Closing the Sea - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 29

So did Selden's. One effect of having come to the notice of the king, he dis-
covered, was that he also came to the notice of everyone else. The decade of the
1620s would see much less scholarship in Selden's life and much more politics, as
menofinfluencesoughthisadviceonconstitutionalissuesandgraduallydrewhim
into public affairs. He did not hold a seat in the brief Parliament of 1621, but he
was engaged as a legal consultant by both the House of Lords and the House of
Commons.ApopularsayingofthetimewasthattheLordswenttoSeldentoknow
their privileges, and the Commons to know their rights. The particular issue that
drew him into the centre of political controversy and brought him to public atten-
tion was the successful attempt by the House of Lords to revive the long discontin-
uedpracticeofimpeachingofficialsaccusedofunlawfulactivity.(Thedeliberation
of the House of Lords to extradite the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain
in 1998 rested in part on the powers the Lords re-established for themselves with
Selden's advice in 1621.)
King James was not amused. Twelve days after Parliament was adjourned, he
ordered three men to be arrested 'for speciall causes & reasons of State knowne
unto himself'. One of them was John Selden. He was taken into custody but then
released five weeks later without charges being brought. Ben Jonson would have
known about the arrest immediately. The poet laureate was not, however, in a pos-
ition to abandon the benefits he got by pleasing the king, especially when he found
himself having to sign away his pension to a creditor the same month Selden went
into prison. Selden needed relief, but Jonson needed money. Buckingham came
to the rescue, paying him an advance of £100 to write a masque for James's visit
to his new country house. Within a month Jonson dashed off The Gypsies Meta-
morphosed , his longest masque, casting Buckingham in the starring role as the
Gypsy Captain. It was an audacious gesture. Gypsies in Stuart drama were fig-
ures whose freedom placed them above the moral constraints enchaining ordinary
people. Turning Buckingham into one hinted at his pariah status as the king's fa-
vourite. Some readers of Jonson go even further and suggest that Jonson was hint-
ing at Buckingham's reputation as James's lover.
If we put John Selden in the picture, however, the picture changes. In the first
speech in which the Gypsy Captain/Buckingham addresses the king, he praises
James for following a foreign policy that eschewed war as a tool for settling the
conflict on the Continent between Catholics and Protestants:
For this, of all the world, you shall
Be styled JAMES THE JUST.