Favourite - Favourites in Literature

Favourites in Literature

Favourites were the subject of much contemporary debate, some of it involving a certain amount of danger for the participants. There were a large number of English plays on the subject, amongst the best known being Marlowe's Edward II, in which Piers Gaveston is a leading character, and Sejanus His Fall (1603), for which Ben Jonson was called before the Privy Council, accused of "Popery and treason", as the play was claimed by his enemies to contain allusions to the contemporary court of James I of England. Sejanus, whose career under Tiberius was vividly described by Tacitus, was the subject of numerous works all around Europe. Shakespeare was more cautious, and with the exceptions of Falstaff, badly disappointed in his hopes of becoming a favourite, and Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII, he gives no major parts to favourites.

Francis Bacon, almost a favourite himself, devoted much of his essay On Friendship to the subject, no doubt writing with some care as a rising politician under Elizabeth I:

"It is a strange thing to observe, how high a rate great kings and monarchs do set upon this fruit of friendship, whereof we speak: so great, as they purchase it, many times, at the hazard of their own safety and greatness. For princes, in regard of the distance of their fortune from that of their subjects and servants, cannot gather this fruit, except (to make themselves capable thereof) they raise some persons to be, as it were, companions and almost equals to themselves, which many times sorteth to inconvenience. The modern languages give unto such persons the name of favorites, or privadoes .... And we see plainly that this hath been done, not by weak and passionate princes only, but by the wisest and most politic that ever reigned; who have oftentimes joined to themselves some of their servants; whom both themselves have called friends, and allowed other likewise to call them in the same manner; using the word which is received between private men."

Writing of George III's old tutor, the Earl of Bute, who became Prime Minister, Macaulay wrote in 1844: "He was a favourite; and favourites have always been odious in this country. No mere favourite had been at the head of the government since the dagger of Felton had reached the heart of the Duke of Buckingham".