Jeffrey Hudson: ​England’s Forgotten Swashbuckler

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Detail of the portrait of Queen Henrietta Maria and Sir Jeffrey, which hangs in the National Museum in Washington, D.C.

Dancer, court favorite, and popular celebrity in late 17th-century England, Jeffrey Hudson was distinguished not chiefly by his achievements, but by his size. Born with dwarfism, Hudson was known as “Lord Minimus.” His diminutive stature and social ableism meant that his court career was dependent in some ways on his novelty. A favorite of Queen Henrietta Maria, Jeffrey Hudson was painted by Van Dyck, and frequently figured in court entertainments. This podcast looks at his life, and what it can tell us about disability in early modern England.

Host: Lucy

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Further Reading

David M. Bergeron, King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire.

Ella March Chase, The Queen’s Dwarf: A Novel.

William Davenant, Jeffereidos, in: The Works of Sir William Davenant (1673, rep. 1968.)

Martin Droeshout, Jeffrey Hudson.

Touba Ghadessi, “Lords and Monsters: Visible Emblems of Rule,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 16 (2013), 491-523.

————. “Perfected Miniatures: Dwarves at Court,” Portraits of Human Monsters in the Renaissance: Dwarves, Hirsutes, and Castrati as Idealized Anatomical Anomalies, (2018): 53-98.

Mary Anne Everett Green, ed. Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria: Including Her Private Correspondence with Charles the First (1857)

Erin Griffey, “Multum in parvo: Portraits of Jeffrey Hudson, Court Dwarf to Henrietta Maria,” The British Art Journal 4 (2003): 39-53

Thomas Heywood (?), The New Yeare’s Gift (1636).

Arthur MacGregor, “Horsegear, Vehicles and Stable Equipment at the Stuart Court: A Documentary Archaeology,” Archaeological Journal 153 (1996): 148-200.

Sir Jeffrey Hudson's House.

Nick Page, Lord Minimus: The Extraordinary Life of Britain’s Smallest Man.

Michael P. Parker, “Satire in Sextodecimo: Davenant, the Dwarf, and the Politics of ‘Jeffereidos.’" ; In: ‘The Muses’ Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century.

Diane Purkiss, The English Civil War: Papists, Gentlewomen, Soldiers, and Witchfinders in the Birth of Modern Britain (2007).

John Taylor, The Old, Old, Very Old Man (1636).

Lynne Vallone, Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies.

Sara Van Den Berg, “Dwarf Aesthetics in Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Early Modern Court,” in: Recovering Disability in Early Modern England.

Michelle A. White, “‘She is the man, and Raignes’: Popular Representations of Henrietta Maria during the English Civil Wars,” in: Queens and Power in Medieval and Early Modern England, eds. Carole Levin and Robert Buchholz, (2009): 205-223.

James Wright, History and Antiquities of the County of Rutland, (1684).

Images

Van Dyck Portrait of Henrietta Maria and Jeffrey Hudson.

Music: "Evening Melodrama" by Kevin Macleod (www.incompetech.com)