Closets played a prominent role in the devotional life of the early Stuart court, where they offered a small space for prayer, liturgy, and diplomatic engagement for the monarch and other members of the royal family. The chapel closet, overlooking the household chapel, was the most prominent of these spaces and regularly hosted the guests invited by the monarch and members of the royal family. Intimacy and access mattered in the early modern court. Being able to speak, touch, and hear the king was a mark of privilege and potential influence. This article examines surviving evidence from the Great Wardrobe Accounts, pictorial representations, and a handful of surviving eyewitness accounts of services to reconstruct the internal environment and appearance of James's chapel closet. James spent far more than Elizabeth I on the furnishings of his closet and limited its ceremonial use to members of the royal family. While the Jacobean chapel closet has been closely associated with the rise of prominent churchmen in favour of greater church beautification such as Richard Neile, clerk of the closet between 1603 and 1632, the article argues that this prominent courtly space reveals an energetic pattern of material splendour promoted from James's accession that was closely connected to his personal conception of his English kingship.
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