Besieged: Early Modern British Siege Literature, 1642-1722 9780228005919

Citation preview

BESIEGED

BESIEGED E A R LY M O D E R N BRI T ISH SIEGE LI T ER AT URE, 1642–1722

Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN 978-0-2280-0540-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0591-9 (ePDF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-0592-6 (ePUB) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Besieged : early modern British siege literature, 1642-1722 / Sharon Alker and Holly Faith Nelson. Names: Alker, Sharon, author. | Nelson, Holly Faith, 1966- author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200321714 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200323938 | ISBN 9780228005407 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780228005919 (PDF ) | ISBN 9780228005926 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. | LCSH: English literature – 18th century – History and criticism. | LCSH: War in literature. | LCSH: Military art and science in literature. Classification: LCC PR431 .A45 2021 | DDC 820.9/3581 – dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11.5/14 Adobe Garamond Pro.

In memory of three intellectually vibrant young people who were full of light and who strove throughout their all-too-short lives to make a profound difference to all they touched with their love and grace. While this book is about spaces of war, they fervently embodied peace, goodness, and integrity. May we all strive to follow in their footsteps: Will J. Reid (1986–2013), Jamie Soukup Reid (1988–2013), and Bryn Frederick Hutchinson (1998–2016).

Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

The “Talismanic” Siege: An Introduction

3

1

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks: Military Diaries, Letters, and Memoirs on Siege Warfare

2

Siege Drama Reimagined: From the Shakespearean to the Restoration Stage

3

Space Made for Change: Siege Drama after Davenant and Dryden

4

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination: The Siege Ballad 159

5

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric: The Siege in Elevated Poetic Strains

6

Old Forms, New Discourses: The Siege in Early Modern Prose Fiction Epilogue 255 Notes 263 Index 309

114

189 238

63

24

Acknowledgments

This project could not have been completed without the generous funding, by way of a Standard Research Grant, of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We are most grateful to our student research assistants from Whitman College (Nanda Maw Lin, Brianna Gormly, Chelsea Kern, Sabrina Wise, Nicole Hodgkinson, and Esther Ra) and Trinity Western University (Chance Pahl, Mackenzie Sarna Balken, Jason Ewert, and Anne Hill), as well as Faith Nelson, who helped with this project over the years, and for the grants that made student assistance possible, including Whitman Abshire and Perry grants and a SSHRC Standard Research Grant. Special thanks go to the librarians who helped us negotiate a vast amount of material in their holdings, most notably Dalia Corkrum, Jen Pope, and Roger Stelk at Penrose Library (Whitman) and Ken Pearson, Sharon Vose, and Lori Penner at the Norma Marion Alloway Library (Trinity Western). We have also received a great deal of support from the Defoe Society, especially from Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, Andreas Mueller, Ben Pauley, and Nick Seager. We are, as always, grateful to our academic mentors who trained and inspired us, including Alan Bewell, Miranda Burgess, Nicholas Hudson, Leith Davis, Alan Rudrum, and Sheila Roberts. Sharon also received support from Bruce Magnusson, Lydia McDermott, and Lynn Sharp, members of her writing group, the Beautiful Mongrels, at Whitman College, and valuable feedback on the siege in classical literature from David Lupher, professor emeritus of classics at

x

Acknowledgments

the University of Puget Sound. We are greatly indebted to Mark Abley, our remarkable acquisitions editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for his encouragement, support, and guidance. We are most thankful to the poet and scholar Carolyn Forché for giving us permission to reprint phrases from her compelling siege poem “Letter to a City Under Siege,” the version that appeared in the Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum on 3 March 2010. Most of all, we thank our families who have supported us with love, patience, and kindness during the years it took us to compose this study: Russell, Caleb, and Faith Nelson; Clyde Henderson; Alan Alker; Crystal and Amethyst Lo; and Mila Tomasovich. A version of the section on Defoe (“The Fluid and Fragile City under Siege in the Works of Daniel Defoe”) in chapter 1 of this book first appeared in “(Re)writing Spaces of War: Daniel Defoe and Early Modern Siege Narratives,” in Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe, ed. Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson (New York: AMS, 2014).

BESIEGED

The “Talismanic” Siege An Introduction

The Potency of Siege Space In Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as the brothers Shandy await the birth of the story’s narrator, Walter Shandy the loquacious father-to-be begins a long meditation on the importance and glory of long noses. Unsurprisingly, his brother Toby, a recovering war veteran, is not particularly interested in Walter’s system of noses and instead silently ruminates on how he might stage military events on his bowling green. However, at the end of his three-hour speech, Walter slips momentarily into figurative language, using the word “siege” as a trope to describe the enclosed and inaccessible nature of truth. Toby’s entire demeanour changes at the use of this term: “[T]he word siege, like a talismanic power in my father’s metaphor, wafting back to my uncle Toby’s fancy, quick as a note could follow the touch, – he opened his ears … took his pipe out of his mouth, and shuffled his chair nearer the table, as with a desire to profit.”1 Toby is destined for disappointment as Walter quickly drops the trope, but we need not share his disappointment, as this moment tells us something important about the power of the siege in early eighteenth-century culture. Uncle Toby, featured in this fictional encounter in November 1718, may be rather silly, like many of Sterne’s characters, but he shares at least one trait with many of his real-life contemporaries, an obsession with sieges. This book argues that the siege, generally the city siege,2 held a sort of “talismanic” power in early modern British culture between the years 1642 and 1722, evidenced by its prominence in the literature of this period. The Oxford English Dictionary, relying on this very quotation from Tristram Shandy as one of four examples, defines talismanic as “pertaining to, or

4

Besieged

of the nature of a talisman; occult, magical, potent.”3 While the siege has been featured as a motif in literature from classical times to the (post) modern age, we suggest that during the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries, it took on a distinctive presence in both literal and figurative terms, creating an imagined space that was magnetic, potent, and capable of fully capturing the cultural imagination. In describing literary spaces in a way that suggests this sort of potency, Gaston Bachelard notes, “Space that has been seized on by the imagination cannot remain indifferent space subject to the measures and estimates of the surveyor. It has been lived in, not in its positivity, but with all the partiality of the imagination.”4 The literary siege, we contend, between the 1640s and the 1720s is produced, disseminated, and consumed in a broad spectrum of genres with an intensity that demonstrates the generous “partiality of the” national “imagination.” Bachelard’s construction of the “dialectics of within and without” the house against the cosmos might seem designed specifically to characterize and interpret the walled city of the imagined siege.5 Yet, Bachelard explicitly decides not to engage with “hostile space,” observing that “[t]he space of hatred and combat can only be studied in the context of impassioned subject matter and apocalyptic images.”6 Our work takes up his idea of space that has been seized by “the partiality of the imagination,” what we call potent space, and reconfigures it by applying it to a decidedly “hostile space”: the understudied siege that populates the literature of the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries. By a potent literary space, we mean a represented space that often, for historical reasons, acquires a significant degree of cultural power that leads to its frequent recurrence in literature for a constellation of purposes. Its cultural appeal is also attributable to its malleability. In 1718, the year in which Sterne imagines Uncle Toby’s eager response occurring, siege space had not yet lost that potency. One way to think about how certain motifs, spatial or otherwise, rise to this level of potency is to adapt Franco Moretti’s concept of dynamic literary forms to motifs, especially their rise and fall over time. In shaping his theory, Moretti works with Viktor Shklovsky’s notion that a “new form makes its appearance to replace an old form that has outlived its artistic usefulness.”7 Moretti relies on this concept to explain what he calls “‘latency periods’ in the early history of genres.”8 By way of example, he asks why, following the publication of Pamela in 1740, twenty years pass before epistolary fiction becomes popular. He concludes that there is a

The “Talismanic” Siege

5

decades-long “lag” because the “exception will not change the system.”9 It is only when “a genre exhausts its potentialities” that “the genre loses its form under the impact of reality, thereby disintegrating, or it turns its back to reality in the name of form, becoming a ‘dull epigone’ indeed.”10 Could there not coexist a similar system for motifs that ebb and flow for reasons that relate both to history and form? Our book suggests that as inherited motifs move through time, they may recede or intensify depending on their perceived relevance to the historical moment, and that while motifs may be remarkably vibrant and multidimensional during one period of time, they can also lose momentum and “exhaust … potentialities” when sociopolitical needs shift and require new forms, modes, and motifs to reflect that reality more usefully. While we would argue that such a system might relate to a broad range of motifs that recur in literature across time, the case study at the core of this book is a particular kind of spatial motif – the locus of siege warfare. The flux of spatial motifs in response to historical conditions may well be familiar to us in our own time. The motif of the dystopian city, and the accompanying barren, violent space it creates, for example, has taken on a potency and urgency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rob Latham and Jeff Hicks have argued that the “urban dystopia” first emerged “during the second half of the nineteenth century” and that it “coincided with – and responded to – an outburst of utopian writing, centring on the city as a site of human perfectibility. The dystopian version instead depicted baleful imaginary societies in which cities themselves feature as the main symbols of negative possibility, as spaces of oppression, blight, and ruin. While such dystopias were initially in the minority, they gradually” took centre stage “in the decades following the First World War, to the point that, today, grim and ominous visions of future cities vastly outnumber any rosier alternatives.”11 The intensification of these motifs occurs in response to historical events, in this case World War I, as well as other sociopolitical changes, such as rapid technological advancement, military and otherwise, in the latter half of the twentieth century and the first few decades of the twenty-first century. The siege becomes just such a motif for British authors, writing in various genres, from the mid-seventeenth century through the first few decades of the eighteenth century. Our study, of course, is hardly the first to engage with the literary effects of the British Civil War (1642–51) and the unstable times that followed. Some of the more significant works to do so include Nigel Smith’s Literature

6

Besieged

and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1997); The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (1999), edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth; David Norbrook’s Writing the English Republic (1999); The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (2001), edited by N.H. Keeble; Diane Purkiss’s Literature, Gender and Politics During the English Civil War (2005); Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday’s edited collection Literature and the English Civil War (2010); David McNeil’s Grotesque Description of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (1990); Eighteenth-Century Fiction’s special issue on war in 2006/2007; and Melinda Rabb’s award winning article, “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-Century Displacements of the Male Body at War” (2011).12 Our study is part of this broader conversation on the effects of the Civil War and the military conflicts that followed on the literary imagination. But our emphasis on the potency of the siege motif in particular is relatively new in relation to British literature of the period. This may not be surprising, given space theorist Paul Hirst’s suggestion that there is a general tendency even in military scholarship to neglect the siege. He argues that scholars often prefer battles, “dramatic and finite” events that “are apparently easy to narrate,” unlike sieges which tend to be “protracted, episodic in their conflicts, and often unsuccessful in outcome.” For military historians, battles are “the decisive form of war,” whereas sieges are “local forms of action that are inherently indecisive.” Hirst concludes that this perception of the siege “is profoundly inaccurate and anachronistic.”13 We contend that siege literature has suffered the same neglect, despite its grip on the early modern British imagination. The impulse to marginalize siege literature may also result from the tendency in literary studies to categorize works not by specific tropes but by genre. A case can be made, however, for devising a distinct category for works across genres that highlight a particular motif, in this case a spatial one. Eric Prieto has recently suggested that geocriticism might benefit from studying imagined spaces in this way, focusing “not on singular spaces but on particular types of place … The unity of such a study would be guaranteed not by the site-specific singularity of a place but by the shared traits that make it possible to conceive [of ] the sites as part of the same category.”14 This is not to say that our study elides genre, which is the key organizing principle of this book, but rather that we categorize works of literature based on the specific type of space or site on which they focus, bringing together texts that have not been read alongside each other and

The “Talismanic” Siege

7

many of which have been neglected because they appear to be outliers from a generic perspective. One of the few writers who has thus far paid attention to the cultural representation of sieges in eighteenth-century England is Jonathan Lamb, who has written of the way the wounded Toby Shandy’s “obsession with shapes of siege architecture and the path of projectiles” does not only lead to recovery but happiness; thus, “by virtue of re-enactment Toby is contemplating not how he has made models of ruin but how ruin made him.”15 Lamb’s emphasis on the literary siege as recuperative instrument and noteworthy object of study in eighteenth-century British literature is rare. More interest in the space of the siege has been emerging in the work of scholars studying other periods or geographical spaces. Tracy Crowe Morey’s Between Historical Fiction: The Early Modern Spanish Siege Play (2010) is one such example, as is Malcolm Hebron’s 1997 work on the cultural representation of sieges in medieval texts. Beatrice Groves’s Destruction of Jerusalem in Early Modern English Literature (2015) foregrounds the representation of a single city in the early modern period. Martha Pollak’s impressive Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (2013) is the first sustained work on the broader cultural expression of the siege in the period, albeit focused on the Continent. She demonstrates that siege warfare on the Continent from the seventeenth century onward created a “distinct kind of urbanism” – “military urbanism, a style of urban design” as well as a wide variety of cultural artifacts of particular martial events, from tapestries to statues, fireworks, performances, and a range of textual representations (from siege views to architectural designs).16 She pays only brief attention to London since siege warfare was not as pervasive in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England and Scotland as it was on the Continent. Our book seeks to tease out and extend the emergent critical strand that sees the siege and the renovated space it brings into being as a crucial part of the study of war literature and to weave it into a study of British siege literature produced between the 1640s and the 1720s.

The Potency of Experience The abundance and potency of siege literature in mid-seventeenth through early eighteenth- century Britain derive in great part from the historical events of the Civil War and the intense period of siege warfare that

8

Besieged

followed, mostly, but not exclusively, overseas.17 An imagined space that evoked relatively recent experiential knowledge of a traumatic nature would necessarily be more potent. Sieges occurred with alarming frequency during the British Civil War, and the experience of this type of warfare was particularly shocking to many English and Scottish communities since the vast majority of their population was unfamiliar with this sort of extreme martial violence in civilian space. Charles Carleton has noted that sieges were “the most brutal and prolonged experience of the British civil wars.”18 In terms of numbers, Carleton states, “Of some 645 military actions in England during the three civil wars, 198 (31 per cent) of them were sieges. In them a total of 20,981 people lost their lives, of whom 9,890 ([47]per cent) were parliamentarians and 11,091 were royalists. Sieges account for 24 per cent of the wars’ total deaths, 9 per cent more than the major pitched battles.”19 Learning to adapt to this type of military event had been problematic for both the royalists and parliamentarians in the wars as, over the course of the preceding century, siege warfare had become increasingly sophisticated on the Continent, and while English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish soldiers may have had some experience fighting abroad, they did not have the level of strategic and tactical expertise needed to navigate the complexity and intensity of sieges during the Civil War. Thus, as Ronald Hutton and Wylie Reeves note of the British Civil War, “All sides … depended on foreign experts … Prince Rupert brought with him to England two professional engineers, Bernard de Gomme and Bartholomew de la Roche … Two Dutchmen, John Dalbier and Peter Manteau van Dalem, fulfilled the equivalent function for the earl of Essex and the New Model Army respectively.”20 Though the mechanics and experience of siege warfare were horrifically new to many British citizens, since war generally took place elsewhere in the Tudor period, circulating accounts of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) would have certainly made them dreadfully aware of the horrors of notorious sieges on the Continent, such as the siege of Magdeburg (1630–31) that infamously ended in horrific acts of plunder and slaughter and the near annihilation of the city. So, disturbing images may have already been forming in the minds of the British about the potential horror of this type of military space and event. Even though the parties in the Civil War largely “adhered to” appropriate military “codes of conduct,” ensuring

The “Talismanic” Siege

9

that most sieges did not end in wholesale slaughter, the potential for atrocity may well have been foremost in the minds of many residents of besieged spaces, whether cities, garrison towns, castles, stately homes, or other dwellings.21 There were also well-known exceptions to “civilized warfare” during the Civil War in which virulent violence occurred not only against soldiers but also against the citizenry of besieged spaces, particularly if a city had not surrendered. The behaviour of the Cromwellian army in their action against Drogheda in 1649 is a particularly brutal case. Large numbers, including civilians, lost their lives. John Buchan wrote in his biography of Cromwell that the argument for taking such actions would be that “the defenders of a fortress, which was duly summoned and then stormed, had no claim to mercy, the more so if the fortress was patently indefensible.”22 Sieges in Irish cities were often particularly ruthless. Carlton writes that after a traitor opened the gate at Wexford (1649), “[e]ven though they had been spared the horrors of a storm, their [Cromwell’s men’s] blood lust was unmitigated. In the mêlée two boat-loads of refugees sank, drowning some 330 folk, many of them civilians. Priests and friars were dispatched without mercy, as they foolishly approached the puritans brandishing crucifixes in the misguided hope that this would save them. Two hundred women were butchered at the Market Cross as they begged for quarter.”23 Questions have been raised about the veracity of some accounts of violence at Wexford. Nevertheless, the dissemination of reports of such brutality would have caused concern about the safety of cities. Stephen Porter reminds us of earlier Civil War assaults on captured cities that followed “the royalist victories at Liverpool and Bolton in 1643” which led to a “considerable loss of life,” and notes that “[f ]ollowing the battle of Worcester in 1651, the city was plundered, ‘all houses being ransacked from top to bottom, the very persons of men and women not excepted.’”24 Ian Gentles writes of the battle in and around the city, “Worcester and its environs were a scene of carnage and desolation. Dead bodies strewed the ground from Powik to the bridge at St Johns and from Sidbury Gate to Perry Wood. Within the walls, streets and buildings were choked with corpses. Soldiers, according to Major-General Harrison, ‘plucked lords, knights and gentlemen out of holes.’ Everywhere was the stench of death.”25 Reflecting on the siege of Colchester (1648), Barbara Donagan not only discusses the ravages of disease, hunger, and fire but also

10

Besieged

the use of “chewed or poisoned bullets” to cause maximum damage, the infamous desecration of the Lucas family tombs, and the large crippling fine imposed on the city by Fairfax when it ultimately surrendered.26 Violence during a siege takes many forms, and property destruction often has severe consequences beyond the obliteration of architecture. M.J. Stoyle notes, for instance, that archeological “[d]igs at Chester, Exeter and Gloucester have revealed considerable evidence of wartime destruction”; at Exeter, this destruction did not only occur during combat but also when, postsiege, royalist occupiers destroyed existing buildings to build “bigger and better defensive outworks.”27 Destruction of a city (sometimes called urbicide) had devastating effects on its residents. In 1646, for example, after Exeter’s final surrender to Parliament, “the war’s events had crippled the city, rendering between a third and a half of the inhabitants homeless.”28 Even cities that did not succumb to military violence were damaged, as Ian Roy explains: “From being places of refuge for the surrounding countryside, well defended towns became at the end of the war, with overcrowding and pestilence, places to flee; and this had serious results on their trade and industry. Bristol was almost a ghost town when it surrendered to Fairfax in 1645; wealthy citizens had departed, its markets were deserted, and the garrison was demoralized. The city could not pay its share of the agreed burning money to the New Model Army on its capture.”29 Most obviously, then, the growing presence of sieges in British literature throughout the mid- to late seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth century emerged from intense everyday experiences of civil war sieges and from detailed reports of them that were disseminated throughout the nation by word of mouth and by a prolific number of published texts given the increasingly far-reaching influence of print culture. Such traumatic experiences and their textual representation have far more cultural resonance than war experiences that occur at a geographic distance. While the siege motif and the space it represented had frequented various genres since classical and biblical times (often in response to historic sieges), it was imaginatively revitalized in literature across genres after the 1640s as a reaction to material reality. We could consider imaginative works set in siege space as a reworking, to some extent, of actual British sieges of the 1640s and 1650s. These texts might be envisioned, from this perspective, as a means of

The “Talismanic” Siege

11

• giving form and coherence to the unspeakable dimension of siege warfare by situating it within well-structured, retrospective prose narratives; • controlling traumatic events by describing them factually with numerical precision; • coming to terms with the horrors of urban warfare by repetitively dramatizing on stage cities teetering on the verge of destruction to revisit the anxiety that comes with the pending destruction of one’s home; • striving to reglorify the fallen city and to honour the fallen prince, noblemen, or city leaders with heroic discourse, thereby rewriting history; • rousing the ordinary citizens to action to suggest that even plebeians have a measure of agency in war; • organizing the urban siege and its aftermath in tidy verses and neatly rhymed lines in an attempt to contain its excess brutality; and • crafting reliable and credible eyewitness narrators who can mediate and make sense of ineffable events. If the memory of the Civil War was insufficient to keep siege space in the national consciousness, the continued accounts of siege warfare overseas that followed ensured its potency did not wane. Having experienced sieges for themselves, Britons would have been far more alert to their presence in news accounts. The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland saw several particularly violent sieges, and even Scotland experienced a few at the hands of the Lord Protector. After a respite of a few decades when naval warfare with the Dutch took precedence, siege warfare, both domestic and foreign, once again came to the attention of the British public. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to sieges in Ireland. The War of the Grand Alliance or Nine Years’ War (1688–97), beginning the same year, involved a great many sieges, including the siege of Namur (1695) at which Sterne’s fictional Uncle Toby was wounded.30 The Sultan of Morocco besieged or blockaded Tangier (which had been in the possession of England since 1662) between 1679 and 1684. Various sieges, notably the sieges of Turin (1706) and Lille (1708), were fought during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). The sieges of Messina and Palermo, among others, took place during the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718–20). Even the

12

Besieged

Jacobite risings in Britain involved occasional sieges, such as the sieges of Inverness in 1715 and 1746 and the siege of Carlisle in 1745. And sieges remained a characteristic feature of wars on the Continent in the first half of the eighteenth century, including those that occurred during the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). With the ever-expanding production and circulation of pamphlets and newsbooks in particular, these sieges on the Continent were reported in Britain with great detail. New media had transformed the way war was represented, placing emphasis on a sense of immediacy and experiential knowledge. The Civil War, a contest of texts as well as arms, was the first conflict in Britain to be a real media event, a war at home whose actuality was heightened by its textuality. It is, therefore, not surprising that after it ended, accessibility to information about foreign wars, including sieges, was greatly improved, making wars abroad seem far closer than they would have done in the Middle Ages or Renaissance.31 Thus, in this increasingly “information-conscious society,” where citizens of the three kingdoms were now acutely aware of the material reality of siege warfare, they also had access to an abundance of information about similar military events elsewhere.32

The Potency of Liminality in a Time of Change The potency of literary siege space between 1642 and 1722 was not only the result of the increased familiarity of readers and audiences with the fragility and trauma of cities in wartime, that is, with the relevance of literal sieges. It was also a consequence of what urban siege space came to represent. In this time of profound sociopolitical change, the siege signified liminality; it existed as a threshold space in terms of the process of change, both adapting domestic space to warfare and straining under the potentiality of future change should the city fall or surrender. Consequently, siege space, and frequently urban siege space in particular, was used to mediate a host of different entities and identities under transition after the Restoration, from the unstable monarchy and less influential national church (given, for example, the rise in nonconformity) to the fragility of urban space, and from destabilized postwar political and social structures to a fluctuating national identity as Britain moved toward modernity.

The “Talismanic” Siege

13

Restoration London, for example, was coming to terms with the vulnerability of urban space more generally, even in times of peace. In the latter half of the 1660s the profoundly destructive plague and fire had marred the ability of the city to recover from the memories of the Civil War years. Cynthia Wall has written convincingly of the way the rhetoric of loss following the fire in particular changed the “grammar of space” in Restoration London; she highlights the trauma of having the “oldest, most reliable signs” of the city’s culture “literally as well as figuratively melted.”33 Wall traces this rhetoric of loss in myriad genres, including city plans, maps, topographies, poetry, prose fiction, and city drama and points out the particular anxieties of rebuilding. Any literary reparation efforts, she suggests, would be haunted by the memory of its destruction, and yet the culture simultaneously, as Wall has shown, reconfigures urban space. Siege literature may not have been viewed as part of this cultural rebuilding as it is often situated in the distant past or elsewhere, but it should be understood as part of this effort as it imagines urban space under pressure. Part of the potency of siege literature might be tied to its ability to overtly foreground concerns about the vulnerability and volatility of cities. Imagined siege space, in fact, helped to represent a nation stumbling toward modernity, toward shifts in the way power, authority, and stability could be envisioned in the face of sociopolitical discord, division, and uncertainty in the decades following the Restoration. The walls that divide city from camp and the violent or productive spaces between city and encampment constituted a response to and a mediation of an unstable and changing social structure. The political scientist Wendy Brown has argued that in our own time we might see our obsession with building walls between nations from North America to the Middle East as an indication of “the weakening of state sovereignty … that is generating much of the frenzy of nation-state wall building today. Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion. While they may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, like all hyperbole, they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express … [T]he new walls often function theatrically, projecting power and efficaciousness that they do not and cannot actually exercise.”34 We suggest that the abundance of walled cities and their discontents in siege literature of the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries is likewise a response to an intense

14

Besieged

uncertainty about the organization of national space and shifting ideas about authority. In fact, Brown locates the origins of this metaphor of walls in the seventeenth century, pointing out that “[f ]ences, titles, and enclosures are among Locke’s most fecund and ubiquitous metaphors in the Second Treatise; they secure freedom, representation, and limits to the right of rebellion, as well as actual territory.”35 The use of the siege to signify urban fragility and to define the unsettled nation in an age of modernity affirms that the figure of the siege becomes malleable when it is harnessed to discuss discord and disjunction beyond the experience of the Civil War. Several of the chapters in this book, particularly those on drama, consider the siege motif as a means of representing the imagined city after erratic urban (and national) change and ongoing sociopolitical instability. Inherited representations of siege space might have seemed inherently backward, focused on outdated ideas of medieval warfare and chivalry and thus best suited to older genres and modes, such as epic, romance, and allegory. However, while siege literature from the Restoration often retained residual ties to such genres, it gradually and messily experimented with them over the course of the eighty-year period under study, reflecting new cultural interest in space as it was lived in by a wider variety of people. We see literary representations of sieges in which civilian residents (men and women), technological experts, and municipal leaders, alongside ordinary soldiers, take on significant, even central, roles in warfare. From a conventional space that was used to display the nobility and desires of exceptional warriors and their “ladies,” siege literature gradually began to engage with a besieged people rather than merely with their leaders and to interact more intricately with the configuration of cities and the mechanics of war. The siege in these works takes on an increasingly multidimensional character, rather than operating as a straightforward background event or a tidy trope. The literary realms generally reserved for noble heroes are infiltrated by diverse figures like military engineers, civilians, city governors, travellers, journalists, and cobblers. Siege ballads appear that affirm the role of the ordinary soldier in the defense of the nation, and siege allegories are published that newly invest the eyewitness with knowledge and agency. If the novel with the ordinary protagonist, from Robinson Crusoe and Lemuel Gulliver to Joseph Andrews, comes to light in the 1720s, ’30s, and ’40s, one of the literary tendencies that may have helped prepare the way for such a figure is the changing representation

The “Talismanic” Siege

15

of siege space that robustly participated in a cultural shift demythologizing traditional heroic space. It may not be surprising, then, in an age when literary sieges had acquired such malleability, relevance, and power, that the motif carries with it an almost magical intensity. There were many who, like the fictitious Toby, were attuned to its “talismanic” influence and who would read memoirs, attend plays, and pore over histories and newsbooks that brought to life the sieges that already occupied their imaginations, using them to interpret the everyday space they inhabited.

Literary Forms and Potent Spaces Nigel Smith has written eloquently of the influence of the Civil War on literary forms in England between 1640 and 1660. He theorizes that “the literature of mid-seventeenth-century England underwent a series of revolutions in genre and form, and that this transformation was a response to the crises of the 1640s: the Civil War and the political revolution which followed.” He adds that “literature was part of the crisis and the revolution, and was at its epicenter” and as a result “[g]enres fell to bits in the 1640s; they failed to achieve their aims, and circumstances prevented individual works being completed … The disruptions of the 1640s caused new forms to emerge, and reconstructions and renovations of suddenly outdated modes.”36 We agree with Smith’s position and suggest that this revolution in form is often especially evident in modes and genres that feature siege space. Britain had inherited a range of respected genres and modes that grappled with siege warfare, some of which were related to the epic and romance genres and the allegorical mode. The intersection of siege warfare and literary culture in the Western world dates back to at least the Iliad, and cultural engagement with sieges has continued, with varying strength, since then. As Malcolm Hebron has shown in The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance, the siege flourished in medieval literature in different forms. Hebron makes reference to a variety of poetic works on sieges, including, for example, the short “Anglo-Norman poem … The Siege of Caerlaverok” on “Edward I’s capture of Caerlaverok castle in Country Dumfries in July 1300,” John Barbour’s The Bruce (Book XVII), on the siege of Berwick (1318–19), and the alliterative Morte Arthur, which deals with sieges during King Arthur’s “wars of foreign conquest.”37 Hebron

16

Besieged

also examines medieval literary representations of the sieges of Troy and Jerusalem and points to a number of allegorical siege narratives: “[I]n religious writings … [the siege motif ] most often represents the soul, or the enclosing body; in love allegories it usually symbolizes the heart of the beloved or of the lover, in their different ways beleaguered by love.”38 The cultural interest in sieges certainly continues into the sixteenth century. There are sieges, for example, in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) and Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1590). The sixteenth century saw authors turn to other genres to engage with the space of siege warfare, including Thomas Nashe’s work of prose fiction The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and a number of dramatic works such as Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (c.1589) and William Shakespeare’s Henry V (c. 1599). Other inherited forms that included sieges were nonfictional, such as histories or translations of histories. For example, in 1602, Thomas Lodge translated The Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus, which included a long description of the military fall of Jerusalem. These cultural representations of siege warfare influenced the way many writers took up the topic in our period of study, but some of these genres would be strained, and even fissured, not only in response to the Civil War but also over the new meanings acquired by the siege in a post-civil war age. That is to say, if we combine Smith’s contention that literary forms are disrupted and fractured by the Civil War with our claim that siege space (as represented across genres and modes) is newly potent because of the immediacy of siege warfare and the ability of siege space to represent other postwar disruptive forces in the national imagination, it becomes clear that siege literature is doubly responsive to the war and its aftermath, and thus particularly important to assess in the period. If genres are already straining under the pressure of crises, how much more will they do so when they are used to explore the newly potent siege space? Another way to pose this question might be to consider how a motif conventionally tied to certain inherited genres and modes changes when it is aligned with other new genres, such as newsbooks and pamphlets. Our chapter on prose fiction, which narrows its focus to a work of fiction in the allegorical mode, and our chapter on formal poetry or elevated poetic forms will pay particular attention to the ways in which inherited genres and modes rupture and/or revitalize when they engage with a motif that carries new aesthetic, as well as military, associations.

The “Talismanic” Siege

17

Chapter Overview This book opens the door to an expansive examination of the representation of the siege, and other military actions and spaces, in the early-modern period and invites scholars to assess how such potent literary spaces (and other motifs) emerge, flourish, and diminish in different historical contexts. To map out the various ways in which siege space is used in literature published between the 1640s and the 1720s, we have divided our chapters loosely by genre. This enables us to study how certain inherited literary forms – the heroic drama, the memoir, the ballad, and the epic, for example – adapted to accommodate the newly relevant and revitalized siege motif or trope. Most of the genres we consider engage directly with literal sieges. But others make use of the siege figuratively, adapting it as needed when the vehicle becomes newly pertinent in an experiential way. Because many siege narratives are understudied or have been completely neglected by scholars, we will frequently need to identify and describe many of these little-known works, as well as to analyze the way they represent siege space. In chapter 1, we first focus on accounts of siege warfare in early modern military diaries, letters, and memoirs, ostensibly documentary genres defined by the language of authenticity and accuracy. We explore the competing discourses used to negotiate siege space under pressure by military personnel recording or reflecting back on their experience of warfare, paying particular attention to the tension between the compulsive discourse of detached quantification and the intervallic discourse of affective disturbance. While the former typically constitutes the city, castle, or close as a quantifiable space in a controllable war game, existing merely to be conquered through measurable strategies, the latter figures such locations as domestic civilian space or more generally as a site of emotional disturbance, often lingering over suffering and shock in the dynamic nub that is the early modern urban centre. We theorize that the discourse of fractured networks – or ruptured commerce in the broadest of terms – intensifies these discourses of fact and feeling. Our analysis of these discourses includes the theorization of the military conception of “space-power systems,” to borrow Paul Hirst’s phrase, in the city siege and the soldierly psychology of recording, remembering, and aestheticizing acts of besiegement.39 Siege writings analyzed in this chapter include those by Nathan Drake, James Hilton, William Brereton, Oliver

18

Besieged

Cromwell, Hugh Cholmley, and Andrew Melville. The chapter then turns to the fictionalization of military history and the military memoir in the early eighteenth century by Daniel Defoe, who mimics but significantly alters the genres given the evolution of the novel and the rising popularity of purported life and travel writing. Defoe was conversant in both genres and would often engage with them from factual and fictional directions. His work suggests that the experience of siege warfare, of seeing cities and their nation ravaged and divided, provoked Britons to rethink their geographical imaginaries, to ask what space means. Siege warfare in Defoe’s work is focused on urban space and he uses the besieged city to explore the plurality of space, its contingency on its operation in a network of relations. Henri Lefebvre has argued that the Greeks foreshadowed this multiplicity, seeing the city simultaneously as the epicentre of civilization as well as a political and military entity. He contends that “[t]o think about the city is to hold and maintain its conflictual aspects: constraints and possibilities, peacefulness and violence, meetings and solitude, gatherings and separation, the trivial and poetic, brutal functionalism and surprising improvisation.”40 We study these conflicting elements as they manifest in three discursive modes detailing the city under siege in Defoe’s memoirs and histories: the tactical mode, the affective mode, and the commercial mode. The potency of the siege space in Defoe’s work is tied to its ability to hold these representations of urban space simultaneously, to recognize the importance of perception in defining city space. In chapters 2 and 3 we consider the genre that most deeply engaged with the siege in the period under study: the siege drama. There are so many siege dramas in our period that we could have dedicated this book to the potency of siege space in the theatre alone. We begin, in chapter 2, by considering the way Shakespeare creates a new sort of siege play in Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602), an antiheroic work that uses the long and tedious space of the siege to display and critique the brutality and violence of war. When John Dryden and William Davenant update and remake this dramatic form in the years surrounding the Restoration, reconfiguring the siege play as a heroic drama, they, as we might expect of two royalist dramatists, ultimately reaffirm royal power and the structure of the state. However, in doing so, the two playwrights invest the urban siege motif with the seeds of other, less orderly, concepts of city space by emphasizing the comprehensive, multilayered nature of a city space which houses more than aristocratic heroes or by presenting the city as fragile and contingent on mutable relations of authority.

The “Talismanic” Siege

19

In chapter 3, we examine how such elements in the heroic drama of Davenant and Dryden allow later imitators, such as the playwrights John Crowne, John Banks, Thomas Southerne, and eventually John Hughes, to distance the siege motif from its past in the epic and romance both to alleviate royal anxiety and to investigate and reimagine city space. Along the way, these writers increasingly affirm the importance of collaborative, tactical martial action over the glories of individual heroism and even begin to emphasize the military role of city leaders rather than kings and nobles. Elkanah Settle is well known for his direct challenge to the Restoration siege play in his opera The Virgin Prophetess, or, the Fate of Troy (1701) and his droll The Siege of Troy (1707). In both works he gleefully emphasizes the discord between the aristocratic leaders of the city, particularly Helen and Paris, and the city itself. The siege drama, in its early form, is revealed to be not so much mythic as out of touch with the world of the people, and heroes are deeply inadequate, apart from the city rather than a part of it. But long before Settle’s work, the siege play had begun to change focus, exploring municipal leadership and matters that, despite elaborate sets, spoke more of everyday life.41 We close our study of siege drama by turning to a radically different sort of siege play, one that may illustrate Moretti’s concept of an exception that “will not change the system” and yet has merit in its own right for its innovation in terms of both the genre of siege drama and its use of the siege motif.42 Ireland Preserv’d: or the Siege of London-Derry (1705) – written not by a playwright but by army officer John Mitchelburne based on Irish experience during the Williamite Wars (1688–91) – may seem to have little appeal to regular playgoers, given that it is 300 pages long. However, it was reprinted throughout the century and was said to have been staged in “entire communities in rural Ulster” as late as the early nineteenth century.43 We have (anachronistically) called this play a docudrama, because in some ways it foreshadows what would become the documentary, an attempt to document in dramatic form an actual, recent siege with some accuracy, though Mitchelburne openly integrates elements of the inherited genre into his play, including, for example, several brief romantic liaisons in a work primarily concerned with the day-to-day experience of siege warfare. Mitchelburne picks up on some of the changes already inherent in siege plays but moves far beyond them in making the central figure in his alternate siege play not a prince but rather an experienced and adaptable soldier recently promoted to governor (resembling himself ) who is able to direct his knowledge not at his own passions and desires but at saving

20

Besieged

the city. Indeed, the city itself seems to be the central protagonist at points as various sectors work with him to resist attack. Mitchelburne thus imagines a siege drama that fully and unapologetically places the strength and resilience of the people at the centre. The existence of such a work indicates it was possible in this historical period to envision a complete overhaul of siege drama, one that would allow it to keep its relevance in a post-Elkanah Settle world by aiming at a broader city audience who might want to see themselves embodied in the plays. Ultimately such an audience did not yet exist en masse in this historical moment, although the recirculation of the play suggests that it did arouse some interest. Therefore, though the siege drama is now only a brief episode in the history of playwriting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the case of Mitchelburne’s play suggests that it had the potential to prefigure the cinematic presentation of the realism of war in the twentieth century. The siege motif is a crucial means to change old ways of cultural representation of war to reflect the lived reality of combat. In chapters 4 and 5, we turn to poetic representations of the siege. As with siege drama, siege verse and poems thrived in the period under study, so we have loosely divided this work into two categories that address siege space quite differently: the first is balladry or popular verse and the second is formal poetry. In chapter 4, we theorize the balladic treatment of civil war sieges as well as those of Vienna (1683), Londonderry (1689), Mons (1691), and Namur (1695), briefly referencing ballads on other sieges in Ireland during the Williamite Wars. We catalogue the characteristics, and posit the material and cultural functions, of siege ballads first published between 1642 and 1722, finding that the potency of the siege ballad, often aimed at readers and listeners in the lower to middling orders, is tied to affirming the national imaginary as unified and inclusive and the soldierly body as a crucial part of restoring order within the nation and abroad. We demonstrate that both before and after the Civil War, the siege ballad (often used to encourage recruitment or disseminate news), unlike the shape-shifting siege drama, was a remarkably stable genre with at least five recognizable and repeatable figures, features, and functions. These include the reportage of news with journalistic flair, sometimes from an eyewitness perspective; the invitation to participate in the war effort, either literally or imaginatively; the valorization of daring and heroic individual military figures who exemplify the nobility of the nation and the demonization of its enemies; the memorialization of the collective

The “Talismanic” Siege

21

military courage of those fighting on the unequivocally right side; and the fantasization of the humiliating, and often pyrotechnic, destruction of the enemy. The annihilation of the fragile cities they envisioned, however, would undoubtedly have had a different resonance after the experience of the Civil War, though that discomfort may have been moderated by the continual enactment of the staying power of courageous soldiers and civilians. We pay close attention to changes in the siege ballad when Europe faces the Ottoman Empire in Vienna since this complicates the already varied racial and religious landscape of the genre. The besieging Turk and his strategies on the Continent are, for example, represented quite differently than the Irish and French besiegers and their tactics on home soil. Our second chapter on siege poetry addresses the conceptualization and evolution of the siege in more formal poetic forms and modes, including the epic, elegy, panegyric, ode, allegory, and satire. It begins by reviewing the shared characteristics of the siege in popular and formal genres, exploring, for example, how established poets deal with, and adapt to, the comparatively new field of war correspondence in their attempt to represent siege events. As a result, there is a renegotiation of forms as poetry becomes experimental in its engagement with siege space, often rejecting inherited poetic representations of sieges as places of glory. The chapter then considers the extent to which generic labels are inadequate to convey the substance of the material and the mode of presentation in, for example, journalistic or documentary siege epics, siege sonnets, siege epigrams, and even an allegorical poem on a besieged castle’s pained reflections on its physical experience of siege warfare. It analyzes, for instance, Robert Herrick’s distinct version of the siege epigram, a relatively rare form, in which a successful siege is both a visual and verbal marker of the victorious king’s and his loyal subjects’ power over fortune. John Milton’s siege sonnets, Abraham Cowley’s siege accounts in The Civil War (c. 1643), W.C.’s The Siege of Vienna, A Poem (1685), and Joseph Aickin’s Londerias; or, A Narrative of the Siege of London-Dery (1699) are similarly anatomized to reveal a generic hybridity that results from the pressure that specific sieges put on literary expression. The final section of the chapter addresses the cultural saturation point for formal siege poetry, as intimated, for example, in the short work of literary criticism entitled Reflections on the Poems made upon The Siege and Taking of Namur (1696). It also turns to antiheroic siege poetry, for example the anonymous Knight-Errantry;

22

Besieged

or, Don Quixot Encountering the Windmill. Being A Relation of the Siege of Knocke (1695), in which the English forces are mocked for envisioning themselves as “Bloody Town-Taker[s].”44 In chapter 6, in which we turn to prose fiction, we contend that the siege is not central to the narrative trajectories of British fiction between 1642 and 1722 with one key exception, John Bunyan’s long allegorical narrative, The Holy War.45 In this work, the potency of siege space calls into question the inherited mode of the allegory as it melds not only with prose but with very specific types of war writing. We theorize the way in which this religious siege allegory, often read straightforwardly as signifying spiritual truth(s), is transformed when its vehicle, the siege, has become recently literalized in an extended material manner. We evaluate the way Bunyan complicates the inherited allegory by incorporating not only literal elements of the siege but also elements of journalistic writing that foreground the eyewitness, the individual viewing and mediating the siege. This shift from a transparent narrator to an engaged one leads to a different view of the besieged city, one that is far more volatile, not only at the beginning of the allegory but also at the end.

Conclusion In his essay “Des Espace Autres” (1984), Michel Foucault writes about the importance of studying space. While “the great obsession of the nineteenth century was … history,” he notes that “[t]he present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed.”46 The significance of space, particularly as it relates to twentieth and twenty-first century war, has been theorized by scholars such as Paul Virilio and, to a certain extent, Jean Baudrillard. However, as Foucault makes clear, space has its own history to which we seek to contribute with this case study of the representation of one type of martial space within a specific temporal framework. When we initially conceived of this book, we hoped to undertake an in-depth study of a variety of spaces of war in the era, including battles on land and sea. The immense amount of material on the subject matter led us to focus on one specific case study of war space, but, given the importance of war in the period, there is much left to be done.

The “Talismanic” Siege

23

This book is not the last word on the siege motif and its significance between 1642 and 1722. Rather, it is an invitation to scholars to investigate further the cultural expression of the siege in this period and beyond. Sieges continue to fascinate readers throughout the eighteenth century and well into the next, not only continuing to appear in drama and memoirs but also in the emergent historical novel, as Mary Favret has shown, in a very different way. Writing of the siege in the Romantic era, Favret notes, “Despite its persistent appearance in the wars of the Napoleonic era … the siege more generally characterized premodern warfare, as any reader of Scott’s Ivanhoe or Felicia Hemans’s Siege of Valencia understood. The sciences of military architecture and siegecraft that flourished in Europe through most of the eighteenth century, and were celebrated in the early encyclopedias, soon grew obsolete.”47 Thus, the siege becomes in the late eighteenth century a “troubling, romantic figure,” which, like other such figures, hovers “in a … mediatory way between portraying some felt or sentient experience of war and allowing a distant and abstracted, unfelt view of violence. The siege offered a way to imagine a world at war coming home in the most intimate ways. But it also allowed a way to frame war as a distant reality, made remote by the movements of history.”48 Favret’s argument points toward a loss of potency in literary siege space. It remains relevant but loses the intense magnetic power it possesses in our period of study, perhaps because the Civil War and wars involving sieges that happened in its immediate aftermath had been, to a certain extent, purged and catharsis achieved. It was replaced by other new concerns, and other new crucial and potent spaces and motifs took precedence. However, as we discuss briefly in the Epilogue, urban warfare has emerged as a crucial part of warfare in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Therefore, paying attention to its historical representation helps us chart and comprehend its cultural function in our own time.

CHAPteR 1

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks Military Diaries, Letters, and Memoirs on Siege Warfare

The representation of warfare in the diaries, letters, and memoirs – “materials of memory” – of military men engaged in a siege is always selective and entrenched in a particular perspective.1 However, those who produce such works generally insist on their authenticity, relying on a series of truth claims and supporting evidence, given their role as active participants in the besieged landscape. In such forms of life writing or “autobiographical historiography,” we should, at least theoretically, come closest to the actual experience of siege warfare between 1642 and 1722. However, as with all genres, life writing, as defined and practiced in the mid-seventeenth through the early eighteenth centuries, involves certain discursive practices that cause them to be shaped in distinct ways and to shape the besieged space in a particular fashion.2 In his study of the relation of seventeenth-century historiography to the emergent novel, Robert Mayer stresses that historians from Bacon to Clarendon accepted life writing, then viewed as a subcategory of historiography, as truthful or factual, even when the author wrote from a personal perspective and had a specific moral purpose in mind. It was quite possible, they believed, for past facts to be accurately shared through personal reminiscence in life writing. Given that there was a growing emphasis in the seventeenth century on the importance of relaying objective facts to readers, as Barbara J. Shapiro details in A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720, it is hardly surprising that an emphasis on the factual and verifiable – “the legalistic language of witnesses, credibility, and ‘matters of fact’” – was a defining convention in most military siege diaries, letters, and memoirs.3 This is also likely because military men often turned to the more “objective” and fact-based language of measurement and calculation “to minimize the terror of combat” and the “horrors of war,” allowing

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

25

them to maintain an honourable and neostoic identity, as Sharon Alker has argued in relation to Daniel Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier.4 The desire for objectivity, in fact, may have caused many early modern military diarists, epistolists, journalists, and memorialists to present material as if it were unmediated, accomplishing this end by, paradoxically, writing themselves, as individual agents, out of their narratives. Their role as objective eyewitness is perceived as more important than their role as military actor in these instances. This devotion to fact, at the expense of richness and complexity of plot, as it were, is clearly articulated in The Journal of John Stevens when Stevens discusses his narration method in recording events at the siege of Limerick (1690): “I shall be brief in my relation of the siege, affirming only what I saw or received from eyewitnesses of credit, for considering my post at that time very much cannot be expected, and I had rather be brief with truth and omit small passages than by pretending to more particulars than I can affirm deliver falsehoods or at least uncertainties.”5 Autobiographical genres of various forms, Shapiro argues, were viewed by some in the early modern period as a kind of “imperfect” history or memorial, though for others they were seen as source materials for the historian rather than as historiographic texts themselves.6 However, despite this distinction, even Shapiro claims that it is “sometimes difficult to distinguish” history from autobiographical writings of all sorts, since the words diary, memorials, history, and so on, were employed on occasion interchangeably by writers and readers. She gives as the most notable example Robert Hooke’s comment on his own life story, in which his “History” is informed by “Memorials” or personal “Memory,” though they remain the product of “Matter of Fact.”7 The blurred line between history and autobiography, objective matters of fact and more subjective personal memories, along with the overlapping terms diary, memoirs, letters, journals, accounts, reports, and the like authored by military personnel is manifest in the hybrid nature of the content of much private and published military writings in the period, including autobiographical siege literature. Regardless of the “perfection” or “imperfection” of the type of history written or the terms used to describe the form of writing past siege events in a first-person, or occasionally third-person, narrative, most siege authors writing in a historical vein – intent on remembrance or commemoration of past sieges for a variety of reasons – focused on the recent past. As Shapiro, Daniel Woolf, and David Cressy have all shown, from the inception of

26

Besieged

the Civil War onwards, there was a tendency in historical writings to focus on contemporary history rather than on the distant past. In fact, Shapiro argues that in seventeenth-century Britain, “perfect history” was “contemporary history” because it was written by “first-hand witnesses,” one reason for assigning it the “most exalted historiographical status.”8 Daniel Woolf explains that “there is a discernible shift in focus toward the recent past beginning in the 1640s” in historiography, the result of living in times of obvious historic significance and of the desire to give order and meaning to national and personal chaos.9 As Cressy has argued, “The battle to control the meaning and memory of the English Revolution began even as its earliest episodes were unfolding. The reiteration of recent historical developments enabled contemporaries to make sense of the disturbances of their age. The writing of history imposed narrative order and thematic coherence on a bewildering clutter of confusions. History, then as now, allowed participants to understand their place in time.”10 And historical autobiography, as Andy Mousley strikingly puts it, has its specific advantages since it “puts human flesh on the bones of historical narrative, it gives us the sensuously lived experience, the embodied reality, and all that goes with embodied reality in terms of recognisable human emotions.”11 Though “human emotions” are revealed in military autobiographical prose, a common first impression of it, as Yuval Noah Harari and others have argued, is that it is comprised of “facts rather than of experiences,” leading Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly to describe it as “frustratingly factual and laconic.”12 The language of fact not feeling is what initially strikes most readers of soldiers’ diaries, letters, journals, or memoirs. While noting “some exceptions,” Harari concludes that “the normal mode of narration in Renaissance military memoirs is a bird’s-eye factual description, which is optimal for knowing the facts, and for getting an objective and fully-rounded view of events, but which is ill-suited for conveying the experience of war.”13 Harari believes, as does Neil Ramsey, who draws upon his work, that it was not until the Romantic period that military memoirs in particular become more sentimental and began to convey the “personal experience and suffering” of military personnel.14 Alker has drawn attention to the fact that classical notions of heroic valour and philosophical stoicism frequently informed soldiery narration, encouraging, whenever necessary, the silencing of the wound.15 After all, in The Souldiers Catechisme, produced for the parliamentary army, the soldiers are advised that “this Warre is surrounded with the prayers and

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

27

blessings of all the good people of the Land” and that men who lack military “metall” are “a breed and generation of cravens.”16 Figurative or quasi-figurative language is, therefore, often relied upon to mask the true nature of brutal confrontations. In Sir Gamaliel Dudley’s account of the Battle of Chequerfield (1 March 1645) during the siege of Pontefract, for instance, he writes, “[T]he encounter continued hot and sharp a good while, with severall various appearances of successe on both sides” (our emphasis).17 Brian Sandberg also takes note of similar phrases in early modern French siege literature written during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1629).18 That military siege writers tend toward attending to fact rather than feeling is predictable given their need to focus on how to take or maintain control of a contested space, and to do so they must memorize in great detail the layout of the space under siege. They must also determine how features of the space can be altered or overcome in order to win it or preserve it from their opponents. Besieging forces, therefore, must become expert at reading the space they wish to possess. In a similar way, the besieged also find themselves caught up in a heightened way with spatial markers. Confined to a restricted space, largely cut off from the landscape outside their walls, the besieged become infinitely aware of an encroachment onto, under, or over a few inches of land that would otherwise be invisible or without significance to them. They are also aware that at any moment in time, they must prepare for the eradication of the places with which they identify themselves and many aspects of their lives, threatening to dismantle and destroy the relational dimension of the self. What might be called a “hyper-spatial consciousness” develops as space becomes infinitely more significant. The besiegers and the besieged, therefore, become space-obsessed, narrowing their focus to the small scale. Time, however, is also significant in terms of the besieged’s feeling that they are running out of it, especially if they are starving. The military personnel writing siege narratives in letters, diaries, journals, and memoirs take their readers into the besieged space or outside its walls by attending very closely both to the temporal and spatial elements of the original experience. It is as if, through the written word and more frequently numerical designations, they can capture and control the space they formerly attacked or inhabited. It is, to some extent, a psychological managerial device by which to control and contain the imagined space of war. The linguistic strategies used to reimagine the space are analogous in some respect to the literal devices

28

Besieged

used during war: weapons that can shape or reshape the combat zone. War deconstructs traditional forms of space and memorialists make sense of this deconstruction. They impose mental maps on the combat zone, encouraged by ideas formulated in military handbooks on how to retain or fight to possess contested space.19 However, the siege narratives of military men in the period are not devoid of feeling or affect, even though this is rarely the dominant form of expression. Only recently, given the “affective turn,” have scholars paid close attention to this dimension of military life writing. Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven’s collection Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination has played a critical role in establishing military life writing as revealing the “[e]motional socialization of soldiers in the military” and the “emotional practices” that flow from such socialization.20 While Kuijpers and van der Haven recognize that many early modern military memoirs “mainly report on the military and logistic aspects of war and focus on heroic events in a very terse, factual way,” they suggest that this style in itself constitutes a particular emotional register.21 Absence of transparent references to internal emotions, they persuasively contend, is not equivalent to lack of emotions. We find, in fact, affective discourse in early modern military life writing expressed both indirectly and directly. For example, Dudley writes of the brutality and cruelty of soldiers to civilians (albeit when describing the behaviour of his enemies), indirectly revealing a sense of the horror of war: “They ravished the women and bound men neck and heels together, and ravished their daughters in their sight. One woman they ravished who was within a week of her time.”22 So too, in the 1642 letters of the English foot soldier Nehemiah Wharton, the affective language of heroic pride is intensified through the trope of flesh-eating: having just begun to eat, his company is interrupted with cries that the enemy is coming, and “in half an hower all our soildiers, though dispersed, were cannybals in armes, ready to encounter the enemy, cryinge out for a dish of Calvellaers to supper”; Wharton celebrates in this passage the bestial passions of the soldier at war.23 Yet, when reflecting on the enemies, he also writes with palpable indignation of the barbarity of war, especially of royalist soldiers: “Our wounded men they [the Cavaliers] brought into the city [of Worcester], and stripped, stabbed, and slashed their dead bodies in a most barbarous manner, and imbued their hands in their blood. They also at their return met a young gentleman, a Parliament man, as I am

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

29

informed – his name I cannot learn – and stabbed him on horseback with many wounds, and trampled upon him, and also most maliciously shot his horse.”24 The horror of “Man’s inhumanity to Man” seems to be at its worst on such occasions, according to Wharton.25 In his war memoirs, Sir Andrew Melville goes so far as to admit that language is insufficient to express the atrocities of war when he arrives at a “quarter that served as a hospital for soldiers.” Of this site, he observes, “It would be difficult to describe the horror of that place, nor do I even think decency permits me to speak of the sights I saw. But this I can aver with truth, that in all my life I have never seen a place so filthy and so vile. At the moment I did not pause to ponder over its horrors.”26 Though the dutiful language of “[l]oyal devotion and service” and the detailed description of the events of war are commonplace in such writings, the affective dimension of the Civil War is not always skimmed over.27 While Harari argues that war was familiar and factual for early modern soldiers – and thus those who write memoirs are generally indifferent “towards the experience, image and phenomenon of war” – this is clearly not always the case in all memoirs and related genres.28 The discourses of fact and to a lesser extent feeling relied upon by military personnel to capture the authentic nature and experience of siege warfare between 1642 and 1722 are deeply impacted by fractured networks – social, political, religious, economic, intelligence, etc. – that result from urban sieges. With disrupted networks, facts cannot be relayed with absolute certainty and emotions of the besieged intensify given that people, information, and resources can no longer move freely. Both rational thought and the emotions are compromised and the rhetoric of representation consequently destabilized. Therefore, siege memoirs authored by military men also frequently employ the language of ruptured networks or disrupted commerce, recognizing both the strategic advantages and devastating consequences of preventing the free flow of beings, information, and resources from taking place. A number of the siege diaries, letters, and memoirs consider the powerful role of weaponized (mis)information under such cut-off conditions.29 In this chapter we explore and theorize the intersection of these three dominant discursive modes – tactical, affective, and commercial (broadly understood to include all types of commerce or networks) – that intersect in the life writing of officers, “gentlemen volunteers,” or “common foot soldier[s]” involved in siege warfare.30 We will begin by delving into early

30

Besieged

modern siege diaries, move through siege letters, and conclude with the more retrospective siege “memorial” or memoir. We will then turn to the fictional military memoirs featuring sieges that have been attributed to Daniel Defoe to demonstrate how in transforming historiographic autobiography into novelistic discourse Defoe makes use of the same three discursive modes to constitute his conception of the fragile city in early eighteenth-century Britain. Along the way, it will become evident that though each genre lends itself to a distinctive treatment of the siege, allowing for greater representational creativity and flexibility, the dominant discursive modes remain the same to varying degrees.

The Siege Diary: Nathan Drake and James Hilton The siege diary of Nathan Drake, a “Gentlem[a]n Volunteer” serving in a division commanded by Sir John Ramsden during the first and second sieges of Pontefract Castle (1644–45), is a strikingly detailed account of civil war sieges from the perspective of besieged royalists.31 Drake’s descendant, Francis Drake, referred to it as a “journal” in his transcription, but we would likely consider it a diary because it records what occurs in the siege often on a daily basis during set periods, with the date of occurrence almost always opening each entry, beginning with Christmas day in 1644.32 The emphasis on timekeeping in the siege diary has the benefit of bringing order to the countless microfacts confronting the eyewitness diarist and, by extension, his reader. And as with the early modern spiritual diary, it also marks a committed regular devotion, though of a secular, soldiery nature, to recording and registering the events and experiences of the physically rather than the spiritually besieged.33 However, this siege diary is also intensely spatially aware, given the complex architectural structures that the military action moves in and through: in Drake’s case, orchards, the church, towers, private homes, the marketplace, closes, walls, and halls, along with the siege works and trenches outside the castle and the mines dug beneath it. Lesser structures are also detailed, including, for example, the staircases, roof, nave, and turret in the church. The commitment in the diary to the exact enumeration of facts that occurred within a specific spatiotemporal context is evidenced in the actual lists of names and numbers provided: the numbers

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

31

of the dead and wounded besieging soldiers; the number of “men women & children of all deseases with those wch was killd within the castle” between 24 December 1644 and 19 July 1645; the names of the royalist soldiers defending the castle; and the supposedly precise number of times the cannon was “played” on certain days (4, 7). This need to give an accurate accounting of war specifically as it relates to besieged structures and the bodies of soldiers and civilians alike within those structures dominates the narrative. Two examples serve as cases in point. On 5 June 1645, Drake writes, “This morning there was a boy, who was prentise wth Mr Richard Stables, but now in the Castle, he went forth to gett some grasse for the Castle’s use, (for the horseyes & cattell,) but was shott thorow the arme & p’te of the shoulder, but recovers prett[y] well again, & walkes up & downe the Castle yeardes” (39). The impact of the besiegers’ weapons on a soldier’s body is similarly accounted for in relation to the specific time and space in which it occurs; on 6 June 1645, Drake writes, “This morning one of our Souldiers, standing upon the toppe of the lower gatehowse wth his back towardes Munkhill, was shott from thence sidlinges upon his back daungerously hurt, & the bullitt not taken out of 4 daies after, hath beene in great paine since, but no feare but he will recover againe” (41). Such inventories of injured bodies in situ dominate diary entries and are mirrored by accounts of damaged manmade structures that are often identified by personal ownership. Drake recounts, for example, that on 4 April 1645 “the beseeged shott one Cannon into Mrs. Oates howse” (19). The besieged landscape in these and other cases is not merely understood as a site of combat but also as a place of domesticity unnaturally disrupted. This fact is underscored by Drake’s recording of the acts and rituals that citizens attempt to carry out during the siege despite the disruptions. Sermons, we are told, are still being preached (two each Sunday) and we are struck by the weird juxtaposition of sermons and combat: “11th [11 May 1645] This day being Sunday, we had 2 learned Sermonds, the one by Docter Bradlay, the other by Mr Oley … the Lord give us grace to Follow them. [T]his day we killd 2 of the enemyes from the Round Tower. [T]his day allso we had one of our men was looking out of a Port hole on the Round Tower (A wright by trade), & seldome using to Come thether, but he was shott thorow the Arme, and though at a weekes end full of payne yet there is no signe of his death” (30). A

32

Besieged

similar account of domesticity disrupted occurs when “a … young maid was Drying of Clothes in Mr. Taytons Orchard” only to be “shott into the head whereof she dyed that night” (24). For Drake, the citizens are not a burden or mindless mob as they are in some other early modern military works. Their persons, homes, and routines are worthy of notice, and events related to them directly and indirectly must be detailed with great accuracy. However, the matter-offact discourse employed to affirm accuracy sometimes necessitates introducing new material prefaced with such statements as, “One thing was forgott wch is now heare inserted” (13), which also results in the discourse of affect coming to the surface in the narrative. It is in the recounting of stories of the suffering citizen bodies that the vocabulary of sympathy manifests most clearly, though it is still restrained. Drake recalls, for instance, that on 27 May 1645 “a little poore wench [who] was keeping of a Cow under Swillington Tower was shott into the thigh by the enemy, but not killd” (36); and that two days earlier “a poore Tailor & his wife” were taken prisoner after the enemy “burnt downe 2 or 3 little howses” near the “Water mill below the Castle” belonging to the tailor’s family (35; emphasis ours). In detailing soldierly combat, the emotive discourse of heroic pride also periodically makes an appearance, though never in an excessive way. On 18 May 1645, for example, after “the enemy Runne away Basely by 40 at a time over St Thomas Hill towardes Ferry bridge,” Drake informs his readers that the royalist “men did greate execution, both breefely & gallantly, having not left one man in all theire trenches but dead, and retreted Honorably the same waies they went out” (32). The discourse of feeling, therefore, punctuates the hammering discourse of fact even in the condensed entries of the period siege diary. However, both the language of feeling and fact are intensified by the besieged’s sense of entrapment and their unstable relation to information and resources. On 3 May 1645, Drake describes with heightened emotion the sense of hope that comes with the temporarily restoring of communication networks when letters arrive from friends and allies: “we had 2 letters sent from newarke wth very good newes from the South, and allso of the good Condition that all the Kinges forces were in, wch did not a little Comforth us to here of theire good p’ceedinges & our freindes wellfare” (28). Those trapped in the castle are, at times, overjoyed on hearing that “the enemies letters” or the stories that they shout “from all theire workes

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

33

neare to the Castle” are “nothing but lyes,” “abominable & apparent lyes” (45, 48). With the circulation of reliable news and goods (including such basic items as apples for the populace and “gras for the Cattell & horseyes”) the facts are known and hope is kindled (43). The desperation for intellectual commerce, or intelligence networks, to be restored, and the accompanying fear that circulating knowledge will improve the military position of the enemy, is inextricably tied to the bodies of the besieged who leave or return to the stormed city. Men, women, and even members of the clergy are stripped to ensure royalist networks remain fractured. On 28 June 1645, for instance, the lady of the castle is given permission to leave, “but when she Came to the enemyes first gaurd, they stript both hur & hur wayting maid to hur very smock, & likewise hur Chaplin & a tenant of hurs wch Came downe wth the Chaplin to the Sally poart, to search for letters but they had none” (50). Bodies in such cases are seen simply as potential vehicles of networking; social niceties, therefore, are ignored, regardless of the intensification of affect, notably shame and humiliation, in those stripped. The parliamentarians not only sought to intensify the emotional anxiety of the royalist besieged in this case by limiting basic resources for survival, they also threatened “the [spiritual] health of … [the] Soules” of those trapped within the walls of Pontefract by preventing the flow of the elements needed for religious ritual (19). On 5 April 1645, Drake describes with some affect the depravity of “the enemy” for refusing to permit wine for Easter communion to pass through the walls: “The enemy basely stayd all wine from coming to the Castle for serving of the Communion upon Easter Day, although Forbus (their Governor) had graunted p’tecktion for the same, and one Browne of Wakefeild said if it were for our damnation we should have it, but not for our Solvation” (19). In Drake’s diary, therefore, fact, feeling, and fractured networks come together in distinct ways, with the privileging of fact, the periodic bubbling up of feeling, and the intensification of both depending on when the besieged have access to or are barred from networks of resources and communication. Drake’s diary conforms most to Harari’s characterization of the content of another genre, the early modern military memoir, which “privileged tangible facts over both abstractions and experiences.”34 However, even in this instance, the soldierly report of his military experience is not devoid of emotion.

34

Besieged

The role and relation of fact, feeling, and fractured networks in Drake’s work is shared by a great many English soldiers who produced siege diaries, even in the case of sieges that occurred far from Britain. One will briefly detain us here: the diary of the soldier James Hilton, employed by the English East India Company, written during the siege of the “Company’s fort and settlement” in Bombay (1689–90).35 Employed as an ensign, then an adjutant, and later a “captain … of the militia and of the island’s grenadier guard,” Hilton produces diary entries that would be far less familiar to the British reader than those of Drake, especially given the complex ethnic identity and allegiances of the besiegers and besieged in a foreign landscape.36 As Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern explain, “The story of the siege thus puts center stage a dizzyingly entangled cast of characters – not just English, Mughal, and Maratha but also Portuguese, Dutch, Gujarati, Rajput, Abyssinian, Persian, and many others.”37 The besieging forces, led by Sidi Yakut Khan on behalf of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, undertook this final military act in what is known as Child’s War or the first Anglo-Mughal War (1686–90), in retaliation for the imprudent and ultimately unsuccessful martial efforts of Sir John Child, the governor, to strengthen the Company’s trade networks in the area at the expense of the Mughal Empire and other traders.38 Still despite the striking differences in the siege participants and the landscape in which the combat occurs, Hilton, like Drake, is caught up with quantifying gains and losses, summarizing daily military actions, and naming the besieged soldiers and occasionally civilians wounded and killed, often detailing the specific cause and nature of their injury or death. The language of fact, at least as conceived of by Hilton, typifies the diary as a whole. Two characteristic entries demonstrate his emphasis on simply what has occurred, not how he experiences it: April 1, 1689 This day we were pretty quiet, only guns passing now and then at each other. We threw a shell out of our mortar piece into the yard of the East India House where they used to play a gun or two and believe it did great execution … October 17, 1689 This day our people began to fortify at Captain Thorburn’s house and being at work about 2 o-clock in the morning, the Sidi sent down a party of about a thousand men, but our black people stood to it and beat them back with only one man on our side being wounded.39

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

35

The language of feeling is deliberately absent from such diary entries, only natural in a military diary that also functions as a business record. However, it is nearly impossible for Hilton to disregard emotions entirely, affect creeping in, for example, through the phrase “praised be God” which first appears parenthetically but is eventually fully integrated into sentences. We read, for example, in the entry for 3 November 1689, ten months into the eighteen-month siege, “This day the Enemy fired several great guns and flung several stones at us, one whereof lit at the Judge’s house just before the Fort Gate and killed one of my Lady’s women. They likewise flung a shell that broke near Ensign FitzGerald’s house that is upon the Green which (praised be God) did no hurt” (69; emphasis ours). Occasional references to the fear of the besieged soldiers and the heroic courage of a few brave men who save the day also find their way into the diary. On 10 March 1690, a sentry runs for his life when attacked by enemy soldiers who breached the wall of the “Company’s garden” and fails to cry out to warn the battery, resulting in about 300 of the besieger’s men trying to push their way through the battery door. Faced with his men’s lack of resolve, the Company’s subadar, one “Maloji Bhonsle,” “surprised at his men’s weak-heartedness in letting the men come in, cried out ‘Will you quit the battery and so be hanged by the English? It is better for you to fight like men,’ which words got some of them about him and he himself with the Christian cabo maintained the door and killed about twenty of the Enemy” (90). This expression of heroic affect helps to maintain the network of ethnically and culturally diverse forces working together to protect the English East India Company, even though different elements of those forces had their own motives for working together. While networks with the outside world were fractured, halting the flow of allies, resources, and information into the fort and settlement in Bombay during the siege – especially disturbing for a company that sought to monopolize trade in the area – it is the fracturing of networks within the community that is of particular distress to Hilton, intermittently disrupting the otherwise monotone diary entries. The fracturing of external intelligence networks certainly results in Hilton’s frequent attempts to guess at the impact of the military actions of the besieged, even when his men sally out of the fort to fight. He leaves blank spaces in his entries hoping to fill them in when he is confident that the information is accurate. He writes, for instance, of combat activities on 16 March 1689, “What damage they have received we refer it to tomorrow’s account having no

36

Besieged

certain news what damage they received, only Ensign Browne supposed to be killed” (35; our emphasis). However, the breakdown of knowledge in these cases is far less anxiety-inducing than the breakdown of military ties within the besieged community, figured by the frequent desertion of the besieged’s military personnel and their conversion to Islam in order to join the forces of the enemy. On 19 May 1689, Hilton recalls that their “Bandareens and Savajees … found one Isaac Scott (lying wounded) who formerly ran to the Sidi [Sidi Yakut Khan] from the Bunder Guard, and being brought before a Court Martial confessed that he had entered himself in the Sidi’s service and that he had fired several great guns against us”; as a result, the court sentenced him to be “hanged by the neck until his body” was “dead dead dead,” which was carried out brutally and publicly (he was “fastened to the angle gun on the Tank Bastion” and left there from morning to evening) as “a spectacle and warning to such inhuman criminals” (48). The “unnatural” deserters who returned as enemies were seen as extremely dangerous since they used their knowledge of the besieged against them. On 26 July 1689, after sallying out in the woods and engaging in vigorous combat with the enemy forces, “at least forty European [men] in the field” “which formerly deserted our Garrison, most of which fell upon our grenadiers,” “called out to them by their names,” presumably to throw them off their game (54). The frightening and often permanent transformation of such “inhuman criminals” is again addressed by Hilton near the end of the siege when prisoners are being exchanged and soldiers who had joined enemy forces were given “a free pardon” (99). When he enters the Sidi camp, offering pardons to “all Englishmen as well them that were cut [circumcised] as them that were not,” he finds that “none would come excepting one William Osboldiston that was formerly a grenadier, although they [who] were not turned Moors had the Sidi’s grant to go or stay” though later “one John Green that was cut made his escape from the Sidi upon sight of the aforesaid pardon” (99). This fracturing of networks within the besieged camp, evidenced by disloyal soldiers and the “shocking degree of disunity among the European settlers,” would have greatly intensified the feelings of anxiety amongst the besieged.40 This response is verified in a letter published early in the siege from “the Bombay council” to “the Company’s governing court of committees in London,” in which the authors explain, “we must confess it is a great evil that our own garrison soldiers should desert us and not

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

37

only that but in actual arms against us, and one of them is worse to us than 100 of the black enemies.”41 The failure to acquire knowledge of facts with any certainty given the fracturing of external networks during the siege, in addition to the instability of relational networks within the besieged community, must have gravely disoriented the besieged. However, as with Drake, Hilton makes every effort to record the facts alone in his diary to appear an impartial and thus credible witness, suppressing affective rhetoric when he can, even if he is not wholly successful in doing so. He left it up to the official letter writers for the Bombay council to place more emphasis on the appeal to affect than on the appeal to fact.

The Siege Letter: Sir William Brereton and Oliver Cromwell The role and interplay of the three discursive modes of fact, feeling, and fractured networks figure rather differently in the letters of a besieging military commander, due, in part, to the nature of the epistolary genre, the location of the author outside the walls of the city, castle, or close, and the office held by the author(s), as shown in the letters of Sir William Brereton (1604–61), the Civil War parliamentary commander of Cheshire. The year after Drake produced his diary, Brereton, who “stormed eleven garrison towns” during his military career, regularly corresponded on his martial activities, which were held in five letter books.42 In these letters to and from Brereton, as well as by others in the war effort, we see a similar reliance on the language of fact, affect, and commerce but from the perspective of the besiegers, especially from the view of a commander, and transmitted through the conventions of epistolary form. The historian John Morrill argues that Brereton’s letter books “are one of the most important sources for understanding the military, administrative, and political dynamics of civil-war parliamentarianism.”43 We focus here on the letter book of April and May 1646, which addresses “the sieges before Dudley, Tutbury and Bridgnorth Castles, and the Cathedral Close of Lichfield,” as well as the siege of Chester but also touch upon an earlier letter on Brereton’s relief of besieged parliamentarians in Montgomery Castle.44 Unlike the diary entries of Drake, the letters of Brereton on besieging efforts are almost always illocutionary in nature. Brereton is not simply recording military minutia for posterity but is writing in the moment to

38

Besieged

bring some action into being. His words, that is, do, or are intended to, cause particular actions to take place and would thus be classified as “performative utterances” or “speech acts,” according to the philosophers of language J.L. Austin and John R. Searle.45 They are also dialogic in nature, based on, and given meaning by, their place in an epistolary network of communication. Given the genre used by Brereton to record and influence siege events, the discourses of affect and intelligence often take precedence over the discourse of fact, though strategic planning necessitates sharing factual details about the state and circumstances of each siege. Brereton certainly writes letters that focus on the transmission of factual strategic or tactical information. In his letter of 9 May 1646 to the Speaker of the House of Commons, for instance, we come across the following factual account of the activities that took place on entering Lichfield Close after its surrender to his forces: “When wee first Entred ye towne wee Rescued out of ye markett place manie Hundreds of Cattell wch ye Enimy had taken from ye neighbourhood upon the Approach of our fforces, all wch we restored to the severall owners. Our first care then was to place our Guards as neere and as Comodiously to the Castell as could bee to secure our men in ye towne and to Blocke upp ye Castell.”46 Brereton’s tactical discourse is expressed in similar terms when he advises Captain Greenwood and Captain Watson how to act when Tutbury Castle is surrendered to the besieging forces: “Gent, Upon ye Surrender of ye Garrison of Tutburie it was referred to your Care to see ye same dismantled soe as it should be incapable of being hereafter made a Garrison … I desire yt some twenty musquetiers maybe taken alonge to contynue in ye castle till it be effectuallie done” (211–12). Such starkly matter-of-fact passages are reminiscent of many of Drake’s and Hilton’s diary entries, only from the besieger’s rather than the besieged’s perspective. However, this type of factbased tactical discourse is more often than not framed in this and related letters by affective discourse that results from the circulation of information through the intelligence network and/or from the practical problems that arise during a long-term siege operation. Writing to Captains Watson and Greenwood the next day (7 May 1646), Brereton articulates his anxiety about their actions given incoming information: “It was some Intelligence I Received that woried mee to write that letter and therein to desire noe delay might bee comitted which being confirmed to mee I have thought good the place being of soe greate Concernm’t to send these lines to desire that you will not faile in this Trust reposed in you” (212).

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

39

In fact, the language of affect, notably worry and frustration, repeatedly surfaces in Brereton’s letters, particularly with respect to the financial networks needed to control his besieging soldiers. Having received information that soldiers in Captain Clegg’s company will not move unless they are given “ye months pay p’mised upon surrender of ye Cittie” of Chester, Brereton merges the discourse of fact and emotion in an effort to raise funds. In a letter dated 11 April 1646, he informs Mr Ashurst and Mr Swinfen, “The Chester men are now come upp to ye number of 700 and are verrie willing to doe service. But I feare unless speedily prevented by supply of money, there may bee an evill president given, for those yt came upp first begin to murmer and threaten to goe home if they receave not money” (114). The affect of the soldiers, an unpredictable bunch, threaten the strategic operation of sieges and battles unless, through his network, Brereton can secure the inflow of cash to control their behaviour. While he waits for financial aid to make its way to him, he must make use of his own private network, rather than the unpredictable public network, to raise the funds to pay his men: “I am sending to Coventrie upon my owne creditt to take upp some money upon bond” (115). The prevalence of affective discourse in the relaying of fact is even more transparent in Brereton’s letter to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, dated 20 April 1646, regarding drafting articles for the surrender of Tutbury Castle. Brereton writes, Wee have this day according to ye power and directions from yor Honor gone through wth ye Articles for takeing in Tutbury and most humblie informe you yt ye increaseing of ye sickness here in ye towne and amongst our soldiers, wee haveing 18 dead and visited and divers dead suddenly this p’ss’tt day, and ye Countries possessed with extreame feares thereof by the spreadinge of it abroad and complaineing likewise of ye burthen of ye charge hath enforced us rather to make bold to put a period to ye same (to pr’vent further eminent and apparent danger) then to stay for ye returne of ye further pleasures upon our transmitting them first. (156) A sense of urgency, fear, and desperation takes precedence in this letter that conveys the difficulty of the three-week siege of Tutbury. While his epistolary network is essential to the operation of the siege, the time involved in transmitting and receiving intelligence and instructions by

40

Besieged

letter undermines his military strategy to reduce the occurrence of death and disease during the siege of Tutbury Castle. Sluggish information networks, therefore, threaten the emotional stability of soldiers and civilians alike. Religious affect makes a more positive appearance in Brereton’s siege letters, as it does tend to do in parliamentary siege literature more generally. In his letter to the Committee of Both Kingdoms, dated 18 September 1644, Brereton relays numerical facts about relieving Montgomery Castle but frames those facts in rousing religio-heroic discourse: But our extremity was God’s opportunity to magnifie his power; for when it was most dubious the Lord so guided and encouraged our men that, with one fresh valiant charge we routed and put to retreat and flight their whole Army; pursued them many miles, even in the Mountaines, and did perform great execution upon them; slew (I doe believe) 500, wounded many more, tooke neere 1,500 prisoners … and all their carriages and neere 20 barrels of Powder … We tooke also (as was conceived) neere 1,500 or 2,000 Armes, most for foot.47 In this case, spiritual networks – the intervention of spiritual forces in the temporal plane to benefit God’s “servants” – are seen to save the day in the siege of Montgomery Castle, amplifying the enthusiasm of a “righteous victory.” Daniel Defoe would later describe spiritual networking thus in A Vision of the Angelic World: “In a word, all these things serve to convince us of a great superintendency of divine Providence in the minutest affairs of this world, of a manifest existence of the invisible world, of the reality of spirits, and of the intelligence between us and them.”48 When fractured temporal networks are inadequate to relieve besieged allies, success is attributed to this powerful spiritual network that also relies on the successful transmission of “intelligence.” The movement between tactical discourse and the language of religious emotion, involving epistolary and spiritual networks, in Brereton’s siege letters also occurs in the siege letters of Oliver Cromwell, evident in two published by the House of Commons in September and October 1645. Serving as Parliament’s lieutenant general of horse at this time, Cromwell wrote to the House of Commons to provide updates on military action. Parliament saw fit to publish some of these letters to draw the public into their communication networks as, presumably, part of their public relations and recruitment strategies. In Lieut: Generall Cromwells Letter to

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

41

the House of Commons, of All the Particulars of taking the City of Bristoll,” dated 14 September 1645 and published by Parliament four days later, he begins by setting out the facts with familiar tactical language, having been told by his general “to represent unto you a particular Accompt of the taking of Bristoll, the which I gladly undertake.”49 Later in the letter, he admits that he cannot in such a brief letter relate all the facts, but he insists that this does not detract from his truth claims: “Thus I have given you a true, but not a full account of this great businesse” (7). He first shares with the House of Commons the strategic discussions at the council of war on where his men should go next, with a focus on enemy forces and trade networks, notably “for the opening of Trade to London” (A2). He continues to report in a matter-of-fact vein information on the type of siege method chosen, the military actions of the enemy, the names of military personnel who carried out particular acts, the number and nature of losses, the misinformation circulating about the loyalties of the townspeople, the successful military tools and tactics used, the treaty for surrender, the goods taken when Bristol was seized, and so forth. However, near the end of his letter, the tactical voice of the narrator is suddenly replaced with an emotive religious voice, with an emphasis on how the heroism of the “gallant men” who took Bristol for Parliament is rooted in their joy in serving as “instruments to Gods glory, and their Countries good” (7). Their military prowess, featured with tactical language, is overshadowed by their religious commitment, figured in “faith and Prayer,” which is identified as what “obtained this City” for Parliament. Cromwell concludes in a sermonic vein, employing the discourse of praise and thanksgiving for this and future military successes: “I doe not say ours onely, but of the people of God with you, and all England over, who have wrastled with God for a blessing in this very thing. Our desires are, that God may be glorified by the same Spirit of faith, by which we aske all our sufficiency, and having received it, it is meet that he have all the praise” (7). Therefore, whereas Cromwell begins his letter with practical siege matters, such as restoring an effective trade route between English cities through military strategy, he ends it with heightened religious discourse on praising the supernatural source of the successful siege. We witness a similar pattern in Lieut: Generall Cromwells Letter to the Honorable, William Lenthall Esq; Speaker of the House of Commons; of the Storming and Taking Basing-House, dated 14 October 1645 and published by Parliament two days later. The home of the royalist John Paulet, Marquess of Winchester, Basing-House was besieged on a number

42

Besieged

of occasions during the Civil War, the one described in Cromwell’s letter being the last. After providing a brief tactical overview of the successful storming of the house, a royalist garrison, Cromwell turns to detailing the need to “slight” or level it and to focus instead on other strongholds in the area, with an eye once again to maintaining safe networks in England for the circulation of people and goods. On this subject he writes, “I dare be confident, it [“a strong quarter at Newbery”] would not only be a curb to Dennington, but a security and a Frontier to all these parts, inasmuch as Newbery lies upon the River, and will prevent any incursion … into these parts, and by lying there will make the Trade most secure before Bristoll and London for all Carriages.”50 After presenting, via tactical discourse, an overview of the siege and setting out in brief future plans to improve the network of relations in the area by razing the house, Cromwell immerses himself in the language of religious affect, declaring, “God exceedingly abounds in his goodnesse to us, and will not be weary, untill righteousnesse and peace meet, and that he hath brought forth a glorious work, for the happinesse of this poor Kingdom, wherein desires to serve God and you with a faithfull heart” (7). The discourse of religious affect sanctifies, as it were, the discourse of tactical siege warfare, conflating service to the divine with service to the parliamentary cause. The three dominant discursive modes, therefore, are central to both siege diaries and letters in the early modern period, but their prominence and interplay differ depending on genre, the political or religious commitment of the author, and even the rank of the military author, since higher ranking officers have more authority over the “game of war.” In the typical military siege diary, tactical discourse is privileged, and the discourse of affect plays an important but far less visible role, while the discourse of fractured networks intensifies both discursive modes. In contrast, in the typical military siege letter, all three modes are more openly in play as the authors not only relay knowledge but also often seek to alter circumstance through their network of relations.

The Siege Memoir: Sir Hugh Cholmley and Sir Andrew Melville In the retrospective memoir, the three discursive modes remain but once again reorient, largely because of the distance of time and space from the siege event(s). While the military siege diary and letter operate in

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

43

the realm of the immediate, recording or transmitting knowledge as soon as, or shortly after, the siege(s) occurs, the author of the military siege memoir or journal consciously constructs a narrative through which to make sense of, and give meaning to, past events, often justifying or embellishing his actions along the way. There is, therefore, a tendency to produce a more coherent story and, in some cases, a fictionalized one, not necessarily making it untrue but rather adapting experience to fictional conventions depending on the intended audience: family, future generations, or the popular reader. So too, in a number of retrospective siege memoirs, unlike siege diaries and letters, the authors are disinclined to list endless martial details, numerical or otherwise, because their readers are not military men. They presume that their readers would be bored by such blow-by-blow details of a given siege or would already be familiar with them given the publication of accounts of sieges in pamphlets and newsbooks shortly after they occurred. What is privileged in many siege memoirs, or military memoirs that feature a great many sieges, is the behaviour of the protagonist (the author) and the unfolding of the plot: what the author envisions as the most significant episodes in the siege story. In the “Memorialls tuching Scarbrough” (c. 1647), written by the parliamentarian-turned-royalist baronet Sir Hugh Cholmley, and the posthumously published Memoires de monsieur Le Chevalier de Melvill (1704) by the Scottish “soldier-of-fortune” Andrew Melville, we hear the voice of the brave and resolute protagonist who outwits (if only temporarily) and outlasts his enemies, even in the face of an ultimate loss. The authors keep the reader captivated by revealing that, despite deeply ruptured networks and intense emotions, they managed to navigate the circumstances of the siege with great dexterity. Cholmley and Melville work hard in their siege memoirs to shape their stories with both historical truth and the entertainment of the reader in mind, which necessitates the balancing of the language of fact and feeling. Sir Hugh Cholmley’s “Memorialls tuching Scarbrough” recounts the Civil War siege of 1644–45 from a royalist perspective two or three years after the event. Initially fighting for Parliament, Cholmley switched sides and when asked by the king, he “withstood [the] siege in Scarborough Castle for five months,” only surrendering when all hope was lost.51 Asked by the historian Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, to provide him with an account of the siege, Cholmley produced a pamphlet-length manuscript of the struggle to retain the castle for Charles I. Cholmley attempts to maintain a matter-of-fact voice in relating the circumstances

44

Besieged

of the siege given the intended purpose of his siege memoir: to recount with accuracy the details of siege events to be integrated into the historical magnum opus of Clarendon, later published as the three-volume History of the Rebellion (1702–04), a clearly partisan account of the Civil War, safely and posthumously published long after the Restoration. However, Cholmley finds it difficult to provide only a factual account of the series of actions that constituted the siege of Scarborough. Given the capacious nature of the genre of the memoir, Cholmley first takes the opportunity to justify his own activities during the Civil War, explain his role in the siege of Scarborough in particular, and situate the siege in its sociopolitical context from a royalist perspective. In vindicating himself and the royalist cause before turning to the siege proper, Cholmley still attempts to restrain his language, with heightened emotion only appearing here and there for rhetorical effect, leading “anie rationall and impartiall” reader to judge his political choices and initial settlement of the garrison at Scarborough Castle “for the King” (which he claims to have achieved “without the least mutiny or dissturbance”) as reasonable and enlightened.52 His account of the political choices, motivated by “his judgement” and “conscience” (570), that led to his service as governor of the besieged Scarborough are presented as a factual corrective to those who might “want of [lack] a right knowledge of that perticuler” and fail to recognize it was a step toward “the generall peace of the Kingdome” (569, 570). The remainder of the siege narrative serves a similar function: to demonstrate Cholmley’s heroic actions, despite the odds against him, in the interest of right rule in Britain. Although he spends a great deal of time on self-vindication and contextualization in as objective a manner as possible, Cholmley makes it clear that in this memoir, he is not sharing everything that happened but selecting for the reader that which is most relevant and engaging. In this, he differs greatly from the military siege diarist who appears to be committed to recording as many details of the besiegement as possible. But like most siege memorialists, Cholmley is acutely aware of the nature and desire of his readers, considering the reception of his narration of events. He declares, therefore, that he does not wish to bore them with too many background details, as “[i]t would be too tedious to recite all actions and things relating to the Governor and Garrison of Scarbrough,” and chooses to relate only “two perticulers” that help reveal “the generall hisstory of the times” before he gives an overview of the siege itself (574).

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

45

The information that Cholmley elects to share about the siege works to generate admiration and pathos in the reader for the author (protagonist) and his loyal forces, who are portrayed in a most optimistic light. When Cholmley realizes that Scarborough is physically unprepared for a siege and that many of the “common soldiors” are so afraid that “they ranne away dayly” when “strucke [with] soe great a terror” on seeing the departure of “the Generall” and “the gentlemen” of “the towne,” he relies on his wit rather than on his limited military resources (575). The reader hears of his role as strategic trickster when he recounts his preparation of articles of surrender to which he never intends to agree in order to gain a few weeks of time to strengthen the city; he dupes Sir Thomas Fairfax, who is sorely angered by Cholmley’s use of misinformation to gain the upper hand temporarily. Cholmley draws on the discourse of religious truth and emotion, as did his former ally Cromwell, to associate his short-term successes with supernatural commerce. On several occasions, Cholmley “acknowledge[s] the Devine power and providence” that led to the provision of the besieged with “coales, salt, and corne” (580). Despite the breakdown of trade and commerce caused by their enemies impeding “all recourse” of the besieged “to the Markett,” spiritual commerce cannot be halted, God “miraculouslie supply[ing] “shipps which brought in prises, sometimes by shipps forced into the harbour by tempest” (580). While Cholmley does try to recount the sequence of events as a “credible historian,” the rhetoric of emotion incessantly breaks through as the situation of the siege becomes more and more dire.53 When the town is taken over, the loyal forces are confined in the castle; sickness, starvation, and disloyalty threaten to destroy the besieged from within. Rather than simply state what happened over the course of the five-month siege, Cholmley cannot help but insert ongoing commentary on the sad condition of the besieged, stressing the “wavering” and later desertion of many of the “Townesmen,” the verbal promises and threats of Sir John Meldrum (commander of the besieging troops), and the suspect behaviour of soldiers inside the garrison, of whom Cholmley writes: “for to speake truth all the actions from the enemie did not soe much trouble him [Cholmley], as the pragmatticall practices of some personns with in his owne Garrison, whoe by there cunning and plauseable deportment had gained a good repute amongst the generalitie, making huge shew and pretences of zeale to the King’s cause, though the Governor had cautions … not to trust those persons too farre” (585).

46

Besieged

Over time, in this hotbed of suffering and suspicion, life was rendered almost untenable for the besieged who were not only cut off from supplies but also from information, since after retreating “into the Castle, they had noe intelligence but what came from the enemie, soe strictlie were they guarded both by land and sea” (586). Their “miseries … exceedinglie … multiply” over time (eventually leaving “halfe of the soldiers … either slaine or dead of the scurvy”) (586), yet they cannot escape undesired commerce with the enemy, especially when they are bombarded with written propositions that literally fly into the besieged space by arrow to undermine royalist resolve and destabilize the minds of the common soldiers confined therein. Nevertheless, if this place of “verry terrible spectacle[s]” and “fatall omen[s]” serves as the background of his siege memoir, in the foreground stands the heroic protagonist who confronts the loss and suffering with stoic courage and self-sacrifice (583). Cholmley tells us, for example, that he personally paid the bulk of the expenses incurred by the common soldiers billeted in the town for four months and arranged for the equal division of “plaite in the garrison” to relieve “the soldiors,” thereby calming the townspeople and soldiers alike (585). Despite the inevitable loss of the garrison, Cholmley fashions himself as a man committed to “wrastl[ing]” with countless mundane and life-threatening difficulties for “the King’s cause” (585), finally making a treaty with the enemy only when “intreated by divers gentlemen to take into consideration the weake esstaite of the Garrison … where it … [was] unanimouslie resolved requisite to enter into a treatie touching the render of the Castle” (586). In the final four paragraphs of the memoir, Cholmley continues to balance fact and affect in describing the state of the besieged as they emerge from Scarborough Castle. On the one hand, he sets forth highly specific facts on the cause of death of his soldiers during the siege, the number and condition of those who left the castle, the just observation of the articles set up between the parties, and his personal post-siege plans, which had to be changed because he was “in verie ill health, and unfitt” to march to the king or “to betake himself to another Garrison” (587). On the other hand, in describing the condition of some of the faithful few who remained in the garrison, he paints a tragic portrait of the sick men and women who had to be “carryed out” of the castle “in blancketts,” many of whom “dyed before they gott into the Towne” (587). Even at the last, therefore, Cholmley is motivated by a desire to inform the reader about the facts of the siege of Scarborough, while also

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

47

inspiring empathy for the loyal royalists, many of whom sacrificed all for the king despite being cut off from all networks of support. The military memoir of Melville is far less tragic than Cholmley’s, perhaps because Melville is less committed to a cause than to his career. Melville also personally benefitted from rather than lamented the fractured networks that resulted from war in Britain and the Continent in the seventeenth century because it kept him actively employed as a “Scottish free-lance,” as one biographer calls him.54 When his parents’ death left him a penniless fifteen-year-old, war became his source of income, so unlike the other siege writers discussed in this chapter, fractured networks were part and parcel of his profession, and they only seem to significantly increase his anxiety when his life is in immediate danger because of limited access to allies or resources.55 Given this context, there is a picaresque quality to Melville’s memoir, though he is more adventure hero than rogue during his varied military career, which included his participation in a great many battles and sieges in Britain and on the Continent that occurred between 1647 and 1676. His memoirs, written when he was governor of Gifhorn and published in French near the end of his life, are peppered with succinct accounts of his activities as besieger or besieged at the sieges of Dixmude (1647), Lens (1647), Ypres (1648), Guise (1650), La Capelle (1650), Sighet (1664), Serinvar (1664), Brunswick (1670), and Staden (1676) before peace was established in 1678 and “the whole of Europe at last was able to enjoy the repose which it had sighed for so long.”56 Like Cholmley, Melville takes centre stage as the protagonist of his memoirs. He fashions himself an indestructible Scot who survives life-altering injuries, some of which are described by Sophia, Electress of Hanover, in 1667, when a member of her household is engaged to Melville: “I believe Madame d’Harburg has proposed a match between Lamotte and the Governor of Cell. He is a Scotsman called Melleville; soldier of ill-fortune I call him, for a cannon-shot has carried away part of his chest, which is only supported by an iron contrivance.”57 She again writes on Melville’s staunch constitution in 1675 after he sustained more injuries in warfare: “Melvill has 16 wounds of which 8 are in the head. Yet will not die, for he is of an excellent Scots complexion … I verily believe that the Scots are descended not from Adam but from the serpent. One cuts them into 16 pieces like Melvill and they all join together again.”58 For the modern reader of his memoirs, Melville, who is constantly on the move, is most remarkable for his uncanny ability to outrun death.

48

Besieged

Like Cholmley, Melville is also deeply conscious of his readers’ expectations when relaying his story with fact and feeling. He begins his memoirs with thoughts on how he might appeal to all readers: “It is the most difficult task imaginable to speak of oneself in such manner as to please every one” (71). However, he mediates the facts through his personal experiences rather than recording every aspect of military events in which he participates, writing, for example, of the siege of Lens, “I will not attempt to chronicle all the events of this siege; they can be read in the histories which deal with it and which are in every one’s hands. I will simply record the things that happened to myself, or the engagements in which I took some part. This is the course I intend to pursue throughout these memoirs, assuming that those who read them do not require information on events which took place, so to speak, under their own eyes” (80). Melville suggests that he will be a reliable record keeper but will focus on his first-hand encounters, which prove he is an exemplary soldier and man. He emphasizes this objective in his dedication to Electress Sophia when he claims she will see in the memoirs “examples of valour and courage worthy of a man who has had the honour of serving the Princes of your August house” (67). Melville, therefore, presumably employs his military memoirs to constitute himself as a paragon of “virtue … pure and disinterested” and of Protestant “[p]iety so deep and true” for socioeconomic ends (68). As he narrates each of the sieges in which he participates, Melville provides lively if tactical accounts of siege events but then shifts to more dramatic and emotional encounters. This pattern emerges in his account of the siege of Lens. He first factually notes that his general “ordered some of his soldiers to pull down the palisades,” but when he “went to show them how it should be done … while struggling with one he received a musket-ball in the head, of which he died at Arras a short time after” (80). After providing the facts of the incident, Melville shifts to elegiac commentary, lamenting, “The death of this Marshal was indeed a very serious loss to France. He was a brave and dashing soldier, and lucky in his undertakings. In fact, his praises can be summed up in a few words by saying that he did credit to the great Gustavus Adolphus under whom he had learnt his trade” (80–1). Even when his account of a particular siege and his role in it is narrated in largely tactical terms, as is his account of the siege of Dixmude, Melville cannot help but shift thereafter to the discourse of feeling to capture the postsiege mood of the soldiers, “I could hardly describe our sufferings in

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

49

this campaign. Hunger and privations were harder to fight than the enemy before us” (81). Similarly, after documenting his role in attacking the old town of Guise with fifty men, Melville shifts to the “great relief ” of the soldiers when the generals “broke camp” after failing to capture Guise’s fortified castle because the men “suffered intensely towards the end of the siege, there being great scarcity of rations and bread costing one pistole a loaf ” (112). Melville also digresses into the emotional landscapes of anger and sorrow when describing the “wrath” that led to a duel with a captain (on his own side) during the siege of La Capelle in 1650 and the loss of a “good friend” during the siege of Staden in 1676, which he describes as “a profound grief ” to him (112, 212). The language of affect, however, is perhaps at its most intense in the memoir when Melville paints a portrait of what occurred after the siege of Serinvar, Hungary, in 1664. In describing the besiegement of the city by the Turks in which the Europeans are holed up, he initially details in strategic language the good position in which the besieged found themselves given an adequate number of men and the suitable location of fortifications. He then sets out his daring sortie with “five hundred men” “to endeavour to surprise the Turks and capture a part of their positions,” again in strategic terms, during which an officer’s mistake leads to the desertion of Melville’s men and the beheading of his servant, who was wearing his officer’s helmet (188). However, despite the ever-increasing intensity of the language used by Melville in recalling these events, the passionate memory of the Turkish execution of the Hapsburg forces postsiege, as they marched along the banks of the Raab River to Saint Gothard, still comes as a shock to readers: “I have never in my wide experience of the many engagements in which I have taken part witnessed such astonishing effects of fear as I saw on this occasion. There were whole regiments of soldiers who allowed their heads to be cut off without stepping out of the ranks, or without making the least effort to defend themselves, to such a degree had terror seized them. They simply cried loudly to the Holy Virgin, imploring her assistance” (191).59 Given Melville’s ability to shift with ease between the discourses of fact and feeling in this way throughout his memoir – a skill shared by Cholmley though performed with less panache – his work belies claims that early modern military memorialists do little more than communicate facts without sentiment. It may well be that the novelistic military memoirs of soldiers such as Melville inspired the growing popularity of the genre and led to its

50

Besieged

fictionalization. In an article on the evolution of the genre, Harari notes that it was in this period that a “handful of veterans” decided to compose “fictional military memoirs,” preferring “to present what seems to be their personal memories in the form of fictional or semi-fictional memoirs.”60 He takes particular note of the imaginary military memoirs of the former soldier Gatien de Courtilz de Sandras, who then attributed the autobiographical texts to living military men.61 Such works, Harari concludes, explain why Daniel Defoe might have elected to produce fictional military memoirs, which include a significant amount of material on sieges, in which, we argue, he also strives to negotiate and interrogate the language of fact, feeling, and fractured networks. However, while earlier authors of siege diaries, letters, journals, and memoirs focus on the way broken networks hinder access to resources from a local perspective, Defoe imagines the consequences of fracturing networks on a far greater geographic and commercial scale.

The Fluid and Fragile City under Siege in the Works of Daniel Defoe Defoe portrays sieges realistically for the most part throughout his writings, describing them in a practical and dispassionate manner. His Essay upon Projects (1697), for example, calls for training in the military engineering methods needed to undertake a siege. Even his fictional representations of sieges often dwell on tangible military actions and productive tactics. In Captain Singleton (1720), a siege occurs toward the end of the narrative, albeit the siege of a “prodigious great Trunk of an old Tree” in which many enemy natives are hiding.62 Defoe’s concern in this episode is primarily tactical. His focus is the evaluation and trial of various strategies to conquer the “supposed Garrison within this wooden castle” over a few days, a goal that is eventually achieved (after a series of failed attempts) by blowing up the tree and its inhabitants with “Barrels of Powder.”63 A series of fictional military memoirs that have been attributed to Defoe also recount the stories of specific sieges and discuss techniques used to commandeer space effectively.64 In this category, we might include Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720), An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar (1728), and a pair of memoirs written in the voice of individuals on opposing sides of the Great Northern War (1700–21): The History of the Wars, of

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

51

his Late Majesty, Charles XII. King of Sweden (1720)65 and An Impartial History, of the Life and Actions of Peter Alexowitz, the Present Czar of Muscovy (1723).66 In his journalistic prose, Defoe also routinely discusses sieges as they unfold, and in the midst of his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26),67 he stops to linger over the infamous Civil War siege of Colchester (1648). Defoe’s approach to the besieged city involves his reliance on the three dominant discursive modes – tactical, affective, and commercial – that he encountered in nonfictional autobiographical prose written by soldiers, though in making use of the commercial mode, he is even more inclined to privilege the urban centre as a hub in a wide network of towns, cities, and even nations. In mirroring the linguistic techniques featured in soldiers’ siege accounts, Defoe reveals the truth of Doreen Massey’s description of space as “the product of interrelations … from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny” or as “the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality.”68 Even in times of peace, urban spaces, whether at the macro level of the city or the micro level of the street, involve competing discourses. Traders, for example, may define a given street in a different way and through a different mode of language than do the nobility, religious leaders, or criminals. During wartime, ways of reading and writing the city are significantly destabilized and new linguistic practices are employed, practices that emphasize the instability and multiplicity of the city in a far more visible and direct manner.69 Tactical military writing, as we have seen, tends to configure space in detached, analytical terms. It creates what Favret might call “the terrain of warfare” in “the realm of the intellect.”70 When Defoe turns to this mode of writing, he makes few or no references to domestic, ordinary architecture or events that might occur in the city in peacetime. He tends to define the space of the siege in binary terms – that which is possessed by the enemy or that which is held by the besieged, policing this binary both literally and discursively. The city is something to be captured or defended. To those who besiege it, it is a means to acquire assets that will be useful for the larger game of war through plunder as well as a means to deprive the enemy of these same assets. It is also a storage space in which to stockpile food and armaments. Such narratives are temporally focused on the present, on the moment, and on the immediate future and day-today progress toward victory. The history of the town or city is eschewed

52

Besieged

as it possesses no practical use value. It is defamiliarized in the process; no longer primarily perceived as an inhabited place, it now resembles a site in a game or sport.71 It is not filled with recognizable buildings and objects such as manmade architectural structures; rather such entities and smaller items are resignified via the terminology of war – bastions, scarps, counterscarps, etc. – though many of these terms have nonmilitary counterparts: the inner and outer walls of ditches, for example. The tactical mode of military writing is deployed, for example, in The History of Charles XII to describe the siege of Riga (1700): The Governour made frequent Sallies out of the Town to hinder the Saxons Approaches, and encourag’d his Men in the Fort … [On] [t]he 15th [of March], the Saxons having carry’d on their Attacks, with extraordinary Application, and made a Breach in the Fort, storm’d it in two Places, but were beaten off with the Loss of nearly 1000 Men kill’d and wounded: but the Reputation of the General, and the Success of the whole Enterprize, depending so much upon this Particular, that the Fort must be taken, cost what it will, they renew’d the Assault the next Day, and by plain Force took the Counterscarp, the Governour, and his Garrison, retreating as well as they could into the Body of the Fort.72 The unstable, shifting landscape of the besieged space is shaped and reshaped through strategic and tactical skills in this account. A breach is created, a counterscarp is taken, a post disputed. Ownership of this militarized space is central and fatalities, even when massive, are peripheral; this, despite the fact that a siege is often an event that involves many civilians who are neither immune to the horrors of battle nor comprehend the tactics deployed by the enemy or even by their own military forces. Defoe is certainly highly competent in this mode of writing, as is evident in his discussions of Gustavus Adolphus and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) in Memoirs of a Cavalier. But he recognizes its severe limitations since it tends to obsess over what happens tactically within combat space rather than what happens to the human body. It is this type of discourse that Sterne mocks in Tristram Shandy when Uncle Toby continually redirects the issue of where on his body he received his wound to the far less significant question of precisely where he was geographically during the siege of Namur when he received the wound.

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

53

Defoe preempts Sterne in his ridicule of the weaknesses and limits of tactical discourse in conveying a true sense of the besieged city. For a brief period of time during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), Defoe introduced a character named Mad Man to the Review and created dialogues between this feisty character and Mr Review about various topics, including the ongoing siege of Lille in 1708, where allied forces had besieged the French. From the first moment he is introduced, Mad Man bombastically spouts out excessive tactical discourse to highlight its predictability and to question its effectiveness and naïve optimism. In the 4 September 1708 issue of the Review, in answer to a question about what shall become of the city of Lille, Mad Man replies, “Become of it, why it shall be batter’d and bomb’d, min’d and counter-min’d, attack’d and defended; Men shall be kill’d for it both within and without, the French shall keep it as long as they can, and the Confederates shall master it as soon as they can; and in short it shall be a very bloody Siege.”73 Mr Review clarifies that this answer was not exactly what he was looking for, as he was wondering whether the city would be won or lost, a question Mad Man simply dismisses. The exchange suggests that regardless of what happens to the city as a result of this martial event, the reduction of what was once a vibrant urban centre to a militarized space at the nexus of a series of violent tactics means the siege will end in ruin for the city and its inhabitants. For although this sort of military discourse seems to be about controlling space in a measured, almost scientific fashion, it is actually about what Mad Man at one point calls butchery: a destructive act in which a living entity (a city) is dismembered. The type of tactical discourse employed by Mad Man in the Review echoes that frequently expressed outside a city by besiegers whose lack of familiarity with the city as a domestic space renders it simpler to portray in neutral terms. However, Defoe’s siege narratives often reveal that those within a city, under the pressure of threatened or actual violence, may, out of need, redefine their city as a tactical rather than a domestic space. In An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar, the soonto-be besieged engage in disassembling their own place: “The Streets were unpav’d; [and] the Women, with several of the Inhabitants retir’d” to make it easier to defend.74 The city is transformed from within into a war machine. If a city is solely described with tactical discourse, and perceived through its lens, only those who have martial use value are valid inhabitants amongst the buttresses, ravelins, and hornworks. Others are

54

Besieged

defined as parasitical and thus, to an extent, unwittingly aligned with the enemy. The others, particularly the already marginalized, will suffer, and the city must face the violence and oppression that it has always contained. Thus, the urban space loses multiple attributes essential to its identity, attributes that emerge and compete with the tactical in different modes of discourse that mark siege narratives. When making use of the affective mode of discourse, Defoe is more inclined to privilege history, permitting the reader to visualize the domestic place that once existed amidst the ruins of the present and to imagine the bodies that inhabit the besieged area, observing these bodies exhibiting emotion, conversing, maiming, killing, and dying. As Alker has suggested, in Memoirs of a Cavalier, after pages of dry military terminology, Defoe uses the siege of Magdeburg (1630–31) to display the disturbing “Fury of the Soldiers who followed [the inhabitants] butchering them as fast as they could.”75 The slaughter of defenseless and unarmed civilians disrupts the detached, unemotional aesthetic of the tactical mode present in much of the earlier narrative. Defoe here and elsewhere brings the generally unspoken violence to the surface in a different way, to embrace an alternate form of narrative that retains history and the shadows of place, of domesticity and intimacy, and which also highlights the fragility of place by capturing the moment in which it and its suffering inhabitants are obliterated. A case in point in the The History of the Wars of Charles XII occurs during a description of the plundering of Poland by the Czar of Muscovy. After describing the desolation of a dismantled country whose “fine Tapestries, noble Libraries, and choice Pictures,” “fine Statues and Orange Trees” had been appropriated and sent to Muscovy, and following a lament for the loss of the “gallant Army” that had been “dispers’d, disarm’d and carry’d into a kind of Slavery,” the narrator writes, “The Relation of these Things are so grievous to me, that I purposely bury in Silence the farther particulars.”76 Here, the text goes beyond merely describing the grievous events in terms of what has been lost, both materially and in terms of human cost. The narrator foregrounds his own inability to articulate the extent of emotion caused by the loss, even though he is not from the region and does not have any personal connection to the fallen cities. His affective discourse thereby disrupts his tactical discourse’s resolute constitution of the city as militarized space by displaying the suffering of city dwellers and representing the suffering of the observer, whether author or reader.

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

55

The shift from the tactical to affective mode of discourse also occurs in An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy, the second of the two memoirs about the Great Northern War attributed to Defoe. Of the siege of Narva (1704), Defoe writes, [T]he Muscovites … advanc’d under the very Cannon of the City, and committed great Disorders in the Neighboring Villages, which they laid in Ashes, making a great Slaughter of the Inhabitants, as also of some Soldiers that were Quarter’d among them; they have also reduc’d into heaps of Rubbish several Houses in the Suburbs; two Sawing Mills, several Country Habitations, notwithstanding that the great Guns from the City and the Castle of Ivanagrod, continually fir’d upon them: That they might get more easily into Peoples Houses, they run about the Streets knocking at the Doors and crying out in the Language of the Country … fly, fly, the Russians are a coming; then upon the People opening their Doors to know what was the matter, believing them to be their Friends, the Muscovites rush’d into their Houses and put all to the Sword, not sparing either Age or Sex, that could not escape to the City, the Cavalry of the Garrison sally’d out upon them, but were beaten back to their very Counterscarp; this bloody Execution continued six Hours.77 In this passage, we see domestic place transformed, in an instant, to a space of violence and war. Villages rapidly become “[a]shes” and “[r]ubbish” as do key economic industries like the saw mills. The residents of homes – once familiar places of regeneration and replenishment – now occupy, at least in the instant before their own annihilation, a ruptured space. Even the normal sounds of domesticity are disturbed when aurality is manipulated. The voice of friendship and civility that unites the city and distinguishes it from the invaders becomes, through trickery, an avenue to death. While Defoe stops short of giving details about individual deaths, the terminology used suggests concern for the treatment of civilians. He mentions that in this once generative and ordered place, the massacring forces have no respect for “[a]ge or [s]ex,” and the reference to the event as a “bloody Execution” diminishes the gamesmanship of war and distracts attention from the skill of the invaders to focus it on the displaced people.

56

Besieged

Focusing on how the besieged city is perceived through the senses also introduces affect to Defoe’s siege narratives. In An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar, for example, the narrator anatomizes in both matter of fact and affective detail the physical experience of encountering death and mutilation during the attempted siege. Though his description of corpses initially seems a practical recounting, it brings to mind the threat of olfactory change, which is, as Yi-Fu Tuan notes, key to locating oneself in place as “[o]dors lend character to objects and places, making them distinctive.”78 During this siege, the narrator explains, dead men are “expeditiously and regularly bury’d, to prevent their being offensive or infectious, which otherwise they might soon have been in our warm Situation.”79 Leaving the reader in this city threatened by the smell of death, he then recounts harrowing burial tales that have occurred outside combat: the near burial of a living man; a soldier who dies in a duel; and the suicide of an impoverished soldier. There are many hazardous layers in this besieged space that have led to the city imploding, figured in such irrational and self-destructive acts by its citizens. The place seems to have turned against its own populace.80 The affective mode is often used in Defoe’s siege narratives to display fracturing from within urban space, revealing competing voices in the city. In the Tour, Defoe accomplishes this end by inserting a first-person account of the siege of Colchester, a diary, in the midst of his description of that city. Pat Rogers leaves this material out of his edition of the Tour, as he quite correctly remarks that it may not be by Defoe. Nevertheless, Defoe’s decision to weave such a text into the midst of a description of the city introduces the competing modes (tactical and affective) that appear in Memoirs of a Cavalier. The diary first foregrounds in tactical terms the goals of each side and their negotiations with each other. Having refused to surrender and accept quarter, the besieged royalists then receive an offer: the parliamentarians will grant liberty to ordinary soldiers and civilians in the city, but not to the officers, if they surrender. The account then records the shattering of the city that follows. An affective account of the starving civilians in the city gains prominence, breaking through the dry tactical discourse: “The Rabble got together in a vast Crowd about the Lord Goring’s Quarters, clamouring for a Surrender, and they did this every Evening, bringing Women and Children, who lay howling and crying on the Ground for Bread; the Soldiers beat off the Men, but the Women and Children would not stir, bidding the Soldiers kill them, saying they had rather be Shot than be Starv’d.”81

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

57

The royalist military leaders attempt to mend the fracture in the city by expelling those who disturb it, since they, after all, have been promised quarter: [W]hen the People came about them for Bread, [they] set open one of the Gates, and bid them go out to the Enemy, which a great many did willingly; upon which the Lord Goring ordered all the rest that came about his Door, to be turn’d out after them: But when the People came to the Lord Fairfax’s Camp, the Out-Guards were order’d to fire at them, and drive them all back again to the Gate; which the Lord Goring seeing, he order’d them to be receiv’d in again. And now, altho’ the Generals and Soldiers also, were resolute to die with their Swords in their Hands, rather than yield, and had maturely resolv’d to abide a Storm; yet the Mayor and Aldermen having petitioned them, as well as the Inhabitants, being wearied with the Importunities of the distressed People, and pitying the deplorable Condition they were reduced to, they agreed to enter upon a Treaty.82 The interpolated work here shifts into the affective mode not only to display the suffering of the civilians in their transformed space but also to demonstrate that wartime discourse that privileges heroism and courage (the desire to die sword in hand) and minimizes passion can be overwhelmed by the discourse of suffering within the siege space itself. When both modes collide, they destabilize each other. It may seem as if Defoe customarily employs the tactical mode and that the affective mode only surfaces in his siege narratives with its periodic failure. However, the affective mode is at times used strategically by Defoe, as it was by the siege diarists, epistolists, and memorialists discussed earlier in this chapter. This strategic use of affect surfaces in An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy shortly after Defoe describes the destruction of the city of Altena (1713), “a rich trading Town” near Hamburg, by the Swedes, supposedly in reprisal for the Russian devastation of towns in Pomerania.83 At this point, the narrative suddenly shifts to an exchange of letters between the attacking Swedish general, who defends his actions in tactical terms, explaining that he burns the city to prevent the enemy from eviscerating towns defended by the Swedes, and the Czar of Muscovy’s men, who make it clear that cities are specific and unique, not interchangeable. Count Steinboch/Stenbock, fighting for Charles XII, insists that it was

58

Besieged

necessary to give the order to burn the town to get “even with the Danes in some Measure, for the dismal and cruel Burning exercised on the good and ancient Town of Staden.”84 The count’s desire for revenge, or at least justice, is upheld as a reason to engage in violence, and perhaps more importantly, the violence might even be seen as a valid tactic to dissuade other attacks on Swedish-held cities. Yet the count is clearly aware of the inadequacy of this perspective alone. Therefore, he insists that mercy was shown, not to the city itself, which was destroyed, but to its inhabitants, those who might be seen as the real core of the city. His letter notes that the inhabitants were “allow’d some Time to save their Effects, and above all, the Churches should be respected and spar’d, tho’ that just Moderation was not observ’d by the Danes in the Burning and Destruction of Staden.”85 The city, in his narrative, is not fully destroyed, and, he believes, his act does not constitute overwhelming and barbaric violence. Of course, there are gaps in such claims as we do not learn what use the churches would be in the midst of a burned and ruined city or how the cast out citizens can survive with only the shell of a ruined city left to them. His claim of necessity is not allowed to stand alone by the czar’s allies, who take advantage of these gaps. The same event is described in a letter of 13 January 1713 from the generals Jacob Heinrich von Flemming, a Saxon general fighting against the Swedes, and Jobst von Scholten, of Denmark: “[T]here is no Comparison between what has been done at Altena, and what happen’d at Staden. Staden is a fortify’d Town, which resisted the Arms of his Danish Majesty, and against which, it was allowable to use all the Means that are ordinarily taken to reduce a Town: But Altena is an open defenceless Place; and we believe, Sir, that a Parallel can never be made, between a Bombardment and the setting a Town on Fire with Torches. ’Tis as if the inevitable Slaughter in a Battle or an Assault should be compared with a Massacre of People who do not defend themselves, nor are in a State of Defence.”86 Far from showing gratitude for the time given to the inhabitants to leave and take their goods, they point out that the besiegers burned “above 2000 Houses” and in doing so “reduc[ed] several Thousands of People to Beggary.”87 This act, they insist is an example “of Inhumanity and Cruelty … [a] Cruelty, that has cost the Lives of so many poor Innocents, of Women in Childbed and in Labour, of Sick who were not in a Condition to get out of Bed. How many Children and Aged snatch’d from the Violence of the Flames were unable to endure the Extremity of the Cold and perished miserably in the Snow?”88

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

59

The interpolation of these letters within the narrative allows this account, told from the point of view of someone serving in the czar’s army, to rebut claims made by the Swedish that they did not commit unnecessary violence. It also helps to demonstrate that the violent and ruinous transformation of urban space can be narrated in entirely different ways. Whereas the Swedish general suggests through tactical discourse that the actions taken are both effective and merciful, the czar’s allies employ affective discourse to demonstrate that the demolition of houses does not merely destroy material objects but rather annihilates places that shelter, protect, and nurture the weak as well as the strong. Depriving a people of their city, even if they are permitted to take goods with them, does not merely defamiliarize the place, rendering it unrecognizable, it turns it against the inhabitants: the weather, the snow, the winter reclaim those wandering within it. As with the affective mode of discourse employed by Defoe in his writings on sieges, the commercial mode used in his military writing exposes in a committed fashion the suffering and loss that accompanies the besieging of a city. However, the commercial mode is not used by Defoe to render visible the bodily pain or slaughter of civilians and soldiers or the destruction of their personal belongings; rather, it foregrounds the crippling of social, economic, and political networks caused by city sieges. As is well known, Defoe, a great lover of trade, frequently portrays the city in his writing in terms of commerce, painting urban space, and very often London in particular, as a hub in a larger network. In the preface to the first volume of Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman, he discusses the city as part of a larger whole: “The circulation of trade within our selves, where all the several manufactures move in a just rotation from the several countries where they are made, to the city of London, as the blood in the body to the Heart; and from thence are dispers’d again, as the nature of the demand directs, to all the several parts of the Kingdom.”89 He goes on to discuss the dependence of the cities of England “upon the city of London, for the consumption of their product, and employment of their people.”90 As with Joseph Addison’s eloquent description of the Royal Exchange as a hub of British power, Defoe’s representation of the city at peace is of a vibrant, mobile entity, energized by commercial enterprises and always reaching out to connect with other such entities. In this way, Defoe anticipates recent views of space as “the product of interrelations” focused not only on city space itself but also on its international context, its place on the map.91

60

Besieged

As we have seen, this is precisely the web of connections that sieges unravel. Since commerce and mobility are part of a city’s lifeblood, during a siege circulation stops and death is the natural result. Moreover, because of the breadth of commercial connections, the ramifications of a blockade or a demolished city may spread well beyond the defined urban space. Defoe points this out explicitly and at length in his History of the Principal Discoveries and Improvements, in the Several Arts and Sciences, in which he uses urban warfare to examine the way that cutting off or damaging a city impedes the development of international commerce by troubling space that is chiefly mercantile. He focuses on the city of Tyre, which he notes had survived multiple attacks before the arrival of Alexander the Great: “Alexander took the City by Storm, murther’d 26000 of the Citizens in the heat of Blood, hang’d 2000 of the most wealthy Merchants, upon Gibbets or Crosses, all in a row, for six Miles in length, on the Seashore; in a Word, he resolved in his tyrannic Rage, to make himself a Terror to the rest of the World, and to make Tyre an Example of it, to terrify any other City that shou’d dare to stand out against him; and as to them, he did every thing he could to blot out the remembrance of the City of Tyre from under Heaven … and all in revenge for their refusing to let him peaceably into their City.”92 To Alexander, storming and shattering a city offers an opportunity to display the raw power of his forces to a global audience, inspiring fear of and respect for his army through horror at the spectacle of a resisting city’s suffering and ultimate erasure from memory. Yet Defoe shows Alexander’s folly in thinking that the destruction is contained, perceived only by spectators in other cities who can distance themselves from such urban violence and act to avoid a similar fate. Rather, the destroyed city is already inextricably linked to other cities, and damaging it has economic consequences far beyond its geographic boundaries, since the metropolis is but one spoke in the wheel of financial exchange. Therefore, “[w]hen the heat, or fire, of his [Alexander’s] Anger was thus quench’d by the Blood of such a multitude of innocent People, and the ruin of the most flourishing City in the World; the seat of Trade, and the center of all foreign Negotiation, he soon relented when it was too late.”93 Defoe discusses the elimination of Carthage in the same terms, noting that “[w]ith the ruin of Carthage, all the Commerce of the World seem’d to be at a stand.”94 Though far from antiwar, given his many works praising certain wars and war heroes, Defoe does at times see military action as the antithesis of trade, and since the city is the centre of mercantilism, the siege

Facts, Feelings, and Fractured Networks

61

is acutely damaging to the merchant and, therefore, to a world increasingly dominated by commerce, the nation, and the globe. He asserts that “[a]s Trade enriches the World, and Industry settles and establishes People and Nations, so War, Victory, and Conquest, have been the destroyers of every good thing; the Soldier has always been the plunderer of the industrious Merchant.”95 In the Tour, which maps out the interconnected industries of many such urban places and the rural product sources, the interpolated letter on the siege of Colchester illustrates war’s destruction of urban commerce. Even the soldiers within the city, who refuse to surrender despite offers of mercy, are partly responsible for the suffering of the city and the failure to circulate necessary goods. An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy likewise lingers over trade interests and the interconnectedness of cities in a discussion of the siege of Narva (1704). Initially, we are told that as the attacking forces wait outside the city, they are visited by representatives of the Dutch and British empires who are deeply concerned about the links their nations have with the city. They ask that their interests within the city be spared. Their request is heard and respected: As to the City of Narva being taken by Storm, it was given up to Plunder as a reward of the Labours of the Soldiery, only that they were forbid to kill any of the Inhabitants, except such as were arm’d, and made Resistance: In the Heat of this Execution the Czar gave such Orders, and took care to have them so well executed, that the Ware-Houses of the English and Dutch Merchants, and also their Dwelling-Houses and Families were not touch’d; no, tho’ upon the Assurances given them of Safety, they suffer’d their Houses to be a Retreat for many of the Citizens, and for an immense Treasure, which they brought to them for Preserving it from the Soldiers.96 The narrator makes visible the international nature of the city and explains that within the plundered place there are pockets of “foreignness,” loci where the connections to other cities and nations are made visible. They are in the city but not of the city. The commercial mode, unlike the affective mode, is neither passionate nor highly experiential in Defoe’s writings on the besieged city. It does not dwell on the physical and psychological suffering of the individual or of a group of civilians or soldiers. However, it does conceive of the broader

62

Besieged

human consequences of the breakdown of physical and financial structures and infrastructure within a distinct urban landscape. It also reveals that the fragility of urban space and its contingency on the modes of discourse that describe it are not local issues. Rather than distancing the siege, as did Romantic authors according to Favret, the commercial mode in Defoe’s siege narratives suggests that the destruction of a city elsewhere has international consequences and thus cannot merely be placed in a comfortably distanced imagined space.

Conclusion The three dominant modes of discourse – tactical, affective, and commercial – used to write factual or fictional autobiographical military siege narratives in the period are part of a broader literary response to the fragility of the city at war in post-Civil War Britain. More generally, the intersecting discursive modes in these nonfictional and fictional war texts harness the powerful experience or memory of the war-ravaged city in order to expose the city’s fluidity, multiplicity, and vulnerability even in times of peace. The contingency of urban space on the different discourses that constitute it are made even more visible when it is represented under threat of annihilation. If the city space is a “product of interrelations” between different discourses that are “always under construction,” then it is always contested and vulnerable to subsumption by discourses, notably the tactical, that may erase or disturb its identity and justify inhuman savagery.97 However, at the same time, the siege narratives under study in this chapter reveal that affective and commercial discourses allow those who inhabit those spaces to counter such attempts at erasure and cruel rationalization. Both modes speak to the terrifying consequences of violence on individuals and social, economic, political, and informational structures that maintain an ordered and balanced civic and national space. Therefore, autobiographical military siege narratives, whether factual or fictional, draw attention to the critical role played by perception and language in the life and death of the town or city. In the case of Defoe’s body of works, his siege narratives complement his many writings on the city and urban networks, inasmuch as they are his attempt to help constitute flourishing urban spaces in early eighteenth-century Britain. They also play a pivotal role in his development of the early English novel.

CHAPteR 2

Siege Drama Reimagined From the Shakespearean to the Restoration Stage

As the royalists William Davenant and John Dryden started to imagine siege dramas in the years surrounding the Restoration, they were not doing so in a vacuum. The siege had been a key part of drama since antiquity, although the way it was performed on stage had undergone multiple permutations culminating in substantial adaptations by William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (among other Renaissance playwrights) and by Civil War playwrights. This chapter will briefly trace the long history of siege drama inherited by two Restoration playwrights, lingering over Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida (c. 1602) as a crucial, if problematic, forerunner of Restoration siege drama, before engaging in-depth with the two influential siege productions of Davenant and Dryden, The Siege of Rhodes (1656) and The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) respectively. The many siege plays produced in the Restoration and beyond were highly indebted to the work of Dryden and Davenant, who took advantage of, and contributed to, the new potency of the siege motif as an instrument for conceiving of space and of individual and communal identity in a post-Civil War world, albeit in different ways. The influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey on classical culture unsurprisingly led to the siege having a recurring role in Greek and Roman drama. Dramas in antiquity, such as Euripides’s Trojan Women (415 BC) and Seneca the Younger’s Troades, tackle the consequences of the siege of Troy, though there were certainly other sieges from which to choose. Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes (467 BC) and Euripedes’s The Suppliants (c. 423 BC) and The Phoenician Women (c. 408 BC) engage with a siege held between the sons of Oedipus after he was banished from Thebes.1 Ennius’s lost tragedy Ambracia, now only extant in fragments, was also likely based on a

64

Besieged

historical siege, given Ennius’s attention to a siege in the city of Ambracia in chapter 15 of his Annals. Classical siege plays sometimes excessively disturbed their audiences as they did not shy away from the overwhelming horror experienced by civilians in a fallen city. Trojan Women, for example, deeply pains the viewer who is confronted by civilian grief, suffering, and trauma on the stage. Indeed, the reception of the earliest known Greek play about a siege, The Capture of Miletus (492 BC) by Phrynichus, emphasizes the power of such plays to destabilize audience emotion, particularly when they deal with recent acts of warfare. Herodotus tells us that this play, no longer extant, represented the Persian siege, capture, and sack of the Greek city of Miletus that had occurred only two years earlier and that it stirred intense and overwhelming emotions in viewers: “[W]hen Phrynichus wrote a play entitled ‘The Fall of Miletus’ and produced it, the whole theatre fell to weeping; they fined Phrynichus a thousand drachmas for bringing to mind a calamity that affected them so personally, and forbade the performance of that play forever.”2 Clearly, classical siege dramas were not only popular, they were potent in their earliest forms, likely because they did not shy away from unsettling their audience by staging the anguish of the city and its noble inhabitants as it fractured under pressure from the enemy. By the Middle Ages, this emphasis had substantially changed. Malcolm Hebron’s important study of the siege in medieval literature, which deals extensively with the representation of sieges across genres, explores how drama continues to engage with the siege in that period. However, in a great many medieval and early Renaissance works, the siege primarily operates as a symbol; the gritty martial reality of literal sieges is often of secondary concern. Hebron refers to drama that crafts the siege in terms of religious allegory or sexual desire, depicting besieged space as an endangered soul or a desirable female.3 The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1440) and the Digby Mary Magdalene (c. 1515–30) are offered as prime examples of the former.4 The latter is exemplified by “other Tudor and Jacobean pageants involving sieges,” including one in which Queen Elizabeth I “sat in the ‘Castle of Perfect Beauty’ while the four Children of Desire … laid claim to it as their inheritance”; unsuccessful, the besiegers then “showered it with flowers and rosewater, and on the next day confessed their presumption and surrendered to ‘Perfect Beauty.’”5 Even in the Renaissance, court pageantry relied on and revelled in the siege as religious, political, and erotic symbol. On this subject, Simon Pepper notes,

Siege Drama Reimagined

65

“The protocols of siege warfare and the formalities associated with the defense and surrender of fortifications seem to find an echo in the use of castle and siege themes for medieval and Renaissance pageantry. Sieges and siege themes, of course, featured prominently in many of the courtly entertainments … [The] ritual siege combined features of conventional tournaments and the traditional battles of cities such as Pisa, Florence, Siena, and Perugia.”6 Therefore, sieges in medieval and early Renaissance drama chiefly operate within a complex religious and political symbolic system rather than within the mundane and brutal realities of siege warfare in a literal sense.7 Pageant plays also focus on castle sieges rather than city sieges in order to privilege the domain of the monarch and nobility rather than to attend to a more mixed urban area and its various inhabitants.8 Performances of such works affirmed religious and political power structures rather than unsettled audiences. Several playwrights in the Renaissance, however, had a growing interest in the chronicle or history play, which took a distinctly different approach to representing siege warfare. While not averse to fanciful turns, the history play was more attentive to actual military matters and martial spaces. This return to the literal was often accompanied by an impulse to discuss the specifics of urban warfare, but siege warfare, with a few exceptions, was typically demoted to one item in a long string of military and political events. After all, a chronicle is primarily characterized by time rather than space. This is not to say that sieges were no longer important but rather that within the trajectory of the history play, they were only a part of a broader historical or biographical arc. In these plays, as might be expected given the history of English warfare abroad, emphasis was most often placed on the actions of the besieging army and its leaders rather than on the psychological or social turmoil experienced by the besieged. Sieges were generally imagined in these plays as acts of urban invasion and destruction rather than as acts of defense. Such plays include Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (c. 1587), since at the end of both parts the protagonist besieges a city, or a number of Shakespeare’s history plays, such as Henry V (c. 1599) and Henry VI part 1 (c. 1592). Patricia A. Cahill, in her astute study of Renaissance drama, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage, argues that drama in the era was changing more broadly in the way it imagined war. Addressing history plays, she suggests that these works

66

Besieged

reconfigure notions of “the ordering of space, the disciplining of bodies, and the regulation of populations.”9 They suggest, to her mind, both “the ordered rule of war and the unruliness of trauma.”10 Throughout her book, Cahill theorizes how this paradoxical combination operates in early modern history plays, which include a series of emergent features: the staging of military “knowledge and affect,” enabling the audience to confront “the deeply unsettling sights and sounds of early modern warfare” and to comprehend, if only slightly, its incomprehensible “traumatic impact”; the inclusion, albeit briefly, of ordinary soldiers, making visible the trauma they experience in war; and, particularly in Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the interweaving of elements of warfare that accentuate “quantification and … the systematization of violence” – the presentation of warfare not as the expression of a “chivalric code” but as a “rationalized … ‘science’” informed by “practical knowledge” involving military technology and “labor-intensive tasks.”11 It is worth noting that although Cahill is interested in the literary manifestation of war more broadly, many of the new areas of emphasis she mentions feature most prominently in works that involve siege warfare and urban sieges rather than besieged castles. Where better to show the unsettling horrors and trauma of war than in a city where civilians, unacquainted with and unprepared for war, must face its horrors? Where better to look at the suffering of ordinary combatants as well as great men than in a domestic space that has been transformed into a war zone? Where else to explore the systemization of war than in a type of war zone in which conflict takes place over an extended period and involves immense technological and architectural feats, requiring not only a specialized vocabulary but also a massive workforce. We can draw other conclusions about the way the siege is represented in several of the works Cahill mentions, most specifically Marlowe’s Tamburlaine and Shakespeare’s Henry V. First, emphasis is frequently placed on threatened and actual violence toward the citizenry of the besieged city. Henry V proclaims that if Harfleur does not surrender, the city will be left buried in ashes, and “the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart” will be set loose on the “fresh fair virgins” and the “flow’ring infants” of the city.12 At the same time, Henry acknowledges that ordinary soldiers will also be slaughtered in the process. When concern is voiced by one of the English soldiers that men will have “legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle,” not dying well if the king’s “cause” is “not good”

Siege Drama Reimagined

67

(4.1.129–31), the disguised Henry responds that the “King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers” and that no cause is “spotless” (4.1.149–50, 153). Characters in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine go far beyond mere threats and philosophical notions about the responsibility of monarchs in war. When, in the first half of the play, the governor of Damascus comes to plead for mercy, accompanied by four virgins, Tamburlaine orders their death. The virgins are killed and their “slaughtered carcasses” are hung on the city walls.13 We learn, during the desperate struggle that follows, that the “streets [are] strewed with dissevered joints of men/And wounded bodies gasping yet for life,” while “heavenly virgins and unspotted maids/… On horsemen’s lances [are] to be hoisted up” (5.1.321–2, 324, 327). This is urbicide. There is no regeneration in this city filled with dismembered limbs and the grotesque sounds of dying bodies. In the second part of the work, a similar set of events play out, this time in Babylon where the men, women, and children of the city are deliberately drowned in the lake while the fish “fed by human carcasses,/Amazed, swim up and down upon the waves” (5.1.204–5). The lake, that which should give life to the city through the water and food it supplies, has been turned into an instrument of death. Such ferocious speeches and barbaric action imply that sieges are monstrous in the extreme. Citizens who are not compliant are not simply defeated but wounded, dismembered, and erased. And it is more than individual citizens who are obliterated. Once it is besieged, the city, the locus of civilization and of commercial exchange and culture, signifies the opposite – it becomes a space of barbarism, a ruined mausoleum for the dead. While audiences would certainly be disturbed by such suffering, the sieges in these plays are only part of a larger narrative that emphasizes the spectacular power of Tamburlaine and Henry, one of many stops on their path to glory or fame. The destruction or threatened destruction of urban space only serves as a worthy and impressive display of monarchical or aristocratic authority. Neither Henry nor Tamburlaine (even when he is delusional and dying) seems regretful for the death of soldiers or civilians. To their minds, untroubled by atrocity in war, the suffering of the city is irrelevant – it is a means to an end. By employing and extending Cahill’s theory of military representation in early modern drama, we arrive at an expanded list of features frequently present in Renaissance history plays as they turn toward the literal and

68

Besieged

weave in a siege as part of the chronicled action. They are increasingly set in urban locations; focus for the most part on the perspective of the besiegers; explore more closely the trauma of warfare; dedicate more space to ordinary soldiers and civilians, while still accentuating the prowess of great men; exhibit greater interest in technological matters and evolving systems of war; and present a variety of endings, depending on the historical events with which they wrestle. What becomes evident, then, is that long before the Civil War (1642–51), the dramatized siege was being revitalized, viewed as newly relevant, even though Britain had been unaccustomed to siege warfare on its own soil for some time. Nonetheless, the siege space at this time had not yet been explored at any length on the stage. The episodic nature of history plays in the period meant that sieges were rarely the central event with an occasional exception. The temporal dimension of siege warfare might have detracted from its perceived effectiveness as a vibrant scenario for an entire play. In the entry on “siege,” in Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary, Charles Edelman writes, “A siege, with its mining, artillery bombardment, and (primarily) waiting for the enemy to run out of supplies, is … hardly the stuff of theatrical excitement.”14 Edelman points out that the one time the word appears in Troilus and Cressida, the only Shakespearean play to focus fully on a siege, it is used by Agamemnon to refer to the tedious nature of a siege where the walls of the city continue to stand after seven years. Given this perception of a siege as a dull dramatic setting, it is unsurprising that it is generally only one of many events through which the life and rule of a monarch is dramatized.

The Siege in Shakespearean Drama Despite Edelman’s claim, Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida and King John (c. 1590s), and even (to a lesser degree) Henry V, represents siege warfare in innovative ways that are far from tedious. Henry V is a play that literally places a siege at its centre. Act 3 opens with the siege of Harfleur and, while the drama engages with many other events, some productions have stressed the siege’s significance. In his introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of Henry V, Gary Taylor notes, for example, that Charles Keane’s 1859 revival took pains to represent the siege as spectacular, as did some others that followed. F.R. Benson’s performances

Siege Drama Reimagined

69

from 1897 to 1916, Taylor explains, involved “Benson’s own pole-vault, in full armour, on to the walls of Harfleur.”15 Such representations of the siege suggest that far from being mundane or tedious, Shakespeare’s siege invites extravagance both in terms of scenery and performance. Yet, Henry V also pays attention to technical aspects of siege warfare and to its ordinary participants. Captains Fluellen and Gower have an intriguingly detailed conversation about some of the problems with mining in the third act, focusing on tactical effectiveness. Fluellen declares, “[T]he mines is not according to the disciplines of war. The concavities of it is not sufficient … [T]h’athversary … look you, is digt himself, four yard under, the countermines” (3.3.4–8). Captain MacMorris, whose abilities have been called into question by Fluellen, since he is in charge of the mines, is also concerned about poor decision making regarding martial action, complaining “’tish ill done. The work ish give over … I would have blowed up the town, so Chrish save me law, in an hour. Oh ’tish ill done” (3.3.31–5). Regardless of whether either man accurately evaluates the situation on the ground, Shakespeare, in Henry V, continues what he began in King John: to interrogate representations of the siege that revel in the glory of kings and aristocrats. The audience is made aware of the mechanics of the siege and the discontent of soldiers involved in it. Shakespeare also, as Gary Taylor points out, foregrounds the substantial time involved in siege warfare: “Once the town has surrendered … we learn that Henry’s soldiers are sick and that winter is already coming on (which implies that it has taken them most of the summer to conquer this one city).”16 We see glimpses here of concerns that will be amplified in Shakespeare’s most extended siege play. Troilus and Cressida complicates and even undoes the siege as a signifier of monarchical glory. It deploys antiheroic language in a siege space to explore the contingency of royal authority and the brutality of warfare. In analyzing Troilus and Cressida, Simon Barker argues that the work captures “a moment of hesitation or uncertainty over many of the military issues that are being discussed beyond the theatre.”17 Franziska Quabeck reaches the same conclusion, asserting this point even more explicitly: “[T]he war in Troilus and Cressida is an unjust war … Greeks and Trojans alike are presented as fully aware of the ‘wastefulness’ of this war, which causes the dark and cynical implication of the play. In fact, both sides argue for the injustice of this war and yet continue fighting, which emphasises the gruesome irony of their conduct.”18 What is more effective at capturing

70

Besieged

such wastefulness and injustice than the most uncertain, tedious, fluctuating space of siege warfare? Though not as clearly a siege play as Troilus and Cressida, King John critiques the military action of princes and empowers municipal space. A substantial part of the play is focused on two competing armies, one French and one English, outside the city of Angiers that are demanding recognition and entry. The inability of either king to access the city makes it an antisiege play of sorts. Angiers rejects threats from both monarchs and ultimately refuses to open its gates. Whenever the action points toward the sacking of the city, the citizens manage to deflect such action and suggest diplomatic and peaceful resolutions, such as a reconciling marriage. Therefore, despite occasional pledges to join forces against the city, the French and English increasingly focus their aggression on each other, and on the identity of the rightful heir to the English throne, rather than on the city. This play distinguishes between the seat of civilization, diplomacy, and regeneration in the city space and the brutality of a warfare figured in the ambition of princes who threaten urban life. The outrageous threats of the two kings seem like a theatrical performance to the inhabitants of the city who refuse to be invested in the outcome of the debate over the legitimate heir. The problem play Troilus and Cressida is far more committed to exploring the specifics of siege warfare, as the siege is its enduring backdrop. This play is the direct ancestor of Davenant’s and Dryden’s Restoration siege dramas in presenting a besieged space as an appropriate locus for an entire dramatic historical romance, although both Davenant and Dryden resoundingly reject its antiheroic and antiromance elements. The problem status of the play may well indicate that Shakespeare is doing something original here, something that exceeds the generic limitations of the time. The play’s resistance to categories, along with what Cora Fox has called an impulse to parody that undermines “the matter of Troy, the foundational story of Western literary culture,” makes it especially unsettling – a counter site in which conventional cultural representations that gild war and conquest are peeled away to reveal the brutality they work to elide.19 Troilus and Cressida’s power to unsettle emerges from Shakespeare’s attempt to create something new in the Renaissance – a siege play. This involves focusing a play on a literal siege, introducing an extended romance that is enmeshed in the war, and illuminating the specific spatiotemporal nature of siege warfare, which is not so much long and tedious

Siege Drama Reimagined

71

as constantly in flux, requiring a set of attributes not solely dependent on brief acts of military glory.20 Troilus and Cressida has much in common with some of the other dramas we have reviewed thus far, although it engages with the myths of antiquity rather than British history. It certainly complicates and extends some of the innovations in the other plays that feature sieges – the urban location, the emphasis on tangible warfare, the exposure to trauma, and the effects of war on ordinary citizens. It also periodically lingers over the acts of great men as in Tamburlaine or Henry V, most fully in Hector’s apparent transformation into a killing machine in Act 5, when his military performance gives the impression of “a thousand Hectors in the field.”21 However, Shakespeare’s representation of the siege in Troilus and Cressida is not merely a better developed example of its dramatization in earlier Renaissance drama. The Bard forges a genre that is more in tune with siege warfare than is possible in earlier plays in which a siege serves as a marginal element of a work on a monarch’s life and political machinations. In engaging directly and solely with a siege, Shakespeare writes what critics recognize as a profoundly antiheroic play. Anthony B. Dawson notes that it is “neither heroic nor romantic. Failure and human weakness are its subject,”22 and Jonathan Bate posits that “[i]n its love plot the play is an anti-romance, while in its martial plot it is an anti-epic.”23 We are faced not with glorious combat but with the way atrocity and revenge replace glory in war. Most shockingly, Shakespeare depicts Hector’s death in battle as a monstrous act of murder in which the unarmed hero Hector is killed not by Achilles but by a group of brutal Myrmidons who mob him, following Achilles’s orders. The clash of noble warriors that should signify the glory of a military victory is replaced by a cowardly act of slaughter. Critics also locate the play’s antiheroism in the voice of the ignoble Grecian Thersites, the “bitter, cynical fool” from the Iliad, who is magnified by Shakespeare to undermine the reputation of the warriors he serves.24 He exposes the crude brutality of the revered Achilles long before his shameful slaughter of Hector, noting after a feisty exchange with Ajax and Achilles, “Shall the elephant Ajax carry it thus? He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction! Would it were otherwise – that I could beat him, whilst he railed at me … Then there’s Achilles, a rare engineer. If Troy be not taken till these two undermine it, the walls will stand till they fall of themselves” (2.3.2–4, 6–8). Thersites emphasizes in these lines the base nature of the two warriors, who embrace clumsy violence over

72

Besieged

diplomacy or strategic wisdom. The elephant and the rare engineer stand for the Trojan War unmasked. As Bate notes, the play is also an antiromance; the sustained romance throughout the text alongside a sustained and present war borrows from earlier verse romances like the Faerie Queene, earlier representations of the story of Troilus and Cressida, and indeed from a mix of war and romance in the Iliad itself. Yet, any gestures toward romance in Shakespeare’s play, particularly of a sentimental bent, is undercut by the crude repeated machinations of Pandarus, Cressida’s adaptability to her new circumstances in the Greek camp, and Shakespeare’s refusal to kill either lover, refusing a tragic end. The coarseness of continual, brutal combat causes the aesthetics of romance to collapse into lust and betrayal. We reframe these well-studied insights into Troilus and Cressida through the motif of the siege that Shakespeare selected for this play. This unusual setting for a drama of this era gives him the freedom to play with the extended time and ruptured space of siege warfare. Shakespeare thereby brings to light the way military tedium and the immobility characteristic of a siege lead to fractures on either side and cause the discourses of romance and heroism to falter. Within Troy, the fissures are most prominent in romance, while outside the city walls, they relate to a fragmentation of power. Time has long been regarded as important in this play, but we position it specifically in relation to this prolonged military event. From the prologue, we learn that this play begins “in the middle” of the war, but it is easy to forget the effect of this lengthy conflict when we rapidly shift to the domestic space of the first act and to the private intrigues of Pandarus, Troilus, and Cressida. When we move to the Greeks in the third scene, however, and realize that these events take place “after seven years” of war (1.3.12), the artificiality and superficiality of all that we have observed in Troy relating to Troilus and Cressida take on new meaning. There had been seven years of heroic parades, seven years of skirmishes, injuries, and death, seven years of Helen and Hecuba watching the fighting from the tower, and, as becomes evident in the second act with Priam’s reference to “so many hours, lives, speeches spent,” seven years of Troy debating whether they should return Helen and end the war (2.2.1). In calling for the “[v]irgins and boys, mid-age and wrinkled eld” to cry out with her, to “pay betimes/A moiety of that mass of moan to come” (2.2.104, 106–7), Cassandra articulates with prophetic certainty a future of unyielding

Siege Drama Reimagined

73

anxiety and suffering in Troy – the relentless fear of that which may come. The weight of time upon this static space of constant unresolved war drains the energy of the city. Authentic desire is impossible under the strain of siege space; only the welcome superficial distraction of ephemeral sexual fulfilment is possible. The effects of time on this extreme space also unsettle the besiegers’ camp, albeit in terms of power and ambition rather than romance, as the tedium of each day disturbs unity between various factions in this masculine space and calls into question the effectiveness of leadership. The besieging army does not even have the architecture, the symbols, the history of a city, or even the superficial remnants of the domestic comforts that may still remain within the walls to reaffirm its order. Thus, Ulysses responds to Agamemnon that his army has lost its unity and its respect for hierarchy. Many of the “Grecian tents … stand/Hollow,” emptied of soldiers committed to the fight (1.3.79–80). The result is that [t]he general’s disdained By him one step below, he by the next, That next by him beneath – so every step, Exampled by the first pace that is sick Of his superior, grows to an envious fever Of pale and bloodless emulation: And ’tis this fever that keeps Troy on foot, Not her own sinews. To end a tale of length, Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength. (l.3.130–8) The extended time of the siege has allowed the spread of an infection in the encampment. The authority of leadership has fissured under that pressure. More specifically, the tedium and monotony of the siege allow Shakespeare to demonstrate the cracks in the literary representation of great men of action, put in a situation where matters cannot be resolved with quick and efficient brutality. Achilles finds this situation incredibly frustrating. He not only criticizes the strategies and tactics of Greek leadership but undermines their effectiveness by privileging brute force (which may well be useful in direct encounters such as skirmishes and battles) over the work essential to managing a long-drawn-out siege. Ulysses claims of Achilles and those who heed him,

74

Besieged

They tax our policy and call it cowardice, Count wisdom as no member of the war, Forestall prescience, and esteem no act But that of hand; … They call this bed-work, mapp’ry, closet war, So that the ram that batters down the wall, For the great swing and rudeness of his poise, They place before his hand that made the engine Or those that with the fineness of their souls By reason guide his execution[.] (1.3.198–201, 206–11) Ulysses suggests that the extended nature of siege warfare requires it to exist in space differently than does the battle. A different sort of intricate intellectual work is required – policy, wisdom, prescience, design, and reason. Yet Achilles and others continue to look backwards at old chivalric models of glory and fame in battle. They have clearly been watching too many history plays. Troilus and Cressida signals the clash between the dominant form of representing warfare as it was emerging in the history play, which highlights the speedy victories of a few noblemen, and an alternate form that imagines the need for other types of characters and strategies. In what is perhaps one of the most crucial speeches in the play, Ulysses alerts Achilles to the fact that he is operating within a different type of temporal plane and must adapt. The speech occurs just after the recalcitrant hero has been shocked by a (Ulysses-manufactured) parade of warriors past his tent who pay little attention to him. When the unhappy warrior voices concern he has lost his fame, Ulysses replies, Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back Wherein he puts alms for oblivion, A great-sized monster of ingratitudes; Those scraps are good deeds past, which are devoured As fast as they are made, forgot as soon As done. Perseverance, dear my lord, Keeps honour bright: to have done is to hang Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail In monumental mockery. (3.3.145–53)

Siege Drama Reimagined

75

Sieges – extended, exhausting martial events reliant on engineering work and the hard labour of ordinary soldiers to build earthworks – offered fewer opportunities than the battlefield for decisive acts and thus less chance for lasting glory. Further, their length and periodic resolution by diplomatic means rather than military victory meant that a successful skirmish one day might be diminished by the events that follow, as each day spills over into the next. While Ulysses addresses the fleeting nature of fame in general in this particular speech, the effects of protracted siege warfare on inherited narratives of chivalry are explored throughout the play, and we might benefit from reading Ulysses’s speech in that context. When we first encounter the Greeks, Agamemnon, trying to raise the morale of his military leaders, acknowledges that after seven long years of a siege, “cheques and disasters” can undermine hopes and divert momentum. However, he repositions these perceived failures in a divine narrative. They are “[b]ut the protractive trials of great Jove/To find persistive constancy in men” (1.3.20–1). Retaining cohesion, momentum, and focus is extraordinarily challenging during an event that can continue for months or years. While it is certainly possible to craft noble ideals and make compelling speeches over an extraordinarily long period of time, we see in this speech that even the most eloquent orator will have difficulty uniting various segments of his army after many setbacks. At the end of the play, Agamemnon, who has the last word on the Greek side, continues trying to weave competing discourses into a unifying narrative, claiming, “If in his [Hector’s] death the gods have us befriended,/Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended” (5.10.9–10). The audience knows, however, that the Trojan War has not ended, so Agamemnon’s words have come full circle. He ends as he began, striving to build a narrative of unity and power that allows him to imagine transforming this siege space. But his dreams fail to elide his and our reality. We leave this play, as we do the Iliad, still in the middle of things, without resolution or a promise of unity. We are simply left with Troilus’s threat of vengeance and continued violence, Stay yet! You vile abominable tents, Thus proudly pitched upon our Phrygian plains, Let Titan rise as early as he dare, I’ll through and through you; and though great-sized coward,

76

Besieged

No space of earth shall sunder our two hates. I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still That mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts. (5.11.23–9) Troilus moves beyond the literal divided siege space – the abominable tents on Phrygian plains – into an eternal binary of frenzied turbulence expressed in the same language of rage and violent aggression that drove Achilles to impatience and ultimately to atrocity. Time, and the constant fear and anxiety of pending conflict, have broken down ideals, leading to desperate acts that defy the older language of chivalry, but there is no impetus to move toward a new creative strategy for which Ulysses calls. Consequently, while Pandarus steps in and works to deflect the audience’s attention as the play ends, the siege space is left in a crystallized state of savagery. It is siege space riven by time that reveals to the audience the fictionality of heroic language, obliging its members to look directly at the heart of war and conflict without the mediating effects of epic glory or chivalric romance. This unmasked brutality and violence is all the more painful because of the way Shakespeare uses siege space, allowing his audience to see both inside and outside the city, to overhear concerns and plans on both sides, and perhaps even to sympathize with both parties. This play is always moving spatially between the inside and outside. Even the Prologue carefully sets up the scene on both sides. The audience is first told of the “princes orgulous” landing at Tenedos in their “deep-drawing barks,” which “disgorge/Their warlike freightage,” and “pitch[ing]/Their brave pavilions” “on Dardan plains” (Prologue, lines 2, 12–15). Then the speaker moves to Troy and its protective named gates: Priam’s six-gated city, Dardan and Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troien, And Antenorides with massy staples And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts Spar up the sons of Troy. (Prologue, lines 15–19) While readers and audiences alike already well know the fate of this war, the Prologue places the audience in the middle of these “skittish spirits/On one and other side, Trojan and Greek,/Set[ting] all on hazard” (Prologue, lines 20–2).

Siege Drama Reimagined

77

Thus the city is not the mere object of war and the besiegers the agents as apparent in earlier Renaissance plays. Rather, from the start we see the problems faced by the Greeks in keeping morale high in the camp and the concerns of the Trojans with the cost of the war on the city. Both sides are occupied by complex communities that are engaged in their own internal acts of negotiation. Rather than presenting an invading monarch who rails at anonymous city representatives and a few key besiegers who carry out his wishes, Shakespeare exhibits many developed characters on both sides of the walls (despite the name of the play which highlights only two characters). While the result is moments of frenetic brutality counterpoised by extended stagnant periods, we also sense that each side champions values that make them more alike than different. Yet, over seven years, the two sides have become immovable and intransigent in their occupied space, whether city or camp. At times, Shakespeare represents moments of crossing space, in which the Trojans leave their city and occupy Greek space, to fight, to engage in acts of diplomacy, or to exchange hostages. Nonetheless, for the most part, these movements merely reinscribe the binary nature of the siege. While opponents meet with occasional diplomacy, there is generally a bite to their exchanges. When, for instance, Diomedes travels to Troy to negotiate an exchange of the captives Antenor and Cressida, he and Aeneas greet each other warmly but the conversation soon turn to threats, with Aeneas proclaiming, Health to you, valiant sir, During all question of the gentle truce; But when I meet you armed, as black defiance As heart can think or courage execute. (4.1.12–15) Diomedes’ reply is similarly double, affirming calm and peace in this diplomatic moment, but reaffirming that shortly he will “play the hunter for thy life” (4.1.18). Acts of crossing involve acknowledging that this moment is an exception but that in truth besiegement defines space purely as a binary; there is no middle space without the reminder that the inside and outside of the city stand in opposition. Therefore, Shakespeare introduces the siege motif as a frame for the entire dramatic production, associating it with romance, something that later writers will overwhelmingly embrace, though generally in an earnest rather than parodic sense. More importantly, the extended time and

78

Besieged

confined locus of the siege yields a space of crisis in which the pressures of time on space call for innovation, creativity, and an ability to step outside inherited ideas and division, yet also in which these qualities seem just out of reach. The audience can see through the words of Ulysses (as can Hector, before Troilus persuades him otherwise) that glory can be redefined, policy can acquire new value, and honour can be weighed against the lost souls; in short, the values that keep the Trojans in two rigid, opposing categories can be recreated. And yet, this does not occur. As Shakespeare envisions it, the framing siege motif situates the audience in a liminal cognitive space between recognizing that new concepts are needed to represent modern warfare and realizing that these are inaccessible in this clogged, dull, extreme space between city and camp. Although Shakespeare is theatrically pioneering in his treatment of the siege motif in Troilus and Cressida, the siege play did not become potent in early seventeenth century Britain. Dawson remarks that Shakespeare’s play “does not seem to have made a hit when it was first written” or in the years that followed, and though, as Frances A. Shirley notes, the play was “assigned to Davenant’s Duke’s Company” in 1668, “there is no record of a production in the 1660s or 1670s.”25 It is not until Dryden revises the play that it finally appears in 1679, well after the first performance of The Siege of Rhodes and nearly a decade after the first performance of The Conquest of Granada. It would seem that Troilus and Cressida is one of the exceptions that “will not change the system,”26 at least in the short term. However, Shakespeare’s recrafting of the siege play by placing the siege in the foreground, integrating elements of romance and war, and emphasizing temporal and spatial matters would, to a degree, influence both Davenant and Dryden in their own Restoration siege plays, albeit not for the same antiheroic ends.

Following Shakespeare: From the Death of the Bard to the Restoration In the decades that followed Shakespeare’s death, plays with sieges at their centre did appear sporadically, tending to develop in one of two directions. The first type of play, what we will call (following Cahill) a visceral history, deals with the siege in a “materialist fashion.” By this, we mean that it examines the mechanics of an actual and relatively recent siege

Siege Drama Reimagined

79

and engages with the space of a besieged city in a more prominent and protracted way than does Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. There is no romance in these works to distract from or resolve martial matters. There is good reason for the increasingly detailed emphasis on sieges and their consequences in these plays. These were customarily composed during the Civil War and are works of propaganda that take a political stance on certain sieges, dwelling on the vulnerability of residents of besieged urban spaces and on military maneuvers. In this category we include the anonymous Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649), which Nigel Smith attributes to Samuel Sheppard, and A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, or Lirenda’s Miserie (1646) written by one Henry Burkhead about the events that followed the 1641 Irish rebellion.27 More relevant to our study is the trajectory of a second type of siege play that follows Shakespeare by entwining a military siege with a romance plot. Most of the authors of these works, however, do not share Shakespeare’s interest in any of the new elements he introduces to Troilus and Cressida. In general, the siege in these later works rapidly fades into a backdrop that exists merely to intensify the romance. An example of such a siege play is William Cartwright’s The Siedge: Or Love’s Convert, A Tragi-Comedy, first published in 1651 in a posthumous collection of poetry and drama, though it was likely written in the late 1620s or the 1630s. The play opens at a siege in Byzantium by the army of Misander, a tyrant of Thrace.28 The first scene zeroes in on the response of the citizens of Byzantium to the demands of the invading king and, for a moment, there is a sense that this play will be, at least in part, about the misery of city space during a siege, this time from the perspective of its nonmilitary inhabitants. However, the action quickly shifts to a romance plot that subsumes the rest of the narrative. The love plot moves into the foreground and while the threats associated with the siege are present until the end of the drama, they no longer rise to prominence. When, in the last scene of the play, Euthalpe, one of the city dwellers, says to Misander, “’tis no dishonour/To your great Valours, if you let a Siedge/End in a Dance,” there seems to be no residual suffering or pain.29 The play is not about a siege in the same way that Troilus and Cressida is, though it certainly does call attention to the intermingling of love and siege warfare, albeit with a vastly increased emphasis on romance. Siege drama continued to be composed during the Civil War and Interregnum, even after the playhouses were closed in 1642 and the theatres destroyed in 1649.30 Dramatic exchanges continued during and after the

80

Besieged

war, for example, in pamphlet dialogues, pamphlet playlets, and closet dramas. It is hardly surprising that drama in this period often featured martial action in general, given the recent experiences of the nation, which Dale B.J. Randall explores in his study Winter-Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660. But regarding the representation of siege warfare, dramatists tended to follow the compositional practices of the earlier playwrights of history or Cartwright rather than Shakespeare. The siege again became one brief moment in a longer play, whether comic or tragic. As in Cartwright’s work, the romance plot in these Civil War and Interregnum plays dominated. Such is the case, for example, in James Shirley’s The Imposture (1653), possibly written around 1640, which begins at a siege but is mainly about the intrigues of romance and Gilbert Swinhoe’s The Tragedy of the unhappy Fair Irene (1658), which begins after a siege, at the storming and plundering of Constantinople where Irene is captured but then shifts to a study of the cruelty of empire and the horrors of Irene’s fate. Jasper Mayne’s comedy Amorous Warre (1648) opens with the besiegement of a castle and the capturing of the women within, but its ending is focused more on seduction than destruction. Only one play during this time period, a closet drama by two women writers, echoes Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida not only in seriously interrelating siege space and romance but also in recognizing the unique ability of the siege motif to explore the influence of sustained, extreme conditions on a community. The Concealed Fancies, the unpublished play written by Elizabeth (Lady Elizabeth Brackley) and Jane Cavendish, the daughters of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, by his first wife, was likely written in the 1640s. This play is considerably different from Troilus and Cressida. It is set in relatively contemporary times rather than a mythic past. It dramatizes the Civil War siege of a country house rather than of a city, a deeply personal and traumatizing intrusion for the household confined inside. It emphasizes individuals and their personal relationships rather than war. Siege warfare is only a subplot, though a key one that refers in a thinly veiled way to the actual siege of Welbeck Abbey (1644), the Cavendish family home. And it ultimately ends up embracing the ideals of epic heroism. However, this play does follow Shakespeare in paying substantial attention to the way chaotic siege space can disturb the identities through which the inhabitants of that space define themselves. Despite the truncated emphasis on the siege, it is not a mere backdrop but has a tangible effect on the trajectory of the play. The siege matters

Siege Drama Reimagined

81

and is used, in this case, not so much to display fractured notions of military glory and honour as it is to reveal the contingency of power, safety, identity, and status.31 Lisa Hopkins and Barbara MacMahon have recently suggested that this play revitalizes and engages with the medieval “Castle of Love trope,” yet they recognize that it deconstructs or problematizes the trope, likely in reaction to the actual warfare experienced by the authors.32 It is possible, however, that Cavendish and Brackley are engaging with Shakespeare’s siege plays rather than simply with medieval representations of siege space. They were likely familiar with Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, as one of the characters enacts the role of Cleopatra at one point in the play. We know that their stepmother, Margaret Cavendish, was certainly familiar with that play, as she had written of Shakespeare in Sociable Letters (1664), “Who could describe Cleopatra better than he hath done?”33 It is possible they were also familiar with Troilus and Cressida and were looking at least in part to this drama rather than to older medieval tropes for inspiration. For like Shakespeare, the playwrights are examining the profound effect of a protracted siege on the peopled landscape. However, it is not soldiers but primarily civilians, women, and servants who are spotlighted in The Concealed Fancies.34 In a series of glimpses into a besieged space, we see how it is transformed from a familiar to an uncanny place in which a variety of occupants are unsure of how they ought to act. This newly defined space primarily derives its identity not from the stature of its inhabitants or by the status of its owners in relation to those who inhabit the surrounding landscape but rather by its ability or inability to remain enclosed. It initially appears that Cavendish and Brackley create a conventional romance plot by first introducing two suitors (Courtley and Presumption) who extol the virtues of their respective beloved (Luceny and Tattiney) and a Lady who is determined to court Lord Calsindow, the father of the young women. But this will not be a conventional drama, despite the comedic resolution. At the beginning of the second act, the play moves, if briefly, beyond domestic frivolity and wit. Colonel Free, the cousin of the two young women, asks a less successful suitor of one of his sisters, “What think you of the taking of Ballamo?” and this opens a brief discussion of martial tactics (2.1.74).35 This conversation quickly relapses into conventional tropes of besiegement as sexual conquest, and we might think this is yet another play in which a siege serves a brief and passing role, and merely a symbolic one at that. The first few acts introduce an ordinary space, in

82

Besieged

which relationships between ladies and their maids, gentlemen and their romantic rivals, and cooks and the kitchen boys highlight the everyday aspects of life – striving to look young, preparing appreciated meals, and flirting. The literal siege, however, is reintroduced in the third act when the stage shifts to Ballamo castle, where three female cousins, Cicilley, Sh., and Is., are imprisoned in a besieged space, reflecting an experience that Cavendish and Brackley had directly encountered in 1644/45. In such a situation, everyday life is ruptured, and characters must reevaluate the place in which they live, recognizing now that known space is not as stable as it appeared. There is a tone of light humour throughout The Concealed Fancies, but Cavendish and Brackley provide their audience with periodic access to the disorientation involved in inhabiting a formerly familiar domestic place that has been upended and transformed into a foreign space, whether one is a member of the nobility, a prisoner, or a mere servant. Experiences of displacement related to bodily safety, social relations, and economic security are brought to light. For example, the servants in the castle, Mr Proper, Mr Friendly, and Mr Divinity, wonder when the relief will come, believe that the royalists are defeated, and wittily ponder whether they will still be popular when they are “without an eye” or have lost “a leg” and hope that they have a pension, as they must otherwise “beg as a lame soldier of the king’s and the king’s lame soldier” (3.1.15–16, 22–4). While this exchange is presented as rather amusing, beneath the humour lies the fact that this renegotiated space, no longer a place of employment but a military zone, threatens economic stability and bodily wholeness. A sense of safety and socioeconomic security has been replaced with the threat of death or dismemberment. The dependence of the servants on the benevolence of their superiors and the latter’s success in protecting them also comes to the fore. Perhaps the authors attribute these thoughts on the brutality of the war to the common servants because it is too painful to picture violent outcomes for nobles. For the female characters who live in the besieged castle, it seems even harder to find a role in such a topsy-turvy world. Like the servants, they are dependent on male agents. How ought women of high rank to act in such a circumstance? Despite their dependency, they seem determined to adapt their identity in such a space. They are concerned with how they look and with how they should perform in these conditions. Believing that the “neighbouring peasants” and the “pedantical servants, have given

Siege Drama Reimagined

83

us up for a prey to the enemy” (3.4.1–3), they manage to find past precedents to help them establish new identities, if but for a time. Sh. acts as Cleopatra, looking to inherited plays to help her understand what her present condition or “scene” requires and announces at one point, “[H]ow did I look in the posture of a delinquent” (3.4.4–5). Cicilley tells her she looked “as though you thought the scene would change again, and you would be happy though you suffered misery for a time” (3.4.7–10). Such hope is undercut, of course, by Cleopatra’s dramatic and actual fate. They ultimately fail in finding a sustained alternate identity and Sh. notes that she wants to “talk no more of our captivity,” sullenly declaring, “I wish I could not think, that I might not remember, I had been once happy” (3.4.19–20). Cicilley recommends distraction and denial as a way to come to terms with their situation, musing, “I am not in your opinion, for then I should remember nothing but misery, therefore, let’s recreate ourselves with other discourse” (3.4.22–4), and after voicing hope for their absent friends, looks for cordials, perhaps hoping medicinal intoxication may hold the pressures of the situation at bay. Such psychological and medicinal strategies are necessary when no physical form of resistance is possible. That the women’s strategies focus on changing their own state rather than on altering their external conditions suggests that siege warfare, far from being mundane even in times of stasis, imperils not only the body but the conception of self for those within the walls. The military resolution that comes at the play’s end seems magical and abrupt, a matter of wish fulfillment, presumably because of the heroic figures, the Elder and Younger Stellow, the two sons of Lord Calsindow, who are in love with two of the trapped cousins. Their ultimate attempts to lift the siege prevail abruptly and off stage.36 The ideals of romance help to temper the instability created by the threat of the siege and enable masculine action and success. Yet the rapidity of the play’s conclusion may suggest a degree of ambivalence about the resolution the writers so heartily present and its ability to work in a world marked by the reality of the Civil War. In the decades before the Restoration, therefore, playwrights not only drew on aspects of siege drama from the classical and medieval periods, they also engaged with a rich array of more recent innovations in theatrical sieges. Not only were new features of the siege introduced in Renaissance chronicle plays, but Shakespeare turned to the siege as a worthy subject for an entire play, bringing to bear a distinct spatiotemporal understanding

84

Besieged

of siege warfare on a romance plot in order to critique narratives of glory associated with war. Cavendish and Brackley’s unpublished play also reveals that new ideas emerged, at least in private, about siege drama as a productive vehicle for exploring individual and social identity in times of crisis. When Davenant and Dryden popularize the siege play after the Restoration, they unsurprisingly reformulate siege space in a way that affirms the values of the restored royalists. Their use of the siege motif, however, to differing degrees also recognizes the profound instability of besieged space as presented in the plays just discussed. In the period following a war of sieges that profoundly disturbed the sociopolitical structure, the siege drama will acquire a remarkable potency.

The Siege in Restoration Drama: Davenant and Dryden During the Restoration, dramas that spotlighted the military siege thrived. Their increased presence and potency resulted in part from new possibilities in theatrical production. Jean Marsden notes that “[c]ontemporary audiences were intrigued by spectacle and were clearly attracted by the promise of newer and more dazzling wonders.”37 Developments in scenery and special effects meant that the transformation of siege space could be represented visually in more sophisticated ways, adding to the energy of a performance. Of course, there were many ways, besides representing besiegement, that Restoration playwrights made use of theatrical innovations to create a sense of wonder in the audience. Marsden mentions adaptations of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1664) and The Tempest (1674) as works that “took full advantage of the technical possibilities for staging intricate productions” and refers to Thomas Shadwell’s The Lancashire Witches (1681), which incorporated “scenes of witches flying over the stage and even summoning the devil.”38 However, while advances in the production of the staged spectacle likely contributed to the potency and ubiquity of siege stories across dramatic genres after 1660, the myriad siege plays of the period cannot be attributed to that alone. More importantly, William Davenant in The Siege of Rhodes and John Dryden in The Conquest of Granada, and those playwrights who followed, may have featured siege space in their heroic dramas, to which audiences flocked, because after the Civil War there was a need to reinvent imaginatively the traumatic urban siege warfare that Britain had experienced,

Siege Drama Reimagined

85

albeit with a happy ending. Janet Clare writes of Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, “[t]he graphic account of the siege of Rhodes, including details of munitions and military strategies, is not so far removed from recent events at the sieges of Colchester, Newark and Bristol.”39 Residual memories of the brutality of city sieges lived on; such violence in domestic space during a civil war was not so easy to wipe from the national memory. Both Davenant and Dryden bring to the fore that brutality of the past and then work toward a tidy resolution; order is restored, and even loss is seen to be noble, as Davenant’s Alphonso and Ianthe negotiate excellent terms for the fallen Rhodes, and Dryden’s Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada, after a miraculous ghostly visitation from his dead mother, identifies a member of the Spanish nobility as his father, reconciles with the besieging Spanish forces, and looks forward to a governing role in Granada. This restoration of order, not to mention the glory of martial loss, is surely a welcome message to a royalist audience. Cynthia Wall has persuasively argued that the vulnerability of cities in the present was also much on the minds of Restoration readers and audiences. Siege dramas were an effective way to express not only vivid memories of war-stormed cities but also concerns about the postwar and post-Restoration city. London, in particular, had grown substantially in size during the seventeenth century, experienced a series of traumatic events, and contained within itself a dynamic myriad of competing and conflicting social, political, economic, and religious interests.40 A city is no longer a mere commercial and domestic space after it is marked by the Civil War but, in the national imagination, a potential space of urbicide and violent death. Consequently, as siege drama evolved in the decades following the Restoration, it was useful for engaging with other societal issues, such as the mutating social order or the precarious nature of urban space. When Davenant was crafting his siege opera, this fragility would primarily be linked to warfare, but by the time Dryden and the later plays were performed, it would have been intensified by London’s experience of the plague and fire. The reemergence of siege drama, therefore, at this historical and cultural moment was especially pronounced because it was reenergized by technical innovation that appealed to the audience and revitalized by events and experiences from the recent past that gave new and deeply relevant meaning to the lived urban experience. In studies of the work of Davenant and Dryden, particularly of their heroic drama, the limits of their writing is often considered, notably the

86

Besieged

odd artificiality of heroes that work to (over)compensate for the royalist military loss. Contemporaries of Davenant and Dryden also frequently ridiculed heroic dramas, as is evident in The Rehearsal (1672). However, if we examine these works from a different perspective, not focusing on the overblown romance at their core or at the excessive discourse and actions of their heroes but rather on the way the plays and their characters use and comprehend communal space, which was privileged over time in the work of both playwrights, we may gain a new understanding of why the motif was so remarkably influential.41 There are key differences between the ways Davenant and Dryden imagine besieged city space.42 Davenant tends to emphasize and foreground the presence and materiality of siege space, the sedimented nature of that environment in terms of the layers of active participants in urban landscapes and the history of the place. He focuses on its productiveness when leaders work with the citizens, especially members of the new professions, to strengthen city space. In other words, unlike Shakespeare, Davenant suggests that adaptability and innovation can occur but that this must involve a newly imagined reciprocity between leaders and citizens. In defining the city as the locus of a wide variety of people and voices with a range of roles and functions, rather than simply a space in which aristocratic warriors strive for power, he complicates and enriches urban, and perhaps national, space. Ordinary citizens thereby see themselves as active agents in a city space, besieged or otherwise. Dryden’s play, on the other hand, pays less attention to the materiality and more to the relationality of space. It is dynamic, representing space changing hands from minute to minute usually within, but sometimes outside, the city. Through much of the play there is a sense that space is always contingent, on the verge of being remade not only by conflicting personal desire but also by history. While Dryden allows for moments when imagination, innovation, and appeals to justice flourish and bear fruit, although only after intense struggles, he also raises questions about whether conceptions of communal space, urban or otherwise, can hold firm under the precarious nature of post-Civil War existence. Therefore, both authors reconceptualize, by representing a site under pressure, city space in post-Civil War Britain. Although both unsurprisingly affirm order and hierarchy, they also create the conditions through which, for later dramatists, such order can be questioned.

Siege Drama Reimagined

87

William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes (1656) Before turning to the representation of siege space in The Siege of Rhodes, we should acknowledge that it is not Davenant’s only literary siege work, nor likely even his first. When a collection of Davenant’s works was published in the 1670s, it included a play simply named The Siege. Some have argued that this play was written much earlier than its publication date, likely in the late 1620s.43 If so, we could view it as a response to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and speculate that Davenant perceived siege drama as artistically useful long before national military experience increased its relevancy.44 Even in The Siege, Davenant resoundingly rejects Shakespeare’s anti-epic and antiromance features and crafts a dense space on which to represent the complexity of war. The plot is not solely focused on relations between the characters or on the heroic activity of aristocratic fighters. It picks up on events in space, the nitty-gritty discourse of war as it changes the landscape, the presence of the technology of war, and the acknowledgement of ordinary soldiers in that location. The siege space coexists with private spaces of romance, yet war is noisily and tangibly present both inside and outside the city. There is overt and sustained mention of direct martial action involving the city, such as sallies, tactical plans, and skirmishes. The Siege of Rhodes can be seen as continuing and developing Davenant’s interest in the theatrical representation of military space, an awareness that would certainly have been complicated and enriched by his experience in the Civil War.45 Clare reminds us that “[d]uring the first civil war, Davenant had been Lieutenant General of Ordnance under the Earl of Newcastle,” explaining the “knowledge of military apparatus” in The Siege of Rhodes.46 Moreover, Davenant’s theory of the way in which dramatic performance works suggests that this military experience, to a degree, can be picked up by those who do not have such first-hand knowledge, simply by attending the theatre. In his First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House, a work that preceded the performance of The Siege of Rhodes, Davenant discusses the potential of performative space, notably performative military space. In an exchange on the effect of scenery in this entertainment, one character criticizes scenes that deceive with “motion and transposition of lights; where … you think you see a great battle” or “gaze on imaginary woods and meadows” which “you can neither fell nor

88

Besieged

mow.”47 But his companion replies, “Is it not the safest and shortest way to understanding, when you are brought to see vast seas and provinces, fleets, armies, and forts, without the hazards of a voyage, or pains of a long march? Nor is that deception where we are prepar’d and consent to be deceiv’d. Nor is there much loss … where we gain some variety of experience by a short journey of the sight.”48 It is significant that “fleets, armies,” “forts,” and “long march[es]” are mentioned as part of this “journey of the sight.” Likewise, watching a siege play conjures up in the minds of audience members the unyielding pressure of besiegement, which some of them may have personally experienced in the late wars.49 Unlike Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, Davenant privileges space over time in The Siege of Rhodes when he chooses to begin his play at the start of a siege rather than in the midst of it. Davenant also deploys and affirms, as he did in The Siege, many of the conventions of romance and honour that Shakespeare undercuts in Troilus and Cressida, especially in relation to his central characters Alphonso and Ianthe. Alphonso will not abandon Rhodes for the sake of love because, as he says, “Honour is colder Vertue set on fire:/My honour lost, her Love would soon decay.”50 Yet while Davenant reclaims and upholds the ideals of love, honour, and virtuous heroism, as he did in The Siege, they are often subordinated to less lofty matters, since, as he tells readers, the action occurs in “the continual hurry and busie agitations of a hot Siege.”51 Davenant’s attention to the multidimensional nature of space in his visual representation of siege warfare reminds the audience or reader that war profoundly alters the perception and experience of space in the nation, and in besieged cities throughout the nation in particular.52 Davenant makes even more tangible the experience of martial conflict, the logistics of a siege, and the way space strains under the pressure of war. At times, this depiction of spatial fracturing undermines the romance plot. While there is some resolution of the love plot in the first part of the play, the failure to resolve the siege until the end of the second part enables Davenant to linger over the disturbing uncertainty of siege warfare. From the play’s inception, Davenant goes beyond the representation of an already militarized city to reveal how a siege changes space in fundamental ways. Not only are the besieged contained in a confined space, the space assumes two identities: one domestic and one military. The multiple possibilities within city space that we see later in Defoe’s memoirs, is performed at the opening of The Siege of Rhodes. Before the siege of a city like Rhodes, it is marked as an urban, commercial, and

Siege Drama Reimagined

89

domestic space in which authority structures, trade, familial relations, and the like are familiar. The longer a city has been peaceful, the more entrenched are its systems, governance structures, citizen behaviour, and business relations. Soon after the city is besieged, this known space is disturbingly double coded, showing that the potential for militarization always existed, awaiting activation. While citizens try to retain aspects of the city’s peaceful past, homes become barracks, suburbs are literally destroyed, public meeting and commercial places transform into yards for military exercises, and the city hierarchy becomes muddled: what is the relationship, say, between municipal and military officers? This process is exemplified in The Siege of Rhodes both by scene changes and by a cacophony of noise, signifying that the besieged city always remains on the verge of falling. At the beginning of the play, Alphonse enters and cries out, What various Noises do mines [sic] ears invade? And have a Consort of confusion made? The shriller Trumpet, and tempestuous Drum: The deaf ’ning clamor from the Canons wombe; Which through the Aire like suddain Thunder breaks, Seems calm to Souldiers shouts and Womens shrieks. (I:4) Yet to Davenant such instability can be productive since it allows for agency and innovation.53 As Jonathan Lamb writes of siege architecture in Tristram Shandy, a siege is strangely creative: “The innovation of the great siege architects … involved the reduction of everything … to the level of the walls … This flattening … encouraged the baroque proliferations of siege architecture, as if in being reduced it was also allowed to spread … Each plan is a starburst of damaging possibilities congealed at the limit of practicable material redress. The whole structure expands as a scene of anticipated ruin rebuilt.”54 In a siege, the besiegers and besieged creatively work to transform the landscape to their advantage. Battles also have this trait, as officers decide which ground gives their troops the greatest advantage. Yet sieges are more creative because their duration allows for the building of massive fortifications and counter-fortifications, producing a long-term audience of trained soldiers who think tactically as bastions, parapets, and ramparts emerge from the earth, and of citizens, whose fears may intensify as they try to grasp what immense topographical shifts mean.

90

Besieged

However, it is not merely military men who are innovative. Davenant’s ordinary people are also active, adaptable, and imaginative. In this regard, Davenant remains true to one of his key sources for The Siege of Rhodes, Richard Knolles’s The Generall Historie of the Turkes (1610), which explains, “The Rhodians … pluckt downe the suburbs of the citie, and laid them even with the ground, their pleasant orchards also & gardens neere unto the citie, they utterly destroied … and taking into the citie all such things as they thought needfull for the enduring of the siege, they utterly destroyed all the rest, were it never so pleasant or commodious, within a mile of the towne, leaving all that space as even and bare as they could possibly make it.”55 The familiar is suddenly unfamiliar, the distinction between urban and rural elements of the city suddenly collapses, the homes of the citizens become refugee shelters, and likely barracks, given the presence of a high number of international soldiers. And yet there is agency and creativity within this instability. Davenant’s Rhodians actively engage in the renovation of the city, helping to transform their space to prevent enemy appropriation. The citizens are not merely a backdrop for noble action, but a central part of the action. As The Siege of Rhodes begins, Villerius, Grand Master of Rhodes, responds to the approaching Turkish fleet by making such changes, crying, Send Horse to drive the Fields; Prevent what rip’ning Summer yeilds. To all the Foe would save Set fire, or give a secret Grave. (I:4) The outlying agricultural spaces that mark the city as peaceful and domestic must be destroyed by the Rhodians. In ordering the destruction and sheltering of ships, readying the soldiers, and preparing the artillery, the Grand Master announces the spatial shift, but the people bring it into being. A chorus of female citizens give voice to this truth in song: Dig up our Arbours, and root up our Flowers. Our Gardens are Bulwarks and Bastions become; Then hang up our Lutes; we must sing to the Drum. … Our Coaches have drove us to Balls at the Court; We now must drive Barrows to earth up the Port. (I:13)

Siege Drama Reimagined

91

Perhaps the most spectacular of such acts of creative destruction takes place in the final section of the second part when the Rhodians, facing famine and concerned about the imprisonment of Ianthe, creatively destroy the palace of the master of Rhodes, setting it on fire to provide light for a surprise nighttime attack on their besiegers. The architectural symbol of power in that urban space becomes more useful to the city when transformed into a torch. Davenant’s emphasis on the role played by ordinary people in the city, made more possible by his choice of the operatic form and the function of the chorus, may well reflect the significant part city dwellers played during the Civil War in fortifying their cities. Of civilian volunteer work on London’s fortifications near the beginning of the Civil War, Michael Braddick has written, Work on London’s fortifications had started in the autumn of 1642, but the real initiative came in the spring of 1643 in a massive programme of public works … [T]he apparent enthusiasm for this work was remarkable. One contemporary observer claimed that 100,000 citizens set their hands to the work; the Venetian ambassador estimated more modestly that 20,000 worked without pay each day, even on Sunday … The great and the good joined “all sorts of Londoners,” marching to the works “with all alacrity.”56 While Davenant would not have been sympathetic to a city arming against the king, he may well have been fascinated by the way the citizenry rapidly adapted to war. This is reflected in his disruption of the heroic story not with a frail, passive citizenry who undermine the city’s strength with complaints or treachery but with a new form of urban community in which plebeians are active agents who take on a more central role in the military defense. The complexity of the makeup and operation of society in urban space is thereby stressed. That is not to say that the link between heroism and the nobility is rejected in The Siege of Rhodes – far from it. The play frequently pauses to commend the fighting of Alphonso or even of Ianthe, but it also extols the actions of the common people. Indeed, the chorus, as the play opens, affirm their willingness to die and their desire to be memorialized as a group,

92

Besieged

being dead, Brave Wonders may be wrought By such as shall our Story read And study how we fought. (I:9) Even the enemy seems to recognize it is urban defiance rather than aristocratic heroic skill alone that defends the space. Assessing the forces that hold him at bay, Solyman is less interested in individuals than in the English army as a whole, comparing it to “shoals of Herrings “choak[ing] a Whale” (I:35), adding, “Audacious Town! thou keep’st thy station still;/ And so my Castle tarries on that Hill” (I:35). The mastery of space by the many is amplified by musical pieces throughout the opera, chiefly sung by “Souldiers of several Nations” or the “Chorus of Women” (I:6 and I:13). In the first part’s final song, the soldiers celebrate their spatial authority, singing of chasing the enemy “[t]hrough Sands and … Plashes” until they return “to their Gallies” (I:38). For them, Solyman’s palace is not an icon of the invader’s greatness but a prison in which he will remain until he dies. And Alphonso himself takes time to praise the varied groups of soldiers who help to defend them. In the second part of the play, issues of love and honour, particularly with the addition of Roxolana, come to the fore, and in the siege plot, the city of Rhodes starts to falter. The people at this point are weighed down with suffering and voice their concern. The admiral complains, The Peoples various minds (Which are like sudden winds, Such as from Hilly coasts still changing blow) Were lately as a secret kept In many whispers of so soft a breath[.] … But now, as if they meant to waken Death, They rashly rise and loud in Tumults grow.57 The disturbance of the masses could certainly have led to their denigration in the play, and the admiral is not unaware that their rebellion could be disastrous, noting,

Siege Drama Reimagined

93

Their murmurs with their hunger will increase: Their noises are effects of emptiness. Murmurs, like Winds, will louder prove When they with larger freedome move. (II:11) Yet, there is a sense that the ability to adapt imaginatively to the pressures of besieged space is contingent not merely on the success of heroes but on a reciprocal relationship, a social contract, between the nobility and the people. Villerius affirms this point when he remarks, Pow’r is an Arch which ev’ry common hand Does help to raise to a magnifique height; And it requites their aid when it does stand With firmer strength beneath increasing weight. (II:11) Therefore, when the citizens call for Ianthe to plead for mercy from Solyman on their behalf, Ianthe does not rail at them or dismiss them as cowards. Rather, after assuring herself that her husband will not again fall into excessive jealousy, she agrees to approach Solyman, affirming thereby that she sees herself as part of this urban space, though, ironically, she, like Alphonso, is an outsider, as are many of the soldiers. She did not always feel this way. Indeed, Ianthe and Alphonso shared an earlier conversation about whether they belong in Rhodes. Ianthe wants to take advantage of Solyman’s offer to leave, but Alphonso responds, “[I]n Rhodes besieg’d, we must be Rhodians too” (II:24). The people applaud Ianthe for her commitment to the city and ultimately, in the second act, participate in a futile but courageous attempt to rescue her. Squarely at the centre of the martial urban identity Davenant adapts from Renaissance drama is the master of technology, representative of innovation and transformation, who is placed alongside traditional heroes.58 When the ground is literally undermined and a social cohesion that is dependent on geographic space (in this case Rhodes) is hence destabilized, the hero with the sword is not necessarily the most important figure. Rather, technologists skilled at observing, measuring, and controlling space in a broader, tactical way are key to military success. John Richardson has argued that such an emphasis celebrates the abilities of soldiers over aristocrats.59 Thus, the military position of engineer is newly celebrated in this architectural war, evident when the admiral and Villerius

94

Besieged

praise the work of the Venetian engineer Gabriele Tadino da Martinengo who counteracts the Turkish mines with countermines. Indeed, significant problems occur for Solyman when his forces are not as capable as the Rhodians of managing their instruments and weapons. The language used by soldiers also stresses the mechanical elements of war and the need for adaptability and tactical knowledge, emphasizing the significance of technical expertise in combat. During an assault on the city/castle by Solyman’s forces, one of the Turkish military commanders cries out, Traverse the Canon! Mount the Batrys higher! More Gabions, and renew the Blinds! Like dust they powder spend, And to our faces send The heat of all the Element of fire; And to their Backs have all the winds! (I:29) His colleague adds to the barrage of tactical information when he enters and calls, More Ladders, and reliefs to scale! The Fire-crooks are too short! Help, help to hale! That Battlement is loose, and strait will down! Point well the Canon, and play fast! Their fury is too hot to last. That Rampire shakes, they fly into the Town. (I:29) Victory and defeat certainly involve combat between individual heroic men. However, Davenant’s play spotlights the ability of the besiegers and besieged to interpret landscape and react accordingly by adjusting weaponry and making use of the technical knowledge of the troops in response to the situation on the ground. Victory is often tied to managing space well, anticipating enemy action, rather than winning a single encounter. When the admiral from Rhodes notes that they have intelligence “[t]hat at the break of day/Their Mine will play,” Villerius assures him that their side has tested the ground, “Counter-digg’d, and has the hollows found,” so they will be able to counter the attacks (I:26–7).

Siege Drama Reimagined

95

Davenant’s elaborate and impressive sets amplify this visual and auditory journey through the chaos and creativity of siege warfare. Not only are images extant from the performance but there are elaborate set instructions in the printed 1670 edition, reinforcing that it is vital to capture visually the transforming city. Davenant, for example, gives the following description of the scene at the first entrance: The Curtain being drawn up, a lightsome Sky appear’d, discov’ring a Maritime Coast, full of craggy Rocks, and high Cliffs, with several Verdures naturally growing upon such Scituations [sic]; and afar off, the true Prospect of the City RHODeS, when it was in prosperous estate: with so much view of the Gardens and Hills about it, as the narrowness of the Room could allow the Scene. In that part of the Horizon, terminated by the Sea, was represented the Turkish Fleet making towards a Promontory, some few miles distant from the Town. (I:2–3) The impressive scenery is vital to the performance and it is apparent from some of the tactical descriptions above, and even the citizens’ songs, that the characters actively interact with it. But we mention it last because the siege experience is enhanced by their presence, and many of the features we have discussed are highlighted by the sets but not wholly contingent on them. For example, Kevin Cope maintains that Davenant’s “innovation” of “picturing people in his scenes” underscores that ordinary citizens are vital to that space.60 The scenery also captures the mutability of the city as it moves from peaceful place to military precinct. The sense of control within the city is disturbed by the visually growing sense of enclosure and noisy discord. At moments we hear a “Consort of confusion … [t]he shriller Trumpet, and tempestuous Drum” and the response of those in the city: “Souldiers shouts and Womens shrieks” (I:4). Davenant’s “picturing [of ] people in his scenes” also accentuates the creativity earlier discussed. Solyman and his army, for instance, rapidly work to claim the space; he orders the creation of disposable architecture and his military commander, Pirrhus, praises the toil which “despite/of Canon, raise[s] these Mounts to Castle-height” (I:9). Solyman insists that on “Philermus hill,”

96

Besieged

ere this Moon her Circle fills with days, They shall, by … cherish’d skill, A spacious Palace in a Castle raise: A Neighbourhood within the Rhodians view; Where, if my anger cannot them subdue[,] My patience shall out-wait them[.] (I:16) Such descriptions would have invited spectacular scenic innovations that mimic theatrically the architectural change they are working to represent. While Solyman does ultimately succeed, the successful resistance of the city for a significant period suggests that spatial dominance is not always immediately attained through the might of great men with crushing armies. It also, of course, confirms that there can be glory in defeat, always a welcome message for royalists. The imaginative and practical powers of the weary Rhodians allow them to control their space at least temporarily and thus be worthy of commemoration. This layered and sedimented space that is Rhodes, to which Alphonso and Ianthe choose to return to share “the Rhodians worst effects of Warr” (II:60), is protected by Ianthe who accepts Solyman’s offer that she make conditions for the defeated city. On the one hand, by presenting Rhodes as an orderly space in which a diverse population works together for the common good, even in times of war, we might conclude that Davenant crafts, or at least artistically moves toward, representing what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a striated space. As Sten Pultz Moslund explains in a recent study of geography in literature, “Striated space is the production of space – or the territorialization of space and human relations – by an authoritative State apparatus. It is the coding of social space and its subjects and all their values and functions where all relations are fixed, institutionalized, compartmentalized, regulated and homogenized: a physical and social space ‘striated by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures.’”61 And as Deleuze and Guattari make plain, “In contrast to the sea, the city is the striated space par excellence.”62 The walled city, Davenant’s focal point, may be protected by a variety of military forces and creative energies but it is unified under the Grand Master Villerius. The “Souldiers of several Nations” sing in one voice of their willingness to defend the city from invaders (I:6). There may be various types of people in the city, but they almost always occupy their proper place and support the municipal structure of authority. Even when the city must

Siege Drama Reimagined

97

change hands at the end of the play’s second part, its coding and relations remain in place, albeit under different leadership. This is another way of saying that the play, unsurprisingly, reinforces royalist order, celebrating the support of the city (or nation) for its leaders. On the other hand, the new visibility of the sedimentation of urban space creates the conditions for the siege play to become less orderly over time and to question the codes and conditions of striated space. In elevating military technologists, for example, Davenant places practical, innovative, merit-based experts alongside glorious noble warriors. By also highlighting the important role of civilian women and ordinary soldiers during combat, he gives such characters increasing value, moving beyond the cowardly and bombastic characters from the lower orders that frequent his earlier play, The Siege. Though far from producing a realistic depiction of the city at war, The Siege of Rhodes makes more visible groups typically marginalized in dramatic representations of war, promotes the resilience and agency of the civilians and troops, and privileges the technological expertise that enables the transformation of urban space. Thus, Davenant broadens the vision of his audience to see heroism not merely in aristocratic individuals but in entire cities. Although the city in the play is lost, the productive reciprocity between the nobility (particularly the influential Ianthe who wins the admiration of Solyman) and the people leads to Ianthe ultimately making her “own/Conditions boldly for the Town” (II:61), presumably protecting the interests of its inhabitants who sacrificed much in an attempt to rescue her. Thus, the possibility is created, though not at all realized, for appreciable tensions between variously significant participants in warfare.

John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (I and II) has much in common with Davenant’s work. Like Davenant, Dryden intertwines the siege space with romance. He also diverges from Shakespeare’s emphasis on the long and tedious nature of siege warfare, the play opening with an unflustered king of Granada enjoying public games. Dryden eschews, as well, the satiric elements of Troilus and Cressida, embracing heroic, in fact ultraheroic, values. As Paulina Kewes has argued, he deploys “historical … settings to shore up the prestige of the Stuart monarchy in rhymed heroic plays.”63

98

Besieged

The Conquest of Granada, like Davenant’s opera, is comprised of two parts and addresses a siege that takes place elsewhere, though the time period he selects is far more recent – the late fifteenth century. Just as Davenant places outsiders, Alfonso and Ianthe, in the city, so does Dryden bring an outsider to Granada, Almanzor. Both playwrights end their second part with resolution rather than indeterminacy: the city is taken. We also know that Dryden, like Davenant, was interested in creating a visual journey for his audience, Dryden providing very impressive scenery as a backdrop to his siege play. John Evelyn records in his diary that during his 1671 attendance of the two-day performance of The Conquest of Granada “there were indeed very glorious scenes and perspectives, the work of Mr Streeter, who well understands it.”64 Though representations of these backdrops no longer exist, we do know that Robert Streater created elaborate work. Dryden also valued the effects of sound, using drums and trumpets, for example, to highlight disturbances in the city. The scenery and sound, therefore, is not unlike that found in Davenant’s opera. But there are also many differences. There is no “dialogue” between the set and the lines. Where performers climb ladders and observe buildings fall or burst into flame in The Siege of Rhodes, talking in detail about what is occurring, Dryden keeps martial activity mainly off stage, although Almanzor occasionally runs in with a bloody sword. While this is much in accordance with inherited generic convention, going back to atrocities occurring off stage in Greek drama, representing combat in this way diminishes the type of scenic presence observed in Davenant’s play. Dryden does not engage with how the siege changes the space of Granada, and there is certainly no sense of creative destruction. Characters move from castles to turrets, to woods, and to camps, but there is less description of what is happening in and to the urban landscape. The absence of detail is even more apparent when we consider that Madeleine de Scudéry’s Almahide; or, the Captive Queen (1661–63; trans. 1677), one of Dryden’s sources, begins her work by describing the chaos in the city in great detail: There was nothing to be heard but the dismal cry of Arm, Arm, in every Street of the great and magnificent City of Granada, when all the People thronging out of their Houses, raised so horrible and confused a Tumult, that would have terrified the most undaunted Courage: Fire and Sword every where began to rage … They go, they run, all things are in a hurly burly in that distracted City; their

Siege Drama Reimagined

99

Steeples sounded with the dismal noise of the Alarum Bell, the Women at the Windows and in the Balconies weeping, with their Hair about their Ears, rear’d both their Eyes and Hands to Heaven, making such loud and lamentable Complaints, as made the very Caverns of the Mountain Elvira eccho back their Cryes.65 There is no sustained sense of the citizenry as a whole in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, suffering or otherwise, and they are certainly not part of a comprehensive urban identity. Although Dryden defined The Siege of Rhodes as the first heroic drama, he strove to rework the genre since he did not fully approve of Davenant’s plays, claiming they “wanted” the necessary “fulness of a Plot, and the variety of Characters.”66 For Dryden, Davenant’s plots are sidetracked by spatial matters. Indeed, given the “problematic” emphasis on space over plot and character, it is no surprise that Dryden’s famous critique of The Siege of Rhodes describes its flaws in spatial terms: “[I]t was … as first Discoverers draw their Maps, with headlands and Promontories, and some few out-lines of somewhat taken at a distance, and which the designer saw not clearly”; yet this space was not “fill’d with Persons, nor beautified with Characters, nor varied with Accidents.”67 Dryden does not seem to consider that the map itself, and the way of seeing urban space that it promotes, might be the point of the play (or at least a key theme). Where Davenant suggests that disorderly quagmires can impel multilayered communities to creatively remake themselves and their urban space, Dryden forms an urban space in which there are no foundational values to help define the city as a social entity. There is no stable city in The Conquest of Granada but rather one that is continually fracturing in new ways, something that the contemporary audience and later readers found mystifying. This may explain Samuel Johnson’s use of the apt trope, “a theatrical meteor,” to refer to the play in his Life of Dryden.68 Michael Werth Gelber explains the effect of The Conquest of Granada on modern readers thus: The apparent lack of pattern and direction in Dryden’s heroic plays has occasioned much confusion. Stabilizing elements are present, to be sure: individual episodes are immediately understandable and are governed by the unities of action, place and time … But if demands for order are not ignored, the plays remain bewildering. They are

100

Besieged

centred in the episodic and the discordant, the improbable and the marvellous. Hence it may be argued that Dryden’s heroic drama is a total failure.69 Gelber counters, however, that rather than critiquing Dryden’s work for these qualities, we might read them in light of a concept promoted by one of Dryden’s key influences, Torquato Tasso, who suggested that “every successful romance demonstrates the principle of ‘discordant concord.’”70 Others have sought to explain the bewilderment in this play in terms of Hobbesian thought, arguing, for example, that Dryden “represented Men in a Hobbian State of War,” that he wrestles most with Hobbes’s theories in his early dramatic works, that the character Almanzor is a Hobbist, or that Dryden’s Hobbesian ideas in this play are inconsistent or “variously used.”71 Although we have no quarrel with the idea that The Conquest of Granada engages with Hobbesian ideas, we are more interested in the way Dryden uses the siege motif to explore city space under pressure.72 In writing of Dryden and London, Harold Love argues that the dramatist was fascinated by “the emergence into history of the modern city,” though Dryden’s engagement with the city was marked by “apprehension,” given its ability to become a “politically potent mob.”73 We certainly see a brief glimpse of such possibilities in The Conquest of Granada when the people of Granada, frustrated at the banishment of their hero Almanzor and the resulting incursions of the besieging army, threaten to rebel at the beginning of the second of the two plays. But for the most part, Dryden, writing only a few years after the plague and the fire, spotlights not so much the power of the rebellious mob as the fractured, fragile, volatile nature of a city space that contains a motley group of inhabitants. There are two distinct (but intersecting) impulses of disorder in Granada, and most criticism dwells on the first. Our interest is primarily in the second. Both are concerned with the way relationality in the city undermines spatial cohesion, identity, and solidity. By relationality, we mean associations and encounters among individuals, groups, events, and spaces. While concepts of relationality and space are generally associated with postmodern geographers, such as Doreen Massey, scholars suggest that the seeds of such ideas emerged in the early modern period. John Agnew takes note, for example, of two different theories of space that began to crystalize in the seventeenth century: “In the Newtonian view, space is absolute, in the sense that it is an entity in itself, independent of

Siege Drama Reimagined

101

whatever objects and events occupy it, containing these objects and events, and having separate powers from them … In the Leibnizian view, space is relational, in the sense that it has no powers independent of objects and events but can be construed only from the relations between them.”74 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz declared, “I hold Space to be something merely relative, as Time is; that I hold it to be an Order of Coexistences, as Time is an Order of Successions.”75 While Isaac Newton’s ideas ultimately became dominant, it is significant that alternative concepts of space were considered at the time. Such spatial ideas are an embryonic articulation of what is later worked out more fully by geographers such as Massey and theorists like Deleuze and Guattari. Barney Warf traces a direct line from Leibniz to contemporary spatial theorists, suggesting that his ideas ultimately led to poststructural geography with its emphasis on “interconnected sets of places as manifolds that are continuously folded and pleated, stretched, distorted and shredded.”76 For Leibniz, and those influenced by him, “relational geographies are always dynamic, incomplete, forever coming into being, and perpetually in flux, giving rise to ever-changing patterns of centrality and peripherality.”77 Dryden’s fluctuating Granada sometimes hints at such concepts of space. We are not suggesting that the ideas of Dryden and Leibniz are directly connected; rather, they seem to be moving in the same direction in terms of the representation of space and may come from similar experiences. Both Leibniz and Dryden wrote in the aftermath of violent and destructive war. Leibniz was born in Germany toward the end of the devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). One way to react to wars that literally destroy local, regional, national, and international space is to conclude that space is continually reconfigured and reinscribed depending on the results of interactions that can be themselves ephemeral or fluid. The siege motif conveys this effectively, given that a besieged city represents space that hangs between some semblance of identity and a state of threatened undoing. The frantic energy within the enclosed space of the siege Dryden selects for his play takes this notion of urban fragility further, suggesting that even the defined space of a city, with its historical identity and spatial boundaries, is not solid. Dryden chooses a particular historical siege for his play, one that is well known for division within the walls of the city. We have seen factional differences before in the encamped army in Troilus and Cressida, but in The Conquest of Granada, the city itself dissolves.

102

Besieged

Though there is an occasional clash between the troops outside and the army within, particularly at the end of the second part of the play, for most of the work conflict is not so much caused by the besieging forces than by disputes within Granada. The city has turned against itself, even though it is evident, from a successful sally in which the factions fight as “brothers in the war,” that if they band together, they would have a greater chance of freeing themselves from a siege.78 The first source of disorder in Granada is the impulse to fulfil personal desire in the present moment, which lines up with the Hobbesian concept of self-interest. Characters whose actions are governed by this motive are primarily aligned with the court or have courtly ambition. They include Boabdelin, the king, who wants to continue to rule the city; his brother Abdalla, who wants to capture the city for himself in order to win Lyndaraxa; the ambitious Zegry; the brother and sister Zulema and Lyndaraxa; and Almanzor, who has come to the city at the request of Abdalla and spends much of his time taking positions on the conflict between the royal brothers and various city factions. The multiple overlapping interactions of these characters lead to fractured and dynamic relations that appear to privilege individual agency. Each of these characters chases his or her own desires but ultimately none is autonomous, leaving most trapped in oddly iterative, off-kilter mirroring movements. On occasion, characters recognize that they are caught in a web of constraints without hope of innovation or escape. Abdelmelech, for example, tells his “rival” and “friend” Abdalla to avoid his beloved (and ambitious) Lyndaraxa: Behold, in me th’ example of your Fate. I am your Sea-mark, and though wrack’d and lost, My Ruines stand to warn you from the Coast. (I:3.1.53–5) Abdalla, nonetheless, knows he will inevitably become like Abdelmelech: Like him, who on the ice——— Slides swiftly on, and sees the water near, Yet cannot stop himself in his Carrear: So am I carry’d. This enchanted place, Like Circe’s Isle, is peopled with a Race Of dogs and swine, yet, though their fate I know, I look with pleasure and am turning too. (I:3.1.90–6)

Siege Drama Reimagined

103

While Abdalla is driven by his individual desire, he recognizes rationally that this is a well trodden, inglorious path but one that is also inescapable. As far as those involved with the court are concerned, Granada is an enchanted place that only enables painful variations of the same movements. The city and its inhabitants are mired in an eternal and inevitable cycle of violent encounters, and even when characters change sides, it simply recreates more of the same, all sliding on ice toward a frenetic stasis. At the end of the play, no tangible material means are envisioned to resolve this chaos. Most volatile characters have killed each other, and a final miracle is produced to provide resolution. The ghost of Almanzor’s mother appears to pronounce that the duke of Arcos, Ferdinand’s general, is her son’s long-lost father. If this narrative strand was the only one in the play, we might think it was deeply pessimistic about human agency, suggesting that in volatile times there is a paralysis in communal spaces, leaving them incapable of creating a cohesive urban identity and dependent solely on supernatural forces. The second impulse of disorder in Granada is deeply immersed in history and concerned with communal identity rather than individual desire. There is a crucial division in the city between two groups, the Zegrys and the Abencerrages. The king distinguishes the factions in terms of their genealogies during a dispute that opens the play. He tells Zulema, chief of the Zegrys, “From equal Stems their blood both houses draw/They from Morocco, you from Cordova” (I:1.1.172–3). Living in Granada, these factions carry within them an alternate urban identity that impacts their allegiances. The Abencerrages are generally aligned with King Boabdelin, who is just about to marry Almahide, the daughter of Abenamar, a member of the Abencerrage faction. This alliance likely amplifies the competition between opposing parties. The Zegrys tend to affiliate with Boabdelin’s brother Abdalla. Certain members of the factions seem more motivated by desire than lineage. Abdelmelech, for example, desires Lyndaraxa, and Zulema craves power and Almahide. Yet the factional dispute is significant because it is primarily static and rigid rather than volatile and mobile and is defined by membership in a group with an identifiable history or origin not by an individual’s private desire. The factional actions typically take place in the city, often transforming it from a domestic, even celebratory, area into a riven space. Directly after the games that open The Conquest of Granada, which are surely an attempt to unite the city through a friendly sports competition, a messenger warns the king,

104

Besieged

The two fierce factions are again in arms: And, changing into blood the dayes delight, The Zegrys with th’ Abencerrages fight, On each side their Allies and Friends appear; The Maças here, the Alabezes there: The Gazuls with th’ Abencerrages joyn, And with the Zegrys, all great Gomels Line. (I:1.1.102–8) The bloody combat is to be staged near the Vivarambla, the name of the square in the centre of the city, where the games are held, as well as the gate leading into it. At the core of Granada, then, factional disputes threaten to transform urban space into a state of chaos. The city here is the site of a binary conflict that contains within it the possibility of generating a multitude of conflicts. For while there are “two fierce factions,” each side involves multiple alliances, any of which, as the unstable world of the play intensifies, could rupture. If space, urban or otherwise, is fundamentally relational – and always fluid because of volatile negotiated or renegotiated relations, “the Maças here, the Alabezes there” – what does it mean to be a city? A similar transformation of metropolitan space into the site of violence occurs in an indeterminate space in the city where Selin, an old Zegry, creates an execution zone, “A Scene of Vengeance, and a Pomp of Death” (I:4.2.228). In this theatre of horrors, he plans to execute Ozmyn, an Abencerago and his son’s killer, for his unwilling audience, his daughter Benzayda. The unending volatility generated by the characters in the first group in combination with the stasis and rigidity of those in the second result in an urban space in which conflicts spill over into one another in untidy, random ways. We see a repeated series of intense moments in the city in which an encounter or event gestures toward a possible, if violent, resolution and affirmation of spatial stability only to rapidly transform into a renewed dispute elsewhere; this is a rhizomatic form of conflict. Selin, for example, is interrupted in the factional act of executing Ozmyn because he is called away by the king who needs a new supply of men to assist him in his dispute with his brother. The movement from one conflict to another, alongside frequent shifting of allegiances, prevents any stable control over a city that seems hell-bent on destroying or cannibalizing itself. As multiple conflicts amplify, the struggles create smaller and smaller embattled units of space, ultimately suggesting there is no geographical

Siege Drama Reimagined

105

entity that can be called a city. At several points there is a specific mention of sieges within the besieged city. Zulema tells Prince Abdalla, “Of five tall tow’rs which fortifie this Town,/All but th’ Alhambra your dominion own” (I:3.1.458–9). Abdalla then sends his men to besiege the Alhambra. Later, when Abdalla’s fortunes have reversed, he seeks refuge in the Albayzin, which is being held by the troublemaking Lyndaraxa to whom he gave ownership of the fortress. She refuses him, saying, But we are not provided for a siege. My Subjects few; and their provision thin; The foe is strong without, we weak within. (I:5.1.30–2) If urban settlements are meant to offer security to their inhabitants, this is far from the case in this passage. Instead, we have a configuration of fortresses and towers, all of which are continually in the process of changing hands. Furthermore, there are disruptive secret spaces in Granada where old disputes gain new intensity and from which new challenges arise. Zulema informs Prince Abdalla, “The Zegry’s at old Selin’s house are met … There we our common int’rest will unite” (I:3.1.258, 260). In the second half of the play, the people, upset at the departure of Almanzor and aroused to frenzy by the forces of Abdalla (who is still in the city despite his intended departure to join Ferdinand), stream from hidden structures: All in despair tumultuously they swarm; The farthest Streets already take th’ Alarm; The needy creep from Cellars, under-ground, To them new Cries from tops of Garrets sound. The aged from the Chimneys seek the cold; And Wives from Windows helpless Infants holds. (II:1.2.23–8) Urban space is dangerous, and the forces of disruption come from all directions. This city is far from a familiar, everyday space but is instead a particularly precarious one, an unruly cluster of competing forces. One way for a modern reader to describe urban oscillation in The Conquest of Granada in spatial terms might be to turn again to Deleuze and Guattari. Mosland notes that in their conceptualization of space, alongside striated space we find smooth space, which, in contrast to

106

Besieged

the “over-coding” of striated space, “is chaotic, deterritorialized, [and] uncontrollable.”79 Striated and smooth space interact in their spatial model: “[T]he two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, traversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space … and the two can happen simultaneously.”80 Davenant, as earlier suggested, ultimately ends up endorsing ordered space, although the increased visibility of the components of that space reveals its potential fault lines. Dryden, on the other hand, crafts a space that seems to exist in a perpetual state of dissolution. The more we examine urban space, as he conceives of it, the more volatility we see. And yet, The Conquest of Granada is not just a play about chaos made orderly through divine intervention. It also represents the material struggle to create identity in a topsy-turvy world, but it is not primarily located in the army camped outside the city, although some critics read it as such.81 The unity of the invading army of Isabella and Ferdinand has been seen as endorsing a superior imperial power that seeks unequivocally to restore “this conquer’d Kingdom” to “its old Religion and its antient Lord.”82 But, as Laura Brown suggests, while Dryden may help “to shape the literary praise of empire that characterizes England’s first age of expansion,” he also generates “a paradigm for its critique.”83 This is most evident in Ferdinand’s speech about imperial space and the way empire inevitably fractures when, as it grows and swells by degrees, from behind, there starts some petty State; And pushes on its now unwieldy fate: Then, down the precipice of time it goes, And sinks in Minutes, which in Ages rose. (II:1.1.13–16) Even the successful accumulation of regional and national space by a united centre is never certain but is always vulnerable to some “petty State” that can undermine and even destroy its geographic authority. Moreover, Ferdinand and Isabella lead a somewhat inept besieging force, their ultimate ability to enter the city facilitated not by their own military prowess or strategic brilliance but by the assistance of characters from Granada. We are also led to call into question the wisdom of Ferdinand when he welcomes into his community and empowers the disloyal and treacherous Lyndaraxa, claiming in the closing pages, “Fair Lyndaraxa, for the help

Siege Drama Reimagined

107

she lent,/Shall, under Tribute, have this Government” (II:5.3.234–5). This passage proves his ignorance of matters and alliances within the city and of the sources of division. Abdelmelech’s assassination of Lyndaraxa, followed by his suicide, prevents her from creating further disruptions. However, despite the audience’s knowledge of the success of actual Spanish military campaigns, we are left with the uncomfortable possibility that Dryden’s Ferdinand would have appointed a crucial representative of disorder to a powerful position in Granada, thereby recreating problems within the city. The material reality of inhabiting domestic war space and trying to formulate a new identity in a landscape destabilized by manifold relationships in a constant state of flux is figured by Ozmyn and Benzayda who may seem rather insignificant amidst the chaos, though Dryden calls our attention to the pair by calling them and Almahide “patterns of exact vertue” in his prefatory essay on heroic plays.84 Susan J. Owen locates the sources for “the exemplary characters Ozmyn and Benzayda” in “cavalier drama, and the French tradition of préciosité, a movement for refining literature and manners, based upon noble ideals of love and honour.”85 She adds that although they “are in some ways the precursors of the sentimental characters who predominate on the eighteenth-century stage … it is important to remember that they are also ‘heroic’ characters operating in the public sphere.”86 Located at the centre of an urban civil war in a besieged city, Ozmyn and Benzayda are the closest the play comes to depicting the domestic elements of the city. While far from ordinary people (Ozmyn is the brother of Almahide, who marries the king during the play), their parents are not the chief leaders of their factions and the couple neither embrace the explosive unstable behaviour of the court nor the factional violence of their families. Owen’s reminder that they are operating in the public sphere is necessary because they are associated with domestic interests struggling against the hostile forces that threaten to devour them. As with the inhabitants of the besieged castle in Cavendish and Brackley’s play, Ozmyn and Benzayda attempt to find a place in a world in which categories of identity are fissured, and we feel their exhaustion as they do so. Ozmyn starts with the force of language at the site of his pending execution. In what seems like a cheesy moment, Ozmyn converts the language of violence and death into the old chivalric romance language of love and besiegement. When Benzayda is bullied by her father into executing Ozmyn herself, he cries,

108

Besieged

All wounds from you are welcome to my brest: Think onely when your hand this act has done, It has but finish’d what your eies begun. (I:4.2.250–2) While this fall back into romance tropology appears entirely unrealistic, overly sentimental, and farfetched, it is also an act of discursive displacement, directly transforming the discourse of violence that dominates the city to that of regeneration. There is no spiritual or magical resolution for the pair. Ozmyn and Benzayda are on their own at the core of this unruly city, trying, through word and action, to imagine or manufacture an alternative fate, and to communicate it to other city dwellers. They begin in miniature when Benzayda manages to persuade one of her father’s two guards to help her release Ozmyn. But her power of persuasion quickly meets fiercer resistance. When Abenamar, Ozmyn’s father, enters with soldiers, he is grateful to Benzayda for rescuing his son; however, as soon as he realizes her name, he angrily laments, “The daughter of the onely man I hate!/ Two Contradictions twisted in a fate” (I:5.1.90–1). There is no way to imagine anything that might transcend these contradictions to help him move beyond his static factional concept of identity. He refuses to let his son marry Benzayda. In fact, Abenamar cannot even comprehend Benzayda’s behaviour, accusing her of instability for the foolish act of forgiving “a Brothers Murderer” (I:5.1.119). Ozmyn and Benzayda, of course, see instability in an entirely different light. Those cemented in historically determined, static categories who refuse to adapt to urban space create intense instability in the lives of others. Ozmyn says that his father’s orders to abandon his beloved “is a murdring will!/That whirls along with an impetuous sway;/And like chain-shot, sweeps all things in its way” (I:5.1.132–4). Chain shot was a relatively recent invention in the seventeenth century; it consisted of “two balls linked by means of a chain and fired from a single barrel” and was generally used in naval battles since it moved in unpredictable ways and caused significant damage.87 The trope of the chain shot captures not only the effects of Ozmyn’s father on the couple but on the way factional violence has damaged city space in general. This chaotic, fluid turmoil is the opposite of the stagnancy often observed in a long and tedious siege and with which Troy struggles in Troilus and Cressida. In such a whirling, impetuous space the young do not know where to go, as they

Siege Drama Reimagined

109

are surrounded by accelerating destructive energies that appear to make change impossible. Benzayda laments, “For where, alas, should we our flight begin?/The foes without; our parents are within” (I:5.1.164–5). At this point in the drama, at the end of the first play, no alternative identity seems possible, and flight is necessary. When the pair leave the city, however, they are quickly captured and brought to the camp where their lives are threatened but spared through the intervention of Isabella who attempts to coopt them to her side by comparing them to her and Ferdinand who united “Castille and Arragon” (1.1.132). They resist this cooption, evident during a conversation they have in a third space, the interstitial space of the woods between the camp and the city. Homi K. Bhabha, using the example of a stairwell, describes such a liminal location as a “space, in-between the designations of identity.”88 Bhabha notes that “[t]he hither and thither of the stairwell, the temporal movement and passage that it allows, prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities. This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”89 In Dryden’s play, the wood is such a place, full of potentiality – anything can happen – since neither the encamped army nor the city have control of it. In the woods, this potentiality is not necessarily harnessed for destructive ends but exists as a possible source of productive change. In fact, the woods are a place in which Ozmyn and Benzayda start assessing their riven identities. Ozmyn appreciates the protection of the queen who has saved him from execution for killing an army leader in self-defence but laments that “while I as a friend continue here,/I, to my Country, must a Foe appear” (II:2.1.3–4). And Benzayda replies with equal concern, “Think not my Ozmyn, that we here remain/As friends, but Pris’ners to the Pow’r of Spain” (II:2.1.5–6). This middle space is a generative locus in which the relationship between geography and identity can be ascertained. Although they are physically outside the city, Ozmyn and Benzayda still have attachments in the city; they are protected by Spain, but are prisoners of a sort, though their ability to wander in the woods implies a degree of autonomy. Moreover, Ozmyn is well aware that their location (or perceived location in the camp) may lead those within the city to define them as enemies. They are neither Abencerrage nor Zegry, neither wholly here (in the city) nor there (in the camp).

110

Besieged

Their own acknowledged liminality, made possible by their lingering in this in-between space, allows them to generate alternate connections, even when the destructive factional chaos of the urban space unexpectedly exceeds the walls and penetrates the wood. Selin suddenly appears, chased by Ozmyn’s father Abenamar. While Benzayda rushes for Spanish help, Ozmyn protects Selin against his own father, first by demanding that his father behave honourably and not kill a “disarm’d, defenceless foe” (II:2.1.48), and then by beginning to literally defend him but without attacking his father. Shortly thereafter, he is aided by the Spanish soldiers who return at Benzayda’s urging. After his father retreats, Ozmyn invites Selin to kill him rather than to continue their enmity, although he also asks, Can you forgive The death of him I slew in my defence; And, from the malice, separate th’ offence? (II:2.1.74–6) This question seems to strike at the core of factional violence. In asking Selin to recognize that he had no malicious intent, he is urging Selin to enact justice rather than revenge. The Zegry must find a way to imagine himself outside his inherited, long-held paradigms of thought, and he tearfully does so, adopting Ozmyn as his son and expressing a willingness to die for him to quench Abanamar’s rage against Ozmyn. In the space of the wood, the distinct line between the factional dispute has been partially blurred by Ozmyn’s behaviour, although Abdalla quickly manages to pull Selin back into disputes over the crown by gaining his support to help the mutinous prince’s forces, with Spanish aid, reenter Granada. In his recent book Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, Giorgio Agamben builds on Christian Meier’s theory of the emergence of concepts of citizenship in fifth-century BC Greece. Agamben notes the “tensions,” in Meier’s model, “between oikos [the household] and polis [the city],” arguing that “stasis [civil war] constitutes a threshold through which domestic belonging is politicised into citizenship and, conversely, citizenship is depoliticised into family solidarity.”90 If the factional division we have seen throughout The Conquest of Granada is an example of the latter, the plea for justice rather than revenge and Selin’s acceptance of that plea could be seen as an example of the former. Selin does not evaluate Ozmyn through the prism of subjective and reactionary familial values but rather considers his past and present actions in a way more worthy of a Grenadian than an Abencerago.

Siege Drama Reimagined

111

The productive, embryonic intersectionality of this moment will ultimately be imported into the city with Ozmyn and Benzayda, carrying with it potential for peace between factions – one borne not from enchantment or spiritual intervention but from difficult, complex contortions, labourious persuasion, a willingness to sacrifice, and an ability to imagine beyond manufactured categories. But initial reentry is tricky and difficult because Ozmyn assumes a neutral position; although the couple does seem to get permission from Isabella and Ferdinand to reenter the city, they neither take a side in the war nor in the factional discord. Ozmyn, an Abencerago, will accompany Selin solely to protect him, claiming, “I must not draw my sword against my Prince,/But yet may hold a Shield in your defence” (II:2.2.156–7). At the nub of numerous conflicting forces, Ozmyn finds a position that allows him to retain honour, to reenter his city, but to occupy a third space. Even Selin changes his own position somewhat, continuing to align with Abdalla in his conflict with his brother but refusing to fight against Abenamar even when they reenter a splintered city that Ozmyn likens to a shipwreck in its final stage of disintegration. The second encounter with paternal rage rooted in past discord takes place in the Alhambra Tower, the site of power in the city, when Selin is captured by Ozmyn’s father and will be killed unless Ozmyn sacrifices himself. In speeches that echo Abenamar’s oration when he learns Benzayda’s name and finds himself in an irresolvable paradox, Benzayda laments, “My wishes contradictions must imply;/You must not goe; and he must not die,” to which Ozmyn replies, “The two Extremes too distant are to close;/And Human Wit can no mid-way propose” (II:3.2.71–2, 75–6). And yet, they do find a solution; both separately make their way to save him (trying to protect each other), and when they find themselves in another scene of violence, once again there is an appeal to a paternal figure caught up in historical division to “[b]e just” (II:4.1.47), although this time justice is only a promise to let Benzayda live if the couple separates. But then Benzayda challenges Abenamar’s construction of enmity by asking him to look not to the past, but at a present in which actions are not violent and in which names are malleable, not fixed in their violent origins: But are we foes? look round, my Lord; and see; Point out that face which is your Enemy. Would you your hand in Selins blood embrue? Kill him unarm’d, who, arm’d shun’d killing you! Am I your foe? since you detest my line,

112

Besieged

That hated name of Zegry I resign: For you, Benzayda will her self disclaim: Call me your daughter, and forget my name. (II:4.1.114–21) Spoken in the heart of the city, Benzayda’s words cause the same sense of productive disorientation that was experienced in the woods. Abenamar is so disturbed by this sudden shift of perspective in which enmity is redefined that he cries, “For my recov’ry, I must shun your sight:/Eyes, us’d to darkness, cannot bear the light” (II:4.1.142–3). Names, lines, histories no longer define relationships; neither does the binary condition caused by disruptive factional conflicts. Ozmyn’s relationship with Benzayda is ultimately the locus of productive becoming in this play, of new ways of envisioning Granada by reaching across factionalism toward mutual sympathy and interests. If postwar space is to be understood relationally, the play suggests that this does not mean stability is forever out of reach but that it is difficult to achieve and requires a continual struggle. At its core is an ideal of justice. Shortly after the conversion of Abenamar, his daughter Almahide is falsely accused of adultery, and this time it is Abenamar who pleads for justice from the king who rejects the tedium and length of a formal process: You haste too much her Execution. Her Condemnation ought to be deferr’d: With justice, none can be condemn’d unheard. (II:4.3.375–7) He is supported by Ozmyn who reminds Boabdelin that the law demands trial by combat in such cases of adultery. Although the king agrees only grudgingly, we begin to see a shift in Grenada, with concepts of objectivity and justness becoming central to a growing number of people. Such ideas are not bereft of historical significance. Ozmyn is one of the two combatants for his sister and openly notes that he will fight for “her Line” (II:4.3.393), acknowledging that his lineage is still important, and the other combatant, Almanzor, will certainly be brought face to face with his own history shortly thereafter. Yet justice, not historical events, is now asserted as the central mediator of communal identity in Granada. Isabella and Ferdinand ultimately, in line with historical fact, take over the city, and the urban space they inherit is indeed unified but not through their efforts. In the preface to Dryden’s rendition of Troilus and

Siege Drama Reimagined

113

Cressida, he suggests that the moral of The Conquest of Granada is that “[u]nion preserves a Common-wealth and discord destroys it,” a moral he notes that he took from Homer.91 However, conquest by the powerful is not the means to such unity or harmony in The Conquest of Granada. Rather, the embattled, fragile seeds of relational, and therefore communal, regeneration will only arise from those committed to present domestic interests, those who uphold the law as a means of resisting being mired in conflicts of the past.

Conclusion Davenant and Dryden each employ the siege drama to tackle the experience of recent domestic warfare and to enact and engage with urban fragility and disorder. They set up divergent possibilities for the motif that in the years to follow were developed by playwrights who wrote in their tradition to varying degrees. While both uphold order and hierarchy at the end of their plays, both also employ the siege motif to conceive of city space as complex and multifaceted. Davenant allows his city audience to see and hear in song a chorus of ordinary citizens and soldiers, to witness the benefits of technological experts, and to affirm the need of all social groups to work together to uphold unity within the city in order to resist pressures from without for as long as possible. Robust partnerships of this sort can hold together a city made up of widely varied communities. Dryden, on the other hand, foregrounds the many competing interests in city space and traces what happens when individuals reside in a city that cannot hold together, when mutable, conflicting private desires and rigid group identities rooted in past disruptive memories atomize urban space. His final assertion of order, grounded in enchantment, justice, and the active forgetting of historical divisions, refuses to eschew the difficulty of constructing a communal identity when a fractured past is at play. These two distinct representations of besiegement opened up new possibilities for the playwrights who worked with the motif in the 1670s.

CHAPteR 3

Space Made for Change Siege Drama after Davenant and Dryden

If the siege play had been developing over the course of the seventeenth century, the 1670s could be seen as its zenith, at least in terms of numbers. This decade saw John Crowne’s History of Charles the Eighth of France, or the Invasion of Naples by France (1672), performed in the Duke’s Theatre; Henry Payne’s Siege of Constantinople; A Tragedy (1675), performed by the Duke’s Company; Thomas Otway, Alcibiades. A Tragedy (1675), which deals with events that occur after a siege, by the Duke’s Theater; Thomas D’Urfey’s Siege of Memphis, or the Ambitious Queen (1676), performed by the King’s Company; Samuel Pordage’s Siege of Babylon (1678), performed by the Duke’s Company; John Crowne’s Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian (1677), performed by the King’s Men; and John Banks’s The Destruction of Troy, A Tragedy (1679), performed by the Duke’s Company. The proliferation of such dramatic works, though varied in box office success, suggest that on the whole siege plays – typically tragedies or tragicomedies as heroic drama started to fade – continued to appeal to and hold relevance for a contemporary audience.1 There are likely many reasons for the staying power of siege drama, not the least of which is its remarkable potential for visual effects. Since the representation of sieges could involve spectacular scenery as a city transforms from a cohesive, harmonious urban place to a chaotic, battered space, it was a perfect location for elaborate settings and scene changes. Thus, to some extent, its popularity accorded with public taste for a spectacle. Dawn Lewcock has noted in her study of Davenant and his influence, that from the 1670s on, “both companies [the Duke’s Company and the King’s Company] were staging opera and/or spectacle until the end of the century.”2

Space Made for Change

115

Beyond impressive special effects, however, the narrative arc of the plots may also be related to the continued appeal of siege drama. Given the royalist leanings of Restoration theatre and the close alliance between Charles II and the stage, in this decade siege drama largely works through issues that still resonate with royalist playwrights.3 In fact, most of the siege plays of the 1670s could be classified as royalist fantasies that frantically process such subjects as usurpation, regicide, fear of mob violence, and right rule. More significantly, the siege trope continued to help glorify royalist martial loss in the Civil War. All the siege plays in this decade (like those of Dryden and Davenant) end with the fall of the besieged city, yet glory and honour in defeat (an idea deeply rooted in literary treatments of ancient Troy) can be magnified so that such losses lose their sting. Beyond these appealing attributes, many of the plays in the 1670s use the siege as a dramatic and suspenseful backdrop for epic aristocratic romance and singular heroic action in the tradition of Dryden and Davenant, with an increased dash of political intrigue (appropriate for Charles II’s increasingly contentious second decade as monarch) but without some of the spatial innovations that made siege drama such an inventive way of exploring spatial, urban, and martial matters. The plays are closer to Dryden’s than Davenant’s in terms of their treatment of the city and its civilian inhabitants. In general, the city is viewed through the lens of court intrigue or the struggle between private desire and public duty, so the plays do not, in most cases, pay a great deal of attention to urban space itself. Though there are sometimes references to specific military events, they are not described with the same level of detail that we find in The Siege of Rhodes. The citizenry in much of the siege drama of the 1670s, as in Dryden’s Conquest of Granada, typically play a diminished role, and when they are briefly referenced, they are often portrayed as fearful, mobbish, or rebellious. In John Crowne’s History of Charles the Eighth of France, the play opens with a mob deposing King Alphonso in favour of his son Ferdinand. While “the French besiege the Town; the Town [besiege] the King,” though the townsfolk ultimately regret this decision.4 In D’Urfey’s city (of Memphis), the populous “trembles” at new alarms caused by advancing troops outside the city.5 In Pordage’s Siege of Babylon, the people defy the murderous Roxana when they learn she has killed the beloved Statira (in fact, her plot to do so has failed): “They now in heaps, before the Palace croud,/And for Revenge and Justice cry aloud.”6 Such passing

116

Besieged

references to the ordinary inhabitants of the city as disruptive and unstable mean that urban space only gains its identity and cohesiveness through its leadership, frequently problematic in these plays as there is often no clearly defined individual leader within the besieged city. Rival monarchs or usurping aristocrats take centre stage in these plays, as they do in The Conquest of Granada. In The Siege of Memphis, D’Urfey depicts the warrior Queen Zelmura killing her husband before vying with her sister Amasis for the love of the imprisoned Syrian, Moaron, one of the city’s besiegers. Pordage’s Siege of Babylon focalizes on the story of Parisatis (sister of Queen Statira), who is beloved by the invading Lysimachus, prince of Macedon, and by his friend Ptolomy, captain of Alexander the Great, and on the rivalry of queens Statira and Roxana for the love of Orontes, the prince of Scythia. Given the divisions within, it is no wonder that the city cannot defend itself against outside invaders. Therefore, although these plays do pay some attention to martial tactics, they generally do so without tying them to civilian action. Their heroes and heroines, as is typical of an epic, are from the upper ranks, and it is they who have agency in relation to urban space. It is D’Urfey’s Queen Zelmura who will “swim o’re Seas of blood” in battle, and Pordage’s Ptolomy and Lysimachus who will “run … to scale these Walls” for “Honour, and for Love.”7 Ordinary soldiers are no match for such heroes. We are in the world of Almanzor; it is magnificent heroes who put things right. We hear that the besiegers of Babylon rear their scaling Ladders, round the Wall, Though Shot as thick as hail, upon them fall: With Rams, and Slings, the Battlements they beat, And force your men with fire-balls, to retreat.8 But their success occurs because the besieging forces are led by the heroic “Scythian Prince.”9 In these plays, then, the city still largely serves as a backdrop for royal and noble anxieties and aspirations. However, by the end of the 1670s, around the time of the Popish Plot (1678), several playwrights, notably Crowne and Banks, built on the more innovative elements of the siege plays of Dryden and Davenant, creating dramatic experiments that made the siege drama more than a mere backdrop for epic romance. Each writer composed a play that showed greater interest (1) in featuring the management of siege space, with a focus on

Space Made for Change

117

military tactics and strategy; (2) in examining how participants in sieges, like actors, work to alter the perception of their audience/enemy; and (3) in revealing the importance of collaborative action rather than individual heroism during a siege. While these plays still foreground romantic desire, it is not at the expense of urban space. Increased attention to space in Crowne’s Destruction of Jerusalem and Banks’s Destruction of Troy could relate to the unstable nature of urban space in the decades following the Restoration. After all, the Civil War (1642–51) and its aftermath and the Restoration and its repercussions specifically involved the reallocation of space. This included not only the thorny issue of the Crown restoring or giving lands to loyal royalists, but also trying to ensure that municipal councils did not lead towns and cities down the wrong path. Ronald Hutton notes that town councils were often resistant to Charles II’s demands. Some town councils “failed to restore royalist members as ordered, others ignored royal nominees for offices, and still others became divided by noisy quarrelling.”10 Charles II had to become “more aggressive” since “most towns were in possession of charters conferred by Interregnum regimes, which were open to challenge.”11 The tussle to formalize control over various city spaces suggests that the ownership of urban space and the operation of power within and without cities were contested ardently for some time. Cynthia Wall’s reading of Restoration London is also relevant here as the urban destruction wrought by the plague and most particularly the fire of London had proven that the seeming permanence of communal spaces was illusory. The fire, she contends, erased the sense of continuity in the life of the city. “What happens to a city, to a culture,” she asks, “when its oldest, most reliable signs suddenly and completely lose their referents,” “when alien new space must be navigated by deformed spatial referents, by architectural ruins, by the dreadful contingency of a piece of public edifice remaining, and remaining identifiable?”12 For Wall, the solution includes “a cultural reconception of space” that profoundly affects multiple genres, including Restoration drama.13 Wall theorizes that plays from this period, notably city comedies, participate in this reconceptualization by establishing and repeating “a vocabulary of place that reaffirmed the stability and recognitive value of key semiotic and historic public spaces,” especially sites frequented by members of the upper classes. In so doing, they hang “social space on topographic pegs,” “not only using place to push plot but also using plot to reaffirm known

118

Besieged

space.”14 The siege plays of the late 1670s can be seen as a precursor to such reconstructive drama, focusing not on the rebuilding of the city, but on reliving again and again, albeit in an indirect way, the fall of a city, the trauma it evokes in residents, and the chaos that ensues, since most siege plays of the period are set near the moment of defeat. The vulnerability of urban space is relived through the visual spectacle that was so popular in the historical moment, as if transforming trauma into entertainment rendered it less menacing. Crowne’s Destruction of Jerusalem and Banks’s Destruction of Troy water the seeds of disruption that had been planted in the work of Davenant and Dryden. These dramatists expose the inadequacies of most siege plays of the 1670s: their inability to see the totality of the city and their failure to envision urban space as more than a backdrop. Instead, they represent the besieged city as a material space filled with a more varied cast of agents, as a location that is given meaning, for good or ill, through acts of the imagination, and as a site marked by suffering across the ranks. In order to introduce alternate forms of action and actors and to represent a more nuanced vision of besieged urban space, these plays radically and overtly deconstruct conventional heroic prowess. Since playwrights were coming from more complicated socioeconomic backgrounds and did not always move in court circles, heroic prowess may not have had the same significance for them.

John Crowne, The Destruction of Jerusalem (1677) John Crowne grew up during the Civil War and Interregnum, and his father had successfully managed to serve both Charles I and the Cromwellian administration. As a young man, he had travelled with his father to Nova Scotia to build a trading post and the family then lived in Boston for some time. He had studied for a while at Harvard, before working to navigate the theatrical marketplace in England by himself.15 Ultimately the support of the Earl of Rochester helped him become a successful playwright. He wrote several plays centred on sieges over several decades, not only Charles the Eighth (1672) but also Regulus (1692). In fact, his drama, in general, is worthy of far more attention as he was not hesitant to experiment with existing genres.

Space Made for Change

119

An audience member attending Crowne’s Destruction of Jerusalem may not have immediately noticed differences between this play and earlier siege drama, for as Vanita Neelakanta has pointed out, it was similar to earlier siege plays in one important way – it was spectacular: “It boasted a stellar cast, with Edward Kynaston and Charles Hart playing Titus and Phraartes, and Mrs Marshall and Mrs Boutell in the roles of Berenice and Clarona. The play incurred ‘vast expence in scenes and cloathes’ with a series of magnificent sets: the lavish Temple gates, the chaotic streets of ‘starving Jerusalem,’ and ‘the blazing Temple sinking to destruction in a sea of fire.’”16 There are additional similarities between Crowne’s siege play and those of Davenant and/or Dryden. Crowne similarly divides the play into two parts, brings back the heroic outsider (indeed doubles it by having two outsiders fight for Jerusalem), and includes an element of romance in the plot. With all these features of past theatrical productions, The Destruction of Jerusalem was particularly impressive and popular when it first appeared, so successful, or so the story goes, that it lost him the favour of the Earl of Rochester. However, there is much that is distinct in this hybrid production that moves beyond inherited conventions. The two-part form allows Crowne more time to focus not so much on romance as on the gradual decay of urban space from the inside out. The play soundly rejects the heroism of romance. The plot of the first half of the play showcases religious disputes within the city of Jerusalem between Matthias, the high priest, and a rebel leader, John, who accuses Matthias of wanting the Romans to take power in Jerusalem and leads the Pharisees against religious authorities. Queen Berenice, meanwhile, is distracted, thinking of her beloved Titus rather than the wellbeing of her city. There are several foreign princes in the city with various love interests. The city seems to be turning against itself in the first half, and it faces divine warnings in the form of signs and omens, which the priests are unable to comprehend. The second half of the play takes place during the siege. It begins by staging Titus’s hesitancy to overthrow the city given his love of Berenice but then reveals his growing receptiveness to the urgings of his officers to complete the siege. Meanwhile the city suffers from famine and a sense of despair. Jerusalem is ultimately overcome because Titus elects to follow the opinions of his men over his private desire. There are certainly romance plots in the play; indeed, one is imported from a different time. Neelakanta points out that though this plot is partly

120

Besieged

taken from historical sources, the romance plots were not something Crowne took verbatim from the writings of Flavius Josephus about the siege of Jerusalem. As she explains, “Historically, the two events – the siege and the affair [of Titus and Berenice] – were not conterminous. The latter occurred a few years after in Rome. Unlike Corneille, Racine, and Otway, who meticulously follow the historical events, Crowne deliberately replaces Rome with Jerusalem so that the fractured love story is superimposed upon the saga of the beleaguered city rife with conspiracy and rebellion.”17 And as if one love story is not enough, Crowne supplements it with others. The atheist Parthian King Phraartes is madly in love with Clarona, the chaste, pious daughter of Matthais, high priest and governor of Jerusalem. Clarona has taken a vow of virginity. And Queen Berenice, queen of Judea, is not only beloved by Titus Vespasian himself (and returns his love) but also by Monobazus, brother to the king of Adiabene (also known as “Prince unknown”),18 who is distraught when, after meeting Berenice, he realizes he has killed her brother in battle. And romance does interfere with the siege. Titus holds back from taking the city, he claims, because of its beauty. It is “noble” and has a “shining Temple” (II:2). This perception in reality is, as noted earlier, tied in part to his love for the Jewish Berenice, and his military advisers work hard, ultimately successfully, to reframe his understanding of the city, arguing that he cannot “[f ]or the Dens sake … the Wild-beasts spare” (II:3).19 What is different about this play, and why it complicates and even deconstructs siege drama as it evolved in the 1670s, is that it, like Davenant’s play, is concerned with the city itself. John B. Rollins argues that “[w]hile these plots and characters are significant and can certainly provide insight into characters Crowne subsequently created, the center of the play is, as the title suggests, the destruction of the city of Jerusalem.”20 Rollins persuasively notes that the play’s apocalyptic imagery responds to contemporary political events and warns of the danger of political unrest.21 While agreeing with Rollins, and with Neelakanta’s assertion that Crowne’s play is one of “loss, devastation, personal betrayal, expulsion, dislocation, and alienation” that “holds out little hope,” our emphasis is on two additional elements of Crowne’s play.22 First, Crowne’s fascination with collaborative tactical martial action, particularly in relation to Titus, means that the management of space in The Destruction of Jerusalem is far more intellectual and complex and far less grounded in individual heroic combat. Second, Crowne’s representation of a decaying city space

Space Made for Change

121

as central to the play changes the focus of siege drama to a general urban experience rather than merely a spectacular setting for aristocratic romantic and heroic machinations. Two martial men are contrasted in the play: Titus, who leads the Roman forces besieging the city, and Phraartes, an outsider. While Phraartes’s kingdom has been usurped and he is an atheist, his skill as a warrior led this city to envision him as the one who will fulfil their religious prophecies by saving the city, a role he attempts to fulfill impressively but unsuccessfully. At the end of the 1670s, siege drama no longer needs an Almanzor, whose glorious individual heroic action can save the day. His military strength is indeed depicted as superb, particularly in comparison to the other weak inhabitants of the city. At one point, during a discussion of religion with Clarona, Phraartes laments that Jerusalem is a city without warriors, the “wretched Lands with Fables overflown” which “Give nothing else but Priests and Prophets birth” (II:30). However, the warrior ethos will also be proved inadequate to protect either the woman he loves or the city.23 During the storming of Jerusalem at the end of the play, a Roman officer tells Titus of Phraates’s spectacular abilities: Hast, hast, Sir, succours to your Legions bring, They fall in crouds before the Parthian King. On yonder burning Mount, which all commands, He like another flaming Mountain stands; And fights, and kills, with rage so much above All that is Man, the Romans think him Jove. (II:57) All this fighting and killing accomplish little, however, and the man of physical prowess is easily overcome by Titus and his army. Titus’s path to success involves repressing his own desire for Queen Berenice and developing his own strategies and tactics by listening to his men. Titus knows it is necessary and practical to inspire his own supporters and to go with his allies to attack and defeat Phraates, “undeify[ing]” him with his “own hands” (II:57). Titus is a very different sort of leader than the two outsiders defending Jerusalem. As the second of the two plays begin, we move to the Roman camp, entering a world of practical politics and strategic planning that will continue for the remainder of the play. While much of the first scene involves Titus’s lamentation on the loss of Berenice and his unexpected

122

Besieged

regret that he may have to use violence against Jerusalem, his is not an immobilizing melancholy. He is not the weeping, helpless Antony that Dryden invents in the same year. Between the two plays, the brokenhearted Titus and his troops accomplish a great deal. They capture prisoners as a result of foraging parties going out from the city to seek food, and Roman troops bestow their own “Robe” on the city, one that will alter the city’s perception of its place in the broader landscape: A wall wherewith he has their Tow’rs confin’d. As if to make new wonders for Mankind: Built by your Legions in the little space, … And now these Crowds cannot your anger fly, They have no way to ’scape you, but to die. (II:3). Titus’s engineers have transformed this mythic urban space into something far more fragile and unstable, despite his insistence that it is a space worthy of preservation. It is this ability to manage his engineers and military forces that leads to victory. In addition to reconfiguring the nature of the successful military leader, Crowne foregrounds city space, even though his Jerusalem is a ghostly, undead city throughout the play. It has no core, no identity. Indeed, by demonstrating that it lacks many of the elements that make a city – a strong leader, a binding culture or religion, and even a strong connection to its own mythic past – it gestures toward the elements of an ideal city. It is a central figure, albeit one in its death throes. But where, we might ask, are the city’s own leaders and why does it appear to be solely dependent on an outsider. The only royal figure we see within its walls is Queen Berenice, who we know before the end of the first act is in love with the enemy, Titus Vespasian, and who declines to attend and participate in religious rituals important to city life, most specifically the “Feast of Passeover” (I:6). Religion and culture are divisive rather than unifying forces in Crowne’s Jerusalem. The city itself is embattled from within. There is a religious conflict throughout between Matthais and his followers and the wily John and the Pharisees. And Matthais seems to see from the beginning that the turmoil means that the city is doomed. When we first meet him, he apologizes to Berenice for the state of the city and for the willingness of the people to attack her, describing the city thus,

Space Made for Change

123

But oft, as when the fatal hour draws nigh Of some great Man, whom pain compels to dye, His strugling powers with scorn their sentence take, And ’mongst themselves do a Rebellion make: Then on his own distorted Limbs does seize, And there chastise weak Natures Cowardise: But thinks the while, he has with Monsters fought, And horrid shapes are in his Fancy wrought; So in distracting pangs our Nation lyse, As if depriv’d of sense with Miseries. Tearing it self, and haunted with a Fiend That does to Zeal and Piety pretend[.] (I:4) Even for Matthais, who might be read as the key force of order in the city, Jerusalem is a dying thing. It is a possessed body, haunted with violent impulses against the self. At the very beginning of the play, long before the Roman siege has even started (it begins at the very end of Act V), more overt references are made to the angst of the Civil War – a war defined by intestine religious and political division – than we find in earlier siege plays even though they too are often set in divided cities. In Jerusalem, religion cannot unify because, despite the passionate commitment to the sacred of some of its inhabitants, it is being divided by fanatics. Monarchs cannot unify for there are none with a strong commitment to the city, and there are no other strong cultural beliefs holding the city together. Cities without an “imaginary” (religious, monarchical, and/or cultural), despite their walls, glorious temple, and impressive architecture, are ephemeral and transitory. History and mythology alone, when it is not connected to the tangible and material present, cannot unify or save a people. Intriguingly, the person in The Destruction of Jerusalem who seems at times to be most strongly connected to the actual state of affairs is the pragmatic outsider Phraartes. It is he who brings food to the people after victory in a sally (II:29), unlike the rebel John who takes food even from starving women (II:13–14). However, he also eschews religious mythology, asserting that the omens are a pretty “Novelty,” discounting their supernatural aspects. “I from all Shadows set my Vassals free,” he proclaims (I:28, 29). Given the ability of the priests to misinterpret signs and visions foreshadowing defeat, his scepticism is comprehensible.

124

Besieged

If, in the first part of the play, Crowne makes it clear that despite its impressive architecture there is no cohesion there in Jerusalem, at least in terms of a unifying cultural imagination, in the second part of the play, the material bodies within the city now echo that sense of emptiness and decay. The high priest and governor lament, Our Crowds are all to fleeting shadows pin’d; They walk about like Spectres of the night, Famish’d to Shapes, would even Ghosts afright: Paler than Ghosts the starving people lie, And rather seem to vanish than to die. No tears for Friends or Kindred now are shed, The living look with envy on the dead[.] (II:12) The Holy City seems to have become a type of hellish space. There is no need to take a separate trip to the underworld in this epic conflict; the underworld has come to the city. Like Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes, the city and its citizens are foregrounded, but instead of stoic citizens who believe in their cause and are ready to fight the enemy, we have only the shadow of a city. The starving people of Jerusalem do not even seem to rise to the status of phantoms; they are less than that and have lost the communal passions at the core of their humanity. This has most certainly been wrought by famine, but the conditions for this loss of identity, both collective and individual, began with the lack of urban identity that ultimately fostered rebellion and vulnerability. They too are unnatural. While the play ends with Titus’s yearning for Berenice, the play has allowed the audience to see beyond the suffering of the nobility, foiled romances, and lost kingdoms, to true tragedy – the spectacle of a dying city. Dramatic siege space is not merely a backdrop for this story; it is the story.

John Banks, The Destruction of Troy (1679) John Banks was “born in obscurity” and after legal training turned to playwriting.24 Though he is generally remembered for his contributions to the genre of “she tragedies,” his siege drama, The Destruction of Troy, written and performed around the same time as Crowne’s play, is similarly innovative, reworking the concept of heroism in a way that foregrounds

Space Made for Change

125

both collaborative martial action and the centrality of the city itself. Regarding the former, like Crowne, Banks undermines the heroic individual by highlighting constant conflict between two figures, in this case between the traditionally heroic Achilles and the wily Ulysses. In opposing their military methods, Banks demonstrates that practical engineering strategies trump valiant single combat every time. The play opens by staging these two very different conceptions of war. The Greeks discuss the possibility of leaving the field since winning the Trojan War now seems an impossibility. While Achilles is willing to stay and fight, he, as a traditional hero, speaks of Troy as a mythic city, claiming that it is [a] Town, for ought we know, built by the Gods, And by the Gods Immortal Aid defended; Begirt with many huge and massy Walls, Stronger than Stone hew’d from their growing Caverns, More hard and beautiful than Marble fetch’d From the deep Bosom of the shining Quarry. Still as we follow’d any fierce Assault, Still we were more and more repuls’d, and often Slid from the tops of her bright Magick Tow’rs, Leaving no more Impression with our Blood, Than restless Waves that dash against the Rocks[.]25 Achilles works hard to justify his greatness. Such a mythic city would require an equally supernaturally strong hero to defeat it, and he assigns himself this role. Ulysses, however, sees a different type of city that presents a different problem. He does not see space as supernatural, mythic, or magical, so he demystifies the city, noting that it has twice lost its name. He reminds his fellow soldiers, What though the Walls run seav’n time round the Town, And with such awful strength, and beauty strike you, Yet were they built by Men, and when at last Their Men decay, and are too weak, or few To hold, and to maintain ’em, they’l soon prove Your steps to take the Town the nearest way. (5)

126

Besieged

What is needed to defeat such a city is not the superhuman leaping or hurling of an individual hero that Achilles describes in lavish detail when he cries, “I will be the Man/Shall leap from thence upon her golden Terrace,/And bring you to her Guardian Pallas Temple” (10). Rather, a heavy dose of practical planning is required. Ulysses outlines his tactics to Diomedes after the others have left, discussing his intelligence network, use of bribery, and plot to enter tunnels under the city. He found easy access to the Trojan Temple by [t]aking some trusty Soldiers of my Legions, To dig to th’ bottom of this rev’rent Mine. They had not pierc’d a Fathom in the Ground, E’re they discover’d Stones of Antique Forms, Which did not seem to be of Natures framing, But artificially were laid with hands[.] (11) Realizing he has discovered “a long and slender Vault” which “[d]id run directly under the Town Walls” (11), he tells his soldiers to continue to explore it but to keep their manoeuvrings secret from the others, who seem to prefer Achilles’s methods. Therefore, he is not only designing tactics that will directly weaken the fortifications of the besieged city, he is also involved in information management, ensuring that the group that will make the attack is trustworthy and single minded. It is this well-managed venture to capture the Palladium and thus further undermine the notion that Troy is invincible, not the feats of Achilles, that ultimately causes a sense of spatial confusion and terror within the city. The play alters the ending of the Iliad. While the original concludes with an act of single combat, Banks chooses to include the fall of the city and the death of Achilles. Rather than ending with Achilles’s victory over Hector, we see his ignoble death, as he is shot in the heel by Paris. His death is presented alongside the triumph of Ulysses’s next use of tactics and trickery, involving a certain infamous large horse. Ulysses calls for the “way of Stratagems” (47). It is the tactics and architectural innovations of the professional man, the military engineer, that are needed in this new age. The city is a mechanical sort of puzzle, something that is associated more with engineering and efficient resource or people management than with heroic codes.

Space Made for Change

127

Beyond the Glorious Revolution J. Douglas Canfield has taken note of the major shift in the tropes featured in dramatic works after the exile of James II: “After the Revolution of 1688, shifting tropes of ideology in the various subgenres of tragedy help to constitute the transformation from an aristocratic, late feudal to a newly dominant bourgeois ideology … While dramatic genres remain quite consistent, the tropes within them shift rapidly over the fulcrum of the Glorious Revolution.”26 Intriguingly, while it might have seemed, during the 1680s, that the trope of the siege had inexplicably died, its revival in the 1690s and beyond implies it was still usefully engaged with cultural concerns. The hiatus of siege drama, and its evolution on its return, can reasonably be attributed both to political changes and to practical needs. As Charles II’s reign came to an end and James II’s began, it may have initially seemed less topical to deal with glorious military losses than with political subterfuge. Elaine McGirr has argued that during Charles II’s reign, “[r]epetition made the heroic’s vision of the civil wars the standard account … The heroic employed its sumptuous spectacle to reinvest the restored but cheapened monarchy with the aura of mystery and majesty lost when Parliament beheaded Charles I.”27 McGirr suggests that the drama written in response to the Exclusion Crisis and the ascendance of James to the throne required a different type of storyline. She observes that audiences had evolved by the time of the Exclusion Crisis and “[t]he commercial stage needed to appeal to both the Tory court and a Whig audience in order to stay solvent,” adding that “James II [largely] rejected heroic spectacle during his reign,” the very sort of spectacle associated with siege drama.28 There may well have been more practical reasons for a shift away from the siege. The two patent companies were undergoing tremendous change in the early 1680s and ultimately collapsed into one United Company. This would have influenced the plays they chose to perform. The fire and plague in London in the 1660s were also part of an increasingly distant past. Writers and audience members, farther from these traumatic spatial experiences, were living in a time when the city was being rebuilt and celebrated. There may not have been the same need to dwell on ruined cities. Moreover, the siege losses that occurred at the end of these plays may not have held the same intense fascination since England had been

128

Besieged

involved in siege victories during this period. This was the case abroad, for example at Maastricht (1673), in which English troops fought with the French, and at Namur (1695) when they fought in a coalition against the French, as well as domestically, during the Williamite Wars in Ireland (1688–91), for instance at Londonderry (1689). With siege drama’s revival in the late 1690s, it was, therefore, significantly different in form and substance. The siege plays composed in the 1690s and the following two decades by Crowne, Settle, Southerne, and Hughes continue to avoid or censure traditional heroes. Settle accomplishes this most explicitly in an appallingly elaborate scene at the end of the third act of his Trojan play The Virgin Prophetess, or the Fate of Troy. Paris and Helen sit in the midst of a grand arch, entertained and distracted by a symphony, cupids, and magnificent set changes and song, while Cassandra, who is in tune with the city itself, tries desperately to bring their attention to the complexity and vulnerability of Troy to help them truly see it but without success. The celebratory self-fashioning of Helen and Paris as epic/romance figures visibly and explicitly comes at the expense of urban space. Once such figures are diminished in, or vanish from, siege plays, it is city space that comes into view. On a micro level, different actors and actions come into focus as we move from the palace to the streets. On a macro level, we encounter the imaginative mechanics of defining and redefining city space and are exposed to communal trauma rather than the internal angst of aristocrats in siege drama. In terms of the former, it is not only military engineers that come into sight but also citizens and municipal governance.

John Crowne, Regulus (1694) Crowne’s Regulus takes place during a Roman siege of Carthage. In an 1874 edition of a selection of Crowne’s works, the editor speculates (based on the work of John Genest) that it was likely performed in 1692, given the cast.29 Arthur Franklin White, in his 1922 edition of Crowne’s works, notes that it was probably based on a play of the same name by the French playwright Nicolas Pradon though Crowne makes some significant changes.30 Crowne’s Regulus, he argues, was not particularly successful, but it is useful to note a few significant features that suggest the siege drama

Space Made for Change

129

was continuing to change. The plot begins at Carthage. The city, led by a somewhat weak and divided senate, is under siege by Regulus, and they have called in the help of the Spartan General Xantippus. The general is in love with Elisa, the daughter of Hamilcar, the prince of the senate. Elisa is also desired by Asdrubal, “a young ambitious Prince, aiming to overthrow the Commonwealth of Carthage, and make himself King.”31 Thus the city is divided, as we have come to expect in many of these plays, as Asdrubal strives to bring to fruition his plan to gain power and Xantippus upholds the current senate leadership as he seeks to protect the city from Rome. Meanwhile, Regulus, outside the city, is preparing to fight, though he is troubled by the anxious Fulvia, his betrothed, and odd appearances of the ghost of his first wife. As the plot unfolds, the planned rebellion is defeated, and Regulus is captured. Xantippus arranges for him to be released with the instructions that he must pledge to convince the Romans to withdraw or return to be likely tortured to death. Regulus convinces his army not to submit and, as a man of honour, returns to Carthage. Xantippus, impressed by Regulus’s sense of honour, tries to save him from death but fails to do so. By the end of the play, Xantippus, disgusted at the behaviour of the Carthaginians, plans to leave Carthage with Elisa and her father Hamilcar to return to Sparta. In Regulus, significant power is in the hands of senators. There certainly are valorous heroes, both Regulus and the Spartan General Xantippus. Both noble figures end up in sympathy with one another against the mobbish common people. Thus, this play would seem, to some degree, to belong to the royalist siege drama tradition. Crowne’s senators, like Southerne’s, are not particularly effective. They cannot save Carthage from the Spartan general. Yet, city governance structures (and their flaws) are increasingly becoming more of a topic of interest in siege drama, and the concept of a dominant monarchy is rejected. Disruption within the senate is caused by Asdrubal, whose offense is that he wants to take on a monarchical role and surreptitiously asserts he is of royal blood, despite claims that he only wishes to fix “the Commonwealth in Safety and Repose” (4). The senate is, therefore, one way to place the citizens rather than the nobility in the foreground. The comic subplot of the play also brings into the foreground an additional type of city voice, that of the commercial man. Batto, described as a “[a] rich treacherous Citizen that trades secretly

130

Besieged

with the Romans, [and] flatters all sides for Profit” (“Dramatis Personae”), is arguably the most vibrant, energetic character in the play. Although he is undoubtedly a scoundrel, he is most certainly an interesting one. Curtis A. Price is not impressed by the subplot in Regulus involving this man who “lines his pockets by selling arms and supplies to the enemy.”32 And yet, Batto is represented as a lively, entrepreneurial character. When Batto presents his resume at the beginning of the play, he tells us he is one who has “been in business all … [his] life, as a Merchant, a Banker, [and] a Farmer o’ the Customes” (1), and he is clearly successful. More than anyone else in the city, Batto understands what is happening within the besieged city and outside it. The play opens with Gisgon (a treacherous senator) and Batto “looking through Prospective Glasses” at the turmoil below, counting the number of towns on fire they can see (1). Batto runs an effective intelligence network between the city and the Roman camp and meets with his spy at times to discuss its operations. Over time it becomes clear to the audience that Batto is running a highly effective arms trade, among other things. During one of their exchanges, the spy explains how the most recent commodity exchange has gone: “Our Swords went off but dully; there having not been a Battle a good while, they ha’ not lost many Swords. But they have shot away a[n] abundance of Arrows … [s]o they gave us any thing for our Arrows” (10). The spy has received wine from the Romans in trade, since Regulus will not allow his besieging army to drink, so Batto’s agent bought the wine “for a song” and now plans to sell it at jacked-up prices to the inhabitants of the city (10). Batto is well aware of how the networks of the marketplace work and is gleeful that scarcity will drive up prices. Even his spy is shocked at his boss’s eager anticipation of the siege leading to famine, since as a result the price of “Corn must rise” (10). Batto has no conscience or loyalty to the city. His love of commerce means that he takes no sides. He will deal with anyone. While the common people of the city, who only occupy a background role, seem to change sides in response to panic or anxiety, Batto does not fluctuate out of angst but out of avarice. Here is how he explains his ethics to the pretender to the throne: “Ours is a trading Town, and we trading Men, account a Man a good Man, if his Bond be good, and his Security for Money good, we look for no other goodness. He was once a very thriving Man, and I confess I have a great regard for thriving Men. But when once a Man gives over thriving, I have done with him” (13). Asdrubal counters Batto, claiming that the trading values of the city are foul, filling us with “dirty Streets and dirty Souls” (14). However, given his

Space Made for Change

131

own villainy and desire for power throughout the play, his call to adhere to values of “Honour, Vertue and Piety” falls short (14). Clearly Crowne condemns the feisty protocapitalist; indeed he does so literally, and Batto is ultimately executed. Yet the wit and energy that Crowne bestows on Batto make him not only comic but also fairly sympathetic. The very outrageousness of his actions and his mutability, traits Susanna Centlivre associates with Whiggish mercantile values in A Bold Stroke for a Wife almost twenty years later, are comic and linked to an effective agent who accumulates wealth efficiently. Even when he languishes in prison, he tries to buy a pardon “at reasonable rates” (37). Far from only operating as a low and incongruous element in the play, as do many comedic characters in previous siege dramas, Batto, an ordinary (albeit rich) citizen, is placed in a conspicuous and significant role. His schemes have real world effects on the siege and the city, even if they are negative. Commerce does provide agency to ordinary people who harness its power, though the nature of that agency may be detrimental.

Thomas Southerne, The Fate of Capua (1700) Thomas Southerne, the son of an Irish brewer, writes a siege play that widens its scope to study more closely not only the senate but a range of ordinary people who are empowered and flawed.33 We enter The Fate of Capua in the midst of a crisis caused in part by the “Rabble” who are in “bareface’d Mutiny,” having “declar’d themselves for Hannibal.”34 The senate discuss what action to take. Pacuvius Calavius makes a strong case for abandoning Rome, while Decius Magius warns them that their fate is intertwined with Rome with whom they have “always been affianced Friends,” sharing “Our Laws, Our Customs, [and Our] Constitutions” (4). As they talk, the situation escalates to atrocity. The rabble, seemingly a particularly fractious part of the population, have aroused the rest of the citizenry to round up the Roman families who live and work in the city: Men, Women, Children, hudled in the Rout, Without distinction hurry’d and shut up, Under the name of Safety, in our Baths, The publick Baths, where choak’d with Heat and Smoak, Their strugling Souls must wretchedly expire, If timely not set free. (6)

132

Besieged

The imprisoned Romans do indeed die, an act of brutality that will come to haunt the city later. The play thus opens with a horrific act of agency accomplished not by brutal kings or heroic warriors but by the people themselves, and it will not be their last violent impulse. The citizens next threaten to overthrow the senate and execute the senators. In an extended discussion with the citizens, Pacuvius Calavius reasons with them. He first persuades them not to burn down the senate building since it “is a publick Ornament, a reverend Pile,/That has stood Ages” and that belongs to them (10). His colleague Virginius exclaims, This venerable Structure may stand up With our most celebrated publick Domes, Sacred and Common, Temples, Theatres, And all our numerous progeny of Art, The Monuments of Famous Ancestry. (10) Pacuvius reminds them, “If you repent,/when it is down, who builds it up again?/The publick Purse alone, the common Stock/(The Citizens freeborn Inheritance)” (10). There is a sense of the city and its architecture not as a backdrop for the king but as a living place owned by the people and their elected officials. The mistakes, and some of them are appalling, ultimately belong with people rather than princes. The siege play, therefore, must include them in a far more extensive way. On the other hand, Southerne makes clear that this system of government is also severely flawed, motivated by emotion and executed with confusion. As the citizens proceed to assess which citizens they should kill, based, it seems, on personal vendettas, Pacuvius Calavius subtly dissuades them from executing the senators by agreeing to help them do so but then telling them they need to elect a new leader before they execute an old one. As they try to decide on likely candidates, they start to come across problems as they need to find one “we have nothing to say against” and “who wonnot forget his Benefactors” (14). As they name names, they start to realize that [w]hen we come to particulars, ’tis only to find fault:/Men are but men; and, new or old,/The Senate’s the same” (15). They decide to keep the current senate, as “the Evils that we are best acquainted with, are always the easiest to be born” (15). Elections do not guarantee better governance despite giving citizens a measure of control.

Space Made for Change

133

The people in general (like a communal form of Almanzor) are also flawed, as they are exceedingly indecisive about which side they should be allied with. When the city submits to Hannibal, they complain about the lack of sufficient pomp in his entry to the city (28), and while they are impressed by Hannibal’s inflated promises, they are displeased at the way he speaks of Decius Magius and ultimately the way they are treated by Hannibal’s troops: “Every place [is] prophan’d by their Rioting and Drunkenness” (46). They are also concerned when he leaves the city with most of his troops to continue his military endeavours. They then begin to realize that the city may be vulnerable to the fury of the Romans (46), a fear that comes to fruition in Act 4 when they are besieged by powerful and vengeful Roman troops. Southerne suggests that the people have both an impulse to do something and a sense that they have some agency but an inability to know how to act given their dire circumstances. “There’s no peeping upon the Walls,” remarks one citizen in response to the siege, and another replies, “The Engines play so thick, they’r about your Ears before you’r aware of ’em.” A third adds, “Not a Spade employ’d in the Trenches, but digs a Capuan Grave” (54). Their circumstances are dire because “[t]here’s no Body to Command” except Hannibal’s garrison who are not followed by Capuens (54). Their leaders cannot ultimately help them, however. The men sent out of the city to reach Hannibal are captured and terribly mutilated: “First strip’d and Scourg’d, then with their Hands cut off,/In that most lamentable plight driv’n back/To Capua, to let us see the News” (62). The city’s situation from a military point of view seems hopeless indeed, but in any case, the senators seem to have no military skills nor even a will to resist actively. There are neither warrior heroes, nor tactical geniuses. The closest they can get is to send Decius Magius to negotiate with the Romans. However, while the Romans offer Decius Magius personal security, they offer no protection to the city. Magius rejects the offer and returns to Capua where the senators have ultimately given up and committed suicide so that “[t]hese Eyes shall never be Spectators of … [their] Countries Ruine” nor will they “behold/The ravage, and the havock of … [their] Spoils,” which include the overpowering of our “chast Matrons, and our blushing Maids” (69). Magius also drinks the poison. The elected senators, therefore, do not seem so much noble as selfish, although they present self-murder as a courageous act, “To rob [Rome’s] Consuls of their Triumph here,/and bear our selves the palm of Victory” (73). They

134

Besieged

do not offer this choice to their citizens but rather withdraw from the conflict completely. And yet, the dream of a town in which the people have a voice is not entirely lost. As the play draws to an end, Decius Magius laments the fact that the city will die: Capua to be disfranchis’d of her Rights, Her Liberties, and her chief Citizens: The Populace by out-cry to be sold, Into the several States of Italy; And none permitted to inhabit here, But Slaves made Free, Strangers, and meanest Trades: Never to be incorporated more In a Community, to have a Voice In free Election of its Magistrates, But live enthrall’d under the Scourge of Rome. (72) However, in these lines, there is a nostalgic reminder of the city they once had in which the community had a voice and officials were freely elected. Both Crowne’s Regulus and Southerne’s Fate of Capua, therefore, in vastly different ways, show ordinary people accessing a measure of power and authority, even if it is misused or deeply problematic. The repeated, extended dialogues and exchanges amongst the ordinary people in Southerne’s play, and the use of the remarkably appealing, if wicked, arms trader and the potential for a meritocracy in Crowne’s, suggest that those within a threatened city have their own stories, that the fall of citizens (not merely abstract cities or warrior princes) can take centre stage in tragedies, and that siege drama is actually about the city as a whole. The city is no longer controlled by a select angst-ridden few but by a more varied cast of characters who share responsibility for problems in the city but at least have a voice in doing so.

Elkanah Settle, Cassandra: or The Virgin Prophetess, or the Fate of Troy (1701) Elkanah Settle is more direct in his critique of traditional heroism in The Virgin Prophetess, or the Fate of Troy, renamed Cassandra: or The Virgin

Space Made for Change

135

Prophetess, or the Fate of Troy in 1702. Settle was of low birth, origins that many of his peers took pains to ensure he remembered. Edith Hall notes that in rewriting his original opera on Troy as a droll, Settle presents Troy in distinctly antiheroic terms, noting that “[t]he hero [of the droll] is an enterprising Trojan cobbler named Tom Bristle. The Trojan working class, who speak earthy prose, elect him their captain. They stay safe during the siege by holding a party and survive to rebuild the city when the Greeks leave. Meanwhile the Trojan ruling class, who speak pompous heroic rhyming couplets, are either killed or commit spectacular suicide.”35 We agree with Hall’s assessment that the droll undercuts old heroic figures, not to mention the genre itself, but even the original opera substantially challenges and reworks the siege drama. In its original conception, the opera follows Crowne and Banks in emphasizing engineering prowess; there is a discussion of the great machine, the horse that will help to defeat Troy. Nevertheless, when the opera moves inside the city, it loses interest in mechanics and space and instead focuses on heroism, or rather on picking apart heroism and setting up binaries involving heroic figures and urban space. More specifically, it shows that the city itself is crowded out by aristocratic spectacle. This is most evident in the moment we discussed earlier in this chapter: the appallingly elaborate scene in Cassandra in which Paris and Helen embrace the luxury of celebratory excess at the expense of urban space. City space becomes visible only when such larger-than-life figures are diminished in, or vanish from, siege plays. On a micro level, different actors and actions come into focus as we move from the palace to the streets. When we turn toward the city in this opera, we see a mob reconfigured as much needed active citizens who understand that the rulers are mistreating them. We encounter them at one moment when they are in a celebratory mood, believing that the war has ended. However, they still wonder what the outcome of all this trouble was. When one asks, “What may the Greeks and Trojans have got by this War?” another responds “why broken Pates, and empty Pockets.”36 When another inquires, “Why do those great Folks make War one with another?” and is confused by the answer, “out of pure Charity,” he is told, “Don’t ye see they make War to make Cripples, and then they build Hospitals to maintain ’em” (37). War is not reasonable, they conclude, and generally arises from jealousy or ambition. Great folks, to get “rid of both of those Pestilent Diseases,” do not open their own “mad Veins” but open “half a

136

Besieged

Nations” (38). The city pays the cost of private aristocratic desire and the citizens recognise that. Even in this rather limited and inane conversation, the suffering of the city is deeply significant. In the later droll, as Hall notes, this pared down Trojan tale cuts out a lot of the original heroic action and gives more prominence to the ordinary people, particularly Bristle the Cobbler, who ultimately takes on the role of a sort of farcical hero. Indeed, we meet the quarrelsome Bristle and his wife and hear of his wife’s desire to view the horse even before we see Helen and Paris. When Bristle and his wife visit the machine, he tells the mob that they will be their leaders.37 When the sceptical mob ask for his qualifications, he makes the silly (but actually valid) remark that cobblers play an important social role: “I am the Man that put such a stout pair of Soles upon the King’s last Neatleather Shoes, that he has kickt the whole Grecian Army quite out of the Kingdom, and his Majesty and I are the Two great Savers of the Nations.”38 Helen and Paris appear after this scene, and they have become even more outrageous. Paris has suddenly become a complete fool who cannot even see the changes Cassandra makes, never mind comprehend them. Considering these circumstances, we might expect this play to end with the destruction of the city. This is not the case, however, perhaps because Settle is producing a droll, not an opera, and is privileging city space over heroes. He decides to have the besieging king recognize the virtue of the city itself, put a stop to “Ruin, Fire, and Death,” and give the people liberty to “go and rebuild … [their] Troy” (23). Despite the profound absurdity of this droll and its complete lack of seriousness, it does, even more than in the original operatic version, remind the audience that at the centre of a siege is a city, vulnerable to all sorts of destructive forces, and its people, who despite their lack of involvement (in this case) in the inception of a siege, are extraordinarily dependent on how it turns out. It also implies that a city, even made up of citizens of low-comedic character, can rebuild itself, a not unimportant point to make a few years after the consecration of St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

John Hughes, The Siege of Damascus (1720) If Settle’s work exemplifies the waning of serious siege drama, John Hughes might be viewed as the last of his contemporaries to take the subgenre more

Space Made for Change

137

seriously but reframing it, as did Banks, Crowne, and Southerne. Hughes’s Siege of Damascus was a highly successful play, despite the death of its author on its opening night. John Hughes, who came from a middle-class dissenting background and affiliated himself with the Whigs, wrote under George I.39 In the Hanoverian period, the Whigs were on the ascent. What could a Whiggish author do with an old royalist form? Many residual elements of the old romance siege drama remain in this work. There is most definitely a romance at its core, between Phocyas and Eudocia, the daughter of Eumenes who is governor of Damascus. As in Dryden’s Siege of Granada, much of the plot is based on the fact that Phocyas, like Almanzor, wants a woman who is denied to him and is angered by the perceived ingratitude of city leaders. Despite behaving heroically in clashes with the Saracen camp outside the city, Phocyas has been refused as a suitor to the governor’s daughter. Eumenes has already decided to marry his daughter to another hero who has left the city to find and return with aid. In despair, Phocyas and Eudocia flee the city, and Phocyas is captured. Like Davenant’s Florello in The Siege, Phocyas changes sides to try to win Eudocia, and the invading army ultimately succeeds in storming the town. In the original play he also converts to Islam, but Hughes changed that in the printed version. This change led to other issues, since the rejection of Phocyas as a suitor seems unjustified without his betrayal of Christianity.40 Finding out that Phocyas has helped the enemy, Eudocia rejects him, and she, her father, and others ultimately abandon the city and camp outside briefly before they leave for good. When some of the Saracens are dissatisfied with the deal made to spare so many Damascans and to let them leave with their goods, they decide to attack the camp. Phocyas helps to defend it, ultimately dying as a result. Thus, Eudocia’s rejection leads to his heroic death in recompense for his shameful action. The general plot of The Siege of Damascas, therefore, employs familiar romance tropes, and the city loses the conflict. This is in line with most of the earlier seventeenth-century siege plays considered thus far. Hughes also imitates these earlier plays by minimizing the role of the ordinary city folk during the siege, except to suggest that they are problematic. The play opens with the governor of the city telling the people to “stop [their] clamorous Mouths, that still are open, to bawl Sedition, and consume our Corn.” He continues, “If you will follow me, send home your Women, and follow to the Walls; there earn your Safety, as brave Men shou’d.”41 Where Hughes’s play takes its strongest turn from the

138

Besieged

conventional genre is in its fascination with what comprises a city. Is it its riches, its mercantilism? Is it its land, its place in the natural landscape? Is it its people or perhaps the buildings? Is it its religion or culture? The siege finishes when the city is stormed in Act III and the rest of the play is dedicated to the immediate aftermath. Following a dispute between two of the leaders of the invading army (Caled and Abudah), the final acts examine how perspective shapes not only our understanding of urban space but also reveal the ambiguity in naming. Are the fleeing people a group of exiles or an army? The two men disagree about what should be done with the city. Caled wants it to be open to plunder; Abudah wants there to be terms established, stating, Leave to depart, to all that will; an Oath First giv’n, no more to aid the War against us. An unmolested March. Each Citizen To take his Goods, not more than a Mule’s Burden; The Chiefs six Mules, and ten the Governor. Besides some few slight Arms for their Defence Against the Mountain Robbers. (43) Caled is horrified at this generosity, claiming that Abudah will, thereby, “equip an army.” But Abudah’s reply reveals he views the besieged as far less of a threat: Canst thou doubt The greater Part by far will chuse to stay, Receive our Law, or pay th’accustom’d Tribute? What fear we then from a few wretched Bands Of scattered Fugitives? (43) How do we define a rag tag group of people with some goods? Are they an army or are they a “wretched band of scattered Fugitives”? Or, as Daran, one of Caled’s allies, speculates later as he watches the Damascans gather their goods, are they merchants “sending forth their loaded Caravans/to all the Neighboring Countries” (50)? The play also leaves us asking, on a larger scale, what exactly is a city? Although the invading army has taken the material city, its land and the surrounding countryside, its buildings and many of its citizens, some of

Space Made for Change

139

the besiegers still do not feel they have truly possessed it. Daran insists it is not truly a conquered city because of the riches of the exiles’ camp. When asked to describe what he sees in the camp, he responds, Why all Damascus; all its Soul, its Life, Its Heart’s Blood, all its Treasure, Piles of Plate, Crosses enrich’d with Gems, Arras and Silks, And Vests of Gold, unfolded to the Sun, that rival all his Lustre … The Bees are wisely bearing off their Honey, And soon the empty Hive will be our own. (52) To Abudah, they have captured the city, one of many that will fall to their army. It can serve as an excellent supply chain during a campaign as well as supply a ready defense when attacked. As long as there are no rebellious citizens (and he has encouraged such people to leave), a city is a martial asset. But to Daran and Caled, a city is its wealth, not its buildings or even its people. The end of urban work is luxury, and the spiritual essence of a city (its soul) is opulence and treasure. Even the crosses seem valuable to Caled, not for their spiritual significance but for their “Gems, Arras, and Silks.” Although letting the conquered leave with a few goods potentially magnifies the victor’s magnanimity, Daran and Caled feel rather that they have been cheated and have inherited only a dead city, an “empty Hive.” They define the city by its commercial worth and thus view the camp as a merchant train. Adding to vignettes of a city as a military fortress and a producer of wealth and luxury is the response of the soon-to-be exiles to their loss of their physical city. Outside Damascus, amongst “A Valley full of Tents,” the leaders reassess the nature of a city (53). They first conclude that it requires a certain number of people. One officer tells Eumenes, “I have marked/The Camp’s Extent; tis stretch’d quite thro’ the Valley./I think that more than half the City’s here” (54). Overcome with feeling at their numbers and comforted by their support, Eumenes offers a counter argument to Daran’s and Caled’s emphasis on material goods as the measure of a city, arguing, “What’s That? Prosperity? A Harlot./That smiles but to betray” (54)! This sentiment is affirmed by Herbis, who tells the governor that he went to bid the city farewell but found that it is not even worth a look, for “All our Possessions are a Grasp of Air” (55). Herbis has recently heard

140

Besieged

of the death of his son, who had planned to marry Eumenes’s daughter, so his vision of the city and all that is in it as ephemera is grounded in a recognition that things that seem permanent and eternal are merely transient. What then is the city to Herbis and Eumenes if it is no longer the physical prosperous space? Eumenes, looking out over the camp, offers an alternative definition: Methinks we’ve here a goodly City yet! Was it not thus our great Forefathers liv’d, In better times? – in humble Fields and Tents, With all their Flocks and Herds, their moving Wealth! See too! Where our own Pharphar winds his Stream Thro’ the long Vale, as if to follow us, And kindly offers his cool wholesome Draughts To ease us in our March! Why this is Plenty. (55) A city, according to this passage, consists of its people, and the positioning of this definition in the past implies that this new configuration of community has behind it the weight and dignity of antiquity. Wealth is not measured in terms of commercial value but as usefulness to the community. Flocks and herds are the wealth at the centre of this fluid and moving city and, while mobile, they are also in tune with nature, followed by the river that keeps them sustained. However, this hopeful new concept of a city as a united group of people travelling together is not without anxiety. When Eudocia enters, she exclaims, “[W]e’re Wanderers, it is our Doom,/There is no Rest for us” (56), as if to reinforce that one of the key elements of urban space is comforting stasis. While striated space can be constraining, smooth space can be unpredictable. And the attack that will shortly take place reinforces the vulnerability of a nomadic people. Nevertheless, she also sees that the city they have left is no longer an alternative: Ruin is yonder, in Damascus, now The Seat abhorr’d of cursed Infidels. Infernal Error, like a Plague, has spread Contagion thro’ its guilty Palaces, And we are fled from Death. (56)

Space Made for Change

141

The trope of a corrupt city looms large at the end of The Siege of Damascus, as it does at the conclusion of Crowne’s Regulus and Southerne’s Fate of Capua. It is figured as a contained space in which error rapidly gains momentum, although in this play the corruption comes from the besiegers. Therefore, like people, cities can be corrupted. Imagining cities in new ways, however, does not always solve this problem. A cohesive identity can be envisioned without a root in an exact locus but not without difficulty. At the end of the play, when Phocyas is killed, Eumenes tells his daughter that the remaining group will travel to another city, Constantinople. The significance of the city would seem to be essential, but the play makes clear that there are alternate ways to define urban space and that crucial to its definition is its people, upholding the increasing centrality and visibility of city dwellers in siege dramas. What we have argued thus far in this chapter is that siege drama transforms significantly over time and is a good measure not only of political differences but of how literary genres adapt to different audiences: spectators who might be reading military memoirs and may appreciate engagement with tactics; spectators who find old heroic models deeply problematic in a world in which technology is changing masculine ideals; spectators who define the city and its discontents from the point of view of the people rather than the aristocracy; and spectators with a new awareness of urban identity and concerns. So while it is crucial to consider the emergence of new genres that reflect changing social and political circumstances, it is equally important to theorize how old genres adapt and survive even when the social hierarchies that inspired their emergence have changed.

From Visceral History to Docudrama In the last chapter, we briefly mentioned siege plays that fall within Cahill’s category of visceral histories. These are plays that reenact recent historical sieges and soundly reject romance. Generally, they are written as propaganda. It is difficult to situate these plays in a linear literary history as they are typically not connected with the formal theatrical scene, which would have required them to meet certain criteria. However, they do appear sporadically in print in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

142

Besieged

Because they are working to capture what happened in recent conflicts, we classify them (anachronistically) as docudramas, and they may well be ancestors of the modern documentary. The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) and A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, or Lirenda’s Miserie (1646) would be examples of early forms of docudrama. There are several dramas in this category on either side of the fin de siècle. Two of them dramatize a particular, recent conflict without recourse to elevated language, extensive romance tropes, or glorious individual aristocratic heroes, thereby granting it a greater degree of authenticity that appeals to an audience hungry for a more on-the-ground, “ordinary” account of things. One is the tragicomedy The Siege and Surrender of Mons (1691) and the other John Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d: or the Siege of London-Derry (1705).42 The two plays are very different. The former is a brief (twenty-eight page) three-act tragicomedy; the latter is a lengthy (approximately 300 page) two-part play that is supplemented by myriad supporting materials. The former, if authored by Richard Ames, was written by a satirist of “Plebean Extraction” while the latter was composed by a soldier and officer who played a vital role in the siege he chose to write about. Despite differences in length, mood, and authorial origins, both plays have certain elements in common.43 Neither follows the conventional romance/martial pattern of the plays performed by professional playwrights, though Mitchelburne does integrate some peripheral romance elements such as a relationship between the main protagonist (Granade) and a woman named Lucretia, who uses her access to Dublin Castle to act as a spy for her beloved, warning him (among other things) that he must leave the city to evade capture. What differentiates these two distinct plays from most conventional siege productions in seventeenth-century Britain is the following group of traits. They spotlight sieges that took place in recent memory, taking a partisan approach to them rather than emphasizing the romance of the distant past. They focus most of their efforts on events in the city rather than simply on the actions of the nobility. The sheer variety of people present in a siege situation becomes clearer, as we meet a range of characters representing city interests. They interact with time differently, better capturing the chaos and sudden changes characteristic of this type of combat zone. They engage with the way information and misinformation transforms perception and the events that follow. They are fascinated with tactics and strategies rather than with love and desire.

Space Made for Change

143

And they are propagandistic in that they strongly favour one group over another. Both, therefore, open up a potential opportunity for a new sort of siege play, though one that does not flourish in this historical moment. Nevertheless, this type of siege play reveals that dramatic genres could and were radically reenvisioned in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this section of the chapter, we will spend more time analyzing Ireland Preserv’d than The Siege and Surrender of Mons because the former made a considerable impact on its audience over the long term. As C.I. McGrath reminds us, “The play was regularly reprinted during the next 100 years, and from 1783 onwards, being bound with Robert Ashton’s The Battle of Aughrim (1727), formed a staple of the pedlars’ chapbooks.”44 The Battle of Aughrim is also a docudrama/visceral history, albeit one obviously focused on a battle rather than a siege, but it possesses many of the same features listed above. Christopher Morash points to both of these plays as “fashion[ing] William’s victory into stage images that quickly became assimilated into Irish folk culture” and he references William Carleton’s description of “entire communities in rural Ulster acting the play [Ireland Preserv’d] in barns and kilns in the early years of the nineteenth century.”45 We are interested in pushing this claim further to assess precisely how Williamite versions of siege drama play out.

[Richard Ames], The Siege and Surrender of Mons. A Tragi-Comedy (1691) The Siege and Surrender of Mons, attributed to Richard Ames, is fascinating for its “real time” coverage of siege events. The historical siege of Mons took place in the spring of 1691, ending in early April. It was part of the Nine Years’ War/War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97). The forces of Louis XIV were besieging Mons, which was located in the Spanish Netherlands. The play was licensed in London in the same year and month (April) the siege ended. Although the play is clearly about a siege on foreign soil, it is still connected to domestic affairs. Ireland’s involvement in the Williamite Wars had come to a head only a few years before. The siege of Londonderry was in 1689 and the Battle of Aughrim in July 1691 (The Siege and Surrender of Mons was licensed between the two events). Britain was participating in a war that involved Catholic resistance to Williamite rule, and Ames’s version

144

Besieged

of the siege and surrender of Mons certainly promotes anti-Catholicism, since he ultimately blames the fall of the city on avaricious priests who take bribes to scare the people into rebelling against their defenders, compelling their surrender. The visceral history wholeheartedly embraces the “from-the-ground-up” viewpoint of the dismantled siege drama, embracing its emphasis on the people of the city and on the intricacy of managing siege space. The Siege and Surrender of Mons focuses on the responses of various sectors of the city to the siege. The leaders of the city, the Prince de Bergue (the governor of Mons), several counts, and a host of military men, such as Brigadier Fagel and Marshal Spinosa, comprise one group, the burghers and the “Rabble” another, the priests a third (“Persons Represented”).46 A few scenes are also set in the besieging French king’s camp. Because there is no romance to distract from the martial action, the importance of tactics is foregrounded as a means to capture space and surreptitiously manipulate the enemy. As the play begins, the city seems to be in a particularly strong position. The prince mocks the invading army as it marches toward the city, with “Trumpets,/Haut-bois and Drums” (1), and Brigadier Fagel speaks with great confidence about the city’s strength: If Art and Nature ever yet contriv’d, A place to bear the worst attacks of Fortune, ’Tis surely Mons can make the justest claim, If Horn-works, Bastions, Counterscarps, Redoubts, With the united Force of Germans, Dutch, Walloones and Spaniards both of Foot and Horse, Bred in the Art of War and Blood since Infancy Speak a place strong, then Mons will try their Valour. (2) What makes the city strong is not individual chivalric heroes but the effective art of engineering, along with well-trained, experienced military men. We have seen this shift also occur in standard siege dramas. It is not your sword work, but your horn works that may save the day. Even the famous Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban, engineer for the invading army, is very impressed by the city’s robust bastions and deep “Moats and Ditches,” although he assures Louis XIV that they will take the town (14). Fagel underscores the importance of a well-trained army as a whole, noting in response to the prince’s worry that mechanical expertise will be insufficient if the men of the city are disloyal:

Space Made for Change

145

so very brave and stout the’ appear As if one gallant and Heroick Soul Did actuate of Men so great a Body, The Burghers too have seem’d to lay aside All thoughts of getting Wealth, and heaping Riches. Daily they leave their Shops to handle Arms, And exercise with so much art and skill, As Nature seem’d to have design’d ’em Souldiers. (2) Fagel’s comments on the burghers are undoubtedly rather ironic as the play progresses, and the priests cause panic within the city. However, as the play opens, it appears that an experienced and loyal army has replaced the single hero model at the heart of earlier (Tory royalist) plays, and the possibility exists that burghers can adapt their values as needed from mercantile to martial. Every man, says the prince after listening to Fagel’s admonitions, should imagine that “on his single Valour/Depends the Glory or the Fall of Mons” (3). The concept of the city, at least as the prince imagines it at the inception of the play and as it might have been without Ames’s wily priests, is holistic and comprehensive. Every person has significance. As one burgher contends, “[E]very man be the Swiss of his own Family” (6). The prince further acknowledges his trust in the military when he gives his engineer Pedro the autonomy to decide what action is best in the heat of battle, to act as he “should judge most proper for the safety/of Mons distrest” (16). Pedro proves that the royal trust was rightly placed when he makes the wise decision to blow up a windmill that has been a locus of frantic and deadly combat as it changes hands on an ongoing basis (16). The prince also works to keep the people of the city on his side, travelling around the town to “different Quarters” to comfort and advise (21). The people too are heroic, especially at the beginning of the play. At one point, they arrest French spies who “designed to have Blown up our great Magazine of Powder” (5). This is not to say that members of the populace cannot be deceitful. Early on, we meet three citizens, Durand, Ternon, and Foquet, who eagerly take “a little French Gold” to turn the populace against the prince, but it is primarily the priests who are instrumental in instigating the citizens to demand the city surrender, and they are criticized by a variety of characters, including Fagel and the prince throughout the drama (7). Excluding priests, however, and some fearful women, there is a sense that the entire city, citizens and all, can unite to repel the besieging army,

146

Besieged

despite the fact that Mons must endure not only military action outside the city but horrific bombing within it (22). The priests, in contrast, are aligned with the French king: indeed they tell the people that they should submit to the Catholic French rather than have their “Town preserv’d by Hereticks” whom they represent as bloodthirsty and barbaric (23). The invading monarch delights in the fact that “Whole Provinces already” he has made “desolate” (13) and threatens, if the city resists, to “lay a Scene of Blood” “[w]ithin their streets” and to “make their Dwellings horrible to Nature” (15). The situation is desperate. As Act 2 draws to a close, the burghers and soldiers desperately try to put out simultaneous fires all over the city (17). Increasingly fearful, the rabble tell the soldiers, “Every where, every where, in the Palace, in the Market place. The whole Town is but one great Oven, and I think they design to bake us in’t” (19). Yet, still the town holds firm until the priests in the final act coach them to demand surrender. Representing Catholic leaders as disloyal and subversive would have very specific significance in England at the end of the seventeenth century. This play appeared less than two years after the siege of Londonderry, in which the Jacobites were defeated in a nail-biting siege that almost ended otherwise, and a matter of months after the frustrated Williamites failed in sieges at Limerick and Athlone in the early autumn of 1690 and successfully besieged Cork the same year.47 Siege warfare was active in the Irish wars at this very moment, and this play functions, on some level, as a politically biased news commentary on a recent foreign war and also as an anti-Catholic attack on the ongoing war in Ireland, expressing English fears that priests would manipulate the Irish to continue to resist Williamite forces. The Siege and Surrender of Mons, as an early docudrama, moves away even more sharply than other plays of the period from the Tory royalist model of a siege featuring the machinations and desires of aristocrats. It also makes use of the raw and disturbing potency of a recent military event rather than setting the play in a far-off time and place. Thus, when The Siege and Surrender of Mons represents the siege as a puzzle that can only be solved through the application of a series of skills, including the sophisticated management of space and a keen awareness of the social dynamics that undercut the unity needed to survive a brutal and sustained siege, it does so with few distancing techniques to cushion readers or viewers.

Space Made for Change

147

48

John Mitchelburne, Ireland Preserv’d: or the Siege of London-Derry (1705) The Irish city of Londonderry had pride of place in an avalanche of late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century literary works because of the horrific suffering and heroic resolution of its inhabitants during the brutal siege of 1689. The besieged, who held the Catholic enemy at bay, were, of course, on the winning Williamite side of the Glorious Revolution, which enhanced the popularity of the siege in the literature of the time. The siege of Londonderry could be called a media event, given its presence in so many works. John Mitchelburne’s play Ireland Preserv’d was published about sixteen years after the actual siege and it deeply resonated with contemporary readers and audiences, despite the fact that it was not written by a professional playwright but by a soldier who had served as cogovernor of the city during part of the siege. Mitchelburne likely wrote the play and other works on the siege in an attempt to ensure that he and other members of the military received the remuneration they felt they were due. As McGrath notes, “In debt, and believing he had received scant reward for his services during the war, he [Mitchelburne] may have been the author, or at least instigator, of three pamphlets, entitled An Account of the Transactions in the North of Ireland, anno Domini 1691 (1692), The Case of Col. John Mitchelburne, Late Governor of Londonderry (1699), and The case of the governor, officers and soldiers actually concerned in the defence of Londonderry in the kingdom of Ireland (1699). The last two were produced at a time when Mitchelburne had gone to London to petition for pay arrears for his regiment.”49 This play, therefore, may be one last attempt to convince the appropriate authorities, as well as the reading public, of his worth, given his excellent service during the siege. The variety of documents and previous committee decisions that follow the play are provided as evidence in support of his call for compensation. The play’s plot follows the life of Granade – an avatar of Mitchelburne – though Mitchelburne likely exaggerates his role in some historical actions, while excluding some life events, such as the death of his wife and children during the siege.50 The first part of the play begins with Granade, a member of the Irish army, becoming involved in military action against James II. We follow his growing astonishment at the ineffective action of many leaders on his side, especially local governors and English officials.

148

Besieged

We learn of the defeat of several cities, Lisburn and Antrim, due to disarray and poor planning. Granade then moves to Londonderry where the inhabitants are burning the suburbs to prepare for a siege.51 The second section of the play, which concentrates only on the siege of Derry, begins with the representation of another incompetent governor. But he is quickly ousted after the legendary Apprentice Boys, frustrated at his tendency to deflect mob violence by calling sham councils, shut the gates of the city against Jacobite troops. A new governor is chosen, Antony (likely a stand-in for the real Henry Baker). By the third act, we are in the eighth week of the siege, and the inhabitants of Derry are having a great deal of success. But by Act 4, the French Marshal Rosin has arrived and, determined to win, engages in the infamous act of gathering up ordinary Protestants in the surrounding area and driving them to the walls of Derry, threatening to let them starve to death. Granade makes a counter move. He places gallows on the walls and lets it be known that he plans to execute the Jacobite prisoners. He circulates letters from these prisoners amongst the besieging army. This causes a near mutiny in the Jacobite army, and the people outside the walls are released. Antony dies around this time, and Granade takes over the governorship. The final act foregrounds the horrors of famine and of the inability of relief ships to get to Derry. Fortunately the townsfolk do find some buried food hidden by some “traitors” in the town. Not knowing whether he will ultimately be relieved, in desperation, Granade devises a plan for the townsfolk to flee. But the ships finally arrive, and the city is saved. The Jacobites retreat, burning the surrounding area, and Granade starts turning over power to the domestic authorities. We might wonder why Mitchelburne chose to write a play, rather than a memoir, given his life circumstances. The Rev. George Walker, who served as joint governor of Londonderry during the siege, had, for example, produced an in-depth analysis of the way the siege unfolded during and in between martial action in his memoir, A True Account of the Siege of London-Derry (1689). Yet Mitchelburne not only selects siege drama, a rather outmoded form by this time (though as we have shown, still evolving) to represent besieged Derry, he produces an excessively long one. He is similarly loquacious in his explanation of his choice of siege drama in his preface: It may be objected why such a memorable Story should be deliver’d in a Dramatick Way, rather than in a Historical Method?

Space Made for Change

149

To which it is answer’d, That tho’ a good Subject or History has generally been imbraced in all Ages, yet at this time Plays being in Esteem, it may not be thought improper to render this Loyal Transaction as it now stands, especially when it has been the Mirth and Diversion of so many. This being in Dialogue, the Representation of it strikes deeper Impressions in the Memory; besides, as Tragedy and Comedy, the first of which hints matters of Blood and Grief amongst Eminent Persons, the other Satyrizes the ill Manners of the Age, has been the Elaborate Pains of the most Celebrated Wits. Whence come their Plots but from such Remarkable Occurences as these, in the Age preceding, or else Contemporary with them? —— Which Authority of these great Men, vindicates the method here taken, to Illustrate the famous Siege of London-derry. There are many Amplifications, Illusions, Humours, and Similies, that a Poetick Liberty allows, more than if it had been adapted for a History (Preface, n.p.) Plainly, Mitchelburne’s decision to write a play was made after much thought. The siege of Derry is deemed to be a remarkable occurrence by Mitchelburne, like the major events of antiquity. But it is more than simply an equivalent. It is worthy of memory and the dialogue promotes greater potential for cultural survival. Mitchelburne may well have been right here, because as Ian McBride points out, the play was “first published in Derry in 1705, reprinted in London (1708), Dublin (1738/9, 1777), Belfast (1774, 1750, 1759), Newry (1774), and Straband (1787), and [was] still popular in the hedge schools among all denominations, in William Carleton’s day.”52 The second half is included in Derriana (1793), a compilation of Londonderry material.53 The dramatic form, therefore, did seem to help the work strike “deeper impressions in the Memory,” both individual and communal, and Carleton’s assertions that it was also performed by pupils in the hedge schools suggest that the performative elements of it ensured it circulated orally as well as in writing. Mitchelburne’s reference to the amplifications, illusions, etc. that are permissible due to “Poetick Liberty” makes it clear that this work is not merely a recounting or an autopsy of events but is more a careful crafting and reshaping of historical matters to fit a different sort of mythology. The substance of this play differs considerably from that of the urban siege drama produced in Britain between the 1660s and 1680s, varying and

150

Besieged

extending the aesthetic and ideological work done by Crowne, Southerne, Settle, and Hughes. It is also distinctly different from the propagandistic visceral history dramatized in the The Siege and Surrender of Mons. Mitchelburne is primarily concerned, in the second half of the play, with locating the multidimensional city in crisis in a familiar and proximate space and time. Londonderry is front and centre in the second part of the play, in which the city is listed as a character, and the people of the city, including its leaders, are vital and vibrant resources during the siege. As we have seen, in Restoration siege plays, groups of citizens are often presented as a mob, appearing only when they panic and threaten to undermine the siege. In Mitchelburne’s play, one of his characters, Hamilton, the leader of the attacking Jacobite army, expects just that in this play, gleefully claiming that “such a confused Number [of people] will never be brought to any method; a Rabble of People, as they are, can do nothing at all” (II:34). But Hamilton is proven wrong: the people of Londonderry are the city and they are no rabble. Highlighting the origins of the city in his preface, Mitchelburne locates its history in the companies of the skilled tradesmen who were an essential to its genesis: “[T]he Mercers, Grocers, Drapers, Fishmongers, Goldsmiths, Skinners, Merchant-Taylors, Haberdashers, Salters, Ironmongers, Vinters, Clothworkers: as also the Woods, Fisheries &c.” (I:n.p.). This is an orderly, commercially viable city, inhabited by individuals with practical expertise in a wide range of professions.54 In the city, we observe tradesmen thoroughly involved in manufacturing equipment. Five carpenters are called to help build the gallows when Granade threatens to hang the prisoners (II:96). Blacksmiths are entrusted with the job of making the metal crow’s feet slow down Jacobite troops (II:151). Searchers are deployed to investigate whether there are hidden food supplies. We also observe women actively involved in the war effort. Amazonian women were, of course, present in earlier siege drama and positive renditions of female warriors may well have derived from the participation of women, particularly royalist women, in the Civil War, from Henrietta Maria bringing her husband needed funds to Lady Mary Bankes resisting parliamentarian troops during their siege of Corfe Castle. In Ireland Preserv’d, however, it is not necessarily aristocratic women who participate in war but ordinary gentlewomen concerned about the city. Lucretia is a highly effective spy in the first section of the play, and, in the second, we witness women involved in military action, at times standing in the stead of their timid husbands and taking prisoners (II:90).

Space Made for Change

151

Consequently, Hamilton’s belief that he will encounter an uncontrollable urban mob is not met despite the precarious conditions of urban space and its inhabitants. This is because, as Mitchelburne represents it, the people trapped in this confined city are managed by an experienced leader, whose military expertise and practicality have made him a topnotch city planner with a specialty in (unnatural) disaster zones. The military strength of the citizens is also due to their willingness to suffer and creatively adapt, not for aristocratic ideals or individual glory but for the sake of the city and nation. This is not to say that Mitchelburne avoids acknowledging the anxiety and fear of the inhabitants of Derry as they watch the invading forces attempt urbicide. Mitchelburne notes the extent of destruction in a description of the ruined city in documents attached to the play: “The Market-House with several others lay in Rubbish, the Roofs broken, shatter’d and until’d, the Streets plowed up with Bombs, which made it dangerous passing in the Night, occasion’d by the great number of Pits made by the Rebound of the Bombs. The Water and the Excrements of the Town made an insufferable Stench: Dead Bodies lay, several of them, half cover’d in their Graves. And when the Cellars and Out-Houses came to be cleansed, the dead Carcasses of starv’d people, and those kill’d with the Bombs, were found in obscure places” (II:181). The vibrant movement of everyday life has been destroyed for this city full of tradesmen. Not only has the siege isolated Londonderry, cutting it off from networks and trade routes to other cities and ports, but the arteries of the city that make trade and exchange possible are gone along with many of the citizens, whose corpses spill out into public space and infect hidden urban spaces. Mitchelburne’s city is no backdrop, and the trauma of the ruined bodies and buildings is not supplemental but vital information. Mitchelburne highlights the reality of material suffering during a siege by allowing the inhabitants to speak of their horror at their conditions and to describe the way the siege also penetrates their embodied and psychological selves. One wounded woman laments, “We do not pull off a [n]ich of our Cloaths in the Night, for as soon as the Bombs fall amongst us, we run with our Children to the Walls half naked, and what between the Bombs, and the fear of the Enemy together, we are half dead; we cannot endure to see our Childrens Throats cut before our Faces … their Brains knock’d out against the Walls” (II:68). The actual bombing of the city was said to be horrific by all who endured it. Walker notes in his memoirs that the bombs were enormous, “273 pound apiece,” and that

152

Besieged

they plowed up our Streets, and broke down our Houses, so that there was no passing the Streets nor staying within Doors, but all flock to the Walls, and the Remotest parts of the Town … while many of our sick were killed being not able to leave their Houses: They plied the Besieged so close with great Guns in the Day time, and Bombs in the Night, and sometimes in the Day, that they could not enjoy their rest, but were hurry’d from place to place, and tyer’d into faintness and diseases, which destroy’d many of the Garrison.55 There is perpetual, frantic movement in this fractured space in which the reader is invited to participate, characterized by fear of present attacks and imagined future horrors. The brutality of the siege is intensified by famine, flux, and fevers that can penetrate all military and domestic structures. This play is specific, at moments grotesquely so, about what it means to live through a famine. It is not only the city that is transformed into a prison for the inhabitants, alienating them from the world outside, the human body itself is turned into an instrument of torture. In response, the people learn to change their tastes, to eat to live rather than to eat for pleasure, and to make the best of unusual culinary products, acknowledging but learning to ignore their natural sense of disgust. Grenade hosts a meal at one point, and he describes to those in attendance, some of whom are women who have fought in battle, the meal they are about to enjoy in detail. It includes “the Liver of one of the Enemies Horses,” which he judges “very good Meat with Pepper and Salt, eaten cold”; “Horse’s Blood, fry’d with French Butter, otherwise called Tallow, thick’ned with Oatmeal; and “a Ragoo, of the Haunch of my Dog Towzer” (II:111). He adds that he has a Horse-head in the Oven, but it will take a little longer to cook as it was an old horse. The reader both appreciates the ingenuity of the governor and his stoic adaptability, this time in the dining room instead of outside the walls of the city. But things only get worse. In the midst of observing a desperate hunt for dogs and cats Granade wonders what the dogs find to eat. The soldier Fergus responds thus: “The Dogs go in the Night, and tear up the Graves, and feed on the dead Bodies, which fattens them extremely; as soon as they are fat we eat them. We have an excellent way of Dressing them, season’d with Pepper and Salt, and baking the Flesh with decay’d Wine we get in Merchants Cellars” (II:125). This speech enables Mitchelburne to make

Space Made for Change

153

clear the dire situation of the city and explain why, at some point late in the siege, they seemed willing to consider a treaty with the French. It is not only that they will soon have nothing to eat “unless we eat one another” (II:125), since they are actually already, to a degree, eating one another. However, he consistently affirms that there is no cannibalism, literal or figurative, of the living. This obscene suffering becomes an inevitable part of the heroism of the city in refusing to surrender. When a play lingers over a besieged city in its detailed material reality, it is clear that the relationship between the townspeople and their leaders is not that typically depicted in heroic drama. The city is not a means of glory for the leader. Rather, the municipal leaders work with the people of the city to protect it. They know the city, its challenges and its suffering. One of the reasons this city survives, Mitchelburne reveals, is its commitment to a Williamite leadership paradigm. William had worked hard to cultivate a concept of himself as a king who lived and acted amongst his people and was thus all the more supported by them.56 Roger B. Manning notes that when William arrived in Ireland, “He staged a military review among his … troops on the shores of Belfast Lough to restore confidence and exhort his soldiers to victory. As each regiment passed … [he] rode in amongst them ‘to encourage the soldiers and to satisfy himself of the state of every regiment.’ When an order was ‘brought to him to sign for wine for his table,’ he said aloud, ‘No, he would drink water with his soldiers.’” He also slept “amongst his troops – albeit in a portable house allegedly designed by Sir Christopher Wren.”57 William’s self-fashioning as a man of the people, as a soldier fighting alongside his troops, as he did at the Boyne, is emulated on a local urban level by Granade. But like William, Granade’s role involves more than military strategizing, for he is both soldier and governor in the final part of the drama. These jobs clearly overlap in besieged space, and he works alongside the civilians and soldiers, looking after their domestic welfare as well as the munitions and fortifications. In terms of the former, Granade is concerned for the material and spiritual needs of the city. He ensures that an old gentlewoman whose cow is killed gets recompense (II:132), voices approval for a young couple who want to get married (II:133–4), makes sure a little orphaned boy says his prayers each night (II:135), and sorely grieves the death of Amazon, one of the female warriors. In the face of the grotesque decay of city space, the governor is both stoic and sentimental. Human compassion for

154

Besieged

others continues to weave the inhabitants of the city together, affirming that in one sense the city is defined by the people rather than the land or architecture. And yet, Granade also conveys the need to engage quickly in practical military measures for the sake of the city. In terms of military measures, one of Granade’s strongest traits is his practical experience. Mitchelburne has several characters praise this quality. Of Granade, the governor (Antony) declares, “What a happiness ’tis, that this Gentleman Stranger came amongst us! He has all the methods of Soldiery at his Fingers ends.” Evangelist replies, “[H]e has been at it all his Life-time, Hamilton, nor any of them all, know their Business better” (II:58). Experience as a soldier, not necessarily as a military leader, gives substantial expertise. Mitchelburne also stresses this trait in the first document that follows the play, the frame narrative that contextualizes the supplementary material he includes, in which he writes that after the Civil War, England and Ireland lived “in all Tranquility, Peace, and Happiness, enjoying their ease, during the last Twenty Four Years of King Charles’s Reign, from 60 to 84; so that the siege of Derry, which happen’d in the Year 1689, may be call’d the Infancy of Soldierly; few understood the Management of War, or went abroad to learn it” (II:177). In particular, what this expertise in the management of war gives is the ability to manage space, in this case urban space. Indeed, Mitchelburne represents the success of the Jacobites in the first part of the play as emanating from the inability of the Williamites to manage space, due to incompetence, fear, or treachery. Both the governors of Colraine and Derry make significant strategic mistakes as they try to protect the city, sending insufficient troops to guard passes with inadequate resources; there is uncertainty whether they are traitorous or inept. Because of his experience, Mitchelburne does not only see the besieged city as a fragmented, chaotic domestic space and cut-off hub of trade; as a soldier, he resignifies the city under attack, its identifiable features, by means of martial terminology. To effectively lead in a time of martial disarray, he must see the city as a military entity and instrument; its features, its surrounding landscape, its fortifications are not aesthetic accoutrements or useful features from this perspective but are military targets and military tools. His words and orders reveal how much the old soldier understands that urban space and its natural surroundings can be transformed by the enemy into a strategic post and can be reorganized or restaged to diminish the advantage of the enemy. At one point, in regard to an incident on Windmill hill, Granade explains, “The Enemy is not

Space Made for Change

155

advanc’d any further than the Windmill, there they made a Halt. —— I understand by the Advantages of the Garden Ditches, their design is to make Breast-works strait down to the River, and have the Windmill for their Grand Guard; where I suppose they’l raise platforms for their Guns, if we let them, by which means they think to cut off our Water” (II:62). After proactively thinking about the way the enemy might harness a city location against itself, Granade maps and carries out specific tactics to take ownership of that space. The Derry Williamites must “flank” the enemy “that our Guns may play on their Front, and when they see us take that method, they must out of their Trenches, draw in a Body to receive us; then they are exposed to our great Shot from the Walls, and before they form themselves in a Body, we shall be amongst them” (II:62). Granade has a multifaceted plan to minimize the besiegers’ use of their hastily constructed architecture (trenches), which involves multiple actors. He is successful. What Mitchelburne also presents as crucial here to urban management is spatial creativity and adaptability which he demonstrates again and again during the siege, whether on the battlefield outside the city or in response to horrific threats, such as the attempt to force the gates open by starving civilians from the surrounding countryside outside the gates. Such creativity requires experience. As Granade explains, he knows about the crow’s feet spikes because he remembers “they were of great use at Tangier, in the Lord Peterborough’s time when he was Governor. They are good against Horse and Foot” (II:151). His colleagues remark that it is a “rare contrivance” and thus one that they would not be likely to invent themselves (II.151). And while there is still a possibility that the ships might be able to ultimately reach them, Granade creates imaginative alternate plans that can be used if that does not occur. As discussed in chapter 1, one of the key weapons of a besieging army is the ability to isolate a city, to prevent information from either entering or exiting it in order to remove it from the network of the nation. In an increasingly commercial world, the city is a hub, a place of interconnection defined not only by what goes on inside it but by interaction with external sites, agents, institutions, and so on. A siege removes that dimension of city life. So as well as working to sustain the city within the walls, Granade diminishes the isolation and ignorance of enemy movements by cultivating a rich and complex intelligence network. Some of the spies are Granade’s men, disguised as country folk (who are consistently underestimated by the Jacobites). The town major, Fergus, who disguises himself as an impoverished countryman with his “Red old Coat, and an

156

Besieged

old Hat,” ultimately warns the city leaders that “Mareschal Rosen, the French General, is come into the Camp” and that an attack is planned on “our Works at the Windmil” (II:80–1). As previously posited in our analysis of life writing, bodies can operate within these wider networks, and the townsfolk in Ireland Preserv’d are actively involved in them. A little boy delivers a letter with important information about military events in England and Scotland tied to his breeches (II:123) and has to take back a vital account of the state of Londonderry: the governor rather comically tells him, you must “put up thy Fundament” for security (II:124). Granade also hires the beggar Darby, with his “Cloak full of patches” (II:138), to determine if there is an unguarded escape route in case they must abandon the city and Darby discovers that information. It is a fifteen-year-old boy who tells him that ships are finally arriving for their relief (II:153). The city, then, finds ways to exceed its walls, to penetrate through the surrounding armies, and to ensure that not only its walls but its networks of connection remain secure. Of course, Mitchelburne also reveals that working with a broad spectrum of military men and civilians does not run smoothly all the time. There are problems. There are cowards, such as Captain Buff and Captain Step-stately (II:45), two aldermen inside the city who are shamed by their wives for avoiding combat. There are people who hide their supplies and others who leave the city. And, at times, Granade must force people to work together. In one instance, near the end of the siege, while the Jacobites are lamenting the loss of a French engineer worth “five hundred” of the French army to Rosin, they gaze amazed at “what a strong Work [the people of Derry] have made since last Night.” How is such a feat possible, “all done with sods,” Lord Clancarty asks, given that they “have no Horses to draw them” (II:137)? One of their number describes the way this seemingly remarkable accomplishment occurred: “’Twas observed, that there was forty or fifty Men employ’d in cutting Sods, for three days, and on yesterday it was noised in the town, that a Man was swimming over the River; presently all run out of the Town, Men, Women, and Children. The Governor upon this ordered the Gates to be closed, and not one to enter, neither old nor young, but such as brought Sods, some two, some three, that they were all brought in, in a moment” (II:137–8). But for the most part, Granade’s faith in the people of the city is justified and their honest and straightforward loyalty does not require coercion. And Mitchelburne also affirms their essential contribution to the war effort. In the preface he notes,

Space Made for Change

157

Tis presum’d, that raising Fortifications about a Town, may be done by one Enginier, tho’ it can’t be expected those should be all Enginiers that are imploy’d. Let them call those of Derry a Rabble, or what they please, they did the Work, and the Service they were imploy’d in; and they that find fault, should have been there and done better. However, the just Encomioms I give the Valoar of those People, is not in the least to lessen the great Actions that afterwards were perform’d, in the full and entire Conquest of that Kingdom by the English Army, headed by King William, of ever Bless’d Memory. But this may be said without any great Ostentation, That those of Derry did preserve Ireland from January till August, being seven months, till Relief came to them[.] (I:n.p.) Though Mitchelburne may think it wise to set his praise of the city dwellers alongside even more effusive praise of the king, the concept of valorizing subjects and working alongside them was key to Williamite mythology as it developed over time. The very ordinary language of the play affirms the focus on everyday men and women performing heroic actions. In his preface to the play, Mitchelburne justifies his choice of diction: If the Reader expects to find florid Language, curious polish’d Lines, let him read no farther, he’ll meet nothing here but homely and plain Truths, nauseous and unsavory to some Mens Stomachs, as was the Eating part in Derry, no more to be compar’d to the Elaborate Writing of the Times, than a rosted [sic] Rat to a Pheasant, or Dog’s-Flesh to Venison. But if we consider things, there is none more proper than the Soldier, to give a true and just Account, in an Affair in which he was the chief Actor. (I:n.p.) The proper emphasis of the siege drama according to this text is not on the language of romance, but on the day-to-day management of the siege itself. The shifting from event to event in the drama mimics, to an extent, the need for adaptability, a trait acquired by the city’s inhabitants as they continually assess and reassess their changing circumstances. Obscene suffering, involving disease and desperate hunger, is also an inevitable part of the heroism of the city in refusing to surrender. Even the length

158

Besieged

of the drama, which seems extreme, is appropriate for a work attempting to capture the intricacies and challenges of an extensive siege. In Ireland Preserv’d, we are invited to participate in the multisensory experience of the siege of Londonderry as elements of civilized life – streets to support movement and interaction, roofs that shelter residents, water that sustains them, and the rituals that help them retain social order (such as burial) – are lost or severely damaged. In the process, we are compelled to confront the fact that cities are intensely fragile and susceptible to sustained violence. Yet, unlike the siege dramas of the 1670s, this work is not the story of a glorious loss. It is the story of an impossible victory, in which the soldiers and civilians of Londonderry, despite the removal of the markers of civilization and modernity, do not lose their determination or their unity and, therefore, their ability to keep their city autonomous. Thus, “that little City; and was it not a little one” could, through effective management of resources and intelligence, offer up a different model of cities at war and function as a dramatic manual for the management of potential urban military disasters (“The Preface”).

Conclusion Siege drama as an aesthetic form is highly malleable in our period of study, as are the recurrent tropes featured in it. From Shakespeare to Mitchelburne, we observe not only the staying power of siege drama but also its flexibility as it reacts to volatile sociohistorical circumstances. Siege drama is, therefore, not a static entity in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It continues to evolve as it engages with debates about war, loss, grief, individual and national identity, technology, hierarchy, and urban space. At the centre of the communal imagination, the early modern theatre was a place where cities and nations could take shape, helping to reconceptualize space for the city dweller in times of instability. Siege plays reflected more fully for the audience the complexity of their lived experience in a multifaceted world. The siege play of Mitchelburne, in particular, demonstrates that authors writing in one age can reach far beyond it, deeply renovating a form in ways that may not be fully valued in its own time but that might be adapted and revitalized in later genres, such as the war documentary, in an age where new media opens up new ways to represent war-torn spaces.

CHAPteR 4

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination The Siege Ballad

The poetry of war that emerged in Civil War Britain has been written about at some length.1 There have also been studies on individual authors of war poetry who wrote during or shortly after the mid-seventeenth-century conflict. However, no one has considered the genre of siege poetry in the Civil War period, although it is a discrete subgenre of the literature of early modern warfare. The poetry of war produced during the first three Anglo-Dutch Wars (1652–74), the Williamite Wars in Ireland (1689–91), the Nine Years’ Wars (1688–97), and other Continental conflicts has also received very limited attention. While a significant amount of war poetry was produced in this period, related to the Civil War (1642–51) in the recent past as well as to contemporary wars, studies of such writings are few and far between. Given the paucity of research in this area, the subgenre of siege poetry composed between 1660 and 1722 has been almost entirely ignored. Recent gestures have been made toward identifying and analyzing some types of early modern siege poetry, including, for example Anders Ingram’s article “The Ottoman Siege of Vienna, English Ballads, and the Exclusion Crisis,” but it remains a nascent field. The scant scholarship on this subject led to the initial conclusion that there must have been few works of siege poetry, both “lowbrow” (e.g., ballads or popular hymns) and “highbrow” (e.g., epics or odes) written between 1642 and 1722. However, a review of the English Short Title Catalogue (eStC), Early English Books Online (eeBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (eCCO), the UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive, the University of Oxford’s Broadside Ballads Online project, and Angela J. McShane’s Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography revealed that there was indeed a subgenre

160

Besieged

of siege poetry in this period, though it certainly shares features with contemporary war literature given overlapping subject matter. There are at least seventy-five extant poems, including ballads, that are dedicated to the subject of siege warfare or a particular siege or that contain significant sections on sieges. No doubt, as Tessa Watt persuasively contends in Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640, only a very small percentage of the ballads that circulated in early modern Britain have survived, so there were likely hundreds more published on sieges in the period that are now lost, and we suspect that there are many other manuscript poems on sieges that have not yet come to light and some siege poetry in, for example, manuscript and printed miscellanies that have yet to be unearthed. If extant siege poems are broken down by decade of publication, it is clear that the vast majority issued between 1642 and 1722 appear in the 1640s, 1680s, and 1690s, stimulated by four major military conflicts: the British Civil War, the siege of Vienna (1683), the Nine Years’ War or the War of the Grand Alliance, and the Williamite Wars in Ireland. Roughly 70 per cent of the extant siege poems published between 1642 and 1722 address civil war sieges or the sieges of Vienna, Namur (1692, 1695), and Londonderry (1689), with Londonderry drawing the most attention from poets. The 1690s was the watershed decade for the genre, poems on sieges emphatically declining in number between 1700 and 1722. In focusing on these four conflicts, the siege poetry of the period deals with the deep horror that attends an intestine war – brother killing brother; the fear of the Ottoman Empire overtaking the Christian West; and the anxiety of a Catholic overthrow of Protestant Europe chiefly organized by the “proud” and “despotic” French. It, therefore, takes into account war in our midst, war nearby, and, to borrow Favret’s phrase, “war at a distance.”2 Although, as discussed in chapter 1, reflections on siege warfare were more likely to be published in prose nonfiction, to which the seemingly endless reports, accounts, diaries, letters, journals, and memoirs on warfare in the period attest, the identification and analysis of the genre of siege poetry demonstrates that this form of warfare was also mediated by a range of verse forms and modes that could “translate” the siege experience for readers and, in the case of oral forms, listeners. The ballad along with the elegy, panegyric, ode, and, to a lesser extent, the epic, were the most common literary forms or modes used to represent the

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

161

siege, though others, such as the sonnet, epigram, lament, satire, and allegory, are also employed to describe current or looming sieges and their aftermath. Most of the poems on besiegers and the besieged between 1642 and 1722, whether highbrow or lowbrow, address literal siege warfare, most often specific historical sieges in the recent past, from a partisan perspective. There are some exceptions in which the siege described is of an allegorical nature, yet even these tend to remain embedded in the material reality of warfare. The broadside ballad, a hybrid mediator “often simultaneously expressive of popular literature, art, music, and history,”3 is the most common verse form to represent the experience of the siege and its repercussions. Given the “explosion of printed ballads in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” one-third of which are, according to McShane, of a political nature, this would be the case for many subjects in the period.4 Of the printed ballad (published on a single sheet or broadside), Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini write, “By far the most printed medium in the literary marketplace of London, all such broadsides were vehicles of mass communication, estimated by historian Tessa Watt to have been printed in the millions, and then sent out to the provinces or onto the streets of London … Indeed, one could not travel anywhere in the city of London without hearing ballads sung on street corners or seeing broadsides pasted up on posts and walls. Ballads and their broadside brethren thus touched all levels of society.”5 Fumerton and Guerrini inform us that despite the ephemeral nature of the ballad, contemporaries saw these “multi-media forms,” “as the truest and most immediate indicators of which way the cultural wind blows – that is, of current events and popular trends.”6 To demonstrate the ballad’s ability to convey, more than other poetic forms, the up-to-the moment, popular, as well as communal and patriotic, take on sieges of importance to Britons, we begin this chapter by identifying the five main features of the siege ballad, before analyzing, to varying degrees, the balladic treatment of sieges that loomed large in the British cultural imagination. This analysis reveals the way that the geographic, religious, political, and/or ethnic context of a given siege alters and complicates the treatment of its major players, exposing the biases of the authors and the age. In the next chapter, we turn to formal siege poetry, which offers more aesthetically and substantively nuanced representations of the siege.

162

Besieged 7

Characteristics of the Siege Ballad

When considering siege ballads published in this period, it is first important to distinguish them from nonballadic siege poems published on broadsides, as the former, intended for musical performance, are multimedia in form, more indebted to oral culture, colloquial in discourse, and distinct in literary style, often featuring, for example, a call to listen and a refrain. Verse prayers, panegyrics, and elegies, for example, which are published on broadsides are, therefore, for the purposes of this chapter, included with the “highbrow” poetic forms. However, it should be kept in mind that siege ballads, like ballads generally, contain elements of a range of other poetic forms. In listening to them sung or read aloud, it is not uncommon to come into contact, for instance, with epic, panegyric, and elegiac phrases and features. However, unlike these classical genres, siege ballads typically convey a greater sense of immediacy and urgency, intensified by the refrain that often stirs the passions about the present state of affairs. Unlike more elite poetic forms, siege ballads also contain an odd mixture of discourses and tropes: at times their language and literary figures rival that of epics, panegyric, and elegies, but such elevated language and rhetorical techniques are often offset by colloquial banter, characterized by nicknames, abbreviations, and everyday phrases. This hybrid form is not intended to compete with formal literary genres, but rather may be directed at a different audience who is desperate for the latest encouraging news on current events and who may find emotional refreshment in the optimistic repetitive refrains of many siege ballads. The siege ballad appeals, along the way, to the mind (logos) and the emotions (pathos) of the audience but the discourse is more affective and committed than rational and distanced. The siege ballads in the period under study have at least three of the following five characteristics directed at informing, inspiring, and invigorating British readers, investing them in a particular (and partisan) view of siege events at home and abroad: 1. They report news on a siege or sieges, sometimes from an eyewitness perspective, in some cases reproducing the purported speech of siege participants. They thereby attest to Hyder E. Rollins’s claim that “[w]ith the outbreak of civil war … ballad-writers turned almost exclusively to journalism,” “[t]he majority … deal[ing] with the

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

2. 3.

4.

5.

163

comparatively new field of war-correspondence,” and this trend continues throughout the century.8 They encourage the audience to join in a song of prayer, praise, or bravado sung by the balladeer in response to recent lamentable or triumphant siege events or in preparation for imminent combat. They represent the military and/or the civilian forces on the “right side” of the siege as the defenders of righteousness and truth who are worthy of admiration and praise, and the enemy forces as perpetrators of wickedness and deception who are deserving of contempt and ruin.9 In royalist and later Tory siege ballads, the enemy forces are more specifically figured as agents of rebellion, disorder, and religious hypocrisy, whereas in parliamentary and later Whig ballads, they are fashioned more precisely as agents of tyranny, slavery, and false religion. Post-civil war siege ballads often triangulate conflicting forces, with the enemy consisting of two parties, most commonly the French and Irish or the Turk and Whig, though occasionally there are four parties at play. They memorialize the military courage and/or prowess of a specific military man or woman leading up to or during a siege, an individual who exemplifies the nobility of the nation itself. In certain cases, the military figure is remembered for giving his or her life for the greater political and religious good of the nation. They fantasize about the humiliation and/or destruction of the enemy’s forces, sometimes figuring such devastation in pyrotechnic and cacophonous terms.

These siege ballads, therefore, not only provide their early-modern audience with the “factual” information that those on the home front desperately desire, they also inspire in them a sense of patriotism, seek to unite them in a common cause against a common enemy, work to provide them with military “celebrities” with whom to identify and admire, and help with military recruitment. What appears to be the earliest extant siege ballad in the period under study was published in 1649. That no siege ballads published between 1642 and 1648 seem to have survived is not surprising given Natascha Würzback’s description of the clampdown on “balladmongers” during the Civil War and Interregnum:

164

Besieged

There is a clear hiatus during the Civil War years, when street ballads were suppressed and for a time banned completely … Nearly every year [between 1640 and 1660] Parliament passed new, stricter laws against any form of criticism of its policies, and against itinerant traders and balladmongers … [G]radually the number of ballads and prose texts decreased, especially those of a royalist tendency; they were only sold clandestinely … Between 1643 and 1656 no ballads were recorded in the Stationers’ Register. After Cromwell’s death in 1658 the censorship of ballads ceased and ballad production started up again with renewed vigor.10 Since siege ballads were highly partisan and political, their transmission would be viewed as especially threatening to the authorities during the Civil War and Interregnum. However, McShane’s critical bibliography of seventeenth-century political ballads does list 167 ballads issued between 1642 and 1659, so balladeers were sometimes successful at navigating around the censorship system, especially during the Interregnum, as Rollins also notes.11 Possibly the only siege ballad to survive (though not intact) from this period is the royalist Gallant Newes from Ireland published near the end of the Civil War (c. July 1649).12

A Siege Ballad from the English Civil War Gallant Newes from Ireland, of which only the first part remains, is a partisan royalist piece that traces a series of historical successes in besieging towns and garrisons in Ireland, including the city of Tredah (1649), the garrisons at Trim and Dundalk (1649), and, as is made clear from the subtitle, “at least 8 strong fortified Townes Fort[t]s and Castles … taken by storme” near the very end of the Civil War.13 The purpose of the piece is to report the news of royalist successes in Ireland gleaned from “Intelligence ryports” (287) with a focus on celebrating the military skill and stratagems of two heroic royalist commanders: Murrough McDermod O’Brien, Earl of Inchiquin and “the magnanimous” James Butler, Marquess of Ormond, though it also praises Ormond’s “potent Heroic Forses” (285). In Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the “Iliad” to Iraq, Kate McLoughlin writes a great deal about the role of the “carriage” and “delivery” of news in the literature of war, discussing the genre of

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

165

“messenger-poems” in particular, in which an authorized and credible speaker relates in a candid manner the “details of conflict.”14 Gallant Newes from Ireland, along with many other siege ballads, operates as such a messenger poem. However, it does not only relay news in an “objective” fashion, as we expect of the modern news reporter, for as with all political ballads, Gallant Newes from Ireland strives “to mold popular opinion” in an effort to garner royalist support.15 It, therefore, figures heroic royalist men as the antithesis of the parliamentary leaders, evident in both the lengthy, descriptive subtitle and the first section of the ballad that remains. That any of this ballad was published and saved is indeed shocking, as Hyder E. Rollins remarks in his introduction to this piece in his collection of royalist and parliamentarian ballads: “That such a ballad,” which “breathes in every line contempt for the Parliament and its leaders,” “could have been published is a commentary on the boldness of the printers and the difficulties of the censors.”16 It is a grand fantasy of a military victory, with the author thrusting the reader into a future in which the heroic royalist forces “will suddenly be sole Victor over Ireland,” supported by “the valiant resolution of Prince Ruperts Fleets” for the benefit of Charles II (285). The author’s prophetic imaginings proved to be fantastical indeed, when the New Model Army decimated the royalist forces in Ireland only a month or so after the ballad’s publication. Nevertheless, in reporting the news from Ireland, we are thrust into the moment of success in which the unsuccessful “Planetary warre” (286) of the rebellious “Gyants” against their lawful “God-head” (285) is compared to the British conflict that “hath wasted three gallant stately Nations” as a result of parliamentary pride against the lawful Stuart king (286). The cacophonous results are emphasized, “For Pride against their King,/Made their Cannons loud to ring,” as is their bloody and blasphemous deceptiveness (286): yet they sweeten’d our hearts by Proclamations, With many a faire pretence, They’d make glorious their Prince, they have chopt him and’s honor quite asunder But Jove being King, His lightning down will fling, and hee’l make the Elements to thunder. (286)

166

Besieged

The monstrous act of regicide, which, through zeugma, is wittily, if grimly, linked to the hewing of the king’s body and honour, is offset by the reassuring refrain in the face of rebellion: “But Jove being King,/His lightning down will fling,/and hee’l make the Elements to thunder” (286). The repetition of the lines almost wills the descent of the divine into human affairs to shake sense into the nation. Through the figure of Charles II, however, the balladeer can return to a discourse of buoyancy and bravado, praising the specific heroic military figures for a series of victories: Then cheere up brave Boyes, Which are the Kingdoms Ioyes, for Ormond ore Ireland is Victor, Lord Inchequin hath taine, Tredah with all its traine, … Dundalk and strong Trim, For the happinesse of him, I meane Charles [II] the Peoples greatest wonder. (287) Detailed descriptions of the sieges are not provided; it is enough to name them, at least in the section of the ballad that remains. Naming (Tredah, Dundalk, Trim) and numbering (“eight of their chiefest Garrisons be taken,/Towns, Cities and strong forts” [287]) in the poem’s subtitle and body is essential in the piece, for like a news report, it is intent on conveying the “facts” of the case and cataloguing, and thereby containing, the unwieldy reality of war, while at the same time fantasizing about the enemy’s “big ambition … swell[ing] it self asunder” (287). This Civil War siege ballad, even in its partial form, contains all five features common to the subgenre: it reports news, encourages the audience to participate in a song of cheer and praise, opposes the brave and loyal royalist with the proud, deceptive, and disloyal parliamentarian, memorializes two heroic figures alongside the “brave Boyes” who fight with them, and takes pleasure in visualising the enemy’s self-implosion (287).

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

167

Ballads on the Siege of Vienna With the exception of a ballad in which a soldier amorously “laies close siege” to two women and “stormes/Their forts, but yet to marry scorns,”17 few extant siege ballads survive until we arrive at the late 1670s/early 1680s, the heyday of siege ballads. A flurry of them appear on the siege of Vienna which took place during the War of the Holy League (1683–99). Vienna was besieged in July 1683 by the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa Pasha, in the service of Sultan Mehmed IV. It was at that time successfully defended by its occupants until John III (Jan Sobieski), king of Poland, came to its aid with an army that “compelled the Turks to retire.”18 While this conflict seems, at first, of interest to the British because it opposes Christendom to the Ottoman Empire, it was not wholly understood in these terms. Ingram persuasively demonstrates that seventeenth-century balladeers and pamphleteers move beyond “the heroic defeat of the enemy of Christendom” when depicting or discussing the siege of Vienna in order “to draw sophisticated analogies between these continental events and English politics, revealing a cosmopolitan frame of reference for popular political writing.”19 For the Tories, in particular, there is a clear association to be made between the Whigs and the Turks during this siege, given the desire of the “German Whiggs” to overthrow Catholicism by calling in and supporting the Ottoman forces.20 It is not uncommon, therefore, to find the Christian military opposed to both Whig and Turk in the ballads on the siege of Vienna, complicating the simpler binary established in the civil war siege ballad. At least seven extant ballads that directly address the siege of Vienna were published between 1683 and 1685, the majority of which are decidedly Tory. The siege occurred on the Continent with little British intervention, though some English volunteers seem to have found themselves in the combat zone. Those who read or heard these ballads, therefore, were simply an interested party rather than direct participants or spectators. Nonetheless, we can still identity many of the elements of the typical siege ballad in the extant ballads on the siege of Vienna, in which courageous, godly Christians are imagined confined in a city space that Turkish forces are ferociously trying to penetrate. We find four, for example, in one of the earliest and most theatrical of these ballads, the one-page Bloody Siege of Vienna: A Song (c. 1688): the eyewitness report; the opposition of the ideal forces of truth and justice and the brutish forces of tyranny and

168

Besieged

slavery; the memorialization of the deeds of one representative Protestant Christian hero; and the fantasy of the fiery and discordant humiliation and destruction of the enemy forces. The Bloody Siege of Vienna is authored by a purportedly credible Tory eyewitness who contrasts the brutal and “[t]hieving” Turks (“Algerines”) with the divine-like allied European forces. Into the mix are thrown the “German Whiggs” or Hungarian Calvinists,21 presented as allies of the Turks, whom the author uses to criticize Whiggish or anti-Stuart forces in Britain: But HUNGARY, that Bloody Sceen Of which the German Whiggs have been The provocation, and the Cause, ’Gainst God, the Emperour, and their Laws Yet still pretend Religion; At the same time brought in the Turk, They all are turn’d Mahometan, Like ours, against the Duke of York. In these lines, the German Whigs are transparently aligned with the Whiggish rebels against James Stuart, the Duke of York.22 The subsequent stanza blends political criticism of these Whigs with a portrait of the reality of war: Their Soveraign Lord the Emperour, Ingag’d ’gainst the French in War: Then, then those Bloody Rebels rose, Surpriz’d his Friends with mortal blows; They Sacrific’d Peasant and Peer, With Fier and Sword, they laid all wast: No Quarter gave for Seven Year, Then brought the Turk to Burn the rest. The German Whigs are imagined as a toxic force that lays waste to the landscape and its innocent inhabitants, without ethics or justice: peasant and peer are sacrificed without discrimination. The brutality and military skill of their allies, the Turks, render them a formidable opponent:

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

169

Three Hundred Thousand Turks in Rage, Who never spared Sex nor Age; In Seven Hundred Leagues they Marcht, Till they V I E N N A did Invest: They raised Batteries round the Town, Which did Command the highest Towers; Candy, nor Rhoads, nor Christian Crown, Was never assaulted by such Powers. The military actions are envisioned in spatial terms; we are compelled to imagine their architectural threat: batteries that “did Command the highest Towers.” Nature responds to this brutality, grieving, as it were, with the besieged. The skies over Vienna “in Black did Mourn” “[a]s if the Town like T R O Y might Burn,” and the cannon balls hurled toward the fortifications are like “Thunder-Claps.” But such natural imagery is jarringly juxtaposed with technological fact, for we are also told that each shot from the cannon was “Two Hundred Pound in weight.” Against such a volatile backdrop the beatific Christians emerge triumphant, “More like to Angels, then like Men.” This saintly body of Christians, the antithesis of the raging and ruthless Turk, stands “with Courage” and their military tactics are admired for their swiftness and accuracy: the “Canoneers” “[t]hree times dismounted their great Guns; Each time our Souldiers sallied forth” killing “all that durst oppose their Arms,” and one “Christian Sword” cannot be overcome by even ten of the Turkish foe. But their angelic nature is not enough to hide the reality of war. An account of war’s horrors with casualties on both sides is relayed in the steady, rhythm of iambic tetrameter, which is violently interrupted by two strophes, “Kill, Kill” and “thump, thump,” testifying to the fact that butchery is “all the Language” to be had in a siege: A Hundred Mines at least they sprung, Our Works blown up, both small and strong, Quartered Men blown in the Air, Kill, Kill, was all the Language there: Their Trenches fill’d with slaughtered Turks, Their Camp infected by the smell; Guns went thump, thump; Plague Dam the Rump,

170

Besieged

That taught all Nations to Rebel. This Thunder, Tempest, Fire and Blood, We Fifty Days and Nights withstood; Their Treacherous Mines we Countermin’d, And Kill’d their Miners their confin’d We Kill’d ’em Seventy Thousand Men, Of our Fifteen was left but Five; Brave P O L A N D, then, like Cæsar, came the Captive Town for to releive. At moments, readers feel as if they have entered a world of desolation, the phrase “Fifty Days and Nights” perhaps calling to mind the forty days and nights that Noah’s ark was at sea and the forty nights spent by Jesus in the wilderness; at the same time, the besieged space reminds readers of the apocalyptic spaces described in the Book of Revelation: spaces of “Thunder, Tempest, Fire, and Blood.” But any opaque allusions are offset by the mundane reality of life during a siege, for we are forced to envision men mining and countermining and tens of thousands of men losing their lives, with even the Christians losing two-third of their forces. Were it not for the Polish, under the leadership of Jan Sobieski, who arrived, like the ancient Caesar, to save their “Captive Town,” even the Christians might have been lost, and the ballad stops to memorialize, if only in brief, Sobieski’s heroic and timely actions, a figure, in the author’s mind, of the Christian heroic. It is stressed, however, in the final two stanzas of The Bloody Siege of Vienna that the Christian men fighting alongside Sobieski are also like the “[g]ods.” Reinforced by the Polish, the other Christian men fight like the heroes of classical epics: Like Gods the Christians made their way, As if they scorn’d to loose the day: And to Revenge the Christian Cause, They layed in more then Humane Blows; And Fighting through their Ranks by force, At every blow cut down a Turk: To th’ Knees in Blood, Run, Run, that cou’d, The Christians then had done their Work.

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

171

The author conjures up the fantasy of mutilated “Mahometan[s]” drained of their blood and the surviving Turks fleeing “like Fiends,” leaving all of their treasures and military supplies in “the Christians Hands.” This success, the eyewitness concludes, dissatisfied “Jack Presbyter,” presumably the Hungarian Calvinists who invited the Turks to join them; and the Turks, we are told, swear that they will return no more to the seat of the Holy Roman Empire. Many ballads on the siege of Vienna adopt a similar approach to the account of that siege, though several self-identify as hymns of praise or rallying cries for the victory of the true Christians, and do not necessarily, in such cases, employ the language of journalism or news reportage. Such is the case with the satirical On the Relief of Vienna: A Hymn for the True-Protestants (1683), where the balladeer denigrates the so-called “True-Protestant[s]” who sided with the Turks against Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor, only to be taught a lesson by “[t]he Christian God”: I Renown’d be Christian Arms, The Turkish Whigs be damn’d And lowsie Holwel in their Head,23 Who our blue Saints has shamm’d. II These are your precious Rogues! Rather than not Rebel Against their Lawful Prince, and God, They’l joyn the Devil of Hell. III These are your True-blue-men, Who Persecution cry, When They, with Julian their old Friend, The Christian God defie! IV But He has found an Arm To do the Royal Work, And vindicate Himself, against True-Protestant and Turk.24

172

Besieged

By the fifth stanza of the ballad, the Christian martial champion Sobieski makes an appearance and is proclaimed “a true Christian Prince” who “taught the Villains what is due/Both to their GOD AND CÆSAR.” In this piece, as in The Bloody Siege of Vienna, the author works to oppose what he sees as the actual, loyal Christians with the false Christians and Turks, who are nothing more than “Rogues” and “Rebels.” These “Villains” are reduced to “Dogs” by the end of the ballad: VII God bless the King of Poland too, And every Christian K I N G; The Name is Sacred: Hang the Dogs Who do not love the Thing. While the chief purpose of the ballad is to distinguish, through the satirical mode, authentic Christians from the self-styled Protestants who are in league with the Ottoman Empire, we are left in no doubt that the author is singing not only of Continental warfare but also of English politics. Making use of the siege ballad to attack the English Whigs, in the penultimate stanza of the ballad, the balladeer sings: VI God bless our good King CHARLeS And JAMeS, His own dear Brother; And may They Both live long, live long, To Succour one another. This twofold figuration of the enemy in the Tory ballads on the siege of Vienna, therefore, accomplishes two ends. First, it derides and debilitates the “idolatrous” Islamic Turk who is forced to face their God’s ineffectiveness. “Their Mahomets aid,/they in vain did implore,/And they swear they’l not trust/the dull God any more,” the reader is told in Vienna’s Triumph.25 In A Carrouse to the Emperour (c. 1683), Mohammed is maligned in even harsher terms, “Mahomet was a senceless Dogg,/A Coffee-drinking drowsie Rogue,”26 while he is described as “fast asleep” in The Christian Conquest (c. 1683), unlike the “great Jehovah” who “bless[es]” the Christians.27 Vignettes of the fleeing Turks are not uncommon; a case in point is the first stanza of A Carrouse to the Emperour, in which the present tense and first person narration thrusts the listener into the middle of the action:

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

173

Hark! I hear the Cannons Roar, Echoing from the German Shore, And the joyful News come’s o’re, that the Turks are all confounded: Loorane comes! they Run, they Run! Charge with your Horse throw the grand half-moon, And give quarter unto none, Since Starenberge is wounded. To this end, the balladeers envision “the English” as part of “all Christendom” “singing … Lays” of praise “to the Powers Divine” who has allowed the “Gyant Goliah” by “David” to be slain at Vienna, proving that those “who fight against Heaven/do fight but in vain” (Vienna’s Triumph). In this case, the substantial differences among the Christian European nations, many of which are in conflict with Britain, are elided, and we are presented with a nostalgic vision of a unified Christendom. Second, the ballad conflates the categories of Whigs and Turks to bolster the Tory party, for Whiggish tendencies are associated with a lack of Christian identity and values in most extant ballads on the siege of Vienna.

Ballads on the Sieges of Londonderry and other Irish Cities, Castles, and Forts (1688–91) Party politics are also heavily at play in the ballads on the siege that arguably had the greatest impact on the cultural imagination of the period, the siege of Londonderry, considered earlier in relation to Mitchelburne’s play, Ireland Preserv’d. However, many of the ballads on sieges in Ireland during the Williamite Wars are Whig rather than Tory in orientation, for the Tories at this point in history were viewed by the Whigs as loyal to the ousted James II and a danger to the Dutch-born William III and his wife Mary II who came to the throne in February 1689. The siege of Londonderry, which held fast against James and his Irish and French supporters, began two months later on 18 April 1689 and lasted until 28 July 1689.28 The vision of starving and injured war-weary soldiers and civilians in Londonderry entombed, as it were, in a loyal city deeply affected the emotions of the public. As with the ballads on the siege of Vienna, those dedicated to the siege of Londonderry, of which at least sixteen are extant, present a triangulated

174

Besieged

or occasionally quadrated relationship between heroic and chaotic forces: the gallant Protestants refuse to surrender to papist forces, who take the shape of French and Irish Catholics (and sometimes English Tories).29 While the ballads on the siege of Vienna frequently use the term Christian inclusively, to incorporate both Catholic and Protestant, the siege ballads on Londonderry unabashedly privilege the Protestant, who is associated with “Willy” or William III rather than the Catholic “Jemmy” or James II. The battle cry in the siege ballads on Londonderry is all liberty and freedom from slavery. One hears in many siege ballads on this subject a protomodern sensibility where politics are concerned, and they often echo, in particular, the language and values of John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which was published in the same year as the siege of Londonderry. Locke wrote in the Second Treatise of a necessary “[f]reedom from absolute, arbitrary Power” which “is so necessary to, and closely joyned with a Man’s Preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his Preservation and Life together.”30 True freedom, for Locke, is defined as a “[l]iberty to dispose, and order as he lists, his Person, Actions, Possessions, and his whole Property, within the Allowance of those Laws, under which he is, and therein not to be subject to the Arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own.”31 For the Whigs, only William and Mary could offer true liberty, freeing them from the tyrannical and enslaving James II. While the extant ballads on the siege of Londonderry exhibit many or all of the five common traits of the subgenre, they do so in a way that stresses the religious righteousness of the Protestant Williamite cause that protects the British from Popish tyranny and slavery and highlights the unmatched heroism of such men as the Anglican priest and soldier George Walker who, in his capacity as joint governor of Londonderry, held off the Jacobite forces until relief came.32 Two aspects of this siege – the need for the besieged to “stand and wait,” despite intense suffering within the castle walls, and the sheer joy at being relieved by Williamite soldiers – are routinely placed in the foreground of the balladic texts.33 The intensity of the discourse and descriptions in ballads on the siege of Londonderry reflect the reality that the conflict occurs on British soil rather than on the Continent: war on the doorstep rather than “war at a distance.” One of the earliest ballads to deal with the siege of Londonderry is The Protestants Triumph in Re-taking Kilmore and Raising the Siege at

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

175

London-Derry (c. 1689). This ballad is transparently associated with the genre of news or journalism in the opening stanza: 1. ’TIs all confirm’d the News is true And the poor Papists all look blew: Their boasted Triumph ends in Noise, For now the Irish Army Flies.34 In this and the following stanzas, we confront the typical opposition of competing forces: the “poor Papists” who “all look blew” and the flying “Irish Army” are contrasted with the “Valiant English-Men.” The “Teague,” “a nickname for an Irishman”35 “can now no longer penn” the true Protestant “[w]ithin a mighty walled Town.” As is often the case in siege ballads of this time, more global descriptions of the opposing forces are then offset by attention to certain heroic individuals; in this case, we learn of “Brave Walker … [w]hose Glorious deeds have rais’d him high,/ In War and in Divinity.” Men of similar worth, including the victorious Colonels Murray and Kirke, “Sing,/Praises to Heaven and our King” we are told, establishing the connection between supporters of William III and God himself. The balladeer takes pleasure in visualising the many slaughtered enemy forces, though he does not tally the deaths, mocking the fate of the survivors by reference to St Patrick and by briefly mimicking an Irish accent: 8. The mighty numbers that are slain, Have weakn’d so their great Campain; The Siege is rais’d and gone with speed, To tell St Patrick how they bleed? 9. Where we now leave’em to condole, Each one his Broder Teagues poor Shoul For this balladeer, who writes not only of the siege of Londonderry but also of the retaking of Kilmore and the rescue of “300 Protestant Prisoners”

176

Besieged

at Dunhaladay, the end of his poetic news report is a reminder that those who remain loyal to William and Mary will achieve fame and fortune and an assurance that nothing can overcome the true Protestant Englishman: 14. Thus men who Thirst for true renown, Enrich themselves to serve the Crown, Nor is there any exploit da[u]nts, True English-men and Protestants. In 1689 and 1690, siege ballads of this sort began to proliferate, several purporting to rearticulate “word-for-word” the speech of Protestant, French, and Irish participants, not unexpected in a work of journalism. Direct speech was, of course, a convention of the ballad genre, which is more immediate and immersive than a third-person narrative. As Elisabetta Cecconi has argued, in “seventeenth-century political broadside ballads,” the “balladeer reported the characters’ direct speech in order to highlight the dramatic impact and foster the audience’s emotional involvement in the story narrated.”36 This is the case in both The Protestant Exhortation, Or, A Copy of Verses of the Courageous Christian Collonel Walker in London-Derry, To his Fellow-Besieged Soldiers (1689) and An Excellent New Song Entituled the Seige of London-Derry, or the Church Militant, Containing the Sum of Collonel Walker’s Speech, whereby he perswaded his Beseiged Soldiers, to continue Stead-fast, Valiant, and Couragious, a little before they Obtained the last Great Victory over the Enemy (1689), in which we have the opportunity to hear from the “true” Protestant who fights to save the Christian religion from papist forces. We have cited the second ballad title in full in order to demonstrate that the balladeer stresses that the work reports direct speech and to show that he also provides the reader with a specific spatiotemporal context within which to read and process that speech. The Protestant Exhortation opens with Walker identifying his fellow soldiers as men who with “true Christian hearts of Gold” and “[c]ourage” will “restore” “[p]ure Religion.”37 They do not fight alone, for God, we learn, is on their side: “Though we are Besieged thus,/The Hand of Heaven Fights for us.” The true Protestant will “overcome” the “Romish Foes,” for the “three Kingdoms” must be kept “free/From French and Popish Tyranny.” The speaker balances the discourse of spiritual and military warfare in such passages, for while he readily “Pray[s] and Preach[es]” about the cause, he also has “[h]ands” that have been

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

177

VI

taught to Fight, To maintain King William’s right; And the Protestant true Cause Our Liberties, nay, Lives and Laws. The language of liberty and freedom is here, as it is in other such siege ballads, merged with the discourse of religion and truth. Walker encourages his fellow men to remain steadfast through analepsis and prolepsis, calling to mind the “[m]any Sallies” they “have made” out of the city to leave “the wretched Romans … Wreeking in their purple Gore” and asking them to imagine future military success, when they are relieved by the nation’s greatest Protestant hero, the king himself: VIII From King William there will come, The true Pride of Christendom; And when they’re Arrived here, They will our drooping Spirits chear. IX Then my hearts, we’ll take the Field, Where our strength shall be reveal’d And in your sweet Company, My Life I’ll venter live or dye. Trapped within the walls of Londonderry, he invites his men to participate in his future dream of mastering the field to “Fight for Liberty” when faced with “Popish Slavery.” Just as Colonel Walker hopes to “chear” his men’s “drooping Spirits” by inviting them to share his fantasy of victory, the balladeer by extension encourages the audience to sing this song of military and spiritual bravado along with Walker and his men as they prepare for imminent combat. We thereby join the choir of the “Brave Boys” of Londonderry. Colonel Walker’s reported speech in the six-part Excellent New Song Entituled the Seige of London-Derry (1689) is similar to that in The Protestant Exhortation, though its sermonic and bellicose discourse is even more rousing. The phrase “[w]e never will Surrender” in the first stanza, purportedly Walker’s motto, is complemented by the repeated declaration that

178

Besieged

death is better than capitulation in this poem that foregrounds masculine, military bravado: I. WArlike Soldiers now Advance Against the Pope and King of France With Cannon, Musket, Sword and Lance: We never will Surrender. We must either Fight or Dye; Therefore we will never fly, Till we get the Victory. Our King is Faith’s Defender.38 “Irish Conjur[ers]” and the French are the heretical anti-Christian forces in this poetic piece, with the English and, interestingly the Scot, serving as the heroic dyad that will save the nation along with King William: IV. Religion and our Liberties, Our Lives and all, at Stake now lies; Then stand your Ground, and play the Prize: And never be Enslaved Let every English Man and Scot Rather dye upon the Spot, Altho’ the Fight be ne’r so hot, Than be by Rogues deceived. These Anglo-Scottish forces, led by a singular king who, like Shakespeare’s Prospero, is master of “both Sea and Land too,” provide the “Antidote” to the poisonous “Mother Church, and Popish Plot:/That threaten’d English both and Scot.” The Glory of London-Derry: Or, The Couragious Protestants Success on the French and Irish Army (c. 1690) makes similar use of intersecting military and spiritual discourse in its “news coverage”: PRotestants chear up amain, Never fear the Popish Train,

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

179

For here I bring you News of Joy, [H]ow they the Irish do destroy.39 The poem relates the details of the siege of Londonderry in the present tense, in a way that stresses its immediacy and contemporaneity, “fram[ing] the huge scale of war for human comprehension,” in McLoughlin’s terms.40 This news ballad becomes a vehicle of good tidings, and is intended to inspire hope in its featured characters, the “Protestants,” who must “chear up amain,” and “[n]ever fear the Popish train,” again reinforcing the basic binary construction. Protestants “[v]aliantly” and “bravely stand,/And dayly fight with heart and hand.” Heroism in this siege ballad is emphasized by providing details about the military combat. We read, for example, From a spacious Steeple high, Cannon-Bullets they do flye, Which will kill two miles and more, And lays the Irish Teagues in Gore. The successful martial heroism of the true Protestant is further stressed when the number of the dead is enumerated, and the state of their bodies detailed: Thirteen Coaches which was there, With dead Bodies loaded were, Of the Great ones which did fall, Before Great London-Derry Wall. When the Romish Army see This their woful Destiny, Straight they quit the Siege therefore, And flew full forty miles and more. Such enumeration not only “fram[es] the huge scale of war for human comprehension” but also feeds into a fantasy of slaughter en masse. The diminishment of the enemy is further highlighted through linguistic mockery in this and other siege ballads on Londonderry. Just as the reported speech of the heroic forces is produced in many ballads, so too,

180

Besieged

a certain number reproduce the reported speech of enemy combatants, always with satiric intent. The enemy’s accent is ridiculed when the speaker phrases their response to their decimation in The Glory of LondonDerry: “By our Shalvashion, we’ll not go/To de King’s Slaughter-house, no no.” Such mockery of the accent of the opponent is a way to diminish them as a threat, the linguistic attack complementing the physical violence of war. Linguistic mimicry as a form of mockery, albeit with a measure of sympathy, is the defining characteristics of another ballad on Irish sieges: Teague, the Irish Trooper: Being His Sorrowful Lamentation to his Cousin Agra, and the rest of his Fellow Soldiers (c. 1691). This ballad, which covers battles and sieges at Drogheda, Dublin, Athlone, Galway, and Limerick (1690–91) during the Williamite Wars in Ireland, is a poetic epistle that parodies the voice of an “Irish Trooper” writing to his “Cousin Agra”41 to relate the series of Irish losses, including several sieges, against the Williamite forces.42 The Irish dialect, treated as a sign of linguistic inferiority, is ridiculed in the poem when, for example, the Irish Trooper explains, “The Irish Nation be Chreest now is lost.” The ballad refrain, “We still have been forc’d to Surrender and Yield,/To K. William’s Army who Conquers the Field,” compels the Irish Trooper to admit repeatedly his martial inferiority and that of the forces he represents. This loss is attributed by the speaker to his own lack of courage: “unwilling to dye,” the Irish “to the Bogs, and the Mountains did fly.” It is no wonder that he reports a litany of military failures, despite his resolve to defend Irish towns. In contrast, as is typical of the Protestant siege ballad, William’s army is associated with “Courage and [good] Conduct,” characteristics that caused Teague and the Irish army to “tremble for fear.” The Williamite army “like Tygers encompast us round,” he reports, stressing the strategic, if predatory, military tactics of William’s forces. The Irish fantasy of military might, as a result, has now been shattered and the Irish Trooper must return to his “native form,” especially once the governor of Limerick locks the gates behind them as they sally out to meet the enemy: I put on my Shack-boots, and left Cart and Plow, And thought to have been a Commander e’re now, But I must return like a poor tatter’d Rogue, Without e’re a Shirt, Coat, nay Stocking, or Brogue.

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

181

Faced with such a reality, the Irish speaker curses the French who have “misled” him and adopts a posture of submission to King William: “Great William for ever shall now be our head.” Both news report, inasmuch as it offers a condensed history of combat in Williamite Ireland, and caricature of the Irish, Teague, the Irish Trooper reminds readers of the inefficacy of efforts to challenge William’s rule either in the field or behind the walls of the besieged town. The siege ballad as, paradoxically, “objective” news report and propaganda is further evidenced in A Brief Touch of the Irish Wars: From the Siege of London-Derry to the Surrender of Drogheda, Dublin, Waterford, and many other strong Forts and Castles (c. 1690). The author stresses in the title that he is a “Private Centinel ” who has been an “Eye-Witness” to the events that he is about to relay.43 As McLoughlin observes, “[f ]irsthand experience or autopsy is indeed the crucial ingredient of authority, legitimacy and credibility in war reporting. The eye-witness offers the epistemological guarantee you can believe it because I saw it happen,” a subject addressed at some length in the first chapter of this book on life writing and to which we will return in the last chapter on Bunyan’s Holy War.44 McLoughlin argues that “tropes of autopsy” are commonplace in war reports, poetic or otherwise, and indeed this is what occurs in the sentinel’s eyewitness account of sieges and surrenders during the Williamite Wars in Ireland: a dissection of the events that secured the military success of King William.45 The sentinel’s verse narrative is Whiggish in that it demonizes the Tories, associating them with the cowardly and ineffectual French Catholic invaders: the behaviour of “The French Horse and Foot, and the Tories likewise” who foolishly put their “trust” in “Lewis” are opposed to the “true English Courage” of the “Undaunted” Williamite forces, ensuring that “Protestant Soldiers still carry the day.” The Tories are left “to scowre and scamper away.” More good “Tydings” from the combat zone are relayed in a poetic journalistic fashion in The Relief of London-Derry; Or, The Happy Arrival of the Timely Succours Landed at London-Derry, by the Prudent Care and Conduct of Major General Kirk, To the unspeakable Joy of the Besieged (c. 1690). Its news is addressed to “True Subjects” who will with an “honest thankfull heart” happily hear the information that is to be shared through song.46 In announcing that the listener or reader need not be afraid of the tidings, the speaker suggests that such tidings were typically feared, as

182

Besieged

they often are in war. But the news shared in this poem is optimistic, for there is “hope” that “the worst is past” now in Londonderry. The speaker contrasts earlier suffering with present recompense, reciting that while “[W]ant of food was all their Grief ” in the past “now they’ve succour and relief ” with the arrival of more troops. Focusing in on a particularly heroic figure, who functions metonymically here, as elsewhere, as the best of the “True Subjects” of William, Major General Percy Kirke is named in this poem as the “noble General” who “for their sakes would venture all” once he hears that his fellow compatriots “could not much longer hold.” So he sails to Londonderry and nature is sympathetic with his plight, providing a “pleasant Gale” that carries his vessel, filled with “Food and Ammunition” along the way. We are told of another “valiant Captain,” “Captain Leake,” whose “Bullets” permitted the “brave Mountjoy” and others to sail “safely by.” The author of The Relief of London-Derry not only dwells on specific heroes but takes time to depict the moment when the starving besieged first see the food brought to them, which is only occasionally described in the siege ballads of the period. The response of the besieged is intense and transformative: When those poor Souls this Food beheld, O they were then with Comfort fill’d They through the City did express Their Joy with hearty thankfullness. Their Great Guns they let off likewise, The which did Eccho to the Skies, That Major Kirk might understand Relief was safe arriv’d at Land. Great King William’s Royal Fame On the Walls they did Proclaim, With Drums, & Trumpets, loud Huzza’s Defender of our Faith, and Laws. The privation of the heroic besieged, who would not give up the city to the enemies of William even to save their lives, is emphasized when we

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

183

are told that some died after eating, since their bodies, used to starvation, were overwhelmed by the food they finally ingested. The willingness to suffer and sacrifice for political and religious liberty depicted in The Relief of London-Derry is not only a masculine attribute as several ballads make clear, for it is clearly shared, for example, by the female soldier in The Woman Warrier: Being An Account of a young Woman who lived in Cow-Cross, near West-smithfield; who changing her Apparel Entered her self on Board, in quality of a Soldier, and sailed to Ireland, where she Valiantly behaved her self, particularly at the Siege of Cork, where she lost her Toes and received a Mortal Wound in her Body, of which she since Dyed in her return to London (c. 1690).47 The first stanza of this work advises women to pay attention to this ballad because it contains the narrative of a young married Englishwoman who leaves the comfort of home and her husband, risking “her Life” to be “a Soldier, a Soldier.”48 Interestingly, this action is praised because she chose the “valiant” path, resolving to go oversees to fight for her kingdom: her heroism is not undermined by her sex or wifely role, for her self-transformation into a male for the purposes of war is seen as a necessary good. This unnamed female soldier is described as “valiant and bold” and as one who cannot “be controll’d” by her foes. She is physically capable, giving “blows” to anyone who did “offend her,” fighting, we are told, “[l]ike a brave Hero” under Grafton, forcing her enemies, “the proud To——ries,” to “retire.” Like her ideal male counterparts, she fights without fear, “bravely … charg[ing]” and “giv[ing] Fire.” The focus in the poem is the siege of Cork, in which she “bravely advance[s]” upon the town. She moves ahead while the cannon balls batter the walls of the city and the trumpet sounds, but she is, unhappily, seriously wounded in the fray. Managing to live until she returns “[t]o her own Native Shore,” she dies before she makes it to London, and the poem ends with a proto-Dickensian scene, in which her loving parents mourn this “woman warrier” who died a martyr for the cause: When her Parents beheld, They with Sorrow was fill’d, For why they did dear——ly adore her, In her Grave now she lies, ’Tis not watry Eyes, No nor sighing, nor sighing, that e’er can restore her.

184

Besieged

That such suffering and sacrifice during the Williamite Wars in Ireland were experienced by the Anglo-Irish, English, and Scots on British soil makes it all the more poignant to readers.

Ballads of the Sieges of Mons and Namur Popular interest in sieges on foreign soil appears to have diminished by the end of the century. Few extant ballads, for example, remain on the siege of Mons, and while the sieges of Namur, which occurred, as earlier noted, during the Nine Years’ War, were the subject of quite a few refined poems (at least sixteen) in the 1690s, only four extant broadside ballads have been identified on the subject. And of these four, one, The Imprisoned Commander, deals with the first siege of Namur in a tangential way since it voices the plight of an imprisoned English commander after the French successfully besiege Namur in 1692. Most of the poems on Namur published in the 1690s are of a more literary and exclusive character, with the panegyric and Pindaric Ode, for example, being viewed as especially suitable genres for the subject. Given the ephemeral nature of the ballad, we cannot be sure that this is the case, but there is evidence to conclude that, as we have also seen with drama, there may have been a measure of “siege fatigue” for balladists by the turn of the century. After all, the sieges at that time and shortly thereafter occurred on the Continent and there was a growing discontent at William’s ongoing military pursuits overseas. Labouring English men and women may have felt that matters at home were more interesting than matters abroad. Although broadside ballads were published into the nineteenth century, the peak of the genre was reached in the 1600s, and as the sun began to set on the seventeenth century, broadside ballads on any subject held less cultural sway over the masses.49 Therefore, the few extant broadside ballads that remain on the sieges of Namur may also reflect the shift in the cultural importance of the ballad form at this historical moment. The ballads on the siege of Mons and those on the siege of Namur tend to narrow the reader’s or listener’s field of vision to the heroic William III. Although the sieges on the Continent during the Nine Years’ War involved multiple parties, the ballads frequently reduce the number of players or at least place them in the background. The valiant and sacrificial soldier-king William III, a figure of “undaunted Courage” flanked by his brave “Boys,”

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

185

and the haughty and insolent Louis XIV, whose troops will soon “flye like Chaff before the Wind,” take centre stage in, for example, The Royal Letter To our Gracious Queen Mary, from his Majesty in Flanders: Who at the Head of Fifty Thousand Men is going to Raise The Siege of Mons (c. 1691), and the royal speaker fantasizes about the constant thunderous noise of cannon fire that will shake the French to their foundations: Trumpets shall sound, and Balls rebound, While the loud-mouth’d Cannons roar all round, Courage we’l take, and likewise make The vast Center of the Earth to shake.50 The author suggests that past successes, during sallies of the besieged out of Mons, predict future victory, and enumerates and enjoys envisioning the French dead, whose bodies are scattered around the town’s gate: MONS the French now lies before, But some are laid in Reeking Gore, For the Forces often Sally’d out, And like valiant Noble Hero’s fought: Seven hundred they cut down, Of French, which lay before the Town, This does cause their very Hearts to ake, Fearing they the Town shall never take: The emphasis on the king’s personal sacrifice for the public good is made clear in this ballad, the king urging the queen to remain patient in his “long absence,” for military matters take precedence over personal relations if European liberty is to be “retrieve[d].” Love is no match for war, and William’s commitment to his “Boys as bold as ever Europe bred” affirms his militant masculinity, which he insists will express itself in “Shot as thick as showers of Hail” which will be sent “with a Flaming Gale.” The extant ballads that deal directly with the second siege of Namur are not especially successful from a literary perspective. The Glory of Flanders: or, The Triumphant Army’s Victory over the French at Namur, forcing them to yield and surrender up the Town to King William, the Royal Conqueror (c. 1695) is particularly stilted and lacklustre. In this ballad, the author is more interested in blandly recounting a series of events than in producing

186

Besieged

a cadenced text rich in literary figures. As is commonplace, however, the balladeer begins by means of the trope of reportage: Here’s joyful good tydings I bring you this day, Therefore listen a while, loving Subjects, I pray Now the Monsieurs at Namur, have met with their match There’s an Army in Flanders the work will dispatch, For already King William of fame and renown, He has made them been glad to surrender the town.51 The obligatory nod to English “courage and conquering skill” soon follows as does the account of the thunderous noise that attends the “batter[ing] down” of “their walls and high battlements” and the triumphant presence of the “right valiant K William of fame and renown.” As with earlier siege ballads, there is a lyrical desire to propel the reader into the future in order to fantasize about the joy of victory: We’ll soon have the castle we make no great doubt, Tho perhaps, at the present, they seem to hold out, For we find that their glory begins to decay, While King William, for victory carries the day; For the pride of the French he begins to pull down, And has made them be glad to surrender the town. At this moment in the ballad, the speaker asks for spiritual intervention from the “loving Subjects” who attend to his words, encouraging them to join in a prayer of supplication for the success of the sacrificial William who is presented as willing to give his own life “our wrongs to redress.” Such redress comes with the diminishment, decay, and disappearance of the French whose “pride” and “insolence” is repeatedly “pull’d … down” in all the ballads on the sieges of Mons and Namur. The Triumph of Namur, Or, The Confederate Army’s unspeakable Joy, for their Victory over the French, in the Surrender of the Castle, which they bravely Conquer’d (c. 1695) is far superior as an aesthetic and rhythmic piece, but it shares with others on the subject the call for loyal “Protestant Subjects” to listen to “Tydings of Joy,” depicts William trampling down the insolence of Louis, revels in the cacophonous sounds of war, and happily pictures the French terrified by and submissive after the Williamite onslaught:

Songs of War in the Popular Imagination

187

The French in their Castle did tremble, to hear how the Canons did roar, Whose battering Balls so shatter’d their walls, they ne’r was so frighted before; For while this close Siege we did form, with Bombs we supplied them so warm, That, during the Action, they were in distraction, that just like a fiery storm, They fell on the Castle with thundring noise, This made them be glad to surrender, brave Boys.52 Linguistic mockery of the French follows, with the foolish and perspiring Duc de Boufflers lamenting the loss of Namur: The Marquess de Boufflers he sweated with Anger and Passion of Mind, Quoth he, Is it so, Begar, must we go and leave this good Castle behind? It is a sad ting, I declare, and more den me’s able to bear; When Leues my Master, shall hear this Disaster, Begar in a passion he’ll swear. And despite William’s military might, the French rely on his mercy on their surrender: “Yes, let us surrender: For why,/If we are serious, King WILLIAM will spare us;/then let us not wilfully die.” William of Orange is, as it were, an “officer and a gentleman,” the balladeer suggests, one who remains civilized despite the brutality of war. A lengthy section of King William’s Welcome Home: Or, The Subjects unspeakable Joy for his safe Arrival from Flanders to his Kingdom of England (c. 1695) published not long after the siege of Namur, recalls with glee the irony that Namur was surrendered by the French to this civilized warrior king who secured Namur on the “very morn,/By date of the Year, as it doth appear,/that Lewis, their Master, was born.” This the author reads as a sign of future success during Continental sieges led by this sacrificial man “who ventures his Life for us all.”53

188

Besieged

Conclusion The majority of siege ballads published between 1642 and 1722 share at least three of the five features listed above. These elements of the subgenre convey to the reader or listener a sense of immediacy, shared communal ambition, national pride, moral clarity, and religiopolitical optimism despite the siege ballad’s recognition of the brutal deaths of soldiers and civilians who defend or attempt to demolish walls that divide at home and abroad. Although the siege ballad is a relatively static form, the complex geographic, political, religious, and ethnic circumstances of major military events stimulates a shift in balladic expression. The besieging Turk and his strategies on the Continent are, for example, represented quite differently than the Irish and French besiegers and their tactics on home soil. Yet there is a remarkable consistency in these siege ballads, from their news reportage to those on the home front to their affecting call to participate in a song of entreaty, celebration, or daring, and from their memorialization of military courage and prowess to their insistence on a political and ethical “right” and “wrong” side in siege warfare and to their violent fantasies of humiliating and devastating those they believe are on the wrong side of history. The siege event compelled ballad authors and their everyday reader to envision the reality of warfare in fragile towns and cities much like the ones they inhabit but to find relief in happily imagining the staying-power of courageous Christians – heroic and virtuous soldiers and civilians alike – rescuing pious Christians from certain death in a mass urban grave in the nick of time.

CHAPteR 5

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric The Siege in Elevated Poetic Strains

1

Formal Siege Poetry: “I sing of Times trans-shifting”

Elements of siege ballads are, as discussed in the previous chapter, present in more formal siege poems published between 1642 and 1722, despite their stylistic, structural, and substantive differences. As noted in our introduction, Nigel Smith has discussed the destabilization of genre in a time of revolution and this is evident no less in the elevated or cultured forms of siege poetry of the period than in popular verse. As Andrea Brady observes, for example, in terms of the postregicide royalist elegy, which would include the siege elegy, “many … elegists availed themselves of the new imaginative resources released in hybrid genres including dream poems, post-mortem confessions, reportage, correspondence, diaries and speeches.”2 When poetry seeks to represent actual events, including sieges, “historical representation subsumes and infiltrates genres,” as Gerald M. MacLean tells us, “[a]nd when generic boundaries are most unstable, political commentary is most to be expected.”3 Some time ago, Margaret Anne Doody, in The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered, argued that this tendency toward generic and modal fluidity and hybridity in “Civil War verse” had “far-reaching implications for Restoration poetry and poetics”: “genres had to be worked out again, and all style” was “recognized as concealing lurking dangers.”4 One outcome of this process was the production of poetic works in a “mixture of styles,” which Doody identifies as a significant aspect of Augustan verse.5 This proves to be the case in the majority of formal siege poems. While the siege motif in particular might appear, on the surface, to fit naturally into such literary categories as the epic, ode, elegy, panegyric,

190

Besieged

and so forth, these generic labels do not adequately convey the substance of the material and mode of presentation, since journalistic epics, siege sonnets, balladic Pindaric odes, and literalized allegories diverge significantly from literary tradition. As with balladists, more established poets must also deal with shifting oral and new print media in their attempt to represent historic events. Milton’s two siege sonnets, one on a threatened siege and a second on the hero of an actual one serve as case studies of the repurposing of genres during wartime. In “When the Assault Was Intended to the City,” the sonnet form becomes a means to record Milton’s plea for mercy at a particular historical moment in a distinct urban space, the poet advising that he can “requite” such mercy to whatever military leader should happen upon his “defenceless doors”: for he knows the charms That call fame on such gentle acts as these, And he can spread thy name o’er lands and seas, Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms.6 This poetic response to what Milton believes is an impending siege of London (November 1642), which did not ultimately take place, reveals not only the fear experienced by citizens readying themselves for a siege of their home but also the fantasy that through linguistic negotiation, an individual inhabitant (albeit a singular one) might be capable of saving the city and the self from destruction.7 Milton recalls occasions in ancient times when art or culture could hold the devastating forces of war at bay: Lift not thy spear against the muses’ bower; The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground: and the repeated air Of sad Electra’s poet had the power To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.8 This is the discourse of wish fulfillment of one who, on his own account, cannot stop the deluge of warfare from engulfing his home. Milton’s sonnet, “On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester,” praises the heroic besieger in a familiar and less personal way, but the substance of the poem, which sidesteps the action to foreground

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

191

the hero, is more characteristic of the panegyric, as Smith claims, than the English sonnet, and the confident hero-worship of Fairfax, a figure of military renown and “firm unshaken virtue,” is offset by a nagging expression of the horror of war: “For what can war, but endless war still breed?”9 These siege sonnets are hardly typical of the sonnets with which Milton was familiar, but as his sonnets written during the Civil War and Interregnum demonstrate, the genre had to accommodate the realities of sieges and massacres.10 As with Milton, most composers of formal siege poetry adapted established genres in order to speak of, and give shape to, a specific military event in a poetic medium. Another representative case of the repurposing of genre in the face of siege warfare and its aftermath is Herrick’s adaptation of epigrammatic verse to siege warfare in “To The King, Upon His Taking of Leicester,” included in Hesperides. This poem speaks of a siege led by Prince Rupert in May 1645: tHis Day is Yours Great CHARLES! and in this War Your Fate, and Ours, alike Victorious are. In her white Stole; now Victory do’s rest Enspher’d with Palm on Your Triumphant Crest. Fortune is now your Captive; other Kings Hold but her hands; You hold both hands and wings.11 In this six-line epigram in heroic couplets, reminiscent of an emblem poem, Herrick takes advantage of the fact that the “Renaissance epigram … had no specified generic subject,” as Alastair Fowler explains: “There were epigrams on fashions and on philosophy; on Pythagorean diets and fat men; music and masturbation; novas and nipples; wet farts and diarrhoea; lawyers and sewage disposals. This freest of forms might also have been destined for mastery of the new worlds of the seventeenth century.”12 Indeed, Herrick can adapt the form to master the world of civil war sieges, although the siege epigram is a rare beast, and in Herrick’s hands, it becomes a way to engage in royalist identity formation and military celebration. The specific day in which Leicester is taken by Rupert becomes a visual and verbal marker of the victorious king’s and his loyal subjects’ power over Fate or Fortune. Perhaps the most curious adaptation of literary forms or modes is Margaret Cavendish’s approach to allegory in her intersecting siege poems

192

Besieged

“The Fort or Castle of Hope” and “Doubts Assault, and Hopes Defence” published in Poems and Phancies (1664). In these poems the allegorical mode is “flattened,” or even inverted, when the purported vehicle, the castle, appears to point to little other than its own material reality as a besieged space, despite Cavendish’s claim that the castle signifies the abstraction Hope and the besieging forces Doubt. Cavendish shares with precision the tactics and strategies that the besieged must undertake to ensure that the castle remains secure in the face of onslaught, relying on the language of ammunition, engines, ditches, entrenchment, mines, grenades, and a wall strewn with the bodies of slain soldiers, on whom the living tread. Privileging the material reality of siege warfare, rather than the psychological struggle between hope and doubt, seems to be the intended end of the poems, with the final phrases of both poems remaining firmly entrenched in physical warfare rather than in mental constructs: “But in the Castle, where lies all their Good,/There they will Fight to the last Drop of Blood” and “Thus Various Fortune on each Side did fall,/And Death was th’ only Conquerour of all.”13 This inability to follow traditional allegorical conventions when describing siege warfare in these poems may explain why earlier she employs a poetic dialogue, “A Dialogue between a Bountifull Knight and a Castle Ruin’d in Warr,” to simply personify the besieged castle (as she did the hare in “The Hunting of the Hare”) to explore the material reality of nonhuman objects (which she understood as sensory given her animist and monist materialism) that are subject to the destructive forces of humans. In this dialogue, the “body” of the castle is no longer its own because it has been transformed into a garrison, losing its place in a wider pastoral landscape and reduced to a rubbish heap.14 As we explore in the next chapter on Bunyan’s Holy War, the allegorical mode is at times heavily strained and transfigured by recent, local siege warfare. In adapting existing literary forms and traditions to siege events, authors of “historical poetry,” to borrow MacLean’s term, most often gravitate toward those associated with the heroic: those best suited to idealize and sentimentalize the subject, notably the heroic leader or resistor of a siege.15 We have seen that this is also the case in many of the ballads considered. There is an impulse to draw the reader’s attention to moments of great nobility of character and action in contexts of great brutality and depravity, leading authors to the epic, panegyric, elegiac, and/or odic modes. We use the term “mode” deliberately in this chapter because of the difficulty of identifying a formal siege poem in terms of a single genre given the

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

193

needed flexibility of literary forms in a nation at war. It is helpful here to keep in mind Kenneth Borris’s differentiation of genre and mode in Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton: “Since a mode is relatively unstructured, dependent for external form on incorporation into one or more kinds, modes commonly develop through abstraction from a correlative kind, as with the heroic mode from epic, or the elegiac counterpart of elegy.”16 By discussing the poems in terms of mode, we can, for example, account for epic and elegiac “motifs, codes and conventions” in a siege poem without requiring that poem to follow a rigid formal structure or to make use of every aspect of a “generic repertoire, especially … the structural features that establish the general aspect and organizational characteristics associated with the genre.”17 Therefore, we will write of the epic, panegyric, elegiac, and odic modes of the siege poem composed during the sixty-year period in question. However, while formal siege poems often narrate the stories of idealized characters and deeds that embody transcendent values and virtues, they cannot always hold material reality and a measure of pessimism at bay. Journalistic details and the ignoble aspects of siege warfare repeatedly rear their head in many siege poems, weighing down the discourse of heroic transcendence just as they did in certain plays and autobiographical prose examined earlier. There are also formal siege poems which are anti- or mock-heroic in nature, especially as we move into the reign of William and Mary, when Tories, as noted in the previous chapter, grew tired of William drawing the English into what felt like endless Continental military conflicts. In the age of satire, it is unsurprising that the satirical eye was turned more pointedly on siege warfare overseas to question the heroic ideals extolled in other siege poems. This chapter will take the reader, therefore, from siege poetry in the heroic mode often undermined by the “realism” of the city, castle, or close under siege and the “matterof-fact” journalistic narration to the barefaced exposure of the absurdities of siege warfare in mock-heroic poems.

Narrative Siege Poems: The Heroic Mode and “Epic Ambition” In the polarizing and explosive world of siege warfare, the heroic mode, with its expansive and idealizing tendencies seems to offer a kind of certainty and stability.18 Sir Philip Sidney defined “heroicall poems” thus:

194

Besieged

There rests the Heroicall, whose very name (I thinke) should daunt all back-biters; for by what conceit can a tongue be directed to speake evill of that, which draweth with it no lesse Champions then Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas, Turnus, Tideus, and Rinaldo? who doth not onely teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and mooveth to the most high and excellent truth. Who maketh magnanimity and justice shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires … But if any thing be already sayd in the defence of sweete Poetry, all concurreth to the maintaining the Heroicall, which is not onely a kinde, but the best, and most accomplished kinde of Poetry. For as the image of each action styrreth and instructeth the mind, so the loftie Image of such Worthies, moste inflameth the mind with desire to be worthy, and informes with counsel how to be worthy.19 This heroic impulse to “teacheth and mooveth” the reader or listener “to the most high and excellent truth” by making nobility and justice, embodied by the virtuous hero, “shine throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires” suggests that these texts are vehicles of moral transcendence. In criticizing earlier epics, the most elevated literary form associated with the heroic, William Davenant argued that “heroic poetry must be made increasingly useful, doctrinal and morally instructive,” especially to political leaders.20 Davenant also argued that heroic poems need to be as realistic as possible, avoiding the fantastical, if they are to have their intended effect.21 With respect to major narrative poems written in the heroic mode between 1642 and 1722 that feature one or more sieges, three stand out: Abraham’s Cowley’s unfinished Civil War (c. 1643), which presents a series of vignettes on recent civil war sieges (in addition to battles) shortly after they occur, W.C.’s The Siege of Vienna (1685) published only a few years after the historical siege took place, and Joseph Aickin’s Londerias; or, A Narrative of the Siege of London-Dery (1699) published about a decade after the siege of Londonderry. In all three instances the sieges represented in these poems are relatively current, surprisingly realistic, and morally instructive. We classify them as the historical heroic with epic features and drive, keeping in mind John Dryden’s definition of the heroic, which he differentiates from the “epic proper.” As MacLean explains, in describing his own heroic poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden observes that “while the subject and persons are of epic stature, the poem lacks certain

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

195

formal and artistic properties required of epic proper – such as unity of action, theme, and length.”22 In the three lengthy historic heroic poems we consider in this chapter, all reveal the impulse to “follow chronological events, even [at times] to the detriment of artistic principles, in the pursuit of its argument.”23 Although the epic is associated with the historical heroic in the three lengthy narrative poems under study, in the former two there is no sustained sense of virtuous heroism that “shine[s] throughout all misty fearfulness and foggy desires.” In fact, we often discover in the poetic landscapes of these heroic poems “misty fearfulness” and sheer horror sitting alongside “magnanimity and justice.” While this tension rarely occurs in Homeric and Virgilian epics,24 it is typical of Lucan’s Pharsalia or The Civil War (c. 61–65),25 which was, as is often noted, highly influential in literary circles, particularly republican, in mid-seventeenth-century Britain. The stark brutality of war and the disturbing nature of intestine conflict in the Lucanic epic often resonated with poets who lived and wrote during the Civil War and its aftermath, and such appears to be true of Cowley and W.C.26 The graphic, and sometimes grotesque and gory, depiction of the reality of siege warfare, and a periodic injection of fatalism, tends to undermine the heroic in these works, for fate seems to have more authority than does providence. Aickin’s Londerias is the most explicitly historical and heroic of the three, yet once again the heroism is greatly diminished because of its strangely hybrid nature. While it clearly draws on epic conventions, it is more properly what we call a documentary epic: the author documents with detailed, largely matter-of-fact prosaic discourse the events surrounding the siege as they occurred chronologically. With the near absence of tropes and the dominance of tactical or strategic discourse, the work never rises to heroic heights, despite Aickin’s association of it with the heroic and the epic specifically. More than any other type of siege poetry published between 1642 and 1722, narrative siege poems written in the heroic mode allow for a detailed account of the physicality of siege warfare, describing with specificity the machinery and architecture of war, as well as the fascinating interaction of soldiers and structures, both manmade and natural. Yet, like the novel, lengthy narrative poems of this nature attend not only to setting but also to character and plot. As Fowler notes, the epic (the highest form of heroic verse) has an “encyclopedic comprehensiveness”27; J.K. Newman stresses that the epic “incorporates within it not only the

196

Besieged

methods of narrative poetry … but also of lyric and dramatic poetry … It includes and expands upon panegyric and lament” in particular, and “[w]ith its extended speeches and its well-crafted scenic structure, it is often dramatic.”28 The three main narrative poems on sieges written in the heroic or epic mode, we argue, provide the reader with the most complete sense of the experience of early modern siege warfare and, in the case of The Civil War and The Siege of Vienna, they do so in a particularly dramatic fashion. But in every case, as suggested above, like Dryden’s historical poetry from the period, all are generic hybrids given the pressures that warfare puts on literary expression. 29

Abraham Cowley, The Civil War (c. 1643)

Much has been written about Cowley’s incomplete epic The Civil War, especially the fact that it is “a poem that was overtaken by history before it was completed” because a royalist epic could not be finished when it was becoming clear that the royalist cause would be lost.30 David Trotter argues that “Cowley found the epic frame increasingly inhospitable” because it could not contain the competing rhetorics needed to capture the reality of the doomed civil war conflict; Nigel Smith envisions Cowley adapting the epic form to accommodate the divisive reality of the Civil War before royalist losses leads him to “forget” this “heroic work”; David Norbrook views the text as a relatively “orthodox poem which then founders on intractable realities” and which turns from historical fact to mythology and satire as a result; and Paul Salzman believes that after the composition of this “stalled epic,” “Royalist epics” could only “approach aspects of the conflict more obliquely.”31 However, for all its limitations and unfinished state The Civil War is perhaps the poem of that period that best captures in a single poetic snapshot the historical, spatial, mythic, and harrowing dimension of siege warfare, describing the sieges of Birmingham (1643), Bristol (1643), Exeter (1643), and Gloucester (1643) from a royalist perspective and in, as Allan Pritchard accurately asserts, “the context of propaganda warfare of this period waged between Mercurius Aulicus and its chief Parliamentary opponent, Mercurius Britanicus, and their cohort of followers.”32 What is most notable in Cowley’s treatment of sieges in The Civil War is the attention he pays to the history of each town, describing its ancient

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

197

past. This is not something detailed in the siege ballads, which tend to skim over the historic dimension of a given combat site. Rather than conceiving of all the inhabitants of a besieged town as English, Cowley links many to early settlers in Britain. In recounting Prince Rupert’s capture of Birmingham in April 1643, for example, he addresses the inhabitants as the “bold Cornavian race,” “the name of a Midlands tribe,” Pritchard tells us;33 when describing the siege of the “strong Close” of nearby Lichfield, Cowley recalls the holy history of this once sacred space, “Long hallow’ed by the peacefull Miter’ed race/Of reverent Duina” (II:95, 98–9). In fact, in the latter case of the siege of a cathedral close, Cowley populates the place with apparitions in support of the royalist besiegers: “The soules of thowsand Bishops midst yee stand,/And with heard prayers adde strength to Ruperts hand” (II:103–4). So spirits of the past, the living dead as it were, haunt many of these besieged sites, as do memories of the trades or activities for which they were known, as Defoe often does in his siege prose. In some cases, the pastness of urban space under siege points to the horror of dismantling the security of placeness and the undoing of civilization. However, in other cases, as MacLean claims, Cowley shares with his readers an account of past traumas endured by the towns, “recall[ing] these precedents as items in the memory of a personified city, a memory that reminds the seemingly impartial city to fear the impending” conflict.34 However, when the royalists are the besiegers, Cowley has little sympathy for the besieged town and its inhabitants, and he takes pleasure in imagining its destruction, theologizing the royalist slaughter of their enemies to justify the need to reduce a civilized urban place to a decimated space. He crafts a dynamic map of the nation where the essence and value of each city is contingent on its leadership. With the call to open the gates of Birmingham, for example, Cowley writes that those inside will experience a brutal moral “[l]esson” which results from “th’ Effects of Sinne” (II:70). The urban space, a Parliamentary stronghold associated with the manufacture of weapons, is reduced to a sooty, unenlightened site through classical allusion: it is “black Vulcans noysy Towne” and those that call it home are associated with “the barbarous Cyclops sooty race” (II:72, 78) Their provision of weaponry to the opponents of the king is tantamount, in Cowley’s opinion, to challenging God: “Did ere Pyracmon and big Brontes prove/The new-made Thunders force against their Jove?” (II:75–6). Cowley turns from the scene of the siege to the wretched tragic scene of a royalist hero, narrowing our vision to the besieging of a specific

198

Besieged

heroic body, that of William Feilding, first Earl of Denbigh (“Denby”). He compels us to witness the bleeding wound in Denby’s head: How bravely there the noble Denby lead? Till, oh, wide Death gap’ed in his wounded Head. And old and youthfull Souldier! O sad sight! The crimson streame all staines his reverent White! (II:81–4) Exposing the penetrated body of Denby seems to justify the penetration and incineration of the militarized and immoral Birmingham, hence Rupert’s instructions: Goe burne the wicked Towne, and let it all Bee one bright Pire for his great Funerall. Into one glowing Forge the whole streets turne; (II:85–7) For Cowley, the agony of a single royalist noble soldier, whose body has been wrongly besieged, justifies the slaughter of an entire town. The word “towne” here functions as a metonym for the people in it, a rhetorical strategy to diminish the inhumanity of retributive military action. Whereas the loss of the royalist Denby is deeply personal and pitiable, slowing down the poetic pace, the scorching of countless soldiers and civilians in Birmingham is reduced to the burning of the “towne” or the slaughter of “foolish Rebells,” whose cries for “peace” are “[t]oo late,” and poetic time seems to speed up apace in its accounting of the conflagration (II:89). “Lichfeilds strong Close,” to Cowley’s mind, has also been taken over by the “profane” (II:95, 97–8), but in his narrative of the siege of the Close, Cowley is caught up with his account of the soldiers lumbering over, and losing body parts on, the walls during a siege, in a graphic scene of the bodily destruction of even those on the “right side” of siege warfare: All shapes of active mischeife fill the ground. Some whist the walls (bold men!) they’attempt to scale, Drop downe by’a leaden storme of deadly haile. Some with huge stones are crusht to dust beneath, And from their hasty Tombes receive their Death. Some leave their parted hands on th’highest wall, The joynts hold fast a while, then quake, and fall. (II:106–12)

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

199

Such passages support Diane Purkiss’s claim that “the process of fighting undermined the unitary hard masculinity that soldiers struggled to build, with the result that the experience of war consisted of the regular irruption of the dark, flighty, disorderly underside of combat into areas of body, personality, and narrative from which it had been laboriously banished.”35 While besieged bodies are dismembered and divested of life, the wall of the besieged castle at this point in the poem takes on a life of its own through personification: “And the proud Wall at last grew Conquerour” (II:114), for the besiegers are no match for both “Nature and Art” (II:113). Still, the royalist hero presses ahead, using ingenuity and sheer brute force to go under the wall if his men cannot go over it: The’unwearied Prince scornes to bee conquer’d soe; The labouring Spade and Pick-axe sound below. With a dire noyse the earth and wall is rent, High into aire th’unwilling Stones are sent. Twice all about, the ground did tremble there, First with the violent shock, and next with Feare. (II:115–20) Even in their heroism, the royalists, it is clear, must destroy both “Nature and Art” to ensure success (II:113), and Cowley stops the narrative of mining beneath the city walls to remark that it also involves the destruction of brave men: A Breach is made, and enter’d; but, oh, stay; Sell not your valours and high Fates for pray [sic]. Whilst yee seeke that, behold our souldiers ta’ne, The matchlesse Digby hurt, and Usher slaine, The rest driven back by their despairing Steele, Achilles like, our Vict’ory slaine i’the Heele. (II:123–8). Although the besieged parliamentary supporters eventually “yeild the place and their Lives forfeit save,” there is little poetic energy devoted to the sense of heroic victory (II:133). As Shakespeare demonstrated in Troilus and Cressida, and as John Banks would later affirm in The Destruction of Troy, the siege problematizes the glory aligned with epics. Cowley’s account of the siege of Bristol leaves us with a similar sense of the horrific impact of war on the bodies of the participants, on nature,

200

Besieged

and on city structures. It begins with an epic vision of the royalist fighters. Princes Rupert and Maurice are figured as heroic warriors: They joy to kill their foes, they joy to Dy; In the deepe Trenches proud and gasping ly, Glad eve’en in Death, if they can fill them soe; A streame of Enemies blood does downewards flowe. (II:243–6) But we quickly move from the heroic to the elegiac mode when two royalist soldiers of name, Sir Nicholas Slanning and Colonel John Trevanion, are shot in the thigh, allowing death to creep in (II:252). Although Prince Rupert once again breaches the town’s fortifications, the result is again less than heroic, conveyed through the fear and laments of the townspeople of Bristol and the continued killing of royalist soldiers: Into the streets they breake; and all around The groanes of men, and shreikes of woemen sound. There valiant Lunsford, there the Hero fell, And with rich blood did their base channels swell. The’accursed bullet his strong hart peir’ed through; Away his Spirit, swift as the Bullet, flew. O sad! two minutes more had conquest showne; Just now they beg their lives, and yeild their Towne. (II:257–64) The tension caused in the reader by the horror felt by the citizens and the death of soldiers and civilians “in the right” is intensified by the conclusion: “Thus happy now was Bristol forc’ed to bee” (II:275). Cowley seems to have missed the irony of forcing happiness upon a city through siege warfare. Cowley’s final detailed account of a civil war siege, the siege of Exeter, follows immediately after the siege of Bristol, and follows a similar pattern. He describes “Isca’s” history as “an ancient, strong, and factious Towne” with Trojan roots and its history of war and peace, including a great many sieges that it endured (II:279). However, what is most original and fascinating in his account of this siege, is its figuration of an attempted relief of the besieged parliamentarians by Robert Rich, second Earl of Warwick. Unlike the earlier siege accounts, which are littered with royalist heroes, here we have the portrait of a parliamentarian “Pyrat” (II:307)

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

201

with crocodilian traits, who makes use of water, the River Exe, to further his rebellious ends: Warwick, the Public Pyrat, brings them ayde, And dares, like an high Tyde, the Land invade. Hee seekes his prey both uppon earth and Sea; Soe lives the doubtfull Crocodile, and Hee. (II:307–10) The role played by bodies of waters in siege warfare is significant here and elsewhere in The Civil War, for this element along with fire, air, and earth come together to respond to and participate in the world of human affairs. We should not simply read such passages in terms of the pathetic fallacy; rather, the elements are viewed as “actants” by Cowley, creatures with the ability to act on the world despite the absence of “subjective interiority and intentionality.”36 “Stormes” and “Windes” rise up to halt the sinful Warwick’s passage, yet he sails along River Exe despite “[t]he Canons murthering blasts from ether shore” (II:315, 316, 319). Their ships on fire and sinking, the waves rush in and mingle with their blood, some men, strangely, being bitten by fish, “feel[ing] their painfull Buriall ere their Death” (II:328). It is as if the river and its piscine population are in collusion with the royalist forces, the water refusing to come to the aid of the burning ships not only because of a “naturall hate” for “the Flame” but also a loathing of “the Rebells” (II:331, 332). Cowley has the dying men swimming around the crocodilian Warwick “curse him” with their “last breath” (II:342). Those who seek to relieve the besieged, therefore, are shown turning on themselves, and the surviving parliamentarian vessels “fly”; the “Excestrian pride” is broken when the failure of a “Navall Victorie” is apparent (II:344, 349, 348). The town, once again “resignes,” reassuringly for Cowley, and “happy Charles” is seen as the victor who can, almost mystically, win naval battles without ships (II:347). The rebels, soon after in the poem, find themselves in a supernatural space, Hell itself, when the brutal reality of war thrusts Cowley from historical to mythological time and space. In this hell, Cowley, in a Dantean fashion, situates “Rebell Minds,” who “Must here forever Live, forever Dy” (II:385–6). By the third book of The Civil War, Cowley focuses his attention on producing a satirical catalogue of heretical puritan antiheroes and some battles, but the “epic ambition” of the poem, like the Civil War itself, is lost for this royalist author.

202

Besieged

W.C., The Siege of Vienna, A Poem (1685) As with Cowley, the author of The Siege of Vienna self-identifies as a Stuart monarchist, evident in his dedication of the poem to Thomas HickmanWindsor, first Earl of Plymouth. He pictures the relationship between the monarch and the Earl of Plymouth, Lord Lieutenant of Worcester and governor of the Garrison of Hull, in sentimental and loyalist terms: “Your Lordship has promising testimonies of our Corporation, Loyalty, led and forwarded by Your Honours Noble Example and Conduct. I would persuade my self, His Majesty has here a Magazin of Hearts as well as Arms.”37 This loyalty is necessary given a context of the “few Intractable tempers” of some who might be inclined to “Attack or Plot the destruction of His Majesties Royal Person, His Heirs, or Successors” (sig. A2r). The poem is, therefore, written against the backdrop of threatened and contained civil strife. W.C. advises us that such loyalty and nobility of character induced him to compose this poem on the siege of Vienna (1683) and the Pindaric ode that follows, since he seeks “to incourage every generous Soul,” like “the Noble Starremburg and other worthy Commanders before the Walls of Vienna,” “that the Glory of their Conquests be not buryed in Oblivion” (“Epistle Dedicatory”). Although the setting of the siege is on the Continent, W.C. indirectly addresses the importance of a loyal and noble heroism in Europe at large, especially when the Christian empire is threatened, for the last time, by the Ottoman Empire, led by “[t]he grand disturber of Europe” (“Epistle Dedicatory”). W.C. asserts that only “Heroick Verse is proper to express the Praises due to the memories of worthy Heroes,” but he claims that he can only produce a “rude Draught” of such a work and he hopes his efforts will “awaken the Pens of Sublimer Muses” to “Pencil” or fill out his draft (“Epistle Dedicatory”). Yet despite his use of the humility topos to suggest he is incapable of producing sublime heroic verse, W.C.’s poem is clearly “a long narrative poem … that treats a single heroic figure or a group of such figures and concerns an historical event, such as a war or conquest … that is central to the traditions and belief of its culture.”38 Of the epic features listed by David Loewenstein in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, The Siege of Vienna includes an “invocation of a muse,” an “emphasis on … martial themes,” an account of “legendary heroes and exploits,” and “the intermixing of the deeds of gods and men,” though the emphasis is on the supernatural agents Fate and Fortune, as well as Jove.39 It also includes

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

203

lengthy martial speeches by military leaders on both sides of the conflict, apostrophes to abstract concepts such as war, and it is, in J.K. Newman’s terms, “long and elaborate in its narrative design, episodic in sequence, and elevated in lang[uage].”40 However, the emphasis is on imperial rather than national concerns, relatively few epic similes are used, and the events, as they do in The Civil War and Londerias, unfold in chronological order. Therefore, as with Cowley’s Civil War, The Siege of Vienna is not an epic proper but has, we would argue, a substantial measure of “epic ambition.”41 And like Cowley’s unfinished epic, the heroic often slips away from W.C., despite his stated goal of venerating the actions of “worthy heroes.” The randomness of events in the lottery of war, the horror of its sounds and sights, the ubiquity of the suffering of all parties involved regardless of allegiance, and the valour displayed by some of the Ottoman forces all work to undermine the Christian heroic voiced at the poem’s conclusion. Because The Siege of Vienna only covers one siege, it delves more deeply than The Civil War into the experience of siege warfare. In the opening of the poem, Fate lures the Turks to Vienna, telling them, “Take your Fixation at Vienna’s Walls,” and we, like the Turks, are fixated on this wall not simply as an architectural structure but as the liminal space largely governed by Fate or Fortune (1). Although, near the end of the poem, Providence and “the eternal God” appear (37), giving the reader the sense that events have unfolded in a divinely inspired predetermined order, for the majority of the poem, military outcomes seem to be dictated by a secular Fate, as they are in ancient epics. This emphasis on an unpredictable Fate rather than on a Miltonic-like God, and on the spurious motivations of and dehumanizing results of war, destabilizes its ultimate vision of either the classical or Christian heroic. What Georgia E. Brown writes of Marlowe’s response to the epic tradition is, in part, relevant to W.C.’s, for in the works of both there is a “sceptical engagement with epic, with the nature of heroism, with masculinity, militarism, and the potential for good and evil in masculine virtus.”42 It is true that some of the attacks on masculine militarism are directed at the Turks alone. In one speech by Fate, the wall surrounding Vienna is refigured as the Turk’s “Golgotha” and their military pride and ambition deemed nothing more than irrational fantasy. However, the aphoristic address to “foolish man” in that speech and the nature of the allusion to the ambitious Alexander the Great suggests that the “wild Ambition” of the Turks is characteristic of all men of war:

204

Besieged

Ah! foolish man, by wild Ambition tost, And in a gulph of pride and folly lost; With what a gust his eager pursuit flies To find the limmits of his vanities; And cheating greatness prompts the thinking fool, By power to quench the Ambition of his soul: Insatiate pride! the dropsie of the mind! The more we drink the more to pride inclin’d. So the great Alexander wept for shame, To find no conquests to exalt his Fame; And in a sullen discontentment di’d, To see the Earth give Bounds unto his pride. But goe Imposthum’d Fooles, where Passion calls; See here, your Golgotha’s before these Walls. (2) After exposing readers to the military march of “[u]nnumber’d swarms of [a] mighty Pagan Force,” W.C. bombards them with the sound effects of siege warfare, most notably the “shrieking Allahs” that “rend the very Skies,” before turning to a presiege conflict, a “mad skirmish” (2, 4, 5) that recognizes moments of Turkish valour and details, in an equalizing fashion, the inevitable deaths of men on both sides of the battle: Here falling Turbants scatter’d o’re the plain, There, falling Crests of gallant Germans slain; Here, Strength and Courage equally debates, Till they have learnt discission from their fates. And then one falls; the other who survives In midst of joy his own black Fate receives. (4) Before instructing his Muse to “stay” in order to examine the terror experienced by those living in Vienna, W.C. produces an apostrophe to war, which seems again to undermine the military heroism he purports to praise in his preface, “Ah War! thou Lottery, where still the Prize/Is caught by Death, who keeps the Box and Dies,” which victimizes both Turk and Christian alike (4). By the time readers reach the wall of Vienna in the poem, they feel like its inhabitants: terrorized by the military maneuvering and slaughter taking

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

205

place outside the wall, which includes an account of the conflagration of other towns (“All Austria was with desolation fill’d,/Towns on a Fire, a dreadful Landskip yield”) and reduces the Turks, who will soon arrive, to “lew’d Villians” who rape women and “Beauteous Boys,” and even perpetrate “Acts, not to mention with a modest mind,/As they by Vice and Nature were inclin’d” (7). One would be better off dead, W.C. discloses, than to be their “Captives” (7). The narrator finds that he must cut short his passionate accounts of the “tragick scene” outside the wall to “look back unto Vienna’s green” (8), taking us from one side of the wall to the other, thereby building up narrative tension. If events outside the wall, in which Christians are hunted down and devoured by the bloodhounds of the Turks, are terrifying, the scene inside is one of sheer panic. W.C. describes the “distractions [that] revel’d in the Town!” once again offering up sound effects: “The universal noise was groanes, and sighs” (5). W.C. attends very closely to the reality of a siege for the everyday citizens of besieged towns: their fear, dread, and suffering are incorporated into the heroic mode. But for W.C., only those who remain within the city walls during the siege are worthy of heroic attention. He recognizes the urgency to flee, especially in those suffering from a disability of sorts – old men, infants, the feeble and the decrepit join the “mighty crowds, vast numbers [who] throng away” (5) – but he has little sympathy for them. Despite the anguish of the “60000 Souls” who “left the City that day” and the pain of their parting from loved ones, he deems them nothing more than “Cow’rds” who would “slink away” from a city in need of defence and happily recounts their capture and enslavement by the Turks as they attempt to escape: “So, Heaven rewards those Cow’rds who basely fly,/To shun an universal Destiny” (6). For W.C., citizens who find themselves in a siege must turn hero, an act that requires bodily and psychological self-transformation. W.C. does not undermine the heroic in conceptualizing the ordinary citizens in this way but rather widens its parameters to include men, women, and children from every socioeconomic class and profession. Thirty lines are dedicated to the radical metamorphoses of the priests, scholars, merchants, mechanics, butchers, bakers, brewers, and even “the Boyes and little Titans of the town” (9). Each group must leave behind their previous identities and activities in order to take on new roles in war. Of the adaptable merchants and mechanics, for instance, W.C. writes,

206

Besieged

The City’s Merchants, bravely too appear, To take up the new Glorious trade of War. In Pagan blood their correspondence write, And pay their Bills of valour even at light. Mechanicks, throw their harmless tools away, In Armour clad, appear most proud and Gay. One hour of Fortune’s kindness in the Field, Exhales a wealth, Industry ne’re could yield; But if he fail, his life of toyle’s betray’d, And in the Bed of honour he is laid. (8–9) Here is the new heroic, available to even the most menial of citizens who can “their own Battalias lead,” which calls to mind the citizen heroes (including tradespeople) in Mitchelburne’s Ireland Preserv’d (9). While there are traditional military heroes in The Siege of Vienna, Ernst Rüdiger Graf von Starhemberg, military commander of Vienna, and Jan Sobieski, king of Poland, the former describing in a three-hour speech the transformed citizens and the Polish infantry as “fellow souldiers, Friends in War” (9), these newfound heroes-in-the-making are tasked with preventing Vienna’s loss to save their country and Christendom. The militarized civilians, like professional soldiers, must now be ready “[t]o sacrifice … [their] lives to th’Holy War” (10). W.C. soon takes us back in time to juxtapose this militarisation and empowerment of the citizenry with the activity outside the wall as the Turks erect their richly decorated tents around the town in the shape of a moon, etching their symbology onto the landscape before they dig a series of lengthy trenches from their camp to the wall (to render them less vulnerable on the open plain). W.C. records the Grand-Vizier’s speech to his troops, which parallels that of Starhemberg, in which he mocks the Christian God in “his wretched Blasphemies”: Your careless, sleeping Jesus will give aide, Scorn ye my power, be not of me afraid. He will protect you in your idle War, And build you Castles in impregnant Air[.] (12) Though he is visited by Fate as he sleeps to learn of his ultimate military failure, he goes on with the conflict and wreaks havoc on both sides. As

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

207

with Cowley, W.C. conveys with Lucanic grotesquerie the horrors of that conflict, focusing on the kinds of violence particular to siege warfare, both inside and outside the walls,43 and the narrator repeatedly states that language is insufficient to express its terrors. “Sence is too gross, and metaphors too mean,/With all their art, to tell the Tragick Scene,” W.C. writes, concluding that “wars and violence are plagues from Heaven,/ By which, not Fame, nor Int’rest can be given” (14, 15), and he admits that he too is overwhelmed by the vision of war’s horrors: “But frightned with the groanes of Dying men,/Too far, my Muse, has wandred from the scene” (15). However, he still records many of the sickening brutalities of the siege. These include a Viennese boy “madly kill[ed]” by the “unexam’ning Rabble” for attempting to set fire to the arsenal inside the walls (14), “shatterd” heads with brains exposed (15), a “maim’d German crawling in the Dust” who “[i]n death’s impartial Arms at last is Crusht” (15), a strangled mutinous Turkish leader (18), hellish struggles that take place in underground “[h]etacombs” among “[t]h’industrious Moles” who mine and countermine (20, 16), “unnumber’d Dead” whose bodies fill the ditches (20), body parts that are strewn around (“Here Arms, and Legs, and there a cloven Head,/Huddled in Earth, lie all confus’dly dead”) when “shorn Limbs” are “from their Bodies rent” (22, 23), dead bodies piled on each other that are used as steps “[t]o mount the Walls” (20), and a wounded earth, “mangl’d” with “curst Mines,” leaving “all the Town” standing “upon Treacherous ground” (23). Though heroic in the extreme, Starhemberg’s acts of valour never come close to balancing the brutal visions of desecration and mutilation of human bodies, historic architectural structures, and the very earth itself. The impact on Creation itself is described midpoem: The whole Creation in convulsion lay, And trembled, as it were the Judgment day. The groaning Globe, sick in a Fever lies, All Blood-shot, roules away her wondering Eyes[.] (14) Still, W.C. does claim that “Starremburg alone the City buoy’d” when all is nearly lost after the wall is breached, “all her Bulwarks” fallen, and a “way for four a breast to enter the Town” is made (24, 22). It is at that moment in the town that W.C. turns his attention from near despair to

208

Besieged

hope on the horizon with the appearance of the Polish forces, though he appears to make a historical error, identifying Michael I rather than Jan Sobieski as the Polish saviour. A council of war ensues, which gives the reader a sense of the city as a pawn in siege warfare. We are told that the captains dispute waiting until “the City” is “at its last Extremity” before fighting (26), leaving the Turks to storms the wall only to “[s]urprise them, and into their trenches fall” (26), but the Polish king is all for relieving the city immediately and fighting the foe head on, the only honourable form of fighting to his mind. However, even as they ride to relieve the town, the Turks intensify the fight against the city, scaling the walls, doubling down on the mining, and Christian fighters continue to die: in sum, the city space becomes a slaughterhouse haunted at night by “the moaning spectrums of the dead” seeking revenge (30). God’s providence still does not seem at work, for W.C. continues to call upon the trope of war as a game of chance, even at this stage of the poem: “Here ’twas the Dice of War was at the height” (30). However, though the results of war at this moment are again deemed a lottery and its consequences nothing less than wholesale slaughter, the “whole Town so valourous did appear” that Starhemberg killed several “Infidels” when even the “meanest Slave” in the town was felled (31). The Polish king likewise will defend all against “the Leviathan” who seeks to “devour this Town” as to do so is to save the “Christian World” (32). While many poets would quickly move on to the Christian victory at Vienna, W.C. seems unable to let go of the horrific impact of war on bodies and brains, rattling off once again the injuries of the participants until we are informed at last that the Turks had fled and “a spotless Dove” (actually a “white Pigeon” according to the marginal note) “the blessed tidings brought,/The Christian Army had with Conquest fought,” and in a biblical allusion, W.C. compares the cleansing of the city to the flood that drowned all humans except for Noah and his family: “And as it wav’d its branch of peace, could say,/The deluge, Infidels, are swept away” (36). The last three pages of The Siege of Vienna are dedicated to the celebratory experience of the besieged and the army that relieved them and it again focuses our eyes on the wall that signified both their safety and vulnerability. The townspeople, we are told, must look to “the Walls” to establish their safety with their own eyes, and their affect radically alters: “dancing passions” bounce “in their breast[s]” and even those who are dying, including the “poor, slasht, Souldiers” lying on the Walls, who view “the blest prospect” show their pleasure and “extasie,” “contentedly …

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

209

part[ing] with [their] breath” (36–7). At this point, the narrative takes on a far more traditional theme and tone: the heroic Starhemberg and Sobieski are praised and rewarded by Leopold I, the Holy Roman Emperor. Both men demonstrate humility, the latter attributing the preservation of “the Empire and the Town” to God rather than himself, and on this Christian note, the besieged urban space is transformed into a place of worship: The “Te Deum” is sung with “Cannon’s roar” as accompaniment, and the emperor heads to the church to thank and worship God (38). Interestingly, as if to locate the church at the centre of the preserved city space, we are, in the final stanza, told something that “we should before have [been] told”: the crucial role played by an agent of the church during the siege: The Holy Rites was by the Bishop done, Who, during all the Siege, had kept the Town. The Bishop, who we should before have told, Suppli’d the Souldiers both with Wine, and Gold. The only Churchman, who the Siege had stay’d, Most lib’rally he Gave, and Fought and Pray’d. Worthy the Office, he to th’Altar went, And when the Sacrifice of Prayer was spent, Thus, the Te Deum Sung. (38) This formal conclusion to The Siege of Vienna, followed by “Te Deum, Pindarick odes,” are an effort by W.C. to Christianize the piece, and the effort is not wholly successful. We do not leave the poem with a sense of it as a Christian heroic narrative or Christian epic in a Miltonic vein, since the bishop seems an afterthought, forgotten until the final stanza. The grotesqueries of siege warfare, which irrevocably mark the city space and the area that surrounds it, the vagaries of human existence, the power of fate, and the lottery of war cannot be undone by the final few pages that attempt to restore the reader’s belief in the classical or Christian heroic in order to rewrite and redeem the space and the actions enacted in it.

Joseph Aickin, Londerias; or, A Narrative of the Siege of London-Dery (1699) While both Cowley’s and W.C.’s siege poems describe siege warfare and particular sieges in gory and grotesque terms, undermining the epic or

210

Besieged

heroic dimension of their poem along the way, Joseph Aickin’s Londerias is the most dispassionate and least dramatic of the three. Though its author, a Protestant supporter of King William, does not call it an epic, but simply a “[n]arrative,” his poem is epic in form, though it consists of four rather than ten or twelve books. Aickin recognizes in his dedication that the subject “deserved the Pen of a Homer or Virgil,” though the “Actions and Occurrences of this Famous Siege are so Heroick of themselves, that they needed no strokes of Poetry, to set them off.”44 Each of the four books is prefaced by an argument of sorts, the poem is episodic in nature, the focus is a martial event, there are councils of war, the feats of daring heroes are featured, catalogues of warriors are shared, lengthy military speeches are relayed, the Muse is often entreated for assistance, and the poem begins with a Homeric-like invocation: Sing the Men, who Dery did restore To the condition, as it were before They taught the French that Cities might withstand Their Storms and Bombs under a good command Why should Heroick Deeds in silence be? Since Poets are of the Fraternity. Assist me Muse? whilst I the Siege do sing, Into my mem’ry all the matter bring? Inspire my tongue? when I the causes tell, How the dire War, how this fam’d Siege befell; How the Town stands, how the proud foe advance How they’re repuls’d, and who great fame enhance. (1.1, 1–2) However, Aickin, a “schoolmaster” who taught English, Latin, and Greek, seems less interested in the literary dimension of his text than in its truthful and accurate historical representation of the siege of Londonderry (1689).45 He makes truth claims in his dedication to the poem, suggesting that while other narratives of the event “all [fall] far short of the thing,” he can more accurately represent what happened: “And I may boldly aver, That no Material Passage is wanting to this, having but my Informations from good Hands, besides the Advantage of the Printed Narratives” (“Epistle Dedicatory”). In Robert Mayer’s terms, Aickin would be a “new historian” in early modern England since he makes “matters of fact” central to his historiographic project, exhibiting a “passion for documents and details.”46

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

211

Dedicated to Robert Rochfort (1652–1727), attorney general of Ireland and speaker of the Irish House of Commons, the mayor of Londonderry, and “the Aldermen, Burgesses, and Free-men of the City of London-Dery,” the poem purportedly serves an important cultural function in which an accurate remembering, even a decade after the event, insists on, and solidifies, a specifically Williamite view of the city’s past and present and its place in the nation as a whole. It also serves a specific moral function in reminding readers that Protestant cities can withstand the assaults of papist forces if they remain loyal and are well commanded. Just as Mitchelburne’s desire to give an accurate and complete account of the siege of Londonderry in his play changed the genre of siege drama, privileging history over aesthetics, so does Aickin’s commitment to facts in Londerias alter the epic poem, rendering it aesthetically inferior if judged by traditional standards. Aickin even notes in his “Epistle Dedicatory” that historical accuracy (recounting, for example, “uncouth Names”) will impair his “Metre” and “Stile,” and the work serves as an excellent example of the complex relation of the heroic, historic, and journalistic in literary works of the period. Like a historian, Aickin is intent on providing historically accurate details of the siege of Londonderry in a relatively objective voice, which he recognizes can be a dangerous thing according to his “Epistle Dedicatory”: “As Your Honours particular concern in the Subject of the Poem, moved me to Dedicate it to You, so also the Opportunity of knowing the Truth of the Actions encourages me to expect Your Protection: For You are the best Judges of the Matter of Fact.” Aickin’s inclination to objectively report events results in a relatively uncritical perspective on Jacobite forces during the siege, which is highly unusual. In a rare commentary on the poem, Andrew Carpenter notes, “The poem, unlike most accounts of the siege, regularly praises the Jacobite forces for gallantry.”47 One cannot imagine such a history being produced ten years earlier. In order to maintain a heroic tone in this historical document about one of the most brutal sieges of the period, Aickin dedicates relatively little space to the brutality experienced during the siege. In fact it is not until page thirty-nine of the seventy-six-page poem that an account of the siege begins: “The Town thus girt, prepar’d for its Defence,/And with Heroick Deeds the Siege commence” (2.14, 39). The prior thirty-eight pages, consisting of two of the four books, are dedicated to a careful account of historical events that led up to the siege; the letters, speeches, and strategies of the opposing parties; the catalogue of the horse, foot, and

212

Besieged

dragoons on both sides; early military engagements; the political wrangling and treachery within Londonderry; the city of Londonderry; the economic sacrifice made by its citizens across socioeconomic class to defend the city against Catholics; negotiations made to prevent the siege; the impeachment of the “treacherous” General Robert Lundy (1.5, 5); and the establishment of the “triumvirate” of Major Henry Baker, Rev. George Walker, and Colonel Adam Murray as leaders. While not dealing with the actual siege, the first two books of this heroic siege narrative should not be dismissed, for they serve three main purposes. First, they convey a sense of military order and preparation, stressing the agency and reasoned thinking of all parties involved with the upcoming siege. Sir Teague O’Regan (“Teague Oregan”), for example, during the council of war, declares to King James, In short my Liege? I am of his Opinion, Wer’t to sustain a Siege, I may boldly tell, No Man in Ireland could my self excell. To Mann the Counterscrap and line the breach, These nobler Arts my better genii teach. (1.10, 7) Aickin finds in the Jacobite forces a “noble courage” and military knowledge that mirrors those of the northern Protestant forces (who organize with “Warlike Discipline”) and envisions them marching to Londonderry in “gallant order” (1.14, 13; 1.15, 13). In providing such details, Aickin rarely uses tropes. It is not suited to this matter-of-fact historical heroic genre. Second, these early books reveal the importance of context, both spatial and temporal. The second book of Londerias opens with a descriptive account of the city as both a military stronghold and urban centre. Aickin’s topographic description of Londonderry is reminiscent of Cowley’s account of the cities under siege in the Civil War, though Aickin is more interested in the present than the past. Conceiving of Londonderry as superior to Troy and Carthage, Aickin provides us with a fascinating account of the physical city, considering its military advantages (e.g., bastions on which cannons can be easily erected) and reading its institutions through a martial lens: “There’s a great Church from whose high Steeple goes,/Thunder and Lightning to annoy the Foes” (2.2, 23). He supplements this information with tidbits of information on climate, angling, agriculture, government, and commerce to humanize the place. These spatial details complement

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

213

temporal ones as Aickin unfolds for us the events (including the convening of Protestants at the Great Hall and negotiations with James II) that led up to the siege in this space in order to demonstrate the linguistic and dialogic aspects of siege warfare, which involves lengthy debates within the city and oral and written negotiations between the besiegers and the besieged. Aickin thereby shows an interest not merely in the act of siege warfare but in siege warfare as a process, and this interest allows him to sustain both a more historically accurate and heroic reading of the siege of Londonderry. Third, the first two books stress the active role of the citizenry in the preparations for a siege. While W.C. explores personal and occupational transformation in The Siege of Vienna, Aickin highlights the citizens’ economic contribution to the siege. He lists all of the “[c]ontributors towards the holding out of the City against King James” (2.5, 30), since the cost of siege warfare is no mean amount; men from all walks of life are listed as providing “Stores and Money for the Towns defence” (2.5, 32). Even people living in the surrounding countryside, Aickin writes, “gave a helping hand,/And with their Forces did the Foe withstand,” including ninety-year-old Major Philips, who had served a key role in the Civil War (in 1641) and carried his knowledge forward to teach the current military forces (2.5, 32). Such loyal and charitable citizens and courageous military leaders, in addition to strange bedfellows – no less “[t]he Church and Kirk,” the English and the Scots – can prevent attempts to capitulate the town before the siege even begins, Aickin suggests (2.8, 35). The heroic and sacrificial spirit of the besieged military forces and civilians do not diminish in its entirety the reality of siege warfare and its consequences. During a debate at the Town Hall, recounted in book 2, one speaker proclaims, You’l draw a Potent Army to this Land; Who will these goodly buildings soon deface, Ravish your Wives and Daughters ’fore your face. And all your wealth and substance soon devour, Submit your selves unto the present power. (2.4, 28) Aickin here displays the politics of siege warfare and the costs of remaining a “Loyal Town,” though he remains deeply committed to the need for loyalty and liberty over lives (2.9, 36). Aickin is further able to feature

214

Besieged

heroism in his account of the siege by deflecting the reader’s view from suffering inside the town to the sallying forth and battling outside its walls. In the third book of Londerias, perhaps the most heroic in tone and action, Aickin again addresses some of the reality of the besieged while simultaneously holding it at bay. The valiant actions of Colonel Adam Murray in his battles outside the town are heralded, for it is by his “great Deeds, the Irish Army fell” (3.1, 41). Whereas in the broadside ballads, Walker’s religiopolitical heroism and endurance is underlined, it is the military heroism of Murray that is the lodestone of Aickin’s piece. His heroic deeds likened to those of Achilles, Aeneas, and the biblical King David, Murray is repeatedly shown leaving the city, sallying forth to engage in epic battles with the French and Irish, climaxing with his killing of the French General Maumont. For much of book 3, the besieged city is not a prison but rather a place of safety and retreat, where the mighty soldiers reenergize for battle and the wounded find comfort and aid. But its wall, that liminal space, also serves as a site on which family members watch horrific scenes of slaughter flash before them without the ability to intervene: The tender Parents view’d the bloody day, From off the stately Walls by the Ship-key, For near the Walls upon the shoar they fought, The tender Parents their dear Children sought, The Wife her Husband[.] (3.4, 45–6) The impact of siege warfare on the family unit is again stressed when family members living outside the walls are used as weapons of war. Such is the case in book 3 when it is learned that the eighty-year-old father of Murray lives nearby: General Hamilton threatens to hang him if he fails to persuade his son to surrender the city. In a similar vein, in book 4, Protestant inhabitants of the city are “forc’d … to repair,/Unto our Walls, both Man and Mothers Son;/And hemm’d … in with a Battalion,” which their family and “friends so dear” must witness (4.9, 67–8). However, Aickin insists that family ties and beliefs – social cohesion among family members and fellow Protestants – could not be broken in such instances, for none were treacherous in order to save their own lives. Murray’s father, an octogenarian trickster, manages to persuade the enemy

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

215

that he did all he could to turn his son when he actually tells Murray upon arriving at the town, “But by this sacred Book I you conjure,/Never to yield unto a Popish Power” (3.6, 48). He returns home safely. And the Protestants driven to the walls, as Mitchelburne also reveals in his play, are freed through psychological manipulation based on the love of one’s family, for the “Town” argues that unless their friends and family are sent “home” “we’ll hang up our pris’ners ev’ry one” which “mov’[s] the Irish to compassion” (4.9, 68). Regardless, even if their fate had been otherwise, the Protestants outside the walls “begg’d” those inside “not [to] deliver up the Town” (4.9, 68). The importance of the familial bond for inhabitants of a besieged town is perhaps conveyed with the greatest pathos in section 13 of book 4 when the life of a seventy-year-old soldier, Lieutenant Evins, who “stoutly fought/At sev’ral Battles, and young Souldiers taught,” is saved when “his tender Daughter found/The safest Course, to suck … [the] bloody Wound” of his bullet-ridden “hardy Breast” (4.13, 74). Such acts of selfless heroism of military and civilian forces within and outside the walls are not without significant complication and cost, as Aickin highlights in books 3 and 4. He reveals the distrust that can emerge between those trapped in a besieged city and begins to increasingly stress the permanent damage on the flesh of the besieged and the structures of the town itself, particularly after the enemy entrench themselves around the city, curtailing the “liberty” of the inhabitants and rendering those who would leave sitting ducks: “They from the Trenches could kill ev’ry one” (3.10, 53). The narrator writes of the shift in power structure as grievances arise in Londonderry as the siege carries on, requiring a more equitable representative body and the agreement of all parties before a law could be enacted, as well as the election of a new governor after Governor Baker dies of fever. The solidity of the political structures, Aickin suggests, is as significant in a siege as the physical and familial structures. A movement toward inclusion and a more democratic system also occurs when starvation sets in and “pestilential Feaver” runs rampant in Londonderry, which the narrator describes in shocking detail.48 The reader is forced to hear of the desperate consumption not only of dogs and horses but also of skeletal cats, horse’s blood, swallows, and mice (4.6, 65–6). When food finally arrives, which Aickin describes with journalistic detail as “English Beef and Cheese,/Bacon and Butter, Brandy, Pork and Pease” and “Oatmeal,” “The Governours divide the joyful Store,/And equal portions give to

216

Besieged

Rich and Poor” (4.12, 73). But such optimism is not enough to offset the horror of the sites and sounds of siege warfare, which the narrator reminds us is sheer brutality compared to the “kindness” of the battlefield. In relating the constant bombardment of the city, which occurred day and night, casting citizens out of their “Rooms” and turning the town into a “heap of Rubbish” (4.8, 66r), the narrator resolutely announces, “This is the hardship of a Town besieg’d:/Who dyes in Battle, to the Fo’s oblig’d” (4.8, 66r).49 As with W.C., Aickin turns to religious discourse to make sense of the horrors of siege warfare. He does so in two ways in the final book of the work: first, he points to miraculous signs and wonders that occurred during the siege, and second, he alludes to the need for testing of one’s spiritual fortitude. The presence of a benevolent supernatural or divine intelligence in the world is evident in the appearance of a “glistering Star … Which all day long a benign aspect gave/From the South East” (4.1, 61). The narrator draws an analogy between it and the “Star” that “foretold our Saviour’s Birth/Who brought Salvation to the Captive earth” (4.1, 61). In this way the experience of the besieged inhabitants of Londonderry is universalized, and they, like all of earth’s citizens, find in such omens evidence of forthcoming “Relief ” (4.1, 61). To explain, however, present suffering, the narrator relies on a more Job-like vision, in which God, in all his wisdom, allows humans to suffer in order to test their faith: “Yet we do own the providence of God,/Who exercis’d us with this heavy rod” (4.8, 66r). Providence, he suggests, is evidenced in the miraculous survival of “Columba’s Church” which served as a site for prayer as well as ammunition storage, and though “the Booms tore the dead out of the ground” in the church graveyard, the citizens “hourly claim’d” “protection from God” in the miraculously preserved ecclesiastical space, the fluidity of which allows it to function as a site of both spiritual and military protection (4.8, 67). And yet, as in the case of W.C.’s Siege of Vienna, the references to the supernatural are belated and slim, the weight of suffering and the permanent desecration of urban and domestic space offsetting it to a great extent. In the final section of the poem, section 15 of book 4, which addresses the rescue of the city, the longest paragraph is dedicated to an image of the sheer destructiveness of the suburbicide that attends siege warfare, highlighting the aesthetic and economic effects of such a military enterprise, particularly on the wealthy:

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

217

Then Kirk with th’English Troops his march commenc’d From Inch, and to our ruin’d town advanc’d. … The large and spacious suburbs were burnt down, Which was a great Detriment to the Town: Their Houses and their Goods destroy’d were, Both by the Booms and Cannon in the War. Their fruitful Parks and Suburb-Gardens fell, Them to the Ground the Enemy Levell. Their Debitors were slain, and Debts were lost, A hundred thousand pounds scarce quit the cost. The rich Inhabitants were turn’d to poor, Which liv’d like Princes on their wealth before. (4.15, 75) The shorter paragraph that follows attempts to set aside this scarred landscape with a brief mention of the “noble” refusal to surrender the town, which occurred in the “infant reign” of William III, and of the “greater Trophies” William achieved elsewhere to the benefit of “the Kingdom” (4.15, 76). The epic blessing of the hero that ends the formal part of the poem, “May fav’ring Heaven preserve his [William’s] precious breath,/And lasting Lawrels round his Temples wreath?” (4.15, 76),50 like the references to scripture and providence, seem underwhelming, from a narrative and psychological perspective. If anything, the selfless sacrifice and suffering of the citizenry seem far more heroic and noble than any individual (monarchical or military) and the new king’s “trophies” are something of an afterthought. In his documentary epic, Aickin is clearly unable to sustain the heroic given the human and structural decimation of siege warfare and its dire social and economic consequences. It may be, as Smith argues, that “the Civil War had proved the decadence of aristocratic, martial, honour culture, and after 1660 [the] traditional epic” (on siege warfare or otherwise) “was no longer possible.”51 However, given the significant heroic dimension of Aickin’s Londerias, especially its repeated attempt to place “martial, honour culture” in the foreground, Smith’s claim is something of an overstatement. Nevertheless, in taking this more inclusive approach to the heroic and committing to record “matters of fact” (lingering over citizens struggling to survive in the besieged city and the devastation of architectural, social, economic, and political structures), this siege epic certainly meaningfully revises the “traditional epic” mode.

218

Besieged

Siege Poems in the Elegiac, Panegyric, and Odic Modes As noted at the beginning of this chapter, such complications in Augustan poetry, like the siege poems of W.C. and Aickin, were rooted in the “Civil War verse” they inherited which “questioned the genres which had been worked out from the time of the Tudors to that of the Metaphysicals and the tribe of Ben.”52 This is true not only for the longer heroic siege narrative poems, but for those briefer genres and modes often associated with the heroic – the elegy (and related funereal forms), the panegyric, and the ode that dominate siege poetry in the period under study. The elegy and the ode are, to a large extent, panegyric in nature, given their devotion to praising a dead or living object of affection and/or admiration. In the early modern period, panegyric was understood to be not so much a genre as a “branch of rhetoric.”53 The line between panegyric and odic forms was, therefore, often blurred, as is evident, for example, in Payne Fischer’s poetic work (translated into English by Thomas Manley) Veni; Vidi; Vici. The Triumphs of the Most Excellent & Illustrious Oliver Cromwell, &c., Set forth in a Panegyricke (1652). Even though the title page of the English translation refers to the poem as “a Panegyricke,” it is labelled inside the covers as “A Gratulatory Ode of Peace.” In classical terms, the work is an “epinikion” or a “victory ode,” but it is still panegyric in character.54 However, there is substantial panegyric verse in our period that cannot be associated with another set genre, so it is helpful to consider panegyric poetry as a separate category. The siege elegy, panegyric, and ode often lend themselves to a more traditional heroic emphasis on unrivalled valiant and virtuous military heroes: they expose the reader to “the lofty image of such worthies,” who, as Sidney writes, inspire in us a desire to become more worthy and teach us how to do so. This becomes increasingly true after 1660 when writers worked the heroic mode into a wider range of literary forms, which Elaine McGirr explores in detail in Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745. It is, therefore, not surprising that a great many of the self-standing elegiac, panegyric, and odic siege poems published between the 1640s and 1720s, whether republican or royalist, Whig or Tory, present a more unadulterated heroic worldview than do the siege epics of the period. This is made possible, in part, by the minimal, if any, role played by the citizenry in the urban siege elegy, panegyric, and ode, in which one or, in some cases, two or three, heroic figures take centre stage. This does not mean that these

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

219

poetic siege genres necessarily remain aristocratic in outlook, since they often focus their eye on military or political figures who are not necessarily members of the nobility. Governors of besieged cities, for instance, are often styled the hero in siege panegyrics. However, ultimately the heroic idealism of such works seems to inspire a backlash, figured in the rise of siege satire, which comes to the fore by the end of our period under study, as part of a broader moment toward the satirical in literary culture. It is difficult to hypothesise the distinct nature of siege elegies, panegyrics, and odes (rather than simply war elegies, panegyrics, and odes in general) published between 1642 and 1722 because these literary forms often focus on individuals and the impact of their death and/or heroic achievement on the poem’s speaker or the nation at large. As a result, far less light is cast on the siege space in which the gain or loss occurred. Early modern elegies on death, as Joshua Scodel explains, focus on voicing “the mourner’s sorrow” and, unlike the epitaph, were part “of a temporal ritual” rather than “a spatial monument”;55 in 1658, the panegyric was defined as “an Oration in the praise of some great person,” attending to the noble and virtuous character of its subject over plot or setting (other than the traditional public, ceremonial setting of the oration itself ).56 The early modern ode, particularly the popular Pindaric siege ode, was a more free and flexible form and could more easily be adapted to speak of broader historical and social matters, but it still spotlighted the heroic actor.57 Many of the odes written during the Interregnum and after the Restoration were Pindaric, focused as James D. Garrison argued some time ago on the “[p]ersonal glory” of the “individual,” seeking to “immortalize a man” rather than to present a “theory of history” or to speak of, to, or for the “public at large.”58 The distinct spatial dimension of siege warfare is, therefore, at times left in the shadows in the elegy, panegyric, and ode. This would mean that in some cases, the siege elegy and panegyric are no different than, say, any war elegy or panegyric composed in the mid-seventeenth through early eighteenth centuries and that the subject need not detain us here long since this material has been capably dealt with by Smith, Norbrook, Brady, Garrison, and others. If we turn, for example, to civil war siege elegies – elegies dedicated to a particular siege event and/or its immediate aftermath as identified in the title or subtitle – this privileging of subject over space would seem to occur in several instances. One of the earliest siege elegies published during the war was the broadside “An Elegie upon the Death Of the Mirrour of

220

Besieged

Magnanimity, the Right Honourable Robert Lord Brooke; Lord Generall of the Forces of the Counties of Warwick, and Stafford, who was slain by A Musket shot at the siege of Liechfield, the second day of March, 1642 [1643].” Robert Greville, second Baron Brooke, was a parliamentarian general. At the other end of the political spectrum and addressing an event near the end of the Civil War, the royalist Margaret Cavendish published an elegy on her brother Sir Charles Lucas, “An Elegy upon the Death of my Brother,” who was shot to death hours after the royalist surrender of Colchester (1648). In these two elegies, the siege space takes up very little, if any, room on the page, as the emotions of the writer and the saintliness of the subject – largely conveyed through the typical elegiac discourses of lament, praise, and consolation – consume the elegiac landscape.59 In “An Elegie upon The Death of the Mirrour of Magnanimity,” Henry Harington writes with baroque flourish and excess on the many virtues of the Puritan “Saint,” Lord Brooke, whose death disturbs the natural world and those who inhabit it, leading to “griefes” that “are infinite” in all who learn of his fate.60 As is often the case in elegies, Brooke’s life stands as a moral exemplar or mirror to the reader, though none, Harington suggests, can reach his Christ-like moral stature: and if yet some vertuous be, They but weake apparitions are of thee. Thine actions were most just, thy words mature, And every scean of life from sin so pure, That scarce in its whole history we can Finde Vice enough to say thou wert but man. Between descriptions of Brooke’s saintly life and the mourners’ torrent of tears come only the briefest of references to the events and location of the siege itself: Ah cruell Death! who with one cursed Ball, Didst make the Atlas of our State to fall, In one thou all hast slaine, whose death alone, A death will be unto a Million. Could none but his sweet Nectard blood appease

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

221

The fire-sprung Bullets heat? Must it needs seaze His sacred face, it selfe there to enshrine, Not in an earthly, but a Tombe divine. See lucklesse Liechfield that thou do not hide The precious blood, which from the wound did slide At this Lords death, it may not Cloister’d be In thy fraile earth, alwayes impuritie It did abhor, therefore in Sacrifice, Send it unto its head above the skies, And for an Altar whereon it to lay, A thousand thousand soules through griefe this day Themselves to death have wept, whom thou maist take, And them conjoyne thine Altar for to make. The poet envisions the tragic moment of the bullet’s entry into the besieging general’s heart as he approaches Lichfield Cathedral on 2 March 1643 and imagines his blood seeping into Lichfield’s earth. But this besieged town cannot contain the fluid and we are soon afterward taken from the earthly town to the eternal realm, “Paradise,” before returning to the praise of Lord Brooke, in largely hagiographic terms. The particular killer, thought to be a royalist sniper in Lichfield, and the specific site of the attack in this poem, as in several other siege elegies, are relatively insignificant, given the partisan desire in such works to assign little or no attention or weight to the actions of the enemy, preferring to identify abstractions such as Death, Fate, Providence, or Chance as the cause of the fatal outcome. A similar pattern is evident in Cavendish’s brief elegy on her brother’s death. Of “[t]he execution of Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle,” on the command of Thomas Fairfax and others, Adrian Tinniswood has written, “[It] was perhaps the single most controversial episode in the Second Civil War.”61 It certainly appears to have inspired more elegies than any other siege event, unsurprising given, as Barbara Donagan notes, that “Royalist publicists created the memory of Colchester as a history of martyrdom” which overtook commemorations of “fire,” the “hunger of its civilians” and “the courage of its defenders.”62 Cavendish personalizes this highly public act by opening her elegy with the epistolary address “Dear Brother,” before turning to the psychological impact of his loss at the conclusion of the siege of Colchester:

222

Besieged

tHy Idea in my Mind doth lye, And is Intomb’d in my Sad Memory, Where every Day I to thy Shrine do go, And offer Tears, which from mine Eyes do flow; My Heart, the Fire, whose Flames are ever pure, Shall on Loves Altar last, till Life endure; My Sorrows Incense strew, of Sighs fetch’d deep, My Thoughts do watch while thy dear Ashes sleep; Dear, Blessed Soul, though thou art gone, yet Lives Thy Fame on Earth, and Man thee Praises gives: But all’s too Small, for thy Heroick Mind Was above all the Praises of Mankind.63 In these lines, the entirety of the elegy, Cavendish shows little concern with the material siege space in which her brother was executed; rather, she dwells on her own mindscape or cognitive space, in which the idea of her brother (all she has left of him) is entombed. An exile from England when her brother was killed, Cavendish conjures up her brother in her imagination, which allows her to express her grief and faith in his legacy. Though she envisions an afterlife for him – “Fame on Earth” – to comfort herself, it too is more of an abstract concept than a concrete reality. As with Harington, Cavendish produces an elegy on a siege event but strips it of its military material and spatial dimensions. This relative absence of the siege space and its physical aftermath in a number of elegies written about civil war sieges is also true for selected siege elegies written in the first few decades of the eighteenth century, as revealed in Timothy Harris’s elegiac poem on the death of the Swedish King Charles XII at the siege of Fredriksten, Norway, during the Great Northern War, A Poem on the Death of the King of Sweden, Who was kill’d before Fredrickshall, December 11. 1718, which is followed by a brief epitaph in a similar vein. It is somewhat difficult to distinguish the genre of this poem given that its author does not identify it other than as a “poem.” However, it has all three elegiac features of lament, praise, and consolation and is followed by an epitaph. Its placement before the epitaph also conforms to the practice in both classical and early modern texts of situating an epitaph after a “longer funerary poem, the form we now commonly call the elegy,” as Joshua Scodel notes in his examination of the “generic combination” in his study The English Poetic Epitaph.64 It

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

223

is reasonable, then, to consider the poem as an elegy and it follows the pattern described above: it tends to dismiss the spatial dimension of civil war, privileging instead the hand of providence in removing the military hero from earthly space. We do learn in the prefatory lines introducing the elegy of the site of the death of this “Glorious Prince” with “a God-like Breast”: “Charles, King of Sweden, Who was kill’d before Fredrickshall, December 11. 1718.”65 But thereafter, no mention is made of the location of his death during his final invasion of “Fredrikshald, a hilltop fortress just across the Danish border,” even though Charles XII’s death was connected with the mechanics of siege warfare: “an enemy sentinel caught sight of his head peering over the parapet and managed a lucky hit” when the king went out “to supervise the construction of a front line trench.”66 Instead of locating Charles XII in the siege space, however, Harris lists the “Heroick Vertues” of this “Glorious Prince,” who was not only gifted at birth by nature but who cultivated these gifts to become morally upright, courageous, and cultured, readying him to “Act upon the Publick Stage” despite his tender years (3–4). No besieged enemy, Harris claims, can take credit for transporting this “Brightest Star” among men out of this world into the next (3), for this is a divine act rather than the military act of a sniper: Like Great GUStAVUS, this Imperial Ray, Exchang’d a Mortal has, for an Eternal Day. Nor let the Conqu’ror boast He has overcome; ’Twas Heav’n that struck, ’twas Heav’n that call’d Him Home. (4) However, despite these case studies, we should be wary of painting all siege elegies with the same formal brush (cataloging them as simply character-centred heroic lyrics) because of the relative absence of the materiality of the siege and its physical aftermath in some examples of the genre. A number of poems of mourning about those killed during siege warfare – siege elegies and related funereal genres such as the siege epitaph – were adapted and expanded in order to localize the poetic subject in the moment and site of death and in so doing complicate simpler funereal forms and reveal the vulnerability of the hero to the dangerous human and structural elements of siege warfare. For example, in his “eyewitness” prose account of the siege of Newcastle, A True Experimentall and Exact Relation upon That famous and renowned Siege of Newcastle (1645), the

224

Besieged

Scot William Lithgow intersperses siege poems, including an “Epitaph” for “that renowned Officer Lieutenant Colonell Home,” “slaine” during the siege. The twelve-line poem opens thus, Woe to that breach, beside blacke Bessies Towre, Woe to it selfe that bloudy butchering Bowre! Where valiant Home, that sterne Bellonaes blade, And brave Commander fell: for there he stayd Arraign’d by death: Where now that heart of Mars Deserves a Tombe, on it, a sable Herse:67 In this work, Lithgow, who was quite comfortable playing with literary forms, begins with historical detail and material fact, focusing on the role and dangers of man-made structures in siege warfare, before moving on to the obligatory praise of the dead, who will soon receive a “crowne of glore” from Christ in heaven. If, as Scodel argues, the “poetic epitaph … participates in the social, and therefore historical, construction of the dead,” then Lithgow’s “conception of its dead” in this poem highlights the public spatial dimension of that loss in siege warfare in particular, marking the importance of social space in the life and death of the individual.68 The space itself, rather than the individual, is figuratively presented as the cause of the colonel’s death. When a city tower becomes a “bloudy butchering Bowre” during a siege, no one, even an agent of Christ, is safe. We see a similar broadening of the elegiac mode in a number of siege elegies that emphasize the public spatial dimension of the end of an individual during a siege. The locus mortis in such siege elegies and epitaphs serves as a “monument” to the fallen hero.69 This is true of An Elegie, On the most Barbarous, Unparallel’d, Unsouldiery, Murder, Committed at Colchester upon the persons of the two most incomparable, Sir Charles Lucas, and Sir George Lisle (1648). This relatively lengthy poem (six pages) deeply embeds the two subjects of mourning – Lucas and Lisle – in the siege space not only for the purpose of lamenting their loss but of recording with a “vindictive, sustained, angry tone” the inhumanity of the besiegers of Colchester, notably the “effeminate” Fairfax.70 In the process, the anonymous author irately resists the act of besiegement metaphorically, having failed to do so in reality, by rewriting the story of the siege. The ultimate demise of Lucas and Lisle, the subject of this elegy, is the result of criminality; the besiegers’ defeat of Colchester is but a “high-way victory,” not the outcome of heroic valour or military acumen:

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

225

Through what they Charge, and vigorous Onset call, Is down-right, Stand, Deliver, and that’s all: Though Forts reduc’d, and Holds suppress’d by awe, Here’s [illegible] a Siege, but Burglary i’th’ Law: And COLCHeSteR it self, in Truth’s free scope, Is no Towne Taken, but a Towne Broke ope: That from the Booty gain’d, and wealthy prize, Not their renowne, but their Indictments rise.71 As with highwaymen and pirates, what the besiegers gain from the besieged town and its contents is nothing more than “[b]ooty”; they have not freed or liberated the site and its inhabitants on behalf of a religiously committed parliament.72 Such siege elegies that rewrite the combat zone or attempt to put a new spin on it may be the exception to the rule, but they are a fascinating study of the psychology of war poetry that must provide “alternate realities” for their readers. In the siege panegyrics published between the mid-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, attention is again focused on a matchless individual – typically a solid, impenetrable masculine body – but these poems often focus more attention than do elegies on the heroic subject’s place and conduct in the siege space because, as Noelle Dückmann Gallagher reminds us, panegyrics “were understood to share the same commemorative purposes as formal historical narratives” and therefore situated individual heroism within broader spatiotemporal accounts.73 An interesting case in point is the panegyric verse On the Siege of Glocester, and Col. Massey, generically self-identified as “Verses” on the top of the page and first published as a broadside in 1644. In this panegyric, the city of Gloucester and Col. Massey (Edward Massey), its governor in 1643 when it successfully defended itself against the onslaught of royalist besiegers, are both celebrated and memorialised for their status as unmovable forces, their unyielding forms intertwined: Gloucester is the fixed body and Massey the impenetrable heart. Though the panegyric begins with the city itself, “a Rock” that “stood against the numerous powers/Of the Besiegers, who with Thunder-showers/Charg’d her old ribs,” the siege space then settles into the background when the attention is shifted to Massey.74 However, his body is inextricably linked to the besieged town, though it is superior to it. His heart is analogous to a “Fort” that “no Engyne could beat down,/Nor Mine blow up”: it is, in fact, “more strong then was the Town.” While both the city and governor are presented as buffered,

226

Besieged

rock-hard masculine bodies, it is Massey’s virtue and valour that prevents penetration, the author claims. It was not the “Trenches,” “River purpled with Malignant blood,” “Canon,” or “Bulwarks rais’d with Martiall art” that “secure[d]” Gloucester, despite the benefits of such barriers between the besiegers and besieged, for without Massey’s resistance to “promises” and “threats,” all might have been lost. Unlike Milton’s Eve, Massey is not vulnerable to verbal temptations, even if they might alleviate his suffering and aggrandize him. As if one impenetrable masculine body is not enough in this heroic siege panegyric, another appears on the horizon “from a far/Upon the Mountains” and the homosocial bond between the two men, Robert Devereux, the third earl of Essex, and Col. Massey, takes on epic proportions. When all is nearly lost (given that there are only three barrels of gunpowder left in the city), “like a Blazing-star,” Essex enters the poetic space, signalling his presence with “auspicious fires”: he thereby grants his military allies “animating vigour” and threatens “Ruine and Death” to his military foes who soon flee the city walls. The bodies of these two military men consume the poetic space, one inside and one outside the besieged city, maintaining the bodily “firmness, resolution” and “control” needed to ensure victory.75 The city itself, in its very “Being” and “Name,” we are told, thereafter became “Monuments” to Massey’s “Fame,” as does the panegyric poem itself. The identity of the besieged space (and its place in the parliamentary narrative of civil war success) and the one who protects it in this historical moment are thereby forever merged, the one permanently signifying the other. Four decades later, in a work whose title makes use of the popular discourse of reportage, An Account of the Great and Glorious Actions of Mr. Walker the Protestant Governor, at the Siege of London-Derry (1689), the author again keeps the brutal siege space in view even when foregrounding the heroism of the besieged city’s joint governor, George Walker. Though Walker, a “Master of Arts and Arms, Heav’ns double Champion,” looms large in the piece as a hero of classical and biblical proportions, an emblem of the hallowed intersection of “Gown” and “Armor,” he still operates within Londonderry, which must battle “a whole Kingdom” trying to batter down its gates.76 The Irish army finds that the walls of Londonderry are “hotter than St. Patrick’s Purgatory” and the bones of the Irish and French besiegers, akin to those of the biblical “barbarous Philistine Race,” are seen strewn together under the city’s walls. Both city and governor

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

227

are once again figured as impenetrable and all who approach them are scorched, wounded, and destroyed. An Account is even more hyperbolic and unrestrained in its presentation of the governor and besieged city than is On the Siege of Glocester, and Col. Massey, which is the case for much of the siege panegyric and odic verse written in the Williamite period, during which the excesses of heroic discourse in formal siege poetry soon triggered a backlash, as they did in siege drama, seen, for example in Elkanah Settle’s “direct challenge to the Restoration siege play” with its overly bombastic heroes, as noted above. In the odes on the siege of Namur, in particular, bombastic heroic discourse appears to reach its apex. In some respects, the siege ode takes over for the siege epic after the Restoration because it manages to cast off the elegiac or melancholic elements of the seventeenth-century siege epic in order to speak into existence a more purified form of the royalist heroic. Some brutal, though highly stylized, elements of siege warfare remain, yet in the Pindaric siege odes on William III’s military enterprises in Namur, the authors are concerned to idealize William at the expense of most others, wholly and strangely ignoring, for example, the significant role played by non-British members of the Allied Forces.77 Congreve’s A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the King On His Taking Namure (1695), along with Henry Denne’s A Poem on the Taking of Namur, By His Majesty (1695) and Thomas Yalden’s On the Conquest of Namur. A Pindarique Ode (1695) all strive to venerate William III in light of his remarkable “Heroick Deeds” at the second siege of Namur.78 This is accomplished in each case by invoking the spectacle of siege warfare not to address the suffering of civilians during a siege but rather to prioritize the ability of the “Godlike WILLIAM,” and the men who serve and strive to imitate him, to overcome any obstacle presented by the city of Namur, whether its strategic location, recent fortifications by the renowned French military engineer Vauban, or the enemy’s firepower (7).79 In accomplishing this political objective via the siege ode, Denne and Yalden, however, are more likely than Cowley to adapt “ancient models” to “represent modern war.”80 John Richardson claims that this renders the war poetry of the period “less than heroic” or, at the very least, diminishes “individual heroism.”81 We would argue, however, that in the siege odes on Namur, while “the disposition and movement of formed [military] groups” are celebrated, they are subordinated to the “individual heroism” of William III alone or of William III and Lieutenant General John Cutts.82 Aspects of the ancient heroic are retained even

228

Besieged

in describing modern warfare in these siege odes, although as Andrew Lincoln explains a shift in the understanding of the nature of the heroic often occurred, for example the “hero’s courage usually exemplify[ing] an ability to remain composed in the presence of … carnage” rather than as personally engaging in that carnage.83 As earlier noted, in our discussion of Mitchelburne’s play on the siege of Londonderry, ideas of heroism applied to William were often distinct from those invoked for the Stuarts, with William appearing as a man of the people. In A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the King on His Taking Namure, after the florid invocation to the Muse, the playwright William Congreve sets the stage in section 4 by conjuring up in the reader’s eye the image of the combat zone and the opposing forces who seek possession of the city: Behold a Town arise, Bulwark’d with Walls, and lofty Tow’rs! Two Rival Armies, all the Plain o’re-spread, In Gallant Order Rang’d, and Shining Arms Array’d: With Eager Eyes, beholding both from far, N A M U R E, the Prize and Mistress of the War. (3) Congreve accentuates the might of the fortress and its relative inaccessibility – the result of Nature: it is located “High on a Rock” and surrounded by “craggy Cliffs” (4). But he also highlights its manmade threats, the “Dangers Men can add, by Force, or Skill”: “[O]n ev’ry side, wide gaping Engines wait,/Teeming with Fire, and big with certain Fate,/Ready to hurl Destruction from above/In dreadful Roar” (4). It could be surmised that detailing the voice and vision of siege combat in section 5 of the ode and elsewhere threatens its heroic sentiment. However, Abigail Williams has persuasively argued that an “enthusiasm for gory bellicosity was central to the popularity of poetry” in the period, especially, Lincoln contends, when it is contrasted with the striking calm of the monarch.84 In stanzas 6 and 7 of Congreve’s ode, such a contrast occurs when the “promiscuous Noise,” “Torrents of fire,” “horrid Gloom” and “Rage” of the second siege of Namur seem pale in comparison to William III’s fixed and resolved martial presence: Amidst this Rage, behold, where N A S S A W stands, Undaunted, Undismay’d! With Face Serene, dispensing dread Commands; Which heard with Awe, are with Delight Obey’d. (5)

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

229

The king is presented as an untouchable, hallowed being, as it were, for “A thousand fiery Deaths, around him fly;/And burning Balls with rapid hiss, pass harmless by” because they cannot burn his “Sacred Head” or “singe the Lawrels there” (5, 6). There is a saintly aspect to this steady and centred commander of the siege. All British soldiers are not as fortunate as the king during the siege, as Congreve shows, detailing in stanzas 8 through 10 the “scorching rage/ Of Missive Fires, that fester in each Limb” of “wounded Briton[s]” (6). However, the reality of frontline soldiers besieging a city is not presented to undermine the heroic in Congreve’s ode; rather it is shown as the motivator for heroic action in the military masses: Only “dire Revenge alone, has Power to assuage” the “scorching rage” endured by the besieging soldiers, “Revenge, mak[ing] Danger dreadless seem” (6). Thereafter, the soldiers insistently move onward and upward – “proceed[ing] with firm unshaken Pace,/And hardy Breasts” – despite fire raining down from above and “Springing Mines … Of secret Sulphur” set as traps below (7). “Still they proceed” is repeated by Congreve to signify the refusal of British soldiers to halt their forward and upward movement as they “Climb, and Scale the Steepy Walls!” (8), which is inspired by the serene yet steely resolve of “Godlike” William III whose “wondrous charms” terrify the enemy and whose heroic acts surpass that of the demigod Perseus, son of Zeus (8). The unfaltering, unbreakable, unmoved leader paradoxically propels his forces forward until they reach the citadel, although they are permeable, exposed beings. The result is military success, marked by a “Heroick Harmony” produced by a military chorus of gunfire and trumpets and Nature’s songs (8). It is true that William III is, in Richardson’s terms, more of a modern military hero than an ancient one in Congreve’s ode, given that he is presented in the poem “as a risk-taking leader rather than a life-taking fighter”; this, Richardson theorizes, is necessary given the difference between ancient and modern warfare in which “the general was increasingly regarded as the controller of the battlefield rather than a fighter.”85 However, since Congreve often describes William III in classical terms through allusion, the ancient and the modern heroic coexist fairly comfortably in this siege ode. As grandiloquent as Congreve, Denne and Yalen exhibit a similar pattern in representing the siege of Namur in their odic works. In fact the style and imagery of all three odes are strikingly similar at times.86 However, Denne’s and Yalen’s odes adapt the ancient models more significantly given the modern stratagems of war at the siege of Namur. Denne, of

230

Besieged

Trinity College, Cambridge, first establishes William III as a quasi-divine figure who is “call’d” “when the World’s at stake.”87 After concluding his expansive invocation to the Muse, Denne presents the king and his British soldiers at the walls of Namur, “the destin’d Object of the War” that “rises in the Air” before our eyes (3).88 As with Congreve, Denne accentuates the difficulty of the military task set before the besiegers, which even causes the king to reflect for a moment before proceeding: Even William pauses, when its [Namur’s] strength he views; All but the Hero would the Task refuse. Fenc’d with vast Rocks it stands, and seems to dare The Siege of Europe joyning in a War. (3) However, Denne reassures his readers that for William, no fortified city stands a chance, regardless of its excessive fortifications: Lewis [Louis] so nicely skill’d himself t’ inclose With Lines, and Bars, and Ramparts from his Foes. Firm as the craggy Rock on which it stands A dreadful Castle all the Plains commands. Tow’rs, Ravlins, Bulwarks, all around appear, So fortified by France, as if her Fate lay there. Art finisht there what Nature’s Pow’r began, To make the Rock impregnable to Man (3) William is “more than [a] man”: he is “The British Genius, and the God of War!” (3). No earthly structures can block his entry. Despite the tremendous noise of modern warfare, a heroic speech is given by William during siege preparations to the “gen’rous Britons” whom he inspires to follow his orders even though they are battered by “Iron Hail” as they run headlong into Namur, fighting through each layer of defense (4, 5). Denne not only presents William as a quasi-divine heroic fighter, he also, in a more modern vein, presents him as a sensitive man, even a romantic figure, when in the midst of a speech he sighs when reflecting on his now “deceas’d” wife Queen Mary (4). However, Denne not only pays significant attention to the heroism and sensitivity of the king, but also to these qualities in Lieutenant General John Cutts, to whom the poem is also dedicated. Though, in fact, “1,349 men” of Cutts were “killed and wounded” during the siege, Cutts also suffering from “a slight head

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

231

wound,” Denne figures him as the second hero of his piece. Cutts’s role on the ground leading “the British grenadiers and four other battalions” certainly conforms more easily to the ancient model of the heroic.89 Denne also balances Cutts’s well-known military bravado with his more sensitive nature, reminding readers of Cutts’ days as a poet, thinking perhaps of the soldier’s 1685 work La Muse de Cavalier, Or An Apology for such Gentlemen as make Poetry their Diversion not their Business. However, to maintain his focus on the king, Denne periodically returns to William as the prime mover and motivator of the action and results; after all, it is William who is the soul of the British army. It is William who causes Namur to surrender and William who “Triumphant … rides along the Plain,/While Nations freed adore the wondrous Man” (8). In his Pindaric ode, the Rev. Thomas Yalden (1671–1736) uses near identical imagery to describe the “immoveable” and “inaccessable” Namur and its “thousand brazen Mouths” that “surround” its “Walls” which “vomit Flames.”90 Once again only William, implored by the Belgians for assistance, can capably penetrate such a monstrous manmade structure: “Alone his Arms can such a Power engage;/Destroy with fiercer Flames, and Thunder back their Rage” (3). Yalden also envisions William as superior to classical heroes, for unlike Achilles and Ajax at the siege of Troy, “WILLIAM dares his Breast expose,/Unarm’d, ungarded, to his Foes” (10). So too, his modern arsenal of weaponry that neither “Nature” nor “Art” could resist renders him more effective, militarily speaking, than Achilles who had no such “bellowing Engines” or “destructive Bombs” to storm the “inferiour” walls of Troy (4). Hence, no town is safe from the godlike William and “[t]he Brittains,” “a warlike Race,” who imitate the “matchless Deeds” of their leader (4). Yalden is perhaps the most overt in presenting the dangers faced by the besieging forces in “the horrid [p]omp” of siege warfare, in which Nature itself utters “horrid Groans” as “the Firmament” is shaken (4, 5): This Wreck of War the upper Regions Share, Whilst Arms, and Men, and Rocks lye scatter’d in the Air. Yet Death in ev’ry Form the Britains face, And march with an undaunted Pace (5) The grotesquerie of war is ultimately, however, absorbed in the overarching message of Yalden’s siege ode: that British military masculinity, figured by the heroic William III and several military leaders who carried out

232

Besieged

his orders during the Nine Years’ War (Lieutenant General James Butler, 2nd Duke of Ormonde, Lieutenant General John Cutts, and Christopher the Elder Codrington, governor general of the Leeward Islands) establish Protestant Britain’s military and political supremacy over a feminized France, signified by the surrender of a frightened Louis-François, Duc de Boufflers, the marshal of France.

Siege Poems in the Satirical Mode Not all contemporaries who read these Pindaric odes on the siege of Namur, or siege panegyrics, including siege odes, in the 1690s more generally, accepted at face value the representation and interpretation of the national significance of the sieges in which the British participated. Many readers recognized them as nothing more than Williamite political propaganda. In fact, the response to panegyric and odic poems on the siege of Namur suggest that the cultural saturation point for heroic siege poetry may have been reached in the 1690s. While recognizing that the panegyric mode, in its various expressions across genres, “was essential” to the Restoration’s “financial structure, its party politics, its religious ideology, [and] its historical consciousness,” Noelle Dückman Gallagher calls attention to late Restoration and early eighteenth-century critiques of the mode, pointing to, for example, Samuel Parker’s denunciation in Homer in a Nutshell (1700) of “panegyric’s ‘Nauseous, vile, pedantick Forms.’”91 Such censure is implied in the context of siege panegyric in the short work of literary criticism entitled Reflections on the Poems made upon The Siege and Taking of Namur (1696). Believed to be authored by Bishop William Sherlock (c. 1641?–1707), this work, written as a letter to a friend, begins by quoting the question posed to him by said “friend”: “Whether the late Siege and Taking of Namur deserves the Great and Extraordinary Applause some People are pleased to bestow upon it? And whether so many English Lives have not dearly bought the King of Spain’s Town?”92 It is estimated that the second siege of Namur resulted in 9,000 casualties among the Allied Forces, with the British suffering the greatest losses.93 After Sherlock aptly avoids the substance of the question, citing “Prudence,”94 he turns to the matter of the aesthetics of poems in the subgenre, censuring many elements of the panegyric and odic poems on the siege of Namur by Denne, Congreve, and Yalden (among others). Even Joseph Addison’s

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

233

poetic effort to praise William’s success at Namur is seen by Sherlock as sadly lacking in aesthetic merit. Sherlock’s treatment of representative siege panegyrics and odes of the Williamite era seems relatively mild when compared to scathing antisiege poems of the period written in the satirical mode, most notably the anonymous Knight-Errantry; or, Don Quixot Encoutering the Windmill. Being a Relation of the Siege of Knocke (1695), a generically hybrid poem that could variously be labelled mock-heroic, burlesque, or parody. Since, as Alastair Fowler argues, “[d]iversity of form is paradoxically the ‘fixed’ form of satire,” it is no surprise that a satirical antisiege poem would display conventions from a range of comic genres, making it all the more potent as a mode of political attack.95 The subject of Knight-Errantry, the siege of Fort Knocke (Knocque/ Knokke) (1695) was carried out by Williamite forces, intended, or so said the king’s party, as a military distraction or strategy to divert attention from preparations for the siege of Namur.96 However, this may have been little more than a belated justification given the embarrassing failure to besiege successfully this relatively vulnerable fortress holding a French garrison. By subjecting William III and other military leaders in the Grand Alliance to harsh scorn, Knight-Errantry suggests that their failed siege of Fort Knocke just prior to the siege of Namur is emblematic of financially wasteful, morally suspect, and politically inexpedient military actions. We leave the poem doubtful of William’s and the Grand Alliance’s skill as “Bloody Town-Taker[s]” despite the vigorous “Copulation” of the “Teeming Brains” of the “grave Cabal” who work to “Procreate Some Shapely, brave design.”97 Throughout the antisiege poem, the author deflates the pretentions of the Grand Alliance by focusing only on its failures. Through analogy, the Grand Alliance is figured as a type of Don Quixote who do nothing more than tilt at windmills, and the “Graceful Pregnant Heroe” William III is reduced, via synecdoche, to a Nose (1), keeping in mind the “long, narrow, hooked and rather crooked nose” for which he was known.98 Having emptied the Grand Alliance and William in particular of heroic significance, the poem’s author then becomes a ventriloquist, putting words in the king’s mouth to expose not only his preposterous sense of self-importance but also the devastating effect on Britain of his endless desire to win battles and towns:

234

Besieged

My Friends, ’tis true, some Blood the Wars have cost; Some Treasure has been spent, and Towns been lost; … The Stubborn murmuring Britains loudly rore That we’re in debt; but Knocke shall pay the Score; That in 7 years it is a Burning shame We’ve nothing done; but Knocke shall raise our Fame. That Mons’s Loss, and two Great Cities more It is a Deep wound; But Knocke shall heal the Sore: … That Horrid Crimes we Act, They dare not Name For fear of Law; But Knocke shall Mend the Same: Where, tho’ we fail, the Conscious World must tell, From vast attempts, how gloriously we fell. (1, 2) In response to this speech, in which William minimizes past failed sieges, criminal military behaviour, and national financial devastation by way of inflating the siege of a relatively insignificant fort (“the fam’d Metrapolis”), he is proclaimed by other members of the enraptured Grand Alliance “the God of Wisdom” (2). Without a second thought or even a pause, the apparently impulsive William with undue haste gives commands that will end in wholesale “slaughter” (2). If it were not enough to mock the heroic aspirations of the leaders of this enterprise, the author of Knight-Errantry debases William’s army by associating the soldiers besieging Knocke with “School Boys” with a past: those who did “craftily slip in-/to Orchards, and steal the Pear-main, and the Pippin” (3). These are the men the army “must trust to” do the “Storming” in the siege (3). The author envisions them “Knavishly Crawling, and Creeping/Into other Folks Premisses” during the siege of Knocke, and a number dying as a result (3). Such a loss is not followed by heroic action on the part of their fellow soldiers. Rather, the soldiers seem to be focused on their food supply, detailed in a digression, before the king is informed that “[t]he Place is too strong, and the Siege in the Sudds, Sir” (4). This only inspires the king to move on to the next siege: the second siege of Namur. Presumably this poem was published before its success, since the author cannot envision the king taking Namur when he could not even manage to secure a fort that is but a “Foot-boy, or Page” to the “Man,” “a fortified Town” like Namur (4). In case the reader has

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

235

failed to pick up the mock-heroic nature of Knight-Errantry, the author concludes his work with an eleven-line poem “in Heroicks” celebrating “KNOCK tHe GReAt” who managed to hold at bay the less than heroic besieging British forces (4). The anonymous antisiege and antibattle poem, “The Campaign, 1692,” written in the satirical mode on William III’s disastrous campaign to stop the French from seizing Namur, similarly undercuts through ridicule the king as military hero, though it is more critical of military actions than persons.99 Written in a variation of Hudibrastic verse, the efforts by the “Hero” William III to save Namur from French besiegers is stymied not by superhuman foes, but simply by “plaguy wet/raw Weather” that left the ground a swamp: all William’s British forces can do is to helplessly watch the town “taken” by the French, while their Dutch allies, devoid of courage, refuse to risk life and limb to save the town.100 William does not respond heroically, swearing vengeance, but merely “unconcernedly lookt on” and decides to take “at least” “full three Months” “to rest” before returning to the field to avenge the siege of Namur (365, 366). When he does undertake the bloody Battle of Steenkirk (1692), he ultimately retreats, leaving “Six thousand Dead” and “Twelve hundred” captured (366). The author lists at great length the munitions, provisions, and men the king had at his service. As if the failure to relieve a besieged town, win a battle, or avoid the death and imprisonment of thousands of soldiers with these resources were not enough, the author highlights the monetary loss (one military event costing “Four hundred thousand Pounds”) involved in William’s “grand design,” which renders British citizens additional casualties of war (369, 368). The author of “The Campaign” finds little hope for celebration: Thus between French that do us beat, And Dutch that daily do us cheat, Our Grief and Ruins must be great, … Namur we saw to France submit, At Steinkirk flush’d into a Net And the Descent proved beshit

I fear it.

all over. (369)

236

Besieged

Ironically, despite the colossal failure of the campaign to relieve Namur in 1692 or to combat the French on the battlefield after the siege, on the king’s return, citizens on the coast are required, upon threat of violence, to light candles in celebration. It is this enforced celebration that the author describes sardonically as William’s “Triumphs” at the poem’s end: But after all it must be said, His Conquests were not quite so bad, But he those Triumphs merited, For sure no Emperor of Rome, Nor Brittish King was, I presume, With Farthing Candles lighted home

and more, Sir;

before, Sir. (371)

Satirical antisiege poetry was hardly limited to the reign of William III in the period under study. The satirical Joanereidos: or, Feminine Valour; Eminently discovered in Western Women, at the Siege of Lyme, first published in 1645 but reprinted as late as 1674, belies any claims to the contrary. Puritan women are lampooned in this poem for their Amazon-like military efforts at the siege of Lyme.101 However, since William was heavily criticized for weighing Britain “down in a long, costly, unpopular continental war” that involved numerous sieges “in aid of the much-reviled Dutch,” it is predictable that the genre might peak at this moment in history.102 And whether it was directed at William III himself or at his military policies, such satire worked to undermine any attempt of the regime to fashion the king as military hero. Nevertheless, antisiege satire did not replace heroic siege poetry, whether written in the epic, elegiac, panegyric, or odic modes in this or any other period. Both the heroic and mock-heroic existed side by side into the eighteenth century, though the heroic, as Richardson argues, was increasingly reimagined in the light of modern warfare and, as Lincoln claims, in relation to modern concepts of “gentlemanly virtue.”103 It may be overstating the fact to argue, as does Richardson, that “[t]he War of the Spanish Succession” (1701–14) that occurred in the reign of Queen Anne “seems to signal the end of contemporary heroic ambitions in English literature.”104 However, there is certainly evidence in the siege poetry of the period to suggest that “heroic ambitions” significantly diminished in British literature as the sun set on Stuart rule.

The Fading Heroic to the Satiric

237

Conclusion During and after the Civil War there is indeed, as Doody, Smith, MacLean, and Brady posit, a greater flexibility and fluidity in literary forms in general which is apparent in the atypical formal siege poems that appear between the years 1642 and 1722. While there is an attempt in much of this siege poetry to embrace the classical heroic, historical circumstances – the horror of a contemporary or a recent civil war, the disruption of imaginative play by reality, the differences between ancient and modern warfare – prevent a simple reproduction of the ancient heroism inscribed in classical literature. In the formal siege poetry under study, therefore, first realism and later antiheroic satire often intrudes upon the heroic. What we might call pure heroic is rarely sustainable in siege literature published between 1642 and 1722, even in works attempting to elevate a celebrated individual, most notably in the elegy, panegyric, and ode. While such a shift could be, and at times has been, envisioned in terms of a cultural loss, it might also be viewed as a liberating cultural moment in which historical circumstances grant early modern writers on war and its aftermath an opportunity for generative aesthetic and rhetorical (re)creation. A protomodern approach to writing war was the result.

CHAPteR 6

Old Forms, New Discourses The Siege in Early Modern Prose Fiction

In previous chapters, we traced shifts in early modern genres that feature sieges, revealing along the way that “the atoms of literary genres were repeatedly fragmented and reassembled in response to traumatic events.”1 Isabelle Moreau has recently affirmed that prose fiction was at the centre of such reinvention in Europe more broadly, noting that “[i]nnovation in prose fiction took Europe by storm during the seventeenth century” and experimentation was then at its core.2 John Barclay’s Argenis (1621) is one notable example of experimental British prose fiction in this century; it integrates into its narrative, as Jacqueline Glomski argues, “contemporary political and religious debate,” thus “introduc[ing] a new genre into European prose fiction, the political romance.”3 In his magisterial study of the emergence of prose fiction, J. Paul Hunter suggests that to understand the birth of new forms, such as the novel, we must consider the wider “materials of everyday print – journalism, didactic materials … and private papers and histories,” seeing them all as “contributors to the social and intellectual world in which the novel emerged.”4 In this chapter, we consider how traits of embryonic journalism – aspects of the siege pamphlet in particular – are integrated into the rare early modern work of British prose fiction dedicated entirely to a siege: John Bunyan’s The Holy War, made by Shaddai upon Diabolus, For the Regaining of the Metropolis of the World. Or, The Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul (1682). It is important to acknowledge that features of life writing about martial matters in general are similarly relevant to The Holy War since siege pamphlets share characteristics with siege letters, diaries, and the like, though much life writing was aimed at private rather than public audiences. As with siege pamphlets, autobiographical

Old Forms, New Discourses

239

prose on sieges foregrounds eyewitness experience, immediacy, and transformation of space. We have elected to consider the influence of the siege pamphlet on The Holy War in this chapter because published pamphlets were circulating on military events as, or shortly after, they occurred and thus would be part of the ongoing public discourse on siege warfare. Unlike longer forms of life writing, such as the memoir, early modern siege pamphlets also tend to focus on one particular place. Our argument is that as the material reality of the siege pamphlet penetrates Bunyan’s allegorical work, the protonovelistic form that emerges supplements its spiritual study of the soul with another set of material concerns on the volatility of urban space, the urgency and necessity of eyewitness testimony, and the simultaneous inadequacy of eyewitnesses to produce a comprehensive account of besieged space. The influence of siege journalism on The Holy War may be unsurprising given that in the poem that frames the narrative, Bunyan references “historiology” and places Mansoul’s wars alongside different types of more popular stories, “[s]ome foreign, some domestic,” of which “reports/Are … made, as fancy leads the writers.”5 By placing the fictional narrative that follows alongside the writing of history, stories, and (news) reports – even though he labels these other stories “vain” and differentiates his story from imaginary ones – he implicitly evokes them in positioning his own narrative (1). He thereby supplements his representation of a spiritual experience with a measure of materialist realism, but, more important to our argument, the resulting work also explores the act of witnessing and testifying to the trauma of war, its potential and its limits. The potency of the siege trope makes it perfect for investigating not merely spiritual but also temporal matters in this protonovel because it often involves an eyewitness unaccustomed to war whose authenticity derives from the recent experience of it. Bunyan’s exploration of the eyewitness, its authority and its limits, might be said to be an important precursor to the first-person narrator in the eighteenth-century novel.

The European Context of Siege Fiction Although The Holy War is apparently the only fictional British work published between 1642 and 1722 that features siege warfare as its primary event, sieges, of course, do appear in fiction in the period, as our earlier

240

Besieged

discussion of the siege in Defoe’s fictional military memoirs demonstrates. In fact, sieges most often surface in works of prose fiction first composed on the Continent before being translated into English for British readers. For example, Madeleine de Scudéry’s Almahide, or, l’esclave reine (1661–63), an English translation of which was published in London in 1677, begins with a siege of Granada and is one of Dryden’s sources for The Conquest of Granada. Richard Maxwell has called an earlier work of de Scudéry, Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus (1649–53) “the most siege-obsessed novel in literary history.”6 It was published in translation in London in 1653. These works are romances or new histories, although they often make use of factual material. Maxwell points out that de Scudéry conducted historical research for her novels: “her siege of Sardis, for instance, is adapted from Sallust.”7 The tendency to translate and publish works in this genre in Britain continued into the 1670s and 1680s and Maxwell lists a number of them. Of particular note is Le Seraskier Bacha, nouvelle du temps contenant ce qui s’est passé au siège de Bude (1685), by Jean de Préchac, which was published in English in or about 1685, a few years after Bunyan’s Holy War. It contains a long section that precisely details military maneuvers during the siege. In contrast, on the relatively rare occasion that a work of British prose fiction includes a siege, it is generally just one event among many. For instance, in The Siege of Mentz, Or the German Heroin, A Novel (1692), the hero Peregrine and his beloved face many obstacles, including being on different sides of the city walls at the siege. However, the siege is not crucial to the action itself in this and other novels like it, since it is just one of a series of adventures; urban siege space is incidental not central to the plot. Of all the works listed above, however, The Serasquier Bassa might be the closest to Bunyan’s Holy War in terms of its genre mixing. The French work is most definitely a romance tale with a long series of events preceding the siege, which keep the lovers Zouglan and Zaratima apart, yet a substantial portion of the last section of the novel grapples in a more tangible way with the actual siege of Buda (1684). Framed by a romance-motivated desire to know whether Zouglan (outside the city) will get to Zaratima (inside the walls), the work engages with the siege itself in historical terms for more than forty pages. De Préchac turns to journalistic terminology to detail at length strategies and tactics on both sides. For example, he writes about the bridge of boats built by Prince Charles of Lorrain, lists numbers killed or wounded and baggage taken, and sometimes weaves in dates of attacks. In

Old Forms, New Discourses

241

one instance, de Préchac describes at great length how a French engineer builds mines to destroy the city and then explains how the work of the city dwellers destroys them. Having discovered the location of the mines from an enemy deserter, the besieged “made a Sally with all the Troops they had left in a Condition to fight, they drove the Imperialists as far as the Batteries, after having Kill’d them above Two hundred Men. A great Number of Laborers, who were come out of the Place, got in the mean time to the Mouth of the Mines, and drew out the Powder … They lost a great many Men upon this occasion; but they re-entred not into the Place, till after the Mines were empty’d.”8 There is no eyewitness in this section of The Serasquier Bassa, at least not in terms of our understanding of the eyewitness in Bunyan’s Holy War; however, there is a sense that throughout the siege section, historical detail and accuracy are privileged in a way that is more aligned with journalism than romance. In the dedication, the author writes that he is presenting a book “compos’d of a Mixture of real Facts and gallant Intrigues” (sig. A2r) and in the epistle to the reader he notes that since his previous works, novels “mixt with Incidents of the Times,” have been favourably received, he is presenting another (n.p.). He then adds, “As to the Circumstances of the Siege of Buda, you will find them here such, as the exactest Relations have Publisht them” (n.p.). He claims to use testimony about the war as a source, and since the facts he describes do seem to resemble some contemporary histories of the siege, it seems as if he may be drawing directly on memoirs or news reports.

The Holy War, the Protestant Culture of Fact, and “Ruined Allegory” Bunyan, like de Préchac, makes use of history in The Holy War, which we can investigate productively by examining the ways in which his allegorical narrative is most influenced by the eyewitness testimony of the siege pamphlet. These very short works of prose nonfiction, often between four and fifteen pages in length, generally describe the process and progress of a particular siege in some detail, in the vein of a siege journal but with greater narrative structure. They are usually written by self-identified eyewitnesses who claim to relay in a factual fashion the unfolding of a siege event (or part of it), covering some or all of the staples of siege warfare – siege works,

242

Besieged

blockading, entrenchment, mining, countermining, sallies, ordnance, dwindling provisions, ongoing negotiations, and so on – over the course of the narration. Our suggestion that siege pamphlets influence the fictional Holy War may seem counterintuitive, given the considerable length of Bunyan’s work and the fact that it engages with multiple sieges in the same space; the subtitle does, after all, name the “Losing and Taking Again of the Town of Mansoul.” Nevertheless, like siege pamphlets, Bunyan’s fictional narrative is concerned with how the distinctive form of siege warfare specifically affects urban space and how a siege eyewitness reports violence and flux within the city. It might also seem wrongheaded to associate war pamphlets purportedly committed to recounting factual details with an allegorical religious work on a fictional city that represents the soul. However, in The Holy War, Bunyan reveals an interest in sensual material experience and its discontents as well as spiritual issues. The gates of his city are, for instance, named after the senses, and these gates are crucial to the wellbeing of the city. Indeed, it is the uneasy coexistence of the spiritual and the material that makes The Holy War experimental. It is as if Bunyan considers, in the work, how the spiritual might be reimagined in an age of fact. Barbara Shapiro, whose work earlier informed our discussion of prose nonfiction, has argued that “[b]y the end of the seventeenth century a substantial part of the English Protestant edifice was anchored by the concept ‘fact’ … English Protestant Christianity would integrate the legal concept ‘fact’ and legal language of establishing ‘facts’ into its very fabric, thus deepening the impact of fact on English culture.”9 Indeed, Shapiro identifies the figure of the witness as central to this marriage of fact and scripture. In relation to Edward Stillingfleet’s Origines Sacræ, or a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (1662), Shapiro explains, “The facts of Scripture, like all others, were dependent on witnesses. ‘The greatest evidence which can be given to a matter of fact, is the attesting of it by those persons who were eye-witnesses of it. This is the Foundation whereupon the firmest assent is built, as to any matter of fact’”; she emphasizes that “[t]he year 1675 witnessed an outburst of publications employing the concept ‘fact’ and ‘credible witnesses’ to secure rational belief in Scripture.”10 Bunyan may well be caught up in this weaving together of the factual and spiritual in terms of witnessing in particular. In The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Bunyan also imports elements of a genre concerned with fact and eyewitness testimony, bringing to bear

Old Forms, New Discourses

243

on allegory aspects of the contemporary travel narrative. In introducing these modern nonfictional forms to his two allegorical works, Bunyan grants allegory the contemporaneity and credibility that Hunter claims is central to the novel. Without a doubt The Holy War, written in the tradition of Christian siege allegories, intends to convey the extreme, prolonged spiritual suffering of the soul by comparing it to the intense, protracted experience of several seiges. Yet, in reimagining the figurative siege in a time when actual siege warfare is still deeply etched on the national memory, and in which historical sieges have been thoroughly represented in journalistic genres, Bunyan is influenced by “materials of everyday print” and the narrating figure at their core, giving new relevance to the figurative siege allegory. The martial language of material reality, therefore, infiltrates his spiritual tropology and the eyewitness is reconceived in a specifically Christian context. This is not to say that The Holy War loses its allegorical modality. An exhaustive amount of research has demonstrated the complexity of the allegorical dimension of the text. Christopher Hill’s formative reading of the sophisticated operation of the allegorical mode in The Holy War is perhaps the most helpful. Hill claimed that Bunyan’s work “combines at least four allegories”: “the history of the universe,” “the process of conversion within the individual soul,” “the history of the English Revolution,” and “the history of [the] Bedford corporation from 1650 to 1682.”11 Many others have since complicated, extended, or added to Hill’s account of allegory in The Holy War, speculating, for example, that Mansoul signifies the corporate church instead of (or as well as) a single soul.12 In theorizing the complexity of Bunyan’s allegory in The Holy War, scholars have also acknowledged that the mode was already breaking down in the seventeenth century. In the conclusion to The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention, Catherine Gimelli Martin, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory, argues that “[i]n normative allegory … [there is] a sequence of interchanges that constantly relay their comparisons yet they are finally deferred onto a projected center of static closure or transcendence. But, in ruined or baroque allegory, the strategy is precisely the opposite: by pushing the analogy until it does break down into a form of meta-allegorical or self-referential irony, the reader finally descends into an immanent but also semierased presence.”13 Likewise, Theresa M. Kelley’s Reinventing Allegory traces a deep scepticism toward allegory in early modern England, voiced by the

244

Besieged

likes of Milton, particularly as it had been used to express royalist ideas.14 Nevertheless, she refers to Milton’s introduction of allegory to Paradise Lost in the figures of Sin and Death to reveal the problematic nature of the mode: “Addison objects to Milton’s use of ‘some Particulars which do not seem to have probability enough for an Epic Poem, particularly in the Action which he ascribes to Sin and Death’ (Spectator no. 297, III:60). For Addison and Dr Johnson, ‘particulars’ are those parts of metaphor which I.A. Richards calls the vehicle: literal, material details that carry the figure unless, as Johnson observes, they end up carrying the reader’s attention away from the metaphorical idea (Lives I:45).”15 Bunyan, therefore, is not alone in the instability or experimental nature of his allegory, resulting in the creation of vehicles that “carry the figure” but also create excess meaning of their own. Beth Lynch places The Holy War in the category of “ruined allegory,” to borrow Martin’s term.16 After mapping the discomfort many readers experience because of the irresolution at the end of Bunyan’s allegory, she suggests that it is an “experimental form” that engages with “epistemological compromise and spiritual uncertainty.”17 The Diabolonians, for example, at times appear to be “foreigners” or “sinful aliens,” and at other times seem, through “miscegenation,” to be an essential part of the town.18 The irresolution of such uncertainties, even in the extended trials of arrested Diabolonians, she notes, “throws into relief the difficulty, and perhaps impossibility, of knowing not just others but oneself.”19 We agree with Lynch’s position on the experimental nature of this work, albeit with our emphasis placed elsewhere. It is the integration of elements of journalism, we would suggest, that introduces much of the uncertainty and ambiguity she recognizes. While Mansoul’s journey involves resisting sieges from destructive forces and opening its gates to productive ones, the narrator’s duty is more complex and even more inconclusive. Uncertainty about narrating war is crucial to eyewitness testimony, to the story of the narrator. Emergent journalists were generally not long-standing creative writers. Rather, they were typically empowered to write not by their background or training but because of their presence at an important event, which led to the acquisition of experiential knowledge that they worked hard to retain and transmit in persuasive detail. Having experienced the trauma of warfare himself while serving in the Parliamentary army, Bunyan would presumably be especially alert to the struggles of those who experience the chaos of war to articulate it with clarity.

Old Forms, New Discourses

245

The Holy War and Eyewitness Testimony In The Holy War, the experimental allegorical mode Bunyan inherited engages at its most literal level with the features of the siege or war pamphlet that emerged during the Civil War as a key means of communication and propaganda. Jason Peacey observes that “[d]uring the 1640s and 1650s … [n]umerous tracts emerged … from the pens of parliamentarian” and royalist “army chaplains,” and “tracts were produced by men from within the army administration as well as soldiers of a wide variety of ranks and social backgrounds.”20 We only need think, for example, of pamphlets like A True and Impartial Account of the Plunderings, Losses, and Sufferings of the County of Hereford by the Scottish Army During their Siege (1650) or A True Relation of the Twenty Weeks Siege of London-derry, by the Scotch, Irish, and Dis-affected English (1649). Such pamphlets affirm the role of the eyewitness in capturing an authentic, sensory-based experience and manifesting it with specificity and documentary evidence. Bunyan echoes the tendencies of this fact-based discourse in The Holy War, suggesting that such traits are an effective avenue to the comprehension of traumatic events. But like these siege pamphlets, Bunyan’s work of siege fiction also reveals the inadequacy or incompleteness of the knowledge of the eyewitness, the emotional effects on the witness, and the tendency of war and partisan journalism to descend into loudly competing stories, masking rather than revealing truth. The Holy War, then, engages with emergent war journalism written by authors brought into being by happenstance, striving for accuracy but recognizing its limits. Thus, the struggle of Bunyan’s narrator is not the same as Mansoul’s, which is to create and maintain a buffered space; it is instead to find an authorial voice that can accurately recount and give testimony – a journalistic voice – about a besieged and war-torn space to the best of his imperfect ability. Indeed, as the work emphasizes, the narrator’s senses are essential to reporting the events in prose, whereas the city he envisages must close off its senses. The benefit of creating an eyewitness siege narrative, particularly one with a relatively objective narrator, in The Holy War is that the authenticity of personal experience in a time of volatility is affirmed. A certain value is given to the description that is grounded in immediate sensory experience, unfiltered by an outside force, rather than in imaginative dreaming. Somewhat ironically, given that the narrative content is focused on the

246

Besieged

vulnerability of the senses (the five gates – Eargate, Eyegate, Mouthgate, Nosegate, and Feelgate – are manipulated by malign forces), the text itself reveals that the eyewitness is frequently empowered by directly seeing, feeling, hearing, and speaking. The senses have an important role to play not only in mediating the spiritual world but also in accurately conveying events as they occur in the material world. This authenticity is differentiated from the experience of readers who, as the narrator says (referring to Emmanuel’s capture of Diabolus) “cannot think unless” they were “there – as I was – what a shout there was in Emmanuel’s camp” (106). The eyewitness’s auditory experience can be recounted but never fully understood by the reader. Because the sensual experiences of Bunyan’s eyewitness are so crucial in The Holy War, the narrating voice is more unstable, more present, than it is in most of Bunyan’s other allegories. Bunyan typically distances the narrator from the allegorical objects in his works, either by making him a fully transparent interpreter without distinct character traits that influence the narrative or a dreamer who reports what he observes in his unconscious mind. The allegory is then presented and interpreted with minimal distraction. In her analysis of the eyewitness in an early modern work of French fiction, Andrea Frisch notes, “the perspective of that narrator is thus never problematized, is in fact never really constituted as a perspective. It is simply a transparent window onto a fictional world.”21 In some of Bunyan’s works, including The Pilgrim’s Progress, the narrator and the author appear to be one in the same. There is nothing to suggest in The Pilgrim’s Progress that the narrator who relates the sequence of events while in an altered dream state is not the author. Even in his allegories within allegories, Bunyan generally has interpreters who are not, in and of themselves, any more than filters. In the House of the Interpreter episode in The Pilgrim’s Progress, for instance, Christian sees a variety of images and situations and has each one of them explained so that they “will be profitable” to him.22 Of the interpreter himself we know little, since it is the explaining of signs that is important rather than the person or nature of the interpreter. The unobtrusive or transparent narrator who recounts the events rather than participates in them is also a feature of earlier allegories, though we do not know how many of them Bunyan read.23 The herald who introduces the drama Castle of Perseverance (c. 1440) is focused purely on his audience and not on himself or on his reactions to various goings on. Even the late Roman writer Prudentius’s Psychomachia, the earliest extant Christian

Old Forms, New Discourses

247

siege narrative, has an invisible third person narrator, who merely shares a series of events in the battle for Mansoul, beckoning the reader to “mark at close quarters the very features of the Virtues, and the monsters that close with them in deadly struggle.”24 This is not to say that a more overt narrational voice was nonexistent in earlier allegories. Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath has recently argued that The Romance of the Rose “presents a dramatic development in creating a first-person narrator,” and that other medieval allegories, both in England and the Continent, picked up on this tradition.25 Yet even in allegories like The Romance of the Rose, the narrator is dreaming as the work begins and is not an engaged participant in the material reality of the literal level of the allegory. Bunyan deviates in The Holy War not only from this convention, but also from his own general pattern of allegorical narration.26 In The Holy War, the narrator is a distinct person, who, we contend, is not primarily represented as Bunyan. In this we disagree with Lynch whose close reading of the frontispiece to the first edition of The Holy War leads her to equate the narrator with Bunyan himself. She notes that “[t]he figure superimposed onto the town of Mansoul” in this illustration, “with his heart assimilated to Heart Castle, Diabolus, and Emanuel vying for attention on either side, clearly represents John Bunyan,” even if “the defining characteristics” of the illustrated man “ – the hair, moustache, coat and collar – do not delineate the author so much as allude to him.”27 Lynch primarily focuses on this figure that resembles Bunyan and the city itself as if The Holy War was an allegorical retelling of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Bunyan’s autobiography. The author, in this reading, is the city and it is his soul we are analyzing.28 However, we would contend that the narrating figure is a carefully crafted eyewitness who is part of the emergence of what Frisch calls the “historical construct” of the eyewitness.29 The narrator resembles the author, and particularly in the framing poem overlaps with the author, but is configured as distinct from the author, as becomes apparent in the opening pages of the book. This narratorial device sits uneasily in the work at moments because the perception of eyewitnesses should be grounded solely in what they have experienced. Yet, at times, the narrator appears omniscient, knowing, without explanation, the precise attack plans of Diabolus and his cronies or of conversations that took place at the court of Shaddai or in private meetings between “the King and his Son” in the “privy-chamber” (11–14, 29–30, 32). But these shifts are repeatedly corrected. He continually

248

Besieged

calls our attention to the fact that he is also unequivocally a “literal” participant in the siege, present at the events in the city. The equivocation between positions suggests that the eyewitness, perhaps out of necessity, is a storyteller, an embellisher rather than a reporter. Thus, despite the claims to credibility that follow, the eyewitness, in Bunyan’s work, makes sense of events by proffering information that must be conjecture. The narrator of The Holy War has his own past, his own opinions, his own sensual experiences, and his own emotional reactions to the siege. This puts the narrational presence not so much in line with spiritual siege allegories in which the narrator (if there is one) gets out of the way of the work’s relatively straightforward signification of spiritual warfare but rather with the authors of siege pamphlets who wrestled with material warfare. While the author was rarely at the centre of these ephemeral works, they did often identify themselves, if not by name, by their relation to the military action. For instance, we learn that the author of A True Relation of the Twenty weeks Siege of London derry is “Captaine Henry Finch, one of the Captains of London derry, and one of the Aldermen of the City.”30 Even an anonymous narrator had to be credible, and credibility, in the siege pamphlet, is grounded in presence and perception. The author of A True Relation of the Passages Which happened at the Town of Portsmouth At the late Siege is listed as “one that was employed in that Service,”31 and we read that A true and faithfull Relation of the besieging of the Towne of Manchester is told “as it was credibly represented unto the House of Commons from a Godly Minister in the Towne.”32 That the one who narrates was there, in the midst of the event he describes, must be relayed so we can evaluate his credibility in telling the tale. He is an eyewitness to the events that occurred, and his asserted authority derives primarily from that function. In The Holy War, the narrator is eyewitness, a compiler of events, as well as interpreter. He is a distinct and fictional person who is not allegorical. He has a specific personal history that includes travels: he “walked through many regions and countries,” coming across “that famous continent of Universe,” and then on that continent he travels to “a fair and delicate town, a corporation called Mansoul” (7–8). Despite the specificity of this background (we know, for instance, that the narrator has a master and that he travels on business and that he can elect to stay in certain places long enough to become acquainted with their customs), his nature is still somewhat ambiguous. We do not know the precise nature of his business, nor exactly who his master might be. His claim to truth, then, is that he was present throughout the besiegement of Mansoul.

Old Forms, New Discourses

249

The narrator is also distinct from the allegorical characters that people Mansoul. Bunyan never names him, refusing to make him a transparent allegorical sign. In an allegorical text in which names define and contain characters, signifying and stabilizing what they represent (Captain Resistance, Mr Ill Pause), the unnamed narrator is significant. He may also be unnamed because many siege narratives were published anonymously; they were often published under such pseudonyms as “a faithful friend,” “a gentleman of good quality,” and “the honest citizen.” Frisch notes that there is, in the early modern period, an “increasing reliance on anonymous witnesses,” whose “ethical status” or “culturally sanctioned authority” could not be determined.33 However, the absence of a narratorial name not only distinguishes this character from Bunyan but also from the inhabitants of the town who are far more one dimensional, as their names suggest. There are many moments in which the narrator of The Holy War is positioned in the city and his sensual experience is magnified. In the introductory poem to the reader he states, For my part, I (myself ) was in the town, Both when ’twas set up, and when pulling down. I saw Diabolus in his possession, And Mansoul also under his oppression. (2) The repetition of such phrases as “I saw,” “I heard,” and “I was there” here and elsewhere, particularly given the focus on the terrors of war – “I heard the stones fly whizzing by mine ears”(3) – has led critics to relate it to Bunyan’s own military experience. But it also affirms the location of the narrator’s voice in a literal city space, given his claim that he stopped at the city on his travels and thus observed all the events that follow in the work proper. The presence of such an individual in a city (even such an oddly imagined municipal space) draws attention to the literal rather than a figurative story. It is not that Bunyan’s allegory does not dwell on the spiritual battle of the soul; it is that in using a vehicle with deeply significant contemporary connotations, the vehicle itself is made more visible beyond its figurative signification. It thus invites a different sort of reading and in this case one that involves an intertextual relationship with the discourse of siege accounts in pamphlets or newsbooks. The increasingly important concept of eyewitness testimony in the Civil War was interwoven with the notion of authenticity or truth claims, which we considered in relation to life writing in chapter 1. We know of what we

250

Besieged

speak because we were there. In the titles of many war pamphlets the word “true” or “exact” is a commonplace. Take, for example, William Lithgow’s A True Experimentall and Exact Relation upon That famous and renowned Siege of Newcastle (1645) or the anonymous True and Exact Relation Of the taking of Colchester, Sent in a Letter From an Officer of the Army (1648). So too, the insistence that the narrator is a participant and thus a credible source of “true facts” is a commonplace. Lithgow notes in his pamphlet that he will not speak of certain military action at York because he was not “there an ocular Testator,” adding that “to build upon the wings of flying report were meerly erroneous.”34 In The Holy War, by claiming to have seen the siege(s) of Mansoul personally, the narrator assumes the position of eyewitness. As mentioned earlier, Bunyan’s narrator, in the prefatory poem, highlights his presence and experience as a witness: “I saw the Prince’s armed men come down” (2); “I saw the mounts cast up against the town”; “I heard the stones fly”; “I saw the battering-rams, and how they play’d/To beat ope Eargate”; “I saw the fights, and heard the captains shout”; “I heard the cries of those that wounded were”; “I was there when the gates were broken ope”; and so on (3). Again and again, the firsthand experience of the narrator is evoked and aligned with what the city saw and experienced. Although we have suggested that, at times, he does exceed his own experiential knowledge, the narrator provides this overwhelming accumulation of experiential evidence to prove he is not a “fable-maker,” affirming his overt truth claim (2).35 In war-related pamphlets and newsbooks, other rhetorical strategies were used to establish the contents of each pamphlet as factual and exact. For example, the description of events is typically detailed and precise, which is also the case in The Holy War. So too, the narrator often included a document or series of documents to further verify the account given. As a case in point, addenda to A true Relation Of the severall passages which have happened to our Army since it advanced towards Glocester (1643) include brief testimonies by eyewitnesses of particular siege events alongside a copy of “A message shot into the City of Gloucester upon an Arrow” and the answer to that message.36 Similarly, Magnalia Dei: A Relation of some of the many Remarkable Passages in Cheshire Before the Siege of Namptwich (1643) contains a copy of the summons of Sir John Byron, Commander of the royalist Army, asking the town to surrender, followed by a second summons after military action, as well as relevant letters.37 Bunyan’s narrator certainly follows this tradition. Extraneous

Old Forms, New Discourses

251

documents include a “breviat” of the contents of a record of Emmanuel’s decision to take back the captured Mansoul (33); an oath and covenant imposed by Diabolus on the inhabitants of Mansoul (35); “[a] Commission from the great Shaddai, King of Mansoul, to his trusty and noble captain, the Captain Boanerges, for making war upon the Town of Mansoul” (43); and an “epitome” of the city’s new charter after it is taken by Emmanuel (156), to name only a few addenda. In addition to these written records, the narrator recounts various oral texts, such as Diabolus’s speech to Mansoul warning them to prepare for Shaddai’s army, causing them to arm themselves with a hideous distorted mirror image of the full armour of Christ (37–40). It is hardly surprising that Protestant Dissenters would emphasize the Word, but what intrigues here is the wide variety of written and oral texts from different parties presented, suggesting that this type of evidence is required of an eyewitness. This implies that while eyewitness testimony is essential to the truth claim of such works, it is insufficient on its own. In A Social History of Truth, Steven Shapin has argued that two of the key maxims for the evaluation of testimony in the early-modern period were “assent to testimony which is immediate” and “assent to testimony given in a manner which inspires a just confidence.”38 If we read the marginal key in The Holy War as the narrator’s supplement to his tale, he thereby not only records what he sees but also displays his reaction to trauma. Emotional response is also evidence of authenticity, which we saw in chapter 1, an attribute that is also present in some ephemeral siege works. For example, in A true and exact Relation of the several passages at the Siege of Manchester, authored by “one that was an eie-witnesse, and an Actor in most of that service,” the narrator often intervenes to remark on the suffering experienced and in which he participates. Of a Monday in October 1642, he writes of the heat of the siege, “My words are as the words of one risen from the grave, and sure you will heare him, they are my own observations, and what I know in great part to be true, being an eyewitnesse: our troubles are so great and fears so many, that we can scarcely tell what we do … We daily looke for assistance from London.”39 The writer of this pamphlet uses the diary form and display of personal emotion to create a sense of immediacy (common to siege pamphlets written in the midst of or soon after a particular conflict). In The Holy War, while the marginal key provides handy interpretative data needed in an allegory and crystalizes the significance of a particular moment in

252

Besieged

the plot, it also evokes the immediacy and trauma of witnessing painful events, creating a strong sense of plausibility and authenticity.40 It is as if the narrator falls from his largely fact-based recitation into the imaginative experience of the siege as it occurs. It is not just sensually acquired knowledge but growing emotional reactions to the heat of combat. The key warns Mansoul in the moment, “Look to it Mansoul” or “Take heed Mansoul” (199, 202). The narratorial voice in such cases almost competes with the main plot, revealing more about his senses or experience in a material war than about an allegorical city. This experiential mode is further exemplified by an oft-quoted moment in the body of the text in which Bunyan’s narrator identifies himself as part of a specific event. In the midst of a skirmish between Mr Conscience and Lord Understanding and several Diabolonians, we hear, “it made me laugh to see how old Mr. Prejudice was kicked and tumbled about in the dirt” (69), and he adds, “I’ll assure you, he had by some of the Lord Understanding’s party, his crown soundly cracked to boot” (70). This is the ultimate moment that marks the narrator as an insider of Mansoul, someone who acts and feels as well as observes. Thus far we have argued that Bunyan modernizes siege allegory in The Holy War by imitating a different sort of siege writing, one that emphasizes the tangible, exact nature of military action, intensifying the literal meaning of the work. To an extent, Bunyan develops a new way to write about the siege in fiction, one that absorbs many aspects of the ephemeral literature of war. The Holy War is an eyewitness narrative grounded in concrete experience. The relationship between tenor and vehicle is not tidy because one thing no longer stands in a straightforward and relatively uncomplicated relationship to another. The tale is not only about the soul (told through the figure of war) but also about the lived experience of actual siege warfare, especially as it is represented in pamphlets and newsbooks throughout the Civil War. However, if Bunyan views these genres as important, and as worth engaging with, as we noted earlier, he also sees them as fallible. In fact, he does not even know the end of the story as the fate of Mansoul is ultimately undetermined. In her assessment of witnessing in Bunyan’s writing, Kelly Oliver argues, It is the performance of testimony, not merely what is said, that makes it effective in bringing to life a repetition of an event, not a

Old Forms, New Discourses

253

repetition of the facts of the event, or the structure of the event, but the silences and the blindness inherent in the event that, at bottom, also make eyewitness testimony impossible. In other words, what makes testimony powerful is its dramatization of the impossibility of testifying to the event. What makes witnessing possible is its performance of the impossibility of ever witnessing the event.41 In The Holy War, immediacy, plausibility, and experiential knowledge ultimately do not seem sufficient for comprehension of the space and the multitude of events and inhabitants it contains. Time and time again, the narrator draws attention to the limits of the individual to manage such volumes of material by pointing to his inadequacies or lack of specific information – or at least lack of direct access to events. At times, he will admit that he even forgot or almost forgot to share important information (18, 210), which he then provides. At other times, he mentions that there were several incidents or events that he did not directly witness. For instance, after describing Shaddai’s army “running round the walls of Mansoul at midnight, shouting,” he notes that in these days “as I was informed, new thoughts, and thoughts that began to run counter one to another, began to possess the minds of the men of the town of Mansoul” (61; our emphasis). Or he ruminates, based on specific information, “so far as I could gather, the town had been surrend’red up to them before now,” if it had not been for Incredulity and Willbewill (62; our emphasis). When the Diabolonians are in charge in the town, the narrator ponders, “Yea, and as I was told, some of the men of Mansoul grew too familiar with some of them, to the sorrow of the corporation” (184; our emphasis). As the work draws to a close, the narrator lets us know that Carnal-sense “brake prison and made his escape” but how it came about … [he] cannot tell (276; our emphasis). He also sometimes advises us that he has muddled the order of information, remarking, “this I should have told you before” (18). Thus, Bunyan suggests, the eyewitness to a traumatic event, even when his testimony is rooted in experience, documentation, and “objective” analysis, cannot transmit complete knowledge of a siege event, and a little knowledge or inadequate knowledge or knowledge conveyed without care or in a fractured state, is a dangerous thing. He worries that eyewitness accounts can also spread misinformation, an anxiety also expressed in early modern soldiers’ life writing, as we explored in chapter 1. When the city is occupied by the Diabolonians but is under attack, confusion is

254

Besieged

created when multiple sources of information try to speak of what they have witnessed at the same time. We are told, “every man began to tell his own tale, so that nothing could be heard distinctly” (68). What are we to believe if firsthand witnessing alone can lead to multiple competing conclusions? Can authority and accuracy be located among excess accounts? This uncertainty gestures toward Mansoul’s struggle with the inadequacy of its own senses.

Conclusion The Holy War could be read as a study and response to the siege pamphlet writ large. Bunyan creates a work of fiction that has at its heart the relationship between a witness and a war-torn city, a narrator who one moment comfortably exists within a safe domestic space and then finds himself in the midst of war with no weapon but his pen. This protonovel, devoted to religious truth (which is seen and known by faith), is tightly interwoven with elements of works devoted to a quest for material truth through observed evidence. This intertextual connection should play an important role in emergent fiction in the period, and yet, after Bunyan, siege fiction in Britain did not come into its own until the end of the eighteenth century, as Maxwell establishes. On occasion, however, fictional works that deeply engage with urban space may be considered descendants of The Holy War, dealing with similar ideas about the role of the eyewitness in fiction, particularly fiction centred on traumatic experience. Most notably, Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, while not an allegory, might be said to retain vestiges of Bunyan’s emphasis on traumatized city space, extended suffering, and eyewitness testimony. And like Bunyan, Defoe foregrounds the people of the city rather than the nobility, as we have theorized in the first chapter of this study. Defoe extracts and harnesses the features of siege narratives that capture human suffering in wounded cities, adapting them to the less glorious but equally disturbing threats of an increasingly urbanized society with a growing reliance on municipal authorities. It may be argued, therefore, that the emergent novel did not absorb the siege motif because it had lost its potency. By the turn of the century, authors of a genre so intensively immersed in the familiarity and credibility of everyday life may no longer consider the siege directly relevant to the dangers faced by the eighteenth-century British city.

Epilogue

This book has traced the siege motif as it evolved in literature (broadly defined) from the mid-seventeenth through the early-eighteenth centuries in Britain. It has considered its presence in early modern life writing, drama, poetry, and prose fiction, exploring its two dominant and interrelated functions in the culture of the period. First, we have argued that the siege motif foregrounds the physical and psychological costs of warfare in early modern life writing and imaginative literature, with an increasing emphasis on the complex discursive resources and strategies needed to mediate urban warfare and on the agency, experience, and trauma of besieged civilians. While the siege motif in literature published between 1642 and 1722 does not consistently undermine the aristocratic form of the heroic, it is often associated with a more inclusive understanding of the heroic that takes into account the valiant role and noble sacrifice of nonmilitary actors and civilian communities in war. Given the presence of civilians in the besieged city, the motif underscores the relevance of war to, and its impact on, everyday men, women, and children in unmistakable ways, suggesting that the increasing urbanization of the nation may render it more fragile than resilient. Early modern emergent journalism and life writing recognize the value of individual and communal heroism and suffering in siege warfare, examining the authority of the embedded eyewitness to military atrocities. Second, we have theorized that given the liminality of besieged space, the siege motif engages with different types of fluctuation and dynamic circumstances in a nation undergoing sociopolitical change. It functions as a means to explore the multidimensionality of the nation – a nation whose identity is no longer solely contingent on the actions of kings and noblemen.

256

Besieged

The siege motif enables the study of how we perceive and describe space under pressure, a subject of great interest in an age in which, for example, “treatises on perspective, landscape painting, microscopy and telescopy, and cartography” play a significant role in the “production of knowledge and meaning.”1 However, the siege motif also reveals the limits of our knowledge in imagining unstable or unpredictable geographies. As we mention in our introduction, there is much work to be done on how other spaces of war function and achieve potency in early modern (and later) British literature. However, there is still much room to expand our study of the siege motif itself. It recurs in a variety of different forms and gains currency in later spatiotemporal contexts, notably the British Romantic period and, intriguingly, in late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century Europe and North America, especially in relation to urban warfare in a global context and to political propaganda in response to shifting populations. We have suggested in this study, drawing on Mary A. Favret’s War at a Distance, that the representation of siege warfare became less potent in a range of genres as the eighteenth century progressed. That diminished relevance, however, does not mean that the motif disappeared entirely. It made a resurgence, for example, in the second half of the eighteenth century, albeit for a different cultural purpose. Favret theorizes that in this period the siege was employed in British literature as a distancing device, speculating that by the nineteenth century the motif was “a way to frame war as a distant reality, made remote by the movements of history.”2 The revival of the motif at this time appears to be connected to a growing interest in antiquarianism, which is evidenced as early as 1760 in John Home’s Siege of Aquileia. By the 1780s there were myriad plays and poems on siege warfare, some of which were highly popular. John Hughes’s Siege of Damascus (1720) was, for example, reprinted in 1790, 1808, and 1816. By the early decades of the nineteenth century, a number of notable siege poems were issued, including Byron’s Siege of Corinth (1816) and Felicia Hemans’s Siege of Valencia. Moreover, the siege also figured prominently at times in the Romantic novel, in such works as Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1820), Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1822), and James Hogg’s Three Perils of Man (1822). Indeed, the novel becomes a key player in working to renovate the siege narrative in the 1820s; one of Scott’s final (unfinished) novels is The Siege of Malta.

Epilogue

257

It could be argued that the siege motif has returned with an even greater force in the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries when historical conditions made it useful once again. Stephen Graham writes of the “new military urbanism” after 9/11 which he argues involves a “paradigmatic shift that renders cities’ communal and private spaces, as well as their infrastructure – along with their civilian populations – a source of target and threats,” though we have shown that siege warfare of the past proves that a disregard for the wellbeing of civilians during spaces of war is hardly new.3 Specialized training in urban operations has become an important part of a military education. Graham has written of the way “US and Western military forces have constructed their own simulations of Arab cities as targets … The US Army alone is building a chain of 61 urban warfare training complexes across the world between 2005 and 2010, to hone the skills of its forces in fighting and killing within what, in military jargon, is termed ‘Military Operations on Urban Terrain’ (or MOUt).”4 The new military urbanism and all it involves is, in fact, only one stage in a very long history of the relationship between cities and warfare, as Richard Doherty argues in The Siege of Derry 1689: The Military History. In his monograph, Doherty identifies the seventeenth-century siege of Londonderry as a crucial part of this history which began with “the first occasion on which people took refuge behind some kind of fortification,” considering how “the conduct of sieges, from both sides of the fortifications” and governing “rules and protocols” evolved over time and space.5 Urban warfare continues to evolve as we write this book, and contemporary consumers of news encounter it widely in print and digital media. Those given most coverage in the twenty-first-century West include the sieges in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and the Ukraine. Headlines about sieges, of various types, in these countries have become almost numbingly commonplace in British and North American newspapers: “Iraq Rebels Stall North of Baghdad as Residents Brace for a Siege”; “US Troops Deployed to Middle East after Baghdad Embassy Siege”; “‘Facing Disaster’: Children Starve in Siege of Syria’s Former Breadbasket”; “Aleppo Siege: ‘We are Crying and Afraid’”; “ISIS Lays Siege to Iraqi Turkmen Village”; “Don’t Call the Siege of Yemen a War. It is Annihilation and Needs to End”; “Ukraine Crisis: Donetsk and Luhansk ‘Facing Siege’”; “UN Urges Access to Besieged Syrian Suburb as Civilians Starve.”6 The prevalence and brutality of siege warfare in recent years has led to legal, moral, and

258

Besieged

medical concerns being raised about particular sieges and siege warfare in general, given voice, for example, in such articles as Mohadeseh Jahangiri’s “Siege Warfare Violations by the Saudi Led Coalition in Yemen Since 2015”; Michael Schmitt, Kieran Tinkler, and Durward Johnson’s “The UN Yemen Report and Siege Warfare”; Nasser Fardousi, Yazan Douedari, and Natasha Howard’s “Healthcare Under Siege: A Qualitative Study of Health-Worker Responses to Targeting and Besiegement in Syria”; and Sean Watts’s “Humanitarian Logic and the Law of Siege: A Study of the Oxford Guidance on Relief Actions.”7 The siege motif has not, however, only indelibly impressed itself on prose nonfiction in the twenty-first century. It has been absorbed into a series of cultural forms as imaginative writers attempt to mediate its present realities, even when showcasing sieges of the past. The nature and consequences of siege warfare take centre stage in such works as Helen Dunmore’s novel The Siege (2001) on the siege of Leningrad; Steven Galloway’s novel The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008) on the siege of Sarajevo; the short stories in Tamas Dobozy’s Siege 13 (2012) which engage with the siege of Budapest near the end of World War II; and Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See (2014) set in the walled city of Saint-Malo during World War II.8 The siege motif is perhaps even more prevalent in twenty-first-century films in which the siege or urban warfare is frequently employed to evoke a sense of extremity, tragedy, and spectacle. Representative films in this category include Enemy at the Gates (2001), The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), Troy (2004), Attack on Leningrad (2009), Ironclad (2011), The Day of the Siege: September Eleven 1683 (2012), The Siege of Jadotville (2016), and Saving Leningrad (2019).9 Video games have also absorbed the contemporary cultural fascination with the relationship between war and the city. Games such as Rome: Total War (2004) and This War of Mine (2014) (the latter focusing on civilian experience) allow players to experience a simulated siege or urban warfare.10 No doubt, the interactivity of games complicates the representation of siege warfare, especially the role of the real time participating eyewitness, an agent of limited change in the game space. New media opens up fascinating new ways of harnessing the power of this resilient motif in relation to (quasi) realistic cultural representations of siege warfare. The language of besiegement, however, is omnipresent in our time in a more figurative way. We seem to imagine ourselves as constantly besieged from many different directions. The Oxford English Dictionary

Epilogue

259

traces the term “siege mentality” as “a defensive or paranoid attitude of mind based on an assumption of hostility in others” to the late 1960s.11 This state of being appears to have become prominent on a global scale. Even when actual warfare is absent or distant, we are ceaselessly haunted by the possibility of besiegement by immigrants, criminals, information, market forces, and more. In the case of Brexit, one representative example, siege language was noisily present, with Denny Pencheva claiming in “Brexit and Migration,” published in The Conversation, that the discourse surrounding the breakup of the European Union made “extensive use of military metaphors (‘army,’ ‘war,’ ‘battle,’ ‘siege’ or ‘hordes’),” and Gerry Hassan comparing Brexit to a historic Russian siege in The National: “It has been a long, gruesome ordeal – longer than the totemic, heroic and bloody 872 day siege of Leningrad.”12 A few years earlier, Stuart GietelBasten speculated that the “representation of Britain under attack” was a significant tool for the Leave campaign.13 Migrants were often painted as besieging forces who threatened not only a city but the entire British nation, thereby justifying the immediate fortification of the nation. Wendy Brown’s work on the global obsession with building or erecting walls paints a similar picture of the strategic political deployment of the siege motif to keep certain people and activities out of a given nation. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, she explains, “If these walls vary in what they aim to deter – poor people, workers, or asylum seekers; drugs, weapons, or other contraband; smuggled taxable goods; kidnapped or enslaved youth; terror; ethnic or religious mixing; peace and other political futures – there are surely common dimensions to their proliferation at this moment in world history.”14 Such “common dimensions” arise from a sense of the decay of sovereignty, Brown concludes, and unlike the fortifications used to protect castles and cities in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, these walls, she contends, are more performative or theatrical than effective. While we have traced in this volume the way that the literal experience of sieges during the Civil War in Britain impacted its culture, we are now facing a sociocultural moment in which politicians deploy the discourse of walls and besiegement to justify morally questionable policies and actions, military and otherwise. And such actions operate in a radically different context than in the early modern period, since, as Brown has shown, walls are not being erected “as defenses against potential attacks by other sovereigns, as fortresses against invading armies, or even as shields against

260

Besieged

weapons launched in interstate wars. Rather … these walls target nonstate transnational actors – individuals, groups, movements, organizations, and industries.”15 The concept of the siege is once again ubiquitous and potent, albeit in an entirely different way, with many Western nations in particular imagining themselves in a constant state of besiegement and acting accordingly. Given the resurgent power of the language of the siege, it would be worth examining not only its current function and the history from which it emerged but also how it might be challenged or reframed to capture its liminality rather than its binary qualities. Is there a possibility of repurposing the imagery of the siege and related motifs in ways that are less destructive and divisive in our own times? Diane Morgan has written optimistically on this subject. In “Bunker Conversion and the Overcoming of Siege Mentality,” Morgan argues that while bunkers “characterise a siege mentality” we can reimagine them by, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, “brushing history against the grain,” which can be accomplished “by focusing on pockets of unactivated utopian potential in the past which can form dynamic ‘constellations’ with the present, thereby reinvigorating our sense of agency.”16 To accomplish this end, Morgan adopts John Paul Lederach’s idea of “restorying” or recreating broken narratives, examining bunkers (which, like walls, are key signifiers of a state of besiegement) that “have been demilitarized, converted into places of cultural experimentation, ludic activity, spiritual communion, as well as being incorporated into everyday life.”17 Such radical acts of transformation can offer cultural resistance to dominant ideas of rupture and divisiveness associated with the siege motif. Our study suggests that some writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries accomplished this work of “restorying” by, for instance, imagining besieged spaces as sites of an inclusive communal heroic. Although it has been fascinating to track the literary siege motif into our own time, we wish we lived in a world without sieges, without urban warfare, where cities could shelter, protect, and nurture their inhabitants. The indestructability of this motif, however, which recedes only temporarily into the background over time and space, suggests that urban warfare will not fade away nor will cultural attempts to engage with, understand, and deploy it metaphorically to capture other traumatic experiences. And yet, as Morgan theorizes, we can proffer counter narratives even about something that seems as inherently divisive as siege stories, creating narratives that will speak to the power of human resilience, agency, and

Epilogue

261

creativity. The American poet Carolyn Forché recently wrote a poem, “Letter to a City Under Siege,” about the siege of Sarajevo during the civil war in Yugoslavia. In it she does not shy away from the destruction of the city but leaves us with an image of beauty and sustenance. While the poem lingers over the details of the wounding of Sarajevo, picturing homes, eateries, libraries, graveyards, bridges, trees, animals, and children marked by war, in this hellish landscape the seeds of creativity and resilience remain. In the poem’s final lines, despite the silencing of the houses of worship and the desecration of human remains, the poet exclaims, “But, my good friend, the tunnel! The oranges.”18 Forché remarked in a public presentation at American Rivers College in 2015, “the people [of Sarajevo] actually managed to dig a tunnel from the city under the airport runway to escape the city and used this tunnel to bring supplies into the city. It was never found during the siege.” The oranges, “bright as winter moons by the barrow-load,” are in a sense the heart of the story, the poem.19 The act of “restorying” renews our perspective on the siege, which is transformed into a tale of strength, ingenuity, and community.

Notes

Introduction 1 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New (London: Penguin, 2003), 215. 2 The words “city” and “town” are routinely used interchangeably in this book, as they often were in early modern literature, to refer to urban areas “as distinguished from the countryside” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “town n.4d”), although cities were also understood to be “municipalit[ies] of larger size or population than a town” (Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “city, n.2a”). 3 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “talismanic, adj.” 4 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. Maria Jolas (1958; Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), xxxvi. 5 Ibid., xxxix; see also 40. 6 Ibid., xxxvi. 7 Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose, quoted in Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 14. 8 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 14. 9 Ibid., 17. 10 Ibid., 17n7. The inset quotation is from the work of Viktor Shklovsky. 11 Rob Latham and Jeff Hicks, “Urban Dystopias,” in The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, ed. Kevin R. McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 163. 12 Melinda Rabb, “Parting Shots: Eighteenth-Century Displacements of the Male Body at War,” ELH 78, no. 1 (2011): 103–35.

264

Notes to pages 6–10

13 Paul Hirst, Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 198–9. 14 Eric Prieto, “Geocriticism, Geopoetics, Geophilosophy, and Beyond,” in Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 23. 15 Jonathan Lamb, “Sterne, Sebald, and Siege Architecture,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–2 (2006–7): 29, 36. 16 Martha Pollak, Cities at War in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1. 17 When the word “Britain” is used in this book, it may appear anachronistic given that the Union did not occur until 1707. However, as Hugh Dunthorne has persuasively argued, “in reality the term was quite frequently used in the century before that date” (Britain and the Dutch Revolt 1560–1700 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013]), xvi). 18 Charles Carleton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651 (London: BCA by arrangement with Routledge; New York: Routledge, 1992), 154. 19 Ibid., 154–5. 20 Ronald Hutton and Wylie Reeves, “Sieges and Fortifications,” in The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660, ed. John Kenyon and Jane Ohlmeyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 208. Siege architecture as a discipline, however, was very old. In War and the City (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), G.J. Ashworth notes that “[b]y 200 BC a school of military architecture had been established on Rhodes” (13). 21 Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Penguin 2008), 395. 22 John Buchan, Oliver Cromwell (London: Hodden and Stoughton, 1934), 352. 23 Carleton, Going to the Wars, 331. 24 Stephen Porter, Destruction in the English Civil Wars (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), 33. The inset quotation is from the writings of Sir Rowland Berkeley of Cotheridge. 25 Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 410. 26 Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 90; see also 344, 359, and 371. 27 M.J. Stoyle, “‘Whole Streets Converted to Ashes’: Property Destruction in Exeter during the English Civil War,” in The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects, ed. R.C. Richardson (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 129, 135. 28 Stoyle, “‘Whole Streets Converted to Ashes,’” 138.

Notes to pages 10–22

265

29 Ian Roy, “England Turned Germany? The Aftermath of the Civil War in its European Context,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Fifth Series) 28 (1978): 142. 30 The first siege of Namur occurred in 1692, when it was captured by the French. It was taken back in 1695 by the Grand Alliance. 31 To read more about these pamphlets and their effects, see, for example, Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) and Jason McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007). 32 Susan Crawford, “The Origin and Development of a Concept: The Information Society,” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 71, no. 4 (1983): 380–5, quoted in Katherine E. Ellison, Fatal News: Reading and Information Overload in Early Eighteenth-Century Literature (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2006), 10. 33 Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 97, 3. 34 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), 24–5. 35 Ibid., 44. 36 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 1, 3. 37 Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 46, 56. 38 Ibid., 136. 39 Hirst, Space and Power, 3. 40 Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 53. 41 See the classicist Edith Hall’s blog entry, “Fiddling while Troy Burns,” The Edithorial (blog), 14 September 2013, http://edithorial.blogspot. com/2013/09/fiddling-while-troy-burns.html. 42 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, 17. 43 Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32; see also the entry on John Mitchelburne in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 44 Knight-Errantry; or, Don Quixot Encountering the Windmill. Being A Relation of the Siege of Knocke (London, 1695), 4. 45 The siege plays a significant part in a few of Defoe’s works of prose fiction, but it does not take on a central role in the narrative structure. In Bunyan’s Holy War, it is the dominant organizing principle.

266

Notes to pages 22–6

46 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 229. 47 Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 187–8. 48 Ibid., 189.

Chapter One 1 We borrow this phrase from the title of Ann Rosalined Jones and Peter Stallybrass’s edited collection Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 2 As Robert Mayer explains in History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), life writing was understood as a subcategory of history in the seventeenth century. He cites Bacon on this point, as Bacon locates “Lives” in the category “Perfect History” (80). 3 Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 39. 4 Sharon Alker, “The Soldierly Imagination: Narrating Fear in Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, no. 1 (2006): 44, 45. 5 John Stevens, The Journal of John Stevens Containing a Brief Account of the War in Ireland 1689–1691, ed. Robert H. Murray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 167. 6 Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 39. 7 Robert Hooke, quoted in Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 39. 8 Shapiro, A Culture of Fact, 38. 9 Daniel R. Woolf, “From Hystories to the Historical: Five Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500–1700,” in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), 48. 10 David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10. 11 Andy Mousley, “Early Modern Autobiography, History and Human Testimony: The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne,” Textual Practice 23, no. 2 (2009): 268–9. 12 Yuval Noah Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs: War, History, and Identity, 1450–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 89; Ronald Bedford, Lloyd Davis, and Philippa Kelly, Early Modern English Lives: Autobiography and SelfRepresentation 1500–1660 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 150. 13 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, 88.

Notes to pages 26–9

267

14 Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 12. 15 Alker, “The Soldierly Imagination,” 43–68. 16 The Souldiers Catechisme: Composed for The Parliaments Army (London: Printed for J. Wright, 1644), 23, 24. 17 A True Copie of Colonel S r. Gamaliel Dudley’s Letter to His Highnesse Prince Rupert, From Newark, 4. March. 1644 (Oxford: Printed by Leonard Lichfield, Printer to the University, 1644), 2. 18 Brian Sandberg, “‘His Courage Produced More Fear in His Enemies than Shame in His Soldiers’: Siege Combat and Emotional Display in the French Wars of Religion,” in Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination, ed. Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 127–47. 19 Simon Barker, “Dressing Up for War: Militarism in Early Modern Culture,” in Dressing Up for War: Transformations of Gender and Genre in the Discourse and Literature of War, ed. Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001), 145–56. 20 Erika Kuijpers and Cornelis van der Haven, “Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800: Practices, Experience, Imagination,” in Battlefield Emotions 1500–1800, ed. Kuijpers and van der Haven, 7. 21 Ibid., 10, 11. 22 Quoted in John Barratt, “A Royalist Account of the Relief of Pontefract, 1st March 1645,” Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 53, no. 215 (1975): 162. 23 The Letters of Nehemiah Wharton, ed. S. L. Ede-Borrett (Wollaston: Tercio, 1983), 9. 24 Ibid., 20–1. 25 Robert Burns, “Man was Made to Mourn, A Dirge,” Burns: Poems and Songs, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 94. 26 “Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill” Translated from the French, and “The Wars of the Seventeenth Century” By Torick Ameer-Ali, foreword by Sir Ian Hamilton (London and New York: John Lane, 1918), 88. 27 Memorial of the military services of John Gwyn, of the Royal troop of Horse Guards, from 1643 to the Restoration, British Library, Birch Collection, Additional Manuscript 4208. 28 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, 104. It should be noted, however, that Harari focuses on Renaissance military memoirs written between 1450 and 1600 when making such claims.

268

Notes to pages 29–34

29 John Ellis, To Walk in the Dark: Military Intelligence during the English Civil War 1642–1646 (Stroud: Spellmount, 2011), 193. 30 Paul Scannell, Conflict and Soldiers’ Literature in Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 59, 61. We use the term “discursive mode” broadly to mean the mode, form, or method of writing. 31 Nathan Drake, The First and Second Sieges of Pontefract Castle: Nathan Drake’s Diary, ed. Alison Walker (Pontefract: Gosling Press, 1997), 5. Subsequent quotations from Drake’s diary are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 32 It is, therefore, identified as a journal, for example, in A Journal of the First and Second Sieges of Pontefract Castle, 1644–1645, intro. and ed. W.H.D. Longstaffe, which was published for the Surtees Society (Durham: George Andrews; London: Whittaker & Co. and T. & W. Boone; Edinburgh: Blackwood & Sons, 1861) and included in vol. 37 of The Publications of the Surtees Society. Longstaffe discusses Francis Drake’s transcription of the diary on p.vi of his introduction. The manuscript of Nathan Drake’s diary is now missing or no longer extant. The diary in this period was not “well defined, but rather was a form that was slowly emerging out of other regular writing habits and that blurred with them” (Laura Sangha, “Personal Documents,” in Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources, ed. Laura Sangha and Jonathan Willis [Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016], 109). Hence, Drake’s diary, like most early modern diaries, is hybrid in form, containing, for example, a list of the volunteers in Pontefract Castle during the sieges, a summons sent by Fairfax to the commander of the besieged, and a list of the wounded and killed during the first and second sieges. 33 See Bedford, Davis, and Kelley’s Early Modern English Lives on this subject. 34 Harari, Renaissance Military Memoirs, 182, 152. 35 Margaret R. Hunt and Philip J. Stern, introduction to The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion: A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay with Related Documents, ed. Hunt and Stern (Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s 2016), 1. This siege diary was neither transcribed nor published until 2016 (Preface iv). 36 Hunt and Stern, introduction to The English East India Company, 21. 37 Ibid., 5. 38 John Child was acting on the instructions of Sir Josiah Child (despite a shared last name, John and Josiah were not related), “the largest stockholder in the English East India Company”; he felt “that only a show of force would arrest what they saw as the downward spiral of the Company” (Hunt and Stern, introduction to The English East India Company, 10–11).

Notes to pages 34–42

269

39 A Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay with Related Documents, ed. Hunt and Stern, 43 and 67. Subsequent quotations from Hilton’s diary are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 40 Hunt and Stern, introduction to The English East India Company, 4. 41 “The Governor and Council of Bombay, Letter to London about the Siege 1689,” The English East India Company at the Height of Mughal Expansion, ed. Hunt and Stern, 147. The first two quoted passages come from Hunt and Stern’s brief introduction to the letter. 42 John Morrill, “Brereton, Sir William, first baronet (1604–1661), parliamentarian army officer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3333. 43 Ibid. 44 Joseph McKenna, preface to A Journal of the English Civil War: The Letter Book of Sir William Brereton, Spring 1646, ed. Joseph McKenna (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 2012), 1. 45 J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 6, 147; see also John R. Searle, “How Performatives Work,” Linguistics and Philosophy 12, no. 5 (1989): 535–58. 46 A Journal of the English Civil War, ed. McKenna, 227. Subsequent quotations from letters to or from Brereton (unless otherwise indicated) are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 47 “Sir William Brereton’s Account of the Victory to the Committee of both Kingdoms,” in Collections Historical and Archæological Relating to Montgomeryshire and Its Borders. Issued by the Powys-Land Club for the Use of Its Members (London: Printed for the Club by Whiting and Co., 1888), 187. 48 Quoted in Katherine Ellison, “Mediation and Intelligence in Defoe’s Vision of the Angelic World, in Topographies of the Imagination: New Approaches to Daniel Defoe, ed. Katherine Ellison, Kit Kincade, and Holly Faith Nelson (New York: AMS Press, 2014), 113. 49 Oliver Cromwell, Lieut: General Cromwells Letter to the House of Commons, of All the Particulars of taking the City of Bristoll (London: Printed for Edward Husband, 18 September 1645), 3. Subsequent quotations from Cromwell’s letter are from this version and are given in the text by page number. 50 Oliver Cromwell, Lieut: Generall Cromwells Letter to the Honorable, William Lenthall Esq; Speaker of the House of Commons; of the Storming and Taking Basing-House (London: Printed for Edward Husband, 1645), 6. Subsequent quotations from Cromwell’s letter are from this version and are given in the text by page number.

270

Notes to pages 43–50

51 Jack Binns, “Cholmley, Sir Hugh, first baronet (1600–1657), royalist army officer and autobiographer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5341. 52 Cholmley’s memoir is reproduced in C.H. Firth, “Sir Hugh Cholmley’s Narrative of the Siege of Scarborough, 1644–5,” The English Historical Review 32, no. 128 (1917): 576, 572. Subsequent quotations from Cholmley’s memoir are from this version and are given in the text by page number. 53 Mayer, History and the Early English Novel, 91. 54 J.G. Alger, “A Scottish Free-Lance: Sir Andrew Melville,” The Scottish Review 26 (July 1895): 1. 55 J.G. Alger, “Melville, Andrew (1624–1706), army officer,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/18544. 56 “Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill,” 214. Subsequent quotations from Melville’s memoir are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 57 Electress Sophia, 2 April 1667, quoted in Sir Ian Hamilton, introduction to the “Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill,” 6–7. 58 Electress Sophia, 5 September 1675 and 19 September 1675, quoted in Hamilton, introduction to the “Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill,” 8. 59 Interestingly, despite the emotional tone used in this account, Melville makes a cruel joke about the loss of the Catholic soldiers killed, claiming that the Virgin did not help them because the “clash of arms prevented her from hearing them” (192). Melville’s staunch Protestantism seems to mitigate his horror at the slaughter. 60 Yuval Noah Harari, “Military Memoirs: A Historical Overview of the Genre from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern Era,” War in History 14, no. 3 (2007): 297. Harari mistakenly claims that Defoe was “devoid of any military experience” when he wrote fictional military memoirs (297). 61 Harari, “Military Memoirs,” 297. 62 Daniel Defoe, Captain Singleton, ed. Manushag N. Powell (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2019), 251. 63 Ibid., 209, 213. 64 There is disagreement amongst Defoe scholars about whether some of the works examined in this chapter were authored by Defoe and a number have been deattributed by P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens in Defoe Deattributions: A Critique of J.R. Moore’s “Checklist” (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994). Maximillian Novak, Paula Backscheider, and Geoffrey Sill, among others, have been cautious about accepting some or all of these

Notes to pages 51–3

65 66

67

68 69

70 71

72 73 74

271

deattributions. Regardless of authorship, the same linguistic characteristics are evident in these works on sieges. An earlier version of this work was published in 1715 under the title The History of the Wars, of his Present Majesty, Charles XII, King of Sweden. Hereafter, The History of the Wars, of his Late Majesty, Charles XII, King of Sweden (London: Printed by H.P. for A. Bell, W. Taylor, and J. Osborn, 1720) and An Impartial History of the Life and Glorious Actions of Peter Alexowitz, the … Czar of Muscovy (London: Printed for W. Chetwood, J. Stagg, J. Brotherton, and T. Edlin, 1723) will be referred to as The History of the Wars of Charles XII and An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy respectively. Other military memoirs that have, at various times, been attributed to Defoe include The Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins, a Highland Officer (1718), Colonel Jack (1722), and The Military Memoirs of Captain George Carleton (1728). Hereafter A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), ed. John McVeagh, vols. 1–3 in P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, eds., Writings on Travel, Discovery and History by Daniel Defoe, 8 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), will be referred to as the Tour. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: Sage, 2005), 9. Thus, in the age in which John Ogilby mapped out Britannia, rendering it relatively two-dimensional and inert on the page, Defoe revealed the instability and multiplicity of urban space, the many ways that a city can be configured, always foregrounding the city itself at the nexus of competing ideas. The siege narrative makes these intersections transparent in the very age that is attempting to make space static and comprehensible. Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 40. See David McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 38–41, 83, for a consideration of war as sport. The History of the Wars of Charles XII, 30–1. Daniel Defoe, A Review of the State of the British Nation, ed. John McVeagh, vol. 5, part 2 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 336. An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar (London: T. Warner, 1728), 19. In Defoe De-Attributions, Furbank and Owens also deattribute this work, claiming that “the case for a Defoe attribution seems extremely flimsy,” though they note it has been attributed to Defoe by William P. Trent, Henry C. Hutchins, John Robert Moore, and Maximillian E. Novak (145).

272

Notes to pages 54–64

75 Daniel Defoe, Memoirs of a Cavalier, ed. James T. Boulton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 45. 76 The History of the Wars of Charles XII, 167, 185. 77 An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy, 133. 78 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 11. 79 An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar, 31. 80 The narrator also discusses problems with provisions in the redefined place, particularly the negative effects of salt meat rather than fresh meat on the digestive system of the residents (An Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar, 29). 81 Defoe, Tour, I:75. 82 Ibid., I:76. 83 An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy, 370. 84 Ibid., 374. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid., 378. 87 Ibid., 88 Ibid., 380. 89 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 2nd ed. (London: Charles Rivington, 1727), xiii. 90 Ibid., xiii. 91 Massey, For Space, 9. 92 Daniel Defoe, The History of the Principal Discoveries and Improvements, in the Several Arts and Sciences (London: W. Mears, F. Clay, and D. Browne, 1727), 120. 93 Ibid. 94 Ibid., 124. 95 Ibid., 123. 96 An Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy, 155. 97 Massey, For Space, 9.

Chapter Two 1 For an assessment of the way that classical drama worked with space in general, including siege space, see Irene J.F. de Jong’s Space in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative (Leiden: Brill 2012). 2 Herodotus, The Histories, trans. A.D. Godley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

Notes to pages 64–9

3 4 5

6

7

8

9 10 11 12

13

14 15

273

University Press 1920), 6.21.1. We are greatly indebted to Dr David A. Lupher (Classics Department, Whitman College) for his generous and extensive assistance with classical siege drama. We are grateful for the detailed information he provided on the Capture of Miletus and Euripides’s Erechtheus, and on siege writing in antiquity in general. Malcolm Hebron, The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 136. Ibid., 149–50. Ibid., 163–4. This pageant took place in May 1581 and likely related to tensions surrounding a proposed marriage between Elizabeth I and Francis, Duke of Anjou. Simon Pepper, “Siege Law, Siege Ritual, and the Symbolism of City Walls in Renaissance Europe,” in City Walls: The Urban Enceinte in Global Perspective, ed. James D. Tracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 593. Adam N. McKeown has convincingly made the case in English Mercuries: Soldier Poets in the Age of Shakespeare (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009) that modern studies of Renaissance wars neglect “the numerous available literary writings about contemporary wars and have looked instead to works that historicize, romanticize, or allegorize war, such as those that round out the opuses of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney” (11). This is not to say that the works of antiquity that dealt with city sieges are particularly interested in the tribulations of the plebeians, but they did reflect on the loss in a space marked as communal with a history that, at least implicitly, went beyond an individual dynasty. Patricia A. Cahill, Unto the Breach: Martial Formations, Historical Trauma, and the Early Modern Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 3, 29, 49, 52, 56. William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Gary Taylor (1982; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3.3.91, 94. Subsequent quotations from Henry V are from this edition and are given in the text by act, scene, and line number. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, in Doctor Faustus and Other Plays, ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 5.1.131. Subsequent quotations from Tamburlaine are from this edition and are given in the text by act, scene, and line number. Charles Edelman, Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary (London: The Athlone Press, 2000), 310. Gary Taylor, introduction to William Shakespeare, Henry V, ed. Taylor, 49.

274

Notes to pages 69–79

16 Ibid., 47. 17 Simon Barker, War and Nation in the Theatre of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 131. 18 Franziska Quabeck, Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013), 176. 19 Cora Fox, “Blazons of Desire and War in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida,” in Staging the Blazon in Early Modern English Theater, ed. Deborah Uman and Sara Morrison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 189. 20 Some studies suggest that this play was a covert response to the Nine Years’ War with Ireland (1594–1603), going on when this play was written. See, for example, Andrew Hadfield’s Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 226. Sieges, of course, occurred during this war (e.g., the siege of Kinsdale in 1601). Problems dating performances of the play make it difficult to ascertain whether Shakespeare was responding to a particular siege. In his introduction to The New Cambridge edition of Troilus and Cressida, ed. Anthony B. Dawson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), Dawson notes that though the play was first “published in 1609,” it appeared “in the Stationers’ Register” “[i]n February 1603” and “evidence indicates a performance date in the late summer of 1601” (6). 21 Troilus and Cressida, ed. Dawson, 5.5.19. Subsequent quotations from Troilus and Cressida are from this edition and are given in the text by act, scene, and line number. 22 Dawson, introduction to Troilus and Cressida, ed. Dawson, 1. 23 Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (New York: Random House, 2009), 338. 24 “List of Characters,” Troilus and Cressida, ed. Dawson, 89. 25 Dawson, introduction to Troilus and Cressida, ed. Dawson, 46; Francis A. Shirley, introduction to Troilus and Cressida, ed. Francis A. Shirley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3. 26 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 17. 27 Nigel Smith, referenced in Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 234n2. Wiseman highlights Smith’s analysis of the play in Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 81–4. 28 William Cartwright, The Siedge: Or, Love’s Convert, A Tragi-Comedy, in Comedies,Tragi-Comedies, With other Poems, by Mr William Cartwright

Notes to pages 79–81

275

(London: Printed for Humphrey Moseley, 1651). In The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (1926; New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965), Kathleen Martha Lynch dates this play c. 1637. In Alfred Harbage’s The Annals of English Drama, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), rev. by Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, it is suggested the play was written between 1628 and 1638; Dale B.J. Randall gives the same dates in Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660 (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 74. For more information on Cartwright and his works, see The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1951). Blakemore Evans notes that “The Siege, or Love’s Convert was printed for the first and last time in the Works (1651), having been entered on the Stationers’ Register by Moseley on May 4, 1648” (355). Given that this work was written in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, which involved many sieges and possibly even after the particularly horrific siege of Magdeburg (1630–31), it gives a brief voice to the citizens of the city. The Thirty Years’ War made a considerable impact on seventeenth-century literature. As Jayne E.E. Boys notes in London’s News Press and the Thirty Years War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), “Hans Werner has identified fiftyfive plays, entertainments and masques with allusions to the Thirty Years War between 1620 and 1642, including ten that were entirely devoted to it, plus up to sixty works of prose and poetry. News coverage was extensive and informative, and surviving journals, commonplace books and the letters of news correspondents in England show that contemporaries took printed war news seriously” (3). 29 Cartwright, The Siedge, in The Plays and Poems, ed. Blakemore Evans, 5.8.[2279–81]. 30 Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War, 4–5; see also Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic 1649–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). 31 Elizabeth Brackley and Jane Cavendish, The Concealed Fancies, in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S.P. Cerasano and Marion WynneDavies (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 1996), 127–54. Subsequent quotations from The Concealed Fancies are from this edition and are given in the text by act, scene, and line number. Alison Findlay has argued for 1644 or 1645 as the year the play was written and notes that on 2 August 1644, Parliamentarians captured Welbeck Abbey (“Playing the ‘Scene Self ’: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies,” in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, ed. Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell

276

32

33

34

35

36

37

38 39 40

Notes to pages 81–5

[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999], 154). Cerasano and WynneDavies convincingly argue in their edition of The Concealed Fancies that while Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley engage with a siege at the fictional castle of Ballamo, they are clearly grappling with the siege at Welbeck Abbey, their home. Lisa Hopkins and Barbara MacMahon, “‘Come, what, a siege?’: Metarepresentation in Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies,” Early Modern Literary Studies vol. 16, no. 3 (2013), https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/83. Quoted in Katherine Romack, “‘I wonder she should be so Infamous for a Whore?’: Cleopatra Restored,” in Cavendish and Shakespeare: Interconnections, ed. Katherine Romack and James Fitzmaurice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 194. In Defending Nottinghamshire: The Military Landscape from Prehistory to the Present (Stroud: The History Press, 2014), Mike Osborne writes that Welbeck Abbey was “taken in August 1644 and garrisoned by 200 Parliamentarian troops who were constantly being raided by Newark-based cavalry. Finally, in July 1645, it was taken in a daring raid by 250 horsemen” (58–9). In their notes to Act 2 of The Concealed Fancies in Renaissance Drama by Women, Cerasano and Wynne-Davies suggest that Colonel Free may be “based upon Colonel Fretchwell who masterminded the brief retaking of Welbeck Abbey for the Royalist cause in 1645” (210n1). It is worth noting that their ultimate actions begin somewhat ambivalently. When they consider the potential of making a rescue attempt, the younger brother remarks, “I am resolved to hazard myself would that relieve her, but to die and not to release her, and then my corpse can have no possibility of enjoying her, and what doth that profit me” (4.2.10–13). But the solution is held to be the romantic ideal. The elder brother replies that it profits him “if she could see me blown in a thousand pieces to show I die her martyr” (4.2.14–16). Jean I. Marsden, “Spectacle, Horror, and Pathos,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre, ed. Deborah Payne Fisk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 175. Ibid., 175. Clare, Drama of the English Republic 1649–60, 183. On this subject, Bas van Bavel, et al. write the following in chapter 21, “Economy,” of The Oxford Handbook of Cities in World History, ed. Peter Clark (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): “The 16th and 17th centuries saw renewed urban growth, and again London was in front during this process,

Notes to pages 86–8

41

42

43

44

45

46 47

48

49

277

with a huge population spurt from some 75,000 in the 1550s to 400,000 in the 1650s. At that point, London had become the biggest city in Western Europe” (399). In Staging the Revolution: Drama, Reinvention, and History, 1647–72 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), Rachel Willie notes that “Charles II encouraged the production of heroic drama” (111). In Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), Susan J. Owen contrasts Davenant’s desire to present the heroic “in [a] more familiar and easy shape: more fitted to the common actions and passions of humane life … more like a glass of Nature” with Dryden’s claim to “leave naturalistic representation to historians” and “let himself loose to visionary objects” or the “imagination” (10). In Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Kevin Sharpe notes that “The Siege is generally thought to be the same play as The Colonel, licensed in 1629” (73n113). Even in this prewar era, Davenant rejects Shakespeare’s antiheroism and antiromance features, though he takes up Shakespeare’s concept of centring the work on a siege and interweaves the romance and the siege as in the Troilus and Cressida model. However, this time the lovers are on different sides of the city walls from the start. The one-part version of The Siege of Rhodes was first performed at Rutland House in 1656. The two-part opera was first performed at the Duke of York’s Theater and printed in 1663. Clare, Drama of the English Republic 1649–60, 183. William Davenant, Entertainment at Rutland House, in The Dramatic Works of Sir William Davenant, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: William Paterson; London: H. Sotheran & Co., 1873), 204. Ibid., 212. See a discussion of this exchange in Dawn Lewcock, Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeenth-Century Scenic Stage, c. 1605–1700 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 91–2. Davenant’s awareness of the power of imaginative space likely derives from his experience before the Civil War writing masques with sets designed by Inigo Jones. In Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Nancy Klein Maguire underscores the relationship between the heroic play and the masque; she identifies Davenant and The Siege of Rhodes in particular as crucial to the transformation of the court masque into the rhymed heroic play. As Lauren

278

50

51

52

53

Notes to pages 88–9

Shohet reminds us in Reading Masques: The English Masque and Public Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), masques were also often complex spatially. For example, she observes that some masques were performed or partially performed outside the court: “Recent studies have discovered masques presented in aristocratic country houses … New records of city masques among the aristocracy have emerged as well, including a ‘running masque’ (a masque produced in several different houses)” (41). William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes (London: Printed by J.M. for Henry Herringman, 1659), I:5. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations from part one of The Siege of Rhodes are from this edition and are given in the text by part and page number. No acts or scenes are given in this edition of the play; it is organized by entries. Davenant, “To the Reader,” The Siege of Rhodes, n.p. Davenant’s concern about the actual space in which this hot and busy action needs to take place is evident in his insistence in early editions (1656, 1659) that there are certain “defects” that could only be “reform[ed] by building us a larger Room” as “[i]t has been often wisht that our Scenes … had not been confin’d to eleven foot in height, and about fifteen in depth, including the places of passage reserv’d for the Musick” (Davenant, “To the Reader,” The Siege of Rhodes [London: Printed by J.M. for Henry Herringman, 1656], A2–A2v, quoted in Shohet, Reading Masques, 228). For a detailed discussion of Davenant and space, see Kevin Cope, “The Glory that WAS Rome – and Grenada, and Rhodes, and Tenochtitlan: Pleasurable Conquests, Supernatural Liaisons, and Apparitional Drama in Interregnum Entertainments,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (1999): 1–17. Cope also points out Davenant’s focus on space for “[t]he experimental Rutland House Entertainment” which “opens with a discussion of the physical properties of the building” (7). Also, of importance to us is that he speaks of “[d]isintegrity” as “an integral feature” of the genre – that is to say “disorganization, disunity, unremitting variety, excessive spectacle, deus ex machinae, incoherence, plain old funkiness and poor execution” (Cope 2). As Paul Hirst notes in Space and Power: Politics, War and Architecture (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), “Disposable architecture is not just a 1960s invention. Consider … the plan of the Turkish trenches at the siege of Vienna in 1683 … They are constructions as remarkable and inventive as anything designed by the 1960s radical architectural group Archigram, and yet just as throwaway as the latter’s walking cities … [The] besieged fortress generated

Notes to pages 89–99

54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61

62

63

64 65

66

67

279

a temporary structure as elaborate and as costly in human effort to create as itself ” (199). Jonathan Lamb, “Sterne, Sebald, and Siege Architecture,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 19, nos. 1–2 (2006–7): 32. Richard Knolles, The Generall Historie of the Turkes, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by Adam Islip, 1610), 578. Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 392–3. William Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes: The Second Part (London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1663), II:6. Unless otherwise indicated, subsequent quotations from part two of The Siege of Rhodes are from this edition and are referenced in the text by part and page number. In Unto the Breach, Cahill writes of “the emergence of a new subject position – namely, the man whose authority derives from his technical experience as a militarist” in the drama of the Renaissance (27). See John Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no. 3 (2005): 557–77. Cope, “The Glory that WAS Rome,” 11. Sten Pultz Moslund, Literature’s Sensuous Geographies: Postcolonial Matters of Place (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 70. The inset quotation is from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 481. Paulina Kewes, “Dryden’s Theatre and the Passion of Politics,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, ed. Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139. Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, ed. William Bray, vol. 2 (London: Printed for Henry Colburn, 1854), 55. Madeleine de Scudéry, Almahide; or, the Captive Queen, trans. J. Phillips Gent. (London: Printed by J.M. for Thomas Dring, 1677), 1; this is the year that the novel was published in English. Its original publication dates were 1661–63. John Dryden, “Of Heroique Playes. An Essay,” The Works of John Dryden: Plays; The Conquest of Granada; Marriage-a-la-Mode; The Assignation, ed. John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, and Vinton A. Dearing, vol. 11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 9 (line 26). Ibid., 10 (lines 18–20, 23–5).

280

Notes to pages 99–101

68 Samuel Johnson, “Dr Johnson on Dryden 1779–81, 1750,” in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971), 285. In The Cambridge Introduction to English Theatre, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Peter Thomson suggests that the rhymed couplet may have intensified the disorientation of the audience: “[T]he English heroic couplet is always in a hurry to reach its clinching rhyme-word … [T]he aural effect is like that of being pelted with a succession of pellets. When, as in The Conquest of Granada, the pelting continues for ten acts, the impact is deafening” (43). 69 Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 137. 70 Ibid., 137. 71 The Censure of the Rota (1673) in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. Kinsley and Kinsley, 55; Derek Hughes, “Heroic Drama and Tragicomedy,” in A Companion to Restoration Drama, ed. Susan J. Owen (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 201–2; Richard Leigh, mentioned in Owen’s Perspectives on Restoration Drama, 16; Loftis, Rodes, and Dearing, commentary on The Works of John Dryden, 417. Some have suggested that this is because Dryden’s play is working to reflect contemporary conflicts in court. In “Dryden’s Theatre and the Passion of Politics,” Kewes notes that “The Conquest of Granada … registers fissures within the royalist ethos” and offers “guarded criticism … of inadequate rulers” (140). 72 In “‘This Confused, Divided, and Wretched City’: The Struggle for London in 1642–43,” The Canadian Journal of History 38, no. 3 (2003), Ian Gentles notes that even London, generally known for its strong alignment with Parliament during the wars, was far more divided than such claims suggest. He analyzes the strength of the movement for making peace with the king within the city (467–79). 73 Harold Love, “Dryden’s London,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, 113,120, 121. 74 John A. Agnew, “Space and Place,” in The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, ed. John A. Agnew and David N. Livingstone (London: Sage 2011), 320. 75 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Mr. Leibnitz’s Third Paper. Being An Answer to Dr. Clarke’s Second Reply,” in A Collection of Papers, Which passed between the late Learned Mr. Leibnitz, and Dr. Clarke, In the Years 1715 and 1716 (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1717), 57.

Notes to pages 101–6

281

76 Barney Warf, “From Surfaces to Networks,” in The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009), 75. 77 Ibid., 75. 78 John Dryden, The Conquest of Granada, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Loftis, Rodes, and Dearing, I:2.1.4. Subsequent quotations from The Conquest of Granada are from this edition and are given in the text by part and act, scene, and line number. 79 Moslund, Literature’s Sensuous Geographies, 70. 80 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 474–5. 81 One of Dryden’s likely sources was Ginés Pérez de Hita’s The Civil Wars of Granada, which was available in Spanish and French at the time that Dryden’s play was written. De Hita dedicates more space to his characters’ description of the factions. One of his characters, Malique Alabez, allied with the Abencerrages, notes, [A]ll Granada knows who gentlemen are, and whence they derive their origin; and let not you Zegries, that spring from the kings of Cordova, imagine that you are so good as the Abencerrages, who descend from the kings of Morocco and Fez, and from the great Miramamolin. The Almoradies also are of the royal family of Granada and of the kings of Africa, and we, the Alabeces, are descended from king Almohabez, lord of Cuco, and related to the renowned Malucos. Where then were all these that they were silent, whilst you were seeking fresh altercation? I repeat it, after my lord, the king, there are none so good as the Abencerrages, and whoever asserts the contrary, lies, and is no gentleman (Ginés Pérez de Hita, The Civil Wars of Granada, trans. Thomas Rodd [London: Printed for Thomas Ostell, 1803], 55). We are then told, “When the Zegries, Gomeles, and Muzas, who were all related to each other, heard this bold speech, they were so incensed, that they rushed upon Alabez to slay him, but the Abencerrages, Almoradies, and other Alabeces, perceiving their intentions, rose in his defence” (55). In this passage, there is an emphasis placed on family descent, and indeed the subtitle of the work is The History of the Factions of the Zegries and Abencerrages, Two Noble Families of that City. Dryden does not place an emphasis on familial connections between all the members of the factions. There are fathers and children and brothers and sisters, but emphasis is placed on the broader group and name.

282

Notes to pages 106–13

82 In The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), Bruce Kramer suggests that the representation of “the imperialist and subject [in Dryden’s work] seems always to evoke these comparisons of the stronger, leaner force warring upon the flourishing weak,” and he includes in this “the Spaniards’ war against the Moors in The Conquest of Granada” (78). 83 Laura Brown, “Dryden and the Imperial Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, 74. 84 Dryden, “Of Heroique Playes. An Essay,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Loftis, Rodes, and Dearing, 16 (line 19). 85 Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, 20. In his monograph Cavalier Drama: An Historical and Critical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), Alfred Harbage quotes S.L. Wolf ’s definition of “[t]he typical Cavalier play” as “an ornate, spectacular, rhetorical, sentimental, fortuitous medley” (28). Harbage then adds his own description of the typical play as having “a background of political and military strife among … neighboring states”; umpteen “[p]irates and bands of freebooters”; “beautiful and virtuous [noble] ladies and valiant and magnanimous men” who must overcome political, social, and/ or economic obstacles (or the machinations of a “lustful villain”) in order to marry; lovers who go missing and are presumed dead; and heroines who “will follow, serve, and share the vicissitudes of her lover in the disguise of a boy”; and so on (31–2). Dryden indeed uses many of these elements. 86 Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, 20. 87 Martin van Creveld, Technology and War: From 2000 B.C. to the Present (1989; New York: The Free Press, 1991), 88. 88 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994; London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 5. 89 Ibid. 90 Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm, trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 19. 91 John Dryden, “The Preface to the Play,” Troilus and Cressida, Or Truth Found too Late (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson and Abel Swall, 1679), [sig. a3v]. Dryden substantially rewrites Troilus and Cressida in 1679. Interestingly, he changes it from an antiwar play of indeterminate genre to a tragedy in which there is sentiment and honour and in which both Troilus and Cressida die. In Dryden’s version, Cressida is totally innocent of what Troilus accuses her. Jennifer Brady discusses the difference between Shakespeare’s original and

Notes to pages 114–15

283

Dryden’s adaptation in “Anxious Comparisons in John Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida,” in Enchanted Ground: Reimagining John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Maximillian Novak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 185–202.

Chapter Three 1 As is well known, shortly after the performance of The Conquest of Granada, the heroic drama as a form and Dryden’s play in particular were attacked by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham in his burlesque drama, The Rehearsal. As John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, and Vinton A. Dearing note in their introduction to Dryden’s play, although versions of the parody had circulated for a while, it was “revised for the season of 1671–72 to include among the many plays parodied The Conquest of Granada from the preceding season … The Rehearsal satirizes Dryden not only through [the character of ] Drawcansir and the absurd two kings of Brentford, but also, and more decisively, through what has aptly been called ‘the voice of Mr. Bayes,’” the author “of the farrago, who is made to explain his dramatic principles and practice” (The Works of John Dryden: Plays; The Conquest of Granada; Marriage-a-la-Mode; The Assignation, ed. John Loftis, David Stuart Rodes, and Vinton A. Dearing, vol. 11 [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 430). Dryden, of course, vigorously defended himself, but such ridicule would decrease the popularity not only of heroic drama but also the siege locus which had appeared in both Dryden’s and Davenant’s work. The continued appearance of such plays suggests that attacks on heroic drama did not unequivocally undermine the appeal of a play set in a siege as some of the heroic dramas had been. 2 Dawn Lewcock, Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeenth-Century Scenic Stage, c. 1605–1700 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 213. 3 Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 16. 4 John Crowne, The History of Charles the Eighth of France (London: Printed by T.R. and N.T. for Ambrose Isted, 1672), act 1 (5). 5 Thomas D’Urfey, The Siege of Memphis, or The Ambitious Queen (London: Printed for W. Cademan, 1676), act 4, scene 3 (50). 6 Samuel Pordage, The Siege of Babylon: As it is Acted at the Dukes Theatre (London: Printed for Richard Tonson, 1678), act 5 (57) (no scene number given).

284

Notes to pages 116–25

7 D’Urfey, The Siege of Memphis, act 4, scene 4 (56); Pordage, The Siege of Babylon, act 1, scene 1 (1). 8 Pordage, The Siege of Babylon, act 1, scene 2 (p. 8). 9 Ibid. 10 Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 168. 11 Ibid. 12 Cynthia Wall, The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–4. 13 Ibid., 4. 14 Ibid., 159. 15 Beth S. Neman, “Crowne, John (bap. 1641, d. 1712), playwright,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/6832. 16 Vanita Neelakanta, “Exile and Restoration in John Crowne’s The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian,” Philological Quarterly 89, nos. 2–3 (2010): 185–6. She also notes that Restoration scholars have not paid attention to its setting. 17 Neelakanta, “Exile and Restoration,”186. 18 John Crowne, The Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian. In Two Parts (London: Printed for James Magnes and Richard Bentley, 1677), act 1, scene 1 (5). Subsequent quotations from The Destruction of Jerusalem are from this edition and are given in the text by part and page number. 19 Titus’s respect for the city is also tied to Flavius Josephus’s account of the siege (likely one of his key sources) but here it is not tied to his love of Berenice since she is not part of the siege. 20 John B. Rollins, “Judeo-Christian Apocalyptic Literature and John Crowne’s The Destruction of Jerusalem,” Comparative Drama 35, no. 2 (2001): 209. 21 Ibid., 221. 22 Neelakanta, “Exile and Restoration,” 202. 23 The other major characters within the city, Matthew, his daughter, and the other priests, will be killed not by the Romans but by the rebels, John and his followers (50–1). 24 Charles Brayne, “Banks, John (1652/3–1706), playwright,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), doi-org/10.1093/ref:odnb/1297. 25 John Banks, The Destruction of Troy, A Tragedy (London: Printed by A.G. and J.P., 1679), 2. Subsequent quotations from The Destruction of Troy are from this edition of the play and are given in the text by page number.

Notes to pages 127–36

285

26 J. Douglas Canfield, Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 145. 27 Elaine McGirr, The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 18–19. 28 McGirr, The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 75, 102. 29 John Crowne, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, ed. James Maidment and William Hugh Logan, vol. 4 (Edinburgh: William Paterson; London: S. Sotheran & Co. 1873), 125. 30 Arthur Franklin White, John Crowne: His Life and Dramatic Works (Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1922), 161. 31 John Crowne, “Dramatis Personae,” Regulus: A Tragedy (London: Printed for James Knapton, 1694), n.p. Subsequent quotations from Regulus are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 32 Curtis A. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 67. 33 Eric Salmon, “Southerne, Thomas (1660–1746), playwright,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/26053. 34 Thomas Southerne, The Fate of Capua. A Tragedy (London: Benjamin Tooke, 1700), act 1, scene 1 (2). Subsequent quotations from The Fate of Capua are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 35 Edith Hall, “Fiddling while Troy Burns,” The Edithorial, 14 September 2013, http://edithorial.blogspot.com/2013/09/fiddling-while-troy-burns.html. 36 Elkanah Settle, Cassandra: Or, the Virgin Prophetess, An Opera (London: Printed for A. Roper and R. Basset, 1702), 37. Subsequent quotations from Cassandra are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 37 While Settle’s opera only refers to the horse and the response of the Trojans in Act 2 of the droll, the spectacle of the horse plays a crucial role, conveyed in the description of its appearance: [I]n a Wood without the Walls of Troy, appears the Trojan Horse, being a Figure of that Magnitude, that ’tis 17 Foot high to the top of his Back. The whole Figure magnificently adorn’d with all the trappings, Furniture of a War Horse, set off with rich Gildings, Plumes of Feathers, and all other suitable Decorations. (10) We see for ourselves, rather than hear indirectly, the response of the mob to the horse. 38 Elkanah Settle, The Siege of Troy, A Dramatick Performance (London: Printed and sold by Benj. Bragge, 1707), 7. Subsequent quotations from The Siege of Troy are from this edition and are given in the text by page number.

286

Notes to pages 137–47

39 Thomas N. McGeary, “Hughes, John (1678?–1720), writer and librettist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14077. 40 See “The Original Plan of the Siege of Damascus,” in The Correspondence of John Hughes, Esq. (author of the Siege of Damascus) and several of his friends, viz. Lord Chancellor Cowper, Bishop Hoadly, vol. 1 (Dublin, s.n., [1773]). 41 John Hughes, The Siege of Damascus: A Tragedy (London: Printed for John Watts 1720), 2. Subsequent quotations from The Siege of Damascus are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. The plot is probably based on Simon Ockley’s History of the Saracens, as John Robert Moore argues in “Hughes Source for the ‘Siege of Damascus,’” Huntington Library Quarterly 21, no. 4 (1958): 362–6. 42 In Early English Books Online (eeBO), Richard Ames is given as the author of The Siege and Surrender of Mons (1691). However, his name does not appear on the play itself and his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not mention the play. 43 [Richard Ames], The Last Search after Claret in Southwark (1691), quoted in Warren Chernaik, “Ames, Richard (bap. 1664?, d. 1692), satirist,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/54117. 44 C.I. McGrath, “Mitchelburne, John (1648–1721),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb18652. 45 Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 32. 46 [Richard Ames], “Persons Represented,” in The Siege and Surrender of Mons. A Tragi-Comedy (London: Printed for Richard Baldwin, 1691), n.p. Subsequent quotations from The Siege and Surrender of Mons are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 47 The Williamites would succeed in taking Limerick the following year (1691) after The Siege and Surrender of Mons had been published. 48 As the Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography entry on Mitchelburne notes, there are several spellings of this author’s name. We have elected to use the one featured in the ODNB, which is “Mitchelburne.” 49 McGrath, “Mitchelburne, John.” 50 McGrath explains that “Mitchelburne’s first wife and all seven children died during the siege of Londonderry,” yet there is no mention of this in the play. Granade is single and in love with the lovely spy Lucretia throughout the play.

Notes to pages 148–58

51

52 53 54

55 56

57

287

But much of the drama follows events that were part of Mitchelburne’s life and his experience in the city of Derry (“Mitchelburne, John”). John Mitchelburne, Ireland Preserv’d: or the Siege of London-Derry (London: s.n., 1705), I:123–4. Quotations from this play are from this edition and are given in the text by part and page number. Although the original title of the 1705 edition suggests that only part 1 is included, it is, in fact, comprised of both parts. Ian McBride, The Siege of Derry in Ulster Protestant Mythology (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1997), 37. Ibid., 39. Mitchelburne’s work highlights the accomplishments of Episcopalians inside Derry, ensuring that readers understand that heroic action was not limited to Presbyterian occupants of the city. There is little or no mention of any Presbyterian heroes, and only one hero (Granade, Mitchelburne’s avatar) is central to the success of the resistance to Jacobite forces. This suggests that the play takes a specific position with respect to the competing representations of the siege that quickly followed its resolution. George Walker, A True Account of the Siege of London-Derry (London: Printed for Robert Clavel and Ralph Simpson, 1689), 28. Cromwell and William III were often compared by William’s supporters, who saw them both as successful soldiers and men of the people, and by his detractors, who saw both leaders as usurpers. See, for example, John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith, introduction to Radicalism in British Literary Culture 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution, ed. Morton and Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–26; and Charles-Edouard Levillain, “Cromwell Redivivus? William III as Military Dictator: Myth and Reality,” in Redefining William III: The Impact of the King-Stadholder in [an] International Context, ed. Esther Mijers and David Onnekink (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 159–76. Roger B. Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army, 1585–1702 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 385.

Chapter Four 1 See, for example, Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988); Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660

288

2 3

4

5 6 7 8

9

Notes to pages 160–3

(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and by contributors to such volumes as Literature and the English Civil War, ed. Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999); The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), title. Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini, introduction to Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500–1800, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 4. We are most grateful for the work done by Patricia Fumerton, professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in establishing and directing the English Broadside Ballad Archive (eBBA), an invaluable resource for the study of early modern ballads and broadsides. Fumerton and Guerrini, introduction to Ballads and Broadsides, 1. In Political Broadside Ballads of Seventeenth-Century England: A Critical Bibliography (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), Angela McShane estimates, for example, that about “3000” distinct “ballad titles were published between 1640 and 1700” (xxi). Fumerton and Guerrini, introduction to Ballads and Broadsides, 1–2. Ibid., 4, 1. We define the siege ballad as either a ballad specifically on the subject of sieges or one that contains significant sections on sieges. Hyder E. Rollins, introduction to Gallant Newes from Ireland, in Cavalier and Puritan: Ballads and Broadsides Illustrating the Period of the Great Rebellion 1640–1660, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (New York: The New York University Press, 1923), 7. Angela McShane rightly describes political ballads as epideictic in nature in “‘Ne sutor ultra crepidam’: Political Cobblers and Broadside Ballads in Late Seventeenth-Century England,” in Ballads and Broadsides, ed. Fumerton and Guerrini, 216.

Notes to pages 164–8

289

10 Natascha Würzback, The Rise of the English Street Ballad, 1550–1650, trans. Gayna Walls (1981; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8, 24–5. There is another siege ballad, the Warning or Lanthorn to London, but this Elizabethan ballad is misdated c. 1655–58 in the Wing Short Title Catalogue (Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Alker, “Dating Warning or Lanthorn to London,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 6, no. 1 [2014]: 125–7, https://english.illinoisstate.edu/digitaldefoe/notes/nelsonalker.pdf. 11 Rollins also notes of the first year of the Civil War, “No ballads were registered in 1642, but there was little stoppage, if any, in their publication” (Cavalier and Puritan 12). 12 In his introduction to Cavalier and Puritan, Rollins explains that “[c]omparatively few ballads about events of the Civil War are extant”; however, he explains that “[d]uring the years 1642–1647, they were printed in enormous numbers; but nearly all escaped entry in the Stationers’ Register, and the Company of Stationers was never able to regain its hold on the balladprinters. Political ballads abounded” (Cavalier and Puritan 13). 13 Gallant Newes from Ireland, in Cavalier and Puritan, ed. Rollins, 285. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version and given in the text by page number. 14 Kate McLoughlin, Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the “Iliad” to Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 26, 50. 15 Rollins, Cavalier and Puritan, 15. 16 Introduction to Gallant Newes from Ireland, in Cavalier and Puritan, 284. 17 Two strings to a Bow; or, The cunning Archer, Being A pleasant new ditty of a Souldier, that had two Lasses at one time That dearly loved him, and how he requited their kindness (London: Printed for Charles Tyus, c. 1662), 1. 18 C.E. Bosworth, “Vienna, sieges of,” in The Oxford Companion to Military History, ed. Richard Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 953. 19 Anders Ingram, “The Ottoman Siege of Vienna, English Ballads, and the Exclusion Crisis,” The Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (2014): 53. 20 The Bloody Siege of Vienna: A Song (London: Printed for J. Dean, c. 1688), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. Since this and subsequent ballads cited are each only one page in length, no page numbers are given for them in the main text. 21 The “German Whiggs” the author references are the Hungarian Calvinists led by Imre Thököly, who “appealed to the Turkish grand vizier, Kara Mustafa, to attack the Habsburg capital. With the tacit support of the Hungarian army, 150,000 Turks laid siege to Vienna, succeeded in capturing the outer

290

22

23

24 25

26

27

28

29

Notes to pages 168–74

fortifications, and began to tunnel to the inner walls”; Leopold I, the emperor, immediately “fled the city” (“Siege of Vienna, [17 July – 12 September 1683],” in The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th ed. vol. 12 [Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 2003], 357). In Daniel Defoe: Contrarian (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), Robert James Merrett reminds us that the English “Whigs hope[d] that the Turks’ siege of Vienna would succeed … so that Protestantism might flourish there” (162); Defoe distanced himself from his Whig allies on this subject. McShane explains that John Holwell was a “radical astrologer” who prophesized “that the Ottoman armies would sweep through Europe, capturing the Emperor and toppling the Pope.” For this, “[h]e was indicted for seditious libel in May 1683 and convicted on 9 July” (No. 734) (Political Broadside Ballads, 356). On the Relief of Vienna: A Hymn for the True-Protestants (N.p: Printed for C.W., 1683), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. Vienna’s Triumph; With the Whigg’s Lamentation For the Overthrow of the Turks ([London]: Printed for J. Deacon, 1683), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. [Thomas D’Urfey], A Carrouse to the Emperour, the Royal Pole, And the muchwrong’d Duke of Lorrain ([London]: Printed for P. Brooksby, c. 1683), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. The Christian Conquest. Being an Account of the great overthrow of the Turks before the Imperial City of Vienna, in Germany ([London]: Printed for J. Wright, J. Clark, W. Thackery, and T. Passinger, c. 1683), 1. In the General Introduction to The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact, ed. Jonathan I. Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), Israel notes that “while the initial stage of the [Glorious] Revolution was carried through painlessly amidst a high degree of national consensus, very shortly the Glorious Revolution turned into something remarkably different – becoming one of the most deeply divisive, bitterly disputed, and passionately argued over episodes in English – not to mention the rest of British – history” (6). In The Siege of Derry 1689: The Military History (Stroud: Spellmount, 2008), Richard Doherty describes the “tensions” between the Anglicans and Presbyterians in Londonderry during the siege but stresses that “all parties were exhorted” at the time “to forget their denominational differences” and unite in the fight for William and Protestantism (89–90).

Notes to pages 174–9

291

30 John Locke, “Second Treatise of Government” and “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” ed. Mark Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 14 (4:23). 31 Locke, “Second Treatise of Government,” 29 (6:57). 32 It is interesting that the ballads on the siege of Londonderry discussed in this chapter focus on the heroism of the Rev. George Walker (as, unsurprisingly, does Walker in his True Account of the Siege of Londonderry) while Colonel John Mitchelburne dwells on his own contribution in his siege play Ireland Preserv’d. In “Disputed Heroes: Early Accounts of the Siege of Londonderry,” New Hibernia Review 18, no. 2 (2014): 21–41, Karen A. Holland discusses the disagreement in the literature published in the decade after the siege over the identity of its “one … outstanding hero” (the main candidates being Walker, Mitchelburne, and Colonel Adam Murray) (22). During the siege, Walker was joint governor of Londonderry with Major Henry Baker and, after Baker’s death, with Mitchelburne. 33 John Milton, “Sonnet 16,” John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 81 (line 14). 34 The Protestants Triumph in Re-taking Kilmore and Raising the Siege at LondonDerry (London: Printed for A. Milbourn, c. 1689), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 35 Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “Teague, n.1.” 36 Elisabetta Cecconi, “‘Ye Tories round the nation”: An Analysis of Markers of Interactive-involved Discourse in Seventeenth Century Political Broadside Ballads,” The Nordic Journal of English Studies 8, no 3 (2009): 59, 63. We should note that Cecconi is speaking of midcentury royalist ballads here, but her point is applicable to all political ballads of the century. 37 The Protestant Exhortation Or, A Copy of Verses of the Courageous Christian Collonel Walker in London-Derry, Licensed according to Order (N.p: s.n., 1689), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 38 An Excellent New Song Entituled the Seige of London-Derry, or the Church Militant, Licensed, and Entered according to Order (London: Printed for, and Sold by Jer. Wilkins, 1689). Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 39 The Glory of London-Derry: Or The Couragious Protestants Success on the French and Irish Army, Licensed according to Order ([London]: Printed for J. Blare, c. 1690), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 40 McLoughlin, Authoring War, 52.

292

Notes to pages 180–3

41 “Agra” is identified in Andrew Carpenter’s notes on the poem as “a proper name made from the Ir[ish] a ghrá, my dear” (Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, ed. Andrew Carpenter [Cork: Cork University Press, 2003], 533n1). 42 Teague, the Irish Trooper: Being His Sorrowful Lamentation to his Cousin Agra and the rest of his Fellow Soldiers, Licensed according to Order ([London]: Printed for P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, J. Blare, J. Back, c. 1691), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. The stanza that may evoke the most sympathy reads as follows: The Fight at fair Agram I’d like to forgot, Where so many Thousands were slain on the spot, My Father and Brother were kill’d in the Fray, My Heart is now ready to break Cousin Gray. 43 A Brief Touch of the Irish Wars: From the Siege of London-Derry to the Surrender of Drogheda, Dublin, Waterford, and many other strong Forts and Castles, Licensed according to Order ([London]: Printed for P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, J. Blare, and J. Back, c. 1690), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 44 McLoughlin, Authoring War, 42. 45 Ibid., 44. 46 The Relief of London-Derry; Or, The Happy Arrival of the Timely Succours Landed at London-Derry. Licensed according to Order ([London]: Printed for P. Brooksby, J. Deacon, J. Blare, J. Back, c. 1690), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 47 For a study dedicated to the “woman warrior” in ballads of the long eighteenth-century, see Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). In this volume, Dugaw claims that The Woman Warrier is “seemingly idiosyncratic” because it “emphasizes the martial side of the ideal” and “gives no romantic reasons whatsoever for the heroine’s masquerade” (113). She is referring to a version published in 1710. However, there are other political ballads of the period in which women also fight or attempt to do so for martial reasons alone. In, for example, The Valliant Damsel; Giving an Account of a Maid at Westminster, who put her self in Mans Apparel, and Listed her self for a Soldier for the Wars of Flanders ([London]: Printed for C. Bates, c. 1691), in which the female soldier is presented as exemplary, a young woman attempts to follow in her footsteps but is foiled by her mother who has her discharged (against her will) and takes her home.

Notes to pages 183–90

293

48 The Woman Warrier: Being An Account of a young Woman who lived in Cow-Cross, near West-smithfield, Licensed according to Order ([London]: Printed for Charles Bates, c. 1690), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 49 In “The Heyday of the Broadside Ballad,” English Broadside Ballad Archive (University of California Santa Barbara, 2007), Eric Nebeker, writes, “In seventeenth century England, broadside ballads were everywhere … They were, in a sense, promiscuous – available to all and used in all kinds of ways. Thus broadside ballads really were everywhere” (accessed 9 February 2020, http://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/heyday-of-the-broadside-ballad). 50 The Royal Letter to our Gracious Queen Mary, from his Majesty in Flanders, Licensed according to Order (London: Printed for C. Bates, c. 1691), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version. 51 The Glory of Flanders: Or, The Triumphant Army’s Victory over the French at Namur (London: Printed for J. Bissel, c. 1695). 52 The Triumph of Namur: Or, The Confederate Army’s unspeakable Joy, for their Victory over the French, in the Surrender of the Castle, which they bravely Conquer’d, Licens’d according to Order (London: Printed for J. Deacon, c. 1695). 53 King William’s Welcome Home: Or, The Subjects unspeakable Joy for his safe Arrival from Flanders to his Kingdom of England, Licensed according to Order (London: Printed for J. Blare, c. 1695), 1. Subsequent quotations from this ballad are from this version.

Chapter Five 1 This phrase is from “The Argument of His Book,” in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, quoted in Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 47. 2 Andrea Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 91. 3 MacLean, Time’s Witness, 46–7. 4 Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 32. 5 Ibid., 30. 6 John Milton, “Sonnet 8,” John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 35 (lines 5, 2, 5–8).

294

Notes to pages 190–3

7 In Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), Anna Beer mentions John Hale’s emphasis on Milton’s emulation of Euripides in this poem, but she also stresses the presence of fear during “wartime conditions”: “Delighted emulation is certainly present but so is fear, masked but not entirely concealed as urbane Classical wit” (156, 157). 8 Milton, “Sonnet 8,” John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Orgel and Goldberg, 35 (lines 9–14). 9 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 280; Milton, “On the Lord General Fairfax at the Siege of Colchester,” John Milton: The Major Works, 85 (line 10). 10 It should be stressed, however, that some sonnets composed prior to Milton’s could and did contain military content. Military matters were the subject of one or two of Edmund Spenser’s sonnets. In Subtle Subversions: Reading Golden Age Sonnets by Iberian Women (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008), Gwyn Fox also discusses seventeenthcentury authors on the Continent using the sonnet form to write of “military exploits” and “military prowess” (14, 59). And as Julie Sanders notes, military metaphors were neither uncommon in sonnets by Shakespeare (The Cambridge Introduction to Early Modern Drama, 1576–1642 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014], 114) nor unusual in many early modern sonnets on love, given the similar language often used to describe love and war. The lover, for example, is often under siege by the beloved. 11 Robert Herrick, “To the King, Upon His Taking of Leicester,” Hesperides: Or, The Works both Humane and Divine of Robert Herrick Esq (London: Printed for John Williams, and Francis Eglesfield, 1648), 319. 12 Alastair Fowler, “Genre and Tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 83. 13 Margaret Cavendish, “The Fort or Castle of Hope” and “Doubts Assault, and Hope’s Defence,” Poems and Phancies, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by William Wilson, 1664), 236, 237. 14 Cavendish, “A Dialogue between a Bountifull Knight and a Castle Ruin’d in Warr,” Poems and Phancies, 109. 15 MacLean, Time’s Witness, 127. 16 Kenneth Borris, Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–8. 17 Ibid., 58, 57.

Notes to pages 193–6

295

18 Elaine M. McGirr, The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009), 33. 19 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. Gr. 20 Michael Werth Gelber, The Just and the Lively: The Literary Criticism of John Dryden (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 128. 21 Davenant does so in “The Preface to Gondibert.” 22 MacLean, Time’s Witness, 132. 23 Ibid. 24 The extent to which the heroic and antiheroic compete in, say, the Iliad, is unclear. In Homer: The Iliad, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), M.S. Silk discusses, for example, Achilles’s refusal to fight, arguing that it does not detract from the heroic vision of the piece: “The Iliad presents a coherent heroic ideology, which presupposes war … Achilles withdraws from the war in the first place, not out of anti-heroic disaffection with heroic combat itself, but in heroic protest against the dishonour done to him and with a heroic ambition of additional honours at a later date” (84). However, Silk proffers such an emphatic defense of the heroic in the Iliad because some earlier scholars have read Achilles’s refusal to fight as antiheroic. 25 There is a siege in Pharsalia: the siege of Massilia (book 3). 26 David Norbrook discusses the influence of Pharsalia at some length in Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 27 Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 73. 28 J.K. Newman, “Epic,” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 362. 29 Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), book 2, line 1. Subsequent quotations from The Civil War are from this edition and are given in the text by book and line number. 30 Allan Pritchard, introduction to Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Pritchard, 4. Interestingly, Fowler associates Cowley’s Civil War, as well as Lucan’s Pharsalia (which deeply influenced Cowley’s poem), with an “epic antigenre” because it is an “epic with a recent action” (Kinds of Literature 175). We would, however, agree with Smith’s argument that, instead, the epic had to adapt to the context of civil war.

296

Notes to pages 196–210

31 David Trotter, The Poetry of Abraham Cowley (London: Macmillan, 1979), 21; Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 216, 203; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 83; Paul Salzman, “Royalist Epic and Romance,” in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. N.H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 218. 32 Pritchard, introduction to Cowley, The Civil War, 23. 33 Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Pritchard, book 2, line 69. Pritchard, notes to Cowley, The Civil War, 150n69. 34 MacLean, Time’s Witness, 199. 35 Diane Purkiss, “Dismembering and Remembering: The English Civil War and Male Identity,” in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 236. 36 Emmanuelle Peraldo “‘Two broad shining eyes’: Optic Impressions and Landscape in Robinson Crusoe,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 4, no. 1 (2012): 18, https://english.illinoisstate.edu/ digitaldefoe/features/peraldo.pdf. Peraldo is citing the theory of Jacques Lévy and Michel Lussault, geographers who distinguish between human actors and nonhuman actants “to identify and differentiate the roles played by human and non-human beings in encounters with each other” (18). 37 W.C. “The Epistle Dedicatory,” The Siege of Vienna, A Poem (London: Printed for H. Hills, 1685), sig. A2v. Subsequent quotations from The Siege of Vienna are from this version and are given in the text by page number. 38 Newman, “Epic,” 361. 39 David Loewenstein, “The Seventeenth-Century Protestant English Epic,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Epic, ed. Catherine Bates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148. 40 Newman, “Epic,” 362. 41 David Loewenstein, Milton: “Paradise Lost,” 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 31. 42 Georgia E. Brown, “Marlowe’s Poems and Classicism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, ed. Patrick Cheney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 121. 43 Siege warfare typically involved the besieged sallying out to fight directly with the besiegers and the siege of Vienna is no different. Sallying and its consequences are detailed by W.C. 44 Joseph Aickin, “Epistle Dedicatory,” Londerias; or, A Narrative of the Siege of London-Dery (London: Printed by J.B. and S.P., 1699), n.p. Subsequent quotations from Londerias are from this edition and are given in the text by book, section, and page number.

Notes to pages 210–20

297

45 R.D. Smith, “Aickin, Joseph (fl 1693–1705?), grammarian,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/73955. In his introduction to an excerpt from Londerias, Andrew Carpenter notes that it “was published twice, once in Dublin in 1699 and again in Derriana, a collection of documents relating to the siege of Derry edited and published by the Derry bookseller, George Douglas, in 1790” (Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, ed. Andrew Carpenter [Cork: Cork University Press, 2003], 564). 46 Robert Mayer, History and the Early English Novel: Matters of Fact from Bacon to Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 21, 22. 47 Carpenter, ed. Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, 567n10. 48 This phrase appears in the opening summary of book 4 (60). 49 The page number “66” is mistakenly reproduced twice in this edition of Londerias, so we give additional information on which side of the page the cited passages appear. 50 Strangely, this “blessing” concludes with a question mark: “And lasting Lawrels round his Temples wreath?” While this punctuation mark could be a compositor’s error, we wonder if it also signifies the tentativeness of the heroic vision at the poem’s conclusion. 51 Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 233 (our emphasis). 52 Doody, The Daring Muse, 32. 53 Chris Baldick, “panegyric,” The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 264. 54 Philip Connell, Secular Chains: Poetry and the Politics of Religion from Milton to Pope (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 25. 55 Joshua Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 87, 88. 56 Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words (London: Printed by E. Tyler for Nath. Brooke, 1658), quoted in James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 5. 57 Stella P. Revard describes the genre thus: “[The] Pindaric ode was perceived as a heterogeneous medium, a poetic catch-all” (Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700, [Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Brepols, 2009], 257). 58 Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, 100–1. 59 Robert Wilcher summarizes these dominant discursive elements in the Renaissance elegy in “The ‘true, practic piety’ of ‘Holy Writing’: Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Christopher Harvey and The Temple,” in Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan

298

60

61 62 63

64 65

66

67 68 69

70 71

72

Notes to pages 220–5

Rudrum, ed. Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 312. Henry Harington, An Elegie upon The Death of the Mirrour of Magnanimity, the Right Honourable Robert Lord Brooke (London: Printed for H.O., 1642), 1. Subsequent quotations from this one-page poem are from this version. Adrian Tinniswood, The Rainborowes: One Family’s Quest to Build a New England (New York: Basic Books, 2013), 271. Barbara Donagan, War in England 1642–1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 385, 382. Margaret Cavendish, “An Elegy upon the Death of my Brother,” Poems and Phancies, 271. Cavendish writes elsewhere of her brother’s death both directly and indirectly. See, for example, “Upon the Funeral of my Dear Brother, Kill’d in these Unhappy Warrs,” which appears just before the elegy on his death (Poems and Phancies 270). Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph, 86. Timothy Harris, A Poem on the death of the King of Sweden, who was kill’d before Fredrickshall, December 11. 1718 (London: Printed for T. Warner, 1719), 3. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. Mike Dash, “The Blazing Career and Mysterious Death of ‘The Swedish Meteor,’” Smithsonian Magazine, 17 September 2012, https://www. smithsonianmag.com/history/the-blazing-career-and-mysterious-death-of-theswedish-meteor-39695356/; Toby McLeod, “Charles XII, King of Sweden,” in The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 197–8. William Lithgow, A True Experimentall and Exact Relation upon That famous and renowned Siege of Newcastle (Edinburgh: Printed by Robert Byrson, 1645), 19. Scodel, The English Poetic Epitaph, 1. In considering the role of the “locus mortis” in elegiac verse, we are indebted to Scott L. Newstok’s Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Joseph Frank, Hobbled Pegasus: A Descriptive Bibliography of Minor English Poetry, 1641–1660 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968), 211. An Elegie, On the most Barbarous, Unparallel’d, Unsouldiery, Murder, Committed at Colchester upon the persons of the two most incomparable, Sir Charles Lucas, and Sir George Lisle (London: s.n, 1648), 1. Ibid.

Notes to pages 225–9

299

73 Noelle Dückmann Gallagher, “The Embarrassments of Restoration Panegyric: Reconsidering an Unfashionable Genre,” Eighteenth-Century Life 39, no. 3 (2015): 35–6. 74 On the Siege of Glocester, and Col. Massey, Printed according to Order for Edw. Husbands ([London], 1644). Subsequent quotations from this broadside poem are from this version. 75 Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics, 41. 76 An Account of the Great and Glorious Actions of Mr. Walker the Protestant Governor, at the Siege of London-Derry (London: Printed for Langley Curtiss, 1689). Subsequent quotations from this broadside poem are from this version. 77 These include the “Bavarians, Dutch, Brandenburgers, Hanoverians and Hessians” (John Childs, The Nine Years’ War and the British Army 1688–97: The Operations in the Low Countries [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991], 294). 78 Denne’s poem is not identified in its title as a Pindaric ode, as are the other two poems. Some may view it as belonging to the “kind of all-purpose heroic” verse of the period (John Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-EighteenthCentury Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 45, no. 3 [2005]: 558). However, we believe that it is usefully read alongside Congreve’s and Yalden’s poems as they share many features. William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode, Humbly Offer’d to the King On His Taking Namure (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1695), 1. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. 79 There are pagination errors in the edition of the poem used. Page 7 is misnumbered page 9, page 8 is misnumbered 01, and page 9 is misnumbered 11. 80 Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” 561. 81 Ibid., 571, 563. 82 Ibid., 562. 83 Andrew Lincoln, “The Culture of War and Civil Society in the Reigns of William III and Anne,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 4 (2011): 461. 84 Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714, quoted in Lincoln, “The Culture of War,” 461. 85 Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” 565. 86 The similarities between the odes of Yalden and Congreve did not go unnoticed in the eighteenth century. In volume 3 of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (London: Printed for C. Bathurst et al, 1781) Samuel

300

87

88

89 90

91

92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99

Notes to pages 230–5

Johnson mentions a satirical response to Yalden’s ode in the poem “The Oxford Laureate” which reads as follows: His [Yalden’s] crime was for being a felon in verse, And presenting his theft to the king; The first was a trick not uncommon or scarce, But the last was an impudent thing (163) Henry Denne, A Poem on the Taking of Namur, By His Majesty (London: Printed for R. Cumberland, 1695), 1. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. This Henry Denne also published Marlborough: A Heroic Poem (London: W. Downing, 1704) and edited the literary miscellany A Pacquet from Parnassus; or A Collection of Papers (London: J. How, 1702). Childs, The Nine Years’ War and the British Army 1688–97, 295, 294. Thomas Yalden, On the Conquest of Namur. A Pindarique Ode (London: Printed for Jacob Tonson, 1695), 3 and 4. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. Samuel Parker, “To Sir R.L.,” Homer in a Nutshell (London: Tho. Newborough, 1700), quoted in Gallagher, “The Embarrassments of Restoration Panegyric,” 35, 38. [William Sherlock], Reflections on the Poems made upon The Siege and Taking of Namur (London: Printed, and are to be sold by M. Whitlock, 1696), 3. Michael Clodfelter, Warfare and Armed Conflicts: A Statistical Reference to Casualty and Other Figures, 1500–2000 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 48. [Sherlock], Reflections on the Poems, 4. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, 110. Rowland Broughton-Mainwaring, Historical Record of the Royal Welch Fusiliers (London: Hatchards, Piccadilly, 1889), 21. Knight-Errantry; or, Don Quixot Encoutering the Windmill. Being a Relation of the Siege of Knocke (London: s.n., 1695), 4, 1. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. Wout Troost, William III, the Stadholder-King: A Political Biography, trans. J.C. Grayson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 24. The poem has been attributed to Tom (Thomas) Brown (1663–1704) by W. Walker Wilkins (Political Ballads of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. 2 [London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860], 34). Wilkins gives the poem a different name, “England’s Triumph for her Conquest in Flanders” and dates it 1694. The poem was included in volume 2 of Poems on Affairs of State from The Reign of K. James the First, To this Present

Notes to pages 235–42

100

101 102 103 104

301

Year 1703, 2 vols. (London: s.n., 1703) and in A New Collection of Poems Relating to State Affairs from Oliver Cromwell to this Present Time: By the Greatest Wits of the Age (London: s.n., 1705). In the 1703 collection, the list of authors of the works contained therein do not include Brown’s name (but it may be that the list given on the title page is not comprehensive). “The Campaign, 1692,” A New Collection of Poems Relating to State Affairs, 364, 365. Subsequent quotations from this poem are from this version and are given in the text by page number. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650–1850 (1989; repr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 175. Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), 116, 128. Lincoln, “The Culture of War,” 456. Richardson, “Modern Warfare in Early-Eighteenth-Century Poetry,” 574.

Chapter Six 1 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 214. 2 Isabelle Moreau, “Seventeenth-Century Fiction in the Making,” in Seventeenth-Century Fiction: Text and Transmission, ed. Jacqueline Glomski and Isabelle Moreau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1. 3 Jacqueline Glomski, “Politics and Passion: Fact and Fiction in Barclay’s Argenis,” in Seventeenth-Century Fiction, ed. Glomski and Moreau, 49. 4 J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century Fiction (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 5. 5 John Bunyan, The Holy War, ed. James F. Forest (New York: New York University Press, 1967), 1. Subsequent quotations from The Holy War are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 6 Richard Maxwell, The Historical Novel in Europe, 1650–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 175. 7 Ibid., 181. 8 Jean de Préchac, The Serasquier Bassa: An Historical Novel of the Times. Containing all that pass’d at the Siege of Buda (London: Printed for Henry Rhodes, 1685), 113. Subsequent quotations from The Serasquier Bassa are from this edition and are given in the text by page number. 9 Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), 168.

302

Notes to pages 242–3

10 Ibid., 171, 172. Of interest may be the publication (after The Holy War) of the anonymous paper “A Calculation of the Credibility of Human Testimony” (attributed to George Hooper), included in volume 21 (“For the Year 1699”) of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (London: Printed for S. Smith and B. Walford, 1700). It provides the categories of “Moral Certitude Absolute” and “Moral Certitude Incompleat” before noting that “[t]he Credibility of any Reporter is to be rated (I) by his Integrity, or Fidelity; and (2) by his Ability: and a double Ability is to be considered; both that of Apprehending, what is deliver’d; and also of Retaining it afterwards, till it be transmitted” (359). 11 Christopher Hill, A Tinker and a Poor Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 240. In his magisterial Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), Richard L. Greaves similarly argues that “The Holy War is a technically sophisticated allegory that explores multiple levels of meaning,” though he claims that “the most fundamental and consistent of ” these levels is the “soteriological, particularly with reference to Bunyan’s own religious experience” (419). 12 The intersection of affect and allegory informs Greaves’s psychological approach to The Holy War, as he traces the ways in which “the allegory effectively captures the core themes of the spiritual autobiography [Grace Abounding], such as the soul’s wrestling with anxiety, terror, despair, and false peace” and aligns the terror in The Holy War with Bunyan’s “struggle with melancholy” as well as his “turbulent early religious experience” (Glimpses of Glory 421–2). Two fairly recent monographs on the allegorical theological and spiritual nuances of The Holy War – Daniel Virgil Runyon’s John Bunyan’s Master Story: “The Holy War” as Battle Allegory in Religious and Biblical Context (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007) and Robert J. McKelvey’s Histories that Mansoul and Her Wars Anatomize: The Drama of Redemption in John Bunyan’s “Holy War” (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2011) – emphasise historical context, both in terms of the Civil War and Restoration politics, which influence the tenor of the allegory. Substantial critical dialogue has also taken place over the certainty of belief in the allegory. In Bunyan and Authority: The Rhetoric of Dissent and the Legitimation Crisis in SeventeenthCentury England (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), Stuart Sim and David Walker mull over Bunyan’s insistence on the buffered self, arguing that the presence of the Doubters in the final battle indicates an “almost pathological fear of debate, dialogue, and most of all, compromise that marks out the predestinarian mind. Doubt of any kind constitutes something like heresy to a believer of Bunyan’s stamp” (203).

Notes to pages 243–7

303

13 Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 340. 14 Bunyan of course seems rather apologetic about using allegory in The Pilgrim’s Progress (see his preface) likely because it was published in the midst of this controversy. 15 Theresa M. Kelley, Reinventing Allegory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 63. 16 Martin, The Ruins of Allegory, 323. 17 Beth Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 144. 18 Ibid., 152; on this subject, see also 143–4. 19 Ibid., 154. 20 Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 109. 21 Andrea Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 74. 22 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Cynthia Wall (New York and London: Norton, 2009), 26. 23 For an impressive list of siege allegories in the medieval period, see chapter 6 of Malcolm Hebron’s The Medieval Siege: Theme and Image in Middle English Romance (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 24 Psychomachia, in Prudentius, trans. H.J. Thomson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1949), 1.281. It is generally agreed, however, that Bunyan could not have read this work, given that it would have only been available in Latin. 25 Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath, Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012), 20. 26 Even works that have, at times, been thought to influence The Holy War, such as Richard Bernard’s Isle of Man (1627), do not have a narrator like that in Bunyan’s Holy War. 27 Lynch, John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction, 136. 28 The introductory poem is signed “John Bunyan” and thus would seem to be strongly aligned with the author. However, read alongside the narrative that follows, which is rich in eyewitness testimony, we would suggest that the speaker of the poem is more firmly aligned with the eyewitness narrator in the prose that follows.

304

Notes to pages 247–56

29 Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness, 13. 30 Title page, A True Relation of the Twenty weeks Siege of London derry (London: Printed by R.I. for S.G. and A.W., 1649). 31 Title page, A True Relation of the Passages Which happened at the Town of Portsmouth At the late Siege (London: Printed for Joseph Hunscot, 1642). 32 A true and faithful Relation of the besieging of the Towne of Manchester, appointed to be printed and published ([London]: s.n., 1642), 1. 33 Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness, 107. 34 William Lithgow, A True Experimentall and Exact Relation upon That famous and renowned Siege of Newcastle (Edinburgh: Printed by Robert Byrson, 1645), 5. 35 Part way through the poem he shifts to the experience of the city, noting, She saw the swords of fighting men made red, And heard the cries of those with them wounded; Must not their frights then be much more by far Than theirs who to such doings strangers are? (4) 36 A true Relation Of the severall passages which have happened to our Army since it advanced towards Glocester, Licensed according to Order (Printed by G. Dexter for Stephen Bowtell, 1643), 5. 37 Magnalia Dei. A Relation Of some of the many Remarkable Passages in Cheshire Before the Siege of Namptwich, Published by Authority and entred according to order (London: Printed for Robert Bostock, 1644). 38 Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 212. 39 A true and exact Relation of the several passages at the Siege of Manchester (London: Printed for Edward Blackmore, 1642), 12–13. 40 We are told at the end of the opening poem, “Nor do thou go to work without my key” (5). 41 Kelly Oliver, Witnessing: Beyond Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 86. She further claims, “We have both the juridical sense of bearing witness to what you know from experience as an eyewitness and the religious sense of bearing witness to what you believe through blind faith” (86).

Epilogue 1 Jeffrey N. Peters, Mapping Discord: Allegorical Cartography in Early Modern French Writing (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 33.

Notes to pages 256–8

305

2 Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 189. 3 Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso 2001), xiii. 4 Stephen Graham, “Cities and the ‘War on Terror,’” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 2 (2006): 266. 5 Richard Doherty, The Siege of Derry 1689: The Military History (Stroud: Spellmount, 2008), 1, 2. 6 Rod Nordland and Alissa J. Rubin, “Iraq Rebels Stall North of Baghdad as Residents Brace for a Siege,” New York Times, 15 June 2014, https://www. nytimes.com/2014/06/15/world/asia/iraq.html; Julian Borger, “US Troops Deployed to Middle East after Baghdad Embassy Siege,” The Guardian, 1 January 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/01/us-troopsfire-teargas-to-disperse-protesters-at-baghdad-embassy; Kareem Shaheen and Patrick Wintour, “‘Facing Disaster’: Children Starve in Siege of Syria’s Former Breadbasket,” The Guardian, 24 November 2017, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/24/syria-eastern-ghouta-siege-talks; Lyse Doucet, “Aleppo Siege: ‘We are Crying and Afraid,’” BBC News, 3 December, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38194962; Rebecca Collard, “ISIS Lays Siege to Iraqi Turkmen Village,” Time, 24 August 2014, https://time.com/3169489/amirli-iraq-turkmen/; Algernon D’Ammassa, “Don’t Call the Siege of Yemen a War. It is Annihilation and Needs to End,” Las Cruces Sun-News, 29 March 2019, https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/ opinion/columnists/2019/03/29/dont-call-siege-yemen-war-annihilationneeds-to-end/3297243002/; “Ukraine Crisis: Donetsk and Luhansk ‘Facing Siege,’” BBC News, 3 August 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/worldeurope-28630391; Philip Issa, “UN Urges Access to Besieged Syrian Suburb as Civilians Starve,” The Globe and Mail, 27 October 2017, https://www. theglobeandmail.com/news/world/un-urges-access-to-besieged-syrian-suburbas-civilians-starve/article36749491. 7 Mohadeseh Jahangiri, “Siege Warfare Violations by the Saudi Led Coalition in Yemen Since 2015,” SSRN (Social Science Research Network), 1 March 2018, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3276632; Michael Schmitt, Kieran Tinkler and Durward Johnson, “The UN Yemen Report and Siege Warfare,” Just Security, 12 September 2019, https://www.justsecurity.org/66137/the-un-yemenreport-and-siege-warfare/; Nasser Fardousi, Yazan Douedari, and Natasha Howard, “Healthcare Under Siege: A Qualitative Study of Health-Worker

306

8

9

10

11 12

13

Notes to pages 258–9

Responses to Targeting and Besiegement in Syria,” BMJ Open, vol. 9, no. 9 (2019), https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/9/9/e029651.full; Sean Watts, “Humanitarian Logic and the Law of Siege: A Study of the Oxford Guidance on Relief Actions,” International Law Studies, 95, no. 1 (2019), https://digitalcommons.usnwc.edu/ils/vol95/iss1/1/. Helen Dunmore, The Siege (London: Viking, 2001); Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2008); Tamas Dobozy, Siege 13 (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2012); Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See (New York: Scribner, 2014). Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud (Mandalay Pictures and Repérage Films, 2001); The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, directed by Peter Jackson (New Line Cinema, 2002); Troy, directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004); Attack on Leningrad, directed by Aleksandr Buravsky (Leningrad Production Inc., et al, 2009); Ironclad, directed by Jonathan English (Mythic International Entertainment, VIP Medienfonds 4, et al, 2011); The Day of the Siege: September Eleven 1683, directed by Renzo Martinelli (Agresywna Banda and Martinelli Film Company International, 2012); The Siege of Jadotville, directed by Richie Smyth (Parallel Films, 2016); and Saving Leningrad, directed by Aleksey Kozlov (Studio AVK, 2019). Rome: Total War, developed by The Creative Assembly (Activision, 2004; Feral Interactive, 2010); This War of Mine, developed by 11 bit studios (11 bit studios, 2014). A relevant review of This War of Mine was published in The Guardian in 2014: Mary Hamilton, “This War of Mine – Gaming’s Sombre Antidote to Call of Duty,” The Guardian, 10 October 2014, https://www. theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/10/this-war-of-mine-gamings-sombreantidote-to-call-of-duty. The game designer later made a “controversial” move by including children in the warzone of a version of the game; on this topic, see Marek Kępa, “This War of Mine Now Features a Controversial Version with Children,” Culture.PL, 10 February 2016, https://culture.pl/en/article/thiswar-of-mine-now-features-a-controversial-version-with-children.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. siege mentality, n.” Denny Pencheva, “Brexit and Migration,” The Conversation, 1 March 2019, https://theconversation.com/brexit-and-migration-our-new-researchhighlights-fact-free-news-coverage-109309; Gerry Hassan, “Brexit Has Lasted Longer than the Siege of Leningrad,” The National, 26 October 2019, https:// www.thenational.scot/news/17995896.brexit-lasted-longer-siege-leningrad. Stuart Gietel-Basten, “Why Brexit? The Toxic Mix of Immigration and Austerity,” Population and Development Review, 42, no. 4 (2016): 678.

Notes to pages 259–61

307

14 Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone, 2010), 20. 15 Ibid., 21. 16 Diane Morgan, “Bunker Conversion and the Overcoming of Siege Mentality,” Кулtура/Culture 6 (2014): 26; Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” quoted in Morgan, 26. 17 Morgan, “Bunker Conversion,” 27, 28. 18 Carolyn Forché, “Letter to a City Under Siege,” Boston Review: A Political and Literary Forum, 3 March 2010, http://bostonreview.net/forche-city-undersiege. Forché states that she “wrote this poem to a friend who had endured the Siege of Sarajevo” (“Letter to a City Under Siege,” The Poetry Archive, https:// poetryarchive.org/poem/letter-city-under-siege/). 19 SummerWords 2015: Carolyn Forché, American River College, 8 June 2015, video, 59:59, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Q1sCi1RP8.

Index

Account of the Great and Glorious Actions of Mr Walker, An, 226 Aeschylus, 63: Seven Against Thebes, 63 Agamben, Giorgio, 110 Agnew, John A., 100 Aickin, Joseph, 21, 194, 195, 209–18; Londerias, 21, 194, 195, 209–18 Alexowitz, Peter (czar of Muscovy), 51 Alger, J.G., 47 Alker, Sharon, 25, 26, 54 allegory, 14–16, 21, 22, 64, 161, 190, 191–2, 193, 239, 241–9, 251–2, 254, 273n7, 302n11, 302n12, 303n14, 303n23 Ames, Richard: Siege and Surrender of Mons, The, 142–4, 146, 150 Anglo-Dutch Wars, the, 159 Anglo-Mughal War, the, 34 Anselment, Raymond A., 287n1 anti-Catholicism, 144, 146, 160, 174, 181, 270n59 anti-epic, 71, 87 antiheroism, 18, 21, 69, 70, 71, 78, 135, 237, 277n44, 295n24

antiromance, 70, 71, 72, 87, 277n44 architecture: destroyed in war, 10, 91, 117, 207, 217; military, 7, 23, 66, 89, 93–6, 126, 155, 169, 195, 264n20, 278n53 (see also engineering, military); urban, 30, 51, 52, 73, 123–4, 132, 154, 203 aristocracy, the, 19, 67, 69, 86, 87, 92, 93, 97, 115, 116, 121, 127, 128, 135, 136, 141, 142, 146, 150–1, 217, 219, 255, 278n49. See also nobility, the Ashton, Robert, 143; Battle of Aughrim, The, 143 Ashworth, G.J., 264n20 Attack on Leningrad (film), 258 Aurangzeb (Mughal Emperor), 34 Austin, J.L., 38 authenticity, 17, 24, 29, 142, 239, 245–6, 249, 251, 252. See also fact, appeal to Bachelard, Gaston, 4 Backscheider, Paula, 270n64 Bacon, Sir Francis, 24 Baker, Col Henry, 148, 212, 215, 291n32

310

Index

Baldick, Chris, 218 ballads, 14, 17, 20–1, 159–88, 189, 190, 192, 197, 214; Bloody Siege of Vienna, The, 167–8, 170, 172; Brief Touch of the Irish Wars, A, 18; Carrouse to the Emperour, A, 172–3; Christian Conquest, The, 172; Excellent New Song Entituled the Siege of London-Derry, An, 176–7; Gallant Newes from Ireland, 164–5; Glory of Flanders, The, 185; Glory of LondonDerry, The, 178, 180; Imprisoned Commander, The, 184; King William’s Welcome Home, 187; On the Relief of Vienna, 171; Protestant Exhortation, The, 176–7; Protestants Triumph, The, 174; Relief of LondonDerry, The, 181–3; Royal Letter To our Gracious Queen Mary, The, 185; Teague, the Irish Trooper, 180–1 Triumph of Namur, The, 186–7; Two strings to a Bow, 167; Valliant Damsel, The, 292n47; Vienna’s Triumph, 172–3; Woman Warrier, The, 183, 292n47 Banks, John, 19, 114, 124, 199; Destruction of Troy, The, 114, 124–6, 199 Barbour, John, 15 Barker, Simon, 69 Bate, Jonathan, 71, 72 battle of: Aughrim, 143, 144; Chequerfield, 27; Steenkirk, 235; Worcester, 9, 28 Bedford, Ronald, 26 Beer, Anna, 294n7 Belon, P[eter]: Siege of Mentz, The, 240

Benjamin, Walter, 243, 260 Benson, F.R., 68 Bhabha, Homi K., 109 Binns, Jack, 43 bodies in war, 9, 28, 31–3, 36, 52, 54, 66–7, 83, 123, 124, 151–2, 156, 179, 183, 185, 192, 198–9, 207–8, 225–6 Borris, Kenneth, 193 Bosworth, C.E., 18 Boys, Jayne E.E., 274–5n28 Braddick, Michael, 91 Brady, Andrea, 189 bravery, 35, 43, 48, 137, 145, 166, 170, 175, 177, 179, 182–7, 198, 199, 206, 224, 233. See also courage; heroism Brayne, Charles, 124 Brereton, Sir William, 17; letters of, 37–40 Brexit, 259 Broadside Ballads Online (Oxford), 159 Broughton-Mainwaring, Rowland, 233 Brown, Georgia E., 203 Brown, Laura, 106 Brown, Wendy, 13, 259 Bruce, The, 15 Buchan, John, 9 Bunyan, John, 22, 181, 192, 238–54; Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 247; Holy War, The, 22, 238–9, 241–54; Pilgrim’s Progress, The, 242, 246 Burkhead, Henry, 79; Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, A, 79, 142 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 256; Siege of Corinth, The, 256

Index Cahill, Patricia A., 65–7, 78, 141, calculation (numerical), 11, 24, 27, 30, 40, 43, 166, 179, 185, 240. See also measurement “Campaign, 1692,” 235 Canfield, J. Douglas, 127 cannon fire, 31, 47, 55, 165, 169, 173, 178, 179, 183, 185, 217 Carleton, Charles, 8 Carleton, William, 143, 149 Carpenter, Andrew, 211 Cartwright, William, 79, 80, 274–5n28; Siedge: Or Love’s Convert, A Tragi-Comedy, The, 79, 274–5n28 Castle of Perseverance, The, 64, 246 Cavendish, Elizabeth (Lady Elizabeth Brackley) and Jane, 80–2, 84, 107; Concealed Fancies, The, 80–2 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle: “Dialogue between a Bountifull Knight and a Castle Ruin’d in Warr, A”, 192; “Doubtes Assault, and Hopes Defence,”192; “Elegy on my Brother, Killed in these Unhappy Wars, An,” 221–2; “Fort or Castle of Hope, The,” 192; “Hunting of the Hare, The,” 192; Sociable Letters, 81 Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle, 80 Cecconi, Elisabetta, 176 Centlivre, Susanna, 131; Bold Stroke for a Wife, A, 131 Cerasano, S.P., 275–6n31, 276n35 chance, 208, 221, 230, 252 chaos, 26, 80, 95, 98, 103, 104, 106–7, 108, 110, 114, 118, 119, 142, 154, 174, 244. See also disorder

311

Charles I, 43, 79, 118, 127, 142 Charles II, 115, 117, 127, 165–6 Charles XII (King of Sweden), 51–2, 54, 57, 222–3 Chernaik, Warren, 142 Child, Sir John, 34, 268n38 Cholmley, Sir Hugh, 18, 42–7, 48, 49; “Memorialls tuching Scarbrough,” 43–7 Christian heroic, the, 168, 170, 203, 209 church, the, 12, 30, 58, 176, 178, 209, 212, 213, 216, 243 citizens. See civilians city, the: corrupt, 14; divided or disordered, 18, 100–3, 113, 123, 129, 280n72; domestic space, as a, 17, 31, 32, 53, 54, 55, 72, 73, 82, 88, 89, 90, 107, 153, 154, 254; dying, 62, 123, 124, 138 (see also urbicide); fluidity of, 62, 104, 140; fragility/ vulnerability of, 12, 13, 14, 18, 21, 30, 54, 62, 85, 100, 101, 113, 118, 122, 124, 128, 133, 136, 158, 188, 208; hub in a network, as a, 51, 59, 60, 62, 154, 155; multidimensional, 18, 51, 62, 88, 99, 150, 271n69; place of refuge, as a, 10, 257; relational nature of, 51, 59, 62, 86, 100, 101, 104, 112, 113; sedimented nature of, 86, 96, 97; site of entrapment, as a, 33, 55, 151, 152, 177, 215; transformation of, 53, 55, 57, 59, 66, 75, 85, 90, 95, 97, 103, 114, 122, 152, 154, 209; unified, 96, 112; utopian/dystopian, 5 Civil War, the (British), 5–16, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 30–47, 51, 79–80, 83, 87,

312

Index

91, 115, 117, 123, 127, 145–6, 150, 151, 159–60, 162–6, 191, 195, 196–201, 212, 213, 217, 219–26, 237, 245, 249, 252, 259 civilians (ordinary citizens): agency or heroism of, 11, 14, 21, 68, 70, 86, 90–5, 132–5, 145, 151, 153, 158, 188, 205–6, 209, 212–13; consumers of war news, as, 8, 12, 274–5n28; disruption of daily life of, 31, 32, 89, 90; foregrounding of, 31, 32, 68, 81, 90, 97, 113, 124, 129, 134, 136, 205, 254, 255; mob, as a 32, 100, 115–16, 129, 132, 135, 136, 148, 150–1, 285n37 (see also rabble, the); suffering or death of, 9, 28, 34, 54–61, 64, 66, 67, 71, 124, 128, 151, 155, 173, 190, 198, 200, 216–17, 221, 227, 235, 255, 257; voice of, 90, 95, 113, 129, 274–5n28 Clare, Janet, 85 clergy, 9, 33, 119–24, 144–6, 174, 197, 205, 209, 284n23 Clodfelter, Michael, 232 commerce, 17, 29, 33, 37, 39, 45, 46, 59, 60–2, 130–1, 212. See also discursive modes, commercial communication, 32, 33, 38, 40, 161, 245. See also networks Congreve, William, 227, 228–9, 230, 232, 299n78; Pindarique Ode … to the King On His Taking Namure, A, 227, 228–9, 230, 232, 299n86 Connell, Philip, 218 Cope, Kevin, 278n52 Corneille, Pierre, 120 country houses, 80, 275n31, 278n49 courage, 21, 35, 46, 57, 77, 93, 98, 133,

163, 167, 169, 180–1, 184–6, 188, 204, 212, 213, 221, 223, 228. See also bravery; heroism cowardice, 71, 74, 75, 93, 97, 123, 156, 181, 235 Cowley, Abraham, 21, 194, 195, 196– 201, 202, 203, 207, 209, 212, 227; Civil War, The, 21, 194–201, 202, 203, 207, 209, 212, 227, 295n30 Crawford, Susan, 32 creativity in war, 76, 78, 89, 90–1, 95, 96, 98–9, 151, 155 Cressy, David, 25–6 Cromwell, Oliver, 9, 11, 17–18, 37, 40–2, 45, 118, 164, 218, 287n56; Lieut: Generall Cromwells Letter… City of Bristoll, 40–1; Lieut: Generall Cromwells Letter … Basing-House, 41–2 Crowne, John, 19, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118–20, 122, 124–5, 128, 129, 131, 134, 135, 137, 141, 150; Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus Vespasian, The, 114, 117, 118–24, 128, 284n16; History of Charles the Eighth of France, The, 114, 115; Regulus, 128–31, 134, 135, 137, 141, 150 Cutts, Lt Gen John, 227, 230–2 Dalbier, John, 8, Dash, Mike, 66 Davenant, William, 18, 19, 63, 70, 78, 84–91, 93–99, 106, 113, 114–16, 118–20, 124, 137, 194, 277n42, 277n44, 277n49, 278n51, 278n52, 283n1; First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House, The 87; Siege, The, 87, 88, 137; Siege of Rhodes, The, 63,

Index 78, 84, 85, 87–97, 98, 99, 115, 124, 277n45 Davis, Lloyd, 26, Dawson, Anthony B., 71, 78, 274n20 Day of the Siege, The: September Eleven 1683 (film), 258 de Boufflers, Louis François, Duc, 187, 232 de Jong, Irene J.F., 272n1 de Scudéry, Madeleine, 98, 240; Almahide or, the Captive Queen, 98, 240, 279n65; Artamène; ou, le grand Cyrus, 240 Dearing, Vinton A., 283n1 defamiliarization, 52, 55, 59, 81, 82, 90 defeat, 67, 82, 94, 96, 115, 118, 123, 125, 126, 129, 135, 146, 148, 167, 224. See also surrender Defoe, Daniel, 18, 25, 30, 40, 50, 51–7, 58–62, 88, 197, 240, 254, 265n45, 270n60, 270n64, 271n66, 271n69, 271n74, 290n22; Captain Singleton, 50; Complete English Tradesman, The, 59; Essay upon Projects, An, 50; History of the Principal Discoveries and Improvements, The, 60; History of the Wars of Charles XII, The, 54; Impartial Account of the Late Famous Siege of Gibraltar, An, 50, 53, 56; Impartial History of the Czar of Muscovy, An, 55, 57, 61; Journal of the Plague Year, A, 254; Memoirs of a Cavalier, 50, 52, 54, 56; Review of the State of the British Nation, A, 53; Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, A, 51, 56, 61; Vision of the Angelic World, A, 40

313

Deleuze, Gilles, 96, 101, 105 Denne, Henry, 227, 229–32, 299n78; Poem on the Taking of Namur by His Majesty, A, 227, 229–31 deserters, 36, 241. See also traitors Devereux, Capt Gen Robert, 3rd earl of Essex, 8, 226 diaries, 17, 24–7, 30–7, 38, 42, 43, 44, 56, 57, 98, 160, 189, 238, 251, 268n32. See also life writing diplomacy, 70, 72, 75, 77 discursive modes, 268n30; affective, 18, 28–29, 37–39, 51, 54–7, 59, 61, 62, 162; commercial, 18, 29, 51, 59–62; tactical, 18, 19, 29, 38, 40–2, 48, 50–7, 59, 62, 95, 195 disease, 9, 40, 46, 135, 152, 157 disloyalty, 36, 45, 106, 130, 144, 146, 166. See also traitors disorder, 55, 99, 100, 102–3, 107, 113, 163, 199. See also chaos disorientation, 37, 82, 112, 280n68 docudrama. See drama, docudrama documentary epic, 195, 209–17 Dobozy, Tamas, 258; Siege 13, 258 Doerr, Anthony: All the Light We Cannot See, 258 Doherty, Richard, 257, 290n29 Donagan, Barbara, 9–10, 221 Doody, Margaret Anne, 189, 237 Drake, Nathan, 17, 30–4, 37, 38, 268n32; First and Second Sieges of Pontefract Castle, The, 30–37, 38, 268n32 drama: comedy, 80, 149; docudrama, 19, 141–3, 146; droll, 19, 135, 136, 285n37; history, 65–8, 74; tragedy, 63, 79, 114, 124, 127, 142, 149,

314

Index

282n91; tragicomedy, 79, 143. See also historic drama Dryden, John, 18, 19, 63, 70, 78, 84–6, 97–101, 106–7, 109, 112, 113, 115, 116, 119, 122, 137, 194, 196, 240, 277n42, 280n71, 281n81, 282n82, 282n85, 282n91, 283n1; Annus Mirabilis, 194; Conquest of Granada, The, 63, 78, 84, 85, 97–113, 115, 116, 240, 280n68, 280n71, 281n81, 282n82, 283n1 D’Urfey, Thomas, 114, 116; Siege of Memphis, The, 114, 116 Dudley, Gamaliel, 27, 28; A True Copie of Colonel Sr. Gamaliel Dudley’s Letter, 27, 28 Dugaw, Dianne, 236, 292n47, Duke’s Company, the, 78, 114 Dunmore, Helen, 258; The Siege, 258 Dutch, the, 8, 11, 34, 61, 144, 159, 173, 235, 236 East India Company, the, 34, 35 economics of war, 10, 39, 55, 59, 60, 62, 82, 130, 212–13, 217, 233, 234. See also commerce Edelman, Charles, 68, Elegie, On the most Barbarous … Murder, An, 224–5 Ellis, John, 29 Enemy at the Gates (film), 258 engineering, military, 8, 14, 50, 75, 93–4, 122, 125, 126, 128, 135, 144, 145, 156, 227, 241. See also architecture, military English Broadside Ballad Archive (UCSB), 159, 288n3, 293n49 Ennius, 63–4; Ambracia, 63–4 Euripides, 63, 294n7; Phoenician

Women, The, 63; Suppliants, The, 63; Trojan Women, The, 63, 64 Evans, G. Blakemore, 274–5n28 Evelyn, John, 98 Exclusion Crisis, 127, 159 eyewitness accounts, 11, 14, 20, 22, 25, 30, 162, 167–8, 171, 181, 223, 239, 241–54, 255, 258, 303n28, 304n41 fact, appeal to, 11, 17, 24–30, 32–4, 37–44, 46, 48–50, 56, 163, 166, 169, 193, 195, 210, 211–12, 217, 224, 240, 241–54. See also authenticity factions, 73, 101–4, 107–12, 200, 281n81 Fairfax, Thomas, Lord, 10, 45, 57, 190–1, 221, 224, 268n32 fame, 67, 74, 75, 176, 182, 186, 190, 204, 207, 210, 222, 226, 234. See also glory Famous Tragedie of King Charles I, The, 79, 142 fate or fortune, 21, 43, 47, 60, 76, 80, 83, 102, 105–6, 108, 131, 144, 175–6, 191–2, 195, 199, 202, 203–4, 206, 208, 209, 215, 220, 221, 228, 230, 252 Favret, Mary A., 23, 51, 62, 160, 256 fear, 33, 35, 39, 49, 60, 73, 76, 89, 115, 133, 145, 146, 151, 152, 154, 160, 180, 181, 185, 190, 197, 199, 200, 205, 234, 235, 251, 294n7 fictional memoirs, 18, 30, 43, 50, 52, 54, 56, 240, 270n60 Findlay, Alison, 275n31 Fischer, Payne, 218; Veni; Vidi; Vici, 218 Forché, Carolyn, 261, 307n18; “Letter to a City Under Siege,” 261, 307n18

Index Foucault, Michel, 22, Fowler, Alastair, 191, 195, 233, 295n30 Fox, Cora, 70 Fox, Gwyn, 294n10 Frank, Joseph, 224 French, the, 21, 53, 70, 115, 128, 144–6, 148, 153, 156, 160, 163, 168, 173–4, 176, 178, 181, 184–8, 210, 214, 226, 227, 233, 235–6, 241, 265n30 Frisch, Andrea, 246, 247, 249 Fumerton, Patricia, 161, 288n3 Furbank, P.N., 270–1n64 Gallagher, Noelle Dückmann, 225, 232 Galloway, Steven, 258; The Cellist of Sarajevo, 258 game of war/war games, 17, 36, 42, 51, 52, 55, 65, 208, 258, 271n71 Garrison, James D., 219 Gelber, Michael Werth, 99, 100 genre: hybridity of, 21, 25, 119, 161, 162, 189, 195, 196, 233, 240, 268n32; (r)evolution of, 4–5, 15, 16, 18, 19, 50, 71, 99, 117, 118, 137–8, 141, 143, 158, 189, 190–1, 211–2, 218–19, 238 Gentles, Ian, 9, 280n72 geocriticism, 6. See also space/place theory Germans, the, 144, 167–8, 204, 207, 240, 289–90n21 Glomski, Jacqueline, 238 Glorious Revolution, the, 11, 127, 147, 290n28 glory, 21, 41, 67, 69, 71, 74–6, 78, 81, 84, 85, 96, 115, 145, 151, 153, 186, 199, 202, 219. See also fame Graham, Stephen, 257

315

Greaves, Richard L., 302n11, 302n12 Greville, Gen Robert, 2nd Baron Brooke, 220–1 grotesque, the, 67, 152, 153, 195, 207, 209, 231 Groves, Beatrice, 7 Guattari, Félix, 96, 101, 105 Guerrini, Anita, 161 Gustavus Adolphus (King of Sweden), 48, 52, 223 Hale, John, 294n7 Hall, Edith, 135, 136 Hanover, Sophia, Electress of, 47, 48 Harari, Yuval Noah, 26, 29, 33, 50, 267n28, 270n60 Harbage, Alfred, 274–5n28, 282n85 Harington, Henry, 220, 222 “Elegie upon The Death of the Mirrour of Magnanimity,” 219–21 Harris, Timothy, 222, 223; Poem on the death of the King of Sweden, A, 222–3 Hart, Charles, 119 Hassan, Gerry, 259 Healy, Thomas, 6 Hebron, Malcolm, 7, 15, 64 Hemans, Felicia, 23, 256; Siege of Valencia, 23, 256 Herodotus, 64 heroic drama, 17, 18, 19, 84–6, 99, 100, 114, 153, 277n41, 283n1 heroism, 19, 41, 57, 72, 80, 88, 91, 97, 117, 119, 124, 134, 135, 153, 157, 174, 179, 183, 195, 199, 202–4, 214–15, 225–8, 230, 237, 255 Herrick, Robert, 21, 191; “To the King, Upon His Taking of Leicester,” 191

316

Index

Hicks, Jeff, 5 hierarchy, 73, 86, 89, 109, 113, 141, 158 Hill, Christopher, 243 Hilton, James, 17, 30, 34–7, 38; diary, 30, 34–7, 38, 268n35 Hirst, Paul, 6, 17, 278n53 historiography, 24, 25, 26, 30, 210 history plays. See drama, history Hobbes, Thomas, 100, 102 Hogg, James, 256; Three Perils of Man, The, 256 Holland, Karen A., 291n32 Home, John, 256; Siege of Aquileia, The, 256 Homer, 113, 195, 210; Iliad, 15, 63, 71, 72, 75, 126, 295n24; Odyssey, 63 honour, 11, 25, 74, 78, 81, 88, 92, 107, 110, 111, 115, 116, 129, 131, 166, 206, 208, 217, 282n91 Hooke, Robert, 25 Hopkins, Lisa, 81 Hughes, John, 19, 128, 136–7, 150, 256; Siege of Damascus, The, 136–41, 256 Hunt, Margaret R., 34 Hunter, J. Paul, 238, 243 Hutton, Ronald, 8, 117 Hyde, Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 24, 43, 44; History of the Rebellion, The, 44 imagination; acts of the, 86, 118; communal, 158; cultural, 4, 124, 161, 173; literary, 6; national, 4, 16, 85; popular, 159–88 immediacy, 12, 16, 43, 162, 176, 179, 188, 239, 245, 251–3 Ingram, Anders, 159, 167

instability (social or political), 5, 12, 13, 14, 37, 51, 52, 83, 84, 89, 90, 104, 108, 116, 117, 158 intelligence networks, 33, 35, 38, 39–40, 46, 94, 126, 130, 155, 158, 164. See also networks Interregnum, the, 79, 80, 117, 118, 163–4, 191, 219 Irish, the, 8, 9, 19, 21, 79, 143, 146–7, 163, 173–84, 188, 211, 214–15, 226 Ironclad (film), 258 Israel, Jonathan I., 290n28 Jacobites, 12, 146, 148, 150, 154, 155, 156, 173–84, 211, 212, 287n54 James II, 127, 147, 168, 173, 174, 213 Joanereidos, 236 John III (King of Poland), 167, 170, 172, 206, 208, 209 Johnson, Samuel, 99, 244 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 24 journalistic writing, 20, 21, 22, 51, 162, 171, 175, 176, 181, 190, 193, 211, 215, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243–5, 255. See also news; newsbooks; pamphlets journals, 25, 26, 27, 30, 43, 50, 160, 241, 254, 268n32, 274–5n28. See also life writing justice, 58, 86, 110–13, 115, 167, 168, 194, 195 Kamath, Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs, 247 Kara Mustafa Pasha (grand vizier), 167, 206, 289–90n21 Keane, Charles, 68

Index Keeble, N.H., 6 Kelley, Theresa M., 243 Kelly, Philippa, 26 Kewes, Paulina, 97, 280n71 King’s Company, the, 114 Kirke, Maj-Gen Percy, 175, 181–2, 217 Knight-Errantry, 21, 233–36 Knolles, Richard, 90 Kramer, Bruce, 282n82 Kuijpers, Erika, 28 Kynaston, Edward, 119 Lamb, Jonathan, 7, 89 Latham, Rob, 5 Lederach, John Paul, 260 Lefebvre, Henri, 18 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 101 Leigh, Richard, 100, 280n71 Leopold I (Holy Roman Emperor), 171, 209, 289–90n21 letters, 17, 24–30, 32, 33, 36, 37–42, 43, 50, 57, 58–9, 61, 81, 148, 156, 160, 185, 211, 232, 248, 250, 261, 274–5n28. See also life writing Lévy, Jacques, 296n36 Lewcock, Dawn, 114 liberty, 56, 136, 174, 177, 183, 185, 213, 215 life writing, 24–50, 156, 181, 238, 239, 249, 253, 255, 266n2. See also diaries; journals; letters; memoirs liminality, 12, 78, 109–10, 203, 214, 255, 260 Lincoln, Andrew, 228, 236 Lisle, Sir George, 221, 224 Lithgow, William, 224, 250; True Experimentall and Exact Relation

317

upon That … Siege of Newcastle, A, 224, 250 Locke, John, 14, 174; Two Treatises of Government, 14, 174 Lodge, Thomas, 16; Famous and Memorable Workes of Josephus, The, 16 Loewenstein, David, 202 Loftis, John, 283n1 London, 7, 13, 36, 41, 42, 59, 85, 91, 100, 117, 136, 147, 161, 183, 190, 251; fire, 13, 85, 100, 117, 127; plague, 13, 85, 100, 117, 127, 254 Lord of the Rings, The: The Two Towers (film), 258 lottery of war, 203, 204, 208, 209 Louis XIV (King of France), 143, 144, 185, 186, 230 Love, Harold, 100 loyalty, 21, 41, 45, 47, 117, 145, 156, 166, 172, 173, 176, 186, 191, 202, 211, 213 Lucan, 195; Civil War, The (Pharsalia), 195, 207, 295n30 Lucas, Sir Charles, 220, 221–2, 224 Lundy, Adj. Gen. Robert, 212 Lussault, Michel, 296n36 Lynch, Beth, 244, 247 Lynch, Kathleen Martha, 274–5n28 MacLean, Gerald M., 189, 192, 194, 197, 237 MacMahon, Barbara, 81 Magnalia Dei, 250 Maguire, Nancy Klein, 277n49 Manning, Roger B., 153 Marlowe, Christopher, 16, 63, 65–7,

318

Index

203, 273n7; Jew of Malta, The, 16; Tamburlaine, 65–7, 71 Marsden, Jean I., 84, Marshall, Ashley, 236 Martin, Catherine Gimelli, 243, 244 Mary II, 173, 174, 176, 185, 193, 230 Mary Magdalene (Digby), 64 masculinity, 73, 83, 141, 178, 183, 185, 199, 203, 225–6, 231 Massey, Col Edward, 225–7 Massey, Doreen, 51, 100, 101 Maxwell, Richard, 240, 254 Mayer, Robert, 24, 210, 266n2 Mayne, Jasper, 80; Amorous Warre, The, 80 McBride, Ian, 149 McGeary, Thomas N., 137 McGirr, Elaine M., 127, 218 McGrath, C.I., 143, 147, 286n50 McKelvey, Robert J., 302n12 McKenna, Joseph, 37 McKeown, Adam N., 273n7 McLeod, Toby, 223 McLoughlin, Kate, 164, 179, 181 McNeil, David, 6, 271n71 McShane, Angela, 159–60, 161, 164, 288n4, 288n9, 290n23 measurement, 4, 17, 24, 53, 93. See also calculation (numerical) medieval literature, 7, 15–16, 64, 65, 81, 83, 247, 303n23 Mehmed IV (Sultan of the Ottoman Empire), 167 Meier, Christian, 110 Melville, Andrew, 18, 29, 43, 47–9, 270n59; Memoirs of Sir Andrew Melvill, 43–9 memoirs, 15, 17, 18, 23, 24–30, 33,

42–50, 141, 148, 151, 160, 239, 241, 267n28. See also life writing memory, 11, 13, 24, 25, 26, 29, 60, 62, 85, 113, 142, 149, 197, 202, 221–2, 243 Mercurius Aulicus, 196 Mercurius Britanicus, 196 Merrett, Robert James, 290n22 Milton, John, 21, 190, 191, 203, 209, 226, 244; “On the Lord General Fairfax at the siege of Colchester,” 190–1; Paradise Lost, 244; “When the Assault Was Intended to the City,” 190–1 Mitchelburne, John, 19, 20, 142, 147–58, 173, 206, 211, 215, 228, 286n48, 286n50, 287n54, 291n32; Ireland Preserv’d: or the Siege of London-Derry, 19–20, 142–3, 147–58, 173, 206, 211, 215, 228, 287n54, 291n32 Moore, John Robert, 286n41 Morash, Christopher, 143 Moreau, Isabelle, 238 Moretti, Franco, 4, 19 Morey, Tracy Crowe, 7 Morgan, Diane, 260 Morrill, John, 37 Morte Arthur (alliterative), 15 Moslund, Sten Pultz, 96 motifs: ebb and flow of, 5; spatial, theory of, 4–6 Mousley, Andy, 26 Murray, Col Adam, 175, 212, 214–15, 291n32 Muscovites, 55 mythology, 15, 71, 123, 149, 157, 196, 201

Index Nashe, Thomas, 16; Unfortunate Traveller, The, 16 Nebeker, Eric, 293n49 Neelakanta, Vanita, 119–20 negotiations, 56, 77, 85, 133, 212, 213, 242 Nelson, Holly Faith, 289n10 Neman, Beth S., 118 networks, 17, 18, 29, 32–43, 47, 50, 51, 59, 62, 126, 130, 151, 155, 156. See also intelligence networks New Model Army, 8, 10, 165 Newman, J.K., 195–6, 203 news, 11, 20, 33, 36, 133, 146, 162, 164–6, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178–9, 181–2, 188, 239, 241, 257, 274–5n28. See also newsbooks; pamphlets; journalistic writing newsbooks, 12, 15, 16, 43, 249, 250, 252. See also news; pamphlets; journalistic writing Newton, Sir Isaac, 100, 101 Nine Years’ War, the, 11, 143, 159, 160, 184, 232, 274n20 nobility, the, 14, 51, 65, 82, 85, 91, 93, 97, 124, 129, 142, 219, 254. See also aristocracy, the noise of war, 89, 93, 99, 185, 186, 187, 205, 228, 230. See also sound of war Norbrook, David, 6, 196, 219 Novak, Maximillian E., 270n64 novel, the, 14, 18, 23, 24, 30, 49, 62, 195, 238, 239, 240, 241, 243, 254, 256, 258 objectivity, 24, 25, 26, 44, 112, 165, 181, 211, 245, 253 Oliver, Kelly, 252, 304n41

319

On the Siege of Glocester, and Col. Massey, 225–6, 227 opera, 19, 85, 91, 92, 98, 114, 135–6, 277n45, 285n37 order, 20, 26, 30, 55, 62, 66, 73, 85, 86, 96, 97, 99, 106, 113, 123, 150, 158, 203, 212 Osborne, Mike, 276n34 Ottoman Empire, 21, 160, 167, 172, 202 Otway, Thomas, 114, 120; Alcibiades, 114 Owen, Susan J., 107 Owens, W.R., 270n64 pageantry, 64, 65, 273n5 pamphlets, 12, 16, 43, 80, 147, 238–9, 241–2, 245, 248, 249–50, 251, 252, 254, 265n31. See also news; newsbooks; journalistic writing Parker, Samuel, 232 Payne, Henry, 114; Siege of Constantinople, The, 114 Peacey, Jason, 245 Pebworth, Ted Larry, 6 Pepper, Simon, 64–5 Peraldo, Emmanuelle, 296n36 Pérez de Hita, Ginés, 281n81 Peters, Jeffrey N., 256 Phrynichus, 64; Capture of Miletus, The, 64, 273n2 plunder, 8, 9, 51, 54, 61, 80, 138 poetry: ballad, 14, 17, 20–1, 159–88, 189, 192, 193, 197, 214, 288n3, 288n7, 288n9, 289n11, 289n12, 291n32, 291n36, 292n42, 292n47, 293n49; elegy, 21, 160, 162, 189, 193, 218–23, 224, 225, 237, 297n59;

320

Index

epic, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 116, 128, 159, 160, 162, 170, 189–90, 192, 193–217, 218, 227, 244, 295n30; epigram, 21, 161, 191; lament, 161, 180–1, 196, 220, 222; ode, 21, 160, 184, 189, 190, 202, 218–19, 227–32, 233, 237, 297n57, 299n78; panegyric, 21, 160, 162, 184, 189, 191, 192, 193, 196, 218–19, 225–7, 232, 233, 236, 237; satire, 21, 161, 171–2, 180, 193, 196, 201, 219, 232–7, 300n86; sonnet, 21, 161, 190–1, 294n10 Pollak, Martha, 7 Pordage, Samuel, 114, 115, 116; Siege of Babylon, The, 114, 115, 116 Porter, Stephen, 9 prayer, 26, 41, 153, 162, 163, 176, 186, 197, 209, 216 Préchac, Jean de, 240–1; Serasquier Bassa, The, 240–1 Price, Curtis A., 130 Prieto, Eric, 6 prisoners, 32, 36, 40, 82, 109, 122, 148, 150, 175–6 Pritchard, Allan, 196, 197 propaganda, 79, 141, 143, 150, 181, 196, 232, 245, 256 prose fiction, 13, 16, 22, 238–54, 255, 265n45 Prudentius, 246; Psychomachia, 246–7, 303n24 Purkiss, Diane, 6, 199 Quabeck, Franziska, 69 Rabb, Melinda, 6 rabble, the, 56, 131, 144, 146, 150, 157, 207. See also civilians, as a mob

Racine, Jean, 120 Ramsey, Neil, 26 Randall, Dale B.J., 80, 274–5n28 Raymond, Joad, 265m31 rebellion, 14, 44, 79, 92, 100, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 129, 139, 144, 163, 165, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 198, 201, 257, 284n23 recruitment, military, 20, 40, 163 Reeves, Wylie, 8 regicide, 115, 166, 189 religion, 16, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 33, 40–2, 45, 51, 64, 65, 85, 106, 119, 121–3, 138, 161, 163, 168, 174, 176–8, 183, 188, 214, 216, 225, 232, 238, 242–4, 246, 248–9, 254, 259, 302n11, 302n12, 304n41 Restoration, the, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 44, 63, 83, 84, 85, 117, 219, 227, 232 Revard, Stella P., 297n57 revenge, 58, 60, 71, 110, 115, 170, 208, 229 rhetoric, 13, 29, 37, 44, 45, 162, 196, 198, 218, 237, 250 Richards, I.A., 244 Richardson, John, 93, 227, 229, 236 Rodes, David Stuart, 283n1 Rogers, Pat, 56 Rollins, Hyder E. 162, 164, 165, 289n11, 289n12 Rollins, John B., 120 romance (genre), 14, 15, 19, 70, 72, 76, 100, 238, 240 romance plot (in siege drama), 70, 72, 77–81, 83–4, 86–8, 97, 108, 115–16, 119–20, 124, 128, 137, 142, 240 Romantic period, 23, 26, 62, 256

Index Rome: Total War (video game), 258 Roy, Ian, 10 Runyon, Daniel Virgil, 302n12 Rupert, Prince, of the Rhine, 8, 165, 191, 197, 198, 200 Salmon, Eric, 131 Salzman, Paul, 196 Sandberg, Brian, 27 Sanders, Julie, 294n10 Sangha, Laura, 268n32 satire, 21, 97, 142, 161, 171–2, 180, 193, 196, 201, 219, 232–7, 283n1, 300n86 Saving Leningrad (film), 258 Sawday, Jonathan, 6 Scannell, Paul, 29 scenery, theatrical, 69, 84, 87, 95, 98, 114 Scodel, Joshua, 219, 222, 224 Scots, the, 8, 43, 47–9, 178, 184, 213, 245 Scott, Sir Walter, 23, 256; Ivanhoe, 23, 256; Siege of Malta, The, 256 Searle, John R., 38 Seneca the Younger, 63; Troades, 63 sermons, 31, Settle, Elkanah, 19, 20, 128, 134–5, 136, 150, 227, 285n37; Cassandra: or The Virgin Prophetess, 19, 128, 134–6, 285n37; Siege of Troy, The (droll) 19, 136, 285n37 Shadwell, Thomas, 84; The Lancashire Witches, 84 Shakespeare, William, 16, 18, 63, 65, 66, 68–73, 76, 77, 78–81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 97, 158, 178, 199, 273n7, 274n20, 277n44, 282n91, 294n10; Antony and Cleopatra, 81; Henry V,

321

16, 65, 66, 68–9; Henry VI, pt 1, 65; King John, 68, 69, 70; Macbeth, 84; Tempest, The, 84, 178; Troilus and Cressida, 18, 63, 68, 69–78, 79–81, 87, 88, 97, 101, 108, 199, 274n20 Shapin, Steven, 251 Shapiro, Barbara J., 24, 25–6, 242 Sharpe, Kevin, 277n43 Sherlock, William, 232–3; Reflections on the Poems made upon … Namur, 232–3 Shirley, James, 80; The Imposture, 80 Shklovsky, Viktor, 4 Shohet, Lauren, 277n49 sickness, 39, 45, 46, 58, 69, 152, 207 Sidi Yakut Khan, 34, 36 Sidney, Sir Philip, 16, 193, 218, 273n7; Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, The, 16; Defence of Poesie, The, 193–4 siege mentality, 259, 260 Siege of Caerlaverok, The, 15 Siege of Jadotville, The (film), 258 siege(s) of: Athlone, 146, 180; Berwick, 15; Birmingham, 196, 197–8; Bombay, 34–7; Bridgnorth Castle, 37; Bristol, 200; Brunswick, 47; Buda, 240, 241; Caerlaverok, 15; Capua, 131–4; Chester, 10, 37, 39; Colchester, 9, 51, 56, 61, 85, 190, 220, 221, 224, 250; Colraine, 154; Cork, 146, 183; Damascus, 67, 136–41, 256; Dixmude, 47, 48; Drogheda, 9, 180, 181; Dublin, 180, 181; Dudley, 37; Exeter, 10, 196, 200; Fort Knocke, 233–5; Fredriksten, 222–3; Galway, 180; Gloucester, 10, 196, 225–6, 250; Granada, 63, 78, 84–5, 97–113,

322

Index

115, 116, 137, 240; Guise, 47, 49; Jerusalem, 7, 16, 114, 117, 118–24; La Capelle, 47, 49; Lens, 47, 48; Lichfield (cathedral close), 37, 197, 221; Lille, 11, 53; Limerick, 25, 146, 180–1, 286n47; Londonderry, 20, 128, 143, 146, 147–58, 160, 173–82, 194, 209–17, 226, 228, 257, 286n50, 290n29, 291n32; Maastricht,128; Magdeburg, 8, 54, 274–5n28; Manchester, 248, 251; Mansoul, 238–54; Messina, 11; Mons, 20, 142–6, 184–6; Montgomery Castle, 37, 40; Namur, 11, 20, 21, 52, 128, 160, 184–7, 227–36, 265n30 ; Narva, 55, 61; Newcastle, 223–4, 250 ; Palermo, 11; Pontefract Castle, 27, 30–3, 268n32; Portsmouth, 248; Riga, 52; Sarajevo, 258, 261, 307n18; Scarborough Castle, 43–7; Serinvar, 47, 49; Sighet, 47; Staden, 47, 49, 58; Tangier, 11, 155; Troy, 16, 19, 63, 69–78, 108, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124–6, 128, 134–6, 199, 231, 258, 285n37; Tutbury Castle, 37–40; Vienna, 20, 21, 159, 160, 167–73, 174, 194, 196, 202–9, 213, 216, 278n53, 289–90n21, 290n22, 296n43; Welbeck Abbey, 80, 275n31; Wexford, 9; Ypres, 47 Silk, M.S., 295n24 Sill, Geoffrey, 270n64 Sim, Stuart, 302n12 Smith, Nigel, 5–6, 15, 79, 189, 196 Smith, R.D., 210 Sobieski, Jan. See John III (King of Poland)

Soldier’s Diary of the 1689 Siege of Bombay, A, 34–7 Souldiers Catechisme, The, 26–7. sound of war, 55, 66, 67, 99, 105, 183, 185, 186, 199, 200, 203, 204, 205, 216. See also noise of war Southerne, Thomas, 19, 128, 129, 131–4, 137, 141, 150; Fate of Capua, The, 131–4, 141 space: contested, 27, 28, 62, 117; contingent, 18, 86, 93, 197; hostile, 4; management of, 116, 120, 146, 151, 154, 155, 158; potent, 4, 8, 16, 17, 23; relationality of, 86, 100–1, 104, 112–13; smooth, 105–6, 140; striated, 96–7, 105–6, 140; transformation of, 53, 55, 57, 59, 66, 75, 81–2, 84, 89–90, 95, 97, 103, 104, 114, 122, 152, 154, 192, 209, 239, 260; under pressure, 13, 17, 64, 86, 100, 256 space/place theory, 6, 18, 22, 51, 56, 96, 100–1, 105, 109, 110, 296n36 Spanish, the, 7, 11, 53, 85, 107, 110, 143, 144, 236, 282n82 spectators, 60, 133, 141, 167 Spenser, Edmund, 16, 273n7, 294n10; Faerie Queene, The, 16 spies, 130, 142, 145, 150, 155 Stallybrass, Peter, 24 starvation, 27, 45, 56, 119, 123, 124, 148, 151, 155, 173, 182, 183, 215, 257 Stern, Philip J., 34 Sterne, Laurence, 3, 4, 11, 52–53; Tristram Shandy, 3, 4, 11, 52, 89 Stevens, John, 25; Journal of John Stevens, The, 25 Stillingfleet, Edward, 242

Index

323

stoicism, 25, 26, 46, 124, 152, 153 Stoyle, M.J., 10 strategy, military, 8, 17, 21, 38–41, 45, 50, 52, 73, 76, 85, 106, 117, 121, 125, 142, 153, 154, 180, 188, 192, 211, 233, 240 Streater, Robert, 98 suburbs, destruction of, 55, 89, 90, 148, 216, 217 Summers, Claude J., 6 surrender, 9–10, 12, 38, 39, 41, 43, 45, 56, 61, 64–66, 69, 143–6, 153, 157, 174, 177–8, 180, 181, 185–7, 214, 217, 220, 231–2, 250. See also defeat Swedes, the, 57–8, 59, 222 Swinhoe, Gilbert, 80; The Tragedy of the unhappy Fair Irene, 80,

Troy (film), 258 true and faithfull Relation of the besieging of … Manchester, A, 248 True Relation of the Passages … at … Portsmouth, A, 248 true Relation Of the … passages … towards Glocester, A, 250 True Relation of the Twenty weeks Siege of London derry, A, 245, 248 truth claims, 24, 25, 29, 41, 45, 157, 194, 210–11, 225, 245, 248–51, 254. See also authenticity; eyewitness accounts Tuan, Yi-Fu, 56 Turks, the, 21, 49, 90, 94, 95, 163, 167–73, 188, 203–8, 278n53, 289–90n21, 290n22

talismanic, 3, 15 Taylor, Gary, 68, 69 technology, 5, 14, 66, 68, 87, 93, 113, 141, 158, 169 Thirty Years’ War, the, 8, 52, 101, 274–5n28 This War of Mine (video game), 258, 306n10 Thomson, Peter, 280n68 Tinniswood, Adrian, 221 Tories, 127, 145, 146, 163, 167, 168, 172, 173, 174, 181, 193, 218 tragedy. See drama, tragedy tragicomedy. See drama, tragicomedy traitors, 9, 91, 148, 154, 212. See also deserters trauma, 64, 68, 71, 80, 84, 118, 127–8, 151, 197, 239, 244, 245, 251, 252–5 Troost, Wout, 233 Trotter, David, 196

uncertainty, 13, 14, 25, 69, 70, 88, 154, 244, 254 urban dystopia, 5 urbicide, 10, 67, 85, 124, 151. See also city, dying van Bavel, Bas, 276n40 van Creveld, Martin, 108 van Dalem, Peter Manteau, 8 van der Haven, Cornelis, 28 Vauban, Sébastien le Prestre, 144, 227 victory, 9, 21, 40, 51, 61, 71, 74, 75, 94, 122, 123, 126, 128, 133, 139, 143, 153, 158, 165, 166, 171, 175, 176, 177–8, 185, 186, 191, 199, 201, 208, 218, 224, 226 video games, 258 Villiers, George, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, 283; The Rehearsal, 86, 283n1

324

Index

Virilio, Paul, 22 visceral history, 78, 141, 143–4, 150 von Starhemberg, Count Ernst Rüdiger, 206–9 W.C., 21, 194, 195, 202–9, 213, 216, 296n43; Siege of Vienna, The, 21, 194, 195, 202–9, 213, 216, 218 Wagonheim, Sylvia Stoler, 274–5n28 Walker, David, 302n12 Walker, George (Rev.), 148, 151, 174, 175–77, 212, 214, 226, 291n32; True Account of the Siege of LondonDerry, A, 148, 151–2 Wall, Cynthia, 13, 85, 117 War of the Austrian Succession, the, 12 War of the Grand Alliance, the. See Nine Years’ War, the War of the Holy League, the, 167 War of the Quadruple Alliance, the, 11 war reportage. See journalism and news Warf, Barney, 101, Watt, Tessa, 160, 161 Wharton, Nehemiah, 28–29 Whigs, 127, 131, 137, 163, 167–8, 171–4, 181, 218, 289–90n21, 290n22

White, Arthur Franklin, 128 Wilcher, Robert, 297n59 Wilkins, W. Walker, 300n99 William III, 143, 153, 157, 173–8, 180–2, 184–7, 193, 210, 217, 227, 228–31, 233–6, 287n56 Williamite Wars, 19, 20, 128, 143, 146, 159, 160, 173–84, 209–18 Williams, Abigail, 228 Willie, Rachel, 277n41 Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester, 118, 119 Wiseman, Susan, 274n27 women and sieges, 9, 14, 28, 31, 33, 35, 46, 53, 56, 58, 63, 67, 80, 81–3, 89, 92, 95, 97, 99, 123, 131, 137, 145, 150, 152, 156, 157, 183, 205, 236, 255, 292n47 Woolf, Daniel R., 25 World War I, 5 World War II, 258 Würzback, Natascha, 163 Wynne-Davies, Marion, 275n31 Yalden, Thomas (Rev.), 227, 229, 231, 232, 299n86; On the Conquest of Namur, 227, 229, 231, 299n86