The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy 9781526144195

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy James Doelman

Manchester University Press

Copyright © James Doelman 2021 The right of James Doelman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 4418 8 hardback First published 2021 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover image: The dance of death. Oil painting. 72 x 55 cm. Wellcome Library no. 45066i

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

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Contents

List of poems in the online appendixpage vi List of abbreviations and conventions x Acknowledgements xii Introduction 1  Prince Henry 2  ‘A Prison is in all things like a Grave’: elegies on Arbella Stuart, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Sir Walter Ralegh 3  Royal deaths 4  Military deaths of the 1620s 5  To ‘Silence Slanders toungue’: elegies on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 6  A defence of suicide: William Douglas’ funeral elegy on the Second Earl of Lothian 7  Funeral elegies on elite women 8  From robe to winding sheet: funeral elegies on churchmen and scholars 9  Distracted into heresy Afterword Appendix: terminology, genres, and sub-​genres Select bibliography Index

1 28 61 89 132 169 200 218 244 276 292 297 303 313

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Poems in the online appendix

This book discusses a large number of manuscript funeral elegies, which are not readily available to most readers. For this reason, an accompanying online appendix, hosted at Manchester University Press (www. manchesterhive.com/funeral-elegies), provides full transcriptions of all manuscript elegies that are discussed at any length in the book. The elegies are organized chronologically and identified by their first lines. 25 February 1601 Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex ‘Welcome sweete Death the kindest freind I have’

6 November 1612 Prince Henry ‘Ay mee poore earth why am I made receaver’

25 September 1615 Stuart, Arbella ‘Too soon alas into the ears of all’ ‘Heere lyes shee whome death befreinded’

6 March 1616 Beaumont, Francis ‘I doe not wonder Beaumont thou art dead’

November 1617 Fisher, Ambrose ‘I am amaz’d to see Theologies’

29 October 1618 Ralegh, Sir Walter ‘Tread softly, passinger, and first advize’

ivi

Poems in the online appendix 2 March 1619 Queen Anne

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‘I chide no Blazing Starr yt did forgoe’ ‘Nor can faire Isis hide her cristal streames’ ‘Poor souls could not a royal theme, nor yet’ ‘Yow men of Brittain, wherefore gaze yow soe’ ‘Yow towringe spirits whose art-​yrradiate eyne’

18 April 1619 Aylworth, Dr Anthony ‘Wake yet mine eyes though yet scarce slept at all’

26 August 1619 Yale, Thomas ‘Alas poor muse, what wast thou only born’

2 January 1621 Lapworth, Mary ‘Weep on poor fools whilst with your sadder folly’

February 1622 Savile, Sir Henry ‘Adored Ghost, or wt ere doth remaine’ ‘Great Tacitus I must lament thy fall’ ‘When learned Savill worne wth quotidian paine’

24 January 1624 King, Anne ‘When other poets veines are done’

6 March 1624 Kerr, Robert, Second Earl of Lothian ‘The emptie vessells sound, the full are dumbe’

5 November 1624 Wriothesley, James and 10 November 1624 Wriothesley, Henry, Third Earl of Southampton ‘I know you love me I would therefore doe’ ‘My thinks I see the Ile of wyght to floate’ ‘Reader if you have not heard’

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Poems in the online appendix

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27 March 1625 King James VI and I ‘Can Christendomes great champion sinke away’ ‘Hast thou binn dead these foure and twentye howers’ ‘He who was our life, is dead’ ‘Mounte up my muse, yt thinkes of Kings’ ‘O troble not the sacred rest’ ‘Of late a Serjeant notinge ye reporte’ ‘Fames new Wôrthie, Earths late lîght,’

June 1625 de Vere, Henry, Eighteenth Earl of Oxford ‘Shall Cannons roaring rent ye ayre asunder’ ‘The moorening bannors that theire blackwinge spred’ ‘Thou that wearth arst glorious glaring high’

18 June 1626 Scott, Thomas ‘Keep thy teares reader & that softer sorrow’

23 August 1628 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham ‘Envy draw nere unto this Marble Stone’ ‘Halfe dead with greife on this untimely Herse’ ‘If Princes favors could but lengthen breath’ ‘Part, foule detraction from thy hellish Denn’ ‘Rest noble Duke, and may thy fatall end’ ‘The Devill in ffrance many yeares since began’ ‘Treade not upon this urne with feete prophane’ ‘Yee snarling Satyrs cease your horrid yells’

7 January or 9 January 1628/​9 Prince Frederick Henry ‘Canst thou be dead and wee be still the same’ ‘What hopes wee had of thee to reobtaine’

13 May 1629 Prince Charles ‘How short a space of life was lent’ ‘Snatch from our longing hoping eyes’

20 January 1633 Hastings (nee Stanley), Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon ‘Were this an argument wch I could raise’

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Poems in the online appendix 1635/​6 Herbert, Charles ‘Wee that could warble lesser greifes, & play’

1638 [probable date] Darell, Elizabeth

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‘If late acquaintance wth the saints above’

30 June 1640 Saltonstall, Sir Samuel ‘As thick black clouds doe long themselves contayne’

10 March [early 1620s?] Lower, Antoinetta ‘Lend me thy tongue deere Sorrow, lend thy pen’

[likely early 1620s] Unidentified churchman ‘What neede I speake or write his praise, whose name’

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Abbreviations and conventions

Abbreviations BL British Library, London Bodl. Bodleian Library, Oxford Camb. Cambridge University Library CCED Clergy of the Church of England Database   https://​theclergydatabase.org.uk CELM Catalogue of English Literary Manuscripts   www.celm-​ms.org.uk CSPD Calendar of State Papers, Domestic CSPV Calendar of State Papers, Venetian DLB Dictionary of Literary Biography Early Stuart Libels Early Stuart Libels, ed. Bellany and McRae   www.earlystuartlibels.net/​htdocs/​index.html ELR English Literary Renaissance Folger Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC HLQ Huntington Library Quarterly HMC Historical Manuscripts Commission Huntington Huntington Library, San Marino, CA JDJ John Donne Journal NLW National Library of Wales OED Oxford English Dictionary Oxford DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Rosenbach Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–​1900 SR A Transcript of the Stationers Register, ed. Arber STC Pollard and Redgrave, Short-​Title Catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland & Ireland and of English books printed abroad, 1475–​1640 TNA The National Archives, London

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Abbreviations and conventions

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Conventions Unless otherwise identified, classical texts and translation are quoted from the Loeb Classical Library. Biblical quotations are from the Authorized Version.

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Unless otherwise indicated, all dates are old style. As the titles of poems vary widely in manuscript, and this study works with numerous anonymous funeral elegies on a single figure, I  have generally used the first line as the primary identifier of a poem. Original spelling and punctuation have been maintained with all quotations from manuscript and printed sources from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; however, i/​j and u/​v have been regularized. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Neo-​Latin texts are the author’s.

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Acknowledgements

Early work on this project was supported by research and travel grants from Brescia University College of the University of Western Ontario. Later, a multi-​year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada allowed me to extend the work and bring it to completion. I thank the many libraries and archives that offered access to, or digital copies of, the primary manuscript material that is the basis of this study: the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University Library, National Records of Scotland, the National Archives (UK), Newcastle University Library, University of Nottingham Library, Hampshire Record Office, Leicestershire Record Office, West Yorkshire Archives, Folger Shakespeare Library, Rosenbach Museum and Library, and Yale University Library. I  also give particular thanks to the staff of Beryl Ivey Library at Brescia for their years of patient assistance, and the Interlibrary Loan Department of D.B. Weldon Library, who tracked down many books and microfilms on my behalf. I thank John Mitchell, Donna Rogers, and Lauretta Frederking, all of whom served as Academic Dean at Brescia during this project, for their active support and encouragement. Likewise, within the Dean’s office Marsha Lace was consistently helpful and patient, and Elizabeth Russell-​Minda and Jen Pecoski helped steer me through the processes of grant applications and use. I also thank my faculty colleagues, Brian Diemert, Dominick Grace, Monika Lee, Carolyn Weber, and Sara Morrison for their continuing interest in and encouragement of this project. This study would not have been possible without the excellent work done by my student research assistants over the years: Christina Wiendels, Jacqueline Chateauvert, and Kendall Fisher. Part of Chapter 8 was published within the article ‘Elegies on the death of Bishop John King (d. 1621)’, in the John Donne Journal, which I thank for permission to republish.

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Acknowledgements

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I thank Matthew Frost and Helen Flitton for their guidance through the publishing process, Luke Finley for his careful copy-​editing work, and the anonymous readers for Manchester University Press for their helpful responses and suggestions. Finally, as with all my work, this book could not have been accomplished without the unfailing love and support of my growing family: Nancy, Sarah, Esther, Elizabeth, Elliot, Joel, Andrew, and Jacob. I dedicate it, with thanks, to my parents-​in-​law, William and Janice Spring.

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Introduction

This book began as an exploratory project rather than an argument: I set out to read all English funeral elegies written between 1603 and 1640, whether published at the time or surviving in manuscript. It was intended as a heuristic, experimental approach, with a view to seeing how a broad or distant reading might uncover different elements from those typically discussed by major studies of the genre, with their focus on a limited number of canonical examples. The ‘project’ is still not quite complete, as I continue to find fresh examples in manuscript, but it is sufficient to support a number of central themes in this book. First, I  was struck by how often funeral elegies went beyond their core purposes of lamentation, commemoration, and consolation to comment on a wide range of other matters. Secondly, many poems highlight how the emotional turmoil of grief (‘distraction’, in the seventeenth-​century sense of mental disturbance approaching madness) leads to a breaking of poetic norms and restraint. A daring unruliness, of both form and matter, often marks the genre. Finally, the discussion of other matters, whether defended as manifestations of distraction or not, often take the form of ‘detraction’, that is, the sharp criticism of individuals, the broader culture, centres of power and other institutions, and even the world itself  –​in short, all that which lies beyond the dead figure who is at the heart of the elegy. I  frequently use the terms ‘distraction’ and ‘detraction’, not merely for the sake of word play, but as ones widely used at the time, and as part of my general commitment to critical description that draws on the terminology within the literary works themselves.1 ‘Detraction’ is a broader term than ‘satire’, and thus captures instances that lack the bite, irony, or wit of satire. ‘Blame’ might function as well, as the flip-​ side of ‘praise’ in the poetic project of judgement.

1 See Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading:  An Introduction’, Representations 108:1 (2008), p. 11.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

While this focus on poetic moments of bold digression governs much of the book’s discussion, I  also sought to avoid a reductionism that ignored other noteworthy elements of the genre that have been relatively neglected by other scholars and critics. Thus, in each chapter, as I focus on the funeral elegies prompted by the death of one person or a group of similarly situated figures, I seek to include all that I have found striking about them. Some of these elements I  will highlight in this introduction; others will become evident as the book unfolds. I  have sought a balance between exploring the repeated concerns of funeral elegies, which may be understood as part of the generic norms, and considering those elegies that do unusual things, thus setting themselves apart from the conventions of the genre.2 In the process of reading widely in the genre, I have noticed recurring tropes not mentioned by other critics, and I at times offer a fuller description of the varieties of elegy in the period than has been hitherto available. This approach also reveals how the circumstances of the death in question challenge poets to adapt the rhetorical resources of the genre to a particular situation. I am especially interested in those cases where the exceptional circumstances challenge the usual approach of ‘Death’s mournfull laws’, as Henry King calls them.3 How does an elegist commemorate the death of a suicide, of political prisoners, of a much-​resented royal favourite like the Duke of Buckingham? Overall, my hope is that the project and ensuing discussion will have established a broader understanding of the culture of funeral elegies in the early Stuart period.

The scholarly context In a funeral elegy a poet articulates his or her grief at the death of another.4 This sort of bald summation has tended to guide –​and limit –​literary critics on the funeral elegies of the early Stuart period: they have most often been concerned with the psychology of grief or the ‘work of mourning’, both artistic and emotional, performed by the poem. G. W. Pigman, for example, 2 On the tension between similarity and distinctiveness in comparing funeral elegies in the period, see W.  D.  Shaw, Elegy and Paradox:  Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 77–​8. 3 H. King, ‘An Elegy upon my Best Friend, L. K. C.’, in The Poems of Henry King: Bishop of Chichester, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 134, l. 7. 4 While the term ‘funeral elegy’ is problematic, it has the virtue of being used both in the period and in critical discussion since, and hence will be used throughout this study. At times, when the context of death is already well established, the briefer term ‘elegy’ will sometimes be used. This too has precedent in the period itself. For a full discussion of terminology, see the Appendix.

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Introduction

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traces poetry’s function in ‘mastering’ the turmoil of grief;5 however, my interest lies in the rhetorical opportunity before the grief is contained. Other scholarly discussions have highlighted the poet’s self-​conscious role as commemorator, engaging in what W. David Shaw has described as the process of a mourner becoming an elegist.6 My study strives to shift this focus in three ways: first, by organizing the study around the dead individual and his or her immediate context; secondly, by exploring how elegies, often ‘distracted’ by grief, go beyond the immediate death to reflect poetically upon other political, religious, and social matters; and, finally, by drawing heavily upon the many funeral elegies from the period that were not published but circulated in manuscript. An accompanying online appendix, hosted at Manchester University Press,7 provides full transcriptions of those manuscript elegies discussed at any length. To understand the genre, I make only limited reference to such works as Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Poetices (1561) and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), as instead I strive to recognize what Gerd Bayer has called the ‘unwritten poetics’ that are manifest in the works of the genre itself.8 These are evident sometimes through repeated appearance in funeral elegies, at other times by poets drawing attention to them as they use them. In his late nineteenth-​century edition of Cyril Tourneur, John Churton Collins dismissed all elegies on Prince Henry (including Tourneur’s) as ‘a mass of fatuous balderdash of which [English literature] ought to be heartily ashamed’.9 Collins’ savage statement is an extreme example of a critical stance that dominated literary history and criticism from roughly 1800 to 1960: except for ‘Lycidas’ and Thomas Carew’s poem on Donne (‘Can we not force from widdowed Poetry’), early modern funeral elegies were categorically rejected as insincere accumulations of commonplace tropes. The past sixty years have seen a much fuller exploration of the genre, with book-​ length studies by G. W. Pigman III, Dennis Kay, Andrea Brady, and Peter Sacks (which extended well beyond the period),10 but this exploration still 5 G.  W.  Pigman, III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 45. 6 Shaw, Elegy and Paradox, pp. 50–​2. 7 See www.manchesterhive.com/funeral-elegies. 8 Gerd Bayer, Novel Horizons:  The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 4. 9 C. Tourneur, Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, vol. 1, ed. John Churton Collins (1878; rpt Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1978), p. xxviii. 10 A. Brady, English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke, Hampshire; New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy; D. Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); P. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

manifests unfortunate limits. The limits are two-​fold:  which poems have been considered and what questions have been asked of those elegies. First, while more than ‘Lycidas’ and Carew’s elegy are now discussed, as critics have paid increased attention to the funeral elegies of Donne and Jonson, some ‘second-​tier’ poets like Drayton, Beaumont, Richard Corbett, Browne, and William Strode are still relatively neglected, despite their rich use of the genre. The breadth of funeral elegies in the period, including anonymous ones in manuscript, has been largely ignored. My project is similar, to varying degrees, to other ‘wide reading’ projects of the sort encouraged by Peter Rabinowitz.11 Predecessors in this approach seem particularly prominent in late seventeenth-​century studies. Far ahead of his time, in The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976) Robert D.  Hume sought to re-​ understand the period’s drama by ‘examining a large number of plays with special attention to chronological sequence’.12 In the process, Hume read all known plays of the period 1660 to 1710, giving equal attention to the non-​canonical.13 More recently, Ashley Marshall’s The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–​1770 engages in an extraordinarily wide-​ranging exploration (reading over 3000 works) that demonstrates the variety and richness of satire in the period (and that its most famous figures, Dryden, Swift, and Pope are far from representative).14 And Gerd Bayer’s Novel Horizons: The Genre Making of Restoration Fiction (2016) has offered a similar reassessment of prose fiction in the period through the process of broad reading. All of these scholars have uncovered the radical variation, both synchronous and diachronous, of what are too often thought of as relatively fixed genres largely defined by a few canonical authors. For example, Hume finds that ‘the drama of this period is vastly varied and complex in type, and further that the different types change and interact on an almost season-​by-​season basis’.15 My study is not as concerned with defining the development of the genre over time, as changes in funeral elegies in the early decades of the seventeenth century were much more gradual, since the expectations for funeral elegies were more well fixed. Of greater interest, then, is how these generic expectations

11 P. Rabinowitz, Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 231. 12 Robert D.  Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), p. vii. 13 Hume, The Development of English Drama, p. ix. 14 Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–​1770 (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), p. 12. 15 Hume, The Development of English Drama, p. viii.

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Introduction

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engaged with the particularities of individual deaths and with the historical moment. A similar broad reading approach has been adopted by Margaret Cohen in her study of nineteenth-​ century French novels.16 She boldly asserts, ‘Forgotten literature is the portal to the recovery of lost poetics’, but notes that texts can be forgotten in different ways: works/​genres revered in their time, but subsequently disregarded; genres that were low in the cultural hierarchy of the time; even well-​known works that are ‘rediscovered’ by being read within this new, broader survey that reveals forgotten generic norms. All this, she argues, ‘has the potential to transform our view of works at the heart of the literary canon’.17 Seventeenth-​century funeral elegies manifest an additional, and most significant, type of ‘forgottenness’: those anonymous works that widely circulated in manuscript but then disappeared because of our focus on print publication and author-​centred discussion. These poems lie at the heart of my study. Like Cohen I seek the patterns that emerge from a broad canvassing of texts, using the terminology and understanding of genres/​norms that were part of these texts or their immediate reception. Cohen rightly identifies the difficulty of then choosing a limited number of texts to focus upon, and urges the adoption of a ‘representative example’, which ‘takes on its importance as the abstraction of a class rather than in its unique specificity’.18 While the present book as a whole establishes this representativeness, individual chapters at times focus upon those individual poems that radically depart from the norm as they engage with the exceptional circumstances of an individual death. Thus, while my project arises from the wide reading espoused by Rabinowitz, much of the extended discussion still engages in the close or ‘intense reading’ simultaneously suggested by the same author.19 Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, critics have ignored the wealth of funeral elegies (often anonymous) that circulated in the manuscript culture of the period. Mary Hobbs notes the prominence of funeral elegies in the manuscripts of the time: ‘outnumber[ing] all except song lyrics in early seventeenth-​century verse miscellanies’, they were ‘often grouped in a whole section by themselves at the end of the book’.20 Given this, it is surprising

16 She describes her method in ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, Representations 108:1 (2009), pp. 51–​75; the study itself appeared as The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 17 Cohen, ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, p. 62. 18 Cohen, ‘Narratology in the Archive of Literature’, p. 61. 19 Rabinowitz, Before Reading, p. 231. 20 M.  Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-​ Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts (Aldershot, Hampshire: Scolar Press, 1992), pp. 35–​36.

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that manuscript elegies have received so little scholarly attention. Nancy A.  Gutierrez deliberately excluded manuscript poems from her article on the genre in the Tudor period, because they ‘appear to have been written for “coterie” rather than a “print” audience … for the poetic purpose seems “exclusive”, rather than “inclusive” ’.21 Scholars have challenged such a view in the last few decades by recognizing the broad audience achieved by many manuscript works. While Kay’s Melodious Tears and Brady’s English Funerary Elegy stand as partial exceptions to this neglect of non-​canonical works, as both consider some elegies from manuscript, neither fully reflects the new understandings of the significance of early seventeenth-​century manuscript culture. Such tools and resources as Early Stuart Libels and Folger’s Union First-​Line Index have made relevant materials more accessible. This has been reflected in such studies as Joshua Eckhardt’s Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-​Courtly Love Poetry (2009). In his recent study of manuscript political pamphlets, Noah Millstone effectively describes this shift in focus: ‘Foundational studies by literary critics and book historians have recovered reading circles, reconstructed the work of individual scribes, and provided a technical vocabulary for talking about manuscript publication.’22 This reconstruction has led to a recognition of the wealth of materials, especially political, which circulated only in manuscript. While elegies are not as restricted to manuscript as the pamphlets considered by Millstone, I hope that this study shows how a consideration of them fleshes out our understanding of the literary, social, and political dynamics of the early Stuart funeral elegy. As such, it is taking Kay’s significant work, on the manuscript elegies on Sidney, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Henry, much further by thoroughly exploring those on both later and more minor figures. The present volume includes at least as much consideration of manuscript poems as printed ones, as I contend that poets found freedom in manuscript circulation to go beyond their print counterparts in ‘distracted’ comment. Anonymity could be more easily preserved and readership possibly limited.23

21 Nancy A. Gutierrez, ‘The Remembrance: Model Literature Not Elegy’, Parergon 6a (1988), pp. 105–​32. 22 N.  Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 2. 23 Millstone complicates the usual picture of manuscript circulation as a coterie activity of the elite, as the use of servants as scribes made possible the broader circulation of sensitive manuscript material as extra copies might be made. (Manuscript Circulation, pp. 47–​50). While Millstone’s focus is on political pamphlets, poems in the period, especially those of political significance, circulated in much the same way.

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Introduction

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Other factors besides political caution, such as the status of the dead and the ambitions of the poet, informed the decision to choose manuscript over print circulation. In the opening of an elegy on the death of Dr Anthony Aylworth (d. 8 April 1619), the poet points back to recent ones on Queen Anne, and then draws this distinction between print and manuscript elegies:

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for princes losse we do lament in print their greif must drop though from a hart of flint Let me my paper blot in private inck24

Certainly, up until the 1620s most print collections of verse had involved royalty or other illustrious figures of political significance, such as Sidney. The author of this elegy on Aylworth likely had the universities’ commemorative volumes on the Queen’s death in mind. However, in the 1620s and 1630s this dichotomy began to break down, as volumes of printed elegies on relatively insignificant figures appeared: Sir John Stanhope (Elegies on Sir John Stanhope, 1624), Robert, Baron Spencer of Wormleighton (The muses thankfulnesse, 1627), Sir Rowland Cotton (Parentalia, 1635), Edward King (Iusto Eduardo King, 1637), Lady Katherine Paston (Funerall Elegies, 1637, by Ralph Knevet), and Paul, Viscount Bayning (Death Repeal’d, 1638). Overall, these printed collections were generally less daring and politically engaged than manuscript elegies.25 However, a manuscript-​based circulation might also seem less publicly ambitious, and might thus avoid the suspicion that the rhetorical tears of public grief were insincere –​‘crafty sorrow’, as one elegy puts it26 –​or written for monetary gain. Often quoted in this regard was Martial: ‘ille dolet vere qui sine teste dolet’.27 We must also recognize that the term ‘manuscript funeral elegy’ in fact covers a range of composition and circulation situations. Manuscript elegies that survive only in a single, presentation-​quality hand were often ‘gift’ poems offered to the family of the deceased and whose circulation never extended beyond that small circle. Other manuscript elegies found a much

24 ‘In obitum Dr. Allworth elegy’, Folger MS V.a.345, p. 72. 25 See Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, pp.  2–​3, on the general tendency of scribal works to be topical and direct in their political commentary. 26 ‘On the King of Sweden’ (beg. ‘I Will not weepe’, Swedish Intelligencer (1632), sig. ¶¶¶2v.). Henry King, in his elegy on the death of John Spenser (d. 1614), argues that excessive poetical sorrows ‘are more Rhetoricall, then tru affected teares’ (‘In obitum sanctissimi viri Di. Dris. Spenseri’, in Lawrence Mason (ed), English Poems (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1914), p. 184. See Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 29–​30, on the self-​consciousness of elegists regarding the question of sincerity. 27 [‘He mourns truly who mourns without a witness’] Martial, Epigrams, 1:33. For example, see the end of Hugh Holland’s elegy on Prince Henry (Lachrymae lachrymarum, sig. D4r.).

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broader audience, appearing repeatedly in the manuscript collections that circulated in the period.28 The more intense circulation of a poem might be driven by the prominent reputation of the poet or the deceased. Or the topical comment may have struck a public chord by dwelling on controversial matters. Such was certainly the case with the elegies on Thomas Washington, the page of Prince Charles, who died during the ill-​fated trip to Spain in 1623,29 or on Sir John Burroughs, who died during the English assault on the Isle of Rhé in 1627.30 A concern with the particular circumstances of death and the immediate contexts (political, religious, and social) also sets my study apart from previous books on the early Stuart funeral elegy. These have tended to focus on either the challenge of the poetic task or the psychology of grief, both of which have removed the poem from its historical moment and its connection to the particularities of the deceased. Peter Sacks’ The English Elegy largely focused on ‘the connections between language and the pathos of human consciousness’ and pursued what he termed ‘the work of mourning’.31 Likewise, Pigman’s Grief and English Renaissance Elegy has explored the psychology of the grieving process as manifest in poetry. Andrea Brady’s English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century, a study rooted in the rituals of mourning, goes furthest in considering non-​ canonical works, including anonymous elegies in manuscript. However, her book focuses on different groupings of elegies than mine: the critical elegy, those (especially by women) on the death of children, and elegies of the Civil Wars and Interregnum.32 Her approach and that of Kay are closest to mine: the latter is most concerned with tracing generic development, especially as influenced by Spenser and Donne, and the creation of a poetic persona, self-​consciously performing his elegiac task. As Ronald Strickland

28 See A. Marotti, ‘ “Rolling Archetypes”: Christ Church, Oxford Poetry Collections, and the Proliferation of Manuscript Verse Anthologies in Caroline England’, ELR 44:3 (2014), pp.  486–​523, for a recent discussion of the overlap among related manuscripts. 29 J. Doelman, ‘Claimed by Two Religions: The Elegy on Thomas Washington, 1623, and Middleton’s A Game at Chesse’, Studies in Philology 110 (2013), pp. 318–​49. 30 J.  Doelman, ‘John Earle’s Funeral Elegy on Sir John Burroughs’, ELR 41 (2011), pp. 485–​502. 31 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. xii. 32 One limitation of Brady’s study is that many manuscript poems are discussed with no reference to their dates, so readers are uncertain (without considerable digging) whether a poem is from 1600 or 1670. The effect is to collapse the whole seventeenth century into a single culture. Such is particularly problematic when considering a phenomenon like rigorism, which was gradually moved away from as the period went on.

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points out, Kay’s concerns are still largely aesthetic rather than historically rooted instances of public discourse.33 Of the elegies considered by this book, those on Prince Henry have received the most critical comment, but the emphases of other scholars differ from mine. Ruth Wallerstein’s chapter in Studies in Seventeenth-​Century Poetic is largely concerned with identifying the main stylistic and rhetorical traditions in which the various elegies participate. She discusses most of the major poems and categorizes them as Spenserian, metaphysical, humanist, etc.; Donne’s elegy is very much at the centre of the chapter. However, Wallerstein offers almost no comment on the political situation out of which the elegies emerged, and despite all these poems about him, Prince Henry himself rather curiously disappears from the discussion. Dennis Kay’s Melodious Tears ranges much more widely than Wallerstein and helpfully presents a number of elegies from manuscript on Prince Henry. Once again, however, his concern is more with the literary tradition rather than how these poems engage with the specific political moment of the Prince’s death. Barbara Lewalski argues (rightly, I believe) that the Prince Henry elegies constituted a major turning point in the poetic treatment of the dead in English.34 Lewalski is largely concerned with the influence of Donne’s Anniversaries on many of these elegies;35 however, some of the tropes from the Anniversaries that she identifies in later works are commonplace ones that do not necessarily reflect direct influence. Overall, these studies are dominated by the questions of literary lineage, seeing the elegies by more minor figures largely in relation to either the Spenserian or the Donnean tradition. Most studies of the early modern funeral elegy have been author-​ focused: thus, we have articles that consider the work of a single poet or books that trace the literary tradition and development of the genre as exemplified by individual poets. My shift from authors to subjects (that is, the dead) is based not upon any ‘death of the author’ position but upon a conviction that this refocusing can help us discover new things about the genre and its place in the broader culture of the time. Such an approach also prevents the marginalizing of the many anonymous funeral elegies that survive in manuscript. As will be fully demonstrated below, funeral elegies were generally composed within a few weeks of the death; hence, not only are they closely connected to the raw experience of grief, but they can be explored as participating in a precise historical moment, and this 33 R. Strickland, ‘Not So Idle Tears: Re-​reading the Renaissance Funeral Elegy’, Review 14 (1992), p. 60. 34 B. K. Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 308. 35 Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries, pp. 307–​29; Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 115.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

allows for a more specific historicist approach than is possible with other genres.36 Such an approach also requires that at times I begin with extensive historical and biographical contexts before turning to the elegies themselves. A subject-​based exploration also highlights broader public concerns of the period, as topics or themes recur in elegies on the same individual. In other cases, elegies respond to each other or compete, either in grief or poetic craft, or, as Jonson playfully recorded in regard to Donne’s elegy on Prince Henry, ‘to match Sir Ed: Herbert in obscurenesse’.37 Funeral elegists function as the arbiters in what John Davies of Hereford calls the ‘After-​ game/​Of Reputation’;38 ostensibly they are defining the reputation of the deceased, but they also seek to further their own. Competition was evident not just among poets but also as part of a broader contest over the surviving reputation of the deceased. Different elements in the mourning or commemorative process might compete; elegists sometimes claimed a sincerity that surpassed other rituals: the work of heralds, funeral sermons, and the tomb or monument.39 Considering funeral elegies in relation to their subject, rather than their author, allows for a greater understanding of the place of the genre in the culture of death and commemoration. Death and sorrow, I emphasize, were the starting points of funeral elegy, but it was a copious and digressive form that allowed a wide variety of material and perspectives. Dennis Kay identifies it as a relatively free and inventive form that took its bearings from the situation: essentially, it is ‘a form without frontiers’.40 By extending its concern beyond grief and consolation, the funeral elegy functions as what Heather Dubrow has called a ‘host genre’, which she defines as ‘provid[ing] a hospitable environment for the other form or forms that are regularly incorporated within [it]. In some cases, for example, the host may assume the function of a screen, hiding or countervailing certain less desirable aspects of the genre within it.’41 As a well-​ respected form, the funeral elegy perhaps escaped the suspicion that might

36 Some earlier scholarship was remarkably uninterested in the identity of the subjects whom funeral elegies treated: for example, G. Blakemore Evans’ scholarly edition of The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951) offers rich commentary and annotation on literary parallels and references, but he makes absolutely no attempt to identify some of the individuals upon whom Cartwright composed elegies. This may reflect an earlier generation of scholars’ embarrassment at ‘occasional poetry’ and the perceived insincerity of the funeral elegy. 37 Qtd G. A. Stringer (ed.), The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 6 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), p. 586. 38 The Muses Teares (1613), sig. A3r. 39 Brady, English Funerary Elegy. 40 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 7. 41 H. Dubrow, Genre (London; New York: Methuen, 1982), p. 116.

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Introduction

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have attended a ‘satire’ or ‘epigram’. After all, a certain remembrance was owed the dead, but in this practice of commemoration the elegist might include castigation or questioning of the living. Andrea Brady, in English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century (2006), offers some recognition of the political dimension of the genre:  ‘Elegies are at once idealistic representations which seek to immortalize their subjects, and critical responses to the decadence of the age.’42 Thus, elegies combined the two roles of poetry recognized in the humanist tradition: to praise and to blame.43 Furthermore, elegies of the period manifest the recurring situation where the dead become the passive object of poetic, religious, and political struggle, subject to revision and competing claims. In this variety of ways, the conventional roles of elegy  –​to lament, praise, and console –​make room for other agendas.

Scope and focus This book sets the years 1603 and 1640 as its parameters; the English funeral elegy came into its own as a widely practised and self-​conscious genre in the first decade of James’ reign, with influential funeral elegies by John Donne and Francis Beaumont, and the massive outpouring of poems on the death of Prince Henry in 1612.44 The terminal date marks the last year before the conflicts of the 1640s significantly changed the dynamics of such a potentially political form as the elegy. In that decade, many elegies were written about men who had been killed by their own countrymen (rather than by illness, a continental enemy, or Death or Fate); furthermore, greater freedom in printing affected the need for manuscript elegies, and the conflict and social upheaval disrupted the circles within which such manuscript verse circulated. Despite these temporal limits, I will occasionally look back to earlier deaths (Sir Philip Sidney, the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth) and forward to later ones (Charles I) for the sake of comparison. And the Afterword will offer some reflection on the changes to the funeral elegy brought about, specifically, by the Civil Wars of the 1640s.

42 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, p. 2. 43 See L. Guilhamet, Satire and the Transformation of Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), pp. 21–​2. 44 On the literary influence of Donne’s early funeral elegies, see C. J. Summers, ‘W[illiam] S[hakespeare]’s A Funeral Elegy and the Donnean Moment’, in M.  E.  Henley and W.  S.  Hill (eds), Wrestling with God:  Literature and Theology in the English Renaissance:  Essays to Honour Paul Grant Stanwood (Vancouver:  Henley, 2001), pp. 53–​66, and T. Pebworth and C. J. Summers, ‘Contexts and Strategies: Donne’s Elegy on Prince Henry’, JDJ 19 (2000), pp. 205–​22.

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Within those four decades, this study especially focuses on elegies of the 1620s. This focus was not adopted by prior design but from a slow recognition that it was in this decade that elegies most strongly pushed into commentary beyond immediate grief. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have described the 1620s as a decade in which foreign conflicts and domestic turmoil created ‘a sustained pitch of public political discourse equal to that achieved in the 1590s’,45 and these years saw a wealth of elegies that turned the form to a decidedly political purpose. Paul Salzman’s Literature and Politics in the 1620s:’Whisper’d Counsells’ recognizes this aspect of the decade and explores the intense treatment of political matters in a wide range of genres  –​but not the funeral elegy. He argues that in the 1620s literature ‘did not produce monolithic ideological positions so much as a constantly shifting series of responses to what were perceived at the time as acutely significant political moments’.46 Within that decade of intense political controversy, the years 1623 to 1628 are the ‘hottest’, as they span the ultimate crisis of the Spanish Match (1623–​4), the death of King James in 1625, the heated Parliament of 1626, the disastrous military expedition to the Isle of Rhé in 1627, and the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628.47 This concentration of politically charged elegies coincides with what Noah Millstone has identified as the burgeoning culture of political manuscript material in the decade, which peaked with the 1628–​9 Parliament, for which ‘hundreds of scribal texts, in thousands of copies, poured out of the palace of Westminster’.48 This intense news culture was the context for many of the funeral elegies to be considered in this book.

The distracted elegy The immediacy of elegiac grief allowed the poet to claim licence for intense emotions and utterances beyond the norms of other contexts. As Peter Sacks notes, the elegy ‘is characterized by an unusually powerful intertwining of emotion and rhetoric’.49 The very composition and circulation of a funeral

45 S. Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, in P.  Lake and S.  Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 9. 46 P. Salzman, Literature and Politics in the 1620s: ‘Whisper’d Counsells’ (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 7. 47 See J.  Limon, Dangerous Matter:  English Drama and Politics in 1623/​ 24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) on the intense political engagement in the drama of those years. 48 Millstone, Manuscript Circulation, p. 19. See also pp. 96–​104 in the same. 49 Sacks, The English Elegy, p. xii.

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elegy could be justified by the strong requirement of the occasion. The otherwise hesitant poet steps forth, as Robert Gomersall writes, ‘and dare[s]‌to greive/​With a full sorrowe’.50 In a funeral elegy on Martin Peirce (d. 1636) William Sancroft (later Archbishop of Canterbury) writes, ‘Faine would my daring Muse with vent’rous paces/​Enter upon the Cat’logue of thy graces’.51 His ‘daring Muse’ is venturing upon praise of the deceased, but in many cases the strong emotional circumstances of the death led poets to dare more outspoken thoughts, to venture into detraction and even satire. Grief overwhelmed the usual strictures of art and decorum to permit an unruliness of verse and emotion. Reformation theology emphasized restraint in mourning; as the early English Protestant John Bradford put it, ‘we bury the dead in a convenient place, and mourn in measure, as men having hope of the resurrection’.52 However, in the funeral elegy some Protestant writers found opportunity for a more unharnessed expression of grief, and justified this by pointing to the tumultuous effects of the news. Ironically, ‘in measure’, that is, verse, they found means to circumvent the ‘measure’ (moderation) normally required of them.53 For Wye Saltonstall his father’s death prompts a blameless ‘Vertuous passion’,54 and Francis Atkins argues that ‘Madnes must bee his fury that would write an Elegie’.55 Robert Allyne presents such as the natural condition of the grieving: Mourners keepe no methode in their mones, But as the passion is conceav’d in thought Abruptly, so into the world ’tis brought. Mourning’s a naturall motion in the heart, And scornes to be reform’d by rules of Art.56

Thus, the abandoning of rules could also be used to justify a roughness of poetic meter and lack of polish: When other poets veines are done Snt Giles my muse bids me halt on, 50 ‘An elegy on the death of Mistress Anne King’, Folger MS V.a.96, fol. 68v. 51 Bodl. Sancroft MS 48, fol. 3v. Similarly, an anonymous elegist asks, how dares my quill, Not yet suspired from Pernassus hill, Attempt so high a subject, (‘An elegy on the King of Sweden’, Folger V.a.245, fol. 32r) 52 J. Bradford, The Writings of John Bradford: Containing Letters, Treatises, Remains, ed. Aubrey Townsend (Cambridge, 1853), p. 279. 53 Thomas Wilson’s Art of Rhetorique (1553), sig. 45r, suggests that grief only be indulged in for a single day. 54 BL Harl. MS 509, fol. 5v. 55 ‘Upon the L. Charles Herbert dying in Italy’, Folger MS V.a.97, p. 178. 56 Robert Allyne, Funerall Elegies (1613), sig. A2r.

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and if my verses have some hobs, thinke I have used not feete, but sobs, my rougher rimes may sute griefe best let theirs runne smooth that mourne in Jeast;57

An extreme adoption of this trope is found in Henry Chettle’s funeral elegy on Queen Elizabeth:  ‘why should I  dote, on rimes, on songs, or note,  /​ Confusion can best quote, /​sacred Elizaes losse’, Collin, the pastoral elegist asks, and then takes the extreme step of ‘brak[ing] his pipe’ and switching to prose.58 The disorder so prompted by death often extended beyond literary style to emotional response, and in this context the term ‘distracted’ (meaning mentally discomposed) was sometimes used by elegists themselves. An anonymous elegy on the Puritan controversialist Thomas Scott identifies itself as a ‘distracted elegy’; William Habington uses the term when he finds that his veneration of the deceased George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, has led him to malign the living: ‘My griefe distracts me. If my zeale hath said, /​What checks the living; know I serve the dead.’59 Thus is the poet excused. Slightly later (1641), the trope was sufficiently established that a poet writing on the Earl of Strafford’s death felt it necessary to assure the reader ‘nor greife, nor zeale distracts /​me from my selfe’.60 Based upon this usage in the period itself, I have adopted the term ‘distracted’ as a way of understanding how early Stuart funeral elegy treated the emotional response to death. While the term is used in a limited number of elegies, the concept is widely present and will recur frequently in this study. The elegist on Rev. Ambrose Fisher admits, ‘Greife makes me madd and rave beyond my sense’.61 Francis Beaumont, after venturing into a diatribe against the failures of doctors, offers a semi-​retraction based upon the ‘detraction’ defence:  ‘Sorrow and madness make my verses flow /​Cross to my understanding’.62 In all these cases the distraction or raving, however, is contained within the elegiac 57 John King, ‘A Letter to his most loving Brother H: K: upon the death of his Late wife’, BL Harl. MS 6917, fol. 89v. 58 Englands Mourning Garment (1603), sig. A3v–​A4r. 59 ‘On the death of the Right Honourable GEORGE Earle of S.’, in William Habington, Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott (Liverpool:  University Press of Liverpool, 1948), p.  76. The line echoes the claim of Corbett some thirty years earlier: ‘The dead I serve’ (l. 3), he writes in his elegy on the Baron of Effingham. 60 ‘An Elegie on the Earle of Strafford’, West Yorkshire Archives, 32D86/​17, fol. 103r. 61 Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 160, fol. 10v. 62 ‘Elegy on the Death of the Lady Rutland’, in Sir Thomas Overbury (and others), Characters, together with Poems, news, Edicts, and Paradoxes based on the eleventh edition of ‘A Wife Now the Widow of Sir Thomas Overbury’, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2003), p. 189.

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process, which often ultimately corrects it by an acceptance of providential design or other consolation. My focus, however, is on the ‘meantime’ of that distraction, what the supposed emotional disruption of the moment frees the poet to utter.63 In particular, I explore how this poetic licence in grief opened up the possibility of the detraction of other people, institutions, and the broader social situation. In the throes of grief and a felt sense of injustice, it becomes ‘difficult not to write satire’.64 Thus, William Douglas, the elegist of the Earl of Lothian (d.  1624), explained that his grief has unintentionally led him into another genre: for whom Intending a mournfull Elegie I have writ a satire Just rage hath Inspird Me so.65

However, other poets present a conflicted sense of whether such genre-​shifting is appropriate: A Lethargie’s on mee, nor can I write Whats Poet-​like, while I conceive this spite Of unjust Fortune, yet I cease to brawle: A Satyre ill becomes a Funerall.66

Likewise, in his elegy on Donne, Richard Busby cuts off a line of thought that is straying into the satiric: ‘No more of this, least some should say, that I /​Am strai’d to Satyre, meaning Elegie’.67 However, at times the language

63 While part of my argument is that ‘distraction’ sometimes led to a detraction of all but the deceased, the very term ‘distraction’ also had a political dimension in the period; OED definition 3.b. reads ‘Disorder or confusion of affairs, caused by internal conflict or dissension; the condition of a community torn by dissension or conflict of parties’. While its earliest citation for this sense is 1642, I  have noted some from the 1620s as well. For example, in 1628 a Cornish justice of the peace reported two sailors spreading rumours that Buckingham had poisoned King Charles; he feared that such might prompt ‘distractions’ among the people; A. Bellany and T. Cogswell, The Murder of King James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 334. 64 Juvenal and Persius, ‘Satire 1’, in Susanna Morton Braund (ed.), Juvenal and Persius (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 1:30 (‘Difficile est saturam non scribere’). 65 BL Add. MS 12067, fol. 250r. 66 Thomas Motershead, in Funerall elegies, upon the most untimely death of the honourable and most hopefull, Mr. John Stanhope (1624), p. 25. 67 ‘In memory of Doctor Donne: By Mr R.B’, Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 357, ll. 63–​4. On the detraction among elegists commemorating Donne, see Charles Green, ‘“A Tomb your Muse must to his Fame supply”: Elegising Donne in Manuscript and Print’, JDJ 35 (2016), pp. 67–​86.

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and imagery of satire do intrude into the mourning realm of elegy for extended passages.68 The best-​known example of this is the St Peter passage in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, which becomes the vehicle for a vehement satire of the corrupt churchmen/​shepherds who neglect ‘the faithful herdsman’s art’ (l. 121). After this jarring satiric digression, the speaker must recall the figures and elements of the pastoral realm as he continues in an elegiac mode. While this passage of ecclesiastical satire is well known and justly celebrated, the extent to which the genre generally functioned as a vehicle of political commentary and satire in the early Stuart period has been neglected. While few do it as well as Milton, the satiric digression, often explicitly linked to the emotional excess of grief, is surprisingly common.69 Another approach to elegiac satire involved lambasting those unworthy figures, either in general or specific terms, who had been commemorated by outpourings of undeserved elegies, while the current deceased has passed unremarked. Such is the approach adopted by William Sampson in his elegy on ‘On the right Honorable Jane Countesse of Shrewsbury’ (d.  1626), as he chastises those poets who have adorned ‘misers Herse’ and notes that ‘Court Parasites, Vertues smotherers, /​False Sonnes of Phoebus, bastards of the Nine,’ ‘their own worthes sing’.70 In combining panegyric with satire or correction, funeral elegy was following a well-​established path in the classical poetic tradition, where the role of the poet was to judge and then appropriately offer praise or blame. Victoria Moul traces Ben Jonson’s use of this in his imitations of Horace, noting how ‘satiric intrusion’ works as ‘an adjunct to, and arguably in contention with, the central matter of praise.’71 The two modes reinforce each other: the blaming of the foolish and vicious acts as a foil to praise of the worthy.

68 To a lesser extent, other occasional genres might thus function as a ‘host genre’ for satire. R. Anselment, ‘The Oxford University Poets and Caroline Panegyric’, JDJ 3 (1984), pp. 193–​4, traces the tendency of late-​1630s Oxford volumes on royal births to glance at the growing political unrest. For an example where an epithalamium gives way to satire, see J. Eliot, ‘A Satyr. Upon a miraculous Marriage, made between a Brave Young Viscount, and an unworthy Old Viscounts Widow’, Poems (1658), pp. 71–​4. R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–​1750 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), p. 320, notes the increasing tendency in the period for funeral sermons to engage in political commentary. 69 The digressive possibilities of poetic mourning are also exploited in Donne’s ‘First Anniversary’, where he presents himself as offering a ‘dissection’ of the dead ‘world’s infirmities’ (Poems of John Donne, pp. 65–​6). 70 William Sampson, Virtus post Funera (1636), p. 12. 71 V.  Moul, Jonson, Horace and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 116.

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The poet who may be driven mad by grief and hence liable to critical outspokenness is similar to the figure of the melancholy satirist, whose innate, humour-​based disposition inclines him to rage against the all-​ too-​visible corruptions of the world.72 Like the satirist, the elegist may succumb to ‘Grief’s rage’73 and in that state rave against death itself, a world that did not appreciate the deceased, or the living who so markedly fall short of the virtue of the dead.74 John Russell, after castigating others for less than fulsome mourning of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, apologizes by claiming ‘distraction’: ‘I fear my faltring tongue, /​Distract with troubled sorrow doth you wrong!’75 John Davies of Hereford’s elegy on the death of Prince Henry offers a portrait of grief that leads to either silence or the ‘braying’ of mad distraction.76 In contrast, however, to formal verse satire, the funeral elegy commonly allowed an opportunity for a more sombre reflection on such general melancholy themes as the decay of the world and the evil of the times. A satirist was compelled into this recognition by spleen and temperament, but the elegist was compelled by the stark occasion. A  poet such as Michael Drayton might use both genres, and in both of them treat the same topics, but the tone of each is distinct. J. W. Hebel suggests that in Drayton the elegist we find ‘not the irritated reaction of a disappointed poet [that is, the satirist], but a conclusion based on observation and thought’.77 However, I would modify this description by emphasizing the role of emotion, even emotional excess, in the funeral elegy. The difference is that the elegist can ethically justify the satiric anger that emerges from his sorrow: such response is owed to the dead. At times, an allowance for the madness of grief extends beyond the poet to afflict the grieving reader; so, Cyril Tourneur addresses the reader of his elegy on Francis Vere: ‘I know thy sight /​With weeping is imperfect, if not

72 A.  Kernan, The Cankered Muse (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1959), pp. 110–​13. 73 Sir Henry Goodere, ‘Elegie on the untimely Death of the incomparable Prince, Henry’, Lachrymae Lachrymarum (1613), sig. F4r. 74 J. Sylvester, ‘Elegiac Epistle’, in Works, vol. 2, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (New York: AMS, 1967), p. 283, ll. 63–​5. 75 J.  Russell, An elegie upon the death of the most illustrious and victorious Prince Gustavus Adolphus King of Swethland (1633), p. 1. 76 Muses Teares (1613), sig. B4v. 77 Michael Drayton, Works of Michael Drayton, vol. 5, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 213.

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blind, /​And sorrow does almost distract thy mind.’78 William Browne, in his elegy on the Countess of Pembroke, represents appropriate grief in this way:

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He that had ta’en to heart thy parting hence, Should have been chain’d in Bethlem two hours thence; And not a friend of his e’er shed a tear, To see him for thy sake distracted there; But hugg’d himself for loving such as he, That could run mad with grief for losing thee. (ll. 95–​100)

Thus, the grief-​distracted elegist is a less isolated figure than the satirist: a broader community of sorrow (often more than human) is invited to join this state.

Political concerns of the early Stuart funeral elegy As the following chapters will show, the distracted digressions in the funeral elegy most often move in a political direction. In some cases, the movement of such digressions into political matters is unsurprising, given the position and prominence of the dead, as in elegies on Queen Anne, King James, and the Duke of Buckingham. However, I  will argue that the death of more minor figures also frequently served as an opportunity for political poetic comment. Unlike many other genres, funeral elegies are firmly rooted in particular moments, and most importantly those moments can be identified because, as more fully outlined below, most elegies were written within a few weeks of the particular death they commemorate. Within the typical seventeenth-​century mental framework, the virtuous dead experience no loss:  the awaiting eternal reward was often imagined by the elegist. However, the elegist, family, community, nation, or world felt the pain of absence and the loss of the dead’s contribution to the world of the living. Furthermore, the deceased could be thought of as heaven’s gain but earth’s loss; for example, Donne laments the 1625 death of the Marquis Hamilton, Lord Steward: ‘What ever order grow /​Greater by him [the Marquess Hamilton] in heaven, wee doe not so.’79 Donne continues in this poem by precisely defining what spheres are hampered by the death: The household widdow’d, and the garter slack; The Chappell wants an eare, Councell a tongue; Story, a theame; and Musicke lacks a song; (ll. 14–​16)

78 Cyril Tourneur, The Death of Prince Henrie, in Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, vol. 2, ed. John Churton Collins (1878; rpt Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries, 1978), p. 210. 79 ‘An hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton’, in Donne, Poems.

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Similarly, William Habington concludes his elegy on Henry Campbell, ‘Wee’le to thee  /​Write hymnes, upon the world an Elegie’.80 Cedric C.  Brown argues convincingly that such weighing of the public loss was part of the ‘admonishing laying to heart’ integral to the funerary process, and hence the ‘ “political” dimensions of “Lycidas” are themselves part of a funerary ritual, not an intrusion into it’.81 While best known in ‘Lycidas’, this lamenting of the loss to the community, the nation, the world, is central to many of the daring elegies considered in this book: for, in anatomizing the loss, a picture –​often satiric, sometimes prophetic –​of the miserable state of the remaining world would often emerge. Despite their recognition of the heavenly reward of the virtuous, elegists often express a deeply felt sense of injustice: it seems unfair to the elegist that the wicked outlive the virtuous. Thus, Habington asks, ‘Why alive /​Is yet disorder’d greatnesse, and all they /​Who the loose lawes of their wilde blood obey?’.82 Thus, Peter Leigh laments the death of Thomas Yale (d. 1619): ‘Thousands (quoth I) there in the wide world be /​wch death wold better satisfy then he’.83 And from this sense of unfairness comes a focus on the deeply flawed survivors. Such might be called the ‘How well could I have spar’d for thee’ trope, to borrow St Peter’s famous line in ‘Lycidas’, when he begins his scathing critique of the corrupt shepherds/​bishops.

The elegist and public grief While allowing more scope for personal grief than other funerary artistic forms, elegies still were public works, within which poets felt obliged to move beyond the private loss felt by an individual mourner to a concern for the broader effect of the death. For example, Carew presents the death of Lady Martha Peniston as an occasion of public, shared grief, to which individual voices contribute:     universall losses may command A subsidie from every private eye, And presse each pen to write; so to supply, And feed the common griefe;84 80 ‘An Elegy upon The Honourable Henry Cambell [sic], sonne to the Earle of Ar.’, in Habington, Poems, p. 88. 81 C.  Brown, ‘Mending and Bending the Occasional Text:  Collegiate Elegies and the Case of “Lycidas”’, in C.  B.  Brown and A.  F.  Marotti (eds), Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 191. 82 ‘An Elegy upon … the Earle of Ar.’, Habington, Poems, p. 87. 83 Peter Leigh, ‘An elegy on the Death of Mr. Thomas Yale son to Dr. Yale Chancellor [1587–​1608] to the bp. of Chester’, Bodl. Dodsworth MS 61, fol. 74v. 84 T.  Carew, ‘An Elegie on the La:  Pen:  sent to my Mistresse out of France’, in The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949), p. 20.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

While some scholars have touched on this question of private and public grief, only Matthew Greenfield fully addresses this question:  he identifies a general shift in the period from public to private elegy, with poets highlighting the ceremonial obligation they fulfil but becoming increasingly self-​conscious about publicly lamenting those to whom they were not close.85 He seeks ‘an interpretive approach that accounts for both the public and the private tasks of the elegist –​and the tensions between them’.86 Where Pigman adopted a psychological approach to the genre, Greenfield grounds his argument in anthropology. The present study, while it finds Greenfield’s attention to public and private helpful, attends more to the historical moment of the elegy, and in particular its public, political role within that moment. For even among largely private elegies, poets are liable to diverge into public, political statement, as they consider what the public realm has lost in a particular death. There are occasions where the elegist speaks on behalf of a community or the public in response to a notable death. This is most often the case with someone like Prince Henry, where there was a strong sense of unified, widespread public grief, or in intentionally cultivated volumes of elegies (print or manuscript), especially those produced within the universities. However, more common is the scenario in which the poet responds to the lack of a proper communal response:  there have not been other (or sufficient) elegies, and the poet stands alone in commemorating the deceased. He and the deceased are closely joined, but the broader community has cut itself off through neglect of its mournful duty. In some of these situations, the elegist indicts the community for its failure to live up to the standard of the dead; all others fall short, including the poet, but he or she at least recognizes this loss. Most often, then, the elegist is an isolated figure, more connected to the dead and his or her virtues than to the living. While Spenser’s elegy on Sidney, Astrophel, addresses the pastoral community, it is ultimately ‘Made not to please the living but the dead’.87 The poet may serve as an intermediary between the living and the dead, but his ultimate commitment is to the latter, as articulated in Habington’s striking final clause quoted above, ‘I serve the dead’. Many elegies address the dead and hence perform their connection as one to be read (shamefully) by the living world, which stands outside this relationship of grief.

85 M.  Greenfield, ‘The Cultural Functions of Renaissance Elegy’, ELR 28 (1998), pp. 75–​94. 86 Greenfield, ‘The Cultural Functions of Renaissance Elegy’, p. 76. 87 E. Spenser, Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 569.

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The moment of the funeral elegy As fully discussed in the appendix on terminology, the label ‘funeral’ elegy is misleading in that most poems in the genre do not reflect the spirit of that public commemoration; instead they are usually part of an earlier moment of response to the initial news of the death. As Tourneur suggests, the time before the funeral was the ‘season for Elegies’.88 Enough elegies survive that identify their time of composition to draw some conclusions. The earliest mentioned time of composition after death is found in an elegy on the death of King James I that begins, ‘Hast thou binn dead these foure and twentye howers’.89 That by Beaumont on the Countess of Rutland (d. 1612) suggests that it was written three days after the death, as does an anonymous poem on Rev. Ambrose Fisher.90 Richard Corbett’s poem on William Howard, Baron of Effingham (d. 1615), notes that ‘Eight days have past since thou hast paid thy debt /​To sin’ (ll. 61–​2). An elegist on Lady Elizabeth Darell (d. 1638) feels obliged to apologize for letting ten days pass before composition.91 The elegy on Thomas Washington begins with a guilty admission that a month has passed without the poet offering an elegy, which thus also indicates the usual time of composition. Similarly, an elegy on Beaumont by George Lucy (‘I doe not wonder Beaumont thou art dead’) begins by referring to a month passing with no elegies having been written.92 ‘An Elegy on Antonella by Sir Francis Lower’ notes that two months have passed since her death but the grief has grown no less.93 Kay found something similar in fictional laments of Agelastus in Sidney’s Arcadia: there is little consolation and such ‘is consistent with the idea that the elegy is properly associated with the period of the prothesis [the period when the body is lying in state or repose], and thus primarily with the shock of grief.’94 Dates of entry into the Stationers’ Register confirm this dating. For example, the vast majority of elegies on Prince Henry (d. 6 November 1612) were entered in November and early December, with the peak around the time of the funeral on 7 December. The indefatigable John Taylor actually had his entered on 7 November: the sceptic might wonder if he had already begun penning it

88 ‘To my Noble Maister Mr. George Carie’, A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie, in Tourneur, Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur, vol. 1, p. 209. 89 BL Egerton MS 2982, fol. 149. 90 Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 160, fol. 10v. 91 ‘Obsequies of the Lady Elizabeth Darell’, Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 210, fol. 59v. 92 BL Add. MS 25707, fol. 43v. 93 Nottingham Pw V 37/​33, pp. 11–​12. 94 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 41.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

when the Prince fell ill in late October.95 Overall, then, it seems that elegies were expected to be composed within a week or two following the death. Such timing is significant for the content and the rhetoric of the poems: they more heavily express grief than consolation or commemoration, and they allow freedom of emotional expression that might be tempered at a later date. As funeral elegies respond to the fresh awareness of a death, they claim an allowance for emotional excess, outspoken commentary, and even the ‘distraction’ noted above. The norm of composing funeral elegies within a few weeks of death allows for a much more precise dating of early Stuart poems than is usually possible. Such in turn makes viable the sort of local historicist readings practised by Leah Marcus, engaging with what she aptly calls the ‘temporarily commonplace’.96 Recent scholars have often attempted historicist readings with genres such as the love lyric, epigram, and drama where dating may be very uncertain.97 In contrast, funeral elegies offer a precise moment and context, and while representative of a private grief, that grief is most often understood as connected to a public loss. Furthermore, prominent events such as deaths were generally perceived as part of a providential pattern, and hence poets and readers were primed to see events, both natural and human, in meaningful relationship to each other. Such will be especially evident in the chapters on royal deaths, where many subjects expected that these would coincide with natural phenomena, such as comets and eclipses, or broader political patterns. Such an approach may also show how one death was understood in relation to another. A cluster of deaths, especially of prominent individuals, could raise questions about divine judgment and the fate of the nation. An elegy marking a death in plague-​time might reflect upon it as part of an epidemic of death, a representative case, or attempt to present an individual marked out from the mass. Such instances prompted questions about appropriate commemoration for individuals. Poets might ask why person x had to this point been poetically ignored when the death of the far less worthy person y had been greeted by an outpouring of verse.

95 J.  Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars:  The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke, Hampshire:  Macmillan, 1997), p.  36, notes that Thomas Crosfield’s diary shows that university collections were often in ‘in print less than three weeks after the occurrence of the event’. 96 L.  S.  Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare:  Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. xii. 97 The masque as a dramatic genre closely connected with a non-​literary event shares the elegy’s precision in dating.

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Deaths of family members close in time (as with the First and Second Barons Harington of Exton in 1613–​ 14) frequently elicited elegiac comment. Josuah Sylvester’s poem ‘Honor’s Farewell’, written to mark the 1615 death of Honora Hay, laments the overwhelming series of deaths of prominent figures, beginning with Prince Henry, the two Lord Harringtons, Godolphin (presumably Sir William, who died 1613), Sir Thomas Bodley (1613), and ‘Sidney’s Rutland’ (that is, Elizabeth, d.  1612), the daughter of Sir Philip Sidney and wife of Roger Manners, Fifth Earl of Rutland).98 As will be shown in Chapters 1 and 2, the deaths of Prince Henry and Sir Thomas Overbury were referred back to by many elegies of the later 1610s. In Chapter  6, I  will explore how English poets were struck by the flurry of deaths of noblemen and prominent military men in the mid-​1620s: the Earls of Dorset (d. 1624), Nottingham (d. 1624), Southampton (d. 1624), and Oxford (d. 1625); the Duke of Richmond and Lennox (d. 1624); and Arthur, Baron Chichester (d. 1625).99 In some cases these were seen as anticipating the death of King James himself: How many Great ones here not meanly graced, In thirteen months the dance of Death have traced Three Earles, two Dukes, a Marquis & a Baron:100

One poem presents the death of King James himself in March 1625 as the crowning conquest of the arch-​king Death in this great slaughter; in another, death is a sergeant who has intruded into the court to charge men with debts owed to heaven.101 Similarly, in 1632 the consecutive deaths of the Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus, military leader of the Protestant forces in the Thirty Years War, and Prince Elector Frederick, whose acceptance of the Bohemian crown had started the conflict thirteen years earlier, also prompted reflection on that whole interminable struggle and Britain’s place within it.

Overview of chapters The death of Prince Henry in 1612 elicited the greatest number of funeral elegies for a single death in the period 1603 to 1640, and these have attracted

98 First published in 1620, R. Sibbes, All the Small Workes, in Complete Works, vol. 2, ed. A. B. Grosart (Oxford, 1863), p. 288. 99 To these were sometimes added the military deaths of 1627, including Sir John Burrows, Sir Charles Rich, and Sir John Prowde. 100 Hugh Holland, A Cypres Garland (1625), sig. A4v. 101 See Corbett’s poem in Academiae Oxoniensis Parentalia; and the elegy on King James, ‘Of late a Serjeant notinge ye reporte’, BL Add. MS 22118, fol. 24v–​25r.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

a significant degree of scholarly attention. My first chapter thus focuses on a limited group of elegies, those which, rather than unproblematically joining the chorus of sorrow, offered a note of discord or question. In some cases, this discord reflected the potentially competitive nature of commemoration  –​competition either among poets or with other memorial forms. ‘Detraction’ thus became an element of the elegiac response. In other cases, a mingled personal and national grief raised troubling questions about the state of Britain. Arthur Gorges pursues these questions in his Olympian Catastrophe, which uses a dialogic form to question the certainty of those elegists who saw Prince Henry’s death as the loss of future national greatness. The chapter concludes with an exposition of John Davies of Hereford’s The Muses Teares, which boldly raises troubling questions about the relationship between King James and his dead son. Through a series of strikingly subversive parallels, Davies offers a stark contrast to the bulk of elegies on the Prince, one which even touches upon the rumours of poisoning as the cause of his death. Chapter 2 explores the complex dynamics of poetically commemorating those who died as political prisoners or through state execution. In these poems the conventions of the genre confront the exceptional circumstances of death. Poets struggle to lament publicly the deaths of perceived threats to the state, such as Stuart, Overbury, and Ralegh. The normal elegiac process is disrupted, and the deaths provide an opportunity to reflect upon the political situation that led to imprisonment or execution. While often acknowledging the dead as guilty of ambition or indiscretion, they also obliquely point to the culpability of others, most often the King or his councillors and favourites. While Prince Henry’s death had elicited a massive elegiac outpouring, royal deaths over the following two decades prompted a more limited and muted response. Chapter  3 explores how poets read royal deaths in relation to surrounding phenomena, both astronomical and political:  the coincidence of the death of Queen Anne (d. 1619) with a prominent comet prompted commentary on the significance of such astral phenomena for the nation. King James’s death was met by an elegiac response that struggled to mourn in the face of a nearly immediate royal wedding of King Charles and Henrietta Maria. These poems also show a tendency to understand one royal death in relationship to another through echoes of theme, language, and metaphor. While many of the printed elegies on Anne and James maintained a careful and limited focus of lament, manuscript elegies ranged more widely, including into matters of detraction and critique. The widely circulating ‘Yow towringe spirits’ affirms the Queen’s quiet hospitality and patronage while castigating other members of the elite that fall short of this standard. Likewise, elegies that commemorated the dead James as

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peace-​maker inevitably raised questions –​and some quite directly –​about the more bellicose approach being taken by King Charles and the Duke of Buckingham. Chapter  4 turns to elegies on English military figures who died in the 1620s, a decade which saw significant failures, in conflicts both with Spain (the Cadiz expedition of 1625) and then France (the Isle of Rhé, 1627), and in the ongoing attempt to support indirectly the Protestant struggle against Imperial forces in the Thirty Years War. The chapter begins by reaching back to the elegies that marked the death of Sir Philip Sidney a generation earlier in similar circumstances; these serve as a touchstone to consider how the genre had developed over the decades since. While largely praising the heroic dead, the 1620s funeral elegies reflect deep unhappiness with British foreign policy in general and with specific military and political leadership, especially that of the Duke of Buckingham. The deceased stands as a model against which others can be criticized, and the funeral elegy as a genre thus allows for a probing consideration of the conduct of the war effort. The most extended discussion is of a sequence of poems, consisting of an introductory verse letter, an elegy, and two epitaphs, on the death of the Earl of Southampton in late 1624. Ultimately, the sequence offers a harsh diatribe against the Dutch allies for whom Hampshire has offered up this local hero. That theme is also pursued by an elegy on Thomas Scott, a soldier turned preacher who in 1626 was mysteriously assassinated in Utrecht by an English soldier. Buckingham himself is the subject of Chapter 5: his deep unpopularity led to an exceptional number of poems, some of which can be described as ‘mock elegies’, which celebrated the assassination or at least were sympathetic to John Felton, the assassin. Some of these have received significant scholarly attention from Alastair Bellany and James Holstun. However, less noticed have been those sincere elegies that in commemorating the Duke were compelled to adopt new rhetorical strategies of a primarily defensive nature to counter both general public perception and particular instances of satiric attack upon him. These elegies are far more combative than any other examples of the genre, and frequently they attack the ‘detraction’ of poems against Buckingham and ironically invoke norms of commemoration and elegy to do so. One particularly arresting example, the widely circulating ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’, not only counters the satiric attacks, but suggests that they (and Felton) have transformed Buckingham into a holy sacrifice for the nation. Finally, a poem unique to a single Edinburgh manuscript offers a corrective to both of the satiric elegies attacking Buckingham and defends him as a military man in a fashion that counters the implicit criticism offered in those poems considered in Chapter 4.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

The deep unpopularity of Buckingham had rendered his a difficult death to elegize in any conventional way, and the suicide of Robert Kerr, Second Earl of Lothian, raised similar challenges for its elegist, William Douglas of Tofts, the subject of Chapter 6. This long, extraordinary poem is the only English elegy from the period in which a death by suicide is commemorated without correction or judgement. In fact, the poem goes further than that by taking the occasion to offer a defence of suicide based largely upon classical arguments and examples. The poem and its context are rendered all the more complex by the mysteries surrounding Lothian’s death: there were rumours that murder, not suicide, was the cause of death, and a few years later two Scottish women were convicted of witchcraft in relationship to it. If this were not sensational enough, William Douglas was said by some to be not only the close friend of Lothian but also his wife’s lover. That the poem comes down to us in a single manuscript copy that was in fact edited and added to by another poet decades later adds further complications to an already sensational situation. The widely influential idealizing elegies of women by Donne in the period 1608–​15 and the scandal-​courting responses to these by Beaumont are relatively well known, but Chapter 7 turns to less familiar elegies on elite women in the 1620s and 1630s. Many such poems maintained a focus on the domestic familial realm, but a number went further in presenting such deaths in broader social, ecclesiastical, or national terms. Central to this chapter are the largely neglected poems of Thomas Pestell, who more than any other elegist seeks to be an ‘arche-​flamen’ for a pantheon of worthy women. However, he faced poetic competition to achieve this role. His poems are marked by a strong sense of elegiac inheritance descending from Donne, and especially Beaumont, and secondly, by a distinct tendency to satiric digression, particularly upon other elegists. The deaths of certain aristocratic women known for religious patronage in the 1630s –​Lady Huntingdon and Lady Chesterfield –​prompted an internecine struggle over their memory on the part of elegists. Chapter  8, ‘From robe to winding sheet’, considers a selection of the many early Stuart funeral elegies on scholars and churchmen. While such might seem to enjoy quiet lives unripe for contentious elegies, a significant number nevertheless provoked daringly intense poetic reflections. In some cases their deaths prompted lament over the state of the church (a pattern best known in the St Peter section of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’); in others, like those on Sir Henry Savile, the theology or scholarship of the deceased made them notorious or divisive in both life and death; and in some cases, like the death of John King, Bishop of London, their memory became contested, as various factions competed to claim them as their own.

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The final short chapter departs from my general approach of considering groups of elegies on an individual or group of similar figures, turning instead to more scattered instances of a recurring trope:  that the ‘distraction’ of elegiac grief might extend to matters of religious conviction. In particular, I consider how clearly Protestant poets present themselves as slipping into heterodoxy during the distraction of grief. These elegists evoke a slide into distinctly Catholic patterns of thought and language regarding the dead, ones that were rejected by orthodox Protestantism.

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Prince Henry

In November 1612 when Prince Henry, heir to the English and Scottish thrones, died at the age of eighteen, the diplomat Isaac Wake described the public grief: ‘I must confess never to have seen such a sight of mortification in my life, nor never so just a sorrowe so well expressed as in all ye spectators, whose streaming eyes made knowen howe much inwardly their harts did bleed.’1 One dimension of this response was what Michael Ullyot rightly calls an ‘unprecedented’ outpouring of poetic grief: ‘Nearly every active poet in London, Edinburgh, and both universities contributed an elegy to the more than forty memorial anthologies and single-​author volumes that were printed or circulated in manuscript.’2 Some funeral elegies self-​consciously gestured towards the efforts of the whole English poetic guild: Thames hath more Swannes, that will his praises sing In sweeter tunes, bee-​pluming his sad Hearce,3

Such a metaphor rather suggests a community all singing at least in harmony, if not in unison. However, as this chapter will show, there were elements of discord in this poetic outpouring. Furthermore, these poems reflect a fascinating tension between public and private grief that was becoming part of the common language of the 1 Isaac Wake to Lady [Carleton], 19 Dec. 1612, TNA SP 14/​71/​68. 2 ‘The Fall of Troynovant: Exemplarity after the Death of Henry, Prince of Wales’ in Alan Shepard and Stephen D.  Powell (eds), Fantasies of Troy:  Classical Tales and the Social Imaginary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Toronto:  Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), p. 279. See also Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 124. The closest parallel may be the response to the death of Spain’s King Philip II in 1598 that led to numerous published accounts and funeral sermons (C. M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-​Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 257–​8, 300–​6.) 3 John Webster, A Monumental Column, in The Works of John Webster, vol.  3, ed. David Gunby et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 384, ll. 314–​5.

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funeral elegy. George Wither’s Prince Henries Obsequies repeatedly returns to this tension, suggesting that if this were simply his personal loss he might find comfort, but instead here is ‘no private Crosse’ but ‘a generall a publike losse’.4 J. W. Williamson argues that the extent to which so many experienced the loss of Henry as a deeply personal as well as public experience suggests ‘the power of Henry’s myth’ as a conqueror-​saviour figure.5 However, I would add that these expressions show the generic development of the personal elegy of direct lament and reflection rather than the more narrative-​based chronicle elegy or the indirection of the allegorical or pastoral elegy. Poets were compelled to direct the increasingly personal mode of expression in the genre towards the most public of events. Wither asserts that this is a public, national loss, but in poetically describing the effect of the funeral procession upon the ‘vulgar’ crowds, he inscribes his own private loss within this public mourning: Sorrow became more busie with the mind, And drew an Armie of sad passions on;     Which made them so particularly mone,     Each amongst thousands seem’d as if alone.6

Such emphasis upon the funeral elegy as a more private genre reflects changes in the preceding decades of the expectations of that genre. Awareness of the broad communal response also pushed funeral elegists towards a poetics of rivalry. Such became a marked feature with notable deaths over the next few decades: the flourishing of funeral elegies in the early seventeenth century created a competitive poetic landscape, in which individual poets strove to claim the authenticity of their own poetic response in contrast to the formulaic gestures of rivals.7 In their awareness of rivals, poets claimed that if elegies became automatic, a merely conventional part of the funerary response, then the poetic gesture itself became debased. Wye Saltonstall presented it in this way thirty years later: ‘since that blacks and racked funerall Verse /​Attend upon each wealthy common Hearse’, the poet must specifically inventory the attributes of the worthy, ‘To mount above

4 George Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies (1612), Elegy 3, [sig. A4v]. 5 Jerry W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart, a Study of 17th Century Personation (New York: AMS, 1978), p. 175. 6 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 32, [sig. C4r]. The fullest account of the funeral itself is found in Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1997), pp. 148–​65. 7 On the ‘agonistic elegiac negotiation over notions of poetic lineage and legacy’ among elegists on the deaths of poets (such as Donne), see Charles Green, ‘ “A Tomb your Muse must to his Fame supply”: Elegising Donne in Manuscript and Print’, JDJ 35 (2018): pp. 57–​86.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy

them and thereby to stunn /​Those vulgar wayes’.8 The poet must somehow rise above the multitude to mark the truly worthy. While funeral elegies habitually use the singular voice, they often claim to express the grief not just of their poet, but of the community of readers who share the loss in their reading of the poem, and such a sense of a broad unquestioned communal grief is stronger with Prince Henry’s death than any other in the period. Some publications reflect this cooperation:  the dramatists Webster, Tourneur, and Heywood combined in a volume printed by Nicholas Okes, and William Browne and Christopher Brooke’s Two elegies, consecrated to the memorie of Henry, prince of Wales (1613), extolled the community of sorrow. Brooke presents himself as writing a lesser work, that might serve as ‘ground-​worke to the rest’, a base ‘where their columbs [sic] stand’.9 The most significant communal work was Josuah Sylvester’s Lachrimae Lachrimarum; the first edition included poems by Walter Quin, the prince’s tutor, as well as Sylvester himself, but its fourth (1613) edition was augmented with ‘Sundry Funeral Elegies’ by a wide range of other writers, including Donne and Edward Herbert. These volumes were the print equivalent to the manuscript elegies and epitaphs conventionally pinned upon a hearse; despite the avowed unity in their subject of sorrow, competition played its part. Jonson famously reported that Donne wrote his in order ‘to match Sir Ed:  Herbert in obscureness’, a comment that, while disparaging both poets, may accurately capture a studied self-​consciousness among those offering elegies.10 The elegists on Henry were participating in a competition for the shifting favour of the new Henry-​less court scene: they were expressing what Richard Corbett called ‘ambitious teares’.11 John Webster, for example, scorns the ‘waste Elegies [which] to his Tombe repaire’, and points to George Chapman as the only one worthy of commemorating the Prince (l. 68).12 And Chapman himself, 8 BL Harl. MS 509, fol. 6r. 9 Christopher Brooke and William Browne, Two elegies, consecrated to the memorie of Henry, prince of Wales (1613), sig. B2v. 10 See Terry G. Sherwood, ‘Reason, Faith, and Just Augustinian Lamentation in Donne’s Elegy on Prince Henry’, Studies in English Literature 13 (1973), pp. 53–​9, and Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) on the elegiac response of the Donne coterie. 11 Richard Corbett, ‘In Quendam Anniversariorum Scriptorem’, l. 14, in The Poems of Richard Corbett ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-​Roper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), p. 9. See Elkin Calhoun Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1946), pp. 163–​66, on references to Charles in the Prince Henry elegies. 12 Lines  260, 68; Webster,  Works. While Chapman’s elegy had been entered in the Stationers’ Register on 11 December (and that of Webster on 25 December), this passage suggests that Webster had not yet seen it.

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claiming a special place in relationship to the Prince, warns off unworthy poetasters from an elegiac role; he hopes his Muse will give him power to

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   adorne my dearest Fautors Herse, That all the wits prophane, of these bold times May feare to spend the spawne of their rancke rymes On any touch of him, that shold be sung To eares divine, and aske an Angels tongue.13

Ullyot suggests that Chapman ‘inspired rampant anxiety among the prince’s elegists’,14 as would the high prestige of many of the others who offered elegies (Chapman, Donne, Heywood, Sir John Davies); however, such anxiety did little to curb the poetic outpouring. For example, Henry’s death prompted George Wither, who would go on to poetically address nearly every major public event over the next half century, to venture into print for the first time: Fate would (perhapps) my Muse, as yet unknowne, Should first in Sorrowes livery be showne.15

Prince Henry’s death also marked a significant shift from Latin to English as the dominant mode of commemoration. Here a comparison with Sir Philip Sidney is helpful: a predominantly Latin elegiac response marked his death in 1586, with the most significant volumes, Peplus illustrissimi viri D.  Philippi Sidnaei and the two university volumes, almost fully in Latin (Academiae Cantabrigiensis lachrymae includes a few Greek and Hebrew verses). In contrast, the equivalent Cambridge volume for Prince Henry, Epicedium Cantabrigiense, concludes with fourteen pages of English poetry (some of which will be discussed below),16 and the bulk of major poets who elegized him did so in English.

13 Epicede, in George Chapman, Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p.  261. On Chapman’s relationship with Prince Henry, see Gilles Bertheau, ‘Prince Henry as Chapman’s “Absolute Man”’, in Timothy Wilks (ed.), Prince Henry Revived:  Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (London: Paul Holbertson; Southampton Solent University, 2008), pp. 134–​45. 14 Ullyot, ‘The Fall of Troynovant’, p. 283. 15 ‘To the Whole World in Generall and More Perticularly to the Iles of Great Brittaine And Ireland. &c.’, George Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies (1612), [sig. A1r]. 16 The equivalent Oxford volume, Eidyllia In Obitum Fulgentissimi Henrici Walliae Principis, remained a strictly non-​English volume. Wilson, Prince Henry and English Literature, p. 146, cites the three eclogues at the centre of the volume as ‘superior examples of their kind’.

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The detraction of other memorial forms In closing his elegy on the courtier Thomas Murray (d. 1623) an anonymous elegist notes that he has raised ‘this paper-​Pyramide’ in place of a marble tomb or altar.17 Such a trope neatly captures elegists’ frequent desire to detract from, surpass, or supplant the material funerary forms of hearse, wax effigy, tomb, and monument, and such is especially true of those on Prince Henry, for whom there was such a range of commemorations, both material and verbal.18 However, the lines between these different cultural responses to death were not fixed:  elegies might be temporarily pinned to a hearse, or, less commonly, actually engraved upon the tomb or a tablet near it. Published engravings of monuments and effigies extended the significance and effect of them. Henry’s effigy was the first of its kind to have ‘an engraving of hearse and effigy produced’.19 Thus, Prince Henry’s elegists were aware of the material commemorations of him, and they repeatedly responded to the physical components of the funerary process, offering the living poetic word as a superior form of continuing commemoration, one that better captures both the qualities of mind and soul of the dead prince and the inward grief of mourners.20 Peter Sherlock has argued that funerary monuments of the time ‘fix’ a memory, by making it a ‘self-​conscious and contained act’, and that they ‘attempt to subdue other versions’ by discharging society ‘from the obligation to remember’.21 In tension with this impetus, the elegy is expressive of a moment of grief: it presents itself not as a gesture of willed remembering, but as one of unavoidable remembering. At least fictionally it suggests that grief is living and continuing. Thus, George Wither responds poetically to the ‘dead-​living Image’ of the wax effigy of the Prince; he calls this ‘antique

17 BL Harl. MS 3910, fol. 146v. 18 Strickland, ‘Not So Idle Tears’, p.  69. William Hole produced an engraving of Henry’s hearse and effigy; it is reproduced as plate 90 in Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1986). On the funeral itself, see Woodward, The Theatre of Death, pp. 148–​67; and Gregory McNamara, ‘ “Grief was as clothes to their backs”: Prince Henry’s Funeral viewed from the Wardrobe’, in Timothy Wilks (ed.), Prince Henry Revived:  Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (London:  Paul Holbertson; Southampton Solent University, 2008), pp. 259–​79. 19 Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 163. 20 Joshua Scodel and Steven Zwicker, The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 19–​20. 21 Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), p. 5.

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curious rite’ into question, but then embraces it as an opportunity to poetically ‘moralize’: it shew’d that though he wanted breath, Yet he should ride in tryumph over death.22

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The very title of John Webster’s Monumental Column gestures towards rival physical forms of commemoration, and he suggests that If Princes thinke that Ceremony meet To have their corps imbalm’d to keepe them sweet: Much more they ought to have their Fame exprest In Homer, though it want Darius Chest23

Any princely desire for embalming is questionable, and Webster presents the offer of poetic commemoration as a certain and greater memento. Ironically, the allusion to Darius’ chest actually invokes an image of poetry rather than great men being preserved: Alexander the Great used the chest spoiled from Darius to honour not any monarch or military leader but the poet Homer, whose Iliad was placed within it. Prince Henry was buried in Westminster Abbey, in the company of his royal predecessors (including his grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, who had been moved there in 1612),24 but an appropriate memorial tomb was never built. King James seems to have intended one –​there were rumours of plans by late December 1612. Elizabeth Goldring rehearses the various arguments to explain this, and she suggests that William Hole’s widely known engraving of the effigy and hearse came to stand in the place of a monument.25 Similarly, Jennifer Woodward has argued that the costly funeral itself was a testimony to the King’s honouring of his son and that the wax effigy of Prince Henry, which remained to adorn the chapel until the eighteenth century, served as an alternative to a stone effigy.26 I would 22 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 42, sig. D2v. 23 Webster, The Works of John Webster, vol. 3, p. 375, ll. 15–​18. 24 Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 140. 25 E. Goldring, ‘ “So just a sorrowe so well expressed”:  Henry, Prince of Wales and the Art of Commemoration’, in Timothy Wilks (ed.), Prince Henry Revived: Image and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (London: Paul Holbertson; Southampton Solent University, 2008), p. 295. 26 Woodward, Theatre of Death, pp. 162–​5. The effigy was on display as late as 1725 (p.  163). The young sisters of the Prince, Sophia (d.  1606) and Mary (d.  1607), were commemorated by monuments (John Physick, ‘The Royal, the Great and the Good: The History of the Later Monuments’, in Tim Tatton-​Brown (ed.), Westminster Abbey:  The Lady Chapel of Henry VII (Woodbridge, Suffolk:  Boydell & Brewer, 2003), p. 302. Peter Sherlock notes that the lack of a monument for Prince Henry did not prove to be exceptional: no stone funeral monument was produced for any

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add that the many elegies came to fill a similar need. The grimly decayed remnants of this effigy survive in the Undercroft Museum of Westminster Abbey, a fitting emblem perhaps of the English disappointment over the Henry IX that never was.27 Ironically, then, the elegists on Prince Henry competed with a monumental stone tomb that was planned but never achieved. However, some elegists wrote in the expectation that an impressive lasting stone monument would be built, and hence their poems offer a rival response. Less dismissive of memorial rivals than some poets, Robert Allyne affirms the wonder of Henry’s would-​be tomb, where, with his royal forebears, he will seem preserved in marble; however, he claims an even more important role for poetic commemoration: Yet [they] cannot so paint out the Soules perfection, A greater taske then Painters art performes,     To brave oblivion with his memorie,     Concernes the sacred art of Poetrie28

He hopes for a British Orpheus that might compel these stones to hear;29 such a figure, which Allyne never quite claims to be, would more worthily attract the throngs that come to view the Westminster tombs. This contemplation prompts an epitaphic attempt by Allyne, one that stutters in uncertainty as it attempts to employ the usual language (‘Here lies …’) of the genre: Here lyes (but Ah how can hee lye so low? Who living still aspired to be high.) Yet heere he lies (and doth his soule also? No sure it mounts immortall th’rough the skie) Heere lyes (why then where are his vertues gone? And are those too in toomb’de within this stone.) Once more, heere lyes the body of a Prince, Whom nature grac’d with such divine perfection,

English monarch or consort between Queen Elizabeth and Prince Albert (Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, p. 20). 27 At some point between 1612 and 1624 a figure of Prince Henry was added to the tomb of Queen Elizabeth: the 1624 edition of Samuel Purchas’ Hakluytus Posthumus shows the tomb with Prince Henry ‘seated at the Queen’s feet in melancholy contemplation of her’ (A. White, ‘Westminster Abbey in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Powerhouse of Ideas’, Church Monuments 4 (1989), pp. 23, 27). See also Physick, ‘The Royal, the Great and the Good’, pp. 295–​314. 28 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. B1v. 29 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. B2r.

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That all that e’re were borne before, or since, Did choose him for their chiefe by rare election.30

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Clearly, however, Allyne both expects an actual marble monument and pre-​ emptively creates one in his imagination, with which his poetry successfully competes. An elegy (probably by Giles Fletcher) in the Cambridge volume honouring the Prince’s death delineates the limitations of the angels upon the tomb: Alas, the silent Angels on his tombe Can him no honour, thee [Britain] no comfort sing, Their pretie weeping lookes may well become Themselves, but him to life can never bring, Thee therefore, deerest Prince, from perishing     Or yet alive wee in our hearts will save,     Or dead with thee, our hearts shall be thy grave.31

Even the elements of the tomb that represent speech and song –​the angels –​ are ineffective, silent voices. Their appearance of sorrow (‘pretie weeping lookes’) is derided as self-​serving and fruitless.32 The real site of mourning and commemoration, even of the continuing ‘life’ of Henry’, is in the hearts of mourners, whose language the poet represents.

Funeral elegy and funeral sermon Elegists might also detract from other, written, dimensions of the funerary process, especially the funeral sermon, which Peter Marshall describes as ‘the definitive Protestant instrument of commemoration’.33 Twenty years later, Thomas Carew was to deride the funeral sermon in his famous elegy on John Donne, who had himself produced numerous funeral elegies and funeral sermons. Carew represents the funeral sermon of ‘the unscissored churchman’, which will be ‘short-​liv’d as his hour, /​Dry as the sand that 30 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. B2r. 31 Epicedium Cantibrigiense, STC 4481, fol. O1r. While this passage seems to refer to a tomb that never existed, it may point to the funereal monumental to Mary, Queen of Scots, which includes angels on the arch above it. Fletcher may have come to equate the tomb with Henry himself. Another possibility is that the poet is referring to the very prominent angels on the famous tomb of Henry VII, which is also in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey. 32 Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, pp. 134, 146, notes that angels ceased to appear on tombs after the Elizabethan reformation but began to reappear in the early seventeenth century. 33 Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 268.

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measures it’. In contrast, an elegy would be a more fitting vehicle to capture ‘the flame /​Of [Donne’s] brave soul’. Such competition between two verbal modes of commemoration is centremost in the rivalry between the preacher Daniel Price and the widely circulated manuscript poet Richard Corbett over the memory of Prince Henry. Price, a royal chaplain in attendance upon Henry at the time of his death, preached and published a series of sermons on Henry’s death: the first two were preached at the royal chapel of St James on 10 and 15 November immediately following the death.34 These were followed by further Price sermons on the first and second anniversaries.35 In response to this ongoing ‘programme’ of sermon-​based commemoration, Richard Corbett and Brian Duppa composed a number of poems that are not funeral elegies per se but imply poetry as the paramount means of commemoration. Corbett’s poem, beginning ‘Even soe dead Hector’, presents the ‘ambitious teares’ of Price’s sermons as unworthy memorials to Henry,36 that ‘murther him in Prose’. Instead, Corbett suggests, ‘some richer pen’37  –​presumably writing in verse  –​should commemorate him. Funeral and anniversary sermons are thus presented as rivals to elegies, a genre which Corbett much practised in these years. Both Corbett’s poems and Duppa’s proceed by coupling Price’s annual sermons with more downmarket print publications. Corbett suggests that Price’s November/​ December publications were in competition with –​and hence similar to –​ the almanacs of Dade and Hopton brought out annually at that time of the year. The poem picks up on Price’s evocation of a dire November38 and the significance of Henry dying on the sixth day of the month: 34 These were published early in 1613 as Lamentations for the death of the late illustrious Prince Henry. This work was expanded shortly afterwards by further sermons in Spirituall odours to the memory of Prince Henry in foure of the last sermons preached in St. James after his Highnesse death (1613). 35 Prince Henry his first anniversary (Oxford, 1613) and Prince Henry his second anniversary (Oxford, 1614)  (dated 6 November, the anniversary of the death). The Oxford DNB on Price suggests that his programme of sermons was influenced by Donne’s Anniversaries on Elizabeth Drury. There were other examples of ‘anniversary sermons’ in the period. Nathaniel Shute’s funeral sermon on Richard Fishburne was published a year later as The Crowne of Charitie (1626), and Donne offered an anniversary sermon on Lady Danvers; Sermons, vol.  8, ed. G.  R.  Potter and E.  M.  Simpson (Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1962), p.  85. Some wills established a bequest to fund an annual sermon in which the benefactor would be named (Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 282). 36 Corbett’s opening reference to Hector may have been suggested by the epigraph on the title page of Teares shed over Abner in Spirituall Odour (1613): ‘Hectora flemus’ [we weep for Hector] (from Seneca’s Troades, l. 98). The trope of Henry as Hector (and hence James as Priam) will be discussed more fully below. 37 Corbett, Poems, p. 9, l. 20. 38 Price, Second anniversary, p. 41.

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Trust mee, November doth more ghastly looke In Dade and Hoptons pennyworth, then thy booke: And sadder record their sixt figure beares, Then thy false-​printed and ambitious teares.39

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Likewise, Duppa’s poem opens by linking Price’s sermons with sensational news and pseudo-​news: Since Sussex dragon,40 or lowe country newes41 What more torments the Presse; who next ensues, To shew the world a Monster?42

The first reference is to the sensational pamphlet True and wonderfull:  a discourse relating a strange and monstrous serpent, or dragon, lately discovered, printed in August 1614. The reference to ‘low countrye newes’ is also topical: the Cleves-​Julich conflict (on the succession to the Duchy of Cleves) had been ongoing since 1609, with an Anglo-​Dutch army involved in support of the Duke of Brandenburg’s claim. Since it was resolved on 12 November 1614, news of it would have been very current when Price’s sermon was published. Thus, Duppa’s lines connect the sermon with the sensational topicality and doubtful reliability of news culture at the time, more concerned with feeding readers’ curiosity about monsters than solid material. Duppa also presents Price’s work as an annual ‘paper plague’ to be feared each November. Price responded in verse to Corbett’s ‘Even soe dead Hector’, which then elicited Corbett’s counter-​response; the three poems are often found together in manuscripts.43 Price’s response picks up on the detailed points of the original poem, including echoing one rhyme pair: ‘hearse’/​‘anniverse’.44 Where Corbett’s poem had used the Henry-​equals-​Hector trope to suggest that Price was desecrating the heroic prince, Price responds,

39 Price, First anniversary, p. 26, ll. 11–​14. 40 The pamphlet is discussed in A.  Hadfield, ‘News of the Sussex Dragon’, in Simon F.  Davies and Puck Fletcher (eds), News in Early Modern Europe:  Currents and Connections (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 83–​95. Hadfield notes both the popularity of the pamphlet and the widespread dismissals of it (p. 91). 41 Given that Duppa wrote the poem in response to Price’s publication in late 1614, it is likely that he is referring to the oral rumours and manuscript newsletters rather than the printed accounts of the treaty that appeared in early 1615. 42 Newcastle Bell White MS 25, fol. 13v. 43 For the most recent discussion of how Corbett’s early verse participated in a robust manuscript culture of response, see Christopher Burlinson, ‘Response and Accumulation: Textual Editors and Richard Corbett’s “Oxford Ballad”’, Studies in English Literature 52:1 (2012), pp. 35–​50. 44 Price’s poem is printed in Trevor-​Roper’s edition of Corbett, Poems, pp. 9–​10.

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So to dead Hector boyes may doe disgrace, That durst not look upon his living face. So worst of men behinde their betters back May stretch mens names and credit on the rack.

He dismisses Corbett as boyish, and Price’s second line implicitly reminds the reader that Price as a royal chaplain had a close role with the Prince. Similarly, he posits that his sermon is partly prompted by the ‘place he now doth hold’, that is as chaplain to Prince Charles. Price proceeds ‘with priviledge of name, /​Whilst others [i.e. Corbett] ’midst their Ale in Corners blame’ (ll.  11–​12). Whereas Corbett, who was strictly a coterie, manuscript-​based English poet, had mocked Price for his print-​based association with almanacs, Price denigrates Corbett for not succeeding in the print marketplace: A penny-​worth in Print they never made, yet think themselves as good as Pond or Dade. (ll. 13–​14)45

The tension, then, is not just between elegies and sermons, but between the very different media of print and manuscript, with the former being linked with a broader, popular audience by Corbett and Duppa, but embraced by Price himself as a more fit medium for public memorials.46 In his second poem Corbett acknowledges the worthiness of commemorating Henry, but identifies the audience provoked by Price as the problem: ‘But for a Cobler to goe burne his Capp, /​And cry, the Prince, the Prince, O dire mishappe!’.47 To this he adds mocking portraits of both a ‘Geneva-​bridegroome’ and ‘an old Popish-​Lady’ in the ridiculous throes of extreme grief. Thus, he groups Price’s sermons with lower-​class expressions of grief, all of which ‘Doe open Laughters, & shutt up griefes springs’ (l. 26). Whatever the sincerity of his grief, Price also used the sermons to angle for advancement in the new court landscape. His sermon on the third Sunday after the death of Henry was dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Carey, who had served as a sort of governess to Prince Charles, now heir to the throne. By the time of the Second anniversary, Price was serving as chaplain to the Prince, to whom Price dedicated the sermon. When he hopes the sermon will be a ‘profit to the living’,48 he certainly intended outwardly that it would be

45 The reference is to Edward Pond (d.  1629), a further well-​ known producer of almanacs. 46 Corbett was junior proctor at Oxford, in which capacity he presented a Latin oration in honour of the Prince, published in The Poems of Richard Corbet, ed. Octavius Gilchrist (1807), pp. 249–​59. 47 ‘In Poetam Exauctoratum et Emeritum’, ll. 17–​18; Corbett, Poems. 48 Price, Second anniversary, sig. *2r.

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a profit to the listeners, but one suspects (as Corbett and Duppa obviously did) that his unspoken motivation was profit to himself.

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Whose loss? In so general a loss as that of Prince Henry, the question arises of where to draw the boundaries of grief, and where to find its focus. Was Henry’s death a court loss, an English loss, a British one, or one for all of Europe or even Christendom? George Wither acknowledged the private mourning of each individual in the royal family; an anonymous author of Great Brittans mourning garment uses a vivid simile to contrast the general loss felt by the public with that experienced by Sir David Murray and other courtiers: We but as strangers on the shore lament, A common ship-​wracke, but you that did owe Your service to that golden vessel (rent) What wonder if your griefes doe over-​flow?49

This, like Wither’s lines, recognizes distinctions within the national community of mourning. The most focused laments dwell on the court and the physical environment of the royal homes; these partake of the widespread conceit, especially in the pastoral elegy, of the dead’s house and landscape participating in mourning the death. Thus, the poet presents Richmond Palace and Park, which the Prince had redesigned with ambitious waterworks and structures of the latest continental fashions, as directly mourning his death.50 Sandison notes that such ‘References to the prince’s desolate parks and houses are frequent in the elegies’.51 Many poets stressed that the whole of the British Isles shared equally in the loss. Richard Niccols frames his laments as those of the three sisters of Britain: ‘Angela’ (England), ‘Albana’ (Scotland), and ‘Cambera’ (Wales). For Arthur Gorges, the Prince’s death was broadly felt, but he localizes it by invoking Cornish wrestlers and Irish kerns as well as more polished London gallants among the mourners.52 More common yet were those who saw European implications (or more) for Henry’s death; in one of the Cambridge elegies, John Wilson describes Prince Henry as like a comet

49 Strickland, ‘Not So Idle Tears’, p.  70, speculates that the volume might have been ‘commissioned by the Prince’s household’. 50 Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, pp. 88–​92,  106–​9. 51 Sir Arthur Gorges, Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. Helen. E.  Sandison (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), p. 239. 52 The Olympian Catastrophe, in Gorges, Poems, ll. 37–​60.

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whose loss ‘darkened all our Northern Hemisphere’.53 The impending marriage of Henry’s sister, Princess Elizabeth, to Frederick, Elector Palatine, had heightened British consciousness of a Protestant European role for the country, in which Henry might play a leading part. Such expectations were in tension with King James’ plans of a Catholic wife for Henry, a diplomatic step that would balance Elizabeth’s ‘Protestant’ marriage.54 William Drummond of Hawthornden’s Teares on the Death of Moeliades offers a similar breadth of mourning in stylized and classical pastoral lament. Its refrain presents a conventional rendering of the universal scope for those who lament, ‘From Thuly to Hydaspes pearlie Shore’, that is, from the mythical far north to India, the traditional bounds of the known world in classical times. However, within that wide conventional scope Drummond identifies three specific European rivers as lamenting Henry: the Tagus, the Rhine, and the Seine:  ‘Tagus did court his Love, with golden Streames,  /​ Rhein with his Townes, faire Seine, with all shee claimes’.55 George Wither addressed his Prince Henries Obsequies ‘to the whole world in generall and more perticularly to the Iles of great Brittaine and Ireland’56 and within the work itself described the Prince’s lost ‘future glories’ as ‘at least all Europes expectation’.57 In Elegy 26 he extended the area affected by the loss, calling upon Europe, Africa, and Asia to join Britain in lament. Like Wither, Josuah Sylvester offers an expanding list of all who mourn, culminating in ‘all the World; except S. P. Q. R.’, that is, Rome.58 Robert Allyne’s Funerall Elegies (1613) also recognized that there would be contrary celebrations as well, that the Ottoman Empire, Rome, Spain, ‘And all that envi’de at great Brittaines blis, /​Shall change their mourning, and rejoyce at this’.59 The most universal mourning is represented by John Hagthorpe’s fine baroque elegy, which was not published until 1622. Hagthorpe, who was deeply interested in colonial enterprise and travel, imagines himself on

53 Epicedium Cantabrigiense, sig. 02r. 54 See Adrian Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics: Literary Responses to the Death of Prince Henry Stuart, 1612–​1614’, Renaissance Studies 31:1 (2017), pp. 101–​3, on the plans for Henry to marry a French (Catholic) bride and John Webster’s treatment of the issue. Streete suggests that the emphasis upon the Black Prince in this poem may be an indirect way of questioning Robert Kerr’s pro-​French policy. 55 William Drummond, Teares on the death of moeliades (Edinburgh, 1614), ll. 113–​14. 56 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, [sig. A1r]. 57 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 18, [sig. B4v]. 58 ‘Lachrymae Lachrymarum’, in Sylvester, Works, vol. 2, p. 277. 59 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. A4r. Cf. Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 38, [sig. C4v].

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‘Dedalean wings’, gathering elements from around the world with which to deck the Prince’s hearse and build his monument: Th’ Indies should yeeld us Diamonds, China Gold;    Perue the Silver that her lap doth hold; Sydon and Ormus, all their Pearle should send,    The Congian Slaves from secret Caves should rend The Chyan Marble, white Cassidonie,     Greene Lacedemon, and red Porpherie, The pure white Marble got in Palestine,    And rare Numidian spotted Serpentine.60

There’s something here of the richness of geographical reference that Milton will exploit in passages of Paradise Lost. However, it is not only exotic raw materials of the far-​flung parts of the globe that are needed, but a Tuscan architect, ‘Whose artfull wit should first these Stones dissect  /​With Sand and toothlesse Saw, and then engrave /​What stories there you memoriz’d would have’. This recalls the Prince’s own cultivation of architecture and design led by Italian masters such as the Florentines Constantino de’ Servi and Salomon de Caus for the work at Richmond.61 Such international masters and materials will assure that ‘the whole Earth [shall] be /​His tombe, and the fairest heavens his Canopie’. Roy Strong’s Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (1986) transformed our view of him by demonstrating the extent to which he was deeply engaged in the art, architecture, landscape design, and sciences of the time. Despite his young age, it was clear that he was setting out to foster a culture in Britain that partook of the leading developments on the continent. Of all the funeral elegies on the Prince, Hagthorpe’s most fully captures that dimension of the Prince’s cosmopolitan cultural ambitions.

‘A Cyrus in Minority’:62 the loss of a future king and warrior Many poets had hoped that Britain had finally found in Henry a real Renaissance prince, one willing to foster the arts, including poetry, and such patronage was certainly enjoyed by Josuah Sylvester and George Chapman. Poets also frequently suggested that the Prince would have provided glorious royal exploits as rich subject material for heroic verse. Hugh Holland recalls that Henry ‘heaw[ing] downe the Turkes like Cattle’ would have been ‘the

60 John Hagthorpe, Divine meditations, and elegies (1622), p. 89. 61 Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, pp. 88–​92,  106–​9. 62 Brooke, Two elegies, sig. C1r.

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mightie Matter’ of his song.63 While he died too young to fulfil these hopes, the idea that Henry would have been an active warrior-​king was generally embraced by those, especially of a militant Protestant stamp, who lamented his death. However, in pursuing this aspect of the Prince’s potential future, poets were treading upon the delicate ground of prophecy and foreign policy, and suggestions of what a valiant Henry might have done could implicitly impugn the present reality of what King James was not doing.64 In lamenting this lost potential reign of Henry, poets most often envision a time of British might and conquest. Richard Niccols projects that Henry would have overcome the ‘strumpet Babilon’ and have British swords ‘to dig a Tombe, /​Wherein to burie all the Pride of Rome’.65 George Wither, always apt to tread a politically perilous line, invoked the ghost of Prince Henry to speak to the nation (a technique that became prominent in the early 1620s with works that use the ghosts of Essex, Ralegh, and Prince Henry for the purpose of outspoken political prophecy). In his sonnet elegies, Wither invokes a prophetic scene that has now been temporarily disappointed: Me thought er’e while I sawe Prince Henries armes, Advanc’t above the Capitoll of Rome66

However, as Adrian Streete points out, Wither goes on to assert that another Stuart will fulfil the providential design of Protestant conquest: in this way the lost potential of Henry is cast upon his successor, Prince Charles.67 Praising the dead Prince Henry through heroic parallels from the past, both historical and mythical, invited implications and associations that extended far beyond the usual limits of elegiac grief. Frequent was the image of Henry as the fallen Hector,68 which participated in the long-​ standing legend of London as a ‘New Troy’, a tradition reinforced by Thomas Dekker’s Troia-​Nova Triumphans, the pageant performed for the Lord Mayor’s show on 29 October, just a week before his death.69 Wither,

63 Hugh Holland, Lachrymae lachrymarum (1613), sig. D3v. 64 On the prophetic elements attached to Prince Henry, see Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics’, pp. 87–​106. 65 Richard Niccols, The Three Sisters Teares, sig. D1v. 66 Elegy 35, [sig. C4v]. See also Elegy 37, where he imagines the various foes of European Protestantism quaking in fear of Henry. 67 Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics’, p. 96. 68 As noted above, Sampson Price’s response to Corbett draws on the trope of Henry as Hector as well. 69 Hans Werner, ‘A German Eye-​Witness to Troia-​Nova Triumphans’, Notes & Queries 46 (1999), pp.  251–​4, notes that Dekker’s text indicates that he expected Prince Henry to attend the show, and that he made no changes to the published text to indicate that he was prevented by his illness.

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for example, asked, ‘May not I  liken London now to Troy,  /​As she was that same day she lost her Hector’.70 The comparison of Henry to Hector allowed for a wider set of family correspondences: Heywood depicted James as a weeping Priam.71 Dudley North goes further, highlighting the military weakness of the grieving Priam/​James: If Troy lamented Hector, Grecians scourge, Farre greater grief thy death to us doth urge: Troy miss’d no Captaines, though their Hector dead, But whom hath now our Priam fit to lead With union and alacrity the Bands, Of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish Lands?72

In Arthur Gorges’ use of the trope, Princess Elizabeth becomes the grieving sister ‘faire Polixena),73 a rather troubling comparison if pursued too far. Thomas Campion’s ‘’Tis now dead night’, addressed to Queen Anne (and set to music by John Coperario), argues that her grief surpasses that of Hecuba, Hector’s mother:  ‘O singing wayle a fate more truely funerall,  /​ Then when with all his sonnes the sire of Troy did fall’. More common yet were comparisons of Henry’s potential valour to that of historical military leaders: Cyrus, Titus, and the more successful kings of England. Stephen Haxby’s ‘A plant of fairest hope’ is one of the few elegies printed in a university collection that achieved widespread manuscript circulation as well.74 Such popularity may be a testament to its poetic accomplishment –​it is an eloquent and economical poem based on the single trope of Henry as a wide-​spreading tree that would have spanned much of the earth. Its popularity in manuscript, however, may also reflect its view that Henry would have proven a ‘Cyrus-​like’ conquering ruler. Haxby extends the ramifications of this loss, not to other lands but to future generations of the British. John Webster invoked the parallel of both Titus, who was lost to death ‘For his owne good and their [the Romans] affliction’ (l. 142), and more recent military models: he suggests that Henry shared his people’s sense of his military potential, that ‘he could not reade /​Edward the blacke Princes life, but it must breed /​A vertuous emulation to have his name /​So

70 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 28, [sig. C3r]. Ullyot, ‘The Fall of Troynovant’, p. 271, also cites Gorges, Drummond, Campion, and Heywood as poets who invoked the Troy parallel in lamenting Henry’s death. 71 Ullyot, ‘The Fall of Troynovant’, pp. 281–​2. 72 Dudley North, A Forest of Varieties (1645), p. 72. 73 The Olympian Catastrophe, l. 1036; Gorges, Poems. 74 The variant openings in some manuscripts (‘A plant of fairest growth that ever stood’, ‘Oh we have lost the bravest plant that stood’) are of the sort that suggest oral or recalled transmission.

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lag behind him both in Time and Fame’.75 Edward, the Black Prince, son of Edward III, is –​in some ways –​an apt parallel: he had died before reaching the throne, and Peacham’s Period of Mourning imagines Henry in Elysium with both him and Prince Arthur (Tudor) as ones who had tragically died before reaching the throne.76 However, in his forty-​six years the Black Prince had accomplished far more than Henry had in eighteen. It is his exploits that Webster rehearses in A Monumental Column –​with typical Websterian violent imagery, or what Ruth Wallerstein calls ‘macabre realism’:77 For men thought his star Had markt him for a just and glorious war. And sure his thoughts were ours, he could not reade Edward the blacke Princes life, but it must breed A vertuous emulation to have his name So lag behind him both in Time and Fame. Hee that like lightning did his force advance, And shook to th’ Center the whole Realm of France That of warme bloud open’d so many sluces, To gather and bring thence sixe Flower de Luces.78

Once again, Prince Henry remains a would-​be military hero, a Cyrus, Titus, or Black Prince only in potential. While most funeral elegists on Prince Henry note his military prowess and the promise it held for Protestant Europe, Adrian Streete notes that some, such as Chapman, Christopher Brooke, and Henry Burton, cautiously accept that with his death, the nation must patiently accept the more peaceful workings of Providence.79 The most extreme example of this, not considered by Streete, is Arthur Gorges’ Olympian Catastrophe. Gorges pulls up short as he recognizes that grief has distracted him into the past, the time of Henry V’s military accomplishments, which he had hoped Prince Henry might emulate: But how am I digrest into lament, Rippinge up curelesse cares of long past acts? 75 A Monumental Column, ll. 142, 66–​9; Webster, The Works of John Webster, vol. 3, pp. 376–​7. Great Brittans mourning garment, sonnet 3, suggests that Prince Henry had renewed the ensign of the Black Prince, and Niccols, The Three Sisters Teares similarly links the two princes (sig. F1r–​v). 76 Henry Peacham, Period of Mourning, sig. C2v–​C3v. 77 Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-​Century Poetic (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1950), p. 87. On Webster’s commemoration of Prince Henry, and its relation to The Duchess of Malfi, see Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics’, pp. 99–​106. 78 Webster, A Monumental Column, ll. 64–​7 79 Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics’, pp. 91–​3.

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When sorrow straines, it strives to finde sume vent: For Henries very name, my sence distracts.80

Overall, this poem stands apart in its sceptical reflection upon Prince Henry and the national condition. While celebrating him as a martial hero, Gorges pulls back from projections of the would-​be future, as he has the Fate Atropos (rendered ‘Atrops’ by Gorges)81 warn that ‘all the world tis but fates tenis-​ ball /​That (with tymes racket) shall in tyme be seene’ (ll. 890–​1), and that such uncertainty applied to Henry as well. Furthermore, Atropos presents a picture of Hannibal, who would have better died after his conquest of Italy, rather than live to sit ‘on ruin’d Carthage wall, /​Wailinge his sadd mishapp and countryes fall’ (ll. 929–​30). She draws similar lessons from the fate of Scipio and Nero, and thus she boldly concludes that if Henry had          so longe  liv’d, As to be sole commander of this Ile; Who knowes not that he soone mought be deprived Of these his vertues and his fame defile,     With pride with Cowardise with blasphemy,     With prodigall will-​edged tyranny? (ll. 948–​53)

This outspoken contrary voice goes further, and is possibly used by Gorges to indirectly comment on the court of King James himself:       most kings have on eare ope To state-​subverting buzze of flattery; Which (by too often clawing) maketh scope For all her Harpie-​ravening company?     That plagueth courts with faithlesse faction,     And mightie kingdomes with exaction. (ll. 954–​60)

This scepticism about the flattery and factional corruption of the court has been in the voice of Atropos, justifying the early death of the Prince. Atropos is then interrupted and scolded by Juno –​‘Cease thy all ill-​anticipatinge chatt’ (l. 973) –​who offers a counter-​narrative of the future, in which the prince fulfils and surpasses all his early promise. The voice of Atropos, however, lingers as a shadow, a quiet suggestion by Arthur Gorges that resists other elegies’ sorrowful representation of the future king that Britain has lost. Gorges was a Gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber in his last years, and a close associate and relative of Ralegh;82 thus, the poem may reflect some of that figure’s gloomier Tower-​based perspective on the state of Britain. 80 Olympian Catastrophe, ll. 91–​4, in Gorges, Poems. 81 Atropos, of course, will be significantly alluded to in ‘Lycidas’ as the Fate that cuts off life with her ‘abhorred shears’. 82 Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 41.

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There were some non-​poetic voices that suggested the dead Prince had cultivated more sinister ambitions, that his cultivation of his own followers was a prelude to usurping his father’s power:  John Holles, Earl of Clare, feared that ‘Absolom like he might with better facility snatch the sceptre out of his father’s fist’.83 An Absalom/​Prince Henry analogy may lie behind numerous musical settings of II Samuel 18:33 in the years following his death. ‘When David heard that Absalom was slain’ was independently set to music by such notable composers as Thomas Tomkins and Thomas Weelkes.84 James Maxwell’s elegy pointedly dismisses any such suggestion about Henry and treachery, claiming ‘his aversenes from Absolomes aspiring minde’.85 George Wither was as fervent as any poet in idealizing Henry as a Papist-​ overthrowing and Turk-​conquering hero, but even he wonders if Britain had verged on idolatry of the Prince’s potential conquests: Looke here within this little place he lyes, Ev’n he that was the Universall Hope: And almost made this Ile Idolatrize, See, he’s contented with a little scope.86

Like Gorges, Wither uses a displaced voice to address the situation of the nation at the Prince’s death; his, however, is the ‘Spirit’ of Henry (but nevertheless speaking of Henry in the third person), who engages in a dialogue with Britain. The Spirit warns Britain that however worthy Prince Henry was, the nation has verged towards idolatry in its grief-​prompted invocations of him: by calling upon him as if he were the Heavenly Judge of the ‘Whore of Rome’, ‘Thou mak’st meane-​while another Whore of him:’.87 This voice also firmly instructs the other members of the royal family, in a tone which Wither (however much he later adopted a prophetic stance) was unlikely to use in his own voice at this time, when he was still courting royal favour. He sternly warns the young Prince Charles to ‘Bannish all Romish Statists’ from his court and even be suspicious of his own family for any evidence of Papist leanings. When he points to those who ‘will not at Christs

83 Letter to Lord Grey, 27 Feb. 1613, HMC Portland, IX, p. 11, qtd in Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 9. 84 See Irving Godt, ‘Prince Henry as Absalom in David’s Lamentations,’ Music & Letters 62:3–​4 (1981), pp. 318–​30. See p. 320 in that article on the subversiveness of any such comparison. 85 James Maxwell, The Laudable Life, sig. B2v [marginal note]. 86 ‘An Epitaph Upon the most Hopefull and All-​vertuous Henry, Prince of Wales’, in Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, sig. D3v. 87 Prince Henries Obsequies, sig. E1v.

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boord partake with thee’, Wither was likely thinking of Queen Anne, whose Catholicism was something of an open secret.88 Another elegy that expressed less than fulsome approval of Henry’s military promise survives only in a single manuscript copy. It too adopts a displaced voice –​that of the earth itself, receiving the Prince’s body: ‘Ay mee poore earth why am I made receaver/​Of yt great losse wch wilbe sorrowes ever’.89 While affirming grief’s tears, the earth also explains that ffor while his mind to martiall deeds intent Purpos’d to go & conquer’d as he went Contriving many kingdomes into one As able for to rule himselfe alone The fearfull potents of ye earth agreed And told how they & I might both be freed Choose mighty earth for one of theis must be Thou under him or he must under thee I trembled all to be surpris’d wth war And to receive him thought it better far Thus as he came in peace I humbly kis’t him Alas I was not able to resist him. (ll. 11–​22)

Henry’s potential wars of conquest frighten the earth, and thus his peaceful passage into death seems a preferable ‘conquest’ that leaves the earth itself a sort of victor. This is less than forthrightly critical of the Prince’s military aspirations, but it does raise questions about the military praise offered by so many other elegies, and its somewhat playful conceit is a step back from typical lament. Adrian Streete has shown the caution of Donne’s elegy (‘Look to me, Faith; and look to my Faith, God’) when it comes to discerning what the Prince might have brought.90 He is more probing than others in considering the competing expectations that had been placed on the Prince. Both foreign princes who ‘were stupefied’ by the ‘Torpedo’ that they angled for,91 and his own people, had unbottomed assumptions about what the lost reign might have entailed. Would Henry have maintained the peace-​making of his father, or exceeded it in bringing a transcendent peace of the end-​times? Arthur Marotti suggests that this passage of the elegy attempts to smooth over the distinct foreign policy approaches of king and prince,92 but the passage goes further in raising questions about where these competing policies 88 Prince Henries Obsequies, sig. E2v. 89 Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS 160, ll. 1–​2). 90 Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics,’ pp. 91–​5. 91 Donne, Poems, p. 244, ll. 29–​30. 92 Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet, p. 271.

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would have led and how the death fits in a divinely ordained plan.93 Streete identifies how Donne draws on the apocalyptic language and imagery of Matthew 24 to raise doubts about the Prince’s place in it.94 Donne wonders if God allowed the Prince’s military reputation as part of a dispensational unfolding: For, to confirm this just Belief, that Now The last Dayes came, wee saw Heaven did allow That but from His aspect and Exercise, In Peace-​full times, Rumors of Warrs should rise. (ll. 39–​42)

This both celebrates the Prince as an apocalyptic figure bringing eschatological peace and playfully questions whether the foreign policy ‘hawks’ who had lamented his death might have been over-​reading the significance of his well-​known martial exercises. Hence any such faith in Henry’s supposed role has become a ‘heresy’ because of his death.95

Henry’s militarism and James’ more pacific ways As we have seen with the poems above, commemoration of Henry’s lost military potential could easily touch upon the contrast with King James’ peace-​making approach. Poets wrestled with lamenting the dead royal son while maintaining due respect for what ought to be his superior father. Robert Allyne seeks to celebrate both the Prince’s military tendencies and his father’s more intellectual (and domestic) faculties: He [Henry] might have beene unto that head a hand, His forces through another world to lead.   Whose glorious conquests in the continent,   The glory of our Iland might augment, While his victorious Father heere at home, Rulde his proceedings by divine directions,

93 Ted-​Larry Pebworth, ‘ “Let Me Here Use That Freedome”: Subversive Representation in John Donne’s “Obsequies to the Lord Harington”’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 91:1 (1992), p. 36, argues that Donne is using the ‘poet’s prerogative of reshaping the world into what he wishes it to be’, i.e. one in which Henry ultimately would have maintained his father’s peacemaking approach. 94 Streete, ‘Elegy, Prophecy, and Politics’, p. 94. 95 Pebworth, ‘Let Me Here Use That Freedome’, pp. 17–​42, shows that in commemorating Harington Donne adopts a similar approach of resisting the widespread straightforward praise of the deceased. Pebworth argues that Donne was repelled by the militant Protestant reputation of Harington, a position that accords with his doubts about the projected ‘hawkishness’ of the Prince.

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Till both made famous by the fall of Rome, Had been admired for the earthes perfections.96

A few pages on, he uses the trope of sun and moon to capture the king–​ prince relationship; in that section he seeks to believe that Henry’s militant approach was a reflection of his father, who now ‘resumes’ that light.97 That Allyne ventured this idea with some doubtful trepidation is manifest when he expresses the fear that England’s enemies might now take advantage of Britain’s half darkness, and ‘this small Ile at length become /​A boundlesse continent of endlesse woes’.98 George Wither either badly fumbles this balance between prince and king or wilfully inverts the relationship in the conclusion to one of his elegy sonnets. He describes Henry as          a booke for Kings to pore  on: And might have been thy [the King’s] BASILIKON DORON99

Basilikon Doron was James’ published work on princely rule, explicitly directed towards his eldest son; Wither’s conceit suggests that James had more to learn from Henry than the other way around. A few poems further along, addressing Prince Charles, like a number of other poets100 Wither invokes the image of the Phoenix, but he does so in a way that invariably sets both princes up as a threat to replace their kingly father: And now dost thou [Charles] to be a Phoenix trye; Well, so thou maist (no doubt) another day, But then thy father (Charles) or thou must die.101

This comes rather close to the treasonous act of ‘imagining the king’s death’. The inherent problem with the Phoenix trope is that it usually marked the smooth transition from dying monarch to successor: the queen is dead, long live the king. Like the Phoenix, there can only be one monarch, and the trope suggests a living continuance of policies and approach. However, its application to the death of a non-​ruling prince raised problems:  while it might reflect a desire that Charles ‘become’ his dead brother, it left James

96 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. A3v. 97 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. Av4. 98 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. B1r. 99 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 5, sig. B1r. 100 Charles rather predictably becomes the Phoenix in a number of poems (Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. B3v). Kay aptly suggests in reference to this that ‘Allyne tangles himself in the coils of panegyric inflation when he likens Henry, Charles, and James to the Phoenix’ (Melodious Tears, p. 151). 101 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 8, sig. B2r.

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out of the picture, and poets like Wither and Allyne only make things worse when they awkwardly try to include James in the Phoenix trope. A funeral elegy by Dudley North written some seven years after Prince Henry’s death manifests the fulfilment of the fears expressed by Allyne and Wither. It expresses deep regret over the peaceful time that is now forced upon aspiring young soldiers: the ‘once illustrious wither’d English name’ will not be restored, and they must instead Smother in his Ashes what began to flame, And teach your thoughts to study peacefull fame, Temper your most untimely ill faln heat, Which may your ruine, not your glory get; Except that idle glory you esteem, Vying who most effeminate shall seem, Most proud, affected, and like weeds of worth, Which our best soyles uncultivate bring forth:102

What began as a simple lament for the lost Prince’s military promise has become by the end a satiric indictment of the affected weakness cultivated at the court of James and how in such a context military valour brings ruin, not glory. The 1619 vantage point reflects the increasing frustration with James’ pacific foreign policy at that time. His unmovable commitment to peace with Spain (and possibly a royal marriage) and his failure to support Princess Elizabeth and Elector Frederick at the outset of the Thirty Years War led to widespread public complaint. North, however, points to Prince Charles as the new focus of expectations that had been dashed with Henry’s death seven years earlier: Happy our Fathers warlike spirits; we Haplesse; though fortunate our Sons may be, To whom this seven yeare retrograde hath brought A Prince with like faire promis’d vertues fraught,103

North had flourished in the last few years of Prince Henry’s life, participating in tournaments and masques, but his career was eclipsed in the later

102 North, A Forest of Varieties, p. 72. 103 North’s poem was not published until 1645 and no manuscript copy survives. While the age difference between the two princes of nearly seven years might explain the ‘seven years retrograde’, other evidence suggests the phrase ‘seven years retrograde’ means that the nation has gone backward in the seven years since the Prince’s death. The title of the Prince Henry elegy also seems to refer facetiously to its lateness: ‘Pathetically, if not too prophetically inspired, upon the death of the late noble and brave Prince Henry.’

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1610s, and, unsurprisingly, in May 1620 he was imprisoned in the Tower for his connection to the anti-​Spanish Amazon Company.104 Other poets (and some preachers) suggested that God took the Prince as punishment for more general sins or shortcomings of the nation. Such an approach then allowed for a prophetic or satiric presentation of those faults. Josuah Sylvester uses this argument to launch an extended section that lies somewhere between ‘estates satire’ and a national lament of repentance. He begins with the general pronouncement that ‘Wee all (alas!) have had our hands herein: /​And each of us hath, by some cord of sin, /​Hal’d down from Heav’n from Justice awfull Seat /​This Heavy Judgment’. He then turns to the various segments of the nation that have fallen short:  the clergy ‘have stood  /​More for the Church-​goods, then the Churche’s good’, nobles have neither ‘offer[ed] Right, or Suffer[ed] Wrong’, magistrates have been blind in judgment. Public offices have been sold, French-​ Italian fashions adopted, and profit made the sole good.105

Davies of Hereford, The Muses Teares Of all the poems that marked the death of Prince Henry, The Muses Teares by John Davies of Hereford is the most extraordinary, not for its poetic brilliance, but for its sheer audacity in raising troubling questions about the Prince’s death and its implications for the kingdom. Unlike many of the elegists on Prince Henry, Davies had direct personal acquaintance with him, as he had served as instructor in penmanship to the Prince in 1605. Davies offers a series of poetic comments and illustrations that, while valorizing the Prince, question the King’s rectitude and his role in the death and its aftermath. Davies does not just unthinkingly blunder on a solitary occasion; rather the work manifests a pattern of troubling suggestions about the King. However, this aspect of the work has not been recognized. While Kay devotes three pages to a discussion of this work, he never remarks upon the radical and subversive political comments that repeatedly surface.106 I would suggest that Davies’ abstract and turgid style rather lulls readers of his poems to the point where they overlook the implications of his conceits, comparisons, and arguments.

104 Oxford DNB. 105 ‘Lachrymae Lacrymarum’, in Sylvester, Works, vol. 2, pp. 277–​8. 106 Kay, Melodious Tears, pp. 175–​7.

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The Muses Teares draws on many of the same conventions identified elsewhere:  it suggests that grief may lead to silence or madness (‘distraction’). Davies wishes for words to explain ‘That We, with Reason, are growne justly mad:’.107 The emphasis on distraction here would then implicitly permit (or at least explain) the detraction that follows. Davies offers an extended justification for this ‘Poetic rage’, before an attempt at retraction:             My knees I bend, And beg for Grace, sith t’was in Minde distrest. Then I retract my Curses [on the day of his death];108

As Sir David Murray had invoked Richmond Park, Davies calls upon St Jame Palace, which the Prince had adorned with paintings, as now a place of mourning where the spiders will ‘scarfe their [the paintings] fairest Face’. It has become a house of horrors with imagery drawn from Isaiah’s description of fallen Babylon.109 The Muses Teares offers more on the political wisdom of the Prince than any other elegy, and it also raises the behaviour of other royal figures through comparison: Some Kings are more than Men in their beliefe; But, in their lives such Beasts as never liv’d: The chiefe Offenders than, are oft the CHIEFE: But this, Belov’d, liv’d well, and well beleev’d!110

Readers of this in late 1612 or 1613 could hardly avoid wondering if James was among those kings of lofty self-​assessment but beastly behaviour. The topic leads the poet into some probing consideration of the reputation of princes: earthly justice cannot touch them, but their reputations (both living and dead) are open to attack, and fear of such may lead them to behave better: For feare whereof a TITUS often strives: To be not what he is, but what he ought! For, it is hard to play an After-​game Of Reputation wel;111

Davies’ point is that Henry was exceptional in not being like this: for him it was pure virtue itself, not concern with reputation, that caused him to ‘preserve/​His Name from blemish’.112 The lingering implication, however, is

107 J. Davies, of Hereford, The Muses Teares (1613), sig. C1r, p. 8. 108 Davies, The Muses Teares, sig. C2r–​v. 109 A marginal note cites Isaiah 13: 21–​2. 110 Davies, The Muses Teares, sig. A3r. 111 Davies, The Muses Teares, sig. B1r. 112 Davies, The Muses Teares, sig. B1r.

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that he was exceptional in this, which leaves readers asking which monarchs are virtuous simply for fear of losing their reputation.113 On its own, this might seem to be the typical rhetorical quandary in which elegists find themselves: the praise of the dead leaves the living, including all readers of the poem, in the shade. However, the pattern continues, as Davies also presents an odd turn at the end of a shorter poem that follows ‘The Muses Teares’:        if in future-​time, (As heretofore) some stranger up do climbe On Ladder of our Branches to our CROWNE He may be such as nere may put us downe!114

This seems to glance past the new heir, Charles, to potential offspring or descendants of Elizabeth and Elector Frederick, whose marriage preparations were underway at the time of Prince Henry’s death (they were to be wed in February 1613). Many English Protestants enthusiastically hailed the marriage (and its potential offspring), placing those hopes that had rested on Prince Henry on this couple. Davies goes further than most in imagining that it is their heirs that will lead the English (a prophetic lineage fulfilled with the 1714 succession of their grandson, George I). The passage is odd in envisioning a future where a foreign figure would assume the English crown, and such an imagining rather ominously supposes that Charles is unlikely to produce heirs. Davies’ concluding note is much more sombre: he hopes only that such a stranger that inherits the throne will not ‘put us downe’ –​very plausibly, as a Catholic Davies may have been alarmed by the militant Protestantism with which Count Frederick was associated. The parenthetical phrase ‘as heretofore’ also raises troubling questions: Davies is suggesting that in the past a ‘stranger’ who inherited the English throne had ‘put us downe’. The primary reference would be to William the Conqueror, as the coming of the Normans was often perceived in the period as a subjugating of Anglo-​Saxon freedoms. The only other ‘stranger’ to so inherit was far more recent: King James in 1603. While there had been nothing like the full-​scale overturning of the political structures that came with the Norman conquest, many English courtiers resented their displacement by the Scots who accompanied James and attained significant positions in his court and council.

113 Helen B. Brooks has noted the cynicism of Davies’ treatment of princes in his earlier poems Microcosmos (1603) and Summa Totalis (1607) (DLB, vol. 121, pp. 70–​1). 114 Davies, ‘Sobs for the Losse of the most Heroick Prince Henry’, The Muses Teares, sig. C4v.

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Although Davies takes pains to praise James in a separate poem addressed to him in the same volume,115 here too a series of troubling comparisons raise the sensitive issue of the King’s relationship with Prince Henry. The poem attempts to reassure the King about Heaven’s justice by invoking the example of the ancient Roman military leader Manlius Torquatus, who famously had his son executed for disobeying orders by attacking the enemy: Severe Torquatus, did his Sonne  mis-​do For charging, ’gainst his Chardge, his braving Fo, Though he wan [sic] fame and conquest: than, sith HE That was as daring (yet was ruld by Thee) Is, for our breach of Heasts, much more devine, Ta’ne hence, by highest Justice, not by thine, Be thou the Patient, sith the Agent Heav’n, Thee, of thy Sonne, hath, for it selfe, bereav’n.116

While Davies’ point is to compare Heaven’s justice with that of Manlius, he recognizes and attempts to mollify the similarity of the classical example to the relationship of King and Prince. Henry’s headstrong heroic impulse had chafed under the more cautious approach of his father; the passage desires to affirm that his ‘daring’ was like that of Manlius’ son, but that, unlike his predecessor, Henry was ‘ruld’ by his father. Davies also rewrites the story to render the people’s ‘breach of Heasts [i.e. commands]’ as leading to the death of the son. They had participated in developing an imagined heroic role for the Prince, and he, then, is the innocent sacrificial victim taken by Heaven (which is the ‘Agent’ and James the passive ‘Patient’ figure). While the argument explicitly honours both King and Prince, the very story of Manlius and his son touches upon the sensitive (and widely known) issue of the tense relationship between King and Prince on the matter of military action. It sits particularly oddly in a poem ostensibly concerned with consoling the King, and it contributes to the volume’s pattern of manifesting unease about the state of a Henry-​less kingdom. After a passage where Davies reminds James of the nation’s dependence, the poem becomes stranger yet on the topic of royal sacrifice of a son. He recalls the example of King Philip II of Spain (1527–​98), who in 1568 had his mad son, Carlos, imprisoned; six months later Carlos died, and Protestant legend suggested that he had been poisoned under the King’s own orders. Philip of Spaine, but for his Commons good, (So sai’d by some) to death, on his owne BLOUD 115 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D2r–​D4v. 116 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D2v.

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Did floate his SONNE, & HEIRE to al his Crowns, So, for his Subjects peace, his sonne confounds.117

The rumour that Philip was responsible for his son’s death was first brought forth by William of Orange’s Apologie (1581); it was known in English translation from that point and echoed frequently in Protestant propaganda.118 Edward Grimestone’s translation of Turquet’s The Generall Historie of Spaine (1612) both reproduces the French account of the death as filicide, and points to an Italian account that ascribed the death only to a ‘disordred diet’.119 Grimestone leaves the verdict to ‘the juditious Reader’. King Philip’s most recent and authoritative English biographer, Geoffrey Parker, dismisses out of hand the charges of poisoning, but they were central to early Stuart British perceptions of the death, and hence any such reference in a poem recounting Henry’s death is strikingly audacious or even scandalous. Despite Carlos’ physical and mental handicaps, there were significant parallels to Henry’s situation. A  rival power-​base had developed around Don Carlos, and his marriage plans (with his cousin Anna) were thwarted by his father.120 Davies attempts to ameliorate this audacious comparison to Philip and Carlos by invoking the example of God the Father sacrificing the Son for the salvation of the world. However, like the comparison to Manlius, this one inevitably raises unsettling connotations about James as father and his son’s death. Two consecutive tropes of this sort would seem to suggest a desire on Davies’ part to raise troubling questions about the relationship between royal father and son. The more general tenor of this poem is that kings, by grace of high and influential place, must rise above the griefs of general humankind, including any based on familial love. Ultimately this leads Davies to another odd comparison –​of King James to Codrus, the last king of Athens: Codrus, who ware th’ Athenian DIADEM, Did (as thou know’st) die willingly for them. Than shall a King, inferior farre in State, In vertue passe a greater Potentate?121

Davies is urging James not to be outdone by the Messenian king Codrus in patriotic virtue, but Codrus is another example of royal sacrifice, who used

117 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D3r. 118 J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–​1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), pp. 315–​6, 520–​3. 119 Qtd in Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, p. 523. 120 Geoffrey Parker, Imprudent King: A New Life of Philip II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 186–​8. 121 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D3v.

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disguise to bring about his own sacrificial death to save his nation. In contrast, Davis encourages James to rise above his sorrow and live, to fulfil his role as God-​like king. And it does present James as performing a theatrical role (using the image of the monarch as a dramatic figure that James had offered in Basilikon Doron: ‘a king is as one set on a stage’):122                  Than If thou would’st have applause above a Man, Or not exposed be to base esteeme, Bee as thou Art (a God!) at least, so seeme!123

The final tacked-​on clause ‘at least, so seeme’ has an extraordinary effect: it cynically suggests that a monarch may lack the virtue that ostensibly should be innate in a divinely ordained king and hence fall back upon the performance of such virtue. Like the phrase quoted above that ‘Some Kings are more than Men in their beliefe’, this passage simultaneously calls into question the divine right of kings and implies that the present monarch may not even be living up to the appearance of virtue. Davies ostensibly praises the stillness and solitude of James’ sorrow by contrasting the activeness of King Henry IV of France, which the poet suggests contributed to his assassination by François Ravaillac. This leads to the odd logic that if ‘Henry the Fourth, of France, had hee beene still; /​ Rauilliack then, had found no King to kil’.124 The situations are hardly analogous, and a comparison raising the troubling matter of a recent assassination of a king hardly seems likely to be consoling to James, whose fear of such a fate was legendary. The poem ends with Davies enjoining the King to resume his duties, else the state ‘will stand crooked’. The cumulation of references suggests either that Davies was incredibly naïve and clumsy or that the work deliberately used the genre to undermine the King and court. Most astonishing is that he made these subversive suggestions while rumours that Prince Henry had been poisoned were in circulation. John Chamberlain mentions the suspicion a mere week after the death,125 and the rumours continued to circulate in late December.126 According to Woodward, the autopsy, which took place the evening after

122 The True Law of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron, ed. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (Toronto:  Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1996), p. 155. 123 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D3v. 124 Davies, ‘Consolations for, and to the King’, The Muses Teares, sig. D4r. 125 12 Nov. 1612, Letters, vol. 1, pp. 388–​9. 126 CSPV, 1610–​13, Item 724, 23 Dec. 1612.

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his death, ‘reported no traces of foul play but the rumours of poisoning persisted.’127 (The Muses Teares was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 17 December 1612.) The pattern of rumours surrounding the Prince’s death were to be reprised twelve and a half years later, when far more extensive suspicions of poisoning were circulated about the King’s death, as will be explored in Chapter 3.

The aftermath Henry’s death came soon after Elector Frederick arrived to begin preparations for his marriage to Princess Elizabeth (and Roy Strong has shown the degree to which Henry was involved in the beginning stages of the festival preparation). Frederick’s presence is noted by a number of the funeral elegies on Prince Henry,128 and the title page of Davies of Hereford’s The Muses Teares announced that it was ‘CONSECRATED To the high and mighty Prince, Frederick the fift, Count-​palatine of Rheyn’. Furthermore, the poetry and masques that greeted the wedding in February 1613 often harked back to the late prince. This juxtaposition of events called out for poetic comment: poets wrestle with the tension between elegiac mourning and epithalamic celebration. Henry Peacham’s extended The Period of Mourning suggested that mourning and celebration struggled within him ‘like fire and water’,129 and it concludes with ‘Nuptiall Hymnes’, where he notes that his tears did encounter ‘a contrary passion of Joy, for the happy Marriage of his Most-​like Sister the Princesse my most gracious Lady; like fire and water (striving for praedominancie) I was enforced to make both way even to mine owne prejudice.’130 George Wither asks ‘Had we no showes to welcome thee [Count Frederick] to Court, /​No solemne sight, but a sad Funerall?’131 This Hamlet-​like sense of the ‘Baked funeral meats coldly furnish[ing] forth the marriage table’ will be more fully explored in the juxtaposition of James’ death and the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria in 1625. In some poems there is the hint, or hope, that Elizabeth’s marriage makes up for the loss of Henry. In particular, the international Protestant hopes that had been placed on Henry were transferred to Frederick and Elizabeth and their offspring rather than the new heir apparent, Charles.

127 Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 161. 128 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 125. 129 Peacham, The Period of Mourning, sig. A3v. 130 Peacham, Period of Mourning, sig. A3v. 131 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, Elegy 9, sig. B2r.

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The elegies on other deaths in the months and years just following 1612 are often explicitly written in the shadow of Henry’s death; elegists perceived the royal death and the outpouring of metrical mourning that marked it as a model for how other deaths might be treated in verse, but also at times an event that eclipsed all following. Such was the case with the death of Sir William Sidney, son of Robert Sidney (later Earl of Leicester), on 3 December 1612. (Sidney had himself contributed an elegy to Henry in Lacrimae Lachrymarum.) Isaac Wake followed his long account of the Prince’s funeral with discussion of Sidney’s death:  ‘I do almost hold it a sinne to mingle ye newes of any other funeralls wth this’.132 Both surviving printed elegies on his death link it with that of the more famous royal figure. Josuah Sylvester’s An Elegiac Epistle Consolatorie on the death of Sidney begins: What object less then our great Henry’s Herse, Could so have seiz’d the voice of every verse? What Subject else could have ingrossed so The publike Store and private Stock of Woe?’133

The lines play upon Sir William as ‘subject’:  he is both an underling to the Prince and the potential topic of verse of shared mourning with the Prince. Like Henry’s death, his deserves both private and public grief. As the nephew of Sir Philip Sidney, he is also a worthy heir to that subject of manifold metrical grief, which had been exceeded only by that of the Prince. However, despite all this worth, the tears have been ‘drowned’ in the grief of the Prince himself, so that Sidney remains ‘un-​bewailed’ and ‘un-​ sung’ (l. 8). George Wither actually included an anagram-​based elegy on the death of William Sidney in his Prince Henries Obsequies (1612) and grieves with Sir Robert in his ‘two-​fold sorrow’.134 He suggests that Sidney’s death ‘darkened by the Other ’twas unseene’, and thus he was motivated to prefix the verses on Sidney to prevent oblivion. By joining the two deaths, Wither hopes in fact to ensure the memory of Sidney. Sylvester had suggested a similar connection: as Sir William served the Prince in his earthly life and ‘attended’ on his death ‘so neer’, it is only fitting that in after-​ages ‘His Name and Fame may ever wait’ upon that of the Prince. The February 1614 death of John, Second Lord Harington, who had been a close friend and member of Henry’s entourage,135 was also read very much 132 Isaac Wake to Lady [Carleton], 19 Dec. 1612, TNA SP 14/​71/​68. 133 Sylvester, An Elegiac Epistle Consolatorie, in Complete Works, vol. 2, p. 283. 134 Wither, Prince Henries Obsequies, sig. A2r. 135 L. Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, in L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 205–​6; Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 43.

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in relation to that of the Prince. (Rumours that Harington, like Henry, had been poisoned –​by Jesuits –​circulated.136) In commemorating Harington, Francis Herring recalls that earlier death:

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Since that tall Cedar, chiefe of all the rest, Prince HENRY fell by sad disastrous fate, No one that grew in our English forrest, Gave such a blow unto the Church and state:137

To mourn for the young Lord Harington was to lament a companion of Prince Henry, to experience an echo of his death. Abraham Jackson, imagining the grief of the Countess of Bedford (Harington’s sister) compares it to ‘how that royal PRINCES did complaine, /​For Brittains hope, renowned HENRIES death:’138 Further on, for a few stanzas Jackson’s poem becomes a commemoration of Henry as Harington’s friend and master.139 As will be traced in Chapter 3, elegies on English royalty were to continue to recall the death of Prince Henry. However, as late as 1634, even the death of a non-​royal figure, Sir Rowland Cotton, might be marked in this manner. Nicholas Oldisworth’s ‘Were he but one brave person, and no more’ concludes by addressing the Prince who has been dead for over two decades: ‘Mighty prince Henry, if thou now hadst liv’d /​For this thy darling how wouldst thou have griev’d!’.140 Thomas Randolph likewise commemorates Cotton in relation to the Prince’s death over twenty years earlier:  ‘When Henry dy’d (our universall woe)  /​Willing was Cotton to dye with him too.’141 Randolph continues by describing how Cotton subsequently withdrew himself into his studies, where ‘Only the Dead his conversation were’. According to Strong, Cotton was ‘recorded as having been in one of the Prince’s masques, possibly Oberon’, while Cotton also wrote a panegyric for Coryate’s Crudities.142

136 Pebworth, ‘ “Let Me Here Use That Freedome” ’, p. 35. 137 Francis Herring, ‘An elegy upon the untimely decease of the honorable and virtuous Lord Harington’, in Richard Stock, The churches lamentation (1614), p. 109. 138 Abraham Jackson, Sorrows Lenitive (1614) [sig. A7v]. 139 Abraham Jackson, Sorrows Lenitive, sig. B6v–​B7r. 140 N. Oldisworth, Nicholas Oldisworth’s Manuscript, ed. John  Gouws (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2009), p. 126. Gouws notes that a number of poems in the commemorative volume Parentalia spectatissimo Rolando Cottono (1635) include references to Prince Henry (p. 222). 141 Thomas Randolph, ‘An Elegie on the death of that Renowned and Noble Knight Sir Rowland Cotton of Bellaport in Shropshire’, in T. Randolph, Poems, ed. G. Thorn-​ Drury (London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1929), p. 89. 142 Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, p. 135.

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Elizabeth Goldring demonstrates a final echo of Henry’s death in the funeral of Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex, in 1646: both his hearse and the engraving of it were closely modelled on Williams Hole’s well-​ known engraving of Henry’s.143 Such was fitting, as Essex –​like Sidney and Harington –​had been a like-​aged figure in the budding Prince’s court. To mark his death with a visual reminder of the long-​dead Prince was to invoke a sort of royal sanction, however distant, for Essex’s leading military role on the side of Parliament.

Conclusion The death of Prince Henry both prompted the most significant outpouring of funeral elegies in the period and cast a long shadow over the culture of subsequent decades. While scholarly consideration to date has emphasized the uniformity of poetic sorrow, the death in fact opened up the possibility of detraction in a number of directions. A  rivalry of commemoration accompanied the outpouring of grief. Some poets dared to use the opportunity to question the King’s approach to foreign policy or satirize the court; others expressed disquiet at the militancy and assumed future glory of the Prince. These divisive tendencies were to be an increased feature of the funeral elegies on both royal and non-​royal figures in the decades to come.

143 Goldring, ‘ “So just a sorrowe so well expressed” ’, p. 290.

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‘A Prison is in all things like a Grave’:1 elegies on Arbella Stuart, Sir Thomas Overbury, and Sir Walter Ralegh For five months in the middle of 1613 the Tower of London served as the prison home of three well-​known historical figures: Lady Arbella Stuart,2 Sir Thomas Overbury, and Sir Walter Ralegh. Overbury was murdered that year, Stuart died in captivity of natural causes in 1615, and Ralegh was executed in 1618. Each death prompted a significant outpouring of elegiac verse, which raises intriguing questions about how the genre and its traditional tropes and strategies might be adjusted to mourn the death of a political prisoner, one whose life ended under a cloud within the Tower’s walls or on the scaffold. These poems struggle to find a way to lament publicly the loss of one perceived as a treasonous threat to the state. For those long imprisoned, death might be celebrated as liberation:  a release from physical captivity and dishonour into eternal glory. Elegies on these three figures also repeatedly use the death as an opportunity to reflect upon the political situation that led to imprisonment or execution in the first place. Often, even poems entitled ‘elegies’ on such figures are more concerned with political and ethical reflection than conventional formulae of grief. Also striking in many of these elegies is their evident self-​consciousness of a tradition of Tower imprisonment and the poetry emerging from it. The deaths of these individuals were not isolated events, but were perceived as part of an archetypal pattern, centred upon the place itself and its significance in English history and imagination. The elegiac response to these three figures will be the main subject of this chapter, with a discussion of the Second Earl of Essex’s death (1601) serving as a preliminary and comparative introduction.

1 Henry King, ‘An Essay on Death and a Prison’, in Poems, p. 139. 2 Both the ‘Arabella’ and ‘Arbella’ spellings are found in the writings of the time and in scholarship since. I have chosen ‘Arbella’ as it was more frequent in the poems about her from the period discussed here.

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In the Elizabethan and early Stuart period, poems believed to be by the condemned proved immensely popular, as Andrea Brady notes that one facing the gallows was perceived to have ‘a special kind of gnosis, which also makes his statements exceedingly dangerous to the crown’.3 Among the most frequently appearing poems in the period’s manuscripts are ‘Tichborne’s Elegy’, supposedly written by Chidiock Tichborne the night before his execution in 1586, and ‘Even such is time’, a similarly meditative poem by Ralegh. As with many cases of illustrious authorship in the period, the attribution of such poems is doubtful, but their popularity demonstrates the public fascination with the often bloody ends of political prisoners.4 The literature emerging from these early modern English prisons has received significant scholarly attention of late, particularly in the 2009 issue of The Huntington Library Quarterly, which was devoted to the topic.5 However, poetry directed towards or about the imprisoned and executed has been less discussed. Although at times elegies on political prisoners simply reproduce the themes and rhetoric of the poems attributed to the prisoners themselves, they often go much further in probing the political situation that led to the deaths. While there have been multiple biographies of Essex and Ralegh, these works consistently offer no account of the elegiac response, and instead usually end with the dramatic moment of execution. Nor have the poems on Arbella Stuart or the elegies on Overbury (often reprinted in the period) attracted significant attention. As discussed in the Introduction, elegies were usually composed a few days to a few weeks after the death of the subject. With these elegies on political prisoners, establishing the date of composition and circulation is of great significance, as shifting political circumstances and public opinion established what could or might be written. The degree and means of circulation are also of central importance. For example, in the case of the Earl of Essex, immediate elegies were not possible because of the threat of rebellion that he represented, but the door opened somewhat with Queen Elizabeth’s death two years later and King James’ partial redemption of the memory of the earl. In contrast, Arbella Stuart’s death rendered her ‘safe’, and allowed more conventional and immediate elegiac mourning. The political significance of Overbury’s death only slowly emerged as the murderous

3 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, p. 98. 4 See my discussion of ‘Illustrious Authorship’ in The Epigram in England: 1590–​1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), pp. 206–​20. 5 See also Ruth Ahnert, The Rise of Prison Literature in the 16th Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

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circumstances became public knowledge: thus, the rich and probing elegiac response to his death was a belated one.

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Robert Devereux, Second Earl of Essex While this study concerns the elegies of the period 1603 to 1640, in this case it is helpful to reach back two years to the execution of Robert, Second Earl of Essex, in February 1601, following his rebellion against the Queen. There were of course significant differences between the political context of 1601 and that of the mid-​1610s: at the time of Essex’s death, England faced a situation where an aging, childless queen might soon die and leave an uncertain succession to the throne. In contrast, any threats to the monarch represented by Stuart, Overbury, and Ralegh were much more limited –​or in the case of Stuart, far off and hypothetical. However, the cultural context also changed in the decade or two following Essex’s death. Those figures at the centre of this chapter, dying in the mid-​1610s, found a culture of elegy writing that had been well established by John Donne and Francis Beaumont, and the massive outpouring marking Prince Henry’s death, described in the previous chapter. Thus, poems on the deaths of these three figures of the 1610s are much more poetically rich and nuanced and politically probing than those commemorating the death of Essex. Essex’s rebellion was perceived as a serious threat to Elizabeth’s authority, with the result that outspoken support or remembrance of him was culpable. For example, one Waterhouse, a lawyer’s clerk, was hanged at Smithfield for circulating libels on the prosecution of Essex.6 Abraham Colfe, a student at Christ Church, Oxford, unwisely praised the dead earl by comparing him to Cicero, an act that was quickly responded to by the vice-​chancellor of the university and led to Colfe’s imprisonment in Newgate.7 The authorities clearly feared popular support for the dead Essex, and to forestall this, Francis Bacon wrote an official account of events (Declaration of the Practices and Treason), and a royal chaplain, William Barlow, preached a sermon at Paul’s Cross to justify the execution. Hence, any direct elegiac response in the months following Essex’s execution might be suspected of demonstrating complicity in or sympathy for his revolt. A volume like Love’s Martyr (1601), which includes Shakespeare’s ‘The Phoenix and the

6 CSPD, Elizabeth, 1601–​3, p. 86. 7 CSPD, Elizabeth, 1601–​3, pp. 35, 44. See Alexandra Gajda, The Earl of Essex and Late Elizabethan Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 232–​ 33, and Oxford DNB.

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Turtle’, is so oblique in its presentation that scholars are not even sure it does mourn the death of Essex.8 The death of Elizabeth two years later, and King James’ recognition of the dead earl’s worthiness, made it somewhat more acceptable to offer commemorations of him.9 Thus, Robert Williams’ lengthy commemorative poem (beg. ‘England thou hast cause to complain’) simultaneously laments Essex and celebrates the clemency of the new king to Essex’s supporters.10 However, Maureen King notes that even at this time such a work might raise trouble. For example, Robert Pricket’s Honors Fame in Triumph Riding (1604) was called in and its author imprisoned.11 A June 1604 newsletter likely refers to this work as ‘well and feelingly written and I think will not hereafter to be had as they are already called in and the printer called in question’.12 As the early optimism about James’ reign evaporated, celebrations of Essex became implicit critiques of James’ more pacific approach. Given this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the poems written soon after Essex’s death are anonymous and circumspect in treating the details of the rebellion itself. The majority are formulaic ‘gallows ballads’ (or ‘hanging ballads’), wherein the trajectory of Essex’s career is traced and his repentance (both political and religious) highlighted.13 These drew in part on his gallows speech or on verses supposed to have been written by him shortly before his execution. Thus, in poems such as ‘Essex’ last voyage to the haven of happiness’ the earl repentantly welcomes death.14 This poem largely represents religious repentance, although the echoes of Psalm 51 render

8 See, for example, Anthea Hume, ‘Love’s Martyr, “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” and the Aftermath of the Essex Rebellion’, Review of English Studies 40 (1989), pp. 48–​71; James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Truth of Love: The Mystery of ‘the Phoenix and Turtle’ (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 9 See Maureen King, ‘The Essex Myth in Jacobean England’, in Glenn Burgess et al. (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 176. 10 BL Arundel MS 418, printed in F. J. Furnivall and W. R. Morfill, eds, Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. 2 (London, 1868–​73), pp. 23–​37. 11 King, ‘The Essex Myth’, p. 181. 12 Francis Morice to Sir Bassingbourn Gawdy, 7 June 1604, HMC Gawdy (1885), p. 92. 13 Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century: Speaking to the People (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan, 1997), p. 100. For a survey of these ballads on his death, see W. L. Braekman, ‘A “Mournefull Dittie” on the Death of the Earl of Essex, Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite’, in J. P. Vander Motten (ed.), Elizabethan and Modern Studies presented to Professor Willem Schrickx (Gent: Seminarie voor Engelse en Amerikaanse Literatur, R. U. G., 1985), pp. 21–​36. Some of the printed ballads are found in J. W. Ebsworth and W. Chappell, The Roxburghe Ballads, vol. 1 (London, 1869–​99; rpt New York: AMS, 1966), pp. 564–​74. 14 Bodl. Ashmole MS 767, fol. 64.

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the speaker as something of a royal David figure, who often functioned for English writers as the image of a ‘courtier pitted against treacherous courtly intrigue’.15 Much of the poem could be the repentance of any young man (for wantonness, etc.), but near the end it does point to the crime that brought him to the block: ‘lord forgive me this last bloudy syn’, which has also ‘brought so many of my frends’ into danger.16 Typical of commemorative poems not in the voice of Essex is A lamentable ditty composed upon the death … earl of Essex (beg. ‘Sweet England’s pride is gone’),17 a broadside that briefly traces his fame, the events of the rebellion, and his death. Similarly, the ballad that survives in Ghent MS 2465 offers a relatively simple and unsophisticated overview of Essex’s life and death.18 It outlines his heroic military career in Portugal and France and his expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, and then it briefly traces his tragic actions in Ireland; however, the ballad offers very little on his downfall: ‘in his heart discontent bred, /​Which after burst out unluckely, /​And he condemned was to die’. Like the hanging ballads in the earl’s voice, this too ends with his speech from the scaffold and does not present mourning after his death. The most significant encomiastic poem –​and the only one that includes the word ‘elegy’ in its title  –​is ‘O England now lament in tears’, which offers an uncomplicated heroic overview of Essex’s character and career.19 The poem focuses on the early part of his career on the continent, leaving untouched the Irish campaigns that ultimately led to his fall from royal grace and subsequent rebellion. Written in the ababcc sixains typical of funeral elegy in the sixteenth and early years of the seventeenth centuries, it recognizes a need for poetic commemoration as it calls upon poets to ‘leave of to penne  /​ffond triflinge toyes as boies delight  /​And frame yr wittes tadvaunce such men’; through such ‘polisht poems’ they might be crowned ‘wth lawrell bayes’.20 However, the poem does not probe the situation deeply or reflect upon the challenges of writing an elegy for one convicted of treason. Once again, the poem ends by shifting to the earl’s own voice with his speech upon the scaffold. Consistently lacking in these poems is

15 James Simpson, Burning to Read:  English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 148. 16 ‘Essex’ last voyage to the haven of happiness’, [sig. 65r]. 17 STC 6791. 18 Printed in Braekman, ‘A “Mournefull Dittie” ’, pp. 21–​36. 19 ‘Elegy on the E of Essex’, Bodl. Tanner MS 306, fol. 192; a published version based on this manuscript when in better condition is found in Furnivall and Morfill, Ballads from Manuscripts, vol. 2, pp. 245ff. 20 ‘Elegy on the E of Essex’, Bodl. Tanner MS 306, fol. 192.

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the reflective first-​person voice (of the poet) that marks the English funeral elegy as developed by Donne and Beaumont in the period 1608 to 1615. There is also a marked tendency to narrative summary, rather than the lyric moment of reflection upon the news that was more typical of the emerging elegy tradition.

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Arbella Stuart As the cousin of King James (her father Charles Stuart was the younger brother of James’ father) and a descendant of Henry VII, Arbella Stuart had a slight claim to both the English and Scottish thrones. Hence, she was a figure both honoured and carefully watched at the royal court. At the time of the 1604 Cobham plot to replace James with Arbella, there were rumours that she was to be married to Thomas Grey, Lord Wilton. The King was convinced of her innocence in the plot, but tensions arose in the following years because of her relationship with William Seymour, who, as a Grey, had his own claim to the English crown. James explicitly forbade them to marry (as any child born to them would have a double claim to the throne), but they defied him with a secret marriage in June 1610. They were imprisoned separately, but in a plot worthy of a tragi-​comedy they attempted an escape and disguised flight to France; their planned rendezvous went amiss and Arbella was recaptured as she waited for Seymour on shipboard in the English Channel. While Seymour made it safely to the continent, Arbella was imprisoned in the Tower, where she endured four years of increasing ill health before dying on 25 September 1615. The King’s ultimate concern was that some might suspect she had been poisoned, and accordingly he had a full post-​mortem performed.21 The threat that Arbella posed to the King was in her living person, because of her lineage and marriage to Seymour. Thus, unlike Essex or Ralegh, she did not represent a continuing idea that might render her a dangerous figure to lament publicly. However, an overly sympathetic elegiac response might still be construed as criticism of the King’s treatment of her. Sara Jayne Steen argues that earlier scholars have focused on the general lack of support for Arbella’s actions in defying the King through her marriage, but have ignored the careful expressions of those who advocated leniency towards her.22 While many at the time might have criticized Arbella’s actions, there

21 Sara Jayne Steen, ‘The Crime of Marriage: Arbella Stuart and The Duchess of Malfi’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991), p. 74. 22 Steen, ‘The Crime of Marriage’, pp. 66–​9.

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seems to have been widespread agreement about the virtue of her character, and such might be the expected focus of elegiac treatment. While ‘Extant sources record no outpourings of public affection after Stuart’s death’,23 the few surviving commemorative poems offer some careful probing of her situation. Richard Corbett’s brief poem on Arbella (‘How doe I thank thee, Death’) survives in numerous manuscript copies, but as most of these are from the 1630s, we cannot draw conclusions about the circulation of the poem at its likely time of composition, soon after the death of Stuart: How doe I thanke thee, Death, & blesse thy power, That I have past the Guard, and scap’d the Tower: And now my Pardon is my Epitaph, And a small coffin my poore Carkasse hath. For at thy charge both soule and body were Enlarg’d at last, secur’d from hope and feare. That amongst Saintes, this amongst Kings is lay’d, And what my Birth did claime, my Death hath payd.24

As one spoken in the voice of the deceased, this poem has affinities with the gallows ballad tradition; it goes well beyond the conventions as Corbett wittily engages with Arbella’s circumstances, wryly celebrating that her death has solved all her problems. Where Death is occasionally figured in elegies as an arresting sergeant or magistrate,25 here he is the liberator from imprisonment in the Tower. Now through death Arbella has achieved the escape earlier attempted  –​she has ‘past the guard, and scap’d the Tower’. Her epitaph will serve in the place of a royal pardon for this escape,26 which highlights that the King’s problems were also solved by her death: the threat she posed is over and he may now offer her a posthumous royal pardon and gracious remembrance. Through death both her ‘soule and body’ are ‘Enlarg’d at last’, a formulation that extends the usual epitaphic suggestion

23 Steen, ‘The Crime of Marriage’, pp. 74–​5. She makes passing reference to Corbett’s poem, emphasizing how it celebrates Arbella’s heavenly virtue. 24 Corbett, Poems, p. 18. 25 See, for example, Gorges, The Olympian Catastrophe, where Jove calls death ‘the Seargeant of my death-​lesse lawes’ (l. 1174); ‘Awake, dull Brittaines’ on the death of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox (d. 1624), where death is a ‘Rude sergeant’ who dared ‘To shoulder clap a Peer of Parliament.’ (Folger MS V.a.345, p. 280); and the opening lines of ‘In obitum Dris Warner’ (Bartholomew Warner, d. 1618/​19) (Folger MS V.a.345, p. 125). The trope is also well known from Hamlet: ‘this fell sergeant Death’ (5.2.315). 26 Corbett, Poems, p. 18.

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that the soul has been freed.27 The final couplet celebrates the restoration of her royal position. While many epitaphs of the period suggest that the soul achieves heaven and the body is left to the earth, here the attaining of rightful place by both is affirmed: ‘That [her soul] among saints, this [her body] amongst kings is laid, /​And what my birth did claim, my death hath paid.’ Arbella was buried with due, if limited, ceremony in Westminster Abbey not far from Mary, Queen of Scots, and Prince Henry.28 Only thus was her rightful royal position finally attained. A more probing consideration of Arbella Stuart’s situation is found in the elegy beginning ‘Too soone alas into the eares of all’.29 This poem is ascribed to ‘J. O.’ in both surviving manuscripts, and given his poetic celebration of her in his Latin poems, John Owen, the epigrammatist, stands as a plausible author of the elegy. It begins with a conventional elegiac situation of responding to the news of death, and thus grappling to come to terms with the emerging reality: Too soone alas into the eares of all, Did that newes come of thy untimely fall. Newes on the wings of sorrow, swift that flewe Most feard the truth, & wisht it weare not true. Some wept to see fames selfe that brought it cry, And longd to give the trumpeter the lye. Others that knewe how fast ill newes will spread, Wish’t so thou liv’st the bringers of it dead.

These lines reflect something of Arbella’s public profile: she was one about whom rumours of ‘ill newes’ might spread, and so the poet vainly hopes that they might prove false. Like Donne in his Anniversaries, ‘J. O.’ praises the female figure as the embodiment of divine virtue, and thus a worthy subject of poetic reflection: Those poets doe not lye that to us tell, Vertue a woman is: for here did dwell Vertue farre fayrer lodg’d, then ever eye Behild her yett cloth’d with mortallity.

27 Henry King offers similar reflections in his ‘An Essay on Death and a Prison’, Poems, pp. 139–​42, concluding that ‘Death is the pledge of rest, and with one Bayle /​Two Prisons quitts, the Body and the Jayle.’ (ll. 89–​90). 28 David N.  Durant, Arbella Stuart:  A Rival to the Queen (London:  Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), pp. 207–​8. 29 The poem is found in Yale University Library, Osborn MS b.197, p. 203; and Bodl. Ashmole MS 781, p. 147. Quotations are from the Yale manuscript.

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The poem is more specific in the second half, as the mythologized River Thames becomes the voice of mourning and dwells upon Arbella’s particular situation:

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For whose untimely losse the sliding Thame (As shee did glide along by ye same Tower) Wept for to looke upon her teare wett bower. Whose very sight makes her (as some doe say) When shee comes thither runns so swift away.

The critique of King James’ treatment of her is thus displaced into the voice of the Thames, as the elegist reminds us that this is what ‘ye flood Nymph says’; the lament is made public and general as it is voiced by the nation’s most significant river. This section also provides a link to her earlier attempt at flight by sea: the Thames curses       that time, & her unlucky  tyde Which parted once the Bridegroome & ye bride Wishing that Neptune then had bin so kind, To have carryed her away in spight of wind.

The poem presents marriage as a ‘right’ denied to Arbella, which was one of the more commonly expressed criticisms of the King’s actions towards her. He had promised to find a worthy husband for her (and mooted that Seymour was too lowly); by not fulfilling this, he compelled her to take steps on her own. The subsequent royal dissolution of her marriage through imprisonment and then death is daringly juxtaposed to the infamous Howard–​Essex divorce:30 Alas shee never claym’d so unjust a Tye, Curst bee thou death then for this Nullity.

In 1615, readers would have immediately associated the word ‘Nullity’ with the Howard–​Essex divorce, which was once again in the public spotlight because of the emerging news of the Overbury murder. (The divorce was technically presented as an annulment, or ‘nullity’, by the courts). The implication is that the King and Death have intervened illegitimately in the literal termination of the Essex–​Howard marriage and the figurative one of Seymour and Stuart. The accompanying epitaph also glances at Frances Howard’s remarriage to James’ favourite, the Earl of Somerset: Stuart and 30 For another elegy in which death is presented as bringing about divorce, see A Funerall Elegye in memory of the late Vertuous Maister William Peeter (1612), sometimes attributed to Shakespeare:  ‘asham’d /​Death often pities his unkind divorce’; Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds), The Norton Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 1997), pp. 521–​2.

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Seymour were cruelly kept apart, ‘Whilest that some of meaner lives, /​Are suffered to take others wives’.31 As in Corbett’s poem, Death is presented by ‘J.  O.’ as a convenient resolution for James: it severed this Gordian knot that had long vexed the King. Nevertheless, Death’s final parting of those already separated (by the King) is presented as too extreme a fate for the innocent Arbella. The poem ends with a heavenly consolation that seems to promise a fulfilment of the Stuart–​Seymour marriage, which ‘shall bee kept in heaven’ through divine royal sanction: ‘The King of Kings so much hath sayd, /​Since heere Th’are consummate: but yr made’. As Death restored her royal position in Corbett’s poem, here he restores her marriage.

Sir Thomas Overbury Arbella Stuart’s death in late September 1615 coincided with the breaking scandal about the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. A  few weeks earlier, the first rumours had begun to emerge that Overbury had been poisoned in 1613 because of his opposition to the plans of his patron, Somerset, to marry Howard. This led to an ever-​widening series of trials in the fall of 1615 (traced more fully below): these first implicated Richard Weston, who had been the keeper of Overbury in the Tower; then servants of Howard; and finally Howard and Somerset themselves. Thus, ‘J. O.’’s presentation of Stuart as the virtuous wife in contrast to Howard was written at a time of growing awareness of the scandal, and it can be seen as part of the same elegiac treatment that belatedly greeted Overbury in late 1615 and early 1616. Unlike Stuart, Overbury became a figure more dangerous dead than alive, as his murder threatened to reveal an expanding circle of court corruption and violence. Although there was little immediate response to his death in 1613, by 1616 many were willing to explore the meaning of his death in elegiac form. The scandal of the Essex–​Howard divorce, the Overbury murder, and the remaining unsolvable mysteries surrounding them has generated a rich quantity of books and articles –​some scholarly, some salacious and sensational.32 Alastair Bellany’s The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern 31 ‘Epitaph upon the Lady Arabella’. In both manuscripts this immediately follows the elegy by ‘J. O.’; while in Bodl. Ashmole MS 781 it too is ascribed to ‘J. O.’, in the Yale MS it is identified as by ‘Ignoto’. 32 In addition to those cited here, see Beatrice White, Cast of Ravens: The Strange Case of Sir Thomas Overbury (London: J. Murray, 1965), and David Lindley, The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact and Fiction at the Court of King James (London: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1996).

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England:  News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–​1660 investigates not so much the events themselves as their public reception and treatment in the news culture of the time.33 As he includes significant attention to the poetic response to the scandal, his work stands closest to mine. However, my focus on the Overbury elegies in this chapter will place them primarily in relation to the developing genre of the funeral elegy and, in particular, to elegies on similarly situated figures (Essex, Stuart, and Ralegh). The fallen favourite of a favourite is seldom the favourite of others, and while poetic sycophancy towards such a living figure is plausible, there is little point to it after death: hence, the muted, and even at times hostile, immediate response to Overbury’s death is understandable. As John Chamberlain noted shortly after Overbury’s death, which at that point was not known to have been murder, ‘his very frends speake but indifferently of him’,34 and many contemporaries remarked upon his pride and high-​handedness.35 Some of the prefatory poems to the first edition of Overbury’s Wife note the poet’s death, but largely do so to play, as had the title page, with the idea that the Overburian ‘wife’ is now a ‘widow’, who might add conjugal mourning to her virtues. In fact, one encourages her to ‘Yet have a care his name be not reveal’d:  /​Griefe merits most, where it is most conceal’d’.36 (Overbury was not named on the first edition’s title page.) Another is too busy wishing ‘I may behold this Widowe in my bed’ to give the first ‘husband’ much thought.37 One surviving poem, usually dated from the year after Overbury’s death, is a satiric epitaph that primarily focuses on his connection with Somerset: Heere lyes one nowe not worth despising Who Persian-​like worshipt the Sunne ryseing Who Courtier-​like embrac’d the brave Nowe Lazarus-​like lyes in his grave Who Stoicke-​like contemn’d a wife God sheild heereafter it breed noe strife Nowe read his fate though hee weere brave & bold Yet Like a Jewe was bought, and sold O burie him, burie him quoth the higher power 33 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1630–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 34 J. Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 478. 35 Anne Somerset, Unnatural Murder: Poison at the Court of James I (London: Phoenix, 1997), pp. 72–​3. 36 ‘Ad Viduam’, sig. A3v. 37 sig. A4r. ‘X. Z.’ expresses a similar desire for the ‘widow’ in his commendatory poem ‘On the Wife’; sig. A8r.

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Least hee poyson court cittie, and tower And was it not sinne to burie him then Who liveing stunck in the face of Men.38

The opening of the poem recalls Overbury as the creature of the royal favourite Somerset, then at the height of his power. However, as the poem unfolds it shows a development in the role of Overbury from a sycophantic courtier of an Eastern-​like court to a stoic reflector upon marriage. Even the transitional figure of Lazarus elevates him somewhat, for of all the dead, Lazarus is an exceptional figure and at first seems inexplicably chosen here. Bellany and McRae suggest that the poem exhibits no suspicion that Overbury was murdered and thus take it to be an early poem. However, there are foreboding elements within it that suggest something more than the commemoration of a despised court-​climber. The fear that his death might breed strife and the attribution to a ‘higher power’ of the injunction that he be buried, ‘Least hee poyson court cittie, and tower’ seem to glance too conspicuously at the matter of poisoning to be mere coincidence. I would, then, suggest that the poem emerged in 1615 before the trials but when rumours of death by poison were already in circulation. The lack of evident sympathy immediately after Overbury’s death makes the elegies that appeared after the news of his poisoning all the more striking in their high praise of him. As the scandal of his death unfolded, Overbury was transformed from an unlamented court operator into a paragon of virtue standing in vivid contrast (both direct and indirect) to the villainy of his murderers. Ironically, Overbury was, like Lazarus, to live again in 1615–​16 as elegies resurrected and reinvented him as a man of integrity. As one elegy, probably by John Ford, opens, he is ‘Once dead and twice alive’. Such a claim of ‘virbius’ (being twice alive) was common among elegies (for example, in the book marking Ben Jonson’s death, Ionsonus virbius, 1638), but in Overbury’s case it is fair to say that he was more alive in the public mind in 1615–​16 than he had ever been previously, living or dead. While elegies of the time often suggested that a life was increasingly forgotten as the years passed, the memory of Overbury followed the opposite trajectory. William Browne concluded his elegy by acknowledging that Britain had ‘lost’ Overbury for only two years; now he is the subject of elegies, composed 38 Early Stuart Libels, F11. When he collected this poem in 1633, John Rous noted an attribution to Overbury’s fellow denizen of the Tower, Sir Walter Ralegh. As Michael Rudick demonstrates so well in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh:  A Historical Edition (Tempe, AZ:  Renaissance English Text Society, 1999), Ralegh’s imprisonment (and later execution) led to his name being linked to all manner of poems. As a victim of James’ suspicion, he certainly would not have been alien to the sentiments expressed here.

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because of his fresh posthumous fame:  ‘Hereafter, rais’d to life, thou still shalt have /​An antidote against the silent grave’. Similarly, Corbett’s poem suggests that the poison that killed Overbury will also function to ‘preserve’ him, as it ‘Work[s]‌afresh in some Historians quill’ (l.  20), which will be better than ‘a Poem mixt with Antidot’ (l. 22).39 This newly mourned and reconfigured Overbury came fully into view with the 1616 edition of his Wife with its extended selection of elegies.40 In these, the conventions of the genre confront the exceptional circumstances of this particular death, a notorious murder (which some poems directly call it; others refer to it as the ‘untimely death’) linked to the highest in the land. The opening of William Browne’s sophisticated elegy confronts the implications for poets of this strikingly odd situation: Had not thy wrong, like to a wound ill-​cur’d, Broke forth in death; I had not been assur’d Of griefe enough to finish what I write. These lines, as those which doe in cold bloud fight Had come but faintly on; for, ever, he That shrines a name within an Elegie (Unles some neerer cause doe him inspire) Kindles his bright flame at the Funerall fire.41

This passage acknowledges that the usual time for an elegy is well past and that with a more typical death the tardy Browne would have failed in his poetic duty. However, what exactly are the opening lines pointing to? Does ‘thy wrong’ refer to the wrong done by Overbury (disobedience to the King), or done to him? If the latter, is it the imprisonment of Overbury, to which the poet would not have attended had it not led to death? Or is Overbury’s death the ‘wrong’, which has now ‘broke forth’ in the deaths of those charged with the murder? Once again, the latter seems more likely, and thus the opening explains why an elegy is now being written, long after any ‘Funerall fire’ that might usually inspire it. The ‘hand of Murther’ (l. 9) (and its implications) ironically imbues poetic vigour, which is certainly

39 The Corbett and Browne elegies are sufficiently similar to suggest that one influenced the other. While Browne’s appeared in print earlier than Corbett’s, it is possible that Browne had seen Corbett’s in manuscript circulation earlier. 40 While Bellany refers to the continuing influence of ‘the set of powerful elegies prefacing Overbury’s Wife’ (The Politics of Court Scandal, 251), he offers no discussion or analysis of them. 41 Throughout this section I use the text of the poem as it appeared in the first edition of Wife. Texts of those by more established figures (Browne, Corbett) can also be found in twentieth-​century scholarly editions of their poetry.

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borne out by the number of elegies that appear after the revelations and the absence of ones from before. Similarly, Corbett’s elegy opens by reflecting upon how Overbury’s death is distinct from ordinary deaths, which prompt a predictable and limited mourning process. In a normal situation, illness, death, the laying out, the funeral sermon would all have taken their natural place, and the dead would ‘have tyded hence in two howers teares’ (l. 6), to be quickly forgotten with the ‘wine and cake’ of the funeral banquet (l. 10). Overbury’s exceptional death means that he has, in a wonderful phrase, ‘outdyde an Elegie’ (l. 17). The elegy by ‘W. S.’ (discussed below) likewise begins by reflecting on how ‘So many Moones, so many times gone round’ have passed since the death. John P.  Considine convincingly argues that the growing material in successive editions of Wife, including the elegies, does not reflect a literary circle surrounding Overbury, but was assembled by the printer Laurence Lisle from among his own associates and friends.42 Considine notes how the expanding collections preceding Wife came to ‘look more and more like a humanistic tumulus, a published record of shared distress’.43 As such, the elegies do not reflect so much personal and particular grief as the public response to the scandal of the murder. Overbury is valorized, rendered ‘the good’, by the vicious actions of ‘the great’ in bringing about his death. (Edward Coke, as the leading prosecutor in the 1615 trials, repeatedly used the term ‘greatness’ to implicitly point at Somerset.44) An elegy by ‘D. T.’ (whom Considine and others suggest may be Daniel Tuvill45), beginning, ‘Twould ease our sorrows, and release our tears’, is among the more sophisticated of these elegies, developing a complex argument through heavily enjambed lines. It is based on the oft-​used conceit that the stars (including the planets, as was usual in the seventeenth century) have not responded to the death as they ought. As will be discussed more fully in the next chapter, such an argument was often used in the poems on the royal deaths of Queen Anna and King James. However, here it is far more developed and central than in most poems: the stars should respond, not because of the greatness of the dead, but because of the monstrosity

42 John P. Considine, ‘The Invention of the Literary Circle of Sir Thomas Overbury’, in C. J. Summers and T. Pebworth (eds), Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), pp. 59–​74. 43 Considine, ‘The Invention of the Literary Circle’, p. 63. 44 White, Cast of Ravens, p. 116. 45 Considine, ‘The Invention of the Literary Circle’, p. 64. Tuvill was a clergyman who graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, B. A. 1600/​1 and M. A., 1607. The strongest basis for attribution is his connection with Lisle, who had published his The Dove and the Serpent in 1614.

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of the event, as these are ‘blacke Deeds’ which ‘might force pittie from the heart of Hell’. Rather than a comet or meteor to mark the death, the poet suggests that the stars, like the people of England, ought to hide their sight from such events: The Sunne should wed his Beames to endles Night, And in dull darknesse canopie his Light, When from the ranke stewes of adulterous Brests, Where every base unhallowed Project rests, Is belcht, as in defiance of his shine, A steame, might make even Death it selfe to pine.

The actions of Somerset and Howard (‘adulterous Brests’) are the basis of ‘projects’ (a term which in the early seventeenth century suggested political underhandedness) that include Overbury’s murder. The poet is dismayed that the out-​of-​joint universe goes on its merry way: ‘Mercurie capers with a winged heele’ even though he [Mercury] ‘sees a true Mercurian killd’, a gesture to dead Overbury’s growing reputation as a wit. The second half of the poem reinterprets the situation:  the stars shine brightly with joy at the revelation of the crime (ll. 29–​30), even while the human community continues to mourn the reality that virtue had been so extensively corrupted. Moreover, the final twelve lines involve a puzzling shift, as they begin by addressing Weston (the only explicitly named guilty party in the poem, who had been executed on 25 October 1615): Weston thy Hand that Couvre-​feu Bell did sway, Which did his life to endless sleepe convay. (ll. 35–​6)

However, in an attitude shared by many of the elegies, the poet’s anger does not dwell upon Weston, instead offering him a conventional funereal blessing:  ‘But rest thou where thou art’.46 The poem refocuses on others who ‘were privie to the Deed  /​And for the Crime must be adjudg’d to bleed’. Thus, the elegy would seem to have been written in very late October or early November 1615, after the execution of Weston but before that of Mrs Turner on 14 November. The poet does not curse these others ‘privie to the deed’ but offers to pray that their souls might rise to ‘shine among the Just’ and form a ‘glorious constellation’. Hence, the weak immediate reaction of the heavenly bodies to the mortal situation will be rectified by a new astral pattern of repentance. The poet seemingly believes that these others who might be accused and executed will be relatively guiltless ones like Weston and that the powerful figures behind them will remain untouched.

46 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, p. 215, recounts how the figure of the repentant criminal on the scaffold frequently elicited the support of the crowd.

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The elegy by ‘W.  S.’ (‘So many Moones so many times gone round’) presents dismayed wonder that the murder took so long to be uncovered. Rather than calling on the astronomical heavens to respond appropriately (as ‘D.  T.’ does), the poet prays for divine heaven to intervene, and thus show its care for the human situation. God governs the cycle of the year (described with rich detail in ll. 12 to 25) but seems to allow the good to be destroyed by the corrupt great. There is a strong suggestion throughout the poem that those brought to justice to date are insignificant in comparison with the great who are guilty: the former is ‘but a falling Starre’, the latter are a ‘bright Firmament of Fire’ (ll. 11–​12). The court in particular is the basis of this deeper corruption, a place where ‘boldest acts of shame blaze’ (l. 34), where buffoons worship scarabs, and all ethics are inverted (ll. 35–​ 41). This is more outspoken satire of the court than found in most of the Overbury elegies. The poem’s final fifteen lines probe what would motivate a mere servant like Weston to murder on his own:  a number of possibilities are considered, but the conclusion is evident from the beginning: ‘there lie[s]‌a flame /​Yet in the embers not unraked, for which /​He died so falsely’ (ll. 62–​4). Thus, the poem ends with a prayer that heaven will ‘Unlock this secret’ (l. 65). Christopher Brooke’s elegiac response to the murder is more theological than cosmological:  he acknowledges that Christian faith compels him to accept ‘all that happs to Men, or Good, or Ill’, even in the present circumstances, where Virtue seems assailed on all sides, which ‘Might shake the firmest Faith’ (l. 10). However, the general opening section begins with his acceptance of God’s mysterious ways, even as this does not excuse ‘Fates bad Instrument’ (l. 19). The second half of Brooke’s elegy turns to address Overbury directly, who has suffered by these ‘wicked Instruments’ of Divine Fate; they, despite their malice, have raised Overbury to the heavenly realm in his virtue, whence Brooke now calls upon him to look down at the course of justice on earth. Thus, Brooke celebrates the increasing pace of justice, which even ‘shakes the Root /​Of loftie Cedars’, an allusion which glances at the deep royal connections of the plot. Cedars, from biblical references onward, were associated with the great and, in particular, with royalty. Brooke was not one to shy away from such criticism of the court: just a year earlier his Ghost of Richard the Third had offered a topical satire that linked the current situation of the court with that of the notorious Richard.47 The same wind that moves justice along, Brooke suggests, increases Overbury’s fame, until it will ‘fill ev’rie part of this vast Continent’ (l. 42).

47 See James Doelman, ‘ “Born with Teeth”: Christopher Brooke’s Ghost of Richard the Third (1614),’ Seventeenth Century 14 (1999), pp. 115–​29.

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Repeatedly, these elegies inflate the virtue of Overbury as a foil to the villainy and debauchery of his opponents. This is taken to the greatest extreme in ‘’Tis dangerous to be good’ by ‘P. B.’ of the Middle Temple,48 which explicitly calls him ‘a Saint’ that ‘hath suffer’d Martyrdome’ (l. 4). ‘P. B.’’s extended and extravagant praise is startling under the circumstances, much more so than the lofty language (ridiculed by Jonson) that Donne applied to Elizabeth Drury in the Anniversaries: Overbury had many more years to sink into well-​known corruption than the young Drury. Similarly, the slight poem by ‘B.  G.  of the Middle Temple’ (identified as Bernard Griffin in Donald Beecher’s edition) presents Overbury as a martyr for his virtue: death is a mercy, which stood opposed to the murderer’s ‘insatiate Lust’. Such phrasing clearly points to Somerset or Howard. This depiction of Overbury is ironic given his attempts to seduce Lady Rutland, as will be discussed below. The tendency of post-​trial poems to idolize Overbury’s virtue was noted by Sir Francis Bacon at Somerset’s trial: he reminded the court that ‘howsoever the tragical misery of that poor gentleman Overbury ought somewhat to obliterate his faults’, the reality was that ‘Overbury was ’naught and corrupt; the ballads must be amended for that point’.49 How precisely was Bacon using the term ‘ballads’? There certainly were one-​leaf broadside ballads issued about Overbury (for example, that which includes his portrait and epitaph, as discussed below),50 but Bacon may be using the term ‘ballads’ to diminish and dismiss the elegies included with Wife. The elegy appended to the published volume The just downfall of ambition, adultery and murder (an account of the trials and execution of Weston, Turner, and Franklin by one ‘I. T.’)51 also whitewashes the faults of Overbury, and extravagantly praises him as the complete ‘Renaissance man’:         in all parts a man compleate, Great in regard, in goodnes farre more greate, Who like a Starre in Brittaines Court did shine Learn’d in the Lawes, both Humaine and Divine, A Scholler, full of Gentleman-​like parts, Whose noble carriage won a world of hearts.52

Like ‘’Tis dangerous to be good’, this poem suggests that virtue brought about his death, although here his goodness is not distinct from greatness: he

48 Beecher suggests that Peter Ball may be the author. 49 James Spedding (ed.), The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 12, 314. 50 STC 18921.3. 51 STC 18920 (early 1616). 52 sig. C4r.

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would have lived longer had he ‘beene some unlearned rusticke hind’.53 The commemoration of Overbury’s death here becomes a call for further justice. After a celebration of his courtly, legal, and scholarly accomplishments, the poem by ‘L. T.’ recognizes his Satan-​inspired enemies: ‘Caine-​like men’ who made him a slain Abel whose blood called from the ground for retribution.54 The poet pointedly suggests that this call is ‘to the Throne of Majesty’: the King must intervene to see justice done. Bellany shows how the materials composed in 1615–​16 also reimagine Overbury as the epitome of betrayed friendship.55 Thus, Captain Thomas Gainsford’s poem invokes the swirling rumours that suggest ‘thy wounds were bleeding from that hand,  /​Which rather should have raisd thee up to stand’ (ll. 5–​6), seemingly a reference to Somerset. Gainsford then sets this troubling suggestion aside and engages in more conventional memorializing of Overbury as one who survives his writings. Similarly, John Hagthorpe resolves to retreat to isolated mourning in order ‘That cruell men which for their dearest friends /​Thus dig the graves, may not my peace offend’.56 John Ford’s ‘Once dead and twice alive’ reflects more extensively on the Overbury–​Somerset friendship than any of the other elegies, repeatedly pointing to the earl’s betrayal of his friend. Certainly, by this time the unlamented court-​climber who had died unregretted in 1613 seems to have been completely rewritten to fit the new narrative focused on the villainy of Somerset and Howard. As is often the case, an elegy by Corbett approaches the situation in a more playful and self-​reflective way than most. His ‘On the death of Sir Thomas Overbury poisoned in the tower’ was published in Overbury’s Wife but, like much of his poetry, also enjoyed a wide manuscript circulation in subsequent decades.57 Corbett’s nearly sardonic poem marvels that by being poisoned Overbury has experienced a rather royal death: ‘For none heares poyson nam’d but makes replie, /​What Prince was that? what States-​man so did die?’ (ll. 14–​15). However, he also considers how his poetic commemoration relates to the ongoing judicial process, and the political implications

53 The thought and language here is quite closely echoed by Samuel Johnson over a century later in ‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’: ‘Low skulks the hind beneath the rage of power, /​And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tower’ (ll. 33–​4). 54 Samuel Rowlands, Sir Thomas Overbury, or, The poysoned knights complaint (1614?) likewise compares Overbury with Abel. 55 Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal, p. 174. 56 ‘Teares for Sir Tho. O.’, in J. Hagthorpe, Divine meditations, and elegies (1622), p. 93. 57 The copies are mostly from 1630s manuscripts; none indicates pre-​ publication circulation.

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of elegizing such a figure. His enigmatic closing lines seem to reflect upon these ongoing trials:

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Enough of ryme; and might it please the law, Enough of bloud: for, naming lives, I saw He that writes more of thee must write of more; Which I affect not, but referre men ore To Tyburne, by whose Art they may define What life of man is worth, in valewing thine. (ll. 27–​32)

In the anaphora that opens the passage, Corbett aligns the elegiac commemoration of Overbury with the trials as parallel processes of public judgment, and he calls for an end to both. One cannot write of Overbury alone: his life and death are connected with those of others (particularly Somerset and Howard), and it would be dangerous for a poet to pursue such a topic. As an explanation of this cessation, he points to the scaffold at Tyburn, which engages in a rival ‘art form’ to elegy. This must refer to the execution of Weston, who had claimed that he in fact had valued and saved Overbury’s life by receiving the poison but failing to administer it through the prisoner’s food. Such, then, would group Corbett with those who doubted the validity of Weston’s conviction, and who believed that he was dying to protect more powerful figures. Some had approached Weston on the scaffold and pressed him for further revelations on this score; for thus questioning the process of justice some of these were called before the Star Chamber.58 Given this, the caginess of Corbett’s conclusion is understandable, and it stands as a fascinating example of a funeral elegy explicitly recognizing the limits of digressive detraction. Such playful engagement with the scandal surrounding Overbury is absent from ‘When I  behold this wife of thine’, which Beecher tentatively attributes to Edmond Grayton. It is more like the prefatory poems to the early editions than the 1616 elegies, in that it focuses on Overbury as the author of Wife rather than as a murder victim. The poem supposes that he has died in order to join with his heavenly wife, who was beyond the limits of this physical realm. However, in the final ten lines the diction begins to recall the circumstances of the Howard-​ Somerset scandal:  the poet suggests that if the fates did not bring about his death, then it was the envy of ‘seduc’de /​Friendship (is please’d to see a Love produc’d /​Lesse carnall then it selfe)’.59 It thus set about ‘with policie’ (a term deeply associated with court machinations) ‘So pure and chast a Love to nullife’. The last term would once again remind readers of the annulment of Frances Howard’s 58 White, Cast of Ravens, pp. 117–​18; Somerset, Unnatural Murder, p. 322. 59 Overbury, Wife, eighth edn, sig. A2r.

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first marriage, and as with the elegy on Arbella Stuart, its use here highlights the disparity between the ideal love of Overbury and his fictional wife and the dark passions of Howard and Somerset. The poet concludes, however, that ‘their project flies in smoke’ as ‘The poyson’s cordiall’ and ‘Their deeds of darknes’ have brought about Overbury’s spiritual marriage by his death. Through its first eight editions, Overbury’s Wife had become not only a compendium of characters but also a collection of elegies that pushed the form into political controversy in a way unseen in England before. The ninth edition (also 1616) made it an even more influential anthology by adding two further elegies, not on Overbury but instead one by Francis Beaumont on Elizabeth Sidney, Countess of Rutland, and Corbett’s on William Howard, Baron of Effingham. Although these might seem at first to be arbitrary filler, Lady Rutland (d.  1612) was connected, at least in gossip, with Overbury. In his Conversations with Drummond, Jonson recalled Overbury’s desire for her and how he sought Jonson’s help in bringing about a liaison: he ‘caused Ben to read his [Overbury’s] Wife to her, which he, with an excellent grace, did, and praised the author. That the morn thereafter he discorded with Overbury, who would have him to intend a suit that was unlawfull.’60 Beaumont’s poem is striking in its outspokenness about her marriage: early on, he reverts to her name of Sidney (which may ‘more force a tear’) and puts that of Rutland aside; then he forthrightly refers to her marriage as ‘Nought but a sacrament of misery’. This is certainly not typical fare in a funeral elegy: the Earl of Rutland had died just a few weeks before his wife, although there were already (according to Chamberlain) rumours about her considering a new marriage. Her marriage to Rutland had changed only her name, and she lived ‘Like a betrothed virgin’ rather ‘than a wife’ –​it was widely known that her husband was impotent. Hence, Lady Rutland came close to being the ‘wife’ of Overbury, and so a poem lamenting her decease (while denigrating her marriage) fits with the volume as a whole. As a ‘widowed wife’ she is like both Arbella Stuart and Overbury’s Wife.

Sir Walter Ralegh: ‘right and wronge both joyn’d to bee his foes’61 As with Overbury, Sir Walter Ralegh’s reputation was transformed by the circumstances of his death. John Aubrey, recording the memories of Sir

60 The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. 5, ed. David Bevington et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 370–​1. 61 NLW Peniarth MS 500B, fol. 53v.

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Robert Harley (1579–​1656), actually links the two men:  ‘it was a great question who was the proudest, Sir Walter or Sir Thomas Overbury, but the difference that was, was judged on Sir Thomas’s side’.62 This reputation for pride was at least partly refigured as Ralegh’s death elevated him, both because of the identity and actions of his foes, and because of his defiant courage on the scaffold, which seemed a rebuke of the justice of the realm.63 However, the elegies marking his death are more self-​conscious than those on Overbury in addressing this changed perspective: his high public profile over decades made it more difficult to focus simply on the significance of his noble death. Ralegh’s life and death were marked by radical swings in public opinion. Valorized (by some at least) for his courtly, exploratory, military, and poetic accomplishments of the 1580s and 1590s, rumours of atheism also dogged him.64 He was much vilified by supporters of the Earl of Essex for his role in that nobleman’s fall and death in 1601, an episode that cast its shadow over a number of poems that responded to his own death.65 Charged, in turn, with devices against the crown early in James’ reign, his long imprisonment slowly re-​established his positive public fame, abetted by the publication of his History of the World in 1614. His final heroic –​or vainglorious –​attempt to find and steal the city of gold in South America from under the noses of the Spanish led to a suitably tragic execution. Such an end confirmed his status as the wearer of the anti-​Spanish mantle opposed to those elements of the English court pursuing a Spanish Match for Prince Charles.66 His main accuser, Lewis Stukeley, found the moniker ‘Judas’ broadly applied to him, and with some commentators and poets the blame was extended from this instrument to the King himself. Whereas Overbury’s short and more private life was a relatively blank slate upon which elegists might project their own ideals, Ralegh’s all too well-​known earlier life had to be rewritten or wilfully ignored in elegiac response, which now sought to present him as an English

62 Oliver Lawson Dick (ed.), Aubrey’s Brief Lives (Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1972), p. 317. 63 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, p. 99. Anna Beer argues that Ralegh’s speech on the scaffold largely remade his public image; A. Beer, ‘Textual Politics: The Execution of Sir Walter Ralegh’, Modern Philology 94:1 (1996), p. 20. 64 ‘Off the Lyffe & Death of Sir Waterr [sic] Rawleye Knight. made by Ed. Kel. 1618’, CCRO MS CR 63/​2/​19, published in Early Stuart Libels, I11, notes these earlier charges of atheism and Machiavellianism. 65 The short epigram-​like poem in the voice of Ralegh, ‘Essex thy death’s reveng’ed; lo here I ly’, circulated widely in manuscript. 66 The most thorough account of Ralegh’s death and its aftermath is still found in Edward Edwards, The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, vol. 1 (London, 1868), pp. 700ff.

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hero and martyr. As one poem baldly rendered it, ‘the man thou wert, /​Is much to blame, but not the man thou art’.67 As Anna R. Beer describes it, Ralegh’s death was ‘a public issue, written about, read about and debated’;68 his death-speech circulated in manuscript, and the government published works, including an official account once again by Bacon, explaining and defending the execution.69 Furthermore, popular ballads, most often in the voice of the dying man, proved impossible for the authorities to control.70 While the response to Essex’s death described above was similar, Ralegh’s death prompted a richer, more outspoken and nuanced poetry. The elegies of Beaumont and Donne, those on Prince Henry, and the widely published elegies on Overbury had established a culture to meet the death of Ralegh with greater subtlety than was possible in 1601. The more straightforward elegies on Ralegh simply reflect public recognition of his heroic virtue, while others more fully and subtly explore the shifting ways of Fame. These often present a more balanced and probing image of the dead than seen in previous elegies. Thus, ‘O had thy name …’ by one ‘Ed. Kelly’ opens with several lines that reimagine the final voyage of Ralegh: O had thy name bene causer of thy death or had thy harte growne aged with thy yeares then had thou yett injoyed now wished breath or drencht in honor wee had spared these teares71

Thus, grief emerges from the particular circumstances of Ralegh’s death. Kelly then muses upon how Ralegh’s popularity and his usefulness to the powerful have been inversely related: Once livedst thou great, beloved but small yet great ones did thee greatlye use now greatlye loved, beinge not at all (ll. 7–​9)

67 ‘But softe, whose this whom Armed troopes attende’, Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 34r. 68 Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers, p. 96. 69 Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers, pp. 96–​8. See also Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh: In Life and Legend (London; New York: Continuum, 2011), pp. 317–​22. 70 See Nicholls and Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh, pp. 326ff., on the flurry of ballads and commentary in the weeks following the execution. 71 Early Stuart Libels, I11. Bellany and McRae suggest that the first line might refer to a pun on Ralegh’s surname; however, it seems more likely a play on his first name as ‘Waterr’, as in the title.

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Of all the surviving elegies, this one most thoroughly rehearses his earlier actions, such as the death of Essex and the 1603 plot against King James, which marred his reputation, and it rather marvels at the sharp change in public opinion. Those who had thought him a ‘Machiavell’ and ‘Atheist’, and sought his death for his actions against Essex, now celebrate him as a Christian hero. Throughout most of the poem, the speaker remains a detached observer of this shifting fame, but in the final lines he comes to participate in the celebration of this redeemed Ralegh: on Earth thou foundste noe harborrowghe of healthe havinge bent thy course unto a higher glorie the gracious porte thou chooise for glorious gaine was trust in him, who for thy soule was slayne. (ll. 27–​30)

Such is a far cry from his earlier reputation as ‘Machiavell’ and ‘Atheist’. The widely circulating elegy, ‘Cease booteless teares’, indirectly recognizes Ralegh’s earlier reputation but accepts the oddity of his renown at death in simple positive terms: ‘his Night surpast his morning every way’.72 The poem compares him to Samson (whose shortcomings were well known), as one who vanquishes in death more than ‘hee had don before’. It thus places him within the long-​standing tradition, both classical and Christian, of the ‘good death’ that made up for a lifetime of inadequacy. The poem echoes in translation the classical expression of this concept, ‘finis opus coronat’: ‘The end the Life, the Evening crownes the Day’.73 The ‘good death’ of Ralegh is also the focus of the poem ‘Great heart who taught thee so to die’, variously attributed but most likely by Captain Samuel King, who served with Ralegh in the final expedition to South America. The elegy in Brathwaite’s Remains after Death (1618) uses Ralegh’s death to reflect even more probingly upon the complexities of his reputation. Brathwaite recognizes how the trajectory of an individual life might compel the figure to be mourned differently at one stage than another. Ralegh’s life resists the predictable conceit of Fortune’s wheel; instead the poem compares it to ‘the mooving hand /​Of every Clocke, which still doth goe or stand  /​According to the weight it has’.74 If light, the wheel turns too slowly and the public looks forward to the death; if heavy, the clock (and life) runs far too fast. Ralegh is one for whom it now seems ‘night did come too soone’, but earlier at its noon (presumably at the time of the Essex trial) the public wished for it. Brathwaite finds himself among those

72 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 194. 73 See Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, pp. 183–​219, on the ‘good death’. 74 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 201. The short poem, ‘Hope flattered thee’, also reflects upon this complexity.

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who ‘like Ideots’ at a play ‘fancie most the Clowne’ and thereby miss the greater action presented. Thus, public response goes up and down regardless of true virtue and simply in reaction to the ‘place’ of the man. This instability of Fame also renders suspect the ecstatic elegiac response to his death: ‘Yet what mischance did bring thee to thy end, /​We willingly (with ignorance) commend’. ‘With ignorance’ the public judges his cause, and unmindful of the reasons of state that brought it about, simply responds ‘t’was pittie thou didst die’.75 The poem ends by pointing to Ralegh’s manifold ‘worth and faults’, and hoping (or accepting) that his worth now lives and his faults die in the grave. More than most elegies (on Ralegh or others), Brathwaite’s poem confronts the distortions and omissions in which such funeral poems engage. A century later Samuel Johnson would note that in ‘lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath’, yet while such an approach may be fine in response to a relatively private death, with a public figure whose shortcomings were well known such an approach is problematic (as we will see in the chapter below on Buckingham). Brathwaite’s poem, then, functions like the words of Bacon on Overbury, resisting the broad pattern of elegies that turned the dead Ralegh into a straightforward martyr figure. While Overbury’s reputation as a writer largely developed while the trials of his murderers took place, Ralegh’s complex stature was well established years before his death. Known as a court poet from the 1590s and thus associated with the celebration of late Elizabethan glory, his twilight years were bound up with the more fittingly sombre History of the World, which famously ends with stoic reflection on the power of death, using the traditional epitaphic opening ‘Hic iacet’. Ironically, this offered a fitting epitaph for one destined soon to die upon the scaffold, and like Donne a decade and a half later in his sermon Death’s Duell, Ralegh seemed to have written proleptically about his own death. The short elegy beginning ‘What worlds of people hath death conquered’ extends the sentiment of the History’s conclusion by musing upon the number of people who had died between the death sentence against Ralegh in 1603 and his execution fifteen years 75 Brathwaite may be echoing the well-​known epigram by Harington on Essex’s execution, which equivocated on whether it was a ‘pity’ that he and his co-​conspirators had died: When noble Essex, Blunt, and Davers dyed, One saw them suffer that had heard them tryed, And sighing sayd when such brave souldiers dy Ys’t not great pitty thinke you? no sayd I.    There is no man of worth in all the Citty    will say ’tis great, but rather little pitty. (John Harington, The Epigrams of Sir John Harington, ed. Gerard Kilroy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 4:59).

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later.76 Death may be the ‘great leveller’ –​which Michael Neill suggests is not a positive egalitarian image in the early seventeenth century, but rather one that threatened a terrifying loss of the natural distinctions between human beings77 –​but Ralegh’s head is a greater conquest for Him than all the rest. As Ralegh had evaded the usual ‘dart’, Death was compelled instead to use the ‘battle axe’ of execution. Thus, the elegy at once confirms Death’s ultimate power and the reality that Ralegh stood above his peers, that even in death he was set apart. Such a formulation also reads Death’s success as a ‘coward conquest’.78 This belittling of Death by pointing to his means is a common rhetorical move in the poetry of the time: for example, Donne mocks Death for dwelling ‘with poison, war and sickness’.79 In this elegy Ralegh overcomes the ominous power of death that had marked the final page of his greatest work. In a similar fashion, the elegy ‘Greate heart, who taught thee so to dye’ celebrates that ‘Death yeeld[ed] thee the victory’,80 a conceit common in elegies on military figures. Such poetic expressions are consistent with the general wonder at Ralegh’s defiant bravery upon the scaffold.81 The idea of ‘Fame’ also echoes through many of the elegies on Ralegh. While poems on those who died unexpectedly often resist the ‘Fame’ or news of death on its arrival, the death of Ralegh had been anticipated for fifteen years. While the final expedition had seemed a reprieve, the ensuing trial once again prepared the public for his execution. Thus, for Ralegh ‘Fame’ is not the news of his death but the heroic reputation thereby achieved, and these poems participate in the propagation of that fame. ‘Cease booteless teares’ (discussed above) finds in Ralegh’s surviving written work a reassurance that he is not gone: ‘those only dye /​That leave noe record to posteritie’. At the same time, the fame conferred by the written works of the dead themselves always puts the elegy at a disadvantage: it is not needed to commemorate, and often the poet makes a point of humbly noting this, as in Carew’s elegy on Donne and Milton’s epitaph on Shakespeare. The elegy ‘I knew thee but by fame’ celebrates Ralegh both as ‘the Muses Freind, and Spaines 76 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 198. 77 Neill, M. The Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp. 13–​18. 78 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 198. 79 ‘Death be not Proud’, Donne, Poems. 80 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 193. 81 John Castle wrote of his death, ‘as Aristotle speakes of a solitary man, he hath shewed him thereine either a god [or] a divill. for mere man is not so furnished against death, & therefore it was either a divelish hardness of hart, & an unsensibleness, or an unspeakable assuredness in Gods mercies’ (Letter to William Trumbull, 29 Dec. 1618, BL Add. MS 72276, fol. 60v).

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Arch Foe’.82 In presenting him as one who has shamed Homer, the elegist actually seems to be reapplying Ralegh’s own depiction of Spenser’s accomplishment in ‘Me thought I saw the grave, where Laura lay’, where ‘Homers spright did tremble all for griefe’.83 The elegy beginning ‘Fly fame, report that all the world may knowe’ strives to publicize his death within a simplified context of political reputation: his death is the triumph of the anti-​English forces, or, put more baldly, ‘Spayne and the devill’.84 And such a death has also placed him beyond the vicissitudes noted by Brathwaite: ‘beeing deade thy fame shall never dy’.85 Henry King, among the finest funeral elegists in the period, offered the most sophisticated poem on Ralegh’s death, one which circulated widely in manuscript but was not published until 1677. ‘I will not weep’ argues against mourning his death because of the nobility with which he faced it. While this mirrors the opening argument of ‘Cease booteless teares’, it is strikingly presented by King in a direct, personal way, a hallmark of his elegiac verse. Unlike most of the other poems considered in this chapter, this elegy is as much about the poet and his poem as the subject. At the same time, King does engage in political critique, as the opening lines suggest that to weep over Ralegh would have been as great a sin ‘as to have bin /​ An Actor in thy Death’. This neatly and quietly points an accusing finger at all in authority who contributed to his death: the King, Bacon, Stukeley, et al. Repeatedly in the poem, Ralegh’s enemies are presented as engaging in malice (l. 8) and scandal (l. 17); for these pathetic figures, King would reserve his ‘pity’ (a word which echoes through the poem). Ralegh’s ‘most industrious and freindly foes’, who only diminished themselves and elevated him through their persecution, are thus deserving of condescending pity. They are ‘Too meane for scorne’ (l. 26): the contrasting of pity and scorn echoes the opening of ‘Satire 3’ by Donne, who was the greatest influence upon King. King presents Ralegh as struggling with Fortune (as well as with his foes) and triumphant even in defeat. This brave and defiant death left him only more admired: there is some recognition of his more sullied earlier reputation, and that he reached his public zenith only at death. Like Brathwaite’s elegy, this poem reads Ralegh’s life as a stage play of plot upheavals (‘Thy Life and age /​Was but a various Scaene on fortune’s stage’; ll. 3–​4), one in which he finally triumphed only in the heroic tragic ending. In this case,

82 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 200. 83 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 2. 84 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 198. 85 Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 199.

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the metaphor of life as theatre might have been suggested by Ralegh’s own famous opening line, ‘What is our life? A play of passion’. Finally, a more epitaph-​like poem that survives only in a manuscript at the National Library of Wales brings together much of the irony and ambivalence noted in the poems on Ralegh up to this point.86 It begins by addressing a visitor to the grave in a variation of the epitaphic formula of ‘Sta, viator’, with the injunction ‘Tread softly, passenger’. These same words open a simple, widely circulating epitaph from the period on an unnamed child,87 but here, applied to Ralegh, the line calls readers to a much more extended contemplation: Tread softly, passinger, and first advize Thy self, e’re thou goe on, who ’twas heere lies A man that ownde a soule soe full of fire As might dessected limbs wth life inspire And had diverted (in that doubtfull gate) The over earnest malice of his fate had hee not (ere his bodies latest pace) Before hand sent her to a better place.

While Ralegh’s vigour of soul could not avert his fate, he will live on in his writings (presumably The History of the World), which shall endure ‘Perhapps till th’Earths self finds her funerall’ (l.  10). The epitaph then recognizes the irony that his destiny has been bound up with shifting official policy towards Spain: his fav’ringe Spaine (Now a more favord Nation) Was the first grownd of his first condemnation Now for offendinge Spaine as t’is pretended his life that waide a thowsand lives is ended (ll. 13–​16)

The poem concludes with the ultimate ironic situation: ‘right and wronge both joyn’d to bee his foes’ (l. 22), a verdict consistent with the bulk of elegies on Ralegh surveyed here.88

86 ‘Epitaph on Sr Walter Rawleigh’, NLW Peniarth MS 500B, fol. 53. 87 Printed in Wits Recreations (1640), sig. 285v. Tread softly passenger! for here doth lye A dainty Jewell of sweet infancie: A harmelesse babe, that onely came & cry’d In baptisme to bee washt from sin and dy’d. 88 This sort of nuanced political reflection is also found in elegies and epitaphs on the Earl of Strafford some twenty years later; like Ralegh, Strafford was sacrificed by the king in an act of appeasement. See Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–​1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 42–​9.

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Overall, then, the elegies on Ralegh offer a more nuanced probing of the paradoxes of his life and death than those better-​known literary works of the next decade that turned his ‘ghost’ to political purpose. In works like Captain Gainsford’s ‘Vox spiritus, or, Sir Walter Ralegh’s ghost’ and Thomas Scott in Sir Walter Rawleighs Ghost (1626), Ralegh’s ‘ghost’ or ‘voice’ was used to articulate an anti-​Buckingham and anti-​Spanish position.89 More than in the immediate elegies, these works put aside Ralegh’s earlier image as a disliked favourite and courtier, and the animosity between him and Essex was also forgotten as the two took up parallel places in a narrative of aggressive foreign policy.

Conclusion The elegies on Stuart, Overbury, and Ralegh enjoyed a popularity based upon the circumstances of death: the Tower and its historical mystique lent a lofty renown and a master narrative to all who died within it, or from its walls went forth to execution. The elegies may perceive them as guilty of ambition or a lack of discretion –​or even sometimes as the victims of mere fate of birth (Stuart) or friendship (Overbury) –​but rarely of the treason which was the actual grounds for imprisonment or death. Instead, the poems consistently point towards the harshness or guilt of others, of those responsible for the prosecution:  the King, or, more often, the King’s councillors and favourites. The unusual circumstances of these deaths posed a challenge to the commonplaces of elegiac commemoration: unlike Sidney, Prince Henry, or Elizabeth Drury, these figures did not invite straightforward celebration of virtue. Any praise invariably implied criticism, stated or unstated, of the ‘great’ who had led to their imprisonment or death. Overall, the elegies produced in response to these deaths of the mid to late-​1610s achieved a richness of self-​reflection and public probing of the political situation generally unseen in previous poems. In particular, the repeated publications of the ever-​growing collection of elegies in Overbury’s Wife came to be among the best known and most influential in the period, and I  would argue laid the foundation for the intense political use of the genre through the 1620s, as will be traced in subsequent chapters.

89 Joshua Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors and the Politics of Anti-​Courtly Love Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 140–​2; Curtis Perry, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 46–​7.

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Chapter 1 explored the massive elegiac response to the death of Prince Henry; this chapter turns to the deaths of four other members of the Stuart royal family over the next two decades: a queen consort (Queen Anne, d. 1619), a sitting king (James, d. 1625), a teenaged nephew of the sitting monarch (Frederick Henry of the Palatine, d. 1629), and an infant heir to the throne (the first Prince Charles, d. 1629). While rarely reaching the depths of despair of the Prince Henry elegies, in a variety of ways the elegies marking these deaths reflect the anxieties of the nation, and they also situate the royal deaths in the context of national, international, and cosmic events. They manifest a developing elegiac rhetoric for mourning royal figures, through both explicit references to previous deaths and echoes of theme, language, and metaphor.1 Thus, Prince Henry’s death is often recalled, and the astronomical phenomenon of a comet associated with Queen Anne’s death raises questions about the lack of similar markers for her husband six years later. As a group, these elegies also demonstrate the delicacy with which any royal death needed to be approached. Numerous writers invoke Psalm 82:6–​7: ‘I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.’ However, at the same time they faced the reality that a royal figure could not be mourned in the same fashion as a commoner.

Queen Anne’s death and funeral While Queen Anne experienced years of ill health (probably tuberculosis or pleurisy), her death came quickly and somewhat surprisingly in the early

1 James Loxley notes that university commemorative volumes marking royal occasions of the 1620s and 1630s show a strong tendency to read one royal event –​whether birth, marriage or death –​in relation to another (Royalism and Poetry, p. 34).

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morning of 2 March 1619 at Hampton Court.2 Her unexpected death left little time for the elaborate and well-​known ceremony of a ‘good death’.3 Despite the entreaties of those around her, she refused to write a will,4 which may have been a way to avoid the usual testament of faith with which one began, as it would have publicly made clear her religious commitment to Catholicism. Queen Anne had long maintained a balanced ‘church papism’ wherein she outwardly attended Church of England services while being committed on a deeper level to the Church of Rome.5 The funeral was delayed until May, which was at least partly attributable to the King’s own serious illness in late March and April. Such a delay also extended the period in which elegies were typically composed, and that the intervening months were particularly rainy compelled a number of poets rather predictably to read the showers as nature’s tears for the dead queen (‘’Tis not yet May’ and the very widely circulating ‘March with his wind hath struck a cedar tall’). The funeral itself, which cost a staggering £40,000, finally took place on 13 May.6 Archbishop Abbot, who had attended the Queen on her deathbed, also preached the funeral sermon.

2 Sir Edward Harwood to Dudley Carleton, 6 March 1618/​9, TNA SP 14/​107/​7; Sir Thomas Edmondes to Carleton, 17 March 1618/​19, TNA SP 14/​107/​38. 3 See ‘Death, Church and Family in England between the Late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries’ in R. Houlbrooke (ed.), Death, Ritual and Bereavement (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 25–​42. 4 Sir Edward Harwood to Dudley Carleton, 6 March 1618/​9, TNA SP 14/​107/​7. The will does not seem to have survived. Harwood also recounts that ‘It is now given out she was not Compos mentis & soe her estate to bee the kinges noe doubte if the kinge woll have it soe the prince will yeilde’. 5 Maureen M. Meikle and Helen M. Payne, ‘From Lutheranism to Catholicism: The Faith of Anna of Denmark (1574–​ 1619)’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 64 (2013), pp.  45–​69. On the question of Anne’s religious commitment, see the overview by Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 162–​72; Peter Davidson and Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., ‘Father Robert’s Convert: The Private Catholicism of Anne of Denmark’, TLS 24 Nov. 2000, pp. 16–​17. On her attendance at Church of England sermons throughout her reign, see Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp.  169–​ 71. On the general phenomenon of ‘church papism’, see Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists:  Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1993). 6 Harwood to Carleton, 16 April 1619, TNA SP 14/​ 108/​ 50; Nathaniel Brent to Carleton, 24 April 1619, TNA SP 14/​108/​70; Thomas Locke to Carleton, 30 April 1619, TNA SP 14/​108/​85.

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Elegiac response Anne’s death attracted some significant printed volumes of poetic mourning:  Cambridge and Oxford produced the expected anthologies of Latin (and a few Greek) elegies: Academiae Oxoniensis funebria sacra (1619), featuring such notables as Henry King, Robert Burton, William Strode, George Morley, and Brian Duppa, and Lacrymae Cantabrigienses (1619), which includes a short poem by George Herbert but otherwise offers a less impressive group of poets, including John Hacket, Dudley North, and Mildmay Fane. A number of English poems that circulated in manuscript reflect awareness of these academic volumes. For example, ‘Nor can faire Isis’ presents itself as prompted by the poems in the classical languages of the two volumes: Nor can faire Isis7 hide her cristal streames when muddy Tybur flowes pure Helicon Nor English muse deny her choicest rimes when Greekes and latins in a tragick tone are seen her deer Pandorah’s losse to moane8

This poem joins with the university volumes rather than competing with them, but two other elegies are far more derisive. One (beg. ‘Poore soules’) survives in a single copy inscribed in an interesting volume at the Bodleian that brings together many tributary volumes (mostly from Oxford) spanning the years 1576 to 1613.9 The poem marvels that such a ‘royall theame’ could not produce anything better than these ‘lowe, triviall /​Earth creeping inventions’ (ll. 4–​5). The poet can only imagine that vain ambition to see their names in print motivated the university poets, and he uses this to

7 The name of the River Thames in the area of Oxford. 8 Folger V.a.345, p. 71, ll.1–​5. The long title of the poem makes the same point: ‘In obitum Annae reginae Britanniae Annae Graia camoena dolet, queriturque latina funera, proh dolor sola Britannia silet’ (On the death of Anne, queen of Britain, the Greek muse of Anne grieves, and Latin funeral rites complain, alas only the British sadness is silent). 9 Bodl. pr. bk. Wood 460. As this is a volume of printed books with no continuous pagination, the position of poems can only be identified by where they stand in relation to the printed material. While clearly responding to Academiae Oxoniensis funebria sacra, this poem is written on a leaf between two earlier Oxford volumes, Bodleiomemna (1613) (on the death of Sir Thomas Bodley) and Threni Exoniensium (1613) (on the death of John Petre). A number of handwritten epitaphs at the end are signed ‘G. S.’, which may correspond to what is written on the second page: ‘George Sadleir. He hath several copies of verses here in ms’. Sadleir matriculated at Exeter College in April 1619, and he himself contributes a two-​line poem to Academiae Oxoniensis funebria sacra (sig. N3v).

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suggest the superiority of manuscript for such works:  ‘better is a private straine  /​Then publicke’ (ll.  21–​2). The poet offers little elegiac utterance of his own, however:  it is sufficient to say ‘the Queene is dead and more woefull wee’ (l. 33). As in his response to Daniel Price’s sermons on Prince Henry, Richard Corbett adopts a combative approach to rival mourners of Queen Anne, but he seems to anticipate the inevitable verses to come rather than ones that have already appeared. He begins his elegy, Noe; not a quatch, sad Poets; doubt you, There’s not greife enough without you? Or that it will asswage ill newes To say, Shee’s dead, that was your Muse? Joine not with Death to make these Times More grievous, with most Grievous Rimes.10

This rather general discouragement of poets is followed by a specific injunction to the ‘famous Universityes’ to ‘For-​beare the press’ (ll. 8–​11). In the lines that follow he ridicules the limited provinciality of Oxford and Cambridge, implying that the world does not care what poetasting students and tutors might produce. This vivid section gives way to more clichéd rhetoric in the second half of the poem:  true grief is a matter of nature, not art, and the Queen’s lineage and offspring are a sufficient epitaph in themselves. Ironically, as J.  A.  W.  Bennett and H.  R.  Trevor-​ Roper point out, Corbett himself contributed Latin verses to Academiae Oxoniensis funebria sacra.11 In addition to the university collections, a number of individual poets produced ambitious print volumes, both in Latin and English. Patrick Hanney published Two elegies, on the late death of our soueraigne, James Maxwell offered a weighty compendium of verse with both scholarly and prophetic pretensions (Carolanna …), and William Slatyer’s Threnodia presented elegies in a range of languages, including English. Queen Anne’s death did not attract composition by renowned poets in the way that Prince Henry’s did, however. Most surprisingly, no contribution from Samuel Daniel (who had been patronized by the Queen since 1603 and took part in her funeral procession) survives –​unless one of the anonymous manuscript poems is his.12 10 Corbett, Poems, pp. 65–​6, ll. 1–​6. 11 Corbett, Poems, p. 139. 12 See Joan Rees, Samuel Daniel: A Critical and Biographical Study (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964), pp. 166–​7, on Daniel and Queen Anne in 1618–​19. James Knowles, ‘Anna of Denmark, Elizabeth I and Images of Royalty’, in Clare McManus (ed.), Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (Basingstoke, Hampshire:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.  35, notes that Daniel, in contrast to Jonson, was sceptical ‘about the workings and function of occasional poetry’.

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Overall, individual manuscript elegies on Anne were less common than they were on the death of Henry six and a half years earlier.

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King James and the blazing star Two concerns dominate the elegies on Queen Anne:  the question of her husband’s response, and the comet (or ‘blazing star’ in 1600s parlance) widely visible in Britain in the months preceding her death. The royal couple had lived markedly separate lives, and James showed little more involvement with his wife at her death.13 Jennifer Woodward notes that while it was consistent with royal tradition that he did not participate in the funeral, his failure to don mourning clothes –​purple was the traditional royal colour of mourning –​was noted by John Chamberlain: wearing blue, he was dressed ‘more like a wooer than a mourner’.14 On 22 May, just nine days after the funeral, Nathaniel Brent noted, ‘The mourning for the queen must cease tomorrow, and St. George his feast wil be celebrated on Tuesday at Greenwich’.15 This royal distance left elegiac poets little to work with on the topic, and such perhaps accounts for the enthusiasm with which a range of mourning poems were ascribed to the King himself, as part of a broader desire to have the royal family manifest their grief publicly. Poets wrote the part that the King was not performing, and this may reflect a desire that the King be credited with a sort of private, poetic mourning to compensate for his distinct lack of a visible public role. ‘And wilt thou goe & leave me heare’ appears in a number of manuscripts with the title ‘K. James upon the death of Q: Anne’.16 However, other manuscripts point to both other authors and other subjects. BL Add. 10308 ascribes it to Sir Robert Ayton (the Queen’s secretary), but with no title applying it to the Queen.17 The poem itself is so general that it could be about anyone, and in fact it is not even clear that the ‘departed’ beloved is dead rather than merely

13 R. Houlbrooke, ‘Royal Grief in England, 1485–​1640’, Cultural and Social History 2 (2005), pp. 74–​5, sets James’ response to Anna’s death within the broader context and norms of royal mourning. 14 Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 169. 15 Brent to Sir Dudley Carleton, 22 May 1619, TNA SP 14/​109/​41. 16 Rosenbach MS 1083/​16; West Yorkshire Archives MS 32D86/​34. Oddly, the opening line was also later adapted in a widely circulated libel on the Duke of Buckingham, written at the time of the expedition to the Isle of Rhé in 1627: ‘And wilt thou go great Duke, and leave us here’. 17 It is included in Charles B.  Gullans (ed.), The English and Latin Poems (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1963), p. 178.

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absent.18 By far the most widely and credibly ascribed poem was ‘Thee to invite the great God sent a star’; its survival in a variety of forms that maintain the basic sense with widely varying word order and diction suggests widespread oral as well as manuscript circulation.19 Jane Rickard argues that the high number of copies (at least thirty-​eight) reflects a deliberate choice on the King’s part to intervene in the public discourse of manuscript circulation,20 but it is as plausible that the dynamic ran the other way: the attribution (whether accurate or not) to the King spurred widespread interest and circulation.21 Its popularity was also likely fuelled by its focus on the comet of late 1618, and the evolving way the King was supposed to have responded to that heavenly marker. The elegist, like many other poets and writers, in retrospect linked it to the death of Queen Anne in March 1619.22 Both classical precedent and Renaissance astrology established the expectation that momentous events –​such as the deaths of princes –​would be anticipated or reflected in the heavens. In the first scene of Hamlet, Horatio recounts the well-​known omens of Julius Caesar’s death; among these are ‘stars with trains of fire’,23 that is, comets. In one of his funeral sermons on Prince Henry, Price looked back a hundred years to the death of Prince Arthur (Henry VII’s son and heir to the throne):  ‘when Prince Arthur died, the Poets then complained that Arcturus was vanished in the heavens’.24 At the time of its appearance in 1618, however, the comet prompted a wide range of readings, from the dismissive to the apocalyptically prophetic. In ‘Upon the late Starre’ William Basse noted these variant readings of the comet, which included that it portended ‘some great mans end’, but he eschewed offering any interpretation of his own.25 God would make clear its significance in His own time, and meanwhile the nation would do best to interpret it as a corrective to their sins.26 While most readings of the comet as proleptic of Queen Anne’s death seem to have been retrospective, the Venetian ambassador Antonio Donato had made the connection between the comet and Anne’s illness already in November of 1618. It is 18 The same is true of ‘See the buildings, which when my mistress laid in’, which Yale Osborn MS fb.69, p. 236, ascribes to the king. 19 BL Harl. MS 6917, fol. 32r, in James Craigie, The Poems of James VI of Scotland, vol. 2, p. 174. This is the most common opening of the poem, but in a number of manuscripts it begins, ‘’Twas thee t’invite’. 20 J. Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 176–​7, 188–​9. 21 For an extended discussion of this dynamic, see my section on ‘illustrious authorship,’ including royal authorship, in The Epigram in England, 1590–​1640, pp. 206–​20. 22 CSPV, XV (1617–​19), 29 Nov. 1618, p. 366. 23 Hamlet, Quarto 2 (1.1.116). 24 Spirituall odours to the memory of Prince Henry (1613), p. 24. 25 W. Basse, A helpe to discourse (1619), p. 181. 26 Basse, A helpe to discourse, p. 182.

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plausible that such an interpretation was considered by others at the same time, but that only an outsider like the ambassador, addressing a safe non-​ British audience, felt bold enough to utter so directly an ‘imagining’ of a monarch’s death. This comet was widely visible in the north-​west sky across Europe from mid-​November to mid-​December 1618. Soon after the first English sighting on 18 November, James’ response –​or non-​response –​became part of the news, as it was reported that ‘The King takes no more notice of the blasinge starre then he hath alwayes done of the day-​starre’.27 Rev. Thomas Lorkin recorded a more vivid version of James’ words: ‘Concerning the blazing star, his majesty, they say swears it is nothing else but Venus with a firebrand in her [arse]’.28 At first glance, James’ supposed comments would seem to be merely dismissive, or, if taken at all seriously, to reflect a commitment to a non-​portentous understanding of astronomical events. However, a fuller manifestation of James’ attitude is found in a poem that circulated under his name while the comet was visible, titled in most manuscripts ‘The Blazing Star’. Chamberlain notes the rumours about this poem: ‘the other verses go abrode in the Kings and S. N.’s name’.29 The poem begins by asking, ‘Yow men of Brittaine, wherefo[re] gaze yow soe  /​Uppon an angrye starre?’30 What follows is not a rejection of the divine significance of the comet, but a suggestion that it can only serve as a general warning for repentance, as any specific application is beyond human understanding: 27 Philip Mainwaring to the Earl of Arundel, 22 Nov. 1618, in John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, vol.  3 (1828; rpt New York: AMS,1968), p. 495. 28 Lorkin to Sir Thomas Puckering, 1 Dec.1618, in Thomas Birch, Court and Times of James I, vol. 2 (London, 1849), p. 110. However, in 1593, James had affirmed the prognostic astronomical capabilities of Tycho Brahe, in a letter and poem reproduced in Alexander Gill, The new starr of the north, shining upon the victorious King of Sweden (1632), pp. 5–​6. 29 Chamberlain to Carleton, 21 Nov. 1618, in Chamberlain, Letters, p.  185. ‘S.  N.’ may refer to Secretary of State Sir Robert Naunton. Curtis Perry considers this poem to have been ‘authored’ by James, while acknowledging that such authorship must be understood in a special sense: ‘they [James’ late manuscript poems] speak for the crown, but they may or may not have been literally produced by the hand and heart of the king’; Perry, ‘ “If Proclamations Will Not Serve”: The Late Manuscript Poetry of James I and the Culture of Libel’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 212. Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority, pp. 9–​12, emphasizes that James himself blurred the distinction between works solely authored by him and ones that he authorized to circulate under his name. On the uncertainty of ascribing poems to King James, see also my ‘The Reception of King James’ Psalter’, in Fischlin and Fortier, Royal Subjects, pp. 454–​75. 30 ‘His Matyes verses on the Blazing starre: 1618’, Bodl. Malone MS 19, fol. 39r.

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The daring muse of the early Stuart funeral elegy And misinterprete not with vaine conceipt The Character yow see one heavens gate. Which though it bringes the world some newes from fate The letters such as noe man can translate. And for to guesse at god allmighties mind Weare such a thing might cosen all mankind. Wherefore I wish the curious man to keepe His rash imaginations till he sleepe. Then let him dreame of famine, plague, & warre And thinke the Match of Spaine hath caus’d this starre. Or lett them thinke that I the Prince, my mind Which [sic] shortly change, or which is worse, Relligion.31

The poem is clearly not free-​standing but part of a larger discussion, or perhaps a royal attempt to end that discussion.32 Already some of James’ subjects were interpreting the event as a warning to beware Spain, as negotiations concerning the Spanish Match were ongoing at the time. Other events, recent or ongoing, offered further bases for speculation: Sir Walter Ralegh’s execution (29 October), or the Synod of Dordt that had begun on 13 November.33 Others mocked such speculation: John Castle sent a number of poems on the event to William Trumbull with this comment: ‘You will see by these verses what opinion our Courtiers have had of the prognostique part of the Comett. I  heare the invention pleased the k.  very well.’34 The poems do not survive with Castle’s letter, but they may be Corbett’s ‘A letter sent from Doctor Corbet to Master Aile[s]‌bury, Decem. 9, 1618’, and the short ‘Upon the Same Starre’, where Corbett engages playfully in the portentous speculation that the verse epistle rejects. ‘Yow men of Brittaine’, then, is similar to other attempts during King James’ reign to limit or control public discussion of what he regarded as arcana imperii. The people should refrain from attempting to read signs beyond their ken, whether those are of the heavens or of the king and his foreign policy.35 It would seem that James was provoked into quasi-​public poetry by the writings of others, particularly on the subject of the Spanish Match.36 31 Bodl. Malone MS 19, fol. 39r. 32 Rickard, Authorship and Authority, p. 189. 33 See, for example, ‘On Sir Walter Raleigh who was beheaded a little before the appearance of the Commett’ (beg. ‘I knew thee but by fame’), Rudick, Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 200. 34 18 December 1618; BL Add. 72276, fol. 62v. 35 Rickard, Authorship and Authority, p. 190. 36 Related to the controversy may be a libel referred to in an 18 December letter from Lorkin to Puckering: ‘There hath lately run up and down an infamous libel, which touches, as they say, most of our great ones; and two gentlemen are committed about it, one Ashfield and another Matthews, either as authors or divulgers’; Birch, Court and Times of James I, vol. 2, p. 114.

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In doing so, he was entering what Thomas Cogswell has called an ‘ “underground” market arguably … as close to a mass media as early Stuart England ever achieved’.37 The death of Queen Anne just three months after the appearance of the comet radically redirected interpretation of the comet’s significance, as it came to be seen as the delayed fulfilment of the comet’s portent. In particular, ‘Yow men of Brittaine’, with its denial of any prophetic significance of the blazing star, must have seemed ironic given the unfolding of events. In his sermon of 11 April, on the recovery of the King from serious illness, Bishop John King chastised the nation (and implicitly the King himself) for dismissing the comet’s significance: [we have had] a signe from heaven that dazeled our eyes, and might have daunted our hearts, but slighted in such sort, as if we had seene but the shining of a Glow-​worme: I feare not the events, what hath bene, nor the portents, what may be; I  feare our portentuous and prodigious sinnes, which are as significant and prognosticant of the wrath of God, as any of these wonders38

Poets also reinterpreted the comet:  Corbett’s elegy ‘Noe, not a quatch’ rereads it as ‘a Herauld-​ Starr’ that ‘Did Beckon to Her to appeare’. However, he downplays any ominous aspect:  ‘For when such Harbingers are seene, God crownes a Saint, not kills a Queene.’39 Ayton offered a Latin elegy that connected both the King and the Queen to the blazing star. In his reading, it first appeared to herald the illness of James, but Anne then self-​ sacrificially offered herself in her husband’s place. James was ill from March to early April 1619; presumably this poem was written after his recovery. In a similar vein, the poem ascribed to the King reinterprets the blazing star not as an omen, but as a divine invitation:

37 Thomas Cogswell, ‘Underground Verse and the Transformation of Early Stuart Political Culture’, in Susan D.  Amussen and Mark A.  Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays presented to David Underdown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 287. 38 John King, A sermon of publicke thanks-​ giuing for the happie recouerie of his Maiestie from his late dangerous sicknesse (1619), pp. 51–​2. 39 Corbett, Poems, p.  67. The Oxford volume of Latin elegies marking the Queen’s death, Academiae Oxoniensis funebria sacra (STC 19024), also has a number of poems that allude to the comet (sig. E1r–​E2r). One in particular, by John Pyt, echoes the king’s supposed poem, and suggests that, like the comet at Julius Caesar’s death, this one ‘excelsam monstret ad astra viam’ (would show the high way to the stars). In the corresponding Cambridge volume, Lacrymae Cantabrigienses, George Herbert was among those who invoked the comet’s new significance: ‘Namque Annae laudes coelo scribuntur aperto’ (‘For Anne’s praises are written in the open sky’); Catherine Freis, Richard Freis, and Greg Miller (trans.), ‘George Herbert’s Latin Verse’, George Herbert Journal: Special Studies & Monographs, 2017, p. 183.

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’Twas to invite this guest God sent the star, Whose friends and nearest kin good princes are: Who, though they run the race of men, and die, It serves but to refine their majesty. So did the queen her court from hence remove, And put off earth to be enthroned above. She then is changed, not dead; no good prince dies, But, like this day’s sun, only sinks to rise!

The sentiment is conventional:  only the attribution to the King and its radical rereading of the comet elevated the poem’s significance. A third manuscript poem mocks those who had claimed to understand the comet’s significance: Yow towringe spirits whose art-​yrradiate eyne dare peirse the Conclaves of the sacred Time Who, ere the fatall Crynite gane to’appere durst callculate the ffate of all the yeare yet when yt sin-​fed flame a month had blazd, true Samian Sophyes, silent stood and gaz’d, Stande ever mute: heavens Oracle hath spoke Shees dead: breake yours our Jacobs staff is broke.40

The portent of the comet is now clear to this poet, and the poem’s wit points in two directions: Anne, who was the ‘staff’ (support) of Jacob (i.e. James), is dead, and her death has also frustrated those would-​be astrologers who with their ‘Jacobs staffs’ (astronomical instruments for measuring altitude) have now been humiliated. In BL Harl. MS 3910, ‘Ye men of great Brittayne’ appears with two other elegies on Anne that survive in no other manuscript. One artfully constructed poem (beg. ‘I chide no Blazing Starr’) rejects any prognostication or cause of her death apart from God’s call: I chide no Blazing Starr yt did forgoe ye Princess death: lett Hethen quarrell so. nor curse I the disease, nor ill aspect of Planets, nor blame Phisicks weak effect because shee’s dead, I see a higher hand beckning her up, whom non can countermand41

This poem rejects speculation about the comet as ‘heathenish’ and aligns such with those who explain the death by blaming the physicians. However, 40 BL Add. MS 25303, fol. 127r. 41 ‘On the death of Queene Anne 2 of March 1618’, BL Harl. MS 3910, fol. 29r. On the verso of this sheet is a copy of James’ ‘Ye men of great Brittayne’.

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the other elegy, ‘No further shalt thou choak me grief ympersoned’,42 fully embraces an astronomical understanding of the Queen’s death: in a rush of unconstrained lament, the poet rues the inversion of the natural order

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      when Englands Demy Godesse her Queene gives place to Fate, & falls away by those fell starres, shee should rule not obey. (ll. 10–​12)

In its hyperbolic imagined construction of the universe, the poem places Anne as the central point around which ‘the Conglob’d starry company /​ And all Heaven mov’d’ (ll.  16–​17). The blazing star and Anne’s subsequent death have overthrown astronomical order, and (in a fashion similar to Donne’s Anniversaries) the poet fears a tumbling of the universe into ‘ould Chaos’. This dire lament finds consolation in the classical idea of apotheosis: But shee desyring rather for to smyte all Heaven wt blushes, darks ye Sunnbeam quite wth brighter Rayes, & giv’s ye world, now blynde no more, anothr eye; whether shee mynde to shyne mongst starres, or els in some new sphere becom fresh labor for th’Astronomere. (ll. 25–​30)43

In this way Anne triumphs over the blazing star, in effect replacing it as the object of the gazers’ awe.44 This rhetorical strategy is similar to the James-​ ascribed poem (‘Thee to invite’) with which I began the section. He stresses the kinship between stars and princes, finding solace in the idea that she is now ‘enthroned above’ (l. 6). All these poems offer a reinterpretation of the comet’s meaning in contrast to earlier, more dire, prognostications. The poets cannot deny that the blazing star was associated with a death in the royal family, but this is reconstrued as a positive development, arising from heaven’s love rather than divine judgment on human misdeeds. Such a brave face would have been quite difficult in the spring of 1619: the King himself was seriously ill, and England was rife with unwelcome prophecies, many directed at

42 BL Harl. MS 3910, fol. 42v. 43 Dryden’s ‘To the Pious Memory of the Accomplished Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew’ offers a similar celebration of astronomical transcendence (ll. 6–​15). 44 The manuscript identifies ‘W. A.’ as the author of the poem; Sir William Alexander, a courtier who directed the bulk of his writing towards the royal family, is the most plausible candidate. Lines 13–​14 (‘whom when I  oft beheld  /​shyning in Gemms’) suggest the personal acquaintance that Alexander enjoyed. He also wrote a funeral elegy on Prince Henry.

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the King.45 The most notorious of these was a prophecy/​libel entitled ‘Balaam’s Ass’, which had appeared four years earlier but for which the author was finally executed a few days before the Queen’s funeral.46 A  number of those elegies that attempt to downplay the connection of Anne with the blazing star do so by stressing her royal connections, both past and future: for example, ‘I chide no Blazing Starr’ describes her as a woman ‘rooted deep in Roialtye’ who is ‘like to a goodly Cedar tree, from whom  /​such sprouts of growing majesty did come,  /​as sett the world at gaze, & fixt ech eye, /​wth hope & wonder, on their Infancye’.47 Her royal offspring are thus a better object for gazing wonder than the much remarked-​upon blazing star. A queen consort’s most important role was to produce royal heirs,48 and so it is predictable that poems on Anne highlight her children. After all, hers were the first undisputed English royal heirs in over a century. North entitles his poem ‘Upon the death of Anne of Denmarke Queen of great Britaine, and the blazing Starre appearing neere her death, taken for the stellifyed spirit of Prince Henry dead not long before’.49 The poet of ‘Nor can faire Isis’ adopts a similar, if broader, argument: the blazing star was sent by ‘heroick Henryes spirit /​ And that quaternion of sweet infant ghosts’ (Anne’s four children who had predeceased her).

‘Yow towringe spirits …’ as detraction ‘Yow towringe spirits …’ also is significant as the only surviving poem to use the occasion of Anne’s death as an opportunity for detraction. It not only mocks astronomers in its opening lines but uses the Queen’s quiet hospitality

45 Thomas Locke to Carleton, 30 Apr. 1619, TNA SP 14/​108/​85; Thomas Locke to Carleton, 1 May 1619, TNA SP 14/​109/​7. 46 Edward Harwood to Dudley Carleton, 4 May 1619, TNA SP 14/​109/​11. See also Lorkin to Puckering, 4 May 1619, TNA SP 14/​109/​14; Birch, Court and Times of James I, vol. 2, p. 157; Anne Clifford, The Diary of Anne Clifford, 1616–​1619, ed. Katherine O. Acheson (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), p. 109. On James’ response to prophet figures, see my chapter, ‘Prophets and the King’, in King James I  and the Religious Culture of England (Woodbridge, Suffolk:  Boydell & Brewer, 2000), pp. 39–​56. 47 BL Harl. MS 3910, fol. 29r. 48 Sybil Jack, ‘In Praise of Queens: The Public Presentation of the Virtuous Consort in Seventeenth-​Century Britain’, in Stephanie Tarbin and Susan Bromhall (eds), Women, Identities and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), p. 216. 49 North, A Forest of Varieties, p. 73.

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and patronage to critique other members of the elite that fall short of this standard:

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If hospitable virtue were a praise In these our ffrenchified & quelq’chose dayes50 I’de say shee kept a greate house, kept it ope hyrselfe a Recluse, gave hyr house large scope Too practicke have hyr Oeconomicks beene too much a house-​Dove for so greate a Queene (ll. 51–​6)

The tenor of the times is French fashion rather than the virtue of hospitality, but Anne fulfilled the latter, if in her own distinctly non-​royal way of practical and easeful hospitality: she was more ‘Recluse’ and ‘house-​Dove’ than queen.51 Although she was responsible for major building work at Denmark House and Greenwich, that dimension of her hospitality is not mentioned. Clearly, the poet was more impressed by her treatment of people than her cultural achievements. Such emphasis upon her kindness follows in the description of her patronage, as the poem represents her as one who assisted the outsider, the figure who had lost favour: in Courte, what ever potent faction strove our Juno, still she reconcilde, our Jove. it was hyr greatest glory, all hyr pryde t’emplume ye deplum’d, helpe the helpless side. (ll. 57–​60)

She was a ‘Juno’ interceding with ‘Jove’ (James) on behalf of the ‘deplum’d’ rather than the ‘potent faction’; again, she herself is effaced, as her ‘glory’ and ‘pride’ are simply in the outcast whom she helped.52 While the elegist might have been thinking of recent English factions, it is worth noting that Anne’s heavy involvement in factional conflict spanned her years in both Scotland and England.53 Her intervention on behalf of the ‘deplum’d’ is already evident in her successful pleading for the lifting of exile on behalf of Ludovick Stuart, Second Duke of Lennox, in 1591. On repeated occasions she favoured Robert Carey when he was put aside by the King or the King’s

50 The preface to Beaumont and Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, likewise makes reference to ‘the French quelque chose’ who are too delicate in their tastes. 51 Knowles, ‘Anna of Denmark’, p. 30, notes that Queen Elizabeth was ‘often represented as the nation’s “good huswife” ’. 52 Sir Sampson Darell’s elegy, ‘Pay tribute eyes’, likewise celebrates her as ‘The bright protectresse of disgrac’t desart’ (Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS 210, fol. 56v). 53 See Clare McManus, ‘Introduction: The Queen’s Court’, in Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (London:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p.  13; and Barroll, ‘The Court of the First Stuart Queen’, pp. 194–​9.

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favourite, Somerset, and Anne Clifford turned to her for support when her husband and the King pressed her to sell some of her inherited property.54 Courtney Thomas has noted how often those suffering persecution (including Ralegh and Arbella Stuart) appealed to Anne to intercede on their behalf; similarly, during Lord Chief Justice Edward Coke’s fall from grace in 1616–​17, Anne remained firm in her commitment to him.55 The passage continues by celebrating the Queen’s protection of her household from spite. The following lines are rather cryptic, and the wide variation in the three manuscripts suggests that the scribes struggled to make sense of them. The basic point, however, seems to be that unlike other powerful figures, the Queen never dispensed with the laws, or ‘patronized a Truth defective Cause’. Certainly in the context of the mid-​to-​late 1610s this sounds like a reference to Somerset and Frances Howard, whose divorce the King infamously supported while Anne was intensely hostile to both Somerset and the whole Howard family.56 The passage reaches its peak of specificity by recounting that this giving was in sharp contrast to the monopolies so controversial in the period: Monopolyes (the banes of publicke state) she prosecuted not but wth hyr hate; (indeed hyr virtues & hyr fayre desarts monopolized had hyr subjects harts) soe free from passions & affections thrall soe gratious of accesse soe sweete to all. (ll. 69–​74)

This emphasis upon her hostility towards the pervasive monopolies of the time has not been noted by recent scholars who have treated her political role in England. Unlike that of Prince Henry or the other deaths considered in this chapter, Anne’s death had no effect upon royal succession, and the funeral elegies do not dwell upon future implications. However, the coincidence of her death with the blazing star and the increasingly unsettled foreign affairs created an opening for exploring national anxiety.57 Her death also eliminated a royal

54 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, pp. 152–​6. 55 C. E. Thomas, ‘Politics and Culture at the Jacobean Court: The Role of Queen Anna of Denmark’, Quidditas 29 (2008), pp. 86–​90. 56 Barroll, Anna of Denmark, pp. 135–​40. 57 The significance of Anne and her circle for English foreign policy is traced in Louis H. Roper, ‘Unmasquing the Connections between Jacobean Politics and Policy: The Circle of Anna of Denmark and the Beginning of the English Empire, 1614–​18’, in Carole Levin et al. (eds), High and Mighty Queens of Early Modern England: Realities and Representations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 45–​59.

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court that had served as an alternative to that of the King, and this too was cause for poetic lament.

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King James’ death and funeral James VI and I died at midday on 27 March 1625 at Theobalds; on 4 April his body was brought in procession to Somerset House, where it lay in state accompanied by a constant vigil of noblemen for a month.58 The funeral, held on 7 May, was an extravagant public affair, ‘the greatest indeed that was ever knowne in England’,59 and thousands were involved in the funeral procession, with Charles playing the role of chief mourner –​an uncommon scenario.60 Thomas Heywood’s Funeral Elegie imagines Charles’ mourning and participation in the funeral:  ‘T’imagine you sit mourning ’mongst your Peeres, /​Your selfe heart-​sad, their eyes all glaz’d in teares’.61 Before Charles’ time it had been seen as improper and weak for a king to participate in mourning. This passage seems an attempt to validate what Charles has done:  nature calls him to mourn, even if as king he should be above it. ‘Why should the least sorrow touch thy heart, /​The sole hope of many millions art?’ Heywood asks, and then concludes that ‘Nature will have course, Kings and Kings Sons /​Must all obey to passion’.62 Having delved this far, Heywood then retreats from this ‘search[ing] the sorrowes of a Kingly brest’. However, as will be traced more fully below, such commitment to mourning was complicated by the new King’s marriage to Henrietta Maria of France in the same month. Funerary grief and martial celebration did not always mix well, and there were those who felt the King and court got the balance badly wrong. Simonds d’Ewes’ report of James’ funeral articulates his sense that there was a relative lack of proper grief: ‘It did not a little amaze me to see all men generally slight and disregard the loss of so mild and gentle a Prince,

58 Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 186. This scene of mourning is described in James Shirley’s elegy, ‘When busy fame was almost out of Breath’, Poems (1646), p. 58. 59 Chamberlain to Carleton, 14 May 1625, p. 616. A thorough description and analysis of the funeral is found in Woodward, The Theatre of Death, pp. 175–​203. 60 The Venetian ambassador noted that this was only the third time since William the Conqueror that the new monarch had been present at the funeral of the old. See Woodward, The Theatre of Death, p. 180, on the tradition of the new monarch not participating in the funeral of the old, and Houlbrooke, ‘Royal Grief in England’, pp. 75–​6, on the unusualness of Charles’ public displays of filial grief. 61 Thomas Heywood, Funeral Elegie, sig. C2v. 62 Heywood, Funeral Elegie, sig. C3r.

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which made me even then to fear that the ensuing times might yet render his loss more sensible, and his memory more dear unto posterity.’63 Some tension is inevitable in any royal death and accession: ‘The King is dead; long live the King’, poets must cry in a single breath; they must ‘both weepe & singe’;64 there is ‘Mirth in Mourning’, as one poem title suggested.65 The proper balance of lament and hope may be hard to achieve, and there was little in the way of established protocol available in 1625; after all, England had not had a straightforward, uncontested, father–​son inheritance of the crown since Henry VIII’s 1509 accession at the death of his father, Henry VII. Catherine Loomis traces this dynamic in the elegies marking Queen Elizabeth’s death, where she suggests elegies played a role in smoothing that more radical transition,66 and Dennis Kay has argued that the funeral elegy experienced a turning point with the death of Elizabeth, that such an occasion called for commemorative verse that was not ‘merely narrative or ceremonial’.67 One funeral elegy on James defensively concludes its awkward attempt to simultaneously lament the old and celebrate the new King: those who May thinke our teares an Inimey to thee [Charles] Shedd for thy father, but excus’t as done ffor losse of him yt left us such a sonne.68

While elegists faced the challenge of balancing lament and celebration that is inevitable with any monarch’s death, here the simultaneous movement towards a royal wedding further complicated the situation. Kay has called the response to James’ death a ‘reticence amounting almost to silence’69, but such a statement reflects his focus on print and canonical poets. In sheer number, the poets did their part –​in fact, William Hodgson complained that ‘Each Poetaster blubbers forth a verse’70  –​ but many of these were in manuscript circulation only, and there were few by the major poets of the time, a situation that is in marked contrast to the elegiac response to Prince Henry’s death. Those who did poeticize on James’ 63 Simonds d’Ewes, Autobiography, vol. 1 (1845), p. 264, May 1625. 64 ‘Of late a Serjeant notinge ye reporte’, BL Add. MS 22118, fol. 26r. 65 Cf. Edward Tilman to Paul D’Ewes. 1 April 1625, in Sir Henry Ellis (ed.), Original Letters Illustrative of English History, vol. 3 (London, 1825–​46), p. 244, where he describes the response to the proclamation of Charles as king: ‘the joy of the people devoured their mourning’. See Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 84–​5, on the immediacy of the heir replacing the dead monarch in the funerary process. 66 Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 47–​8. 67 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 80. 68 ‘So when thy corpse in sad solemnity’, BL Add. MS 11811, fol. 29r. 69 Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 205. 70 Plurisie of Sorrow (1625), sig. A4r.

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death were of the second, if not third, rank: such poets as Abraham Holland, George Morley, Thomas Brewer, Francis Hamilton, William Hodgson, and Hugh Holland. Among surviving elegies, the best-​known poets are the prolific Thomas Heywood and John Taylor. In his own contribution, Richard James wished that a major poet would embrace the elegiac task: Some Johnson, Drayton, or some Herick would Before this time have charactred the Mould Of his perfections; and in living Lines, Have made them knowne before these mourning times.71

Given his role in court masques, Jonson would have been well positioned to promote the court’s perspective, but he, like Drayton and Herrick, remained silent.72 The relative neglect by the greatest poets may partly be explained by the tumult of events in the spring and summer of 1625. What Thomas Dekker called one of ‘the worlds Climactericall yeares’73 was marked by other developments besides the royal wedding that distracted from mourning: uncertainty reigned as the pressure to bury James and bring about the marriage-​based alliance with France was heightened by preparations for war with Spain, and the onset of the plague.74 John Holles, the Earl of Clare, comments facetiously on this strange state of affairs in the spring of 1625: The settling of the court will not appeare till after the funeralls, then will darknes and light divide, eache to his proper place, our affaires of state, and what relation we shall have to our neabors; after parlament, and coronation: the proxy will have played his part ear this letter, tutche your fingers: and between funerall and Parlament (that there be nullum vacuum, which nature suffers not) the Lady cums.75

71 Muses Dirge (1625), sig. B4v. 72 On Jonson’s late adoption of the funeral elegy genre, see Kay, Melodious Tears, pp. 205–​11. 73 London looke backe at that yeare of yeares 1625 (1630), sig. A3r. 74 James Howell described the situation at the beginning of Charles’ reign: ‘he [Charles] is left engag’d in a War with a potent Prince, the people by long desuetude unapt for arms, the Fleet Royal in quarter repair, himself without a Queen, his Sister without a Countrey, the Crown pitifully laden with debts’; Epistolae Ho-​Elianae (1655), p. 172. On commemoration of James in this tumultuous year, see Thomas Cogswell, ‘1625’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture:  Volume 1, Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland to 1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 589–​98. 75 10 April 1625, to his brother Sir George Holles from Westminster, in Letters of John Holles 1587–​1637, vol. 2, ed. P. R. Seddon (Nottingham: Thoroton Society, 1975–​ 80), p. 303.

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It is within this complex and bewildering context that poets composed funeral elegies on the King.

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Astronomy Despite the ‘wonders’ of this ‘climacterical’ year, nothing like the comet of 1618 marked James’ death, which primed a number of poems to consider this absence of astronomical markers. The question was posed in the wide-​ ranging manuscript poem by Isaac Wake, English ambassador in Venice: Question Can a king die, and we no comet see? Tell me, astrologers, how this can be. Answer Heaven’s beacons burn not but to give alarm Unto a state of some ensuing harm. The angels carrying up our blessed king Did with still music his sweet requiem sing. No innovation being to be heard, Why should Heaven summon men unto his guard? His spirit was redoubled on his son: And that was seen on his assumption.76

Wake concludes that there is no astrological response to the death because the transition has been so smooth: no ‘innovation’ was heard, and James’ spirit, like that of Elijah to Elisha, was doubly bestowed upon his son. For both the public and government officials like Wake, a royal succession would always raise questions about stability and order, and the poem seeks reassurance in the cosmos. This concern with continuity between monarchs, and the relationship between the death of the old King and the advent of the new, was a recurring element in the King James elegies.77 Among the most widely circulating manuscript elegies was ‘Can Christendom’s great champion’, variously ascribed to Walton Poole, William

76 14 May 1625, Chamberlain to Carleton, in Thomas Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1 (London: 1848), p. 23. 77 A similar poem that resolves the question of the lack of an astronomical marker by pointing to Charles’ inheritance of his father’s role is found only in William Andrews Clark Memorial Library MS L6815 M3 C734, fol. 92v. It begins by noting that ‘Our Sun departed yet no night appeared’, and that Urania has explained that ‘In the moment when this thing is done,  /​Must Charles’s Wain be England’s glorious Sun’; Donald W. Foster and Tobian Banton (eds), Women’s Works Vol. 4: 1625–​1650 (New York: Wicked Good Books, 2013), p. 2.

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Strode, or Thomas Goad.78 Like the Wake poem, it responds to the lack of astronomical markers: Can Christendomes great champion sinke away Thus silently into a bed of Clay? Can such a Monarch dye, and yet not have An earthquake for to open him a grave? Did there noe Meteor fright the Universe? No commet hold torch unto his hearse? Was there noe Clap of Thunder heard to tell All Christendome their losse, and ring his knell?79

While the rhetoric is similar to that of the dialogue poem of Wake, this elegy more insistently calls for some sign from the heavens or earth of such a momentous death, of not just England’s king but the leader of ‘Christendom’. The poet answers his own anguished question by invoking the idea of death as the great leveller, in language that directly recalls Psalm 82: Impartiall Fates! I see that Princes then Though they live Gods, yet must they dye like men; And the same passing bell may tole for them, Which rung but now the beggars requiem. (ll. 9–​12)

Like death itself, the cosmos pays no heed to status. However, the most striking aspect of the poem is its celebration of James as peace-​maker, which ultimately becomes an indictment of the war-​mongering of other monarchs, and by doing so glances at the policies being adopted by Charles (and Buckingham) even before James’ death. He is one that ‘did strive, /​Dying in peace, to keepe peace still alive’ (ll. 17–​18). After Charles and Buckingham’s return from Spain in 1623  –​without the Infanta  –​they had increasingly adopted a belligerent posture, and if Parliament had been forthcoming with financial support England would have gone to war against Spain in 1624. James, however, maintained a commitment to peace with Spain, and

78 Folger MS V.a.97, p. 58; BL Add. MS 14874, fol. 48v; Bodl. Tanner MS 465, fol. 71. The poem offers a complicated manuscript situation: in the majority of manuscripts (including BL Egerton MS 2725, which I cite), it is a fifty-​six-​line poem (ending ‘And see the new Sunne riseing in the East’). However, an eighteen-​line version (ending ‘Dyinge in peace, to keepe peace still alive’) appears in Folger V.a.162, BL Stowe MS 962, and BL Egerton MS 1160. That the section beginning at line 19 (‘Noe Widdowes curses, nor no Orphanes cryes’) is found as a free-​standing poem in Huntington MS 116 suggests that there may have been originally two distinct poems that became merged early in manuscript circulation. There is also a 12-​line version, ending ‘Which rung but now the beggars requiem’, in BL Add. MS 47111. Later, a variation of the poem was applied to the death of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. 79 BL Egerton MS 2725, p. 86.

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this created a distinct divide within the royal family and in the nation as a whole. Despite the efforts pointed to in the poem, James’ attempts in his last months led to no continuing peace: after planning through the summer of 1625, in October the Cadiz expedition was launched. The lines that follow contrast James with those kings who achieve glory –​but also the curses of widows and cries of children –​through a martial approach: Noe Widdowes curses, nor no Orphanes cryes Shall interrupt thy hallowed obsequies, For their slaine husbands, or their fathers lost In bloody warrs; nor wake thy peacefull Ghost. Let thy great Predecessours boast the prize Of glorious, but yet murtherous, victories. Let them upon their sepulchres expose Triumphs of warre, and spoiles of forraine foes; And glory in that they turn’d the harvest field To a pitch field, the plow-​share to a shield; Soe that on bloudy furrowes there new borne, Soe many blades of steele, as now of Corne (ll. 19–​30)

Military victories are ‘glorious’ but ‘murtherous’, and the ‘Triumphs of warre’ are diminished by the verb ‘expose’. While this rejection of war draws upon a long tradition and James is explicitly contrasted with his forebears, in the context of 1625 it must be read as a critique, not just of James’ forebears, but of the bellicose approach of his son, the new King. James’ peace-​making is also distinguished from passivity by the suggestion that he was involved in the great battle of the Protestant cause, but unlike most kings (though like Spenser’s Red Crosse Knight) his was a spiritual conquering of the power of the Papacy: Truth was thy banner, the thrice sacred word Thy target, and thy [wea]pon the two edged sword, Wherewith thou didst resist and overcome The Heresy of Ante Christ and Rome.

James’ conflict was word-​based: he drew on the ‘two edged sword’ (Hebrews 4:12; Rev. 1:16) of Scripture in his polemical works against the Church of Rome.80 While this poem involves implicit critique of Charles’ military approach, like many other elegies on James it still includes a final gesture towards the new king:  after dropping ‘your last benevolence  /​Of pious

80 Similarly, Anne Ley’s ‘Upon the great plague following the death of King James’ celebrates his ‘brave combat’ in which ‘His pen, the weapon was’; Donald W. Foster (ed.), Women’s Works Vol.  1:  900–​1550 (New  York:  Wicked Good Books, 2013), pp. 2–​3.

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teares’ upon James, ‘peacefull Soules’ should turn ‘from the west, /​And see the new Sunne riseing in the East’ (ll. 54–​6). Thus, a poem that began by bemoaning the absence of an astronomical marker finds a commonplace metaphoric one in its conclusion. However, in its abrupt brevity, the shift in focus is less than convincing.81 As in a number of other poems, James becomes the astronomical marker of his own death, and his apotheosis is completed by his son (often figured as ‘Charles’ wain’), appearing as a new heavenly body as well.82 Ironically, this conclusion echoes that of the poem on Queen Anne’s death ascribed to James (‘Thee to invite’): then she is changed not dead, noe good prince dyes, but only like the sunne doth sett to rise.83

The poem is using a ‘Lycidas’-​like trope of the sun rising to represent the Final Resurrection, whereas in the poem on James the sun rising represents royal succession.

Funeral baked meats Among the ‘wonders’ of 1625 was the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria, which took place in the same month as James’ funeral. Early in Hamlet, Horatio and Hamlet playfully debate the latter’s arrival at Elsinore:  was it for the funeral or the wedding? Hamlet wryly concludes that the tight sequencing was Thrift, thrift, Horatio. The funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.84

English poets faced not just the usual task of balancing lament for the old monarch and praise of the new, but also that of simultaneously mourning a late king and celebrating the marriage of the present one. What rhetoric

81 Very similar language is used in the manuscript version of Shirley’s elegy: ‘Our day being one, noe night hung o’re our eies,  /​ ffor at Sunn setting did the Sunn arise’ (Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 88, fol. 53r, published in facsimile James Shirley, Poems, 1646; together with, Poems from the Rawlinson Manuscript (Menston, West Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1970). The version published in Shirley’s Poems (1646) has a much briefer shift to a focus on Charles in its final four lines and does not use this image. 82 See, for example, the concluding stanza of Ley’s ‘Upon the great plague’. 83 BL Harl. MS 6917, fol. 32r, in James Craigie (ed.), The Poems of James VI of Scotland, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1955–​8), p. 174. 84 Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Greenblatt et al., The Norton Shakespeare, 1.2, pp. 179–​80.

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can serve such turns?85 A somewhat similar situation had followed the death of Prince Henry, as his sister’s marriage was celebrated three months later; however, in that case the events were more separated in time, and it was easier to present the marriage as something of a consolation. In 1625 the time of mourning and marriage completely overlapped, and this may lie behind some of the complaints that the response of grief to James’ death was insufficient.86 Negotiations to bring about a marriage between Prince Charles and Henrietta Maria of France had been ongoing since 1624, and they were only temporarily delayed by James’ illness and death. They reached fruition with a proxy wedding in France on 1 May, news of it was heard in London on 4 May, and three days later James’ funeral was held in London.87 Delays in France and then poor weather kept Charles waiting in Kent until 13 June, when his queen, escorted by Buckingham and a large French train, sailed the channel. Both Charles and his court seemed uncertain how to balance these competing events. On 24 March, Edward Conway, secretary of state, noted that Charles wished to convey to the French, who had placed a thirty-​one-​day limit for the marriage, that ‘it cannot be suitable with the good nature of a son, in so dangerous a state of his father’s health, to entertain such jollity and triumph, as duly belong to so acceptable a marriage’.88 However, marital proceedings went ahead, and King Louis expressed satisfaction that Charles did not allow his father’s death to delay the marriage negotiations: ‘he thought that it was well to wipe away all tears as soon as possible for the good of the kingdom, since over-​indulgence in sorrow could be interpreted as a sign of weakness’.89 Conway captures the impossible balancing act as he writes to the negotiators, Carlisle and Holland: 85 Three decades later, James Howell played with the tension between two such events, as he mourned the death of Edward, Fourth Earl of Dorset, and celebrated the marriage of Katherine Stanley and Henry, First Marquess of Dorchester, in the same volume. Its title neatly captures the tension: Ah, ha; tumulus [burial mound], thalamus [marriage-​bed]. Two Counter-​Poems (1653). 86 Henry VIII had also married (Catherine Aragon, his brother Arthur’s widow) less than two months after his father’s death. 87 Chamberlain to Carleton, 6 May 1625, Letters, vol. 2, p. 614; Mead to Stuteville, 6 May 1625, Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1, p. 20. 88 Conway to Lord Carlisle, 24 March 1624, Hardwicke State Papers, vol. 1 (London, 1778), p. 564. 89 Elizabeth Hamilton, Henrietta Maria (London:  Hamish Hamilton, 1976). Such thinking was not uncommon. Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983), p. 25, notes that ‘at the death of Francis I in 1547 the new heir was forbidden to attend the ceremony and the future Henri II was obliged to watch the procession from a window on the Rue St. Jacques’, and cites a 1594 French source which discouraged royal participation in funerals.

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But when I should observe the distress his Majesty was in, to pay the sacrifice of joy to his Mistress, and duty of gravity to his kingly wisdom, I want the art to divide that hair; only I must tell you, he discovered what he sought to hide, and all learnt to increase their joy by his.90

While acknowledging the delicate tension of the situation, Conway’s final message is of the King’s joy winning out, a politic message to send to France. However, such a spirit was not fully acceptable in England. Two days after the funeral, Zuane Pesaro, the Venetian ambassador, reported that ‘The King after wearing black for a month has begun to dress in violet. All are commanded to wear coloured garments at Dover. This is the subject of action and conversation.’91 Joseph Mead reports, No jollity at the marriage, nor any of the French, save the king himself and the prince, in gay clothes. But our ambassadors were very rich and gallant.92

Mead implies that even the French had the decency to subdue their celebrations, while the English ambassadors did not. Thus, during these weeks following James’ death –​the season for the writing of elegies –​public attention was diverted by the preparations for the marriage and then the bringing of the royal bride to England, and any poet would have been challenged to articulate the balance of funerary woe and marital celebration that even the King’s closest circle found difficult to work out. Understandably, many poets simply ignored the awkward confluence of events, and only two poems, both unpublished, explicitly allude to the marriage:  ‘Coronis’, and Richard Taileboys’ ‘Elegiack Encomium’.93 ‘Coronis’, which presents itself as a Pindaric ode (a rare early example), traces James’ life and celebrates his virtues of peace-​making and learning. It concludes by simply celebrating Buckingham in his role as proxy for King Charles in the 1 May wedding: All the glories of his might, Hidden now in sorrows night And their cover throwne aside, Wait uppon the roiall Bride, Queene of beauties highest set, Flowr of fair France HENRIET, Nor alone of France the flower, But now also rather our, Heaven and Buckingham the mean,

90 5 May 1625, Hardwicke State Papers, vol. 1, p. 570. 91 CSPV, 1625–​6, 9 May 1625, p. 35. 92 Mead to Stuteville, 28 May 1625, Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1, p. 23. 93 BL Lansdowne MS 805 and BL Royal MS 18 A. XLIX, respectively.

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To produce this other scaene, Spaine and Envy wringing handes At the bliss of both the landes [France and England].94

In this way, grief implicitly turns to mirth. One of the more extensive elegiac projects was that of Richard Taileboys: a sequence of poems that focuses heavily on Charles as the successor to his father. Taileboys moves quickly from ‘An Ellegiack Encomium’ to a poem addressing Charles, in which he offers a sympathetic account of the burdens of the new King: And for prince Charles, whose cares befall. By’s death Buriall and Embassages To come, Marrige, affaires, state passages. That alters so, after King James.95

Taileboys recalls the language of Conway in reconciling the death and marriage; he hopes that Henrietta Maria may ‘turne Charles mourning for his father /​In mynd and weeds to Joying rather’.96 He posits a continuity based on James’ deathbed desire for the completion of the French Match: Cares and Crownes, begins wth one letter. But Marriage state makes yt Better King James knew this and labored To see In’s life him marryed.97

Taileboys presents James as one mourned by the whole British social spectrum, but also, in recognition of the impending marriage, highlights the special role of France in continental mourning.98 Apart from these two works, the elegies on James are silent about the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria. But how do we interpret the silence? There are three possibilities:  the first is that poets in the spring of 1625 felt uncertain about the state of marriage negotiations and hence avoided the subject. The second possibility is the ‘Hamlet position’ that poets felt that the marriage was unseemly in the shadow of the King’s death, and that to mention the marriage in funeral poems would be an insult to the late King’s memory. The final possibility is that it was not the timing of the marriage that was the issue but the match itself. A French Match might be 94 BL Lansdowne MS 805, fol. 65. 95 BL Royal MS 18 A.  XLIX, fol.  4v. Its presence in this collection suggests that it was composed for and presented to the new King Charles, although the manuscript’s many emendations are uncharacteristic of a gift manuscript. 96 BL Royal MS 18 A. XLIX, fol. 12r. 97 BL Royal MS 18 A. XLIX, fol. 22r. 98 BL Royal MS 18 A. XLIX, fol. 3v.

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preferred to the failed Spanish Match of two years previous, but Charles was still wedding a Catholic princess and there are clearly articulated concerns about what concessions this match included, and uncertainty about how far the French Match would lead to military cooperation against Spain. Hamlet’s disgust at his mother’s remarriage was at not just its haste but the object of her new marriage.99

‘This new shuffle of the packe’ The death of a monarch encourages thoughts of fresh opportunities within a new political landscape. Thomas Wentworth (later Earl of Strafford) wrote to his cousin Christopher Wandesford about the implications of James’ death: ‘could the death of the kinge work lesse upon mee consideringe my pretences and hopes at Court, then one daie’s intermission and pawse for advisement how to sett my cards upon this new shuffle of the packe?’100 Hence, even in elegies poets may relatively neglect the dead king or queen as they look for favour with the new. While that favour might be achieved by a proper elegizing of the dead, the praise must be consistent with the direction of the new regime. Poets might fear the new king would take offence at an excessive poetic grief that showed no hope for the future. As one of the poems in the Oxford collection puts it, they strive to produce poems, ‘Grata patri & Nato qui iam moderatur habenas’ (Pleasing to the father and to the son who now holds the reins).101 One surviving poem takes this desire for balance quite literally, actually alternating lines of elegiac praise with celebration of James’ replacement: Our Pellican is dead, but he hath left his Bloud his Legacy. Our dove is flowne, but yet we find the Olive Branch still left behind; The star of Jacob’s falne, but we have a Charles wayne as bright as he. Our Phoebus’ sette, but yet no Night ensues, we have his Son & light102 99 Thomas N.  Corns, ‘Duke, Prince, and King’, in Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 17–​18, notes the paucity of poems celebrating the coronation as well, as poems seemed ‘less certain of the terms in which to celebrate the new king’, and that it was not until the early 1630s that English poets determined how to celebrate his reign. 100 4 April 1625; J.  P.  Cooper (ed.), Wentworth Papers, 1597–​1628 (London:  Royal Historical Society, 1973), p. 229. 101 Academiae Oxoniensis, sig. ¶3r. 102 ‘An Elegy on ye death of King James’ (beg. ‘he who was our life, is dead’), BL Add. MS 33998, fol. 36v–​37r.

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Thus, the consolation offered by the successor repeatedly negates public sorrow.103 This concern with the new court is rather comically manifest in an elegy beginning ‘Locke up your liddes’, where after many lines of grief the poet abruptly breaks off to conclude: lets shedd our eyes & drop them out, Which I had brought to passe ere this well nere but that Apollo pul’d me by the eare, And bidd me lett them keepe their wonted station that I might see King Charles his coronacon.104

The more rhetorically successful elegies emphasize continuity between the two regimes. Frequently repeated in the Oxford volume is the idea that Charles is the living continuation (‘superstes’) of James; he is the Elisha inheriting a double portion from Elijah, ‘a spirit redoubled on his son’, or he is the living statue. This idea was possibly derived from Charles’ participation in the funeral and Bishop Williams’ use of the statue conceit in the funeral sermon. All of these images emphasize continuity, that this is not a crisis or moment of great change, unlike James’ accession of 1603. James Shirley’s poem ‘When busy fame’ considers the mourning process: he comes across grieving courtiers at Somerset House, and then the effigy of James at Westminster. Shirley vividly describes his expectation of the royal ‘presence’ when he enters the room of mourning, only to be confronted by stark absence:  the ‘subtle art’ of the effigy is a paltry ‘Counterfeit’ of royal reality (ll. 49–​50). Only his turning to Charles as the heir who provides a new, continuing presence can redeem the travesty.105 The version of this poem published in Shirley’s 1646 Poems suffers from a brief, trite ending, which is similar to ‘Locke up your liddes’ in its abrupt turn to Charles. However, a significantly different manuscript version offers a more nuanced conclusion that draws on the metaphor of the Phoenix.106 A number of poets react against any such over-​hasty turn from sorrow to joy. Among these is Holland’s rich elegy on James, clearly written after the funeral and appearing in his posthumous works, which were published in

103 Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I, pp. 51–​3, in the commemorative poems marking the Queen’s death. 104 ‘On King James’ death’, West Yorkshire Archives MS 32D86/​17, fol. 94v. 105 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 85–​6. 106 Bodl. Rawl. poet. 88, p. 46. This version is published in facsimile in the 1970 Scolar Press edition of Shirley’s Poems.

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1626 by his brother.107 It begins strikingly by complaining that the nation has forgotten to weep: Now that the Land hath nigh forgot to weepe, And IAMES the Good more peaceably doth sleepe In his unblamed Urne, and th’Universities, Upon his Hearse from their lamenting eyes Have throwne their Pearles, & through the widdow’d Towne The curious wits have jewelled his Crowne, Pardon if now poore I doe spend a teare,108

Holland adopts the role of the belated poet, appearing after the perfunctory contributions of the funeral, ‘th’Universities’, and ‘The curious wits’ of the city. However, his belatedness is presented not apologetically but as a reminder that others have failed to mourn long enough. Holland offers long, heavily enjambed Miltonic passages; for example, he describes the flight of James’ soul into heaven:       and now much like a  strong And nimble-​winged Eagle, which hath long Bin pent in some close Cage, his un-​hous’d sprite On able Plumes hath tan’e a joyfull flight Up to the Sunne, while we poore men below Gaze at the sight, and after him can throw Onely our vowes109

This passage echoes ‘Yow men of Brittaine, wherefo[re] gaze yow soe  /​ Uppon an angrye starre?’, and in this way engages with the earlier astronomical controversy. James himself has become the heavenly phenomenon (i.e. worth gazing at) that he had mocked six years earlier. Also fascinating is Holland’s reconsideration of the prophecies that had forecast the King’s death, some of which dated to the late 1610s (as discussed above in relation to Queen Anne and the blazing star). The treason statute of Edward III made it an offence to ‘compass’ or ‘imagine’ the king’s death, and prophesying fell under this statute.110 James’ death has radically changed what it is acceptable to write by rendering the prophetic simply historical: And yet hee’s dead, hee that few dayes agoe Had sayd so much, had bin Great Britaines foe, 107 A. Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma (1626). 108 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B1r. 109 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B2r. 110 Cyndia S.  Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 114.

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Alas ’tis past an Omen now, and Fate Hath given us a bad licence to relate The hated truth, nor treason is’t to say His Funerall was kept on such a day111

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Holland marvels at how the king’s death has changed the cultural landscape and the bounds of acceptable speech. He extends his reflection to consider other prophecies that were current in the latter years of James’ reign:            Much I cannot  blame    Those Idle Wizards, who did blindely ayme    At Truth they knew not, when it is agreed    That now Thou art an Emperour indeed,    And farre above a King; Thy Laureat soul    Being rid in triumph to her Capitoll,    Nor art thou fall’n, but as in purest nights,    In a full quire of Starres wee see some lights    Dissemble ruine, which when man kinde saw    At first, it thought that Fate had broke the law Of Nature, and let loose those rolling eyes.112

Some of the more radical Protestant prophecies had anticipated James taking a leading role in establishing a Protestant empire across Europe. For example, John Castle describes a sect that are called of the beleefe, which hold that our K’s Majestie shall in ye yeare 1622 be crowned Emperor of Roome & putt down ye Pope. The author is one Balle who hath putt forth much mony upon it, grounding his fancie upon ye prophecies of Danyell, Esdras & the Apocalips. I have no skill in prophecying; yet I  knowe that God hath, & will bring to passe as great a worke absque miraculo. If that same unum hoc deficit called the Treasure were once settled & in prosperity, I see not but that our lions might affright all ye Bulls of Italy. But while wee remayne unhealed wthin, our lyons have no strength to make those beasts beleeve that they have nayles & teeth.113

Pragmatic money-​ counting trumps prophecy. While such prophesying was in general harshly prosecuted, James’s death allows Holland to adopt a playful acceptance of it that still manages to compliment the dead King. The passage above is engaging in the oft-​ used conceit of heaven as a political parallel to earth  –​other poets described it as an alternative Star Chamber. The poem offers occasional flashes of political wit:  Holland wonders ‘whether thou with Angells doest consent /​To hold an everlasting 111 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B1v–​B2r. 112 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B2v. 113 Castle to William Trumbull, 19 Nov. 1619, BL Add. MS 72276, fol. 81r.

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Parliament’.114 This seems whimsical rather than sharply satirical, and it might at first seem a jibe at Parliament’s desire for further meetings. However, the Parliamentary session of summer 1625 was a rare occasion where the King wished a continuation while the members mostly wanted to go home.115 Parliamentary business seemed to be wrapping up in early July, and the spread of the plague left members eager to leave London. Great was the surprise on 8 July when Charles called for an adjournment to be followed by a reconvening in Oxford on 1 August to consider a further grant of supply.116 Thus, if this ‘belated’ poem were composed between 8 July and 1 August, the satire is directed towards Charles’ unexpected and resented extension of Parliament.117 The need for further supply arose from the expenses of mounting a fleet against Spain, but some among the Commons feared that the King was seeking supply for a war that would never actually be fought. Holland finds a more artful and playful way to combine praise of Charles and commemoration of James: Pardon our Avarice if wee would faine Enjoy our CHARLES? yet have our IAMES againe, England with one consent would gladly view A Heptarchy againe of such as You Without division118

This reimagines the English polity in the shape of Anglo-​Saxon kingdoms, which would allow the co-​existence of James and Charles as ruling monarchs. He also uses the rhetoric of continuity to balance the praise: ‘Thy Sonne is living, who is so mis-​led /​While hee doth live to say that Thou art dead?’119 It is striking how poetic craft and invention can redeem a threadbare conceit: Holland engages in a series of metaphors to express the paradox that England is now ‘both extreamely rich /​And most deplored poore’ (the sun has set, but light remains, etc.).120 Such is this ‘Change /​Without an alteration’. The shifting experience of joy and sorrow is captured in an epic simile:       As when in some uncertain weather Two diverse windes doe joyne their blasts together 114 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B2r. 115 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–​1629 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 257. 116 Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 234–​5. 117 The outspoken members Sir Francis Seymour and Sir Robert Phelips suggested that the continuing sitting of the House was only for the pleasure of one man: Buckingham (Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, pp. 242–​3). 118 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B2v. 119 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B2v. 120 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B3r.

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The wavering Forrests, and the Neuter Corne You then may see, now this, now that way borne, Still most inclining to the conquering blast That did prevaile, and breathe upon them last.121

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Holland exercises here a rich power of invention, as he refigures the common trope of Charles as the sun rising. He imagines that if a new sun should appear, And make his Zodiack from the Southerne skies And set i’th’ North, leaving the East as chill As th’Orcades, yet we should thinke on still Our ancient friend the former Sun122

Such denies the commonplace idea of satisfactory replacement:  whatever new sun is manifest in Charles, there is still a longing for that ‘former Sun’ of his father. The final verse paragraph rises to a climactic summary of James’ identity and hints at the uncertain future that follows: he     was the moment of this Westerne clime, And held it in just poize: who did devise, But now the Embryo’s of Policies Which Fate is still a teeming:123

While the future is uncertain, there is still some sense that James’ prior actions are working themselves out: in that way, he is still present. Holland’s poem gathers up the astronomical concerns connected with royal deaths (going back to 1618–​19) and complicates any simple sense of Charles as a new sun worthy of his subjects’ gaze. The disquietude of the conclusion, with fate ‘a teeming’, is strikingly different from the usual consolations.

Peace and war The most uncertain fate of spring and summer 1625 was the question of war with Spain, and this raised challenges for those poets set on commemorating James as the ‘blessed peace-​maker’ that was such a central part of his identity. That James, the king of peace, died in the month of 121 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B3v. 122 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B4. 123 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. B4v. ‘Moment’ here seems to be related to sense 7 in the OED: ‘movement about an axis or centre’, but Holland’s sentence seems to render the ‘moment’ the centre point itself. Milton is the only source cited for this sense.

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Mars, proved irresistible to many of the contributors to the Oxford and Cambridge volumes: ‘Mars odit pacis amantem’ (Mars hated the lover of peace). Although elegists might celebrate Charles as the ‘superstes’ of his father, this was praise of counsel rather than reality:  most realized that change was imminent with the death of the peace-​loving James. As the Earl of Clare noted in a letter of April 1625, ‘Now are we blotting out the motto of 22 years standing; beati pacifici; and this while we had mony, men, and rewards, and honors for men, and now we are falln into the trott of the warrs, too hard a pace for coached, and carpett bredd, and the consumption of men and mony, and yet want both’.124 Poets thus struggle to reconcile the celebration of James’ peace-​making role and support for Charles’ ‘trott of wars’ with Spain. In the opening poem to the Oxford collection, John Prideaux hopes that Charles’ military approach may correct the beleaguered situation of James’ other surviving child, Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia: ‘Sit CAROLUS Ultor Elisae, /​Nec ferat Exilio spretos languere Nepotes’ (May Charles be the avenger of Elisa, lest he bring his spurned nephews to languish in exile).125 Edward Herbert’s suggestion that ‘strangers’ will lament James’ death more than Britain herself, because they recognize they must now face Charles’ ‘victorious arm’,126 clearly reflects his enthusiasm for the new approach (and does little to grieve James’ death). Others pushed for the maintenance of peace. One poem obliquely urges Charles to continue the peace-​fostering ways of his father by presenting him as an ‘anti-​Phaeton’, who pointedly will not destroy the ‘carre’ of flight he takes from his father: his Son, but yet no Phaeton that will set fire on his Throne, and, instead of light, enflame our Land, more then a Sea can tame. Tis Charles, that mounts into his Carre, wth light of peace, not flames of warre.127

Where Herbert had welcomed Charles’ reign by suggesting that England’s enemies were the greatest mourners of the peace-​making James’ death, ‘O troble not’ (an anonymous elegy) fears that with James’ death, peace will disappear.128 However, the poem is at least partly playful in its presentation

124 To Sir George Holles, 10 April 1625, Letters, vol. 2, p. 303. 125 Oxoniensis Academiae Parentalia (1625), [sig. ¶4r]. 126 ‘Epitaph of King James’, in Poems English and Latin, ed. G.  C.  Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923), p. 24. 127 ‘An Elegy on ye death of King James’ (beg. ‘he who was our life, is dead’), BL Add. MS 33998, fol. 37r. 128 BL Add. MS 34217.

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of the impending ‘war’, which will come about as the nations vie with each other in grief: ffor in soe emulous a greife each Countrye quarrells to be cheife And by their tributarye teares wold prove he was not ours but theirs. Thus by an officious jarr they seeme to preface to the warr which shall make knowne that in this tombe here lyes the peace of Christendome.

Play soon gives way, for the battles of grief are simply a ‘preface’ to the unspecified war that will follow. The poem offers a final foreboding image: not just James but the peace of all Christendom is being entombed. Nor is such mere hyperbole:  while James had not managed to keep the peace of western Europe, he was the one major leader who held back from involvement, and now Britain as well seemed set to join the bloody struggle. Arthur Johnston, who claimed to be an official physician to the King, attempts to reconcile the foreign policies of James and Charles by emphasizing the goal that they shared: the restoration of the Palatinate to Frederick and Elizabeth.129 He argues that James’ early death prevented the fulfilment of his peace-​based initiative. Instead, ‘Armorum Bellona decus transcribere nato  /​Maluit, et juveni credere Martis opus’ (Bellona preferred to assign honour of arms to the son, and to credit the work of Mars to the young).130 This leads to a long justification of a son adopting a more militant approach than his father: Gloria sed nati, fas sit mihi vera fateri, Non minor, incolumi patre, futura fuit. Quis pudor auspiciis natum pugnare paternis? Primaque consilio bella movere senis? Dicitur AEacides Atridae signa secutus, Hector et imperio sub patris arma tulit. Nil tamen AEacidae titulis detraxit Atrides, Nec pater Hectorei nominis umbra fuit. [But it would truly be lawful for me to confess the glory of the son, who would not be less than the unharmed father. What shame is it for a son to fight by paternal guidance? 129 Arthur Johnston, In obitum Iacobi Pacifici (1625). The poem was reprinted in his Parerga (1632), pp. 62–​6. This reprinting was the basis of an edition of the poem, with an introduction, summary and footnotes by William Duguid Geddes in Musa latina aberdonensis 9 (1892), pp. 86–​94. 130 Johnston, In obitum Iacobi Pacifici, sig. A1v.

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And first to suggest wars in the council of the aged one? It is said that the offspring of Aeacus [Achilles] followed the battle standards of the offspring of Atreus [Menelaus and Agamemnon], Hector bore arms under the rule of his father. However, the Atrides took nothing away from the titles of Achilles, nor was the father of Hector the shadow of his name.]

Johnston’s support for Charles’ more militant approach is clear, but through the invocation of classical precedent he suggests that this support is consistent with veneration of James, and he emphasizes the familial continuity between the two kings.

Raking in the grave Finally, consideration must be given to those elegies that adopt a defensive posture, that seek to protect either the dead King or the living one, or Buckingham, from rumours and criticism. Among the most widely circulating manuscript elegies on King James was ‘All that have eyes now wake and weep’,131 usually ascribed to George Morley (later Bishop of Winchester). Morley’s place in the well-​connected poetry circles at Christ Church, Oxford, may be partly responsible for the large number of surviving copies,132 but I would suggest it also proved popular for its engagement with more hostile comments on James’ death: Then let no Shymeis curses wound His honour, nor prophane his ground. Let no black-​mouth’d ranck-​breath’d curr Peacefull James his Ashes stirr. Princes are gods, oh doe not then Rake in their Graves to prove them men.133

These lines are clearly responding to otherwise unrecorded libels about the King following his death. The image of ‘raking’ in the ‘embers’ or grave of the dead was encountered in the elegy on Overbury, ‘So many Moones’, where the poem concluded that the mystery of his death lay ‘in the embers not unraked’.134 131 Stoughton MS, p. 87; Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS 24, p. 69; and Bodl. MS 25, fol. 40v. A slightly different version appears as ‘He that hath eyes now wake and weep’ in a number of manuscripts. 132 See Hobbs, Early Seventeenth-​Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts, p.  37 and p. 40n. 133 Mary Hobbs (ed.), The Stoughton Manuscript: A Manuscript Miscellany of Poems by Henry King and His Circle, circa 1636 (Aldershot, Hampshire:  Scolar Press, 1990), pp. 87–​8, ll. 17–​22. 134 Overbury, Wife, STC 18909 (1616), sig. 6v.

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The opening figure of antonomasia invokes Shimei, a kinsman of the biblical King Saul, who cursed David for his role in the deaths of seven of Saul’s sons and grandsons, a curse that David did not resist (2 Samuel 16:5–​ 14). The passage in Morley’s poem is striking, not only in demonstrating that lament was not the sole response, but for the form Morley’s defence of James takes. He does not deny the truthfulness of what those ‘currs’ are saying about the late King but calls for a sense of respect where such things are not explored. Because ‘princes are gods’ –​again recalling Psalm 82 –​we are not to inquire in what ways they are also men. A similar emphasis on circumspection is found in the anonymous poem glancingly referred to above: O troble not the sacred rest whereof these ashes are possest nor lett an eye approach too nere where every glance will cast a teare Search not what must be conceald this Moses sepulcher is seald and remov’d from curious eyes135

However, from this point the poem takes a different direction, suggesting that the danger of inquiry is not scandal but idolatry. Both poems’ emphasis on respecting the royal remains may reflect disgust or disquiet at the widely reported details of the autopsy that took place on James.136 That any autopsy results would be of interest (given the rumours of poisoning of the King) makes this a contentious issue. Bellany and Cogswell note that ‘The solemnity of James’s funeral, the printed sermons and elegies, and the doctors’ official reports left no place for even the faintest whisper of anything unusual about James’s death’.137 Overall, Morley’s poem functions as part of this banishing of awkward or even seditious questions.

Prince Frederick Henry Frederick Henry, the eldest son of James’ daughter, Elizabeth, and Elector Frederick of the Palatine, drowned crossing the Haarlemmermeer in Holland on 9 January, 1628/​29, where his family had taken refuge after their defeat

135 West Yorkshire Archives MS 32D86/​17, fol. 94v. 136 A detailed description of the autopsy is found in Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James, pp. 41–​3. They note that ‘Unlike the physicians’ report, however, the other narratives sanitized the gruesome bodily experience of James’s dying’ (p. 43). 137 Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James, p. 62.

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early in the Thirty Years War. James Howell reports how Frederick Henry and his father were travelling

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to look how his bank of money did thrive, and coming (for more frugality) in the common boat, which was o’erset with merchandize, and other passengers, in a thick fog, the vessel turn’d o’er, and so many perish’d. The Prince Palsgrave sav’d himself by swimming, but the young Prince clinging to the mast, and being entangled among the tackling, was half drowned and half frozen to death.138

Another correspondent notes that ‘the Queene [of Bohemia, Elizabeth] was about a weeke before delivered of a daughter, & confesseth noe affliction ever touched her soe neere, since the death of her brother, Prince Henry’.139 This stands as another example of how a royal death was experienced in relation to earlier ones, and how that of Prince Henry in particular cast an especially long shadow. Frederick Henry’s death was also invariably seen as part of the broader tribulations of his parents. Since the loss of both the Palatinate and Bohemia in 1620, the family had lived in exile in Holland, and neither the peace-​ based planning of King James nor the ongoing conflicts of what came to be known as the Thirty Years War had brought about restitution. This family of misfortune –​and its English sympathizers –​now faced the loss of their fifteen-​year-​old heir upon whom ‘the eyes and hopes of all the afflicted party were already fixed’.140 He was elegized as ‘most likely to revive /​The glorious Triumphs of his ancestrie’.141 Simonds d’Ewes wrote to his Dutch friend Albertus Joachimi that the death of the Prince ‘struck the faces and hearts of all the faithful with tremendous sorrow’.142 In this death elegists faced something of the situation of Prince Henry: the loss of youthful royal promise, not just for the Palatinate but for the broader Protestant cause in Europe. The hopes raised that Elector Frederick would become a mighty leader of Protestant Europe had been shattered by his failed acceptance of the Bohemian crown and the resulting loss of even 138 Joseph Jacobs (ed.), Epistolae Ho-​Elianae:  The Familiar Letters of James Howell (London, 1890), p. 221. As with much of Epistolae Ho-​Elianae, the letter is misdated (to Feb. 1625), but it clearly refers to the drowning of the Prince in 1629. A similar description is found in Beaulieu to Sir Thomas Puckering, 21 January 1628/​9, Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 2, pp. 7–​8. 139 Peter Moreton to John [William?] Moreton [his father], 18 Jan. 1628/​9, BL Add. MS 33935, fol. 241v. 140 Beaulieu to Sir Thomas Puckering, 21 January 1628/​9, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 2, p. 8. 141 R. Abbey, An elegy upon the most deplorable death of prince Henry eldest sonne to the king of Bohemia (1629). 142 BL Harl. MS 377, fol. 239; qtd. in J.  Sears McGee, An Industrious Mind:  The Worlds of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 458.

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his ancestral lands. By 1629 Elizabeth and Frederick had been in exile for nearly ten years, and a successful resolution seemed no closer. Thus, Prince Frederick Henry’s death was now added to this seemingly interminable misfortune. The elegy ‘What hopes wee had of thee to reobtaine’ takes a straightforward and thoroughly political approach to the Prince’s death.143 It laments the loss of this young man who might have restored his ‘Birth-​rights due’ by overcoming the Hapsburg powers: ffor had hee liv’d his genius to us told That Austrias fforce and all ye Power of Spain Could not ffrom him his ffathers country hold (ll. 19–​21)

As we saw in some of the elegies on Prince Henry, the ‘cruell ffoes’ are imagined rejoicing at the news, ‘With as great joy’ (l.  30) as the sorrow of Frederick Henry’s mourners. However, such malicious joy is ill-​placed, and the poem ends with an expression of the hopes now resting upon his younger brother, Charles Louis:     though hee’s dead wee shall no reliefe want ffor his brave brother lives and lives to bee A scourge to our insulting enimye (ll. 34–​6)

Overall, this poem is rather unimaginative and lacking in nuance, but it can be taken as typical of the English response to this tragedy. The richest elegy on Frederick Henry is ‘Canst thou bee dead and wee bee still ye same’.144 Its opening rhetoric recalls ‘Can Christendom’s great monarch’, on the death of King James, but here the contemplation is of the placidity not of the cosmos but of England. The poem offers an element of guilty chastisement, a sense that the English have stood by unaffected at this death, which the poet is at pains to impress was not a distant one: ‘shall only thay that knewe thee weep, and wee /​That beare a part, in the Calamyte, /​Not share in sorrow?’ Frederick Henry was both a foreign royal and a domestic one: heir to the Palatinate and the crown of Bohemia (however unlikely to achieve the latter), but also still the heir to the English and Scottish thrones while Charles remained childless. However, this poem is most concerned with the continental situation:  how those ‘that without doubt  /​Or law, unjustly threw thy father out’ (ll. 9–​10) now celebrate. This death is part of the broader Protestant calamity of the 1620s: ‘our hopes lye in the dust; /​As low as thou art or the Palatinate /​which now laments thy fall’ (ll. 18–​20). The bitter sorrow of the poet finds extended expression in one of those 143 Bodl. Ashmole MS 47, fol. 78v–​79v. 144 Bodl. Ashmole MS 38, p. 191.

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complaints that becomes satiric through its vehement imagining of who might better have died: Now lett me blame heavens justice and not bee Prophane or irreligious; why should hee Suffer an accursed Channell; had ytt bene Some Craftye Mearchants shipp, loaden wth sinn And Cousnage; sophisticated wyne Or fish, stolen from our shoare or the rich myne (To thee but Drosse) or had thy shipp but tane A Brownist, or stincking Puritane on that had searcht all Amsterdame to find A new religion (fitting to his mynd not to the truth) had such a fraught as this Nothing but scisme and Doubtfull heresies Sunck ere ytt came to shoare, wee had not been More safe then thou (ll. 25–​38)

The passage imagines the usual traffic on the canal between the Hague and Amsterdam where the Prince died:  Dutch merchant ships are uppermost, and beyond a decidedly anti-​business attitude where merchants are ‘Craftye’ and their ships bear ‘sin /​And Cousnage’, this allows for an opportunity to complain that the fishy cargo would be ‘stolen’ from English waters. (These Anglo-​Dutch tensions will be more fully explored in Chapter 4.) In imagining that the Prince was indifferent to ‘the rich myne’ that supplied the precious metals or jewels that make up the rest of the cargo, the poet is rather revising history, as the Elector and Prince had set out for Amsterdam explicitly to ‘see the ships of the West India prize’.145 The second half of the passage turns to disparage the other ‘cargo’ the ship might have borne and the poet would have gladly lost: the English non-​conformists who had made their home in Holland over the previous two decades. Amsterdam is presented as an ecclesiastical marketplace featuring a ‘new religion’: the parenthetical comment on the motivation behind this sharply satirizes such searching as being concerned with distorted individual taste rather than truth. The energy of the poem is thus spent on attacking that which was bound up with the Dutch in the English imagination, and while there is an attempt at the end to return to the subject of Henry –​God took him rather than the merchants and religious novelists because he (unlike them) was

145 Beaulieu to Sir Thomas Puckering, 21 January 1628/​9, Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 2, p. 7.

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ready for heaven –​it feels weak and trifling in comparison with the satire that precedes it. A similar anti-​Dutch sentiment is central to R. Abbey’s printed elegy, as the poet wishes that, rather than the loss of this prince, a host of calamities would befall Holland: Batavia, rather should thy shores downe fall, And the fierce waves their ancient Lordship fill; Rather should time backe summon and recall The bloody Actors in thy former ill: Rather in former seates should Fate install Proud Austria, D’Alva, Parma, Longeville In this revenge backe to reduce a flood, And make where once was Sea, a Sea of blood.146

In a complex extension of the myth of Nereus, Abbey imagines that Frederick Henry was the sacrificial price exacted ‘for the unnaturall soile’ of Holland’s land claimed from the sea. The poem also quietly chastises the avarice of the Dutch in taking the booty of the Indies fleet, and of the Prince Palatine and Frederick Henry in going to see it. This most disparaging of elegies finds that ‘th’angry heavens our hopes still countermand’, and those hopes placed on Frederick Henry, like that placed on his namesake, Prince Henry, are removed by God for their potential for idolatry.147 Only thus can divine failure to support the Protestant cause be understood. The two dead princes are figured as companion stars that will in turn light the earth, a trope that both continues the astro-​royal imagery that we have traced from Queen Anne’s death onward and echoes Jonson’s celebration of Henry Morison and Lucius Cary as the Dioscuri, one shining upon earth, the other in the heavens.148 However, at the end of the poem, Abbey denies his own (and the commonplace) astral metaphor: Frederick is ‘not set a fained Starre in skie, /​ But plac’t a Saint in greater dignitie’.

‘The Prince of Ghosts’: the death of the infant Prince Charles England and Scotland had to wait four years until the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria produced a royal heir, and that child, the first Prince Charles, survived for less than a day. His birth –​and death –​just before 146 Abbey, An elegy upon the most deplorable death of prince Henry. 147 Frederick Henry had been named after his dead uncle, and celebrations of his birth, like Henry Peacham’s Prince Henrie Revived (1615), had encouraged the connection. 148 ‘To the Immortal Memory and Friendship of that Noble Pair, Sir Lucius Cary and Sir H. Morison’, ll. 90–​6.

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Ascension Day (13 May 1629)  led to predictable poems aligning his fate with the Ascension of Christ; also predictable were the number of elegies that could not resist the ‘womb/​tomb’ rhyme. While the death of this infant Prince prompted rhetoric about the disappointment of national hopes similar to that found with the deaths of Prince Henry and Prince Frederick Henry, in this case elegists could only plausibly lament the idea of a royal heir. Because little could be ascribed to him beyond his royal inheritance, poets tended to turn outward and address the King and Queen or the national situation. William Cartwright mocked the effusion of elegies on this brief royal life as ‘The two houres greife of idle Poetry’, and he parodies their extreme claims: ‘Ours was a deity at least’.149 Nevertheless, Cartwright rather awkwardly shifts to his own elegiac lament, which eschews grand claims of the Prince’s exceptionality for the exploration of paradox. Despite Cartwright’s mockery, some of the surviving elegies are more than token commemoration, as they raise significant issues of public concern. The long-​standing conflict between England and France had been resolved with a peace treaty that was announced on 10 May, just days before the Prince’s death. ‘England & ffrance unhappily at warres’ rereads the dead Prince as an angel sent ‘downe to end all Jarres’ and bring peace between the two nations. At times, the poem goes further, nearly aligning him with Christ himself, and Henrietta Maria with the Virgin Mary. The poet seems untroubled by the way in which this parallel serves as a reminder of the Queen’s Catholicism, which had proved a stumbling block to many of Charles’ subjects: [the Virgin Mary] unto ye Temple hyes there payes her Vowes, there payes her sacrifice, What did our blessed Maria lesse? she goes and in ye Temple payes ye Vowes she owes (ll. 9–​12)

Henrietta Maria fulfils every aspect of the Virgin Mary’s child-​bearing and worship:  ‘in each holy thing  /​she imitates that Virgen’ (ll.  14–​15), and the parallel is extended to the infant Prince as well:  he is the Christ-​like bringer of peace, who then ‘ascends’ when his mission is complete. He is also, rather oddly in a way that recalls the political situation, described as ‘Gods Embassador’ (l. 18) and one who ‘an Angell was, not Prince of Wales’ (l. 24). A second poem, ‘How short a space of tyme was lent’, offers a briefer form of the same conceit:  ‘The peacefull Babe desyrt a truce/​Betweene ye Rose & Flowre-​de-​luce’.150 This poem ends by imagining the Prince travelling heavenwards to bring the news to the peace-​loving King James. 149 ‘Tis vayne to weepe’, Folger MS V.a.170, p. 158. 150 Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 26, fol. 9, ll. 5–​6.

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While these poems use the royal birth and death to celebrate the nation as it is, ‘Snatcht from our longinge hopinge eyes’ offers a far bleaker, and even satirical, portrait of the world the infant Prince encountered.151 Like the ‘Brave infant of Saguntum’, recalled at the beginning of Jonson’s famous ode on Cary and Morison (written in the latter part of 1629), Prince Charles did not need long to assess the world: ‘he had scarce cry’d /​But he despised ye tymes and dy’d’ (l.  4). While the elegy does not lend direct speech to Prince Charles, the deceased serves as a moral centre or vantage point from which to judge the world. This royal contemptus mundi of one who stands aloft in judgement allows the poet to identify the ills of Britain in 1629: the infant Prince was sent       to lett us  knowe God could not trust us it belowe Wth two great Charleses in one Throne Till wee have learnt to valew one. (ll. 9–​12)

While this participates in the common trope that the death is a judgement on the unworthiness of the world (or nation, family, friends, etc.), it is far more specific than most in its naming of the sin: political ingratitude. The death took place in the very month in which the 1629 Parliament reached its crisis: the same newsletters briefly describing the death are largely given over to discussion of the MPs who had been imprisoned for their outspoken opposition to the King. In Bodl. Ashmole MS 38 the poem is followed by one that fancifully compares the Prince to John the Baptist, not as the locust-​eating prophet but as the prenatal greeter of his divine cousin: And as the Glorious Babtist [sic] hy’de when through … two wombes hee had espyde his Glorious Lord, to reverence hym wth the first use of his sence soe when my Blessed Prince did spye his Lord assending upp on highe   Hee hastned I may beleve   To usher hym uppon the Eve152

As in other elegies that seize upon the festival of the Ascension, this poem offers the triumphant consolation of a Christianized apotheosis: the usual vagueness of the deceased ‘being with God’ or ‘in heaven’ is given concrete 151 Bodl. Ashmole MS 36/​37, fol. 170, runs this and the following two poems from Ashmole MS 38 together. The logic of the argument suggests that they were originally three distinct poems, as reflected in Ashmole MS 38. 152 Bodl. Ashmole MS 38, fol. 240v, ll. 25–​32.

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point by the physical image of Christ’s ascending. Even more than the elegies on Prince Henry and Prince Frederick Henry, this poem laments the lost potential in the royal death, for Prince Charles was nothing but potential. In a poem that follows, the contrast drawn is not with the recent deaths of teenage princes, but with that of Edward, the Black Prince, who lived to the age of forty-​six: Lett other weepe for what thay lost when thay lost Edward or lost most thay lost what Princes weare, but wee lost all, that any Prince might bee   To loose possesion is noe fall   who looseth hope hee looseth all153

England in 1629 has lost the ideals that would be fastened upon this royal –​ ‘all that anie Prince might bee’ –​and such hopes have no bounds, unlike the loss of princes who had at least the time to show more specifically what they might be (and consequently not be). The only consolation to this is another heir: the grieving will continue ‘Tell [sic] my kinge sees his second sonne’ (l. 48), the poem concludes.

Coda: ‘The smiling Preface to our Funerall’ This chapter has suggested that elegies on royal death often understood the death of the moment in relation to other royal deaths, and that certain themes and tropes (such as astronomical markers) ripple through the various royal deaths over the decades. Furthermore, seemingly straightforward royal deaths were marked by poems that often express unease, and at times outright detraction, amid the general situation of grief and commemoration. I conclude this chapter by considering a poem by Henry King that technically falls outside the bounds of this study: his poem on the birth in May 1630 of a second Prince Charles, who would become King Charles II. Henry King wrote elegies over a span of forty-​five years, from the death of Prince Henry to that of Lady Katherine Cholmondeley in 1657, and while he composed in other genres as well, his greatest achievements were his ‘Exequy’ on the death of his wife (1624) and his elegies on John Donne and King Gustavus Adolphus. Whatever the occasion, there is in King a tendency to reflections on mortality. This elegiac mood (or perspective) suffuses even his poem on the ‘second sonne’, another Prince Charles, born only a year after the one discussed above:  ‘By Occasion of the young Prince his 153 Bodl. Ashmole MS 38, fol. 240v.

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happy Birth. May 29. 1630’. Beyond the expected celebration of the young heir’s birth, the poem engages in a reflection upon the eventual death of his father, King Charles.154 The birth puts mortality into King’s mind. His initial reflection is general:

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      each following  Birth Doth sett the Parent so much neerer Earth: And by this Grammer, wee our Heires may call The smiling Preface to our Funerall.155

However, the lines that follow place this broad conceit within a particular royal context: This sadded my soft Sense, to think that Hee Who now makes Lawes, should by a bold decree Be summon’d hence, to make Another roome, And change His Royall Palace for a Tombe. (ll. 27–​30)

To celebrate the birth of a royal heir is simultaneously to reflect upon the implications of the word ‘heir’, that it carries in it the recognition of the ultimate death of the father. And so the shadow of the father Charles’ ‘Tombe’ falls across the birth of the son. King pulls up short at this point, realizing that he has wandered into the felonious territory of ‘imagining’ the King’s death: ‘And if’t be Sin to wish that Light extinct, /​Sorrow may make it Treason but to think’t’ (ll. 33–​4). King’s reference to the ultimate reality of the King’s death is significantly different from the specific prophecies (‘the King will die this year’) that were generally charged under this law, but he recognizes the potential problems of too fervently heralding the new Prince: I know, each Malecontent, or giddy man In his religion, with the Persian, Adores the Rising Sun (ll. 35–​7)

King is at pains to distance himself from such malcontents and giddy men, and to wish that he might ‘fetter time’ to protect ‘our Sun from Death’ (l. 46). However, in such imagining ‘with Fate we dally’, and so he seeks a different rhetorical strategy to lead him out of the twisted rhetorical knot that he has tied. He falls back on the argument of Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, that death is common, ‘nor can  /​It hurt the King to think He is a Man’ (ll. 53–​4). That second point is, once again, invoking Psalm 82: ‘I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. But ye shall die

154 Similarly, King’s poem ‘To the Queen at Oxford’ (1643) meditates upon the ‘sad truth and plain’ of the Queen’s eventual death. 155 King, Poems, p. 74.

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like men, and fall like one of the princes.’ Furthermore, to celebrate the child as prince is to affirm at the same time that the King is still alive, and the living monarch is once more compared to a star of the northern sky, not as an apotheosized figure but as a living man who guides the nation:

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Let Him [the Prince] shine long a mark to Land and Mayne, Like that bright Spark plac’t neerest to Charles’ Wayne (ll. 63–​4)

Lastly, that the young Prince is also ‘Charles’ allows a final conceit, which blurs the distinction between father and heir: Charles will ‘reigne still, since thus Himself will be /​Heire to Himself through all Posteritye’ (ll. 73–​4). Thus, as with the elegies on royal figures, a poem on the royal birth highlights the literary challenges of such commemorations: in chief, to understand both births and deaths as part of a continuing family, where the passing of one is joined with the arrival of another.

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Military deaths of the 1620s

James I set the tone of his English reign by completing a peace agreement with Spain in 1604, and from that point on revelling in his motto, ‘Beati Pacifici’ (‘Blessed are the Peace-​makers’). Even with the turmoil prompted by his son-​in-​law Elector Frederick’s taking of the Bohemian crown in 1618–​19, James largely avoided the war that engulfed northern Europe in the early 1620s. While he did at times allow allies to enlist soldiers to fight against the Spanish and Imperial powers, England itself mounted no military campaign until 1624. The relative lack of early Stuart experience in war is reflected in a hyperbolic but memorable passage from Anthony Nixon, who wrote in 1610 that if 20,000 English men were brought together, it would be impossible ‘to find or picke out one Souldier’, whereas on the continent one might ‘call together 100000 and [be unable] to cull out of them any other person but a Souldier’.1 Thus, military men appear rarely in the elegies of the first two Stuart decades. However, with the increased involvement of British troops from 1621 on, elegists began to grapple with the exceptional circumstances of such deaths. English military endeavours of the 1620s left elegists little to celebrate, as mortality rates for English troops serving on the continent were extraordinarily high: ‘37,000 of the 50,000 English troops drafted abroad during the 1620s (74 per cent) may have died’, with the highest proportion succumbing to disease.2 Abraham Holland’s ‘The Description of the late great memorable and prodigious Plague’ laments English soldiers dying on foreign shores and fields from both battle and disease: That world of bloud in foreine Ayre that lyes, Of noble English soules, whose carkasses The brutish Shores, wild Fields, and greedie Seas Expose to Dogs, to ravenous Fowles, and Fishes3 1 Swethland and Poland Warres (1610), sig. B1v, quoted in David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (London:  Pickering & Chatto, 2008), p. 11. 2 Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family, p. 24. 3 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. F1r.

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Such a death-toll and misery in the field of war must have undermined both military and civilian morale.4 Furthermore, all British campaigns  –​those in the Low Countries throughout the decade and those against Spain and France between 1625 and 1627  –​were notoriously unsuccessful. Elegists thus could not claim that a death was worthwhile in the sense that it contributed to a military victory. At best, an elegist might simply leave a death unmentioned or deny the context in which it occurred. For example, an elegy on Sir Charles Rich, who died in the debacle of the 1627 expedition to the Isle of Rhé, begins with the lament, ‘How fayne would wee forget this fatal war’.5 Overall, elegies on military figures who died in these years reflect deep unhappiness with British foreign policy in general and the failures in military and political leadership.6 While military deaths were infrequent through most of James’ reign, a single late Elizabethan one had a decades-​long influence. When Sir Philip Sidney died in 1586 during a military campaign in Holland, an unprecedented abundance of elegiac verse was written. Both universities produced large collections of Latin and Greek elegies, and New College, Oxford, offered its own volume, Peplus. Most significantly, Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe gathered elegies by a range of poets, and Drayton’s fourth eclogue in Idea laments the dead Sidney. Among more minor poets, Nicholas Breton, Thomas Churchyard, George Whetstone, John Philip, and Angel Day, all published English elegies. Raphael Falco traces the shift evident in the Sidney elegies: early ones focused on his role as knight, warrior, and cultural patron and later ones highlighted him as a poet –​a reflection of the publication of his Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella in the early 1590s. Those by Philip, Day, and Whetstone manifest that earlier tendency and are thus more significant for this chapter: they mark Sidney’s death by  rehearsing his accomplishments, particularly military ones. As such, they initiate a tradition of what I have termed ‘chronicle elegies’ that was highly favoured for dead soldiers between 1590 and the early 1620s. Unlike the military elegies of the 1620s, they were largely celebratory.

4 Roger B.  Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms:  The Origins of the British Army, 1585–​1702 (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.  106–​7, describes the particularly appalling conditions during the harsh winter of 1624–​5. 5 Folger MS V.a.262, p. 117. 6 On English interest in military-​related publications in these years, see Cian O’Mahony, ‘ “Souldiers, or Clarkes, or both”:  Ralph Knevet and the Fashioning of Military Identity through Print and Performance in Caroline Norwich’, in Matthew Woodcock and Cian O’Mahony (eds), Early Modern Military Identities, 1560–​1639: Reality and Representation (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell & Brewer, 2019), pp. 79–​99.

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With these chronicle elegies, the emphasis is on recounting the military successes of the deceased rather than offering extended passages of personal (or even public) lament. Such an approach is continued in John Ford’s Fames Memoriall on Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy (d.  1606), Cyril Tourneur’s Funerall poeme on the famous general Sir Francis Vere (1609), and Robert Marston’s long elegy on Thomas, Lord Grey of Wilton (d. 1614). These chronicle elegies were often written in sixains rather than the pentameter couplets most common in personal elegies. The chronicle elegy did not disappear entirely in the 1620s:  Alexander Spicer’s on Sir Arthur Chichester (general and lord deputy of Ireland) largely falls into this pattern, and that by Christopher Brooke on the same figure was a hybrid, offering both considerable reflective mourning and a chronology of Chichester’s career. However, the trend of the 1620s was certainly to focus more on immediate emotional response to the death of a military figure rather than relate his career in the more detached fashion of the chronicle elegy. As noted in Chapter 3, ‘Royal deaths’, between the years 1623 and 1627 England lost a significant number of prominent political and military leaders, and contemporaries remarked upon this cluster of deaths. John Chamberlain wrote in March 1624 that ‘This hath ben a dismall yeare to great men’,7 and the following year would prove at least as dismal. The commonly perceived cluster of deaths included military ones: those of the Earl of Southampton (November 1624), Chichester (February 1625), Maurice, Prince of Orange (April 1625), and the Earl of Oxford (April or June 1625) were almost always mentioned; on the civilian side, the list included the Earl of Dorset (March 1624), the Duke of Richmond and Lennox (February 1625), the Marquis Hamilton (March 1625), and King James (March 1625).8 Daniel Price’s sermon A Heartie Prayer listed the following: ‘two Dukes of Lennox; the Marquis of Hamilton; the Earls of Dorset, Nottingham and Southampton; Southampton’s son, Lord Wriothesley; and Lord Chichester of Belfast’.9 Some saw such a catastrophic toll as direly prophetic, but other surmised more than chance or Providence at work. George Eglisham’s Forerunner of Revenge was most concerned with the death of the Marquis of Hamilton,

7 Chamberlain, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 604–​5. 8 Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James I, pp. 68–​74. 9 Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James I, p.  61. Similar lists are found in other elegies on James’ death:  John Taylor’s Living Sadness, sig. B3r; Richard Taileboys, BL Royal MS 18 A. XLIX, fol. 7r. Some slightly later works included the deaths of Prince Maurice of the United Provinces (April 1625) and the Earl of Oxford (June 1625) in this pattern.

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whom he served, but presented that death as part of an orchestrated plan of poisoning by Buckingham, which included the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, the Earl of Southampton, and even King James himself. He cited a rumour that ‘went through London long before my L. Duke of Richmonds death, or his brothers, or my lord of Southampton, or of the Marquis, that all the noblemen that were not of Buckingham’s faction should be poysoned’.10 Others saw a yet more extended pattern in which Prince Henry himself had been poisoned (by Overbury, no less), who was in turn the victim of a justly deserved poisoning.11

English military actions of the 1620s The two significant military spheres for 1620s Britain were the various campaigns to reclaim the Palatinate and Bohemia for Elector Frederick, and the conflicts with France in the latter half of the decade that culminated in the Isle of Rhé expedition (1627) and the La Rochelle expedition (1628). Those labelled ‘Puritans’ were generally the most committed to English military action in support of Elector Frederick and other Protestant causes on the continent, and by failing to match their support, James and then Charles significantly alienated them.12 However, this broad description must be qualified in a number of ways: support for the Palatine cause in general did not always lead to support for a particular mission or confidence in the leaders of that mission, and thus Parliament was slow to provide the financial resources needed for a military campaign. A lack of strategic agreement hampered the efforts: English leadership was torn between mounting (or supporting) land campaigns against the Imperial forces (with the goal of directly restoring the Palatinate to Elector Frederick), an aggressive sea campaign against Spain, action against France in support of the Huguenots, and a defensive guarding of the English coastline against a range of threats. Multiple delays in sending English forces overseas led to a mass of discontented unpaid soldiers and sailors along the southern coast that troubled the towns in which they were billeted. The ill success of the ventures that were mounted increased the opposition to Buckingham and shook English confidence in the ability or will of King Charles to further the Protestant cause.13 Likewise, enthusiasm for

10 G. Eglisham, Forerunner of Revenge (1626), p. 7, qtd in Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James, p. 173, p. 326. 11 Bellany and Cogswell, The Murder of King James I, p. 331. 12 Marvin A. Breslow, A Mirror of England: English Puritan Views of Foreign Nations, 1618–​1640 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 2. 13 Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms, p. 95 and 124.

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the Palatine cause did not consistently coincide with support for the Dutch in their struggle against the Spanish, as competing national interests undermined their shared religious situation. Here (as will be more fully discussed in the section below on the Earl of Southampton), the conflicts between the Dutch and English engendered by competition in international trade and fishing could trump any sense of common cause. Often, English writers would feel that self-​interest prevented the Dutch from fully supporting the Elector.

Funeral elegies The uncertainty of financial means, the wavering of royal policy, and the ill-​ preparedness of English forces all contributed to the lack of military success in the 1620s. Whatever individual battles or sieges might be won in the Low Countries or Germany, the various campaigns fell far short of restoring Elector Frederick, and the Cadiz expedition, the Rhé campaign, and the Rochelle campaign (1628) were abject failures and national humiliations.14 Thus, funeral elegies on military leaders, whether they died in battle or in other circumstances, could not offer the time-​worn consolation that the individual death was a heroic sacrifice, justified for its place in national accomplishment. These circumstances left the door open for widespread and intense complaint within the elegies composed on these men. Allocating blame was a central feature: the men had died because of national apostasy, corrupt leadership, or the failure of allies. Another possibility was to celebrate the deceased in contrast to the excesses or corruptions of soldiers in general, as George Tooke does in his elegy on Sir William Fairfax (d. 1621).15 The military elegies of the 1620s tend to go beyond partisan support for the military cause:  for them the commitment is more often to the individual who has died, and often the leaders and allies are represented as having fallen short through negligence or even treachery. In these cases, the deceased stands as a model in comparison to which others can be criticized, and the elegy as a genre thus allows for a more probing consideration of the conduct of the war effort. While such seldom extends to an outright disparaging of the cause, the pity of the wasted loss is paramount. The glorious past of the English military is often invoked, through allusions to the Hundred Years War or the 1588 defeat of the Armada; thus, there is often a strong sense 14 On the systemic problems with English military endeavours in the 1620s, see Kevin Sharpe, ‘Crown, Parliament and Locality: Government and Communication in Early Stuart England,’ The English Historical Review 101:399 (1986), pp.  339–​40; and Manning, Apprenticeship in Arms, pp. 94–​125. 15 The Belides or Eulogie and elegie (1647), pp. 41–​3.

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that the English military valour and success of the present fell far short of the idealized past. This is represented in one of the more extended poems of critique on the Isle of Rhé expedition, ‘The noblest brave profession’, which offers the refrain, ‘Ould Souldyers heades, were decked /​with bayes and not with willowes’.16 Past glories have been replaced by occasions for mourning English incompetence, cowardice, and defeat. While the general dynamic of elegiac dismay leading to forthright criticism is found in poems on deaths from both the Low Countries and the French campaigns, this chapter will limit its focus to the former, and in particular to the 1624 deaths of the Earl of Southampton (and his son), the Earl of Oxford (d. 1625), and Thomas Scott, a soldier-​turned-​preacher assassinated in Utrecht, Holland, in 1626. In all three cases, elegiac lament is transformed into satiric detraction of their would-​be allies, the Dutch.

Sir Arthur Chichester The general tendencies of the military elegy in the 1620s described above are manifest in the elegies on Sir Arthur Chichester (d. 1625). Chichester had a long and distinguished military career reaching back to the 1580s, serving with Sir Francis Drake and Henry IV of France, and, most significantly, as lord deputy of Ireland, in which role he had major success in quashing Irish rebellion. Thus, in the new military age of the mid-​1620s, his death provided an opportunity to contrast his record with those of the upstarts that were granted military roles in which they fell short. Christopher Brooke’s elegy on Chichester includes a long passage describing his early military glory, including how he ‘did wyn his golden spurrs in blood: /​And as he bled, the king of France in feild /​Gave hym his knighthood’.17 A section lambasting the neophyte warriors of the 1620s follows: The worthles knights that now and then are made; Some fooles, some clownes, some yeomen, some of trade; That when wee speake of them (as t’were in scoffe) It may be ask’t what trade the knight is of: Theise parcell-​guilt ones, counterfetts, that fly And dare not stand the test of gentrie, Our heroe scorn’d; compar’d with hym no better Than empty ciphers, or a flourish’t letter.18

16 Early Stuart Libels, Oii11. 17 Christopher Brooke, The Complete Poems of Christopher Brooke, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Blackburn, 1872), p. 212. 18 Brooke, Complete Poems, p. 213.

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Brooke’s elegy is a rare instance where we have surviving evidence of the interaction between licenser and poet on contentious material in a funeral elegy. The satiric lines above were marked ‘to be omitted’ by the licenser, and Brooke then appended a letter to the licenser defending them: Though it be a knowne truth, that yu shall fynd here writ, concerning knights of theise tymes (as my matter subject gave scope): yet if you shall take exception, or think any offence therein, I answere, that it may stand if yu please, for theise grounds or reasons. First it cannot be unknowne to yu and others, that things much more satyricall, in England have passed both the publike stage, and the presse, and never question’d by authority; next, I presume there are not a feaw in this kingdome that will fynd themselves touched or taxed.19

If they are to be censored, Brooke argues that only the first four lines (of the passage beginning ‘The worthles knights’) need be eliminated, as the rest is ‘voyd of all offence or scruple, because it may concerne other kingdomes as well as ours’.20 This case demonstrates the alertness of licensers to potentially controversial material in funeral elegies, and helps to explain why certain elegies very popular in manuscript remained unpublished. Brooke clearly intended print publication, but there is no surviving printed copy (and the only manuscript is BL Egerton 2405). Sir Egerton Brydges surmises that Brooke did not publish because Alexander Spicer’s An elegy on the death of my Lord Chichester (1625) pre-​empted him;21 however, that so many notable deaths were greeted by a multitude of published elegies rather belies this assumption. The two likely possibilities are that continuing disagreement with the licenser prevented publication (or delayed it to the point where it no longer seemed timely) or that the poem was published in a short run from which no copy survives.

Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573–​1624) Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton (1573–​ 1624), is best known to literary scholars as a young courtier of the 1590s and a patron of William Shakespeare. Thus, a major biography is entitled Shakespeare’s Southampton, and this aspect of his life has received the bulk of scholarly attention.22 Through the 1590s he also developed a reputation as a figure

19 Brooke, Complete Poems, p. 223. 20 Brooke, Complete Poems, p. 223. 21 Sir Egerton Brydges, The British Bibliographer, vol. 2 (London, 1810-​14), p. 237n. 22 A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare’s Southampton, Patron of Virginia (London; New York: Macmillan, Harper & Row, 1965). See also G. P. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).

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of military valour, participating in the expeditions to Cadiz and the Azores, and then serving in Ireland in 1599. This phase of his life ended with his involvement in the Essex rebellion of 1601, for which he was spared execution but imprisoned in the Tower.23 With King James’ accession, Southampton’s fortunes improved, as he was freed from imprisonment and restored to his title and offices. He was granted the captaincy of the Isle of Wight, named one of the lord lieutenants of Hampshire, and enjoyed the favour of Queen Anne. However, he never attained high position at James’ court, which is understandable given his continuing resistance to the expansion of the royal prerogative.24 Through the second decade of James’ reign, Southampton became deeply engaged in the exploratory and colonial enterprises of the East India Company and the Virginia Company. His sympathy for the more outspoken figures in the 1621 House of Commons led to a brief imprisonment that year. The pro-​Spanish inclination of the King in these years did not align well with the militant Protestantism of Southampton and his supporters; however, the abrupt shift in the court’s position following the collapse of the Spanish Match in 1623 brought the fifty-​year-​old Earl once more to the fore. He was one of four established military ­figures  –​the others were the Earls of Essex and Oxford, and Lord Willoughby (later Earl of Lindsey) –​who in 1624 led English volunteers to fight alongside the Dutch against the Imperial forces.25 The more militant English Protestants had long wanted such a foreign policy, with the ultimate goal of the recovery of the Palatinate. However, enthusiasm for the mission was tempered by the high costs and the fear that a taxation granted by Parliament might not be fully used for the purpose. In addition, conflict in the East Indies trade between England and Holland (as will be discussed below) strained relations between the allies.

23 See the recent article, Lara M. Crowley, ‘Was Southampton a Poet? A Verse Letter to Queen Elizabeth,’ ELR 41 (2011), pp. 111–​45. 24 On Southampton’s literary and political connections in this period, see M. Heinemann, ‘Rebel Lords, Popular Playwrights and Political Culture:  Notes on the Jacobean Patronage of the Earl of Southampton,’ Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), pp. 63–​86. 25 In the same year, the famed continental commander Count Ernst Mansfeld was granted permission to raise a force in England to fight on behalf of the Elector Palatine. Pressing of men for this force was ongoing in November 1624, the time of Southampton’s death. At the same time, English soldiers were suffering under the famous siege of Breda, which was to finally end the next June. See the verse letter of Captain Thomas Morton, written from Breda in late November 1624 (Bodl. Ashmole MS 36, 37, fol. 43v).

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In June of 1624, England committed itself to supplying six thousand troops to the Dutch,26 and through that month and July volunteer forces were levied, and shortly after set sail. In late October, Southampton’s forces were at Roosendaal, attempting to cut off the victualing of the Imperial forces from Antwerp.27 There, Lord Wriothesley, Southampton’s eldest son, who had accompanied him as an officer, died of a fever on 5 November. His father intended to leave Holland to comfort his wife but succumbed to the same illness four days later at Bergen op Zoom.28 Dudley Carleton described the ceremony of the bodies leaving Holland: My Ld of Southampton & my Ld. Wriothsleys bodyes were carryed the 21th [sic] of this present from the house where my ld. dyed, to the ship wth as much solemnity as the assistance of all our English chiefes & gentlemen of quality at Rosendal, & the Governor wth the garrison & towne of Berghen could afford.29

Both bodies were returned to England, and on Innocents Day, 1624, were buried in the family tomb in St Peter’s, the parish church of Titchfield, Hampshire, just across the Solent from the Isle of Wight.30 Both the return of the bodies by sea and the family’s connection to the southern part of Hampshire figure prominently in the most significant commemorative poems on Southampton, which survive only in Brotherton Manuscript Lt q 44 (Leeds University Library). This manuscript stands apart from most early Stuart poetic miscellanies in its focus on a single period of time (the early to mid-​1620s) and its high percentage of poems (including the most lengthy and substantial) that appear in no other manuscript. It includes a section of elegies and epitaphs on figures who died in the mid-​1620s, the most striking of which is a sequence, consisting of an introductory verse letter, an elegy, and two epitaphs, on the death of Southampton. These are thematically related to three other poems in the

26 G. M. D. Howat, Stuart and Cromwellian Foreign Policy (London: A. & C. Black, 1974), p. 32. 27 William Beeston to Simond d’Ewes, 22 Oct./​1 Nov. 1624, BL Harl. MS 383, fol. 18. 28 Carleton to Conway, 15/​25 Nov. 1624, TNA SP 84/​121, fol. 91v; John Hassall to Lady Carleton, 26 Oct./​5 Nov. 1624, SP 84/​121. The Dutch battlefields of 1624–​ 25 were more dangerous than usual; Carleton to Chamberlain 16/​26 Nov. 1624, Maurice Lee (ed.), Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–​1624:  Jacobean Letters (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972), p. 318, reported on the plague that was affecting both the various armies and Dutch civilians; he notes, ‘my lady of Oxford is fallen dangerously sick at the leaguer at Waalwijk, a very unfit place for a fair lady’. 29 Carleton to Conway, 30 Nov. 1624, SP 84/​121, fol. 40, 30 Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, p. 175.

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following pages: elegies on the deaths of the Earl of Oxford, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, and the Earl of Dorset. In contrast to the elegies on these prominent noblemen is a brief gathering of epitaphs on minor figures of the gentry:  Sir Edward Bromly (d.  2 June 1626), Constantia Greville (daughter of Sir Edward Greville), and Etheldrid Millisone (daughter of Sir Roger Millisone). The first two of these have family connections to Sir Thomas Lyttelton, to whom the Southampton poems are addressed. Also noteworthy in this gathering of epitaphs is one on William Cecil, a son of the Earl of Salisbury who had died in 1623. This poem connects the selection of epitaphs with a sequence of poems celebrating Hatfield House, the home of the Cecils, which has been reproduced and discussed in a recent article by Thomas Lockwood.31 None of this establishes that the bulk of the poems in the manuscript were by the same poet (in fact, the few that can be ascribed are by a variety of authors); however, it does suggest that the manuscript was at least collected by a single person, most likely one connected to the family of the Cecils at Hatfield, sometime in late 1626 or early 1627. It seems plausible, based on the biographical hints in the Hatfield poems outlined below, that the same poet was responsible for these and those on the Earl of Southampton.32

The introductory poem to Lyttelton The verse letter to Lyttelton that begins the sequence is obviously to a friend and regular correspondent. The poet reminds Lyttelton of his previous informal, rhyming newsletters, in which he ‘present[ed] in rough unpolisht Ryme /​the knaveryes and foolleryes of the tyme’. However, that light spirit must now give way, as Lyttelton, serving in the regiment under Southampton,33 has presumably conveyed the news of the Earl’s death to the poet. The poet is writing to Lyttelton from England, and while the elegy focuses on the Isle of Wight and the New Forest, it is clear that he writes at some distance from the southern part of Hampshire (ll. 84ff.). From lines 23–​26 we gather that Lyttelton’s messenger met the poet upon the way,

31 Thomas Lockwood, ‘ “All Hayle to Hatfield”: A New Series of Country House Poems from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 44’, ELR 38 (2008), pp. 270–​303. The manuscript is largely in a single, unidentified hand. 32 See the introductory notes to these poems in the online appendix for further comment on possible authorship. 33 Markham, Honour in his Perfection (1624), sig. A4r. Capt. Lyttelton appears seventh in the list of officers serving under Southampton in the Jessup Papers, BL Add. MS 46188, fol. 32.

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and that the poet composed both the elegy and the prefatory epistle overnight in an inn (‘betwixt the evening and succeeding morne’; l.  78), before the bearer departed again. The poem then embodies the immediacy of response frequent in funeral elegies: it is ‘slubber’d’ with tears, and impeded by the ‘Caryers, Tapsters [and] Ostlers’ who frequent inns and quash the ‘muses fyer’ (ll.  43–​4). Thus, they are lines written without restraint or second thought. This may be fictional or semi-​fictional, but clearly the poet is trying to present his elegy as ‘of the moment’. He has been violently overcome by the news of the deaths, which have ‘forc’t [him] to sing /​deathes ill sett notes’ rather than the jesting verse letters that he normally sends to Lyttelton. The compulsion, which may also excuse the poor writing, is described in a striking way: ‘And hee that wth his muse a Rape Comitts /​ mishapen shall the bastard be he getts’ (ll. 35–​6). The lines recall the ‘Elegie to Mris Boulstred’, sometimes ascribed to Donne: Shall I goe force an Elegie? abuse My witt? and breake the Hymen of my muse For one poore houres love?

Both poems partake of the funeral elegy’s sense of ‘bitter constraint’ (‘Lycidas,’ l. 6) that forces the elegist ‘to sing /​deathes ill sett notes’ (ll. 15–​ 16). Importantly, the elegist is conscious of writing for a soldierly readership: he wishes for ‘verces that wthout blushing may appeare /​and boldly knock att any soldiers eare’ (ll.29–​30). In the same passage, he more fully defines his desired audience: these are lines that may not be ‘fitt for every eare, for every eye’, nor are they meant for St Paul’s Churchyard, or ‘by informers to bee Read or heard’.34 Instead, they are presented as a private work for Lyttelton, composed in haste and left unpolished. The immediacy of response also leads him to outspokenness, ‘wthout the feare of punishmt or blame’ (l. 68). The verse epistle is followed by the first of two epitaphs, which focuses on the burial of the father and son together. It adopts the typical rhetoric of the tombstone, addressing the passing reader to describe the occupants of the tomb. Like many epitaphs, it points to the brief scope of the form as insufficient to describe the virtues of the dead, which in this case will be trumpeted by fame itself, compelling the wicked to depart and the virtuous to venerate the tomb. The elegy proper that follows closely connects the Earl with the Isle of Wight, of which he was captain, and the adjacent mainland of southern Hampshire, where the Wriothesleys were the dominant family. Unusually 34 ‘Informers’ here may reflect either OED sense 1, ‘teacher’ or sense 2, ‘informant’, especially to the government.

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for a funerary elegy, this poem begins with a dream-​ vision statement, ‘Mythinkes I see’, which compares the Isle in its sorrowful distress to the chaos of a shipwreck.35 The poet vividly depicts the drowning passengers and crew, as seen by ‘a sheepheard from some high hill’, a passage that recalls Ariel’s description of the shipwreck at the beginning of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. As with so many elegies on prominent figures from this period, there is considerable focus on the public effect of the news of death. In this case, we see it first among the common folk, passed from a shepherd to a milkmaid and then to her master, until it finally reaches the town. The shepherd that served in the vehicle of the opening simile becomes he who literally first hears and spreads the news. The poet uses faintly ridiculous hyperbole to depict the islanders’ grief: milk pails are spilled, oxen and sheep left untended, and the mayor distractedly throws a carpet over his shoulder in place of his gown. Such hyperbolic presentations of disorder are an occasional feature of the funeral elegy in the period, perhaps best known in the depiction of the disordered world in Donne’s Anniversaries. In another elegy from 1624, on the death of the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, King James is presented engaging in a rather comically surreal dialogue with an owl about the tragic news.36 As will be more fully explored in the coda to this book, the overturning of religious certainty also figures prominently in the elegies of the period. In this poem, the women turn to the vicar (ll. 39–​46) with a demand for prayers for the dead, and ‘if that [is] unlawfull’ they will withhold their tithes. The vicar ‘falls a raveing to’ and offers them absolution should they be driven to despairing suicide because of the news. This playful reflection of residual Catholicism would seem to reflect an ongoing Protestant dilemma:  the Reformation had left the grieving without a clear and active process to follow.37 The Earl’s own religious inclinations were ambiguous: the family had long been stalwart adherents of the old faith, but personally the Third Earl seems to have been fully conforming; however, the playfulness of this section should restrain us from identifying this as residual Catholicism in either the poet or Southampton. This section of the poem closes by returning

35 The opening may have been influenced by Henry Peacham’s elegy on the Earl of Dorset, who had died earlier in 1624, which began, ‘Meethought I saw by Durovernum’; An Aprill shower (1624), p. 6. 36 ‘It was the morne’, BL Sloane MS 542, fol. 48r. An edition of this poem (with commentary) can be found in ‘Two poems on the Death of the Duke of Richmond and Lenox, 1624’, Opuscula 1:6 (2011). 37 See Thomas Rist, Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England (Aldershot, Hampshire:  Ashgate, 2008), who argues that revenge tragedy arose partly in response to this lost structure of grieving.

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to the conceit that the island is now a floating one, and, that if Southampton was still its governor, it would float away from Britain for some soil ‘more fortunate, more blest’ (l. 66). Most often, as in Jonson’s Fortunate Isles, a masque of Twelfth Night from 1625, Britain itself had been equated with the ‘Fortunate Isles’ (the Hesperides), but this poem suggests that such is no longer the case with the death of Southampton.38 The elegy also grounds the sorrow felt for Southampton’s death in the New Forest near Beaulieu Abbey, a Wriothesley family home. At first, the forest’s sympathetic response to Southampton’s death (ll.  67–​79) is more typical of the pastoral elegy tradition than the Isle of Wight section:  flowers will not bloom and the order of nature is inverted as owls and ravens replace traditional songbirds. However, this soon diverges from the pastoral tradition, as lament gives way to anger and the poet calls upon the hunting dogs of the New Forest, made mad by grief, to turn upon the Dutch (l. 83) whom the poet blames for the death of the Earl and his son. The poet wishes that they might ‘dye of that desease’ and that English tears might make the Dutch ‘trenches overflowe /​till they and theires as deepe in waters lye /​as att this instant doth each Bryttannes eye’ (ll. 96–​8). The complaints about the Dutch develop over forty lines and become an extended attack upon Holland, its people, and its doctors who failed to save Southampton and his son.39 As we have seen with the elegy on Frederick Henry, ‘Canst thou bee dead and wee bee still ye same’, a common faith, enemy, and cause (the restoration of the Palatinatee) did not prevent sharp tensions between the Dutch and British. The hostility towards the Dutch may seem surprising, given that Britain in the summer of 1624 was on a war footing with Spain that brought the two nations together as allies, and that Southampton had long been an ardent supporter of international Protestant militancy against the Spanish and Imperial forces. However, the shared enemy and purpose could not override ongoing problems between the Dutch and British. Going back to the siege of Ostend (1601), British soldiers serving the States General had resented the Dutch because of delays in payment and what they perceived as a greater Dutch interest in trade than war.40 As the British and Dutch turned towards more formal cooperation in 1623–​24, conflicts over the East Indies trade, culminating in the Amboyna massacre of 1623, further strained relationships. In this incident, ten Englishmen of the East India Company

38 In a poem from the preceding year, written to Buckingham during the Spanish trip, Richard Corbett begins, ‘I’ve read of Ilands floating and removd’. The Prince and Duke, as embodiments of England, have made it ‘float’ to Spain. 39 Surviving accounts of Southampton’s death suggest that he was actually tended to by an English doctor named Turner. 40 Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms, pp. 41–​3.

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were executed in Indonesia, under the charge of treason, by agents of the Dutch East India company.41 The news did not reach England until the late spring of 1624, the very time when English forces were being mustered for service in the Low Countries. In a letter of early June, John Chamberlain, after discussing the difficulty in raising soldiers for the Low Countries, notes the arrival of the Amboyna news: And now in the very nicke comes newes how barbarously the Hollanders have dealt with our men in the East Indies in cutting of ten of our principall factors heads after they had tortured them, upon colour of a plot they had to surprise their fort of Amboyna, which whether true or false they need not to have used them so rigorously, but either have kept, or sent them home in chaines with their confessions and proofes: the rest of the English there have sent a protest, against this manner of proceeding, which doth disharten their frends and those that otherwise wish them well, that cannot speake nor heare of this their insolence without much indignation.42

While the Amboyna massacre was somewhat overshadowed by the conflict with Spain, it did not pass unnoticed, and there were many leading English figures for whom it was a major issue.43 Most significantly, the Amboyna controversy meant that anti-​Spanish feeling might not translate into pro-​ Dutch action.44 Part of the tension between the Dutch and English arose from confusion over the mission and the danger of what today would be called ‘mission creep’. While some, like King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, held that ‘all the wars that are on foot in Europe are fused together and have become one war’,45 many of the English sought sharper distinctions. In 1624–​26, they were uncertain whether they were fighting simply on behalf of the Dutch or as allies with the Dutch in the recovery of the Palatinate. King James, whose diplomatic hopes entailed making careful distinctions, had been adamant that the troops raised under Count Mansfeld in early 1625 be used only for military actions directly connected with the recovery of the Palatinate.46 Even at the time of recruitment, there had been tension 41 Lee, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, p. 319. 42 5 June 1624, in Chamberlain, Letters, vol. 2, pp. 562–​3. 43 Breslow, A Mirror of England, pp.  85–​90. Its interest for the English public was reflected the next year when there was an attempt to mount a play in London on the incident; the Privy Council intervened before any performance; N. W. Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 29. Five decades later it was treated by John Dryden in his play Amboyna (1673). On the lingering effect of this incident, see Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms, p. 61. 44 Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–​1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 274–​5. 45 Quoted in Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years War (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 159. 46 Parker, Thirty Years War, p. 68.

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over the war aims:  a sergeant was imprisoned for presenting the recruitment as ‘against the King of Spain and the Infanta’ rather than simply for the Dutch (as if their enemy were a nameless ethereal entity).47 There is a subtle but important distinction here: James wanted to avoid the suggestion of direct war with Spain and the Empire, but that actually was more attractive to the English public than alliance with the Dutch. Of the three formulations –​restoring the Palatinate, fighting the Spanish, and helping the Dutch –​the last had the least allure for the English.48 The State Papers Domestic of the second half of 1624 include frequent discussion of the Amboyna massacre, with James repeatedly assuring the English Company that he was seeking justice and discouraging their threat to give up the trade. Similarly, the letters of Dudley Carleton, English ambassador to the United Provinces, show his continuing but frustrated effort to compel the Dutch government to punish the offenders.49 The response of Edward Conway, secretary of state, to one of these letters shows how the Amboyna affair was undermining the joint Dutch-​English endeavour against the Spanish: he asserts that if the Dutch give not satisfaction in this barbarous insolency past, in a good reglement to come and in the Groenland busines, wth some good tokens of their affection & respect to his Ma: & this state, I protest to yor lp, I speake it wth fear: grounded upon knowledge shipps will sink for it, and a good part of the cause may sinke too. God give better.50

The reference to the sinking of ships reflects a concern that the tension between the two countries would lead to direct English–​Dutch naval conflict, also metaphorically ‘sinking’ the common cause against Spain. In the weeks preceding Southampton’s death, English naval forces were authorized to seize ships of the Dutch East India Company,51 so direct conflict was a real possibility. Writing in November 1624, Thomas Roe, a strong proponent of

47 It is clear from CSPD 1623–​5, p. 294, that the Infanta had objected to King James, who then required from the colonels a copy of what proclamation they were using to raise volunteers. A letter of John Chamberlain, 3 July 1624, notes the change in the recruiting language as well. 48 On the growing disillusionment of the House of Commons with the military expedition, see the competing arguments of Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution, pp. 317–​ 22, and Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, p.  259. The former argues that Buckingham failed to maintain parliamentary support because he disregarded the attachment to a ‘blue water’ strategy that would give priority to naval endeavours. Russell blames it largely on financial concerns. 49 TNA SP 84/​121. 50 4 Nov. 1624, TNA SP 84/​121, fol. 45. 51 CSPD 1623–​5, Sept. 30, Oct. 4, and Oct. 21, 1624.

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a united Protestant effort to support Elector Frederick, concludes his bitter assessment of England’s Dutch allies: ‘I have tryed them East and West, and know their bestialitye and ingratitude.’52 Arrogant ingratitude for English sacrifice (which extended from Sir Philip Sidney to Southampton and finally to the suffering of Englishmen in the ongoing siege at Breda) was a frequent complaint of the English.53 Thus, the poem’s outburst against the Dutch is part of this broader anger, and unsurprisingly it descends to some typical national slurs. Such sentiments were likely especially felt in coastal areas like the Isle of Wight and south Hampshire, with their strong ties to English seafarers. The poet brings forth many of the usual stereotyped English ideas of the Dutch: they are ‘dull flegmatick’ and ‘druncken’, and the country as a whole is presented as a muddy morass of illness. Mock epitaphs (in contrast to the serious ones that will commemorate Southampton and Wriothesley) are offered for the Dutch –​‘here lyes a doctor, here a Burger dead’ (l. 109) –​and the poet prays that ‘Ranck flesh poyson that earth that ayre /​that poysond hath to death this matchless paire’ (ll.  112–​13). However, the elegy goes beyond such commonplace complaints and insults, and offers an analysis of the foreign policy situation that verges on prophetic claims. The poet dismisses those unprophetic eyes who can only see ‘what before them lyes’ and that fall into the debate of whether the expedition ‘was against Spaine, or in the states defence’ (ll. 140, 142). His prophetic reading of the deaths suggests that what brought English forces to Holland under Southampton was not simple military action but a providential retreat from a Sodom-​like England about to undergo divine judgement: for my part I confess, I rather feare it did concerne ourselves, our state to neare,     When lott and his from Sodom must retyer     who is soe stupid that expects not fyer (ll. 144–​7)

The judgment to come on England is not explicitly spelled out, but through an extended simile that compares the situation to a stage play, the poet suggests an unfolding tragedy ordained by heaven. However, as a drama it involves not disguise but authentic playing of true selves. From the heavenly script ‘each must actt his owne part’, and the poet particularly notes how monarchs must show themselves:

52 Sir Thomas Roe, Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, From the Year 1621 to 1628 Inclusive:  Printed by Samuel Richardson (London, 1740). 53 Breslow, A Mirror of England, p. 94.

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great kings themselves would they lay by theire Crownes and choose to enter in the shape of Clownes thinking to hyde theire base and damned deeds under the shaddow of some Antick weeds, shall not be sufferd (ll. 161–​5)

This is an outspoken prophetic judgment directed towards the English monarchy, and it would seem to point to the previous year’s expedition to court the Spanish Infanta, when Prince Charles had donned the disguise of a commoner to leave England. It also suggests that in the judgement to come, ‘noe minione shalbe heard nor favoritt’ (l.  166), which points to the contemporary English scene where Buckingham was perceived to control the aging King James and to have taken the lead in the anti-​Spanish foreign policy of 1624. This is the sort of apocalyptic writing that was most associated with radical Protestantism at the time. The point of this section is that most would have preferred deaths like those of Southampton and Wriothesley in watery Holland rather than the final judgement of fire coming to England, an allusion to Noah’s flood that in the end times will give way to judgement by fire (2 Peter 3:6–​7).54 While the author cannot be identified with certainty, it is reasonable to infer that the hostile view of the Dutch and gloomy prophetic vision of England were in accord with the attitudes of Lyttelton, one of Southampton’s officers, to whom he sent the poem. As often in the elegies of the period, this interlude of political commentary is relieved by a return to more conventional mourning and consolation. The proper basis for grief is not that these noble figures died, but that the readers have remained to outlive them and take their parts in the apocalyptic tragedy unfolding in England. Hence, repentance is the apt response:  the people of England should don sackcloth rather than mourning blacks (l. 191). The elegy’s conclusion returns the focus to the return of the bodies to the Isle of Wight and the New Forest as an appropriate resting place. In doing so, the poem reiterates the primacy of the noblemen’s domestic, local roles, from which they had been taken to their deaths in a hostile, alien land. But even this geographic focus is secondary to the spiritualized emphasis of the poem’s conclusion:  the two men are reimagined as spiritual warriors, who, rather than besieging Spanish-​held towns in the Low Countries, had beleaguered and won ‘Mount Syon’ (l. 217). In keeping with an emphasis on virtue over outward commemoration, the technical epitaph that follows denies identification of the dead. The voice of the tomb, in resistance to the

54 The suggestion that the dead have been spared the dies irae that awaits England is also found in Daniel Price’s Lamentations for the Death of the Late Illustrious Prince Henry (1613), pp. 21–​2.

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classical epitaphic formula of ‘Sta, Viator’ (‘pause, reader’), calls upon the reader to ‘goe by’, for if the story of Southampton and Wriothesley is told, it will be too long for an epitaph and will hold the readers until they weep themselves ‘into this Tomb.’ A comparison of the elegy in the Brotherton manuscript with a number of those printed with William Jones’ funeral sermon on Southampton, A Treatise of Patience in Tribulation (1624), sheds further light on the perception of the Earl’s death. Their title, ‘The Teares of the Isle of Wight’, very much reflects a similar concern with the locality’s response to the death. Jones was rector of Elvetham and vicar of Arreton on the Isle of Wight, and some details in the sermon suggest he may also have served as domestic chaplain to Southampton.55 In addition, a number of poems share the Brotherton elegy’s hostility towards England’s Dutch allies and doubts about the expedition. The elegy of William Jones himself questions the repeated sacrifice of English lives in the Low Countries, and one by William Pettie vividly complains: We man’d your Cities, and instead of stones, Helpt you to build your Bulwarks with our bones. Nor had your Castles now unbattered stood, Had not your slime ben tempered with our blood.56

However, the unattributed and most outspoken of these printed elegies has many affinities with that in the Brotherton manuscript. It first castigates the Dutch climate of fog and beer, and then, putting aside the usual elegiac voice, adopts the language of the satirist venting spleen as he, like the Brotherton elegist, considers the sacrifice of English blood on the soil of an unthankful land: But thou accursed Netherland, the stage And common theater of bloud and rage, On thee Ile vent my uncontrouled spleene, And stabbe the to the heart, with my sharpe teene. Thou whose cold pastures cannot be made good, But with continuall shour’s of reeking blood; Nor fields be brought to yeald increase agen, But with the seeds of carcasses of men. Whose state, much worse than us’rers, onely thrives By th’large expence and forfeitures of lives;

55 CCED. C. C. Stopes, The Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s Patron (New York: AMS, 1922), p. 474. 56 Jones, ‘To the Hollanders upon the returne of the Lords Corpes’, A Treatise of Patience, p. 41.

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Yet bankerupt-​like, who daylie for thy store Without regard of payment, borrowst more. Wherein in threescore years, more men of worth Have perish’t, than th’ whole countrey hath brought forth Since the Creation57

This passage, more than the Brotherton elegy, sets Southampton’s death in the broader history of the Dutch–​Spanish Eighty Years War, and like both the Brotherton elegy and others discussed later in this chapter it laments the continuing sacrifice of English blood to sustain the soil and state of the United Provinces. The correspondences between this anonymous printed poem and the elegy in the Brotherton manuscript could mean a number of different things. It may be that the two poets knew each other and one had seen the other’s poem; as noted above, the Brotherton elegy certainly shares a focus on the Isle of Wight consistent with the poems published along with the sermon. Or, the two poems may both reflect more widespread English concerns about the death of Southampton and the military mission in the Low Countries –​concerns we will see reflected in the elegies on the Earl of Oxford and Thomas Scott, discussed below.

The Earl of Oxford: ‘deathes slaughterbooke for that sad yeare’ Eight months after Southampton’s death, another of the four leaders of the English forces died in the Low Countries. Henry de Vere, Eighteenth Earl of Oxford, succumbed to an infected wound suffered at Terheijden in North Brabant. As with Southampton, his corpse was returned to England where it was buried at Westminster Abbey on 15 July 1625. Oxford had come to this role of military leadership in 1624 despite a reputation for wild living and a tumultuous relationship with the King. He spent a number of years in Italy in the mid-​1610s, and upon his return to England he became involved in military matters. In 1620 he served in the Palatinate under his cousin, the famous general Sir Horatio Vere. His vehement commitment to the cause of the Palatinate and open hostility towards Buckingham eventually led to two brief periods of imprisonment in the Tower in the early 1620s. However, the failure of the Spanish Match, and the promotion of a war policy against Spain on the part of Buckingham and Charles, reversed the situation and led to his appointment as one of the leaders of the 1624 expedition. Nevertheless, he survived little longer than Southampton.

57 William Jones, A Treatise of Patience in Tribulation (1624), p. 35.

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‘The moorening bannors’ ‘The moorening bannors’, a funeral elegy on the death of Oxford, is another unique poem from Brotherton MS Lt q 44, which immediately follows upon the gathering of Southampton poems and is plausibly by the same poet. It certainly gives less attention to the military circumstances of death than those poems do, as it largely celebrates the general virtues of Oxford that were appropriate for one of the highest nobility. It begins with a description of the room where the corpse of Oxford lay in state, with the usual hatchments and scutcheons for a noble funeral. The poet initially posits that such memorials might seem sufficient, but he then invokes the Horatian ‘monumentum aere perennius’ (‘a monument more lasting than bronze’) trope: But such materialls subject are to rust and they, as man, in tyme shall turne to dust in marble then or brass, or if there might more lasting stuff be found, on wch to wryte sad Epitaphes, tis fitt his name should bee on them recorded to posterity (ll. 9–​14)

The poet then explicitly rejects a chronicle elegy approach, as Oxford’s accomplishments would overwhelm it:  ‘for tis impossible for tongue or pen /​to Character att full, this best of men’ (ll. 21–​2). The recurring adjective in the summary description that follows is ‘noble’: Oxford was ‘noble in mynd’, ‘noble in deeds’, etc.; the poet is at pains to both stress his high birth and insist that his nobility was not mere inheritance. Thus, Oxford fulfilled the early modern ideal of ‘mixed nobleness’, in which high birth is reflected in the highest standards of virtue and valour.58 He lacks an heir, but his ‘glorious fame’ remains, and while the de Vere coffers were notoriously empty, the elegist defies this reality by insisting that ‘To count his wealth Arethmatick wants arte /​(for he dyes rich dyes lord of each mans hart)’.59 Both ‘The moorening bannors’ and other elegies on Oxford wrestle with the challenge of commemorating the particular death of Oxford in what Abraham Holland called ‘this great Yeare of Elegies’.60 The spring of 1625 saw 58 Richard Cust, ‘Honour, Rhetoric and Political Culture: The Earl of Huntingdon and His Enemies’ in David Underdown (ed.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 89–​90. 59 His father had died relatively impoverished. 60 ‘A L’Envoy to my endeared Friends Mr. R.  T.  Mr. W.  H.  Mr. T.  C.  and others’, Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. D3r. The subtitle of this work reflects the coming together of these events: ‘a funeral elegie of King Iames, with a congratulatory salve to King Charles; an elegie of the magnanimous Henry Earle of Oxford; a description of the late great, fearefull and prodigious plague’.

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both King James’ death and a plague that afflicted much of England. Michael Neill has argued that the large-​scale effect of the plague was frightening in its erasure of individual, human distinctiveness. Fear-​induced speed and negligence led to mass burials, with the loss of identity and commemoration of an individual figure.61 Was Oxford only honoured by ‘maimed rites’ because his body returned to an England beset by plague? An elegy in NLW 5390D (more fully discussed below) surely suggests so: after noting the inflated rites of the undeserving, the poet asks ‘shall the Corpes of that most valiant grave /​ Heroicke Henry in oblivions Cave /​occluded lye’. The last twenty lines of the poem present a contextual celebration: ‘wth troopes of black kings may theire funeralle trim’ clearly recalls the grand funeral of King James two months earlier, but this poem suggests that Oxford surpasses him, for ‘men not onely moorned but dyed for him’ (l. 49). The poet then hyperbolically reads the widespread deaths by the plague as a manifestation of public grief: read but deathes slaughterbooke for that sad yeare theire shall you find soe many soules hence fled, as if none wisht to live when he was dead,     Weomen and children young and old did strive     to prove those base that Oxford would survive (ll. 50–​4)62

Abraham Holland’s elegy on Oxford, ‘What star was wanting’, grapples, if rather cryptically, with the challenge of being a man of war under a monarch whose motto was ‘Beati pacifi’. He recalls recent, more straightforward centuries of uncomplicated military greatness:       In those times to  have A TALBOT, ESSEX, or a DRAKE did save The Countrie but from damage: but that now When the now-​Sainted JAMES had made a Vow To blesse himselfe, and us by making Peace: That not all Spirit, and all Mars should cease But such a flame from those still ashes rise, Did save the Land from guilt of Cowardize.63

In other words, the martial valour of Oxford established a continuity with past military greats and prevented the charge that a James-​led England was a land of cowards. The epoch of past military greatness is a more appropriate context for Oxford, and Holland imagines his soul being welcomed in heaven by his ancestral predecessors, including Sir Philip Sidney who 61 Neill, The Issues of Death, pp. 18–​20. 62 The reference to ‘that sad yeare’ suggests that the poem was written sometime after that year. 63 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. C4v.

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‘threw his Bayes /​On OXFORDS head, and daign’d to sing his praise’. In embracing the military life, Oxford dismissed the ceremonies and pleasures of the court as ‘Boy-​games to his minde’: for example, ‘to see a Maske /​And sit it out, he held a greater taske /​Than to endure a Siege’.64 Like so many elegists, Holland dallies with the possibility of grief-​induced heresy: O wer’t not Profanation, I now Could turne a stiffe Pythagorist and allow A reall metempsychosis, if so The Soule of OXFORD might divided flow On much Nobilitie: and my sect Should honour finde from hence, they no Defect.65

The implication is that other noblemen of the time lack the qualities and abilities of the dead Earl, and hence Holland’s would-​be profanation is driven by fear as well as grief. Holland also eschews any chronicling of Oxford’s achievements, as they are already known across the world. Like many elegists of the 1620s, his focus is on the future public loss that comes with the death. An elegy surviving only in a manuscript of the Salusbury family of Llewenni, Wales (beg. ‘Shall Cannons roaring rent’),66 takes a more thoroughly satirical approach, as the poet laments the relative neglect of Oxford in contrast to others of his time. He seems particularly concerned with those who have received undeserved military honours: Shall Cannons roaring rent ye ayre asunder wth Bacons67 brayne bred artificiall thunder Volleys of shott envelloped wth smoak mantling the earth wth sable Cloudy cloak and every martiall right Confer’d on those that never durst scarce looke upon theire foes May valiant Scipio and brave Hanniball have an obscure and private funerall meanely inter’d wthout all pompe or state and shall even Otho68 that effeminate swyme to his grave in souldiers blood and teares 64 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. D1r. 65 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. D1r. 66 NLW MS 5390D, p. 167. 67 The allusion is to the legend that Roger Bacon (ca.  1214–​1292?) introduced gunpowder to Europe; his experiments in this vein were often linked with Friar Thomas Bungay. 68 Marcus Salvius (AD 32–​69), favourite of the emperor Nero; he himself was briefly emperor in the last year of his life before being overcome by Vitellius. The reference here also likely glances at a contemporary figure.

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though ruling all yet overrul’d wth feares the hartles hart base Coward he did goare wth his owne sword his foes could doe noe more69 (ll. 1–​14)

The opening conjures up the violent world of the battlefield, and perhaps especially the siege, through language that is itself somewhat satiric in depicting gunpowder as ‘Bacons brayne bred artificiall thunder’. This mocking of the use of gunpowder was something of a satiric commonplace in the period: since soldiers no longer needed to confront their enemies face to face, gunpowder had a levelling effect, as all men might seem brave at a distance.70 Oxford, as a seasoned military leader, had experienced direct combat, but military honours were now given to those without it. Oxford is equated with the classical heroes of Scipio and Hannibal, in comparison with Otho, who, while he did manage briefly to become emperor, achieved the position through being a favourite of Nero, and whose greatest act of violence was in his suicide. Further, merchants and others who achieve honour though ‘ill got pelfe’ are ‘rays’d and prays’d by poetasters pens’. It is not clear here whether the poet is specifically meaning funeral elegies on such figures or more general panegyric works. The allusion may be to the wealthy London merchant Richard Fishburne, whose death in May 1625 was commemorated in poems by William Strode and William Browne. Such poetasters strive to raise the undeserving dead from Lethes Channell and her mournefull dens Where Acheron doth hide her sulpherous head and grying Megara brings the feends to bead shall such base Carkases turn’d into mould Coffin’d in brasse gylt all with Perus gould (ll. 18–​22)

The conventional decrying of ornate tombs is given a new twist here, as such gilding seems an attempt to both cheat the figures of the classical underworld of their rightful victims and obscure the corruption of the carcasses as they decay. In contrast, Oxford is relatively ignored, but the elegist offers the consolation of even children in the future ‘weep[ing] fourth mournefull Elegies’ (l. 29). The concluding two couplets point, in their defensiveness, towards the critics of Oxford: Let Envie speak of him the worst she may shee cannot him discreditt any way 69 Otho died by suicide. 70 There was a strong anti-​gunpowder tradition in Renaissance literature; see, for example, Spenser, Faerie Queene, I.7:13, and Milton, Paradise Lost 6: 482–​91; Sheila J.  Nayar, ‘Arms or the Man I:  Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance’, Studies in Philology 114:3 (2017), pp. 517–​60.

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For let fame blowe her trumpett it will drown’d spites hellish Clamours with a heavenly sound

While this satiric elegy is found among poems written by Henry Salusbury, it is not in the hand of most of his in the manuscript and is not followed by the usual ‘HS’ identification. The manuscript as a whole is rich in elegies on military figures, including ones on Henry’s brother, Captain John Salusbury, who died at Prague in 1620 while fighting on behalf of the Elector Palatine. Hence, the family’s close connection with military figures may partly explain the Oxford elegy’s antagonism to the falsely glorified. Owen Felltham’s elegy on Oxford also engages in critique of others in contrast to the dead Earl, but his focus is on Dutch allies rather than English courtiers. As in the elegies on Southampton from the Brotherton manuscript, the United Provinces are depicted as an unworthy ally wasting the lives of England’s best: Why wert thou gone so soon? dull Holland why Must thou find war, and we send men to dye? But oh! thou gain’st by’t, having none but ill, And such as scarce are good enough to kill That are thy own. Th’hast offered him to Fate, Whose every Limb was worth more than thy State. I know the gods are pleas’d with’t, but ’tis we That feel the losse, not they, nor you, nor he.71

The last two quoted lines raise theological questions in an odd way: England was sending men to fight in Holland partly to recover the Palatinate for Frederick and Elizabeth, but also to aid their co-​religionists, Dutch Protestants, against their long-​standing Spanish enemies. The reference to the classical ‘gods’ rather than the Christian God holds the passage back from direct questioning of divine will, but still shows a resistance to theological arguments in favour of English participation in the war. The poem develops this theme by suggesting that Oxford functions as a sacrificial offering on behalf of Holland: ‘you thought so much good might expiate /​ Your blackest sins’ (ll.  20–​1). This leads to an extended comparison of Oxford to spilled perfumes:       as when Perfumes are spil’d, The Air Is mixt, and with their odor fill’d: So where his breath expir’d, the Earth and Air Are Antidotes ’gainst Cowardice and fear. Thus ’twas when Sydney dy’d: and ’tis from hence Thy Clime has had such noble spirits since. (ll. 22–​7) 71 Owen Felltham, Resolves divine, moral, political, vol. 2 (1661), p. 8, ll. 11–​18.

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This passage both identifies the shortcomings of the Dutch allies (‘Cowardice and fear’) and connects Oxford’s death with the archetypal figure of Sidney, who was also sacrificed –​or wasted –​in the Dutch cause. Felltham’s next verse paragraph is both more direct in its accusation against the Dutch and puzzling in its reference to the city of Breda, which had been surrendered by the Dutch to Spinola in the very week that Oxford died):72          Know in him  thou Hast slain a Tutelar god; and to prove this, Think but the time when Breda swallowed is. (ll. 34–​6)

The passage correlates the two events, suggesting that Oxford was a sort of protective deity whose death led to the loss of the city.73 (Terheijden, the site of Oxford’s injuries, is only a few miles north of Breda.) The poem ends by pushing satiric critique to a threatened curse upon Breda: Let not the place be known, lest when men see His worth, and come to know he dy’d for thee, They curse thee lower than thy staple, Fish; Thy own Beer-​drinkers, or the Spaniards wish. But if by curious search it must be known, Write by it thus, Here Belgia was undone. (ll. 43–​8)

Felltham’s antagonism towards the Dutch, which dominates the poem, likely stems from his active work as a merchant in Holland; as we saw with the Southampton poems, while English merchants often shared the advanced Protestantism of the Dutch Calvinists, trade disputes greatly complicated the relationship between these groups. Felltham travelled in the Low Countries at some point in the mid-​1620s, and his view of the Dutch is much more completely presented in his A Brief Character of the Low-​Countries, which circulated in manuscript during this time but was not printed until 1648. While it celebrates their cleanliness, industriousness, agriculture, and military success against the Spanish, it also offers a biting satire on their impulse towards religious schism, and a whimsical and inventive mocking of the Dutch landscape, character, and social norms. Overall, it does not reflect the bitter frustration manifest in the Oxford elegy, and it seems probable that the poem was written somewhat later and that its tone reflects an embittering of Felltham’s perspective 72 The scene was famously depicted in Velázquez’ painting The Surrender of Breda. 73 The Dutch Stadtholder, Prince Maurice of Orange, also died in April 1625, and there was a strong sense of anxiety in these months of convergent calamities, including plagues, floods and the siege of Breda; Johannes Bogerman, The godly and Christian decease (1625), sig. D2v.

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as the English mission in Holland faltered, a shift that we also find reflected in other elegies of 1624 to 1626. For example, the lowness of the watery land is marvelled at in A Brief Character: ‘Even their dwelling is a miracle. They live lower than the fishes’.74 However, in the elegy this aspect becomes a part of the potential curse upon them: they might become ‘lower than thy staple, Fish’.

Thomas Scott A funeral elegy responding to the 1626 murder of Thomas Scott, an English preacher in Utrecht, shares certain features of the elegies on Southampton and Oxford. Most significantly, it uses his death to question the involvement of British forces in the struggle of the States General against the Spanish, and it offers a more extended satire of England’s Dutch allies.75 Its very title affirms ‘distraction’ as an apt sorrowful response to the death: ‘A distracted Elegie upon that most execrable murther of … Thomas Scott Preacher’.76 As with the elegies on Southampton and Oxford, the disruption prompted by this unusual death affords an opportunity for an anguished probing of the deleterious and confused state of the Protestant cause in the mid-​1620s as the military efforts to re-​establish Elector Frederick repeatedly fell far short. While the elegy shares much with the Southampton and Oxford elegies, Scott was a far more controversial figure than either earl, and the violence and mystery surrounding his death add further complexities with which the elegist must engage.

Scott’s life A number of men named ‘Thomas Scott’ were active as writers, political figures, or churchmen in the early Stuart period; hence it can be difficult to disentangle the biographical strands. The Thomas Scott assassinated at Utrecht was most significant as the author of Vox Populi (1619/​20), the first of a series of outspoken pamphlets on Britain and its foreign affairs. This Thomas Scott must be distinguished both from Thomas Scott of Canterbury

74 Owen Felltham, A Brief Character of the Low-​Countries (1652), p. 91. 75 While Scottish troops were a significant component of those who fought alongside the Dutch in this period, and Scott served a joint English and Scottish church, I use ‘English’ rather than ‘British’ throughout this section, as that is the term used by the elegist himself. 76 Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 160, fol. 5.

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(ca. 1566/​67–​1635) and the shadowy poet named Thomas Scott, active between 1602 and 1611, who published Four Paradoxes in 1602. A fourth prominent figure, Thomas Scot, was chaplain to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and incumbent at Ipswich.77 At the same time, it must be admitted that there are events, references, and publications where we cannot be sure which ‘Thomas Scott’ is involved. Though presumably of Scottish background, our Thomas Scott was born in Norfolk, but he was educated at St Andrew’s in Scotland in the late 1610s. While not noted in the Oxford DNB account of Scott, one of the published elegies on his death suggests that he pursued a military career before entering the church.78 In 1620 he became associated with Peterhouse, Cambridge, and was named rector of St Saviour’s Church, Norwich. His brother, William Scott, was rector of Thetford, Norfolk, where Thomas is also known to have preached. After his politically controversial Vox Populi was published in 1620, he went into exile in Holland, where he served as a minister to the English church first at Gorinchem (Gorkum), and then at Utrecht. While the English church at Utrecht had its roots in the chaplaincy services rendered to English soldiers, it had become a fully established civilian (or ‘burgher’) congregation in 1622, at which time Scott was called to minister there. The church’s demographics were thus mixed, serving both military and civilian residents79 and both Scots and English. Scott’s military and ecclesiastical roles are both reflected upon by the major elegy on his death.

Scott’s writings Scott’s Vox Populi, which takes the form of a fictional report by the Spanish diplomat, Gondomar, to his superiors, was a satiric critique of the Spanish themselves and any English inclined to a pro-​Spanish policy. In both its vehement anti-​Spanish and anti-​Papal stance and its adoption of fictional voices, it set the pattern for Scott’s series of works published over the next half-​ decade, which included Vox Dei (1623?), Vox Regis (1624), and Sir Walter Rawleigh’s Ghost (1626). Peter Lake offers a post-​revisionist exploration

77 Oxford DNB. Most confusingly, both this Scott and that of Utrecht published works entitled Vox Dei in 1623. 78 ‘Man’s life a warfare, waifare, ah good man’, in A briefe and true relation of the Murther of Master Thomas Scott (1628), p. 9. 79 Keith L.  Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism:  A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1982), pp. 213–​14.

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of Scott, suggesting that his strongly anti-​Catholics views were not unusual but that his boldness in writing and publishing such works set him apart.80 Between 1620 and 1626, Scott’s distance from political restraints in Britain allowed him to articulate fully a position shared by many on the Puritan side of the ecclesiastical spectrum.81 He could claim to speak for an English Protestant consensus while pushing that body of thought in a direction antithetical to the official government position, which until 1624 was rapprochement with Spain through a marriage between Prince Charles and the Spanish Infanta. However, at the same time he put aside those positions (like Presbyterianism) that would have marked him as distinctly outside the English mainstream.82 His pamphlets are written in vigorous satiric prose and castigate both the corruptions of the English church as it stands and those ‘precisians’ who allow their own private impulses free rein. In Lake’s view, Scott’s emphasis is not on divisions among Protestants but on the threat posed by Catholic powers that must be met by a united Protestantism. Scott held that any focus on the competition between Dutch and English merchants was a chimera promoted by Papist powers to weaken the Protestant opposition. Lake notes that Scott promoted ‘far greater English (or rather British) involvement in the essentially international struggle with Rome and in particular for closer co-​operation with the Dutch, whom Scott never tired of citing as the very model of a godly commonwealth’.83 However, Lake’s account downplays Scott’s sense of the growing tensions between the English and the Dutch, evident in Symmachia:  or, A  true-​loves knot (1624), and similarly, Breslow presents the work as unequivocal in its support of the Dutch. He reads the references to Dutch wrongdoing as merely rhetorical concessions to those English who had become hostile to the United Provinces because of the Amboyna massacre.84 However, Symmachia is an even-​ handed but outspoken discussion of the Dutch–​English relationship; Scott corrects both Dutch lack of gratitude towards the English and the English tendency to take offence too easily. He also strives to present the wrongdoing at Amboyna as that of merely private persons rather than the state.85 Scott hopes for a ‘true-​love knot’ between the two Protestant nations, but the need for the pamphlet in itself shows the poor state of relations.86

80 Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal 25 (1982), pp. 805–​25. 81 Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus’, pp. 806–​7. 82 Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus’, pp. 807–​8. 83 Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus’, p. 811. 84 Breslow, A Mirror of England, pp. 88–​90. 85 Breslow, A Mirror of England, p. 89. 86 Symmachia [Holland, 1624].

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The work’s preface notes the conflict sparked by the two nations’ competition in the East Indies, but Scott suggests that there is a still greater source of contention between the two nations:  the treatment of the Merchant Adventurers and their wool trade in Holland, as it is a commodity central to the English economy. Scott does not downplay English grievances and strives to counter Dutch complaints and arguments. He emphasizes the English contribution of soldiers, including the English nobility that led them, and the flow of English money into the United Provinces that came with these soldiers. And this sacrifice is based upon earlier ones: English soldiers ‘are the sonnes of those Fathers whose brave blood, spilt in the warres, hath inriched and manured these feilds’.87 As we have seen, this image of the sacrifice of English blood on Dutch soil was widespread in these years; the anonymous elegy on Southampton appended to Jones’ funeral sermon had angrily lamented that it was only through ‘continuall shour’s of reeking [English] blood’ that Holland’s fields were ‘brought to yeald increase agen’.88 Robert Wilkinson’s sermon The Stripping of Joseph (1625), which was extended to treat the Amboyna massacre, rhetorically challenged the Dutch:  ‘Whilst the Blood of our valiant Countrimen lies reeking on the ground, to keepe you in your own Land, doe you wastefully spill the blood of our faithful Countrimen in a strange Land?’89 As will be shown below, this sense of the imbalance in the Anglo-​Dutch relationship, coupled with the negative effect of the Dutch on English Protestantism, is the central concern of the elegist who marked Scott’s death.

The circumstances and aftermath of Scott’s death The fullest description of Scott’s murder and its aftermath is found in A Briefe and true Relation of the Murther of Master Thomas Scott, which was written shortly after the event but only published in 1628. On Sunday 18 June 1626, Scott was stabbed, without warning, as he approached St Peter’s Church in Utrecht to lead the service.90 The assassin, John Lambert, was a London-​born soldier in the regiment of Edward Cecil, Viscount Wimbledon, but he had earlier served a few months with the Imperial forces. Lambert

87 Symmachia, p. 19. 88 A Treatise of Patience (1624), p. 35. 89 R. Wilkinson, The Stripping of Joseph (1625), p. 11. 90 A Briefe and true Relation, p. 1.

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claimed that he was motivated by Scott’s hindering of his advancement with Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, and that no one had prompted him to the deed. Throughout the time leading up to his conviction and execution, Lambert assured himself of a supernatural deliverance: ‘the spirits of my Soveraigne in the Queene of Bohemia will free me presently’.91 He also claimed to have visionary experiences of Queen Elizabeth of England, King James, and Maurice, the late Prince of Orange. Unsurprisingly, many doubted his claims to have worked on his own and without political motivation, and rumours circulated that it had been an Imperial or Jesuit plot. Others suggested that the murder was committed to prevent Scott’s planned pamphlet on the Cadiz expedition (which had been led by Wimbledon) or a pamphlet on the 1625 Parliament.92 However, Lambert never budged from his claims of independence. Scott was buried with great pomp, in what was almost a state funeral: the account concludes that ‘the like hath not beene seene, nor knowne in Utricht’.93

The elegy A Briefe and true Relation concludes with two relatively pedestrian short elegies on his death. However, ‘A Distracted Elegie’ (mentioned above) is a far more probing and controversial work.94 Running to nearly 450 lines, the poem is marked by an intense and lavish style, replete with extended classical and biblical tropes. The poem and its manuscript contexts have received brief attention from Arthur F. Marotti and Joshua Eckhardt. The former describes it as ‘us[ing] the occasion of Scott’s assassination for a broad-​based assault on Caroline corruption and English pusillanimity at a time of crisis for European Protestantism’.95 Such a description captures a part of the poem and reflects the common pattern of using an elegy for wide-​ ranging political and religious satire, but it neglects the English isolationism

91 A Briefe and true Relation, p. 3 92 Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, vol. 1, p. 123. Proceedings in Parliament, 1626, vol. 4, p. 347. 93 A Briefe and true Relation, p. 6. 94 There are significant differences between the two surviving texts; I cite from that in Bodl. Rawl. Poet. MS 160, but will occasionally note the variants in BL Add. MS 33998. Vantage point is the most significant difference: where Add. 33998 refers to Holland as ‘here’, suggesting the poem was composed in Holland, Rawl. poet. 160 usually has ‘there’, suggesting a copy made in England. 95 Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Chaloner Chute’s Poetical Anthology (British Library, Additional MS 33998) as a Cosmopolitan Collection’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–​1700 16 (2011), pp. 126–​8.

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and satiric hostility towards the Dutch so prominent in the poem. Eckhardt argues that Bodl. Rawl. poet. 160 features many poems ‘opposing the Spanish match and Buckingham, and defending militant English protestants’,96 and suggests that the scribe was contrasting the assassination of Buckingham with that of Scott. Those on Buckingham ‘praise the assassin and censure the victim’.97 He also suggests that ‘None of the texts that the compilor of this Rawlinson Poetry manuscript copied in his miscellany distances him from puritans’,98 which is to overlook the strongly anti-​Puritan satire of the Scott elegy itself, and its questioning of the alliance with the Dutch often favoured by English proponents of International Calvinism. Both Marotti and Eckhardt collapse the perspective of Scott himself with the elegist upon his death, whom we should not suppose was attempting simply to reflect Scott’s views on international and English affairs. Rather, as has been demonstrated at a number of points in this study, elegists adopt the death as an opportunity for promoting their own agenda, which need not be consistent with that of the deceased. Like most funeral elegies of the period, this one is in pentameter couplets, but it is unusual in opening with a preface in a different form. Three sixains (a form common in the earlier chronicle elegy) address the reader in vehement terms. The poet begins by rejecting conventional sorrow in these extraordinary circumstances: ‘Keep thy teares reader and that softer sorrow  /​for thy good parents or true kinsmans urne’ (ll.  1–​2). With any such ‘kindly subject’ (l.  7) it is appropriate to adopt the rituals of being ‘calmly miserable’ (l.  12). In contrast, this poem will embrace distraction and confusion as the apt response to a monstrous event: Nay sure if thou when thou art entred in Shalt blame theis lines that they distracted goe Thou dost not know how horrible a sin Tis for thou to know this & not be soe   Thou dost blaspheme my subject if thy soule   Be not as confus’d as the act was fowle (ll. 13–​18)

‘Distraction’ and ‘confusion’ function as key-​notes throughout the poem. The poet presents himself as like ‘nights tuneles bird’ [an owl], offering ‘troubled and uneasy verse’ (ll. 95–​7). Midway through the poem, after a passage that drifts into satire on women’s use of cosmetics, the poet feels compelled to beg the Muses’ forgiveness for such distraction: ‘fforgive me if my lines grow somtimes madd /​not allwayes soft not allwaies sweetly sadd’ 96 Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors, p. 142. 97 Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors, p. 140. 98 Eckhardt, Manuscript Verse Collectors, p. 143.

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(ll. 201–​2). His thoughts are divided ‘betwixt /​Sorrow and rage’ (ll. 213–​4), and he offers an extended comparison to the ‘Distracted’ raging sorrow of Andromache who curses both the Greeks and Trojans (ll. 215–​34), a fitting analogue for a poem that blames Spanish, Dutch, and English. The elegist explicitly defies and curses those who ask him ‘to rehearse how thou didst dye’ (l. 70), but he nevertheless does at times reflect upon Lambert’s action and motivations. He finds it incredible that ‘a soldier should attempt his end /​That was in such a Sympathy their friend’ (ll. 97–​ 8), but such an assassin also implicates all British soldiers. They are ‘outcast unthrifts’ (l.  103) for not properly using Scott’s writings, and ‘by one of yow was this man slaine’. The elegist directly rejects Lambert’s own explanation of his motivation; rather than the inspiration of Elizabeth of Bohemia, the poem surmises that Lambert’s ‘divine patron’ was the ‘lame Loyola returning’ (l.  157), or more generally ‘those powerful spirites  /​of Rome and Spaine the active Jesuites’ (ll.  171–​2). The supposition that Lambert was backed by Catholic or Spanish forces is consistent with Scott’s view of the world, which Peter Lake has stressed was based primarily on the opposition between Protestantism and Catholicism rather than divisions within Britain or among the Protestant states. However, Lambert and his supposed Catholic/​Spanish inspirers are left far behind by the end of the poem, as the focus of blame centres on the Dutch and the English themselves.

Prelapsarian English innocence and isolationism The poem emphasizes the innocence of Scott: he was like the sacrificial lamb brought forth by the priest (ll. 21–​4); both his blood and ink were ‘wasted for our good’ (l. 100). His ‘martyrdom’ is presented as an extension of a broader English innocence in European affairs, both present and past. Like many other 1620s elegies on military figures, this poem invokes a mythology of uncomplicated past English military glory, as it catalogues the efforts of figures like Talbot, Drake, and the Earl of Essex (ll. 110–​8, 383–​ 91), all of whom were mentioned as predecessors in Abraham Holland’s elegy on Oxford.99 In the elegist’s perspective, these figures of the past could fight against clearly defined enemies, while the present state of England is cumbered by the lack of such sharp definition: ‘Spaniolized’ figures function within the English court, and the royal marriage has created a link –​but not an alliance –​between England and its traditional French foes. Marotti notes that ‘Celebrating English isolationism, the poem (contradictorily) 99 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, sig. C4v.

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encourages England to develop its potential international and proto-​ imperial power’,100 but the international future imagined by the poem is not in Europe but in the New World. In addition, the advocated isolation emerges from the strong anti-​Dutch sentiment of the poem, as it argues for independence from conflicts organized by foreign allies (Dutch or French). While Rome and Spain are the great villainous powers, undependable allies can also undo Britain:    While we kept of we were our own & good but the imbrace infects our catching blood Ev’n soe pure aire blasted with dragons breath    of meanes for health becomes the cause of death (ll. 189–​92)

Where Scott himself had been primarily driven by the threat of a Spanish Match, the elegist confronts instead the reality of Charles’ marriage to a French princess. He longs for an earlier time when the French were         yet kept out at Halberds end And we disdain’d to cast away a thought on their Court-​nodds or any toye thence brought. (ll. 236–​8)

All foreign influence is suspect as the poet finds ‘our Gentry Frenchify’d, our state /​Hispanoliz’d, our witts Italionate’ (ll. 253–​4). An apostrophe to England towards the end of the poem celebrates its geographical situation as a providential and normative basis for isolation: God ‘plac’d thee alone and made thy seas thy wall’ (l. 340).

Hostility to the Dutch The dire threat of French, Italian, and Spanish influence was a Tudor and Stuart commonplace, and a general cultural wariness was enhanced, especially for those on the Calvinist side of the Protestant spectrum, by the fear of Catholic powers that might roll back the Reformation. However, the poem comes to present Dutch corruption as a greater and more immediate threat. More of the poem is devoted to this satirizing of the Dutch than to combatting the Catholic threat posed by Lambert and his ilk. Entangled in the Dutch military scene,    our English gentry that hath us’d to bee Soe peerles for high mindes now lost in new, degen’rate waies such as their sire n’ere knew. (ll. 744–​6)

100 Marotti, ‘Chaloner Chute’s Poetical Anthology’, p. 128.

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The chief degeneracy is the ‘ignoble thirst for gaine’ that stands in contrast to an earlier ideal English military life in which officers and men shared their goods like a family. The poem alludes to Scott himself having written of such matters, exclaiming, ‘Sure thou spakes’t too much here (fyr’y Scott)’ (l. 415) and suggesting that such outspokenness may have caused his assassination (which hardly accords with the idea of a Jesuit-​backed plot). This leads to an extended condemnation of the Dutch, and as with the elegies on Southampton and Oxford, we glimpse the faltering of English Protestant hopes in their Dutch allies as a means of restoring Elector Frederick and Elizabeth. Scholarly discussions of Scott’s works have generally considered him in relation to a British audience, but the elegy depicts Scott in relation to a Dutch rather than British context: there is no reference to the effect of his work in England or Scotland, but the poet asserts that his             wise  pen Like Circes wand had turn’d them [the Dutch]101 back to men Thou gav’st their warres a cause their Councell eyes     before none knew them Just, none knew them wise (ll. 45–​8)

As noted above, Scott’s Symmachia had identified the tensions within the ‘love-​ relationship’ of the Dutch and English; however, the elegy on his death goes much further in attacking the Dutch. The elegist characterizes the Dutch response to the assassination as a rather gleeful delight in the ‘great horror’ (l. 153), which becomes for them an opportunity to mock the English: And the lowd Commons of that place proclaime (tickled with bitternes) the English shame This act for which all lands will now abhor us is hugg’d and layd up for a long scoffe for us, with this shall their triumphing malice blott us whose utmost power n’ere before could spott us. (ll. 155–​60)

The unusual, insistent rhyming on ‘us’ emphasizes the victimhood of the whole English nation in Scott’s death. At the same time, the elegist cannot help admitting that the event is a shame for his ‘blushing Countrimen’ (l. 184), but he seeks to redefine it as ‘a personall not native act’ (l. 186). Whatever similarities it might superficially bear to the civil strife of the Wars of the Roses, Lambert must be a foreign agent, led by Rome or Spain. While this poem, like the Southampton and Oxford elegies, reflects the sense of mercantile competition with the Dutch, it is ultimately more

101 The antecedent is ‘the Belgick’; as in much of Scott’s own writing, the elegist consistently refers to the Protestant Dutch of the United Provinces as ‘Belgick’.

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concerned with intra-​Protestant tensions felt by the English resident in the Low Countries. The Dutch are assailed for their influence upon English religious life, and this is a far greater problem (in the writer’s view) than their merchants’ corruption. The elegist attempts to draw a sharp line between Dutch and English varieties of Protestantism, but in reality these divisions ran down the middle of the English church at Utrecht itself. While this church leaned towards non-​conformity, it also reflected a range of positions: Scott used the Prayer Book service, while his successor Elborough did not.102 Those associated with the English military presence were more inclined to the English liturgy; English civilians and Scots were more non-​conformist. These latter groups were also more closely connected to the ways of their Dutch hosts, and some of them had come to the Low Countries precisely to escape conformity to the Church of England. The poem describes English worship in Holland as maintaining a form that reflected at least the general pattern of the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer: their ‘free devotion’ began ‘with generall confession of sin’, and included prayers ‘short and many’, ‘pow’erfull songs’ (i.e. the Psalms), ‘orisons with bended knee’, the creed, and ‘the decalogue’. They heard ‘God himselfe speake from either testament’ and ‘as the glorious name of Jesus flew /​from his blest lippes wee tooke wher was more due /​a rev’rent notice of’t’ (ll. 267–​90). This picture of ideal, moderate English liturgy is contrasted with a sharply satiric depiction of the Dutch approach to worship: Now since at Amsterdam it doth not please the foggy hollander to break his ease who lolling on his brest with reared snowt Like a whale tosseth a petition out his puling sister in her simpring chaire bound fast from any manners in her pray’r Our moderne lecturists have brought it in for their new faction to avoyd as sin All forme of publique rites, all preparation but their precise private edification What helpes need they, tis merit, tis martirdome to keep a hard seat long with patient bum (ll. 295–​306)

In this view, Dutch resistance to kneeling or standing at set points of worship reflects sheer laziness rather than any legitimate theological tenets. The final two lines, where the word ‘martirdome’ echoes the earlier references to Scott’s martyrdom (l. 64), but then is rhymed with the word ‘bum’, constitute an incredible moment of bathos and what I am certain is the only use of

102 Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, p. 352.

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the word ‘bum’ in a serious early seventeenth-​century funeral elegy.103 The poet is venturing into disputes about liturgy and ritual that had long divided the various Protestant factions across Europe but were now becoming hot in England. The elegy adopts the argument that rigorous 1620s Calvinism (or ‘anti-​Arminianism’) was in fact a novelty in the Church: ‘modern lecturists’ and a ‘new faction’ are responsible for this new abhorrence of ‘All forme of publique rites’. The satiric passage continues with more mundane, stereotypical depictions of Dutch ‘scisme’ and the unseemly ‘tempestuous Deborahs’ within the Dutch church who will not maintain silence. The poet’s defence of English liturgy concludes with a long passage built around the word ‘sigh’, as the only ‘liturgical’ gesture practised by the Dutch: they bind themselves to sigh at all they read they sigh at Ezra’s, at Nehemie’s at Midians flight, at david’s victories At all the Halleluiahs sigh on at any cause, at good, at bad, at none At all without the booke at all within’t sigh at the Cover sigh too at the print (ll. 316–​22)

The elegist satirizes not just this rampant excess of sighing in itself but the fact that the Dutch ‘bind themselves’ to the practice: that they have established a new set ritual that they follow despite their exclamation against all ritual.

‘Thy deaths foule mysteries’ Near the end of the poem, Scott is presented as a ‘man who knew too much’, who of      those hidden things couldst  tell As which of all our Belgick councell may Be he that doth our stratagems bewray. (ll. 418–​20)

The poem has left far behind the idea of a Jesuit-​inspired Lambert, and now implies not just corruption but outright betrayal of the Protestant cause within the Dutch government. Scott’s death is linked with those of Southampton and Oxford as suspicious (ll. 421–​2), and the poem wonders ‘Who sold Breda?’ and ‘what other plotts there be  /​hid from the blind world’ (ll. 423–​4), including ones at home. These dark murmurings leave a cloud over the poem’s conclusion, as they fall so far short of any usual 103 A mock elegy on Buckingham (beg. ‘Heavens is’t trew yat Englands george is gone’) does satirize him as one who ‘bickered at’ (assailed) the ‘bums’ of Court ladies; NLS MS Adv. 33.1.7, fol. 24.

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consolation. The elegist recognizes his lack of conformity to grieving norms, that he has laden the hearse of Scott ‘with a Restles Verse’ (l. 434). The only consummation is the burying of such daring pens and ‘foule misteryes’ in the grave with Scott: Ah! rest thou still and undisturbed lye in all true soldiers aged memory, And with thee ev’ry hand ev’ry faire brest that dares pen freely or think wisely rest; And here with all thy deaths foule misteryes the great sires to theis dark impieties Leave me asleep by thee; unknowne unscan’d till juster time find some more happy hand That may resolve this knott, since yet none       As Alexander did the Gordian. (ll. 425–​34)

There is poetic precedent for the burying of the elegiac quill in the tomb:  Donne concludes his elegy on Lord Harington by saying, ‘in thy grave I doe interre my Muse’.104 However, despite the epitaphic injunction of ‘rest’, this instance of the trope offers no closure or peace. The deeds and plots that led to the assassination are interred with Scott but buried ‘unknowne unscan’d’, with a suggestion that in the future they might be disinterred, raked, and resolved.

Conclusion The ill success of English military campaigns in the 1620s led to an anguished detraction in the elegies marking individual deaths. Despite official attempts to assert the common cause of resisting Catholic Imperial forces, the emotional space created by these deaths allowed for outspoken criticism, in elegiac form, of the English leadership and especially their Dutch allies. Elegists saw a pattern of English aristocratic heroism undone by the reality of poor administration, battlefield illness, muddy death, and untrustworthy allies. The disappointing outcome of the various military campaigns coincided with the height of the satiric impulse in the funeral elegy, which I see as taking place in the 1620s. The result is an incredibly rich vein of sorrow-​infused detraction. By 1630, Britain had withdrawn from most of its direct military engagements, although English and especially Scottish regiments continued to serve under Gustavus Adolphus and other continental Protestant leaders. Thus, funeral elegies on military figures become rare in the 1630s.

104 ‘Obsequies to the Lord Harrington’, in Donne, Poems, pp. 247–​54, l. 256.

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To ‘Silence Slanders toungue’: elegies on George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham

Gerald Hammond convincingly argues that the death of Prince Henry allowed for a ‘cultural continuity’, but ‘The deaths of Buckingham and Strafford, in contrast, put the culture under pressure, and their elegies reveal discontinuities’.1 Scholarly discussion of this ‘discontinuity’ has focused on the hostility (poetic and otherwise) towards Buckingham, with limited consideration of his poetic defenders. While steadfastly supported by Kings James and Charles, Buckingham was vehemently despised and resented by a large part of the English public and faced repeated Parliamentary attempts to deny his power. Thus, his 1628 assassination by John Felton was welcomed by many outspoken (if usually anonymous) voices and little grieved by many others. While generally overlooked by scholars, there were funeral elegies that came forth to commemorate and defend him, but they faced a far different rhetorical situation than with most deaths.2 Rather than engaging in the traditional elegiac tasks of lament, praise, and consolation, the authors of these poems by necessity turned to defence and counter-​attack in response to the savage satiric attacks against the dead royal favourite. The long-​standing consensus that of the dead only good was to be spoken is manifest in Sir John Oglander’s comment that Buckingham was ‘the greatest subject that England ever had. Of his contrary virtues I  will say nothing: de mortuis nil nisi bonum.’3 Such a statement indirectly confirms the vices, but many went further in breaking with this tradition and, unlike

1 Hammond, Fleeting Things, p. 63. 2 Hammond’s Fleeting Things, pp. 49–​63, offers a balanced overview of the positive and negative poetic treatments of Buckingham. Regarding the Duke’s death, he focuses on the poems of Carew, Davenant, and Waller. 3 Sir John Oglander, A Royalist Notebook:  The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, ed. Francis Bamford (London: Constable, 1936), p. 41.

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Oglander, continued directly to attack the dead Duke. As one poet defending Buckingham puts it, this meant for him ‘a lingring death’.4 Thus, many of the elegies are explicitly concerned with countering libellous attacks, or as Hammond refers to one of Thomas Carew’s poems on Buckingham, they are acts of ‘counterpropaganda’.5 One elegy, ‘Death come thy selfe’, directly acknowledges this redirection of the genre’s role: ‘such Epitaphs and Elegies as sung  /​By a sweet muse may silence slanders toungue’.6 Since Buckingham was a favourite who died at the very height of his power, the elegiac response was different than that for the two closest precedents. As discussed in Chapter 2, the Earl of Essex had died after his fall from royal grace, and hence elegists could mourn his death as part of that greater movement of fortune’s wheel. Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, died in 1612 while still very much in power, but he had never been a personal royal favourite in the style of Essex, Somerset, or Buckingham. His death did attract some satiric attack, but defensive elegiac response was quite limited.7 The heated political climate of the 1620s, the deep public resentment of the royal favourite, and an elegiac culture that had become accustomed to controversial outspokenness led to the fierce elegiac battles that took place following Buckingham’s death. Even the means of his death, assassination, did not foster public sympathy, as had Thomas Scott’s murder discussed in the last chapter. Since his rise to royal influence in the mid-​1610s, Buckingham had faced an ever-​increasing deluge of public criticism, and by the mid-​1620s there was vehement disgust with his perceived corruption and inordinate power. His multiple official roles and influence in the royal court led to the perception that the power concentrated in him threatened to eclipse other political bodies and individuals, and that he would ultimately supplant the King himself. Buckingham was also an exceptional figure in that his role as favourite continued from the reign of James to Charles; in fact, Charles’ reliance upon him was greater than that of his father. A brief respite from public attack came with his shift towards an anti-​Spanish policy in 1624, which brought him into accord with more militant Protestant interests, previously his greatest critics. However, the new antagonism towards Spain was never

4 ‘Dearling off Kings, Patrone off armes’, Early Stuart Libels, Piii3. 5 Hammond, Fleeting Things, p. 52. 6 Constance Aston Fowler, The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler:  A Diplomatic Edition, ed. Deborah Aldrich-​ Watson (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2000), p. 97. The poem, initialed ‘Mr AT’, may be by Aurelian Townshend. 7 The closest parallel may be the death of Esmé Stuart, First Duke of Lennox, in 1583; the attacks upon him compelled the young King James to offer a poetic defence in his Phoenix.

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sufficiently supported by Parliamentary supply of funds to launch an effective English military force against Spain and its Hapsburg allies. Many members of Parliament feared that tax money raised would be dissipated by the Duke’s misuse or redirection. As seen in the previous chapter, the military endeavours that followed, to Cadiz (1625) and the Isle of Rhé (1627), failed because of poor administration and insufficient funds, and ultimately much of the blame fell upon Buckingham. It is difficult to judge how much the shortcomings of organization were the personal fault of Buckingham rather than due to broader structural and organizational problems.8 However, the failures of the English military attempts of 1625 to 1628 led to a renewed and intensified backlash against him. Buckingham was especially associated with the debacle of the 1627 Rhé expedition, which he personally led. The English had hoped to assist the besieged Huguenots of La Rochelle, but as they proved hesitant to accept the help, Buckingham instead led a three-​month attempt to take the citadel on the French Isle of Rhé. Some initial success was undermined when the French managed to supply the besieged citadel in St Martin; as will be more fully discussed below, the retreat from the island led to the deaths of hundreds of English soldiers. Buckingham had launched the expedition in the hope that it would bolster his domestic popularity,9 but the failure led to yet greater disdain for Buckingham’s military leadership. As Sir Thomas Wentworth put it, the attempt had been ‘ill begun, worse ordered in every particular, and the success accordingly most lamentable’.10 Some criticism of Buckingham was direct and official, as the Parliaments of 1626 and 1628 made concerted efforts to break his power in the realm through impeachment or direct appeal to the King. The 1626 impeachment failed because of the dissolution of Parliament, but it certainly encouraged the public view that Buckingham was corrupt in manifold ways11 and thus fostered the increased verbal, and eventually physical, attacks upon him. The Remonstrance presented to the King on 17 June 1628, which charged him with misuse of navy funds and promotion of family members, directly inspired John Felton’s assassination of Buckingham. Beyond these official Parliamentary attacks, criticism was articulated in a variety of cultural

8 See Manning, Apprenticeship in Arms, pp.  114–​ 21, for a harsh critique of Buckingham’s failure; in contrast, Roger Lockyer, Buckingham, the life and political career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, 1592–​1628 (London: Longman, 1981), p. 366, argues that Buckingham’s record as a ‘naval administrator compares very favourably with that of his predecessor, the earl of Nottingham’. 9 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 371 10 Qtd in Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 402. 11 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 359.

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forms:  epigrammatic quips, publicly sung ballads, and rumours of the Duke’s plotting. The assassination of Buckingham on 23 August 1628 was something of a ‘chronicle of a death foretold’. Prophecies of his death (including one by the famous Eleanor Davies) were widespread in the months before his death.12 Some were threatening, others merely hopeful. The time leading up to his death saw direct physical confrontations, especially in a number of instances where malcontent unpaid soldiers and sailors attacked his property or assailed his carriage.13 These physical attacks culminated in June in the mob killing of Dr John Lambe, Buckingham’s personal astrologer, prompting a widely circulated threatening couplet: ‘Let Charles and George do what they can, /​The Duke shall die like Dr Lambe’.14 Likewise, a satire asked ‘hath no witch poyson! not one man a dagger’ as a way of ‘solving’ the Buckingham threat,15 and there were other libels in these months that imagined the Duke’s violent death.16 On 17 August a mob attacked his coach and tried to drag him out of it; this led to the execution of the leading mutineer.17 Finally, six days later, John Felton, a lieutenant who had served in both the Cadiz and Rhé expeditions, mortally stabbed the Duke in a small, crowded room in a Portsmouth inn. Felton immediately gave himself up to arrest. While he was partly motivated by personal grievance (he was owed back pay), a copy of the Parliamentary Remonstrance found tucked in his hatband indicated that the assassination had a political dimension as well. Felton saw his mistreatment as symptomatic of a broader tyranny on the part of Buckingham and the killing as a patriotic and sacrificial action. Felton remained imprisoned for over three months, as the authorities pressed him to discover a broader conspiracy. He was finally convicted on 27 November and executed by hanging on 29 November. The delay in execution means that most of the elegies defending Buckingham were composed while the assassin was still alive. The King sought a lofty funeral for Buckingham, but public opinion made this difficult. One newsletter reports that in the night-​time ceremony on 18 September, the ceremonial military guard to accompany his corpse

12 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 452. 13 Lockyer, Buckingham, pp. 420–​1. 14 See Alastair Bellany, ‘The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-​Century England’, Past & Present 200 (2008), pp. 37–​76. 15 ‘Upon the Duke Buckingham his opposition to the Parliament’, Early Stuart Libels, Oiii1. 16 See Early Stuart Libels, Oiii12 and Oiii13, for example. 17 Lockyer, Buckingham, pp. 452–​3.

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abandoned their roles: ‘before they came unto the place appoynted most of them Rann away wthout givinge any volly of shott att all and soe left him almost to bee buried in the darke every one runninge away wth his torch’.18 The same letter notes resistance to his burial in the chapel of Westminster Abbey associated with royal figures: ‘And itt is since reported that the deane of Westminster refused that hee should bee buried in Henery the seavenths Chappell untill hee had expresse comaund from the Kinge that place beinge only for the interringe of the bloud Royall.’19 His opponents resented any conventional funerary commemoration. Simonds d’Ewes, for examples, commented that Buckingham was ‘more prodigiouslie flattered in his epitaph at Westminster church then hee had been by all his sycophants in his lifetime’.20

Restrictions on publishing The hostile public climate surrounding Buckingham compelled the King to order a suppression, or at least delay, of any publication on his death.21 It was clearly effective, for the Stationers’ Register for the second half of 1628 includes no volumes that refer to the event at all. Bishop Laud alludes to this careful scrutiny in a letter to Edward Conway, secretary of state: There hath bene a proffer to print a certaine Booke in folio of English verses in the commendacion (as is pretended) of our late gracious & worthie ffrend the Duke of Buckingham. The pretenders to the presse affirme they had leave under your Lordships hand. That I  did desire to see; because his Majesties chardge was strict … that noe papers concerning my Lo:  Duke should be suddainly printed … [T]‌he papers were brought mee by one whoe calls himself Mr. Darcie, & goes for the man that puts it to the press. There I sawe yor

18 Timothy Wade to Henry Sherfield, 26 Sept. 1628, Hampshire Record Office 44M69/​ L42/​24–​27. For further sources on this, see Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms, p. 120n. 19 Timothy Wade to Henry Sherfield, 26 Sept. 1628, Hampshire Record Office 44M69/​ L42/​24–​27. 20 Autobiography, fol. 114v–​115r (I:  388–​89), qtd in McGee, An Industrious Mind, p. 147. 21 On the suppression of any printed commemoration of Buckingham, see Alastair Bellany, ‘ “The Enigma of the World”: Memorializing and Remembering George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham in the Aftermath of Assassination, C. 1628–​1642’, in Martin Wrede and Horst Carl (eds), Zwischen Schande und Ehre: Erinnerungsbrüche und die Kontinuität des Hauses (Mainz: Zabern, 2007), pp. 21–​51.

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Lordships hand … but soe fairly written that after the party was gone wth his papers, it drewe mee into some jealousie.22

This ‘Mr. Darcie’ was likely Abraham Darcie, who had earlier commemorated Richmond and Lennox’s death.23 The proposed volume of verse seems to be favourable towards the Duke, but Laud is clearly suspicious and hesitant to allow any publication: he actually suspects that Conway’s signed approval of the volume was forged. No printed volume matching this description survives, and it seems likely that Darcie’s work never reached print. The one surviving printed volume, Illustrissimi fortissimique domini, D. Georgii Villerii (1628?), proves the effectiveness of the publishing ban: the author Robert Spence notes that because he was denied an English licence he had the book printed in Amsterdam.24 Thus, there was no official authorized defence or commemoration, there were no university volumes, and the conflict over Buckingham’s memory took place largely through manuscript circulation.

‘All rimers now make Musick of his Grace’:25 the literary response to Buckingham’s death Bellany and McRae’s Early Stuart Libels includes seventy-​ nine poems on Buckingham’s death:  thirty-​ seven mocking Buckingham, twenty ‘Celebrating Felton’, and twenty-​two which they categorize as ‘Ambivalent Voices and Defenders of Buckingham’. The first two categories are not fully distinct, as most poems celebrating Felton involved an explicit and vigorous denunciation of the dead Buckingham. Poems on Felton took the form of both conventional elegies and epitaphs and gallows speeches (as we saw with the executions of Ralegh and Essex).26 While, since their project concerned libels, the count of Belany and McRae may underestimate the number of positive poems, it is incontestable that the negative poems greatly outnumbered them, and that some achieved a very high level of manuscript circulation. Brief descriptions of three of these libels will give a sense of their emphasis and flavour.

22 Daniel Starza Smith, John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 49n, quotes Bishop Laud to Ed. Conway, 7 Oct. 1628, TNA SP 16/​118/​32. 23 Oxford DNB. 24 Robert Spence, Illustrissimi fortissimique domini, D.  Georgii Villerii (1628?), ‘Ad Lectorem’, sig. B2r. 25 Early Stuart Libels, Pi26. 26 See, for example, ‘Felton’s Farewell’, Early Stuart Libels, Pii4.

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Among the most widely circulated pro-​Felton poems was ‘Enjoy thy Bondage; make thy Prison know’, probably by Rev. Zouch Towneley.27 This poem earnestly celebrates Felton as one driven by valiant political conscience:  his coming execution is to be celebrated as one of ‘Miracle and Glorie’ (l. 8). As such, it functions as an anticipatory funeral elegy of Felton, enjoining him to maintain stoic resolve through the tortures that will lead up to his death, thus fulfilling what Towneley here writes of him. The poem adopts the role of expressing widespread public sentiment –​Felton is ‘Of publique sorrow the Epitomie’ (l. 36) –​and concludes with an epitaphic celebration: ‘Stout Felton, Englands Ransome, heere doth lye’ (l. 40). Offering similar sentiments, ‘Here uninterred suspends’ is epitaphic throughout,28 and playfully reflects upon the spectacle of Felton’s corpse hanging in chains. Like ‘Enjoy thy bondage’, this poem enjoyed widespread circulation and then response. It was directly countered by a parody, possibly by Henry Chettle: ‘Here uninterd suspends (doubtles to save […)]’.29 The dynamic is similar to what we will see with the elegies on Buckingham: that the vehement satiric attacks upon him (and the celebration of Felton) led to a response markedly distinct from the usual elegiac formulae. One of the more sophisticated satiric responses to his death, ‘Pale death, with Iron hand, hath struck a blowe’, recognizes that it is breaking the long-​ standing ‘rule’ against criticizing the dead. After some thirty lines of satire, the poet interrupts himself: Oh heavens! What doe I? Alas, hee’s dead, And’s burd’nd soule untimely from him fledd. Burie his Faults. Ile say no more then: Why?30

Unsurprisingly, however, the poem continues, ostensibly as a warning for others about the fate of those who, like Icarus, fly too high. ‘And art thou dead! who whilome thought’st thy state’31 is a more detached reflection upon Buckingham as an example of the fallen great man, at times reminiscent of Mirror for Magistrates or a late Elizabethan history play:             Shall  death Bereave thee, in a moment, of that breath Whereby soe many liv’d? Did not thy hand

27 Early Stuart Libels, Pii10. On the connection of this poem to Ben Jonson, see Early Stuart Libels, Pii10; and David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 300–​1. 28 Early Stuart Libels, Pii16. 29 Early Stuart Libels, Pii16 30 Early Stuart Libels, Pi22, ll. 33–​5. 31 Early Stuart Libels, Pi21.

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Monopolize the glorie of this land? Did not thy smiles or frowns make Princes kneele? (ll. 5–​9)

This passage is directly critical, describing Buckingham as aspiring ‘like Lucifer’ and repeating complaints that he monopolized power and, in doing so, triumphed over princes. However, its tone is not bitter or satiric; it describes  –​rather than expresses  –​the hate that beset the Duke in life and death. He is an ‘Atlas’, for whom the responsibilities of power are a ‘pleasant burthen’.32 Rather than picturing him in Hell, as some satiric elegies and epitaphs delight in doing, this poem hopes that after Purgatory he at last ‘mightst enjoy that blisse /​Where our Creator and Redeemer is’ (l. 55).33

General elegiac response Elegists of Buckingham faced a difficult choice: to ignore the widespread din of continuing vituperation against their subject or to confront it directly. Most chose the latter. Even the official epitaph on his tomb in Westminster Abbey acknowledged the reality: he was one whom Reges adamarunt   Optimates honorarunt Ecclesia deflevit   Vulgus oderunt

(kings loved deeply, the nobility held in honour, the Church lamented, the multitude loathed).34 The elegies at times adopt the very defences that Buckingham himself had used in the years preceding his death, especially when directly challenged by Parliament. Those who refuted detractors chose a variety of strategies: to deny them vehemently and assert that the Duke was misunderstood or misperceived, to concede some of the charges as part of broader human imperfection or sinfulness, or to counter-​attack the motivations and allegiances of his detractors. The last-​mentioned strategy sometimes took the form of accusing the Duke’s detractors of being Puritans or political radicals who threatened traditional order; in other cases, their satiric temper or project was maligned. Drawing on the traditional depiction

32 ‘Our countrie Merry England’ (Early Stuart Libels, Piii11) likewise compares Buckingham’s fulfilling of his duties to Atlas shouldering the earth. 33 A second poem, ‘A Dialogue Betweene Charon and the D’ (Early Stuart Libels, Pi27), also imagines the Duke long experiencing Purgatory before receiving his heavenly blessing. 34 Maritime Memorials, M4772, http://​memorials.rmg.co.uk/​m4772.

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of the satirist as a distorted figure, they describe these attackers as ‘men of misaffected braines’.35 Misconceptions are part of the very nature of satirists: ‘the Ulcerous breath of Malecontent /​Turnes into poison what was truely meant’.36 Buckingham’s elegists also sometimes take pains to group his poetic attackers with Felton himself: they ‘murder’ him a second time, or are even more base and cowardly than he. As one puts it, ‘Know then his Murtherer was not more unjust /​Then he that shall disturbe this good mans dust’.37 However, such aligning with the assassin himself would be little insult for those who greeted Felton as a national hero. One rhetorical gambit was to posit that the ‘vulgar’ never perceived the virtuous reality of the duke, but that they ‘now deprave the worth /​of him thou never saw’st but through a cloude’.38 These critics were also attacked as cowardly, as they stepped forth with bravado now that the Duke was safely dead, like the assailants of the weakened lion in Aesop’s fable ‘The Lion Grown Old’.39 In this fable, the once powerful lion is attacked by lesser beasts (particularly asses) who find satisfaction in triumphing over the figure they once reverenced and feared. Ironically, this transferring of the lion imagery from a king to his favourite in some ways fulfils the perceptions of Buckingham’s opponents that he had illegitimately usurped royal power.40 Some elegies embrace the opportunity for political debate by rejecting the claims of Parliamentary rights offered by Buckingham’s opponents. For example, ‘Treade not upon this urne’ concludes by drawing a firm line between the power rightly wielded by kings (and by extension their servants) and that claimed by Parliament: Let no remonstrance of ye vulgar frye unlock the secrett Cabinetts of Kings Nor buzard kites presume to looke so hie as if they armed were with eagles wings unjustlie call’d an act of Parliament Is that whereto ye King nere gives consent41 35 ‘Thalassiarchae Manium Vindiciae’, BL Add. MS 15227, fol. 31r. 36 ‘An Apologie, in memorie of the most illustrious Prince George Duke of Buckingham’, Early Stuart Libels, Piii5, ll. 27–​8. 37 ‘Envy draw nere unto this Marble Stone’, Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 73v. 38 ‘Treade not upon this urne’, Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 83v, ll. 37–​8. 39 Aesop Unveiled (1731), p.  73. On the lion as king in seventeenth-​century fables, see Annabel Patterson, Fables of Power:  Aesopian Writing and Political History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 64. 40 On broader associations of the lion with Buckingham, see Peter Redford (ed.), The Burley Manuscript (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), p. 371. 41 ‘Treade not upon this urne’, Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 83v. The allusion is likely to the ‘Common Remonstrance against the Duke’, passed by the 1628 House of Commons but vehemently rejected by the king (Lockyer, Buckingham, pp. 441–​3).

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This emphasis upon royal prerogative extended to include the King’s right to favour whom he would. As Buckingham’s opponents had so often focused on his role as favourite, his elegiac defenders attempted to defend this role as part of his vindication. Royal judgement, some averred, was of a higher sort, and as William Lewis puts it, ‘such things /​As Buckingham, none can esteeme but Kings’.42 That he was favoured by two monarchs in succession testified to a worth that went beyond individual judgement (or potential misjudgement). To attack such an individual amounted to a treasonous questioning of royal judgement, an argument that Charles himself had made in response to parliamentary pursuit of Buckingham. And in these elegies Buckingham is a ‘good favourite’ who served in true loyalty rather than corrupting and abusing his position.43 Ultimately, these elegies suggest that only the King sees the full picture needed for accurate judgement of this worthy man. Those attacking Buckingham often suggest that his powerful influence on James and Charles inverted the normative relationship: that he was more master than servant of his king. Elegists on his death, however, emphasized the difficulty in being a favourite, or even turned this role as favourite to his advantage. One poem points to the envy that afflicts all favourites by their very position: ‘It is a destinie belongs to State /​Him whome the Prince doth love, the people hate’.44 This same poem astutely notes the role of favourite in protecting the king himself from public complaint: his ‘office is to save /​ Their goverment from blame, as what’s amisse  /​The fault bee not there owne; but counted his’ (ll. 44–​6). In this framework, Buckingham becomes a sacrificial figure, taking the faults of government upon himself. By such a measure, Buckingham was a very successful favourite.

‘Death come thy selfe’ Hitherto I have sketched some of the general features of the many elegies on Buckingham; as poets defended him against the more strident continuing attacks, they seized upon similar arguments. However, a significant number

42 ‘Hee that can read a sigh, or spell a teare’; Camb. Add. MS 42, fol. 20r. 43 On the depiction of the ‘good favourite’ in plays of the late 1620s and 1630s, see Perry, Literature and Favoritism, pp. 84–​93. 44 ‘An Apologie, in memorie of the most illustrious Prince George Duke of Buckingham’; Early Stuart Libels, Piii5, ll. 37–​8. The sentiment is echoed in ‘A Contemplation upon the Dukes Grave’: ‘For ther’s a Fate belonging unto kings /​That whome they most affect, are hated things’ (Early Stuart Libels, Piii7, ll. 13–​14), and ‘I was displeasing by the common fate /​Of Favorites of kings; I was your hate’ (Early Stuart Libels, Piii11).

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of Buckingham elegies are worth individual attention, as they take the typical arguments further than most or in a new direction. The Constance Aston Fowler manuscript (HM 904) preserves the sole copy of a poem by one ‘Mr AT’ (possibly Aurelian Townshend) that commemorates the Duke’s death through a dream-​vision experience where the ‘golden thread’ of his life is cut. The poet awakes to the harsh reality of the rumours of the Duke’s death, and the attendant hostile commentary that continued to belie the Duke. This prompts a complex passage based on the Greek legends of Deucalion and Cadmus: Till I had heard such comments on that text As made me wish Deucalions race of men Rays’d out of stones newly reviv’d againe ore thoese men monsters which though armed sprung From dragons teeth wanted a killing toungue45

The angry grief of the speaker compels a desire for the miraculous: that in response to the calumny against the Duke he might be joined by the legions of men produced by Deucalion’s stones or the armed men sprung from dragon’s teeth in Cadmus’ story. The second allusion signals recognition of the divisive antagonism prompted by the Duke’s death. These ‘dragon teeth’ of conflict were to be invoked again sixteen years later in Milton’s Areopagitica to describe the power of books to incite opposing sides to violence. That the maligners of Buckingham have continued after his death compels the poet to compare them to ‘Anthropophagi’ who proceed ‘as if they kill’d to eate’ (ll. 101–​2). Unusually for an elegy on Buckingham, this poem imagines a community of mourners (ll. 103–​6), and a funeral monument upon which elegies and epitaphs will be hung in the conventional manner (ll.  135–​7). Within this more typically consoling conclusion, an extended portrait of Buckingham’s mourning widow, Katherine Manners, is included.

Owen Felltham, ‘Sooner I may some fixed statue be’ Owen Felltham’s elegy on the Duke repeatedly affirms an intention to ‘mourne’ and ‘pittie’ Buckingham, but the bulk of the poem is taken up by a consideration of his supposed faults that led to the assassination.46 While the speaker distinguishes himself from the ‘rude Genius of the giddie traine’

45 Fowler, Verse Miscellany, p 101, ll. 88–​92. 46 Early Stuart Libels, Piii8.

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(l. 7) that triumphed in Felton’s act, their perspective is given considerable scope. Felltham does not deny the possible faults:

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Thy Mists I knowe not, If thou hadd’st a falt My Charitie shall leave it in thy vault There for thyne owne accompting: ’tis undue To speake ill of the dead, thoughe it be true. (ll. 25–​8)

The final clause of this passage pushes the familiar ‘nil nisi bonum’ formula towards a confirmation of the Duke’s shortcomings. Felltham briefly endeavours in the lines following to mention his virtues of mind and noble carriage, but the conclusion presents the perspective of Buckingham’s enemies: Yet should I speak the Vulgar, I should boast Thy bold assassinate, and wish all most He weere noe Christian, that I upp might stand To praise th’intent of his misguided hand (ll. 33–​6)

While this identifies the killing as unchristian, it also affirms that in another context it would be praiseworthy, and in the lines following, Felton is placed among ‘the Patriots in the shade’ (l. 37), worthy to ‘sitt next to Brutus, and receive /​Such bayes, as heath’nish Ignorance can give’ (ll. 39–​ 40). After giving this scope to the perspective of classical republicanism and its resistance to tyranny, Felltham offers a corrective: But then the Christian checking that, shall say Thoughe hee did good, hee did it the wrong way And oft they fall into the worst of ills That act the Peoples wish, without theire wills (ll. 41–​4)

Astoundingly, in this conclusion the Christian perspective ends up affirming the goodness of the result (while rejecting its means), and it suggests no fault in the people’s wish for Buckingham’s death, but only in Felton’s translating that ‘wish’ into ‘will’. Overall, Felltham’s poem, while ostensibly mourning the Duke and rejecting the phenomenon of posthumous fault-​finding, gives such voice to the pro-​Felton perspective as to undermine the usual elegiac approach and the attempt to defend Buckingham

‘Part, foule detraction’ An extended elegiac defence of Buckingham is found in ‘Part, foule detraction from thy hellish Denn’, which survives in a single manuscript.47 47 BL Add. MS 34217. At no point is Buckingham explicitly named, but the details of the poem are consistent with the widespread vituperation prompted by his death, and the poem is followed by the elegy ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’ (discussed below).

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The opening line directly echoes the extended poem ‘An Apologie, in memorie of the most illustrious Prince George Duke of Buckingham’ (beg. ‘I did not flatter thee Alive, and nowe’), which sets out to defend the dead Duke from ‘th’envious breath /​Of foul detraction’.48 It begins with a general argument against criticism of the dead, which draws upon commonplace tradition: ‘Humanity admitts noe oblique penn /​To rase the graves of the Interrd’ (ll. 3–​4) and ‘The Censures of the dead belonge to God’ (l. 7). The details in the lines that follow suggest that a particular satire may be intended: ‘an ofspring of old Cadmus-​race’ seeks ‘Wth poysning tongue all others to asperce’ (ll. 9–​12). (And it is certainly possible that ‘Death come thy selfe’, discussed above, is responding to the same satire.) Cadmus had been transformed into a serpent at the end of his life, and the poet groups the insistent satirist attacking Buckingham with the ‘poysning tongue’ of such serpents. This satire maliciously rereads the virtues of Buckingham as consistent with a catalogue of famous political villains: Yf wise then Synon49 or Achitophels Yf Courtly kind, then crouching Machivells Yf holding state like Persian sapor50 proud, Yf greate in Hospitallity dis-​allow’d, Lucullus like, condemned for Luxury Ryott, excesse, and prodigallity (ll. 13–​18)

This passage achieves an indirect commendatory portrait of Buckingham (as virtuous, courteous, stately, hospitable), but more significantly it characterizes his detractors as wilful and malicious misreaders of reality. The passage that follows is rather cryptic, partly as the text may have been marred in circulation, but also because the poem seems to apply typical royal imagery (cedar, Caesar, the sun) to Buckingham himself: Yf Jove smile on them [favourites], Saturne bends his brow And all malignant plannets disavowe Their greatnes for Hephestions must downe Supported though by Allexanders Crowne All gaze upon the Cedars withered bowes Small motes are Mountaines in a Caesars browes The Sunn at hight yf Bedded quickly spide 48 Early Stuart Libels, Piii5, ll. 5–​6. See Bellany, ‘ “The Enigma of the World” ’, pp. 31–​ 4, on this poem. 49 Sinon was the Greek who persuaded the Trojans to admit the wooden horse into their city. The long anti-​Buckingham libel, ‘The argument is cold and senseless clay’, has Buckingham refer to his ‘Sinons Art’; Early Stuart Libels, Pi36. 50 The reference is either to King Shappir (or Shapur) I or Shappir II (‘the Great’) of the Sassanid dynasty.

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Defects in Greatnes are as soone decried (l. 30)

The passage suggests an excessive scrupulosity in examining the dead Buckingham for faults, but ironically the application of royal imagery to him indirectly affirms the idea that he was supplanting the king he served. From this point the poem becomes less compelling, as it repetitively asks, through a variety of metaphors, whether there ‘Was ever Mortall man exempt from Sinn?’ The poem’s conclusion returns to the attack upon the ‘Sulphurous tongues’ of satirists, but something of the poem’s vitriolic energy has been lost by the concession that Buckingham was sinful. Hence, now the poet must simply ask attackers to ‘Drinke wholsome waters, trouble not the mudd’. By enjoining others to ignore wrongdoing, even the concluding couplet ends up making that wrongdoing the subject of the poem’s final line: Esteeme the pearles, the Sunn, the golde, the graine, Let sand, clouds, craggs, & chaffe untoucht remaine. (ll. 55–​6)

‘Thalassiarchae Manium Vindiciae’ The most extended direct refutation of the malicious ‘elegies’ on Buckingham’s death is found in ‘Thalassiarchae Manium Vindiciae’ (beg. ‘Yee snarling Satyrs cease your horrid yells’).51 In the Edinburgh University Library copy, a short verse epistle introduces the poem by situating the poet; denying any direct relationship with the Duke, he claims that he was only moved to write by the savage attacks upon the dead:          breifely  knowe it was that bindinge debt of love I owe to humane pitty, when I see the dead (wch cannot byte) prodigiously orespread wth Carryon vulters, wch excited me to personate this service52

In the manuscript the poem is headed,

51 My text is from BL Add. MS 15227; Early Stuart Libels, Piii6, uses Bodl. Malone MS 23 as a source text. The title, which appears in all three manuscript copies, can be translated as ‘The Vindication/​Reclaiming of the Remains of the Admiral of the Sea’. A prefatory poem (beg. ‘The few stolne minutes of a borrowed day’), found in Edinburgh University Library, MS Laing iii.493, refers to this poem as ‘his manes vindication’. 52 Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 84r.

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To etc.: /​Sr the dere tender of my best respect promis’d to you and her your most affect: etc.:

This suggests that the poet wrote with a specific addressee in mind, one who knew and loved the Duke and who ‘in purest orbes did move /​about his glorious Center, while kind fate /​lent him a beinge in this mortall state’. The poem attacks the maligners of Buckingham as satirists, and as with the poems above it applies the genre’s conventional qualities and actions to them. After initially calling on them simply to cease, the elegist acknowledges that they by nature have rhymes that ‘itch’ to lash out, and that they are ‘men of misaffected braines’, armed with whips and scourges. However, in Buckingham their satiric zeal is misdirected:       goe lash the petulant  times With whipps in salt, & sulphure steept, they need A scourge to urge them either blush or bleed. (ll. 4–​6)

To subject the Duke to further abuse is ‘misguidance’, and the poet attempts to elicit the pity of satirists by vividly describing the assassination. ‘Cannot, oh cannot all this satisfie’, he asks. To lambaste the dead shows a lack of humanity and honour:          Men (if men) of  flint Or adamantine heart-​stringe know ’tis base And fitly emblemes the dead lyons case With whose beare haires the fearefull hares did play. (ll. 18–​21)

Such attacks are not merely dishonourable but cowardly, and the poet draws upon a proverb, similar to the Aesopian fable noted above, in which a timorous hare boldly plucks a dead lion’s mane. This gives way to a further, proverbial illustration: Buckingham’s attackers are like ‘yelping curres that bay /​The midnight moone carroaching53 in her sphear’ (ll. 22–​23).54 However, envy drives them beyond satire: by offering ‘Paeans of joy’ on this occasion, they are embracing treason. The poem then addresses the question of Buckingham’s guilt, temporarily accepting the hypothesis that he was corrupt:

53 A number of other poems from 1628 compare Buckingham’s detractors to dogs barking at the moon: one describes them as ‘currs [who] will still be barking at the Moone’; ‘Treade not upon this urne’, Edinburgh UL MS Laing iii.493, fol. 83v. See also ‘Avaunt you giddie-​headed multitude’; Early Stuart Libels, Oiii5, line 54. 54 The two illustrations may be related: the elegy by William Douglas of Tofts on the Earl of Lothian (BL Add. MS 12067)  has the couplet ‘For in Grim Deaths blacke parliament, I know /​Dead Dogs and Lyons equallie doe goe’, which I suspect may be proverbial.

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Suppose him (as your fancies shap’t him) ill Lecher & trecher and what ere you will, In soothy language stile him though I know You many most or all such notions owe To banquets of Common credit, and are found To take them up at third or fourth rebound.

After briefly accepting the hypothesis, he quickly undercuts it: such ‘Common credit’ (that is, public belief) is based upon things heard at third or fourth hand. However, the hypothesis leads to this question: even if Buckingham were guilty, should justice be left to ‘a phrenzied Miscreant that pretends /​ His countries good mixt with sinister ends/​Of private spleeny heart-​bane’ (ll. 37–​39) –​that is, Felton, to whom is attributed the temperament of the melancholic satirist. The passage concludes with a lamentation that this approach to ‘justice’ left Buckingham with no time to ‘cast & cleare the audyt booke of heaven’ (ll. 45–​6). While this might at first seem to concede guilt on Buckingham’s part, it aligns with well-​established contemporary thought that a violent, unexpected death was troubling because it left the individual (who like all was sinful) unable to prepare spiritually.55 A brief passage then identifies the envious source of the attacks: I know the tydes of some ranke galls swell high, Cause Jove so long affected Mercurie And that his deepe ingagements in the myne Of Secret state did warilie decline The dampe of popular lungs (ll. 47–​51)

The love of Charles (Jove) for Buckingham (Mercury) protected the favourite from ‘The dampe [noxious air] of popular lungs’, and all attacks (whether by Parliament or others) only drove the King to more unwavering support.56 Buckingham’s statecraft, presented as somewhat surreptitious but not directly faulted by the poem, also kept him safe for a time. The conclusion of the poem becomes more vehement yet in its attack on satirists. Putting aside the idea that the dead should be left in peace (to enjoy ‘priviledged fame beyond deaths verge’), the poet commands the ‘ulcer’d Spirits’ of satire to

55 That Buckingham reportedly swore an oath (‘God’s wounds’) with his final breaths was taken by some opponents as symptomatic of his religious failings; Early Stuart Libels, Pi16. 56 Buckingham was depicted as Mercury in a 1628 painting (Apollo and Diana) by Gerrit van Honthorst now at Hampton Court. A  manuscript poem celebrating Felton (beg. ‘Immortal man of glory’) facetiously refers to this painting by ‘cunning Hondthirst’; Early Stuart Libels, Pii8.

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    cease to cast fowle urine to his Urne Least they stirre hornets, For Eclipsed Sunnes Result with double shadowes, and there runnes A Thunderbolt with lightning[.]‌(ll. 54–​7)

Warnings to leave the dead alone are widespread in the epitaphic and elegiac tradition, with passers-​by often warned not to ‘tread upon’ the grave or disturb it in other ways, but this passage is exceptional in its reference to satiric utterance as ‘urine’ rather than the more common gall or vinegar, and the darkness of its obscure warning. Who are the ‘stirred hornets’? Perhaps merely counter-​satirists like the poet’s self, for it must be said that this elegist is ultimately satiric in tone and spirit. Hornets were often associated with satiric writing, as in Abraham Holland’s ‘Hornet To sting a Varlet’.57 The references to solar eclipse and lightning are more evasive, but possibly warning of royal retribution on the libellers. The lines may also glance threateningly at Sir John Eliot, who had compared Buckingham to the moon eclipsing the sun (the King).58 From this direness, the elegist turns to a more dismissive characterization of the libellers in contrast to Buckingham:          Nor  doe  I Deprecate his but their worse destiny For what if they or one that basely shrowdes His face in foggs of thicke Tobacco cloudes Shall pace the suburbs, with a spur-​gald muse And sprinckle pasquils in the Burse or stewes? Alas those gloe-​worme Elfe fire flashes shall But like faint sparkles on dank Tinder fall. When the producer after all the throwes Of his obstruct Minerva, never shewes The spurious issues parent. His great name Shall Laurell like even crackle midst the flame Of scorching calumny & time relate How rich hee died in stiles59 of powerfull state. So trodden greatnes shall ascend yet higher, And dying Lampes with mounting flames expire. (ll. 57–72)

The caricature of the satirist belittles him as a tobacco-​shrouded figure loitering in the usual urban spaces for posting or exchanging news and libels. Pathetically, his attempts are merely temporary ‘flashes’ and 57 Holland, Hollandi Post-​huma, [sig. G2r]. Cf. William Goddard’s collection of satiric epigrams, A Neste of Waspes (1615). 58 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 466. 59 OED ‘style’ III.19.a seems the pertinent sense: a form or method associated with a court or other high body.

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‘sparkles’ that bring about no lasting fire. Furthermore, his labouring muse (‘obstruct Minerva’), after long struggles, produces a bastard poetic child, whose father is unknown.60 Hence, even if the satiric poems did ‘catch fire’ (achieve public acclaim) there could be no credit for the author. In contrast, the name of Buckingham in all its ‘trodden greatness’ will rise above ‘the flame /​Of scorching calumny’ in a lasting triumph. Thus, the poem’s concluding thought is an elegiac celebration of the deceased, but the route to this has been completely through an extensive counter-​satire.

Buckingham as national sacrifice: ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’ Some elegies on Buckingham develop the imagery of him as national sacrifice. For example, ‘Our countrie Merry England’61 adopts the voice of Buckingham himself to present him as sacrificial victim. It catalogues past cultures that practised human sacrifice, wondering whether the Christian England of the present is slipping back into past barbaric practices. William Davenant attacks ‘the precise’ (Puritans) as ones who ‘relish murder as a Sacrifice’.62 This sacrificial imagery is most fully developed in ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’, among the most widely circulating of the poems on Buckingham. The scholarly discussion about this poem’s authorship has overshadowed the learnedness and complex argumentation of the poem. It brings together classical and biblical story and is clearly informed by the Calvinist-​Arminian debates of the mid-​1620s. The poem offers a complex engagement with those enemies of Buckingham who read his death as a divinely sanctioned ‘sacrifice’ for the nation. It proposes that his death was like a sacrificial offering of the Roman Republic, in which a bidental sheep (that is, one whose teeth are complete) was offered in such a way that it preserved the temple ever after. Yet were Bidentalls sacred and the place Strucken wth thunder was by spetiall grace Neere after trampled over, yf this blow that strucke me in my height, and laid me low, Came from the hand of heaven, Let it suffice That God required noe other sacrifice63

60 On anonymous poems as ‘bastards’, see Doelman, The Epigram in England, pp. 199–​206. 61 Early Stuart Libels, Piii11. 62 Early Stuart Libels, Piii22, ll. 59–​60. 63 BL Add. MS 34217.

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The copy of the poem in BL Add. MS 34217 draws particular attention to these opening lines with two notes that follow the poem:

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    The Interpretacon of the first 2 lines will make all playne. This word Bidentalls, doth signifie sheepe offered in sacrifice soe that though the Temple was burnt downe wth Thunder, yet both the sacrifice was kept sacred, and the Temple by speciall grace, never after Trampld on.

Such explanatory notes are uncommon in manuscript verse of the time. The first note emphasizes these lines as the interpretive key to the poem, but unfortunately the exact way in which the death of Buckingham is like a bidental remains unclear.64 A clearer explanation of ‘bidentals’ is offered by G. G. Ramsay: a ‘[b]‌idental is properly a spot struck by lightning, purified or consecrated by the sacrifice of a bidens (a two-​year-​old victim), and enclosed with a fence’.65 Especially significant for this poem is that the gods would punish those who disturbed a bidental.66 The opening passage is suppositional, exploring the idea that Buckingham’s death was divinely ordained, but then objecting that such a ‘sacrifice’ should, like the Roman offering of a bidental, prevent further marring of the space. Here, that ‘holy space’ is Buckingham himself, or his posthumous reputation. His opponents’ pursuit of him after death compels him to ask, ‘Why doe you bruise a Reede as if yor Rodd /​Could wound me deeper, than the hand of God’. Buckingham’s opponents have presumed to wield God’s power of judgement, and this bold folly is particularly ironic since the Calvinist opponents of Buckingham stressed the unassailable sovereignty of God. The classical reference to bidental sacrifice gives way to a Biblical allusion as ‘Buckingham’ refers to his posthumous libellers as ‘Nadab and Abihu’, the Hebrew priests (sons of Aaron) who suffered the divine punishment of being consumed by fire because they presented an unholy sacrifice (Lev. 10:2). Once again, Buckingham is conceived of as a sacrifice, but those offering it lack legitimacy. This section of the poem concludes with the assertion that ‘Hee that doth blesse a murtherer, kills a King’; the logic here is not explicitly developed, but like their presumptuous taking of the role of divine judgement, those who condone murder are overriding the laws of

64 The rarity of the allusion calls out for explanation: the first use of the word ‘bidental’ recorded by the OED dates from 1692, but it was more common in Latin texts of the century. 65 G. G. Ramsay (ed.), Juvenal and Persius with An English Translation (London: William Heinemann, 1918), p. 336. 66 William Smith, William Wayte, and G.  E.  Marindin, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, vol. 1 (London, 1890), p. 299.

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the nation and treasonously undermining the King himself as the ultimate guarantor of justice in the land. The second half of the poem turns to the relative virtue of Buckingham that was recognized by the King  –​and denied or envied by the people. ‘Buckingham’ asks, ‘was I all /​Massa Corrupta, a stigmaticall?’. The term ‘massa corrupta’ (corrupt body or mass) bore heavy theological weight in the period: it was first used by Calvin to describe the fallen world and sinful humanity, from which God elected those to be saved.67 It was embraced by the Infralapsarians at the Synod of Dordt (1618–​19), and hence associated with the most hard-​line strain of Calvinism.68 Thus, the poet seems to be taking a phrase of Buckingham’s Calvinist opponents and turning it against them. Buckingham had sponsored a gathering of churchmen at York House in 1626 that was to resolve the Calvinist/​Arminian divisions within the Church of England. While his Arminian sympathies ‘could well have been for political as much as religious reasons’,69 as Barbara Donagan points out, the Conference led to his name being associated with the rising forces of Arminianism in the Church.70 The poetic passage’s main idea, that there was at least some good in Buckingham, challenges the Calvinist concept of Total Depravity (or perhaps more accurately, the common Arminian misunderstanding of Total Depravity) as it performs an imagined ethical anatomy of the dead Duke. Through a convention long established in the elegy tradition (and best known from Surrey’s ‘Wyatt Resteth Here’), Buckingham’s various body parts are read as manifesting a range of virtues: courage, honour, and patriotism. The passage admits faults as well, but it is hard to know whether these are to be read as the sort of grudging acknowledgements found in some of the other elegies, or more as a rhetorical move of accepting a certain degree of Calvinist assessment of any human being in order to counter their treatment of this particular individual. As with the phrase ‘massa corrupta’, the poem’s concluding reference to Buckingham’s death as ultimately for the sake of ‘these Remonstrances’ (or ‘Remonstrants’ in some manuscripts) also potentially partakes of the heated Calvinist/​Arminian debates of the decade.

67 Calvin, Institutes, III.xxiii.3. 68 Lee Gatiss, ‘Shades of Opinion within a Generic Calvinism: The Particular Redemption Debate at the Westminster Assembly’, Reformed Theological Review 69:2 (2010), p. 112. The matter had come up the month before Buckingham’s death in theological debate at Oxford; Quaestiones in sacra theologia discutiendae Oxonii (1628), p. 1. 69 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 308. 70 Barbara Donagan, ‘The York House Conference Revisited: Laymen, Calvinism and Arminianism’, Historical Research 64 (1991), p.  314. See also Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 111.

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In the late 1620s, the word ‘Remonstrance’ could point in two quite different topical directions:  Parliament would frequently present a ‘Remonstrance’ to the King, that is, an appeal for the correction of some abuse or problem (OED 2.b). The 1628 Parliament had issued a famous one concerning the threat posed by Buckingham. Hence, those Parliamentary opponents of Buckingham might be described as ‘remonstrants’. However, the term was also closely associated with the Arminians, who (in Holland in 1610)  had presented their famous ‘Remonstrance’ in defence of their rights within the Church (OED 2.c). These ‘Remonstrants’ achieved a high profile in England after the 1619 Synod of Dordt and subsequent discussion on whether the English church should affirm its controversial anti-​ Remonstrant Canons. Buckingham might be said to have died because of the Parliamentary ‘Remonstrants’ who charged him by name in their Remonstrance presented to the King in June 1628, or to have died on behalf of the theological ‘Remonstrants’, through his defence of their Arminian position. Overall, ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’ is among the most sophisticated and probing of 1620s elegies: it challenges those writers who had conceived of the assassination as a necessary ‘sacrifice’ that would benefit the nation, and it does so by exploring the religious framework in which such a sacrifice might be understood. Historically, there were both legitimate and illegitimate sacrifices, and self-​appointed sacrificers were a threat to the nation that this poem strives to expose.

Poems from the Edinburgh Manuscript One of the most substantial gatherings of Buckingham elegies is found in Edinburgh University Library MS Laing iii.493.71 While it includes such widely known poems as ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’ and ‘Ye snarling Satyrs’, the most significant aspect of the manuscript is a group of rich elegies for which it provides the only known copies. Among these, is ‘Halfe dead with greife’, which more than most elegies recalls Buckingham’s times of public popularity, when he was not

71 The manuscript as a whole seems to date from the late 1620s, but it bears little indication of provenance. The opening twenty-​nine folios of the manuscript contain a speech by the Lord Keeper from 1627; this is followed by material concerned with the arraignment and execution of Ralegh (including an elegy unknown elsewhere), and then about twenty-​five leaves of lighter, farcical material emerging from late 1620s Cambridge (including pieces by Thomas Randolph). The Buckingham material, with its own title page, follows.

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only the ‘Darling of two greate Kinges’ but ‘the peoples darlinge’, who delivered Charles from the threat of a Spanish Match. The poet then rhetorically asks ‘what deede of thine  /​which raised our Princes love made ours decline’ (ll. 13–​14), which allows him to recall Buckingham’s positive achievements:  war with Spain, the expulsion of Henrietta Maria’s French courtiers and priest, and the revenging of French aggression. It excuses his failures in the expeditions to Cadiz and the Isle of Rhé through redirecting blame from the ‘Agent’ (Buckingham) to the ‘Instrument’ (those below him, widely construed): ‘Since his supplies were wantinge and wee were /​divided in our prayers God could not heare’ (ll. 27–​8). Like ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’, in listing his virtues this poem offers a token acknowledgement that no one ‘is from humane errors free’ (l. 42), but it offers no specific examples in Buckingham’s case.72 The poem defies the ‘Base Libeller, whoe Duke of Allgonaughts /​him styled’ (ll. 49–​50): a direct response to the widely circulated libel against Buckingham’s conduct during the Isle of Rhé expedition of 1627, which begins ‘And art return’d againe with all thy Faults,  /​Thou great commaunder of the All-​goe-​naughts’.73 However, the greatest wrath of this poet is reserved for Felton himself (who was clearly still alive at the time of the poem’s composition); it concludes with an elaborate fantasy of torture and execution: O for inventions to finde out a meede Worthie soe foule a fact: First burne the hand that gave the deaths wound, and then lett him stand twixt heaven and earth hung up to Fowles a Prey in chaines reserv’d to darkenes of doomes day. Butcherlie Felton I will thy dyrge singe for killinge the companion of a Kinge Hee dyed like Henry 4th mayst thou not lacke doeinge this deed, the meede of Ravilacke. (ll. 64–​72)

This section of the poem then becomes a gleeful ‘dirge’ on Felton rather than an elegy on Buckingham. These lines accurately capture Felton’s fate of being publicly hung in chains, which was much more sympathetically depicted in the widely known epitaph ‘Here uninterred suspends’, where the ‘pittying Fowle /​Contend to beare his bodie to his soule.’74 72 A similar defence is offered in an elegy on Sir James Weston, Baron of the Exchequer: Summon detraction to object the worst It cannot finde a blemish to be’nforc’d (Though spittefully it utter all it can) Against him other then he was a man’ (BL Harl. MS 1055, fol. 32v) 73 Early Stuart Libels, Oii12. 74 Early Stuart Libels, Pii15.

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This aligning of Felton’s ‘meede’ with that of François Ravaillac, the assassin of King Henry IV of France (d. 1610), is extended in the following poem (beg. ‘The Devill in ffrance’), which, on stylistic grounds, I  suspect was written by the same poet. It begins by depicting assassination as a particularly French custom, and it aligns Buckingham’s death not only with that of Henry IV but also with the assassination of Admiral Gaspard II de Coligny in 1572 and Henry III in 1589. Like Henry IV, Buckingham had been stabbed in a public space. The parallel roles of de Coligny and Buckingham (both were admirals of their respective nations), and de Coligny’s status as a Protestant hero (his death was part of the St Bartholomew Day’s massacre), allow the elegist to highlight Buckingham’s own Protestant bona fides: The place th’employment death & tyme was one To Buckingham and to Chastillion Both Admiralls employed both in Commaund Against the power of th’Antichristian band In ayde of Rochell & the Hugonotts (ll. 13–​17)

The poet rather ignores the problem with the Rochelle reference: while the Isle of Rhé expedition had been meant to aid the Huguenots of La Rochelle, the reference was as likely to remind readers of a string of failures. In 1625, the French forces had used borrowed English ships against Protestant rebels in a battle offshore of La Rochelle, a scandal that was very much laid at Buckingham’s door by his opponents.75 Conversely, they might think of the aborted attempt of the Earl of Denbigh (Buckingham’s brother-​in-​law) in early 1628 to re-​provision the town. Some were sceptical that the Duke had ever sincerely intended to help La Rochelle and speculated that he in fact was in duplicitous league with various Catholic forces.76 The poem both villainizes Felton and extols Buckingham by aligning him with kings and Protestant heroes. In the last lines of the poem, a new triumvirate of assassinated Protestant heroes replaces the parallel with the two French kings: In lasting triumph french Chastillion Hollands old Prince of Orenge William And Englands much lamented Buckingham. (ll. 70–​2)

Overall, the poem strives to reverse the usual complaints about Buckingham: it is his opponents, not he, who are guilty of being ‘Frenchified’. Or his ‘Frenchness’ lies in his similarities to French protestant heroes.

75 Lockyer, Buckingham, pp. 321–​2. 76 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 444.

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The next poem, ‘Rest, noble Duke’, is the richest and most intriguing of the Buckingham elegies in Edinburgh MS Laing iii.493, offering an extended exploration of the Duke’s military legacy by a warrior who identifies himself as a former opponent. Criticized by some for his failure to personally lead the 1625 Cadiz expedition, Buckingham found no compensatory acclaim when he commanded the attempt on the Isle of Rhé in 1627.77 During and after this expedition, he was repeatedly assailed for his military shortcomings and blamed for the loss of English life and honour. Many short satiric poems mocked his cowardice and inept administration, if they did not accuse him of outright treachery. (The Duke may have failed in strategic judgement and administration, but there seems little hard evidence for the charges of personal cowardice that he faced.) The poem’s opening section reworks many of the tropes discussed above. Like ‘Yet were Bidentalls sacred’, it adopts the conceit that Buckingham was sacrificed for England’s sake, and the poem is also unsurprising in its defiance of those who ‘descant what estate thou’rt in’ –​that is, who imagine Buckingham in Hell.78 Most startling, however, is the poet’s admission that ‘Amongst those many that despis’d thee most /​Once I was one’. The poem thus draws its rhetorical power from being the work of a soldier who served under Buckingham, one of sufficient rank to offer advice to the Duke (l. 63). He was converted to recognition of the Duke’s worth, especially his actions as a military leader: ffor when my Soveraigne Lord commanded mee To leave the Brutish Coast and follow thee, without Command or charge at that tyme I In all thy acts resolv’d to be a spye. Hopinge to finde some fault in thee that might Make thee seeme odious in our Masters sight But soe farr were my hopes deceiv’d therein That now I charge my wishes with a sinne (ll. 15–​22)

This offers far more biographical information than usual for an anonymous manuscript elegy of the time; and it lends credibility to the poet’s testimony about the Duke’s military skills. The poet strives to counter the idea that the Rhé expedition had been undone by the Duke’s military inexperience and unwillingness to heed military advice. Such was strongly implied, for

77 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 313. See also Manning, Apprenticeship in Arms, p. 119. 78 Found in, for example, Early Stuart Libels, Pi34, ‘I that my countrey did betray’, and Pii4, ‘The heavens approve brave Feltons resolution’. The fullest example, however, is Pi37, ‘Ye gastly Spiritts that haunt the gloomy night’, which offers a vividly detailed prospect of the scene.

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example, in many short libels and in John Earle’s elegy on Captain John Burroughs, ‘O wound us not with this sad tale, forbeare’.79 The poet presents himself as one who had shared his military colleagues’ view that Buckingham was an effete and morally corrupt courtier, unsuited to battlefield hardship and lacking courage: For I thought that thou durst not hunt for fame But in \ye/​chamber of a wanton dame Or shew thy selfe in Mars his hot alarmes Or prove a man but in a Ladyes armes (ll. 23–​6)

In the long-​standing literary dichotomy between soft, courtly love-​making and military vigour  –​best known from Richard III’s opening soliloquy  –​ Buckingham was expected to land firmly in the former category. Now, having seen the Duke in action, the poet concedes that his ‘Courage was not over-​match’t by any’ (l. 32). His direct observation –​I will not ‘say’, but ‘will affirm I sawe’ (my italics) –​trumps the ‘vulgar forgd reports’ (l. 43) circulated by others. While no specific battle is explicitly named, the details match those of the final retreat from Rhé on 27 October 1627. The poem represents the Duke as sharing the experiences of the common soldier and concerned only with the ‘Common-​wealth’, not his own standing or safety (l. 48). Although a general, Buckingham did as much as the desprat’st Souldier durst when (with advantage) in a hott pursuite Thy foes came on till reason forct thee too’t Thou scorndst to fly (ll. 54–​7)

This seems an attempt to justify Buckingham’s military decision-​making during the final retreat. After a final futile attack upon the French-​held citadel, the English forces began a retreat across a narrow causeway to the Ile de Loix, where ships waited to evacuate the men. However, a furious French attack while the English were upon the causeway led to mass confusion and destruction of the English. Many died: some through direct French attack and others by drowning when they leaped off the causeway. The passage seems to validate the retreat itself: reason, not cowardice, compelled Buckingham’s decision; up to this point he was as daring of death as any, and perhaps more guilty of foolish gallantry than of cowardice.80 The poem 79 Doelman, ‘John Earle’s Funeral Elegy on Sir John Burroughs’, pp. 485–​502. 80 His leading military men often suggested a more prudent approach; Burroughs had advised against the siege completely in favour of easier conquests. See Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms, p.  39, on the tendency of aristocratic military leaders to adopt honour-​based reckless strategies in contrast to the caution of the professional officers.

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implies that the chaos of retreat led Buckingham to accept the advice that in this case battle was the more prudent choice. He acted on that advice, even as other officers hesitated:

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But when t’was tould thee, that thy safest way was to give Battell, thou without delay Being resolute gav’st present order to it when others basely did refuse to doe it (ll. 59–​62)

Buckingham’s counter-​attack did push the French some way back down the causeway, but overall the conclusion of the Rhé expedition was catastrophic: approximately 500 English soldiers and forty officers were killed, and forty English standards were captured and displayed in Notre Dame cathedral, to English shame81 –​and, unsurprisingly, this shame found vent in blaming Buckingham.82 The elegist attempts to limit the Duke’s responsibility and validate his decisions at the campaign’s conclusion, despite its disastrous result.83 The poem’s single element of criticism of Buckingham’s military conduct is that he engaged in ‘private parlies’ with the French, including his frequent private meetings with Marshal Toiras, the French commander, about which his officers were kept in the dark:84 Nor could thy carriage merritt blame in ought Save (as I tould thee, and as others thought) Thy private parlies, which I am sure did tend Unto noe false, but to a faithfull end (ll. 63–​6)

Buckingham’s desire to play the gallant, courteous warrior is reflected in some of his interactions with the enemy: he sent ‘some muske mellons to the governour for A present, & was by him Requited wth another of sweete powder to throwe upon his hayre’.85 The underlining in the manuscript captures well the image of Buckingham so prominent in his opponents’ minds:  that, despite his military endeavours, he was still most concerned with courtly fashion and frivolity.

81 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 401. 82 On the Rhé expedition’s damage to Buckingham’s reputation, see Thomas Cogswell, ‘The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity’, in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 230–​4. 83 For another poem that defends the retreat at the Isle of Rhé as a valiant and noble escape under difficult circumstances, see ‘As [or Thus] sick men feare the cure’, Early Stuart Libels, Oii14. 84 Lockyer, Buckingham, p. 392. 85 ‘A Journall of the Voyage of Rease’, BL Add. MS 26051, fol. 4v.

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The parenthetical note in the passage above, ‘as I tould thee, and as others thought’, situates the poet as not merely an observer but an outspoken close advisor to the Duke. His self-​presentation as a practiser of parrhesia (outspoken and honourable directness to a superior) sets him apart from the other officers: they only thought, whereas the poet dared direct speech (although their thinking the same confirms his judgement). Such parrhesia has the effect of justifying the elegy as a whole:  even when impressed by Buckingham’s actions the elegist still told the difficult truth, and now he tells the truth of the Duke’s virtues, despite widespread criticism. The elegy minimizes Buckingham’s other faults and suggests that criticism was fostered by envy: whoe blames thy worth thou hadst as much as they I meane in valour, with what else thourt [sic] charg’d were it but little, it wilbe enlarg’d for Greatnesse gott thee envy and thy state Soe highlie rais’d procur’d thy publique hate (ll. 68–​72)

The corrective clause ‘I meane in valour’ establishes a limit to the elegy’s claims. The poet will not address virtues beyond those shown in Buckingham’s military capacity, but neither is he willing to accept those attacks uncritically. Besides envy, it was Buckingham’s dependence on his inferiors that caused problems:                    thy  trust Caus’d others faults seeme thine, for great men must Seeke helpes in great employments, and oft they To make themselves, procure their Lords decay Corruption creeps in Councells, great mens freinds Have most regard to these peculier ends (ll. 73–​8)

The clients of Buckingham, including family and friends, were part of his downfall, and the reference to ‘Councells’ suggests that the Privy Council (or perhaps the Navy Commissioners or Council of War) deserved the blame that fell upon the Duke. The elegy concludes by returning to the idea of Buckingham as a sacrifice for ‘the kingdomes good’ (l. 83); his death may prompt others to rejudge him as the poet has: So may thy fatall chance establish those In death thy freinds who were in life thy foes And since thy end was suddaine, goodmen will wish all thy sorrowes, finisht with that ill That as thy death the multitude did please So may the forme thereof, heavens wrath appease. (ll. 89–​94)

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While the ‘multitude’ (a word that carried then a derogatory charge now lacking) were pleased by the assassination, ‘goodmen’ ought to be moved to compassion.86 The final couplet achieves a sense of balance and completeness, but it does beg the question:  what was the cause of heaven’s wrath that needed appeasement? Was it some misdeed of Buckingham, or of the nation? Whatever it was, the poem, like those discussed above, implies that the Duke was the sacrifice offered to satisfy that wrath. Overall, this poem is exceptional for its perspective of one who has posthumously revised his judgement of the Duke. He is like the enemies described in Edward Hawes’ relation of Buckingham’s later career and death: ‘Not long after his death (to the comfort of his freinds) many of his Enemyes lamented his end and repented themselves they understood him no better in his lifetyme.’87 After a number of shorter poems (including ‘Reader stand still’, possibly by Elizabeth Cary), a rather sprawling, unfocused poem entitled ‘The misery of Greatenes’ touches all the bases in defending the dead Duke against his detractors. It particularly emphasizes Buckingham’s role as royal favourite, a position that should place him above attack. This favour was, however, subject to the violent envy of the less worthy: for loe, the favors of two mighty Kinges A fatall hand to suddaine ruine bringes Life, Glorie, Greatnes, bewty, strength, & reason lost with a stabbe untimely done by treason I call it treason in the high’st degree Against heav’n and great Brittaines Majestie (ll. 13–​18)

The poet is at pains to justify and explain his use of the word ‘treason’ to define Felton’s act. Such is achieved by stressing royal favour, that an attack on the Duke was indirectly one upon the King himself, and by extension upon heaven itself. Royal and divine power are joined grammatically in the construction ‘Against heav’n and great Brittaines Majestie’, and this elision of the two is continued in the following line, which refers to ‘This treach’rous murder ’gainst the throne of Grace’ (l. 19). The phrase ‘throne of Grace’ is a biblical one, used periphrastically for God himself and frequent in prayers and sermons of the time. However, in this context it also refers to King Charles, who was the throne of ‘grace’ or favour that Buckingham enjoyed. Felton is guilty of a crime against God by destroying one who bore ‘The Almighties Glorious image’ (l. 20), but also against the King for depriving 86 OED, ‘multitude’, 3.b. Cf. the poem ‘Avaunt you giddy-​headed multitude’, which, set in the voice of Buckingham, caricatures his lofty, disdainful attitude; Early Stuart Libels, Oiii5. 87 BL Egerton MS 2533, fol. 63v.

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him ‘Of a just servant’ (l.  22). The reader is then reminded that this favour was begun by ‘the wisedome of most Royall James’, which validates Buckingham’s rise to power as based on merit rather than emotional royal attachment. Theoretically, such a defence could stand alone, but the elegist then points to examples of where Buckingham’s actions chimed with public opinion: His breakinge of the feared match wth spaine Exprest his loyalty and service plaine His true attendaunce on our Gratious Prince And blest returne hath made him ever since Deerely respected in his soveraignes love which nothinge (but his death) could e’re remove And when from Spaine hee came the people then With acclamationes welcom’d him agen. Approv’d his service wish’d him happie dayes In printe and speeche expressinge forth his prayse And (had hee held it fast) in fates despight Hee to the vulgar then was favourite (ll. 27–​38)

Buckingham’s role in the Spanish trip of 1623 and its aftermath is used first of all to explain Charles’ commitment to him, but the poet  also gestures towards the public support (‘acclamationes’) that greeted him at that time. His recollection of the discourse of both ‘printe and speeche’ counterpoises later attacks upon him and implicitly calls attention to the fickle nature of public opinion. Most strikingly, the passage concludes that he ‘to the vulgar then was favourite’ (l. 38), a phrase that recalls ‘the peoples darlinge’ discussed above. Unlike royal favour, that of the public is fickle, irrational, and disconnected from the accurate recognition of virtue: for (generally) they still are vertue haters And still are fishinge in fowle troubled waters Swift in defame, their reason is their will And will their reason onely unto ill (ll. 43–​6)

Ultimately, in the poem’s rhetoric this irrational and fickle quality denies credibility to popular opinion and inverts conventional values:  the poet concludes that ‘their slaunder is a praise’ (l. 53). Hence, the loud detraction of Buckingham in life and death testifies to his worth, as does his endurance of such vituperation with ‘manly fortitude’ (l. 58). The poem considers the bases and dynamics of such slander and finds it a sort of malicious, irrational echo chamber, that the slanderers would admit when pressed that ‘their toungs did goe /​At Randome because others did doe soe’ (ll. 63–​4).

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Like ‘Rest, noble duke’, this poem emphasizes Buckingham’s military ability and suggests that active officers and common soldiers, who directly observed his military leadership, were not the ones maligning him. At the Isle of Rhé, despite the supreme odds he faced and the poor condition of his men, ‘with courage hee recald his scattered men /​And valiant, bravely won the bridge agen’ (ll. 79–​80). This action, the poet claims, saved his men, who else ‘had all beene wounded, tane, or slaine’ (l. 84). This argument and the testimony of the soldiers under the Duke refute those ‘most partiall Malecontents’ who continue to attack him. The poem continues by asserting that some of the antagonism towards Buckingham stemmed from circumstances: ‘Misfortune in the warre’ increases the number of a leader’s foes, encourages mutiny, damages alliances, and clarifies who are truly the King’s supporters, as ‘fawning ffreinds fall off, like Cater-​pillers’ (l. 98). The last reference draws on the vocabulary of royal favouritism, since favourites were often satirically depicted as the ‘caterpillars’ of the state. However, here the metaphor is transferred to the opponents of the faithful favourite. Misfortune in war clarifies commitment: true servants (like Buckingham) remain loyal, while mere caterpillar-​courtiers drop away. Then, from the sidelines –​safely distant from the real battle –​these armchair warriors explain where Buckingham’s leadership in the field went wrong. Like many of the Buckingham elegies, this poem concedes that the Duke had faults: ‘yet would my conscience give my verse the lye /​To write this Duke cleare from infermitie’ (ll.  105–​6). He was vulnerable to flattery, which the poet reflects upon in general rather than as a particular fault of Buckingham. Because of flattery, ‘when great men err none dares to tell them soe’ (l.  114). Among his flatterers are ‘fawninge Parasites’ and ‘Cankerwormes’ who, like the courtier-​caterpillars, sought merely their own interest, not his. These then become the focus of the poem’s criticism, as they have been guilty of that for which the Duke was blamed. The poet concedes that Buckingham was ‘ambitious’, but again this is cast as a common quality, and those who attack him for it as merely manifesting their own envy. Ambition here is given its loftiest status, as that which rouses men to heroic action and greatness: Was he ambitious? twas to wynne renowne Man is not as a beast still lookinge downe But wth erected visadge he lookes hye And upwards sends his thoughts beyond his Eye (ll. 137–​40)

The following lines compare the Duke to a gallery of selfless Roman greatness (Curtius, Scaevola, and Horatius), and the poet speculates that in time he might have achieved equally laudable feats.

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The final section of the poem reflects upon the relatively few true mourners who marked the Duke’s death. The poet concedes that there may have been ‘some foes that wisht him dead’ but resists the possibility that any ‘trew Christian’ could wish him murdered. His death, however, should stand as a warning to all the great that they too are vulnerable, are merely ‘noble heapes of dust’, more likely to be the target of such attacks than the lowly. His final lines are a prayer to the ‘glorious god of battells’ (l. 186), that he will guard England’s coasts and lead its armed forces on both sea and land; that is, that God will now fulfil the earthly roles of Buckingham himself.

Conclusion Unlike elegies on less notorious figures, those on Buckingham had a well-​ defined rhetorical purpose:  widespread slander and libel of him offered a formidable mass against which funeral elegies could push, and it compelled them to develop a line of argument rather than merely present an aggregate of sorrow and praise. Thus, the unusual circumstances of the subject elicited vigorous poems of defence. Their own elements of detraction were thus also less digressive than those in most funeral elegies: counter-​attack upon the Duke’s maligners was their central function and they were not compelled by the madness of grief. I hope as well that this chapter corrects the suggestion of Deborah Aldrich-​Watson (based upon comments earlier made by Frederick W. Fairholt and David Underdown) that there were few positive poems written about Buckingham at his death and that these few were consistently ‘apologetic in tone’.88 The positive elegies on Buckingham never reached anywhere near the widespread manuscript circulation of the most notorious poetic attacks, but they offer a noteworthy attempt to defend the Duke through an extension of the usual elegiac practice.

88 Fowler, Verse Miscellany, p. xl.

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A defence of suicide: William Douglas’ funeral elegy on the Second Earl of Lothian

Early Stuart elegies are nearly silent on those who took their own lives.1 A rare exception is Robert Herrick’s poem, ‘To the reverend shade of his religious Father’, in which the poet apologizes that it has taken thirty-​five years (‘seven Lusters’) for him to offer appropriate commemoration: That for seven Lusters I did never come To doe the Rites to thy Religious Tombe: That neither haire was cut, or true teares shed By me, o’r thee (as justments to the dead) Forgive, forgive me; since I did not know Whether thy bones had here their Rest, or no.2

This most belated poem seems to suggest that it is only at this point (in 1627) that Herrick is aware of his father’s burial site. The poem both signals a participation in proper rites for the dead and is itself a verbal marker of the same. However, it offers little of the circumstances of death or of the dead father himself. This example provides some sense of the limitations for elegizing suicides in the period. In stark contrast to this general hesitation to commemorate poetically the self-​killed, William Douglas’ nearly 800-​ line funeral elegy on Robert Kerr, Second Earl of Lothian (d. 1624), stands apart. This astonishing poem vehemently defends the Earl’s final action and uses the occasion to offer an ethical defence of suicide, based primarily on classical precedents. In this way, it differs not only from other elegies of the

1 Falling into a rather different category is the light mocking elegy in four-​beat lines upon the suicide of Dr Butts, Vice-​Chancellor of Cambridge (d. 1632), which begins ‘A worthie gentleman this other yeare’; St John’s College, Cambridge MS K. 56. 2 ‘To the reverend shade of his religious Father’; Robert Herrick, Complete Poetry, 2 vols, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 28. See ‘Robert Herrick’, ODNB, and Complete Poetry, vol. 1, pp. xviii–​xxi, on the suicide and subsequent legal process.

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early Stuart period but from the usual ideas about suicide, as articulated in pamphlets, letters, and sermons. The circumstances surrounding the Earl’s death enhance its exceptionality and render Douglas’ poem the most unusual of all funeral elegies of the period. By some accounts, the death of Lothian occurred due to the influence of witchcraft, and the late 1620s brought a variety of court cases involving these charges and the related financial struggles over the Earl’s estate. The relationship between the Earl and Douglas is a complex and potentially scandalous one:  while the two were known friends and co-​ investigators of maths and science, Douglas was rumoured to be romantically involved with Lothian’s wife, Annabella Campbell, prompting one source to imply that Douglas himself may have been responsible for the Earl’s death. Finally, while the poem was originally composed by William Douglas of Tofts in the mid-​ 1620s, in the 1660s it was substantially rewritten and added to by a better-​known poet, Sir James Turner, whose clergyman father had participated in prosecuting the witches charged in the case. This chapter will investigate the unusual circumstances of the death and the Earl’s relationship with Douglas and consider Douglas’ extension of the elegy genre into the controversial subject of suicide. Douglas is at pains to both acknowledge the death as suicide and defend Lothian by attacking his detractors. In the process, he finds that he has strayed beyond the genre’s usual bounds: ‘Intending a mournfull Elegie /​I have writ a satire.’3 The manuscript that preserves the only known copy of the poem dedicates a significant portion to the works of Sir James Turner, including his memoirs. The elegy on Lothian appears towards the end of the manuscript, among Turner’s translations of poems from a number of different languages. Turner’s preface explains how the original poem came into his hands: in 1662 when visiting William’s brother, Archibald Douglas of Lumsden, he was shown ‘this peece, pitifullie torne, mutilated, Defective in most places, and writ with a very bad orthographie. He and I haveing long before contracted a strict enough friendship in Germanie. He prayed me to looke on it, and to take a […]le4 paines to reduce it to some good order, at least to make it Intelligible, for the memorie of his Noble Brother, who designd it.’ Turner then describes the unpolished nature of the original and the pains he took to ‘put it in that garbe in which it is now to be seene’.5 To show what he had done to the poem, Turner placed an ‘X’ beside lines

3 BL Add. MS 12067, ll. 732–​3. 4 Possibly ‘little’. 5 BL Add. MS 12067, fol. 238v–​239r.

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where he had ‘some words added, or changed, or the rime helped’, and a rectangular box next to passages where ‘the verses are alltogether added, or whollie changed’. (In this chapter I have maintained the ‘X’s, but used italics to indicate those passages that are Turner’s.) Generally, I  focus on those sections clearly by Douglas or at least little amended by Turner, but I offer some assessment of the general tendency of Turner’s additions in the Appendix at the end of the chapter.

Robert Kerr, Second Earl of Lothian Details about the life of Robert Kerr, Second Earl of Lothian, are relatively sparse.6 He was the eldest son of Mark Ker, who had been created First Earl of Lothian only in 1606, after a life of royal service as gentleman of the bedchamber, privy councillor, and judge. Robert studied at the University of Edinburgh until 1597 and then travelled on the continent with his tutor, Patrick Sandys, who was a regent at the University and well connected with other Scottish thinkers in the fields of mathematics and astronomy.7 During those years he also spent time at the University of Padua, a major centre of mathematics and hotbed of alchemy at the time.8 When his father was raised to an earldom, Robert took over his role as Master of Requests, and in 1609 he succeeded his father as Second Earl. The family seat was Newbattle (or ‘Newbottle’) south of Edinburgh, which had been converted from a sacred to a secular institution over the final decades of the sixteenth century. Conflict over the estate seemed to follow quickly upon the First Earl’s death:  his will had enjoined his son ‘to bere him selfe obedientlie in all thingis to his mother’,9 but by 1612 legal battles between them had commenced.10

6 The fullest account of Lothian is found in Sir James Balfour Paul, Scots Peerage, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1904–​1914), pp. 458–​60. 7 Fasti Ecclesiae Scoticanae; David McOmish, ‘A Community of Scholarship:  Latin Literature and Scientific Discourse in Early-​ Modern Scotland’, in S.  Reid and D.  McOmish (eds), Neo-​ Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 69–​72. 8 Stefano Gattei, ‘The Wandering Scot Thomas Seget’s album amicorum’, Nuncius 28:3 (2013). A. Francis Steuart, ‘The Scottish “Nation” at the University of Padua’, Scottish Historical Review 3:9 (1905), pp. 55–​6, adds that in Padua he ‘served in the Council of the Natio Scota in 1599/​1600’. The study of mathematics at the time was closely connected with the solving of astronomical questions; McOmish, ‘A Community of Scholarship’, p. 47. 9 NRS CC 8/​8/​46. 10 NRS GD 40/​2/​1/​7.

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In 1611, Robert married Annabella Campbell, second daughter of Archibald Campbell, Seventh Earl of Argyll.11 With her he had three children, a son, Charles, who predeceased him, and two daughters, Anne and Jean. Lothian died on 6 March 1624; he was found with his throat slashed after locking himself in his chamber at Newbattle.12 The Summons of the Special Declarator describes it this way: ‘he put violent hands on himself, and cuttit his throat with any knyfe, quhairthrew he depairtit this lyfe’.13 David Calderwood’s History of the Kirk of Scotland (written in the 1630s and 1640s) suggests that Douglas’ significant financial problems prompted his suicide but notes that others attributed it to his ‘consulting with magicians and witches’.14 Lothian’s scholarly pursuits, which according to Turner’s ‘Argument’ to the poem included astrology, seem to have contributed to these suspicions about the cause of his suicide. Such belief –​that witchcraft might prompt suicide –​was widespread in the period; Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy write that ‘the common people attributed suicidal urges to witches as well as to Satan, and those malevolent figures caused suicidal despair for their own reasons’.15 Rumours connecting the death with witchcraft emerged only in 1628, possibly since that year marked the beginning of a witchcraft ‘panic’ in Scotland. A petition to the Privy Council of the late Earl’s siblings, dated 31 July 1628, complained that two women, Margaret Unes and Janet Schitlingtoun, used witchcraft to bring about their brother’s death. The

11 J.  Willcock, The Great Marquess; Life and Times of Archibald, 8th Earl, and 1st and Only Marquess of Argyll, 1607–​1661 (Edinburgh: O. Anderson & Ferrie,1903), p. 341. She was thus sister to Archibald, the Eighth Earl and Marquis of Argyll, who played such a significant role in the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s. Annabella was the granddaughter of William Douglas, Sixth Earl of Morton, and hence distant kin to Douglas of Tofts. 12 Nothing is known of Lord Robert’s funeral and burial; his name does not appear in the family cemetery at Newbattle. Note, however, that the engraved tablet there probably dates from the late eighteenth century. 13 I have not found this official document, but it is quoted in a nineteenth-​century article on the family history, filed with the Lothian papers at the National Records of Scotland (GD 40/​2/​17/​29). 14 David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, vol.  7 (1842–​9), pp.  595–​6. Calderwood had roots in the area, having been born in Dalkeith around 1575. 15 Michael MacDonald and Terence R.  Murphy, Sleepless Souls:  Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1990), p.  43. R.  A.  Houston, Punishing the Dead:  Suicide, Lordship, and Community in Britain, 1500–​ 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 292–​3, however, asserts that Scots were less likely than the English to explicitly invoke the Devil as the cause of suicide, and that this reflects legal differences more than theological ones. The cause of a suicide had little legal significance in Scotland.

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petition notes that the two women ‘varye in thair depositionis, denying one day what thay haif granted the other according as thay ar informed and wroght upoun be some personis who hes free access unto thame and who in the conscience of thair awin guiltines laboures by all meanes to hinder the tryall and discoverie of the treuth of that mater’.16 Hence, the petitioners desired that they be further examined concerning ‘what thay knaw anent the deathe of the said Earle of Lotheane, by what meanes the same wes procured and who wer authouris or accessorie thairunto, quhairby this misterie being oppynit up God may be glorified, justice ministrat upoun the offendouris, and the honour and reputatioun of that nobleman vindicated and releived’.17 On 28 August 1628 the siblings of Lothian appealed again to the Privy Council, noting that the said Janet [Schitlingtoun] had been accessory ‘and upoun the foreknowledge of the death of the saids [sic] supplicants umquhill brother in so farre as she hes confessed that she caried him evill will, and that she raised the devill and consulted him anent her revenge, which ar verie pregnant presumptiouns to inferre a probable conclusioun that she had a hand in his death.’18

A number of details from these documents deserve attention: first, while the charges are solely against Unes and Schitlingtoun, there is a strong suggestion of more powerful figures (‘authoris and accessories’) behind them  –​that they have been ‘wroght upoun be some personis’. No further identifying of these suspected figures is possible, but other family or household members are certainly a possibility, especially given that Unes was a long-​standing servant of the family and, as I will recount below, was perceived to be an agent for Lady Lothian, the Second Earl’s mother.19 Secondly, the stated reason for the prosecution was to vindicate their brother’s reputation, presumably by suggesting that he was a victim of witchcraft and hence not culpable himself.20 Of course, the unstated motivation may have been to affect the legal status of the late Earl’s estate, which was still being contested in the courts in 1628. (Note as well that neither petition explicitly mentions that the Earl died by his own hand.) Clearly, the siblings did not accept the verdict of suicide and attempted to vindicate their brother’s honour and recover 16 J.  Hill Burton et  al., The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ser.  2, vol.  2 (Edinburgh, 1898–​1908), p. 624. 17 Burton et al., Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 624. 18 Burton et al., Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ser. 2, vol. 2, p. 442. 19 Scot of Scotstarvet, ‘The Staggering State of Scottish Statesmen’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1872), pp. 364–​5. 20 Houston, Punishing the Dead, p.  299, suggests that ‘Blaming witches could be a means of explaining misfortune by assigning responsibility to an external agency, rather than dwelling on potentially negative internal explanations’.

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something of his estate. Yeoman notes that in most high-​status witchcraft cases, those accused were mothers of sole heiresses;21 while the Lothian case is different in that the charges were against lower-​class women, the conflict did concern his daughter’s inheritance rights. The King directly attempted to sort out the dispute: a 1628 letter of Archibald Acheson (secretary of state) hopes that the King’s letter ‘hath produced suche good effects as no harme is to be expected ffrom the pretenses grounded upon meere phantasies. Some bissie men their amongst your selves may easilie mak men beleive anything heir when they have litle other witt in their heads then what is prompt by others; and selff opinion is so comon as nosce teipsum is quyt gone out off the memorie off many’.22 Acheson at least sees the accusations of witchcraft as ‘meere phantasies’. What do we know of the women charged with witchcraft in the case? It seems in fact that Meg Unes had some history with the family: the names is a variant of ‘Innes’ and in Scot of Scotstarvet’s Staggering State, we find this sentence about the Second Earl’s mother, Lady Lothian: that she ‘kept always in her company wise women, or witches, and especially on Margaret Nues (F. Innes), who fostered his [Mark, the First Earl] daughter, the Lady Borthwick,23 who was long after his death burned in Edinburgh for that crime’.24 Similar charges were made against Unes regarding deaths in the Borthwick family.25 The fate of Schitlingtoun is unknown, and I have found no record of the resolution of the case. Although his father had left him an estate worth nearly £37,000, by the time of his death the Second Earl was in financial difficulties that took years to resolve. (A 1631 Council Act refers to the situation as in 21 Louise Yeoman, ‘Hunting the Rich Witch in Scotland:  High-​ Status Witchcraft Suspects and Their Persecutors, 1590–​1650’, in Julian Goodare (ed.), The Scottish Witch-​Hunt in Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 110. 22 Letter from Under-​Secretary of State Sir Archibald Acheson to the Clerk of the Council, 20 June 1628, Burton, Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ser.  2, vol. 2, p. 605. 23 This was Lilias Kerr, who married John, ninth Lord Borthwick, whose death Unes was also charged with. She died 10 July 1659; Paul, Scots Peerage, vol. 2, p. 113. 24 Scot, ‘The Staggering State of Scottish Statesmen,’ p. 581. Scot continues by offering other instances where Lady Lothian (Margaret Maxwell) used the power of witchcraft, including to bring about the death of her husband, the First Earl. This passage immediately precedes that in which Scot describes the marriage of Robert, the Second Earl, and Douglas of Tofts’ relationship with his wife, but he makes no reference to witchcraft in regard to that death. 25 According to Paul, Scots Peerage, vol. 2, p. 113, John, ninth Lord Borthwick (husband of Lilias Kerr) died in November 1623. The James Borthwick bringing the charges was the ninth lord’s younger brother, not the tenth lord. The Peerage does not identify his wife.

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‘a perplexed and almost ruinated estate.’26) Conflict over financial matters with Sir John Kerr of Jedburgh marked the years before his death,27 and these disputes continued after his death, complicated by further struggles between Annabella, Lothian’s widow, and his siblings. As his death was a suicide, Lothian’s movable goods were technically forfeit to the crown, but as was common in the period, the estate was assessed a small £40 penalty instead.28 R.  A.  Houston represents this act as a gift of King James to Robert Kerr of Ancram (the curator of Lothian’s daughter), meant to facilitate a harmonious end to the financial wrangling and create stability for this family who were important to the King’s desire for peace in the eastern borders areas.29 Lothian’s son had died in 1623, and he had legally established that his daughter Anne was to be his heir and his title to be bestowed upon any man of the name of Kerr whom she married.30 The Earl of Ancram had an appropriate candidate, his son William, who thus became the Third Earl of Lothian in 1630.31 However, the King’s attempt to solve the situation fell short of success: the dowager Countess, Annabella (on behalf of her daughter, Anna) continued the struggle between Lothian’s family and the Kerrs of Jedburgh, and appeared repeatedly before the Privy Council in 1625.32 Strikingly, in most of the legal correspondence between the Earl of Ancram and the lawyers of Lady Annabella (Sir Thomas Hope of Craighall and Mark Cass) there is no direct reference to the witchcraft charges or their implications for the estate. However, a letter from Cass dated 20 November 1629 may allude to them:  ‘You have heard the evil reports goes here invented by the Devil the author of all mischiefs who are the spreaders of these it may be guessed. –​I hope God will disclose all their frustrous ways and redirect course, they use to oppose your just and lawful

26 ‘Act of Council’, 28 Oct. 1631; printed in Sir Robert Kerr, Earl of Ancram, Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, first earl of Ancram, and his son William, third earl of Lothian (Edinburgh, 1875), p. 488. 27 Burton, Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, vol. 13, p. ix. 28 See Burton, Register of the Privy Council, vol. 13, pp. 488–​9, for the King’s letter to the council. K. M. Brown, ‘Noble Indebtedness in Scotland between the Reformation and the Revolution’, Historical Research 52 (1989), pp. 260–​75, discusses Lothian as an example of the financial problems of the nobility at the time. 29 Houston, Punishing the Dead, pp.  52–​ 3. Houston makes clear that in Scotland this was fairly standard procedure. The ‘gift of escheat’ was generally returned to a member of the family or local landowner; rarely did it end up in the royal coffers. As he puts it elsewhere, ‘Escheat for suicide in Scotland was meant to protect survivors or “creditors”, widely conceived to include the family’ (p. 55). 30 Kerr, Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, vol. 1, p. xlviii. 31 Kerr, Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, vol. 1, pp. xlviii–​ix. 32 Burton, Register of the Privy Council, ser. 2, vol. 1, pp. 8–​9, 41, 63–​4, 72, 99–​100,  643.

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designs to their discredits.’33 While it would seem likely that the charges of suicide and witchcraft entangled with the financial situation following the Earl’s death, it is not yet completely clear how.34 Further complicating the situation following the Second Earl’s death was his brother’s claim to the earldom. Despite the Second Earl’s will, already in April 1624, Sir William Ker of Blackhope was styling himself ‘Earl of Lothian’,35 and throughout the late 1620s and early 1630s, Annabella and Kerr of Ancram were busy legally disputing this claim.

William Douglas of Tofts and the Second Earl of Lothian It is within this complicated situation that the funeral elegy on Lothian appears. The manuscript ascribes the elegy to William Douglas of Tofts (‘in the Mearns’, that is Berwickshire), and John Scot of Scotstarvet refers to him as a grandson of James, Fourth Earl of Morton, the Regent who was executed in 1581. Archibald, one of the Earl’s four illegitimate sons, bought Tofts in Berwickshire, and he served as sheriff of that county. At his death (probably in 1622), his eldest son William Douglas inherited Tofts. William’s brother (also named Archibald) inherited Lumsden in the same county; it was from him that Turner received the manuscript.36 Establishing any further details about the lives of these men is difficult. Given his attested abilities in mathematics and science, some university education is likely, and he could be the ‘Gulielmus Douglas’ listed in the 1619 class of the University of Edinburgh (which Lothian had attended).37 A William Douglas served as minister in Coldingham from 1616 (Lumsden is in the parish of Coldingham), and it is plausible that this is Douglas of

33 NRS 40.15.4.3, item 212. 34 On the inheritance issues and family feuds connected with witchcraft charges in the period, see Yeoman, ‘Hunting the Rich Witch in Scotland’, pp. 106–​21. Unlike in England, there seems to have been little investigation of the causes of suicides, and less to be gained by establishing that the deceased was insane or the victim of witchcraft. 35 Earl of Melrose to Sir Robert Kerr of Ancram, 19 April [1624], NRS GD 40/​2/​15/​2; see also Sir William Ker to the Earl of Nithsdale, 26 Nov. 1626, NRS GD 40/​2/​16/​3. A 1627 printed book by James Baillie, Spiritual Marriage, includes ‘William earl of Lothian’ among its dedicatees. 36 Tofts was sold in 1624, which means that from this point the William Douglas who authored the elegy may no longer have been referred to as ‘Douglas of Tofts’, thus making him more difficult to trace. 37 A catalogue of the graduates in the faculties of arts, divinity … University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1858), p. 33.

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Tofts.38 A Samuel Douglas, likely a younger brother of William, then served as prior of Coldingham in the 1630s and 1640s.39 Soon after Lothian’s death, Douglas left Scotland for a military career, first under his kinsman the Earl of Morton, in support of the Rhé expedition, and then as a developer of military inventions for the Dutch. He died at the siege of the Bosch in 1629. Both Scot of Scotstarvet and Sir Thomas Urquhart in Eskubalauron (1652) refer to Douglas of Tofts’ mathematical interests, which he clearly shared with the Earl of Lothian. Turner describes the friendship in this way: ‘He [Lothian] made choyce of William Douglas of Tofts, to be his friend, his Confident, and his Alter Ego. This was a gentleman of a good spirit, generous, and learnd in omni scibili.’40 Urquhart describes his inventions as ‘flowing from the remotest springs of Mathematical secrets, and those of natural philosophy’.41 We then come to Scot of Scotstarvet’s scandalous suggestion that Douglas was the lover of the countess, which he recounts in these vivid terms: the countess was a woman of a masculine spirit, but highland-​faced; yet so much given to her own contentment, that she kept in the house a young gentleman called William Douglas of Tofts … a man of a brave personage, and of a notable spirit; which was very scandalous, and much talked of in the country; especially seeing her husband, the said Earl, in a morning, was found lying in his own chamber with his throat cut, never man knowing who was the author of that wicked deed.42

Scotstarvet was in a position to know about the death of Lothian; he had been among the privy councillors who investigated the charges of witchcraft against Unes and Schitlingtoun. Scholars have long regarded Scotstarvet as rather an unreliable gossip-​monger, but T.  G.  Snoddy’s biography offers something of a corrective to that perception, and he aptly emphasizes how Scotstarvet ‘throws a light on the inner and human side of characters who are imperfectly delineated by the conventional historians.’43 At the very least, his account shows that some suspected that Douglas, although a friend and elegist, was actually an adulterous murderer, and they would have read the funeral elegy in that light. Whatever the status of Scotstarvet’s suggestion, there is no evidence of connection between William Douglas 38 William King Hunter, History of the Priory of Coldingham (Edinburgh,1858), p. 77. 39 Fasti Ecclesiæ Scoticanæ:  Synods of Merse and Teviotdale, Dumfries, And Galloway, p. 37. 40 BL Add. MS 12067, fol. 238v. 41 Eskubalauron (1652), pp. 78–​9. 42 John Scot of Scotstarvet, ‘The Staggering State of Scottish Statesmen,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1872), p. 365. 43 T G. Snoddy, Sir John Scot, Lord Scotstarvit: His Life and Times (Edinburgh: T. and A. Constable,1968), p. 214.

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and Annabella after the Earl’s death. She largely lived on the continent, first in Rochelle in France, and then in Antwerp, where she died in the summer of 1652.44

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The argument of the poem In their study of suicide in the period, MacDonald and Murphy remark on ‘how few accounts have survived of the personal reactions of family members to suicides and of their feelings and experiences afterwards’.45 This elegy on Lothian is thus a rare instance of direct response to a particular suicide, by a close friend –​or at least it appears as such on the surface. As we will see, the complicated history of the poem and its author’s connections to Lothian raise many questions about its rhetorical purpose. As a largely defensive poem, this elegy partly corresponds to the elegies on Buckingham; however, while those poems could straightforwardly lament their subject’s death (while defending his life’s actions), Douglas must primarily defend the way in which Lothian died and says little of his life itself. He defends the suicide in two ways:  first by arguing that it is an understandable response to the corruption of the world and Lothian’s hardships, secondly by offering a broader defence of suicide based largely on classical examples and arguments. The opening fifty lines are fully conventional, as Douglas rehearses the common argument that true grief is beyond expression, but that he nevertheless will use the elegy as a token of his intense grief. The poem has been compelled by love, duty, and gratitude towards his dead friend. In particular, love is the force that urges him to speak ‘for my now speechles friend’, an act that fulfils his role as ‘alter ego’ to Lothian, as described by Turner. The lines         X   X  

Say, Haples Thou, to more unhappie me, Must we in Death expostulating be? Can we, whom friendlie love once firmlie knitted, By thy sad fate be doublie disunited (ll. 67–​70)

suggest a separation between the two that goes beyond that usually created by death. Douglas is driven to ‘expostulating’, and their friendship is

44 Margaret F. Moore, ‘The Education of a Scottish Nobleman’s Sons in the Seventeenth Century: I. Study in Holland’, The Scottish Historical Review 31 (1952), pp. 1–​15. On the significant Scottish community in La Rochelle, see Kevin C. Robbins, City on the Ocean Sea: La Rochelle, 1530–​1650 (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 131–​2. 45 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. vi.

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‘doublie disunited’ in a way that remains undefined, but which we might surmise arises from the circumstances of Lothian’s death or the accusations that followed it. The passage that follows also suggests some breakdown in the friendship of the two before the Earl’s death, or at the very least that Douglas felt betrayed by Lothian’s suicide. Comparing their relationship to a stage play, Douglas wonders why their harmony of friendship ended in discord and a ‘tragicall catastrophe’ (l. 80). He touches on what seems to be for him the tender matter of their inequality: ‘Then in thy end onlie, how could it be /​That thou envyd me ane equalitie?’ (ll. 89–​90). Douglas is suggesting that throughout their friendship, Lothian treated him as an equal, but that he failed to share, as with an equal, the thoughts that brought him to his death. Douglas wonders why, after having shared so much thought, Lothian would be ‘Reservd in this one, thy last thought, from me?’ (l. 86). He laments a lack of any role at Lothian’s death and claims a willingness to have assisted Lothian in his suicide: Ah, had I knoun’t [the reason for the suicide], and had it not beene sinne, I at Deaths gate sould the have usherd in, Or keepd the out. (ll. 97–​9)

Thus, while Douglas at least claims to not know the rationale for the suicide, he is willing to fully defend it throughout the poem. He represents Lothian’s act as a sort of triumphant military campaign against death, even though Lothian ‘Advancd too fast’ (l. 124) because of excessive courage. However, this ‘vanguard’ action and ‘triumph’ over death has been attended by an action against his rear, by which Douglas must mean those who have faulted Lothian for his suicide. And it is against these that the poet sets forth this defence of both the Earl and himself: ‘though they directlie shoot at the /​Yet by a squint rebound reflect on me /​Because thy friend’ (ll. 143–​5). Much of what then follows is an attempt to defend Lothian’s life and manner of death. While such is common in elegies, the suicide and controversy surrounding it called for a much fuller and at times even strident defence. ‘Infamie’ is the term Douglas uses repeatedly to characterize the post-​ death attacks on Lothian, but he inverts the framework by detracting the usual bases of ‘fame’. It is     bot the blasted fruitles fruit of seeming Which glorie hunters, for the times redeeming (Like shifting sutes of cloths) put of and on As it is in or out of fashion. (ll. 157–​60)

Having defied fame in general, he turns to particular instances of the hypocritical ‘seeming’ upon which it lies. This begins with a significant section

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of anti-​Puritan satire: Lothian might have fared better in the public eye if he had learned ‘to groane  /​Out sighes in the Church? (the poore ambition /​Of the precisian’ (ll. 165–​7). Instead, Lothian suffered as a frank and honest man in an age of hypocrisy. Neither did he learn the ‘fashion’ of ‘descend[ing] /​To everie one in compliment’ (ll. 189–​90). However, Douglas acknowledges that ‘these generall words’ against hypocrisy are insufficient to protect Lothian’s ‘goodnes from supposititieous blame’ (l.  213), so he will directly counter ‘those who freelie give  /​Their unrequired verdicts’ (ll. 216–​17). Thus, he will ‘give the ly /​Unto thy Infamie’ and either ‘make it Innocent, or make it mine’ (ll. 219–​20). As we saw above, Douglas shows a willingness to total identification with Lothian, his ‘alter ego’.

Suicide and classical virtue He admits that in the process, his ‘Irregular griefe’ might cause him to pass the ‘strict rules of beleefe’ (the common trope of grief ‘distracting’ the elegist into heresy that will be fully discussed in this book’s coda). His heresy is a thorough-​going adoption of a classical perspective on suicide:           that Couragieous  will The Antients had to dy, we take for ill, Nor is our Difference small, for we have quite Changd this their vertue to its opposite. (ll. 241–​4)

Douglas argues that judged within a framework of classical ethics, Lothian’s act is valorous, and he posits that the move away from this earlier ethic is a matter of fashion, not nature. Embracing the commonplace that ‘mundus senescit’ (the world grows old), he perceives this new ‘fashion’ as a decline from classical virtue and understanding. Further, he avers that it was not only ancient Greece and Rome that manifested this virtue but also ‘Jews and primitive Christians’ (l. 254). A long disquisition follows, on the inferiority of the present to the past in cultural, intellectual, and heroic achievement; having established this inferiority, Douglas asks ‘how can it be  /​That in our age, presumption dare say /​That we are better Moralists, then They?’ (ll. 270–​2). He associates the decline of the modern age with the degeneration of old age in the human body. The ‘feare of Death’, which ‘doth love of honor quaile’, has triumphed, and as contemporary society has lost the ancient virtue of the heroic embracing of death, so has fear been reconceived as a virtue. Douglas then embarks on what he presents as a logical examination of the question of suicide, ‘without passion, or yet preconceit’ (l.  389). He argues that modern Christian prohibitions against suicide lack consistent

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logic, and only manifest the circular reaffirming of what others have believed. Douglas traces the shifting of ideas and intellectual paradigms over time, all of which is to support his central argument that the mores of the previous centuries concerning suicide are to be abandoned in favour of those of ‘The Antients’ (l. 457). Only after this does he arrive at the ethical heart of the issue: that any sin is not in the act itself, but in the intention behind it. In probing the Christian argument against suicide, Douglas suggests that there is a large theological grey area for voluntary death, and he cites various examples of those who brought death upon themselves or passively accepted persecution that led to death. This is the section of the poem most heavily overwritten by Turner, so the details of Douglas’ original argument are difficult to infer. However, it is clear that he drew on Christ’s willingly accepted death as part of his justification. Having established any basis of sin in the will, Douglas/​Turner points to such unimpeachable figures as Simeon and the Apostle Paul, who both expressed a willingness or wish for death.46 Nothing in Scripture or the Christian tradition condemns them for this, and hence the desire is not sinful. In this way, Douglas absolves both the act (in isolation) and the will (in isolation) from sin. This leads him to question whether the joining of act to will is sufficient to render the death a sinful one, and points to examples where such is not the case because the death ‘Aime[s]‌at a greater good’ (l. 550). While he does not offer a conclusive answer to this question, he suggests that charity must prevail when judging ‘a case of Doubt’ (l. 553). This general argument only briefly returns to the specific situation of Lothian (in a passage amended by Turner): ‘And since we know not, what was my friends end /​In Death, let’s judge it good, at least suspend /​Our censures’ (ll. 567–​9). However, this application to the present situation is a fleeting one, as Douglas returns to consider what he perceives as the significance of the means of death and the grey area that lies between a ‘free and a compelled will’ (l. 576). He then recognizes how his audience may perceive his defence:       All paradoxes to the vulgars  eye    Are odieous, I know, sure, they will cry X   This to be one least the world we mistake X   I doe most heartilie wish, that I may make X   My meanings Innocence be understood (ll. 607–​11)

46 Because it is heavily revised by Turner, it is difficult to tell whether the argument is fully Douglas’s.

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In connection to this defence of ‘paradox’, Douglas seeks to ‘rather faile in Charities excesse /​Then in its Defect’ (ll. 615–​16), and he calls for a similar charitableness in his audience:

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And I shall ever pray, all men may looke On such emergments, as upon the booke Of their oune frailtie, and to have ane eye Of gentle pitie, rather then envy (ll. 617–​20)

Both in his use of the term ‘paradox’ to define his argument and in his emphasis upon charitable judgment, Douglas comes close to Donne’s tract on suicide, Biathanatos.47 Something of a ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ argument follows, with Saul, the first king of Israel, as an example of one from whom God withdrew his grace. Douglas explicitly links Lothian with Saul, who died by his own hand: ‘As my friend, he [Saul] did offend, /​What can be assured of his end?’ (ll. 629–​30). The ‘his’ of that final line can refer to either Saul or Lothian, and the point of the passage is to align them fully. Ironically, that Saul’s reputation was marked by his consulting the witch of Endor rather magnifies the comparison to Lothian, although this was unlikely to have been Douglas’ intention, as throughout the rest of the poem he avoids any suggestion of witchcraft. Abruptly following the example of Saul, Douglas turns to an argument based upon natural science and alchemy. He posits that Nature is not static but involves a continual circular process of changing forms and beings; within this framework the ‘Body’ is simply one stage in a process, and Death then a point of transition from one stage to another. As alchemists use a variety of means (fire, water) to separate elements, so there may be a variety of types of death, but again the ‘means’ is inconsequential:  ‘Death is bot Death, both by fire and suord /​And none of Natures ways sould be abhord’ (ll. 665–​6). Thus concludes the general defence of suicide. This extended defence has been prompted by Douglas’ ‘Just passion, for the vindication /​Of my friends Death, and unjust Imputation’ (ll. 667–​8). These ‘imputations’, Douglas argues, have been brought forth by those who did not fully know Lothian. Among the charges against him were that ‘he knew too much’ (l.  681), and in particular that ‘he was ane Astrologer’ (l.  705). Once again, Douglas argues, such an accusation turns a virtue into a fault or sin, and only reveals the ignorance of the vulgar, who are like ‘curs bark[ing] at the moone’ (l.  710). He defends the general practice of astrology/​astronomy by invoking the examples of Ptolemy and King Alphonso X of Castile and Leon. Further, he refutes the more particular 47 Michael Rudick and M.  Pabst Battin (eds), Biathanatos/​John Donne:  A Modern-​ Spelling Edition (New York: Garland, 1982), p. xlvi.

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charge that Lothian ‘the art abusd’ (l. 719), by claiming that he knew him (and the art of astrology) better than his maligners did: ‘I knew him better, and knows [sic] the art as well /​As they, that censure him’ (ll. 721–​2). The passage aligns Douglas and Lothian in astrological interest but denies any connection between it to his death. Other charges against him are denied, but left unspecified: ‘His other faults are not spoke of, nor shall /​Or can by me’ (ll.  725–​6).48 Douglas rather weakens his argument concerning these other charges by acknowledging that he would not speak of them even if he did know them: ‘I did not know them, /​Or If I did, sure, I sould never show them’ (ll. 727–​8). After his long exploration of the ethics of suicide and defence of Lothian against his detractors, Douglas acknowledges that he has strayed: ‘Intending a mournfull Elegie /​I have writ a satire’ inspired by ‘Just rage’ (ll. 732–​3). The latter part of the elegy more closely follows the traditions of the genre, as the poet laments his separation from Lothian and his sense that he has ‘died’ with his friend’s death. The oneness of Lothian and Douglas is uppermost: ‘Thou shalt not dy, for thou shalt live in me, /​Nor shall I live, for I am dead in The’ (ll. 753–​4). It concludes with the explicit idea of a return to the silence of true grief with which the poem had opened.

Suicide in the period In seventeenth-​century British culture there often seems a disconnect between general ideas about suicide and how individual suicides were treated and responded to. On the one hand, both Christian theology and the law called for clear rejection and absolute punishment of suicide, but in local circumstances ways were found to mitigate the harshest strictures called for by Church and state. In addition, there was a strong awareness of classical, especially Roman, ideas about suicide that framed it in valorizing terms of heroic defiance of unjust power or the miseries of life.49 However, this classically informed thought about suicide was rarely transferred from the general realm to the defence of specific suicides within the period. MacDonald

48 The elite circles in the vicinity of Edinburgh were intensely interested in mathematicallybased astrology, and it seems likely that Lothian and Douglas were connected with such better-​known figures as Robert Pont and John Napier of Merchiston in these endeavours. See Arthur Williamson, ‘Number and National Consciousness:  The Edinburgh Mathematicians and Scottish Political Culture at the Union of the Crowns’, in Roger A. Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 187–​212. 49 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 86–​9.

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and Murphy categorically state:  ‘Despite the public’s familiarity with Roman examples, no actual suicide was praised as honourable death before 1650’.50 They point to the valorizing of Miles Sindercome, who took his own life after a failed assassination attempt against Cromwell in 1657, as the first example of an individual death to which the Roman ideas of honourable self-​murder were applied. However, Douglas’ elegy anticipates that valorizing by three decades, and it offers a rare and extended example that bridges the gap between abstract theorizing on suicide and the particulars of an individual death.51 Douglas’ defence of suicide also stands in vivid contrast to the most famous defence of the period, Donne’s Biathanatos, which eschews any reliance on the classical Stoic position as inconsistent with his suggestion that suicide is only defensible if fully prompted by a concern for the glory of God, and hence a Christ-​like act of perfect charity.52 Donne’s main point regarding Christ is that his death ‘was His own act, and before His natural time’.53 Ultimately, while Douglas and (even more so) Turner draw on biblical examples to support their position, the argument itself is most indebted to the Stoic tradition.

Conclusion Finally, we must consider the poem’s potential rhetorical purposes, all the while acknowledging our ignorance of the circulation and audience of the poem. The first possibility is that Douglas wrote out of honest loving friendship to vindicate the Earl’s memory in the court of public opinion. The poem makes no reference to witchcraft, and it may be that by framing Lothian’s death within a rational argument for suicide, drawing on both classical and Christian examples, Douglas hoped to repel the rumours that connected Lothian’s final act with astrological interests or witchcraft. The second possibility is that Lothian himself is less central to the poem’s purpose: that Douglas saw the death as an opportunity to explore radical ideas on suicide and classical virtue (and that Turner was later drawn to the work 50 MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, pp. 92–​3. 51 Another defence (partial) is BL Add. MS 27632, fols 122–​5, regarding Sir James Hales’ death in 1554. In 1695 Charles Gildon wrote a defence of the suicide of his friend Charles Blount, largely by invoking the Stoic tradition (MacDonald and Murphy, Sleepless Souls, p. 150). 52 My reading follows that of Rudick and Battin in their introduction to Biathanatos, pp.  xxi–​lxxxvi. Biathanatos was not published until well after Donne’s death, but there is a slight possibility that Douglas of Tofts might have seen a manuscript copy, as one was owned by Robert Kerr of Ancram. 53 Rudick and Pabst, Biathanatos, III.iv.5, p. 122.

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for the same reason). The third possibility is that the motive behind the elegy was to confirm the idea that Lothian died by his own hand and own will. What could be the motive for such confirmation? There could be financial or legal issues: that in some fashion Douglas was working against the siblings’ attempt to ascribe the death to witchcraft that might affect the legal contest that was still ongoing (but I have not found evidence that such was the case). The final possibility seems so sensational and nefarious that I hesitate to offer it: that Scot of Scotstarvet was correct in suggesting that an adulterous relationship between Douglas and the countess lay behind the death and that the elegy was meant to obscure Douglas’ culpability. By emphasizing heroic suicide (unconnected to witchcraft), Douglas deflects any blame, either for drawing Lothian to dark knowledge or for more directly bringing about his death. If such were the case, it is the most radical redirection of the elegy’s purpose away from commemoration and lamentation found in the period.

Appendix: Turner’s amendments and additions As they stem from the 1660s, well beyond the scope of this book, I will only give limited attention to Turner’s revisions and additions to the Lothian elegy. Turner claims that he came to edit the poem to please Douglas’ brother, Archibald, whom he knew from earlier military connections. Both had been among those Scots active on the Protestant side in the latter half of the Thirty Years War. However, that Turner’s work goes so far beyond a mere copying of the poem suggests a more personal interest in the Earl’s death on his part. In fact, Turner was the son of Rev. Patrick Turner (Turnour) of Borthwick, who had been closely involved in the prosecution of Meg Unes (of Borthwick) and Janet Schitlingtoun in 1628, but the younger Turner’s agenda in returning to the case is unclear.54 A Turner section towards the end also further reveals public perception of Lothian’s intellectual activities: the ignorant say that his ‘speciall knouledge was /​They know not what’ (ll. 699–​700). This is the closest the poem comes to mentioning Lothian’s association with witchcraft. While Turner indicates those sections which he has significantly rewritten or added to, he does not distinguish between those two possibilities. In many 54 A warrant of the Privy Council has the two women handed over to Patrick Turner and another clergyman to be taken to trial at Dalkeith for their role in Lothian’s death. Patrick Turner, who was minister of Borthwick from 1604 until being named minister of Dalkeith in October 1628, was also involved in a number of other witchcraft investigations in Dalkeith in the years 1628–​30.

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shorter cases, the syntax of the Turner sections is so continuous with that preceding or following that we must judge it to be largely revision. A few longer sections might more plausibly be additions. Many of these seem to be further examples, classical or Biblical, that Turner invokes to support a general point in Douglas’ original text. Overall, Turner’s sections seem to emphasize the heroic possibilities of suicide, especially by drawing on classical examples. For example, in one passage he calls Lothian’s actions ‘Herculean toyle’ overcoming the ‘Monsters’ of Death and Fate (ll. 127–​9). However, Turner’s most significant section draws on Christ’s death as a sort of suicide that supports his argument. Two lines of this are identified as Douglas’, so it is not that Turner supplied the instance without warrant from the original. Turner argues that there are no theological distinctions among ‘To wish for Death, to will it, and to bring /​It to the fact’ (ll. 523–​4) and that Christ’s willing of his own death is a theological necessity. It seems that Turner, in the 1660s, felt freer to press the idea of the Crucifixion as a sort of suicide to implicitly link Lothian’s death with Christ’s. Turner’s additions also invoke the example of Samson’s death, and other scholars might find this a worthwhile perspective to consider in relation to Milton’s contemporary Samson Agonistes.           The faults not his, but Time’s, Which makes of Antient vertues, Moderne crimes. (ll. 281–​3)

This more neatly articulates (through parallelism) the central argument of the poem than anything written by Douglas himself.

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Funeral elegies on elite women

Approximately 20 per cent of surviving funeral elegies written in the period 1603 to 1640 are on women. Of these, however, a higher percentage survive in single manuscripts, which suggests that they did not circulate as widely as those on male figures, and that many were part of a gift and honour culture that functioned within a more limited family circle. There were exceptions, however:  those on politically prominent figures, like Arbella Stuart (discussed in Chapter 2) and Queen Anne (Chapter 3), and those that rose to prominence due to their author rather than their subject, as in the case of the influential ones by Donne and Francis Beaumont discussed below. Many focus on the private life of the deceased and hence are less likely to engage in the detraction that has been a recurring concern of this study. This approach to commemoration is also reflected in funeral monuments and engraved epitaphs on women, which, Peter Marshall notes, tend to emphasize their private, domestic virtues.1 However, some poets did emphasize the public dimension of the woman’s death; for example, Ralph Knevet writes that the death of Lady Katherine Paston was ‘More like a publike ruine, then the weight /​Of any private crosse’.2 As part of this public concern, elegies on women did at times participate in the patterns of detraction this book has been examining. Such is manifest in a number of ways: mild detraction of the deceased, detraction of other women, defences against detraction, detraction of other elegists, or detraction of other figures. Some of the last-​ named category venture into social, religious, and political critique. Most common was a scenario where the dead woman was extolled as the seat of all virtue and piety, and in which, with her death, the world now stood bereft of those elements. An exceptional few went well beyond this in using the death of a woman as the starting point for outspoken satiric anger.

1 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 271. 2 Ralph Knevet, Funerall elegies; consecrated to the immortall memory, of the Right Honorable the Lady Katherine Paston (1637), sig. B3r.

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This chapter falls roughly into two halves:  in the first, I  offer a brief overview of the period’s funeral elegies on women, the circumstances of composition and circulation, the influential norms established by Donne, the outrageous elegies on women by Francis Beaumont, the use of funeral elegies on women for satiric detraction, and the general patterns of elegiac commemoration of female virtue. The second half turns to two particular elite women of the 1630s: Venetia Digby and Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon. As sexual virtue in particular was central to many elegies on women, some cases, like that of Venetia Digby, required a defensive posture to challenge persistent rumours about the deceased. Lady Huntingdon, renowned as a patron, was commemorated by a number of elegists, of whom the most significant was Thomas Pestell. Explicitly acknowledging the influence of Donne and Beaumont, Pestell is notable for the way in which his patronage-​seeking poems go beyond the celebration of female virtue to the satirizing of a range of vices and follies.

Circumstances of composition and circulation Elegies on women were often closely embedded in the patronage networks of the time, both lamenting women who had been significant patrons of poetry and other arts and functioning as gifts to surviving family members and friends who might continue the patronage begun by the deceased. In such a situation, women who were major poetic patrons were more likely to be elegized by significant poets, while the less culturally active might have their deaths marked by verses from the local parish priest, family chaplain, or family tutor. The death of Catherine Boyle, Countess of Cork (d. 1630), was marked by a volume out of Trinity College, Dublin, Musarum lachrymae, and Jane Paulet, Marchioness of Winchester (d. 1631), was commemorated with elegies by major poets such as Jonson and William Davenant. Lady Anne Rich (nee Cavendish, d. 1638) was elegized by at least ten different poets,3 and, as with the other women so treated in the period, she seems to have been set apart by the combination of high birth and reputation for literary patronage. She was the daughter of William Cavendish, Second Earl of Devonshire, and the wife of Robert Rich, Third Earl of Warwick. However, this sort of fame and position is not sufficient to ensure a large surviving corpus of funeral elegies; for example, there are no surviving elegies marking the death of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, the most famous female literary patron of the Jacobean period. The commemoration of Lady

3 See especially the collection in Bodl. MS Eng. misc. e. 262.

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Rich seems to have been orchestrated by John Gauden, the family chaplain, whose connection to such established figures as Henry King and Edmund Waller, and whose gathering of the poems in Bodl.MS Eng. misc.e.262, lend to Rich a prominence that she would otherwise not have enjoyed.4 In contrast, the death of Frances Rodney (d. 1637) of Stoke Rodney, Somerset, is marked by a family-​based commemoration, which comes down to us in only one copy, BL Add. MS 34239. This volume includes not only funeral elegies but also other sorts of memorials, including the funeral sermon, pedigrees, and religious meditations. Such emphasis on family is frequent in many elegies on noblewomen of the period, as the dead women are commemorated through their lofty ancestry and male relationships:  grandfathers, father, brothers, husband, sons. Examples of this include a long anonymous elegy on Isabella, Countess of Rutland (d.  1605)5, and Ge[rald?] Brady’s on Elizabeth, Countess of Cork (d. 1630).6

Donne As described in the Introduction, scholars have argued for Donne’s establishment of influential new norms for the English funeral elegy in the years 1609 to 1615. While some scholars have emphasized his reluctance to write funeral elegies and the limited number of them compared with the other genres that he practised,7 it should also be stressed that before 1615 there is no English poet from whom more funeral elegies survive and that these poems were repeatedly cited by later practitioners of the genre. This was achieved through funeral elegies proper, a number of verse epistles that concern individual deaths, and the famous Anniversaries on the death of Elizabeth Drury (d.  1610). Claude J.  Summers rightly identifies these as ‘coterie’ poems, deeply embedded in the patronage culture of his time, 4 Henry King reflects his awareness of this crowd of poetic mourners when he writes of ‘those many Ones /​Who wett this Ladye’s Urne with zealous Moanes’ (ll. 31–​2), King, Poems, p. 94. 5 ‘Threnos:  A funerall song or Elegie of … Ladie Isabel late countess dowager of Rutland ‘, Camb. MS Dd.V.77. 6 ‘To thee deare soule I  consecrate my verse’, Musarum Lachrymae (Dublin, 1630), sig. A3r. 7 See Claude J.  Summers, ‘The Epicede and Obsequy’, in Jeanne Shami et  al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of John Donne (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 286–​7. It should also be emphasized that with any death in this period we can only refer to the number of funeral elegies that survive, not the number that were written. Especially with funeral elegies largely written as a private testimony of sorrow and respect to a grieving family, it is likely that only one or two copies were ever in existence.

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and particularly focused on the family and friends of Lucy, Countess of Bedford.8 The Anniversaries and ‘Funeral Elegy’ on Elizabeth Drury are less about Drury than about what the world is like without her. Being well known, they need little attention here, but, most significantly, their sense of the female deceased as the lodestar of all virtue whose loss leaves the world or even the cosmos out of joint was to be echoed (usually in somewhat more restrained terms) by many elegists over subsequent decades. While imitators of Donne’s Anniversaries were not to reach his level of poetic extravagance, they were often to engage in a commemoration in which the female deceased took her rightful place among the heavenly host. The other funeral poems by Donne are also less about the individual who had died than about death itself, death as an abstraction but given richly imagined substance by being directly addressed by Donne and represented through a range of figurative constructions. Summers and Ted-​ Larry Pebworth argue that Donne’s major redirection of the funeral elegy is its transformation ‘into a vehicle for theological and philosophical speculation’.9 Summers convincingly shows that Donne’s elegies on Lady Bridget Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode function as a thematically linked sequence that balances occasional particularity with more general meditation on death.10 In a more minor way, Donne also pushed the boundaries by probing the controversial aspects of the dead, but scholars have relatively neglected these passages. In the Markham poem Donne moves towards consideration of her religious shortcomings, a topic usually avoided in funeral elegies. He argues that her sins were ‘small spots’ on ‘pure white’, and, in a more ominous metaphor, that they were the ‘little poyson [that] cracks a christall glasse’11 just enough to prove God’s word that ‘All, sinners be’ (l. 44) and compel Lady Markham to repent. Donne’s Anniversaries on the young Elizabeth Drury had been faulted by some readers of the time as presenting a figure of far too sublime perfection, and his approach in the Markham poem is noteworthy for its acknowledgement of a woman’s religious flaws, despite the elegy’s typical rhetorical shape of participating in the general praise of the woman. As an approach, it is also markedly different from the defensive 8 Summers, ‘The Epicede and Obsequy’, p.  289. See also Pebworth and Summers, ‘Contexts and Strategies’, pp. 205–​22, on Donne’s transformation of the genre. 9 Pebworth and Summers, ‘Contexts and Strategies’, p. 219; see also Summers, ‘The Epicede and Obsequy’, p. 288. 10 Claude J.  Summers, ‘Donne’s 1609 Sequence of Grief and Comfort’, Studies in Philology 89:2 (1992), pp. 211–​31. Summers follows the edition of John Shawcross in treating the verse epistle beginning ‘You that are she and you’ as the opening poem of this series. 11 ‘Elegie on the Lady Marckham’, Donne, Poems, p. 256, l. 42.

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posture adopted twenty years later to defend questions about the honour and virtue of Venetia Digby. The first Donne elegy on Bulstrode (‘Death I recant’12) is primarily a meditation upon the power of death (and explicitly a denial of his earlier sonnet ‘Death be not Proud’, or perhaps the elegy on Lady Markham).13 The poem becomes controversial only towards the end, where Donne considers what Bulstrode might have become and how she then might have tempted others. The passage is quite cryptic but seems to suggest that her ‘devotion’ might become ‘superstition’ (ll. 57–​8); this seemingly refers to the possibility of her leaving the Protestant Church of England for the Church of Rome, since ‘superstition’ was what Protestants accused Catholics of in the period. Donne’s second Bulstrode elegy (‘Language thou art too narrow’14) also points to the danger that she posed for others, that ‘some of us should love /​Her … him [God] and his lawes above’ (ll. 39–​40), which would seem a temptation to idolatry or adultery, or both.

Beaumont Nearly as famous and influential as Donne’s funeral elegies on women were those by Francis Beaumont on Lady Bridget Markham, Lady Elizabeth Rutland (d. 1612), and Lady Penelope Clifton (d. 1613). Where Donne had touched gingerly on potentially controversial matters, Beaumont flagrantly addresses the particular personal aspects of the three women. His poem on Lady Markham (‘As unthrifts groan in straw’15) is a prime example of elegy becoming the vehicle of satire. However, it goes beyond even that: it is a piece of calculated outrageousness perhaps intended to outdo Donne in being scandalous. Beaumont coolly begins by acknowledging that he never knew Markham, but through others’ reports (possibly that of Donne?) he finds that ‘death’s sad dart, proved Cupid’s shaft to me’. He finds her now the ideal lover, far above living mistresses:      when with this I do compare The love I do a living woman bear, I find myself most happy: now I know Where I can find my mistress, and can go Unto her trimm’d bed, and can lift away Her grass-​green mantle, and her sheet display; And touch her naked (ll. 11–​17)

12 ‘Elegie on Mris Boulstred’, Donne, Poems, p. 258. 13 Summers, ‘The Epicede and Obsequy’, p. 292. 14 ‘Elegie. Death’, Donne, Poems, p. 259. 15 G. Darley, ed., Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, vol. 2 (London, 1883), p. 705.

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She surpasses other women in her refusal of cosmetics:  ‘she will not abide /​With any art her blemishes to hide, /​As many living do’ (ll. 19–​ 21). Thus, the poem becomes a satiric attack on other women for their attempts at beauty, their ostentation, their calling on men to defend their honour, their mercenary approach to sexuality, and, finally, their duplicity. Such an approach, in which the solitary virtue of the female deceased is used cynically to disparage all other women, was to be picked up by some later elegists examined below. What is most striking in Beaumont’s case, however, is the irreverence with which he reflects upon the dead woman herself: in the latter part of the poem he resigns any desire to lie with her in her present state, but gives her up to his foes and his rivals, the worms, who now have their way with her –​imagined in intensely sexual terms –​and then write this epitaph upon her forehead: ‘Living, she was young, fair, and full of wit; /​Dead, all her faults are in her forehead writ’ (ll. 67–​8).16 While not as shocking as the Markham elegy, Beaumont’s elegy on Lady Rutland is baldly contentious and unusual in another way: whereas many funeral elegies gesture towards the sorrow of the widower, Beaumont outspokenly belittles Rutland’s marriage. Early on, he puts the name of Rutland aside as he reverts to her maiden name of Sidney (which may ‘more force a tear’), and he then forthrightly characterizes her marriage as ‘Nought but a sacrament of misery’.17 This is hardly typical fare in a funeral elegy.18 The Earl of Rutland had died just a few weeks earlier, although there were already (according to John Chamberlain) rumours about Lady Rutland considering a new marriage with Sir Thomas Howard.19 Beaumont suggests that her marriage changed only her name, and that she lived ‘Like

16 See Philip J. Finkelpearl, ‘ “Wit” in Francis Beaumont’s Poems’, Modern Language Quarterly 28 (1967), pp.  33–​ 44. A  further elegy on Markham was written by Donne’s friend Henry Goodere, and like Beaumont he dwells on her beauty, but as ‘a bayte [which] was sent from heaven /​to angle for our harts’; ‘Elegy upon the death of La: Markham’, published in Daniel Starza Smith, ‘The Poems of Sir Henry Goodere: A Diplomatic Edition’, JDJ 31 (2012), pp. 108–​11. Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I, pp. 68–​9, notes a similar gruesome violation of the Queen by worms in Thomas Newton’s Atropoion Delion (1603). 17 Overbury, Characters, p. 187, ll. 8, 34. 18 One of the few similarly cynical instances I have found is the anonymous elegy on Sir Gilbert Knyveton (d.  1634), which concludes:  ‘His greatest Crime, his second Marridge Bedd, /​For wch he su’d divorce, from life, and’s dead. /​and left his Lady widdowe; did appoint her, /​To mourne for him, but more for her small Joincture’; Nottingham MS Pw V 25/​33, fol. 36. 19 Letter to Carleton, 11 Aug. 1612, Chamberlain, Letters, vol. 1, p. 377.

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a betrothed virgin’ rather ‘than a wife’: it was widely known that Rutland was impotent.20 The latter half of the poem goes off in a different, but still contentious, direction, as he lambasts the physicians, suggesting that they cure their own purses, not the sick, and that their only skill is ‘some knowledge how to kill’. Beaumont semi-​retracts his attack by leaning on the conventional sorrow-​induced madness trope: ‘Sorrow and madness make my verses flow /​Cross to my understanding’. His apology, however, is merely a temporary feint:  physicians can ‘do wonders’  –​but only in curing the wicked, not the good. He then suggests that since their anatomies have typically been performed on thieves and whores, physicians only know how to cure the same, and that the arteries of the virtuous, like the Countess of Rutland, are in different places. As in a number of Donne’s funeral elegies, that by Beaumont on Lady Clifton is primarily addressed to Death, whom the poet chastises for his duplicitous taking of Clifton. The commemoration of her is framed as the poet’s instruction to Death of what he, in his blindness, has taken. Like Donne in Holy Sonnet X, he tells Death, ‘thou thyself must die’21 (l. 10), but his sportive tone is strikingly different. He suggests that Death must have been blind to take a woman of Clifton’s beauty, and hence Beaumont will offer a description of her. That description lauds her virtue, but still jauntily concludes with a satiric excursus: Such ladies thou canst kill no more, but so I give thee warning here to kill no moe; For if thou dost, my pen shall make the rest Of those that live, especially the best, Whom thou most thirstest for, to abandon all Those fruitless things, which thou wouldst have us call Preservatives, keeping their diet so, As the long-​living poor their neighbours do: Then shall we have them long, and they at last Shall pass from thee to her, but not so fast. (ll. 53–​62)

Beaumont is promising to move from the role of elegist to that of diet advisor: he will starve Death of young victims by counselling well-​off women to forsake their lavish diets of pseudo-​preservatives for the healthy diets of the poor. This is certainly nowhere near as outrageous as the elegies on Markham and Rutland, but it bears an air of facetiousness remarkably outside the bounds of normal elegiac sorrow.

20 Jonson’s epigram #50 in Underwood, likely about Lady Rutland, refers to her as a ‘widow’d wife’. 21 Darley, Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, vol. 2, p. 707, l. 10.

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Beaumont’s elegies on these three women are so daring in their contentiousness that one wonders if they have crossed the line into being ‘mock elegies’. This is particularly the case with that on Lady Markham, which seems calculated to be a piece of extravagant outrageousness. Is it responding to those of Donne and Henry Goodyer upon her? Should Beaumont’s elegies be perceived in the context of Coryat’s Crudities, which included mock panegyric verses?22 Such would compel us to perceive them as primarily written to amuse and entertain a circle of wits rather than to commemorate and console. None of the other elegists considered in this chapter match his outrageousness, but Pestell was clearly inspired by him to push the boundaries of what might be said in an elegy on an aristocratic woman.

Satiric impulses While Donne and Beaumont at times engage in somewhat scandalous commemoration of the deceased, they seldom turn to the specific detraction that this study has frequently noted. However, in the following decades a number of elegies on women did take this approach. Most often, the rhetoric involves holding the dead forth as a strikingly virtuous contrast to the corruption of others. An extreme example of this rhetoric of exceptionality is found in an anonymous elegy on Mary Lapworth (d. 1621), wife of the physician and poet Edward Lapworth. It begins with the speaker taking on the role of the misogynist satirist, who would ‘evaporate my brainsick melancholy’, and in that spirit regrets that women are born at all.23 In his violent disgust, he vows that he would even murder female elves in their cradles. Ultimately, he acknowledges misguided male adoration of women as part of the problem: men ‘mistress them so much /​befor their stinking Carkasses wee touch’. This odd beginning is then semi-​apologized for: ‘But I’me no Satyrist, only their name /​brought my unwilling Genius to ye same /​ height of true doctrine’ (ll. 19–​21). However, Lapworth is held forth as the exception to this sweeping denunciation of women: ‘hir perfections totally redeem’d /​Natures o’resight in others’ (ll. 25–​6). A poet commemorating the Countess of Cork adopts the related trope that any other woman could have been more easily spared,24 wondering why Death did not choose

22 On Beaumont’s place in such circles, see Mark Bland, ‘Francis Beaumont’s Verse Letters to Ben Jonson and the “Mermaid Club” ’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100–​ 1700, 12 (2005), pp. 139–​79. 23 Rosenbach MS 1083/​17, p. 161. 24 Best known in the St Peter section of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, ll. 113ff.

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Some painted peece of clay that trip’t about With outward borrowed glory to amaze The eyes of fooles that vainely stand at gaze And idolize weake flesh?25

Another in the same volume had wished that other women ‘had prov’d so constant in thine imitation  /​That honour’d vertue had become their fashion’.26 This leads to a catalogue of female failings. In a similar way, Edward Benlowes’ long elegy on Lady Anne Rich presents a series of satiric ‘foils’ to the gem of Anne Rich, which become a set of short characters. Benlowes thus mocks false attempts at female beauty, the corruption of avarice, and affected rhetoric.27 These sorts of satire-by-contrast are the most comment detractive elements in funeral elegies on women in the period. In other cases, detraction focuses on other would-​ be mourners and elegists. Michael Drayton’s elegy on Lady Penelope Clifton (beg. ‘Must I needes write, who’s he that can refuse’) is rich in bravado and pursues the rhetoric that this book has often noted:  grief-​based madness giving vent to satire. The poem presents an extended reflection upon the unfortunate bearer of the news of death, who, according to Drayton, should have offered it with greater vigour and horror. The messenger himself should have manifested the raging madness prompted by sorrow. Likewise, at the end the poet warns others who might presume to elegize Clifford in place of him. Such ‘falsely termed verse’ might ‘sit like mothes upon her herse’ (l. 118), while his ‘sacred rage’ will be the fit accompaniment of Clifton’s body as it awaits burial. Between these extravagant gestures disparaging others that bookend the poem, Drayton defends his seemingly sorrow-​driven madness by turning it upon those who would criticize it (ll. 110–​11). Much more of this approach will be seen with Pestell’s poems, discussed below.

Commemorating –​and defending –​Venetia Digby A defensive posture towards those who had maligned the dead was central to a number of the funeral elegies that marked the death of Venetia Digby.28 Digby was probably the most heavily commemorated non-​royal woman of the early Stuart period, with elegies by such prominent poets 25 Ge[rald?] Brady, Musarum lachrymae, sig. B1v. 26 Musarum lachrymae, sig. A2v. 27 ‘Verses made by … on the death of the Lady Anne Rich’, BL Harl. MS 4931, pp. 38–​9. 28 For an insightful study on a variety of poets’ responses to a particular prominent noblewoman, see Raymond A.  Anselment, ‘The Countess of Carlisle and Caroline Praise: Convention and Reality’, Studies in Philology 82:2 (1985), pp. 212–​33.

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as Thomas Randolph, Thomas May, Aurelian Townshend, and, most significantly, Ben Jonson. May fears he may be construed as merely joining ‘A Conclamation’,29 rather than presenting a true elegy. In addition to the funeral elegies upon her, Anthony van Dyck produced a famous painting of her on her deathbed,30 and her husband, Sir Kenelm, constructed a manuscript memorial of her, In Praise of Venetia, consisting of his own letters and meditations.31 He also composed a haunting funeral elegy on her, ‘Buried in the shades of horrid night’, a portrait of absolute despair,32 in which he compares himself to ‘the damn’d tormented soules in hell /​enrag’d ’gainst God’ (ll. 11–​12). The poem defies all of the usual consolations of divinity or common wisdom, including that offered by Donne in ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’:  that parted souls, like beaten gold, ‘endure not yet  /​ A breach, but an expansion’.33 Digby writes, And I see those bookes are false wch teach that absence makes betweene two soules no breach       when they wth love       to each other  move

Lacking Venetia’s physical presence, he projects for himself only a life of groaning ‘doleful elegie’. Many of the elegies by others respond to Kenelm’s cultivated image of intense mourning. This great outpouring of elegiac grief probably came about for a number of reasons: the prominent place of Venetia Digby and her husband, Kenelm, in the literary circles surrounding Jonson; the famed beauty of Venetia; Kenelm’s widely known devotion; and finally, the rumours that her death was not natural but possibly brought about by her husband’s attempts to maintain her beauty with ‘viper-​wine’ (wine infused with viper extract taken medicinally). That so many of the elegies also survive stems from the prominence of some of the poets involved and that Kenelm gathered many of them into a formal manuscript volume.34

29 Bodl. Ashmole MS 38, p. 192, l. 16. A conclamation is a joint outcry, especially of sorrow for the dead (May’s use of it in his translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia (1627) is the first recorded in the OED). 30 Dulwich Picture Gallery. 31 Vittorio Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-​ Book:  “In Praise of Venetia”’, National Library of Wales Journal 9:2 (1955), pp.  113–​48; 9:4 (1955), pp.  440–​62; 10:1 (1956), pp. 81–​105. 32 BL Add. MS 89136, fols 5–​6; printed in H. A. Bright (ed.), Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers (London, 1877), pp. 7–​9. 33 ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’, Donne, Poems, p. 45, ll. 22–​3. 34 BL Add. MS 30259; see CELM on this manuscript (www.celm-​ms.org.uk/​repositories/​ british-​library-​additional-​30000.html#british-​library-​additional-​30000_​id400882).

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Ben Jonson was close to both Venetia and Kenelm in the early 1630s,35 and his ‘Eupheme’ (an incomplete sequence on her from birth to death) is the best-​known poetic account of her. Its lofty, religious-​focused concluding section, ‘The Elegy on my Muse’, offers a portrait of Kenelm’s ‘wounded mind’, which          cannot sustain this stroke; It rages, runs, flies, stands, and would provoke The world to ruin with it; in her fall, I sum up mine own breaking, and wish all. (ll. 23–​6)

The idea that the world is broken or amiss through the death of the individual woman goes back to Donne’s ‘First Anniversary’, but here it is given a new twist that places the poet’s mind at the centre of calamity. The distracted poetic mind seeks, or would bring about, its reflection in the world at large. A chaotic fracturing emanates from the deceased in widening circles, in which the mourning poet plays a significant part. Jonson’s poetry often invokes a nobility of ‘goodness’ that supplants traditional nobilities of ‘greatness’ (i.e. of high birth), but in this poem he rather confounds the two: God calls Venetia Out of her noble body to this feast, And give[s]‌her place, according to her blood, Amongst her peers, those princes of all good: Saints, martyrs, prophets, with those hierarchies, Angels, archangels, principalities, The dominations, virtues, and the powers, The thrones, the cherub, and seraphic bowers (ll. 82–​8)

The opening lines suggest her position is owing to her blood (or birth): she sprang from two of the oldest noble families, the Percys and the Stanleys, and at first we read ‘Amongst her peers’ as referring to the earls of those families. However, the second half of the line rereads ‘peers’ as the ‘princes of all good’, who are not earthly progenitors but the angelic powers fully listed in the lines that follow. Jonson manages to have it both ways:  to honour the family lineage that Digby enjoyed and to displace that earthly hierarchy with a heavenly one in which she takes her place.36 The second half of the poem offers a corrective to Sir Kenelm, who has put on ‘black and mourning’ (l. 98) when Venetia is in a shining ‘robe of 35 Ian Donaldson, Ben Jonson:  A Life (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 411–​13,  426–​7. 36 A similar tension is found later in the poem when Jonson celebrates God’s creation of Venetia, but through ‘two such veins of blood, /​As nature could not more increase the flood /​Of title in her’ (ll. 157–​9).

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light’ (l. 102), and it offers him an anticipation of their heavenly reunion. However, while Jonson invokes the reunion of ‘brother with the sister’ (l.  116) and ‘sons and daughters with their parents’ (l.  118), there is no reference to conjugal reunion (presumably because of Jesus’ words in Matthew 22:30: ‘For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage’). The theme of all human relationships is God alone, and Jonson warns Kenelm against his intense embracing of the grieving husband role. With this focus, Jonson sidesteps all human judgements of Venetia, whether by Kenelm, other poets, or gossips: it is God who best ‘knew her noble character’ (l. 155), a theme to which the concluding lines of the poem return. Those lines are part of a final section of the poem devoted to her pious life of prayer and charity. Jonson closes the poem by returning to the idea that his ‘muse is gone’, but that in compensation he has found a ‘saint’ to ‘publish’ (l. 228). Aurelian Townshend’s funeral elegy reflects much that was typical of the outpouring:  he celebrates Venetia’s exceptional beauty, the loss to all men of this beauty, and then in particular the loss to Kenelm, her ‘Frend, Companion, and Copartner too’.37 Like many, the poem becomes about the very public grief of the widower: Whose head since hanging on his pensive Brest, Makes him looke just like one had beene possest Of the whole World, and now hath lost it all. (ll. 37–​9)

Townshend’s poem may increase Kenelm’s grief in the short term, but such is part of a process that will ultimately ‘minister Releefe’ to him. An exceptional element in Townshend’s poem is the acknowledgement of Jonson’s poetic treatment of Venetia in ‘Eupheme’. Unlike the usual competitive nature of elegy writing, Townshend is content to appreciate how Venetia’s beauty raised Jonson to poetic heights: Witnes that Penne, which prompted by thy Parts, Of Mynde, and Body; caught as many Harts, With every Lyne; as thow with every Looke:38

Pre-​ Venetia, Jonson’s lines were ‘perfect steele  /​Strong, Smoothe, and Sharpe’ (ll.  21–​2), but with her as model they became ‘Magnetick’ (presumably an allusion to Jonson’s play of the previous year, The Magnetick Lady) and could attract all like a lodestar in the heavens. Venetia as subject is aligned with Jonson as poet, and their combined force then works upon secondary elegists like Townshend. 37 Bright, Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers, p. 18, l. 36. 38 Bright, Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers, p. 17, ll. 17–​19.

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Thomas Randolph’s poem follows the course laid down by Francis Beaumont’s elegy on Lady Markham, focusing on the beauty and sexual desirability of the deceased. While Beaumont’s poem leads up to a section where he envies the worms for the liberties they take with the beautiful corpse, Randolph strikingly opens the poem with this outrageous conceit:

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Death, Who’ld not change prerogatives with thee, That dost such rapes, yet mayst not question’d bee?39

Beaumont had perceived the worms as his own rivals, but in Randolph they become the rivals of Death (l.  16) in having their way with her body. As Llewellyn puts it, Randolph ‘manages to simultaneously stay within the complimentary and come very close to the insolent’.40 Felltham’s poem especially engages in defence of both Venetia and Kenelm, and Llewellyn suggests he may be ‘deliberately presenting a counter-​image to Randolph’s idea of Death-​as-​rapist’.41 The defensive stance is clear from his opening:  ‘Rash Censure: not he, nor she that’s gone /​Must be condemn’d’.42 From that point on, however, the poem does not amount to much of a defence. Felltham proceeds by stressing the unknowability of Venetia’s mind (rather than her innocence). His attack on her detractors is focused as well on her brain: Yet there are those, striving to salve their own Deep want of skill, have in a fury thrown Scandal on her, and say she wanted brain. (ll. 19–​21)

These lines are an explicit response to the autopsy, which reportedly ‘found but little braine’.43 However, from there the argument takes a strange turn, emphasizing Venetia’s charming power over men, and that her maligners were themselves bound by their senses until her death and ‘ne’r thought of that Intelligence /​ Which did move her’ (ll. 34–​5). He emphasizes how Death came gently on her, not affecting her appearance, or was ‘As a rough Satyr, tam’d with love’, which rather turns Venetia into Una from The Faerie Queene.44 While Venetia Digby attracted the most widespread poetic defences, such a dynamic is also manifest with others. William Sampson’s Virtus post 39 Randolph, Poems, p. 52, ll. 1–​2. 40 Mark Llewellyn, ‘ “Cease Thy Wanton Lust”: Thomas Randolph’s Elegy, the Cult of Venetia, and the Possibilities of Classical Sex’, C. C. Barfoot (ed.), ‘And Never Know the Joy’: Sex and the Erotic in English Poetry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), p. 92. 41 Llewellyn, ‘ “Cease thy Wanton Lust” ’, pp. 100–​1. 42 Felltham, Resolves, vol. 2 (1661), p. 13. 43 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, chiefly of contemporaries, vol.  1, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford, 1898), p. 231. 44 I:vi:19.

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Funera vivit (1636), a sixty-​four-​page gathering of his funeral elegies on prominent women and men of the 1620s and 1630s, presents his undertaking as at least partly defensive:  Fame and Envy ‘usd to be sworne enemies of the dead (either in detracting, or saying too much), and his work will counter these with deedes of Honor, Piety, and Truth worthy of Fames Trumpet!’45 This defensive role of funeral elegies was also seen in those on the Duke of Buckingham discussed in Chapter 5.

The Countess of Huntingdon Poets marked the death of Elizabeth, the Fifth Countess of Huntingdon (d. 20 January 1633/​4), because of her social prominence and long-​standing role as patron. Among these, Thomas Pestell stands apart, as he responds to her death within the context of an extended career of satiric elegizing. For decades, the Fifth Earl and Countess of Huntingdon proved attractive as would-​be patrons to a range of poets: Donne, John Fletcher, John Marston, Sampson, and Pestell.46 Although the Huntingdons were chronically in financial difficulties, they wielded beneficial local power and offered significant connections among the nobility across England. The Earl was a first cousin of Lucy, Countess of Bedford,47 and the Countess was the daughter of the well-​known literary patrons Ferdinando, Fifth Earl of Derby, and Alice Spencer, Countess of Derby, who long outlived her husband and was known as both a participant in and patron of masques. The Countess of Huntingdon’s sister, Frances, Countess of Bridgwater, fulfilled a similar cultural role as patron. (Her other sister, Anne, is best known for having had the misfortune to marry the notorious Second Earl of Castlehaven.) Lady Huntingdon herself was also connected to Donne, who first made her acquaintance in the household of Sir Thomas Egerton (Alice’s second husband) in the late 1590s and later sent two verse epistles to her.48

45 ‘To the right Honorable … Lady Carastian [sic] Dowager Countesse of Devon’, [sig. A2r]. 46 Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions:  Aristocracy, the State and Provincial Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 26. 47 Cogswell, Home Divisions, p. 23. 48 See Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 17–​28, on her connections with Donne, Fletcher, and other poets. Dennis Flynn has recently cast convincing doubt on the idea that Donne had a deep and continuing relationship with the countess; he notes that after 1609 his contact with her seems only to have been through the intermediary Sir Henry Goodere; ‘Donne and Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon, Revisited: The Evidence of Donne’s Letters’, JDJ 33 (2014), p. 31.

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Her death attracted a number of elegists: Sampson, Lucius Cary (Viscount Falkland), and Pestell. Sampson’s poem is quite conventional in praising Elizabeth as a model of piety and virtue, and he presents her as a contrast to the corrupt world of the court: ‘Shee knew Court Ladies faults, and did not tie, /​Her faith unto her fashion!’49 While her husband had avoided the royal court for decades, in the years before her death the Countess made frequent visits to court in an attempt to salvage the family’s financial situation.50 The distance of Sampson from Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon, is marked by an awkward faux pas: he identifies her as the ‘Wife to the right Honorable Ferdinand Earle of Huntington’,51 whereas she was the wife of Henry, the Fifth Earl (d.  1643) and the mother of Ferdinando.52 From this error we sense that for him Elizabeth is just one more figure in his massive pantheon. Falkland’s elegy is an altogether more substantial poem that situates itself in reaction to the failures of other poets. He self-​consciously notes ‘the vane glorious end /​Of Elegiack writers’,53 and while, like Pestell, he invokes the example of Donne, for him the earlier elegist represents hyperbolic excess:  ‘Compar’d to what hath bin deserv’d by thee,  /​Balsac, and Donne, writt noe Hyperbolye’ (ll. 29–​30). The implication here is that Donne’s elegiac praise of figures like Elizabeth Drury had become a byword for excess and hyperbole, and that Huntingdon alone is worthy of such praise.54 The rhetorical point is like that made by Jonson about the Anniversaries: that it ‘was profane, and full of blasphemies. That he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary it had been something.’55 While funeral elegies on women repeatedly affirm the religious virtues of the dead, Falkland’s major concern is to define more precisely the religious devotion of Huntingdon. She was by reputation a woman of piety, mixing in godly circles that were perceived by many in the Church establishment

49 Sampson, Virtus post Funera Vivit, p. 15. 50 Cogswell, Home Division, pp. 207–​10. 51 Sampson, Virtus post Funera Vivit, p. 14. 52 The other possibility is that Sampson erred through thinking of Elizabeth’s father, Ferdinand, Earl of Derby. Both earls are mentioned on the title page to her funeral sermon. 53 BL Egerton MS 2725, fol. 132r, ll. 7–​8. 54 Pestell had likewise rejected courtly hyperbole in praise of the countess:  ‘All their Hiperbolies, and all their skill /​Prove a faint offer of a weake good will’ (ll. 91–​2). Falkland’s reference is probably to Balzac’s Le Prince (1631), a work in praise of King Louis XIII. Falkland also used Balzac and Donne as exemplars in his elegy on his friend Henry Morison; there he claims Morison surpassed the ‘archwits o’ the past age’ (BL Eger. MS 2725, fol. 132r). 55 Jonson, Informations to William Drummond, in Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, vol. 5, p. 361.

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as dangerously Puritan. In contrast to this, Falkland keenly argues that she was fully conforming, embracing all the religious exercises that the Church allowed or required. The section goes far beyond establishing Huntingdon’s ecclesiastical bona fides as it embarks on a nearly fifty-​line section of anti-​ Puritan satire. While Falkland concedes that she moved in those circles that he caricatures as Puritan, she herself avoided these extremes. The dynamic is like that in the elegy on Thomas Scott discussed in Chapter  4, where the redefining of the dead individual’s ecclesiastical commitment provides the context for anti-​ Puritan satire. Falkland presents Puritan preaching as founded solely upon ‘Good lungs, noe learning, and a Concordance’ (l.  70), which are then inexplicably held as more important than prayer. These Puritans see a Catholic menace in ‘Virginity /​With Almes and fasting’ (ll.  53–​4), and ‘Hate Hooker perfectly, and honour Prynn’ (l.  58). They are those To whom the want of Charity seemes noe losse; Soe they have confident faith and hate Christs crosse Worse then his Crucifiers, and soe proud be growne, To give his spouse [the Church] lesse honour then their owne. (ll. 63–​6)

Their unthinking suspicion of the Church Fathers leads them even to reject St Augustine, usually conceived as something of a proto-​Protestant. Falkland concludes this digression of detraction by pointing to what he sees as Puritans’ disappointment in Huntingdon, that she did not follow them in their divisive judgement and rigour. In a neat turn of phrase, he suggests that ‘This made thee by them excommunicate /​Into the Church’ (ll. 81–​2). However, we sense that Falkland’s rhetorical purpose is to gather her into the Church and separate her from the Puritans. Falkland’s elegy somewhat overplays the Countess’s religious moderation, but the section also opens up the question of shifts both within the definition of conformity (and hence non-​conformity) and within families and individuals over time. For example, the Hastings family were often perceived as Puritan, and the Third Earl, Henry (d. 1595), is often referred to as the ‘Puritan earl’, but the Fifth Earl is described by Richard Cust as a ‘Calvinist conformist’ who emphasized the duty of obedience to the King in church matters.56 Victoria Burke, in a detailed study of the Fifth Countess’s devotional work in manuscript, ‘Certaine Collections’, stresses her indebtedness to figures on the godly end of the Protestant spectrum: Henry Smith,

56 Richard Cust, ‘Honor, Rhetoric and Political Culture: The Earl of Huntingdon and His Enemies’, in S. Amussen and M. Kishlansky (eds), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 92. See also Cogswell, Home Divisions, p. 27.

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Lewis Bayly, and Arthur Hildersham.57 However, Burke downplays the significance of the other two figures that the Countess draws on, bishops Joseph Hall and Lancelot Andrewes, who were not of that stripe. Overall, I would suggest that the Countess was somewhat less emphatic about conformity than her husband, but far from the radical, godly end of the spectrum. Falkland, in his keenness to claim her for his own religious faction, suggests that late in her life Huntingdon, who had been ‘part of their [Puritans’] Hierarchie’ (l. 84), moved back in a conforming direction. This representation is consistent with the Earl’s own increasing emphasis upon conformity in the mid-​1630s, despite his reputation as a ‘Puritan’ magnate, and with his increased contact with the royal court and willingness to promote Laudian ceremonialism in 1634/​5.58 This elegy then participates in a post-​death struggle over her name and reputation. As demonstrated more fully in the next chapter’s discussion of the elegies on Bishop John King, the metaphoric hearse of the dead becomes the site of extended religious controversy. Falkland concludes his elegy by returning to the idea that Huntingdon functions as a model for others to follow. Rather than using Huntingdon’s virtue as the basis of a satiric attack upon other women (as will be evident in Pestell’s elegies, discussed below), Falkland presents Huntingdon as one who might redeem the general reputation: ‘Let all contempt to womankind have showne  /​Admire her Sex for her’ (ll.  101–​2). While this ‘praise by contrast’ trope was noted above, here the poet does not malign all women except the subject; instead, others have shown ‘contempt’, and their views will be changed by the redeeming action of Huntingdon.

Thomas Pestell’s ‘unruly Muse’ With many of the poems this book has considered, it would be fair to say that the elegist momentarily turned satirist; however, in the case of Pestell the formulation ‘the satirist turned elegist’ may be more apt. Before turning to his elegies on the Countess of Huntingdon, some account of his career, both poetic and ecclesiastical, is in order. Due largely to the richness of the surviving Hastings papers and Christopher Haigh’s use of them in tracing Pestell’s career and conflicts, we know more about him than we do 57 Victoria E.  Burke, ‘ “My Poor Returns’:  Devotional Manuscripts by Seventeenth-​ Century Women’, Parergon 29: 2 (2012), p. 53. She rather stretches to find Puritan links for Andrewes and Hall from early in their careers. It should also be noted that Hall’s very popular Meditations was drawn on by a wide range of English Protestants. 58 Cogswell, Home Divisions, pp. 211–​13.

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about many poets of the early Stuart period.59 However, few readers of early seventeenth-​ century poetry are familiar with his work. Haigh describes him as a complex figure, an ambitious and irascible priest, but one who also was willing to stand up for the lower orders in his parish and society. Outspokenness, in the pulpit, in his poetry, and in interactions with his neighbours, was Pestell’s continuing hallmark, and through that tendency he managed to offend individuals across the religious and political spectrum and from a range of social classes. Unsurprisingly, then, the satiric mode dominates Pestell’s surviving poetry, including funeral elegies; as Allan Pritchard, one of the handful of critics who have discussed him, notes, he ‘possessed a greater talent for satire than for compliment’.60 Pestell’s elegies are like Donne’s in their coterie nature and their place in his cultivation of patrons. As the majority of Donne’s funeral elegies were connected to the circle of Lucy, Countess of Bedford, so Pestell’s elegies of the early 1630s emerge from the family and household of Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon, and at times he seems desirous of playing Donne to Lady Huntingdon’s Countess of Bedford. Pestell’s elegies are marked by a strong sense of elegiac inheritance descending from Donne and Beaumont, and a marked tendency to satiric digression, particularly upon other elegists, based upon a proud confidence in his own role and ability. He pursued a combined poetic and priestly career in which his aggressive pursuit of patronage was often in tension with his tendency to clash with those in authority. Haigh concludes that Pestell ‘was an unusual combination of preacher, pastor, and poet  –​a more worldly and ambitious George Herbert, with a chip on his shoulder’.61 His funeral elegies combine his poetic and priestly role. He often presents the dead as a newly canonized saint and himself as that saint’s earthly votary, performing the rituals of the hierophant protecting the tomb or shrine, but the sharp, satiric voice is rarely far off. Before considering Pestell’s elegies on the immediate members of the Huntingdon circle, and the Countess in particular, it will be helpful to survey his earlier endeavours in funeral elegies, and his responses to those of others. His earliest elegy is on Beaumont himself, which makes no reference to the drama for which he is now best known but celebrates Beaumont as one who played a role (through his elegies) in ‘instructing ladies how their lives /​Are

59 Christopher Haigh, ‘The Troubles of Thomas Pestell:  Parish Squabbles and Ecclesiastical Politics in Caroline England’, Journal of British Studies 41:4 (2002), pp. 403–​28. 60 Allan Pritchard, ‘Unpublished Poems by Thomas Pestell’, ELR 10 (1980), p. 141. 61 Haigh, ‘The Troubles of Thomas Pestell’, p. 428.

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best preserv’d, with no[e]‌preservatives’,62 a direct echo of Beaumont’s elegy on Lady Clifton discussed above. The poem also establishes the satiric norm that will dominate Pestell’s later elegies on women: about half of its 130 lines are given over to a savage satire on lawyers, whom Pestell suggests Death should have taken instead. After satiric digressions that will be discussed below, he concludes that Death took Beaumont          for a spitefull secret grudge, ’Cause those quick lines from his live Muse did passe Have marble shedd and everlasting brasse Over three ladies, which still fresh shall be, And live to thy disgrace in memorie. (ll. 110–​14)

The poet is thus the rival of Death, and (as Shakespeare suggests in ‘Not marble nor the gilded monuments of princes’) he triumphs with living lines that preserve the dead.63 Like many of the others elegized by Pestell, Beaumont is given a final canonization, but one based on his wit rather than virtue. He is chiefly a saint for other would-​be witty poets: ‘when they mean to frame /​ A wittie poem, invocate his name /​The new Saint Francis’ (ll. 127–​9), and Pestell himself would seem to be chief among these new ‘Franciscans’.64 Pestell continues Beaumont’s outspoken satiric impulse but is more respectful of the deceased women he elegizes. His direct praise is often overwhelmed by satiric attacks on rival commemorators or on those women who fall short of the ideal represented by his subjects. Thus, for example, he begins his elegy ‘On the Lady Berklay: 1620’ by addressing those ‘British Faeries, saffron-​coloured Elfes’ and ‘stuft out puppetts’, suggesting that they ought to ‘wantonly rejoice’65 at Berklay’s death, as she was the embodiment of all the virtues that they reject. This satire is quite topical: the ‘saffron’ reference concerns ‘Yellow starch’, which was a central component of female fashion attacked in the late 1610s, and especially associated with Anne Turner, convicted for the Overbury murder.66 Similarly, his elegy ‘On 62 Thomas Pestell, Poems of Thomas Pestell, ed. Hannah Buchan (Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1940), p. 74, ll. 51–​2. 63 Pestell also participated in the manuscript circulation of these Beaumont elegies: surviving is a poem entitled ‘To Mr Clifton with Mr Fr:  Beaumount’s Verses on the Count: of Rutland’. 64 A culminating gesture of ‘canonizing’ the deceased and presenting him or her as the founder of a new order is also found in his elegies on Dorothy Arden and Katherine, Countess of Chesterfield. 65 Pestell, Poems, p. 20. 66 A.  R.  Jones and P.  Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.  59–​85. Pestell’s participation in such attacks makes sense given that in the 1610s he served as the chaplain to the Third Earl of Essex, the husband of Frances Howard, and the Overbury murder was prompted by her need for a divorce to bring about a marriage to Robert Kerr, Earl of Somerset.

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the Lady Dorothy Arden sister to the Earle of Denbigh’ (d.  1625) begins with a satiric attack on female fashion: ‘Paint Ladies paint’, he despairingly counsels them, since the paragon of the alternative modesty, Dorothy Arden, is dead.67 Lady Arden’s death is represented in language that recalls Donne’s ‘First Anniversary’: ‘Shees dead that nature scornd with art to staine’ (l. 7). In celebrating the rare virtuous individual, Pestell maligns the rest of the sex. Although such cynical satire would seem to sit uneasily with any attempt to attract patronage, from the early 1620s Pestell turned towards the Hastings family in general, and the Countess of Huntingdon in particular, as his patrons. An early poem by him, ‘Verses of ye Countess of Huntington’, offers a picture of their relationship about fifteen years before her death.68 It is written from Donnington Park (the Huntingdons’ estate), to which Pestell has returned after a short absence. Pestell presents himself as performing the duties of a personal chaplain to the Countess: ‘when I, or preach, or praye, /​Or reade before her’ (ll. 45–​6). During his previous stay he had enjoyed poetic company (Gordon McMullan suggests the poet referred to may be John Fletcher, long Francis Beaumont’s dramatic collaborator) and viewed what certainly sounds like a masque. With his return, the ‘same unruly Muse’ (l. 30) of the place inspires him to poetry. As we will see with the elegies on her death, Pestell is highly aware of poetic rivals praising the Countess: he dismisses one who like a ballad-​maker ‘trebl[es] faire, & sweete Elizabeth’, and those who seek anagrammatic significance in her name: Stanley & Huntingdon; her twoe great names Ripp up, and rake in, to finde Anagrams Lett those at Court are famous (where to bee (But the Kinges will) noethinge will bring mee) Make flatteringe Poems of her (soe entend because yt is a fault they must not mend) All their Hiperbolies, and all their skill Prove a faint offer of a weake good will. (ll. 85–​92)

This same impulse to banish poetic competitors will be evident in his funeral elegies upon her. BL Add. MS 25707 includes a poem by Edward Catlin (possibly one of the poetic rivals to whom Pestell refers) that reflects on Pestell’s mercenary pursuit of Lady Huntingdon’s patronage:69 he needs a David as an

67 Pestell, Poems, p. 13. 68 This poem must have been written at least a few years after 1615 because of its reference to George Ruggle’s Ignoramus, which ‘is remembre’d yett’; Pestell, Poems, p. 87 (l. 12). 69 BL Add. MS 25707, fol. 70, reproduced in Pestell, Poems, Appendix A, pp. 122–​3.

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appropriate prophet-​poet figure of inspiration. However, Catlin’s point is that Pestell’s panegyric was all in pursuit of church office:

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and sure thou harps’t upon some benefice Wherein yf shee should fayle, shee does thee wronge for never was Ladie more largely Songe.70

In 1622 Pestell was installed in the benefice of Packington, which was in the gift of the Earl of Huntingdon.71 In addition to such official clerical roles, he served as something of an elegist-​servant to the family by writing elegies on the Countess, her sister-​in-​law the Countess of Chesterfield, and Arthur Hildersham (d. 1632),72 the priest that the Earl had appointed to St Helen’s, Ashby-​de-​la-​Zouch. While we cannot fully delineate the relationship of Pestell and the Countess of Huntingdon in the 1620s and early 1630s, it is clear that her death in January 1634 robbed him of a significant supporter and prompted him to his richest work in the elegiac vein. Pestell most often expresses a supreme confidence in his poetic task, but in the first, introductory elegy he claims that he, being weak and old, had put poetry aside. He refers to his ‘sepulchred name (l. 6)’, clearly recalling Donne’s suggestion in ‘Obsequies to the Lord Harringtons brother’ that ‘in thy grave I doe interre my Muse’.73 However, here that interred Muse is brought back to life by the occasion of Huntingdon’s death. Feeling his insufficiency, Pestell calls for a great funeral elegist of the past: he invokes a tradition of elegists reaching back to Sidney, Beaumont, and the ‘Black prince of witts, ye most illustrious Dunn’.74 This reference to Donne recalls Carew’s reference to that poet’s ‘monarchy of wit’, and Pestell’s rhetoric likely owes something to the repeated use of this variant of the inability trope in the funeral elegies on Donne in the previous year’s first edition of his poetry.75 70 Pestell, Poems, p. 123. The scanty evidence on Catlin suggests that he was in service to the fifth earl at Ashby-​de-​la-​Zouch (Buchan, p. 116–​17). An Edward Catlin was at Lincoln’s Inn, ca. 1615. 71 Pestell, Poems, p. xxxiv. 72 On the Fifth Earl of Huntingdon’s patronage of Hildersham (also rendered ‘Hildersam’ and Hildesham’), see Cogswell, Home Divisions, p. 27. 73 Donne, Poems, p. 254, l. 256. 74 He also invokes ‘Careys glad muse (for he still survives /​And holds a lease of glorie for 4 lifes)’, but the reference is uncertain: it may be to Thomas Carew (who had just written his elegy on Donne) or Lucius Cary, his fellow elegist on Lady Huntingdon. (Pestell had connections to the Cary family, writing short poems on Victoria Cary and ‘Lord Falkland’, which as undated poems could be about Henry or his son Lucius.) 75 See Green, ‘ “A Tomb your Muse must to his Fame supply’, pp.  57–​86:  a further example of the continuing sense that Donne and Beaumont had established a benchmark that elegists of the 1630s could not match is found in an elegy on Thomas

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While the first elegy depends upon the inability trope, in the subsequent longer elegy Pestell confidently takes on the role of elegist. In a vigorous opening, he steps forth from his poetic grave to chase off unworthy poetic interlopers: I first was dead, now this glad vantage have Thus first to rise and walke about hir grave In a white sheet, & bearing in this hand A scourge of steele, in this a flaming brand Which apparition, frights to quick retyre All sinfull offrer’s off unhallowed fire (ll. 1–​6)

This is not just the funeral elegist engaging in satire, but the archetypal satirist figure defiantly presenting himself. The passage draws energy from this variant of the reluctant elegist trope, as it suggests that only the death of one as great as Huntingdon could raise the dead in this fashion, aptly armed with the satiric weapon of the scourge and the ‘flaming brand’ of a warrior angel. Pestell presents these poems as a time-​limited task, after which he will ‘return to former sleepe /​In grave obscur’d’ (ll. 26–​7). While the first elegy had created a poetic genealogy based upon Donne and Beaumont, in this poem Pestell aggressively distinguishes himself from living elegist-​rivals (and would-​be elegists), whom he subjects to savage satiric attack. Thus, he discourages other unworthy poets, and in his ghostly satirist role frightens off those       that wou’d here presume To shedd low rimes, in lamentable rheume: Restrain’s their Pleiades of froth that fall An extreame unction after funerall, Whose shortliv’d lines are lost infinities Each single word innumerable is Go shoot at common birds with easie bolts Runn your rough verses wheele which jumps & jolts Ore wombs of Aldermen outfac’d in brasse With here he lies, & just so old he was:76

This outspoken confidence is a striking contrast to the more usual topos that the elegist has stepped into the breach of neglect, that his or her meagre abilities are not worthy but someone must provide an elegy. The passage

Randolph (d. 1635) that opens with a gesture of self-​consciousness that points back to Donne’s death: ‘When Donne, and Beaumont dyed, an Epitaph /​Some men (I well remember) thought unsafe’. 76 ‘A second Elegie on the same’, Pestell, Poems, p. 8, ll. 7–​16. I suspect ‘wombs’ is an error for ‘tombs’ that occurred at some point in the transmission process.

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also rejects the more epitaph-​like compositions that marked so many deaths with the convention of ‘Here lies …’ and mere life chronicles. The rest of the poem develops an extended figure that recalls Donne’s complex argumentation. Huntingdon’s death begets a sea of mourning, presided over by Pestell, who compares himself to the ‘Joviall tyrant stork’ (l. 33) of the Aesopian fable, who will drive off the ‘paddock poets’ who would offer ‘slime for balme’ (ll. 20–​3). This poet intervenes to save the deceased from unworthy poems. The second elegy ends with an imagined heavenly triumvirate of ‘Elizabeths’: he pronounces that the name ‘Elizabeth’ will echo through all the world, while the Countess’ soul is placed Neare hirs, that late this kingdome rul’d & grac’d The next throne emptie for one living yett Beyond sea, far beyond my sea of witt. (ll. 66–​8)

By linking the Countess to Queen Elizabeth and Elizabeth of Bohemia, Pestell reaffirms her status while connecting her with royal figures distinct from the present English court.77 This reflects Pestell’s general tendency to erect pantheons of virtuous females; Falkland had sought to retrieve the Countess from the Puritans’ ‘Hierarchie’. Pestell’s hierarchy, in which she was the continuing figure, was neither ‘Puritan’ nor of the established church but fully his own –​and one which he zealously guarded from poetic rivals of whatever religious stripe. The sleeping but watchful shade of Pestell was roused once more to elegy by the death of the Countess of Huntingdon’s sister-​in-​law, Katherine, Countess of Chesterfield, some three years later.78 Here he returns to much of the same imagery and argument, as he warns away those Puritans who are suspicious of poetry and hence offer mere prose and rheum (i.e. tears, similarly dismissed in the second elegy to Huntingdon) upon ‘this noble Herse’ (l. 13). He likewise banishes the industrious but indiscriminate Sampson: Nor Silly Samson though in printed verse Prophane or touch hir glad enamour’d sheet With his affrighting and defiling feet. (ll. 14–​16)

Sampson’s Virtus post Funera vivit was published in April 1636 (hence just four months before the Countess’ death) and includes elegies on Charles 77 These lines recall ones in ‘Verses of the Countess of Huntington’, where he suggests ‘That next to God, & his bright Mother Mayde;  /​I  shall doe reverence to her in Heaven’ (pp. 60–​1). 78 Pestell, Poems, p. 11. Pestell had also written a verse epistle to Chesterfield in 1615, when she was staying at Twickenham, the home of Lucy, Countess of Bedford; Poems, pp. 17–​19.

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and Henry Stanhope, sons of the Countess of Chesterfield. Pestell mockingly reapplies the language of Calvinist theology to this poetic rival:  his opponents’ verses on Chesterfield are ‘reprobate’ (l. 23) and ‘praedestinate to flames unseene’ (l. 25), while his are ‘in state of Grace’ (l. 24). Against such inferior rivals, Pestell presents himself with ‘right thunder proofe’ laurel (l. 18) as a contrast. He claims a duty to commemorate, with his ‘powerfull art to frame a herse /​Past brasse or marble’ (ll. 41–​2), but once again with a strong sense of his worthiness to do so. There are no ‘forc’d fingers rude’ here. However, this endeavour is not solitary but shared with elegists whose deaths have removed them as immediate rivals. He imagines himself building with Donne and Beaumont a monument to female virtue: he dismisses Egyptian monuments and the accomplishments of Ovid (Heroides) and Chaucer (The House of Fame) as he erects for his ‘St Katherine’ a temple worthy of her memory. He will be the ‘Arche-​Flamen here till I  preferre  /​ What dames I list to this high sepulcher’ (ll. 51–​2). Hither he invokes those female figures who have been celebrated in earlier English elegies: Come glorious Drury Donns eternall mayde, Those three Franke Beaumont buried here be layd, Hither transporte their Urnes, and gladly meet, Rutland the fayre, Markham & Clifton sweet. With famous Arden79 late enterrd too low Whom thus I raise and here with theise bestow. (ll. 53–​8)

The last two lines of this passage suggest that his earlier funeral elegy on Arden was insufficient, that she should now take a place in the more ambitious temple of worthy women that he is constructing. Pestell also adds ‘My owne two soveraigne sister Paralells’, that is, the sisters-​in-​law, ladies Chesterfield and Huntingdon. The confidence is striking, for unlike in the elegy on Huntingdon, he here considers himself the primary builder of poetic commemoration, within which frame those earlier marked by Donne and Beaumont will find a place. The lines are also very self-​congratulatory for a funeral elegy: Pestell glories that his pen has such power ‘to make them [i.e. the two countesses] mine agen’ (l. 62). The poem concludes with the trope (to be more fully discussed in this book’s coda) that the deceased may become the subject of redirected religious veneration: Bow pilgrimes to these tombes, for here shall rise Cleare dropps to purge all redd disdainfull eyes 79 Arden (d. 1625) was the widow of Sir Henry Arden of Curdworth, Warwickshire, daughter to Basil Feilding, and sister to William, Earl of Denbigh. No other funeral elegy on Arden is known.

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Restore health, beauty bounty, fame & witt Above all spawes; a potent water fitt To wash St Winefride, false Crossed cure Make Nunneries, pipers, theives, ranke Pur’tans pure. Haile you fresh Hallowes, in whose names we now Double our Rubriques; double Feasts allow, And you whose bloods matchd theise two Royall things Scorne not the Muses Hymne, nor him that sings And will be thus your preist to embalme & shrine St Elsabeth, & holy Katherine. (ll. 81–​92)

Pestell performs the part of the presiding priest, offering ‘ave’s to the saints he himself has newly canonized, and calling upon other would-​be worshippers. In this process of imagined veneration, Pestell engages in further religious satire as he suggests that their saintly power will make even ‘Nunneries’ and ‘ranke Pur’tans pure’ (l.  86). Most significantly, however, Pestell presents himself as fulfilling a new role within the Huntingdon circle:  as in the Huntingdon elegy, he serves as the attendant priest at this shrine and in that capacity hopes that his Muse is not scorned by the surviving family members. Any such patronage was not to be assumed:  a well-​documented series of Pestell’s conflicts with the Earl survives,80 and the later 1630s increasingly saw him turning to the royal court for patronage. In a decade when English Protestantism was riven by questions of ceremony, Pestell courts controversy by creating his own rites celebrating his patron. Where elegists of dead women often treated them as saint-​like figures, deservedly ranked in heaven, none do it in as ostentatious and scandal-​courting way as Pestell.

Conclusion Andrea Brady is partly right in her suggestion that ‘elegies for women often focus on their families and on their faithfulness and virtues, rather than on their more specific qualities’.81 However, emphasis must be laid on the word ‘often’, and Brady herself follows up this sentence with a description of a manuscript elegy on Cecilia Ridgeway, Countess of Londonderry (d. 1627) that offers a far more detailed description of character and activities than was usual.82

80 See Pestell, Poems, Appendix B, p.  127; Cogswell, Home Divisions, pp.  99–​100; Haigh, ‘The Troubles of Thomas Pestell’, p. 411. 81 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, p. 15. 82 ‘Heere lyes Cicilia; the Noble Countesse of Londondery’, Leicestershire Record Office DE 728.970.

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I would also suggest that the circumstances of death (as with Venetia Digby) and the cultural prominence of the deceased (like Elizabeth, Countess of Huntingdon) could prompt far more adventurous and unlikely elegies. This chapter has been, like the book in general, necessarily selective, and I  have chosen the boldest examples. Counter-​ examples must be acknowledged:  Robert Codrington made rather a William Sampson-​like career in composing extended but staid funeral elegies on 1630s noblewomen, most of which survive in fine manuscript presentation copies. Certainly, the character of the poet has much to do with extending the bounds of the genre: the satiric temperament of Pestell sets his funeral elegies apart, and the roughness of them seems appropriate to poems that are as much satire as elegy. He, like Falkland, and like some of those who stepped forward to defend Venetia Digby, found scope to follow the ‘unruly muse’ that funeral elegy allows.

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From robe to winding sheet: funeral elegies on churchmen and scholars

While scholars and churchmen might seem to enjoy quiet lives and pious deaths unripe for contentious elegies, a significant number of them in the early Stuart period provoked daring poetic reflections. In some cases, their deaths prompted lament over the present state of the church (a pattern best known in the St Peter section of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’); in others, the theology or scholarship of the deceased left a controversial legacy; or their memory was contested, as various factions competed to claim them as their own. This chapter opens with a general discussion of the composition of these elegies, particularly in university-​based collections, and examples of satiric digression. A published Oxford volume marked the death of the Merton College scholar Henry Savile, but it prompted a vigorous manuscript response that laid open the questions surrounding such volumes. The death of Bishop John King (1620) provides an example of a contested memory, where his elegists were compelled to defend his Protestant orthodoxy. In the final part of the chapter, I break from my focus on named figures to consider the richly satiric elegy on an unnamed churchman, ‘What need I speak’. There is a certain logic in treating churchmen and scholars (including students) within a single chapter. While not all early Stuart academics were churchmen and not all churchmen were deeply committed to scholarship, there was significant overlap between the two groups. In the early seventeenth century, although many attended the English universities with no intention of entering the church and often took no degree, the primary function of Oxford and Cambridge was still to educate clergymen for the Church of England. Furthermore, the vast majority of tutors, fellows, and professors at Oxford and Cambridge were in holy orders,1 and the academic atmosphere was a semi-​clerical one. In addition, the college and the parish church provided similar contexts:  a natural, limited community within which the death of an individual took place. 1 Henry Savile was in fact one of the rare exceptions.

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The universities were also significant for the history of funeral elegies as they were the greatest producers of commemorative volumes (manuscript or print) of largely Latin funeral elegies. As briefly discussed in Chapter 3, university poets would invariably produce these on the deaths of royal figures and other royal occasions. However, at least as many were compiled to honour members of the universities themselves. Those commemorated might be students, professors, graduates, or patrons; and more often than with elegies on other categories of people, they survive in gatherings, either in manuscript or in print. Through the 1620s, Latin was the default medium for these commemorative volumes (although a few included Greek and even Hebrew poems), but slowly some English poems came to be included as well.2 (By far the best known of these is Justo Eduardo King in 1638, because it includes Milton’s ‘Lycidas’.) Students from the college of the deceased wrote most of the elegies in these volumes, with a few poems by more established figures (college masters, professors, fellows, and alumni) appearing at the beginning of the volume.3 Commemorative volumes, whether in print or in manuscript, generally had what we might call a ‘convenor’ who solicited and arranged the contributions (and who usually was usually himself a contributor). Scattered evidence also suggests that the convenor sometimes allowed contributors to see the work of others as they composed.4 The universities, and more particularly their individual colleges, formed sharply defined, continuing communities that highly valued epideictic rhetoric. Thus, they constituted natural sites for the production of funeral elegies, and there was a strong sense of a duty to respond with volumes of elegies on the death of notable academics and churchmen. A  manuscript elegy on Rev. Ambrose Fisher (d.  1617) condemns the non-​response of Cambridge and Oxford: two dull Academyes may yow never / know how to speake, may yor wing’d muses ever / prove haggards to yow henceforth may yor brayn / never exceed a balladmongers vaine / If in a subject, course, and time soe fitt / Yow bridle in yor tongues your Muse yor witt5

2 Among the richest in English poetry is Death Repeal’d (1638) on Paul, Viscount Bayning. 3 Brady, English Funeral Elegy, p. 20. A few volumes reverse this hierarchical order, with the elite figures appearing at the end. 4 For example, an elegy in a manuscript gathering on Atherton Bruch (d.  1631) concludes: An Academye celebrates in teares, ffor t’is a Bruch (reader) wouldst thou have more Let others speake his vertue i’le adore (Bodl. Ashmole MS 47, fol. 62r) 5 Bodl. Rawl. poet. MS 160, fol. 10v.

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In the case of well-​ established scholars and churchmen, their subjects were also figures who had been deeply involved in rhetorical display, who had represented at times a version of themselves for public consideration. Regarding William Lewis’s funeral elegy on Roger Fenton (d. 1616), Tom Lockwood writes, ‘Lewis’s poem is aware of the parallel between its own audience as elegy, and audiences to Fenton’s preaching that it remembers and half-​creates’.6 The elegists were of the same social group as the deceased, which creates a very different dynamic than an elegy on a royal figure or military hero, from whom the poet is removed by vocation. Their elegies marked the death of one of themselves: as Milton puts it in ‘Lycidas’, the elegist and subject were ‘nurst upon the self-​same hill  /​Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill’ (23–​24). Part of their elegiac duty was to continue the scholarship or ministry that the dead had left behind. In this way they are like ‘Critical elegies’ (elegies on other poets), in which Andrea Brady notes elegists positioned themselves as heirs to the dead poets they commemorated.7 Given a shared educational background, a certain uniformity of style and substance in university collections of funeral elegies is understandable. The production of students’ verses on a common theme had deep roots in the educational culture of England. Already during their time at schools such as Westminster and Eton, students regularly wrote Latin verses on a set theme in which they displayed their mastery of rhetorical techniques and drew upon the wisdom they had gained from their reading in classical texts. Thus, elegies on academic and clerical figures tended strongly to the formulaic: senior figures were celebrated for their impact on generations of students and parishioners, and for their effect on both the local community and the nation. The community might now be like Israel in the wilderness without its Moses, as in the elegy on Rev. Richard Rogers (d. 1618): Alas therfore what shall we doe   Our Moses cannot crie Nor stand up in the gapp to stay   Gods judgements when they flie. How shall we passe to Canaan now   The wildernesse is wide Soe full of Tygers, Beares & Wolves   And many a beast besyde8

6 Tom Lockwood, ‘Poetry, Patronage and Cultural Agency:  The Career of William Lewis’, in Hugh Adlington et al. (eds), Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 103–​22. 7 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 134–​5. 8 BL Harl. MS 1598, fol. 9v–​11r. Rogers was the priest of Wetherfield, Essex.

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As in ‘Lycidas’, elegists lamented students for what they would have become, for the loss to the future life of college, church, or even nation. Frequent was the conceit that in their unexpected maturity, Death had mistaken them for the ripe fruits of old age.

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Satiric digression I now turn to those funeral elegies on churchmen and scholars that move beyond the formulaic, especially through satiric digression or response to other elegies and memorial forms. Among those from the first decade of the century, Richard Corbett’s on Thomas Ravis, Bishop of London (d. 1609), impresses with its playful inventiveness. His elegy on Prince Henry quarrelled with the rival form of the funeral (and anniversary) sermon (Chapter 1); in this case, Corbett contests the lavish tombs granted to others in St Paul’s Cathedral, the physical setting of the poem. He describes the cathedral as the site of popular experience, where newsmongers and bankrupts consort. It feels like the world of a Donne satire:  the speaker goes through Paul’s walk, the denizens of which he satirizes in the process, towards Ravis’ effigy (or perhaps the body itself). The formulation here –​the speaker ‘then beheld the Body of my Lord’ –​conflates the dead bishop with Christ, particularly Christ as present in the bread of communion. The irony is that the remains of this holy man rest in so unholy a space, ‘Trodd under foote by vice that he abhorr’d’ (l. 6). Corbett satirizes the living as they fall short of the virtues of the worthy dead.9 The elegy’s focus is the tomb, but the poem does not itself become epitaphic. Rather, it engages in some of the usual tropes of how an ornate tomb is unnecessary, but with a vigour and freshness that sets it apart. While elegies in general often dismiss the ostentation of funerary monument, such was particularly pronounced in the cases of scholars and churchmen, whom it was felt should be above such physical concerns.10 Rather than merely general references to statues and monuments, Corbett calls such things ‘Bubbles, and Alablaster-​ Boyes’, and he derides ‘hired Epitaphs, and perjur’d stone’. He pushes the trope further when he suggests that those who have such tombs must hope that at Doomsday, God might mistakenly judge the contrived image of them rather than the reality (l. 32). The poem ends with a contrast to the specific tomb of Sir Christopher 9 The allusion is to Jonah 4:6–​10. 10 A particular style of ‘scholar monument’ emerged in the late sixteenth century:  it showed ‘the deceased as an upright half-​ effigy engaged in reading, teaching or preaching’, a style which emphasized his life of the mind and language (Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, p. 150).

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Hatton (a favoured courtier of Queen Elizabeth, d. 1591) in St Paul’s, which was widely derided for its excessive size and ornateness.11 While Corbett’s is a witty and striking poem, it is not completely removed from the university volumes discussed above: Corbett had come to know Ravis a decade earlier at Christ Church, Oxford, where Ravis was Dean. Christ Church overshadowed other Oxford colleges in the production of funeral elegies, whether in Latin or English, in manuscript or printed volumes.12 Ravis was among the highest churchmen in the land, but there were also, at times, elegiac outpourings for mere students. Such was the case with the death of the Christ Church student John Stanhope in 1623, which led to the published volume Funerall elegies (1624). This university volume is unusual in that English and Latin elegies are completely mixed together:  often an English poem follows a Latin one (or vice versa) by the same poet. One poem from this collection, by Edward Radcliffe, is also found in a large number of manuscripts: although it begins with mundane convention (death mistook the young Stanhope because of his unusual maturity), it rises to something more compelling in its second half, which juxtaposes the typical triviality of student pursuits with the intense intellectual habits of Stanhope. This is the same rhetoric of exceptionality outlined in the preceding chapter, where an elegy praises one woman (the deceased) in contrast to all others. Here the poet derides ‘the common nobler sort’ of student whose goal at the university is only to fashionably wear ‘a gaudye gowne’, play tennis, fence, dance, make music, ‘learne the colledges’, and gather a few jests for future use.13 In contrast to such desultory behaviour, the poet offers a vivid vision of Stanhope in his study: Thy studies were more serious as thy lookes whilst others bandied thou was tossing bookes, Busied in papers & collecting there gemms to sticke in thy mind not in thy eare Me thincks I see the yet close by thy selfe reaching some choice booke, from thy furnisht shelfe loose the silke strings: and wth a willing paine to read, & thinke, and write, & read againe14

Striking here is the carefully detailed description of his taking the book and loosening its strings. These are physical actions, but all preparatory to the deep thought presented in the final line, where the polysyndeton and repetition 11 See Doelman, The Epigram in England, pp. 328–​30. 12 See Marotti, ‘ “Rolling Archetypes” ’. 13 In his elegy on the death of Jonas Radcliffe of University College, Oxford (presumably a relation), the poet praises the Fellows of the college in that they did not promote vice by being indulgent towards ‘the nobler breed’. 14 Bodl. MS Don. d. 58, fol. 7r–​v, ll. 32–​9.

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capture the slow deliberation of deep study.15 The poem becomes an effective satire of typical elite behaviour at Oxford and a vivid representation of Stanhope as a worthwhile contrast. In Radcliffe’s elegy on Stanhope the satiric dimension was limited, and this chapter now turns to poems in which dissension, controversy, satire, and political comment are far more central to the elegiac enterprise.

Henry Savile The polymathic nature of scholarship in the period meant that elegists might celebrate the dead for accomplishments in a wide range of fields. Thus, Henry Savile (d.  1622), provost of Eton and warden of Merton College, Oxford, was renowned as an astronomer, mathematician, rhetorician, and translator of Tacitus, St Chrysostom, and the Bible, and the elegies on his death touch on these to varying degrees. His funerary monument at Merton was the culmination of an involved, and ultimately competitive, set of funerary rites that greeted his death. While Savile left £200 for his funeral, his burial at Eton was a simple, night-​time rite, according to one report to ‘save expense’.16 However, some of those funds may have gone to pay for a richly coloured hanging wall monument to him in Merton College chapel. It includes an allegorical figure of Fame above, and to the sides St Chrysostom, Ptolemy, Euclid, and Tacitus, reflecting his range of knowledge.17 His funeral oration was delivered by the deputy orator of the university, Thomas Goffe of Christ Church. 15 John Wall’s funeral sermon on Stanhope also includes a description of his study: ‘After his departure, I  had the perusal of his studie. O that I  had heer to shew you the writings and collections that he had made in Grammar, Rhetorique, Poetrie, Logique, Philosophie, Heraldy, Geographie, which these eies have seen; yea, & in Divinity a little book, which he intended to dedicate to his Lady-​Mother!’; A sermon preached at Shelford, in Nottinghamshire on the death of … M.  Iohn Stanhope (1623), sig. C4v. It is probable that one influenced the other, but which was first is not clear. 16 George Carleton, Bishop of Chichester, to Sir Dudley Carleton, 1 April 1622, TNA SP 14/​129/​1. 17 See Stefanie A.  Knöll, Creating Academic Communities:  Funeral Monuments to Professors at Oxford, Leiden and Tübingen, 1580–​1700 ([Haren, the Netherlands]: Equilibris, 2003), pp.  301–​3, 337, 429. She asserts that it was rare for a scholar to be commemorated in two separate places (there was also a simpler memorial at Eton) (p. 303). While this may be of true of scholars, it did occur with some regularity among the secular elite; I.  M.  Green, Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education (Aldershot, Hampshire:  Ashgate, 2009), p.  352. Peter Sherlock, Monuments and Memory, p.  146, suggests that Savile’s monument may have been influenced by that to his friend, Sir Thomas Bodley, in the same chapel, which depicted the seven liberal arts.

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Further contributing to this wide-​ranging commemoration was a major volume of funeral elegies published at Oxford; its very title, Ultima Linea Savilii, reflects Savile’s scholarly work on geometry, and plays on the common conceit of the individual life as a thread (‘linea’ can mean ‘thread’, ‘string’, or ‘line’).18 Ultima Linea shows the broadest range of languages among these university volumes: while the vast majority of poems are Latin, there are also ones in Greek, Hebrew, and English (printed in Gothic type). The volume draws its contributors from across the university, but nearly half are of Christ Church; the only other college with more than five is Savile’s own Merton. Some of the contributors were (or at least became) fairly prominent: William Strode produced a significant body of poetry in Christ Church circles in the 1620s and 1630s; Degory Wheare was Camden Professor of history, Edward Lapworth professor of natural philosophy, and William Piers the vice-​chancellor of the University. However, my focus is on the controversy stirred by this publication and a group of manuscript poems that respond to it. Exceptional among funeral elegies in the period, the three surviving manuscript funeral elegies on Savile all respond to Ultima linea Savilii, and as such they demonstrate the dynamics surrounding the publication of university memorial volumes in the period.

‘Great Tacitus’ The satiric intention of the manuscript elegy that begins ‘Great Tacitus I must lament thy fall’ is signalled in its title, which functions primarily as a description of context:  ‘Sir Raignolds. Christ Church poetical fantastic brains made tragical verses on the death of Sir Henry Savile. These censure them for it.’19 It is not clear whether ‘Sir Raignolds’ refers to the author of these verses or to one associated with Ultima Linea, and the only knighted ‘Reynolds’ from the period is a Sir Thomas of Devon for whom there is no obvious connection to Savile. It is possible that the ‘Sir’ is a mocking term of address and that the poet intends Edwards Reynolds of Merton College, who was heavily involved in Oxford commemorative volumes.20 The reference 18 In George Chapman’s Tragedy of Chabot, the Proctor-​ General refers to ‘death, which all know to be ultima linea’ (3.2.67–​8), in The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies with Sir Gyles Goosecappe, ed. Allan Holaday (Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1987). 19 Folger MS V.a.345, p. 87. 20 This Reynolds had gained his BA from Merton in 1618 and was to receive his MA in 1624; he later became Warden of Merton (1660) and Bishop of Norwich (1661). He is known for many poetic translations from the classics and contributed to the Oxford volume on Queen Anne’s death, Annae funebria sacra Academiae Oxoniensis (1619), and the volume on Charles’ return from Spain in 1623, Carolus redux ex Hispania (1623).

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to ‘Christ Church’ in the title also deserves comment: while Savile was of Merton College, Thomas Goffe, of Christ Church and the deputy orator of the university, delivered the funeral oration,21 and, as noted above, Christ Church dominated the elegies in Ultima Linea. ‘Great Tacitus’ begins with the conceit that Savile, as one who had made Tacitus live again, deserves another Tacitus, not the mere scholar-​poets of Ultima Linea, to mark his own death. Rather than such appropriate classical markers, Savile is subject ‘To the ambition of each scribling boy’ (l. 14), and hence murdered a ‘second time in verse’ (a not uncommon conceit for those maligning elegiac competitors). Those attempts, this poem avers, were not compelled by grief or proper respect, but by ‘pride and rapture’ (l. 24), and the results were so horrid that foreknowledge of them might have compelled Death (unusually represented as female) to spare Savile. As in some of the elegies on Prince Henry, we see here the degree of competition within what were supposed to be unified communities of mourning.22 This competitiveness might even take a physical form:  Andrea Brady quotes the father of John Friend, at whose collegiate funeral ‘severall Schollers of other houses tore the Verses of the Cloth (which I took to be a piece of Rudenes but it seemes it is usuall)’.23 This abuse of the juvenile attempts of Ultima Linea dominates ‘Great Tacitus’, although the poet finds scope to note briefly the quietness of Savile’s death. However, the commemorative goals of the poem are limited: it hopes to ‘give a lasting breath /​At once to others wrongs & to thy death’ (l. 44). And rather than the more conventional straying into satire and then return, ‘Great Tacitus’ ends with a claim for the propriety of marking Savile’s death with satire: ‘Greif commends other men. but he hath best /​Learned to please thee, that can turne Sataryst’ (ll. 45–​6).

‘When Learned Savill’ Like ‘Great Tacitus’, the funeral elegy ‘When learned Savill’ mocks the youthful ‘raptures’ of those mourning Savile. However, this poem offers a more extended description of their attempts as it engages, primarily through satiric rejection, with individual poems in the volume. The elegy

21 It was printed at the beginning of Ultima Linea Savilii. 22 On the competitive nature of Justa Edouardo King, see David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 275–​85. 23 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, p. 65, quoting Bodl. Top. Oxon. f. 31, p. 227. Brady provides no date for this funeral, but as John Friend, son of Nathaniel, matriculated in 1672, it would be a few years after that.

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seems to explore an unfolding process of poetic treatment of Savile’s illness and death. The first twenty lines respond to youthful verses written when Savile was sick but the efforts of the physician temporarily raised hope. The young poets felt their role was ‘to racke & stretch their powers /​In natures restauration’; frustrated in the failure of this, they lament all the more, but in ways that ‘Explaine their loves, yet not expresse their skills’, as the poet neatly puts it in parallel form. Hence, unlike in ‘Great Tacitus’ and many other cases, the poet does not question the sincerity of mourners, but he mocks their lack of poetic craft to offer a fitting rhetorical display. However, another sort of ‘Artist’ –​presumably a physician –​offers a further hope to grasp, represented in language and imagery that recalls Savile’s own scholarly interest in geometry. Further, it mocks the title of Ultima Linea, as it plays upon the idea of an artificial line that the artist attempted to add to the ‘threadbare clue’ of Savile’s life: Yet to delay his death & drie their cries Wth some small hopes some skillfull Artist tries for when he wellenigh had drawne out ye line Of his prefixed fate, this strives to joyne Lines artificiall to ye threadbare clue (ll. 13–​17)

The final section of ‘When learned Savill’ becomes more specific in directly responding to the verses produced by William Piers that prominently stand at the front of the volume.24 Thus sobd they forth their griefe untill their teares Did stretch themselves unto ones friendlie eares Who quickelie moved by a just compassion Did turne their Savill to a Constellation Where golden Lira makes ye sparkeling skie To Eccho forth enchanting harmonie. To these sweete tones ye Muses stretch their throates To augment his passion wth their sugred notes. (ll. 33–​40)

As vice-​chancellor, Piers was by far the most distinguished contributor to the volume, one whom younger members of the university might echo.25 Further, his second poem ‘De Stella, quae fuit in constellatione Cassiopeiae & iamdudum disparuit’ is an epigram that plays with the stellification of

24 The centrality of Piers for the venture seems to be confirmed by the Latin poem of James Marsh, where he refers to the poetic mourners as ‘omnesque cohortes/​Pieridum’, which means both ‘all the cohorts of the Muses’ and ‘all the cohorts of Piers’; sig. E2v. 25 Ultima Linea concludes with a number of poems by prominent university professors; I suspect that these were a late addition to the work.

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Savile: ‘Astronomi Quaerunt stellam, quae condita; reddit /​Savilius Stellam (Cassiopaea) tuam’ (The astronomers sought a star, which was hidden; Savile restored your star (Cassiopeia)).26 Piers’ epigram builds its conceit upon a fifty-​year-​old astronomical phenomenon: in 1572 the famous Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (d.  1601) noticed a ‘nova’ star in the constellation Cassiopeia;27 after two years it disappeared again, but it was named in honour of Brahe. Piers’ conceit is that it now has reappeared with the ‘stellification’ of Savile, who in the early 1570s had been the leading English astronomer.28 ‘When learned Savill’ begins its reference to the stars with mockery of Piers’ use of the conceit, but then transforms this to a positive extension of that same conceit in the lines that follow. He argues that the addition of Savile to the night sky has made it brighter than the day, to the envy of Phoebus. The final lines seem straightforward, conventional panegyric, unlike the firm adoption of the satirist role at the end of ‘Great Tacitus’. Overall the elegy functions as a redemption of the poetic attempts made by the writers of Ultima Linea rather than a simple rejection.

‘Adored Ghost’ In contrast to the two manuscript elegies discussed above, ‘Adored Ghost, or wt ere doth remaine’ more fully explores what the loss of Savile means for the nation. However, it does so by quietly responding to the criticism of the boyish mourning of the university volume, and in the process manifests great anxiety about the potential ‘commonness’ of poetic grief. In Folger MS V.a.345, the poem is entitled ‘Mr Marsh, on Sr Henry Savil’; other manuscripts offer no further evidence, but it seems very likely that the poem is by James Marsh, who had become a fellow of Merton College in 1613 and had contributed a long Latin elegy to Ultima Linea.29 The English poem seems to have been written after the publication of Ultima Linea and in response to the sort of criticism found in the two poems discussed above.

26 This epigram also appears in Folger MS V.a.510, ser. 1, pt. 2, fol. 200. 27 See his De nova et nullius aevi memoria prius visa stella (1573). 28 On Savile’s astronomical scholarship, see M.  Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship:  Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–​ 1640 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 47–​8, and 124–​31, and R. D. Goulding, ‘Henry Savile and the Tychonic world system’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995), pp. 152–​79. 29 Marsh had a relatively successful church career, becoming Doctor of Divinity in 1630, rector of Chingford, Essex, and vicar of Cuckfield, Sussex, and ultimately archdeacon of Chichester in 1639.

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Marsh first offers a defence of public poetic mourning, and explicitly refutes the common assertion that true grief is silent: Adored Ghost, or wt ere doth remaine Of thy best reliques Savil yet unslaine suffer our il-​bred sorrow for to speake And ease it selfe in language. Tis not weake And undervalued greife alone affords The use of wit, of reason, or of words, Great sorrowes may be pious, yet allow sence of our greife, and voice too expresse them too.30

In the passage that follows, Marsh both sets up a rivalry of grieving, where expression of Savile’s virtues through public lament is the best service, and acknowledges the relative immaturity of the young competitors in grief of Ultima Linea: He then laments thee (Savil) best that showes Thy honour to the world and speakes our woes Although (I must confesse) we can as yet But dally wth our sorrowes and our wit Playes smal game wth our losse, thy fate wee mourne (ll. 11–​15)

While the poets of Ultima Linea may only be capable of ‘dallying’ (a word also used by Milton in ‘Lycidas’ to describe the imagining of a flowery hearse for the absent body of Edward King), and ‘play[ing] smal game’, such is still an appropriate honouring of the worthy Savile. More importantly, for Marsh it is anticipatory of a full understanding of the significance of Savile’s death. His main point is not that the youthfulness of the contributors warrants acceptance of their limitations, but that all articulated grief at this time is limited: only the future will show what was lost with the death of Savile. The poem’s emphasis on the future, one that will be the worse for the absence of Savile, markedly diverges from the funeral elegy tradition, which generally looks backwards and traces the earthly accomplishments of the dead, or looks forwards only to imagine the dead in heaven or at the Resurrection. This poem is striking for its full imagining of a dire English future without Savile. Marsh presents this first through an extended simile in which he compares Savile’s death to a shipwreck: Much as in shipwrack of some rich returne. We know not wt wee have lost, & as tis there what was of sleight account, & slender ware Is quickly seen disboweld up againe

30 Folger MS V.a.345, p. 85, ll. 1–​8.

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But things that are of waight & price, remaine And must expect some greater tide, before The sea can goods of such a masse restore So heer we can as yet but only see what was of cheape and common garbe in thee what popular and of an easy raine (ll. 16–​25)

The ware of greater value is sunk deep, beyond the knowledge of loss, and present grieving only touches on that which is ‘common’, a word that recurs throughout the lines that follow. This section also fully accepts the limited and premature (rather than immature) poetic grieving of Ultima Linea: These graces are to big for common fame To tel the worlde, these secrets of thy name wee must expect and waite, and then shal see when wee are past our teares minority wee are as yet but learners, and lament In common Notions, wise, learn’d, Innocent He was, at length our riper age shal know Better distinguist teares, and as wee grow In yeares, so shal we wiser in our losses Each day improve our sorrowes & our crosses Our teares are yet but prophecyes wt wee foresee (ll. 29–​39)

Phrases such as ‘our teares minority’, ‘learners’, and ‘riper age’ acknowledge the mocking charges laid in ‘Great Tacitus’ and ‘When learned Savill’, but the passage presents this immaturity as part of a process, as prophetic of greater sorrows to come as the poetic mourners ‘know /​Better distinguist teares’ and grow wiser in years and sorrows. This passage reorients the tradition by denying the temporal immediacy of death as the prompter of elegiac grief (i.e. that the elegist ‘Kindles his bright flame at the Funerall fire’,31 as Browne puts it in his elegy on Overbury). ‘Adored ghost’ also constitutes a defence, of not just Ultima Linea but the whole tradition of university volumes of funeral elegies: however routine and limited they may be, they appropriately perform a step in the developing ritual of mourning. They are the beginning of mourning, not its end. When they ‘Grow up in sorrow’, the mourners shall recognize very specifically the high cost in the death of Savile, and such will not be private grief or even that of the university community, but public and national loss: Hear after when the state shal be at stand In some new point of consultation, and

31 William Browne, Poems, ed. Gordon Goodwin, 2 vols, vol. 2 (London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1893), p. 261, l. 8.

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The counsel shal require som able man To tel what former times have don or can Be paraleld from story, when church men Shal meet wth corrupt fathers, and no men T’affront bold Romes impostures, when ye poore Though learned stand wth Homer at the doore And be neglected, whilst some nobles hand [‘Wth Cabalisting lres shall command]32 Preferment for his kinsman or Ally Scarce good enough to looke [on] or stand by. When as the times, shal ask a man that dares Be dangerously honest, that nere cares What price his vertues cost him, that can speak A33 free defending truth, although t’shal breake The neck of’s future hopes, and cal each thing (Beet good or bad) by its name, though to the king when such sad trials shal require great spirits Men of more daring vertues, bolder merits Then shal we know the (Savil) and shal more Honour thy goodnes then wee did before. Then shal we truly mourne and send late teares Better proportion’d to our woes and feares (ll. 46–​69)

Rather than articulating the present corruptions that the deceased leaves behind (so frequent in the elegies of the period), this poem anticipates a future corrupt state in which the nation finally recognizes the loss of Savile. Nor will his absence be marked in only one sphere: his expertise in law, statecraft, and religious knowledge will all be missed, a reaffirmation of the breadth of his skills noted at the beginning of this section. Savile’s historical knowledge would have offered parallels from the past to instruct the present, which is what some recognized in his Tacitus, which offers an unspoken affirmation of the Earl of Essex.34 In this way he was one that ‘dare[d]‌ /​Be dangerously honest’. His scholarly expertise in theology would have recognized ‘Romes impostures’ in their corrupting the writings of the Church Fathers. 32 This line does not appear in the Folger V.a.345 text but is supplied from Bodl. Ashmole MS 47. 33 ‘A’ is supplied from Ashmole 47; Folger V.a.345 has ‘As’, clearly a scribal error. 34 That Savile was close to Essex in the 1590s would have encouraged the recognition of such a parallel. He was briefly taken into custody at the time of the Earl’s rebellion. See G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, A History of Merton College, Oxford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 171–​2. On the significance of Tacitus for the period, see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169–​88.

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His absence would also have been felt when unworthy scholars were promoted and then, most significantly in the political sphere, as his historically informed counsel was lost. Through these anticipated moments, the elegist offers a model of the needed outspokenness (parrhesia) of the public man. Such amounts to a critique of the court, where rare is the man, as the poem strikingly puts it, ‘that dares /​Be dangerously honest’, who is willing to put aside favour to speak ‘free defending truth’. Marsh presents that loss with an odd metaphor: such parrhesia ‘shal breake /​The neck of’s future hopes’. It is a striking metaphor because such outspokenness in the court might actually collapse the tenor and vehicle of the trope: it may be not only the bold man’s ‘hope’ whose neck is broken in speaking unwelcome truths to the King, but his physical neck on the gallows or scaffold. Was Savile really such a man? Or was his death an occasion to imagine a worthy public voice in a time when corruption seemed everywhere? The years 1620–​22 saw growing public frustration with the direction of court policy, the expanding power of the Duke of Buckingham, and, most particularly, the shutting down of the 1621 Parliament by the King. John Chamberlain’s account of Savile’s final illness in a letter to Sir Dudley Carleton (Savile’s son-​in-​law) suggests that the perspective urged by Marsh is consistent with Savile’s own views: Sir Henry Savile went to Eaton on Wensday in weake case, but well resolved in mind, and willing to depart when yt shall please God to call, the rather he sayes for that having lived in goode times he doth feare or foresee worse.35

The poem echoes something of the outsider satirist perspective found in the well-​known George Wither, who had achieved public prominence (once again) in 1621 for his Motto, in which he claimed ‘Nec careo’ –​I do not care what happens to me, I will speak the truth. I have emphasized the unusualness of this elegy’s defence, but the collection of elegies (in BL Harl. MS 3910)  that marked the death of Sir Thomas Murray (d.  1623), who had been the tutor and then secretary to Prince Charles, present something similar. These elegies, written when English fears of a Spanish Match were at their height, consistently praise Murray for his outspoken guidance of the Prince, which the King had rejected in favour of those like Buckingham. These poems also lament the future sufferings of Prince and nation caused by the loss of such daring loyalty.36 Overall, Marsh’s poem offers a bridge between the undeveloped and at times perfunctory Latin elegies of Ultima 35 16 Feb. 1621/​22, Letters, vol. 2, p. 424. 36 For a full discussion, see James Doelman (with Andrew Dunning), ‘ “The Daring Pen of Sorrow’: Elegies on the Death of Thomas Murray (1564–​1623)’, Seventeenth Century 34:1 (2018), pp. 27–​63.

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Linea and the full-​throated political commentary of the outspoken funeral elegy of the 1620s by looking forward: ‘Then shal we truly mourne and send late teares /​Better proportion’d to our woes and feares’ (ll. 68–​9).

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John King While the poetic mourners of Saville quarrelled over who was worthy to commemorate him, the death of John King, Bishop of London, was followed by a contest over his soul. He died on 30 March 1621 (Good Friday), after long suffering from kidney stones; his burial in St Paul’s Cathedral took place the next night with markedly little ceremony.37 King himself had instructed his family to provide a simple service and a plain tomb with ‘Resurgam’ (I shall rise) as the only epitaph. However, in the year following his death, many more words –​both at his tomb and beyond –​were offered to commemorate him, as his legacy and reputation became the contested matter of rumours, religious tracts, a sermon by his son –​the churchman and poet Henry King –​ and a significant number of elegies and other poems. Of special interest are the elegies, mounted in Latin beside his tomb and then circulated by manuscript in English form. I suspect that Henry King is the author of these ‘St Paul’s’ poems.38 Henry King is known as the author of a separate elegy, ‘Sad Relick of a Blessed Soule!’, which he must have written shortly after his father’s death and burial. Margaret Crum dates this poem to the late 1630s,39 but as I have shown in the Introduction, most funeral elegies were written within a few weeks of the subject’s death, and the poem’s focus on the bareness of the tomb marked only by the single word ‘Resurgam’ is belied by the Latin poems (discussed below) which later (probably in 1622) were mounted on a tablet next to the tomb. As I will more fully develop in the pages below, the most plausible sequence is as follows:

37 The funeral certificate quoted by Hannah only notes that it was ‘immediately following’ his death; Poems and Psalms by Henry King, ed. John Hannah (Oxford:  Francis Macpherson, 1843), p. xci. The private funeral and lack of a sermon was later cited by Roman Catholic writers as evidence of the conversion; Alan Davidson, ‘The Conversion of Bishop King: A Question of Evidence,’ Recusant History 9:5 (1968), p. 242. 38 In ‘Elegies on the Death of Bishop John King (d. 1621)’, JDJ 35 (2016), pp. 23–​56, from which this section is derived, I present the argument that Henry King is the likely author of these poems. 39 King, Poems, p. 236n. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from King’s poetry are from this edition.

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• Henry King’s ‘Sad Relick’ composed in the early spring of 1621 • through the remaining months of the year, the spreading of rumours that Bishop King converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed • the refutation of these rumours by Henry King in a sermon, preached at St Paul’s on 25 November 1621 and published in late December • in 1622, the composition (probably by Henry King) and public inscription of the Latin St Paul’s poems next to the Bishop’s tomb as part of the same campaign to protect his Protestant reputation • at the same time, or shortly afterwards, the translation of these St Paul’s poems into English verse In addition, at some point in 1621, two other poets with loose connections to the King family, Thomas Goffe and Robert Aylett, composed funeral elegies defending the Bishop against Catholic claims. The simple humility of Bishop King’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral is the dominant theme of Henry’s ‘Sad Relick of a Blessed Soule!’; this brief and elegant poem not only celebrates his father’s lack of pride and ostentation but also defends against any suspicion that the ‘low Exequyes’ and lack of extravagant tomb are ‘the cheap Arguments of our neglect’.40 Rather, such limited commemoration was ‘a commaunded duty, that thy Grave /​As little Pride, as Thou Thy self, should have’ (ll. 5–​6). Henry’s poem highlights the contrast between his father’s tomb and those surrounding him in St Paul’s. The paraphernalia of ‘Chronicle and Pedigree’, ‘Pennons’, and ‘flagges’ are ‘formall braggs’ (ll. 10–​12), which Bishop King avoids despite his (supposed) ancient lineage: When Thou (although from Ancestours Thou came Old as the Heptarchy; Great as Thy Name) Sleepst there enshrin’d in thy admired Parts, And hast no Heraldry but thy Desarts. (ll. 13–​16)

The parenthetical reminder of the claim that the family descended from Anglo-​Saxon kings constitutes an undermining irony: the poem attempts at once to affirm the Bishop’s humility and to offer the very pedigree that the tomb eschews.41 The final verse paragraph offers a dismissive description of

40 King, Poems, p.  172, ll.  3–​ 4. See Nigel Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-​ Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 272–​82, on the patronage of funerary monuments in the period, most of which were commissioned by the family of the dead. 41 Hannah also finds it in bad taste that Henry dwells upon the family’s supposed origins among Saxon kings, given his father’s wish for a humble commemoration (p. 176). On the use of genealogy in funeral commemoration, see Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past:  English Historical Culture 1500–​1730 (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 92–​5.

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the labouring vanity of tomb-​building that Joshua Scodel describes as typical of the period:42 Goe, search the world, and with your Mattocks wound The groaning Bosome of the patient ground: Digg from the hidden veines of her dark womb All that is rare and pretious for a Tomb: Yet when much Treasure, and more Time is spent, You must grant His the Nobler Monument,    Whose Faith stands o’re Him for a Hearse, and hath    The Resurrection for his Epitaph. (ll. 19–​26)

The power in the detraction here lies partly in the dismissive imperative of its opening, and partly in the metaphoric violence of the mining enterprise. The Earth as a mother figure assaulted by her offspring leads to a folly: the construction at the end of this exercise falls short of the spiritual memorial of the Bishop. The final couplet (ll.  25–​6) manifests King’s typical expertise in the judicious use of caesura and enjambment: the rhyming word ‘hath’ takes little weight, and after the caesura the poetic energy comes to fall upon the word ‘Resurrection’. The final line is not only memorable but accurate, as it returns attention to the one-​word epitaph desired by Bishop King: ‘Resurgam’.43 Bishop John King, however, was not to rest in quiet peace until the Resurrection, as Roman Catholic claims slowly emerged in the following months that this renowned Protestant bishop had converted to Rome on his deathbed, claims to which those close to King quickly responded through preaching and poetry.44 The rumours about Bishop King promulgated by Roman Catholic propagandists were part of a widespread pattern much feared by Protestant apologists in the early 1620s.45 The conversion of a notable Protestant (whether lay or clergy) could be held forth as vindicating the Roman Church.46 This controversy then became the dominant concern of a sermon by Henry King and a number of elegies that mark the Bishop’s death.

42 Scodel and Zwicker, The English Poetic Epitaph, pp. 19–​20. 43 As noted above, the spring of 1621 is the most likely composition date for this poem. Enough days must have passed for the inscribed ‘Resurgam’ to be in place. 44 A similar, if more limited, dynamic played out following Queen Anne’s death, as described in Chapter 3. 45 See Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–​1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England, pp. 102–​34. 46 Henry Mason, New Art of Lying, Covered by Jesuites under the Vaile of Equivocation (London: George Purslowe for Iohn Clarke 1624) connects the rumours about Bishop King to a tradition of such claims going back to Theodore Beza.

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While a number of Catholic works refer to the supposed conversion of King, it is likely that Henry King’s sermon and the posted elegies respond to the earliest and fullest of these, The English Protestants Plea (1621) by the archpriest Richard Broughton. It claims that Bishop King, a little before his death did plainely denounce your Religion to be damnable, renounced (as wee had prooved before of all such) that he was any Bishop or Cleargieman; was penitent for his protesting heresie, & humblie at the feete of a Priest, whom he had formerly persecuted, confessed his sinnes, receaved Sacramentall absolution at his hands, and was reconciled to the Catholike Romane Church, of which he had in his life bene so vehement a persecutor.47

A second work making the same claims, The Bishop of London his Legacie, appeared the following year. It boldly offers a supposed first-​person account of the Bishop’s conversion (while acknowledging in the added preface that such was ‘a Poeticall freedome’ validated by the example of Xenephon and Plutarch).48 Bishop King would have been a major ‘catch’ for the Church of Rome: he was a widely respected figure in the mainstream of Jacobean Protestantism about whom no rumours of Catholic leanings had circulated. While firmly Calvinist in his theology, he was fully conformist in matters of worship and church government. He promoted a balanced ministry of preaching and prayer, and he was noted for preaching weekly in the churches of his diocese.49 This reputation ‘for Calvinist orthodoxy, moral rectitude, and strident anti-​ Catholicism’50 rendered the supposed deathbed conversion a great scandal for the Church of England and potential triumph for the Church of Rome. Instructed by King James himself, the Bishop’s eldest son, Henry, led the defence against these claims.51 His sermon was preached at St Paul’s on 25

47 Richard Broughton, The English Protestants Plea (1621), p.  19. This is likely the work referred to in a letter of John Castle to William Trumbull, BL Add. 72276, Letter 68, 31 March 1622:  ‘One of your Emissaries hath cast out a most ridiculous lyinge pamphlett about the Religion of the late Bp. of London wherein are rehearsed the motivs and forme of his reconciliacion to the Church of Rome.’ A letter of Broughton to John Bennett (23 October 1622) goes somewhat further in claiming that Bishop King ‘had testified with his owne hand his reconciliation’; cited in Michael C. Questier (ed.), Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–​1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 171n.. 48 Musket, The Bishop of London his Legacie (1623), p. ii. 49 Thomas Fuller, Church History of Britain, vol. 5, ed. J. S. Brewer (Oxford, 1895), p. 500. 50 P. E. McCullough, ‘John King’, Oxford DNB. 51 In the epilogue ‘To the Reader’ of his sermon, he writes that he has chosen to print it to show ‘I have not yet so doted on their part, or dis-​affected my owne, as to leave my Countrey or Religion’, and that John has ‘also had his share in this lewd imputation

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November 1621 and published in three editions in the following months. The last two editions included ‘the retraction of the libeller’: Thomas Preston, a Benedictine monk who had long sought to reconcile English Catholics with King James, was the priest who had reputedly converted the Bishop to the Catholic Church on his deathbed; however, late in 1621 he retracted those statements.52 The sermon itself charges that the Roman Church made a practice of such supposed conversions, rehearsing their claims about the deaths of such Protestant notables as Calvin, Luther, and Beza (including a premature announcement of Beza’s death).53 Although King first asserts that brevity is the hallmark of truth, he nevertheless gives an extended account of his father’s deathbed: he quotes his last testament and describes his peaceful approach to death and his blessing of those around him. This description is partly meant to prove that Bishop King was never alone in such a way that a Catholic confessor could come to him. The sermon, however, was only a limited dimension of the defence of the Bishop: despite his request for no word other than ‘Resurgam’ on his tomb, at some point in 1622 or shortly after, a tablet was erected upon which were engraved five further Latin poems.54 Although the monument and tablet were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666, the 1633 edition of John Stow and John Strype’s Survey of London records the poems.55 The opening two poems are the most substantial: the first, entitled ‘Johannis King Episcopi as well as my selfe’; Henry King, The Sermons of Henry King (1592–​1669), Bishop of Chichester, ed. Mary Hobbs (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1992), p. 82. All subsequent references to King’s sermon are from this edition. 52 That the retraction was not coerced or merely Protestant propaganda is confirmed by Oliver Almond, a Roman Catholic priest, who wrote later in 1622 that ‘Mr Preston never confessed unto me but denyed that ever he reconciled or in that kynd dealt with the b[ishop] of London’ (31 August/​September 1622, Oliver Almond to John Strong [Matthew Kellison], in Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, p. 162. David Lunn, The English Benedictines, 1540–​1688 (London: Burns & Oates, 1980), pp. 51–​2, describes the possibility that the rumours of Preston’s conversion of Bishop King had been promulgated by the Jesuits to undermine him. John Gee, Foot out of the Snare (1624), p. 143, asserts that a Jesuit, Father Palmer, also denied being the priest that brought about the conversion. 53 King, Sermons, pp. 74–​5. 54 That they were engraved on the tablet hung next to his tomb may have been a way of technically respecting the bishop’s wish that only the word ‘Resurgam’ appear on his tomb. 55 Coincidentally, Bishop King had been the dedicatee of the 1618 edition of Stow. Tracey Hill, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p.  176, notes that the 1633 edition of Stow/​Munday, Survey, had a section on improvements to London churches, ‘which he claims to have been specifically requested to put together for the 1618 edition by the Bishop of London, John King, via an unnamed “Gentleman of much learning and respect.” ’

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Londinensis, quicquid mortale est in hoc pulvere componitur’, is, like the sermon, a rebuttal of the Catholic claims of conversion. The second, ‘In Diem Obitus’, reflects upon the coincidence of his death with Good Friday. An anagram and a chronogram follow, and then a concluding epitaph, beginning ‘Non hic Pyramidos’. In addition, English versions of the three longer St Paul’s poems (not the anagram or chronogram) survive in BL Harl. MS 6918 and BL Add. MS 58215. It seems most likely that the Latin versions were composed first, possibly intentionally for the tomb, and the English versions followed  –​and of course it is possible that the English ones were by a different author (or authors) than the Latin. (It is also possible that a number of authors were responsible for the five poems.) At the very least, it is very unlikely that such would have been posted in St Paul’s without the active involvement of Henry King and his brother John King, who was also a minor poet. I turn now to consider how the mounted St Paul’s poems refigure the Bishop’s death in response to the Catholic claims of conversion. (I will primarily discuss the English versions but turn to the Latin where they offer further details or clarification.) The first poem playfully engages with the formulaic ‘Here lies …’ of the epitaph tradition: Here lyes (unles some dare belye His Ashes wth Apostacy As they have done his Faith, and Rome His changling Mind and Corpse entoombe.) A praelate rightly Catholike Who factious siding did dislike;56

‘Belye’ functions in a variety of ways here:  the Bishop’s ‘lying’ in repose may be troubled by being ‘belied,’ that is, misrepresented (‘calumnietur’) by Roman Catholic propaganda. However, ‘belie’ can also mean ‘to lie next to’ –​his opponents have set apostasy in his tomb alongside his body. Finally, the verb can also mean ‘to besiege’, a fit metaphor for how the defamers have attacked the helpless dead Bishop. The poet avers that these propagandists, not content to claim his deathbed experience, extend their meddling to disturb his ‘ashes’ and tomb. Rome has snatched his ‘changling Mind’, which does not mean that he has changed his mind but that Rome has made a ‘changling’ of it. Roman Catholic writers were abducting his whole continuing being –​both soul and body, which his epitaph promised would be resurrected. They have not just claimed him dying, but claimed him dead.

56 BL Add. MS 58215, fol. 97v, ll. 1–​6.

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The poet is at pains to stress that King was ‘rightly Catholic’  –​not of the Roman sort, but of the Church Universal that looked back to primitive times. On the other side, the poem seeks to distinguish the Bishop from more radical Protestants. While Bishop King was of a decidedly Calvinist theology, he was a moderate in his ecclesiology, disinclined to what the poet calls ‘factious siding’. The lines that follow distinguish him from Protestant sectaries and those inclined to follow new ideas: Nor trode he wild Opinions Maze; Nor any newe sects did he rayse Or if some long wing’d Rabbis sor’d, Made by the Many, and ador’d; He rose not lightly at their sight, But flewe their Faiths not persons height: Deeming them great (no doubt) but lesse Then Truth which did him more possesse. (ll. 7–​14)

This situating of the Bishop’s theology is akin to the first few pages of Henry’s sermon, which, rather than refuting conversion to Rome, denied any inclination to radical Protestantism on the Bishop’s part. While the reference to ‘long wing’d Rabbis’ is rather cryptic, from its context we can gather that the poet uses the term to denigrate preachers (especially Puritan ones) popular for their soaring oratory.57 In the lines that follow, the poet most directly denies any connection between Bishop King and Rome: Onely he was not of the swarme Of shaveling Locusts, that doe harme Cloak’t wth Religion; whose troopes loade The seven hill’d Roome; who making bode Like Geese about the Capitoll Dare swanlike songs harshly controll By gagling and unpleasant notes, (Sent from their rough, uneven throtes) And for a dying Swanns sweet breath Their Gander tunes and quills bequeath. (ll. 15–​24)

The representation of Catholic priests as plague-​like devouring ‘locusts’ was widespread in early seventeenth-​century Protestant polemic, perhaps best known in Phineas Fletcher’s Locustae (1627).58 The latter part which satirizes the Roman Church is more intriguing, as it specifically addresses

57 OED, rabbi, 3.a. The Latin text has ‘notae prioris’ (familiar priors). 58 See Phineas Fletcher, Locustae vel Pietas Iesuitica, ed. Estelle Haan (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1996), pp. xlix, 54.

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writers who had claimed the Bishop’s conversion. The poet associates their ‘song’ with the geese of the Capitol in ancient Rome, whose cackling warned Marcus Manlius of the Gauls’ attack. Such ‘gagling and unpleasant notes’ might be appropriate as defensive warning but are a mocked replacement of the ‘swanlike songs’ of ‘a dying Swan’ like Bishop King. This verse paragraph concludes with an assertion that the Bishop died committed to the Church of England: ‘Yf but one God, one Faith there bee, /​In this one Englands Faith dyed hee’ (ll. 31–​2). However, this statement is not as clear as it might be, and in fact it seems to engage in some of the equivocation with which Protestant polemicists charged Catholics at the time. The first line posits, conditionally, a single God and faith. If there is only a single faith (despite seeming differences), then as a logical consequence the Church of England is part of it, and even if King died adhering to the Roman Church, the broader unity of the church would mean he had also died in the Church of England –​ because after all there is just one church. The opening ‘if’ complicates the whole sentence because, seemingly, if it is denied, if one were to argue that no, there are different faiths, Catholicism and Protestantism are distinct, then the second line is no longer true. One wonders if the ambiguity is unintentional, but the equivalent lines in the Latin version manifest the same ambiguity: ‘Unus si Deus est, Fides & una /​Huic uni immoriens, & Anglicana’. While the poem’s primary purpose is to defend Bishop King’s deathbed commitment to the Church of England, the poet embraces the opportunity to offer more general satire of the Roman Church and its beliefs. Thus, he suggests that the ‘forger of false Fames’ has attempted a ‘transubstantiation’ of Bishop King akin to the Roman Catholic doctrine of the mass, which is derided as ‘Christ swimming on the plate’ or ‘wine Christo-​fer ith’plate’, which is in turn pejoratively associated with the Pythagorean idea of transmigration of the soul (King explicitly names Pythagoras in the Latin text). The concluding lines of the poem address the naïve Roman Catholic reader, here put in the typical epitaphic situation of the ‘viator’ (passer-​by or passenger): Thou passenger,59 who ere thou art, Yf otherwise thou thinkst in heart Yf thy Implicite Faith needs must Take up each Fable upon trust Sucking wth spongie greedynes All those seraphlike Guides expresse; Shake off thy Lethargie, and skan By thine owne Reason, like a man Mature to use both tongue and braines 59 These two words are highlighted by a slightly larger, finer script.

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Without the borrow’d easie paines Of undertakers. Bee thou wise On thine owne stocke. A friends advise Knockes to awake thee. But if Thou Hoodwinke thy sence, and wilt not know, Thy state is desperate, Bee gone, And henceforth cheerly foole it on. (ll. 63–​78)

The poet’s charge is that such unquestioned allegiance (the Catholic idea of ‘implicit faith’) has led to widespread acceptance of ‘fables’, among which are the accounts of Bishop King’s conversion. This becomes a stern rallying of the reader to ‘be a man  /​Mature to use both tongue and braines’ in independent rational thought. Thus, from beginning to end this opening poem concerns itself with the ecclesiastical struggle over the reputation and commitment of the dead Bishop: religious controversy has largely displaced other elegiac commemoration. The second long poem next to King’s monument (beginning, ‘Quem Ρασχα Domini fecerat sacrum Diem’) appears in the manuscripts in English as ‘That sacred Friday by his Paines (our Peace)’. This is a more straightforward conventional elegy that explores the appropriateness of Good Friday for Bishop King’s death and highlights the parallels between Christ and the Bishop. Its concluding lines anticipate the Final Resurrection, and in so doing redirect readers’ attention to the original one-​word epitaph, ‘Resurgam’:  ‘Which here Thou readst in Characters engraven,  /​’Twas stamp’t upon his Heart, confirm’d in Heaven’ (ll. 27–​28). Following an anagram and chronogram, the poetic sequence concludes with a short epitaph (beg. ‘Non hic Pyramides’ in the Latin inscription) that returns the focus to the simple, but spiritually significant, tomb. This translation of it occurs in manuscript with the other St Paul’s poems: No Pyramis nor guilded Elogie, Nor lofty Pile rayses these Ashes high More thrift it is to leave Thee to Thy selfe, Thy corpse were poorer, laden with more pelf. For hee that lives and dyes soe, leaves his Name To outlive Tomb, or costly marble frame. (ll. 1–​7)60

While this partakes of the oft-​used trope that the worthy need no monument, it gains an extra layer of irony since Bishop King’s original desire for

60 BL Add. MS 58215 offers two versions of the final line: that reproduced above, and ‘A living/​lasting Toomb, and costly Marble Frame’. (‘Living’ and ‘lasting’ are offered within {  } as competing possibilities.)

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an unadorned tomb had been at least partly undermined by the erection of the tablet including these verses.61 Apart from these Latin poems erected beside Bishop King’s tomb, two other funeral elegies on him, by Thomas Goffe and Robert Aylett, confront the Catholic claims of conversion. Goffe, playwright and priest, writes from within the close circles of the King family and Christ Church, Oxford (and he presented Henry Savile’s funeral oration). While he predictably mounts a direct challenge to the conversion rumours,62 he goes further to develop an extended satiric attack on the Church of Rome in general. He compares the universality of death with the defaming of the dead: ‘As Nature makes it common for to die /​Soe common tis’ one dead mens fames to lie’ (ll. 5–​6); this moves him to engage in the equally common role of elegists defending the reputation of the dead, as we saw in the elegies on Buckingham and Venetia Digby. However, the explicit defence against the claims of apostasy only comes near the end of the poem. Instead, he first reflects on the Bishop’s one-​word epitaph and his heavenly life after death, which will include the angels using him to inspire other preachers. He also extensively celebrates King’s selfless devotion to rebuilding St Paul’s, rather than building memorials to himself. In the final section of the poem, Goffe, like Henry King’s sermon and the first St Paul’s poem, confronts those who have spread rumours about the bishop’s supposed deathbed conversion: And let no noise from Babell er’e molest Thine urne with slaunder; Though some undertake with clamors of confusion to awake Thee from thy peace. No blessed soule can hearke Unto such doggs that stand without & barke. Boast not proud Jezebel, such a victory That thou, or thine adulterate vanity could ere entice his eyes to bee or’e tane with such a painted beauty (ll. 99–​107)

61 Other translations of the ‘Epitaphium’ also survive. One, from the Phillipps manuscript, is printed in Crum’s edition of Henry King, Poems, p.  186; it begins, ‘No Pyramids, nor Panegyrick Verse.’ Also printed by Crum (King, Poems, p.  242) is a second, beginning ‘No Pyramis, nor carv’d toomb-​complement’ (Bodl. MS Rawl. D.317, fol. 171) in a hand identified as John King’s. Payne Fisher provides what is presumably his own translation, beginning ‘No Pyramid, no Panegyrick here,’ on p. 133. 62 All quotations are from Morgan Library MS MA 1057, published as The Holgate Miscellany: An Edition of Pierpont Morgan Library Manuscript, MA 1057, ed. Michael Denbo (Tempe: ACMRS, 2012), p. 176. The first six lines of the poem also appear in Rosenbach MS 1083/​16, p. 298.

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Goffe derisively presents the Church of Rome in terms common to Protestant polemic:  it is ‘Babell’ (Babylon), a ‘proud Jezebel’, and ‘a painted beauty’, and those individuals who spread rumours are not to be heeded. His refutation continues, not by recounting the history of the Bishop’s death (as his son Henry’s sermon had done), but through an act of the imagination in which his soul in heaven does ‘scorne those foule reports’ (l.  112). If he were to visit Earth again, ‘with what a power  /​ Of Indignation would hee to’th world declare /​His stedfast innocence?’ (ll. 119–​21). The final lines extend this indignation to God himself, who ‘doth from heav’n deride /​Their folly, where with good men are belide’ (ll. 128–​9); the final word echoes the ‘Here lyes (unles some dare belye […)]’ of the first St Paul’s poem. In the midst of this final section, there is one further intriguing line, where Goffe writes that Rome by ‘His name shall never add one relique more’ (l. 113). Thus, he metaphorically applies the competition waged by medieval churches for the remains, however partial, of the saints to establish themselves as sites of pilgrimage. Bishop King’s reputation and ecclesiastical commitment, here figured as his ‘reliques’ (which Henry King had begun his first elegy by addressing), are safe from Roman plunder. The elegies on Bishop King are exceptional in how thoroughly Catholic–​ Protestant conflict dominates them. The furore prompted by claims of his conversion also overrode Bishop King’s specific instruction for a simple tomb marked by the single word ‘Resurgam’. If, as I have proposed, Henry King himself wrote ‘the St Paul’s poems’, his role as grieving son was also largely displaced by the role of defender of the Church of England and his father’s commitment to that church.

‘What neede I speake or write his praise’ In its focus upon the deceased as an organizing principle, this book has largely ignored those elegies where the subject is not fully identified. However, the context of this chapter calls out for the inclusion of one of these as an exception: ‘A ffunerall Elegie one a reverend Divine’, which survives in a sole manuscript, BL Harl. MS 3910.63 This poem, which runs to nearly 400 lines,

63 This manuscript is remarkable for the number of poems within it for which it is the sole witness. The title of the manuscript copy is in a different hand than the poem itself, which suggests that it is non-​authorial and merely descriptive; it is plausible that the owner of the manuscript at that point did not know the identity of the subject. A third hand attributes the poem to ‘T. D.’, as recorded in the BL catalogue, but the initials may be ‘J. D.’.

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is a rich celebration of a moderate, unambitious churchman that, through a consistent pattern of contrast, highlights the corruptions and distortions of many others within the church at the time. The poem exploits a series of complex, extended similes and in its conclusion offers a warm portrait of the poet’s experiences with the dead divine. However, in relation to the focus of this chapter it is most notable for its detailed and specific castigation of clerical extremes and vices. It is akin to the elegies on Bishop King in its celebration of an exemplary churchman who serves as a foil to others, but it offers a far more sweeping survey of ecclesiastical abuses. The subject is celebrated for his knowledge, humility, pastoral diligence, and patience, but ultimately more for what he is not, and a series of negations constitute the bulk of the poem. He learned in order to serve, not that he might be ‘reputed deepe eloquente /​by mincing sundry tongus’ (ll. 23–​4), nor was he concerned with scholastique subtilties, darke, various, fill’d all with trikes & intricate Maeanders, Jerkes, & cross-​pointes, wherin the reader wanders as in a deasart, pulling crabbes & sloes (ll. 30–​3)

Through a long, complex water-​based simile his pastoral application of knowledge is affirmed: When any weaker soule did closely stray (as wanton streames so longe in meaddowes play windinge there snakye currents here, & there that they forget in there ould tracke to beare there tribute to the Ocean, and doe chainge for some bychannell, uncouth, newe, & strange, and loose themselves, & all there power scatter) from the most holy fount of livinge water wch in the scripture springs; and well abroad enstyl’d the sea of wisdome, streames of god, hee would by humble eloquence invite and winne againe to god, forcinge hime quitt humane authority, & seeke to knowe truth in ye springes-​hed, whence it first did [flowe]64 Wherin all swelling doubtfull soules doe draine, and being empty’d, fill themselves againe with holye liquores from the boundles mayne. (ll. 43–​59)

The errant parishioner is like wanton streams that lose their way on the journey from source (Scripture) to ocean (God); most compelling is the

64 Corrected from manuscript scribal error ‘flood’.

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imagery of that soul finding itself in ‘a bychannell, uncouth, newe, & strange’. The passage constitutes both a critique of innovation in theological thought, of those who through a habit of ‘play’ leave the established streambeds, and –​in its description of the commemorated priest who redirects them to ‘the springes-​hed’  –​a decidedly Protestant emphasis upon an ‘ad fontes’ return to the biblical source. The wariness of innovation found in the poem is directed (roughly equally) to more radical, non-​conforming Protestants and Roman Catholics (especially Jesuits). The individual may be led astray, even to despair, through hear-​ -​inge some browne puritan in Darbyshyre65 wth whom the great words now in fashion are Reprobat’s, Zellous, and Damnation, but above all, Damnation, wch doth paw the Auditour, & strike a shivering awe and revorence to what is spoken; (ll. 52–​8)

The poet exclaims against the fashions of theological language and the manipulation of fear, and affirms instead the comfort offered by the deceased. Likewise, further on, he chastises the ‘cocke Jacke puritanes’ for their ‘casting scrupolus fetters’ (l. 105) upon their followers that would lead them to break the laws enjoining ecclesiastical conformity because of their ‘consciences’. This chastisement leads into an extended satiric depiction (ll.  107–​14) of private Puritan gatherings or ‘prophesyings’ centred on a ‘parlour-​preacher’. The ‘reverend Divine’ is correspondingly distinguished from Jesuits who cultivate doubt and unresolved consciences in their flocks; they offer no light but clouds, except for clarity in one particular subject: onlye in that one case of killinge Kinges they appere round, open, & liquid Thinges, nor when they would this doctrine high advance care they for curious windinge circumstance, But plaine & confident in that, insiste; (ll. 82–​6)

The commemorated priest is not only obviously guiltless of such treason, but so innocent (in a rather Parson Adams-​like way) of the possibility of such a view that

65 John Charles Cox, Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals, vol.  1 (London, 1890), pp. 317–​18, notes the prevalence of Brownists in the Derbyshire section of the diocese of Lichfield.

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[he] might have tane an oath securely well yt hee thought no man halfe so deepe in hell as to conceyve itt, much les give itt byrth (ll. 89–​91)

Of course, the poet is not so innocent, and clearly plays on Catholic unwillingness to take the Oath of Allegiance to the King of England. While such an espousal of a Church of England via media is unremarkable, the following, greater, part of the poem goes beyond this to distinguish the commemorated divine from a range of abuses within the Church of England. Throughout, the emphasis is upon what the subject of the poem did not do, and hence the suggestion is that these practices are widespread. Given their prevalence, it is remarkable that any churchman avoided them. Thus, he did not choose his sermon texts with an eye to affecting the congregation to recognize his needs: nor would hee when hee preachd on purpose chuse a text, that might a tendernes infuse and move the hearers charritye to hime (ll. 116–​18)

Nor did he pursue his ‘privat spleene’, nor thump, nor thunder. He sought only the good of souls, and lacked any ambition for ‘th’applausive humm, in Maryes or in Paules’(l. 139).66 This lack of ambition is a recurring note in the second half of the poem, where that vice is identified as the basis of the distortions within the church. It leads to pluralism and the attendant problem of poor curates: some haltinge Curat, that had gott a row of wife & childrine, like a teame of geese, and twenty Nobles are this yonge mans fees. (ll. 139–​41)

Ambition leads churchmen to seek high political offices, royal chaplaincies, and deaneries. Such seeking might manifest itself in a variety of ways, the poem suggests, but the richest satiric description is of the preacher who engages in published religious disputes: Nor (wch I wonder at) did [he] e’re compile a hungrey pamphlett in an angrye style against the Papistes, or some heathen men wch hee had heard weare knaves; wth his swift penne having accomphish’d, hee doth dedicate

66 The latter reference is clearly to sermons preached at St Paul’s (the public sermons held frequently at Paul’s Cross were particularly famous and apt to make a preacher’s reputation); while there are of course many churches named after St Mary, this is most likely a reference to St Mary’s, Oxford, the official church of the university.

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to som great master of a Colledge, that Just att that instant is to make a choyse of brave fellowes; (ll. 156–​63)

The effectiveness here stems from incisive phrasing: the echoing balance of ‘a hungrey pamphlett in an angrye style’, and the sly suggestion of weakly informed vagueness of attack in ‘some heathen men  /​wch hee had heard weare knaves’. The deceased’s lack of ambition renders it ironically suitable that the elegy comes down to us with its subject unnamed. Unlike many churchmen, this exemplary divine avoided the gift culture that sustained the patronage culture of church appointments: nor wth his presents noble patrons plyde sendinge in Woodcockes att a new-​yeares tyde or coache-​mares to there Ladies; or stockinges and scisszers to there weemen (ll. 175–​8)

The increasingly homely details here condemn the gift-​givers as ones caught up in the trivialities of life, and the passage extends into a tangential social commentary by adding that these serving women are ‘prowder then Ladyes, & more harde to please’ (l. 178). Instead, the subject embraced justice as the foundation of church life: he was just in all proceedings, and did not ‘his way facilitate  /​to higher compositions by affright-​ /​ing some poore wthe [sic] the lawes rigorous byte’ (ll. 237–​9), nor turn ‘to the terrible Starr-​ Chamber’ (l. 242). The elegist also emphasizes how the deceased restricted himself to the appropriate duties of parish ministry. He did not practise medicine (or fortune-​ telling!) on the side; he did not enter suits of law; he did not preach in favour of usury so that he might justify becoming the extortionate money-​lender of the parish; he did not set himself up as market-​gardener, selling ‘carrots & Cabishes’ (l. 205). He did not seek to be the ‘good fellow’ of the parish and, Herrick-​like, participate in their rural sports: wth every boddye dice, drinke, or play att Ruff, at Trump, or Nodye; or att Stoole-​ball his parrish-​wives amonge play for a Tansey after Evensonge or for a Silli-​bubb mongst Mayden trye67 and when they hopped about ye May-​pole crye heigh boyes for our toune; or good wenches goe drinke att the parsonage (ll. 212–​19)

67 The manuscript’s reading of ‘trye’ would seem a scribal error.

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From this description, the deceased (or at least the elegist) might seem a harsh kill-​joy, meanly opposed to the sources of harmless mirth of traditional parish life like the card games mentioned in line 213. However, the passage closes with a telling point:

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Thus many doe and so had neede; havinge no way but this to make the people pardon theyr amisse (ll. 219–​21)

Participation in such mirth is not genuine or innocent but part of the bargain-​based approach to churchmanship the elegist sees as rampant in the Church of England. While through this section there are brief passages that recount the dead priest positively, few go on for long without comparing him with more corrupt churchmen. The ongoing contrast reaches a climax in a complex simile which takes two types of streams as its vehicles:       [his] goulden temper  did give cause & Jewell to his bounety-​head (not like a swellinge Current whose proud head is lift even wth the waves, really68 to shedd and fitt to succor the disparinge meades yet like a Miser, his ranke billowes leades into som hollo entry under grounde and buryes all his treasure). hee was founde like a coole streame refreshing nayghbor plaines, and every plant & every hedge-​row gaynes Increase of sappe & moisture; many a time up stonye barrine cliffes his liquores climbe and gently supple then in secrit slippes amonge lowe bushes wch fierce scarcety nipps, and finding there some shrubb blasted & bare dry withering doth inpart a liberall share of his cleare silver burthen, & doth make the wretched thinges new life & verdure take wch all the world before did beate with fowle broad laughters & reproches; & home roule then his indulgent waters, and none misse the scattered portions full his channell is and heavenly influence still mend his store and keepe brim-​full Just enough & no more (ll. 276–​99)

The poet first offers a negative simile, in which the corrupt, ungenerous churchman is like a stream that has the rich abundance to overflow and 68 Presumably a scribal misreading of ‘ready’.

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fertilize the adjacent water meadows but instead buries its treasure underground, like a miser. In contrast, the deceased, as the positive model of the beneficent priest, provides succour and nourishment to all, seeking out the hidden and neglected spots. His gracious stream exceeds its bounds in wisdom, yet remains ‘brim-​full’, and hence in a position to aid again. In this final instance, the positive model is more fully developed than its satiric counterpart, and the whole passage draws on the conceptual metaphor of patronage/​favour as a stream. After a section which presents the deceased as a ‘saint’ outperforming anyone of Rome (which this book’s coda, ‘Distracted into heresy’ will consider), the poem concludes with a more intimate perspective. The elegist recalls his relationship with the dead churchman: he knew him well enough to spend extended time in his company and to be pastorally directed by him. As the poem surpasses most in the vigour and richness of its satiric passages, here it transcends the typical funeral elegy through its sense of a real relationship with the dead: How did his presence daunt mee, & affright from every action, that hee counted lighte And (wch none did before him) mad a waygh each forward thought I was about to say How often in his presence did I blush & maze when I had fallen on some ungratious phrase and in his booke of’s life, free from offence study and reade cases of contience [sic]; (ll. 354–​61)

The poet presents a portrait of the worthy dead priest, but also of himself as a figure in need of correction: from whome I gayn’d instruction to refraine my wilde understandinge, from a vaine and endles travill in perplexed thinges of snarling schoole-​men, whose disputinge, brings Anxious incombrancis, and does more harme then good to readers; for itt getes a swarme, Hydra, & wheels of doubts, making ye soule a Sysiphus. On wch thinges when I roule mine eye backe & perceive ye dainger gone, I first praise heaven, & then this heavenly one (ll. 364–​73)

Elegies on churchmen often recalled their effect upon their auditors, but this is nearly always presented in a general way; here in contrast we are offered the particular effect upon a particular individual. The poet portrays himself as one of ‘wilde understanding’, all too easily led astray by the disputes of ‘snarling schoole-​men’. The theological challenges so unnecessarily created

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are brought to life through the classical metaphors:  the human soul too easily becomes a Sisyphus doomed to the perpetual punishment not of rolling a stone but of rolling ‘wheels of doubts’. Through this conclusion, the poet involves himself in the satire of ecclesiastical corruption that had dominated the poem: faulty churchmen would be of little consequence were there not also faulty layfolk to be led astray.

Conclusion While funeral elegies on churchmen and scholars were apt to engage in rather generic praise and predictable laments of the loss as experienced by the community of church or college, some, as seen in the examples above, achieve a freshness by close attention to particulars. The controversies both within the Church of England and between it and the Church of Rome also prompted elegists to more vigorous writing of detraction. While the published university volumes could be relied upon to mark with due honour the more prominent scholars and students, it was generally those in manuscript that offered the most daring and compelling elegiac commemorations.

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Distracted into heresy

Preceding chapters have been organized around the deaths of specific individuals or similarly situated individuals, and I have frequently noted those distracted moments when the elegist veers in the direction of satiric or political comment. In this final chapter, I range across the period to consider how poets present themselves as slipping into religious heterodoxy during the distraction of grief. This heterodoxy took a range of forms:  spiritual rebellion, doubt, or despair. Death could prompt temporary gestures of theological resistance: a questioning of God’s timing or a rebellion against the unfairness of death. For example, Ben Jonson considers the possibility of ‘blasphemy’ in his resistance to God’s will in taking Venetia Digby in her youthful beauty. In a rhetorical technique akin to apophasis, he wonders, ‘Dare I profane, so irreligious be /​To greet or grieve her soft euthanasy?’ (ll.  39–​ 40). However, this chapter focuses particularly on those points where Protestant elegists evoke a slide into distinctly Catholic patterns of thought and language regarding the dead, ones that orthodox Protestantism rejected. Distracted elegies embrace (or at least consider) a temporary heresy prompted by powerful sorrow at the death of another. In other cases, the poet suggests a threat to the broader community of mourning or even a distant community –​at times these become something closer to mock-​Catholicism. This chapter takes its bearings in part from a number of other scholars who have explored the implications of the Reformation for how the living related to the dead. The historian Peter Marshall has aptly referred to the ‘far-​ reaching reconfiguration of the cultural and emotional nexus that bound the living to the dead, of the idioms in which feelings, anxieties, and aspirations about the dead could be expressed’.1 Alison Shell has argued for the ambivalent attitude of Protestant audiences towards Catholic elements in revenge tragedy,2 and Thomas Rist has developed her ideas much 1 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 188. 2 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–​1660 (Cambridge; New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 1999). On the

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further in tracing the aesthetic performance of the remembrance of the dead in the genre. Rist points to ‘the division of the living from the dead that is at the heart of Reformation differences of commemoration’,3 and that late Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy reflects a striving against the excessive strictures surrounding remembrance and mourning. These dynamics in revenge tragedy are similar to what I find in the funeral elegies of the period.4 However, whereas in revenge tragedy the poet distances such remembrance and mourning by assigning them to often self-​ destructive characters, in funeral elegy they are most often represented as the poet’s own impulses. My contention is that both general poetic licence and the particular licence offered by the emotional turmoil of grief allowed elegiac poets to probe the dilemmas raised by the Protestant view of the dead. A fully realized and tidy Calvinist theology left its adherents with a sense of emptiness in the face of death: there simply was too little scope for mourning, and especially for a sense of continuing relationship with the dead. In the face of this, through means at times poetically playful and at others supposedly mad, Protestant writers ventured some way back towards Catholic elements of devotion.5 I am tracing not lingering folk or popular elements of Catholic devotion6 but self-​conscious use of Catholic tropes among the more learned who knew that such language did not cohere with orthodox Protestant theology. I seek in this chapter to take these tropes seriously, never to dismiss them as ‘merely’ rhetorical or conventional. Their frequency of use points to a certain original power, however much poets might have diminished this power through repetition. Collectively, they point to the disruptive power of death to overthrow emotional and theological norms. The waywardness of grief compelled poets to embrace, or at similar dynamic in which Protestants maintained an ambivalent attitude towards the Catholic penitential tradition, see Paul D. Stegner, Confession and Memory in Early Modern English Literature: Penitential Remains (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 2–​3. 3 Rist, ‘ “Those Organnons by which it mooves”:  Shakespearian Theatre and the Romish Cult of the Dead’, Shakespeare Survey 69 (2016), p. 236. 4 Joshua Scodel describes how a number of Protestant epitaphs in this period ‘adapt [the cult of the saints] in order to heighten respect for the physical remains of the dead’; Scodel and Zwicker, The English Poetic Epitaph, p. 38. 5 Wistful Protestant gestures towards forbidden Catholic rituals are also found in other genres:  Sir Thomas Browne, in Religio Medici, Hydriotaphia, and The Garden of Cyrus, ed. R. H. A. Robbins (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), p. 8, notes that he could ‘scarce contain my prayers for a friend at the ringing of a bell’, and in his ‘To all Angels and Saints’ George Herbert wrestles with his urge to invoke the Virgin Mary; Works, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon 1941), pp. 77–​9. 6 As described, for example, in Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), pp. 71–​5.

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least evoke, elements clearly rejected by Protestant orthodoxy: prayers for the dead, the invocation of the dead as saints, and even the desire for the ghostly presence of the deceased.

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Elegiac elements in tension with Protestantism Many typical features of funeral elegies were in tension with the tenets of Reformed theology. John Calvin argued that idolatry had ‘originated with those who bestowed this honour [of funerary rites] on the dead, from a superstitious regard to their memory,’7 and this perspective coloured later Protestant misgivings about funerary ceremonies. As Peter Marshall describes it, ‘To neglect [the memory of the dead] was a potentially dangerous form of cultural and social amnesia; to celebrate it too exuberantly an equally dangerous temptation to apostasy’.8 In both funeral sermons and elegies, general doctrines of predestination and foreordination seem to be put aside in the particular grief of the moment. Marshall notes the desire ‘to accommodate the ineluctable doctrine of election to a deep-​seated social impulse to think well of the dead’.9 When it came to individual deaths, pastoral concerns trumped the theology of limited atonement. The intense grief associated with the genre clashed with other Protestant norms as well; Rist notes that ‘the Reformed emphasis on “moderate” mourning was deep-​ seated and widespread’10 and only slowly eased through the 1620s and 1630s. However, intense sorrow was foundational for early Stuart funeral elegies. In some, the process of the poem might quiet grief, but the genre affirmed its validity as at least a stage of the response to death. Finally, with the Reformation the capacity to speak to the dead (by invoking saints) or for the dead through prayer was lost. Hence, the most usual radical of presentation in a funeral elegy –​a first-​person voice addressing the deceased –​ in itself assumes or imagines a continuing contact with the dead that sits uneasily with Protestant orthodoxy.

Prayers for and to the dead Reformers insisted on the immediate passage of the dead to either life with God or condemnation to Hell, and in either case absolute removal from 7 Institutes, I.xi.8. Calvin’s source for this is the Wisdom of Solomon 14:15. 8 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 301. 9 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 197. 10 Rist, Revenge Tragedy, p. 20.

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the mortal realm.11 Most significantly, it was Protestant doctrine that the redeemed in Heaven could not –​or would not –​heed the events of the mortal realm.12 As described by Marshall, the dead ‘did not listen to the prayers of the living, indeed, could not hear them … the dead on their own account could have no knowledge of what transpired in the created world’.13 Many Protestants went further in suggesting that they bore no interest in or concern for those of the mortal realm. However, early Stuart Protestant elegies often go beyond the questionable act of addressing the dead at all by repeatedly hailing the beloved dead as saints, not in the general Reformed sense of the redeemed, but with distinctly Catholic language and imagery that recall the invocation and veneration of saints. In Chapter  4 (‘Military deaths’) I  discussed the anonymous elegy on the Earl of Southampton (d.  1624) where grief led the women of the parish to the heterodoxy of prayers for the dead. This playful reflection of residual Catholicism would seem to reflect an ongoing Protestant dilemma:  the Reformation had left the grieving without a clear and active process to follow, and bereft of contact with the dead. More common are scenarios where the poet-​speaker addresses the dead using the language and imagery of canonized saints. Conventional examples of this trope are widespread:  Henry King begins his famous ‘Exequy’, ‘Accept, thou Shrine of my Dead Saint’, and an elegy on Thomas Harrison, vice-​master of Trinity College, claims, ‘Yet for these relics, sometimes thine,  /​That very name commands a shrine’.14 However, more complex manifestations of this rhetoric are found in Donne’s poems on the dead, in which the issue is complicated by the author’s tangled (and debated) religious commitments. As recounted by Catherine Gimelli Martin, Donne experienced a ‘triangulation of religious desire’ as he felt the tension between ‘Calvinist iconoclasm and Counter-​Reformation neosacramentalism’.15 Donne at times blatantly exposes his internal tensions by employing both Catholic and Protestant

11 Rist, Revenge Tragedy, p. 3, notes that in the Christian tradition the Greek word ‘anamnesis’ and Latin word ‘memoria’ bear with them the very idea of immediate living presence. 12 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 211. 13 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 211. 14 G.  C.  Moore Smith, Thomas Randolph (London:  Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 38. 15 Catherine Gimelli Martin, ‘ “Unmeete Contraryes”:  The Reformed Subject and the Triangulation of Religious Desire in Donne’s Anniversaries and Holy Sonnets’, in Mary Arshagouni Papazian (ed.), John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), p. 197.

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tropes.16 However, this discussion has most often focused on salvation and grace as found in the Holy Sonnets. For example, Greenblatt suggests that purgatory ‘leaves a ghostly trace in his writing’.17 Less noted has been Donne’s articulated loss of the connection between the heavenly saints and the mortal world. The ‘First Anniversary’ describes the severing in this way: If this commerce ’twixt heaven and earth were not Embarr’d, and all this traffic quite forgot, She, for whose loss we have lamented thus, Would work more fully, and powerfully on us. (ll. 399–​402)

The embarring –​that is, forbidding –​of traffic with the dead hampers the process of grief. A  passage at the end of the ‘Second Anniversary’ goes much further; after nearly a thousand lines praising the virtue of the young Elizabeth Drury, Donne admits a temptation to invoke her as a saint. Writing from France (where he had travelled with her parents), Donne suggests that the setting and his subject draw him towards an acknowledged heterodoxy: Here in a place, where mis-​devotion frames A thousand praiers to saints,18 whose very names The ancient Church knew not, Heaven knowes not yet, And where, what lawes of poetry admit, Lawes of religion, have at least the same, Immortall Maid, I might invoque thy name. Could any Saint provoke that appetite, Thou here shouldst make mee a french convertite. (ll. 511–​18)19

Poetic licence (‘the laws of poetry’) is acknowledged as allowing the ‘heresy’ of ‘invoking’ the pagan muses or other poetic powers:  should not such licence extend to a far more deserving embodiment of Protestant virtue? As often with such elegiac passages, a potential heretical lapse is richly imagined but then evaded. In the process Donne offers a tangential mockery of less deserving (or even less real) saints turned to in mis-​devotion, a gesture that both diminishes the Catholic ritual of invocation and elevates this far more worthy figure. 16 See Wilbur Sanders, John Donne’s Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 128. 17 Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 42. 18 Cf. Donne’s similar trope and language in ‘The Relic’: ‘If this [the digging up of his body] falls in a time, or land, /​Where mis-​devotion doth command’ (ll. 12–​13). 19 Raymond Jean-​Frontain, ‘Donne’s Protestant Paradiso: The Johannine Vision of the Second Anniversary’, in Papazian (ed.), John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, p. 123, argues that with such terms as ‘Immortal Maid’ Donne is presenting Drury as a challenging alternative to Roman Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary.

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Donne’s ‘Hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton’20 offers a similar near-​canonization; Maurer identifies the ‘body as monasteries’ trope (ll. 23–​8) as ‘the crux of the poem’, arguing that it ventures ‘into the helplessness of bereavement by seeming to express nostalgia for the palpably comforting rituals of Roman Catholicism’, in particular those that involved ‘intercourse with the dead’.21 She captures Donne’s approach well:  he is ‘courting scandal in order to disarm it’. However, while disarmed, the scandal of saintly invocation is not completely denied or erased; a self-​ consumed artifact leaves behind a certain presence in the imagination.

Veneration, shrines, and relics As noted in the previous chapter, the 1623 death of Thomas Murray, provost of Eton, and former tutor and secretary to Prince Charles, prompted a rich collection of anonymous English and Latin elegies.22 The timing of his death –​while the Prince was on his ill-​conceived journey to Spain to court the Infanta, Maria Anna,  –​deeply informs the way in which the Prince’s former tutor was poetically commemorated. While some of the other elegies regret that Murray did not accompany Charles on the Spanish voyage, one poet finds some solace in his death at home: he imagines a scenario where Murray lived and died in a foreign realm, where, as Donne put it, ‘mis-​ devotion frames’ prayers to saints. In such a context, Murray’s virtue would become a focus of posthumous veneration: Rest happy Murray then that thou didst here; For hadst thou livd a life so good elswhere Such mad devotion som blind men would have Theyd dig thy bones from out thy quiet grave And in thy Sainted Reliques put such trust They’d were them with ther kisses into dust; Or on thy Marble they so longe would pray Till there hard knees had fyled the stone away.23

Here the poet imagines the devotion in others, and, given the presence of Charles and many of his courtiers in Spain, readers of 1623 would have likely imagined a Spanish Catholic setting for this veneration of the dead 20 Donne, Poems, pp. 262–​4. 21 Margaret Maurer, ‘Poetry and Scandal: John Donne’s “A Hymne to the Saynts and to the Marquesse Hamilton” ’, JDJ 26 (2007), pp. 5–​6. 22 On Murray’s work in these roles, see Aysha Pollnitz, Princely Education in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 330–​5. 23 ‘Murray is dead I heard it longe agoe’, BL Harl. MS 3910, fol. 140v, ll. 63–​70.

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Murray. The effect is threefold:  to mock Catholic excesses, celebrate the saintly virtue of Murray, and castigate the English court for not commemorating him aright by matching Catholic intensity of veneration. However, another one of the anonymous elegies on Murray presents an unironic veneration of him: And yett thy Charitie will not repine That we should thus instruct our lives by thine. Or rather by thy death, And I must thinke (That whereas others while they live doe stinke) It joyes thee to beholde there rises thus So sweete an odor from thy corpes to us. Thou lokst downe from heaven where now thou arte And seest how every man doth play his parte. (ll. 45–​52)

The final lines present a distinctly un-​Protestant suggestion of the heavenly interest of the deceased in earthly affairs, but the main trope of the passage is also distinctly Catholic. The idea that a saint’s body did not suffer corruption but might bring forth a sweet (and healing) scent had deep roots in the Christian tradition:  it was ascribed to the body of St Stephen when it was discovered in the early fifth century.24 The poet couples this sweet perfume of Murray’s corpse with a parenthetical satiric comment on the ‘stinking lives’ of others: like many of the elegies on Murray, this points towards other, unworthy, courtiers –​especially ones supportive of the Spanish Match –​who had displaced him. A final example of imagined veneration in a Catholic land appears at the end of the elegy on Thomas Washington, a page of Charles who died in Spain during the 1623 trip: Yet now it holds a guest, wch every age Will invite strangers to a Pilgrimage Thy Reliques (Washington) may bring agayne Me & my Curse back once more unto Spayne. Who had forsworne it. But if e’re I come I’le come a Pilgrim to weepe o’re thy Tombe.25

The poet –​likely either William Lewis or Matthew Wren, both Protestant chaplains to Charles on the trip  –​imagines both himself and ‘strangers’

24 Peter Robert Lamont Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 91–​2. 25 ‘Hast thou beene dead a Moneth; & can I be’, Bodl. MS Eng. poet. e.14, fol. 91v–​92v, ll. 85–​90.

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engaging in future pilgrimages to the ‘shrine’ of Washington’s grave: he had been buried beneath a fig tree in the English ambassador’s garden.26 Even while Protestants vehemently discarded the whole tradition of saints’ relics, the word itself often appears in their funerary verse. Daniel Woolf argues that the word had lost ‘its specifically religious connotations’ and points out that Milton, ‘certainly no friend to popery, wrote eloquently on Shakespeare’s “honor’d bones” and “hallowed relics” ’.27 However, Woolf too quickly dismisses the saintly associations of the word ‘relic’: as in most cases, including Milton’s, the adjective ‘hallowed’ clearly affirms the religious sense of the term –​that is, there is a lingering suggestion of saint-​like veneration. The word ‘relics’ should not be taken as a merely conventional shorthand for ‘physical remains’: for Milton and other Protestant writers of the time, it was a living metaphor that still drew its power from –​ or against  –​the traditional Catholic sense of the term. Protestant poets drew attention to their use of the term, as they ‘fleshed’ out the scene with moments of potential or actual ‘veneration’ of such relics. Lucy Razzall has examined how the relic continued ‘as a powerful literary metaphor in post-​Reformation English writing’,28 but her concern is primarily with the relic as a site or thing of mysterious power, and she draws examples from passages where books are metaphorically represented as ‘reliquaries’ holding power, as for example in ‘Areopagitica’: a book holds ‘the pretious life-​blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life’. Razzall reaches a conclusion somewhat more nuanced than Woolf, as she concludes that while ‘the idea of the relic is translated into secular locations and discourses in post-​Reformation culture, the image is not freed from the complicated relationship of matter and spirit it embodies’.29 However, funeral elegies add a further element:  the frequent personal connection of the elegist to the corpse. For Protestants, to disdain the bones of what might or might not be an ancient saint was easy,

26 James Howell, Familiar Letters (1753), p. 142. 27 Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–​ 1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 195. Such readings assume that the sense of ‘relic’ is limited to sense 3 of the OED: ‘The remains of a person; the body, or part of the body, of a deceased person’, but the examples given there frequently merge with the theologically tinged one of sense 1. 28 Lucy Razzall, ‘  “A Good Booke Is the Pretious Life-​ Blood of a Master-​ Spirit”:  Recollecting Relics in Post-​ Reformation English Writing’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance 2:1 (2010), paragraph 2.  On written works as ‘relics’ or ‘remains’, see also Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-​Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), pp. 27–​31. 29 Razzall, ‘ “A Good Booke” ’, paragraph 24.

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but when those remains were of a recently dead loved one, the problem of response was complicated by emotional anguish that leads to a saint-​like veneration. With traditional literal relics there is a sense of distance from the living body from which they come: a finger of St Peter is not treasured for its continuing relationship with that person but as a quasi-​magical holy object. This is where the elegies that use the term ‘relic’ differ: their relics are a way for the living mourner to maintain the deep emotional relationship with the dead individual. It is not any supernatural power but their sense of continuing life that makes these ‘relics’ valued. If the bodily remains were relics, often the poet described the tomb as the ‘shrine’ at which he offered his devotional sacrifice, but in other cases the poem itself is the ‘shrine’. William Browne suggests that the poet ‘shrines a name within an elegy’,30 and, as discussed in Chapter 7, Thomas Pestell presents himself as the priest who ‘shrines’ the two noblewomen (the Countess of Huntingdon and Countess of Chesterfield) that he commemorates. The anonymous poem ‘What need I speak’, on an unidentified English churchman (discussed in Chapter 8), offers an extended consideration of a Protestant ‘saint’s’ relics: This streame ranne holines & purity such sweet exemplar heavenly sanctity worthy admiringe, to be prizd of us bove there Gonzaga, or Phillipps Nereus; for had this honourd man his life their spent he had bine past Beatus, a full saintt, his nayles, & hayre, & drye tooth in’s head bin kept for Reliques, & the sheets yt spread his breathless coarse, preserv’d for handkercheers, crossclothes for ladyes, & excellent plaisters to stanche bloud, & people taught they had power to cure the Jaundise, and the body scoure from the cold dropsy, or originall pox part of the dust yt whelm’d him in a box beene kept as Garnetts strawe they shew (they say) on Peters or on Corpus Christi day; fond fodder fooles ther was no face in strawe t’was surely tougher stuff, indeed men sawe a hed & face appeard in Hempe (they thought) yet never drem’t a myracle was wrought; they had seene divers, & concev’d a hope

30 ‘An Elegy on Sir Thomas Overbury, Poisoned in the Tower of London’; Brown, Poems, vol. 2, p. 261.

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to see ther Parson shortly or ye Pope. wee tell noe Legend of our holy man whose prayse must live longer then story can whose death, & buriall, gives a liquid proofe that noe mans sanctity is cause enough or any cause of miracles; Hee liv’d & dyde a life & death that show’d him sanctifide, and yet no miracle was seene; less t’were miraculous, to see a swellinge teare hanginge in each mans eye, woemen all mourners, this prov’d a Saintes funerall (ll. 300–​31)

The argument is very similar to that of the first Murray poem:  the dead English priest exceeds recent, well-​known Catholic saints, but here the poet more fully imagines the veneration that would take place. As the description moves from the customary relics of Saints Gonzaga and Philip Neri to the holy straws sprinkled with the blood of the English Father Garnet, executed in connection with the Gunpowder Plot, it becomes a digressive satire on Garnet and those English Catholics who venerated him. The elegy harshly redirects attention to the execution itself, that his ‘hed & face appeared in Hempe’, that is, the noose. After the digression, the poet returns his attention to the English priest that his poem celebrates. He now explicitly rejects the Catholic formulae of legends and recorded miracles for the proving of sainthood. Thus, he is safely re-​established as a ‘saint’ in the Protestant sense: a godly man in life and death who is now mourned (but not venerated) by his parishioners. A cluster of poems associated with Anne King (d. 1624), wife of the poet Henry King, involve variations on this imagery of relics and shrine. Beyond the opening invocation, ‘thou Shrine of my Dead Saint’, throughout his ‘Exequy’ he maintains a direct, impassioned addressing of the dead.31 The poem culminates in a meditation on the Final Judgement and Resurrection, which is on a certain level orthodox Protestantism, but King strikingly imagines that event solely in personal terms. It is an intensely romantic experience of Anne and Henry alone:32

31 King, Poems, p. 68. 32 On the Protestant emphasis upon heavenly contemplation of God rather than the continuance of human relationships, see Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, pp. 215–​20. While such was the ‘official’ theological line, Marshall notes that both pastoral works and common belief allowed more scope for human relationships in heaven and after the Last Judgement.

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          That fit of  fire Once off, our bodies shall aspire To our souls’ bliss; then we shall rise And view ourselves with clearer eyes In that calm region where no night Can hide us from each other’s sight. (ll. 55–​60)

The emphasis upon the human social relationship eclipses any sense of the presence of the divine, and the New Heaven and New Earth are subsumed by Anne’s presence.33 This is not explicit heresy but heresy by omission, and one that is never corrected or rejected by the speaker. This sets it apart from the self-​conscious (and sometimes playful) heterodoxy of my other examples. The language of veneration is picked up by others in the King circle when writing on the same death:  for instance, John King, Henry’s brother, writes I with Comfort here Embrace those sacred reliques, which that Saint left for my Record, not complaint;34

These lines rejecting ‘complaint’ are a direct refutation of his brother’s ‘Exequy’, which offered ‘Instead of Dirges this Complaint’ (l. 2). He gently encourages his brother to a more restrained grieving and offers an orthodox Protestant explanation for Anne’s non-​response to Henry’s laments. Another elegy on Anne King, by Thomas Spenser, a friend of John King, adopts similar language: she is addressed as a ‘dear saint’, who is ‘not prison’d here, but shrin’d’.35

Ghosts While most elegies of the time imagine (or represent) the dead in heaven, a number move towards desiring or evoking their ghostly presence,36 and

33 There is something Dantean about this vision, but it is one in which Beatrice is the only presence. A fascinating contrast is offered by William Browne’s elegy (likely on his wife), ‘Is death so great a gamester’, where he laments that her individual being is lost forever to him: he will never ‘know thee in the grave, when I have one [a grave]’ (l. 68). He adopts the metaphor of her being like a drop of rain in a river, which he would never be able to distinguish again. 34 BL Harl. MS 6917, fol. 89v, ll. 14–​16. 35 Bodl. Rawl. MS D. 398, fol. 172. 36 Marshall notes the relative absence of discussion of ghosts in social histories of death in the period, and his Beliefs and the Dead, pp.  232–​64, offers an important corrective. In contrast, literary scholarship, especially on Hamlet, has given the topic much attention.

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some even embrace the role of necromancer by conjuring the dead. The reality and status of ghosts (or ‘walking spirits’, as they were commonly called in the period37) stood as a sharp dividing line between Catholic and Protestant thought:  ‘More than any other manifestation of popular religious culture, belief in ghosts challenged the Protestant maxims that the dead had no interest in the affairs of the living, and the living no role to play in securing the happiness of the deceased.’38 Protestantism left no room or scope for interaction with the dead, and any suggestion of a ghost was usually treated as a demonic manifestation or the deception of priests.39 As one Protestant writer of the time put it, ‘eyther they were jugling tricks of imposters to deceive the simple, or deceits of devils to delude the learned’.40 However, the licence of elegiac grief sometimes overwhelmed Protestant theology:  the dead are addressed as ghosts and encouraged to revisit the mortal realm. Robert Codrington writes on Alice, Countess of Derby (d. 1637), And were’t not Sinne to doe it, and a show Of treason ’gaynst the Powr’s that rule below, Our vowes should conquer Death, and Fate controule To breake thy slumbers, and call back hir Soule41

An anonymous elegist hesitates in addressing the dead poet Thomas Carew: Pardon thou learned ghost, for wee not strive To keep thee living, but our selves alive In praying thee; such is thy conq’uring fate Thou dead hast power as quick to animate42

The passage recognizes the illegitimacy in disturbing the dead but finds life in so doing. An anonymous elegist on Sir Arthur Chichester (military leader and lord deputy of Ireland, d. 1625) reflects this desire for some presence,

37 Rist, ‘ “Those Organnons” ’, p.  240, notes the relative ‘interchangeability of terms: “ghost”, “soul”, “spirit” ’. ‘Walking spirit’ or ‘wandering spirit’ were the most common Protestant terms (Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 254). 38 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 234. 39 The implications of this for Hamlet have been relentlessly (and contentiously) explored; see, among other works, Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, and Thomas Rist, ‘Religion, Politics, Revenge: The Dead in Renaissance Drama’, Early Modern Literary Studies 9:1 (2003). 40 Thomas Beard, Retractive from the Romish Religion, p. 437; qtd in Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 241. 41 ‘An elegie: sacred to the immortall memory … Alice Countesse Dowager of Derby’, Clark Library MS C1929001, pp. 25–​6. 42 June Schlueter, ‘The Kassel Miscellany of Seventeenth-​Century Poems’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 107:2 (2013), pp. 241–​70; p. 251.

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even if a ghostly one. The elegist first notes the popular belief that usurers were wont to wander as restless ghosts:

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           have we not  seene Usurers walke after their deaths, & bene affrighted by their Ghoste? as if that hell could not afford a place for such to dwell.43

The poet logically moves on to suggest that if such bad men are allowed a continually earthly presence, then why should the virtuous (like Chichester) be ‘deprivd of life & of that Liberty’ (l. 42)? The poet at once articulates but simultaneously distances the desired ghostly presence:              yet there  are some, that could wish his presence, howsoere he come, though like a Ghost; nor can he be fearefull to any, but an Enemy (ll. 45–​8)

After an extended section where the poet considers in what contexts Chichester was fear-​producing (among his Irish enemies, towards the cowardly, etc.), he addresses directly the ghost that others might desire: Poore gentle Ghost, we should not feare to see but sorrow so to see thee, for in thee was nothing to affright, but to amaze (ll. 59–​61)

While the Chichester elegist had begun by distancing himself from those desiring the ghostly presence, he concludes the section by writing as if his poetic text had conjured the ghost, noting that he ‘could have added more’, but           henceforth Ile  ceasse by raysing thee, to trouble thy firme peace, or my owne Thoughts, for when I thinke of thee straight I dissolve into an Elegy (ll. 67–​70)

Thus, the sorrow of elegiac practice and the conjuring of ghosts collapse into one another. Great Brittans mourning garment, on the death of Prince Henry, invokes not the Prince’s ghost but the shades of the underworld as proper participants in grief: Then like a bould enchaunter I will call, The mournfull shadowes from infernall deepe, They know best how t’adorne a Funerall

43 ‘Death, thou art proud & cruell, though thy power’, BL Add. MS 33998, fol. 39r, ll. 37–​40.

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Or what rights doe belong to them that sleepe.

However, this venture into the theologically dubious is quickly retreated from:

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No: Rest you ghosts, possesse your quiet peace, My griefes forbid me to disturbe the dead,44

Another elegy on Anne King, by Robert Gomersall, most forthrightly engages with the heretical elements of invoking the ghosts of the dead. It survives in two versions, of which the manuscript version is more candidly heretical, a feature then qualified in print. In the manuscript, Gomersall begins with the bold statement, ‘Sure death hath power in Heaven’. He has been led to such a conclusion by this logic: a ‘blest shade’ of heaven must have died and this has prompted heaven to turn earthward to find the one human being worthy to replace that shade. This prompts him to consider the heresy that there might be death in Heaven. In the more public realm of print, the ‘daring pen of sorrow’ steps back from such forthright heresy: I Dare not say that Death in heav’n hath powre, Or that we have a second fatall howre: ’Tis impious to beleeve that soules doe range, Or that they can affect that foolish change Of happinesse, for Earth (as if they thought Gadding to be felicity, or sought, A moderation of their joyes) that heav’n, The roomes being empty which she first had giv’n, Strives to make good afresh, that this should be The cause, deare Ghost, why we are robb’d, of thee.45

Within his Protestant framework, Anne’s ghost could only have wandered not from Purgatory but from the heavenly realm, and he can find no reason why one would return from there to earth. Ironically, while acknowledging the impiety of belief in ‘walking spirits’, he concludes by addressing the dead Anne as ‘deare Ghost’. Like Chichester, Anne King has been conjured by the poetic work: while the ghostly presence is theologically rejected, it remains as part of the poetic process. As evident in the Chichester poem, fear was the usual early modern response to the ‘walking dead’,46 but such is strikingly absent from elegiac invocations of the possibility. The implication, I believe, is that the strong emotion of grief both creates a desire for the revenant that overwhelms the usual response of fear and eclipses the doctrinaire Protestant dismissal of the reality of ghosts.

44 Great Brittans mourning garment, sonnet 12, [sig. B3v]. 45 Robert Gomersall, Poems (1633), p. 1. 46 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 262.

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The heresy of others

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While in some of these cases poets present themselves as prone to or tempted by heresy, in others they direct the gesture outward, to other individuals or a whole culture that was prone to such. Thus, William Browne, in contemplating the death of Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke (d.  1621), playfully considers how a desire for her continued presence might even lead Puritans astray: For should the world but know that thou wert gone, Our age too prone to irreligion, Knowing so much divinity in thee, Might thence conclude no immortality: And I believe the Puritans themselves Would be seduc’d to think, that ghosts and elves Do haunt us yet, in hope that thou would’st deign To visit us, as when thou liv’d’st again.47

He does not leave the conceit there, but considers that ‘wits and nobles’ who read his elegy, ‘spite of all penalty’, might turn necromancers ‘and raise thee from thy tomb’(ll. 33–​7). From grief, all are ‘now half mad, or more, with inward woe’. These connected conceits are somewhat distanced from the poet, both as the result of madness and as what others might do, but Browne then acknowledges his own desire to maintain contact with the dead. He wishes that Galileo’s instrument might allow sight of this new heavenly element: Pardon, my sorrow is, that man alive, Who for us first found out a prospective To search into the Moon; and hath not he Yet found a further skill to look on thee? (ll. 43–​6)

If such were possible, he would ‘Stand fix’d, and gaze on her felicity’ (l. 52). Browne considers similar possibilities in ‘Is Death so great a gamester’,48 where in an imagined scene a ‘holy father’ will come ‘to say /​His orisons’ (ll. 79–​80). The speaker will ask him if there are any ‘whose faith and piety /​ Could raise the dead’ (ll. 82–​3), and the answer will be, no, but there are some ‘that dare to thrust /​Their hands profane to raise the sacred dust /​Of holy saints out of their beds of rest’ (ll. 85–​7), a seeming reference to Puritan iconoclasts.

47 Browne, Poems, vol. 2, p. 249, ll. 23–​30. 48 Browne, Poems, vol. 2, pp. 266–​70. In most manuscript copies this poem is titled as an elegy on his dead wife.

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John Eliot uses a similar trope in celebrating the beauty of the deceased Jane Pawlet, Marchioness of Winchester: The stiff-​neckt Puritane doth not allow His god a knee, yet to this Saint would bowe. Her gravest Chaplins in the midst of grace Stood often mute, till gazing on her face They from her Cheeks, as from two well pend books, Found graces store, and read them in her looks. And thus all men Idolatrie commit, Some with her feature, others with her wit.49

And further on, the poem imagines ‘Pilgrimes from furthest parts shall here arrive, /​To kiss the earth thou trod’st on being alive’ (ll. 83–​4). This reflects much of what has been covered in this chapter, but with the added dimension of anti-​Puritan satire of the sort we have seen in the elegy on Thomas Scott (Chapter 4) and Falkland’s on Lady Huntingdon (Chapter 7).

Conclusion What I have traced here is a particularly explicit and self-​conscious wrestling with the Catholic response to the dead, but it is typical of a broader tension that elegies share with early Stuart religious culture in general. These elegists are responding to what Marshall has identified as ‘the emotional claims and cultural leverage exercised by dead ancestors’, which ‘could prove peculiarly intractable to the dictates of Protestant orthodoxy’.50 As a genre, the funeral elegy was committed to a remembrance and celebration of the dead, and thus in its essence it clashed with Protestant norms. While often playful or ironic, and usually confined as a momentary lapse or symptom of distraction, these rhetorical gestures all point to a real desire for a continuing sense of relationship or contact with the dead. They constitute another way in which the elegiac situation allowed for daring exploration and outspokenness.

49 John Eliot, Poems (1658), p. 35, ll. 25–​32. 50 Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, p. 234.

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Afterword

Most occasional poetry of the early Stuart period has the rhetorical purpose of guiding human virtue, both private and public, through the complementary means of praise and blame. However, a death provided a context removed from both conventional panegyric and satire; as Richard Corbett writes, with the peace of death ‘Flatterie and Envie both doe cease’.1 Whether distracted or emboldened by sorrow, the funeral elegist can claim a space of objectivity, or at least disinterestedness from the motivations of flattery and envy. The usual addressee, the dead, with whom the poet fully identified, was beyond the reach of elegist and audience alike. Thus, in serving the dead, poets frequently enjoyed a licence for daring outspokenness on matters political, religious, and literary that put them in opposition to the living. The chapters above have traced the various ways in which such outspokenness was manifest. Rather than largely summarize the argument of preceding chapters, in these final pages I point to possibilities with the funeral elegies of the early seventeenth century that this study has left largely untouched. Most of all, I  hope that this book (and the accompanying online edition) has shown the richness of anonymous manuscript verse and its potential for further study. Chapters in this book have considered unusual and challenging situations for a funeral elegist: suicides, deaths in inglorious wars, the deaths of those who were publicly attacked or alienated from royal favour. All of these situations called for more than the usual elegiac elements of grief, commemoration, and consolation. The situations elicited combative or questioning poetry that comes down to us as some of the freshest occasional verse of the period. However, I have left undiscussed funeral elegies emerging from other special situations. 1 ‘An Elegie on the late Lord William Haward Baron of Effingham’; Corbett, Poems, p. 20, l. 18.

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For example, how might a foreign leader be elegized? British elegies of this period are overwhelmingly insular:  few deaths of foreigners were noted in this fashion. I  have considered those on Prince Frederick Henry of the Palatine (whom the elegies treated largely through his connection with the British royal family). Of the others, by far the greatest number were on the Protestant hero King Gustavus Adolphus, who died in 1632 at the height of his military success. At least forty-​one English poems lamenting his death survive, a number surpassed only by those on Prince Henry. However, to praise lavishly a foreign king was a delicate matter, where an elegist had also to consider the implications for his own (living!) monarch. Also unconsidered in this book are particular situations such as elegies on plague deaths, those on women who died in childbirth, or elegies where the body (usually through drowning) was never retrieved to become the focus of the grieving process. I have written little in these pages about critical elegies of the period, as I felt that other scholars have offered rich studies of this sub-​genre, especially those on Donne and Jonson.2 However, through the course of the project I also recognized the possibilities with elegies on other notable poetic figures. Those on Francis Beaumont, the first of the major Stuart elegists to die, consider how to approach an elegy on an elegist: one wishes for ‘A muse like his to sigh upon his grave’,3 a trope frequently picked up by elegies on Donne and Jonson. In Chapter  7 I  discussed Beaumont’s significance for Thomas Pestell, but much more could be done on his significance for the funeral elegy as a genre. Those that prefaced the posthumous publication of Thomas Randolph’s works are long and probing, and, like those on Donne and Jonson, show a strong sense of the emerging English tradition of elegizing other poets. Belated funeral elegies, those not written until many years after the death, constitute a noteworthy sub-​genre, which prompt most of all the question, ‘why now?’. For these, the context of the present would provide the likely answer. For example, the issuing of a volume of elegies on the renowned military leader Sir Horace Vere (d. 1635) in 1642 must be connected with the conflicts between Parliament and king emerging at that time. My final chapter offered some discussion of one element of the elegies on Anne King; however, this richly interconnected group of poems deserves far more attention, especially with its emphasis upon the bodily Resurrection, which connects them with the elegies on Bishop John King (her father-​in-​law) and the centrality of that topic in John Donne’s poetry and sermons. 2 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 131–​73. 3 John Earle, ‘Beaumont lies here; and where now shall we have’, in Francis Beaumont, Poems (1640), sig. K1r.

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Afterword

Throughout much of this book, Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ has been an unseen presence and continuing touchstone; in particular, the more early Stuart funeral elegies I read, the greater sense I had that the St Peter section of that poem was not an outlier but part of a recurring pattern of satiric or detractive digression. What sets it apart is Milton’s audacity in putting this outspoken passage in the heavenly voice of St Peter, rather than framing it as one emerging from the poet’s own distracted grief. However, I  have written little about the use of the pastoral elegy in the period, especially in the 1630s, which saw revival of the genre in court circles. The dialogue form offered the possibility of daring comment in a voice other than the poet’s. I hope that this study might also encourage scholars to consider lesser-​ noticed elegies of later periods. Monographs on the funeral elegy in English have usually dwelt primarily on the ‘peaks’: after ‘Lycidas’, heavily focusing upon Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’, and Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.  B.  Yeats’, and emphasizing the pastoral mode and poetic self-​consciousness. However, I would suggest that the ‘valleys’ offer much rich soil to be worked by critics and scholars, and that an approach focused on what funeral elegies do beyond grieving, commemorating, and consoling has much to offer. From my brief forays beyond the temporal end-​point of this book, I recognize how the patterns of detraction and political comment remain part of the elegiac tradition. In the 1640s, the partisan divide was not erased by death, and poets lamented the dead primarily within this divisive framework. The stakes were certainly raised in this period; as Alexander Brome admits when he encourages William Davenant to elegize John Suckling, he hopes that to do so ‘will not prove treason’.4 In these tumultuous years many elegies were written about men who had been killed by their own countrymen rather than by illness, a continental enemy, inept physicians, or Fate. The greater freedom of the printing press through much of the 1640s also encouraged outspoken elegies that in previous decades would have been constrained to manuscript circulation. Especially with the contentious Royalist deaths, those of Strafford, Laud, and Charles, elegies became a major site of struggle and contestation, with what we might call ‘anti-​elegies’ as well as elegies in wide circulation, a dynamic anticipated by the elegiac contest over the death of Buckingham that I traced in Chapter 5. Another hallmark of 1640s elegies was their sense of collective, national guilt:  that the deaths represented the national apostasy of civil war.5 The volume on the death of Henry Lord Hastings prompted the collaborative

4 An Elegie upon the death of the renowned Sir Iohn Sutlin (1642), p. 2. 5 See Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 131–​73.

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volume Lachrymae Musarum (1649), which featured an impressive range of major poets: Herrick, Denham, Marvell, and Dryden. Both in title and in breadth of illustrious authorship, it recalls the major volume commemorating Prince Henry, Lachrimae Lachrimarum. Did the genre continue to function as a vehicle for detraction in the decades following the Restoration? It may have been less necessary as an indirect method in periods when greater freedom of political comment was enjoyed, and more straightforward political satire prevailed, as in the voluminous Poems on Affairs of State in the 1680s and 1690s.6 However, the satiric possibility of the funeral elegy might still be adopted by the politically vulnerable. Furthermore, the phenomenon of mock elegies and defensive elegies on Buckingham was partially replayed following the death of William III in 1702, which was responded to with an outpouring of satiric elegies, and then the defensive responses of such writers as Daniel Defoe (The Mock Mourners) and Mandeville (The Pamphleteers).7 Finally, while this book has considered the relationship between the funeral elegy and related cultural forms, including the funeral monument and funeral sermon, far more could be done in this direction. While the funeral sermon was a recurring experience for most people of the early Stuart period, and hundreds, if not thousands, survive, this sub-​genre has received almost no scholarly attention. The project Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons is making these far easier to trace, and it would be especially worthwhile to study those instances where both funeral elegies and a sermon on the same figure survive.8 * * * * * * The present study has emphasized the rhetorical nature of funeral elegy, as befitting a century in which all language –​including the language of poetry –​ was thought of as primarily affective rather than expressive. As a result, I have written of poets using the opportunity of grief to comment on matters beyond the death itself. However, such a consideration is not to deny the reality of grief in their time or subsequent centuries. One early Stuart funeral elegist, Robert Allyne, asserted that ‘Mourning’s a natural motion in the heart’ to justify his poem,9 a sentiment not far removed from Wordsworth’s description of the elegist as

6 Marshall, The Practice of Satire, pp. 11–​12. 7 Marshall, The Practice of Satire, pp. 129–​30. 8 Gateway to Early Modern Manuscript Sermons, www.itergateway.org/​iter-​press/​ gateway-​early-​modern-​manuscript-​sermons. 9 Allyne, Funerall Elegies, sig. A2r.

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       a  voice Obedient to the strong creative power Of human passion.10

Whether in the ‘vertuous passion’ of Wye Saltonstall in the 1630s, or in Wordsworth’s ‘power /​Of human passion’ nearly two centuries later, death stirs poetry in unexpected ways. I write these final words in the spring of 2020, when COVID-​19 has rendered the ever-​present but often ignored reality of death so starkly apparent. Whether it is the death of an individual known intimately or from a distance, these moments do ‘break open’ our usual ways of thinking, of talking, and, ultimately, of writing poetry.

10 Wordsworth, ‘The Ruined Cottage’, ll. 478–​80.

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Appendix: terminology, genres, and sub-​genres

Both parts of the label ‘funeral elegy’ are problematic. In classical Greek and Latin poetry, ‘elegy’ was first of all a formal category: verse in elegiac distichs, that is, alternating dactylic hexameter and pentameter.1 The early Greek elegy was a genre used for a wide variety of occasions, especially at symposia and festivals, and while deaths were one of these occasions, there were many others.2 The earliest Greek elegies offered consolation rather than lamentation in the face of death. Thus, a greater lamentatory element developed in later centuries.3 That elegiac meter was also used for Greek epitaphs reinforced this association with death, and by the Hellenistic period the term ‘elegy’ was generally understood to mean a sung lament.4 Most significantly, late classical Greek commentators thought that the word’s etymology connected it with grief, and it was this sense that was then adopted by Renaissance writers. However, in ancient Rome the form was most associated with the intense emotions of love, found in the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, Catullus, and Ovid.5 Thus, the Renaissance inheritance of the term applied it to both love poems, as in Donne’s elegies, and poems of mourning.6 However, through the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the concern of this book, the term ‘elegy’ increasingly meant ‘funeral elegy’ specifically. The attributes associated with the love elegy by a Renaissance theorist like Scaliger,

1 For a fuller discussion of elegy in the classical context, see Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 11–​15. 2 R. S. Garner, Traditional Elegy: The Interplay of Meter, Tradition, and Context in Early Greek Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 3–​6. 3 E.  L.  Bowie, ‘Early Greek Elegy, Symposium and Public Festival’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 106 (1986), pp.  22–​3. Bowie counters the argument of D. L. Page regarding an earlier emphasis upon lament in the history of the elegy. 4 Bowie, ‘Early Greek Elegy’, pp. 24–​5. 5 A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 136–​7. 6 On the sixteenth-​century uses of the term, see F. W. Weitzmann, ‘Notes on the Elizabethan Elegie’, PMLA 1 (1935), pp. 435–​43.

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however, came to be part of the funeral elegy as well: immediate, passionate thought presented in a middle style, neither overly artful nor descending to the colloquial or coarse.7 Unfortunately, the other part of the label, ‘funeral’, is also rather misleading, for the poems had no formal role in the funeral service and generally reflect the period of mourning before the funeral. However, in some cases, elegies were a part of the formal ritual leading up to the funeral and were pinned to the hearse where the body lay while awaiting the funeral and burial.8 Funeral elegies of the period also include frequent references to weeping on the hearse and other suggestions that the body is yet unburied. A number of poets associate elegies with the hatchments (heraldic emblems) that likewise decked the hearse.9 In a few cases, such elegies then find a place at the end of published funeral sermons:  for example, in William Jones’ sermon on the Third Earl of Southampton (1625)10 and Richard Stock’s The churches lamentation for the losse of … John Lord Harington (1614). In spite of these problems with the term ‘funeral elegy’, it was widely used at the time and no other label has become universally accepted (although Brady’s ‘funerary elegy’ would be a helpful alternative). Occasionally, English poets of the period used the classical term epicedium/​epicedion/​epicede, but with little precision.11 The term originally meant a communal poem or song presented over the body at the funeral, and in the few cases where such sense is maintained, the voices are in a more

7 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p. 207. 8 A. Bellany, ‘A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse: Puritanism, Libel and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference’, Journal of British Studies 34:2 (1995), pp. 137–​64. C. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 183, notes in her description of heraldic funerals that ‘the hearse was often left standing in the church for some months as a memorial to the deceased’, and this is supported by John Weever’s comment in Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631) that the hearses might be left in place for ‘the continuance of a yeare, or for the space of certaine moneths’ (p. 32). 9 Hugh Holland, A Cypress Garland (1625), sig. A3r, writes, ‘With his [King James’] Hatchments, at Westminster [I]‌also offer up my Pen’; Henry King, ‘To the Memorie of my Ever Desired Friend Dr. Donne’, refers to how with other deaths ‘Each quill can drop his tributary verse, /​And pin it, like the Hatchments, to the Hearse’. 10 W. Jones, A treatise of patience in tribulation (1625). 11 George Puttenham notes the classical distinction between epicedia and monodia: the former were communal funeral songs and the latter ‘uttered by one alone’; The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 137. However, in English the term ‘epicede’ seems to lose any sense of being an utterance by a communal voice; ‘Monody’ as a term was very rare in English, but was famously adopted by Milton in the 1645 headnote to ‘Lycidas’. See also Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp 11–​12.

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settled acceptance of the death than those elegies set at the receiving of the news.12 However, by the 1600s it was most often used as a mere classical replacement for the term ‘funeral elegy’. The classical terms ‘threnody’ and ‘monody’, while potentially helpful, were little used in the period, apart from Milton’s use of the latter in the subtitle of ‘Lycidas’. Thus, consistent with the norms of the period, this study uses the term ‘funeral elegy’ and, often, the shortened form ‘elegy’. In his study of genre in the early modern period, Alastair Fowler points to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analogy of ‘family resemblance’ to Renaissance genres. In this analogy, a genre is more like a family than a precisely defined and limited botanical class; thus, there is resemblance but not necessarily an always-​appearing feature or features.13 (Likewise, Franco Moretti’s ‘evolutionary’ approach is helpful in avoiding the idea of static, precisely defined generic categories:  it acknowledges both synchronic and diachronic flexibility.14) In the present case, the single connecting or continuing element would be that a ‘funeral elegy’ is a poem on the death of a named historical individual; however, such would need to be distinguished from other death-​ related genres within the same family, such as the epitaph and anniversary poem. These differences can be determined by considering what Northrop Frye calls the ‘axis of presentation’: voice and moment. The funeral elegy most typically involves a first-​person voice responding emotionally to the recent death of an individual, at times through a direct addressing of the deceased. This immediacy in timing significantly distinguishes ‘funeral’ elegies from other poetic memorials of the dead. Epitaphs offer instead a tomb-​ based, stable and continuing commemoration  –​and generally use a third-​person voice, sometimes of the tomb itself. The less common genre of ‘anniversaries’, such as those by Donne on Elizabeth Drury, Henry King’s ‘Anniverse’, and Richard Brathwaite’s Anniversaries upon his Panarete (1634 and 1635), are poems of later reflection rather than immediate response.15 As formal markers they imply a programme of remembrance quite different from the immediate, momentary

12 Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, p.  137. Puttenham also notes the ‘vulgar’ term ‘obsequy’, which like ‘epicede’ was not nearly as widely used in the period as ‘funeral elegy’. The problem of terminology seemingly led the editors of the Donne Variorum to collect his funeral elegies in a section entitled ‘Epicedes and Obsequies’; Stringer, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. 13 Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp. 40–​1. 14 Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). 15 Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy points to a tradition of such verses: ‘the lamenting of deaths was chiefly at the very burials of the dead, also at month’s minds and longer times, by custom continued yearly’; p. 117.

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response of many elegies: Brathwaite vows ‘For wee an Anniversall meane to reare /​In honour of her vertues ev’ry yeare’.16 Likewise, what I call ‘chronicle elegies’ (which recount the life and career of the dead) often appeared at a greater temporal distance from the death.17 In her article on the funerary poetry of the Tudor period, Gutierrez adopts the term ‘remembrance’ to identify such printed elegies in the period that were more concerned with commemorating the accomplishments and virtues of the dead than with expressing personal grief. She describes it as ‘a hybrid of obituary and elegy’, and suggests that such an approach reflects the more public realm of print; its chief object was to offer a praiseworthy model for emulation by the living.18 In contrast, she follows A. L. Bennett in using the term ‘personal elegy’ to mean that more subjective poetic response that was to prevail in the seventeenth century.19 Gutierrez suggests that the organizing of praise through attention to the stages of the individual’s life was based upon rules derived from the classical tradition and codified by rhetorical handbooks of the Renaissance.20 A well-​known example of this type in English is Ralegh’s ‘Epitaph upon … Sir Philip Sidney’ (beg. ‘To praise thy life’), which (despite its title) is not epitaph-​like in either its tropes or its length. The chronicle elegy still dominates in the early part of the century: in print, John Ford’s poem on Lord Mountjoy (d.  1606) and Tourneur on Francis Vere (d. 1609); in manuscript, an anonymous elegy on Isabella, Countess of Rutland (d.  1605), Anthony Cade on John Skeffington (d.  1613), and Robert Marston on Thomas, Lord Grey (d. 1614). The largely biographical, narrative approach adopted by these poets is distinct from the more reflective 16 It should be noted that in some ‘Anniversary’ poems an elegy-​like grief is maintained despite the passage of time, and dismay at the continuing loss is paramount. This merging of the genres is reflected in the fact that in most manuscript copies King’s ‘Anniverse’ is simply entitled ‘Elegy’. 17 A.  Fowler, ‘The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After’, New Literary History 34:2 (2003), p. 187, argues that it ‘seems usual for subgenres to emerge before genres’, and this seems borne out with this genre, where what I call the ‘chronicle elegy’ was prominent before what scholars have generally recognized as the main genre of the personal funeral elegy. Certainly, part of the problem is inherent to the very vocabulary of ‘genre’ and ‘sub-​genre’ with its suggestion of fixity and hierarchy. Fowler’s suggestion to think of genres as ‘domains of association’ rather than categories is helpful in this regard (p. 190). 18 Gutierrez, ‘The Remembrance’, p. 105. 19 A.  L.  Bennett, ‘The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy’, Studies in Philology 51:2 (1954), pp. 107–​26. 20 Gutierrez, ‘The Remembrance’, pp.  106–​7. Gutierrez also appropriately sees the ‘remembrance’ as part of the broader category of ‘model literature’ that dominated the Tudor period (p. 114).

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nature of the emerging ‘funeral elegy,’ which responds in a personal voice to the death itself. They tend to be written in the loftier forms of sixains or rhyme royal, rather than the elegiac norm of the pentameter couplet.21 In contrast, Gutierrez notes that in the Tudor ‘remembrance’, ‘the normal verse is poulter’s measure, rhyming fourteeners, or iambic pentameter couplets’.22 Whether we call these ‘remembrances’ or chronicle elegies, they differ from the later subjective funeral elegy, in that the latter’s performance of emotion allows for praise to be joined, at times, by bitter complaint and even satiric critique of the world left empty by the departure of the deceased. What Avon Jack Murphy has called the ‘critical elegy’, that is, one that offers an element of literary assessment on the death of a fellow poet,23 might be construed as simply the funeral elegy turning in subject matter to a particular group of individuals. However, since those individuals practised the same craft as the medium of the elegy, a distinct relationship between subject and commemoration was possible: the poem might attempt to reflect the literary style of the deceased (as in Carew’s famous elegy on Donne) or, often, to lament the poet’s own ability to write an elegy worthy of the dead poet’s style.24 Some, as again in Carew on Donne, suggest that only the deceased could have penned an appropriate commemoration. Over the decades of the first half of the century, these were published in ever-​ increasing bulk as preliminaries to the published poetic works of recently dead poets: that of Donne in 1633 and Thomas Randolph in 1638 are noteworthy examples, but the greatest mass was probably in the 1651 edition of William Cartwright’s work, which was preceded by more than one hundred pages of such material. These, to the extent that they at times extend beyond the usual elegiac priorities of lament, commemoration, and consolation into the realm of literary criticism, fall within this book’s range of concerns, but as they have received significant attention from other scholars, like Brady, who discusses those on Donne and Jonson, I largely pass them by.25 Also surviving are a significant number of poems that reflect upon the writing of funeral elegies. Verse epistles are especially common, and most often are addressed to a relative of the dead. The elegiac epistle, while in the

21 See D.  S.  Wilson-​Okamura, Spenser’s International Style (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 43–​4, on George Gascoigne’s and King James’ preference for lofty rhyme royal over more pedestrian couplets. 22 Gutierrez, ‘The Remembrance’, p. 113. 23 A. J. Murphy, ‘The Critical Elegy of Earlier Seventeenth-​Century England’, Genre 5:1 (1972), pp. 75–​105. 24 There is some affinity here to the frequent musical genre of the ‘déploration’ in which a fellow composer’s death was lamented. 25 Brady, English Funerary Elegy, pp. 131–​73.

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mode of the elegy, differs in the radical of presentation: the figure addressed throughout, usually a family member of the deceased, is understood to share the grief of the poets themselves, and in many cases the poem functions more to honour and validate the family’s grief than present the speaker’s own. Frequent notes of apology adorn these, with remarks upon the poet’s own failure to write an elegy (or a sufficient one). Grieving spouses are a common audience of such epistles, but there are surviving examples that address other relationships. Two elegies (‘He that can spell a sigh’ by William Lewis and the anonymous ‘Nourishd with sighs and frights’) address the posthumous son of the Duke of Buckingham. Some poems begin as a verse epistle on another’s elegy and then become one on their own: that entitled ‘To a friend of Sir Tho: Overburyes’, beginning ‘Sir you are one of those’, would be among these. Other examples include Sylvester’s ‘Elegiac Epistle’ on the death of Sir William Sidney (d. 1612) addressed to his father, Sir Robert; the anonymous ‘Morgan! to call thee sadd and discontente’ on the death of Sir John Davies (d. 1626); John King’s ‘A Letter to his most loving Brother H[enry]: K[ing]: upon the death of his Late wife’; and the lengthy one addressed to Sir Thomas Lyttelton on the death of the Earl of Southampton (d. 1624), which was fully discussed in Chapter 4. While the typical funeral elegy is a monody, there were a number of related dialogic forms. Of these, the most significant was the pastoral elegy, which had deep roots in the Greek and Roman traditions. The majority of pastoral elegies present more than one voice; they offer a community in mourning, or voices that embed within the poem itself the competition of mourning. Dialogic forms offered another opportunity for contentious comment, as poets could distance themselves from, and possibly deny, the voice of another. The ‘dread voice’ of St Peter section in ‘Lycidas’ is a well-​ known example. On rare occasions, they offer a voice completely outside the circle of mourning  –​specifically, a contrary voice against which the mourners can defend the dead. While pastoral elegy was the most common dialogic form, poets attempted other possibilities. George Chapman’s Eugenia (on the death of William, Lord Russell, d.  1613) offers personified voices of abstractions; Arthur Gorges’ Olympian Catastrophe, for Prince Henry, presents Juno, Minerva, and Bellona as the three main (and competing) voices of mourning. Occasionally an elegy may inscribe the mourning words of another, directly identified individual: Gorges dramatizes the voice of Princess Elizabeth in this same poem (ll. 1063–​88).

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Manuscripts Bodleian Library, Oxford (Bodl.) Ashmole MS 38 Ashmole MS 47 Dodsworth MS 61 Malone MS 19 pr. bk. Wood 460 Rawl. poet. MS 26 Rawl. poet. MS 160 Rawl. poet. MS 210

British Library, London (BL) Add. MS 11811 Add. MS 12067 Add. MS 15227 Add. MS 22118 Add. MS 25303 Add. MS 26051 Add. MS 30259 Add. MS 33998 Add. MS 34217 Add. MS 72276 Egerton MS 2533 Egerton MS 2725 Egerton MS 2982 Harl. MS 383 Harl. MS 509 Harl. MS 4931 Harl. MS 6917 Lansdowne MS 805 Royal MS 18 A. XLIX Sloane MS 542

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Cambridge University Library Add. MS 42

Edinburgh University Library

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MS Laing iii.493

Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC MS V.a.97 MS V.a.170 MS V.a.262

Hampshire Record Office 44M69/​L42/​24–​27

Leeds University Library Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 44

Leicestershire Record Office DE 728.970

The National Archives, London (TNA) SP 14/​71/​68 SP 14/​107/​7 SP 14/​107/​38 SP 14/​108/​50 SP 14/​108/​85 SP 14/​109/​7 SP 14/​109/​11 SP 14/​109/​14 SP 14/​109/​41 SP  84/​121

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth (NLW) Peniarth MS 500B 5390D

503

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National Library of Scotland (NLS) MS Adv. 33.1.7

National Records, Scotland (NRS)

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40.15.4.3 GD 40/​2/​1/​7 GD 40/​2/​15/​2

Newcastle University Library Bell White MS 25

University of Nottingham Library Pw V 37/33

Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia MS 1083/​17

West Yorkshire Archives 32D86/​17

Yale University Library, New Haven, CT Osborn MS b.197

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Bright, H. A. (ed.). Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers (London, 1877). Brooke, Christopher. The Complete Poems of Christopher Brooke, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: Blackburn, 1872). Burton, J.  Hill et  al. The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1898–​1908). Calderwood, David. History of the Kirk of Scotland (1842–​9). Carew, Thomas. The Poems of Thomas Carew, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949). Carleton, D. Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain, 1603–​1624: Jacobean Letters, ed. Maurice Lee (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1972). Chamberlain, J.  The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols, ed. N.  E.  McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939). Corbett, R. The Poems of Richard Corbett ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-​ Roper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Davies, J. of Hereford. The Muses Teares (1613). Donne, J. Poems of John Donne, ed. H. J. C. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1933). Ellis, Sir Henry (ed.). Original Letters Illustrative of English History (London, 1825–​46). Fowler, Constance Aston. The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler:  A Diplomatic Edition, ed. Deborah Aldrich-​Watson (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2000). Gorges, Sir Arthur. Poems of Sir Arthur Gorges, ed. Helen. E. Sandison (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953). Habington, William. Poems, ed. Kenneth Allott (Liverpool:  University Press of Liverpool, 1948). Hagthorpe, J. Divine meditations, and elegies (1622). Herbert, Edward. Poems English and Latin, ed. G.  C.  Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1923). Herrick, Robert. Complete Poetry, 2 vols, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Holland, Abraham. Hollandi Post-​huma (1626). Holles, Sir John [Earl of Clare]. Letters, 3 vols, ed. Peter Seddon (Nottingham: Thoroten Society, 1975–​80). Jones, William. A Treatise of Patience in Tribulation (1624). Jonson, B. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols, ed. David Bevington et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2012). Kerr, Sir Robert, Earl of Ancram. Correspondence of Sir Robert Kerr, first earl of Ancram, and his son William, third earl of Lothian (Edinburgh, 1875). King, H.  The Poems of Henry King:  Bishop of Chichester, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). Musarum Lachrymae (Dublin, 1630). North, D. A Forest of Varieties (1645). Oglander, Sir John. A Royalist Notebook:  The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, ed. Francis Bamford (London: Constable, 1936). Oldisworth, N.  Nicholas Oldisworth’s Manuscript (Bodleian MS. Don.c.24), ed. John Gouws (Tempe, AZ: ACMRS, 2009).

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Overbury, Sir Thomas (and others). Characters, together with Poems, news, Edicts, and Paradoxes based on the eleventh edition of ‘A Wife Now the Widow of Sir Thomas Overbury’, ed. Donald Beecher (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2003). Pestell, Thomas. Poems of Thomas Pestell, ed. Hannah Buchan (Oxford:  Basil Blackwell, 1940). Price, D. Lamentations for the Death of the Late Illustrious Prince Henry (1613). Randolph, T.  Poems, ed. G.  Thorn-​Drury (London:  Frederick Etchells & Hugh Macdonald, 1929). Roe, Sir Thomas. Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte, From the Year 1621 to 1628 Inclusive (London, 1740). Rowlands, S. Sir Thomas Overbury, or, The poysoned knights complaint (1614?). Sampson, William. Virtus post Funera vivit (1636). Scot of Scotstarvet, John. ‘The Staggering State of Scottish Statesmen’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 (1872). Scott, T. Symmachia: or, A true-​loves knot (Holland, 1624). Spenser, E. Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. W. A. Oram et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). Tourneur, C.  The Death of Prince Henrie. In John Churton Collins (ed.), Plays and Poems of Cyril Tourneur. Vol.  1 (1878; rpt Freeport, NY:  Books for Libraries, 1978). Webster, J. The Works of John Webster, ed. D. Gunby et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Wilkinson, R. The Stripping of Joseph (1625).

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Index

Acheson, Archibald 205 Aesop ‘The Lion Grown Old’ 177, 183 Allyne, Robert 13, 34, 40, 48 Amboyna massacre 144, 146, 160 Ancram, Robert Kerr, Earl of 206 Anne, Queen 89–103, 109 anniversaries (genre) 299 Arden, Lady Dorothy 237, 241 Arminianism 186, 188 astrology 213 Atkins, Francis 13 Augustine, St 233 Ayton, Sir Robert 97 Bacon, Francis 77 Basse, William 94 Beaumont, Francis 14, 80, 225, 230, 235–6, 241, 293 Bedford, Lucy Russell, Countess of 219, 231, 235 Benlowes, Edward 226 Bradford, John 13 Brady, Andrea 8–9 Brathwaite, Richard 83–4, 300 Breda 156, 167 Brooke, Christopher 30, 76, 137–8 Broughton, Richard 261 Browne, William 18, 72, 73, 284, 290 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of 111, 135, 148, 150, 162, 169–99, 257 Bulstrode, Cecilia 222

Burroughs, John 193 Busby, Richard 15 Cadiz expedition (1625) 190, 192 Cadmus 179, 181 Calvin, John 278 Calvinism 188, 261, 277 Cambridge 244 Carew, Thomas 287, 301 Cartwright, William 127, 301 Castle, John 96 Catlin, Edward 237 Chapman, George 30 Charles I, King 103, 108, 109–13, 114, 121, 170, 178, 184, 281, 282 Charles II, King 129–31 Charles, Prince (d. 1629) 126–9 Chesterfield, Katherine Stanhope, Countess of 242 Chettle, Henry 14 Chichester, Sir Arthur 134, 137–8, 287 Christ crucifixion of 217 chronicle elegies 133, 151, 162, 300 Church of England 265, 268–75 liturgy 165–7 Civil Wars (1640s) 294 Clare, John Holles, Earl of 105, 119 Clifton, Lady Penelope 224, 226 Codrington, Robert 243, 287 Colfe, Abraham 63 Coligny, Gaspard II de 191 comet of 1618–​19 93–100

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314

Index

Conway, Edward 146 Corbett, Richard 36–9, 73, 74, 79, 92, 96, 97, 292 elegy on Bishop Thomas Ravis 247–8 ‘How doe I thank thee, Death’ 68 Cork, Catherine Boyle, Countess of 219, 225 Cotton, Sir Rowland 59 critical elegies 293, 301 Daniel, Samuel 92 Darcie, Abraham 174 Davenant, William 186 Davies, John, of Hereford 17, 51–7 Death personification of 85 Digby, Lady Venetia 226–31, 276 Digby, Sir Kenelm 227–8 Donne, John 86, 168, 231, 232, 235, 238, 241, 279, 293, 301 Anniversaries 9, 77, 143, 221, 228, 232, 237 Biathanatos 213, 215 funeral elegies on women 222 ‘Hymne to the Saints, and to Marquesse Hamylton’ 281 ‘Look to me, Faith’ 47 ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ 227 Dorset, Richard Sackville, Third Earl of 134 Douglas, Archibald, of Lumsden 201, 207 Douglas, William, of Tofts 15, 200–17 Drayton, Michael 17, 226 Drummond, William, of Hawthornden 40 Duppa, Brian 39 East India Company 145 Eglisham, George 134 elegiac epistles 301 elegiac meter 297

Eliot, Sir John 185, 291 Elizabeth I, Queen 63, 104, 240 Elizabeth, Princess 40, 57, 123, 161, 240 England isolationism 163 military past of 163 epicede 298 epitaphs 142, 147, 149, 176, 299 Essex, Robert Devereux, Third Earl of 60, 65, 66, 81, 88, 170, 256 Fairfax, Sir William 136 Falkland, Lucius Cary, Viscount 232, 234 Felltham, Owen 157 Buckingham elegy 180 Felton, John 169, 172, 174–5, 177, 184, 190, 191, 196 Fishburne, Richard 154 Fisher, Ambrose 245 Ford, John 78 France 127, 135, 164, 191 Frederick Henry, Prince of the Palatinate 122–7 Frederick, Elector 57, 123, 135, 136, 155 funeral elegies belated 293 competition among 251 critical history of 3–4 defensive role of 121–2, 169, 176–8, 226–31 detraction within 15–18, 168, 218, 225–6, 248, 295 distraction within 12–15, 143, 162 functions of 10–11 heresy and 143, 153, 276–91 manuscript culture of 5–8 and other memorial forms 32–5, 259–60 and patronage 219–20, 237–8 politics and 18–19 terminology 300 timing of 21–2

513

Index funeral sermons 35–9, 278, 295, 298 funerary monuments 32–3, 154, 173, 247, 249, 258, 259

315

Huntingdon, Henry Hastings, Fifth Earl of 233

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Ireland 137–8 Gainsford, Thomas 78 Gauden, John 220 genre theory 299 ghosts 286–9 Goffe, Thomas 249, 251, 267–8 Gomersall, Robert 13, 289 Gorges, Arthur 44–5, 302 Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden 145, 293 Habington, William 14 Hagthorpe, John 40, 78 Hamilton, James, Second Marquess of 134 Harington, John, Second Lord 58 Hastings, Henry Lord 294 Hatfield House 141 Hatton, Sir Christopher 248 Haxby, Stephen 43 Henrietta Maria, Queen 103, 109–13, 127, 164 Henry III, King of France 191 Henry IV, King of France 191 Henry, Prince of Wales 9, 21, 123, 135, 288 as Absalom 46 as Hector 42–3 military potential of 48 patronage of the arts 41 tomb of 33–5 heresy 211 Herrick, Robert 200, 272 Heywood, Thomas 103 Hildersham, Arthur 238 Holland, Abraham 114–18, 132, 151, 152–3, 185 Horace 151 Howard, Frances 69, 70–2, 75, 102 Huntingdon, Elizabeth Hastings, Countess of 231–4

Jackson, Abraham 59 James VI and I, King 57, 64, 66–7, 69, 78, 93–100, 127, 134, 139, 143, 148 death of 103–22 peacemaking 132, 152 James, Richard 105 Johnston, Arthur 120 Jones, William 149 Jonson, Ben 16, 80, 105, 126, 227, 232, 276 ‘Eupheme’ 228–9 Fortunate Isles 144 Kay, Dennis 8–9 Kelly, Ed 82 Kerr, Anne 206 Kerr, Sir John, of Jedburgh 206 King, Anne 286, 289, 293 King, Henry 129–31, 258, 263, 286 elegies upon Bishop John King 259 ‘Elegy upon S.W.R.’ 86–7 ‘The Exequy’ 279 sermon on Bishop John King 261–2 King, John (the younger) 263, 286 King, John, Bishop of London 97, 258–68 La Rochelle 191 Lambe, John 172 Lambert, John 161, 163 Lapworth, Mary 225 Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 173, 234 Lewis, William 178, 246, 282 Lothian, Annabel Kerr (née Douglas), Countess of 201, 203, 206, 208, 209 Lothian, Robert Kerr, Second Earl of 200–17

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Index

Lothian, William Kerr, Third Earl of 206 Love's Martyr 64 Lyttelton, Sir Thomas 141–2, 148

prophecies 99 Puritanism 165–7, 176, 211, 232–4, 270 Puttenham, George 3

Mansfeld, Count Ernst von 145 Markham, Lady Bridget 221, 222 Marsh, James 257 Maurice, Prince of Orange 134 May, Thomas 227 Milton, John Areopagitica 179, 283 ‘Lycidas’ 16, 246, 254, 294 ‘On Shakespeare’ 283 Samson Agonistes 217 Murray, Sir Thomas 257, 281–2

Radcliffe, Edward 248 Ralegh, Sir Walter 80–8 Randolph, Thomas 59, 227, 230, 293, 301 Ravis, Thomas, Bishop of London 247 relics 283–6 Resurrection, Final 285–6, 293 revenge tragedy 276 Rhé, Isle of, expedition 137, 171, 190, 191, 192, 195 Rich, Lady Anne 219, 226 Richmond and Lennox, Ludovick Stuart, Duke of 134, 143 Rodney, Frances 220 Roe, Sir Thomas 146 Roman Catholicism 127, 143, 270, 271, 276, 277, 279–83 conversion to 260–5, 268 Russell, John 17 Rutland, Elizabeth Manners, Countess of 80, 223–4

Netherlands, United Provinces of the 126, 136, 138–50, 155–7, 160, 164–7 New Forest 144, 148 Newbattle Abbey 202 Niccols, Richard 39, 42 North, Dudley 50, 100 Overbury, Sir Thomas 69, 80, 135 Owen, John 68 Oxford, Henry de Vere, Eighteenth Earl of 134, 150–7 Oxford University 244, 248–9 Christ Church 248, 251 Merton College 249 Parliament 171, 177, 189, 257 Paston, Lady Katherine 218 pastoral 16, 144, 302 Peacham, Henry 57 Pestell, Thomas 219, 225, 231, 234–42, 284 Piers, William 252 plague of 1625 152 poetic form of 134 Price, Daniel 39, 94, 134 Pricket, Robert 64 prison literature 62

Salisbury, Robert Cecil, Earl of 170 Saltonstall, Wye 13, 29 Salusbury, Henry 155 Sampson, William 16, 231, 232, 240 Sancroft, William 13 satire 183, 184–6, 239 Savile, Henry 249–58 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 3 Shitlington, Janet 203, 205, 208, 216 Scot, John, of Scotstarvet 205, 208 Scott, Thomas 14, 168 Seymour, William 66 Shirley, James 114 Sidney, Sir Philip 31, 133, 147, 152 Sidney, Sir William 58 Somerset, Robert Kerr, Earl of 69, 70–2, 75, 102

713

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Index Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of 134, 138–50 Spain 145–7, 158, 170 Spanish Match 96, 107, 113, 139, 148, 150, 190, 197, 257, 281, 282 Spence, Robert 174 Spicer, Alexander 138 St Paul's Cathedral 247, 258 Stanhope, John 248–9 Stoicism 215 Stuart, Arbella 70 suicide 200–17 Sylvester, Joshua 51, 58 Lachrimae Lachrimarum 30 Tacitus 251, 256 Taileboys, Richard 112 The Bishop of London his Legacie 261 Thirty Years War 123–4, 132, 144, 145, 155, 157, 208 Tichborne, Chidiock 62 Titchfield 140 Tooke, George 136 Tourneur, Cyril 17 Towneley, Zouch 175 Townshend, Aurelian 179, 227, 229

317

Turner, Sir James 201–2, 208, 212, 215, 217 Unes, Margaret 203, 205, 208, 216 university anthologies 92, 119–20, 133, 245, 246–7, 250–1, 255 Urquhart, Sir Thomas 208 Wake, Isaac 28, 106 Washington, Thomas 282 Webster, John 33, 43 Weston, Richard 75, 76, 79 wide reading 4–5 Wight, Isle of 140, 142, 144, 147, 148, 149 William III, King 295 Williams, Robert 64 Winchester, Jane Paulet, Marchioness of 219 witchcraft 205, 206, 208, 215, 216 Wither, George 257 Prince Henries Obsequies 29, 31, 33, 40, 42, 46, 49, 57, 58 Wren, Matthew 282 Wriothesley, James 140