Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality: Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism 0754656144, 9780754656142

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism

Syrithe Pugh

HERRICK, FANShAWE AND ThE POLITICS Of INTERTEXTUALITY

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality

Classical Literature and Seventeenth-Century Royalism

SYRIThE PUGh University of Aberdeen, UK

First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Syrithe Pugh 2010 Syrithe Pugh has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Pugh, Syrithe. Herrick, Fanshawe and the politics of intertextuality: classical literature and seventeenth century royalism. 1. Fanshawe, Richard, Sir, 1608–1666–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Fanshawe, Richard, Sir, 1608–1666–Political and social views. 3. Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674. Hesperides. 4. Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674–Political and social views. 5. English poetry–Early modern, 1500–1600–History and criticism. 6. Intertextuality. 7. English Poetry–Classical influences. 8. Politics in literature. 9. Monarchy in literature. I. Title 821.4’09142-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pugh, Syrithe. Herrick, Fanshawe and the politics of intertextuality: classical literature and seventeenth-century royalism / Syrithe Pugh. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5614-2 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7546-9805-0 (ebook) 1. Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Herrick, Robert, 1591–1674– Political and social views. 3. Fanshawe, Richard, Sir, 1608–1666–Criticism and interpretation. 4. Fanshawe, Richard, Sir, 1608–1666–Political and social views. 5. Poets, English–Early modern, 1500–1700–Political and social views. 6. Politics and literature–Great Britain–History–17th century. 7. English poetry–Classical influences. 8. Royalists in literature. 9. Allusions in literature. 10. Imitation in literature. I. Title. PR3514.P84 2010 821’.4–dc22 2009020258 ISBN 9780754656142 (hbk) ISBN 9781315586755 (ebk)

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements   Introduction  

vii ix 1

PArT I OVid iN ThE HESPERIDES: HErricK’s PoliTics of AllUsioN Introduction to Part I  

15

1 ‘Cleanly-wantonnesse’: Ovid’s Amatory Elegies in the Hesperides  

21

2 ‘Times trans-shifting’: The Metamorphoses and the Fasti in the Hesperides  

39

3 Exile and Haven: The Tristia and Ex Ponto in the Hesperides  

57

PArT II PoETic IMiTATioN ANd LiMiTEd MoNArchY iN FANshAWE’s 1648 Il PaStOR FIDO Introduction to Part II  

87

4 ‘These lessons let his tender years receive’:Buchanan, Fanshawe, and Fatherly Advice to Kings  

89

5 Otium and Civil War: The ‘Ode on the Proclamation’  

107

6 Humanist Counsel, the Body Politic and the Ship of State  

121

7 ‘A Canto of the Progresse of Learning’:Spenser and the Decline of Humanist Counsel  

131

8 Tempering Lucan and Virgil: Fanshawe on the Civil Wars of Rome   151

vi

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality

Appendix A Translation of Fanshawe’s Maius Lucanizans ‘May Lucanizing’ (or ‘Lucanizing More Greatly’)  

175

Bibliography   Index locorum   Index   

177 187 193

List of Figures 1

2

Frontispiece engraving from Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648) (British Library G.11495 ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 08/01/2009)  

17

Frontispiece engraving from Thomas May, Supplementum Lucani (1640) (Bodley 8oM 22 Art Seld, by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford)   153

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Acknowledgements I began work on this book as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Leeds, where I was funded by the British Academy. My thanks go both to the Academy for their patronage, and to the English department at Leeds for providing such a nurturing environment. Among my colleagues there, I am particularly grateful to Karen Britland, Paul Hammond, David Lindley, Martin Butler, Tom Lockwood and especially Michael Brennan, for their conversation, advice and responses to early parts of my research. I completed the book in my current post at the University of Aberdeen, and thanks are due also to my colleagues there, particularly Tom Rist, Derek Hughes and Andy Gordon, for conversation, advice and responses to a later section. Along the way, some of this material was also aired in different forms at seminars and conferences, and I am grateful to the organizers of these events: to John Roe for an exile conference at York in 2005, to the English department research seminar at Glasgow for their hospitality in 2004, to Jane Grogan for a conference on Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos in May 2009, and to Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain for the Herrick conference of July 2008. My thanks also go to the audiences at all of these events for their thought-provoking responses. Others to whom I am grateful for help, advice and interesting discussion include Robert Cummings, Stuart Gillespie, John Creaser, Aschah Guibbory, Andrew Laird, David Levene and Stephen Hinds. Any remaining faults and errors are, of course, entirely my own. The book is dedicated to my darling daughter, Ishbel Burn – infinitely the more perfect and precious of my recent productions. A version of Chapter 1 has previously appeared as an article in The Seventeenth Century, and versions of Chapters 3 and 5 in The Review of English Studies. I am grateful to Manchester University Press and Oxford University Press for granting permission to reprint these here.

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Introduction Since Earl Miner’s influential characterization of the ‘cavalier mode’ in 1971 as one of retreat from the public and the political into private sociability and inward virtue, our perceptions of the royalist poetry of the 1640s have changed considerably. Such a literal-minded response to the conviviality, rural retreat and Stoic self-sufficiency which are often the explicit subject-matter of the ‘cavalier’ poets not only distorted but also had the unintended effect of trivializing their poetry for a generation of literary critics who would take a keen and absorbing interest in literature’s relation to history, and especially political history. Poetry whose ‘most distinctive feature’ was perceived as ‘retreat’ to ‘wait out the winter with … wine and friends’ could hardly escape being seen as minor by the historicizing criticism which has come to dominate literary studies over the last three decades. But greater attention has more recently been paid to several of these poets, and to their ‘freight of political significance’. ‘Never before in English history’, as Nigel Smith has observed, ‘had written and printed literature played such a predominant role in public affairs, and never before had it been felt by contemporaries to be of such importance.’ Even when the apparent topic of poems is the virtue of Stoic withdrawal, publication itself can often be seen as a rhetorical act and an intervention in public affairs.    Earl Miner, The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 179. A more considered modern treatment of the same idea, seeing royalist poetics as founded on Stoic withdrawal, is Raymond A. Anselment, Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988).    Thomas N. Corns, ‘Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 200–220 (quotation at p. 201). See also Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Gerald Hammond, ‘Richard Lovelace and the Uses of Obscurity’, Proceedings of the British Academy 71 (1985), 203–34; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997); Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). See also several of the essays in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999).    Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, p. 1.

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality



James Loxley has argued that the very ‘rhetoric of retirement’ which characterizes so much royalist verse ‘is highlighted, qualified and contained as an element in a contrary strategy of continued engagement’. Robert Herrick, the first of the two poets who are the subject of this volume, is in particular enjoying something of a renaissance, recently evidenced by a conference organized by the University of Newcastle in 2008, and a part of this renaissance has been several excellent articles on the polemical aspects of his poetry. The other focus of this book, Richard Fanshawe, however, remains neglected and misrepresented. This growing attention to royalist poetry in literary criticism has been paralleled by a growth of attention among historians to the royalist party and its politics. In 1981, Ronald Hutton complained that, while ‘a score of books and articles’ over the preceding forty years had changed our understanding ‘of the parliamentarian party during the Great Civil War … almost beyond recognition’, ‘the accepted view of its opponent, the royalist party, is still that established by Gardiner over a hundred years ago.’ His own contribution was to distinguish between the different political persuasions which gathered under the King’s banner. Developing Ian Roy’s division of the royalist council of war into ‘civilians’, ‘courtiers’ and ‘swordsmen’, Hutton’s article identified three main factions within the royalist party: ‘moderates’, such as Edward Hyde, John Culpeper and Viscount Falkland; the ‘ultra-Royalists’ grouped around the Queen, including those who had been in exile in the early 1640s; and those whose loyalty and concern was principally

  Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars, p. 232.   For instance, Claude Summers, ‘Herrick’s Political Poetry: The Strategies of His

 

Art’, in ‘Trust to Good Verses’: Herrick Tercentenary Essays, ed. Roger B. Rollin and J. Max Patrick (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), pp. 171–83, and ‘Herrick’s Political Counterplots’, Studies in English Literature 25 (1985), 165–82; Aschah Guibbory, ‘Enlarging the Limits of the “Religious Lyric”: The Case of Herrick’s Hesperides’, in John R. Roberts (ed.), New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1994), pp. 28–45, ‘The Temple of Hesperides and Anglican–Puritan Controversy’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), ‘The Muses Common-Weale’: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1988), pp. 135–47, and Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 80–118; Leah S. Marcus, ‘Herrick’s Hesperides and the “Proclamation made for May”’, Studies in Philology 76 (1979), 49–74, and The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Peter Stallybrass, ‘“Wee feaste in our Defense”: Patrician Carnival in Early Modern England and Herrick’s Hesperides’, English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 234– 52; Takashi Yoshinaka, ‘The Politics of Traducianism and Robert Herrick’, The Seventeenth Century 19 (2004), 183–95.    Ronald Hutton, ‘The Structure of the Royalist Party, 1642–1646’, The Historical Journal 24 (1981), 553.

Introduction



military, grouped around Charles’s nephew, Prince Rupert. Since then, several studies have further examined the range of political views which made up what one scholar has called the ‘rainbow coalition’ of the royalist party. Such studies have made it clear that royalist positions ranged from a belief in absolute monarchy supported by the doctrine of the Divinity of Kings, to the belief that England was and should be a constitutional or limited monarchy, in which the King was subject to the law. At one end of this spectrum, drawing on mediaeval ideas of sacral monarchy, authority was centred in the person of the anointed King; at the other, in a tradition traceable back to John Fortescue’s definition of England as a dominium politicum et regale, true authority resided in the King-in-parliament, a position which reveals ‘the constitutional convergences that, as the war began, linked moderate royalists and moderate parliamentarians’. Many of the councillors identified as ‘moderate’ or ‘constitutional royalists’ began the 1640s as supporters of the reforms pressed on Charles I by Parliament, and after joining the King’s side were active in seeking a negotiated settlement, while the ultra-royalists tended to dissuade the King from seeking peace and pressed instead for the pursuit of a decisive military victory. This more nuanced view of the range of political beliefs brought together in an often uneasy alliance on the royalist side in the 1640s has, however, not made much impact on criticism of royalist poetry. While Loxley’s reaction, for instance, against the depoliticization of poets who in fact, as he puts it, ‘continue to forge the soldiery, arms and armour of a civil war fought with the pen’ is salutary, yet his representation of this ‘committed poetics’ tends to fuse the poets he treats into the image of the most extreme of the proponents of the royalist cause.10 Tracing their politically engaged poetics back to the early years of Charles I’s rule, he finds there ‘a verse which sees in itself a mimetic performance of the royal will’.11    Ian Roy, ‘The Royalist Army in the First Civil War’ (D. Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1963), pp. 78–85.    Barbara Donagan, ‘Varieties of Royalism’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 66–88 (quotation at p. 66); see also Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Court and the Emergence of a Royalist Party’, in the same volume, pp. 43–65; J.W. Daly, ‘The Implications of Royalist Politics, 1642–6’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), 745–55; David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1985); Arihiro Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). On the constitutional royalists, see also Brian Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 1640–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), pp. 1–88.    Donagan, ‘Varieties of Royalism’, p. 69. 10   Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, pp. 234, 215. 11   Ibid., p. 45.

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality



‘The most striking articulation of this shared poetics’ is, for Loxley, Fanshawe’s ‘Ode on the Proclamation’, which he sees as ‘putting on the performative identity of the proclamation’, and presenting itself ‘as edict’.12 The model of monarchical authority invoked in Loxley’s rhetoric here is unambivalently absolutist, alluding to the notion of government by the King’s decree, rather than by statutes agreed in Parliament, enforcing his personal will rather than constitutionally agreed law. This Caroline poetry is presented as endorsing absolute monarchy, indeed as subsuming itself wholly in the personal authority of the King. In fact, despite the fact that, unlike Herrick, Fanshawe actually took up arms for the royalist cause, the political position consistently expressed in his poetry aligns him with the moderate, constitutional royalism of his friend Edward Hyde. Though, on the strength of a superficial reading of the ‘Ode on the Proclamation’, he has often been caricatured as an absolutist, the rest of the volume in which that poem first appeared in print, the 1648 edition of his translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, clearly indicates his belief in the necessity of limiting the monarch’s power, in the rule of law, and in the desirability of a negotiated peace and a balanced settlement. The volume reprints a commendatory verse which originally appeared prefacing his friend Thomas May’s 1640 Supplementum Lucani, the most republican of all of May’s Lucanian exercises, and prominently features a translation of perhaps the most outspoken political poem by the sixteenth-century scourge of tyrants, George Buchanan, roundly condemning the use of violence by a king to enforce his rule. Even a careful reading of the ‘Ode on the Proclamation’ itself reveals deep unease about Charles’s absolutist proclivities at the beginning of the Personal Rule, proclivities which the rest of the 1648 volume repeatedly suggest are to blame for the Civil War. Like Fanshawe’s volume, Herrick’s Hesperides was dedicated to Prince Charles in 1648, a time when, with the King in prison awaiting trial, the Prince was the focus of royalist hopes for victory. But despite the coincidence of date and dedication, the two volumes reveal very different political positions. Although Herrick never took up arms, and made his stand for royalism only by refusing to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant, for which he was ejected from his living in 1647 – and, of course, by his publication of the Hesperides – the political views expressed in his poetry are thoroughly consonant with ultra-royalism. The contrast between the two poets’ political beliefs can be clearly indicated by looking at their respective treatments of the doctrine of the Divinity of Kings. This notion is a recurrent theme in Herrick’s collection. ‘A Pastorall upon the birth of Prince Charles, Presented to the King, and Set by Master Nicholas Laniere’ (H-213), for instance, draws an explicit analogy between the nativities of the Prince and Christ: And that his birth sho’d be more singular, At Noone of Day, was seene a silver Star, Bright as the Wise-mens Torch, which guided them To Gods sweet Babe, when borne at Bethlehem. (19–22)

  Ibid., pp. 46, 48.

12

Introduction



The basis of the analogy is the contemporary report that Charles’s birth on 29 May 1630 had been marked by the prodigious appearance of Hesperus in the noon-day sky, an incident which also underlies other of Herrick’s poems. The shepherds in the ‘Pastorall’ discuss what gifts to take to the new babe, and Amarillis decides to offer a garland of flowers ‘most sweet; yet all lesse sweet than he’. This phrase is repeated in the Noble Numbers, the shorter sequence of devotional verse at the end of Herrick’s collection, in a song on the festival of Christ’s circumcision.13 This is just one example of the sustained and elaborate way in which both the King and especially Prince Charles are elided with the figure of Christ throughout the volume. Several epigrams, meanwhile, spell out the political implications of such a view of kingship: The Gods to Kings the Judgement give to sway: The Subjects onely glory to obay. (‘Obedience in Subjects’, H-269)

‘Rev’rence’ must be shown even to ‘the Tyrant’. (‘Duty to Tyrants’, H-97) For Fanshawe, on the other hand, only the ‘good King’ is a ‘true Image’ of God (‘Presented to His Highnesse in the West’, 90–91), and if he falls off from virtue or the rule of law he is guilty of the ‘high Sacriledge’ of an assault on that image just as surely as any subject who rebels wrongfully against a good monarch (92–6). These lines from the translation of Buchanan’s Genethliacon divorce the rhetoric of divine kingship decisively from any argument against resistance to tyranny, and elsewhere in his volume Fanshawe alludes to the notion of the Divinity of Kings very rarely and with extreme scepticism. A more oblique and interesting example is to be found in a relatively well-known poem, ‘On the Earle of Straffords Tryall’. Whatever his past crimes may be, Fanshawe praises Strafford for his dignified conduct during ‘his lifes last act’, which he describes through the metaphor of aesthetic decorum: He might have fled at first, or made his skreene A Royall Master, or a Gracious Queene; But this had been the Touch-stone to decline, T’ingage in Mortalls Quarrels, Powers Divine. As artlesse Poets Jove or Juno use, To play the Mid-Wife to their labouring Muse. No he affects a labour’d Scene, and not To cut, but to untye the Gordian knot. Then if ’twill prove no Comedy, at least To make it of all Tragedies the best. (3–12)

The idea that Strafford’s not fleeing to the King for protection from his enemies in Parliament represents his artistic avoidance of the lame and hackneyed poetic   ‘The New-yeeres gift, or Circumcisions Song’ (N-97), line 10.

13

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality



device of bringing in a deus ex machina to resolve a plot difficulty seems on the surface to put on the problematic episode a gloss as loyal as possible to Charles. Invoking the Divinity of Kings as a poetic compliment, it appears to cordon Strafford’s predicament off safely as a purely private one, not affecting Charles or reflecting on his authority, implicitly denying the King’s implication in the affair and dissembling his powerlessness to help. But even as he calls Charles and his Queen ‘Powers Divine’, Fanshawe inescapably implies that the conventional compliment, and the serious political doctrine behind it, are merely a threadbare poetic device which bears no resemblance to reality. To rely on the aid of the King would be to deny the Aristotelian law of probability and to mar the plot with a recourse to the incredible and fanciful. By eschewing implausible comedy in favour of realist tragedy, Strafford draws attention to the fact that the King in reality has no ‘Power Divine’, that his weakness has been exposed by his failed attempts to liberate Strafford. Where Herrick’s dedication to the Prince is explicable in terms of the Prince’s liberty and martial capacity, which makes him the focus for royalist hopes of victory now that the King is a captive, in Fanshawe we have instead a strong sense of discontent with the King’s style of government, but a hope, reflected in the dedication of his volume, that the Prince will learn the lessons of his father’s disastrous reign and prove a better monarch by accepting his monarchy on constitutional terms. Both Herrick and Fanshawe rely heavily on classical allusion and imitation to articulate their political views. In the poems just quoted, for example, Herrick’s ‘Obedience in Subjects’ is a direct translation of a passage in Tacitus’ Annals.14 Fanshawe’s translation of Buchanan’s Genethliacon, meanwhile, builds on the implications of his original’s imitation of Claudian, and ‘On the Earl of Straffords Tryall’ compares Strafford both to the assassinated dictator Julius Caesar and to Otho, a favourite of Nero who was nevertheless betrayed and banished by his former benefactor to obtain Otho’s wife Poppea as his mistress, and whose suicide, ending a brief spell as emperor in 69 CE, averted civil war. It is widely recognized that imitation of the poetry of imperial Rome played a major role in the celebration of Stuart rule both before and during the Civil War, and the extent to which the parliamentary and republican critique of that rule was also articulated through such allusions has also received increasing attention in recent years.15 But even within the ranks of the royalists, we can see in the poetry of Herrick and   Noted by Alfred Pollard in his 1898 edition of the Hesperides.   See for instance Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart

14 15

Court, 1603–42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981); John Peacock, ‘The Image of Charles I as a Roman Emperor’, in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 50–73; and on republican classicizing, David Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 45–66, and ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre’,

Introduction



Fanshawe the very different political purposes to which such allusion could be put. In the last example, for instance, the ostensible point of the analogy with Otho – the suicide which averted civil war – is only part of the story: the allusion also shadowily evokes Nero’s betrayal of his former favourite, inculpating Charles in the same way as in Fanshawe’s sonnet on the same subject, ‘The Fall’, where the denunciation of the world’s hypocrisy and treachery also implicates the King: Ten yeares the world upon him falsly smild, Sheathing in fawning lookes the deadly knife Long aymed at his head … (9–11)

The political significance of classical allusion and imitation in both these poets is more complex and sophisticated than has been previously been recognized, and the main purpose of the present book is to illustrate this. However, my further argument is that Herrick and Fanshawe differ radically from one another in the very way they imagine, or theorize, the process and nature of classical allusion, and that these differences also reflect the differences in their political positions. There is an inherent consonance in each between the way they envisage their relation to the poets of the past and their beliefs about the nature of monarchy. Both include imitation of a wide range of authors, and both (Herrick more explicitly than Fanshawe) present this imitation as a kind of conversation with the poets of the past.16 But the mode of representation of this conversation, and the rhetorical purpose of thus representing it, is different in each. Herrick’s belief in the transcendental nature and justification of the monarch’s authority is matched by the idea of classical imitation as a means of transcending time and death, which Herrick develops into a radical vision of poetry as a realm immune to political defeat and aloof from the parliamentary forces which now claim to govern England, an imaginary space in which the royal family still exercise their true authority. Herrick derives this nexus of ideas from the highly allusive and politically oppositional poet Ovid, in whom he also finds material for other strands of his own oppositional polemic. Where Ovid developed his ideas of poetic authority in opposition to the imperial authority of Augustus, however, Herrick employs them in the service of his own dethroned Augustus, to counter the ascendant political authority of Parliament. The trope which underlies and unifies his volume and its diverse oppositional tactics is the literary immortality exemplified in Herrick as Ovidius redivivus, an Ovid come back to life. In Fanshawe, meanwhile, the voices of various classical and modern authors are drawn into a dialogue, and induced to debate their competing political ideas, while the whole aims to ‘minister … in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 147–69. 16   On imitation as conversation in the period, see Zachary Lesser and Benedict S. Robinson (eds), Textual Conversations in the Renaissance: Ethics, Authors, Technologies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).



Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality

Discourses’ and ‘principles of Vertue, and knowledge Morall, Politicall, and Theologicall’, like a tutor, to its dedicatee the young Prince.17 In a mode of reading indebted to the traditions of humanist study, each is considered in relation to the historical context in which he wrote, and applied with an eye to the political needs of the historical present. The result is that each tempers the views of the others, producing the effect of a multivocal counsel on political matters and especially on the nature of kingly authority, in which extreme views (particularly those of Virgil and Lucan) are moderated through disagreement. This model of intertextuality reflects Fanshawe’s recurrent emphasis on the need for the King to rely on and recognize the authority of counsel, and not merely to enforce his personal will but to govern in accordance with the public good. The dialogue with and between the dead poets in Fanshawe’s volume is, I think deliberately, the literary equivalent of, and metaphor for, parliamentary debate in a limited monarchy. The effect of tempering and moderation of political positions, which mirrors the concern with moral temperance running through the volume, is reminiscent of the benefits which proponents of limited or constitutional monarchy in the period saw in the law-making powers of elected assemblies. As Buchanan puts it, while arguing that an assembly selected from all classes of the people (ex omnibus ordinibus selecti) should prescribe the mode of government to the King, and that he should abide by the laws which the people give him (ut eius imperii modum ei praescribat, eoque iure, quod populus in se dederit, ut rex utatur):18 Non … solum plus vident ac sapiunt multi quam unus quilibet eorum seorsum, sed etiam quam unus qui quemvis eorum ingenio et prudentia praecedat. Nam multitudo fere melius quam singuli de rebus omnibus iudicat. Singuli enim quasdam habent virtutum particulas, quae simul collatae unam excellentem virtutem conficiunt … in hominibus aliis tarditas et cunctatio, aliis praeceps temeritas obest, haec in multitudine commixtae temperamentum quiddam et quam in omni genere virtutis quaerimus mediocritatem pariunt.19 [‘Many men see and understand not only more than any one of them alone, but even more than one who may surpass each of them in intellect and discretion. You could say that a multitude is a better judge in all things than one man. For each individual has some particular strengths, which collected together make up one excellent virtue … in some men tardiness and hesitancy is a problem, in 17   Dedicatory epistles to Prince Charles, Peter Davidson (ed.), The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 54; Walter F. Staton, Jr and William E. Simeone (eds), A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 3. 18   George Buchanan, De iure regni apud Scotos dialogus (Edinburgh: John Ross, 1580), p. 32. 19   Ibid., p. 33.

Introduction



others headlong rashness; but these brought together in a crowd acquire a certain balance, and that moderation which we seek in every kind of virtue.’]

It is just such a council which Fanshawe assembles from among the poets of the past to lay down rules of conduct to the future King. One way to frame the political differences between these two approaches to intertextuality is through the terms of the debate, originating in classical Stoicism but vigorously renewed in the Renaissance, over the relative merits of otium and negotium, whether the intellectual should pursue a life of leisure or private study as Seneca argues in the De otio and De brevitate Vitae, or of active involvement in affairs of government, as humanists, influenced by Cicero in the De officiis, argued. Loxley invokes these terms at the conclusion of his book, to contend against Miner and the depoliticized reading of the ‘cavalier’ poets that the publication of royalist poetry constitutes a kind of negotium, or intervention in political affairs, even where that poetry seems to celebrate a life of otium. But in fact the operation of these concepts in the poetry of both Herrick and Fanshawe is more complex and subtle than this suggests, and it is tellingly different in each. The championing of otium and negotium respectively had specific political resonances in the period.20 As Loxley acknowledges, before dismissing its implications, The active citizenship propounded by classical republicanism is praised by those who seek a political framework which allows the members of a commonwealth some role in its governance; the goodness of a retired and private life is emphasised by those who believe the subject’s greatest virtue to be obedience.21

In fact we can see that the theories of intertextuality embodied in Herrick and Fanshawe do represent an embrace of otium and negotium respectively, in keeping with the differences I have sketched between their versions of royalism. The context in Tacitus of the lines which Herrick translated as his absolutist epigram ‘Obedience in Subjects’ is a speech to Tiberius Caesar by the knight Marcus Terentius. In the wake of the execution of Sejanus for conspiring against the emperor, Terentius is excusing himself from potential blame and suspicion for having been Sejanus’ friend. His argument is that Tiberius himself favoured Sejanus highly in those days, and in counting him a friend Terentius was honouring not Sejanus but the emperor. Absolving himself of any responsibility for personal judgement on Sejanus’ character, he exclaims obsequiously:

  See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 216–24; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 21   Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, p. 203. 20

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non est nostrum aestimare quem supra ceteros et quibus de causis extollas: tibi summum rerum judicium di dedere, nobis obsequii gloria relicta est.22 [‘It is not for us to judge the man whom you may raise above all others, or to consider your motives. The gods have given you supreme jurisdiction in all matters; to us remains the glory of obedience.’]

This denial of any responsibility, or even right, on the part of a subject to make any personal judgement on a matter decided by the monarch, let alone to offer that monarch unsolicited advice, is precisely a refusal of negotium, and we find the same reluctance to explore political ideas or problems with any specificity, beyond asserting the King’s supreme authority and defying the Puritanism of the parliamentary regime, in the Hesperides. Despite the fact that the publication of Hesperides constitutes a political act as a gesture of royalist defiance, there is a sense in which the Hesperidean realm of poetry and royalism imagined by Herrick, in transcending the real political conditions that prevail in the geographical actuality of England, refuses to recognize Parliament as an authority with which the King and his party could or should negotiate. The life imagined for poets and loyal subjects within this Hesperidean realm is indeed one of otium or leisure, in which the act of reading the poetry of contemporaries and predecessors is troped as an eternal drinking party. Though derived principally from Ovid’s exile elegies, Herrick’s vision of eternal, convivial conversation with the poets of the classical past tellingly recalls one of Seneca’s descriptions of the glories of the life of intellectual otium: Soli omnium otiosi sunt qui sapientiae uacant: soli uiuunt. nec enim suam tantum aetatem bene tuentur: omne aeuum suo adiciunt. quidquid annorum ante illos actum est, illis adquisitum est … nullo nobis saeculo interdictum est, in omnia admittimur et, si magnitudine animi egredi humanae imbecillitatis angustias libet, multum, per quod spatiemur, temporis est. disputare cum Socrate licet, dubitare cum Carneade, cum Epicuro quiescere, hominis naturam cum Stoicis uincere, cum Cynicis excedere. cum rerum natura in consortium omnis aeui patiatur incedere, quidni ab hoc exiguo et caduco temporis transitu in illa toto nos demus animo, quae inmensa, quae aeterna sunt, quae cum melioribus communia?23 [‘Of all men, only those are at leisure who make time for philosophy: only they really live. For not only do they guard their own lifetime well: they add every age to their own. Whatever has been done in the years before them is added to their stock … No age is forbidden to us, we are admitted to them all, and, if it pleases us, through greatness of mind, to pass beyond the straits of human weakness,

  Tacitus, Annals, VI.8.   Seneca, De brevitate Vitae, XIV.1–2.

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Introduction

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great is the span of time through which we may walk. We may dispute with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, be at peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, go beyond it with the Cynics. Since the nature of things allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why do we not turn from this meagre and unsteady passage of time and give ourselves with all our soul to this boundless and eternal communion with our betters?’]

Among the participants in Herrick’s ghostly poetic convivium there is no political activity, or even discussion: Herrick eschews Ciceronian negotium in this sense, apparently even on behalf of the King. Charles’s divine authority simply is, existing on a higher plane than the world of politics in which real power must be exercised. In Fanshawe, meanwhile, the concepts of otium and negotium are foregrounded prominently throughout the volume. Their political implications are rendered quite explicit, and otium is denounced as dangerous and corrupting, the root of the evils of Charles’s reign which, Fanshawe repeatedly suggests, have caused the Civil War. The longest original poem in the volume, A Canto of the Progresse of Learning, takes the question of the intellectual’s involvement in government directly as its subject, and plainly concludes that all the vices of the age are to be blamed on the failure of the learned, half voluntary and half imposed, to take the leading role in the distribution and exercise of power. Composed in Spenserian stanzas, the Canto casts itself as just such a salutary satire as Fanshawe sees Spenser as having been able to administer to his Queen, Elizabeth, on whose reign Fanshawe, like his republican friend Thomas May, looks back nostalgically as an age of willingly limited monarchy, in contrast with the absolutism of Charles. Along with the other sixteenth-century models imitated or translated in Fanshawe’s volume, Buchanan and Guarini, Spenser is presented as an example of the poet as humanist counsellor, using his literary authority to exert a moral authority over the ruler. Virgil too is recast in this image, as Fanshawe translates Book IV of the Aeneid in Spenserian stanzas, and corrects the excesses of Virgil’s Augustan panegyric in the Summary Discourse of the Civill Warres of Rome with which the volume concludes. Contemporary writers and intellectuals are implicitly urged to emulate these humanist forebears, to engage in negotium and not to be afraid to admonish and to criticize their monarch for the public good, while the young Prince is exhorted to heed and obey such lessons as a student obeys a tutor. The volume as a whole aligns itself with the distinctively English humanist tradition of handbooks for the education of princes,24 but greatly amplifies the authority of the poet-tutor at the expense of royal authority. The literary and moral authority of the poets brought together in dialogue within Fanshawe’s volume emerges as an emblem of the right of Parliament, according to this constitutional royalist, to limit and control the monarch’s power. Fanshawe’s poetry is fully political in a modern sense, in a way in which Herrick’s is not.   Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, pp. 46–7, 167–70, 296–300.

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality

As a final word in this introduction, it remains only for me to hope that my work here may help to bring Fanshawe to the attention of a wider audience. As I noted above, Herrick is at last beginning to achieve the recognition that his poetry deserves, but Fanshawe meanwhile, despite the appearance of Peter Davidson’s scholarly edition a decade ago, remains little known. I hope that I have succeeded here in giving some impression of the subtlety and intricacy of his poetry, which, while not perhaps as highly polished as Herrick’s, in its political negotiations is more interesting and may be more congenial to modern sensibilities.

PART I Ovid in the Hesperides: Herrick’s Politics of Allusion

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Introduction to Part I Herrick’s Hesperides opens and closes with lines from Ovid. On the title page appears an assertion of the immortality of poetry, slightly misquoted from Amores III.ix, Ovid’s elegy for Tibullus: ‘Effugient avidos carmina nostra rogos’ (‘our songs will escape the greedy funeral pyre’). The final poem, To his Book’s end this last line he’d have plac’t, Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast.

directly translates a line from Tristia II, Ovid’s letter to Augustus from exile: ‘vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea’ (Tr. II.354). The four poems immediately preceding this closing quotation are, moreover, calculated to evoke Ovidian endings. ‘The End of his Work’ (H-1126) is a translation of the final couplet of Book I of the Ars amatoria, ‘To Crown it’ (H-1127) a translation of the penultimate couplet of the Remedia amoris. ‘On Himselfe’ (H-1128), The worke is done: young men, and maidens set Upon my curles the Mirtle Coronet, Washt with sweet ointments,

closely imitates the conclusion to Book II of the Ars, finis adest operi: palmam date, grata iuventus, sertaque odoratae myrtea ferte comae. [‘The end of the work is here: give me the palm, grateful young people, and bring garlands of myrtle for my perfumed hair’, Ars II.733–4].

‘The Pillar of Fame’ (H-1129), meanwhile, Fames pillar here, at last, we set, Out-during Marble, Brasse, or Jet, Charm’d and enchanted so, As to withstand the blow Of overthrow: Nor shall the seas, Or OUTRAGES    As already noted by John Roe, ‘“Upon Julia’s Clothes”: Herrick, Ovid, and the Celebration of Innocence’, Review of English Studies 50 (1999), 352.

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality Of storms orebear What we up-rear, Tho Kingdoms fal, This pillar never shall Decline or waste at all; But stand for ever by his owne Firme and well fixt foundation

imitates the famous conclusion to the Metamorphoses, iamque opus exegi, quod nec Iovis ira nec ignis nec poterit ferrum nec edax abolere vetustas … perque omnia saecula fama, siquid habent veri vatum praesagia, vivam [‘And now I have finished my work, which neither Jove’s anger, nor fire, nor the sword, nor devouring age can ever destroy … and through all the ages, if the predictions of prophets have any truth, I shall live in fame’, Met. XV.871–2, 878–9]

with shades of the final poem of Book I of the Amores, ergo, cum silices, cum dens patientis aratri depereant aevo, carmina morte carent. cedant carminibus reges regumque triumphi … vilia miretur vulgus; mihi flavus Apollo pocula Castalia plena ministret aqua, sustineamque coma metuentem frigora myrtum … ergo etiam cum me supremus adederit ignis, vivam, parsque mei multa superstes erit [‘So, though hard stones, though the tooth of the enduring plough are ruined by time, songs know no death. Let kings and the triumphs of kings yield place to song … Let the vulgar gawp at base things: for me let golden-haired Apollo pour cups full of the Castalian waters, and may I bear on my locks the myrtle which fears the cold … I, too, when the last fire has consumed me, shall live, and the greater part of me will survive’, Am. I.xv.31–3, 35–7, 41–2]

and of the final poem of the Tristia, Quanta tibi dederim nostris monumenta libellis, o mihi me coniunx carior, ipsa vides … dumque legar, mecum pariter tua fama legetur, nec potes in maestos omnis abire rogos

Introduction to Part I

17

[‘You see yourself what a monument I have given to you in my books, oh wife, dearer to me than myself … while I am read, your fame will be read together with me, and you cannot entirely vanish into the sad funeral pyre’, Tr. V.xiv].

As far as allusion to and imitation of Ovid in the Hesperides goes, these instances are only the tip of the iceberg. I single them out for mention here because their prominent position, framing the Hesperides (if we ignore the appended Noble Numbers with its separate title-page), suggests a deliberate act of self-presentation: the Ovidianism of the collection is foregrounded as partly constituting its identity, and therefore as something of which interpretation must take account. The frontispiece (see Figure 1) reinforces this impression. Before a landscape which contains a rearing Pegasus on Helicon, the springing Hippocrene, and a ring of dancing Cupids (or amores) stands an impressive bust of the author, towards which two other amores fly bearing garlands of roses. This bust has two

Figure 1

Frontispiece engraving from Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648) (British Library G.11495 ©The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 08/01/2009)

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striking peculiarities: firstly its immense nose (indeed, as if to draw attention to this, one of the amores seems to be about to hang his rose garland over it), and secondly that despite its marmoreal and sculpted appearance it is endowed with luxuriant dark curling hair and a moustache. The nose I take as Herrick’s jocular self-presentation as another Ovidius Naso, about whose cognomen (naso = Lat. ‘nose’) Shakespeare’s Holofernes puns ‘Why, indeed, Naso but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy?’ (Love’s Labours Lost IV.ii). Herrick makes a similar pun in ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201), but he and Holofernes are only making explicit a joke implied by Ovid himself in the Fasti, when he refers to himself by his cognomen in prayer to the goddess Flora, whose breath smells of roses, as she vanishes after their interview: mansit odor: posses scire fuisse deam. floreat ut toto carmen Nasonis in aevo, sparge, precor, donis pectora nostra tuis. [‘Her fragrance remained: you might know the goddess had been there. That the song of Naso may flourish for all time, shower my breast with your gifts, I pray’, Fasti V.376–8].

The long locks, meanwhile, like the ‘Curles’ mentioned at the ends of two outspokenly Royalist poems, ‘The bad season makes the Poet sad’ (H-612.11) and ‘To Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter’ (H-756.17), are a badge of allegiance to the King’s party and a mark of differentiation from the asceticism of the Puritans. The monumental classical poet is revivified, through this sprouting hair, as a defiantly partisan Herrick, whose engagement with his classical models will be inextricable from his lively engagement with contemporary politics. Herrick’s political engagement with his turbulent times has received much valuable comment in recent years, but the role of the Hesperides’ oft-noted and pervasive allusiveness within its political programme has escaped attention. Treatment of Herrick’s classical allusion and imitation seems influenced by some idea that the classicizing habit necessarily tends toward that turn away from the ‘troubled age’ into a ‘timeless Arcadia’ of poetry which used to be supposed characteristic of him – that if history enters this Arcadia after all, it does so despite and not through its allusiveness. The most sustained account of Herrick’s classical allusions, Gordon Braden’s, is relentlessly attached to the idea of Herrick’s aesthetic retirement from the world. Finding in Herrick something ‘approaching … latter-day notions of “pure poetry”’, Braden strictly delimits the meaningfulness of his imitative practices, concluding that Herrick is ‘less interested in what his poets mean than in what they say’ and responds ‘primarily to moments of verbal    Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century, 1600–1660 (2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), p. 115.

Introduction to Part I

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grace rather than to structures of meaning’. For the most part this assumption of a cherry-picking approach to the classics on Herrick’s part endorses an old-fashioned Quellenforschung-type critical approach which merely catalogues ‘borrowings’, and rules out more intensive and systematic intertextual study (‘Source hunting that brings context to bear can make Herrick seem rather shallow’, he warns). Where Braden allows Herrick a more continuous engagement with a particular poet, expressing a form of identification or analogy, he refuses to read it as an intentional and meaningful strategy. Herrick’s ‘special regard for Horace’, for instance, is due to their coincidental ‘congruence of situation’ as ‘two aging bachelors piddling around in their rustication, celebrating moments of pleasurable transiency’, whose allusions and imitations are alike devoid of meaning: ‘They are both songsters borrowing words to make their tunes visible.’ What I shall argue here is that Herrick’s imitation of one classical author, Ovid, is systematic, strategic and meaningful, foregrounded as an act of self-presentation which functions as a guide to the unifying polemical purpose of the collection. Ovid appeals to Herrick as a model precisely as a figure of politically oppositional poetics. The Hesperides invokes Ovid’s whole career from the perspective of its final phase, his exile: it is Herrick’s Amores, Ars amatoria, Metamorphoses, Fasti and exile poetry rolled into one. From Ovid’s amatory elegies, whose flouting of Augustus’ moral legislation was the ostensible cause of Ovid’s exile, he learns to publish erotic poetry in defiance of a puritanical regime, and the Amores furnishes him with what is only the first of many Ovidian assertions of the immortality and political invulnerability of poetry. From the Metamorphoses he derives his themes of universal mutability and of metamorphic etiology (explaining the current appearance of a thing through a tale of metamorphosis, as in ‘How Roses came red’), as well as numerous images and mythological references. From the Fasti he learns again of ‘Times trans-shifting’ (H-1.9), to tell of ‘the succession of months’ (H-70) and of stars and stellification (‘To the most illustrious … Charles’, H-226, H-336, H-351, H-516), and the conservative project of detailing religious rites and festivals, classical and contemporary, in what he calls his ‘eternall Calender’    Gordon Braden, ‘Herrick’s Classical Quotations’, in Roger B. Rollin and J. Max Patrick (eds), ‘Trust to Good Verses’: Herrick Tercentenary Essays (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), pp. 162, 175, 176.    Ibid., p. 136.    Ibid., pp. 138, 140, 145.    It should be emphasized that, when I talk of the ‘polemical purpose’ of Hesperides, I have in mind the purpose behind the publication of the collection in 1648, which may be very different from any intention behind the original composition of particular poems. As John Creaser has recently reminded us, many of the poems included in Hesperides were composed at a much earlier date (‘Herrick at Play’, Essays in Criticism 56 (2006), 324–50). But in the context of such a highly self-conscious publishing act the poems are subtly transformed, often acquiring a new topicality and different resonances: they become a new and distinct object of study.

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(H-545.10; cp. H-444.6). Above all, he learns from Ovid’s exile poetry a deep strategy for articulating his oppositional political stance. Like the space of the Tristia and Ex Ponto, the space of the Hesperides is double. On one hand Herrick’s Devon, like Ovid’s Tomis, is portrayed as a harsh and uncivilized environment in which the poet suffers ‘exile’, his ‘discontents’ in a geographically marginalized position figuring his political disaffection and ideological distance from the centre of power. On the other, this site of Western rustication is transmuted into an idealized haven, in the metaphorical space of his poetry, for the old-fashioned values banished by the current regime, a mythological garden space transcending the reality of political disempowerment, in which the mind remains free and sustains an alternative virtual society by communing with like-minded friends and poets. As the Muse whisks Ovid away from the Hister to Helicon (Tr. IV.x.119–20), so Herrick escapes from the ‘Dean-bourn, a rude river in Devon’ to the Hesperidean garden, poets’ Elysium and ‘Hellicon’ (H-266.12) embodied in his collection, ‘This sacred grove’, ‘This great realme of Poetry’ (H-265.3; H-264.6). Like Ovid, Herrick has reason on one hand to fear ‘martyrdome’ (H-1128.4) and persecution because of his oppositional stance, but on the other his confidence in his own immortality and in his power to confer immortality on others through poetry is a source of strength and ultimate immunity. In making this claim for the pervasive and multi-faceted Ovidianism of the Hesperides I do not wish to elide the importance of Herrick’s many allusions to and imitations and translations of other classical authors in the collection, or to claim that all of these themes are unique to Ovid. Their combination and interrelation is distinctively Ovidian, but there is ample room within it to house contributions from Anacreon, Martial, Horace, Catullus and others. Indeed, because the realm of poetry transcends the limitations of time and place, the convivial community of poet-friends whose symposia are celebrated so frequently throughout the collection includes an array of classical poets along with contemporaries (e.g. H-111, H-201, H-544, H-575), as Ovid too includes the deceased in his catalogue of the dulcia convictus membra mei (‘sweet members of my circle’, Tr. IV.x.41–54), and therefore the multiplicity of voices which Herrick echoes actually contributes to the Ovidian theme of the immortal chorus peopling his alternative realm.

Chapter 1

‘Cleanly-wantonnesse’: Ovid’s Amatory Elegies in the Hesperides Love poems constitute a high proportion of the Hesperides, and prominent among the many mistresses Herrick addresses are ‘Corinna’ and ‘Julia’. The first of these names is best known as that by which Ovid refers to his chief mistress, the main addressee of the Amores. Indeed she appears in this role in the Hesperides too, when Herrick sees, in his vision of the poets’ Elizium, ‘witty Ovid, by / Whom faire Corinna sits’ (H-575.39–40). As for Julia, meanwhile, the most popular theory regarding the mysterious error which Ovid tells us was the other cause of his exile, along with the carmen of the Ars, but about which he will not be explicit, held that the real subject of the Amores was Ovid’s secret affair with the emperor’s daughter, Julia, who was exiled in the same year, the name ‘Corinna’ being used as a veil to hide her identity. Originating in the songs of the fifth-century Sidonius Apollinaris and made commonplace in the vitae prefacing Renaissance editions of Ovid’s works, the idea persists to form part of the plot of Jonson’s Poetaster. Herrick’s treatment of both his Corinna and his Julia is strongly tied in with other aspects of his work designed to evoke Ovid’s Fasti. Corinna is the focus of the May Day poems, where Herrick’s calendar of festivals comes closest to Ovid’s, and is compared to Flora, goddess of Ovid’s Floralia. Many of the Julia poems are concerned with what is also the chief topic of the Fasti, detailing the order of ritual sacrifices, of which she is dubbed the ‘Queen-Priest’. The amatory aspect of Herrick’s Ovidianism is thus firmly linked to other aspects of the collection’s Ovidianism, but the evocation of Ovid’s poems of wanton love is in itself important. Corinna in the Amores is guarded by someone referred to as her vir or husband, whom she and Ovid must constantly deceive. Though vir could also be used to refer to the long-term client of a prostitute, it provocatively implies that Corinna may be a married woman, and that she and Ovid are thus transgressing the lex Julia de adulteriis introduced by Augustus in 18 BCE. This law made adultery with a married woman, and sex between men, capital state crimes, while sex with an unmarried woman or widow of respectable social class was made punishable by the confiscation of half the offender’s property. The use of prostitutes remained legal. A few years later, Ovid codified the techniques used by his persona in the    Sidonius Apollinaris, Carmina XXIII.158–61; ‘Ovidii Vita per Paulum Marsum’, in P. Ovidii Nasonis Fastorum … cum commentarii A. Constantio, P. Marso, et al. (Venice, 1508), sig. p3v.    See Justinian, Institutiones IV.18.2.

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Amores to continue his affair with Corinna and to deceive her ‘husband’ as a set of precepts for young lovers in the Ars amatoria, and here too is the same ambiguity. Despite the opening disclaimer, warning respectable virgins and wives away from the work and asserting that nos venerem tutam concessaque furta canemus, inque meo nullum carmine crimen erit [‘I sing of safe love-making and permitted deceits, and there will be no crime in my song’, Ars I.33–4.]

– that is, that he is speaking only of legitimate affairs with professional prostitutes – the assumption throughout is nevertheless that a vir or husband is to be deceived. In the third book, addressed to women, he claims that he is using the term in its figurative or slang sense: ‘though you lack the honour of the fillet [i.e. though you are courtesans, not married women], it is still your concern to deceive your “husbands”’ (quamvis vittae careatis honore, / est vobis vestros fallere cura viros, Ars III.483–4). Yet adultery is never far from the surface. With perseverance and Ovid’s advice, the student is assured, he will be able to seduce Penelope herself, the very archetype of the faithful wife and respectable matron, and Menelaus is told that only he, because of his neglectful absence, is to blame for the adultery of Paris and Helen, which Ovid condones: nil Helene peccat, nihil hic committit adulter: quod tu, quod faceret quilibet, ille facit. cogis adulterium dando tempusque locumque … [‘Helen does not sin at all, this adulterer commits no crime: he does what you or anyone else would do. You compel them to adultery by giving them time and space’, Ars II.365–7.]

This apparent defiance of the lex adulteriis was made the ostensible reason (or excuse) for Ovid’s relegation to Tomis some years later, in 8 CE As Ovid puts it in his letter to Augustus from exile, ‘I am charged with making myself a teacher of obscene adultery in a shameful poem’ (turpi carmine factus / arguor obsceni doctor adulterii, Tr. II.211–12). Herrick’s imitation of Ovid’s erotic elegies appeared against the background of similar legislation. In 1644 the Commons proposed a bill against incest, adultery, prostitution, drunkenness, swearing and blasphemy. Owing to the disruption of parliamentary business by the Civil War it was put aside for a time, but it was    On the political charge of libertine love poetry in the period, see Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 75–6, 113–14.

‘Cleanly-wantonnesse’

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brought forward again in 1647 and split into two bills. That dealing with sexual behaviour had its first reading in March 1648, the year in which the Hesperides was published, and finally became law in 1650, in an act ‘for the suppressing of the abominable and crying sins of Incest, Adultery and fornication, wherewith this Land is much defiled, and Almighty God highly displeased’. Like Augustus’s law, it brought sexual behaviour under direct state control for the first time: in England authority to punish such transgressions had previously belonged to the church, in Rome to the woman’s male kin. In imposing the death penalty for adultery and three months imprisonment for ‘fornication’ (sex outside wedlock where the woman was unmarried) it answered long-standing pressure from ‘godly’ or Puritan clergy and members of Parliament for greater rigour and severer penalties than the church had been wont to use. (Augustus’ act too seeks to redress the former authority’s laxity in exercising its power to punish: under the new law, if the husband fails to bring charges against an adulterous wife himself, he also falls liable to prosecution, as a pimp.) The complacence and leniency with which the English church treated sexual offences had become one of the chief complaints against the bishops in the years leading up to the abolition of episcopacy in 1646. Part of the purpose of the act may thus have been to conciliate Presbyterians and to ensure their loyalty to the parliamentary cause by identifying it with the cause of moral reform. An analogous political purpose underlies the Augustan law. Emerging as sole ruler from the period of Rome’s civil wars, Augustus was eager to consolidate his power (and to justify the suspension of republican liberty which it involved) by presenting himself as the only guarantor of order and stability in all aspects of Roman life. As Severy observes: By making adultery a public crime, an offence with which the state should concern itself, the law confirms that a primary aim of this whole package of legislation was to restore the ancient Roman morality whose decay was thought to have resulted in the breakdown of the res publica.

A similar implication that the current civil strife indicates a need for moral reform, justifying the power of those ready to pursue it, can be perceived in the 1650 act’s claim that ‘the Land is much defiled, and Almighty God highly displeased’.

   See Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 258–82, and J.R. Kent, ‘Attitudes of Members of the House of Commons to the Regulation of “Personal Conduct” in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 46 (1973).    Beth Severy, Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 55.

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The act of 1650 was extremely controversial, as Thomas notes: Within the Rump [Parliament] it encountered a vigorous opposition led by Ludlow and Henry Marten, the latter arguing, perhaps disingenuously, that its very severity would cause the sins it proscribed to be committed more frequently, because people would take greater care to conceal their offences ‘and being undiscovered would be emboldened the more in the commitment of them’.

Thus much we know because Bulstrode Whitelocke thought it worth mentioning in his diary. It is not on record whether Marten quoted Ovid in his speech on the subject, but he might have done so to good effect. The locus classicus for such arguments is Amores III.iv, in which Ovid’s case against marital jealousy undermines Augustus’ adultery legislation too, and Herrick draws repeatedly on this elegy as part of his own Ovidian polemic against the moralism of the ‘godly’ faction which was increasingly influencing the parliamentary campaign. Ovid advises a durum vir (‘stern husband’) that his disciplinarian efforts to control his wife’s sexuality are useless: ut iam servaris bene corpus, adultera mens est; nec custodiri, ne velit, ulla potest. nec corpus servare potes, licet omnia claudas; omnibus exclusis intus adulter erit [‘Though indeed you have guarded her body well, her mind will be adulterous; and if she wishes it, nothing can keep her captive. Nor are you able to guard her body, let all the doors be locked; with everybody shut out, an adulterer will be inside’, Am. III. iv.5–8.]

Herrick’s version of this last couplet is ‘No Lock against Letcherie’ (H-233): Barre close as you can, and bolt fast too your doore, To keep out the Letcher, and keep in the whore: Yet, quickly you’l see by the turne of a pin, The Whore to come out, or the Letcher come in.

In fact such strictness, Ovid continues, can only make matters worse, inciting his wife to transgress: cui peccare licet, peccat minus; ipsa potestas semina nequitiae languidiora facit. desine, crede mihi, vitia inritare vetando …    Keith Thomas, ‘The Puritans and Adultery’, p. 278, quoting Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (Oxford, 1853), III.190.

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[‘Who is allowed to sin, sins less; the power makes the seeds of wickedness weaker. Believe me, stop inciting vices by forbidding them’, Am. III.iv.9–11]

– lines which Herrick translates as the poem ‘More potent, lesse peccant’ (H-270): He that may sin, sins least; Leave to transgresse Enfeebles much the seeds of wickednesse.

Herrick returns to this idea in ‘The parting Verse, or charge to his supposed Wife when he travelled’ (H-465, 45–6): He that doth suspect, do’s haste A gentle mind to be unchaste,

and again, more humorously, in ‘Upon Scobble’ (H-126): Scobble for Whoredome whips his wife; and cryes, He’ll slit her nose; But blubb’ring, she replyes, Good Sir, make no more cuts i’th’outward skin, One slit’s enough to let Adultry in.

Such jealous prohibitions, Ovid continues, incite not only the wife but also potential lovers to adulterous attempts, for quidquid servatur cupimus magis, ipsaque furem cura vocat; pauci, quod sinit alter, amant … indignere licet, iuvat inconcessa voluptas; sola placet, ‘timeo!’ dicere siqua potest. [‘Whatever is guarded we desire more, and care itself summons the thief … Be indignant, if you want: forbidden pleasure is delightful; she alone pleases, who can say “I’m afraid!”’, Am. III.iv.25–6, 31–2.]

He has already treated this paradox at length in an earlier elegy, II.xix, where he begs his mistress’s foolish husband to be more vigilant, that difficulty may sharpen his desire, for ‘what is permitted is not pleasing; what is forbidden inflames more intensely’ (quod licet, ingratum est; quod nonlicet acrius urit, 3), and pinguis amor nimiumque patens in taedia nobis vertitur et, stomacho dulcis ut esca, nocet

  As Pollard notes.



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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality [‘Love left too unhindered and grown fat becomes loathsome to us, and harms us as sweet food harms the stomach’, Am. II.xix.25–6]

– lines which, incidentally, probably underlie Herrick’s ‘Love is a sirrup’ (H-949): Love is a sirrup; and who er’e we see Sick and surcharg’d with this sacietie: Shall by the pleasing trespasse quickly prove, Ther’s loathsomnesse e’en in the sweets of love.

Ovid goes on to make it clear that his arguments apply to Augustus’ legislation against adultery too, adding further that in the case of freeborn matrons such surveillance is also an insult, detracting from the honour it is meant to preserve: nec tamen ingenuam ius est servare puellam – hic metus externae corpora gentis agat! scilicet ut possit custos ‘ego’ dicere ‘feci,’ in laudem servi casta sit illa tui? [‘Nor, however, is it just to guard a freeborn Roman woman – such fear as this should harass the bodies of foreign slaves. I ask you! Should your wife be chaste for the glory of your servant, so that her keeper may say “This is my work”?’ Am. II.xix.33–6.]

Ovid here inverts the intended polemic significance of the adultery legislation: rather than expressing the moral probity and orderliness of Roman society under its new leader, the law instead implies that no Roman woman is capable of being chaste except under duress, and prevents any exercise of voluntary virtue. The same sentiment and attitude to recent legislation underlies Herrick’s observation in ‘A Prognostick’ (H-718) that ‘many Lawes and Lawyers do expresse / Nought but a kingdoms ill-affectednesse’, and it is, of course, an argument used against censorship in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644): ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary’. Areopagitica is another work opposing legislation restricting civil liberties under the new regime, this time an attempt to persuade Parliament to rescind the Licensing Order of 1643. Ovid ends his elegy, outrageously, by advising the husband to profit from his wife’s adultery (like Herrick’s Snare in H-631), and enjoy the youthful company and house full of gifts which it will bring. Herrick does not, like Ovid, present himself as an adulterer in the Hesperides, unless one considers the implications of one poem, ‘Julia’s Churching, or Purification’ (H-898), where the most prominent of Herrick’s many mistresses, ‘dearest of thousands’ (H-627), has given birth, and reference is made to her ‘husband’ (13). But he does very ostentatiously present himself, or rather his persona, as guilty of ‘fornication’ under the existing church law and the severer

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law in preparation. He addresses a great variety of mistresses with different names over the course of the collection, with several poems addressed collectively ‘to his mistresses’ (e.g. H-19, H-54) or ‘wanton wenches’ (H-1098), or mentioning his ‘many dainty Mistresses’ (H-39.2). It is repeatedly implied and at times made quite explicit that at least some of the affairs are fully sexual, while we are told repeatedly that he is not married (H-546, H-1052). Like Ovid elevating the adultery practised in the Amores into a set of precepts in the Ars, Herrick goes so far as to state his indulgence in extramarital sex as a principle in ‘The Poet loves a Mistresse, but not to marry’ (H-422): I do not love to wed, Though I do like to wooe; And for a maidenhead Ile beg, and buy it too … Ile hug, Ile kisse, Ile play, And Cock-like Hens Ile tread: And sport it any way; But in the Bridall Bed.

The poem praises the unmarried man’s ‘freedom’ to be promiscuous. Herrick’s supposedly full use of this freedom is also the subject of a series of poems which are all variations on Amores II.iv, in which Ovid confesses his promiscuity and catalogues at great length the variety of qualities which attract him: non est certa meos quae forma invitet amores – centum sunt causae, cur ego semper amem … conveniunt voto longa brevisque meo. non est culta – subit, quid cultae accedere possit; ornata est – dotes exhibet ipsa suas. candida me capiet, capiet me flava puella, est etiam in fusco grata colore Venus … omnibus historiis se meus aptat amor. [‘It is not a particular type of beauty which attracts my love – there are a hundred reasons why I should always be in love … Tall and short both answer my desire. Is she unkempt? I think what refinement could add. Is she ornamented? She herself displays her endowments. A fair-skinned girl captivates me, a golden-haired enthralls me, and Venus is delectable in a dusky hue as well … My love will adapt itself to all stories’, Am. II.iv, 9–10, 36–40, 44.]

In short he is ambitious for the love of any and all women in the city (47–8). This elegy is imitated in Herrick’s ‘No loathsomnesse in love’ (H-21), ‘Short and long both likes’ (H-437), ‘Love dislikes nothing’ (H-750) and ‘Love lightly pleased’

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(H-579), which marks the imitation by ending with a close translation of the last line quoted above: Let faire or foule my Mistresse be, Or low, or tall, she pleaseth me: Or let her walk, or stand, or sit, The posture hers, I’m pleas’d with it. Or let her tongue be still, or stir, Gracefull is ev’ry thing from her. Or let her Grant, or else Deny, My love will fit each Historie.

That Herrick intends the sexual licence of his persona to be considered in relation to the laws against fornication is suggested by the inclusion of three poems explicitly on the subject of penalties imposed on fornicators under church law: whipping in ‘Upon Luggs’, who ‘by the Condemnation of the Bench, / Was lately whipt for lying with a Wench’ (H-199); appearing in church wrapped in a white sheet to do penance before the congregation in ‘Upon Groynes’, who ‘for his fleshly Burglary of late, / Stood in the Holy-Forum Candidate’ (H-261); and another ritual of public shaming in ‘Upon Letcher’, who ‘was Carted … about the streets, / For false Position in his neighbours sheets’ (H-532). Yet ‘The Argument of his Book’ (H-1) asserts that the amatory matter which will be such an important focus of the collection is harmless, and ultimately innocent, despite its insistent presentation as transgressive: I sing of Youth, of Love, and have Accesse By these, to sing of cleanly-Wantonnesse.

The defiant epithet ‘cleanly-Wantonnesse’ takes issue with the whole ethos of the Puritan drive to strengthen sexual legislation. Herrick’s poetry takes lightly the church laws in existence, and in doing so does not merely flout the severer ones in preparation, but rejects their very basis, defining as permissible and ‘cleanly’ what they denounce as ‘abominable and crying sins’. Like Ovid in the amatory elegies, then, Herrick sets himself up in opposition to the puritanical ethos driving legislation under the new regime, and he makes the parallel conspicuous by continual allusion to and imitation of Ovid’s treatments of love. I shall mention just a few examples. Amores II.xv, for instance, in which Ovid addresses a ring which he is sending to his mistress as a gift, with the wish ‘May you fit her as well as she fits me, and fitting, press her finger with a perfect circle’ (5–6), is evoked by Herrick’s inclusion of a poem on ‘A Ring presented to Julia’ (H-172), Julia, I bring To thee this Ring, Made for thy finger fit;

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To shew by this, That our love is (Or sho’d be) like to it,

although Herrick develops the conceit in a more metaphysical and less bawdy direction; Ovid’s vicarious enjoyment of the proximity the ring will enjoy, meanwhile, is reflected in ‘The Carkanet’ (H-34), where, having sent a mistress a carcanet or necklace, Herrick is ‘wrapt … to see / My jet t’enthrall such Ivorie’. Several poems evoke Ovid’s play on the stance of servitium amoris. In Amores I.ii, Ovid yields himself captive to Cupid and submits to be bound in chains. Amores II.ix, however, falls into two halves: in the first, he revolts indignantly against Cupid’s hard rule and wishes to be allowed to live in peace (1–24), while in the second he changes his mind abruptly. Women are ‘so sweet an evil’ that he begs to be enslaved again: fige, puer! positis nudus tibi praebeor armis … indeserta meo pectore regna gere! [‘Transfix me, boy! Naked, with my arms laid aside, I offer myself to you … Hold everlasting sway in my breast!’ Am. II.ix.35, 52.]

The same movement is repeated in III.xi, where he first announces ‘Now for sure I have freed myself and escaped my chains’ (3), and then realizes he cannot help himself: ‘Nor does the ox love the yoke; but what he hates, he bears’ (36). Herrick addresses Cupid in similar ways, invoking the characteristic imagery of shackles and yokes, first announcing his freedom in ‘To Love’ (H-42): I’m free from thee … Farewell my shackles, (though of pearle they be) Such precious thraldome ne’r shall fetter me. He loves his bonds, who when the first are broke, Submits his neck unto a second yoke,

and humbly retracting in ‘His Recantation’ (H-246): Love, I recant, And pardon crave, That lately I offended, But ’twas, Alas, To make a brave, But no disdaine intended.

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality No more Ile vaunt, For now I see, Thou onely hast the power, To find, And bind A heart that’s free, And slave it in an houre.

The same happens in ‘Upon Love’ (H-458): Love, I have broke Thy yoke; The neck is free: But when I’m next Love vext, Then shackell me.

In H-256, ‘Upon the death of his Sparrow. An Elegie’, Herrick imitates one of Ovid’s more celebrated games of imitation. Amores II.vi, Psittacus, Eois imitatrix ales ab Indis, / occidit (‘Our parrot, imitative bird of orient India, is dead’), an elegy on the death of Corinna’s pet parrot, conspicuously imitates Catullus III, an elegy for Lesbia’s sparrow. Ovid humorously highlights this by turning the sparrow into a parrot, an imitatrix ales which parrots the words of others, heightens the mock-seriousness of Catullus’ picture of the sparrow’s soul journeying to Hades per iter tenebricosum / illud, unde negant redire quemquam (‘down the dark road from which, they say, noone returns’, 11–12), by imagining a corner of Elysium, reminiscent of Anchises’ abode in Book VI of the Aeneid, reserved for ‘pious birds’, and advertises his witty overgoing of Catullus by concluding with the inscription on the parrot’s tomb: colligor ex ipso dominae placuisse sepulcro. ora fuere mihi plus ave docta loqui. [‘It may be seen by this tomb itself that I was pleasing to my mistress. I had a mouth skilled in speech beyond any other bird’, Am. II.vi.61–2.]

That is, Ovid’s imitative ‘Psittacus’ (the poem as well as the bird) is more learned and eloquent than Catullus’ ‘Passer’. Herrick combines the Catullan original and the Ovidian imitation. The bird is turned back into the Catullan sparrow, and, like Ovid, Herrick at once acknowledges his debt to Catullus and claims to overgo him in the direct allusion, Had Lesbia (too-too-kind) but known This Sparrow, she had scorn’d her own.

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Where Lesbia’s ‘eyes are reddened with weeping’ (flendo … rubent ocelli, 18) at the end of Catullus’ poem, for this sparrow she would have ‘Wept out her heart, as well as eyes’ (14). Meanwhile, he adopts from Ovid’s poem the avian Elysium and the impressive tomb. The twist he adds himself is to merge these two Ovidian elements into one. The pleasant grove of eternal spring, where uda … perpetuo gramine terra viret (‘the moist ground is green with ever-springing herbs’, 50), now partakes of the immortality of art rather than the immortality of the Elysian fields, for in Herrick’s poem the ‘flowrie Carpets’ growing ever fresh, ‘Where spring-time smiles throughout the yeare’, are merely embroidery on the sparrow’s ‘Hearce-cloth’. This rich embroidery, in turn, is what makes the tomb of Herrick’s sparrow, like that of Ovid’s parrot, so impressive to the passer-by, eliciting a closing statement even more explicit than Ovid’s on the subject of overgoing a literary model: Till passengers shall spend their doome, Not Virgil’s Gnat had such a Tomb.

Ovid’s non-Catullan mention of a tomb for his parrot has inspired Herrick to make the further connection to Virgil’s Culex, with its closing description of an elaborate monument built to honour a dead gnat. Virgil’s funerary monument is planted with ‘whatever flowers the spring seasons renew’ (quoscumque novant vernantia tempora flores, 410), and a lengthy catalogue of these flowers makes up the greater part of his description. It is thus, perhaps, with a nod to the Culex that Herrick has made the focus of his poem the embroidery of ‘all flowers / Nature begets by th’Sun and showers’ (4–5), deftly drawing the Catullan / Ovidian tradition of the lament for a dead bird closer to its distant cousin, the mock-heroic Culex. Herrick seems to be quite aware that even by engaging in knowing and playful imitation – and contaminatio, the witty combination of different sources – he is playing a distinctively Ovidian game. In addition to these conspicuous imitations of elegies from the Amores, the collection is peppered with direct translations from the Ars amatoria, such as ‘On Love’ (H-872): Love is a kind of warre; Hence those who feare, No cowards must his royall Ensignes beare, militiae species amor est; discedite, segnes: non sunt haec timidis signa tuenda viris (Ars II.233),

‘Change gives content’ (H-517): What now we like, anon we disapprove: The new successor drives away old Love,

  Noted by Pollard.



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which evokes both the Ars and the Remedia: lentescunt tempore curae, vanescitque absens et novus intrat amor … successore novo vincitur omnis amor [‘Devotion slackens with time, an absent love vanishes and a new one enters’, Ars II.357–8; ‘All love is vanquished by a new successor’, Remedia 462]

and ‘Teares’ (H-900): Teares most prevaile; with teares too thou mayst move Rocks to relent, and coyest maids to love,

which slightly expands Ovid’s et lacrimae prosunt: lacrimis adamanta movebis (‘tears too are useful: with tears you will move adamantine hearts’, Ars I.659). Perhaps the most telling of the allusions to the Ars, though, are the series of poems in which Herrick displays the taste of a connoisseur for the refinements of female beauty. Like Ovid, Herrick repeatedly expresses his approval of highly developed cultus over primitive simplicity, praising such sophistications as fine silks and perfumes, grooming and elegant manners, and does so in ways which pointedly evoke his Ovidian model. Sometimes, again, he uses direct translation, as in ‘Neglect’ (H-234): Art quickens Nature; Care will make a face: Neglected beauty perisheth apace, Cura dabit faciem; facies neglecta peribit [‘Care will give a face; neglected beauty will perish’, Ars III.105],10

sometimes merely gives the same advice in the same pithy manner, as in ‘Painting sometimes permitted’ (H-641): If Nature do deny Colours, let Art supply, sanguine quae vero non rubet, arte rubet [‘What will not blush with real blood, will blush with art’, Ars III.200],

  The latter noted by Pollard.   Noted by Pollard.



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or ‘To women, to hide their teeth, if they be rotten or rusty’ (H-738): Close keep your lips, if that you meane To be accounted inside cleane: For if you cleave them, we shall see There in your teeth much Leprosie, cui gravis oris odor numquam ieiuna loquatur, et semper spatio distet ab ore viri. si niger aut ingens aut non erit ordine natus dens tibi, ridendo maxima damna feres. [‘Let her whose mouth smells unwholesome never speak when hungry, and always keep herself well away from her lover’s face. If you have a tooth which is black or overlarge or crooked, you will suffer great losses from laughing’, Ars III.277–80.]

At other times the evocation of Ovid’s Ars, and especially its third book, that addressed to women, is more general, as in ‘What kind of Mistresse he would have’ (H-665), a connoisseur’s itemized list of pleasing qualities in a mistress, or ‘To his Mistresses’ (H-54), instructing them to put on their silks and perfumes, and make sure their breath is sweet. The debate over the relative merits of art and nature, of course, has a long history and many aspects, but the celebration of the arts by which women make themselves pleasing to men in Ovid and in Herrick has very particular and topical significance. While Augustus was assiduously justifying his power by claiming to restore to Rome the virtue and order supposed to have been hers in her early history, identifying true Romanitas with the hardy, self-denying and warlike virility of exemplars like Romulus and Cincinnatus, Ovid puts forward a quite different version of what is to be celebrated as truly Roman. For him it is the sophistication of cultivated society, refined manners, enjoyment of material luxury and taste for pleasure which are most characteristic of Rome, and her greatest achievement. These modern refinements are quite opposite to the rustic simplicity of early Rome which represents Augustus’ moral ideal: forsitan antiquae Tatio sub rege Sabinae maluerint, quam se, rura paterna coli … at vestrae matres teneras peperere puellas. vultis inaurata corpora veste tegi, vultis odoratos positu variare capillos … nec tamen indignum: sit vobis cura placendi, cum comptos habeant saecula nostra viros [‘Maybe the ancient Sabine women under King Tatius preferred to tend their fathers’ farms rather than themselves … But your mothers have borne soft girls. You want

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your bodies clothed in gold-embellished garments; you want to vary the style of your perfumed hair … Nor is this unbecoming: let it be your care to be pleasing, since our age has well-groomed men’, De Medicamina Faciei, 11–12, 17–24],

and for Ovid this is undoubtedly an improvement: prisca iuvent alios: ego me nunc denique natum gratulor: haec aetas moribus apta meis. non quia nunc terrae lentum subducitur aurum, lectaque diverso litore concha venit … sed quia cultus adest, nec nostros mansit in annos rusticitas, priscis illa superstes avis. [‘Let ancient ways please others: I rejoice that I was not born till now. This age suits my habits. Not because now the pliant gold is drawn up from the earth, and choice shells arrive from diverse strands … but because we have refinement, and the rusticity which outlived our ancient forefathers has not endured into our time’, Ars, III.121–4, 127–8.]

The first couplet of this passage, incidentally, is translated by Herrick as ‘The present time best pleaseth’ (H-927): Praise they that will Times past, I joy to see My selfe now live: this age best pleaseth mee.11

One of the chief expressions of this sophistication for Ovid is the urbane conducting of adulterous affairs, under direct attack from Augustus’ moral legislation. In Amores III.iv again, Ovid mocks the old-fashioned values of Augustus and the strict husband as merely boorish, and outrageously appeals to the story of Augustus’ darling Romulus, product of Mars’ rape of a Vestal virgin, in order to identify the practice of illicit sex as the essence of Romanitas: rusticus est nimium, quem laedit adultera coniunx, et notos mores non satis urbis habet in qua Martigenae non sunt sine crimine nati Romulus Iliades Iliadesque Remus. [‘He is too boorish, who is troubled by an adulterous wife, and is not familiar enough with the customs of the city in which the sons of Mars were born, not without crime – Romulus and Remus, children of Ilia’, Am. III.iv.37–40.]

Ovid, then, makes his recommendation of cultus, care of the body and refined manners, a shorthand for his rejection of the values and premises of Augustan   Noted by Pollard.

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ideology, and opposition to its goals. This opposition becomes even more clearly legible retrospectively in the shape of Ovid’s subsequent career, which ends with two large collections of verse epistles from Tomis on the Black Sea, where he died in exile as a punishment for the indiscretions of the Ars. Herrick’s imitation of Ovid’s amatory elegies in the Hesperides is elegant and rather profound, for he is at once invoking Ovid’s oppositional stance as part of his own act of self-presentation, to convey his hostility to the new parliamentary regime and continuing allegiance to the defeated royalist cause, and redeploying Ovid’s strategy with a new topical application. Like Ovid, Herrick explicitly prefers sophisticated cultus to rustic simplicity, art to nature, a position set out plainly in ‘Art above Nature, to Julia’ (H-560). After praising the fine lace trimming of her dress and the variety of hairstyles in her repertoire, ‘knit in knots far more then I / Can tell by tongue’ – a passage itself imitating the Ars: non sint sine lege capilli … nec genus ornatus unum est … nec mihi tot positus numero conprendere fas est [‘Let not your hair be without rule … nor is there only one style to wear it in … and it is not possible for me to count the ways of arranging the hair’, Ars III.133, 135, 151]

– he concludes decisively that ‘his eye and heart / Dote … less on Nature, then on Art’. The allegiance to cultus is the same, but in the new context of 1648 its precise political valence has changed. The elegant manners, rich dress and amatory discourse which Herrick so openly prizes throughout the Hesperides would have been associated with the highly sophisticated court of Charles and Henrietta Maria, and indeed the sexual libertinism suggested by the collection would also have had courtly connotations.12 When the Hesperides was published, that court was already part of a lost ‘golden age’ (H-612.7), with the King under arrest and the Queen in exile. The forces opposing them, which seemed to be victorious, were those concerned with moral reform and responsible for the process of sexual legislation which Herrick’s collection flouts. The family values of Augustus are translated into the Puritan sobriety which was taking over the country in the late 1640s. The last touch of refinement in female beauty, according to the Hesperides, is when art feigns neglect. ‘A sweet disorder in the dresse’, we are first told, delights him more ‘then when Art / Is too precise in every part’ (H-83.1, 13–14); later, in ‘What kind of Mistresse’, such a winning disarray appears as a deliberate affectation, recommended and required by the connoisseur:

12   See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965).

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality Be she shewing in her dresse, Like a civill Wilderness; That the curious may detect Order in a sweet neglect.

This too is Ovidian. The list of hairstyles in Book III of the Ars to which I referred earlier culminates with et neglecta decet multas coma; saepe iacere hesternam credas; illa repexa modo est. ars casum simulat; sic capta vidit ut urbe Alcides Iolen, ‘hanc ego’ dixit ‘amo’ [‘Unkempt hair, too, suits many. Often you would believe it had been neglected since yesterday; that hair was combed again just now. Art counterfeits accident. When Alcides saw Iole thus in the captured city, he said “This is she I love”’, Ars III.153–6],

and in Amores I.vii, where Ovid has been beating Corinna and is now repentant, he is distracted from self-accusation as he remembers how attractive she looked in the disarray caused by his attack: ‘Nor was disshevelled hair unbecoming to my lady; she was beautiful like this’ (nec dominam motae dedecuere comae. / sic formosa fuit, 12–13). This taste for an affected disorder marks off the careful control of cultus from the restrictive order of moralitas. To adhere to Ovid’s or Herrick’s rules of amatory sophistication is precisely to transgress the moral and legal rules of their respective governments, to be disorderly: such cultus is in essence a ‘civill Wilderness’ or ‘wild civility’ (H-83.12; H-560.14). In Ovid there is frequently at least an undertone of sexual violence and conflict heightening this pleasurable sense of transgression, as in the examples above, where Corinna’s disordered hair is the result of physical attack, and the contrived disorder recommended in the Ars is compared to that of a woman taken as spoil from a defeated city. Ovid may intend this to reflect badly on his persona, but though Herrick mutes the suggestions of violence, the traces that remain are without irony. Roe suggests that the animation of the woman’s garments which Herrick commends in ‘Delight in Disorder’ have their origin in Daphne’s agitated clothes as she flees from the rapacious Apollo in Book I of the Metamorphoses, a passage which he also sees as underlying ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ (H-779). It is true, as Roe observes, that the threat of sexual violence in the Ovidian original is removed along with the narrative situation, but the traces it leaves behind of conflict and struggle – the shawl rather than the girl ‘thrown / Into a … distraction’, the ribbons flowing ‘confusedly’, the ‘tempestuous petticote’ – rather than suggesting Herrick’s chastely ‘puritan’ admiration for an unassailable innocence,13 register instead the rebellious energy 13   John Roe, ‘“Upon Julia’s Clothes”: Herrick, Ovid, and the Celebration of Innocence’, Review of English Studies 50 (1999), 354–7; Roe is of the opinion that, in

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of political opposition which lies beneath the deceptively smooth and urbane surface both of Ovid’s amatory elegies and of the Hesperides. Before going on to look at the collection’s relations to Ovid’s other works, a word should be said about the opening and closing quotations which I mentioned at the outset, and which both relate directly to the amatory elegies. The elegy quoted on Herrick’s title page, Ovid’s lament for his fellow elegist Tibullus in III. ix, also inspires ‘Leanders Obsequies’ (H-119) and ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201), and together with Amores I.xv it provides an early instance of the assertion of poetic immortality which Ovid was to repeat so frequently throughout his career. This forms the basis of the poet’s confidence in his own power and invulnerability, the confidence ultimately needed to maintain his stance of opposition to those who wield political power, and who may threaten him with exile or ‘martyrdom’, enabling him to say defiantly cedant carminibus reges regumque triumphi (‘Let kings and the triumphs of kings yield place to song’, Am. I.xv.33). This aspect of Ovid is crucial to Herrick, and I shall deal with it more thoroughly when I come to consider the exile poetry. The final poem, meanwhile, To his Book’s end this last line he’d have plac’t, Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast,

as I remarked earlier, translates a line from Ovid’s exilic epistle to Augustus, Tristia II: vita verecunda est, musa iocosa mea. It was evidently an important Ovidian locus for Herrick – an earlier poem, ‘Poets’ (H-624), translates the preceding line, to the same effect: Wantons we are; and though our words be such, Our Lives do differ from our Lines by much. crede mihi, distant mores a carmine nostro [‘Believe me, our habits are far removed from our verses’, Tr. II.353.]14

The jocose muse Ovid is referring to is the muse of the Ars, and his disclaimer is part of a long and elaborate defence in which he argues that he did not deserve to be sent into exile for writing his elegies. Ovid had broken no laws – ‘There is no husband, even among the plebeians, who doubts that he is the father because of my fault’ (351–2) – nor was he charged with or tried for any crime. Ovid presents his exile as an unprecedentedly severe, inequitable and censorious reaction to a mere book, and hints that the real reason may have been the one he is not permitted to disclose, his accidental discovery of some fault Augustus did not want known (103–8). ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’, ‘Herrick responds to Julia’s free spirit without wishing to colonize it further’. 14   Noted by Pollard.

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Both reasons, as they are presented in the exile poetry, suggest that Augustus saw Ovid as politically dangerous to him, and was punishing him not so much for any moral or criminal transgression as to defend his own power. Thus the line Herrick translates does not merely function, in either poet, to disclaim the literal truth of the erotic transactions they have recounted. It draws attention to the fact that, if these erotic poems were not written in the interests of documentary sincerity, they were written to some other purpose, and the context of Ovid’s political exile – evoked in Herrick through the line’s conspicuous allusion to Tristia II – points to the ideological anti-Augustanism, or anti-Puritanism, which I have been tracing through the amatory poems of each.

Chapter 2

‘Times trans-shifting’: The Metamorphoses and the Fasti in the Hesperides The Ovidian self-presentation of the Hesperides is extraordinarily comprehensive. In a collection which represents virtually Herrick’s entire poetic output, excepting the religious verse of Noble Numbers, he systematically alludes to all of Ovid’s major poems too. This is partly in order to direct the reader’s attention not only to Ovid’s individual works but to the whole shape of his career, whose narrative, reflecting his relation to political power, is fundamental to Herrick’s purpose. Thus the reminiscences of the Metamorphoses and the Fasti dotted liberally through the collection serve, in part, simply to keep the figure of Ovid firmly and fully in the reader’s mind, but they also make some more specific and substantive contributions to meaning. The Metamorphoses are continually called to mind by the many metamorphic flower etiologies spread through the volume. ‘How the Wall-flower came first, and why so called’ (H-36) sets the tone: Why this Flower is now call’d so, List’ sweet maids, and you shal know. Understand, this First-ling was Once a brisk and bonny Lasse, Kept as close as Danae was: Who a sprightly Springall lov’d, And to have it fully prov’d, Up she got upon a wall, Tempting down to slide withall: But the silken twist unty’d, So she fell, and bruis’d, she dy’d. Love, in pitty of the deed, And her loving-lucklesse speed, Turn’d her to this Plant, we call Now, The Flower of the Wall.

There are no fewer than 11 poems of this type in the collection, all offering an etiology involving metamorphosis, always with a cause somehow related to love, as with so many of Ovid’s metamorphoses. There are also poems in which   H-36, H-37, H-167, H-190, H-258, H-260, H-391, H-478, H-503, H-706.



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Herrick imagines himself ‘Metamorphoz’d’ (H-41.2) into some object which can freely enjoy physical proximity to a woman – a vine in the highly erotic H-41, a lute in H-68 – a common idea in early modern poetry, but one which has its origin in Ovid’s elegy on the ring sent to his mistress, o utinam fieri subito mea munera possem … tunc ego, cum cupiam dominae tetigisse papillas … in … sinum mira laxus ab arte cadam. [‘Ah, if only I could suddenly be turned into my gift! … Then, when I desired to touch my mistress’s breasts, … made loose by wonderful art I should fall into her bosom’, Am. II.xv.9, 11, 14.]

The Metamorphoses are also a source of inspiration for Herrick’s erotic play with his mistresses, as in ‘To Electra’ (H-152): Ile come to thee in all those shapes As Jove did, when he made his rapes: Onely, Ile not appeare to thee, As he did once to Semele. Thunder and Lightning Ile lay by, To talk with thee familiarly. Which done, then quickly we’ll undresse And ravisht, plunge into the bed, (Bodies and souls commingled) And kissing, so as none may heare, We’ll weary all the Fables there,

wittily culminating in an alternative interpretation of the line from Amores II.iv which we have seen Herrick elsewhere translating ‘My love will fit each Historie’ (H-579). Similarly, we are told in ‘To the Maids to walke abroad’ (H-616) that the Metamorphoses will serve as a theme for amorous dalliance: Fables we’l relate; how Jove Put on all shapes to get a Love: As now a Satyr, then a Swan; A Bull but then; and now a man.

One of the chief functions of the Metamorphoses in the Hesperides, then, is to contribute to the atmosphere of Ovidian eroticism explored in the previous section. In addition to passing allusions to individual fables from the Metamorphoses, too numerous to count, Ovid’s poem is the source of images and details which have evidently caught Herrick’s imagination, and which may appear at first glance

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to have no more than aesthetic significance for him. But even here, the gesture of allusion seems to be important: part of the intention is that the reader will catch and identify the Ovidian echo. For instance, H-193 introduces an image which will appear no fewer than four times in the collection, ‘The Lilly in a Christal’: And here, you see, this Lilly shows, Tomb’d in a Christal stone, More faire in this transparent case, Then when it grew alone … Thus let this Christal’d Lillie be A Rule, how far to teach, Your nakednesse must reach … So though y’are white as Swan, or Snow, And have the power to move A world of men to love: Yet, when your Lawns and Silks shal flow … Then will your hidden Pride Raise greater fires in men.

It has been suggested that this poem imitates one of Martial’s epigrams, 8.68, ‘The wine lives preserved in the transparent goblet, and the rich grape cluster is covered yet not hidden: thus a woman’s body shines through her silks.’ But the true source of the central image is Ovid’s story of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in Book IV of the Metamorphoses, where the rejected nymph Salmacis watches with desire as Hermaphroditus swims in her pool: in liquidis translucet aquis, ut eburnea si quis signa tegat claro vel candida lilia vitro. [‘He shines through the clear waters, as if one should enclose ivory figures or white lilies in transparent glass’, Met. IV.354–5.]

Herrick teasingly displays the image again in two further poems before finally tracing it back to its Ovidian home. In ‘His age, dedicated to his peculiar friend, Master John Wickes, under the name of Posthumus’ (H-336), a poem alluding in the main to Horace, as Braden has demonstrated, Herrick imagines sitting by the fire when he is old, reading poetry aloud with his imagined wife (named after the Ovidian archetype of the loving old wife, Baucis) and son:   As explicitly for Braden, and even to an extent for Roe.   D.B.J. Randall, ‘The Roman Vibrations of Julia’s Clothes’, English Language Notes

 

21 (1984), 10–16.

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Then shall he read that flowre of mine Enclos’d within a christall shrine: A Primrose next;

– coupling ‘The Lilly in a Christal’ with what may be a reference to the very obviously Ovidian metamorphic etiology of ‘How Primroses came green’ (H-167) as the pair of poems chosen to epitomize Herrick’s work. It recurs again in ‘To Julia, in her Dawn, or Day-break’ (H-824): As Lillies shrin’d in Christall, so Do thou to me appeare …

Finally, for any reader who has so far failed to identify the Ovidian source of the image, Herrick reveals all in ‘Upon Julia’s washing her self in the river’ (H-939): How fierce was I, when I did see My Julia wash her self in thee! So Lillies thorough Christall look: So purest pebbles in the brook: As in the River Julia did, Halfe with a Lawne of water hid, Into thy streames my self I threw, And strugling there, I kist thee too; And more had done (it is confest) Had not thy waves forbad the rest.

For readers as familiar with the Metamorphoses as were all educated men in the seventeenth century, the situation is so peculiar, and the imitation so close, that it is impossible not to recognize Ovid’s passage behind the poem: iam cupit amplecti, iam se male continet amens. ille cavis velox adplauso corpore palmis desilit in latices alternaque bracchia ducens in liquidis translucet aquis, ut eburnea si quis signa tegat claro vel candida lilia vitro. ‘vicimus et meus est’ exclamat nais, et omni veste procul iacta mediis inmittitur undis, pugnantemque tenet, luctantiaque oscula carpit … [‘Now she desires to embrace him; insane with desire now, she cannot control herself. He, clapping his body with hollow palms, swiftly dives into the pool, and swimming with alternate strokes he shines through the clear waters, as if one should enclose ivory

  Alternatively it may refer, as editors have suggested, to ‘The Primrose’ (H-580).



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figures or white lilies in transparent glass. “I have won, and he is mine!” exclaimed the nymph, and casting off all her clothes dives into the midst of the waves, holds him struggling, and reaps reluctant kisses’, Met. IV.351–8.]

The gender roles are reversed in the Herrick poem, but traces even of those elements of Ovid’s story which are distinct and different from Herrick’s remain in the inconsistency over who is the addressee in Herrick’s poem. In lines 2, 7 and 10 Herrick addresses the river, yet line 8’s ‘I kist thee’ obviously refers to Julia. This ambiguity derives from Ovid’s tale, where the nymph’s triumph is due to the fact that she and her waters, in which Hermaphroditus is swimming, are one: it is thus that she circumfunditur (‘flows around, encompasses’, 360) him so clingingly on every side, an idea imitated by Marlowe in Neptune’s dalliance with Leander. Julia resembles Hermaphroditus in being the victim of the assault, but bears traces of the female nymph in the pronouns which seem to make her interchangeable with the water. The recurrent image of the lily in crystal, then, is a riddling game which Herrick has been playing with the reader across the collection, and its solution is Ovid. But the most significant metamorphosis in Herrick’s collection is that of the poet himself, whose ‘transmutation’ by grief, decay and the approach of death is a constantly recurring theme. In ‘To his Friend, on the untuneable Times’ (H-210), for instance, he laments Play I co’d once; but (gentle friend) you see My Harp hung up, here on the Willow tree. Sing I co’d once; and bravely too enspire (With luscious Numbers) my melodious Lyre. Draw I co’d once (although not stocks or stones, Amphion-like) men made of flesh and bones, Whether I wo’d; but (ah!) I know not how, I feele in me, this transmutation now. Griefe, (my deare friend) has first my Harp unstrung; Wither’d my hand, and palsie-struck my tongue.

In this ‘transmutation’ we have again, as in the final poem on the poet’s jocund muse and chaste life, an allusion to one of Ovid’s earlier works as seen from the perspective of the exile poetry. In the first elegy of the Tristia Ovid, addressing the epistle he is now writing and will send to Rome, imagines it there encountering its ‘brothers’, Ovid’s other works, and among them the Metamorphoses: sunt quoque mutatae, ter quinque volumina, formae, nuper ab exequiis carmina rapta meis. his mando dicas, inter mutata referri

  Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 665–74.



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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality fortunae vultum corpora posse meae. namque ea dissimilis subito est effecta priori, flendaque nunc, aliquo tempore laeta fuit. [‘There are also thrice five volumes on changed forms, songs lately snatched from my funeral ceremony. To these I charge you to say that the appearance of my fortune can be entered among those changed bodies. For suddenly it has been made quite unlike what it was before, and is now a reason to weep, though in other times it was joyful’, Tr. I.i.117–22.]

As we shall see when we come to consider the role of Ovid’s exile poetry in Herrick’s collection, Herrick repeatedly presents his lamentable ‘transmutation’ by analogy with Ovid’s, as exile or a metaphorical death. But this grief, this exilic discontent, and Herrick’s concentration on the decay of his own fortunes and body, are chiefly intended to reflect what he perceives as a lamentable change in the state of the realm. As the title of the poem quoted above suggests, it is ‘the untuneable Times’ which have undergone the real ‘transmutation’ and decay, causing the poet’s grief. It is made very clear, for instance in ‘The bad season makes the Poet sad’ (H-612), that the change which grieves him is the country’s descent into civil war, the deposition of Charles, and the transfer of power to Parliament. Herrick’s constant harping upon ‘the indignation of the Times’ (H-869.2), the ‘Times most bad’ (H-596), the metamorphosis which the country has suffered, is then another expression of his opposition to parliamentary power. The introductory poem, ‘The Argument of his Book’, promises that the collection will ‘sing of Times transshifting’ (H-1.9), and it is in this sense of political change that the overarching theme of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, universal mutability, is significant to Herrick’s design. ‘There is nothing in the whole world which endures’, Pythagoras declares in the last book of the Metamorphoses; ‘everything is in a state of flux’: sic tempora verti cernimus atque illas adsumere robora gentes, concidere has. [‘Thus we see the times revolving, and these people acquiring strength, those being overthrown’, Met. XV.177–8, 420–22.]

This principle of the ever-changing times, however, is also a source of hope. As Ovid in the Tristia hopes for an end to his exile with the dispersal of Augustus’ anger – ubi [Iuppiter] detonuit strepuitque exterruit orbem, purum discussis aera reddit aquis

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[‘When [Jupiter] has thundered and terrified the world with the noise, he disperses the rain-clouds and makes the air clear again’, Tr. II.35–6]

– so Herrick in ‘Good precepts, or counsell (H-725) offers reassurance, surely aimed particularly at his disheartened fellow royalists: Nor let the shackles make thee sad; Thou canst but have, what others had. And this for comfort thou must know, Times that are ill wo’nt still be so. Clouds will not ever powre down raine; A sullen day will cleere againe.

The hoped-for restoration of Charles will make the seasons once more ‘smooth and unperplext’ (H-612.9). The same mutability evidenced in the downfall of the King will bring about the fall of the new regime, and the axiom that ‘All things decay and die’ (H-69) contains the approaching nemesis of new-born republican authority as well as that already met by the royal English oak: All things decay with Time: the Forrest sees The growth, and down-fall of her aged trees: That Timber tall, which three-score lusters stood The proud Dictator of the State-like wood: I meane (the Soveraigne of all Plants) the Oke Droops, dies, and falls without the cleavers stroke.

Because seized by force, indeed, parliamentary power is especially subject to such decay, for ‘No Kingdomes got by Rapine long endure’ (H-1023). At bottom, then, the theme of metamorphosis in the Hesperides functions as encouragement to the royalist resistance, offering the hope that Times bad And sad Are a turning: And he Whom we See dejected; Next day Wee may See erected (H-993).

  The last two lines also draw on Horace, Carmina II.ix.1 and II.x.17.



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As well as these grand cycles of political history, the smaller temporal cycle of the calendar is another focus of the Hesperides’ concern with ‘Times trans-shifting’ (H-1.9), and through this aspect the collection assimilates itself to Ovid’s Fasti. Ovid’s poem is a verse calendar, in which Ovid charts the rising and setting of stars and constellations, explains the origins of the months’ names and of the Roman festivals, and details in conservative and antiquarian spirit the religious observances and festivities assigned to each day, in six books, each dealing with a separate month. (Ovid completed only January to June before abandoning the work: according to the Tristia this was because of his exile.) Recent critics have detected in the Fasti an ironic undercurrent of oblique satire on Augustus’ manipulation of Roman religion to shore up his own power, which seems in keeping with the attitude to Augustan ideology we have seen in the amatory elegies. But nevertheless, the work appears on the surface both to participate whole-heartedly in Augustus’ project of preserving or restoring customs seen as venerable relics of an ideally pious Roman past (a project to which the adultery legislation mentioned earlier was also related), and to endorse with equal enthusiasm the celebration of Augustus’ many additions to the calendar, festivals devoted to himself and his family whose cumulative effect is to elevate him to god-like status. Once again, heeding Ovidian irony only where it suits his purposes, Herrick selects and adapts aspects of Ovid’s work to serve the needs of his own polemic. Drawing the reader’s attention to the resemblance by referring to his collection as ‘my eternall Calender’ (H-545.10) and ‘this Poetick Liturgie’ (510.4), and with regular glances towards ‘The succession of the … months’ (H-70) and the revolving seasons (H-642), Herrick systematically deploys two characteristic features of the Fasti in the service of his royalist programme. Like Ovid he adopts an explicitly conservative stance towards traditional festivals, both sacred and secular, in poems which, like the didactic Fasti, assume a tone of instruction, and cultivates a general atmosphere of ritual and ceremony through a rhetoric of typically Roman ‘sacrifice’ – all contributing to the expression of his Laudian sympathies. Also like Ovid, he uses references to stars and stellification for the purpose of political praise and to imply the quasi-divine nature of the monarch. One aspect of the Hesperides which has attracted attention to its partisan political programme in recent years is its ‘sustained defense of the Laudian “politics of mirth”’. In 1633 Charles had reissued his father’s controversial declaration, the Book of Sports, forbidding the hindrance, by Puritan reformists, of Sunday and holiday pastimes: Our pleasure likewise is, That after the end of Diuine Seruice, Our good people be not disturbed, letted, or discouraged from any lawfull Recreation; Such as dauncing, either men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmlesse Recreation, nor from hauing of May-Games, Whitsun Ales, and    Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 17.

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Morrisdances, and the setting vp of Maypoles and other sports therewith vsed, so as the same be had in due and conuenient time, without impediment or neglect of diuine Seruice.

Attitudes to such pastimes were a major bone of contention in the period leading up to the Civil War. In 1644 Parliament ordered the public burning of the Book of Sports and banned Sunday recreations. By 1648 the Whitsun Ales, May games and Christmas and Candlemas festivities ostentatiously celebrated in Herrick’s collection had all been made illegal by act of Parliament. Not only does Herrick’s poetic celebration of such festivals have unmistakeably royalist implications, but the recurrent more general and abstract theme of ritual and ‘sacrifice’ conveys a Laudian attitude to religious ceremony in defiance of Puritan modes of worship. A common strain in Puritan opposition both to church ceremony and to traditional May and Christmas festivities was the argument that they were pagan in origin. Herrick openly defies such criticism by embracing and amplifying the pagan overtones of the festivals he treats, and repeatedly employing the language of Roman ritual and sacrifice. His conservative harking back to Laudian and Caroline attitudes to ceremony and festivity is thus couched in terms highly reminiscent of Ovid’s Fasti. The celebration which attracts perhaps the most attention in the Hesperides is May Day, the subject of ‘The may-pole’ (H-695), ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ (H-178), and the paired ‘meddow verse or Aniversary to Mistris Bridget Lowman’ and ‘parting verse, the feast there ended’ (H-354, 355), and it is tempting to see a parallel with the Floralia, which is given vivid and extensive treatment in Book V of the Fasti. Both poets suggest a specially marked personal involvement with this festival: the parting with Flora at the end of Ovid’s long interview is the single occasion in this work where he refers to himself by name, in the pun on ‘Naso’ I mentioned earlier, while in ‘The parting verse’ (355) Herrick wonders whether he shall himself be present at next year’s May festivities, and promises Bridget Lowman that, if he lives, ‘Herrick shall make the meddow-verse for you’ again. The Roman Floralia was celebrated over six days, from 28 April to 3 May, and according to Ovid involved public games and was marked by the wearing of flowers, ‘great wantonness’ and ‘unrestrained jests’ (Fasti V.331–2). The May Day celebrations were commonly believed in the seventeenth century to have their origin in the Floralia, as argued for instance by Polydore Vergil: At the Kalends of May, the Youth, as well men as women, are wont to go a Maying in the fields, and bring home boughs and flowers to garnish their houses and gates, and in some places the Churches: which fashion is derived of the

   The King’s Maiesties Declaration to His Subjects, concerning lawfull Sports to be vsed (London, 1618), pp. 6–7.

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Romans that use the same to honour their Goddess Flora, with such ceremonies, whom they named Goddess of fruits.

Reformist pressure to have the May festivities banned often cited both their ‘heathen’ origins and the sexual license with which they, like the Floralia, were associated. William Prynne in the Histrio-Mastix associates morris dancing with pagan idolatry, asserting that the Church Fathers condemne all dancing, as being, not onely a common recreation of lascivious drunken Pagans & Idolaters, in their Festivals and times of publike mirth, as Ovid, Horace, Iuvenall … and infinite others testifie: but likewise a part of that solemne worship wherewith they courted and honored their Devill-Idols, whose Festivals and Solemnities, were for the most part spent in Playes and Dancing, as our Christian Holy-dayes oft-times are … Witnesse their Corybantes, Curetes, Salii, and such like dancing Priests, who on the solemne festivall dayes of Cybele, Bacchus, Mars, and other Pagan-deities, danced about the streets and Marketplace with Cymbales in their hands, in nature of our Morrice-dances (which were derived from them) the whole multitude accompanying them in these their dancing Morrices, with which they honoured these their Devill-Idols.10

The passage is glossed in two places with quotations from the Fasti’s account of the Floralia, Flora’s explanation that the gods ‘delight in festivities and altars; we celestial beings are a bunch fond of excess’ (Fasti V.297–8), and the sketch of the revellers: ebrius incinctis philyra conviva capillis saltat, … ebrius ad durum formosae limen amicae cantat, habent unctae mollia serta comae. [‘The drunken guest dances, his hair gathered in a linden chaplet, … drunken he sings on the hard doorstep of his beautiful beloved; his perfumed hair is crowned with soft garlands’, Fasti V.337–40.]11

Like Ovid in his treatment of the Floralia, Herrick displays a relaxed and tolerant, even approbatory view of the sexual license associated with May Day. In ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ he admonishes Corinna that while she delays   Polydore Vergil, An abridgement of the works of the most learned Polidore Virgil being an history of the inventors and original beginning of all antiquities, arts mysteries, sciences, ordinances, orders, rites and ceremonies, both civil and religious … compendiously gathered by T. Langlet (London, 1659), p. 194. 10   William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), pp. 233–5. 11   See Prynne’s notes h on p. 233 and t on p. 235. 

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Many a green-gown has been given; Many a kisse, both odde and even,

urging her to join in and ‘take the harmlesse follie of the time’ while she is young. The sexual element is more implicit but still present in ‘The may-pole’, where the traditional association of the phallic maypole with fertility seems to underlie the closing hope that the girls will ‘multiply all, like to fishes’. The first two stanzas of ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ are thoroughly Roman in their range of reference, with day-break described through mention of Aurora and Apollo and Corinna told to Rise; and put on your Foliage, and be seene To come forth, like the Spring-time, fresh and greene; And sweet as Flora.

The final stanza expresses the commonplace, but nevertheless typically Ovidian, advice to seize the day before old age and death descend, as does Ovid’s Flora herself (Fasti V.353–4). Over the course of the poem this Roman atmosphere, making May Day reminiscent of the Floralia, has been assimilated to Christianity, with allusion to the Hebrew Feast of Tabernacles described in Leviticus, and to the biblical expressions of the carpe diem sentiment assigned as readings for 1 May in the Book of Common Prayer.12 Herrick’s Laudian defence of the May festivities presents them simultaneously as a version of the wanton Floralia celebrated by Ovid and as perfectly in keeping with Christianity, even as sacramental. His conservative celebration of festive tradition and Ovid’s are made one and the same. A general atmosphere of Roman religion pervades the collection, from the Roman trappings and invocations of Roman gods in the epithalamia, conventional enough in this genre, through the many ‘hymnes’ and ‘prayers’ addressed to Roman deities, recalling, along with other classical examples, the many invocations in the Fasti, to several poems about burnt offerings (H-63, H-65, H-66, H-736). Yet more take the form of relatively detailed instructions to Julia, recalling the didactic approach of the Fasti, to assist him in ‘sacrifices’ described in thoroughly Roman terms. In ‘To Julia, the Flaminica Dialis, or Queen-Priest’ (H-539) Julia is told to don white vestures and chaplet, to take up the Inarculum or ceremonial pomegranate twig, and to sacrifice to the goddess of love, to atone for having neglected her temple and altars. The evocation of formal Roman religion in this poem cultivates a tone of antiquarian erudition and historicity, especially in the title ‘Flaminica Dialis’ (the wife of the priest of Jupiter, who did have her own ritual responsibilities) and the rather obscure Inarculum, to which Herrick adds an explanatory footnote, thereby drawing attention to its arcane and scholarly nature. Though of course the whole thing is merely a joke, a wittily oblique rebuke to his mistress for not serving Venus by granting him sexual favours, nevertheless the   Marcus, Politics of Mirth, pp. 160–63.

12

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mock-scholarly paraphernalia of Roman ritual is bound to call the Fasti to mind.13 Elsewhere the figurative intention is not so obvious. In ‘The Sacrifice, by way of Discourse betwixt himselfe and Julia’ (H-870), for instance, the detailed evocation of preparations for a typical Roman sacrifice sustains an oddly serious, reverential tone: Herr. Come and let’s in solemne wise Both addresse to sacrifice: Old Religion first commands That we wash our hearts, and hands. Is the beast exempt from staine, Altar cleane, no fire prophane? Are the Garlands, Is the Nard Jul. Ready here? All well prepar’d, With the Wine that must be shed (Twixt the hornes) upon the head Of the holy Beast we bring For our Trespasse-offering.

That such observances bear some relation to the Christian rites which Herrick would in reality have performed as vicar of Dean Prior is suggested by the intermeddling of specifically Christian imagery in certain of the poems of this group. H-974, for instance, instructs Julia to ‘baptize’ herself and him in ‘holy waters’ before returning to the Roman range of reference with ‘Then I’le be the Rex Sacrorum’. In H-584 Julia is again to assist in a religious ceremony, this time helping to ‘sing the Dirge’ of the deserving dead, but here Christian references have completely displaced Roman ones: The Saints-bell calls; and, Julia, I must read The Proper Lessons for the Saints now dead: To grace which Service, Julia, there shall be One Holy Collect, said or sung for Thee.

This church service is itself figurative, probably referring to the Hesperides itself, with its frequent epitaphs and its poems of praise granting immortality to friends and relations, promising ‘his Kinswoman, Mistresse Penelope Wheeler’, for example, ‘you a Saint shall be, / In Chiefe, in this Poetick Liturgie’ (H-510; cp. H-545). But the Anglican church which recognizably provides the vehicle, with its sanctus bell and its reading of the daily lessons, and which draws some of its significance from its allusion to Herrick’s profession, is evidently connected to the sacrificial altars of the other, ‘Roman’ poems of religious observance addressed to the ‘Queen-Priest’ Julia. The highly ritualized nature of the ‘Roman’ sacrifices 13   Ovid mentions the Flaminica Dialis three times in the Fasti, at II.27–8, III.397–8, VI.226–34.

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described by Herrick, then – their emphasis on sanctified space, on the altar (rather than communion table), on incense-burning, on special vestments – connotes a particular conception of Christian worship, one which is deeply Laudian and quite opposed to the Puritan ethos governing the church in 1648. Indeed the provocatively Roman Catholic overtones of his frequent reference to ‘saints’, to ‘trentals’ or sets of masses for the dead, and to the sprinkling of ‘holy water’ constitute even more extreme gestures of defiance. Herrick had of course been expelled from his parish in 1647 for refusal to subscribe to the reformist and anti-Laudian Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. Thus the evocation in the Hesperides of the Fasti’s project to preserve and teach ancient forms of worship has a pointed polemical and oppositional purpose. The ‘Old Religion’ (H-870.3) which dictates the ritual observances in Herrick’s poems of sacrifice figures the pre-Civil War Laudian church under its antiquarian reminiscences of Roman religion. Another element of the Hesperides’ political programme drawn from Ovid’s Fasti is the pervasive imagery of stars and stellification. The title of the collection refers to the daughters of Hesperus, the evening star, the guardian nymphs in Greek mythology of a garden full of golden fruit in the ‘Fortunate Isles’ of the West (‘Hesperus’ and ‘Hesperides’ derive from the Greek ‘έσπερος’, ‘western’), as well as to the garden itself. I shall return to the latter, spatial significance in the next section. Although there is no constellation of this name, the nymphs themselves were frequently, and given their parentage not unnaturally, interpreted as stars in the Renaissance. Abraham Fraunce for instance explains Hesperides, the daughters of Hesperus, are the starres: their garden is in the weast, wherein grow golden apples: for such is the nature of the starres, to glister like gold, and seeme round in shew like apples. They grow in the weast, because the stars never appeare, but when the sun setteth, and that is in the west.14

Herrick’s prefatory poem ‘To the Most Illustrious, and Most Hopefull Prince, Charles’ encourages such an interpretation of his collection’s title: … look how all those heavenly Lamps acquire Light from the Sun, that inexhausted Fire: So all my Morne, and Evening Stars from You Have their Existence, and their Influence too.

On one level then, Herrick’s Hesperides is a collection of stars, and so shares the stellar focus of Ovid’s Fasti, which sings of ‘the setting of the constellations beneath the earth and their rising’ (lapsa … sub terras ortaque signa, I.2). But it is already clear that Herrick’s concern with stars will be of a particular nature and for a specific purpose, reflecting a small but important subset of the stellar material 14   Abraham Fraunce, Third Part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yvychurch (London, 1592), sig. 46v.

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of the Fasti: he is interested in stellification as a tool of epideictic rhetoric and in connection with his royalist belief in the Divinity of Kings. The conceit of ‘To the Most Illustrious … Charles’ rests on the widespread belief that within an hour of Charles’s birth, on 29 May 1630, Hesperus appeared in the mid-day sky, a phenomenon which was celebrated as a favourable auspice of supernatural origin. ‘A Pastorall upon the birth of Prince Charles, Presented to the King, and Set by Master Nicholas Laniere’ (H-213) draws an explicit analogy between this event and the star which signalled the birth of Christ. Three shepherds discuss the news that Three dayes before the shutting in of May … To all our joy, a sweet-fac’t child was borne … And that his birth sho’d be more singular, At Noone of Day, was seene a silver Star, Bright as the Wise-mens Torch, which guided them To Gods sweet Babe, when borne at Bethlehem.

The shepherds decide to ‘wend along his Baby-ship to see’, taking pastoral gifts in imitation of the ‘incense, myrrh and gold’ brought by the wise men to Jesus, gifts which they deem appropriate because ‘As he is Prince, he’s Shepherd too’, an image which blends the two traditional metaphors of the King and of Christ as shepherd of their people. Amarillis will take a garland of flowers ‘most sweet; yet all lesse sweet than he’, a phrase which suggestively recurs in the sequence of poems on Christ’s nativity in Noble Numbers (N-97.10). This sequence (N-96, 97, 98 and 102) mingles praise of the royal family, now explicit, now implicit, with its ostensible heavenly subject, to a point where the slippage between ‘our heavenly King’ and King Charles and his son amounts to identification. In ‘A Christmas Caroll, sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall’ (N-96), the birth of Christ ‘sees December turn’d to May’, the month of Christ’s nativity turned to that of the young Prince, as Christ’s ‘quickning’ influence calls forth flowers from the earth, and concludes with at least a momentary elision of Christ and King in the repeated pronoun ‘Him’: The Darling of the world is come, And fit it is, we finde a roome To welcome Him. The nobler part Of all the house here, is the heart, Which we will give Him; and bequeath This Hollie, and this Ivie Wreath, To do Him honour; who’s our King, And Lord of all this Revelling.

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The title of ‘The New-yeeres gift, or Circumcisions Song’ (N-97), on the festival of Christ’s circumcision, also notes that it was ‘sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall’, and includes the echo of the ‘Pastorall upon the birth of Prince Charles’; the next poem on the same subject ends by coupling praise of the babe with praise of the King, wishing him longevity followed by phoenix-like resurrection, a traditional image of Christ; and ‘The Star-Song: A Caroll to the King; sung at WhiteHall’ (N-102) may refer equally well throughout to either nativity. The analogy between Christ and the King or the royal heir is a logical extension of the Stuart doctrine of the Divinity of Kings, the idea that the King is divinely anointed and the representative of God on earth, making any challenge to his authority a defiance of God. Herrick explicitly embraces this doctrine, by which the authority of the current government is invalidated, in a number of poems, for instance ‘The Difference Betwixt Kings and Subjects’ (H-25), ‘Duty to Tyrants’ (H-97) and ‘Obedience in Subjects’ (H-269). In ‘To the King, to Cure the Evill’ (H-161) he endorses a mainstay of the doctrine, the belief that the King’s touch could cure scrofula, with imagery presenting the hand of his ‘adored Cesar’ as a ‘branch’ of Revelation’s ‘Tree of Life’. This imperial concept of unlimited monarchy, by which kingly authority derives directly from God and not, as in mediaeval Common Law theories, ultimately from God but directly from the people, was introduced to England by Henry VIII at the time of the break with Rome, but Charles had exploited its absolutist implications more fully than any Tudor monarch in his reliance on prerogative and disputes with Parliament. It can be seen as deriving ultimately from the role of the Roman emperors, and the insinuation of the ruler’s quasi-divine status was integral to it from its beginnings with Augustus.15 It is thus unsurprising that Herrick often addresses Charles as ‘Ceasar’ or ‘Great Augustus’ (e.g. H-264, H-961), or that one of the clearest statements of his belief in the Divinity of Kings, ‘Obedience in Subjects’ (H-269), takes the form of a direct translation from Tacitus, on Tiberius.16 The analogy between the nativities of Prince Charles and Christ merely gives a Christian twist to a Roman idea. Elsewhere in Herrick it takes more recognizably Roman form, resembling the frequent apotheoses of rulers in Ovid, and especially in the Fasti. Ovid continually addresses Augustus as a god, following the lead already laid down by poets like Virgil and Horace to participate in the cultural and   On the relation of Renaissance ‘imperial’ monarchy to Roman empire, see Frances Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 29–47. John Guy dubs the Henrician concept of monarchy ‘caesaropapist’: see ‘Tudor Monarchy and its Critiques’, in John Guy (ed.), Tudor Monarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 78–109. On the divinity of the Roman emperor, see Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor, American Philological Association, Philological Monographs no. 1 (1931); J. Pollini, ‘Man or God: Divine Assimilation and Imitation in the Late Republic and Early Principate’, in K.A. Raaflaub and M. Toher (eds), Between Republic and Empire (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 334–57. 16   Tacitus, Annales VI.8, as already noted by J. Max Patrick in his edition. 15

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iconographical aspect of Augustus’ gradual assimilation to the gods over the course of his rule.17 One way in which this assimilation was accomplished was by establishing his descent from gods (Venus, the mother of Aeneas, and Mars, the father of Romulus), and the posthumous deification of his human ancestors. The apotheoses of Augustus’ ancestors, Aeneas, Romulus and Julius Caesar, thus play an important role in Ovid’s poems. In Fasti II he recounts how Romulus becomes the god Quirinus and venit in astra (‘came among the stars’, II.478): amid thunder and lightning rex patriis astra petebat equis (‘the King seeks the stars with his father’s horses’, II.496), and a vision of the deified Romulus appears to his people, who falsely believed him to have died, forbidding them to mourn and instructing them to offer sacrifice to his newly divine self. In the third book, Vesta asserts similarly that Julius Caesar, Augustus’ adoptive father, did not die, but was snatched away by her and borne up to the sky, leaving a mere simulacrum to fall under the swords of the conspirators (III.701–4). The first book has the daughter of Evander, prior to the arrival of Aeneas in Latium, prophesying the future deification of Julius Caesar, Augustus, his heir Tiberius and his wife Livia (I.529–36). The concluding Roman books of the Metamorphoses, meanwhile, have the apotheosis of Aeneas after the river Numicus has ‘washed away whatever was mortal’ in him at XIV.602–8, and a lengthy account of that of Julius Caesar (this time carried to the stars by Venus after his assassination): Venus … suique Caesaris eripuit membris nec in aera solvi passa recentem animam caelestibus intulit astris … luna volat altius illa flammiferumque trahens spatioso limite crinem stella micat [‘Venus snatched away the newly released soul of her Caesar from his body, and not allowing it to dissolve in the air she carried it up among the heavenly stars … it flew higher than the moon and, drawing behind it a flaming trail across the spacious zodiac, shone as a star’, Met. XV.844–50],

and anticipate a couple of times Augustus’ posthumous translation ‘to the stars’ (XV.839, 869–70). It is this notion of immortalization through stellification which lies at the heart of the Hesperides’ concern with stars, and with the same purpose, to insinuate the quasi-divine nature, and therefore the absolute and unchallengeable authority, of the monarch. The conceit of ‘To the Most Illustrious … Prince Charles’, whereby Herrick’s little stars, the poems of the Hesperides, draw ‘their Existence, and their Influence’ from Charles, a ‘Light’ who ‘leads the way’, identifies Charles with a 17   On the iconographical aspect, see Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, tr. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1988).

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star, or with the star, Hesperus, which signalled his birth. Pointing to Charles’s supernatural influence as the means whereby the ‘glories’ of Herrick’s poetry ‘become Immortall Substances’, the poem actually shows this working the other way round, as the poem confers quasi-divine status on the King through the trope of stellification. Herrick returns to the trope several times in the course of the volume, to describe the way in which he confers the immortality of fame on select friends and relatives through poetic praise, adding to the ‘firmament’ surrounding Charles the stellified community of a like-minded chosen few. ‘To his peculier friend Master Thomas Shapcott’, for instance, he writes (H-444) I give Thee here a Verse that shall (When hence thy Circum-mortall-part is gon) Arch-like, hold up, Thy Name’s Inscription. Brave men can’t die; whose Candid Actions are Writ in the Poets Endlesse-Kalendar: Whose velome, and whose volumne is the Skie, And the pure Starres the praising Poetrie.

In ‘Mary Willand’ he finds another ‘T’enspangle this expansive Firmament’ of his collection (H-516). In ‘To his faithfull friend, Master John Crofts, Cup-bearer to the King’ (H-804), he observes that since I’ve travail’d all this Realm throughout To seeke, and find some few Immortals out To circumspangle this my spacious Sphere, (As Lamps for everlasting shining here:) And having fixt Thee in mine Orbe a Starre (Amongst the rest) both bright and singular,

he has repaid in part his debt to his friend. ‘To his deare Valentine, Mistresse Margaret Falconbridge’ (H-789) draws on another Ovidian myth of stellification: Now is your turne (my Dearest) to be set A Jem in this eternall Coronet: ’Twas rich before; but since your Name is downe, It sparkles now like Ariadne’s Crowne.

At Fasti III.510–16 Ovid tells how Bacchus transports his wife, Ariadne, to heaven, changing the nine gems of her crown, which he had given her, into stars. (He relates the same story at Metamorphoses VIII.177–82 and Ars amatoria I.557–8.) The myth is already in Ovid associated with the poet’s own bestowal of immortality on a beloved woman through poetic praise. The prayer to Bacchus (Tr. V.iii) in which he wishes

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directly follows an elegy to his wife (V.ii) and closely precedes one on his wife’s birthday, promising her immortal fame (V.v), in a book which culminates in an elegy describing the whole collection as a ‘monument’ conferring immortality on mihi me coniunx carior (‘my wife, dearer to me than myself’, V.xiv.1–2). We shall return to the implications of this set of friends immortalized out of love or for their virtue in the next section. Herrick’s royalism, however, remains the organizing principle of his firmament, as ‘To the King’ (H-685) makes clear: Give way, give way, now, now my Charles shines here, A Publike Light (in this immensive Sphere.) Some starres were fixt before; but these are dim, Compar’d (in this my ample Orbe) to Him. Draw in your feeble fiers, while that He Appeares but in His Meaner Majestie. Where, if such glory flashes from His Name, Which is His Shade, who can abide His Flame! Princes, and such like Publike Lights as these, Must not be lookt on, but at distances: For, if we gaze on These brave Lamps too neer, Our eyes they’l blind, or if not blind, they’l bleer.

The deifying implications of this stellification are here once again brought to the fore, as the poem concludes with an echo of God’s words to Moses in Exodus xxxiii.20, ‘Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me and live’.

Chapter 3

Exile and Haven: The Tristia and Ex Ponto in the Hesperides As well as referring to the daughters of Hesperus, making his collection a firmament of stars, Herrick’s title also alludes to the Hesperidean garden itself, the mythical garden in the west where the golden fruit were jealously guarded, and this, too, functions as a metaphor for the collection. As he offers places in his ‘firmament’ to various friends, so he offers a ‘Leavie-Throne’ in ‘This Sacred Grove’ to Queen Henrietta Maria (H-265), a place ‘in this my rich Plantation’ to ‘his peculiar friend Sir Edward Fish’ (H-392). This mythical western locale also shadows the actual geographical west of England. Several poems in the collection draw attention to the setting in which the bulk of the poems seem to have been composed, Dean Prior in Devon, where Herrick had been vicar from 1630 until his expulsion in 1647, shortly before publication, and others reflect a particular concern with the progress of the royalist cause in the south-west. The western space reflected or embodied in Herrick’s collection, then, has a double aspect. On one hand it is the real setting in which the poet suffers and laments the effects of civil war and views from a distance the consolidation of the parliamentary power to which he is opposed in the capital. On the other it is an ideal, mythical space in which the magical property of the gods is kept sacrosanct, beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, an ideal space recreated in Herrick’s poetry, which through its oft-vaunted immortality shares the Hesperidean garden’s unassailability, and in which Herrick preserves the royalist values temporarily exiled from the centre of power. This too is learned from Ovid, from the two collections of exile poetry, with their delineation both of the harsh physical setting of Tomis in which Ovid voices his exilic discontent, the severity of his suffering an implied criticism of Augustus’ and Tiberius’ inclemency and injustice, and of a virtual space of poetry which transcends the limitations of space and time, where the poet and his friends may meet and commune freely, sharing elegiac values of friendship seen as exiled from contemporary Rome, assured of poetic immortality, and thus ultimately immune to persecution by the emperor. Herrick on several occasions describes his living in Dean Prior as a ‘banishment’, for instance in ‘His Lachrimae or Mirth, turn’d to mourning’ (H-371): Call me no more, As heretofore, The musick of a Feast; Since now (alas)

58

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality The mirth, that was In me, is dead or ceast. Before I went To banishment Into the loathed West; I co’d rehearse A Lyrick verse, And speak it with the best. But time (Ai me) Has laid, I see My Organ fast asleep; And turn’d my voice Into the noise Of those that sit and weep,

or in ‘His returne to London’ (H-713), where he celebrates his return as a recall to Rome, such as Ovid hoped for and never received: I am a free-born Roman; suffer then, That I amongst you live a Citizen. London my home is: though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since cal’d back; henceforward let me be, O native countrey, repossest by thee! For, rather then I’le to the West return, I’le beg of thee first here to have mine Urne. Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall; Give thou my sacred Reliques Buriall.

His depiction of the wildness and incivility of the setting of this ‘banishment’ and of his sorrows within it are, in the context of all the other evocations of Ovid in the collection, highly reminiscent of Ovid’s exile. Already in these two poems he draws on two recurrent themes of Ovid’s exile poetry, to which he also returns frequently in the course of the collection. The first is the supposed decay of the poet’s ability under the pressure of his exilic grief, which as we saw in the last section was also the subject of ‘To his Friend, on the untuneable Times’ (H-210), and which recurs in ‘On himselfe’ (H-332), ‘The departure of the good Daemon’ (H-334), ‘The Poet hath lost his pipe’ (H-573) and ‘To Sir Clipsebie Crew’ (H-489): Since to th’Country first I came, I have lost my former flame:

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And, methinks, I not inherit, As I did, my ravisht spirit. If I write a Verse, or two, ’Tis with very much ado.

Ovid sets up the notion that the ‘long sorrows’ of his exile have ‘diminished his poetic skill’ (EP III.iv.11) in the opening elegy of the Tristia: carmina proveniunt animo deducta sereno; nubila sunt subitis tempora nostra malis. carmina secessum scribentis et otia quaerunt; me mare, me venti, me fera iactat hiems [‘Fine-spun song comes forth from a cheerful mind: my days are overcast with sudden woes. Songs require the writer’s leisure and retirement: I am tossed by the sea, by the wind, by wild winter’, Tr. I.i.39–42],

and he returns to it repeatedly. The wish to be buried, ‘to have mine Urne’, in the capital city, rather than in exile, is also a recurrent theme in Ovid’s exile poetry. ‘But make sure that my bones are carried back in a little urn’, he begs his wife, ‘so that I shall not be an exile even in death’, and often reiterates the wish. Herrick also has two further poems on the same idea. ‘On himselfe’ (H-860), If that my Fate has now fulfill’d my yeere, And so soone stopt my longer living here; What was’t (ye Gods!) a dying man to save, But while he met with his Paternall grave;

is a verbatim translation of Tristia III.iii.29–32: si tamen inplevit mea sors, quos debuit, annos, et mihi vivendi tam cito finis adest, quantum erat, o magni, morituro parcere, divi, ut saltem patria contumularer humo?

and the theme is resumed in ‘To his Paternall Countrey’ (H-52): Banish’d from thee I live; ne’r to return, Unlesse thou giv’st my small Remains an Urne,

   For instance at Tr. I.xi.35–42, III.i.10–18, IV.i.1–3, V.i.69–74, EP I.v, II.v.19–22, III.ix, IV.xiii.13–22.    Tr. III.iii.65–6; cp. Tr. IV.iii.41–6, EP I.ii.57–8, III.ix.28.

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– a poem which directly follows ‘Discontents in Devon’, making it quite clear that Herrick is speaking in propria persona of his own situation. The fullest expression of the supposed incivility of his Devonshire environs is ‘To Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which sometimes he lived’ (H-86), a poem which draws conspicuously on Ovid: Deane-Bourn, farewell; I never look to see Deane, or thy warty incivility. Thy rockie bottome, that doth teare thy streams, And makes them frantick, ev’n to all extreames; To my content, I never sho’d behold, Were thy streames silver, or thy rocks all gold. Rockie thou art; and rockie we discover Thy men; and rockie are thy wayes all over. O men, O manners; Now, and ever knowne To be A Rockie Generation! A people currish; churlish as the seas; And rude (almost) as rudest Salvages With whom I did, and may re-sojourne when Rockes turn to Rivers, Rivers turn to Men.

The landscape is made to reflect the ‘incivility’ of the inhabitants, the ‘frantick’ violence of its streams and its rocky hardness their rough, uncontrolled nature and lack of soft manners. The technique recalls Ovid’s treatment of Tomis and the Getae, linking the physical characteristics of the land to the supposedly barbarous nature of the Getes. Tristia IV.iv provides a particularly pointed instance, where Ovid claims that the region, the Euxinus – which means ‘hospitable’ – used to be called Axenus, which means exactly the opposite, a name which fits landscape and inhabitants alike: nam neque iactantur moderatis aequora ventis, nec placidos portus hospita navis adit. sunt circa gentes, quae praedam sanguine quaerunt; nec minus infida terra timetur aqua. [‘For the sea is tossed with no moderate winds, nor does the foreign ship arrive at any placid harbour. All around are tribes who seek spoils and blood, and the land is feared no less than the treacherous sea’, Tr. IV.iv.57–60.]

Like the winter storms that rack the region, its people are neither moderate nor placid but fierce and hostile, just as the inhabitants of Herrick’s Devon, ‘churlish as the seas’, resemble the Dean-bourn’s streams, ‘frantick, ev’n to all extreames’. The Getes are wild (ferus, EP III.ix.32, IV.xv.40), uncivilized (inhumanus, EP I.v.66, III.v.28), and barbaric (EP III.ii.38), but most of all they reflect their

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environment. The winds of Tomis are saeva (‘savage’, Tr. III.x.51); so are the Getes (EP I.vii.2). Winter in Tomis is squalentia (‘stiff, rude, rough’, Tr. III.x.9); the Getes are squalidi (EP I.ii.106). Most insistently, place, climate and people are ‘hard’, durus, rigidus: hard winter (Tr. III.x.44) hardens the snow (14), the river Hister freezes in the hardening winds (29), the land is like marble (10), the rigid waters of the sea are like marble (47–8), and the people too are repeatedly described as durus (EP I.v.12, III.ii.102) or rigidus (Tr. V.i.46). Herrick’s picture of his place of ‘exile’, then, is distinctly Ovidian, and to underline this he works in an appropriate reference to the Metamorphoses, too. After the flood in Book I, Pyrrha and Deucalion re-people the world, on the instruction of the goddess Themis, by throwing stones behind them, which miraculously metamorphose into a new race of men. ‘That’, Ovid explains, ‘is why we are a hard race’ (or ‘rocky generation’, genus durum, I.414), ‘proved in our endurance of labours.’ The idea of such a metamorphosis both underlies the conceit of Herrick’s ‘Rockie Generation’, and of course provides the example of the impossible imagined in the last line. There are continual evocations of characteristic postures and concerns of Ovid’s exile poetry, some of which we will come to later. For now, I shall mention one theme which pervades both Herrick’s and Ovid’s collections, setting up a continual analogy. Both poets are obsessed with their own decay, ageing and death, treated as imminent or as already past, for as Ovid continually observes, ‘In what does my condition differ from death?’ (EP II.iii.3; cp. Tr. I.vii.38, III.iii.53–4, III. xiv.20–22). Ovid describes his premature ageing and weakening several times, making it an index of the harshness of his punishment: Iam mihi deterior canis aspergitur aetas, iamque meos vultus ruga senilis arat: iam vigor et quasso languent in corpore vires, nec, iuveni lusus qui placuere, iuvant … confiteor facere hoc annos, sed altera causa est, anxietas animi continuusque labor. [‘Now the worst age is mine, sprinkling me with white hairs, and now the wrinkles of age furrow my face: now vigour and strength are fading in my broken body, nor do I enjoy the youthful games which used to give me pleasure … I confess that it is my years which do this, but there is another cause: anxiety of mind and constant toil’, EP I.iv.1–8.]

Herrick, too, dwells on his own ageing, his grey hairs (H-14, 1093, 1098), wrinkles (H-852), failing strength and faculties (H-973, 482) and impotence (H-19). Ovid continually harps upon his own death, sometimes, as we have seen, to deplore the idea that he will die and be buried far from home, or to wish for death as an end to   Cp. Tr. III.viii.24–34, III.iii.2–14, IV.viii.1–4.



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his woes, but more often speaking of himself as already dead, since his exile was a blow as great a death, separating him as surely from all that he loved: cum patriam amisi, tunc me periisse putato: et prior et gravior mors fuit illa mihi. [‘Think that I died then, when I lost my homeland: that was both my first and my most serious death’, Tr. III.iii.53–4.]

He speaks of his exile repeatedly as his ‘funeral’ (e.g. Tr. I.viii.38, III.xiv.20, V.i.48), and ‘as the bird of Cayster [the swan] is said, lying on the bank, to lament its own death with fading voice’, so he writes verses to ‘make sure that [his] funeral rites do not pass in silence’ (Tr. V.i.11–14), even composing his own verse epitaph (Tr. III.iii.73–6). Herrick too continually imagines his own death. Usually it is spoken of as imminent, and often Herrick begs mistresses, tomb-makers, birds and herbs to honour him with funerary observances. Often, though, it is equally possible to read a poem as spoken by one already dead, as is nearly unavoidable in ‘To Flowers’ (H-343): In time of life, I grac’t ye with my Verse; Doe now your flowrie honours to my Herse,

or ‘On Himselfe’ (H-952): Weepe for the dead, for they have lost this light: And weepe for me, lost in an endlesse night. Or mourne, or make a Marble Verse for me, Who writ for many. Benedicite.

Indeed, like Ovid in Tristia III.iii, Herrick composes such a ‘Marble Verse’ or epitaph for himself, not once but four times (H-50, 159, 546, 617). In each poet this self-presentation as one dead or dying is balanced by an equally pervasive insistence on his own immortality through the fame of his verse, and I shall come to this later. But before we leave this topic, this is an appropriate place to glance once again at the Ovidian verses which frame the collection, this time to look at the tiny changes Herrick makes. The verse on the title page is slightly misquoted from the Amores: where Ovid, in the elegy for his fellow-poet Tibullus, has defugiunt avidos carmina sola rogos (‘only songs escape the greedy funeral   E.g. H-14, 55, 280, 627, 1095.   Cp. H-50, 89, 225, 617, 634.    Warren Chernaik argues that the collection ‘is designed by the author as his own  

funeral monument’ (‘Books as Memorials: The Politics of Consolation’, Yearbook of English Studies 21 [1991], 208).

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pyre’, Am. III.ix.28), Herrick changes two words. The verb is put into the future tense (effugient, ‘will escape’), and nostra (‘my’ or ‘our’) replaces sola, giving us ‘My songs will escape the greedy funeral pyre’. Where Ovid is here concerned with the death and immortality of his friend – though in many other places he is as outspoken about his own – Herrick tweaks the quotation to make it contribute to his self-presentation, with its themes of his own death and immortality. The final verse of the collection, meanwhile, ‘Jocond his Muse was; but his Life was chast’, again changes the tense of Ovid’s vita verecunda est, Musa iocosa mea. Ovid in this line is not keeping up the conceit of his post-mortem existence, and speaks as one still alive. By putting it into the past tense as the epilogue for his book, Herrick makes it more consistent with the Ovidian exilic stance of one already dead on which he has drawn throughout the collection. Herrick, then, weaves an ongoing analogy between himself and the Ovid of the exile elegies into his fabric of Ovidian allusion across the collection. In fact he does not restrict himself to analogy, comparison, translation, but even – in a characteristically Ovidian way – claims to overgo Ovid’s exilic sufferings. ‘To his Houshold gods’ (H-278) posits such a scene as that remembered by Ovid in exile in Tristia I.iii, the poet’s home on the eve of his departure into cruel banishment: Rise, Houshold-gods, and let us goe; But whither, I my selfe not know. First, let us dwell on rudest seas; Next, with severest Salvages; Last, let us make our best abode, Where humane foot, as yet, ne’r trod: Search worlds of Ice; and rather there Dwell, then in lothed Devonshire.

Until the last line, Herrick seems to be setting up a parallel with Ovid’s exile as seen in the exile poetry, which begins with a whole book (Tristia I) supposedly composed ‘on rudest seas’ during the voyage to Tomis, goes on to describe Tomis as a wilderness where few can live, and those who do live there as saeva, savage, and returns continually to the region’s iciness, the regular freezing of the great Hister and even of the sea. In the final line, however, we realize that Herrick is not being forced into exile, but is voluntarily seeking this appalling abode as an escape from his ‘irksome banishment’ in ‘lothed Devonshire’: the suffering of which Ovid complains bitterly through nine books of elegies is desirable ease compared to what Herrick is suffering in Devon. It is precisely such a witty overgoing as we find in Ovid’s lengthy comparisons of his own sufferings to those of Ulysses, which, he concludes, were not nearly so great, in Tristia I.v and Ex Ponto IV.x. Herrick’s living in Dean Prior was not, of course, a banishment in any literal sense. Indeed, the closest thing to banishment which he could be said to have suffered was his expulsion from his living in 1647 for refusing to subscribe to the Solemn League and Covenant, probably the occasion of the ‘returne to London’

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which he celebrates with apparent gladness as a recall from banishment in H-713. But again this exilic aspect of Herrick’s Ovidian self-presentation asks to be considered not in a narrow biographical sense but in wider political terms. Herrick adopts the stance of exile from Ovid’s late poetry as a symbol for his political opposition, reading Ovid’s geographical distance from Rome, imposed on him for transgressing Augustus’ moral laws, as symbolic of his ideological distance from the centre of power. There are indeed ample, though oblique, hints of such an ideological distance in the exile elegies. While Ovid is ostensibly contrite, promising never more to write of love, he actually offers an eloquent defence of the Ars in Tristia II, implying the absurdity and injustice of his punishment. Seeming loyally to praise the emperor to the skies, he obliquely but repeatedly suggests that Augustus is an irascible and cruel despot who rules by fear. (Throughout the Tristia he represents his friends as unwilling to be named in his poems, out of fear that they will be persecuted for remaining loyal to him. Ovid reasons with them that Augustus would respect the noble virtue of loyalty even among his enemies: even savage Turnus was touched by Nisus’ and Euryalus’ friendship [Tr. I.ix.23–34]; their fears might be justified under a Busiris or a Phalaris, but not under clement Augustus [EP III.vi.39–43]. Yet Ovid’s persuasions are presented as failing, with the implication that Augustus is thought fiercer than Turnus, tyrannical as Busiris or Phalaris, and has no respect for fides and pietas.) Both collections of exile elegies are peppered with satirical portraits of contemporary Roman society, in which the two overwhelming motives of fear and greed have destroyed traditional values of piety, loyalty and friendship, now to be found only in the breasts of the few loyal friends with whom he corresponds. As Gareth Williams observes, If in general ‘Ovid’s challenge to Augustus is embodied precisely in his profound engagement with the regime’s whole programme, his insistent probings of the very underpinnings of its authority,’ then Augustus’s decision to banish Ovid actually privileges the exile with a potentially embarrassing vantage-point on the fragile underpinnings of his imperial authority and on the limits of his divine reach. Ovid is ironically empowered by his exilic insight into the pretensions of Augustan rule.

In his new abode at the edge of the Roman world, Ovid records how reality escapes the imperial myths which seek to contain it. The incursions of unpacified tribes undermine the supposedly universal pax Augusta (EP II.v.17–18; II.vii.67–8), and such physical incursions on and erosion of imperial power are reflected in Ovid’s own rhetorical testing of the myths of Augustus’ clemency and of his quasi-divine nature.   E.g. EP II.iii.5–40, III.ii.15–18.   Gareth D. Williams, ‘Ovid’s Exilic Poetry: Worlds Apart’, in Brill’s Companion to

 

Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: Brill, 2002), p. 371.    On Augustus’ supposed clemency, see the passages mentioning Turnus, Busiris and Phalaris mentioned above, and Tr. IV.viii.37–40; on his divine associations, and indeed

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By modelling the western space of the Hesperides on the Tomis of Ovid’s exile, Herrick draws attention to the fact that he is using geography in the same way, to express ideological distance and political opposition. As James Loxley has demonstrated, the conflict between King and Parliament was already being viewed in terms of such politically symbolic geography. Charles’s withdrawal from London in January 1642, retiring first west to Windsor and then north to York, allowed the political rivalry between the Commons’ majority and Charles to be mapped onto the geography of the country. As David Smith has written, ‘The King’s withdrawal … marked a watershed, for the physical separation of monarch and Parliament made it far more difficult to reconcile allegiance to both. For the first time, civil war between the two became physically possible.’ … His withdrawal … enacted the increasingly polarized struggle for authority between Charles and the ‘Firmament of lesser Lights’. Parliament was left with the symbolic authority of the kingdom’s capital as one context for its claims. Indeed, the empty seat of royal government, Whitehall, came to be read as an emblem of the circumscription of royal authority and the expansion of its parliamentary other.10

Loxley goes on to argue that ‘Coopers Hill’, first published in 1642, the subject of Herrick’s praise in ‘To Master Denham, on his Prospective Poem’ (H-673), ‘clearly participat[es] in this topographical politics, contrasting the Windsor of Charles (“Thy Masters Embleme”: 61) at the western extreme of its landscape with a hostile London to the east’.11 Herrick expands Denham’s politically polarized topography of the Thames valley to represent the west of England, his own Devon and its neighbouring counties, as the symbolic locale of Charles’s authority, opposed to London in the parliamentary east. On one level, this development of Denham’s conceit reflects political reality. At the beginning of hostilities support for Charles was strongest in the north, but as the war continued and Parliament gained control of the north, the south-west became an increasingly important royalist stronghold.12 Herrick draws attention to the progress of the royalist cause in the west in four poems. ‘To the King, Upon his comming with his Army into the West’ (H-77) celebrates the King’s sojourn at Exeter and march into Cornwall in 1644. At his approach

divinity itself, as poets’ fictions, see especially EP IV.viii.55–64. 10   James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 71, quoting David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement c.1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 88. 11   Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, p. 85. 12   See Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714 (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), p. 112.

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality The Drooping West, which hitherto has stood As one, in long-lamented-widow-hood; Looks like a Bride now, or a bed of flowers, Newly refresh’t, both by the Sun, and showers,

with overtones of Charles as the heavenly bridegroom, and the west as both the bride of the Lamb of Revelation 19.7 and the woman sent into the wilderness of Revelation 12.6. ‘To Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter’ (H-756) marks Prince Charles’s arrival at Exeter in 1645, hailed as ‘A Renovation of the West’. Herrick wishes that ‘Apollos Image side with Thee to blesse / Thy Warre’, suggesting an analogy with Augustus’ victory, aided by Apollo, against Cleopatra and the forces of the East at Actium, as depicted on Aeneas’ shield in Book VIII of the Aeneid, and Herrick thus momentarily aligns his own topographical strategy with that of Virgil, who founds the ideological programme of the Aeneid on the binary opposition of triumphant imperial West and threatening but defeated East.13 ‘To Sir John Berkley, Governour of Exeter’ (H-745) praises the royalist governor of Exeter from 1643 to 1646 as a ‘Hector’ defending another Troy from hostile Greeks (in this evocation of the Iliad, of course, the east-west alignment of Parliament versus King is not a functional part of the allusion); and in ‘To the Lord Hopton, on his fight in Cornwall’ (H-1002), Herrick praises the royalist Hopton for his military victories in Cornwall and urges him on to more. Herrick’s fiction of his ‘banishment into the loathed West’, then, figures in his own person the displacement of the King and of monarchical authority from the seat of government, and the exilic grief which he imitates from Ovid his discontent at the King’s removal from power. Thus the celebration in ‘His returne to London’ (H-713) of what he presents as his recall to the capital from ‘banishment’, but which in fact probably marks his expulsion from his Devonshire living in 1647, asks to be read in relation to the place and status of the King, and hence Herrick laces the poem with echoes and anticipations of other poems in the collection: From the dull confines of the drooping West, To see the day spring from the pregnant East, Ravisht in spirit, I come, nay more, I flie To thee, blest place of my Nativitie! Thus, thus with hallowed foot I touch the ground, With thousand blessings by thy Fortune crown’d. O fruitfull Genius! that bestowest here An everlasting plenty, yeere by yeere. O Place! O People! Manners! fram’d to please All Nations, Customes, Kindreds, Languages! I am a free-born Roman; suffer then, 13   See David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 21–31.

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That I amongst you live a Citizen. London my home is: though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since cal’d back; henceforward let me be, O native countrey, repossest by thee! For, rather than I’le to the West return, I’le beg of thee first here to have mine Urn.

As the intratextual allusions to his other poems make clear, this is not so much an apolitical homage to London as a homage to the King, and to a putative London of restored monarchy. The first two lines echo H-77.3–6, quoted above, in which it was the advent of the King which revived ‘the drooping West’ as ‘the Sun’ revives flowers. In the same poem, it was Charles who was hailed as ‘universall Genius’: the ‘fruitfull Genius’ celebrated here has as much to do with him as with the city. This appellation also looks forward to H-961, ‘To the King, Upon his welcome to Hampton-Court’, which, since it provides a crucial context for H-713, I shall quote: Welcome, Great Cesar, welcome now you are, As dearest Peace, after destructive Warre: Welcome as slumbers; or as beds of ease After our long, and peevish sicknesses. O Pompe of Glory! Welcome now, and come To re-possess once more your long’d-for home … Enter and prosper, while our eyes doe waite For an Ascendent throughly Auspicate: Under which signe we may the former stone Lay of our safeties new foundation: That done; O Cesar, live, and be to us, Our Fate, our Fortune, and our Genius; To whose free knees we may our temples tye As to a still protecting Deitie. That sho’d you stirre, we and our Altars too May (Great Augustus) goe along with You.

Under the custody of the English Parliament since January 1647, when he had been handed over by the Scots to whom he had given himself up the previous year, Charles was transferred to Hampton Court in August, and remained there under house arrest, while anxious negotiations for a new constitution were conducted, until his escape to the Isle of Wight in November. It is the presence in London of its ‘Genius’ the King, and the chance that negotiations would result in the establishment of a limited monarchy, which makes London and the East ‘pregnant’ with the promise of sunrise and potential repatriation for Herrick in H-713. His wish to be ‘repossest’ by London anticipates and is dependent on his wish that Charles should fully ‘re-possess once more [his] long’d-for home’, his freedom

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and authority restored, that the intervening period of uncertain negotiations should prove in effect to have been merely the delay, the period of waiting ‘For an Ascendent throughly Auspicate’, as which Herrick optatively figures it. The optative mood of both poems is crucial, for should the event hoped for in H-961 prove otherwise, and Charles not fully re-possess the seat of power, Herrick expresses the willingness of royalists to follow him again into physical and political opposition, ‘That sho’d you stirre, we and our Altars too / May … goe along with You’. Though preferring to be ‘repossest’ by a London of restored monarchy, even if only to die there, Herrick is willing to return to his metaphorical banishment, to resume his distance from the capital, should that capital reject monarchy. Indeed, a London not under the control of the King would be, for Herrick, a place of irksome banishment from a glorious past and from a longed-for possibility. Hence the ambiguity of line 9 in H-713, ‘O Place! O People! Manners! fram’d to please’.14 Though presented as an ejaculation of praise, this conspicuously echoes the well-known Latin tag O tempora! o mores!, Cicero’s expression of disgust at the decadence of society in the first oration against Catiline, a condemnation of Catiline’s attempt in 65 BCE to seize power in Rome by force. It also looks back to Herrick’s earlier echo of this tag in his bitterest depiction of the place of his ‘banishment’, ‘To Dean-bourn’ (H-86): ‘O men, O manners; Now and ever knowne / To be A Rockie Generation!’ Just beneath the surface of his praise for the possible future London of restored monarchy, then, lurks bitter invective against the revolutionary London of the recent past; beneath the joy of homecoming figuring hope for the success of the royalist cause, a potential renewal of exilic suffering figuring political discontent should Charles not be reinstated. This too mirrors one of Ovid’s favourite twists in the exile elegies, for, durus and saevus as the Getes are, they show themselves to have a clearer sense of justice, and to be kinder, more soft-hearted and more piously reverent of virtue than ‘civilized’ Rome and its ‘clement’ emperor. They recognize that the loyal Ovid, who praises Caesar, should be restored by Caesar, yet Caesar leaves him unjustly to languish in exile (EP IV.xiii.37–40); there is no race in the whole world fiercer than the Getes, yet they have sighed for Ovid’s sufferings, while the imperial family and Ovid’s enemies in Rome are pitiless (EP II.vii.31–2). With the exception of Ovid’s few loyal friends and correspondents, corrupt Rome shamefully values friendships only by how profitable they are, so that illud amicitiae quondam venerabile numen prostat et in quaestu pro meretrice sedet. [‘The once revered goddess of friendship offers herself for sale, intent on profit like a prostitute’, EP II.iii.19–20.]

14   On allusion and ambiguity in this poem, see also Claude Summers, ‘Herrick’s Political Couterplots’, Studies in English Literature 25 (1985), 165–82.

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But when Ovid praises his true friends’ loyalty, the Getes respond sympathetically, praising piam fidem (pious loyalty), and Ovid realizes scilicet hac etiam, qua nulla ferocior ora est, nomen amicitiae barbara corda movet. [‘Just think! Even on this shore, than which there is none wilder, the name of friendship moves barbarian hearts’, EP III.ii.99–100.]

Ovid’s negative portrayals of the inhabitants of Tomis, then, ultimately rebound upon the people of Rome, and especially the emperor, who have sent him there, and the extremity of his discontent is a measure of the injustice and cruelty of the imperial regime. But pending the hoped for restitution, for Herrick of Charles and monarchy to London, for Ovid of himself to Rome, a restitution which in each case would never come, each poet creates an alternative ideal space of freedom from the blows of adverse fortune in poetry itself. Like the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, in which the immortal fruit of the gods is preserved safe from human attack, the metaphorical garden space of Herrick’s collection provides a haven for the royalist values expelled from London and from the political reality of England, a virtual kingdom in which the royal family may continue their reign, and the community of the court and of royalist sympathizers caused to disperse by the parliamentary regime may commune freely and sustain their shared values. This is not only the antiquary’s collection of royalist values and experiences from the pre-Civil War period gathered together to survive the flood of Puritanism described by Marjorie Swann.15 It is a peopled space, representing also the social network sustained by manuscript exchange both in early Stuart England and after.16 As Nigel Smith observes, ‘Lyrics kept the gentry and the nobility together during the Civil War and the Interregnum … [T]he form ensures the continuity of civilisation inside the order of words.’17 The Hesperides not only exemplifies but also reflects on this process as an aspect of the Ovidian creation and sustenance of an alternative and politically oppositional society which he imitates from the exile poetry. As Spenser had done half a century earlier in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, Herrick finds in Ovid’s depiction of his immortal community of friends and fellow-poets in the

  Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: the Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, PA: Penn State University Press, 2001). 16   See Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 17   Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 250. 15

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exile elegies a model for the creation of a virtual realm outside the authority of the current political regime, and rivalling it.18 Towards the end of the Hesperides occurs the poignant pastoral ‘A Dialogue betwixt himself and Mistresse Elizabeth Wheeler, under the name of Amarillis’ (H-1068): My dearest Love, since thou wilt go, And leave me here behind thee; For love or pitie let me know The place where I may find thee. Am. In country Meadowes pearl’d with Dew, And set about with Lillies; There filling Maunds with Cowslips, you May find your Amarillis. Her. What have the Meades to do with thee, Or with thy youthfull Houres? Live thou at Court, where thou mayst be The Queen of men, not flowers. Let country wenches make ’em fine With Poesies, since ’tis fitter For thee with richest Jemmes to shine, And like the Starres to glitter … I prithee stay. (Am.) I must away, Let’s kiss first, then we’l sever. Am. And though we bid adieu to day, Wee shall not part for ever.

As in so many poems of the Hesperides, though war and defeat are not mentioned here, their pressures are at once felt and overcome, and the poem both reflects and undoes the dispersal of the court and the royalist community. The court at which Herrick feels his cousin is worthy to be presented no longer exists, and the end of the poem implicitly looks forward not only to reunion, but to the reconstitution of that court, when Amarillis may be recalled from rustication to a more fitting courtly setting. Until such a time, she must be adorned with floral posies in lieu of courtly gems. But, as the spelling hints, she is also adorned with Herrick’s lyric poesies, which as we have seen are repeatedly compared to gems and glittering

  Syrithe Pugh, Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

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stars, adorning and immortalizing his friends.19 Her inclusion, not only here but also in H-130, in Herrick’s collection, his ‘firmament’ presided over by the royal family, effectively grants her a place in a kind of virtual court, until such time as the real one should be reconstituted. Moreover, because his book will, as we have frequently been told, ‘superlast all times’ (H-405) and ‘grow green for ever’ (H-240), she will remain continuously co-present and in dialogue with Herrick within it, and thus the separation itself is in a sense illusory. They ‘shall not part for ever’ not only because, in the physical world, they will one day meet again, but also because, in the metaphorical space of the Hesperides, they shall not ever part. The exiled Ovid finds in poetry just such a space, immune to adverse fortune, and transcending physical separation, time and death. As he writes to his daughter Perilla, urging her to continue to write poetry herself, for time and fortune may snatch away all other blessings of beauty and wealth, en ego, cum caream patria vobisque domoque, raptaque sint, adimi quae potuere mihi, ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque fruorque: Caesar in hoc potuit iuris habere nihil. quilibet hanc saevo vitam mihi finiat ense, me tamen extincto fama superstes erit, dumque suis victrix omnem de montibus orbem prospiciet domitum Martia Roma, legar. [‘Look at me, now I am deprived of my country, of you and of my home, and everything which could be taken away has been snatched from me; yet I enjoy and have for company my own mind: in this Caesar could have no authority. Should anyone end my life with the fierce sword, nevertheless when I am dead my fame will survive, and while Mars’ Rome looks forth from her hills, a conqueror, over the world she has subdued, I shall be read’, Tr. III.vii. 45–52.]

Herrick has two versions of the beginning of this passage, in ‘His Losse’ (H-830) and ‘On Fortune’ (H-1061): All has been plundered from me, but my wit, Fortune her selfe can lay no claim to it. This is my comfort, when she’s most unkind, She can but spoil me of my Meanes, not Mind.

This freedom of a mind over which Caesar can have no authority is most often exercised in Ovid’s exile poetry as freedom of movement. As his books may enter 19   See above, together with the ‘coronets’ of H-224 and his ‘Book with richest jewels over-cast’ of H-194.

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the city from which their ‘father’ is banished (e.g. Tr. I.i.1–2, III.xiv.9–12), so his thoughts travel back to his friends in Rome or bring them mentally into his presence at Tomis sic tamen haec adsunt, ut quae contingere non est corpore: sunt animo cuncta videnda meo. ante oculos errant domus, urbsque et forma locorum, acceduntque suis singula facta locis. coniugus ante oculos, sicut praesentis, imago est … vos quoque pectoribus nostris haeretis, amici … scite …, quamvis longe regione remotus absim, vos animo semper adesse meo. [‘Yet these things are present, though I cannot touch them physically: in my mind I can see them all. Before my eyes drift my home, the city, and the shapes of places, and added to this, whatever was done in each place. The image of my wife is before my eyes, as of one present … You too, my friends, are fixed in my heart … Know that, although I am far from you and separated by a great distance, you are always present in my mind’, Tr. III.iv.55–9, 63, 73–4.]20

And he hopes that he in turn is present to them in their thoughts, giving him a place in the longed-for city: haec tibi cum subeant, absim licet, omnibus annis ante tuos oculos, ut modo visus, ero. ipse quidem certe cum sim sub cardine mundi, qui semper liquidis altior extat aquis, te tamen intueor quo solo pectore possum, et tecum gelido saepe sub axe loquor. hic es, et ignoras, et ades celeberrimus absens, inque Getas media iussus ab urbe venis. redde vicem, et, quoniam regio felicior ista est, istic me memori pectore semper habe. [‘When you remember these things, though I am separated from you by all these years, I shall be before your eyes, as if you saw me. I myself certainly, although I am beneath the pivot of the world, which is always lifted high above the flowing waters, yet I gaze upon you in the only way I can, in my heart, and speak with you often beneath the frozen pole. You are here, and do not know it; absent, you frequent this place often, and at my bidding you come among the Getes from the midst of the city. Pay me back, and, since yours is the happier region, keep me there always in your remembering heart’, EP II.x.43–52.]

  Cp. EP III.iv.69–70, III.v.45–56.

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The virtual conversation described here (et tecum … saepe … loquor) relives and continues the remembered long evenings of friendly conversation which Ovid enjoyed with this fellow poet, Macer: saepe dies sermone minor fuit, inque loquendum tarda per aestivos defuit hora dies. [‘Often the day was shorter than our conversation, and we wore out the lingering hours of long summer days in talking’, EP II.x.37–8.]

Such evenings of conversation with fellow literati form a large part of Ovid’s fond remembrances of his life at Rome – indeed, Ovid is imitating a well-known model, Callimachus’ epigram 2, where he addresses his dead friend Heraclitus, remembering their long conversations, and predicting his immortality through song. The poems collected in the nine books of Ovid’s exile elegies are verse epistles, supposedly comprising Ovid’s part in an ongoing correspondence with his friends and family at Rome, and this correspondence is itself often imagined as a continuation of such symposia: utque solebamus consumere longa loquendo tempora, sermoni deficiente die, sic ferat ac referat tacitas nunc littera voces, et peragant linguae charta manusque vices. [‘As we used to wear out long periods in talking, and the day was not sufficient for our conversation, so now our letters should carry back and forth our silent voices, and hand and page should perform the office of our tongues’, Tr. V.xiii.27–30.]21

Many of the friends Ovid addresses are fellow poets or orators, and their remembered conversations often involved reading aloud their work and exchanging praise or criticism. Ovid hopes they may continue the practice by sending each other verse, and that thus, though he has suffered a metaphorical ‘death’ through exile, he will not be dead to them.22 He imagines his poet-friend Maximus Cotta, a ‘youth full of, inspired by [Ovid’s] studies’, continuing to hold poetry readings with friends, and reminded of the absent Ovid who used to form one of the circle.23 In a prayer to Bacchus, he imagines the circle of poets of which he used to form part gathering together to offer praises to their patron god, their temples bound with fragrant garlands and drinking wine, and addresses them:

  Cp. EP II.iv. 1–24, II.vi.1–4.   E.g. EP III.v.7–36, II.iv.1–24. 23   EP III.v.37–44. 21 22

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vos quoque, consortes studii, pia turba, poetae, haec eadem sumpto quisque rogate mero. atque aliquis vestrum, Nasonis nomine dicto, opponat lacrimis pocula mixta suis, admonitusque mei, cum circumspexerit omnes, dicat ‘ubi est nostri pars modo Naso chori?’ [‘You too, poets, loyal band who share my pursuit, taking up your wine, make this same plea. And let one of you, speaking the name of Naso, pledge a goblet mixed with his tears, and remembering me, let him say as he looks around at the company, “where is Naso, who used to be part of our troop?”’ Tr. V.iii.47–52.]

In fact, Ovid is confident of his place in this convivial chorus, and because poetry is immortal, his membership within it, and that of his illustrious predecessors, transcends time and death as well as place. The catalogue of the great poets he has seen or known in his biographical elegy, Tristia IV.x, includes the dead as well as the living among its dulcia convictus membra, and prophesies his own immortality along with them, while the second collection of exile elegies ends with a triumphant roll-call of the immortal poets, himself among them, whose fame can only be made greater by death.24 As well as allowing him to travel in thought and word from Tomis to Rome, then, the muse of his poetry, his ‘guide and companion, leads [him] away from the Hister and grants [him] a place in the midst of Helicon’, by giving him, even while still alive, the fame which usually comes only after death (Tr. IV.x.119–22). This Helicon of poetry and poetic fame is Ovid’s haven from his exilic surroundings, and in it, we understand, he rejoins the circle of poet-friends listed earlier in the poem – both those like Propertius and Horace whose company he enjoyed in the remembered symposium scene, and those like Virgil and Tibullus to whom ‘greedy fate gave no time for friendship’ with him – to resume their convivial poetry reading. Transcending the limitations of time and death as well of those of physical space, then, poetry provides the setting for the friendly gatherings and poetic exchange of a literary community which includes the living and the dead. The ‘Helicon’ of Tristia IV.x thus recalls the poets’ Elysium at the end of Amores III.ix, where Ovid imagines the recently deceased Tibullus meeting his comrades, Catullus, Calvus and Gallus. The royalist community sustained in the poetic space of the Hesperides is also most often figured as communing in such symposium scenes. The death of Jonson stands throughout the collection as a symbol for the passing of better times, and more specifically perhaps of the monarchy with which he was so closely associated. In ‘An Ode for him’ (H-911), remembered poetic symposia are the focus of this sense of loss:

  Tr. IV.x.41–56, 125–30; EP IV.xvi.2–46.

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Ah Ben! Say how, or when, Shall we thy Guests Meet at those Lyrick Feasts, Made at the Sun, The Dog, the triple Tunne?

The ‘Lyrick Feast’ becomes the paradigm for the fondly remembered community and state of society before the Civil War. But the second verse suggests a solution: My Ben Or come agen: Or send to us, Thy wits great over-plus.

The form of the poem suggests that the second verse is an answer to the question of the first – ‘how, or when’ shall we resume those ‘Lyrick Feasts’? – and the answer is through the influence of Jonson’s wit kept alive in our own poetry. Like Ovid, Herrick recreates and continues such symposia in the space of his poetry, and thus overcomes separations caused by civil strife and even death. ‘His age, dedicated to his peculiar friend, Master John Wickes, under the name of Posthumus’ (H-336) begins in Horatian mode, translating the opening of Carmina II.14 on the inevitability of death, and proposes a convivial symposium as a fitting response to this: ‘since life is short, / Lets make it full up, by our sport’. In stanza 9, he confronts the possibility that the fortunes of ‘th’Sea, Camp, Wildernesse’ may part them, but decides that their constant friendship will overcome physical separation and keep them one. He goes on to imagine himself in old age, bringing back the ‘Ages fled’ by calling his imagined family – ‘Baucis’, the Ovidian paradigm of a faithful old wife, and ‘Iülus’, the Virgilian paradigm of the son – to read aloud his own early poems and those of others, reawakening in him his lost youth (‘as in a fit / Of fresh concupiscence’), and causing him to ‘Repeat the Times that [he has] seen’. After the reading they will make merry, drinking health to Wickes and other friends of mine (Loving the brave Burgundian wine) High sons of Pith, Whose fortunes I have frolickt with: Such as co’d well Bear up the Magick bough, and spel: And dancing ’bout the Mystick Thyrse, Give up the just applause to verse.

It is as if the reading and the toasts bring into presence both the poet’s youthful self and the friends from whom he has been parted, the present symposiastic

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scene reviving, repeating and continuing, in ‘these last / Lame and bad times’, the symposia of the ‘past-best Times’, overcoming the effects of historical change, physical separation and adverse fortune. This idea is made more explicit in ‘An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’ (H-544). The poet describes to Crew the symposia he enjoys at his home: If full we charme; then call upon Anacreon To grace the frantick Thyrse … Then cause we Horace to be read, Which sung, or seyd, A Goblet, to the brim, Of Lyrick Wine, both swell’d and crown’d, A Round We quaffe to him.

Crew, from whom the poet has been ‘parted’ (H-426.16), is invited to come and join in, but if he merely sends some of his verse it will amount to the same, for then his heart and mind will be there: Take Horse, and come; or be so kind, To send your mind (Though but in Numbers few) And I shall think I have the heart, Or part Of Clipseby Crew.

As in Ovid’s exile poetry, the sending of verses back and forth between separated friends constitutes participation in an ongoing symposium in the virtual space of poetry. And since verse is thus considered fully representative of the heart and mind of the poet, so that Crew can be virtually present by sending his mind in numbers few, the long dead Anacreon and Horace may be said to participate in the evening’s merriment to quite the same extent as the distant Crew. This is more explicitly suggested in ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’ (H-111), where the same classical pair join Herrick and a couple of his musician friends in a symposiastic evening: Let us sit, and quaffe our wine. Call on Bacchus; chaunt his praise; Shake the Thyrse, and bite the Bayes: Rouze Anacreon from the dead; And return him drunk to bed: Sing o’er Horace; for ere long Death will come and mar the song:

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Then shall Wilson and Gotiere Never sing, or play more here.

The elegiac sense of impending mortality in the closing lines is qualified and alleviated by the image of Anacreon being roused from the dead. To read Anacreon aloud is to revive him as easily as if merely awaking him from sleep, and to make him so fully present at the drinking party that he will ‘return … drunk to bed’ at the end of the evening. If such revivals are spoken of in such a familiar and matterof-fact way, death’s power to ‘mar the song’ is brought in question, and the claim that, when dead, Wilson and Gotiere shall ‘never sing, or play more here’ seems less likely to be true. In ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201), it is possible that the symposium is attended only by Herrick and the virtual presences of classical poets ‘call[ed] forth’ (17) through toasts. The poem opens and closes with translations from Ovid’s Amores, and the invocation of Ovid through a toast, among the others so invoked, could be seen as answering Ovid’s plea in Tristia V.iii that the chorus of poets drink to their absent friend, keeping him present and alive in their thoughts, as he hopes he will be to Macer and to Cotta Maximus as they read his verses in Ex Ponto II.x and III.v. Herrick’s poem makes the connection between such virtual symposia, uniting friends and fellow poets separated in space and time, and the idea of the poets’ Elysium, which we traced in Ovid’s exile poetry. The last half of the title, ‘to trust to Good Verses’, is a quotation from Amores III.ix, the elegy on the death and immortality of Tibullus which Herrick also quoted on his title-page. The first stanza expands the Ovidian range of reference by expanding a line from another of the Amores, tempus adest plausus – aurea pompa venit (‘Now is the time for applause – the golden procession is coming’, Am. III.ii.44), converting what in Ovid is merely an instruction to applaud (the speaker in this poem is attending the races with his mistress), into an instruction to hold a ‘Lyrick Feast’: Now is the time for mirth, Nor cheek, or tongue be dumbe: For with the flowrie earth, The golden pomp is come.

But at the end of the poem the toast to Tibullus takes him back to Amores III.ix: But stay; I see a Text, That this presents to me. Behold, Tibullus lies Here burnt, whose smal return Of ashes, scarce suffice To fill a little Urne.

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His ‘call[ing] forth’ of Tibullus from death through a toast reminds him of the elegy in which Ovid laments Tibullus’ death and assigns him immortal life, and this prompts Herrick to an act of ventriloquism in which Ovid speaks through him, and Ovid’s text becomes present in his own. Lines 41 to 44 translate Ovid’s iacet, ecce, Tibullus: / vix manet e toto, parva quod urna capit (‘Behold, Tibullus lies here: of the whole of him there hardly remains what a small urn will hold’, Am. III. ix.39–40). The following stanza turns to the preceding half-line in Ovid’s elegy, carminibus confide bonis, ‘trust to good verses’, and links it with Ovid’s assertion a few lines earlier, defugiunt avidos carmina sola rogos: / durant vatis opus (‘only songs escape the greedy funeral pyre: the works of bards endure’, 28–9), adding the detail of the ‘Pyramids’ from another locus classicus of this idea, Horace’s Carmina III.xxx. The final stanza gestures towards the end of Ovid’s elegy: Si tamen e nobis aliquid nisi nomen et umbra restat, in Elysia valle Tibullus erit. obvius huic venias hedera iuvenalia cinctus tempora cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo … [‘Yet if anything remains of us beside a name and a shade, Tibullus will be in the Elysian valley. May you meet him there, learned Catullus, your temples bound with ivy, and your Calvus with you’, Am. III.ix.59–62.]

Surviving the oblivion of the mortal body to be ‘crown’d’ with endless life, Herrick’s ‘Numbers sweet’ recall Ovid’s dead poets, their temples bound with ivy, enjoying immortal life in Elysium. Herrick does not need to mention here the post-mortem reunion with poetfriends which Ovid envisages, because the rest of his poem has embodied it: the symposium scene into which Herrick has summoned Tibullus, Catullus and Ovid, along with Homer, Virgil and Propertius, reviving them and bringing them together in his poetry, provides a setting for an ongoing poetic community transcending death equivalent to Ovid’s Elysium. Ovid in fact is already doing something similar, for, as if to suggest that he too is joining the conversation he imagines between Tibullus and his comrades in Elysium, his elegy quotes and replies to Tibullus’ poems. Most strongly present is Tibullus I.iii, in which Tibullus lies ill

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in Phaeacia, and fears he may die there, where his mother and sister and mistress Delia will not be able to lay him to rest and weep at his tomb (Carmina I.iii.3–9). Before his departure, the anxious Delia had sought the protection of the gods for his journey, praying to Egyptian Isis with her sistrum, and insisting that they sleep apart during her ritual observances – but, Tibullus asks, what good has this done him (23–6)? Ovid repeats the question: since Tibullus has now at last really met death, ‘How have your sacred rites helped you? What good now are Egyptian sistrums? What good to have slept apart in an empty bed?’ (Am. III.ix.33–4). Still, Ovid goes on, it is better this way than if he had died at Phaeacia, for now at least his mother, his sister and his mistresses have been able to lay him to rest and mourn for him (47–54). Ovid adds a twist, for later in the Carmina Tibullus would forget Delia for another mistress, Nemesis, and Ovid imagines them quarrelling over his pyre. ‘Why do you grieve for my loss?’ Nemesis asks Delia; me tenuit moriens deficiente manu (‘it was me he held as he was dying with his failing hand’, 57–8) ironically recalling Tibullus’ words to Delia in Carmina I.i., te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora, / te teneam moriens deficiente manu (‘I shall see you when my last hour comes, I shall hold you as I am dying with my failing hand’, Carmina I.i.59–60). Ovid’s closing vision of Tibullus in the poets’ Elysium, meanwhile, also refers to Carmina I.iii, for Tibullus imagines that, if he does die in Phaeacia, nevertheless Venus will lead her faithful servant to the Elysian fields, where those who died for love eternally enjoy love’s sport (I.iii.57–66).25 In ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse calling him to Elizium’ (H-575), his fullest reworking of Ovid’s vision of the poets’ Elysium in Amores III.ix, Herrick shows that he is alive to the intertextual conversation of Ovid’s elegy by grafting Tibullus’ vision of the lovers’ Elysium onto his expansion of Ovid’s Elysium for poets. As in Tibullus’ Elysium, where fert casiam non culta seges, totosque per agros floret odoratis terra benigna rosis [‘The untilled soil bears cassia, and through all the fields the rich land blooms with fragrant roses’, Carmina I.iii.61–2],

‘Roses and Cassia crown the untill’d soyle’ in Herrick’s (4). In Tibullus’ vision, ‘ranks of youths mingled with tender girls play, and love joins battle without remission’ (Carmina I.iii.63–4), in Herrick’s, ‘naked Younglings, handsome Striplings run / Their Goales for Virgins kisses’ (17–18). In Tibullus’, choreae cantusque vigent (‘dancing and singing flourish’, 59); in Herrick’s, the lovers, ‘Love’s Chorus led by Cupid’, ‘danc[e] … commixt’ (19–22), while the singing   On this poem and the next, see further my paper in the forthcoming collection edited by Ruth Connolly and Tom Cain, currently in preparation for Oxford University Press under the working title ‘Lords of Wine and Oil’: Community, Conviviality and the Works of Robert Herrick. 25

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is provided by the poets in the catalogue which ensues. This catalogue expands Ovid’s greatly, stretching back to the Greeks and forward to Herrick’s nearcontemporaries. Both Tibullus and Ovid had one eye on Virgil’s underworld in Book VI of the Aeneid when they described their Elysiums: Tibullus is especially pointed, for where Virgil dooms lovers to eternal sorrow in the ‘Mourning Fields’ (Lugentes Campi, Aen. VI.441), hiding away as if for shame in a myrtle grove, he gives them eternal enjoyment and myrtle wreaths as proud ‘insignia’, and he reworks the noble sporting contests of the heroes in Virgil’s Elysium (Aen. Vi.642–3) as the sexual ‘battles’ of youths and girls. Virgil includes two poets in his Elysium, Orpheus and Musaeus, and, whether by accident or design, Herrick commits his own travesty of Virgil by replacing the legendary Musaeus, supposed pupil of Orpheus, to whom Virgil refers, with the poet of the same name who lived in the fourth century CE, and who wrote the erotic epyllion Hero and Leander – an inmate more suited to Herrick’s amatory ‘Grove, / Where Poets sing the stories of our love’ (23–6). When the catalogue of Greek poets reaches Herrick’s favourite, Anacreon, several of whose poems he has translated in the Hesperides, there is a witty surprise. Herrick’s mistress (who is describing this Elysium to him and proposing to transport him there) tells him Ile bring thee Herrick to Anacreon, Quaffing his full-crown’d bowles of burning Wine, And in his Raptures speaking Lines of Thine … welcome he shall thee thither, Where both may rage, both drink and dance together.

This conceit, at the exact centre of Herrick’s poem, follows from the idea of poetry as a space transcending death in which poets may commune with predecessors: in such a space all poets become contemporaries, and intertextual relations thus work both ways. Herrick appears to imitate and translate Anacreon, but, Herrick seems to be musing, it will feel to future readers just as much as if Anacreon is imitating and translating Herrick, and their poems may be read as if responding to each other, ‘together’ in an ongoing convivial conversation. There follows a list of Roman poets, among whom Ovid is the one singled out for special treatment, with three and a half lines devoted to him compared to the rest, who get at most an adjective apiece. I shall return to the figure of Ovid shortly. These Romans are described as those, whom Rage (Dropt from the jarres of heaven) fill’d t’engage All times unto their frenzies,

an image suggesting that their subsequent readers, receiving through their poems the energy which inspired them, actually participate in their original creative ‘frenzies’ in their own excitement of reading. These Roman poets are then seen

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as the audience in ‘a spacious Theater’, listening appreciatively while Beaumont and Fletcher recite from their plays, and the catalogue concludes with ‘thy Father Johnson’, grac’t To be in that Orbe crown’d (that doth include Those Prophets of the former Magnitude) And he one chiefe,

bringing the population up to date, and hinting, through the paternal metaphor, that Herrick too is in line to inherit this Elysium. The figure of Ovid stands out strangely among this population by being the only one asleep: witty Ovid, by Whom faire Corinna sits, and doth comply With Yvorie wrists, his Laureat head, and steeps His eye in dew of kisses, while he sleeps.

He is thus oddly outside the scene of energetic activity, at a remove from the crowd who surround him, despite being so near its centre. Is it far-fetched to read this as Herrick’s indication that this vision of his, this description of the poets’ Elysium by an ‘Apparition of his Mistresse’, this ‘glim’ring of a fancie’ which has come to him by night and is dispelled by daybreak at the end of the poem, leaving it fragmentary, is being dreamt by Ovid? For Herrick is not only expanding the vision of the poets’ Elysium from the end of Amores III.ix, but also developing and combining with it the idea of the poet himself being transported while still alive to the midst of Helicon, to join the immortal chorus of poets, which we saw in Tristia IV.x, and the idea of poetry as a virtual meeting and conversation both with those distant in space and, through intertextual allusions, with predecessors. As Anacreon and Herrick recite each other’s lines, so Ovid and Herrick dream each other’s visions. Herrick’s frequent allusions to and imitations or even translations of other classical poets in the Hesperides go to people the space of his collection, contributing to the community it harbours and preserves, a community which as we have seen represents royalist England banished into literary space by parliamentary rule. The circle of friends and fellow royalists addressed in the collection, like the circle addressed by Ovid in the exile epistles, includes a high proportion of fellow artists, contemporary or recently deceased poets, playwrights and musicians, and thus it blends easily into the immortal community of poets across the ages which Herrick evokes in his symposium poems and ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse’, just as Ovid’s circle of friends in the exile epistles merges into his vision of the community of immortal poets. By passing in and out of Herrick’s collection on such an equal footing with his friends and contemporaries, the classical poets reinforce the sense that the community drawn together in the charmed space of his poetry is

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immune to the normal limitations of space, time and political misfortune – that over this Caesar, or the current government, has no authority. Herrick sets his own royalist seal on this Ovidian idea of poetry as an alternative and politically independent realm by setting the royal family, ousted from government in the reality of contemporary England, in authority over it. But Herrick from the first attributes his work, and the immortality which it gives to him and to the community celebrated within it, to the influence and inspiration of Prince Charles, ‘who are my Works Creator’, by whom the ‘Glories’ of his book ‘become Immortal Substances’. A trio of verses later in the collection makes explicit the identification of the space of the Hesperides as a new kingdom for the royal family to enjoy. ‘To the King’ (H-264) gives the King the right to make any of the verses ‘Your owne, by free Adoption’, thus choosing ‘The Heire to This great Realme of Poetry’. ‘To the Queene’ (H-265) invites Henrietta Maria Be pleas’d to rest you in This Sacred Grove … Your Leavie-Throne (with Lilly-work) possesse; And be both Princesse here, and Poetresse.

The ensuing poem, meanwhile, ‘The Poets good wishes for the most hopefull and handsome Prince, The Duke of Yorke’, the future James II, (H-266) wishes May the thrice-three-Sisters sing Him the Soveraigne of their Spring: And entitle none to be Prince of Hellicon, but He.

This ascription to another of authority over the transcendent realm embodied in his poetry is Herrick’s distinctly un-Ovidian twist on Ovid’s idea. If there is any figure of preeminent authority in Ovid’s alternative realm, it is Ovid himself. But even this twist, by which Herrick adapts Ovid’s counter-Augustan poetics to fit the new historical reality of a monarchical court banished from power, reveals Herrick’s sensitivity to the politically oppositional undercurrents of Ovid’s work. Herrick’s intertextual relationship with Ovid in the Hesperides is complex, systematic and strategic, a formidable deployment of Ovidian ideas both to critique the current regime and lament its dominance, and to create a space in which the poet (and the displaced King) may enjoy an authority independent of and immune to hostile political power. Central to this strategy is an Ovidian conception of intertextuality itself, as the system of communication belonging to the virtual realm of poetry, which demonstrates and symbolizes the ability of a community and a communal cause to survive and cohere despite political disempowerment, physical dispersal and individual death. Despite Herrick’s frequent gestures of self-deprecation, his fondness for a genre (lyric) usually considered rather slight than weighty, and for ‘light’ and amatory subject-matter – all characteristics of Ovid, too – there are, again as in Ovid, serious and large ideas beneath the surface.

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Herrick, like Ovid, is capable of a certain profundity as well as playfulness, and his allusiveness must be seen not as idle embroidery but as part of an ambitious theory of poetic intertextuality, of poetry’s relation to society and of his own role. His conception of the importance of that role, and confidence in the extent of his own lasting fame, exceed what literary history, deceived partly by his own sprezzatura, has so far granted to him. The increase in the serious attention he has received in the last twenty years suggests that a long overdue reappraisal may be beginning.

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PART II Poetic Imitation and Limited Monarchy in Fanshawe’s 1648 Il Pastor Fido

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Introduction to Part II The same year which saw the publication of the Hesperides saw the appearance of another royalist collection of verse dedicated to Prince Charles, the second edition of Richard Fanshawe’s translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, supplemented with other translations and original verse and prose. Unlike Herrick’s, Fanshawe’s activity in the royalist cause was not merely literary but also political and military. Having already served as Secretary to the Council of War in Ireland under Thomas Wentworth (later Earl of Strafford) in 1639–41, he joined the King at Oxford in 1643, and in the following year was appointed Secretary for War to the Prince of Wales, moving with him to Bristol in 1645, as part of the ‘Council of the West’, and fleeing with him to the Scilly Isles, Jersey and France in 1646. Indeed, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, it was ‘largely owing’ to Fanshawe’s counsel ‘that the party left the mainland’. The King’s main object in setting up the Council of the West and placing his son in charge of it had been, according to Clarendon, to provide another focus for royalist support in case he himself should be captured; the escape in 1646 ensured that this alternative focus was preserved, ultimately making possible the restoration of monarchy fourteen years later. Fanshawe, then, actively participated in and helped to preserve that aspect of the political topography of Civil-War England on which Herrick constructs his Hesperidean fantasy, his idealizing poetics and extremist politics. We might expect to find similar ideas about poetics and politics in Fanshawe, and indeed, when he is mentioned in works on the period, it tends to be with reference to his supposed ‘absolutism’ and taste for pastoral ‘idealization’. Such judgements almost always rest on exclusive consideration of just one poem, ‘An Ode upon occasion of His Majesties Proclamation in the yeare 1630, commanding the Gentry to reside upon their Estates in the Country’. This is the first of the poems newly added in the second edition of Il Pastor Fido, and, superficially at least, is strikingly reminiscent of Herrick, in its depiction of England as the Isles of the Blessed, ‘a world without the world’ (34). But context is all. Its allusions to passages of Augustan poetry are haunted by darker notes in the classical contexts from which they are taken. These resonate with the discord which characterizes the real England of 1630 – the wider historical context which the ode seems, but only seems, to ignore.   Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 88; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 65.    All quotations are from Peter Davidson (ed.), The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). 

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In the context of Fanshawe’s volume, meanwhile, the ode’s governing tropes are developed and reworked in other poems, and what emerges is Fanshawe’s advocacy of a limited and even a conditional monarchy. The more moderate political position goes hand in hand with a very different way of imagining poetry, and his own relation to the poets of the past, heavily indebted to the humanist tradition. The frontispiece to the volume is a portrait of Battista Guarini, the author of Il Pastor Fido, whom the volume will present, together with George Buchanan and Edmund Spenser, as embodying the ideal poet as a humanist counsellor, exercising moral authority over monarchs – an authority which comes in the course of the volume to stand for the legal and constitutional limits on the monarch’s power. Beneath the portrait appears the couplet, ‘Not Mars is this, but learn’d Apollo’s knight: / Of Italie the glory, and delight’. At a time when ‘ultra-royalists’ were pressing for the pursuit of a decisive military victory over Parliament, while the more moderate royalists grouped around Fanshawe’s friend Edward Hyde were actively seeking a negotiated settlement, Fanshawe uses the portrait to distance his volume from the more militant position. The Prince is urged to heed not the war party, but the followers of Apollo, a humanist learning which the volume will consistently associate with limited monarchy, opposed to the absolutism of his father’s rule.

Chapter 4

‘These lessons let his tender years receive’: Buchanan, Fanshawe, and Fatherly Advice to Kings Despite an address to Charles I as ‘Th’ Augustus of our world’ in the ‘Ode on the Proclamation’, which seems at a first glance wholly in the vein of mainstream Caroline panegyric (though even this as we shall see is severely undercut by deeper currents in the poem), Fanshawe’s volume as a whole is much more concerned with its dedicatee, the young Prince. For the most part it ‘avoids the living and present problem of the King’, and what allusions there are to him are notably ambivalent and reserved. There are numerous suggestions that King Charles was himself at least partly responsible for the Civil War, and the advice to the Prince on how to govern both himself and the state is often implicitly by contrast with his father’s style of government. The poems printed after the translation of Guarini’s Pastor Fido in Fanshawe’s volume begin with ‘Two Copies of Verses to the Prince upon severall occasions’: alone among the supplementary poems, these two verses had also appeared in the first edition of the Guarini translation in 1647. Both have disturbing political implications, and both play literary authority off against paternal and royal authority, in order to encourage Prince Charles to distance himself from his father, and to subject himself instead to the rules enshrined both in the poet’s teachings and in the laws of the realm. Ultimately he must obey the poet, and by extension his subjects as represented in Parliament, as a pupil obeys his tutor, a quasi-filial relationship which not only displaces his relationship to his biological father, but also inverts the paternal metaphor as favoured by Charles I and his father James I to describe their authority over the kingdom.

  The comment is made by Peter Davidson, referring specifically to the Aeneid translation: see The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) , vol. I, p. 356.    In the Trew Law of Free Monarchies for instance, ‘The King towards his people is rightly compared to a father of children’: King James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 76. On James’s use of the paternal metaphor, see Su Fang Ng, ‘Father-Kings and Amazon Queens’, in Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 21–48. 

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By far the most interesting of these poems is the second, a translation from Buchanan. But it is worth lingering briefly over the first, ‘Presented to His Highnesse the Prince of Wales, At his going into the West, Anno M.DC.XLV. Together with Cesar’s Commentaries’. Sir, Now that your Father, with the World’s applause Imployes your early Valour in his Cause, Set Cesar’s glorious Acts before your sight, And know the man that could so doe and write. View him in all his postures, see him mix Terrour with love, Morals with Politicks. That courage, which when fortune ebb’d did flow, Which never trampled on a prostrate Foe, Admire and emulate. Before hee fought, Observe how Peace by him was ever sought: How bloodless Victories best pleas’d him still, Grieving as oft as he was forc’d to kill, How most religiously he kept his word, And conquer’d more that way then by the sword. In whom was all wee in a King could crave, Except that Right which you shall one day have. Yet think (Sir) it imports you to make good With all his worth the title of your blood.

Perhaps the first thing to notice about this poem is the implied relationship between poet and addressee. Despite the deferential repeated ‘Sir’, the older man is setting the younger a course of Latin reading, and admonishing him, also repeatedly, to emulate the improving example he finds therein. Caesar’s Commentaries were a standard textbook in early modern grammar schools in England: there are distinct overtones of the tutor in Fanshawe’s instructions, anticipating and retrospectively confirmed by the second poem, which will be a translation from Buchanan writing as James VI and I’s appointed tutor. The poem’s only modern commentator, Gerald Hammond, finds that the figure of the Prince’s father tends to merge irresistibly with the classical exemplar, Julius Caesar, which the poem is recommending for the Prince’s study. As he observes, this would be unproblematic if it were not for line 16. If Caesar is being elided with Charles I here, then Fanshawe is implying that Charles I does not have any right to his throne. Why this might be so will become clear in the second poem, which expounds the theory that a monarch loses his right to power when he ceases to deserve it morally, by his virtue and his love for his subjects. The ‘title’ which    Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 82.

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the young Prince derives from his ‘blood’, the hereditary principle, must indeed on this view be ‘made good’ by his moral ‘worth’, for it will otherwise count for nothing. Hammond’s reading is plausible, though startling, but yet another reading is possible, and its implications are just as disturbing. (Perhaps the poem is deliberately ambiguous. If so, it allows no way out for a reader devoted to Charles I: the two readings, while not compatible, are just as damning as each other.) What struck me, at least, on first reading this poem, was not the elision of the two figures referred to, ‘your Father’ and ‘Caesar’, but to the contrary the differentiation between them. Having raised the Prince’s relationship to his father at the opening of the poem, and tied the subject of the Prince’s valour and conduct firmly to it – it is in his father’s ‘Cause’ that it is to be exercised – Fanshawe then drops Charles I entirely for the rest of the poem. While the natural advice to the son would be to observe and to emulate the father, this is conspicuously not the advice given. It is Caesar, instead, whom the Prince is to ‘know’, ‘view’, ‘admire and emulate’. The two couplets of the opening sentence almost have the effect of placing their two subjects in a balance – on one hand, Charles I, on the other, Caesar – as though the Prince and the reader were being invited not to confuse but rather to choose between them. Whether the ensuing praise of Caesar can be applied very naturally to Charles, as in Hammond’s reading it must, is perhaps doubtful: as we shall see, the second poem at least implies a lack of ‘love’ and ‘morals’ in Charles’s reign, and two of the best-known poems in Fanshawe’s collection, on the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford, suggest very strongly that Fanshawe took a very dim view of ‘how religiously’ Charles ‘kept his word’ in this instance. The sharpest point of this implied contrast comes, for me, in line 15. Fanshawe chooses not the impersonal passive construction, ‘In whom was all that could be desired in a king’, but the active and personal, ‘In whom was all wee in a King could crave’. It may seem a subtle point, but it has its effect. What is evoked is not simply Caesar’s desert as an abstract quality of the man (‘Whenever he lived, this man would be thought worthy of being a king’), but rather that ‘wee’, now – Charles I’s subjects – crave a King as deserving as this. ‘Crave’ here sounds on my ear at least with an accent on the notion of lack: though Charles I may have the hereditary ‘Right’ to the throne which is the only criterion under the English constitution, he nevertheless leaves much to be desired by his subjects. The final couplet then urges on the young Prince the importance of bringing together the attributes of the two contrasted figures, of coupling ‘worth’ modelled on Caesar’s with ‘the title of [his] blood’ inherited from his father. What underlies all this is the fact that neither of these possible role-models, Caesar and Charles I, were able to put an end to civil war, to be to their respective countries the ‘great Instrument’ of peace which, as Fanshawe advertises in the prefatory letter to his Guarini translation, he hopes the young Prince will prove. The subtext of line 16 is that Julius Caesar was assassinated and the Roman civil wars renewed, not exactly for the sake of republican liberty as a universal principle and an end in itself, but because, in seeking to be crowned king (as he was rumoured to be doing, according to Plutarch), he was acting unconstitutionally in a state

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which didn’t happen to be a monarchy. Balancing this is the implication that the Civil Wars in England, and Charles’s failure to conclude them, can be explained by reference to Charles’s lack of Caesar’s ‘worth’. Tactfully but firmly, the young Prince is being admonished that, if he wishes to possess the throne his father has effectively lost, his only chance is not to rely on his hereditary claim, enforcing it by violence, but rather to win the acclaim and love of the people, aided by the course of reading prescribed by his tutor-like counsellor and poet – one might almost say, to behave as though the kingdom were a meritocracy or an elective monarchy. All the points we have seen adumbrated in this brief opening verse will be made much more fully and explicitly in the second poem, the translation from Buchanan ‘Presented to His Highnesse in the West, Ann. Dom. 1646’, to which let us now turn. George Buchanan had been tutor to Prince Charles’s grandfather, the young James VI of Scotland, later to become James I of England. He was a leading humanist and celebrated Latin poet, but his widespread fame as poet and scholar was equalled by the fame, or notoriety, of his radical political views. He was the foremost propagandist for the opposition to James’s Catholic mother, Mary Queen of Scots, writing De Maria Scotorum Regina to defend her imprisonment and enforced abdication in 1567 by proving her a tyrant: its publication, in Latin and in English, in London in 1571 was a blow in the campaign of Buchanan’s patron, the Earl of Moray, to persuade Elizabeth to bring Mary to trial and execution after her flight to England. The charge of tyranny, however, was not sufficient by contemporary standards to justify subjects in deposing the tyrant, who may, as the Homily on Obedience for instance claimed, have been sent by God as a punishment for their sins. So Buchanan followed this up by writing a dialogue entitled De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, laying out a theory of limited, contractual and conditional monarchy. Sovereignty, according to Buchanan’s dialogue, resides with the people, whose will is expressed through Parliament in the making of laws. The King is created for the good of the people (not the other way round as in Aristotle’s slave-state), and must obey the law. If he fails to do so, he ceases to be a true king and becomes a tyrant, and his subjects are therefore released from the obligation to obey him; in fact, it is the moral duty of each individual to kill him. The dialogue was dedicated to the young James, to ‘remind you of your duty to your subjects’ (tui erga cives officii te admoneret). James, however, had his own very different ideas about the nature and extent of kingly authority, and, after procuring an Act of Parliament to suppress Buchanan’s dialogue as soon as he came of age in 1584, wrote his own Trew Law of Free Monarchies (published 1599), laying out what he saw as the Divine Right and absolute powers of the King, in large part to counteract the dangerous views of his former tutor, now long deceased. Buchanan’s political works were to provide an inspiration and    On Divine Right theory in James’s Trew Law of Free Monarchies, see Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’ and J. P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right

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an authority to English parliamentarians in the 1640s. The De Jure Regni Apud Scotos was reprinted in London in 1643, and the same year saw the publication of an English translation of his Latin tragedy Baptistes, also on the subject of tyranny, with the title Tyrannicall-government anatomized, or, A discourse concerning evil-councellors. The deposition, trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots, in which Buchanan had played no small part, provided the English regicides with a precedent for the trial and execution of her grandson Charles I; the De Jure Regni Apud Scotos provided an articulate theoretical justification. Buchanan was cited approvingly by Milton and other defenders of the regicide. For Fanshawe to include a translation from Buchanan in his royalist volume, then, is surprising to say the least. The poem he chooses is Buchanan’s fullest and most detailed expression in verse of many of the ideas on kingship which he was to expound in more systematized form in the De Jure Regni Apud Scotos. Buchanan’s Genethliacon is a celebratory verse on the occasion of the birth of James VI. Modelled in large part on Claudian’s ‘Panegyric on the fourth consulship of the emperor Honorius’ and drawing also on Seneca’s essay De Clementia, it presents an austere vision of the civic virtue, moral self-restraint and loving duty to his subjects without which a king cannot – and, it strongly implies, should not be permitted to – remain in power. Radically at odds with the other celebrations orchestrated by James’s mother Mary to mark the occasion, which were strongly imperial in tone and aimed at reviving the cult of monarchy, the poem has been labelled ‘quasi-republican’ by some modern historians. However, the poem clearly expresses Buchanan’s hopes for the reforming power of a virtuous monarchy, so it is far from being irreconcilable with a royalist position. But the brand of royalism which can relay its political views must be markedly moderate, and necessarily (though implicitly) diverge widely from the view of monarchical authority expressed by Charles I’s style of government in the 1630s. Every aspect of Fanshawe’s redaction of Buchanan’s poem at this critical historical moment bespeaks his embrace of Buchanan’s ideas on the nature of the King’s authority and a concomitant censure of Charles I. The celebratory prophecy of an end to civil war and the return of a ‘golden Age’ (3) under the peaceful reign of Charles II, ‘The hoped cure of our great flux of blood’ (2), is made to depend, almost explicitly, on his renouncing the model of his father’s reign and determining himself to rule in a manner quite antithetical to it. The nature of the authority to which the poet himself lays claim within the poem plays a major role in the delineation of this moderate royalist position. of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 36–70.    Glenn Burgess, The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715, International Library of Historical Studies 11 (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), p. 159. On the iconography of the celebrations surrounding the baptism, see Michael Lynch, ‘Queen Mary’s Triumph: The Baptismal Celebrations at Stirling in December 1566’, Scottish Historical Review 69 (1990), 1–21.

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Most of the main points of Buchanan’s poem are drawn from one central section of Claudian’s panegyric, and I shall catalogue them here as they will also provide a useful sketch of the political argument of Buchanan’s poem. The closest echo is the last of several: Buchanan’s Et regnare putet multo se latius, orae Hesperiae fuscos quam si conjunxerit Indos, Si poterit rex esse sui [‘And if he could truly be king of himself and king of his own people, he would think his kingdom more extensive by far than it would be if it stretched from the Indies to the shores of Hesperia’, Genethliacon, 93–5],

which Fanshawe translates And let him believe, ’Tis not so much both Indies to command, As first to rule himself, and then a Land (110–12),

is drawn from Claudian’s tu licet extremos late dominere per Indos, te Medus, te mollis Arabs, te Seres adorent: si metuis, si prava cupis, si duceris ira, servitii patiere iugum; tolerabis iniquas interius leges. tunc omnia iure tenebis, cum poteris rex esse tui. [‘You may rule over furthest India; the Mede, the soft Arabians, the Chinese may worship you; still, if you are afraid, if you have wicked desires, if you are swayed by anger, you will bear the yoke of slavery: you will suffer inwardly a tyrannical rule. When you can be king of yourself, then you will justly control all things’, Panegyricus de Quarto Consulatu Honorii Augusti, 257–62.]

The passage gains added emphasis in Fanshawe, because this is where his translation stops: he omits the closing section of Buchanan’s poem, in which Buchanan sketches a sort of curriculum for the growing Prince to follow, progressing through learning to talk and to write, through the study of logic, rhetoric, astronomy and Greek philosophy, to religion, and finally the art of ruling a kingdom. Such a curriculum is obviously less appropriate for Prince Charles, already a young adult    Throughout this chapter I am using the text and translation of Genethliacon in George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, ed. and tr. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish History Society, 5th series, no. 8 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1995).

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at the time Fanshawe translates the poem, but the omission also focuses the poem more sharply on this central notion of the moral qualities required in the leader. This Stoic self-control is not only better than control of the world through imperial dominium, and not only that without which such imperial dominium is only an illusion, veiling inward slavery. It is also, literally and practically, the necessary basis and mechanism of the King’s rule. A little later in Claudian’s poem, a further passage provides Buchanan with the material for his explanation of this process: In commune iubes si quid censesque tenendum, primus iussa subi: tunc observantior aequi fit populus nec ferre negat, cum viderit ipsum auctorem parere sibi. componitur orbis regis ad exemplum, nec sic inflectere sensus humanos edicta valent quam vita regentis: mobile mutatur semper cum principe vulgus. His tamen effectis neu fastidire minores neu pete praescriptos homini transcendere fines. inquinat egregios adiuncta superbia mores. [‘If you command or decree any law to be observed by the public, be the first to submit to what is commanded: the people will be more ready to observe a law and not refuse submission when they see its author obey it himself. The world is ordered after the example of the king, nor do a ruler’s edicts have so much influence in bending men’s minds as does his life: the fickle multitude always changes with the prince. Yet even once you have achieved these things, you must neither be scornful towards your inferiors, nor seek to overstep the limits set for mankind. Pride is an attribute which defiles an excellent character’, 296–305].

The exemplarity of the King in lines 299–302 is the basis for Buchanan’s Sic in Regem oculos populus defigit, et unum Admirantur, amant, imitantur, seque suosque Ex hoc ceu speculo tentant effingere mores (Genethliacon, 37–9),

translated by Fanshawe as So do the People fix their eyes upon The King; admire, love, honour Him alone. In Him, as in a glasse, their manners view And frame, and copie what they see Him doe. (45–8)

The King’s submission to his own laws in lines 296–7 of Claudian’s panegyric is echoed in Buchanan’s

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And Claudian’s notion that the king must also observe the ‘limits set for mankind’ (praescriptos homini … fines) is reproduced by Buchanan, with more explicit reference to a temperate way of life, in Ille nec in cultu superet mensaque domoque Quem posuit natura modum … [‘He does not go beyond the limit which nature places on food and drink, on dress, and on shelter …’, Genethliacon, 52–3.]

Fanshawe’s translation here, Neither in Diet, Clothes, nor Train will He Exceed those banks should bound ev’n Majesty; (63–4)

throws further emphasis, in its explicit ‘ev’n Majesty’, on the fact that the King shares the limitations common to humanity, and is subject to the same natural laws, implying that there is a particular danger that monarchs will forget this. Immediately after the passage just quoted, Claudian continues with examples of the pride which defiles character and oversteps the limits set for mankind, drawn from Roman history: annales veterum delicta loquuntur: haerebunt maculae. quis non per saecula damnat Caesareae portenta domus? quem dira Neronis funera, quem rupes Caprearum taetra latebit incesto possessa seni? [‘The histories tell of the crimes of our ancestors: the stains still cling. Through all the ages, who will not condemn the atrocities of the house of Caesar? Who will not know of Nero’s horrible murders, and of the foul cliff of Capri occupied by a lecherous old man?’ 311–15.]

Buchanan weaves reminiscences of this passage into his radical reworking of the trope of the King as the image of God. The ‘well-governed Prince’ (moderato Principe, 76) is he ‘in whom shines the true and living image of God’ (In quo vera Dei vivensque elucet imago, 77), but God will be avenged on the king who

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pollutes this image by wickedness or tyranny, just as surely as on the subject who attacks it by rebelling against a good king: Hanc seu Rex vitiis contaminet ipse pudendis, Sive alius ferro violet vel fraude, severas Sacrilego Deus ipse petet de sanguine poenas, Contemtumque sui simulacri haud linquet inultum. Sic Nero crudelis, sic Flavius ultimus, et qui Imperio Siculas urbes tenuere cruento, Effigiem foedare Dei exitialibus ausi Flagitiis, ipsa periere a stirpe recisi. [‘But if the king should contaminate this image by shameful vices, or if some person should desecrate it by force or fraud, God himself will exact a bloody punishment for such a sacrilege, nor will He leave unavenged an insult to His image. Thus did cruel Nero, thus did the last of the Flavians [Domitian], and those who cruelly held sway in the Sicilian cities [Hippocrates, Gelon and Hieron, Sicilian tyrants of the 5th century BC], daring to disgrace the likeness of God with their execrable crimes. Thus did they and their name perish root and branch from the face of the earth’, Genethliacon, 78–85.]

Beginning his catalogue of tyrants with Nero, like Claudian, Buchanan’s contaminet (78) and foedare (84) amplify the trope of uncleanness in Claudian’s haerebunt maculae; its implication that the guilt clings even to the descendants of tyrants, meanwhile, is developed into the startling claim that providential justice dictates not only the destruction of tyrants but the extirpation of their line. Fanshawe’s version of those last lines, So cruell Nero, fierce Domitian so, And the Sicilian Tirants, whilst they throw Dirt in their Makers face with their black deeds, Are from the earth cut off, they and their seeds (96–100),

renders both of these points with particular vividness. Whether a king can still be said to be the image of God once he has defaced that image through vice or tyranny, and therefore whether his subjects can still be said to be committing a crime against God in rebelling against him, is left ambiguous. The answer of the De Jure Regni Apud Scotos would certainly be ‘No’, and the Genethliacon is at least open to such a reading too. All of these passages imitated by Buchanan are drawn from a reported speech at the centre of Claudian’s panegyric, in which Claudian imagines Honorius’ father, the emperor Theodosius I, advising his son in his youth on how to rule wisely, virtuously and securely. By putting his reworking of much of this advice into the frame of his instructions to James’s parents on how their son should be educated, Buchanan has effectively co-opted for himself as James’s tutor the moral

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authority accorded to the father and emperor Theodosius in Claudian’s poem. When Fanshawe translates the poem in 1646, the date mentioned prominently in the title, his subject, Prince Charles, is already a young adult. The act of translating this poem parallels his own position as Secretary for War to the Prince of Wales, fellow counsellor in the Council of the West, and of course poet of this volume, dedicated to Charles, with Buchanan’s position as tutor of the royal child, his grandfather. It has the effect of claiming for the officials and counsellors of a king (or at least of the expectant and adult heir to the throne), and for poetry itself, the kind of moral and instructional authority over the royal figure which belongs to a tutor over a young pupil. If James I’s favoured metaphor, in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and elsewhere, of the King as the father of his people contributes to the absolutist tendencies of his political thought by transforming his subjects into perpetual children ‘to construct them as dependent, immature and incapable of resistance’, the analogy implied by Fanshawe’s poem, between the King’s relation to his counsellors and poets and the pupil’s relation to his tutor, almost exactly reverses the situation. The King becomes a perpetual child, his right to govern the state dependent on his ability to govern himself, which means to obey the moral instructions laid out by the poet-tutor. This moral self-control or obedience to moral laws is clearly bound up in the poem with obedience to the laws of the kingdom. Although in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies James does observe that the King should endeavour to obey the laws of the realm, it is a central principle of his theory of monarchy that he does so freely and voluntarily, for the King is above the law. Fanshawe and Buchanan, by contrast, make the moral self-regulation of which obedience to the law is a part an indispensable condition of kingship, without which the King cedes his god-given authority. Since laws must be ratified by Parliament, Parliament too exerts a tutor-like authority over the monarch. Given the origin of Buchanan’s instructions in the fatherly advice of Theodosius in Claudian’s panegyric (which Fanshawe would surely have known), another body of work becomes a shadowy presence in the background of Fanshawe’s poem. James had written just such a set of instructions on governing to his own eldest son and heir, Prince Henry (who was to die before he could assume the throne in 1612). Composed at the same time as the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and published the following year in 1599, the Basilikon Doron (or ‘royal gift’) combines a recapitulation of the principal tenets of the Trew Law’s divine right   Ng, Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth-Century England, p. 22.   That Claudian’s poetry was still a familiar resource for panegyrists of the early

 

Stuarts is suggested by the fact that Ben Jonson, in his contribution to the celebrations of James’s entry into London at his coronation, and Aurelian Townshend in his Caroline masque Albion’s Triumph, both draw on Claudian’s panegyrics. See John Peacock, ‘The Image of Charles I as a Roman Emperor’, in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 66–9.

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theory of kingship with more practical advice. If the Trew Law of Free Monarchies was a riposte to Buchanan’s De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, Fanshawe, in translating Buchanan’s Genethliacon here, might be seen as giving Buchanan the last word in the debate, which death had denied him. To those readers who would recognize the echoes of Claudian’s advice from a royal father to his heir, the poem begs comparison with James’s Basilikon Doron and Trew Law of Free Monarchies, and of course diverges from them radically in its view of the nature and extent of monarchical authority. Buchanan’s advice to the young James and his parents, now reiterated as Fanshawe’s advice to the future Charles II, displaces and overturns the intervening and opposite advice from a royal father which was handed down to the previous generation, the instructions for absolutist government inherited by Charles I after the death of his elder brother. The young Prince is implicitly instructed not simply to heed this lesson, but to prefer it to the faulty lesson embodied in his grandfather’s treatises on kingship, which he should ignore – to return to and to abide by Buchanan’s humanistic theory of monarchy, against which James’s insistence on divine right was in part a reaction, making the doctrine which shaped the rules of his father and grandfather merely an unfortunate divagation which need not mar his own wiser reign. Fanshawe’s role in delivering this advice parallels him with James, the author of the Basilikon Doron, while making him a truer and better authority. As the authority of the poet and counsellor thus displaces and trumps the authority of the royal father, the power relations in this to-ing and fro-ing of texts can be seen to reproduce the political power relations which are their subject. True authority resides not in the King, but in his subject, the poet and counsellor, recalling Buchanan’s claim in the De Jure Regni Apud Scotos that sovereignty resides in the people and derives from them to the King. Even Buchanan’s more radical claim that monarchy should be elective rather than hereditary, a view in the De Jure Regni Apud Scotos which is not foreshadowed in the Genethliacon, seems to be hovering over the textual transaction here, as Prince Charles is reminded that he draws his authority and right to rule from the people’s love for his virtue, and at the same stroke is implicitly admonished to ignore and abjure the ‘kingly gift’ which, like the hereditary crown itself, has been passed down from father to son in his family’s dynasty. What treatment the concept of the Divinity of Kings, so central to the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and the Basilikon Doron, receives in Buchanan’s poem and Fanshawe’s translation we have already seen: it is transformed from a charter for absolutism into a virtual justification for tyrannicide. This is the only place in Fanshawe’s volume where he touches explicitly on this favourite Stuart doctrine: he is evidently keen to distance both himself and his addressee, Prince Charles, from its more familiar connotations and from the style of government of his father and grandfather. The way in which Fanshawe reworks the opening of    For the claim that true kingship is elective rather than hereditary, see George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579), p. 15.

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Buchanan’s poem has a similar effect, making an implicitly critical perspective on the grandfather’s and particularly the father’s rule inextricable from its optative praise of the future rule of the son. The subject in these opening lines is a trope which was central to the classical iconography associated with the concept of the Divinity of Kings in state celebrations, masques and public poetry under the Stuarts: the prophecy of the return of the Golden Age, itself ultimately drawn from the poets of the Roman empire in their praise of deified emperors, most influentially Virgil in his fourth eclogue and in the Aeneid. The Genethliacon begins with reference to just such a prophecy, a flight into hyperbole unusual for him: Cresce puer patriae auspiciis felicibus orte, Exspectate puer, cui vatum oracla priorum Aurea compositis promittunt secula bellis … [‘Thrive, boy, born in happy times to be your country’s prince, to whom the oracles of the early prophets promise a golden age and the end of warfare’, Genethliacon, 1–3.]

In this reference to prophecies of James’s rule, Buchanan probably has Galfridian prophecy in mind.10 But the climactic third line here, a golden line about the Golden Age,11 refers us specifically to Virgilian prophecy. It echoes Jove’s prophecy to Venus of the glorious destiny of Rome under a deified Augustus in Book I, the first of the Aeneid’s Augustan prophecies: nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar, imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris, Iulius, a magno demissum nomen Iulo. hunc tu olim caelo, spoliis Orientis onustum, accipies secura; vocabitur hic quoque votis. aspera tum positis mitescent saecula bellis … [‘From this illustrious family the Trojan Caesar will be born, who will bound his empire by the ocean, his fame by the stars: a Julius [Augustus], the name descended

  According to McGinnis and Williamson: see George Buchanan: The Political Poetry, p. 317. On Galfridian prophecy generally, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971). 11   The modern definition of a ‘golden line’ in Latin poetry is a hexameter comprising two adjectives (a, b) and the two nouns they qualify (A, B) arranged around a central verb in the order ab [verb] AB, as in Genethliacon line 3. This seems also to have been Scaliger’s definition in the Poetices Libri Septem (1560). See Kenneth Mayer, ‘The Golden Line: Ancient and Medieval Lists of Special Hexameters and Modern Scholarship’, in Carol D. Lanham (ed.), Latin Grammar and Rhetoric: Classical Theory and Modern Practice (London: Continuum Press, 2002), pp. 139–79. 10

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from great Iulus. One day you shall receive him safely into heaven, laden with Oriental spoils; he too will be invoked in prayers. Then the harsh ages will grow mild, with wars laid aside’, Aen. I.286–91.]

Buchanan combines the last line quoted here with a memory of the aurea saecula in Anchises’ later prophecy, hic vir, hic est, tibi quen promitti saepius audis Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam … [‘This is the man, this is he, whom you have often heard promised to you: Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who will establish again the Golden Age throughout the fields once ruled by Saturn in Latium …’, Aen. VI.791–4.]

The two passages form a key part of Virgil’s Augustan programme in the Aeneid, which aims to justify the overthrow of republican liberty with Augustus’ rise to absolute power and establishment of empire by presenting it as divinely ordained. Buchanan’s echo sits very oddly with his emphasis in the rest of the poem on the necessary limitations of monarchical power. But it is interesting to note that Buchanan’s line also echoes one of his own earlier poems, where it occurs, in a very slightly altered form, in a context which reinforces that argument of limitation. This is his prefatory verse to a canon law text by Martim de Azpilcueta, Relectio c. novit. non minus sublimus quam celerris de judiciis (Coimbra, 1548). Buchanan praises the author for revealing ‘the innermost secrets of the law’ (abdita secreti reseras penetralia juris, line 2), and contrasts him precisely with those who relay lying prophecies: Non tu Dictaeo mendacia callidus antro, Authoremque Jovem fingis: lucove Capeno Atria nocturnae simulas commercia nymphae: Nec tripodas Phoebi mentita oracula fundis … [‘You do not speciously pretend to foist on us simulations of the truth from a cave in Crete, fostering their authorship on Jove, or dark dealings with a goddess in the sacred grove of Capena, nor do you bring forth the lying oracles of Apollo’s tripod …’, 5–8.]12

The reference to Apollo’s tripod glances at the prophecy received by Aeneas at the temple of Apollo on Delos in Book III of the Aeneid (90–98), as well as at Apollo’s 12   Georgii Buchanani in insigni bonarum artium collegio apud inclytam Conimbricam professoris primarii aliud, line 2. For text and translation I again use McGinnis and Williamson, George Buchanan: The Political Poetry.

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Delphic oracle. Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl, meanwhile, who leads Aeneas to the underworld to receive the prophecy from the shade of his father Anchises, is strongly associated with Crete in Book VI of the Aeneid.13 It is evidently just such prophecies as those which play an important role in the Aeneid’s political programme which Buchanan has in his sights, a fact emphasized by the poem’s final line, Aurea compositis instauras secula bellis. [‘And the restoration of the Golden Age, with wars settled, we owe to you’, 26.]

In echoing Jove’s prophecy in Book I of the Aeneid, as explained above, the line corrects Virgil: it is law and the exponents of law which bring back the golden age, not absolute monarchs. The law expounded by De Azpilcueta in fact restrains and sets a limit upon rulers, preventing them from becoming tyrants: et justis legum compescis habenis Spes nimias: animosque feros moderamine flectis. Pontifices tu purpureos, dominumque potentis Ausoniae, regesque doces discrimine certo Nosse modum juris … [‘you check overweening designs by the just restraints of the law. Untamed ambitions you bring under control by reasoning based on principle. The priests in purple, the Lord of Ausonia, and kings as well – you teach them all by a sure method to know the limits of the law’, 11–15.]

Buchanan’s echo of this poem at the opening of Genethliacon therefore covertly imports into that poem a reinforcement of its main argument on the necessary limitation of monarchical power, together with a sceptical denunciation of just such politically motivated prophecies as it seems, on the surface, to be reproducing. Whether Fanshawe would have picked up Buchanan’s intratextual reference to his own earlier poem we cannot know, but his own twist on Buchanan’s Golden Age prophecy has similarly disturbing implications, ultimately implying a like air of scepticism. Fanshawe’s opening brings Buchanan’s poem up to date, applying it to Charles and the current condition of England: Grow Royall Plant, born for your Country’s good, The hoped cure of our great flux of blood. That Union, and that peacefull golden Age, Which to your Grandsire ancient Bards presage, And we suppos’d fulfill’d in Him, appears 13   See Susan Skulsky, ‘The Sibyl’s Rage and the Marpessan Rock’, The American Journal of Philology 108 (1987), 56–80.

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By Fate reserved for your riper yeers. And Thou, self-hurt since that half-Union more Then ever, Britain, thou hadst been before, Raise they dejected head, bind up thy hair With peacefull Olive … (1–10)

In reapplying the Golden Age prophecy of Buchanan’s poem to the young Prince Charles, Fanshawe draws attention to what has proved in the event to be its failure, or falsity, in relation to the original addressee, his grandfather James. The prophecy of ‘ancient Bards’ which in Buchanan was Galfridian prophecy, intertextually aligned with Virgil’s Augustan prophecy, is now the Genethliacon of the Bard Buchanan himself. Thus Fanshawe is drawing attention at the opening of his translation to the unreliability of the very poem he is translating, or rather to the hollowness of its political optimism. Though the overt purpose is merely to replace that frustrated hope with his own optimistic prophecy of the Golden Age which Charles will at last bring, the manoeuvre foregrounds the optative and purely rhetorical nature of that prophecy, emphasizing that its fulfilment depends wholly on the new addressee’s marking the lesson of the poem in a way which James signally failed to do. Even more than James, in whose peaceful reign the people at least ‘suppos’d’ that the Golden Age had indeed returned, Charles I is obliquely but unmistakably criticized. There is no direct reference in the text to this intermediary figure between the young Prince and his grandfather, as though he has already been written out of history just as James’s Basilikon Doron and Trew Law of Free Monarchies have been displaced and written out of literary history by Fanshawe’s translation of Buchanan’s poem, or as though he is not even worthy of mention in connection with this theme of Golden Age prophecy. But his reign is present in the reference to ‘our great flux of blood’ (2) and the lengthy description of the Civil Wars that begins ‘And Thou, self-hurt since that half-Union more / Then ever, Britain, thou hadst been before’ (7–8). Fanshawe substitutes this phrase for Buchanan’s lines Tuque peregrinis toties pulsata procellis, Pene tuo toties excisa Britannia ferro. Exsere laeta caput … [‘And you likewise, Britannia, so often beset by whirlwinds from offshore, so often destroyed by your own iron, lift your head and be joyful …’, Genethliacon, 4–6.]

Returning then to direct translation, the next ten lines render lines 7 to 14 in the Genethliacon, where Buchanan was writing of the wars between Scotland and England during the reign of Henry VIII. But now, of course, they refer to the far greater turmoil (‘self-hurt … more / Then ever, Britain, thou hadst been before’) of the 1640s, the English Civil Wars in which Scotland too was involved. Not only was Buchanan’s prophecy of peace frustrated, but Stuart rule in England has brought worse tumult than he had ever witnessed.

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Charles I, then, is remarkable only for presiding over the collapse of his country’s hope of peace, and any idea that this might be his misfortune rather than his fault is impossible to reconcile with the poem’s argument. So do the People fix their eyes upon The King; admire, love, honour Him alone. In Him, as in a glasse, their manners view And frame, and copie what they see Him doe. That which the murdring Cannon cannot force, Nor plumed Squadrons of steel-glittering Horse, Love can. In this the People strive t’out-doe The King; and when they find they’re lov’d, love too. They serve, because they need not serve: and if A good Prince slack the reins, they make them stiffe; And of their own accords invite that yoke, Which, if inforc’t on them, they would have broke. (45–56)

As Gerald Hammond, commenting on these lines, observes, For both poets the theme is that good kings get good subjects … Fanshawe’s poem makes disturbing reading, for … it strongly implies that at least part of the responsibility for the troubles lies with the father. Obviously, this could not be openly said, but Fanshawe refuses to subscribe to the idea of an obdurate people who have malevolently blocked their monarch’s purposes. Much the opposite, they are seen to have taken their lead from him … The unasked question behind this is how far the father loved his people – and ‘not enough’ is the unavoidable answer.14

That this is not merely an inadvertent implication on Fanshawe’s part, arising from his not thinking through the consequences of applying Buchanan’s poem to the current age, is supported by the only other passages in which he diverges slightly from Buchanan’s poem. In both cases, Fanshawe’s changes have the effect of making Buchanan’s abstract examples of bad kingship sound topical, specifically recalling Charles I’s reign. The first of these is in the passage just quoted, where the ‘murdring Cannon’ and ‘plumed Squadrons of steel-glittering Horse’ are introduced in translating Buchanan’s Quod non sanguinei metuenda potentia ferri Exprimet, et nitido florentes aere phalanges … [‘That which the awesome force of bloody iron fails to effect, accompanied by legions of soldiers with their shining armour …’, 40–41.]

  Hammond, Fleeting Things, pp. 83–4.

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Replacing Buchanan’s swords and armoured foot soldiers with heavy artillery and cavalry, Fanshawe makes Buchanan’s image of the severity and violence with which a bad king strives unsuccessfully to enforce obedience into a recognizable picture of the troops and batteries of the current wars. Charles stands accused in these lines quite literally of ‘murdring’ his subjects. Twenty lines on, a second detail has a similar effect. Where Buchanan asks patrios quis frangere mores Audeat, ignavoque animum corrumpere luxu, Ipse voluptatum cum Princeps frena coercet, Et nimium laetam vitiorum comprimit herbam? [‘Who would dare to violate the standards of his country, and corrupt his soul with shameful debauchery, when the prince himself keeps wayward pleasures in check, and restrains the exuberant weeds of wickedness?’ 60–63.]

Fanshawe elaborates slightly: Who’l dare t’import Beyond-sea vices to infect a Court, And make his body with excesse and ease A sink to choak his soul in, when he sees A Monarch curb his pleasures, and suppresse Those weeds which make a Man a Wildernesse. (71–6)

What is no more than a possible hint of foreign influence on home-grown vice in Buchanan’s patrios … frangere mores (‘to violate the standards of his country’) becomes in Fanshawe an explicit reference to ‘a Court’ corrupted by ‘Beyond-sea vices’, evoking the widespread distrust on the side of Parliament of the influence of Charles’s French – and Catholic – queen, Henrietta Maria, called in one parliamentary newspaper ‘a great causer of the Combustions and Miseries that have happened in this kingdome’.15 When Fanshawe at the very opening of the poem grafts his metaphor for the young Prince, ‘Royall Plant’ onto Buchanan’s straightforward Cresce puer (‘Grow, boy’), it chimes across the poem with the image of the weeds of wickedness which spring from imported vice in these lines: if the young Prince is a healthful plant, it is a miracle he has survived in the weedchoked garden of his father’s corrupt court. But what really underlies this critique of Charles I in Fanshawe’s poem is effectively the charge that he has caused the outbreak and continuance of civil war by putting into practice the ideas about the nature and extent of monarchical 15   Mercurius Civicus, 18–24 May 1643, p. 22, quoted in Michelle A. White, Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 102–3.

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authority expounded by his father in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies and the Basilikon Doron, those ideas so contrary to the teachings of the Genethliacon, relayed anew by Fanshawe’s translation. In refusing to call a parliament for eleven years, and ruling as though he were above the law, he has presumed upon his father’s theory of the Divinity of Kings in such a way as to verge on tyranny, thereby in Buchanan’s and Fanshawe’s terms defacing the image of God in himself just as surely as any subjects’ wrongful rebellion against a just king could do. In rising against their divinely anointed King, the poem would seem to suggest, his subjects thus merely ‘copie what they see Him doe’ (48), and the resulting Civil War is God’s vengeance upon him (94–6). By continuing to wage war on his part against his own subjects, he compounds and deepens the original error, becoming more and more the tyrant. Fanshawe’s poem is a plea to the young Prince to escape the vicious circle by resisting retaliation and seeking a negotiated peace, which accepts the restraints and limitations on his power which his father sought to evade. It is also an attempt to persuade the reading public that the future King is aware of his father’s mistakes and willing to embrace a very different style of government and conception of his own role. The poem concludes, These lessons let his tender yeers receive; His riper, practise: And let him believe, ’Tis not so much both Indies to command, As first to rule himself, and then a Land. (109–12)

To heed the ‘lesson’ of Fanshawe’s poem, the young Charles must prefer the Buchanan so dear to parliamentarians and republicans both to the teachings of his grandfather and to the example of his father. His subscription to the moral authority of the poem and to the laws which it bids him obey, equated with Stoic self-control or the obedience of the passions to reason within himself, precedes and is the necessary condition for his bearing authority in the land.16 In promising the people a return of the Golden Age under the future Charles II, Fanshawe is not indulging in imperial propaganda reminiscent of the extremes of Caroline panegyric, but rather, and to the contrary, promising them an obedient king at last.

  On the identification of reason with the rule of law and popular sovereignty and of the will or the passions with despotism in classical republican discourse in the mid-seventeenth century, see Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 193–5. 16

Chapter 5

Otium and Civil War: The ‘Ode on the Proclamation’ Fanshawe’s ‘Ode on the Proclamation of 1630’ is widely read as the epitome of Caroline pastoral idealism, a piece of straightforward royalist propaganda, following Virgil in its mythologization of contemporary politics so as to identify the monarch’s authority with ‘cosmic order’. Offering a ‘distorted picture’ of contemporary England as ‘an ideal state of a king presiding over a benevolent aristocracy’, the ode, according to such readings, ‘diverts attention away from the real social problems at hand’, and ‘absolutely refuses to concede anything to the realities of the political situation’. It is thus seen as agreeing in spirit with Thomas Carew’s slightly later ‘In answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townsend’, where Carew advises his friend to confine himself to pastoral poetry of praise and pleasure. It is the business of contemporary English poets, he argues, to celebrate the peace which affords them the otium necessary for song, and to ignore political strife – specifically the Thirty Years War raging in Europe: Then let the Germans feare if Caesar shall, Or the Vnited Princes, rise, and fall, But let us that in myrtle bowers sit Vnder secure shades, use the benefit Of peace and plenty, which the blessed hand Of our good King gives this obdurate Land … … gently inspire The past’rall pipe, till all our swaines admire Thy song and subject, whilst they both comprise The beauties of the SHEPHERDS PARADISE.

  David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 65.    Gerald MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. 172; Gerald Hammond, Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 27.    Poems by Thomas Carew (London, 1640), p. 128. 

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Fanshawe’s ode remained in manuscript until 1648, when it was published as one of the poems supplementing the second edition of his translation of Battista Guarini’s pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido. Gerald Hammond remarks that it becomes a different poem on its publication in 1648, as the gap between its idealized picture of what is now an irrevocable past and the present reality of civil war becomes so evident as to ask to be read as irony. In its new context, that is, it expresses the same nostalgic view of the England of the 1630s (again as set apart from the European wars) articulated by Fanshawe’s friend Edward Hyde in 1646, while both were sojourning with Prince Charles in the Scilly Isles: The happiness of the times I mentioned was enviously set off by this, that every other kingdom, every other province, were engaged, some entangled, and some almost destroyed, by the rage and fury of arms … whilst alone the kingdoms we now lament were looked upon as the garden of the world.

I agree that the irony of this publishing act is important, but it consists not in a poignant sense of the loss of the Caroline Golden Age it recalls, but in a sceptical probing of the political implications of the Golden Age myth as a myth – an irony just as integral to the meaning of the poem as it is first composed, in 1630 or soon after. Indeed, it shows Fanshawe already in 1630 weighing the possibility of civil war as a consequence of the absolutism of Charles’s ‘Halcyon dayes’ (80), in a subtext which can only have become clearer as its forebodings were proved true, in the new climate of its publication. Ostensibly, the ode begins by celebrating, like Carew and Hyde, the peace which the England of 1630 enjoys in a Europe generally racked by the Thirty Years War. The first eight stanzas enlarge on the theme ‘Now warre is all the world about’ (1), cataloguing the troubles of Holland, France, Germany and Russia, and culminating with a stanza on the Persian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, Who now sustains a Persian storme: There hell (that made it) suffers schisme This warre (forsooth) was to reforme Mahumetisme. (29–32)

The tone of amused incredulity at blood shed over differences in interpretation of a religion so wholly wrong (to Fanshawe’s mind) as Islam seems to reflect back on the struggle of the Catholic and Protestant powers in the preceding stanzas, suggesting that all schism is futile and originates in ‘hell’. England, then, is well out of it:

   Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England Begun in the Year 1641, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols (1888; repr. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), I.162.

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Onely the Island which wee sowe, (A world without the world) so farre From present wounds, it cannot showe An ancient skarre. White Peace (the beautiful’st of things) Seemes here her everlasting rest To fix, and spreads her downy wings Over the nest. As when great Jove usurping Reigne From the plagu’d world did her exile And ty’d her with a golden chaine To one blest Isle: Which in a sea of plenty swamme … (33–45)

England is compared to the Isles of the Blessed, recalling especially Horace’s sixteenth epode, which Fanshawe will translate later in the volume: Let us seeke those Isles Which swim in plenty, the blest soyles … When Jove with brasse the Golden-Age infected, These Iles he for the pure extracted. Now Iron raignes, I like a statue stand, To point Good Men to a Good Land. (41–2, 63–6)

‘A world without the world’, meanwhile, recalls Virgil’s first eclogue, where Meliboeus complains that, while Tityrus has obtained special favour and the right to remain on his land from Octavian, he and others must go into exile, for Octavian has confiscated their farms to reward the soldiers who have secured his victories in the civil wars. Some of the dispossessed must go to Africa, some to Scythia and Crete, and some toto divisos orbe Britannos (‘to the Britons, cut off from the whole world’, 66). The isolation which Meliboeus considers a guarantee of barbarity Fanshawe converts into a symbol of special blessedness. Indeed, Charles’s proclamation inverts the polarities of Virgil’s eclogue, for the grateful fields will, to quite so great a love, A Virgill breed; A Tytirus, that shall not cease Th’ Augustus of our world to praise, In equall verse, author of peace And Halcyon dayes. (75–80)

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Britain is now identified with the home in which the contented Tityrus remains, praising as a god the emperor who has thus preserved his leisure (deus nobis haec otia fecit, 6). Charles’s proclamation commanding the gentry to quit the city and live on their country estates is presented as a command ‘forc[ing] us to enjoy / The peace hee made’ (59–60). To dwell in London is to behave ‘as if some foe were here’, and safety had to be sought ‘In walled Townes’ (49, 52). And it creates disease to the state, which the proclamation must cure: The sapp and bloud o’th land, which fled Into the roote, and choackt the heart, Are bid their quickning pow’r to spread Through ev’ry part. (65–8)

The image comes close to betraying the true state of affairs in the capital, very different from the ode’s dominant picture of halcyon contentment and peace. The heart of Charles’s government had indeed been suffering dangerous commotions, and the class that posed the threat were precisely the gentry, in the House of Commons. Accumulated public grievances had led in 1628 to Parliament presenting a Petition of Right, denouncing the arbitrary taxation and forced loans not agreed by Parliament, and arbitrary imprisonment without charge, which the King had practised over the preceding years, and demanding that martial law, which had been imposed in some southern and western counties, be revoked and never reintroduced. Despite accepting the petition, Charles continued to collect Tonnage and Poundage (customs dues), never agreed by Parliament, and when the Commons protested in 1629, Charles dissolved Parliament and imprisoned six members without bail: one, John Eliot, would die there. This marked the beginning of the Personal Rule, or Eleven Years’ Tyranny, with Charles refusing to call a parliament again until 1640. A major cause of Charles’s need for the unconstitutionally raised money which caused all this trouble was the expense since 1625 of wars against Spain and France, also never agreed by Parliament and disastrously mismanaged by Buckingham. In 1630, Charles had only just withdrawn from the European war. His brief involvement had done more damage than good to European Protestants against the Catholic powers, enabling Louis XIII to crush the Huguenots of La Rochelle, through a mixture of deliberate intent and bungling. Public opinion found the peace as shameful as the ineffective war had been, leaving the task of ‘Revenging lost Bohemia’ (17), seized by Spain from the Elector Palatinate and his wife, Charles’s own sister Elizabeth, to ‘The great Gustavus’ Adolphus of Sweden (13). Fanshawe devotes stanzas 4 and 5 to Gustavus: their adulatory tone, which of course implies a less sanguine view of Charles’s peace, has been watered down for the printed version, with ‘Than whom the earth did ne’re invest / A fiercer King’ replacing ‘A braver King’, the manuscript reading.

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There is an uneasy gap, then, between the real England of 1630 and the home of ‘everlasting’ peace pictured in the Ode. Though the warfare of the 1620s has not touched English soil, England has nevertheless been at war and has only recently achieved peace – as Fanshawe says of other parts of Europe, ‘the Torch so late put out / The stench remaines’ (3–4). And this peace has been achieved not through victory, but through failure and ignominious withdrawal, a return to the unpopular policy of James, making England once again merely an audience to the ‘Christian tragedies’ and ‘proud wrongs’ (6, 18) being played out on the European stage. Moreover, this withdrawal is a symptom of discontent and unrest at home, the complete breakdown of relations between King and Parliament in the face of their irreconcilable views on the extent of the royal prerogative, of parliamentary powers, and of the rights of subjects. By wishing to remain in London, Fanshawe observes, the gentry are behaving ‘as if some foe were here’, but the real hostility between King and Parliament has arisen because of Parliament’s conviction that there are indeed enemies to the liberties of English subjects close to the crown. In a final effort to voice their opinions before Parliament was dissolved, with Black Rod already hammering on the door, Eliot and his associates physically restrained the Speaker from leaving his chair and thus ending the session while they hastily pronounced resolutions that anyone seeking to ‘introduce popery’, counselling the levying of Tonnage and Poundage, or agreeing to pay it, ‘shall be reputed a capital enemy to the kingdom and commonwealth’, ‘a betrayer of the liberties of England and an enemy to the same’. Two of the most contentious issues at this point of Charles’s reign, then, amount to his enforcing of an unwanted otium – peace or leisure – on his subjects, denying them negotium, involvement in public life, through military service in the popular Protestant cause or participation in parliamentary government. In this light, the note of coercion in ‘Unlesse he force us to enjoy / The peace hee made’ (59–60) and ‘Nor let the Gentry grudge to goe’ (81) hints at a real conflict of wills over much larger concerns than the immediate object of the proclamation. And in fact the allusions to Horace and Virgil, which at first glance seem central to the fulsome praise of Charles as ‘Th’Augustus of our world’ (78), deepen this ambiguity. In that they are commanded ‘To rowle themselves in envy’d leasure’ (61) in a pastoral idyll, the gentry resemble Tityrus, granted the right to remain on his land and envied by Meliboeus. But in that they are forced to remove themselves far from   S.R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625– 1660 (Oxford, 1906), pp. 82–3.    Otium and negotium are key terms in the Stoics’ debate over the relative merits of the vita activa and the vita contemplativa. Cicero’s advocacy of the active life engaged in public affairs in the De Officiis was enormously influential in the Renaissance, and central to the political thought of those humanists who opposed monarchical absolutism. See Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 216–24; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 

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the centre of power, where they ‘grudge to goe’, they also resemble Meliboeus. Though the poem envisions a time when England may breed a Tityrus to praise Charles for this enforced otium, it is ‘not for my muse / To celebrate, nor the dull Age’ (69–70), and while this passes as a claim of insufficient poetic skill, it allows for the fact that both Fanshawe’s poem and contemporary England reflect both of the perspectives offered by Virgil’s first eclogue – that of the aggrieved Meliboeus as well as that of the contented Tityrus. Horace’s description of the Blessed Isles, meanwhile, concludes the sixteenth epode’s grimly ironic counsel of despair at a renewed outbreak of civil war. Now that ‘Romes owne Sword destroyes poore Rome’, accomplishing what all her enemies could not, And Wolves shall repossesse this place. The barb’rous Foe will trample on our dead, The steele-shod Horse our Courts will tread; And Romulus dust (clos’d in religious Urne From Sunne and tempest) proudly spurne, (10–14)

Horace advises the people ‘T’abandon all’, giving in to what cannot be helped, to leave their ‘Houses, and the Houses of their Gods, / To Wolves and Beares for their abodes’ (19–21), and to seek the mythical Islands of the Blessed. The call to acquiesce coolly in such a scene of destruction and desecration, and the claim that to remain or to try to prevent it is a sign of ‘unmanly grief’ (39), are evidently intended not to be taken seriously, but to shock, to shame and to reawaken the love of country which should prevent civil war. There is also bitter irony in the epode’s recollections of Virgil’s fourth eclogue, where Virgil announces the birth of an offspring of Jove (usually interpreted as an anticipated son to Augustus, who traced his line to Aeneas, grandson of Jupiter’s daughter Venus), who will end the Iron and bring back the Golden Age. The miraculous fruitfulness which Virgil promised Rome is now attributed to a mythical setting precisely in contrast to a Rome doomed to destruction. And the peace between the ox and the lion    On the widespread use of Virgil’s first eclogue for and against James’s policy of peace, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 142–7. Patterson notes ‘interesting signs of tension and complexity’ in Fanshawe’s echoes of Meliboeus (pp. 148–50, quotation at 148).    For the temporal priority of Virgil’s Eclogues to Horace’s Epodes, see Bruno Snell, ‘Die 16. Epode von Horaz und Vergils 4. Ekloge’, Hermes 73 (1938), 237–42; L.C. Watson, A Commentary on Horace’s Epodes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ludwig Bernays, ‘Zur Prioritat der 4. Ekloge Vergils gegenüber der Epode 16 des Horaz’, Museum Helveticum 63.1 (2006), 19–22. For the converse argument that Horace’s poem is earlier than Virgil’s, see Wendell Clausen, A Commentary on Virgil’s Eclogues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).    Compare for instance Virgil, Eclogues IV.21–2 with Horace, Epodes XVI.49–50; Ecl. IV.24–5 with Ep. XVI.52; Ecl. IV.30 with Ep. XVI.47; Ecl. IV.40 with Ep. XVI.44.

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which forms part of Virgil’s miraculous Golden Age becomes in Horace an absurd impossibility, measuring the extent of his resolution to forsake Rome forever: But you must sweare first to return againe, When … new Lust weds Antipathies, Making the Hynde stoop to the Tygers love, … And credulous Heards, t’affect the Lyons side. (25–6, 30–31, 33)

Horace’s poem ends, in the lines quoted earlier, identifying the mythical isles as the only remnant of the Golden Age in a world where ‘Now Iron raignes’ (65). The very Jove whose descendent in Virgil will bring back the Golden Age is here named only for having first ‘with brasse the Golden-Age infected’ (63). Like Horace, Fanshawe in his equivalent lines emphasizes Jove’s responsibility for the end of the Golden Age in the world at large, explaining more specifically that it was through his wrongful seizing of power, ‘when great Jove usurping Reigne / From the plagu’d world did [Peace] exile’ (41–2). The abandonment of a corrupt homeland ironically advised in Horace’s epode was a course of action to which many Protestant English men and women actually resorted from 1630 on. Many supporters of international Protestantism came to view England after Charles’s withdrawal from the war very much as Epode 16 presents Rome, despairing of it as irreversibly given over to an Iron Age and turning to America as the blessed isle where a better state could be created. 1630 was the year in which John Winthrop sailed to New England and founded Boston. Commiserating with Elizabeth of Bohemia in the wake of Charles’s withdrawal, Viscount Dorchester wrote of ‘our godly people, who, weary of this wicked land, are gone (man, woman and child) in great numbers to seek new worlds’.10 Fanshawe’s echoes of Horace’s sixteenth epode could very possibly have prompted early readers of the poem in manuscript to think of these expeditions, and the condemnation of Caroline England which they embodied. But in context the allusions to Horace evoke much more strongly (and with the full force of Horace’s irony) two less constructive withdrawals: Charles’s abandonment of fellow Protestants in war-torn Europe, and the withdrawal from public affairs and active pursuit of the common weal which Charles forced on the English gentry during the Personal Rule. While on the surface, then, Fanshawe seems to depict Charles’s peace as a returned Golden Age, the gentry residing on their private estates as shepherds who, like Tityrus, owe a debt of gratitude and even divine worship to the King, the subtext presents a darker picture of England in a state of unrest already prompting comparison to civil war, and a population excluded from public life, forced to relinquish traditional duties and rights and to become passive subjects of an absolute monarch. The gentry’s retirement into the country and private life, 10   Quoted in Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 64.

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reflecting the wider retirement from negotium imposed by Charles on his subjects in a move to replace civil strife with absolute rule, is implicitly paralleled with the ostentatiously irresponsible and unpatriotic abandonment of the res publica in the face of civil war in Horace’s epode, an abdication of the citizen’s duty to remain and to work for the public good. Beneath the more obvious contrast between an external Iron Age in war-torn Europe and the Golden Age in peaceful England lies the Horatian hint of an internal Iron Age dominating the seat of power in England, contrasted with a fool’s paradise in the countryside, where a disempowered gentry must bury its head in private affairs, abdicating civic responsibility and learning simply to praise its ruler. Charles’s imposition of this enforced otium on his subjects is aligned with Augustus’ unjust deprivation of Meliboeus’ rights and property to consolidate his personal power. The ode ends with eight stanzas describing to the ladies the pleasures of the countryside, which, they are assured, are equivalent to, but ‘more solid’ than, ‘all Town-toyes’. The most striking aspect of the stanzas is the quaintness of their conventional poetic artifice, particularly when considered as answering the opening eight stanzas on the horrors of the current wars. Yet here too there are darker notes – an insistent, though muted, ground bass of ‘blood’11 – and a suggestion that the enforced pastoral otium, whose rhetorical correlative and consequence is this aestheticizing whimsy, is itself the origin of a threatening violence. We begin with the height of conventional artifice, as Fanshawe assures the ladies that amatory entertainment is also available in the country: Nor Cupid there lesse bloud doth spill, But heads his shafts with chaster love, Not feathered with a Sparrowes quill, But of a Dove. (109–12)

As the contrast is drawn between virtuous love in the country and lustful love in the city, between the faithful dove and the promiscuous sparrow, the dove’s association with peace also neutralizes the connotation of violence in the conventional trope of love as war and bloodshed. Yet that violence lingers, and becomes more real, in the next stanza – embedded in the landscape, though still at the remove of mythical allusion: There you shall hear the Nightingale (The harmelesse Syren of the wood) How prettily she tells a tale Of rape and blood. (113–16)

11   Patterson notes ‘in the last section … the word blood appears four times, in a way that makes the mental act of washing one’s hands more difficult to perform than might have been possible without the poem’ (Pastoral and Ideology, p. 148).

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Though aestheticized into a pretty tale, the myth of Philomel still tells ‘of rape and blood’, a disturbingly physical instance of the amatory violence which in Cupid’s wars was purely metaphorical. We might remember that, in the story recounted by Ovid in Book VI of the Metamorphoses, Philomel was sequestered in a wood by her brother-in-law Tereus so that he could rape her, cutting out her tongue to prevent her from publicly accusing him of the crime. The myth is an image of enforced rural retirement and the denial of free speech as the most brutal disempowerment and victimization. There is an uncanny resemblance between what the dark undercurrents of Fanshawe’s poem suggest may be happening to Charles’s subjects, what happens to Philomel in the myth, and what is happening to that myth rhetorically in this stanza. Fanshawe’s rendering, initially at least, aestheticizes and trivializes Philomel’s suffering, reducing it to a pretty tale and decorative poetic allusion, whose aesthetic function is analogous to the innocent pastoral pleasures awaiting the ladies on their country estates. Until the final line reminds us of the myth’s violent content, it is, as it were, disarmed of its power to shock and accuse, and transformed into a pure object of pleasurable consumption. The transformation of the myth thus continues the process of aestheticization and disempowerment to which Philomel herself is subjected. Fanshawe’s description of the nightingale as a ‘harmelesse Syren’ makes Philomel’s subsequent metamorphosis an extension and continuation of the effects of Tereus’ abuse, which reifies her as an object of sexual attraction and attempts to render her harmless through mutilation. In Fanshawe’s hands the myth too becomes an apparently ‘harmelesse Syren’ of sorts, except of course that we are not allowed to rest unreflectingly in this reading of her tale, for the final line pithily reminds us of the violence being elided. Once again a chance anticipation of Carew’s ‘In answer of an Elegiacall Letter’ is suggestive. ‘These harmless pastimes let my Townshend sing / To rural tunes’, Carew urges, wishfully evoking a poet who will cease to create trouble with overtly political song and instead resemble Fanshawe’s ‘harmlesse Syren’. Fanshawe’s more complex and ambivalent poem toys with such ‘harmless’, whimsical poetry only to expose the violent suppression involved in its production. The following stanzas describe ‘The Common-wealth of Flowres int’s pride’: The Lillie (Queene) the (Royall) Rose, The Gillyflowre (Prince of the bloud) The (Courtyer) Tulip (gay in clothes) The (Regall) Budd The Vilet (purple Senatour) How they doe mock the pompe of State, And all that at the surly doore Of great ones waite. (121–8)

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The stance struck is one of fashionable Tacitean scepticism about political life, mixed with Senecan Stoicism, which connects virtuous self-control, freedom from the influence of the passions, with retirement from the vanity of worldly affairs into private life, the vita contemplativa.12 We might be reminded of the garden setting of Justus Lipsius’ On Constancy. The tone of courtly whimsy is comparable to poems like Herrick’s ‘The Parliament of Flowers to Julia’ (H-11). Yet the aspects of state affairs specifically targeted in this whimsical little satire are rather precisely topical, and uncomfortably closely related to the command which the Ode is ostensibly praising. In the same year as the Proclamation commanding the gentry back to their country estates, Charles issued a set of regulations strictly controlling access to the court, especially the Privy Chamber, the Presence Chamber, and the royal bedchamber.13 1630, then, marks an increase in the formality and ‘pompe of State’ at Charles’s court, and in the numbers excluded by ‘surly doors’ from the site of politics under the Personal Rule – an exclusion mirroring in little the exclusion of the gentry from London and from Parliament, and in the same spirit. Beneath a surface which seems gently and conventionally to mock involvement in politics lies a more serious criticism precisely of the way in which Charles’s subjects are currently being denied such involvement. Once again, a deliberately suspect use of rhetoric contributes to the effect. The quaintness of the prosopopoeia, reducing the ‘Senatour’ (paradigm of a mixed constitution and participatory government in the style of the Roman republic) to a flower, is disturbingly reminiscent of the dehumanizing metamorphosis of Philomel in the earlier stanza, suggesting that the Senecan celebration of otium and the retired life is complicit with such violent subjection. If this seems oversubtle, it is supported by the ambiguity of the ensuing, final stanzas: Plant Trees you may, and see them shoote Up with your Children, to be serv’d To your cleane boards, and the fair’st Fruite To be preserv’d: And learne to use their severall gummes, “T’is innocence in the sweet blood “Of Cherryes, Apricocks and Plummes “To be imbru’d. (129–36)

Is it only the fruits of the trees which are ‘to be serv’d’ to the gentry’s tables, or is it also their children? What at first glance seems only a grotesque clumsiness of expression in that first stanza makes horrible sense in terms of the reading I have been suggesting. The analogy between trees and children again perceptibly 12   J.H.M. Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 199–225. 13   Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, p. 71.

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follows from but makes more literal the plant-personifications of the preceding stanzas, the whimsical trope developing this time into what seems a conventional and sensible comparison between fertility and growth in humans and in plants. The outrageous implication that the identification might be carried so far as to result in cannibalism strikes us at first as a mistake – although the final stanza uncomfortably reinforces the identification of bloodshed and jam-making, even as it draws its insistent and unnecessary distinction. Yet it represents the return of the repressed, the vengeful sequel to violence held off in the Nightingale stanza. For of course, in the myth and in Ovid’s poem, Philomel turned out to be no harmless siren after all, and her singularly terrible revenge took precisely this form, as she and her sister Procne killed Procne’s children by Tereus and served them up at their unwitting father’s table.14 The imposition of pastoral otium is dehumanizing, and to comply with it is not only to turn oneself into some passive plant or beast, but to bequeath that status to future generations, parents violating their children’s rights so that they themselves may ‘rowle … in envy’d leasure’ (61). Senecan or Tityrean content in retirement is made to resemble not only sensual indulgence but monstrous appetite. (One might catch faint overtones of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss, particularly the wilful metamorphosis of the sensual Grill and hints of cannibalism; such an association would not be surprising given the role Spenser will play later in the volume.)15 The act of violence to which the monarch’s exclusion of the populace from government is implicitly compared leaves arrears only to be settled by further violence, and there is a sense that the threatened revenge will go beyond the author of that exclusion and swallow a generation in general destruction.16 We are back with the shadow of civil war cast by the allusions to Virgil and Horace. Those lines on trees and children also, as Patterson points out, constitute a final echo of Virgil’s Eclogues, combining Meliboeus’ bitter insere nunc, Meliboee, piros, pone ordine vites (‘Plant your pears now, Meliboeus, and arrange your vines in rows’, I.73) and the fragment of a song by Menalcas, quoted by Lycidas in Eclogue IX, insere, Daphnis, piros; carpent tua poma nepotes (‘Plant your pears, Daphnis; your grandchildren will reap the fruit’, IX.50). Patterson thinks that 14   Fanshawe’s evocation of such a particular culinary procedure as the making of preserves seems reminiscent of the grotesque specificity with which Ovid’s account lingers over the cooking implements used by Procne and Philomel – the copper pots and spits (Ovid, Metamorphoses VI.644–51). 15   Grill ‘hath so soone forgot the excellence / Of his creation, when he life began, / That now he chooseth, with vile difference, / To be a beast, and lack intelligence’ (The Faerie Queene II.xii.87); for hints of cannibalism see xii.64.9 and 73.4–7. (The gates of the Bower also depict the story of Medea, whose revenge against her husband takes the same form as Philomel and Procne’s, though Spenser doesn’t mention that particular incident here.) 16   Though I do not want to press the analogy, the resemblance to the bloody harvest in the offing at the end of Zola’s Germinal is a measure of how far this takes us from the conventional ‘royalist propaganda’ reading.

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Fanshawe ‘denies both the sarcasm of the first and the uncertain status of the second’, flattening out the ‘tensions and anxieties’ hinted at by Fanshawe’s echoes of Meliboeus into something she presumably sees as something more nearly approaching Tityrus’ praise.17 In my reading, Fanshawe imbues these lines with even more disturbing overtones. But there is more to be said about that echo of the ninth eclogue. The tone of Lycidas’ line is in fact more than ‘uncertain’: it is an ironic overturning of the optimism and security embodied by Tityrus in the first eclogue. Eclogue IX is spoken by two shepherds who share Meliboeus’ fate, as they journey into exile. Lycidas is surprised to find that Moeris too is leaving his lands, for he had heard news that Menalcas’ versified plea had found favour, saving Moeris’ farm as well as his own. Menalcas, that is, had obtained the same patronage enjoyed by Tityrus in Eclogue I – and indeed, like Tityrus, Menalcas is traditionally identified with Virgil, on the basis that he apparently names himself as the author of the first two eclogues at the end of Eclogue V. Tityrus and Menalcas are evidently separate people (in lines quoted by Lycidas, Menalcas asks Tityrus to take care of his goats while he is away). In so far as both are related to Virgil, they seem to represent his different possible fates. For, Moeris explains to Lycidas, Menalcas’ hopes of patronage have been dashed, and his very life threatened. In place of the first eclogue’s vision of the harmonious reciprocity between poet and patron, the lesson Moeris draws from his experience is the political inefficacy of song: sed carmina tantum nostra valent, Lycida, tela inter Martia, quantum Chaonias dicunt aquila veniente columbas. [‘But our songs are of as much use among the weapons of Mars, Lycidas, as the Chaonian doves when an eagle approaches’, IX.12–14.]

Moeris’ simile may lurk beneath Fanshawe’s ‘Dove’ whose quills feather Cupid’s arrow, his ‘harmelesse’ nightingale and ‘lyrricke Larke’, those dehumanized and aestheticized denizens of the countryside who reflect the dangers inherent in the passivity being forced on Charles’s subjects. Insere, Daphni, piros is the last line of a fragment by Menalcas, quoted by Lycidas, offering an example of the kind of poetry which has proved so useless: it is a song praising the deified Julius Caesar, culminating in this assurance of protected property-rights, representing the same transaction as Tityrus’ worship of Octavian in the first eclogue. The trust on which Tityrus’ brand of ruler-worship rested has proved hollow. Mere pastoral poetry of praise, and the otiose life of subjection to an absolute monarch which it represents, offers insufficient protection from possible oppression, and insufficient safeguard against civil unrest and the violence it brings. But Fanshawe’s poetry will not be the ineffective Tityrean pastoral of praise which accompanies absolute rule over passive subjects. The Ode is as near as   Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, p. 149.

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Fanshawe ever comes to such poetry, and though some may think my reading of that poem excessively dark, I hope I have shown that it is at least more ambivalent than the ‘ardent royalist’ propaganda as which it is usually read.18 Those ambivalent and cautionary notes are amplified in other poems, balancing praise with blame and warning, in writing which aims to educate the future ruler and shape his political ideas, through the political lessons of history and moral lessons of civic virtue. The role which Fanshawe assumes as a poet is continuous with his political office as Secretary of War to the Prince of Wales, reflecting traditional humanist ideas of the writer as counsellor, actively serving the state. The content and tone of his poems are also often recognizably humanist, with their emphasis on the Ciceronian ideas of active virtue and the public good, on weighing both sides of an argument, on reading classical texts in their historical context and on understanding the political lessons of classical history. The volume as a whole fits into the ‘education of a prince’ genre which had emerged as the distinctive form of English humanism in the sixteenth century.19 This humanist pattern of thought is traditionally associated with mixed or limited monarchy, where an educated elite bears a share of government, and the monarch submits to be guided by counsel – a conception very far from the Stuart insistence on prerogative and Divine Right. As we shall see, it is with the former, humanist political ideal that Fanshawe’s volume aligns itself, advocating a tempering of the absolutist ambitions which had led to the mid-century crisis. This too shows continuity with his role in office. Several recent historians have pointed out that the counsellors chosen by the King and his advisors to make up the Council of the West represented the moderates on the royalist side, ‘that body of royalist opinion which had favoured the conclusion of a negotiated peace, preserving the reforms of 1640–1, as the happiest end to the war’.20 Fanshawe’s friend Sir Edward Hyde, one of the Council’s most powerful members, had indeed been on the side of the opposition in the early days of the Long Parliament, shifting to the King only in 1641. Fanshawe thus shares political ideas and concerns about Stuart absolutist tendencies with many supporters of Parliament, and several poems clearly suggest that responsibility for the Civil War lies with Charles I. The 1648 edition of Il Pastor Fido is an attempt to fashion a more acceptable monarch, in a double sense. It strives to mould the young Prince, its dedicatee, into a just king who will compromise – even agree – with his opponents, and, courting the public sphere in a way quite different from Herrick, it offers to a wider public a persuasive image of the virtuous and moderate king Prince Charles promises to become.   Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds), Literature and the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 4. 19   Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, pp. 46–7, 167–70, 296–300. 20   Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 8; see also Hutton, ‘The Structure of the Royalist Party, 1642–1646’, The Historical Journal 24 (1981), 553–69. 18

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Chapter 6

Humanist Counsel, the Body Politic and the Ship of State The dedicatory epistle ‘To the most Illustrious and most hopefull PRINCE CHARLES, Prince of WALES’ is suggestive both of Fanshawe’s humanist conception of his role as poet and of his politics. Guarini is portrayed very much in the shape of the humanist intellectual, applying his learning to the good of the state by counselling a ruler in virtue, apparently with extremely beneficial results. A ‘Scholer’ and veteran of ‘Travell, Universities, and Courts’, he has infused his pastoral tragicomedy with all the wisdom of his learning and experience, His scope therein being, to make a Dernier effort (as the French call it) or generall muster of the whole forces of his Wit before his Princely Master (the then Duke of Savoy) and withall to insinuate and bring into that awfull presence, in their masking clothes (as I may say) such principles of Vertue, and knowledge Morall, Politicall, and Theologicall, as (peradventure) in their own grave habits, out of the mouths of severer Instructers, would not have found so easie admittance to a Prince in the heat of his youth, heightned with the pomp and flatteries that attend on Greatnesse, and with the glorious triumphs and felicities of his royall Nuptials then celebrating: though this was the same Charles Emanuel who proved afterwards in his riper yeers, by his Councels and by his Prowesse, the Bulwark indeed of Italie, against the puissance of the great Henry of France himself, your Highnesse most renowned Grandfather.

The efficacy of the mature ‘Councels’ of the ‘Princely Master’ seems a direct result of the sound counsels of his pleasant ‘Instructer’ in his youth, a balance and confluence of ducal authority with moral and intellectual authority tending to the protection of the state. Together with the twentieth edition of his Pastor Fido in 1602, Guarini had published the Compendio della poesia tragicomica, an essay defending his new genre as a valid extension of Aristotelian poetic theory. Though Fanshawe does not translate it, he would surely have read it. Among the arguments Guarini puts

   Walter F. Staton, Jr and William E. Simeone (eds), A Critical Edition of Sir Richard Fanshawe’s 1647 Translation of Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 3.

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forward for the value of mixed or tempered forms like his tragicomedy is a recurrent analogy with the mixed constitution recommended in Aristotle’s Politics. I speak of the forms that spring from the diversity of these two [sorts of people, the great and the humble], that is, the power of the few and the power of the masses. Are not these two species of government very different among themselves? If we believe Aristotle, or even pure reason, there is no doubt of it; yet the Philosopher puts them together and makes of them the mixture of the republic … If these, that work practically, can be mixed, cannot the art of poetry do it in those things that are done for sport? In an oligarchy do not the few alone govern? And in popular states the plebs? Are not these contraries? Yet they join in a single mixed form. Is not tragedy an imitation of the great and comedy an imitation of the humble? Are not the humble opposite to the great? Why cannot poetry make the mixture if politics can do it?

The distribution of power between the classes in a mixed constitution is compared with the mingling of tragedy and comedy, among whose distinguishing features are that they are concerned with great and low persons respectively. The artistic excesses which this mingling avoids, neither ‘inflict[ing] on us atrocious events and horrible and inhumane sights, such as blood and deaths’, nor ‘caus[ing] us to be so relaxed in laughter that we sin against the modesty and decorum of a well-bred man’, suggest the excesses to which the pure forms of monarchy and democracy, in an unmixed state, are prone – rule by force and fear in the service of private interests rather than the public good on one hand, and complete disregard for dignity and degree in extreme democracy, which according to Aristotle also amounts to tyranny, of the lesser over the great. Tragicomedy, by contrast, ‘can delight all dispositions, all ages, and all tastes’, and thus resembles Aristotle’s ideal mixed constitution, whose permanence depends on its pleasing all classes. The excesses of monarchical government are illustrated in Carino’s narrative of his experiences at the court of Argos in Act V, scene i of Il Pastor Fido, where Guarini ‘personates himself under the name of old Carino’, as Fanshawe puts    Aristotle argues that ‘the constitution is better which is made up of more numerous elements’, at II.vi (tr. Benjamin Jowett). Guarini refers to Aristotle’s Politics almost as often as to the Poetics: one wonders whether he was influenced by Mazzoni’s theory that the Poetics was intended as a ninth book of the Politics, treating ‘the civil faculty at rest’ as the earlier books had treated ‘the civil faculty in action’ (Jacopo Mazzoni, Discourse in Defense of the Comedy, tr. Allan Gilbert, in Gilbert [ed.], Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden [Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1982], p. 375).    Giambattista Guarini, The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, tr. Allan Gilbert, in Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, p. 511. Aristotle also draws an analogy between the dramatic genres and different forms of government, Politics III.iii.    Gilbert, Literary Criticism, p. 512. ‘For a constitution to be permanent, all the parts of a state must wish that it should exist and the same arrangements be maintained’, Politics II.ix.

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it in the epistle to Charles. Carino contrasts Pisa, where he served Egon, who resembled Apollo by being decked with Virtue as well as with the bays and purple of rule, and Argos, where he worshipped ‘An earthly god’, and laboured for no reward in a ‘hard captivity’ which makes him long for ‘sweet freedome’: And as the Delphick iron, which is turnd Now to Heroick, now Mechanick use, I fear’d no danger, did no pains refuse, Was all things, and was nothing; chang’d my hair, Condition, custome, thoughts, and life, but ne’re Could change my fortune. (4336–41)

These demands and failure of patronage reflect the dissembling, opportunism and dishonesty he finds among courtiers, dispelling his former illusions: I thought by how much more in Princes Courts Men did excell in Titles and Supports, So much the more obliging they would be (The best enamell of Nobility). But now the contrary by proof I’ve seen: Courtiers in name, and Courteous in their meen They are; but in their actions I could spie Not the least spark or drachm of Courtesie. (4348–55)

All values are overturned ‘By that vast thirst of Riches’, so that ‘That which elsewhere is vertue, is vice there’ (4385, 4369). It is not entirely clear in this long satirical passage that Carino refers only to Argos and not to Pisa too – that is, how far the virtuous individual ruler can mitigate the abuses to which the institution of monarchical and courtly rule is prone. That simile of the ‘Delphick iron’ used by Carino to describe his virtual slavery at Argos is also taken from Aristotle’s Politics, where Aristotle is distinguishing between master–slave and husband–wife relationships, the starting point of his argument that there are different forms of government, and the authority of a ruler is not necessarily the same as that of a master over a slave: Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use … But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female.

  Aristotle, Politics, tr. Benjamin Jowett, I.ii (1252b15).



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Later he observes that the husband’s rule over his wife is ‘constitutional’ (his term for a participatory mixed or democratic state) rather than ‘royal’, because both are free (I.xii), and that the barbarians favour absolute monarchy because they are slaves by nature (III.xiv). By comparing himself to ‘the Delphick iron’ in his service at Argos, Carino is drawing attention to the way in which Argos’ tyrannical ruler collapses this distinction. Where Nature, and natural law, distinguishes between those who should be ruled ‘constitutionally’ on one hand and natural slaves who are appropriately subject to absolute monarchy on the other, Argos makes all into slaves. The relationship between part and whole is crucial both to Aristotle’s definition of the constitutional state and to Guarini’s definition of tragicomedy. Aristotle finds within the microcosm of the individual images both of a despotical rule and a constitutional rule, ‘for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule’ (‘royal’ being Aristotle’s term for the rule of one chosen on the basis of merit, rather than heredity, wealth or power). Where there is such a difference in kind between men as there is between soul and body, ‘the lower sort are by nature slaves’, and a despotical rule is therefore appropriate: as possessions, slaves can have no interest apart from their master’s interest, ‘for the interests of part and whole, of body and soul, are the same, and the slave is a part of the master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame’. (This is why the barbarians, as natural slaves, live under absolute monarchy.) But among free men, between whom there is not this great difference, as all possess reason, constitutional rule is appropriate, and the interests of all are to be protected. Aristotle leaves no doubt as to which he prefers: ‘governments which have a regard to the common interest are constituted in accordance with strict principles of justice, and are therefore true forms; but those which regard only the interest of the rulers are all defective and perverted forms, for they are despotic, whereas a state is a community of freemen.’ The precedence of the public good, identified as ‘justice … the bond of men in states’, is also described using the microcosm analogy: the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand … [T]he individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is self-sufficing, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state.

           

Ibid., I.v. Ibid., I.vi. Ibid., III.vi. Ibid., I.ii.

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So under despotism, the political equivalent of slavery, the subject is effectively a part of his master or ruler, in that his interest is not considered, but only the interest of the ruler; but in a constitution of free men individuals are parts of a different whole, the state, ordered with regard to the public interest and the principle of justice. It is in this latter sense of balanced interdependence and the unity of the public good that Guarini compares the relation of parts to whole in his ‘mixed’ genre to Aristotle’s mixed constitution. It is a truly mixed form, making up a new unity, rather than merely a ‘grafted’ or ‘double’ form, because the comic and tragic parts cannot ‘be disjoined without doing injury to either’.10 Invoking the distinction between mixed and compound forms in Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, Guarini also uses the analogy of a human body to explain this: true tragicomedy resembles the Hermaphrodite, in which the male and female parts cannot be separated without injury, while a play in which a tragedy was merely grafted onto a comedy would resemble instead a pair of embracing, but separable, lovers.11 The tempering of the two forms in the new mixed form, which he compares to Aristotle’s tempering of monarchy and democracy, he will also later compare to the tempering of the humours in the human body. Returning to Fanshawe’s epistle, the next paragraph describes a perspective painting in Paris, which seen from one angle depicts ‘a multitude of little faces’, but from another ‘there appears onely a single portrait in great of the Chancellor himself’ – another version of the political microcosm. Lois Potter thinks it ‘obvious’ that the painting ‘symbolizes, not the tempering of monarchy and democracy which Guarini describes, but the absolutism which absorbs and transcends all the power of its separate components’.12 This emphasis on hierarchy is of course a familiar application of the microcosm in the Renaissance: Nicholas Breton, for instance, argues that ‘God made all the parts of the bodie for the Soule, … and all the Subiects in a kingdome to serue their King’, a use recalling Aristotle’s image of despotic rule.13 But neither of the two interpretations offered by Fanshawe resembles this. Fanshawe suggests first that the painter means to intimate ‘that in him [the Chancellor] alone are contracted the Vertues of all his Progenitors’.14 Though this would constitute a justification of an individual’s power, and loosely allude to the hereditary principle, it would only be by asserting that in him, any inherited status is coupled with personal merit, the very argument implying that such is not always or necessarily the case, and hinting at the meritocratic principle,

  Gilbert, Literary Criticism, p. 507.   Guarini, Il pastor fido e il compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed. Gioachino

10 11

Brognoligo (Bari: Laterza, 1914), pp. 224–5. 12   Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 87. 13   Nicholas Breton, A Murmurer (London: 1607), Dvir. For Aristotle, slaves, as possessions, are ‘instruments’ (Politics I.iv). 14   Staton and Simeone (eds), A Critical Edition …, p. 4.

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that ability or virtue is a relevant factor in appointment to office. Alternatively, Fanshawe suggests, the painter may be perchance by a more subtile Philosophy demonstrating, how the Body Politick is composed of many naturall ones; and how each of these, intire in it self, and consisting of head, eyes, hands, and the like, is a head, an eye, or a hand in the other: as also, that mens Privates cannot be preserved, if the Publick be destroyed, no more then those little Pictures could remain in being, if the great one were defaced: which great one likewise was first and chiefest in the Painters designe, and that for which all the rest were made.15

We have here the sense of instrumentality invoked by Breton, but used very differently. The whole for the sake of which the parts are created, the ‘single portrait in great’, here no longer represents the individual potentate, but ‘the Body Politick’, ‘the Publick’ as opposed to men’s private interests. Rather than Potter’s ‘absolutism’, Fanshawe is articulating the same idea of the primacy of the public interest which we saw in the Politics. Even the Prince himself is in this sense a ‘part’ rather than a ‘whole’, dependent on and created for the public good which transcends all private interests. At the end of the letter, drawing the analogy between the troubled state of Arcadia in the play and England’s Civil War, Fanshawe claims he has undertaken the translation ‘to occasion your Highness, even in your recreations, to reflect upon the sad Originall’, the plight of England, combining serious thought about the public good with the pursuit of pleasure, and hopes to see the Prince ‘a great Instrument’ of a happy conclusion to the war. As in his use of the microcosm image in the passage on the perspective painting, the Prince or his private good is here not the end served by his instrumental subjects, created for him, not the whole to which they are related as parts, but is himself, like them, merely an instrument serving the end of the common weal. The humanist didacticism underlying the recreative nature of Fanshawe’s translation of Il Pastor Fido exploits this sense of instrumentality: the pleasure the Prince may derive from the entertainment as a private person is only a means to what for Fanshawe is the true end of poetry, the education which will fit him to govern well, serving his country’s good. Another common trope structured by ideas about the relation of part to whole within the state receives a similar inflection in the poem ‘On His Majesties Great Shippe’. Written to celebrate the building of the exorbitantly expensive and impractically vast flagship, the Sovereign of the Seas, which had largely occasioned the bitter disputes over Charles’s levying of unconstitutional ‘Ship Money’ taxes, the poem seems scarcely to fit the diplomatic wooing of moderate parliamentarians over to the cause of the Prince, in the hope that he will prove a more temperate and moderate ruler than his father, which informs the rest of the volume: it seems irrevocably wedded to the old Charles and his most unpopular   Ibid., p. 4.

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policies. But Fanshawe turns his subject into a version of the familiar trope of the ‘ship of state’ which suggests a view of the monarch’s role quite at odds with Charles’s behaviour. The passage in question is where Fanshawe speculates as to what name will be given to the ‘almost finisht’ ship. Fanshawe passes swiftly through various possible names, to which we shall return, before focusing on the ship’s figurehead, which represents the tenth-century King Edgar, deciding that the ship will surely be named after him. Edgar was known to contemporary historians particularly for his ‘great nauie of ships’ (Stow gives a figure of 3600)16 and for his ‘absolute monarchie’ over a united kingdom, not only ruling the whole of England, but also receiving homage from the kings of Wales, Scotland and the islands.17 After praising Edgar’s naval power for protecting the kingdom, Fanshawe proceeds to evoke another nautical tableau, the famous scene in which Edgar, receiving homage from eight subject kings (‘sev’n vassall Kings’ in Fanshawe [39]) at Chester, made them row his barge along the Dee. The image most obviously and traditionally symbolizes Edgar’s imperial rule, ‘shewing thereby’, as Holinshed puts it, ‘his princelie prerogatiue and roiall magnificence, in that he might vse the seruice of so many kings that were his subiects’.18 One can easily see how the pomp and ceremony of such an image would appeal to Charles I. But Fanshawe transforms it into an image of the ‘ship of state’, and his version of the conventional trope has very different political connotations, emphasizing the vita activa and officium so important to humanist conceptions of the state. It did both seale his clayme, and represent The image of a perfect Government, Where, sitting at the helme the Monarch steeres, The Oares are labour’d by the active Peeres, And all the People distributed are In other offices of Peace and Warre. Whilst he that in the Common-wealth doth beare No calling, is the Sea-sick passenger. (49–56)

Where Edgar proclaimed his ‘princelie prerogatiue’ by transforming subject kings into galley-slaves, Fanshawe transforms the ‘vassall Kings’ into ‘active Peeres’, the emphasis shifted from servitude to participation in the management of the country, to which the commoners also contribute in their various ‘offices of Peace and Warre’. This is a view of the state as a shared project and a ‘Common-wealth’ in the full sense, the public weal. The peers (and perhaps even the commoners) of 16   Raphael Holinshed, The first and second volumes of Chronicles (London, 1587), vol. II, p. 159; John Stow, The chronicles of England from Brute vnto this present yeare of Christ 1580 (London, 1580), p. 133. 17   John Speed, The history of Great Britaine (London, 1611), p. 369. 18   Holinshed, Chronicles, vol. II, p. 159.

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this ideal state could indeed be said to acquire a little of the lustre of royalty for themselves, because they are presented as being figured by the subject kings who row Edgar’s barge. The transition from Fanshawe’s suggested names for the ship to this little allegory has political implications similar to those we found in Fanshawe’s use of the trope of the body politic. The commonplace metaphor of the ship of state here made explicit reflects backwards over the poem, so that we can now see it was already implied at the beginning of the passage, where the vast bulk of the ship makes it comparable to the island nation which has built it: Then tell me, thou, that seemst a floating Isle, What name dost thou aspire to, what great stile, Which in a few gold letters may comprize All beauty, and presage thee victories? Since thou art so much greater than the Prince Which to thee only sayes; I serve, and since The meaner Charles takes the Kings name in vaine, What canst thou be except The Charlemaigne? Or will thy Royall Master Christen thee The Edgar, to revive his memorie Who so long since ore Land and Ocean raign’d …? (25–35)

The ship is compared to the already existing, smaller warships, the Prince Royal, built in 1610, and the even smaller Charles, built in 1632. Since a greater name is required for the greater ship, that of the emperor Charlemagne strikes Fanshawe as one possibility, before he proceeds to his final choice of Edgar. The implication that both King Charles and Prince Charles are lesser figures than the first Holy Roman Emperor is clear, and hardly an insult; but it is also implied that they are also inferior to the Anglo-Saxon Edgar. This is a little more disturbing, and may shadowily anticipate the image of those other royal figures whose inferiority to Edgar is about to be pointed out – the ‘vassall Kings’ at Edgar’s feet in line 39. I shall consider the implications of this in a moment. There is also, however, a degree of slippage between the older ships and their royal namesakes, creating a fruitful ambiguity in the passage. The Prince Royal’s imagined submission to the new flagship with the word ‘I serve’ wittily alludes to Prince Charles’s motto as the Prince of Wales: Ich dien. In the light of the already subliminally activated commonplace trope of the ship of state, it is not only that the new ship is greater than the ship called the Prince Royal, but also that the ship of state is greater than Prince Charles, who to his country ‘only sayes; I serve’. The possible implications of this slippage in the next line are even more surprising. On the surface, ‘The meaner Charles takes the Kings name in vain’ seems flattering to Charles I, suggesting that the smaller ship is unworthy of its glorious namesake. But a possible alternative reading would go something like this: ‘Charles I, a meaner Charles than his son the Prince of Wales, abuses or does

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not deserve his title of King.’ (The implication is perhaps even stronger in the variant reading of this line in some manuscripts: ‘The meaner Charles usurpes our Soveraigne’s Name.’)19 At the same time, of course, this Charles is not only meaner than the Prince, but also – like the Prince – meaner than the state which the ship represents. What we effectively see in the consideration and dismissal of the royal names for the ship in lines 29–32 is a rejection of the idea that the good of the country can be either subordinated to or identified with the good of the reigning or expectant monarch. The ship of state is independent of and greater than Prince or King, who exist only to serve it. As a consequence of these implications in the earlier lines, the same slippage happens in reverse in the passage on Edgar. The subjection of the ‘vassall kings’ at the oars of Edgar’s barge now seems to symbolize not the ‘absolute monarchie’ of the supreme King Edgar and of future kings who might wish to be compared to him, but rather the authority of the commonwealth as a whole, the ship of state imaged in the physical ship which may be named The Edgar, over its own monarchs. Charles I and his son, then, are implicitly aligned with the ‘vassall Kings’, and therefore also with the ‘active Peeres’ labouring at the oars in the allegorical interpretation of the Chester vignette in line 52, their part in government shrinking from absolute rule to participation in the common endeavour on something approaching an equal footing with their subjects. In the light of all this, even the apparently hyperbolical panegyric of the poem’s conclusion may take on a more ambivalent colouring, especially for readers of the printed edition in the climate of 1648. Fantasizing some future apotheosis as the only fitting end for the great ship, Fanshawe imagines it forming a new constellation, and concludes, ‘So Charles his Shipp shall quite Ecclipse his Wayne’ (110). The witty surface point is that there is already a constellation which might appear to be named in Charles’s honour, Charles’s Wain (the Plough), but this will outshine it. But, especially in 1648, it must have been tempting to hear instead a reference to Charles’s wane, his fall from power (as in the punning title of a 1644 pamphlet, The Great Eclipse of the Sun, or Charles His Waine). The line then becomes a reminder that the ship of state, England, will survive her King’s fall and possibly imminent death, and that the continuing good of the commonwealth quite eclipses that event in importance.

19   British Library MS Egerton 2982, Bodleian MS Wood F 34; see p. 74 of Davidson’s edition.

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Chapter 7

‘A Canto of the Progresse of Learning’: Spenser and the Decline of Humanist Counsel The ideas about the nature and extent of monarchical authority and the role of humanist counsel which we have glimpsed in the background of all this material are explored fully and explicitly in the longest original poem in the volume, ‘A Canto of the Progresse of Learning’. The canto is composed in the distinctive Spenserian stanza: nine lines with the complex interlocked rhyme scheme ababbcbcc, the first eight lines in pentameters with a concluding hexameter. The translation of Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid which follows towards the end of the volume thus forms a partner piece to this poem, as that too is rendered in Spenserian stanzas – a fact with interesting implications for Fanshawe’s reading of Virgil, and for his sense of the Roman poet’s relation to his patron Augustus, to which we shall come later. It is not only the stanza of the ‘Progress of Learning’ which is Spenserian, however. At the opening of the poem Fanshawe invokes not only his Muse but also ‘Spencers ghost’, and the poem is deeply concerned with themes ubiquitous in Spenser: the nobility of poetry, its divine origins and moral power, courtly corruption, and the failure of patronage. It is written in the familiar Spenserian mode of personification allegory, and in fact it becomes clear halfway through the poem that it is closely modelled on Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, the fragment printed as the conclusion to The Faerie Queene since 1609. The tone and subject matter of Fanshawe’s conspicuous imitation of the Mutabilitie Cantos make it evident that he reads Spenser’s fragment not, as most modern editors and critics have done, as a purely philosophical meditation on the problem of mutability in the sublunary sphere and on the relation of the temporal to the eternal, detached from contemporary political concerns yet still deeply conservative in its political implications. Rather, he clearly regards it as a bitterly ironic indictment of the abuses of monarchical power, of a piece with Spenser’s most scathing satirical passages on corruption at court in poems like Colin Clouts Come Home Againe.    For an example of the more usual philosophical and conservative reading of the Mutabilitie Cantos, see Sherman Hawkins, ‘Mutabilitie and the Cycle of the Months’, in William Nelson (ed.), Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), pp. 76–102. For sceptical and political readings more akin to what I argue is Fanshawe’s own, see my Spenser and Ovid (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 246–77; Elizabeth Fowler, ‘The Failure of Moral Philosophy in the Work of

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Incidentally, but interestingly, his allusions to Ovid suggest that he also recognizes the ways in which the Ovidianism of Spenser’s Cantos contributes to their satirical political programme. Fanshawe clearly sees Spenser’s poem, like his own, as embodying precisely the kind of humanist counsel through salutary criticism and moral guidance which the Progresse of Learning asserts the monarch must heed if he is to be anything other than a tyrant and usurper of true authority. Such a view of Elizabeth’s laureate poet seems in keeping with the nostalgic attitude towards Elizabeth’s reign often expressed by critics of Stuart absolutism. Thomas May, for example, a friend of Fanshawe’s who nevertheless took the other side in the Civil War, opens his History of the Parliament of England, which began November the third, MDCXL with a glowing account of ‘Queene Elizabeth, of glorious Memory’. He emphasizes her championship of the Protestant cause at home and abroad, and ‘the justice and prudence of her government, … making the right use of her Subjects hearts, hands and Purses in a Parliamentary way’. All this forms a foil to the disastrous reign of James, who failed to follow her example, weakly abandoned the cause of international Protestantism, ‘despised and abused’ parliaments, and formed ‘projects against the Lawes … to supply [his] expences, which were not small’. May even marks the accession of James with a quotation from Book I of Lucan’s Pharsalia (I.510–11), describing the panic in Rome as Julius Caesar marches towards it with his army, intending to rob the treasury and to seize power, implicitly comparing the exchange of Elizabeth’s rule for James’s with the death of Rome’s republican liberty. In what was perceived, at least retrospectively, Edmund Spenser’, Representations 51 (1995), 47–76; Andrew Hadfield, ‘The Trials of Jove: Spenser’s Allegory and the Mastery of the Irish’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal 2 (1996), 39–53; and Gordon Teskey, ‘Mutabilitie, Genealogy, and the Authority of Forms’, Representations 41 (1993), 104–22.    As John Watkins points out, Elizabeth was used as a ‘propagandistic icon’ during the civil wars not only by parliamentarians but also by royalists, who ‘associated her with strong assertions of her prerogative rights in the face of Parliamentary criticism’ and ‘with the notion of the monarch as a sacred person whose anointing distinguished him or her from ordinary mortals’ (‘Recollections of Elizabeth during the Civil Wars and Interregnum’, in Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 87–107; quotations at pp. 87–8). In the context of Fanshawe’s satirical poem, however, the evocation of the Elizabethan age is clearly in the spirit of the more familiar parliamentary nostalgia for Elizabeth as a willing proponent of limited monarchy.    Thomas May, The history of the Parliament of England, which began November the third, MDCXL with a short and necessary view of some precedent yeares (London, 1647), p. 1. On nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth in the Stuart era, particularly among Protestants, see also Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986).    Thomas May, The history of the Parliament of England, p. 3.    Ibid., p. 6.

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as Elizabeth’s ‘Parliamentary way’ of governing, her (relative) attentiveness to the wishes and opinions of her people expressed in Parliament, this somewhat idealized memory of the Tudor Queen embodies Fanshawe’s idea of a virtuous monarch willing to submit to the guidance of wise counsel. Spenser, offering such guidance in poetry, thus presents, like Guarini in the letter ‘To the most hopefull Prince’, another example of the poet as a humanist counsellor whose lessons to the monarch, if heeded, will contribute to a successful and glorious reign. Wondering at the beginning of the poem how the state of human learning can have decayed so far ‘Since ancient times’, (3) Fanshawe calls on his Muse and ‘Spencers ghost’ to tell ‘how Learnings Sunne to shine began? / And by what darke degrees it did goe backe in man’. (8–9) The account opens with the immediate aftermath of Creation: Then thus when seeds of all things (from the wonbe Of pregnant Chaos sprung) were perfected; Another Chaos (yet to be orecome) Out of the Reliques of the former bred, With ignorance this infant world orespred. (10–14)

What constitutes the ‘chaos’ caused by this universal ‘ignorance’ is the absence of any hierarchy, both between men and beasts and among men themselves. Men are ‘Companions of their slaves: The Beasts and they / Promiscuously fed, Promiscuously lay’ (17–18), and nature’s goods lie ‘Heapt in a common field’ (31): As now they are, things were not sorted then; Nor by division of the parts did breed The publique harmony. (19–21)

In their ignorance and disorder, men labour to improve neither themselves nor the soil: there is no agriculture, and the land is a wilderness: ‘Grasse, / And woods, and stifled Corne, were shuffled in one Masse.’ (26–7) Nature laments this state of affairs, and calls on Jove to redistribute her wealth according to a meritocratic hierarchy:

  On Spenser’s significance to critics of Stuart rule, see further David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), chapters 8 and 9; Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheard’s Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000); and Jane Tylus, ‘Jacobean Poetry and Lyric Disappointment’, in Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisamann Maus (eds), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 174–98; and on Sidney, Peter C. Herman, ‘“Bastard Children of Tyranny”: The Ancient Constitution and Fulke Greville’s “A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney”’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 969–1004. 

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And grant that they possesse those gifts alone In whom that Reason most shall fructifie For till for worth some difference be showne Twixt man and man, twixt man and beast there will be none.

A social hierarchy, and inequality of wealth, in other words, are what make us human, and constitute a ‘publique harmony’ better than communistic equality in the same way that a part song is better than a single voice. Fanshawe seems to be drawing here on a passage in Ovid’s Fasti – a text which also, as it happens, probably underlies Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. Ovid’s Polyhymnia is describing the birth and exploits of Maiestas (‘majesty’). She begins with an account of creation: after Chaos, she sings, the confused elements separated, but in place of the expected celebration of concord emerging from discord, she presents a cosmos still virtually chaotic in its failure to observe a social hierarchy: sed neque Terra diu Caelo, nec cetera Phoebo sidera cedebant; par erat omnis honor. saepe aliquis solio, quod tu, Saturne, tenebas, ausus de media plebe sedere deus … [‘But for a long time neither would Earth yield pride of place to Heaven, nor would the other stars to Phoebus; their honours were all equal. Often one of the ordinary plebeian gods dared to sit on the throne which belonged to you, Saturn’, Fasti V.17–20.]

All is changed by the birth of Maiestas, offspring of Honour and Reverence. Decked in imperial purple she seats herself on Olympus, flanked by Pudor and Metus (Modesty and Fear), and inspires her beholders with awe: protinus intravit mentes suspectus honorum: fit premium dignis, nec sibi quisque placet. [‘Immediately a respect for the honour of office entered their minds: the deserving are rewarded, and noone seeks to please themselves’, Fasti V.31–2.]

Ovid’s passage is the prelude to what I have elsewhere called one of his ironic Gigantomachies, for Maiestas does not wield her power impartially or in a principled fashion for long. Polyhymnia glosses over Jupiter’s violent usurpation of Saturn’s throne, clearly a violation of maiestas. Jupiter and Maiestas together   See Pugh, Spenser and Ovid, pp. 254–6. Fanshawe’s very clear imitation of this passage in the context of his larger imitation of Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos would seem to confirm that I was correct in arguing for its significance as part of the Ovidian background of Spenser’s poem. 

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defeat the rebellion of the Giants against the new ruler, and Maiestas thereafter emerges as no longer the defender of an impersonal principle but rather as Jupiter’s perpetual personal bodyguard: assidet inde Iovi, Iovis est fidissima custos et praestat sine vi sceptra tenenda Iovi. [‘Thenceforth she has sat beside Jove, she is Jove’s faithful guardian, and she ensures that Jove may keep his sceptre without further recourse to violence’, Fasti V.45–6.]

Nicola Mackie points out that Maiestas was known to Ovid’s audience not as a goddess but as a legal concept; she therefore argues that the passage is a satire on changes in Roman law under Augustus which redefined treason as an offence against maiestas Augusti, the majesty of the princeps and his imperial household, rather than, as formerly, against the maiestas populi Romani, enabling him to use the law as a tool for maintaining his personal hold on power. The hierarchical principle which resolves the chaos of Fanshawe’s primitive society will likewise succumb quickly to a similar corruption. The hierarchy which Fanshawe’s Jove institutes is a meritocracy. In answer to Nature’s prayer, he sends ‘Wit / (Which is the use of Reason)’ to the earth, bidding him enter man’s heart by whatever means present themselves, and once there, as ‘Soveraigne Lord’, to ‘impart / Kingdomes and Provinces to them that tooke his part’ (44–5). This meritocratic principle is, in other words, to be the imagined basis not only of the class system but of monarchy itself. Wit finds a way into men’s hearts through female beauty, inspiring love and waking reason, hitherto smothered in the dullness of the flesh. The ‘kindly flame’ of Love lays ‘the first stone of civilitie’ (74), teaching man language and the arts, including poetry, which itself contains all other knowledge and teaches it effectively and delightfully. The idea is reminiscent of neoplatonism, and of Spenser’s accounts of Love as the agent of the Creation in An Hymne to Love, the first of the Fowre Hymnes, 50–112, and in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 839–78. The phrase ‘kindly flame’ is itself taken from the proem to Book IV of The Faerie Queene, where Spenser defends the subject of love, with reference to Plato, as the basis of ‘all vertue’ (IV.Proem.2.6), and particularly of ‘Friendship’, the social harmony which is the topic of Book IV. But Fanshawe does not linger long over the neoplatonic theme. Having accomplished his task, Wit retires ‘to his Contemplations’,    Nicola Mackie, ‘Ovid and the Birth of Maiestas’, in Antony Powell (ed.), Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of Augustus (Worcester: Bristol Classical Press, 1992), pp. 83–97.    Noted by Davidson in The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, ed. Peter Davidson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), vol. I, p. 362. See also Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, ed. and tr. S.R. Jayne, University of Missouri Studies 10 (Columbia, MO, 1944), 3.2.

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Under this just rule of the most rational, social order does not imply great material inequality or hardship. However, ‘wily’ Nature (105), ‘ever Covetous of more’ (101), is not content with the ‘rare perfection’ (102) of this state of affairs. Imitating Spenser’s Archimago, the evil magician who creates a duplicate of the heroine Una to deceive the Redcrosse knight in Book I of The Faerie Queene, she fashions ‘a counterfeit’ of Wit, Who in his lookes Wits perfect likenesse bore, And by that stollen tytle dar’d to clayme The Government of things, but Craft was his right name. (106–9)

Craft gains the allegiance of most men, some mistaking him for Wit, others bribed with the gold and pearls which, under his influence, are now first discovered. Craft’s distinctive traits are avarice and hypocrisy: His precepts are; From every thing to get: And each from other. But with legall show. (118–19)

He throws Wit wrongfully ‘From his just right’ (122), and becomes the sole dispenser of all titles: ‘And all the world is held of Craft in Capite’ (126). As Davidson explains, ‘The legal term “in Capite” is used with precision: Craft is presented as the chief feudal tenant, holding all land directly from his sovereign and which he may let out in turn.’ The ‘sovereign’ in this case is Jove, or God, but Craft’s power is of course usurped. Under him, the entire social order becomes a corrupt system of abused patronage. Meritocracy has become plutocracy, and society’s former values are replaced by mere greed for gold. Wit’s ‘poore Clients’ (132) are forced to abandon the ‘nobler Sciences’ (133), both for lack of patronage to sustain them and for want of an audience, in this corrupt and avaricious world, who can appreciate the fruits of true learning: “Since Lamps that have no Oyle can give no light, “And folly twere to shine when men have lost their sight. (134–5)

Though wishing to pursue their studies, ignoring ‘the dull world’ and its ‘Golden Apples’ of patronage (142–4), material need forces each of them ‘to give halfe obedience for his ease / To the new Government’ (140–41). They cry out to Wit in reproachful tones:

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O Witt! next Jove Creator of Mankind, Where dost thou now in secret corner sit, Counting the Starrs with avaricious mind Or brooding some immortall worke of wit Whereby thou maist affected glory get, Whilst thy poore Clients, outed of their right, For nobler Sciences are made unfit …? (127–33)

The vignette presents the vita contemplativa in which Wit has buried himself as a selfish abandonment of earthly duties: not only should wit and learning be applied to the study of human affairs rather than the abstractions of astronomy, but the learned should actively involve themselves in maintaining justice in the social system. Indeed, the self-indulgence of Wit’s star-gazing contemplation, his wronged subjects’ rebuke implies, makes it comparable to the selfish pursuit of private interest by the new, unjust rulers: both are ‘avaricious’, though one of material and the other of intellectual wealth, both apparently lacking in proper concern for the public good. Wit, fetched by these cries ‘from the retyred shade / Of a delightfull Solitary Grove’ (145–6) is horrified at what he sees, and cries out in his turn on Jove and Nature. His first response is to learn ‘to be Satyricall’ (150) and literary satire is born, ‘words of hard Construction’ ‘mingled with … Gall’ (152–3). But then he calls for a legal trial: At last demands the Law. And he will try By publique Justice before Natures Barre To whom the World perteynes most rightfully. Craft, (though possession were his surer farre) His plea of merit would not seeme to marre, But nam’d a day his Title to abet; On it the Creatures all assembled are, Raunged by Natures Marshall as they met, And all on the Successe their expectation set. (154–62)

It is here that the poem announces its close relation to Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos. Spenser’s Mutabilitie, a daughter of Titan, likewise appeals ‘to Natur’s Bar’ for justice (The Faerie Queene VII.vii, ‘Argument’, line 1), claiming that Jove and the other Olympians have usurped ‘the whole worlds raign’ (VII.vii.15), which is her rightful heritage. Jove’s initial response is merely to threaten violence, but he is unable to refuse Mutabilitie a hearing before the higher power, Nature. ‘Time and place appointed were’ (vi.36.1), when all creatures are to assemble ‘Before great Natures presence’, ‘For triall of their Titles and best Rights’ (vi.36.3–4). The day arrived, the assembled crowd is ‘well disposed’ by ‘Natures Sergeant (that is Order)’ (vii.4.6).

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Fanshawe’s scene is clearly intended to evoke Spenser’s, and the way it continues to unfold also follows Spenser’s pattern, but the whole strongly indicates a reading of Spenser very different from that of most modern commentators. Like Mutabilitie, Wit is the first to present his case: First Wit with copious language did dilate Those benefits which Man to him did owe, Who from a poore dishonourable state, He made with blessings of all sorts to flow. He said, whom he made Rulers first did know To rule themselves. And if the World new Clad With a few glitt’ring Trifles (but for show) Which Craft with dammage of true Goods did adde, Seem’d now to have more wealth, it then more honor had. (163–71)

There is no ambiguity over the justice of Wit’s case, which relies on a long literary tradition disparaging man’s obsession with glittering but useless gold to make its contrast between the ‘honor’ and ‘true Good’ of the former meritocracy and the current corrupt age. At the centre of the stanza we have the first explicitly moralistic articulation of the principle of meritocracy, whereby only those who ‘know / To rule themselves’ are fit to rule others. Craft then proceeds to present his reply. His case has three parts. Firstly, and most damagingly from the reader’s perspective, he argues that the followers of Wit have already voluntarily abdicated their role in government: Then Craft reply’d to all With such a boldnesse as not blusht to slight Th’immortall workes of Wit, which he did call Chymera’s of the Fancy, vaine and light And urg’d the Learned had renounc’t their right In Earthly things, as he could represent By diverse Instruments themselves did write, Knowing they were unfit for Government, As wholly unto idle Contemplations bent. (172–80)

The denigration of ‘th’immortall workes of Wit’ as ‘Chymera’s of the Fancy’ suggests that what Craft has in mind particularly is imaginative literature, and evokes the humanist preference for the study of history and for historical subject matter, as teaching lessons applicable to new and current problems, over the escapism of purely imaginative poetry, exemplified most strongly in poetry which indulges in the creation of fantastical monsters like Chimeras and in the depiction of magic. But the accusation in the rest of the stanza has a wider application. Craft does not specify which texts he is citing when he claims that the learned have renounced in writing their right to involvement in worldly affairs, ‘Knowing

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they were unfit for Government, / And wholly unto idle Contemplations bent’, but his claim is on one level undeniable. He is clearly referring to the strong and influential philosophical tradition stemming from Seneca’s De Otio, which defends the vita contemplativa (the philosopher’s retirement from public affairs to pursue his studies) against the vita activa, or duty of involvement in public affairs argued by Cicero, on the grounds that the philosopher and the grubby world of real politics are by nature ill suited. ‘The public realm is too corrupt to be helped’, and there is no actual state ‘that could endure the wise man or be endured by him’.10 The philosopher is therefore advised to retire from political life in order to pursue his enquiries into the nature of the universe: contemplation of the stars is a prominent and recurring example Seneca invokes. Craft’s allegation is damagingly supported, within Fanshawe’s text, by our memory of how Wit was passing his time while Craft’s usurpation was carried out, his self-indulgent contemplations in ‘the retyred shade / Of a delightfull Solitary Grove’ (145–6), ‘Counting the Starrs with avaricious mind’ (129). Craft’s second argument is that the Learned (again he targets poets specifically) are hypocritical in their denunciation of gold, his gift to mankind and the basis of all value under the new system. The true worth of gold, he points out, Poets ev’n denying had confest, Styling the Golden Age what they would have The best (188–9)

– with a nod to Jonson’s Volpone, who, hymning his gold, observes Well did wise poets, by thy glorious name, Title that age, which they would have the best. (Volpone I.i.14–15)

Fanshawe develops the irony nicely, for the fantasy of the Golden Age was remarkable specifically as an age before the advent of avarice and the discovery of gold. It is therefore precisely in denying the value of gold, through their fabrication of the Golden Age as an ideal and pre-monetary society, that poets invoke its name as a standard of supreme value. He may also be indebted to Ovid’s ironic observation in Book II of the Ars amatoria, aurea sunt vere nunc saecula: plurimus auro venit honos: auro conciliatur amor. [‘The Golden Age is, in truth, the present: many an honour is sold for gold: love is procured by gold’, (Ars II.277–8).]

10   Seneca, Moral and Political Essays, ed. John M. Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 174, 180.

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The context of Ovid’s lines is a passage treating the same theme as Fanshawe’s poem, though from a slightly different angle: Ovid is lamenting that he cannot recommend that the lover should send tender verses to his mistress, as poems are not honoured so highly as gifts in the present avaricious age: Homer himself, accompanied by all the Muses, would not win favour from women these days, unless he brought money with him too (Ars II.273–80). Craft elaborates on his point by drawing attention to the way in which poets invoke the names of ‘Gemms of wondrous price’ (190), as the only objects fit to provide metaphors capable of describing their mistresses’ superlative beauties. It is not any of this which sways Nature, however. Rather, she is won over by his final brief remark: And last, said he; ’Tis hamm’ring in this brayne To turne all things I touch to golden veyne. This clos’d his speech; But left such stings behind In Nature, biteing greedily at gaine, That (seeming first to poyse it in her minde) She judg’d the World to Craft, which Wisdome she defin’d. (193–8)

Fanshawe glosses the first two lines here ‘The Philosophers Stone’, and it is this alchemical promise of limitless wealth which effectively bribes Nature to find in Craft’s favour. Hypocritically pretending to pause for careful consideration (a moment corresponding to Nature’s pregnant pause before she delivers her judgement in favour of Jove in the Mutabilitie Cantos, vii.56), she does not, of course, admit that this is the reason for her decision. Rather, she devises a ‘pretext’ which sounds more reasonable, and superficially appears to pay more respect to Wit’s true worth: Her overpartiall Doome, she colour’s ore With this pretext, that the world’s Rule (now growne More intricate through its increased store) Requir’d a Drudge to tend that worke alone, But Wit had many things to study on. Then ended with a smooth fac’d Complement, How Him she held in high opinion … (19–205)

Nature in effect dispatches Wit back to his solitary contemplations in words reminiscent of the Senecan defence of the vita contemplativa, implying that Wit’s abstract study of the universe is far too important to be interrupted by the mundane drudgery of politics. Wounded and resentful, Wit responds by proudly spurning the earth and all its creatures. Leaping on the back of an eagle, he cries ‘The Earth to me she may deny, / But not the Heav’n’, and forthwith ‘Directs his flight to fair Eternity’ (212–14). In other words, he returns to his contemplation of the stars and the heavens which had

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preoccupied him while Craft was busy usurping his sovereignty on earth. ‘Heav’n op’ning still new Beauties to his Eye’ (218), he has nothing but disdain for the petty affairs of Earth: ‘the whole Terrestrial Globe below’ now ‘Seem’d a meane Quarry to debase his flight’ (228–9). The prognostications of those who watch from earth vary: some presage his fall to Poverty, The heighth will turne his braine, some others cry; Some few in judging Eares his raptures poise, (Who like a Larke doth singing mount the Skye) They beare him up with their applausive noise, At which in secret heart he not a little joyes. (220–25)

It would appear initially that the applause of the ‘judging’ few represents the correct response to Wit’s heavenly contemplations: these, we understand, are the few left on a corrupt earth sufficiently learned to appreciate the fruits of true reason. But the last line is a little disturbing: supposedly unconcerned with base earth, Wit nevertheless ‘in secret heart’ enjoys the applause, the worldly fame. We are reminded of the ‘affected glory’ which Wit’s abandoned clients accused him of seeking in his selfish retirement into the life of contemplation. The practical warning of the first group, who ‘presage his fall to Poverty’, a reminder of the difficulties of pursuing the contemplative life in the absence of proper patronage, is meanwhile borne out by the ensuing stanzas. The eagle must perforce return to earth to feed, despite the impatient ‘cuffs’ of its rider: But need Commands, and Flesh must needs obay, So at the last he stoops and seazes the skorn’d prey. … So Wit is forc’t (some Maintenance to get) To stoop to Earth against his owne desire; But soone againe the fruitfull Earth doth quit, To soare in Empty Ayre: (Heav’n send me better wit!) (233–4, 240–43)

But the final stanza of the poem anticipates a time when Wit will be freed from this residual dependence on earth: Yet when this Eagle shall have cast her Bill, And mew’d her mortall plumes, some thinke that he Shall then attaine the topp of Heavens hill, And Coeternall with his writings be, Taking peculiar felicitie In penning Hymnes of His Creators praise; (That is the genuine use of Poetry) And for reward of those Coelestiall Layes That hov’ring Cherubins shall Crowne him with fresh Bayes … (244–52)

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The apparently celebratory tone of this conclusion, however, is somewhat undermined, and not only by the memory of the poem’s frequent hints as to the self-indulgent and selfish nature of Wit’s heavenly contemplations. Nor is it only our disturbing realization of the hopeless state of the earth, ruled by the usurper Craft and now abandoned forever by its God-given true ruler, Wit. Fanshawe also adds a Latin motto which, in his characteristically intertextual fashion, brings out the critical undertones in his description of Wit’s flight into contemptus mundi: Non est mortale quod optas Cum sis mortalis. [‘It is not for mortals, that which you desire; whereas you are mortal’, 253]

As Davidson points out, this motto is made up from two fragmentary quotations. Non est mortale quod optas comes from Book II of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (line 56). It is part of Phoebus’ reply to his son Phaethon, who, promised by his father that he can have whatever boon he wishes for as a proof that he is indeed Phoebus’ son, has just asked to be allowed to drive his father’s chariot for a day. Phoebus is pleading with his son to change his wish, since he will not be able to control the god’s horses, but Phaethon refuses. Having sworn an oath, Phoebus is powerless to deny his son the wish whose fulfilment will end in his death and threaten destruction to the earth itself: when Phaethon loses control of the horses, the earth will be narrowly saved from a general conflagration only by the intervention of Jove, who strikes Phaethon with a thunderbolt, throwing him from the car. Cum sis mortalis, meanwhile, probably comes from the Disticha Catonis, a collection of moral maxims from late antiquity and a popular teaching tool in late mediaeval and early modern schools.11 It appears in distich 2 of Book II: Mitte archana dei caelumque inquirere quid sit; Cum sis mortalis, quae sunt mortalia cura. [‘Do not inquire what the secrets of God or of the heavens may be; since you are mortal, those things which are mortal are your concern.’]

Fanshawe’s fabrication of his motto is rather interesting. The allusion to the tale of Phaethon might at first appear unequivocally to imply a critical view of Wit’s flight, at the very least presaging a fall like those spectators in line 220, at worst suggesting that Wit is motivated by ambition and overweening pride, which were the traits commonly identified with Phaethon in moralizing interpretations of Ovid in the middle ages 11   See Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Intret Cato: Authority and the Epigram in SixteenthCentury England’, in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 158–86.

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and the Renaissance, and that his flight will like Phaethon’s result in disaster both for himself and for the world below.12 However, the Ovidian line appears with very different connotations in an earlier Caroline publication, George Wither’s Collection of Emblemes (1635), in a context highly relevant to Fanshawe’s poem. The twentysecond emblem in the third book of Wither’s volume depicts Ganymede flying up into the sky on the back of an eagle, illustrating the fable in which Jove took the form of an eagle in order to ravish the beautiful boy, Ganymede, who became his cupbearer. Wither’s text follows a widespread and traditional allegorical interpretation of the myth, exemplified for instance in Alexander Ross’s summary: ‘Ganimedes … is one that delights in divine counsell or wisdome; and wisdome is the true beauty of the minde where [i]n God takes pleasure … The quick-sighted Eagle, is divine contemplation or meditation, by which Ganimedes, the soul is caught up to Heaven.’13 For Wither similarly ‘The Aegle, meanes that Heav’nly Contemplation’, and Wither’s text concludes with his spurning the ‘Favours’ given by Man and the World, the earthly rewards of patronage of which he has ‘seene the best’, in favour of meditating on heaven.14 This moralized Ganymede mounted on his eagle of contemplation is obviously the original of Wit’s flight at the end of Fanshawe’s poem. Like Fanshawe, Wither chooses as the motto for his emblem the line from Ovid’s story of Phaethon: Non est mortale quod opto. The phrase is now put into the first person, and mortale is in this context to be taken as nominative neuter, rather than ablative masculine as in Ovid and Fanshawe, giving ‘What I desire is not mortal’. Fanshawe’s allusion to Ovid’s Phaethon, then, contains a careful ambivalence, and can be taken as simply part of his wider reworking of the traditional positive allegorization of Ganymede’s flight, with which the line had already been associated. But his addition of the quotation from the Disticha Catonis restores the negative and warning implications of the line in its original Ovidian context. In fact, Ovid’s line taken as a whole would itself convey the same idea: sors tua mortalis, non est mortale, quod optas (‘Your fate is mortal; it is not for mortals, that which you desire’). By substituting the equivalent phrase cum sis mortalis from the Disticha, Fanshawe adds nothing to the literal sense of the motto as it would have been if Fanshawe had simply reproduced Ovid’s line in full and without addition. The intent must therefore be to allude to the meaning of the distich as a whole, the injunction not to inquire into the secrets of the heavens but rather to concern oneself with human affairs. Phoebus’ warning to Phaethon thus becomes an exhortation to study the humanities rather than natural philosophy, or to involve oneself in business and politics rather than retreating into a life of star-gazing and pure contemplation, and the Disticha’s advice is brought into dialogue with the high valuation of unworldly and abstract wisdom enshrined in 12   See for example Arthur Golding, ‘To the ryght Honorable … Erle of Leycester’, in The. xv. bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis (London, 1567), sig. a iiv. 13   Alexander Ross, Mystagogvs poeticvs, or, The muses interpreter (London, 1647), pp. 96–7. 14   George Wither, A Collection of Emblemes (London, 1635), 3.22, p. 156.

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the traditional allegorization of the Ganymede story, and in Seneca’s defence of the vita contemplativa, with the story of Phaethon newly moralized as a warning against the dangers of intellectual otherworldliness. As well as Ganymede and Phaethon, another figure from classical mythology informs the flight of Fanshawe’s Wit. This is Bellerophon, and the allusion is again an inherently ambivalent one, which Fanshawe uses at once to suggest Wit’s positive virtue and potential worth and yet also to reinforce the negative and critical overtones of the treatment of his flight. Bellerophon’s most well-known exploit was to defeat the monstrous Chimaera, a task which he accomplished while mounted on the winged steed Pegasus. The traditional allegorization of this myth resonates very strongly with Wit’s flight in Fanshawe’s poem. Fulgentius’ influential version is as follows: Bellerophon, that is, good counsel, rides a horse which is none other than Pegasus, for pegaseon, that is, an everlasting fountain. The wisdom of good counsel is an everlasting fountain. So, too, is Pegasus winged, because he looks down on the whole nature of the world with a swift perception of its designs. Then, too, he is said to have opened up the fountain of the Muses with his heel, for wisdom supplies the Muses with a fountain.15

As ‘good counsel’, Bellerophon represents the role which Wit is qualified to fulfil, but from which he is, half willingly, excluded – that of using his wisdom to offer practical guidance to those who control earthly affairs. The lofty overview of Pegasus or wisdom is obviously akin to Wit’s perspective from the back of his eagle, but with the important difference that Pegasus’s gaze is directed downwards to the world and its designs, while Wit’s is obstinately turned in the opposite direction, towards the heavens. This stubbornly upward trajectory recalls another episode in Bellerophon’s career. According to fragments of Euripides’ lost play Bellerophon and to Pindar’s thirteenth Olympian Ode (‘To Xenophon the Corinthian’) and seventh Isthmian Ode (‘To Strepsiades of Thebes’), Bellerophon later called on Pegasus’ aid again, this time to help him scale the heights of Olympus and to penetrate the abode of the gods. He would have succeeded, had not Jove, angered by the presumption of this mortal, caused Pegasus to throw his rider. Fanshawe would seem to be referring to this episode when he speculates in the final stanza that Wit may one day ‘attaine the topp of Heavens hill’ (246). Despite its relative obscurity in the classical sources, the episode was well known to commentators. Comes is typical in moralizing it as Jove’s punishment of Bellerophon’s ‘arrogance’: Bellerophon was ‘too elated with the great success of his accomplished deeds’.16 Such self-aggrandizing pride resembles Wit’s selfish 15   Leslie George Whitbread (tr.), Fulgentius the Mythographer (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 3.2. 16   ‘tanta rerum gestarum felicitate nimium elatus’ (Natalis Conti, Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decem [Padua, 1637], IX.viii).

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pursuit of ‘affected glory’ (131) in his flight, turning his back on the earthly duties of good counsel represented by Bellerophon’s earlier exploits. Wit’s rapturous flight, and even his possible future apotheosis, then, appear on closer inspection to offer poor consolation for his exclusion from the affairs of government. In fact, they merely further exemplify the very tendency in Wit to neglect his earthly duties ‘as Soveraigne Lord’ (44) because of his self-indulgent absorption in private ‘Contemplations’ (95) which was ultimately to blame for Craft’s successful usurpation in the first place. While in Fanshawe’s ideal, meritocratic society matters of government should be decided by the learned, the learned themselves are to be held partly responsible for the decay of the imagined original meritocracy into the current corrupt plutocracy, because their reluctance to involve themselves in public affairs and the Ciceronian vita activa has conspired with their exclusion from positions of power by plutocrats intent only on selfinterest. But the possible solution is also clear, not only to the ordinary reader, but also and perhaps more importantly to the volume’s dedicatee, the future ruler, Prince Charles. Kings must bring Wit back to earth and reinstate him as sovereign, by ruling wisely, which means also knowing ‘first to rule themselves’, but also by deferring to the counsel of the wise and learned, whom Fanshawe’s allegory presents as the ultimate source of all kingly authority. Though Ganymede’s eagle is clearly the most important model for Wit’s flight, Davidson is nevertheless right to invoke Spenser as offering strong parallels. He mentions lines 183–9 of the Hymne to Love, the first of the Fowre Hymnes: this (secular) Love is indeed described in the previous stanza as ‘Lifting himselfe out of the lowly dust, / On golden plumes vp to the purest skie’ (177–8), an eagle-like image. But the ‘retractation’ of the hymns to earthly love and beauty in the two sacred hymns which complete the collection offer the same imagery in what is perhaps a more appropriate analogy. ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Love’ opens Loue, lift me vp vpon thy golden wings, From this base world vnto thy heauens hight, Where I may see those admirable things, Which there thou workest by thy soueraine might, Farre aboue feeble reach of earthly sight, That I thereof an heauenly Hymne may sing Vnto the god of Loue, high heauens king, (1–7)

while ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Beauty’ ascends more gradually, but with the same trope: Beginning then below, with th’easie vew Of this base world, subiect to fleshly eye, From thence to mount aloft by order dew, To contemplation of th’immortall sky, Of the soare faulcon so I learne to fly,

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However, the bitterness motivating Wit’s flight, and the tone of severely qualified celebration with which Fanshawe depicts it, are more strongly reminiscent of other Spenserian passages. The most suggestive analogies are to be found in the early Shepheardes Calender and in the Mutabilitie Cantos themselves. In the argument to the October eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender, Cuddie, representing ‘the perfecte paterne of a Poete’, finding no maintenaunce of his state and studies, complayneth of the contempte of Poetrie, and the causes thereof: Specially hauing bene in all ages, and euen amongst the most barbarous alwayes of singular accounpt and honor, and being indede so worthy and commendable an arte: or rather no arte, but a diuine gift and heauenly instinct …

He laments that princes’ courts now afford neither the patronage which supported good poets in former ages, nor the virtuous deeds which were wont to supply poets with noble subject-matter for their verse. Piers replies: O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place? If nor in Princes pallace thou dost sitt: (And yet is Princes pallace the most fitt) Ne brest of baser birth doth thee embrace. Then make thee winges of thine aspyring wit, And, whence thou camst, flye backe to heauen apace. (October, 79–84)

The impoverished Cuddie, however, replies that he is ‘all to weake and wanne, / So high to sore, and make so large a flight’: his wit’s ‘peeced pyneons bene not so in plight’ (85–7). This bitterly satirical flight to heaven, struggling against the material constraints of poverty to turn one’s back in despair upon a world which has lost both its virtue and its respect for learning, seems much closer to Wit’s flight in Fanshawe’s poem. Most clearly, however, Wit’s flight seems modelled on Spenser’s turn to prayer in the final two stanzas of the Mutabilitie Cantos. But by reworking that final fragment into his elaborate satirical episode Fanshawe makes it clear that he reads the same satirical bitterness in that closing prayer which inform Piers’ lines in the October eclogue. Fanshawe’s reworking of the Mutabilitie Cantos’ concluding prayer as Wit’s flight suggests, in fact, that he reads the two-stanza fragment of canto viii as Spenser turning his back on the world in disgust at the injustice of Nature’s judgement. That judgement does not, to be sure, come across in Spenser as the ‘overpartiall Doome’ obtained by rank bribery which Fanshawe’s Nature delivers, but Fanshawe is nevertheless responding to and amplifying notes of ambivalence in the original. Spenser’s Nature denies Mutabilitie’s claim on the grounds that all change in the

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universe is teleological and directed ultimately by a benign Providence, but she speaks no word about Jove or his entitlement. It is only implicitly and by default, if at all, that Jove is, as the narrator subsequently puts it, ‘confirm’d in his imperiall see’ (Mutabilitie Cantos VII.vii.59.7). Nature herself only refers to Apocalypse: But time shall come that all shall changed bee, And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see. (VII.vii.59.4–5)

This is the coming of the City of God described in Revelation, when not only change shall come to an end but with it all human sovereignty: God and the Lamb shall be the only rulers, and Rome and the ‘kings of the earth’ shall be no more. For all the cosmological trappings of the Cantos, it is this human sovereignty which is at issue: in Jove and Cynthia, to whom poets conventionally compared Augustus and Elizabeth respectively, Spenser is holding monarchy up to scrutiny, and doing so through his own version of the Titanomachy, a myth which had traditionally been applied as a fable of defeated rebellion against monarchs. By looking forward to the coming of the City of God and the superseding of all earthly authority by God’s, Nature’s words simply bypass and ignore the question of whether Jove can legitimately enjoy his ‘imperiall see’ until that time. The best gloss that can be put on Jove’s right to his throne in so far as the Mutabilitie Cantos suggest he has any, then, is the plea of ‘possession’ which Fanshawe tells us would have been Craft’s surest claim (157). Mutabilitie’s hereditary right is in fact never so much as questioned, while Jove’s attempts to justify his claim earlier in the cantos are blustering and unconvincing. The only substantive claim he makes is right of conquest – incidentally the principle on which James VI of Scotland and I of England bases his claim to absolute power in the Trew Law of Free Monarchies. It is a plea that carries as little in the way of moral justification as one of ‘possession’, and which is in keeping with the threats of force which are his initial response to Mutabilitie. In stanza 27 of canto vi, Mutabilitie rhymes the ‘right’ of her own claim against the ‘might’ by which Jove ‘iniuriously’ holds his power, and Jove, rather than denying her presentation of the situation, echoes the rhyme in stanza 33: But wote thou this, thou hardy Titanesse, That not the worth of any liuing wight May challenge ought in Heauens interesse; Much lesse the Title of old Titans Right: For, we by Conquest of our soueraine might, And by eternall doome of Fates decree, Haue wonne the Empire of the Heauens bright; Which to our selues we hold, and to whom wee Shall worthy deeme partakers of our blisse to bee. (VII.33)

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Jove’s principle manoeuvre here, however, is a rhetorical one. Despite the appeal to right of conquest and the pagan notion of ‘Fates decree’, what Jove is doing is assimilating himself rhetorically to the Christian God. Building on his repeated misrepresentation of Mutabilitie as a ‘mortal’ woman different in kind from his own divinity, he here misappropriates the terms of articles x and xi of the ThirtyNine Articles, interpreting Mutabilitie’s claim that she has a ‘right’ to heaven as an heretical (or Catholic) claim to salvation through merit. His argument that ‘not the worth of any liuing wight / May challenge ought in Heauens interesse’ would be unanswerable if we were actually talking about the relation between a mortal and the Christian God, an analogy he presses further in the next stanza: Then cease thy idle claime thou foolish gerle, And seeke by grace and goodnesse to obtaine That place from which by folly Titan fell; There-to thou maist perhaps, if so thou faine Haue Ioue thy gratious Lord and Soueraigne. (34.1–5)

Distorting the violent deposition of Titan into the semblance of Adam’s wilful fall, Jove turns the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of salvation by ‘grace’ as the only possible cure for original sin into an offer of patronage and a possible place at court – the ‘grace’ exercised by monarchs – if Mutabilitie will give over her attempted coup. It is precisely this blasphemous strategy for maintaining his hold on power by insinuatingly identifying himself with the Christian God which Mutabilitie is concerned to denounce to the highest him, that is behight Father of Gods and men by equall might; To weet, the God of Nature, (vi.35.4–6)

and it is a major emphasis of her complaint: The weigh, ô soueraigne goddesse, by what right These gods do claime the worlds whole souerainty; And that is onely dew vnto thy might Arrogate to themselves ambitiously … (VII.vii.16.1–4)

The final evidence Mutabilitie brings as she presents her case is that these ‘Kings’ (vii.49.3) ‘that Gods themselues do call’ (26.2) are ‘mortall born’ (50.5), ‘begotten … / And borne here in this world’ (53.8–9). The object here is clearly the hubris of earthly princes who arrogate to themselves the name of divinity in order to justify (as Mutabilitie puts it) ‘Wrong and tortious injurie’ (14.5) done to their fellow men, ‘Oppressing them with power vnequally’ (14.7). The Mutabilitie Cantos, then, can be read as a satire on the idea of the Divinity of Kings, and this, I suggest, is how Fanshawe seems to have read it. Throughout the 1648 volume, Fanshawe

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handles this central Stuart doctrine only rarely and with extreme suspicion and qualification. Here, Fanshawe’s imitation of Spenser implicitly aligns Jove’s kingly self-deification with Craft and the rule of self-interest. Fanshawe simplifies the ambivalence of the Mutabilitie Cantos considerably. Spenser’s Mutabilitie has an hereditary right which is never questioned, but her claim is unquestionably undermined for the reader by her name and allegorical significance, and by her responsibility for the Fall of Man and all the evils which ensued, laid out by Spenser in stanzas 5 and 6 of canto vi. It is not, in Spenser, that Mutabilitie should sit on Jove’s imperial throne, but rather that her own presumption as a mortal claiming quasi-divine authority holds up a mirror to the similarly presumptuous reigning monarchs figured in Jove, Cynthia and the other Olympians. In Fanshawe, a different ambivalence arises, creating a shift in the emphasis of his satire: though Wit’s rule is unquestionably to be desired, his inward aversion to negotium and the vita activa, ironically reflecting the selfishness of his rivals in another form, conspires with the usurpers to exclude him from a power he does not fully want, leaving the world to suffer. Fanshawe’s poem is not only a call to Prince Charles to return to a better style of government, submitting to the ‘counsel’ of those qualified by learning and wisdom – perhaps to govern in the ‘Parliamentary way’ of Queen Elizabeth, as she was nostalgically viewed from the perspective of the mid-seventeenth century. It is also a call to the learned – perhaps especially to those poets who, as Carew recommended in ‘To Aurelian Townshend’, had retreated willingly or even gratefully into Virgilian otium and poetry of mere praise and recreation – to assume a more Spenserian role, devoting themselves to their country’s good by daring to offer moral and political guidance and admonition to their Prince, steering him away from the worst excesses of absolutism and covert self-interest which ‘The Progresse of Learning’ suggests have plagued his father’s rule.

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Chapter 8

Tempering Lucan and Virgil: Fanshawe on the Civil Wars of Rome Perhaps the most startling element in Fanshawe’s volume is Maius Lucanizans, a commendatory poem written for Thomas May’s Supplementum Lucani (1640). Despite his earlier patronage by Charles I, May was clearly leaning to the side of Parliament when he composed the Supplementum, and by the time Fanshawe’s collection was published May was an outspoken opponent of monarchy. The apparent shift in his political position seems to have been informed by his long engagement with Lucan’s Pharsalia, a republican epic on the loss of Rome’s liberty with the defeat of Pompey by Julius Caesar, presented as a ruthless tyrant motivated by selfaggrandizing ambition and disregard for law and the good of his country. May had translated the Pharsalia into English in 1627. In 1630 he published A continuation of Lucan’s historicall poem till the death of Iulius Caesar, taking events through Caesar’s defeat of his remaining enemies, Juba, Scipio, Pompey’s sons, Labienus and Cato, his assumption of power in Rome, and ending with his assassination at the hands of Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators. He then translated this into Latin as the Supplementum Lucani, which was published in 1640. The Latin version excises many passages which mitigated the sense of Caesar’s villainy in the English Continuation, restoring a more Lucanian and starkly negative view of Caesar. At the end of the Personal Rule and close to the outbreak of civil war, May’s 1640    On Thomas May and his politics, see further J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Thomas May and the Narrative of Civil War’, in Derek Hirst and Richard Strier (eds), Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 112–44; David Norbrook, ‘Lucan, Thomas May, and the Creation of a Republican Literary Culture’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 45–66; Andrew Shifflett, ‘By Lucan Driv’n About: A Jonsonian Marvell’s Lucanic Milton’, Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996), 803–23; Blair Worden, ‘Classical Republicanism and the Puritan Revolution’, in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds), History and Imagination: Essays in Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 182–200; and Karen Britland, ‘Buried Alive: Thomas May’s 1631 Antigone’, in Ian Atherton and Julie Sanders (eds), The 1630s: Interdisciplinary Essays on Culture and Politics in the Caroline Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 138–53.    Hereafter I shall refer to the English and Latin versions as Continuation and Supplementum respectively.    R.T. Bruère, ‘The Latin and English Versions of Thomas May’s Supplementum Lucani’, Classical Philology 44 (1949), 145–63.

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Supplementum continues Lucan’s historical narrative in the same Lucanian spirit, as a condemnation of despotism. May’s English Continuation includes a prefatory poem in which Calliope laments the death of Lucan, which prevented him from continuing his poem to relate the deaths of Cato, Scipio and Juba, and compares it to her earlier bereavement when Orpheus was killed. In the 1650 edition of the Continuation, as David Norbrook has observed, the poem is expanded to end with a ‘grisly ritual’ in which Calliope offers a cup of blood to Lucan’s ghost, instructing him: Thou, once the Glorie of th’Aonian Wood, But now their sorrow, Lucan, drink this Bloud. No other Nectar Phoebus gives thee now; Nor can the Fates a second life bestow; A second voice by this charm’d cup they may, To give some progress to that stately Lay Thou left’st unfinish’d. End it not until The Senates swords the life of Caesar spil; That he, whose conquests gave dire Nero reign, May as a sacrifice to thee be slain. The Ghost receiv’d the cup in his pale hand, Drunk, and fulfill’d Calliopes command.

The assassination of Caesar, the last event narrated in the Continuation, is presented as a sacrifice to Lucan’s ghost, avenging his forced suicide under the later Caesar, Nero. The earlier event is a revenge for the later, a temporal sequence which makes sense only when May’s act of writing about the assassination is identified with the assassination itself: as Norbrook puts it, ‘Lucan’s ghost conflates the acts of writing and regicide’. In the context of 1650, the closing lines must surely have evoked memories of the execution of Charles I: as Norbrook again points out, the ritual ‘aligns the poem … with the many defences of the regicide which presented it as a necessary sacrifice’. However, this ending to Calliope’s complaint had made its first appearance several years earlier, before the regicide. It is published first in Latin. Along with the frontispiece engraving, depicting the laureate ghost drinking from the cup proffered by Calliope (see Figure 2), which was also to be reproduced in the 1650 edition of the Continuation, the Latin poem appears in the 1640 edition of the Supplementum to which Fanshawe contributed his Maius Lucanizans, and again in the 1646 edition. This does not weaken Norbrook’s claim that the poem with this ending endorses the regicide: to celebrate the most famous (or notorious) tyrannicide of classical history during a period of growing disaffection with an absolutist monarch (and to reprint it during the Civil War) arguably has something    David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 228.

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Figure 2 Frontispiece engraving from Thomas May, Supplementum Lucani (1640) (Bodley 8oM 22 Art Seld, by permission of the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford) of proposition or incitement about it, a bolder political statement than drawing an analogy after the fact, in a defensive citing of precedent. The version of Calliope’s complaint which lacks this ending, in fact, only ever appeared in English, prefacing the early editions of the Continuation, a work less overtly republican and more sympathetic to Caesar than the Supplementum. It is all the more surprising, then, to find that not only does Fanshawe choose to contribute his commendatory verse to the outspokenly anti-Caesarean Supplementum, but that his poem shares the grisly image of the 1640 conclusion to the complaint of Calliope in May, with all its implied Lucanian hostility to tyranny, and sense of writing as political action. Fanshawe’s poem begins: Vivis (Io!) Lucane sacra revocantur ab urna Purpurei manes, et noto major Imago. Cesareo turgent exhaustae crimine venae,

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Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality Dum melior Caesar Capitolia, vindice versu, Conspergit moriens, ipsumque cruore Tonantem. [‘Lo! Lucan, you live: your purple ghost is recalled from the sacred urn, and this apparition is greater than your familiar form. Veins emptied by the crime of Caesar swell, while a better Caesar, with your verse playing the avenger, dies, and spatters the Capitol and Jove himself with blood.’]

Both Fanshawe’s and May’s prefatory poems adapt a Lucanian idea. In the Pharsalia the assassination of Caesar by Brutus and the other conspirators is anticipated several times as vengeance for the death of Pompey and of Roman liberty. Escaping his corpse at the beginning of Book IX, Pompey’s ghost smiles at the abuse of his headless body, surveys the bloody field of Pharsalia and Caesar’s standards, et scelerum vindex in sancto pectore Bruti / sedit (‘and lodges, the avenger of wickedness, in the righteous breast of Brutus’, IX.17–18). After the immediate agents of Pompey’s death are killed in Book X the narrator reflects: Altera, Magne, tuis iam victima mittitur umbris; Nec satis hoc Fortuna putat … Dum patrii veniant in viscera Caesaris enses, Magnus inultus erit. [‘Another victim now was sent to your shade, Magnus, but Fortune does not think this enough … Until the swords of his countrymen are plunged in Caesar’s entrails, Magnus will be unavenged’, X.524–9.]

In Fanshawe and May, it is Lucan’s ghost, not Pompey’s, which is thus avenged. Both Fanshawe and May also draw on other Lucanian passages to develop the trope. Most obviously, Lucan’s ghost in their prefatory poems is no mere shade, but a corpse revivified with blood. In the gruesome specificity of this both are obviously alluding to the terrifying scene, in Book VI of the Pharsalia, where the Thessalian witch Erictho revives a corpse to tell Sextus Pompeius what fate has in store for the republican side. Having chosen a corpse with lungs intact and capable of speech (et vocem defuncto in corpore quaerit, 631), she makes new wounds and through them pectora … ferventi sanguine supplet (‘fills his breast with seething blood’, 667), telling her trembling audience iam nova, iam vera reddetur vita figura, / Ut quamvis pavidi possint audire loquentem (‘Now a new life, now his true living form will be restored to him, so that even the fearful will be able to hear him speak’, 660–61). Calliope’s words to Lucan in May’s prefatory poem recall these lines even as they distinguish May’s act of ventriloquism from such    The translation in the Oxford edition is unreliable: I am grateful to Andrew Laird for help with my own translation, which I use throughout, and which appears here as an appendix.

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full-blown necromancy: Nec possunt vitam reddere fata tuam; / Sic vocem reddunt (‘Nor can the fates restore your life; thus they restore your voice’). The short verse ‘Author Lectori’ which follows the Complaint in the Supplementum also recalls the ‘voice in a defunct corpse’ sought out by Erictho (et vocem defuncto in corpore quaerit, 631) with its final line, Haec tibi defuncti debilis umbra canit (‘The feeble shade of a dead man sings this to you’). Though less flamboyant than May’s Complaint, Fanshawe’s Maius Lucanizans is intertextually more sophisticated, weaving in memories of other passages, in Virgil, in Lucan and in May’s Supplementum. ‘Et noto major Imago’ in line 2 is a quotation from Aeneid II.773, where Aeneas is visited by the ghost of his wife Creusa as he leaves Troy: infelix simulacrum atque ipsius umbra Creusae visa mihi ante oculos et nota maior imago. [‘The unhappy spectre and shade of Creusa herself appeared before my eyes, larger than I knew her’, Aen. II.772–3.]

Creusa delivers the first of several prophecies he will receive of the new kingdom awaiting him in Latium. Fanshawe uses italics for this phrase to highlight the quotation, but the reader is expected to see beyond the Virgilian original. Virgil’s line is echoed twice in the Pharsalia. On each occasion the loving forgiveness of Virgil’s Creusa is conspicuously absent, and, as in Fanshawe’s poem, the spectre or imago in question responds to a crime against pietas with the promise of vengeance either explicit or implicit. On the first occasion, the imago of Rome herself confronts Caesar on the banks of the Rubicon: ingens visa duci patriae trepidantis imago (‘the huge image of his trembling country appeared to the leader’, I.186). Roma warns him in the name of law and civility not to cross, but Caesar ignores the warning. Excusing himself to Roma and to Jupiter Tonans, who looks out over the walls of Rome from the Tarpeian rock on the Capitoline (I.195–6), he crosses the Rubicon and having crossed declares ‘hic pacem temerataque iura relinquo’ (‘here I leave peace and the laws, which I have already violated, behind me’, I.225). The threat of vengeance is not made explicit here, but when in lines 4–5 Fanshawe has Caesar spatter Jupiter Tonans with blood as he falls at the hands of the conspirators, it may be in order to refer us again to the vengeful gods Caesar offends in this passage: the assassination actually took place in the Senate, not in the nearby temple of Jupiter Tonans. Lucan’s second echo of the Virgilian line occurs at the beginning of Book III, when Pompey is visited by the ghost of his former wife and Caesar’s daughter, Julia: diri tum plena horroris imago / visa … Iulia (‘Julia appeared, a spectre full of ominous dread’, III.9–10). Furious both at his love for his new wife and at his raising arms against his father-in-law, she    Lynette Thompson and R.T. Bruère, ‘Lucan’s Use of Virgilian Reminiscence’, Classical Philology 63 (1968), 1–21.

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promises to haunt him in the midst of battle, and gloatingly predicts his death. Though quoting Virgil on the benevolent Creusa, it is these vengeful Lucanian ghosts to which Fanshawe alludes. In May’s Supplementum there is a further, fainter echo of the same Virgilian line. As Caesar views the severed head of Gnaeus Pompey, the son of his murdered enemy, subiit magni genitoris imago, / atque Aegyptiaco miserandum in litore funus (‘there comes upon him the image of his great father, and the pitiable funeral on the Egyptian shore’, VI.301–2). May is punning on Pompey’s honorific, Magnus, by which Lucan repeatedly refers to him: magni genitoris imago could be translated either ‘image of his great father’ or ‘image of his father, Magnus’. This magni imago which haunts Caesar mentally is an inward reflection of Pompey’s manes which lodges in Brutus’ breast in Pharsalia IX, a reminder of the vengeance which bides its time until the moment of the assassination. By linking these vengeful ghosts in Lucan and May back to their original in the Virgilian phrase he quotes, Fanshawe develops May’s pun. By reinstating Virgil’s comparative maior (‘greater’), Fanshawe suggests that this ghost is greater than its originals in Virgil and Lucan, particularly than Pompey’s: if Pompey’s ghost is magni imago, Lucan’s is maior imago. There is an implied tribute here to May, who is the ‘ghost’ of Lucan continuing his poem in the Supplementum, suggesting, at least rhetorically, that May is greater than his original. The same idea provides Fanshawe with his punning title: Maius Lucanizans most obviously means ‘May Lucanizing’, but this merges into the alternative possible translation, ‘Lucanizing more greatly’ (or ‘in a grander epic style’). Rome will not be avenged on Caesar until the end of May’s Supplementum, but within the scope of Lucan’s epic, the gods avenge her lost liberty on Curio, who urged Caesar to march on Rome in Book I. Fanshawe also alludes to this episode. In Book IV Curio arrives in Libya, where he plans to overthrow the Libyan king Juba, a supporter of Pompey. A local recounts to him two legends associated with a particular cliff, where Hercules is said once to have defeated the wrestler Antaeus, and Scipio later to have pitched his camp when he defeated Hannibal in the battle of Zama. Trusting that the lucky place (felici loco, IV.663) will ensure that he too, like Hercules and Scipio before him, obtains victory over the indigenous enemy, Curio chooses it for his camp. But his superstitious hope is disappointed: Juba uses his knowledge of the terrain to accomplish a tactical victory, and Curio falls in the massacre of his troops, a startling reversal of the victories of the outsiders Hercules and Scipio which marks the current degeneracy of Rome. Juba is an Antaeus who succeeds. Curio pays the penalty for Rome’s misery with his own blood (IV.805–6). The narrator reflects: Felix Roma quidem civisque habitura beatos, si libertatis superis tam cura placeret, quam vindicta placet!    Charles Saylor, ‘Curio and Antaeus: The African Episode of Lucan Pharsalia IV’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 112 (1982), 169–77.

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[‘How happy Rome would be, and what blessed citizens she would possess, if it pleased the gods to guard her freedom as much as it pleases them to avenge it!’ IV.807–9.]

Juba, the agent of this vengeance, foreshadowing Brutus’ eventual vengeance on Caesar himself, is a latter-day and more successful Antaeus. Thus it makes sense that in line 3 of Maius Lucanizans, Cesareo turgent exhaustae crimine venae (‘Veins emptied by the crime of Caesar swell’), Fanshawe recalls Lucan’s striking description of Antaeus’ revival when he is first overthrown by Hercules, and his strength is replenished by contact with his mother Earth: calido conplentur sanguine venae, / Intumuere tori (‘his veins were filled up with warm blood, his muscles swelled’, IV.630–32). The uncanny powers of Antaeus give Lucan’s ghost the strength to avenge Rome’s lost liberty, just as, in Lucan, they foreshadow Juba’s part in that same vengeance. If allusions to Lucan are anything to go by, Fanshawe ‘Lucanizes’ as much as May, and his invocations of Lucan’s vengeful ghosts suggest some sympathy with Lucan’s political position. However, if Fanshawe is willing to condemn the crime of a Caesar like Nero (3), he is nevertheless at pains to point out that Julius Caesar was melior (‘better’, 4). In the second half of the poem, Fanshawe urges May to write another instalment, and in the shape he proposes for this envisioned final epic there is a similar sense of political ambivalence, a judicious and pragmatic weighing up of alternatives. Sympathy for the republican cause and the victims of Caesarean tyranny is the note struck at first. He chides May for withholding the immortal fame which it is in his power to bestow on Brutus’ death and Portia’s fidelity, Atque ipsum dira proscriptum lege Senatum, Et Ciceronem ipsum, Libertatisque (Tyrannis Jam tribus oppressae) supremam audire querelam, Te recitante juvat. [‘And it would be pleasing to hear, with you reciting, the senate and Cicero himself proscribed by a dire law, and the last complaint of Liberty, already oppressed by three tyrants’, 28–31.]

Fanshawe clearly presents the retaliation of Octavian, Antony and Lepidus after Caesar’s assassination – the proscriptions (a vast programme of executions including that of Cicero) and the defeat of the republicans at Philippi – as the death of Liberty, the final transition of Rome from republic to empire as something which needs to be lamented as a return to tyranny. But then, through a passage calling for May to finish the story of Cleopatra, he makes the transition to Actium, and Octavian’s final rise to power, and here the tone and implications of the poem shift. Actium represents a different political choice. Antony, the last obstacle to the establishment of empire, is presented as a slave to private passion, uninterested

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in any public cause. His flight from battle in Cleopatra’s wake represents for Fanshawe a voluntary abdication of his public role: Formam pinge Ducum victricem; Haud tempore victam: Pinge Ducem molli vinctum fera colla cathena: Actiasque acies; Tyroni ubi gloria cana Cessit. Saepe Virum retrahebat conscia virtus Factorum veterum, Martisque innata Cupido, Navali sed enim pugna posse probavit Aequoream Venerem. Fugiens quem vincere posset, Victricem sequitur fugientem: Et parte recedens Imperii, laxas Augusto tradit habenas. [‘Paint her beauty, a conqueress of generals; in no way has she been conquered by time. Paint the General bound, with his fierce neck in a tender chain. Paint the battle array of Actium, where his grey eminence yielded to a beginner. Often his courage conscious of former deeds, with an innate cupidity for Mars, used to drag this man back again into the fray; but in the naval battle he proved that sea-born Venus has more power. Fleeing a man he could conquer, he follows the conqueress as she flees; and retiring from his part in empire, he hands over the slack reins to Augustus’, 37–45.]

Antony, in this picture, is defeated not so much by Octavian as by Cleopatra and by the personification of sexual desire in Venus. Octavian assumes power more by default than by military conquest, filling the role of charioteer to a state which would otherwise be dangerously without guide. The choice here is no longer the Lucanian one between liberty and empire, Libertas et Caesar (Pharsalia, VII.696). Rather, if Octavian like Lucan’s Caesar is motivated by selfish ambition (and Fanshawe is conspicuously silent on the subject here), the choice is now between two leaders motivated alike by self-interest, taking the form of ambition in one and love, or sensual indulgence, in the other. Since this love of Antony’s is presented as a loss of his government over himself, the choice could, in this depiction, be more accurately described as one between empire and anarchy, a ruler enslaved by passion being equivalent to no ruler at all. Fanshawe’s reference to Antony’s conscia virtus in line 40 glances towards the Aeneid, where the same line-ending appears as the maddened Turnus prepares to rush forth to single combat and death at the hands of Aeneas: aestuat ingens uno in corde pudor mixtoque insania luctu et furiis agitatus amor et conscia virtus. [‘Within his single heart burns huge shame, and madness mixed with grief, and love stirred up by rage, and conscious bravery’, Aen. XII.666–8.]

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Motivated by his sense of his own worth and consistently associated with virtus, Turnus resembles Homer’s Achilles. His defeat by Aeneas, whose primary characteristic is pietas or sense of duty to kin and nation and obedience to the gods, is an index of Virgil’s distance from the heroic ethos of Homer, based on a fierce individualistic pride which Virgil associates here with the madness of passion. Like Dido, Turnus is presented as driven insane by uncontrolled emotion, both serving as foils to Aeneas’ self-control. By paralleling Octavian’s enemy Antony with Aeneas’ enemy Turnus in his deployment of the Virgilian phrase, Fanshawe seems both to endorse the traditional reading of Virgil’s Aeneas as a typological prefiguring of Augustus, and to apply to Actium and Augustus the ethical scheme governing Virgil’s account of Aeneas’ career. The ethical ideal of a ruler governed by pietas, a sense of duty, embodied in the hero of the Aeneid, is held up as a kind of compromise between the dangerously individualistic ambition which characterizes Turnus, Achilles and Lucan’s Caesar on one hand, and the political ideal of constitutional republicanism on the other – or perhaps even only as some consolation for the irrevocable loss of that ideal. The most famous representation of Actium in classical poetry is also in the Aeneid: the prophetic depiction on Aeneas’ shield in Book VIII. In his transition from lamenting republican losses in the civil wars to celebrating Octavian’s victory at Actium, Fanshawe seems superficially to be returning us from Lucan’s world of bitter political vendettas to the Virgilian world of benign monarchical prophecy, and retrospectively this benign promise now seems to glimmer through the Lucanian clouds which darkened the allusion to Creusa at the beginning of the poem. But where the focus in Virgil’s depiction of Actium is on the godlike Octavian, his brow crowned with the star of his deified father (Aen. VIII.681), in keeping with his presentation of Augustus and empire as Rome’s divinely ordained destiny, Fanshawe’s is on the defeated Antony, and his political implications are more restrained. Fanshawe is shifting the debate from politics to ethics, from the constitutional debate between monarchy and republicanism to the question of the character needed in a good ruler. However we might regret the deaths of the defenders of republican liberty, the state should be grateful to be ruled by a virtuous monarch rather than a tyrant. In doing so he is directing May back to the views expressed in May’s own early tragedy Cleopatra Queen of Ægypt (1626), which centres on the battle of Actium. The way in which Fanshawe introduces the section, in lines 31 to 32, in fact indicates this: Prima Cleopatra Camena Dicta tibi, summo poscit jam carmine dici … [‘Cleopatra, recounted to you by your first Muse, now demands to be told in a final song’, 31–2.]

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Prima … Camena nudges May to remember the ethos of his youthful work, as well as referring to the beginning of Cleopatra’s story, covered in the Continuation and Supplementum. May’s tragedy exploits to the full the irony of Antony’s being the last remaining hope of the anti-Caesareans. May’s Antony, like Fanshawe’s, is enslaved by his love for Cleopatra, whose beauty did So sweetly conquer, I was proud to yield; And more rejoyc’d in that captivity, Than any Roman in a triumph did,

and he frankly renounces ‘the weary burden of his government’ to enjoy it. He therefore offers but a poor hope to those remaining republicans who look to him to save Rome from Octavian’s imperial ambitions. As Titius observes, ‘The tottering state thou holdst, must be supported / By nobler vertues, or it cannot stand’. Antony’s preoccupation with love at the expense of business is merely the form taken by his tendency to put his private interest above the common weal, his motivation in his military endeavours as well as in his present relaxation. Seleucis remarks that both Antony and Octavian are driven by ‘No other justice then ambition …; no other cause’. In this Antony resembles Lucan’s Caesar, and May obliquely points this out when, at the beginning of Act 2, the consuls Domitius and Sossius urge Antony to take up arms against Octavian. Sossius’ speech is so closely modelled on Curio’s, urging Caesar to march on Rome and Pompey in Book I of the Pharsalia, as to be almost a direct translation.10 Both speeches begin with an exhortation to uphold ‘laws … put to silence’ in Rome, a clarion call on behalf of the public good, but both end with a direct appeal to personal ambition: nor canst thou share The world with him, his pride would barre thy right … Or all the world, or nothing must be thine. partiri non potes orbem, Solus habere potes. (Pharsalia I.290–91)

The play is indeed not much more sanguine about Octavian. He too is driven by ‘No other justice then ambition’, and when he receives the news of Antony’s suicide in Act V, his magnanimous speech claiming that he wished merely to embrace Antony as his equal, and promising him funeral honours, is itself closely modelled on Caesar’s hypocritical lament on viewing the head of Pompey in Book IX of the Pharsalia, which Lucan introduces with these words:   Thomas May, The Tragedie of Cleopatra Queen of Ægypt (1639), B6v.   Ibid., B10 v. 10   Ibid., B8 v; cp. Lucan, Pharsalia I.273–91.  

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Nec non his fallere vocibus audet Adquiritque fidem simulati fronte doloris … [‘Yet he dared to utter this deceitful speech, and sought to gain belief for the counterfeit sorrow in his face’, Pharsalia IX.1062.]

Caesar’s hypocrisy fools nobody: ‘nor did the crowd believe his lament’ (nec turba querenti / credidit, IX.1105–6). The resemblance is pointed up in May by Lucilius’ wry comment, ‘Most royall Caesar-like dissimulation’.11 All that is left to be glad of at the end of the play is that the colder Octavian is not likely to drop the reins of government at the incitement of sexual desire, and that civil war must now end, as there is no challenger left: And here let Caesar sheath the civill sword, Whose fatall edge these twenty years has ripp’d The bleeding entrails of afflicted Rome.12

This visceral image is itself typically Lucanian, and indeed, though the tone of weary resignation to empire seems antithetical to Lucan’s unrelenting resentment of tyranny, the sentiment is not irreconcilable with the Pharsalia, where Lucan repeatedly expresses such grief and horror at the violence of civil war that continued armed resistance to Caesar seems at times almost worse than the tyranny it strives to avert. These two points – gratitude for Octavian’s self-control and for the return of peace – are also the emphases in the ‘Augustan’ ending of Fanshawe’s poem, such as it is. It concludes by proposing that Lucanizing May should adopt (or return to) a more Virgilian role in relation to his Augustus. He calls on May to recognize himself enrolled in the society of the great classical poets: Hic suspende Tubas. Hic cum Nasone Maronem, Et Flaccum, dulcesque choros agnosce Tuorum. Egregius Victor pacato carmine Mundo Auscultat, totamque Hederis indulget Olivam. Emeritus vates agat otia grata sub illo.13 [‘Here hang up your trumpet. Here recognize, along with Ovid, Virgil, and Horace too, the sweet choruses of your work! The outstanding victor, with the world pacified

  May, Tragedie of Cleopatra Queen of Ægypt, D9 r-v; cp. Lucan, Pharsalia IX.

11

1089–104. 12   May, Tragedie of Cleopatra Queen of Ægypt, E3 v. 13   The 1648 edition has agnosse at line 47; I follow the 1664 edition’s correction to agnosce. On the advice of Andrew Laird, I have corrected the 1648 edition’s indulgent to indulget, which both makes better sense and scans.

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by song, pays heed, and adorns the whole olive branch of peace with poetry’s ivy leaves. Under him, the deserving bard may follow his favoured pursuits’, 46–50.]

The opening lines here recall Dante’s meeting with the great poets in canto iv of the Inferno.14 Accompanied by Virgil, Dante encounters Homer, Horace, Ovid and Lucan, who enjoy an eminent position in Limbo. After welcoming Virgil back, they include Dante as one of their group: e più d’onore ancora assai mi fenno, ch’e’ sì mi fecer della loro schiera, sì ch’ io fui sesto tra cotanto senno. [‘and then they showed me still greater honour, for they made me one of their number so that I was the sixth among those high intelligences’, IV.100–102.]15

Dropping Homer, probably as less relevant than the Roman poets to the celebration of a neo-Latinist, Fanshawe also omits Lucan from Dante’s list. This could simply be read as following from the master trope which identifies May as the ghost of Lucan himself, continuing his own poem, so that Lucan’s inclusion is implicit in May’s. On the other hand, it may suggest that, with the continuation of his account up to Octavian’s victory at Actium, May will graduate from his earlier Lucanizing to a more courtly and Augustan, perhaps a more exalted, company of poets, from which the bitter republican Lucan is tacitly excluded. The final image recalls Virgil’s grateful Tityrus, reclining sub tegmine fagi (‘under the spreading beech’, Eclogue I.i) to enjoy otia (6) ensured by Octavian, and it implies a call to May to side, like Fanshawe, with the King in his growing disputes with Parliament. There may be a further nuance in the implications of the punning title emerging here. Fanshawe is giving May instructions on how he can Lucanize, or imitate Lucan, more greatly than he has done up to this point: to do so, he must temper Lucan’s republican zeal with some touch of Virgil’s accommodation to the conditions prevailing under a monarch who is at least virtuous. The allusion to Tityrus, reminiscent of the courtly world of Caroline pastoral which is the subject of Carew’s ‘In answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townsend’, might lead us at first to see the adaptation of Dante as an exclusion of Lucan. But in fact both political extremes are tempered in this final picture. To Lucanize more greatly is, for Fanshawe, to moderate one’s politics, to Lucanize in a more Virgilian strain, but not to exclude Lucan and his ideals. That a degree of Virgilian accommodation to monarchy does not need to imply servile worship, nor a selfish mercenary exchange of praise for patronage,   I am indebted to Andrew Laird for noticing this.   Text and translation from John D. Sinclair (ed.), The Divine Comedy of Dante

14 15

Alighieri (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939; rev. 1948).

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is conveyed by the wording of lines 48 and 49. Pacato carmine mundo is slightly surprising: we might expect the victor Octavian to emerge as egregius precisely because he has pacified the world through his decisive military victories in the civil wars, and that Fanshawe’s recommendation to May that he should adopt the position of Virgil’s Tityrus will be explained as an apt expression of gratitude to the leader for that peace, not least because it provides him with the leisure to pursue his calling, making poetry itself possible. This after all is the transaction summed up in Tityrus’ line deus nobis haec otia fecit (Virgil, Eclogues I.6). Here, however, all is reversed: we have the world pacified not by Octavian and his military victories but by song. As in the earlier conflation of writing and regicide, the act of representing something in writing becomes identified with enacting or causing it in real life: writing about the peace achieved at Actium is now equated with achieving that peace oneself. The idea, presumably, (at least in the context of the 1648 publication) is that Fanshawe is calling on May to join him in writing poetry which will encourage political moderation and thus perhaps bring about an end to hostilities, just as (to put it rather crudely) the Augustan propaganda machine, including Virgil’s Tityrus, helped to prevent a renewed outbreak of civil war after Octavian had completed his rise to power. But this singing will not be propaganda. While exerting some control over the minds of the monarch’s subjects, it is not controlled by the monarch in its turn. Rather, we discover when the surprising main verb of the sentence hits us at the beginning of line 49, the relationship is if anything the other way round. As the poet sings, the Egregius Victor … / Auscultat, an unusual verb meaning to heed or obey. A strained reading could perhaps yield something loosely paraphrasable as ‘The victor pays heed to the way in which the poet has pacified the world by song, and duly rewards him.’ But it is more natural to understand that the Egregius Victor obeys the poet, or heeds the lessons of his song – the poet exerting his influence over the monarch as well as over the world. The real influence the poet exerts on the world has shifted, over the course of the poem, from the Lucanian propagation of republicanism, inciting revolution, civil war and regicide, to a power which is made to sound more positive, productive and impressive: the power to end civil war (hitherto in literary convention the proudest boast of the emperor himself), and in some measure to command and control the present and future ruler. As in the Proclamation Ode’s echoes of Tityrus, this, then, is a muted Virgilianism, qualified by its interweaving with other sources, and the royalism it implies is moderate. It is exceptional virtue in a monarch, rather than divine authority, which claims subjects’ allegiance, together with the pragmatic need to preserve the peace. When the poem is printed in the 1648 volume, its message to its readers may take on new overtones. With the possibility already in the air that the state may demand Charles I’s blood, as Rome demanded Julius Caesar’s, Fanshawe is perhaps inviting his readers to look beyond that event, and, whatever their view of the father, to trust to the virtue of the son as a better monarch – a plea that the crimes of a Caesar can be abolished and avenged without abolishing Caesarism.

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The Caesarism, or royalism, which Fanshawe’s volume suggests may yet be recuperated is, however, far from the imperialist panegyric associated with Virgil and with much of the literature of the Caroline court. Like his treatment of Lucan here, Fanshawe’s handling of Virgil elsewhere in the volume also modifies and even explicitly corrects his classical model, tempering his politics in order to make of him a voice more amenable to Fanshawe’s moderate royalism. The translation of ‘The Fourth Booke of Virgills Aeneis On the Loves of Dido and Aeneas’, as Davidson rightly points out, fits into ‘the thematic unity of [the volume], both as a depiction of a Prince in exile and adversity and also as a lesson in the governance of the self and the nation’.16 Such an application would have seemed to Fanshawe’s contemporaries thoroughly Virgilian in spirit: from the time of the earliest commentaries, the belief was that Virgil wrote the Aeneid ‘to praise Augustus through his ancestors’ (Augustum laudere a parentibus).17 Like the Canto of the Progresse of Learning earlier in the volume, it is put into Spenserian stanzas. For Davidson, this choice ‘emphasizes the supernatural and romance elements of his original’, and thereby ‘redress[es] the ambiguity which appears, in most translations, to surround Aeneas’ behaviour’, for ‘the reality and the horror of the supernatural visitation must be credible of Aeneas if to retain his heroic stature.’18 By dramatically rendering Aeneas’ supernatural dread at the awe-inspiring divine commandment, in other words, Fanshawe lessens any hint of guilt in his abandonment of Dido, making him a more straightforwardly positive figure. Such an ambiguity of possible guilt, however, is not only an aspect of ‘most translations’ but is inherent in Virgil’s poem itself, giving rise to a persistent strain of commentary criticizing Aeneas’ behaviour in this episode from the Middle Ages on, and still forming a key part of the argument for the so-called ‘Harvard School’ of modern critics of Virgil, who emphasize those aspects of the Aeneid which pull against the poem’s more obvious celebration of its hero and of Virgil’s patron Augustus.19 If Davidson were right about Fanshawe’s intention here, it would mean that Fanshawe was seeking to reduce the Aeneid to its Augustan voice, removing those darker notes of criticism which cast doubt here and there on its overarching Augustan programme – as though Fanshawe considered Virgil not quite royalist enough. But Fanshawe, if anything, increases Aeneas’ guilt. Referring to Aeneas’ data dextera quondam, ‘thy late plighted hand’ in Fanshawe’s translation (Aen. IV.307, Fanshawe line 350), Virgil’s Dido claims that Aeneas has married her, making his breach of faith the more unforgivable. But Aeneas denies this:   Peter Davidson (ed.), The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), vol. I, p. 365. 17   Servius Grammaticus, Ad Aen. Proem, in Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii Carmina, ed. G. Thilo and H. Hagen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1902–27). 18   Davidson, The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, vol. I, pp. 365–6. 19   See John Watkins, The Specter of Dido: Spenser and Virgilian Epic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 16

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nec coniugis umquam praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni … [‘I never held out the bridegroom’s torch (or ‘alleged marriage as an excuse’), nor entered into such marriage bonds …’, Aen. IV.338–9.]

which Fanshawe translates And much lesse did I Wedlock-bands pretend, Neither to such a treaty ever condescend (391–2)

and Virgil’s narrator seems to support Aeneas’ denial in his criticism of Dido immediately after they have consummated their union: coniugium vocat; hos praetexit nomine culpam (‘she calls it marriage; with this name she cloaks her fault’, Aen. IV.172) – in Fanshawe’s translation, ‘She calls it Wedlock, gives her fault an honest name’ (203). All we witness directly is that Aeneas and Dido come together in a cave during a storm while out hunting, a coupling, attended with dire portents, at which prima et Tellus et pronupta Iuno / dant signum (‘Primal Earth and Juno, goddess of marriage, give the sign’, Aen. IV.166–7). Despite the fact that Juno, who is Aeneas’ implacable enemy and has hatched this scheme to bring Aeneas and Dido together in an attempt to frustrate his quest, also happens to be the goddess of marriage, dant signum does not seem to imply a marriage ceremony. In Fanshawe’s translation, however, much more is implied: Earth gives the signall word, And Juno, Queene of Marriage, doth their hands accord. (193–4)

The Virgilian action of giving the signal is now restricted to Earth, and in the additional phrase supplied by Fanshawe a separate action is attributed to the ‘Queene of Marriage’, who ‘doth their hands accord’, anticipating and lending support to Dido’s later reference to Aeneas’ ‘late plighted hand’. While maintaining Virgil’s ambiguity over Aeneas’ guilt in leaving Dido, then, Fanshawe actually shifts the balance subtly to make Aeneas seem more clearly culpable, his abandonment of the woman who now seems really to be his wife a violation of a properly consecrated bond, and his denial of their wedlock apparent hypocrisy. Rather than making Virgil’s Aeneas more heroic and his poem more strongly Augustan, Fanshawe is heightening the notes of ambivalence which problematize the Augustan reading of the Aeneid. The choice of Spenserian stanzas for the form of the translation in fact fits very comfortably with this purpose. It was not until the Romantics that the supernatural atmosphere of The Faerie Queene emphasized by Davidson came to be seen as Spenser’s most distinctive trait. For seventeenth-century readers he was primarily a moral and political writer, though perceptions of his political aspect had, as Michelle O’Callaghan puts it, ‘an unsettling doubleness: he was simultaneously

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the laureate poet gloriously serving his monarch and the oppositional poet, the persecuted critic of the corrupted times’.20 While the early seventeenth-century Spenserians who are O’Callaghan’s principal subject were associated with opposition to Stuart absolutism, the 1648 pamphlet The Faerie Leveller: or, King Charles his Leveller described and deciphered in Queene Elizabeths dayes, a reprinting of the democratic Giant episode from Book V of The Faerie Queene with glosses applying the allegory to the current troubles, appropriates Spenser on behalf of an aggressive royalism. As we have seen in the last chapter, Fanshawe’s Spenserian satire on the corruption of the power-system under Charles’s reign in the Canto of the Progresse of Learning shows clearly that his Spenser is closer to that embraced by the critics of Stuart rule. By putting his translation from Virgil into Spenserian stanzas, Fanshawe makes it into a companion piece, answering the earlier satire from across the volume. In doing so, he brings together the two sides of Spenser’s political heritage, tempering the satirical Spenser exemplified in the earlier poem with Virgilian connotations of the laureate poet’s loyal service to a monarch. But he also implicitly brings the concerns and the tone of the earlier poem to bear on the Virgil translation. If Spenser was invoked in the Canto of the Progresse of Learning as a model of the wise counsellor, able to teach ‘Rulers first … To rule themselves’ and thus to govern their kingdoms justly, as Wit has been prevented from doing in the current corrupt age, Virgil acquires the same character here. The Canto’s emphasis on the rule of reason and the moral education offered to the ruler by the counsellor or poet, as contrasted with the self-seeking flattery and corrupt patronage associated with Craft and his followers, colours our sense of Virgil’s purpose and stance in relation to Augustus in the Aeneid translation. Virgil is effectively recast in the mould of Spenser’s explicitly didactic virtues allegory, as a poet and moral teacher who is, like Fanshawe’s Spenser, not afraid to offer criticism as well as praise to his monarch in an effort to shape him into a good ruler. Aeneas’ adventure in Carthage, ‘that Land / Of sweet inchantments’ as Fanshawe calls it (321–2), represents the most obvious (and most Spenserian) example of a test of moral self-government in the Aeneid, most clearly comparable to Spenser’s Bower of Bliss in Book II of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s Legend of Temperance. Spenser’s Bower of Bliss episode, and indeed much of the career of Guyon, his knight of Temperance, was of course in large part based upon Virgil’s Dido episode and the tradition of moralizing commentary upon it. But Aeneas, seen through the lens of this Spenserian moralism, affords both a negative and a positive exemplum, a vehicle for both warning and exhortation to, or praise and blame of, any ruler to whom he may be compared. He is not only a temperate Guyon resisting and escaping the Bower, but also an intemperate Verdant, initially luxuriating in it. Taking the translation as a companion piece to the Canto of the Progresse of Learning, we can once again see this dual message as dividing along 20   Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 1.

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the line of a split between Fanshawe’s retrospective condemnation of Charles I and his hopes for the young Prince, the volume’s addressee. The luxury and wealth of Carthage where an ‘uxorious’ (308) Aeneas is found ‘loytring’ (312) by Mercury, decked with jewels and gorgeous gold-edged robes (302–6), may, like the world driven by avarice under the reign of Craft in the Progresse of Learning, be read as reflecting on Charles’s reign. At the end of the volume, the Summary Discourse of the Civill Warres of Rome, about which I shall have more to say shortly, is prefaced by Two Odes out of Horace, relating to the Civill Warres of Rome: we have looked at the second of these, the translation of Horace’s Epode 16, in Chapter 5; the first, a translation of Odes III.24, ‘Against covetous rich men’, blames the ‘blood-shed and intestine rage’ (26) of the civil wars on the ‘Unbridled License’ (30) and insatiable lust for ‘Jewels and pernicious muck’ (52) with which it characterizes contemporary Rome. As in the Progresse of Learning, Fanshawe clearly indicates in his selection of this ode that he views Charles’s reign as one of moral laxity, luxury and avarice, but here he makes it explicitly a cause of the Civil Wars. That Aeneas’ luxurious life at Carthage carries similar implications is suggested by Dido’s curse. Dido’s curse is the means whereby Virgil explains the Punic Wars later in Rome’s history as Carthage’s vengeance for Aeneas’ treatment of Dido here. After first invoking the assistance of ‘you revenging pow’rs, Gods which pertaine / To dying Dido’, she turns to her subjects present and future: Then you, O Tyrians, breed your children in Successive hate, so shall my wrong’d ghost rest; Let Peace or Faith with these be held a sinne, Some one of ours with fire and sword infest, The proud Aeneiades where ere they nest, … and our late sons keep endless war alive. (Fanshawe, 713–21)

In the context of Fanshawe’s 1648 volume the passage is bound also, for a contemporary reader, to evoke the current wars. The immediately preceding part of Dido’s curse, moreover, has a particular connection to the English Civil Wars, because of a notorious anecdote concerning Charles I. In one account of the incident (though several different versions exist), it occurs during the winter of 1642–43, while the King was at Oxford. As they strolled through the Bodleian library one day, ‘The Lord Falkland, to divert the King, would have his Majesty make a Tryal of his Fortune by the Sortes Virgilianae; which every Body knows was an usual kind of Augury some Ages past.’21 The sortes was a fortune-telling   James Welwood, Memoirs of the Most Material Transactions in England: For the Last Hundred Years, Preceding the Revolution in 1688 (4th edn, London: T. Goodwin, 1702; first published 1700), p. 105. Davidson refers to this anecdote in his notes, but the source he cites (John Aubrey, Remaines of gentilisme and judaisme) in fact gives a quite different version, in which the inauspicious sortes is performed by Prince Charles in Paris 21

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practice in which the questioner lets the book fall open at random and blindly picks out a passage with a pin. The passage lighted on by the King was precisely that translated by Fanshawe’s stanza, Yet vext b’a warlike people, forc’t to flye, Torne and divorc’t from his deare sonnes imbrace, Let him beg forraine ayde, see his men dye For crimes not theirs: And let him, when a peace Shall be concluded by him with disgrace, Enjoy nor Crown, nor life (then seeming good) But be cut off in middle of his race, And uninterr’s float on the restlesse Flood: Thus pray I, these last words I powre out with my blood. (Fanshawe, 504–12)

The King was not surprisingly somewhat dismayed by the uncanny appropriateness and gloomy prognosis of the result. If the incident really occurred in the way the earliest written source describes, Fanshawe would almost certainly have heard of it, since he joined the King at Oxford in 1643. England’s Civil War, then, is obliquely portrayed here, in the terms of Dido’s curse, as a divine vengeance on Charles. The culpable aspects of the hero in whom Virgil foreshadows Augustus – his breach of faith to Dido, the self-indulgence and failure of moral restraint which led him into the amatory adventure in the first place, the life of Verdantlike luxury and ease in which it embroiled him – are permitted to reflect badly on ‘Th’ Augustus of our age’, as Fanshawe names Charles I in the Ode on the Proclamation, even to the extent of suggesting that England’s Civil Wars are to be blamed on his implied moral failings. But in his pious obedience to the gods, Aeneas also furnishes a positive exemplum and a role-model for the young Prince. As Aeneas heeds the divine command and assumes moral self-control once more, suppressing his personal desires in favour of the public good and his nation’s destiny, so Prince Charles is implicitly adjured to exercise moral self-control, and to put his country before himself in a way which his father failed to do. In Virgil, of course, the moral wrongs caused by Aeneas’ delinquency cannot be wholly righted, for his very obedience to the gods entails the breaking of his vows to Dido (vows which as we have seen are given a more certain and sacred status in Fanshawe’s translation). It is difficult to know how far to press the analogy, but perhaps there is a sense here that the guilt accrued under the father’s rule cannot be entirely washed away (haerebunt maculae, as Claudian puts it in the principal source for Buchanan’s Genethliacon), and that in his own future rule the son will be obliged to behave differently not only as a matter of obeying an absolute moral standard, but also as a means of doing penance for the father’s crimes – that the limited monarchy, in December 1648 – later than the publication of Fanshawe’s volume – while the King is imprisoned at Carisbrooke and awaiting trial.

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for instance, which the Buchanan translation urges the young Prince to accept as an aspect and extension of a ruler’s moral self-control, is not simply an absolute good but an obligation incurred by his father’s excesses, a debt to a country already wronged. Within the Aeneid, Dido’s curse in Book IV appears as a kind of nightmarishly distorted echo or parody of the numerous prophecies foretelling Rome’s glorious future in other books.22 In Chapter 4 we looked at the ways in which Buchanan and Fanshawe both undercut the very idea of such optimistic Virgilian prophecy, with its political motivation as an attempt to present Augustus’ imperial rule as divinely ordained. Such a mystification of monarchical power, like the Stuart notion of the Divinity of Kings a charter for absolutism, is as we have repeatedly seen alien to Fanshawe’s political ideas, and the closest thing to such a prophecy allowed to enter the volume is its chilling parody and inversion in Dido’s curse – with one notable exception. The final item in the volume is a piece of prose, A Summary Discourse of the Civill Warres of Rome, extracted out of the best Latine writers in Prose and Verse, To the Prince His Highnesse. At the end of a swift and highly readable account of the Roman civil wars from the Gracchi to Actium, he comes to the point when the Common-Wealth, after the defeat of Mark Anthony at the Battell of Actium, being now quite tired out with civil Warres, submitted her selfe to the just and peacefull Scepter of the most Noble Augustus.23

He then quotes and translates Aeneid VI.791–805, Anchises’ prophecy to Aeneas in the underworld of a return of the Golden Age with the reign of his descendant Augustus, beginning hic vir, hic est, tibi quen promitti saepius audis Augustus Caesar, Divi genus, aurea condet saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva Saturno quondam …

which Fanshawe translates This is that man of men Augustus, hee Whom (sprung from Heaven) Heaven oft hath promis’d thee, That man that shall to Italy restore The Golden Age which Saturne gave before …24 22   ‘The curse operates as a rival prophecy, set alongside the prophecies in the Aeneid of Rome’s future greatness’ (David Quint, ‘Voices of Resistance: The Epic Curse and Camões’s Adamastor’, Representations 27 [1989], p. 122). 23   Davidson, The Poems and Translations of Sir Richard Fanshawe, vol. I, pp. 139–40. 24   Ibid. p. 140.

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The prose lines which introduce this high-point of Virgilian panegyric are italicized because they are a quotation, taken from the beginning of Tacitus’ Annals, and though Fanshawe adds the flattering adjectives ‘just and peacefull’ and ‘most Noble’ in his translation, he gives the original Latin in a marginal gloss: Qui cuncta discordiis civilibus fessa nomine principis sub imperium accepit (‘Who, using the title Princeps, took control of the whole state, which was worn out with civil wars’). The Tacitean original, thus preserved in Fanshawe’s margin, gives a much flatter and demystified view of Augustus’ rise to power: there is no hint, as in Fanshawe’s translation, of Rome’s voluntary submission, let alone of the divine providence at work in the Virgil passage. A tension between different ways of representing Augustus is, then, already being slipped into Fanshawe’s text, at least for those capable of reading, and bothering to read, the Latin as well as the English. Immediately after the flattery of the Virgil passage, Fanshawe proceeds to control the reader’s response to it in a careful explanation of precisely what makes Augustus worthy of emulation: I must confesse Sir, I am now where I would be, and from whence I would not bee removed a great while, but for troubling Your Highnesse with unmannerly length; for this Mirrour of Princes I have above all others ever admired, not for his great Victories at home or abroad (these in themselves had been but splendid Robberies) but for this, that he directed all his studies and actions to use, and not to ostentation and glory; nor to his own use, but to the use and benefit of Mankind, whom it was more his Ambition to civilize and make happy, than to subject them to his Authority.25

The rhetorical purpose of Fanshawe’s employment of Virgil’s hyperbolic praise of Augustus, then, is to remind the young Prince yet again that his role is to serve the good of his people, rather than seeking ostentation, glory or his own ends. The mere achievement or enlargement of power through ‘his great Victories at home or abroad’ – both the expansion of empire and his success in the Civil Wars – is so far from being a justification for praise that it is dismissed with the contemptuous epithet ‘splendid Robberies’. Virgilian praise, we are being told, can be justified only when applied to a ruler who does not seek power for its own sake but only to serve the common good. These priorities are suggestively further illustrated by a comparison to Augustus’ adoptive father, Julius Caesar: yet contenting himself with so much Souldiery as was sufficient to assert his succession to the Empire against his Fathers Conspirators, and to tye the hands of a potent Mad people, from doing farther mischief to themselves … he chose to be inferiour to Julius onely in Martiall Arts, that hee onely might be Superiour to Julius in Civill.26

  Ibid., pp. 140–41.   Ibid., p. 141.

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The exhortation to the Prince to concentrate, like Augustus, on serving the good of the people rather than on subjecting them to his power by force is coupled, then, with the implicit exhortation to be, like Augustus, superior to his father in civil arts, once he has overcome his father’s enemies and obtained the throne. Again we have the suggestion that the reign of Charles I did not conform to this ideal of the monarch who serves his people. The concrete examples of Augustus’ alleged public service, Fanshawe then tells us, he ‘must borrow Prose to explaine’, since they are ‘but toucht upon in one word by Virgill’, and he turns to the historian Paterculus for a summary.27 This summary is indeed quite different in tone and emphasis from Virgil’s panegyric, foregrounding prominently Augustus’ supposed bolstering of the Senate and of the legal system: In the twenty yeare the Civill Warres were ended, forreigne buried, the fury of Armes every where laid asleepe; force restored to the Lawes, Authority to the Judges, Majesty to the Senate … the old and ancient forme of Government recalled …28

Augustus’ claim that he had restored the republic was in fact a thin veil for what was clearly in reality a massive centralization of power in himself and his household, with the effective power and freedom of the Senate greatly reduced from what it had been in the mixed constitution of the old republican system. But historical reality is not what matters here: what does matter is that Charles is being invited to admire and emulate an imagined Augustus who did willingly use his power not to establish an absolute monarchy but, to the contrary, to restore a system of mixed government, voluntarily sharing with the people, through their ancient institutions, the power that he had obtained through war. The equivalent notion in England during the Civil War period, that of preserving or restoring the ancient constitution, was commonly invoked in the rhetoric of both sides: royalists claimed to be defending the ancient constitution against the dangerous ‘innovations’ of a Parliament which was assaulting the monarch’s traditional rights and prerogatives, just as often as parliamentarians accused Charles I of overthrowing what they saw as England’s traditionally mixed or limited monarchy to replace it with absolutism. But the emphasis here on the defence of the Senate’s powers suggests that Fanshawe intends here to remind the Prince again of the need to respect the ‘Majesty’ of Parliament. This tactical exposition of the supposed virtues which rendered Augustus worthy of Virgil’s panegyric in Book VI leads Fanshawe finally, and strikingly, to an explicit rejection and correction of that very passage:

  Ibid., p. 141.   Ibid., p. 141.

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When I reflect upon all these things, methinkes that Character which the same Virgil bestowes a little after upon the Roman Nation in generall, would have better fitted, and perchance also better pleased Augustus, then the former, as most insisting upon that excellency whereupon he valued himselfe most.29

He then quotes Aeneid VI.847–53, and concludes with a translation, or ‘paraphrase to your Highnesse’,30 which applies Virgil’s words explicitly to the young Charles: Others may breathing Mettals softer grave, Plead Causes better, and poore Clients save From their oppressours: with an Instrument They may mete out the spacious Firmament, And count the rising starres with greater skill, Reyne the proud Steed, and breake him of his will. Better their Sword, and better use their Pen. Breton remember thou to governe men, (Be this thy trade) And to establish Peace, To spare the humble, and the proud depresse.31

Fanshawe’s paraphrase effectively performs what he has argued that Virgil should have done, for his ‘Breton’ is not just any British man, corresponding to Virgil’s generalized ‘Roman’, but is evidently Prince Charles himself. Where Virgil in the earlier passage praised Augustus as the commander of a wide empire and as a ruler with quasi-divine status, Fanshawe praises in Charles ‘that excellency whereupon [Augustus] valued himselfe most’, the art of just government, sparing the humble and taming the proud. Lines 6–7 here are inserted by Fanshawe, bracketing the art of war, as Virgil does not, with the plastic and intellectual arts which the ‘Breton’ should leave to others. Charles is not to pride himself upon his martial exploits, but to consider acts of violence against his own people a sad necessity of civil war, to be kept to a minimum and regretted. Or rather, Fanshawe does not exactly praise Charles in this passage at all. In place of the earlier, displaced panegyric we have instead a passage of instruction, exhorting Charles to govern justly. Virgil is implicitly rebuked for his lapse into the worship of power, and amended to fit him back into the mould of the Spenserian teacher and counsellor as whom he appeared in the translation of Book IV of the Aeneid. The final, delightful stroke is the clearly implied claim that the only Augustus who could deserve the fulsome praise of Virgil’s Golden Age prophecy, the ‘Mirrour of Princes’ whose virtues Fanshawe has expounded in the closing section of his Summary Discourse, is an Augustus who would himself reject such a panegyric, and be ‘better pleased’ by this kind of admonition and counsel from   Ibid., p. 142.   Ibid., p. 142. 31   Ibid., p. 142. 29 30

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his poet. As Fanshawe’s idealized Augustus hands over a share of power to the Senate, so he willingly submits to the tutor-like authority of the poet-counsellor. Fanshawe’s volume, in its entirety, teaches Prince Charles that he must do likewise, both in his reading and in his style of government, if he is to earn the acclaim and allegiance of his people. And it promises the people, its wider readership, that the second Charles may prove to be such a ruler. By looking to the Roman past, it encourages them to put their own past behind them, and, whatever their feelings about the reigning King may be, to place their hopes in an expectant heir who has learned the lessons of history and will not repeat his father’s mistakes.

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Appendix

A Translation of Fanshawe’s Maius Lucanizans ‘May Lucanizing’ (or ‘Lucanizing More Greatly’) Lo, Lucan, you live! Your purple ghost is recalled from the sacred urn, and this apparition is greater than your well known form. Your veins, emptied by the crime of a Caesar, swell, while a better Caesar, with your verse playing the avenger, dies, and spatters with blood the Capitol and Jove himself. This is your doing, May, as heir to the poet’s divine breast and as a master of languages. Whether you render in your native song what the wandering Muse sang to her Romans; or you dare to advance further, now your leader has been snatched away, and bearing the victorious standards of the English goddess of song where those of Rome lie prostrate, you add to your huge endeavours. Or again as your own translator, you deliver again Roman wars to Rome which were hitherto sung to few ears. Your well-known tongue describes vacillating Cato, who dies as the whole Theatre of the World looks on. You surpass your original and yourself, and reaching both peaks of Parnassus you are read by the learned and the masses where, chanting fierce triumphs with varied voice at the river Thames, your trumpet beats each bank, sounding Roman notes from here, and a British response from over there; the English boast of Lucan, the Latins of May. Oh, recount more to us! How many battles remain to be embellished by you? What are the love poems your Muse is burying? Alas! How many are the death scenes you do not allow to live on forever? What of the angry plebs, and the pitiable end of Brutus, and the loyalty of his wife not deserving the test of death; ah! too attached was she to her husband! too emulous of her father! Yet the proscription by a dire law of the Senate itself and of Cicero himself too, and Liberty (already oppressed by three tyrants) giving her last sob is a pleasure to hear, if you are reciting it. Cleopatra, recounted to you by your first Muse, now demands to be told in a final song: the whole of her does not yet shine forth; it is more in the mid-part of her life’s light that she toils: the Queen is afraid, unless you hurry to help with your lofty verse, to calm her spirits with your words and to provide her with serpents. Paint her beauty, a conqueress of Generals: in no way has she been conquered by time. Paint the General bound, with his fierce neck in a tender chain. Paint the battle array of Actium, where his grey eminence yielded to a beginner.   The title is a pun.



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Often his courage conscious of former deeds, with an innate cupidity for Mars, used to drag this man back again into the fray; but in the naval battle he proved that sea-born Venus has more power. Fleeing the man he could conquer, he follows the conqueress as she flees; and retiring from his part in empire, he hands over the slack reins to Augustus. Here hang up your trumpet. Here recognize, along with Ovid, Virgil, and Horace too, the sweet choruses of your work! The outstanding victor, with the world pacified by song, pays heed, and adorns the whole olive branch of peace with poetry’s ivy leaves. Under him, the deserving bard may follow his favoured pursuits.

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Index locorum

Aristotle On the Generation of Animals, 125 Politics, 122, 123–5, 126 Bible Exodus, 56 Leviticus, 49 Revelation, 53, 66, 147 Book of Common Prayer, 49 Buchanan, George Baptistes, 93 De iure regni apud Scotos dialogus, 8–9, 92, 93, 97, 99 De Maria Scotorum Regina, 92 Genethliacon, 5, 6, 93–106, 168 prefatory verse for Martim de Azpilcueta, 101–2 Carew, Thomas, ‘In answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townsend’, 107, 115, 149, 162 Catullus, Carmina III, 30, 74, 78 Cicero De officiis, 9, 111 In Catilinam, 68 Claudian ‘Panegyric on the fourth consulship of the emperor Honorius’, 93, 94–8, 168 Dante, Inferno IV, 162 Denham, Sir John, Cooper’s Hill, 65 Disticha Catonis, 142, 143 Faerie Leveller, The (1648 pamphlet), 166 Fanshawe, Sir Richard ‘A Canto of the Progress of Learning’, 11, 131–49, 164, 166, 167 ‘A Summary Discourse of the Civill Warres of Rome’, 11, 167, 169–73

‘Against covetous rich men’ [Horace, Odes 3.24], 167 Il Pastor Fido, 123–4 Il Pastor Fido frontmatter, 88 Il Pastor Fido ... with ... divers other Poems, 87, 89 Maius Lucanizans, 151, 153–4, 175–6 ‘Ode on the Proclamation’, 4, 87, 89, 107–19, 163, 168 ‘On His Majesties Great Shippe’, 126–9 ‘On the Earle of Straffords Tryall’, 5–6, 91 ‘Presented to His Highnesse in the West’, 5, 92–106, 169 ‘Presented to His Highnesse the Prince of Wales, At his going into the West’, 90 ‘The Fall’, 7, 91 ‘The Fourth Booke of Virgills Æneis On the Loves of Dido and Æneas’, 131, 164–9, 172 ‘To the most Illustrious and most hopefull Prince Charles’, 121, 123, 125–6, 133 ‘To the People of Rome, Epode 16’ [Horace], 109 Great Eclipse of the Sun, or Charles His Waine, The (1644 pamphlet), 129 Guarini, Giambattista Il compendio della poesia tragicomica, 121–2, 125 Il Pastor Fido, 4, 87, 121–4 Herrick, Robert Frontmatter to Hesperides, 15, 62–3 Hesperides, 87

188

Herrick, Fanshawe and the Politics of Intertextuality ‘To the Most Illustrious, and Most Hopefull Prince, Charles’, 51, 52, 54–5, 82 ‘The Argument of his Book’ (H-1), 19, 28, 44, 46 ‘The Parliament of Flowers to Julia’ (H-11), 116 ‘To Perilla’ (H-14), 61 ‘To his Mistresses’ (H-19), 27, 61 ‘No loathsomnesse in love’ (H-21), 27 ‘The Difference Betwixt Kings and Subjects’ (H-25), 53 ‘The Carkanet’ (H-34), 29 ‘How the Wall-flower came first, and why so called’ (H-36), 39 ‘Upon the losse of Mistresses’ (H-39), 27 ‘The Vine’ (H-41), 40 ‘To Love’ (H-42), 29 ‘To Robin Red-breast’ (H-50), 62 ‘Discontents in Devon’ (H-51), 60 ‘To his Paternall Countrey’ (H-52), 59–60 ‘To his Mistresses’ (H-54), 27, 33 ‘Cheerfulnesse in Charitie: or, The sweet Sacrifice’ (H-63), 49 ‘Sweetnesse in Sacrifice’ (H-65), 49 ‘Steame in Sacrifice’ (H-66), 49 ‘[Upon Julia’s Voice] Againe’ (H-68), 40 ‘All things decay and die’ (H-69), 45 ‘The succession of the foure sweet months’ (H-70), 19, 46 ‘To the King, Upon his comming with his Army into the West’ (H-77), 65–6, 67 ‘Delight in Disorder’ (H-83), 35–6 ‘To Dean-bourn, a rude River in Devon, by which sometimes he lived’ (H-86), 20, 60, 68 ‘Duty to Tyrants’ (H-97), 5, 53 ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’ (H-111), 20, 76–7 ‘Leanders Obsequies’ (H-119), 37 ‘Upon Scobble’ (H-126), 25 ‘Upon Mrs. Elizabeth Wheeler, under the name of Amarillis’ (H-130), 171 ‘To Electra’ (H-152), 40 ‘The cruell Maid’ (H-159), 62

‘To the King, to Cure the Evill’ (H161), 53 ‘How Primroses came green’ (H-167), 42 ‘A Ring presented to Julia’ (H-172), 28–9 ‘Corinna’s going a-Maying’ (H-178), 47–9 ‘The Lilly in a Christal’ (H-193), 41 ‘Upon Luggs’ (H-199), 28 ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201), 18, 20, 37, 77–9 ‘To his Friend, on the untuneable Times’ (H-210), 43–4, 58 ‘A Pastorall upon the birth of Prince Charles’ (H-213), 4–5, 52 ‘To the most vertuous Mistresse Pot, who many times entertained him’ (H-226), 19 ‘No Lock against Letcherie’ (H-233), 24 ‘Neglect’ (H-234), 32 ‘To his Booke’ (H-240), 71 ‘His Recantation’ (H-246), 29–30 ‘Upon the death of his Sparrow. An Elegie’ (H-256), 30–31 ‘How Roses came red’ (H-258), 19 ‘Upon Groynes’ (H-261), 28 ‘To the King’ (H-264), 20, 53, 82 ‘To the Queene’ (H-265), 20, 57, 82 ‘The Poets good wishes for the ... Prince’ (H-266), 20, 82 ‘Obedience in Subjects’ (H-269), 5, 9, 53 ‘More potent, lesse peccant’ (H-270), 25 ‘To his Houshold gods’ (H-278), 63 ‘On himselfe’ (H-332), 58 ‘The departure of the good Daemon’ (H-334), 58 ‘His age, dedicated to his peculiar friend, M. John Wickes’ (H-336), 19, 41–2, 75–6 ‘To Flowers’ (H-343), 62 ‘The meddow verse or Aniversary to Mistris Bridget Lowman’ (H-354), 47 ‘The parting verse, the feast there ended’ (H-355), 47 ‘His Lachrimae or Mirth, turn’d to mourning’ (H-371), 57–8 ‘To his peculiar friend Sir Edward Fish’ (H-392), 57

Index locorum ‘To his Booke’ (H-405), 71 ‘The Poet loves a Mistresse, but not to marry’ (H-422), 27 ‘A Hymne to Sir Clipseby Crew’ (H-426), 76 ‘Short and long both likes’ (H-437), 27 ‘To his peculier friend Master Thomas Shapcott, Lawyer’ (H-444), 19–20, 55 ‘Upon Love’ (H-458), 29 ‘The parting Verse’ (H-465), 25 ‘Upon his eye-sight failing him’ (H482), 61 ‘To Sir Clisebie Crew’ (H-489), 58–9 ‘To his Kinswoman, Mrs. Penelope Wheeler’ (H-510), 46, 50 ‘To Mistresse Mary Willand’ (H-516), 19, 55 ‘Change gives content’ (H-517), 31 ‘Upon Letcher’ (H-532), 28 ‘To Julia, the Flaminica Dialis, or Queen-Priest’ (H-539), 49 ‘An Ode to Sir Clipsebie Crew’ (H544), 20, 76 ‘To his worthy Kinsman, Mr. Stephen Soame’ (H-545), 19–20, 46, 50 ‘To his Tomb-maker’ (H-546), 27, 62 ‘Art above Nature, to Julia’ (H-560), 35, 36 ‘The Poet hath lost his pipe’ (H-573), 58 ‘The Apparition of his Mistresse calling him to Elizium’ (H-575), 20, 21, 79 ‘Love lightly pleased’ (H-579), 27–8, 40 ‘To Julia’ (H-584), 50 ‘Upon the troublesome times’ (H-596), 44 ‘The bad season makes the Poet sad’ (H-612), 18, 35, 44, 45 ‘To the Maids to walke abroad’ (H-616), 40 ‘His own Epitaph’ (H-617), 62 ‘Poets’ (H-624), 37 ‘His charge to Julia at his death’ (H-627), 26 ‘Upon Snare, an Usurer’ (H-631), 26 ‘Painting sometimes permitted’ (H641), 32

189

‘Farewell Frost, or welcome the Spring’ (H-642), 46 ‘What kind of Mistresse he would have’ (H-665), 33 ‘To Master Denham, on his Prospective Poem’ (H-673), 65 ‘To the King’ (H-685), 56 ‘The may-pole’ (H-695), 47–8 ‘How Roses came red’ (H-706), 19 ‘His returne to London’ (H-713), 58, 63–4, 66–8 ‘A Prognostick’ (H-718), 26 ‘Good precepts, or counsell (H-725), 45 ‘The smell of the Sacrifice’ (H-736), 49 ‘To women, to hide their teeth, if they be rotten or rusty’ (H-738), 33 ‘To Sir John Berkley, Governour of Exeter’ (H-745), 66 ‘Love dislikes nothing’ (H-750), 27 ‘To Prince Charles upon his coming to Exeter’ (H-756), 18, 66 ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ (H-779), 36 ‘To his deare Valentine, Mistresse Margaret Falconbridge’ (H-789), 55 ‘To his faithfull friend, Master John Crofts, Cup-bearer to the King’ (H-804), 55 ‘To Julia, in her Dawn, or Day-break’ (H-824), 42 ‘His Losse’ (H-830), 71 ‘Age unfit for Love’ (H-852), 61 ‘On himselfe’ (H-860), 59 ‘To his Honour’d friend, Sir Thomas Heale’ (H-869), 44 ‘The Sacrifice, by way of Discourse betwixt himselfe and Julia’ (H-870), 50, 51 ‘On Love’ (H-872), 31 ‘Julia’s Churching, or Purification’ (H-898), 26 ‘Teares’ (H-900), 32 ‘An Ode for him [Ben Jonson]’ (H-911), 775 ‘The present time best pleaseth’ (H-927), 34 ‘Upon Julia’s washing her self in the river’ (H-939), 42 ‘Love is a sirrup’ (H-949), 26

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‘On Himselfe’ (H-952), 62 ‘To the King, Upon his welcome to Hampton-Court’ (H-961), 53, 67, 68 ‘Crutches’ (H-973), 61 ‘To Julia’ (H-974), 50 ‘Anacreontike’ (H-993), 45 ‘To the Lord Hopton, on his fight in Cornwall’ (H-1002), 66 ‘Rapine brings Ruine’ (H-1023), 45 ‘His Comfort’ (H-1052), 27 ‘On Fortune’ (H-1061), 71 ‘A Dialogue betwixt himself and Mistresse Elizabeth Wheeler’ (H-1068), 70 ‘To his Girles who would have him sportfull’ (H-1093), 61 ‘To his Girles’ (H-1098), 27 ‘The End of his Work’ (H-1126), 15 ‘To Crown it’ (H-1127), 15 ‘On Himselfe’ (H-1128), 15, 20 ‘The Pillar of Fame’ (H-1129), 15 H-1130 [‘To his Book’s end this last line he’d have plac’t’], 15 ‘A Christmas Caroll, sung to the King’ (N-96), 52 ‘The New-yeeres gift, or Circumcisions Song’ (N-97), 5, 52, 53 ‘Another New-yeeres Gift, or Song for the Circumcision’ (N-98), 52, 53 ‘The Star-Song: A Caroll to the King’ (N-102), 52, 53 Homily on Obedience, 92 Horace Carmina II.14, 75 Carmina III.24, 167 Carmina III.30, 78 Epode XVI, 109, 111, 112–13, 167 James VI of Scotland and I of England Basilikon Doron, 98–9, 104, 106 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, 92, 98–9, 103, 105, 147 Jonson, Ben Poetaster, 21 Volpone, 139 Lucan Pharsalia, 151, 160

Pharsalia I, 132, 155, 156 Pharsalia III, 155–6 Pharsalia IV, 156 Pharsalia VI, 154–5 Pharsalia VII, 158 Pharsalia IX, 154, 156, 160–61 Pharsalia X, 154 Marlowe, Christopher, Hero and Leander, 43 Martial, Epigrams 8.68, 41 May, Thomas A continuation of Lucan’s historicall poem till the death of Iulius Caesar, 151, 152 Cleopatra Queen of Ægypt, 159 frontmatter to Supplementum Lucani, 152–5 History of the Parliament of England, which began November the third, MDCXL, 132–3 Lucan’s Pharsalia: or The Civill Warres of Rome, 151 Supplementum Lucani, 4, 151, 152, 156 Milton, John Areopagitica, 26 Ovid Ars amatoria, 19, 21, 22, 27, 37 Ars amatoria I, 15, 22, 32, 55 Ars amatoria II, 15, 22, 31, 32, 139–40 Ars amatoria III, 22, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36 Amores, 19, 21, 22 Amores I.ii, 29 Amores I.vii, 36 Amores I.xv, 16, 37 Amores II.iv, 27–8, 40 Amores II.vi, 30–31 Amores II.ix, 29 Amores II.xv, 28, 40 Amores II.xix, 25–6 Amores III.ii, 77 Amores III.iv, 24–5, 34 Amores III.ix, 15, 37, 62–3, 74, 77–8, 81 Amores III.xi, 29 De Medicamina Faciei, 33–4 Ex Ponto I.ii, 61 Ex Ponto I.iv, 61

Index locorum Ex Ponto I.v, 60, 61 Ex Ponto I.vii, 61 Ex Ponto II.iii, 61, 68 Ex Ponto II.v, 64 Ex Ponto II.vii, 64, 68 Ex Ponto II.x, 72–3, 77 Ex Ponto III.ii, 60, 61, 69 Ex Ponto III.iv, 59 Ex Ponto III.v, 60, 77 Ex Ponto III.vi, 64 Ex Ponto III.ix, 60 Ex Ponto IV.x, 63 Ex Ponto IV.xiii, 68 Ex Ponto IV.xv, 60 exile poetry, 10, 20, 57–8, 76 Fasti,19, 21, 39, 46 Fasti I,51, 54 Fasti II, 54 Fasti III, 54, 55 Fasti V, 18, 47–9, 134–5 Metamorphoses, 19, 39, 43 Metamorphoses I, 36, 61 Metamorphoses II, 142 Metamorphoses IV, 41–3 Metamorphoses VI, 115 Metamorphoses VIII, 55 Metamorphoses XIV, 54 Metamorphoses XV, 15, 44, 54 Remedia amoris, 15, 32 Tristia I.i, 43–4, 59, 72 Tristia I.iii, 63 Tristia I.v, 63 Tristia I.vii, 61 Tristia I.viii, 62 Tristia I.ix, 64 Tristia II, 15, 22, 37, 44–5, 63, 64 Tristia III.iii, 59, 61, 62 Tristia III.iv, 72 Tristia III.vii, 71 Tristia III.x, 61 Tristia III.xiv, 61, 62 Tristia IV.iv, 60 Tristia IV.x, 20, 74, 81 Tristia V.i, 61, 62 Tristia V.ii, 56 Tristia V.iii, 55–6, 74, 77 Tristia V.v, 56

191

Tristia V.xiii, 73 Tristia V.xiv, 16–17, 56 Pindar, Thirteenth Olympian Ode, 144 Seventh Isthmian Ode, 144 Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix, 48 Seneca De brevitate vitae, 9–11 De clementia, 93 De otio, 9, 139 Shakespeare, William, Love’s Labours Lost, 18 Spenser, Edmund Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, 69, 131, 135 Fowre Hymnes, 135, 145 Mutabilitie Cantos, 131, 137–8, 140, 146–9 The Faerie Queene I, 136 The Faerie Queene II, 117, 166 The Faerie Queene IV, 135 The Faerie Queene V, 166 The Shepheardes Calender, 146 Tacitus, Annals, 6, 9–10, 53, 170 Tibullus Carmina I.i, 79 Carmina I.iii, 78–9, 80 Virgil Aeneid, 30, 66, 100, 101 Aeneid I, 100, 102 Aeneid II, 155 Aeneid III, 101 Aeneid IV, 11, 131, 164–9 Aeneid VI, 30, 80, 100, 102, 169, 171–2 Aeneid VIII, 66, 159 Aeneid XII, 158–9 Culex, 31 Eclogue I, 109, 111–12, 162, 163 Eclogue IV, 100, 112, 113 Eclogue V, 118 Eclogue IX, 117–18 Wither, George, Collection of Emblemes, 143

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Index

‘Act for the suppressing of ... Incest, Adultery and fornication’ (1650), 23 Actium, Battle of, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 169 Aeneas, 54, 155, 158–9, 164–8 Anacreon, 76–7, 80, 81 Anchises, 101 Antaeus, 156, 157 Antony, Mark, 157, 158, 159, 160, 169 Apollo, 36, 49, 88, 101, 142 Archimago, 136 Ariadne, 55 Aristotle, 92 (and see Index locorum) Aurora, 49 Augustus (Octavian), 7, 21, 23, 26, 33, 34, 44, 46, 53, 54, 57, 64, 66, 89, 100, 109, 112, 114, 118, 131, 135, 147, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173 deification, 53, 54, 64, 110, 112, 172 Lex Julia de adulteriis, 21, 22, 26, 34, 46, 64 Bacchus, 55, 73 Beaumont, Francis, 81 Bellerophon, 144 Bible (see Index locorum) Body politic (political microcosm), 124–6 Book of Common Prayer, 49 Book of Sports reissued 1633, 46 burned, 47 Braden, Gordon, 18–19, 41 Breton, Nicholas, 125 Brutus, Marcus Junius, 151, 154, 156, 157 Buchanan, George, 4, 5, 8, 11, 88, 90, 92 (and see Index locorum) Buckingham, 110 Bush, Douglas, 18 Busiris, 64

Caesar, Julius, 6, 54, 90, 91, 118, 132, 151, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 170 Callimachus, 73 Calliope, 152, 153, 154 Calvus, 74 Carew, Thomas, 107, 115, 149, 162 Carleton, Dudley, 1st Viscount Dorchester, 113 Cary, Henry, 4th Viscount Falkland, 2, 167 Catiline, 68 Catullus (see Index locorum) Charles I, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11, 35, 45, 46, 52, 53, 65, 66, 82, 89, 90, 91, 93, 99, 100, 103–6, 126–9, 149, 151, 162, 167, 168, 171, 173 absolutist style of government, 4, 6, 93, 105–6, 108, 119, 171 court, 35, 69, 70, 82, 105, 116, 164 death, 127, 152, 163 imprisonment at Hampton Court, 4, 35, 67 Personal Rule, 106, 110, 113, 151 reissues Book of Sports, 46 royal prerogative, 111, 119, 171 Sovereign of the Seas flagship, 126 Charles, Prince of Wales (Charles II), 4, 5, 6, 8, 11, 54–5, 82, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 99, 106, 119, 126, 128, 129, 149, 163, 167, 168, 170, 171, 172, 173 birth, 5, 52, 53, 55 dedications to, 4, 82, 88, 89, 98, 119, 121 motto (Ich dien), 128 Christ, 4–5 Cicero, 9, 119, 139 (and see Index locorum) Cincinnatus, 33 Civil War in England, 11, 22, 44, 47, 57, 69, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 103, 105,

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106, 108, 109, 117, 119, 126, 132, 151, 152, 163, 167, 168, 171, 172 Civil Wars of Rome, 23, 91, 109, 112, 114, 161, 159, 170, 171 Claudian, 6 (and see Index locorum) Cleopatra, 157, 158, 159, 160 Conti, Natalis, 144 Council of the West, 87 Creaser, John, 19 Creusa, 155 Culpeper, John, 2 Curio, 156, 160 Cynthia, 147, 149 Dante (see Index locorum) Daphne, 36 Davidson, Peter, 12, 89, 136, 142, 145, 164, 165 Denham, Sir John, 65 Deucalion, 61 Dido, 159, 164–9 Disticha Catonis (see Index locorum) Divinity of Kings, 3, 4–6, 46, 52, 53, 92, 99, 100, 106, 119, 148–9, 169 as conditional on good rule, 96–8 Domitian, 97 Donagan, Barbara, 3 Edgar, King of England, 127 Eliot, John, 110, 111 Elizabeth I, 11, 92, 132, 147, 149 Elizabeth of Bohemia, 110 Elysium, 20, 30, 31, 74, 78, 79, 80, 81 Euripides, 144 Euryalus, 64 Evander, 54 Faerie Leveller, The (1648 pamphlet), 166 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 2, 4, 5–6, 9–12 (and see Index locorum) as Secretary for War to the Prince of Wales, 87, 119 as Secretary to the Council of War in Ireland, 87 Fletcher, John, 81 Flora, 21, 47 Floralia, 47 Fortescue, John, 3

Fraunce, Abraham, 51 Frederick V, Elector Palatine, 110 Fulgentius, 144 Gallus, 74 Ganymede, 143 Giants, rebellion of the, 135 Golden Age, 139–40 myth of the return of, 100–103, 106, 108, 112, 113, 169, 172 Great Eclipse of the Sun, or Charles His Waine, The (1644 pamphlet), 129 Guarini, Giambattista, 4, 11, 88, 91, 121, 125, 133 (and see Index locorum) Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, 110 Guyon, 166 Hammond, Gerald, 90, 104, 107, 108 Hannibal, 156 Helen, 22 Helicon, 17, 20, 74, 81 Henrietta Maria, 2, 6, 35, 57, 82, 105 in exile, 35 ultra-royalism, 2 Henry Stuart, Prince of Wales, 98 Henry VIII, 53, 103 Hercules, 156, 157 Hermaphroditus, 41–3 Herrick, 2, 4, 9-12, 119 (and see Index locorum) as vicar at Dean Prior, 50, 57, 63 depiction of Devon, 20, 57, 50 ejected from living at Dean Prior in 1647, 4, 51, 63 Frontmatter to Hesperides, 15, 62–3 Hesperides, 87 imagined death, 61–3 ultra-royalism, 4–5 Hesperus, 5, 51, 52, 55, 57 Hesperides, Garden of the, 51, 57, 69 Hippocrene, 17 Homer, 78, 140, 159, 162 Homily on Obedience, 92 Horace, 19, 41, 48, 53, 74, 76, 117, 161, 162 (and see Index locorum) Humanism, 8, 9, 11, 88, 92, 99, 111, 119, 121, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133, 138 Hutton, Ronald, 2

Index Hyde, Edward (Lord Clarendon ), 2, 4, 87, 88, 108, 119 immortality, 7, 15, 19, 20, 31, 37, 55, 56, 62, 69, 71, 73, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 157 Isles of the Blessed, 87, 109 James VI of Scotland and I of England, 89, 92, 93, 99, 100, 103, 132 (and see Index locorum) Jonson, Ben, 74, 81 (and see Index locorum) Juba I of Numidia, 151, 152, 156, 157 Jupiter, 100, 102, 112, 113, 133, 134–5, 137, 142, 144, 147–9, 155 Juvenal, 48 Laudianism, 46, 47, 49, 51 law, 4, 5, 8, 89, 92, 95, 98, 101, 102, 106, 132, 135, 151, 155, 160, 171 martial, 110 on sexual morality, 21, 23, 26–7, 28, 64 Leander, 43 Lipsius, Justus, 116 Livia Drusilla, 54 Louis XIII of France, 110 Loxley, James, 2, 9, 65 Lucan, 151, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164 (and see Index locorum) death, 152 Lycidas, 118 Mackie, Nicola, 135 MacLean, Gerald, 87, 107 Maiestas, 134–5 Marcus, Leah, 46 Marlowe, Christopher, Hero and Leander, 43 Mars, 88 Marten, Henry, 24 Martial, 41 Mary, Queen of Scots, 92, 93 May, Thomas, 4, 11, 132, 157, 162 (and see Index locorum) Meliboeus, 109, 111, 112, 114, 117 Menalcas, 118 Menelaus, 22 Mercury, 167 meritocracy, 92, 125–6, 133–4, 135, 136, 138, 145

195

Milton, John, 93 (and see Index locorum) Miner, Earl, 1, 9 Moeris, 118 monarchy, hereditary, 91, 99, 147 absolute, 3, 92, 124, 127, 129, 171 by right of conquest, 147 elective or meritocratic, 92, 99, 135–6 limited or constitutional, 3, 8, 92, 119, 127–9, 168–9, 171 Musaeus, 80 Neoplatonism, 135 Nero, 6–7, 96, 97, 152, 157 Norbrook, David, 87, 107, 152 O’Callaghan, Michelle, 165–6 Orpheus, 80, 152 Otho, 6–7 otium vs. negotium, 9–11, 111, 113–16, 127, 149 Ovid, 7, 10, 48, 78, 80, 81, 132, 161, 162 (and see Index locorum) and cultus, 32, 33 exile, 21, 22, 35, 46, 57–8, 74 exile as death, 61–3 exile poetry, 10, 20, 57–8, 76 (and see Index locorum) love poetry, 21–38 (and see Index locorum) Ovid’s Corinna as Augustus’ daughter Julia, 21 Paris, 22 Parliament and parliamentarianism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 22–4, 26, 35, 44, 45, 47, 53, 57, 65, 66, 67, 69, 81, 88, 89, 92, 93, 98, 105, 106, 110, 111, 116, 119, 126, 132, 133, 149, 151, 162, 171 pastoral, 107, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 162 Paterculus, 171 patronage, 118, 123, 131, 136, 141, 143, 146, 148, 151, 162, 166 Patterson, Annabel, 114, 117 Pegasus, 17, 144 Penelope, 22 Phaethon, 142, 143

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Phalaris, 64 Philomel, 115, 116, 117 Pindar (see Index locorum) Plutarch, 91 Polydore Vergil, 47–8 Pompey the Great, 151, 154, 156, 160 Poppea, 6 Procne, 117 Propertius, 74, 78 prophecy, political, 54, 93, 100–103, 155, 159, 169, 172 Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix, 48 Puritans and puritanism, 18, 23, 28, 36, 46, 47, 51 Pyrrha, 61 Pythagoras, 44 Redcrosse, 136 Roe, John, 36 Romulus, 33, 34, 54 Ross, Alexander, 143 royalism, varieties of, 2–3 absolutism, 2–3, 4 constitutional royalism, 2–3, 4, 6, 88, 163–4 Roy, Ian, 2 Rupert, Prince, 3 Salmacis, 41–3 Scipio, 156 Sejanus, 9–10 Seneca, 9, 116, 117, 140, 143 (and see Index locorum) Severy, Beth, 23 Shakespeare, William (see Index locorum) Ship of state, 126–9 Sidonius Apollinaris, 21 Solemn League and Covenant (Herrick’s refusal to sign), 4, 51, 63 sortes Virgilianae, 167–8 Smith, Nigel, 1, 69 Speed, John, 127

Spenser, Edmund, 11, 69, 88, 131, 149, 172 (and see Index locorum) Stow, John, 127 Swann, Marjorie, 69 Tacitus, 116 (and see Index locorum) Terentius, 9–10 Tereus, 115, 117 Themis, 61 Theodosius I, 97–8 Thirty Years War, the, 107, 108 Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of England, 148 Thomas, Keith, 24 Tiberius, 9–10, 53, 57, 96 Tibullus, 15, 37, 62, 74, 77–8, 80 (and see Index locorum) Tityrus, 109, 111, 113, 117, 118, 162, 163 tragicomedy, 121–2, 124 Turnus, 64, 158–9 Una, 136 Venus, 100, 158 Verdant, 166 Vesta, 54 Virgil, 11, 53, 74, 75, 78, 107, 117, 131, 149, 155, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166 (and see Index locorum) prophecy in, 100–102, 155, 159, 169, 172 vita activa, 111, 127, 139, 145, 149 vita contemplativa, 111, 116, 137, 139, 140, 144 Welwood, James, 167 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 5–6, 87, 91 Wither, George (see Index locorum) Whitelocke, Bulstrode, 24 Winthrop, John, 113