The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution 9780199560608, 0199560609

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t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

LITERATURE AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

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the oxford handbook of ...............................................................................................................................................................................

LITERATURE AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION ...............................................................................................................................................................................

Edited by

LAURA LUNGER KNOPPERS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries # Oxford University Press 2012 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2012 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 978–0–19–956060–8 Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................

The making of this expansive volume would not have been possible without the time and assistance of many persons and institutions. I am grateful to Andrew McNeillie for his kind original invitation to undertake this project. His successor, Jacqueline Baker, has been a magnificent editor, offering cheerful support and wise advice throughout the long gestation of this volume. I am grateful also to the staff at Oxford University Press for exemplary assistance throughout the publication process. The contributors to this Handbook came together from both sides of the Atlantic and from the disciplines of history and English to produce a remarkably coherent whole. I thank them for their enthusiasm, their cooperation, and their generosity in sharing their time and expertise. Two able research assistants, Giuseppina Iacono Lobo and Ryan Hackenbracht, provided meticulous help with research, formatting, and putting together the Chronology. The National Art Gallery of Scotland, the British Museum, the British Library, the Folger Library in Washington DC, and Houghton Library, Harvard, responded promptly and courteously to queries and enabled us to reproduce a number of striking images in this volume. Two readers for the Press provided useful feedback at a preliminary stage. For cogent suggestions on the early formulation of this project, I thank Nigel Smith and Dan Beaver. For collegiality and a sympathetic listening ear when needed, I wish to thank my Penn State English colleagues Robert Caserio, Patrick Cheney, Marcy North, and Garrett Sullivan. Finally, I am grateful to my husband, Gary, and my children, Theresa and David, who shouldn’t have had to hear so much about the English Civil War, but listened with patience and interest. Thankfully, at least for this endeavour, the Civil War is now over. L.L.K.

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C ONTENTS ..................................... List of Figures Notes on Contributors English Revolution Chronology

Introduction: Critical Framework and Issues

xi xiii xx 1

Laura Lunger Knoppers

PART I: ENGLAND AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD 1. England, Europe, and the English Revolution

29

Nigel Smith

2. Three Kingdoms

44

Eamon Darcy

3. British Atlantic World

65

Carla Gardina Pestana

4. Political Thought

80

Glenn Burgess

5. Religion

98

John Coffey

6. Literature, Medicine, and Science

118

Karen L. Edwards

7. The Book Trade, Licensing, and Censorship

135

Jason McElligott

8. Society and the Roles of Women Ann Hughes

154

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CONTENTS

PA RT II: CIV IL W A R S 9. News, Pamphlets, and Public Opinion

173

Jason Peacey

10. Principle and Politics in Milton’s Areopagitica

190

Stephen B. Dobranski

11. The Personal Rule of Poets: Cavalier Poetry and the English Revolution

206

Ann Baynes Coiro

12. Civil War Letters and Diaries and the Rhetoric of Experience

238

Helen Wilcox

13. Marvell among the Cavaliers

253

Nicholas McDowell

14. The Levellers: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn

272

Rachel Foxley

PART III: REGICIDE AND REPUBLIC 15. Eikon Basilike: The Printing, Composition, Strategy, and Impact of ‘The King’s Book’

289

Robert Wilcher

16. Nascent Republican Theory in Milton’s Regicide Prose

309

Stephen M. Fallon

17. Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers

327

David Loewenstein

18. Abiezer Coppe and the Ranters

346

Ariel Hessayon

19. Marchamont Nedham

375

Joad Raymond

20. The Claims of a ‘Civil Science’: Hobbes’s Leviathan James Loxley

394

CONTENTS

21. Henry Vaughan and Thomas Vaughan: Welsh Anglicanism, ‘Chymick’, and the English Revolution

ix

409

Nigel Smith

22. Conversion Narratives in Old and New England

425

Kathleen Lynch

PART IV: PROTECTORATE 23. Milton’s Defences and the Principle of ‘Sanior Pars’

445

Elizabeth Sauer

24. Prophecy and Political Expression in Cromwellian England

462

Katharine Gillespie

25. Marvell among the Cromwellians

481

Nicholas McDowell

26. Countering Anti-theatricality: Davenant and the Drama of the Protectorate

498

Janet Clare

27. Printed Recipe Books in Medical, Political, and Scientific Contexts

516

Elizabeth Spiller

28. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana and the Republican Tradition

534

Rachel Hammersley

29. The Political Ideologies of Revolutionary Prose Romance

551

Amelia Zurcher

30. Quakers and the Culture of Print in the 1650s

567

Kate Peters

PART V: RESTORATION 31. Lament for a Nation? Milton’s Readie and Easie Way and the Turn to Satire Paul Stevens

593

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CONTENTS

32. The Early Poetry of John Dryden

611

Thomas N. Corns

33. Say First, What Cause? The Origins of Paradise Lost

624

Annabel Patterson

34. Acephalous Authority: Satire in Butler, Marvell, and Dryden

639

Clement Hawes

35. The Consolation of Natural Philosophy: Margaret Cavendish and the English Revolution

656

Rachel Trubowitz

36. Family and Commonwealth in the Writings of Lucy Hutchinson

669

Shannon Miller

37. ‘Out of the spoils won in Battel’: John Bunyan

686

N. H. Keeble

Index

703

L IST OF FIGURES ...........................................................

I.1 William Dobson, Charles II (When Prince of Wales, with a Page), Scottish National Portrait Gallery

2

1.1 Den Afgrysselikken Start-Man (The Horrible Tail-Man), Dutch satire on Oliver Cromwell during the Anglo-Dutch Wars (c.1652). # The Trustees of the British Museum. Kk, 5.6.97

34

2.1 Detail from A Solemn League and Covenant, print by Wenceslaus Hollar (1643) # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1862, 0712.119

56

11.1 Sculptured bust of Robert Herrick on a pedestal with inscription, engraved frontispiece to Herrick, Hesperides (1648) # The Trustees of the British Museum, 1896, 1230.83.

225

14.1 Portrait of John Lilburne, standing before the bar, from The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne . . . at the Guildhall in London (1649) # The Trustees of the British Museum. P, 4.146

276

15.1 William Marshall frontispiece portrait of Charles I at prayer, Eikon Basilike (1649) # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1868, 0808.13507

298

18.1 Anon., The Ranters Monster: Being a true Relation of one Mary Adams, living at Tillingham in Essex, who named herself the Virgin Mary (London, printed for George Horton, 1652), title page [British Library, Thomason E 658(6)] # The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011

347

18.2 Anon., The rovting of the Ranters Being a full Relation of their uncivil carriages, and blasphemous words and actions at their mad meetings ([London], published by authority, and printed by B[ernard] A[lsop], 1650), title page [British Library, Thomason E 616(9)] # The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011

359

18.3 I[ohn] R[eading?], The Ranters Ranting: with The apprehending, examinations, and confession of Iohn Collins, I. Shakespear, Tho. Wiberton, and five more which are to answer the next Sessions (London, printed by B[ernard] Alsop, 1650), title page [British Library, Thomason E 618(8)] # The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011

360

18.4 Timothy Stubs [pseud.], The Ranters Declaration, with Their new Oath and Protestation; their strange Votes, and a new way to get money (London, printed by J[ane] C[oe?], MDCL [1650]), title page [British

xii

LIST OF FIGURES

Library, Thomason E 620(2)] # The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011

361

20.1 Allegorical title page to Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1858, 0417.283

399

22.1 Engraved title page, Saint Augustine’s Confessions Translated (1631). STC 912. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library

428

27.1 Title page and frontispiece portrait of Henrietta Maria, The Queens Closet Opened (1656 edition) *AC85.A191.Zz656m. Houghton Library, Harvard University

521

37.1 Robert White, Portrait of John Bunyan in later life, graphite on vellum, finished in metalpoint, c.1679. # The Trustees of the British Museum, Gg, 1.493

695

N OTES ON CONTRIBUTORS .............................................................................................

Glenn Burgess was born in New Zealand, and educated in Wellington and at the University of Cambridge, where he completed a Ph.D. in 1988. He returned to New Zealand to teach at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, from 1988 to 1994, when he joined the History Department at Hull. He was Head of Department from 2003 to 2009; and appointed to the university’s senior management team as a Pro-Vice-Chancellor in 2010. His major publications include The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought 1603–1642 (1992); Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996); and British Political Thought 1500–1660: The Politics of the Post-Reformation (2009); he has edited or co-edited a further seven books. Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Hull and Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval to Early Modern Studies. Amongst her publications are ‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (1990; 2nd edn, 1999), Drama of the English Republic, 1649–1660 (2002), and Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (2006). Her most recent publication is Shakespeare and the Irish Writer, edited with Stephen O’Neill (2010). John Coffey is Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Leicester. He has published intellectual biographies of Samuel Rutherford and John Goodwin and is the author of Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1588–1689 (2000). He is coeditor of The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (2008) and Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (2009). He is currently working (with Neil Keeble and Tim Cooper) on a critical edition of Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae to be published by Oxford University Press. Ann Baynes Coiro is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She has published essays on a range of topics, including Amelia Lanyer and Ben Jonson, Caroline court culture, manuscript circulation and censorship, Andrew Marvell, and a number of essays on John Milton. Author of Robert Herrick and the Epigram Tradition (1988) and co-editor of Rethinking Historicism: Shakespeare to Milton (2012), she is completing a study of Milton and drama. Thomas N. Corns is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales. His recent publications include (with Gordon Campbell, John Hale, and Fiona Tweedie) John Milton and the Manuscript of De doctrina Christiana (2007) and (with Gordon Campbell) John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought (2008). With Ann Hughes and David

xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Loewenstein, he has edited The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009). With Gordon Campbell, he is the General Editor of The Complete Works of John Milton (in preparation, in eleven volumes). He is an Honoured Scholar of the Milton Society of America. Eamon Darcy is a research assistant on the 1641 depositions project and an adjunct lecturer in the History Department, Trinity College Dublin. He is co-editor of The 1641 Depositions and the Irish Rebellion and is writing a book on the 1641 rebellion and its effect on wider British politics. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences. Stephen B. Dobranski is Professor of English at Georgia State University. He is the author of Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade (1999; repr. 2009); Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (2005; repr. 2009); and A Variorum Commentary on the Poems of John Milton: ‘Samson Agonistes’ (2008). He is also co-editor, with John Rumrich, of Milton and Heresy (1998; repr. 2008) and editor of Milton in Context (2010). Karen L. Edwards teaches at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’ (1999), Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary (2005–9), and numerous articles on seventeenthcentury literature. She is currently working on a study of abusive animal epithets in polemical discourse of the Civil War period. Stephen M. Fallon, the Cavanaugh Professor of the Humanities at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (1991) and Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (2007). He has co-edited The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton with William Kerrigan and John Rumrich for Random House/Modern Library (2007). His articles on Milton have appeared in various journals and in multicontributor volumes. He co-founded in 1998 and continues to teach a series of seminars on literary and philosophical classics at the South Bend Center for the Homeless. Rachel Foxley lectures in early modern history at the University of Reading. Her primary research interests are in the history of political thought and political culture in seventeenth-century England, and she has published articles on the Levellers in Historical Journal, The Seventeenth Century, and History of Political Thought; she is completing a monograph on the thought of the Levellers. Her next project, ‘Gender, Democracy and the Republican Tradition’, will examine the influence of classical anti-democratic tropes on the early modern republican tradition. Katharine Gillespie is an associate Professor of Seventeenth-Century English and Colonial American Literatures at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She is the author of Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (2004) and the editor of Katherine Chidley (2009). She has published

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xv

articles on Anna Trapnel, Katherine Chidley, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Lucy Hutchinson, and Elizabeth Peter and is completing a monograph tentatively titled Lucretia and Beyond: Women Write the English Republic, 1622–1681. Rachel Hammersley is a Senior Lecturer in History at Newcastle University. She is the author of French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794 (2005) and The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns (2010) as well as of a number of articles on the intellectual history of seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France. Clement Hawes holds a joint position in History and English at the University of Michigan. He specializes in British literature and history 1660–1800, especially such authors as Jonathan Swift and Christopher Smart. He is author of Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (1996) and The British Eighteenth Century and Global Critique (2005); and has edited Christopher Smart and the Enlightenment (1999), Gulliver’s Travels and Other Writings (2003), and Europe Observed: Multiple Gazes in Early Modern Encounters (2008), co-edited with Kumkum Chatterjee. Most recently, he co-edited (with Robert Caserio), The Cambridge History of the English Novel (2012). Ariel Hessayon is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution (2007), as well as the co-editor, with Nicholas Keene, of Scripture and Scholarship in Early Modern England (2006) and, with David Finnegan, of Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context (2011). His current research is primarily focused on the reception of the writings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme; Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers; and Jews and crypto-Jews in early modern England. Ann Hughes is Professor of Early Modern History at Keele University. She is the author of many books and articles on the English Civil War, including Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (2004), and The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009), co-edited with Tom Corns and David Loewenstein. Most recently, she published Gender and the English Revolution (Routledge, 2012). N. H. Keeble recently retired as Senior Deputy Principal and Professor of English Studies at the University of Scotland, Stirling. His publications include studies of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (1982), The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (1987), The Restoration: England in the 1660s (2002), a two-volume Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter (1991; with Geoffrey F. Nuttall), and editions of texts by Baxter, Bunyan, Defoe, Hutchinson, Marvell, and Milton. He currently leads a project funded by a major grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council to prepare for Oxford University Press a multi-volume edition of Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae.

xvi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Lunger Knoppers is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She is author of Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (1994), Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (2000), and Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (2011). Her Oxford scholarly edition of Milton’s 1671 poems (2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Her edited collections include Puritanism and its Discontents (2003); Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe (2004), co-edited with Joan Landes; and The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (2009). Former President of the Milton Society of America, she has served as the editor of Milton Studies since 2010. David Loewenstein is Helen C. White Professor of English and the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His publications include Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (2001), winner of the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for Distinguished Book. He is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (2002) and The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley (2009). He is an Honored Scholar of the Milton Society of America. James Loxley is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Among his books is Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars (1997), and he has published a number of essays on mid-seventeenth-century literature and culture. He is currently working on an edition of a newly discovered manuscript account of Ben Jonson’s walk to Scotland in 1618, and co-editing the Oxford Anthology of Renaissance Literature with Greg Walker. Kathleen Lynch is the Executive Director of the Folger Institute. She has written on material culture and the book trade in reference to literature and experiential religion in the seventeenth century. She is author of Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (2012), a study that directs critical attention toward the collective processes through which ‘truthful’ texts of spiritual experience were constructed and endorsed by print publication. Nicholas McDowell is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought at the University of Exeter. He is the author of The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (2003) and Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (2008). He is the editor, with Nigel Smith, of The Oxford Handbook of Milton (2009; paperback, 2011), and, with N. H. Keeble, of The Oxford Complete Works of John Milton, VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Tracts (forthcoming). Jason McElligott is The Keeper of Marsh’s Library in Dublin. He read for his Ph.D. at St John’s College, Cambridge, and was the J. P. R. Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Printed Book at Merton College, Oxford. His books include Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (2007) and Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660 (2009). He has edited a number of collections: Fear, Exclusion and

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xvii

Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (2006) and (with David L. Smith) Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars (2007) and Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (2010). He is currently working on the Civil War pamphlets owned by early nineteenth-century radicals such as William Hone and Richard Carlile. Shannon Miller is Professor of English at Temple University. She is author of Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers (2008) and Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World (1998). She has published articles on women writers, including Mary Wroth, Mary Sidney, and Margaret Cavendish, and on Thomas More, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. She is currently working on a study of bound collections of political tracts entitled ‘On the Margins of History: Case Studies in Tract Collections’, with special attention to the writings of the prophet Eleanor Davies. Annabel Patterson is Sterling Professor Emeritus of English at Yale University. She has written at least thirteen books, depending how you count, the most recent being Milton’s Words (2009). Much of her work has been on Andrew Marvell, a good friend of Milton’s. Currently she is writing a book entitled The International Novel, something completely different in focusing on post-Second World War writing about nationalism and internationalism. Jason Peacey is Senior Lecturer in History at University College London. He is the editor of The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (2001), co-editor of Parliament at Work (2002), and editor of The Print Culture of Parliament, 1600–1800 (2007). He is also the author of Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda in the Civil Wars and Interregnum (2004). He is currently completing a book on popular participation in parliamentary politics during the mid-seventeenth century. Carla Gardina Pestana is holder of the Joyce Appleby Chair of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author of The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (2004) and Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World (2009), she is currently working on the origins of imperialism in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. She was the holder of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for 2009–10. Kate Peters has been a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Murray Edwards College founded as New Hall, Cambridge, since 2009. Previously she lectured at Birmingham University and University College London. Her research to date has focused on the religious and political significance of print in early modern England. She completed her doctorate under the supervision of Professor Patrick Collinson, published as Print Culture and the Early Quakers by Cambridge University Press in 2005. She is currently writing on approaches to record keeping and documentation in the early Quaker movement, part of a larger project on attitudes to posterity during the English Revolution.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Joad Raymond is Professor of Renaissance Studies, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Invention of the Newspaper (1996), Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (2003), and Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (2010), and editor of various books on the history of the press, including The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I: Cheap Print in Britain and Ireland, Beginnings to 1660 (2011). He is at present editing Milton’s defences for the Oxford Complete Works and investigating international news networks in early modern Europe. Elizabeth Sauer is Professor of English at Brock University. Recent publications include Reading the Nation in English Literature, edited with Julia M. Wright (2010); Milton and Toleration, edited with Sharon Achinstein (2007; Milton Society of America award); Milton and the Climates of Reading, sole editor (2006; named a Choice Outstanding Title); ‘Paper-Contestations’ and Textual Communities in England (2005); and Reading Early Modern Women, edited with Helen Ostovich (2004; Society for the Study of Early Modern Women award). She is currently completing a book on Milton, toleration, and nationhood. Nigel Smith is William and Annie S. Paton Foundation Professor of Ancient and Modern Literature and Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Books and Media at Princeton University. His principal publications are Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (2010), Is Milton Better than Shakespeare? (2008), The Longman Annotated English Poets Edition of Andrew Marvell’s Poems (2003; rev. 2007), Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (1994), and Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (1989). He has also edited the Ranter pamphlets, the Journal of George Fox, the library catalogue of Samuel Jeake, and co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Milton. Forthcoming work is concerned with the relationship between the state and literary production in Europe, 1500–1700. Elizabeth Spiller is Professor of English and Director of the History of Text Technologies Program at Florida State University. She is the author of Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (2011) and Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: The Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (2004), and the editor of the two-volume Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books (2008). Paul Stevens is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern Literature and Culture at the University of Toronto and Fellow of Trinity College, Toronto. Former President of the Milton Society of America and Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, his most recent publications include Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, co-edited with David Loewenstein, and ‘Literary Studies and the Turn to Religion: Milton Reading Badiou’, Religion and Literature, which won the Canadian Society for Renaissance Studies’ 2011 Montaigne Prize. He is currently completing a book provisionally called Milton Imagining England. Rachel Trubowitz is Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She is author of Nation and Nurture in Seventeenth-Century Literature (2012). Her essay

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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‘“The People of Asia and with them the Jews”: Israel, Asia, and England in Milton’s Writings’, in Douglas A. Brooks (ed.), Milton and the Jews, won the Milton Society of America’s James Holly Hanford Award for Best Essay on Milton in 2008. Her many essays on seventeenth-century literature include ‘Death and Calculus in Paradise Lost’, in Brian Cummings, Andrew Hadfield, and Rob Iliffe (eds.), Milton and Newton: The Cultures of Literature and Science in the Seventeenth Century (forthcoming). Robert Wilcher served as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Reader in Early Modern Studies at the University of Birmingham (1972–2007). He is currently Honorary Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham. His publications include Andrew Marvell (1985), and, as editor, Andrew Marvell: Selected Poetry and Prose (1986), The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660 (2001), The Discontented Cavalier: The Work of Sir John Suckling in its Social, Religious, Political, and Literary Contexts (2007), and articles and book chapters on Shakespeare, Quarles, Eikon Basilike, Marvell, Vaughan, and Milton. Helen Wilcox is Professor of English at Bangor University, Wales, and Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Bangor. Her wide research interests in early modern literature include autobiographical works, devotional poetry, drama, women’s writing, and the relationships between words, music, and the visual arts. She has published numerous articles and chapters in these fields, and her books range from the co-edited Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (1989) to the annotated edition of The English Poems of George Herbert (2007; paperback 2010). She is co-editor of the academic journal English (Oxford) and editor of the forthcoming Arden 3 All’s Well That Ends Well. Amelia Zurcher is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Marquette University. She is the author of SeventeenthCentury English Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics (2007) and the editor of Judith Man’s Epitome of the Historie of Faire Argenis and Polyarchus for Ashgate’s Early Modern Englishwoman Series (2003).

E NGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY ...................................................................................................................................

Historical Events 1629–40 1638 1639 1640

1641

1642

Charles I rules without Parliament (‘Personal Rule’) National Covenant signed in Scotland First Bishops’ War (between England and Scotland) Thomas Wentworth elevated to position of Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and created Earl of Strafford (January) Short Parliament (13 April–5 May) Second Bishops’ War Long Parliament convenes (3 November) Strafford impeached (11 November) Root and Branch petition presented to Parliament (11 December) Archbishop William Laud impeached for high treason (18 December) Triennial Act ensures that Parliament will sit at least once every three years (February) Trial and bill of attainder against Strafford (March–April) Strafford executed (12 May) Act abolishing the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, collapse of censorship regulations (5 July) Irish uprising breaks out in Ulster (22 October) Grand Remonstrance of grievances against Charles I passed by Parliament (22 November) Charles I fails in his attempt to arrest five members of the House of Commons (4 January) Henrietta Maria departs for Holland (23 February)

Texts

Suckling, Brennoralt, or The Discontented Colonel Carew, Poems Davenant, Salmacida spolia Jonson, The Underwood Walton, Life of Donne

The Heads of Several Proceedings in this Present Parliament (first weekly public newsbook) Milton’s anti-prelatical tracts

Cleveland, ‘The Rebell Scott’; The Character of a London-Diurnall Cowley, A Satyre Against Seperatists; The Guardian Denham, Coopers Hill (many expanded editions)

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

1643

1644

1645

1646

Charles I leaves London for the north (2 March) Parliament passes Militia Ordinance (5 March) Charles I denied entry at Hull, site of main northern arsenal (23 April) Parliament sends the Nineteen Propositions to Charles I (1 June) Parliament raises an army under Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (July) Charles I raises the royal standard at Nottingham Castle (22 August), beginning of First Civil War Theatres officially closed (September) Battle of Edgehill (23 October) Henrietta Maria returns from Holland with troops and supplies (February) Westminster Assembly of Divines authorized by Parliament to reform the English Church (June); first meeting (July) Solemn League and Covenant ensures military alliance between Parliament and Scottish Covenanters and promise of church reform (September) Battle of Marston Moor (2 July) Henrietta Maria sails for France (14 July) Commons requests that the Westminster Assembly prepare Directory of Worship to replace Book of Common Prayer (October) Archbishop William Laud executed (10 January) Uxbridge Negotiations between King, Parliament, and Scottish Covenanters (January to February) Self-Denying Ordinance and formation of New Model Army with Thomas Fairfax as Captain-General (April) Battle of Naseby (14 June); King’s private correspondence seized by Parliament (June) Charles I surrenders to the Scottish Army (5 May) First Civil War ends with surrender of royalist Oxford (24 June) Episcopacy abolished by parliamentary ordinance, sale of bishops’ lands authorized (9 October)

xxi

Fuller, The Holy State Milton, The Reason of Church Government; An Apology for Smectymnuus Prynne, Sovereign Power of Parliaments (to 1643) Quarles, Observations Concerning Princes and States upon Peace and Warre

Browne, Religio medici Cowley begins writing The Civil War Davies, Star to the Wise; Samsons Legacie Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Nedham, Mercurius Britanicus (parliamentary newsbook, 1643–6) Overton, Mans Mortallitie Milton, Areopagitica; The Judgement of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce; Of Education; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce

Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times The Kings Cabinet Opened Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right Justified Milton, Poems . . . both English and Latin; Tetrachordon; Colasterion Quarles, The Profest Royalist; Solomons Recantation Waller, Poems Walwyn, England’s Lamentable Slaverie

Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica Crashaw, Steps to the Temple; The Delight of the Muses Edwards, Gangraena Overton and Walwyn, A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens Suckling, Fragmenta aurea; The Goblins Vaughan, Poems (Continued)

xxii

1647

1648

1649

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

Historical Events

Texts

Scots hand over Charles I to Parliament (30 January) New Model Army removes Charles I from Parliament custody at Holmby House (4 June) to Hampton Court (24 August) Westminster Assembly presents Westminster Confession of Faith to Parliament (April) New Model Army marches on London (6 August) Putney Debates between representatives of New Model Army and Levellers on new constitution for England (October) Charles I escapes from Hampton Court to Isle of Wight (11 November) Charles I signs Engagement with the Scots (26 December) Scots intervene on behalf of the King, beginning of Second Civil War (July); Battle of Preston, end of Second Civil War (August) Army Remonstrance presented to Parliament (20 November) New Model Army occupies London (2 December) Pride’s Purge: Colonel Thomas Pride forcibly prevents MPs conciliatory to Charles I from entering the House of Commons (6 December) Purged House of Commons (‘Rump’) sets up High Court of Justice to try the King (1 January) Trial of Charles I begins (20 January) Charles I, found guilty of tyranny and treason, is executed outside Whitehall (30 January) Charles II proclaimed in Edinburgh, with proviso that he take the Covenant (5 January) Rump Parliament abolishes monarchy (17 March) House of Lords abolished (19 March) Diggers occupy St George’s Hill in Surrey (April) England declared a Commonwealth (19 May)

Cowley, The Mistress The Case of the Army Truly Stated Davies, Excommunication out of Paradice Leveller proposed constitution, Agreement of the People Nedham, Mercurius pragmaticus (royalist newsbook, 1647–9) New Model Army’s Book of Declarations

Crashaw, Steps to the Temple (expanded edn) Herrick, Hesperides; Noble Numbers Lilburne, Foundations of Freedom Symmons, A Vindication of King Charles

Second Agreement of the People Brome (ed.), Lachrymae Musarum Charles I, Eikon Basilike Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll; A Second Fiery Flying Roule Culpeper, Pharmacopoea Londinensis Digger manifesto: The True Levellers’ Standard Advanced Lilburne, Walwyn, and Overton, England’s New Chains Discovered Lovelace, Lucasta Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates; Eikonoklastes Winstanley, The Breaking of the Day of God; Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England; A Declaration to the Powers of England

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

1650

Leveller mutiny suppressed by Fairfax and Cromwell (May) Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England chartered (July) Printing Act outlaws unlicensed books, pamphlets, and newsbooks (September) John Lilburne tried for high treason; found not guilty (October) Cromwell heads military expedition to Ireland (August); storming and massacre of Drogheda and Wexford (September and October) Oath of Engagement (declaration of loyalty to the Commonwealth) extended to all males (January) Charles II signs Treaty of Breda, promising to come to Scotland and to impose Presbyterianism Cromwell returns from Ireland (May) Cromwell succeeds Fairfax as LordGeneral of the Army and marches for Scotland (June) Blasphemy Act (9 August) Cromwell’s victory over the Scots at Dunbar (3 September)

1651

Charles II crowned at Scone (January) Charles II and Scots invade England (August) Cromwell defeats Charles II and Scots at Worcester (3 September). Last major battle of the Civil Wars Navigation Act, aimed against Dutch trade (9 October) Charles II flees to France (15 October)

1652

First Anglo-Dutch War (to 1654)

1653

Cromwell forcibly expels the Rump Parliament (20 April) Nominated Assembly (‘Barebones Parliament’) convenes (4 July) Nominated Assembly resigns, giving power back to Cromwell (12 December)

xxiii

Anon., A Justification of the Mad Crew Baxter, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest Bradstreet, Tenth Muse Davenant, Preface to Gondibert Descartes, Passions of the Soul (first English translation) Hobbes, Treatise of Human Nature; De corpore politico Hutchinson, translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (probably composed in the 1650s) Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated; Mercurius politicus (continues to 1660) Eugenius Philalethes [T. Vaughan], Anthroposophia theomagica. H. Vaughan, Silex scintillans Booker, The Bloudy Almanack Boyle, Parthenissa (in part) Cary, The Little Horn’s Doom & Downfall Cleveland, Poems by J.C. Coppe, Copp’s Return to the Wayes of Truth; A Remonstrance Hobbes, Leviathan Marvell, Upon Appleton House Milton, Defensio pro populo Anglicano Vaughan, Olor Iscanus Crashaw, Carmen Deo nostro (Paris) Winstanley, The Law of Freedom in a Platform Cavendish, Poems and Fancies Eliot, Tears of Repentance Franc¸ois de la Varenne, The French Cook (first English translation) Grey, A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets (Continued)

xxiv

1654

1655

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

Historical Events

Texts

Cromwell installed as Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland under the Instrument of Government (16 December)

Marvell, ‘The Character of Holland’ Overton, Vox plebis Powell, Spirituall Experiences Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh Walton, Compleat Angler Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers Milton, Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda Nedham, A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth Trapnel, Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall; The Cry of a Stone; Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea; A Legacy for Saints Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions; The World’s Olio Fuller, The Church History of Britain Goodwin, A Fresh Discovery Hartlib, Chymical, Medical and Chyrurgical Addresses; The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees Marvell, The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector W.M., The Queens Closet Opened Nedham, The Public Intelligencer (continues to 1660) Talbot, Natura exenterata Vaughan, Silex scintillans (expanded edn) Waller, Ayres and Dialogues Baxter, Gildas Salvianus: The Reformed Pastor Cowley, Poems Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes (Part 1) Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State Vane, A Healing Question Harrington, The Prerogative of Popular Government Nayler, A True Narrative of the Examination, Tryall, and Sufferings of James Nayler

Seizure of Dutch ships in Carlisle Bay (January) Peace with the Dutch (April) First Protectorate Parliament convenes (3 September) Launch of Cromwell’s Western Design, English naval attack on Spanish West Indies (October) Cromwell dissolves the First Protectorate Parliament (22 January) Penruddock’s royalist uprising (March) Henry Cromwell takes up appointment as Major-General of the army in Ireland (9 July) Decimation Tax imposed on propertyowning royalists (21 September) Rule of the Major-Generals in England and Wales (31 October)

1656

Charles II signs treaty with Spain (2 April) Second Protectorate Parliament convenes (17 September) James Nayler tried and convicted of blasphemy by Parliament (December)

1657

Decimation Tax and Rule of the MajorGenerals abandoned (28 January) Humble Petition and Advice; Cromwell offered the crown (23 February) Fifth Monarchist uprising thwarted (9 April) Cromwell formally refuses the crown (8 May) Revised version of Humble Petition and Advice passes in Parliament (25 May)

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

1658

1659

1660

Cromwell’s second installation as Lord Protector (26 June) Henry Cromwell appointed Lord-Deputy of Ireland (17 November) Cromwell dissolves Second Protectorate Parliament (4 February) Savoy Conference of Independent ministers (April) Cromwell dies (3 September) Richard Cromwell proclaimed Oliver’s successor in London, and then in Edinburgh and Dublin (September) Third Protectorate Parliament convenes (27 January) Cromwell orders dissolution of Council of Officers (17 April) Cromwell forced by army officers to dissolve Third Protectorate Parliament (22 April) Cromwell forced to recall the Rump Parliament by Council of Officers (7 May) Parliament elects Council of State (19 May) Cromwell resigns (24 May) Booth’s royalist uprising (5–19 August) Rump Parliament reassembles (26 December)

General George Monck brings army from Scotland into England (January) Monck reaches London, restores Long Parliament, admitting members excluded by Pride’s Purge (February) Convention Parliament convenes (25 April) Charles II’s Declaration of Breda read in Parliament (1 May) Charles II declared King since 30 January 1649 (8 May) Parliament orders arrest of surviving regicides (14 May) Charles II enters London (29 May) Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (August) Royal Society inaugural meeting (28 November)

xxv

Baxter, Call to the Unconverted Marvell, ‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highnesse the Lord Protector’ Trapnel, A Voice for the King of Saints and Nations

Bishop, Mene Tekel Davenant, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru Dryden, Heroic Stanzas Evelyn, A Character of England; An Apology for the Royal Party; The Late Newes from Brussels Unmasked Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power; Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church Vane, A Needful Corrective or Ballance in Popular Government Waller, Dryden, and Sprat, Three Poems upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector Cowley, Ode, Upon the Blessed Restoration and Returne of his Sacred Majestie, Charles the Second Dryden, Astrea redux Harrington, The Rota, or, a Model of a Free State or Equall Commonwealth Milton, The Readie and Easie Way Nedham, Newes from Brussels Tatham, The Rump, or, The Mirrour of the Late Times Waller, ‘To the King, upon his Majesties Happy Return’

(Continued)

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1661

1662

1663

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

Historical Events

Texts

Fifth Monarchist uprising under Thomas Venner suppressed (6 January) Bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw exhumed and reburied at Tyburn on the twelfth anniversary of the regicide (30 January) Cavalier Parliament convenes (8 May) Marquess of Argyll executed (27 May) Corporation Act (December) Charles II marries Catherine of Braganza (21 May) Act of Uniformity requires the use of the Book of Common Prayer and episcopal ordination of all ministers (July) Royal Society chartered (15 July) Declaration of Indulgence (December) Licensing Act imposes new print regulations Staple Act

Cowley, A Proposition for the Advancement of Learning; The Visions and Prophecies Concerning England, Scotland, and Ireland Davenant, The Siege of Rhodes (Parts 1 and 2) Dryden, To his Sacred Majesty

1664

Conventicle Act outlaws meetings outside of the Church of England (May) English seize New Amsterdam, rename it New York (August)

1665

Second Anglo-Dutch War (to 1667) Great Plague in London English victory near Lowestoft (3 June) English defeat at Bergen (2 August) Five Mile Act Four Days’ Battle (1–4 June) English victory near North Foreland (25 July) Great Fire of London (2–6 September)

1666

1667

1668

Dutch fleet burns English ships and sails up the Medway (10–13 June) Treaty of Breda ends war with the Dutch (21 July) Clarendon impeached and exiled (October) Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (2 May)

Anon., Rump: or an Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times Butler, Hudibras: the First Part Fuller, History of the Worthies of England

Butler, Hudibras: the Second Part Cowley, Verses on Several Occasions Cavendish, Sociable Letters and Philosophical Letters Etherege, The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom Bunyan, The Holy City Dryden, The Indian Emperor Hooke, Micrographia Hutchinson, ‘Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson’ (c.1665–71) Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners Cavendish, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing World; Observations on Experimental Philosophy Fell, Women’s Speaking Justified Waller, Instructions to a Painter Dryden, Annus mirabilis Milton, Paradise Lost (10-book edition) Marvell, Last Instructions to a Painter (written)

Dryden appointed Poet Laureate by Charles II Dryden, Of Dramatick Poesy Traherne, Centuries of Meditation

ENGLISH REVOLUTION CHRONOLOGY

1669 1670

1671

1672

1673

James, Duke of York, makes public his conversion to Catholicism Hudson’s Bay Trading Co. established (March) Second Conventicle Act Stop of the Exchequer (January)

Third Anglo-Dutch War (to 1674) Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence permits nonconformist and (private) Catholic worship (March) English embassy to the Hague (June) Parliament forces withdrawal of Declaration of Indulgence; passes Test Act. Catholics and Protestant dissenters are prohibited from holding public office (March)

xxvii

Dryden, Tyrannic Love Walwyn, Physick for Families Dryden, The Conquest of Granada Behn, The Forced Marriage Buckingham, The Rehearsal Milton, Paradise Regained; Samson Agonistes Dryden, Marriage a`-la-Mode Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d Wycherley, Love in a Wood

Behn, The Dutch Lover Milton, Of True Religion Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d: The Second Part

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INTRODUCTION Critical Framework and Issues ....................................................................................................... LAURA LUNGER KNOPPERS

William Dobson’s portrait of Charles II as a 12-year-old Prince of Wales (Figure I.1) exudes the elegance and authority of the van Dyck courtly portraiture upon which it draws, adapted to a wartime setting.1 The three-quarters-length portrait shows the Prince dressed in a breastplate over a buff coat, with white satin sleeves and red breeches decorated with gold braid. He wears a crimson royalist sash and holds a commander’s baton in his right hand; his left hand is placed upon a gold-trimmed helmet, held up by a page. The resplendent light and the gold, silver, and crimson colouring, the massive pillar and the imposing draperies, and the Prince’s direct gaze and central, forward position underscore his royal authority. The visually striking portrait exemplifies a masculine, martial mode, with the accoutrements of page, baton, and armour. One of the portraits done in wartime Oxford, to which King Charles I and his court had retreated, the Dobson portrait is traditionally thought to be commemorating the Prince’s experience of the first major battle of the English Civil Wars, the Battle of Edgehill (near Banbury) between royalist troops under Charles I and his nephew Prince Rupert and parliamentarian forces under the Earl of Essex on 23 October 1642.2 The left-hand background of the portrait shows a cavalry battle under a high sky, while the crowded lower left foreground shows a pile of weapons and colours captured in the battle, along with a severed Medusa’s head that evinces the horrors of rebellion while also showing its defeat. The portrait thus transmutes into visual form royalist confidence and even bravura, the accomplishment of an initial (claimed) victory. Yet the Medusa head, unlike the captured weapons and colours, remains sentient, almost grotesquely so, with a glassy stare of the bulging eyes, open mouth, and hair of vivified snakes that move outward toward the viewer. The Medusa’s downward gaze

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I . 1 William Dobson, Charles II (When Prince of Wales, with a Page), Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

FIGURE

breaks the triangular composition, which otherwise would pull the viewer’s eye back to the Prince, as in the case of the page who gazes upward. It is virtually impossible to focus on the Prince and the Medusa at the same time. Far from confirming the royalist victory and parliamentarian defeat, the Medusa head startles and unsettles the viewer, disrupting the visual focus and the painting’s celebration of royal prowess. Indeed, both sides claimed victory at Edgehill: the very inconclusiveness of the battle prompted an outpouring of texts and images that competed for and sought to sway public opinion. The first major battle of the war shocked people into the realization that this would be a costly, protracted, and hard-fought struggle: that parliamentary forces would not spare the King’s person on the battlefield. The military inconclusiveness made the propaganda contest even more important, and a range of texts—newsbooks, pamphlets, letters, printed speeches, proclamations, and sermons—addressed the Battle of Edgehill, alongside visual images such as Dobson’s and public performances such as the King’s triumphal entry into Oxford. The dispute over the Battle of Edgehill is an early instance of the new and newly politicized genres, rhetoric, and language that

INTRODUCTION

3

would constitute a revolution in print and literature broadly conceived from 1640 to 1660. Dobson’s portrait provides a window into art and literature as emerging from but also responding to the political, religious, and social upheaval of the English Revolution. Since the 1990s, a stream of monographs, essay collections, and journal articles (including work by the contributors to this volume) has challenged the old literary historical canard that 1640–60 was a lost era, with theatres closed, court poets dying or in exile, the epic in abeyance, the Muses fled. Rather, both historians and literary scholars have examined how literary genres were created or transformed, how republicanism took an aesthetic form, how polemic writers infused their texts with rhetorical flair and literary emplotment, and how radicals and royalists alike drew on the powers of imagination to mythologize civil war and redefine the meaning of England.3 This volume takes the measure of that energetic and innovative criticism, as well as gesturing toward future research paths. The rubric of the English Revolution allows us to consider a broad range of royalist and republican writings, high and low forms, new and revised genres. We will trace a trajectory of radicalization in history and literary history. Thinking about literature and the English Revolution brings challenges as well as opportunities for students and scholars in both literature and history. Following recent scholarship, this Handbook will expand the range of texts normally considered under the rubric of the literary to include cookery books and conversion narratives, prophecy and political theory, polemical prose and dramatic dialogue. We will examine not only the political and religious ideas but the imaginative and aesthetic qualities of writings from the republicanism of James Harrington and Marchamont Nedham, to the royalism of Thomas Hobbes, to the radical formulations of Gerrard Winstanley, John Lilburne, Abiezer Coppe, Anna Trapnel, and Margaret Fell. Our Handbook chapters look not only at the articulation of political values, but at how shared literary affiliations and values cross differing political positions. At the same time, canonical literary genres and authors will be brought into new conversations and juxtapositions, showing how literary genres such as lyric and narrative poetry, drama, and prose fiction respond to the pressures of revolutionary times. A range of well- and now-lesser-known literary authors—Sir John Denham, Richard Lovelace, Edmund Waller, Robert Herrick, Henry Vaughan, William Davenant, Percy Herbert, John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Lucy Hutchinson, Margaret Cavendish, and John Bunyan—will be examined in new contexts, highlighting aspects of their work particularly important in the context of revolution, as well as attending to their aesthetic, lyric, dramatic, and narrative achievements. Such re-examination of the literary aspects of a wide range of writing, and of the political genesis of high literature, can in turn shed new light on historiographical questions regarding the events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Our exploration of contexts, texts, authors, and genres shows that literature is not constrained but generated by civil war. Rather than a lull, the 1640s and 1650s in England evince a flourishing of political writing and of new forms and uses of lyric and narrative poetry, epic, drama, and romance. Indeed, there could be an inverse

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relation between political success and literary achievement. That some of the most imaginative and influential texts came from moments of crisis and defeat ensured that after 1660, the literary impact of the Civil Wars, regicide, and republic would continue, even flourish, not only in royalist recuperations but in ongoing oppositional discourse.4 Our volume ends, then, not at 1660 with the return of the monarchy, but with texts written in the 1660s and 1670s that continue to show the cultural impact of the midcentury change. The break at 1660 makes sense only in the most narrow constitutionalist terms, as legislatively the clock was turned back to 1641, retaining the changes agreed to by Charles I after the initial parliamentary effort to curb the abuses of Personal Rule. Yet in religion and culture, and in the nature and role of popular politics and print, the mid-century crisis had an ongoing impact, and the legacy of the 1640s and 1650s continued. Indeed, some recent scholars have suggested that the energies released in the 1640s provided the impetus for a long revolution, stretching through the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81 (in which the alleged threat of a ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II led to attempted legislation to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the throne) and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688–9, which brought about the exile of James II and the accession of William and Mary.5 Our Handbook thus not only expands the range of texts considered literary and newly considers the political uses of literary texts, but also rethinks how the impact of revolutionary literature continued long after the return of the King. This Handbook aims for a broad audience of advanced students and scholars in literature and in political, religious, and cultural history. The chapters discuss both primary texts and secondary scholarship, giving a sense of current debate and charting avenues for future research. In doing so, contributors examine the revolutionary nature of the events in mid-seventeenth-century England and explicate their long-term cultural significance. It is hoped that such a broad view and reassessment will be of use both in research and in the classroom, for scholars and students alike.

DEBATING

THE

ENGLISH REVOLUTION

.................................................................................................................. What do we mean by the English Revolution and, by extension, the literature of the English Revolution? How is the rubric of ‘English Revolution’ useful in considering the writings that emerged in the 1640s, 1650s, and 1660s? And, in turn, how does understanding literary production and the aesthetic qualities of polemical texts contribute to an understanding of political, religious, economic, and social change? Under any rubric, the years 1640–60 evinced a maelstrom of change and upheaval: war between England and Scotland, two civil wars in England, the public trial and execution of the King, disestablishment of episcopacy, abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords, continuing wars in Ireland and Scotland, and new institutions and political structures.6 From the Council of State and Rump Parliament that ruled the English

INTRODUCTION

5

republic 1649–53, to Oliver Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump, the brief tenure of a nominated ‘godly’ Parliament, the first and second Protectorates under Oliver Cromwell, the brief succession of Richard Cromwell, and months of near-chaos after Richard’s forced resignation before Charles II was welcomed back, the Three Kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland saw political, religious, economic, and social change and transformation. Most pertinent to our interest, such upheaval prompted an explosion in the printed word and image. Contrary to common assumptions, ‘revolution’ and ‘revolutions’ were contemporary, if hotly contested, terms for describing the events in England from 1640 to 1660.7 When Oliver Cromwell sent his first Protectoral Parliament packing in January 1655, disappointed in their unwillingness to accept the Instrument of Government by which the new regime had been established and in their lack of legislative progress, he rebuked them by holding up a standard of divinely guided revolution. Objecting to critics who claimed that ‘It is an easie thing to talk of necessities when men create necessities; would not the Lord Protector make Himself great, and his Family great? doth not He make these necessities?’,8 Cromwell waxed eloquent on the divine agent behind revolution in England: And I say this, not only to this Assembly, but to the World, that that man liveth not, that can come to me, and charge me that I have in these great Revolutions made necessities; I challenge even all that fear God; And as God hath said, My glory I will not give unto another, Let men take heed, and be twice advised, how they call his Revolutions, the things of God, and his working of things from one Period to another, how I say, they call them necessities of mens creation, for by so doing, they do vilifie and lessen the works of God, and rob him of his Glory, which he hath said, he will not give unto another, nor suffer to be taken from him. (29)

Cromwell appeals to divine agency behind the events of mid-seventeenth-century England to chastise nay-sayers. And he warns ominously that ‘God knoweth what he will do with men when they shall call His Revolutions, humane Designs, and so detract from his Glory’ (29). Bundled back off to their provinces, however, the MPs might well have differed from Cromwell’s definition of God’s ‘Revolutions’ and particularly its indirect endorsement of his own actions. Rather, they might have agreed with an early Leveller critique (later a full-blown attack on Cromwell the Machiavel), that ‘You shall scarce speak to Crumwell about anything, but he will lay his hand on his breast, elevate his eyes, and call God to record, he will weep, howl and repent, even while he doth smite you under the first rib.’9 Regardless of its immediate effectiveness, Cromwell’s impassioned speech nonetheless shows that the idea of revolution as change and upheaval, not simply as a natural cycle or return, was, in fact, contemporary with the events of mid-seventeenth-century England. Indeed, the language of revolution was both powerful and contested, appearing in texts by both royalists and ‘roundheads’, and in genres from political theory to radical religious writings to fictional romance. Cromwell might well have drawn the language of revolution from a text that he recommends in his parliamentary speech, Marchamont Nedham’s The Case of the

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Common-wealth of England, Stated.10 Writing after the regicide to defend the new republic, Nedham drew upon a more traditional definition of ‘revolution’ as natural rotation or circularity. And yet his use of the term boldly undergirds the de facto power in England, a power whose rise is presented as part of a natural process. Nedham’s first chapter examines the proposition ‘that Governments have their Revolutions and fatall Periods’ (1), part of a broader natural process of growth, perfection, and dissolution. For Nedham, the historical ‘Rise and Revolutions’ of various governments point to the basic principle ‘That the Power of the Sword is, and ever hath been the Foundation of all Titles to Government’ (6). History also shows, Nedham argues, that ‘the People never presumed to spurne at those Powers [of the sword], but (for publique Peace and quiet) paid a patient submission to them, under their various Revolutions’ (16). The lesson for England is clear. Significantly, Nedham evinces a heightened sense of Englishness and of the moral imperatives facing England itself that can be seen elsewhere with uses of the language of revolution. From republicans to religious radicals, the language of revolution enabled a rethinking and reimagining of the English nation and its identity. Indeed, the language of revolution became an important tool for advocating social, political, economic, and religious change. But interest in the term ‘revolution’ was by no means restricted to radical writers. Rather, the language of revolution was labile, shifting, and contested. If, after the Restoration, Quaker William Smith saw the change in rulers as a cyclical turn that showed the vanity of human pretensions—‘And now the Revolution is gone about, and that which was out of sight is come up, and that which was above is gone down and over-shadowed; so vain a thing is man before his Maker’11—the staunchly royalist clergyman Thomas Pierce hailed the King’s return as ‘our late happy revolution’.12 While the Quaker Smith urged repentance for present sin—‘Oh England! thou art traced thorow, . . . and thou art found to be exceeding wicked in thy heart, and exceeding vain in thy imaginations’ (7)—Pierce lauded a ‘Revolution, by which we all are transported with joy, and wonder’ (11). Debate over the term ‘revolution’ not only characterized the seventeenth-century crisis itself, but has long been part of historiography. Multiple questions mark this debate. What caused the events of the mid-seventeenth century in England, Ireland, and Scotland? Were the causes and effects long-term and structural or short-term and contingent? Was this a revolution or a rebellion? Was it driven primarily by class, religion, politics, or economics? How much weight must be placed on a functional breakdown in the Three Kingdoms? To what extent can we frame a narrative in England alone or speak of an ‘English’ revolution? In the broadest terms, Civil War historiography has moved from Marxist and Whiggish teleologies of long-term structural breakdown and consequences, to a ‘revisionist’ challenge emphasizing consensus and short-term triggers of occasion and personality, as well as the centrality of civil wars fought within the three Stuart kingdoms and the importance of relations between them.13 Most pertinent to our volume, ‘post-revisionist’ scholarship has turned to religious, cultural, and ideological differences and to print and political culture more

INTRODUCTION

7

broadly.14 As such, the idea of revolution has been recovered and redefined in cultural terms. The prolific and influential work of long-time Oxford don and historian Christopher Hill shaped the scholarly discussion of literature and the English Revolution not despite but because of revisionist challenges to Marxist and Whig teleology. Having begun with a Marxist framework, Hill eventually retreated from his early formulation of a ‘bourgeois’ revolution that paved the way for capitalism. But Hill never gave up on the idea of revolution. Rather, by vastly expanding the scope of the political, forging connections between social ideas, religion, economics, and literary texts, Hill turned to a broader cultural revolution. Hill found revolutionary ideas and impulses in the radical nature of Puritanism; in plebeian thinkers; and in literature itself, especially as it implicitly encoded dissent under conditions of repression and censorship.15 Highly influential on literary scholars was Hill’s view that ‘there was a revolution in English literature’ as well as in science, politics, economics, and society.16 With the expansion of scholarly focus from high politics to a broader political sphere and from the legal processes of Westminster and Whitehall to a more broadly conceived political culture, the concept of ‘revolution’ has taken on new life. In the past two decades, both historians and literary scholars have refined and built upon this expansion of the political to include the literary, bringing new attention to genre, aesthetics, literary convention and texture, print history, and the history of readership. Drawing upon this scholarship, and while acknowledging the Scottish and Irish impetus to and ongoing experience of the Civil Wars, this volume tells the story of literature and revolution in mid-seventeenth-century England.

LITERATURE

AND

REVOLUTION

.................................................................................................................. How do we define ‘literature’ in considering literature and the English Revolution? First, explicit consideration under the broad rubric of the English Revolution is appropriate and productive because so much of the writing not only reacted to the events of 1640 to 1660 but used rhetorical modes and literary techniques to do so. The English Revolution challenges us to expand our idea of the literary, to consider the breadth and range of texts, change and continuity, and (as we shall see) increased radicalization over time. Under the rubric of the English Revolution, scholars have explored the literary merit and use of a number of genres, from prophecy to political prose to conversion narratives. The ‘literature’ of the English Revolution can first be broadly defined as writing chronologically of this period, including writing directly or indirectly on the subject of the revolutionary times. Literature defined as belles-lettres, writings in canonical literary genres or drawing on the principal classical texts of polite or humane learning, is also relevant to consideration of literature and the English Revolution. We can see how canonical texts were not above the pressures of their time. Whether directly addressing the

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conflict or not, literature registers the pressures, upheaval, freedoms, and promise of mid-century change, while also transmuting and going beyond the historical moment. The rubric of literature and the English Revolution thus brings together canonical and non-canonical texts and authors under a broadened definition of the political, aligning literary writing with other kinds of cultural production, while also recognizing its distinctive linguistic play, narrative power, and aesthetic achievement. Writings on the Battle of Edgehill, the event commemorated in the Dobson portrait of Prince Charles with which we began, offer an apt example of how political tracts deploy literary techniques and literary genres are politicized. The very characteristics that frustrated early military historians on Edgehill prove valuable for a study of literature and the English Revolution. Seeking to determine the most basic facts of the battle, e.g. the number of regiments and troops of horse and dragoons, which regiments took part in the fighting, how the two armies were drawn up, what tactics they employed, and the numbers of those killed, wounded, and captured, early military historians bemoaned the plethora of inconsistent and contradictory texts.17 Yet these inconsistencies often stem from materials rich for literary analysis: constructions of protagonist, plot, character, and theme, as well as rhetorical devices and legitimating languages, deployed for political ends. As evinced by their titles, early parliamentary accounts of Edgehill grounded their legitimacy on an appeal to the truth. Yet it is precisely in their straying from facts and figures that the accounts are most rhetorically powerful. An Exact and True Relation (28 October 1642), sent from six parliamentary officers to John Pym in the Commons, opens with a divine protagonist, taking the ‘first occasion’ to ‘declare [God’s] goodnesse, in giving so great a blessing as he hath now done to the resolute and unwearyed endeavours of our Souldiers, fighting for him in the maintenance of his truth, and for themselves and their Country, in defence of their Liberties, and the Priviledges of Parliament’.18 The appeal to divine agency and shared values (country, liberties, and the privileges of Parliament) allows the writers to gain legitimacy, buttress their political identity, and occlude the bloody indeterminacy of this first protracted battle. Rather than dwelling on hunger and pain, wounded men dying of cold in the night, unburied corpses, frightened runaways, and a cessation of battle from sheer exhaustion, they offer ‘a Narration of a blessed Victory which God hath given us upon the Army of the Cavaliers’ (3). Similarly, A Full and True Relation of the Great Battle (4 November), written by Captain Edward Kightley, frames its narrative with a title-page Bible verse, ‘Judges 5.31. So let all thine enemies perish O Lord, but let them that love him, be as the Sun when he goeth forth in his might.’19 The text intersperses its account of human action—infantry and cavalry charges, troops running away, the capture of the royal standard, and heaps of slain enemies—with attribution of victory to the divine: ‘God did give the victory to us’ (4) or ‘It was Gods wonderfull worke that wee had the victory’ (6). Eight Speeches Spoken in Guildhall combines appeal to the divine with turning the language of ridicule back against the enemies of Parliament. Master Strode asserts that ‘as God did this great worke, and we ascribe to him the honour, so you will looke upon the persons by whom he did it . . . these were the men that were ignominiously

INTRODUCTION

9

reproached by the name of Round-heads, and by these Round-heads did God shew himself a most glorious God’.20 Royalist accounts of Edgehill, though fewer in number, deploy similar legitimizing languages and literary devices to claim victory for their own side and to stigmatize their opponents. In pre-battle speeches to his lords and captains, Charles I swears to ‘maintaine and defend the Protestant Religion, the Rights and Priviledges of the Parliament, and the Liberties of the Subject’.21 For the King, divine bestowal of victory will attest to the rightness of his cause: ‘Let Heaven shew his power by this days victory to declare me just, and as a lawfull so a loving King to my subjects’ (3). Speaking to the soldiers, the King embraces the terms of opprobrium, as did the Parliament in adducing a God of the ‘Round-heads’. Given that they are ‘called Cavaliers in a reproachfull signification and ye are all designed for the slaughter if you do not manfully behave yourselves in this Battell’ (5), the King urges his men to ‘shew your selves, therefore now couragious Cavaliers, and beat backe all opprobrious speeches and aspersions cast upon you by the Enemy’ (5). Of course, the royalist soldiers needed to beat back much more than ‘opprobrious speeches’, but weaponry, wounds, and casualties are largely elided. A Prayer of thanks giving for his Majesties late Victory over the Rebells likewise credits the divine for the King’s proclaimed victory, turning its gaze away from the carnage of battle: ‘O Thou God of Hosts, who goest forth with our Armies, and pleadest the cause of thine Anoynted against them that strive with Him . . . it is thy Hand alone that hath dispos’d of Victory to thy Servant the King, that hath covered his Head in the day of Battaile, and hath kept His Crown from being thrown down to the ground.’22 Despite opposed views of who had won the battle, royalists and parliamentarians thus shared the use of literary devices of plot and character, as well as powerful religious language, to deflect the horrors of battle and mobilize support. In the aftermath of Edgehill, John Milton even more fully deployed literary resources, as London itself braced for attack by the King’s army, and parliamentary declarations adjured the people to be ready to defend themselves.23 Waiting in the panic-stricken city, Milton composed a sonnet, ostensibly a paper to be pinned to the door of his house in Aldersgate Street. The sonnet’s opening octave appealed directly to the expected royalist invader: Captain or Colonel, or Knight in Arms, Whose chance on these defenceless dores may sease, If ever deed of honour did thee please, Guard them, and him within protect from harms, He can requite thee, for he knows the charms That call Fame on such gentle acts as these, And he can spred thy Name o’er Lands and Seas, What ever clime the Suns bright circle warms.24

While parliamentary propaganda depicted royalist soldiers as papists, marauding plunderers, and potential rapists,25 Milton boldly appropriates and reworks the Italian sonnet, métier of Petrarch, Dante, and Tasso, to address not a beloved lady, but a

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royalist soldier, metamorphized from ‘Captain or Colonel’ to an honour-bound ‘Knight in Arms’. Here, the expected ‘charms’ of the lady in the sonnet tradition are transmuted to the charms (incantations) of the poet’s verse. ‘Fame’ comes not from deeds of war but from ‘gentle’ acts and the voice of the poet. The sestet of Milton’s sonnet flatters and mythologizes both poet and royalist commander with a double analogy to ancient and heroic Greece: Lift not thy spear against the Muses Bowre, The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre Went to the ground: And the repeated air Of sad Electra’s Poet had the power To save th’Athenian Walls from ruine bare.

According to Plutarch, when Alexander the Great sacked the city of Thebes, he instructed his soldiers not to destroy the house of the poet Pindar; similarly, Plutarch recounts that upon hearing the first Choral Ode from Euripides’ tragic drama Electra, the victors in the Peloponnesian wars spared the city of Athens that had produced such men.26 Such are the heroic predecessors for Milton as poet and for the imagined royalist commander whom he hopes to persuade. What should be obvious, then, is that even the turn to belles-lettres and the great classical tradition of poetry and drama is not a turn away from but an embrace and transformation of the historical moment.27 Milton boldly and brilliantly politicizes the sonnet tradition of love poetry.28 His sonnet sets up the poet as a public figure who uses his rhetorical and poetical skills to speak out against violence and plunder, to reimagine himself and his nation in heroic mode. The sonnet shows the civic role of the poet, constituting a speech act that evinces the power of poetry to interpret and mythologize, to bring meaning to the threat of chaos and disorder.

PRINT

AND

PUBLIC OPINION

.................................................................................................................. Milton’s hope that his sonnet might save a city, or at least his own house, may have been overly optimistic, and in the event was not tested, as the King at first delayed his assault on London and then was stopped by a numerically superior force of soldiers and Trained Bands at Turnham Green. But the poem constituted a different sort of speech act when it appeared in print, under the title ‘When the Assault was intended the City’, in Milton’s 1645 Poems, published by the well-known literary publisher Humphrey Moseley.29 By this time, Londoners no longer feared an immediate royalist assault, sacking, and pillaging. But Milton’s audience now expanded from the potential ‘Captain or Colonel’ to a broader reading public. A topical moment had become art, or, rather, art was deployed to universalize and moralize the topical moment. In his early anti-prelatical tract, Reason of Church-Government, Milton had claimed for poetry the

INTRODUCTION

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power ‘to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertu and publick civility’.30 Despite the seeming self-deprecation of his prose writing as ‘but of my left hand’, Milton made no binary distinction between his poetry and his prose.31 If the private voice of lyric poetry speaks to the public in Milton’s politicized sonnets, his political tracts became aestheticized prose epics, which equally sought to persuade through voice and character, imagery and metaphor, allusion and analogy. Scholars on the English Revolution have become particularly interested in appeals to public opinion, the opening up of an emergent public sphere with the print explosion of the early Civil War years.32 After 1641, as is well known, the mechanisms of censorship broke down with the abolition of the prerogative Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission.33 The number of printed texts, including domestic newsbooks and pamphlets, rose sharply, generating political opinion and debate in London, in the English provinces, and in the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland.34 While news travelled in newsletters, letters, satiric verse, and other manuscript writings, print was key to the appeal to a politicized public. The spate of pamphlets being rushed into print after Edgehill, for example, not only deployed literary techniques to shape a narrative that swayed public opinion, but, even more self-consciously, modelled or staged public responses within the text. In January 1643, several months after the initial tracts and at a moment when there was a push-back for peace, two ‘wonder’ texts reported on an airy battle between infernal horsemen in the skies above Edgehill. A Great Wonder in Heaven: Shewing the late Apparitions and Prodigious Noyses of War and Battels, seen on Edge-Hill gives a graphic account: ‘first the sound of Drums a far off, and the noyse of Soulders, as it were, giving out their last groanes . . . [then] appeared in the ayre the same incorporeall souldiers that made those clamours, and immediately with Ensignes displayed[,] Drums beating, Musquets going off, Cannons discharged, Horses neighing . . . the alarum or entrance to this game of death was struck up.’35 Shortly thereafter, The New Yeares Wonder: Being a most Certaine and True Relation of the Disturbed Inhabitants of Keaton, and other Neighbouring Villages Neere unto Edge-hill presents even more graphically the infernal airy re-enactment of Edgehill, ‘whose troubled peece of earth plastred with English goare and turned unto a golgotha of bones is now become the plot of feare and horror . . . and sends both feare and horour round about to terifie the living with dead soules’.36 In self-consciously attempting to shape public opinion, both Edgehill texts of January 1643 provide the reaction of witnesses, virtual stand-ins for the reading public. In A Great Wonder in Heaven, the infernal soldiers appear to horrified shepherds, parodying the angelic heralding of the birth of Christ. More expansively in The New Yeares Wonder, the shepherds’ account brings mockery and disbelief, until a week later when the townspeople are themselves suddenly awakened with ‘the dolfull and the hydious groanes of dying men . . . crying revenge and some againe to ease them of their paine by friendly killing them’ (6). As the townspeople hide in corners, half-smother themselves in their beds, or peep out of their windows, even gentlemen sent by the King from Oxford bear witness to the sight and depart ‘wonderous fearfull amaized and affrighted’ (8). Faced with such horrors, both wonder texts express the hope that God

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will end the unnatural civil wars in England and ‘send a sudden peace between his Majestie and Parliament’.37 Other responses to Edgehill remind us that news travelled well beyond London to the English provinces, and into Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. In Aberdeen, Scotland, the Presbyterian minister and royalist sympathizer John Spalding eagerly copied down what he read and heard about the Battle of Edgehill.38 Early military historian T. Arnold denounced use of Spalding’s History ‘as if it were a source of prime importance’, adducing its claim that the parliamentary army ‘wes rowtid and all defeat[ed]’ as typifying ‘the absurd statements such as a diary of the kind can hardly escape being full of ’.39 Yet modern-day scholars might see these alleged faults as precisely the virtues of Spalding’s account. Spalding shows the fluidity of oral, manuscript, and print culture, as he reads and (probably) listens to accounts of the Battle of Edgehill and writes down full or partial accounts in his diary. Spalding copies long excerpts from Three Speeches Made by the Kings Most Excellent Majesty, the royalist text on Edgehill that we examined earlier. He adds in the wry detail that, preceding these speeches, the ‘king goes to his counsall of war, [and] resolves to fight on Sonday aganes his will, saying, “Then, since it is so resolved, let God fight his owne battellis upone his owne day”’ (91). We also see current opinion as Spalding characterizes the King’s speeches to his troops as a ‘brave and comfortable oration’ (91). Spalding transcribes the King’s speech about the ‘Cavaliers’ and adds that, after having made his third speech, the King commanded that Psalm 7 (‘save me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me . . . ’) be publicly sung, ‘to the gryte joy of his people, who threw ther capes in the air, saying and crying out, “God save the King, Forduard, Forduard”’ (92). An enumeration of the battle, including the claim of royalist victory, follows. Finally, another royalist sympathizer in London shows how political opinion after Edgehill was manipulated not only by print but by display and oral performance. On 26 October 1642, in a fast sermon in St Margaret’s, Westminster, before members of the House of Commons, Puritan clergyman Thomas Case drew upon Psalm 68: 1–2—‘Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered, let them that hate him, flee before him’—to blacken royalists and legitimize the Parliament’s cause.40 Referencing a wide range of biblical texts, Case characterizes parliamentarians as followers of Moses, the children of Jacob, the Lord’s Remembrancers, beloved Christians, ancient Christians, the seed of the Woman, Worthies of the Lord of Hosts, and captives in Babylon. Conversely, royalists are part of the kingdom of Sin and Satan, Moabites, Ammonites, Philistines, seed of the Serpent, incarnate devils, lions, bears, wolves, haters of God, heathen, thieves and murderers, and enemies of Jesus Christ. A dramatic delivery in the midst of the sermon of a note with the ‘news’ of parliamentary success at Edgehill allowed the Reverend Case to shift from a call to repentance to effusive thanksgiving for divinely bestowed victory. Yet for all of the rhetorical and exegetical excess, at least one listener to Case’s sermon in St Margaret’s remained unconvinced. In a manuscript newsletter written shortly thereafter on the Battle of Edgehill, a royalist in London comments that, having been given a paper ‘to give G[od] thanks for the Victory, being 3000 slain on the K[ing]s

INTRODUCTION

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side and 300 on theirs’, Case ‘did it an houre together, throwing such abominable dirt on private men & making such strong expressions to alm[ighty] G[od] that I tremble to think on them’.41 Print, manuscript, oral delivery, and word of mouth contributed to shaping public opinion on Edgehill, and on the English Revolution more broadly.

REVOLUTIONARY READERSHIP

.................................................................................................................. In appeals to public opinion, printed texts in the 1640s and 1650s both manipulated and empowered readers. And these readers—imagined or real, sympathetic or resisting, commenting in manuscript or responding in print—have received considerable recent attention in scholarship on the English Revolution. Building on a broader interest in the materiality of print culture, books, and reading, scholars have looked at reception and habits of reading as well as at the dialogic nature of much cheap print in the midcentury crisis.42 As we shall see, important acts of print were also acts of reading. The Kings Cabinet Opened, the notorious publication of the secret and incriminating correspondence between Charles I and Henrietta captured after the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, was both a ‘print event’ and an act of reading, complete with highly tendentious annotations of the royal letters.43 The overwhelmingly successful Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings portrayed Charles I as a pious and conscientious reader of the Bible, particularly the Psalms and Gospels, as he meditated upon and prayed over the crises of civil war; the King’s book was framed as a last testament for his son and heir, and it was in turn read and annotated by scores of loyal, grieving subjects.44 Politicized uses of reading and explicit attention (positive and negative) to readers can also be seen in Milton’s revolutionary prose, nowhere more so than in Eikonoklastes, his officially commissioned response to Eikon Basilike.45 Much of Eikonoklastes is dialogic, quoting from and engaging Charles’s own words. But Milton also reads the King’s book—and the King’s life—through other texts, including the Bible and classical Roman history. Two epigrams to Eikonoklastes are drawn from the Roman historian Sallust. From Sallust’s War with Jugurtha, Milton adduces Memmius, tribune of the commons elect, who speaks out against condoning the crimes of the Numidian king Jugurtha through the influence of a few (bribed) Roman partisans. Appealing to the people’s sense of honour and their own liberties, Memmius (as cited by Milton) urges that they recognize and punish the guilty: Impune quælibet facore, id est regem esse (For to do with impunity whatever one fancies is to be a king).46 Milton draws another epigram—Regibus boni, quam mali suspectiores; semperq[ue] his aliena virtue formidolosa est (For kings hold the good in greater suspicion than the wicked, and to them the merit of others is always fraught with danger)—from Sallust’s War with Catiline.47 Sallust had underscored the irony that, after the defeat of Carthage, the late Roman republic was corrupted from within, spawning the political conspiracy of the penniless

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aristocrat Catiline against Cicero and the Senate, and paving the way for eventual return to monarchy. Milton thus aligns himself not only with Sallust but with Cicero, whose orations to the Senate and the people were crucial in uncovering Catiline’s plot and in exiling him as hostis and enemy to the state, as well as in summary execution of the conspirators remaining in Rome.48 Charles becomes a Catiline, stripped of the rights of a citizen, and appropriately executed. Milton not only brings his own reading to bear in Eikonoklastes, but he puts considerable energy into addressing, indeed deriding, readers of the King’s book.49 In his impassioned peroration, Milton excoriates those who gaze upon the frontispiece of Eikon Basilike as ‘an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble . . . a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib’d with a new device of the Kings Picture at his praiers’.50 Yet Milton holds out hope that the rest, the remaining few, ‘may find the grace and good guidance to bethink themselves, and recover’.51 But Milton in turn had his own revolutionary, or at least resisting, readers. On one extant copy of Eikonoklastes, beneath the final sentiment wishing for recovery of the misguided, an early hand has written: ‘which it is to bee feared ye Author hereof John Milton never did but is gone to his owne place[.] usque quo Domine.’52 As he implicitly consigns Milton to hell, this reader strikingly matches Milton in his own learning, and the classical text to which he alludes carries a special sting. The Latin words constitute the famous beginning of Cicero’s first speech against Catiline in the Roman Senate: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra’ (In heaven’s name, Catiline, how long will you take advantage of our forbearance?).53 In opening his first oration by asking ‘how long’ or ‘to what extent’ Catiline will abuse them, Cicero brilliantly presupposed the reality of the conspiracy and of all the charges—from personal immorality to plotting murder and sedition—that he would bring against Catiline. Cicero skilfully constructed dual opposed characters: the evil character of Catiline out of which bad deeds would flow and the wise and virtuous consul, Cicero, who protected the state.54 This resisting reader of Eikonoklastes thus boldly turns Milton’s own literary and historical analogue against him, aligning Milton not with Sallust or Cicero but with Catiline as hostis: a conspirator, traitor, and enemy to the state. Significantly, however, the application to Milton has a twist. It is not the deceased Milton, gone to ‘his owne place’, but his text that offends. Eikonoklastes takes on the life of the author, text, and person as interchangeable as in Milton’s 1644 Areopagitica when he protested ‘as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye’.55 If for Milton ‘a good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life’,56 for this early reader that ‘life beyond life’ continues the damage, the insurrection, the treason of the man himself. Such is the strongest possible condemnation of Milton’s republicanism. Yet in condemning the book as the man, the reader

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paradoxically affirms the central Miltonic belief in the public power of texts to challenge, transform, and revolutionize. It is that powerful role of texts—and in particular the flourishing, transformation, and achievements of the ‘literary’—that this Handbook will address. It is the assumption of this volume that the writings of mid-seventeenth-century England grow out of and respond to the events of civil war, regicide, and republic and are best understood in that context. Yet at the same time, such texts transmute and go beyond their historical moment. In thirty-seven chapters, historians and literary scholars from North America, the United Kingdom, and Ireland examine texts and contexts, authors and genres, movements and moments, capturing the innovation and excitement, as well as the aesthetic achievements and lasting contributions, of mid-century literature. As such, we aim to provide an up-to-date, capacious, and authoritative guide for students and scholars of literature and the English Revolution.

DESCRIPTION

OF

HANDBOOK PARTS

.................................................................................................................. Our volume begins with contextual essays on England at home and in the world, 1640– 60. Early chapters consider the cultural influence of the English Revolution on Europe and elsewhere, beginning with the reactions of Dutch, German, French, and Italian writers (including literary writers) to the war’s violent conclusion and its far-reaching political implications. We also see the interacting histories of the Three Kingdoms of Scotland, Ireland, and England, linked by economic and political interests and by shared experience of the destruction and displacements of war. The Civil Wars also impact connections and interchanges within the English Atlantic, particularly shipping, trade, religion, imperial politics, and the rhetoric of identity. Intellectual movements examined in Part I include religion, political thought, and science. During the years of revolutionary turmoil, English political thought strove to find constitutional order and stability, but also to ensure that this order was compatible with divine mandate. As an internecine Protestant conflict, the English Civil War had its roots in the ambiguities of the European and the English Reformations; religious concerns were at the forefront of the revolution, albeit intertwined with political and constitutional issues and concerns. Mid-seventeenth-century England also saw the emergence of medical or scientific concerns in literary texts, including Paradise Lost, which registers Milton’s animist materialism and his interests in physiology, natural history, and medicine. The early 1640s mark a significant increase in print, including topical, controversial material that both reflected and contributed to the current crises: print was also a commercial business that depended on less controversial ‘steady sellers’, warranting examination in terms of consumption as well as production. Finally, midcentury literature emerges at a time when Civil War disruptions inevitably influenced women’s roles in the household, church, and politics.

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The Handbook sections that follow this first, contextual part turn to revolutionary moments and movements, proceeding largely chronologically from the outbreak of civil war into the Restoration years. Part II looks at the First and Second Civil Wars in England, 1642–8, intertwined with events in Scotland and Ireland. This period evinces a new public audience and the development of news, pamphlets, and public opinion. Milton’s appeals for liberty in Areopagitica evince a tension between principle and pragmatism, as he responds to the Presbyterians in Parliament and his own recent experience with the divorce tracts. Cavalier verse thrives in civil war, finding a public voice and print audience and responding deftly (e.g. Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill) to the progression of events. Autobiographical writing flourishes in the 1640s, and letters and diaries draw upon various genres (sermons, mother’s advice books, history, devotional writing) in responding to political and religious turmoil. Andrew Marvell’s shifting alignments mark the exigencies and complex political allegiances of civil war and its aftermath, yet his lyric and public verse shows accommodation and generic decorum, rather than simple equivocation. The Leveller movement grows out of engagement with parliamentary thought, the mid-century boom in print and petitioning, and Puritan culture, particularly the gathered churches. Part III of our volume turns to the regicide and republic, 1649–53. By virtually any standard, 1649 constituted a revolutionary moment. The King was put on trial and publicly executed in January 1649. In March, monarchy was officially abolished and the House of Lords disestablished. As wars continued in Ireland and Scotland, England struggled in print and propaganda. Scholars debate the extent to which England achieved a new republican aesthetic and to what extent royal modes continued. It is certainly the case that Charles I lived on in image and text, especially in Eikon Basilike, the most powerful and influential text of the seventeenth century, with a fascinating history of composition, strategy, and dissemination. At the same time, political writings responded to ongoing events with bold new formulations, explored in the chapters in this Handbook section. As a defender of the regicide, and spokesman for a movement that claimed, but never gained, popular support, Milton turns to various rhetorical manoeuvres in defining ‘the people’. As the key leader of the Digger movement, Gerrard Winstanley gives eloquent expression to some of the most radical ideals of the English Revolution, especially the potential for dramatic social transformation. Abiezer Coppe and other Ranters deploy violent, martial, and sexual imagery, along with wordplay, to express religious experience and community, but such writings also gave rise to fears and exaggerations among their contemporaries (as well as modern-day historians). Political allegiances and identities register the pressures of the times. A stress on literary aspects as well as ideological issues shows continuities across shifts of allegiance in the work of journalist and political writer Marchamont Nedham. Rather than being a straightforwardly royalist work, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan develops a comprehensive framework of rights and duties for both sovereigns and subjects. And, at the same time that non-traditional genres employ literary techniques, lyric verse turns political. Henry Vaughan’s distinctively ‘Welsh’ poetry responds to current politics, even in its most seemingly inward

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and spiritual moments. Finally, conversion narratives, drawing upon the models of St Augustine and St Paul, become increasingly important with English sectarians and New England Congregationalists in the early 1650s, pointing toward development into fuller narratives with such writers as John Bunyan. Our fourth Handbook part looks primarily at texts written under the Cromwellian Protectorate, 1653–9, a time no longer seen as an inevitable march back to kingship, but as politically and culturally experimental.57 Chapters in this part explore a range of genres and texts. In addressing his two Latin Defences to a broad European audience, Milton appeals to the ‘better part’ of the people and evinces a continual concern with reformation and toleration. Prophetic writings, including by women, call to account the powers-that-be and predict events that would soon unfold. Marvell’s three major poems on Oliver Cromwell evince the issues of patronage and allegiance faced by poets and writers in the shifting political contexts of the 1650s. The closure of theatres opens up other kinds of theatrical spaces in the 1640s and 1650s: plays move into pamphlets as a means of attacking parliamentary grandees, and above all, the ground is set for reformist aristocratic entertainment. Deliberately nostalgic printed recipe books of the 1650s offer access to medicinal and culinary culture, as well as to experience of the body, and are, rather than a domestic retreat, part of the political story of Revolution. Political texts under the Protectorate continue to break new theoretical ground. James Harrington challenges conventional republican assumptions about virtue when (following Hobbes) he sees humans acting out of passion and self-interest, and aims to design a system that would channel this self-interest for the good of government. Less overtly in the Protectoral period, the seemingly escapist genre of royalist prose romance engages political issues through narrative and such aspects as the language of interest, critiquing Cromwell’s ambition and royalist errors alike. Quakers’ pamphleteering shows the impact of print in English society in the 1650s and the dialogic nature of their writings challenges prevailing views of the Quakers as eccentric outsiders. Our fifth and final part looks at writing leading up to and following the restoration of King Charles II in May 1660. Our focus on political culture allows for a reorientation of the 1660s and 1670s to consider an England that is less secular, less moving in a straightforward trajectory toward Enlightenment than is often thought. Attention to the ‘literariness’ of Milton’s late prose tract, The Readie and Easie Way, shows how its intense rhetorical language works not only as lament but as satire in the tradition of Juvenal. John Dryden’s triumphs and tribulations demonstrate how the conflicts of the English Revolution reverberate into the Restoration. In his grand epic poem, Paradise Lost, Milton draws upon both his Civil War experiences and literary tradition, yet neither of these ‘origins’ can account for the brilliance of the poem’s heterodox theology, the marriage of Adam and Eve, the rebellion in hell, and its redefinition of epic heroism. Samuel Butler, Andrew Marvell, and John Dryden use satire to analyse the predicament of chaos at the top and to redefine an authority that is neither natural nor heroic, yet shared respect for literary skills links the three writers across differing political allegiances. Royalist writer Margaret Cavendish turns to natural philosophy as a remedial vantage point not only on the losses suffered during the English Civil Wars

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but also on disappointments after the Restoration. Lucy Hutchinson’s emphasis on maternal authority in her epic Order and Disorder counters royalist uses of Genesis and shows how writings on the household and family are interlinked with republicanism. Finally, John Bunyan’s career as a best-selling author is made possible by the English Revolution: his appeal to common readers and aim to transform ordinary lives are part of the ongoing impact of the revolutionary moment. This section thus concludes with texts of the 1660s and 1670s and beyond, evincing the ongoing cultural impact of the mid-century revolution.

REVOLUTIONARY OUTCOMES

.................................................................................................................. William Dobson died in poverty in London in 1646. Many of the royalists he had earlier painted with bravura died on Civil War battlefields or lost fortunes in the King’s cause and retreated to penurious exile. Charles II, whom a later account claims actually had to be rescued at the Battle of Edgehill, escaped a second time as a young adult, in the somewhat undignified dress of a serving woman, after defeat in the Battle of Worcester in September 1651. But, after the Restoration, Dobson’s portraiture found an analogue in multiple depictions of Charles II in armour, despite his never having won a battle. Restoration court painter Peter Lely (who had earlier executed a sombre head-and-shoulders portrait of Oliver Cromwell) established visual continuity by adapting the grace and elegance of van Dyck Caroline portraiture to the far differing court of Charles II.58 The continuities in portraiture were part of an effort, also seen in print and literature, to depict the naturalness and inevitability of the return of the monarchy. Yet such efforts to insist upon return and inevitability belied their own intent. If the message was of continuity since the 1630s, the struggle over print and image demonstrated an ongoing appeal to public opinion that was itself a legacy of revolution. The literature that had been generated by the very ruptures and dislocations of revolutionary times continued both to reflect and to shape political, religious, and social change. And, as in the revolutionary years, such literature also continued to reach beyond the historical moment in its aesthetic, rhetorical, and imaginative achievement. It is the aim of this Handbook to give that achievement its full historical and analytical due.

NOTES 1. See Rogers, William Dobson; and Dobson, ODNB. On Sir Anthony van Dyck and Caroline court portraiture, see essays in Hearn (ed.), Van Dyck & Britain. 2. See the detailed accounts of the Battle of Edgehill in Young, Edgehill 1642; and Davies and Stuart, ‘Battle of Edgehill’. On the Verney family correspondence and Whitelocke’s diary relating to Edgehill, see the chapter by Helen Wilcox in this volume.

INTRODUCTION

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3. See e.g. Smith, Literature and Revolution, on the revolution in literary genres; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, on the language of republicanism; Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, on the politicization of literature; Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, on royalist modes; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, on aesthetics in religious polemics; and McDowell, The English Radical Imagination, on the strategic rhetoric and learning of prominent radicals such as Overton, Walwyn, and Coppe. 4. On nonconformist literature growing out of defeat, see Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, and Achinstein, Literature and Dissent. 5. Braddick, ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’ and God’s Fury, England’s Fire. 6. See Morrill, Nature of the English Revolution; Keeble (ed.), Cambridge Companion to the English Revolution; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution; and Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in Three Stuart Kingdoms, as well as the contextual chapters in Part I of this volume. 7. Two scholars who do recognize mid-seventeenth-century radical uses of the term ‘Revolution’ are Hill, ch. 5 in A Nation of Change and Novelty; and Rachum, ‘The Meaning of “Revolution”’. 8. Cromwell, His Highness Speech, 28–9. On Cromwell and the Bible, see Morrill, ‘How Oliver Cromwell Thought’. 9. The Hunting of the Foxes, 12. On the Levellers, see also the chapter by Rachel Foxley in this volume. 10. Nedham, Case of the Common-wealth. On Nedham, see also Joad Raymond’s chapter in this volume. 11. Smith, The True Light Shining in England, 7–8. 12. Pierce, Englands Season for Reformation of Life, 2. 13. For overviews of the issues, see Hughes, ‘The English Revolution of 1649’; Cust and Hughes (eds.), Conflict; Richardson, Debate on the English Revolution; and MacLachan, The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England. On long-term causes, the classic text is Stone, Causes of the English Revolution. Broadly ‘revisionist’ challenges include Russell, Unrevolutionary England. Important work on the new British histories includes Russell, Fall of the British Monarchies; and Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in Three Stuart Kingdoms. 14. On the revolution in print culture, see Smith, Literature and Revolution; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; and Hughes, Gangraena and ‘A “lunatick revolter from loyalty”’. On political culture more broadly, see Braddick, ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’ and Walter, ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’. 15. See e.g. Hill’s Puritanism and Revolution; World Turned Upside Down; and Milton and the English Revolution. 16. Hill, Collected Essays, i. 3. 17. Arnold, ‘Battle of Edgehill’. 18. An Exact and True Relation, 3. 19. A Full and True Relation, title page. 20. Eight Speeches Spoken in Guild-Hall, 11–12. 21. Charles, I, Three Speeches, 3. 22. A Prayer of Thanksgiving for his Majesties late Victory, broadsheet. 23. For example, Die Lunæ 24 October 1642, in which the Parliament orders that everyone in the cities and suburbs of London and Westminster ‘shut up their shops, and forbeare their Trades and other ordinary Imployments, that so they may with the greater diligence

20

24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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and freedome for the present attend the defence of the said places’ (broadsheet), and the amply titled A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Speedy Putting this City into a Posture of Defence, and to Fortifie All the Passages into the Same, Divers Rebels, Traytors, and Other Ill-Affected People, in Pursuit of a Wicked Designe to Alter Religion, Being now Marching against the Parliament for Destruction of the Same, and of the City of London. Sonnet 8, in John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Revard, [67]. For example, for Lord Say and Seale, ‘it cannot bee doubted . . . that their intentions are, that this rich glorious City should bee deliver’d up as a prey, as a reward to them for their treason against the Kingdome and the Parliament, and that your lives should satisfie their malice, your wives, your daughters, their lust, and religion it self the dearest thing of all others to us, should be made merchandize of, to invite Papists, to invite forreigners’ (Eight Speeches Spoken in Guild-Hall, 17–18). See Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, [67], nn. 2 and 3. Or, as Patterson, ‘That Old Man Eloquent’, puts it, in constructing his sequence of sonnets, Milton ‘articulated a specialized poetics . . . a theory of how literature cannot be understood except in the perspective of history’ (37). On the move away from the literary historical into the political with this sonnet, see Mueller, ‘On Genesis in Genre’. On Milton’s 1645 Poems and Moseley, see Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade, 82–103. Milton, Reason of Church-Government (1642), Complete Prose Works, i. 816. Hereafter cited as CPW. Ibid. 808. Scholars draw the concept of an emergent public sphere from Jürgen Habermas, Transformation, albeit with qualifications and changes. See e.g. Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere’ and his Invention of the Newspaper; and Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, however, finds an inverse relationship between rational public debate and propaganda (331–2). On licensing and censorship, see Jason McElligott’s chapter in this volume. On newsbooks, pamphlets, and political debate, see the chapter by Jason Peacey in this volume. A Great Wonder in Heaven, 5. The New Yeares Wonder, 5. A Great Wonder in Heaven, 7. Spalding, History of the Troubles, 91–3. Arnold, ‘Battle of Edgehill’, 140. Case’s sermon was printed in 1644 as God’s Rising, His Enemies Scattering. Royalist newsletter on Edgehill (1645). British Library, Harleian MS 3783, fo. 62. On readers, see Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader; on the dialogic character of cheap print, see Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering. On the tendentiousness of the parliamentary reading in The Kings Cabinet Opened, including selection, omission, translation, and framing of the holograph letters, see Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, ch. 2. On readers of Eikon Basilike, see Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, ch. 3. On the making and impact of the King’s book, see also the chapter by Robert Wilcher in this volume. On Eikonoklastes, see also the chapter by Stephen Fallon in this volume.

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46. Milton, Eikonoklastes, title page, in CPW, iii. 337. See the Latin text (from which Milton’s text varies slightly) and translation in Sallust, The War with Jugurtha, in Sallust, Works, 204–5. 47. Milton, Eikonoklastes, title page, in CPW, iii. 337. See the Latin (from which Milton varies slightly) and translation in Sallust, The War with Catiline, in Sallust, Works, 12–13. 48. Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations thus may have been one source for Milton’s recurrent use of ‘enemy’ as an epithet for Charles I, a striking usage to which Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Regicide’, has recently called our attention. 49. For the suggestion that Milton’s denunciation of the reader may be a rhetorical strategy that models by contrast an apt reading public, see Shore, ‘“Fit though Few”’. On Milton’s readers more broadly, see Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader; Dobranski, ‘Milton’s Ideal Readers’, and von Maltzahn, ‘Milton’s Readers’. 50. Milton, Eikonoklastes, CPW, iii. 601. 51. Ibid. 52. Milton, Eikonoklastes (1649). The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Call # 821M64.P16.1649 copy 1. 53. Cicero, 1st Catilinarian Oration. I am grateful to Bruce Swann, classics librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for assistance in deciphering the Latin and for pointing out the allusion to Cicero’s oration. 54. On ethos and the persuasiveness of Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations as based on character, see May, Trials of Character, 51–3. 55. Milton, Areopagitica, CPW, ii. 492. 56. Ibid. 493. 57. See Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell; Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate, and the essays in Little (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate. 58. See Alexander and MacLeod (eds.), Politics, Transgression, and Representation.

WORKS CITED Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. ——. Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Alexander, Julia Marciari, and Catharine MacLeod (eds.). Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007. [Anon.]. Royalist Newsletter on Edgehill. British Library Harleian MS 3738, fos. 61–2. Arnold, T. ‘Battle of Edgehill’. English Historical Review 2.5 (1887), 137–42. Braddick, Michael. ‘The English Revolution and its Legacies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 27–42. ——. God’s Fury, England’s Fire: England during the Civil Wars. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Case, Thomas. Gods Rising, His Enemies Scattering; Delivered in a Sermon Before the Honourable House of Commons, At their Solemne Fast, 26. Octob. 1642. London, 1644.

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[Charles, I]. Three Speeches Made by the Kings most Excellent Majesty. The First to Divers Lords and Colonels in His Majesties Tent, the Second to His Souldiers in the Fields; the Third to His Whole Army, Immediately before the Late Battell at Keinton Neer Banbury. London, 1642. [——]. Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings. London, 1649. Cicero. In Catilinam I–IV, Pro Murena, Pro Sulla, Pro Flacco, trans. C. MacDonald. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. Corns, Thomas N. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Coward, Barry. The Cromwellian Protectorate. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector. His Highness Speech to the Parliament in the Painted Chamber, at their Dissolution. Upon Monday the 22[n]d. of January, 1654. London, 1654/5. Reprinted at Dublin, 1654/5. Cust, Richard, and Ann Hughes (eds.). Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642. London: Longman, 1989. Davies, G., and Bernard Stuart. ‘The Battle of Edgehill’. English Historical Review 36.141 (1921), 30–44. Dobranski, Stephen B. Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ——. ‘Milton’s Ideal Readers’, in Kristin A. Pruitt and Charles W. Durham (eds.), Milton’s Legacy. Selingsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005, 191–207. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Milton and the Regicide’, in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds.), John Milton: Life-Writing-Reputation. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010, 91–106. Eight Speeches Spoken in Guild-Hall Upon Thursday-night, Octob. 27. 1642. 2nd edn. London, 1642. England and Wales, Parliament. A Declaration of the Lords and Commons assembled in Parliament, for the Speedy Putting this City into a Posture of Defence, and to Fortifie all the Passages into the same, Divers Rebels, Traytors, and Other Ill-Affected People, in Pursuit of a Wicked Designe to Alter Religion, Being now Marching against the Parliament for Destruction of the Same, and of the City of London. London, 1642. ——. Die Lunæ 24 October 1642. London, 1642. An Exact and True Relation of the Dangerous and Bloody Fight, Between His Majesties Army, and the Parliaments Forces, neer Kyneton in the County of Warwick, the 23 of this instant October. Sent in a Letter to John Pym Esquire, a Member of the House of Commons. London, 1642. A Great Wonder in Heaven: Shewing the late Apparitions and Prodigious Noyses of War and Battels, seen on Edge-Hill neere Keinton in Northampton-shire. London, 1642. Habermas, Ju¨rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Berger and Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: Polity, 1989. Hearn, Karen. Van Dyck & Britain. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. New York: Viking, 1972. ——. Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Viking, 1978.

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——. The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, i: Writing and Revolution in 17th Century England. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1985. ——. A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Routledge, 1990. ——. Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth Century. 1958. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997. Hughes, Ann. ‘The English Revolution of 1649’, in David Parker (ed.), Revolutions and the Revolutionary Tradition in the West, 1560–1991. London: Routledge, 2000, 34–52. ——. Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ——. ‘A “lunatick revolter from loyalty”: The Death of Rowland Wilson and the English Revolution’. History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 192–204. The Hunting of the Foxes from New-Market and Triploe-Heaths to White Hall, by Five Small Beagles (Late of the Armie.) Or The Grandie-Deceivers Unmasked. London, 1649. Keeble, N. H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987. —— (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kightley, Captain Edward. A Full and True Relation of the Great Battle Fought between the Kings Army, and his Excellency, the Earle of Essex, upon the 23. Of October . . . Sent in a Letter from Captain Edward Kightley, now in the Army. London, 1642. The Kings Cabinet Opened, or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers: Written with the Kings own Hand, and Taken in his Cabinet at Nasby-field, June 14, 1645. London, 1645. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Little, Patrick (ed.). The Cromwellian Protectorate. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. McDowell, Nicholas. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. MacLachlan, Alastair. The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary England: An Essay in the Fabrication of Seventeenth-Century History. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996. Maltzahn, Nicholas von. ‘Milton’s Readers’, in Dennis Danielson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Milton. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 236–52. May, James M. Trials of Character: The Eloquence of Ciceronian Ethos. Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Press, 1988. Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. John Milton: Complete Shorter Poems, ed. Stella P. Revard. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Morrill, John. The Nature of the English Revolution. London: Longman, 1993. ——. ‘How Oliver Cromwell Thought’, in John Morrow and Jonathan Scott (eds.), Liberty, Authority, Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 1600–1900. Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic, 2008, 89–111.

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Mueller, Janel. ‘On Genesis in Genre: Milton’s Politicizing of the Sonnet in “Captain and Colonel”’, in Barbara K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986, 213–40. Nedham, Marchamont. The Case of the Common-Wealth of England, Stated. London, 1650. The New Yeares Wonder: Being A Most Certaine and True Relation of the Disturbed Inhabitants of Keaton, And Other Neighbouring Villages Neere unto Edge-hill, where the Great Battaile betwixt the Kings Army, and the Parliaments Forces was Fought. London, 1642. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Ohlmeyer, Jane. Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Earl of Antrim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Patterson, Annabel. ‘That Old Man Eloquent’, in Diana Treviño Benet and Michael Lieb (eds.), Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 22–44. Peacey, Jason. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pierce, Thomas. Englands Season for Reformation of Life. A Sermon Delivered in St. Paul’s Church, London, on the Sunday Next Following His Sacred Majesties Restauration. London, 1660. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. A Prayer of Thanksgiving for his Majesties late Victory over the Rebells. Oxford, 1642. Rachum, Ilan. ‘The Meaning of “Revolution” in the English Revolution (1648–1660)’. Journal of the History of Ideas 56.2 (1995), 195–215. Raymond, Joad. ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. London: Frank Cass, 1999, 109–40. ——. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ——. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Richardson, R. C. The Debate on the English Revolution. 3rd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Rogers, Malcolm. William Dobson, 1611–46. London: National Portrait Gallery, 1983. Russell, Conrad. Unrevolutionary England. London: Hambledon Press, 1990. ——. The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Sallust. The Life and Works of Sallust, trans. J. C. Rolfe. Cambridge, MA, 1921. Shore, Daniel. ‘“Fit though Few”: Eikonoklastes and the Rhetoric of Audience’. Milton Studies 45 (2006), 129–48. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Smith, William. The True Light Shining in England, to Give unto all her Inhabitants the Knowledge of their Ways Wherein They many behold Things Past, and Things That Are, and Thereby Come to Repentance, and Escape that Which is to Come. London, 1660. Spalding, John. The History of the Troubles and Memorable Transactions in Scotland and England, from M.DC.XXIV. to M.DC.XLV, vol. ii. Edinburgh, 1829. Stone, Lawrence. Causes of the English Revolution, 1529–1642. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

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Walter, John. ‘The English People and the English Revolution Revisited’. History Workshop Journal 61.1 (Spring 2006), 171–82. Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Young, Peter. Edgehill 1642: The Campaign and the Battle. Kineton: The Roundwood Press, 1967. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petition and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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PA RT I ...............................................................................................

ENGLAND AT HOME AND IN THE WORLD ...............................................................................................

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CHAPTER

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ENGLAND, EUROPE, AND THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION ....................................................................................................... NIGEL SMITH

The entire history of the British Civil Wars, and any cultural phenomena consequent to it, has been written in a predominantly Anglocentric way. With the exception of one debate among historians, to which we will come, the crisis of the 1640s has been seen almost entirely as a feature of the maturing of English and then British society, and from the viewpoint of mid-Victorian British world ascendancy this is entirely understandable. Britain was important in the world so the world needed to know about the formation of the British constitution. The Victorians loved the crisis of Parliament and monarchy that was so formative of their own parliamentary democracy. The British looked to their own history to show how they were fortunately distinct, while historians from other European countries looked to the British Civil War example in order to explain their own later revolutions.1 England was exceptional even before the Civil War, having a state infrastructure that was capable of ignoring the traditional political elite in the country, and hence capable of generating a full-blown crisis within the governing classes.2 We are now reminded again that Britain’s seventeenth-century crisis was the first modern revolution.3 While the unfortunate economic conditions in England in the first half of the seventeenth century (a production slump coupled with rise in labour costs, and periodic poor harvests, notably in the late 1640s) were common to many parts of Europe, the response to the crisis was not: ‘The Revolution in England was . . . the most dramatic incident in the crisis, and its turning-point.’ ‘This nation’, wrote Samuel Fortrey in 1663 in his England’s Interest and Improvement, ‘can expect no less than to become the most great and flourishing of all others.’ ‘It could and it did; and the effects on the world were to be portentous.’4 Or, the English Revolution was the result of a necessary downsizing of a burdensome court. This happened in Spain, France, and Holland, but there to different degrees royal or princely figures found ways of subtle adaptation. Not so in the court of King Charles I: ‘in England . . . the storm of the mid-century, which blew throughout Europe, struck the most brittle, overgrown, most rigid Court of all and brought it violently down’.5

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The same sense of apartness is true of British cultural history. The cultural achievements of the mid-seventeenth century were either unknown or assumed to relate only to English speakers. Paradise Lost was revered by the English soon after its publication, and while it certainly became a poem of empire in the eighteenth century, as England emerged as a colonial power, it was English-language culture that carried the interest in the poem, largely understood as a poem for the nation rather than as a document of political revolution.6 Another stereotypical set of views also reinforces this picture. First, there is the assumption that English culture had little impact on the world, even on western Europe, until the eighteenth century. By then English cultural ascendancy in letters, philosophy, architecture, and aspects of painting began to assert itself in the world of learning with a success never before encountered. Before then in this view an English author read in Europe was a most unusual, freakish occurrence. The English were consumers of the cultures of others, be it in literature or painting. They were not exporters. The burgeoning translation market—translation into English, not from English—supports this view. Across Europe from the Middle Ages onwards, it has been assumed that everyone revered most of all the works of the Italian Renaissance and sought to have them translated into their own vernacular, a view that was well established by Ernst R. Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, a work that has enjoyed enormous prestige and influence.7 The argument of this chapter is that it was in fact the English Revolution and its cultural production that began the period of high English influence on the Continent and some other parts of the world because it shocked the Continent with its violent outcome and its extreme political conclusions. To be sure, English cultural influence had been felt earlier in some important instances: there is a 1623 German translation of Sidney’s Arcadia by the German poet Martin Opitz, and, stretching back further still, we have figures like Thomas More or Roger Bacon whose writings enjoyed popularity within the Latin republic of letters. The close connection between Henry VIII’s first divorce and the English Reformation exercised suggestive power over Roman Catholic apologists, and Spanish pious literature responded to the difficulties of being a Catholic in Reformation England.8 In a case that will be made later in this chapter, it may be that the natural philosophers enjoyed a bigger and earlier influence in Europe than is currently supposed; the role of Francis Bacon there is significant. We might yet say that the different political boundaries of medieval Europe meant that in a strict sense the English, working between French and English, enjoyed a cultural presence in a polity the geographical centre of which was northern France.9 But in the period after the formation of the prince-governed west European states that would eventually become the nation states of modern Europe, the first time English cultural influence was felt on a large scale was the English Civil War. It was felt abruptly, distinctly, and differently as Milton’s aggressively republican Pro populo defensio Anglicano circulated as the Latin explanation of what had happened in England in January 1649. What gave the Europeans the beginnings of an insight into

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the English predicament was the common experience of popular resistance to central governments.10 What followed was different. The English Civil War met with widespread disquiet in just about every quarter of Europe, but the execution of Charles I was greeted with intense and utter horror. No one regarded the regicidal outcome of the dispute between King and Parliament with anything other than terror and disgust. This was even the case in western Europe’s one republic, the United Provinces of the Netherlands (Republiek der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden), where the presence of an exiled Stuart court since 1618 meant that Stuart sympathy was high, especially around the court of the Stadholder (the Prince who had responsibility for raising an army) at The Hague. Likewise, since Charles I’s queen was a French princess, the official French view of parliamentary victory and the establishment of a commonwealth was outrage. It was no different in Madrid where careful cultivation of pro-Spanish relations until the early Stuarts had resulted in a wellentrenched English presence in the Spanish royal court. The English ambassador even sat on the royal Council of State. But despite much painstaking negotiation, English royalists, including the exiled Charles II himself and his future Chancellor, Sir Edward Hyde (later Earl of Clarendon), failed to raise military support from anywhere: France, Spain, the United Provinces, or any of the German states.11 To Andrew Marvell, this looked like the sluggishness of monarchs, as opposed to the vigour of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell, but by their own reasoning, the European powers acted out of prudence.12 The Commonwealth put its case in a series of diplomatic missions, alongside the literary impression created by Milton. Eventually, Oliver Cromwell would exercise an impressive foreign policy, in which he was respected and in which he talked on terms that were understood. The Swedish embassy of 1654, which actually began in the last days of the Republic, but which was discharged in the first six months of the Protectorate, and in which Marvell’s poem on Queen Christina played a not insignificant diplomatic role, counts as a significant success in enhancing the reputation of the regime, and in seeing its foreign policy goals achieved. Before then, things were much tougher. Two ambassadors were assassinated by English royalists: Isaac Dorislaus in The Hague and Anthony Ascham (himself a distinguished apologist for the new regime) in Madrid. The second embassy to the United Provinces, led by Oliver St John and Walter Strickland in 1651 and which proposed a union of England and the United Provinces, went very wrong, and the First Dutch War followed. The literary commitment in Europe to rightful monarchical authority was widespread. Let’s start with a Dutch example. In the 1640s, the most prolific Dutch playwright, Joost van den Vondel, both acquired Latin and converted to Catholicism in 1640–1. He was a staunch defender of the Dutch republic, and the republican element within it, having a distinct aversion to the princes of Orange. Nonetheless, Mary Stuart or Tortured Majesty (1646) presents Mary Queen of Scots as the victim of a Machiavellian Elizabeth I and international intrigue.13 The parallels with the plight of Charles I at this time are obvious: there is open castigation of Puritanism and, in presenting Mary as a latter-day Christ, Vondel affirmed his now strong belief in divine right monarchy.

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Mary’s son, James VI of Scotland and future James I of England, is warned to keep the Puritans in check, and by 1646 James’s son, Charles I, had consummately failed to do this, having already lost the First English Civil War. The First Anglo-Dutch War was five years in the future and Vondel was speaking against the official view of the republic, which tended to support the English Parliament: he seemed to delight in finding these positions. Perhaps we should not be so surprised when we remember that religious controversy was no stranger to the religious acting companies before the Dutch Revolt, so that some rhetorical societies in the Netherlands were populated by majorities of both Lutherans and Anabaptists.14 Vondel is, however, not uncritical of Mary, and clearly sides with a rational analysis of her predicament and with the free will that we see her exercise, as opposed to the blind partisanship and bigoted intolerance of her chaplain. Vondel’s play brought forth a sharply anti-Catholic response on another subject from English history, Joachim Oudaen’s Johanna Grey, of Gemartelde Onnozelheyd (1648) (martyred innocence), but it was a martyr play nonetheless and one that still affirms rightful monarchy. Oudaen was but 20 years old when he wrote this play. As a Collegiant, that is, a Mennonite, and a sometime Remonstrant, Socinian, and Chiliast, we might otherwise expect him to have some sympathy with the English revolutionaries. A strong critic of the Stadholder, Vondel took his negative view of Protestant military power to another target when he adversely referred to Cromwell, and perhaps some republicans, in his play ‘Lucifer’ (1654). The same allusions are also likely in his play Samson (1665). Vondel and Oudaen could at least agree on Cromwell, and the younger playwright produced in the year of regicide Koningh Konradyn en Hartoogh Frederyk, a thinly disguised denunciation of, as he saw it, Cromwell’s rise to what was assumed to be singular power. Closer to Vondel and moving to literature concerned with the English Revolution itself is a Dutch poem of late 1650, Schotse Nederlage, effectively an ‘Horatian Ode’ in Dutch on Cromwell’s return from Scotland, precisely the campaign for which Marvell’s famous ‘Horatian Ode’ summons ‘forward youths’. It seems to have been written after the defeats of Musselburgh and Dunbar (3 September 1650), and before the death from smallpox of the Stadholder Willem II on 6 November. All that was to come during the next year, including the Battle of Worcester in September 1651, which gave final security to the English free state, is not foreseen. The poem is Dutch but about British (that is, English and Scottish) matters. It is decidedly monarchist and almost certainly Orangist, but its perspective displays none of the sense of a defeated culture of the English royalists. Rather, it reverses English millenarian polarities, in keeping with a slightly later Dutch engraving showing Cromwell as the Whore of Babylon, complete with dress, ringlets of hair, and ribbons.15 Despite Cromwell’s devastatingly effective victories in Scotland, and clean contrary to English depictions (including Marvell’s famous ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’) of Cromwell as divine instrument, Providence is merely waiting to lay low General Cromwell and the Parliament:

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Recht en goet sijn Gods oordeelen, Hy laet elck zijn Rolle speelen Is het quaet of is het goet: Yder moet met my gelooven, Of hy most Gods eer verdooven. Dat het so geshieden moet, Sint men carels Hals gingh breecken, Kon men met het selfd geweer Al die Parlementsche koppen, Nu eens met een slagh of kloppen. Dat riep vreek, was leer om leer. God’s judgments are right and good, he allows each one to play their role, be it bad or good; Everyone must believe this with me, or make themselves deaf to the honour of God, that things have come to pass in this way. If men broke Charles’s neck, men can with the same weapon strike a blow or knocks on the heads of the Parliament. That declares itself as tit for tat.

The Netherlands represent a special case because of the long-standing English presence there, which goes back at least as far as Elizabeth’s reign, with the Earl of Leicester’s attempt to establish a domain for the Queen to be a Protestant empress in the Netherlands.16 English and Dutch theologians remained distinctly interested in each other’s intellectual territory throughout the late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, with a strong English presence weighing in behind the cause of the Calvinist Counter-Remonstrants.17 In a famous pamphlet campaign and through diplomacy, James I managed to have a figure associated with the Dutch Remonstrants or Arminians, the German Conrad Vortius (who had succeeded Arminius at Leiden), dismissed from his post. The politics of the Dutch republic and of the English Commonwealth were mutually sensitive to each other, and in the second year of the English republic, the States General of Amsterdam were prepared to appeal to it for help against the threat of an encroachment in the form of military occupation from the Stadholder, Willem II. The English royalists planned their own alliance with Willem, until his sudden and unexpected death in 1650. At the level of foreign policy this closeness has even been adduced to describe regional power in the period as a threestate interface (in some respects, one state) of the United Provinces, England, and France.18 The rarefied insights of Vondel arose within polemical literature in Holland that was obsessed with these English matters, and at times the threat from the English. Hence the splendid collection of surviving engravings with accompanying poetry that vilifies Oliver Cromwell. As Paul Sellin has shown, what is remarkable about this literature is the multi-confessional nature of its authors, from Joachim Oudaen the Collegiant, Jan van Neer and Jacob Westerman, Arminians, and Johannes de Dekker, a most unusual Calvinist, to Reyer Anslo, a Catholic ex-Mennonite, and Jan Vos, a fervent Catholic but (unlike Vondel) an equally fervent supporter of the princes of Orange.19 Even when merely praising Colchester oysters, the poet Jan Six van Chandelier commended the Essex town in 1655 for its royalism, echoing his own lament for the regicide, which was originally printed in blood-red ink.

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The wars with England were a particular cause for Dutch literary anxiety over English matters, but the Dutch response exploited its own special place in the world of painting at this time. Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) is one of the most art-rich poems to have been written in seventeenth-century England, with its multiple references to artists and styles (particularly Rubens), but it is still no match for Jan Vos’s 1654 epic poem on the paradox that the dead form of art might be more lively than the living thing itself. The poem is at the same time an allegory of the First Dutch War (which the Dutch settled on unfavourable terms in that year), with Death figuring Oliver Cromwell.20 Those powerfully complex engravings that commented on popular affairs were particularly successful during the First Dutch War as well as during the regicide period, and, as has been shown, exploited the ancient view, known to the Dutch, that the English had tails (Figure 1.1).21 The next example takes us to the German-speaking world and offers a less immediately contingent perspective, since it is a play by a playwright with a distinctive vision of the role of tragedy and its connection with kingship: Andreas Gryphius’ Ermordete Majestät oder Carolus Stuardus (1657; rev. 1663). Overall more than 600 separate titles concerned with the English Civil War and Revolution appeared in German between

F I G U R E 1 . 1 Den Afgrysselikken Start-Man (The Horrible Tail-Man), Dutch satire on Oliver Cromwell during the Anglo-Dutch Wars (c.1652). # The Trustees of the British Museum. Kk, 5.6.97.

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1640 and 1669.22 Gryphius’ knowledge of English history and the Civil War was extensive. His play is indebted to Eikon Basilike, Thomas Edwards, Salmasius, George Horn, du Moulin, and Heylyn, in addition to the German author Philipp von Zesen and other publications, and notes to the second edition of his play cited further historical and political works by Camden, Polydor Vergil, de Thou, Reggius, and Buchanan.23 His interpretation of events in Carolus Stuardus is that the trial and execution of the King is an example of worldly injustice, as instanced in the engraved frontispiece to both editions. In this respect the play might be seen as hyper-Stuart, a dramatic extension of Eikon Basilike. There is no criticism of Caroline policy, no position of critique from within the royalist spectrum, and in this regard Gryphius’ contribution to absolutist and divine right thought is well attested.24 Instead, Gryphius underlined in his notes to the play his belief that Charles’s policy in respect of Scotland in 1638–9 was thoroughly well grounded in law. Gryphius’ metaphysical interest in time is evident enough, but it is harder in this work, as has been alleged, to see links to Silesian mystics like Abraham von Franckenburg, or his sharing with the advanced tolerationist thinker of the sixteenth century Dirk Volkertszoon. Coornhert the idea of a central religious truth that rises above religious confessions yet is not incompatible with them: a Nicodemist and Familist perspective. Gryphius’ Carolus Stuardus moves between highly authentic material—letters and speeches from Strafford and Laud, and other materials derived from England’s Memorials, including visual materials—and spectacular prophetic sections with various prophets and ghosts of his own invention, but whose form derives from Jesuit drama and the Kunstdrama of the German courts. In this respect, Gryphius was working with a reduced two-part stage, whereas the Jesuit plays often exploited the martyrological theatre of a three-part stage, left to right, each with a curtain, thereby enabling the progressive display of acted emblems. ‘I am convinced that this bloody tragedy cannot be portrayed more movingly than if this deposed prince is presented to the audience and the reader as he himself painted himself with his own colors in the face of death’, Gryphius writes, and significantly goes on: ‘when all decorative and metaphoric language comes to an end and disappears as mist’.25 And yet his own reworking of these speeches is heightened poetically: Schwulst is the German stylistic term. To this extent his plays belong with some of the pamphlet drama of 1648–50, although with far greater compositional complexity, and notably unlike the heroic tragedies of the Restoration, in which the anxiety about the King’s head can only be indirectly remembered.26 Belonging to a different tradition in a different language, Gryphius’ drama is able to confront the matter of the regicide far more openly than any English example. It is notable that the execution of the King actually takes place on the stage and is witnessed and commented upon by six girls looking down as it were from windows above the scene of execution, unlike any other dramatic representation of the regicide or the classical tradition where the death of a hero takes place off stage.27 Each act of Carolus Stuardus is punctuated with a chorus; in Act I, a chorus of murdered English kings, speaking pseudo-Pindaric odes, denounces the illegality

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of Charles I’s trial and confidently announces that divine vengeance is at hand, the force of their conviction backed by our knowledge that they too are victims. It is notable that the chorus is an integral part of the work: this again relates in part to Jesuit dramatic influence. No Protestant could easily accept the presence, as another denunciatory ghost, of Mary Stuart. Carolus Stuardus has been compared to Shakespeare’s Richard II, but it more readily fits Macbeth, and makes Milton’s interest in Shakespeare’s Scottish play, his possible attempt at rewriting it in late 1648 and 1649, and his association of duplicitous Presbyterians with the female characters of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, more palpable.28 The Chorus of Sirens, rendered in highly elevated language, reflects the apocalypticism felt by Gryphius at the challenge to monarchy in several parts of mid-seventeenth-century Europe. This role is taken up later by the Chorus of Women, but does their fainting echo visual depictions of the regicide, including a painting of the regicide with a Continental source?29 The Chorus of Religion is designed to show the betrayal of piety by political ambition. This is amplified by the introduction in the second edition of Poleh, the remorseful visionary character with a remarkable soliloquy, based, it has been persuasively argued, on Alderman Thomas Hoyle of York, who committed suicide exactly one year after the regicide, and who was widely but wrongly believed to have been one of the King’s judges.30 Poleh’s guilt trauma is revealed through deluded dreams and real visions, rendered theatrically, of the future justice that will fall on the regicides. In Gryphius’ view the high point of Cromwellian rebellion is a threatened overcoming of God’s will: A. What if your own house burns in the future? C. We will find future solutions for the flames. Time is passing! I seek not to do what is beyond my power. The request is pointless. As incapable as you are of splitting the foundation of the earth: you are just as incapable today of stopping the blade of justice. Because nothing more can save him | nothing, I say to you | believe me: Even if God himself stood here in this very moment.

The confrontation of the allegorical figures of Religion and Heresy makes for a psychological study of the will to truth in a crisis: an explanation of how something like regicide comes about. Far from placid, it is utterly vital, at once horrifying and sobering. All of the study devoted to the originality of Gryphius’ playwriting would be sustainable were it not for the fact that he had been preceded in the making of a regicide play by the Amsterdam dramatist (and future translator of Tasso and adaptor of Racine) Joan Dullaert in 1652 with a title suspiciously close to the German play: Karel Stuart: of Rampzalige Majesteit. So much for the response to the central event of the Revolution. What about a response to the writings produced by the Civil War and Interregnum? Perhaps the

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greatest English revolutionary author who had an impact on European letters was Thomas Hobbes. Without doubt the most original of the English empirical philosophers, Hobbes profoundly influenced the most original of the Continental philosophers in the period: Baruch Spinoza. In a European context, Hobbes is not usually thought of as a quintessential figure of the English Revolution (as he most decidedly is in an English or British context), perhaps because he spent so long in Europe and corresponded with so many European intellectuals. But Hobbes’s long exile in Paris was a direct consequence of his decision to avoid civil conflict, and the final version of his scientia is thought to have been directly influenced by his interpretation of the outcome of events in his homeland.31 It was Spinoza’s importation of Hobbes’s treatment of scriptural interpretation in the Tractatus and of his stark view of power that so transformed the Ethics, and it was this view that brought Leviathan widespread opprobrium and condemnation. The same can be said of the even more extreme views of Spinoza’s associate Adriaan Koerbagh, who died as a result of the harsh conditions of his imprisonment in Amsterdam in 1669. Koerbagh’s denial that Moses was the author of the Pentateuch was directly indebted to Hobbes’s discussion of the issue in ch. 33 of Leviathan. Was Hobbes better than Milton in this respect? We cannot discount the possibility that English radicalism from the 1640s and 1650s did not disseminate, in addition to the philosophical radicalism of Hobbes. In the library of the Free University of Amsterdam is a copy of a translation of Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), Tractaet ofte discours vande echt-scheydinge: waerin verscheyden Schriftuyr plaetsen, ende politycke regulen, dese materie aengaende, en der selver lang verborgene meyningen, werden ontdect, published by Jacob de Laet at Middleburgh in 1655. One of the most significant works of late 1640s Puritanism, the very popular Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (1647), an account by and about the Baptist prophet Sara Wight, was published in a Dutch translation in 1661 with annotations by Petrus Serrarius, the merchant, Collegiant, millenarian, and mentor of Spinoza.32 Much of this particular interest was underwritten by the burgeoning industry of printing English Puritan books in the United Provinces, a feature that had already enabled some authors to find readerships in the distant book markets of central Europe.33 This includes a large proportion of the early canon of English Protestant separatist writing. Many English Puritans, unwelcome at home, were forced to live in exile in the United Provinces. A significant body of English Puritan writings had already found their way into Dutch translation by 1620, and it almost seems unsurprising that, having gone into exile in the Netherlands, the Leveller leader John Lilburne should publish tracts in Dutch and solicit the attention of the States General in Amsterdam. English books in France are far harder to trace. Howsoever the French court regarded Charles I as a politician of poor strategy, Paris was full of English exiles of all kinds, many of them followers of the King. The proclamation of a republic was greeted with as much revulsion there as anywhere else, Milton’s Defensio being burned in Paris and Toulouse. But France had its own problems and the success of the parliamentarians in England encouraged the nobility in their struggle with Cardinal

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Mazarin, the chief royal administrator, who thought a republican rebellion possible in his own country. Others felt the same. In the summer of 1651 Edward Sexby, sometime Leveller and republican, was sent by the English Council of State on a mission to France with four others to determine the state of the country and whether English support for the Fronde would result in better terms for the Huguenots and a republican government for the country.34 Sexby operated in and around Bordeaux. A republican faction emerged in Bordeaux, led by the Huguenots, and Sexby provided it with a French version of the Levellers’ ‘Agreement of the People’, albeit much reduced in scope compared with its English predecessor. Attempts were made to adapt to French conditions, there being calls for an end of servitude, and an equality of rights under the law for nobility and peasants. An earlier ‘Manifesto’ also had been presented to the English Council of State as an affidavit of revolutionary intent. The document, in effect a French Leveller pamphlet, was thwarted by the objections of the Prince de Condé, and widespread anti-Huguenot and anti-English sentiment within the city. A Frondeur deputation visited Westminster in the spring of 1653 with a view to seeking English military assistance, which was unforthcoming, although even after the revolt was defeated in August 1653, Sexby was rumoured to be a potential commander of an English and Irish force to invade Guyenne. If the Council of State appeared to be cynically sanctioning Leveller ideas, with which they themselves had previously disagreed, to foment revolution in France, the strategy took another conspiratorial turn in February 1655 when a disaffected Sexby, fleeing arrest in England, was involved in discussions in Antwerp and Madrid to raise a force of English republicans and royalists, backed by Spanish money and arms, to bring down the Protectorate. Only when Cromwell was known to be dead would the Spanish and English royalist intent be properly revealed. How we would like to know what was said when Felipe IV and his Council heard Sexby’s proposals in Madrid, for it was then that the English Revolution met the essence of absolutist Hapsburg power in Europe. A French translation by Jacques Charpentier de Marigny of Sexby’s notorious attack on Cromwell, Killing no Murder, was published at Leiden in the same year of its original appearance, 1658: Traicté politique composé par William Allen . . . et traduict nouvellement en françois, où il est prouvé par l’exemple de Moyse et par d’autres, tirés hors de l’Escriture, que tuer un tyran, titulo vel exercitio, n’est pas un meurtre.35 Yet French reportage throughout the 1640s found it difficult to recognize the true nature of this civil war, and certainly did not single it out for special treatment among other events in Europe. The religious and political dimensions of ideological dispute were not understood. ‘Civil war’ was not a term used in the Fronde so it made sense that it was not used of England. While Albert Bailly translated the precise names of English actions into French, he thought of the English polity as a climate undergoing a tempest, analogous to bodily distemper, or passions ruling reason. Yet, not unlike the Dutch and the Germans, for the French, English history was the most frequently used source for the history play apart from Roman antiquity, although Orest Ranum doubts that the French—unlike Vondel—could easily connect Tudor and Stuart events.36 Corneille’s Nicomède (1651) may have represented Anglo-Irish relations as Rome’s

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relationship with a troublesome tributary monarch. The sense of a political order undergoing periodic disturbance points in two different directions within the French sphere of thinking. On the one hand there is a Cartesian political analysis of collective passions, in itself an exciting philosophical development in the period. On the other, political behaviour as being passion driven was perfectly consonant with the terms of analysis used by Charles I and his French queen.37 To that extent royalist romance was indeed part of what was by the 1620s and 1630s a thoroughly Anglo-French literary movement. What then of the Italians? Is it possible to reverse the trend of dominant cultural influence and see English letters influencing Italian culture? It is certainly the case that the Italian information networks soon picked up reports of events in 1640s England and began to publicize them in newsbook chronicles. Stefano Villani has showed how contacts between English publishers and booksellers, as well as English travellers more generally, made this possible. ‘English Traveller’ at this time, in Italy as throughout Europe, was usually synonymous with royalist exile.38 Italian journalism was invariably royalist, but from the late 1640s onwards there was a growing respect for Cromwell as a military leader. It would not be long before Cromwellian material found its way into fiction. Early 1670s romance (Girolamo Graziani’s Cromuele [1673]) turned the life and times of Oliver Cromwell into a series of incestuous treasons, misunderstandings, disguises, love affairs, and extreme passions, in which exile, flight, and disguise are significant features. But perhaps the most interesting development was in the area of historical writing. Quite unlike English historians of the Civil War, who privileged documents—either those of state, or pamphlet literature—as testimony, Gregorio Leti privileged hearsay and gossip as a way of capturing what was ‘in the air’ at the time of the events being described. This, he claimed, enabled him to give historical narrative greater coherence and to gather a more faithful sense of perceived historical agency. Having become a Protestant, Leti would later reside in France, England, and Amsterdam, but throughout this time his methods were derided for inaccuracy. Nonetheless the inclusion of gossip as evidence did have the effect of disturbing some of the ways in which historical comparisons involving the English Civil War had been made, such as the widespread analogy made with the French wars of religion of the late sixteenth century. One thinks again of that powerful cultural commodity of the Italian intellectuals: Machiavellian history and the analytical tradition to which this kind of writing belonged—history with a theory of power and political behaviour rooted in antiquity. Whereas in the northern Dutch province of Friesland, pictures hung of the embattled Charles I, and there were plans to install him as the stadholder, in 1650s Florence, the Grand Duke, Ferdinando II Medici, had a portrait of Oliver Cromwell in his collection.39 Unlike Robert Browning’s duke, Ferdinando said he could easily remove the portrait, but that he included it tells us that he recognized Cromwell as il principe.40 It is no coincidence that Ferdinando’s son, Cosimo III, who would become Grand Duke in 1670, was a great friend of Henry Neville, the English republican, wit, freethinker, Harringtonian, and translator of Machiavelli, staying with him during a visit to England in 1669, and consulting him for book-buying advice in the 1670s.41 Neville

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had travelled in Italy in the earlier 1640s, had been a guest of Ferdinando, and had been much impressed with the different constitutional arrangements and the rich intellectual tradition he found there. When Neville arrived to join his elder brother Richard in Florence in 1643 he may have seemed, like his brother, a royalist. But then he began to learn about and reflect on the English crisis. It seems so fitting that in that great Renaissance centre of political wisdom, an English gentleman should begin to reformulate his understanding so that he could argue for a great increase in popular power in his own country, and that two generations of one of the great houses of European politics, the Medici, should pay particular and sustained attention to one of the English Revolution’s most advanced thinkers, while honouring the English Revolution’s greatest and most controversial actor. Neville, of course, hated Cromwell.

NOTES 1. See e.g. Guizot, Collection des mémoires relatifs; id., Études sur la révolution d’Angleterre; id., Histoire de la république d’Angleterre; id., Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre; id., Why was the English Revolution Successful?, trans. Hazlitt; and von Ranke, A History of England. 2. See Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 160; Kennedy, ‘Radicalism and Revisionism’, 42. 3. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution. 4. Hobsbawm, ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, 27. 5. Trevor-Roper, ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, 95. 6. Zwierlein, ‘Milton Epic and Bucolic’. 7. Curtius, Europäische Literatur, trans. Trask. 8. See e.g. Davanzati, Scisma d’Inghilterra; de Carvajal y Mendoza, Epistolario y poesías. 9. Wallace, Premodern Places, esp. chs. 1–2. 10. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance, 111, 130. 11. See Underdown, Royalist Conspiracy in England, 31–4, 43, 56, 108, 178–81, 215–16, 219, 240, 281–2, 293. 12. Marvell, The First Anniversary of the Government, ll. 103–18, 344–94. 13. For a translation, see van den Vondel, Mary Stuart or Tortured Majesty, trans. with Introduction and Notes by Aercke. 14. Waite, Reformers on Stage, 127–9. See also Hüsken, ‘“Heresy” in the Plays of the Dutch Rhetoricians’, 103–24. 15. Kort Beworp vande dry Teghenwoordighe aenmerckens-weerdighe Wonderheden. See Knoppers, ‘“The Antichrist, the Babilon, The Great Dragon”’, 93–123. 16. Adams, The Protestant Cause. 17. Sprunger, The Learned Doctor William Ames; id., Dutch Puritanism; Brooks, ‘The Early Church’. 18. See Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism; Levillain, Vaincre Louis XIV. 19. Sellin, ‘Royalist Propaganda and Dutch Poets’, 241–64. 20. See Jan Vos, ‘Strydt tusschen de Doodt en Natuur’, i. 127–41; Weber, Der Lobtopos des ‘lebenden’ Bildes. 21. Staffell, ‘The Horrible Tail-Man’, 169–86.

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22. Berghaus, Die Aufnahme der Englischen Revolution. 23. See Stackhouse, The Constructive Art; Berghaus, Die Quellen zu Andreas Gryphius’ Trauerspiel ‘Carolus Stuardus’. 24. See Lentfer, Die Glogauer Landesprivilegen des Andreas Gryphius. 25. Gryphius, V, 285, Werke, iv. 158; trans. Stackhouse, The Constructive Art, 90. 26. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration. 27. See Mercurius Melancholicus, Craftie Cromwell. 28. For the career of Macbeth and its performance in the context of seventeenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations, see Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, ch. 2. 29. Weesop, Eyewitness Representation of Execution of Charles I. 30. Alexander, ‘A Possible Historical Source’. Hoyle appears misspelt as ‘Hople’ in Johann Georg Schleder’s Theatrum Europaeum (1663), 1124, thereby supplying Gryphius with the beginnings of an anagram. 31. Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. 32. Van der Wall, Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669). 33. Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower, esp. appendices 1 and 2. 34. See Knachel, England and the Fronde. 35. See also Hane, Un fugitif en Bordelais. 36. Ranum, ‘The Vocabulary of Civil War’. 37. Bulman, ‘The Practice of Politics’. 38. Villani, ‘English Radicalism and 17th-Century Italian Movements’. 39. Canterbury Cathedral Archives, Lit MS E 39a–c. I owe this reference to the outstanding Hakluyt Society lecture by Michael G. Brennan, English Civil War Travellers, 17. 40. The ducal speaker of Browning’s famous poem ‘My Last Duchess’ (1842) keeps his late wife’s portrait hanging. 41. See ODNB life of Neville by von Maltzahn.

WORKS CITED Adams, S. L. ‘The Protestant Cause: Religious Alliance with the West European Calvinist Communities as a Political Issue in England, 1585–1630’ (unpublished D.Phil. dissertation). 2 vols. Oxford, 1973. Alexander, R. J. ‘A Possible Historical Source for the Figure of Poleh in Andreas Gryphius’ Carolus Stuardus’. Daphnis 3.2 (1974), 203–7. Anderson, Perry. Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism. London: Verso, 1996. Berghaus, Gu¨nther. Die Quellen zu Andreas Gryphius’ Trauerspiel ‘Carolus Stuardus’: Studien zur Entstehung eines Historisch-Politischen Märtyrerdramas der Barockzeit. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1984. ——. Die Aufnahme der Englischen Revolution in Deutschland 1640–1669. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989. Bosch, Ian Vanden. Kort Beworp vande dry Teghenwoordighe Aenmerckens-weerdighe Wonderheden des Wereldts. Cologne, 1656. Brennan, Michael G. English Civil War Travellers and the Origins of the Western European Grand Tour. London: Hakluyt Society, 2002. Brooks, Sara E. ‘The Early Church in the Sacred and Secular Politics of England and the United Provinces, c.1580–1616’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation). Princeton University, 2009.

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Bulman, William J. ‘The Practice of Politics: The English Civil War and the “Resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’. Past and Present 206 (2010), 43–79. Canterbury Cathedral Archives. Lit MS E 39a–c. Canterbury, UK. Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de. Epistolario y poesías. Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1965. Curtius, Ernst R. Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter. Bern: A. Francke, 1948. ——. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1953. Davanzati, Bernardo. Scisma d’Inghilterra. Florence, 1638. Gryphius, Andreas. Gesamtausgabe der deutschprachigen Werke, ed. Marian Szyrocki and Hugh Powell. 9 vols. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1963–2007. Guizot, M. Franc¸ois. Collection des mémoires relatifs à la révolution d’Angleterre. 26 vols. Paris: Béchet ainé, 1823–5. ——. Why Was the English Revolution Successful? A Discourse on the History of the English Revolution, trans. William Hazlitt. London: David Bogue, 1850. ——. Histoire de la république d’Angleterre et de Cromwell (1649–1658). 2 vols. Paris: Didier et cie, 1854. ——. Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre. Paris: Didier et cie, 1854. ——. Études sur la révolution d’Angleterre: portraits politiques des hommes des différents partis. Parlementaires—Cavaliers—Républicains—Niveleurs. Paris: Didier et cie, 1869. Hane, Joachim. Un fugitif en Bordelais: les aventures d’un récit. Pessac: Ausonius, 2005. Hobsbawm, E. J. ‘The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1600. New York: Basic Books, 1965, 5–59. Hu¨sken, Wim. ‘“Heresy” in the Plays of the Dutch Rhetoricians’, in Elsa Stretman and Peter Happé (eds.), Urban Theatre in the Low Countries, 1400–1625. Turnhout: Brepols, 2006. Kennedy, Geoff. ‘Radicalism and Revisionism in the English Revolution’, in Mike Haynes and Jim Wolfreys (eds.), History and Revolution: Refuting Revisionism. New York: Verso, 2007, 25–49. Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Knachel, Philip A. England and the Fronde: The Impact of the English Civil War and Revolution on France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967. Knoppers, Laura. ‘“The Antichrist, the Babilon, The Great Dragon”: Oliver Cromwell, Andrew Marvell, and the Apocalyptic Monstrous’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (eds.), Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, 93–123. Lentfer, Dirk. Die Glogauer Landesprivilegen des Andreas Gryphius von 1653. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. Levillain, Charles-E´douard. Vaincre Louis XIV: Angleterre, Hollande, France, histoire d’une relation triangulaire, 1665–1688. Seyssel: Éditions Champ Vallon, 2010. Maguire, Nancy Klein. Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Maltzahn, Nicholas von. ‘Henry Neville (1620–1694)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Marvell, Andrew. The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector. London, 1655. Mercurius Melancholicus [Nedham, Marchamont]. Craftie Cromwell: Or, Oliver Ordering our New State. London, 1648.

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Pincus, Steven. Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ——. 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Rabb, Theodore K. The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity. New York: Basic Books, 2006. Ranke, Leopold von. A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon, 1875. Ranum, Orest. ‘The Vocabulary of Civil War’. Online. . Schleder, Johann Georg. Theatrum Europaeum. Frankfurt, 1663. Sellin, Paul R. ‘Royalist Propaganda and Dutch Poets on the Execution of Charles I: Notes for a Further Inquiry’. Dutch Crossing 24 (2000), 241–64. Skinner, Quentin. Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Sprunger, Keith. The Learned Doctor William Ames: Dutch Backgrounds of English and American Puritanism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972. ——. Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 1982. ——. Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640. Leiden: Brill, 1994. Stackhouse, Janifer Gerl. The Constructive Art of Gryphius’ Historical Tragedies. Bern: Peter Lang, 1986. Staffell, Elizabeth. ‘The Horrible Tail-Man and the Anglo-Dutch Wars’. JWCI 63 (2000), 169–86. Trevor-Roper, H. R. ‘The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century’, in Trevor Aston (ed.), Crisis in Europe, 1560–1600. New York: Basic Books, 1965, 59–97. Underdown, David. Royalist Conspiracy in England, 1649–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960. Villani, Stefano. ‘English Radicalism and 17th-Century Italian Movements’. Forthcoming. Vondel, Joost van den. Mary Stuart or Tortured Majesty, trans. with introduction and notes by Kristiaan P. Aercke. Ottawa: Doverhouse Editions, 1996. Vos, Jan. ‘Strydt tusschen de Doodt en Natuur, of Zeege der Schilderkunst’, in Jan Vos, Alle de Gedichten. 2 vols. Amsterdam, 1662, 1671. Waite, Gary K. Reformers on Stage: Popular Drama and Religious Propaganda in the Low Countries of Charles V, 1515–1556. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Wall, Ernestine G. E. van der De Mystieke Chiliast Petrus Serrarius (1600–1669) en Zijn Wereld. Dordrecht: ICG, 1987. Wallace, David. Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Weber, Gregor J. M. Der Lobtopos des ‘lebenden’ Bildes: Jan Vos und sein ‘Zeege der Schilderkunst’ von 1654. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1991. Weesop, John. Eyewitness Representation of Execution of Charles I. Bridgeman Art Library, Private Collection. Zwierlein, Anne-Julia. ‘Milton Epic and Bucolic: Empire and Readings of Paradise Lost, 1667–1837’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 669–86.

CHAPTER

2

.......................................................................................................

THREE KINGDOMS ....................................................................................................... EAMON DARCY

After his contentious nine months in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell, the new Lord Lieutenant, returned to London in May 1650 to gather supplies for his forthcoming campaign in Scotland. To commemorate his return, one of the chief literary figures of the recently installed Commonwealth regime, Andrew Marvell, composed ‘An Horatian Ode’, which portrayed Cromwell as an unstoppable force of divinity: ‘Tis madness to resist or blame | the force of angry heaven’s flame.’ The poem, prompted by events in Ireland and Scotland, clearly had an English audience in mind. Up to this point, Cromwell had been increasingly vilified as a Machiavellian rogue, hell-bent on securing absolute power. Marvell’s poem, however, stressed Cromwell’s subservience to Parliament and the will of the people. He portrayed Cromwell as a falcon, ready to do his master’s bidding: ‘She, having killed, no more does search | But on the next green bough to perch; | where, when he first does lure, | The falconer has her sure.’ Cromwell’s unpopularity was mitigated by news of his considerable successes in Ireland, in which Marvell rejoiced: ‘And now the Irish are ashamed | to see themselves in one year tamed.’ The next target for Parliament was the Scots, who had, despite their shared Protestant faith, sided with their Scottish King, Charles II. Marvell duly warned: ‘The Pict no shelter now shall find.’1 Events in Ireland and Scotland had a dramatic effect on the course of English politics in the mid-seventeenth century. As the content and circulation of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ shows, Cromwell had to balance the demands of administering the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. His endeavours had a drastic influence on his popularity in England and his regime had to contend with ruling two potentially troublesome kingdoms whose loyalty was always in doubt. The fate of the Three Kingdoms and the course of English, Irish, and Scottish history were completely entangled throughout the mid-seventeenth century, which witnessed a series of political and military developments that had dramatic political and social ramifications: the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland, the 1641 rebellion and Confederate wars in Ireland, the English ‘Revolution’ or ‘Civil Wars’ and the Cromwellian conquests of Ireland and Scotland, the establishment of the Protectorate, and finally, the restoration of Charles II. Major

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figures of the period had to look beyond their national borders for survival, while representative bodies played an active role in the political machinations of their neighbouring kingdoms. All were devastated by the effects of the bloodiest warfare ever to take place in the Atlantic Archipelago and had to contend with the migration of populations and wholesale destruction of the countryside by rival armies. Despite this, the historiography of the mid-seventeenth century was, until relatively recently, largely viewed through national prisms with little attention paid to the influences England, Scotland, and Ireland exerted on one another.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

OF THE

THREE KINGDOMS

.................................................................................................................. Histories of the 1640s and 1650s often reveal more about the context in which they were written than the events that they describe. In the 1930s, a concerted effort to move beyond the polarized account of the Irish past that had presented native versus newcomer, and Catholic versus Protestant, emerged within Irish historical academia. The founding of the journal Irish Historical Studies had a clear manifesto, which embodied this development: to tell the story of Ireland’s past in a more scholarly and scientific manner. A leading figure within this movement, J. C. Beckett, lecturer in Irish history at Queen’s University, Belfast, composed a general history of Ireland in the 1960s. Although an eighteenth-century scholar, Beckett understood the gravity of the events of the mid-seventeenth century and was acutely aware of the troubled legacy of the 1641 rebellion in Ireland. It was widely believed that native Irish Catholics took part in a premeditated massacre of Protestant settlers during this revolt and that thousands had been killed—a charge Irish Catholics strenuously denied. The Protestant Ascendancy that emerged in Ireland in the 1700s had pointed to the 1641 rebellion as justification for the enactment of a series of anti-Catholic laws, thereby legalizing the segregation of Catholic and Protestant communities in Ireland. Rather than engage in tit-for-tat exchanges over the massacres of 1641, which exacerbated sectarian tensions in Ireland at the time, Beckett chose not to portray 1641 as a ‘rebellion’ or ‘massacre’ but rather as one of a series of interlocking crises in Britain and Ireland. He therefore dubbed the conflict part of the ‘War of the Three Kingdoms’.2 Beckett’s definition of the crisis inspired J. G. A. Pocock who had just been appointed the William Eliot Smith Professor of History at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. Pocock wished to tease out this concept of a wider ‘British’ perspective on the seventeenth century. In 1974, he argued that: The War of the Three Kingdoms was in fact three wars, originating independently if interconnectedly, and differing in political character—a national rebellion in Scotland south and east of the highlands, a frontier rebellion (perhaps aiming to be more) in the multicultural conflict zone of Ireland, and a civil war in the highly integrated political society of England—and flowing

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together to form a single series but not a single phenomenon. . . . It is evident that we are studying three, and in some ways more than three, interacting histories.3

Paying heed to political sensitivities in Ireland, Pocock referred to the islands that comprised Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England as the Atlantic Archipelago. Much like Beckett, Pocock had a larger political agenda in mind. He vehemently opposed the amalgamation of Britain into the European Economic Community, viewing it as an insult to other Commonwealth nations. What Pocock and Beckett achieved from a historiographical perspective, however, transformed our understanding of the nature of the conflicts that contributed to, and became an integral part of, what had been termed the ‘English Revolution’. For the rest of his career, Pocock championed this ‘anti-nationalist’ approach to the history of the AngloCeltic frontiers prior to the establishment of the British Empire, calling it a ‘New British History’. Discussions about this ‘New British History’ coincided with Helmut Georg Koenigsberger’s work on composite monarchies in early modern Europe. With these two considerations in mind, Conrad Russell began to spot similarities between the English and Spanish monarchies’ experience of the seventeenth century. The Stuarts, like the Hapsburgs, ruled over different kingdoms that had unique administrative systems. This placed pressure on monarchs to impose uniformity in legal, religious, and political affairs. England, Scotland, and Ireland lacked a unified Protestant church, and operated under separate legal systems and distinct parliamentary structures. When Charles I ascended the throne he gradually moved towards the establishment of an integrated Episcopalian Church across the Three Kingdoms, aiming to tackle Scotland first. The Scottish Kirk and Assembly, imbued with Calvinist teachings on the division between Church and state, used this as a basis to reject Charles I’s attempts to implement Laud’s reforms, which had a distinct Catholic flavour. In Ireland, anxiety among Irish Catholics about the imposition of religious uniformity caused them to fear for their status in the political and social order. These ‘pressures’ of uniformity, Russell argued, caused the Scottish Covenanters and Irish Catholic Confederates to take up arms to reject the King’s policies. In the end Russell laid the blame for the crisis squarely at the feet of religion; this contradicted extant historiographical orthodoxy that stressed the social and economic background to the troubles of the 1640s and 1650s.4 Subsequent scholarship adopted this Three Kingdoms model with considerable success in teasing out the causes and the course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in greater detail. John Morrill, following on from Russell’s work, argued that the fabric of peace that England experienced in the late 1630s was torn apart by religious tensions in Scotland and Ireland. In 2002, the first integrated history of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms appeared, although with an Anglocentrist focus.5 This ‘New British History’ approach moved beyond political history into the realms of military history—particularly in the work of David Stevenson, Ian Gentles, and James Scott Wheeler, who investigated the victualling, mobilization, and deployment of Covenanting, Confederate, parliamentarian, and royalist armies in the

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Atlantic Archipelago.6 Literary scholars also began to see the influence of the Celtic fringe on the development of the English language and on literary outputs in English and the gradual creation of a ‘British’ identity under the Stuart monarchs.7 The proliferation of Three Kingdoms scholarship on the seventeenth century led Jane Ohlmeyer to describe it as ‘a useful conceptual framework in which historians, and, increasingly, literary scholars can contest orthodoxies and challenge narratives’. That same year, Ian Gentles placed Ireland and Scotland at the ‘heart’ of events in England.8 To give greater clarity to the Three Kingdoms methodology, one of its leading proponents, John Morrill, outlined three major approaches:9 1. Perfect This usually involves the study of important people who were heavily involved in the politics of all Stuart kingdoms. Revealing biographies show how some figures were ‘men of the Three Kingdoms’ who equitably (‘perfectly’) balanced their economic and political interests across the Atlantic Archipelago. 2. Confederal Scholars compare events in the Three Kingdoms. They tend to focus on the relationship between English and Scottish and/or Irish politics, society, and culture. 3. Incorporative Incorporative historians try to weave their narratives around the complexities of the politics of the Three Kingdoms and show the reciprocal influences each exerted on one another. This chapter will therefore discuss the use of each of these approaches and suggest the ways in which they can be used to understand the events of the mid-seventeenth century. It is necessary to stress that the Three Kingdoms model has not met with unqualified success, or widespread acceptance. Some historians are critical of what Morrill termed ‘pontoon-building’ accounts that claim to offer a Three Kingdoms perspective, but do so only in title and not in content. Sometimes, ‘Three Kingdoms’ accounts could better be described as an ‘enriched’ national history, as opposed to a ‘New British History’. This prompted Tim Harris to warn, ‘there is no point trying to force a Three Kingdoms approach where one does not make sense’.10 The simple truth is that Ireland and Scotland did not wield influence to the same degree that their English neighbour did. As Ivan Roots recently argued in his review of David Stevenson’s Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: ‘To deny to England the prime role in all this [the Wars of the Three Kingdoms] is not only unhelpful but distorting. England was the chosen location for the ambitious Stuart monarchy, and greater in terms of population, wealth, communications, diplomacy and political sophistication.’11 In the words of Austin Woolrych: ‘The fact is that England was where most of the crucial decisions were taken, and most of the crucial battles fought, which determined the fates of all three kingdoms. Sheer intelligibility commands a closer focus on England.’12 To redress this

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balance, Michael Braddick and David Cressy recently refocused our attention on events in England.13 With these criticisms in mind, this chapter will also show the limitations to these Three Kingdoms approaches and suggest that they can only be used in certain contexts.

THE PERFECT APPROACH: PERSONALITIES AND PRECIPITATES OF THE WARS OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

.................................................................................................................. For some, the crisis that engulfed the Atlantic Archipelago consisted of a major political and religious struggle where seemingly local issues and personal interests were played out in a wider British, European, and Atlantic world context. The ‘perfect’ approach has shown how key figures such as Randal McDonnell, the Earl of Antrim, and Roger Boyle, Lord Broghill (later Earl of Orrery), delicately negotiated the politics of the Three Kingdoms.14 In such circumstances, the Three Kingdoms can be seen as a perfect and unified entity exerting equal pressures and influences upon one another. At the heart of events during the ‘English Revolution’ and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms lay one man: Charles I, the King of England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1625 until 1649. His duplicitous dealings with the Scottish in the 1630s provided the impetus for the Covenanters to take arms against their monarch, which proved a dangerous precedent. Throughout his reign, Charles could rely on prominent members of the nobility, such as James Hamilton, the Earl of Hamilton (made Duke of Hamilton in 1643), the Earl of Antrim (made Marquess of Antrim in 1645), Thomas Wentworth, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and later Earl of Strafford, and James Butler (later Duke of Ormond). These men were often at loggerheads with one another, largely because of the King’s own behaviour.15 Vain, arrogant, stubborn, and deluded, Charles’s inability (or refusal) to understand the complexities of rule in a multiple kingdoms context created many of the problems that led to the subsequent crisis. His conduct during the latter half of the 1640s hardened the attitudes of his political opponents and galvanized the Independent movement which called for his execution. In effect, Charles set the chain of events in motion when he insisted in 1637 upon the imposition of cryptoCatholic reforms in the notoriously Calvinistic Scottish Church. In response, the Scots organized themselves into a National Covenant and called for their war veterans to return home from Europe’s battlefields. Another key figure in the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms was Thomas Wentworth, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, later Earl of Strafford and one of the King’s closest allies. Stationed in Ireland during the 1630s, Wentworth played competing political factions against one another and therefore exacerbated tensions between the Old English, New English, and native Irish communities. His steadfast loyalty to the

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King aroused the suspicion of the Scottish and English Parliaments who were further aggrieved by his elevation to the earldom of Strafford. In response to the Westminster Parliament’s refusal to cooperate with the King against the Scottish National Covenant, Wentworth raised an army of Irish Catholics. Prominent Catholic nobles, such as the Earl of Antrim, assisted Wentworth in this endeavour, hoping to gain the King’s favour. Charles I’s attempt to use a Catholic army, however, was an unmitigated public relations disaster. As the army consisted of and was funded by Catholics, both Parliament and the Covenanters feared that popish agents or ‘evil’ councillors had infiltrated the King’s court (and his judgement), particularly in light of his intended ‘popish’ church reforms. To make matters worse, Wentworth declared that this Irish army could be used to quell rebellion ‘in this kingdom’. Although he probably referred to Scotland, Westminster MPs argued that he meant England. This statement led to his execution for treason on 12 May 1641. Wentworth’s trial brought together various factions across the Three Kingdoms in London. This provided the ideal opportunity for many to develop networks of political support that would shape their allegiances during the 1640s. For example, Sir John Clotworthy, who owned considerable estates in the north of Ireland, fostered networks among the Covenanters and Parliament in a bid to claim land near Derry city, networks he cultivated for the rest of his career. Thus, the Three Kingdoms offered a political space in which influential characters could operate, building networks to augment their own personal standing or to lobby support for greater political causes. Other prominent figures’ experiences of the midseventeenth century, such as the Earl of Ormond and General George Monck, who were heavily involved at key moments in the politics of the Three Kingdoms, could be narrated through such a prism.

THE CONFEDERAL APPROACH: THE OUTBREAK OF THE WARS OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

.................................................................................................................. Sometimes, events in one of the Three Kingdoms had a domino effect on the others. This is best illustrated by the confederal approach. The bullishness of both Charles and Wentworth led to the commencement of the Bishops’ Wars—the Scottish front to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In the 1630s, England was at relative peace; the outbreak of the First Bishops’ War, or the Scottish Prayer Book rebellion, however, gave voice to critics of Charles’s authoritarian rule not just in England but also in Ireland, which was a bubbling cauldron of dissatisfaction with the colonial order. Unhappy with the first round of peace talks with the King after the First Bishops’ War, the Scots took up arms again and invaded England. The Covenanters pre-empted their capture of Newburn by canvassing for support among the English nobility who shared their political and religious grievances. The capture of Newburn also had a range of dire consequences for the monarchy and its relationship with Parliament. The long and protracted

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negotiations for a peace settlement seriously weakened the King’s authority. In their dealings with the King, Scottish Covenanters challenged royal prerogatives and the legality of the implementation of Laudian reforms in the Scottish Church. An emboldened English Parliament, meanwhile, began a programme of reforms to reverse the abuses of Charles’s ‘Personal Rule’. Finally, the concept of armed resistance cloaked in the language of defence inspired other would-be ‘rebels’ to adopt the methodology of the Covenanters. On 22 October 1641 the native Irish nobility took up arms against the colonial order in Ireland. Like the Scots, they feared the imposition of a new religious settlement, although they identified a different agent—the ‘Puritan’ Parliament. The Covenanters’ success in resisting the ‘popish’ reforms of the Scottish Church, however, underlined the strength of Calvinism in Scotland and England and was perceived as a clear threat by the Catholics of Ireland. The lords justices (the main colonial administrators who sat in the absence of an appointed Lord Deputy or Lord Lieutenant) were warned of the plot to seize Dublin castle and key fortifications across Ireland by Owen O’Connelly, a native convert to Presbyterianism. Their aim was to ‘imitat[e] Scotland who got a privilege by that course’. O’Connelly testified that a plan was afoot to seize the kingdom and ‘cut off all the Protestants . . . so that the Papists should become possessed of the Government and the Kingdom at the same time’. Before the plot had taken hold, therefore, the lords justices believed that the intention of the Irish rebels was ‘that all Protestants should be killed’.16 This increased the lords justices’ suspicion of both the native Irish and Old English from the very beginning of the rebellion. The Irish lords justices, William Parsons and John Borlase, were members of the New English settler community and could rely for support on prominent planters, most notably Sir John Clotworthy, Charles Coote, and the Earl of Cork. Clotworthy was related by marriage to John Pym, the unofficial leader of the Long Parliament. News of the rebellion coincided with Pym’s preparations to present the Grand Remonstrance, a list of grievances against Charles I.17 The Grand Remonstrance claimed that Catholics were at ‘the root of all this mischief ’, along with Laudian bishops and ‘evil’ councillors of the King who courted foreign (i.e. popish) intervention in English political affairs.18 Controversially, this Remonstrance was published; now the wider public could witness the growing chasm between their monarch and Parliament.19 The lords justices, with this larger political debate in mind, preferred to focus on the sectarian aspect of the rebellion in their correspondence with English authorities. For example, in November 1641, they reported that ‘the preservation of his Majesty’s honour’ may have been part of the rebels’ claims but stressed that religion ‘works most powerfully on the minds of men’.20 From October 1641 to March 1642, correspondence between the political bureaucracies in Ireland and England portrayed the rebellion as a religious assault with little mention of the rebels’ desire to align with Charles or the political grievances of Ireland’s Catholic population, of which they were well aware.21 Authorities in Ireland, therefore, tailored news about the rebellion that they dispatched to London as a means to accrue greater funds to end the rebellion.

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The Long Parliament used Charles’s distractions across the Three Kingdoms to secure a greater say in religious and political matters from a reluctant King. After Charles left London for Edinburgh in August 1641, Parliament limited his prerogative by abolishing the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. They also targeted other non-religious issues such as the Ship Money tax and attempted to limit the King’s ability to raise an army. After the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, Parliament sensed the King’s political fragility (and desperate need for funds to raise an army) and launched a further attack by announcing the Nineteen Propositions, which underlined Parliament’s desire for executive powers. With the Remonstrance on Hull and the Militia Ordinance, Parliament sought to limit the royal powers further and to act as the state’s sole judicial power. In effect, Parliament had thrown down the gauntlet.22 In response, Charles sought to reposition the monarchy as an agent that could work with Parliament but not be subordinated to it.23 Parliament feared granting the King possession of munitions stores and command over an army to suppress the rebellion in case Charles would deploy troops against them. This anxiety dictated the terms of the debate on the best methods to suppress the insurgency in Ireland. It soon became clear, however, that neither side had any sincere desire to remedy their differences by negotiation. The English front to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms opened on 22 August 1642 when Charles raised his standard at Nottingham. The confederal approach is best used in moments when events in one kingdom had a drastic influence on the others. As seen above, events in Ireland and Scotland directly influenced what was going on in England. Both kingdoms paid considerable attention to the machinations of English politics. The confederal approach, therefore, could also be used to understand the effect of the King’s execution on Irish and Scottish politics and the subsequent conquest of these two kingdoms by the Cromwellians. In the moments leading up to the restoration of Charles II, his supporters in Ireland looked to Scotland for assistance and then both kingdoms looked to like-minded individuals in England. It remains to be seen, however, whether the confederal approach offers anything more than an enriched national history that displays the consequences of one kingdom’s actions in the other two.

THE INCORPORATIVE APPROACH: THE COURSE OF THE WARS OF THE THREE KINGDOMS

.................................................................................................................. When hostilities commenced in England, all sides began to look to the other kingdoms for support; and so, to understand what happened next, it is necessary to incorporate what happened in all Three Kingdoms. In the first military season of the Civil Wars, royalist forces under the command of Charles I and his nephew Prince Rupert, Count Palatine of the Rhine, recorded remarkable successes against parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex and

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presented a clear threat to the city of London. Imbued with a fresh confidence these military successes brought with them, the King once again opened negotiations with Parliament, aiming to crush Pym and his colleagues’ hopes for redress. To maintain the advantage, Charles hoped to free his most trusted commander in Ireland, James Butler, the Earl of Ormond, a Protestant of Old English descent. To do so, he ordered the reluctant Ormond to negotiate a one-year cessation of arms with the Irish Confederates. The Confederates, sensing an opportunity to remove a prominent opponent, blamed William Parsons for the rebellion in a critique of the English administration in Ireland entitled a Remonstrance of Grievances. To add further insult, the Remonstrance of Grievances identified Parsons as a supporter of the King’s enemies in England and pointed to his allegiance to the ‘malignant party’ there. As a result of Parsons’s actions, the Catholics of Ireland, according to the Remonstrance of Grievances, were forced to take up arms. This contrasted sharply with rival accounts of the Irish Rebellion that portrayed it as an orgy of massacres committed against Protestant settlers. Through blaming Sir William Parsons’s anti-Catholic belligerence, the Remonstrance of Grievances defended the Confederates’ taking of arms as wholly legitimate. In short ‘every man saw that the estates of Catholicks were first aymed at, and their lives next’.24 Charles I, therefore, imprisoned Parsons and anyone else who opposed his intention to parley with the Confederates.25 In return, the Confederates promised £30,800 for the King’s military efforts. It was easy for the King to identify those who opposed his cessation with the rebels. A report sent to Charles I on 16 March 1643 outlined the extent of opposition to Charles’s decision. Sir Robert Meredith, Sir William Parsons, and Sir John Temple all signed their names to it. They argued strongly that the insurgency could only end when ‘the sword abated these rebels’.26 Hearing of the extent of opposition to the cessation, Parliament courted the support of prominent Irish Protestants, such as Murrough O’Brien, the Earl of Inchiquin. Disaffected members of the Irish Council, therefore, began to canvass for support from MPs in Westminster. Parsons later spearheaded an Irish lobby at the Parliament and favoured an alliance with the Independents.27 In contrast, Ormond, Sir Maurice Eustace, speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and Sir James Ware, MP for Trinity College, formed part of the ‘King’s party’ in Ireland.28 The Scots, of course, were involved in these detailed negotiations between King and Irish Confederates. The Earl of Antrim was captured with letters pertaining to the matter on his way to meet the Earl of Hamilton. The majority of the Covenanters favoured an alliance with Parliament due to their shared dislike of Caroline reforms of the Church. In response to the approaching ceasefire with the Irish Confederates, parliamentary commissioners arrived in Edinburgh on 7 August 1643 to raise 10,000 Scottish foot and 1,000 horse to fight in England. Scotland wanted to bring the two kingdoms together on a stronger and more equal footing, which resulted in the swearing of the Solemn League and Covenant in 1644. This became a pivotal year in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: Irish, Scottish, and English forces fought on the English soil, and Oliver Cromwell rose through the ranks of the Earl of Manchester’s

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army. Despite the fact that Charles had lost ground in this crucial year, he held firm in his unshakable belief that he was God’s anointed ruler over the Three Kingdoms. By 1645, many within the Three Kingdoms were wearied by the strain of war. The cost of funding the various armies 1641–9 amounted to £3.65 million—an average of £450,000 a year.29 In Ireland, the Confederates were torn between negotiating a final peace with the King that would guarantee land ownership and private practice of their religion or full recognition of the Catholic faith and a reversal of the plantations. In England, Parliament split into two factions: the ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘Independent’ movements. Their differences were characterized by their religious aims—the Presbyterians favoured a religious solution similar to that used by the Scottish, while the Independents wanted congregated churches such as were established in the colonies. Over time, the Scottish Covenanters drew closer to the Presbyterian party in Parliament, due to their growing dislike of Cromwell and their shared religious beliefs. A striking characteristic of these divisions was that factions within these movements increasingly turned to the printing presses to encourage popular support for their views. In certain moments, particularly when individual groups such as political factions and armed forces needed support or to gain political and military advantages, their attentions focused on all Three Kingdoms, which the incorporative approach uniquely captures. It must be stated, however, that when such groupings’ outlooks did not extend beyond their own national borders, it would be futile to force a Three Kingdoms approach where it does not exist.

LITERATURE

THE WARS KINGDOMS

AND

OF THE

THREE

.................................................................................................................. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms coincided with a revolution in the print trade in England, or an ‘explosion’ of print. As Joad Raymond has convincingly argued, this ‘explosion’ amounted only to a modest change in the nature of what was printed, as opposed to a dramatic increase in new books of all sizes. Printers in London began to print smaller, cheaper works as opposed to more scholarly tomes.30 News pamphlets became more popular while the polemic came of age, thanks to the ingenuity of the Scottish Covenanters who were among the first to harness the use of print as propaganda to such success. Without doubt, the most influential printing presses and distribution networks were based in London, which produced 20,767 works between 1641 and 1653. The ready availability of printing presses in Edinburgh, Dublin, and London convinced the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny to produce their own printed material. By 1643 they owned presses at Kilkenny and Waterford. These produced sixty-six works between them during the 1640s—Europe, Britain, and Ireland were their target audience.31 The Confederates’ printed output, however, compared

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unfavourably with regional presses elsewhere in the Three Kingdoms. During the 1640s, for example, presses at York, Edinburgh, and Oxford produced 162, 426, and 884 titles respectively.32 These figures do not account for the possible loss of titles that either remain undiscovered or are lost forever, nor do they account for the use of foreign presses by Covenanters and Confederates, for example; however, they do offer a flavour of the printed output of the period. A key aspect of the Three Kingdoms methodology is the issue of geography, which becomes problematic when discussing the dissemination of ideas in books and oral culture. All sides in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms looked beyond the British Isles and appealed to a European audience, printing their works in French, German, Latin, and Dutch to state their respective cases and enlist support. For example, in December 1642, the Confederate supreme council wrote to Hugh Bourke in Flanders and asked him to print an enclosed proclamation. Through this they aimed ‘to encourage seamen to come to us’.33 Covenanter, parliamentarian, and royalist texts were also printed on the Continent in news publications and as a means to raise funding for various war efforts. Returning veterans from the European theatre of war brought back new military and technological innovations. In this sense, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms became another stage in which wider European issues were fought. The use of polemic had differing impact, depending on the context of circulation. The Covenanters and the General Assembly of Scotland disseminated their message of Calvinist-inspired reforms in print and maintained a watchful eye over the output of the Edinburgh presses which targeted a predominantly English market.34 Prior to the Scottish invasion of England, Covenanter propaganda assured English nobles that they intended to protect the Reformed faith, a claim that clearly struck a chord among those dissatisfied with the nature of Laudian reforms in the Church of England. They spoke of a shared history, identity, and religion. Aware of growing opposition to Charles I, Covenanters talked up the ‘common interest of both kingdoms’. The language used was inclusive: they noted the existence of enemies to ‘our Religion’, targeted the King’s court as ‘wicked and ungodly men’ who ‘divide the King from his people, and the people from their King’, and spoke of the need to defend the ‘Liberties and religion’ of the two kingdoms.35 The language of their grievances directly influenced those who shared their views in England. A petition from ‘many thousands of the inhabitants of Norwich’ also spoke of the ‘utter subversion of our religion and liberty’ and blamed ‘bad counsellors’ as well as the ‘Jesuited Papists’ (a reference to the court of Charles I).36 Such arguments were utilized by the Long Parliament in their own polemics and speeches in the early 1640s. Blaming the King’s ‘evil councillors’ made it easier to criticize Charles I without being openly accused of treason.37 Even Charles I promised to secure the ‘religion and liberty’ of his people during the contested debates over the bill for Tonnage and Poundage.38 The Irish Confederates also spoke of the need to preserve their religion and the liberties ‘of our country’; yet, their loyalties lay firmly with the King, ‘being necessitated to take armes for the . . . maintenance of your Majesties rights, & prerogatives’.39 They circulated copies of their constitution across Europe, rather than England, leaving

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pro-parliamentarian printers to reprint copies of it, replete with their own commentary on its legality.40 One London edition of the Confederate constitution, for example, characterized their war effort as a popish conspiracy ‘Wherein Both Root and Branches of the English Nation, as also the very Essence of Protestant Religion are wholly struck at’.41 The Confederate oath, however, had a most unusual origin: it was based on the Protestation Oath sworn by members of the Long Parliament in May 1641. The Protestation galvanized parliamentary opposition to Catholic-inspired reforms in the Church of England and to the presence of ‘popery’ in England. Instead of vowing to ‘maintain and defend’ the ‘Church of England’, Confederates were bound to ‘defend vphold and mayntayne . . . the fundamentall lawes of Ireland, the free exercise of the Romish Catholique fayth and religion’.42 While the Confederates positioned themselves as loyal soldiers of Charles I, their parliamentary and Covenanter opponents needed to respond with an alternative message. Parliamentary supporters, during negotiations between the King and the Confederates, sponsored publications that appeared on London booksellers’ shelves seeking financial assistance to end the rebellion and to encourage popular dissatisfaction with the King. The agreement of the Solemn League and Covenant highlighted their shared Protestant faith and dislike of Laudian reforms. Appealing to a united Protestant community across England, Scotland, and Ireland, the two Parliaments promised to restore peace to all the Three Kingdoms and argued that ‘a threefold chord is not easily broken’ (Figure 2.1).43 The mid-seventeenth century witnessed the strengthening of ties between Protestants across the Three Kingdoms who developed a greater awareness of their shared identity. Their common distrust of Catholics fashioned their exchanges with Confederate propaganda. They made little of the Confederates’ ‘pretended’ complaints. What underpinned these movements were the efforts of Protestant ministers from both England and Scotland, some of whom actively urged their co-religionists to rise above ‘nationall interests’ and to remember that they were all of ‘the same bond where with we are all united in one Lord Jesus Christ’.44 These bonds of Protestant unity, symbolized in the Solemn League and Covenant, however, did not extend to Ireland to any great extent. To promote the Solemn League and Covenant in Ireland, parliamentarian ships distributed printed copies along the Irish coast. By so doing, Parliament sought to generate popular support. The circulation of the Solemn League and Covenant brings up a key issue about the dissemination of literature during the mid-seventeenth century: how exactly did such texts reach the wider population? Texts circulated along established trade routes and through other informal means throughout this period. More controversial publications could be exchanged in scribal formats among political supporters, while seditious printed materials could be smuggled clandestinely through ports and along established trade routes. Such distribution networks could easily supply texts to major urban centres in the early modern period. The existence of oral and literate communication networks catered to the dissemination of news and ideas across the Three Kingdoms.45 This raises another issue, however: when

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F I G U R E 2 . 1 Detail from A Solemn League and Covenant, print by Wenceslaus Hollar (1643) # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1862, 0712.119.

Parliament attempted to promote the Solemn League and Covenant, one of the local commanders ordered that an eye be kept on parliamentary ships on the coast in order to prevent other seditious texts from circulating in the vicinity.46 The circulation of the Solemn League and Covenant in Ireland suggests that there is a need for scholars to understand in greater detail how news of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms influenced the actions of the lower social orders in the mid-seventeenth century. To what extent did propaganda printed in England, Ireland, and Scotland attract the support of the ‘common sort’? Related to the dissemination of printed and manuscript polemics was the issue of censorship in the Three Kingdoms. Prior to the outbreak of the crisis, seditious publications originated primarily from the Continent and were censored in a piecemeal fashion.47 In 1637, Laud stated his intention to prosecute booksellers and merchants who traded in such works. Charles had already expressed concerns about Covenanter propaganda being disseminated in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In the exchanges with Parliament during the winter of 1641 and spring of 1642, Charles repeatedly urged that they clamp down on seditious printing.48 Contrary to popular belief about the Long Parliament, MPs did not wish for a free press.49 Consistently throughout the 1640s, they attempted to maintain some form of control over the ‘explosion’ of printing that erupted in 1641–2.50 John Milton, along

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with several other of his colleagues in the print trade, lobbied for the full extension of printed liberties: ‘but when complaints are freely heard, deeply consider’d and speedily reform’d, then is the utmost bound of civill liberty attain’d, that wise men looke for.’51 Furthermore, passionate defences of the rights of printers and the Stationers’ Company to self-regulate were made throughout this period. The outpouring of popular discontent during the 1640s caused many to believe that the print trade had a catastrophic effect on the ‘peace’ of the three Stuart Kingdoms, a charge the Stationers were trying to address. Eventually, the Stationers’ Company was entrusted with policing the print trade and the dissemination of worthy books. Despite this, upon the establishment of the Commonwealth, Parliament was acutely aware of the need to suppress seditious publications and clamped down extensively in the early years of the regime. Two months after the death of Charles I, at least two works were banned, one author was sanctioned, and John Milton was asked ‘to make some observations on the complication of interest which is now amongst the several designers against the peace of the commonwealth’.52 One publication largely evaded suppression, however, and was a key text in shaping subsequent accounts of Charles I—Eikon Basilike. Although some editions appeared in London, Eikon Basilike was also printed in Cork and in Paris where most of the royal court began to converge. Its polemical value can be measured by the fact that by May 1649, the Commonwealth hired a propagandist ‘for answering pamphlets against the commonwealth’ and offered £100.53 In Ireland, the newly installed Commonwealth regime seized control of all the printing presses and admitted only suitable official works for publication. The authorities in Ireland tried to forestall the publication of anything which would be deemed ‘scandalous to religion or the present Government’. The country’s ports were searched for seditious ‘popish’ books, while members of the establishment argued over the punishment of Irish Catholic rebels. They did not engage in the kinds of religious debates witnessed in Scotland, where the Cromwellians encouraged discussions on religious matters (if they did not criticize the Independent faith) and bought out the Evan Tyler printing house ‘brand’ in an attempt to assume old power structures put in place first by Charles I and then the Covenanters.54 Despite the gradual ascendancy of print, oral culture remained remarkably resilient. Print may have reached a wide readership, but the pulpit had a weekly audience and had considerable influence in the localities. Stuart and Cromwellian authorities were acutely aware of the pulpit as a venue for sedition. During the 1650s in Ireland, Presbyterian ministers were punished for expressing support for Charles II.55 Many other clergymen across the Three Kingdoms were also censured for expressing royalist sympathies.56 In fact, much power remained in the hands of local figures of authority. John Ludlow, one of the commissioners appointed by the Rump Parliament to administer Ireland, tried to prevent the proclamation of the Protectorate in Ireland. Meanwhile, in Scotland an Irishman, Lord Broghill, became President of the General Assembly and slowly began to forge consensus between the warring Protestant factions in a bid to restore Scotland’s previous relationship with England. Events in the localities

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were heavily influenced by prominent personalities and their individual loyalties. During the mid-seventeenth century, therefore, at both local and national level, local power structures negotiated their evolving role and position in a society that was being rapidly encroached upon by an expanding state bureaucracy. This brought an era of intense petitioning and protest of the newly emerging social and political order in early modern Britain and Ireland. Sometimes this manifested itself in episodes of extreme violence, such as the 1641 rebellion, but as yet there is no trans-national Three Kingdoms account that investigates the similarities and differences between Irish, Scottish, and English petitioning and protest in the early modern period. The Protectorate had to contend with affairs in Ireland and Scotland as well as England, but became increasingly distracted by wider world interests. War with Spain, threats from Holland, possible involvement in a Baltic war, and the capture of Dunkirk were just some of the military challenges Cromwell had to deal with in the late 1650s. Furthermore, many royalists exiled in Europe were liaising with their supporters back home. In effect, there was a European front to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. It could be argued that these wider world distractions created the conditions that allowed royalists within Ireland and Scotland to begin the process of restoring Charles II. It therefore appears that there are considerable restrictions to the Three Kingdoms approach. Through limiting studies of the mid-seventeenth century to Ireland, England, and Scotland, scholars may fail to pay heed to other external and internal pressures that may have had different consequences in each kingdom.

CONCLUSION

.................................................................................................................. The concept of the Three Kingdoms emerged following the disintegration of the British Empire and the negotiation of its role in global politics in the second half of the twentieth century. This encouraged academics to reflect on the past in new ways. Its success can be measured in the ways through which it reveals a wealth of new information and perspectives on the causes and course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Yet there are some notable disadvantages to the ‘New British History’. For example, while the perfect approach may explain how some were integral figures of the Three Kingdoms, what about those whose interests also extended into the Americas and Europe? On a related issue, confederal and incorporative accounts can provide a valuable perspective in certain contexts, but a key question remains: how can one limit the events of the mid-seventeenth century geographically? All of the major combatants spoke to a Continental audience, petitioning them for support through diplomatic means and the medium of print. Equally, European intellectual conversations wielded considerable influence in the Three Kingdoms. For example, the Irish Confederation became a microcosm of wider Catholic debates over the nature of the Catholic Reformation. Exiled royalists in France, largely through the aid of the Duke of Ormond, heard about the dissemination of seditious texts critical of both Parliament

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and Charles II. Lively exchanges about the nature and course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms occurred under Cromwell’s regime, yet away from the exercise of Commonwealth jurisdiction. The entire Wars of the Three Kingdoms, in fact, took place within the much wider context of the politics of the Reformation that began a century earlier. To move beyond a historical narrative of events in the Three Kingdoms will require the use of new methodologies such as the adoption of a trans-national perspective to investigate themes such as popular protest and the relationship between the locality, the state, and the wider Britannic kingdoms. While the Three Kingdoms undeniably exerted influence on each other, a key issue is, why did subsequent historians in the early modern period not pay attention to this wider perspective in their own accounts of the mid-seventeenth century? The 1641 rebellion provided the foundation myth of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, the Whig Tradition looked to the ‘English Revolution’ as its starting point, and the execution of Charles I cemented Scottish loyalty to the Stuart crown. To what extent can the differences between the Three Kingdoms and the events that are unique to each be incorporated into a New British History? Literature that captures the evolution of identities across the Three Kingdoms has an important role to play in understanding the processes that dictated greater unity and involvement among the Three Kingdoms, but also the recourse to national prisms to regale future generations with the events of the mid-seventeenth century. While England may have been undeniably central to the course of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, if scholars began to investigate the mid-seventeenth century through trans-national prisms and to consider themes instead of events, charges of Anglocentrism will be avoided. This approach could readily celebrate the similarities and differences between the Three Kingdoms, the events that were unique to the separate geographic regions, and the cultural, political, and social influences that shaped such behaviours. John Dryden may have called Britain ‘a world divided from the rest’ and celebrated the restoration of Charles II from a very Anglocentric perspective, but he nonetheless paid lip service to the radical changes the Three Kingdoms had experienced. Dryden celebrated the role of literature in bringing about the Restoration: ‘pencils can by one slight touch restore | Smiles to that changed face that wept before’, underlining its centrality to the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. More importantly, Dryden’s literary commemoration of the succession of Charles II spoke of England’s forthcoming global reach: ‘Abroad your empire shall no limits know, | But, like the sea, in boundless circles flow.’ The challenge for scholars now is to balance these local, national, and international issues in the early modern Atlantic Archipelago.57

NOTES 1. Marvell, ‘An Horatian Ode’, 486–9; Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 52–6. 2. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 82–103.

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3. Pocock, ‘British History’, 28–9. 4. Russell, ‘Composite Monarchies’, 133–46; id. ‘The British Problem’, 79–103. 5. Morrill, ‘Three Kingdoms and One Commonwealth’; id., The Nature of the English Revolution; Woolrych, Britain in Revolution. 6. Gentles, The English Revolution; Stevenson, Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates; Wheeler, The Irish and British Wars. 7. Kerrigan, Archipelagic English; Baker and Maley (eds.), British Identities. 8. Ohlmeyer, ‘Review’, 499–500; Gentles, The English Revolution, 3. 9. Morrill, ‘Thinking about the New British History’. 10. Harris, ‘In Search’, 90. 11. Roots, ‘Review’, 549–50. 12. Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 3. 13. Braddick, God’s Fury; Cressy, England on Edge. 14. Little, Lord Broghill; Ohlmeyer, Randall MacDonnell. 15. Ohlmeyer, ‘Strafford’, 209–29. 16. Trinity College Dublin (TCD), MS 809, fos. 13–14, fo. 14; TCD, MS 836, fos. 82–6, fo. 83. 17. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 145. 18. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, 205–31. 19. Braddick, God’s Fury, 170–2. 20. Calendar of State Papers, Ireland (CSPI), 1633–47, 347–8; Historical Manuscripts Commission (HMC), Ormond, NS II, 13–17. 21. CSPI, 1633–47, 354; HMC, Ormond, NS II, 35–6. 22. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 146–7; Gentles, The English Revolution, 93. 23. Macinnes, The British Revolution, 147–8; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 241. 24. Confederate Catholics of Ireland, A Remonstrance of Grievances, 7–8, 17–18, 22. 25. Armstrong, Protestant War, 85. 26. HMC, Ormond, NS II, 244–53; Armstrong, Protestant War, 82–3. 27. Adamson, ‘Strafford’s Ghost’, 138; Little, ‘The Irish Independents’, 942. 28. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series (CSPD), 1645–7, 32. 29. Gentles, The English Revolution, 433–56. 30. Raymond, Pamphlets, 161–72. 31. English Short Title Catalogue Online; McClintock Dix, ‘Printing in the City of Kilkenny’, 125–37; id., ‘Printing in the City of Waterford’, 333–44. 32. English Short Title Catalogue Online. 33. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation, ii. 125–6. Between 1641 and 1652, sixtyfour publications were published in favour of both Parliament and Charles I respectively in Dutch, French, German, and Latin. English Short Title Catalogue Online. 34. Raymond, Pamphlets, 171–92. 35. Scotland, Convention of Estates, A Remonstrance Concerning the Present Troubles. 36. Inhabitants of Norwich, To the Right Honourable the Lords. 37. Anon., The Parliaments Love and Loyalty. 38. Anon., Mr. Speakers Speech before his Majestie, Sig. A2; Charles, I, His Maiesties Answer to the Declaration. 39. A Remonstrance of Grievances, 3. 40. Confederate Catholics of Ireland, A True Coppie of the Lawes. 41. Orders Establisht in the Popish Generall Assembly. 42. Journal of the House of Commons, ii: 1640–1643 (1802), 131–3; TCD, MS 812, fo. 243.

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43. Anon., A Solemn League and Covenant. 44. Anon., A View of the Present Condition, 3. 45. Love, Scribal Publication, 174–94; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 31–63; Raymond, Pamphlets, 98–160. 46. TCD, MS 818, fo. 281. For more examinations on this event, see Gilbert, History of the Irish Confederation, iv. 210–37. For the fallout from the Covenant in Ireland see Little, Lord Broghill, 38–40. 47. Kemp and McElligott, Censorship and the Press, i, xxxv–li. 48. Rushworth (ed.), ‘The Star Chamber on Printing, 1637’, 306–16; Cobbett, Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, ii, cols. 1180–3. 49. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 132–62. 50. Parliament, An Order of the Lords and Commons. 51. Milton, Areopagitica, 1. 52. CSPD, 1649–50, 43, 45–6, 55, 56, 57–8, 63, 527. 53. CSPD, 1649–50, 139. 54. Spurlock, ‘Cromwell’s Edinburgh Press’. 55. Dunlop, Ireland Under the Commonwealth, i. 78. 56. Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech’, 44–66. 57. Dryden, ‘Astraea redux’.

WORKS CITED Anon. Mr. Speakers Speech before his Majestie and both Houses of Parliament, after his Returne from Scotland, upon Passing the Bill for Tunnage and Poundage, on Thursday the 2. of December, Relating the Present Distempers of England and Ireland also, the King’s Most Excellent Majestie’s Speech to the Honourable House of Parliament the Same Thursday Deceb. 2, 1641. London, 1641. ——. Orders Establisht in the Popish Generall Assembly. London, 1643. ——. The Parliaments Love and Loyalty to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie. London, 1642. ——. A Solemn League and Covenant for the Reformation and Defence of Religion, the honour and happinesse of the King, and the Peace and Safety of the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland. London, 1644. ——. A View of the Present Condition of the Three Kingdomes of England, Scotland and Ireland. London, 1642. ——. ‘The 1641 Depostions Online’, . Adamson, John. ‘Strafford’s Ghost: The British Context of Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 128–59. Armstrong, Robert. Protestant War: The British of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Baker, David, and Willy Maley (eds.). British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Beckett, James Camlin. The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.

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Bowen, Lloyd. ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism, 1649–1660’, in Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 44–66. Braddick, Michael. God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars. London: Penguin, 2008. Charles, I. His Maiesties Answer to the Declaration of Both Hovses of Parliament Concerning the Commission of Array of the 1 of July 1642. Oxford, 1642. Cobbett, William (ed.). Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England. From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803. From which last-mentioned epoch is continued downwards in the work entitled, ‘Cobbett’s Parliamentary Debates’, vol. ii. London, 1807. Confederate Catholics of Ireland. A True Coppie of the Lawes and Rules of Government, Agreed upon and Established by the Nobles of the Severall Counties of Ireland. London, 1641. ——. A Remonstrance of Grievances Presented to His Most Excellent Majestie, in the Behalfe of the Catholicks of Ireland. Waterford, 1643. Cressy, David. England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution 1640–1642. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Dix, E. R. McClintock. ‘Printing in the City of Kilkenny in the Seventeenth Century’. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 32 (1914–16), 125–37. ——. ‘Printing in the City of Waterford in the Seventeenth Century’. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 32 (1914–16), 333–44. Dryden, John. ‘Astraea redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second, 1660’. Dunlop, Robert. Ireland Under the Commonwealth: Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (ed.). Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. Gentles, Ian. The English Revolution and the Wars in the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652. London: Longman, 2007. Gilbert, J. T. (ed.). History of the Irish Confederation and the War in Ireland, 1641–1653. Dublin: M. H. Gill, 1882–91. Green, Mary Ann Everett (ed.). Calendar of State Papers Domestic (Interregnum) 1649–50. London, 1875. Hamilton, William Douglas (ed.). Calendar of State Papers Domestic (Charles I) 1645–7. London, 1891. Harris, Tim. ‘In Search of a British History of Political Thought’, in David Armitage (ed.). British Political Thought in History, Literature and Theory, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 89–108. Historical Manuscripts Commission. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, K.P. Preserved at Kilkenny Castle N.S. II. London, 1903. Inhabitants of Norwich. To the Right Honourable the Lords of the Higher House of Parliament the Humble Petition of Many Thousands of the Inhabitants of Norwich. London, 1642. Kemp, Geoff, and Jason McElligott (eds.). Censorship and the Press, 1580–1720 London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Little, Patrick. ‘The Irish “Independents” and Viscount Lisle’s Lieutenancy of Ireland’. Historical Journal 44.4 (2001), 941–61. ——. Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Macinnes, Allan. The British Revolution 1629–1660. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Mahaffy, Robert Pentland. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland of the Reign of Charles I 1633–47 Preserved in the Public Record Office. London, 1901. Marvell, Andrew. ‘An Horatian Ode: Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Poetry. New York: Norton, 2005, 486–9. Milton, John. Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr John Milton For the Liberty of Vnlicenc’d Printing, to the Parliament of England. London, 1644. Morrill, John. The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill. London: Longman, 1993. ——. ‘Three Kingdoms and One Commonwealth? The Enigma of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Britain and Ireland’, in Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History. London: Routledge, 1996, 170–92. ——. ‘Thinking about the New British History’, in David Armitage (ed.), British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 23–46. Ohlmeyer, Jane. Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim, 1609–1683. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ——. ‘Strafford, the “Londonderry Business” and the “New British History” ’, in Julia Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 209–29. ——. ‘Review: The “Old” British Histories?’ Historical Journal 50.2 (2007), 499–512. Parliament of England. An Order of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament. For the Regulating of Printing, And for Suppressing the Great Late Abuses and Frequent Disorders in Printing Many False, Scandalous, Seditious, Libellous and Unlicensed Pamphlets, to the Great Defamation of Religion and Government. London, 1643. Peacey, Jason. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pocock, J. G. A. ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’. Journal of Modern History 47.4 (1975), 601–21. ——. The Discovery of Islands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Roots, Ivan. ‘Review: Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649’. English Historical Review 122.496 (2007), 549–50. Rushworth, John (ed.). ‘The Star Chamber on Printing, 1637’, in Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, iii: 1639–40. University of London & History of Parliament Trust, 2011, 306–16. Online. .

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Russell, Conrad. ‘Composite Monarchies in Early Modern Europe: The British and Irish Example’, in Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (eds.), Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History. London: Routledge, 1996, 133–46. ——. ‘The British Problem and the English Civil War’, in Peter Gaunt (ed.), The English Civil War: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000, 79–103. Scotland, Convention of Estates. A Remonstrance Concerning the Present Troubles from the Meeting of the Estaees [sic] of Scotland, Aprill 16. unto the Parliament of England. Amsterdam, 1640. Spurlock, Scott. ‘Cromwell’s Edinburgh Press and the Development of Print Culture in Scotland’. Scottish Historical Review 90.2 (2011). Stevenson, David. Scottish Covenanters and Irish Confederates: Scottish–Irish Relations in the Mid-Seventeenth Century. Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1981. Wheeler, James Scott. The Irish and British Wars 1637–1654: Triumph, Tragedy and Failure. London: Routledge, 2002. Woolrych, Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

CHAPTER

3

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BRITISH ATLANTIC WORLD ....................................................................................................... CARLA GARDINA PESTANA

Revolutionary events in the three kingdoms occurred during a formative stage for the English colonies in the Atlantic world.1 When war broke out in Scotland, the oldest of the twenty-two colonies—Virginia—had been in existence for just thirty years, and most settlements had been planted in the previous decade. This burst of plantation schemes was bolstered by a steady and sizeable stream of mostly English migrants, driven by economic malaise and dissatisfaction with Charles I’s policies. Those living in these newly formed and recently settled polities watched with amazement as their homelands first degenerated into wars, uprisings, and regicide and then began a series of experiments in religious, social, and political forms. Colonies were decisively affected by these events, but plantation residents also attempted to affect the outcome at home. Throughout these decades of upheaval, the Atlantic settlements participated in their own version of the revolution, with consequences sometimes similar to but also occasionally divergent from those in Britain and Ireland.

STATE

OF THE

C O L O N I E S , 1640

.................................................................................................................. The fact that the centre ceased to hold at an early moment in the colonization of the wider Atlantic is worth bearing in mind. In 1640, approximately 50,000 of Charles I’s subjects resided on the western edge of the Atlantic, stretching from Newfoundland (with perhaps 200 year-round residents) to Trinidad (with about 300). The vast majority had arrived quite recently, part of a ‘Great Migration’ that carried people not only to New England but to every settlement since 1630. The three most populous—Massachusetts Bay, Barbados, and Virginia—included over 30,000 of the total inhabitants. The majority of these settlers were young and male, with New England standing out because its sex ratio was less skewed and its population covered a wider range of ages. Living in all these locations continued to be fairly rudimentary, with most people sheltering in small, rough-hewn structures. Every plantation2 relied

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heavily on its maritime links to the wider Atlantic world. Basic necessities were imported, and a steady stream of new arrivals kept the local economies afloat. Almost all of the colonies that would be in existence in 1660 had already been founded (and a few that were in existence at this time would flounder before the Restoration). As the fate of the English settlements on Marie-Galante, St Lucia, Providence Island, and Trinidad indicated, the English hold on its Atlantic settlements was still rather tenuous as Charles called the Long Parliament. Links between these settlements and England were varied and occasionally tenuous as well. The nature of the official link differed: about half of the plantations were covered by proprietary grants, three had company charters, one was a royal colony, and the remainder had no legally recognized bases to their governments. Despite this variation in official forms, most had one thing in common: English authority rested relatively lightly upon them. The King appointed governors to administer Virginia, but permitted the resident elite to serve as councillors. The legislative body that had emerged under company rule continued to set policy. Most proprietors paid relatively little heed to their plantations or found, when they attempted to manage them, that their ability to do so was seriously circumscribed by distance and their own ignorance of colonial conditions. In 1640 Cecil, Lord Baltimore, was relatively attentive to his new province of Maryland, but many of his plans for it were nonetheless thwarted. Massachusetts Bay, though it had a company charter similar to those of Bermuda and Providence Island, answered to no external company authority, because company members were settlers and ran their corporation from Boston. The squatter colonies— those without legal standing—such as New Haven and Plymouth Plantation sat on one extreme of a spectrum in terms of their ability to manage their own affairs locally. If royal and proprietary forms of government were clearly favoured in Charles I’s Atlantic domains, that preference for vesting authority in a single elite male was enacted on paper but not on the ground. This lack of effective oversight from England does not mean that settlers—and especially the planter elite—did not value those links or that they sought to escape their connection to Europe. Most of those living in the English Atlantic in 1640 had been born in the ‘Old World’, indeed, in England itself in the vast majority of cases. They had family members and sometimes property in England, and some of them would return, whether temporarily or permanently, to their homeland. All residents depended on the ships that plied the Atlantic for news, goods, and even foodstuffs. Such ties were central to life in a nascent colony. More than physical links, though, colonial governments relied on their connections to England to bolster their authority. They brandished their subject status—and the protection that their King theoretically provided them—in their dealings with representatives of other European states and with local Native Americans. Even the ultimate ‘squatter’ colony Plymouth Plantation—which had been settled in 1620 without a grant and would limp along without a charter or any official sanction until it was finally absorbed into Massachusetts in the 1690s—declared its relation to the monarch at moments of confrontation. Colonists would occasionally engage in struggles over the respective legitimization that different

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groups could claim, trying to best rivals with better documentation of endorsement by an English authority. The links may have been weak, but they were never considered insignificant. The English Atlantic was relatively young at the outbreak of the troubles at home. Residents would have been conscious of living in new societies, where conditions of daily life were rudimentary and everyone remained dependent on the regular arrival of ships carrying workers, supplies, and news. The agricultural regimen, local governance, and other basic aspects of these plantations were not yet firmly established. In a population that was largely transplanted, inhabitants were eager to learn of events in England, Scotland, and Ireland. As the crisis heated up, residents of the English Atlantic would watch closely, many of them torn between relief that their location sheltered them from the worst of the crisis and anxiety about what the upheavals meant for their loved ones at home and for their insecure settlements in the Americas.

CIVIL WARS

.................................................................................................................. The news of the situation in Scotland, Ireland, and England stunned colonial residents, who keenly felt their distance from these events as they unfolded. The circulation of news was slow and uneven. Settlers depended utterly on the timely arrival of ships, which might carry letters and written (both print and manuscript) news accounts but certainly always included crews and passengers with new information. Colonists passed any news they gathered to others or routinely remarked about the lack of news. Distance from events made them difficult to follow and to understand. Men such as correspondents Roger Williams and John Winthrop felt their isolation from the major transformations occurring at home, mulling over their meaning and speculating about the outcome in letters. Many individuals remarked dispiritedly on ‘thes perillous tymes’.3 As England polarized, colonists and colonial governments confronted questions about how to respond to these events. Some people threw themselves into the fray, picking fights over the divisions at home, such as the man who refused to drink a toast to the local governor in the island colony of St Christopher (today St Kitts) because he acknowledged no general but the parliamentary appointee, the Earl of Essex.4 Some inhabitants of the English Atlantic returned to participate in the Civil Wars, usually to take up the parliamentary cause. But colonial governments—and many residents too— were a bit more cautious, hanging back from commitment to see how events transpired. Colonial elites knew their authority was insecure, and they hoped to avoid antagonizing powerful interests on either side of the yawning divide. They watched and waited, trying to figure out what was happening and what it portended for them. In the meantime, colonial ports remained open to royalist and parliamentary ships and local authorities attempted to suppress confrontations between them.

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The most obvious and immediate effect of the outbreak of war in England was a sharp decline in shipping from England to the various Atlantic ports. Ships that were otherwise occupied at home in support of the war effort no longer plied the colonial trade. Investments that had sent ships full of settlers and supplies to new plantations were diverted into other channels, closer to home. The Atlantic became dangerous in a new way as ships’ captains feared attack by their fellow English mariners. Fewer people wanted to send their goods or to chance an Atlantic crossing in this new climate, and trade fell sharply. The sudden decline made colonists feel isolated, and it slowed the circulation of information precisely at the moment when inhabitants of the western Atlantic were especially eager to learn the news. Very soon after the calling of the Long Parliament, migration from England slowed dramatically. Political developments effectively brought the concentrated period of high movement of peoples known as the ‘Great Migration’ to an end. The impact of this change was felt most dramatically in New England, where newly founded colonies had grown quickly as a result of a huge influx of settlers. The economy there was dependent on meeting the demands of these new arrivals, and the sudden cessation led to an economic collapse. Elsewhere the flow of migrants had not risen so precipitously, and the economic impact of the drop—while notable—was not quite as severe. Migration would resume over the coming decades, but it would never return to the high level of this earlier era. Favoured destinations shifted south from New England to the Chesapeake and Caribbean. These later migrants would be less likely to be free and voluntary; many of them would be indentured, including transported prisoners sentenced to labour in the fields of the Atlantic plantations. New England was doubly affected by shifts in migration trends, because it was also the location from which most of those choosing to return to England were most likely to come. Some remigrants simply returned because colonial life was disappointing. Others—drawn from among those who left unhappy with Charles’s policies—turned for home once England looked more amenable to reform. Having chosen New England to get away from the policies and problems at home, these individuals decided to go back when the wind seemed to shift in a direction they preferred.5 Many of the first graduates of the newly founded Harvard College, unable to find pulpits in New England, travelled back to an England very different from the one they had left as children. They would find work in churches that had been closed to clergymen with their reformist views only a decade earlier. As remigration trends indicate, some inhabitants of the Atlantic world threw themselves into the fight. Partisan opinion was fairly high throughout the Atlantic basin. Views in favour of or opposed to the Parliament’s challenge to the King were expressed in every colonial region. While regional variations occurred, with New England more inclined to support Parliament and Virginia tending to the side of the King, residents in every location held both sets of views. A high-ranking militia officer in Watertown, Massachusetts, declared of Parliament that he was ‘doubtful whether he might take their part against their prince’.6 Similar views were expressed elsewhere. Sentiments against the King were also widely uttered. A ‘muletto gyrle’ in Bermuda spoke against

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the ‘person of the king’s majesty’, which garnered her an appearance before the local court.7 Preachers prayed for their favoured cause, most famously in support of Parliament in New England. A plan was floated to offer the King shelter in Virginia when his fortunes took a troubling turn. Despite being far from the action of civil wars, parliamentary innovation, and the outpouring of print, colonists cared deeply about the outcome. Yet the colonies remained relatively uninvolved and largely sheltered from the crises of the 1640s, with a few notable exceptions. Their position on the sidelines arose from their location but was furthered by official colonial policy. Local authorities worked hard to avoid decisively choosing between King and Parliament in any official way. This uninvolved approach prevailed even when the ostensible authority over the colony had a definite position and dictated that his underlings adopt it. The best example of this tendency to avoid taking a stand involved Virginia. Although the King’s own colony, with a clear mandate to support royal policies to the utmost, Virginia traded with parliamentary as well as royalist ships and failed to punish treasonable statements to the full extent of the law. Massachusetts, in spite of vehemently pro-Parliament views held by those at the highest level in the colony, refused to allow its merchants to seize a royalist ship to make up for losses suffered elsewhere. The ship was left free to trade in the colony, just as those from parliamentary ports did. The precarious position of these nascent settlements encouraged local leaders to set aside their partisan difference in the interest of lying low and staying out of trouble while war raged elsewhere. Little wonder that residents of the English Atlantic often spoke of the plantations as a refuge during troubled times. Still the struggle rocking Scotland, Ireland, and England overflowed into the colonial settlements on more than one occasion. Usually the conflicts were minor. Occasionally visiting ships from opposing sides came to blows in a colonial location, as in Virginia when an inhabitant who was on board one ship was killed when it exchanged fire with another. Boston saw roving gangs of ships’ crew members squaring off in its streets and feared that the tensions would lead to serious violence. On other occasions, confrontations turned bloody. Maryland was plunged into an extended period of anarchy and bloodshed after an English ship’s captain, Richard Ingle, attacked the colony, interpreting the Roman Catholic faith of the proprietor and of the province’s leadership as an affront to Parliament’s cause. In the volatile context of early Maryland, displaced colonizers, embittered indentured servants, and anti-papist settlers combined to wreak havoc on the province and its government. It took over a year to restore order. In the West Indies, impoverished nobleman James, Earl of Marlborough, with a commission from the King to take control of all the colonies there, demanded that local governors choose to support the King’s command; the alternative was to remain vaguely loyal to their own lord proprietor, the Earl of Carlisle. Most islands avoided endorsing Marlborough, although they tried to do so without challenging the King’s authority, and eventually the Earl and his crippled ships limped home. Such instances, although relatively rare, brought home the dangers of getting involved in the troubles at home.

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REGICIDE

.................................................................................................................. The execution of Charles I ended all possibility of the Atlantic plantations and their residents remaining outside the struggles in England. Regicide forced all colonial polities to choose a side. Those that favoured the loser—and it was not clear immediately that Parliament was the victor—faced being forcibly coerced back into the empire. The new Commonwealth government set about strengthening the connections between the core and periphery, creating trade policies and governance structures that would outlast the revolution. The authority of the English state reached increasingly into the lives of colonists. The triumph of the Parliament over the King, and the creation of a new system of governance in England, also meant radical changes for the colonies. Charles I was beheaded on a public scaffold on 30 January 1648/9.8 From the perspective of Atlantic observers, the decision to execute him was made rather suddenly; it also occurred at a time of year when few ships sailed for the colonies. News was therefore slow to arrive in the Atlantic outposts. Rumours circulated by the late spring; during the summer most colonies had received conclusive word; it may have been a full year before notification reached Bermuda. Once the choice between Charles II and the new Commonwealth government (‘without monarch or House of Lords’) had been laid before them, five colonies—Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Newfoundland, and Virginia—declared allegiance to the dead King’s son, signalling their intention to resist the revolutionary regime. Colonists everywhere remained divided, however: some individuals in all the royalist colonies opposed the official policy of support for the King, while others in places where the change was being accepted without comment felt unsettled about it. John Cotton, the pre-eminent preacher in the Atlantic world, delivered a sermon justifying regicide in response to concerns he had heard expressed in Massachusetts.9 The news was shocking, regardless of a person’s politics, and—as in England—killing the King turned some away from a cause they had heretofore supported. Parliament moved quickly to suppress rebellion in those colonies that had declared support for the King. It ordered the arrest of the royalist proprietor of Newfoundland, and Sir David Kirke was returned to England for trial. The government commissioned two fleets—one bound for the Caribbean and the other for Virginia—to reclaim errant colonies for the new government. Barbados was blockaded for an extended period before capitulating in January 1651. The royalist governor, Sir Francis Willoughby, gained permission to retire to his newly established colony of Surinam, on the coast of South America, where he would wait out the revolution with only a nominal link to the English state. Virginia was on the brink of battle, but word of the fall of Barbados deflated support for the fight except among the most militant royalists. That colony fell in March 1651 without bloodshed. The other rebellious colonies backed down. Antigua dropped its belligerent stance in the face of the fleet stationed at nearby Barbados.

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Bermuda caved in despite never receiving an official visit, as the tide in the Atlantic clearly turned against the King. Word that Charles II had been defeated at the Battle of Worcester in September 1651 undermined the resolve of his supporters; the news of the rout was disseminated by the Commonwealth to ensure that all those inclined toward royalism knew that theirs was a lost cause. Although a relatively minor affair, Virginia’s royalist rebellion later took on major significance in the colony’s myth-making. A modest influx of former royalist officers at the end of the Civil Wars, in conjunction with this rebellion, would be central to the later creation of the image of Virginia as a haven for gentlemen supporters of the King. Long after the American Revolution had sundered the tie to the British monarchy, Virginia’s first families would proudly boast of their Cavalier ancestry. Although they did not care to do so, many more families could trace their genealogical roots to less romantic ancestors, including some religious reformers and even the occasional indentured servant. The governor Sir William Berkeley, with his consistent adherence to the King, contributed to this image.

CHANGES WROUGHT

BY

REVOLUTION

.................................................................................................................. Over the course of the revolution many changes—some long lasting, others with a more short-term impact—overtook the English Atlantic. In areas as far flung as religion, imperial policies, labour, and the rhetoric of identity, the colonies were caught up in their own version of the revolutionary changes that tore apart the three kingdoms. As soon as Parliament gained the upper hand in England, well before it killed the King and inaugurated a new government, it began to change the religious establishment in England. The Church of England was effectively disbanded, and Parliament appointed an ‘Assembly of Divines’ to create an alternative. The Westminster Assembly ultimately endorsed a Presbyterian system much like that in Scotland, but the political will to impose a uniform ecclesiastical settlement on the entire country had by that time evaporated. The message that went out from the centre to the colonies was to abolish the Church of England and to support godly reformation of both Church and society. In theory at least, the example to follow was that offered by the major colonies in New England, where a Congregationalist Church order had been erected and the government promoted godliness. In some senses, the wider Atlantic world did follow the pattern set in these colonies, recruiting ministers from among recent Harvard graduates and attempting to pass Sabbath laws and similar legislation. Yet Massachusetts, New Haven, and Connecticut (the three colonies most closely associated with New England orthodoxy) vigorously suppressed dissent in a way that offended many supporters of Parliament in England, which limited the impact of their example. The New Model Army was rife with religious diversity, as were the streets of London, and only the most religiously conservative members of Parliament thought it

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wise to enforce conformity when so many of Parliament’s allies were radicals. Religious reformers in England first eagerly studied New England’s church order and then turned away from it when its repressive potential became clear. By 1656 when Quaker missionaries first arrived in New England, the region was already well known for its persecuting spirit. Massachusetts Bay Colony would execute four of them, making it the only place where the widely travelled (and often persecuted) Quakers were killed outright for their adherence to this new sect. Despite the hesitation to endorse fully the model of a godly reformed polity promulgated as the ‘New England way’ in this era, a decided shift occurred, which I have elsewhere called the ‘puritanization’ of the Atlantic.10 The term ‘Puritan’ although widely used for the New England colonies until the early eighteenth century, appears a much more complicated term when put into the context of the revolutionary English Atlantic world. The movement it denotes in English history fragmented during the 1640s, with the godly opposition to the Church of England disbursed among various churches and sects and no longer forming anything like a unified movement. The broad goals of the Puritans, however, largely guided religious policy during the Interregnum, and those general goals shaped religious policy for the plantations. Implementing Sabbath observance, policing moral infractions, and watching for signs of witchcraft were all consistent with this position, and an upswing in all these activities can be charted through the English Atlantic in these years. The triumph of the godly at home was also interpreted as licensing the forces of anti-popery in the wider Atlantic, so that opponents of Catholic proprietor Lord Baltimore unseated the government he had placed over his province of Maryland on the grounds that a papist in authority was by definition a violation of the revolutionary settlement. Maryland witnessed yet another civil war in the Battle of the Severn as a result of the antagonisms thereby unleashed. In a break with the official ‘Puritan’ position on the Church of England—that it required reformation but was at root a true church—newly triumphant officials in England took a harsher view of the Church, ordering its dismantling. Adherence to the Church of England rite became associated with disloyalty to the new regime, while embrace of a broadly Puritan or even a more narrow anti-Anglican position was interpreted as support for revolution. In part propelled by interest in revolutionary England, the first sustained effort to evangelize Native Americans within the British Atlantic occurred during these years as well. A group of natives, interested in fending off settlers and rival Indians, asked to come under the protection of the government of Massachusetts in the mid-1640s. Around the same time the radical Samuel Gorton made a bid to use alliance with local Indians in his campaign against encroachments by the over-mighty Bay colony. When he earned the endorsement of the Earl of Warwick, leaders of Massachusetts decided that a campaign to evangelize local Native Americans, beginning with those who had recently come into the colony’s orbit, would offset the threat posed by Gorton. It would also, they hoped, enhance the colony’s flagging reputation in England. The government recruited clergyman John Eliot for a one-year stint as missionary (in addition to his duties as pastor to the Roxbury congregation), thereby launching a second career that

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would earn Eliot the sobriquet ‘Apostle to the Indians’. Former Plymouth governor Edward Winslow eventually went to England as the agent of the Bay colony, where he promoted these missionary activities in order to gain support for the effort. A series of pamphlets describing the efforts, published with titles that played on the image of sunlight suffusing the darkness of Native New England, appeared from 1647. By 1649 Parliament was fully behind the project and created the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England. Like so much else in this era, the new corporation was the first in what would later emerge as a standard edifice in the architecture of the state, anticipating the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and other organizations. The corporation raised funds, partly by appeals from the pulpits of the parishes in England and Wales, to support the work of Eliot and other missionaries. At the height of its influence, Eliot’s system of Praying Indian villages would number two dozen. He would experiment with an Old Testament governing structure for them based on his own utopian vision of the ideal society, one he was unable to persuade England to adopt. More significant for the future of the English Atlantic than these inconclusive religious changes was the imperial vision promulgated by the Commonwealth government and endorsed both by the Protectorate and, subsequently, the restored monarchy. The Commonwealth that was created after Charles’s death promoted a vision of a politically uniform and commercially integrated empire. Parliament asserted its control over the governance of the plantations, removing proprietors, recalling charters, and declaring its authority to limit trade. In a highly significant 1650 act against the rebel plantations, the Commonwealth laid out an expansive view of its role. The betterknown 1651 ‘Navigation Act’ instituted one part of that vision, channelling colonial trade into English ports and placing duties on various products, but Parliament’s ambition for its role in the empire was far more capacious than the mere control of trade. It embraced a new interventionism, completely reversing the minimalist approach of the early Stuarts, meanwhile claiming authority in an area never touched by Parliament before. The subsequent governments of the Interregnum followed the path laid out by the legislation of 1650 and 1651, attempting to control the settlements, their government, and their trade from the centre. Parliament’s move to control trade occurred in the context of an emerging colonial economic system, one dominated by profitable monoculture and insatiable demand for labour. Over the decade prior to the regicide, a colonial economy had begun to take shape, with increased traffic in shipping and regional variations. The direction of change was clearest in Barbados, where sugar cultivation created growing profits but also generated demand for labourers that was being filled increasingly through the African slave trade. Barbados was first to embrace the ‘sugar and slaves’ model that would eventually dominate the British Caribbean, while the smaller English-held West Indian islands continued to rely upon indentured servants and tobacco cultivation. The Chesapeake colonies had developed similarly, importing many indentured servants to work the tobacco fields. Further north, New England lacked the climate for profitable monoculture. The region depended upon a more varied economic base that combined

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extractive industries (especially based on exploiting the region’s forests), mixed farming, and livestock. New England was also becoming a centre of trade, building ships that plied the Atlantic to sell the products of its region and buy those of others. This level of economic activity attracted Parliament’s attention. Capturing the profits from colonial trade seemed a worthy goal in 1650 because recent economic developments demonstrated their potential profitability. The growing reliance on unfree labour and the imposition of centralized control over their economic and political affairs pushed leading colonists to articulate claims to the rights of ‘freeborn Englishmen’.11 The idea that the English enjoyed freedoms beyond those of other Europeans was an old one, and it played a large role in the political discourse of the English Revolution. Parliament’s supporters cited the Magna Carta and a tradition of political representation against an overreaching royal authority that threatened tyranny. Colonists turned that language against the Parliament. They characterized the Commonwealth’s move to take control of colonial polities and trade as a violation of colonists’ rights. The rebel colonies of Barbados and Virginia both issued declarations to that effect, asserting their right to continue to trade as they chose despite the recently passed laws. Planters who relied heavily on enslaved Africans or unfree Europeans as labourers accused the English government of attempting to enslave them. This rhetorical battle over the rights of freeborn Englishmen and the alleged effort to deny those rights through enslavement shaped a discourse about what it meant to be English and free at mid-century. Issues of identity and rights were debated just at the moment when the English planters took up the practice of purchasing human chattel; it was a volatile combination.

WESTERN DESIGN

.................................................................................................................. Many of the trends in the English Atlantic culminated in Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design of 1655. The attack on the Spanish West Indies that resulted in the English capture of the colony of Jamaica acted out the deepest religious animosities at the heart of the revolution. Anti-Catholicism, which had been reinvigorated by the exaggerated reports of rebel Irishmen massacring innocent Protestant settlers in the 1641 rebellion, influenced the fears of the King and united much of the opposition to royal policy. The design extended the state’s new interventionism, as the government seized a colony from a foreign power for the first time. Acting in ways that were consistent with the imperial vision laid out by the Commonwealth government in 1650–1, Cromwell demonstrated how a vigorous imperial state might act. The fleet he sent to prosecute the design enforced the new economic policies, taking ships that traded in violation of the Navigation Acts with Barbados and other colonies. The seizure of numerous Dutch ships (and the sale of the slaves taken from these prizes) signalled the intention to enforce the new policies.

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The major event within the English Atlantic during the course of the revolution, the Western Design was an ambitious plan to unseat the Spanish from their New World empire. When Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector in December 1653, he inherited a war with the Dutch from the Commonwealth government. This war had been consistent with Parliament’s economic ambitions, since it targeted a primary rival in trade. Cromwell, who hoped for cooperation with the Protestant Dutch, ended that war—while exacting some concessions, such as an apology for the notorious Amboyna affair—and moved quickly against his own favoured target, the Spanish holdings in the Americas. Cromwell objected to the Spanish for their Catholicism, of course, but also for their tight hold on most of the best parts of the Americas. English (like French and Dutch) colonization had been forced to the fringes of Iberian-held lands; these later and less powerful colonizers had been able to take only the least attractive areas, such as the eastern Caribbean and the northern reaches of North America. Spanish policies not only excluded English trade but also officially prohibited any English presence in the Caribbean. (A truce of sorts allowed non-Iberian colonization in the fringe regions, and the Spanish had ceased actively attempting to eradicate those settlements. Any move toward the centre, however, would be greeted by stiff opposition, in theory.) The history of exclusion and occasional prosecution of English merchants and settlers riled Cromwell and his allies, who had long advocated an aggressive policy against the Spanish. Spain extracted great wealth from the silver mines of its colonies, and the thought of taking the plate fleet that carried that ore to Europe (or of seizing the mines where the extraction occurred) added to the attraction of war against Spain. The outcome of the design was, in the short term, as discouraging as the vision behind it was grand. Cromwell’s orders to the commissioners charged with implementing the design revealed that he aimed to take the entire Spanish American empire, starting most likely with one of the major islands. After the invasion of Hispaniola failed abysmally, the fleet limped off to the small and relatively unattractive island of Jamaica. Proceeding to botch the invasion even of this thinly populated island, the force settled into a long and deadly occupation period, in which a Spanish opposition force remained on the island and neither side gained complete mastery. The only success story—and it was a potentially embarrassing one—originated with the piratical attacks on Spanish shipping and the mainland, which generated the only profit the island was able to produce in the first years. The occupation of Jamaica lasted until the eve of the Restoration, and it cost the Protector much in men, money, and reputation. The debacle on Jamaica would constitute Cromwell’s only military failure. His opponents would use it to prove that God did not smile on the Protectorate, in spite of having favoured Cromwell and his cause in earlier phases of his career. Cromwell himself found it difficult to fathom God’s intention when the design so evidentially targeted his enemies, the Spanish papists.12 Playwright William Davenant would struggle to produce operas praising Cromwell’s imperial vision, hampered by the difficulty of the material more than by godly hostility to the theatre. A century later Jamaica would be Britain’s single most important imperial holding, but in the late 1650s it was considered a costly mistake.

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The Western Design, despite its ignoble results in the near term, revealed a great deal about the direction of change in the English Atlantic. From this time forward the English—later the British state—would engage aggressively in empire building, bringing the Atlantic into play in its ongoing rivalries with other European powers. It would pursue a centralized policy for its colonies, creating mechanisms to control their governance and their trade from afar. The state would not hesitate to use force to implement its policies, as the seizure of numerous Dutch ships in Carlisle Bay in 1654 by the design fleet portended. The government—whether under Protector, Commonwealth, or monarch—would expect colonies to support its larger military and imperial goals. The conquest of Jamaica was begun with men and materials recruited from various island colonies, and securing the island would involve similar appeals for settlers and other support from colonies as far away as New England. This expedition marked the beginning of a long-standing expectation that thriving plantations held a reserve labour force that could be called upon in times of need, and would be used increasingly over the course of imperial wars that recurred over the next century. If Cromwell’s reach exceeded his grasp in Jamaica, his general conception of the empire had staying power.

END

OF THE

REVOLUTION

.................................................................................................................. After the death of Oliver Cromwell, as the revolutionary state lurched from one settlement to another on its way to the restoration of the Stuarts, the residents of the English Atlantic again watched and laboured to understand events from afar. The move to replace Oliver with his son Richard seemed appropriate to observers steeped in monarchical forms and accustomed to dynastic succession. But as the younger Cromwell stepped down and other stratagems were attempted, Atlantic inhabitants with an interest in the outcome felt once again their distance from the centre. They watched for the arrival of news and shared any bits of information they received, much as they had done in the first years of war and revolution. Those who had been placed in positions of authority by the senior Cromwell worried that their credentials were now questionable. This problem was felt acutely by the commander of the military force on Jamaica, who wrote home begging for a renewed commission. He worried that he could be prosecuted for executing mutineers without proper authority. As events spiralled toward the conclusion of Restoration, supporters of the revolution watched with alarm and tried to understand God’s meaning in this unexpected turn of events. Others simply feared the vulnerability that an unstable centre seemed to create; Barbados for instance worried over rumours of an impending Spanish invasion. News was slow to arrive and difficult to verify, leaving colonists to wonder what was going on. When the Restoration finally occurred, the reaction in the Atlantic settlements was unsurprisingly mixed. Virginia had the great good fortune of having invited its former governor, the staunch royalist Sir William Berkeley, to resume his office prior to the

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Restoration. This serendipitous move later vindicated the colony’s claim to undying royalism, bolstering its reputation with the new King and helping to lay the foundation for its later myth-making agenda. In Barbados, another formerly royalist colony, the government did not manage to anticipate the Restoration, but did greet it with enthusiasm all the same. Governor Thomas Modiford—who had cooperated with the Parliament when it suppressed the rebellion and supported the Protector against local planters who objected to centralized power—blithely declared to the Restoration meeting of the island assembly: ‘You have been summoned in his Majesties name, the sweet sound whereof hath not for almost these ten years been heard in the Island.’13 Soon replaced as governor by his rival Edward Walrond (a man of more straightforward royalist credentials), Modiford would nonetheless bounce back to become governor of Jamaica under Charles II. Although no colonial government rebelled against the Restoration, some greeted it with little enthusiasm. Most New England governments were tepid toward the return of the King. New Haven went furthest in showing its displeasure, openly sheltering escaped regicides in defiance of the King’s command. The settlement would lose its autonomy, absorbed into the newly chartered colony of Connecticut. Those who, like John Winthrop Jr, were willing to approach Charles II for support gained advantages (such as charters that benefited them to the detriment of their neighbours). John Eliot so completely misread events that he sent off his plan for a reorganization of the English government according to his Old Testament models as implemented in the Praying Indian villages on the eve of the Restoration. He soon had to endure public humiliation at the hands of the Massachusetts government which wanted to dissociate itself from his radical proposal. Whether the Restoration was seen as a treasured boon or a dispiriting reversal, everyone acceded to it when it occurred. The Restoration brought Charles II an Atlantic dominion very different from the one his father had ruled two decades before. Jamaica was a notable addition, and the tiny settlement on Surinam was another new acquisition; a few colonies too had slipped from the English grasp, most notably Providence Island. From a population of 50,000, the Stuart colonies had by 1660 quadrupled. Rather than a migrant society made up largely of young English-born men, the colonies now included many non-English residents (Scots, Irish, and Africans among others), a sizeable minority of Americanborn residents, and a slightly less skewed sex ratio. Many of the people who had come into the English-controlled Atlantic plantations over these decades had been unfree at the time of their arrival—slaves, indentured servants, and transported prisoners. A heavy reliance on slavery and convict labour was one legacy of the revolutionary era. So too was an increasingly assertive landowning class, confident of its rights. Like the kingdoms which he reclaimed, Charles’s American dominions were far more diverse religiously than had been the case in his father’s reign. The revolutionary era’s rise in religious experimentation had spilled over into the Atlantic, so that Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Jews, and Protestants from various European traditions all vied with the re-established Church of England. Its religious diversity would be yet another lasting legacy for the English Atlantic.

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Although the Atlantic was vastly changed by the experience of two decades of upheaval and experimentation at the centre, Charles accepted it largely as it was. He demanded that every settlement acknowledge his authority (in this he mimicked every new regime since the regicide), but he changed little of what he found. The Navigation Act continued, re-enacted in 1661 and expanded thenceforth, as did the larger imperial vision behind it. The turn toward slavery was embraced as well, with a new Royal African Company chartered to continue the work started under the Interregnum governments. The authorities continued to ship convict labour to work New World crops, but the flow henceforth contained opponents of the King rather than his supporters, along with the usual allotments of thieves and prostitutes. Despite efforts at the centre to undermine religious alternatives, the plantations remained religiously diverse places. Indeed Charles II’s own affinity for toleration of religious difference could be more easily enacted in the colonies than at home, and he championed the Quakers against the authorities of Massachusetts Bay and authorized a number of new colonies with liberal religious policies. The changes wrought by the revolution were left undisturbed, even though the King never acknowledged their origins in the revolution that had killed his father.

NOTES 1. Additional information about the topic of this chapter can be found in Pestana, English Atlantic. 2. The most common term in use at the time for a colony or settlement was a ‘plantation’. Here I have followed that usage. On the rare occasion when I refer to a specific property owned by an individual, it will be clear from the context. 3. George Fenwick to Sir Gilbert Gerrart and Sir William Marsham, 10 November 1643, Seabrook, Egerton MSS 2648, fo. 1v, British Library. 4. William Johnson to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 19 January 1642[/3]. Hay of Haystoun Papers, GD 34/923 (36), National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. 5. Moore, Pilgrims. 6. Winthrop, Journal, 518–19. 7. Colonial Records, Bermuda, 1, page number omitted. 8. In this period the year began on 25 March in Britain, while the rest of Europe had already switched to 1 January. 30 January 1648/9 thus indicates that in England the year 1648 was waning, whereas elsewhere the following year had already begun. 9. Bremer, ‘In Defense of Regicide’, 117–22. 10. Pestana, English Atlantic, 87–8. 11. For a discussion of this language see ibid., ch. 5. 12. Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell’, 125–45. 13. Modiford, ‘Journal of the Proceedings’, 15–17.

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WORKS CITED Bermuda Archives. Colonial Records, 1. Hamilton, Bermuda. Bremer, Francis J. ‘In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton on the Execution of Charles I’. William and Mary Quarterly 2nd ser. 37 (1980), 117–22. Fenwick, George. Letter to Sir Gilbert Gerrart and Sir William Marsham, 10 November 1643. Seabrook, Egerton MSS 2648, fo. 1v. British Library. Johnson, William. Letter to Sir James Hay and Archibald Hay, 19 January 1642/3. Hay of Haystoun Papers, GD 34/923 (36). National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh. Modiford, Thomas. ‘Journal of the Proceedings of the Governor and Councel of Barbados from the 29th of May 1660. To the 30th of November 1686’. Colonial Entry Books, CO31/1, 15–17. National Archives, Kew, United Kingdom. Moore, Susan H. Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. National Archives, Kew, Great Britain. Colonial Entry Books, CO31/1. Pestana, Carla G. The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Winthrop, John. The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Richard S. Dunn et al. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1996. Worden, Blair. ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sins of Achan’, in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best (eds.), History, Society and the Churches: Essays in Honor of Owen Chadwick. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, 125–45.

CHAPTER

4

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POLITICAL THOUGHT ....................................................................................................... GLENN BURGESS

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

.................................................................................................................. From Edgehill to Preston, from Marston Moor to Wexford, the people of Britain and Ireland fought one another on the battlefield; they tried and executed their King, abolished monarchy and the House of Lords, established a republic, and briefly possessed a written constitution (which gave them a legislature that had representation from England, Scotland, and Ireland). Through the printing press—and through sermons and songs, gossip, and conversations—these people struggled to justify the things they were doing, and to understand the purposes that they hoped to pursue. The meaning of events was always essentially contestable and that is why the history of political thought during the English Revolution is important. As people argued, and sought to persuade or manipulate others, they constructed multiple understandings of the political events that they lived through. This multiplicity should be a warning to historians seeking to understand the causes of the revolution or the reasons for which people took sides: from the start, matters of cause, justification, and objectives were the subject of argument and disagreement. Motives were diverse; but the events themselves meant different things to different people who experienced them. Hindsight may be a fine thing; but it can blind historians as much as it can help them. In the period before 1642 English political thought was focused on three core concepts—commonwealth, ancient constitution, and divine right. They could come together to form a powerful vision of a people joined together for their common wellbeing, guided by a king who ruled by the grace of God, through laws and customs sanctified by time and the consent of many generations. But the fit between the ideas was not always so harmonious, and in the years before and after 1640 a number of questions began to provoke more disharmony. Some of these revolved around sovereignty: where, in the last resort, or in times of conflict, did final authority really lie in a commonwealth? What was to be done if kings failed to respect those laws sanctified by

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time? Others revolved around religion: where did authority over the Church reside, and where authority over the Christian conscience?

POLITICS

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RELIGION

.................................................................................................................. Two interwoven imperatives shaped English political thinking during the two decades of revolutionary turmoil: the imperative to find constitutional order and stability, and the imperative to ensure that worldly order, new or old, was compatible with the commands of God. The interplay of these imperatives runs right through the story of political thinking during the English Revolution, and is relevant to more or less every political grouping that emerged through two decades of turmoil. Understanding the interplay is not a simple task. Much of the pioneering work on the political thought of parliamentarians and royalists was interested in their legalconstitutionalist ideas. Consequently these have been well explored.1 Forged in the months that preceded the outbreak of civil war, as Parliament sought arguments for refusing to compromise or to obey royal commands, a body of ideas developed that linked justification of Parliament’s actions with key themes in English common law constitutionalism.2 Very important in the circumstances of 1642/3 were four such themes. First, the parliamentary case was one of emergency. In Henry Parker’s words, ‘Parliamentary government being used as Physicke, not diet . . . has in it all that is excellent in all forms of Government whatsoever.’3 It could be acknowledged that in England the authority to make laws and to tax resided in King-in-Parliament. All things were done by royal authority, but that royal authority had to be exercised through appropriate channels. Kings were strengthened by Parliament when they ruled to promote liberty. But what happened when the normal operation of King-inParliament failed to work, and there seemed to be no way of settling matters? Focusing on the idea of emergency, parliamentarian writers were able (with varying levels of conviction and sincerity) to maintain the niceties of loyalty to a sovereign king, while denying that in the unusual conditions of the times they were obliged to follow his personal commands. When war came in August 1642 it was interpreted by parliamentarians as defensive (a second key theme). Parliament was defending itself, and its traditional constitutional position, and defending the people of England, against an aggression that would enslave them all if it was not withstood.4 A key ingredient behind the emergency and the aggression that prevailed was untrustworthiness. It was not safe, even well before August 1642, to trust a king who had given ample evidence of a willingness to use force against law, and to behave mendaciously. As a result, law and constitution could not operate, for they required mutual trust between King and people (or their representatives). A king who might use his army to enable him to retract his promises and agreements could hardly be trusted to respect the law. King and Parliament needed to work together, but if they could not, then

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history showed that it was safer for the people that the two Houses of Parliament, the Lords and the Commons, should together lead the nation through the emergency, making, at least temporarily, laws (parliamentary ordinances) in their own name, without the King. They, too, should command the army, and appoint officers of state, for—and this is another important theme—the King had been led astray by the advice of his ministers and clergy. These evil counsellors misled the King, hardening his heart and closing his ears against the good advice that he should have received either from his born counsellors (the Lords) or those elected by his people to give him advice (the Commons), as Henry Parker suggested, ‘public advice be[ing] commonly better than private’.5 Secretly, evil advisers plotted to overthrow constitutional restrictions on the use of authority; or, alternatively, they plotted to reintroduce popery to England. One does not get far into the voluminous pamphlet literature of the early 1640s before confronting the intertwining of politics with religion. Historians have struggled with the subject, perhaps because there is probably no one right answer to the question of whether the struggles of the English Revolution were ‘really’ or ‘primarily’ political or religious. Justifications for resistance to the King’s commands were—early on at least—predominantly legal, and even Puritan ministers usually insisted, as did Stephen Marshall (author of the landmark Puritan sermon Meroz Cursed), that religious war was illegitimate, and a people could only defend their liberties and their religion within a constitutional framework. In England, at least, the law did allow for such defence in emergencies; but had it not, then the people of England would have been expected to suffer passively. This remained a powerful view amongst the Puritan clergy, rooted as it was in the fundamental principle that religion could not be propagated by force; but there were other ways of tying constitutional and religious principles together.6 One of these was the idea that the Church of England was a church by law established—and therefore by law protected and defended. With a little ingenuity, writers could argue that the English constitution allowed Parliament (which shared, it might be thought, in the King’s royal supremacy) to lead both its defence and its reform. This could tie a number of things together. Parliamentarians were acting within the law (albeit in unusual and untypical circumstances that pushed the law to its limits); but they were not just acting in ‘secular’ matters, because the law allowed them to defend the integrity of the Protestant Reformation both from political aggression and from spiritual corruption. On Parliament’s authority the Westminster Assembly was established, to reform the Church and safeguard it from the forces of apostasy that had undermined it internally from the 1620s onward. Political ideas are not necessarily a good guide to motive and intention. They are intended to persuade and to justify, and so—at least when expressed in public and in print—will be shaped by the expectations of the audience at which they are aimed. Very often these expectations are understood through a set of values thought to be shared by writers and audience. In the early 1640s, these values related to lawfulness, to the commonwealth (or the idea of salus populi and public good), and to divine right (in the broad sense of an expectation that rulers in a Christian commonwealth derived

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their legitimacy in part from some sort of conformity with God’s commands). While the cluster of ideas that we have been exploring attached particular importance to the value of lawfulness, and addressed values relating to the importance of pursuing religious duties in ways that subordinated them to lawfulness, we should not assume from this anything (one way or the other) about how people might personally prioritize between these two things. Increasingly, though, the cluster of values and expectations surrounding Christian rulership became less about how one acquired authority and more about how it was exercised.7 As the 1640s progressed, the demand for reformation of religion, to protect England from any further backsliding—a demand already widely felt in the Long Parliament which was bombarded with petitions for religious reform and instructed by fast-day sermons encouraging the nation to rescue itself from religious torpor and win God’s favour once more—took hold, and began to take diverse forms. Some of those will be explored at later points in this chapter; but one that had a particular impact on the development of parliamentarian thought was the political use of the idea of covenant. The idea has a long history before the 1640s, but was given particular point by Parliament’s treaty with the Scottish Covenanter opponents of Charles I, the Solemn League and Covenant ‘for reformation and defence of religion, the honour and happiness of the King, and the peace and safety of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland’ (September 1643). This could be interpreted (particularly by the Scots and their keenest English supporters) as a covenant to pursue religious reform, and a justification for a war to that end, though there were many who saw it as much more defensive and cautious.8 Royalists were not blind to the intertwining of religion and politics amongst their opponents. John Bramhall, for example, argued that attacks on the King’s constitutional position (his right, for example, to veto legislation) was fuelled by the perception that he was an obstacle to reform of the Church. If his authority could be undermined, he could no longer protect the Church from the subversive call for further reformation. Generally, royalists themselves kept things cleaner, vesting the royal supremacy over the Church in the King alone, and deploring both the enthusiasm and the incitement of the multitude in their opponents’ propaganda. Many may well have been more interested to defend the episcopal Church of England from Puritan zeal than to defend the King from parliamentary resistance, but they saw the two as largely going together. ‘No bishop, no king’, James I had said in 1604; ‘support the king to support the bishops’ was the echo from some of his son’s followers. Not all royalists were like this, though, and the royalist spectrum included Erastians who thought that religion was best kept out of, or subordinate to, political matters, and even the odd supporter of something like religious toleration, who might believe that a king would be better off not aligning himself too closely with any confessional position in a world in which confessional differences fuelled resistance and war. There were also royalists who rather doubted the King’s religious reliability, and insisted therefore on a quasi-independent Church, governing itself, and led by apostolic bishops. The King should protect this Church but not interfere in it.9

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KINGS

AND

REPUBLICS

.................................................................................................................. Defenders of the King were not slow to reply to Parliament’s arguments, and before the end of 1641 a royalist brand of political thought began to form. At one level, royalists and parliamentarians can look rather similar to one another. The majority of them, at least for most of the 1640s, defended their position by reference to a shared acceptance of the sovereignty of King-in-Parliament, and a strong commitment to the rule of law. Certainly some royalists pushed beyond this, and developed theories defending absolute and arbitrary monarchy; but most balanced personal allegiance to the King and an assertion that it was never right to resist or actively to disobey him, with a firm faith in the capacity of common law and Parliament, functioning without resort to any fanciful emergency powers, to ensure that he was effectively limited. Charles I may have been ill-advised during the 1630s, but since then he had promised repeatedly to abide by the law and had abrogated past mistakes. There was no excuse for anyone to disobey, and Parliament was the aggressor, seeking to destroy the fine balance of the constitution. Sovereign, irresistible, and limited: such was the king of England. Royalists differed about how authority was acquired by kings—many believed he ruled by divine right acquired through legitimate hereditary succession; some thought he ruled as a patriarchal king, with powers originally possessed by all fathers and inherited from Adam; some—the Great Tew royalists in particular—believed that kings derived their authority by consent from the people, who had alienated to him any rights they might originally have possessed to defend themselves. Defenders of the King in their Answer to the xix Propositions portrayed the English king as limited and prevented from abusing his authority by virtue of the fact that England was a mixed monarchy, with King, Lords, and Commons representing the three estates of the realm. Wiser royalists, notably Sir Edward Hyde, future Earl of Clarendon, saw this as a mistake—the King was not one of the three estates but ruler over them all (clergy, Lords, and Commons). The Answer sought to portray the King’s cause as moderate and unthreatening, although this should not necessarily be taken at face value. But it was mercilessly exploited by parliamentarians who seized on the idea that England was a mixed monarchy to justify the claim that the King was merely one part of the mixture, not a sovereign ruler, and that when the three estates could not agree with one another, it was safer to follow the two Houses rather than the King.10 For Charles Herle, while in general all three estates should be coordinate and work together, nonetheless two were more than one; Lords and Commons outweighed the King.11 Not surprisingly, some royalists were keen to repudiate theories of mixed monarchy. Royalists who went beyond the ‘constitutionalist’ position of most of the early defences of the King certainly existed, most notably Sir Robert Filmer (though he was not alone). For them, Parliament was at best an advisory body, and the King really legislated alone, ruling by his own will. He was able to use arbitrary and extreme

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measures when circumstances justified—and he was the judge of when circumstances did so justify. A king might become a tyrant if he used arbitrary measures inappropriately, but there was no authority other than himself to determine whether this was the case, and the people were required to obey him nonetheless.12 For these royalists, sovereignty looked much as it had done to the great French thinker of the seventeenth century, Jean Bodin, whose thought seeped across Europe and helped produce the modern idea of state sovereignty. From this perspective, sovereign authority had to be unmixed and undivided (if it was not, it was not really sovereign at all). When the chips were down, kings were arbitrary rulers. Parliamentarians did not reject the idea of monarchy, and shared with royalists an attempt to interpret—not reject—a constitution rooted in the primacy of King-inParliament, royal supremacy, and respect for law. Even at the time of the regicide in January 1649, there was a large dissenting element of Presbyterians amongst the old parliamentarians who held fast to the view that loyalty to monarchy and King was inherent in the parliamentary cause, and that the regicide was therefore illegitimate. Even the parliamentarian Independents who supported regicide perhaps did so more with an exasperation that led them to believe God had finally spoken clearly against their scheming and dishonest King than with a settled conviction of the inadequacy of monarchy as such. But among the Independents and Levellers, there were certainly supporters of the parliamentary cause who, if they did not explicitly condemn monarchy, nonetheless left little room for it. During the mid-1640s, the cluster of ideas and arguments that Parliament had used to justify its fight against the King were appropriated by other pamphleteers, keen to affirm the principles behind Parliament’s (sometimes shifty and self-serving) words, but asking pointedly whether Parliament actually lived up to those principles. Preeminent among them was a loose grouping of writers, mainly London based, that came to be known as the Levellers.13 (The name was, at least initially, a slur: an accusation that they possessed a secret intention to destroy social hierarchy and difference, and, along with them, private property.) Emerging as an identifiable tendency in 1646, the Levellers quickly acquired support and influence in the parliamentary armies, and when the search for peace and stability began at the end of the First Civil War, they were well placed to have a voice, though it was a voice that the army’s leadership chose ultimately to ignore. Political ferment within the army led to the calling of the Putney Debates, which began on 28 October 1647 and ran into early November. The record of those debates remains an astonishing document, enabling us to listen to people arguing with a passion and a furious reason that never loses its freshness. The Levellers used the debates as an opportunity to present an outline constitution—the Agreement of the People—to establish ‘a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right’. These grounds contained two key principles, the first that political authority should be entrusted to a Parliament chosen every second year by the consent of the people; and the second that the power of this Parliament was inferior to that of the people who chose it, and that these people had reserved to themselves some matters in which

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Parliament could not therefore dabble. Crucial among these reserved matters was liberty of conscience: ‘matters of religion and the ways of Gods worship are not at all entrusted by us to any human power, because therein we cannot remit or exceed a tittle of what our consciences dictate to be the mind of God without wilful sin’, though Parliament could determine the public form of religion so long as it was non-compulsive.14 The Levellers’ position was grounded on a particular way of understanding God’s relationship with the humanity whom he had created. Political life was rule by consent, because God had created individuals free, and only with a person’s consent could authority be exercised over him or her; but the human conscience was accountable to God alone, and no one could alienate that accountability. Not even the consent of the governed could allow a Parliament the right to abridge people’s liberty of conscience. This position brought together the political and religious; and, though the Levellers could be flexible on many points of detail (including whether government by consent really did imply, as Colonel Thomas Rainsborough put it at Putney, the explicit consent of even ‘the poorest he that is in England’),15 they never compromised this core position. The dignity of man, as God’s creature, demanded a civil politics rooted in consent, and it demanded the freedom of the human conscience from religious coercion. Peace eluded the English people late in 1647, but the Levellers were again to have influence in the army in the months before the regicide, and attempts were made to refine the Agreement of the People so that it could be acceptable to army and Puritan leaders. Events, however, evaded their control. The Rump Parliament did not adopt a version of the Agreement, and Leveller influence on the army was expunged during 1649. At the same time the Levellers were fending off claims from those impatient to cooperate with God’s transformation of the world that their politics failed to rise to the challenge God posed to the English people: you have destroyed a king, but can you bring into being a true Godly commonwealth? There was no space and less affection for monarchy in these ideas, though some Levellers in their more pragmatic moments might have been prepared to seek religious liberty from a properly reduced and confined monarch. But deep in parliamentary argument there was the foundation for more explicitly anti-monarchical arguments, to be exploited by John Milton and picked up by other defenders of ‘republican’ government in the 1650s. Monarchy, it might be argued, could in theory take more limited forms, but in practice these were always unreliable. There was little to ensure that the limits worked; and even the most limited of monarchies was liable to decay and become arbitrary over time or in adversity. Limited monarchy was a wolf dressed as a sheep, and the wolf was none too keen to keep its clothing on. So the subjects of monarchs tended to be in the position of slaves, if not directly oppressed by arbitrary exactions, then living always subject to the will of someone other than themselves. However long kings refrained—of their own good will—from exercising their wills tyrannically, the threat was always there. No security could be given, and this state of uncertainty was tantamount to a state of slavery. Many parliamentarians and Covenanters not overtly ‘republican’ advanced arguments like this—Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex (1644) was

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full of them for example—and it was a small step from here to the conclusion that no true commonwealth amongst a free people (i.e. a political community that was ruled for the good of all and not subject to the whims of one man) could be a monarchy. The Commonwealth government that followed the regicide showed some reluctance to declare unequivocally its republican credentials, but nonetheless during these years (1649–53) such arguments were presented in editorials in the Commonwealth’s official newsbook, Mercurius politicus, later collected into a pamphlet, The Excellencie of a Free State (1656). Their author was Marchamont Nedham, and for him a genuinely free commonwealth was characterized by good laws that were well administered, the power to alter your government from time to time, and an unaltered course of elected popular assemblies, chosen by free elections. This was a true condition of freedom and safety, and it was unmistakably not a monarchy: the key institutions were freely elected Parliaments, with accountable magistrates to execute the business of government. John Milton in 1660 made the case against monarchy with even greater force: for a free people to (re)admit a king would be to ‘conclude themselves his servants and vassals, and so renounce their own freedom’. The subjects of monarchs were soft, base, vicious, servile, and ‘sheepishest’.16 Milton’s vehemence may have been fuelled by a realization that in 1660 readmitting monarchy was just what his fellow citizens were about to do.

PASTS

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FUTURES

.................................................................................................................. Time is central to revolutions, which so often aspire to found a new order (a novus ordo seclorum, as the Great Seal of the United States famously proclaims). In the French example, a new revolutionary calendar started time afresh. Breaking from the shackles of the past is perhaps the most usual of all revolutionary aspirations, though the breaking often proves easier than avoiding a new set of shackles (as Milton noted, with respect to the aspiration for religious liberty, ‘New presbyter is but old priest writ large’). From the start those who made the English Revolution began to assert their freedom in time. On 26 May 1642 the two Houses of Parliament issued a Remonstrance in which they responded to the charge that their actions in withstanding the King’s commands ‘want[ed] the warrant of any precedent therein, but what ourselves have made’. The reply was resounding: ‘if we made any precedents in this parliament, we have made them for posterity, upon the same or better grounds of reason and law than those were, upon which our predecessors first made any for us’. The future was not bound by the past. Regardless of what our ancestors had endured, the Levellers believed, ‘we are the men of the present age, and ought to be absolutely free from . . . Arbitrary Power’.17 Time was not, though, chiefly a secular business. It was framed by the crucial moments of God’s intervention in human affairs—by the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, and the expectation of the Second Coming of Christ, the rule of the saints

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on earth, and the Last Days. For many in the mid-seventeenth century, these future events seemed imminent, and as a result the world would be transfigured, its corrupt institutions overturned. This transfiguration seemed even closer in the months following the regicide: it had begun. How could it seem otherwise to those infused by the reiterated calls for Reformation that had poured from the pulpit during the 1640s?18 God had called upon the English people to repent of their sins, to purify their faith and their Church; they had responded, imperfectly as with all human endeavours; but perhaps God would be satisfied enough and bring the work to its fulfilment. The process might still, on occasion, be portrayed as renovation and not innovation; but at this level it was renovation so thorough as to call in question all human institutions. Many talked of throwing off the ‘Norman Yoke’, the oppression of the people imposed by force in 1066, but Gerrard Winstanley was clear that this could hardly be considered sufficient: The Reformation that England now is to endeavour, is not to remove the Norman Yoke only, and to bring us back to be governed by those laws that were before William the Conqueror came in; as if that were the rule or mark we aim at: No, that is not it; but the Reformation is according to the word of God, and that is the pure Law of righteousness before the Fall, which made all things, unto which all things are to be restored.19

Reformation, the word of God, the sense of a future in which none of the purely human features of the social and political world was guaranteed to survive: this was the dust from which was made the cluster of ideas we call ‘radicalism’. Radical groups proliferated in the years just before and just after the regicide. Almost all possessed some element of millennial expectation, if only to provide a basis for expecting, or allowing, a new world to come into being. A number of themes linked individuals and groups into a broad ferment, however much they might disagree passionately on the details. One was the insistence that social and political order should be modelled in conformity with God’s expectations; another was a consequent critique of most established institutions (monarchy, lordship, organized churches, private property, lawyers); and a third was a commitment to religious liberty—i.e. the liberty to follow God’s true path without hindrance from worldly authority (and possibly without respect for it too). Abiezer Coppe reminded his contemporaries that, though they had been frightened by the possibility of ‘sword-levelling, man-levelling’ during the 1640s, something altogether more awesome was in prospect by the end of that decade. ‘The Eternal God, the mighty Leveller is coming, yea come, even at the door.’20 Not that manlevelling was altogether to be rejected. As the Fifth Monarchist, John Tillinghast, put it, ‘we are not to wait as Idlers do . . . and cry God help us, but we are to wait as if we would have it in by our very striving and struggling’. What precisely was to be had in was often harder to say, in part because what was sought was a receptiveness to God’s commands, and a flexibility in accommodating them.21 William Covell certainly expected the poor to benefit, like Winstanley and other Diggers, but so long as ‘the work of the Lord be done . . . I care not’. ‘Deeds are better than words’, he argued, and that was the key

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point:22 deeds to create social justice, to end oppression, to live the requirements of charity and not just to mouth them. A Christian commonwealth would be a literal commonwealth for many—a place where wealth was indeed held in common. Religious liberty was, along with social justice, another key demand of radical groups. But we should be wary about what this actually meant. There were certainly some—like the Leveller leader William Walwyn—who seemed genuinely tolerant, sceptical of excessive certainty, and eager to allow people to follow their sincerely held convictions. But for others religious liberty was allied to a zealous radicalism. It was the latitude allowed to people who wished to follow God’s commands, including the imperatives of charity and love, and an insistence that they should be held back neither by the empty formalities, petty requirements, and malicious clergy of the organized churches, nor by the civil authorities. This was not a liberty that would necessarily extend to those who were in error (e.g. Catholics or even Anglicans) or those who were blasphemers and livers of evil lives.

HOBBES

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HARRINGTON

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CONTEXT

.................................................................................................................. Among a multitude of pamphleteers and polemicists, many of them anonymous, two political thinkers stand out for their sophistication and imagination. Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington have received considerable attention from scholars, the latter only in recent decades.23 Though neither can be understood exclusively as a ‘philosopher of the English Revolution’, the thinking of both is illuminated when they are seen in relation to the intellectual context of the revolutionary period. Implicitly or explicitly, they responded to arguments that might have promoted resistance and revolution, but which also left the country destabilized. Both of them sought a recipe for a peace that was proving elusive; both thought they had found it.

Hobbes The recipe for peace presented by Thomas Hobbes was considerably the more elegant of the two, and Hobbes’s masterpiece, Leviathan, a long but wonderfully crafted piece of writing, is based on what is at bottom a simple idea. Hobbes’s simple idea occurred to him early, though the elegance with which it was presented in Leviathan took longer to be achieved. His early book The Elements of Law has as good a claim as anything to be considered the first piece of political writing produced by the English Revolution. Hobbes wrote the book at the time of the Short Parliament (April–May 1640), and so worried was he by the boldness of his arguments and the growing heat of conflict in England that he felt it prudent to go into exile in November 1640. The Elements was the earliest of the three main versions of Hobbes’s

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political thought. It was also the only work in which Hobbes—notoriously reluctant to cite other authors on whom he drew—referred to Jean Bodin. He did so to refute the erroneous opinion ‘that the sovereign power may be divided’: And if there were a commonwealth, wherein the rights of sovereignty were divided, we must confess with Bodin, Lib. II, chap. I De Republica, that they are not rightly to be called commonwealths, but the corruption of commonwealths. For if one part should have power to make the laws for all, they would by their laws at their pleasure, forbid others, to make peace or war, to levy taxes, or to yield fealty and homage without their leave; and they that had the right to make peace and war, and command the militia, would forbid the making of other laws, than what themselves liked. And though monarchies stand long, wherein the right of sovereignty hath seemed so divided, because monarchy of itself is a durable kind of government, yet monarchs have been thereby divers times thrust out of their possessions. But the truth is, that the right of sovereignty is such, as he or they that have it, cannot, though they would, give away any part thereof, and retain the rest.24

Even before the King’s Answer to the xix Propositions conjured the unhelpful image of a mixed kingship, Hobbes was insistent that sovereign authority must always be unmixed and undivided. People, Hobbes argued, when they lived outside a commonwealth (that is in a ‘state of nature’) were insecure and lived in a condition of perpetually threatened war. People sought to protect themselves from the threat posed by others by taking pre-emptive action, and so life was ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. How could humankind remove itself from this condition? Just as importantly, how could people avoid the sorts of civil war that England experienced in the 1640s, which was something close to a return to the state of nature? The answer was that they must pursue peace, for ‘all men agree on this, that Peace is Good’; and the only way in which this could be safely done was for everyone to abandon the rights they possessed in a state of nature (notably the right to protect themselves)—everyone, that is, except for one, who would become sovereign. The first law of nature required men to have a disposition towards peace; the second required ‘That a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himselfe he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe.’25 Following this command led to the creation of a commonwealth. The ‘Mortall God’, Leviathan, or the commonwealth, was defined as: One Person, of whose Acts a great Multitude, by mutuall Covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the Author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence. And he that carryeth this Person, is called Soveraigne, and said to have Soveraigne Power.26

This commonwealth was an artificial entity, created by human action, when each man entered into a covenant on these terms: ‘I Authorise and give up my Right of Governing

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my selfe, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner.’27 Men created sovereignty rather than a commonwealth: it was in the benign shadow cast by this sovereign, who had both the right to do as he saw fit to preserve the peace and the power to enforce his commands, that a commonwealth was formed. But the commonwealth would last only so long as sovereignty was one and undivided. The sovereign was the only true representative of the people. Any Parliament existed only at his will, and could advise but not command him. The sovereign could appoint all officers of state, and could make laws at will, though prudence might suggest that some of this should be moderated. There were no limits to the sovereign’s rights. All of this was a rather better answer to the nineteen propositions than the one that had been issued in the King’s name in 1642. (At the same time, given that the sovereign did not have to be a monarch, it was also a recipe for the restoration of order after 1651, when Leviathan was published, for Hobbes suggested that what mattered more was not having a legitimate hereditary king, but having an effective sovereign—any sovereign—able to maintain peace.) Hobbes’s sovereign was also more than a match for Puritans and religious zealots. In a letter as early as 1641, Hobbes had declared that ‘I am of the opinion, that Ministers ought to minister rather then governe; at least that all Church government depend on the state, and authority of the Kingdom, without which there can be no unity in the Church. Your Lordship may perhaps think this opinion, but a fancy of Philosophy. But I am sure that Experience teaches, thus much, that the dispute for [precedence] between the spiritual and civil power, has of late more than any other thing in the world, been the cause of civil wars, in all places of Christendom.’28 In Leviathan the sovereign was the chief pastor of his people. Any political influence that the clergy might possess was given to them by the sovereign (who could take it back). The Church was no more than a voluntary association of believers. It had no authority of its own, and no capacity to interfere in public affairs. Private conscience was of no public weight (God might speak to a man in his dreams, but why should the rest of us take any notice, and how do we know that the man did not just dream that God spoke to him?). There were in Christian times no true prophets, since a true prophet was expected to perform miracles, and the age of miracles had past. Hobbes’s answer to the radicals was also concerned with eschatological time, and in a detailed biblical analysis he showed that there was no warrant in a Christian kingdom for religious resistance to the sovereign, and no warrant for any belief that subjects of the sovereign had any right to cooperate with God in producing a better future. Game, set, and match to the sovereign. Hobbes may, as many historians suspect, have been an atheist, but it is hard to tell. Nonetheless, he certainly played to win; and pursued to the limit a ruthless and often sarcastic argument against the Church and any claims to independent religious authority by individuals or groups.

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Harrington Harrington, a reader of Hobbes, was also a theorist of peace. Writing a little later— Oceana was published in 1656—he was a commentator on the Cromwellian Protectorate, though far from an out-and-out supporter. Building on the ideas of Nedham and other republicans, Harrington found the recipe for peace in a rather peculiar form of republic. He provided extensive historical analysis—of classical republics (Rome especially), of the ancient Hebrew republic, and of medieval Europe and England.29 He was particularly scornful of the ‘Gothic balance’, a term which described for Harrington the ancient constitution. It led to a form of unstable mixed monarchy, in which kings never possessed sufficient property to maintain stable rule. From this historical analysis Harrington was able to deduce certain ingredients for his recipe for peace. There were some things that made a commonwealth more stable and peaceful, and some things that caused more or less perpetual violence and warfare. So what did the recipe look like? Peace required an ‘equal commonwealth’: An equal commonwealth . . . is a government established upon an equal agrarian, arising into the superstructures or three orders, the senate debating and proposing, the people resolving, and the magistracy executing by an equal rotation through the suffrage of the people given by the ballot.30

The formula requires a little unpacking. An equal agrarian is a reference to the importance for Harrington of landed property. Where property was preponderantly in the hands of one person, for example, then absolute monarchy would be the most stable form of government. In a commonwealth, property was fairly widely distributed—Harrington meant by this that there was a large landed gentry—and so some form of commonwealth was needed. As it happened, this broad base of property was probably the most stable basis for a political society, and it was fortunate that as a result of the dissolution of the monasteries and other things England possessed a large landed gentry. Peace and stability, though, required in addition agrarian laws that would prevent significant shifts in property distribution, otherwise there was a risk that the property base could get out of kilter with the political superstructure. If, for example, land was slowly accumulated in the hands of a few, then they would have the means to overthrow the commonwealth. Harrington devised an elaborate set of laws to counteract this risk. The three orders of senate, ‘people’ (representative assembly), and magistracy refer to Harrington’s complex political system. Eligibility for senate and the representative— two parts of a bicameral legislature—was by property ownership, senators being the larger landowners; the representatives were the gentry at large, that is smaller landowners. Election was by secret ballot, so that no one’s vote could be influenced by threat or bribery. The magistracy, which executed laws, was held by rotation so that no one could exercise perpetual authority. The governor always knew that he was also the governed.

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One of the chief peculiarities of this republic relates to the qualities of its civic life. If one’s image of a republic is that of a small Greek city, like Athens, in which people come together in a public forum to persuade and to argue with passion, vehemence, and rhetorical skill, then Harrington’s Oceana will be a disappointment. Political discussion and debate were carefully circumscribed, not least in the legislature. The senate discussed and produced proposals for laws; the representative voted on them (in silence, without debate). This followed the principle that when two people want to share a cake, one cuts (the Senate) and the other chooses (the representative), and is designed to ensure that no one has the opportunity to make law unchecked.31 At bottom, Harrington was close to Hobbes in possessing a sense of human selfishness, and in designing a commonwealth to counteract it. Peace would prevail amongst selfish men, but at the price of a rather constraining and mechanistic set of political institutions. Harrington was clear that the civil war came about because England had been a sort of mixed or limited monarchy, but that this monarchy was kept in being against the implications of a popular distribution of property. The opportunity of the 1650s was to create a lasting commonwealth, in which property and empire (authority) were aligned—forever. Religion would be pacified in this polity by the existence of an Erastian state Church—there was for Harrington no independent ecclesiastical authority—that shaped public worship in the civic interest; but this would also be noncoercive, and people would be free to pursue their own religious path outside of its boundaries (provided that this was entirely non-political). As with Hobbes, the key was in ensuring that neither the Church nor inspired individuals possessed a religious authority that could be deployed to the detriment of civil peace.

CONCLUSION

.................................................................................................................. As English thinkers and writers struggled to understand and to claim imaginative authority and control over the events of the 1640s, two insistent notes were sounded. Together they form a chord that gives a distinctive tone to the English Revolution. This dyad of notes generally sounds together, but the notes are nonetheless distinct. One of them is formed by the creative rethinking of the relationship between God and his human creation; the other by recognition that the English Revolution was a ‘Bodinian moment’. Arguments over the nature of Parliament, mixed monarchy, and the right of subjects to resist led, not surprisingly, to debates on sovereignty. As with Hobbes in 1640, many writers engaged directly with Bodin;32 many others, though, came to see the relevance and usefulness of a concept of sovereignty by less immediate means. Aside from the specific debate about legal sovereignty and mixed monarchy that raged during the 1640s,33 there was a pervasive, if vaguer, awareness building that a clear locus of sovereign authority was needed if a commonwealth was to remain at peace. Hobbes

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developed the case magnificently, but through Harrington (and his engagement with Hobbes) it seeped into republican thinking too; and already in the 1640s parliamentarian writers often sought not to reject the idea of sovereignty but to appropriate it, as with William Prynne’s Sovereign Power of Parliaments (published in several parts over the years 1642–3). English writers had been exploring the ways in which God’s authority was mixed into the structures of human authority at least since the Henrician Reformation of the 1530s. During the English Revolution a considerable spectrum of views was advanced— the divine right of kings and bishops (the latter by apostolic succession), the rights of conscience, Erastian subordination of Church to state, and a form of clericism that argued the secular state was the servant of God and his Church. Underneath this lurked the question that Hobbes was able to discern: by what authority are God’s commands (especially those recorded in the Scriptures) made into binding laws? Herein lies much of the legacy of the English Revolution.34 Much of the old world was restored in 1660, seemingly with its underpinning assumptions intact. But this can be misleading. Monarchy returned (for ever), but its exact nature and its relationship to Parliament were much less matters of shared assumption after 1660 than before 1640. So too the nature of the restored Church was a matter of argument and polemic after 1660, with some of the questions raised by the English Revolution unsettled until the early eighteenth century. English ideas were not exactly secular after 1660—even the divine right of kings was not dead—but assumptions became questionable, and various ideas about the relationship of divine command to civil politics were discussed. Sometimes the eighteenth century can resemble an old world, with King, Lords, and Church once again socially dominant. But there is an unmistakably brittle tone to the defence of these pillars of establishment, largely absent before 1640. In a famous story, Jorge Luis Borges tells us of Pierre Menard who aspired to rewrite (not copy) Don Quixote. The result, even though it corresponded word for word with Cervantes’ book, would nonetheless be an entirely different work, because written by a different person in a different time and place. The Restoration polity was the ancient constitution rewritten in the fashion of Menard.

NOTES 1. e.g. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution; Allen, English Political Thought, 1603–1660, vol. i; Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns; Sanderson, ‘But the people’s creatures’; Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War. 2. Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution. 3. Parker, Observations, 24. 4. On slavery see Skinner, ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’; also Coffey, ‘England’s Exodus’. 5. Parker, Observations, 26.

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6. See further Burgess, ‘Was the Civil War a War of Religion?’. Cf. Vallance, ‘Preaching to the Converted’. 7. A theme long ago opened up in Lamont, Godly Rule. 8. Vallance, Revolutionary England. 9. Burgess, British Political Thought, 203–25. 10. See further Mendle, Dangerous Positions; Smith, Constitutional Royalism. 11. Herle, A Fuller Answer, 3. 12. Burgess, British Political Thought, 176–80, 213–14. 13. On the Levellers, see also the chapter by Foxley in this volume. 14. The Agreement of the People (1647). 15. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 53. 16. Milton, The Readie and Easie Way, 460. 17. Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, 4–5. 18. Baskerville, Not Peace but a Sword. 19. Winstanley, Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 292. 20. Coppe, in Smith (ed.), A Collection of Ranter Writings, 89–90. 21. Tillinghast, Mr Tillinghasts Eight Last Sermons, 38. 22. Covell, A Declaration unto the Parliament, 7–8. 23. On Hobbes and Harrington see, respectively, the chapters by Loxley and Hammersley in this volume. 24. Hobbes, Elements of Law, 172–3. 25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 92. 26. Ibid. 121. 27. Ibid. 120. 28. The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 120. 29. Though Harrington is often classed as a ‘classical’ republican, recent work has emphasized the importance of the Hebrew model for his thought. See Nelson, The Hebrew Republic, ch. 2. 30. Harrington, Political Works, 181. 31. For the cake cutting, see ibid. 172. 32. Burgess, British Political Thought, 199, 213–14, 218, 300, 312. 33. Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns. 34. Cf. Burgess, ‘Religion and Civil Society’.

WORKS CITED The Agreement of the People (1647), in Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Don Wolfe. New York: T. Nelson and Sons, 1944. Allen, J. W. English Political Thought, 1603–1660, vol. i. London: Methuen & Co., 1938. Baskerville, Stephen. Not Peace but a Sword: The Political Theology of the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 1993. Burgess, Glenn. ‘Was the Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda’. Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (2000 for 1998), 173–201.

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Burgess, Glenn. British Political Thought 1500–1660. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ——. ‘Religion and Civil Society: The Place of the English Revolution in the Development of Political Thought’, in M. Braddick and D. L. Smith (eds.), The Experience of Revolution in Stuart Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 270–90. Coffey, John. ‘England’s Exodus: The Civil War as a War of Deliverance’, in Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds.), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011, 253–80. Covell, William. A Declaration unto the Parliament, Council of State and Army. London, 1659. Cromartie, Alan. The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Harrington, James. Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Herle, Charles. A Fuller Answer to a Treatise Written by Dr Ferne. London, 1642. Hobbes, Thomas. Elements of Law, ed. F. Tönnies. 2nd edn. London: Cass, 1969. ——. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ——. The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. N. Malcolm. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Judson, Margaret. The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–45. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949. Lamont, William. Godly Rule: Politics and Religion 1603–1660. London: Macmillan, 1969. Mendle, Michael. Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm, and the Making of the Answer to the XIX Propositions. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985. ——. Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Milton, John. The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (2nd edn, 1660), in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vii: 1659–1660, ed. Don Wolfe. Rev. edn. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Nelson, Eric. The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Parker, Henry. Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses. London, 1642. Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens. London, 1646. Sanderson, John. ‘But the people’s creatures’: The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989. Skinner, Quentin. ‘Rethinking Political Liberty’. History Workshop Journal 61 (2006), 156–70. Smith, David L. Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Smith, Nigel (ed.). A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century. London: Junction, 1983. Tillinghast, John. Mr Tillinghasts Eight Last Sermons. London, 1655. Vallance, E. ‘Preaching to the Converted: Religious Justifications for the English Civil War’. Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2003), 395–419. ——. Revolutionary England and the National Covenant: State Oaths, Protestantism, and the Political Nation, 1553–1682. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005.

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Weston, C., and J. Greenberg. Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Winstanley, Gerrard. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George Holland Sabine. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965. Woodhouse, A. S. P. Puritanism and Liberty. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951.

CHAPTER

5

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RELIGION ....................................................................................................... JOHN COFFEY

The English Revolution was a religious event. It was much more than that, of course, but hardly less. Historians from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century have recognized this, and given particular attention to the central role of Puritanism in this great political upheaval. The royalist Earl of Clarendon identified Puritan preachers as the ‘incendiaries’ of ‘the Great Rebellion’. The Enlightenment historian David Hume saw the Civil War years as an object lesson in the dangers of religious enthusiasm. For the Whig historians, led by S. R. Gardiner, the upheaval advanced the cause of civil and religious liberty and constituted ‘the Puritan Revolution’. The Methodist-raised Marxist Christopher Hill abandoned this term for a more secular label, ‘the English Revolution’, but he too kept Puritanism at centre stage in his many books and articles. Revisionist historians were sceptical of Whig constitutionalist and Marxian socio-economic explanations for the Civil War, and turned instead to religion (and the religiously charged British problem); for John Morrill, this was not the first modern revolution, but ‘the last of the European wars of religion’.1 Postrevisionists like Ann Hughes stress the interpenetration of the religious, the social, and the constitutional; but while reluctant to isolate the religious factor, they have refused to marginalize it. John Adamson’s recent work The Noble Revolt develops a running argument (in its footnotes) against the war of religion thesis, but its central figures are a group of powerful aristocrats variously described as a ‘Puritan “knot”’, ‘Warwick’s godly mafia’, ‘the Puritan faction’, or ‘a militantly Puritan junto’.2 In contrast to most of their colleagues working on the American and French Revolutions, historians of the English Revolution have found it impossible to avoid religion, especially Puritanism. It is easy to see why. Consider some of the most striking features and episodes of the mid-century crisis: Parliament’s seven years of monthly fast days between 1642 and 1649; the executions of Catholic priests; the mass ejection of royalist and episcopal clergy; William Dowsing’s iconoclastic purge of the churches and chapels of East Anglia; the witch-hunt spearheaded by Matthew Hopkins in the same Puritan heartlands; the abolition of episcopacy and the execution of Archbishop Laud; the years of

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intense debate within the Westminster Assembly of Divines; the irruption of the sects and the great toleration controversy; the prayer meetings of the New Model Army Council; the birth and dramatic rise of the Quakers; the Nominated ‘Assembly of the Saints’ in 1653; Oliver Cromwell’s extraordinary speeches-cum-lay-sermons to Parliament; the Whitehall Conference on the readmission of the Jews in 1655; the marathon parliamentary debate over the blasphemy of James Nayler in 1656; the failed Fifth Monarchist risings of 1657 and 1661. Consider too the revolution’s major players. The Puritans formed ‘the core of the Parliamentarian party’.3 Leading the backlash against Charles I’s Personal Rule and the High Church reforms of Archbishop Laud were the Earl of Warwick, Lord Saye and Sele, and Lord Brooke, powerful Puritan peers who had been active in godly colonization projects in the 1620s and 1630s, and who worked behind the scenes with godly MPs like John Pym, John Hampden, Oliver St John, and Sir Henry Vane the younger (previously governor of Puritan Massachusetts). All these men were patrons and devotees of Puritan preachers, and convinced of the existence of a popish plot against English Protestantism. Within the New Model Army, at least four of the five generals—Fairfax, Cromwell, Skippon, and Ireton—were devout Puritans. Cromwell was particularly notorious for fostering lay preaching and extemporary prayer and for sheltering sects like the Baptists. Leading parliamentarian politicians turned their hands to religious writing: Lord Brooke issued strikingly original tracts on truth and episcopacy; Henry Lawrence, President of the Council of State in the 1650s, had published a work on angelology; Sir Thomas Fairfax kept three volumes of sermon notes, produced a metrical version of the Psalms, and translated other parts of the Bible; Sir Henry Vane wrote a major doctrinal treatise that was mystical, allegorical, and millenarian. Consider finally the print culture of the 1640s and 1650s. During the two revolutionary decades, the London bookseller George Thomason collected approximately 15,000 tracts (plus 7,000 newsbooks). On average, ‘explicitly religious titles averaged between twenty and fifty per month’, around half of the total number.4 In 1641 alone, more than 200 pamphlets were published on the subject of episcopacy, with the majority calling for its reform and a substantial minority for its abolition. No secular issue generated this much debate in print, and religious disputes continued to inspire satirical prints and provoke pamphlet wars throughout the revolution. There were controversies over church government, baptism, antinomianism, Arminianism, Socinianism, tithes, toleration, and the sects. The Quakers alone published a thousand tracts between 1653 and 1660. Among publications by women, prophecy constituted the single largest genre in the 1640s, Quaker works in the 1650s— together they comprised more than half of the printed writings of women during the revolution.5 This outpouring of religious argument and expression testifies to the English Revolution as a post-Reformation crisis.

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CONTESTED REFORMATION

.................................................................................................................. Unlike the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War was not a confessional clash between Catholics and Calvinists. But the war was (among other things) a battle for the Church of England. As an internecine Protestant conflict, it had its roots in the ambiguities of the European and the English Reformations. From the 1520s onwards, two emerging blocs of Lutheran and Reformed Protestants competed with each other and with a third force, the Radical Reformation associated with assorted Anabaptists and spiritualists. In England, the initial influence of Lutheranism was overtaken by the second great wave of Reformed Protestantism that broke upon English shores in the 1540s. Under the influence of Continental theologians like Peter Martyr Vermigli and Martin Bucer, Archbishop Cranmer and the Edwardian Reformation took a decidedly Reformed turn, reflected in a systematic policy of iconoclasm. But when Elizabeth became queen in 1558, she presided over a somewhat ambiguous Reformation. While the bishops and intellectuals of the Elizabethan Church were clear about its Reformed identity, there were significant survivals that sat awkwardly with Calvinism—an elaborate ecclesiastical hierarchy, a fixed liturgy, traditional ceremonies, clerical vestments, and cathedral choirs. Militant Reformed Protestants—who were quickly dubbed ‘Puritans’ by their critics—agitated for ‘further reformation’ of the Church’s government and worship, but by the 1590s their campaign had been largely stalled by Archbishop Whitgift.6 It was from this point that a new clerical faction began to emerge, one committed to a fundamental revisioning of English ecclesiastical identity. Rather than seeing the Church of England as firmly aligned with the Continental Reformed churches, these avant-garde conformists, led by figures like Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Neile, began to glory in its distinctiveness, repositioning the Church between Rome and Geneva, and depicting it as a uniquely faithful reconstitution of ancient patristic Christianity. This invention of ‘Anglicanism’ (a later term, but one that aptly characterizes their project) was anathema to Puritans and deeply worrying to the conformist Calvinists who still dominated the church hierarchy. But under James I, the new faction rose in prominence, thanks in part to their high view of royal authority and their defence of the King’s policy of neutrality in the Thirty Years War.7 Whereas James was personally committed to Reformed Protestantism, his son Charles I threw his whole weight behind the High Church faction, appointing William Laud Bishop of London in 1628 and Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. This proved to be a fateful political mistake. Already in the 1620s, there were angry protests in Parliament over Arminianism (which denied the Calvinist doctrine of unconditional predestination). Charles ruled without Parliament from 1629 to 1640, and during this Personal Rule, there was growing fear of a vast popish conspiracy. To Puritans, Laud’s altar policy (moving the communion table to the east end of parish churches and railing it off) and his programme of beautification looked like a reversal of the

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Reformation. That suspicion was only intensified by the prominence of Catholics at court, where they enjoyed the aggressive patronage of Charles’s queen, the devout French Catholic Henrietta Maria. To compound matters, many Puritan clergy were prosecuted for nonconformity, and Puritan polemicists William Prynne, John Bastwick, and Henry Burton had their ears mutilated for criticizing the bishops. The godly emigrated in their thousands to the Netherlands and to the new Puritan colonies in New England. Yet it was the King’s decision to impose a new Prayer Book on Scotland in 1637—without consulting either the General Assembly of the Kirk or the Scottish Parliament—that was to bring down his Personal Rule. Rioting in St Giles Cathedral was soon followed by the birth of the Covenanter movement, organized around a National Covenant for the defence of the Reformed Kirk. The Covenanters abolished episcopacy in Scotland, and, after two brief Bishops’ Wars (1639–40), they forced Charles to recall Parliament in England. When the Parliament sat, religious grievances were to the fore, though they were characteristically bound up with concerns about constitutional liberty. Opposition to the policies of the past decade was orchestrated in the Commons by the Puritan John Pym, who worked closely with the Calvinist Earl of Bedford in the Lords. Whilst MPs and peers were nearly unanimous in their opposition to Laudianism, significant religious fault-lines began to appear during the course of 1641. Many MPs displayed a firm commitment to episcopacy (properly ‘limited’ or ‘reduced’) and to the Book of Common Prayer. But for Puritans, this was an unprecedented opportunity to complete the English Reformation by reforming the Church. A ‘Root and Branch’ petition for wholesale dismantling of the hierarchy attracted 15,000 signatures, and the godly rejoiced in the destruction of Cheapside Cross and other remnants of the popish past. In May 1641, Pym pushed Parliament into agreeing to a Protestation to be sworn across England. It wove together secular and religious grievances, suggesting that England’s troubles could be traced to ‘the designs of the Priests and Jesuits, and other adherents of the See of Rome’, and reminding readers of the ‘multitudes driven out of His Majesty’s dominions’ by ‘innovations and superstitions’ in the Church. Signatories swore to defend ‘the true reformed Protestant religion’, ‘His Majesty’s royal person’, ‘the power and privilege of Parliaments’, and ‘the lawful rights and liberties of the subjects’.8 Characteristically, religion came first, but it was never alone. Yet many MPs were increasingly uncomfortable with the strident and populist tactics of Pym. Fear of Puritan populism began to rival fear of popish conspiracy. When the Irish Rebellion broke out in October 1641, it electrified Westminster, and lent sudden credibility to Puritan claims about a popish plot. Several thousand Protestant settlers were killed in the Catholic rising, though the scale and barbarity of the slaughter were exaggerated in the telling. Pym drew up the Grand Remonstrance, a 204-point indictment of developments since 1625. Once again, this document was shot through with paranoia about popery, and around fifty of its clauses concern religion. Its fevered tone and appeal to popular opinion (it was controversially printed) divided MPs, who only narrowly voted to pass it. With Parliament split over how to deal with the Irish Rebellion and who should control the forces raised to suppress it, the King was

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now able to gather a royalist party. Wisely, Charles reached out to Calvinist bishops and conformist clergy, positioning himself as a defender of the traditional Church of England. This enabled him to attract both the conservative wing and the moderate middle of the Church, while stigmatizing its ultra-Reformed wing. Anti-Puritanism became an essential part of royalist propaganda, and drew on a growing backlash against the godly who were associated with iconoclasm, mob rule, and attacks on the theatre and on traditional festive culture. The Puritan Richard Baxter noted that the Civil War ‘began in our streets’, and Patrick Collinson has agreed that it was prefigured in the ‘street wars of religion’ that afflicted local communities across England.9 The philosopher Thomas Hobbes later wondered if 100,000 lives might have been saved if the seditious Puritan preachers, ‘which were not perhaps a thousand, had been all kill’d before they had preached’.10 Puritan clergy like Stephen Marshall, John Goodwin, and William Bridge certainly played a key role as propagandists for the parliamentarian cause. In sermons and tracts, they pictured England as Old Testament Israel, confronted with a stark choice between true religion and idolatry, liberty and slavery. For the most part, parliamentarian theorists (clerical and lay) did not justify armed resistance on purely religious grounds, but they did see the conflict as a just war fought to defend the legally established Protestant religion.11 And when the parliamentary armies went to war, their banners were inscribed with slogans such as ‘Antichrist must down’, ‘For the Protestants’, and ‘Pray and fight’.12 Yet if religion was up front and centre in parliamentarian texts, the present trend among historians is to reinstate secular ideology alongside it. Civic humanism, ancient constitutionalism, common law, and natural law contractualism each provided rich ideological resources for a critique of the royal prerogative. For parliamentarians like John Selden and Henry Parker, the Civil War was a constitutional conflict, not a war of religion.13 Even for the Puritans, religion was bound up with constitutional concerns. From the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the political thought of the godly tended to yoke together religion and liberty. Although willing to play politics at court, the godly depicted the ‘court’ as a threat to ‘country’ values of virtue, independence, and godliness, values sustained by the universities, the Inns of Court, Parliament, and ‘the Puritan party’. The Puritan-Calvinist peers who did so much to engineer the revolt against royal rule seem to have wanted a de facto aristocratic republic as well as a pure Reformed Church.14 The mix of factors under consideration in 1642 made choosing sides a complicated business, yet there were patterns of allegiance, and religion was especially important in defining political identities. In parliamentarian propaganda, the royalists were comprised of papists, prelates, and the godless; conversely, the King claimed to be confronted by a ‘Rabble of Brownists and other Schismaticks’. Religion functioned as a boundary marker and was arguably the best predictor and the prime determinant of allegiance. At Westminster, almost all the MPs who supported a Puritan agenda of further reformation became parliamentarians. In the provinces, at least twenty of the twenty-two towns and villages that raised volunteers for Parliament before August 1642 had been centres of godly preaching for a very long time.15 And in Devon, the division

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between parliamentarian and royalist often ran along parish lines. Parishes which had had a Puritan minister tended to be firmly parliamentarian, whereas non-Puritan parishes were much more likely to turn royalist. After surveying the evidence from the rest of country, Mark Stoyle concludes that ‘civil war allegiance was based primarily on religious sentiment’.16 This may be too sweeping a statement. Anti-Puritanism was one source of royalism, but we should not underestimate the role of more secular values: honour, the rule of law, loyalty, submission. Moreover, conventional Prayer Book Protestants found themselves on both sides of the Civil War divide, and ‘religious sentiment’ was a far less decisive factor in their case than it was for Puritans or Laudians. Calvinist bishops like James Ussher refused to support war against the King, and a fair number of leading parliamentarians were moderate Protestants who supported bishops and liturgy.17 For many people in 1642, the choice of sides was an agonizing one.

MAGISTERIAL REFORMATION

.................................................................................................................. Yet the parliamentarians had some clear religious objectives. In 1642, they were overwhelmingly committed to the ideals of the magisterial Reformation. All the major Reformed confessions had ascribed a key role to magistrates in purifying the Church, promoting the true faith, and suppressing false religion. Christian rulers, they maintained, were ‘nursing Fathers’ to the Church, like the kings of ancient Israel or the early Christian emperors. It was their job to purge the land of idolatry, but also to establish true worship. Godly magistrates, the Puritan fast sermons proclaimed, were building the temple of the Lord like Solomon or Ezra and Nehemiah. The watchwords were order, discipline, law, and unity. The power and appeal of these magisterial Reformation ideals is apparent throughout the English Revolution. In the Grand Remonstrance, MPs made it clear that ‘it is far from our purpose or desire to let loose the golden reins of discipline and government in the Church, to leave private persons or particular congregations to take up what form of Divine Service they please’. Instead, Parliament would require ‘conformity’ to a national order and ‘take away the monuments of idolatry’.18 For most of the 1640s, Parliament was true to its word. In 1641, it ordered churchwardens to reverse Laudian ‘innovations’ by removing communion rails, altars, crucifixes, and images from parish churches. In 1643, it signed a Solemn League and Covenant with the Scottish Covenanters, agreeing to reform the English Church ‘in doctrine, worship, discipline and government, according to the Word of God and the example of the best reformed churches’.19 An Assembly of Divines was established at Westminster for that very purpose. In 1644, the Book of Common Prayer was proscribed, and in the following year it was officially replaced by the Assembly’s Directory of Public Worship. In 1645, Parliament passed an ordinance against lay preaching and Archbishop Laud was executed on Tower Hill. In 1646, episcopacy was abolished, and Parliament approved

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the Westminster Assembly’s confession and its plan for a Presbyterian national Church. Almost 2,800 clergy were ejected over the course of the revolution, most during the Civil War, with a staggering 86 per cent of London ministers being removed.20 But as well as purging the ministry, Parliament also moved to consolidate Calvinist orthodoxy. In 1648, a Blasphemy Ordinance made it a capital offence to deny the Trinity, the Atonement, the Resurrection, Holy Scripture, or the Last Judgement, and it threatened imprisonment for those who taught second-order errors like Arminianism, popery, mortalism, universalism, antinomianism, or believer’s baptism. Historians have focused so heavily on ‘the radicals’ of the revolution that the mainstream Puritans have been neglected. We have excellent monographs on tiny groups like the Diggers, Ranters, and Muggletonians, but no major modern study of Presbyterianism, the Cinderella of the English Revolution. Gradually, the balance is being redressed. A Presbyterian settlement was favoured by the great majority of the Puritan clergy and it had widespread support among the laity too. The London wood turner Nehemiah Wallington, whose manuscript notebooks open up the world of plebeian godliness, revered the city’s moderate Puritan divines and had no time for sects and heresies. The Presbyterian clergy themselves proved very adept at appealing to a mass audience. The heresiographer Thomas Edwards exploited print culture for all it was worth, and mainstream godly divines gave as good as they got in vigorous public disputations with radicals. And through an intensive programme of Sabbath observance, fast days, morning exercises, catechizing, and examination for Communion, Presbyterians used the parish system to promote Puritan heart religion among the English people.21 The achievements of the Westminster Assembly were also impressive. Around 120 divines (plus thirty members of the Commons and the Lords, and a number of Scottish ministers and elders) met for four years of debate between 1643 and 1647. The first full critical edition of the Assembly’s minutes is nearing completion and will transform our understanding of a body that was both Parliament’s largest committee and the last of the great post-Reformation synods. What emerges is a more complex picture of clerical alignments, one no longer dominated by a simple stand-off between a monolithic Presbyterian majority and a vocal minority of Dissenting Brethren (led by Thomas Goodwin and Philip Nye). Instead, we see how the Assembly’s key texts were born after a protracted and painful labour in public debates and sub-committees, as serious disagreements over both ecclesiology and theology (e.g. the role of ancient creeds) were thrashed, or ironed, out. The Assembly had a tense relationship with its parliamentary masters, and the final form of church government disappointed both Congregationalists and clericalist Presbyterians (the Covenanter Robert Baillie said that Parliament had created ‘a lame Erastian presbytery’). Yet the Assembly’s documents were built to last. The Confession of Faith, Larger and Shorter Catechisms, and Directory of Public Worship were officially adopted by the Scottish Kirk, and have continued to be used by many Presbyterian churches down to the present.22 The division that did open up between Presbyterian and Independent was, however, ominous. These were ecclesiastical labels: Presbyterians were supporters of a compulsory

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national church ruled by a system of representative assemblies, whereas Independents (or rather Congregationalists) believed in self-governing congregations composed purely of the godly (‘visible saints’). But the terms were also labels for political coalitions: Presbyterians were pro-Scots, suspicious of the New Model Army, and (for the most part) more conciliatory towards Charles I; Independents were anti-Covenanter, pro-army, and inclined to a hard line towards the monarch. While religious Independents were a minority among Puritans, and political Independents a minority among parliamentarians, they had the army on their side, and in the wake of the Second Civil War they seized power in a military coup in December 1648. The Independent coup opened the way for regicide and republic, but it did not mean the end of magisterial Reformation. The Parliaments of the Interregnum continued to pass religious legislation. While a Toleration Act in 1650 removed the requirement to attend parish worship on the Sabbath, it still required citizens to participate in some form of Christian worship. The Blasphemy Act of 1650 was far less draconian than its counterpart in 1648, allowing Baptists, Arminians, and even anti-Trinitarians to breathe more easily, but it still gave the authorities power to punish atheism and the scandalous practical antinomianism of the Ranters. The Instrument of Government (1653) guaranteed liberty of conscience to ‘such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgement from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth)’, but it excluded Catholics, Episcopalians, and Ranters. The scope of liberty of conscience became one of the most contentious issues between Cromwell and his Protectorate Parliaments. The Protector found himself at odds with a powerful grouping of Presbyterian MPs who demanded tough measures against ‘heresies and blasphemies’, and displayed consistent scepticism about the liberation of the sects. When the Quaker James Nayler imitated Christ’s entry into Jerusalem while riding into Bristol on a horse, he sparked a marathon ten-day debate in Parliament, which divided MPs between a lenient Cromwellian faction and the harsher Presbyterians. Nayler was eventually sentenced to be branded with the letter B (for blasphemy) as well as being bored through the tongue, flogged, and imprisoned. During the years of the Protectorate, around 2,000 Quakers were imprisoned by local magistrates. In speeches to his Parliaments, Cromwell lamented the tendency of the godly to wound each other, but like his son-in-law Henry Ireton, who had died in 1652, Cromwell believed that magistrates had a duty to foster a godly ministry and restrain false religion, and his religious policy was never one of pure laissez-faire. He opposed the abolition of tithes, and issued an ordinance in 1654 establishing a system of London-based Triers to vet candidates for the parish ministry and local Ejectors to dismiss unfit incumbents. The Triers were especially active, examining 3,500 aspirant clergy in just five years, but whilst the effectiveness of the Ejectors varied from place to place they did remove some 200 clergy from their livings. Moreover, in 1652 and again in 1654, there were serious attempts to draw up a national confession of faith to be subscribed by all parish ministers, and the Savoy Conference of 1658 was probably a state-sponsored effort to push Congregationalists to forge a religious settlement.

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Although historians have often associated the Congregationalists with the sects, recent work emphasizes how much the conservative Congregational clergy like Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and John Owen were magisterial reformers. Whilst they argued for a degree of toleration for godly, orthodox Protestants, they retained the older Reformed view of magistrates as ‘nursing Fathers’ to the Church, whose task was to uphold the Decalogue and restrain false teachers. Far from being separatist, the mainstream Congregationalists wanted to work within the parish system. By 1660, the Calvinist Congregationalists had some 250 churches across Britain and Ireland, some with many members (the congregation at Yarmouth had up to 1,000 at its Sunday services). The vast majority of churches were gathered after 1649, but these were not separatist fellowships and their pastors were often parish ministers, a good many of whom had signed the ‘Presbyterian’ testimonies against sectaries and toleration in 1648.23 Most Presbyterians, however, felt frustrated by the Independent ascendancy. While a system of classes was implemented in a few areas, principally Lancashire and London, Presbyterians lamented the collapse of uniformity and the spread of sects and heresies. Richard Baxter’s vision of Reformation was firmly magisterial, but before the (all too brief) Protectorate of Richard Cromwell, he saw no sign of a godly prince. He turned instead to writing, publishing forty books during the Interregnum alone, including evangelistic bestsellers like Call to the Unconverted (1658), which sold 20,000 copies in one year. Baxter also recognized that the godly had to act locally by using all means possible to evangelize their parishes. In The Reformed Pastor (1656), he urged his fellow ministers to engage in a systematic programme of visitation and catechizing, and he also pioneered the most important pastoral and ecclesiastical innovation of the midcentury, the Association movement, which brought together parish clergy (mainly but not exclusively Presbyterians) in Baxter’s Worcestershire and sixteen other counties. Although Baxter had an intense dislike for Cromwell (and for John Owen), he would later look back on the 1650s as golden years, a time when five galleries had to be built in his parish church at Kidderminster to accommodate the throngs, and hundreds of families devoted the Sabbath to prayer and Bible reading. According to Eamon Duffy, this ‘pastoral revolution’ represented ‘the reformed tradition’s best shot in England at coming to terms with the parish’ and converting the nation.24 Other clergy were far more downbeat than the energetic Baxter. Puritan determination to restrict the communion rite to the godly alienated many parishioners, and some ministers like the Essex Puritan Ralph Josselin gave up administering the sacrament altogether. Demographers have calculated that the percentage of baptisms per births dropped from 93 per cent in the 1630s to 82.5 per cent in the late 1640s and early 1650s. This was probably due to popular aversion to the new baptism ceremony prescribed by the Directory. There was also widespread resentment at the Puritan campaign for the reformation of manners. Throughout the 1640s and 1650s, Parliaments passed legislation designed to make England a godly nation. The theatres were officially closed down in 1642, and Shakespeare’s Globe was razed to the ground two years later. Between 1642 and 1649 the last Wednesday of every month was set aside as a public fast and

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humiliation. In 1644, ordinances were passed against maypoles and for the better observation of the Sabbath. In 1647, an ordinance abolished holy days including the feasts of Christmas and Easter. In 1650, the Rump Parliament passed an Act for the ‘prevention of prophane Swearing and Cursing’. Another Act in the same year made adultery a capital offence, though few were executed as a result. In 1654, Cromwell issued an ordinance against cockfights, and in the following year major-generals were sent to different regions of the country to ‘promote godliness’ and suppress swearing, drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, brothels, gaming-houses, bear-baitings, stage plays, horse races, and cockfights. This was nothing less than a drive for ‘wholesale cultural revolution’.25

RADICAL REFORMATION

.................................................................................................................. Whilst England’s magisterial Reformation could be authoritarian and repressive, it also took an unexpected turn. The Independents who seized control at the helm of the revolution—Saye, Cromwell, Vane—proved to be unusually tolerant of Protestant sects. Whereas sixteenth-century Continental Anabaptists were banished beyond the pale of the magisterial Reformation, seventeenth-century English Baptists were welcomed by its Cromwellian equivalent. It helped, of course, that English Baptists were generally neither a pacifist sect nor a theocratic cult, and were often Calvinist in theology. But as David Como observes, we should not underestimate ‘the extremity of the Anabaptist turn . . . involving as it did a decision to repudiate not merely the English church, but centuries of Christian tradition and one of the most critical rituals of the early modern social fabric’.26 The Independents’ embrace of Baptists was without precedent in the Reformed world. It stood in sharp contrast to Scotland’s ‘Second Reformation’ under the Covenanters, and opened the door to ‘the last and greatest triumph of the European radical reformation’.27 As in the sixteenth century, there was a startling outburst of religious creativity manifested in itinerant prophets, around 300 female visionaries, primitive communists, heterodox theologians (including anti-Trinitarians), mystical spiritualists who denied the need for sacraments, and anti-formalists who questioned the very notion of reform-ation. Conservative churchmen shook their heads in dismay at this fragmentation of Protestantism, fearing that England was succumbing to the madness of Munster, the German city taken over by apocalyptic Anabaptists in 1534–5. More accurately, they claimed that London was being ‘Amsterdamified’, as the dominant Independents encouraged a Dutch-style Reformation, one that combined purification with pluralism.28 The Puritan Revolution had become a revolution within Puritanism itself. Study of the radicals has a long history, but it was given a powerful boost by the publication of Christopher Hill’s seminal book The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Hill’s celebration of ‘the revolution within the revolution’ inspired documentaries,

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plays, novels, folk songs, festivals, and a film of enduring appeal, Winstanley (1975). In the decades since its publication, there has been a torrent of publication on almost every aspect of religious radicalism in this period, and it is now far better mapped than it once was. We have, for example, a much clearer sense of the origins of Civil War radicalism.29 Hill thought in terms of a subterranean radical tradition that went back to the Lollards, a plebeian ideology pitted against the bourgeois values of mainstream Puritanism. More recently, scholars have shown how the spokesmen for radical religion (like Richard Overton the Leveller, Abiezer Coppe the Ranter, and Samuel Fisher the Quaker) were often university-educated intellectuals who emerged from within mainstream Puritanism, as a by-product of its internal tensions and instability.30 While the centripetal force within English Puritanism was powerful, there was also a strong centrifugal tendency at work. Long before the 1640s, the hot Protestantism of the godly had thrown up exorcists, prophets, Judaizers, heretics, and antinomians. These extremists disturbed moderate Puritans, but they were capitalizing on features inherent within godly religion: intense Bible-based piety, an emphasis on lay agency and interpretation, a doctrine of salvation by free grace alone, fascination with the work of the Holy Spirit, a primitivist drive to restore the early Church, and eschatological fervour. Yet radical Puritans were also reacting against the constraints of mainstream Puritanism with its learned ministry, its exacting moral discipline, and its reverence for the Western theological tradition. Before 1640, the godly kept a lid on most of these controversies, managing them internally by conferences among Puritan minsters and other mechanisms of control. Although there were Separatist and Baptist splinter groups in the early seventeenth century, they were tiny, and the overwhelmingly mass of the godly remained in communion with the Church of England, even if only nominally from the safe distance of the Netherlands, Ireland, or Massachusetts. During the 1640s, however, English Puritanism became seriously fractured. The collapse of episcopacy, church courts, and effective censorship, together with the sheer confusion and exhilaration of the new reformation, facilitated an unprecedented surge of sectarian religion. The sects were given vital cover by leading Independent politicians and army commanders. We still await a full study of military piety in the English Revolution, but while the New Model had its share of conscripts and ex-royalist soldiers, its ethos was intensely Puritan and it played a key role in safeguarding godly minorities. Baptists would rise to positions of prominence within the New Model especially in Ireland in the early 1650s, and Bristol became a Quaker stronghold thanks to protection from officers in the garrison. In London, a city with around 400,000 people, the sects found ample space to worship and organize, and the number of gathered churches (both separatist and non-separatist) quadrupled to around forty between 1640 and 1648. The capital also offered access to printing presses. There was an explosion of pamphlet literature, as the number of titles published annually rose from 625 in 1639 to a peak of 3,666 in 1642. Pamphleteering proved ideally suited to radical minorities.

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However, it is important not to exaggerate the scale of the sectarian phenomenon, as contemporaries were wont to do. The moral panic over the sects often bore little relation to their actual size. The Adamite scare of 1641 occurred in the absence of any legal evidence for a nudist cult. The Ranter crisis of the early 1650s had more substance to it, but whilst there were Ranter tracts and networks, they were neither substantial in scale nor particularly coherent in theory or practice. Royalist fears of the Quakers in 1659 and the Fifth Monarchists in 1661 were once again out of all proportion to the threat. Statistically, the sects never amounted to much, though there may well have been many congregations not recorded in surviving sources. Baptists, divided into Particular (i.e. Calvinist) and General (largely Arminian) factions, probably never numbered more than 25,000, though there were more who passed through the movement en route to other destinations. Groups like the Diggers, the Ranters, and the Muggletonians numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands; the so-called Seekers were (by definition) an unorganized tendency; and Fifth Monarchists were found within existing congregations, rather than becoming a separate sect. The most successful group was the Quakers, who in the decade after 1650 grew from nothing to between 40,000 and 60,000. Despite such growth, the sects (as opposed to the gathered churches of the parochial Congregationalists) probably only accounted for one in fifty of the English population, which numbered more than five million people. Nevertheless, these sects had a presence in towns across the length and breadth of the country, and were particularly prominent in cities like London, Norwich, and Bristol. Moreover, radical Puritans used the printing press to publish seminal defences of religious freedom, including (in 1644–5 alone) Roger Williams’s Bloody Tenent of Persecution, Henry Robinson’s Liberty of Conscience, William Walwyn’s The Compassionate Samaritan, and Richard Overton’s The Arraignment of Mr Persecution. These writers denied the magistrate’s coercive power in matters of religion, arguing for the toleration of false religion.31 Their argument met with denunciation from the Presbyterian clergy, but the Presbyterian campaign pushed sectarian and gathered churches into the Independent coalition. By 1645, there was a concerted campaign against uniformity involving Westminster politicians, military commanders, clergy and pastors, lay pamphleteers, local politicians, publishers, printers, and licensers. The coalition proved formidable, but it was also fragile, and far from unanimous on important matters of strategy and principle. It embraced magisterial Congregationalists and radical sectarians, orthodox Calvinists and their fiercest critics, grandees and Levellers. The latter group commanded significant support among the Baptists and some other congregations, only to lose much of that sympathy when they set themselves against the army coup and the regicide. Despite the appeal of Levellers, Diggers, republicans, and Fifth Monarchists, many sectarian Puritans continued to place their faith in Cromwell, whom they rightly saw as their most likely protector. It was their anguished letters in 1657 that persuaded him to refuse Parliament’s offer of the crown. The motley crew of the political Independent coalition was inspired by a mélange of political sources and traditions, and it is a mistake to stereotype them as narrow-minded,

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hot-headed zealots, seventeenth-century counterparts to the Taliban. Some were notoriously ungodly, like the republican and regicide Henry Marten, who was a religious sceptic and (as John Aubrey observed) ‘a great lover of pretty girles . . . as far from being a puritan as light is from darkness’. The godly themselves, men like Henry Ireton or John Cook, had often enjoyed a good humanist education, and were as well read in the classics and the law as they were in theology. It is striking that the New Model Army’s ‘Book of Declarations’ (1647) is not dominated by the language of providentialism (let alone millenarianism), but is largely legal and secular in its style of argument. Yet recent scholarship has done much to uncover the biblical sources of radical thought. The story of Israel’s Exodus, originally mobilized by mainstream Puritans against bishops and royalists, was redeployed by Independents and Levellers against Presbyterians, the Lords, and even the monarchy. The Civil War was presented as England’s Exodus from Egyptian bondage, a war of deliverance that would release the oppressed from civil and ecclesiastical taskmasters. The Digger Gerrard Winstanley, once celebrated as a forerunner of Marxian communism, has been reclaimed as a theologian of equality and liberation, one who reworked Christian doctrines of Creation, Fall, and Redemption from the viewpoint of the oppressed. Historians of the regicide have argued that reflection on a key biblical text—Numbers 35: 33—led the army Council to conclude that the land would not be cleansed of the pollution of Civil War bloodshed until Charles Stuart (‘that man of blood’) be put to death. Recent scholarship has tried to reconstruct how Cromwell thought by a close reading of his many allusions to Scripture. In the wake of the failure of his Western Design, for example, the Lord Protector turned to the Book of Joshua, where Israel’s defeat was attributed to ‘the sin of Achan’. In this case, as in many others, the godly placed contemporary events within a biblical narrative frame, using it to make sense of their times and guide their actions.32 Above all, radical Puritans believed that they were living at the climax of history.33 The prophecies of Daniel and Revelation were being fulfilled. Antichrist was falling, the Jews were on the verge of conversion, and the Church was being restored to its primitive purity. Millenarianism and restorationism were powerful intellectual driving forces behind the religious creativity of England’s Radical Reformation. Believing that the Church stood on the brink of a new day, radical Puritans lost their deference for tradition and their inhibitions about novelty. Clerical authority, infant baptism, religious coercion, and even the doctrine of the Trinity were all challenged in the name of primitive Christianity and ‘new light’. In Areopagitica (1644), Milton pictured Truth as the body of a beautiful woman, hewn to pieces during the Church’s medieval apostasy, but now being lovingly reassembled by adventurous truth seekers in London’s Puritan subculture. Milton himself was connected with the intellectual circle of Samuel Hartlib, which saw its researches as a means of repairing the worst effects of the Fall, restoring Adamic knowledge of the natural world, and renovating human society. The millenarian John Dury believed that he was called to reconcile Protestant Christians in

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preparation for the last days, and he was a leading proponent of the readmission of the Jews to England. Cromwell himself seems to have shared the millenarianism that was so common among Congregationalists and Baptists, and in his opening address to the Nominated Assembly he alluded to Daniel and Revelation and to the conversion of the Jews. Fifth Monarchists, who hoped that the Assembly could bring about the fifth monarchy of God prophesied by Daniel, were appalled by its collapse. They took up a new slogan: ‘King Cromwell or King Jesus’. On its wilder fringes, radical piety went far beyond the Bible for inspiration. The prophet Thomas Totney, who had abandoned conventional Puritanism after falling into a trance and having a vision in 1649, even consigned his Bible to the flames, and immersed himself in esoterica, including the works of Jacob Boehme, hermeticism, angelology, Pythagorean mysticism, alchemy, astrology, heraldry, genealogy, and apocryphal Scriptures. Yet his imagination continued to bear the stamp of the Bible and millenarianism, as he discovered the gift of tongues and sailed for the Netherlands ‘to call the Jews there’.34 Quakers were accused of denigrating the written Word in favour of the inner light, and they repudiated Calvinist soteriology, sacraments, and clericalism.35 But their writings were steeped in prophetic, Johannine, and Pauline phraseology, and their profoundly eschatological, perfectionist, and spiritist piety had emerged from within the biblicist culture of English Puritanism. A very different challenge to mainstream Protestantism was presented by the Socinians, a branch of the European Reformation which attacked traditional doctrines of the Trinity and Atonement, and advanced strikingly original ideas about natural rights and liberty of conscience. While English Socinians like John Biddle were few and far between, a new study has shown how intellectuals across the political and religious spectrum were often preoccupied by Socinian theology and political thought. Royalists like Henry Hammond used it for their own purposes, as did defenders of toleration, but fear of Socinian influence was a major factor shaping the Cromwellian church settlement, which was firmly Trinitarian.36 The intimate connection between religious and political thought is also evident in the republican thinkers of the 1650s, who until recently were depicted as essentially secular figures. English republicanism did have deep classical roots and was inspired by the impious Machiavelli, and some of its chief theorists were non-Puritan ex-royalists like James Harrington and Marchamont Nedham. But early modern republicans looked to the Hebrews (as well as the Romans) for inspiration, and it has been suggested that Harrington’s agrarian law, Milton’s exclusivist republicanism, and Selden’s Erastian tolerationism resulted from an encounter with newly available rabbinic readings of Old Testament history.37 There was a potent strain of godly republicanism, centred on the cultivation of moral and civic virtue, and exemplified by Milton, Vane, John Cook, Algernon Sidney, Edmund Ludlow, Lucy Hutchinson, and George Wither. As one historian observes, ‘when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution’.38

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EPISCOPAL REFORMATION

.................................................................................................................. That revolution was a catastrophe for Laudians and for supporters of episcopacy more generally. With episcopacy abolished, the liturgy banned, its calendar replaced, Oxbridge purged, clergy ejected, Archbishop and King executed, any prospect of an ‘Anglican’ Reformation looked very distant. The Puritans may have been at each other’s throats, but their power and dynamism was undeniable. Even during the Civil War, Oxford printing presses could not compete with the Puritan-dominated presses of London, and with the fall of the royalist capital the problem was exacerbated. Laudianism found few defenders in the 1640s, though Laudian clergy gradually reclaimed a prominent place at court as the decade progressed. Church of England loyalists made sense of calamity by reflecting on the Exile of the Jews, identifying with the sufferings of Christ, and lamenting the sins which had brought down such terrible divine punishment.39 In the long run, however, the political success of the godly would prove to be the making of ‘Anglicanism’. Charles I did more damage to his enemies by his death than he ever had in his life. By dying with dignity, and voicing his devotion to the traditional Church of England, the Church of bishops and Prayer Book, the King laid the foundations for episcopal revival. The Eikon Basilike (1649), a treatise drafted in his name by the divine John Gauden, became a runaway bestseller, its sales dwarfing those of Milton’s regicidal works.40 The Puritan campaign against traditional religion and festive culture also backfired. The ban on the old liturgy revealed the strength of Prayer Book Protestantism, for the Prayer Book continued to be used in many churches for sacraments and rites of passage, despite the availability of the Westminster Assembly’s Directory. The young John Bunyan, fresh out of the New Model Army, was smitten with ‘the High-place, Priest, Clerk, Vestments, Service’, and bell-ringing traditions of the parish church. Even Cromwell’s daughter Mary was married in accordance with the Prayer Book service, following a civil ceremony. The crackdown on theatres, alehouses, maypole dancing, Sunday sports, and Christmas festivities made the Puritan regime even more unpopular.41 Royalist poets like Abraham Cowley, John Cleveland, and Robert Herrick capitalized on resentment of the godly, satirizing them as fanatical killjoys, and offering a defiant celebration of ritual worship and the ritual year. Anti-Puritanism, which had proved such an effective recruiting sergeant for the royalists in 1642, was mobilized once more by Anglicans during the 1650s, and the Restoration would be marked by the reopening of the theatres and the erection of maypoles. Yet what came to be known as ‘Anglicanism’ was never simply a reassertion of Church of England tradition. It also involved significant innovation. Some episcopal divines like Jeremy Taylor responded creatively to Independent calls for toleration. In matters of doctrine, Henry Hammond and others consolidated the shift away from orthodox Reformed (or Calvinist) religion, promoting an ‘Arminian’ stress on free will and good works, and a high view of priesthood, episcopacy, and the

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sacraments.42 Uncompromisingly royalist clergy kept themselves apart from the Cromwellian Church, serving as tutors or chaplains to sympathetic gentry, and worshipping illegally in Prayer Book services which were only occasionally disrupted by the authorities. But recent research has shown that many episcopal clergy conformed. Perhaps three-quarters of all parish ministers maintained their livings during the revolutionary decades, and many of these combined ‘loyalty to the old order with service to the new’ by retaining elements of the Prayer Book service. Evidence from exhibit books suggests that as many as 2,500 clergymen were clandestinely ordained by bishops between 1646 and 1660. But most of those ordained found some sort of living in the national Church. The bishops who ordained the majority of clergy were the Irish archbishop Thomas Fulwar (or Fuller), the Calvinists Joseph Hall and Ralph Brownrigg, and the Laudian Robert Skinner. Brownrigg corresponded with Richard Baxter looking (unsuccessfully) for common ground with Presbyterians, while Skinner was the only bishop to retain a benefice throughout the Interregnum, as a conformist rector in Oxfordshire. The activism of these neglected figures reminds us that episcopalianism should not be narrowly identified with the hardline royalists like Gilbert Sheldon and Hammond.43 In 1662, however, it was the aggressively anti-Puritan clergy (led by Sheldon) who triumphed, as the royalist gentry in the Cavalier Parliament passed a new Act of Uniformity. Around 2,000 Puritan ministers were ejected between 1660 and 1662. Yet with over 9,000 parishes, the Church retained thousands of pastors who had served during the 1650s, including Puritans like Ralph Josselin and William Gurnall. Among the bishops of the Restoration Church were a significant number who had been ordained or worked within the Cromwellian Church. ‘Latitudinarians’ like John Tillotson and Cromwell’s brother-in-law John Wilkins promoted schemes of ‘comprehension’ designed to reincorporate moderate dissenters within the Church, while Reformed bishops like Thomas Barlow and Edward Reynolds (a leading figure in the old Westminster Assembly) maintained the Jacobean theology and ecclesiology of Archbishop Ussher. By the 1660s, the invention of ‘Anglicanism’ was largely complete, but it was still contested within the Church itself. Outside the Church, the exclusion of the Presbyterians meant that more than 5 per cent of the population now met in illegal conventicles. Religious uniformity was still a dream, but no longer a reality. The English Revolution had produced a powerful backlash from Anglican royalists, but the new religious movements which emerged during mid-century had put down deep roots and weathered the storm of persecution. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers would be an awkward presence in English life from this point on, and they would soon become a dominant force within American religious culture. The Puritan Revolution has often been written off as an abject failure, but its impact on religious and political culture would reverberate across the Atlantic world for generations.

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NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, 68. Adamson, The Noble Revolt, 13, 121, 373. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War, 417. Loewenstein and Morrill, ‘Literature and Religion’, 671. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society, 268–9. See MacCulloch, The Later Reformation. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Milton, Catholic and Reformed; Quantin, The Church of England. Gardiner (ed.), Documents, 155–6. Collinson, The Birthpangs, 136, 139. Hobbes, Behemoth, 96. Burgess, ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion?’ But see Vallance, ‘Preaching to the Converted?’ Gentles, ‘The Iconography of Revolution’. For an up-to-date survey see Burgess, British Political Thought, 193–203. Winship, ‘Godly Republicanism’; id., ‘Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen’; Lake, ‘The “Court”’; Adamson, The Noble Revolt. Russell, The Causes, 21–2, 220–6. Stoyle, Loyality and Locality, 254–5. See Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession (1691), 30, which lists prominent parliamentarian commanders and politicians who were conventional Prayer Book Anglicans. Gardiner (ed.), Documents, 229. Ibid. 268. See Green, ‘Persecution’. Hughes, Gangraena; Vernon, ‘A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’. Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation’. Halcomb, ‘A Social History’. Duffy, ‘The Long Reformation’, 48–52. Durston, ‘The Failure of Cultural Revolution’. David Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’, 248. Scott, England’s Troubles, 253. Religions Enemies (1641), 6. For what follows see Como, ‘Radical Puritanism’. See McDowell, The English Radical Imagination. See John Coffey, ‘The Toleration Controversy’. On Exodus see Coffey, ‘Quentin Skinner’; for a broader survey see Hill, The English Bible. For what follows see B. Capp, ‘Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism’; Coffey, ‘The Impact of Apocalypticism’. Hessayon, Gold Tried in the Fire. See Underwood, Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War. Mortimer, Reason and Religion. Nelson, The Hebrew Republic. Scott, Commonwealth Principles, 6. See Judith Maltby, ‘Suffering and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Invention of “Anglicanism”, 1642–60’.

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40. Lacey, The Cult of King Charles. 41. See Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, ch. 7; Durston, ‘The Failure of Cultural Revolution’. 42. See Packer, The Transformation of Anglicanism. 43. Fincham and Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity’.

WORKS CITED Adamson, John. The Noble Revolt: The Overthrow of Charles I. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2007. Baxter, Richard. Richard Baxter’s Penitent Confession and his Necessary Vindication in answer to a book called The Second Part of the Mischiefs of Separation. London, 1691. Burgess, Glenn. ‘Was the English Civil War a War of Religion? The Evidence of Political Propaganda’. Huntington Library Quarterly 61 (1998), 173–203. ——. British Political Thought, 1500–1660. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Capp, B. ‘Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism’, in J.F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Coffey, John. ‘The Impact of Apocalypticism during the Puritan Revolutions’. Perichoresis 4.2 (2006), 117–48. ——. ‘The Toleration Controversy’, in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. —— and Paul C.-H. Lim (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ——. ‘Quentin Skinner and the Religious Dimension of Early Modern Political Thought’, in A. Chapman, Brad Gregory, and John Coffey (eds.), Seeing Things their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2009, 46–74. Collinson, Patrick. The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: Macmillan, 1988. Como, David. ‘Radical Puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P.C.-H. Lim (eds.), The Cambridge Companian to Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Dixhoorn, Chad B. van ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate in the Westminster Assembly, 1643–52’ (University of Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation). 7 vols. Cambridge, 2004. Duffy, Eamon. ‘The Long Reformation: Catholicism, Protestantism and the Multitude’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The Long Reformation, 1500–1800. London: UCL Press, 1998, 33–70. Durston, Christopher. ‘The Failure of Cultural Revolution’, in C. Durston and J. Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996. Durston, Christopher, and Jacqueline Eales (eds.). The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1996. ——and Judith Maltby (eds.). Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Fincham, Kenneth, and Stephen Taylor. ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–1660’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 18–43.

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Fincham, Kenneth, and Nicholas Tyacke. Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Fletcher, Anthony. The Outbreak of the English Civil War. London: Edward Arnold, 1981. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (ed.). Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625– 1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. Gentles, Ian. The New Model Army. Oxford: Blackwell, 1992. ——. ‘The Iconography of Revolution: England 1642–1649’, in I. Gentles, J. Morrill, and B. Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 91–113. Green, Ian. ‘The Persecution of “Scandalous” and “Malignant” Parish Clergy during the English Civil War’. English Historical Review 94 (1979), 507–31. Halcomb, Joel. ‘A Social History of Congregational Religious Practice during the Puritan Revolution’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation). University of Cambridge, 2009. Hessayon, Ariel. Gold Tried in the Fire: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972. ——. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Allen Lane, 1993. Hobbes, Thomas. Behemoth, or An Epitome of the Civil Wars of England. London, 1679. Hughes, Ann. Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lacey, Andrew. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003. Lake, Peter. ‘The “Court”, the “Country” and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the “Puritan Opposition” Think (Historically) about Politics on the Eve of the English Civil War’. Midland History 35 (2010), 28–70. Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ——and John Morrill. ‘Literature and Religion’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 664–713. MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. McDowell, Nicholas. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1603–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. McGregor, J. F., and Barry Reay (eds.). Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Maltby, Judith. ‘Suffering and Surviving: The Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Invention of Anglicanism, 1642–60’, in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Milton, Anthony. Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Morrill, John. The Nature of the English Revolution. Harlow: Longman, 1993. Mortimer, Sarah. Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Nelson, Eric. The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.

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Packer, J. W. The Transformation of Anglicanism, 1643–1660, with Special Reference to Henry Hammond. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969. Prior, Mary (ed.). Women in English Society, 1500–1800. London: Routledge, 1991. Quantin, Jean-Louis. The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of Confessional Identity in the 17th Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Richardson, R. C. The Debate on the English Revolution Revisited. London: Routledge, 1988. Russell, Conrad. The Causes of the English Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Scott, Jonathan. England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stoyle, Mark. Loyalty and Locality: Popular Allegiance in Devon during the English Civil War. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1994. Tyacke, Nicholas. Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Underwood, T. L. Primitivism, Radicalism and the Lamb’s War: The Baptist–Quaker Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Vallance, Edward. ‘Preaching to the Converted? Religious Justifications for the English Civil War’. Huntington Library Quarterly 65 (2003), 395–419. Vernon, Elliot. ‘A Ministry of the Gospel: The Presbyterians during the English Revolution’, in C. Durston and J. Maltby (eds.), Religion in Revolutionary England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Winship, Michael. ‘Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity’. William and Mary Quarterly 63 (2006), 427–62. ——. ‘Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c.1570–1606’. English Historical Review 124 (2009), 1050–74. Worden, Blair. ‘Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England’. Past and Present 109 (1985): 55–99.

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‘A monster horrible, deformed, huge, and sightless.’ Thus quoting Aeneid III.658, the printer Adrian Vlacq calls the poet John Milton a Cyclops.1 The insult wholly conforms to the conventions of seventeenth-century polemical exchange, in which the role of well-honed opprobrium is central. What gives the insult its sting is the assumption that Milton’s blindness results from divine punishment. It is an assumption made by many of his opponents, and Milton addresses it directly in the Second Defence. As Job impatiently replies to the question of his false comforters (‘who ever perished, being innocent?’),2 so Milton declares: I call upon Thee, my God, who knowest my inmost mind and all my thoughts, to witness that (although I have repeatedly examined myself on this point as earnestly as I could, and have searched all the corners of my life) I am conscious of nothing, or of no deed, either recent or remote, whose wickedness could justly occasion or invite upon me this supreme misfortune.3

Clearly Milton, too, has considered—only to reject—the possibility that his blindness is a form of divine retribution. Hence we must view with some caution Andrew Wear’s statement that early modern Protestants and Catholics found in their religion both the cause and the treatment of disease: ‘Prayer, pleading for divine mercy, was Christianity’s remedy for an illness that was viewed as God’s punishment or as a trial of one’s faith.’4 Most seventeenth-century patients, Milton among them, did not rely on prayer alone to relieve the symptoms of illness (and indeed Wear speaks elsewhere of ‘a kind of religio-medical spectrum for action or cure’).5 It is true that epidemics raging through the population were generally assumed to express divine displeasure. But whether an individual would have been as ready to view his or her own illness as punishment for sin is far less certain, as Milton’s self-defence demonstrates.6

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Even this brief glance at polemical literature of the mid-seventeenth century points to the underlying presence of questions about causality, about the relationship between providence and chance or between individual responsibility and immutable laws, and about the capacity of human understanding to penetrate occult realities—questions which are scientific (in the largest sense) as well as religious. That they are questions rather than assumptions stems from the fact that traditional epistemological certainties were being undermined during the seventeenth century by the advance of the ‘new’ or ‘experimental’ philosophy, umbrella terms used by contemporaries to signal a host of new approaches to comprehending the natural world and material reality and which it is tempting simply to call ‘science’. But the term ‘science’ meant ‘knowing’ in the seventeenth century; the dominant, modern sense of the word was not established for well over a century after the period covered in this chapter. It is true, however, that the metamorphosis from natural philosophy to (modern) science has its origins in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and to call the process a revolution is justifiable. But the division of knowledge into the categories we use today would not have made sense, and works that would now be classified as ‘literary’, or ‘theological’, or ‘political’, take up (both incidentally and directly) what we would now call ‘scientific’ concerns. Even to separate the revolution in medicine from the revolution in science is somewhat artificial, as physic was centrally concerned with questions about chemistry, and natural philosophy was concerned with questions about human physiology. Given such cautions, this chapter will attend to the ways in which medical and scientific concerns emerge in literature of the mid-seventeenth century and to the strategies by which modern literary scholarship seeks to understand them. Paradise Lost will figure prominently here, but the chapter will also glance at the writing of Andrew Marvell, Thomas Browne, Thomas Hobbes, and Abraham Cowley.7 Side by side with what Wear calls the ‘spiritualising’ of sickness in the early modern period are attempts to explain its physical causes. Even in the case of the plague, acknowledged to be God’s judgement upon a sinful population and so requiring acts of public penitence, corrupt or putrid air was usually seen as the material agent of infection. William Boraston, author of a chapter on pestilence in The English-Mans Treasure, declares, ‘Penitency and Confession are to be preferred before all other Medicaments, and withall to change the place for a more pure ayre.’8 Offering practical advice and written in the vernacular, The English-Mans Treasure is self-evidently not the work of learned physicians, whose interest lay not in medical practice but in medical theory. Harold Cook suggests the term ‘medical philosophers’ for such physicians, ‘men trained in texts’, whose ‘academic knowledge became the institutionalized criterion by which medical practice was gauged’.9 Historians of medicine have tended to focus on controversies among these medical philosophers; only recently have they begun to investigate the complex and elusive issue of how the distance between medical theory and medical practice was bridged in the quest for treatments. In terms of relating the changes in medicine to the tumultuous political events of the mid-seventeenth century, historians no longer equate Galenic physiology, the traditional and dominant paradigm for understanding health and illness in the early modern period,

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with a conservative politics. As a dietetic physic providing a regimen for health, Galenism aimed at helping the individual to maintain or restore balance in his or her unique temperament. In conjunction with the four Aristotelian elements (earth, water, air, and fire), the four humours and their qualities are today the best known of the ‘naturals’ believed to define the Galenic body:10 black bile, associated with the qualities of dry and cold, was held to dominate in the melancholic temperament; phlegm, associated with wet and cold, in the phlegmatic temperament; blood, with hot and wet, in the sanguine; yellow bile, with dry and hot, in the choleric. A healthy humoral balance was to be maintained by regulating one’s relationship to the six ‘non-naturals’ or externals: ‘air, food and drink, exertion and rest, sleep and waking, retentions and evacuations, and passions of the mind’.11 The ‘old physiology’, as Galenism was often called, may thus be said to imply a politics of self-discipline, a politics as congenial to sectarians and republicans as to those loyal to the established Church and monarchy. Moreover, as Andrew Mendelsohn has observed, the use of Galenic organic language for political analogy—as, most famously, in the notion of the body politic—‘offered a legitimate way to propose change and revolution, or simply intervention in what was thought to be a natural order’.12 What Galenism did not have, until recurring outbreaks of the plague helped bring about a change in thinking, was a concept of the disease entity (as opposed to constitutional imbalance) that was contagious and arrived from outside the body. Thus ‘Galenic physicians’ were pushed, as Andrew Wear remarks, ‘some way to accepting the view of empirics, their hated competitors’.13 This may partially explain why, against humoralism’s long-established dominance, the chemical theories promulgated by the Swiss-German occult philosopher Paracelsus, and followers such as Johannes Baptista van Helmont, increasingly gained adherents in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the centre of Paracelsian physic are three immaterial ‘principles’: sulphur (representing the combustible), mercury (the vaporous), and salt (the residual), all observable in alchemical distillation. Paracelsianism proclaimed ‘the neoPlatonic unification of the corporeal and the spiritual’ (which implies the transmuting of one into the other); searched for the panacea (variously called the ‘elixir’, ‘tincture’, or ‘stone’) that would heal all human ills; and viewed the human body as a microcosmic version of the macrocosm.14 Many chemical physicians or ‘iatrochemists’, while rejecting Paracelsus’s religious mysticism, adopted his insistence upon the investigation of nature and his disdain for the use of dialectical methods in physic. It is thus fair to say that chemical medicine contributed significantly to the gradually increasing role of experience and experiment in the understanding of physiology, even though Paracelsus’s reputation (as prophet or charlatan), allied to the exuberant language in which he and his followers wrote, made adherents of chemical medicine easy targets for accusations of enthusiasm, separatism, communism, and rebellion. Underestimating the rhetorical flair and interested motives of the accusers may have contributed to claims among an influential group of twentieth-century historians that chemical physic could be straightforwardly identified with a subversive politics.15 These claims have now been qualified; ‘alchemy’, Andrew Mendelsohn observes, ‘did not attract only radicals’.16

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The connection between a new physic and a new politics is now seen to be more subtle, indirect, and creative than had earlier been thought. By the middle of the seventeenth century, notes Harold Cook, ‘few learned [i.e. Galenist] physicians opposed the use of chemical methods of analysis and treatment in toto, although most criticized the chemists for single-mindedness’.17 Certainly any simple dichotomy between Galenic and Paracelsian medicine at the mid-century is untenable; indeed, the combining of traditional and newer approaches to physic is at least as significant as the controversies between dogmatic adherents of either approach. The staunch royalist and Church of England rector Thomas Vaughan, brother of the poet, denounces the ‘old’ philosophy as ‘a Vomit of Aristototle’, declaring that ‘Air . . . is no Element but a Certain miraculous Hermaphrodit, the Cæment of two worlds, and a Medley of Extremes.’18 Yet in his account of a chemical Creation, in which Earth is seen as the residue of a primitive mass, Galenic language emerges: ‘Crude, phlegmatick, indigested humors’ are said to have ‘settled like Lees towards [Earth’s] Centre.’19 In Paradise Lost (probably begun in the late 1650s though not published until 1667), Milton exploits to extraordinary literary effect the availability of multiple theories of physiology. His unique synthesis is most clearly apparent in Book V, when Raphael, sharing a meal with Adam and Eve, explains why angels can consume human food. What God gives ‘to man in part j Spiritual’, the archangel states: may of purest spirits be found No ingrateful food: and food alike those pure Intelligential substances require As doth your rational; and both contain Within them every lower faculty Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste, Tasting concoct, digest, assimilate, And corporeal to incorporeal turn. For know, whatever was created, needs To be sustained and fed; of elements The grosser feeds the purer, earth the sea, Earth and the sea feed air, the air those fires Ethereal . . . (V.405–18)

The presence here of the four elements in relation to the process of digestion clearly summons the old physiology, as does the presence of an apparently Aristotelian scala naturae. But ‘concoct’ has a place in chemical medicine as well, and there is nothing static about this scale of nature. What Raphael describes is a dietetic system with a difference. All matter proceeds from God, the archangel explains, and if creatures govern their appetite by obedience to him, they will become ‘more refined, more spirituous, and pure, j As nearer to him placed or nearer tending’ (V.475–6). The doctrine of the inseparability of matter and spirit, usually known as ‘monism’ or ‘animist materialism’, is framed here in what Michael Schoenfeldt calls the poem’s ‘alimental vision’, in which digestion is ‘the central moral and physical phenomenon of

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the universe’.20 Raphael eats dinner, explains the narrator, ‘with keen despatch j Of real hunger, and concoctive heat j To transubstantiate’ (V.436–8). It is ‘a transubstantiation fully available to a priesthood of all eaters’, Schoenfeldt remarks,21 or, as Alastair Fowler puts it, ‘matter is transformed to spirit by ordinary digestive processes’, which suggests ‘that Adam and Eve enjoy Communion with the gods’.22 Recently Charlotte Nicholls has demonstrated that this transformative ‘digestion’ ought more precisely to be understood as ‘sublimation’, the term in chemical medicine that signifies ‘the process of purifying a compound substance through heat, whereby the purest element is extracted in the change from a solid state to a vaporous state, with distillation the comparable process for liquids or solids dissolved in solvents’.23 Sublimation is the exact ‘biomechanism’, that is, by which creatures’ transubstantiation and the ascent of the scala naturae may occur in the prelapsarian world of Paradise Lost.24 Here, physiology and theology are one: the possibility of ascending the scale of nature is available to all creatures who choose to govern their appetites and obey God.25 Milton’s animist materialism is thus the ontological expression of his Arminianism, which holds that salvation is available to all who seek it. Determinism, whether from a belief in predestination or adherence to the ‘mechanical philosophy’, is repudiated.26 The corollary of the ‘ordinary’ transubstantiation available to all creatures is that those who disobey, who do not govern their appetites, become coarser in their physical and intellectual being; they descend the scale of nature. After Satan falls, for instance, he espouses a dualist philosophy, vainly imagining that what he seems to be can hide what he is. Of course in the monist universe of Paradise Lost, the truth of what Satan is manifests itself despite, or rather through, his disguises. His ‘incorporeality begins to decline into corporeality’ as he comes increasingly to resemble his ‘sin and place of doom obscure and foul’ (IV.840);27 he is able to feel pain; and his clarity of mind is muddied by contradictions and uncertainties. Working out animist materialism’s complex physiological, theological, and political implications for angels and human beings in Paradise Lost is one of the most exciting areas of current Milton scholarship. There is still much to explore in terms of monism’s implications for the postlapsarian human condition represented in Books XI and XII. The poem’s picture of the fallen world—which necessarily responds to the conditions of the seventeenth-century world in which it was produced—acutely emphasizes the distance between physiological theory and medical practice. Practice has none of theory’s neatness: its ‘method’ resembles trial and error as it engages with the myriad particularities of the material world, particularities that were increasingly valued over the course of the seventeenth century. The greater use of dissection in the understanding of anatomy, the gradual realization of what was implied by William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, the wonders revealed by the microscope, even the availability of New World plants for medicine—such material developments (to which I will return) began inexorably to shift physiology from its preoccupation with and polemical disputes about theories of causation to close observation of and engagement with the physical world. In this respect, the career of Francis Glisson is paradigmatic. His monistic, vitalist medical theories—which influenced Milton’s

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physio-political thinking in ways now vigorously at issue—led contemporaries to suspect him of heresy, if not atheism; while his use of dissection and close anatomical observation for the study of healthy and diseased livers (published in 1654 in his Anatomia hepatis) has made an enduring contribution to medical science.28 Inevitably, the shifting balance between philosophy and empiricism undermined the position of academic physicians. In an essay first published in 1974, ‘The Medical Profession and its Radical Critics’, Christopher Hill turned scholars’ attention away from a focus on medical disputes at the mid-century towards the rapidly changing social politics of who was treated by whom. The social history of early modern medicine is now a burgeoning field of study, which takes as one point of departure the fact that the College of Physicians—‘elitist, Latinate, and Galenist’—exerted a monopolistic control over the medical profession.29 Thus much of the population sought (or were confirmed in their tendency to seek) more affordable and locally available medical advice not only from ‘literate practitioners without medical doctorates’, such as surgeons and apothecaries, but also from ‘wise women’, midwives, empirics, and others.30 Hill’s essay calls attention to men such as Nicholas Culpeper and William Walwyn, who wrote or translated medical manuals for the general public in response to the shortage and expense of physicians.31 What is most marked about Walwyn’s self-help medical manuals is their tone of compassionate determination to avoid harming patients, while his criticism of physicians and their conventional treatments grows increasingly severe. In his last medical treatise, Physick for Families, published in 1669, Walwyn states that physic, which ought to be ‘the great sustainer of mankind’, is at the present ‘not in its true exalted state, but in a sordid, low, and perplexed condition unfit for Humane Constitutions, and not to be trusted in times of sickness and extremity’.32 First he surveys the usual course of treatments, which he calls ‘molesters of the sick’: glisters, bleeding, purging, vomits, sweating, ‘Vescicatories, or Raisers of small and great Blisters’, and opium.33 Then he explains the principles upon which treatment ought to be based, among them the rule that the prescriber, for assurance, should take what he prescribes, and that medicines ought to ‘nourish and cherish’ the bodies of the ill rather than violently ‘move’ them.34 Milton’s own experience with physic not only failed to preserve his sight (if it did not actually ‘hasten’ his blindness) but significantly increased his suffering.35 Setoning, one of the treatments to which he was subjected, involves piercing the skin with a hot cautery and drawing a cotton thread through the holes, a procedure that gives weight to Walwyn’s condemnation of ‘the common Road of Physick . . . for its manifest uncertainty in Principles, Roughness, Harshness, and Cruelty in Methods, Impropriety, Impotency, and danger in Medicines’.36 Blindness is not among the maladies shown to Adam by the archangel Michael in Book XI of Paradise Lost, maladies endemic in the postlapsarian world. The inclusion of this minor epic catalogue may owe something to the depiction of the Furies (that is, the torments to which fallen humanity is prey) in Josuah Sylvester’s translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’s Divine Weeks and Works.37 Du Bartas’s list is loosely structured on the human body. The first ‘furies’ he mentions attack the head; the next, the throat; then the lungs, and so on. Those that Michael shows Adam follow no such neat

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organization, perhaps an acknowledgement of the randomness with which illness seems to occur.38 Adam sees a ‘lazar-house’ or hospital wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased, all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums. Dire was the tossing, deep the groans, despair Tended the sick busiest from couch to couch; And over them triumphant death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike, though oft invoked With vows, as their chief good, and final hope. (XI.479–93)

These afflictions, states Michael, have been brought about ‘by intemperance . . . j In meats and drinks’ (XI.472–3), a statement which, though at first surprising, is fully in accord with the poem’s animist materialism. Today we might well qualify the element of choice implied by ‘intemperance’, but modern medical science would not deny the role of environmental factors (including food) in disease aetiology. What is alien about this portrait of human suffering, to modern sensibilities, is the absence of any mention of effective treatment, therapeutic or palliative. It is an absence that reflects what it meant to experience serious illness in the seventeenth century (and beyond). To Adam’s anguished question, ‘Why should not man, j Retaining still divine similitude j In part, from such deformities be free?’ (XI.511–13), Michael returns an uncompromisingly monistic answer. ‘Their maker’s image’, he states, ‘Forsook them, when themselves they vilified j To serve ungoverned appetite, and took j His image whom they served, a brutish vice’ (XI.515–18). But as monistic principles would also dictate, there is another way to die. Those who govern their appetite, Michael explains, will drop ‘like ripe fruit’ into the lap of mother earth, or ‘be with ease j Gathered, not harshly plucked’ (XI.535–7). The fact that despair tends the sick in Adam’s vision may hint at Milton’s attitude towards the grand claims made for medicines derived from such New World plants as tobacco, coffee, coca, tea, and Peruvian bark (source of quinine). In contrast, Milton’s contemporary Abraham Cowley greets the discovery of such plants with a mixture of wonder and enthusiasm, devoting the fifth book of his Latin poem Plantarum to praise for these New World discoveries. Cowley’s poem has not been much studied, although a great deal of scholarly attention is currently being focused on how Europeans came upon the new medicines, and on the relationship between ‘bioprospecting’ and colonial expansion.39

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Much more attention has been devoted to the question of natural history in general and its relationship to the literature of the mid-seventeenth century. The question of ‘dominion’ over the natural world—given to Adam by God in Genesis 1 (and echoed by Milton’s God at Paradise Lost VII.532)—is of particular interest to those scholars who read early modern literature in light of ecological concerns, a critical approach still in the process of defining its scope and methodology. As scientific disciplines, botany and zoology did not come into being until the eighteenth century. But European exploration of the Americas, Africa, and Asia—and, with exploration, the increasing value attached to eyewitness and experiential encounters with plants and animals—makes seventeenth-century literature notable for the liveliness of its natural history. European encounters with new worlds have special relevance for Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia epidemica, published in 1646, which sceptically analyses information about plants and animals inherited from antiquity, and for Paradise Lost and its representation of the garden of Eden, which contains ‘[i]n narrow room nature’s whole wealth’ (IV.207). To understand how Milton’s poem makes good its claim to include the whole wealth of the natural world, it is necessary to consider the politics of naming. Unlike Andrew Marvell’s portrait of Appleton House, which revels in the colloquial particularity of English names (e.g. hazel, throstle, heron, ash, hewel, osier), Milton’s naming of paradisal creatures avoids geographical and indeed historical specificity.40 Thus the garden includes creatures with names familiar to Europeans through their reading of the Bible and classical literature, New World creatures named for their Old World counterparts, and, most frequent of all, creatures called simply ‘bird’, ‘beast’, ‘fish’, and ‘fowl’, and ‘grass’, ‘herb’, and ‘tree’, according to the general categories derived from Genesis. In the tiger that frisks in paradise, the New World jaguar (which Europeans at first called a ‘tiger’) merges with the swift and cruel beast exhibited in Rome in the first century bc; and in the biblical fig that provides covering for the fallen Adam and Eve, the Indian banyan meets the South American ‘strangler fig’ reported by Walter Raleigh. Eve’s careful tending of the plants of paradise and her experience at the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge have been juxtaposed to mid-century experimentalism and to the development of botanical gardens at Oxford and elsewhere in Europe. Milton even assigns to her the naming of flowers in paradise. Upon learning that she and Adam must leave the garden, Eve laments: ‘O flowers, j . . . which I bred up with tender hand j From the first op’ning bud, and gave ye names, j Who now shall rear ye to the sun’? (XI.273, 276–8). Her naming of the flowers parallels Adam’s naming of the animals, based on Genesis 2: 20: ‘I named them, as they passed,’ says Adam to Raphael, ‘and understood j Their nature’ (VIII.352–3). The study of the literary representation of animals in the early modern period is currently developing in two main directions. The first considers what happened to the complexly encoded meanings of animals (pelicans and hyenas, for example) familiar from biblical and classical antiquity and the medieval bestiaries, when first-hand reports were brought back to Europe by travellers and exploring naturalists. The second considers the boundary between the human and the animal in Renaissance thinking, and the religious, political, and rhetorical uses to which that shifting boundary was put.

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Dissection and especially vivisection of animals helped lead William Harvey to his discovery of the circulation of the blood in the early seventeenth century, a discovery that was not generally embraced, however, until the middle of the century (and then only with some distortions). Having studied medicine at Padua, where anatomical investigation with the use of dissection was taught by Fabricius (Girolamo Fabrizi), Harvey continued his studies of the body in England, publishing in 1628 his explanation of the circulation of the blood, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus.41 As scholars have noted, the title of his book, with its reference to animals, aligns it with philosophical disputation rather than with medicine. It affronted traditionalists; Harvey’s conclusions undermined Galenism, as circulating blood would mix the humours together, making it impossible to balance them or evacuate an individual humour through bloodletting. By the time of Harvey’s death in 1657, however, with Galenism being challenged on several fronts, the circulation of the blood was gaining a measure of acceptance by those who were antagonistic to the old physiology and by others who advocated Cartesian mechanism (to which I will return). Attempts have been made to connect the theory of the circulation of the blood to the republican fervour that accompanied the Civil War. More productively, Jonathan Sawday locates the ‘culture of dissection’ within the early modern culture of representation: ‘The human body may, in the Renaissance, have been “emblazoned” or embellished through art and poetry. But to “blazon” a body is also to hack it into pieces in order to flourish fragments of men and women as trophies.’42 His study culminates in a consideration of the role of dissection in the creative mix of scientific, political, and literary activity that marks the Civil War era. Harvey was not the sole Englishman upon whom the Paduan method of study, with its emphasis upon dissection and its strongly empirical tradition, had a lasting influence. Thomas Browne studied at Padua in the early 1630s; evidence that he continued to experiment with animal dissection is scattered throughout his correspondence and indeed throughout Pseudodoxia epidemica (as when he invokes a detailed knowledge of hares’ reproductive organs to refute the vulgar error that they are bisexual).43 Thomas Hobbes, who did not study at Padua, nonetheless adopted its methodology, described as follows by J. W. N. Watkins: ‘the way to understand something is to take it apart, in deed or in thought, ascertain the nature of its parts, and then reassemble it—resolve it and recompose it’.44 In Leviathan, published in 1651, Hobbes may be seen to take apart, philosophically, what he saw as a broken society—England in a state of civil war—in order to reassemble it and restore it to proper working order. Like Milton, Hobbes was a monist, but his is a mechanical rather than an animist materialism. ‘Hobbes’s philosophy rests on his certainty that the universe contains nothing other than matter in motion, which can be analyzed mathematically.’45 The seventeenth-century intersection of ‘science’ with politics, theology, and literature is nowhere more dramatic than here, the point at which mechanical natural philosophies confront questions about free will, the nature of Creation, and the existence of the soul. Indeed, Carolyn Merchant has argued that regarding nature as a machine rather than an organism licensed the exploitation of the natural world (particularly through

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colonial conquest) and the subordination of women. Hobbesian determinism produced violent reactions both from orthodox Christian theologians, offended both at Hobbes’s denial of free will and at the material God his philosophy implies, and from those liberal theologians known as the Cambridge Platonists. In contrast, the mechanical philosophy of René Descartes, which bears a superficial resemblance to that of Hobbes, enjoyed great popularity in the mid-seventeenth century, despite the fact that Descartes’s (unjustified) reputation as an Epicurean atomist tinged his philosophy with the scandal of libertinism.46 Unlike Hobbes’s, Descartes’s mechanism is dualist—and so preserves the notion of a God who is spirit, eternal, immutable, and infinite—and, to some degree, atomist, for ‘Descartes envisioned the world as a plenum of particles of matter of various sizes set in motion by God and self-perpetuating since then.’47 In his groundbreaking Milton among the Philosophers, Stephen Fallon demonstrates in rich detail the relevance of this polemical, philosophical context for Paradise Lost. His general argument is that ‘Milton’s animist materialism responded to contemporary debates while being rooted in older traditions. It . . . countered the threats to free will and theism posed by the new science and emerging mechanism.’48 It may be useful here to consider how another poet at the heart of cultural and political matters of his day, Andrew Marvell, responded very differently to this teeming philosophical context, specifically to the whiff of libertinism and scepticism that accompanied it. In stanza 73 of Upon Appleton House, the speaker reviews ‘official’ routes to interpreting nature: ‘What Rome, Greece, Palestine, ere said j I in this light mosaic read. j Thrice happy he who, not mistook, j Hath read in Nature’s mystic book.’49 Whether mosaic is a noun or a verb cannot be ascertained, and the interpretive ambiguity thereby introduced into the lines strongly hints that there is no happy he who does not mistake in his reading of nature’s book. Against these (perhaps mistaken) views on nature, the poet is grabbed by immediate sensory experience in the form of the ivy of stanza 74, which ‘licks, and clasps, and curls, and hales’ the poet.50 The implication is that if the philosopher does not grab the ivy but lets the ivy grab the philosopher, truth will (someday, though not yet) be found. The poet, sceptical about scepticism, has thus cleared for himself a space for free thinking, unlike the libertines, who merely think they are free. Concerned throughout with perspective, Upon Appleton House (probably written in 1651) includes a reference to the ‘multiplying glasses’ that make fleas appear ‘to feed so wide, so slowly move, j As constellations do above’.51 In 1665, the picture of a flea magnified by the lenses of a microscope appeared in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, though Hooke’s findings, including the illustrations, were being aired well before the book was published.52 Marvell’s glasses, however, refer not to the microscope but to ‘the short tubes in which fleas were trapped’ or ‘a lens with many flat facets ground onto its convex’.53 Similarly, the insects that Raphael describes in his account of Creation in Paradise Lost, Book VII, their ‘smallest lineaments exact j In all the liveries decked of summer’s pride j With spots of gold and purple, azure and green’, belong to the realm of inscription or illumination rather than optics; and ‘magnifying’ in the poem means ‘praising’.54 The impact of the telescope on the poem is an entirely different matter. From the studies of Marjorie Nicolson in the early twentieth century

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to those of present-day scholars, Milton’s attitude toward Copernicanism, including his meeting with and poetic allusions to Galileo, has produced heated critical debate.55 Galileo, Padua’s most famous scholar, was teaching at the university when William Harvey studied medicine there; both Hobbes and Milton claimed to have met him (though there is some dispute about both claims). Famously, Galileo is the only contemporary of Milton to be mentioned in Paradise Lost. Amy Boesky observes that Milton ‘occludes’ his three allusions to the astronomer with ‘ambiguities’, figured as spots or spottiness. She argues that ‘it is Milton’s subtle challenges to Galileo’s optics which most strongly confirm his dedication to the open-endedness of scientific enquiry’.56 Even Galileo, the mortal who most surely and powerfully sees the natural world, cannot attain absolute certainty. The lesson that Galileo embodies is reinforced in the dialogue between Raphael and Adam in Book VIII. On his calculation, Adam states, nature has been disproportionate in allowing the sun and stars to revolve around the dark, tiny earth. Raphael’s response has been called ambivalent, implying for some scholars that Milton was afraid to commit himself to either Copernican heliocentrism or Tychonic geoheliocentrism.57 Those who posit a timid ambivalence do not take into account the rhetorical form of the dialogue between the man and the angel: Adam makes a statement, and Raphael asks a question. ‘When I behold this goodly frame, this world j Of heaven and earth consisting, and compute j Their magnitudes,’ Adam states, ‘this earth [is] a spot, a grain, j An atom, with the firmament compared’ (VIII.15–18). That the verb is implied tends to hide the declarative form of Adam’s ‘questioning’ of Raphael. The archangel, in turn, ‘answers’ Adam’s statement with a question: ‘What if the sun j Be centre to the world, and other stars j By his attractive virtue and their own j Incited, dance about him various rounds?’ (VIII.122–5).58 The form of the response allows Adam to work out for himself what else his calculations might mean. That is, the productive ambivalence of Raphael’s question is designed to instil confidence in Adam (whose calculations have been accurate) while pointing out that there is still intellectual work for Adam to do (for he needs to be more creative in applying what he has computed). Beyond the immediate astronomical instance, moreover, the response encourages Adam to infer that, when it comes to reading the book of nature, a disciplined, enquiring attitude (embodied in Raphael’s well-informed question) is more productive than the assumption of certitude. This must be distinguished from the kind of speculation that can never be resolved. Thus Raphael admonishes Adam, ‘Dream not of other worlds, what creatures there j Live, in what state, condition or degree’ (VIII.175–6). But, he might have added, do not exclude the possibility that such worlds exist, a possibility alluded to throughout Paradise Lost.59 This chapter on literature and revolutionary medicine and science may appropriately end with a brief consideration of the institutionalization of the ‘new philosophy’, its symbolic embracing by the establishment, which occurs with the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 under the patronage of Charles II. From 1645, informal gatherings in Oxford and at Gresham College, London, were held by those interested in discussing the new philosophy. These led eventually to the proposal for and founding of the Royal

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Society. The political character of the early gatherings has long been the subject of scholarly interest, as has the satirical representation of scientific virtuosi. More recently, issues of gender in early modern science have produced a wealth of critical studies centring on Margaret Cavendish’s relationship with the Society and her poetic appropriation of the new philosophy. The 400th anniversary in 2005 of the publication of The Advancement of Learning has stimulated new discussion about the extent to which the early Royal Society was Baconian. It would perhaps be fair to say, however, that critical attention continues primarily to focus on the role of the Royal Society in the development both of a method for verifying claims to knowledge and of a scientific language, a style suitable for the ‘experimental philosophy’, as the early Society’s most prominent member, Robert Boyle, persisted in calling it. Studies of the early Society’s attempts to work out such a method, studies that involve consideration of class-related conventions and discourse, have increased significantly in the last two decades. It is nonetheless significant that Peter Dear, early experimentalism’s most discerning student, avoids referring to ‘the experimental method’ when he describes the way in which midseventeenth century natural philosophers went about their work. ‘Experience’ and ‘experiment’ had not yet separated themselves, he insists. ‘Everyone . . . agreed that experience was crucial to the achievement of natural knowledge’, but only at the end of the seventeenth century was there a ‘practical implementation of this rhetorical stress on experience . . . [in] the form of stylized, set-piece investigations that established the lessons of specific experiences’.60 When newly fallen Eve addresses the Tree of Forbidden Knowledge in Paradise Lost, Book IX, she echoes the ‘rhetorical stress’ of Milton’s contemporaries: ‘Experience, next to thee I owe, j Best guide’ (IX.807–8). She is mistaken in ‘best’, and the last lines of the poem gently correct her: ‘The world was all before them, where to choose j Their place of rest, and providence their guide’ (XII.646–7). But Eve’s praise of experience need not be read as a rejection of the new experimental philosophy. Rather, we can see it as embodying a certain caution: experience, undisciplined and ungoverned, is not in itself an unadulterated good leading directly to productive knowledge. Indeed, the ambition to know ‘as gods’ meets with profound disappointment in Eve’s ‘experience’. But what she and Adam are learning is how, by experience, one gains knowledge in a postlapsarian world, and, from knowledge, wisdom. This is the world they have gained (though they have lost the garden), and experience will teach them how to learn from experience.

NOTES 1. The insult occurs in Vlacq’s dedication to Regii sanguinis clamor, 1045. The work was written by Peter Du Moulin, though published anonymously in 1652. 2. Job 4: 7 (KJV). 3. Milton, Complete Prose Works (hereafter CPW), iv. 587. 4. Wear, ‘Religious Beliefs and Medicine’, 147. 5. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 293.

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6. In contrast to Milton’s attitude is Ralph Josselin’s note in his diary for 1644 that God had ‘exercised’ him and his wife with bad colds because ‘we have sinned this week’ (Diary, 32–3). 7. Svendsen, Milton and Science, and Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things (which takes issue with Svendsen’s study), are to date the only critical studies attempting to deal with all the sciences that have a presence in Milton’s epic. Clemens, ‘Falling, Fallen, Fell’, has argued for the radically dissociating effect that the burgeoning experimental sciences have on an epic that aims to be encyclopedic. 8. Boraston, ‘Of the Pestilence’, 250. The English-Mans Treasure was first published in 1596 and expanded and republished in 1613, 1626, and 1633, when the chapter on pestilence was added. The last, badly printed, edition appeared in 1641. 9. Cook, Decline of the Old Medical Regime, 255–6. 10. A fifth Aristotelian element, the superlunary quintessence, was believed to be present in the four sublunary elements, from which alchemists aimed to extract it. 11. Cook, ‘Medicine’, 423. 12. Mendelsohn, ‘Alchemy and Politics’, 48. 13. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 299. 14. Debus, The English Paracelsians, 37. 15. See esp. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 287–305; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 270–1; and Rattansi, ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’. 16. Mendelsohn, ‘Alchemy and Politics’, 37. 17. Cook, ‘Medicine’, 422. 18. Philalethes [Vaughan], Anthroposophia theomagica, sig. B4r, 99. 19. Ibid. 17. 20. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 139. 21. Ibid. 140. 22. Milton, Paradise Lost V.434–8, note. 23. Nicholls, ‘“Your bodies may at last”’, 34–5. 24. Ibid. 24. 25. John Rogers, who argues that Milton puts his ‘vitalist materialism’ at the service of a conservative politics in Paradise Lost, states that ‘[i]nflexible stratification is as much the focus of Raphael’s vision as ontological mobility’ (Matter of Revolution, 111). This argument ignores the transformative chemical process at the heart of the scala naturae described by the archangel. 26. See below for the ‘mechanical philosophy’. 27. Raymond, Milton’s Angels, 291. That Milton’s angels have shapes but not bodies, as Raymond notes, depends upon the crucial distinction between matter and body in Milton’s philosophy, a distinction argued for by Phillip Donnelly in an important qualification of Fallon’s thesis: ‘Milton’s materialist monism treats spiritual and corporeal substances as manifestations, differing in degree and hence qualitatively, of the one first matter’ (Donnelly, ‘“Matter” versus Body’, 82). 28. Giglioni, ‘Anatomist Atheist’, 115. 29. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine, xi. 30. Cook, ‘Medicine’, 419. In Secrets of Women, Katharine Park traces the means by which learned physicians, often without experiential knowledge, worked to retain their status especially in competition with midwives, who did have the experience increasingly valued in the seventeenth century.

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31. The English-Mans Treasure, cited above, is another, somewhat earlier, medical self-help manual of the sort Hill discusses. 32. Walwyn, Physick for Families, 2. 33. Ibid. 6, 18. 34. Ibid. 21. 35. Darbishire, Early Lives, 28; see also 45 and 72. 36. Walwyn, Physic for Families, 3. 37. Du Bartas, Divine Weeks, trans. Sylvester, i. 366–73 (ii.i.3.331–572). 38. Lines 485–7 appear for the first time in the second edition of Paradise Lost. Perhaps, as has been suggested, Milton had seen more suffering by 1674 and so the list was expanded. But was it Milton who expanded it? Monistic principles would imply the merging of physical and mental ills (as in ‘qualms j Of heart-sick agony’), not their separation (as in ‘Demoniac frenzy’); and elsewhere in his work Milton avoids alliterative, clichéd, Bartasian-like epithets such as ‘moping melancholy’ and ‘moon-struck madness’. 39. Schiebinger, ‘Prospecting for Drugs’, 120. 40. Marvell, Upon Appleton House, in Poems, 232, 237 (11. 531, 532, 533, 537, 646). 41. In Secrets of Women, Park argues that it was the attempt to understand the reproductive organs of women that crucially propelled the study of anatomy in the early modern period. 42. Sawday, Body Emblazoned, ix. 43. Browne, Pseudodoxia epidemica, i. 23–31. 44. Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas, 52. 45. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 32. 46. Catherine Wilson explains ‘the series of easy deductions’ that led contemporaries to this suspicion: ‘whoever studies nature sets a value on nature; whoever sets a value on nature seeks to live according to nature; whoever seeks to live according to nature lives outside the laws of God and men’ (Invisible World, 177). 47. Blair, ‘Natural Philosophy’, 397. Among the three major mechanical philosophers of the seventeenth century, the ‘true’ atomist is Pierre Gassendi. His work was not translated into vernacular languages (although it was popularized in English by Walter Charleton), which may explain why his version of mechanism exercised less influence on English thinkers. See Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 41–9. 48. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 79. A fruitful area of current scholarship pairs Milton with another animist materialist and opponent of mechanism, Anne Conway. 49. Marvell, Poems, 234 (11. 581–4). 50. Ibid. (1. 590). 51. Ibid. 230 (ll. 463–5). 52. Hooke, Micrographia, plate 35. 53. Marvell, Poems, 230 n. 462. 54. Milton, Paradise Lost VII.477–9. 55. The astonishingly prolific and wide-ranging Nicolson may be said to have inaugurated the study of early modern science and literature with a series of books and articles written for the most part between 1920 and 1940. Among numerous pieces devoted to astronomy and literature, her best known is probably ‘Milton and the Telescope’. Among the current generation of Milton scholars, Alastair Fowler is notably knowledgeable about early modern astronomy, as demonstrated in his erudite annotations on the poem’s astronomical passages.

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56. Boesky, ‘Milton, Galileo, and Sunspots’, 40. 57. Marjara, Contemplation of Created Things, 134–5. 58. Alastair Fowler observes of lines 122–3 that ‘[t]he sun is numerologically at the centre of [Raphael’s] paragraph’ (Paradise Lost VIII.122–3 n.). 59. For further allusions to the plurality of worlds in Paradise Lost, see III.458, 565–71, and 670; V.263; VII.621; and VIII.140–58. 60. Dear, ‘Meanings of Experience’, 131.

WORKS CITED Bartas, Guillaume de Saluste du. The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, ed. Susan Snyder, trans. Josuah Sylvester. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Blair, Ann. ‘Natural Philosophy’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), Early Modern Science, vol. iii of The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 365–406. Boesky, Amy. ‘Milton, Galileo, and Sunspots: Optics and Certainty in Paradise Lost’. Milton Studies 34 (1997), 23–43. Boraston, W[illiam]. ‘Of the Pestilence’, in Thomas Vicary (ed.), The English-Man’s Treasure with the True Anatomie of Mans Body. London, 1633, 245–62. Browne, Thomas. Pseudodoxia epidemica, ed. Robin Robbins. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Clemens, Justin. ‘Falling, Fallen, Fell: Symptoms of the New Science in Paradise Lost’. Ninth International Milton Symposium. London, 8 July 2008. Cook, Harold J. The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. ——. ‘Medicine’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), Early Modern Science, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 407–34. Darbishire, Helen. The Early Lives of Milton. London: Barnes and Noble, 1965. Dear, Peter. ‘The Meanings of Experience’, in Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (eds.), Early Modern Science, vol. iii of The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 106–31. Debus, Allen G. The English Paracelsians. London: Oldbourne, 1965. Donnelly, Phillip J. ‘“Matter” versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism’. Milton Quarterly 33.3 (1999), 79–85. Fallon, Stephen M. Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in SeventeenthCentury England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991. Furdell, Elizabeth. Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2002. Giglioni, Guido. ‘Anatomist Atheist? The “Hylozoistic” Foundations of Francis Glisson’s Anatomical Research’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Scolar, 1996, 115–35. Harvey, William. Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. London, 1628.

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Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. ——. ‘The Medical Profession and its Radical Critics’, in Change and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, 157–78. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies. London, 1665. Josselin, Ralph. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 1976. Marjara, Harinder Singh. Contemplation of Created Things: Science in ‘Paradise Lost’. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith. London: PearsonLongman, 2003. Mendelsohn, J. Andrew. ‘Alchemy and Politics in England 1649–1665’. Past and Present 135 (1992), 30–78. Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler. London: Longman, 1998. Moulin, Peter du . Regii sanguinis clamor ad coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos, trans. Paul W. Blackford, in Don M. Wolfe et al. (eds.), Complete Prose Works of John Milton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, iv. 1042–81. Nicholls, Charlotte. ‘“Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit”: Medical Science and the Anatomia animata in Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation). University of Exeter, 2010. Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. ‘Milton and the Telescope’. English Literary History 2.1 (1935), 1–32. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. Philalethes, Eugenius [Thomas Vaughan]. Anthroposophia theomagica. London, 1650. Rattansi, P. M. ‘Paracelsus and the Puritan Revolution’. Ambix 11.1 (1963), 24–32. Raymond, Joad. Milton’s Angels: The Early-Modern Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Sawday, Jonathan. The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Schiebinger, Londa. ‘Prospecting for Drugs: European Naturalists in the West Indies’, in Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (eds.), Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, 119–33. Schoenfeldt, Michael C. Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Svendsen, Kester. Milton and Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956. Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.

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Walwyn, William. Physick for Families. London, 1669. Watkins, J. W. N. Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories. London: Hutchinson, 1965. Wear, Andrew. ‘Religious Beliefs and Medicine in Early Modern England’, in Hilary Marland and Margaret Pelling (eds.), The Task of Healing: Medicine, Religion and Gender in England and the Netherlands, 1450–1800. Rotterdam: Erasmus, 1996, 145–69. ——. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wilson, Catherine. The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

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THE BOOK TRADE, LICENSING, AND CENSORSHIP ....................................................................................................... J A S O N M CE L L I G O T T

THE BOOK TRADE

IN THE

1640 S

AND

1650 S

.................................................................................................................. When Samuel Johnson looked back at the period between 1640 and 1660 he was, he claimed, minded to label it ‘The Age of Pamphlets’ because these short, ephemeral pieces were ‘more numerous [during the conflict] than can be conceived by any who have not had an Opportunity of examining them’. Johnson penned this comment in an essay on the ‘Origin and Importance of Small Tracts and Fugitive Pieces’, which was written as an introduction to the Harleian Miscellany, a collection of religious and political pamphlets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries published in eight volumes between 1744 and 1746. Johnson used his characteristically elegant introduction to muse upon ‘the Treasure of Materials out of which this Miscellany’ was compiled, namely the ‘small Tracts and fugitive Pieces’ published in Britain over the previous two centuries. Johnson claimed that ‘Pamphlets and small Tracts [are] a very important Part of an English Library’ and that ‘many Advantages may be expected from the Perusal of these small Productions, which are scarcely to be found in that of larger Works’. They were ‘easily dispersed, or privately printed’ and this ensured that ‘Almost every Controversy . . . has been, for a Time carried on in Pamphlets, nor has swelled into larger Volumes, till the first Ardor of the Disputants has subsided.’ This meant that pamphlets provided evidence as to ‘the progress of every Debate; the various State to which Questions have been changed; the Artifices and fallacies which have been used, and the Subterfuges, by which Reason has been eluded’.1

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Johnson was obviously exaggerating his point about the importance of pamphlets in order to increase the sales of the Harleian Miscellany, but it is striking that until relatively recently historians of early modern Britain tended to disregard printed material in favour of more ‘respectable’ and ‘reliable’ sources such as government papers, court records, or private diaries. Over the past three decades, however, historians have begun to reassess the importance of printed material in general, and of cheap, topical books and pamphlets in particular. This interest in print culture inspired some of the most groundbreaking books in early modern studies of recent decades, such as Margaret Spufford’s Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), Tessa Watts’s Cheap Print and Popular Piety (1991), Ian Green’s The Christian’s ABC (1996) and his Print and Protestantism in Early-Modern England (2000), as well as Adam Fox’s Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (2000). This historiographical turn towards print has occurred across the entire early modern period, but it has been particularly pronounced among scholars of the mid-seventeenth-century ‘troubles’, a period which saw a huge increase in the production of topical ephemeral pamphlets. It is now commonplace for modern commentators to assert that the Civil Wars were fought on two fronts: by the pen, and by the sword.2 The number of items printed in Britain grew slowly over the sixteenth century from about 50 in 1500 to around 200 per annum by the time of the Spanish Armada. From the start of the seventeenth century, however, the number of items published each year hovered between 450 and 500, with a slight increase during the crisis years between 1621 and 1624. During the 1630s the number of titles fluctuated between 500 and 700 per annum, but we know of slightly more than 2,000 titles published in Britain during the turbulent year of 1641. The number of surviving titles published in 1642 grew to almost 3,700 before falling back to around 1,800 in 1643, and 1,200 in both 1644 and 1645. The number of published items peaked at 2,300 in 1648. Thereafter, it decreased from 1,500 in 1649 to 1,300 in 1650 and 1,000 in 1651. The production figures were surprisingly constant at around 1,200 per annum between 1652 and 1658. The chaos of the last years of the Interregnum meant that the numbers increased to around 2,000 in 1659 and 2,700 in 1660.3 The early 1640s was a significant watershed because at no previous point in British history had there been such a rush to appear in print; and, perhaps more importantly, from this date one can certainly say that print was an important signifier of turmoil and crisis, and that it both contributed to those crises and helped to prolong them.4 Recent scholarship means that we now know much more about the interaction between religious and political controversy in print, as well as the use of print as a polemical weapon, as a harbinger of conflict, and as a tool for manufacturing the appearance of consensus and shouting down one’s enemies.5 It is unsurprising that over the past decade so many scholars have begun to place the topics of communication, polemic, news, and press manipulation centre stage in their examinations of the English Revolution. We live in a period of history characterized by technological change, media innovation, and the tension between news, fact, ‘spin’, and ‘counter-spin’, and historians and literary

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scholars have always projected—whether consciously or unconsciously—the preoccupations of their own time back into the past. Valuable as recent work on Civil War print undoubtedly is, it is arguable that scholars have concentrated too much on the production of topical, controversial political material. This was only one, small part of the overall book trade: a commercial business which was pursued by men (and sometimes, women) who needed to eat, provide for their families, and pay their bills. It was a capital-intensive business with a notoriously slow return on one’s investment. It was an industry which needs to be examined in terms of consumption as well as production.6 Scholars of the multitude of political, religious, and literary controversies of the seventeenth century tend to forget that the book trade as a whole relied for its profitability and survival not on controversial items, but on a range of long-established ‘steady sellers’ which could be relied upon to generate sales over a period of time. It is also necessary to realize that there was a healthy market in second-hand books which has left little trace in the historical records, and the majority of ‘new’ books sold in any one year would, most likely, have been published in the years immediately prior to that in which the purchase was made. In other words, statistics about the total number of titles published each year necessarily give a skewed picture of the nature of the book trade in any given year. Civil War England was certainly a society ‘saturated with print’,7 but it was not necessarily saturated with the type of material which has been the primary focus of historians and literary scholars over the past decades. The London book trade had long been a remarkably vibrant, variegated, specialized, and commercially responsive industry.8 The scale of its commercial development is perhaps best seen by contrasting it with Dublin, where there was only one printing press during the 1640s and the first dedicated bookshop had opened as late as 1630.9 By 1650, however, London had at least thirty-five separate printing houses,10 and bookshops and bookstalls were spread widely across the metropolis. There was a strong preponderance of stalls in and around St Paul’s Churchyard, but there were also concentrations in Paternoster Row, Smithfield, Little Britain, Temple Bar, and Moorfields.11 The trade in each area had its own characteristics. So, for example, St Paul’s Churchyard naturally had a high concentration of outlets specializing in religious works, but the area around Smithfield seems to have been colonized by those who catered to the lower, coarser end of the market. Some books and pamphlets were evidently sold at a large number of locations, but most were offered for sale at only one or a small number of outlets. Many booksellers evidently sold a broad cross-section of printed items, but it is hard to believe that zealots such as the Presbyterian Michael Sparke or the loyalist Richard Royston ever knowingly stocked religious or political books which they believed to be repugnant. There was a marked social differentiation between the booksellers of London: a man such as the wealthy and well-connected Richard Royston published over 1,000 titles during his career, while other less exalted members of the trade merely scraped a living selling books published by other men. It is not possible to provide a figure for the number of outlets which might have sold printed matter in and around the capital during the English Revolution, but a total of 200 does

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not seem unreasonable.12 The figure may, however, have been higher, as we know that ninety-five men and women from London who described themselves as ‘stationers’ had their wills proved in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC) in the twenty years after 1 January 1640.13 Only the most successful members of the trade would have had sufficient means to have their wills proved in the PCC. So, the number of London stationers who died during these twenty years must have been greater than ninety-five. It is perhaps significant that around a third of the booksellers whose wills were proved in the PCC do not appear to have published material in their own right. Instead, they seem to have sold a range of goods: books and pamphlets published by others, but also paper, notebooks, pens, ink, and other items associated with the book trade.14 These non-publisher booksellers do not tend to appear in the usual sources for the history of the book trade (which tend to focus on production), and the implication is that printed material was probably sold at a much larger number and variety of outlets than has hitherto been realized. It also seems likely that customer demand and commercial opportunism conspired to ensure that outlets almost always sold books and pamphlets in conjunction with a range of items of stationery. This would explain why all of the ninety-five London booksellers whose wills were proved in the PCC described themselves as ‘stationers’ rather than simply ‘booksellers’. Ian Green has shown that the expansion of educational provision during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to the development of a very profitable trade in school books which was at the heart of the early modern book trade. A large number of very basic texts such as The ABC or The ABC with the Catechisme were produced for beginners or ‘petties’. These were used to teach the alphabet and basic literacy as well as a smattering of key religious texts such as the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ Creed. It is known that in 1676, 84,000 copies of one category of elementary ‘primer’ were produced, and perhaps as many as two million copies of the ‘primer’ alone were produced in the last quarter of the seventeenth century.15 At a slightly more advanced level, grammar schools operated a surprisingly homogeneous curriculum which introduced students to a range of classical texts such as Cato’s Disticha and Aesop’s Fables. Older students would grapple with more demanding texts such as Cicero’s Letters, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Virgil’s Opera.16 The market produced a whole range of practical books for those studying astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and divinity at Cambridge and Oxford, as well as aspiring lawyers at the Inns of Court in London. A variety of practical, didactic books were also produced for use in less formal settings: books on, to name only a few of the possible examples, agriculture, animal husbandry, accountancy, acceptable social behaviour, the art of ship navigation, the practice of surveying land, and the teaching of shorthand.17 The largest category of books produced, bought, and read during the English Revolution was religious in nature. These books were used by men and women from a variety of social backgrounds in a range of educational, professional, and recreational settings from earliest childhood until death was imminent. The Bible was obviously ubiquitous; there were a minimum of ninety-five editions of the complete Bible published in a variety of formats in England between 1641 and 1659, and very many

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copies which were in existence at the time had been produced during the previous century.18 Booksellers also made considerable amounts of money from what modern consumers might call ‘add-ons’: aids to Scripture study such as commentaries on individual books of the Bible, annotations on specific words or passages within the Bible, as well as paraphrases, concordances, and lexicons. There was also a large volume of practical religious material produced for use in spiritual exercises or formal worship: catechisms, the Book of Common Prayer, and the Psalms.19 The Psalms had played a key role in creating and sustaining Protestant communities across Europe during the sixteenth century, and their popularity is attested to by the fact that at least 482 separate editions of this group of religious songs were published in England between 1562 and 1640. There is considerable evidence that religious texts such as the Psalms were so widely known, read, and internalized by individuals that they became cultural reference points.20 For example, the biblical text which refers to the murder of children by dashing them against stones (Psalm 137: 9) provides the (unacknowledged) inspiration for the accounts in many London pamphlets and newsbooks which described the atrocities committed by Irish Catholics against Protestants in Ulster in 1641.21 The same trope appears in a number of the manuscript testimonies by the survivors of the massacres themselves.22 In literary circles, Psalm 137 also provided inspiration for works as different as John Taylor’s meditation on the ruins of Lichfield Cathedral and John Milton’s sonnet of 1655, ‘On the Late Massacre in Piedmont’.23 Booksellers also profited from a host of improving works of a didactic nature which one might read quietly for edification: sermons, treatises concerning the example of good Christians, and handbooks on the art of Christian living and dying. In fact, guides to ‘practical divinity’ such as Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-Way, Lewis Bayley’s Practice of Pietie, or Richard Allestrie’s Whole Duty of Man were among the best-selling and most widely known titles of the entire early modern period. There was also a separate category of books which combined edification and entertainment: dialogues, religious verses, or religious chap-books such as The Penitent Murderer (1659). For less experienced or demanding readers there were a plethora of single-sided broadsides such as The Godly Maid of Leicester.24 Beyond the traditional ‘steady sellers’ of the book trade there was an established market for non-utilitarian reading in a leisure or recreational setting. The diversity and number of history books may surprise modern readers,25 and texts which described voyages to foreign shores seem to have been very popular. There were also a host of books on pursuits such as gardening, fishing, and cooking. Some, such as Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler (1653) or the anonymous Queens Closet Opened (1655),26 had political undertones, but the vast majority existed only to entertain or amuse readers. Those who wanted to buy maps and prints or portraits of public figures to decorate their homes or places of business would have sought out the Newgate shop of Peter Stent. Those who wished to peruse plays, poetry, and even prose fiction could choose from a range of outlets across the city. There was a discernible ‘Anglican’ slant to the material produced by the bookseller Humphrey Moseley, but most purveyors of ‘literature’ (narrowly defined) were unconcerned with matters of state. Surviving

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libraries suggest that many readers had little or no contact with literary works, but one example of the level of interest among some readers is afforded by the example of the Worcestershire gentlewoman Frances Wolfreston. Her library of several hundred books contained a number of theological and historical works, but she was mainly interested in English literature and drama. Her library included plays written by Dekker, Heywood, Marlowe, Massinger, Shirley, and Shakespeare, and verse by Donne, Drayton, Greene, Wither, and Gascoigne, as well as more ephemeral material by the likes of the Water Poet, John Taylor, and the famous balladeer Martin Parker.27 The genre of news-related print began across Europe during the sixteenth century as rulers commissioned items to convey information to a defined public.28 Printed news tended to focus on remarkable events in the natural world (fires, floods, earthquakes, monstrous births) and events of national or international importance in the field of religion and high politics (the movement of armies, battles, wars, coronations, royal births and deaths). In a British context, the market for news was stimulated greatly by the advent of thirty years of religious warfare on the Continent from 1618. James I and Charles I tolerated, with varying degrees of irritation or annoyance, a degree of printed news about affairs on the Continent, but they kept a very close rein on the circulation of printed information about events within their own realms. The great innovation of the English Revolution was, then, the explosion of cheap, topical print produced about current events which could be influenced by those buying and reading the items in question. In recent times, scholars have stressed the political and religious impetus behind the publication of much topical and controversial print during the English Revolution. It is true that those who wrote, printed, and sold controversial material often—but not always—did so because they were committed to a particular cause, but it needs to be recognized that they were also simultaneously pursuing a commercial strategy which enabled them to maximize their cash-flow by regularly selling relatively large numbers of units within a short period of time. Controversial material had the great benefit of creating a virtuous cycle, for the bookseller at least, of inevitably bringing forth a variety of texts for and against the original item; these texts necessarily attracted repeated visits by customers, some of whom must occasionally have left the premises of their stationer of choice with more items than they had originally intended to purchase. One highly specialized form of topical print was the newsbook: serial quarto pamphlets of domestic and foreign news which first appeared in London in late 1641. These publications have been much analysed by scholars since the appearance of Joad Raymond’s seminal The Invention of the Newspaper (1996),29 and Jason Peacey’s chapter in this volume provides an overview of the current state of research on printed serial news publications. For some scholars, newsbooks provide a way of examining the factional politics pursued by political and religious grandees during this period.30 Others have argued that they are vital calibrating tools for the study of print culture; they allow us to trace the waxing and waning of a variety of phenomena through days, in and out of weeks, and over years.31 Yet, it could be argued that historians and literary scholars have been seduced into a Whiggish, teleological discourse which equates the

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production of printed news with modern concepts of journalism which foreground ideas of honest discussion, disputation, and a willingness on the part of readers to be persuaded by facts. In this context, the concept of the ‘Habermasian public sphere’ of rational debate is never far from some scholars’ thoughts. Newsbooks were certainly sources of information (albeit of varying quality) for readers who wished to be informed of events. Some were also political and religious tools used by politicians, and they are undoubtedly extremely useful historical sources for modern scholars who wish to understand the English Revolution. However, recent work has perhaps lost sight of the fact that there were sound commercial reasons for producing newsbooks; they brought customers to booksellers’ stalls on a weekly basis, and served to create, feed, and stimulate a seemingly insatiable demand for news of current events. This demand generated sales of the newsbooks themselves as well as a range of other topical printed items. Individual newsbooks often folded soon after being founded, but taken as a whole this sector of the market was surprisingly profitable. In concentrating so much on newsbooks in the context of the public sphere, scholars have lost sight of the pounds, shillings, and pence which both motivated the production of these titles and underpinned their regular appearance over a period of time. The business nature of the newsbooks is best seen by reference to the growth of paid advertising. This developed slowly and fitfully during the 1640s, but during the following decade the gradual return to peace and stability, the improvement of the economy, and the increasingly nationwide distribution of newsbooks facilitated an unprecedented growth in newspaper advertising. In total, twenty-nine separate newsbooks carried more than 3,800 paid advertisements during the Interregnum.32 Book advertisements accounted for almost 60 per cent of the total number of these paid notices. They were relatively rare before 1653, but thereafter increased slowly. In December 1653, for example, A Perfect Account carried a notice by the bookseller John Sweeting at ‘the Angel in Popes Head Alley’ advertising five plays in one volume by Richard Brown; an edition of letters written by John Donne; and poems by Donne and John Quarles.33 In July 1655, The Perfect Diurnall carried six separate notices of books being sold by eight booksellers in different locations across London.34 However, the history of book advertising during the Interregnum is largely that of the newsbooks controlled by Marchamont Nedham, Mercurius politicus (1650–60) and The Publick Intelligencer (1655–60). Before 1655, advertisements usually only appeared in every second or third issue of Politicus. During the first half of 1655, however, the number of notices began to climb noticeably and by late summer it was carrying between half a dozen and ten inserts per issue. By 1658, each issue of Nedham’s newsbooks regularly carried more than ten paid inserts. During 1659, Nedham sometimes carried as many as twenty advertisements per issue. For example, in early June 1659 issue no. 570 of Politicus contained notices about a runaway servant named Richard Smith from Cheapside, a horse lost in Bexley in Kent, a plant nursery in Westchester, and no fewer than seventeen separate books and pamphlets. These included advertisements for James Harrington’s The

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Commonwealth of Oceana; an English–Italian dictionary; an ‘Astrological Discourse’ about the effect of a forthcoming conjunction of Saturn and Mars; a tract on the medicinal virtues of tobacco; and a number of religious tracts, including two attacks on the leading Presbyterian Richard Baxter. The men who paid for these insertions were a mixture of prominent and less well-known booksellers from different religious and political backgrounds.35 The use of advertising is one indication of the existence of a profitable, capitalized industry which is both sensitive to the desires of customers and tries to manufacture new cravings for non-essential commodities. The growth of advertisements for books in the newsbooks therefore provides us with a sense of the commercialized nature of serial newsbooks in particular and the wider book trade in general.

LICENSING, CENSORSHIP, AND FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

THE

.................................................................................................................. This section will examine the interrelated issues of censorship and freedom of the press. Having argued above that the book trade operated as a commercial, market-driven (dare one say ‘capitalist’?) business, it is necessary to emphasize that the early modern book trade did not operate within a free-market system. The book trade, like all mercantile trades in the period, was regulated by a trade guild (known as the Stationers’ Company). However, the religious and political sensitivities of print culture ensured that the book trade, unlike other mercantile trades, was also regulated and overseen by both Church and state. Church oversight of the trade effectively died when the Long Parliament abolished the ecclesiastical court known as the Court of High Commission in 1641. In the same year, the Long Parliament also abolished the court of law known as the Star Chamber, which had played a prominent role in the regulation of the spoken, written, and printed word. Yet, the civil authorities did retain an interest in, and power over, print culture and the book trade during the English Revolution; the history of censorship during these decades is in many ways a history of the symbiotic relationship between various forms of state power (broadly defined) and the Stationers’ Company. For most of the twentieth century, scholars tended to believe that the Tudor and Stuart book trade laboured under a draconian system of control. This system was characterized by the requirement to submit manuscript copies of books, pamphlets, tracts, and broadsides for pre-publication inspection by one of a number of officially nominated censors who would issue a licence allowing for publication only if the contents of the item in question were deemed to be acceptable. When a licence was issued the individual who had financed the work could enter his (or, occasionally, her) right to the copy—what we now call ‘copyright’—in the Register of the Stationers’ Company. Entry in this Register ensured that the Stationers’ Company would enforce the publisher’s copyright against any unauthorized editions or reprints of the work,

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thereby protecting the substantial financial outlay involved in bringing a printed text to the market.36 The members of the book trade always trod a fine line between solvency and bankruptcy, and it was assumed that all but the most recalcitrant could be persuaded to alter portions of a manuscript deemed to be unacceptable in order to ensure that their work saw the light of day. The authorities hoped that the relatively small number of malcontents who conspired to avoid, evade, or subvert the process of licensing—those who were deliberately rather than accidentally transgressive—could be easily identified by the absence of an official stamp of approval by a licenser at the front of their text; once identified and isolated they could be heavily censured (punished) for their unwillingness to accept the constraints imposed by society. Since the mid-1980s, however, scholars have moved in the opposite direction, maintaining that that censorship, control, and punishment were not very important considerations for the book trade during the early modern period.37 Cyndia Clegg, D. F. McKenzie, and Sheila Lambert, to name only three of the most influential ‘revisionists’, have constructed a model of censorship in the years before 1641 as a ramshackle system of ad hoc responses to a surprisingly small number of texts deemed to be particularly offensive.38 This scholarship has, in turn, had a significant influence upon scholars whose work concentrates upon the decades after 1641. The revisionists have done a great service by pointing out that many apparent incidents of early modern ‘censorship’ are probably best described as commercial disputes or attempts to assert ownership of a profitable text. In contrast to older assumptions that censorship was something which happened to texts which were concerned with strictly political matters, they have allowed scholars to appreciate that the majority of incidents of what one might call ‘actual’ censorship (i.e. non-commercial disputes) were concerned with an admixture of attempts to maintain public morality, personal reputations and honour, and (perhaps most frequently) religious and spiritual matters and controversies. The revisionists have demonstrated that there was no active, all-encompassing system of regulation, and that the requirement to obtain a licence before publication was easily evaded and open to abuse. Censors were not always as competent or diligent as they were supposed to be,39 and they were sometimes personal friends or associates of those whose texts they were supposed to read and assess.40 Authors and stationers could, and did, present carefully selected portions of potentially problematic texts for pre-publication review; they could, and did, rewrite texts or insert new material into them after a licence was granted. Furthermore, the financial penalties for evading the licensing provisions were relatively minor. These factors explain why John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) likened pre-publication licensing to the ‘vain and impossible attempts’ of a man with an estate who tries to keep crows off his land by ‘shutting his Parkgate’. Similarly, John Goodwin’s A Fresh Discovery (1655) compared the system of licensing to setting ‘a company of armed men about an house to keep darknesse out of it in the night season’.41 Yet, this chapter moves beyond revisionist arguments about the ineffectiveness of early modern censorship. It argues that one needs to differentiate between pre-

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publication licensing by censors and post-publication censure or punishment, and that even when the system of licensing broke down for a number of years during the early 1640s there were still a range of punishments that could be inflicted on transgressive books and pamphlets which came to the attention of the relevant authorities.42 It is striking, indeed, that the Long Parliament re-established pre-publication licensing in 1643, and thereafter each of the periodic attempts to exert control over the book trade brought forth another slightly modified licensing scheme (1647, 1649, 1653, and 1655). The political and religious chaos enveloping England ensured that the 1647 and 1653 regulations were ineffectual, but they could be very effective when, as happened in 1649 and 1655, their sustained implementation was overseen by talented, determined administrators who believed that it was important to bring the book trade to heel in order to defend the existence of the state. In addition, it is necessary to stress that recent work has demonstrated that the Stationers’ Company was far from the toothless, ramshackle body so often portrayed in revisionist writings on early modern censorship.43 Censorship should be seen as the nexus of pre-publication and post-publication processes whereby restrictions were imposed upon the collection, dissemination, and exchange of written and printed information, opinions, and ideas.44 Such processes cannot be entirely divorced from attempts to regulate the spoken word, but there is no space to consider the control of speech in this short article.45 The regulation of the written and printed word was by no means only a ‘top-down’ or state-inspired process. A variety of agencies and individuals undertook to censor and censure texts, and they did not always have uniform, hegemonic, or even mutually compatible reasons for so doing. Also, individuals could and did censor their own words and actions due to either an internalization of the dominant mores of society, or a fear of potential punishment by external bodies or agencies for transgressing these societal norms. ‘Censorship’ was, in other words, bigger, broader, more flexible, and more resilient than the rather feeble system of licensing which collapsed so dramatically in the early months of the Long Parliament. In the light of revisionist arguments about the ineffectiveness of licensing as a form of censorship, it is important to note that the Cromwellians followed the Tudors, the early Stuarts, and the Long Parliament by instituting a complex system of pre-publication licensing. However, they realized that for the system to work it did not have to result in the prosecution of every unlicensed item. Indeed, any over-zealous attempt to enforce the licensing provisions against the entire book trade would have been counter-productive as it would have wasted considerable amounts of time and effort for comparatively little gain, and led to the alienation of the individual members of the trade who collectively made up the Stationers’ Company. The licensing laws, like all laws, were not expected to ensure that the crime or offence in question never took place. Instead, they provided what might nowadays be termed an ‘industry-wide standard framework’ for regulation, and allowed for the selective punishment of minor transgressions. It should be stressed that ‘minor’ is the operative word here; failure to license one’s book or pamphlet was a trifling offence. Censorship did not rely

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on licensing, although licensing was certainly one part of the architecture of censorship. Infractions which were judged to be at the more serious end of the scale—usually those with a religious and/or political rather than merely commercial dimension— could be dealt with not under the licensing provisions but through the evolving and wonderfully flexible common law of libel, which included criminal libel, blasphemous libel, and seditious libel. The most serious offences could be proceeded against as ‘scandalum magnatum’, sedition, or treason. If one considers the architecture of censorship, one might profitably think of the mechanisms for the control of the book trade as resembling a pyramid, with the most numerous cases involving licensing provisions at the bottom, the libel laws in the middle, and the rarer and more serious concerning sedition and treason at the apex. One could certainly characterize the control of the book trade in Cromwellian England as tight, but it was not uniformly tight over the entire Interregnum. The most effective enforcement of the law (then as now) relied on targeted campaigns against certain types of crime. Control of the trade was at its tightest in the two years after the Printing Act of September 1649, and again in the three and a half years or so after the promulgation of Cromwell’s August 1655 Orders against the press.46 The authorities naturally tended to relax their grip on the book trade and move on to other, more urgent and immediate problems whenever they felt that they had achieved their immediate aim of suppressing printed opposition. Even during the periods of greatest severity against the book trade there was no attempt to punish each and every item which evaded the regulations or was deemed to be offensive. England’s rulers were sophisticated enough, or pragmatic enough, to realize that there were some offensive books which should be studiously ignored. They also seem to have believed that it would be counter-productive to punish some books and pamphlets, thereby publicizing them and giving them a certain ‘cachet’ that they might not otherwise have enjoyed. The New Model Army and its supporters in Parliament who seized power in 1649 probably knew better than most that the effectiveness of their enemies’ pamphlets would be directly proportional to their military preparedness: ‘paper bullets’ are never as lethal as lead bullets, although the combination of the two is often very potent.47 The Cromwellian regime had a sense of perspective and an ability to prioritize the tasks which needed to be undertaken at any point in time. That prioritization was determined, above all else, by the perceived danger to the state. Censorship was a pragmatic, practical, and grubby process. It was often a rough business, or one in which there was frequently an implicit threat of violence. There was no grand theory of censorship: its aims, motives, and modus operandi could and did change in the light of shifting circumstances. It was, above all, a process which rarely needed to be played out in the courts of law. The failed attempt to try the Leveller polemicist John Lilburne in 1649 for his life testifies to the dangers inherent in going to law against the book trade. Lilburne’s use of his court appearances to present his argument about Cromwellian tyranny to a jury of his peers, his acquittal by that jury, and his subsequent acclamation after his release by thousands of citizens outside the

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Guildhall were propaganda disasters for the regicides. When one considers the large amount of printed material which circulated against the Cromwellians during the Interregnum one is struck by the fact that the state only moved formally against a very small number of the items which they might potentially have censured, and the number of acts of censorship which led to a trial, let alone a conviction, was even smaller. Regular visits to print-shops and book-stalls, or imprisonment for the purposes of interrogation and petty harassment, were often more effective ways of ensuring compliance than trials in open court. There were perhaps three main reasons for the success of the Cromwellians in taming the book trade at this point in time: the press had become a central concern of state; there was one dominant faction in control of the apparatus of state; and there were a number of talented and diligent administrators who were determined to oversee the sustained and vigorous implementation of the rules against the book trade. Whenever these three factors were present, any administration of the early modern period was able to exert a significant degree of control over the trade. Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the practice of Cromwellian censorship is that it is often misleading to look at individual acts of censorship or non-censorship, no matter how hard one tries to contextualize that act. Rather than taking one isolated incident, which may or may not be typical of the assumptions and beliefs of the society in which it took place, it is important to understand censorship as a dynamic process which takes place over a period of time. To assess the nature, level, and effectiveness of censorship one needs to examine a broad selection of sources over a period of time, noting both the incidents of censorship and non-censorship, and relating these to the power structures in society. There were a number of factors which might make the punishment of books and pamphlets more or less likely. These factors might conspire to render books and pamphlets transgressive which were not intended to be controversial or objectionable and which adhered to the letter of the law. They might also ensure that a book or pamphlet which was intended to bring the civil, military or religious authorities into disrepute never came to the attention of those in power, or was never punished even if it did come under scrutiny. The first and most important factor which might make the punishment of a book more likely was the perceived presence of an immediate threat or danger to the state. Books which might otherwise have been safely ignored, or would never ordinarily have been likely to come to the attention of the authorities, could become important solely because they appeared at a time when the state felt anxious or insecure. This perceived danger to the state would be particularly important if one’s book or pamphlet had a large print run, had an intended audience of low-status readers, or put forward some form of call to political or religious action. The preexistence of personal, religious, or political rivalries and animosities against the author, printer, or publisher of a particular item might also render it more likely to come to the attention of the authorities, as prominent contrarians such as William Prynne, John Lilburne, and Marchamont Nedham often found to their cost.

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There were, of course, factors which lessened the chances of an offensive book or pamphlet falling foul of the authorities. A confident, self-assured power could enjoy the luxury of choosing to ignore seditious or tumultuous material, and even an unsettled or contingent entity such as the English Republic in the initial months after the regicide might make a conscious decision not to unnecessarily antagonize the public or get itself drawn into battles which it did not need to fight, or would prefer to fight at a later date. Non-censorship might, therefore, be both the conscious strategy of a strong government and a decision forced upon a weak regime.48 Other factors militating against censorship included an intended readership which was small in number, or socially and educationally exclusive. It seems clear that books or pamphlets which contained contentious ideas or arguments which were only likely to circulate among educated men were widely understood to enjoy a broad degree of freedom, as these men were deemed to be immune from the hot-headedness and credulity of the masses. All things being equal, one could also be fairly sure that very few items written in the classical or Continental languages would fall foul of the authorities, no matter what their subject matter.49 There were periodic surges of printed polemic and controversy during the English Revolution, and authors, printers, and publishers often found it easy to hide among the crowds of pamphlets produced during these times. The volume of material produced during these ‘pamphlet surges’50 often meant it was difficult for the authorities to know where to begin any crackdown and, furthermore, such surges are fairly reliable signals of the type of political and religious turmoil which often ensured that the authorities had little time or inclination to concentrate on the control of the book trade. There was an element of safety in the publishing crowd, even if the presence of the reading crowd drew unwanted attention from the authorities. If an author, printer, or publisher did find himself in trouble with the authorities it was common to call, if one could, upon the assistance of friends, kinsmen, or patrons in high places.51 Yet, the most important factor which determined whether an offensive item would fall foul of the authorities or not must have been the sheer good luck involved in not coming to the attention of an individual in a position of power who had the time, ability, or inclination to proceed against one.52 Those who produced books and pamphlets might hope that they would avoid the attention of someone minded to teach them a lesson, but they could never be sure in advance that this would be the case. In other words, there was no generally known and accepted code of ‘functional ambiguity’ which enabled authors to encode their opinions so that nobody would be required to make an example of them.53 Instead, a number of aggravating factors might lead a variety of individuals or organizations to choose to make an example of a particular author or any other member of the book trade connected to the offending item. Once the process of censorship began there were many variables determining how far matters would progress and how serious the punishment would be. All things being equal, the producers of items which fell foul of the law would face a relatively small fine, or be allowed to apologize and promise not to repeat the offence. One could never be sure that this would be the case, however, and it was the unpredictability and

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capriciousness of censorship—its unaccountable, almost whimsical, nature—which gave it its bite. Modern readers may be surprised at the negative reaction of a range of commentators to the perceived licentiousness of the book trade during the English Revolution. The hallowed phrases commonly intoned by modern scholars—‘liberty of the press’ or ‘freedom of the press’—were rarely used in a positive sense, and never used in ways which chime with modern understandings of those phrases. On the few occasions when one does find the ‘liberty of the press’ invoked during these years it is, with the sole exception of John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), a minor, incidental part of the tactical programme of small groups of individuals who were excluded from power and chose to use the printing press at a specific moment to make themselves heard about the most pressing issues of the day. There was never any suggestion in these texts that the authors’ assertion of their right as people of good faith to make these arguments should be extended to a general right across the populace as a whole to comment upon broader issues at any time that they might choose to so do. Areopagitica is not a timeless text ‘for all seasons’, but a shrewd tactical polemic produced within the particular context of a fear that the Order of June 1643 ‘For the Regulating of Printing’ would be used by the Presbyterians against godly men and women who differed from them in matters of conscience.54 Milton was certainly against prior restraint by censors on practical and intellectual grounds, but he did favour the post-publication censure of offensive or transgressive material. Milton believed that the publication of Roman Catholic material should be punished: ‘I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpat[e]s all religions and civill supremacies, so it self should be extirpat[ed].’ He also understood that some books ‘being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men’, and this is why he favoured the suppression of treasonous and seditious books and pamphlets such as the royalist newsbook Mercurius aulicus. Furthermore, Milton did not condemn the ancients who suppressed blasphemies, atheism, and libels. This was because he believed that things ‘impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit’. Milton’s condemnation of pre-publication licensing was concerned with ensuring that ‘neighbouring differences, or rather indifferences . . . in some point of doctrine or of discipline’ were freely discussed in order to assist ‘the approaching Reformation’. Such material would not, and should not, be subject to pre-publication licensing or post-publication punishment because it was necessary for members of the broad Puritan family to discuss matters of mutual concern in such turbulent times. Milton had no intention of extending this freedom to those strangers who remained outside the fractious Puritan clan. Furthermore, Milton argued for this vision of liberty because he believed that truth, in other words his particular version of religious truth, would prevail in an open and honest contest between the Presbyterians and the Independents. Areopagitica was, in other words, the tactical argument of a man on the ‘outside’ who believed that the printing press would be a useful weapon in ensuring that he and his brethren entered ‘inside’ religious and political power. This view of Areopagitica,

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if accepted, explains how and why Milton saw no contradiction in acting as both a press licenser and searcher for seditious material under the Commonwealth, and why he returned to condemning the practice of licensing at the very end of the 1650s, when it was clear that the side he had chosen in the conflict would most likely soon be outside the structures of power. To conclude, modern scholars have placed books, pamphlets, and print culture at the centre of their account of the origins, nature, and consequences of the English Revolution. If these decades can be described, in Johnson’s formulation, as ‘The Age of Pamphlets’, it must be stressed that printed texts were produced within a particular political and religious context by a long-established, diversified, commercially responsive, and market-driven industry. Yet, the book trade of the 1640s and 1650s did not operate within a free-market system. This chapter has attempted to provide an overview of the business of books and the regulatory framework within which that business operated. Implicit in such an overview is the fact that one can only hope to understand an industry as complex and multifaceted as the book trade by moving away from our traditional focus on the production of print towards a more nuanced understanding of the interconnectedness of production, consumption, and regulation.

NOTES 1. I have taken this text from Thomas Davies’s later edition of Johnson’s Miscellaneous and Fugitives Pieces, ii. 1–9; Brack and Early, ‘Samuel Johnson’s Proposals’. 2. Worden, ‘The Royalism of Andrew Marvell’. 3. Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book, iv. 779–84. All figures have been rounded. 4. McElligott, ‘1641’. 5. A list of the most important contributions would include Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture; Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; de Groot, Royalist Identities; Hughes, Gangraena; Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers; and Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers. 6. Raven, The Business of Books, 23–4, 50, 51; Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature, 70, 82; Green, Print and Protestantism, 14. 7. Hughes, Gangraena, 278. 8. Barnard, ‘London Publishing, 1640–1660’, 1–16. 9. Gillespie, Reading Ireland, 55–61, 188; Gillespie and Hadfield (eds.), The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii. 17–33, 61–73. 10. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660, 244–9. 11. Raven, The Business of Books, 26, 154–92; Plant, The English Book Trade, 82, 253; Johns, Nature of the Book, 65–72; Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature, 76. 12. McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 30. 13. See the online catalogue for the Prerogative Court of Canterbury at .

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14. See the will of Thomas Gould, stationer (proved 19 November 1660), at TNA, PROB 11/302, fos. 161–2. 15. Green, Print and Protestantism, 184. 16. Green, Humanism and Protestantism, 34, 39, 40–3. 17. Cormack and Mazzio (eds.), Book Use, Book Theory 1500–1700, 79–93. 18. Green, Print and Protestantism, 20. 19. Ibid. 1–13; Green, The Christian’s ABC. 20. Holmes, Why was Charles I Executed?, 65, 80. 21. For example, Mercurius civicus, no. 9, 20–8 July 1643, 69–70. 22. For example, Trinity College Dublin MS 838, fos. 273r–275v; MS 832, fos. 54v–55r. 1641 Depositions Project, online transcript December 2009, . 23. Taylor, A Short Relation of a Long Iourney, 8, ll. 99–104; I am grateful to Ian Atherton for this reference to Taylor’s pamphlet. Hale, ‘Milton’s Sonnet 18 and Psalm 137’, 91. 24. Green, Print and Protestantism, 1–5. 25. Woolf, Reading History in Early Modern England. 26. Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’. 27. McElligott, ‘Frances Wolfreston, bap. 1607, d. 1671’. 28. Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance, 131. 29. Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper. 30. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers. 31. Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are, unpaginated; this provided the inspiration for the model of four-dimensional print culture in McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship. 32. The number of newspaper advertisements soared from less than a dozen in 1649, to more than 900 in 1659. McElligott, ‘The Newsbooks of Interregnum England’, 176. 33. A Perfect Account, no. 152, 30 November–7 December 1653, 1213, 1216. 34. The Perfect Diurnall, no. 291, 2–6 July 1655, 4484. 35. Mercurius politicus, no. 570, 2–9 June 1659, unpaginated, but pp. 12 and 13 of this issue. 36. Jackson (ed.), Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602 to 1640; cf. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. 37. Green, Print and Protestantism, 233. 38. This historiography is discussed at length in McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 187–200. 39. The most famous case is that of the man who licensed William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix (1633), see Clegg, Press Censorship in Caroline England, 1–5, 164–78. 40. Hughes, Gangraena, 82–4, 139–42. 41. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660, 105, 404. 42. As Abigail Dexter found to her cost when she became involved in 1642 in the production of a wildly seditious attack on King Charles entitled King James his Judgement of a King and of a Tyrant (1642). McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660, 35–6. 43. McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 191–213. 44. I have borrowed and modified this definition from O’Higgins, Censorship in Britain, 11. 45. Cressy, Dangerous Talk and Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism’. 46. McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660, 392. 47. Weber, Paper Bullets. 48. Nedham, Certain Considerations Tendered in all Humility, 1–3. 49. Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion, 163. 50. Ibid. 150.

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Patterson and Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey’. Monod, ‘The Jacobite Press and English Censorship, 1689–95’, 131. See Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation. These paragraphs are based on an argument that appears in McElligott, Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660, 83–4. On Areopagitica, see also the chapter by Dobranski in this volume.

WORKS CITED Anon. King James his Judgement of a King and of a Tyrant. London, 1642. ——. Mercurius civicus. ‘No. 9, 20–28 July 1643’. London, 1643. ——. Mercurius politicus. ‘No. 570, 2–9 June 1659’. London, 1659. ——. A Perfect Account. ‘No. 152, 30 Nov.–7 Dec. 1653’. London, 1653. ——. The Perfect Diurnall. ‘No. 291, 2–6 July 1655’. London, 1655. Barnard, John. ‘London Publishing, 1640–1660: Crisis, Continuity and Innovation’. Book History 4 (2001), 1–16. Barnard, John, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.). The Cambridge History of the Book, iv: 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Bowen, Lloyd. ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism’, in Jason McElligott and David Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 44–66. Brack, O. M., and Mary Early. ‘Samuel Johnson’s Proposals for the Harleian Miscellany’. Studies in Bibliography 45 (1992), 127–30. Clegg, Cyndia. Press Censorship in Caroline England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cormack, Bradin, and Carla Mazzio (eds.). Book Use, Book Theory 1500–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Library, 2005. Cressy, David. Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious, and Treasonable Speech in PreModern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Gillespie, Raymond. Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early-Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. —— and Andrew Hadfield (eds.). The Oxford History of the Irish Book, iii: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Gould, Thomas. Stationer (proved 19 November 1660) at TNA, PROB 11/302, fos. 161–2. Green, Ian. The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England, c.1530–1740. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. ——. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. ——. Humanism and Protestantism in Early Modern English Education. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Groot, Jerome de. Royalist Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Hale, John K. ‘Milton’s Sonnet 18 and Psalm 137’. Milton Quarterly 29.3 (1995), 91. Holmes, Clive. Why was Charles I Executed? London: Hambledon Continuum, 2006.

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Hughes, Ann. Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Jackson, W. A. (ed.). Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company 1602 to 1640. London: Bibliographical Society, 1957. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Johnson, Samuel. Miscellaneous and Fugitive Pieces, ed. Thomas Davies. London, 1774. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 464–99. McElligott, Jason. ‘The Newsbooks of Interregnum England’ (unpublished MA dissertation). University College Dublin, 1996. ——. ‘Frances Wolfreston, bap. 1607, d. 1671’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–11. Online . ——. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. ——. Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. ——. ‘1641’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, i: Beginnings to 1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Monod, Paul. ‘The Jacobite Press and English Censorship, 1689–95’, in Eveline Cruickshanks and Edward Corp (eds.), The Stuart Court in Exile and the Jacobites. London: Hambledon Press, 1995, 125–42. Nedham, Marchamont. Certain Considerations Tendered in all Humility, to an Honorable Member of the Councell of State. London, 1649. O’Higgins, Paul. Censorship in Britain. London: Nelson, 1972. Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Reading and Writing in Early-Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. —— and Martin Dzelzainis. ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’. Historical Journal 44.3 (2001), 703–26. Peacey, Jason. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Peters, Kate. Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pettegree, Andrew. Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ——. The Book in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Plant, Marjorie. The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale of Books. 3rd edn. London: Allen & Unwin, 1974. Prerogative Court of Canterbury. . Prynne, William. Histrio-mastix. London, 1633. Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–49. Oxford: Clarendon, 1996. ——. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Scott-Warren, Jason. Early Modern English Literature. Malden, MA: Polity, 2005.

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Sendak, Maurice. Where the Wild Things Are. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Taylor, John. A Short Relation of a Long Iourney. London, 1653. Trinity College Dublin. MS 838, fos. 273r–275v; MS 832, fos. 54v–55r. 1641. Depositions Project, online transcript December 2009. . Weber, Harold. Paper Bullets: Print and Kingship under Charles II. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996. Woolf, Daniel. Reading History in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Worden, Blair. ‘The Royalism of Andrew Marvell’, in Jason McElligott and D. L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

CHAPTER

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SOCIETY AND THE ROLES OF WOMEN ....................................................................................................... ANN HUGHES

Far away in Massachusetts, the poet Anne Bradstreet summed up the impact of civil war in old England: ‘My plundred towns, my houses’ devastation, j My weeping virgins and my young men slain; j My wealthy trading fall’n, my dearth of grain.’1 The complacent assumption that the English Civil War was a restrained and limited affair, in contrast to the brutal contemporaneous conflicts in Continental Europe, is no longer accepted. The costs in blood and treasure, stressed by men and women at the time, have been assessed systematically by modern scholars. In Ireland and Scotland there was massive loss of life and social dislocation, but even in England—the focus for this chapter—the war consumed a significant proportion of the population and disrupted economic affairs and social relationships. At the Battle of Marston Moor in June 1644, a royalist army of about 18,000 men was defeated by 28,000 parliamentarians, both English and Scottish. Thousands served in the main armies on both sides, while equal numbers joined local forces and manned garrisons near their homes. One historian has estimated that one in five English men fought in the Civil War; this is probably too high, but an estimate of one in ten is entirely plausible.2 Many men fell in battle, and many more died later from their wounds or from disease in crowded camps, while marching armies spread infection to local communities. Charles Carlton has suggested that the Civil War caused proportionally more deaths in England than the First World War. At the most fundamental social level, then, the Civil War had a significant demographic impact, as the population of England stagnated from mid-century at a little over five million people with fertility rates 10 per cent lower in the 1650s than in the 1630s. The absence, maiming, and deaths of men, the economic dislocation that prevented young people establishing independent households in the 1640s and early 1650s, and perhaps dismay at the civil marriage law passed in 1653 led to many delayed or abandoned marriages.3

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The costs of war were stupendous and required enormous increases in taxation. The burden of official taxation rose at least tenfold compared to pre-war levels, and encompassed a much greater proportion of the population. The 1640s were thus crucial years for English state formation, a period when the power of the state impinged on the population to an unprecedented degree. Besides taxes on wealth, Parliament imposed an unpopular levy on consumption, the excise.4 There was also, as Bradstreet realized, much unauthorized plunder by unruly troops, as well as the sanctioned but deeply resented practice of free-quarter, the provision of compulsory board and lodging for soldiers (and their horses). Alarming intrusions by armed strangers into the domestic environment must have been onerous and threatening to mistresses of households and maidservants; the tensions are rarely documented, but easily imagined. Social and economic relationships were strained by the burdens of war. All landowners faced increasing demands in taxation and free-quarter, while royalists had additional burdens as their property was confiscated and only restored on the payment of substantial fines to the victorious parliamentarians. Many responded by intensifying the exploitation of their lands and their tenants: the Civil War encouraged agricultural innovation but also accelerated the decline of small landholders, and compounded the increasing social differentiation and the growth in the numbers of the poor, already characteristic of social change in England.5 Troop movements made trading difficult in many parts of England, while manufacture was diverted to military ends; supplying garrisons and armies might be profitable for some but for many their livelihoods were more precarious than before. Bad weather and poor harvests in the later 1640s added to the suffering; the years between 1646 and 1650 saw the lowest real wages and some of the worst depressions of the whole early modern period: ‘numerous swarms of begging poor’ were reported in the streets of northern England.6 Women suffered from the social and economic dislocations of war, alongside or in the absence of men. The imposition of the excise may have had a disproportionate effect on women given their particular responsibilities for marketing and supplying their households. Women frequently led protests against the levy: in Derby, for example, ‘two women of the town went up and down the town beating drums and making proclamation . . . that such of the town as were not willing to pay excise should join with them and they would beat the commissioners out of town’.7 Many women preserved their families from destitution when their soldier husbands were killed or maimed. Widows of parliamentarian soldiers petitioned local magistrates for pensions, revealing in the process a capacity for assertive and strategic lobbying in which they insisted on both their misery and their staunch loyalty. Civil War divisions had politicized many humble women, for they demanded their rights rather than begging for charity.8 In early modern England women at all social levels were taught to be obedient to their fathers, masters, and husbands. In sermons, printed advice books, plays, ballads, and proverbs, the subordination of women was stressed. Women’s disobedience and irrationality had prompted the fall of humanity from the garden of Eden, and the legacy of Eve remained a powerful warning against female assertion. Popular and

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educated understandings of the female body concurred in regarding women as the weaker sex, less capable of rational self-control than men. But there were tensions and complexities in gendered relationships before the Civil War; women were not simply passive victims of male dominance, and men’s insistence on their ultimate authority often masked an uneasy consciousness of mutual dependence. Marriage was a prime aspiration for both men and women for only the rich could survive comfortably alone. Active, competent women were essential to well-run households—some making a direct economic contribution, others supervising children, servants, or apprentices. Respectable married women were often the moral arbiters of street and village life; elite women might nurture political networks and wield economic power and social authority over men of lower social status. The brief examples already introduced show how women’s customary responsibilities in their households and communities might promote creative or assertive responses to Civil War suffering. Women’s experiences during the war sometimes demonstrate their vulnerability within a patriarchal society; at other times we see how their conventional roles as wives, daughters, and mothers were transformed by extraordinary circumstances. In other words, women were sometimes victims of the war, but more often it was useful for them to assert that they were innocent and helpless victims in order to preserve their families or advance a cause. Beyond this women did do extraordinary things: they were directly involved in military affairs; they had political influence, as individuals and collectively; and, above all, they were active participants in the religious fragmentation that was one of the most dramatic and significant aspects of the English Revolution. Women’s interventions in political or religious affairs attracted derision or hostility from some men, even as others took advantage of their initiatives. Those perceived as acting outside their proper roles always risked becoming become victims of male hostility. Female messengers or spies were sometimes treated as whores or witches; the social dislocation and more intimate anxieties fanned by Civil War contributed to a spike in witchcraft prosecutions, particularly in East Anglia, after a generation of decline. The ‘single worst atrocity’ of the war in England was the parliamentarian cavalry’s assault on the royalist women camp followers after the Battle of Naseby in June 1645. This was not a piece of random brutality in the exhilaration following a crushing victory, but a product of long-standing gendered and ethnic hostilities. The soldiers believed they were attacking Irish whores or witches; they butchered at least a hundred women and mutilated many more, usually by slitting their noses in the customary punishment for whores.9 The vulnerability of women is also revealed in their use as pawns in struggles between defenders and attackers during long and bitter sieges. At Lichfield in 1646, the royalists held the Cathedral close, while parliamentarians controlled the city itself. When the parliamentarian commander drove the wives of royalists from the city to add to the burdens of the enemy garrison, their royalist husbands refused to admit them and they were ‘enforced to lodge in the cold open air and there likely to perish for want of relief’. The royalist commander at Colchester in 1648 expelled 500 women and children to conserve resources. They were met with

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warning shots, and assaults from parliamentarian soldiers who stripped them of their clothes and goods. Only when it was clear that the parliamentarians were prepared to kill them were they readmitted to the town.10 There are many examples, however, of women’s active participation in the war effort on both sides. Both humble and noble women were useful as couriers or spies, taking advantage of their sex and non-combatant status to slip unchallenged between enemy lines. The mayor’s maid in royalist Chester evaded the parliamentarian besiegers to bring back vital information; but the prominent courtier Lady Aubigny was not so lucky. She smuggled a royal commission into London to encourage a plot against the Parliament but was discovered and imprisoned. Women also defended their homes from direct military assault. In parliamentarian cities like London, Hull, Bristol, and Coventry, as in royalist strongholds like Hereford, Worcester, or Chester, women helped to construct the city defences and sometimes joined in the fighting. Elite women found their homes turned into garrisons and, in the absence of their husbands, took command of the defenders. In Herefordshire the godly Lady Brilliana Harley withstood a long royalist siege in 1643, justifying her actions through reference to ‘the laws and liberties of this kingdom’, which guaranteed property rights, and to her obedience as a wife: ‘my dear husband hath entrusted me with his house and children, and therefore I cannot dispose of his house but according to his pleasure.’ Equally determined royalists such as Lady Mary Bankes in Dorset or Charlotte, Countess of Derby, in Lancashire held off parliamentarian troops; Derby indeed held out despite her absent husband’s urging surrender.11 We have already seen how humble women protected their economic livelihoods through petitioning or riot, but the most telling examples of women’s roles in preserving their families’ fortunes are at a higher social level. As the losers in the Civil War, royalist women had to be especially active, limiting the impact of confiscation, fines, and land-sales. The wives of royalist clergy were determined in their defiance of the authorities who sought to eject their husbands from office, and thus the whole family from their homes. In 1643 the wife of Robert Lovell, a minister in Sandwich, resisted eviction for several months after her husband was deprived of his living: she ‘kept her doors close up, and by her kinswoman absolutely denied obedience to the order till those who kept her husband sent him unto her’.12 Wives and daughters were often able to rescue confiscated property or lease lands back from the parliamentarian committees. Jane Cavendish, the daughter of the Earl of Newcastle, preserved some of the treasures of Welbeck when it was taken by Parliament’s forces, and successfully petitioned Parliament for maintenance for herself and her siblings. Jane Sneyd, wife of an imprisoned Staffordshire royalist, leased back the family’s property in 1644 and energetically defended her rights over the next year, lobbying the local committee for reductions in tax, for the return of stolen oxen, and for measures to force local people to grind their corn at her mills.13 Where men were politically eclipsed and sometimes exiled from England, women’s lobbying was crucial. Margaret Cavendish, Countess of Newcastle, failed to regain any of her husband’s estates on a visit from Antwerp and was contemptuous about the

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women who became ‘pleaders, attorneys, petitioners and the like’ at the Parliament’s committees—presumably forgetting how she and her husband benefited from the efforts of her stepdaughter Jane.14 Mary Verney, wife of the exiled moderate Sir Ralph Verney, was more successful. As his friends suggested, ‘women were never so useful as now . . . their sex entitles them to many privileges, and we find the comfort of them more than ever’. Mary needed to ‘bring her spirit to a soliciting temper’ to remember ‘to use the juice of an onion sometimes to soften hard hearts’. But Sir Ralph insisted that no pretence would be necessary: ‘it is not hard for a wife to dissemble, but there is like to be no need of that for where necessities are so great, the juice of an onion will be useless.’ Despite her pregnancy, Mary left her family behind in France in the winter of 1646 and began an exhausting programme of lobbying and negotiation over the next eighteen months to get Parliament to agree to lift the sequestration on the family estates. She was lonely and short of money, and her new baby died, but her business was successful.15 The practical interventions of women in garrisons or committees were surely founded on political allegiance as well as family loyalties, while there is ample evidence of more overt political activity. Women’s political influence was derided in both royalist and parliamentarian propaganda in terms that indicate something of the commitment and influence of actual women as well as the self-image of the rival causes. The self-righteous dominance of Puritan women was a favourite theme of the royalist press. Mercurius Aulicus claimed that the parliamentary commander Sir William Waller was subordinated to his godly wife, who ‘at Winchester Church . . . if he offered to speak about doctrines or uses, her ladyship would rebuke him, saying, peace Master William, you know your weaknesses in those things, since which time Sir William hath ever gone for the weaker vessel’. Parliamentarian defences of Lady Anne Waller retaliated by defaming royalist women as frivolous whores: ‘She is not like your Court-Madams, Aulicus; uses no oyle of talc, no false teeth, no wanton frisking gate, no caterwauling in Spring Garden. She bestows not all her time upon her body and leaves none for the soul.’16 Queen Henrietta Maria was the single most influential, and most controversial, political woman of the Civil War. She spent a year in the Netherlands from February 1642 raising men and supplies for the royalist cause; after landing back in Yorkshire in February 1643, she spent some months on a slow journey south to a reunion with the King at Oxford, collecting support as she went. From July 1643 until she left Oxford to give birth to her last child in Exeter in April 1644, Henrietta Maria was probably the King’s closest adviser. Her prominence was resented by some on the royalist side, but her unique access to the King may have taken the heat out of royalist factionalism.17 From a broader perspective, however, the influence of this foreign, papist Queen was profoundly harmful to the King’s cause. For parliamentarians, the King’s devotion and apparent subservience to his wife was not praiseworthy, but a sign of his unfitness to rule. The comments of the republican Lucy Hutchinson are well known: ‘the king had another instigator of his own violent purpose, more powerful than all the rest, and that was the queen . . . [she] was more fatal to the kingdom, which is never in any place

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happy where the hands that were made only for distaffs affect the management of scepters . . . wherever male princes are so effeminate as to suffer women of foreign birth and different religions to intermeddle with the affairs of state, it is always found to produce sad desolations’.18 The most catastrophic evidence of the Queen’s influence was exploited by Parliament when the King’s correspondence was seized at Naseby. The Queen’s letters from her French exile were printed with pious editorializing: ‘the Queen appears to have been as harsh, and imperious towards the king, as she is implacable to our religion, nation and government’.19 Royalist politics, conducted as they were in the court and other great households, as much as in councils and committees, offered scope to adventurous and independent women, and the war itself gave some women an independence they would not otherwise have had. Lady Aubigny was one such, and another was the young single woman Anne Murray, later Lady Halkett, who wrote a memoir of her Civil War experiences, looking back a little ruefully from her sedater middle age. Anne helped to engineer the escape from St James’s Palace of the King’s younger son James, Duke of York; she suffered two unhappy love affairs, including a tumultuous relationship with Colonel Joseph Bampfield who turned out to be a bigamist as well as a double agent. The dislocations and confusions of the war years made Bampfield’s deceptions possible but they also enabled Anne to travel independently throughout England and Scotland. She tended wounded soldiers after the Battle of Dunbar, defied parliamentarian troops who were attacking the house of her friend the Countess of Dunfermline, and argued over God’s providence with Robert Overton, the zealously millenarian parliamentarian commander.20 Anne Murray/Halkett’s memoirs reflected on the complex interrelationships between private virtue and public loyalty, as she gradually realized that an (apparently) loyal subject could be a bad man.21 We have already seen how important women were to preserving family fortunes following the decisive defeat of the royalist cause in the later 1640s. In the years of retreat and exile, when royalist men were banned from public office, women also had a broader cultural agency as royalists at home and abroad sought to preserve morale and nurture alternatives to Puritanism and republicanism. Royalist publishers issued cookery books in the name of Henrietta Maria and other elite women, challenging Puritan austerity with visions of generous aristocratic hospitality; female creativity was celebrated in musical and literary circles; women writers—Katherine Phillips living quietly in Wales and England, Margaret Cavendish in more extravagant exile—celebrated loyalty, friendship, and innocent pleasures, drawing stark contrasts with low-born republican philistinism and betrayal. These were ‘feminized’ and ‘private’ worlds, but through ‘the potency of feminized retreat’ they represented defiance of the dominant public power. The politics of royalist withdrawal thus served as a ‘genuine route to collective empowerment’ for women.22 On the parliamentarian side, individual godly women like Brilliana Harley and Anne Waller had political influence within their households and local communities, but the most remarkable political initiative by parliamentarian women was collective petitioning of Parliament itself. Humble petitions to the authorities by individuals or groups of

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men and women were a familiar element in the processes of negotiation and legitimization through which order was maintained in early modern England. But during a civil war in which fundamental issues of religious authority and political beliefs were debated in streets and market places, and contested on battlefields, broad sections of the population were politicized, and familiar processes transformed into something more radical and more disturbing. In the 1640s and 1650s, women were not simply petitioning for individual relief, or on local social issues, but they were presenting collective positions on specific political and religious questions. Many women’s petitions, like those from groups of men, were printed; this novel development highlights the importance of print as a means of expressing opinions and mobilizing support, and suggests the ways in which some sense of ‘public opinion’ emerged as readers debated the merits of rival political positions.23 Women petitioners faced derision and harassment, not necessarily from men in general, but certainly from men who disagreed with their political stance; and when challenged many eloquently defended their right to express opinions on public affairs. In early 1642, women petitioned in support of zealous parliamentarian reform, calling for the abolition of episcopacy, and for the kingdom to be put on a war footing. An alarmed member of the House of Lords was heard to splutter, ‘Away with these women, we were best to have a parliament of women.’ In contrast, in the summer of 1643 women petitioners called for peace. They were denounced as lewd whores for their pains, accused of being the dupes of the royalists, and dispersed by force, with injuries and possible fatalities.24 Towards the end of our period, a remarkable printed petition organized by the Quakers denounced tithes, the compulsory levy paid to the parish ministry. Three-quarters of the pamphlet was taken up by the signatures of 7,746 women, about half of whom can be identified as Quakers in local studies.25 The most extended collective petitioning campaign by women was in connection with the London-based democratic movement, the Levellers, in 1649 and 1653.26 Householder status was central to the political identities of male Levellers, and the active support of their wives (and their apprentices and servants) was an important element in their self-presentation and practice. Women’s petitioning was not openly controversial within the Leveller movement itself, but it was profoundly alarming to more conservative elements in the precarious, new republic. Leveller women were told in no uncertain terms in April 1649: ‘the matter you petition about, is of an higher concernment then you understand . . . you are desired to go home, and look after your own business, and meddle with your housewifery.’27 Elizabeth Lilburne and Mary Overton, wives of Leveller leaders, and the radical religious activist and author Katherine Chidley are amongst the individual women prominent from the start in distributing Leveller tracts, organizing petitions, supporting the men in their frequent imprisonments, and sometimes joining them in jail. When several Leveller leaders were rounded up by the new republic in 1649, women organized petitions for their release; drawing in part on radical petitions from the early 1640s, their arguments ranged widely and were sometimes contradictory. At times the women emphasized their ‘frailty’ and presented their petitioning as an extraordinary initiative, forced on weak women by the unprecedented

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threat to their movement. It was not the ‘custom’ of the sex to petition, but they were ‘so over pressed, so overwhelmed in affliction’ that they could not keep within their normal compass; ‘poverty, misery and famine, like a mighty torrent, is breaking in upon us’, and they would rather die than see their children starve. But there were also more direct and positive arguments: they knew that ‘for our encouragement and example, God hath wrought many deliverances for several nations from age to age, by the weak hand of women’. As Deborah and Jael had helped to deliver Israel, so Englishwomen had resisted the Vikings, and the women of Scotland initiated the struggle against episcopal tyranny in 1637. And when their first petition was contemptuously rejected, they organized another which straightforwardly claimed a political role for women: ‘Have we not an equal interest with the men of this nation, in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other good laws of the land?’ In 1653, John Lilburne was again in prison, facing trial for treason, and again the women petitioned, combining a sense of exceptional crisis founded on female weakness: ‘the thing is so gross that even women perceive the evil of it’, with a determination to defend female political initiative, insisting on their ‘undoubted right of petitioning’.28 The Leveller movement was nurtured within the separatist religious sects that sprang up in London in the 1640s, and began as a struggle against authoritarian Presbyterianism. The shattering of Protestant unity was amongst the most significant developments of the Civil War years. Episcopal government collapsed, but parliamentarians could not agree on how to replace it, and strategically placed minorities, particularly in Parliament’s own army, pushed for religious liberty. The dramatic challenge to the King, and Parliament’s decisive victory, explicable to many only as sign of God’s blessing on their struggle, ensured that religious liberty for Protestants was established by the late 1640s in practice, and officially sanctioned after 1649. Women played a full part in this fragmented religious market place, writing and distributing pamphlets, founding and sustaining congregations, spreading God’s word as preachers and prophets. Radical women in the Quakers and other groups have been the focus of much historical and literary scholarship,29 but we should not forget that many women, perhaps a majority, hankered for the old ways or an idealized version of them, seeking to preserve the familiar worship of their parish communities, based on the ceremonial and traditional feast days enjoined in the Anglican Common Prayer Book. Many gentlewomen, such as Hester Pulter, Anne Sadleir, and Dorothy Packington, preserved the Anglican liturgy in their homes and protected deprived royalist clergy.30 Controversies over the nature and validity of the ceremonies which marked crucial life events, particularly baptism, were of immediate personal concern to women. Two well-documented cases reveal contrasting reactions. Infant baptism was controversial amongst radical Protestants, and for more orthodox Puritans it was an austere event, not an occasion for ceremony or elaborate sociability: godparents and feasting were forbidden by Parliament’s Directory of Worship. Mary Verney, back in England, pregnant and alone, deplored the new religious atmosphere: ‘Truly one lives like a heathen in this place.’ She planned to christen her new baby according to Anglican rites: ‘I will obey thee’, she wrote to her husband, ‘and get a minister in the house that

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will do it the old way, for tis not the fashion here to have godfathers or godmothers.’ The republican Lucy Hutchinson in contrast found that pregnancy raised doubts about the validity of any form of infant baptism. She shared her unease with her husband who ‘diligently searched the scriptures’ and ‘all the eminent treatises on both sides’. The couple then decided not to have their new baby baptized, and were consequently reviled as ‘fanatics and anabaptists’. Both women characteristically presented themselves as obedient wives, but it is clear that Lucy rather than John Hutchinson took the initiative, while Mary Verney ignored her cautious husband, who urged her to ‘give no offence to the state, should it be done in the old way perhaps it may bring more trouble upon you than you can imagine’.31 Many of the gathered congregations founded in the 1640s and 1650s as voluntary bodies outside the imperfect national Church depended heavily on the agency of women. In Bristol Dorothy Hazzard led a small group who began by criticizing the Laudian ‘innovations’ of the 1630s and ended by founding a gathered independent church in the early 1640s where some members rejected infant baptism. Hazzard had mobilized some 200 women and girls in an unavailing defence of Bristol against royalist attack in 1643, and was a dominant figure in the congregation until her death in 1674, full of years and much revered: she ‘came to her grave a shock of corn fully ripe’.32 The attractions of gathered churches to women can easily be demonstrated. The Broadmead church had been founded by Hazzard and four men, but by 1660 at least half its members were female. An independent church in Canterbury had fourteen male and nine female founding members in 1645, but by 1658 there were almost twice as many women (79) as men (43).33 The more heterodox General Baptist congregations of East Anglia also had a large, and often obstreperous female membership. As we shall see, in many congregations conventional views on gendered hierarchies were challenged by women’s assertiveness over religious beliefs, as the records kept by the churches themselves reveal. Few of these troublesome women had an impact beyond their families and church members, unlike the more dramatic female prophets and assertive Quaker women who claimed divine inspiration for a public role.34 The widespread conviction that God was at work directly in this world was inevitably intensified by the dramatic upheavals of the Civil War, culminating in the regicide. Many shared the millenarian expectations that these were the last days before Christ would return to rule in glory with his saints; in such a time God might inspire his weakest instruments to deliver prophetic judgements on corrupt earthly powers and offer liberation to his chosen people. As the prophet Joel had promised, God would ‘pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions. And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit’ (Joel 2: 29–30). Assumptions of female weakness and passivity thus made it credible that they might be chosen as God’s messengers, although the role of prophet was always a contested and dangerous one—for if a woman speaking in public was not simply a conduit for God’s words, she might well be a scold, a witch, or a whore. Nonetheless there were

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always sympathetic hearers who believed that they were inspired by God.35 Consequently when Elizabeth Poole approached the General Council of Officers in late December 1649, as they were debating the future of the kingdom and the proposed trial of the King, the army leaders took seriously her claim to bring a message from God, and allowed her to address them on two occasions. When it transpired that her message—expressed in a familiar comparison between monarchical power and men’s authority in the family—was against putting the King to death, the officers repudiated her prophetic claims, and Poole was disowned by her gathered congregation.36 The most influential and notorious female prophet, Anna Trapnel, was a member of the millenarian Fifth Monarchist movement, that campaigned for the rule of the saints and denounced Cromwell’s seizure of power as Lord Protector as a betrayal of God’s cause. Trapnel, a Stepney shipwright’s daughter, burst into prominence when she fell into a trance in January 1654 as she was amongst the crowds witnessing the Council of State’s examination of the imprisoned Fifth Monarchist preacher Vavasor Powell. Her trances continued for some twelve days interrupted by ‘visions of God, Relating to the Governors, Army, Churches, Ministry, Universities, and the whole Nation’ and identified Cromwell as one of the horned beasts in the Book of Daniel who would make war with God’s precious Saints.37 Trapnel was vital to Fifth Monarchist activism throughout 1654, especially as many male leaders of the Fifth Monarchists were in prison. News of her visions spread through print, and she attracted large crowds of supporters, sceptics, and enemies on a prophesying trip to the West Country, all eager to hear her ‘vision of the horns’. Godly radicals who believed she was God’s instrument gave her shelter, but the authorities were seriously alarmed. They smeared her with the usual labels given to women speaking or acting out of turn, as a scold, a witch, or a vagrant. In the end Trapnel was arrested and confined to the London Bridewell. Trapnel’s career reveals the ambiguities as well as the perils of the female prophetic role. She sometimes protested that she was simply God’s passive instrument, ‘a weak worthless creature, a babe in Christ, which makes his power the more manifest’, but she also insisted that she was an independent single woman, revelling in the public service to which God had appointed her.38 The Quakers were the most provocative of all the radical sects that emerged in the years after Civil War, not least for the freedom to preach and publish they seemed to give to unruly women. The Quakers had a remarkable impact as charismatic itinerant preaching in the early 1650s offered an inspirational vision of salvation founded on acceptance of the ‘light within’ to disillusioned Baptists and other sectaries. The survival of the movement despite harassment in the 1650s and persecution after 1660 depended largely on the role of Margaret Fell, a Westmoreland gentlewoman who later married the Quaker leader George Fox. Her home was the Quakers’ headquarters, a centre for correspondence, and the dispensing of essential financial support. Like many other Quaker women, Fell was a prolific author, of pamphlets arguing for women’s right to preach amongst other works. Remarkably Quakers published almost half of all printed works by women in the 1650s, and some 20 per cent of all female publications in

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the seventeenth century.39 Besides writing pamphlets condemning corrupt authority, women denounced ungodly clergy to their faces, and travelled around England and beyond seeking converts. Women were involved in about a third of the incidents when Quakers attacked parish ministers. In turn, they were humiliated, whipped, and imprisoned; like Trapnel they risked condemnation as whores or scolds. Dorothy Waugh, a young servant, denounced worldly oppressors in Carlisle market place, the most public forum possible. As punishment for this audacity, Waugh was made to stand for three hours in the market place with a scold’s bridle on her head: ‘I stood their time with my hands bound behind me with the weight of iron upon my head, and the bit in my mouth to keep me from speaking.’40 There is evidence from their more private correspondence that Quaker men were often uneasy about the assertiveness of women in their movement, although they defended women’s preaching in their pamphlets, using a distinctly mystical interpretation of the Scriptures. Most religious radicals held conventional views on gendered relationships, usually founded on a more literal approach to the Bible. West Country Baptists were typical when they agreed in November 1653: ‘a woman is not permitted at all to speak in the church, neither by way of praying, prophesying nor enquiring . . . but, if any have a gift, we judge they may exercise it in private, observing the rule mentioned, 1 Corinthians 11.5’.41 It is, of course, significant, that the question needed to be discussed, and even if preaching was forbidden, it is clear that many congregations offered women greater formal influence than was possible in other spheres of their lives. In the Broadmead church women gave individual assent to the appointment of preachers, and were allowed to indicate their criticisms of decisions, although they had to convey their views through a man.42 The Fifth Monarchist John Rogers argued for more active participation, although he recognized his views were controversial. Women, Rogers emphasized, often excelled men in ‘piety and judgement’, and although the Scriptures forbade women from public preaching, this should not apply to ‘the common ordinary liberty due to them as members of the church, viz to speak, object, offer or vote with the rest’. Indeed Rogers looked forward to the time when ‘handmaids shall prophecy, and have more public liberty than now they have’.43 There are clear tensions in the gender politics of the sects. Except in the Quakers, ministers were male, and, along with male elders, they were often exercised by independent, argumentative women. Women who had exercised a religious choice to join a particular congregation were not always amenable to discipline after they joined. On the other hand, all groups were competing for members, and, in the last analysis, commitment to God and to a particular congregation was valued above obedience to earthly hierarchies, of gender or social status. Thus when the West Country Baptists considered whether a ‘sister’ whose husband was not a Baptist might ‘dispose of outward substance’ without her husband’s ‘knowledge or consent’, they concluded, with some unease, that there was scriptural sanction for a wife’s use of household goods for the good of the church without her husband’s permission.44 The East Anglian General Baptists, more radical in their belief in general redemption than the Calvinists previously discussed, were equally exercised by issues of female obedience. Ministers

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and elders struggled to prevent defections to the Quakers, but were defied by many women members: Sister Pharepoint ‘refused to hearken’ to reproof, and ‘exhorted us to look within, for the light within was the only rule to be guided by’. Some women cited obedience to husbands as a justification for leaving the Baptist Church, but the elders would have none of it. Jane Adams used her husband’s command as the reason why she would not come to church: ‘He had sworn she should not come, and she was unwilling to make him break his oath.’ Jane was told in no uncertain terms that this was ‘not a sufficient cause to keep her from the meetings’, and her retort that ‘she was minded to seek her peace’ brought another sharp rebuke. After a general discussion it was agreed that ‘the threatenings of a husband’ were not a sufficient warrant for a woman to leave the church, unless she was actually ‘restrained by force’.45 After the restoration of the monarchy, a group of royalist women whose husbands had been executed for their participation in Penruddock’s rising against Cromwell in 1655 petitioned Charles II for revenge, asking that the judges who had condemned their husbands be arraigned in their turn. This mode contrasted dramatically with their petitioning techniques in 1655; Arundel Penruddock’s approach was typical in her acknowledgement that her husband’s punishment was ‘justly deserved through his rashness and folly’, and her humble plea to Cromwell to pardon him nonetheless for the sake of her seven small children.46 This reminds us that women’s deployment of their traditional roles in families and households, and conventional expressions of obedience, fragility, and dependence, were often strategic and assertive arguments, mobilized for the good of their households, or for partisan political and religious stances. As Leveller women insisted in 1653, ‘nothing is more manifest then that God is pleased oftentimes to raise up the weakest means to work the mightiest effects’.47 Women’s activities during the Civil War were sometimes sanctioned or co-opted by male allies; perhaps more often they were denounced or violently opposed by men who claimed that they were moving out of their proper sphere. At the time many women did indeed achieve mighty effects. Their longer-term impact is harder to gauge. At the Restoration, Anglican and royalist women welcomed the religious and political changes, and some were prominent in the restored court, but whether they had as much influence in their communities as they had in the 1650s is a moot point. At the other extreme, Quakers survived persecution by establishing a more systematic organization and moderating their more provocative and ecstatic impulses. The organization included women’s committees with responsibility for marriage and welfare. Although Margaret Fell Fox backed this development, it was opposed by some activist women who saw it as a restriction of their general influence within the movement.48 Nonetheless the Quakers were remarkable in allowing women formal authority as well as informal influence, and women were prominent in many other nonconformist congregations. There is not a straight line between women’s activism in the rival religious groupings of the seventeenth century and more recent claims for emancipation or liberation, but the Quakers in particular continued to endorse public roles for women as well as female piety, while religious commitment more generally continued to facilitate female agency and to permit women to defy men, all the while insisting on

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their obedience to God. In the radical religious sects, then, the impact of the English Revolution continued to be seen long after the return of the King.

NOTES 1. Anne Bradstreet, ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’, quoted in Chedgzoy, Women’s Writing, 129. 2. There is a balanced discussion in Donagan, War in England, 215–16. 3. Carlton, Going to the Wars; Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 229–30; Durston, Family, 115. 4. Braddick, Nerves of State, 95–6. 5. Clay, Economic Expansion, 158–64. 6. Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution’. 7. Braddick, Nerves of State, 222–4. 8. Hudson, ‘Negotiating for Blood Money’. 9. Stoyle ‘The Road to Farndon Field’. 10. Carr and Atherton (eds.), Civil War in Staffordshire, 280–5; Donagan, War in England, 340. 11. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 173; Donagan, War in England, 237; Plowden, Women All on Fire, xiv–xv, 96–110. 12. East Kent Archives Centre, Dover, Sa/C1, Sandwich Letter Book fos. 128v, 129v, 132v. 13. Whitaker, Mad Madge, 86, 131–2; Pennington and Roots (eds.), Committee at Stafford 1643–1645, 38, 48–9, 60, 141, 264. 14. Cavendish, ‘A True Relation’, 379–80. On Cavendish, see also the chapter by Rachel Trubowitz in this volume. 15. Verney (ed.), Memoirs of the Verney Family, ii. 239–40. 16. Mercurius Aulicus, week ending 24 August 1644, quoted in de Groot, Royalist Identities, 118; The Spie, 26 April–1 May 1644, 110. 17. Cust, Charles I: A Political Life, 370; de Groot, Royalist Identities, 127. 18. Hutchinson, Life, 70. 19. The King’s Cabinet Opened, 44. 20. Halkett, Memoirs, 23–9, 59–61. On royalism and romance, see also the chapter by Amelia Zurcher in this volume. 21. Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 319–33. 22. Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’; Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 104, 132. 23. Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. 24. Higgins, ‘Reactions of Women’, 185–98. 25. Nevitt, Women and the Pamphlet Culture, 160–71; Kent, ‘“Handmaids and Daughters of the Lord”’. 26. On the Levellers, see also the chapter by Rachel Foxley in this volume. 27. Perfect Occurrences of Every Daie Journall in Parliament, 20–7 April 1649. 28. This section is based on Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’. 29. For some examples see Hinds, God’s Englishwomen; Laurence, ‘A Priesthood of SheBelievers’. 30. See the entries on these women in ODNB.

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31. Verney (ed.), Memoirs of the Verney Family, ii. 258–60; Hutchinson, Life, 210–11; cf. Durston, Family, 117. 32. Hayden (ed.), Records of a Church of Christ, 84, 88–90, 155, 293. 33. Canterbury Cathedral Library U37, ‘A History of the Church which was first gathered and settled in the city of Canterbury’. 34. On Quakers, see also the chapter by Kate Peters in this volume. 35. See Mack, Visionary Women for a full account. 36. Wiseman, ‘Conspiracy and Virtue’, 143–60. 37. Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone, title page. 38. Trapnel, Report and Plea. 39. Peters, Print Culture, 125–9; Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings’, 213. 40. Gill, Women in the Seventeenth Century Quaker Community; Hinds, ‘Embodied Rhetoric’, 195. 41. Association Records, Part II, 55. The text is ‘But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.’ 42. Hayden (ed,) Records of a Church of Christ, 130–2. 43. Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh, 465–76. 44. Association Records, Part II, 58–9, 67. 45. Records of the Churches of Christ, 117, 218, 233, 242. 46. Button, ‘Royalist Women’s Petitioners’. 47. To the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England. 48. Gill, Women in the Seventeenth Century Quaker Community, 146–8.

WORKS CITED Association Records of the Particular Baptists of England, ed. B. R. White. Baptist Historical Society, 1973. Braddick, Michael J. The Nerves of State: Taxation and the Financing of the English State 1558–1714. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Button, Andrea. ‘Royalist Women’s Petitioners in South-West England, 1655–1662’. Seventeenth Century 15 (2000), 53–66. Carlton, Charles. Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651. London: Routledge, 1992. Carr, Ivor, and Ian Atherton (eds.). The Civil War in Staffordshire in the Spring of 1646: Sir William Brereton’s Letter Book. Collections for a History of Staffordshire, 4th series, 21, 2007. Cavendish, Margaret. ‘A True Relation of my Birth, Breeding and Life’, in her Nature’s Pictures. London, 1656. Chalmers, Hero. Royalist Women Writers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Chedgzoy, Kate. Women’s Writing in the British Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Clay, C. G. A. Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500 -1700, vol. i. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

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Crawford, Patricia. ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society. London: Methuen, 1985, 211–34. Cust, Richard. Charles I: A Political Life. Harlow: Longman, 2005. Donagan, Barbara. War in England 1642–1649. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Durston, Christopher. The Family in the English Revolution. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989. Eales, Jacqueline. Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Gill, Catie. Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Groot, Jerome de. Royalist Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Halkett, Anne. The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett, and Ann, Lady Fanshawe, ed. John Loftis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Hayden, Roger (ed.). Records of a Church of Christ. Bristol Record Society, 27, 1974. Higgins, Patricia. ‘The Reactions of Women, with Special Reference to Women Petitioners’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War. London: Edward Arnold, 1973, 179–224. Hindle, Steve. ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50’. Economic History Review 61.1 (2008), 64–98. Hinds, Hilary. God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. ——. ‘Embodied Rhetoric: Quaker Public Discourse in the 1650s’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds.), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England. London: Routledge, 2007, 191–211. Hudson, Geoff. ‘Negotiating for Blood Money’: War Widows and the Courts in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (eds.), Women, Crime and the Courts. London: UCL Press, 1994. Hughes, Ann. ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, 162–89. Hutchinson, Lucy. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble. London: Everyman, 1995. Kent, Steven A. ‘“Handmaids and Daughters of the Lord”: Quaker Women, Quaker Families and Somerset’s Anti-tithe Petition in 1659’. Quaker History 97 (2008), 32–61. The King’s Cabinet Opened (London, 1645). Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 464–99. Laurence, Anne. ‘A Priesthood of She-Believers: Women and Congregations in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds.), Women in the Church. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1990. Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1994. Nevitt, Marcus. Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England 1640–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pennington, D. H., and I. A. Roots (eds.). The Committee at Stafford 1643–1645. Manchester: Staffordshire Record Society and Manchester University Press, 1957. Peters, Kate. Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

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Plowden, Alison. Women All on Fire: The Women of the English Civil War. Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998. Records of the Churches of Christ Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys and Hexham, ed. E. B. Underhill. Hanserd Knollys Society, vol. 9, 1854. Rogers, John. Ohel or Beth-shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun. London, 1653. Stoyle, Mark. ‘The Road to Farndon Field: Explaining the Massacre of the Royalist Women at Naseby’. English Historical Review 123.503 (2008), 895–923. To the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England (London, 1653). Trapnel, Anna. Report and Plea, or a Narrative of her Journey into Cornwall: London, 1654. ——. The Cry of a Stone, ed. Hilary Hinds. Tempe, AZ: Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000. Verney, F. P. (ed.). Memoirs of the Verney Family. London, 1892. Whitaker, Katie. Mad Madge: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Royalist, Writer and Romantic. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003. Wiseman, Susan. Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing, and Politics in SeventeenthCentury England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Wrightson, Keith. Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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CHAPTER

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NEWS, PAMPHLETS, AND PUBLIC OPINION ....................................................................................................... JASON PEACEY

This chapter explores the broad historiographical and methodological framework of scholarship relating to pamphlets and newspapers during the Civil Wars. It outlines why such material has proved fascinating and contentious, and what scholars have made of it, in terms of the genres which emerged and the people who produced them. It also addresses claims about the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ and of ‘public opinion’, by analysing the ‘dynamic’ of print during the 1640s, in terms of how it was used and exploited, the forces which affected its production, and the ways in which it was perceived and consumed. By examining issues such as censorship and propaganda, authorship and journalism, reading and consumption, it highlights emerging trends within the field, and new avenues of enquiry, and it suggests that the importance of newspapers and pamphlets lay in how they affected political practices and the shape of the political nation. In many ways, scholars and students are fairly familiar with the pamphlet and newspaper culture during the 1640s. Famously, the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission in 1641 removed the mechanisms for enforcing pre-publication censorship, and this, together with rising political and religious tension following the assembly of the Long Parliament, as well as looming civil war, created the conditions for an explosion of cheap print. This did not necessarily mean more print, but it certainly involved a dramatic change in the nature of literature which emerged from the printing presses, and the emergence of a great deal more topical and ephemeral political and religious material, much of it poorly produced.1 Eventually it involved the emergence of a fledgling news industry.2 This print revolution is often encapsulated in statistics about the vast quantities of pamphlets and newspapers which appeared following the collapse of censorship in 1641, notably the 22,000 items amassed by the London bookseller George Thomason between 1640 and 1661, very often with a precise date of acquisition to enable individual items to be located in a precise temporal context. Scholars are thus able to map the paper war onto the political, religious, and

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military conflicts of the period, both between royalists and parliamentarians, and between the factions on each side. If this is all well known, however, it might surprise some that scholars do not agree on how to interpret such changes. Scholarly attention paid to the material collected by the likes of Thomason has increased dramatically in recent decades, not least as waves of technological innovation—from microfilms to the internet and Early English Books Online—have made this material increasingly accessible. Yet the absence of scholarly consensus reflects the fact that the meaning and importance of Civil War pamphlets and newspapers have been contested. Indeed, such material has become central to some of the key historiographical debates since the Second World War, in terms of whether, why, and how scholars should scrutinize contemporary printed literature. Put crudely, many Marxist historians, most notably Christopher Hill, looked to Civil War pamphlets in order to recover the political and religious views of individuals and groups previously overlooked by scholars, from radical sectarians to fiery Levellers.3 ‘Revisionist’ scholars, meanwhile, who sought to challenge Whiggish and Marxist grand narratives, often eschewed printed literature, on the grounds that it was too easy to over-emphasize the contemporary importance of marginal voices, and instead refocused attention upon high politics, manuscript sources, and a less ideologically driven narrative about the Civil Wars.4 Recent decades, however, have witnessed a fairly strenuous reaction against such revisionism, both in terms of their arguments and their methodology, not least in terms of the value of studying print culture. This reflects a sense that, by studying political culture in a broader rather than a narrower fashion, a different picture emerges about the degree, intensity, and longevity of political and religious tension and division, as well as a sense that, properly understood in a contextual and archivally informed fashion, printed material and communicative practices shed important light upon the nature of popular politics and political culture.5 As such, attention has become focused once again upon all aspects of popular print culture during the seventeenth century, from censorship to propaganda, from newspapers to almanacs, and from ballads to religious treatises.6 Most controversially of all, the ‘post-revisionist’ revival of interest in print culture has become bound up with ideas, more or less influenced by Jürgen Habermas, about the emergence of a ‘public sphere’ and the development of public opinion as a political force of considerable significance, which was appealed to, expressed through, and mediated by print.7 Habermas, as is well known, formulated a view of a rational and critical bourgeois public sphere consisting of private persons coming together to debate public matters that had previously been tacitly accepted. Habermas links this public with institutions such as coffee houses and salons, as well as regular newspapers, although his public sphere, while deemed universal, is restricted to men of property and dated late in the seventeenth century.8 The notion of a public sphere, and its applicability to the seventeenth century, remain highly contested, and in what follows an attempt will be made to consider a number of ways in which the nature of Civil War print culture has been, and ought to be, analysed, in order to establish the extent to which it represented a revolutionary force and had a democratizing effect.

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PRINT EXPLOSION

.................................................................................................................. There is a very real sense in which the most important developments of the period after 1640 involved the volume of titles which appeared, and the conditions in which they appeared, rather than the kind of material which was produced. The most important genres of ‘cheap print’, not least ballads, works of popular piety, heroic tales, and affordable history, as well as almanacs, were already familiar; what was new was their appearance in such profusion, making it much more likely that they would reach the provinces, and the ‘lower orders’, not least through the efforts of pedlars and chapmen.9 Even polemical and controversial pamphlets can be found before the 1640s, not least during the Marprelate controversy and the debate over the projected ‘Spanish match’, although these appeared somewhat episodically, and were far from being a consistent feature of the literary landscape.10 What is striking about many of these polemical and highly controversial texts, however, is that they were an ‘underground’ phenomenon. The Marprelate tracts were produced surreptitiously on secret presses in the provinces, while works by Thomas Scot discussing the Spanish match tended to be printed in, and then smuggled from, the Continent, in order to evade censure and punishment. All in all, topical polemic was a risky business; illicit presses were difficult to hide, and overseas printing was investigated with some diplomatic rigour, and during the 1630s many of those involved in such ventures—such as Henry Burton, John Bastwick, William Prynne, and John Lilburne—were discovered and severely punished alongside their associates and collaborators.11 What happened in the early 1640s, therefore, was not the invention of new kinds of political and religious literature, but rather their homecoming. Moreover, while it would be unwise to push too far the claim that England witnessed a free press after the abolition of Star Chamber and High Commission—from 1641 onwards attempts were repeatedly made to punish offensive literature and to reimpose pre-publication censorship—it certainly became much easier to publish in print material which had been unthinkable during earlier decades.12 The relative impunity with which authors and publishers could operate, and the demand for ideas and for debate which was generated by ‘England’s troubles’, ensured that political and religious arguments appeared in pamphlet after pamphlet, ranging from lengthy scholarly treatises to short eight-page works, often decorated with woodcuts which could be crude in both form and content.13 Much more innovative was the development of printed news, and ultimately of weekly newspapers, ‘mercuries’ or ‘diurnalls’. Strictly speaking, these were not exactly invented during the 1640s, since the preceding two decades had witnessed brief experimentation with the newsbook or ‘coranto’ format, as entrepreneurial publishers and printers such as Nathaniel Butter and Nicholas Bourne sought to copy the format of works which proliferated on the Continent after the outbreak of the Thirty Years

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War, and found an enthusiastic market among England’s political elite. The English corantos, however, failed to become established, in the face of opposition within the government and the failure to recognize the potential for a government newspaper, and they also lacked one fundamental ingredient which guaranteed success in the 1640s: the inclusion of ‘domestic’ news. This omission reflected a concerted attempt by the Stuart regime to prevent public debate about affairs of state, and the ability after 1640 to publish relations about domestic affairs, both locally and nationally, represents perhaps the most notable development in political print culture of the mid-seventeenth century.14 From 1641 onwards, most notably after the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion, news reports were published on an almost daily basis, and in a variety of formats. They appeared in pamphlets offering ‘exact’ and ‘true’ relations of recent events, and they also appeared on broadsides which could be displayed in public, as ballads traditionally had been, not least in order to catalogue the battles of the Civil Wars, and the heroic deeds of individual commanders. Such broadsides, like news pamphlets, were often illustrated with woodcuts, in order to provide readers with evocative, if not necessarily accurate, depictions of the events which they described, and in order to represent the brutalities of war.15 Such texts remained an important part of contemporary print culture throughout the Civil War period, but they were quickly joined by a much more dramatic and important genre: the newspaper. Newspapers endeavoured to provide readers with regular updates on the latest developments by adopting settled titles, by endeavouring to appear on the same day each week, and by being numbered and dated in such a way as to enable readers to become regular consumers. The familial resemblance between these mercuries and diurnalls and modern newspapers is thus real, and it is possible to detect experimentation with features which became much more striking subsequently, from the development of editorials to the importance of adverts.16 Nevertheless, such similarities ought not to be overplayed. Civil War newspapers appeared only weekly, and their news tended to be written up as it arrived, and was thus arranged in a diurnal format, rather than in ways which reflected the importance of individual stories. As such, the most important events in any one week might end up being buried on the final page, although some editors sought to overcome this by providing headlines on their front page. Moreover, it would be a long time before newspapers appeared in formats other than that of the quarto pamphlet, or adopted other visually distinctive elements associated with the modern press, and they remained small operations with only a limited staff. Indeed, insofar as it is possible to be clear, newspapers from the 1640s appear largely to have been written by an editor and no more than one other journalist, with overall editorial responsibility being assumed to have rested with the publisher, rather than the journalists, judging by the severity of the punishments which the parliamentarian authorities meted out to those whose texts proved too inflammatory.17 Beyond highlighting the nature of Civil War newspapers, it is also necessary to recognize the bewildering diversity of texts which were available. This is partly a matter of style and content, and while journals like the Perfect Diurnall concentrated upon providing relatively dry factual

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information—some predominantly from Britain, and others primarily from across Europe—works such as Mercurius Britanicus or Mercurius pragmaticus relied upon comment and argument for their appeal, sometimes of a scandalous and more or less scatological and pornographic nature. But it is also a matter of the number of competing titles which appeared, sometimes for only a few issues, but on other occasions for years on end. By the mid-1640s, newspapers were probably appearing on almost every day of the week, and in any one week customers might have been confronted by a choice of over a dozen different titles.18 Another way of confronting the novelty of Civil War literature involves developments in terms of authorship. This can be connected to developments relating to specific genres which rose to prominence during the 1640s, and has profound importance for any assessment relating to the rise of public opinion and the possible emergence of a ‘public sphere’. In essence, this issue revolves around the degree to which the conditions which existed during the 1640s facilitated the emergence of new voices, and new kinds of authors, not least in terms of men and women from outside the conventional political elite, and there are clearly any number of examples of those with contributions to make to debates feeling able to do so in novel ways. This is then connected to the possibility of detecting the rise of ‘professional’ authors, who perhaps came from outside the gentry elite, and who were able to make a living from their literary efforts. ‘Living by the pen’ is generally discussed in terms of those impoverished scholars who inhabited what became known as ‘Grub Street’—both literally and figuratively—and who were prepared to eke out a living, sometimes by creating fraudulent texts and selling them to publishers for a few shillings, or of those ‘alienated intellectuals’ who were produced as a result of a profound educational revolution, and whose frustrated ambitions fed into the intellectual origins of the Civil Wars.19 Once again, it is important not to overplay the changes of the 1640s, since the rise of the professional author can be detected as far back as the midsixteenth century. Nevertheless, contemporaries who detected growing numbers of non-elite and professional authors were clearly right to identify the rise of both penniless hacks and those with unconventional backgrounds, even if some of their claims were overblown, and driven by political agendas. This can be seen most clearly from the earliest pamphlets of the 1640s, such as the many works by John Taylor, the Thames waterman, and Henry Walker, the London Ironmonger, which were short, cheap, and often illustrated, as well as scurrilous and highly polemical.20 More intriguing still is evidence relating to the authorship of newspapers, which reveals how professional authors often proved more skilful at adapting to the new medium than those with more conventional literary backgrounds. There is a very real sense, in other words, in which Civil War journalism became the province of new men, and of professionals, such as Walker and Marchamont Nedham, as well as men from the mercantile classes who had cut their teeth as intelligencers for members of the gentry and aristocracy, such as John Dillingham and Daniel Border, rather than clerics and scholars, such as Peter Heylyn.21

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PRINT DYNAMICS

.................................................................................................................. The key to a deeper appreciation of Civil War print culture, however, lies in moving beyond the kinds of texts which were produced, and the kinds of people who produced them. In order to assess the significance and impact of such material it is vital to explore the dynamic of print, and both texts and contexts, in terms of the ways in which print was appropriated, exploited, and deployed, the forces which were at work behind the production of pamphlets and newspapers, and the ways in which print was consumed and perceived. Each of these fields will be explored in turn, and perhaps the most striking thing which scholars have gleaned is the changing nature of contemporary debate within the public domain. Perhaps the most obvious way in which this can be explored involves the prevalence of printed exchanges and public debates. From the early months of the 1640s, therefore, pamphlet culture was dominated to a very great extent by pamphlets produced to engage with other pamphlets. This was evident along a spectrum from ‘elite’ to ‘popular’, and on both political and religious issues, from the pamphlets of the ‘Smectymnuus’ controversy over church government, which involved leading Puritan divines, as well as Joseph Hall and John Milton, to the bitter print rivalry between John Taylor and Henry Walker, played out in short, cheap, and shoddy pamphlets, which mixed personal invective with political and religious animosity.22 This tendency towards printed debates, which could extend over months and even years, persisted throughout the 1640s, from the pamphlets provoked by Henry Parker’s Observations in July 1642 to the exchanges between royalist polemicists such as Henry Ferne and their parliamentarian rivals such as Charles Herle and Philip Hunton. Some of the most bitter and protracted debates, meanwhile, centred upon church government, and debates involving such controversial figures as John Goodwin, William Prynne, and Thomas Edwards generated significant heat, and occupied thousands of printed pages.23 Moreover, this centrality of debate became evident across almost every genre of print, not least in the newspapers, the existence of which can sometimes be explained almost entirely by a determination to respond—over every story and argument—to political rivals. This process—most notably involving the exchanges between the parliamentarian Mercurius Britanicus and the royalist Mercurius aulicus—went a long way towards developing the newspaper medium and the journalistic ‘profession’.24 Scholarly fascination with this dialogic culture relates in no small part to what it reveals about the ideological landscape, and the shape of the political nation. As scholars who focus primarily upon the religious debates of earlier decades have pointed out, the conditions and opportunities of the 1640s were such that debates which would once have taken place privately, within scholarly circles or the confines of discrete disputations, now took place in public and in print, and there is scope for arguing that this ensured that new audiences were reached, and that the nature of debate changed.

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Debates in print seem more likely to have become less measured and less polite, and more likely to have become protracted, as new contributions were thought to call for yet further interventions. The result appears to have been a hardening, or exaggeration, of divisions, as Archbishop Laud had feared in the 1630s, although there is also scope for arguing that print enabled cracks within the ideological landscape which had once been papered over to become much more visible.25 This is closely linked to the sense that the 1640s witnessed a broadening of debate, in terms of the range of views which contributed to contemporary discourse, and the range of people who were able to participate. As generations of scholars and students have been aware, therefore, one of the most striking things about the 1640s is the emergence of new voices and new ideas, from radical sectarians to Levellers and Diggers, in what appears to represent the growth of once obscure and underground groups, the creativity of the Civil War era, and the emergence of inspired individuals, empowered by the print medium.26 This sense that the 1640s witnessed the emergence of ‘new voices’, both ideologically and socio-economically, raises bigger and less well-studied questions about participation, the appropriation of print, and public opinion. Another way of exploring the changing nature of public debate in the 1640s involves thinking not merely about the collapse of censorship but also about the breakdown of secrecy, and crucial to the ‘print revolution’ was the way in which once privileged information became more freely available. Just as news reporting shifted from scribal newsletters, which catered for an elite audience, into cheap news pamphlets and newspapers, so political information which had traditionally been available only to those with contacts or deep pockets now tended to appear in print. Although some work has been done on the phenomenon of printed parliamentary speeches, much more work is needed on the publication of material which made political processes understandable and political proceedings accessible, and there is scope for arguing that the rise of Parliament (however temporary) in the 1640s, and of investigative journalism and political muck-raking, brought into the public domain evidence which enabled contemporaries to become much better acquainted with a broad range of characters from public life.27 Print culture, in other words, fostered the personalization and individualization of political culture. The participatory impact of print can also be explored, however, in terms of the way in which it became common for print to be appropriated, both individually and collectively, in order to contribute not merely to ideological debates, but also to policy discussions. This was done most obviously through petitioning, which could sometimes be undertaken on a massive scale, and which may increasingly have sought to emphasize the number, rather than merely the quality, of signatories, in a development which has encouraged scholars to think about the way in which print was used in order to give expression to public opinion.28 However, historians are only beginning to appreciate the importance of what might be described as the ephemerality of print culture, in terms of recognizing that printed texts were not always ‘public’ or ‘published’, least of all published ‘commercially’, and in terms of the ways in which print could be used as a means of making a more or less discrete intervention, in order to

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petition the authorities and lobby policy makers and opinion formers, and in order to agitate and organize political campaigns like those which the Levellers pioneered.29

PRINT CONSTRAINTS

.................................................................................................................. A second way of exploring the dynamic of pamphlet and newspaper culture during the Civil Wars involves the constraints under which such texts were produced, which are crucial for any assessment of the extent to which the conditions for a Habermasian public sphere—essentially those of a free press—were met in the 1640s. Mention has already been made of two factors of direct relevance to this issue (the collapse of censorship and the rise of Grub Street), and the impact of these must clearly be recognized. Nevertheless, there is a real risk of exaggerating the significance of both of these, because a form of pre-publication censorship was reimposed fairly quickly, because the press continued to be policed, and because seditious literature continued to be punished, even if none of these mechanisms was entirely efficient. Moreover, while evidence exists of cheap print being produced along commercial lines, Grub Street practices, like the street from which they took their name, may have remained marginal to the London book trade, and it would be a mistake to read into their emergence the eclipse of more traditional forms of literary patronage, and to overlook the likelihood that the printers and booksellers involved in publishing blended commercial and ideological motives, sometimes in fairly unequal measures. Here, however, attention will focus upon another problematic issue: propaganda. A real danger for scholars of Civil War print culture involves the failure to contextualize individual pamphlets and newspapers in order to uncover evidence of either ‘soft’ or ‘hard’ political power, and the possibility that certain authors had more or less intimate connections to members of the political elite, and that certain works appeared with more or less official backing. Using the term ‘propaganda’ to describe such works may be problematic, but it is hard to deny the existence of a propaganda spectrum which stretched from texts which were overtly and obviously official—such as proclamations and declarations—to works which were sanctioned by means of an official imprimatur. Between these extremes lay a variety of texts which can be shown to have received some form of official encouragement or support, whether that meant being commissioned and paid for, or merely encouraged, and whether this involved official channels and paper trails or semi-official mechanisms, and perhaps the patronage networks of individual MPs and peers, and of the political factions with which they were involved.30 However, while the process of uncovering propaganda, in all its forms, is difficult both conceptually and methodologically, it nevertheless has the potential to transform the ways in which individual authors and works are considered, from the political pamphlets of Henry Parker to the journalism of Marchamont Nedham and John Berkenhead and even the astrological works of William Lilly, and to alter our

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appreciation of contemporary attitudes towards, and the nature of, contemporary debate.31 Conducting scholarly enquiry into pamphlets and newspapers by considering the political and commercial forces which conditioned and constrained print culture provides the key to contextualizing individual authors and works, and highlights the problems with simplistic descriptions of contemporary attitudes towards public debate and discussion. There are certainly grounds for concluding that there were royalists and parliamentarians who recognized the power of print, and that it had become necessary to issue printed appeals for public support, and even that this might need to be done by means of rational debate and argument essential to Habermas’s definition of the public sphere. Yet it must also be recognized that attitudes to print varied dramatically, that many continued to prefer to rely upon instruction and obedience rather than engagement and persuasion. Differences of opinion on the value of print as a means of engaging the public, and on how this should be done, cannot simply be mapped onto divisions between royalists and parliamentarians. Nevertheless, recognition of both the power and the perils of print culture ensured that attempts were sometimes made to reach out to an extremely wide audience, to foster political understanding, and to promote political openness. There is even evidence that print was explicitly used in order to foster popular debate and participation, not least through campaigns to encourage subscription and oath-taking.32 The significance of these developments cannot be underestimated, not least since the techniques used to rally support could then be appropriated by others—most famously with the campaigns of the Levellers, and the agitation for an ‘Agreement of the People’—but it must also be recognized that, within the political elite, print culture was almost invariably thought about in pragmatic and instrumental terms, rather than in terms of principled strategies. As such, policies towards print culture were rarely entirely coherent, and were always apt to change, and they were underpinned by a determination to police, if not exactly control, the public domain. The result, of course, is that it is difficult to argue for the existence of a public realm of debate which was free from official control and which was created by pamphlet and newspaper culture. During the Civil Wars the press was neither ‘free’ nor ‘controlled’; rather it was policed and constrained, and as a sphere of discourse, the public domain was circumscribed.

PRINT CONSUMPTION

.................................................................................................................. The third crucially important area of enquiry which is vital to any appreciation of the nature of print culture, and of its impact upon public opinion, involves issues of consumption and reception. In order to understand the significance of pamphlets and newspapers, in other words, it is necessary to do more than merely note their appearance, study their contents, and explore the ways in which authors and works can be contextualized. It is also vital to analyse contemporary reactions and responses, not

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least in order to assess the impact of print culture upon contemporary political culture, and upon debate and discussion during the Civil Wars.33 To the extent that scholarly attention has turned from the nature of the texts which were available to the audience response, it is striking how often it has been argued that contemporaries felt uneasy about, or expressed hostility towards, popular print culture, both at a macro- and micro-political level. At a general level, contemporary commentary upon the kinds of pamphlets and newspapers which appeared in the 1640s ranged from fear to outrage, and any number of examples could be cited of individuals bemoaning the fact that they lived in a ‘scribbling’ age, and arguing that print culture served to inflame divisions, and represented not merely a commentary upon the times, but a contributory political factor in its own right. Both during and after the Civil Wars, moreover, some contemporaries claimed not merely that print culture had helped to cause and prolong the Civil Wars, but also that it had brought about undesirable sociopolitical change, by drawing members of the lower orders into the political nation.34 At an individual level, meanwhile, certain individuals professed to find themselves bemused and bewildered not merely in the face of what might be described as ‘information overload’, but also in the face of a variety of conflicting stories and arguments, to the extent that the period has been characterized as one which involved a crisis of truth-telling. Amid so many ‘true’ and ‘perfect’ relations which were immediately contradicted and challenged, it was obviously difficult to know which account to believe, and at times it was difficult to be sure whether anything could be believed about a particular tract or newspaper.35 Its factual statements were liable to be challenged, and its interpretations were open to ridicule and refutation, but it was also possible to forge imprints and imprimaturs, to ventriloquize and impersonate individual authors, and to hijack and counterfeit specific newspaper titles. People could be forgiven for being confused, and confused some certainly were. Indeed, scholars often find it difficult to disentangle truth from fiction in Civil War print culture, whether in terms of the facts about individual military engagements, or the difference between the serious and the satirical voice, or in terms of distinguishing between authentic and counterfeit newspapers, each of whose editors professed to be the victim of fraud and deceit, and sought to expose their rivals as interlopers.36 The problems faced by both modern scholars and seventeenth-century contemporaries ought not to be underestimated, therefore, but this represents a challenge to undertake more rigorous scholarly analysis, and to develop methodologies for addressing the readership and reception of Civil War literature. Indeed, by piecing together evidence relating to the consumption of print culture—from correspondence, financial accounts, commonplace books and diaries, and library inventories—it is possible to develop a more nuanced picture of the contemporary response to pamphlets and newspapers.37 It is possible to observe that Thomason was far from alone in acquiring large quantities of material on a regular basis, and even individuals who were relatively detached from the cut and thrust of political life at Westminster and in London can be shown to have amassed large collections. They can also be shown to have devoured literature which covered a spectrum of political and religious views, and many

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consumed more than one newspaper title each week, and read newspapers which differed in style, content, and political outlook.38 The best-documented individuals and families, indeed, can be shown to have devised methods of securing regular supplies of new material even when they were outside London, notably by exploiting friends and family in London, and by developing strong and lasting relationships with individual booksellers, who provided help and advice, and lines of credit. On some occasions, indeed, it is even possible to demonstrate that individual readers were seeking to compare the accounts offered by different pamphlets and newspapers, and to combine material from print with evidence gathered from oral and scribal networks and communities.39 What such evidence suggests is that contemporary problems, concerns, and fears about print culture can easily be overplayed, and it is notable how often hostility to print culture was expressed in response to the initial collapse of censorship and print explosion of the early 1640s, and how frequently thereafter such hostility was politically charged. Such comments need to be balanced, indeed, by observations regarding contemporary practice, which indicate that contemporaries found ways of coping with, and adapting to, the print revolution; that print was a problematic medium, but that these problems were not intractable; and that print was regarded as a useful means for contributing to a process of understanding their times, but not the only way of so doing.40 It is also important to extend this analysis of the contemporary response to Civil War print culture by examining the social and geographical reach of print, and to gauge the response to pamphlets and newspapers on the part of those below the level of the gentry, not least if there is to be any chance of testing claims made about the expansion of the political nation, and the democratizing impact of print. As with other aspects of Civil War print culture, in other words, it is important to do more than merely assume that ‘popular’ genres, whether ballads, political and religious polemic, or newspapers, were intended for, and reached, a ‘popular’ audience. Recently, scholars have debated the popularity of political ballads, and the possibility that distinctions need to be made in terms of accessibility, in terms of both price and content, between ‘white’ and ‘black’ letter ballads, but challenges have also been made to simplistic assumptions about other genres, including newspapers.41 Nevertheless, it is important to recognize that those merchants who conveyed print to the most humble readers—such as hawkers and pedlars, and the publishers with whom they worked—can be shown to have made a fairly clear shift away from traditional forms of popular literature, and towards political and religious texts, as well as newspapers, during the 1640s.42 In addition, however, the reach of print needs to be addressed in at least three ways. The first of these involves the availability of print beyond London, which can be shown to have been transformed in important ways during the 1640s by developments in provincial bookselling, whereby those involved in the retail book trade beyond London began to stock topical and controversial print, as well as newspapers, in ways that are not evident for the period before 1640, doubtless because they encountered demand for this material, rather than merely for the devotional and educational literature upon which they traditionally focused.43 Other significant developments related to the

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availability of print even to those who did not, or could not, purchase material, whether because political authorities vigorously distributed declarations and proclamations, or because texts circulated relatively freely around local networks. This is evident from discussions about specific printed texts which can be observed to have taken place in local communities, and in alehouses, shops, and streets across the country.44 Secondly, the ‘reach’ of print can be analysed through patterns of consumption by those below the level of the gentry, and although evidence is much more sketchy for less elevated social groups, it nevertheless seems that a thirst for large quantities of information and argument can be detected amongst provincial clerics and merchants, as well as soldiers, and occasionally even farm workers, and that such individuals were also prepared to read beyond the literature which reflected their own views. Thirdly, it is possible to assess how humble readers responded to what they read, and whether they were able to engage critically with material with which they were presented. Here again, evidence is limited, and evidence from one of the best documented examples of the humble reader, the London woodturner Nehemiah Wallington, provokes suspicion that, while large quantities of pamphlets and newspapers were consumed, almost to the point of addiction, these were not read with notable scepticism. Nevertheless, Wallington’s notebooks, and the comments of other individuals of similar status, do occasionally reveal both the willingness and ability to question from where texts came, by whom they were produced, and whether they ought to be regarded as authoritative, and it is also possible to argue that such critical awareness was growing over time.45

RECONSIDERING PUBLIC OPINION

.................................................................................................................. Civil War print culture is thus striking for the volume and variety of titles available, and the period witnessed a qualitative as well as a quantitative shift in the ways in which readers were offered news and opinion. Such developments clearly had a profound impact upon the way in which contemporary debate was conducted, and they provided opportunities and problems for parliamentarians and royalists alike, in terms of both the political elite and the public. Pamphlets and newspapers, as well as more ephemeral forms of print culture, constituted a powerful political tool, in terms of ideological debates and practical politics, and in terms of both mobilization, agitation, and participation, and in a very real sense it was a tool which could be appropriated by individuals and groups from across the country and across the social spectrum. But precisely because print offered a means to reach a national audience, the period witnessed complex machinations over its control and exploitation, the outcome of which was rarely straightforward or stable. As such, it is easier to discuss Civil War pamphlets and newspapers in terms of forces, impulses, and tendencies, rather than in terms of outcomes, and in terms of its impact upon contemporary practices, rather than in terms of the emergence of ‘public opinion’ and a ‘public sphere’. Thus, it is possible to argue that the peculiar circumstances of the 1640s fostered dramatic

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innovation and experimentation, that developments in intellectual and political life were inextricably bound up with changes in print culture, and that communicative practices ought to be regarded as integral to the Civil Wars, rather than merely being peripheral. There is, however, no straightforward way of linking print culture with public opinion. The 1640s witnessed unprecedented attempts to engage with and appeal to a broad public, and print certainly provided a means by which to appeal to, and with which to invoke, broad public support, and a means for exploring how contemporaries thought about public political culture, but this did not mean that the period witnessed anything like a clear or settled notion of the ‘public’ or of ‘public opinion’, let alone that print culture reveals contemporary opinion. At best, the study of print culture provides a window onto contemporary struggles with the practical and desirable boundaries of the political nation. Likewise, it is better to think about the ‘public sphere’ in terms of the ways in which the public domain was contested, the forces which were brought to bear upon printed discourse, and the ways in which these impacted upon the ways in which political life was conducted, rather than as something which might have been a demonstrable reality. Thinking with Habermas provides a way of examining the relationship between print and political practice, and exploring the centrality of communicative practices. But the result will probably be a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which pamphlets and newspapers ensured that the nation became acculturated to print, the ways in which printed genres were contested, exploited, and appropriated, and the possible existence of something like a shared political culture, rather than a confident assertion that the 1640s witnessed the emergence of a commercial and bourgeois sphere of rational debate which was made possible by print, and which existed between the state and the citizen.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

Raymond, Pamphlets. Raymond, Invention. Hill, World Turned Upside Down. Russell, Parliaments; Sharpe, Faction; id., Personal Rule. Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus’; Freist, Governed, 1–25. Capp, Astrology; Clegg, Press Censorship; McElligott, Royalism; Hughes, Gangraena. Zaret, Origins; Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking’; Pincus, ‘State and Civil Society’; Randall, ‘Epistolary Rhetoric’; Raymond, ‘Newspaper’; Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica’; Halasz, Marketplace; Freist, Governed, 1–25. Habermas, Public Sphere. Watt, Cheap Print; Spufford, Small Books. Raymond, Pamphlets. Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus’; Foster, Caroline Underground. Peacey, Politicians; McElligott, Royalism; Mendle, ‘De Facto Freedom’; Freist, Governed, 27–75. Peirce, Unseemly Pictures; Friedman, Miracles; Freist, Governed, 125–76.

186 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

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Frank, Beginnings; Raymond, Invention; Cust, ‘News and Politics’. Shagan, ‘Constructing Discord’. Sommerville, News Revolution; Raymond, Invention. Peacey, ‘Management’. Underdown, Freeborn, 90–111. Mendle, ‘De Facto Freedom’; Peacey, ‘Management’; id., ‘Print and Public Politics’. Capp, Taylor. Cotton, ‘John Dillingham’; Worden, ‘“Wit in a Roundhead”’; Thomas, Berkenhead. Capp, Taylor; Wolfe, ‘Introduction’; Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 32–64. Mendle, Parker; Hughes, Gangraena; Coffey, Goodwin; Haller, Liberty and Reformation, 100–88. Thomas, Berkenhead. Lake and Como, ‘“Orthodoxy”’; Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge. Hill, World Turned Upside Down. Cromartie, ‘Printing’; Peacey, ‘Royalist News’; id., ‘Print Culture’. Zaret, Origins; Mahoney, ‘Presbyterianism’. Gentles, ‘Parliamentary Politics’; Carlin, ‘Leveller Organization’. Peacey, Politicians. Mendle, Parker; Worden, ‘“Wit in a Roundhead”’; Peacey, ‘Struggle’; Thomas, Berkenhead; Capp, Astrology. Cressy, ‘Revolutionary England’; id., ‘Protestation’. Corns, ‘Freedom of Reader-Response’; Freist, Governed, 77–124. Achinstein, ‘Politics of Babel’; Atherton, ‘Itch’; Raymond, ‘Irrational’. Braddick, ‘English Revolution’. Peacey, ‘Counterfeit’. Mendle, ‘Preserving’. Peacey, ‘Sir Thomas Cotton’. Bohannon, ‘London Bookseller’s Bill’; Randall, ‘Joseph Mead’. Randall, Credibility. McShane, ‘Roasting’; Underdown, Freeborn, 72, 98–9, 110. Bell, ‘Sturdy Rogues’; Freist, Governed, 77–124, 177–238. Stewart-Brown, ‘Chester Bookseller’s Lawsuit’. Cressy, Dangerous Talk; Freist, Governed, 177–238, 255, 262. Seaver, Wallington’s World; Rugg, Diurnal.

WORKS CITED Achinstein, Sharon. ‘The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution. London: Frank Cass, 1992, 14–44. Atherton, Ian. ‘“The itch grown a disease”: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. London: Frank Cass, 1999, 39–65. Bell, Maureen. ‘Sturdy Rogues and Vagbonds: Restoration Control of Pedlars and Hawkers’, in Peter Isaac and Barry McKay (eds.), The Mighty Engine: The Printing Press and its Impact. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 2000, 89–96. Bohannon, M. E. ‘A London Bookseller’s Bill: 1635–1639’. The Library 4th series 18.4 (1938), 417–46.

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Braddick, Michael. ‘The English Revolution and Its Legacies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution, c.1590–1720. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 27–42. Capp, Bernard. Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. ——. The World of John Taylor, the Water Poet, 1578–1653. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Carlin, Norah. ‘Leveller Organization in London’. Historical Journal 27 (1984), 955–60. Clegg, Cyndia. Press Censorship in Caroline England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Coffey, John. John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. Corns, Thomas. ‘The Freedom of Reader-Response: Milton’s Of Reformation and Lilburne’s The Christian Man’s Triall ’, in Roger Richardson and G. M. Ridden (eds.), Freedom and the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986, 93–110. Cotton, A. N. B. ‘John Dillingham, Journalist of the Middle Group’. English Historical Review 93 (1978), 817–34. Cressy, David. ‘The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642’. Historical Journal 45.2 (2002), 251–79. ——. ‘Revolutionary England, 1640–1642’. Past and Present 181 (2003), 35–71. ——. Dangerous Talk: Scandalous, Seditious and Treasonable Speech in Pre-Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cromartie, Alan. ‘The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642’. Historical Journal 33.1 (1990), 23–44. Cust, Richard. ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England’. Past and Present 112 (1986), 60–90. Foster, S. Notes from the Caroline Underground. Hamden: Archon Books, 1978. Frank, Joseph. The Beginnings of the English Newspaper, 1620–1660. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Freist, Dagmar. Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637–1645. London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997. Friedman, Jerome. Miracles and the Pulp Press during the English Revolution. London: UCL Press, 1993. Gentles, Ian. ‘Parliamentary Politics and the Politics of the Street: The London Peace Campaigns of 1642–3’. Parliamentary History 26.2 (2007), 139–59. Habermas, Ju¨rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger. Cambridge: Polity, 1992. Halasz, Alexandra. The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Haller, William. Liberty and Reformation in the Puritan Revolution. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975. Hughes, Ann. Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Lake, Peter. ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’. Historical Journal 25 (1982), 805–25. ——. The Boxmaker’s Revenge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. —— and David Como. ‘“Orthodoxy” and its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”’. Journal of British Studies 39.1 (2000), 34–70.

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Lake, Peter, and Steven Pincus. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’. Journal of British Studies 45.2 (2006), 270–92. McElligott, Jason. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. McShane, Angela. ‘The Roasting of the Rump: Scatology and the Body Politic in Restoration England’. Past and Present 196 (2007), 253–72. Mahoney, Michael. ‘Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645–1647’. Historical Journal 22 (1979), 93–114. Mendle, Michael. ‘De Facto Freedom, De Facto Authority: Press and Parliament, 1640– 1643’. Historical Journal 38.2 (1995), 307–32. ——. Henry Parker and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ——. ‘Preserving the Ephemeral: Reading, Collecting and the Pamphlet Culture of Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001, 201–16. Norbrook, David. ‘Areopagitica, Censorship and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in R. Burt (ed.), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 3–33. Peacey, Jason. ‘“The counterfeit silly curr”: Money, Politics, and the Forging of Royalist Newspapers during the English Civil War’. Huntington Library Quarterly 67.1 (2004), 27–57. ——. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. ——. ‘The Struggle for Mercurius Britanicus: Factional Politics and the Parliamentarian Press, 1643–1646’. Huntington Library Quarterly 68.3 (2005), 517–44. ——. ‘The Management of Civil War Newspapers: Auteurs, Entrepreneurs and Editorial Control’. Seventeenth Century 21.1 (2006), 99–127. ——. ‘Sir Thomas Cotton’s Consumption of News in 1650s England’. The Library 7th series 7.1 (2006), 3–24. ——. ‘Print and Public Politics in Seventeenth-Century England’. History Compass 5.1 (2007), 72–98. ——. ‘Print Culture and Political Lobbying during the English Civil Wars’. Parliamentary History 26.1 (2007), 30–48. ——. ‘Royalist News, Parliamentary Debates and Political Accountability, 1640–60’. Parliamentary History 26.3 (2007), 328–45. Pierce, Helen. Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England. London: Yale University Press, 2008. Pincus, Steven. ‘The State and Civil Society in Early Modern England: Capitalism, Causation and Habermas’s Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007, 213–31. Randall, David. ‘Joseph Mead, Nouvellante: News, Sociability and Credibility in Early Stuart England’. Journal of British Studies 45.2 (2006), 293–312. ——. Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008. ——. ‘Epistolary Rhetoric, the Newspaper and the Public Sphere’. Past and Present 198 (2008), 3–32.

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Raymond, Joad. The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. ——. ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain. London: Frank Cass, 1999, 109–40. ——. ‘Irrational, Impractical, and Unprofitable: Reading the News in Seventeenth-Century Britain’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (eds.), Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 185–212. ——. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Rugg, Thomas. The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, ed. William Sachse. London: Royal Historical Society, 1961. Russell, Conrad. Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Seaver, Paul. Wallington’s World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985. Shagan, Ethan. ‘Constructing Discord; Ideology, Propaganda and English Responses to the Irish Rebellion of 1641’. Journal of British Studies 36 (1997), 4–34. Sharpe, Kevin. Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History. London: Methuen, 1985. ——. The Personal Rule of Charles I. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Sommerville, C. John. The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England. London: Methuen, 1981. Stewart-Brown, Ronald. ‘A Chester Bookseller’s Lawsuit of 1653’. The Library 9 (1928), 53–8. Thomas, Peter. Sir John Berkenhead, 1617–1679. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Underdown, David. A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Walsham, Alexandra. Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Wolfe, Don. ‘Introduction’, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. i, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953, 1–210. Worden, Blair. ‘“Wit in a Roundhead”: The Dilemma of Marchmont Nedham’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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PRINCIPLE AND POLITICS IN MILTON’S AREOPAGITICA ....................................................................................................... STEPHEN B. DOBRANSKI

John Milton explained his reasons for writing Areopagitica (1644) ten years after its publication. Trying to justify the actions of the English Revolution on behalf of the Cromwellian Protectorate, Milton pauses in the midst of Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda (1654) to defend himself and to review his polemical career. He recalls that he published ‘several books’ defending divorce ‘at the very time when man and wife were often bitter foes’ and then composed a ‘small volume’ about the education of children because ‘nothing can be more efficacious’ in ‘moulding the minds of men to virtue’.1 Lastly, he turned in Areopagitica to ‘freedom of the press’, what he calls the third type of ‘domestic or personal liberty’ (ii. 624). In this tract he wished to show: that the judgment of truth and falsehood, what should be printed and what suppressed, ought not to be in the hands of a few men (and these mostly ignorant and of vulgar discernment) charged with the inspection of books, at whose will or whim virtually everyone is prevented from publishing aught that surpasses the understanding of the mob. (ii. 626)

That Milton here equates the discerning of ‘truth and falsehood’ with ‘what should be printed and what suppressed’ suggests the landmark nature of Areopagitica’s argument. In 1644 he anticipated the central role that the printing press would come to play and allied its unfettered operation ‘with truth, with learning, and the Commonwealth’ (ii. 488). Some modern readers have even come to regard Areopagitica as a manifesto of individual liberty.2 Milton eloquently defends both the free circulation of knowledge and the right and privilege of thinking for oneself. ‘[A]bove all liberties’, he appeals to Parliament, ‘Give me liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience’ (ii. 560).

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But Milton in Areopagitica also proposes a specific social policy and in places he offers a more measured response to the government’s regulation of the book trade that qualifies the tract’s impassioned calls for freedom. As he explains near the start of Areopagitica, he does not oppose all censorship; he only wants the Parliament to judge ‘over again that Order which ye have ordain’d to regulate Printing’, by which he seems to mean the Licensing Order passed on 16 June 1643 (ii. 490–1). This new law stipulated, as Milton summarizes, ‘That no Book, pamphlet, or paper shall be henceforth Printed, unlesse the same be first approv’d and licenc’t by such, or at least one of such as shall be thereto appointed’ (ii. 491). In this chapter, I am interested in the tension in Areopagitica between Milton’s broad appeals for liberty and the circumstances to which he was responding, between his arguments from principle and the practical considerations that shaped those arguments. While Milton’s impassioned rhetoric and rich metaphors have established Areopagitica as his best-known and most influential prose work—his description of a good book as ‘the pretious life-blood of a master spirit’ (ii. 493), for example, is embossed on the wall of the reading room in the New York Public Library—I want to examine the precise political context of Milton’s ideas as well as his personal reasons for publishing the tract. The second part of this chapter then addresses Milton’s idealized vision of ‘books freely permitted . . . both to the triall of vertue, and the exercise of truth’ (ii. 528). In response to the government’s censorship, Milton posits a collaborative process for sharing knowledge that includes not only authors but also members of the book trade and a book’s diverse readership. During the reign of Charles I, the book trade operated under a two-part regulatory system. The business of producing, selling, and binding printed matter was overseen by the Company of Stationers, which the crown had chartered in 1557 to prevent the publication of ‘certain seditious and heretical books . . . moving our subjects and lieges to sedition and disobedience’.3 Anyone who wished to have a text printed first had to obtain official approval—a licence—from a group of government-appointed censors, many of whom were episcopal divines. The text then had to be approved a second time by a member of the Stationers’ Company, who, for a fee, officially entered the title and the owner’s name in the Company’s Register. With the assembly of the Long Parliament in 1640, this system temporarily collapsed, the first period of unrestricted publication in England since 1476 when William Caxton introduced printing in Westminster. The elimination of the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission in July 1641 meant that members of the book trade no longer feared royal prosecution for publishing a work that could be deemed scandalous or seditious. The quantity of English publications consequently soared: the total number of published items leapt from 625 in 1639 and 848 in 1640 to 2,034 in 1641 and 3,666 in 1642.4 The Licensing Order that Milton opposes in Areopagitica represented Parliament’s attempt to re-establish control of the book trade and to redress, in the government’s words, the ‘great . . . abuses and frequent disorders in Printing’ that had arisen during the preceding three years.5 Reviving key provisions from the intrusive regulations

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favoured by the Stationers and characteristic of Tudor and Stuart press laws, Parliament specifically wanted to curtail the ‘many false forged, scandalous, seditious, libelous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and government’.6 The 1643 order did not include the threat of corporal punishment, an important part of previous legislation under Charles I, but the new government still attempted to establish a rigid protocol for overseeing the press. Under the new law, Presbyterian censors replaced episcopal licensers, and Parliament assumed the position formerly held by the King. We should not assume, however, that the Long Parliament had entirely ignored the book trade prior to its revival of licensing. Although the total number of printed texts rose considerably during the early 1640s, the government passed a series of temporary measures while preparing its broader legislative policy. Thus, in an effort to establish greater accountability, Parliament first ordered on 29 January 1642 that printers ‘do neither print or reprint any thing without the Name and Consent of the Author’; seven months later on 26 August 1642 a second order prohibited the publication of ‘any Book or Pamphlet, false, or scandalous to the Proceedings of the Houses of Parliament’, and the government granted Stationers the right to search for and seize presses and printing materials used to produce such publications.7 The third temporary measure enlarged the law’s scope: on 9 March 1643, Parliament outlawed all ‘scandalous and lying Pamphlets’, not just those that misrepresented the government, and it granted the Committee for Examinations the power ‘to appoint such Persons as they think fit’ in order to apprehend and imprison anyone who helped to produce or circulate scandalous or unlicensed works.8 Milton in Areopagitica objects to none of these earlier laws. On the contrary, he approves of the first ordinance, which required, in his words, ‘that no book be Printed, unlesse the Printers and the Authors name, or at least the Printers be register’d’ (ii. 569), and he even concedes some parts of the 1643 Licensing Order, in particular, ‘that part which preserves justly every mans Copy to himselfe, or provides for the poor’ (ii. 491).9 Perhaps more strikingly, Milton in Areopagitica also accepts some postpublication censorship: he objects to licensing books before they are printed, but, if a book ‘prov’d a Monster’, he reasons, ‘it was justly burnt, or sunk into the Sea’ (ii. 505). But that Milton in Areopagitica misidentifies the order passed on 29 January 1642 as ‘publisht next before this’ may be revealing: he leaves out the two other ordinances that the Long Parliament passed in the months before ‘this’, the Licensing Order of 1643. Surely he knew about the other, intervening laws; he would have needed to be at least somewhat familiar with all the recent legislation that supported censorship before undertaking a pamphlet about censorship addressed to Parliament. It is pleasing to speculate whether Milton could have ignored the orders of August 1642 and March 1643 because their ambiguous provisions would have exposed some of the vagueness of his own argument such as his general concession that ‘the executioner’ is ‘the timeliest and most effectuall remedy’ for books ‘found mischievous and libellous’ (ii. 569). Just as Parliament’s earlier laws did not fully address who would determine a ‘scandalous’ book and how such a judgement would be made, so Milton in Areopagitica never

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explains how exactly a book after its publication will ‘prove’ itself worthy of censorship (ii. 505). Of course, Milton could have left out the August and March orders because he believed that the Licensing Order of 1643 superseded them; Parliament even acknowledged that the earlier orders were stop-gap measures while the government continued preparing a bill ‘which, by reason of present Distractions, cannot be so speedily perfected and passed as is desired’.10 But we also need to consider the possibility that Milton for political reasons deliberately ignored the Parliament’s other orders: in Areopagitica he wished to emphasize licensing, and the Parliament’s two earlier orders muddied the waters. The laws enacted in August 1642 and March 1643 temporarily established a form of pre-publication censorship that did not depend on licensers, whereas Milton in Areopagitica wanted to connect Parliament’s regulation of the press with the unpopular, repressive policies under Charles I. The revival of licensing represented the clearest link between Presbyterians in Parliament and the episcopal divines previously appointed as licensers by the King and Archbishop William Laud. As various critics have noted, Milton’s concern about Presbyterians in Parliament seems to underpin his broader opposition to pre-publication licensing in Areopagitica.11 While he had allied himself with the Presbyterian cause during the anti-prelatical controversy, Milton became bitterly disappointed that many Presbyterians sought a reconciliation with Charles I and did not support putting the King on trial. They were thus, as Milton notes in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), ‘fall[ing] off from thir first principles’ and siding with the ‘worst of men, the obdurat enemies of God and his Church’ (iii. 238). Given that Presbyterians, striving to consolidate their power within Parliament, had the most to gain from the Licensing Order of 1643, Milton could have advocated less regulation for the book trade in order to limit Presbyterian control of the government. As William Walwyn complained in A Compassionate Samaritane (1644), the ‘Ordinance for licensing of Bookes, which being intended by the Parliament for a good and necessary end . . . , is become by meanes of the Licensers (who are Divines and intend their owne interest) most serviceable to themselves’.12 Like Walwyn, Milton may have wanted a freer press in order to give voice to opponents of Presbyterianism and thus to thwart calls for a settlement with Charles I. Certainly in Areopagitica Milton emphasizes his dissatisfaction with Presbyterians for beginning to resemble prelates. Although episcopacy was not formally abrogated until 9 October 1646, prelates (alternatively called bishops) were excluded from the House of Lords as of 13 February 1642, and the abolition of the Star Chamber in 1641 had eliminated their authority for censoring books. With the revival of licensing, Milton in Areopagitica warns, ‘Episcopall arts begin to bud again’ and the country will suffer ‘a second tyranny over learning’ (ii. 541, 539). He repeatedly underscores the Parliament’s hypocrisy for adopting a system of regulation just as rigid as the restrictions that the episcopal church government had imposed on learning: ‘He who but of late cry’d down the sole ordination of every novice Batchelor of Art, and deny’d sole jurisdiction over the simplest Parishioner, shall now at home in his privat chair assume both these over worthiest and excellentest books and ablest authors that write them’ (ii. 540). Milton argues that the 1643 order ‘will soon put it out of controversie that

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Bishops and Presbyters are the same to us both name and thing’ (ii. 539), an idea that he reiterates in ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’ as he laments that ‘New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large’.13 Even Milton’s decision to title his treatise Areopagitica after the highly respected Athenian court that met on a hill named Areopagus was in part an attempt to encourage Parliament not to repeat the prelates’ policies. Just as Isocrates had appealed in his similarly titled tract for the Areopagus to reform itself and live up to its reputation as virtuous and fair-minded, so Milton was trying to persuade England’s government to follow the Areopagus’ classical precedent and to return to the ideals that initially distinguished the Long Parliament from Charles I’s administration. Milton wanted the new government, as he puts it in Areopagitica, to demonstrate ‘what difference there is between the magnanimity of a trienniall Parlament, and that jealous hautinesse of Prelates and cabin Counsellours that usurpt of late’ (ii. 488–9). Presbyterian calls for reconciliation with the King also probably influenced Milton’s acceptance of some censorship. Although in principle he may have believed in the value of regulating the book trade, the specific types of books he proposes that the government should censor seem intended as a critique of the King’s administration. Most notably, Milton’s rejection of ‘a rigid externall formality’ as a ‘grosse conforming stupidity’ (ii. 564) forcefully alludes to efforts by Charles I and Laud to restore and make uniform the elaborate rituals that characterized religious worship before the Reformation. Whereas Laud advocated the ‘Beauty of Holiness’ and argued that the ‘Outward Worship of God’ was directly related to ‘Inward’ spiritual devotion, Milton and other opponents of Laud objected that an emphasis on external worship distracted believers from the Word of God.14 Immediately after dismissing such ‘a rigid externall formality’, Milton in Areopagitica introduces his exceptions to what should be freely published: Yet if all cannot be of one mind, as who looks they should be? this doubtles is more wholsome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather then all compell’d. I mean not tolerated Popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpats all religions and civill supremacies, so it self should be extirpat, provided first that all charitable and compassionat means be us’d to win and regain the weak and the misled: that also which is impious or evil absolutely either against faith or maners no law can possibly permit, that intends not to unlaw it self. (ii. 565)

Commentators such as Ernest Sirluck are no doubt correct that Milton here refers to Roman Catholicism as an exception to his argument for toleration;15 in particular, the description of ‘open superstition’ as ‘extirpat[ing] all religions and civill supremacies’ echoes the language used by other seventeenth-century pamphleteers who also tried to impose limits on what should be tolerated. Writing in 1642, for example, John Pym argues against tolerating Catholics because ‘The Religion of the Papists’ is ‘incomputable to any other Religion, destructive to all others, and doth not endure any thing that doth oppose it’.16 But we also need to remember that the answer to Milton’s question about a forced uniformity (‘as who looks they should be?’) would have included the episcopal Church under Laud. In this context, ‘tolerated Popery’—as opposed to

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simply ‘Popery’—is not a synonym for ‘open superstition’ but more likely refers to Laudian ritual under an episcopal form of church government. In Milton’s view, to insist that such ceremonialism determined a person’s salvation was tantamount to tolerating Catholicism, and books espousing such a belief should not be freely printed. I do not mean to suggest, however, that Milton’s political circumstances entirely shaped his argument in Areopagitica. While clearly Milton was responding to Presbyterians in Parliament in the early 1640s, his other writings indicate that he also held a principled belief in free expression. He continues to criticize censorship in the following year in Colasterion (1645), complaining that licensing intimidates authors and printers and only brings in ‘round fees to the Licencer, and wretched mis-leading to the People’ (ii. 727–8), and years later in Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda he warns Cromwell not to institute pre-publication censorship. Milton specifically proposes that the newly titled Lord Protector should ‘permit those who wish to engage in free inquiry to publish their findings at their own peril without the private inspection of any petty magistrate, for so will truth especially flourish’ (iv. 679). Milton also supported the free circulation of ideas before writing Areopagitica. In Animadversions (1641), he asserts that ‘nothing is more sweet to man’ than the ‘liberty of speaking’ (i. 669), and in The Reason of Church-Government (1642) he anticipates that ‘the honest liberty of free speech from my youth’ will serve ‘as the best treasure, and solace of a good old age’ (i. 804). Although Milton’s advocacy of free speech in An Apology Against a Pamphlet (1642) sounds more cautious—he suggests ‘that a more free permission of writing at some time might be profitable’—he continues to bemoan how under the prelates ‘the bookes of some men were confuted, when they who should have answer’d were in close prison, deny’d the use of pen or paper’ (i. 907). Yet even with such a principled position staked out in advance, Milton’s composition of Areopagitica in late 1644 also seems to have been self-interested.17 Given that his tract appeared almost a year and a half after the Licensing Order was made law, his own more recent legal difficulties apparently prompted him to take up his pen on behalf of the liberty of printing. How else can we account for the tract’s delay? As Milton himself acknowledges in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1644), self-interest often lies behind attempts to effect social change: ‘when points of difficulty are to be discusst, appertaining to the removall of unreasonable wrong and burden from the perplext life of our brother, it is incredible how cold, how dull, and farre from all fellow feeling we are, without the spurre of self-concernment’ (ii. 226). In Milton’s own case, his defence of divorce, published without a licence two years earlier, provided the ‘spurre’ he needed to address the government’s regulation of the book trade. Not only did an anonymous critic in 1644 find fault with Milton’s ‘intolerable abuse of Scripture’ in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, but also on 13 August 1644 the Presbyterian divine Herbert Palmer, speaking before both Houses of Parliament, proposed that Milton’s divorce pamphlet should be publicly destroyed.18 Later that same month the Stationers’ Company submitted a petition to the House of Commons complaining about recent unlicensed and unregistered books, including Milton’s divorce pamphlet, and shortly afterwards the House of Commons ordered the Committee for Printing to prepare a

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new ordinance and ‘diligently to inquire out the Authors, Printers, and Publishers, of the Pamphlet against the Immortality of the Soul, and concerning Divorce’.19 The Stationers’ petition and Parliament’s new ordinance reinforce the significance of Milton’s personal and political motives for writing Areopagitica. If, more than a year after the Licensing Order, the Company and government were still struggling to regulate the book trade, then Milton in 1644 was apparently not reacting to a widely established practice of censorship. Although it is difficult to measure how repressive authors and printers found the government’s laws regulating the book trade, the licensing system under the Long Parliament seems never to have been strictly enforced.20 The government tried to prosecute anyone who repeatedly published unlawful works, or, as in Milton’s case with his divorce tracts, anyone who took egregiously controversial positions or whose works elicited official complaints, but the quantity of manuscripts that the government’s thirty-four licensers would have been expected to examine must have necessitated in practice no more than a cursory review of some tracts. As Milton observes in Areopagitica, ‘there cannot be a more tedious and unpleasing journey-work, a greater losse of time . . . then to be made the perpetuall reader of unchosen books and pamphlets, oftimes huge volumes’ (ii. 530). And with only a little initiative, authors and printers could have circumvented the Parliament’s order, either by inserting a controversial passage in a book after it was officially licensed, or, as Milton did with his unlicensed divorce tract and Areopagitica, simply ignoring the law altogether. In 1644, the year Areopagitica was printed, only 20 per cent of the published books and pamphlets were registered, which suggests that in many cases owners did not bother to obtain official approval.21 Presumably, the mere existence of pre-publication licensing discouraged some writers from even attempting to take controversial works to press, but we cannot know how often such self-censorship occurred nor with what frequency licensers redacted or expunged passages they deemed unacceptable from works that they then approved.22 Milton’s argument in Areopagitica emphasizes both the effrontery of Presbyterian interference and the impracticality of the government’s policy. Even an author who was not trying to skirt the law, Milton notes, would be grossly inconvenienced if he had to seek approval for every late revision: ‘what if the author shall be one so copious of fancie, as to have many things well worth the adding, come into his mind after licencing, while the book is yet under the Presse’ (ii. 532)? Milton also faults the government’s order because it will require licensers to redact individual passages in books that ‘are partly usefull and excellent, partly culpable and pernicious’; the labour of making so many separate ‘expurgations, and expunctions’ would ‘ask as many more officials . . . that the Commonwealth of learning be not damnify’d’ (ii. 529). Alongside such practical objections to the government’s licensing policy, Milton argues that allowing a select group of agents—whether Stationers or licensers—to oversee the book trade will lead ‘primely to the discouragement of all learning, and the stop of Truth’ (ii. 491). This part of Areopagitica sounds more idealistic, concerned less with Presbyterians in Parliament than with an abstract principle of liberty. In a series of extended poetic images, Milton emphasizes the dynamic nature of pursuing ‘religious

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and civill Wisdome’ (ii. 492): he compares truth to a ‘streaming fountain’ whose waters must flow ‘in a perpetuall progression’ (ii. 543); to a ‘flowry crop . . . sprung up and yet springing daily in this City’ (ii. 558); and to a virgin, ‘hewd . . . into a thousand peeces’, whose ‘lovely form’ must be actively ‘gather[ed] up limb by limb’ (ii. 549). As this last metaphor suggests, Milton tries to counter the government’s idea of restricting control of the book trade—that is, having the ‘liberty of Printing . . . reduc’t into the power of a few’ (ii. 570)—by advocating instead an inclusive, social process. In contrast to Presbyterians, ‘who perpetually complain of schisms and sects, and make it such a calamity that any man dissents from their maxims’ (ii. 550), Milton extols the value of open discussion and constructive disagreement: ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions’ (ii. 554). In another of the tract’s extended metaphors, he compares the pursuit of knowledge with constructing ‘the house of God’, for both require various, differently skilled people, ‘some cutting, some squaring the marble, others hewing the cedars’ (ii. 555). Here Milton also puns on contemporary fears of ‘sects and schisms’ within the episcopal Church by insisting that to construct the physical temple ‘there must be many schisms and many dissections made in the quarry and in the timber’ (ii. 566, 555). Milton points up the need for tolerating a diversity of Christian opinions and suggests that individual efforts will lead to a greater collaborative achievement: ‘out of many moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes that are not vastly disproportionall arises the goodly and the gracefull symmetry that commends the whole pile and structure’ (ii. 555).23 This ideal of a collaborative construction is not limited to writers; critics often overlook that Milton includes both printers and readers within the social process that he promulgates. In various places in Areopagitica, he focuses on an author’s authority, as in the tract’s most often quoted passage, in which he describes a ‘good Booke’ as ‘the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm’d and treasur’d up on purpose to a life beyond life’ (ii. 493). Perhaps influenced by his own legal difficulties, Milton repeatedly addresses the ways that the law demeans ‘the free and ingenuous sort’ whose ‘publisht labours advance the good of mankind’ (ii. 531). He complains, for example, that the licensing order implies that members of Parliament ‘distrust the judgement & the honesty’ of authors, casting them as mere ‘Grammar lad[s]’ and ‘boy[s] at school’ (ii. 531). But elsewhere in the tract Milton hints at the perspectives of printers, publishers, and booksellers, and emphasizes the need for their cooperation to create and circulate books. His paraphrase of the 29 January 1642 order as requiring that ‘the Printers and the Authors name, or at least the Printers be register’d’ indicates the authority he grants agents of material production (ii. 569). Even his metaphor of differently skilled artisans constructing God’s temple could suggest the division of labour in a printing house and include members of the book trade as part of the social process of authorship. ‘[L]earning is indetted’, Milton more plainly asserts near the end of Areopagitica, to the ‘honest profession’ of book-making (ii. 570).

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Milton also incorporates a series of subtle allusions to what the seventeenth-century Stationer Joseph Moxon described as a special ‘Printers Language’ that distinguishes between the ‘Vulgar acceptance’ and a ‘more peculiar Phrase Printers use among themselves’.24 Thus when Milton depicts pre-publication licensing as a ‘kinde of homicide’ and warns that it could escalate to a ‘kinde of massacre’, he interrupts his anthropomorphic metaphor with a conditional clause, ‘if it extend to the whole impression’, so as to stress that he is talking about books (ii. 493): an impression refers to all the copies of an edition printed at one time.25 Similarly, when Milton recalls how the Papal Court not only kept catalogues of prohibited books but also invented licensing ‘To fill up the measure of encroachment’ (ii. 503), he seems to allude to the length of a line of type.26 Compositors used the expression ‘to fill up the measure’ to describe the process of justifying a line of type by adjusting the amount of space between words in a composing stick. Milton’s language reminds readers of the material process of book production so as to underscore that he is arguing not just for toleration but specifically for an unlicensed press. Although these puns and allusions may be too few or too subtle to create a consistent subtext for the tract’s argument, they serve individually as reminders of the dynamic collaboration out of which, Milton believes, truth emerges. Thus the description of ‘gathering up limb by limb’ truth’s ‘dissever’d peeces’ evokes the procedure called gathering by which books were assembled piece by piece after the printed sheets were dried and piled in stacks (ii. 549–51), and a separate group of possible puns highlights the importance of book-binding: Milton warns against trying to ‘bind’ truth ‘when she sleeps’ (ii. 563); criticizes the Star Chamber for intending ‘to bind books to their good behaviour’ (ii. 570); and praises ‘all the heathen Writers . . . with whom is bound up the life of human learning’ (ii. 518). Trying to establish the significance of books near the start of the tract, Milton alludes to the myth of Cadmus: ‘I know they [books] are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men’ (ii. 492). But even here Milton hints that authors do not work in isolation. If we recall that Cadmus was credited with inventing letters (or, according to some traditions, introducing the alphabet into Greece), he represents a material agent on whom authors depend to create their texts.27 When Milton writes that books are as ‘lively’ and ‘vigorously productive’ as Cadmus’ ‘fabulous Dragons teeth’ (ii. 492), he conjures the image of letters as the life-giving seed that books preserve. Only when ‘sown up and down’ in readers’ minds can the words stored in books give birth— ‘chance to spring up’—to people ‘armed’ with an author’s insights (ii. 492). Milton’s allusion to Cadmus thus includes readers within the social process of acquiring knowledge that the government’s licensing policy threatens to impede. Authors and printers depend on a book’s audience for their work to have lasting value. Milton accordingly compares a good reader to ‘a good refiner’ who ‘can gather gold out of the drossiest volume’, even using ‘errors’—when they are ‘known, read, and collated’—for ‘the speedy attainment of what is truest’ (ii. 521, 513). Like Psyche sifting through Venus’s ‘confused seeds’, readers must ‘cull out, and sort asunder’ the good ideas found in books (ii. 514).

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This part of Areopagitica echoes other seventeenth-century discussions of reading as a laborious searching and gathering. Perhaps most immediately, Milton’s metaphor suggests Francis Bacon’s indictment of scholastic reading in The Advancement of Learning (1605). Bacon compares ‘schoolmen’ to spiders, spinning ideas out of their heads, ‘admirable for their fineness of thread and work but of no substance or profit’; Bacon instead wants readers who will weigh what they read with what they observe, and ‘hunt’ in books ‘after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention, or depth of judgment’.28 A seventeenth-century edition of Plutarch’s Morals (1603) similarly emphasizes the effort involved in effective reading. When readers discover ‘some wicked and ungodly speech’, they ‘must confute it’, either by locating ‘contrarie sentences of the same author in other places’ or by tracking down ‘contrarie sentences of other famous authors’ that can be ‘weighed and compared’.29 Milton in Areopagitica pushes this idea of active reading further. Most notably, personifying truth as a dismembered virgin raises the stakes for readers’ engagement with an author’s and printer’s work; Milton’s violent imagery suggests the tremendous responsibility he accords a book’s audience. He wants readers who will persevere, ‘imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl’d body of Osiris’ by ‘gathering up limb by limb’ the ‘dissever’d peeces’ of Truth ‘scatter’d’ through various pamphlets and books (ii. 549, 550–1). If, as Sabrina Baron has argued, Milton in Areopagitica ultimately emerges less as an opponent to censorship and more as ‘the proponent of the freedom to read’, equally important is the obligation that Milton believes readers have: they must work hard and think for themselves.30 Because ‘the knowledge and survay of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human vertue’, readers must cultivate good reading habits: ‘how can we more safely, and with lesse danger scout into the regions of sin and falsity then by reading all manner of tractats, and hearing all manner of reason’ (ii. 516–17)? Milton introduces metaphors of digesting food and compounding medicine to emphasize readers’ power and responsibility. Whereas ‘Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction’, a ‘discreet and judicious Reader’ can digest even ‘bad books’, making them useful ‘to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate’ (ii. 512–13). He adds that books also resemble ‘usefull drugs and materialls wherewith to temper and compose effective and strong med’cins’ (ii. 521). This comparison once again suggests the potential that books contain and the work that they require: readers must first transform a text into something useful, then apply it in their pursuit of knowledge.31 Yet, lest we overstate Milton’s ideas about readers’ authority, we need to remember that he was inclined to elevate the status of readers in general, not necessarily the few, fit readers whom he posits in his own poetic and prose works. The year before he died, in Of True Religion (1673) Milton was still urging his readers ‘to read duly and diligently the Holy Scriptures’ (viii. 433) and still hoping readers would peruse books critically ‘to examine their Teachers themselves’ (viii. 435). But Milton could also respond harshly to readers of his works whom he considered impertinent or ill prepared. When readers of the first edition of Paradise Lost wondered why the poem did not rhyme, he added a sharp critique of their expectations, dismissing ‘the jingling sound of like endings’, and

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when readers objected to the logic and morality of his divorce tracts, he wrote two sonnets satirizing such hostile reactions as the ‘barbarous noise . . . j Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs’.32 The problem with his divorce tracts, he would later explain, was that he should not have written in English, ‘for then I would not have met with vernacular readers, who are usually ignorant of their own good, and laugh at the misfortunes of others’ (iv. 610). And for all Milton’s open-mindedness and forward thinking in Areopagitica, his willingness to serve as a government licenser just five years after the tract’s publication seems to qualify further his arguments for readers’ freedom. As Secretary for Foreign Tongues under the Commonwealth, Milton regularly licensed one of the government’s newsbooks, Mercurius politicus, and two separate entries ‘under the hand of Master Milton’ appear in the Stationers’ Register for two other texts, a copy of the newsbook The Perfect Diurnall and a French-language book about Charles I’s trial.33 Because not all entries in the Register include the licenser’s name, Milton may have officially approved other texts. The anonymous religious work Catechesis ecclesiarum quae in regno Poloniae (1651), for example, may have been licensed by Milton. Commonly known as The Racovian Catechism, this heretical, anti-Trinitarian tract was confiscated in early 1652 by Parliament, which then appointed a special committee to investigate how such a work could have been published. The committee examined ‘a Note under the Hand of Mr. John Milton’ dated 10 August 1650, and on 2 April 1652 members of the committee formally questioned, among other people, the author of Areopagitica.34 Although details of the proceedings have been lost, and the official resolutions that the committee presented to the House make no mention of Milton, Liewe van Aitzema, a Dutch ambassador newly arrived in England, recorded in his journal that it was Milton who had approved (‘hadde gelicentieert’) the catechism’s printing.35 According to van Aitzema, Milton explained ‘that he had published a tract on that subject, that men should refrain from forbidding books; that in approving of that book he had done no more than what his opinion was’.36 Van Aitzema’s account raises the intriguing possibility that Milton as secretary was more involved with overseeing the book trade than has been previously thought. During Milton’s first year in office he prepared only seven letters and wrote two translations. Early on he seems to have worked primarily with members of the book trade, licensing individual titles, negotiating on the government’s behalf, and policing the papers of authors and stationers—what the biographer David Masson has summed up as a ‘squalid, but perhaps necessary, business’.37 But van Aitzema’s account may also permit us to downplay Milton’s licensing duties and to rescue his reputation as a defender of individual liberty. If Milton licensed a heretical catechism, this way of thinking goes, perhaps he never took his job as licenser seriously, approving every book that crossed his desk. Van Aitzema’s recollection of Areopagitica’s argument does not tell the whole story, however. Like the summary of Milton’s polemical career in Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, which, as we saw at the start of this chapter, neatly divides his early prose writing into three categories of personal liberty, the assertion that van Aitzema

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records, that ‘men should refrain from forbidding books’, leaves out the political and practical considerations that complicate Milton’s idealistic claims about censorship in Areopagitica. Certainly Milton’s decision to work as a licenser contradicted his earlier argument: in Areopagitica he bluntly criticizes pre-publication licensing as ‘the greatest displeasure and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him’, and he predicts ‘that no man of worth, none that is not a plain unthrift of his own hours is ever likely to succeed’ the current group of licensers (ii. 531, 530). But Milton, as we have seen, never opposed all regulation of the book trade. Understanding the political context and qualified nature of his argument against censorship in Areopagitica helps to explain his pragmatic decision to work as a government licenser five years later. Milton’s censorial duties presumably reflected the new circumstances of 1649. When he wrote Areopagitica, he could not have imagined that within five years the King would be tried and executed, and the country would be on the verge of becoming a republic. If we are looking for consistency in Milton’s words and deeds, it may lie not in an idealized notion of a free press but in an ongoing commitment to the social process of pursuing knowledge that he describes in Areopagitica. In practice and in principle, Milton throughout his career depended on other people in the creation and circulation of his texts.38 Returning, for example, to the note on the verse that he added to Paradise Lost, we discover that he only wrote it at the request of the printer Samuel Simmons and that Simmons, on behalf of the ‘many’ who ‘desired it’, also asked Milton to compose the arguments that summarize each of the epic’s books.39 Often, as with The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Milton attempted to accommodate readers’ responses by working with printers and booksellers to publish revised versions of his prose tracts. When readers failed to live up to Milton’s high expectations, he tried harder in each expanded edition to map out the preparation and effort he required of them. Milton also envisioned his own writing as part of a larger cooperative endeavour— the building of God’s temple, as he describes it in Areopagitica. Thus in his theological treatise De doctrina Christiana, Milton promotes ‘free discussion and inquiry’ (vi. 121); he does ‘not urge or enforce anything upon [his] own authority’ but instead tells readers to think for themselves and ‘Assess this work as God’s spirit shall direct you’ (vi. 121, 124). Or, to take a better-known example, when Eve in Paradise Lost separates from Adam to garden alone, she argues, ‘what is faith, love, virtue unassayed j Alone, without exterior help sustained?’ (IX.335–6). Critics frequently note that Eve is paraphrasing the crucial point in Areopagitica that virtue must be tested; Milton in 1644 specifically explains that he ‘cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d virtue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary’ (ii. 515). But, as Joan Bennett has astutely observed, the second part of Eve’s argument for working alone is faulty: Adam’s ‘exterior help’ would not limit Eve’s virtue or compromise her free will.40 Eve does not sin until she eats the fruit, but here she fails to understand that arriving at truth is a collaborative process and that she and Adam should ‘sustain’ each other as they decide whether to work together or apart.

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That in Paradise Lost Milton stages the scene preceding the fall of humankind by dramatizing one of Areopagitica’s core principles is significant. In the years following the pamphlet’s publication, Milton may have agreed to work as a government licenser, and his faith in readers may have sometimes waned, but he still believed in the need for collaboration. In both Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, Milton continues to emphasize that ‘Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing . . . many opinions’ (ii. 554).

NOTES 1. Milton, Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, iv. 625–6. All subsequent references to Milton’s prose are taken from this edition and identified parenthetically in the text by volume and page numbers. 2. See e.g. Belsey, John Milton, 78. 3. Transcript of the Registers, i. xxviii. Here and throughout the chapter, I distinguish between upper-case ‘Stationers’, members of the company, and lower-case ‘stationers’, participants in the book trade. For a more extended discussion of the early modern book trade, see Jason McElligott’s chapter in this volume. 4. For these statistics, see Barnard, McKenzie, and Bell, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 779–93. On printing and licensing, see also the chapter by McElligott in this volume. 5. ‘An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing’, i. 184. 6. Ibid. 7. Journal of the House of Commons, ii: 1640–43, 402; 739. 8. Ibid. 997. 9. At the conclusion of Areopagitica, Milton reiterates his support for ‘retaining of each man his severall copy’ and emphasizes that honest stationers should not ‘be made other mens vassalls’ (ii. 570). 10. Journal of the House of Commons, ii: 1640–42, 739. 11. See e.g. Norbrook, ‘Areopagitica, Censorship’, 20–1. 12. Walwyn, Compassionate Samaritane, in Writings of William Walwyn, 112–13. 13. Milton, ‘On the New Forcers of Conscience’, 164–5 (l. 20). All quotations of Milton’s poetry are taken from Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, ed. Kerrigan et al. 14. Laud, History of the Trouble and Tryal, X3v. 15. Sirluck, Introduction, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, ii. 180–1. 16. Pym, March 17. Master Pyms Speech in Parliament, A3v. 17. The evidence that Areopagitica was published in late 1644 derives largely from the copy dated 24 November 1644 in the Thomason Collection at the British Library and the copy dated 23 November 1644 at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. 18. Answer to a Book, E2v; Palmer, Glasse of Gods Providence, I1r. 19. Journal of the House of Commons, iii: 1643–1644, 606. 20. In this paragraph and the next, I am drawing on Dobranski, ‘The Book Trade’, 226–36. 21. This statistic is taken from McKenzie, ‘The London Book Trade’, 131. 22. For the ways that licensers under Charles I tried to ‘massage’ and ‘modify’ texts to control religious opinion, see Milton, ‘Licensing, Censorship’, 629–31. 23. Kolbrener more fully pursues this dialectic in Milton’s Warring Angels, 11–27.

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24. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 16. In this section I am working from arguments in Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade, 116–24. 25. During the seventeenth century, an impression was often the same as an edition (all the copies printed at any time from the same setting of type) because, as Philip Gaskell notes, ‘it was normal’ for compositors to reuse the type from sheets after they were printed. See Gaskell, New Introduction, 314. 26. See Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, 206–8. 27. See Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, 148–9. 28. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, 140, 139. For a fuller discussion of early modern instructions for readers, see Dobranski, Readers and Authorship, 32–53. 29. Plutarch, Philosophie, C1v, C2r; and see B3r. 30. Baron, ‘Licensing Readers’, 237. 31. Five years later in Eikonoklastes (1649), Milton continues to empower readers over writers. He justifies his own interpretation of Charles I’s intention in Eikon Basilike by arguing that ‘in words which admitt of various sense, the libertie is ours to choose that interpretation which may best minde us of what our restless enemies endeavor, and what wee are timely to prevent’ (iii. 342). 32. Paradise Lost, ‘The Verse’, 291; and Sonnet XII, ‘I did but prompt the age’, 149 (ll. 3–4). See also Sonnet XI, ‘A Book was writ of late’, 147–8. 33. Transcript of the Registers, i. 333, 380. 34. Journal of the House of Commons, 7. 113–14. 35. French, Life Records, iii. 206. The catechism had been entered in the Stationers’ Register on 13 November 1651, but we do not know whether this entry named a specific licenser, for the Council had it cancelled two days after issuing a warrant for the arrest of the book’s printer, William Dugard. See Transcript of the Registers, i. 383. 36. French, Life Records, iii. 206. 37. Masson, Life of John Milton, iv. 155. For examples of Milton’s early duties as secretary, see Calendar of State Papers, i. 474, iv. 338. 38. For Milton’s rhetorical conception of himself as an isolated author, see Lewalski, ‘Milton’s Idea of Authorship’, 53–79; for evidence of Milton’s various collaborative practices, see Dobranski, Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade, esp. 1–13, 82–103. 39. Paradise Lost, ‘The Printer to the Reader’, 291. 40. Bennett, ‘“Go”: Milton’s Antinomianism’, 401.

WORKS CITED Anon. An Answer to a Book. Intituled, ‘The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce’. London, 1644. Arber, Edward (ed.). A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D. 5 vols. London: Privately printed, 1875–94. Bacon, Francis. The Advancement of Learning, in Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 120–299. Barnard, John, D. F. McKenzie, and Maureen Bell. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, iv: 1557–1695. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Baron, Sabrina A. ‘Licensing Readers, Licensing Authorities in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002, 217–42.

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Belsey, Catherine. John Milton: Language, Gender, Power. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Bennett, Joan S. ‘“Go”: Milton’s Antinomianism and the Separation Scene in Paradise Lost, Book 9’. PMLA 98.3 (1983), 388–401. Dobranski, Stephen B. Milton, Authorship, and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ——. Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ——. ‘The Book Trade’, in Stephen B. Dobranski (ed.), Milton in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 226–36. French, J. Milton. The Life Records of John Milton. 5 vols. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1949–58. Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Green, Mary Anne Everett (ed.). Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series. 13 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1874–86. Kolbrener, William. Milton’s Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Laud, William. The History of the Trouble and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and Blessed Martyr, William Laud. London, 1695. Lewalski, Barbara K. ‘Milton’s Idea of Authorship’, in Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola (eds.), Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text, and Terrorism. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2006, 53–79. McKenzie, D. F. ‘The London Book Trade in 1644’, in Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez (eds.), Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, 126–43. Masson, David. The Life of John Milton. 7 vols. [1877–96]. New York: Peter Smith, 1946. Milton, Anthony. ‘Licensing, Censorship, and Religious Orthodoxy in Early Stuart England’. Historical Journal 41.3 (1998), 625–51. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Moxon, Joseph. Mechanick Exercises of the Whole Art of Printing (1683–4), ed. Herbert Davies and Harry Carter. 2nd edn. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Norbrook, David. ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Richard Burt (ed.), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 3–33. Palmer, Herbert. The Glasse of Gods Providence towards His Faithfull Ones. London, 1644. Parliament of England. Journal of the House of Commons, ii: 1640–1643. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802. ——. Journal of the House of Commons, iii: 1643–1644. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802. ——. Journal of the House of Commons, vii: 1651–1660. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1802. ——. ‘An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing [14 June 1643]’, in C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (eds.), Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660. 3 vols. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911.

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Plutarch. The Philosophie, Commonlie Called the Morals. London, 1603. Pym, John. March 17. Master Pyms Speech in Parliament. London, 1642. Sandys, George. Ovid’s Metamorphosis, ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1970. Stationers’ Company. A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640–1708 A.D. 3 vols. [1913–14]. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1967. Walwyn, William. The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. Jack R. McMichael and Barbara Taft. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989.

CHAPTER

11

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THE PERSONAL RULE OF POETS Cavalier Poetry and the English Revolution ....................................................................................................... ANN BAYNES COIRO

When Monarchies trans-shifted are, and gone; Here shall endure thy vast Dominion. (Robert Herrick, ‘On Himselfe’)

A sense of melancholy (or Schadenfreude) shrouds criticism of court-affiliated poetry. The term Cavalier implies a commitment to King and honour even in the face of loss— and has therefore sometimes been used nostalgically to celebrate a lost grandeur or condescendingly to label a deluded, outdated belief in an empty symbol. In either sense, the generic appellation ‘cavalier’ has been a categorical death knell, implying graceful decline, political failure, self-effacement, a cul-de-sac of literary history. Since the poetry we call ‘Cavalier’ directly shaped the ‘short but admirable lines’ that would rule English poetry for generations, this literary historical narrative is oddly ahistorical.1 In spite of a number of excellent studies of royalist poetry in recent years, however, the notion has persisted that Cavalier poetry was a delicate flower soon faded.2 This chapter proposes something altogether different—that although the war against the King may have been profoundly destabilizing, it was also liberating for many poets working in what we call the Cavalier tradition. Such an understanding turns on its head the standard characterization of Cavalier poetry as dispossessed of its natural habitat, celebrating friendship in retreat and waiting for the winter of exile to end. In reality, the political crisis of the mid-seventeenth century spurred the publication of poetry that had long circulated in manuscript and occasioned new poems that grappled publicly with crucial events and figures. During the war and Commonwealth, poetry moved out of the circuit of the court and engaged directly in a wider struggle for cultural power.

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Cavalier was a term of scorn first used by the parliamentary side against the supporters of the King.3 In order to wage war, Charles had to rely on two widely hated groups: commanders recruited from European armies (‘caballeros, chevaliers, cavalieri’) and army officers from the Scots war of 1640.4 John Goodwin’s denunciation in Anti-Cavalierisme (1642) reveals the tenor of attacks: ‘the scum of the Land, that most accursed confederacy . . . That bloody and butcherly Generation, commonly knowne by the name of Cavaliers.’5 Royalists then attempted to reappropriate cavalier as a term of honour, albeit sometimes with a touch of witty self-deprecation. In 1643, for example, John Taylor took a punning offensive against the slur ‘cavalier’: ‘To begin roundly, soundly, and profoundly, The Cavalier is a Gentleman, a Commander on Horsebacke; The Caviller is a Rascall, whether he swim, go, or ride.’6 In 1648, Herrick’s ‘His Cavalier’ creates a fantastical hybrid of Taylor’s opposing sides, calling upon a mythic creature riding out of a court masque: Give me that man, that dares bestride The active Sea-horse, and with pride, Through that huge field of waters ride: Who, with his looks too, can appease The ruffling winds and raging Seas, In mid’st of all their outrages. This, this a virtuous man can doe, Saile against Rocks, and split them too; I! and a world of Pikes passe through.7

The heart of Herrick’s ‘Cavalier’ is ‘virtuous’. Yet Herrick’s whimsy also suggests a tinge of mockery. After all, parliamentarians made fun of Cavalier fancy dress, and this Cavalier uses ‘his looks’ to ‘appease’ natural outrage. Although royalist is a more neutral and wide-ranging term, the category ‘Cavalier’ still shapes literary history. Our understanding of early seventeenth-century poetry, for example, has long been determined by the distinction between metaphysical and Cavalier (or, put another way, the schools of Donne and Jonson). Although these terms are notoriously subjective and politicized, they have endured through changing critical fashions, the reign of theory, and the heralded return of a new formalism. Many poets who were already dead when the Civil Wars began have been grouped together as ‘Cavalier’ because of their court associations, sometimes even including Jonson himself.8 Characteristic manifestations of Cavalier poetry are witty love lyrics, court compliment, an emphasis on sociability, and a measured Jonsonian verse form. Metaphysical is the older literary historical term, first applied (disapprovingly) by Samuel Johnson in 1744 to Donne and Cowley because Johnson felt they were using poetry to show off their learning.9 In the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot focused renewed attention on Donne and other ‘metaphysicals’, but he praised their poetry for demonstrating and inducing quickness and complexity of apprehension.10 Since the ‘metaphysical’ influence of Donne is strongly felt in the work of many poets called Cavalier, a more apparently polarized way of sorting mid-seventeenth-century poetry

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might be to place Milton’s poetry as the political and aesthetic counterweight to the Cavaliers. After all, Eliot’s lament that the English Revolution cut off metaphysical habits of mind is an implicit attack on Milton. But Milton’s early career shares a number of connections with court poetry, bedevilling attempts to construct any neat division between ‘schools’. Perhaps, therefore, ‘Cavalier’ should more aptly be called a strong style or a social mode. Nevertheless, it is often used as a subgenre, a critical basket in which to toss a dozen figures and a worldview. Inevitably, then, the choice of poets and time frame profoundly shapes any argument about this slippery category. I will be discussing four poets, Sir John Denham, Edmund Waller, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Herrick. Because of their significance, on the one hand, and their relative neglect in studies of this period, on the other, my discussions of Denham and Herrick will be somewhat more expansive and detailed. My particular focus will be on poetry published in the 1640s, a decade when challenges to the King’s authority initiated an unprecedented explosion of print publication that revolutionized both government and culture. While many other royalist poets could fruitfully be considered in the context of the English Revolution, Denham’s Coopers Hill (first published in 1642 and many times after, including a significantly revised version in 1655); Waller’s Poems & (1645); Lovelace’s Lucasta (1649, with an expanded posthumous edition in 1659); and Herrick’s Hesperides and Noble Numbers (1648) allow us a richly various vantage point.11 Each volume is by a gifted poet who became an important cultural presence in the print culture of 1640s. Except for Denham, who, according to his friend Waller, ‘broke-out like the Irish Rebellion—threescore thousand strong before any body was aware’, each man had been associated with Charles’s court before the Civil Wars.12 As a group they also present instructive lessons in the abiding and potentially distorting power of literary history. We associate two of these poets, Lovelace and Herrick, with courtly lyricism and think of their poetry as belonging to the earlier seventeenth century. On the other hand, we usually group Denham and Waller with Restoration culture.13 Nevertheless, each poet moves into the print realm at the same fulchral moment, the tumultuous decade of the 1640s. For royalist poets, the 1640s changed the ground: a court first relegated to Oxford, then no court; a king seized, escaped, imprisoned, and, finally, tried and decapitated; a queen and a teenage heir apparent on the run and then in European exile. The roles of central actors of court culture—including poets—therefore altered fundamentally. Media and audience were also different in the 1640s, as print superseded the more restricted loop of manuscript circulation and court performance. Since the old ‘stigma of print’ had, if anything, strengthened in the 1630s, the move to more open publicity was all the more profound.14 The royalist embrace of this cultural battlefield is most famously and monumentally evident in Humphrey Moseley’s determinedly royalist editions of Beaumont and Fletcher (1647) and William Cartwright (1651). But royalist publishers and their collaborators moved a number of other sympathetic poets into print posthumously as well. For example, Thomas Carew’s Poems was published by Thomas Walkley in 1640 and 1642 and by Moseley in 1651; Richard Corbet’s Certain Elegant Poems was published in 1647 and Poëtica Stromata in Holland in 1648; Sir John

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Suckling’s Fragmenta aurea was published by Moseley in 1646, 1648, 1658, and 1659. Even more remarkable are the number of living poets who published their poetry. Besides Denham, Waller, Lovelace, and Herrick, other examples include James Shirley’s Poems & in 1646 (with Moseley); Mildmay Fane, Earl of Westmorland’s Otia sacra in 1648; Abraham Cowley’s The Mistresse in 1647 (with Moseley, who published another edition in 1656); Thomas Stanley’s Poems and Translations in 1647 (and in 1651 and 1652); and Vaughan’s secular poems in 1646 and Silex scintillans in 1650.15 Royalist poets entered a burgeoning market place, competing with pamphlets and petitions, newsletters, religious tracts, and ballads. Court poetry’s embrace of a much wider and more disparate readership, its efforts to influence pubic opinion and to consolidate a cultural base, thus helped to shape the public sphere that was emerging, willy-nilly, in the 1640s.16 Poetry set out to protest the revolution, but in the process poetry itself was revolutionized. The execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649 was a stunning end to hopes for some kind of constitutional settlement to the Civil Wars. Up until that point, royalist poets were writing in defence of the beleaguered King, even as they mixed with their support a degree of disappointment and some forthright advice. Once the King was executed, each made his own accommodation: Denham served as an agent between Charles II and Henrietta Maria, on the one hand, and Parliament, on the other; Waller returned to join Cromwell’s government after his banishment was revoked by Parliament in 1651; Lovelace, between his release from prison in 1649 and his death in 1657, wrote poems much more louche and cynical; and Herrick, although he lived until 1674, chose silence. But for each, the 1640s wrought a fundamental change in his career; with the King and court no longer the cultural centre, these poets found a public role in their own right.

SIR JOHN DENHAM:

POETRY

AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE

.................................................................................................................. In recent decades, literary historians have turned serious attention to polemical prose in print in the 1640s and 1650s, but our attention to the poetry of this period has remained focused on a canon that has not been similarly repositioned. Marvell’s Upon Appleton House is surely today the best-known poem of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, and deservedly given its strange wit and power—but because it remained in circumscribed manuscript circulation, it was not public in the ways that a printed poem could be.17 Instead, we might begin our understanding of poetry’s public engagement in the English Revolution with the poem that did hold centre stage throughout these years, indeed evolved in the public eye—Denham’s Coopers Hill. That Denham’s poem is rarely more than a footnote in the impressive body of scholarly work on royalist poetry over the last two decades has significantly distorted our understanding of the increasingly important role of poetry in the English Revolution.

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After circulating in manuscript versions in 1641 and early 1642, Coopers Hill was published anonymously on 5 August 1642 by Thomas Walkley and reprinted, with Denham’s name attached, in Oxford in 1643. In 1650, Humphrey Moseley published another edition of Coopers Hill. Moseley then published Denham’s very extensively revised version in 1655; this version of Coopers Hill appeared six more times by 1707, either as part of Denham’s Poems and Translations or separately. Its impact was immediate and continued to be enormous. As poetry it was seen as a modern masterpiece. Herrick includes in Hesperides an epigram ‘To Master Denham, on his Prospective Poem’ (H-673), which concedes ‘’Tis dignity in others, if they be | Crown’d Poets; yet live Princes under thee’ (ll. 114–15). In 1664, Dryden called ‘the Majesty’ of its style ‘the exact Standard of good Writing’, and so it was regarded well into the eighteenth century.18 Denham’s use of poetry as evolving public speech is remarkable. This is evident, first of all, simply in the poem’s significant changes over time: the circulated manuscript versions, the 1642 printed poem, Denham’s careful attention to changes to the 1643 edition, and his comprehensive revisions in 1655.19 We can take as a point of comparison Milton’s addition of the historicizing headnote to Lycidas in 1645, where he inserts a new political interpretation of his pastoral, originally published in 1638. Coopers Hill’s ongoing negotiation with changing historical circumstances far exceeds Milton’s 1645 Lycidas in scale and ambition.20 Most famously, the final version of Coopers Hill includes the much expanded allegory of the royal stag and a more threatening interpretation of the concluding Thames metaphor: But if with Bays and Dams they strive to force His channel to a new, or narrow course; No longer then within his banks he dwells, First to a Torrent, then a Deluge swells: Stronger, and fiercer by restraint he roars, And knows no bound, but makes his power his shores.21

The vision of potentially destructive force evokes the warning at the end of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’: ‘The same arts that did gain | A pow’r must it maintain’ (119–20). Whether the Thames is meant to represent the exiled Charles Stuart or whether the fierce power overwhelming legal restraints suggests Cromwell is unclear. Indeed, the multivalence of Coopers Hill’s final caution, including its palimpsestic quality, layered on the text over time, is part of the poem’s brilliance. Also extraordinary is Coopers Hill’s integration of poetic technique with historical analysis. Throughout its evolving versions, the poem comments on the events of the 1640s and 1650s, on the need for a balance of power in proper government, and on the appropriate role of religion and commerce in England’s national identity. At the level of formal structure, Denham uses history and poetry both as hermeneutic tools and as objects of analysis. Just as the versions of Coopers Hill become a chain of interpretative significance, so does the form itself—lines divided midway, couplets balanced across lines, and chiasmus making the lines tensile and polarized. Form then works with

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content so that history becomes an interpretative lens that changes the outcome depending on examples cited and perspectives drawn. Most relevant to this discussion focusing on the waves of poetry published in the 1640s is the initial publication of Coopers Hill in 1642. There we can see a moderate royalist poet first entering print debate with a learned poem that is startlingly critical of kings even as it justifies kingship.22 Here, as in all its versions, Coopers Hill negotiates the role of poetry in a changing world, and it is aggressive in its claims. As a topographic poem, Coopers Hill suggests close comparison with the country house poem genre in general, including Upon Appleton House, which was written almost a decade after Coopers Hill’s first publication.23 Many country house poems are less interested in the house itself than in surveying the patron’s estate. It is conventional for the speaker of a country house poem to draw lessons about society and the patron’s hospitality and nobility from the metaphorical ‘Book’ of the patron’s hereditary land. But there are striking and telling differences between Coopers Hill and poems like To Penshurst or Upon Appleton House. The speaker of Coopers Hill has no need to praise a Sidney or a Fairfax. Coopers Hill is a famous prospective spot at Egham, Denham’s own family home. The poet figure in Coopers Hill surveys England and speaks for himself. The poet’s role is central and powerful, drawing lessons for King and subject alike. Denham’s political analysis is inextricable from his style: he uses metaphor, analogy, and allegory to assert his poetic authority.24 The opening lines of Coopers Hill demonstrate the carefully linked progression of the poem’s thinking and the pre-eminence of the poet’s role: Sure we have Poëts, that did never dreame Upon Pernassus, nor did taste the streame Of Helicon, and therefore I suppose Those made not Poëts, but the Poëts those. And as Courts make not Kings, but Kings the Court; So where the Muses, and their Troopes resort, Pernassus stands; if I can be to thee A Poët, thou Pernassus art to mee. (1–8)

As kings are to courts, so the poet is to his Parnassus. But whereas the poet creates and controls poetry’s ‘court’ on English land, his poem encircles the King with restraints and doubts. Even the ‘auspicious height’ (10) of Coopers Hill that allows the poet’s flight of ‘fancie’ (12) is liable to criticism when it becomes an analogy for lordship: And as our surly supercilious Lords, Bigge in their frownes, and haughty in their words, Looke downe on those, whose humble fruitfull paine Their proud, and barren greatnesse must susteine: So lookes the Hill upon the streame, betweene There lies a spatious, and a fertile Greene. (245–50)25

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When the Hill becomes a supercilious lord, poetry moves to the plain where Dryads and Naiads, ‘Faunus and Sylvanus keepe their Courts’ ‘although their airie shap | All but a quicke Poëticke sight escape’ (255; 253–4). In all its versions, the poem maintains a basic structure: from Coopers Hill, the poet sees first the city of London, next Windsor, and then the abbey ruins on St Anne’s Hill. After these three elevations, the poet’s eye shifts to the Thames, which serves as the occasion for reflections on kingship and the Magna Carta. The city is associated with greed, a place and a vice that had become shorthand for Puritan hypocrisy: . . . men like Ants Toyle to prevent imaginarie wants; Yet all in vaine, increasing with their store, Their vast desires, but make their wants the more. As food to unsound bodies, though it please The Appetite, feeds onely the disease. (29–34)

Denham’s speaker makes a strong gesture toward pastoralism as an antidote to London’s appetite (‘O happinesse of sweete retir’d content! | To be at once secure, and innocent’ (47–8)), but he himself is driven by an unnervingly similar appetite. After contemplating Windsor, for example, he admits: Here could I fix my wonder, but our eies, Nice as our tastes, affect varieties; And though one please him most, the hungry guest Tasts every dish, and runs through all the feast. (141–4)

The extended section on Windsor is the most directly applicable to the King, since Windsor is the seat of the monarch. It is strangely intimate. Windsor is made utterly feminine, the hill ‘swell[ing]’ ‘into’ the poet’s eye, a newly married woman: (Who proud, yet seemes to make that pride her shame) When Nature quickens in her pregnant wombe Her wishes past, and now her hopes to come. (50–1; 52–4)

The poet takes pleasure in ‘her gentle bosome’: ‘Thy Masters Embleme, in whose face I saw | A friend-like sweetnesse, and a King-like aw’ (56; 61–2). This extraordinarily feminized version of the King suggests his marriage and what many considered his effeminization because of his uxorious devotion to his often-pregnant French queen.26 At the least, the poet’s suggestion of familiarity with this friendly King and his unthreatening redoubt imply a monarch too accommodating, if not weak. The degree to which Coopers Hill became a widely shared cultural reference point is evident in Milton’s direct recall of the Windsor passage in the description of paradise in Paradise Lost. In Denham’s poem, the happily married couple, Charles and Henrietta Maria, live in ‘sweet retir’d content! . . . at once secure, and innocent’ (47–8) protected by ‘an easie, and unforc’d Ascent . . . Where no stupendious Cliffe, no threatning heights | Accesse deny’ (55; 57–8). Milton’s edenic elevation makes emphatically clear

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that to be ‘secure and innocent’ requires more than an ‘easie’ barrier. Instead, Adam and Eve, that perfect married pair, are strenuously protected by a ‘steep wilderness, whose hairy sides | With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild, | Access deni’d’.27 Milton’s use of Coopers Hill to offer an efficient comparison of Puritan marriage to the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria demonstrates the centrality of Denham’s poem in contemporary poetic and political discourse. Indeed, long before Paradise Lost, the poet on Coopers Hill had deftly criticized, while ostensibly praising, a marriage in which a husband is effeminized by lack of caution.28 The third hill the poet views prompts the strongest political commentary. On St Anne’s Hill are the ruins of Chertsey Abbey. Denham sets up two poles of bad Church–state behaviour: Henry VIII’s opportunistic reformation that began England’s Protestant Reformation and the over-heated calls for religious reform in the present. Certainly the poet finds considerable fault with the Catholic Church in sixteenthcentury England: ‘Then did Religion in a lazy Cell, | In emptie, ayrie contemplations dwell’ (169–70). But now religious zeal has moved too far in the other direction: ‘Is there no temperate Region can be knowne, | Betwixt their frigid, and our Torrid Zone?’ (173–4). Denham’s decision to include the politically charged precedent of Henry VIII is part of Coopers Hill’s ongoing balancing act. Like the Magna Carta, Henry VIII was at the centre of historical controversy in the 1640s. Henry VIII’s instantiation of the Reformation in England could, for example, be interpreted as an instance of British liberty or monarchical tyranny, the King a Protestant hero or an irreligious sensualist. Denham’s calls for moderation are not surprising, but very surprising is the anger and contempt for the Tudor King that the poet expresses harshly and at length. While Marvell will defend Henry VIII’s seizure of church lands at least on the surface of Upon Appleton House, Denham is sharply and directly critical of the King’s actions: . . . they (alas) were rich, and he was poore; And having spent the treasures of his Crowne, Condemnes their Luxurie, to feed his owne; And yet this act, to varnish o’re the shame Of sacriledge, must beare devotions name. (156–60)

One modern critic has asserted that here ‘the Henrician Reformation undoubtedly becomes a representation of a ravaging Parliament’.29 Such a reading forces the poem into a stance preconceived as blindly royalist. In fact, the poet of Coopers Hill explicitly condemns not the Parliament, but the King’s greed and hypocrisy. The remarkable thing about Coopers Hill is that it uses poetry formally and thematically to seek balance, critiquing excess on either side. While the poet’s eye had strayed from Windsor in search of new sensations, he now turns his eye from St Anne’s Hill, upset by the extremes he has considered: ‘Parting from thence ’twixt anger, shame, and feare | Thos for what’s past, and this for what’s too neare’ (183–4). Reading Coopers Hill can feel like playing a logical shell game. The many changes Denham makes over the years partly contribute to the difficulty of finding a stable

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reading of the poem’s political position. But it is also true that even in any single version, shifts in meaning inhere in Denham’s preferred poetic technique, the extended metaphor or analogy. The second half of Coopers Hill, for example, uses the river Thames to tie its many narrative threads together. The King becomes a figure for the Thames who enriches his shores with prosperity, bringing peace—‘No unexpected Inundations spoile | The Mowers hopes, nor mocke the Plough-mans toyle’ (199–200)—and foreign trade: ‘So that to us no thing, no place is strange | Whilst thy faire bosome is the worlds Exchange’ (217–18). Runnymede, on the shore of the Thames, then becomes the scene for the poem’s famous stag hunt. The identity of that doomed beast has been much debated. Most critics believe he represents Strafford in the 1642 and 1643 versions and then Charles in 1655. The allegory is complicated because the stag is ‘royall’, a ‘gallant beast’ (265) who does not always act very heroically. He runs away, and he tries to find safety in numbers, until his ‘herd unkindly wise’ (273) chases him away. He then resolves to take a stand, but loses his nerve and runs into the river, hoping his pursuers will not follow him. Once cornered he ‘disdaines to die | By vulgar hands’ (291–2) and, in the 1642 version, is killed by Charles’s ‘unerring hand’ (297). The analogy of kingship moves from river to stag, from stag to hunter. King kills king, and the Thames turns red with blood. This ‘more Innocent, and happy chase’ (301) is then compared to the signing of the Magna Carta: ‘Faire Liberty pursude, and meant a Prey | To tyranny, here turn’d, and stood at bay’ (303–4). The poem’s analogical switchbacking becomes truly disorienting at this point; if ‘Faire Liberty’ represents the barons at Runnymede, turning and confronting kingly tyranny, what then does the stag’s death represent? Or is ‘Faire Liberty’ a stand-in for King John and does that mean that liberty and kingship were destroyed by the signing of the Magna Carta? The poem’s mixed signals are symptoms of the richly complicated political challenge that the Magna Carta presented in the early 1640s.30 On the one hand, it was key to Parliament’s claims. Sir Edward Coke had magisterially reiterated its importance as the foundation of English legal rights in opposition to monarchical tyranny in his Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, a work that was denied publication in 1629 (on the day Strafford was executed in 1641, Parliament triumphantly authorized its publication). On the other hand, John Foxe interpreted King John as a Protestant hero, resisting the Pope’s insidious power, until, tragically, corrupt clerical powers forced the King to sign the Magna Carta.31 In the 1642 version of Coopers Hill the poet cautiously approves of the Magna Carta since with its signing: All markes of Arbitrary power layes downe: Tyrant and Slave, those names of hate and feare, The happier stile of King and Subject beare. (314–16)

Nevertheless, the speaker is uneasy that the King had been forced to sign, and he turns himself in qualifying circles:

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When in that remedy all hope was plac’t, Which was, or should have beene at least, the last. For armed subjects can have no pretence Against their Princes, but their just defence; And whether then, or no, I leave to them To justifie, who else themselves condemne. Yet might the fact be just, if we may guesse The justnesse of an action from successe (305–12)

The poet allows the possibility that the subjects had rightly resorted to their ‘last’ ‘remedy’ and armed themselves in ‘just defence’, and that, in fact, the result was a good one—a balance of rights where ‘Kings give liberty, and Subjects love’ (318). Viewed retrospectively, it may be difficult to see how remarkably forthright the political analysis of Coopers Hill was in 1642. Denham published the poem without front matter of any kind.32 Poetry entered the print realm to parse the complexity of a difficult political situation. While the poem is clearly royalist in its sympathies, it nevertheless evaluates and criticizes all sides from its hill surveying England. The poet stands at the true centre, striving for balance and using his art to advise, or at least to reflect and give perspective upon public events. In 1655 Denham added Coopers Hill’s most famous lines, invoking the Thames, as the poem’s ‘great example’ and ‘my theme’, lines that were embraced as the dominant exemplar of good English poetry for more than a century: Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull, Strong without rage, without ore-flowing full.33

The couplet presents in small the analogy between kingship and poetry as a public responsibility that undergirds Coopers Hill’s project throughout the 1640s and 1650s and beyond.

EDMUND WALLER:

POETRY AND MANHOOD

.................................................................................................................. An essay evaluating Cavalier poetry and the English Revolution can hope only to fairly represent, rather than give a definitive accounting of, the complex range and shifting perspectives of royalist poetry. Edmund Waller belongs in this story precisely because of his moderation, his agonized weighing and shifting over the tumultuous decades from the 1630s to the 1680s. If we want to understand the role of poetry as it moved into the public debate, a poet who wrote panegyrics for Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Charles II, and James II deserves attention. Moreover, Waller was then and is still acknowledged as a powerfully formative influence on the course of English poetry. Yet, there has not been a new edition of Waller’s work in more than a hundred years.34 Until recently, when David Norbrook’s extensive treatment of Waller in Writing the English

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Republic signalled a resurgence of interest, he has been at once a signposted way station in literary history and little known.35 We will be centrally concerned here with only one chapter of Waller’s long career, the publication of his Poems in 1645. But like Denham, Waller would be a significant figure in the 1650s (and beyond). Immensely wealthy, innately moderate, and kinsman to Cromwell and other key parliamentary figures, Waller was able to move from Charles I’s court, to accusations of treason against Parliament, to serving as a commissioner of trade during the Protectorate. And he then thrived as a poet and politician when Charles II returned. Waller’s great ability was to write graceful, muscular, and thoughtful verse that used the vehicle of elaborate praise to critique people and events of widely disparate political persuasions. That he had a long career as a poet makes his ambivalence about poetry in the 1640s all the more interesting. Waller agreed reluctantly to see his poems published in 1645 (or at least acted reluctant), concerned, like the speaker of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’, that: The forward youth that would appear Must now forsake his Muses dear, Nor in the shadows sing His numbers languishing. (1–4)

Waller demonstrates a widely shared uncertainty about whether poetry had a place in the tumultuous events of the public world, or if poems were only for ‘halcyon days’.36 Denham, for example, tells the story of visiting Charles I at Hampton Court in 1647. The King advised him ‘to write no more’ poetry, ‘alleging, that when men are young, and have little else to do, they might vent the overflowing of their Fancy that way, but when they are thought fit for more serious Employment’ a man should give it up (advice, Denham told Charles II, he politely followed until the King was executed).37 The movement of Waller’s poetry from manuscript to print also demonstrates one of Cavalier poetry’s important avenues to public interaction in the 1640s: the circuits of connection between publishers and influential social circles where manuscript publication had previously been the rule. Perhaps encouraged by Coopers Hill’s immediate success, Denham’s publisher, Thomas Walkley, published The Workes of Edmund Waller Esquire, Lately a Member of the Honourable House of Commons in 1645, including poems and three of Waller’s most famous speeches before Parliament. Waller’s panegyrics to Charles I and to Henrietta Maria, his love lyrics, and his elegies thus become part of his political, public ‘works’. Waller was not on the scene when his poetry was published, since he had been banished from the realm in November 1643 for his role in ‘Waller’s plot’. Indeed, Walkley underscores Waller’s notoriety by reminding his readers of his status as ‘Lately a Member’ of Parliament and by including the speech in which Waller pled with his fellow parliamentarians that he be spared martial law.38 Zachary Lesser has demonstrated persuasively that Walkley provided parliamentary news throughout his long career and catered particularly to readers interested in mixed government.39 It is likely that Walkley published Workes to take advantage of Waller’s prominence as an

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advocate of constitutional monarchy, and that the poems were passed on by friends, with Waller’s encouragement, in order to keep his voice in circulation after his banishment. The market for Waller’s book was clearly significant, for his poetry appears in three more, increasingly augmented, volumes over the course of 1645. These next three editions are published by that literary king-maker, Humphrey Moseley. In fact, it is with Waller that Moseley seems to have found his métier—publisher as cultural defender and curator of the canon of English literature. Moseley added to Walkley’s barebones edition of Waller what would become the signature elements of his many other single-author literary publications.40 First, on the title page, high-status court connections are signalled by the prominent announcement that Henry Lawes ‘of the Kings Chappell, and one of his Majesties Private Musick’ had set to music ‘All the Lyrick Poems in this Booke’. (The deluxe fourth edition of 1645 was further burnished by the aura of personal association: ‘Printed by a Copy of his own hand-writing.’) Moseley also adds an address to the reader from the stationer, explaining the poet’s worth and implying the kind of readers who would appreciate ‘[t]his parcel of exquisite poems’ (A4r). Moseley gestures to Waller’s banishment to encourage the purchase of his book: ‘like the present condition of the Author himselfe [these poems] are expos’d to the wide world, to travell, and try their fortunes: And I beleeve there is no gentle soule that pretends any thing to knowledge and the choycest sort of invention but will give them entertainment and welcome’ (A4v). Considering the appetite in 1645 for editions of Waller’s Poems, there were a number of these ‘gentle souls’. Moseley’s prediction was further justified by the Restoration anointing of Waller (and Denham) as the foundational figure of neoclassical poetics. Today, however, the publication of Waller’s 1645 Poems is most often cited as a footnote to Moseley’s publication of John Milton’s 1645 Poems. Moseley made the connection himself: given ‘that incouragement I have already received from the most ingenious men in their clear and courteous entertainment of Mr. Wallers late choice Peeces’, he has decided to publish Milton’s ‘ever-green, and not to be blasted Laurels’ (A4r). In light of Waller’s critical neglect, Milton scholars might now be mystified by the comparison, but in 1645 Waller and Milton could have been associated, for one thing, as political writers. Waller was a parliamentary speaker renowned for rhetorical brilliance. In 1641, his speeches had been printed and reprinted eight times, at the forefront of the transgressive publishing phenomenon of printing parliamentary proceedings.41 In his 1644 Areopagitica, Milton had, of course, also published a learned, rhetorically dazzling speech written as if delivered to Parliament. For Moseley, however, they are similar because each is an elegantly learned poet being shepherded rather shyly into print under his own guidance. The similarities (and differences) in Waller and Milton’s poetic temperaments can also be illuminated by their shared use of a conventional trope for the relationship of the poet and his audience. The myth of Orpheus and the Maenads is deeply embedded in Milton’s ambitions and fears as a poet; for Waller, it is a playful, self-deprecatory fiction.

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Women are a crucial part of the creation of the Stuart royalist ideology. Much of the poetry that emerged in print in the 1640s had been fostered in the court of Henrietta Maria and Charles, where Neoplatonic love reigned as the approved code of love and honour. Waller, for example, began his writing career as an important member of Henrietta Maria’s coterie of poets and dramatists in the 1630s.42 During the English Civil Wars, however, parliamentarians charged that royalists had been unmanned by précieux notions of male honour. The structure of the 1645 publications of Waller’s work (poetry, to begin; public speeches, to conclude) makes visible that tension between service to women and service to the state. Waller imagines the movement of his poetry from manuscript to print as the end of a chapter in a man’s life. In the address ‘To my Lady’ (included in each of Moseley’s three editions) Waller declares that she now has ‘not onely all I have, but all I ever mean to doe in this kind’.43 It is time to move on to serious business, for it is ‘not so much to have made verses, as not to give them over, leaves a man without an excuse’ (A3r). He proposes Cicero as the model of a manly career: first a poet but then ‘the most perfect Oratour’ (A2v). If she chooses to publish them, the Lady herself will be, in Waller’s conceit, the poems’ author. But he recommends that after she publishes them, she destroy the poems: ‘with the help of your faire friends, (for thus bound, it will be to hard a taske for your hands alone) to teare them in pieces, wherein you shall honour me with the fate of Orpheus, for so his Poems, where of we onely heare the forme (not the limbs as the storie will have it) I suppose were scattered by the Thracian Dames’ (A3r–A3v). Waller rationalizes the story of Orpheus rent asunder by women (it is about literary form dismembered, not a poet’s body). He also makes the Lady and her friends innocent; the book she rips and burns is hers to dispose of. Milton’s use of the myth of Orpheus and the Maenads is strikingly different—full of horror at the violation of the poet’s integrity. In the final English poem in Milton’s 1645 Poems, the speaker of Lycidas considers and rejects writing the kind of poetry that ‘others’, like Waller or Lovelace, write while ‘sport[ing] with Amaryllis in the shade, | Or with the tangles of Neaera’s hair’ (67–9). The classical/erotic world of ‘Nymphs’ could not save Lycidas. Nor could Orpheus, himself a fictive being, be saved by his poetic mother: . . . the Muse herself that Orpheus bore, The Muse herself, for her enchanting son Whom Universal nature did lament, When by the rout that made the hideous roar, His gory visage down the stream was sent, Down the swift Hebrus to the Lesbian shore. (58–63)

Like Waller, Milton both uses and rationally dismisses the mythological code that had become a standard language of court poetry, particularly when referring to women. But in Milton’s poem, this rationalization becomes part of a dramatic portrayal of the speaker’s fear and disappointment when he realizes that poetic conceits are fictions. Waller, on the other hand, uses the Orpheus myth in his prefatory address to describe the physical published volume rather than the vulnerable poet; in a mash-up of the

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authorial humility topos and erotic masochism, he revels in the thought of his book torn to pieces by ‘faire’ hands. Yet, in spite of his embarrassed sense in the 1640s that writing poems was out of place in a newly masculine world, Waller found his way back to poetry, just as he returned to Parliament for a long and distinguished career. Perhaps Waller’s poetry thrived in a political setting weighted by a strong presence, whereas Denham blossomed in shifting uncertainties. Before the Civil Wars Waller had written poems such as ‘Upon His Majesty’s repairing of Pauls’ in support of Charles’s controversial project of restoring English churches, in which he imagines Charles as a mythic artist: ‘like Amphion | . . . in his art of regiment is found | A power like that of harmony in sound’.44 In 1642, when the speaker of Coopers Hill peers through the haze of London’s smog, Paul’s rises above the city: ‘Secure, while thee the best of Poets sings | Preserv’d from ruine by the best of Kings’ (19–20).45 To praise Waller and his poem, Denham firmly places the mantle of artistry on the poet by appropriating Ben Jonson’s epigram to James I that begins: ‘How, best of Kings, do’st thou a scepter beare! | How, best of Poets, do’st thou laurell weare!’46 In Denham’s revised formulation, the King is no longer the poet; the poet has assumed his own crucial place. Indeed, Waller would later try to be a king-maker. His ‘Panegyrick to my Lord Protector’, published in 1655, strongly suggests that Cromwell is virtually a monarch since he is a Caesar, an Alexander, a David, ‘Born to command’ (135). ‘Upon the Present War with Spain, and the First Victory Obtained at Sea’, written in 1658, explicitly encourages Cromwell to accept the crown. Yet two years later Waller would deftly welcome Charles II’s return. No doubt one reason we do not think of Edmund Waller as a ‘Cavalier’ is that he was willing to accommodate, to respond and adjust to the times. On the other hand, his younger contemporary Richard Lovelace defined himself in opposition.

RICHARD LOVELACE:

POET AS ARISTOCRAT

.................................................................................................................. Richard Lovelace best fits the stereotype of the Cavalier. His beauty and wit were much admired at the Caroline court. He wrote risqué seduction poems, and embraced the role of noble soldier. He was one of the ‘swordsmen’ who fought in the 1640 Bishops’ War with General George Goring, although he did not fight in the English Civil Wars. Imprisoned twice for his loyalty to the King, Lovelace died impoverished in 1657, having spent his wealth on the royalist cause.47 In recent years Lovelace has been well served by the sustained attention of outstanding critics.48 Nevertheless, his Lucasta is an uneven volume with a few memorable lyrics and one great ode (‘The Grasshopper’). If he had not had the poetic good fortune of living in difficult times, losing the court, being imprisoned, and appearing in print as the archetypal Cavalier, Richard Lovelace might barely be remembered today.

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Lovelace wrote his best poetry in the 1640s, and during these years he and friends lived the Cavalier ideal of social and intellectual exchange in the patronage circle around Thomas Stanley.49 Although it was licensed in 1648, Lucasta was published in May 1649, after Charles’s execution, and it is possible that some form of censorship caused its delay.50 Its royalist bona fides are many. Of its sixty-one poems, seventeen are specifically identified as having been set to music by composers associated with the court, such as Henry Lawes, John Wilson, and John Lanier. The prologue and epilogue of Lovelace’s own (now lost) play The Scholar and Lovelace’s melancholy poem praising Fletcher’s published plays and lamenting the spreading cultural ‘darknesse’ demonstrate his loyalty to the now-darkened stage. Lucasta begins with commendatory poems by fourteen admirers, including Andrew Marvell, and the overall tenor of the praise is royalist. Most explicit is John Pinchback: ‘Now when the wars augment our woes and fears | And the shrill noise of drums oppresse our eares’, when ‘all the graces from the Land are sent, | And the nine Muses suffer banishment’, Lovelace will ‘raise up by musicke of the Arts | Our drooping spirits and our grieved hearts’. Like Orpheus in hell, Lovelace will make ‘the damned to forget their smart’.51 With his characteristically deflective wit, Marvell in his commendatory poem ‘To his Noble Friend’ imagines a troupe of undressed ladies ‘in mutiny’ (39) against Presbyterian censorship or Parliament’s rule, sallying forth to protect ‘their deare Lovelace’ (34). And, indeed, Lovelace’s most famous poems are song lyrics connecting war and the love of women. One refutes Lucasta’s disappointment that he has found ‘a new Mistresse | . . . A Sword, a Horse, a Shield’ (‘To Lucasta, Going to the Warres’, 5, 8). Instead, going to war is a perverse testimony to Lucasta: ‘I could not love thee (Deare) so much, | Lov’d I not Honour more’ (11–12). Another, ‘To Althea, From Prison’, imagines a series of delicious imprisonments: entangled in Althea’s hair and eyes; in intoxication; and in praising the King, ‘how Good | He is, how Great should be’ (22). As long as he has ‘freedome in my Love, | And in my soule am free’, ‘Stone Walls doe not a Prison make, | Nor I’ron bars a Cage’ (25–9). There is no honour or innocence, however, in ‘The faire Begger’, a poem that invokes the plight of royalist women in the 1640s and uses it as an opportunity for sexual coercion. The speaker addresses a woman who is hungry: In all ill yeares, wa’st ever knowne On so much beauty such a dearth? Which in that thrice-bequeathed gowne Lookes like the Sun Eclipst with Earth, Like Gold in Canvas, or with dirt Unsoyled Ermins close begirt. (7–12)

If she refuses to drink ‘Nectar’ from his ‘starry Cup’ (21) or be covered with his body, however, she can starve. Lovelace takes the Caroline cult of platonic love and sets it aflame with the hostility of war. Recent criticism of Lucasta has wrangled about where on the political spectrum his poetry places Lovelace: unshakable royalist, disappointed royalist, or determined

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neutralist. Given the evidence of his poetry, this question seems impossible to answer. But Thomas Corns has persuasively identified a nostalgic recall of ‘the chivalric loyalism of the feudal era’ shaping Lovelace’s poetry.52 Dudley Lovelace, in his poem praising his eldest brother, recognizes something similar: His is ‘but a Yonger-BrotherWit ’ and he is just ‘a Squire’ attending ‘the Knight’ (p. 13). The Lovelace brothers’ very romanticization of chivalry indicates the powerful stress the English Revolution placed on the patrilineal social structure. The war against the King put in question the wider concept of patriarchal primogeniture, the right of the eldest son to inherit land and power. Lucasta shows us one way that an individual and his family understood each other in these years of political and social crisis. Herrick’s Hesperides (to which we shall turn shortly) will show us another. Lucasta includes a number of Lovelaces. While Richard Lovelace addresses a series of conventional pastoral characters, the book is explicitly dedicated, for example, to a specific woman, his titled cousin’s wife Anne, Lady Lovelace, who is promised jewels and toys within the pages to follow.53 Lucasta’s first commendatory poem is by Richard’s younger brother Francis. His conceit is that Lucasta is Lovelace’s first-born son, with a continuous pun on the light of the sun. The commendatory poems are imagined as paying tribute in the way university volumes had when Henrietta Maria gave birth.54 But now Lovelace is the queen and Lucasta the heir apparent: As when some glorious Queen, whose pregnant wombe Brings forth a Kingdome, with her first borne Sonne; Marke but the Subjects joyfull hearts, and eyes, Some offer Gold, and others Sacrifice; This slayes a Lambe, That not so rich as hee, Brings but a Dove, This but a bended knee; And though their gifts be various, yet their sense Speaks only this one thought, Long live the Prince. (2)

Herrick had begun Hesperides, published a year earlier, in a similar way, but he was paying tribute to the actual Prince of Wales: ‘Well may my Book come forth like Publique Day, | When such a Light as You are leads the way.’55 Francis Lovelace shifts the rhetoric of courtly poetry unambiguously away from the Stuarts, to crown his brother. Richard Lovelace himself addresses a poem to his brother Francis who ‘immoderately mourn[s] my Brothers untimely Death at Carmarthen’, where their brother William had been killed while serving under Francis’s command. The poem, a translation of a widely admired Latin poem by Casimir Sarbiewski, says nothing about their lost brother. It insists on a steely resistance to tears in order to defeat fate: But this way you may gaine the field, Oppose but sorrow and ’twill yield; One gallant thorough-made Resolve Doth Starry Influence dissolve. (17–20)

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Lovelace, who did not actually fight for the King in the English Civil Wars, offers his younger brother only the comfort of a hardened heart.

ROBERT HERRICK:

POETRY AND THE

KINGDOM OF DEATH

.................................................................................................................. The combination of ritual and individuality in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides is arguably the greatest achievement of royalist poetry as it grappled with profound change. Aspects of Hesperides are formally conventional and politically conservative. But its familial intimacy and domesticity, its private obsessions and mythologies, make the book deeply moving and strange. Herrick shapes poetry he had been writing for three decades into his own idiosyncratic amalgam—performances in the service of court culture; a homely family album; epigrams and lyrics in imitation of Martial, Catullus, Anacreon and Horace; poems enacting English country rituals, erotic stripteases, and pragmatic political analysis. In 1646, Herrick had been expelled from the living he had held at Dean Prior in Devonshire since 1629; by 1647 he was in London, where he was closely involved in arranging his poems for publication in early 1648.56 From its title to its concluding gravestone and epitaph, Hesperides is a self-conscious print performance.57 Yet, understandably, the dizzying multiplicity of Hesperides is rarely considered as a whole (Hesperides alone has 1,130 poems, 1,400 counting its companion Noble Numbers). Rather, individual poems like ‘Corinna’s Going a-Maying’ or ‘To the Virgins to make much of time’ are anthologized as representative of this vast lyric epic. But to read only the carpe diem or ‘Julia’ poems undercuts Hesperides’ response to the troubled world into which Herrick deliberately sent it.58 The English Revolution pervades Hesperides, inflecting love lyrics, political sententiae, poems in praise of the royal family, and the many, many poems about Herrick himself and his own family. Herrick’s decision finally to publish poetry he had long circulated among patrons and friends in manuscript is explicitly tied to the changed world of the 1640s. The poet sends forth ‘his Booke’ (H-405) conventionally: ‘Have I not blest Thee? Then go forth; nor fear | Or spice, or fish, or fire, or close-stools here’ (1–2). The usual humiliating purposes to which paper is put do not worry the poet, however. It is joining the mob of popular ballads in print that fills him with nervous scorn: ‘Nor thinke these Ages that do hoarcely sing | The farting Tanner, and familiar King’ . . . ‘Shall live, and thou not superlast all times?’ (5–6; 14). That ballads about the ‘farting Tanner, and familiar King’, the ‘Maide of Gingerbred’ (10) and ‘little Robin Rush’ (8) sound like demotic sources for Herrick’s own poems of country ritual and bodily grossness makes his address to his published book amusingly defensive. Yet he does send his book forth, determined to be a presence in changing times. The poet borrows astronomical language from his poems for the royal family to promise immortality for himself:

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No, no, thy Stars have destin’d Thee to see The whole world die, and turn to dust with thee. He’s greedie of his life, who will not fall, When as a publick ruine bears down All. (15–18)

This final sententia connects Herrick’s published poetry with the English Revolution, promising a kind of salvation for himself by self-destruction. Beginning with the large image of a crown on its title page, Hesperides makes clear its loyalty to the King. Throughout Hesperides are intermixed a number of royalist poems written years before (such as the pastoral dialogue sung at court to honour the birth of Prince Charles in 1630) as well as poems written in the 1640s. Hesperides opens with a dedication to ‘To the Most Illustrious, and Most Hopefull Prince, Charles, Prince of Wales’, a poem Herrick probably wrote in 1640 when Charles turned 10. Also placed early in the book is a pair of poems written during the First Civil War and addressed to Charles and Henrietta Maria, ‘To the King, Upon his comming with his Army into the West’ (H-77; Charles was in Exeter in the summer of 1645) and ‘To the King and Queene, upon their unhappy distances’ (H-79; Henrietta Maria went abroad in 1642 and then again, permanently, in 1644). The most poignant poem to the royal family is the one placed latest in Hesperides, ‘To the King, Upon his welcome to HamptonCourt’ (H-961). Herrick indicates that this poem was ‘Set and Sung’ before Charles as part of an arrival ceremony. Many people of various political positions hoped that the King would agree to proposals of power-sharing during this period of loose imprisonment at Hampton Court (from 24 August until 11 November 1647). The singer of Herrick’s welcome is full of love for the King, but also apprehension that, once again, things could go wrong: Enter and prosper, while our eyes doe waite For an Ascendent thoroughly Auspicate: Under which signe we may the former stone Lay of our safeties new foundation. (9–12)

The auspicious sign never did come; instead, Charles’s flight from Hampton Court precipitated his end. In retrospect, the song’s chorus, ‘Long live the King; and to accomplish this, | We’l from our owne, adde far more years to his’ (19–20), becomes part of Hesperides’ fascination with rituals of death. Indeed, a sense of doom about the King’s fate pervades Hesperides. ‘Upon the troublesome times’ (H-596), for example, one of Herrick’s most effective poems written in the 1640s, turns four times on a tight spiral of rhyme: O! Times most bad, Without the scope Of hope Of better to be had!

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2. Where shall I goe, Or whither run To shun This publique overthrow? 3. No places are (This I am sure) Secure In this our wasting Warre. 4. Some storms w’ave past; Yet we must all Down fall, And perish at the last.

Hesperides is explicitly committed to the King’s cause, but the tenor of the volume is very different from Lovelace’s code of military honour. Facing the title page’s crown, the frontispiece portrays, against the background of cupids, Pegasus, Helicon, and a pastoral garden, the bust of a jowly, hook-nosed, curly-bewigged Herrick atop a pillar: a man half living, half dead (Figure 11.1). Inscribed on the plinth under his bust is a Latin verse that aptly describes Herrick’s poetic intentions: ‘Tempora et Illa Tibi mollis redimisset Olivia; | Scilicet excludis Versibus Arma tuis’ (‘The peaceful olive should these brows entwine, | For arms are banished from such verse as thine’.).59 Hesperides indeed extends the court’s pastoral imagery and its love of song to the war. For example, in ‘A Pastorall sung to the King’ (H-421) two shepherds mourn: ‘Montano: Bad are the times. Silvio: And wors then they are we’ (1). The sad shepherds go off to sing with Mirtillo, who clearly represents the King, missing Henrietta Maria who is gone ‘Where she and I shall never meet together’ (30). Music had saturated Caroline court culture, and Herrick wrote many of his lyrics to be set to music, not only for court performances but also for good times with friends. ‘A Lyrick to Mirth’ (H-111) exemplifies the Horatian, Jonsonian spirit that appears many times in Hesperides: While the milder Fates consent, Let’s enjoy our merryment: Drink, and dance, and pipe, and play; Kisse our Dollies night and day: Crown’d with clusters of the Vine; Let us sit, and quaffe our wine. (1–6)

It is all the more striking, then, when in ‘The bad season makes the Poet sad’ (H-612) the speaker sinks into depression as the world without the King looms: Dull to my selfe, and almost dead to these My many fresh and fragrant Mistresses: Lost to all Musick now; since every thing Puts on the semblance here of sorrowing.

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F I G U R E 1 1 . 1 Sculptured bust of Robert Herrick on a pedestal with inscription, engraved frontispiece to Herrick, Hesperides (1648) # The Trustees of the British Museum, 1896, 1230.83.

Sick is the Land to’th’heart; and doth endure More dangerous faintings by her desp’rate cure. (1–6)

‘Lost to all Musick’, the Poet moves his poetry into print, ‘dull’ to himself, ‘almost dead’, although he continues to hope for a return of the ‘golden Age’ (7) and Charles’s return to rule, when the Poet could once more ‘have my Curles half drown’d | In Tyrian Dewes, and Head with Roses crown’d’ (11–12).

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Songs are only part of the generic mix of Hesperides. Many hundreds of the poems in Hesperides and Noble Numbers are adages, maxims, proverbs, and nuggets of arcane learning shaped into a couplet or quatrain. Herrick no doubt added to this versified commonplace book throughout his life, but a number were either written in the 1640s or take on a topical resonance in light of the Civil Wars. Typical of a commonplace book, the adages concern recurring themes (such as the limits of a prince’s power, the influence of the multitude, and the need for wise counsel) and are often contradictory. Some espouse a classicized version of divine right monarchy such as ‘The Difference Betwixt Kings and Subjects’ (H-25): ‘Twixt Kings and Subjects ther’s this mighty odds, | Subjects are taught by Men; Kings by the Gods’. Or ‘Duty to Tyrants’ (H-97): Good Princes must be pray’d for: for the bad They must be borne with, and in rev’rence had. Doe they first pill thee, next, pluck off thy skin? Good children kisse the Rods, that punish sin. Touch not the Tyrant; Let the Gods alone To strike him dead, that but usurps a Throne.

Others, like ‘Obedience’ (H-1073) are much more pragmatic: The Power of Princes rests in the Consent Of onely those, who are obedient: Which if away, proud Scepters then will lye Low, and of Thrones the Ancient Majesty.

A number offer counsel along the lines of ‘Strength to support Soveraignty’ (H-971): ‘Let Kings and Rulers, learne this line from me; | Where power is weake, unsafe is Majestie’. London’s centrality in the English Revolution is suggested in ‘Peace not Permanent’ (H-1030): ‘Great Cities seldome rest: If there be none | T’invade from far: They’l finde worse foes at home.’ And ‘Present Government grievous’ (H-921) is a general warning to every side: ‘Men are suspicious; prone to discontent: | Subjects still loath the present Government.’ The multitude haunts Hesperides and the King. ‘Ill Government’ (H-536) is disdainful: ‘Preposterous is that Government, (and rude) | When Kings obey the wilder Multitude.’ But ‘The power in the people’ (H-345) is resigned: ‘Let Kings Command, and doe the best they may, | The saucie Subjects still will beare the sway.’ Rituals are enacted repeatedly in this book written by a defrocked minister of the Church of England: some rituals are High Church, but many are pagan.60 Kissing games, burial rites for roses, going a-maying, and harvest home contribute to Hesperides’ puzzling charm. While his devotion to ceremony no doubt signals a cultural allegiance to Charles and Laud’s religious reforms, ceremony also seems to be a personal pleasure for Herrick, whose religious beliefs are deeply involved with his private mythology. Virtually every line of ‘The Transfiguration’ (H-819), for example, is a biblical allusion, yet this is a poem to Julia, Hesperides’ pre-eminent lyric mistress:

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Immortal clothing I put on, So soone as Julia I am gon To mine eternall Mansion. Thou, thou art here, to humane sight Cloth’d all with incorrupted light; But yet how more admir’dly bright Wilt thou appear, when thou art set In thy refulgent Thronelet, That shin’st thus in thy counterfeit?

The most overtly royalist rituals embraced by Hesperides and Noble Numbers are from the Christmas season (there are more than a dozen poems), particularly the pieces he wrote for performance at the Caroline court. Noble Numbers includes, for example, a lyric sung on 1 January, the feast of the circumcision, before Charles at Whitehall: Prepare for Songs; He’s come, He’s come; And be it sin here to be dumb, And not with Lutes to fill the roome. Cast Holy Water all about, And have a care no fire gos out, But ’cense the porch, and place throughout. (N-97; 1–6)

It is hard to think of a more provocative subject in 1648. In general, however, Herrick’s religious poetry uses simplicity rather than elaborate ritual as a form of devotion. The resulting poems are strikingly different from Herbert’s complex self-consciousness or Milton’s combination of learning and passion. The simple prayer ‘To God, in time of plundering’ (N-124) is probably a response to the Civil Wars, particularly the widespread raiding in the West Country: Rapine has yet tooke nought from me; But if it please my God, I be Brought at the last to th’utmost bit, God make me thankfull still for it. I have been gratefull for my store: Let me say grace when there’s no more.

Well over half of Noble Numbers, the book of religious poems published with Hesperides, are gathered adages, some written soon before publication. At least twenty poems, for example, are versified passages from the orientalist and biblical scholar John Gregory’s 1646 Notes and Observations upon some passages of Scripture, such as ‘Penitence’ (N-206): The Doctors, in the Talmud, say, That in this world, one onely day In true repentance spent, will be More worth, then Heav’ns Eternitie.

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A handful of poems written for court services, such as ‘A Christmas Caroll, sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall’ (N-96), add a royalist lustre to Noble Numbers. Others use kingship as a vehicle for religious meditation. Imagining Christ as an actor and a king, ‘Good Friday: Rex Tragicus, or Christ going to His Crosse’ (N-263) eerily foreshadows the theatre of Charles’s execution a year later, and the role of Christ-like, tragic actor that would be crafted for him in Eikon Basilike: Thine houre is come; and the Tormentor stands Ready, to pierce Thy tender Feet, and Hands. Long before this, the base, the dull, the rude, Th’inconstant, the unpurged Multitude Yawne for Thy coming . . . Why then begin, great King! Ascend Thy Throne, And thence proceed, to act Thy Passion To such an height, to such a period rais’d, As Hell, and Earth, and Heav’n may stand amaz’d. (3–7; 28–31)

Christ’s crucifixion becomes a performance governed by the rules of art, a royalist ritual of death. The powerful centring force of Hesperides, however, is not the King, but the poet Robert Herrick. There are twenty-eight poems ‘on himself’ and to his book and the name ‘Herrick’ is worked into the fabric of more than thirty others. There are, in addition, thirty-odd poems to his family members: father, mother, brothers, sister, sisters-in-law, cousins, nephews, and nieces. There are more than sixty poems to his friends from Cambridge, from his time at court, Devon, and London. Some poems are bids for patronage or compliments to important cultural figures like Selden, but many seem to be simply signs of friendship or admiration. Several praise other artists such as Ben Jonson (a number of times), Henry and William Lawes, Denham, Mildmay Fane, and John Hall. Dozens of additional poems address parishioners in Dean Prior (not always kindly). These poems of friendship and personal detail are, to an extent, conventional. Jonson, for example, invites friends to supper or a drinking session, writes a number of poems meant to immortalize the names of admirable persons, and works his own name into ‘On My First Sonne’ and the Cary–Morison Ode. Many seventeenth-century poets imitated classical poems on everyday life, such as Catullus on Lesbia’s sparrow, Horace on going grey, and Martial on pets. But Herrick’s many poems on his little household routines, his parishioners in Dean Prior, his beloved spaniel Tracy (H-967), his pet lamb, and his excellent mousing cat (H-724) feel authentically intimate. Several sweet poems praise his maid Prudence Baldwin (including her epitaph (H-782), although she lived for another thirty years after Hesperides was published) and their happy life together: Here, here I live with what my Board, Can with the smallest cost afford.

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Though ne’r so mean the Viands be, They well content my Prew and me. ... We blesse our Fortunes, when we see Our own beloved privacie. (H-552 ‘His content in the Country’, 1–4; 17–18)

The overwhelming presence of family and friends, and of the everyday life of a man named Robin (his preferred nickname) Herrick, moves Hesperides out of convention and into a paradox of ‘beloved privacie’ made public. The sheer, astonishing number of poems in Hesperides underscores Herrick’s silence after 1648. Since the publication of Hesperides seems to have been precipitated and shaped by the Civil Wars, Herrick’s ejection from his living in Dean Prior, and his return to London, it could be argued that the execution of the King and the end of courtly ritual destroyed Herrick’s source of inspiration.61 It seems closer to the truth that Herrick buried the Poet in order to send his book into the world, for ritual death is the price to rule the ‘vast Dominion’ of Hesperides (H-592). The King’s troubles make ‘the Poet sad’ (H-612), but Herrick’s obsession with death is also directly tied to his family history. His father died an apparent suicide when Herrick was a toddler and was hastily buried in an unmarked grave in St Vedast parish, London.62 Herrick’s moving poem ‘To the reverend shade of his religious Father’ (H-82) begs forgiveness for not performing burial rituals: Forgive, forgive me; since I did not know Whether thy bones had here their Rest, or no. But now ’tis known, Behold; behold, I bring Unto thy Ghost, th’ Effused Offering. (5–8)

The formulaic promise of immortality takes on a poignant particularity in this poem to Nicholas Herrick, a father he could not have remembered but for whom he is willing to die: ‘For my life mortall, Rise from out thy Herse, | And take a life immortall from my Verse’ (15–16). Herrick’s urge to gather his family together, to build a poetic domain, and to bury himself within it is illuminated by ‘On himselfe’ (H-860): Though while we living ’bout the world do roame, We love to rest in peacefull Urnes at home, Where we may snug, and close together lye By the dead bones of our deare Ancestrie. (5–8)

That ‘snug’ dwelling is 1648’s published volume. Herrick’s 1648 poems are arranged in two books: Hesperides and then Noble Numbers (although they have separate title pages, the signatures are continuous throughout the volume). Each book ends with a group of poems on death: Hesperides with the death of Herrick, Noble Numbers with the death of Christ and the empty sepulchre. Herrick’s justly famous carpe diem poems are, of course, impelled by mortality. Death motivates the joyful invitation of ‘Corinna’s going a Maying’ (H-178), for example:

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Come, let us goe, while we are in our prime; And take the harmlesse follie of the time. We shall grow old apace, and die Before we know our liberty. (57–60)

And a poem like ‘To live merrily, and to trust to Good Verses’ (H-201) promises conventional poetic immortality. But the more than sixty poems devoted to imagining ceremonies for Herrick’s death go far beyond poetic convention. Herrick chooses his own dirges, directs his own funeral services, and erects his own gravestone. Sometimes the poet buries his mistresses before he dies, as he does in ‘To Anthea’ (H-22): If, deare Anthea, my hard fate it be To live some few-sad-howers after thee: Thy sacred Corse with Odours I will burne; And with my Lawrell crown thy Golden Urne. Then holding up (there) such religious Things, As were (time past) thy holy Filitings: Nere to thy Reverend Pitcher I will fall Down dead for grief, and end my woes withal: So three in one small plat of ground shall ly, Anthea, Herrick, and his Poetry.

More often he imagines them burying him, most often Julia. ‘His last request to Julia’ (H-1095), for example, is part of the closing movement of Hesperides: I have been wanton, and too bold I feare, To chafe o’re much the Virgins cheek or eare: Beg for my Pardon Julia; He doth winne Grace with the Gods, who’s sorry for his sinne. That done, my Julia, dearest Julia, come, And go with me to chuse my Buriall roome: My Fates are ended; when thy Herrick dyes, Claspe thou his Book, then close thou up his Eyes.

At the end of the book, it is the poet who is crowned and whose kingdom will survive. The poet’s ‘wearied Barke’ has reached its haven: ‘O Let it now be Crown’d!’ (‘To Crowne it’, H-1127). ‘The worke is done: young men, and maidens set | Upon my curles the Mirtle Coronet’ (‘On Himselfe’, H-1128, 1–2). ‘The Pillar of Fame’ (H1129) is his gravestone: 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

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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.

Centred in the pillar, the angry ‘outrages’ points to the fallen kingdom, into which Hesperides ventures. The reference to the Stuart’s troubles makes even clearer that Herrick’s poetry will abide, whether the King loses or not. The Poet is dead, but the poetry will survive. Literary scholars have too often conceived of the English Revolution as splitting ‘seventeenth-century poetry’ from the literature of the Stuart restoration. The revolution against the King did change a cultural system that allowed an elite knit together by court and coterie circles to see themselves as standing apart from the literate crowd outside. But to imagine that Cavalier poetry came to an end in the 1640s is a fiction with roots in the partisan debates of the time. Tolerant, impassioned, nostalgic, innovative, intimate, and public—Cavalier poetry played a fully involved role in the literary discourse of the English Revolution and beyond.

NOTES I am grateful to Alastair Bellany, Thomas Fulton, and Michael McKeon, my invaluable colleagues at Rutgers, for their advice as this chapter progressed. 1. Upon Appleton House, 42. All references to Marvell are to The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Smith. 2. Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing and the literary analysis of a historian, Sharpe, in Criticism and Compliment, and with Zwicker, Politics of Discourse, initiated a sustained re-evaluation. Other important studies are: Anselment, Loyalist Resolve; Hammond, Fleeting Things; Loxley, Royalism and Poetry; Summers and Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination; Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660; de Groot, Royalist Identities; and McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance. Important books on the period that consider both royalist and parliamentarian authors include: Corns, Uncloistered Virtue; Zwicker, Lines of Authority; Smith, Literature and Revolution; and Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. Royalism was similarly understudied by historians until recently. An important exception is Wormald’s Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion. See also Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead; Smith, Constitutional Royalism; and McElligott and Smith (eds.) Royalists and Royalism. 3. See McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, for a useful parsing of the terms Cavalier, royalist, and loyalist (5–6). McElligott’s study of the royalist newsbooks published in

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

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London 1647–50 also makes a long overdue case for broadening our understanding of royalism to include women and non-elite men. Cited by Roy, ‘Royalist Reputations’, 90. Cited ibid. 91. Taylor, The Noble Cavalier Caracterized, 1. The Complete Poetry, ed. Patrick, 44–5. Further references to Herrick’s poetry will be to this edition and will cite Patrick’s numbering of the poems in Hesperides and Noble Numbers. The currently available teaching edition, for example, is Maclean (ed.), Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets. Johnson, ‘Life of Cowley’, in The Lives of the Poets, in Works, ed. Middendorf, xxi. 23–48. ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 281–91. Other possible candidates include but are not limited to: Sir John Suckling, Thomas Carew, James Shirley, William Cartwright, John Cleveland, Alexander Brome, Henry Vaughan, and Abraham Cowley. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Clark, i. 217. A notable exception is Miner’s The Cavalier Mode whose definition of Cavalier as a ‘mode’ allows him to range across much of the seventeenth century, grouping poets by ‘certain styles, certain recurring subjects, certain recurring approaches, and certain cultural assumptions’ (vii). See Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print’; Coiro, ‘Milton and Class Identity’; Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England; and Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Cowley had already published Poetical Blossoms as a boy wonder in 1633, 1636, and 1637. I accept Zaret’s argument in Origins of Democratic Culture that the origins of the public sphere should be traced to the 1640s and include print as well as voiced discussion (it is also worth noting, however, that a great deal of royalist lyric poetry was written for performance). McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, makes a convincing case for Marvell’s participation in a literary circle around Thomas Stanley. Even then, Marvell’s poetry would have been known only to a limited group. Dryden, Works, ed. Smith and MacMillan, viii. 100. On Denham’s strong influence on Dryden, see Caldwell, ‘John Dryden and John Denham’. Any scholarly work on Denham is indebted to O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, which provides the poem’s manuscript versions and the two major print version (1642 and 1655). O Hehir works with six manuscripts (see ‘The Exemplars of Coopers Hill’ in Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 41–55). The earliest extant manuscript version belonged to the first Earl of Bridgewater, the patron of Milton’s Maske. Here and throughout my discussion of Coopers Hill I am indebted to Michael McKeon’s observations. 1655 edition, ll. 353–8 (O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 162). All references to the 1642 edition will be to ‘A’ Text: Draft III, O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 109–34. For a comparison of Coopers Hill and Appleton House see Turner, The Politics of Landscape.

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24. The major scholarship on Coopers Hill has seen it as an early template for neoclassicism. See Wasserman’s discussion of Denham’s use of discordia concors (The Subtler Language, 45–88) and Paul Korshin, ‘The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics’. 25. In 1655, the powerful are treated with much more respect. ‘The aery Mountain’ frowns down ‘While winds and storms his lofty forehead beat: | The common fate of all that’s high or great’ (O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 152). 26. See Coiro, ‘ “A Ball of Strife” ’. 27. IV.135–7. Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Hughes. Milton may have intended a private joke as well, since the speaker of Coopers Hill asserts that the choice of Windsor Hill was obvious: ‘For none commends his judgement, that doth chuse | That which a blind man onely could refuse’ (73–4). 28. Connections between Denham and Milton are usually limited to weighing the validity of Jonathan Richardson’s anecdote of Denham coming into Parliament in 1667 waving a sheet of Paradise Lost and saying it was ‘part of the noblest poem that was ever wrote in any language or in any age’ (Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost, cxx). 29. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 321. Denham’s editor, O Hehir, sees him as taking ‘a firm stand’ with Laud and Charles and their goal of returning the beauty of ritual to the British Protestant Church (194–5); this too seems like special pleading. Wallace focuses on the 1641 manuscript version as ‘a historical document’ (‘Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’). 30. O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 206 and passim. See also Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law and Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’. 31. See Lamont, Marginal Prynne: 1600–1669, 93–8. 32. Denham added his name and several revisions to the 1643 edition. 33. ll. 190; 191–2 (O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, 151). 34. Poems, ed. Thorn-Drury. 35. In addition to Norbrook, see Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, and Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, on Waller in the Cromwellian period. 36. Thomas Carew, ‘In answer of an Elegiacall Letter upon the death of the King of Sweden from Aurelian Townsend, inviting me to write on that subject’, in Poems, ed. Dunlap, 97. 37. ‘To the King’, Poems and Translations, with The Sophy, A2v. 38. See Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 101–8. 39. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication, 157–225. 40. Moseley sets up Walkley’s edition as a straw man, arguing that ‘an adultrate Copy, surreptitiously and illegally printed, to the derogation of the Author, and the abuse of the Buyer’ has necessitated the new printing. This is disingenuous, since Moseley was using Walkley’s edition. See Raylor, ‘Moseley, Walkley, and the 1645 Editions of Waller’. 41. On the publication of parliamentary speeches and pseudo-speeches see Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, passim; and Cromartie, ‘The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642’. 42. See Raylor, ‘Early Poetic Career’, and Kaminski, ‘Edmund Waller, English Précieux’. 43. A2r, 4th edition. Lady Sophia Bertie has been the leading contender, but Raylor believes she is Lady Sophia Murray, a good friend of Waller’s (‘Early Poetic Career’). 44. Poems, ed. Drury, 16. Further references to Waller’s poetry will be to this edition.

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45. Since Waller’s poem had not yet been published, Denham’s prominent notice begins its movement from a wide manuscript circulation to its eventual publication in Waller’s 1645 Poems. Waller is acknowledged in the margin of every edition of Coopers Hill. 46. Complete Poetry, ed. Hunter, 5. 47. Lovelace fought in the Bishops’ War in Scotland in 1639. As a condition of his release from prison after the Kentish uprising in 1642, he may have agreed not to fight against the King. I am indebted throughout to Anselment’s entry on Lovelace in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 48. See e.g. Hammond’s lively and controversial essay ‘Richard Lovelace and the Uses of Obscurity’, and the extensive discussions of Lovelace in Corns, Uncloistered Virtue and McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance. 49. A circle reconstructed by McDowell in Poetry and Allegiance. 50. Marvell devotes the middle third of ‘To his Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace, upon his Poems’ to the moral and political suspicions surrounding his book (‘The barbèd Censurers begin to look | Like the grim consistory on thy book; | And on each line cast a reforming eye’ (ll. 21–3)). Lucasta’s final poem, ‘Aramantha. A Pastorall’, was added after licensing. 51. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. Wilkinson, 5. Further references to the 1649 Lucasta will be to this edition. 52. Uncloistered Virtue, 74. 53. Anne was the wife of Lord Lovelace of Hurley. At least one other poem in Lucasta, ‘The Lady A. L. My Asylum in a great extremity’, is probably also addressed to her. 54. Several of the poets writing Lucasta’s commendatory poems had contributed to such university volumes, including Marvell (and Lovelace himself). 55. Patrick argues that Herrick wrote this poem for the volume registered in 1640, and meant to mark Prince Charles’s formal presentation as Prince of Wales and initiation into the Order of the Garter (9). 56. Hesperides comes first, although its title page date is 1648, and Noble Numbers is 1647. 57. Most wittily, Herrick writes a poem to introduce the volume’s errata, which begins ‘For these Transgressions which thou here dost see, | Condemne the Printer, Reader, and not me’, The Complete Poetry, ed. Patrick, 8. 58. In ‘Robert Herrick and the Makings of Hesperides’, Ingram takes issue with aspects of my own earlier argument for the ‘integrity’ of Hesperides (Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition). Ingram is right about Herrick’s unease about print; nevertheless, Herrick’s understanding that he was publishing his poems in a material book and his attempt to fashion a textual place where his friends, family, and he himself can live after death are manifest throughout Hesperides. 59. Grosart’s translation, from Patrick’s edition, 8. 60. There is a significant body of criticism devoted to ritual in Herrick. See e.g. DeNeef, ‘This Poetick Liturgie’; Deming, Ceremony and Art; Marcus, The Politics of Mirth; and Guibbory, Ceremony and Community. 61. A volume registered in 1640 never appeared. 62. I am indebted to Cain’s entry on Herrick in the Oxford DNB.

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WORKS CITED Anselment, Raymond. Loyalist Resolve: Patient Fortitude in the English Civil War. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988. ——. ‘Lovelace, Richard (1617–1657)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Aubrey, John. Brief Lives, vol. i, ed. Andrew Clark. Oxford: Clarendon, 1898. Cain, Thomas. ‘Herrick, Robert (bap. 1591, d. 1674)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Caldwell, Tanya. ‘John Dryden and John Denham’. TSLL 46 (2004), 49–72. Carew, Thomas. Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap. Oxford: Clarendon, 1949. Coiro, Ann Baynes. Robert Herrick’s Hesperides and the Epigram Book Tradition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. ——. ‘Milton and Class Identity: The Publication of Areopagitica and the 1645 Poems’. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 22 (1992), 261–89. ——. ‘ “A Ball of Strife”: Caroline Poetry and Royal Marriage’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 26–46. Corns, Thomas. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Cowley, Abraham. Poetical Blossoms. London, 1633, 1636, and 1637. Cromartie, A. D. T. ‘The Printing of Parliamentary Speeches, November 1640–July 1642’. Historical Journal 33 (1990), 23–44. Deming, Robert H. Ceremony and Art: Robert Herrick’s Poetry. The Hague: Mouton, 1974. DeNeef, A. Leigh. ‘This Poetick Liturgie’: Robert Herrick’s Ceremonial Mode. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1974. Denham, John. ‘To the King’, in Poems and Translations, with The Sophy. London, 1668. Dryden, John. Works, ed. John Harrington Smith and Dougald MacMillan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Eliot, T. S. ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in Selected Essays. London: Faber, 1972, 281–91. Groot, Jerome de. Royalist Identities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Guibbory, Achsah. Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hammond, Gerald. ‘Richard Lovelace and the Uses of Obscurity’. Proceedings of the British Academy 71 (1985), 203–34. ——. Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems, 1616–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Herrick, Robert. The Complete Poetry, ed. J. Max Patrick. New York: New York University Press, 1968. Holberton, Edward. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Ingram, Randall. ‘Robert Herrick and the Makings of Hesperides’. SEL 38 (1998), 127–47. Johnson, Samuel. ‘Life of Cowley’, in The Lives of the Poets, in Works, ed. John H. Middendorf. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, xxi. 23–48. Jonson, Ben. Complete Poetry, ed. William B. Hunter Jr. New York: New York University Press, 1963.

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Kaminski, Thomas. ‘Edmund Waller, English Précieux’. Philological Quarterly 79 (2000), 19–43. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Korshin, Paul. ‘The Evolution of Neoclassical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham and Waller as Poetic Theorists’. Eighteenth-Century Studies 2 (1968), 102–37. Lamont, William M. Marginal Prynne: 1600–1669. London: University of Toronto Press, 1963. Lesser, Zachary. Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993. Lovelace, Richard. The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson. Oxford: Clarendon, 1953. Loxley, James. Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil War: The Drawn Sword. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997. McDowell, Nicholas. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. McElligott, Jason. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007. ——and David L. Smith (eds.). Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Maclean, Hugh (ed.). Ben Jonson and the Cavalier Poets. New York: Norton, 1974. Marcus, Leah. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Marotti, Arthur. Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith. London: Longman, 2007. Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: Odyssey, 1957. Miner, Earl. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. O Hehir, Brendan. Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. ——. ‘Coopers Hill: The Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641’. ELH 41 (1974), 494–540. Peacey, Jason. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957; reissued 1987. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Raylor, Timothy. ‘Moseley, Walkley, and the 1645 Editions of Waller’. Library 3 (2001), 236–65. ——. ‘The Early Poetic Career of Edmund Waller’. HLQ 69 (2006), 239–65.

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Richardson, Jonathan. Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost. London, 1734. Roy, Ian. ‘Royalist Reputations: The Cavalier Ideal and the Reality’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 89–111. Saunders, J. W. ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’. Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), 139–64. Sharpe, Kevin. Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Skinner, Quentin. ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’. Historical Journal 8 (1965), 151–78. Smith, David L. Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Summers, Claude, and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.). The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Taylor, John. The Noble Cavalier Caracterized, and a Rebellious Caviller Cauterized. Oxford, 1643. Thomas, P. W. Sir John Berkenhead, 1617–1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics Oxford: Clarendon, 1969. Turner, James G. The Politics of Landscape: Rural Scenery and Society in English Poetry, 1630–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Waller, Edmund. Poems, ed. G. Thorn-Drury. London: C. Scribner’s & Sons, 1893. Wasserman, Earl. The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959. Wilcher, Robert. The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wormald, B. H. G. Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion, 1640–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Zwicker, Steven N. Politics of Discourse: Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987. ——. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993.

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CIVIL WAR LETTERS AND DIARIES AND THE RHETORIC OF EXPERIENCE ....................................................................................................... HELEN WILCOX

The Civil Wars of 1642–8 form a landmark in the history of autobiographical writing in English. As the result of a hitherto unique combination of rising levels of literacy in the populace, increasing self-scrutiny under the influence of Protestant interiority, and intense awareness of the momentous military and political events unfolding around them on their home territory, the men and women of mid-seventeenth-century Britain committed their experiences to paper in unprecedented numbers. While the retrospective autobiographical modes of conversion narrative and personal memoir became particularly prominent in the 1650s, it was the more immediate forms of first-person account—letters and diaries—which flourished, often out of necessity, in the 1640s. These fresh and vivid texts are among the most important documents of the midcentury: largely unmediated, invariably urgent, often moving, and always full of the material details of conflict or its consequences. To read such writings is one of the best ways to understand the complexities of the period at first hand and discover the rhetoric of experience as it began to pave the way for the prose fiction of subsequent centuries. Although this chapter will discuss letters and diaries separately, at the outset it is important to note their similarity—indeed, their interrelatedness—as genres. As Diane Purkiss has observed, letters are generally motivated by ‘a will to conjure up a series of events and persons absent from the destination of the narrative’, for the benefit of the recipient who is that ‘destination’; diaries, too, attempt to ‘call up and reanimate lost scenes’,1 though generally for a less specified readership. In order to bring these ‘events and persons’ to life on the page, the writers of letters and diaries use similar narrative techniques, drawing on the apparent objectivity of material detail while at the same time relying upon the inner resources of individual memory and imagination. Both genres, as soon as they rise above the level of dates, names, and lists, draw on a

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shared range of rhetorical skills, though these are often disguised in quotidian dress. Their dynamic storytelling is channelled into units of time or place: a letter often recounts what has happened in a specific period (a day, a week, a month) or reports on a named action (a visit, a journey, a battle) in the same way as a journal records the events of a measured portion of time. Equally, many diaries implicitly take the form of letters, whether to the writers themselves or to imaginary or anticipated readers, and indeed some diaries written during the 1640s were drawn up with reference to letterbooks kept by the diarists.2 Both genres were written in ways which negotiate the troubled boundary between private and public writing, a distinction which becomes particularly blurred and potentially dangerous in the circumstances of civil war, where privacy may not mean intimacy but enforced secrecy.3 Similarly, letters and diaries were particularly vulnerable to being read by the wrong readers, leading some writers to resort to codes and ciphers to avoid detection.4 The documents discussed in this chapter were by nature ephemeral, not preserved as literary texts or entrusted to print but subject to the exigencies of the battlefield, the road, or the busy household. While much of the fascination of reading letters and diaries derives from their apparent directness and spontaneity, it is vital to be aware of the ways in which even these transient modes were shaped by social and literary conventions. Long before the 1640s, handbooks for the proper writing of letters were already on the market, including Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586), and letters, especially when in verse, were seen as a particularly sophisticated means by which writers and readers could ‘mingle Soules’, as John Donne claimed.5 Diaries were equally, if more discreetly, framed by generic expectations, derived in this case from the practice of spiritual preparation at the start of the day and self-examination at the end of it: ‘Dresse and undresse thy soul’ daily and with care, advised George Herbert in ‘The Church-porch’.6 There is hardly a ‘naive’ set of letters or diary entries to be found—just as there is rarely any straightforward self-expression in these genres. Extreme contingencies of both textuality and historical circumstance always preclude an uncomplicated reading of letters and diaries. Correspondence, for instance, assumes the conventions of a dialogue opened or resumed; Lady Brilliana Harley referred to the letters she wrote to her husband as a means of ‘silent discoursing with you’.7 The writers of diaries tend to employ a written mode closer to monologue, but even this discourse, though less immediately social, generally adopts a style which, as in a soliloquy, implicitly takes a reader or listener for granted. The neatness of expression in John Evelyn’s diary suggests a careful self-presentation, even in apparently throwaway entries: in January 1642 Evelyn went to stay in London and spent his time ‘studying a little; but dauncing and fooling more’.8 The persona captured in this cameo is deliberately ironic, and irony is a mode that implies interaction with a reader. Indeed, the letters and diaries of the 1640s repeatedly intrigue the reader with their complex mixture of rhetoric and honesty, powerfully evoking the interaction of the humdrum and the extraordinary in this most unusual of decades.

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LETTERS

.................................................................................................................. It could quite reasonably be claimed that the Civil Wars of the 1640s were fuelled and sustained through the medium of letters. In the aftermath of the victory of the parliamentarian army over Charles I and his followers at Naseby in 1645, a cabinet full of letters between the King and his Queen, Henrietta Maria, was discovered in the abandoned royalist camp.9 Published the following month as a pamphlet entitled The Kings Cabinet Opened: or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters and Papers, this material demonstrates how letters and the processes of writing, reading, collecting, intercepting, and interpreting them were at the heart of the political and personal interactions of the war. The Kings Cabinet Opened, a highly significant invasion of the monarch’s secret epistolary space, stands here as an emblem of the centrality of letters to the experience of the Civil Wars. Military information was conveyed by this most urgent yet vulnerable means, dependent as much on the bearer as the author,10 but personal news also arrived in this mode. After the Battle of Marston Moor in 1644, Cromwell informed the father of a parliamentarian soldier: ‘Sir, God hath taken away your eldest son by a cannon-shot. It brake his leg. We were necessitated to have it cut off, whereof he died.’11 The brutal simplicity of the giving of information in this letter lies at one extreme of epistolary rhetoric; at the other extreme is the public function of official letters as the formal orations of those who are physically absent. Cromwell announced the defeat of the Scottish army in a letter to the Speaker of the House of Commons in August 1648: ‘Surely, Sir, this is nothing but the hand of God, and wherever anything in this world is exalted, or exalts itself, God will pull it down, for this is the day wherein he alone will be exalted.’12 Letters are a chameleon genre, able to borrow, as here, the apocalyptic language of the pulpit, but at other times to convey news, petition for assistance, or evoke intimate conversation. In letters, we overhear the public and private dialogues of the war. This is nowhere more true than in the letters of the Verney family, who were themselves divided across the political fault-lines of the 1640s. While Sir Edmund Verney and his son Mun were active Royalists—indeed, Sir Edmund was the King’s knight-marshal and standard-bearer in battle—Sir Edmund’s eldest son Ralph was a member of Parliament who chose to support the rebel cause until he went into exile in France in 1643. The astonishing hoard of Verney family letters preserved by Ralph is a microcosm of the intensely painful national divisions of the 1640s, and suggests how extensive were the webs of correspondence between relatives and friends in this period. An early instance of this may be seen in the widespread dismay among the network of correspondents at Ralph’s decision to support Parliament in the approaching wars. Ralph’s younger brother Mun expressed the position most eloquently in a letter of September, 1642: Brother, what I feared is proved too true, which is your being against the King. Give me leave to tell you in my opinion ’tis most unhandsomely done, and it grieves my heart to think that my

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father already and I, who so dearly love and esteem you, should be bound in conscience (because in duty to our King) to be your enemy.13

The uncertainty caused by fear and suspicion, the clash of love and duty, and the awful truth of military opposition, are all implied in these emblematic lines. Mun proceeds to remind his brother that ‘majesty is sacred’, but he cannot lecture him for long: ‘I am so much troubled to think of your being of the side you are that I can write no more, only I shall pray for peace with all my heart.’ The prayer was not answered, nor was the relationship between the brothers healed. Despite the density of the family papers and the existence of so many letters from this time, there is no extant reply from Ralph; the silence is suggestive of the pain of political fractures within families. Others in correspondence with Ralph and his wife Mary must have intensified the difficulty of his isolated situation by their letters. A neighbour and friend, Lady Anne Sydenham, wrote to Mary: ‘Truly, my heart, it staggers me that [Ralph] should not see clearly all of [the Parliamentarians’] ways’, adding that it was impossible for her to interpret the violence of the ‘unruly multitude’ as being in the interests of ‘the liberty of the subject’.14 The mingling of political arguments with the parenthetical ‘my heart’, interweaving the language of social intimacy with the urgent issues over which the war was being fought, is a fine example of the nature of letters from the 1640s. So, too, is the way in which epistolary exchanges report other people’s opinions to third parties. In the case of the breach between Ralph Verney and his father, their mutual friend Lady Eleanor Sussex wrote to Ralph quoting the poignant words of his father, written about Ralph in a letter that she received from Sir Edmund: ‘madam, [Ralph] hath ever lain near my heart and truly he is there still.’15 Sir Edmund’s original utterance echoes the language of contemporary love lyrics and is eloquent in its assertion of continuing affection in spite of political differences. Sussex’s letter, in turn, reveals a generous intention—not to upset Ralph but to use her letters, received and written, to help him towards reconciliation with his father. Typically, this is also to be achieved through letters: Sussex advises Ralph ‘not to write passionately to your father’ in order to defend his position, but simply urges Ralph ‘to over come him with kindness’.16 The close bond between Sir Edmund Verney and his son and heir Ralph—the relationship that Lady Sussex is attempting to see healed with ‘kindness’—is evident from an earlier exchange of letters in the family papers. In 1639 Sir Edmund had been determined, in spite of ill health, to go north with the King to fight against the Scots, and writing to Ralph from York, he confessed: ‘Since Prince Henry’s death I never knew so much grief as to part from you; and truly, because I saw you equally afflicted with it, my sorrow was the greater.’17 Sir Edmund’s point of reference is most revealing: separation from his own son is akin to the loss of the young heir to the throne (Charles I’s elder brother) as long ago as 1612. By implication, Sir Edmund likens himself to the grieving royal father; the memory of past national sorrow becomes entangled with the current divisions within his family as well as his unease at the cracks within the kingdom. Ralph’s response is to condemn Sir Edmund’s defiance of medical advice and family concerns, asking ‘how can I think you love me?’ when his father seems to set upon losing ‘that life that is so much dearer to me then my own’.18 The letters also

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reveal that Ralph writes to the family’s doctor requesting him to dissuade Sir Edmund: ‘Will nothing move him? Dear Dr: try, and try again and set all his friends upon him . . . give him no rest till he hath yielded to stay.’19 The power of epistolary rhetoric, especially when part of a concerted campaign of letters, was as well understood in the early modern period as it is today. Sir Edmund Verney, gout-ridden though he was, refused to come home, survived the northern campaign, and went on to be the bearer of the royal standard when the First Civil War began in 1642. However, his part in the war was destined to cease within two months, at the Battle of Edgehill, and the letters surrounding this event in Verney family history are among the most eloquent and revealing in this unique epistolary archive. Ralph knew that his father had gone into battle ‘with many afflictions upon him’, including the disturbing sense that Ralph himself ‘had used him unkindly’ by taking the part of Parliament.20 When the royalist and parliamentarian armies finally squared up at Edgehill near Banbury, Sir Edmund went into battle without armour, against the soldiers whose cause his son had embraced, and was ‘slain by a gentleman of the Lord General’s Troop of Horse’.21 Sir Edward Sydenham wrote to inform Ralph of the parliamentary triumph on the one hand but his father’s death on the other, adding that ‘for all our great victory, I have had the greatest loss by the death of your noble father that ever any friend did’.22 On the same day, a sorrowful letter from Lady Sussex reached Ralph: ‘The most heavy news of your worthy good father’s death is come to me. . . . I pray God fit me for another [life], for I am sure I shall never have more joy in this.’23 Here the letter spills over the invisible boundary between correspondence and devotional writing, and Ralph’s own response to her is similarly prayerful: ‘God’s will be done, and give me patience to support me in this extremity.’24 Both correspondents are conscious of pushing at the limits of what can be expressed in a letter: Sussex finds her condition ‘so miserable’ that it is impossible to write—‘my eyes are so full that I cannot say more’—and Ralph observes that his pen cannot ‘express the miseries I am in’.25 Paradoxically, the writers manage to convey their grief with unaffected eloquence, needing no flourishes of wit to adorn the language of loss in the distressing circumstances of family estrangement and violent death. Taken together, this is a remarkable series of letters, all written within a few days of each other in a rush of military reports, personal grief, and mutual support. They offer evidence of the urgency, immediacy, and emotional force of the genre, particularly as in this case when the criss-crossing within a network of correspondents can be observed in full. The complexity of Ralph Verney’s situation could only have been produced by civil war—parent fighting against child, family members divided on principle and with unthinkable consequences—and was no doubt shared to some extent by many other families in the 1640s. By contrast, the circumstances in which Lady Brilliana Harley wrote her letters, nearly 400 of which are extant, were more straightforward. She and her family all supported the same cause, that of Parliament, and her role was clear: to uphold Calvinist spiritual values, to protect the family home at Brampton Bryan Castle during the Civil War when her husband and son were away, and to resist the royalist siege of the castle in 1643. Unlike the Verney letters, Harley’s correspondence is

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not part of an epistolary web; some letters to local officials have survived, and many to her husband Sir Robert Harley and her son Ned, but it seems likely that she destroyed the replies in order to preserve the secrets and therefore ensure the safety of the family members separated from her during the siege.26 It is evident from Harley’s own letters that those sent to her must have contained information about political events at home and abroad, suggesting the importance of epistolary networks in the passing on of newsbooks as well as the confirmation or denial of rumours by means of first-hand accounts. But what is most striking about Brilliana Harley’s letters is the strength of her conviction that Parliament would win: because of the godliness of their purposes, ‘surely the Lord will arise to healpe us’.27 When faced with an order from the royalist sheriff to give up her house and arms, she defiantly retorts that she has ‘as good a right to what is mine as any one’ and claims ‘the law of nature, of reason, and of the land’ in her defence.28 This lady’s letters ring with conviction: epistolary rhetoric here exerts the force of unassailable moral authority. For all her boldness of will, born of a sense of religious and political justice, it is fascinating to note that Harley writes from a consciously gendered position as a wife acting only on her husband’s authorization. She is, she tells her husband, ‘an instruement to keepe possestion of your howes’.29 She plays this patriarchal card skilfully in negotiations with her enemies, deferring decisions in connection with the siege because of her husband’s absence, until the surrounding royalist forces eventually move away to a more significant engagement. This quiet resistance to opposition, referred to as ‘my resolution’, demands courage, and her private letters reveal the enormous pressures on her in 1643: she asks her son Ned to ‘pray for me that the Lord in mercy may preserve me from my cruell and blood thirsty enemys’.30 Her hope meanwhile is that Ned, a parliamentarian soldier, will not be tempted into ‘plundering and unmercifullness’ when he finds himself in a besieging force.31 Whatever happens, she tells Ned, ‘you and I must forgive them’.32 The epistolary mode shifts here from the sharing of news to the language of maternal advice, a kind of writing often prepared by a mother in anticipation of her possible death in childbirth. Harley’s letters may properly be seen in this light: she was educating her son spiritually and morally by this epistolary means, while facing a very uncertain future herself. In fact, her death in late 1643 did not occur as a result of childbirth, nor as a direct consequence of the siege of Brampton Bryan, but was said to have been caused by an ‘apoplexy’.33 The parallels, however, remain valid: Harley’s letters outlived her and went on to fulfil the function of the mother’s advice book—to teach and testify to her godliness, proper worldly conduct, and tenacity of vision.34

DIARIES

.................................................................................................................. The remarkable texts of the Civil War years repeatedly confound our modern preconceptions and expectations. A diary, for example, might be considered one of the

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most intimate of written forms, yet the extensive diaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke from the 1640s contain a detailed narrative of the author’s life written consistently in the third person. This distinguished parliamentarian lawyer35 always wrote about himself as ‘Wh’, avoiding the first person pronoun and holding his experiences at arm’s length in grammatical terms. This narrative method creates a strangely dislocating effect, particularly at moments of great emotion. On 16 May 1649, the diarist notes that this was ‘[t]he saddest day of Wh[itelocke’s] life when his deare wife dyed, then whom never wife was a truer comfort & helper then she was’; ‘her husband . . . cannot now relate for tears’.36 The immediacy and rawness of the grief is suggested in the faltering of Whitelocke’s narrative voice, being unable to go into greater detail at that point, but the distancing of the writer’s identity into ‘Wh’ and ‘her husband’ tempers the emotional intimacy often expected in a diary or journal. There is a further framing and containing of his private mourning in Whitelocke’s recourse to classical eloquence to round off his paragraph: confessing that his wife’s husband ‘can say no more of this subject’, he ends, ‘curae leves loquuntur’ (238). The phrase from Seneca, meaning ‘minor sorrows speak’, is left incomplete; Whitelocke evidently knew what followed in the original and felt no need to complete it. If readers of the diary are anticipated by its author, they are expected to recognize the reference, too, and hear in their own minds, ‘anguish finds no words’.37 Over the course of his long life, Whitelocke actually found about a third of a million words to express his experiences in his diary, and the entries for the Civil War years provide a fascinating record of fluctuating personal, political, and military histories written from inside the edgy negotiations and shifting perspectives of an unfolding national drama.38 At the time of the Battle of Edgehill in 1642, the entry makes clear how indirect and wayward the news of the war’s progress could be: first Whitelocke and his companions ‘had intelligence’ that an officer was reporting how ‘the King had routed the Parlements Army, & was advancing apace towards London’, but soon afterwards ‘Other Scoutes brought intelligence quite Contrary, & much more wellcome’, namely that ‘Essex had routed the King[s] Army & gained a full victory’ (137). At the end of his entry, Whitelocke records that a ‘true description’ of the battle would succinctly note that ‘the Parlements forces had a great deliverance, and a little victory’; the excitement of a diary is that it reveals the puzzled and uncertain steps on the way to that dispassionate and rhetorically astute account. A similar sense of events from the inside pervades Whitelocke’s record of the political debates and negotiations taking place between and alongside the military campaigns. In December 1644 he is privy to the detail of intense secret discussions with the Scots, but he also notes, in passing, that the session was finally dissolved ‘about two a clocke in the morning’ and that ‘[s]ome false brethren were in the Company & Crom[well] was informed of all the passages att this meeting’ (161). Whitelocke’s experience of actual warfare was limited. His only injury was ‘the blow of a pistol, which brake, & beate out many of his teeth, & loosened the rest, yet by the goodnes of God . . . did him no further hurt, only it caused great pain in his teeth, & was a hinderance to his eating & to his speaking’ (133). However, he does note a great ‘hurt’

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done to his home at Fawley Court when a royalist regiment decides to quarter there. Although he manages to remove some of his ‘bookes, linen & houshold stuffe’ for safekeeping, Whitelocke claims that the ‘brutish common soldiers’ did great damage to the park and house, including the fact that they ‘tore & burnt’ some precious papers in his study ‘& lighted Tobacco with them’ (138). This accusation highlights the propaganda value of the diary: Whitelocke suggests that the King’s army lacks respect for learning and is obsessed with worthless and indulgent pastimes—in this instance, smoking. The account of the army’s sojourn at Fawley begins with another soldierly pastime, the ‘outrage’ of their whoring, and ends with their stealing ‘a Tame Hinde & his hounds’ which were then ‘presented to Pr[ince] Rupert’ (138–9). The judgemental tone of these framing devices serves a serious purpose: the supposedly factual account implies that the royalist soldiers were only capable of capturing a ‘Tame’ animal. Although Whitelocke’s diaries are more often collections of fact and observation than argument or outspoken commentary, their everyday rhetoric invests apparently trivial matters with a burden of political or moral principle. This is, of course, one of the greatest qualities of a good diary: it conveys opinion through the selection, ordering, and, in particular, the juxtaposition of its information. Whitelocke’s diaries offer a dynamic depiction of life during the Civil War—a life lived on the move, in which the only constant factors are transience and changing fortunes. He and his ever-increasing family—by the end of the war he and his wife had ten ‘innocent children’ (139)—moved from place to place, often with the family divided over several locations for safety or comfort as the war or Whitelocke’s career dictated. Between 1644 and 1645 Whitelocke refers to rented homes in Highgate, Deptford (‘for the Summer only’), Oxford, Uxbridge, and eventually ‘the L[ord] Paulets house’ in Chiswick, ‘which Mr Chute procured for him’ (151, 177). In the midst of this peripatetic lifestyle and the pressures of legal and parliamentary responsibilities, one other constant is Whitelocke’s very Calvinist anxiety to record at the end of each year of his life just how much he is worth financially. In 1642, he notes that although he was ‘much hindered in his [legal] practise’ by ‘attendance & imployment in the Parlement, & by the unhappy breaking out of the troubles, yet he gained by it this year—[£]243-0-0 through the blessing of God’ (133). Three years later, the equivalent entry can only record that Whitelocke ‘gott nothing this year by his profession, the troubles being so high, & he wholly taken up in the publique service’ (177). For all that Whitelocke’s diary can be self-congratulatory in tone, whether counting his coins or listing the names of the aristocrats who offer him ‘respect’, there is a range and even-handedness about its concerns which render it profoundly expressive of its era. In July 1645, Whitelocke records his great relief at being acquitted of treason; in August he worries that ‘his wifes gentlewoman’ has been taken ill; in September he notes that he ‘finished his gallery att his Temple chamber’ (177–9). Some of the briefest entries also suggest the equilibrium of his life in spite of the national circumstances: he builds a garden wall, goes hawking, proudly witnesses his 12-year-old daughter’s riding skills, and takes down a sermon in shorthand in order to repeat it to his family the following Sunday. Above all, he is not afraid to note errors on both sides of the conflict.

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Whereas his own home was ransacked by the royalists, he later records with great sorrow how his sister died because of maltreatment by ‘barbarous domineering’ members of the parliamentarian forces. Despite the fact that she had only recently given birth, the soldiers ‘compelled her (though in that condition) to rise out of her bed, to make better preparations for them, with which, she tooke cold, fell into a fever & dyed’ (196). Whitelocke has an acute sense of individual vulnerability, as well as the ‘giddye’ and malleable nature of human affairs in general. As he observes of the unrest in London in 1648, ‘[s]uch is the incertainty of worldly affayres, when the Parlem[en]t & their army had subdued their common ennemy, then the[y] quarrelled among themselves’ (212). As the 1640s drew to a close, Whitelocke knew that politics would not get any simpler just because the fighting in England had stopped. On 30 January, 1649, the diary entry concludes: ‘stayed all day att home, troubled att the death of the King this day, & praying God to keep his judgements from us’ (229). On the same day, the royalist diary-writer John Evelyn also chose to stay away from the momentous national event, but his entry uses a completely different vocabulary from Whitelocke’s quiet trepidation. Evelyn draws on the flamboyant language of betrayal and martyrdom to evoke the ‘horror’ of what has happened. In his distress he rails against the ‘Villanie of the Rebells’ in ‘proceeding now so far as to Trie, Condemne, & Murder our excellent King’, and openly asserts—to the extent that any diary can be ‘open’—that he ‘kept the day of his Martyrdom a fast, & would not be present, at that excecrable wickedness’.39 Evelyn’s response declares by its rhetoric that 30 January has already become a holy date, a martyr’s feast day in the liturgical calendar of the future. However, in keeping with the immediate preoccupations of a diary, the entry also demonstrates the directness of its relationship to the sorrowful events, and claims the authenticity of eyewitness accounts: though he was not present at the King’s death in Whitehall, Evelyn received his account of the execution ‘from my Bro: Geo: & also by Mr Owen, who came to Visite this afternoon, recounting to me all Circumstances’ (ii. 547). The impact of the execution is increased by the implied thoroughness of the information—‘all Circumstances’—and intensified by the contemporaneity of the record, the shocking details having being reported to him earlier on the same afternoon. Evelyn’s horrified reaction to the death of the King, so contrasting in tone from Whitelocke’s, is one of the few entries in his early diaries in which he is physically close to the events of the English Revolution. Evelyn, later known not only as a diarist but also as a scholar and horticulturalist, was only 21 at the outbreak of the hostilities and spent much of the 1640s travelling on the Continent as one of the first young Englishmen to take an extended ‘grand tour’. Before leaving for France, however, Evelyn travelled to ‘see’ for himself ‘the Siege of Portsmouth’ in October 1642, noting this site of civil conflict as a curiosity to be observed. The siege features in the diary alongside a trip to Winchester, ‘where I visited the Castle, Schole, Church & K: Arthyrs round table; but especially the Church and its Saxon Kings Monuments, which I esteemed a worthy antiquity’ (ii. 79). In December, Evelyn went privately to inspect the city of London’s fortifications, ‘the much celebrated line of Communication’ (ii. 80). The war

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appears to rank among items worthy of inclusion in his tour of English antiquities: military events and techniques are, like King Arthur’s round table, phenomena to be observed, already forming significant aspects of national history. Like many Civil War diarists, Evelyn is almost drafting a tour guide to the antiquities of Britain as he attempts to establish a historical perspective on the events of his own time. The diary entries are written with a disconcerting mixture of spontaneity and hindsight. Evelyn’s first reference to the war is an instance of this narrative complexity: ‘for now was that blody difference between the King and Parliament broaken out, which ended in the fatal Tragedy so many yeares after’ (ii. 79). The pivotal word in this statement is ‘now’, which on many occasions in the diary indicates the genre’s special sense of the present moment, but in this passage denotes a specific time in the past, since the death of the King seven years later is the narrative vantage point of the comment. The diary is a patchwork of contemporary jottings and retrospective memoir: just like early modern letters which overlap with newsbooks, mother’s advice manuals, sermons, and prayers, seventeenth-century diaries are not always what they seem. In the sections of his diary that deal with the early days of the Civil Wars in England, Evelyn continues to live in the hope that normality will prevail; however, his habit of visiting friends’ houses, or his delight at the installation of new ‘Water-Workes and Gardens’ on his own estate (ii. 81), could not long remain immune from the abnormal events in the nation. In London in May 1643, Evelyn is disturbed by seeing ‘the furious & zelous people demolish that stately Crosse in Cheapeside’ (ii. 81), and that same spring he notes a strange phenomenon in the night sky, ‘viz, a shining clowd in the ayre, in shape resembling a sword, the poynt reaching to the North; it was as bright as the Moone’ (ii. 80). Such sights were considered profoundly symbolic—so much so that no comment in the diary is thought necessary. By this time, Evelyn had a deep sense of foreboding, but also a feeling that he could not contribute very much to the royalist cause on the battlefield. As he confesses in his diary entry for November 1642, the battle of ‘Braineford’ (Brentford) took him by surprise, so that he arrived with his ‘horse and Armes just at the retreate’, but was ‘not permitted to stay any longer then the 15th by reason of the Armys marching to Glocester, which had left both me and my Brothers exposed to ruine, without any advantage to his Majestie’ (ii. 79). Evelyn considered himself of so little ‘advantage’ to the King’s cause—whether accurately or not—that the following year he ‘obtayn’d a Lycense of his Majestie dated at Oxford, & sign’d by the King, to travell againe’ (ii. 82) and set sail for France. On his return in 1647, he witnessed with dismay the ‘power of those execrable Villains’ whose army had defeated the Royalists in the intervening years (ii. 537), and on one occasion Evelyn ‘gott privately into the Council of the rebell Army at White-hall, where I heard horrid villanies’ (ii. 546). The repeated vocabulary of ‘villainy’ is a reminder of the cumulative power of a diary text, in contrast to the day-by-day perspective of the diarist, for whom the same impressions and distresses are freshly experienced each time. Diaries also have the capacity to remind us that some aspects of ordinary life continue in spite of the disruptive intrusions of a civil war. Anne Clifford, whose intermittent diary entries span the immense period from the death of Elizabeth I in

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1603 to her own death in 1676, spent the years from the outbreak of war in 1642 until July 1649 in the centre of London. Strange though it may seem in the light of all the tensions and actions centred upon the city during the Civil War, Clifford’s diary makes clear that her husband’s London house, Baynards Castle, seemed to her at the time ‘a place of refuge’.40 The primary meaning of this phrase is evidently that the house offers her a safe haven from local unrest: Clifford writes of ‘the Civill Warres being then very hot in England’ and describes Baynards as a place ‘to hide myself in till these troubles were over-passed’ (95). However, there is another, more personal sense in which Baynards was a place of security for Clifford and her daughter: it afforded them the opportunity to live apart from Clifford’s second husband, Philip Herbert, the fourth Earl of Pembroke, a ‘violent and contemptible man’,41 who fortunately chose to ‘lye in his lodgings in ye Cockpitt in St James Park over against Whitehall to be near the Parliament’ (95) during the 1640s. Clifford’s accommodation was thus a ‘refuge’ from the private trauma of married life, as well as from the unsettled existence she had led since childhood. Looking back as she completed her diaries from this period, Clifford notes, with the precision typical of her personal record: ‘I continued to lye in mine own Chamber without removing 6 yeares & 9 monthes, which was ye longest time I continued to lye in all my life’ (95). As if to emphasize the oasis provided, paradoxically, by the war years, the contents of her diaries from these years are almost exclusively focused on the basic events of family life: the births of her grandchildren, the marriage of her younger daughter, and the deaths of friends and relations. The cycles of ordinary existence continue unabated in spite of the war, offering a reassuring and familiar rhythm in keeping with the patterns of diary-writing itself. During the Civil War, Clifford finally came into her inheritance—the Cumberland castles and estates originally left by her father to his brother and descendants—for which she had fought moral, legal, and financial battles for forty years. In the end her patient determination was rewarded by the reversion of the lands to her upon the death without heir of her cousin Henry, Earl of Cumberland—an event recorded in her diary along with the other births, marriages, and deaths which were its staple material. On this occasion, however, Clifford offers a quotation from the Book of Job as a quiet commentary on this very significant death: ‘Is there not an appointed time to man on earth? Are not his days also like the days of a hireling?’42 With this sense of a divinely appointed inheritance to be claimed, as the wars end and travel becomes possible once more, Clifford leaves her London ‘refuge’—and her husband—and moves northwards to Skipton. It is at this point in the diary that the impact of the war becomes fully apparent: she notes that her arrival at Skipton Castle on 18 July 1649 was ‘ye first time of my coming into it after ye pulling down of most of ye old castle, which was done some 6 monthes before, by Order of Parliament because it had been a garrison in ye late Civil Warre’ (100). As she sets about visiting, restoring, and inhabiting the northern castles of which she is now the rightful owner, her biblically inspired assurance emerges in the tone of the diary. After arriving at Appleby Castle, ‘ye most auncient seat of myne inheritance’, she adds: ‘So various are ye pilgrimages of this human life’ (100). Though working against the political mood of the period to remedy

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the ‘extreme Disorder’ caused during ‘the late Civill Warres’ (106), nothing can shake Clifford’s defiance: ‘Let [Cromwell] destroy my Castles if he will, as often as he levels them I will rebuild them, so long as he leaves me a shilling in my pocket’ (101). This statement is not only an assertion of Clifford’s distinctive character and political willpower; it is also a reminder of the immensely therapeutic value of private diaries to those who write them in times of public turmoil.43 This discussion has touched upon selected examples of the letters and diaries with which the 1640s abounded. We have seen some of the qualities shared by these autobiographical modes: immediacy, materiality, secrecy, and vulnerability; a mixture of formality and informality, by which ordinary life rubs shoulders with Seneca and Job; conversational discourse and a rhetoric of the everyday; a sense of the historicity of the present and the dominance of temporality. The way in which letters and diaries overlap with and borrow from related genres has also been observed: we have found echoes of sermons, mother’s advice books, love lyrics, histories, tour guides, and devotional writing in the chosen examples. Differences have emerged, too—in the narrative methods, functions, and contexts of these socially embedded documents, but also in the political and religious assumptions of those writing them. At one end of the spectrum, Cromwell’s letters refer in Calvinist biblical mode to the righteousness of the parliamentarian cause and argue that ‘if any plead exemption from it, he knows not the Gospel’,44 while at the other end Evelyn’s diary records with regularity how he has ‘receiv’d the B.S. [Blessed Sacrament]’ in an attempt to maintain his Anglican liturgical practice.45 Across the gender divide, Harvey maintains her maternal role in the letters she sends to her son Ned, while Whitelocke faces a ‘grave’ accusation of treason from his male colleagues in Parliament but ‘thought not fit to impart this buisnes to his wife, least it should raise too much feare & trouble in her’ (169). Individual quirks occasionally prevail over distinctions of belief or gender: Evelyn follows his passion for garden architecture, while Clifford records the coincidences of dates and locations, suggesting a sense of life ordered by providence but also revealing an obsession with the precise records of time and place that no doubt lay behind her diary entries. Finally, it is notable that these texts share both passionate conviction and common humanity. There are, of course, moments of profound pain and anger at the circumstances of war, and undoubted hatred for the opposing faction, but at the same time there are recurring expressions of compassion in the communal experience of grief: for example, the affection and distress of the letters of the Verney family and friends in spite of their divisions of principle, and Whitelocke’s anxious discomfort over the execution of the King, his enemy. In these letters and diaries which are the products of a time of civil war, there is a special intensity about the way in which national and local events, political loyalties and domestic commitments, are intertwined. Sir Edmund Verney likens his parting from his son to the remembered death of Prince Henry, and Anne Clifford simultaneously finds marital and political ‘refuge’ in Baynards Castle. Evelyn seems to perceive the national crisis of January 1649 emblazoned in personal

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accidents and freak weather: returning home down the Thames, he came within ‘an extraordinary danger of being drown’d’, then a few days later ‘was the Thames frozen over, & horrid Tempest of Winds’ (ii. 547)—and within a week, the King was dead. Juxtapositions such as these, bringing into conjunction the writer’s subjective experience with shared public events of national significance, make the Civil War letters and diaries an invaluable resource for literary and historical study—and bring before readers the subtle fascination of these unnecessarily modest autobiographical modes.

NOTES 1. Purkiss, Literature, Gender and Politics, 34. 2. Bulstrode Whitelocke, for instance, compiled his early diaries in retrospect, using copies of his letters from the time (Diary, ed. Spalding, 28); this practice also alerts us to the permeable borders between memoirs—normally written with hindsight—and letters and diaries, whose writing is presumed to be closer to the moment recounted. 3. See Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing. 4. Four letters written by Lady Brilliana Harley to her son Edward in 1643 required an additional sheet of paper with holes cut in it, in order to decipher the code; see Eales, ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics’, 148. 5. John Donne, verse epistle ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’, in The Complete English Poems, 256. 6. George Herbert, ‘The Church-porch’, l. 453, in The English Poems of George Herbert, 62. 7. Letter dated 28 April 1626, British Library Additional MS 70110, cited by Eales, ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics’, 149. 8. Diary, ed. de Beer, ii. 78. 9. For further interpretation of this event, see Bullman, ‘The Practice of Politics’. 10. As Brilliana Harley wrote to her son in 1638, ‘when you rwite [sic] by the carrier, rwite nothing but what any may see, for many times the letters miscarry’ (Letters, ed. Lewis, 11). 11. Letter from Cromwell to Colonel Valentine Walton, 5 July 1644: Letters and Speeches, ed. Lomas, i. 176. Cromwell adds later in the letter, ‘He was a gallant young man, exceeding gracious. God give you His comfort’ (i. 177). 12. Letter from Cromwell to Speaker Lenthall, 20 August, 1648 (Letters and Speeches, i. 343–4). 13. 14 September 1642, British Library Verney papers M636/4; see also Tinniswood, The Verneys, 191. 14. 2 September, 1642 (M636/4). 15. 9 September 1642 (M636/4). 16. Ibid. 17. 1 April 1639 (M636/3). 18. 10 May 1639 (M636/3). 19. Ibid. 20. Letter from Lady Sussex to Ralph Verney, 9 September 1642 (M636/4). 21. Balfour et al., An Exact and True Relation of the Dangerous and Bloudy Fight, 5. 22. 27 October 1642 (M636/4); Sir Edmund’s body was never found. 23. 27 October 1642 (M636/4).

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24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

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29 October, 1642 (M636/4). See nn. 24 and 23. See Eales, ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics’, 145. Harley, Letters, 181. BL Add. MS 70004, fo. 101r; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Bath, i. 8. See also Eales, Puritans and Roundheads, 165–77. BL Add. MS 70110, fo. 92r. Harley, Letters, 187, 208. Ibid. 206. Ibid. 187. See Eales, ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics’, 154. For further reading among the letters from the Civil War period, see the correspondence of Sir Edward Dering, Richard and Sir Symonds D’Ewes, Sir Thomas Knyvett, Susan Villiers, and Thomas Windebank. Whitelocke rose to be Commissioner of the Great Seal in 1648 and later led the Commonwealth embassy to the Swedish court. Diary, 238. Seneca, Hippolytus l. 608; translations provided by Whitelocke’s editor, Ruth Spalding (238). It is clear that Whitelocke did indeed expect members of his ‘private family’ to read the diary in later years, ‘to the end that like faylings may be avoyded, & what is good may be imitated’ (88). Whitelock is sometimes regarded as one who too comfortably adapted to the changing political moods of these troubled decades—he is referred to by Tristram Hunt, for example, as ‘the great trimmer of the day’ (The English Civil War at First Hand, 273)— but in the closing words of her ODNB article on Whitelocke, Ruth Spalding firmly upholds his reputation as ‘consistently a staunch defender of freedom’. Diary, ii. 547. Diaries, ed. Clifford, 95. This phrase is used by Clifford’s editor, D. J. H. Clifford (Diaries, 88), but the view is widely shared. Diaries, 94; Job 7: 1. For further diaries from this period, see the work of Sir Edward Dering, Ralph Josselin, Sir John Oglander, Sir Henry Slingsby, Richard Symonds, John Syms, and the Marquess of Winchester. For a fine account based on the extensive diaries of Nehemiah Wallington, see Seaver, Wallington’s World. Letter to Speaker Lenthall, 14 September 1645. See e.g. 29 January 1642 (Diary ii. 78).

WORKS CITED Balfour, Sir William, et al. An Exact and True Relation of the Dangerous and Bloudy Fight between His Majesties Armie, and the Parliaments Forces, neere Kyneton in the Countie of Warwick, the 23 of this Instant October. London, 1642. Bullman, William J. ‘The Practice of Politics: The English Civil War and the “Resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’. Past and Present 206 (2010), 43–79.

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Clifford, Lady Anne. The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990. Cromwell, Oliver. The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. S. C. Lomas. London: Methuen, 1904. Donne, John. The Complete English Poems of John Donne, ed. C. A. Patrides. London: Dent, 1985. Eales, Jacqueline. Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ——. ‘Patriarchy, Puritanism and Politics: The Letters of Lady Brilliana Harley (1598–1643)’, in James Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, 143–58. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955. Harley, Lady Brilliana. The Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, ed. T. T. Lewis. London: Camden Society, 1854. Harley Papers. British Library Additional MSS 70004, 70110. Herbert, George. The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Historical Manuscripts Commission. Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath Preserved at Longleat, Wiltshire. 1904. Hunt, Tristram. The English Civil War at First Hand. London: Phoenix, 2003. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Purkiss, Diane. Literature, Gender and Politics during the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Seaver, Paul S. Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. London: Methuen, 1985. Tinniswood, Adrian. The Verneys. New York: Riverhead/Penguin, 2007. Verney Papers. British Library M636/3, M636/4. Whitelocke, Bulstrode. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. Ruth Spalding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the British Academy, 1990.

CHAPTER

13

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MARVELL AMONG THE CAVALIERS ....................................................................................................... N I C H O LA S MCD O W E L L

Andrew Marvell (1621–78) is today acknowledged to be the finest lyric poet of the midseventeenth century, and his ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650) is often described as the greatest political poem in English. The widespread appreciation of Marvell’s qualities as a poet developed only in the twentieth century and was advanced in particular by T. S. Eliot’s treatment of Marvell in his hugely influential 1921 essays ‘Andrew Marvell’ and ‘The Metaphysical Poets’. From his death in 1678 until the late nineteenth century, Marvell was best known, rather, for his activities as the MP for Hull in the Restoration and as the writer of prose satires challenging the corruption of Restoration politics and arguing for religious toleration. Marvell’s star as a poet rose as the Modernist movement strove to separate poetry from history and as the founders of English as a university discipline sought to establish ‘practical criticism’ as its distinguishing mode of enquiry. Marvell the ‘metaphysical’ lyric poet rose to prominence as ‘the creator of an acutely private art’, valued by intellectuals who ‘felt a severance from the civilization that both created and threatened them’.1 In the twenty-first century scholars have in the main sought to recover both the interest and importance of Marvell’s political activities and prose writings, and to contextualize his political poetry amid the complicated historical events and diverse allegiances of the 1640s and 1650s. Those who would recover the place of Marvell’s poems in history or would reconstruct his biography still find themselves faced, however, by the opaque relationship between private and public in the life and work of a secretive man who did not put any of his lyric poems into print in his lifetime, and about whom we still do not know basic biographical facts such as when he wrote most of his verse or whether he was married. Indeed the ‘ambiguity’ of Marvell’s verse which was celebrated by critics like William Empson2 has found its biographical correlative in ingenious speculation about Marvell’s political allegiances and sexual preferences.

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Understanding Marvell presents a stringent challenge to both the biographer and the literary critic. The more careful recent writers on Marvell have indeed been sceptical not only of making connections between the early political poems and the lyrics but of looking for consistent development in the early political poems. Thomas N. Corns warns against imposing ‘internal coherence’ upon works that ‘defy certain or straightforward resolution’. If the Civil War poems are ‘disconcertingly unstable’ in their allegiance that is because they measure a disconcertingly unstable historical moment: in short, ‘Marvell does not hold together.’3 Similarly David Norbrook has argued that we ‘need to be wary about constructing an unproblematic grand narrative of Marvell’s career: in a period of massive political upheaval, major discontinuities may have marked personal and poetic histories’.4 If the lyrics have long been valued for their ‘ambiguity’ and ‘ambivalence’, the early political poems are here rather associated with incoherence and instability. But the apparent inconsistencies within and between the early public poems might be approached more positively as a flexible quality of tone which registers and accommodates the competing forces coming to bear on the poet in a moment of unprecedented splitting of political, cultural, and personal allegiances. We may indeed be able to identify this tonal quality of accommodation, as opposed to equivocation, with what T. S. Eliot celebrated in Marvell as ‘wit’s internal equilibrium’.5 For the lyric and pastoral poems that were probably written in the 1640s and early 1650s also register the brutal sunderings of the Civil Wars, often in similar images to the political poems; but the lyric images of division and violence, which might otherwise prove intolerable, are accommodated, if sometimes almost to breaking point, within the bounds of generic decorum. This chapter, then, will survey both the public and occasional poems of 1648–50 and several of the lyrics conventionally dated to the 1647–51 period, paying particular attention to their imagery of violence, the poet’s commitments to individuals as well as (or instead of ) larger causes, and Marvell’s depiction of the royalist figures, including the King himself, who elicit his early loyalty and poetic attentions.

LYRIC ECHOES

OF

WAR

.................................................................................................................. The sudden moments of violence and killing in the lyric verse of Andrew Marvell invite biographical links with the poet’s experience of a time of civil war and regicide. But the lyrics quickly frustrate attempts to impose upon them any coherent topical or political allegory. ‘A Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn’ (c.1647–9?) opens with an anachronistically precise reference to the brutality of parliamentarian cavalry—‘The wanton troopers riding by | Have shot my fawn and it will die’ (ll. 1–2)—but the focus of the poem moves rapidly from the innocence of the suddenly killed fawn to the corruption of the sexual innocence of the nymph. The poet meditates on the casual brutality and cruelty of men, but in too generalized a manner to subject the poem to the

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political reading initially invited by the apparently royalist sympathies of that phrase ‘wanton troopers’.6 In 1652, the year that Marvell most likely wrote ‘Damon the Mower’, one of a series of four ‘Mower poems’, Oliver Cromwell was compared to a mower in his all-conquering military might in a panegyric by Payne Fisher, one of the Commonwealth government’s official poets: ‘Not much unlike a Husbandman, who goes | Through all the fields, and with his sickle mowes | The riper Corne and the first grass for Hay.’7 Damon’s self-inflicted injury might be taken as a figure of the damage the parliamentarians and the New Model Army have done to their own country in resorting to civil war, and thus finally to themselves: While thus he threw his elbow round, Depopulating all the ground, And, with his whistling scythe, does cut, Each stroke between the earth and root, The edgèd steel by careless chance Did into his own ankle glance; And there among the grass fell down, By his own scythe, the mower mown. (ll. 73–80)

Is Marvell adopting the analogy of the mower to subvert Cromwellian panegyric, predicting that Cromwell’s violent ‘depopulating’ power will finally cut away his own support—Marvell had recently written of how Cromwell ‘Did thorough his own side | His fiery way divide’—or consoling himself that ‘Time’, sometimes figured in the period as a mower wielding the scythe of death, will finally catch up even with one as superhumanly ferocious as Cromwell?8 Yet the political analogy will not stick: to ‘mow’ in the seventeenth century could also mean to have sex and the sickle was identified with male virility, as it is in Marvell’s own short Latin poem ‘Upon a Eunuch: A Poet’, ll. 2–3: ‘Falcem virgineae nequeas immitere messi, | Et nostro peccare modo’ (‘you are unable to thrust a sickle at the virgin harvest or to sin in our manner’). Damon’s self-inflicted wound, suffered in contemplation of the love-wounds inflicted by Juliana, and his fall into the grass seem to have more to do with the Fall in Eden and the Christian association between sin, sexuality, and mortality—‘all flesh is grass’, the Old Testament tells us (Isaiah 40: 6)— than the topicality of England’s Civil Wars; or rather the Civil Wars become an extreme manifestation of the Fall in which violence and death and sexual desire originate. Marvell’s longest and perhaps greatest poem, Upon Appleton House (1651), written while Marvell was employed as tutor to the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax, is too compendious to sustain much generalization about its subject, but one thing the poem does is to measure the universality of the Fall against the generic conventions of the country house poem, as developed earlier in the century by Ben Jonson and Thomas Carew. Upon Appleton House scrambles the utopian, Edenic structures of stability and order that usually sustain the genre to suggest the futility of the efforts of Fairfax, the former commander-in-chief of the New Model Army who refused to lead the Army on the Scottish invasion of 1650, to escape the consequences of his own recent history

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by retiring to his estate in Nun Appleton in Yorkshire—as futile as the poet’s hope to lose himself in solitary contemplation of nature. It has been well observed that ‘Marvell sees the Fall primarily as a change that occurred in the mind of man, as a change in the way man thinks about or looks at nature’.9 The mowers, who physically impose human ‘order’ on the landscape, personify this changed relationship and they are, inevitably, inside the walls of Appleton House where the violence and death continues, whether we are aware of it or not: With whistling scythe, and elbow strong, These massacre the grass along: While one, unknowing, carves the rail, Whose yet unfeathered quills her fail. The edge all bloody from its breast He draws, and does his stroke detest; Fearing the flesh untimely mowed To him a fate as black forbode. (ll. 393–400)

By stanza 41 of Upon Appleton House it seems that the conflicts that have riven England in the 1640s and which imbrue the very landscape of Fairfax’s country estate are finally less the consequence of any particular decision or policy or character flaw than of the original sin that infects all men: Oh thou, that dear and happy isle The garden of the world ere while, Thou Paradise of foúr seas, Which heaven planted us to please, But, to exclude the world, did guard With wat’ry if not flaming sword; What luckless apple did we taste, To make us mortal, and thee waste?

The allusions to lamenting speeches in Shakespeare’s Richard II—‘This other Eden, demi-paradise’ (ii.ii.42); ‘When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, | Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers chok’d up’ (iii.iv.43–4)—suggest that civil war and deposition of kings are not a consequence of the unique circumstances in the 1640s but part of the recurring cycle of English history and indeed of all postlapsarian human history, rather as that history is recounted by the angel Michael in the final books of Paradise Lost (1667; rev. edn. 1674).10 Any extended political allegory of Marvell’s lyrics risks their aesthetic deformation, and the most that might be said of the public or topical context of ‘A Nymph Complaining’ and ‘Damon the Mower’, as probably of Marvell’s lyric work as a whole, is that ‘the contours of a particular psychology discover an unusual or obscure fit with the hinted shape of external events’.11 Yet this does not mean that we need necessarily separate the early public poems from the lyrics written around the same time and treat them as though they are the work virtually of different people. If the rail or corncrake in Upon Appleton House knows nothing of its impending doom, and

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if Damon’s cut is a self-inflicted accident—although it is debatable whether there are ever truly any accidents in Marvell’s poetic world or whether character is always fate— aspects of both poems nonetheless recall the depiction of the execution of a fully aware Charles I at the heart of ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’, written (presumably) in June–July 1650, in the summer between Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns: He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try. Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed. This was that memorable hour Which first assured the forcèd pow’r. So when they did design The Capitol’s first line, A bleeding head where they begun, Did fright the architects to run: And yet in that the State Forsaw its happy fate. (ll. 57–72)

Marvell’s representation of the regicide is nothing if not direct. Charles looks directly at the blade, at the ‘axe’s edge’, with his ‘keener eye’; perhaps he sees his reflection there, as Damon sees his: Nor am I so deformed to sight, If in my scythe I lookèd right; In which I see my picture done, As in a crescent moon the sun. (ll. 57–60)

Damon will ‘glance’ his blade into his ankle a few lines later: Marvell, who was renowned as a Latin poet in his own time and who thinks simultaneously in English and Latin, puns here, as he does in the ‘Horatian Ode’, on the Latin acies, meaning both ‘sharp edge’ and ‘keeness of eye’. The clean ‘axe’s edge’ in the ‘Ode’ becomes a ‘bloody edge’ when it severs Charles’s head from his body, like the scythe that kills the rail in Upon Appleton House; and just as the unintended killing of the bird frightens the mower as a bad omen, the ‘bleeding head’ of Charles has frightened away many of Parliament’s previous supporters (‘the architects’ of his death), most prominently Fairfax, who never wished nor intended that the King should be killed. This is not to say that the killing of the corncrake in Upon Appleton House is an allegory of the execution of Charles I. For one thing the ‘bleeding head’ of Charles in the ‘Horatian Ode’ is immediately compared to the man’s head

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discovered during the construction of the Capitol building in ancient Rome, an event that, according to Livy, ‘foretold that [Rome] should be the chief castle of the empire and capital palace of the whole world’.12 If the Commonwealth government is a ‘forcèd power’, one imposed by force, it is also ‘assured’ or legally made secure by the regicide— and Cromwell’s victory over the Irish and impending defeat of the Scots suggests that the decapitation of Charles I may have been the foundation for England’s imperial reign as the ‘capital palace of the whole world’. If Marvell’s lyrics arouse only to frustrate a sense of their political resonance, then his public or political poems of 1648–50 also provoke consternation about the nature and consistency of his allegiances. The moment when Charles I looks into the blade of the executioner’s axe in the ‘Horatian Ode’ (and the moment when Damon sees his reflection in his scythe) recalls Marvell’s elegy of two years earlier for the young royalist nobleman Francis Villiers, who during the Second Civil War in July 1648 was put to the sword (like the nymph’s fawn) by parliamentarian troopers. Villiers is presented as having been the epitome of a Cavalier, both courtly lover and aristocratic warrior: ‘How comely and how terrible he sits | At once and war as well as love befits!’ (ll. 91–2). If Villiers puts his martial valour before his love affairs, this does not necessarily diminish his vanity; he rather admires himself in the reflection of his sword, or even of the eyes of his opponent in combat: Lovely and admirable as he was, Yet was his sword or armour all his glass. Nor in his mistress’ eyes that joy he took, As in an enemy’s himself to look. I know how well he did, with what delight Those serious imitations of fight. (An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers, ll. 51–6)

The myth of Narcissus haunts Marvell’s verse, and the glance in which the ‘lovely’ Villiers and ‘comely’ Charles (and the sun-like Damon) see themselves reflected in the blade of sword and axe presages their downfall, wounding, and death. Is this the auto-erotic vanity that is the condition of all post-fallen men, as seems to be the case in the lyrics—‘The mind, that ocean where each kind | Does straight its own resemblance find’ (‘The Garden’ (1668?), ll. 43–4)—or is it in the political poems a more specific characteristic of a magnificent but doomed Stuart court culture that is finally put to rest by regicide?

THE GRAMMAR

OF

COMMITMENT

.................................................................................................................. As Paul Hammond has brilliantly observed, ‘pronouns of self-definition and mutual definition, “I” and “we”, the grammar of commitment, did not come easily to Marvell’s pen’.13 The only use of the first-person singular (‘I know how well he did’) in the

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Villiers elegy asserts the speaker’s personal acquaintance with Villiers, recalling how he watched the young nobleman prepare for battle and, it seems, even fenced with him. Marvell mentions in a letter his training in swordsmanship in Spain, during travels in Europe, probably as a tutor to young noblemen, which seem to have lasted for most or all of the First Civil War of 1642–6.14 But it was probably in Rome in 1646 that Marvell watched Villiers handle a sword. Marvell may have known Francis and his elder brother George, Duke of Buckingham, at Trinity College, Cambridge: the brothers matriculated in 1641, although Marvell, who had been at Trinity since 1633, probably left Cambridge in the months after the death of his father in January 1641. The Villiers brothers joined the King at Oxford with the outbreak of war and served under Prince Rupert at the royalist defeat at Lichfield Close in 1643; their estates were subsequently sequestered by Parliament and they were placed under the care of the Earl of Northumberland, who sent them on a tour of Europe. Buckingham and his brother were in Rome by December 1645, apparently presiding over a ‘Poetical Academy’ of exiles. The Catholic priest Richard Flecknoe, recalling after the Restoration his ‘accession’ to this ‘Poetical Academy’, described it as ‘a free Mart, or Fair; | I now perceive of all Poetick ware’.15 Buckingham was a writer and liked the company of poets, as is evident from the friendship that he cultivated with Abraham Cowley (1618–87) at Trinity. Marvell seems to have arrived in Rome towards the end of 1645 and the dinners held by Buckingham in the English College are probably the social occasion of Marvell’s satirical poem on Flecknoe and his verse, ‘Flecknoe, an English Priest at Rome’ (c.March 1646). Marvell’s entrance to Buckingham’s circle may have been provided by Cowley, with whom Marvell must have been acquainted at Trinity and whose collection The Mistresse (1647), completed in exile in France after he was deprived of his Cambridge fellowship in 1644, is one of the most consistent of the many contemporary influences on Marvell’s lyrics. The Villiers brothers returned to England in 1647, and it is possible that Marvell, as a member of their circle, returned with them. The brothers immediately became involved in royalist conspiracy and took up arms with the outbreak of the Second Civil War in spring 1648. An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers—published unsigned and undated in a single-page quarto, presumably soon after Villiers was killed—was attributed to Marvell by the antiquarian George Clarke (1661–1736). Scholars who argue for a consistently radical Marvell have solved the problem posed by the apparently ardent royalism of the poem, with its imagining of the violent deaths of ‘heavy Cromwell’ and ‘long-deceivèd Fairfax’ and bloodthirsty desire to transform elegy into execution (‘And we hereafter to his honour will | Not write so many, but so many kill’), by using doubts about attribution to excise it from the canon (ll. 14–16, 125–7).16 Those who argue that the poet who wrote the pro-Commonwealth and pro-Cromwellian poems of the 1650s could not also have written the Villiers elegy risk displaying ‘a naïve attitude towards the politics of patronage as they affected the scribal medium’.17 Marvell probably wrote the elegy for Villiers’s family, who then had the poem privately printed.

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It has been persuasively argued that that ‘the acquisition of a patron was crucial to Marvell’s literary production’ throughout his life.18 Patronage links with Buckingham and his family in 1646–8 would help to explain the intensity of personal grief in the Villiers elegy—its un-Marvellian resort to the ‘grammar of commitment’ in ‘I know how well he did’—and yet the speaker’s fantasy about the death of Marvell’s two major patrons of the 1650s, Fairfax and Cromwell, still forces a double-take from the reader who knows the ‘Horatian Ode’ and Upon Appleton House. The names in Marvell’s other occasional poems of this period offer, alongside the Villiers elegy, the outline of what looks like a strongly royalist social context between 1647 and 1650: there is the elegy in Lachrymae Musarum (1649), the collection of thirty-five poems on the death of the royalist nobleman Henry, Lord Hastings; the commendatory poem for the poems collected in Lucasta (1649) by the recently imprisoned Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace (1618–57); and then ‘Tom May’s Death’, a scabrous satirical elegy for the court writer turned parliamentarian polemicist Thomas May, who died in November 1650. On the basis of these poems it has been surmised that after Marvell ‘returned to England his sympathies were apparently royalist’; or more emphatically, that he was ‘immersed in the counter-revolutionary ferment of London and a resurgent Cavalier literary culture’.19 But then how do we account for the ‘Horatian Ode’, written just before ‘Tom May’s Death’ and which, for all its manifold ironies, is in some sense a panegyric on Cromwell? Or for the subsequent career in the post-regicide governments—a career that Marvell certainly sought at least by February 1653, when Milton recommended him for a post, and probably earlier, judging by the Latin poem (‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas’) which he wrote in early 1651 to commemorate the Commonwealth embassy to the Dutch republic, but which he did not secure until late 1657, having in the interim published the unambiguous (but anonymous) Cromwellian panegyric The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector (1654–5)? (The issues are complicated further by the publishing history of the early verse: the three occasional poems of 1648–9 appeared in print but the ‘Horatian Ode’ and ‘Tom May’s Death’ remained, like the lyrics, unpublished in Marvell’s lifetime.) To conclude that Marvell simply decided to switch pragmatically his allegiance along with his social milieu from Cavalier to Cromwellian after the execution of Charles I, whether out of self-interest or a Hobbesian notion of the practical legitimacy of the ruling power, does not do justice to the complexity either of the public poems or of the political, cultural, and social contexts from which they emerged.20 As Blair Worden observes in relation to Marvell in 1649–50: ‘before a future so uncertain, and amid competing claims and arguments for allegiance, consistency might be an honourable virtue. But it might also be the temptation of stubbornness . . . and of simplemindedness.’21 ‘Simple-mindedness’ is not something of which Marvell could ever be accused. The early public poems of elegy and praise articulate admiration for particular individuals and aspects of their personal qualities—Villiers, Lovelace, Charles I, Cromwell—while withholding full allegiance to the cause with which that person was associated. And, without constructing an ‘unproblematic grand narrative’ of Marvell’s

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career, we might find in the ‘internal equilibrium’ of these early political poems a resistance to the monomania of full partisanship that anticipates the dedication to liberty of conscience of the Restoration Marvell. But we should not confuse equilibrium with blandness or security or passivity. Rosalie Colie, noting that not all her undergraduates took to Marvell’s lyric tone, strikingly called him ‘a smiler in his sleeve, a smiler with a knife’.22 In the one moment in the Villiers elegy when Marvell seemingly speaks in the grammar of commitment, when recounting his eyewitness experience of Villiers’s facility with a sword—‘Nor in his mistresses’ eyes that joy he took, | As in an enemy’s himself to look’—the poet, as fencing partner, in fact becomes a simulacrum of the sword-wielding enemy: ‘I know how well he did, with what delight | Those serious imitations of fight.’ In the verse epistle to Richard Lovelace, the poet again casts himself in the role of his subject’s enemy, if only then to protest his allegiance; and in both the Villiers elegy and the Lovelace epistle Marvell documents with a sceptical eye the erotic super-abundance of his Cavalier friends, measuring it against their chivalric self-image and finding it a sign of their anachronism in a new-model, post-royalist nation.

THE CAVALIERS AND THE LADIES: FRANCIS VILLIERS

.................................................................................................................. The archetypal Cavalier values of honour and love that Francis Villiers is praised for correctly keeping in hierarchical order at the beginning of Marvell’s elegy are in tension by the middle section of the poem. Villiers’s sister Mary, Duchess of Richmond— whose husband’s brothers, Lord John and Bernard Stuart, had been at Trinity with Marvell and had both already been killed fighting for the King—is unable to persuade Villiers to hold back from the fight, but the charms of the ‘the matchless Chlora’ apparently succeed, at least initially: But he resolved breaks carelessly away. Only one argument could now prolong His stay and that most fair and so most strong: The matchless Chlora whose pure fires did warm His soul and only could his passions charm. You might with much more reason go reprove The am’rous magnet which the north doth love. Or preach divorce and say it is amiss That with tall elms the twining vines should kiss Than chide two such so fit, so equal fair That in the world they have no other pair. Whom it might seem that Heaven did create To restore man unto his first estate. Yet she for Honour’s tyrannous respect Her own desires did and his neglect. (ll. 66–80)

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It is hard to see how Chlora could be anyone else but Mary Kirke, daughter of the court writer Aurelian Townshend.23 The former parliamentarian soldier Edmund Ludlow, although hardly an unbiased source, recounts in his memoirs that Villiers was surprised by the parliamentarian troopers because he had sent his company on before him so he could make ‘a splendid entertainment’ for ‘Mrs. Kirk’, to whom that night he ‘made a present of plate to the value of a thousand pounds’: ‘after his death there was found upon him some of the hair of Mrs. Kirk sew’d in a ribbon that hung next his skin’.24 In Ludlow’s account, it is implicitly Villiers’s typically Cavalier profligacy and weakness for women (and in this case a married woman) which holds him back from the manly business of war and leads directly to his death. The fate of Villiers is for Ludlow emblematic of the inevitable and deserved defeat of the Cavaliers. Whether or not Marvell had heard this rumour, Chlora does indeed persuade Villiers to delay his journey to war. While their mutual attraction is presented as natural (‘the am’rous magnet which the north doth love’, ‘twining vines’), the phrase ‘preach divorce’ introduces the element of moral censure to which Chlora submits a few lines later, suppressing her adulterous desire ‘for Honour’s tyrannous respect’—apparently unlike Mary Kirke in Ludlow’s account. But in Marvell’s elegy there is no mention of such restraint or moral scruples on Villiers’s part. He hardly lives up to the Cavalier motto that concludes Lovelace’s ‘To Lucasta. Going to the Wars’: ‘I could not love thee, dear, so much, | Loved I not honour more.’25 As Nigel Smith observes, Villiers is in the final section of the poem placed in ‘a heroic romance narrative’, which in generic terms makes the elegy ‘unique and outstanding in its time’.26 And yet lines 93–6 are peculiar and might rather be read as bathetic and mock-heroic: Ride where thou wilt and bold adventures find: But all the ladies are got up behind. Guard them, though not thyself: for in thy death Th’eleven thousand virgins lose their breath.

The obscure allusion is to St Ursula, who brought 11,000 British virgins to Rome to be converted to Christianity only for them all to be slain by the Huns on their return. There is something rather comic about the size of Villiers’s virginal following, and the standard early modern sexual pun on ‘death’ implies that Villiers’s libertine appetites would hardly be satiated by one married woman but could encompass even 11,000 virgins. Virginities tend to be lost easily and in huge quantities in Cavalier verse, as in Lovelace’s ‘Love Made in the First Age’: ‘Lasses like Autumne Plums did drop, | And Lads indifferently did crop | A Flower, and a Maiden-Head.’27 There is also something absurd in the image of ‘all the ladies’ riding up in the saddle behind Villiers, as though the horse were buckling under the weight of admirers who will not let the Cavalier out of their sight. We might compare the reaction to Villiers’s death of the young parliamentarian newsbook writer John Hall (1627–56), who in Mercurius Britanicus on 11 July 1648 expostulated on the moral weakness of the Cavaliers, those ‘Puff-Paste Tituladoes and

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Mushroome-Gallants, creatures born to make cringes’. That ‘power than can give titles’, Hall insists, ‘cannot give worth and ennoble the minde, the true seat and source of Nobilitie’. A few lines later he recounts a humiliating rout in Surrey of royalist forces on their way to join the Earl of Holland’s uprising, but cites as an exception the courage of their aristocratic commander: ‘the Lord Francis Villiers, a fine yong Gentleman expiated part of the folly of his companions, and dyed by a many wound, which had been brave enough, had they been received in another cause’. The following week Hall recounted how the Earl of Holland had been captured and would ‘perhaps be admitted to London to make cringes and shew himself before the Ladies, who may be as glad of the recovery of this old Otho as they were lately sorrowful for the death of the young Adonis’.28 Holland’s imagined cringing links him to the ‘Puff-Paste Tituladoes’ mocked in the previous issue: Otho was a Roman emperor famed for his extravagance and vanity. The ‘young Adonis’ is Villiers. The oddly comic introduction of both ‘the Ladies’ who ride with Villiers into battle, and of the 11,000 panting virgins whose ‘death’ depends on his, unexpectedly modulate the tone of Marvell’s Villiers elegy, to the extent that we might even identify hints of the sceptical, amused attitude towards Cavalier eroticism that we find in Hall.

THE CAVALIERS AND THE LADIES: RICHARD LOVELACE

.................................................................................................................. The yoking of Marvell and John Hall is not a random one, because they appear beside each other both in the commendatory poems for Lovelace’s Lucasta, first licensed for the press in February 1648 but not published until May 1649, and in some copies of the first, 1649 edition and all copies of the second, 1650 edition of Lachrymae Musarum. Although no transparent textual record of friendship between Marvell and Hall survives, recent scholarship has linked the careers of the two men.29 The influence of Hall’s own lyric verse, published in his 1646/7 Poems, is evident in several of Marvell’s lyrics, most startlingly in the use made in ‘To his Coy Mistress’ of several lines of Hall’s ode to his Cambridge tutor.30 Hall is a particularly interesting figure because he was at the heart of the Cavalier literary coterie which formed in the Inns of Court in 1646–9 around the wealthy royalist gentleman Thomas Stanley (1625–78). The coterie was connected by kinship, friendship, and literary admiration: Lovelace was Stanley’s cousin, while Stanley had acted as Hall’s patron at Cambridge after they had formed an instant friendship when they met in Hall’s native Durham in 1642. Hall’s friendship and literary association with Stanley, Lovelace, and others in the circle (such as James Shirley, Alexander Brome, Richard Brome, the editor of Lachrymae Musarum, and probably also Robert Herrick, who is a notable influence on the lyric Marvell) survived his parliamentarian activities and even his appointment in 1649, alongside Milton, as the Commonwealth government’s chief propagandist, a position he retained in the

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early years of the Protectorate.31 Hall’s career illustrates, in other words, how shared Cavalier literary tastes could trump split political allegiances, and he must have provided an interesting example for Marvell, a poet of increasing renown but also a man in need of patronage and employment, to consider following in 1649–50. ‘To his Noble Friend Mr Richard Lovelace’ couples a concern for the fortunes of poetry in post-war England with continued scepticism of the relevance of the Cavalier ethos to that world. Initially the poem echoes royalist laments for the decline of wit and poetry with the destruction of the Caroline court and the philistine rule of a Puritan Parliament, but the tone again modulates, but more obviously this time, into gentle satire of the anachronistic values of the Cavalier and above all the vanity of his self-image as warrior-lover. In the opening of the verse epistle, ‘wit’, literary creativity, is no longer an ideal that stands above faction, but has been absorbed into the discourse of party polemic and personal abuse. Sir, Our times are much degenerate from those Which your sweet Muse with your fair fortune chose, And as complexions alter with the climes, Our wits have drawn th’infection of our times. That candid age no other way could tell To be ingenious, but by speaking well. (ll. 1–6)

Marvell uses ‘wit’ and ‘wits’ three times in the first twenty lines of the poem, on each occasion linked to disease and corruption. The times in which Lovelace first wrote, however, are separated from this present corruption of wit by the careful use of pronouns. The opposition created through repetition of ‘our’ and ‘your’ is aptly described by Martin Dzelzainis as a ‘wall dividing the way things were from the way they are now’.32 It might seem odd that Marvell should contrast Lovelace’s age with ‘our times’—‘our’ is repeated four times in the first twelve lines, emphasizing a common infection, whose victims presumably include Marvell himself. But was Lovelace not also living in ‘our times’ and therefore similarly infected? After all Lovelace was only three years older than Marvell and they had both been at Cambridge in 1637. Yet Lovelace had been a court favourite in the final days of the Caroline era, renowned (like Francis Villiers) for his beauty. According to Anthony Wood, ‘after the murther of K. CH. I’, Lovelace, having ‘consumed all his Estate’ in the royalist cause, ‘became very poor in body and purse, was the object of charity, went in ragged Cloaths (whereas when he was in his glory he wore Cloths of gold and silver) and mostly lodged in obscure and dirty places, more befitting the worst of Beggars’. In Wood’s account, the handsome Lovelace, once the flower of Cavalierism and golden adornment of the Caroline court, becomes a personification of the tragic decline and disintegration in the 1640s and 1650s of a once glorious Stuart culture. As Smith notes, Marvell’s poem to Lovelace ‘is a panegyric, but also, by its occasion, an elegy, not for Lovelace, but for the lost halcyon days of pre-war culture’.33 The opposition between Lovelace’s pure past

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and the corrupt present invokes a characteristically royalist nostalgia for a golden, prewar literary world.34 Lovelace had been imprisoned by Parliament in October 1648 and would not be released for six months, preventing publication of Lucasta until May 1649. Marvell, presumably writing during Lovelace’s incarceration, accuses the parliamentary authorities of barbarous treatment of Lovelace and his poetry: Some reading your Lucasta, will allege You wronged in her the House’s privilege; Some that you under sequestration are, Because you write when going to the war[.] (ll. 27–30)

The first couplet ‘alludes to the privilege of freedom of speech within the Commons, a privilege limited, however, to Members of Parliament, and denied to the rest of society specifically by the 1643 printing ordinance’ stipulating that all books must have a prepublication licence from a parliamentary committee.35 The second couplet echoes the title of the second lyric in Lucasta, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Warres’: the implication is that the censors have read Lucasta in the foolishly literal way that Presbyterians read Scripture, assuming that when Lovelace writes ‘To Warre and Armes I flie’ (l. 4), he really is on his way to take up arms against Parliament. Unlike most of the commendatory poems, which are addressed to ‘Colonel Lovelace’, Marvell’s contribution makes no mention of Lovelace the soldier; and indeed Lovelace appears never to have fought on English soil during the wars, having left to fight in France and Holland after his imprisonment in 1642 for presenting a royalist petition to Parliament.36 Marvell’s joke about the comically literal misunderstanding of ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Warres’ by the censors seems to have led him to consider Lovelace’s non-involvement in the English wars, for the third verse paragraph abruptly moves from satirical attack on Lovelace’s enemies to mock-heroic description of Lovelace himself. A group of ‘beauteous ladies’, having heard ‘that their deare Lovelace was endangered so’, run to protect him: ‘They all in mutiny, though yet undressed, | Sallied, and would in his defence contest’ (ll. 33–4, 39–40). This is a more extended instance of the tonal shift that we encountered in the Villiers elegy, with the ‘beauteous ladies’—who are, as Lois Potter observes, ‘typically “cavalier” themselves in their dishabille’—taking the place of the 11,000 virgins who are ‘got up behind’ Villiers as he rides to his death in battle.37 Here though the ladies are not defended by Lovelace, but spring to his defence—a rather embarrassing situation for a man lauded as the greatest of soldiers. The shift of tone is more unsettling in the context of the Villiers elegy but is nonetheless a surprise in the verse epistle, particularly in the context of the praise of Lovelace’s heroism in most of the other commendatory verses. Marvell evidently plays on his friend’s reputation as one of the handsomest men in England, and probably also alludes to one of the poems included in Lucasta, a commendatory poem for Anthony Hodges’s translation from the Greek of The Loves of Clitophon and Leucippe (1638). Lovelace addresses his poem ‘To the Ladies’ and plays the charmer, asking them to ‘Unfold the smoothness of this book, | To which no Art (except your sight) | Can reach

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a worthy Epithete’.38 But Marvell also seems to be playing off aspects of the commendatory poem for Lucasta by Alexander Brome, one of Stanley’s circle, for Brome concludes his otherwise serious musings on the perilous condition of letters in an England dominated by the prose of ‘Pulpiteers’ by turning to Lovelace’s ‘amorous fancy’: Ladies love To kiss those accents: who dares disprove What they stile good? Our lines, our lives, and all; By their opinions either rise or fall[.]39

Given Brome’s taste for bawdry and occasionally obscenity, there is probably a pun in the notion that poets ‘rise and fall’ depending on female approval. While there is a similar progression in Brome’s poem, as he moves from attack on the barbarity of the times to light-hearted admiration for the ardour of Lovelace’s female fan-club, Brome does not adopt the unsettling mock-heroic tone which distinguishes Marvell’s lines but duly admires such typically Cavalier popularity with ‘the ladies’. We might again discern the influence on Marvell of Hall’s satirical representations of the Cavalier in Britanicus, where Cavalier energies are seen as (mis)directed towards empty erotic adventure rather than military victory or learned achievement. Marvell though seems self-conscious about his mildly satirical representation of Lovelace as Cavalier lover rather than fighter, for he then makes himself a character in the mock-heroic romance narrative in which he has placed Lovelace. He is challenged by one of the ladies, ‘the loveliest that was yet e’er seen’, and, with some alarm, insists on his loyalty to Lovelace: Thinking that I too of the rout had been, Mine eyes invaded with a female spite, (She knew what pain ’twould be to lose that sight.) ‘On no, mistake not’, I replied, ‘for I In your defence, or in his cause would die. (ll. 42–6)

The first-person singular is once more introduced to assert commitment, after the poet has been mistaken for the Puritan enemy—is Marvell joking with Lovelace and other members of the Stanley circle about the possibility of him following the example of their friend Hall and lending his pen to the enemy? The grammar of commitment now acts as a defensive parry, as the poet loses sight of the beautiful Lovelace, on whose form all eyes (including Lovelace’s own?) wish to be trained: the poet’s own eyes are ‘invaded’ and the transfixing image of the Cavalier is (painfully) forced out. And what is Lovelace’s ‘cause’ for which Marvell insists he would die? Is it the cause of wit or the cause of the King? Royalist polemicists insisted that the two causes were indistinguishable—to support the King was to support poetry, and vice versa. But a figure like John Hall, a friend of Lovelace but by May 1649 also a colleague of Milton, argued for new possibilities for literary endeavour in a post-courtly state.40 In his parliamentarian newsbooks he mocked his Cavalier friends for wasting their talents on

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women and wine: ‘In the meantime Gallants make much of your selves; any thing swallowed down with good liquor may pass for Newes . . . I appeale to yourselves; when in the heat of wine and wenches . . . Is it not sufficient that you fool away your lives in this manner?’41 Marvell did not have the money or, perhaps, the inclination to fool away his life in the manner of Lovelace.

HISTORY

AND

NOSTALGIA

.................................................................................................................. Marvell wrote the ‘Horatian Ode’ around eighteen months after the regicide, if we are to assume the occasion to which the title refers is the moment of composition. The passage of time is registered in the contrast of tone between Marvell’s stanzas and the depiction of the regicide in Loyalties Teares Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer Charles I (1649) by the prolific royalist polemicist John Berkenhead, published a year before Marvell composed the ‘Ode’. The similarity between the ‘Ode’ and Loyalties Teares suggests how recognizable this section of Marvell’s poem would have been to royalist readers: Thus though the People-cheating Pageantry Of specious formall Court, and Judge, and Barre, (That he might be mock’d, as well’s oppressed die) He convey’d is to his last Theatre: Where how he acts his passions part, may they Who to this martyrdome did bring him, say; Say, wretches, was Deaths bloudy face to him So dreadfull as the thought of it to you? Of’s Scepter did he e’er tender seem As of the Ax? Taught he not Princes how To reigne in death, when he gave strait command Not that his Throne, but Blocke should firmly stand? And wish’d he not that Block had higher been, That all bloudthirsty eyes that thither came, Might theire deare draught have had, and fully seen How little ashamed he was of shame? Yet though thus low, it serv’d him for his step From earth to heav’ns high kingdom to get up. (5)

Marvell similarly absolves the tragic actor Charles of shame on the scaffold that he ‘adorns’, but, despite the scorn for the ‘armèd bands’ who ‘Did clap their bloody hands’, the ‘Horatian Ode’ shows little of the anger and none of the defiance of Berkenhead’s poem (ll. 55–6). The resemblance to Berkenhead’s angry elegy lends some substance to Blair Worden’s suggestion that the ‘Ode’ may ‘have begun life as a royalist poem’ in the months after the regicide—perhaps even as a poem which Marvell showed to Stanley,

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Lovelace, and their circle. Yet Cavalier culture is a matter for historical record in the version of the ‘Horatian Ode’ that has come down to us. As in the Villiers elegy and, to a lesser extent, the Lovelace verse epistle, it is also a matter for nostalgia; but we should beware the hazard of ‘confusing Cavalier nostalgia with political commitment’.42 In ‘Tom May’s Death’ (1650), the ghost of Ben Jonson appears both to assert the deadly seriousness of the poet’s role in a time of civil war—‘Then is the poet’s time, ’tis then he draws, | And single fights forsaken Virtue’s cause’—and to berate May as a ‘Most servile wit, and mercenary pen’ (ll. 65–6, 40). ‘Tom May’s Death’ was perhaps written in part for the amusement of Stanley and his circle, several of whose members had previously been in Ben Jonson’s ‘tribe’ in the 1620s and saw themselves as upholding in a time of war and religious extremism the Jonsonian ideal of the links between literary society, sociability, and liberty of thought.43 But the allegiance of the satirical elegy, like that of the epistle to Lovelace, is finally to an ideal of virtuous letters rather than the Stuart cause. The valiant poet of ‘Tom May’s Death’ draws his sword, but he does not stare at his own reflection in the blade. History had made its judgement on the Stuarts: eighteen months on, England remained kingless and Marvell was moving on.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Everett, ‘The Shooting of the Bears’, 35. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 235, 310. Norbrook, ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” ’, 150. Eliot, ‘Andrew Marvell’, 58. ‘Troopers’ was a term more commonly used of the Scottish Covenanter and later parliamentarian cavalry, although not exclusively so. All references to Marvell’s poems are to Poems, ed. Smith and all dates given for Marvell’s poems are Smith’s suggested dates unless otherwise noted. Fisher, Veni; vidi; vici, 63. ‘An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650), ll. 15–16. See Pecke, Parnassi puerperium, 112: ‘Time devours Things; His Sithe our Legs will hit.’ Taylor, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, 159. All references to Shakespeare are to The Norton Shakespeare. Hirst and Zwicker, ‘Eros and Abuse’, 380. Livy, Annals, sig. E1v (i.iv.6). Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Pronouns’, 224. Marvell, Poems and Letters, ii. 324. Marvell was certainly back in England by 12 November 1647, when he sold family property in Meldreth, Cambridgeshire, and presumably this money (£80) helped to maintain him in the late 1640s. See von Maltzahn, Chronology, 31–2. The standard biography of Marvell is now Smith, Andrew Marvell, although Legouis, André Marvell, remains interesting and useful. I am grateful to Nigel Smith for showing me his biography in advance of publication.

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15. Richard Flecknoe, ‘On his Accession to the Poetical Academy in Italy, under the Presidency of the Duke of Buckingham, An. 45’, in Epigrams, 66, ll. 1–2. 16. Chernaik, The Poet’s Time, 236–7, and more recently Chernaik, ‘Was Marvell a Republican?’, 81. On the issues surrounding the Villiers elegy and other attributions, see von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell’s Ghost’, 74. 17. Love, Scribal Publication, 63. 18. Hirst and Zwicker, ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton’, 265. 19. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, 305; von Maltzahn, Chronology, 32. See also Kelliher, Andrew Marvell, 29, 32. On Cavalier poetry in the 1640s more generally, see also the chapter by Coiro in this volume. 20. The most influential historical account of Marvell’s alleged change of allegiance has been Wallace, Destiny his Choice, who argues that the previously royalist Marvell accepted the claims of Commonwealth propagandists, turned into coherent political philosophy by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), for the de facto legitimacy of whatever regime takes effective power: monarchical, republican, or otherwise. 21. Worden, Literature and Politics, 84. 22. Colie, ‘My Echoing Song’, viii. 23. As first suggested by Duncan-Jones, ‘Notes on Marvell’. 24. Ludlow, Memoirs, i. 198. 25. Lovelace, Poems, 18, l. 12. 26. Marvell, Poems, 13. 27. Lovelace, Poems, 146, ll. 16–18. 28. Mercurius Britanicus (11 July 1648), 70; (18 July 1648), 75. 29. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 169–82; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 53–111. 30. See Hammond, Figuring Sex Between Men, 221–3; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 31–3. 31. For a full discussion of Stanley’s circle and the argument that it may provide a social context for Marvell’s lyric productivity in the later 1640s, see McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 13–68. 32. Dzelzainis, ‘Literature, War and Politics’, 12. 33. Wood, Athenae Oxonienses, ii. 146–7; Marvell, Poems, 19. 34. On this typical royalist lament, see e.g. Corns, ‘Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, and Richard Lovelace’. 35. Patterson, Marvell, 15. 36. See the ODNB entry by Raymond A. Anselment. 37. Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, 153. 38. Lovelace, Poems, 68, ll. 6–8. 39. Ibid., pp. lxxxvi–lxxxvii, l. 34–6. Brome’s poem was not in fact printed in the 1649 Lucasta, and may have been removed by the licensers. Marvell, however, had evidently seen it. 40. On Hall’s efforts to develop a government-backed post-regicide literary culture, see McDowell, ‘Urquhart’s Rabelais’. 41. Mercurius Britanicus (16 May 1648), 8; Mercurius censorius (1 June 1648), 6; (8 June 1648), 14. 42. Worden, ‘Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, 526. 43. See McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 259–72.

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WORKS CITED Anselment, Raymond A. ‘Richard Lovelace’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Chernaik, Warren. The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ——. ‘Was Marvell a Republican?’ Seventeenth Century 20 (2005), 77–96. Colie, Rosalie L. ‘My Echoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Corns, Thomas N. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ——. ‘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, 200–20. Duncan-Jones, E. E. ‘Notes on Marvell’. Notes and Queries 198 (1953), 102. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Literature, War and Politics, 1642–1668’, in David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 3–19. Eliot, T. S. ‘Andrew Marvell’, in John Carey (ed.), Andrew Marvell: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. New York: New Directions, 1966. Everett, Barbara. ‘The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell’, in Poets in their Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Fisher, Payne. Veni; vidi; vici: The Triumphs of the Most Excellent & Illustrious Oliver Cromwell, trans. Thomas Manley. London, 1652. Flecknoe, Richard. Epigrams of All Sorts. London, 1671. Hall, John. Mercurius Britanicus Alive Again. London, 1648. ——. Mercurius censorius. London, 1648. Hammond, Paul. Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ——. ‘Marvell’s Pronouns’. Essays in Criticism 53 (2003), 219–34. Hill, Christopher. Puritanism and Revolution. London: Secker and Warburg, 1995. Hirst, Derek, and Steven N. Zwicker. ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and the Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’. Historical Journal 36 (1993), 247–69. —— and ——. ‘Eros and Abuse: Imagining Andrew Marvell’. English Literary History 74.2 (2007), 371–95. Kelliher, Hilton. Andrew Marvell: Poet and Politician, 1621–78. London: British Library, 1978. Legouis, Pierre. André Marvell: Poète, Puritan, patriote, 1621–78. Paris: Henri Didier, 1928. Livy. Annals, trans. Philemon Holland. London, 1600. Love, Harold. Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Lovelace, Richard. Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. Ludlow, Edmund. Memoirs, ed. C. H. Frith. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894. McDowell, Nicholas. ‘Urquhart’s Rabelais: Translation, Patronage, and Cultural Politics’. English Literary Renaissance 35 (2005), 273–303. ——. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Maltzahn, Nicholas von. ‘Marvell’s Ghost’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999, 50–74. Marvell, Andrew. Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis with E. E. Duncan-Jones. 2 vols. 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. ——. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith. Rev. edn. Harlow: Longman, 2007. Norbrook, David. ‘Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” and the Politics of Genre’, in Tom Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 147–69. ——. Writing the English Republic: Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetry, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patterson, Annabel. Marvell: The Writer in Public Life. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Pecke, Samuel. Parnassi puerperium. London, 1659. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Shakespeare, William. The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2nd edn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008. Smith, Nigel. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Taylor, E. W. Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1964. ——. An Andrew Marvell Chronology. Harlow: Longman, 2005. Wallace, John. Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxonienses. 2 vols. London, 1691–2. Worden, Blair. ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’. Historical Journal 27 (1984), 525–47. ——. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER

14

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THE LEVELLERS John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Walwyn ....................................................................................................... RACHEL FOXLEY

The Leveller movement was a product of the fracturing of the parliamentarian side during the First Civil War and the contested victory which followed the war. In its active and occasionally influential years in the later 1640s it radically challenged the direction of parliamentarian settlement over religion, the role of the King and House of Lords, and the nature of consent to and participation in government, before turning decisively against the Commonwealth regime in 1649. The hostile nickname ‘Levellers’, current from the end of 1647, implied that the group hoped to obliterate distinctions of rank and even sweep away property rights. In reality, the Levellers’ demands were more limited, but still represented an enormous shift from the pre-war status quo and from the type of settlement many parliamentarians would have wished for. The Levellers advocated an almost total freedom of conscience in matters of religion; they hoped to place supreme power in a reformed, representative House of Commons with no veto power in the King and Lords (perhaps, their works strongly implied, no king or House of Lords at all); and they wanted to make meaningful the popular sovereignty which, for them, had to be the foundation of any claim to legitimacy by Parliament. Such a collection of views has an air of modernity which can be hard to dispel, no matter how carefully we labour to set the Levellers in their historical context. Indeed, the scandalized reactions of their more critical contemporaries may well suggest that the Levellers were far ahead of seventeenth-century norms. Sydenham, addressing the Rump Parliament in the autumn of 1649, summed up the Leveller movement as many respectable parliamentarians, and of course royalists, would have viewed it:

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that generation of men which are truly called levellers, a Faction grown out of Your own Bowels, whom I know not what to call, but the putrifaction of god’s Mercies and Your Indulgencies, whose Principles, as they are begotten by the corruptions of Persons and Governments, so they are maintained and only thrive by Tumults and Confusions; a People who have as many Governments as Religions, and as little of the true Religion, as they have of Estates and Fortunes in this Nation; men of no more reputation, then what they get among discontented and bank-rooted persons, by holding forth taking and seeming Propositions of Levelling and Licentiousness . . . 1

The Levellers could easily be painted as everything that was most feared within early modern political culture: a danger to property, hierarchy, order, the constitution, and religious orthodoxy and conformity. And yet, as Sydenham conceded, the Levellers were ultimately ‘a Faction grown out of [the Long Parliament’s] own Bowels’, whose flourishing was the direct result of God’s mercy in granting victory to Parliament in the Civil Wars. Recent work has made it easier to understand the Levellers’ emergence in 1640s England. In the 1970s, Christopher Hill viewed Leveller and other radicalism of the 1640s as the temporary emergence into the open of an underground current of popular dissent which stretched back as far as the Lollards.2 The events of the 1640s enabled its expression, but did not generate its main impulses or tropes. It has increasingly become clear that this underground tradition, as Hill conceived of it, does not account for the specificities of Leveller radicalism, and that their ideas developed not out of a plebeian radical discourse inaccessible to historians, but out of their engagement with parliamentarian and sometimes learned sources.3 Their radicalism was not so unprecedented within this context as might once have been thought; David Wootton has argued that key Leveller positions of the later 1640s were prefigured in writing that emerged from the first winter of the Civil War in 1642–3.4 Parliamentarian thought sowed the seed for Leveller thinking, particularly as it began to invoke ‘natural law’ principles of selfpreservation and salus populi (‘the welfare of the people’) as an essential adjunct to more conservatively constitutionalist arguments. Leveller thought was an offshoot of parliamentarian thought—one which through years of sustained political instability and a degree of collective organization was able to root itself more deeply and develop more systematically than previous sparks of parliamentarian radicalism. The Leveller movement had roots in the cultural changes of the Civil War years as well as in parliamentarian thought. The proliferation of cheap, topical, and often very vigorous and uncivil printed pamphlets gave the Levellers a means of engaging a potentially broad audience, and they seized on it skilfully. Personal involvement in the business of printing5 made them well aware of the power of the medium, and they exploited it to react quickly, and often with multiple, presumably orchestrated responses, to new developments. Indeed, their political strategies often depended intrinsically on print. Petitioning, a traditional right which became politicized in the course of the Civil War years, was hard to organize on a mass scale without printing copies of the petition which people were to subscribe. Levellers could hardly have reported, or aspired to, their petitions reaching ‘many thousands’ of signatures without print.

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Petitioning became one of the key modes of mobilization employed by the Levellers, and print thus mediated a newly organized form of popular politics, as large crowds of petitioners gathered to present their demands to the House of Commons. These occasions in their turn became—and were intended as—news events, with the weekly newsbooks giving space to reports, however hostile, of the petitioners and sometimes their texts. Again, the Leveller ‘Agreements of the People’, settlements proposed for subscription by the population at large, depended on wide circulation in print, and the first Agreement of 1647 even became an emblem pinned to their hats by soldiers at the failed mutiny at Ware. The third key context out of which the Leveller movement emerged was Puritan culture, particularly at its fringes beyond the national Church. Here, independent congregations might express ultra-Calvinist doctrines of the separation of the elect, but others moved beyond Calvinism to more open, mystical, or even heretical forms of Christianity. Space for such congregations and views to emerge into the open came with the confusions of the Civil War years, but relevant networks of religious radicalism stretched back into the pre-Civil War period. Of course, religious radicalism did not necessarily lead to political radicalism, or not of the Leveller type. The exclusive religious congregations into which separatists withdrew themselves might, as some have argued, have been apt to foster a sense of in-group equality, which sometimes extended to ‘democratic’ congregational decision-making. But the leap to spreading that egalitarian spirit to the corrupted and corrupting world of secular politics was a great one. For some religious radicals, the sense of their spiritual separation, combined with widespread millenarian ideas, might lead to theocratic rather than democratic conclusions; for others, it might lead to withdrawal from secular political life, rather than the Levellers’ passionate engagement with it. Indeed, the Levellers’ relationship with the sectarian congregations was to be a troubled one, and former allies in the sects were to turn against the Levellers, particularly in the wake of the regicide. At the centre of the Leveller movement was the political (and often literary) collaboration of John Lilburne, William Walwyn, and Richard Overton, with John Wildman and others also contributing to the prodigious print output associated with the group. This group, primarily of young men, was drawn from the ‘middling sort’. Walwyn, a merchant, was the oldest and most prosperous. The others were apparently lesser men, though Lilburne was prone to boast of his gentry status, as well as his rank of Lieutenant-Colonel, which he continued to use long after his departure from the parliamentary armies. Overton was the most highly educated, having studied at Cambridge, but Lilburne had a grammar-school education, and he and Walwyn were enthusiastically self-taught, advertising some of their reading in their tracts. As a group, the Leveller leaders were well rooted in the London worlds of artisans and apprentices,6 and the godly gathered congregations. Dedicated ‘war party’ adherents of Parliament from the start, they also had contacts within the army and in parliamentarian politics in the city. The world of the law also impinged on them, with Lilburne and Wildman (who sometimes signed himself ‘John Lawmind’) making particular use

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of legalistic argument, although Lilburne was an amateur, and the extent of Wildman’s legal education is unknown. The birth of a relatively cohesive Leveller movement is hard to date—Overton and Walywn were writing in Lilburne’s cause from 1645; documents from 1646, such as the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, have been seen as collaborative statements laying the foundations of the movement, and by the spring of 1647, Leveller petitioning was clearly an organized activity. The hostile nickname of ‘Leveller’ was coined only late in 1647, in the wake of the famous Putney Debates at which the New Model Army’s officers debated political settlement with representatives from the army’s rank and file and civilian radicals. The Levellers continued their agitation against arbitrary power, whether in King, Lords, Commons, or (after the regicide) the Rump Parliament’s new Council of State; their anti-monarchism undoubtedly contributed to the radical campaign which led to regicide, but their influence proved far too limited to shape the settlement which followed. They were, however, one of the most urgent threats to the new regime, which imprisoned their leaders, crushed radical mutineers, and unsuccessfully put Lilburne on trial for his life in the autumn of 1649. There are several reasons for looking at the three Leveller leaders separately, before moving on to characterize the writings of the Leveller movement as a whole. Their distinctive voices and modes of thought have attracted attention from literary scholars and intellectual historians in recent years, and it is clear that aspects of their thought and writing cannot be adequately treated together. This is particularly true as some of their most distinctive writings belong to the pre-Leveller period of the early to mid1640s or are not direct contributions to Leveller campaigns for particular political ends. Revisionist political historians have also become keen to resist the premature (chronological) labelling of individuals as ‘Levellers’, to emphasize the political alliances that ‘Leveller’ figures were involved in beyond the confines of our ‘Leveller movement’, and to remind us that the Leveller leaders, even while working together, may sometimes have been pulling in different directions. Discussing ‘Levellers’ only as a group might obscure some of the most interesting influences on the Leveller movement as a whole, and make it harder for us to understand the cross-currents of religious and political ideas which were absorbed into the imperfect, but powerful, Leveller synthesis. Lilburne, originally a staunchly Calvinist Particular Baptist, was well known in ‘godly’ circles for his sufferings and imprisonment in the Puritan struggle against the bishops in the late 1630s; typically, his involvement had been in the printing and smuggling of texts, and he publicized his own sufferings in print (Figure 14.1). Lilburne’s early associations with key Presbyterian figures in the future parliamentarian side gave way in the 1640s to an alliance with politicians of the ‘Independent’ faction, and his personal narratives of heroic resistance to oppression have disguised the extent to which he was, at first, able and willing to operate within factional politics.7 His later opposition to former allies was all the more bitter for their history of collaboration, and vitriolic denunciation of individuals who had betrayed his trust became part of his literary output, drawing accusations of barbarity and incivility from his critics, but no doubt delighting many of his more sympathetic readers. Lilburne’s writing often

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FIGURE 14.1 Portrait of John Lilburne, standing before the bar, from The Triall of Lieut. Collonell John Lilburne . . . at the Guildhall in London (1649) # The Trustees of the British Museum. P, 4.146.

revolved around his own case, taken as emblematic of the oppressions (potentially) visited on all ‘free-born Englishmen’, and his narratives of his resistance to this oppression—and probably his actual behaviour under trial or interrogation—were inspired by his reading of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. He combined this gift for ostentatious martyrdom with an oppositional energy which allowed his many critics to dismiss his claims to political principle, concluding that Lilburne would inevitably be ‘a professed Enemy to every present Government whatsoever it be’, just as a rainbow is

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always on the other side of the sky from the sun.8 While he liked to present himself as ‘honest John’, a constant truth-teller holding to principle while enemies and former friends jostled for self-interest, Lilburne’s own changing alliances laid him open to charges of hypocrisy and even royalism. His ‘honest’ self-presentation was also compromised by some of his more cunning attempts to deflect conviction in his treason trials of 1649 and 1653, and his occasional self-presentation as a trickster hero rather than a sober martyr for the truth.9 Lilburne’s powerful personality, whether experienced in print or in person, polarized audiences; what enemies saw as ‘the licentious provoking daringness of L. Col. Lilburnes pen’ could be redescribed by an ally as simple ‘zeal’.10 Lilburne contributed a distinctive strand to Leveller thought, often relying on his own radicalized version of common law thought to claim equal ‘privileges’ and ‘liberties’ for all ‘free-born Englishmen’.11 Richard Overton’s pre-Leveller writing ranged widely over genres and styles, from a lengthy heretical treatise on the indivisibility of body and soul, invoking classical and modern authorities (Mans Mortallitie, 1643), to brief satirical play-pamphlets against the prelates or in favour of freedom of conscience. Walwyn described Overton’s highspirited writing as clothing its truths ‘sometimes in a Comick, and otherwhiles in a Satyrick stile’.12 Overton’s choices of style, genre, and reference have fascinated scholars, partly because of his own apparent awareness of literary and intellectual traditions, both elite and popular, and his willingness to manipulate them for his own ends. He consciously placed himself within one tradition when he invented the character ‘Martin Marpriest’, recalling the scandalous ‘Marprelate’ tracts of the 1580s, which had employed rough language and merciless ridicule against the Elizabethan bishops. Significantly, this model was in a sense doubly oppositional, as the Marprelate tracts not only set themselves against the church establishment but also stepped outside Puritan expectations of propriety and simplicity of style. Overton’s enterprise in the 1640s displayed similarly complicated oppositions and allegiances. He made a General Baptist confession of faith in Amsterdam, and Mans Mortallitie shows that it was not merely his belief in free grace which placed him beyond the mainstream of Calvinist Puritanism. In the struggles of the 1640s within the parliamentarian alliance, Independents and sectarian congregations resisted the imposition of a new religious orthodoxy and discipline by the Presbyterians, arguing instead for freedom of conscience at least for themselves. Overton’s participation in this struggle for freedom of conscience made deliberate use of modes of writing which might be thought to challenge Puritan norms, invoking theatre in the dialogue pamphlets, and turning the tropes of ‘festive culture’, so hated by Puritans, into weapons against Puritan intolerance. As Smith notes, ‘the festive became the motor of subversion’, and even the tradition of anti-Puritan satire itself could be adopted by Overton after the nasty split with the sects in 1649.13 If Overton undermined some elements of Puritan culture to promote more radical ideals which had arisen out of that culture, he also subverted other traditions which he employed. Unlike Lilburne and Walwyn (at least on their own accounts), Overton was literate in Latin, giving him access to the humanist culture based on the revitalization of values found in classical texts. But again, he made subversive use of his privileged access

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to humanist discourse (references to Latin university drama, for example) to critique the exclusive ways in which it was used.14 Overton’s satire was often achieved by throwing his voice, and he had a particular fondness for the affected, self-consciously arcane scholarly voice, as when the ‘Vniversity man’ Martin Marpriest boasts that he ‘can sophisticate any Text’.15 But Overton did not just invoke humanism and scholarship to mock their pretensions: he also invoked them to call on their authority (his most abstract passages of theorizing delight in the deployment of technical vocabulary and logical techniques), and to recall them to their true purpose. Like Walwyn, whose love of classical literature was based on English translations, and who has been characterized as a ‘vernacular humanist’,16 Overton was opposed not to humanist ideals of learning and education, but to their perversion into a system of privilege. As McDowell remarks, ‘In his emphasis on the pedagogical efficacy of persuasion and argument and on the democratizing role of education in enabling human beings to understand themselves and their God-given freedoms, the Leveller Overton was the true heir of the humanist ideal.’17 William Walwyn wrote particularly effectively in the cause of liberty of conscience, developing a literary persona which sought to model or mirror the virtues of the toleration he advocated. Thus he advertised his simplicity and openness, professing no interest in anything but the ultimate triumph of the truth and the benefit of the public. He denigrated any ‘rhetorical’ means by which persuasion might be achieved as manipulative, preferring to rely on the irresistible force of truth to persuade.18 His own written style—even when it conveyed most effectively this sense of benign openness— was, however, a carefully achieved effect, and one which maddened critics who saw Walwyn as a canny politician, whose ‘devout, specious, meek, self-denying, soft and pleasant’ style was merely a cover for his ‘sligh, cunning and close subtlety’.19 Walwyn was willing to exploit the genres of popular pamphleteering, quite possibly influenced by Overton in using dialogue and parodic forms which enabled him to imitate other voices. This allowed him to combine his characteristic advocacy of honesty and love with a high irony which satirized his opponents’ failure to achieve it. This was particularly true in his sequence of pamphlets replying to the attacks on him by the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards in his collection of current heresies entitled Gangraena (three parts; 1646). These include a playlet in which allegorical figures (Love, Patience, Truth, and Justice) act as physicians to Edwards, sick with the ‘gangrene’ of his own title; and a prediction of Edwards’s ‘conversion and recantation’ frames a mock conversion narrative in which Edwards, the self-important Presbyterian minister, sees the light and admits that he has followed worldly reputation and power at the expense of humility and love. If Overton used anti-Puritan satirical tropes and the festive to critique the Presbyterians from a position on the fringes of Puritanism, Walwyn even more tellingly used one of the Puritans’ own literary forms: the conversion narrative. The perfect fit of Edwards’s imagined recantation with the Puritan form in which Walwyn cast it demonstrated just how far the real-life Edwards had drifted from the values implicit in his religious allegiances. Even Walwyn’s allegories somehow maintain his concern for directness and simplicity: his presentation of abstract

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concepts in concrete form oddly reinforces his contention that the most important concepts are plain for anyone to see and understand. When Walwyn urges Edwards to treat himself with ‘love’, the ointment which will cure his distemper, his homely advice to ‘rub it in’ well makes Edwards’s stubborn intolerance seem ridiculous as well as inexcusable.20 The Leveller leaders, then, carried strikingly different literary personae, modes of thought, and ranges of reference into their Leveller activities. However there were some key commonalties which ran through their thought and enabled a relatively cohesive Leveller movement to emerge. The second half of this chapter will consider the thought of the Leveller movement as a whole. Perhaps the first puzzle is over the religious roots of what can seem a precociously secular political theory. Some false scents are laid down by the heterodoxy—even by Independent and sectarian standards—of Overton and Walwyn, which attracted accusations of atheism from their contemporaries. Such accusations have sometimes been taken too literally by scholars keen to see Leveller political secularism as a result of a general move towards a secular mindset, with the leaching away of essentials of the Christian faith. Overton’s extension of the language of ‘reason’ to encompass ‘divinity’ as well as ‘morality’,21 and Walwyn’s characteristic advocacy of the discovery of truth (including religious truth) through discussion, have perhaps contributed to this impression, along with Walwyn’s insistence, partly derived from his readings of the scepticism of Montaigne and Charron, on the impossibility of certain religious knowledge and hence of full agreement ‘in this world’. Yet Walwyn and Overton’s heterodoxies remained fully Christian: Walwyn’s faith was based around ‘that unum necessarium, that pearle in the field, free justification by Christ alone’,22 the discovery of which had allowed him to jettison the distractions and anxieties of Calvinist, clergydominated orthodoxy; Overton’s universe of matter imbued with spirit still found room for the physical location of Christ after his ascension, in the sun. This was far from the rationalist mindset of the later deists; Walwyn’s defence of his belief in Scripture—admittedly, offered under pressure of criticism—seems more ‘fideist’ than deist: Scripture simply has within it an ‘irresistible perswasive power’, whose operation is not reducible to human reasoning.23 Scripture is self-authenticating, and faith is based on revelation, not reason. In contrast to Overton and Walwyn, Lilburne is usually seen as well within the mainstream of Puritan Calvinism, his early pamphlets advertising the stringent separatism of his Particular Baptist faith. The character of his religious beliefs during the Levellers’ most active period is unclear, and Lilburne took up the new Quaker faith at the end of his life, so it is very possible that his attachment to predestinarian Calvinism waned at some earlier point, perhaps under the influence of his Leveller colleagues. But Lilburne, who started his career with the zeal of the religious martyr, is unlikely to have been a sceptic or religious rationalist at any point in his journey. It was not, then, mere irreligion or personal uncertainty about religious doctrine which led the Levellers to their separation of religion from politics. Indeed, scholars now tend to see religious commitment and engagement, rather than lukewarmness or

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scepticism, as the key impetus for liberty of conscience in this period; this may be just as true of the Levellers as of others. The shape which the Leveller argument for liberty of conscience took in their petitions and settlement schemes was the demand that the magistrate should have no power over conscience. One of the sources of this demand was the separatism expressed in Lilburne’s early works, which required the elect to withdraw from a national church which could not, by definition, be a true church. If this was the key impulse behind the Levellers’ tolerationism, however, it does raise the question of what drove their political engagement: why should the elect not only engage in politics, but promote a politics of inclusive and egalitarian principles? It could, of course, be argued that the urgency of the demand for freedom of conscience generated the Levellers’ political concerns: that demands for political and legal accountability were added to the Leveller programme because they were crucial in the defence of religious liberty.24 But it was surely not mere separatism which motivated either liberty of conscience, or, by derivation, Leveller politics. Naturally, religious understandings informed their politics—it could not have been otherwise—but they were committed to political life as a crucial aspect of human activity in its own right. To understand why this was the case, we need to consider the Levellers’ views of human nature, which again cross the divide between religion and politics. The Levellers were able to invest so much in worldly political life because their view of human nature and human potential in this life was fundamentally optimistic. Rather than believing that humans were hopelessly mired in sin, the Fall having corrupted the divine elements of their created nature, the Leveller leaders suggested that much of God’s original and natural purpose for human beings was redeemable. Divinely implanted reason had not been entirely or irrecoverably wiped out by sin; it was still accessible to the human mind. For Lilburne, the Fall had corrupted mankind, leading to tyranny and domination, but Christ’s work as ‘the Restorer and Repairer of mans losse and fall’ enabled legitimate government to be recovered through the restoration of the divine aspects of human nature. Overton, too, saw the marring of reason in humans as the cause of people’s sinful preference for ‘usurpation, and tyranny’ over ‘naturall freedom and property’.25 But he, too, felt that the current degenerate state of human reason was not inevitable: people were, in his ‘vitalist’ philosophy, a living substance able to become more bestial or more rational partly through their circumstances and education.26 Part of the Leveller project, then, was to stimulate people to recover the use of their reason and come to a full and proper understanding of themselves and of their true human nature and potential. Much of Leveller writing was itself directed to that end; rather than merely using writing as an instrument to bring about mechanical political changes (although changed political practices might themselves help to reconstitute the people in their understandings of their rights), the task was to change the readers to enable them to reconstitute political life in accordance with the best, divinely ordained aspects of human nature. That hopefulness about human nature was to be challenged by the course of events in the 1640s, and the Levellers came to have a more disillusioned view, recognizing the corrupting effects of power as almost universal. But it is striking that their solution to

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this problem still expressed a deep faith in the rationality and incorruptibility of the people as a whole, at least under the right political conditions: their remedy for corruption involved placing time-limits on the terms of office which anyone could serve, but also instituting systems of local election not only for members of their elected ‘Representative’ chamber, but also for local office-holders, ministers of religion, army officers, and jurors.27 This is in marked contrast to the effects of disillusionment on other thinkers in the 1640s and 1650s, even those who had had similar aspirations to create a public of enlightened, virtuous citizens. Where Milton withdrew his trust from the mass of the people, seeing them as dangerously inconstant and corruptible, and placed it in the godly few, the Levellers continued to place their faith in the people as the only possible safeguard against the corruption of the few. What enabled the Levellers to hold such a generous view of the capacities of the many, and how far did this extend into their political proposals? Here too, the Levellers’ theological views may well be relevant. Overton’s General Baptist belief in free grace (which could be accepted or rejected by the individual) and Walwyn’s antinomian belief in free grace available to all can be seen as foundations of the inclusive political life which the Leveller authors advocated: it might have come more naturally to those with a generous, rather than exclusive, view of salvation. There were, of course, arguments for the original equality, and fundamental spiritual equality, of all human beings which ran back into Catholic natural law theory. That natural law theory, in Catholic and Protestant texts of the sixteenth century, fed quite directly into parliamentarian argument in the Civil War period, and from there into Leveller thought. Lilburne drew on this tradition in stating that all human beings since Adam and Eve ‘are, and were by nature all equall and alike in power, digni[t]y, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or majesteriall power, one over or above another’.28 Original equality and freedom was one of the basic buildingblocks of political theories based on natural law. What is striking, however, is the Leveller insistence that this original equality is not a mere premiss on which to build a theory of the origins of hierarchy and government in the distant past, but a reality which applies to each person born even into established polities, and which continues to have crucial implications for the relationship of individuals to their governments and to each other. Like Lilburne, Overton tellingly phrased his discussion of natural equality in the present tense: For by natural birth all men are equally and alike born to like propriety, liberty and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature into this world, every one with a natural, innate freedom and propriety—as it were writ in the table of every man’s heart, never to be obliterated—even so are we to live, everyone equally and alike to enjoy his birthright and privilege; even all whereof God by nature has made him free.29

Political and legal equality was a constant in Leveller political theory, the first Agreement of the People typically requiring ‘That in all Laws made, or to be made, every person may be bound alike, and that no Tenure, Estate, Charter, Degree, Birth, or place, do confer any exemption from the ordinary Course of Legall Proceedings, whereunto

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others are subjected’.30 Equality clearly also underlay the Levellers’ constitutional arguments and proposed arrangements for political representation, but more debate surrounds the nature of their thinking here. Their proposed constitutional settlements involved, effectively, the sovereignty of a reformed House of Commons, which they referred to as the ‘Representative’, echoing the common description of Parliament as the ‘representative body’ of the kingdom. The franchise was to be reformed, but the Levellers were sometimes coy about what that meant; historians have seen them as advocating positions ranging from a virtually full adult male franchise, to a much more restricted household-head franchise, although C. B. Macpherson’s much-debated claim that even wage-earners were to be excluded (under the category of ‘servants’) has not stood the test of time.31 Much Leveller writing does have a pronounced egalitarian and inclusive drive, addressing its (male?) audience as equally concerned in the polity, regardless of their status or wealth. Indeed, Leveller women petitioners could even adopt this rhetoric to justify their own intervention in politics. However, it is also true that the second and third Agreements of the People (the first, in 1647, carefully avoided spelling out a position on the franchise) mentioned certain grounds on which adult males might be excluded from the vote. Practical politics had much to do with this, and it was the second, so-called Officers’ Agreement which set out the most restrictive franchise: the Levellers were trying to reach a compromise with the army leadership. But essentially, the Levellers’ thought on the franchise may appear muddled and compromised because of the tension between two animating concerns: the importance of autonomy, and the need for political consent. The concern for autonomy returns us to the Leveller picture of humanity’s original state. This natural state was not a mere blank canvas of free and equal individuals with no further characteristics. Lilburne saw in these original human beings a natural ‘power, digni[t]y, authority, and majesty’, although not over each other; Overton, more explicitly, set out a sophisticated if sometimes obscure account of their natural ‘self-propriety’. There was clearly something intrinsically valuable about this Godgiven quality of self-direction and self-ownership, such that it could not, in its fundamentals, be violated by others. Through consent, people could transfer some of their powers in order to create legitimate government, but it was a given in Leveller thought that there was still a core of selfhood which no individual could rightly give away and no magistrate could rightly control. This was one of the key reasons for the Leveller insistence on liberty of conscience: religious conscience fell within the area of personal autonomy which no magistrate could violate. But this protected core was also important politically: no one could give away to another the power to hurt him—anyone who did so, according to Overton, ‘sins against his own flesh’. The magistrate, then, was not to be given the power to violate the essential integrity of individuals, either by forcing their consciences or by endangering their safety or well-being. Accordingly, the Levellers’ ‘Agreements of the People’ explicitly set out ‘reserves’ which were areas in which the magistrate had no power, and religious conscience was at the head of the list, closely followed by freedom from impressment, justified on grounds of conscience as well as of the danger to the life of a soldier serving against his will. Individuals who

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allowed such violation of their consciences or safety to occur had sinned against their own God-given integrity. But here perhaps is one reason for Levellers to limit the franchise in some circumstances: those who had forfeited their integrity, or who for circumstantial reasons were not in a position to exercise their own religious and political consciences fully, might perhaps be excluded. When the franchise was discussed at the Putney Debates, this explanation for exclusions from the vote was hinted at: all those who had not ‘lost their birthrights’ (perhaps through royalism) were to be enfranchised; and a further possible concession was offered: servants’ independence of thought might be compromised, so they might be excluded and their judgements ‘included’ in their masters’.32 Against this, the principle of the legitimization of government through consent, which was central to Leveller thought, clearly argued in favour of a near-universal franchise if understood in Leveller terms. Rainborough, a radical army officer speaking at the Putney Debates, put it most directly, arguing ‘that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under’.33 This logic was implicit in a good deal of Leveller writing, even if other considerations sometimes overrode it. As we have seen, the argument from natural liberty and equality was a conventional one which the Levellers shaped in their own way; parliamentarians had used it to build a theory of government legitimized by consent which did not, for them, imply any need to widen the franchise. For the Levellers, though, consent had not just taken place when people came together from a ‘state of nature’ to set up societies by giving up their original liberty in favour of government. Much of that liberty had never been given up, and the line between a state of nature and a well-governed society was blurred. The transaction which was understood by many theorists as a once-and-for-all transfer of popular power to establish a polity was translated by the Levellers into a mechanism for the renewal of legitimate power within an established polity—the election of a new Parliament. This meant that the original free population of the ‘state of nature’ could never fully be superseded by a more numerically limited, constitutionally defined ‘political nation’. The Levellers mapped the state of nature onto the existing constitution, collapsing the sharp distinction which other parliamentarians had been keen to make between original freedom and a current constitution in which the people had entrusted Parliaments to look after their interests. Rather than replacing history with theory, or English law with natural law, they viewed English history, law, and the constitution through the lens of a natural law theory which cast it in a very particular light.34 The original powers and freedoms of the state of nature flowed into and animated the English polity: at elections; on occasions when the people had to take back their power from treacherous representatives to summon new ones; and in the proposed popular subscription of the ‘Agreements of the People’ (whether or not these were intended as social contracts). An underlying popular sovereignty was the recurrent theme of Leveller writing, and this is why Leveller writing was spread so energetically, urgently, and widely. Whatever

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their own political manoeuvres, the Leveller leaders knew that their political visions could only be realized, in the end, by their readers.

NOTES 1. [Sydenham], An Anatomy, epistle to the House of Commons, A2v. 2. Hill, ‘From Lollards to Levellers’. 3. Sharp, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations’; McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 50–88. 4. Wootton, ‘From Rebellion to Revolution’. 5. Como, ‘Secret Printing’. 6. See Houston, ‘Way of Settlement’, for the Leveller critique of the monopolistic aspects of the city and the City Companies. 7. Peacey, ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’. 8. Canne, Lieut. Colonel J. Lilburn, 23–4. 9. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 145. 10. [Price et al.], Walwins Wiles, 2–3; Walwyn, Writings, 405–6. 11. Foxley, ‘John Lilburne’. 12. Walwyn, Writings, 405–6. 13. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 136–7; Smith, ‘Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts’; Borot, ‘Richard Overton and Radicalism’. Heinemann, ‘Popular Drama’ argues that theatre should not be seen as an anti-Puritan mode in itself. 14. McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 64. 15. [Overton], The Araignement, Epistle Dedicatory. 16. Morton, ‘A Still and Soft Voice’, 158. 17. McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 72. 18. Foxley, ‘Wildernesse of Tropes’. 19. [Price et al.], Walwins Wiles, 2–3. 20. Walwyn, Writings, 145 ff.; A Prediction of Mr. Edwards his Conversion and Recantation, 227ff.; An Antidote against Master Edwards his old and new Poyson, 205 ff., at 215. 21. Overton, An Appeale (1647), in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 158. 22. Walwyn, Writings, 398. 23. Ibid. 271. 24. Davis, ‘Levellers and Christianity’, 247–8. 25. Foxley, ‘Problems of Sovereignty’. 26. McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 67. 27. An Agreement of the Free People of England, 1 May 1649, in Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 408–9. 28. Lilburne, The Free-mans Freedom, 11. 29. Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny (1646), in Sharp, English Levellers, 55. 30. Wolfe, Leveller Manifestoes, 227–8. 31. Macpherson, Political Theory of Possessive Individualism; Hampsher-Monk, ‘Political Theory of the Levellers’; Thomas, ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’; Levy, ‘Freedom,

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Property and the Levellers’. Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics’, argues for the importance of the household to the Levellers. 32. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 83; Thompson, ‘Maximilian Petty’. 33. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 53. 34. On history and theory, see Skinner, ‘History and Ideology’; Sommerville, ‘History and Theory’. On English law and natural law, see Gleissner, ‘The Levellers and Natural Law’; Seaberg, ‘The Norman Conquest’.

WORKS CITED Borot, Luc. ‘Richard Overton and Radicalism: The New Intertext of the Civic Ethos in Mid Seventeenth-Century England’, in Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (eds.), English Radicalism: 1550–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 37–86. Brailsford, H. N. The Levellers and the English Revolution. London: Cresset Press, 1961. Canne, John. Lieut. Colonel J. Lilburn Tryed and Cast. London, 1653. Como, David R. ‘Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’. Past and Present 196 (2007), 37–82. Corns, Thomas N. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Davis, J. C. ‘The Levellers and Christianity’, in Brian Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and the English Civil War. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972, 225–50. Foxley, Rachel. ‘John Lilburne and the Citizenship of “Free-Born Englishmen” ’. Historical Journal 47.4 (2004), 849–74. ——. ‘ “The Wildernesse of Tropes and Figures”: Figuring Rhetoric in Leveller Pamphlets’. Seventeenth Century 21.2 (2006), 270–86. ——. ‘Problems of Sovereignty in Leveller Writings’. History of Political Thought 28.4 (2007), 642–60. Frank, Joseph. The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth-Century Social Democrats: John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955. Gleissner, Richard A. ‘The Levellers and Natural Law: The Putney Debates of 1647’. Journal of British Studies 20.1 (1980), 74–89. Gregg, Pauline. Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne. London: J. M. Dent, 1961. Hampsher-Monk, Iain. ‘The Political Theory of the Levellers: Putney, Property and Professor Macpherson’. Political Studies 24 (1976), 397–422. Heinemann, Margot. ‘Popular Drama and Leveller Style: Richard Overton and John Harris’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, 69–92. Hill, Christopher. ‘From Lollards to Levellers’, in Maurice Cornforth (ed.), Rebels and their Causes: Essays in Honour of A. L. Morton. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978, 49–67. Houston, Alan Craig. ‘ “A Way of Settlement”: The Levellers, Monopolies and the Public Interest’. History of Political Thought 14.3 (1993), 381–420.

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Hughes, Ann. ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, 162–88. Levy, Michael B. ‘Freedom, Property and the Levellers: The Case of John Lilburne’. Western Political Quarterly 36.1 (1983), 116–33. Lilburne, John. The Free-mans Freedom Vindicated. London, 1646. McDowell, Nicholas. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Mendle, Michael (ed.). The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Morton, A. L. ‘A Still and Soft Voice’, in his The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970, 143–96. [Overton, Richard]. The Araignement of Mr. Persecution. London, 1645. Peacey, Jason. ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’. Historical Journal 43.3 (2000), 625–46. [Price, John, et al.]. Walwins Wiles. London, 1649. Seaberg, R. B. ‘The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity’. Historical Journal 24.4 (1981), 791–806. Sharp, Andrew (ed.). The English Levellers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ——. ‘John Lilburne and the Long Parliament’s Book of Declarations: A Radical’s Exploitation of the Words of Authorities’. History of Political Thought 9.1 (1988), 19–44. Skinner, Quentin. ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’. Historical Journal 8.2 (1965), 151–78. Smith, Nigel. ‘Richard Overton’s Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style’, in Thomas Corns (ed.), The Literature of Controversy: Polemical Strategy from Milton to Junius. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1987, 39–66. ——. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Sommerville, Johann. ‘History and Theory: The Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought’. Political Studies 34 (1986), 249–61. [Sydenham, Cuthbert]. An Anatomy of Lievt. Col. John Lilburn’s Spirit and Pamphlets. London, 1649. Thomas, Keith. ‘The Levellers and the Franchise’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660. London: Macmillan, 1972, 57–78. Thompson, Christopher. ‘Maximilian Petty and the Putney Debate on the Franchise’. Past and Present 88 (1980), 63–9. Walwyn, William. The Writings of William Walwyn, ed. J. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1989. Wolfe, D. M. Leveller Manifestoes of the Puritan Revolution. New York: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944. Woodhouse, A. S. P. Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–49) from the Clarke Manuscripts. 3rd edn. London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1986. Wootton, David. ‘From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642–3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism’. English Historical Review 105 (1990), 654–69.

PA RT I I I ...............................................................................................

REGICIDE AND REPUBLIC ...............................................................................................

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CHAPTER

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EIKON BASILIKE The Printing, Composition, Strategy, and Impact of ‘The King’s Book’ ....................................................................................................... ROBERT WILCHER

I

.................................................................................................................. Charles I was beheaded on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall on 30 January 1649. On 1 February, the former royal chaplain Henry Hammond received from Richard Royston, bookseller and publisher, ‘the sad narrations’ of the execution along with the ‘fruits’ of the King’s ‘retirements’ in an advance copy of Eikon Basilike: The Portraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings.1 Second and third issues of the first edition of this book, with Royston’s name removed from the title page, were on sale within the next few days.2 What Hammond held in his hands was a small volume containing a frontispiece, a title page, a table of contents, and twentyeight chapters that reviewed some of the most significant events and issues of the past eight years, from the calling of the Long Parliament in 1640 to the Vote of No Addresses passed by both Houses in January 1648. The text was couched in the firstperson singular throughout and all but two of the chapters consisted of prose reflections on recent history followed by psalm-like prayers for the preservation of the captive King and his people. The exceptions to this pattern were Charles’s penitential meditations during his confinement at Holmby and a letter of fatherly and kingly advice to the Prince of Wales. The material was not mediated to the reader by a publisher’s epistle or editor’s preface, although the form of some of the chapter headings—‘Upon His Majesty’s Retirement from Westminster’, ‘Upon Uxbridge Treaty, and Other Offers Made by the King’—implied the intervention of a third party between the King’s manuscript and the printed page. As Thomas Corns observes, the title is ‘curiously ill-fitting’ with the book’s contents, since it suggests ‘a portrait or image made of the king, rather than one produced by the king himself ’.3

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What happened over the next few months has been called ‘one of the most stunning epiphenomena of the regicide’.4 The first edition sold so well that Royston found it necessary to publish two more editions by the middle of March and was probably connected with three more by early May. Before the end of March, five reprints derived from the first edition appeared in duodecimo format, which Francis Madan associates with the bookseller Henry Seile.5 On 15 March, William Dugard, headmaster of the Merchant Taylors school, who had already printed two editions on his private press, set up a new edition for the publisher Francis Eglesfield from a manuscript that Charles I had given to one of his chaplains, Edward Symmons. They supplied a verse explanation of the emblematic frontispiece and added various other items, including four prayers used by the King during his captivity, a letter from his exiled eldest son, and relations of his last words to his younger children. Annexed to the volume, under the separate title Apophthegmata, was a collection of sayings extracted from the main text. This supplementary material proved to be so popular that it was quickly incorporated into other editions. Dugard was arrested on 16 March and questioned by the Committee for Scandalous Pamphlets, but on his release he defiantly issued another edition. Royston had also been interrogated by the authorities when the Eikon Basilike was first published and on 31 May he was summoned before the Council of State, after which only five miniature volumes printed by William Bentley for John Williams came from an English press between June and December.6 The arrest of Williams on 25 December marked the end of separate printings of ‘the king’s book’ in England, but by then the astonishing total of thirty-five editions had been reached. In the course of the year, there had also been English texts printed in Ireland, Holland, and France and translations into Latin, Dutch, French, Danish, and German. In spite of the ban, Royston included the Eikon Basilike in a collection of Charles I’s writings. This was printed clandestinely in 1650 by Roger Norton under the title Reliquiae sacrae Carolinae, three more editions of which, all with a false Hague imprint, were produced during the 1650s. After the Restoration, Royston issued a magnificent volume of the late King’s works under the title Basilika (1662); and he and Norton produced separate editions of the Eikon Basilike in 1681 and 1685. Thereafter it appeared intermittently on its own or as part of the collected works through the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The most recent edition by Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson prints the text along with the four prayers, selections from Milton’s Eikonoklastes, Charles’s speech from the scaffold, and other related material.7

II

.................................................................................................................. The aesthetic judgement by one of the earliest readers of the Eikon Basilike that there was ‘nothing in the English language before written’ that could ‘with any Justice compare with this’ was bound up with the conviction that no other literary work could ‘set such a character upon the author whence it came’.8 Given the propaganda power of words from the pen of a king who had died proclaiming himself not only ‘an

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honest man, a good King, and a good Christian’ but also ‘the Martyr of the People’, it is not surprising that their authenticity was questioned by opponents of monarchy.9 At the beginning of June, rumours that a cleric was responsible for the text of ‘the king’s book’ were countered by The Princely Pellican, the long title of which promised ‘Royal Resolves . . . Extracted from His Majesties Divine Meditations: With Satisfactory Reasons to the whole Kingdome, That His Sacred Person was the onely Author of them’. Having explained that he is qualified to confirm the King’s authorship by his position as ‘a Constant Servant to His Sacred Person’ over many years, the anonymous apologist describes the inception and progress of this ‘Living Memoriall of Princely piety’ and dismisses suggestions that it was ghosted by Dr Harris or Dr Hammond.10 During August, the first printed attack on the Eikon Basilike was launched in Eikon Alethine, which aimed to expose it as a fraud perpetrated by some unknown priest or prelate. A royalist refutation of this charge was published in September under the title Eikon E Piste. Then in October, John Milton entered the fray with Eikonoklastes, an official attempt to discredit Charles and his book commissioned by the Council of State, in which the Latin Secretary hinted that ‘the Author of these Soliloquies’ may have had a ‘secret Coadjutor’.11 Although the public dispute died down soon afterwards, it has recently been argued that ‘one’s stance on whether Charles had written the book was the litmus test of whether or not one was a royalist during the Interregnum’.12 The controversy was reignited by a sensational revelation in a new edition of Eikonoklastes published in 1690. In 1686, a note was discovered in which the first Earl of Anglesey claimed to have been assured by Charles II and the Duke of York that the book attributed to their father ‘was none of the said Kings compiling, but made by Dr. Gauden Bishop of Exceter’.13 This ‘Anglesey Memorandum’ was inserted into some copies of the 1690 Eikonoklastes, and its provision of an identity for the mysterious ‘coadjutor’ initiated a vehement debate that was to rumble on into the twentieth century. In the immediate wake of the publication of the memorandum, important evidence from witnesses on both sides entered the public domain for the first time. Restitution to the Royal Author or a Vindication of King Charls the Martyr’s most Excellent Book, published (and probably written) by Samuel Keble in May 1691, printed a letter in which William Levett, a former royal page, stated that he had seen the King working on a manuscript at Newport and had been entrusted with its conveyance in a casket from there to Hurst Castle. Later in the year, in A Defence of King Charles I, Richard Hollingworth reported the personal testimony of Sir John Brattle that in 1647, at the request of Bishop Juxon, he had ‘sate up with his Father some nights’ to complete the task of putting ‘into an exact method’ a collection of ‘loose papers’ that the King had written ‘at different times’ and that constituted ‘the most considerable part’ of his book.14 Both of these defences of Charles I’s authorship were challenged by Anthony Walker in A True Account of the Author of a Book entituled Eikon Basilike (1692). Walker, who had been Gauden’s curate during the 1640s, affirmed that a manuscript taken to Newport by the Marquess of Hertford for the King’s approval was mainly the work of Gauden, with some help from Bishop Duppa. In the following year, a publisher’s postscript to Truth Brought to

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Light: or, the Gross Forgeries of Dr. Hollingworth made available both a letter (dated 13 March 1661) in which the Earl of Clarendon admitted that he was privy to the secret of Gauden’s authorship, and a narrative by Gauden’s widow, who had died in 1671. Mrs Gauden insisted that her husband ‘did pen that Book which goes by the name of the King’s Booke’, that the Marquess of Hertford had taken it to the King at Newport, that the King wanted it ‘to be put out in another name’ but was persuaded by Bishop Duppa to go along with ‘the designe’ of its being his own work, that its original title was ‘Suspiria Regalia’, and that Gauden had added two more chapters before employing Edward Symmons to deliver it to Royston for printing.15 Significant support for the existence of genuine writings by the King then came in the form of a letter printed in the second edition of Thomas Wagstaffe’s A Vindication of King Charles the Martyr (1697). This letter, by an Essex minister named Le Pla, passed on what he had heard from William Allen, who had once been Gauden’s servant. According to this old man, his master had borrowed a manuscript of the King’s (as far as he could remember from Edward Symmons) and ‘he sate up one whole night to transcribe it’, while Allen himself stayed in the chamber with him ‘to wait upon him, to make his Fires, and snuff his candles’.16 Further pieces of evidence turned up in the course of the eighteenth century, including more letters by Gauden and a statement in The History of his Own Time by Bishop Burnet (1724) that the future James II had informed him in 1673 that the book ‘was not of his father’s writing’, that ‘Dr Gawden writ it’, and that Charles I had read it at Newport and ‘approved of it as containing his sense of things’.17 In 1824 and 1825, Bishop Christopher Wordsworth gathered together everything that was then known into two volumes with the aim of demonstrating once and for all that Gauden’s case did not stand up against the accumulated testimony in favour of the King’s authorship. Supporters of Gauden were unconvinced, however, and the details were argued over for the rest of the decade, culminating in the Revd Henry Todd’s Bishop Gauden the Author of Icon Basilike (1829). One more important piece of evidence came to light in 1839 with the publication of The Autobiography of Symon Patrick, Bishop of Ely. Writing not long before he died in 1707, Patrick recalled that Mrs Gauden had told him the ‘great secret’ of her husband’s authorship and added that he had kept this knowledge to himself, ‘desiring it should be reputed the king’s book, because he read the sheets as they were composed, and sometimes corrected and heightened them’.18 During the first half of the twentieth century, the authorship controversy continued and much of the scholarly engagement with the Eikon Basilike was carried on as an adjunct to the study of Eikonoklastes, focusing particularly on Milton’s discovery that the first of the King’s prayers was plagiarized from Sidney’s Arcadia.19

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III

.................................................................................................................. Edward Almack compiled a descriptive bibliography of some seventy-five editions of the Eikon Basilike in 1896, which in Madan’s opinion was ‘to be judged more as a tribute to the memory of the King, whose sole authorship of the Eikon he regards as established beyond a doubt, and for its value as a pioneer in the field, than by the standards of a modern bibliography’.20 Madan’s own project, which was published in 1950, sought to remedy the shortcomings of Almack’s work by furnishing an accurate bibliographical description of every edition of the Eikon Basilike up to 1800. He reprinted title pages, identified printers, and traced variations on William Marshall’s original frontispiece. In the first appendix, he described all the sources relating to the authorship question and assessed their value. The narrative of the book’s composition and publication constructed from this material has been the basis for subsequent discussion of the historical impact and literary significance of the work. Madan’s ‘heroic accomplishment’ is not accepted as definitive, however, in a recent study of three of the printers involved in the production of the Eikon Basilike. Kathleen Lynch suggests that ‘newer bibliographical methodologies’ would disrupt his ‘neat tabulation of distinct editions’; and that a ‘revised bibliographical description . . . might well probe the existence of publishing syndicates, or practices of shared printing and wholesaling’. Furthermore, ‘copy-specific evidence’ would necessitate a fuller acknowledgement of ‘the haphazard relationship of the eight successive states and sizes of the frontispiece engraving to extant copies of the work’.21 Nevertheless, whatever reservations modern bibliographers may have about the descriptive dimension of Madan’s work, his judicious resolution of the authorship dispute has been widely enough endorsed to warrant an outline of its main arguments here. Madan begins by accepting that ‘Gauden’s responsibility for the published Eikon can no longer be denied’, but acknowledges that there is also sufficient evidence to prove the existence of ‘some authentic writings of the King’, which Gauden had before him ‘when composing the Eikon’.22 The Princely Pellican dates Charles I’s decision to pen a personal defence of his conduct against libels in the press as early as March 1642, when he aired the project with some of his intimate attendants, including Edward Symmons, in the garden at Theobalds. At that time, he had already ‘set his hand to Paper’ on matters relating to his withdrawal from Westminster that were covered in some of the early chapters of the Eikon Basilike, and he announced that his ‘next Essay’ would tackle the vexed issue of Strafford’s trial and execution. Madan thinks it unlikely that much was added during the years of Civil War, but does not discount the possibility that among the King’s papers lost at the battle of Naseby in 1645 and later ‘recover’d above all expectance, and return’d to His Majesties Hand’ was ‘the continuation of His Divine Meditations, which He had gone along with to the Successe of that day’.23 It was during his confinement at Holmby House between February and June 1647 that Charles must have resumed work on his self-justification; and it was at Hampton

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Court, where he was kept after he had fallen into the hands of the army from 24 August until his flight to the Isle of Wight on 11 November, that he recovered what had been lost at Naseby and had his ‘loose papers’ put ‘into an exact method’ by the Brattles.24 Edward Symmons re-enters the story at this point. He had been in Oxford during most of the Civil War and moved to Cornwall when the King departed for the campaign of 1645. There, according to a prefatory epistle dated 25 October 1647, he had written the bulk of A Vindication of King Charles before escaping to France. After various delays, the manuscript was committed to print early in 1648. While he was preparing this volume for the press, he may have visited Hampton Court and gained access to the King’s writings. A section in his book entitled ‘A true Parallel between the sufferings of our Saviour and our Souereigne in divers Speciall particulars’ contains the most sustained deployment prior to the Eikon Basilike of what was to become a standard trope in royalist propaganda.25 Symmons had known John Gauden since the early 1640s, when they had held neighbouring livings in Essex, and it was from him that Gauden borrowed the manuscript of the King’s papers (set in order through the agency of Bishop Juxon) which he spent an entire night copying. The King’s original manuscript would then have been returned to him during his time in Carisbrooke Castle, where it was seized during a search of his quarters in March 1648.26 In Madan’s narrative, therefore, Symmons was instrumental in recruiting Gauden to produce a work from the King’s own papers that was to be called ‘Suspiria Regalia’. A copy of this redaction, completed by the end of May, was taken later in the summer to Newport, where—in the words of Bishop Patrick—Charles ‘corrected and heightened’ it. This was the manuscript entrusted to the page William Levett during the move to Hurst Castle in December 1648; and a copy of it, made by the King’s secretaries and containing his emendations, was the one—drawn ‘from under his Blew Watchet Wastcoat’ and given to Symmons—which became the copy-text for Dugard’s edition of 15 March.27 In a statement dated 18 November 1684, Richard Royston recalled that, ‘about Mich[ael] mas’ 1648, he had received orders from the King ‘to provide a Presse for hee had a Booke of his owne for him to Print’; and that Symmons had brought it to him on Christmas Eve.28 Before Gauden passed his corrected copy of the manuscript to Symmons, he added chapters 24 and 28, ‘Upon their denying His Majesty the attendance of his Chaplains’ and ‘Meditations upon Death’. Contrary to Mrs Gauden’s assertion that her husband had been responsible for the final title, one of the compositors claimed that Jeremy Taylor had seen proofs with an English title—‘The Royal Plea’—in Royston’s shop and suggested the change to Eikon Basilike.29 Both Walker and Mrs Gauden stated that sheets of the first impression were discovered by parliamentary agents and destroyed when the book was half printed. As a result, Royston moved his presses outside the city and had advance copies of the first edition ready within a day of the execution.30 Some adjustments to this narrative may be required following the discovery of an alternative account in a collection of materials compiled by Roger Morrice (1628–1702). Morrice’s Entring Book is described by Jason McElligott as ‘a dispassionate chronicle of public affairs’ which contains ‘anecdotes about a wide variety of events from the early

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sixteenth century onwards’. Among these are two that relate to ‘the authorship and composition of the Eikon Basilike’.31 The first was reported to Morrice on 5 November 1687 by Dr Anthony Walker and follows quite closely the version later published in Walker’s A True Account (1692). The second, recorded in January 1688, tells ‘an altogether different story, which purports to be based on information provided by the noted royalist, Arthur, 1st Baron Capel (d. 1649)’.32 It merits quoting at some length: The Lord Capell said That the King reading a Vindication of his the said Kings Case against the Parliament Written by Mr. Simons . . . he told the Lord Capell that that was the best Pen that ever Writt in his defence, and he approved highly of his great judgement and excellent notions, and desired the Lord Capell to Convey some Papers of his, to wit the first draught of his Eikon basilike to the said Simons, Ordering him to deale freely, and to alter, adde or correct entirely according to his own judgement, and Capell did answerably give those papers to Simons, and Simons did make many alterations, but Simons acquainted Dr. Gauden herewith, and Dr. Gauden tooke a Coppy of the said corrected Papers and in tract of time gave that Coppy to Royston who Printed it.33

The latter part of the entry deals with Gauden’s attempts to bargain for a richer bishopric after the Restoration by passing Symmons’s work off as his own. In Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence of Charles the First’s Holy and Divine Book (1692), there is a similar report that ‘King Charles sent his Book to Mr. Simmonds, to peruse and correct’ and that Gauden ‘borrowed’ and ‘transcribed’ it, but it lacks the crucial detail that Symmons himself made ‘many alterations’ before lending it to Gauden.34 McElligott is cautious about giving too much weight to this reversal of roles between Symmons and Gauden. He does remark, however, that ‘[a]t first sight Simmons is a much more convincing candidate than Gauden for the authorship of the Eikon Basilike, primarily because he was personally close to the King and was a pugnacious royalist propagandist in his own right’.35 This alternative version of events offers possible answers to two questions prompted by Madan’s narrative. First, how did Symmons come to be in possession of the royal writings that were begun in 1642, continued at Holmby, and arranged at Hampton Court? Madan speculates that he was ‘among those persons who must have paid their homage to the King at Hampton Court’ and that there he ‘must have been one of the first to study the originals’ of what became chapters in the Eikon Basilike.36 No such speculations are necessary if the King took the initiative in sending his papers to his former chaplain to deal with ‘according to his own judgement’. Secondly, why did Symmons pass them on to Gauden? Gauden himself, in one of his letters to Clarendon, had claimed that the ‘book and figure was wholy and only my invention, making and designe’.37 If the story in Morrice’s Entry Book is correct and Symmons acquainted Gauden with the project after he had himself made ‘many alterations’ to the King’s drafts, then it may have been with a view to his former neighbour putting the manuscript into publishable form. And if it was Gauden’s idea to conclude each of the historical ‘essays’ with a prayer based on the Psalms of David in order to emphasize the likeness between the two royal authors, then he may have felt there was genuine substance to his later claim that the ‘invention’ and ‘designe’ of the

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‘book and figure’ were his own. One might add that Symmons’s Vindication is widely regarded as the prototype for later comparisons of Charles and Christ, a motif that is firmly embedded in the narrative sections and could easily have been extended by Gauden into the prayers and the additional chapters he supplied.38 Furthermore, since Symmons died on 29 March 1649, he was never in a position to gainsay any rumours about Gauden’s sole responsibility for the ‘King’s book’ that were circulating at the highest level after the Restoration.39

IV

.................................................................................................................. The process of composing, revising, and printing ‘the King’s book’ raises questions about the aims of those involved in the project—the King himself, Juxon, Symmons, Gauden, Duppa, Royston, and perhaps Jeremy Taylor. When he first mooted the idea of justifying himself personally in print, Charles cannot have foreseen that the product of his labours would put the seal on his martyrdom at the hands of his political opponents. In the spring of 1642, he must have conceived it as a necessary manoeuvre in the ‘paper war’ that preceded the outbreak of hostilities later in the year. When he resumed his writing at Holmby and asked Juxon to arrange for his accumulated papers to be set in order at Hampton Court, he must have seen publication as a way of appealing directly to the outside world from the captivity that followed military defeat. His reflections on being seized by Cornet Joyce from the custody of Parliament in June 1647 are careful to play off the fears of Londoners now threatened by the army—‘I pray God the storm be yet fully passed over them’—against the ‘interests’ of the soldiers ‘demanding Pay and Indemnity’. He concludes with what is clearly intended as a negotiating offer to his current captors: ‘though they have fought against Me, yet I cannot but so far esteem that valour and gallantry they have sometime showed, as to wish I may never want such men to maintain My self, My Laws, and My Kingdoms, in such a peace, as wherein they may enjoy their share and proportion as much as any men’.40 In the course of 1648, while Symmons and Gauden were working on the manuscript and Charles was correcting it, the book must have been regarded as a means of strengthening his hand in talks with the parliamentary commissioners at Newport. Even when Royston began to print it in late December under the title Suspiria regalia, or, The Royal Plea, the hope may have been to influence the High Court of Justice that commenced proceedings on 8 January. After all, as Sean Kelsey has demonstrated, some contemporaries saw the trial as ‘just another means of increasing pressure on the King to make key concessions’; and when it began few of the King’s judges ‘actually required that the king’s blood be spilt’, so that ‘king-killing was in all essentials a consequence of their loss of control over a complex and unpredictable situation’.41 The addition of the ‘Meditations upon Death’ at the last minute may indicate that those closest to the King had already resigned themselves to the outcome of the imminent trial and were preparing a propaganda coup that would transform

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execution into martyrdom. The change of title during January certainly marks a recognition that ‘the King’s book’ would make its appearance not as a ‘plea’ for clemency towards the suffering monarch but as a ‘portrait’ of the royal martyr and an indictment of his murderers. Marshall’s frontispiece (Figure 15.1) honoured the new title’s promise of a ‘royal image’ with a visual depiction of the King that ‘hovered ambiguously between symbol and portrait’.42 The symbolic element was developed from an original design of three crowns set on a wreath of thorns.43 Gazing at a crown of immortal glory above him, holding a crown of thorns in his hand, and spurning a crown of earthly vanity beneath his foot, the familiar figure of Charles kneels before a table on which a Bible is open at the words ‘In verbo tuo spes mea’ (‘My hope is in your word’). On the left of the engraving is an emblematic landscape: in the upper part, a rock stands firm in a turbulent sea; and in the lower part, a palm tree hung with weights bears the motto ‘Crescit sub pondere virtus’ (‘Virtue increases under oppression’).44 Setting it in the context of the rhetoric of compassion employed in the public sphere of the midseventeenth century, John Staines reads the frontispiece as ‘a study of passion’ in which Charles is both the King ‘weeping over the sins of his nation’ and the martyr

F I G U R E 1 5 . 1 William Marshall frontispiece portrait of Charles I at prayer, Eikon Basilike (1649) # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1868, 0808.13507.

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‘praying for deliverance like Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane’.45 The affective power of this image was more disturbing than its emblematic import for supporters of the new regime like Milton, who mocked the ‘new device of the King’s Picture at his praiers’ because of its hold over the depraved sensibilities of ‘an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble’.46 Indeed, such was its popularity that ‘copies and variants’ were ‘sold as engravings and reproduced in books and polemical tracts’ and ‘[t]he image of the king dominated the visual culture of the Commonwealth’.47 Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler has emphasized the original function of Marshall’s emblematic portrait as the frontispiece to a book, designed to prepare the reader ‘for a proper response to the contents’.48 But what was the ‘proper response’? As Lois Potter explains, ‘The Eikon posed problems for which seventeenth-century readers, both royalist and parliamentarian, were mostly unprepared. . . . How was the book to be read? Was it a literary work, a series of religious meditations, or a political tract?’49 During the past twenty-five years, those questions have been addressed not only in studies of the Eikon Basilike and its place in royalist culture and polemic, but also in relation to Milton’s effort to limit its political impact. It is no longer the case, as Kevin Sharpe complained in 1994, that ‘it has received little critical analysis’. His own perception that the Prayer Book rebellion in Scotland ‘instigated a new politics of discourse in which power depended upon the articulation of the royal voice’ has been widely taken up; and his more recent account of the evolution of ‘a new language of sensibility’, in which Charles could be presented ‘as the people’s prince’, has contributed to the current consensus that the portrait of the King created by the text was the end product of a transformation in royalist rhetoric that took place during the 1640s.50 The trigger for this development in the discourse of royalism was the capture of Charles’s correspondence and other papers at Naseby and the subsequent revelation of their contents in The Kings Cabinet Opened: or, Certain Packets of Secret Letters and Papers (July 1645). The exposure of his duplicity in seeking military assistance from abroad while conducting peace negotiations with Parliament seriously undermined trust in his word as a man, and the damage to his political cause is indicated by the publication of no less than six replies from the Oxford presses in the first two weeks of August.51 Symmons’s Vindication was originally conceived as part of this campaign to rehabilitate his reputation. Sharon Achinstein has demonstrated that Charles’s ‘selffashioning as a Christian martyr relied upon the traditional Protestant sense of conscience as an infallible moral judge to be obeyed regardless of human censure’; and Sharpe has argued that the effort to appropriate to himself and his cause ‘the validation of conscience’ commonly associated with Puritanism bore fruit in a posthumous victory over his enemies through the construction of ‘a powerful text of the royal conscience that might live after him’.52 Andrew Lacey has also shown how ‘sympathy for the person of the king’ was aroused during the second half of the Civil War decade by ‘a deliberate concentration’, in a variety of media, upon his ‘personal integrity’ and the ‘pathos of his predicament’.53 It was crucial for the propaganda success of the project, therefore, to maintain the impression that, like the documents lost at Naseby, these pages were never intended for

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the eyes of the public. In the chapter devoted to The Kings Cabinet Opened, Charles attempts to turn the tables on those who made his private letters public by branding it an ‘odious’ act that brought more ‘infamy’ upon ‘the Divulgers’ than any ‘reproach’ to himself. He then expresses the wish that his subjects ‘had yet a clearer sight’ into his ‘most retired thoughts’, where they would discover ‘how they are divided between the love and care I have, not more to preserve My own Rights, than to procure their peace and happiness’.54 Similarly, chapter 27 begins with Charles’s hope that ‘if these Papers, with some others, wherein I have set down the private reflections of my Conscience’ should ever chance to come into the hands of the Prince of Wales, he will make pious and practical use of them.55 This is why the authors of the Eikon Basilike made no attempt to fit it ‘into the accepted structures of political debate’, but presented it as ‘first and foremost a private and personal work’.56 By investing Charles with the attributes of martyrdom in the text as well as in the frontispiece, they ‘encouraged an identification of individual sufferings and anxieties with those of the king, who suffered for and with each individual’.57 Staines sums up the political effectiveness of this rhetorical strategy: ‘The people who do not shed tears for the dead king break a divine social covenant. Likewise, in weeping for the royal martyr, the reading public restores the bonds of compassion that unite the monarchic state and thus prepares the ground for a royal restoration.’58

V

.................................................................................................................. The fact that the popular appeal of the book ‘lay not in any supposed justification of action, but in the depiction of Charles’s character’ has an effect on the way events from the 1640s are chosen and processed.59 Therefore, while it is true that the past is laid out not as a connected narrative but ‘as a series of historical vignettes’ that enabled the King ‘to present his own reading of the critical episodes in the raveling of the state’, Steven Zwicker is not quite accurate in characterizing the result as a ‘political case’.60 The text consistently avoids specific details that might be disputed on political grounds and focuses on the honesty of Charles’s own motives for acting as he did.61 In reflecting upon his attempt to arrest the Five Members, for example, he recalls that there were some among his friends who ‘resented it as a motion rather rising from Passion than Reason’, but instead of spelling out the political imperatives that governed his illegal incursion into the House of Commons, he proceeds to absolve himself of moral taint: ‘But these men knew not the just motives, and pregnant grounds, with which I thought my self . . . furnished . . . Nor had I any temptation of displeasure, or revenge against those men’s persons.’62 Laura Knoppers likens the experience of reading such a text to ‘the reversals of anamorphic art’, like the slanting skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors, in which a shift of perspective makes a distorted figure appear in its proper proportion. By means of this technique, ‘the “death bed” meditations of Eikon Basilike position the

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reader to see through the disguises of Charles’s enemies and into his most secret thoughts’.63 The decision to begin with the calling of the Long Parliament is seen by Corns as an instance of ‘cunning simplicity’, since it ignores the royal policies of the preceding eleven years that sowed the seeds of rebellion and enables the narrative to focus ‘on the area of conflict in which the king was for the most part reacting to events, not initiating or occasioning them’. The only individuals identified apart from the Queen and the Prince of Wales are Strafford and the Hothams. Charles’s opponents are referred to variously as ‘some men’, ‘the chief contrivers’, ‘turbulent spirits’, ‘the seduced Train of the vulgar’, and Corns wonders if this vagueness about the identities, interests, and motivations of other characters in the King’s story ‘is central to the spell the book sought to weave over the consciousness of its contemporaries’.64 Several commentators have discussed the prominence given to the signing of the Bill of Attainder that sent Strafford to his death, for which Charles expressed repentance ‘as an act of so sinful frailty that it discovered more a fear of Man, than of God’.65 Lana Cable describes it as a ploy ‘to create a public perception of royal remorse over one death that can in turn deflect perceptions of royal remorselessness over many others’.66 For Lacey, the examination of the steps that led Charles to ‘repentance for this act of betrayal of both Strafford and his conscience’ serves a casuistical function for ‘people struggling to make sense of their duty and follow their consciences in extraordinary times’.67 And in Corns’s reading of the book’s propaganda strategy, it is ‘a master-stroke’ that provides ‘[t]he “sin” necessary to fulfil the Davidic pattern of deviation, punishment, penitence, and—prospectively—restoration’.68 That pattern, running alongside parallels between the sufferings of Charles and the Passion of Christ, is established mainly in the prayers that reflect upon the narrative and discursive sections and appears in its most concentrated form in the ‘Penitential Meditations and Vows’, which are stitched together from the Psalms and the Old Testament books that tell the story of King David. Corns has calculated that over a quarter of the biblical imagery throughout the volume is derived from this kind of material and that a ‘web of allusion to Davidic lamentation’ is woven ‘particularly into the inset prayers’.69 Noting how ‘the words of Charles merge with the words of David’, also a monarch ‘whose motives were often maligned’, another commentator observes that both kings ask God to judge them according to the integrity of their hearts rather than the results of their deeds.70 Whoever wrote chapter 25 put into Charles’s mouth a verse that made clear his own perception of the similarities between himself and the anointed King of Israel: ‘I come far short of David’s piety; yet since I may equal David’s afflictions, give me also the comforts and the sure mercies of David.’71 Milton was among the first to recognize that the book had ‘the form of a privat Psalter’; and it was not long before the inset prayers were turned into metre by Thomas Stanley and set to music by John Wilson.72 The impact of this strategic use of the Psalms can also be gauged from the existence of a painting based on Marshall’s frontispiece, which bore the inscription ‘Lord, remember David and all his troubles’.73 In the view of David Loewenstein, the

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link forged ‘between Charles and the biblical line of kingship represented by David and Christ’ was also designed to challenge ‘the perception of history as a dynamic and unsettling process of change’ and to combat revolution with ‘notions of historical continuity and immutability’ under a monarchy.74 A good deal of the critical energy expended by Miltonists and others on the literary and propaganda dimensions of the Eikon Basilike has been devoted to teasing out its affiliations with and subversions of familiar genres. Elizabeth Skerpan broke new ground in her 1985 essay about the appropriation of rhetorical methods used in 1637 to create public sympathy for the victims of Laudian persecution. Her insight into the connections between ‘the King’s book’, the Puritan pamphleteers, and the genre of Protestant martyrology perfected in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the English Church has since stimulated a good deal of critical debate. Knoppers, for example, has argued that, because of Charles’s special situation as not only a good Protestant but also a Christian king, the Eikon Basilike ‘further politicizes the discourse of martyrdom’ and ‘is able to draw much more fully than Foxe on the powerful biblical and literary tradition of Christ as royal martyr’.75 And Lacey highlights ‘the brilliant propaganda coup’ of turning ‘against his puritan opponents’ the very genre that ‘had come to be associated almost exclusively’ with their ideological position.76 Skerpan herself has gone on to explore the kinship of the Eikon Basilike with the related genres of Protestant historiography and spiritual autobiography. Just as ‘each individual example of religious persecution’ in Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ becomes an instalment in ‘the grand narrative’ of God’s providential plan for England, so each ‘signal event’ selected from the history of the 1640s ‘becomes meaningful when filtered through the perspective of the king’s conscience’; and the ‘confluence of prayer and personal narrative’ in the increasingly popular genre of spiritual autobiography provides both a model for the formal design of ‘the King’s book’ and the template for Charles’s construction of himself as an ‘exemplary’ Christian, in whose experience readers ‘could discover the divine structure of their own lives’.77 Other generic models that have been invoked to explain features of the Eikon Basilike are the Imitation of Christ and the ars moriendi.78 Turning from the production to the consumption of refashioned ‘literary modes’ and ‘the intricate relations, commercial and ideological, between the two’, Steven Zwicker argues that this unique product of the printing press was deeply embedded in its specific historical moment: Those who adored and those who denounced the book shared an exact sense of what it meant to participate in a community of reading practices in the shadow of 1649. . . . And those responsible for the Eikon Basilike understood that puritan modes of confession and autobiography might be challenged and subverted, that those reading Charles I’s testament would understand the ironic correction that this sacred history effected on those acts of confession and autobiography it echoed and adapted.79

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VI

.................................................................................................................. The impact of the publication of ‘the King’s book’ was not only immediate but also long-lasting. If the function of a religious icon is to provide ‘practical, working access to the affective resources of popular will’,80 then the Eikon Basilike was triumphantly designed to serve that function within the secular context of mid-seventeenth-century politics. There can be no doubt that it achieved the ‘explicit aim’ of those responsible for its production as described by a recent Milton critic—‘to place the living image of the dead king in the hearts of all his “loyall Subjects” and convert them to the Stuart cause’.81 William Sedgwick, an Independent who had fought for Parliament in the Civil War, confessed that ‘his sufferings make me a Royalist that never cared for him’; and Bishop Burnet, who had been ‘bred up with a high veneration of this book’, claimed that ‘the piety of the prayers made all people cry out against the murder of a prince, who thought so seriously of all his affairs in his secret meditations before God’.82 In the words of a modern historian, ‘in their tragic mood’ the citizens of the new republic ‘were willing to romanticise as their martyr’, the King whom they had once reviled as their ‘tyrant’.83 There is evidence that 30 January was being ‘secretly observed’ even before it was officially designated a day of fasting and humiliation in December 1660; and by 1859 many hundreds of sermons had been preached on that day in commemoration of the royal martyr.84 Although these sermons had become ‘at best an ambivalent public exercise after 1688’, Knoppers has found manuscript evidence ‘that Charles the martyr was repeatedly and powerfully evoked in Jacobite texts’.85 But perhaps it was over the popular imagination that ‘the King’s book’ cast its most enduring spell. Lacey records the existence of a sampler embroidered in 1759 on which the elegy published with the Eikon Basilike was given a new title—‘An Encomium of that ever Blessed Martyr King Char. the 1st. Dedicated to all true Lover’s of Church and Monarchy’.86

NOTES 1. Quoted from a letter dated 5 February 1649 in Madan, A New Bibliography, 165. All further references to A New Bibliography will be cited as Madan. 2. George Thomason acquired his copy of the third issue on 9 February (Madan, 9–11, 165). 3. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 80. 4. Lynch, ‘Religious Identity’, 289. 5. Madan, 14–20 and appendix V, 174. 6. Ibid., appendices II, III, and IV, 164–71. 7. For descriptions of all separate and collected editions of the Eikon Basilike up to 1904, see Madan, 9–87. Between Almack’s editions in 1903 and 1904 and that of Daems and Nelson in 2006, the text was edited by Knachel in 1966. 8. Hammond, quoted by Madan, 165.

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9. Charles’s speech from the scaffold is quoted from Eikon Basilike, ed. Daems and Nelson, 320, 322. 10. The Princely Pellican, 1, 25. Madan (136) believes that the writer of this pamphlet was John Ashburnham, who had been appointed Groom of the Bedchamber in 1628 and had attended the King at Oxford and later at Hampton Court and Carisbrooke Castle. 11. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works, iii. 346. 12. McElligott, ‘Roger Morrice’, 122. 13. Quoted from facsimile in Madan, 138. 14. Quoted from Madan, 128. 15. Quoted from Wordsworth, Documentary Supplement, 43–4. 16. Quoted from Madan, 129. 17. Ibid. 160. 18. Ibid. 150–1. 19. See e.g. Farrer, Literary Forgeries, 98–125; Smart, ‘Milton and the King’s Prayer’; Hughes, ‘New Evidence’. 20. Madan, 124. 21. Lynch, ‘Religious Identity’, 290. 22. Madan, 127. 23. The Princely Pellican, 4–7, 21–2. 24. Madan, 128. A variation of tenses in the text itself may support the argument that the bulk of the king’s own writings were composed at Holmby, where he narrated events up to his flight from Oxford in 1646 in the past tense and reflected upon them in the present with the benefit of hindsight (chs. 1–21). The period of his ‘solitude and captivity’ at Newcastle and Holmby and his abduction by the army in November 1647 are written about in the present tense (chs. 22–6). This is consistent with Madan’s account. Some anomalous present-tense material (in chs. 7, 9, 10, and 11) may derive from earlier drafts, lost at Naseby and returned to the King at Hampton Court after the papers written at Holmby had been set in order by the Brattles. For a more detailed presentation of this argument, see Wilcher, ‘What Was the King’s Book For?’, 223–7, and Writing of Royalism, 281–5. 25. See Symmons, A Vindication, 241–51. 26. Evidence that Colonel Hammond confiscated ‘many sheets of the rough draft’ of the King’s book at this time came to light in the third edition of Wagstaffe’s A Vindication of K. Charles the Martyr (1711) (Madan, 133). 27. See the evidence of Edward Hooker in Several Evidences Which have as yet not appeared in the Controversy Concerning the Author of Eikon Basilike (1703) (Madan, 146). 28. Royston’s statement, first published by Walter Seton in Scottish Historical Review, 21 (1923), 37–44, is reprinted in Madan, 152–3. 29. See Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence, 14. 30. Madan’s account of the printing of the first edition is in appendix II, 164–5. 31. McElligott, ‘Roger Morrice’, 119–20. 32. Ibid. 129. Morrice does not reveal the name of his informant. 33. Ibid. 129. 34. Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence, 9. 35. McElligott, ‘Roger Morrice’, 130. 36. Madan, 129. 37. Letter to the Lord Chancellor dated 21 January 1661, quoted in Wordsworth, Documentary Supplement, 16.

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38. As long ago as 1883, it was proposed that ‘the composition of the Eikon was first suggested to Gauden by Symmons’ Vindication’ (Doble, ‘Notes and Queries II’, 368). 39. Symmons must have known that the manuscripts used by Royston and Dugard had been worked up from the King’s own writings, whether by himself or Gauden, but according to his widow he maintained the book’s authenticity even ‘upon his Deathbed’ (Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence, 11). 40. Eikon Basilike, ed. Daems and Nelson, 181–2. All quotations from the Eikon Basilike will be from this edition. 41. Kelsey, ‘Staging the Trial’, 72; ‘Death of Charles I’, 728–9. 42. Potter, Secret Rites, 170. 43. A detail from Richard Perinchief ’s ‘Life of King Charles I’ included in Basilika (1662). 44. Knott notes that the emblem of the rock ‘expresses the fundamental characteristic of martyrs, constancy’ (Discourses of Martyrdom, 161). 45. Staines, ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere’, 89, 105. Marshall may have developed his image of Charles from a Titian studio painting of St Catherine of Alexandria in prayer, which he ‘could have studied in The Royal Collection’ (Howarth, Images of Rule, 150–1). 46. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works, iii. 601. 47. Sharpe, ‘ “An Image Doting Rabble” ’, 35. 48. Skerpan, The Rhetoric of Politics, 101. 49. Potter, Secret Rites, 170. 50. Sharpe, ‘The King’s Writ’, 136, 134; ‘ “So Hard a Text”?’, 391. 51. See Maddison, ‘ “The King’s Cabinet Opened” ’, 8. 52. Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 164; Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience’, 659, 660. 53. Lacey, Cult of King Charles, 29. 54. Eikon Basilike, 159–60. 55. Ibid. 183–4. For the importance of this strategy, see Helgerson, ‘Milton Reads the King’s Book’, 9. 56. Boehrer, ‘Elementary Structures’, 105. 57. Lacey, Cult of King Charles, 47. For this feature of the text, see also Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom, 160–1. 58. Staines, ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere’, 105. 59. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, 127. 60. Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 44. 61. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler sees this as a feature of other royalist texts published at the time of the trial, which adopt an epideictic approach that ‘depends upon character and its emotional impact, often to the exclusion of specifics’ (The Rhetoric of Politics, 103). 62. Eikon Basilike, 57–8. 63. Knoppers, ‘Imagining the Death of the King’, 158. 64. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 82. 65. Eikon Basilike, 54. 66. Cable, ‘Milton’s Iconoclastic Truth’, 144. 67. Lacey, ‘Texts to be Read’, 12, 5. 68. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 90. 69. Corns, ‘Imagery in Civil War Polemic’, 5. 70. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, 126. 71. Eikon Basilike, 176.

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72. Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works, iii. 360; Stanley’s Psalterium Carolinum, published in 1657, was probably composed in 1649 (Poems and Translations of Stanley, ed. Crump, liv). See Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, for the political implications of this transformation of the book’s mode of consumption ‘from an individual reading experience to a group singing experience’ (135). See also Treacy, ‘Psalterium Carolinum’. 73. See Potter, Secret Rites, 161–2. 74. Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 54–5. 75. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 19. 76. Lacey, ‘Texts to be Read’, 8. 77. Wheeler, ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, 129–31. 78. Knoppers, ‘Imagining the Death of the King’, 161; Kezar, Guilty Creatures, 155. 79. Zwicker, ‘Passions and Occasions’, 289, 292–3. See also Potter, ‘Royal Actor as Royal Martyr’. 80. Cable, Carnal Rhetoric, 145. 81. McDowell, ‘Milton’s Regicide Tracts’, 253. 82. Sedgwick, Justice upon the Armie Remonstrance, 31; Burnet, History of my Own Time, quoted from Potter, Secret Rites, 170. 83. Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays, 211–12. 84. Randall, ‘Rise and Fall of a Martyrology’, 136. 85. Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King’, 263–4. 86. Lacey, ‘Texts to be Read’, 4.

WORKS CITED Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Almack, Edward. A Bibliography of the King’s Book or Eikon Basilike. London: Blades, East, and Blades, 1896. —— (ed.). Eikon Basilike or the King’s Book. London: De la More Press, 1903. Anon. The Princely Pellican. [London], 1649. Boehrer, Bruce. ‘Elementary Structures of Kingship: Milton, Regicide, and the Family’. Milton Studies 23 (1988), 97–117. Cable, Lana. ‘Milton’s Iconoclastic Truth’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 135–51. ——. Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Corns, Thomas N. ‘Imagery in Civil War Polemic: Milton, Overton and the Eikon Basilike’. Milton Quarterly 14.1 (1980), 1–6. ——. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Daems, Jim, and Holly Faith Nelson (eds.). Eikon Basilike with Selections from Eikonoklastes. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2006.

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Doble, Charles E. ‘Notes and Queries on the Eikon Basilike II’. The Academy 23 (1883), 367–8. Farrer, J. A. Literary Forgeries. London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1907. Helgerson, Richard. ‘Milton Reads the King’s Book: Print, Performance, and the Making of a Bourgeois Idol’. Criticism 29.1 (1987), 1–25. Hollingworth, Richard. Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence of K. Charles the First’s Holy and Divine Book, called Eikon Basilike. London, 1692. Howarth, David. Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1997. Hughes, Merritt Y. ‘New Evidence on the Charge that Milton Forged the Pamela Prayer in the Eikon Basilike’. Review of English Studies ns 3.10 (1952), 130–40. Kelsey, Sean. ‘Staging the Trial of Charles I’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001, 71–93. ——. ‘The Death of Charles I’. Historical Journal 45.4 (2002), 727–54. Kezar, Dennis. Guilty Creatures: Renaissance Poetry and the Ethics of Authorship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Knachel, Philip A. (ed.). Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994. ——. ‘Reviving the Martyr King: Charles I as Jacobite Icon’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 263–87. ——. ‘Imagining the Death of the King: Milton, Charles I, and Anamorphic Art’, in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt (eds.), Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003, 151–70. Knott, John R. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lacey, Andrew. The Cult of King Charles the Martyr. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003. ——. ‘Texts to be Read: Charles I and the Eikon Basilike’. Prose Studies 29.1 (2007), 4–18. Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Lynch, Kathleen. ‘Religious Identity, Stationers’ Company Politics, and Three Printers of Eikon Basilike’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 101.3 (2007), 285–312. McDowell, Nicholas. ‘Milton’s Regicide Tracts and the Uses of Shakespeare’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 252–71. McElligott, Jason. ‘Roger Morrice and the Reputation of the Eikon Basilike in the 1680s’. The Library, 7th series 6.2 (2005), 119–32. Madan, Francis F. A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike of King Charles the First. Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, new series 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. Maddison, R. E. ‘ “The King’s Cabinet Opened”: A Case Study in Pamphlet History’. Notes and Queries 211.1 (1966), 2–9. Milton, John. Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. iii, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962, 337–601.

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Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. ——. ‘Royal Actor as Royal Martyr: The Eikon Basilike and the Literary Scene in 1649’, in Gordon J. Schochet (ed.), Restoration, Ideology and Revolution: Papers Presented at the Folger Institute Seminar ‘Political Thought in the Later Stuart Age, 1649–1702’. The Folger Shakespeare Library: Washington DC, 1990, 217–40. Randall, Helen W. ‘The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons on Charles I’. Huntington Library Quarterly 10 (1946–7), 135–67. Sedgwick, William. Justice upon the Armie Remonstrance. [London], 1649. Sharpe, Kevin. ‘The King’s Writ: Royal Authors and Royal Authority in Early Modern England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1994, 117–38. ——. ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’. Historical Journal 40.3 (1997), 643–65. ——. ‘ “An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Refiguring Revolutions: Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998, 25–56. ——. ‘ “So Hard a Text”?: Images of Charles I, 1612–1700’. Historical Journal 43.2 (2000), 383–405. Skerpan, Elizabeth. The Rhetoric of Politics in the English Revolution 1642–1660. Columbia, MS: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Smart, John S. ‘Milton and the King’s Prayer’. Review of English Studies 1.4 (1925), 385–91. Staines, John. ‘Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles’, in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 89–110. Stanley, Thomas. The Poems and Translations of Thomas Stanley, ed. Galbraith Miller Crump. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Symmons, Edward. A Vindication of King Charles: Or, A Loyal Subjects Duty. [London], 1648. Todd, Henry John. Bishop Gauden the Author of Icon Basilike. London: C. J. G. and F. Rivington, 1829. Treacy, Susan. ‘Psalterium Carolinum: Music as Propaganda in Seventeenth-Century England’. Explorations in Renaissance Culture 19 (1993), 45–69. Trevor-Roper, H. R. Historical Essays. London: Macmillan, 1957. Wheeler, Elizabeth Skerpan. ‘Rhetorical Genres and the Eikon Basilike’. Explorations in Renaissance Culture 11 (1985), 99–111. ——. ‘Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 122–40. Wilcher, Robert. ‘What Was the King’s Book For? The Evolution of Eikon Basilike’. Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991), 218–28. ——. The Writing of Royalism 1628–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wordsworth, Christopher. Who Wrote Eikon Basilike? Considered and Answered in Two Letters. London: John Murray, 1824.

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Wordsworth, Christopher. Documentary Supplement to ‘Who Wrote Eikon Basilike?’ Including Recently Discovered Letters and Papers of Lord Chancellor Hyde, and the Gauden Family. London: John Murray, 1825. Zwicker, Steven N. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. ——. ‘Passions and Occasions: Milton, Marvell, and the Politics of Reading c.1649’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds.), Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000, 288–305.

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NASCENT REPUBLICAN THEORY IN MILTON’S REGICIDE PROSE ....................................................................................................... STEPHEN M. FALLON

The beheading of King Charles I on 30 January 1649 was a defining moment for the English Revolution and for John Milton. Milton’s writings defending the regicide would fulfil an ambition he had once thought to reach by his poetry—international fame. In Milton’s political prose, one can witness the ideological turbulence and paradoxes of nascent English republicanism. The ascendant Independent party moved toward and through the cataclysmic events of 1649 without a fully realized political programme, and Milton like others was obliged to keep pace with events by cobbling a set of intuitions and nascent principles into a coherent and explicitly anti-monarchic political theory. One can trace this process in Milton’s 1649 prose: The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Observations upon the Articles of Peace, and Eikonoklastes. Although, as we shall see, the three works have much in common in their arguments, both explicit and implicit, they differ in rhetorical context and, as a result, in style. They follow a trajectory from self-generated essay to animadversion, or point-by-point refutation of an opponent. As the Tenure is succeeded by Eikonoklastes, which answers Charles I’s Eikon Basilike nearly line by line, so Milton’s first anti-prelatical tract, Of Reformation, had preceded his more vitriolic Animadversions on the Remonstrants Complaint against Smectymnuus, and so Colasterion had concluded the divorce tracts with its caustic animadversions against An Answer to a Book, Entitled the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. The Tenure is the work of a private citizen; Eikonoklastes and the Observations (an answer to a set of royalist and Presbyterian documents emerging from the unrest in Ireland) are works commissioned by the Council of State. Milton complains in Eikonoklastes that he writes it ‘as a work assign’d rather, then by me chos’n or affected’.1 The formal limitations Milton imposes on himself by adopting the rhetorical strategy of animadversion make these later works less compelling than some

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of his other prose works, including the Tenure, though Eikonoklastes in its exordium and peroration returns to some of the invigorating rhetorical flights familiar from the anti-prelatical tracts and missing from the Tenure. Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates on or before 13 February 1649, a mere two weeks after the beheading of Charles. He is engaged in a task, the formulation of a republican political theory, made urgently necessary by the pace of events. At the end of the First Civil War, the coalition that formed the backbone of the victors in the First Civil War had disintegrated. Many, and especially Presbyterians, who had opposed the King and championed Parliament did not wish to see the King deposed or, worse, executed. From their perspective, the insistence that it was not Charles but his advisers who were to blame was more than rhetoric or polite fiction; they had fought for toleration of Presbyterianism, not the abolition of monarchy. Milton and his fellow Independents saw the Presbyterians as hypocritical, intent now on imposing their own consciences and church on their countrymen, and as mercenary, having opposed the bishops and King in ‘the hope to bee made Classic and Provincial Lords’ (YP iii. 196). The members of the Westminster Assembly hoped to establish a Presbyterian national church; Scottish Presbyterians also offered Charles their allegiance contingent on his supporting the establishment of their church. The King negotiated in turn and simultaneously with parliamentary Presbyterians, Scottish Presbyterians, and Independents in the New Model Army. Deciding that his best chance to maintain his throne lay in throwing in his lot with English and Scottish Presbyterians, Charles and his followers embarked on the Second Civil War of 1648. Royalist forces were quickly defeated by a New Model Army dominated by Independents. The King’s continued negotiations were put an end to by Pride’s Purge, which excluded most Presbyterian MPs, and left a Rump Parliament beholden to and in league with the New Model Army and disposed to putting the King on trial. England backed into a republic in 1649. Opposition to the King had galvanized the army and Independents in Parliament. It was not clear to all of them, much less to the excluded Presbyterians, that Charles should be deposed and punished, or that monarchy should be abolished. The army debates at Putney in 1647 pitted radical spokespersons, including John Goodwin, Thomas Rainsborough, and the Leveller John Lilburne, who argued for punishment for Charles and full equality for all English men, against more conservative army leaders, Thomas Fairfax, Oliver Cromwell, and Henry Ireton among them, who supported constitutional reform but retention of the monarchy. The Putney Debates ended inconclusively, but by their actions in December 1648 and January 1649 the army’s leaders implicitly endorsed the position of their more radical interlocutors at Putney.2 The radicals’ position at Putney represented what Arthur Barker long ago called a ‘translation . . . into political terms’ of the principle of Christian liberty. According to Barker: The priesthood of all believers became the natural equality of all men; Christian liberty, the natural liberty and right of every individual to consent to and share in the government under

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which he lives; God’s law, the law of nature expressed in the fundamental laws of the constitution according to which the executive governs by the authority received from the people or its representatives.3

In the absence of clear constitutional and legal support for the trial and execution of the King, leaders of the army and the Rump had to rely on the same radical arguments that some had opposed at Putney. It was in this context that Milton wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Although he must have been writing the tract during the King’s trial, Milton never mentions Charles Stuart in it by name, choosing to present himself as offering a ‘general discours’ on the rights of a people to change and, if warranted, punish holders of executive power, rather than a particular demonstration of the tyranny of any individual.4 Leaving little doubt, however, that his disinterestedness is more rhetorical than actual, Milton immediately draws from the indictment against Charles a picture of the tyrant as one ‘by whose Commission, whole massachers have been committed on his faithfull Subjects, his Provinces offerd to pawn or alienation, as the hire of those whom he had solicited to come in and destroy whole Citties and Countries’ (YP iii. 197). In defending in the tract the right of Parliament to authorize the deposition and trial of a monarch and the right of a court of justice to condemn a monarch to death, Milton defended extra-constitutional and illegal actions, opposed even by some of his allies in the war against Charles.5 To make this defence, Milton drew from ideas forged both in his anti-prelatical tracts and in his divorce tracts of the early and mid-1640s. In the antiprelatical tracts, he had argued for the freedom of Christian churches to choose their own leaders, as opposed to having bishops and priests imposed on them from above. From the divorce tracts, Milton took up his argument that covenants become void whenever and as soon as they fail to meet the purpose of the covenant. In the marriage covenant, that purpose is mutual support and conversation between husband and wife; in a political covenant, the purpose is the benefit of the people.6 Milton had written in 1644, in the second edition of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, that ‘He who marries, intends as little to conspire his own ruine, as he that swears Allegiance: and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to an ill marriage’ (YP ii. 229). Milton proposes in the first edition of the Doctrine and Discipline what will be a central pillar of the Tenure: ‘all sense and reason and equity reclaimes [i.e. denies or rejects] that any Law or Cov’nant how solemn or strait soever, either between God and man, or man and man, though of Gods joining, should bind against a prime and principall scope of its own institution, and of both or either party cov’nanting’ (YP ii. 5). For Milton, this principle supports the legitimacy of the court created to try Charles I. As representative of the people (though this status was contested), the court could judge whether Charles had acted in violation of his covenant with the people—i.e. tyrannically—and, if warranted, sentence and punish him. Milton begins his argument in the Tenure by reconstructing the origins of kingship. At its inception, monarchy represented a partial abridgement of natural liberty. He writes that ‘No man who knows ought, can be so stupid as to deny that all

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men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all other creatures, born to command and not to obey’ (YP iii. 198–9). The need for kings and magistrates arose because fallen human beings could not trust each other to abstain from violence and theft. Milton continues: And . . . they lived so[,] Till from the root of Adams transgression, failing among themselves to doe wrong and violence, and foreseeing that such courses must needs tend to the destruction of them all, they agreed by common league to bind each other from mutual injury, and jointly to defend themselves against any that gave disturbance or opposition to such agreement. Hence came Citties, Townes and Common-wealths. And because no faith in all was found sufficiently binding, they saw it needful to ordaine som authoritie, that might restrain by force and punishment what was violated against peace and common right. This autoritie and power of self-defence and preservation being originally and naturally in every one of them, and unitedly in them all, for ease, for order, and least each man should be his own partial Judge, they communicated and deriv’d either to one, whom for the eminence of his wisdom and integritie they chose above the rest, or to more then one whom they thought of equal deserving: the first was call’d a King; the other Magistrates. (YP iii. 199; emphasis mine)

In Milton’s eyes, the people’s power was inalienable. It was delegated only conditionally. While there is a superficial resemblance here to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, the two thinkers could hardly be more different. Hobbes argues in his Leviathan that the people covenant with each other to transfer power to a sovereign person or body, but that the sovereign does not covenant with the people.7 The difference is fundamental. The Hobbesian sovereign, not having covenanted, cannot violate the covenant, and the people have no recourse against perceived injustice. Indeed, Hobbes argues that, inasmuch as the sovereign acts in the person of his subjects, the sovereign cannot perform an injustice against them, for the sovereign’s acts are the subjects’ own acts. Milton’s sovereign, being a party to a covenant, most certainly can act unjustly toward his subjects. The fundamental argument of the Tenure is that allegiance to a sovereign person or body ends when the sovereign fails to uphold the covenant. A people, Milton contends, enters into a covenant with a sovereign for mutual welfare and the preservation of justice; if the sovereign no longer advances mutual welfare, then the covenant has been violated and the people released from allegiance. But who are the people? This was the most pressing question in 1649. Many of Milton’s allies in the Civil War had viewed Parliament, and specifically the House of Commons, as embodying the will of the people. Could one legitimately claim that a purged Rump Parliament embodied that will? Presbyterians in particular pushed this question, and there was no clear-cut answer to them.8 So Milton, in order to justify actions that were extra-legal, turned to the radical argument of the natural liberty of the people, who could express their will outside of settled constitutional forms. In arguing that ‘all men naturally were borne free, being the image and resemblance of God himself, and were by privilege above all other creatures, born to command and not to

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obey’ (YP iii. 198–9), Milton endorsed a principle voiced by such radical figures as John Lilburne, John Godwin, and William Walwyn. According to Lilburne’s 1646 The Free-Man’s Freedom Vindicated: God, . . . who by his own will and pleasure, gave man (his meer creature) the sovereignty (under himselfe) over all the rest of his Creatures, . . . and indued him with a rationall soule, or understanding, and thereby created him after his own image, . . . the first of which was Adam, a male, or man, [from whose rib God made a] Woman cal’d Eve, which two are the earthly, original fountain . . . of all and every particular and individuall man and woman, that ever breathed in the world since, who are, and were by nature all equall and alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty, none of them having (by nature) any authority, dominion or majesteriall power, one over or above another, neither have they, or can they exercise any, but merely by institution, or donation, that is to say, by mutuall agreement or consent, given, derived, or assumed, by mutuall consent and agreement, for the good benefit and comfort each of other.9

While gesturing toward something resembling gender equality in his divorce tracts, Milton would not have agreed with Lilburne’s strong argument for the equality of women, but in his Tenure he does follow the argument for the continuity between Adamic freedom and the freedom of the people after the Fall. He would also have endorsed Lilburne’s assertion that it is ‘unnatural, irrationall, sinfull, wicked, unjust, divelish, and tyrannical . . . for any man whatsoever . . . to appropriate and assume unto himselfe, a power, authority and jurisdiction, to rule, govern, or raign over any sort of men in the world, without their free consent’.10 Although the bulk of the argument of the Tenure aims to establish the right of a people to cast off tyranny and to punish the tyrant, at one point Milton also asserts the yet more radical position that a people is free to change its government whether or not the current sovereign is tyrannical: since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people, both originaly and naturally for their good in the first place, and not his own, then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty and right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best. (YP iii. 206)

Milton never addresses the objection that the same kind of fallen frailties that required the imposition of sovereignty originally might obscure or prejudice the thinking of people deciding to withdraw their obedience from a sovereign. Like the Levellers, his attention is focused on Adamic freedom, not fallen frailty, or, more accurately, like Lilburne he imputes fallen frailty only to those exercising power without consent. And it is precisely the imputation of frailty to which he objects in the argument that people may not change their governors or form of government at will. Absent this freedom, Milton argues, citizens are not self-determining and are no better than slaves. They have only ‘a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to coz’n babies’ (YP iii. 236). Milton was still left with the problem of identifying the people whose will is to be expressed in deposing a king and constituting a republic. He could not point to broad popular support for the Rump or the High Court of Justice. The Levellers,

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whose arguments on natural liberty Milton echoes, complained that the Rump and army, like the King before them, did not embody or express the will of the people. In this they were joined by the Presbyterians with whom they agreed on little else. Ignoring the attack from the left, which must have made him uncomfortable, Milton responded to royalist and Presbyterian objections by suggesting that reverence for monarchy resulted from blind custom. If not blinded by custom, Milton argues, one can see through the ‘carnal admiring of . . . worldly pomp and greatness’ (YP iii. 193) and so recognize the justice of the punishment of kings. For Milton, adherence to custom is one of the great causes of human error and misery. He begins the Tenure, as six years earlier he had begun the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, with an attack on custom: If men within themselves would be govern’d by reason, and not generally give up thir understanding to a double tyrannie, of Custom from without, and blind affections within, they would discerne better, what it is to favour and uphold the Tyrant of a Nation. But being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule, by which they govern themselves. (YP iii. 190)

As a private citizen alarmed by signs that his compatriots recoiled from bringing the Civil Wars to their logical conclusion by punishing Charles, Milton laments the timidity of those who ‘begin to swerve’ after having ‘thir share in great actions, above the form of Law or Custom’ (YP iii. 194). An implicit faith in legal precedent and custom characterizes those he labels ‘naturally servile’. Joining principle with rhetorical strategy, Milton divides his audience between ‘good men’, who ‘love freedom heartily’, and ‘bad men . . . naturally servile’, who favour and are favoured by tyrants (YP iii. 190). Milton did believe that only the virtuous desire and can hold on to true liberty. Later in Paradise Lost (henceforth PL) he will put in the archangel Michael’s mouth his conviction that ‘true liberty | . . . always with right reason dwells | Twinned, and from her hath no dividual being’ (PL XII.83–5). The loss of self-control in indulging vices brings one to the appropriate punishment of political subjection, as Michael insists along with the Milton of the Tenure: Therefore since he permits Within himself unworthy powers to reign Over free reason, God in judgment just Subjects him from without to violent lords; Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom: tyranny must be, Though to the tyrant thereby no excuse. (PL XII.90–6)

At the same time Milton’s division of the people, and by inclusion his audience, into good and bad is rhetorically deft. Agree with Milton’s anti-monarchic argument and be included among the good; defend monarchy, which in the tract is scarcely distinguishable from tyranny, and consign oneself to the ranks of ‘bad men’.

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The logic of Milton’s argument suggests not only that the ‘naturally servile’ ‘ bad men’, who blindly follow custom or are duped by the dazzling displays of monarchy,11 are unqualified to speak for the people, but that their wishes can and must be ignored. For Milton in the Tenure, the ‘people’ are not every adult, as the Levellers would have it, or even every man, or every freeholder, as Cromwell and Ireton preferred, but the naturally free, those who are not held in the grip of custom, those not dazzled by monarchy. In the case at hand, Milton will leave the guilt or innocence of the unnamed king ‘to Magistrates, at least to the uprighter sort of them, and of the people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevaild above the Law of nature and right reason, to judge as they find cause’ (YP iii. 197). Milton argues explicitly here for the determination of affairs by those he would a decade later in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) call the ‘well-affected’ (YP vii. 435). How is one to determine who the ‘uprighter sort’ are? A cynical answer would be those who agree with Milton and his party. The ‘uprighter sort’ should decide matters, and we know who is upright by how they are inclined to decide matters. Robert Filmer probes the weak spot in Milton’s logic: Nay J. M. will not allow the major part of the Representors to be the people, but the sounder and better part only of them, & in right down terms he tells us to determine who is a Tyrant, he leaves to Magistrates, at least to the uprighter sort of them and of the people, though in number less by many, to judge as they finde cause. If the sounder, the better, and the uprighter part have the power of the people, how shall we know, or who shall judge who they be?12

Any successful appeal for deference to a minority of the ‘uprighter sort’ would depend on the majority’s recognizing and acknowledging that they are not part of this honourable group. Milton’s argument is neither cynical nor dishonest, but it is naive and entirely impractical. It helps us to understand Milton’s implicit and apparently circular argument here to recall that, although he advocated the separation of Church and state, he brought a version of the Church into the state by a back door. For Milton, one works out one’s faith individually, being led by the Spirit in the reading of Scripture. This authority of the Spirit clashes with the pernicious authority of a state-sponsored Church. Milton’s reliance on a subjective understanding of who are the ‘good men’ and the ‘uprighter sort’ betrays the importation of a criterion from Protestant ideology—in which one is responsible for one’s own faith—into the political sphere, which is irreducibly corporate or communal. Milton does have one argument for the justice of the proceedings against Charles that depends on external evidence rather than the imponderable ‘uprightness’ of judges. With the recent triumphs of the army over both royalists and newly royalizing Presbyterians, Milton makes a claim for the authorizing power of military might. As for those who shiver at the prospect of taking the conflicts of the 1640s to their logical and inevitable conclusion of deposing and punishing Charles, Milton will ‘exhort them not to startle from the just and pious resolution of adhering with all thir assistance to the present Parlament & Army, in the glorious way wherin Justice and Victory hath set

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them; the only warrants through all ages, next under immediat Revelation, to exercise supream power’ (YP iii. 194). While Milton might have recalled these words ruefully as General George Monck brought the power of the army to bear against the remnants of the Good Old Cause in 1660, in 1649 he spoke from a position of military if not rhetorical strength. Milton in the Tenure is simultaneously voicing cherished ideals and putting the best face on a bad business.13 The strain marks the text throughout, as he struggles to cast as the will of the people actions and institutions that lacked popular support.14 Milton’s failure to complete his first assignment as Secretary for Foreign Tongues, to write an attack on the Levellers, may well be a sign of the unease he felt as spokesperson for a party that claimed but lacked popular support.15 The first assignment that he did fulfil was the writing of the Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels (May 1649). Milton’s Observations comprise the fourth part of a volume ‘Publisht by Autority’, the first three being the Articles of Peace themselves; an exchange of letters between the Earl of Ormond, the royalist who concluded the peace with the Irish, and Colonel Michael Jones, governor of Dublin and supporter of Parliament; and an appeal or ‘Necessary Representation’ by the Belfast Presbytery against the triumphant ‘Sectarian Party’ in England. The Observations take up less than a third of the volume; the Articles themselves fill the first thirty-four pages; the letters span pages 34 to 40; the Presbytery’s ‘Representation’ pages 41 to 45, and Milton’s Observations pages 45 to 65.16 Milton allots fewer than five pages of his twenty to comments on the Articles themselves (45–9; YP iii. 301–8); he gives roughly the same space to the exchange of letters (49–54; YP iii. 308–16); he devotes more than half his space to the shortest of the documents under consideration, the ‘Representation’ of the Belfast Presbytery (54–65; YP iii. 317–34). This lopsided distribution of his remarks, as we shall see, points to one of his central preoccupations in 1649. Milton heaps contempt on the Irish as uncivilized and idolatrous. He condemns Ormond for concluding a peace between his late master Charles I and ‘those inhumane Rebels and Papists of Ireland’ (YP iii. 301). These Irish ‘preferred their own absurd and savage Customes before the most convincing evidence of reason and demonstration: a testimony of their true Barbarisme and obdurate wilfulnesse’ (YP ii. 304), the last phrase calling to mind the Satan of Paradise Lost, whose Book IV soliloquy epitomizes a tortured but wilful obduracy. As in the Tenure, Milton claims divine endorsement of the actions of his party; the execution of the King he terms ‘that impartiall and noble peece of Justice, wherein the hand of God appear’d so evidently on our side’ (YP iii. 311). In terms that look forward to his celebration of parliamentary worthies in the Second Defence of the English People, Milton counters Ormond’s ‘contemptuous naming’ of Cromwell: ‘that Cromwell whom he couples with a name of scorne, hath done in a few yeares more eminent and remarkable Deeds whereon to found Nobility in his house, though it were wanting, and perpetuall Renown to posterity, then Ormond and all his Auncestors’ (YP iii. 312). As in the Tenure, Milton approves of Pride’s Purge and argues that covenants—including the Solemn League and Covenant, which the Belfast

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Presbyterians (like their English counterparts) cited against Milton’s party—are not absolute but conditional on both sides fulfilling the terms of the covenant. Milton faced a more daunting challenge when, soon after his appointment as Secretary for Foreign Tongues on 15 March 1649, the Council of State ordered him to answer the Eikon Basilike (The King’s Image), ostensibly the work of Charles I though apparently compiled by John Gauden based on the King’s own writing.17 The supposed author, and the first-person speaker, was a king and, in the eyes of many, a martyr. Moreover, the instruction to answer the book meant that Milton has to structure his own work after the book he answers. The first lines of Eikonoklastes illustrate Milton’s awareness of what he is up against: To descant on the misfortunes of a person fall’n from so high a dignity, who hath also payd his final debt both to Nature and his Faults, is neither of it self a thing commendable, nor the intention of this discours. Neither was it fond ambition, or the vanity to get a Name, present, or with Posterity, by writing against a King: I never was so thirsty after Fame, nor so destitute of other hopes and meant, better and more certaine to attaine it. . . . [N]o man ever gain’d much honour by writing against a King, as not usually meeting with that force of Argument in such Courtly Antagonists, which to convince might add to his reputation. Kings most commonly, though strong in Legions, are but weak in Arguments; as they who ever have accustom’d from the Cradle to use thir will onely as thir right hand, thir reason always as thir left. (YP iii. 337–8)

Kings may be weak in reason, but as Milton had made clear in the opening pages of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce and in the Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, the vulgar many were moved less by reason than by custom. Thus he fears that the ‘industrie and judicious paines’ that he devotes to Eikonoklastes will be ill-judged by those satisfied by and habituated to ‘the easy literature of custom’ (YP iii. 339). At the end of the work, Milton defends himself against the powerful and ready charge that he is unfairly, or at least indecorously, speaking ill of the dead by insisting that Charles ‘now after death still fights . . . in this his book’ (YP iii. 596). The wild popularity of King’s book, with thirty-five English editions printed in London within a year and with many more printed elsewhere both in English and translation, could only have confirmed for Milton his darkest meditations on the hold of the idol of kingship on the popular imagination. Milton’s approach in Eikonoklastes is forensic, as he cross-examines the King’s book, quoted in italics in his own book, paragraph by paragraph, in an attempt to dismantle what he views as Charles’s mendacious self-presentation as an irenic, conscientious, approachable sovereign. The opening of Milton’s first chapter illustrates his procedure throughout: That which the King lays down heer as his first foundation, and as it were the head stone of his whole Structure, that He call’d this last Parlament not more by others advice and the necessity of his affaires, then by his own chois and inclination, is to all knowing men so apparently not true, that a more unlucky and inauspicious sentence, and more betok’ning the downfall of his whole Fabric, hardly could have come into his minde. (YP iii. 350)

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Milton goes on to relate high (or low) points in the history of Charles’s reluctance to call and inclination to prorogue Parliaments, answering two lines of the King’s with four pages of his own (YP iii. 350–6; 2nd edn. 1650, pp. 1–4). Milton claims accurately enough that ‘upon meer extremity he summon’d this last Parlament’, and asks, ‘how is it possible that hee should willingly incline to Parlaments, who never was perceiv’d to call them, but for the greedy hope of . . . his Subsidies’ (YP iii. 355). For the rest of the work, over 225 closely printed pages, Milton dissects and refutes Charles’s account of his actions in the 1640s. There is an element of the theatrical in Eikon Basilike, as Charles places himself (or, as Gauden places Charles) in the role of a martyr.18 Milton takes advantage of those moments in the King’s book that suggest the dramatic or poetic (and thus the fictional), beginning with his comment in the Preface on William Marshall’s striking frontispiece: ‘the conceited portraiture before his Book, drawn out to full measure of a Masking Scene, and sett there to catch fools and silly gazers’ (YP iii. 342).19 Charles is the central figure in a masque tableau, displayed on the page as monarchs were displayed on stage in court masques as preservers of virtue. Milton argues that hypocrites in plays, including Shakespeare’s Richard III, often have prayers in their mouths, and takes the occasion to point out that Charles’s ‘Prayer in Time of Captivity’, included in an appendix to editions after March 1649, is taken nearly verbatim from a prayer by Pamela in Sidney’s Arcadia (YP iii. 363).20 An enemy to set prayer, Milton must have been particularly offended by a prayer lifted from a romance and presented as evidence of the King’s piety. Milton recasts that piety as a fiction staged for the credulous vulgar. Milton systematically strips away the King’s pose as a pious, judicious, flexible, and selfless monarch, pointing repeatedly to Eikon Basilike’s fictionality. Milton’s Charles is a poet who praises his wife ‘in straines that come almost to Sonnetting’ (YP iii. 420–1). Milton’s recasting of Charles as a poet serves two purposes: it emphasizes that the story of the King’s book is fiction and it demotes its putative author from monarch to scribbler. For Charles is not only a bad king, but a bad poet: ‘to bad Kings, who without cause expect future glory from thir actions, it happ’ns as to bad Poets; who sit and starve themselves with a delusive hope to win immortality by thir bad lines’ (YP iii. 502). The King’s devolution is captured in Milton’s succinct catalogue of Charles’s ‘reason, conscience, humour, passion, fansie, folly, obstinacy’ (YP iii. 576). The first two terms derive from the King’s self-presentation; the next two are arguably neutral, as even the best of us have humours and passions; the next three epitomize Milton’s own negative depiction of Charles. While unmasking Charles I over several hundred pages, Milton reiterates the Tenure’s argument for conditional covenantal rule. The King holds his authority only conditionally. The 1643 Solemn League and Covenant between the Scottish Covenanters and the leaders of England’s Parliament, like the covenant between a people and a king, binds only so long as the King acts according to his responsibility to preserve the welfare of the people. Covenants are conditional contracts matching obligation and benefit. In Eikonoklastes Milton adds the argument that the trial and

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execution of the King preserves rather than violates the Solemn League and Covenant, which mandated that anyone ‘hindering the reformation of religion, dividing . . . one of the kingdoms from another, or making any faction or parties among the people, contrary to this League and Covenant . . . be brought to public trial, and receive condign punishment, as the degree of their offences shall require or deserve’. From Milton’s perspective, Charles hindered the reformation of religion and set one kingdom against the other, Ireland and Scotland separately against England. As in the Tenure, Milton in Eikonoklastes does more than argue that tyrants should be deposed and punished; he asserts the superiority of republican government to monarchy, which is intrinsically inimical to the development of a free and virtuous people. He asserts that ‘It were a Nation of Idiots, whose happiness and welfare depended upon one Man’ (YP iii. 542). Again as in the Tenure, Milton borrows from classical republicanism the idea that to be a subject of a monarch is essentially to be a slave.21 A republic of free citizens is a nation composed of kings: ‘The happiness of a Nation consists in true Religion, Piety, Justice, Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and the contempt of Avarice and Ambition. They in whosoever these virtues dwell eminently, need not Kings to make them happy, but are the architects of thir own happiness; and whether to themselves or others are not less then Kings’ (YP iii. 542). The liberty of citizens in a republic is tied to Christian freedom; ‘Christian libertie purchas’d with the death of our Redeemer, and establish’d by the sending of his free Spirit to inhabit in us, is not now to depend on the doubtful consent of any earthly Monarch’ (YP iii. 492). Eikonoklastes is informed by the revolutionary optimism of one who believes the time has come for free men to emerge from the demeaning subjection to hereditary monarchs. At the same time, it is overshadowed by the rueful awareness that the people do not support the republican revolution. Here Milton defines the ‘people’ as ‘the Parliament and best-affected People’ who are not cowed at the Eikon Basilike’s ‘calumnies and reproaches’ (YP iii. 512). The others, those still besotted and hoodwinked in their cringing subservience to monarchy and its shows, are the ‘blockish vulgar’ (YP iii. 339), well fitted to the yoke of tyranny. To educate and rally them, Milton points to what he sees as divine endorsement of his position. Milton writes that Charles ‘appeal’d to God’s Tribunal, and behold God hath judg’d, and don to him in the sight of all men according to the verdict of his own mouth’ (YP iii. 381). Near the end of the work Milton tempers without abandoning his claim for God’s favour on the parliamentary cause: ‘We measure not our Cause by our success, but our success by our cause. Yet certainly in a good Cause success is a good confirmation; for God hath promis’d it to good men almost in every leafe of Scripture’ (YP iii. 599). But those supported by divine judgement remain a decided minority. Standing against the ‘blockish vulgar’ are ‘few perhaps, but those few, such of value and substantial worth, as truth and wisdom, not respecting numbers and bigg names, have bin ever wont in all ages to be contended with’ (YP iii. 339–40). The disclaimer ‘not respecting numbers’ bodes ill for the success of the nascent republican experiment. Milton is dismayed that so many of his compatriots exhibit ‘a besotted and degenerate

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baseness of spirit’, unlike ‘some few, who yet retain in them the old English fortitude and love of freedom’ (YP iii. 344). Milton’s calm confidence in the rectitude of the few is belied a moment later when he looks back nostalgically to the early years of the Civil War, when ‘no man [was] more generally condemn’d then was the King’, when ‘All men inveigh’d against him; all men, except Court-vassals, opposed him and his tyrannical proceedings.’ He recovers himself at the end of the Preface when he maintains, ‘I never knew that time in England, when men of truest Religion were not counted Sectaries’, and takes as ‘a speciall mark of [God’s] favor’ to be among those ‘selected as the sole remainder’ (YP iii. 348). Milton’s dismissal of the majority and his confidence in military victory endorsed by God once again issue in what for us is an unsettling emphasis of the convergence of might and right. Here in Eikonoklastes he argues that: Either Truth and Justice are all one, for Truth is but Justice in our knowledge, and Justice but Truth in our practice . . . ; or els, if there be any odds, that Justice, though not stronger then truth, yet by her office is to put forth and exhibit more strength in the affaires of mankind. For Truth is properly no more then Contemplation; and her utmost efficiency is but teaching: but Justice in her very essence is all strength and activity; and hath a Sword put into her hand, to use against all violence and oppression on the earth. (YP iii. 583–4)

Milton here articulates the theory that those who know and embody the truth, however much in the minority, have by right the sword of justice in their hands. This disturbing implication will be spelled out explicitly in The Readie and Easie Way a decade later: ‘More just it is doubtless, if it com to force, that a less number compel a greater to retain, which can be no wrong to them, thir libertie, then that a greater number for the pleasure of thir baseness, compell a less most injuriously to be thir fellow slaves’ (YP vii. 455). Whatever his critical comments on Charles I’s mixing of political argument with poetry, Milton draws in Eikonoklastes from one of his own poems, A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (1634), to characterize the many who never renounced or who have now recovered their fealty to Charles. In that reformed masque, Comus ‘cheat[s] the eye with blear illusion’ and offers to travellers his mother Circe’s enchanted cup, from which ‘Whoever tasted, lost his upright shape, And downward fell into a groveling swine’.22 Those English who lament the execution of the King are ‘like men inchanted with the Circœan cup of servitude, [who] will not be held back from running thir own heads into the Yoke of Bondage’ (YP iii. 488). Milton elaborates upon this metaphor in the second edition of 1650, where he rebukes those ‘now againe intoxicated . . . with these royal, and therefore so delicious because royal rudiments of bondage, the Cup of deception, spic’d and temperd to thir bane’ (YP iii. 582). In the brief and ringing peroration, Milton, however much he hopes to persuade his fellow English, disdains ‘to catch the worthless approbation of an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble’ sunk in ‘Sorcery or obduration’ (YP iii. 601). Those fit to govern are immune to the debased magic or illusionism that captures and holds the many. Milton contemplates government by the people, but a people defined by their commitment to reason and

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truth, and thus in his eyes a minority in 1649. His allusions to the Circean cup mark his attempt to perform an exorcism of the demon of doubt regarding the institution of a republican government unpopular with the people. An important factor in the paradoxical minority status of the triumphant army and the Rump was the defection of the Presbyterian ministers after the First Civil War. When they saw that their hopes for the establishment of a national Presbyterian Church of England would expire with victory by Cromwell’s party, Presbyterian ministers turned to the King whom they had formerly reviled in their pulpits, hoping to secure a royal commitment to a Presbyterian settlement in return for their political and military support. As they struggled to secure popular approval for republican government, Independents, recognizing the futility of swaying large numbers of proepiscopal royalists, saw their best hope in dividing rank-and-file Presbyterians from their leaders. In his three regicide works, Milton is engaged in a battle for the hearts and minds of the English not only with royalist supporters of Charles but also, and more emphatically and viscerally, with backsliding Presbyterian ministers. Part of the rhetorical aim of Milton’s regicide works of 1649 was to drive a wedge between Presbyterian ministers and their congregations. While Milton’s regicide works of 1649 are focused on the defence of the trial and execution of Charles I and the nascent articulation of a republican political theory and, in the case of the Observations upon the Articles of Peace, an unveiling of royalist treachery in Ireland, anyone spending any significant time with them will be struck by the extent to which the Presbyterian ministers are the target of Milton’s attacks. Milton’s animus against the Presbyterians is over-determined. By their attempted accommodation with Charles, Presbyterian leaders revealed themselves in Milton’s eyes to be hypocritical graspers at the episcopal English Church’s wealth and its right to silence dissent. And this change of alliance after the First Civil War resonated with another, and to Milton more personal, transgression. Earlier in the decade Milton had in several works attacked government of the Church by bishops and, most prominently in The Reason of Church-Government Urged against Prelaty, endorsed Presbyterian church government,23 only to see Presbyterian ministers as his fiercest critics and detractors after he published, between 1643 and 1645, his arguments proposing divorce for mutual incompatibility, a radical expansion of then current grounds for divorce. The Presbyterian Herbert Palmer, in a sermon to Parliament in August 1644, censured Milton’s Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce as ‘a wicked booke . . . abroad and uncensored, though deserving to be burnt’.24 Thomas Edwards, another Presbyterian, included Milton and his teaching on divorce in his Gangraena: or a Catalogue and Discovery of many of the Errours, Heresies, Blasphemies and pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this time (1646).25 The Scottish Presbyterian Robert Baillie in 1645 treated Milton’s argument on divorce as a sectarian heresy, and, significantly, conjectures that Milton is an Independent: ‘I doe not know certainely whither this man professeth Independency (albeit all the Hereticks here, whereof ever I heard, avow themselves Independents).’26 Ironically, it may have been this kind of reaction from Presbyterians that hastened Milton’s move leftward from his defence of Presbyterianism a few years earlier. Milton

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clearly smarted from these concerted attacks, particularly as they came from those whose part he had taken. His resentment animates two sonnets (‘A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon’ and ‘I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs’) and a tailed sonnet (‘On the New Forcers of Conscience under the Long Parliament’). In this last poem, Milton attacks Edwards by name and is thought to allude to Baillie; he concludes, famously and damningly, that ‘New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large’. Milton’s hostility toward the Presbyterian ministers animates the Tenure. They are ‘rav’nous Wolves’ and ‘a pack of hungrie Church-wolves’ who had allied themselves with other opponents of the King in order to ‘gorg[e] themselves like Harpy’s on those simonious places and preferment’s of thir outed predecessors, as the quarry for which they hunted, not to plurality onely but to multiplicitie’ (YP iii. 241, 257, 252). They are ‘dancing divines’ and ‘nimble motionists’ who change allegiances guided not by principle but by advantage (YP iii. 1027, 1053). They remained faithful to their high rhetoric only so long as ‘the hope to bee made Classic and Provincial Lords led them on, while pluralities greas’d them thick and deep, to the shame and scandal of Religion, . . . then to fight against the Kings person . . . was good, was lawfull, was no resisting of Superior powers’ (YP iii. 196). Milton repeatedly threatens the Presbyterian ministers. Whatever their defence of the King’s person and their insistence on the clause in the Solemn League and Covenant’s third article, ‘to preserve and defend the king’s majesty’s person and authority’, they have by their actions leading up to and in the First Civil War already deposed the King (YP iii. 227). More than that, by inciting their compatriots to oppose the King and by participating in the First Civil War, the Presbyterian ministers ‘have long since tak’n from him the life of a King, his office and his dignity, [and therefore] they in the truest sence may be said to have killd the King’ (YP iii. 233). Milton’s threat, here and in other passages scattered through the tract, is clear: whatever their second thoughts or scruples, the Presbyterian ministers are complicit in the King’s blood, and their best chance of thriving lies in realigning themselves with the Rump and army, for a restored monarch will include them among his enemies. The various elements of his assault on the Presbyterian ministers (and thus of his attempt to pry Presbyterians from their hypocritical leaders) are already in place by the middle of the tract’s opening paragraph: when it comes to thir owne grievances, of purse especially, they would seeme good Patriots, and side with the better cause, yet when others for the deliverance of thir Countrie, endu’d with fortitude and Heroick vertue . . . would goe on to remove, not only the calamities and thraldoms of a People, but the roots and causes whence they spring, straight these men . . . as if they hated only the miseries but not the mischiefs, after they have juggl’d and palter’d with the world . . . turne revolters from those principles. (YP iii. 191)

By retreating now from their earlier principles, the Presbyterian ministers will lose whatever the outcome; those who have freed the English people will revile them for abandoning a righteous cause, and royalists (and any future king) will place them among the guilty and punish them along with those they now desert. Milton hopes that

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lay Presbyterians reading his tract will recover themselves and follow Independent rather than Presbyterian leadership. As I noted above, Milton devotes more than half of his ‘Observation’ to the ‘Representation’ of the Belfast Presbytery, which is shorter than either the Articles of Peace or the exchange of letters between Ormond and Jones. He answers the four and a half pages of the ‘Representation’ with twenty pages of his own, in which he begins with sardonic contempt for the Irish Presbyterians (‘we do not think that one Classick Fraternity so obscure and remote, should involve us and all State affairs within the Censure and Jurisdiction of Belfast, upon pretence of overseeing their own charge’ (YP iii. 318)) and ends with a ringing condemnation (‘By thir actions we might . . . judge them to be a generation of High-land theevs and Red-shanks . . . ingrateful and treacherous guests to thir best friends and entertainers’ (YP iii. 333–40)). Like their co-religionists in England, the Irish Presbyterians have opposed prelates only out of envy and greedy desire for their wealth and livings. As Thomas Corns among others has argued, the Observations addresses the political situation at home by indirection.27 Milton’s forbidding picture of the Irish ‘other’ is designed to encourage solidarity at home. He describes the Scottish Presbytery at Belfast as ‘casting off, as [Saul] did his garments, all modestie and meekness wherewith the language of Ministers ought to be cloath’d’ (YP iii. 332–3). Having blurred the lines between the Irish Catholic rebels and a supposedly Romanizing royalist Ormond, who share a hostility to the current English government, Milton further blurs the line between the Scottish Presbytery and the wild and unruly Irish. As Corns has astutely pointed out, Milton ‘simplif[ies] the political configuration and thus offer[s] a simple binary opposition between “rebels” and Parliament’s friends’.28 Milton pursues a rhetorical strategy pitting a united Protestant front, now excluding the Presbyterian leadership, against all enemies of the Parliament. While the mode of point-for-point refutation of Charles I dictates that Eikonoklastes will not mirror the Tenure and the Observations in their sustained attention to the Presbyterian ministers, the same animus finds its way into that text. As he had in the earlier works, in Eikonoklastes Milton lumps English bishops and Presbyterian ministers together for their hypocrisy and greed. If the English spirit has been broken and fitted to tyranny, the twinned causes are: The Prelats and thir fellow-teachers, though of another Name and Sect, whose Pulpit stuff, both first and last, hath bin the Doctrin and perpetual infusion of servility and wretchedness to all thir hearers; whose lives the type of worldliness and hypocrisie, without the least true pattern of vertue, righteousness, or self-denial in thir whole practice. (YP iii. 344)

If the self-interest of the Presbyterian clergy, the unnamed ‘fellow-teachers’ of ‘another Name and Sect’, divides them from the public, Milton will seek to divide their public from them.29 Milton’s 1649 prose works evince in concentrated form the excitement, idealism, anxieties, animosities, and contradictions of the nascent Commonwealth. The 1640s culminated in an event that few had desired and fewer could have predicted at the

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beginning of the Civil War. The Independents in the army and the Rump had brought the King to justice and executed him; shortly thereafter they had abolished monarchy. A political theory upon which to found these actions had to be cobbled together quickly, and Milton stepped into the breach. Building on his own elaboration of the implications of Christian liberty in the anti-prelatical tracts, the divorce tracts, and Areopagitica, Milton in 1649 argued that men are by nature free, and that subservience to monarchs violates the dignity and weakens the virtue of nations. A republican government would foster virtue and preserve the freedom that virtuous men require and deserve. Like republican theorists from ancient times until as late as the last century, however, Milton and his like-minded contemporaries had to determine who counted as ‘the people’. Some argued that only freeholding men constituted the people, while others such as the Levellers would expand the franchise to all men and women. Milton found himself caught in the toils of a circular logic: only the upright are ‘the people’, even (and especially?) if they are in the minority, and one knows the upright by their disposition on the question of who comprise ‘the people’. This vicious circle would circumscribe Milton’s party during the Interregnum, as the Council of State, the Rump and Barebones Parliaments, the quasi-regal Protectors, the Committee of Safety, all in turn tried and failed to establish their legitimacy by mustering the support of the people more broadly understood than in Milton’s polemical view. In Milton’s repeated insistence that a minority of the well affected have the right to speak for the people, we can see the central contradiction of the republican experiment and the inevitability of the Restoration that was to follow.

NOTES For their helpful comments, I am indebted to Stephen B. Dobranski, Henry Weinfield, and the editor of this volume. 1. Milton, Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Wolfe, iii. 196. All quotations from Milton’s prose are from this Yale edition and are cited parenthetically as YP. 2. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 152. 3. Ibid. 141. 4. In an excellent recent essay, Martin Dzelzainis has proposed that Milton omits Charles’s name to underline his argument that Charles was neither a king (as royalists contended) nor even a private person subject to law (as the High Court implied by referring to him as ‘Charles Stuart’ rather than ‘Charles, King of England’), but an enemy of the state and thus a nameless outlaw (‘Milton and the Regicide’). For this reason, and because ‘regicide’ was a term used at the time exclusively by royalists, Dzelzainis has argued against the use of the term ‘regicide’ in relation to Milton’s prose; like Dzelzainis himself, I use the term ‘regicide’ in my title for reasons of familiarity. 5. Including James Harrington, John Hutchinson, Algernon Sidney, and Sir Henry Vane; see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 194.

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6. The first to note the connection was Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma, 134, 138. 7. ‘Because the Right of bearing the Person of them all, is given to him they make Soveraigne, by Covenant onely of one to another, and not of him to any of them; there can happen no breach of Covenant on the part of the Soveraigne’ (Hobbes, Leviathan, 230 [ch. 18] ). 8. See Dzelzainis’s ‘Introduction’ to Milton: Political Writings, xii. 9. Lilburne, The Free-Mans Freedome, ‘A Postscript, containing a generall Proposition’, 11. 10. Lilburne, The Free-Mans Freedome, 11–12. 11. In Paradise Lost, Milton will heap contempt on ‘the tedious pomp that waits | On princes, when their rich retinue long | Of horses led, and grooms besmeared with gold | Dazzles the crowd, and sets them all agape’ (V.354–7). 12. ‘Observations on Master Milton against Salmasius’, in Filmer, Observations, 14. 13. Long ago Don M. Wolfe suggested that ‘in writing the Tenure Milton was confronted, like the Independent party itself, with the dilemma of justifying at once military coercion and democratic ideology’ (Milton in the Puritan Revolution, 215). 14. For a salient product of that strain, see my discussion of Milton’s shifting argument on whether private persons, as opposed to inferior magistrates, may bring the sovereign to justice (‘ “The Strangest Piece of Reason” ’, 241–51). 15. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 201–4. 16. The volume appears in the Yale edition of Milton’s prose (iii. 259–334). 17. On Eikon Basilike, see Robert Wilcher’s chapter in this volume. 18. See Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, 51–73. 19. The frontispiece is reproduced in Wilcher’s chapter in this volume. 20. The prayer can be found on pp. 264–5 of the 1590 edition of Arcadia. 21. See Skinner, ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, 1–22. 22. A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, ll. 155, 52–3, in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose, 69, 66. 23. Milton’s support for Presbyterianism derived more from his opposition to episcopacy than from any settled or strong preference for Presbyterian church government. 24. Parker, Milton’s Contemporary Reputation, 73–4. 25. Ibid. 76. 26. Ibid. 75. 27. Corns, ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace’, 123–34. 28. Ibid. 128. 29. For two recent and complementary arguments that the aim of Milton’s rhetoric in Eikonoklastes is to foster the emergence of readers who would view events as dividing the world into godly and ingenuous readers on the one hand and servile and vicious readers on the other, see Ainsworth, ‘Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes’, and Shore, ‘ “Fit though Few” ’.

WORKS CITED Ainsworth, David. ‘Spiritual Reading in Milton’s Eikonoklastes’. Studies in English Literature 45 (2005), 157–89. Barker, Arthur E. Milton and the Puritan Dilemma: 1641–1660. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1942.

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Corns, Thomas. ‘Milton’s Observations upon the Articles of Peace: Ireland under English Eyes’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 123–34. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Introduction’, in Milton: Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ix–xxv. ——. ‘Milton and the Regicide’, in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds.), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010, 91–105. Fallon, Stephen M. ‘ “The Strangest Piece of Reason”: Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 241–51. Filmer, Robert. ‘Observations on Master Milton against Salmasius’, in Robert Filmer, Observations concerning the Originall of Government. London, 1652, 13–23. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Lilburne, John. The Free-Mans Freedome Vindicated. London, 1646. Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don Wolfe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Modern Library, 2007. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Parker, William R. Milton’s Contemporary Reputation. Repr. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Shore, Daniel. ‘ “Fit though Few”: Eikonoklastes and the Rhetoric of Audience’. Milton Studies 45 (2006), 129–48. Sidney, Philip. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia. London, 1590. Skinner, Quentin. ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, in Graham Parry (ed.), Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002, 1–22. Wolfe, Don. Milton in the Puritan Revolution. London: Cohen & West, 1941.

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GERRARD WINSTANLEY AND THE DIGGERS ....................................................................................................... DAVID LOEWENSTEIN

Leader of the experimental agrarian communist group commonly known as the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley (1609–76) was one of the most original radical religious writers and social thinkers of the English Revolution and indeed of early modern England. Between 1648 and 1652, during some of the most acute crises and political transformations of the English Revolution, Winstanley composed and published all his major works: more than twenty pamphlets, letters, and broadsides, including his major utopian text The Law of Freedom in a Platform: or, True Magistracy Restored (1652). From April 1649 until April 1650, in the midst of these particularly unsettling years, he led the small but fragile agricultural community of Diggers (or ‘True Levellers’ as they preferred to call themselves) in Walton-on-Thames and Cobham, Surrey, an experiment in communal living and work aimed at acting out his radical social vision that the land should be ‘a common treasury for all’ humankind. No writer of this period wrote more movingly and probingly about the plight of the common people, about class conflict and oppression, and about the interconnected forces of power—economic, political, and religious—that continued to trouble the English Republic and impede radical reform. Winstanley’s writings eloquently express some of the most radical ideals of the English Revolution, especially its potential for dramatic social transformation; yet his writings also articulate, with acute insight and in memorable prose, its ambiguities, limits, and shortcomings. Winstanley was rediscovered at the end of the nineteenth century and has keenly interested historians of seventeenth-century England, who did much, in the twentieth century, to illuminate his striking contributions to political, social, and religious thought.1 Yet, as we shall see, Winstanley is an exceptionally vivid and powerful writer of English prose and also a significant religious writer who gives distinctive expression to some of the most heterodox ideas stimulated by the upheavals of the English Revolution. Consequently, his works deserve to be read from a range of disciplinary perspectives that enable us to appreciate more richly their contributions to English

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political and religious writing and to the literary culture of the English Revolution. The Oxford University Press edition of Winstanley’s complete works, published on the 400th anniversary of his birth, was edited by two literary scholars and a historian, a reminder that the remarkable achievements of Winstanley’s revolutionary writings straddle more than one discipline.2 In this chapter, I hope to highlight what makes Winstanley a particularly distinctive and powerful radical writer and thinker of the English Revolution. As I do so, I want to suggest that his extraordinary achievements as a writer are most fruitfully understood from an interdisciplinary perspective that highlights interconnections among the social, religious, political, and literary dimensions of his works.

RADICAL VISION

AND

SOCIAL ACTIVISM

.................................................................................................................. In the summer of 1649, while the Digger experiment was under way, Winstanley published one of his most memorable aphoristic assertions: ‘for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’; consequently, in April of that year he had acted as a ‘True Leveller’, taking his spade and breaking the ground on St George’s Hill, Surrey, ‘thereby declaring freedom to the Creation’. Without collective action— both the practical and symbolically charged action of digging and planting the commons—‘words and writings were all nothing’.3 In fact, ‘words and writings’ meant a great deal, for they allowed Winstanley to articulate in vividly written texts that we still read and study today the daring and humane radical ideas of Winstanley and the Diggers. How did Winstanley reach this commitment to social activism that enabled him to lead the Digger experiment while continuing to write his visionary works challenging the political and religious institutions of revolutionary England? There is much we do not know about Winstanley’s earlier career (in Wigan, Lancashire, where he was born) and the details of his transformation from a failed London clothier (in the late 1630s and early 1640s, his business ending in bankruptcy in 1643) to a struggling grazier living in Cobham, Surrey, into one of the leading radical voices of the English Revolution.4 During the early 1640s he would have been exposed to the ferment of political debate and radical ideas in Civil War London, though there is no evidence he became radicalized while living there (see below). The social instabilities generated by the Civil War years, however, contributed significantly to Winstanley’s radical social and political perspectives: the later 1640s, when he was struggling with poverty and beginning to write, were years of severe economic depression, political uncertainty, and social dislocation of the lower classes. Harvest failures from 1646 to 1649 accentuated the social and economic crisis immediately following the Civil War by causing high food prices, near famine, heavy taxation, and escalating poverty5—a sense of social turmoil and instability frequently expressed in Winstanley’s writings. While working as a hired farm labourer in the Surrey countryside, Winstanley converted to communism during the unsettled period of December 1648 to January 1649, an

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experience that had a profound effect on his subsequent writings and political activities. By starting to dig and plant the common land on St George’s Hill, Walton, on 1 April 1649, Winstanley, William Everard (initially a joint leader), and a small group of followers were engaging in practical georgic and communal activities. But the Diggers were also doing more than this: they were engaging in highly provocative social and symbolic acts aimed at challenging the powers of the earth and their subtle Antichristian practices; digging was a means of ‘declaring freedome to the Creation’, setting the earth ‘free from intanglements of Lords and Landlords’, so that ‘it shall become a common Treasury to all’, meaning that all creation would belong to all of humanity, not to the powerful few.6 Since it served to advance the Kingdom of Christ on earth and within every man and woman, righteous acting on the land was essential to bring about Winstanley’s revolutionary vision of social and political transformation. Prophetic words and symbolic actions consequently interacted in Winstanley’s career as communist visionary writer and Digger: ‘Words and actions going together are the declarations of a sincere heart’,7 Winstanley declared at the end of 1648, still some months before he took his spade and broke the ground on St George’s Hill. Winstanley began to publish his first radical religious tracts in the spring of 1648 and these important pre-Digger texts—The Breaking of the Day of God, The Mysterie of God, The Saints Paradice, Truth Lifting up his head above Scandals, and The New Law of Righteousnes—reveal his emerging social radicalism before the publication of the first Digger manifesto, A Declaration to the Powers of England (better known as The True Levellers Standard Advanced) in April 1649. Winstanley’s pre-Digger writings are fiercely anticlerical and apocalyptic as he challenges orthodox systems of belief and social order. In The Breaking of the Day of God, for example, he draws upon Haggai 2: 7 to envision times of sweeping iconoclastic reform when God unsettles all social and political institutions and ‘shakes . . . Kings, Parliaments, Armies, Counties, Kingdomes, Universities, humane learnings, studies, yea, shake[s] rich men and poore men, and throwes down every thing that stands in his way opposing him in work’.8 If Winstanley’s age was one of apocalyptic overturnings, then communism was a crucial means by which he hoped to create a new world in which the saints were ultimately freed from the profound insecurities of their age. In The New Law of Righteousnes (26 January 1648/9), published in the midst of the revolutionary upheavals of 1648–9, Winstanley first records a visionary trance at the end of 1648 (discussed below) that resulted in his conversion to communism, that crucial event in his career coinciding with the climactic events of the English Revolution. With his preface dated a few days before King Charles I was executed, Winstanley hoped that the cataclysmic political events of the revolution would finally bring about significant social change; the saints, inspired by millenarian fervour, could expect great transformations now that Parliament had been purged and ‘kingly power’ overthrown. The problem was that the sense of exhilaration generated by the traumatic events of December 1648 to February 1649 was qualified by disappointment among radicals. The Rump turned out to be a cautious regime with little revolutionary enthusiasm and was no more radical about religious reform than about social change. A month after

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Winstanley published his New Law of Righteousnes, the outspoken Leveller leader John Lilburne published a scathing attack on the Rump (England’s New Chains Discovered) for betraying its promises to uphold the people’s rights and liberties. Winstanley’s substantial pamphlet warned about the ongoing politics of economic enthralment, class divisions, and ecclesiastical bondage. The ‘particular propriety of Mine and Thine’ remained a terrible curse, a condition which destroys the Creation and fuels class conflict and exploitation as the rich and gentry harden their hearts against the poor, ‘oppressing them and treading them like mire in the street’.9 The Digger experiment would begin two months later, but Winstanley was already calling for ‘righteous actions’ in response to the socio-economic conditions that kept the poor in a state of misery and oppression.10 Indeed, in The New Law of Righteousnes, Winstanley introduces his visionary communist notion of making ‘the earth a common treasury’ (as it had been at the beginning),11 a theme that remains pervasive in his writings until his last published work, The Law of Freedom. The first Digger manifesto, A Declaration to the Powers of England, dated 20 April 1649, combines Winstanley’s radical social vision and his revolutionary myth-making in striking ways. Although a collaborative work (Winstanley’s name appears on the title page along with fourteen others), this Digger text clearly shows the mark of Winstanley’s own creative vision, as it opens by revising, in terms of Digger communism and language, the myth of Genesis itself: In the beginning of time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to be a common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the Lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes; but not one word was spoken in the beginning, that one branch of mankind should rule over another.12

As we shall see below, the heterodox Winstanley, rejecting the terrifying God of Calvinism, substituted ‘Reason’ for ‘God’; but this passage is notable in other ways. Winstanley does not hesitate to reinterpret the Bible freely to express his vision of agrarian communism and to challenge a social system which only reinforces the misery of the poor and oppressed. According to Winstanley, our relation to the treasures of the earth must be completely rethought and reimagined. In a very significant sense, Winstanley the agrarian communist is also a major visionary in the history of English literature and the environment and deserves more critical attention from this perspective. In Winstanley’s age, after all, England was predominantly an agricultural nation, and much of it remains so today. As Winstanley creatively reinterprets the Bible, and Genesis in particular, he expresses in original ways the notion that humankind’s relation to the earth fundamentally defines social, political, religious, and individual freedoms. By ‘buying and selling’ the earth and locking up its treasures (thereby making them unavailable to all, especially the poor), the covetous among humankind create the conditions for multiple and interconnected forms of tyranny, including economic, political, ecclesiastical, and social bondage. Winstanley and the Diggers also employ the powerful myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’, the legacy of William the Conqueror, to articulate the continuity of terrible class

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oppression which has beaten down the poor throughout the ages: ‘The Norman Bastard, William himself, his Colonels, Captains, inferior Officers, and common Souldiers, who still are from that time to this day in pursuit of that Victory, imprisoning, robbing, and killing the poore inslaved English Israelites.’13 William the Conqueror, with his foreign aristocracy, had originally deprived the people of their Anglo-Saxon rights and liberties in 1066, dividing up the land among his followers; Winstanley transforms the anti-Norman legend into a myth of the Fall of humankind itself. Yet despite the recent victory over King Charles I (who perpetuated Norman tyranny in the eyes of the Diggers), Norman power has never indeed ended. The power of private landlords, lawyers, the clergy, the new government, and the army sustains Norman oppression in the Commonwealth; all these institutions and professions are facets or ‘branches’ (as Winstanley often puts it) of the kingly power that perpetuates a tragic cycle of tyranny, social injustice, exploitation, and poverty. Committed to a programme of righteous, collective action as a means of freeing the creation from the curse and regaining its paradisal state, which would include a restoration of economic equality, the Diggers became the unique (though not a mass) movement of the rural poor during the English Revolution. Notable agrarian communities, modelled after Winstanley’s original one, appeared during 1649–50 at Iver in Buckinghamshire and at Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, and there is evidence that the social protest instigated by the Diggers inspired colonies elsewhere in the south Midlands.14 By attempting to cultivate unused waste and common land, the Diggers attempted to eradicate the tyranny of particular interest and private property (especially property in land), thereby making ‘the earth a common treasury’ for all. In the Digger writings, the notion that the poor and the meek would inherit the earth (see Matthew 5: 5) was a daring revolutionary vision that deeply challenged orthodox assumptions about class, social hierarchy, property, and power in seventeenth-century England. Winstanley’s experimental agricultural community, however, was fragile, and by April 1650, after suffering repeated harassment and vicious assaults (including the burning of their houses and goods), the Diggers were driven off the land by local landlords and their henchmen. Winstanley wanted collective action to be ‘the life of all’, but it was in his visionary writings above all that he gave unique and enduring expression to the extraordinary social ideals and penetrating critiques of oppressive power that continue to move readers today. Although the Digger communal experiment had failed by the spring of 1650, Winstanley nevertheless published his final and most ambitious revolutionary tract in 1652, a blueprint for a communist utopia, first conceived during his Digger years, which he addressed to Oliver Cromwell, the most powerful man in England: ‘You have power’, he writes to the Lord General, ‘I have no power.’ The Law of Freedom in a Platform is characterized by an uneasy mixture of radical social idealism and more sober political realism reflecting the disappointments of Digger defeat, as well as the frustrating political, social, and economic realities which have enabled kingly power to remain ‘in power still in the hands of those who have no more right to the Earth then ourselves’.15 Winstanley elaborates more systematically than ever before his vision of

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social reform, civic activism and labour, and true righteousness in a communist society free of the Antichristian practice of ‘buying and selling’ the earth and individual property-ownership; he offers many practical recommendations for governing his free, carefully organized commonwealth and for preventing the creeping in of lordly oppression and covetousness. Yet his utopian platform also expresses his great anxiety about the spirit of darkness overspreading the land. Under the new Republic little has changed for the commoners of England, even though, Winstanley stresses, they played an instrumental role in Parliament’s struggle against the King. Despite complaints from the poor about hardships caused by enclosure and about the destruction of common rights by acquisitive landlords, the Rump Parliament had done little to relieve their burdens and suffering and had shown itself more protective of the powerful. The troubling ambiguities of the Commonwealth remain, the defeated Digger dares to remind its godly leader. Winstanley argues that a man must either be ‘a free and true Commonwealths man, or a Monarchical tyrannical Royalist’; instead, the gentry and political leaders of the Republic have too often taken an ambiguous ‘middle path between these two’ positions.16 Kingly power, Winstanley warns, has cast a long shadow over the English Commonwealth, endangering the restoration of true magistracy.

W I N S T A N L E Y ’ S R E L I G I O U S R A D I C A L I S M 17

.................................................................................................................. Winstanley the radical social reformer and visionary was also one of the most distinctive radical religious writers of the English Revolution. He produced his works during an intense period of political revolution, religious ferment and unrest, and religious radicalism when Puritanism had fragmented and sectarianism was flourishing. During the tumultuous decades of the 1640s and 1650s, popular heretical beliefs circulated widely, including anti-Trinitarianism, Anabaptism, radical Arminianism and the doctrine of universal salvation, repudiation of original sin, scepticism about the existence of heaven and hell, mortalism or soul sleeping, the doctrine of creation ex deo, antinomianism, and the belief that the Spirit within believers or the inner light was above the letter of the Bible.18 Radical millenarianism flourished during these unsettled times encouraging visions of a world made new and the imminent kingdom of heaven on earth. Repelled by the practices and teachings of a professional ministry, Winstanley shared all these heterodox views, as well as a strong belief in complete liberty of conscience.19 His religious outlook became extremely unorthodox by 1648 and was increasingly tied to his political and social radicalism, and he soon found himself called ‘a blasphemer, and a man of errors’.20 Winstanley envisaged kingly power reigning with clerical orthodoxy, on the one hand, and with covetous power over the land, on the other. Even as Winstanley shared heterodox beliefs with other religious radicals of the 1640s and 1650s, he expressed these ideas with fresh potency in his visionary writings, and combined them in unusual ways.21 Some of his bold heterodox

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formulations and ideas are indeed original, as when, in reaction to the harsh determinism of Calvinism and its depiction of a distant God, he uses the word ‘Reason’ to denote the Spirit of God. His heterodoxies intersect with his materialist theology, including his radical belief, as leader of the Diggers, that the earth should be a common treasury for all people, without respect of persons, and therefore free from the entanglements of oppressive kingly and clerical power, as well as from the power of a legal system inaccessible to the common people. Winstanley’s religious views and practices, however, had not always been heterodox. As a younger man, he worshipped in a parish church, subscribed to orthodox Puritan beliefs about humankind’s innate sinfulness, and lived in fear of a distant, terrifying God. Rather than following his own inner convictions and the Spirit within him, Winstanley describes how he knew only what he received: by tradition from the mouths & pen of others: I worshipped a God, but I neither knew who he was, nor where he was, so that I lived in the darke, being blinded by the imagination of my flesh, and by the imagination, and by the imagination of such as stand up to teach the people to know the Lord, and yet have no knowledge of the Lord themselves, but as they have received by hearsay, from their books, and other mens words.22

Suffering under the coercive power of the established Church, the younger Winstanley was intimidated and kept in awe by the learned ministers, rituals, and teachings of orthodox religion; he feared hell and damnation, endured the harshness of predestinarian theory, and lived in a state of spiritual helplessness, anxiety, and enslavement as he ‘lay under the bondage of the Serpent’ and ‘lay dead in sin’.23 In that state of spiritual confusion and weakness, Winstanley himself had known little ‘of the Spirits inward workings’.24 He laments his own past religious conformity and passiveness, as well as his subjection to the established clergy, reinforced by their bewitching preaching, deceptive language, and their anxiety-generating notion of a Christ outside of us and at a distance: ‘I was a blind Professour and a strict goer to Church . . . and a hearer of Sermons, and never questioned what they spake, but believed as the learned Clergy (the Church) believed.’25 At some point in his past—Winstanley does not tell us precisely when during the upheavals of the 1640s26—he began to doubt seriously the orthodox doctrines and practices of the professional clergy and became fiercely anticlerical and anti-formalist in religion. Yet during the 1630s—the height of Laudian power, persecution of Puritans, and church innovations—and during the early 1640s Winstanley was a member of the established Church. While living in London during the early 1640s, he was an active parishioner in a church with no history of nonconformity,27 although the proximity of St Olave’s parish to the parish of St Stephen, Coleman Street, where the radical preacher and controversialist John Goodwin was based, meant that Winstanley was very likely exposed, at some level, to the ferment of religious radicalism in the city. Nonetheless, up until the end of 1643, when he left London for Cobham in Surrey, we have no evidence for his involvement in radical protest and Puritan sectarianism.28 Ultimately the story of the precise evolution of Winstanley’s religious beliefs from

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orthodoxy to extreme heterodoxy remains elusive. But then the 1640s, with the outbreak of Civil War and the collapse of censorship and church government, were years of millenarian speculation, religious flux, and choice when other radical religious writers also underwent considerable change, sometimes running the gamut of popular religion.29 What we can say is that sometime between 1643 and 1648 Winstanley underwent a period of acute religious struggle and depression. ‘Tossed with many troubles within his own spirit’,30 his heterodox religious positions began to develop significantly; they were very likely deepened by his second financial collapse and by a spiritual crisis in late 1647 and early 1648. The winter of 1647–8, just before he began publishing his first visionary pamphlets, was a period of severe economic hardship for the lower classes and personal trial for Winstanley, and seems to have been a moment of great spiritual revelation for him. While experiencing a powerful visionary trance (occurring in the equally trying winter of 1648–9), he heard a voice urging him to ‘Worke together. Eat bread together; declare this all abroad’, resulting in his conversion to communism and prompting him to undertake the Digger experiment.31 In addition, the mid-1640s and the momentous political events of the end of the decade constituted a period of extensive radical Puritan challenges to Presbyterian power and orthodoxy and to the notion of a compulsory national church; this was also a period of intense religious questioning, as well as the popularization of radical religious beliefs. From one perspective, ‘the old World’ of religion—including its theological orthodoxies, religious forms, and church ordinances—seemed, during these years of extreme turmoil, radical religious explosion, and millenarian yearnings, to be ‘running up like parchment in the fire, and wearing away’.32 Already in his early and theologically daring apocalyptic writings, the virulently anticlerical Winstanley, who resents that preaching has become a trade and the clergy an oppressive power, envisages God manifesting himself not through ‘the wise, learned, [and] the rich of the world’, but rather through ‘the despised, the unlearned, the poor, the nothings of the world’, filling ‘them with the good things of himself’.33 As a religious radical, Winstanley also stresses that God, a mighty king of righteousness, lies within men and women who inhabit a world in turmoil being turned upside down (Acts 17: 6): ‘wise men in the flesh are made fools, fools are made wise, scholars are declared to be ignorant, the ignorant ones in mens learning, become abundantly learned in the experimentall knowledge of Christ’. Prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Isaiah all spoke sharply ‘what they saw from God . . . out of experience of what they saw, and felt’;34 and so does the prophetic Winstanley in these times of crisis in England when the saints find themselves embattled and the poor are downtrodden. Drawing inspiration from Haggai (see 2: 7) and Ezekiel (e.g. 38: 19), Winstanley envisions his age as a time of terrible shakings in which God the mighty leveller is ‘shaking Nations, trying men, | and changing times and customes, | Ruining the Beast, and saving men, | amidst these great combustions’.35 As a visionary writer who maintains a fierce independence in relation to religious authorities, Winstanley does not depend upon ‘other mens words’ and teachings,36 nor upon forms of external ecclesiastical authority. Rather, he

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responds to divine impulses, drawing upon the inspiration and teaching of the Spirit in order to challenge the religious and social orthodoxies of his age with polemical indignation and prophetic fervour. Antinomian in his radical spiritual impulses and in his profound scepticism about human religious institutions, Winstanley presents his texts as ‘Written in the Light of inward experience’37—much as apostolic and apocalyptic Quaker writers would do during the 1650s—so that he follows above all authorities (even the Bible) the indwelling Spirit.38 Paradoxically this radical religious stance, with its emphasis on individual inspiration, reinforced Winstanley’s commitment to collective labour and righteous action, since he envisaged dramatic spiritual renewal and social transformation occurring simultaneously. One of the most provocative ways Winstanley rejects the terrifying, darker God of orthodox Puritanism—an oppressive, awesome, and distant God—is by changing the very name of God in his writings: ‘I am made to change the name from God to Reason; because I have been held under darknesse by that word as I see many people are.’39 In this way, Winstanley challenges professional, learned ministers who keep the common people subservient and poor, stress their sinfulness and helplessness, and hold ‘forth God and Christ to be at a distance from men’.40 From Winstanley’s heterodox perspective, God is no external God but the mighty Spirit Reason that dwells within all creatures and a dynamic, pantheistic force infusing the creation with new life: ‘for the Spirit is not confined to your Universities’, Winstanley tells the orthodox clergy, ‘but it spreads from East to West, and enlightens sons and daughters in all parts’.41 This power of righteousness and restoration is crucially an internalized spiritual force since the more orthodox belief of ‘Jesus Christ at a distance from thee, will never save thee; but a Christ within is thy Saviour.’42 In other ways too Winstanley expresses notable heterodox religious views as he shows his sharp hostility to the externals of religion. Winstanley, who at one point seems to have joined a Baptist congregation,43 rejects infant baptism as a practice without warrant in Scripture and as another custom by which the professional clergy ‘mightily deceives the people’; similarly, his anti-Sabbatarianism expresses his abhorrence of clerical compulsion and ‘a practice which the writings of the New Testament warrant not’.44 He also envisages God’s creation ex deo, making God ‘the life of the whole creation’,45 so that this heterodoxy, a rejection of creation ex nihilo, takes on distinctive socio-economic implications in Winstanley’s writings where he depicts the creation—the earth—groaning under bondage. In addition, Winstanley rejects the orthodox view of the Trinity (which finds no support in the Bible) since ‘Jesus Christ . . . was the first in whom the Father did appeare bodily to dwell in’;46 he emphasizes universal redemption and rejects the idea that the elect alone will be saved; and he stresses the internalization of the kingdom of heaven and the misery of hell, much like the internalization of the conflicting powers of Spirit and flesh striving within each person. His heterodox religious perspectives may at times remind us of Milton’s theological heresies, not to mention his hostility toward kingly power in its earthly forms. However, the radical socio-economic vision and material actions Winstanley aligns with his heterodoxies often give them distinctive

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expression, contributing to his originality as a writer. And as we shall see below, Winstanley’s mythopoeic revisions of the Bible likewise express his heterodox views, as well as his perception of menacing clerical powers, in exceptionally vigorous prose. Especially crucial to Winstanley’s heterodox religious perspective is his radical millenarianism expressed throughout his writings. During the years of crisis when Winstanley was writing his pamphlets, millenarian expectations, inspired by the thousand years’ reign of the saints with Christ envisioned in Revelation 20: 1–6, ran particularly high. Radical millenarianism was fuelled not only by years of economic hardship but also by the turbulent years of Civil War and the traumatic revolutionary events of 1648–9 when the Parliament was purged, Charles I was tried and executed (the latter event occurring days after Winstanley dated the preface to his New Law of Righteousnes), and the experimental Republic established. Many religious radicals welcomed these transformative political events as a triumph for the saints, as a sign that the downfall of all earthly kings was at hand, and as evidence of the imminent coming of King Jesus—the successor to Charles—and the establishment of a New Jerusalem on earth. Moreover, if at ‘a popular level, the millennium seems to have meant a future world freed from the insecurity of the seventeenth century’,47 then millenarianism had a particular appeal for Winstanley and his vulnerable colony of the Diggers, who experienced constant harassment, persecution, and violent suppression. Throughout his writings, Winstanley expresses a keen sense of an imminent millennium—of Christ coming ‘glorified with thousand thousands attending upon him’48— and of the spiritual and social redemption of humanity drawing near. Winstanley’s vision of a world made new and a true regnum Christi at hand—his vision of Christ’s coming ‘to create new Heavens, and new Earth, wherein Righteousness dwels’49—is also distinctive. He envisions millenarianism as an internal spiritual process, not only an external transformation: the Second Coming refers to the rising of Christ in all sons and daughters, the spreading of divine power inwardly, and, consequently, the perfectibility of humankind. The inward kingdom of Christ and the destruction of all earthly powers will have significant social and political consequences: ‘Christ hath begun to reign in his Saints’, Winstanley announces on the title page of The Breaking of the Day of God, ‘and to tread their corrupt flesh under his feet’. And when Christ comes ‘in his brightnes’, then he will destroy the Beast ‘in all her shapes and disguises’50—a theatrical formulation that underscores Winstanley’s dramatic sense of the imminent coming of the king of righteousness and the destruction of Antichrist in its multiple forms. The protean shapes of Antichrist include kingly power, ecclesiastical power, the power of professional lawyers, and the power of rapacious landlords. The distinctive millennium Winstanley envisages is an agrarian communist paradise or golden age: a new age of social equality—since Winstanley’s mighty Spirit of ‘universal Righteousness’ is ‘no respector of persons’—in which property is abolished so that ‘the Earth may become a Common Treasury to all her children’.51 Nevertheless, Winstanley’s vision of his society burdened by ongoing class oppression

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and interwoven forms of Antichristian powers often darkens and complicates his exhilarating millenarianism and his arresting new vision of a better world. We possess no written expressions of Winstanley’s heterodox and popular millenarian convictions beyond the visionary and communist writings he published between 1648 and 1652. In 1660 the ex-Ranter Laurence Clarkson attacked Winstanley for ‘a most shameful retreat from Georges-hill, with a spirit of pretended universality, to become a real Tithe-gatherer of propriety’.52 Just how respectable did Winstanley become in his later life with regard to his religious alignments? Winstanley had voiced in print his own sharp criticisms of immoderate Ranter behaviour and idleness (even as he shared their repudiation of Puritan orthodoxy),53 so we need not accept Clarkson’s view of Winstanley’s ‘retreat’ from radicalism at face value. Still, in 1659 and then again in 1666 Winstanley served as a way warden of Cobham parish and then as church warden in 1667 and 1668.54 Such evidence about Winstanley’s later religious activities reminds us that we need to be careful about pigeonholing this leading radical in terms of his religious developments.55 In considering his religious career as a whole, we need to be wary about demanding too much consistency in an age of enormous religious flux and uncertainty, even as we acknowledge that his powerfully voiced heterodox beliefs and fierce anticlericalism contributed profoundly to the major body of writings he produced during the upheavals of the middle of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the fact that, at the end of his life, he abandoned the established Church, attended Quaker meetings in London, and married a second wife who was a committed Quaker also seems revealing—perhaps more so than commentators on the end of his religious career have suggested. In religious terms, the Winstanley who had followed ‘the Light of inward experience’ during his years of greatest spiritual radicalism and communist experimentation chose to align himself, later in his life, with a sectarian community that likewise sought inspiration from the inner light and refused, despite facing harsh persecution during the Restoration, to conform to the Church of England.56 Winstanley’s involvement with the Quakers at some point after 1670, however, did not stimulate him to produce more heterodox writings challenging a restored Church of England. Yet for all his later respectability, Winstanley, who had composed his remarkable radical religious and political writings at the height of the English Revolution, seems to have retained, in his last years, an element of religious nonconformity.

V I S I O N A R Y M Y T H -M A K I N G : W I N S T A N L E Y ’ S RADICAL USES OF THE BIBLE

.................................................................................................................. Like other radical religious writers of his age, Winstanley possesses an intimate knowledge of the Bible, which he interprets in highly original ways. He draws upon the Bible more than any other book—there are no references to classical authors in his works and few explicit references to publications of his own day57—and he often does

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so with fresh mythopoeic power. A self-proclaimed prophet inspired by the Spirit within, Winstanley makes idiosyncratic use of the Bible and its potent myths throughout his works. Winstanley is no literalist who sticks to the letter of the Bible, however. He interprets the Bible’s fundamental stories, myths, and visions—including Genesis and the garden of Eden, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, the Exodus narrative, the first and second Adams, and the great apocalyptic visions of Daniel and Revelation—in both highly figurative and allegorical ways. His Christ is less important as a historical personage and more significant as a spirit of righteousness within each individual; similarly, Winstanley envisages Cain and Abel as two mighty powers struggling within the self, just as he depicts the land of Canaan, ‘the habitation of rest’, and Judas the covetous spirit all lying within.58 Indeed, from Winstanley’s visionary perspective, all of biblical history can be discerned within the self: ‘whether there was any such outward things or no, it matters not much, if thou seest all within, this will be thy life’.59 The stories and images of the Bible consequently take on new life, potency, and urgency in Winstanley’s works; he invests them with fresh imaginative, spiritual, and cosmic significance as he responds to the tumultuous seventeenth-century world of religious, political, and class conflicts. He freely adapts the Bible’s language and reworks its myths to scrutinize the mighty struggles of his age between bondage and freedom and between property and community, as well as to represent the state of internal human alienation, division, and restlessness under the curse of socio-economic oppression. The potent myths and images of the Bible enable Winstanley to voice his searing indictments of contemporary social, religious, and political institutions and practices, shaped by years of Civil War, social dislocation, revolutionary upheaval and experimentation, and political disillusionment. Winstanley perceives the Bible as a powerful interpretative weapon capable of challenging the social order and religious orthodoxy in a period of revolution when control over scriptural exegesis was bitterly contested.60 He urges his readers to reconsider who possesses the inspiration to unlock the Bible’s radical spiritual and social messages. With his deep mistrust of institutional ecclesiastical authorities, he sharply challenges the interpretations of the Bible by university-trained ministry ‘new moulding those Scriptures into their own language’.61 In the hands of the orthodox godly clergy, the Bible has become an instrument of power, a means of controlling and dominating the common people, and therefore a source of acute class conflict. Scriptural exegesis practised by the professional clergy involves obscurantism, enabling them to deceive, confound, manipulate, and oppress the lower classes and ordinary people who possess no scholarly learning: The Scriptures of the Bible were written by the experimentall hand of Shepherds, Husbandmen, Fishermen, and such inferiour men of the world; And the Universitie learned ones have got these mens writings; and flourishes their plaine language over with their darke interpretation, and glosses, as if it were too hard for ordinary men now to understand them; and thereby they deceive the simple, and makes a prey of the poore, and cosens them of the Earth, and of the tenth of their labors.62

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When it comes to the Bible, its original authors, and its basic but radical spiritual messages, Winstanley contrasts the inspiration, inward testimony, personal experience, and plain language of ‘inferiour men’ of the world—georgic and pastoral figures like shepherds and husbandmen—with the menacing practices and language of the educated clergy of his own time. Unlike the professional ministers of his day, Winstanley stresses, Moses was a shepherd, Amos a fruit gatherer, the Apostles fishermen, and Christ a carpenter.63 In Winstanley’s unorthodox perspective, the established clergy, insisting on control over the Bible’s interpretation and supported by compulsory tithes (established under Jewish law but abolished under the new covenant when Christ came to earth), prevents the earth—and England—from becoming a common treasury of livelihood for all. Winstanley the agrarian communist and allegorical prose writer treats the garden of Eden metaphorically: it symbolizes the natural world in all its potential; yet it also symbolizes the internal workings of mankind’s spirit and heart. It is the ‘living Earth’—the natural world that could become a common treasury for all, including the poor—and yet it also refers to the internal garden and land within humankind, a state of being corrupted by selfish internal impulses and the desire for material objects and power: ‘I speak of the Garden of Eden, which is the spirit of man . . . And in that Garden there are weeds and hearbs. The weeds are these. Selfe-Love, Pride, Envie; Covetousnesse after riches, honours, pleasures, Imagination, thinking he cannot live in peace, unlesse he enjoy this or that outward object.’64 According to Winstanley’s biblical myth-making and exegesis, the creation of private property in land is one of the dire causes of the fall of man; has fuelled covetousness, enmity, and other sins; and has resulted in wars, theft, and humankind’s enslavement. Yet according to Winstanley’s interpretation, the Fall, while not a consequence of original sin, is also an expression of internal alienation, as well as outward bondage; driven out of the garden, mankind is also driven out of himself and ‘does not enjoy the Kingdome within himselfe; but seekes after a Kingdome and peace without him’.65 In this fallen state—a state of inward bondage, warfare, vexation, fear, and anguish—covetous mankind restlessly pursues power. If Eden represents an internal state or a paradise within, so do heaven and hell according to the heterodox Winstanley: both are located within humankind. In Winstanley’s myth-making, the great human struggles and apocalyptic conflicts depicted in the Bible represent the mighty struggles of Civil War and Interregnum England and the forces which have sustained class oppression in what is supposed to be a ‘Free State’.66 In Winstanley’s world of social inequality, class conflict, and exploitation of the poor, Cain is still killing Abel and the Lord Esau still strives to dominate his younger brother Jacob. In Winstanley’s typology, Abel, plain-hearted man whose industry originally made the earth more fruitful, is a type of Christ who is rising up to purge and redeem the creation. Jacob is the meek spirit—also a type of Christ, the king of righteousness—while Esau, who hates Jacob and plans to kill him (Gen. 27: 41–5), is the man of flesh, a tyrannical oppressor symbolic of economic, religious, and political oppression. Ahab’s restless desire for Naboth’s vineyard (in 1 Kings 21: 1–16)

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becomes symbolic not only of kingly power and prerogative, but of the lords of manors in their voracious desire to possess the common land.67 The precise details of such biblical conflicts, however, are less important to Winstanley than their broader symbolic significance; this includes their potential to convey the terrible injustices of Winstanley’s England, as well as the spiritual conflicts and striving impulses within fallen mankind plagued by a profound sense of discontent. The spectacular apocalyptic and eschatological visions of the Books of Daniel and Revelation, especially, inspire some of Winstanley’s most memorable prose, prophetic writing which can match in symbolic power and vividness the great prose of Milton and Bunyan. The early, pre-Digger tracts, based upon Winstanley’s elaborate exegesis of prophetic scriptural texts, are shot through with images of apocalyptic conflict, including visions of the Beast making war with Christ and his saints. But some of the most potent eschatological writing can be found in the Digger texts. In the rich mythopoeic prose of Fire in the Bush, Winstanley develops a terrifying image of evil based upon the great red Dragon of Revelation 12 to represent ecclesiastical power and oppression in his age of crisis: ‘clergy power makes a man a sinner for a word, and so he sweeps the Stars of Heaven downe with his tayle, he darkens Heaven and Earth, and defiles body and mind’.68 This biblically based image of a monstrous, Antichristian iniquity suggests that the oppressive use of language by the established clergy is a manifestation of the terrible battles in Winstanley’s age between the powers of darkness and light, flesh and Spirit, bondage and righteousness, property and community. Winstanley also elaborates upon Daniel’s vision of the four great beasts or world empires rising out of the chaos of the great sea (Dan. 7: 2–12), a fertile passage for radical religious writers engaging in millenarian speculation and interpretation: These foure powers are the foure Beasts, which Daniel saw rise up out of the Sea . . . And this Sea is the bulke and body of mankinde, which is that Sea, and waters, upon which the Spirit of God is said sometimes to move; for out of Mankinde arises all that darknesse and Tyranny that oppresses it selfe; and though these Beasts appeare divers, one from another, yet they are all one in their power.69

Winstanley’s terrifying allegory based upon Daniel’s vision gives a distinctive sociopolitical interpretation to the interconnected powers of Antichrist—all human creations—thriving in his age, including kingly power, ecclesiastical power, and the power of the law. Winstanley’s eschatological representations of the various powers of the world, as he revises scriptural prophecy and myths and invests them with fresh potency, vividly express his response to interwoven forms of worldly power, economic oppression, and institutional authority; these forms of tyranny continue, during Interregnum England, to keep the poor downtrodden and impede true revolutionary change. Winstanley, moreover, continued to employ the Bible in original ways until the end of his short but highly prolific career as a visionary writer. In his major utopian work, The Law of Freedom,70 he again gives scriptural texts distinctive contemporary sociohistorical interpretation that underscores the urgency and challenge of his appeal to

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Oliver Cromwell, the godly leader of the troubled Commonwealth, in whose hands lie ‘the Power of the Land’. Addressing Cromwell as an instrument of providence and as England’s Moses who destroyed an oppressing Pharaoh, Winstanley freshly reworks the story of Jonah and the gourd (Jonah 4: 5–11), which tells of God’s dramatic challenge to the prophet; he recreates that biblical parable in striking allegorical terms suggesting that, in the eyes of the common people, the radical social and political expectations generated by the traumatic events of the English Revolution have never been realized. In Winstanley’s retelling, the gourd, which shelters the prophet from the fierce heat of the sun but is destroyed by a worm sent by God, becomes ‘a remembrancer to men in high places’ like Cromwell, a sharp reminder that, even under the Republic, kingly power still remains. In the Bible, the parable highlights the unrighteousness of Jonah, who becomes angry over the perished gourd, but who shows no sympathy for the ignorant people of Nineveh. Winstanley transforms the parable so that it now dramatizes the spirit of unrighteousness in the English Commonwealth. In Winstanley’s revision of the allegory, the earth where the gourd grows is identified with the oppressed commoners of England and the gourd itself becomes the power that covers Cromwell. The root of gourd is the heart of the common people, still groaning under kingly bondage. The worm in the earth gnawing at the root of the gourd in this political allegory represents ‘Discontents’ because promises made to the oppressed commoners by those with power have not been kept: popery, presbytery, and kingly bondage all still thrive in the English Republic. People are still ‘made sinners for a word’ keeping them in a state of anxious submission; tithes have never been abolished and continue to support an orthodox national clergy; and laws remain intricate, obscure, and subject to manipulation by lawyers, thereby upholding the bondage of Norman power over the powerless poor. If Cromwell truly wishes to act righteously, he must, Winstanley’s biblical allegory suggests, ‘cherish the root in the Earth’ or the commoners of England. Only ‘performance of professions, words, and promises’ will kill the worm, Winstanley asserts, conveying through his potent allegorical prose, his urgent and oft-repeated plea that ‘action is the life of all’ in a free Commonwealth, ‘and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing’.71 Until the very end of his short but remarkably fertile career as a writer, then, Winstanley’s mythopoeic imagination transformed the well-known stories, symbols, and images from the Bible, giving them fresh socio-historical immediacy and spiritual significance. This makes Winstanley, the foremost social radical of the English Revolution, among the most original and boldest interpreters of the Bible in seventeenthcentury England. It also reminds us that Winstanley’s remarkable social, religious, and literary achievements as a radical visionary are interconnected and must be understood in relation to each other. Few radical writers of the English Revolution (or any other period in English literature) have analysed more acutely and expressed so vividly the abuses of institutions of economic, political, and religious power. Few English writers, moreover, have dared to envision, with such conviction, a world completely transformed in political, religious, and economic terms—a world that could indeed

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become a ‘common treasury’ for all humanity. Gerrard Winstanley did so in some of the most memorable prose in the English language.

NOTES 1. Notable twentieth-century studies published by historians include Berens, The Digger Movement; Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy; Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 107–50; id., The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley; Lutaud, Winstanley; Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society, ch. 7; Aylmer, ‘The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley’, 91–119. 2. Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley. References in this chapter are to the OUP edition (henceforth abbreviated CW). Sabine’s edition of The Works of Gerrard Winstanley remains valuable, especially for its introduction. 3. A Watch-Word to the City of London, and the Armie (1649), CW, ii. 80. 4. For Winstanley’s biography and the challenges it poses to scholars, see CW, i. 1–25. 5. For a vivid account of the economic difficulties and plight of the poor, see Manning, 1649, 79–89; see also Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English Revolution’, 64–98. 6. A Watch-Word to the City of London, CW, ii. 80. 7. Truth Lifting up his Head, CW, i. 446. 8. The Breaking of the Day of God, CW, i. 180. 9. The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 482, 531. 10. Ibid. 531. 11. Ibid. 482. 12. A Declaration to the Powers of England, CW, i. 4. 13. Ibid. 12. 14. CW, i. 37, ii. 249; Winstanley, Works, ed. Sabine, 439–41, 649–51; Thomas, ‘Another Digger Broadside’, 59. 15. Law of Freedom, CW, ii. 288, 285. 16. Ibid. 291. 17. The next two sections of this chapter draw at points upon the introduction to CW (i. 51–65), but I have made substantial changes and cuts, as well as some additions, so that the following pages address the needs of the present volume. 18. See also John Coffey’s chapter on ‘Religion’ in this volume. 19. As he observes in The Law of Freedom in a Platform, ‘no man shall be troubled for his judgment or practice in the things of his God, so he live quiet in the Land’ (CW, ii. 370). 20. The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 567. 21. As Christopher Hill notes, however, it is indeed often difficult ‘to decide which writers during the revolutionary epoch are producing original ideas, and which are expressing or recombining commonplaces’: The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley, 11. Nonetheless, Winstanley gives these religious heterodoxies distinctive expression, even as they are widely circulating during the 1640s and 1650s. 22. The Saints Paradice, CW, i. 313–14. 23. The Mysterie of God, CW, i. 23. 24. Preface to Several Pieces Gathered into One Volume, CW, i. 99. 25. The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 567.

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26. For what is known about Winstanley’s early religious life and contexts, see CW, i. 6–7, 14– 15; Alsop, ‘A High Road to Radicalism?’, 11–24; Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: What Do We Know of his Life?’, 19–36, esp. 19–29; Davis and Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’; Gurney, Brave Community, ch. 3. 27. For Winstanley and St Olave’s parish, see CW, i. 5–6. 28. However, in October 1643 Winstanley did take the Solemn League and Covenant for the reformation of Protestant religion, the extirpation of popery and prelacy, and the destruction of Antichristian tyranny; yet accepting the Covenant was not in itself an inevitable indication of Winstanley’s future religious radicalism. 29. The sometime Ranter Laurence Clarkson provides a notable example: see his autobiography, The Lost Sheep Found. 30. The Saints Paradice, CW i. 343. 31. Winstanley’s trance is first mentioned in The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 513; see also ii. 14–15. 32. A Declaration to the Powers of England, CW, ii. 5. 33. The Mysterie of God, CW, i. 255. On the religious heterodoxies of the early writings, see Corns, ‘The Road to George Hill’, 185–202. 34. The Saints Paradice, CW, i. 322. 35. The Breaking of the Day of God, CW, i. 188. 36. The Saints Paradice, CW, i. 314. 37. Title page to Several Pieces Gathered into One Volume (1649), CW, i. 97. 38. For Winstanley’s statement to Edward Burrough that the Quakers were perfecting the work of the Diggers, see CW, i. 17. 39. Truth Lifting up his Head, ‘To the gentle Reader’, CW, i. 414; see The Saints Paradice, i. 375. 40. Truth Lifting up his Head, CW, i. 412. 41. Ibid. 410. 42. Ibid. 420. 43. Ibid. 449, where Winstanley observes that he went ‘through the ordinance of dipping’. 44. Ibid. 451. 45. Ibid. 415. 46. Ibid. 419. 47. Capp, ‘The Fifth Monarchists’, 189. 48. Fire in the Bush, CW, i. 196. 49. The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 548. 50. The Breaking of the Day of God, CW, i. 101, 144. 51. The Law of Freedom, CW, ii. 311, 351. 52. The Lost Sheep Found, 27. 53. Winstanley most notably criticized the Ranters in A Vindication of those whose Endeavors is only to make the Earth a Common Treasury, CW, ii. 235–40, and in the postscript to Englands Spirit Unfoulded, CW, ii. 167. 54. See CW, i. 17; Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability’, 705–9. 55. Compare Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: What Do We Know of his Life?’, 33. 56. Compare Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’s Later Life’, 81, who stresses differences between Winstanley and the Quakers and who concludes that Winstanley’s adoption of Quakerism does not confirm any radical religious conviction at the end of his life. See also Gurney, Brave Community, 221.

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57. The only other major book the anticlerical Winstanley refers to is John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments or Book of Martyrs, first published in English in 1563 and then expanded in subsequent editions, with a significant edition appearing during Winstanley’s lifetime in 1641; this massive apocalyptic martyrology concerning the persecution of the godly, including the savage persecution of Mary Tudor’s reign, clearly appealed to Winstanley who used it to support his more radical attack on ecclesiastical power: Breaking of the Day of God, CW, i. 185. 58. See e.g. The New Law of Righteousnes, CW, i. 538. 59. Fire in the Bush, CW, ii. 188. 60. On the uses and competing interpretations of the vernacular Bible in seventeenth-century England, see Knott, The Sword and the Spirit; Hill, The English Bible. 61. Truth Lifting up his Head, CW, i. 412. 62. Fire in the Bush, CW, ii. 200. 63. Truth Lifting up his Head, CW, i. 451–2. 64. Fire in the Bush, CW, ii. 172. 65. Ibid. 177. 66. Winstanley refers to the Declaration of England as a Commonwealth (19 May 1649) in A Watch-Word to the City of London, CW, ii. 84, and A New-Yeers Gift for the Parliament and Armie, CW, ii. 108. 67. An Appeal to the House of Commons, CW, ii. 72. 68. Fire in the Bush, CW, ii. 194. 69. Ibid. 190. For further discussion of Winstanley’s original socio-historical revisions of the prophecies of Daniel and Revelation, see Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, ch. 2. 70. Some scholars argue (unpersuasively in my view) for Winstanley’s increasing secularization. See e.g. Juretic, ‘Digger No Millenarian’, 263–80; George, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: A Critical Retrospect’, 191–225. Accounts of the relationship between religious belief and politics in Winstanley’s writing include Bradstock, Faith in the Revolution, esp. chs. 4–6; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, ch. 2; and Corns, ‘The Road to George Hill’, 185–202. 71. The Law of Freedom, CW, ii. 279–83.

WORKS CITED Alsop, James D. ‘Gerrard Winstanley’s Later Life’. Past and Present 82 (1979), 73–81. ——. ‘Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability’. Historical Journal 28.3 (1985), 705–9. ——. ‘A High Road to Radicalism? Gerrard Winstanley’s Youth’. Seventeenth Century 9 (1994), 11–24. ——. ‘Gerrard Winstanley: What Do We Know of his Life?’, in Andrew Bradstock (ed.), Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Aylmer, G. E. ‘The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Berens, Lewis H. The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth. London: Simkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1906.

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Bradstock, Andrew. Faith in the Revolution: The Political Theologies of Müntzer and Winstanley. London: SPCK, 1997. Capp, Bernard. ‘The Fifth Monarchists and Popular Millenarianism’, in J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 165–89. Clarkson, Laurence. The Lost Sheep Found . . . after a sad and weary Journey through many Religious Countryes. London, 1660. Corns, Thomas. ‘The Road to George Hill: The Heretical Dynamic of Winstanley’s Early Prose’, in David Loewenstein and John Marshall (eds.), Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern English Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 185–202. Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. —— and J. D. Alsop. ‘Gerrard Winstanley’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. George, C. H. ‘Gerrard Winstanley: A Critical Retrospect’, in Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (eds.), The Dissenting Tradition. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975, 191–225. Gurney, John. Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. London: Penguin, 1975. ——. The Religion of Gerrard Winstanley. Past and Present, supplement 5, 1978. ——. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin, 1993. Hindle, Steve. ‘Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50’. Economic History Review 61 (2008), 64–98. Juretic, George. ‘Digger No Millenarian: The Revolutionizing of Gerrard Winstanley’. Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975), 263–80. Knott, John R. The Sword and the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lutaud, Olivier. Winstanley: Socialisme et christianisme sous Cromwell. Paris: Didier, 1976. Manning, Brian. 1649: The Crisis of the English Revolution. London: Bookmarks, 1992. Petegorsky, D. W. Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War: A Study in the Philosophy of Gerrard Winstanley. London: Victor Gollanz, 1940. Thomas, Keith. ‘Another Digger Broadside’. Past and Present 42 (1969), 57–68. Winstanley, Gerrard. The Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. George Holland Sabine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1941. ——. The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

CHAPTER

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ABIEZER COPPE AND THE RANTERS ....................................................................................................... ARIEL HESSAYON

In 1652 Mary Adams of Tillingham, Essex apparently died by her own hand. According to a pamphlet entitled The Ranters Monster printed at London for George Horton (Figure 18.1), Adams claimed that she had been made pregnant by the Holy Ghost. Furthermore, she reportedly denied the Gospels’ teachings, wickedly declaring that Christ had not yet appeared in the flesh but that she was to give birth to the true Messiah. For these supposed blasphemies Adams was imprisoned. After a protracted labour of eight days, she gave birth on the ninth day to a stillborn, ugly, misshapen monster. This loathsome creature was said to have neither hands nor feet, but claws like a toad. Adams herself became consumed by disease, rotting away, her body disfigured by blotches, boils, and putrid scabs. To compound her sins she refused to repent and then committed the terrible crime of suicide by ripping open her bowels with a knife. The account in The Ranters Monster was reproduced in some contemporary newsbooks and subsequently in a broadside enumerating the great blasphemers of the times. It was, however, fictitious. While the pamphlet formed part of the genre of monstrous births, which tended to be interpreted as providential signs warning against private and public sin, it also served another function: as an admonition against the licentiousness of the Ranters and an affirmation of the dreadful divine punishments that awaited all such reprobates. Represented as a devout, godly woman of good parentage, Adams became victim to what attentive readers would have recognized as a lamentable falling away from the Church and zealous observance of ordinances into membership of various heretical sects, becoming successively a Baptist, Familist, and Ranter. It was as a Ranter that she was said to have maintained diabolical tenets: the denial of God, heaven and hell, and the opinion that a woman may have sexual relations with any man— regardless of his marital status.1 The Ranters Monster is therefore instructive both for its fictive yet evidently believable account of a woman claiming to be the new Virgin Mary, soon to be delivered of a Christ child, and its construction of assumed Ranter

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F I G U R E 1 8 . 1 Anon., The Ranters Monster: Being a true Relation of one Mary Adams, living at Tillingham in Essex, who named herself the Virgin Mary (London, printed for George Horton, 1652), title page [British Library, Thomason E 658(6)] #The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011.

beliefs. It also epitomizes the difficulties scholars have faced in distinguishing between polemical stereotypes and evidence of actual principles and practices. Indeed, since much of the extant printed literature derives from hostile sources or recantations, J. C. Davis took the extreme position of arguing that there was ‘no Ranter movement, no Ranter sect, no Ranter theology’.2 Yet, as we shall see, this goes too far.

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THE RANTERS

AND THEIR

HISTORIANS

.................................................................................................................. The Ranters have generally been better served by literary critics than by their historians. Hence Abiezer Coppe (1619–72?), whom some contemporaries regarded as a fiery sectarian preacher turned diabolically possessed mad libertine, was portrayed by the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood as a lascivious blasphemer ultimately and justly debilitated by alcoholism and sexually transmitted disease. So blackened was Coppe’s name that in the late eighteenth century he was still remembered as one of the wildest enthusiasts of a fanatical age. Nineteenth-century critics fundamentally concurred with this verdict, calling Coppe a ‘strange enthusiast’ and the ‘great Ranter’.3 In the same vein Alexander Gordon, the Unitarian minister and authority on Protestant nonconformity, dismissed Coppe as an insane if somewhat pathetic fanatical proponent of ‘distorted antinomianism’, given to flights of mystical fancy that were occasionally expressed in ‘passages of almost poetical beauty’.4 Later commentators were little different: Coppe was an ‘indefatigable dipper’ who became one of the ‘wildest’ Ranters with an appetite for excessive drinking, smoking, and swearing, while his most significant work, the ‘vigorous and colourful’ A Fiery Flying Roll (1649), was reckoned an eccentric book full of ‘curious ravings’ and ‘stylistic idiosyncrasies’.5 Just as Coppe was vilified in particular, so the Ranters at large long remained maligned. Partly this was because they neither sought nor succeeded in establishing an enduring legacy. Their leading lights imprisoned, their most inflammatory writings suppressed and publicly burned, their influence dissipated, the Ranters initially had no advocates to refashion their past and rehabilitate their reputation. Unlike Baptists, Quakers, and even Muggletonians, who carefully collected, collated, and copied manuscript letters, testimonies, and treatises, as well as meticulously compiling records of their fellow believers’ sufferings, almost no one attempted to legitimize the Ranters by preserving their records for posterity. Moreover, late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury denominationally committed historians—largely preoccupied as they were with constructing complicated if unbroken genealogies of religious dissent—were repeatedly at pains to distinguish the Ranters’ blasphemous opinions and seemingly scandalous activities from those of their much eulogized founding fathers, mothers, and precursors during the English Revolution and beforehand. Consequently Quaker scholars, even allowing for polemical exaggeration and distortion, frequently denounced the Ranters as a dangerous pantheistic aberration and disorganized degenerate movement whose extreme mystical doctrines and immoral excesses had threatened to spread like a contagion across the nation had it not been for the spiritual antidote afforded by George Fox’s ministry and Quakerism. This alone had cured many wayward souls infected by ‘a serious outbreak of mental and moral disorder’.6 Nor did the Ranters fare better within the two broad prevailing historiographical trends of the period that were largely responsible for the piecemeal rediscovery or recovery of what is now usually called English radicalism. One was bourgeois, liberal,

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and teleological, essentially concerned with identifying democratic and republican ideas that emerged in response to acute social and economic tensions during the English Revolution, together with tracing their growing influence during the American and French Revolutions. The other was Socialist and Marxist, with an emphasis on secular class struggle under the shadow of capitalism. Neither, however, effectively integrated the Ranters within their conceptions of radicalism. Indeed, the Ranters at first received scant attention from Marxists and their fellow-travellers, mainly because they found it awkward incorporating their supposed practical antinomianism and pantheistic doctrines within orthodox, scientific interpretations of the revolution. ‘Arrogantly and snobbishly’ lumped with self-appointed Messiahs on the ‘lunatic fringe’ by Christopher Hill,7 it was other scholars who originally stressed the Ranters’ humble origins, ‘bold class hatreds’, and powerful demands for social justice—including the ‘common ownership of all goods’.8 The most notable was Norman Cohn, whose The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957) provided an incipient contribution to the psychoanalysis of prophetic and messianic figures, as well as a welcome reprint of key passages from selected Ranter texts. Envisaging the Ranters as ‘mystical anarchists’ prone to extravagant behaviour, Cohn eventually located them within a loose tradition spanning from the Brethren of the Free Spirit (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries) and Spiritual Libertines (sixteenth century) to Charles Manson and his murderous ‘family’ (1969).9 By the late 1960s several unpublished dissertations had been written on the Ranters. Though most researchers were based in North American universities, one was completed at Oxford by J. F. McGregor under Hill’s supervision. McGregor suggested that Ranterism was indicative of a ‘climate of opinion, expressed in antinomian ideals’ that ‘could not be translated into social terms’ because it was a ‘philosophy of individualism’. According to McGregor, after 1651 Ranterism existed as a largely fictional image in contemporaries’ minds, although the Ranters also survived indistinctly as a ‘mood of disaffection’.10 Then in 1970 A. L. Morton published The World of the Ranters. Morton was a former chair of the briefly influential Historians’ Group of the Communist Party, an organization whose objective had been to create a tradition of Marxist history in Britain. Having previously speculated that William Blake and that ‘strange genius’ Abiezer Coppe ‘shared a common body of ideas and expressed those ideas in a common language’—particularly the seeming resemblances between Coppe’s Fiery Flying Roll and Blake’s Prophetic Books and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell— Morton elaborated on the Ranters’ ‘crazy extravagances’ and Coppe’s outrageous courting of London’s unrevolutionary underclass. For Morton, the Ranters ‘formed the extreme left wing of the sects’, both theologically and politically. Combining a ‘pantheistic mysticism and a crudely plebeian materialism’ with a ‘deep concern for the poor’ and a ‘primitive biblical communism’, the ‘Ranter Movement’ spectacularly manifested itself in late 1649, peaked the next year, and then splintered under the hammer of ‘savage repression’. Its sudden emergence at a moment when the ‘radical, plebeian element’ had been politically defeated signalled ‘all the signs of a revolution in retreat’ from the forces of bourgeois respectability. In contrast to the rural Diggers, the Ranters were primarily an urban movement, appealing to the ‘defeated and declassed’,

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drawing support from London’s ‘impoverished artisans and labourers’ (including those on the margins of criminality), as well as ‘wage earners and small producers’ in numerous towns.11 All the while, Hill became increasingly sympathetic to the Ranters, recognizing that they too perhaps had ‘something to say to our generation’. Consequently, they underwent a remarkable transformation in The World Turned Upside Down (1972). Here Hill envisaged the Diggers and Ranters as boldly defying early modern European bourgeois society’s greatest achievement—the Protestant ethic. Antinomianism became ‘Calvinism’s lower-class alter ego’, Ranter swearing an act of defiance against God and ‘Puritan middle class standards’. Hill likened the Ranters’ tobacco smoking and ‘communal love-feast[s]’ to drug-taking and free love, overstating—as he later admitted—their participation in a (Puritan) ‘sexual revolution’. Moreover, he claimed that the ‘Ranter ethic . . . involved a real subversion of existing society and its values’. Only the experience of defeat put a check to the ‘intoxicating excitement’. For ‘what had looked in the Ranter heyday as though it might become a counter-culture became a corner of the bourgeois culture’. That this was a post-1960s manifesto thinly disguised as ‘History from below’ was precisely the point.12 Over a decade passed before an uncompromising reaction to Morton’s and Hill’s interpretations was published. This was J. C. Davis’s Fear, Myth and History (1986), provocatively chosen by Kenneth Baker, then Margaret Thatcher’s Education Secretary, as his favourite book that year. Davis argued that abusive terms like ‘Ranter’ were ‘witness to some sort of social struggle rather than functioning as precise cognitive signifiers or markers’. Furthermore, he detected ‘a tension between the word “Ranter”, as revelatory of the perception of seventeenth-century commentators, and the thing Ranter, as perceived by twentieth-century historians’. Assuming that he was dealing with a heterogeneous collection of individuals rather than a homogenous group, Davis proceeded to test the proposition that Ranterism was either a ‘reasonably consistent set of doctrines’ maintained, however fleetingly, by a handful of people or the ‘broader movement’ that contemporaries ordinarily reported. To help identify a small core of ‘Ranter ideologists’ linked by common theological doctrines and a shared social programme, he proposed two essential components of Ranter thought: antinomianism and pantheism. He then set about eliminating the Ranter fringe (‘new messiahs’, ‘new prophets’, and ‘new victims’) before tightening the core to dispense with several alleged Ranters—the millenarian and visionary George Foster (fl. 1650), the former army chaplain Joseph Salmon (fl. 1647–56), and the preacher Richard Coppin (fl. 1646–59). There followed an examination of the Ranter core, which consisted of the Leicester shoemaker Jacob Bothumley (1613–92), Abiezer Coppe, the anonymous author of A Justification of the Mad Crew (1650), and the preacher, polemicist, and sectary Lawrence Clarkson (c.1615–1667?). For Davis, the evidence suggested that ‘the Ranters did not exist either as a small group of like-minded individuals, as a sect, or as a largescale, middle-scale or small movement’. Consequently, he was forced to justify why, if there were no Ranters, so many contemporaries believed the contrary. Accordingly Davis ascribed literary conventions to the ‘sensational’ literature; ‘short, racy,

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disapproving and at the same time prurient’. He maintained that Ranterism was ‘a powerful and dangerous slur’ which had to be directed ‘away from the Commonwealth towards its enemies’. Amidst the ‘reckless fabrication and repetitive exploitation of material’ he noted two themes—the influence of atheism and the relationship between Ranterism and royalism. Moreover, sectarian exploitation of the term by Baptists, Quakers, and Muggletonians kept this image of ‘deviance’ alive.13 The fierce but inconclusive debate that immediately followed generated a great deal more heat than light, its most enduring legacy being destructive rather than constructive: concerns, given the problematic nature of the evidence, that it may prove impossible to establish the Ranters’ existence to everyone’s satisfaction. Even so, it is sometimes forgotten that Davis, like Morton and Hill, depended entirely upon printed documents. Yet for all its faults, in the furore generated by his book it has generally been ignored by Davis’s critics that parts of his argument are persuasive, and that some of what he said is correct. Davis was right to warn against taking Lawrence Clarkson’s autobiography The Lost Sheep Found (1660) or polemics by Baptists, Quakers, and Muggletonians at face value. Likewise, several pamphlet and newsbook accounts of ‘Ranters’ were either completely fictional or mainly invented. The majority, however, mention names that can be corroborated from court records and seem to accurately reflect charges brought against the accused. The term Ranter should therefore be used cautiously to indicate hostile yet shifting contemporary attitudes towards individuals who normally knew each other (usually through conventicles, Baptist congregations, or as members of spiritual communities); believed themselves to have been liberated from, or passed beyond, the outward observance of Gospel ordinances; maintained that all things sprang from God and that God was in all living things; espoused similar theological notions that were regarded as blasphemous, especially that sin was imaginary and that to the pure all things are pure; justified transgressive sexual behaviour, drunkenness, and cursing through scriptural precedents and interpretations; demanded that Christians fulfil their charitable obligations by giving to the poor, sick, and hungry; and enacted shocking gestures as prophetic warnings of the impending Day of Judgement. While none of this was exclusive to the Ranters, and while there was no Ranter archetype that conformed precisely to all aspects of this characterization, collectively it embodies the central features of their perceived ideas, outward conduct, and self-fashioned identities. With the publication of two ‘Ranter poems’, Nigel Smith’s important collection of Ranter Writings and Andrew Hopton’s edition of Coppe’s selected writings, literary experts have gradually shown one way out of the impasse reached in the Ranter debate by focusing on typography, genre, imagery, mimicry, parody, vocabulary, and modes of address.14 Archival-based biographical studies of the major personalities with an emphasis on mapping social networks offer another exit. The remainder of this chapter will therefore highlight the fruits of this relatively new research by identifying the Ranters, exploring their origins, examining how they were seen by contemporaries, accounting for their activities, discussing their beliefs, assessing their possible sources, and reviewing the ways in which their texts were expressed and suppressed.

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IDENTIFYING

THE

RANTERS

.................................................................................................................. During the parliamentarian campaign in Ireland, Oliver Cromwell referred in a letter of 14 November 1649 to ‘great ranters’ among the enemy between Dublin and Wexford, which his nineteenth-century editor Thomas Carlyle took to mean braggarts. This usage, though unusual, indicates that the noun ranter then described a way of speaking. It surely derived from the verb to rant, meaning to talk or declaim in an extravagant or hyperbolical manner, or to speak furiously.15 In early 1650 Gerrard Winstanley warned women to beware of the ‘ranting crew’, refuting the accusation that ‘the Digging practises, leads to the Ranting principles’. Clearly the Diggers’ spiritual and temporal community, with its open fluid membership, had been infiltrated by what Winstanley was shortly to call ‘Ranters’, and in a subsequent vindication he dissociated the Diggers from them, giving some reasons against ‘the excessive community of women, called Ranting’ (dated 20 February 1650, with postscript 4 March 1650). Winstanley defined the ‘Ranting Practise’ as ‘a Kingdome without the man’, a corrupting carnal realm of the five senses that lay in the ‘outward enjoyment of meat, drinke, pleasures and women’. It was therefore not the spiritual kingdom of heaven—interpreted as Christ within—but the devil’s kingdom of darkness, full of unreasonableness, madness, and confusion. Excessive copulation with women dissipated male vitality, resulting in unwanted pregnancies and the destruction of harmony within the patriarchal household. ‘Ranting’, moreover, begat idleness, and this evil had to be prevented with righteous communal labour.16 Significantly, Winstanley’s pamphlets contain the earliest known use of the words ‘Ranting’ and ‘Ranter’ in this sense. Afterwards, ‘Ranters’, together with its variants ‘Raunters’, ‘Rantors’, and ‘Rantipoler’, appears in several newsbooks and other sources from late June 1650, while ‘ranting’ occurs in newsbooks and sermons from early August. In addition, ‘Rantism’ was used from 1653, as was ‘Ranterism’. As for those called Ranters by their contemporaries, and of whose existence we can be confident, it must be stressed that there are noticeable discrepancies in how this pejorative label was deployed and no consensus as to its exact meaning. Indeed, by imputing a set of odious characteristics onto those designated Ranters, the person adopting the term often unwittingly revealed something about his—or very occasionally her—own anxieties. Nevertheless, Jacob Bothumley, Lawrence Clarkson, Abiezer Coppe, Joseph Salmon, the minister Thomas Webbe (c.1625–c.1651), and the preacher Andrew Wyke (fl. 1645–63) were all considered Ranters during particular phases of their lives. Coppe, Clarkson, and, to a lesser extent, Salmon and Bothumley were acknowledged by polemicists and subsequently several Quakers as their ringleaders.17 Between 1648 and his release from Newgate about July 1651, Coppe can be connected through encounters, correspondence, prefatory epistles, and publications with Giles Calvert (publisher and bookseller), Clarkson, Richard Coppin, James Cottrell (printer), John File (author), John Gadbury (astrologer), Mr Maule (of Deddington, Oxfordshire),

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Thomasine Pendarves (of Abingdon, Berkshire), John Pordage (rector of Bradfield, Berkshire), Salmon, William Sedgwick (millenarian preacher), Mrs Seney (matron of the Savoy Hospital carted through the streets of London for prostitution), Mrs Wallis (Wyke’s kinswoman), Webbe, and Wyke. Coppe was most likely also associated with William Bray (imprisoned army officer accused of being a Ranter and being in bed with two women together at Seney’s residence). In addition, Coppe reportedly had an unknown number of followers, several of whom had probably been one-time members of Baptist congregations meeting at London (St Helen’s Bishopsgate), Gloucestershire (Little Compton, near Moreton-in-Marsh), Oxfordshire (Hook Norton), and Warwickshire (Coventry, Easenhall, Southam, and Warwick). According to Clarkson, moreover, while in London about January 1649, Coppe had appeared in a ‘most dreadful manner’ before a spiritual community known as ‘My one flesh’. Known to Calvert, they seem to have gathered secretly on Sundays at the homes of the group’s various members. ‘My one flesh’ consisted of, among others, Mr Brush, Mr Goldsmith, Sarah Kullin, Mary Lake (blind ‘chief speaker’), Mr Melis (possibly John Millis, brown baker living on Great Trinity Lane), William Rawlinson (who knew of Salmon), Mrs Rawlinson, and Mr Watts.18 Another spiritual community either overlapping or conterminous with them appears to have included W.C., J.H., Sedgwick, and Edward Walford (a messenger of the House of Commons); another still included Margery Castle, John Radman (army agitator turned mutineer and ‘greate Raunter’), and Valentine Sharp. For his part Clarkson, an itinerant Baptist preacher turned self-styled ‘Captain of the Rant’, had conferred with Sedgwick and the Welsh preacher William Erbury (later charged with saying that the Ranters had been the holiest people in the nation). Clarkson counted Dr Barker, Major William Rainsborough (brother of the murdered Leveller martyr), and Mr Wallis among his ‘disciples’. Although a married man, Clarkson also claimed that Mrs Mary Middleton and Mrs Star were in love with him, engaging in an adulterous liaison with the latter. After disrupting the Digger plantation on the Little Heath in Cobham, Surrey, he was eventually apprehended with several ‘Raunters’ allegedly openly ‘satisfying their lusts’ like ‘lascivious beasts’ at the Four Swans, near Whitechapel, in mid-July 1650.19 Mary Middleton of Clarkson’s ‘old society’ was doubtless the Mrs Middleton who, with one or two others, narrowly escaped arrest when a group of Ranters were seized on 1 November 1650 at her husband’s house at the David and the Harp on Moor Lane, St Giles Cripplegate. The remainder were caught and committed to Bridewell for indecency, blasphemy, swearing ‘Ram me, Dam me’, and singing filthy songs to the tune of the Psalms. They were Walter Albone, John Collins, William Groome, William Holt, William Reeve (possibly brother of the heresiarch John Reeve), William Shakespeare, and Henry Wattleworth. While in Bridewell they may have become acquainted with the former Digger and suspected sorcerer William Everard, since many of ‘Ranting Everard’s party’ were reportedly ‘lunatick, and exceedingly distracted’.20 Another group commonly supposed to be Ranters were the followers of John Robins, whom they believed to be ‘the God and Father’ of Jesus Christ, while Joan, his reputed spouse, would give birth to the Messiah.21 Another group still were apprehended in London for ‘disorder and uncivil

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carriage’ on 2 January 1651.22 Other suspected or supposed Ranters, though this is not an exhaustive list, included: James Claphamson; John Norris; Thomas Willett (found dancing naked with a woman); two ‘naked Ranters’ disrupting a church service at Hull; and a ‘company of ranting Sluts’ detained in Bridewell.23 Several parliamentarian soldiers were also accused of being Ranters, associating with Ranters, or holding blasphemous opinions consonant with Ranterism: William Covell (captain in Thomas Fairfax’s regiment of horse); Francis Freeman (captain in Colonel John Okey’s regiment of dragoons); Edward Leak (cornet in Major Grove’s troop, which originally had ‘many persons of subtle Ranting Principles’);24 Nathaniel Underwood (said to have been a cornet in Oliver Cromwell’s regiment); and two troopers of Colonel Nathaniel Rich’s regiment. In the provinces there were suspected Ranters in Dorset, Ely (where Sedgwick had been a minister until September 1649), and Towcester (Northamptonshire), while spiritual communities akin to Ranters existed at Godmanchester (Huntingdonshire) and Abingdon. Furthermore, John Bunyan remembered having read a few of the ‘Ranters Books’ that were distributed in Bedfordshire and highly esteemed by several old professing Protestants.25 Suggestively, a separatist congregation was established at Bedford about 1650. There were also General Baptist churches at Fenstanton and Warboys (Huntingdonshire). The Warboys church book contains a condemnation of the Ranters’ ‘wicked practices’, while emissaries from Fenstanton later confronted individuals at Kingston (Cambridgeshire), Newport (Essex), and Dunton (Bedfordshire) whose doctrines ‘savoured of Ranterism’.26 The Muggletonians regarded Clarkson, Mistress Cook, Nathaniel (dung-eating prophet), Isaac Penington, Mr Pope, the pedlar Stephen Proudlove (formerly an alleged member of the ‘family of the mount’), William Reeve (the heresiarch John’s brother), Mr Remington, William Smith (future Quaker), and TheaurauJohn Tany (self-proclaimed High Priest and Recorder to the thirteen Tribes of the Jews) as Ranters. In addition, Lodowick Muggleton recalled mingling and disputing with Ranters in London, who at that time were ‘very high in Imagination’.27 For their part, the Quakers considered a number of people to be Ranters including, though again this is not comprehensive, Rose Atkins, Bothumley, Jonas Browne, Thomas Burdhall, Thomas Bushel, John Chandler, Coppe, John Flower, Thomas Ford (of Staffordshire), Bess Hodgkin, William Lampitt (of Ulverston, Lancashire), Mr Mills, Blanche Pope, Salmon, Mary Todd, Timothy Travers, and Robert Wilkinson (of Leicestershire, possibly the author of that name). They disputed with what they took to be Ranters at various meetings in London, Leicestershire (Swannington), and Warwickshire (Edge Hill), and wrote of Ranters in counties south of London as well as in Cornwall (Looe), Derbyshire (Kidsley Park, the Peak District), Dorset (Weymouth), Hampshire, Leicestershire (Leicester, Twycross), Norfolk (Norwich), Northamptonshire (Wellingborough), Rhode Island (Providence), Staffordshire (Basford, Leek), Sussex, and Yorkshire (Cinder Hill Green, Cleveland, Staithes, York). Although several journalists fabricated authorial personae as former Ranters or claimed to have witnessed Ranter gatherings to authenticate their sensationalist accounts (John Holland, ‘J.M.’, J[ohn] R[eading?], ‘Gilbert Roulston’, ‘Timothy Stubs’,

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‘Samuel Tilbury’), no actual Ranter embraced this opprobrious epithet. All the same, just as those cultivating St George’s Hill referred to themselves as Diggers and some scornfully called Quakers declared themselves to be Children of Light, so a few people branded Ranters or, more rarely, High Attainers styled themselves the Mad Crew. This ‘mad ranting crew’ were accused by the London minister Robert Gell of pretending to be ‘Gods peculiar people’ and of believing that they had ‘happy and blessed unitie and community’ with God and, crucially, ‘among themselves’.28 Significantly, leading Ranters such as Coppe and Clarkson also developed a strong sense of group identity, regarding themselves as members of a spiritual community. Thus Coppe believed that he had been shown ‘a more excellent way’ beyond church fellowship with his Baptist brethren, owning ‘none but that Apostolical, Saint-like Community spoken of in the Scriptures’,29 while Clarkson described himself as ‘one of the Universality’.30 Identifying the Ranters is, in short, a contentious exercise. There was (and is) no agreed definition. Furthermore, not all contemporary ascriptions should be accepted. On the one hand there was lumping: uninformed polemicists tended to invent, exaggerate, and conflate for self-serving ends. On the other, an impulse for splitting: former co-religionists and opponents within the same milieu were anxious to dissociate themselves from the Ranters by accentuating doctrinal and behavioural differences. Both tendencies have been reflected in the historiography. And while both approaches have their merits and limitations, it might be better to reconceptualize the Ranters as an assortment of spiritual and temporal communities, sometimes overlapping and given added cohesion by their adversaries. At their heart were Coppe, Clarkson, and their adherents, although it is noteworthy that other groups such as the one centred around Bothumley seem to have existed independently. Marked variations notwithstanding, they generally shared similar origins and characteristics.

THE ORIGIN

OF THE

RANTERS

.................................................................................................................. Although the surviving evidence is uneven, the most plausible explanation for the Ranters’ origins is to conceive of it as polygenetic rather than monogenetic; that is, they had multiple instead of singular beginnings. Those who became prominent Ranters came from different parts of the country, were of low social status, either relatively poor or of modest means, and, with the exception of Coppe, were autodidacts. Bothumley, like his father, was a shoemaker and freeman of Leicester. Clarkson came from Preston and was described as a tailor. Coppe was the son of a Warwick tailor with commercial links to the town’s tanning industry. He attended Warwick’s free school before going to Oxford, but left without a degree. During the Civil Wars Bothumley served in Hertfordshire as quartermaster in Colonel Alban Cox’s regiment of foot; Clarkson was a soldier at Great Yarmouth under the command of Captain Paul Hobson; Coppe was minister to Major George Purefoy’s garrison stationed at Compton House, Warwickshire; Salmon was a soldier and then chaplain in Commissary-General Henry Ireton’s

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regiment of horse; and Wyke, who had friends living near Ipswich, served Parliament in an unknown capacity. The most important thing these men had in common was their religious background. Bothumley, together with his father, was part of a tightly knit group of Leicester semi-separatists. From the age of 14 he was frequently in trouble with the church authorities for refusing to receive communion kneeling and attending conventicles, where he repeated sermons. Bothumley remained obdurate when ordered to perform public penance and was excommunicated in 1634. Consequently, he was forced to forsake his trade and seek his livelihood elsewhere until he was absolved in 1640. Similarly, even though his parents conformed to the Church of England’s teachings, Clarkson claimed to have dissented by refusing to receive communion kneeling at a railed altar. Instead he took it sitting, administered by sympathetic preachers in the countryside. His youth, moreover, was marked by puritanical devotions; long walks to hear godly ministers, keeping the Sabbath, fasting, private prayer, and memorizing the Authorized Version of the Bible. On arriving in London sometime after January 1642 he hunted out the ablest preachers, diligently reading their works. Thereafter Clarkson discovered his own ‘small gift of preaching’ and, following his adult baptism in the moat around the Tower of London on 6 November 1644, he began evangelizing and baptizing in Suffolk and Norfolk.31 This resulted in allegations of sexual misconduct during his trial at Bury St Edmunds and imprisonment. On his release he issued a recantation and purportedly turned Seeker, denying the Scriptures to be the Word of God and thus their authority as a guide to Christian conduct. For his part, Coppe’s youth was marked—according to his later confession—by a godly litany of zealous devotion: fervent prayer, daily Bible-reading, memorizing Scripture, frequent fasting, keeping a daily register of his sins, and abasement before God. Thereafter through his godly upbringing and natural abilities he gained entry into stridently anti-Catholic, anti-Arminian, and anti-Socinian circles. Rising on the crest of Puritan patronage, he seemed destined to espouse these views as a renowned Presbyterian preacher. But instead Coppe became a notorious Baptist active in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and part of Worcestershire. He was imprisoned in Coventry for fourteen weeks and then, aged 28, underwent a profound transformation, an experience that he came to represent as a spiritual passage from death to life. Salmon too recalled in his confession a progression through various forms of church fellowship, having been successively a zealous Presbyterian, Independent, and Baptist. As a Baptist he was ‘made one eminent both in holding forth this way to the world, and also in an open suffering for the same’. Salmon then had a deep spiritual experience and came to believe that he had passed beyond outward forms, ordinances, and fleshy representations of God.32 Webbe’s earliest religious experiences are unknown, but when still only a young man he appeared before the House of Lords in November 1644 charged with venting blasphemies—among them denying the immortality of the soul, a view shared by several Baptists. Although he recanted, Webbe was shortly accused of preaching antinomian doctrines and evangelizing against baptism by water in Suffolk, Essex, and Kent. Afterwards Webbe became minister of Langley Burrell, Wiltshire, where he

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became infamous locally for scandalous activities. Wyke likewise became a Baptist, and was imprisoned for rebaptizing and lay preaching. He claimed that he had been ordained, most probably by a Baptist congregation meeting in Bell Alley, Coleman Street (London), and subsequently went forth from his church to spread the gospel message. Wyke was active in Suffolk, Rutland, and the adjacent counties before moving to Colchester. When these men became Ranters their skilled preaching attracted crowds and enabled them to gather what was most likely a handful of committed disciples. Coppe was praised for his ‘admirable good Oratory’ and reportedly had an abundance of followers, while Salmon and Wyke were said to have acute wits, voluble tongues, and a great deal of confidence.33 Parliament had issued an Ordinance in April 1645 permitting only ordained ministers to preach, but Clarkson, in common with other pamphleteers, justified unlearned lay preaching by drawing parallels with the lowly occupations of Christ and his disciples: a carpenter, fishermen, and tent-makers were compared with poor tailors and weavers. Among their hearers were probably Independents and Baptists who had left their congregations questioning the legitimacy of church fellowship and the validity of outward ordinances such as baptism: what heresiographers categorized as a new sect of ‘Seekers’, who sought and awaited a return to the primitive Christianity of the Apostles. This process, which may have been reinforced through the publication and distribution of their writings, partially accounts for the rapid emergence of the Ranters at a moment of heightened apocalyptic speculation. It also resembles, albeit in miniature, traditional versions of Quaker origins which emphasize how George Fox and other pioneer evangelists harvested support for their message from pre-existing communities of Independents, Baptists, and so-called Seekers.

THE RANTERS THROUGH THE EYES OF THEIR CONTEMPORARIES

.................................................................................................................. The Ranters were generally demonized as a lustful, ungodly crew given to all manner of wickedness. Their allegedly lascivious habits and sinful theatrical antics—cursing, excessive drinking, revelling, roaring, smoking, whoring, and parodying of religious ceremonies—were envisaged as a threat to patriarchal norms and societal order, their teachings denounced by Presbyterian moralists and scandalized former co-religionists alike as detestable doctrines inspired by the devil. Accordingly, many contemporaries perceived them as a horrible, monstrous sect. Some condemnations were modelled upon and positioned within a long line of anti-heretical writing that stretched from Paul, Epiphanius, and Augustine to Luther and Calvin. Intemperate, alarmist, and often inaccurate, their purpose was to represent doctrinal and behavioural errors as inversions of truths so as to facilitate their extirpation. Constantly alert to precedents,

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several polemicists also provided the Ranters with a distinctive identity and genealogies that variously linked their blasphemous doctrines and abominable, filthy practices to Adamites, Anabaptists, atheists, Donatists, the Family of Love, Gnostics, Manichaeans, Nicolaitans, royalists, Simonians, and Stoics, as well as the even more fanciful Athians, Clements, Marcious, Seleutians, and Shelomethites. More than twenty cheap pamphlets primarily or nominally targeting the Ranters, each usually consisting of a sheet of paper folded into eight pages, were issued between November 1650 and August 1654. Nine of these works claimed to have been published by authority or licensed according to order, though the copyrights of only two were entered in the Stationers’ Register. At least four were printed by Bernard Alsop and perhaps the same number by Jane Coe, while George Horton published three items. Significantly, several recycled and adapted woodcuts and bits of text that had been used in earlier publications, and it seems either that Coe and Horton collaborated in this venture, or that Horton acquired Coe’s blocks. Some of the imagery was intended to shock and showed representations of the devil, sexual debauchery, nakedness, merriment, and, in one instance, baby killing (Figures 18.2–4). These crude yet presumably marketable representations tended to complement the contents which conveyed potent messages warning godly Christians of the devil’s seductive power and his ability to tempt the unwary into sectarian degeneracy. In the same vein, the minister Richard Baxter later grouped the Ranters with Anabaptists, Familists, Seekers, Shakers, and Quakers, imagining them as part of a cunning popish confederacy let loose by the devil to undermine the foundations of the Reformation. Baxter advised professing Protestants to be humble, fearful, circumspect, and watchful lest they be infected with the same poison. Winstanley too warned against the Ranters, likening ‘Ranting’ to a golden, pleasing, and deceitful bait to ensnare foolish young men.34 In common with the Ranters he had a pronounced sense of community, believing that only those who had undergone an illuminating spiritual transformation could willingly dispense with their possessions and have all things common. Yet Winstanley was also careful to stress that his notion of community did not extend to sharing women; a stigma that had attached itself to the Anabaptists after their forerunners had seized the town of Münster in 1534, proclaiming it the New Jerusalem, and forcefully establishing polygamy. Accordingly Winstanley, whose heterodox religious views were the product of a spiritual journey with distinct Puritan and General Baptist phases, distanced himself from the perceived sexual excesses of the Ranters by distinguishing between community of goods and community of women. This emphasis on morality links the Diggers with certain followers of the German mystic Jacob Boehme—who desired everything should be held in common except women and lived chastely together in community at Bradfield, Berkshire—and Quakers. Edward Burrough denounced the Ranters as a viperous generation deceived by Satan in the guise of an angel of light and corrupted by the Whore of Babylon. Similarly, Margaret Fell reproved them for asserting several blasphemous doctrines; notably that God was darkness as well as light, that all acts were good in God’s eyes, and that to the

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F I G U R E 1 8 . 2 Anon., The rovting of the Ranters Being a full Relation of their uncivil carriages, and blasphemous words and actions at their mad meetings ([London], published by authority, and printed by B[ernard] A[lsop], 1650), title page [British Library, Thomason E 616(9)] #The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011.

pure even unclean or unlawful acts were pure. Nor were these isolated voices, for other Quaker authors condemned the Ranters in manuscript, print, and person, including Fell’s future husband George Fox, who rebuked them for their blasphemous expressions, cursed speaking, swearing, drunkenness, tobacco smoking, dancing, and unbridled lust. Forged in the heat of religious controversy this vitriolic if largely one-sided

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F I G U R E 1 8 . 3 I[ohn] R[eading?], The Ranters Ranting: with The apprehending, examinations, and confession of Iohn Collins, I. Shakespear, Tho. Wiberton, and five more which are to answer the next Sessions (London, printed by B[ernard] Alsop, 1650), title page [British Library, Thomason E 618(8)] #The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011.

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F I G U R E 1 8 . 4 Timothy Stubs [pseud.], The Ranters Declaration, with Their new Oath and Protestation; their strange Votes, and a new way to get money (London, printed by J[ane] C[oe?], MDCL [1650]), title page [British Library, Thomason E 620(2)] #The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved 20/10/2011.

exchange demonstrated the early Quakers’ evident concern to distinguish between the Ranters’ sinful behaviour and their own upright conduct, since a variety of critics— Baxter, Bunyan, Baptists, and Muggletonians among them—tarred Ranters and Quakers with the same brush. And for good reason, because despite the Quakers’ ‘outward

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austere carriage’,35 there appeared to hostile observers little theological difference between them: Fox accused the Ranters of claiming they were God and boasting of their communion with God and Christ, yet was himself charged with affirming that he had the divinity essentially within him and that he was equal with God. Moreover, both were attacked for maintaining that the Light (Christ) was within everyone, denying the validity of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, antiscripturism, anticlericalism, falling into trances, and public nakedness. Fox even conceded that the Ranters had experienced a ‘pure convincement’ (religious awakening), before straying from the path of righteousness and becoming enemies of Christ’s doctrine.36 Indeed, he admitted some Quakers had been Ranters; the most notable being the former Baptist evangelist John Chandler, who wrote a tract urging all Ranters to examine their conscience and turn to the light of Christ. Among Fox’s many polemical adversaries was Lodowick Muggleton who, along with his cousin John Reeve, claimed to be one of ‘the two Witnesses of the Spirit’ foretold in the Revelation. In his exegeses of Revelation, Muggleton interpreted the seven churches of Asia as having a European antitype: the Catholic, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist, Ranter, and Quaker. According to Muggleton, the Ranters’ ministry had mainly proceeded from the Baptists’, while the bulk of the Quakers’ doctrines—but not their proud, conceited, sanctimonious conduct—derived from the Ranters. Deploring the Ranters’ spiritual wickedness, elevated language, and destruction of their bodies through lust, Muggleton simultaneously denounced what he understood to be their principal teachings: that God was an infinite, incomprehensible Spirit present in everything; that God was the author of all actions, whether good or evil; and that light and darkness, God and the devil were all one. The ‘Prince and head’ of these atheistic lies maintained by ‘all filthy Sodomitical Ranters’, those ‘cursed Children of that Dragon Devil’ Cain, had been TheaurauJohn Tany. He had been vilified by Reeve as the Ranters’ ‘King’ for professing that God was an immortal, eternal being that dwelled in spiritual form in every man: an immanentist theology that thereby denied the corporality of Christ, which constituted the essence of Muggletonian Christology.37 These textual and visual representations of Ranters must also be contextualized since they resonate with distorted portrayals of other religious communities—mostly real but occasionally imagined—that had separated from or refused to reach an accommodation with the Church of England. Hence the Catholic minority were accused of licentiousness, idolatry, and superstition, as well as being suspected of conspiracy, disloyalty, and treason. Similarly, Anabaptism was compared to a contagion, canker, or gangrene that had infected several limbs of the body politic. Shocking accounts of adult baptism rituals contained lurid allegations that young women were immersed naked in rivers, afterwards indulging their carnal appetites with those who had dipped them. The Diggers were regarded as new-fangled, distracted, crack-brained, and tumultuous, while Quakers were so called in order to mock their trembling—variously interpreted as evidence of diabolic possession, witchcraft, or epileptic seizures. Quakers were depicted as of low social standing, unlearned blasphemers, fanatical disrupters of

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organized religious services, fomenters of sedition, even as clandestine papal agents. And they were defamed as sufferers from mental illness who in extreme cases engaged in bestial sexual practices. Taken together, then, these constructed ‘Others’—in the sense of that which lay outside or was excluded from the group with which someone identified themselves—had some obvious differences yet also shared several significant features. Among them were an emphasis on blasphemous religious beliefs and rituals, diabolic inspiration, sinful conduct (especially sexual immorality), mental instability, dissimulation, disloyalty, and disorder. By preying upon individual and collective fears they combined to create panics centred on perceived threats to the progress of the Reformation, national security, good government, a hierarchical social system, the maintenance of law and order, property ownership, and patriarchal authority. Furthermore, because contemporaries envisaged these ‘Others’ as the antitheses of perfect models (divine truths, religious orthodoxy, constant devotion, sexual probity, virtuous conduct, faithfulness) their inverse reveals constructed notions of idealized individual and communal selves. Resemblances between perceived Ranters and their immediate contemporaries—particularly apparent Adamites and atheists, as well as Baptists, Familists, royalists, and Quakers—therefore suggest that these were not interchangeable static stereotypes but rather a blurring of notional boundaries between different types of ‘Others’. This noticeable degree of fluidity was partly a consequence of the readily available repertoire of constantly evolving tropes from which they derived as well as the common functions they served. It also highlights the need to analyse separately the Ranters’ beliefs about themselves.

THE RANTERS RANTING

.................................................................................................................. In The Spirituall Madman (December 1648), William Sedgwick looked forward to a time when young men and maids would dance together and ‘mad Lads’ would swear ‘by the eternall God’, cursing their enemy the devil ‘with all plagues to the pit of hell, and so dam him and ram him in’.38 Similarly, Coppe envisaged the ‘Eternal God’ as ‘universall Love’, declaring in A Fiery Flying Roll that what was taken for swearing and cursing in some was ‘more glorious’ than praying and preaching in others.39 Coppe recalled that he had been ‘utterly plagued, consumed, damned, rammed, and sunke into nothing, into the bowels of the still Eternity (my mothers wombe)’, his vocabulary resonating with an intercepted letter in which Salmon greeted Webbe—the web of his ‘own spinning’—with ‘ten thousand’ holy kisses: ‘Eternal plagues consume you all, rot, sink and damn your bodies and souls into devouring fire.’40 Suggestively, Valentine Sharpe also wrote of his flesh being consumed by the plagues of God, Clarkson used the phrase ‘damm’d and ramm’d into its only Center’, while the Ranters seized at Moor Lane reportedly exclaimed ‘Ram me, Dam me’ (ram meant God).41

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Copies of other intercepted correspondence in the hand of Fairfax’s senior secretary William Clarke indicate that Sedgwick developed an idiosyncratic doctrine of spiritual fatherhood and sonship. Addressing one spiritual son, Sedgwick spoke of spiritual parricide and filicide followed by an imminent spiritual rebirth from his nourishing womb. Among Sedgwick’s spiritual children was Edward Walford, whom he regarded as a jewel within his bosom that might not fare better ‘in the wombe of Eternity in the heart & Bowells of Glory’.42 Walford in turn was spiritually embraced by J.H. with ‘eternall kisses’ in the bosom of their father, and was the spiritual father of W.C. his ‘first begotten’.43 Significantly, Sedgwick, Walford, Coppe’s correspondent Thomasine Pendarves, and R[ichard] C[oppin?] all appear in News from the New-Jerusalem (preface dated 24 September 1649), a collection of spiritual epistles published by Giles Calvert. So, given Coppe’s cryptic allusion to Sedgwick within him, he may have been another of Sedgwick’s spiritual offspring.44 Coppe himself was said to have been John Gadbury’s spiritual father. He was most likely also the spiritual progenitor of ‘My one flesh’: an anonymous letter to William Rawlinson, perhaps by Clarkson, desired that this spiritual community be gathered up in one bond of love and lie together in Coppe’s bosom ‘where is our true & p[er]fect Center’.45 The anonymous author of A Justification of the Mad Crew was probably also connected with these circles since he signed himself ‘Jesus the Son of God’.46 If he was Andrew Wyke, as an attribution in an early eighteenthcentury library catalogue seems to imply, then that strengthens this suggestion. As well as these paternal and filial spiritual bonds, the peculiar ways in which these people addressed each other and communicated in correspondence—using violent, martial, and sexual imagery together with word plays, acronyms, and inversions— suggests both a common code to express religious experiences and that they considered themselves members of spiritual communities united with each other and Christ in one mystical body of flesh and blood. Coppe’s community of self-regarding saints, of which he became the general and Salmon and Wyke his metaphorical serving boys, was conceived as the ‘universall Assembly’ and ‘Church of the first born’; ‘the spirits of just men made perfect’ (Hebrews 12: 23).47 Imitating the original apostolic community upon which it was based, Coppe called nothing that he had his own. Indeed, he believed that he was living in the ‘last daies’ (James 5: 3) when cankered gold and silver would rise up like fire in judgement against those that forborne from casting all into ‘the Treasury’ (Mark 12: 43). For only those who had ‘all things common’ (Acts 2: 44) would escape the plague of God which threatened to ‘rot and consume’ all possessions. Coppe therefore exhorted: Come! give all to the poore and follow me, and you shall have treasure in heaven (Matthew 19: 421).48

In the same way, A Justification of the Mad Crew upheld the principle of truly enjoying ‘all things in common’ (Acts 2: 44). Citing the scriptural precedent of those upon whom the ‘sprinklings of the spirit fell’, who were made to ‘see and act in this Communitie’, its author denounced the hypocrisy of ownership:

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what is mine is every ones, and what is every ones is mine also: every woman is my wife, my joy and delight, the earth is mine, and the beasts on a thousand hills are mine.49

Then there was Coppe’s supposed embrace of adultery and delight in citing the example of Hosea, ‘who went into a whore’ (Hosea 1: 2).50 Unsurprisingly, his provocative behaviour became intertwined with accusations that Ranters maintained community of women. And because they supposedly interpreted the passage ‘All things are lawfull ’ (1 Corinthians 6: 12) as giving them unlimited freedom of action, Ranters allegedly deemed it acceptable to make use not only of a man’s wife, but also his ‘Estate, Goods, and Chattels’—for ‘all things were common’.51 Little wonder that a few contemporaries questioned the sincerity of Coppe’s second recantation in which he catalogued several doctrinal errors and casuistically asserted the contrary truths, disowning adultery and fornication as sins, detesting the notion that ‘Community of wives is lawful ’.52 Maintaining spiritual community among themselves, some prominent Ranters also believed that they were in community with God and his creation. Thus in an epistle to Thomasine Pendarves published in Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spirituall Wine (printed for Giles Calvert, 1649), Coppe declared: The River is as cleare as Chrystall, nothing but Christ, all Christ, Chrystall—it is as clear as Chrystall, Christ-all, Halelujah.53

This alluded to the water of life (Revelation 22: 1) and the notion that ‘Christ is all, and in all’ (Colossians 3: 11). Coppe envisaged the ‘Living God ’ as the ‘Fountaine of Life’ (Revelation 21: 6) in which ‘all things consist’, and wrote in the margin of ‘An Additional and Preambular Hint’ (before 18 September 1649) of the ‘Effluence or out spreading of Divinity’ or ‘out-going of God into all things’. Significantly, these marginal annotations show a familiarity with Jacob Boehme’s XL. Qvestions concerning the soule (1647) and Coppe continued by speaking of ‘the out-breathing, or emmanation of Divinity, into Father, Son and Spirit’ and the ‘eye or globe of eternity, where the end makes towards and meets the beginning . . . and all’s swallowed up into Unity’.54 Afterwards when attempting to regain his liberty he still affirmed that God ‘filleth all in all’ and is ‘all in all’, and that ‘we’—the sons of God—‘are partakers of the Divine nature, through our Mystical, and Spiritual Filiation’, ‘fraternity, unity, and in-dwelling’.55 Coppe’s doctrines can be compared with his comrade Salmon, who insisted that ‘God and the Saint are really one’ in ‘glorious union of the spirit’; ‘I am in thee, and thou in me, that they also may be one with us.’56 In his recantation Heights in Depths (1651)—its title perhaps a reworking of Ephesians 3: 8—Salmon advanced a vision of God as the ‘oneness or Eternity’, a being of ‘nothing but good’ from whose womb our ‘scattered spirits’ had descended ‘into multiplicity’ ‘to lose our selves in an endlesse Labyrinth’. Yet our souls would ‘ascend from variety into uniformity’ to find ‘bliss and happiness’ in their ‘original center’.57 Salmon also related how he saw the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21: 2) ‘in its divine brightnes and corruscant beauty’ and how he had appeared to himself as:

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one confounded into the abyss of eternitie, nonentitized into the being of beings; my soule spilt, and emptied into the fountaine and ocean of divine fulness: expired into the aspires of pure life.58

Although the source of these ideas has yet to be identified, they appear to have originated from a Neoplatonic and perhaps also alchemical tradition. Interestingly, in his correspondence with Webbe, Salmon alluded to a soldier who had been condemned to have his tongue bored through with a red hot iron. This was Jacob Bothumley, whose blasphemous book The Light and Dark Sides of God (1650) was burned before his face. In this work Bothumley acknowledged that God was an ‘endlesse and infinite Ocean’ and if he spoke of God it would be ‘nothing but contradiction’, because God was ‘beyond any expression’. Bothumley could not conceive of God as having a ‘personall being’ or a ‘simple, pure, glorious, and intire being’ confined in a place above the stars and firmament. Rather, he saw that: God is in all Creatures, Man and Beast, Fish and Fowle, and every green thing, from the highest Cedar to the Ivey on the wall . . . God is the life and being of them all.

Only in man did God appear ‘more gloriously in then the rest’.59 Bothumley also supposed that some lived in the ‘light side’ of God, and some in the ‘dark side’ at the same time maintaining that there was nothing contrary to God but only to our apprehension. In another place he presented an exposition of the dual presence of the divine and the diabolic within man, appealing to the verse ‘God is Light, and in him there is no darkness’ (1 John 1: 5).60 Bothumley’s conception of God evokes Nicholas of Cusa’s admission in The Single Eye (1646) concerning ‘the Coincidence of contraries, above which is the infinite’. Yet the resemblance is not close enough to indicate readership.61 Again, Bothumley’s belief that God was in all creatures recalls the Hermetic notion that God was ‘All, and the All, through all, and about all’.62 These, however, are parallels rather than influences, suggesting that The Light and Dark Sides of God was an individual meditation on the nature of God in a tradition exemplified by another East Midland work, The Divine Cloud of Unknowing. Similar themes were explored by Clarkson in a blasphemous book which may have originated in a sermon on Isaiah 42: 16, ‘I will make Darkness Light before them’. Published as A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness (1650), it was publicly burned by order of the House of Commons. Here Clarkson maintained that ‘sin hath its conception only in the imagination’. Indeed, ‘so long as the act was in God’ it was ‘as holy as God’. Consequently there was no iniquity to behold with ‘purer’ eyes, only that the ‘Devil is God, Hell is Heaven, Sin Holiness, Damnation Salvation’.63 These oxymorons recall Nicholas of Cusa’s editor’s dictum that knowledge of God consisted of opposites and contradictions. That editor was Giles Randall, who owned and sold copies of Clarkson’s first book A Pilgrimage of Saints (1646). Though Randall may have discussed these writings with Clarkson, there is no indication in A Single Eye that Clarkson had read them. Nor does it appear that he was familiar with Boehme’s teachings. A more likely source for Clarkson’s doctrines was the posthumously published sermons of Tobias

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Crisp, a minister who extolled free grace, defended libertinism, and was considered an antinomian. Crisp’s sermons may also have been familiar to Coppe, who asserted that God was served though ‘perfect freedome, and pure Libertinisme’. Yet Coppe went further by combining this outrageous doctrine with an exultant apocalyptic proclamation: Sin and Transgression is finished and ended; and everlasting righteousnesse brought in [Daniel 9: 24]; and the everlasting Gospell preaching [Revelation 14: 6].64

While imprisoned in Coventry for the misdemeanour of swearing and defying an order which prohibited visiting Coppe, Wyke too preached from the prison grate of ‘the Love of God in pardoning sin, finishing transgression & bringing in everlasting Righteousnesse’.65 Salmon, who was confined with Wyke for the same offences, had claimed that sin was nothing more than ‘a transgression of the Law’. This outward law, however, was but a carnal dispensation lacking spiritual force and because all things were alike and one with God—hell, heaven, light, darkness, good, evil—so ‘all things are pure before him’. Only when our base carnal apprehension of God—the Antichrist within—had been destroyed could we attain the spiritual discernment to conclude that ‘there is nothing but what is good in the pure sight of divine presence’.66 In the same vein, Coppe perverted the sense of a scriptural text, which was conventionally read as a Pauline reference to Christ’s nullifying Jewish dietary prohibitions on unclean meats and drinks, to declare: Well! To the pure all things are pure (Titus 1: 15).67

Following his profound spiritual experience from which he emerged as a resurrected man with a new name (Revelation 3: 12), Coppe reportedly set about putting his inflammatory beliefs into practice. And it was this provocative behaviour—enacting prophetic performances warning of impending divine judgement, falling down before the feet of cripples, beggars, and lepers, kissing their feet, and giving them money, together with his justification of cursing and swearing—that led to him being called the ‘great Ranter’.68

THE RANTERS ROUTED

.................................................................................................................. By 8 January 1650 Coppe had been taken into custody and imprisoned at Warwick. He was shortly moved to Coventry jail and on 19 March transferred to Newgate. Sometime after 28 June 1651, after purportedly recanting, Coppe was finally released. Salmon and Wyke were committed to Coventry jail by 13 March 1650. Wyke was bailed on 5 July and Salmon on 9 September 1650. Bothumley was tried by court martial on 11 March 1650 and cashiered from the army. Clarkson was apprehended in mid-July 1650, detained in custody, and examined on 27 September by a parliamentary committee for suppressing licentious and impious practices. He confessed and was sentenced to

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one month’s labour in New Bridewell followed by banishment, though the latter part of this decree was not executed. Major William Rainsborough, who had allegedly subsidized the publication of A Single Eye, was disabled from his office as a justice of the peace. Of the Ranters committed to Bridewell, William Groome escaped but was soon recaptured and remained imprisoned on 10 December 1651; William Shakespeare was indicted but acquitted; John Collins and William Reeve indicted and convicted of blasphemy. Collins was still imprisoned on 14 January 1652 pending payment of a £100 fine, while Reeve (if he was the heresiarch’s brother) was said to have become a drunkard. As for Webbe, he was deprived of his living in September 1651. Although no Ranter was burned at the stake for heresy, the published writings of blasphemers and seditionists—if not their bodies—were still consigned to the flames in public book-burning rituals that resembled Protestant autos da fé by proxy. Copies of Coppe’s Fiery Flying Roll, Bothumley’s Light and Dark Sides of God, and Clarkson’s Single Eye all met this fate in 1650. Moreover, on 10 May 1650 Parliament issued an Act for suppressing incest, adultery, and fornication. This was followed on 28 June by an Act against profane swearing and cursing and on 9 August by an Act against blasphemy. Although this legislation can be seen as part of a wider programme designed to further the cause of godly reformation in doctrine and manners, it is also evident that the impetus for these measures came from a parliamentary majority’s desire to eradicate the Ranters. Coppe was still more specific, claiming that the acts against adultery and blasphemy ‘were put out because of me’.69 Afterwards, Bothumley kept an unlicensed alehouse in Leicester. He also held several minor civic offices; sergeant-at-mace, library keeper, and keeper of the house of correction—living for nine years in a tenement within Leicester’s jail. He disputed with George Fox at Leicester in 1653 and with Richard Farnworth and other Quakers at nearby Swannington in January 1655. In September 1667 he was presented before the church courts for not receiving communion at his parish church of All Saints. Bothumley’s only other publication was an abridgement of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments. Dedicated to the Mayor and Aldermen of Leicester, it was intended to show the sufferings of those in former ages whom God had singled out to witness his truth. Wyke was dispatched to Ireland as an army preacher, where he was regarded as a Baptist and became involved in written controversy with a Quaker. He was active in Dublin and then counties Antrim (Belfast, Lisburn), Armagh (Lurgan), and Down (Dromore, Tullylish). In 1663 Wyke was arrested together with a number of nonconformist preachers. Salmon, weakened by almost six months of incarceration, issued a recantation. He moved to Kent and was active in Chatham, Strood, Frindsbury, and Rochester, where he preached regularly in the cathedral every Sabbath sowing ‘the seeds of Ranting Familism’.70 Salmon then emigrated to Barbados. In November 1656 he was reported to be preaching regularly, seemingly denying ‘Rantinge outwardly’, attracting followers and securing protection from powerful people on the island.71 He was succeeded at Rochester by Richard Coppin, who was imprisoned at Maidstone in December 1655 on suspicion of blasphemy. Clarkson took up astrology, medicine, and magic upon his release, combining his newly acquired skills in healing and recovering

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stolen goods with preaching in Cambridgeshire, Essex, and Norfolk. He subsequently became a Muggletonian and, claiming to be the only true bishop and faithful messenger of Jesus Christ, wrote five treatises in quick succession, including an attack on the Quakers that provoked an intemperate response. Yet he also quarrelled with Muggleton who, fearing his attempt to usurp control of their tiny sect, excommunicated him on 25 December 1660. A humbled Clarkson was eventually forgiven on condition that he desist from writing. According to Muggleton, after the Great Fire of London Clarkson became involved in an ill-advised financial scheme that led to his incarceration for debt at Ludgate, where he died about a year later. As for Coppe, in September 1651 he preached two recantation sermons in Oxfordshire. Towards the end of February 1655, together with a Baptist army officer and ‘a great company of ranters’ Coppe drank and smoked tobacco in George Fox’s presence.72 After the Restoration and having changed his name to Hiam, he was licensed to practise medicine and surgery. He was buried under that name in St Mary’s church at Barnes, Surrey. There were Ranters: admittedly not many, but the debate on their existence should now be considered closed. Instead discussion should focus on their significance within wider contemporary contexts. For a brief moment during the English Revolution it may have seemed, at least from George Fox’s retrospective perspective, that—in words he disingenuously attributed to Durand Hotham, a partially sympathetic Justice of the Peace in the East Riding—had it not been for the Quakers, England would have been ‘overspread with rantisme’, and despite all their laws none of the nation’s magistrates could prevent it.73 On this justificatory view, divinely appointed Quakerism triumphed against diabolically inspired Ranterism. And certainly it is indisputable that by the early 1660s there were a maximum of 60,000 Quakers compared to no openly professing Ranters. But as we have seen, and indeed as others have shown, from shortly before the execution of Charles I in January 1649 until the parliamentarian forces’ victory at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651 the blasphemous beliefs and outrageous behaviour of those reproachfully known as Ranters—whether real or imagined— greatly troubled a number of magistrates, military officials, ministers, moralists, and politicians, as well as prominent Baptists and Diggers. Although the anxieties they engendered were out of proportion to their size, exaggerated as they were by journalists and other polemicists, the varied if near universal condemnatory reactions to and fairly swift suppression of the Ranters exposed manifold pre-existing religious divisions within England’s fledgling republic. Yet that is not the end of the matter, since there remains much to be done. With the partial exception of Coppe, we still need detailed accounts of the Ranters’ reading habits and possible influences on their thought. Moreover, we await research on the lesser-known individuals that comprised ‘My one flesh’, together with a reconstruction of their social networks. The same may be said of members of several other spiritual communities, notably those clustered around Sedgwick and those named in News from the New-Jerusalem. We also require meticulous studies of Bothumley, Coppe

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(particularly after 1648), Coppin, and Salmon. So it is fair to suggest that despite all that has been said about them, there is another book on the Ranters still to be written.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Anon., Ranters Monster; ODNB. Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 124. Barclay, Inner Life, 423. Entry in the old DNB. Whiting, Studies, 274; Tindall, John Bunyan, 97; Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 316, 353–54. Jones, Studies, 467–81. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 16; id., Century of Revolution, 149. Tindall, John Bunyan, 96–9; Petegorsky, Left-Wing Democracy, 236, 237, 239. Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 315–72; id., ‘Ranters’, 15–25. McGregor, ‘Ranters’, 60, 128, 173. Heinemann and Thompson (eds.), History and the Imagination, 122–3, 125, 127–37, 142–3; Morton, World of the Ranters, 17–18, 70–1, 110–12. Hill, World Turned Upside Down, 15–16, 138, 162, 199, 202–3, 280, 314–23, 339–41, 358, 363, 371, 379. Davis, Fear, Myth and History, 17, 18, 20, 21, 75, 77–8, 81, 83, 92. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed; Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 174–93; Hawes, Mania and Literary Style; Flinker, Song of Songs, 120–39, McDowell, English Radical Imagination, 89–136. Carlyle (ed.), Cromwell’s Letters, ii. 15; OED, s.v. ‘rant’, ‘ranter’. Complete Works of Winstanley, ii. 167, 235–40. The Bodleian Library copy of Richard Coppin’s Divine Teachings (2nd edn, London, 1653), shelf-mark Antiq.e.E 34(2), also has a note added after Coppin’s name; ‘who is one of the chiefe rantors’. Although this annotation is undated, the volume passed into the possession of the eighteenth-century bookseller John Denis. Clarkson, Lost Sheep, 24–6. Ibid. 26–9; Anon., Routing of Ranters, 2. Anon., Ranters Recantation, 6. Hessayon, ‘Gold’, 151–2, 157–60. Perfect Passages (27 December 1650–3 January 1651), 168. Moderate Intelligencer, no. 4 (23–30 May 1653), 32; Trapnel, Report and Plea, 38. Mercurius politicus, no. 211 (22–9 June 1654), 3584–5. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 20–2. Underhill (ed.), Records, 73, 77–80, 90, 107, 198, 269–70. Underwood (ed.), Acts of the Witnesses, 54–5, 57, 59–60, 62–3, 77–8. Gell, Sermon Touching Gods Government, 39. Coppe, Copp’s Return, sig. A2r–3; id., Remonstrance, 5. C[larkson], Single Eye, title page. Clarkson, Lost Sheep, 10.

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32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

371

Salmon, Heights in Depths, 10–25; id., Divinity Anatomized, 38. Several Proceedings, no. 16 (11–18 January 1650), 213. Complete Works of Winstanley, ii. 167. Collier, Looking-Glass for Quakers, 7. Fox, Word from the Lord, 13. Hessayon, ‘Gold’, 209–11. Sedgwick, Spiritual Madman, 13, 14. Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, 1, 8. Ibid., preface; Stokes, Wiltshire Rant, 13–14. Laurence, ‘Two Ranter Poems’, 58; C[larkson], Single Eye, 12, Anon., Routing of Ranters, 5; Anon., Ranters Ranting, 2. MS Clarke 18 fos. 55v–56v. MS Clarke 18 fos. 6r–v, 19v–20r, 20v–21r. Coppe, Second Fiery Flying Roule, 15. MS Clarke 18 fo. 23r–v. Anon., Justification of Mad Crew, sig. A3v. Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, 8, 33; id., Fiery Flying Roll, preface; id., Second Fiery Flying Roule, 18, 22. Coppe, Second Fiery Flying Roule, 4, 16, 22. Anon., Justification of Mad Crew, 16–18. Coppe, Second Fiery Flying Roule, 7. Anon., Ranters Declaration, 6. Coppe, Copp’s Return, 6, 12–14. Coppe, Some Sweet Sips, 54. Ibid. 55; Smith (ed.), Ranter Writings, 73–5. Coppe, Copp’s Return, 10, 24–5. Salmon, Divinity Anatomized, 5–6. Smith (ed.), Ranter Writings, 207, 216, 220, 222. Salmon, Heights in Depths, 15, 16. Bothumley, Light and Dark Sides, 1, 2, 4–5, 71. Ibid. 10, 29. Nicholas of Cusa, Single Eye, 77. Hermes Trismegistus, Divine Pymander, 157. C[larkson], Single Eye, 8, 13–14. Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, preface, 1, 7. MS Clarke 18 fo. 25v. Salmon, Divinity Anatomized, 62–8; Salmon, Heights in Depths, 47, 49. Coppe, Fiery Flying Roll, 8. ODNB. Coppe, Remonstrance, 1, 6. Rosewell, Serpents Subtilty Discovered, 1. FHL, MS Swarthmore I 66r. ODNB. The Journal of George Fox Edited from the MSS, i. 29. The contrast with what Hotham himself wrote could not be starker.

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WORKS CITED Anon. A Justification of the Mad Crew. London, 1650. ——. The Ranters Declaration. London, 1650. ——. The Ranters Monster. London, 1652. ——. The Ranters Ranting. London, 1650. ——. The Ranters Recantation. London, 1650. ——. The Routing of the Ranters. London, 1650. Aylmer, G. E. ‘Review Article: Did the Ranters Exist?’ Past and Present 117 (1987), 208–19. Barclay, Robert. The Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the Commonwealth. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1876. Bothumley, Jacob. The Light and Dark Sides of God. London, 1650. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. London, 1692. Carlyle, Thomas (ed.). Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches. 3 vols. London: Chapman and Hall, 1886. C[larkson], L[awrence]. A Single Eye All Light, no Darkness. London, 1650. ——. The Lost Sheep Found. London, 1660. Cohn, Norman. The Pursuit of the Millennium. London: Pimlico, 1957. ——. ‘The Ranters’. Encounter 34.4 (1970), 15–25. Collier, Thomas. A Looking-Glass for the Quakers. London, 1656. Coppe, Abiezer. A Fiery Flying Roll. London, 1649. ——. A Second Fiery Flying Roule. London, 1649. ——. Some Sweet Sips, of Some Spiritual Wine. London, 1649. ——. Copp’s Return to the Wayes of Truth. London, 1651. ——. A Remonstrance or the Sincere and Zealous Protestation. London, 1651. ——. Selected Writings, ed. Andrew Hopton. London: Aporia, 1987. Corns, Thomas. Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Davis, J. C. Fear, Myth and History: The Ranters and the Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ——. ‘Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the “Ranters” ’. Past and Present 129 (1990), 79–103. Ellens, G. F. ‘The Ranters Ranting: Reflections on a Ranting Counter Culture’. Church History 40 (1971), 91–107. Flinker, Noam. The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature: Kisses of their Mouths. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Fox, George. A Word from the Lord, unto All the Faithless Generation of the World. London, 1654. ——. The Journal of George Fox Edited from the MSS, ed. Norman Penney, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Friedman, Jerome. Blasphemy, Immorality, and Anarchy: The Ranters and the English Revolution. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1987. Friends House Library, London, MS Swarthmore I 66. Gell, Robert. Aggelokratia theon. Or A Sermon Touching Gods Government of the World by Angels. London, 1650. Gucer, Kathryn. ‘ “Not heretofore extant in print”: Where the Mad Ranters are’. Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000), 75–95.

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Hawes, Clement. Mania and Literary Style. The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Heinemann, Margot and Willie Thompson (eds.). History and the Imagination: Selected Writings of A. L. Morton. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Hermes Trismegistus [pseud.]. The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus. London, 1649. Hessayon, Ariel. ‘Gold Tried in the Fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. ——. ‘The Making of Abiezer Coppe’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History 62 (2011), 38–58. Hill, Christopher. The Century of Revolution, 1603–1714. London: Sphere Books, 1972. ——. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. ——. ‘Abolishing the Ranters’, in A Nation of Change and Novelty. London: Routledge, 1990, 152–94. Jones, Rufus. Studies in Mystical Religion. London: Macmillan and Co., 1909. Kenny, Robert. ‘ “In These Last Dayes”: The Strange Work of Abiezer Coppe’. Seventeenth Century 13 (1998), 156–84. Labuzetta, Evan. ‘ “This Diabolical Generation”: The Ranters and the Devil’. Literature Compass 5 (2008), 591–602. Laurence, Ann. ‘Two Ranter Poems’. Review of English Studies 31 (1980), 56–9. McDowell, Nicholas. ‘A Ranter Reconsidered: Abiezer Coppe and Civil War Stereotypes’. Seventeenth Century 12 (1997), 173–205. ——. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. McGregor, J. F. ‘The Ranters, 1649–1660’ (unpublished B.Litt. thesis). Oxford, 1968. ——. ‘Ranterism and the Development of Early Quakerism’. Journal of Religious History 9 (1977), 349–63. ——. ‘Seekers and Ranters’, in J. F McGregor and B. Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984, 129–39. ——, Bernard Capp, Nigel Smith, B. J. Gibbons, and J. C. Davis. ‘Debate: Fear, Myth and Furore: Reappraising the Ranters’. Past and Present 140 (1993), 155–210. Morton, A. L. The World of the Ranters: Religious Radicalism in the English Revolution. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970. Nelson, Byron. ‘The Ranters and the Limits of Language’, in James Holstun (ed.), Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution. London: F. Cass, 1992, 60–75. Nicholas of Cusa. The Single Eye, ed. Giles Randall. London, 1646. Petegorsky, David. Left-Wing Democracy in the English Civil War. 1940; repr. Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1995. Rosewell, Walter. The Serpents Subtilty Discovered. London, 1656. Salmon, Joseph. Divinity Anatomized. London, 1649. ——. Heights in Depths and Depths in Heights. London, 1651. Sedgwick, William. The Spiritual Madman. London, 1648. Smith, Nigel (ed.). A Collection of Ranter Writings from the 17th Century. London: Junction, 1983. ——. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Stokes, Edward. The Wiltshire Rant. London, 1652.

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Thompson, E. P. ‘On the Rant’, in Geoff Eley and William Hunt (eds.), Reviving the English Revolution: Reflections and Elaborations on the Work of Christopher Hill. London: Verso, 1988, 153–60. Tindall, William. John Bunyan Mechanick Preacher. New York: Russell & Russell, 1934. Trapnel, Anna. Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. London, 1654. Underhill, Edward (ed.). Records of the Churches of Christ, Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–1720. London: Haddon Bros., 1854. Underwood, T. L. (ed.). The Acts of the Witnesses: The Autobiography of Lodowick Muggleton and Other Early Muggletonian Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Whiting, C. E. Studies in English Puritanism from the Restoration to the Revolution, 1660–1688. London: Macmillan Co., 1931. Winstanley, Gerrard, The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Worcester College, Oxford, MS Clarke 18.

CHAPTER

19

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MARCHAMONT NEDHAM ....................................................................................................... JOAD RAYMOND

Mr. Marchamont Needham, then a zealous Loyalist, and scourge to the Rump Parliament, being violently pursued by them, was sheltered in the Doctors [Peter Heylyn’s] House while the storm was over: the good Doctor now as his Tutelary Angel, preserved him in a high Room, where he continued writing his Weekly Pragmaticus; yet he afterward like Balaam the Son of Beor, hired with the Wages of Unrighteousness, corrupted with mercenary gifts and bribes, became the only Apostate of the Nation, and writ for the pretended Commonwealth, or rather may I say, for a base Democracy; for which the Doctor could never after endure the mention of his name, who had so disobliged his Country, and the Royal Party, by his shameful Tergiversation. (Heylyn, Keimelia ’ekklesiastika, 1681)

SHITTLE-COCK

.................................................................................................................. Marchamont Nedham, a witty, intellectually versatile journalist and political theorist, began the year 1649 as a royalist journalist, hiding from Parliament’s officials; in the following months he was silenced, captured, and imprisoned. He recanted and reappeared in the spring of 1650 with the new persona of a republican propagandist and journalist. He thereby incurred, as George Vernon observes in his life of Heylyn, the contempt of former acquaintances and colleagues. Nedham became the most prominent, and probably the most widely read, republican propagandist of the seventeenth century, amalgamating persuasion and political theorizing to generate support for and legitimize the various governments of the 1650s. In some respects Nedham is an exemplar of the literary shifts of the revolutionary decades. From a comfortably modest background (son of an innkeeper, stepson of a vicar) and educated at the University of Oxford, he responded to the efflorescence of

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print in the early 1640s by writing in an engaging, accessible style, exploring new genres, and wearing his education lightly. He took Parliament’s side quickly and with ease, but proved flexible in later years. His voice was demotic and satirical, his persona ebullient, but these were assumed masks of the kind that made appearance in the world of print more colourful, more effective, less risky. Of his real person we know little, despite rumours of drinking bouts (perhaps mere smokescreen). His voice was a mixture of Martin Marprelate (the pseudonymous Elizabethan anti-ecclesiastical satirist), Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas More, and Daniel Defoe, a combination inconceivable before the Civil Wars disrupted writing and publishing. In other respects Nedham is unique. First, because he pioneered a style combining serious politics and jocular satire, informed a wide readership, and in doing so developed the early newsbook into something more like the modern newspaper or political blog; and, secondly, because his proclivity for changing sides inspired unequalled opprobrium among his contemporaries that was never entirely dispelled. He was, according to one satire, a ‘politick Shittle-cock’.1 His first incarnation was as Mercurius Britanicus [sic] (1643–6), the parliamentarian newsbook; after being removed from the editorship for excessively enthusiastic attacks on the King he turned and wrote the royalist Mercurius pragmaticus (1647–9). He turned again with the republican and Cromwellian Mercurius politicus (1650–60), alongside which he published many pamphlets. He changed sides again after the Restoration. Calling for appropriate punishment in 1660, the Restoration censor and pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange lamented: ‘what was by others singly attempted in several waies, has been in all practis’d by the late Writer of Politicus, Marchemont Nedham, whose scurrilous Pamphlets flying every Week into all parts of the Nation, ’tis incredible what influence they had upon numbers of unconsidering persons, who have a strange presumption that all must needs be true that is in Print’.2 The Oxford antiquarian Anthony Wood, who collected many of Nedham’s publications, offered a bitterly recriminatory biography in his Athenæ Oxonienses: He was a person endowed with quick natural parts, was a good humanitarian, poet and boon droll: and had he been constant to his cavaleering principles he would have been beloved by, and admired of, all; but being mercenary and valuing money and sordid interest, rather than conscience, friendship, or love to his prince, was much hated by the royal party to his last, and many cannot endure to hear him spoken of.3

C. H. Firth’s Dictionary of National Biography article on Nedham drew on Wood’s partisan sketch. Many historians have endorsed the judgement that Nedham was a man without conscience, a political ‘Vicar of Bray’,4 willing to sell his pen—and implicitly his soul—to the highest bidder. No turn has been left unstoned. Nedham exemplifies a vital dimension of writing from the revolutionary decades— one that ideological and theological conflict forced upon many writers—the quantum of allegiance. Writers found themselves forced to take sides, as writing, rhetoric, form, genre, and print were increasingly and unavoidably implicated in political debate and military conflict. Nedham’s role was a very public one, and, for all of the political

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complexity of his arguments and persuasions, it can be hard to extrapolate the motives or beliefs behind them (though one could equally argue that the superficial ease of accessing the beliefs and values of others who were more constant in their expressions is itself deceptive). For that reason, and the fact that he was paid for his efforts, accusations that Nedham had a mercenary soul were liable to stick. Like many writers of the 1640s and 1650s, he creates an imaginary, public persona that shapes what he says and how he says it, moulding the public sphere around him. In a writer like Andrew Marvell—even in his most subtle and discreet political lyrics—we hear measured deliberation in a public voice that is not his own but a tissue of quotations. In Nedham we find something similar but rougher, and more urgent, as he writes to inform and persuade in print. It is the consequence of calculation, of a measured response to the times and a sense of audience. The greater the pressure to express allegiance, then, the more elusive and unpredictable some writing can become. This chapter explores Nedham’s allegiances, and the range of writing activities they involved.

LOYALTIES

.................................................................................................................. Nedham was a serious thinker, and some of the complexities of his shifts during the period 1649 to 1653, far from revealing superficiality, can allow us to see his depths. Indeed, these shifts disclose deeper continuities, and his journalism reveals an impressive range of ideas and ideals. The scandalous swing from the King to the Commonwealth in 1649–50 merits scrutiny, both for Nedham’s own motivation and as a symptom of the ideological pressures of the times. It is perhaps a little too easy to dismiss Nedham’s royalism as an opportunistic aberration—an interval between his strident radical parliamentarianism in 1646, which contained traces of anti-monarchism, and his rebirth as a republican in 1650. The recent recovery of Nedham’s republicanism and re-evaluation of his intellectual credentials has had the (perhaps unintentional) consequence of marginalizing or misinterpreting his royalist years.5 As Jason McElligott has argued, in this period Nedham has been represented either as insincere (he was a closet republican while writing the royalist Pragmaticus) or as indifferent (he was a royalist fellow-traveller because of his anti-Presbyterian and antiScottish sentiments rather than out of any genuine commitment to the principles and sentiments of royalism). Hence a ‘disservice’ has been done to his ‘exciting and innovative’ royalist writings. McElligott proposes that Nedham was genuinely a royalist partisan, and that this reflects the heterogeneous nature of royalism, and the ‘emotional, un-intellectual and simplistic propaganda’ that supported it.6 Royalist writing is characterized by a different kind of sophistication—not by a lack of it. Ultimately we cannot reconstruct Nedham’s deepest emotional or intellectual commitments: we can do this for few writers of his time, and him least of all because of his sensitivity to rhetorical occasions, and the range of voices and arguments he was able to bring to bear upon it. Nedham’s republican writing may have been, as McElligott

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suggests, more vigorous and inventive precisely because it needed to be; whereas the royalist writing was clichéd and commonplace because that was what was called for. Neither quality is a sign of sincerity or true allegiance. However, remaining an outspoken adherent of the royalist cause longer than is strictly necessary is not a sign of true belief: allegiances were shaped by opportunities and by conjunctions of prevailing circumstance. It may be wrong simply to equate those stable and consistent elements in a writer’s life and profile with what she or he truly holds dear. This is not to say that practice or actions—as opposed to testimony—cannot be taken to reveal the beliefs and values of a writer of propaganda, and it may well be that the tactics of someone like Nedham, the decisions he made to change sides and the timings of those decisions, reveal something about him. Nedham’s arrival at Charles I’s feet in September 1647, three weeks before the commencement of his career as a royalist journalist, was preceded by his accusing, in Mercurius Britanicus in May 1646, that same King of tyranny: ‘Be resolved, O ye Commons of the Kingdom; you have paid deare for your Liberties, and whosoever he was that endeavoured to rob you of them, is ipso facto a [Read old George Buchanan] Tyrant, by consent of all that ever wrote History or Politiques.’7 Nedham was imprisoned by Parliament and promised on his release to ‘write no more pamphlets without obtaining leave of the House [of Lords] first’.8 It is unclear whether the particular offence was this trenchant accusation: the anonymous complaint to the Lords suggests more of a concern with parliamentary privileges, and Nedham’s fierce interjection cannot have helped the delicate negotiation within both Houses over the matter of treating with the King. In the interval between Nedham’s release and his petitioning the King, the Presbyterians ascended to dominance in the House of Commons, and the probability of a settlement involving the establishment of the kirk as the national religion of England increased. The Leveller movement argued in favour of religious toleration, and against both the military junto and a Presbyterian settlement. While anti-Presbyterianism certainly colours Nedham’s writing throughout the 1640s, it can be seen as a symptom of his support of religious toleration.9 It explains his sympathy with the Levellers, and his support of the radicals in the early days of the Rump. While it did not drive him to the King’s side, his conversion to royalism in order to write against the Parliament certainly makes more sense in the light of this belief. Though Nedham’s writing as a royalist may be less inspired than his republican journalism, it is not without distinctive character. This includes anticlericalism, a facetious, jocular tone, and an interest in history and constitutional matters. In Mercurius pragmaticus he introduced opening poems, in ballad metre. For example, from the second issue: O goodly Kirke that we have got By Lowdons Information; What thankes we owe unto the Scot For our blest Reformation.

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The Crowne and Scepter’s out of date, The Miter low doth lie, While we are governd by a State, And hugge Democracy. We have no King we all are Kings, And each doth doe his pleasure, And therefore tis we act strange things, And sin beyond all measure. When we have toyld our selves in vaine For to be Rulers all, We must intreat our Soveraigne For to be Principall.10

Much of this is off-the-shelf royalism, but the lines express Nedham’s dislike of Scots, and fear of Presbyterianism dominating English politics. Nuanced political language mixes with jocoseriousness. Nedham thoroughly exploits the royalist commonplace that religious enthusiasts are insincere: Let none censure me of Atheisme, while I set down the Religion of the Money-drivers of the times. These are they that have blown away Popery and Protestantisme all in a breath, to make way for that grand Idolatry Covetousnes; the roote of al our evils, and the fruitfull mother of all our new Opinions . . . their whole weekes proceedings will hardly amount to a penny-worth of Newes, though (perhaps) they may cost the kingdome many thousand pounds. They roll but one stone, and that is as precious as the Philosopher’s, which they gueld out of the purses of the people.11

Puritanism is used throughout Pragmaticus as a stereotype, a cynical veil for personal ambition and avarice. Nedham strips godliness of all theology, so the religious position becomes a figure for a social vice. It is, of course, both easier and less controversial to mock greed and hypocrisy than anti-Trinitarianism, Socinianism, or soteriology. This makes for convincing polemic while also disobliging Nedham from engaging with religious positions to which he was not entirely unsympathetic. What fits less smoothly into traditions of royalist polemic is the kind of analysis that Nedham published in the immediate wake of Pride’s Purge, an analysis that harked back to the more radical passages in Britanicus: To say, that Government is mutable at the pleasure of the People, is a bold Assertion destructive to the common weale of Nations; forasmuch as it leaves the yoake loose upon their necks, and gives them a liberty of resisting all Authority whatsoever; nor would any Governours be safe, longer than they flatter and sooth the rascall Multitude: so that the Purple-robe, which ought to be accounted venerable and sacred, shall be prostituted to the lust and pleasure of the Prophane vulgar, that are as mutable as the Aire, and never content with their present condition.12

Nedham proceeds to spell out the consequences of popular sovereignty—alteration of laws, confusing the commonwealth, the persistence of faction and division, ambition and rebellion, the swallowing of firm government by the behemoth of anarchy. These

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are the notions and the arguments that he would deploy in Mercurius politicus after his volte-face, though his reasoning and conclusions would be different. Nedham, probably because of his personal circumstances, abandoned Pragmaticus in January 1649 (someone else took over the title); he returned briefly with Mercurius pragmaticus (For King Charles II) in April and May, but fled London shortly thereafter. He was caught, imprisoned for three months, escaped, and, having been recaptured, found his life in jeopardy. He then took the Oath of Engagement and was pardoned and released after interventions by William Lenthal (the Speaker of the House) and John Bradshaw (President of the Court that had tried Charles I, and future chair of the Council of State).13 While in prison he had written a pamphlet entitled Certain Considerations Tendered in all Humility (1649) addressed ‘to an Honorable Member of the Councell of State’, probably Bradshaw, in which he presents a reasoned argument for treating offenders, such as himself, with lenience, and pleads for a tolerant state—tolerant except of seditious preaching, which is a peculiar threat to the commonwealth (he would, importantly, return to this theme). The pamphlet is oddly unapologetic, and far from a ringing endorsement of the new government, but it does augur the Nedham of the 1650s in its references to classical history. Nedham had been reading Latin in prison, and, while Roman history had played a role in both Britanicus and Pragmaticus, much closer analysis of episodes of Roman history, and examination of the political wisdom and linguistic traits of Livy, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Seneca, now informed his prose. In May 1650 his conversion to republicanism was announced with the publication of The Case of the Common-Wealth of England Stated, and in June, and presumably on the back of the success of this, he submitted a prospectus for an official newsbook, a proposal that was realized with the appearance of Mercurius politicus later that month. The young King he had defended a year earlier in Mercurius pragmaticus (For King Charles II) he now labelled ‘young Tarquin’, ‘The Thing of Scotland’, the ‘Scottish King’, ‘the yong Lad of Scotland’, ‘the Presbyterian Property’.14 The heir to the abolished throne had thrown his lot in with the Scots, while a radical faction in the ‘Rump’ Parliament promoted religious toleration. Nedham, like Milton, decided to work for the government.

THE CASE

OF THE

C O M M O N -W E A L T H (1649)

.................................................................................................................. Nedham begins his first major republican treatise by disarmingly admitting to a change of mind: ‘Perhaps thou art of an Opinion contrary to what is here written: I confesse, that for a Time I my Self was so too, till some Causes made me to reflect with an impartiall eye upon the Affairs of this new Government.’ This is a specimen of captatio benevolentiae, but it may well be true; people do change their minds, especially when circumstances dramatically shift. He explains that, resolving to examine affairs, he entered into serious study of precedents (Certain Considerations is evidence of the truth of this), and his opinion was conquered (a pun on conquest theory). He

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acknowledges that many ‘high Talkers’ and the ‘censorious’ will doubtless ‘charge me with Levity and Inconstancy’, but these men are themselves obstinate ‘against Conscience, Right, Reason, Necessity, the Custome of all Nations, and the Peace of our own’. He appeals above them to ‘the great Tribunall, where it is known I have in this dealt faithfully’ (A2v). He divides these argumentative readers—this is a typical pamphleteers’ device—into the ‘Conscientious’ and the ‘Worldling’. Where Nedham differs from the typical pamphleteer is that, instead of dismissing the latter, and persuading his readers to identify with the former, he seeks to persuade both through diligence and the reasoned appeal to self-interest.15 This division is reflected in the structure of The Case of the Common-Wealth, which is as simple and direct as contemporary works of political theory—Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio (1650), and James Harrington’s Oceana (1656)—are rich, extravagant, or artful. Rejecting classical rhetoric, Nedham divides his tract into two parts: the first, addressed to the ‘Conscientious man’, discusses law in terms of necessity and equity; the second, for the ‘Worldling’, discusses the interests of particular groups in the language of utility and benefit (A3r). The Case of the Common-Wealth offers a bridge between theory and practice, professing to be not a system of government argued from basic principles, but a manual for practical understanding of and engagement with politics. Its undecorative style affected a plain-speaking, reasonable intonation, the voice of the calm after a storm, addressing a universal readership. What caused his change of mind, Nedham professes, was reading: ‘supposing those learned men who wrote before these Times, were most likely to speak Truth, as being un-interested in our Affairs, and un-concerned in the Controversie, I took a view of their Reasons and Iudgments . . . ’ (A2r). In a voice of sober, republican responsibility, Nedham claims that self-education converted him; others, including John Lilburne, Thomas May, James Harrington, and John Hall would make similar claims, and the trope of conversion to republicanism through reading would appear in later, unsympathetic accounts. Nedham’s arguments are deceptively simple, even in the theoretic first part. The first chapter uses historical examples to show that all governments have a natural period of revolution, of rise and fall. The English monarchy had corrupted with age and thus naturally been overthrown. The bonds of loyalty to monarchy have been dissolved, ‘And when all is done, we shall find it but labour in vain; that we have but fortified Castles in the Aire against fatall Necessity, to maintain a Phant’sie of pretended Loyalty’ (5). The subsequent four chapters assert various legal propositions. First, conquest theory: all claims to the right to rule are ultimately founded on ‘the Power of the Sword’. This argument had been widely propounded in pamphlets in 1649 and 1650 (the associated image of the ‘erect sword’ appeared in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’). It is not unlawful, Nedham argues, to obey a de facto government. Secondly, government is essentially a contract, and those who obstinately refuse to submit to a government thereby deprive themselves of the right to its protection (16–19). This argument was supported by De jure belli ac pacis (1625) by the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius, and also by Thomas Hobbes: Nedham discovered this after publication, and added to a second

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edition eleven months later an appendix of passages from Claudius Salmasius’ Defensio regia and Hobbes’s De corpore politico, these authors chosen, Nedham claims, because of the esteem in which Presbyterians and royalists held them. Thirdly, government established by a prevailing party, though a minority, has as much lawful right to rule as one erected by the entire people. Nedham brandishes an allusion to Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, who coupled ‘Law and Force, making Authority and Power walk hand in hand together’ (19–20). Authority was formerly divided between King and Parliament (as averred in the Nineteen Propositions), the King encroached on it, and the Parliament rightfully had recourse to arms in self-defence. In the case of civil war a nation must be counted as two nations; the King lost his title by ‘Right of War’, and so the present government has a right to rule not by usurpation but by conquest (21, 24). Fourthly, new allegiances could, under circumstances of conquest, dissolve old ones. This last was important personally for Nedham, and many others, in 1649–50 (some argued that the Oath of Allegiance and the Covenant required royalists and Presbyterians to oppose the Engagement). Nedham’s Machiavellianism surfaces here, though the argument is also indebted to Seneca and Grotius: ‘In a word, Allegiance is but a politicall Tie, for politick ends, grounded upon politicall Considerations; and therefore being politically determined, when those alterations are altered by new Circumstances, (be it in relation to Cæsar, or the Senate) the old Allegiance is extinct, and must give place to a new’ (25). He would use this argument throughout his pamphlets, though in other circumstances he would defend popular sovereignty. All oaths have implicit conditions: that their words are equitably interpreted, that God and human laws permit them, that there is no ‘alteration of Affaires’. With the erection of a new government, he argues, former obligations have been extinguished on all three grounds (32). These arguments were all familiar from the Engagement controversy. The second part of Nedham’s The Case of the Common-Wealth examines the worldly interests of particular parties, exemplifying the application of interest theory, which Nedham had developed from Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and especially the Duc de Rohan. Nedham was committed to ‘interest’ as a means of analysis, and as a powerful means of linking theory to practice. He had exploited it in his royalist days, notably in his anonymous Case of the Kingdom Stated, According to the Proper Interests of the Severall Parties Ingaged (1647), which closely anticipated The Case of the Common-Wealth. Reasoning on the grounds of interest had also appeared in Nedham’s royalist newsletters in the winter of 1648–9, newsletters in which he convinces his readers, and perhaps himself, that the trial of the King was a potent bluff, a ‘pretended trial’, and that the Independents would never follow it through because regicide was against their interest.16 Though his calculations were wrong, he stuck fast to this means of understanding politics. There is, then, significant continuity between Nedham-theroyalist and Nedham-the-republican not only in the mode of argument but in much of the analysis. Nedham’s value to the Commonwealth in 1649–50 involved his former sympathies with Levellers and royalists—he understood their perspectives, and knew their arguments and loyalties.

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Nedham divides the parties ‘claiming an Interest in this Nation’ into four: royalists, ‘Scots’, Presbyterians, and Levellers (33). He identifies the objectives and analyses the design of each party according to the improbability of their objective being effected, and how disadvantageous it would be to the people of the nation were the party to succeed (e.g. the prospect of tyranny or high taxes). In each case he shows, at some length, that the party is likely to receive little support, and that ultimately most satisfaction is to be gained by submission to the Commonwealth. Significantly, Nedham omits discussion of religious Independents, and the commonwealthmen: they have the upper hand, and at present act according to conscience. By implicitly aligning himself with them he advocates religious toleration and a free state. The final chapter of Nedham’s text, ‘A discourse of the excellency of a Free-State above a Kingly Government’, twists away from worldly interest arguments to a more literary panegyric of a mode of government. Thus the structure of the first part, moving from principle to practicality, is mirrored in the second, which suggests that practicalities turn to theoretic principles. The structure is an artful demonstration of the fluidity of such arguments. Nedham is here at his most eloquent and Miltonic. In the voice of Jeremiah he chastises an unregenerate people brought up under tyranny, corrupt in manners, who prize liberty lightly, despite the ‘Blood and Treasure’ it has cost (80–1).17 Whereas in the Roman republic, liberty and courage and resolution walked ‘hand in hand’, in the early days of the British Republic only a minority have cultivated this virtue amidst the debaucheries of monarchy, and are thus ‘qualified like those Roman Spirits of old’. Before ‘Cæsar’s Tyranny’ England was not a monarchy; and, ‘though the very name of Liberty is grown odious or ridiculous among us, it having been a Stranger a long time in these Parts’, Nedham has no doubt that the virtue which flourished in the ancient world will take firmer root in northern soil (82–4). A free state has two advantages over other forms of government: first, its durability (though not immortality) through its capacity to expand (the title page proclaims ‘It is incredible to be told (saith Salust.) how exceedingly the Roman Common-wealth encreased in a short time, after they had obtained their Liberty’ [85]);18 secondly, religious toleration (89). Toleration continued to be central to Nedham’s vision of a flourishing commonwealth, and I think it was a foundation of his personal religion and his public politics. It may also explain why he decided to support the King in 1647: the prominence of Presbyterians in Parliament meant that the cause of toleration was not likely to fare well there, and so Nedham tried to persuade the King to seek support among Independents. When the Parliament was purged, monarchy was allied to both Scots and Presbyterians, and toleration was more allied to the Commonwealth. Like Milton, who argued in Pro populo Anglicano defensio (1650) that the constitution of the Commonwealth was ‘what our time and dissentions allow’,19 Nedham suggests that any present inconveniences in the Commonwealth are occasioned by the people’s resistance, owing to which the sword remains drawn. He concludes with an utopian gesture:

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would they close cordially in Affection, and be resolved once to settle, in opposition to all Invaders and Intruders, and let the Common-wealth have leave to take breath a little, in the possession of a firme peace, then they would soone find the Rivulets of a Free-State, much more pleasing than the troubled Ocean of a Kingly Tyranny; begetting Fertility and verdure (as they run along) in all the Meadows, and reviving those Pastures, which Royalty was wont to drown and swallow . . . And though this discourse may sound like that concerning the Joyes of Heaven in the ears of ordinary People, as of Blessings afarre off; yet since it is in your Power to hasten them, why stand ye off, and delay? yee may (if you please) by an unanimous obedience, quickly open the Fountains of future happinesse, that Justice may run downe as a mighty streame, in the Channel of the Lawes, and righteousnesse and Peace embrace each other. (93–4)

The Case of the Common-Wealth offers a remarkable compression of historical precedent, abstract political analysis, and modish interest arguments applied with critical intelligence and polemical fervour. It is a self-consciously popular tract, and though the margins are peppered with references, it is written in an easy, vernacular style, with Latin quotations mostly translated. It addresses practical issues with heterogeneous strategies. It is a hybrid pamphlet, made up of different languages and perspectives: this makes it stimulating and user-friendly, a little like a newspaper. It bridges the boundary between the theory and practice of politics by developing the application of interest theory, and by presenting politics as a dynamic of competing tensions, the resolutions of which were predictable. This makes pragmatic behaviour intellectually possible and ethically coherent. In a sense Nedham is stepping beyond political prudence to the modern field of policy science.20 Nedham ended the 1640s as an imprisoned, brilliant polemicist. He entered the 1650s a political theorist with a state pension. The Case of the Common-Wealth announced his conversion and return. The gesture with which it concluded implied that political theory and propaganda were involved in the processes by which the Commonwealth was furthered. Nedham urged his ‘ordinary People’ to realize the millennial utopianism he proffered them. He fostered the role of public rhetor and then proceeded to unsheathe his sword once more: this sword was journalism, at which he excelled.

MERCURIUS POLITICUS

.................................................................................................................. In June 1650, one month after The Case of the Common-Wealth was published, the Council of State approved Nedham’s proposal for a new newsbook. The Republic recognized the importance of the printing press, and particularly the newspaper press. Having hunted down the surviving royalist mercuries in the spring and summer of 1649, Parliament had passed in September an act outlawing newsbooks except those subsequently authorized. Additional powers of search were given to the Stationers’ Company, and gradually the booksellers’ stalls were wiped clean of newsbooks. The documents do not specify the government’s motivation—whether the Leveller campaign or anxiety over negative reporting of Cromwell’s campaign in Ireland—but

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underlying it was publicity, which was addressed initially by banning all newsbooks, and then licensing official ones, first A Briefe Relation of Some Affaires and Transactions, Civill and Military, Both Forraigne and Domestique, subsequently Severall Proceedings in Parliament and others. Nedham’s June 1650 proposal offered a more reasoned and coordinated extension of this policy. Nedham’s prospectus explained his rationale: The designe of this Pamphlett being to vndeceive the People, it must bee written in a Jocular way, or else it will never bee cryed vp: For those truths which the Multitude regard not in a serious dresse, being represented in pleasing popular Aires, make Musick to the Common sence, and charme the Phantsie; which ever swayes the Scepter in Vulgar Judgements; much more then Reason. I entitle it Politicus, because the present Gouernment is veram ºØÆ as it is opposed to the despotick forme. It shalbee my care to sayle in a middle way, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Scurrility and prophanes. . . . I desire suplyes of the best Intelligence of State; and that Tuesday may bee the weekly day, because most convenient for dispersing it through the Nation.21

This is a dense document, especially for one submitted to a busy committee. Nedham promises his traditional joco-serio style as a means of persuading his audience—a sugar coating for a pill of hard news and ‘truths’—but also a curious political vision: ‘veram ºØÆ’ (politeia) understands ‘polity’ to refer exclusively to a non-monarchical form of government. Something similar happened with the word ‘commonwealth’ in 1649, when writers tended to use it as a near-synonym for ‘republic’; though as the term commonwealth could also be used to describe a monarchy, its very ambiguity made it seem less abrasive. Nedham’s use of politeia is an appropriation (or misreading) of Aristotle, used by some republicans in the 1650s, opposing polity to (despotic) monarchy, and perhaps also (disorderly) democracy.22 Hence this present government, Nedham says, is a true polity. Others are flawed. He promises politics, rather than prudence or statecraft, looking forward to a political language governed by ideology and principle. Yet at the same time he promises humour, perhaps for a different audience, not only those less educated but also those hostile to his principles. He will charm as well as reason with them. This was the spirit in which he began the first issue of Politicus: Why Should not the Common-wealth have a Fool, as well as the King had? ’Tis a point of State, and if the old Court-humors should return in this new Form, ’twere the ready Road to Preferment, and a Ladies Chamber. But you’ll say, I am out of fashion, because I make neither Rimes nor Faces, for Fidlers pay, like the Royal Mercuries; Yet you shall know I have authority enough to create a fashion of my own, and make all the world to follow the humor. Besides, any fashion will fit, being now bound beyond Berwick, to strike in with Bread and Cheese, and the Clouted Commissioners, that are to welcome his Scottish Majesty home to the Stool of Repentance. For, the truth is, they say, he is coming (with better luck than his Father;) only, he lingers a little to learn to catch Mackerel, or some other odd fish which he hath to frie upon his Landing.23

His tone is bantering, but the language is dense and allusive. For example, the absence of ‘Rimes’ refers to the common practice of beginning a royalist poem with verse;

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Nedham suggests that he is unfashionable for eschewing this, and asserts his right to innovate. The King is Scottish because he had been crowned in Scotland, whereas his proclamation had been forbidden in England and Wales, hence Nedham’s names ‘The Thing of Scotland’, ‘the Presbyterian Property’. Other republican writers would adopt a similar stance, resisting giving Charles Stuart titles that were not his—language became a battle ground between republican and royalist polemicists. Nedham did indeed innovate, exploiting the flexibility of the newsbook form more thoroughly and intelligently than any of his contemporaries. Politicus combined this kind of humour with serious political analysis, and extensive news as well as advertising and comment. The mixing of these elements is dynamic and potent. Perhaps Nedham’s most radical innovation was the political editorial. In issues 16 to 69 (September 1650 to October 1651) Nedham included learned and informative discussions of republican political principle, most extracted from Case of the Common-Wealth, with some of the more obscure allusions edited out.24 This recycling of materials is in a way typical of newsbooks, but there is an extraordinary ambition in Nedham’s action. He seeks to educate a very broad readership—‘the People’ as he describes them in his prospectus, and the claim had some justification—in political theory. This education will make them better citizens, their allegiance developed not through secrecy, misinformation, or deception, the soma of soft news, but through a better understanding of politics. This is volatile stuff: in fact these bullish editorials about republican ambition appeared at a time when the Rump’s radicalism had been curtailed, and the reprinting of passages from The Case of the Common-Wealth could be interpreted as a disappointed sotto voce critique of the increasingly conservative regime. The same literary hermeneutic appeared with even greater intensity when a second series of editorials were reprinted in Politicus. This series ran from issue 70 to 114 (October 1651 to August 1652), and was republished as The Excellencie of a Free State in June 1656.25 In the context of 1656, these earlier editorials read like an indictment of the Cromwellian Protectorate for its failed ambitions; they fit into the literature of the republican opposition that emerged from the press that summer. The political theory supplied in Nedham’s editorials furnished readers with a means to interpret the news that followed. This was extensive in kind and in geographical diversity. Politicus incorporated news from Britain (though abridged after 1655). Nedham reported, with comments, on letters and documents sent between various individuals and political parties. He reported on fighting, sensation, weather, and trade. He reported on parliamentary debates and resolutions—cautiously, but not so cautiously that his sympathy with the radicals in Parliament could not be detected. It was probably as a result of his relationship with these radicals that Nedham was the first publicly to broach the possibility of Anglo-Dutch union, a proposal driven by republican ideals. He reported closely on negotiations in the Netherlands (and printed antiDutch writing after their failure).26 The coverage of overseas news in Politicus was unprecedented. It was made possible by Nedham’s official connections. On Nedham’s appointment his overseer was Walter Frost, Secretary to the Council of State. He also established a relationship with Thomas Scot, the head of the

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Commonwealth’s intelligence service, who supplied him with news from his circle of informants.27 Frost was replaced in March 1652 by John Thurloe, who also replaced Scot as director of the intelligence service in July 1653. Thurloe supervised Nedham, but also provided him with access to some or all of his mailbag. Overseas news in seventeenth-century periodicals originated in letters from overseas correspondents. Thurloe’s spy network was extensive, and with what Nedham passed on his readers could surmise a picture of the state of Europe—and interpret it with the political theory of the editorials. In the early 1650s this was a fiercely republican picture, optimistic about the imperial destiny of the English and about the fortune of anti-monarchical ideology in Europe. It is possible that Nedham, and his friend John Milton (an overseer of Politicus for a year from January 1651), fabricated letters of news and opinion in the voice of others and inserted them in Politicus.28 Yet if Politicus was a form of propaganda—a term which might be viewed as anachronistic—it was complex and indirect, representing a diversity of opinions.29 When the newsbook articulated a particular point of view, other views jostled with it. It relied on the active cultivation of the reader’s sympathy more than misinformation. Moreover, it was not (as propaganda is generally assumed to be) subsidized: it turned a commercial profit, and made payments to the state’s representatives. The profit of Politicus came partly from advertising, and perhaps, as the work of Jason Peacey suggests, partly from payments by grandees wanting sympathetic reports;30 but it mostly came from sales. The newsbook received exceptionally wide distribution. It is notoriously difficult to give concrete information about early modern readership, owing to the tendentiousness of extant evidence, and most statements on this topic are speculative or inferential, but in the case of Politicus there are many allusions in correspondence that indicate the political and geographical diversity of its readership. It was read by British readers and English-speaking readers across mainland Europe, in the Low Countries, France, Germany, though perhaps not Spain. It folded into pre-existing trade, travel, and diplomatic routes across the Continent, and strengthened those routes. Readers compared it—usually favourably—to local news sources. They wrote to Thurloe or Nedham asking for the inclusion (or suppression) of news. Several wrote apologetically to Thurloe expressing regret that they had no news beyond that already printed in Politicus.31 Evidence for this European market survives because of unusual circumstances—Thurloe’s correspondence—and does not reflect the full readership of Politicus. It does, however, indicate its international status and significance. While Milton wrote in Latin with half an eye on the British audience, Nedham wrote to a popular, British audience, but was aware of, and also spoke to, a European readership. An upmarket volume from 1652 shows Nedham engaging in other literary activities. This is the translation of John Selden’s Mare clausum, initially published in 1635, a treatise presenting the legal justification of English dominion over the narrow seas. The 1652 edition is exemplary of aspects of authorship in this period in two ways. First, it is a translation. Nedham seeks to supply sophisticated legal arguments to an audience unlettered in Latin, though not a popular audience, as the large and sumptuous volume

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was printed by William Du-Gard, a printer of prestigious books (rather than Nedham’s usual collaborator, Thomas Newcombe, who printed more workaday matter, including Mercurius politicus). The translation may have been Nedham’s idea, though the Council of State ordered its printing, and it fits his profile as a popularizer of learning. Secondly, the volume reveals the potency of reprinting in the period, and the way that old books appeared in new contexts, unchanged or slightly modified, and found new messages. While the original, Latin publication of Mare clausum spoke to royal prerogative, the English version firmly adhered to the Commonwealth. Nedham brought out the non-monarchical strain in English common law writing. The title page had the arms of the Commonwealth printed in red and black; the volume included an allegorical engraving of the triumphant ‘Angliæ Respub[lica]’ commanding the seas, and in an accompanying poem Nedham looked forward to England’s expansion of its dominion over all seas.32 Whereas Selden’s Latin was written for a learned international audience, Nedham’s translation spoke to promote allegiance to (and pride in) the Republic among a socially broader but geographically more local audience.

YEAR

OF

C R I S I S , 1653

.................................................................................................................. The year 1653 was a difficult one for republicans in government, Milton and Nedham included. Cromwell and the army dissolved the Parliament in April, resulting in the appointment of the Nominated Assembly (also known as the Barebones Parliament), which dissolved itself in December, leading to the introduction of the written constitution the Instrument of Government and the inauguration of the Protectorate. The events of the year divided republicans into those who spoke out against the army and Cromwell, and those who continued to work with the new regime, some of whom subsequently uttered indirect criticisms of Cromwell for his ambition and neglect of republican principle.33 Kevin Sharpe goes so far as to argue that ‘it was the reaction to the monarchism of the Protectorate that cohered and strengthened a party and position that had failed to establish itself in the early years after regicide’.34 This may overstate the case: but 1653 divided republicans into several parties, and Nedham, with Milton, chose the path of compromise and pragmatism. Nedham was sceptical of Cromwell, probably because, having discovered classical republicanism, he saw the dangers of a single person rising and breaking the Republic. He had told his readers enough about Caesar. One of Nedham’s last editorials, in August 1652, quoted at length a chapter from Machiavelli’s Prince entitled ‘In what manner Princes ought to keep their words’. Blair Worden suggests that this was ‘directed against Cromwell’, noting that Machiavelli’s own words, with which the chapter concludes, might have a contemporary application: ‘A Prince there is in these parts, whom I shall not do well to name, that preaches nothing else but peace and faith; but had hee kept the one and the other, several times had they taken from

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him his state and reputation.’ It is possible, as Worden suggests, that it was for this implied criticism of Cromwell—not yet Lord Protector but Lord General of the Army and an MP—that ‘Nedham’s editorials were terminated a fortnight later’.35 There is an internal logic that would mean that editorials would have concluded here anyway; neither the structure nor the contents of Excellencie suggest suppression of previously intended materials; and the final editorial concludes with a hint that they might ‘appear abroad in a more accomplished manner hereafter’.36 However, Nedham wrote no more editorials—at least until the Utopia letters in March and April 1657, which offered an oblique political commentary on the second Protectorate Parliament and the Humble Petition and Advice—though he still found ways to present political opinions and offer his readers a testing diet of news.37 He defended the Instrument of Government in a treatise entitled A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654), one of the few books Cromwell is known to have personally recommended.38 Nedham emphasized the republican nature of the constitution—the separation of powers, the pledge of religious toleration, the elective nature of the Protector’s office, and the significant limits on the Protector’s prerogative—though he probably saw that the written constitution did not guarantee the kind of republic for which he had hoped. Nedham may have been more involved in the demise of the Commonwealth and the rise of Cromwell than his subsequent repudiation of Cromwell intimates. In the closing months of 1653 he took on two further roles available to authors at this time: spy and adviser to princes. Apparently concerned by Fifth Monarchist activism in London, Nedham went to a meeting at Blackfriars, and wrote, unprompted, a letter to Cromwell informing him on the proceedings that evening. Two things he saw seem to have troubled him. First, the denunciation of all ‘Reformed Churches’ as the ‘Instruments’ and ‘Out-works of Babylon’. He worried about how this insulted the godly across Europe. All of the religious factions in the country, he advised, ‘euery one of them driues at an establishmt of their owne; their owne Members, their own Principles & Opinions’. Nedham feared that the ascendance of any one of these parties would result in the end of religious toleration. In A True State he would celebrate the fact that the Instrument promised a religious settlement without tying ‘all mens Consciences, who profess Truth in sobriety, to any one particular form’ (it is possible that he, like Milton, would have preferred no settlement) while preventing godly rule.39 Though personal devotion and theology played little part in his writing, beyond bland statements of providence and the will of God, religion profoundly influenced his thinking and allegiance. Secondly, Nedham feared that the ascendance of any one of these groups would result in interference with the state: ‘ffactions & Parties growing rank & numerous, at length the paramount ffaction (such as the Anabapt. now seems to be) will take all the rest vnder its Wing, and establish it self by dismounting the Magistrate; who must needs fall vnder the Assault’. Long an advocate of the clear separation of Church and state, and a denouncer of the invasion of secular politics by religion, Nedham is concerned that in unstable times the Fifth Monarchist churches threaten to establish a theocracy. The solution? Nedham proposes that both of these dangers, and that of a

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Stuart invasion, can be averted by establishing a surer and more stable government, ‘by fixing the Nations Interest & your own, vpon some solid ffundamentals, in reference to the State both of Religion & Politie’.40 The letter is dated 16 November; within a month the Nominated Assembly voted itself out of existence and Cromwell was appointed Lord Protector. Nedham would continue to work as a spy and informant, supplying Cromwell with reports on Fifth Monarchist activity: two further reports are extant. As adviser to a prince—the role of the counsellor that humanists had long sought—he had obtained his wish, though he may have come to regret it.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

Character of Mercurius politicus (1650), 1. [L’Estrange], Rope for Pol, sig. a2r–v. Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, iii. 1182. Muddiman, King’s Journalist, 14 (and others). For this recovery, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Norbrook, English Republic; Rahe, ‘Inky Wretch’ and ‘Marchamont Nedham’; Scott, Commonwealth Principles; Worden, Literature and Politics. McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship, 111–26, qu. 120, 122. Britanicus, no. 130 (18 May 1646), 1111. Interpolation in original. McKenzie and Bell, Chronology, i. 174. Nedham’s reporting on the expulsion of the MP John Fry from the House for antiTrinitarian writings may be sympathetic, aligning him with Milton, and reveal his support of toleration. Worden, Literature and Politics, 250–4, though he suggests that this is a departure from his normal Erastianism. Pragmaticus no. 2 (28 September 1647), [9]. John Campbell, first Earl of Loudoun, was a leading Covenanter. Pragmaticus no. 21 (8 February 1648), sig. Xr–v; Raymond (ed.), Making the News, 353. Pragmaticus nos. 36, 37 (12 December 1648); Raymond (ed.), Making the News, 359. See my DNB article on Nedham, and Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent. See my ‘The King is a Thing’, in Parry and Raymond (eds.), Milton, 69–94. Nedham, Case of the Common-Wealth, sigs. A2r–A3r. Bodleian Library, MS Clarendon 34, fos. 17, 18. For the authorship of the ‘Lawrans’ letters, see Peacey, ‘Lawrans Letters’. Cf. a similar jeremiad concluding Nedham’s True State, 50. Fink, Classical Republicans; Scott, Commonwealth Principles, warns that there has been an excessive focus in the historiography on this specifically constitutional perspective on the stability of a republic (associated exclusively with Harrington), and that this has resulted in underestimates of the scale of republicanism in the period. While this is largely true, Nedham undeniably pursues this line of argument here. Milton, Political Writings, 61. See Maclean, Prudence to Policy. French (ed.), Life Records of John Milton, ii. 310–11. Wootton in id. (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 5; Maclean, Prudence to Policy; Rubinstein, ‘Italian Political Thought’, 43, 49 ff.

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23. Politicus 1 (13 June 1650), 1. 24. For details of the serialization see Frank, Cromwell’s Press Agent, 182–5, and the works there cited. 25. Ibid. 182–5; for Excellencie, see Works of James Harrington, ed. Pocock, 33–40; Worden, Literature and Politics, 306–19. 26. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 15–39, and 58 n. 81. 27. Firth, ‘Thomas Scot’s Account’. 28. Worden, Literature and Politics, 204–17. 29. Raymond (ed.), News Networks, 5–12; Peacey, ‘Propaganda State’. 30. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers. 31. Raymond, ‘El rosto Europeo’; I will supply fuller evidence in my forthcoming OUP edition of Milton’s defences. 32. Discussed in Norbrook, English Republic, 293–5. 33. Worden, Rump Parliament; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate; Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty’. 34. Sharpe, ‘Failure of Republican Culture’, 260. 35. Worden, Literature and Politics, 92–3; Politicus 113 (5 August 1652), 1770–3. 36. Politicus 114 (12 August 1652), 1789. 37. For the Utopia editorials, Raymond (ed.), Making the News, 369–79; id., ‘Marchamont Nedham, Monopoly and Censorship’. 38. Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty’, 324 and n. 54. 39. True State, 25, 40–3, qu. at 43. 40. The quoted letter, in Nedham’s hand but unsigned, is Bod: MS Rawl. A. 8. pp. 129–31. The other reports are National Archive, SP 18/42/59 and SP 18/66/20.

WORKS CITED Fink, Zera S. The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-Century England. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1945. Firth, C. H. ‘Thomas Scot’s Account of his Actions as an Intelligencer during the Commonwealth’. English Historical Review 12 (1897), 116–26. Frank, Joseph. Cromwell’s Press Agent: A Critical Biography of Marchamont Nedham, 1620–1678. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1980. French, J. Milton (ed.). The Life Records of John Milton. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950. Harrington, James. The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Heylyn, Peter. Keimelia ’ekklesiastika. London, 1681. [L’Estrange, Roger]. A Rope for Pol, or, A Hue and Cry after Marchemont Nedham. London, 1660. McElligott, Jason. Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. McKenzie, D. F., and Maureen Bell (eds.). A Chronology and Calendar of Documents Relating to the London Book Trade, 1641–1700. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. MacLean, Ian. From Prudence to Policy: Some Notes on the Prehistory of Policy Sciences. Nijmegen: Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen, 1993.

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Milton, John. Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis and trans. Claire Gruzelier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Muddiman, J. G. The King’s Journalist 1659–1689: Studies in the Reign of Charles II. London: The Bodley Head, 1923. Nedham, Marchamont. The Case of the Common-Wealth of England Stated. London, 1650. ——. A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth. London, 1654. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Parry, Graham, and Joad Raymond (eds.). Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002. Peacey, J. T. ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Lawrans Letters’. Bodleian Library Record 17.1 (2000), 24–35. ——. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. ——. ‘Cromwellian England: A Propaganda State?’ History 91.302 (2006), 176–99. Pincus, Steven C. A. Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Rahe, Paul. ‘An Inky Wretch: The Outrageous Genius of Marchamont Nedham’. National Interest 70 (Winter 2002–3), 55–64. ——. ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Origins of Liberal Republicanism’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, PA, 31 August 2003, accessed 1 July 2010. . Raymond, Joad (ed.). Making the News: An Anthology of the Newsbooks of Revolutionary England 1641–1660. Moreton-in-Marsh: Windrush Press, 1993. ——. ‘ “A Mercury with a Winged Conscience”: Marchamont Nedham, Monopoly and Censorship’. Media History 4.1 (1998), 7–18. ——. ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’. Huntington Library Quarterly 62.3 and 4 (2001), 313–50. —— (ed.). News Networks in Seventeenth-Century Britain and Europe. London: Routledge, 2006. ——. ‘El rosto Europeo del periodismo Inglés’, in Roger Chartier and Carmen Espejo Cala (eds.), La aparición del periodismo en Europa: Comunicación y propaganda en el Barroco. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia, 2012, 177–206. Rubinstein, Nicolai. ‘Italian Political Thought, 1450–1530’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 30–65. Scott, Jonathan. Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sharpe, Kevin. ‘ “An Image Doting Rabble”: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 223–65. Wood, Anthony. Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Phillip Bliss. 4 vols. 3rd edn. London: Rivington et al., 1813–20. Woolrych, Austin. Commonwealth to Protectorate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

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Wootton, David (ed.). Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Worden, Blair. The Rump Parliament 1648–1653. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. ——. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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THE CLAIMS OF A ‘CIVIL SCIENCE’ Hobbes’s Leviathan ....................................................................................................... JAMES LOXLEY

Hobbes’s most famous treatise on ‘the matter, forme, and power of a commonwealth’ was published in London in April 1651. It was not his first work in this genre: his Elements of Law, which had circulated in manuscript a decade earlier, had been printed without his consent in 1650, while his Latin treatise De cive had been published twice in the 1640s and appeared in an unauthorized English translation the same year as Leviathan. Distinctively Hobbesian arguments had already begun to feature in the polemical debates accompanying the search for a settlement to a decade of bloody constitutional conflict, but the impact of Leviathan was still keenly felt by readers willing to part with the eight shillings and sixpence it cost.1 Within a year, horrified opponents in England were calling for its suppression, and it had so offended Hobbes’s royalist and Anglican allies in the exiled court of Charles Stuart that they engineered his expulsion from the royal household. It was to become one of the most calumniated books of its, or any, age, its author castigated as the ‘Monster of Malmesbury’.2 But as the vehemence of its enemies’ response might suggest, the ideas to which Leviathan gave their most memorable form were also strangely compelling. The book’s success lay at least in part in its capacity to embed its claims or positions within a structure of logical demonstration that not only draws its readers towards disturbing conclusions but also refigures the terms in which politics can be made intelligible. It has, as Jon Parkin has put it, a ‘viral character’, and it was as an insidious threat to the health of the body politic that its opponents sought to characterize it.3 That the book should produce this response is no doubt due in part to the configuration of forces and opinion at the moment of its publication; that it should continue to attract anti-viral attention even today testifies to the extraordinary force of Hobbes’s combination of systematic argument and rhetorical control.4 As early as its

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introduction, it offers both a striking figure—the Commonwealth as artificial man— and a promise of stringent reasoning and rigorous logical demonstration. Rather than working within established traditions of thinking and argument, and with available moral and political vocabularies, Leviathan claims to set out from first principles. Methodologically, this requires the clarification of the philosophical terms that are to be deployed, and Hobbes claims to be proceeding more geometrico, tracing the inferential relationships between perspicuously defined ‘names’ or concepts. He describes such logical reasoning as a kind of reckoning: it involves the basic logical operations of addition and subtraction, analysing complex terms into component units and assembling them anew in logically consistent ways. What results is supposed to be a philosophical language purged of absurdities and obscurities, freed from the corruptions of a worn-out Aristotelianism. In it, the conceptual edifices of politics and morality are constructed with the same a priori necessity as the geometrical definition of the triangle. The epistemology underlying this certainty, though, is fundamentally empiricist. All human knowledge arises through experience: concepts and ideas gain their consistency from the operations of memory and language, which first make it possible for us to discern identity and difference in the flux of our sensations. What matters, though, is not so much how we arrive at concepts, but that we recognize the logical constraints on their deployment once we begin to use them. Science is ‘the Knowledge of the Consequence of one Affirmation to another’, and Hobbes thinks that many of our philosophical problems can be put down to our ignorance of our own false steps.5 In calling us back to what the words that we use must mean if they are really to have the binding rational power we presume to attribute to them, his philosophy is attempting to make us sensitive to the errors we have inherited from generations of teachers. He claims therefore to take nothing on trust or merely by authority. Demonstrating how this approach applies to terms fundamentally descriptive of the world requires the invocation of some basic ontological claims properly advanced only in De corpore, the first part of his Latin magnum opus. Existence implies extension, so whatever exists must be extended—it must be corporeal. The totality of the world is therefore material, and large and complex bodies can be reductively analysed as assemblages of smaller and simpler bodies. This is certainly an atomistic view of the universe, and indeed a mechanistic one. But body for Hobbes, even at its simplest or most fundamental, is not inert, and the universe is not therefore primordially dead. There is micro-motion at work even in immeasurably small bodies, a kind of striving that he calls ‘endeavour’. Such strivings are of a piece with the motions discernible in larger bodies acting—or impacting—on each other. The bodies of the world are therefore restlessly ballistic and magnetic, both propelled from without by other bodies and impelled from within by changing flows of attraction and repulsion. This whirl of activity is not random or spontaneous, however, because every action is a link in a chain of causal determination, the effect of some cause and the cause of some effect. This is Hobbes’s robust and bracing materialism, and nowhere are its implications more evident than in the picture he paints of a purely corporeal humanity. Human

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beings are matter in motion like other bodies, and their motions—both inward and outward—are of two sorts. Most fundamental are the natural and unavoidable ‘vital motions’ of breathing, eating, excreting, and so on, while ‘voluntary motions’ are by contrast the product of deliberation and experience. Since these motions take place in time, and have objects or fulfil functions, they can be described as appetites or aversions. Hobbes’s anthropology and psychology are premised on this universal interplay of drives, and from it he draws some potentially disturbing implications. Moral scepticism is one: terms such as good and evil are reducible to desires or aversions and only relative to the person animated by them, so ‘whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good ’ (39). Because our desires differ, moral terms can apply variously to anything anyone finds desirable or repellent. On the same basis Hobbes insists that mental capacities such as prudence, craft, and wit are integrated into a unified sensibility of thought and feeling, ruling out any separation or counter-position of reason and passion. Of a piece with this is his account of willing, which was traditionally identified as the crucial site of human moral agency. Since human beings for Hobbes are complex assemblages of matter in motion, they are in no way exempt from causality. There is no independent faculty of the will capable of spontaneous, uncaused action; willing can never be ‘free’ in this metaphysical sense. The will is instead ‘the last Appetite in deliberating’ (45), the drive dominant enough to make the delicate interplay of desires and aversions give way to outward action. Crucially, though, this libidinal life has its torments. Beyond our impulsion towards any desirable object loom further desires, endlessly. Desire is interminable, and coextensive with life; as he pithily puts it, ‘to have no Desire, is to be Dead’ (54). We desire some things as means, rather than ends, making some desires mere stepping stones to others, and we continually strive to enhance our capacity to obtain what we think we need: ‘the object of mans desire, is not to enjoy once onely, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desire’ (70). Desire, that is, shows a necessary tendency towards exorbitance. Furthermore, these restless beings also exist together in a finite world, more or less equal—insofar as they are equally mortal and vulnerable bodies—and sometimes in competition for the same object. What happens if there is no framework of authority to adjudicate any disputes that might arise? It might be possible for parties to reach some kind of agreement, and for potential conflicts to be defused. But here our orientation towards the future and the exorbitance of our desires make things harder for us: what if our neighbour is not to be trusted, or some new and more aggressive competitor arrives on the scene? We can’t know for certain what will happen, so perhaps it would be prudent to prepare for all eventualities if we want to be sure of maintaining our access to the means of life. Perhaps we should try to accumulate more of what we want than we would otherwise do, even if that means there’ll be less of it for others, in case it becomes harder to secure in the future. Since we can’t depend on unenforceable agreements with those others, we must shift for ourselves. Force of some sort, or the threat of force, is the only reliable means available; but if I’m armed, or others think I’m armed, then they will arm themselves

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too. Perhaps it would be prudent to take pre-emptive action, and try to prevent any threats emerging? But if I do, or others can reasonably suspect that I might, then what might they try to do first? A life lived like this would be a life lived in ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death’ (89). It would be a life in which nothing that required a longue durée of social stability could be accomplished, and in which all the human energies we like to devote to the industrious arts of peace would be diverted instead into fruitlessly attempting to appease an entirely rational paranoia. Thus we arrive at Hobbes’s famously nightmarish description of the ‘state of nature’, the condition of permanent hostility that he sets out in chapter 13 of Leviathan. His exposition suggests that this condition is ultimately deducible from his materialist account of natural human being. It follows, in effect, from our constitution as creatures of appetite. We cannot therefore simply be condemned for behaving like this, and our desires and aversions are not a mark of sinfulness. Being hungry, needing to breathe, or wanting a comfortable place to sleep are not moral failings; in all of these desires we are merely manifesting a genuinely vital drive to conserve or preserve ourselves. Neither, given the insecurity we can perceive around or ahead of us, is it wrong to seek to secure the means to feed ourselves and stay alive in the future. As Hobbes had put it in De cive: We cannot be blamed for looking out for ourselves; we cannot will to do otherwise. For each man is drawn to desire that which is Good for him and to Avoid what is bad for him, and most of all the greatest of natural evils, which is death; this happens by a real necessity of nature as powerful as that by which a stone falls downward. It is not therefore absurd, nor reprehensible, nor contrary to right reason, if one makes every effort to defend his body and limbs from death and to preserve them.6

The difficulty for the reader of a passage such as this is to see how anything like a normative philosophy of politics can be derived from it. It reads rather as a repudiation of the possibility of such a philosophy, where not only questions of good and evil but also considerations of law and right, obligation and entitlement, have been displaced by an apolitical account of bare life in which the rational human drive towards selfpreservation becomes, by some monstrous irony, the greatest threat to its satisfaction. This, though, is exactly the point. Pursued thus, the drive to self-preservation is indeed self-defeating, and therefore self-contradictory. It is at this low point, facing this seeming dead end, that Leviathan starts to bring juridical categories into its account. Because the natural condition is one of an unending war of all against all, and every person unfortunate enough to find himself enmeshed in it has nothing but his own reason to tell him what to do, he has a right to follow whichever course of action his reason dictates as the surest route to his own safety. In such circumstances, where paranoia is rational, ‘there is nothing he can make use of, that may not be a help unto him, in preserving his life against his enemyes’ (91)—or at least, nothing can be identified as necessarily off limits as such a means, even the bodies and lives of others. Since that’s the case, in the state of nature ‘every man has a Right to every thing’ (91). But this right, as Hobbes points out, is juridically worthless: if we all have a contradictory and impossible right to everything, including each other, then everything remains

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permissible and the hostility continues. Unless, that is, those who are pursuing their own survival in these circumstances recognize the minimal but vital leverage the possession of this plenitudinous right actually confers on them. Their apparently rational pursuit of survival through violence is self-defeating, and therefore unreasonable. Reason itself begins to dictate other courses of action, and the maxims thus generated are what Hobbes calls the laws of nature. The first law of nature prescribes that peace should be sought when it might be obtained; the second requires ‘that a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defence of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himselfe’ (92). The means to bring this about is a covenant or contract, but a contract needs to be enforceable if it is to be binding. Some kind of guarantor is therefore needed, with the power to punish non-compliance, in order to ensure that each party could have a reasonable expectation that the others would keep their word. The contracting parties therefore authorize someone else, or some group of people, to bear the enforcing power or right that they have given up. To act as such a representative and guarantor, with a monopoly of legitimate violence, is the essential function of the Hobbesian civil state and the sovereign power which crowns it. The engraved title page of the first edition (Figure 20.1) neatly illustrates the scope and nature of the role: although the sovereign possesses a face of his own, his artificial body is made up of all the people who authorize him to act in their name. In the drawn title page accompanying a scribal copy of Leviathan presented by Hobbes to the exiled Charles II, which may well represent Hobbes’s original or preferred design, the political unity of subjects and sovereign is made even clearer.7 Whereas the subjects are gazing up at their sovereign in the image accompanying the printed text, here the sovereign’s body is constituted by his subjects’ faces, staring somewhat unnervingly out at the reader. The real achievement of the account of political right and obligation that Hobbes develops in these chapters of Leviathan should now be clear. It is not that he is merely a pessimist, peddling an unduly bleak picture of human nature and prescribing strong, unitary government as its necessary corrective. Nor, as Descartes claimed of De cive, is he giving people good reason to be wicked.8 Instead, he has demonstrated that the intelligibility and applicability of juridical categories can be derived even from this profoundly unpromising set of axioms. What moralists might be tempted to call the basest of human urges, and the instrumental reasoning that nourishes those drives, nevertheless furnishes grounds for the rational justification of a normative orientation towards peace and safety. Both also generate a clear-eyed view of the obligations such a commonwealth imposes, the entitlements that it leaves to its citizens, and the benefits that justify the surrendering of the natural, individual right to protect and nurture themselves in whichever ways they see fit. Given the extent of the powers which Hobbes argues must be granted to the sovereign power if it is to be capable of performing its role and preventing the eruption of uncontainable conflict, it’s important to remember that this power is not an end in itself. Although it is not a party to the covenant that creates a commonwealth out of the chaos of the state of nature, the

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F I G U R E 2 0 . 1 Allegorical title page to Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). # The Trustees of the British Museum. 1858, 0417.283.

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sovereign cannot reasonably or justifiably act without restraint. Hobbes does indeed insist that the sovereign’s power must be absolute or unbounded, in the sense that no earthly authority can be invoked to overrule it without creating a higher, even more sovereign power, compromising its capacity to govern, or precipitating civil conflict. He also argues that the sovereign cannot treat subjects unjustly because it acts in their name, and ‘he that doth any thing by authority from another, doth therein no injury to him by whose authority he acteth’ (124). Despite such arguments, though, Leviathan is not a deliberate apology for tyranny or despotism. Hobbes also insists that the ‘office’ or role of the sovereign consists in ‘the procuration of the safety of the people’; and ‘by Safety here, is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of life, which every man by lawfull Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himselfe’ (231). A sense that sovereigns even have the kinds of obligations that arise from being a party to a contract emerges from his account of the ‘commonwealth by acquisition’ in chapter 20, in which a conqueror assumes sovereign power over defeated opponents. While a conqueror might well keep the vanquished in abject servitude by refusing to enter into a political relationship with them, any such relationship will involve the defeated assenting to some kind of ‘covenant’ that constitutes the civil bond (141). The language of contract can even be used to elucidate the mutual relation of parents and children: infants ought to obey their parents, but only as long as their parents protect them. Parents who neglect or abandon their children lose their rights over them, and if someone else provides the necessary protection they lay claim to the child’s loyalty. As Hobbes says in his ‘Review and Conclusion’, Leviathan elucidates ‘the mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience’ (491). If this relation is not necessarily or normally embodied in the explicit terms of a covenant (though Hobbes’s view of conquest might suggest that it can be), it is nonetheless fundamental to the purposes and limits of politics. Subjects have to obey, but sovereigns have to protect. The precise nature of these obligations is different, of course, but even when magnifying the powers of the sovereign and stressing that it needs to be feared if it is to fulfil the functions for which it was established, Hobbes never loses sight of those essential functions. Because people contract to establish a sovereign in pursuit of their own safety and security, the civil power cannot require them to ‘kill, wound, or mayme’ themselves, nor to ‘abstain from the use of food, ayre, medicine, or any other thing, without which [they] cannot live’ (151). A covenant with terms such as those would be void, because contradictory to the whole purpose of entering into such covenants in the first place. Hobbes, in other words, believes that subjects have inalienable rights: ‘a man cannot lay down the right of resisting them, that assault him by force, to take away his life; because he cannot be understood to ayme thereby, at any Good to himself ’ (93). These perhaps reach further than one might expect, with Hobbes claiming for example that subjects justly condemned to death may with equal justice resist the execution of that sentence, ‘if it be onely to defend their persons’ (152). A further implication of his insistence that sovereignty is justified as a means towards the self-preservation of those who establish it is that all legitimate political authority requires the foundational

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consent of the ruled—though this might be given tacitly as well as explicitly, and a contract entered into out of fear is as valid as any other. And he insists, too, that the subjects of the sovereign power remain in full possession of meaningful liberty even when they have contracted with each other to obey this absolute power. As subjects rather than slaves or captives they retain their liberty ‘in the proper sense’, which for Hobbes means ‘corporall Liberty’, the freedom to go about their daily business unimpeded (147). They are not, of course, free of the laws: they have in fact ceded their natural right or entitlement to the sovereign, who wields his in their name. Thus, the freedom of the citizen qua citizen is visible in the commonwealth’s own liberty to act as it sees fit for the preservation of itself and its incorporated subjects. This liberty ‘is not the Libertie of Particular men; but the Libertie of the Common-wealth’ (149). In the first two parts of Leviathan, then, Hobbes manages not only to deduce a comprehensive and consistent framework of rights and obligations but also to establish a clear view of the ends of government and a coherent account of the rights and duties of both sovereigns and subjects. This is clearly a significant philosophical achievement. But it might not seem unreasonable to ask why Hobbes felt that Leviathan was a necessary vehicle for his claims. After all, the second edition of his Latin treatise on politics, De cive, had been published only in 1647, and while Leviathan is strikingly different in some particulars the main architecture of his thinking is established in the earlier book. Nevertheless, Hobbes interrupted his work on De corpore, the foundational part of his philosophical system, in order to write this condensed version of his thinking in vivid English at the turn of the 1650s. What might have made this such a pressing or topical enterprise? An initial answer is, of course, ready to hand. The ferment of political opinion and the crisis of government in his native land presented Hobbes with the opportunity to make a forceful intervention, just at the moment when the widely understood or conventional structures of political power, and their underpinning justifications, had become perilously insubstantial or had been weakened by scandals and reverses. This, and the cacophony of different voices entering into political debate, might leave conscientious subjects confused as to their duty; indeed, many casuists and commentators rushed into print to enlighten them. Few, however, attempted anything as systematic or professedly independent of inherited opinion and authority as the work that Hobbes now offered his readers. A lack of presuppositions, though, needn’t imply neutrality between contending parties, and it has not unreasonably been thought that Leviathan is an essentially royalist work. There is certainly scope for a reading that sees Hobbes’s treatise as asserting the high privileges of the sovereign monarch at the expense of the subject’s rights. In his account of the liberties of the subject, for example, Hobbes quite clearly attempts to displace the opposing view of liberty asserted by those with a sympathetic interest in classical republicanism.9 And there can be little doubt that Leviathan not only usually envisages the sovereign as a monarch, but also explicitly states that monarchy is preferable to other forms of political organization. Here, again, he tilts at republican opponents: where they might charge monarchy with producing an institutional corruption of the commonwealth’s public good by the private interests of

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the ruler, Hobbes claims that the very identity of private and public interests in the person of a monarch will make him more heedful of public concerns. ‘Where the publique and private interest are most closely united,’ he says, ‘there is the publique most advanced’ (131). Hobbes’s royalist allies, however, were quick to realize that Leviathan has some serious shortcomings as a defence of monarchy. It was not only that the express preference for monarchy coexists with a repeated recognition that sovereignty can just as legitimately take aristocratic or democratic form. Equally problematic is the Hobbesian claim that all commonwealths are to be justified as the outcome of contracts between originally free people, a claim that deprives monarchy of the originary political status on which its defenders often insisted. More locally troubling for defeated royalists are the implications that Hobbes draws from the ‘mutuall Relation between Protection and Obedience’ embodied in the commonwealth. Towards the close of chapter 21, Hobbes states that ‘the Obligation of Subjects to the Soveraign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them’ (153). Beaten and exiled, the young Charles II could clearly offer his subjects no protection at all. In which case, he could no longer justly call on their obedience, a point pretty much explicitly highlighted in Leviathan’s ‘Review and Conclusion’. At the time Hobbes was finishing his book, just such arguments were being proposed to the tender consciences of defeated royalists by the supporters of the new regime.10 No wonder, perhaps, that he quickly became persona non grata at the exiled Stuart court. So Leviathan was not meant primarily as a defence of monarchy. Hobbes makes this quite clear in the Dedication to Francis Godolphin with which the published text was prefaced. His book, he says, is like the legendary Capitoline geese, ‘those simple and unpartiall creatures in the Roman Capitol, that with their noyse defended those within it, not because they were they, but there’ (3). It is an ‘endeavour to advance the Civill Power’ (3), asserting the rights of civil government per se rather than the claims of any one of its three customary varieties. The need to reiterate those rights derived not from any widespread hostility to government as such—anarchists were thin on the ground, even at the fringes—but from the possible clouding of specifically civil power. In this light, Hobbes’s derivation of political right and obligation from the facts of human and earthly nature appears as more than a flexing of philosophical muscles. It demonstrates, rather, the viability of a properly and purely civil deduction of legitimate authority, asserting its claims against the rival accounts of government proffered and pursued by insidious and determined opponents. The identity of those opponents is made clear in the second half of Leviathan, where Hobbes turns from the anatomy of commonwealth in general to consider the particular complexities of a Christian polity. From this perspective, though, the robust consistency of his thoroughly earthly deduction of right looks more like a problem than a strength. In confining itself to materialist axioms concerning bodies in motion it failed to acknowledge the theological context for discussions of justice in which the treatise also had to function. This produces some apparently jarring effects: in chapter 12, for

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example, Hobbes offers a highly sceptical anthropology or psychology of religion, suggesting that it arises as an epiphenomenal manifestation of human cognitive and affective processes. But in the same chapter he also talks easily of ‘true religion’, unproblematically accepting that the Christian God is the true God. Such positions seem irreconcilable, so it’s no surprise that both enemies and sympathizers have claimed that Hobbes is really an atheist, and apparently conformable remarks such as these are set up for ironic disavowal.11 If we take Hobbes at his word, though, his commitment to examining the nature of the Christian commonwealth at such great length makes rather more sense. The Christian God and the Holy Scriptures cannot be dismissed as an irrelevance or disenchantedly diagnosed as error and illusion. They must instead be shown to be compatible with the justification of civil authority expounded in parts I and II. Only thus can Hobbes hope to sustain the claim that his account of civil power has implications for a commonwealth of professing Christians. This is a not inconsiderable task, made both daunting and pressing by the fact that he has to deal not just with questions of faith, but also with the institution, or institutions, of the Church. The conflicts of the 1640s admitted no separation of religion and politics, a situation which meant that ecclesiastical powers and the limits that might be placed on them were issues no political actor could, or would want to, avoid. Whether Charles I died an unrepentant tyrant or a kingly sacrifice, what brought him to that pass was his unwillingness to surrender his ecclesiastical convictions. ‘No bishop, no king’—his father’s maxim—was grimly affirmed, and indeed can be generalized: no church, no state, and vice versa. Hobbes too is obliged to engage with the complex of issues presented by the crises of his times. In part III he considers the nature of a Christian commonwealth, moving on in part IV to refute the arguments of those with opposing views of such an entity. While it has often been treated as the least important section of Leviathan by more modern readers, it certainly mattered both to Hobbes and his contemporaries. Indeed, the book’s longest chapter, 42, is entitled ‘Of Power Ecclesiastical’. The issues are tackled with gusto and not a little presumption. Though sufficiently tempted by scholastic theology to speak of God as a first cause or prime mover, Hobbes’s pronouncements on the nature of the divine are minimal. The finite can have no sure knowledge of the infinite, and all our characterizations of God as a person are in fact, pragmatically, gestures of honour appropriate to something as potent as God must clearly be. It is also appropriate to refer to God as king, lord, or master, because his omnipotence endows him with a natural right to all things that he would never need to transfer to a sovereign in order to secure his safety, unlike those of us with merely limited powers. By the same token, it makes sense for a Christian to speak of the laws of nature as God’s laws, since he created the world and endowed us with the reason that enables us to recognize them. But we do not need revelation, or the word of a prophet, to convince us of the imperative force of these laws; that can be rationally deduced from our knowledge of our condition as earthly creatures, exactly as Hobbes has shown in parts I and II. Any explanatory or justificatory resort to God here is therefore, strictly speaking, unnecessary.

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But God is not only sovereign in this sense. He has also been king of a particular people, interacting directly with his subjects as Scripture tells us. He ruled through his representatives, Moses and the prophets, and in so doing he ruled on exactly the same basis, Hobbes argues, as any other sovereign. His subjects, however, eventually sought an earthly king, and from that point onwards God ceased to be anyone’s peculiar ruler. When Christ came, Hobbes says, he spoke as teacher rather than sovereign. And although Christ promised the renewal of God’s kingdom, he did not effect it—it has not yet happened, and will not do so until Christ returns. In the meantime, we cannot be God’s subjects in a direct sense, nor even in the way that the Jews were God’s subjects in Mosaic times. The age of prophets and miracles is over, and no one should feel at all obliged to treat the claims of those who say that God is speaking or acting through them, or that they either speak for God or on his authority, with anything other than a healthy dose of scepticism. Any suggestion that such people need to be obeyed by the faithful if they wish to attain salvation is equally questionable, since salvation requires only the basic credo that Jesus is the Christ. Hobbes’s argument in these chapters is meant to rule out any suggestion that a church can legitimately instruct the subjects of an earthly sovereign to act in a way that is contrary to the interests or commands of that sovereign. In particular, Hobbes wants to prove that no church can claim it acts on an authority higher than that of the sovereign power, especially not when it claims to derive that authority from God. Only ancient Israelites were governed by such authority, and even then it conformed to the model set out by the laws of nature. For the rest of us, given that the renewed kingdom of God is yet to come, the laws of nature are all there is to go on. And those laws, as we’ve seen, stipulate obedience to the sovereign power on the basis worked out in the first half of Leviathan. So no church, and no clerics, can justly claim that their commands outweigh those of the civil authorities, nor that believers owe a primary and conflicting allegiance to them. Hobbes had a number of specific targets in view when attacking the pretensions of the clergy. Foremost among them, and most uncontroversial for his English audience, was the Roman Catholic Church. A large proportion of the lengthy chapter on ‘Power Ecclesiasticall’ is taken up with a detailed refutation of the Jesuit Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s arguments in support of the Church’s claim to temporal jurisdiction over commonwealths in which the Pope was not the civil ruler, with Hobbes insisting that no such jurisdiction exists or can exist, and that any church is by right subject to the power of the civil sovereign. Although such arguments might well have had the support of a broad spectrum of English ecclesiastical opinion, Hobbes makes sure that Leviathan also stresses implications of his position objectionable to many Protestants. His denial that bishops held their offices on any authority other than that of the civil power offended Anglicans, who generally believed not only that episcopacy was divinely authorized but also that the power of ordaining ministers was an exclusively ecclesiastical power that could be traced back to Christ himself. While Hobbes had refrained from making claims directly contrary to Anglican views in De cive, he shows no such restraint in Leviathan. The tone of some of his comments even seems deliberately

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designed to antagonize his erstwhile allies. When bishops claim to hold their positions by divine right, he says, ‘they deny to have received their authority from the Civill State; and sliely slip off the Collar of their Civill Subjection, contrary to the unity and defence of the Common-wealth’ (374). Such vigorously Erastian views also put him at odds with Presbyterians, who may have had no truck with episcopacy but were certainly not willing to countenance a vision of Church and state that subordinated the former to the latter and made ‘Christian Kings’ the ‘Supreme Pastors of their people, [with the] power to ordain what Pastors they please’ (373). Hobbes in fact considered the whole notion of an independently ecclesiastical power little more than a piece of deliberate obfuscation, declaring caustically that ‘Temporall and Spirituall Government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their Lawfull Soveraign’ (322). The object of his scorn and suspicion was a clerical hierarchy which presumed to impose on the loyalties of someone else’s subjects. Hobbes’s insistence not just on denying civil authority to a church or its leaders but also on subordinating the doctrine and worship of any church to the judgements and commands of its earthly sovereign did not mean, however, that he thought it necessary for the state to interfere with what people actually believed. Its government extended, he said, only as far as ‘mens externall actions, both in Policy and Religion’ (377). Subjects could not justly promulgate or proclaim a faith that ran counter to the religious practice prescribed by their sovereign, even if that was not Christian; their consciences, however, were their own business. At times his hostility to clerical presumption and his advocacy of freedom of conscience suggest an alignment with what has been called the ‘radical enlightenment’, and a preference for the kind of ecclesiastical Independency and free religious enquiry that flourished in the republican and protectoral 1650s.12 In a striking passage in chapter 47 he writes of three stages of clerical imposition on conscience, each one a ‘knot on Christian Liberty’ (479). These knots have now been untied—the first unravelled with the Protestant Reformation, the second when episcopacy was abolished in the English Church, and the third when Presbyterian ambitions were thwarted. ‘And so’, he says: we are reduced to the Independency of the Primitive Christians to follow Paul, or Cephas, or Apollos, every man as he liketh best: Which, if it be without contention, and without measuring the Doctrine of Christ, by our affection to the Person of his Minister . . . is perhaps the best: First because there ought to be no Power over the Consciences of men, but of the Word it selfe, working Faith in every one, not always according to the purpose of them that Plant and Water, but of God himself, that giveth the Increase: and secondly, because it is unreasonable in them, who teach there is such danger in every little Errour, to require of a man endued with Reason of his own, to follow the Reason of any other man, or of the most voices of many other men. (479–80)

Just as his account of the mutual relation between protection and obedience reinforced the post-regicide government’s claims to legitimacy, so his ecclesiastical views resembled those of prominent Independents in some, though far from all, respects. No

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wonder, then, that he should become the focus for a campaign of vilification by outraged clerics, which began as early as 1652 with Presbyterian demands for Leviathan to be burned and continued with Anglican moves to condemn him for heresy after the Restoration.13 Indeed, some recent commentators have argued that Hobbes not only found the intellectual milieu of republican London congenial, but met with a much more sympathetic and enthusiastic hearing there than he had received in Stuart and royalist circles.14 Hobbes was no doubt aware that his ‘discourse of Common-wealth’ would cause him trouble. ‘I know not how the world will receive it’, he wrote to Francis Godolphin in the Dedication, ‘nor how it may reflect on those that shall seem to favour it’ (3). He saw his task as the uncomfortable labour of picking out a passable via media between entrenched and antagonistic alternatives: ‘in a way beset with those that contend, on one side for too great Liberty, and on the other side for too much Authority, ’tis hard to passe between the points of both unwounded’ (3). Most later commentators have not unreasonably thought him rather too partial to the claims of authority, and subsequent philosophers have found ways to mitigate the starkness of the choice between these two extremes. But Hobbes’s uncompromising advocacy of the rights of the civil power ought perhaps to be understood in the light of this comment as more of an attempt to clip ecclesiastical wings than a justification of the overweening state, written at a time when, in Hobbes’s view, the claims to political authority made by meddling churchmen had plunged not just the Stuart kingdoms but much of Europe into uncivil conflict. Indeed, his famous definition of the commonwealth as ‘that great Leviathan, or rather (to speake more reverently) . . . that Mortall God ’ (120) is not without irony: while we tend to read this, not unreasonably, as a magnification or deification of state power, it is just as surely an insistence on its vulnerability. ‘Though Soveraignty, in the intention of them that make it, be immortall’, he writes in chapter 21, ‘yet it is in its own nature, not only subject to violent death, by forreign war; but also, through the ignorance, and passions of men, it hath in it, from the very institution, many seeds of a naturall mortality, by Intestine Discord’ (153). In the fall of the Stuart monarchies Hobbes and his compatriots could see a vivid contemporary instance of this mortality. Unsurprisingly, then, the quotation from the Book of Job on the engraved title page also speaks of both the power and vulnerability of the civil realm. ‘Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei [There is no power on earth to be compared to him]’ obviously refers to the sovereign commonwealth, but this apparent boast also recalls the central lesson of the story from which it is taken. As Hobbes himself notes in chapter 31, Job’s questioning of his fate elicits a stark justification from God ‘by arguments drawn from his power’ (247), and it is in the course of this justification that God refers to the great Leviathan. The evocation of the monster comes in a response to Job intended to show, Hobbes claims, that ‘the Right of Afflicting men at his pleasure, belongeth Naturally to God Almighty; not as Creator, and Gracious; but as Omnipotent’ (247). The all-too-common sufferings of the just and the triumphs of the wicked are oblique reminders of the sublimity of divine omnipotence, and any attempt to invest the civil power with something of that sublimity by invoking the figure of the

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Leviathan also recalls its weakness in comparison to divine majesty. In a world afflicted by the miseries of all-pervading war, though, the mighty but mortal commonwealth provides the only chance and necessary condition of peace and justice. Hobbes hoped his ‘civil science’ would bring his contemporaries to a clearer view of the perils of their situation, and equip them with the intellectual means to find safety within it.

NOTES 1. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 343. 2. The epithet appears to have been first coined by the author of The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury: or, Thomas Hobbes in his Proper Colours. 3. Parkin, ‘The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, 444. 4. See e.g. Runciman, Great Books, Bad Arguments. 5. Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, 60. Subsequent page references are given parenthetically in the text. 6. Hobbes, On the Citizen [De cive], ed. and trans. Tuck and Silverthorne, 27. 7. Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, 200. See also Brown, ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page’, 28–9. 8. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, iii: The Correspondence, trans. Cottingham et al., 230–1. See Sommerville, Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context, 41, and Rogers, ‘Hobbes and his Contemporaries’, 419–20. 9. Skinner, Hobbes and Republican Liberty, esp. 124–77. 10. The literature on Hobbes’s relation to these debates is extensive. Important contributions include Skinner, ‘The Context of Hobbes’s Theory of Political Obligation’, and ‘Conquest and Consent: Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy’, in Skinner, Visions of Politics, iii. 264–86 and 287–307; Burgess, ‘Usurpation, Obligation and Obedience’; id., ‘Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan’; Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 1–10, 115–59; and Condren, Argument and Authority, 290–314. 11. See the discussion of this issue in e.g. Jesseph, ‘Hobbes’s Atheism’, and Curley, ‘“I durst not write so boldly”’, 497–594. 12. Curley, ‘Hobbes and the Cause of Religious Toleration’, 321, and Parkin, ‘The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, 453. See also Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Aspects of Hobbes, 457–545. 13. Collins, ‘Silencing Thomas Hobbes’, 478–99. 14. This claim has been made most strikingly in Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. See also Parkin, ‘The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, 444–7.

WORKS CITED Anon. The True Effigies of the Monster of Malmesbury: or, Thomas Hobbes in his Proper Colours. London, 1680.

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Brown, Keith. ‘The Artist of the Leviathan Title-Page’. British Library Journal 4 (1978), 28–9. Burgess, Glenn. ‘Contexts for the Writing and Publication of Hobbes’s Leviathan’. History of Political Thought 11 (1990), 675–702. ——. ‘Usurpation, Obligation and Obedience in the Thought of the Engagement Controversy’. Historical Journal 29 (1986), 515–36. Collins, Jeffrey. The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ——. ‘Silencing Thomas Hobbes: The Presbyterians and Leviathan’, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 478–99. Condren, Conal. Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Curley, Edwin. ‘“I durst not write so boldly” or, How to Read Hobbes’s Theological-Political Treatise’, in Daniela Bostrenghi (ed.), Hobbes e Spinoza: Scienza e politica. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1992, 497–594. ——. ‘Hobbes and the Cause of Religious Toleration’, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 309–36. Descartes, Rene´. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, iii: The Correspondence, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ——. On the Citizen [De cive], ed. Richard Tuck and trans. Michael Silverthorne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Jesseph, Douglas. ‘Hobbes’s Atheism’. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 26 (2002), 140–66. Malcolm, Noel (ed.). Aspects of Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ——. ‘Hobbes and the European Republic of Letters’, in Malcolm Noel (ed.), Aspects of Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 453–545. Parkin, Jon. ‘The Reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan’, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 441–59. Rogers, G. A. ‘Hobbes and his Contemporaries’, in Patricia Springborg (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 413–40. Runciman, W. G. Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan and The Communist Manifesto. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Skinner, Quentin. Visions of Politics. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ——. Hobbes and Republican Liberty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Somerville, Johann. Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

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HENRY VAUGHAN AND THOMAS VAUGHAN Welsh Anglicanism, ‘Chymick’, and the English Revolution ....................................................................................................... NIGEL SMITH

Even the most spiritual and inward poems in Silex Scintillans are charged with counter-revolutionary-energy. (Stevie Davies, Henry Vaughan)

I picture a man of middling stature walking on a barren Welsh hillside in the Brecknock Beacon country somewhat to the west of the border with England. It is raining and the wind blows; visibility is poor. Within the mind of this figure, the cosmos whirls around and seems about to crash. ‘Let me out of this place! Let me go there. Let me be with my Lord!’, he cries. It’s not King Lear then, but Henry Vaughan, lawyer, soldier, physician, and poet. At some point in the later 1640s, Henry Vaughan, a royalist officer, must have ridden from battle, perhaps no more than a local siege or even a skirmish, but perhaps something larger and more devastating, and, sickened with the bloodshed that he had witnessed, in fairly certain knowledge that the cause was lost, gave up the cause. It must have been crushingly hard and depressing for the young lawyer, recently married, and fully respectful of his family’s historic role as guardians of royal authority and all it stood for in south Wales, and more precisely the mountainous Brecon region, bisected by the river Usk, now a designated national park, located to the north of what would become the heavily industrialized, predominantly English-speaking region of south Wales. We know that the Vaughans were native Welsh speakers; English was their second language. The young lawyer had had literary ambitions, even to the extent of publishing a volume of poems in 1646, a volume of, it is fair to say, indifferent amorous Cavalier

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verse, a short retirement poem, and a translation of Juvenal’s tenth satire. He confessed his debt to Ben Jonson and the Tribe of Ben, the poetry scene that he would have witnessed during his time at the Inns of Court in London (although Jonson himself had died in 1637, and it is thought Vaughan did not arrive in London until c.1640).1 In splendid rural retirement, yet busy employment, and preoccupied with raising a young family, Vaughan now constructed himself as a regional poet, the voice of Anglo-Welsh dignity, in whose verse the greatness of English literary virtue (Thomas Randolph’s name is added to that of Jonson in another poem; Sidney would be added in a poem published in 1651 but probably written in the late 1640s2) is given new life through the poet’s living engagement with the unspoiled presence of Welsh nature, not least the river Usk itself. He would come to see himself as a British bard, writing in English, but in touch with that ancient, venerable, and prophetic tradition of Welsh verse.3 In 1694, the year before his death, he wrote to his kinsman the biographer John Aubrey: As to the later Bards, who were no such men, butt had a societie & some rules & orders among themselves: & several sorts of measures & a kind of Lyric poetrie: wch are all sett down exactly In the learned John David Rhees, or Rhesus his welch, or British grammer: you shall have there (in the later end of his book) a most curious Account of them. This vein of poetrie they called Awen, which in their language signifies as much as Raptus, or a poetic furor; & (in truth) as many of them as I have conversed with are (as I may say) gifted or inspired with it.4

That ‘Raptus’ is one of the qualities of Vaughan’s most famous verse, and in the same letter he reported learning years before from a now deceased but reliable acquaintance that: In his time, there was a young lad father & motherless, & soe very poor that he was forced to beg; butt att last was taken vp by a rich man, that kept a great stock of sheep vpon the mountains not far from the place where I now dwell, who cloathed him & sent him into the mountains to keep his sheep. There in Summer time following the sheep & looking to their lambs, he fell into a deep sleep; In wch he dreamt, that he saw a beautifull young man with a garland of green leafs vpon his head, & an hawk vpon his fist: with a quiver full of Arrows att his back, coming towards him (whistling several measures or tunes all the way) & att last lett the hawk fly att him, wch (he dreamt) gott into his mouth & inward parts, & suddenly awaked in a great fear & consternation: butt possessed with such a vein, or gift of poetrie, that he left the sheep & went about the Countrey, making songs vpon all occasions, and came to be the most famous Bard in all the Countrey in his time.5

Although he confessed that it was very hard to learn about the ancient Welsh bards because they had committed none of their customs to writing, Vaughan believed he was part of this lineage. He saw the poet who most influenced him, George Herbert, also from an Anglo-Welsh gentry family, in similar terms. But the dump truck of the Civil Wars cut right through this bardic parkland: right across it. Not only do we have elegies on fallen soldiers, such as the ‘Elegy on the Death of Mr. R.W. Slain in the Late Unfortunate Differences at Rowton Heath, near Chester, 1645’, or ‘An Elegy on the Death of Mr R. Hall, slain at Pontefract, 1648’, but also evidence that Vaughan had himself seen action at Rowton Heath, even though he

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would later insist that he had spilled no innocent blood.6 His twin brother Thomas was taken prisoner, while Henry was among the royalists who retreated to Beeston Castle, and he was in the castle when it surrendered nine months later. Vaughan’s youngest brother William died in 1648, possibly from wounds incurred in the Second Civil War: he is the subject of several elegies by Henry. He signed his second volume of poetry, Olor Iscanus (1651), ‘Henry Vaughan Silurist’ after the Silures, the ancient British tribe native to Brecon, who resisted Roman incursions, and the Romans were clearly meant to represent the parliamentarians and Puritans, the alleged middling-sort victors who displaced the ruling royalist gentry in southern Wales. The wars also stopped Vaughan from publishing: nothing he wrote in the later 1640s appeared before 1650 or 1651, and the victory of Parliament pitched him into a world of adversity. After the fighting he no longer practised law, but took up medicine. (Perhaps he was now unwelcome in the new local jurisdiction; he was also responding to the deprivations of the war, and the need to increase his income in light of general family poverty.) Vaughan’s twin brother Thomas, alchemist and divine, was ejected from his living at Llansantffraed in 1650, and Vaughan himself lost his home. He may be considered part of a group of Welsh royalist poets, most of them clergymen, and all of these ejected from their livings under the terms of the Committee for the Propagation of the Gospel.7 It is not difficult to see in the poetry how this sensitive and earnest man suffered a considerable depression, and he was not alone to have so suffered in these turbulent decades.8 What is remarkable is how he kept up a literary output of quality, eight works in eleven years, during this time of adversity, and most of them clearly outspoken in their religious and political preferences. It has been noted that this was courageous.9 Yet these grim experiences ultimately made Vaughan a great poet, transcending the mediocrity that had marked his previous verse. At some point in the late 1640s, he experienced some kind of conversion. The depression he suffered in these years was accompanied by a physical illness, and a near-death encounter brought about a conversion in Vaughan. Shortly afterwards came the intense writing of sacred verse that would emerge as Silex scintillans, the most important collection of devotional verse to be published in the Civil War and Interregnum period. Through a very close engagement with the writing of George Herbert, in particular The Temple (1633), the most significant collection of devotional verse in the entire century, Vaughan remade himself as a high-order holy poet. It is the extraordinary versatility and malleability provided by the interspersed use of shorter lines, together with the intricately arranged stanzas of various line lengths, that frees Vaughan from longer and less variegated forms: 1. A Ward, and still in bonds, one day I stole abroad, It was high-spring, and all the way Primros’d, and hung with shade;

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Yet, was it frost within, And surly winds Blasted my infant buds, and sinne Like Clouds eclips’d my mind. 2. Storm’d thus; I straight perceiv’d my spring Meere stage and show; My walke a monstrous, mountain’d thing Rough-cast with Rocks, and snow; And as a Pilgrim’s Eye, Far from reliefe, Measures the melancholy skye, Then drops, and rains for griefe: 3. So sigh’d I upwards still, at last ’Twixt steps, and falls I reach’d the pinacle, where plac’d I found a paire of scales, I tooke them up and layd In th’one late paines; The other smoake, and pleasures weigh’d But prov’d the heavier grains; (‘Regeneration’, ll. 1–24)

The result is a visionary poetry of exceptional quality. One can feel the presence of Herbert (for instance in the whispering divine voice that concludes this poem (l. 80), or the sense of false freedom expressed in the first two lines), but the further sense of seeing a reality that is both real and symbolic and beyond this world is quite remarkable and distinctively Vaughan: 9. It was a banke of flowers, where I descried (Though ’twas mid-day,) Some fast asleepe, others broad-eyed And taking in the Ray, Here musing long, I heard A rushing wind Which still increas’d, but whence it stirr’d No where I could not find; (‘Regeneration’, ll. 65–72)

The sense of apocalypse is very real: When through the North a fire shall rush And rowle into the East,

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And like a fiery torrent brush And sweepe up South, and West, When all shall streame, and lighten round And with surprizing flames Both stars, and Elements confound And quite blot out their names. (‘Day of Judgement’, ll. 1–8)

But throughout this intensity, the status of the song lyric as a higher form of poetry, a bridge to the world beyond, is very clear. ‘But as I urg’d thus, and writ down | What pleasures should my Journey crown . . . Me thought I heard one singing thus’: Leave, leave, thy gadding thoughts; Who Pores and spies Still out of Doores descries Within them nought. The skinne, and shell of things Though faire, are not Thy wish, nor pray’r but got By meer Despair of wings. (‘The Search’, ll. 67–8, 74–87)

Oh how he would like some Welsh angel wings. Like so many poems in this profoundly biblical volume, the poem ends with some Scripture: in this case two verses from Acts (17: 27–28). The poems on key biblical subjects are fine enough, but the ones that relate to personal matters of salvation (e.g. ‘The Call’) are even more impressive and moving; a death wish, in order to become part of heaven, surfaces several times in the collection. So too there is an emphasis upon the verities taught by childhood innocence (‘When on some gilded cloud, or flower, | My gazing soul would dwell an hour’; ‘Quickly would I make my path even, | And by meer playing go to Heaven’ (‘Childe-hood’, ll. 7–8)), often seen as a precursor of Romantic sensibility.10 How can this verse be related to the Civil Wars and the revolution that followed it? Silex scintillans might have emerged from the conflict, but it does not directly address revolutionary events; it wants to transcend them. Natural beauty, alchemical renewal, and the resurrection of the dead become ways in which Vaughan is able to imagine escape from the dullness and pain of this world. This desire to leave the context of the wars behind was recognized in older Vaughan criticism, but as Alan Rudrum says, ‘it is a spiritual response to a political situation’, and hence a manifestation in the poetry of hidden potentiality that will eventually result in cultural renewal: a revival of

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royalism.11 The prose works as well as the poetry that Vaughan produced in these difficult years functioned as a replacement for the banned Book of Common Prayer and indeed for the proscribed Church of England, which had been effectively abolished, its governing bishops imprisoned, outlawed, and in exile. Nature became the source of Vaughan’s sacraments in these circumstances, his books part of the means by which a secret Anglicanism prevailed in Wales, and through the country, since the books were published in London. The poet is still much in charge of his vision, so that the fusion of texts from Isa. 30: 26, Ps. 104: 2, Job 37: 11–12, and Cant. 4: 16 fashions a stanza that may be interpreted as an image of the living Church repairing the ravages of winter, even as it looks as authentically spontaneous as a recorded dream vision. ‘Regeneration’ works brilliantly by bringing us to the edge of mystical experience but never quite into it and beyond this world, and never in fact away from a felt presence of God, though not a mystical one, in this example in the presence of the wind: It was a banke of flowers, where I descried, (Though ’twas mid-day,) Some fast asleepe, others broad-eyed And taking in the Ray Here musing long, I heard A rushing wind Which still increas’d, but whence it stirr’d Nowhere I could not find; I turn’d me round, and to each shade Dispatch’d an Eye, To see, if any leafe had made Least motion, or Reply, But while I listning sought My mind to ease By knowing, where ’twas, or where not, It whisper’d; Where I please. Lord, then said I, On me one breath, And let me die before my death!

Likewise in Vaughan’s ‘The World’, a visionary flight above earthly achievement is compromised by reflection on the state of the universe: I saw Eternity the other night Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years Driv’n by the spheres Like a vast shadow mov’d, In which the world And all her train were hurl’d; (ll. 1–7)

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Yet there is in fact no Gelassenheit, no abandonment of ego. The ego is finding some good flying experience, and sustaining revelation. In the middle of it is Christ the King, but Vaughan’s way of describing him sometimes makes the identity of Jesus fuse unmistakably with that of Charles I:12 If those bright joys he singly sheds On thee, were all met in one Crown, Both Sun and Stars would hide their heads; And Moons, though full, would get them down. (‘The Seed Growing Secretly’, ll. 29–32)

In the second part of Silex scintillans, not published until 1655, the presence of the Civil War and the Commonwealth returns more discernibly, framing the astonishing vision of the afterlife in ‘Ascension-Day’ with reference to the memory of lost dear ones, lost, it is implied, in the wars (‘They are all gone into the word of light!’, ll. 1–4), and the Puritans, with Wales in their sure grip, the dark forces we can glimpse in oblique references: the ‘Wolves’ and not the ‘Sheep’ in ‘White Sunday’, and the ‘state’ (i.e. not merely the fallen human condition but for Vaughan the abhorred ‘free state’; the poem marks a feast day, Whitsun, the Ascension, banned along with the church calendar’s other holy days by legislation of 1645) that ‘no redresse’ admits. ‘The Proffer’ is a full-blown attack on a flyblown world, with the Puritans presented as insects: ‘black parasites’ (1 n. 1). F. E. Hutchinson’s 1947 biography suggested that the poem was written on the occasion of Vaughan’s refusing a position in the Commonwealth administration; as Alan Rudrum and others have concurred, it is hard to disagree.13 It’s a little difficult to unwrap each reference without scholarly help, but the animus in the poetry is clear: No, No; I am not he; Go seek elsewhere. I skill not your fine tinsel, and false hair, Your Sorcery, And smooth seducements: I’le not stuff my story With your Commonwealth and glory. (‘The Proffer’, ll. 31–7)

In ‘The Constellation’, the zeal of the Puritans is presented as merely fashionable bigotry: ‘The children chase the mother, and would heal | The wounds they give, by crying, zeale’ The response focuses on the blood and tears that this costs, and what’s worse: ‘by our lusts disord’red into wars, | Our guides prove wandring stars’ (ll. 39–40, 45–6). We might well be able to find earlier and similar inferences. In the preface to the first, 1650, part of Silex scintillans, Herbert’s followers are derided for having more ‘fashion’ than ‘force’, and this is connected to a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid, II.724, ‘Sed non passibus aequis’ (but with steps that match not his).14 The reference is to Aeneas’ son Ascanius, whose steps do not match those of his father. What does the future hold after the destruction of Troy and where the young walk not with the confidence and strength of their parents? Salome, ‘The Daughter of Herodias’, delivers the head of John

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the Baptist; in his poem on this subject, Vaughan noted an extra-biblical account of Nikephorus Kallistos for l. 9 in which she was decapitated by falling through ice on a frozen river. As Jonathan Post sees it, this is a double decapitation, predicting the future one that will punish the Puritans for their bloody imposture.15 Indeed, the entire Silex scintillans is an attempt at a redirected Herbertian poetics, with a particular emphasis on rhyme and other aspects of prosody; it is no new thing to say this. Vaughan expects nothing less than the greatest sympathy for this forceful visionary poetry, and as a readerly experience this is how we are meant to take the poems. These moments of ‘leading’ and ‘turning’ should be seen as a quickening of spirit in the sinful believer, even in ‘The Daughter of Herodias’. But the poetry, in the context of royalist defeat, and to Vaughan the unwelcome presence of the Commonwealth government and church reforms, offers a decidedly royalist and Anglican vision as part of this ‘turning’. We should not see Vaughan here as seeking a place in the bestseller list, howsoever he had once made use of London’s most impressive (and royalist) poetry publisher, Humphrey Moseley. He was a dedicated Anglican-royalistphysician and Herbert’s The Temple, like Silex scintillans, was understood to be a poetic representative of the way the true Church works on mankind: Herbert’s poetry is surprisingly full of references to parish and church structures, and was invoked by some at this time and to this effect.16 Henry Vaughan follows suit in the context of the Commonwealth years. It has been argued that the crisis of the late 1640s induced in Vaughan the exclusively superior poetry of Silex scintillans, but that cannot quite be true since there is other less distinctive verse from these years that he reserved for later publication in Thalia rediviva (1678): grimly royalist verse letters.17 The fact is that he knew the worth of his rapturous poetry and wanted it to have the greatest impact in its own time without adulteration by other kinds of poetry. Now Vaughan’s activities, and those of his brother too, were surrounded by a culture of Welsh and Anglo-Welsh Puritanism that was as rooted in the Bible as Silex scintillans. Morgan Llwyd, certainly at times a Fifth Monarchist as well as an Independent minister, is now regarded as the finest Welsh-language prose writer of the seventeenth century, and an impressive poet to boot.18 No less a hymn-writer and a more influential figure in Puritanism was Vavasor Powell, himself directly associated in royalist verse with the armed saints who came to Breconshire.19 While these authors shared with Vaughan an indebtedness to apocalyptic imagery, they largely parted company on the meaning of the millennium. Where the Fifth Monarchists expected an imminent return of Jesus as an earthly king, Vaughan’s poetry insists that while we can glimpse the reality of that better holy space and time, and the imagery of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is there to help us apprehend it, the Fifth Monarchist millennium is not the solution. The apocalypse will come, and let it come quickly, but when it happens it will be immediate judgement and the end of things without a millennium. This point is forcefully made by Philip West in his detailed and persuasive reading of Vaughan’s pervasive use of the Bible in Silex scintillans, and it is true for nearly all of Vaughan’s poems.20 However, there are exceptions, such as ‘The Jews’, which unmistakably refers to a time of the returned

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messiah: ‘When the fair year | Of your deliverer comes’ (ll. 1–2).21 The Bible, and the complexity of its interpretation among Protestants, ensured that partisan enemies in Church and state agreed as well as disagreed on its meaning. Furthermore, and in another way, in stressing the Bible, West silences the very real presence in Vaughan of hermetic ideals. Llwyd and the Vaughans in fact shared an interest in the Lusatian mystic Jacob Boehme, whose works circulated in English translation for the first time between 1644 and 1661, and enjoyed much influence.22 Boehme’s mysticism can be read in many different ways and certainly there were royalists as well as Commonwealth Behmenists (given how some of the English Behmenists were treated in the 1650s, it would not be surprising to find all of them royalists but it is in fact not so).23 The explanation of the Vaughan brothers’ interest in Boehme, Hermeticism, and alchemy, both in the practical and contemplative senses, goes back to the appearance of the Rosicrucian texts earlier in the century. Several of them were translated by Thomas Vaughan. The Rosicrucian texts emerged from a small elite within the German Protestant states at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War.24 Alchemy and other occult arts were offered as a holistic solution to the horrors of mass destruction, warfare, and disease that were sweeping through the German-speaking world. These arts would redeem the lost world and eventually produce a near heaven upon earth. Healthcare would be part of this, and so it is no surprise to find Vaughan fairly early in his medical career translating Paracelsian texts: Henry Nollius’ Hermetick Physick (1655) and the same author’s The Chymists Key (1657). Several of the poems have been seen to embody Hermetic ideas, not least ‘Cock-Crowing’ with its emphasis on the operation of the empowering ‘seed’, the ‘glance’ of divine light, of God’s intelligence, embedded in the natural world: Father of lights! what sunnie seed, What glance of day hast Thou confined Into this bird? To all the breed This busie Ray Thou hast assign’d; Their magnetisme works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light. Their eyes watch for the morning hue; Their little grain, expelling night, So shines and sings as if it knew The path unto the house of light. It seems their candle, howe’er done, Was tinn’d and lighted at the sunne. If such a tincture, such a touch, So firm a longing can impowre, Shall Thy own image think it much To watch for Thy appearing hour? If a meer blast so fill the sail, Shall not the breath of God prevail?

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The same might be said for ‘The Seed Growing Secretly’. Are the same principles at work in ll. 25–9 in this poem, or is the subject merely nature? Dear, secret Greenness! nurst below Tempests and winds, and winter-nights, Vex not, that but one sees thee grow, That One made all these lesser lights.

In ‘The Stone’, ll. 38–41, the stones upon which men walk are seen as alive, part of an inherently and extensively animated nature, and witness to the sins of those who walk upon them. Vaughan’s prose treatises of the early 1650s are usually overlooked, but it is clear that both the translations and the original works are consistent with the project of Silex scintillans and how Vaughan saw his moment in history. Plutarchus’ ‘Of the Benefit wee may get by our Enemies’ (1651) speaks for itself, and on the first page, Vaughan describes the need for a prince ‘to sway a Common-wealth burthen’d with a various and vicious multitude’.25 The treatise proceeds to show how many different kinds of adversity, some described in lurid detail, may be turned to advantage. It’s also impossible to avoid the sense in the text of living in an alien and hostile culture: ‘As Vultures take from far the s[c]ent of corrupt carcasses, and flock to them, but passe by the sound and untainted bodies; so the diseased and vitious parts of our lives and affections are alwaies resented by our enemies, they fly upon our soares, handle them continuously, and love to see them bleed afresh.’26 These conditions, and a sharp awareness of them, produce in us, says Vaughan’s translation, a ‘kind of virtuous ardour, and a steadfast resolution to led a life blameless, and incalumniable’. Antonio de Guevara’s The Praise and Happinesse of the Countrie-Life is also an obvious choice for Vaughan, chiming with the engraved frontispiece to Olor Iscanus, with bees busily at work among the trees and flowers and the swan swimming on the river Usk. The preferred royalist theme of retirement is met. The swan symbolizes self-transformation, intuition, sensitivity, the soul, light, love, beauty, perfection, grace, the love of poetry, harmony, and wisdom; swans were also under crown protection. Olor Iscanus: the swan of Usk. Vaughan is describing both himself and his project. Swans of course were held to sing beautifully just before they died.27 The quoting of poetry in a prose treatise is common in this period, but Vaughan is particularly attracted to it. Just as his poetry follows Herbert in the respect that it is hymnodic, so he translates at the start of the ‘Of the Diseases of the Mind, etc.’ an anonymous ancient hymn to health, and a long paragraph follows in which the hymn is discussed: body, soul, hymn, and poet are the italicized words that stand out. His own author in The Mount of Olives: or, Solitary Devotions (1652), this tendency is extended to include in the second part, ‘Man in Darkness, or A Discourse of Death’, indented lines from Herbert, Seneca, Petronius, Juvenal, Paulinus, the Welsh poet Aneurin, Marcellus Palingenius, Manilius, Lucan, Petrarch, and more significantly some even longer verses that Vaughan assumed to be ancient hymns, a long passage from Virgil’s Georgics, Bk. IV, and George Herbert again. The first part is arranged as a series of

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prayers, admonitions, and meditations: in other words, sacred prose poetry, marked in its use of the vocative. Most striking are the ‘Ejaculations’, direct, sentence- or twosentence-long calls to God meant to be said on the hour, its quarters and halves when the clock chimes sound.28 The sense of rapture is present in the prose of Anselm’s Man in Glory, appended to The Mount of Olives. The greatest sense of contact with this past world, in which true holiness and poetry, the only way to address God properly, went hand in hand, is in Primitive Holiness, Set Forth in the Life of Blessed Paulinus, the Most Reverend, and Learned Bishop of Nola (1654). Here a considerable body of early Christian verse is quoted, some of it yet to be identified, suited to this converted and beatified Roman senator who lived from 353 to 431. There is a strong presence of Ausonius (a favourite among the royalist poets of the Stanley circle), who was Paulinus’ tutor in Bordeaux, and Paulinus was a poet himself; Vaughan quotes liberally from the verse letters between the two.29 Paulinus’s own preference for seclusion, his veneration of saints, his indulgence of monasticism, the considerable sums of money he spent on the Church, and his turning away from a worldly career in imperial governance that was his by birthright sit well with Vaughan.30 Paulinus’ verse letters to Ausonius become the ideal inhabited voice for Vaughan. By contrast, Ausonius, greatly respected as a poet, accepted the invitation to teach the Emperor Valentinian’s son Gratian and was rewarded with the rank of consul. The volume ends with Vaughan’s translation of Paulinus’ poem to his wife Therasia. It is poetry that is pious rather than poetically brilliant, but the commitment to imagined self-martyrdom as the only way to venerate Christ’s atonement is noticeably very Vaughan-like: Burne me alive, with curious, skilfull paine Cut up and search each warme and breathing vaine: When all is done, death brings a quick release, And the poore mangled body sleepes in peace. Hale me to prisons, shut me up in brasse: My still free Soule from thence to God shall passé; Banish or bind me, I can be no where A stranger, nor alone; My God is there.31

Continuous with this is Vaughan’s growing professional interest in medicine, or ‘physick’ as it was known, and marked by the publication of two works by Heinrich Nolle, drawn from his Theoria philosophiae Hermeticae (Hanover, 1617), and published as Hermetical Physick (1657) and The Chymists Key (1657). Professing no partiality in the contemporary battle between Galenic and Paracelsan theories, Nollius in Vaughan’s English aims down the middle in pursuit of this goal: ‘I call them Hermetists, who observe nature in her workes, who imitate her, and use the same method as she doth, that out of nature, by the mediation of nature, and the assistance of their own judgements, they may produce and bring to light such rare effectual medicines, as will safely, speedily, and pleasantly cure, and utterly expel the most deplorable diseases.’32 The prime importance of a body pure in mind and spirit, of leading a pious and holy life, is the first step toward bodily health. This health depends upon the purity of the inner essence or ‘balsam’ within every person, and the ‘balsam’ is sustained by

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the equal and mutual sustaining of the hypostatical principles. Such sobriety, preserving the inner seed of the Hermetic tradition, might well result in extreme old age: You are to understand from this Paragraph, that seed is two-fold, Radical, and Prolific. The Radical seed, is the innate balsame of the body, which if it be advantaged with perfect digestion, will yeeld effusion, and a balsame of the same nature as it selfe. In this balsame the body lives as in his proper seed. Hence Anonymus Leschus, Tract. 7. instructs us, that so long as there is seed in the body, it lives; but the seed being consumed, the body dies. It is no wonder then, that so many have perished by this intemperance, who going to bed in a vegetous, perfect health, were found dead next morning.33

It is not hard to imagine Puritanism appearing as a kind of bodily disorder to Vaughan. The younger Vaughan had objected to the influx into Breconshire of the oddly costumed (and at this point largely English) functionaries after the defeat of Charles I: ‘Midst these the Cross looks sad, and in the Shire- | Hall furs of an old Saxon Fox appear, | With brotherly ruffs and beards, and a strange sight | Of high monumental hats ta’en at the fight | Of Eighty-eight.’34 The older Vaughan, informed now by a greater immersion in medical knowledge, could quite see why his religious enemies were described as a disease in the kingdom: in hermetic terms, they literally were. Vaughan’s medical outlook sits well with the chemical work of his twin brother Thomas, no less an ardent royalist, and no less a Welsh speaker by birth. Thomas Vaughan was the vicar of Llansantffraed and was, as we have seen, ejected in 1650. But before then his trajectory was as academic as his brother’s was legal. By Henry’s testimony Thomas progressed in ten years from being an undergraduate at Jesus College to being a fellow. Service as a captain in the King’s army, and imprisonment after the battle at Rowton Heath, preceded his presentation to the living at Llansantffraed. It is not clear how much time Thomas spent in Wales as incumbent, since he is known to have been resident in Oxford at least until 1648, and after his ejection, if not before, he had returned to Oxford where he busied himself with chemical experiments. At some point during the climax of the revolution, perhaps as early as 1648, he took his laboratory to London, and established two associations, one with Thomas Henshaw, the other with Sir Robert Moray, both built consciously on utopian principles (Rosicrucian associations creep back in here), in order to conduct chemical experiments in the name of the ‘great instauration’ proclaimed by Sir Francis Bacon. Although the association with Moray would mean that Thomas spent his last days under the patronage of Charles II (he died in a laboratory accident in 1666), the Baconian and Hartlibian allegiances of his work put him in the company in the 1650s of some of the radical Puritans with similar alchemical interests. This explains why Samuel Butler found it so easy to place Thomas Vaughan in the company of Puritans satirized in his Characters and Hudibras (1664). Remarkably, his assistant was not his apprentice but his wife Rebecca, who figures extensively both literally and in dream visions in his alchemical notebook. She was, as its editor argues, both ‘research partner and idealized muse’.35 This is fascinating enough, and surely a departure point for further research, but the two points worth making here are that Thomas Vaughan’s language of experiment and occult theory are as worthy of analysis as his brother’s poetry, and indeed live alongside it:

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The Anima though in some sence active, yet is she not so essentially, but a meer Instrumentall Agent, For she is guided in her Operations by a Spirituall Metaphysicall Graine, a Seed or Glance of Light, simple, and without any Mixture descending from the first Father of Lights. For though his full-ey’d Love shines on nothing but Man, yet every thing in the World is in some measure directed for his Preservation by a spice or touch of the first Intellect. This is partly confirmed by the Habitation and Residence of God: For he is seated above all his Creatures, to hatch as it were, and cherish them with living Eternall Influences which daily and hourely proceed from him. Hence he is call’d of the Cabalists Cether, and it answers to Parmenides his Corona Ignea, which he plac’d above all the Visible spheares. This Flux of Immateriall powers, Christ himself, in whom the Fullnesse of the Godhead resided, confirm’d, and acknowledged in the Flesh: For when the diseased touch’d his Garment, though the prease was great, he questioned who it was, adding this Reason, I perceive (said he) that vertue is gone out of me.36

Secondly, Thomas’s defence of the Rosicrucian goals and protocols, his disputes with other chemists like George Starkey, or philosophers like Henry More, would have him labelled as an enthusiast in the 1650s, precisely the company he would have been horrified to keep. The Rosicrucian translations of 1652 were published by Giles Calvert, the great disseminator of radical books and patron of the religious radicals; another publisher of his own works with radical connections was Humphrey Blunden.37 But through the revolution in medical thought brought about by Paracelsus, Thomas Vaughan was interested in mastering the elements in order to produce new and effective medical remedies. In this respect again, his interests line up with his brother’s professional knowledge. Silex scintillans part I was published in 1650 by Humphrey Blunden, and both parts in 1655 by Lodowick Lloyd, another specialist in arcane books and also very probably a Welshman. There’s no doubt that the book represented Henry Vaughan’s royalist spiritual poetics, and that it has been rightly judged to be the pinnacle of his literary achievement. That this poetry is a response to a personal and national (or international) crisis, that it is making sense of a trauma, only makes it more rather than less interesting. That it could not help but partake of the language of its religious and political enemies, and that this was more fully the case with the work and writing of his twin brother Thomas, tells us even more about the ideological and linguistic territory of the English, or should we say the British Revolution. That this territory privileged poetry and the language of hermeticism and alchemy, as well as the heritage of both the Bible, the early Church, and the mysterious origins of Welsh-language poetry, is a prospect at which to marvel, and an invitation for further enquiry.

NOTES 1. Vaughan, ‘A Rhapsodie. Occasionally written upon a meeting with some of his friends at the Globe Taverne, in a Chamber painted over head with a Cloudy Skie, and some few dispersed Starres, and on the sides with Land-scapes, Hills, Shepheards, and Sheep’.

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2. ‘ To my Ingenuous Friend, R.W.’, ll. 29–33; ‘To the River Isca’, l. 8 (the preceding lines also add Orpheus, Petrarch, and Ausonius as poetic authorities). 3. See the outstanding discussion in Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 205–9. 4. Henry Vaughan to John Aubrey, 9 October 1694, in Vaughan, Works, ed. Martin, 696. 5. Ibid. 6. For further examples and interpretation, see Rudrum, ‘Royalist Lyric’ 7. Rudrum, ‘Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence’. 8. See e.g. Fox, The Journal, ed. Smith. 9. Rudrum, ‘Resistance, Collaboration and Silence’, 102–3. 10. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan, 24–5. 11. Rudrum, ‘Royalist Lyric’, 191. 12. See also the discussion in West, Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintillans, 196. 13. Hutchinson, Henry Vaughan, 125; Vaughan, Complete Poems, ed. Rudrum, 595. 14. Vaughan, Works, ed. Martin, 391. 15. Post, ‘Civil War Cleavage’. 16. See Smith, ‘George Herbert in Defence of Antinomianism’. 17. Davies, Henry Vaughan, 25–6; in Thalia rediviva, see e.g. ‘To his Learned Friend and Loyal Fellow-Prisoner, Thomas Powell of Cant., Doctor of Divinity’ and ‘The King Disguis’d’. 18. See Llwyd, Jones, and Owen, Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd o Wynedd; Nuttall, The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660; Thomas, Morgan Llwyd. Part of Llwyd’s ‘The Summer’ is anthologized in Norbrook (ed.), The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1642, 602–4. 19. See Jones, ‘The Life, Work, and Thought of Vavasor Powell (1617–1670)’; Post, Henry Vaughan, 122–3, 125, 127, 130, 132, 139; Smith, Literature and Revolution, 257, 271, 275. 20. West, Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintillans, 194. 21. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 269; Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 490 n. 64. 22. See Hutin, Les Disciples anglais de Jacob Bhme; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, ch. 3; Gibbons, Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought; Hessayon, ‘Gold tried in the fire’; Poole, ‘Naming, Paradise Lost, and the Gendered Discourse’. 23. The case in point being John Pordage, perhaps the first significant English follower of Boehme, patron of radical Puritans, but ejected in 1654: see Brod, ‘A Radical Network in the English Revolution’; id., ‘The Seeker Culture of the Thames Valley’, 1–10. 24. See Åkerman, Rose Cross over the Baltic; Dickson, The Tessera of Antilia. 25. Vaughan, Works, ed. Martin, 98. 26. Ibid. 99. 27. See Edwards, ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals’. 28. See Clarke, ‘George Herbert’s House of Pleasure?’ 29. The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. Walsh. 30. See Conybeare, Paulinus Noster; Lehmann, Paulinus Nolanus und die Basilica Nova. 31. Vaughan, Works, ed. Martin, 384–5. 32. Ibid. 550. 33. Ibid. 558. 34. ‘To his retired friend, an Invitation to Brecknock’, ll. 21–5. 35. BL MS Sloane, 1741; Thomas and Rebecca Vaughan, Aqua vitae, non vitis (British Library MS, Sloane 1741). 36. ‘Eugenius Philalethes’ [Thomas Vaughan], Anima magica abscondita or a Discourse of the Universall Spirit of Nature, 13–14. Published by Humphrey Blunden. 37. See ‘Eugenius Philalethes’, The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R: C:.

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WORKS CITED A˚kerman, Susanna. Rose Cross over the Baltic: The Spread of Rosicrucianism in Northern Europe. Leiden: Brill, 1998. British Library. MS Sloane, 1741. London. Brod, Manfred. ‘A Radical Network in the English Revolution: John Pordage and his Circle, 1646–54’. HER 119.484 (2004), 1230–52. ——. ‘The Seeker Culture of the Thames Valley’, in M. Caricchio and G. Tarantino (eds.), Cromohs Virtual Seminars: Recent Historiographical Trends of the British Studies. 17th–18th Centuries, 2006–2007, 1–10 . Clarke, Elizabeth. ‘George Herbert’s House of Pleasure? Ejaculations, Sacred and Profane’. George Herbert Journal 19 (1996), 55–71. Conybeare, Catherine. Paulinus Noster: Self and Symbols in the Letters of Paulinus of Nola. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Davies, Stevie. Henry Vaughan. Bridgend: Seren, 1995. Dickson, Donald R. The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Edwards, Karen. ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary: Swan’. Milton Quarterly 43 (2009), 131–3. Eugenius Philalethes [Thomas Vaughan]. Anima magica abscondita or a Discourse of the Universall Spirit of Nature. London, 1650. ——. The Fame and Confession of the Fraternity of R: C:. London, 1652. Fox, George. The Journal, ed. Nigel Smith. New York: Penguin, 1998. Gibbons, B. J. Gender in Mystical and Occult Thought: Behmenism and its Development in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hessayon, Ariel. ‘Gold tried in the fire’: The Prophet TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Hutchinson, F. E. Henry Vaughan: A Life and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon, 1947. Hutin, Serge. Les Disciples anglais de Jacob Bæhme aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Paris: Éditions Denoël, 1960. Jones, R. Tudur. ‘The Life, Work, and Thought of Vavasor Powell (1617–1670)’ (unpublished D.Phil. thesis). 2 vols. Oxford, 1947. Kerrigan, John. Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Lehmann, Tomas. Paulinus Nolanus und die Basilica Nova in Cimitile, Nola: Studien zu einem zentralen Denkmal der spätantik-frühchristlichen Architektur. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2004. Llwyd, Morgan. Gweithiau Morgan Llwyd o Wynedd. Cyffrol 3, ed. J. Jones, Goronwy Wyn Owen, and R. Tudor Jones. Cardiff: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru, 1994. Norbrook, David (ed.). The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1642. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. The Welsh Saints, 1640–1660: Walter Cradock, Vavasor Powell, Morgan Llwyd. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1957. Paulinus of Nola, St. The Poems of St. Paulinus of Nola, trans. P. G. Walsh. New York: Newman, 1975.

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Poole, Kristen. ‘Naming, Paradise Lost, and the Gendered Discourse of Perfect Language Schemes’. ELR 38 (2008), 535–59. Post, Jonathan F. S. Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. ——. ‘Civil War Cleavage: More Force than Fashion in Vaughan’s Silex scintillans’, in Donald R. Dickson and Holly Faith Nelson (eds.), Of Paradise and Light: Essays on Henry Vaughan and John Milton in Honor of Alan Rudrum. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004, 25–49. Rudrum, Alan. ‘Resistance, Collaboration, and Silence: Henry Vaughan and Breconshire Royalism’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1999, 102–18. ——. ‘Royalist Lyric’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Smith, Nigel. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon, 1980. ——. ‘George Herbert in Defence of Antinomianism’. Notes and Queries ns 31 (1984), 34–5. ——. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Thomas, M. Wynn. Morgan Llwyd. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1984. Vaughan, Henry. Works, ed. L. C. Martin. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon, 1957. ——. Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976. Vaughan, Thomas, and Vaughan, Rebecca. Aqua vitae, non vitis (British Library MS, Sloane 1741), ed., trans., and with introduction by Donald R. Dickson. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2001. West, Philip. Henry Vaughan’s Silex scintillans: Scripture Uses. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

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CONVERSION NARRATIVES IN OLD AND NEW ENGLAND ....................................................................................................... KATHLEEN LYNCH

‘Wouldst thou know whether thou art an elect received of God, decreed to be saved; it is not to search the records in heaven first, but the records in thy heart first.’1 So advised John Rogers in his 1653 Ohel or Beth-shemesh, a Hebrew title which he translated as ‘Tabernacle for the Sun’. Ohel was an instructional manual for the gathering of a church of ‘saints’, with some parts addressed directly to individual believers, others to communities that were ready to incorporate themselves as churches, and others (like the dedicatory epistles) to Oliver Cromwell, instructing him on the proper constitution of a godly government. In late spring 1653, when Ohel was published in London, Cromwell had just dissolved the Rump Parliament and was under intense political pressure as he contemplated his next step. Rogers was a vocal leader of religious Independents who were lobbying for the establishment of a godly Parliament. Rogers had a flurry of publications in these months, including an open letter to Cromwell, printed as a broadside. Addressed ‘To his Excellency the Lord Generall Cromwell’, the letter contained ‘a few proposals’ for a hand-selected Parliament of the godly, modelled on the Old Testament Sanhedrin. Released almost simultaneously, Ohel detailed Rogers’s model for a ‘true gospel church state’. As if laying out his credentials for the job of national church-building, he described the theology and practice of the church he had gathered several years earlier among Cromwellian soldiers in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. Congregants had each delivered a spiritual experience as a requirement of membership, and Rogers printed their accounts in Ohel as a model for the gathering of a godly society whose time he fervently believed was at hand. Cromwell’s Protectorate did not last much beyond his death, and Rogers’s model for a church state never got off the ground. But it is not an exaggeration to say that a new self was born out of the narration of spiritual experience. This was a self that insisted on the authority of personal conscience, that publicly asserted its own salvation, and that sought to establish a holy commonwealth on the basis of that (self-proclaimed) divinely sanctioned authority. The conversion narrative was one’s ticket to admission, and its

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significant historical impact was just beginning in the mid-seventeenth century. Through missionary efforts, spiritual revivals, and literary traditions, the practice of spiritual examination that Rogers recommended has proven to be adaptable to any number of historical and cultural circumstances. By the early twentieth century, the conversion narrative was taken by William James to be the essence of religious experience and by Max Weber to be the engine of capitalist growth. With such a pervasive influence, it has been easy to understand the truth claims of this form of autobiographical narrative to be transparent and universal. Direct address to God is a hallmark of the form, and the writer is generally taken to risk eternal damnation if he or she is anything less than brutally honest in self-examination. The default ascription of authenticity is further buttressed by the chiasmic articulation of the truth claims. As Jean Starobinski described the relations between human confessor and divine auditor (with Augustine in mind), the truth is rendered discursive and the discourse true.2 This chapter highlights the methods and historical circumstances by and in which the very type of confessional narrative was established. We will first survey several conditioning factors for the codification of the Protestant conversion narrative in the mid-seventeenth century. These include the important precedent-setting conversions of St Paul and St Augustine, the Calvinist emphasis on predestination, the diaspora of religious dissent, and a rising millenarian outlook. Dispersed geographically and varied in form, the conventions of a narrated spiritual experience were rapidly codified when they became a required aspect of the rituals of membership in Independent and Congregational churches in seventeenth-century England and America.

ST PAUL

AND

AUGUSTINE AS EARLY MODELS OF CONVERSION

.................................................................................................................. John Rogers’s call to search the records of the heart for evidence of salvation was hardly a new one. An utter dependence on Christ’s propitiating sacrifice is fundamental to Christian belief. St Paul’s change from persecutor to apostle on his way to Damascus is the paradigmatic example of conversion as the process by which sinful man is regenerated by God’s freely given grace. Paul was felled to the ground by a blinding light and a voice that called him to a new life as one of God’s chosen people. Paul’s personal call was to an evangelical mission, and the early modern push for large-scale conversions of Amerindians, Muslims, and Jews was understood as responsive to this mission. But confoundingly, Paul’s personal conversion was all but inimitable. There was no narrative preparation for the event, and not even a subsequent account of any stages of enlightenment. There was only the ‘light from heaven’ that ‘shined round about him’, temporarily blinding him in Acts 9: 3.

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One must look to St Augustine’s Confessions for a retrospective autobiographical narrative of conversion. The Confessions reported in minute detail the long intellectualization of a process of coming to an authentic belief. It reflected shifting levels of hope or conviction over time and sought fervently for a language adequate to the ineffable divine. It kept in suspension a doubled sense of conversion—a turning towards God as well as away from one’s past self. The resolution of Augustine’s spiritual journey towards a true and sustaining faith was also marked by a change in church. This resolution presented a challenge for seventeenth-century readers of the Confessions. The book could not be claimed definitively by Catholics or Protestants, and it therefore did not very well serve the polemics of conversion into which it was first translated into English (Figure 22.1).3 If we judge by the introductions of the earliest translations (1620 and 1631, Catholic and Protestant, respectively), readers wanted a clearer understanding of the analogies between heretics of Augustine’s time and their own before subscribing to his resolution in a change of church. In other words, they needed to know how their church was related to the church in which Augustine’s doubts were resolved. The need for biographical support in autobiographical narrative is vividly illustrated in the reception of the Confessions in seventeenth-century England. Extensive introductions and frontispiece engravings provided contextualizing information for readers. Of course, not all of Augustine’s readers were caught by the polemics of conversion. Copies of the Confessions are traceable in personal libraries, far from the sharp exchanges of polemics, as, for instance, in an inventory of books in a commonplace manuscript that includes entries by Lady Anne Southwell and others.4 Elizabeth Isham and Richard Norwood both titled autobiographical investigations after the Confessions.5 John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) gives ample evidence of his familiarity with the Confessions. The example Augustine made of his youthful stealing of pears, as wickedness for the sake of wickedness, was reflected in various early modern autobiographical narratives. Richard Baxter, for instance, reported an inordinate longing for apples in his youth. It was surely an appetite that he construed as a moral failing under the influence of the Confessions. The most influential part of the Confessions was the account of the dividing fissure in Augustine’s life—the wild youth giving way to the settled authority of the Church Father. That fissure was marked by a clearly identifiable moment of change, as definitive as was Paul’s. In a garden at Ostia, reading with his friend Alypius, Augustine heard the voice of a young child nearby. He decided to apply the imperative chant, ‘Take up and read, take up and read’ to his own dilemma. Thus, by happenstance, he hit upon the passage in Romans 13 that immediately resolved his indecision and led to a changed course of life. Such recourse to the Bible for passages applicable to one’s life would become routine for Augustine’s early modern readers. But for all its influence, Augustine’s Confessions was lacking as a model for religious conversion in two important respects. First, it was not itself scriptural. And second, Augustine’s journey was also too wilful; it did not adequately model the abject terror felt by so many of the Calvinist devout who feared that they were among the preordained damned and that there was no act of will or

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F I G U R E 2 2 . 1 Engraved title page, Saint Augustine’s Confessions Translated (1631). STC 912. By Permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

remorse that could change that status. These early models of conversion in Paul and Augustine also differed in their illustration of the temporal dimensions of conversion. Baldly stated, the question was, how much time did conversion take? Was it an instantaneous experience, or was it a prolonged effort? Much theological writing was

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devoted to the question in the seventeenth century. As significant as these seminal exemplars of Christian conversion were, it took something else to spark the epiphenomenon of autobiographical examinations among religious reformers in the seventeenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world.

PREDESTINATION, EXPERIENTIAL RELIGION, AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF CONVERSION

.................................................................................................................. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century and especially as an aspect of an anti-Laudian consensus, new forms of lay devotional practices were developing in England. Increasingly, people left written traces of their self-examinations in such forms as letters, diaries, and the blank pages of Bibles and almanacs. Individuals responded to the harsh dictates of predestination by searching for signs of their own salvation. As a result of a new wave of archival research, many textual traces of these writings have been recovered in the last decade. We now have a clearer picture of lay devotion, including evidence from further down the social scale, to amplify (and complicate) the picture of religious belief that has long depended on the flood of theological texts from the period. John Bunyan, the tinker and eventual preacher and writer, is just one representative voice of the many who could newly assert that ‘notwithstanding the meanness and inconsiderableness of my Parents . . . the Lord did work his gracious work of conversion upon my Soul’.6 However, texts such as his Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) can only hint at the rich vein of oral culture, lost to the documentary record. Bunyan’s is a landmark work, fully developed as a first-person narrative. However fragmentary, other autobiographical narratives from the seventeenth century are also significant for what they reveal of the communal contexts of sharing, comparing, encouraging, and setting examples. Judging from many of the deeply personal devotions that are extant, it is clear that community building and identity formation went hand in hand.7 The underlying anxieties about credibility and the sufficiency of spiritual assurance made human endorsements as important as an individual’s projection of divine sanction. In the magisterial Reformation, the doctrine of predestination was not meant to be a puzzle to be solved by any individual. But at the pastoral level, it became the responsibility of the ministerial class to allay fears and provide some recourse towards peace of mind. Such Protestant clergymen as William Ames, William Perkins, Richard Rogers, and others urged the devout reader to think of the self as transparent to God and to live with a responsive openness to a saving grace. Most clerics also laid out as benchmarks a set of conventions and stages towards sanctification. The process of regeneration came to be well outlined to the point of prescription. The major stages included a personal calling, justification (what the scholar of early American religion Edmund S. Morgan

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called ‘the imputation of Christ’s righteousness to man’), and sanctification (or again according to Morgan, ‘the gradual improvement of a man’s behaviour in obedience to God’). These three conditions were linked as signposts of predestination in Romans 8: 29–30. Considered as stages, they are the most condensed articulation of what Morgan memorably termed the ‘morphology of conversion’.8 That morphology was well established by the early seventeenth century in both England and New England. As detailed as some of the stages and signs could be, however, there were murky questions about this morphology, even beyond the welter of competing systems and numbers of stages introduced by various clerics. For instance, what was the true basis of justification? Faith, not works, is the correct answer. Or what was the causal relationship between justification and sanctification? The godly behaviour that was the sign of sanctification could not properly be understood as cause of justification, but only its product, or so insisted the clergymen. Beyond the different theological positions, the notion of conversion that developed under the influence of a more experiential understanding of religion contained a fundamental paradox. As Morgan put it, ‘in order to be sure, one must be unsure’.9 Constant self-examination was required to combat the longed-for, but simultaneously potentially disabling, sense of assurance, for that could prove to be a false assurance. Approaching and losing that sense of spiritual comfort was also inherently a narrative process, as Bruce Hindmarsh has noted.10 Though no scholar has identified any specific pastoral exhortation to the writing of these self-examinations, surely it is the underlying conundrum of seeking a lasting assurance while guarding against false assurance that explains the multiplying forms and practices of the writing of diaries and spiritual exercises in the period (that, and possibly a greater availability of paper).11 Many seventeenth-century women wrote in the context of lay devotion. Often on the basis of their claims to election, women achieved authority as spokespersons for their religious communities in a number of places. Briget [sic] Cooke, Anne Fenwick, and Katherine Chidley are some early examples. In his study of Cooke, Michael Winship has noted that we cannot assume that this sort of lay devotion is necessarily a sign of nonconformity. Cooke, for one, was devoted to the Church of England.12 Still, it is clear that ‘mere’ conformity to religious ‘ordinances’ was no longer enough for many. It was not brain knowledge, as Cicely Johnson put it, that the seekers were after. It was heart knowledge. The finer points of doctrine could be left behind. Cicely Johnson and her neighbour Rose Thurgood have left some of the earliest extant testimonies of spiritual experience from England (dating from late 1630s). In telling her experience, Thurgood was well aware that there were conventional stages of conversion and that the order mattered.13 But she dismissed the morphology of conversion in favour of that supremely transporting moment of happened-upon and overwhelming sensation. The only necessary endorsement of authenticity in her mind was that of an analogous scriptural reference. So that, when she found herself one day feeling ‘a sweet Flash coming over my heart’, it was sufficient confirmation that ‘suddenly withall theise [sic] words were pronounced in my heart: Thy name is written in the booke of Life: Thou hast that white stone, & a newe name’ (Scripture Women, 14).

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This is the stone from Revelation 2: 17, which she had referenced earlier in her narrative as the longed-for sign of election. Cicely Johnson also reported that her sense of election was like receiving ‘the hidden manna, & hee gave mee a white stone, and in the white stone a newe name written, which none knowe but they that receive it’ (Scripture Women, 43). For these two women, the white stone was a metaphor for a permanent truth, the truth of their salvation. The potential social and political disruptions as a consequence of this sort of self-understanding were enormous—and well debated, both then and now. There were narrative consequences, as well. The idea that a life contained a single moment in which its whole meaning could be revealed was a tremendously appealing one.14 It is also the source of greatest reservations about the narrative form of conversion. How can one episode in a life be taken to signify the whole of any life’s journey? For detractors of the form, the sudden end of narration (usually right after the apprehension of assurance) is the chief evidence of its inability to convey the meaning of a life in full. It was also the catalyst for a nasty game of public recrimination, any time a self-proclaimed saint’s behaviour belied the claim of election. Insofar as there is a narrative drive in these seventeenth-century exemplars, however, it is the tension between assurance and doubt. Not everyone admitted that tension. The ministers Farnham and Bull, for instance, who tended to Johnson and Thurgood, insisted that there could be no doubt associated with an authentic assurance (Scripture Women, 39). Others, like Lawrence Clarkson, insisted that spiritual assurance freed one from the imputation of sinfulness. But most early moderns believed that such an attitude was to put oneself beyond God’s law, to indulge in antinomianism. Most of the mid-century ‘saints’ were not interested in release from God’s law, but rather succour from it. What did such comfort feel like? How was assurance experienced? Briget Cooke, whose reputation for godliness has already been mentioned, would not tell anyone how she had achieved her assurances. An admirer, R.P., wrote that its nature ‘almost passeth credit’, and that she revealed it in detail only to a few close friends. Thereafter, ‘she doubted not of her salvation but was as sure of it as if she weare [sic] in heaven already’.15 For most others, however, the sources and the occasions of spiritual assurance were rehearsed again and again and within communities of likeminded believers. One of the chief motivating texts was Psalms 66: 16: ‘Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will declare what he hath done for my soul.’ With such a rhetorical orientation, it is a mistake to think of the resulting narratives as wholly spontaneous or transparent windows into a protected, interiorized self. But neither is it helpful to dismiss them as procrustean. They are rather evidences of a particular method of subjectification.16 To think of it another way, conversion narratives show us individuals struggling with the semiotics of salvation. What are the signs? What do they mean? How lasting are the effects of an apprehension of salvation? Theological positions were developed and defended. Just as importantly, a heuristics of self-examination was applied. In this process, an acceptance of sinfulness, the application of an Old Testament model to one’s experience, the ability to pray extemporaneously, and to produce the evidence of

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tears of repentance and a softened heart were persuasive elements within a community of like-minded believers. One further example of the written traces of the search for signs of election is a letter written in 1638 by a provincial English gentleman. Addressing his cousin, he took the opportunity to ‘declar[e] what [God] hath done for my soul’.17 He called himself the chief of sinners, but he also had a ready catalogue of hopes and assurances that he achieved by viewing his own experience in the metaphoric terms of Old Testament exemplars: ‘I live (you know where) in Mesheck, which they say signifies Prolonging; in Kedar, which signifieth Blackness; yet the Lord forsaketh me not.’ Because the author was Oliver Cromwell, this letter has been scrutinized as a signal moment in Cromwell’s spiritual formation and developing sense of personal destiny as an instrument of God. These passages have been read as evidence of Cromwell’s deeply personal, deeply interiorized conversion. Few of Cromwell’s contemporaries played out their belief in spiritual election on such a vast public stage or to such polarized receptions. Eventually, Cromwell’s sense of himself as God’s instrument would take on shadings of Gideon, David, and even Moses, leading his people out of the arid deserts of a monarchical government. No doubt he cast his military victories as signs of God’s pleasure. Still, if we focus too tightly on Cromwell’s personal sense of election, we again risk losing track of the conventionality of this language and this way of viewing the self. Even when we expand our view of Cromwell, to see him as, perhaps, the figurehead of the sectarians, we might be tempted to think of experiential religion as the basis of a unified political party. Nothing could be further from the truth. Cromwell learned the necessity of political manoeuvring in his long public service, and the disaffection between him and the millenarian party in the 1650s was pronounced. No group felt more betrayed by Cromwell than those advocates of a new theocracy, just when they thought Cromwell was poised to lead them to the promised land. This is the very group, a mix of religious Independents and Fifth Monarchists, who were in the process of codifying the delivery of a spiritual experience as a requirement of church membership. They thought they were gathering the saints for Cromwell to lead. They took the dissolution of the Rump Parliament as one of the last impediments to Christ’s rule on earth.

THREE PRINTED ANTHOLOGIES SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

OF

.................................................................................................................. Throughout the 1630s and 1640s, a diaspora of religious dissent had yielded experiments in ecclesiology in a variety of related locales. New England was often cast as Edenic. Cromwell himself had described Ireland as a clean slate. But none of the experiments in godly government were as promising as the one that seemed to be unfolding in England in the 1650s. The perception of opportunity for a holy

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commonwealth brought the narrative forms of spiritual experiences into print. In print and for a larger public, one objective became clearer: the testimony of spiritual experiences replicated selves. Print became a surrogate witness to the method of church-building that the millenarian and militaristic Independents offered as evidence of their readiness to form a godly state. Three anthologies of spiritual experiences were published in London in 1653. In a way these anthologies are the very grounds of ‘imagined communities’, as described by political theorist Benedict Anderson. Moreover, they were being disseminated as a cohesive bond at the very time that the key rights of the modern liberal state were being articulated. In fact, these self-articulations of godliness spoke directly to the freedom of religious expression, or the liberty of conscience, which would become a cornerstone of those rights. A full examination of the imbrications of religious and political identities in the seventeenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world far exceeds the brief of this chapter. But this chapter can contribute a note of caution to those examinations. Though it is convenient to think that religious and political goals were in accord, that was not necessarily the case. Neither was it the case that the pursuit of religious freedoms was necessarily undertaken in a national context. As much as religious principles might underpin a shared national identity, those same religious principles might also mark the breaking point of national identity. Insofar as a firstperson articulation of a religious identity is at issue, we are as likely to find a dissociation of religious identity and national identity—or at a minimum, a tension between the two. The three 1653 publications grew out of churches gathered in London, Dublin, and Natick, a Praying Indian village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The first two, collections edited by Henry Walker and John Rogers, respectively, have served as touchstones of the form.18 The third anthology contains the first, albeit heavily mediated, transcriptions of first-person Amerindian conversion testimony from New England. It has therefore figured as an originary document in a different tradition. Each publication was deployed as a deliberate means of calibrating criteria for validation in a wider community. The first two solicited further corroborative examples of millenarian preparedness. The third, a collection of Amerindian narratives, illustrates the near simultaneous failure of the methodology when pushed to cultural extremes. It is worth pausing over the irony that in the first of these publications, Spiritual Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (henceforth SE), which has to be recognized as one of the founts of autobiographical writing in the period, individuality is so subsumed in a collectivity that the names of those testifying are not recorded. Members are referred to only by their initials. Neither is the congregation given an identifying location or identity. These experiences may not have been collected from one congregation, after all, and in any event, it is the heavy editorial presence that unifies the narratives. These narratives are endorsed by the Welsh militant preacher Vavasor Powell, and they may have been compiled by the editor of the parliamentary newsbook Perfect Occurrences, Henry Walker. His involvement in politics and religion earned him the contemptuous

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nickname the Ironmonger for his reported apprenticeship in that trade. Together, Powell and Walker represent the leading edge of militant religiosity. George Thomason purchased a copy of the tiny volume (12mo) in January 1653.19 It contained sixty-one ‘experiences’, delivered by individuals whose identities are recorded only by their initials. The narratives are supplemented by materials addressing ‘The Practice of the Gathered Churches’, including an exemplary letter indicating the procedure for expelling a member of a gathered church. Walker’s involvement would indicate that these testimonies were delivered in London. If so, however, there are indications that these individuals had travelled extensively, many with the army. Their personal losses were heavy—a number of women had lost husbands to war and children to disease. Many of those testifying refer to their straitened circumstances. One particularly affecting woman, M.W., describes having seen her husband and a child killed in front of her during the Civil War and then being reduced to shivering in a barn, wounded and ‘stript’, with two children and ‘a peece of an old Bible’ (SE, 12–13). The testimonies regularly refer to Matthew 11: 28 as a source of comfort: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ Collectively, the entries in Spiritual Experiences achieve great clarity in simplification: the apprehension of a lasting sense of assurance leads inexorably to a stable narrative end, which receives communal confirmation in admission to the Church. The table of contents sets up a pattern of movement from a variety of beginnings to a common end. The circumstances of conversion are emphasized. These testimonies would not have passed the stringent test for membership developed by Thomas Shepard. Beginning in 1637, Shepard recorded the narratives of prospective members of his Massachusetts Bay colony congregation in a notebook. These are the earliest collected narratives from New England. His requirements came to be reduced to the formula ‘thus I was humbled, then thus I was called, then thus I have walked, though with many weaknesses since, and such special providences of God I have seen, temptations gone through, and thus the Lord hath delivered me, blessed be his Name &c.’ (Morgan, Visible Saints, 92). Those whose testimonies are recorded in Spiritual Experiences were not overly concerned with the proper sequence of justification and sanctification. Rather, as if in answer to an unstated question, the occasion of conversion is highlighted and cast as a prepositional phrase: as ‘in the loss of children’, ‘by fearing Hell’, ‘after seven yeares temptation to kill her selfe’, or ‘when Satan tempted her’ (SE, A3–6). The questions of when or where one was converted are frequently addressed, but more often the narrative is a response to how: by trouble, by laying to heart, in fear, despair, waiting, or loss, by temptation, by a sermon, by prayer, by being persuaded, in a dream. These are among the occasions of conversion that are listed in the table of contents. G.S.’s experience, the last one in the collection, proceeds as a series of sixteen elliptical phrases, each prefaced with the causal conjunction ‘that’, and cumulatively building to the conclusion, ‘that I desire to grow up in the grace of God, more and more, to perfection in Christ’ (SE, 408).

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M.K. produced the longest (by far) of the narratives in Spiritual Experiences. M.K. has a vivid sense of the dramatic, and her testimony represents a rare indulgence of plot. She begins her narrative as if setting a scene: ‘When I take a view of my life upon the stage of this world, I may very well compare it to a comicall Tragedy, or a tragical Comedy, or a labyrinth from one sin to another, from one affliction to another’ (SE, 160–1). M.K.’s crisis of faith came with her resolution to murder the man she perceived as her husband’s greatest temptation to slothfulness. The gathered churches recognized that some experiences would stand out as extraordinary. M.K. certainly had an extraordinarily colourful tale to tell. But there is no sense that anyone in the congregation is looking out for those with the extraordinary spiritual gifts that mark them out for leadership, and there is no indication that M.K. had any particular leadership role herself. It is their association with Vavasor Powell that marks these narratives as extraordinary. He is the only person identified on the title page, as recommending ‘the sound, spiritual, and savoury worth’ of the experiences. An itinerant preacher, Powell was one of the chief agents of the Commonwealth’s Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales. He was a close associate of then-Colonel Thomas Harrison, who was among the most millenarian of the army leaders. Powell organized troops from his own congregation to follow Harrison to Scotland in 1651 and was involved in skirmishes against royalists as late as 1655.20 If anyone could match Powell’s notoriety for religious militarism, it was John Rogers. With Rogers’s congregation in Ohel (the second of the 1653 publications), the entanglements of military, religious, and political agendas are even more explicitly provocative than those represented by Spiritual Experiences. Rogers’s congregants were the militant saints who followed Cromwell to Ireland, with Cromwell’s officers chief among them.21 They included Colonel John Hewson, the regicide mayor of Dublin, and Elizabeth Avery, who was already in print with her Scripture Prophecies Opened (1647), and who was one of several congregants described as having been called in an extraordinary fashion. A welter of printed marginal notations and headlines speaks to Rogers’s instructional goals with Ohel. In the section that details the members’ spiritual experiences, printed marginal notes repeatedly mark the moment when the testifier was ‘Called’. Such terms as ‘confirmed’, ‘assured’, and ‘satisfied’ reflect Rogers’s editorial approbation in the margins. Routinely, the moment when one was ‘called’ is emphasized, with the further queries of ‘When?’ and ‘How?’ These gestures towards a discernible pattern in the stages of conversion also encourage a responsive search for similar moments in the reader’s own life. So do print conventions take over where face-to-face encouragement leaves off. These narratives would not pass muster in Shepard’s church, either. For the role of dream, trance, and vision is elevated above that of scriptural precedent. John Cooper, for instance, is reported as having been ‘earnestly praying to be confirmed in faith’ when that confirmation came in a dream. He was walking through a field, then had to pass over a deep pit and entered into a fair room, where he and his companions,

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Rogers, Hewson, and the Lord Clogher, joined in song to give thanks and praise to God. Cooper found that their song was amplified by a multitude of voices, even though no one else was present in his dream (Ohel, 401–2). Edward Wayman was moved to fear of his sins when he dreamt of a ‘great black terrible dog, which seized upon me’ (Ohel, 409). Convinced that the dream was sent to raise him out of his sins, Wayman sought the company of godly others and petitioned to join Rogers’s congregation. Several others in the congregation had revelatory dreams, including Rogers himself. Beset with bouts of despair and even suicidal thoughts, Rogers repeatedly found his spiritual comforts in dreams (Ohel, 431, for instance). Rogers’s emphasis on the assurances of the unconscious was closely associated with the prophets, of whom Anna Trapnel is a famous example, and who were a related phenomenon of the 1650s.22 Reminiscent of medieval forms of mysticism, his was an extremist theological position—by design, as Crawford Gribben has argued. For Rogers, extraordinary conversions ‘confirmed the doctrine of progressive revelation that justified the eclipse of scriptures’.23 By the 1650s, Rogers was increasingly influenced by millenarian thinking. In the course of the interregnum, he was to become one of the leading ‘Fifth Monarchists’, someone who anticipated the imminent, earthly fulfilment of the prophecy in Daniel 17 that a fifth, godly monarchy would follow four earthly monarchies. The prophecy seemed also to be confirmed by the passages in Revelation 20 that foresaw a thousand-year reign of Christ.24 These practices (and beliefs) did not go uncontested. Even within the dissenting community, there were many detractors of the methodology of replication illustrated in the collections of spiritual experience. The primary objection was that there was no scriptural precedent for the narration of a spiritual testimony for admission to the Church. Others argued that the practice bypassed the pastoral role of the ministry, and still others that it demanded too much of the weaker members of the congregation. Rogers himself noted that one of his women congregants had been answering questions put to her ‘very fearfully and uncertainly’, so that some members were not satisfied until she burst into tears and reminded Rogers that he had preached the week before on freely answering Christ’s call—and that she was trying to do precisely that (Ohel, 291). Those whose testimonies were recorded in the third anthology printed in 1653, Tears of Repentance, faced exponentially greater barriers to successful integration into a gathered church. These testimonies were delivered on the other front for the establishment of a Protestant Utopia in the seventeenth century: New England. But they were not the confessions of English religious exiles, as one might expect. Rather, they were conversion narratives that were delivered by the nineteen members of a Massachusetts tribe who were in the process of being gathered into a church by John Eliot. Eliot had established the first of a number of ‘praying villages’ for the Indians. They had built a meeting house. They had learned the Ten Commandments and the catechism. Several had delivered confessions of faith to Eliot in private. Mindful of the need for a transparent process and the validation of witnesses to his cross-cultural conversions, Eliot had arranged for a public ceremony in which his first group of Amerindian converts would be gathered into a church. His experiment in showcasing

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his method failed, however. Perhaps Eliot’s mistake was in asking for approval of his method. But ask he did. From event to publication, the whole process was an elaborately orchestrated, public appeal for the validation of witnesses. In the first place, Eliot appealed to the dignitaries he had gathered on site, but as importantly, he appealed to virtual witnesses among his godly readers and supporters in England. Five candidates presented their oral testimony on the day described in Tears of Repentance. In four of the cases, Eliot first read aloud in English translation one or more prior statements of faith that he had transcribed on earlier occasions. Then the candidate delivered an oral confession in person. In the printed volume, the five are identified by their Indian names: Totherswamp, Waban, Nataôus, Monequassum, and Ponampam. Nataôus was also identified by his English name, William of Sudbury. Waban, who was a sachem or chief, spoke for himself with no prior confession read. Totherswamp went first. He noted that he turned to the Englishmen’s faith after the deaths of friends, and he emphasized the benefits of ‘all outward blessings, as food, clothing, children, all gifts of strength, speech, hearing’ (Tears of Repentance, 5). The recent deaths of other Indians were a steady point of reference in the confessions. Nataôus (William of Sudbury) made reference to one of the cultural concessions that the English had demanded—the cutting of his hair. This, along with settlement in one place, the taking up of agricultural labour, and the establishment of a civil government, were all constituent aspects of the missions. Waban wondered aloud if God could understand prayers in his language. Having been assured that God understood all languages, Waban still was left confessing only this much: ‘I do not know how to confess, and little do I know of Christ; I fear I shall not believe a great while, and very slowly; I do not know what grace is in my heart . . . ’ (Tears of Repentance, 7–8). Eliot’s editorial note follows, with an admission that though ‘this Confession being not so satisfactory as was desired’, one of the witnesses did note Waban’s tearful delivery (Tears of Repentance, 8). Tears of repentance had long been a key physiological sign of sincerity. But the very performativity of sincerity was also an important source of contemporary objections to the ‘enthusiasms’ of the godly. Here, the witnesses had only physical affect to judge by. The ideational challenges to conversion were immense.25 Eliot did not successfully gather an Amerindian church that day. Instead, he was left examining his method. He was keenly aware that his own word was not enough confirmation of the success of the mission and that the inability of his witnesses to understand the language was an insurmountable impediment. By the time Ponampam finished, the auditors were so restless that the proceedings had to be stopped. Eliot had not been able to transcribe the testimonies fully. He had no back-up to assist him in the difficulties of translation. The elders and magistrates were clearly and utterly uncomprehending. On this cold, darkening day on the New England frontier, the cultural limits of the replication of godly selves were reached.

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CONCLUSION

.................................................................................................................. Religious Congregationalists in New England and Independents in England inherited a varied tradition of lay devotional practices of self-examination. In service of new church membership policies, they fixed some of these practices in print. The resulting narratives were abbreviated and formulaic. The sense of self that underwrote these forms and in turn was sustained by them was also disciplined into a narrow understanding. That self was defined by one transformative moment that revealed the essential meaning of a life. If this means of subjectification failed (at least initially) as a basis for cross-cultural conversions, the narrative forms facilitated a virtual assembly of saints. Members of the Church Militant, these saints were prepared to meet a perceived—and elusive—political opportunity. It would take the Restoration’s renewed persecution of nonconformists to effect the next stage of development of the conversion narrative. John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners has its roots in the very church-building practices of the 1650s that have been detailed here. Bunyan’s autobiographical narrative only achieved its iconic form, however, when he found himself telling the story of his spiritual experience in a vastly changed institutional context—when he found himself imprisoned on charges of seditious activity.26 His prison sentence had no fixed time of release, but only the requirement that he renounce his proselytizing. For Bunyan, fidelity to his story was construed as fidelity to his faith, and that constituted fidelity to his inner conviction of salvation. Bunyan’s spiritual experience was more than a decade old when he published it in Grace Abounding. By then, his story had become a far more elaborate and intense study of the psychological struggle for clarity than those contained in the anthologies of a decade earlier. Bunyan deployed a variety of narrative strategies to maintain the story’s stability. These included a resistance to revision, despite the multiple editions published in his lifetime. His is a plain English response to Augustine’s eloquent Latin. But the goal is consistent across the ages: to tell a truthful story of spiritual assurance. Also like Augustine’s, Bunyan’s is an extra-scriptural exemplar of devotion. In a way John Rogers never could, and almost despite his own best efforts, Bunyan’s testimony of personal devotion threatened to supplant Old Testament models with the simple life stories of seventeenth-century English men and women.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

Rogers, Ohel, 360. Starobinski, ‘The Style of Autobiography’, 77–8. On those polemics, see Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England. Folger MS V.b.198, 64v–65r.

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5. The manuscripts are in the Northamptonshire Records Office and the Bermuda National Archive, respectively. 6. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 6. On Bunyan, see also the chapter by Keeble in this volume. 7. Cambers, ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England’, 802. 8. Morgan, Visible Saints, 66; and Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 62–6. For an anthropological model, see Rambo, Understanding Religious Conversion. 9. Morgan, Visible Saints, 70. 10. Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 6–8. 11. Webster, ‘Writing to Redundancy’. 12. Winship, ‘Briget Cooke’, 1054. 13. Baker (ed.), Scripture Women, 19, 22. 14. Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 6–8. 15. Winship, ‘Briget Cooke’, 1047. Dr Williams’s Library, MS 28.9 (5). 16. Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination, 4–6. 17. Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, i. 96–7. 18. Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative, 5–6, 17–22; Watkins, The Puritan Experience, 93–5; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 33–45; and Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 45–50. With its two conversion narratives appended to The Voice of the Spirit, Petto, Roses of Sharon (1654) is often included in discussions of these early printed exemplars. This section draws on Lynch, Protestant Autobiography. 19. LT E1389[1]. 20. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men, 54–5; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 11–12; Roberts, ‘Powell, Vavasor (1617–1670)’, in ODNB. 21. Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 70–3; Gillespie, ‘The Crisis of Reform, 1625–60’, 211–12. 22. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 23–72. On prophecy, see also the chapter by Gillespie in this volume. 23. Gribben, God’s Irishmen, 72. 24. Jue, ‘Puritan Millenarianism in Old and New England’. 25. On theology, see Cohen, God’s Caress; on the impact of disease, see Chaplin, Subject Matter. 26. Lynch, ‘Into Jail and into Print’.

WORKS CITED Abbott, Wilbur Cortez. The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. 4 vols. New York: Russell and Russell, 1970. Baker, Naomi (ed.). Scripture Women: Rose Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’ and Cicely Johnson, ‘Fanatical Reveries’. Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005. Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski with Anita Pacheco. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Cambers, Andrew. ‘Reading, the Godly, and Self-Writing in England, circa 1580–1720’. Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 796–825.

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Capp, B. S. The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1972. Chaplin, Joyce. Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Cohen, Charles Lloyd. God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Eliot, John. Tears of Repentance: or, A further narrative of the progress of the Gospel amongst the Indians in New-England: setting forth, not only their present state and condition, but sundry confessions of sin by diverse of the said Indians, wrought upon by the saving power of the Gospel; together with the manifestation of their faith and hope in Jesus Christ, and the work of grace upon their hearts. London, 1653. Folger Shakespeare Library. MS. V.b.198, 64v–65r. Gillespie, Raymond. ‘The Crisis of Reform, 1625–60’, in Kenneth Milne (ed.), Christ Church Cathedral: A History. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999, 195–217. Gribben, Crawford. God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hindmarsh, D. Bruce. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Jue, Jeffrey K. ‘Puritan Millenarianism in Old and New England’, in John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 259–76. Lynch, Kathleen. ‘Into Jail and into Print: John Bunyan Writes the Godly Self’. Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009), 273–90. ——. Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Morgan, Edmund S. Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea. New York: New York University Press, 1963. Powell, Vavasor. Spirituall experiences, of sundry beleevers. Held forth by them at Severall Solemne Meetings, and Conferences to that end. With the recommendation of the sound, spiritual, and savoury worth of them, to the sober and spirituall reader. London, 1653. Questier, Michael. Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rambo, Lewis. Understanding Religious Conversion. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Roberts, Stephen K. ‘Powell, Vavasor (1617–1670)’. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford, 2004–11. Rogers, John. Ohel or Beth-shemesh. A Tabernacle for the sun, or, Irenicum evangelicum: an idea of Church-Discipline in the theorick and practick parts, which come forth first into the world as bridegroom and bride . . . by whom you will have the totum essentiale of a true Gospel-church state according to Christs rules. London, 1653. Smith, Nigel. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Stachniewski, John. The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Starobinski, Jean. ‘The Style of Autobiography’, in James Olney (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, 73–83. Watkins, Owen. The Puritan Experience. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.

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Webster, Tom. ‘Writing to Redundancy: Approaches to Spiritual Journals and Early Modern Spirituality’. Historical Journal 39 (1996), 33–56. Winship, Michael P. ‘Briget Cooke and the Art of Godly Female Self-Advancement’. Sixteenth Century Journal 33 (2002), 1045–59. Woolrych, Austin. Commonwealth to Protectorate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982, 11–12.

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CHAPTER

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MILTON’S DEFENCES AND THE PRINCIPLE OF ‘SANIOR PARS’

....................................................................................................... ELIZABETH SAUER

On the eve of the Civil War, John Milton referred to the translation of the prophecies of the Hebrews who ‘liv’d in the times of reformation’ to a ‘more perfect reformation under Christ’, and finally to the reformation of his day.1 As a self-proclaimed prophet on the national and international stage (CPW, iv. 536–7), Milton in the aftermath of the revolution rehearses St John Chrysostom’s explanation of Paul’s exhortation to the Romans: ‘“There was a common report among men of that time which libelled the apostles as traitorous revolutionaries whose every word and deed was aimed at the overthrow of the general laws: Paul stopped the mouths of those slanderers”’ (CPW, iv. 382). Milton’s philosophical and legal vindication of the English revolutionaries and their vision of the nation affords what David Loewenstein aptly terms ‘a polemical occasion for Revolutionary myth-making’.2 The ‘tumultuous times’ anticipating and characterizing the English Revolution (CPW, i. 807; iv. 621) defy the containment of history and historiography. The embattled ideals and ongoing debates about the revolution, republicanism, and liberty of conscience distinguish the literature of the Interregnum, including John Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Eikonoklastes (1649, 1650), the 1651 Pro populo Anglicano defensio, the 1654 Joannis Miltoni Angli Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, and the Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660). Over the past decades, scholarship on the English Revolution foregrounded political, socio-economic, and class issues, as well as relationships between national and local interests, and the varying degrees of involvement of the commoners, sectarians, and provincial gentry. Since the 1970s, ‘revisionists’ interrogated the archival (manuscript) evidence for and methodological approaches to the revolution and, while granting the civil libertarian objectives of the revolutionaries, supplied an important corrective to

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Whig historiography by documenting the seemingly arbitrary course of events and both the short-term and avoidable causes of the Civil Wars.3 The examination of a ‘revolution’ proposed here does not signal a retreat to Whiggish assumptions or teleology but rather identifies ways in which Milton imagined socio-political and notably religious reformation.4 In castigating Claudius Salmasius and Alexander More (mistaken for Dr Peter Du Moulin, the Younger) in his respective Defences, Milton himself confronted the haphazardness of the revolution— ‘conversio’ (a turning around)5—and the question about the limited representation and participation of the populace in what came to be known as ‘the good Old Cause’ of liberty (CPW, vii. 462). This chapter situates his post-revolutionary Defences in philosophical contexts in light of Milton’s own privileging of the moral disposition of the Protestant nation over its political, republican character, which has been the focus of much of the best scholarship on the treatises.6 Since the revolution was not historically fixed, neither were the writings that rehearsed its divergent premisses, notably in its aftermath. As material objects, polemics, and studies in the controversialist arts, Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Eikonoklastes, the Defences, and The Readie and Easie Way appeared in altered forms in Milton’s day, each time inviting a reassessment of the concepts of revolution, nationhood, liberty, and their conjunctions in new politico-historical settings. At the same time, Milton’s writings rehistoricize the revolution, while issuing powerful appeals for a reinvigorated Protestant reformation.

I

.................................................................................................................. Upon assuming his duties as Secretary for Foreign Languages for the new Republic in March 1649, Milton directed his writings largely to international audiences. Following the release of Tenure, which promoted the revolution ‘as a force in history’,7 Milton was commissioned by the Council of State to compose Observations upon the Articles of Peace, Eikonoklastes, and a response to the anonymous 1649 Defensio regia pro Carolo I by the internationally renowned divine-right theorist and Protestant humanist Claude de Saumaise (or Salmasius). Written at the behest of Charles I’s envoy Sir William Boswell, Salmasius’ Defensio was directed at the future Charles II and assailed the new English government. In late 1649 and early 1650, Defensio regia made its way from Holland to booksellers in England, and the Council sought the prosecution of the importers, including William Dugard, the future printer of Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio, which was authorized on 23 December 1650 and published 24 February 1651.8 Adapting oratorical models from Cicero, defender of the ancient republic, Milton designed the treatise as an exercise in disputation and an apology for the nationalist agenda of the Purged Parliament. The Defensio became Milton’s most famous and controversial work through its multiple editions and translations in England, France, Spain, Germany, and Holland.

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Acclaimed as a rhetorical masterpiece, Defensio, like its successor, is a declaration of civil, political, and religious rights and liberties—enjoyed by the virtuous, rational ‘better part’ (pars potior) or the ‘sounder’ (sanior)9 that bears a synecdochic relation to the nation. Discursively produced, the lineaments of the better nation are made up of ‘citations from divine law, the law of nations, and the statutes of my country’ (CPW, iv. 507), which Milton amasses in scripting an English constitutional history.10 In the process, he confronts the competing positions on the law of nature and, correspondingly, on constitutional law that inform national identity. At one with divine law and the law of nations (international law), Milton’s formulation of the law is an amalgam and extension of his theories of toleration, Christian humanism, free will, and moral law rooted in ‘right reason’ (CPW, vii. 479). In his tribute to the free nation, Milton registers the Puritan shift from legal precedent to the law of nature, and from historic to abstract rights. In upholding the (extra-)judicial process against the late King, Milton develops a defence of nationhood, dependent less on a codified judicature and legal positivism than on natural law equated with law of God, thus illustrating Joan Bennett’s claim that a ‘valid revolution tests whether supremacy is accountable to law, which alone has the power to liberate’.11 If in the Reason of Church-Government Milton ascribes to the nation ‘the title of Clergy S. Peter gave to all Gods people’ (CPW, i. 838), in Areopagitica he designates the people as ‘a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies’ (CPW, ii. 554); if in Eikonoklastes iconoclastic readers, the fit though few, are cast as ‘not less then Kings’ (CPW, iii. 542), in the Defensio, they are legislators or their ‘own lawmaker’ (CPW, iv. 479). Only a commonwealth could accommodate a sovereign people. ‘The strongest of realms . . . is now . . . a commonwealth, so much the stronger’ (CPW, iv. 311), Milton declares, as the revolution transformed the kingdom into what he hailed as a free nation whose government was designed ‘to train up a Nation in true wisdom and vertue’ (CPW, i. 571).12 On 4 January 1649, the Commons named the people as the source of power and authorized both its own representation of the people and its jurisdiction to pass legislation independent of the King’s consent. The welfare of the nation rested with the ‘joynt voice and efficacy of a whole Parliament, assembl’d by election, and indu’d with the plenipotence of a free Nation’, as Milton had insisted in Eikonoklastes (CPW, iii. 410), though the fickleness of the electorate would call for revisions to his configuration of the revolutionary nation. Omitting a representation of (a pro-monarchist) Scotland, the frontispiece of the Defensio displays a shield with an English cross and Irish harp (the arms of the Commonwealth), but the polemical war zone that Milton designated encompasses an international space. Milton thus selects Latin, the ‘common language of Christendom’ (CPW, vii. 239), as his medium, while also translating his justifications for the English Revolution into the European languages of theology, philosophy, and history. Marshalling his troops, Milton recruits the Reformers, ‘Luther, for example, and Zwingli, Calvin, Bucer, Paraeus’ (CPW, iv. 337–8; also iv. 661), and thus subdues the obscure figures invoked by Salmasius, a convert to Protestantism. The ancients, whom Milton selectively rescues from Defensio regia, come to his aid: among others,

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Euripides, Sophocles, Horace, Seneca, Aristotle, Xenophon, Polybius, and Pliny the Younger assist with the attack on tyranny (CPW, iv. 440–2, 446–9, 455). Likewise Tacitus and Sallust, who also supply a psychology of servitude under monarchy.13 Cicero contributes republican and natural law principles as well as oratorical and rhetorical devices, notably from his Philippics, based on Demosthenes’ orations against Philip (CPW, iv. 536). With remarkable agility, Milton proceeds to subvert unidirectional interpretative practices by demonstrating how incisively the Greeks and Romans, the biblical writers, and the Protestant Reformers intervene in early modern controversies over kingship, revolution, and the English constitutional law. The constitutional model that Milton develops in the place of the realm’s dynastic history is, however, still sketchy and inconsistent. Since the nation ultimately is distinguished not by its political institutions but by the civility and virtue of its subjects, Milton names and compares diverse political models, according to the Aristotelian example. In the Defensio, moreover, diplomacy and internationalism force the concession that ‘all kings are [not] tyrants’ (CPW, iv. 367). When Milton invoked the Defensio in its sequel, he called it ‘the Defence of religion and of liberty’ (CPW, iv. 654), and professed astonishment that it was burnt ‘in the city where under the counts Raimond both religion and liberty were once so nobly defended’ (CPW, iv. 653–4). Milton’s ideas of the nation’s religious spirit in fact dominate and inform matters of political organization.14 Keith Stavely ascertains that ‘Milton did not translate his ideals into political terms. If his tracts were the only surviving documents of the English Revolution, we would know little about it as a major political event . . . Form embodies abstract ideal to the detriment of concrete political meaning.’15 Biblical examples serve for Milton as historical and legal precedents, and judicial principles evolving from moral considerations, reason, deliberation, and a proclivity to self-governance displace formal legislation.16 Milton’s recourse is ultimately to divine law or the law of nature, which Digger-turned-Quaker Gerrard Winstanley called the original language: ‘to read the Law of Nature (or God) as he hath written his name in every body, is to speak a pure language, and this is to speak the truth as Jesus Christ spake it, giving to every thing its own weight and measure’.17 The Independent minister John Goodwin declares that the law of nature is the law of God, written on the heart and having an ‘authoritative jurisdiction over all human Laws and constitutions whatsoever’.18 An exasperated Salmasius complains that the English fanatics invoke natural law by default, in the absence of written laws.19 The philosophical controversy over the revolution centred on the meaning of divine law and its translation into political theory and practice, and by extension, the King’s relationship to the law and nation. Salmasius describes revolution—‘conversio’ or ‘mutatio’ (a changing, altering)—as a world turned upside down (CPW, iv. 398), when kings become subject to the people, and the law of nature and the customs and teachings of Christianity are overturned (CPW, iv/2. 1006). For the absolutist, natural law encompasses hierarchical arrangements that support sovereignty in the person of the king. Accountable to God alone, kings ‘cannot be judged’, which is ‘the fundamental principle and the basis of this work of kingly defence’, Salmasius announces (CPW,

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iv/2. 1007). By challenging the King’s prerogative over the Church and the judicial system, the English usurp the monarch’s position.20 Sir Robert Filmer would likewise reproach Milton for his theories of ‘kingship’ and ‘liberty of the people’ that reduced the monarch to ‘a condition below the meanest of his subjects’.21 In conjunction with ancient Roman law, divine-right theorists emphasized the paternal relationship of king and nation, which the king embodies and invests with life. Theories on the supremacy of the sovereign were ‘perfectly compatible with a strong sense of nationhood’,22 when the concept of the king’s inviolable paternal and political body dominated national imaginings and conscience was wedded to state loyalty. Insisting that elective monarchy was not the original form of government, James I declared that kingship ‘is the true paterne of Divinitie’ and that ‘the stile of pater patriae was ever, & is commonly used to Kings’. Paternal rights were an extension of ‘the agreement of the law of nature . . . with the laws and constitutions of God and man’.23 Availing themselves of scriptural support for the divine right of kings, royalists rehearsed the oft-cited dictum of St Paul: ‘There is no power but of God’ (Romans 13: 1). The decree was translated into an affirmation of the absolute obedience to the monarch that God’s law enjoined, even if the monarch proved tyrannical (CPW, iv/2. 1030). The Bible in fact supplied the language in which early modernists thought, communicated, and fought. In his history of the Civil War, Thomas Hobbes remarked that ‘Nor will that serve the turn among Christian Soveraigns, till Preaching be better lookt to, whereby the Interpretation of a Verse in the Hebrew, Greek, or Latine Bible, is oftentimes the cause of Civil War, and the deposing and assassinating of Gods Anointed.’24 Joining the print war over Romans 13, an ‘early Reformation resistance theorem’, and over the equally contentious ‘be ye Subject to the King as Supreame’ (1 Peter 2: 13) was R. Mossom, translator and publisher of David Owen’s Anti-Paraeus, or A Treatise in the Defence of the Royall Rights of Kings. Appearing on the eve of the Civil War, this printed version of Owen’s 1619 speech was as a timely reminder of the obedience to magistrates and monarchs required of their subjects.25 German theologian David Paraeus’ Commentary on Romans (1609), whose burning James I arranged, had stated that inferior magistrates could resist superiors in self-defence and in defence of the nation and true religion. In his Golden Rule, Fifth Monarchist John Canne cites authorities, from Augustine on—sometimes overlapping with Owen’s sources—who explicate Romans 13: 1, but in defence of the lawfulness of revolution against tyranny.26 The semantic ambiguity of Romans 13: 1 meant that the verse could lend itself to competing interpretations, justifying Henry VIII’s break from Rome and James I’s headship over the English Church, as well as the defiance of early modern Reformers, radicals, and Milton himself in wrenching the nation from the absolutist monarchy that Henry himself inaugurated.27 In conjunction with his view that the law of right reason or natural law—an abstract justice—is ‘the highest and ultimate power’ and trumps the state, Milton reads the verse as a mandate to obey legitimate authorities, those appointed by God, author of the most ancient laws (CPW, iv. 383).

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The fixed and immutable law of nature observed by all nations is the basis of the law of nations. In the Roman tradition, international law, founded on custom, differed from the law of nature,28 but Milton regularly aligns them in defending his position on the monarch’s subjection to the law: ‘Certainly all the best emperors were aware that the authority of the laws and the Senate far exceeded their own: so too in all civilized lands right has ever been the most sacred possession’ (CPW, iv. 382). Reinforcing the connectedness of constitutional law, civil societies, and the Gospel, which ‘accords with reason and with the law of nations’ (CPW, iv. 383), Milton supports his philosophical defence of the English nation with international precedents that situate political authority in a system of answerability and rational consent. In law, as in other forms and fields of nationhood, explained Richard Helgerson, national consolidation was Janus-faced: ‘It turned inward to find out and eliminate those practices and those institutions that failed to reflect back its own unitary image, and it turned outward to declare its defining difference—and to assure itself that such difference was not so different that it would be taken as a sign of backwardness or barbarity.’29 The centripetal, centrifugal process of nationhood described here involved historicizing feats. The over-determined historiography of the Norman Conquest demanded on the part of advocates of an ancient national sovereignty a reassessment of William I’s imposition of a foreign law on England. In 1649 Milton strategically traced the ancient tenure of kings not to the era of the Norman invasion but earlier to the year ad 446 when the British elected their kings after the Roman occupation (CPW, iii. 221). In the Defensio, Milton creates a constitutional history uninterrupted by the Conquest, which he overwrites: ‘those who are most familiar with our history know that the English strength was not so reduced in the one battle at Hastings . . . When he broke his word and the English again resorted to arms, he lacked confidence in his own power and swore anew on the Gospels to keep the ancient laws of England . . . Furthermore it is certain that, long ago, conquered and conquerors were joined into a single people and so the laws of war, if they ever applied, must have become obsolete long since’ (CPW, iv. 480). While Milton here absorbs the Conqueror into his narrative of English nationhood, radicals of his day repudiated ‘the Norman Yoke’ that still strangled English liberties. Salmasius had argued for the validity of Charles’s kingship on the basis of his ascendancy from William I and the Norman race (CPW, iv/2. 1005). For Winstanley, Charles’s succession from the Conqueror established his foreignness, while his laws represented ‘the successive Power of that Norman Conquest over England’. The revolution of the ‘Commoners of England against King Charls’ was thus a just war, Winstanley explains (65). The developmental process of English constitutionalism emphatically prohibited foreign interference. In addition to being the object of Milton’s diatribe that unleashes a battery of opprobrious rhetorical and personalized epithets, Salmasius is reviled as an intruder in English affairs. Milton’s assaults on Salmasius’ foreignness are statements on national sovereignty (CPW, iv. 306, 336). Salmasius is charged with ‘meddl[ing] in our affairs, of which you know nothing’ (CPW, iv. 533). He is also chastised for citing foreign constitutional models in his defence of divine right, as if the English lacked a

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legal history. Indeed the English ‘can make for themselves what laws they wish’, Milton avers, in defence of natural freedoms (CPW, iv. 533) and of an immemorial law that extended from Magna Carta—the seminal document on the inheritance of liberty and pre-Conquest laws—to Modus tenendi parliamentum (Manner of Parliament), Speculum justiciariorum (Mirror of Justices) (CPW, iv. 493–4) and through to the 1628 Petition of Rights and 1653 Instrument of Government.30 The definition of national character through resistance to foreignness is less fraught than the renunciation of internal features that undermine national consolidation. Among the most vexed issues of the day were the constitution and role of the people in the revolutionary nation. The representation of the people in terms of a qualitative principle rather than numerical majority in constitutionalism is grounded in the Aristotelian political concept of government by the most worthy. The principle of ‘sanior pars’ was introduced in canon law in the twelfth century, and in the thirteenth, legist Henry de Bracton applied it to the British kingdom in defending governance by lords and bishops.31 The distinction that Marsilius of Padua articulated in the following century between the populus (the nobles) and the plebs (the lower-class masses) resonated even through to the early modern era. Populist-supporter George Buchanan himself subscribed to the ideal of a qualitative representation of the people.32 Milton’s contemporary John Goodwin broached the issue of popular representation in his remarks on the governance by the army, which, despite being ‘contrary to the minde and desires of the people or at least of the major part of them’, complies with natural law.33 Marchamont Nedham in the following year likewise defended the legitimacy of representative government, notably during national crises: ‘our present Governours have no Call or Consent from the People’, but elections are for peacetime: in times of war, government ‘is decided by the Sword’ and must conduct its affairs ‘as if it had the Peoples positive Consent’.34 Milton’s own recourse first to the middling sort—those not diverted by luxury or want—and then to the regenerate over the collective or the majority is a function of the characteristically ‘restrictive emphasis’ of Puritan thought.35 Yet it is a practice in need of defence: ‘why should I not say that the act of the better, the sound part of the Parliament, in which resides the real power of the people, was the act of the people’ particularly, Milton continues, if the minority can preserve the freedom of the commonwealth? (CPW, iv. 457). The remnant of better citizens and parliamentary representatives of the people’s ‘real power’ resist identification, though their superior reason is assumed, as is their legal immunity. Although all are born into a state of natural liberty, only ‘the wise, that is, and the brave’ and ‘the larger or more able part’ (CPW, iv. 343, 470) are desirous of liberty and can maintain it. Popular sovereignty for the present extended only to the propertied, the intellectuals, republicans, Independents, the army, and the Rump—later the Council.36 Conflicts over the principles and practices of inclusion and exclusion are central to the debate about the revolution and the constitution of the nation. For his detractors, Milton’s qualifications of popular rule undermined his philosophical and constitutional models. Authority cannot reside in the people if they cannot make laws or create

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magistrates, and if ‘the army with their leaders’ has delegated judicial power to the lower house, abrogated old laws, implemented new ones, and abused the terms of justice, Salmasius retorts (CPW, iv/2. 989). Milton concedes Salmasius’ point that the revolution was not a majority movement, but in so doing, legitimizes the principle of ‘sanior pars’, notably in the face of national exigencies: ‘If . . . a country harassed by faction and protecting herself by arms regards only the sound and upright side, passing over or shutting out the others, whether commons or nobles, she maintains justice well enough’ (CPW, iv. 317). Complementing Salmasius’ notion of the law of nature as dictating monarchical absolutism is the divine right patriarchalism of Sir Robert Filmer, whose appraisal of Hugo Grotius precedes his rebuttal of Milton’s Defensio. Filmer observes that just as Aristotle never definitively identified the free citizens, so ‘our modern politicians . . . though they talk big of the people, yet they take up and are content with a few representors (as they call them) of the whole people’. Milton exemplifies such inconsistencies and limits of toleration by denying to ‘the major part of the representors’ the status of ‘people’ and condoning ‘the sounder and better part only of them’. The soldiers themselves now stand for ‘the people’.37 In the same year, John Lilburne used the Defensio to admonish the Cromwellian regime. The substantial section from the epilogue of Defensio that Lilburne translates in English in the prophetic As You Were or The Lord General Cromwel and the Grand Officers resonates with pleas for the preservation of national liberties.38 A lover of his ‘native Countrey’ (15), Lilburne issues Milton’s warning to his countrymen and the Rump to remain vigilant against internal threats to law, liberty, and revolution. But in the early 1650s, the Republic, while allegedly deriving its power from the people, declined to call new elections, Lilburne charges, thus violating the nation’s constitution. As he interrogates the legitimacy of the increasingly tyrannical Republic and laments the shortcomings of the revolution, Lilburne turns to Milton’s treatise in support of fundamental liberties. Milton, however, displayed no enthusiasm for elections at this time, and would later compose his own postscript to the Defensio. In the meantime, Defensio secunda would negotiate the shifting ideals and limitations of the revolution, toleration, and popular representation.

II

.................................................................................................................. Much of Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, printed by Thomas Newcomb in 1654, was in fact completed by April 1653 and ‘belongs to the same political environment’ as its prequel.39 At the beginning of a retrospective account in Defensio secunda of his contributions to the advancement of the Protestant Reformation (CPW, iv. 622), Milton recalls his commitment to the national cause and what would be termed ‘the good Old Cause’. The Protectorate—based on single-person rule—remained a republic in Milton’s tract (CPW, iv. 561, 673), thus inciting Blair Worden’s

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conclusion that Defensio secunda ‘fought yesterday’s battles’ (Literature and Politics, 271). Milton claimed still to be living in a republic, and the treatise ‘is essentially a work of the Rump period’, Worden reiterates (288) after meticulously and authoritatively reviewing the stages in which it was written. If Defensio secunda is read primarily as a political and topical tract, then it can be judged as dated or outdated, as The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660) would also seem to be about a time well before the inexorable march to the Restoration.40 But as a product of the 1650s, a ‘decade of startling shifts of temporality’,41 and as a major contribution to what Milton outlined as the larger programme of defending liberty (CPW, iv. 624), Defensio secunda is more than the sum of its historico-republican reflections. It is, among other things, a statement on Protestant nationalism, with tolerationism as a key feature thereof. Whereas the 1651 Defensio forensically anatomizes Salmasius’ defence in order to dismantle it, Defensio secunda takes greater liberties in pursuing its own form and line of argumentation. It includes a character assassination of the author of Regii sanguinis clamor (The Netherlands, 1652), whom Milton, despite warnings, misidentifies and defames as Alexander More. More or Morris, a French minister of Scottish descent then a professor at Middelburg, had overseen the printing of Regii sanguinis in consultation with the now deceased Salmasius. In the confrontation with More, Milton draws on his earlier Defensio in inflecting his pronouncements on political participation with theories on natural law. Conceding that the parliamentarians ‘are themselves now the people’ while the commoners constitute an indecisive mob that might have acquitted the King (CPW, iv. 635), Milton maintains that ‘nothing is more natural, nothing more just, nothing more useful or more advantageous to the human race than that the less should yield to the greater, not in numbers, but in wisdom and in virtue’ (CPW, iv. 636). Given the superiority of the Independents ‘both in law and in merit’ (CPW, iv. 636), they constitute ‘the sounder party’ (CPW, iv. 648). Occupying a diplomatic and ambassadorial role as a polemicist on the international stage, Milton modulates his antimonarchism to avoid alienating the Cromwellian regime from Continental states already distressed by the ‘parricidal’ execution of Charles I (CPW, iv. 596). Milton summons international, notably French, examples of resistance to tyranny that serve as historical and legal precedents for the opposition to the despotic Charles (CPW, iv. 658). But Milton is also careful to distinguish between the just punishment of a tyrant and the indefensible murder of a lawful king (CPW, iv. 599). Milton’s encomium to Christina, Queen of Sweden—hailed as a patron of the arts, an admiring reader of his Defensio, and a paragon of magnanimous virtue—exhibits the differences between tyranny and righteous monarchical rule, differences fortuitously perceived by ‘Augusta’ herself, whom he also credits with banishing Salmasius (CPW, iv. 603–7). The subsequent panegyric to the Lord Protector, though no Augustus,42 registers the pan-European potential and reach of his appeal by enjoining Cromwell to ‘honour what foreign nations think and say of us’ (CPW, iv. 673). During the Civil War years and early Republic, Milton acclaimed Cromwell as the agent of religious and political revolution. At the start of the Protectorate, Milton

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revives an earlier portrait of Cromwell, whose victory over the ungodly Irish he applauded in the 1651 Defensio (CPW, iv/1. 458). Applying his extensive use of the military metaphor for the art of writing, Milton exalts Cromwell’s heroism in his own ‘true history’ that constitutes ‘a second battlefield . . . and a space for narration equal to the deeds themselves’ (CPW, iv. 668). Cromwell’s expulsion of the discredited Rump in April 1653 was among the ‘deliverances’ of the Puritan revolution that Milton, who continued to work for Cromwell’s Council of State, defended (Worden, Literature and Politics, 291). John Hall, like Marchamont Nedham, had judged the dissolution of the Rump as the most exemplary of ‘the greatest Revolutions’ because it occurred ‘without effusion of blood, and . . . without the least resentment of those whom it generally concerns’. The dissolution, he assures the reader, is the means of preventing further abuses of national liberty.43 Nedham’s anonymously published A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654), albeit a propagandist piece, maintained that the republicans never ‘took up Arms for, or against any particular Form of Government whatsoever’ and that Parliament ‘seemed to be the likeliest and best means . . . to preserve the Liberties of the People’, demonstrating again that ‘the revolution was not about forms of government but about liberties’.44 A True State proceeds to defend the expulsion of the Barebones Parliament convened in July 1653 after the Rump’s forcible dissolution (22–3). Milton himself derided Barebones: ‘The elected members came together. They did nothing’ (CPW, iv. 671). The tribute that Milton composes for the Lord Protector balances compliment and counsel, while largely keeping criticism at bay. Milton defends Cromwell for having ‘assumed a certain title very like that of father of your country . . . and be[ing] forced into a definitive rank, so to speak, for the public good’ (CPW, iv. 672). He is acclaimed a national saviour, though the apologia also registers Milton’s sometimes strained efforts to distinguish Cromwell’s majesty from regality: ‘The name of king you spurned from your far greater eminence’ (CPW, iv. 672). Seeking to neutralize the autocratic nature of the Protectorate (CPW, iv. 674), Milton advises Cromwell to surround himself with counsellors. In addition to celebrating John Bradshaw, who oversaw the trial of the King and who brings ‘a liberal frame of mind’ to ‘knowledge of the law’ (CPW, iv. 638), and Thomas Fairfax whom he cautiously commends for moral rather than political feats (CPW, iv. 669), Milton selects for Cromwell twelve comrades, representing a combination of Milton’s and Cromwell’s preferences. In most cases, their positions on toleration had more to recommend them than did their support of Cromwell or his policies. Among the worthies, Bulstrode Whitelocke, like Bradshaw, had in fact rebuked Cromwell for dissolving the Rump; Henry Lawrence, whom Milton praises along with Edward Montague for his patronage of the arts, resisted the proceedings against Charles; Whitelocke, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Robert Overton—parliamentary officer and critic of the Protectorate—were among the practitioners or defendants of civic and religious toleration (CPW, iv. 676, 677). Milton thereafter modulates the tone of the encomium by rendering the exaltation conditional on the exercise of moral and civic responsibilities designed to further the revolutionary cause. The directives to Cromwell include committing to self-scrutiny,

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implementing policies on disestablishment, reforming English legislation and education, and securing freedom of speech and liberty of conscience—for the meritorious.45 Defensio secunda is like its prequel intent on cultivating a climate of toleration, but the advice to Cromwell communicates this message in primarily negative terms as an entreaty to curb intolerance: ‘eos autem minimè omnium audieris, qui sese liberos esse non credunt, nisi aliis esse liberis, per ipsos non liceat; nec studiosiùs aut violentiùs quicquam agunt, quàm ut fratrum non corporibus modò sed conscientiis quoque vincula injiciant’ (may you ‘listen the least of all to those, who never fancy that themselves are free, unless they deprive others of their freedom; who labour at nothing with so much zeal and earnestness, as to enchain not the bodies only, but the consciences of their brethren’).46 The exhortation to Cromwell to commit to inner reform and secure national liberty is redirected to the people themselves. Milton represents the English nation in moral and philosophical terms, as characterized by its ‘the acquisition or retention of liberty’ (CPW, iv. 680). The principle of international law derived from Grotius that ‘a Nation engaged in Civill warr is deemed . . . to be two nations’47 becomes in Milton a crucible of national self-fashioning based on the premiss of sanior pars: ‘nation presses upon nation, or the sounder part of a nation overthrows the more corrupt’ (CPW, iv. 681), the healthier part alchemically transforming and constituting synecdochically the free nation. The intra-national contest emerges as the venue for the new revolution: ‘many tyrants, impossible to endure, will from day to day hatch out from your very vitals. Conquer them first. This is the warfare of peace, these are its victories, hard indeed, but bloodless, and far more noble’ (CPW, iv. 681). At the end of the decade, the relationship between the revolution and free nation was reinforced on behalf of Puritans and dissenters in Mene Tekel, George Bishop’s prophecy of the writing on the wall for the Council of army officers: ‘the Good Old Cause, was (chiefly) Liberty of Conscience’, and the government was charged with ‘defend[ing] and deliver[ing] it, and the Liberties of the Nation, which with the Liberty of Conscience were bound up, and joyned together’. In fact, the nation’s ‘Common Right and Freedome . . . hath been the chief subject of our Contest [of war]’ (6). But Parliament under the Council is now guilty of the King’s own transgressions against the cause of liberty and the Reformation.48 Into this climate, the Defensio, while still in circulation in London and Amsterdam, was reintroduced with a coda that could have been meant for both Defences and for the volatile decade of the 1650s at large. The 1658 edition, printed by Newcomb who published Defensio secunda, betrayed the degree to which the Protectorate had by its fifth year deviated from the cause of the revolution celebrated in 1651 and in 1653–4, when Milton located Cromwell in the company of revolutionaries and still clung to the ideals of a free commonwealth. Among the additions to the new edition of the Defensio was the testimony that ‘civil freedom’ has never been ‘more freely defended’ in ‘a greater or more outstanding instance’ than by Milton in this inspired ‘memorial’ (CPW, iv. 536). Milton both reflects upon and creates an exuberant reception history for his work: exemplary nations and his own native country, as comprised of the ‘best citizens’ (CPW, iv. 537), will recognize

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his achievement as the Romans had applauded Cicero’s oath with its coda to his singlehanded deliverance of the city and state (CPW, iv. 536). The deliverer, that is, liberator of the nation is hailed as pater patriae, a title first bestowed on Cicero, then on Julius Caesar and Augustus. In the early modern era, James I claimed the distinction. When invoking the title in Defensio secunda, Milton confers it on Cromwell (CPW, iv. 672) before consecrating himself—in the epilogue to both Defences (CPW, iv. 537, iv. 685). Beginning with his own heroic past when he was literally trained up to serve the nation, Milton reaffirms the relationship between the ideal nation and himself, both characterized by the cultivation and exemplification of civic virtues founded on liberty. The philosophical, epic foundation for the Commonwealth had been laid by the poetpolemicist whose work is at once a self-defence, national defence, and exemplum. Thereupon he resolves to take on ‘still greater things’ (CPW, iv. 537), joining ‘epic vision to revolutionary politics’.49 But while the national epic was under way, its polemical prequel, the Defensio, was called in to be burnt, and the author incarcerated.50 Milton’s appraisals of the revolution’s ideals and shortcomings inflect his writing of the English nation. The revolution was designed to establish a climate for toleration, free enquiry, and the hazarding of truth in a free nation, but Milton’s frustrations over the failings of popular self-governance result in the subtle, muted transference of legislative and moral authority to an intellectual elite in the 1650s writings. The representation of elected parliamentarians by the regenerate is likewise at variance with the belief in the fundamental law of nature and rights of the majority. That Milton reconstitutes nationhood in the Defences in terms of the sanior pars, situated in the context of Protestant ethics and moral law, demonstrates the double-faced nature and contrary impulses of national consolidation in the literary afterlife of the revolution.

NOTES 1. Milton, Complete Prose Works, i. 799, 757, 838. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Milton’s works are from the Yale edition of the prose and cited as CPW. 2. Loewenstein, ‘Milton’s Prose and the Revolution’, 99. Loewenstein refers here to Defensio secunda but his description is equally applicable to the 1651 Defensio prima. 3. Keeble, ‘Introduction’, 6; see also Morrill’s ‘The Causes and Course’, 13–31, and Patterson, ‘The Very Name’, 21–37. 4. On post-revisionist approaches, see e.g. Sharpe, Remapping Early Modern England, esp. 3–27. The portrait of Milton as a staunch defender of rights and liberties has been interrogated of late. See esp. Achinstein and Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration, which resists the ‘progressive’ analyses of Milton’s positions on liberty enunciated by such historicist critics as William Haller, A. S. P. Woodhouse, Arthur Barker, and Christopher Hill. 5. Keeble comments that ‘the word revolution signified cyclical movement or rotation, rather than (as in the modern sense) abrupt change; it was not hence used of contemporary events’ (Keeble, ‘Introduction’, 8 n. 26). Cf. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 9.

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

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However, see the Introduction to this volume for more varied uses of ‘revolution’, notably instances of revolution in the more contemporary sense of abrupt change. The scholarship on the Defences focuses on their political and republican principles. See e.g. Worden, ‘Milton’s Second Defence’, 262–88; id., ‘Marchamont Nedham’, 45–81; Dzelzainis, ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, 3–24; and Corns, ‘Milton and the Characteristics’, 25–42. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, 167. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 229–30. Joannis Miltoni Anglo Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio, vii. 356, 357. The phrase also appears in the earlier remark about the state maintaining relations with ‘its sound and uncontaminated part alone’ (‘si sanæ et integræ tantùm partis’), vii. 28–9. Cyriack Skinner defines constitution as the ‘distinguishing Principles of Government’ that would advance civil liberties (John Phillips, ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton’, 26). Bennett, Reviving Liberty, 47. Cf. Eikonoklastes, CPW, iii. 458. See Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism. Brown, ‘Great Senates’, 44. Stavely, Politics of Milton’s Prose Style, 112–13. See Chakravarty, Like Parchment in the Fire. Winstanley, The Law of Freedom, 58. Goodwin, Right and Might, 15. Salmasius, Defensio regia, CPW, iv/2. 1020. Wolfe, ‘Introduction: “Defensio regia of Salmasius” ’, CPW, iv. 107. Filmer, ‘Observations on Mr. Milton’, 251. See Sommerville, ‘Literature and National Identity’, 469. James I, The True Lawe, B2v, D3r. Hobbes, Behemoth, 151. Hobbes made similar observations about the political dangers of reading classical anti-monarchical writings (Leviathan, 267). Owen, Anti-Paraeus, 54, 57. Canne, The Golden Rule, 22. McEachern, Poetics of English Nationhood, 10. Grace, ‘Preface to A Defence’, CPW, iv. 294. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 71. See Pocock, Ancient Constitution, 30–55. Monahan, Consent, Coercion and Limit, 140. Dzelzainis, ‘Introduction’, John Milton, Political Writings, xxiv. Goodwin, Right and Might, 14. [Nedham,] Mercurius politicus, 341–2. Woodhouse, Puritanism and Liberty, 93. See Hill, Liberty against the Law, 242–51. Filmer, ‘Observations on Mr. Milton’, 252, 256. Lilburne, As You Were, 16. Worden, Literature and Politics, 268. Cf. Knoppers’s reading of the tract in ‘Late Political Prose’, 309–25. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 437. Payne Fisher and other poets put Cromwell in the role assigned to Augustus, though Milton did not (Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 328–9).

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43. [Hall], A Letter, 1; 15–16. The title page of the British Library copy attributes the Letter to Milton. 44. [Nedham], A True State, 5. Lewalski, Life, 300. 45. The scholarly debate over the encomiastic or critical nature of the portrait of Cromwell was ignited by Woolrych’s ‘Milton and Cromwell’. For select recent analyses of the panegyric as (covertly) ironic, see Worden, ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’, 175–8; as balanced, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 331–7 and Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 93–5; as laudatory, see Fallon, ‘A Second Defence’, 167–83 and Chernaik, ‘Victory’s Crest’, 93–4. 46. Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, viii. 238–9. 47. [Nedham], Mercurius politicus (1650), 342. 48. Mene Tekel, 4–6. 49. Loewenstein, ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense’, 187–8. 50. A Proclamation for Calling in, and Suppressing of Two Books Written by John Milton.

WORKS CITED Achinstein, Sharon, and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.). Milton and Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Anon. A Proclamation for Calling in, and Suppressing of Two Books Written by John Milton, the One Intituled, Johannis Miltoni Angli pro populo Anglicano defensio, contra Claudii Anonymi alias Salmasii, defensionem regiam; and the Other in a Answer to a Book Intituled, The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty in his Solitude and Sufferings . . . London, 1660. Bennett, Joan. Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Bishop, George. Mene Tekel, or The Council of Officers of the Army, Against The Declarations, & c. of the Army. London, 1659. Brown, Cedric C. ‘Great Senates and Godly Education: Politics and Cultural Renewal in Some Pre- and Post-revolutionary Texts of Milton’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 43–60. Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Canne, John. The Golden Rule, or, Justice Advanced. London, 1649. Chakravarty, Prasanta. Like Parchment in the Fire: Literature and Radicalism in the English Civil War. London: Routledge, 2006. Chernaik, Warren. ‘Victory’s Crest: Milton, the English Nation, and Cromwell’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, 73–111. Corns, Thomas N. ‘Milton and the Characteristics of a Free Commonwealth’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 25–42. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Introduction’, in John Milton, Political Writings, ed. Martin Dzelzainis, trans. Claire Gruzelier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, ix–xxv.

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——. ‘Milton’s Classical Republicanism’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 3–24. Fallon, Robert Thomas. ‘A Second Defence: Milton’s Critique of Cromwell?’ Milton Studies 39 (2000), 167–83. Filmer, Sir Robert. ‘Observations on Mr. Milton Against Salmasius’, in Patriarcha and Other Political Works of Sir Robert Filmer, ed. Peter Laslett. Oxford: Blackwell, 1949, 251–60. Goodwin, John. Right and Might well Met, or A Briefe and Unpartiall Enquiry into the . . . procedings of the Army. London, 1649. Grace, William. ‘Preface to A Defence’, in Don M. Wolfe (ed.), vol. iv of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 285–94. Hall, John. A Letter Written to a Gentleman in the Country, touching the Dissolution of the Late Parliament. London, 1653. Helgerson, Richard. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. New York: Viking Press, 1978. ——. ‘Liberty and Equality: Who are the People?’, in Liberty against the Law: Some Seventeenth-Century Controversies. London: Penguin Press, 1996, 242–51. Hobbes, Thomas. Behemoth; or an Epitome of the Civil Wars of England, From 1640, to 1660. London, 1679. ——. Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. James I of England. The True Lawe of Free Monarchies. London, 1603. Keeble, N. H. ‘Introduction’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), Writing the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 1–9. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ——. ‘Late Political Prose’, in Thomas N. Corns (ed.), A Blackwell Companion to Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, 309–25. Lewalski, Barbara. Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Lilburne, John. As You Were or The Lord General Cromwel and the Grand Officers of the Armie their Remembrancer. [Amsterdam], 1652. Loewenstein, David. ‘Milton and the Poetics of Defense’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 171–92. ——. ‘Milton’s Prose and the Revolution’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), Writing the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 87–106. ——. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. McEachern, Claire. The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Milton, John. Joannis Miltoni Anglo pro populo Anglicano defensio, ed. Clinton W. Keyes, trans. Samuel Lee Wolff, in vol. vii of The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. A. Patterson. 18 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1932. ——. Joannis Miltoni Anglo pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda, ed. Eugene J. Strittmatter, rev. George Burnett, trans. Moses Hadas, in vol. viii of The Works of John Milton, gen. ed. F. A. Patterson. 18 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1933.

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Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. A Defence of the People of England, trans. Donald Mackenzie, ed. Don M. Wolfe, in vol. iv of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 299–537. ——. A Second Defence of the English People, trans. Helen North, ed. Don M. Wolfe, in vol. iv of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 547–686. Monahan, Arthur P. Consent, Coercion and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987. Morrill, John. ‘The Causes and Course of the British Civil Wars’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), Writing the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 13–31. Nedham, Marchamont. Mercurius politicus 21 (24–31 October 1650), 341–56. London, 1650. ——. A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth. London, 1654. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Owen, John. Anti-Paraeus, or A Treatise in the Defence of the Royall Rights of Kings. York, 1642. Patterson, Annabel. ‘The Very Name of the Game’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 21–37. Phillips, John. ‘The Life of Mr. John Milton by John Phillips’, in Helen Darbishire (ed.), The Early Lives of Milton. London: Constable, 1965, 17–34. Pocock, J. G. A. The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. New York: Norton, 1967. Salmasius, Claudius. Defensio regia pro Carola I (1649), trans. Kathryn A. McEuen, in vol. iv/2 of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82, 985–1039. Sharpe, Kevin. Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sommerville, Johann P. ‘Literature and National Identity’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 459–86. Stavely, Keith W. The Politics of Milton’s Prose Style. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Winstanley, Gerrard. The Law of Freedom in a Platform: or, True Magistracy Restored. London, 1652. Wolfe, Don M. ‘Introduction: “Defensio regia of Salmasius” ’, in vol. iv of Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966, 1–283. Woodhouse, A. S. P. Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates 1647–9. Foreword by A. D. Lindsay. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1966. Woolrych, Austin. ‘Milton and Cromwell: “A Short but Scandalous Night of Interruption?” ’, in Michael Lieb and John Shawcross (eds.), Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974, 185–218.

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Worden, Blair. ‘Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism, 1649–1656’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, 45–81. ——. ‘Milton and Marchamont Nedham’, in David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 156–80. ——. ‘Milton’s Second Defence’, in Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 262–88.

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PROPHECY AND POLITICAL EXPRESSION IN CROMWELLIAN ENGLAND ....................................................................................................... KATHARINE GILLESPIE

On Whitson-Monday in early August of 1647, Anna Trapnel’s heart was in ‘a very low dead frame’.1 A young seamstress in London who, as a child, had received the gift of prophecy from her dying mother, Trapnel was consoled in her desolation by the voice of the Lord: ‘I am’, he promised, ‘about to shew thee great things’ (4). The next day, the New Model Army approached the capital. After nearly a decade of battling royalist troops, the army had a new mission: to reinstate those parliamentarians whose belief in separation of Church from state had led to their purge by a powerful Presbyterian faction prepared to turn against its own army and broker a back-room deal with the defeated Charles I. A staunch supporter of Parliament and the quest by many of its soldiers to implement religious ‘Independency’, Trapnel had sold her own plate and rings to raise money for the troops. The army, she believed, would not just bring religious reform, but would prepare England to become the site for an even greater destiny. Standing in her house in the Minories of Aldgate Parish, learning that the soldiers were ‘drawing up towards the city’, she had ‘a glorious Vision of the New Jerusalem’ (4). She cried out, ‘Lord, what is this?’ and was answered: It is ‘a discovery of the glorious state of whole Sion, in the raign of the Lord Jesus, in the midst of them, and of it thou shalt have more visions hereafter’ (4). While other citizens closed their shops and shuttered themselves in their houses, Trapnel flung open her window and looked towards the City in time to see a flag appear at the end of her street. The flag was, she was told, the ‘flag of defiance’; it was ‘with the Army’ for ‘the King of Salem is on their side, he marcheth before them, he is the Captain of their Salvation’ (4). Turning in the opposite direction, she saw Blackheath Hill—just one of ‘many hills,’ she was told, that signified the preordained rise of a new order and the retreat of the old into the obscure hollows of submission. These hills ‘shall fall down and become Vallies before it’ (4). As instructed next, Trapnel left her house and went into the city where she was shown that

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‘the Councels of men shall fall, but the Councel of the Lord stands sure, and his works shall progress’ (5). After returning home, she ‘had many Visions, that the Lord was doing great things for this Nation’ (5). A nine-day fast precipitated what would turn into a nearly ten-year period of time when Trapnel did indeed receive ‘many Visions’, visions that would haunt the contours of the rise and fall of the new order over the course of the 1650s. This decade would become known as the ‘Interregnum’—a rupture in the reign of kings—rather than the beginning of a new and permanent commonwealth era as Trapnel and so many others hoped. But in these heady early days, when Trapnel lay in the first of many fast-induced trances through which her visions would famously be received and delivered to increasingly large crowds, she still believed that the parade of troops into London signified the biblically sanctioned displacement of earthly monarchs with a form of rule that was more in keeping with God’s ultimate plan for humankind. Many of her visions would come true—for a time. She foresaw the demise of Charles I, the dismantling of the episcopacy, and the suppression of the Scottish rebellion by Oliver Cromwell. God, she was told, ‘had raised up a Gideon’ and Oliver Cromwell ‘was as that Gideon, going before Israel, blowing the trumpet of courage and valour, the rest with him sounding forth their Courage also’ (6). As a Gideon, Cromwell’s staunch virtue would fortify him against the temptations offered to conquerors by the desultory authoritarianism of crown rule. ‘Without these Dignities and great Titles,’ her visionary Cromwell declared, ‘I will serve the People and Commonalty’ (29). Trapnel was not alone in her jubilant conviction that Cromwell would ‘serve the People’ rather than subjecting them to the ‘Norman Yoke’ of monarchy.2 Nor was she alone in utilizing prophecy as a medium for articulating political alternatives to kingship. Indeed, there was a long history in England of popular prophecy, a form of ‘lay piety’ or ‘experimental predestinarianism’ in which ordinary individuals asserted that God often performed ‘the greatest workes by the weakest instruments’, that is through ‘men of base accompte . . . & such as are . . . the verie abject of the earth’.3 Within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, monarchy itself rested upon the prophecy that God gave to Moses in Deuteronomy: ‘When thou art come unto the land which the lord thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me; Thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom the lord thy God shall choose’ (17: 14–15).4 And yet so did kingship’s ‘necessary adjunct’ (107), the prophet as the enunciator and anointer of kings, the denunciator of tyrants, and the seer of the coming of the ‘king of kings’ who would succeed and supplant earthly monarchs. As Moses was also told, ‘The lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken’ (18: 15). Members of the ‘ordinary ministry’ often constituted themselves as direct descendants of Hebrew prophets who enjoyed an ‘extraordinary calling’.5 But the idea that the age of miracles was not over and God was still bestowing the gift of ‘breathing’ onto human agents emboldened unlicensed men and women alike to forgo ‘counsel of flesh and blood’ and identify themselves as ‘some faithfull Zorobabell or Nehemiah’.6 Indeed, self-appointed prophets were so

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feared by kings as a medium for ‘political iconoclasm’ that statutes against prophecy were enacted by Henry IV in 1402 and 1406, Henry VIII in 1541–2, Edward VI in 1549– 50 and again in 1552–3, and Elizabeth I in 1562–3 and 1580–1.7 Prophecy’s power not just to imagine but to induce various forms of subversion is acknowledged in the wording of Edward’s ‘Acte against fonde and fantasticall Prophecies’, which condemns those ‘divers evill disposed parsons’ who, ‘mynding to stir and move sedicion disobedience and rebellion’, had ‘invented published and practysed dyvers fantasticall and fonde Prophesyes, concerning the King’s Majestie, dyvers honorable parsons gentlemen and common of this realme, to the great disturbance and peril of the King’s Majestie and this his Realme’.8 As the statute intimates, prophecy was understood to move immediately from intention to effect. The prophet’s fantastical pronouncements were equivalent to ‘imperiling’ and ‘disturbing’ the subject of his or her intonations. Prophecy was a ‘speech act’, a ‘felicitous’ verbalization that purportedly engendered the very reality that it envisioned, through the very act of envisioning.9 As Thomas Hobbes nervously put it, prophecies were ‘many times the principal cause of the event foretold’.10 During the years leading up to and forming the Civil War period, self-proclaimed seers exploited Parliament’s lax enforcement of its own censorship laws to fill the bookstalls at St Paul’s Cathedral with an unprecedented number of penny prophecies.11 When Parliament re-established censorship laws in the 1650s, there was a consequential dip in output, but the anxieties conveyed by prohibitions against prophecy served only to highlight its ongoing potency and appeal.12 Prognostications were a regular feature of the highly popular form of almanacs.13 As John Booker reminded his readers in his 1651 edition of The Bloody Almanack, ‘Ptolomy, the Father of Astrologers, having 300 years ago, foretold and prophesied, That great would be the fall of Kings and Monarchs, and potent would be the people that should rise up against them for the breaking of their Crowns and Scepters, &c. we find by experience, is now fulfilled in these our days.’14 Some of the most elaborate prophetic texts were published in the 1650s, including lengthy works by Trapnel and other redoubtable women, several of whom helped define the genre by composing highly detailed visions of the new age and arguing that the attainment of religious authority by such ‘empty vessels’ as themselves epitomized the alterations in traditional society heralded by that new age.15 And prophetic modes cohabited comfortably in many pamphlets with argumentation that was more straightforwardly conventional or ‘rational’. Henry Vane’s A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved (1659) combines highly structured, point-by-point argumentation in favour of ‘unity’ among the various factions who won the war but could not come together to govern with vatic reminders of God’s involvement in the ‘Cause’: ‘In the management of this war, it pleased God (the righteous Judge, who was appealed to in the controversie) so to bless the council and Forces of the persons concerned and engaged in this cause, as in the end to make them absolute and compleat Conquerors over their common Enemy.’16 Critics tried to diffuse the influence of prophecy by characterizing it as madness or ‘brainsicknesse’, a stance that remained prevalent among such post-Enlightenment sceptics as Alfred Cohen, who wrote in 1984: ‘As a special kind of historical occurrence it presents itself to the modern,

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and for the most part secular, historian as a unique problem that requires some kind of reasonable explanation.’17 But prophecy is more and more recognized as an important source for early modern popular political expression, an oppositional discourse that claimed the imprimatur of God and hence operated precariously but persistently in the margins of human law, and a form of prescription that, from within the Bible’s rich veins of anti-authoritarian ore, mined mandates for higher law and contract theories, civil disobedience, religious separatism, and various forms of social and political equality.18 To be sure, some royalist sympathizers utilized the genre as a means by which to legitimize kingship and criticize the rebellious pretensions of their foes.19 In 1648, William Sedgwick’s The Spirituall Madman envisioned a reconciliation between earthly monarchy and the ‘Majestie of God’ that would heal the unnatural rupture in the correspondences between divine will and human society that the revolution had introduced.20 In 1649, Samson Jones published Vox infantis, a prophecy ostensibly delivered by a baby discovered in a field, which declared that the ‘den of Vipers’ who had staged ‘Rebellion, Blood, and Murther’ against the King would feel God’s imminent wrath when Charles II was restored to the throne.21 Published that same year, the broadside poem ‘Chronosticon’ denied that the execution of Charles I—the ‘knowne j King of three Realms’—was preordained. ‘Such a Fall j Great Christendome ne’re Pattern’d’, the poet insists. Rather, ‘Religion put’s on Black’ and ‘Sad Loyaltie j Blushe’s and Mourn’s to see bright-Majestie; Butchere’d by such Assassinates’ who work ‘’Gainst God’ rather than in conjunction with his will. Such visions illustrate the degree to which both sides in the civil conflict shared a religious worldview in which rulers prevailed not because they wielded the mightiest sword but because God guided the hand that wielded that sword in the name of divine justice. They also demonstrate the grim delight that royalists took in utilizing a favourite Puritan tool to undermine Puritan confidence in the righteousness of the anti-monarchical cause. But this was a largely futile attempt at fighting fire with fire for, as Parliament’s victory loomed and dramatic change appeared imminent, radical prophets rushed to circulate their visions of a more perfect future. As unlicensed religious authorities, prophets embodied those aspirations. Christ’s sacrifice and the salvation it bestowed upon fallen man had nullified the need for ‘brick and mortar churches’ and redefined the Church as an ontological state inherent within each soul, thereby authorizing ordinary lay people to preach and prophesy. Certain scriptural passages enhanced the claim to spiritual equality by levelling the hierarchies established through class, gender, and unequal access to formal training. As Joel 2: 28 confidently proclaimed: ‘And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.’ And given that all were God’s creatures—or ‘kings and priests unto our God’ as Revelations 5: 10 put it—then all were sovereign selves and hence possessed of certain ‘rights’. These included the right to follow one’s own conscience, to form independent churches under the dispensation of ‘toleration’ rather than attending mandatory services at the state church, and to preach and

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prophesy within the private sphere of the Independent or ‘gathered’ church and the public sphere of print.22 Finally, many were inspired by their direct engagement with these and other radical potentialities within Scripture and revelation to envision larger, even more encompassing visions of new social and political orders. Following through on the proto-democratic logic contained in the entire passage quoted above from Revelation 5: 10, self-denominated saints proclaimed: ‘As kings and priests unto our God, we shall reign on the earth.’ One of the most prolific prophets of the age was Lady Eleanor Davies.23 Davies was a kind of ‘spiritual’ ancestor of Anna Trapnel’s in that she helped to popularize the ‘Fifth Monarchist’ creed to which Trapnel subscribed and which played such an instrumental role in toppling English monarchy, however temporarily. Derived from a synthesis of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, Fifth Monarchism held that the four prior empires of Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome would be succeeded by the return of King Jesus who would rule the world with his saints for a thousand years. Just after Charles I took the throne in 1625, Davies published her first Fifth Monarchist tract, A Warning to the Dragon and all his Angels. Just as Trapnel hoped that Cromwell would usher in a new age of religious and political reform, Davies’s vision celebrated the new King as ‘his victorious Majestie’ who, like his father King James before him, would ‘tread downe the power of his enemies’ and ‘be gracious to the remnant of Joseph’.24 And just as Trapnel believed that her visions both enunciated and incanted the new nation, Davies offered herself to Charles as a latterday Daniel, the Old Testament seer who had guided Nebuchadnezzar away from idol worship. She too would inspire her ruler to continue his father’s work of reforming the established Church and paving the way for the implementation of Christ’s fifth and final kingship.25 Charles, however, was unsettled by the anti-monarchical ramifications of Fifth Monarchism and ordered the prophetess to be imprisoned and her book to be burnt. In 1633, she travelled to Amsterdam to publish Given to the Elector Prince Charles of the Rhyne (1633), a tract criticizing Charles for refusing to follow his father’s example and behaving instead like Belshazzar, the debauched king who failed to heed the ghostly ‘handwriting on the wall’ and mend his pagan ways. During the wars, she wrote tracts such as Star to the Wise (1643) and Samsons Legacie (1643) in which she proffered her services as a seer to Parliament, believing that the representatives would finally be the ones who would prepare the ground for Christ’s return by implementing the ‘Sovereign Remedy’ of ridding the English Church of residual Catholicism and ceasing such oppressive practices as ‘fill[ing] Prisons, with those call’d by them, Puritans: and now, Round-Heads’.26 In 1647, as the ‘Faith’ continued to ‘lay at stake’, Davies, like Trapnel and many others, shifted her hopes for religious and political reform to Oliver Cromwell, dedicating her Excommunication out of Paradice to him as a man of ‘high merit’ who would finally usher in Christ’s reign.27 When Cromwell’s star ascended further in 1651, she was moved to write The Benediction, canonizing him as the leader that ‘the Prophet Joel . . . foresaw’ and intoning: ‘O: Cromwel, Renowned be Victorious so long as Sun Moon continues or livever.’28

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Broadly defined as a millennial creed which posited that a new, more godly order was poised to replace monarchy and preside for a thousand years, Fifth Monarchism helped to inspire a number of utopian visions, some of which will be highly recognizable to modern readers.29 Throughout the late 1640s and early 1650s, the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley used prophetic modes to exhort his readers to subscribe to his agrarian vision of England as a property-free and hence ‘true’ commonwealth.30 As Winstanley promised his readers in The Breaking of the Day of God (1649), ‘your redemption drawes neer, you are come to the half day of the Beasts reign, which may be very hot, yet it will be short, for the Son of righteousness and peace is risen’.31 Pamphlets written by the more libertarian Levellers similarly contended that their radical political calls for ‘just Freedomes’ were synchronous with divine intention.32 As John Lilburne wrote in Englands Birth-Right Justified, his ‘best endeavour here’ is to ‘shew the maladies and remedies of this sick, swooning, bleeding, and dying Nation, that if God hath not ordained it, like Babell, to sudden, inevitable and utter destruction, it may yet be cured, and a remnant reserved, according to the Lords usual dealing in all his visitations’.33 In the early 1650s, a group of people who, like Eleanor Davies, subscribed to Fifth Monarchism began to form themselves into actual Fifth Monarchist congregations.34 Like Winstanley and others who believed that the war would lead to substantive change, they looked to Cromwell for national leadership. For their part, Fifth Monarchists anticipated that Cromwell would install a government of the elect which would pave the way for Christ’s return. In 1651, Mary Cary, an independent prophetess who soon after joined a Fifth Monarchist church, dedicated her twin publication of The Little Horn’s Doom & Downfall and A New and More Exact Mappe or, Description of New Jerusalems Glory to Cromwell’s wife Elizabeth and daughter Bridget Ireton.35 As the title page explains, the former was a ‘Scripture-Prophesie’ illustrating how the ‘late Kings doom and death, was so long ago, as by Daniel predeclared’ while the latter provided a follow-up vision of England as the ‘fifth monarchy’ predicted by Daniel in which ‘the saints’ rather than a king would reign. ‘The truth is’, she explained, ‘that which is given to the head is given to the members, that which is given to the Husband, the wife must partake of: for there is nothing that he possesses which she hath not a right unto. And the Saints of Christ are the members of Christ, they are the Lambs wife’ (54). One prominent Fifth Monarchist, Thomas Harrison, persuaded Cromwell to adopt this vision of rule by council. After Parliament refused to dissolve itself and hold elections as promised in 1653, Cromwell and his Council of Officers replaced the standing membership with 140 delegates of their own choosing, being ‘persons fearing God, and of approved fidelity and honesty’.36 As Cromwell said to those who subsequently styled themselves the ‘Nominated Parliament’, ‘you are as like the forming of god as ever people were . . . you are at the edge of promises and prophecies’.37 In keeping with the aspirations of many Fifth Monarchists, this body instituted civil marriage and proposed to abolish tithes, the Court of Chancery, the universities, and the public ministry. But when the members voluntarily dissolved themselves later that year, power devolved back to Cromwell. His subsequent installation as ‘Lord Protector’ in December 1653 represented a disappointing turn for Fifth Monarchists and others

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who defended Parliament against the crown’s assault during the Civil Wars.38 A ‘Lord Protector’ looked monarchical enough and the events of 1654 served only to deepen that impression. When some demanded that Parliament be made the sole institution of government and the army reduced in size, Cromwell’s strenuous opposition prompted the resignation of the Chief Justice, a lawyers’ revolt, and jury nullifications of Cromwell’s hated treason ordinance. Amidst the unrest, Charles II was joined by the Levellers in an attempted counter-coup, an unlikely alliance signifying the dissonance provoked by Cromwell’s attempt at reforming rather than either replicating or outright rejecting monarchical forms of rule. Cromwell’s suppression of the coup and his declaration of war on Spain endeared him to royalists predisposed to equating conquest with political legitimacy. But among republicans, it only increased fears that he had become a king in all but name. When Cromwell and his family relocated to Whitehall Palace and acquired the trappings of a court, the dissonance between his alleged republican intentions and his seemingly monarchical pretensions grew. The ‘commonwealth’ period was over and the age of the first Protectorate had begun.39 Many who had fought for radical change returned to prophecy both to register their sense of betrayal by the man who had appeared to be an avatar of God’s ultimate plan and to warn him of his dire fate should he refuse to abandon his trek towards tyranny. In The Law of Freedom in a Platform, Gerrard Winstanley cautioned Cromwell that, while God had honoured his ‘successful Instrument’ with ‘the highest Honor of any man since Moses time, to be the Head of a People, who have cast out an Oppressing Pharoah’, the leader must still complete the prophecy by insuring that ‘the Oppressors Power’ was ‘cast out with his Person’ and that ‘the free possession of the Land and Liberties be put in the hands of the oppressed Commoners of England’.40 And as the Leveller Richard Overton warned in Vox plebis, if Cromwell did not ‘immediately’ and ‘unanimously act for the good of the nation’, then ‘the vengeance of God shall dog [him] at the heels’ and the people forced to take matters into their own hands.41 As stated, the Fifth Monarchists were similarly embittered, bemoaning what they saw as Cromwell’s overreaching usurpation of Christ’s proper role as the fifth and final monarch whose rule would be administered by council rather than a single person. Leading spokes-minister Christopher Feake declared that Cromwell’s ‘raigne was but short, and that he should be served worse than that great tyrant the last lord protector was, he being altogether as bad, if not worse than he’.42 As he had done with the Diggers and Levellers, Cromwell responded to Fifth Monarchist protests against the Protectorate with force, ordering Powell to Whitehall for questioning. Unfortunately for Cromwell, Powell was accompanied by Anna Trapnel. The prophetess had joined the Fifth Monarchist movement earlier that year, sharing its vision of England as the site for the New Jerusalem as well as its disillusionment with Cromwell’s apparent abandonment of those revolutionary dreams. As she waited with other Fifth Monarchists in the anteroom of Whitehall for Powell to be released, Trapnel was once again filled with the visions that had long helped her to make cosmic sense out of power politics. Her friends took her to a room in a nearby inn

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where she stayed for twelve days, fasting in bed and alternating between lying rigid and mystically intoning verse ‘songs’ and prose ‘prayers’ in sessions of 2–5 hours to a noisy crush of visitors to her bedside. Soon after, she published two accounts of what took place: the first was a short description entitled Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall (1654), the second a seventy-six-page-long pamphlet entitled The Cry of a Stone (1654).43 The latter combined spiritual autobiography with verse, spiritual songs sung in English ballad form, prose disquisitions, and prayers, all recorded by ‘the Relater’, an unnamed recorder who attended her trances at the inn and transcribed as much of her flowing visions as could be captured by pen on paper. Many of these visions were so critical of Cromwell that the leader assigned a spy to monitor Trapnel’s subsequent activities, followed his royal predecessors in acknowledging prophecy’s subversive potential by banning it, and eventually ordered the arrest and imprisonment of God’s self-styled oracle for the treasonous violation of that ban. This new Cromwell, this ‘so-called Lord Protector’, Trapnel proclaimed in The Cry of a Stone, was ‘not Gideon of old’; instead, he had ‘backsliden’ and become enamoured of ‘great pomp and revenue’ (50). He and his counsellors were ready to ‘join with any corrupt party that comes forth’; they would say anything in order to ‘have their fat and Fleeces’; it was Satan rather than the Lord whom he served when he held his great ‘Feasts’ and allowed members in his ‘own family’ to ‘go naked and wanton’ (51). How could he ‘rule a whole Nation’ when he could not rule his own wife and children (51)? Like Samson, Cromwell had carelessly given his ‘strength’ to the ‘Delilahs of the earth’ and allowed himself to be ‘blinded’ by the spoils of power (52). ‘You shall be as weak as water’, she predicted, while those that have ‘kept their garments clean’ will be the ones to ‘stand up for the Lord’ and gain ‘liberty’ (52). Cromwell could still be redeemed and the New Jerusalem built with his guidance. But this reversal would only occur if he heeded the ‘extraordinary workings’ that God was revealing through his ‘handmaid’ (29). Indeed, while bitterly critical of Cromwell’s desire to ‘wallow in pleasure at home’ rather than ‘labouring for the Lord’ (53), much of The Cry of a Stone is cast as a felicitous vehicle for returning Cromwell to a righteous path so that he could fulfil his original promise. ‘Oh thou dear General,’ Trapnel calls, ‘I would fain have thee to hear, j The Lord Jesus does so speak to thee, j Oh come therefore and hear’ (28). If Cromwell would but ‘hearken unto Christ’ rather than ‘vain Spirits’ and ‘wicked’ and ‘false’ counsellors, he would ‘say unto all Saints, j Oh come let us here live. j In honor and great Dignity j Which Christ here doth afford’ (28–9). Were he to remember that there was ‘one only King, j Alwaies t’write our Record’, he would not continue to ‘aspire, for to So high a title have; j As King, or Protector’ (29). Those titles are given only ‘unto Christ’ (29). It is ‘sweeter’, Trapnel tells him, to be ‘crowned by’ God than by man; indeed he must sure remember his original promise to the people: ‘I will not be your king’, he had said (like Gideon), rather ‘the Lord shall reign over you’ (29). To honour this original contract, the so-called Lord Protector must remove the cursed mantle of monarchy from his neck and ‘cast it down’ (29). He must cease ‘building great Palaces’ (29) and instead ‘go forth’ and ‘see that the flock of Christ have Justice done them’ (53). ‘Oh’, Trapnel cries, ‘look to the whole of Israel, to the earth, to the whole earth, for the

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earth is theirs, and so manifest that you love Justice and Mercy, as you would seem to do’ (53). But while Trapnel may have intended her tract to function as a corrective, the visions contained in The Cry of a Stone helped incite Cromwell to issue an ordinance just four days after she left Whitehall declaring it treasonable to ‘compass or imagine the death of the Lord Protector’ or to ‘declare his government tyrannical or illegal’.44 Three days later, Christopher Feake and Vavasour Powell were arrested under this statute. Cromwell’s spy Marchamont Nedham then reported that, while the imprisonment of leading Fifth Monarchist men had led to momentary quiet, the Fifth Monarchist conspiracy was still alive because the prophecies that Anna Trapnel had delivered during Powell’s hearing were about to be published and her performance repeated in other venues. As he stated, ‘There is a twofold design about the prophetess, Hannah, who played her part lately at Whitehall at the ordinary; one to print her discourses and hymns, which are desperate against your person, family, children, friends, and the government; the other to send her all over England, to proclaim them viva voce.’45 In his own uncharitable way, Nedham highlights the high esteem in which prophecy was held at this time, not to mention the respect that Trapnel appears to have earned as a compelling medium. As he writes, ‘She is much visited, and does a world of mischief in London, and would do in the country. The vulgar dote on vain prophecies. I saw hers in the hands of a man who was in the room when she uttered them day by day in her trance, as they call them. He promised me them; if he does, I will show you them. They would make 14 or 15 sheets in print.’46 It is unclear if Cromwell actually read The Cry of a Stone. He did, however, believe enough in Trapnel’s ability to mobilize public opinion to monitor carefully her countryside tour. Under surveillance, Trapnel kept her own record of what happened next, a riveting piece of reportage entitled Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654).47 As Trapnel narrates, after arriving in Tregaslow in early March and taking up lodging in a chamber at the home of Francis Langdon, she drew large crowds with her public ‘singing’ (20), leading to her arrest by local authorities for treason, witchcraft, and prostitution. She refused to be intimidated by the ensuing court proceedings, instead responding to the justices’ questions with Christ-like composure and detached scorn. She looked her accusers directly in the eye; this gesture, she insisted, ‘was no carnal boldness, though they called it so’ (24). She was nonplussed when the magistrates aggressively confronted her with a copy of The Cry of a Stone—‘Tender her the book which was written from something said at White-Hall’—and asked her, ‘What say you to that book? will you own it? is it yours?’ (25). She calmly replied, ‘I am not careful to answer you in that matter’ (25). She defended her prophesying by insisting that she had a right to speak as she pleased within the private spaces of her friends’ homes and accused the local licensed clergymen of using the legal system to stifle the competition she represented to their state-guaranteed monopoly over the preaching franchise: ‘One depends upon another’, she aphorized, ‘Rulers upon Clergie, and Clergie upon Rulers’ (21). After hearing this latest report on Trapnel’s controversial activities and receiving chastisement from Nedham for his inaction, Cromwell ordered the Council of State to have the prophetess taken into custody and sent to London for questioning. Trapnel’s

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Report continues to provide her own version of the events leading up to and resulting from ‘the injustice acted under [the Council’s] dominion’ (48). As she reiterated, Christ had chosen her, a ‘silly handmaid’, to transmit a ‘present’ from himself, the true ‘Protectour of the faithfull’, to the ‘the great Council and their great Protectour’ (37). This ‘present’ consisted of her ongoing visions of the fall of Babylon and the new ‘cornerstone’ of the ‘sure foundation’ (37–8) for the commonwealth that would replace it. Such a gift was ‘costlier than the gold of Ophir, or Rubies and Pearls from a far Countrey’ and yet, Trapnel wryly adds, ‘for presenting them with the Lords present, they sent their messengers with a Bridewell reward to me, for all my pains and good will, and love to their welfare’ (38). Trapnel’s ‘Bridewell reward’ was a stint in the notorious Bridewell prison, located in Bride Lane just off Fleet Street and a mere two miles from the house in the Minories where she had lived in 1647 when the New Model Army entered London with such banner-waving fanfare. The contrast between that past moment and the present one could not have been starker. Rather than flinging open her window to breathe in the electrifying air of a new age, Trapnel’s cramped cell was infused with the ‘filthy smell of the Rats that abode much in that room’ (39). Rather than experiencing herself as a ‘Bride of Christ’ entrusted with the Lord’s message, she heard the voice of Satan telling her that she would be mocked as a ‘Bridewell bird’ (40). The conviction with which she had earlier delivered her visions faltered and she was plunged into illness and depression. But ultimately, she resumed ‘singing’ and mustered the courage to challenge the grounds for her arrest. She was bolstered by the fact that her arrest had in some sectors served to increase her popularity and further damage the image of her persecutors, prompting Cromwell to issue the cringing claim that she had been thrown in Bridewell without his knowledge. Trapnel scoffed at this assertion and demanded that the government acknowledge the ‘reproach and odium’ (45) it had brought upon her before she would accept release. After much deliberation, the order for her ‘Liberty’ finally came and, though it met the terms she had demanded, she did not fail to issue the following warning to an unnamed ‘friend’ before departing: ‘go tell your Masters, though they will not see me, they shall be sure to hear from me’ (48). And they surely did when she published several more tracts over the next few years. Along with the aforementioned Report, she produced A Legacy for Saints (1654)—a compilation of the visions she delivered while in prison as well as further rebuttals of the government’s cynical charge that, by prophesying against Cromwell’s hypocrisy, she proved herself a witch, a traitor, and a whore; A Voice for the King of Saints and nations (1658)—a series of verse prophecies that Trapnel delivered throughout 1657; and an untitled folio consisting of almost a thousand pages of prophecies that Trapnel delivered to large crowds in the throes of her signature trances.48 Dated 1659, these later messages illustrate Trapnel’s fearless refusal to allow government harassment to suppress her antagonism towards Cromwell and her faith that the promise of the fifth monarchy was not dead. ‘Spirit and Voice hath made a league against him j That hath such a Traytor been’, she writes, ‘But O the time, the time it will come, j the which Daniel did see: j The time, the time and half a time, j A time wherein much there shall be.’49

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Trapnel was not the only Fifth Monarchist to continue delivering prophetic blueprints for a new order in the face of Cromwell’s escalating persecution of critics who had once been allies. The imprisoned Christopher Feake sent visionary letters to his congregation from his cell in Windsor Castle. Collected and published under the title The New Non-Conformist (1654), Feake’s messages sought, as his title page states, to reassure his flock that God ‘doth persist unto this very day witnessing, Both to Small and Great, some of those Glorious Things which, The Apostles, the Prophets, & Moses, did say should come to pass’.50 Like Trapnel, Feake looked back nostalgically upon the revolutionary promise of the war years when the New Model Army was on the march and ‘the whore of Babylon and the Kings of the earth had cause to be exceedingly afraid’ (G1). He decried the fact that, since then, ‘the most noble and glorious Cause of the Lord Jesus hath been forsaken by those who ought by manifold obligation, to have promoted it to the utmost’ (A3). Instead of carrying out their obligations, he lamented, the new leadership sought ‘great things for themselves’ (A3). Implicating but not naming Cromwell and flirting with the injunction against ‘imagining’ the death of the Protector, Feake enacted his ‘new non-conformity’ by bitterly proclaiming that ‘It is a sad Symptome, when the love of many grows colder and colder, at that point of time, when the Lord expects (as well he may, if you knew all Christian friends), it should grow hotter and hotter, till it amounts to that degree, and perfection of operation, which is mentioned in Rev. 11. 5. If anyone will hurt them, who stand before the Lord of the whole earth, fire proceedeth out of their mouth, and devoureth their enemies: and if Any One will hurt them, he must in this manner be killed’ (A3). Only God, he stated, ‘be Your Protector for ever’ (29) and indeed, ‘the Lord is coming’ (10). In the meanwhile, the godly must perform the work of the commonwealth that their leaders have forsaken. They must continue to act as ‘lovers of God, of Christ, of the saints, of the Common-wealth, and publick-good, more then of all the pleasure, delights, honours, powers and glory, which the world can by any means administer to her admirers’ (10). Feake was not fully liberated until Cromwell died in 1658. Meanwhile, hostility to Cromwell’s reign continued to grow, emanating both from those who desired a republic of some sort and those who wished for a return to monarchy. After a royalist uprising in 1655, Cromwell divided England into districts and installed a major general to rule over each. This apparent implementation of a military dictatorship pleased nobody and a new round of outrage flared.51 A Fifth Monarchist uprising took place in 1657 just as Cromwell was offered the crown by conservative members of Parliament who believed that the move would stabilize the roiling nation. Cromwell was tempted but finally refused in terms that recalled the radical vision of himself as God’s chosen vehicle for the abolition of monarchy. ‘I would not’, he insisted, ‘seek to set up that which Providence hath destroyed and laid in the dust, and I would not build Jericho again.’52 However, by way of alternative to being dubbed Oliver I, Cromwell was equipped with expanded powers and reinstalled as Lord Protector in a ceremony fit for a king. But even as he sat enfolded within the purple ermine-lined robe he wore for his near-coronation, a new threat was emerging in the form of the Quakers. A loosely affiliated set of ‘Friends’ in existence since the 1640s, the Quaker movement gathered

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momentum in the mid-1650s to the point where they rivalled the Fifth Monarchists as a major source of government anxiety.53 Taking to the extreme Feake’s claim that, while Cromwell fiddled with kingship, the saints would get on with the work of building the Commonwealth, Quakers or ‘Friends’ argued that Sion had always already existed within each individual.54 There was no need to look to a man like Cromwell for guidance nor to lament his failure to live up to his stated ideals because every man and woman functioned as the eternal dwelling place for the just order. Each person was his or her own ‘Lord Protector’. As William Dewsbury wrote in A true prophecie of the mighty day of the Lord (1655): Certain years ago . . . I enquired of my God, to manifest unto me where Sion was, that I might return thither & worship him in spirit & in truth; there being so many confused cries in thee O England, who professes to worship the only true God: some saying, Lo here is Christ in the Presbyterian practice so called: and the Independent so called, cries, Lo he is here: and the Anabaptists so called saying, Lo he is here: and others in outward forms saying, He is here, according as Christ foretold, that the time should come when they shall say, Lo here is Christ and lo there, as it is fulfilled in thee: but Christ saith, Believe them not, look not forth, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within. (A2)

For the Quakers, the new order was not a figment of the future, waiting for the right politician to come along and make it real. Rather it cohered within the ongoing present, constantly manifesting itself within each and every soul. ‘This is the day’, Dewsbury announced, ‘that the God of Heaven will set up his own kingdom, which shall never be destroyed; and the Kingdom shall not be left unto other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these Kingdomes and it shall stand for ever and ever’ (5). In October 1656, the nation received a concrete display of what the Quakers meant when they promoted the idea of an ‘original equality of persons’ within the miraculous ‘now’ when James Nayler ‘did assume the gesture, words, honour, worship, and miracles of our blessed Saviour’ by imitating Christ’s entry into Jerusalem.55 Riding his horse into Bristol surrounded by a discipleship of women who sang ‘Holy Holy’ and spread garments before his horse as he progressed, the long-haired Nayler shocked his countrymen with his implied incarnation of the Messiah.56 In A true narrative of the examination, tryall, and sufferings of James Nayler (1657), Nayler published transcripts of the resulting trial and sentencing.57 While the House split on a bill calling for his execution and declined another bid to have his ‘hair cut off ’, he was nonetheless convicted of blasphemy and condemned to: be set on the Pillory, with his head in the Pillor, in the Palace-yard Westminster during the space of two hours on Thursday next, and shall be whipt by the Hangman through the streets from Westminster to the old Exchange London, and there likewise be set on the Pillory, with his head in the Pillory for the space of two hours, between the hours of eleven and one, on Saturday next, in each place wearing a paper containing an inscription of his crimes; and that at the old Exchange his tongue be bored through with a hot iron, and that he be there also stigmatized in the forehead with the letter B, and that he be afterwards sent to Bristol, and back bare ridged, with his face backward, and there also publickly whipt the next Market-day after he comes

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thither & that from there he be committed to prison in Bridewell London, & there restrained from the society of all people, and there to labour hard till he shall be released by Parliament, and during that time be debarred the use of pen, ink, and paper, and shall have no relief but what he earns by his daily labours. (34–5)

Many Quakers, including the prominent leader George Fox, were themselves mortified at Nayler’s subversive pageantry and did little to protest his plight. But, in the margins of the transcripts he published, Nayler defended himself in terms commensurate with his Quaker worldview. Next to the list of punishments quoted above, Nayler wrote unrepentantly, ‘Though the Devill had power to cast some into prison, yet the Lords work will go on to the confounding of all his enemies, this assuredly will come to passe, and remember that a prophet hath been amongst you’ (35). The Quakers pushed the logic of popular prophecy to its most intimidating extreme. If all were ‘kings and priests unto god’, then institutionalized orders of monarchs and priests were redundant. God’s intended order, when filtered through Quaker doctrine, looked a lot like anarchy. Cromwell spent real time during his remaining years trying to stem the rapid growth of the movement—Fox was reportedly attracting thousands to his sermons—and prevent what many saw as an imminent Quaker rebellion.58 By 1657, a thousand Quakers were in prison. When Cromwell died in September 1658, his son Richard inherited not only headship over the ‘Second Protectorate’ but the Quaker problem as well. In his single year as Lord Protector, he incarcerated some 700 affiliates. When Richard abdicated in 1659, some fleetingly hoped that the original dream of a commonwealth could be recovered. However, the failure to eliminate ongoing Quaker enthusiasm for democracy in many forms also fuelled a growing demand for monarchy’s return. In 1659, there appeared an anonymously authored tract entitled An Ancient and true prophesie of all those transactions that have already happened, which began to craft the 1650s as a prophetically ordained but finite and grotesque interruption of the more eternal order of kingship.59 The author claims to be God’s angelic ‘Secretary’, chosen to convey an ‘ancient prophesie’ that was allegedly ‘Written in Verse, in the latter end of the Raign of Queen Elizabeth’. According to this amanuensis, everything that had ‘already happened’ was first set in motion when a Scottish king (presumably Charles I) set his throne ‘Above the Circle of a Brittish King’ (2). This hubristic overreaching in turn spawned a Parliament ‘From whence [sprang] a dreadful Armed brood’ (2). That ‘off-spring’ then caused a ‘wild confusion’ to ensue that led to ‘Anarchy’ (2). Anarchy brought forth a ‘Creature’ [Cromwell] which conceived a ‘sickly’ democratic state (2). Democracy was ‘A false Conception of imperfect nature, And, of a shapeless, and brutish feature’ which enabled people to ‘Live and Raign together’ to the point where they no longer knew ‘Which of them gets the Sov’raignty; or whether j There be among them, a Supreme, or no’ (2). This in turn gave rise to ‘jarrs and janglings’—internecine strife which was so corrosive that it reduced all of nature to its ‘first elements’ (2). But out of this corruption ‘rise there shall j A true Supreme, acknowledged by all’ (3). This

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emergent King must ‘repent’ of his ‘sins’, but, if he does so, ‘God, will remit, ev’n all his punishment; j And, him, unto his Kingdomes, back restore’ (3). Charles II’s restoration in 1660 appeared to fulfil this ‘ancient prophesie’, thereby exposing the falsehood of the claims to divine sanction that authorized the writings of those radical visionaries who, it now appeared, had not been channelling God’s desire for the permanent dissolution of earthly kingship after all. Instead, their inherent animality rendered them biddable for penalizing a particular overreaching wannabedeity with an ‘interregnum’. Still, the restored son proved to be just as anxious about and resistant to the power of the prophet as had the crowned heads—and Lord Protectors— of old. In 1664, he jailed Fox on grounds of conspiracy and refused to listen to the political advice that the earnest preacher tried helpfully to send him from his cell. And yet, the Quaker movement and other forms of opposition did survive to play a part in inspiring the formation of a constitutional monarchy during the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688. Throughout the years leading up to that compromise, and in defiance of formidable efforts to silence them, the critical seers continued to try and get the last prophetic word. In a broadside published in 1660 and addressed To Those Who Were in Authority, Whom the Lord is Now Judging, James Nayler enjoyed a grim moment of ‘I told you so’ with the defeated leaders of the crumbled Protectorate.60 ‘You that did imprison’, he sneered, ‘are imprisoned.’ Because ‘your ears’ were ‘stopt towards God’ and ‘you begun to persecute the Messenger of the Lord, which he sent with it to you for your good, and many hundreds suffered in all parts of the Nation upon this account’, then, as predicted, ‘Your authority has vomited you out, your glory hath left you naked, and your riches cannot profit you in this day of wrath from the Almighty.’ That same year, yet another prophetess took a purposeful trip to the halls of power. A ‘woman-Quaker’, clad ‘all in white’ and called ‘Ahivah’, travelled to Whitehall and presented Charles II with a ‘strange prophecy’.61 In her ‘petition and proposal for the saints liberties’, Ahivah, like so many before her, deployed the unique propensity of prophecy for instructing in the guise of predicting. She joined Nayler in condemning the Protectoral governors for labelling her a ‘mad body’ (3) and casting her into Bedlam. In her case, she was condemned for envisioning Charles II’s ‘return to England again’ and for deeming it ‘Justice’ (2). But Ahivah also informed the King that Quakers only obey a ‘righteous Government’ (4) and so he must prove himself a just ruler if he was to earn Quaker allegiance. She also tried to persuade the King to tolerate the movement by praising him for his refusal to ‘oppress the weak Spirit of Gods Majesty in his Saints’ (2). While confident that the King would in fact ‘let the Saints make themselves a body in Christs fashion’, Ahivah does not fail to dutifully warn him that, should he be remiss in doing so, the nation would meet with a ‘speedy destruction’ (2).

NOTES 1. Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 4. 2. Fraser, Cromwell.

476 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

KATHARINE GILLESPIE

Walsham, ‘ “Frantick Hacket” ’, 37, 47. Meeks, Prophet-King, 107. Walsham, ‘ “Frantick Hacket” ’, 45. Ibid. 46, 47. Ibid. 43; and Rusche, ‘Prophecies’, 754. Rusche, ‘Prophecies’, 754. Austin, How to Do Things with Words. Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’, 155. Rusche, ‘Prophecies’, 753. Ibid. 768. Smyth, ‘Almanacs’, 201. Booker, Bloudy Almanack, 1. Ludlow, ‘Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations’; Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’; Crawford, ‘Challenges to Patriarchalism’; Mack, Visionary Women; Davies, Unbridled Spirits; Purkiss, ‘Producing the Voice’; and Hinds, God’s Englishwomen. Vane, Healing Question, 2. Walsham, ‘ “Frantick Hacket” ’, 48; and Cohen, ‘Prophecy and Madness’, 411. Hill, English Bible; Wiseman, ‘Unsilent Instruments’; Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger; Smith, Literature and Revolution; Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent; and Feroli, Political Speaking. Rusche, ‘Prophecies’, 752. Sedgwick, Spiritual Madman, 12. Jones, Vox infantis. Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent; and Gray, Women Writers. Cope, Handmaid. Davies, Warning, A8. Feroli, Political Speaking. Davies, Samsons Legacie, 95. Davies, Excommunication, 2. Davies, Benediction, 2. Bradstock, Winstanley. Berens, Digger Movement. Winstanley, Breaking of the Day, 2–3. Lilburne, Foundations of Freedom, A2. Aylmer, Levellers in the English Revolution; and Otteson, The Levellers. Lilburne, Englands Birth-Right, A1. Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men; and Brown, Political Activities. Cary, The Little Horn’s Doom and A New and More Exact Mappe. Abbott, Writings and Speeches, 643. Roots, Speeches, 8–27. Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate. Gaunt, Oliver Cromwell, 156. Winstanley, Law of Freedom, A2. Overton, Vox plebis, 5, 6. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 72. Trapel, Strange and Wonderful Newes; Cry of a Stone. Calendar of State Papers.

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45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

477

Ibid. Ibid. Trapnel, Report and Plea. Ibid.; Legacy; Voice; and Unpublished folio. Burrage, ‘Anna Trapnel’s Prophecies’, 530. Feake, New Non-Conformist. Durston, ‘The Fall’. Roots, Speeches, 128. Davies, Quakers. Graves, Preaching. Ruether, ‘Prophets’, 11; and Nayler, True Narrative, 3. Damrosch, Sorrows. Ibid. Ingle, First among Friends. Anon, Ancient and True Prophesie. Nayler, To Those. Ahivah, Strange Prophecie.

WORKS CITED Abbott, W. C. (ed.). Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. 4 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937–47. Ahivah. A Petition to his Majesty. London, 1660. ——. A Strange Prophecie Presented to the Kings most Excellent Majesty, by a Woman-Quaker (all in white) called Ahivah. London, 1660. Anon. An Ancient and True Prophesie of All Those Transactions That Have Already Happened. London, 1659. ——. Chronosticon. London, 1649. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Aylmer, G. E. The Levellers in the English Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Berens, Lewis Henry. The Digger Movement: Radical Communalism in the English Civil War. St Petersburg, FL: Red and Black Publishers, 2008. Booker, John. The Bloudy Almanack, Or, Englands Looking-Glass. London, 1651. Bradstock, Andrew (ed.). Winstanley and the Diggers, 1649–1999. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Brown, Louise Fargo. Political Activities of the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy Men in England during the Interregnum. Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 1913. Burrage, Champlin. ‘Anna Trapnel’s Prophecies’. English Historical Review 26.103 (1911), 526–35. Calendar of State Papers: Domestic. Marchamont Nedham to the Protector, 7 February 1654. Capp, Bernard. The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism. London: Faber, 1972. Cary, Mary. The Little Horn’s Doom & Downfall and A New and More Exact Mappe or, Description of New Jerusalems Glory. London, 1651. Cohen, Alfred. ‘Prophecy and Madness: Women Visionaries during the Puritan Revolution’. Journal of Psychohistory 11.3 (1984), 411–30.

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Como, David R. ‘Women, Prophecy, and Authority in Early Stuart Puritanism’. Huntington Library Quarterly 61.2 (1998), 203–22. Cope, Esther. Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Crawford, Patricia. ‘The Challenges to Patriarchalism: How Did the Revolution Affect Women?’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s. London: Collins & Brown, 1992, 112–28. Damrosch, Leo. The Sorrows of the Quaker Jesus: James Nayler and the Puritan Crackdown on the Free Spirit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Davies, Adrian. The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Davies, Lady Eleanor. A Warning to the Dragon and all his Angels. London, 1625. ——. Given to the Elector Prince Charles of the Rhyne. Amsterdam, 1633. ——. Star to the Wise. London, 1643. ——. Samsons Legacie (To the Most Honorable the High Court of Parliament Assembled). London, 1643. ——. Excommunication out of Paradice. [London], 1647. ——. The Benediction. London, 1651. Davies, Stevie. Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution: 1640–1660. London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1998. Dewsbury, William. A True Prophecie of the Mighty Day of the Lord. London, 1655. Durston, Christopher. ‘The Fall of Cromwell’s Major-Generals’. English Historical Review 113.450 (1998), 18–37. Feake, Christopher. The New Non-Conformist; Who Having Obtained Help of God, Doth Persist unto This Very Day. London, 1654. Feroli, Teresa. Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Fraser, Antonia. Cromwell. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Gaunt, Peter. Oliver Cromwell. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Gillespie, Katharine. Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Graves, Michael P. Preaching the Inward Light: Early Quaker Rhetoric. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009. Gray, Catharine. Women Writers and Public Debate in 17th-Century Britain. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Hill, Christopher. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Penguin Books, 1993. Hinds, Hilary. God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Hirst, Derek. ‘The Lord Protector, 1653–8’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. London: Longman, 1990, 119–48. Holstun, James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso, 2000. Ingle, H. Larry. First among Friends: George Fox and the Creation of Quakerism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jones, Sampson. Vox infantis. Or, the Propheticall Child. London, 1649.

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Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lilburne, John. Englands Birth-Right Justified. London, 1645. ——. Foundations of Freedom; or An Agreement of the People. London, 1648. Ludlow, Dorothy P. ‘Shaking Patriarchy’s Foundations: Sectarian Women in England, 1641–1700’, in Richard Greaves (ed.), Triumph over Silence: Women in Protestant History. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1985, 93–123. Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Meeks, Wayne. The Prophet-King: Moses Traditions and the Johannine Christology. Leiden: J. Brill, 1967. Nayler, James. A True Narrative of the Examination, Tryall, and Sufferings of James Nayler. London, 1657. ——. To Those Who Were in Authority, Whom the Lord is Now Judging. London, 1660. Otteson, James R. The Levellers: Overton, Walwyn, and Lilburne. London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2003. Overton, Richard. Vox plebis: or, The Voice of the Oppressed Commons of England Against their Oppressors. London, 1653. Purkiss, Diane. ‘Producing the Voice, Consuming the Body: Women Prophets of the Seventeenth Century’, in Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (eds.), Women, Writing, History 1640–1740. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1992, 139–58. Roots, Ivan. Speeches of Oliver Cromwell. New York: Everyman Classics, 1989. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. ‘Prophets and Humanists: Types of Religious Feminism in Stuart England’. Journal of Religion 70.1 (1990), 1–18. Rusche, Harry. ‘Prophecies and Propaganda, 1641 to 1651’. English Historical Review 84.333 (1969), 752–70. Sedgwick, William. The Spiritual Madman. London, 1648. Smith, David (ed.). Cromwell and the Interregnum: The Essential Readings. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. Smith, Nigel. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. ——. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Smyth, Adam. ‘Almanacs, Annotators, and Life-Writing in Early Modern England’. English Literary Renaissance 38.2 (2008), 200–44. Thomas, Keith. ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’. Past and Present 13 (1958), 42–62. Trapnel, Anna. Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. London, 1654. ——. The Cry of a Stone. London, 1654. ——. A Legacy for Saints. London, 1654. ——. Strange and Wonderful Newes from White-Hall. London, 1654. ——. [A] Voice for the King of Saints and Nations. n.p., 1657. ——. Unpublished folio. 990 pages. Pressmark, S. 1. 42. The Bodleian Library, Oxford, UK. Vane, Henry. A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved. London, 1659. Walsham, Alexandra. ‘ “Frantick Hacket”: Prophecy, Sorcery, Insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan Movement’. Historical Journal 41.1 (1998), 27–66. Winstanley, Gerrard. The Breaking of the Day of God. London, 1649.

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Winstanley, Gerrard. Declaration from the Poor Oppressed People of England. London, 1649. ——. The Law of Freedom in a Platform; or, True Magistracy Restored. London, 1652. Wiseman, Sue. ‘Unsilent Instruments and the Devil’s Cushions: Authority in SeventeenthCentury Women’s Prophetic Discourse’, in Isobel Armstrong (ed.), New Feminist Discourses: Critical Essays on Theories and Texts. London: Routledge, 1982, 176–96. Woolrych, Austin. Commonwealth to Protectorate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

CHAPTER

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MARVELL AMONG THE CROMWELLIANS ....................................................................................................... N I C H O LA S MCD O W E L L

PATRONAGE, ALLEGIANCE,

AND

PROTECTION

.................................................................................................................. On 23 November 1658 Andrew Marvell (1621–78), now aged 37, walked alongside John Milton and John Dryden in the funeral procession for Oliver Cromwell. While Milton had worked for the state as Secretary for Foreign Tongues since the execution of Charles I at the beginning of 1649, Marvell and Dryden (1631–1700) had been employed as Latin secretaries by the Protectorate only since 1657. Unlike Milton, who did not mark the Protector’s death, both Marvell and Dryden composed elegies for Cromwell, to be included in a volume that was registered for publication in January 1659 as Three Poems to the Happy Memory of the Most Renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth, by Mr Marvell, Mr Driden, Mr Sprat. However Marvell’s poem was replaced by one by Edmund Waller by the time the volume was actually published later in the year. We have no explanation for why Marvell’s elegy was replaced between January and spring 1659, but it has been assumed that the withdrawal was for ‘reasons of political prudence’.1 Marvell’s elegy concludes with praise of Oliver’s son Richard Cromwell, declaring that ‘A Cromwell in an hour a prince will grow’ (l. 312); Marvell is thinking of the Machiavellian princeps, but even by spring 1659 it was becoming clear that Richard had not matured quickly enough to control the Protectorate Parliament that he had summoned in January, and to which Marvell was returned as a proCromwellian MP for Hull. By 22 April republican MPs and army officers had forced its dissolution, and the reign of ‘Tumbledown Dick’ as Protector was over by the end of May, when Marvell was also unseated in new elections by the diehard republican Sir Henry Vane. The interactions between Waller, Dryden, and Marvell constitute a striking illustration of the problems of patronage and allegiance faced by poets during the Protectorate and then the early years of the Restoration. Although Waller and Dryden both rose to

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positions of favour under Charles II, with Dryden becoming laureate, their praise of Cromwell was never entirely forgotten by their enemies. Waller, who had been appointed a commissioner for trade by Oliver Cromwell as reward for his A Panegyric to my Lord Protector (1655), had his early attempts at preferment in the Restoration blocked by the Earl of Clarendon, while Dryden’s ‘Heroic Stanzas Consecrated to the Glorious Memory Of his most Serene and Renowned Highness Oliver’ was reprinted three times in the 1680s with the intention of embarrassing its author by exhuming his Cromwellian past. Thomas Shadwell and others picked up on Dryden’s apparent approval of the regicide in his reference to how Cromwell ‘essayed | To staunch the blood by breathing of the vein’ (ll. 47–8); Dryden, says Shadwell, ‘prais’d his [Cromwell’s] opening the Basilick vein’.2 Yet neither Waller nor Dryden was ever at risk of imprisonment and execution in the way that Milton was in the early months of the Restoration, as a writer who had explicitly and repeatedly defended and theorized the regicide in print. Marvell’s relative security at the Restoration—he was re-elected MP for Hull in 1660 and remained in that position until his death in 1678—was doubtless assisted by the fact that both ‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ (1650) and ‘A Poem Upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’ remained in manuscript until after his death, while his one printed Cromwellian tribute, The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector (1654–5), was issued anonymously. Marvell’s prudence, or perhaps reticence, about exposing his verse proved to serve him well in this respect. But this does not mean that we should assume Marvell’s contemporaries were unaware of his Cromwell poems. One of the great debates about the ‘Horatian Ode’ has always been whether the poem ‘merely assumes a public mode of address but was always envisaged as a vehicle for private reflection’ or was written ‘in pursuit of patronage from the new regime’—a debate which evidently has some bearing on how we interpret the allegiances of the poem.3 In 1969 John Carey declared there to be ‘not the least evidence’ that the ‘Horatian Ode’ was ‘made public in manuscript’.4 It has become increasingly clear, however, that the ‘Horatian Ode’ did have a limited, or probably very tightly controlled, scribal circulation among other poets in the 1650s, including Dryden, who seems to have remembered the ‘Ode’ as Cromwellian panegyric.5 This chapter considers Marvell’s three major poems on Cromwell in terms of these issues of patronage and allegiance that had to be confronted by poets and writers amid the shifting political contexts of the 1650s. It seeks to understand Marvell’s Cromwell poems as in dialogue with the arguments and activities of his peers and fellow Cromwellians, as well as responses to the figure of Cromwell himself. The issue of allegiance was connected with the need to secure an income for someone such as Marvell, without sufficient private means to remain independent of employment.6 But neither was political allegiance decided only by the availability of patronage for a man as intellectually sophisticated as Marvell. There was ideological substance to Marvell’s support for the Cromwellian Protectorate, and that support was rooted, as it was for others who had formerly moved in a royalist milieu, in the perception of Cromwell as a leader who could offer domestic security as well as military glory—who would suppress

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clerical and sectarian ambitions for power in the interests of civil liberty. Or, as Blair Worden pithily puts it: ‘In the new Cromwellian order, it seems, Marvell found hope of patronage; of national achievement abroad; and of a liberty of conscience that would thwart the persecuting instincts of the Presbyterians.’7 This reading of Marvell’s advocacy of Cromwellian rule in The First Anniversary, in particular, has the virtue of allowing us to preserve some consistency between the aims of the man who supported Cromwell in the 1650s and Charles II in the 1660s—for Marvell seems to have believed that both men could ensure more successfully than elected parliaments that the English would not fall prey to religious tyranny and persecution.

A MAN WHO ALSO OFFERS HIMSELF: T H E ‘H O R A T I A N O D E ’

.................................................................................................................. In styling the ‘Ode’ to Cromwell as Horatian, Marvell offers, if he does not necessarily endorse, an analogy between Augustus and Cromwell three and a half years before the instalment of Cromwell as Lord Protector initiated a literary vogue for ‘Protectoral Augustanism’.8 If the ‘Horatian Ode’ is taken to be a poem written in hope of securing patronage from the Commonwealth government, then much of Marvell’s datable poetic output 1650–9 is comprised either of a succession of bids for preferment from the post-regicide state in its various forms or of works composed specifically for state occasions. Either just before or while Marvell was at Nun Appleton in Yorkshire, tutoring Thomas Fairfax’s daughter—a period which has habitually been depicted as one of seclusion from London politics, spent composing lyrics about nature and gardens in the umbra of Fairfax’s estate—he wrote a Latin poem for the visit to the Dutch republic of the ambassadors of the Commonwealth, or respublica as Marvell calls it, although this term could mean simply the ‘state’ and does not necessarily contain anti-monarchical implication (‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas’ (February–March 1651), l. 5). Milton’s letter of 21 February 1653 recommending Marvell to John Bradshaw as a man ‘of singular desert for the state to make use of; who also offers himself ’, coincides with the composition of ‘The Character of Holland’, celebrating the Commonwealth’s recent successes in the AngloDutch War of 1652–4. It seems likely that the satire was a display of Marvell’s polemical talents designed to impress Bradshaw, first President of the Commonwealth’s Council of State.9 If Marvell did not secure the Latin secretaryship that Milton wanted for him and that he presumably wanted for himself, he was soon after employed at Eton as tutor to Cromwell’s ward William Dutton. Marvell’s earliest surviving letter is a report on his progress with Dutton addressed to ‘his Excellence, the Lord General Cromwell’ from Windsor on 28 July 1653. Even by seventeenth-century standards, Marvell’s mode is elaborate in its obsequiousness: ‘It might seem fit for me to seek out words to give your Excellence thanks for my selfe. But indeed the onely Civility which it is proper for

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me to practise with so eminent a Person is to obey you . . . Therefore I shall use the time that your Lordship is pleas’d to allow me for writing, onely to that purpose for which you have given me it.’10 This is unmistakably the address of a client to a patron, or hoped-for patron. Marvell appears now to have been allowed into Cromwellian inner circles and to have gained an official audience for his poetry. In 1654 Marvell composed several verses for presentation to Queen Christina by the Protectorate’s embassy to Sweden, including lines on a portrait of Cromwell which assure Christina that ‘this representation submits its brow more reverently to you, nor is this countenance forever savage towards kings’ (ll. 7–8: ‘At tibi submittit frontem reverentior umbra, | Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces’). The First Anniversary was printed by a government printer, Thomas Newcomb, in January 1655 and advertised by Marchamont Nedham in his official government newsbook, Mercurius politicus.11 Yet even The First Anniversary does not seem to have secured Marvell the kind of government post that he apparently sought from at least early 1651. Were his earlier links with prominent courtly figures such as the Duke of Buckingham and Cavalier poets such as Richard Lovelace (see chapter 13 above) held against him? On the other hand, the Commonwealth government was clearly eager to hire men who could write well: Nedham, who had been a leading propagandist for royalism after 1646 and was imprisoned by the Commonwealth for his polemical activities in the aftermath of the regicide, had by May 1650 joined Milton and John Hall as the lead propagandists of the regime, on an annual salary of £100.12 In the end, it was not until September 1657, after he returned from travels on the Continent with Dutton, that Marvell finally obtained a Latin secretaryship and was sufficiently accepted in the Cromwellian household (or court) to compose, along with Edmund Waller, songs for Mary Cromwell’s wedding. Marvell, then, was faced with a daunting choice in the summer of 1650 which might shape the rest of his life. He could follow the path of literary employment by the Commonwealth taken by Nedham and also by Hall (1629–56), the lauded young poet alongside whom Marvell had appeared in print in 1649–50 in the commendatory poems for Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta and again in Lachrymae Musarum, a collection of elegies for Henry, Lord Hastings, which was also largely a royalist lament for the regicide (see chapter 13 above). To follow this path was to risk being ostracized from the London literary circles in which Marvell had moved since his return in 1647 from four years of travel in Europe; or indeed risk being charged with treason to the monarchy as well as to the Muses if the Commonwealth was overthrown by Charles II. Hall had been excoriated for his involvement with the parliamentarian cause by some royalists who depicted his actions as not only disloyal but a betrayal of poetry and friendship.13 The option of retirement to the country, in the manner of substantially propertied royalists such as Thomas Stanley and Mildmay Fane, was only available to Marvell if he entered into service—a choice which he was indeed to make later in 1650 when he became tutor to Fairfax’s daughter. Yet there was another path, which ensured that one’s loyalty to the King and to the Muses could not be questioned: members of Thomas Stanley’s literary coterie (about which see chapter 13 above) such as Lovelace,

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Robert Herrick, and James Shirley remained in and around London and refused to reconcile themselves with their new rulers. But this meant eking out a living through school teaching (Shirley, who published a Latin grammar in 1649), or relying on the continued support of an absent patron (Herrick, who retained a small quarterly stipend from Mildmay Fane), or on the kindness of friends (the increasingly destitute Lovelace). The much-debated opening stanza of the ‘Ode’ presents this stark opposition, if we take ‘would’ in the first line to signify desire; but what scholars have missed is that it is an opposition that only a royalist would insist upon: ‘the Muses dear’ of lyric verse or public service to the Commonwealth. The lives of lyric poet and public servant are apparently incompatible in the post-monarchical world: The forward youth that would appear Must now forsake his Muses dear, Nor in the shadows sing His numbers languishing. (ll. 1–4)

Jonathan Post comments on the ‘tonal difference if Marvell had simply used the offhand “forget” instead of the reluctant “forsake”’.14 In royalist polemic, wit and poetry were by definition qualities of loyalty: ‘forsake’, with its sense of the repudiation of an allegiance, emphasizes the royalist perspective from which the decision to ‘appear’ is regarded. The ‘forward youth’ in the opening line is not Cromwell (who was hardly known for his love lyrics) and probably not Marvell (who was 29 in 1650), although there is a parallel between the youth and the poet and between them both and Cromwell. Blair Worden wonders if the ‘Ode’ was ‘written, after Horace, for a forward youth now unknown to us’.15 The youth is finally a generic figure, derived from Virgilian pastoral and faced with the archetypal choice of the vita activa or the vita umbratilis, public engagement or private contemplation.16 Yet it is hard not to see some connection with John Hall, whose youthful precocity, as well as great wit and learning, is mentioned in every poem written about him: Lovelace’s 1657 elegy for Hall, for example, declares that ‘None but the sun was ere so young and old’.17 Cromwell had returned from Ireland at the end of May having achieved a series of overwhelming victories over the royalist and Catholic alliance. In July 1650, the period in which Marvell wrote the ‘Ode’, Hall ‘was commanded by the Councell into Scotland to attend his Exellencie [Cromwell] . . . to make such observations on affairs there, as might conduce to the settling of the Interests of the Common-wealth’.18 Hall seems to have been what would be called today an ‘embedded’ reporter, sending accounts of the campaign back to Nedham and Mercurius politicus. For the next nine months Hall was paid seven pounds per month from the army and received twenty pounds for ‘extraordinary service’.19 The Scottish commission confirmed Hall’s complete integration into the new postmonarchical order. If ‘forsake’ gives the opening two lines a royalist colouring, the phrase ‘numbers languishing’ assumes a republican resonance in the context of the work that Hall wrote later in 1650 while with Cromwell in Scotland, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered. In a Review of the Scotch Story, Gathered out of their best Authours and Records. Hall presented Cromwell with this work ‘in Manuscript, printed soon after at Edenburgh in quarto, and since at London’. In this, Hall’s most

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strident attack on hereditary monarchy, the history of Scottish kings is shaped into a Gothic narrative of rape, murder, madness, and witchcraft, designed to demonstrate to the Scots that they can only be prevented from ‘enslaving and ruining themselves’ under a ‘Tyrannizing Nobilitie and Clergie’ by incorporation into a British republic. Hall writes of how people under kings ‘languish under a brutish servitude (Monarchy being truly a disease of Government) . . . [they] languish when their Princes are fullest, and like leeches, rather willing to burst then fall off ’. Hall associates the failure to take action against degenerate monarchies with ‘contemplative men . . . fighting only with Pen, Ink, and Paper’, ‘speculative men’ guided by books that are usually biased towards monarchy.20 The opening four lines of the ‘Horatian Ode’, then, oppose letters and arms, courtly poetics and public service, but they do so from both a royalist and an anti-royalist perspective, held in a tension that is reflected formally here, and throughout the poem, in the ‘interplay of tight quatrain and constantly resumptive syntax’.21 The complexity of the opening lines of the ‘Ode’ is a salutary reminder of the problems which arise when we categorize it as a poem straightforwardly written to gain the favour of the new government. As John Creaser has observed: ‘those who would read the ode unequivocally as an encomium on Cromwell are implicitly accusing Marvell of incompetence, since . . . phrase after phrase bears ironic or hostile implications’. Creaser quotes lines 31–2 by way of example: ‘As if his highest plot | To plant the bergamot’. The poet chose ‘plot’ instead of a more positive term such as ‘plan’ either ‘because he is technically inept and at a loss for rhymes or in order to express some deep reservations about Cromwell’s ambitions’. Creaser does not add that the ‘bergamot’ was known as the fruit of kings.22 Readers conditioned by royalist satire would have been amused by the notion that Cromwell’s interest in kingship was limited to varieties of garden fruit. The passage in Lucan’s epic of the Roman civil wars, the Pharsalia, to which Marvell alludes in his image of Cromwell as a lightning bolt comes just before Caesar crosses the Rubicon and enters Rome with the army—the moment at which he first flouts the law of the republic and sets in motion a historical cycle of imperial rule which culminated in Lucan’s own time in the tyranny of Nero. This intertext might incline us to see republican suspicion of Cromwell’s true intentions. Yet in its fascination with the dangerous charisma of Cromwell as early as 1650—Cromwell had only just been made commander-in-chief of the New Model Army when Marvell was writing—the ‘Ode’ has more in common with the discourses of pre-regicide royalism than of post-regicide republicanism. If history tends to remember Cromwell as a Puritan zealot, hostile contemporaries were more likely to view him as a ‘Machiavellian realist, aiming at power and willing above all to manipulate religious sentiment to achieve it’.23 Marvell alludes to this polemical image in his elegy for Cromwell: ‘Lest others dare to think your zeal a mask, | And you to govern only heaven’s task’ (ll. 225–6). The notorious concluding couplet of the ‘Ode’—‘The same arts that did gain | A pow’r must it maintain’ (ll. 119–20)—may derive from a maxim of Machiavelli and can be read as ‘a dispassionate endorsement of the prince’s policies by a self-appointed counsellor; but it can also be a prediction of the new series of ruthlessly violent acts which will be needed if “gain” is to be balanced with “maintain”’.24

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One of the writers who had done as much as anyone to project the image of Cromwell as a ‘State Machiavel’ was Nedham in his royalist phase, who habitually referred to ‘King Oliver’ in Mercurius pragmaticus in 1647–8. Nedham is probably the author of The second part of Crafty Crumwell. Or Oliver in his Glory as King. A Trage Comedie (1648), a revealing example of satirical royalist representations of Cromwell. Although he only makes a brief appearance at the end of this play-pamphlet, Cromwell ‘shows the high spirits and inventiveness of [Shakespeare’s] Richard III’, asking the cabal of advisers who have just crowned him in a travesty of religious ceremony: ‘What shall we do now to confirme our Kingdom? What lawes shall we invent meet for our purpose [?]’ (16).25 At the end of The Second Part of Crafty Crumwell, the Chorus, who explicitly oppose Charles and Cromwell in a sort of cosmic duel, warn that there is only space for one of them to reign and ascribe to Cromwell the hubris of Phaeton, who in Greek myth finally could not control the chariot of the sun and devastated the earth: Why Oliver, shouldst thou so high aspire. Phaeton like, to mannage Charles his Waine, When thou art in, thou canst not back retire. That man is Mad who glory for to gaine Doth cast himselfe upon the Lightening Fire. Kings do admit no fellowes if thou Reigne Charles must surrender, but I surely hope To see him Rule, thou Ruled in a Rope. (16)

The comparison of Cromwell and Phaeton at the end of Crafty Crumwell encapsulates the way in which ‘the energetic figure of Cromwell complicates the play’s royalism’ in his domination of the page/stage as a type of ‘Marlovian anti-hero’: ‘to present Cromwell in these terms was undoubtedly to satirize him, but it was also to acknowledge his greatness’.26 Marvell’s representation of Cromwell as lightning bolt has its inverted mirror-image in Nedham’s royalist satire: but in both representations, Cromwellian energy is elemental and uncontrollable, like ‘Lightening Fire’. And as Crafty Crumwell exemplifies, it was royalist polemicists who personalized the Civil Wars as a struggle between Cromwell and Charles I for kingship (‘if thou Reigne | Charles must surrender’). But equally history for Marvell in the ‘Ode’ seems to be less about constitutions and rights than about the epic clash of personalities: Nature that hateth emptiness, Allows of penetration less: And therefore must make room Where greater spirits come. (‘Horatian Ode’, ll. 41–4)

One wonders how members of the English Republic’s Parliament and Council of State would have reacted in 1650 to a poetic depiction which concentrates political power not in legislative institutions but in a single military figure: ‘Much to the man is due’ (l. 28).

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SCRIPTURES

AND

LAWS: THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY

.................................................................................................................. In a pioneering study some forty years ago, John M. Wallace related the ‘Horatian Ode’ to Thomas Hobbes’s ideas about political obligation in Leviathan (1651), situating the poem in the context of the so-called Engagement Controversy, when in 1649–50 the Commonwealth demanded an oath of allegiance of its citizens. Wallace finds in the ‘Ode’ a change of allegiance that should actually be understood in terms of an underlying ideological continuity: Marvell, like others in the period, should be characterized not as a royalist or a republican but a ‘loyalist’ who deferred the ‘transference of his allegiance until after the death of his former sovereign’ in a passive acceptance of the dictates of providence and the political realities of force. But, as Jeffrey Collins has now persuasively argued, it was Cromwell’s subordination of the Presbyterian clergy which impressed the anticlerical Hobbes and encouraged him to emphasize the de facto sovereignty of the Commonwealth as conquering power.27 The bitter anti-Presbyterianism of Marvell’s verse epistle to Lovelace in 1649—‘The barbed censurers begin to look | Like the grim consistory on thy book’ (ll. 19–20)—and the relish with which he looks forward to Cromwell’s scattering of the Scottish Presbyterians in the ‘Ode’—‘The Pict no shelter now shall find | Within his parti-coloured mind’ (ll. 105–6)—suggest that Marvell was struck by Cromwell’s growing reputation, demonstrated in Ireland and about to be put to the test in Scotland, as a scourge of clerical power. Marvell appears to have followed Hobbes in identifying Cromwell, rather than Parliament, as the agent of sovereign control of British Church and state—and this helps to explain why Marvell could greet the Protectorate in The First Anniversary with the unqualified panegyric that is hard to locate in the ‘Ode’. Marvell continues in The First Anniversary, composed in the final months of 1654, the representation of the sublime Cromwell who dominates the ‘Horatian Ode’: indeed one critic suggests that The First Anniversary is ‘perhaps the only instance in English literature of a poet’s cannibalizing one major poem so extensively to produce another poem of such accomplishment on the same theme’—although, as we shall see, Marvell would return to the ‘Ode’ once more in his elegy for Cromwell.28 The first word of The First Anniversary is ‘Like’ (‘Like the vain curlings of the wat’ry maze’), and from one perspective the poem is a succession of brilliantly inventive attempts to answer (and perhaps in the process evade) the question asked by Cromwell’s royalist and republican enemies: what is the Protector if he is not a king? Marvell’s reply is that Cromwell looks king-like, but he is both more than a king in his ‘martial rage’ (l. 59) and less than a king in his ‘sober spirit’ (l. 230): ‘For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, | Than ought below, or yet above a king’ (ll. 225–6). As in the ‘Ode’ the terrific energies of Cromwellian military might are contrasted with the brittle power of ‘image-like’ kings, a phrase which invokes the title of the Eikon Basilike (1649), the purported record of Charles I’s final thoughts before his trial which had become so popular with the English people in the aftermath of the regicide. However, while monarchs are static and ‘heavy’,

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‘indefatigable Cromwell hies | And cuts his way still nearer to the skies’ (ll. 15, 41, 45–6). Indeed the implicit analogy with Phaeton in the ‘Ode’ is biblicized as Cromwell is imagined rising to heaven like Elijah (2 Kings 2: 11–13) after the fall from his coach in Hyde Park in 1654: ‘But thee triumphant hence the fiery car, | And fiery steeds had borne out of the war, | From the low world’ (ll. 215–17). Cromwell had been widely ridiculed by his enemies after this accident as a very fallible human being who could not control his coach never mind the country; in response to these bathetic images, Marvell restores Cromwellian sublimity through scriptural allusion. But Marvell also, and daringly, imagines the reaction if Cromwell really had died when he fell from his coach, and he invokes a scene of cosmic dissolution: ‘It seemed the earth did from the centre tear; | It seemed the sun was fall’n out of the sphere’ (ll. 205–6). The First Anniversary has of late been closely read in relation to the Instrument of Government, England’s (first ever) written constitution drawn up for the Protectorate in the winter of 1653. The Instrument established terms for a return to mixed government by a single person and a Parliament: Cromwell was declared Protector for life, but the Instrument stressed that his office was elective and not hereditary. The effectiveness of the Protectorate’s constitution depended on the ability of Protector and Parliament to work together.29 Marvell appropriately concludes the first 100 lines of the poem by invoking the tightly interlocking constitutional powers of Protector and Parliament in extended images of architectural construction or ‘contignation’ (ll. 75–98). Yet this imagery of balance and interdependence is undermined by the later images of the destruction and dissolution which would occur in the aftermath of Cromwell’s death: Cromwell is the keystone without whom all will fall, and Marvell, who would welcome Richard Cromwell as Protector in 1658, may here be questioning the instability introduced by the constitutional stipulation against hereditary succession.30 Critical debate has focused on the extent to which The First Anniversary is ‘the work of a republican poet becoming wary of the Protector’s charisma’.31 But Marvell mocks the constitutional wrangling of the ‘tedious statesmen’ of the dissolved Commonwealth Parliament: they are dilatory bunglers, who ‘many years did hack, | Framing a liberty that went back’. Marvell prefers to play on the term ‘Instrument’ to turn Cromwell into a type of Amphion, the legendary Orphic figure who built the walls of Thebes through the magical harmonies of his lyre (ll. 67–74). Marvell is finally less concerned in the poem with precise constitutional provisions than with Cromwell’s supernatural, indeed ‘angelic’ (l. 126), power to protect the state against religious tyranny, whether it be in the form of the external, foreign threat from Catholicism or of the internal threat from Presbyterianism and sectarianism. This claim can be clarified if we consider the analogies between John Hall’s apology for Cromwell’s dissolution of the Nominated Assembly or ‘Barebones Parliament’ in December 1653 and Marvell’s The First Anniversary. In Confusion Confounded: or, A Firm Way of Settlement Settled and Confirmed Hall, who like Milton and Nedham retained his position as official propagandist when the Commonwealth gave way to the Protectorate, argues that the threat of disorder that Cromwell had to quell came from the religious radicals who had taken control of the Assembly, specifically the Fifth Monarchists, the association of sectarians who sought to establish a theocratic republic founded on Mosaic law in

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preparation for the (imminent) Second Coming. The ‘despised ones of Christ (as they call themselves)’ are ‘ambitious and seditious men’ who claim inspiration only to further their attempts to seize political power: their ‘main pretence was Religion, or according to their odd and fanatick Notions, the setting up of the Kingdome of Jesus Christ’ (3, 9). Hall alludes on several occasions to the civil science of his friend Thomas Hobbes, the ‘learned Modern’, and repeatedly argues, in language which echoes Leviathan, for the necessity of subordinating religion to civil power: ‘By drawing all Politick debates into matter of Conscience, that is confounding them with matters of Divinity, they . . . raise up an insupportable Tyranny upon all Experience and good Induction . . . if they become once Magisterial, [they will] oblige us to quit our Discourse, our natural Reason, our experiences drawn even from common sense, the means God hath ordained to direct us in civil matters, and to follow those Wills-with-Wisps, or ignes fatui of revelation and pretended Spirit’ (3, 8). Hall’s objection to the Fifth Monarchists is the same as his objection to the Presbyterian clergy who dominated the Long Parliament. Both groups seek to subordinate the state to an ecclesiastical power which they falsely claim is jure divino; like the papists and the prelates before them, they do so out of self-interest and private ambition, and they foment instability in the civil state through their attempts to impose their doctrines on men’s consciences. Nedham, who had attended Fifth Monarchist meetings as a spy, argued for the necessity and efficacy of Cromwell’s actions in very similar terms in A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (1654). In The First Anniversary ‘Angelic Cromwell . . . outwings the wind’ as he pursues the beast or Antichrist ‘thorough every throne’ of Europe; Marvell invokes violent imagery from Revelation and seems to identify Cromwell with the archangel Michael (ll. 125– 30). Yet the praise in The First Anniversary of the Protector as soaring, apocalyptic scourge of Catholic monarchs is also rooted in earthy satire of the domestic Fifth Monarchist opposition to the Protectorate condemned and mocked by Hall and Nedham in their prose tracts.32 Marvell celebrates the Protector in terms of his suppression of the sectarian threat to the security of the state, focusing on his scattering of the ‘frantique Army’ of the Fifth Monarchists. He works up to a violent denunciation of sectarians, representing them as hypocritical and deceitful in their claims to Adamic purity and a Satanic threat to both true religion and civil liberty, ‘Scriptures and Laws’: Accursed Locusts, whom your King does spit Out of the Center of th’unbottom’d Pit; Wand’rers, adult’rers, liars, Münzers’s rest, Sorcerers, Atheists, Jesuites, Possesed; You who the Scriptures and Laws deface With the same liberty as Points and Lace; Oh Race most hypocritically strict! Bent to reduce us to the ancient Pict; Well may you act the Adam and Eve; Ay, and the Serpent too that did deceive. (ll. 311–20)

Marvell isolates and controls in the order of his couplets the sectarian anarchy forecast in the apologies of Hall and Nedham for the removal of the Nominated Assembly. But

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Marvell’s images of Fifth Monarchists also have their origins in the hostile depictions of Presbyterians in his earlier verse. The apocalyptic image of swarms of locusts rising from the bottomless pit invokes Revelation 9: 2–3 and recalls the threat of clerical censorship in the verse epistle to Lovelace: ‘The air’s already tainted with the swarms | Of Insects which against you rise in arms’ (ll. 17–18). Marvell’s warning that the sectarian groups will reduce the English to the barbarous condition of the ‘ancient Pict’ reminds us of the Pict who ‘no shelter now shall find’ in the ‘Horatian Ode’ (l. 105)—and so of Cromwell’s campaign against the Scottish Presbyterians in 1650 and his impressive track record in destroying clerical threats to liberty of conscience in England. Cromwell ordered in May 1654 that Hall be paid £50 for Confusion Confounded. Marvell evidently believed that the anti-sectarian verse of The First Anniversary would find favour with those in authority and with the Protector himself. The career prospects in a patronage system that was not rigged to aristocratic status seem to have been one of the attractions of the Cromwellian order for literary men of modest background like Marvell. But the attraction of Cromwellian power was not, as it was not for many former royalists, born solely out of self-interest. The representation of the threat to the nation of religious extremism in the First Anniversary legitimizes Cromwell’s acquiescence in the resignation of the members of the Nominated Assembly, who handed power back to him in December 1653. The elision of anti-sectarianism and antiPresbyterianism in Marvell’s poem suggests he believed it preferable to accept Cromwell’s unified sovereign power under the Protectorate than risk either clerical tyranny or sectarian anarchy. It also suggests that Marvell already tended towards the Erastian ecclesiology promoted by Hobbes, and also by Nedham and Hall—who initially accepted the Cromwellian regime in large part because its church settlement ‘provided the closest approximation’ available to a civil religion subordinate to the authority of the secular state—rather than towards the separatism of Milton, who ‘eschewed all coercive authority over matters of faith’.33 There is scanty evidence to claim the Marvell of the 1650s, or at any other time, for constitutional republicanism. Yet in Marvell’s commitment to a leader who could ensure the supremacy of the civic power and prevent ecclesiastical tyranny and sectarian disorder, we can begin to reconcile both the Marvell of the Civil Wars and the Marvell of the Protectorate with the Marvell of the Restoration, and see the outline of the Hull MP who in his two-part prose satire The Rehearsall Transpros’d (1672–3) placed his hopes for greater religious freedom not in parliamentary legislation but in the exercise of the royal prerogative by Charles II.34

‘M I L D E R B E A M S ’: M A R V E L L A N D CROMWELLIAN DYNASTY

THE

.................................................................................................................. In Marvell’s elegy for Cromwell there is a dramatic moment which emphasizes the poet’s personal access to his elegiac subject, and which recalls the 1648 elegy for Francis Villiers in its unexpected introduction of the first-person pronoun that signals personal

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commitment (see chapter 13 above). The restless Cromwellian energy of the earlier two poems is reduced to the stark portrait of a motionless body: I saw him dead. A leaden slumber lies, And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes: ... That port which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along[.] (ll. 247–8, 251–2)

Cromwell is here neither Phaeton, dying spectacularly, nor Elijah, whirled bodily up to heaven, but, simply, a ‘leaden’ corpse. There are similarities between Marvell’s elegy and the ‘plain style’ of state portraiture encouraged by Cromwell, as the Protector’s body is notably bereft of kingly regalia.35 Yet, as the poet is forced to acknowledge, the fact that Cromwell died in his bed may have an effect on popular memory of the great warrior: The people, which what most they fear esteem, Death when more horrid, so more noble deem; And blame the last act, like spectators vain, Unless the prince whom they applaud be slain. (ll. 7–10)

Though Blair Worden is broadly right to say ‘the elegy does without the polemical force of the previous poetry’, there is an obvious recollection here of the depiction of the regicide as drama and Charles I as ‘tragic actor’ in the ‘Horatian Ode’: Marvell had avoided the inflammatory topic of the regicide altogether in The First Anniversary but it returns through self-echo in the elegy, suggesting Marvell’s acceptance, or anxiety, that Cromwell will finally be remembered above all for his part in regicide.36 The elegy contains in fact several echoes of the ‘Ode’, as Marvell incorporates the imagery of his own earlier poem to give a sense of Cromwell’s development from the awesome and almost inhuman martial figure of 1650 into the Protector of his people who has just died eight years later. The elegy continues: And he whom Nature all for peace had made, But angry heaven unto war had swayed, And so less useful where he most desired, For what he least affected was admired, Deservèd yet an end whose ev’ry part Should speak the wondrous softness of his heart. (ll. 13–20)

In the ‘Ode’ Cromwell is described as the ‘force of angry heaven’s flame’ (l. 26), who ‘could not cease | In the inglorious arts of peace’; in the elegy we learn of the discordance between Cromwell’s natural disposition for peace and the acts of valour for which he was most admired, and which he was driven to perform by providence. The ‘wondrous softness’ now ascribed to Cromwell’s heart is demonstrated by his love for his family, most prominently his daughter Elizabeth, who died only a month before

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her father. The humanity that becomes apparent in Cromwell’s mortality enables the poet, it seems, to express a personal affection that is absent from the earlier poems. The marriage of Cromwell’s daughter Mary in 1657, for which Marvell composed two songs, was an event that underlined how the Humble Petition and Advice, the new constitutional settlement of that year which had replaced the Instrument of Government, brought the Protectorate closer to monarchical forms. Indeed Cromwell was offered the crown by Parliament on 23 February 1657 but turned it down—possibly because he feared the reaction of the army and the radicals such as the Fifth Monarchists, or possibly because he recognized that the office of king was bound by ancient legal restrictions. Crucially, however, the Humble Petition and Advice enabled Cromwell to name his own successor. Marvell’s emphasis on Cromwell as a family man is not surprising, for the poet seeks in the elegy to give cultural authority to the idea of a Cromwellian dynasty, with Richard Cromwell assuming the mantle of Protector at the end of the poem and needing immediately to unite the opposing religious and political factions in the country to continue the Protectorate’s ‘calm peace’ (l. 321). Indeed, while Marvell does revisit in the elegy the national glories obtained by the martial prowess of Cromwell, who ‘stretched our frontier to the Indian ore’ (l. 174), the poet looks ahead to the domestic challenges faced by Richard’s rule in praising Oliver’s ‘prudence’ in controlling popular and sectarian (in this case antinomian) threats to law and liberty.37 This section recalls the (more vitriolic and extended) attack on sectarianism in The First Anniversary: What prudence more than human did he need To keep so dear, so diff ’ring minds agreed? The worser sort, as conscious of their ill, Lie weak and easy to the ruler’s will; But to the good (too many or too few) All law is useless, all reward is due. (ll. 217–22)

Marvell, as a loyal MP in the Parliament called by Richard in 1659, was given the opportunity to play a part in the continuing effort to subdue republican and sectarian dissent: the rapid breakdown of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate, however, rendered irrelevant and potentially incriminating Marvell’s poetic effort to invoke a Cromwellian dynasty in which the poet’s own position would be secure. In the final lines of the elegy the archetypal royalist image of the king as the sun, nourishing his subjects through patronage and bounty, is suggested but not explicitly invoked as Richard Cromwell is compared to a rainbow that follows the terrible storm that coincided with Oliver’s death: He, virtue dead, Revives, and by his milder beams assures; And yet how much of them his grief obscures. ... Heav’n to this choice prepared a diadem, Richer than any eastern silk or gem: A pearly rainbow, where the sun enchased

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His brows, like an imperial jewel graced. ... Rainbows to storms, Richard to Oliver. (ll. 306–8, 315–18, 322)

In The First Anniversary such royalist iconography of the sun is found insufficient to describe a Cromwell who is king-like and yet more than a king: ‘Cromwell alone with greater vigour runs, | (Sun-like) the stages of succeeding suns’ (ll. 7–8). Oliver outpaces time, bringing the last days of cosmic renovation promised in Revelation to the present; in the elegy the cyclical process of death and rebirth has replaced this millenarian vision of a linear, ‘Foreshortened Time’ (l. 139; ‘foreshortened’ is derived by Marvell from a term for a trick of visual perspective). If Marvell hesitantly introduces monarchical iconography in the elegy through a kind of metonymy (rainbows for suns), in Dryden’s elegy for Oliver Cromwell, in which no mention is made of Richard, the conventional regal image of the sun is applied to the dead Protector, but the ironic potential of the language applied to Cromwell which characterizes the ‘Horatian Ode’, and which is largely absent from Marvell’s two later Cromwell poems, has crept into Dryden’s verses: His grandeur he derived from heaven alone, For he was great ere Fortune made him so; And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow. (ll. 21–4)

How are we to read the last two lines? Is Cromwell’s greatness, or indeed his resemblance to a king, a trick of the light?38 Are the mists that ‘rise against the sun’ actually recalling the rising against monarchy in the Civil Wars? When Dryden observes in the next stanza that ‘Nor was his virtue poisoned soon as born | With the too early thoughts of being king’ (ll. 27–8), this praise also conjures an image of the Machiavellian Cromwell of the ‘Horatian Ode’, waiting for the right occasion on which to crown himself king. If Dryden seems to be under the influence here of the ironic technique of Marvell’s ‘Ode’, in his post-Restoration poem Annus mirabilis (1667) the memory of Marvell’s description of Cromwell, who left the shadows of an obscure life to become ‘the force of angry heaven’s flame’ which ‘palaces and temples rent’ (ll. 26, 22), is more straightforwardly recalled to provide an analogy with the destructive power of the Great Fire of London: As when some dire usurper heaven provides To scourge his country with lawless sway ... Such was the rise of this prodigious fire, Which in mean buildings first obscurely bred, From thence did soon to open streets aspire, And straight to palaces and temples spread. (ll. 849–50, 857–60)

It was the superhuman force imagined in the ‘Horatian Ode’ that haunted Dryden’s memory (and his career) rather than the soft and pacific mortal depicted in Marvell’s

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elegy; and it is those same strange images of ‘restless Cromwell’ in the ‘Ode’ and The First Anniversary, rather than those of Cromwell’s ordinary, mortal humanity in the elegy, which continue to hold sway over Marvell’s fascinated readers today.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

Marvell, Poems, ed. Smith, 299, 312. All references to Marvell’s poems are to this edition. See Dryden, Poems, i. 17–18, 21. Healy, ‘Andrew Marvell’, 165–70; Marvell, Poems, 267. Carey (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 21–2. For Dryden, see Hammond, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, 74–84; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 254–6. This aspect of Marvell’s life is emphasized by Nigel Smith’s immediately standard new biography, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. Worden, Literature and Politics, 152. On ‘Protectoral Augustanism’ and its critics, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 299–325. Carey (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 35; Marvell, Poems, 246. Poems and Letters, ed. Margoliouth, ii. 291. Marvell, Poems, 315, 281. On Marvell and Nedham, see Worden, Literature and Politics, 54–81. See McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 180–2. English Lyric Poetry, 269. ‘Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, 525. Greene, ‘The Balance of Power’, 386; Friedman, Marvell’s Pastoral Art, 6. Lovelace, Poems, 191, l. 30. John Davies, ‘An Account of the Author’, in Hall, Hierocles Upon the Golden Verses, sig. b4r. Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers, 199–200. Davies, ‘An Account of the Author’, sig. b4v; Hall, The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy, 8–9, 25–6, 54–5, 127. Creaser, ‘Prosody and Liberty’, 47. Ibid.; Marvell, Poems, 274 32 n. Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 156–7. Vickers, ‘Machiavelli and Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” ’, 38. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 18. Ibid. 17; Smith, Literature and Revolution, 77. Wallace, Destiny his Choice, 4–5; Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, passim. Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 340. Smith, ‘The Struggle for New Constitutional Forms’, 21. Holberton here sees Marvell as offering a warning that the Protectorate needs ‘to be built to outlast its officers’, most obviously the Protector himself (Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 112). Although Holberton does not make the point, hereditary succession was one obvious way to ensure continuity. Compare Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty’, and Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 101–18 (101).

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32. On this aspect of Marvell’s poem, see also Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 143–71; McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 247–9. 33. Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, 205. See also von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’, 97. 34. See further Worden, Literature and Politics, 151; von Maltzahn, ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’. 35. On the ‘plain style’ of Cromwellian portraiture, see Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 129–31. 36. Worden, Literature and Politics, 153. 37. Patterson emphasizes the militarism of the elegy in ‘Andrew Marvell and the Revolution’, 121. 38. I owe this brilliant point to Keymer, ‘Protean Prevaricator’.

WORKS CITED Carey, John (ed.). Andrew Marvell: A Critical Anthology. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Collins, Jeffrey R. The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Creaser, John. ‘Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds.), Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002, 37–55. Dryden, John. Poems of John Dryden, i: 1649–81, ed. Paul Hammond. Harlow: Longman, 1995. Friedman, Donald. Marvell’s Pastoral Art. London: Routledge, 1970. Greene, Thomas M. ‘The Balance of Power in Marvell’s “Horatian Ode” ’. English Literary History 60 (1993), 379–96. Hall, John. The Grounds and Reasons of Monarchy Considered. 2nd edn. London, 1651. ——. Confusion Confounded: or, A Firm Way of Settlement Settled and Confirmed. London, 1654. ——. Hierocles Upon the Golden Verses. London, 1657. Hammond, Paul. Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Healy, Thomas. ‘Andrew Marvell, “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland” ’, in David Womersley (ed.), A Companion to Literature from Milton to Blake. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 165–70. Holberton, Edward. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Keymer, Thomas. ‘Protean Prevaricator’. Times Literary Supplement (23 July 2004), 5–7. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Loewenstein, David. Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Lovelace, Richard. Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930; 1953. McDowell, Nicholas. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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Maltzahn, Nicholas von. ‘Milton, Marvell, and Toleration’, in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, 86–104. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963. ——. 2007. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith. Rev. edn. Harlow: Longman, 2007. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Politics, Rhetoric, and Poetry, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patterson, Annabel. ‘Andrew Marvell and the Revolution’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2001, 107–23. Peacey, Jason. Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Post, Jonathan F. S. English Lyric Poetry: The Early Seventeenth Century. London: Routledge, 1999. Raymond, Joad. ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’. Huntington Library Quarterly 62 (2001), 313–50. Smith, David L. ‘The Struggle for New Constitutional and Institutional Forms’, in John Morrill (ed.), Revolution and Restoration: England in the 1650s. Harlow: Longman, 1992, 15–34. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. ——. Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Vickers, Brian. ‘Machiavelli and Marvell’s “Horatian Ode”’. Notes and Queries 36 (1989), 32–8. Wallace, John M. Destiny his Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Worden, Blair. ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’. Historical Journal 27 (1984), 525–47. ——. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER

26

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COUNTERING ANTI-THEATRICALITY Davenant and the Drama of the Protectorate ....................................................................................................... JANET CLARE

ROYALIST CULTURE

IN

OPPOSITION

.................................................................................................................. The small-scale revival of public performance initiated by William Davenant during the Protectorate can be understood only in the context of parliamentary–Puritan opposition to theatre during the Civil Wars and after the regicide. Attendance at plays along with other popular pastimes was regarded as a sign of the profanity endemic in the public sphere, and from the outbreak of civil war there were repeated attempts to suppress theatrical performance.1 The curt order against stage plays on 2 September 1642, nine days after the King had raised his standard at Nottingham, determined that such spectacles of pleasure ‘commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity’ were ill suited to the times, which called for measures to appease and avert ‘the wrath of God’, and should cease.2 Anti-theatrical polemic was reiterated in later legislation. On 22 October 1647 an ordinance was passed for ‘the better suppressing of stage plays’, empowering the Lord Mayor and City of London and Justices of the Peace ‘to enter into all houses, and other places . . . where stage plays, interludes, or other common plays are or shall be acted or played’ and to call offending actors before the London Sessions of the Peace to be punished as rogues.3 A further, more extensive ordinance, that of 11 February 1648 ‘for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stageplays and interludes’, repeats the providential language and sets out more deliberately to suppress theatre production. All stage galleries, seats, and boxes are to be demolished; players who defy the ordinance are to be whipped and spectators fined five shillings for the use of the poor of the parish.4 What is interesting is that the Act, like the previous one, has resonances of Elizabethan regulation of drama and performance;

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reminiscent of earlier punitive injunctions, stage players and players of interludes are deemed rogues and are to be punished as such. After decades of royal patronage, actors were reduced to the marginal social status they had had before their elevation in the 1580s and 1590s to servants of the nobility. The recovery of early Elizabethan definitions of unlicensed players as rogues, vagabonds, or sturdy beggars was turned to advantage in the royalist newspaper Mercurius anti-pragmaticus which commented: ‘They [the actors] are not only silenced, but branded with a name of infamy, rogues; but this word perhaps doth the less distaste them, on consideration that a famous Queen bestowed upon them the same epithet.’5 The framing of legislation against plays and players was not the only occasion for a revival of Elizabethan attitudes: hostile rhetoric from the pulpit was reminiscent of earlier anti-theatrical prejudice. In February 1653, the floor of an upper room of a tavern in Witney collapsed in the midst of a production of the old Elizabethan play Mucedorus. In the first of three sermons preached to check ‘the growing atheism of the present day’, the preacher John Rowe was quick to capitalize on the event and rehearsed all the familiar Elizabethan anti-theatrical polemic. It was not the throng of people eager to enjoy an outlawed popular pastime which had caused too much pressure on the rafters, but ‘the strange and wonderful hand of God’ in putting an end ‘to this ungodly play’, and in doing so revealing ‘his holiness, justice, and other attributes to the world’.6 According to Rowe, it was no coincidence that God had chosen this occasion to show his disapproval of ungodly pastimes, for Mucedorus was a play which contained a ‘bitter taunt against all godly persons under the name of Puritans, and at religion itself’. Rowe proclaimed that the deaths and injuries occasioned by the collapse were God’s demonstration that in such an age of light he would not tolerate profanity. Stage plays were against the word of God, which forbids idle and foolish words, jesting, and unchaste looks, gestures, and apparel, all of which lead to sin. Comedies simply bring the wanton lusts of men upon the stage. In the production of Mucedorus in the Witney inn, God had turned comedy into tragedy and for a moment, in Rowe’s interpretation of the event, Witney had been turned into ‘a public theatre’ for a display of divine disapproval. Again, Rowe recovers the drama of Elizabethan providential rhetoric deployed half a century earlier by Thomas Beard in his Theatre of God’s Judgement (1597) in which Beard had warned of retribution for all those who engaged in the dissolute activities of singing, dancing, and playing. Rowe’s sermon reveals little change in the language of Puritan hostility to stage practice and, the familiar admonition suggests, despite the revolution, no conversion of the ungodly. As with the Oxfordshire production of Mucedorus, the prohibition against the theatre met with resistance, and it is quite evident that players and audiences colluded to circumvent anti-theatrical measures. Although the interiors of several playhouses had been dismantled, contrary to a common assumption there had been no official closure of the theatres; plays were performed as part of a loyalist oppositional culture in the private indoor theatres, Salisbury Court and the Cockpit in Drury Lane, and in the public theatres, the Fortune and the Red Bull. Parliamentary and royalist mercuries record army raids on theatres as plays were in performance. The most comprehensive

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raid on record took place simultaneously at three theatres on 1 January 1649; the date suggests that the theatres were playing as part of traditional seasonal festivities. The Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer reports a sweeping assault on those theatres still in operation: The soldiers seized on the players on their stages at Drury Lane, and at Salisbury Court. They went also to the Fortune in Golden Lane, but they found none there, but John Pudding dancing on the ropes, whom they took with them. In the meantime the players at the Red Bull, who had notice of it, made haste away, and were all gone before they came, and took away all their acting clothes with them. But at Salisbury Court they were taken on the stage the play being almost ended, and with many links and lighted torches they were carried to Whitehall with their players’ clothes upon their backs. In the way they oftentimes took the crown from his head who acted the king, and in sport would oftentimes put it on again. Abraham had a black satin gown on, and before he came into the dirt, he was very neat in his white laced pumps. The people not expecting such a pageant looked and laughed at all the rest, and not knowing who he was, they asked, what had the Lady done? They made some resistance at the Cockpit in Drury Lane, which was the occasion that they were bereaved of their apparel, and were not so well used as those in Salisbury Court, who were more patient, and therefore at their releasement they had their clothes returned to them without the least diminution. After two days’ confinement, they were ordered to put in bail, and to appear before the Lord Mayor to answer for what they have done unto the Law.7

This account is corroborated by a shorter item in Perfect Occurrences, which adds the interesting detail that amongst the Salisbury Court audience were members who had been purged from Parliament in December 1648 by the army under Colonel Pride for their willingness to negotiate with the King.8 The parliamentary journal also clears up an ambiguity in the observation that it was the soldiers (and not the actors, as might be inferred from the account above) who performed this mock coronation and deposition, anticipating the regicide by only a few weeks. With the demolition of theatres, theatrical space was created in other buildings and playing went underground. Mercurius Democritus reports, in March 1653, preparation for a performance of Thomas Killigrew’s Claricilla at Charles Gibbon’s tennis court in Vere Street. The performance was betrayed to the army by one of the players and the journal rounds on the unnamed actor while also revealing that he had himself undertaken the production of a number of plays in his own home: ‘An ill beast or rather bird (because the rest denied him a share of their profits) beshit his own nest, causing the poor actors to be routed by the soldiery, though he himself hath since the prohibition of plays had divers tragedies and comedies acted in his own home.’ The use of this space initiated later developments. Gibbon’s Tennis Court near Lincolns Inn fields was to be the site of the first Restoration playhouse, the Theatre Royal, in which Thomas Killigrew’s Company played.9 One theatre which seems to have kept going and was the location of popular resistance to anti-theatrical measures was the open-air Red Bull in Clerkenwell. Rope dancing was advertised there in June 1653 with the assurance that ‘the audience may come and return with safety’.10 Clearly this was something of a subterfuge; besides rope

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and sword dancing, the Red Bull was the venue for dramatic interludes, jigs, short plays, or truncated versions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays which could be performed in a short space of time before army patrols got wind of them. The nature of the productions of the 1650s is illustrated in a publication by the actor Robert Cox, Actaeon and Diana: with a pastoral story of the nymph Oenone: followed by the several conceited humours Bumpkin the Huntsman, Hobbinal the Shepherd, Singing Simpkin and John Swabber the Seaman, a publication which refers to their performance on the stage of the Red Bull. The pieces are a strange medley of rustic comedy, farce, mythology, and dance, recapturing urban popular pastimes. Nonetheless, Cox addressed his volume ‘to all worthy-minded gentry’, suggesting the collapse of distinct popular and elitist audiences; in the absence of alternative theatre, the gentry in the capital frequented what they could. When the army raided the theatre in June, Cox was caught performing John Swabber, a farcical interlude in which, to deceive Swabber, his wife substitutes Cutbeard the barber for her baby in a cradle.11 By then, such raids seem to have been routine and did not deter later performance at the Red Bull. Performances continued throughout the 1650s, for in May 1659 the actors Edward Shatterell and Anthony Turner were bound over by the Justices of the Peace for ‘the unlawful maintaining of stage plays and interludes at the Red Bull’. Apparently, the actors and parishioners of Clerkenwell had struck up a deal to facilitate performance with the actors paying the parishioners twenty shillings a day for the hire of the Red Bull (a considerable sum) as well as poor relief and money towards highway repair.12 To recoup such an outlay the actors must have been sure of capturing an audience. New writing for performance—as opposed to closet drama and translations by royalist writers such as Cosmo Manuche, William Lower, Edmund Prestwich, and Christopher Wase13—took the form of topical, satirical pamphlet plays.14 The Actors’ Remonstrance published in 1644 listed amongst its grievances the reduction in means of playwrights forced to write ‘contemptible penny pamphlets’ in which they are obliged to feign ‘miraculous stories and relations of unheard battles’. Soon, the complaint runs on, playwrights will be forced to write ballads for a living. The writing of news dramas was thus seen as a viable, if vulgar, alternative to the composition of drama proper. Most of the playlets were published anonymously, and the authors who can be identified, such as Samuel Sheppard and John Crouch, were editors of royalist weeklies which in disseminating news fulfilled a parallel function. Typographically, the plays represent texts for performance; they offer a list of dramatis personae, prologues and epilogues, stage directions, and details of scene locations and were probably performed in a rather ad hoc fashion in inns, private houses, fairs, and at the Red Bull. The Disease of the House, for example, is a short prose drama with a verse prologue, spoken by ‘John Capon’, and an epilogue.15 Capon, a generic name like ‘Jack Pudding’, is mentioned specifically in an advertisement in the royalist journal Mercurius Democriticus as appearing in an entertainment at the Red Bull which includes a display of rope, sword, and country dancing,16 and The Disease of the House may well have been performed there.

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Performance of the pamphlet dramas gave the illiterate access to the news, smears, and propaganda which comprised the paper wars of the 1640s. On 4 July 1649 the royalist journal The Man in the Moon reported that the King’s goods were to be sold and commented on parliamentary proceedings: ‘Newmarket Fair it seems is proclaimed at Westminster.’ A Tragi-comedy, called Newmarket Fair, or A Parliament Out-Cry of State Commodities Set to Sale is the title of a playlet, published in the previous month, presenting the aftermath of the King’s execution as a period of chaotic jostling for power as Cromwell, General Fairfax, leader of parliamentary forces, Henry Ireton, son-in-law to Cromwell, and Colonel Pride each bid for royal regalia flogged off by a crier at the fair. Fairfax and Cromwell compete for the crown; Fairfax suggests that they share power, but Cromwell, with supposedly monarchical ambitions, declares that a crown admits no rival and a throne no division, while Mrs Cromwell rejects the goods of Henrietta Maria because they ‘smell of popery’. The play ends in a royalist fantasy as the regicides fall on their swords and the crier articulates their predicament—‘all people here behold our miseries | Who lives by Treason, thus by Treason dies’—but in some of its scenes the play evidently provided a model for actual events, so much so that the title alone served as a cipher to evoke them. As vehicles for attacking the parliamentary grandees and the radical sects, the pamphlet plays are anarchic in substance, genre, idiom, and style, their aesthetics matching what their authors, readers, and spectators perceived as a world upside down. Political and sexual transgression merge. The Famous Tragedy of Charles I, a five-act playlet, published immediately after the King’s execution, displays an extraordinary generic hybridity. Act 1 presents a scheming Cromwell with his chaplain Hugh Peters plotting the indictment of the King and, in Peters’s promise through pulpit and press to ‘render kingly government obnoxious and incompatible with the people’s rights’, disseminating anti-royalist ideology. Scene 2 depicts the Siege of Colchester and the heroic self-presentations of Lord Goring and Charles Capel who counter Peters’s anti-monarchism with declarations of divine right while sustaining themselves with drink and drinking songs. Act 3 begins with Cromwell’s soliloquy, representing a parody of Marlovian overreacher rhetoric, and concludes with the deaths of the royalist captains Lucas and Lisle. Act 4 is in the characteristic register of the pamphlet plays in representing Peters as a go-between for Cromwell in his seduction of Mrs Lambert but also introduces a dance of masquers satirizing the new regime in the guise of ambition, treason, lust, revenge, perjury, and sacrilege. In Act 5 Cromwell’s seduction of Mrs Lambert is interrupted by the arrival of a letter from Ireton with the news of the regicide and the ‘modalizing’ of the Commonwealth. In this bizarre mixture of theatrical and rhetorical idioms The True Tragedy seems to have performance in mind, strikingly so in the play’s final moment when, following the lament of the Chorus, the bodies of the King and the loyalists Capel, Holland, and Hamilton are revealed in what would seem to be a discovery space. In almost all the pamphlet plays transgression in the domestic sphere mirrors inversion in the public sphere. The depiction of Cromwell and his major generals as libidinous and hypocritical is designed to undermine their moral and political

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authority, although, as has been argued, the image of a powerful Cromwell with royal pretensions long before that was actually the case contributed to a common conception of Cromwell as a key military and political figure.17 Other plays, less controversially, mock the libertinism of the sects and exploit the divisions and factions amongst the parliamentarians. Illicit and impromptu performance of the pamphlet plays was one way of satisfying a popular need but, with the establishment of the Protectorate and the accommodations and cooperations that the regime produced, they declined in popularity or they found no publisher.

REFORMIST ARISTOCRATIC ENTERTAINMENT

.................................................................................................................. No one could have known in 1653 that, by the end of the decade, monarchy would be restored and, from the time of Cromwell’s Protectorate, Richard Flecknoe and William Davenant began to petition the Council of State for a theatrical revival amenable to a Puritan dispensation that enjoyed music and some visual display.18 That the newly established regime was not entirely opposed to theatrical entertainment is apparent from a performance of James Shirley’s masque Cupid and Death before the ambassador of Portugal in March 1653.19 At the same time, William Davenant and Richard Flecknoe produced variegated arguments to counter entrenched anti-theatricality. In A Proposition for the Advancement of Morality by a New Way of Entertainment of the People, presented to the Council of State in 1653, drawing on aesthetic theories advanced in The Preface to Gondibert, Davenant argued for the moral and socially educative advantages for the lower classes of a reformed stage, charged with ‘instructive morality’.20 In general terms, Davenant is echoing Milton who, in The Reason of Church-Government, a decade earlier, had proposed that drama performed in state-controlled theatres should serve a moral and instructive purpose. Davenant promises that the ‘scandalous and extravagant parts’ of theatre will be removed, particularly ‘the disguising of men in women’s habits’, and the audience will be diverted through scene, music, and discourse. The subject matter of the reformed drama would be heroic, ‘famous battles at sea and land’; the actions depicted would be inherently virtuous; and, between the changing of scenes, interlocutions will variously praise valour, vigilance, and obedience to authority. In the manuscript accompanying the Proposition, Davenant argues the case further by advocating censorship of any public presentations apart from those allowed by a licensee. The following year Richard Flecknoe made a similar bid to realign and reconstitute the drama by seeking the patronage of Lady Elizabeth Claypole, Cromwell’s daughter. In dedicating Love’s Dominion (1654) to Claypole, Flecknoe made a strong plea for the revival of drama, which is desired by ‘the nobler and better sort’. The play was advertised as ‘a dramatic piece full of excellent morality’ and written as a pattern for the reformed stage. In the preface, Flecknoe suggests wholesale redefinitions of terms claiming that ‘actions’, ‘opera’, or ‘works’ would all be more apt designations than ‘plays’. A restored, reformed stage, he argues, should be

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welcomed by the dispensation of the Cromwellian Protectorate, as a means of promoting virtue, and he suggests, like Davenant, that it could be subject to moral censorship. Davenant followed up his proposition three years later with a letter to John Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State and occasional licenser of the press.21 Here the argument is expanded beyond the humanist to include economic, pragmatic, and ideological advantages for a theatrical revival. The extent to which ‘retailers and mechanics’ had been impoverished by the royalists’ desertion of London enabled Davenant to argue that the gentry must be encouraged to return to London by the allure of ‘pleasant assemblies’ which are ‘occasioned in all great cities’. The people of England, he declares with a sweeping generalization of national identity, are inclined to be melancholy and this breeds sedition, which he argues disingenuously can be dispelled, as it has been in the past, by ‘public meetings for prizes in archery, horse races, matches at football, wakes, may-poles and sports of Christmas, theatres and other public spectacles’. In contrast to the argument of his earlier document, Davenant emphasizes that the clientele he now proposes to attract are the gentry. At the close of his letter to Thurloe, Davenant puts forward a fitting subject for a reformed stage: ‘If moral representations may be allowed (being without obsceneness, profaneness, and scandal) the first arguments may consist of the Spaniards’ barbarous conquests in the West Indies and of their several cruelties there exercised upon the subjects of this nation: of which some use may be made.’ The revival of anti-Spanish rhetoric in the cause of colonial expansionism was bound to appeal to the Protectorate, and it seems to have been the perceived political utility of the project which influenced the government’s decision to sanction public performance, though no doubt the promise of a morally reformed stage was an essential ingredient in Davenant’s proposal. For strategic reasons, the projected entertainment was slow to materialize and Davenant experimented with other drama before the production of The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru in 1658. Appropriately, the theatrical revival, in the private space of Davenant’s residence Rutland House, near Charterhouse Square, began with a debate about the nature of drama. The Prologue to The First Day’s Entertainment apologizes for the modest facilities and resources: But though you cannot front our cupboard scene, Nor sit so eas’ly as to stretch and lean, Yet you are so divided and so plac’d, That half are freely by the other faced Think this your passage, and the narrow way To our Elyzian field, the Opera.

There are two parts and two rhetorical exchanges to ‘the opera’, The First Day’s Entertainment, whose very title draws attention to the novelty of the performance. The first debate is between Diogenes, the cynic philosopher who was alleged to have spent his life in a tub, and Aristophanes, the satiric playwright; the second is set between a Frenchman and an Englishman. In the first dialogue Diogenes voices and possibly anticipates objections to recitative and scenic drama familiar from Puritan

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anti-theatrical polemic. Music is a deceitful art, leading to the ‘evil of extremes’ of feeling and transporting an audience ‘beyond the regions of reason’. Scenes are deceptive of place and motion and, argues Diogenes, may only inculcate the evil of deception in general. Aristophanes refutes such literalism with a reiteration of the therapeutic, moral, and affective power of music, poetry, and the visual. All work harmoniously to move the mind. Music ‘unites and recollects a broken and scattered mind; giving it sudden strength to resist the evils it hath long and strongly bred’. Pictorial representation, as in the uses of scenes, is ‘the safest and shortest way to understanding’. The playwright dismisses Diogenes’ claim that the tendency to use the remote past in dramatic representations makes their subject matter less credible by arguing that the past works with greater subtlety on the intelligence. Predictably, the victory lies with Aristophanes, who defeats his antagonist by arguing that, since Diogenes is himself the worst representative of morality, he is justly afraid to be portrayed in the theatre. At the close of the dialogue, in a graphic rejection of antirepresentational argument, Diogenes is forced to retreat to his tub. The debate was followed by a song composed by Henry Lawes, who had composed for Davenant’s Caroline masque The Triumphs of the Prince d’Amour, as well as for Milton’s Comus. Further instrumental music led to the second half of the entertainment, a debate between a Londoner and a Parisian, a topical enough subject for members of the audience as well as Davenant, who had lived in the exiled Parisian court of Henrietta Maria, although not one designed for the Protectorate. In his short account of The First Day’s Entertainment, an informer for the Protectoral Council absorbed Davenant’s definition of The First Day’s Entertainment as opera, for this is how he alluded to the work in his report to the Council. He also reports that the performance ended with a song in praise of Cromwell, a feature not in the text which had served to advertise the production.22 The public recital was not in fact an ‘opera’ but an argument—as Davenant tells his audience—‘against and for public entertainment by moral representations’. The Siege of Rhodes, which in September 1656 followed shortly after The First Day’s Entertainment on the same stage in Rutland House, can be described as the first English opera. It was considerably more ambitious in scope and was close to fashionable continental opera sung, as it was, in recitative music and making use of a scenic stage in the form of wings and back shutters designed by John Webb.23 Davenant took the precaution of sending a copy of the libretto to Bulstrode Whitelocke, Cromwell’s ambassador to Sweden and occasional speaker in the House of Commons, who had intervened for Davenant when the poet was imprisoned in the Tower following his capture off the Isle of Wight, on the way to taking up the post of lieutenant-governor of Maryland.24 Amongst the members of the Council of State, Whitelocke might have been expected to promote The Siege of Rhodes; he had been a former Master of the Revels at Middle Temple, involved with dramatic production, notably the performance of Shirley’s The Triumph of Peace by all four Inns of Court in 1634. Davenant alludes playfully to the ‘nicety of the times’ which, he anticipates, will ‘draw a curtain’ between Whitelocke and his opera; nonetheless, even if he cannot attend, he appeals to Whitelocke to read the opera. Whitelocke almost

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certainly did not see The Siege of Rhodes although he was interested enough to note in his journal, picking up on Davenant’s euphemism, that Davenant had printed the opera ‘notwithstanding the nicety of the times’.25 In 1656 a drama involved with a siege and the besieged would have resonated with recent experience. The English Civil Wars had been wars of sieges, and in the language of assault and defence Davenant applied his military knowledge as Lieutenant General of Ordnance under the Earl of Newcastle. On the tiny stage of Rutland House, Davenant represented what was the most famous and last of the sieges of Rhodes by the Turks. Richard Knolles in The General History of the Turks had described how, in 1522, Solyman the Magnificent had led a massive assault on the city defended by the international Knights Hospitallers.26 In the first entry (Davenant uses the scenic divisions of the masque rather than the play), the Admiral of Rhodes sights the Turkish fleet and calls for the city to arm itself to repulse the invading power. Intertwined with the imperial conflict is a story exemplifying the conflicts of love and honour as Alphonso, a young Sicilian Duke who has been residing in Rhodes for the annual jousts, gets caught up in the Turkish invasion. His wife Ianthe, hearing of the threat to Rhodes, sells her jewels to help the cause and sets sail for Rhodes. Her fleet is intercepted by Solyman, who—contrary to Renaissance stereotypes of the Turkish emperors as cruel, sensual, and imperialist—behaves honourably.27 Impressed by Ianthe’s virtue and her beauty, Solyman offers her and Alphonso safe passage to return to Sicily, which Alphonso sees as a smear on his honour. Further, Solyman’s action prompts him to suspect Ianthe and become morbidly jealous. The need to compress the opera’s narrative means suspicion, introversion, and obsession cannot be developed as they would have been in earlier Renaissance plays; but the duets between Ianthe and Alphonso effectively convey the emotional dynamics of the couple before, each believing the other is fatally wounded, they are reconciled. The opera ends as the Turks are repulsed from Rhodes thanks to the Christian defenders. In the second entry Alphonso praises the dauntless courage displayed by the English, and, as the attack on Rhodes intensifies, the Bassa or military commander, Mustapha, declares that ‘those desperate English n’er will fly! | Their firmness still does hinder others’ flight’ (fifth entry ll. 41–2).28 This is all quite contrary to Knolles’s account in which the English bulwark was the first to be undermined by Turkish ammunition. This unhistorical celebration of English valour and honour is replicated in Davenant’s other Commonwealth operas and is in a sense what unites them. The story of Ianthe, Alphonso, and Solyman was borrowed from the Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Kyd and radically transformed by Davenant to suit his agenda. In Kyd’s play, Soliman and Perseda (1592), Soliman acts the tyrant and, out of lust for Perseda, orders the murder of Erastus. Davenant offers quite different characterization and revises Solyman’s alterity to such an extent that Ianthe declares he behaves as if he is in ‘civil France’. Details of the relationship between Alphonso and Ianthe must have reminded contemporaries of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. When Alphonso refuses to accept Solyman’s offer of safe passage and declares that his virtue must be greater than that of Solyman, this may have evoked some of the ambivalent responses to Charles by

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royalist supporters. In the same year as The Siege of Rhodes was performed, the King’s former chaplain, Peter Heylyn, published anonymously his Observations on the Historie of the Reign of Charles in which he expressed misgivings about a king ready to sacrifice his kingdom to save his conscience.29 In the view of some royalists, Charles’s pursuit of virtue had been politically lacking in pragmatism, and Alphonso’s rejection of Solyman’s offer, coloured by unfounded jealousy, elicits a similar response. By the time of the opera’s performance, it was well known that in support of the royalist cause Henrietta Maria had pawned jewels given to her by Charles. In 1645 after the royalist defeat at Naseby the Queen’s letters had been published with a hostile commentary, and in them she had declared that she wished to share Charles’s fortunes or misfortunes providing ‘it be with honour’.30 If we suppose a royalist audience at Rutland House would have seen in the roles of Alphonso and Ianthe something of the late King’s dilemma then this prompts questions about Solyman’s role. Ianthe identifies Solyman’s interception of her fleet and his granting freedom of passage as part of a providential design. Equally his adviser, Pirrhus, accounts him a force that should not be resisted: ‘They are not foes, but rebels who withstand | The power that does their fate command’ (fourth entry, ll. 17–18). This is close to the Cromwell of Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode on Cromwell’s return from Ireland’ who is similarly described as an irresistible force: ‘Tis madness to resist or blame | The force of angry heaven’s flame.’ Indeed, royalists of a more absolute persuasion might well have recognized in Cromwell a more manly and decisive leader than the honour-bound Charles. In his re-presentation of the love and honour plot, Davenant would seem to be appealing deftly to both sides of the political and cultural divide. In the actions of the chivalric Rhodian knights inspired by the honour of Alphonso and the virtue of Ianthe, there would seem to be nostalgic royalist interests; but Solyman in demonstrating military vigour and incisiveness as well as honour is the man of the moment. The Siege of Rhodes was one of the first plays to be performed at the Restoration and, with the newly written second part, it was very popular. Davenant expanded the first part of The Siege of Rhodes, and in one of the added scenes Ianthe is preparing to sail for Rhodes and arranging to sell her jewels. The action is incomprehensible to her waiting women, to whose query—‘should all these gems be spent in war?’—Ianthe replies: ‘If by their sale my Lord may be redeemed, | Why should they more than trifles be esteemed.’31 These scenes are expanded in a way that resonates most obviously with the actions of Charles and Henrietta Maria during the Civil Wars. The Restoration additions make it possible to detect where the play’s sympathies lie; at the same time they indicate Davenant’s earlier circumspection in creating a drama of less clearly defined loyalties. A second edition of The Siege of Rhodes was published in 1659 with the information that it had been performed at the Cockpit in Drury Lane. Along with other Caroline theatres the interior of Cockpit had been dismantled a decade earlier by parliamentary troops, but it had been refitted by Christopher Beeston in 1651 and was to be the venue for Davenant’s two other Commonwealth operas, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and The History of Sir Francis Drake.32 The first clearly relates to Davenant’s letter to

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Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, in 1656, petitioning for the revival of theatre on the grounds of its political utility. The proposal is firmly rooted in the antiHapsburg colonialist policy of the Republic and its revival of anti-Spanish, antiCatholic rhetoric.33 The text presents the reader with ‘the argument of the whole’, that is to present the happy condition of the people of Peru before the Inca civil war and the invasion of the Spanish. And then Davenant leads on to his fanciful ending: And towards the conclusion, it infers the voyages of the English thither, and the amity of the natives towards them, under whose ensigns (encouraged by a prophecy of their chief priest) they hope to be made victorious, and to be freed from the yoke of the Spaniard.

And, indeed, like the harmonious ending of the masque, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru concludes with a dance of Peruvian Indians and English soldiers clad in the red coats of the New Model Army while a proud and sullen Spaniard ‘pays a lowly homage to the English’. The apocryphally benign English colonization is morally justified by the cruelties of the Spanish; one entry has an Indian prince being roasted on a spit by two Spaniards, a scene which was reused by Dryden in 1672 for another ‘atrocity’ play, Amboyna or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants.34 Davenant found his material for Spanish barbarism in the New World in a translation of Fr Bartolome de Las Casas’s Brevissima relacion de la destruccion de las Indias by Milton’s nephew, John Phillips. Phillips’s translation The Tears of the Indians (1656) is dedicated to Cromwell, who Phillips claims has been divinely inspired to lead his armies into battle ‘against the bloody and popish nation of the Spaniard’. Las Casas’s record of Spanish brutalities in the Americas, which later became known to the Spanish as the Black Legend, had been exploited before.35 Richard Hakluyt, for example, in his Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1585) had used it to fuel anti-Spanish feeling and promote English colonial ventures, though it turned out that Davenant’s appropriation of the Black Legend was rather badly timed. When he wrote to Thurloe suggesting an opera depicting Spanish cruelties, Cromwell had launched his Western Design, the conquest of the Spanish West Indies. But the policy was an utter failure: the English failed to take San Domingo in Hispaniola, and their occupation of Jamaica was under constant threat from Spanish guerrillas in Cuba.36 The leaders of the expedition, William Penn and George Venables, deserted their posts and on return to England were imprisoned. Davenant could hardly underwrite such an expedition, and its failure no doubt accounted for his decision to open his theatrical revival with The Siege of Rhodes. As with The Siege of Rhodes we can see in The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru a judicious interweaving of ideological agendas. Interspersed with the narrative of Spanish invasion and colonial brutality is a celebration of primitive Peruvian life and an account of the civil war between the last of the Incas. At the beginning of each entry, the Priest of the Sun narrates the story and describes an ideal way of life before the Inca conquest. The theme is complemented by the songs; the first song, for example, is introduced as ‘in pursuance of the manner of their life, before their Incas brought them to live in cities, and to build forts’. This disruption of native Peruvian society through

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civil war and foreign conquest is one of the opera’s motifs. In the third entry the Priest of the Sun describes the cause of the Inca conflict: the twelfth Inca had chosen not to marry a woman of Inca blood, which prompts the concluding lines of the song: ‘But Kings who move | Within a lowly sphere of private love | Are too domestic for a throne.’ In these lines it is possible to hear an indictment of Charles’s reign, picking up on the view, held particularly after the publication of his letters, that Charles had allowed his feelings for Henrietta Maria to intervene too much in the public sphere. For Davenant’s audience the allusions to the Incas and the spoliation of a society which had been governed by peace and sportive pleasure may have evoked nostalgia for a lost preCivil War world, a time of licensed sport. There is a return to the theme of Cromwellian expansionism in the final entry expressed through the fantasy of a colonial encounter. The Sun Priest has a vision that the Spanish forces will be defeated by the English, freeing the Peruvians who will now see the Spanish enslaved to the English. English colonial domination is reinforced in the final song: We shall no longer fear The Spanish eagle darkly hovering here; For though from farthest climes he hither fled, And spaciously his wings has spread, Yet the English lion now Does still victorious grow, And does delight To make his walks as far As the other o’er did dare To make his flight.

To pass this off as a vision is a useful way of reconciling the triumphal nationalist message with the reality of the Protectorate’s defeated ambition of making inroads into the Catholic Spanish Empire. In his last entertainment written during the Protectorate, Davenant returned to Elizabethan material, that of the history of Sir Francis Drake. Again, the piece was advertised as expressed in instrumental and vocal music and represented by perspective scenes. Indeed, Davenant made use of the same frontispiece as he had for Peru, noting that ‘it was convenient to continue it, our argument being in the same country’. By country, Davenant evidently means the Spanish Indies, for only three out of the five entries are set in Peru. An account of Drake’s voyage to the Indies in 1572–3 had been compiled by Philip Nichols at Drake’s request in order to regain the favour of Elizabeth I. It was published as Sir Francis Drake Revived, but not until 1628 by Drake’s nephew, also Francis Drake, with the injunction to the ‘dull and effeminate age’ to emulate the manly and heroic Drake and follow his ‘noble steps for gold and silver’.37 Davenant appropriates Drake, ‘Dragon Drake’, as a unifying national hero. He is a courageous, disciplined seaman, and respected by the Symerons, people of Moorish origin, who, as with the Peruvians of The Cruelty of the Spanish in Peru, respect the English, but resent the Spanish. Rather than the plunderer that he was, Davenant perpetuates the image of

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an honourable and courteous figure. This image is projected in the fifth entry when the Symerons abandon civility, take hostage members of the Spanish wedding party, and bind the bride to a tree (the scene was not acted, but represented as a relief design). Drake and his captain, Rouse, are quick to represent this as dishonourable as they rescue the bride and reprimand the Symerons. Similarly at the end of the drama, as Drake tells his men to plunder Spanish gold not for its material value, but ‘fame’, the audience is offered a sanitized and idealized view of the pirate’s raids on the Main and his pillaging of Spanish vessels. In adapting such nationalist themes as the apocryphal colonization of Peru and Drake’s plundering voyages to South America, Davenant produced a drama which harked back to Elizabethan foreign policy. This was, of course, a safe enough subject, and non-divisive for a nation trying to recover Elizabethan values. The Cromwellian Protectorate spoke the language of Elizabethan expansionism. It had been a familiar theme of the news journals that if the Stuarts had been Tudors, England would not have suffered the same religious, political, and economic ills and would still have been recognized as a European power. In reviving such Elizabethan material and making a connection with Cromwellian foreign policy, Davenant is contributing to the reformation of an earlier English national identity in a guise which is compatible with the ideology of the Protectorate. In theatrical form The Siege of Rhodes, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, and The History of Sir Francis Drake dramas are the most innovatory works of the Protectorate. Davenant, with Flecknoe, had introduced the term ‘opera’ to signal the departure from pre-Civil War drama, and this is how he referred to The Siege of Rhodes when he sent a copy to Bulstrode Whitelocke. The Siege of Rhodes contains the most narrative, and reveals a remarkable recovery of dramatic form, with the five entries closely resembling acts and the invented love plot between Alphonso and Ianthe complicating the historical action. Later entertainments are more obviously hybrid. The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru contains rope dancing, actors dancing wearing costumes of apes, dancing with castanets, and acrobatic turns by the Priest of the Sun. The use of the term entry to designate change of scene suggests the court masque. It would have been impolitic to use this term so heavily reminiscent of Stuart court culture, yet this is how they were described as they were entered into the Stationers’ Register. All three entertainments displayed considerable versatility when they were revived at the Restoration, the most popular being the enlarged The Siege of Rhodes with its second part, particularly its songs. Pepys records an evening of dancing and singing which included Katharine Coleman, who had played Ianthe in Davenant’s production, singing the part of Solyman reproaching his men for cowardice.38 The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and The History of Sir Francis Drake were repackaged to comprise separate acts of a Restoration miscellany, A Playhouse to be Let, where their very eccentricity of form becomes a self-conscious feature.39 The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru is prefaced by a dialogue between a player and a stage manager or ‘house-keeper’ in which the latter queries the identity of the Priest of the Sun by alluding to him as a ‘human bird’. In the dialogue before Sir Francis Drake the house-keeper comments: ‘Now we shall be in stilo

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recitative. I’m in a trance when I hear vocal music’, to which the player rejoins, ‘thou understand’st recitative music as much as a dray horse does Greek’. Evidently the pieces were still sung, at least in part, but they were re-presented for a broader audience as dramatic curiosities and the political agenda they had had was largely irrelevant. In an essay on heroic plays prefaced to his The Conquest of Granada, John Dryden proclaimed a debt to Davenant’s Protectoral drama, at the same time noting that its form was determined by Puritan restrictions on performance: For heroic plays (in which I have used it without the mixture of prose), the first light we had of them on the English theatre was from the late Sir William Davenant. It being forbidden him in the rebellious times to act tragedies and comedies, because they contained some matter of scandal to those good people who could more easily dispossess their lawful sovereign than endure a wanton jest, he was forced to turn his thoughts another way, and to introduce the examples of moral virtue writ in verse, and performed in recitative music. The original of this music, and of the scenes which adorned his work, he had from the Italian operas; but he heightened his characters (as I may probably imagine) from the example of Corneille and some French poets. In this condition did this part of poetry remain at his Majesty’s return; when, growing bolder, as being now owned by a public authority, he reviewed his Siege of Rhodes, and caused it to be acted as a just drama . . . For myself and others who come after him, we are bound, with all veneration to his memory, to acknowledge what advantage we received from that excellent ground-work which he laid.40

As a collaborator with Davenant, Dryden was well placed both to assess Davenant’s achievements during the Protectorate and, with hindsight, to identify the constraints which produced innovation. The Siege of Rhodes did, indeed, initiate a preoccupation with love and honour as guiding principles in a number of Restoration plays and stimulated other siege plays, those of Memphis, Constantinople, and Babylon in the 1670s. But Dryden’s view of opera formation as necessitated by the prohibition of comedies and tragedies may be overstating the case. In reviving theatrical production in the general style of continental opera, Davenant was not merely circumventing opposition to the performance to drama but realizing an interest expressed much earlier in a musical and scenic stage. In 1639 he had been granted a patent for a playhouse ‘to exercise Action, musical Presentments, Scenes, Dancing and the like’;41 and his subsequent exile in France had given him experience of the fashionable recitative style. Davenant must also have been stimulated by the theories advanced by Richard Flecknoe who was advancing ideas for scenic and musical drama, notably in Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus, published but not performed in 1654. In his preface Flecknoe asserts that, in course of travelling in Italy, he ‘found that music I intended to introduce, exceedingly in vogue’: that is, recitative music, which he claims has immense emotive power through its association with poetry, and that, consequently, he had advocated to the King a theatre in which music was ‘all of one piece with design and plot’. Flecknoe’s final operatic entertainment, The Marriage of Oceanus and Britannia, published in 1659, depicts imperial expansionism under Cromwell as had The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. Britannia

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herself appears in the second ‘part’—unlike Davenant, Flecknoe avoids the masque term of ‘entry’—reflecting on her present happiness in contrast to the recent miseries of the Civil Wars; nevertheless she orders Oceanus to desist from his pursuit of her until she has become ‘the most renowned and opulent | Of all the isles with circling waves | You ever yet surrounded have’. Flecknoe is drawing on imagery of the Republic which had been mobilized earlier by Davenant, yet the work was never performed. There is no explanation of why Flecknoe’s operas were not produced other than lack of resources. Flecknoe’s works demand more elaborate stage effects than do Davenant’s texts, and it is possible that restrictions on the scope of production rather than any official prohibition hindered their staging. Nonetheless, their composition indicates that Davenant was not alone in seeing in the Commonwealth an opportunity to experiment with the semi-operatic practice which was proving so influential in French and Italian courts. The story of Davenant’s drama performed under the Protectorate is not chronologically discrete, but representative of a truly transitional moment in the materials and aesthetics of dramatic production. In the response of practitioners to some of the deeprooted objections to the profanity of plays and performance, Puritanism did make its mark on dramatic practice. The societal role of drama was debated as had not been done before, and these debates impinged on the ethos of Restoration adaptations and the preoccupation with love and honour in heroic plays. In terms of production, the drama of the Commonwealth made a decisive break with the past as theatre moved indoors, men no longer played women, and scenic design and a curtain framed the action. All these features were exhibited later when theatre recovered something of its former privileged position in Restoration drama. Musical theatre, plays of love and honour, and Shakespearian adaptations, all in vogue at the Restoration, were each and all shaped by the innovations of the 1650s. Rather than simply dismiss the English Revolution as a period inimical to drama, the stress should fall on theatrical resistance, accommodation, and innovation: achievements whose influence continued to be felt long after the return of the King.

NOTES 1. Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, 3–81. 2. Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances, i. 26–7; also available online at . 3. Ibid. 1027. 4. Ibid. 1070–2. 5. Mercurius anti-pragmaticus, 28 October–4 November 1647. 6. Rowe, Tragi-Commedia Being a Brief Relation of the Strange and Wonderfull Hand of God. 7. The Kingdom’s Weekly Intelligencer, 9 January–16 January 1649, 1210–11. 8. Perfect Occurrences, 29 December 1648–5 January 1649. See Worden, The Rump Parliament, 15, 23–6.

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

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See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, i. 297. Mercurius Democritus, 1–8 June 1653, 463. Ibid. 22–9 June 1653, 467. Middlesex County Records, ed. J. C. Jeaffreson, 3 vols. (1887; repr. 1972), iii. 279. See Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 18–21, 26–29. See also Loxley, ‘Dramatis Personae’. For a detailed discussion of the pamphlet plays, see Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War, 19–59. The Disease of the House or The State Mountebank Administering Physic to a Sick Parliament, 1649. See Mercurius Democritus, 2–9 March 1653. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 10–30. See Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell, 135–48. See Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 153–7. Portugal was one of the first of the European powers to recognize the Protectorate and a treaty between the two nations was signed in July 1654. See Jacob and Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience’. The piece was published anonymously in 1653, but dated 1654. The document which was brought to Samuel Hartlib by John Pell, Professor of Mathematics in Breda, does not survive, but a manuscript synopsis of the tract, probably in Davenant’s hand, that accompanied the printed tract does survive. Firth, ‘Sir William Davenant and the Revival of Drama during the Protectorate’, 103–20. Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1655–6, 396. See Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb, and Southern, Changeable Scenery. 114. See Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant, 116–20. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 449. Knolles, The General History of the Turks, 580–93. See Matar, Islam in Britain, 50–63. All references to Davenant’s entertainments of the 1650s except The First Day’s Entertainment are from Clare (ed.), Drama of the English Republic. See Milton, ‘ “Vailing his Crown”: Royalist Criticism of Charles I’s Kingship’. The Letters of Henrietta Maria, ed. Green, 112–13. See Clare (ed.), Drama of the English Republic, appendix 2. Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb. See Taylor, The Western Design. Winn, John Dryden and his World, 219. Maltby, The Black Legend in England. For details of the failed venture see Howat, Stuart and Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 86–90. ‘Sir Francis Drake Revived’, 245–326. Diary of Samuel Pepys, vi. 284. ‘A Playhouse to be Let’, in Works. ‘Of Heroic Plays: an Essay’, prefixed to The Conquest of Granada (1672) in John Dryden ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’, i. 157–8. Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant, 75.

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WORKS CITED Calendar of State Papers Domestic, 1655–6, ed. Mary Anne E. Green. London, 1882. Clare, Janet. Drama of the English Republic, 1649–1660. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Davenant, William. The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House. London, 1656. ——. Works. London, 1673. Dryden, John. ‘Of Heroic Plays: An Essay’, Prefixed to The Conquest of Granada (1672), in John Dryden ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’ and Other Critical Essays, ed. George Watson. 2 vols. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1962. Edmond, Mary. Rare Sir William Davenant. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987. Firth, C. H. ‘Sir William Davenant and the Revival of Drama during the Protectorate’. English Historical Review 18 (1903), 103–20. —— and R. S. Rait (eds.). Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum. 3 vols. London: Stationery Office, 1911. Flecknoe, Richard. Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus. London, 1654. ——. The Marriage of Oceanus and Britannia. London, 1659. Henrietta Maria, Queen. The Letters of Henrietta Maria, ed. M. A. E. Green. London, 1857. Hotson, Leslie. The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage. New York: Russell & Russell, 1962. Howat, G. M. D. Stuart and Cromwellian Foreign Policy. London: A. & C. Black, 1974. Jacob, James R., and Timothy Raylor. ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and “A Proposition for Advancement of Morality” by Sir William Davenant’. Seventeenth Century 6.2 (1991), 205–50. Knolles, Richard. The General History of the Turks. 4th edn. London, 1631. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Loxley, James. ‘Dramatis personae: Royalism, Theatre and the Political Ontology of the Person in Post-Regicide Writing’, in Jason McElligot and David L. Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 149–70. McElligot, Jason, and David L. Smith (eds.). Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Maltby, William S. The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1971. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Milton, Anthony. ‘ “Vailing his Crown”: Royalist Criticism of Charles I’s Kingship in the 1650s’, in McElligott and Smith (eds.), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, 88–105. Nichols, Philip. ‘Sir Francis Drake Revived’, in Documents Concerning English Voyages to the Spanish Main 1569–1580, ed. I. A. Wright. London: Hakluyt Society, 1932. Orrell, John. The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham. 11 vols. London: Bell, 1970–82.

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Rowe, John. Tragi-Commedia Being a Brief Relation of the Strange and Wonderfull Hand of God discovered at Witney . . . Together with what was Preached in Three Sermons on that Occasion. London, 1653. Sherwood, Roy. The Court of Oliver Cromwell. London: Willington Press, 1989. Southern, Richard. Changeable Scenery: Its Origin and Development in the British Theatre. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. Taylor, S. A. G. The Western Design: An Account of Cromwell’s Expedition to the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica and the Jamaica Historical Society, 1965. Whitelocke, Bulstrode. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and his World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. Wiseman, Susan. Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Worden, Blair. The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974.

CHAPTER

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PRINTED RECIPE BOOKS IN MEDICAL, POLITICAL, AND SCIENTIFIC CONTEXTS ....................................................................................................... ELIZABETH SPILLER

The Protectorate was a time of political uncertainty and transition, a period that looked back as much as it looked ahead. This was true in politics and religion, in the Painted Chamber of Westminster and the pews of St Paul’s. It was also true in the kitchen and stillroom. Works such as Eikon Basilike (1649), Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), and Descartes’s Passions of the Soul (trans. 1650) often seem to provide the relevant keynote that establishes the sense of the tumult and urgency that will come to define this period. Yet, while English printers were issuing these and other more ephemeral religious and political tracts, they also began printing large numbers of recipe books. These recipe books offer us access to the medical and culinary culture of the period and to experiences of the body as a site of taste and physical sensation. At an intellectual level, these texts align themselves with developments in science and philosophy, most notably the surge of interest in iatrochemical medicine, Paracelsian vitalism, and experimental science that dominates the intellectual culture of the 1640s and 1650s. They also reflect shifting economic and legal regulations within London guilds and companies. In both their form and content, printed recipe books stand at the intersection of artisanal and scientific culture in ways that reflect a distinctively early modern understanding of the embodied nature of human experience and knowledge. At the same time, recipe books should not be understood as simply a domestic retreat from larger civic battlefields: as Diane Purkiss points out, these recipe books are as much a ‘part of the political story of these years’ as are parliamentary debates and may thus tell us as much about the Protectorate as they do about the kitchen.1 The recipe books published during the Protectorate marked a radical break with the previous three decades. The ‘delights’ and ‘commodious conceits’ of John Dawson, John Partridge, and Hugh Plat—those often exuberant recipe books that emerged out

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of the tradition of books of secrets and delighted in combining art and nature, food and physic, into elaborate sugar works and other conceits—went in and out of fashion by the early seventeenth century.2 John Murrell’s New Booke of Cookerie (1615) arguably points less toward new culinary directions than it marks the very end of this earlier tradition: because of the tacit censorship imposed with the publication of an official London medical dispensatory, the Pharmacopoea Londinensis (1618), almost no new and few reissued recipe books are published in England for almost a generation. In 1653, however, the printer Charles Adams imported the first and perhaps most famous of all French cookbooks into England: François Pierre de la Varenne’s landmark Le Cuisinier françois (1651). The publication of Le Cuisinier françois marks what Sarah Peterson has characterized as ‘one of the most dramatic and stubbornly influential changes in the history of food’; for many, France’s ‘enduring authority in food dates from this historic moment’.3 La Varenne’s cookbook articulated a new ‘modern’ form of cooking, based on sauce reductions that were designed to concentrate and enhance, rather than conceal or transform, the natural taste and appearance of foods, a shift away from saffron and the other spices that had comprised the medieval alchemy of the table, and a new embrace of ingredients like asparagus and butter. La Varenne’s work was also connected to a professionalization of culinary practices that depended on ‘the specialist cook’.4 For La Varenne, this specialist was a male chef and Le Cuisinier françois was thus written for male readers, ‘not onely for Noblemen and Gentlemen, but also even to the Husbandman or Labouring man’.5 The new culinary model articulated by La Varenne was significant, but its impact was not immediately felt in English kitchens or on bookshelves. From 1652 to 1660, English booksellers published an unprecedented number of recipe books, among which the translation of The French Cook stands out as an anomaly rather than as a new standard. These works included a number of popular English recipe books that integrated ‘kitchen-physic’, distillation, and cookery such as Elizabeth Talbot Grey, Countess of Kent’s Rare and Select Secrets (1653, with at least seven further editions before 1660); the anonymous A Ladies Companion (1653/4); Patrick, Lord Ruthven’s The Ladies Cabinet Enlarged and Opened (1654; a revised version of a 1639 recipe book); and W.M.’s The Queens Closet Opened (1655), which appeared in more than a dozen subsequent editions and purported to contain recipes ‘presented to the Queen’ Henrietta Maria, ‘Transcribed from the true Copies of her Majesties own Receipt Books’.6 More focused on physic and modelled in the traditions of Greek antidotaria and Latin receptaria are a group of medical and chemical remedy books that included Leonard Sowerby’s Ladies Dispensatory (1651); A.M.’s A Rich Closet of Physical Secrets (1652), a composite volume of remedies for plague, smallpox, and childbearing ailments; Nicholaas Fontanus’ The Womans Doctour (1652), a gynaecological tract that also included ‘Choice and Experimentall’ remedies;7 and Aletheia Talbot Howard, Countess of Arundel’s Natura exenterata (1655). In a marked shift from Elizabethan and early Stuart publishing practices, the 1650s also see the appearance of several discrete volumes of culinary recipes, such as Joseph Cooper’s The Art of Cookery (1654), Robert May’s The Accomplist Cook (1660), and Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus

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(1658), a book of recipes and ‘experiments in cookery’, purportedly by the late Theodore de Mayerne, royal physician and primary architect of the Pharmacopoea Londinensis.8 The features that distinguish these English recipe books from those of La Varenne and other continental counterparts arise out of an interrelated set of issues that centre on the English Civil War. These include the ending of legal restrictions on the publication of remedies and recipes that had been in place since 1618; the volatile and politically charged enthusiasm for Paracelsian medicine in the 1640s and 1650s, and the reassessment of domesticity caused by the breakdown of patriarchy as a political model. These concerns are not truly separable from one another. Restrictions on the printing of remedy books, for instance, were as much about philosophical resistance to the publication of secrets and Galenic opposition to the concept of a ‘universal cure’ as they were about establishing an economical monopoly for the Society of Apothecaries. Likewise, Culpeper’s London Dispensatory arguably leads both to the apocalyptic and politically radical Paracelsianism of Samuel Hartlib’s Chymical, Medicinal and Chyrurgical Addresses (1655) and to Walter Montagu’s elegiac lament for a disappeared monarchy in The Queens Closet Opened (1655). The remainder of this chapter will thus provide an account of the political, scientific, and philosophical contexts in which English recipe books were printed and read during the Protectorate. The most significant difference separating La Varenne’s French Cook from contemporaneous English recipe books is that, as a group, the English volumes present themselves as ‘women’s recipe books’. They were attributed to and published under the names of women. The first recipe book directly attributed to a female author, A Choice Manual, for instance, gives its readers recipes ‘collected and practiced by the Right and Honorable, the Countesse of Kent, late deceased’.9 The printer Gabriel Bedell published Natura exenterata under a pseudonym, but included a portrait of Aletheia Talbot as a frontispiece and elsewhere identifies and advertises this volume as ‘The Countess of Arundells Experiments’.10 These books contain named recipes, ‘approved’ or ‘experienced’ by women. A Ladies Companion promises its readers recipes ‘By persons of quality whose names are mentioned’: almost 80 per cent of the recipes are attributed, all of them to women.11 Sir Kenelm Digby’s Choice and Experimented recipes (1668) contains only one recipe approved by a woman (‘with this a great Lady of quality cured her self ’), but his Closet (1669) includes a number of recipes directly attributed to or approved by women.12 In contrast to La Varenne’s volume, English recipe books of this period likewise address women as readers and would-be practitioners. Joseph Cooper’s The Art of Cookery, for instance, includes a letter to the reader which promises, ‘Ladies, forgive my confidence if I tell you, that I know this piece will prove your favourite.’13 Women are also invoked as a primary audience in the medical dispensatories. Reacting against the professionalization advocated by the Royal College of Physicians and the Society of Apothecaries, Nicholas Culpeper thus presents his unauthorized 1649 translation of the Pharmacopoea Londinensis to the ‘kind Gentlewomen’ who ‘freely bestow your pains brains and cost, to your poor wounded and diseased neighbours’.14 The long popular

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Anatomie of Mans Body (1577) had started out as a vernacular treatise of pre-Vesalian anatomy attributed to the Tudor barber-surgeon Thomas Vicary but gradually assimilated other texts into it, including a 100-page pharmacopoeia of recipes for kitchen physic.15 In 1651, when Thomas Faucet published the tenth edition of this now expanded work, he changed the title to The Surgions directorie (1651) and for the first time invoked women as his primary audience. Recalling for readers the physical dangers of the war years, The Surgions directorie was now offered ‘To all the vertuous Ladyes and Gentlewomen, of this Common-wealth of England, whose Goodnesse surpassing greatnesse, and desires to Exercise themselves (as nursing Mothers) in the Art of Medicine and Surgery’.16 La Varenne’s French Cook assumes a male chef and male reader because it is concerned with defining cooking as a professional activity within the public sphere. English recipe books, by contrast, address women and articulate the mixed domestic practices of ‘kitchen physic’.17 This divergence should not be taken primarily as a marker of some kind of proto-feminist shift—or even in any simple way as an anticipation of the many post-Restoration cookbooks, beginning with Hannah Woolley’s The Ladies Directory (1661), that were published by women and perhaps linked to rising literacy rates among women.18 Rather, the recipe books of the Protectorate invoke gender and domesticity in ways that look back, rather than forward. They invoke domesticity not as a withdrawal from the public sphere but rather as a way to insist upon the integrity of the civic to the domestic. Understanding this depends on recognizing why these texts were published when they were. Why did these particular recipe books come off the presses ‘in these Times’, as Vicary’s publisher put it? The recipe books that were printed in the 1650s include modest culinary and technical innovations—as we will see, these mostly derived from Paracelsian medical practices that encouraged a shift toward standardized measurement and sharper category distinctions between food and physic. In most respects, though, texts like Rare and Select Secrets and The Queens Closet Opened are nostalgic, conservative, and arguably almost immediately outmoded. (Saffron, for instance, may disappear from the French sources, but in England, it persists and indeed appears more often in post-1650 publications than it does in pre-1650 ones.) Partly, this is a matter of dating: most of the recipe books printed in the 1650s were compiled long before the war. Yet, these texts are not oldfashioned because they were printed belatedly (and usually posthumously); rather, they were printed precisely because they were old-fashioned. English recipe books of the 1650s nostalgically evoke the Stuart court and its aristocracy as an ideal of sustenance and nurture. In this context, they invoke women as authors and readers as a way of asserting a domesticity that they understood to be inseparable from the patriarchal political structure of that past. These recipe books read as a Who’s Who of the royal court and aristocracy. Readers who wanted to imagine how the King ate could consult both his cook and his physician: The Art of Cookery advertised itself as a collection of ‘rare and unpublished’ recipes from Joseph Cooper, ‘chief Cook to the Late King’, while Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus collected ‘Excellent & Approved’ recipes from Theodore de Mayerne, ‘Physician to the Late K. Charles’.19 The

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Queen’s habits were likewise available in the recipe collection of her former chancellor, Sir Kenelm Digby. Published after his death (d. 1665), his Closet evoked the daily life of Henrietta Maria in dishes that were humble and ordinary rather than ceremonial (‘Portugal Broth as it was made for the Queen’, ‘The Queens ordinary Bouillon de santé in a morning’).20 These recipes may seem to point beyond the culinary boundaries of England, but Digby’s royal broths and stews are typical rather than exotic, making Henrietta Maria’s foreignness into little more than a matter of a hen, cooked with thyme, parsley, spearmint, and onion. Other of Digby’s recipes tacitly attribute to the Queen the tastes and robust digestion that many Englishmen understood to be a marker of their national identity and physical character: Digby identifies the Queen as a native meat-eater, rather than as a weak-stomached foreigner, when he recommends her hochpot of mutton stew as ‘exceeding good of fresh Beef also, for those whose Stomacks can digest it’.21 At the centre of this domestication of Queen Henrietta’s court—and the opening up of its chemical and medicinal secrets to Englishwomen—is The Queens Closet Opened (Figure 27.1) First published in 1655, with at least thirteen further editions before the end of the century, The Queens Closet contained sections on household distillation and medicinal recipes and was supplemented by a volume of culinary recipes that was often bound with it. The Queens Closet was arguably the most popular recipe book of the century.22 The volume was published under the initials W.M., probably by Walter Montagu (1603–77), a Catholic writer who was long in Henrietta Maria’s service. As both the Queen’s private secretary and probable spy, Montagu was, as Jayne Archer puts it, both a ‘keeper and discoverer of secrets’.23 The Queens Closet opens its domestic secrets to readers and does so in a way that comments both on contemporary politics and on the relationship between the private world of the home and the public space of the state. Recasting a long tradition arising out of sixteenth-century printed books of secrets, The Queens Closet promised readers that it ‘opened Incomparable Secrets in Physick, Chirurgery, Preserving, Candying, and Cookery’.24 In presenting its recipes in those terms, The Queens Closet stands as a symbolic refutation of one of the most sensational and politically decisive publications of the 1640s: The Kings Cabinet Opened (1645).25 When King Charles’s army was defeated at the Battle of Naseby on 14 June 1645, the parliamentarian forces captured a wagon that contained Charles’s secret correspondence. Some of the Naseby letters were apparently domestic matters between the King and Queen, but others contained political correspondence that revealed the Queen’s plans to bring foreign troops and English Catholics into the war on her husband’s behalf. Deciphered, edited by a special parliamentary committee, and rushed into print three weeks later, The Kings Cabinet opened the most damaging of these letters to the public. At the heart of this scandal was not so much the King’s military plans, but the Queen’s ongoing involvement and interference in these matters of state.26 The domestic letters from this cache of documents were not published, but the political ones were and, as Michelle White notes, readers saw in Charles and Henrietta Maria ‘a house in patriarchal disorder’.27

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F I G U R E 2 7 . 1 Title page and frontispiece portrait of Henrietta Maria, The Queens Closet Opened (1656 edition) *AC85.A191.Zz656m. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

The Queens Closet tries to restore order to that house. In the introductory letter to the reader, W.M. begins by addressing the question of the possible propriety of disclosing royal secrets. These secrets belonged to the many ‘Persons of Honor and Quality’ who first gave them to the Queen, who in turn kept them in her book and closet on their behalf. W.M. assures his readers that, as the Queen’s servant, he would never have ‘made publick’ the secrets that were in his keeping were it not for the fact that he had learned that unauthorized and false copies of these recipes were in circulation.28 In rightly publishing these secrets, W.M. offers to restore the Queen’s secrets back to those who had given them to her: I should not have thought it lesse then Sacriledge, had not the lock been first pickt, to have opened the Closet of my distressed Soveraigne Mistresse without her Royall assent; but since that unfortunate miscarriage, I thought this publication to stand upon no ordinary tearms of honour, as it might continue my Soveraign Ladies remembrance in the brests and loves of those persons of honour and quality, that presented most of these rare receipts to her.29

In the tradition that arose out of medieval pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, domestic ‘secrets’ (these included distillation, medical physic, and various of the domestic arts that comprise the different sections of these recipe books) had never

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been entirely separate from political ones. The larger claim of Aristotle’s supposed letters to Alexander had been that art was a secret key which man could use to master nature and achieve political sovereignty over others. The Secretum secretorum and its descendants assumed, as William Eamon notes, that ‘statecraft depends upon two kinds of knowledge, public and secret’.30 Rereading The Kings Cabinet back through this longer intellectual tradition of the books of secrets, The Queens Closet and the other aristocratic recipe books of the 1650s reconfigure this division between the public and the secret. Suggesting that the King had the right to keep his own political counsel in ways that The Kings Cabinet had denied, recipe books reveal their domestic secrets to the public as a political act that was intended to sustain and nourish the people of England. Thomas Faucet had addressed the Surgions directorie to ladies and gentlewomen who would be ‘as nursing Mothers’ to the inhabitants of what he suggested was an ailing and perhaps wounded English commonwealth.31 This topos by which printed recipe books were themselves medicines, textual physic for the nation, is even more pronounced in The Queens Closet. During times of plague, the royal publishers under Elizabeth, James, and Charles had often issued official remedies against the plague: it is therefore not an accident that The Queens Closet thus includes paired recipes, ‘The Kings Medicine for the Plague’ and ‘A Medicine for the Plague that the Lord Mayor had from the Queen’.32 In returning to England in the pages of The Queens Closet in ‘the apparently innocuous guise of housewife’, Henrietta Maria retains what Archer identifies as ‘arguably one of her most important functions as queen, namely the production and circulation of secrets of nature, by which the sick can be healed, the impoverished nourished, and the charitable work of the nobility and gentry enabled’.33 Such evocations of Henrietta Maria and other members of her household and court are not simply memorials to the past. Early modern society recognized that, as a political philosophy, patriarchalism conceived of the power of the sovereign over his subjects in the terms provided by the natural model of the father’s dominion over his family. When James had been on the throne, he thus had understood himself, following the terms of Isaiah 49: 23 (‘And kings shall be thy nursing fathers, and their queens thy nursing mothers’), as a ‘nourish’ father to his subjects. The recipe books of the 1650s—filled with the recipes and medicines of the late King’s Queen, his cook and physician, and the most prominent members of his court—are published in a void created by the lack of this patriarchal father who had once figured at the centre of a system both political and domestic. Faucet’s depiction of England’s aristocratic women as ‘nursing mothers’ certainly resonates in this lack. As Laura Lunger Knoppers argues, The Queens Closet ‘links participation in domestic practices with legitimacy and authority in the state’.34 Keeping a good table at home and charitably extending physic to needy and ailing neighbours were essential to the good home; they may also have been essential to a good state. Sustenance and physic, as these recipe books suggested and many contemporary readers seem to have agreed, were as needed outside the home for the body politic as they were within in it for the body physical.

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English printed recipe books of this period were with a few notable exceptions royalist in their orientation. From the perspective of print culture, though, that these books were published at all is an ironic consequence of the breakdown in royal authority created by the war. These recipe books collectively lament the loss of the Caroline court, but had the King still been on the throne it is unlikely that they would have been published. However innocuous their instructions on how to ‘preserve Oranges the French way’, recipe books of this period provide one confirmation of Lois Potter’s argument that ‘from 1640–1660 the source of the most deliberately and consciously subversive publications was the royalist party’.35 In this context, it is thus useful to understand the particular relationship that these recipe books had to the larger history of English printing. Before 1640, English printing was regulated through the Star Chamber and High Commission, and the Stationers’ Company was ‘recognized as an important element in the state’.36 The Star Chamber and High Commission were both abolished in 1641. The English publishing industry was chaotic up to 1649, when licensing control was returned to Parliament and remained largely effective to the end of the Commonwealth.37 The loosening of press restrictions, while temporary, had some curious effects. Whether overtly in The Kings Cabinet or in sensationalist newsbooks or more opaquely in the crypto-royalist romances that were modelled on John Barclay’s Argenis (1621), the new openness in printing practices seemed paradoxically to create a demand for intrigue, mystery, and revelation—a print culture in which, as Potter explains, ‘secrecy is published’.38 Manuscript recipe collections circulated long before the printing of Bartolomeo Sacchi [Platina’s] De honesta voluptate et valetudine (Rome, c.1470), and they thrived long after the invention of printing.39 Until at least 1660, many of the most important seventeenth-century collections of recipes circulated in manuscript, products of what Harold Love calls ‘scribal publication’. Surveying ninety-six seventeenth-century manuscript recipe collections signed or owned by women, Jennifer Stine reports that almost three-quarters of these date after 1650.40 The persistence of manuscript recipe collections—stillroom books kept over multiple generations, copied out as gifts, borrowed and shared among correspondents—provides one example of the continued and separate vitality of manuscript culture during the hand press period. In his Chymical, Medicinal and Chyrurgical Addresses (1655), Samuel Hartlib published an anonymous appeal, written by Robert Boyle, for the ‘free and generous communication of Secrets and Receipts in Physick’, but Boyle in fact only communicated his remedies in manuscript form and he was not unique in this regard.41 Printed recipe books—even when they contained the same recipes that also appeared in manuscripts, as they often did—were understood to be ontologically distinct from their manuscript counterparts. Printed recipe collections are a distinctive invention of print culture: that is, these books are not simply a product of remediation—manuscript recipe books that happen to have made it into print. Potter’s sense that this was a print culture defined by the ‘publishing of secrecy’ points to a key marker of the difference between manuscript and printed recipe collections. Aletheia Talbot Howard’s Natura exenterata promises its readers ‘choice secrets digested into receipts’, along with

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‘Many Rare, hitherto un-imparted Inventions’.42 Some of the nearly 2,000 recipes in this printed volume derived from a 1606 manuscript collection of 397 recipes (Wellcome MS 213) owned by her mother-in-law, Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel, and later given to Talbot.43 In contrast to the printed volume, the manuscript only once describes its recipes as either a ‘secret’ or ‘treasure’.44 Recipes in manuscripts collections were not understood to be ‘secret’; paradoxically, it was only being printed that made them so. This understanding that printed recipe books were published secrets—secret not despite but because of being published—is a legacy of their intellectual and generic affiliations with late medieval books of secrets. Aristotle had made teleological distinctions between nature and art and, in doing so, had separated knowledge from both practice and artifice. The pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum, as I have suggested, instead promised readers a ‘secret’ knowledge by which art could master nature. This argument aligned with both the technological possibilities and philosophical assumptions of early print culture. Printing was itself the product of a new attention to the mechanical arts: among the most popular products of the sixteenth-century presses were handbooks, recipe books, and other manuals devoted to mechanical and artisanal traditions. These texts, which put into print craft and guild practices that were once transmitted orally, were dedicated to the assumption that art provided a secret way to master nature. Deviating from Aristotelian knowledge categories, they assumed that making something was a way of knowing it and, as a corollary, tended to understand this knowledge as embodied.45 Perhaps one of the most sought-after ‘secrets’ within this tradition was the alchemical search for the universal cure. Paracelsian medicine was, as Pamela Smith makes clear, a culturally powerful instance of the embodied forms of knowledge associated with maker’s knowledge traditions. In Paracelsus’ ‘artisanal epistemology’, art was not simply a source of knowledge but a form of physic, the cure that might redeem man in the fallen world: ‘the art of the craftsman “reformed” nature by creating noble objects from the dross of fallen nature’.46 For Paracelsus, diseases were external in origin, and cures were thus specific to the disease rather than individual to the patient. This assumption prompted ‘chymical’ philosophers and physicians—in England this tradition ranged from Theodore de Mayerne and Walter Raleigh to Samuel Hartlib, Kenelm Digby, Aletheia Talbot, and Robert Boyle, all of whom were associated with the printed recipes books of the seventeenth century—to experiment with the purification of matter. Such experiments sought to find not just remedies for particular diseases but a universal cure that would put an end to disease. In his Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses, Samuel Hartlib voices the apocalyptic ends of this search: ‘we shall have an universal Medicine, which shall not onely recover the sick and keep them well, but also take away death, and for ever swallow it up . . . in these times shall be manifest whatsoever hath been hidden hitherto, and even those things which kept most secret’.47 Alchemists were looking for the universal cure, but along the way they helped invent the recipe in its modern form. Iatrochemistry altered both the structure and content

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of the recipe, encouraging the shift to a more set form and promoting more precise measurements. Paracelsians believed in remedies. Unlike the therapies of the Galenic dietary, the recipes of the chemical remedy book increasingly had a set form. Galenists typically took the Hippocratic position that ‘no measure, neither number nor weight, by reference to which knowledge can be made exact, can be found except bodily feeling’.48 Paracelsians, by contrast, were committed to measure, number, and weight. Nicholas Culpeper, for instance, complains that ‘handfuls’ and other measurements of the body are a ‘foolish and incertain way of measuration’ for ‘what a handfull is, is known to all, but how much it is, is known to none, but is as different as mens hands are in bigness or their fingers in length’.49 As Allen Debus notes, Paracelsians ‘went to great pains to determine the correct dosage with their medicines’.50 Individual chemical remedies begin appearing in English remedy books as early as the 1580s, but these larger tendencies became increasingly integral to both medical and culinary recipe books over the course of the seventeenth century. While Paracelsianism was an impetus to the form of the individual recipe, it was arguably a deterrent to the development of the recipe book as a whole. The alchemical yearning for a universal remedy became a desire for a set of standardized remedies, a liber antidotarius. In England, acceptance of Paracelsian attitudes regarding remedies essentially occurred by royal mandate when James supported the publication of a national dispensatory, the Pharmacopoea Londinensis (1618). The Pharmacopoea Londinensis included Galenic and herbal remedies, but, having been assembled largely through the efforts of Theodore de Mayerne and Thomas Atkins, both Paracelsians, it also included an important section on chemical remedies. The volume also stressed both precise measurements and fixed recipe forms. On 16 April 1618, King James issued a royal proclamation that decreed that no apothecary could ‘compound or make any medicine or medicinal receipt, or prescription, or distill any oyle, or waters, or other extractions, that are or shall bee in the said Pharmacopoea Londinensis mentioned and named after the wayes or meanes prescribed or directed, by any other bookes or dispensatories whatsoever, but after the onely manner and forme, that is or shall be directed, prescribed and set downe by the sayd booke, and according to the weights and measures, that are or shall bee therein limited, and not otherwise’.51 With this proclamation, James effectively established a trade monopoly, on behalf of the Society of Apothecaries, on compounding and dispensing of chemical remedies. At the same time, James’s proclamation also had the effect of creating a print monopoly on the publishing of recipe books. This textual monopoly was clearly articulated in the royal proclamation: ‘We [are] therefore desirous in all things to provide for the common good of Our Subjects, and intending to settle and establish the generall use of the said booke in this Realme of England.’52 This royal monopoly, which successfully suppressed the printing of recipe books in England for nearly forty years, was one of the casualties of the Civil War. Once printing regulation shifted from the Star Chamber to Parliament, the first recipe book to break this monopoly was the radical Nicholas Culpeper’s (often tendentious) 1649 translation of the Pharmacopoea Londinensis into English. Culpeper

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clearly understood his translation to be an act of war against the royalists. He passionately argues that of state monopolies, the monopoly of physic is the most pernicious. In translating the College’s Latin remedies into English, Culpeper suggests that he is fighting the good fight, doing battle for a soon to be achieved ‘liberty of the subject’.53 In publishing the ‘secrets’ of the Royal College of Physicians and Society of Apothecaries, Culpeper’s Physicall Directory followed in the political model set by The Kings Cabinet, but he also arguably established the terms for the reclamation and reintegration of the parliamentarians’ political secrets into the domestic science of the home. After Culpeper, the breaking of this print monopoly in the 1650s led to the aristocratic recipe books that covertly reclaimed physical and domestic secrets for the royalists throughout the 1650s. As I have suggested, the printed recipe books of the Protectorate draw from artisanal, medical, and scientific culture in ways that arise out of a specifically early modern understanding of the embodied nature of human experience and knowledge. These qualities are also apparent in the recipes within the volumes themselves. The recipes that appear in print throughout the 1650s are often nostalgic and at other times anticipatory of developments that lead to both modern cooking and modern chemistry; they are an intellectually and culturally transitional form. These recipes are sometimes hard to read in part because they point to a physical and sensory reality that extends beyond the page. Early modern recipes—cooking foods, distilling spirits and waters, and concocting medicines—are crucially concerned with enacting different transformations of matter. Yet, the material reality of those transformations is often the most elusive component of these texts. Appelbaum thus notes that early modern recipes can be frustrating because they are engaged in ‘reducing an abundance of practical operations and sensory experiences to a minimally adequate set of instructions’.54 Albala argues that cooking itself must become a research methodology: we need to ‘recreate techne itself ’ in order to achieve a ‘full appreciation of the embodied experience of our forebears’.55 It may be that the only way to read a cookbook is to bring it into the kitchen. I would thus like to turn to three recipes that may, in a representative way, illuminate some of these practical operations. My goal here is to open up some of the physical and sensory experiences that have been distilled into the pages of these printed recipe books. The first recipe, taken from the opening section on medical and physical recipes in The Queens Closet Opened (1655), is a syrup to ‘comfort the Heart and Spirits and to suppress melancholy’; the second, also from The Queens Closet, is a distilled ‘Water of Thyme for the Passion of the Heart’; and the third a recipe for ‘The Queen Mothers Pressis’, a meat broth of ‘great yet temperate nourishment’ from Sir Kenelm Digby’s Closet.56 I have chosen these three recipes—a medicinal syrup, a distilled water, and a cooked broth—because they represent the three major categories of recipes contained within these volumes, while also illustrating shared assumptions that move across them. ‘To comfort the Heat and Spirits, and to suppress Melancholy’, The Queens Closet recommends a syrup. This remedy begins with the juices of the herbs borage and

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bugloss, pippins or the red-skinned, red-centred Queen Apple, and balm, clarified. Recommended by Pliny and Dioscorides, borage and bugloss were traditional herbal remedies used to correct the cold, dry state of the melancholic because they are hot and moist in the first degree. As Gerard’s Herball (1633) explained, borage and bugloss will ‘exhilerate and make the mind glad’ and ‘comfort and strengthen the heart’.57 Some seventeenth-century writers began to question their efficacy, but they are at the heart of several of the other remedies for melancholy in The Queens Closet.58 To these traditional native ingredients, this recipe adds a more exotic one: powered red ‘Cochenel’. Cochineal was first brought back from the Aztec markets in 1519 and remained an expensive and sought-after commodity throughout the seventeenth century.59 Its presence here stands in suggestive counterpoint to the arguably now outdated heartstrengthening saffron that is added at the end of the recipe. Both powders would add a symbolically powerful golden, red colouring to this syrup, but their combination is suggestive of the ways in these transitional recipes layer different knowledges, practices, and beliefs. Once the initial ingredients have been clarified, infused, and strained, the remaining liquid is then boiled with four pounds of sugar to render it into a syrup. In this process, the sugar acts as a vehicle for the herbal ingredients. Most contemporary syrup recipes put the ratio of sugar at about one and a quarter pounds of loaf-sugar to one pint of liquid. Although we are familiar with the chemical process by which this happens, early modern recipes that adhered to Galenic principles understood sugar as a medicinally subtle substance. Both hot and moist, sugar’s use in remedies was closely linked to its powers both to preserve the virtue of the medicine and restore the body of the patient itself.60 To this syrup are then added diamargaritum frigidum and diambra, so that this remedy combines the two forms of compound remedy which Robert Burton recommends for melancholy, the herbal syrup and the hot and cold aromatical compound.61 In the final step, ‘if there be cause’ saffron can be added to ‘make it more cordial’ and so strengthen the weak heart of the melancholic. The herbal ingredients here are hot and moist. The use of the sugar-based syrup and the aromatic compounds, as vehicles for the medicine, would have made it possible to use the senses of both taste and smell to reheat and remoisten the patient’s body. This recipe provides a typical example of dominant Galenic assumptions about the concoction, digestion, and transformation of the four elements within the physical body. Unlike culinary recipes which were designed to provide sustenance that the body could convert entirely into its own matter, this medical recipe attempts to transform the physical matter of the patient into its own qualities, transforming cold and dry matter back toward hot and moist. The second remedy, this one ‘for the Passion of the Heart’, is for a water that distils thyme, together with spicy galingale, the oil calamus aromaticus, cloves, mace, ginger, and grains of Paradise, in white wine and sack. Distillation is also involved in the transformation of matter in connection with the body, but along quite different lines. It depends on the chemical principle that different substances vaporize at different temperatures, making it possible, through repeated heating and cooling, to isolate and extract one substance from a more complex compound. For medieval alchemists,

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distillation of metals provided a way to eliminate grosser forms of matter, transmuting substances into ‘a purified and mystical form that might prolong life’.62 The new ‘chymical’ experiments of seventeenth-century corpuscular natural philosophy also relied on distillation to separate the matter from the essence of substances, imposing order on otherwise ‘mingled’ and disordered atoms.63 ‘Domestic distillation’ of the kind found in printed recipe books differed from both alchemy and chymistry, but the firm boundaries that we might expect between the kitchen and the laboratory did not yet exist. Nearly identical recipes for various waters appear in both cookery books and chemical texts. At a philosophical level, the distillation of ‘waters’ made it possible to separate the gross from the subtle, the corruptible from the incorruptible, and the material from the immaterial.64 In this ‘water’, the central ingredient, thyme, is hot to the second degree; it was specific for phlegm, sores, jaundice, and liver ailments. Thyme was often used as a simple or in a syrup. Distilling it, however, would have separated out its subtle and powerful virtues, the unchanging essence, from the dross matter of its physical form. What distillation did to the materials put into the still, medicines made from it did to the patients who took them, as the body itself functioned as a type of still. Dr Stephens’ Water promises to anyone who takes it that it will ‘preserveth him in good liking, and will make him seem young very long’, while the virtue of Sir Kenelm Digby’s Aqua mirabilis is such that if ‘given to one a dying, a spoonful of it reviveth him’.65 As Wall concludes, ‘in its ongoing struggle against the negative effects of temporality, domestic work was distilling writ large’.66 The final recipe is a culinary recipe, Sir Kenelm Digby’s recipe for ‘Pressi nourissant’, a simple meat broth.67 This recipe calls for three legs of mutton, veal, and capon, each to be cooked until ‘above half roasted, or rather, till they be two thirds roasted’. The cooked joints are then pressed out in a press with screws and the juice collected, skimmed, and cooked. When the meat broth is ‘ripened enough to drink’, then a half a cup of orange juice and salt are added.68 The mid-seventeenth-century recipe books continue to include recipes for ‘baked meats’, which often would involve taking meat out of the skin, mincing with spices like pepper, nutmeg, and ginger, stuffing it back into the skin, and baking it in a pastry ‘coffin’. Newer adaptations of these recipes include meats with the new French-inspired sauces, not dissimilar from this broth, in which meats were flavoured in their own juices. This broth is a variant of a common chicken soup which appears usually more than once in every cookbook. Purportedly a broth that ‘The Queen used this at nights in stead of a Supper; for when she took this, she did eat nothing else’,69 this recipe is one among a number of typically modest recipes associated with Henrietta Maria and other members of the royal court that appear in contemporary recipe books. Such recipes serve to domesticate the royal court, but they are also reminders of the ways that the domestic spaces of the English kitchen and stillroom were concerned with acts of nouriture and sustenance that were understood to extend outside the home and hearth to the political realm of the English state. In this case, food and physic are closely allied with one another: cooking the meat to extract the juices would begin the process of concoction

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that would otherwise begin within the body. Characterizing his broth as being ‘of great, yet temperate nourishment’, Digby promises that ‘Great weaknesses and Consumptions have been recovered with long use of this, and strength and long life continued notably’,70 a wish that might have applied to the Queen’s court as much as to her person. The recipe books of the Protectorate are a traditional genre, pointing back to earlier understandings of the humoral body while also integrating new iatrochemical understandings of matter into their recipes. They reflect changing attitudes toward the practice of the mechanical arts, the relationship between food and physic, and the very place of the kitchen within the Commonwealth itself. To the extent that cooking and physic were centrally concerned with the sustenance and succouring of man in a fallen world, whether that fall was understood to derive from original sin or from the loss of the monarchy, reading the printed recipe books of the Protectorate allows us some access to the matter of the past that they consistently sought to concoct, distil, and temper into healthy bodies and a sound England.

NOTES 1. Purkiss, English Civil War, xxiii. 2. Spiller, Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books, xii–xvi; Wall, Staging Domesticity, 42–53. 3. Peterson, Acquired Taste, xiii, xiv. 4. Wheaton, Savoring the Past, 120. For an account of the ‘golden food’ of the medieval kitchen, see Peterson, Acquired Taste, 1–41. 5. La Varenne, The French Cook, A4rv. 6. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, title page. 7. A.M., A Rich Closet, A2r; [Nicholas Fontanus], The Womans Doctour, title page. 8. Mayerne, Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus, title page. 9. Grey, A Choice Manual, title page. 10. Goffe, Three Excellent Tragædies, S2v; see also Mayerne, Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus, G5r. 11. A Ladies Companion, title page. 12. Digby and Hartman, Choice and Experimented, 72. 13. Cooper, Art of Cookery, A2r. 14. Royal College of Physicians, A Physicall Directory, A3r. 15. Duncan, ‘Thomas Vicary and the Anatomy’, 243–5. 16. Vicary, The Surgions Directorie, A3r. 17. Robert Burton thus notes that ‘the country people use kitchin Physick’ and praises their healthiness (Anatomy of Melancholy, 431); see Wall, Staging Domesticity, 1–17; Wear, Knowledge and Practice, 46–55; Sloan, English Medicine, ch. 9. 18. For an account of cookbooks from the Restoration to the eighteenth century, see Lehman, The British Housewife. 19. Cooper, Art of Cookery, title page. 20. Digby, Closet, 149, 150.

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21. Ibid. 179. On the belief that, as the physician Andrew Boorde put it, ‘Beef is a good meat for an Englishman’, see Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, 1–8. 22. See Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 473; Archer, ‘Queens’ Arcanum’; Spiller, ‘Introduction’ to Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books, xxxviii–xl. 23. Archer, ‘Queens’ Arcanum’, 21. 24. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, title page. 25. Archer, ‘Queens’ Arcanum’, 23–4; Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 477–80. 26. White, Henrietta Maria, 151–69. 27. Ibid. 151. 28. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, A5r. 29. Ibid. A4r–v. 30. Eamon, Science and the Secrets, 45. 31. Vicary, The Surgions Directorie, A3r. 32. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, 30–1. 33. Archer, ‘Queens’ Arcanum’, 24. 34. Knoppers, ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet’, 490. See also Wall, Staging Domesticity, 7–9. 35. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, 224; Potter, Secret Rites, 3. 36. Feather, History, 41. 37. Ibid. 41–9; Potter, Secret Rites, 4. 38. Potter, Secret Rites, 3. 39. See Appelbaum, Aguecheck’s Beef, 66–74. 40. Stine, ‘Opening Closets’, 109–10. 41. Hartlib, Chymical, Medicinal and Chyrurgical Addresses, A3r. Boyle’s Medicinal Experiments: Or, a Collection of Choice and Safe Remedies (1693–4) was published posthumously. 42. Talbot, Natura exenterata, title page. 43. Stine, ‘Opening Closets’, 23, 43, 144–5. 44. Ibid. 43. 45. On books of secrets, print culture, and the publishing of secrets as a form of political power, see Eamon, Science and the Secrets, 45–53, 93–133; on the maker’s knowledge tradition, see Pérez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea, 48–62, 83–4; on the embodied quality to Paracelsianism and related artisanal practices, see Smith, Body of the Artisan, 54–6. 46. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 83. 47. Hartlib, Chymical, Medicinal and Chyrurgical Addresses, {1r, {2r. 48. Hippocrates, Ancient Medicine; cited in Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, 53. 49. Royal College of Physicians, A Physicall Directory, B3v. 50. Debus, English Paracelsians, 34. 51. James I, ‘A Proclamation’, n.p. 52. Ibid. 53. Royal College of Physicians, A Physicall Directory, A1r; see Spiller, ‘Recipes for Knowledge’, 56–9. 54. Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, 68. 55. Albala, ‘Cooking as Research Methodology’, 73–4. 56. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, 4, 287; Digby, Closet, 166. 57. Gerard, The Herball, 797, 799. 58. Albala, Eating Right, 11; M[ontagu], Queens Closet, 23, 52, 177. 59. Greenfield, Perfect, 3, 43.

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Albala, Eating Right, 175, 211–12. Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 282. Wall, ‘Distillation’, 91. Newman and Principe, Alchemy Tried; Digby, Closet, 56. Wall, ‘Distillation’, 91–2. M[ontagu], Queens Closet, 276–7, 291. Wall, ‘Distillation’, 98. Digby, Closet, 165–6. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid.

WORKS CITED Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. ——. ‘Cooking as Research Methodology: Experiments in Renaissance Cuisine’, in Joan Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010, 73–88. [Anon]. The Ladies Companion, or, A Table furnished. London, 1654. Appelbaum, Robert. Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup, and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food among the Early Moderns. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Archer, Jayne. ‘The Queens’ Arcanum: Authority and Authorship in The Queens Closet Opened (1655)’. Renaissance Journal 1.6 (2002), 14–26. Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy. London, 1621. Cooper, Joseph. The Art of Cookery Refin’d and Augmented. London, 1654. Debus, Allen G. The English Paracelsians. New York: F. Watts, 1966. Digby, Kenelm. The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelm Digby, Kt., Opened. London, 1669. —— and G. Hartman. Choice and Experimented Receipts in Physick and Chirurgery. London, 1668. Duncan, Thomas. ‘Thomas Vicary and the Anatomy of Mans Body’. Medical History 50.2 (2006), 235–49. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Feather, John. A History of British Publishing. London: Routledge, 1988. Fitzpatrick, Joan (ed.). Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare: Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010. [Fontanus, Nicholas]. The Womans Doctour. London, 1652. Gerard, John. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. 2nd edn. London, 1633. Goffe, Thomas. Three Excellent Tragœdies. London, 1656. Greenfield, Amy Butler. A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Grey, Elizabeth Howard. Countess of Kent (attributed author), and W.J. A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery. London, 1653. Hartlib, Samuel. Chymical, Medicinal, and Chyrurgical Addresses. London, 1655.

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Hunter, Lynette. ‘Women and Domestic Medicine: Lady Experiments, 1570–1620’, in Lynnette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Society, and Medicine 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society. Phoenix Mill: Sutton Publishing, 1997, 89–107. Hunter, Michael. ‘The Reluctant Philanthropist: Robert Boyle and the “Communication of Secrets and Receipts in Physick” ’, in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (eds.), Religio medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996, 247–72. James I, Sovereign of England and Wales. ‘A Proclamation Commanding all Apothecaries’. London, 1618. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Opening the Queen’s Closet: Henrietta Maria, Elizabeth Cromwell, and the Politics of Cookery’. Renaissance Quarterly 60 (2007), 464–99. La Varenne, Franc¸ois de, and I.D.G. The French Cook. London, 1653. Lehmann, Gilly. The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking, and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain. London: Prospect Books, 1993. M., A. A Rich Closet of Physical Secrets. London, 1652. Mayerne, Theodore de. Archimagirus Anglo-Gallicus or, Excellent and Approved Receipts and Experiments in Cookery. London, 1658. M[ontagu], W[alter]. The Queens Closet Opened. London, 1655. Newman, William Royall, and Lawrence Principe. Alchemy Tried in the Fire: Starkey, Boyle, and the Fate of Helmontian Chymistry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Pagel, Walter. Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. Basel: Karger, 1958. Pe´rez-Ramos, Antonio. Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Maker’s Knowledge Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Peterson, T. Sarah. Acquired Taste: The French Origins of Modern Cooking. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Purkiss, Diane. The English Civil War: A People’s History. London: HarperCollins, 2006. Royal College of Physicians of London, and Nicholas Culpeper. A Physicall Directory, or, A Translation of the London Dispensatory. London, 1649. Sloan, A[rchibald] W[alker]. English Medicine in the Seventeenth Century. Durham: Durham Academic Press, 1996. Smith, Pamela H. The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Spiller, Elizabeth (ed.). Seventeenth-Century English Recipe Books: Cooking, Physic and Chirurgery in the Works of W.M. and Queen Henrietta Maria, and of Mary Tillinghast. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2008. ——. ‘Recipes for Knowledge’, in Joan Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010, 55–72. Stine, Jennifer K. ‘Opening Closets: The Discovery of Household Medicine in Early Modern England’ (Ph.D. dissertation). Stanford University, 1996. Talbot, Aletheia (Howard), Countess of Arundell (attributed author). Natura exenterata: or Nature Unbowelled. London, 1655. Vicary, Thomas. The Surgions Directorie. London, 1651. Wall, Wendy. Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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——. ‘Distillation: Transformations in and out of the Kitchen’, in Joan Fitzpatrick (ed.), Renaissance Food. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2010, 89–104. Wear A[ndrew]. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savoring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300 to 1789. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. White, Michelle Anne. Henrietta Maria and the English Civil Wars. Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2006.

CHAPTER

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JAMES HARRINGTON’S THE COMMONWEALTH OF OCEANA AND THE REPUBLICAN TRADITION ....................................................................................................... RACHEL HAMMERSLEY

INTRODUCTION

.................................................................................................................. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana presents a number of apparent contradictions. It was one of the most outspoken proposals for kingless government produced during the seventeenth century, and yet its author had been an apparently affectionate servant of Charles I. It was dedicated to Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector, and yet it constituted a critique of his regime. It has been placed at the heart of the republican tradition, and yet it effectively subverted most of the conventions of that tradition. Finally, though Harrington was concerned with reforming the English political system, Oceana probably exercised greater influence abroad than it did at home. It is partly these contradictions, and the complexity they reflect, that make Oceana such an important and fascinating work.

JAMES HARRINGTON AND THE CONTEXT OF OCEANA

.................................................................................................................. Relatively little is known about Harrington’s life—particularly before the publication of Oceana in 1656—since no personal papers have survived. For biographical information

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it is necessary to rely principally on three contemporary accounts, those by John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, and Thomas Herbert, as well as on the later ‘Life’ by Harrington’s editor John Toland.1 Harrington was born on 3 January 1611 at Upton, Northamptonshire. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and travelled extensively in Europe. During the Civil War he lived on the family estate at Rand in Lincolnshire, but little is known of his actions until 1647, when he was employed by Parliament as Gentleman of the Bedchamber to Charles I, who was then being held captive at Holdenby (Holmby) House in Northamptonshire. Harrington remained with the King after he was moved from the area in 1648 and may even have attended him on the scaffold.2 Afterwards Harrington disappears from the historical record again until the publication of Oceana in late 1656. Almost all of Harrington’s publications appeared between then and March 1660. Harrington spent his later years at Little Ambry near Dean’s Yard in Westminster. He was arrested at the end of 1661 along with several known republicans. Though he was subsequently released, imprisonment affected his health, and he remained weak until his death on 10 September 1677. Oceana, which was Harrington’s first and best-known work, was published during Cromwell’s Protectorate. It appeared at some point between 19 September 1656, when it was registered with the Stationers’ Company, and November 1656, when it was advertised in Mercurius politicus.3 There appear to have been problems surrounding its publication. It initially appeared in two separate editions, which are almost identical apart from their typefaces. The first was printed by John Streater for Livewell Chapman and the second was ‘printed for D. Pakeman’. Moreover, in an ‘Epistle to the Reader’, which appeared in both versions, Harrington explained that the end of the work had been printed by a third press. Beyond this, the exact details of the controversy are uncertain. Toland offered a colourful account of the seizure of the work by soldiers and of Harrington threatening to hold Cromwell’s granddaughter to ransom in exchange for it, but other evidence does not support this story.4 Indeed, it is not even clear whether the problems Harrington faced in publishing the work were prompted by the content of Oceana itself or the printers and publishers involved. The work was ostensibly dedicated to Cromwell, but it appears to have emerged out of a milieu of republican hostility to the Protectorate that was active during the mid-1650s.5

THE COMMONWEALTH

OF

OCEANA

.................................................................................................................. The purpose of Harrington’s book was to demonstrate that England was ripe for republican government and to provide a blueprint for the type of republic that ought to be adopted. Its form, however, is not that of a conventional political pamphlet. It is dominated by the ‘Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana’, which takes the form of a draft constitution consisting of thirty ‘Orders’. This constitution is prefaced by three sections: ‘The Introduction or Order of the Work’, in which the scene is set; ‘The

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Preliminaries, showing the Principles of Government’, which sets out the political theory and history behind the model constitution and which is itself divided into two parts; and ‘The Council of Legislators’, which explores the context in which the ‘Model of the Commonwealth’ was supposedly drawn up. The work then closes with ‘The Corollary’ in which the consequences of the introduction of this type of government are set out. From the opening lines of ‘The Introduction’ it is clear that ‘Oceana’ is, in fact, England. The country itself is described—as well as its neighbours Marpesia (Scotland) and Panopea (Ireland)—and the suggestion is made that it is ideally suited to be governed as a commonwealth. The organizing principle behind Harrington’s political theory was the division between ancient and modern prudence attributed to the Italian writer Donato Giannotti, whose account of the republic of Venice was a crucial source for Oceana. Ancient prudence, which is said to have operated in the Hebrew republic and among the Greeks and Romans until the time of Julius Caesar, is described as: ‘an art whereby a civil society of men is instituted and preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest, or . . . it is the empire of laws and not of men’.6 It is contrasted with modern prudence, which is said to have been in operation in Europe since the time of Caesar, and is described as: ‘an art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a city or a nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest; which . . . may be said to be the empire of men and not of laws’.7 The Preliminaries are thus divided into two, with the first focusing on ancient prudence and the second on modern. Harrington’s aim was to argue for the revival of ancient prudence and to show the means by which it could be introduced into the modern world. As he explained, he intended ‘To go mine own way, and yet to follow the ancients’.8 The central feature of ancient political theory, according to Harrington, was the mixed form of government, which was designed to benefit from the advantages of the simple forms without incurring their associated disadvantages, not least their tendency to degenerate over time. In fact, the English constitution had already been characterized as a mixed form of government, most famously in His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Propositions.9 Harrington’s version differs significantly from that account, however, not least in its omission of monarchy (in its traditional form) from the mixture. Harrington’s desire to revive ancient prudence determined the main sources on which he drew. Venice was to be admired since it constituted an exemplar of ancient prudence that had survived into modern times. Machiavelli too had much to teach, since he sought to revive ancient prudence. On the other hand, Harrington was openly critical of Hobbes on the grounds that he was intent on its destruction. However, as will become clear below, Harrington’s relationship with Hobbes was actually more complex than this.10 Reviving ancient prudence also raised a number of potential problems, which Harrington had to solve. In the first place, ancient prudence had been developed in the context of the small city-states of antiquity, whereas Oceana was a large nation state. Harrington addressed this issue by introducing a system of representative

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government. However, he was also keen to counter conventional wisdom by insisting that a large agrarian republic would have advantages over city-states, not least in being less turbulent: ‘Otherwise a commonwealth consisting but of one city would doubtless be stormy, in regard that ambition would be every man’s trade: but where it consisteth of a country, the plough in the hands of the owner findeth him a better calling, and produceth the most innocent and steady genius of a commonwealth, such as is that of Oceana.’11 Indeed, for Harrington the relationship between land and political power was crucial. By contrast with the conventional view that the size of the state determines the appropriate form of government, Harrington set out his famous theory that because land is required to sustain soldiers, dominion follows the balance of property. Thus he explains that if the land was owned by just one man, then the nation would be best suited to absolute monarchy; if it was shared among a few, then it would be ideal for mixed monarchy; and if it was shared by the majority, then it would be fitted for a commonwealth.12 Moreover, if the form of government was not in line with the balance of property, then it would prove unstable and short-lived. On this basis Harrington proposed the first of his fundamental laws, the agrarian law, designed to establish and then preserve the appropriate balance of property for the system of government.13 Secondly, in introducing ancient prudence into the modern world Harrington had to find a way of reconciling, and even integrating, ancient political thought with the Christian tradition. His main solution to this problem was to adopt Israel (an instructive model in a number of ways) as one of his ancient republics, a move which prompted some controversy among his contemporaries.14 A third problem that Harrington had to address was human nature. During the seventeenth century a number of thinkers, including Hobbes, began to argue that human beings act on the basis of their passions rather than reason, and to present self-interest as the key motivating force within human nature.15 Most seventeenthcentury English republicans—including Henry Vane and John Milton—remained distanced from these debates and continued to believe that individual virtue was both the essential basis for, and the main outcome of, republican government. While they accepted that virtue was difficult to achieve, they believed it to be possible, at least for an elite minority, by means of individual self-restraint encouraged by education and religious conviction. Once again Harrington subverted the conventional logic. As a careful and, in this respect, sympathetic reader of Hobbes, he was convinced that humans tend to act on the basis of their passions and self-interest rather than reason and virtue.16 He therefore argued that it was the task of the legislator to design a system of government in which the self-interested behaviour of each of the individual parts could be made to result in a virtuous whole. In his pamphlet A Discourse Upon this Saying, he used the analogy of a carnival pageant he had seen whilst in Rome to illustrate how such a system would work: I saw one which represented a kitchen, with all the proper utensils in use and action. The cooks were all cats and kitlings, set in such frames, so tied and so ordered, that the poor creatures could

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make no motion to get loose, but the same caused one to turn the spit, another to baste the meat, a third to skim the pot and a fourth to make green sauce. If the frame of your commonwealth be not such as causeth everyone to perform his certain function as necessarily as this did the cat to make green sauce, it is not right.17

Similarly, in Oceana, Harrington explored this issue in more detail: But it may be said that the difficulty remains yet; for be the interest of popular government right reason, a man doth not look upon reason as it is right or wrong in itself, but as it makes for him or against him; wherefore unless you can show such orders of a government as, like those of God in nature, shall be able to constrain this or that creature to shake off that inclination which is more peculiar unto it and take up that which regards the common good or interest, all this is to no more end than to persuade every man in a popular government not to carve himself of that which he desires most, but to be mannerly at the public table, and give the best from himself unto decency and the common interest.18

Harrington illustrated how such ‘orders of a government’ might work with his famous anecdote of two girls dividing a cake: ‘“Divide”, says one unto the other, “and I will choose; or let me divide, and you shall choose”. If this be but once agreed upon, it is enough; for the divident dividing unequally loses, in regard that the other takes the better half; wherefore she divides equally, and so both have right.’19 In the context of a commonwealth this practice of dividing and choosing would take the form of debating and resolving. The senate, made up of Harrington’s ‘natural aristocracy’, would be charged with debating the issues and putting forward a proposal, but it would then be up to the popular assembly (who might not be capable of debating, but would know what was in their interests) to accept or reject the senate’s proposal by means of a silent vote. In addition to these two legislative bodies, Harrington’s commonwealth also required a third, executive branch, which he called the ‘magistracy’. Consequently, as Harrington explained, ‘the commonwealth consisteth of the senate proposing, the people resolving, and the magistracy executing, whereby partaking of the aristocracy as in the senate, of the democracy as in the people, and of monarchy as in the magistracy’.20 Just as Harrington proposed the introduction of an agrarian law to keep the foundation in order, so at the level of the constitution he advocated rotation of office and the adoption of a special ballot.21 These mechanisms, both of which were adapted from the Venetian system, were designed to make republican government workable in a large state and to avert the corruption which, given human self-interest, threatened its destruction. Harrington’s version of rotation of office involved annual elections to both legislative Houses in which one-third of the members of each would be replaced each year, with those standing down being ineligible for re-election for a further three years. It was also to be applied, though on varying terms, to almost all magisterial offices within the commonwealth. The Venetian ballot was a complex secret voting system involving elements of both lot and election and a collection of electoral ‘furniture’ including urns and coloured balls.

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‘The Second Part of the Preliminaries’ is more historical in its approach, offering an account, as Harrington explained, of ‘the rise, progress and declination of modern prudence’ from the time of the Roman emperors, with a particular emphasis on how things developed in Oceana (England).22 He described the form of government introduced by the Saxons and the gradual emergence of feudalism, or the ‘Gothic balance’. Harrington’s main aim in this section was to explain the origins of the Civil War and to demonstrate, on the basis of his theory that the balance of property determines political power, that England was now ripe for republican government. In seeking to explain the origins of the Civil War, Harrington highlighted the role of Panurgus (Henry VII) and Coraunus (Henry VIII). The former, in seeking to secure his own position against the nobility, allowed land (and therefore power) to pass into the hands of the people, while the latter—through the dissolution of the monasteries—brought further land into popular hands. Thus, by the time of the reign of Parthenia (Elizabeth I), the balance of property lay firmly in the hands of the people. The full implications of this were not immediately felt, however, since Parthenia was adept at managing and controlling her subjects. Nevertheless, by the mid-seventeenth century the Commons were seeking to exert greater influence over the polity. On this basis Harrington argued that it was ‘the dissolution of the government’ that ‘caused the war, not the war the dissolution of this government’.23 Towards the end of ‘The Second Part of the Preliminaries’ and in ‘The Council of Legislators’, Harrington moved from history to fiction—from an account of what had actually happened to his vision of what ought to have happened. It was probably because of this move that Harrington chose to adopt fictional names throughout his work. His aim was not to describe the existing English system, but rather to propose a preferable alternative to it. Harrington claimed that Olphaus Megaletor (Cromwell as he ought to have been) had read Machiavelli and understood the need for a single legislator and the necessity of establishing a government all at once. On this basis, he made himself sole legislator of Oceana, or Lord Archon, and chose fifty men to sit as a council of legislators. This body was charged with studying the constitutions of republics past and present, and hearing proposals from the population of Oceana, in order to aid Archon in his creation of a new commonwealth. Of course, the real Cromwell had not taken this course and Harrington was deliberately criticizing him for that. Indeed, Blair Worden has described Lord Archon as an anti-Cromwell and the dedication of the work to him as an anti-dedication.24 The fictional account continues in ‘The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana’. Harrington set Archon alongside Moses and Lycurgus as legislators who had sought to establish an entire commonwealth at once. He then claimed that Archon had commissioned him to offer an account of the constitution and the discussions surrounding it. Harrington prefaced that account with three quotations: the first from the Bible regarding the creation of the Hebrew republic by Moses, the second from Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus, and the third from Livy’s account of Rome. The fact that Harrington set his constitutional model in this context suggests that recent accounts, which have tried to present him as following either the neo-Roman or the Greek tradition of

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republican thought, tell only part of the story.25 Harrington was drawing on an ancient republican tradition that incorporated not only the Greek and Roman models, but also the Jewish republic. In line with Archon’s request, Harrington offered an annotated constitution, with each of the thirty Orders being accompanied by a commentary explaining its purpose, and often including speeches supposedly given during the debates within the council of legislators. The constitution embodies the political theory set out in the Preliminaries. It thus establishes a mixed commonwealth with a senate proposing, a popular assembly resolving, and a number of magistrates executing. The agrarian law and Venetian Ballot are placed at the centre of the constitution in Orders thirteen and fourteen, the point at which the focus shifts from the institution of the commonwealth to its day-today operation. The institution of the commonwealth begins with the division and organization of the male population along four axes. First, they are divided, according to their status, into citizens and servants. Only the former are to participate in government, servitude being described as ‘inconsistent’ with politics. Secondly they are distinguished on account of their age. Those under 30 are to form the marching army, while those over constitute the standing garrisons as well as being eligible for political office. It was crucial for Harrington that all citizens were engaged in both political and military tasks—these being the twin components of citizenship. Thirdly, the citizens are separated according to their wealth in order to distinguish the cavalry from the infantry. This division is justified here on the grounds of the costs of military equipment, but is later used to ensure that only the wealthier members of society are eligible for election to the senate. Finally they are organized, on the basis of their place of residence, into parishes, hundreds, and tribes—this kind of division being crucial in a commonwealth focused on a nation rather than a city-state. Harrington then dealt with the elections of deputies (at the level of the parish and tribe) and of magistrates (of the parish, hundred, and tribe), most of which were to be carried out according to the Venetian ballot. As well as demonstrating how a republic, based on popular sovereignty, could be constructed in a large nation state, and describing the complex workings of the ballot, it is in this section that Harrington set out the religious policy of Oceana. There was to be a national Church (with the elders of each parish having some control over the choice of their minister), but also liberty of conscience for Protestant sects. Harrington’s account of the day-to-day operation of the commonwealth is dominated by his description of the senate (Orders fifteen to twenty) and popular assembly (Orders twenty-one to twenty-three). The composition, functions, and business of the various offices and bodies associated with the senate that made up the executive branch—including the councils of state, war, religion, and trade—are set out in detail. Of particular interest is the academy of provosts, a daily venue to which citizens could come in order to debate political matters or present their own proposals: ‘to the end that not only the ear of the commonwealth be open unto all, but that, men of such

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education being in her eye, she may upon emergent elections or occasions be always provided of her choice of fit persons’.26 Harrington also set out the means of establishing a three-month dictatorship in times of emergency and the powers this body would have. Finally, the complex process by which potential laws were to be proposed and discussed within the senate is described. Harrington named his popular assembly the Prerogative Tribe. As with the senate he described the offices associated with it, as well as its legislative and judicial functions. In order to facilitate the crucial separation between the discussion of legislation and its acceptance or rejection, all members of the Prerogative Tribe would be required to take an oath promising not to engage in debate. The final seven Orders deal with diverse issues not already covered. These include the government and organization of the provinces (Marpesia and Panopea); the costs of the proposed system and how they are to be met; the systems of education and military training to be provided for the nation’s youth; the measures to be taken in case of invasion; and the organization of the marching army. Finally, the ‘Epitome’ of the commonwealth summarizes the essential elements of the system in a few pages. The final chapter of Oceana, ‘The Corollary’, opens with Plutarch’s account of Lycurgus’ actions after he had completed the constitution of Lacedaemon. Lycurgus’ suicide at Delphos is paralleled with Lord Archon’s abdication and retirement. Archon’s action is, however, less enduring since he was soon persuaded to resume his post in order to deal with the immediate dangers of foreign invasion and internal divisions. Worden has convincingly argued that Harrington was again playing with the contrast between the fictional Archon and his real-life counterpart, with Archon’s surrender of power constituting the mirror-image of Cromwell’s violent seizure of it in April 1653.27 The purpose of ‘The Corollary’ is to demonstrate the huge benefits of the system of government embodied in the ‘Model of the Commonwealth’. Set forty years after its establishment, it looks back at the peace and prosperity the constitution had brought. The work ends with an account of Archon’s death, the national mourning it prompted, and the statue erected in his honour.

CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES TO OCEANA, AND HARRINGTON’S OTHER WORKS

.................................................................................................................. Given its subject matter, and the context in which it was written, it is perhaps not surprising that Oceana generated considerable debate. A number of contemporaries wrote responses to particular aspects of the work, and Harrington replied with fresh pamphlets of his own. The focus of most of the criticism was either religious or political. The religious debates centred on Harrington’s account of the Hebrew commonwealth and his views on the origins and legitimacy of clerical authority. Harrington’s

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first direct opponent on these matters was Dr Henry Ferne, Archdeacon of Leicester. Ferne had initially expressed his views in a private letter to Harrington’s sister who had sent him a copy of Oceana. Harrington controversially published Ferne’s letter, together with the ensuing correspondence and his own refutations of Ferne’s arguments, in Pian Piano in January 1657.28 In reply to Ferne, Harrington insisted that the Hebrew commonwealth was originally a theocratic republic in which God had proposed the laws (via Moses), but the people had the right to accept or reject them. Subsequently Israel had become corrupted not least through the disappearance of popular election and the emergence of an oligarchy. According to Harrington, something very similar had happened in the primitive Church, with the laying on of hands displacing election as the means of ordination, and the development of a distinct clerical order. Given these arguments, Ferne’s initial suggestion that on these matters Harrington’s ideas were akin to those of Hobbes seems justified.29 Moreover, Harrington made no attempt to deny this accusation and even endorsed it in his next work The Prerogative of Popular Government, where he admitted that while he opposed Hobbes’s politics: ‘in most other things I firmly believe that Mr Hobbes is, and will in future ages be accounted, the best writer at this day in the world’.30 Harrington continued the religious debate, and particularly that concerning the history of ordination, in Book II of The Prerogative of Popular Government. However, here his ‘opponents’—Henry Hammond and Lazarus Seaman—were not figures who had written against Oceana, but the authors of earlier works on the subject, which Harrington explained had been sent to him because they contradicted his claims.31 The views of these figures were not identical, since Hammond was explicitly responding to Hobbes’s Leviathan, whereas Seaman was a Presbyterian. However, in reply to both works, Harrington reiterated many of the arguments he had rehearsed against Ferne. Harrington also continued to pursue the debate surrounding the nature of the Hebrew commonwealth. In The Stumbling-Block of Disobedience and Rebellion, of June 1658, which was a response to a work of the same name by the Laudian Peter Heylyn, Harrington refuted Heylyn’s account of the Hebrew state (as well as of the Spartan commonwealth). Heylyn then responded in Certamen Epistolare. Similarly, in Book II of The Art of Lawgiving Harrington again reasserted his interpretation of the commonwealth of Israel. Understandably, some of the political attacks on Harrington came from royalists seeking to discredit his claims for republican government and to reassert the advantages of monarchy. Harrington’s most persistent royalist critic was Matthew Wren, son of the Bishop of Ely. Wren wrote two works against Oceana, having been presented with a copy and asked for his views on it by Dr John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and a key figure in the origins of the Royal Society. Wren’s first work, Considerations upon Mr Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana, appeared anonymously in 1657 and responded systematically to the first part of Harrington’s preliminaries.32 Harrington responded directly in Book I of The Prerogative of Popular Government, which appeared towards the end of that year. Wren’s second antiHarringtonian work, which expanded on the arguments of the first, was Monarchy

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Asserted, or the state of monarchicall and popular government; in vindication of the Considerations upon Mr. Harringtons Oceana, of 1659, against which Harrington directed the conclusion of The Art of Lawgiving and Politicaster.33 Though an advocate of monarchy, Wren did not adopt a conventional position, but was heavily influenced by the political philosophy of Hobbes. He found much to praise in Harrington’s work, but was critical of his distinction between the government of the ancients and that of the moderns, and insisted that commonwealths were no more empires of laws than monarchies.34 He also attacked Harrington’s failure to trace the true origins of government. Wren put the case for monarchy as the older, and therefore more legitimate, form of government and he insisted that power is always the basis of authority. The debate between Harrington and Wren also touched on moral philosophy. Wren shared Harrington’s emphasis on interest as the motivating force in political life, but went further in his development of interest theory.35 Where Harrington maintained a belief in ‘the public interest’, which government should seek to fulfil, Wren (again in line with Hobbes) saw politics as little more than the battle between competing interests.36 Apart from Wren, Harrington’s main political opponents were republicans, and in particular members of the circle of so-called ‘godly republicans’ who gathered around the MP Sir Henry Vane in the late 1650s. Vane had originally set out his political position in A Healing Question in the spring of 1656.37 He went on to offer a direct response to Harrington in A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government, which took the form of an open letter and responded directly to the questions Harrington had addressed ‘To the godly man’ at the end of Book I of The Prerogative of Popular Government.38 Vane’s arguments were developed by his supporters—in particular his protégé Henry Stubbe and the former Fifth Monarchist John Rogers. Rogers initially attacked Harrington in his Diapoliteia of July 1659.39 Harrington responded at the beginning of September in the jocular A Parallel of the Spirit of the People with the Spirit of Mr Rogers and Rogers replied in similar vein with Mr Harrington’s Parallel Unparallel’d later that month. Stubbe’s works against Harrington included Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause of September 1659; A Letter to an Officer of the Army concerning a select senate, dated 26 October 1659 (to which Harrington replied in A Sufficient Answer to Mr Stubbe); and The Common-wealth of Oceana Put into the Balance, and Found too Light (which was answered in A Letter unto Mr Stubbe, Harrington’s final political work to appear during his lifetime).40 There were three fundamental points of disagreement between these ‘godly republicans’ and Harrington. In the first place, their religious positions were different. Vane and his associates placed much greater emphasis on the religious foundations of the commonwealth against Harrington’s belief in ‘human prudence’ and the balance of property. They also insisted on the complete separation of Church and state, whereas Harrington called for a national Church and believed, like Hobbes, that the Church should be subordinate to the state. Secondly, they held different views on the extent to which the population could be trusted with citizenship. Harrington called for free elections, whereas the godly republicans were adamant that full citizenship rights

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needed to be restricted to the godly, at least initially. While all of these men were sceptical about the human potential for virtue, and feared the effects of corruption, Vane, Stubbe, and Rogers placed their faith in the godly, whereas Harrington preferred to rely on constitutional mechanisms. As he explained in Aphorisms Political: ‘Where the security is in the persons, the government maketh good men evil; where the security is in the form, the government maketh evil men good.’41 Thirdly, Harrington disagreed with the godly republicans over the nature and role of the upper house. Against Harrington’s rotating senate that would debate and propose legislation for the popular assembly to vote upon, they favoured a standing senate whose members would be elected for life from among those known for their commitment to the Good Old Cause.42 In addition to producing several works in response to his critics, Harrington also authored a number that were essentially restatements of the ideas of Oceana in different forms. These include Brief Directions, parts of The Art of Lawgiving, and Harrington’s aphoristic works Aphorisms Political and the posthumous A System of Politics. Harrington’s willingness to engage in debate with his critics was no mere academic exercise. Oceana had been written with practical politics in mind. So alongside his later writings, Harrington and his associates engaged in more direct attempts to bring England more closely into line with Oceana. Harrington’s political ideas were drawn into parliamentary debates in February 1659 during Richard Cromwell’s Parliament, but they proved more influential after the collapse of the Protectorate and the restoration of the Rump in May. On 6 July a ‘Humble Petition of diverse well-affected persons’ was presented to Parliament.43 Its authors were clearly Harringtonians and almost certainly included Henry Neville and John Wildman. The petition asserted the desperate need for a settlement and proposed the establishment of a new constitution as the means of providing one. The petitioners put forward six principles of government and discussed their implementation. In the process they proposed the introduction of key elements of Harrington’s system, including: a bicameral legislature with one house being responsible for debating and proposing laws and the other for resolving them; a separate magisterial branch responsible for the execution of the laws; Harrington’s system of rotation of office; and his religious policy. Parliament acknowledged receipt of the petition, but showed little enthusiasm for adopting Harrington’s ideas.44 Undeterred by the lukewarm response, a second petition was produced in the autumn of 1659, probably by Harrington himself. It argued that the only alternative to government by a King and House of Lords was one in which the senate would debate and propose and the popular assembly resolve.45 Parliament was urged to institute such a system immediately in order to avoid ‘the inevitable ruin of this nation’.46 Harrington produced a pamphlet to accompany the petition in which he again demonstrated the dangers of a select senate.47 Harrington presented the petition and pamphlet to the committee for government and, having received no reply, had intended to present them to Parliament. However, the Rump was dissolved before he could do so. Consequently, they were simply inserted into his dialogue Valerius and Publicola, which appeared in October.

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Alongside the pamphlets and petitions, Harrington and his associates adopted another tactic. Around the beginning of Michaelmas term 1659, they established a political debating club called The Rota.48 It met every evening at Miles’s coffee house in the Turk’s Head, New Palace Yard, Westminster. According to John Aubrey, the members sat round a special oval table with a passage in the middle for Miles to deliver the coffee.49 They also possessed a balloting box for taking votes on the propositions put forward. There was apparently a membership fee of 18d. and yet, according to Aubrey, the room was always full.50 Members included Aubrey himself; Harrington’s friend Neville; the diarist Samuel Pepys; the future author of Political Arithmetic Sir William Petty; Cyriac Skinner; and the former Leveller Wildman. Clearly the main purpose of the Club was the discussion and dissemination of Harrington’s proposals. Beginning on 20 December 1659, the members engaged in a focused debate on the form that a republic ought to take, which was based around the summary of Harrington’s ideas in The Rota: or a Model of a Free State or Equal Commonwealth.51 However, there is evidence to suggest that the debates were free and open and that Harrington’s own view did not always prevail.52 This is not surprising given that a number of the members held political views that were different from Harrington’s own. The club continued meeting until late February, at which point the readmission of those members of the Rump excluded at Pride’s Purge had rendered such meetings at best irrelevant and at worst dangerous.

HARRINGTON’S LEGACY

.................................................................................................................. While Harrington did not succeed in introducing his system into England in the 1650s, his ideas exercised a considerable influence during the 150 years that followed. Harrington had been adamant that because of the balance of property ownership in midseventeenth-century England, the only viable form of government was a commonwealth. Indeed he had predicted that if monarchy was restored it would only last a few years.53 Despite this, the Restoration did not bring about the disappearance of his ideas. Rather, his erstwhile supporters revised his proposals to fit the new circumstances. Harrington’s friend Neville took a central role in this endeavour. As the publisher’s preface to his Plato redivivus of 1681 explained: Oceana was written (it being thought Lawful so to do in those times) to evince out of these Principles, that England was not capable of any other Government than a Democracy. And this Author out of the same Maxims, or Aphorisms of Politicks, endeavours to prove that they may be applied naturally and fitly, to the redressing and supporting one of the best Monarchies in the World, which is that of England.54

In particular, Neville, like the earlier neo-Harringtonian writers discussed by J. G. A. Pocock, sought to direct Harringtonian ideas against the corruption of Parliament through places and pensions and the establishment of a standing army.55 The Glorious

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Revolution only served to reinforce the positive vision of the English monarchy, and Harrington’s ideas continued to be invoked in similar ways during the Standing Army Controversy of the 1690s and in the early years of the eighteenth century. Crucial for the survival of Harringtonian ideas was Toland’s edition of The Oceana of James Harrington and his Other Works, which appeared in 1700. Like Neville, Toland sought to make Harrington’s ideas applicable to the new monarchical circumstances.56 He was also responsible for setting Harrington’s works in a broader context. Harrington was just one of several seventeenth-century authors whose works Toland republished at the turn of the century. Thanks to him, Harrington’s writings were subsequently associated with those of Edmund Ludlow, John Milton, and Algernon Sidney.57 Toland’s edition was reprinted several times during the eighteenth century and commonwealthmen such as Walter Moyle, John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Viscount Bolingbroke referred directly and indirectly to Harrington’s ideas.58 Later in the century his thought exercised an influence on writers as diverse as David Hume and Thomas Spence.59 Nevertheless, in Britain Harrington’s ideas did not have any perceptible political influence. By contrast, in both North America and France they exerted a practical impact, being echoed in the Massachusetts state constitution and even forming the basis of a draft constitution addressed to the French National Assembly in 1793.60 Interest in Harrington appears to have faded during the nineteenth century, but was revived during the twentieth. He was deployed by R. H. Tawney to support his theory of the rise of the gentry and was identified by C. B. Macpherson as one of several ‘possessive individualists’.61 Finally, Pocock and others presented him as a key exponent of the English republican tradition. The early twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of a significant critique of Harrington’s place at the heart of the republican tradition. Harrington’s rejection of the right of resistance, his emphasis on peace and stability rather than regular libertyenhancing tumults, and his obsession with constitution-building are out of line with other leading writers of that tradition.62 This reflects a deeper conflict. Whereas most English republicans placed emphasis on virtue as, to quote Jonathan Scott, the ‘principal end at which the republican experiment aimed’, Harrington, as has been demonstrated, remained much more sceptical about the human potential for virtue.63 Though it is now 400 years since Harrington was born, and more than 350 since Oceana first appeared, it would seem that interpretations of his ideas are by no means settled, but will continue to be a source of fascination and debate among historians for many years to come.

NOTES I am most grateful to Blair Worden and to the editor of this volume, Laura Knoppers, for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 282–6; Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, iii. 1115–26; Herbert, Charles I in Captivity, 33–69, 87–130, 160–92, 247–57, 277–83, 301–9. Toland, ‘Life’, xiii–xli. The best

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

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recent account of Harrington’s life appears in Pocock’s ‘Introduction’ to Harrington, Political Works, 1–152. See also Höpfl, ‘Harrington, James (1611–1677)’. Toland, ‘Life’, xvii. This story is not confirmed by other sources. Pocock, ‘Introduction’, 6n. Toland, ‘Life’, xix. For more detail on the context see Pocock, ‘Introduction’, 6–42; Worden, ‘Harrington’s “Oceana”: Origins and Aftermath’, 113–26 and id., Literature and Politics, 108–15. Harrington, Political Works, 161. Ibid. Ibid. 163. Carey and Colepeper, His Majesties Answer. See also Pocock, ‘Introduction’, 19–22 and id., Machiavellian Moment, 361–6. On Harrington’s debt to Hobbes see Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword and Rahe, Against Throne and Altar. Harrington, Political Works, 158–9. Ibid. 163–4. Ibid. 181. See, in particular, Pian Piano and The Prerogative of Popular Government, ibid. 369–87 and 516–63. For a more detailed discussion of Harrington’s religious thought, see Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 395–400. Force, Self-Interest before Adam Smith; Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 9–68. See Fukuda, Sovereignty and the Sword; Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, 321–46; Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, 165–73; and Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France, 19–27. Harrington, Political Works, 744. Ibid. 172. Ibid. Ibid. 174. Ibid. 180–4. Ibid. 188. Ibid. 198. Worden, ‘Harrington’s “Oceana”: Origins and Aftermath’, 120–4. Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism; Nelson, Greek Tradition, 87–126. Harrington, Political Works, 252. Worden, ‘Harrington’s “Oceana”: Origins and Aftermath’, 122. Harrington, Political Works, 369–87. Ibid. 370. Ibid. 423. Ibid. 500. Wren, Considerations. Wren, Monarchy Asserted. Wren, Considerations, 31. Harrington, Political Works, 715. Wren, Considerations, 20–1. Vane, Healing Question. Vane, Needful Corrective, 2. Rogers, Diapoliteia.

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40. Stubbe, Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause; A Letter to an Officer of the Army; and The Common-Wealth of Oceana Put into the Balance. 41. Harrington, Political Works, 763. 42. See, in particular, Stubbe, A Letter to an Officer of the Army. 43. Harrington, The Oceana and Other Works, 541–6. 44. Ibid. 546. 45. Harrington, Political Works, 801. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 801–2. 48. There is also some evidence of the existence of an earlier club that met in Bow Street Covent Garden, which was probably behind the petition of 6 July. See Ashley, John Wildman, 142. 49. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 283. 50. Pepys, Diary, 13; Aubrey, Brief Lives, 283. 51. Harrington, Political Works, 807–21. 52. See e.g. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 283 and Pepys, Diary, 20. 53. Aubrey speaks of seven years, but other evidence suggests that Harrington had originally talked in terms of it lasting no more than three years. Aubrey, Brief Lives, 284; Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament, 40n. 54. Neville, Plato redivivus, 551. 55. Pocock, ‘Introduction’, 128–33. 56. Toland, ‘Preface’, viii. 57. There are also striking similarities between Harrington’s ideas and those of his contemporary Marchamont Nedham. See Worden, ‘Harrington’s “Oceana”: Origins and Aftermath’, 111–12. 58. For a more detailed account of the Harringtonian nature of the moral and political philosophy of the commonwealthmen, see: Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France, 14–32. 59. Hume, ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, 512–29; Spence, Pig’s Meat, esp. i. 115–18 and 272–4; ii. 108–10, 140, and 269–71. 60. On the influence of Harringtonian ideas in America see Russell-Smith, Harrington and his Oceana; Robbins, Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman; Bailyn, Ideological Origins; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 506–52; and Hammersley, ‘From ConstitutionBuilders to Radical Democrats’. For his influence in France see Russell-Smith, Harrington and his Oceana, 205–15; Liljegren (ed.), French Draft Constitution, 44–79; Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans; and id., The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France. 61. Tawney, ‘Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age’; Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, 160–93. 62. See, in particular, Scott, Commonwealth Principles; Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, 144–73 and Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, 321–46. Worden had already acknowledged most of these elements of Harrington’s thought: see Worden, ‘James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana’. 63. Scott, Commonwealth Principles, 170.

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WORKS CITED Ashley, Maurice. John Wildman: Plotter and Postmaster: A Study of the English Republican Movement in the Seventeenth Century. London: Jonathan Cape, 1947. Aubrey, John. Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949. Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992. Carey, L., Viscount Falkland, and J. Colepeper. His Majesties Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament. Cambridge, 1642. Davis, J. C. Utopia and the Ideal Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981, chapter 8. ——. ‘Equality in an Unequal Commonwealth: James Harrington’s Republicanism and the Meaning of Equality’, in I. Gentles, J. Morrill, and B. Worden (eds.), Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 229–42. Force, Pierre. Self-Interest before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fukuda, Arihiro. Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Hammersley, Rachel. French Revolutionaries and English Republicans: The Cordeliers Club, 1790–1794. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005. ——. ‘From Constitution-Builders to Radical Democrats: Neo-Harringtonians in EighteenthCentury America and France’, in 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. New York: AMS, 2005, xi. 315–43. ——. The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France: Between the Ancients and the Moderns. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Harrington, James. The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland. London, 1737. ——. The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Herbert, Thomas. Charles I in Captivity, ed. G. Scott Stevenson. London, 1927. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Ho¨pfl, H. M. ‘Harrington, James (1611–1677)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Hume, David. ‘The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth’, in Essays: Moral, Political and Literary. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987, 512–29. Liljegren, Sten Bodvar (ed.). A French Draft Constitution of 1792 Modelled on James Harrington’s Oceana. Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1932. Macpherson, C. B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. Nelson, Eric. The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Neville, Henry. Plato redivivus, in The Oceana of James Harrington and his Other Works, ed. J. Toland. Dublin, 1737. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews. London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970. Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.

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Pocock, J. G. A. ‘Introduction’ to The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Rahe, Paul Anthony. Against Throne and Altar: Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Robbins, Caroline A. The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987. Rogers, John. Diapoliteia: A Christian Concertation with Mr. Prin, Mr. Baxter, Mr. Harrington, for the True Cause of the Commonwealth. London, 1659. Russell Smith, H. F. Harrington and his Oceana: A Study of a Seventeenth-Century Utopia and its Influence in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914. Scott, Jonathan. Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Seaward, Paul. The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–1667. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Spence, Thomas. Pig’s Meat; or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude. 3rd edn. London, 1795. Stubbe, Henry. Essay in Defence of the Good Old Cause. London, 1659. ——. A Letter to an Officer of the Army Concerning a Select Senate . . . London, 1660. ——. The Common-Wealth of Oceana Put into the Balance and Found too Light. London: Giles Calvert, 1660. Sullivan, Vickie B. Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Tawney, R. H. ‘Harrington’s Interpretation of his Age’. Proceedings of the British Academy 27. London, 1941. Toland, John. ‘The Life of James Harrington’, in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. J. Toland. London, 1737. ——. ‘Preface’, to The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. J. Toland. London, 1737. Vane, Henry. A Healing Question. London, 1656. ——. A Needful Corrective or Balance in Popular Government, Expressed in a Letter to James Harrington. London, 1660. Wood, Anthony. Athenae Oxoniensis: An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops who have had their education in the University of Oxford, ed. P. Bliss. London, 1817, iii. 1115–26. Worden, Blair. ‘James Harrington and The Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656’ and ‘Harrington’s Oceana: Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660’, in D. Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994, 82–110 and 111–38. ——. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wren, M. Considerations on Mr. Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana: Restrained to the First Part of the Preliminaries. London, 1657. ——. Monarchy Asserted, or the State of Monarchicall and Popular Government in Vindication of the Considerations upon Mr. Harrington’s Oceana. London, 1659.

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THE POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES OF REVOLUTIONARY PROSE ROMANCE ....................................................................................................... AMELIA ZURCHER

Among the literary genres that suddenly began to flourish during the English Revolution was a variety of quasi-fictional, aristocratic prose romance without much precedent in England. Before about 1650, the only comparable English fictions on the literary landscape were Philip Sidney’s late sixteenth-century revised and composite Arcadia, a large portion of which was in verse; Sidney’s niece Mary Wroth’s similar 1621 Urania; and John Barclay’s only quasi-English 1621 Argenis, published in Paris in Latin, after Barclay had spent ten years in the Stuart court. The decade and a half after Charles I’s execution, by contrast, saw the publication or manuscript circulation of a sudden burst of prose romances, all long and episodic in structure, all aimed at educated, relatively elite readers, and all concerned with love and matters of state: the anonymous Theophania (published 1655, written in the late 1640s), Thomas Bayly’s Herba parietis (1650), Robert Boyle’s The Martyrdom of Theodora, and Didymus (published in part 1687, written and circulated in the late 1640s or early 1650s), Roger Boyle’s Parthenissa (published in parts starting in 1651 and in whole, with a new book, in 1669), Percy Herbert’s The Princess Cloria (also published in parts starting in 1653 and in whole 1661), Richard Braithwaite’s Panthalia (1659), Nathaniel Ingelo’s Bentivolio and Urania (1660), George MacKenzie’s Aretina (1660), the anonymous Eliana (1661), John Bulteel’s Birinthea (1664), and John Crowne’s Pandion and Amphigenia (1665); and the circulation in manuscript, doubtless among several others, of Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda (transcribed 1661) and Rivall Friendship, by a member of the Manningham family. The heyday of the genre was brief; within a few years of the Restoration, as bookseller Francis Kirkman noted in 1671, English romances had been ‘thrust out of use’,

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and by the 1670s the still substantial English taste for aristocratic romance was mostly supplied by translations of European narratives.1 Any consideration of the short history of this group of romances must begin with the question of what in the political and intellectual culture of the latter part of the revolutionary period made these narratives so compelling. Early modern romance is not only extremely long but formally unfamiliar to modern readers brought up on the novel, and many of these narratives have gone largely unread since their original publication. But in the last few decades the new interest in royalism of the 1640s and 1650s has sent historians back to romance, and the explanation offered for the genre’s quick rise and fall has primarily been that romance was a vehicle for embattled royalist ideology. In its broad outlines this is almost certainly true. Romance in the 1650s must have seemed tailor-made to convey royalist ideology: from the fourth-century Greek Aethiopika through medieval chivalric romance into the early modern period, the genre consistently took as one of its foundational narratives the recuperation of lost royal heirs and the rationalization of hereditary monarchy. And many of the romances of the period are by known royalists who argue explicitly for royalist politics. Percy Herbert, author of The Princess Cloria, was a Catholic MP in the 1620s who probably contributed to a plot to raise an anti-parliamentary army in Wales and was imprisoned in London for about eighteen months before escaping for the Continent in 1644. His estates were forfeited and sold in 1653, the same year that he published the first book of Cloria, which recounts by means of a thin fictional veil the fortunes of the Stuarts and their allies throughout the 1640s and 1650s, and ends, in the last instalment published in 1661, with the triumphant restoration of Charles II. Aretina: or, the Serious Romance, which George MacKenzie published in Edinburgh when he was only 22, embeds in its main fictional narrative an account of the Civil Wars in Scotland that is sympathetic to the Stuarts, and the main narrative makes a strong argument against ambitious usurpers. Richard Braithwaite probably fought on the royalist side in the Civil Wars; like Cloria, his Panthalia: A Royal Romance uses fiction to narrate recent English history from a mostly royalist perspective (extending back, in his case, to Elizabeth I), and also like Cloria it ends with a joyful restoration of the monarch—albeit only a prospective one, from a historical point of view, as Panthalia was published in 1659. And Thomas Bayly, though his Herba parietis is not so obviously an account of contemporary events as Herbert’s or Braithwaite’s and is more interested in ethical than political philosophy, recounts in his preface that he scratched it out in Newgate, where he was imprisoned for eight months in 1649 and 1650 as punishment for publishing The Royal Charter Granted unto Kings by God Himself. But if romances of the 1650s and 1660s were more often royalist than not, even the politics of the most avowedly royalist were not as simple as critics have sometimes assumed.2 These romances display little sentimentality about the monarch and the royal family; even Herbert, probably the most personally loyal to the Stuarts of any of the romance writers of the period, criticizes Charles I for his political passivity and Prince Charles for his impetuosity and naivety, and when Cloria (the figure, as the keys to the romance point out, for the English monarchy itself3) extols the virtue of personal

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loyalty above all, her beloved nurse mocks her for her failure of pragmatism (207–11). Braithwaite’s Panthalia is strongly critical of Cromwell for his overweening ambition and self-interest, but in reference to Charles I’s political failure Braithwaite also quotes approvingly John Pym’s famous maxim from the trial of the Earl of Strafford, that ‘though it came from a dangerous Head-piece, If the Prerogative of the King overwhelme the liberty of the People, it will be turned to Tyranny’ (102), and he gives an extremely positive account of John Lambert, an ally of the army throughout the 1650s who drafted the Instrument of Government defining Cromwell’s powers as Lord Protector but later resisted Cromwell’s coronation (118–22). As the old picture of 1650s politics as dominated by polarized oppositions between monarchist and republican, Anglican and nonconformist, conservative and radical, has given way to the recognition of substantial variation within those categories, so it is becoming clearer that ‘royalism’ itself was not a monolithic position, and the political ideology of romance, accordingly, turns out to look simultaneously complex and contingent. Sympathy for mixed government could coexist with strong personal loyalty to the Stuarts and sympathy for Laud, as in Cloria; or as in Eliana and Pandion and Amphigenia, an account of a brutal and ambitious usurper might be followed by another of usurpation by accident, by someone who seemed to have no interest of his own. And contrary to a conception of 1650s romance as part of a royalist cult of secrecy, using its roman à clef form to mystify and thereby convey prestige on the person of the monarch, in fact the genre’s rendition of and commentary on current events was more or less readily available.4 As several recent historians have pointed out, romance’s fictional veil tended to be flimsy, all but decoding itself.5 And when we acknowledge too that overall romance’s commentary on current events was as deliberative as it is polemical, it seems fair to conclude that its writers meant not to withdraw from political debate but to engage with and participate in it. In assessing the political ideology of prose romance in the 1650s and 1660s, it also must be acknowledged that narratives such as Cloria and Panthalia that directly allegorized contemporary political events were only a subset of the larger genre. Romance at mid-century imagined itself a sort of fictional encyclopedia: the preface to Eliana pronounces the genre the most appropriate teacher for matters ‘Oeconomical, Ethethical [sic], Physical, Metaphysical, Philosophycal, Political and Theological as well as Amatory’ (A3v), and characters in Herba parietis and Pandion and Amphigenia not only debate hereditary succession and political sovereignty but also take up numerous other subjects, from household governance to the pitfalls of rhetorical instruction to cross-dressing and court masque. Curiously, the only other emphasis in mid-century romance consistent enough to rival the tendency toward coded contemporary political history was its fascination with histories more remote. Roger Boyle turned to Plutarch and Livy (sometimes via direct quote or paraphrase) to rework the histories of Hannibal, Scipio, and Spartacus in Parthenissa; Robert Boyle’s Theodora took its narrative from an old martyrology; John Bulteel’s Birinthea returned to Herodotus, sometimes via Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène, ou Le Grand Cyrus, to tell the story of Cyrus the Great; and Hester Pulter borrowed from the 1637 The Life and Death of Mahomet, The Conquest of Spaine, Together with the Rysing and Ruine of the

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Sarazen for the main plot of The Unfortunate Florinda.6 All of these narratives were fascinated by charismatic leaders with a tendency toward absolutism, but such a fascination could hardly be called royalist only; indeed Roger Boyle, whose Parthenissa was probably the best known of all the mid-century romances, was, like Herbert, part of the royalist exilic community in Paris but also spent most of the 1650s in Cromwell’s employ, leading the pro-civilian government faction (in opposition to Braithwaite’s hero Lambert) that tried to crown him king. This picture of revolutionary prose romance as broad in its subject matter and complex in its political and philosophical ideas contradicts still-operative ideas about the genre as aesthetically outdated, clearly on its last legs before it gave way to the novel, and as politically naive and sentimental in contrast to hard-headed Hobbesian royalism or the pragmatic republicanism of the 1650s.7 But in fact this more complex portrait is quite consistent with that of early modern romance more generally, which it both extends and revises. The surge in the production of English romances in the 1650s and 1660s coincided almost exactly with the production of similar romances in France, especially those of Scudéry and Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de la Calprenède, which were translated into English almost as soon as they appeared in French; and the subsiding of the genre in England corresponded too with the almost complete ascendance in 1660s France of the shorter and formally more dramatic nouvelle. Prose romance was a much more vigorous genre in France in the 1630s and 1640s than in England (in the 1630s, the influence of French romance in England was mainly on court drama), and if English royalists began to catch on to the trend in the 1650s, part of the reason was surely that the French genre in English hands gestured toward remembrance of the exiled royalist community in Paris, serving as a political sign of solidarity via genre.8 At the same time, however, post-heroic French romance tended to come out against the absolutist state represented by Mazarin and in favour of mixed government, and Scudéry’s protofeminist narratives especially depicted a world of competing interests and claims.9 To the extent that French romance was a model and an intertext for English romance, it offered a range of political ideas and affiliations, and such complex manoeuvres as Birinthea’s reworking at once of Xenophon’s Cyropedia and Scudéry’s Artamène, ou le Grand Cyrus still await their critical due. Probably even more significant than contemporary French narrative, as a model for ideological complexity in mid-century romance, was older English romance. Drawing on narratives as ancient as Heliodorus’ Aethiopika and as recent and controversial as Ariosto’s 1532 Orlando furioso, Philip Sidney’s 1580s Arcadia decisively affiliated romance’s long-standing generic tendency toward irony with the Tacitean, ‘politic’, reason of state theory brought to England in the late sixteenth century by the work of Lipsius and Guicciardini, among others. As I have argued elsewhere, Arcadia’s demystificatory treatment of self-interest prods readers to recognize that royal succession is as much about politics as about love or inherent worth, and to remember that erotic love in romance has always functioned in part as a code for other kinds of selfinterested desire.10 Sidney’s extremely prestigious example rendered romance in England available for complex analysis of the relation between pragmatic or demystified

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and idealist approaches to politics and ethics, and his niece Mary Wroth perceived this potential and exploited it. Wroth’s two-part Urania self-consciously juxtaposes one kind of plot, a classic Heliodoran one centred on the constancy of Wroth’s royal heroine (buffeted by fate and by the moral failings of others but staunch in her singular virtue), to another that is characterized by multiplicity and adaptability (epitomized by a counter-heroine who defends her own change in love and counsels pragmatism). With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Wroth’s canny encapsulation of the dichotomous plot alternatives available to romance in the early seventeenth century signalled a historical transition, as romance of the revolutionary period shifted consistently to the second kind of plot. If by the late 1640s and into the 1650s romance often mirrored the tension between idealist principle and pragmatic accommodation characteristic of royalist ideology, this tendency probably owed as much to the genre’s history as to revolutionary royalism—which is to say, the genre was set up by its recent history to take on this contemporary ambivalence. Indeed, recognition of romance’s association with tempered or ironized idealism in the 1650s helps make sense of one of its central concerns in the revolutionary period, with the concept of interest—a concept the importance of which has only recently been recognized, but for which, in fact, romance served as a central forum of debate. Interest (often understood as synonymous with reason of state) had entered English political and philosophical thought especially through the importation of Tacitean, politic ideology in the late sixteenth century, but it was newly popularized for the revolutionary period by Henri, Duc de Rohan’s Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome (1638; English trans. 1640, 1641, 1663). Rohan redefined interest, which had earlier tended to be seen as the instrument of cynical, dissimulating (albeit effective) courtiers, as a rational analytical tool. As Rohan declared on the first page of his treatise, in what became virtually a maxim in revolutionary England, ‘interest never lies’, either to the agent of an action or to others trying to interpret and respond to that action, and this meant that to determine interest correctly was to know the best way of proceeding at any given moment (1). In Albert Hirschman’s formulation, interest at the time was perceived as a way to render an agent’s motives transparent, and transparency itself, in a context in which politics was treated with suspicion, was in turn a kind of virtue—so that a concept that had formerly signalled dissimulation and self-advantage came almost paradoxically also to represent their opposite (50). In the 1640s and 1650s interest also widened its conceptual range, from politics to theology and popular ethics; as Charles Herle remarked in his 1655 moral-philosophical treatise Wisdomes Tripos, it was a word ‘of late come much into use among us’ (169), signalling an up-to-date, sophisticated conception of social and political behaviour. Twentiethcentury studies of ‘Cavalier poetry’ have juxtaposed royalist themes of camaraderie and love against parliamentary views of personal relationships as interested and expedient, but historians have more recently shown that the language of interest was taken up across the political spectrum. In the late 1650s, republicans denounced monarchical systems for their foundation in ‘distinct interest’, as opposed to the Harringtonian ‘interest of the whole’, while royalists perceived pernicious self-interest in Cromwell’s

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assumptions of the trappings of monarchy or praised the ‘balanced interests’ of mixed government.11 In romance of the revolutionary period, the language of interest became so common as to seem almost an attribute of the genre. Lovers in romance proclaimed their undying interest in one another; male rivals for women or for political prizes explicitly acknowledged and sympathized with one another’s interest; in one of the genre’s longstanding favourite plot dilemmas, the choice between faith to a childhood friend or a new lover was now expressed in terms of the protagonist’s competing interests. In Sidneian fashion, the language of interest became a means of analogizing or comparing different kinds of desire or ambition, even as it also constituted a subject of investigation in itself; so the characters in Eliana, for instance, wonder whether it is possible or ethically necessary to separate self-interested ‘Lust’ from other-interested ‘Love’, or Cyrus and one of his generals in Birinthea debate to what extent a ruler’s individual self-interest is compatible with his proper exercise of power over others. Such enquiry, I have been suggesting, was part of a larger conversation about interest in the period, which in general terms could be seen to engage central political and moral-philosophical questions of the revolutionary period: were communities held together by mutual interests or by affective ties of love and loyalty? And more fundamentally, were affective ties categorically different from interests or only one version of them? Romance was certainly of its moment when, as in Cloria or Panthalia, it narrated contemporary events with a political spin; but it was equally part of the discourse of its time when it considered interest more abstractly, as an element of a love relationship or in opposition to the ties of friendship. As an example of the moral-political connotations adhering to an ostensibly apolitical romance, I turn briefly to Theodora by Robert Boyle, brother of Roger and eventually a famous chemist and natural philosopher. By the time Boyle wrote Theodora, in the late 1640s or early 1650s when he was still preoccupied with moral philosophy of a soft royalist bent, he was all but saturated with romance. In his autobiography, drafted about the same time as Theodora, Boyle says that during his teenage years in Europe he read romances gluttonously, and when he returned to England he wrote a treatise on the genre, now lost, probably at least in part in response to his brother Roger’s work on Parthenissa (which Robert was reading in instalments before it was published). When he was a boy, Boyle writes in his autobiography, his romance reading led to what he calls ‘raving’, a dangerous submission to fancy or imagination in which he went ‘a-gadding’ and ‘roving’ off learning’s proper path.12 In much of his moral philosophy one of the great dangers is hypocrisy, best described as a sort of tool of politic ideology, roughly equivalent to Tacitean dissimulation, by which one cloaks one’s private, self-interested goals. For Boyle the most damaging aspect of hypocrisy, oddly, is not its deceptiveness toward others or self but its tendency to distract its practitioners with ‘by-ends’, producing social disorder and irrationality.13 Boyle seems to follow here an ancient moral-philosophical metaphor, in which the virtuous life path is unitary and collective, and detours are problematic, in the end, mainly because they are detours, because they separate people from others and divert

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them from their goals. Boyle’s assessment of politic hypocrisy is strikingly similar to his fear of romance: both induce a self-focused, anti-teleological oblivion, in which rational narrative structure seems to disappear. By his account, romance would seem to have been set up for politic ideology by its intrinsic nature, its very indulgence of such selfish ‘by-ends’ as imagination and pleasure. This was, of course, a long-standing judgement of romance and indeed of all fiction, for indulging fancy at the expense of reason, and it reminds us of how readily romance lent itself to being set in opposition, in the popular perception, to the values of the virtuous commonwealth. For Theodora, then, Boyle provocatively chose a genre associated in his own mind with self-interest in order to tell the story of a character presumably as far from selfinterest as anyone could be, the early Christian martyr Theodora. Though it might be ‘a kind of Profaneness, to transform a piece of Martyrology into a Romance’, writes Boyle, he is following the precedents of Livy and Plutarch in bringing historical characters to speak, and thereby persuading readers to embrace the virtue they read about (A6r). Throughout the narrative, Theodora and the Roman soldier Didymus, who falls in love with her and saves her from the brothel where his commander has sent her to shake her Christian faith, struggle over the moral significance of self-interest. Ultimately the romance endorses Theodora’s absolute self-renunciation, but along the way it raises objections that trouble its ostensible moral absolutism and destabilize its ending. Probably the most complex of these occurs in a conversation Theodora has with her friend Irene after Didymus rescues her from the brothel. Although in truth she is going to sacrifice herself to God by offering herself up to the Romans for execution, she plans to tell the Romans that she is sacrificing herself to win Didymus’ pardon, so they will believe she is acting out of gratitude—a motivation they can understand and respect, which will garner greater respect for the Christians than her enthusiasm for God ever could (85–6). Disturbed, interestingly, on Didymus’ behalf rather than God’s, Irene objects that gratitude ought to be ‘a relative thing’, inspired by and directed toward a particular person, and assures Theodora that Didymus will not appreciate the gesture (86). Theodora retorts that real friendship is based on virtue, not ‘sympathy and inclination’ (90), but Irene’s objection stands: in the performance of her virtue, Theodora is denying the ethical claims that her friends make on her, and is thus displaying a kind of vanity, a moral righteousness and self-love, when she means most to deny it. Perhaps, in this case, what Theodora defines as self-interest, ‘sympathy and inclination’, might better be described as interest in, or for, another. The romance portrays additional, equally nuanced quandaries and deliberations on the subject, but this one is enough to suggest the ethical subtlety with which Boyle tempers Theodora’s principled opposition to self-interest. In a sense, Boyle uses his martyrology against itself, to show the complexities inherent in any adherence to an ideal. So too he engages romance in a kind of self-critique: initially we assume that Boyle’s purpose is for romance to redeem itself as the frame for a story of martyrdom, and as the characters reassert self-interest it might seem that true to form the romance has failed. But when self-interest turns out to have something of a moral claim itself, it appears instead that

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romance’s tendency to destabilize the ideals it also celebrates may be how it lays claim to virtue. Robert Boyle’s philosophical subtlety may have been unusual, but other romances shared Theodora’s sense of the redeeming complexities inherent both in self-interest and in romance as a genre. Like Theodora and Didymus and virtually every writer of romance in the period, Roger Boyle worries in Parthenissa that masculine heterosexual love, traditionally construed as the pursuit of an object, is tainted by the most limiting kind of self-interest, and in classic Ciceronian fashion he proposes friendship between men as an alternative. Strikingly, this conventional argument attributes not only moral but narrative ‘freedom’ to the hero who puts his male friend before his female beloved: heterosexual love, says Boyle in the dedication of Parthenissa’s first book, stops his narrative in its tracks, but friendship between men propels the story forward.14 Similarly, in Herba parietis, Bayly includes a fascinating episode in which the merchant Corderius gives up his profession because it is too acquisitive, then approaches the lady Fortunata with the proposal of a loving but sexless marriage, to which proposal she consents, and the couple thereafter spend the rest of their lives offering help to the suffering. Before he proposes, though, Corderius asks Fortunata both whether she can love him and also whether her love can have ‘any Influence upon my person’ (74). By way of an argument reminiscent of Irene’s in Theodora, Corderius recasts the relation between romantic heterosexual love and self-interest, suggesting not that the ethical lover must repudiate self-interest, but rather that he must redefine it such that it might inhere not in loving as traditionally defined (the attainment of an object) but rather in the state of being loved, which in turn, we are to suppose, provides a powerful motive toward care for others. Defining self-interest in this way, Bayly would have us believe, transforms Fortune from Machiavelli’s strumpet, deserving of the most vicious subjugation for her constant attempt to steal the power of men’s will from them, to a chaste and loving helpmeet. As even these brief examples suggest, mid-century romance did not simply paste the language of interest onto its traditional plots, but instead construed the subject of interest as a problem in itself. Clearly in this respect it was pondering to what extent our self-interest could be said to make an ethical claim on others and on ourselves, and whether martyrdom was not after all an act of self-indulgence—both questions with obvious relevance to the events of the late 1640s, especially for royalists wondering what ends the execution of Charles I had served. The answers provided by romance were never simple. In the most influential recent scholarly account of royalist romance, Victoria Kahn argues that 1650s romance was taking an instrumentalist, even cynical, stance toward its traditional faith in love as the glue of political relationships, collapsing the traditional opposition between passions and interests in favour of the idea that passions themselves could usefully be treated as interests.15 According to Philip Major’s summary of this argument, a conflict in royalist ideology between traditional, affectbased politics and newer politic conceptions of the state and its actors was ‘displaced’ into romance, so that a crisis in royalist ideology became also a crisis in romance as a genre.16 By the 1640s in England, I have suggested, interest had lost its exclusive

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identification with politic thought and broadened its discursive range and moral connotations, such that it might even seem as applicable to love as to political advantage. But to the extent that romance adopted an attitude of politic calculation and instrumentalism toward the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s—and Kahn is certainly right to recognize this attitude in such explicit political allegories as Cloria and Panthalia17—I would argue that romance, again, had been ironic about its ideals at least as early as Sidney and Ariosto, if not Heliodorus. Its complex stance on interest and idealism in the 1650s, rather than being seen to register a generic (or a political) crisis, might be accounted for as consistent with romance’s broader generic history. In fact, by the start of the revolutionary period romance had already been established at least in its ‘high’ versions as a politic genre, associated with political demystification and pragmatism, and what ought to distinguish these mid-century narratives for us— and in turn, the royalist ideology to which they contribute—is not their late humanist, reason-of-state politics but rather their efforts to make the insights of such politics more compatible with ethical idealism. Romance, then, became compelling in the revolutionary period at least in part because it offered a forum for a varied and flexible royalist consideration of interest, a concept that in these decades served as the focus for political and moral-philosophical discussion across the ideological spectrum of such problems as the relation between individual and community and the nature of political bonds. Rather than marking a crisis for the genre, the prevalence of interest in romance flowed logically, as it were, from its generic trajectory. Interest was a subject that in its particular mid-century manifestations romance was all but destined to take up. And there is one more major reason, I will argue in the last section of this chapter, that romance achieved such currency in the 1650s and 1660s, because it sought to rehabilitate the narrative genre of history. As I noted earlier, broadly speaking there can be said to be two subgroups within romance of the revolutionary period, coded political allegories or romans à clef of contemporary events, and narratives that recapitulated and revised classical or other well-known histories. The histories resorted to by this latter group did not tend to be direct allegories of contemporary British events. Parthenissa, for instance, turned to Plutarch and to Raleigh’s History of the World to give a complex (and anachronistic) blended account of Hannibal, Scipio, and Spartacus in which it is difficult to see even implicit connections to Boyle’s own present moment—and at first it might seem that the second group of romances was engaged less with its contemporary context than the first. But the two groups were essentially similar in being forms of history, and in fact, I will argue, both groups took it as one of their main functions to respond to a perceived crisis in historical writing. They did this in quite similar ways, by enlisting fiction to render history, in the dominant French term of the day, again vraisemblable, and thus accountable to the political and moral chaos of its contemporary milieu. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes famously complained that ‘one of the most frequent causes’ of ‘Rebellion in particular against Monarchy’ was ‘the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the ancient Greeks, and Romans’.18 Philip Sidney in his Defense of Poesie, so it turned out, had been right; history, obliged by its fidelity to what really

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happened to describe the victories of the wicked as well as the virtuous, always carried the potential to deliver the wrong moral lesson, and for anyone conversant with classical history, in Hobbes’s view, the events of the 1640s must have seemed just another episode in a long story of rebellion against legitimate authority. If history seemed to some in the 1650s to have failed as moral guide, there was also the sense that it had failed simply as predictive precedent. The writer of the preface ‘To The Reader’ in the 1661 edition of Cloria, for instance, explains that Herbert chose romance over history as his genre because of ‘the multiplicity of strange Actions of [these] Times . . . that exceeded all belief, and went beyond every example in the doing’, and Charles Cotterell writes in the preface to his translation of Cassandre that nothing about La Calprenède’s sensational romance can seem ‘improbable to us, whose eyes have in as short a space been witnesses of such Revolutions, as hardly any Romance, but sure no History can parallel’.19 Historians and critics, probably remembering the sixteenth-century controversy over romance for its infatuation with the supernatural and marvellous, have assumed that Herbert and Cotterell meant to justify their generic choice of romance by drawing a parallel between romance’s affinity for the marvellous and the marvellous events of the 1650s. In fact, however, elite romance had been insisting on its repudiation of magic and the supernatural and its fidelity to verisimilitude at least since Jacques Amyot claimed in the preface to his 1547 French translation of Heliodorus that any romance worthy of admiration must shun the marvellous—a judgement that appeared repeatedly in the prefaces to seventeenth-century romances as a claim to seriousness and sophistication.20 If romance’s appropriateness for telling history in the revolutionary period did not lie in its tendency toward the marvellous, what then accounted for the link between the genres and the flourishing of romance as a historical mode? In his well-known 1670 Treaty on the Origins of Romances, Pierre-Daniel Huet offers a clue. Huet distinguishes what he sees as the two fundamental narrative genres, romance and epic, from one another by narrative approach, on the grounds that epic is the genre of ‘Figures’ to be interpreted, while romance consists essentially of ‘Events and Episodes’, which furnish the reader with one ‘Idea’ after another.21 Epic explains and analogizes, prompting us to put events in relation to one another; romance simply recounts. As has often been remarked, epic rarely appeared during the revolutionary period even as romance proliferated,22 and in the light of observations such as Cotterell’s that the period is characterized by absolutely unprecedented ‘Revolutions’, Huet’s distinction may suggest one reason why not. In a context of contemporary events so strange and marvellous that epic narrative structure could not meet its responsibility to account for them, to establish relation and thereby causality and meaning, romance could at least account for events by listing them, setting one after another in an endless paratactic series. Romance, that is, could tell history that didn’t quite make sense; in a historical moment felt to be without precedent in its climate of chaos, it might serve as a kind of default mode of narration, taking over where epic failed. Huet’s description of romance as a paratactic chain of events without much call for interpretation is in fact a fair description of popular romances such as the 1639

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Clidamas: A Sicilian Tale, or the ever-profitable Legend of Captain Jones by David Lloyd, reprinted six times in the forty years after 1630. But writers of more elite romance were not content either to submit to such a comparatively limited sense of their own function or to cede history to non-meaning, and in the 1650s and 1660s they worked to retool romance into a more useful form of historical narrative. The longer romances of the revolutionary period came to make the New Arcadia look concise: not only did they string episode after episode, frequently offering multiple versions of the same basic narrative, but they framed these episodes as extended ‘discourses’ in the first person, in which characters also commented on others’ narratives and expressed their affections and disappointments. In the preface to her first romance, Ibrahim, which arguably inaugurated the trend in 1650s England toward the extended episodic style of romance, Scudéry complains that some authors, in describing an adventure, note that the hero thought ‘very galiant things’ without ever telling us what they were—but this, Scudéry exclaims, ‘is that alone which I desire to know!’ Without such information, she is unable to tell whether ‘fortune’ or the hero himself was responsible for his adventure, and whether his valour was merely ‘brutish’, driven by animal spirits, or was rather the product of ‘the noblest of Passions’, love or ambition (A4v–A4r). Scudéry’s protest suggests that romance’s overriding concern was not event but motivation, and indeed much of the material that Boyle added to Plutarch, or Bulteel to Xenophon, had to do with their heroes’ passions, the love or envy or disappointment that drove them toward particular actions. The historical romances revisited larger-than-life figures—Spartacus and Hannibal in Boyle, or Cyrus in Bulteel—in order to construct an emotional context that might rationalize and interpret their behaviour. And the genre’s tendency to multiply episodes made it possible to analogize after all: these heroes were not singular exceptions but members of a community, and readers looking to read in accepted historicist fashion could draw parallels and weigh variations for their significance. In 1650s and 1660s romance, historical and roman à clef alike, Huet’s events and episodes and the discourses that interpret them pile up so insistently that the tendency can seem to a modern reader almost compulsive, a sort of anxious defence against the perceived limitations of romance and history. But we can also, I am suggesting, read it more positively, as an effort to establish verisimilitude—or, in the idiom of the latter half of the seventeenth century, vraisemblance. The meaning of the term we are most familiar with is the quality of being ‘probable’ or ‘likely’, a trait that is extremely important to romance, which Huet supposes the most probable of all narrative genres (5). But vraisemblance also carried another connotation. As Gérard Genette argues, in the seventeenth century vraisemblance designated whatever conformed to public opinion, that is, ‘to a body of maxims and presuppositions that constitutes, simultaneously, a vision of the world and a system of values’. Crucially, both logical and moral judgements were thought to proceed from the same source; the ideology that vraisemblance expressed and prescribed upheld both what was likely and what was right. As an example Genette offers Georges de Scudéry’s 1637 objection to Corneille’s Le Cid, that in a narrative conforming to vraisemblance, a woman should not marry her father’s murderer not only because she would be unlikely to do so, because such a

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choice of husband by a sane woman seemed impossible to imagine, but also because it was something she should not do in the moral sense, since such a marriage would violate her duty to her father.23 In this double aspect, of course, vraisemblance addressed both of the perceived limitations of historical writing in the 1650s, its failures of probability and of moral instructiveness. The fiction that romance added to history in this period made history, we might say, more properly historical. By motivating and contextualizing action, romance made it intelligible; even more importantly, romance as history reassured readers that social and political behaviour was still best comprehended in a moral framework. Perhaps counterintuitively, in romance of the revolutionary period, this emphasis on vraisemblance as a narrative value produced not closure but a consistent failure, or refusal, to end. Aretina stops in mid-episode with an inset story; in Eliana the title character’s lover is interrupted only a few pages from the end when he is finally about to tell his own history, which presumably would have at last explained the romance’s title. Parthenissa concludes its sixth book without any resolution to the story of its heroine (who in his source text, as Boyle reminded readers in the book’s dedication, dies); Crowne’s narrator announces at the end of Pandion and Amphigenia that he finds himself unable to bring all his narrative lines to conclusion; and Birinthea concludes right after its hero Cyrus has delivered a soliloquy lamenting his uncertainty about whether Birinthea loves him. One ready explanation for this formal openendedness is the intrusion of real life: in theory, perhaps, the new, interest-based view of politics could be reconciled with traditional romance notions of virtue, and characters could be shown to be moral actors. But to the extent that romance plots were royalist allegories, their writers could not see their way clear to resolution until after 1660. This argument might make sense in regard to Cloria, to which Herbert added a final book in 1661 representing Charles II’s return to England. But Eliana, Pandion and Amphigenia, Birinthea, and the last book of Parthenissa, none of them as explicitly allegorical of contemporary events as Cloria, were all published after the Restoration, which suggests that something besides political despair or frustration was at issue. In the preface to the 1655 edition of Parthenissa, Roger Boyle explains that romances such as his, retelling well-known histories, are necessary because it is ‘impossible that there should be but one Truth’ to any given historical event (B1v). Boyle’s political loyalties in the 1650s were complicated—after the execution of Charles I, he was expected to dissociate himself from the new regime and follow his brothers to France, but according to popular rumour he was accosted by Cromwell and reminded that only the new Protestant regime could secure his family holdings in Ireland, and as a member of Henry Cromwell’s inner circle in the later 1650s he led the faction, as I have already noted, to crown Oliver. (At the Restoration, after he had published the bulk of Parthenissa, he so quickly ingratiated himself with Charles II that he was created Earl of Orrery in September 1660.) Boyle’s position on multiple truths might be read cynically, as a justification of political expedience. But as a claim for the significance of perspective, it affords us an important view of the proliferation of episodes and discourses that substitute for closure in romance. For Boyle perhaps the best one

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could hope for was serial truth or versions of truth, and the presumption of good faith—or, in other words, vraisemblance. In keeping with a long-established view of royalism, one historian has recently argued that royalist ideology ‘attempted to define a straightforward identity hierarchy in which you were either in or out’, ‘a set of binary roles and behavioural models’.24 But to the extent that romances of the revolutionary period were royalist—and overall we would have to conclude that they were—they were royalist in a different way. Looking forward from the late 1640s and 1650s or, just as often, untriumphantly backward from after the Restoration, they did not think in simple oppositions. On the contrary, their most characteristic technique was to ramify and reconsider. If this was at times an avoidance tactic, in keeping with the strategic ambiguities of both romance and politic ideology, it also led to a complexity and rigour not consistent with romance’s reputation as a wishful or escapist genre.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Kirkman, ‘To the Reader’, A4v. See e.g. Potter, Secret Rites, 107–9; Smith, Literature and Revolution, 239. See e.g. Cloria, ‘To the Reader’, A2r. On romance and the royalist aesthetic of secrecy, see Potter, Secret Rites, esp. 109; see also Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation. See Smith, Literature and Revolution, 242; Major, ‘ “A Credible Omen” ’, 409. For Pulter’s sources, see Herman, ‘Lady Hester Pulter’s’. For seventeenth-century romance as aesthetically and ideologically exhausted, see, for instance, McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel. Roger and Robert Boyle and Percy Herbert were all in Paris during parts of the late 1640s and 1650s; Roger Boyle dedicated individual books of Parthenissa to members of the royalist community in Paris, including (the last book) Henrietta Maria. For the politics of French romance, see Harth, Ideology and Culture, and Bannister, Privileged Mortals. For Tacitean ‘reason of state’ thought in the late sixteenth century, see Burke, ‘Tacitus’; Dzelzainis, ‘Bacon’s “Of Dissimulation” ’; Levy, ‘Hayward, Daniel’; and Salmon, ‘Stoicism and Roman Example’. For the extension of this ideology into the seventeenth century, see Tuck, Philosophy and Government. For Arcadia and politic thought, see Zurcher, Seventeenth-Century Romance, 21–6. For the Cavalier aesthetic, the canonical source is Miner, The Cavalier Mode; for more recent discussions of interest and pragmatism in revolutionary politics, see Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 2–3, 47–8; Dzelzainis, ‘Ideas in Conflict’, 36–40; and Mayers, 1659. Robert Boyle, The Life, i. xxi; for Boyle’s use of raving, see also Harwood, Introduction to Boyle, Early Essays, xlix. For hypocrisy and ‘by-ends’, see Robert Boyle, ‘Aretology’, in Early Essays, 108–13. Roger Boyle, Parthenissa (1655), A2v; on friendship in Boyle, see Zurcher, SeventeenthCentury Romance, 132–5. Kahn, ‘The Passions and the Interests’. Major, ‘ “A Credible Omen” ’, 409; see also Kahn, ‘Reinventing Romance’, 630.

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17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Kahn, ‘Reinventing Romance’. Hobbes, Leviathan, ch. 29, 225. La Calprenède, Cassandra, A4v. For Amyot, see Hardee, ‘Toward a Definition’, 28. Huet, A Treatise, 5–6. See Tranter, ‘Samuel Sheppard’, and Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’. Welch, ‘Epic Romance’, has recently argued for ‘a little burst of Cavalier epics’, but besides Cowley’s Davideis and Davenant’s Gondibert (which, as Salzman notes, is probably closer to romance than epic, 220), all the epics that he cites are translations. 23. Genette, ‘Vraisemblance and Motivation’, 239–41. 24. de Groot, Royalist Identities, 94.

WORKS CITED Bannister, Mark. Privileged Mortals: The French Heroic Novel, 1630–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Barclay, John. John Barclay his Argenis, trans. Robert Le Grys. London, 1628. Bayly, Thomas. Herba parietis. London, 1650. Boyle, Robert. The Martyrdom of Theodora, and Didymus. London, 1687. ——. The Life of the Author, The Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch. 2nd edn. 6 vols. London, 1772. ——. The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle, ed. and intro. John T. Harwood. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Boyle, Roger. Parthenissa, A Romance in Four Parts. London, 1655. ——. Parthenissa, A Romance, The Last Part. London, 1669. Braithwaite, Richard. Panthalia, or, The Royal Romance. London, 1659. Bulteel, John. Birinthea, A Romance. London, 1664. Burke, Peter. ‘Tacitus, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 479–98. Crowne, John. Pandion and Amphigenia. London, 1665. Davenant, William. Gondibert, An Heroick Poem. London, 1651. Dzelzainis, Martin. ‘Bacon’s “Of Simulation and Dissimulation” ’, in Michael Hattaway (ed.), A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, 233–40. ——. ‘Ideas in Conflict: Political and Religious Thought during the English Revolution’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 32–49. Eliana. London, 1661. Genette, Ge´rard. ‘Vraisemblance and Motivation’, trans. David Gorman. Narrative 9 (2001), 239–58. Groot, Jerome de. Royalist Identities. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Hardee, A. Maynor. ‘Toward a Definition of the French Renaissance Novel’. Studies in the Renaissance 15 (1968), 25–38. Harth, Erica. Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.

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Heliodorus. Histoire aethiopique de Heliodorus, trans. Jacques Amyot. Paris, 1547. Herbert, Percy. The Princess Cloria, or, The Royal Romance. London, 1661. Herle, Charles. Wisdomes Tripos. London, 1655. Herman, Peter. ‘Lady Hester Pulter’s The Unfortunate Florinda: Romance, Rape, and the Politics of Geography’. Renaissance Quarterly 63 (2010), 1208–46. Hirschman, Albert. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Holberton, Edward. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Huet, Pierre-Daniel. A Treatise of Romances and their Original [Traitte de l’origine des romans]. London, 1672. Ingelo, Nathaniel. Bentivolio and Urania. London, 1660. ——. Bentivolio and Urania, the Second Part. London, 1664. Kahn, Victoria. ‘Reinventing Romance, or the Surprising Effects of Sympathy’. Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002), 625–61. ——. ‘The Passions and the Interests in Early Modern Europe: The Case of Guarini’s Il pastor fido’, in Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 217–39. Kirkman, Francis. Cassandra the Fam’d Romance, trans. Charles Cotterell. London, 1661. ——. ‘To the Reader’, The Honour of Chivalry (anon.), 2nd edn. London, 1671. La Calprene`de, Gauthier de Costes, Sieur de. Cassandra. 1661. Levy, F. J. ‘Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History in England’. Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987), 1–34. MacKenzie, George. Aretina, or, The Serious Romance. Edinburgh, 1660. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Major, Philip. ‘ “A Credible Omen of a More Glorious Event”: Sir Charles Cotterell’s Cassandra’. Review of English Studies 60 (2009), 406–30. Mayers, Ruth E. 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth. Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press, 2004. Miner, Earl. The Cavalier Mode from Jonson to Cotton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Patterson, Annabel. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984. Pigeon, Rene´e (ed.). Theophania, Or, Several Modern Histories Represented by Way of Romance, and Politickly Discours’d Upon. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1999. Potter, Lois. Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Pulter, Hester. Poems Breathed Forth by the Nobel Hadassas and The Unfortunate Florinda. Leeds University Library, Brotherton MS Lt q 32. Rivall Friendship. Newberry Library, Case MS folio Y 1565.R52. Rohan, Henri, Duc de. A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, trans. Henry Hunt. Paris, 1640. Salmon, J. H. M. ‘Stoicism and Roman Example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. Journal of the History of Ideas 50 (1989), 199–225.

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Salzman, Paul. ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 215–30. Scude´ry, Madeleine de. Ibrahim, or the Illustrious Bassa: An Excellent new Romance, trans. Henry Cogan. London, 1652. ——. Artamenes, or The Grand Cyrus, trans. F. G. London, 1653–5. Sidney, Philip. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The Old Arcadia, ed. Jean Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. ——. The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia: The New Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Tranter, Kirsten. ‘Samuel Sheppard’s Faerie King and the Fragmentation of Royalist Epic’. Studies in English Literature 49 (2009), 87–103. Tuck, Richard. Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Welch, Anthony. ‘Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War’. Modern Philology 105 (2008), 570–602. Wroth, Mary. The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1995. ——. The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts and completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1999. Zurcher, Amelia. Seventeenth Century Romance: Allegory, Ethics, and Politics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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QUAKERS AND THE CULTURE OF PRINT IN THE 1650S

....................................................................................................... KATE PETERS

In the spring of 1653, the Puritan divine Richard Baxter encountered a pamphlet so horrifying that he concluded it was written from ‘the mouth of the Divel’, and he hurried to refute it in print. He did not recognize the authors, who were ‘many’ and ‘not worth the naming’, although Baxter was scandalized at their claim that they wrote ‘from the Spirit of God’, and he fretted that it would be ‘judged a great weaknesse in mee, to regard the words of such men’ by engaging with them in print. Although Baxter had not encountered the authors before, they were, of course, Quakers, and Baxter later recalled in his autobiography that this was ‘the first of their Books (as far as I can remember) that I had ever seen’.1 Within weeks, the relative anonymity of the pamphleteers would be replaced by collective notoriety, as Quaker pamphlets increased in quantity and uniformity, their authors declaring not only that they wrote ‘from the Spirit of the Lord’ but that they were those whom ‘the people of the world call a Quaker’.2 Quaker publishing in the 1650s was impressively prodigious. From a handful of publications in 1652, Quaker preachers rapidly identified printed pamphlets as an important facet of their proselytizing mission, ‘very servisable’ both for ‘weake frends’ and for ‘convinceing the world’; ‘the truth’, as Richard Farnworth observed in February 1653, ‘doth spread much abroad by the Bookes that is in Printe’.3 Output increased: over 100 Quaker titles were published in 1655, and although there was a decrease in publications in the aftermath of the James Nayler crisis of 1656, nearly 400 Quaker pamphlets were published during the intense political excitement of 1659–60, approximately 10 per cent of all published titles at that time.4 Such a high profile understandably attracted the attention of contemporaries, who denounced the sheer quantity of Quaker tracts as ‘Satan’s library’, craftily circulated ‘to infect the nation’, ‘which like a Gangrene spreads more and more’.5 This reputation stuck with historians, who note

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the ‘abundance’ of their writing, and their ‘trust in the efficacy of the printed word’ to spread their ideas.6 Yet the sheer prominence and ubiquity of Quaker pamphlets are in some respects problematic. Quaker pamphlets are easy to identify as such: printers and publishers were quick to exploit the hostile ‘Quaker’ epithet, and from mid-1653 the word ‘Quaker’ often appeared in large letters on title pages, bestowing upon their publications a clear corporate identity.7 Quakers were also precocious in collecting and cataloguing their tracts and their letters, which has led to impressive survival rates and the preservation of a substantial corpus of Quaker material.8 This has had a profound influence on subsequent interpretations of ‘Quaker writing’ as a homogeneous and distinctive phenomenon, most clearly evident, perhaps inevitably, within denominational histories of the movement, which explore Quaker publications in order to trace the teleological development of Quaker religious thought, and particularly the transition from an enthusiastic movement to an established, quietist church: ‘early’ Quaker writing is thus considered in the light of the later Quaker canon.9 Yet historians and literary scholars of the period have also tended to delineate Quaker writing as a discrete category, arguing that Quakers pursued a distinctive style of writing and speaking which was profoundly linked to their enthusiastic religious views. Hence Quaker insistence on plain style, the use of ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ as a form of address, the refusal to swear oaths, and the insistence on writing and speaking as literally God-given utterances were expressed in a distinctive Quaker style which served to emphasize the unique and eccentric nature of the Quaker movement.10 These arguments reinforce the widely held view that Quakers were feared and reviled by contemporaries. In Barry Reay’s enduring analysis, it was popular fear and hostility towards the Quakers’ religious enthusiasm and social radicalism which helped to usher in the Stuart monarchy in 1660; similarly, Quakers and their writings were alien and alienating to the rest of society.11 Unsettling though the Quakers clearly were to contemporaries, however, it is increasingly clear that they were not universally reviled; they functioned successfully within their communities as local office-holders, merchants and tradesmen, and esteemed and trustworthy neighbours.12 Equally, it is important to acknowledge that their writing and publishing functioned successfully within the broader paradigm of writing in the English Revolution. As the ambivalent reaction of Richard Baxter, discussed above, testifies, contemporaries took Quaker publications seriously, and, as will be seen, Quaker authors went to extraordinary lengths to disseminate their writings to carefully identified audiences. Quaker publishing thus flourished within the specific cultural and political circumstances of the 1650s. This chapter will attempt to integrate Quaker pamphleteering into its immediate cultural context, and in so doing will argue, first, that our extraordinarily detailed understanding of how Quakers used the press can tell us much about the impact and insinuation of print into English society more broadly in the 1650s, and, second, that the essentially dialogic nature of the Quakers’ writing should challenge a prevailing view of the Quakers as eccentric, unsettling outsiders.

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PRINT CULTURE T H E 1650 S

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.................................................................................................................. Quaker authors described and availed themselves of a print culture which was firmly integrated into oral cultures. Printed pamphlets were enthusiastically espoused by the itinerant preaching ministers as a logical extension of their preaching. ‘Preaching is publishing’, wrote William Tomlinson in 1653; and many early pamphlets emphasized that publication in print enabled a wider exposure.13 In 1652, after the first consignment of 300 Quaker pamphlets was sent from the printer in London for distribution in Yorkshire, one of the most prolific early Quaker authors, Richard Farnworth, sent some copies to Margaret Fell in Lancashire, describing enthusiastically how ‘frends’ in Yorkshire had read them out loud in churchyards and market places; another Quaker author described pinning up printed papers on church doors which ‘many people read’ and were ‘convinced it was truth and proved by Scripture . . . they see a great deceite in their Priest’.14 Pamphlets were distributed in the expectation that they would be visible and read aloud in public places, especially churches and courtrooms. The distinction between manuscript and printed papers was also minimal: authors often referred to the circulation of ‘papers’ among Quaker audiences without specifying whether they were manuscript or print: ‘send a coppie of this paper to frends . . . in every place in those parts, to be read at their meetings’.15 In 1654 Richard Farnworth, told Quaker contacts in London that he had no immediate plans to write any more ‘for the presse’, but was still moved ‘to write Abundante and send Abroad in writeing, which is of great use’.16 Quaker authors, for the most part itinerant preachers travelling around England, Wales, and Scotland, moved interchangeably between print and manuscript, according to need, circumstance, or opportunity. ‘I have sent a paper’, wrote William Dewsbery to the formidable Quaker leader Margaret Fell, instructing her: ‘when thou art free it may be read amongst friends; here is what was done at the assizes, I sent thee it in writing; not knowing [if] it came to thee I have sent one in print’.17 Print was not always necessary to consolidate a written account, though: one paper, rather pointedly entitled ‘Away with your decetefull Marchandize, and all your Coseninge’, was read ‘at the Crosse in Bawtry [Yorkshire] uppon the ffare day, which the world call Martinemesse day’; and subsequently copied and circulated to other Quakers.18 The circulation of written material, including the expression of Quakers’ ideas, and news of successful preaching, imprisonments, and disputations, clearly helped to define and reinforce the nascent Quaker community, which included a growing number of disparate groups and remote meetings across an increasingly wide geographical area, linked up by itinerant preachers known as the ‘First Publishers of Truth’. In late April 1654, two itinerant Cumbrian Quakers, Edward Burrough and Christopher Atkinson, wrote to James Nayler from Berwick (Northumberland), requesting that he or Anthony Pearson (who lived near Durham) send a copy of their letter ‘into the West to our friends who would be glad to heare of us’. The letter made its way to Gervase Benson

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and George Taylor in Kendal, Westmorland, and Taylor was instructed to copy it ‘as they had writ it’: accordingly, ‘a true Copie of it’ was forwarded to Margaret Fell at Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire, the gentlewoman who played such a pivotal role in the early organization of the movement.19 Thus news and ideas were exchanged, and friendships reinforced, across a geographical area spanning more than 150 miles. Letters (and printed tracts) also reinforced discipline and sectarian identity. In July 1653 James Nayler wrote to George Fox from the town of Shap in Westmorland, situated on the main highway leading from Kendal to Penrith and Carlisle, and explained that as he had travelled north among Quaker communities he had seen ‘many got up into words and vaine janglings’, which, he worried, ‘leads them out of there condisions’. He asked Fox, who was staying about thirty-five miles south, at Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire, to write to ‘friends on this side of the sands in Westmorland’, in order to ‘put them in mind of it’ and to warn them: ‘some have lost themselves already by it, for mindeing words neglects the power by which they should grow’.20 Nayler’s letter illustrates neatly a key tension for scholars of ‘Quaker writing’: expression, for Quakers, came from the Holy Spirit, and Quakers were keen to distinguish between the ‘carnal’ words, or corrupt communication, of scholarship, and the ‘pure’ communication which derived from God. Yet this did not necessarily equate, as some scholars suggest, to a passive mysticism or apocalyptic rhetoric. Quaker writing was also pragmatic and purposeful, and central to the establishment of a coherent, recognizable movement. The circulation of letters, manuscript papers, and printed tracts by Quaker leaders provides an important window into our understanding of scribal communities, and communications, in this period. Much evidence of scribal publication, or manuscript ‘networks’, inevitably focuses on the activities of the gentry, and as such is often understood as a surreptitious means of political subversion or criticism within scholarly or governing classes, often radiating out of London, and as an almost explicit alternative to print.21 The evidence from the early Quaker correspondence broadens our understanding of provincial manuscript networks: print and manuscript operated simultaneously; letters and papers were copied and circulated almost spontaneously, without recourse to professional scribes; and the focus of the Quakers’ polemical ire was local Puritan ministers and magistrates, as much as Westminster governments. Despite the fluidity between printed and manuscript papers, however, the organization required to print and distribute books on the scale undertaken by Quakers reveals much about the parameters of religious publication in the 1650s. Recent scholarship has stressed the material, commercial context of the early modern book trade, whose practitioners depended upon it for their livelihood. Initially, the main publisher of early Quaker books was Giles Calvert, who is usually understood as an ideologically driven ‘radical’ publisher; what is less often emphasized is the sheer scale of his prolific publishing output, which in the 1640s and 1650s was second only to that of Edward Husband and John Wright. An estimated 20 per cent of Calvert’s acknowledged publications were Quaker tracts.22 Although none of Calvert’s papers survive, the

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correspondence generated by Quakers seeking to publish and distribute their work reveals much about the nature of radical religious publishing in this period. Quaker authors deployed an impressive array of strategies in order to distribute their books to appropriate audiences, underlining again the extent to which the Quaker movement emerged into a society in which print was already a diverse and sophisticated medium. As has been suggested already, much of the distribution of Quaker books was public: they were pinned up and read aloud in market places, churchyards, and courtrooms. This very public distribution of their books is reflected in the early financial organization of Quaker publishing. Initially overseen by the gentlewoman Margaret Fell from her Lancashire home at Swarthmoor Hall, Quaker meetings in the north of England collected money in order to fund itinerant preaching, an important initiative which may have enabled travelling Quakers to avoid prosecution as vagrants. The money raised, through what has become known as the Kendal Fund, paid for travel expenses such as clothes, shoes, and horses, expenses for prisoners, as well as postage and printing. This was an important feature of the growth of the early movement, and was probably a practice carried over from the gathered Seeker churches from which the Quaker movement emerged, with a clear element of charity or informal poor relief for poorer Quakers. Quaker ministers were regularly furnished with a supply of books as they set off on itinerant preaching missions. The accountants of the Kendal Fund recorded that Thomas Salthouse received twenty-four copies of one title, and eighteen of another, before setting off on a journey from Lancashire to Plymouth; George Fox was sent eighteen shillings’ worth of books before his trial at Carlisle in 1653.23 It is clear, too, that many books were ephemeral. Richard Clayton boasted that one of his pamphlets, pinned up on a market day in Lurgan, Ireland, stayed up for three or four hours, ‘and many people read it’; a week later, in Legacurry, another ‘did stay up most part of the day and I was moved to speake amongst the people up and downe the market and receved noe persecution’.24 Beyond the clearly oral dimension of Quaker pamphlet distribution lay a more performative element which may usefully be considered as part of the Quakers’ use of gesture, and which reinforces the extent to which printed pamphlets had become an integral part of polemical debate and political argument. Much has been made of Quaker gesture as a means of challenging the worldly authority of ministers and magistrates: the refusal to doff hats and the rejection of other demonstrations of deference were means by which Quakers refuted social hierarchy; Quakers also used language symbolically, worshipping in silence and advocating plain and egalitarian speech.25 Quaker books, too, were used symbolically to challenge those in authority: Puritan ministers complained that Quakers ‘magnify’ their books above the holy Scriptures themselves.26 One Quaker was imprisoned for ‘throwing books’ into the coaches of the magistrates in York; another book was ‘caste to the clerke’ of the court during a trial.27 The presence of soldiers in the public distribution of Quaker tracts is also striking. One author described how his pamphlets were read aloud ‘in the steeple house yards, and in the markets on market days, and some souldiers is made to goe

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along with them and stand by them while they are reading’.28 In 1655, the Quaker author Thomas Aldam described being attacked by an angry crowd of people who tried to seize the books he was handing out in Whitehall; he was rescued by ‘Major Packer’— presumably William Packer—who reportedly told the crowd: ‘whosoever doth strike this man let him look to be stricken; with the sword I give all warneing to let him passe quietly from you’. Packer (usually no friend to the Quakers) asked for a copy of the pamphlet, but allowed Aldam to keep the rest.29 Quaker pamphlets were not surreptitiously distributed behind the backs of those in power; although unlicensed, the presence of the army in their distribution reminds us of the ambiguities of state control over the press in the 1650s. Descriptions of such aggressive distribution, funded by concerted collections of money from local groups, reinforce the view that Quaker publications were deliberately ephemeral, and formed an integral part of a preaching mission which sought to challenge the authority of ministers and magistrates alike. Quaker writing in this context both exemplifies and extends our understanding of what Peter Lake and Steven Pincus have recently termed the ‘post reformation public sphere’: their pamphlets were an integral part of public debates up and down the country about the shape of religious liberty, and they could be used—literally—to start arguments. Yet in addition to public confrontation and audiences, there is also much evidence of private reading, and finer-tuned distribution more redolent of the subscription publications which became common after the Restoration.30 Once again, the authors of Quaker pamphlets were highly sensitive to the proclivities of their audiences, and took great care in communicating these to their fellow Quakers who were in direct contact with the ‘Quaker’ publishers, Giles Calvert, and later Thomas Simmons. In October 1654, the Yorkshire Quaker Richard Farnworth was preaching in Leicestershire, around Swannington, where he described ‘great opposition by the priests and the Baptists’. In a letter to his fellow Quakers Edward Burrough and Francis Howgill, in London, Farnworth described how the Baptists were ‘much troubled’ by their public confrontations with Farnworth and explained that he had been ‘moved by the Eternall spirit’ to write a book against them ‘for the Confounding of their deceipts’. He enclosed the manuscript, along with one other, with his letter, and asked Burrough and Howgill, both experienced Quaker authors currently in London, to oversee their publication. His instructions describe in great detail the local provincial market for Quaker tracts. Farnworth asked for 100 copies of the anti-Baptist pamphlet, and 100 copies of the other, to be sent to Swannington from London by the Atherstone carrier to one Anthony Bickley, a Quaker living in nearby Baddesley, Warwickshire.31 Anthony Bickley was then to return the wholesale cost of the books, via the carrier, to another trusted Quaker, Captain Amor Stoddard in London, who would ‘dischardge the printer’ for the books. That the books would then be sold in the hinterland of the market town of Atherstone is suggested in Farnworth’s further instructions that when all the ‘money cometh upp for the Bookes’, a note of receipt should be sent to Anthony Bickley in order that ‘thinges be kept Cleare’. Farnworth also anticipated a broader audience for his tract, continuing in his letter, ‘you may take off soe many of those two sorts [of pamphlets]

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that should goe to frends as is sent hereaways . . . because so many [Baptists] is amongst them in Yorkshire and those parts, so I shall leave it to you and Captain Stoddard to order’.32 Quaker authors, then, played an important role in assessing the likely market for their own books in a particular locality, and, through contacts with fellow Quakers like Burrough and Howgill as well as locally based figures like Amor Stoddard and Anthony Bickley, communicated with Giles Calvert or Thomas Simmons about their publications. In November 1659, another Quaker author, John Whitehead, similarly embroiled in Lincolnshire in a series of public confrontations with the Manifestarians John Horne and Thomas Moore junior, sent a manuscript to Quakers in London for printing. This was part of a larger disputation. Manifestarians, like the Quakers, rejected the predestinarian tenets of Calvinist Puritanism and argued for the possibility of universal salvation: followers of Manifestarian views, therefore, were clearly likely to be open to Quaker preaching. As John Whitehead described it, his preaching had ‘shaken’ the followers of Horne and Moore, who had sought to ‘pervert’ things by publishing their own account of debates with the Quakers. Whitehead was clearly keen to have his own account published: ‘that it can cleare mee and the truth’.33 Like Farnworth, Whitehead recommended to Quakers in London that his manuscript should be printed, and 300 copies ‘sent downe into this countie’. With the same letter, however, Whitehead enclosed a further ‘short paper’ which he had been ‘moved to write’ to members of the Committee of Safety. He asked again, ‘if the Committee . . . bee yett sitting’ that the paper ‘may speedily bee delivered to them either in writeing or print if you see meete’, and added, ‘if it bee printed and dispersed abroad I desire Thomas Simmons may send downe a hundred for them to Martin Mason on Lincolne and signify the charge of the presse and I shall take care it shall be satisfied’.34 Whitehead’s letter reveals a nuanced understanding of his local book market in Lincolnshire, anticipating a relatively large potential audience for a local religious disputation, and a smaller one for a more ephemeral political, London-based pamphlet. Although he deferred (and appears to have been subjected) to the editorial judgement of his fellow Quakers (‘if you see meete’), he also stressed the general interest attached to his political tract—‘though I felt the spirit reach to other rulers also yet it most nearly Concernes [the Committee of Safety]’—and hence was stressing its relevance, and marketability, to his London contacts. And again the role of Quaker authors in coordinating local distribution is evident: as well as undertaking to ‘satisfy’ the cost of the pamphlets, John Whitehead also arranged for a local Quaker, Martin Mason, to receive and probably distribute the books. Mason was himself a published author of Quaker tracts, and was reported to Roger L’Estrange as a known disperser of Quaker books in 1664.35 These examples reinforce and illuminate much of our current understanding of the early modern book trade, and underline the importance of authors in the publication process.36 Both Farnworth and Whitehead were emphatic about the need for their publications, were confident that they would have a readership, and clearly expected to play a role in overseeing sales and raising the money to cover publication costs. Equally

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important in their accounts are the local distributors, or ‘dispersers’, of Quaker books. Local contacts to whom books could be sent feature prominently in letters between Quaker ministers, and unsurprisingly emphasis was placed on their trustworthiness, in terms of both their discretion and their reliability; it is also striking how many of them were shopkeepers or retailers in their own right.37 We understand relatively little about the provincial book trade in this period, but it seems clear, again, that Quakers operated within cultural paradigms available to them, obtaining books wholesale, directly from the printer or publisher, often on credit, and returning the money once the books had been sold.38 Both Giles Calvert, and more certainly Thomas Simmons, who published exclusively for the Quakers after 1655, enjoyed steady business with the Quakers; Giles Calvert ran a number of regular accounts with local book distributors for the Quakers.39 The regularity of this relationship is made clear in a letter from Margaret Fell in 1656, who, ordering copies of one of her own books to be published, stipulated that they ‘goe forth amongst freinds as the Rist of Books does, the same Quantety to Every place, and as they are Called for soe they may bee prented in Quantety’.40 Quaker authors were thus able to employ a wide range of strategies in order to disseminate their books to their chosen audiences; and these strategies reflected both the integral relationship between oral culture, performance, and print, and the degree to which print culture was already well established within local political and religious cultures of the 1650s. The commercial dimension to Quaker publications is also important. Despite contemporaries’ complaints that their books flew ‘as thick as moths’ up and down the country, Quaker publications were, on the contrary, part of a carefully controlled, well-funded campaign which entailed regular financial arrangements with printers, publishers, and booksellers: there was a clearly defined Quaker (and anti-Quaker) audience who could be relied upon to buy tracts.

QUAKERS, PRINT, AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

.................................................................................................................. The intense awareness on the part of the authors of their readers reminds us of the purposeful nature of Quaker writing. Many scholars have emphasized the apocalyptic, immediate, and prophetic nature of Quaker writing, as an expression of the individual’s relationship with the divine; other important studies have focused on the significance of spiritual autobiography or conversion narrative.41 While this is undoubtedly evident in Quaker writing, however, Thomas Aldam’s early insight that Quaker books were useful for convincing ‘the world’ and ‘weak friends’ alike reminds us that Quaker writing was clearly intended as polemic, and that Quaker authors had a clear sense of purpose in their writing. It is important to stress this. Historical interpretations of the Quakers focus largely on them as apolitical, mystical witnesses of their times, rather than as political participants. For scholars like Barry Reay, in the tradition of

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Christopher Hill, Quakers were symbolic of the failure of the English Revolution of 1649, and, although retaining the social and religious radicalism which so alarmed the gentry, were increasingly disillusioned by worldly politics and retreated into mysticism. For later revisionist scholars, who objected to the over-emphasis placed by Hill and his ilk on radical religious sects in the history of the 1650s, Quakers, although numerically significant, were equally limited by their failure to propose any constitutional proposals along the lines of the Levellers or later republican thinkers.42 In Ruth Meyers’s recent analysis of the restoration crisis of 1659, Quakers rarely ‘descended from the clouds of apocalyptic rhetoric’, and she deplores their political writings in 1659 as ‘at best’ imitations of Leveller writings.43 It is increasingly difficult to maintain this analysis, resting as it does on a separation of apocalyptic thought from political agency, which have been shown to be deeply connected in contemporary thought. Moreover the very act of writing and publishing is indicative of political engagement. Recent scholarship on print culture in the 1650s argues that the mid-seventeenth century represented a transformative moment in the relationship between print and political participation. David Zaret has shown ways in which print fundamentally altered the scope of political petitioning, fostering notions of political accountability, and enabling a public dialogue between political institutions and the English people. Joad Raymond has argued similarly both for the publication of printed newsbooks, and for pamphleteering more generally between 1640 and 1660; in his analysis, the format of the printed pamphlet fostered polemical debate and disputation, mirroring in paper the actual military conflicts of the Civil Wars.44 The alacrity with which Quaker leaders embraced printing in the early 1650s reminds us of the degree to which printing had become embedded within broad political and religious culture over the course of the 1640s. Important Quaker authors were remarkably youthful: in 1652, Richard Farnworth was 22, and Edward Burrough 18. These young men and women, many of them too young to have fought in the wars, had grown up in the 1640s and were remarkably familiar with the mechanisms of printing, and its potentialities. Although they did not offer formal political constitutional solutions to the manifold political lacunae of the Protectorate, Quaker authors sought, via their pamphleteering and preaching activities, a high degree of political and religious participation, which suggests on the contrary a very purposeful campaign in pursuit of religious liberty of conscience as the central facet of any secular political settlement. The following section thus seeks to emphasize the participatory nature of the Quakers’ pamphleteering, and to demonstrate the degree to which it was centred upon a dialogic relationship with magistrates and ministers of Protectorate England. An oft-repeated phrase in many early Quaker tracts, urging readers to ‘be not sayers but doers’, exemplifies this: Quakers sought action rather than deliberation, and their pamphleteering should therefore be understood as practical intervention. A large proportion of early Quaker pamphlets emerged out of local religious disputations between Quakers and Baptist or Independent ministers, such as those described above by Richard Farnworth and John Whitehead. These disputations

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themselves often sprang from the circulation of printed queries which challenged the doctrinal basis of the ministers’ authority, and, although Quaker authors claimed to ‘abhor striving for masterhood in words’, it is clear that they placed a premium on successful religious debates.45 In May 1659 the Quaker minister Alexander Parker described a ‘large meeting’ called by ‘an ancient professor’ in Cambridge who was, he claimed, the uncle of Major-General Desborough. The meeting was a success, according to Parker: both sides had ‘large time to declare the truth without interruption’; when they had finished, ‘a Baptist Teacher stood up and spoke some words, but was soone silent’; then they had some words with ‘another of their Teachers and some others . . . but they had very little to say against what was declared’. As they mounted their horses and were about to go, their opponents ‘had some words with John Crook [another Quaker] about water Baptizme and they were put to prove the Command’; finally, ‘after some little time with them we passed away: I doe beleeve that meeting will prove serviceable.’46 Even allowing for a clearly optimistic self-assessment, Parker’s letter reveals much about Quaker expectations for religious debate. The political status and connections of their religious opponents were of great significance, and often commented upon, and underline the complexities of political and religious lobbying in the mid-seventeenth century.47 Despite the Quakers’ reputation for flamboyant, disruptive religious interventions, and symbolic silences, Parker welcomed the lack of interruption in the debate, and he clearly interpreted the silence of his opponents as a sign of their intellectual defeat; equally, despite the Quakers’ reputed rejection of scriptural authority, they challenged their opponents to prove the truth of their arguments from the Bible. Finally, Parker was emphatic that the meeting would prove ‘serviceable’ in strengthening the Quakers’ cause and winning followers: this was polemic intended to persuade through rational argument and political connection. John Crook was a wealthy Quaker lawyer and justice of the peace; the departure of the Quakers on horseback reminds us of their not inconsiderable social status. This was formal religious disputation which sought moderate and reasoned debate, and precisely the sort of exchange which would be subsequently incorporated into a printed pamphlet disputation.48 A second key element of Quaker publishing in the 1650s which may be viewed as part of an ongoing public dialogue was the publication of Quaker sufferings. Because they were subsequently compiled by Joseph Besse as a composite account published in 1733, Quaker sufferings have been largely studied either as an exercise in martyrology, or as a source which describes the nature of Quaker persecution and the relationship between Quakers and their neighbours.49 But in the 1650s, the publication of sufferings was a form of immediate political petitioning, as Quaker campaigners drew to the attention of the authorities in London the religious persecution carried out by local magistrates and ministers. Quakers were present at the calling of the Barebones and Protectorate Parliaments, and are known to have regularly lobbied Oliver Cromwell about incidences of Quaker ‘persecution’.50 Very soon after the inauguration of Richard Cromwell as Protector in September 1658, Quakers visited him and supplied him with a list of

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all Quakers ‘sufferings’; at the same time, a fifty-page tract was published, which presented a lengthy synopsis of all fines, imprisonments, and distraints of property suffered by Quakers in each county of England over the course of the 1650s. This tract sought to lay the blame, pragmatically, at the feet of England’s national ministry, ‘the greatest troublers of the people in the Courts of the Nation, and the greatest casters in prison in the Nation’, rather than the Protectorate governments, ‘as this following Record doth make mention’: finding fault with local persecutors was a more effective petitioning strategy than attacking the head of state directly.51 When the Rump Parliament was recalled in May 1659, Quaker leaders came to the capital in order to ‘deliver the subscription agt Tythes’ to Parliament; this substantial petition was also accompanied by a broadside listing those who had been ‘imprisoned and persecuted until death’.52 The following spring, Quaker leaders again presented a list of Quaker sufferings to the newly formed Convention Parliament within days of its assembly, but were frustrated by the procedures associated with the Restoration: ‘it is not yet A Conveniant time to present them because they doe not acte Any thing till Charles come’.53 Thus Quakers lobbied each new Parliament, systematically, with evidence of what they argued was unjust religious persecution. An earlier letter, written in 1655, reminds us that the initial purpose for collecting and publishing sufferings aimed at immediate political change, and evidently sprang from the same roots as the petitioning of the 1640s. Two politically savvy Quakers, the former mayor of Kendal, Gervase Benson, and Anthony Pearson, a Durham justice of the peace and political secretary to the MP Sir Arthur Hesilrige, informed Margaret Fell in a letter that they were ‘endeavouringe to gett togeather the sufferings of freinds in the North parts for Tythes’; their purpose ‘for laying open to the people the grounds of the payment of tythes and the ends for which people did give them; and how they have from tyme to tyme diverted them, from the end for which they weare given’.54 Quaker writing, on tithes and the legal repression of Quakers, thus clearly sought to engage, not only with secular political leaders, but with a broader audience more generally defined as ‘the people’. Emphasis was placed on the importance of explaining arguments about the Protectorate’s religious and ecclesiastical policies; published pamphlets were an integral part of Quakers’ campaign to engage with, and challenge these policies. The pamphlet format of the 1650s lent itself to contestation and debate; printed petitions were associated with the accountability of government to ‘the people’.55 That Quakers embraced this medium with such enthusiasm reminds us of the centrality to them of public dialogue and engagement, and this is key to their political engagement with, and against, Protectorate regimes. A final element of Quaker writing to explore in this context is the prevalence of Quaker women authors. Like their male counterparts, Quaker women authors were exceptionally prolific: their writings alone constituted nearly one half of all publications by women in the 1650s, and around 5 per cent of all Quaker writings.56 Radical Protestant sects fostered a range of public roles for women, notably preaching and prophecy; after the Restoration, the Quakers extended this to a formal role for women in the governance of the Church, particularly overseeing issues of poor relief and the

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regulation of Quaker marriages. This public role, remarkable for its time, has understandably attracted the attention, not just of hostile contemporaries, but of generations of historians who see in the early Quaker defence of female preaching and church leadership an articulation of proto-feminist ideals.57 The explicit justification of women preachers and prophets forms an important component of Quaker writing in the period: famously, two otherwise obscure ministers, Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, told Puritan ministers in a published tract: ‘we are all one both male and female in Christ Jesus . . . Indeed, you yourselves are the women, that are become women’ for ‘it’s weakness that is the woman by the Scriptures forbidden’.58 More famously still, Margaret Fell herself in 1666 was the first woman to write an entire pamphlet justifying women’s preaching.59 Womens Speaking Justified constructed a case based on scriptural precedent for the spiritual authority of women preachers, and one which was novel, it has been argued, for emphasizing that female political authority derived explicitly from the female body rather than as an adjunct of patriarchal hierarchy.60 As the first work written by a woman in defence of women’s preaching this has been widely celebrated as an ‘early’ feminist text.61 Yet, impressive though the spectacle of Quaker women’s preaching, and its justification in print, is, it is inaccurate to describe it purely within a narrative of female empowerment.62 The case for Quaker women’s preaching was put forward in print initially by male Quaker authors Richard Farnworth and subsequently George Fox in the mid-1650s. Both pamphlets constructed justifications for women preaching from biblical precedent, focusing especially on the notion that women and men were spiritually equal, as in the Book of Joel: ‘I will pour out my Spirit upon all Flesh; your Sons and Daughters shall prophesy.’63 It is likely that the issue was debated publicly too: at least one account of a Quaker trial described how in the course of the proceedings ‘there was a few words spoken concerning the Objection of the woman’s non-permission’, at which the defendant (Richard Farnworth) rehearsed the arguments of spiritual equality. Notably, this discussion appears to have taken place between the judge and Farnworth; at another part of the hearing the judge reputedly told a female defendant, Sarah Tims, who enquired which law she had broken, ‘that sweeping the house and washing the dishes was the first point of law to her’.64 Until Margaret Fell argued the case herself in 1666, women authors spent relatively little time discussing their authority to preach or prophesy, and their writings largely resemble those of their male co-religionists, presenting accounts of their sufferings, or offering prophetic warnings to towns or to governments, and denouncing the Puritan ministry. The Quaker Ann Audland (or perhaps her printer) simply alluded to her sex via the relevant verse, ‘And on my servants and on my handmaidens, I will pour out in those dayes of my Spirit, and they shall prophesie’, on the frontispiece of one of her tracts, before embarking on an account of her trial at Banbury.65 Studies of women’s agency in early modern England have stressed the ways in which women exercised significant authority within largely patriarchal boundaries; as partners or helpmeets to their husbands, women fulfilled a number of important economic and social roles in an economy still centred largely upon the household, within a moral

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framework of patriarchal marriage.66 Female religiosity is often understood as empowering for women, enabling them to act in extraordinary ways, either within Catholic resistance to the Reformation, or beyond the bounds of the Church of England in separatist Protestant churches: as Phyllis Mack and others have stressed, the spiritual intensity of women’s (and men’s) religious experiences could lead to ecstatic outbursts of prophecy and preaching. At the same time, of course, the Bible and the liturgies of the Church of England provided the main parameters of patriarchal values and practice. The phenomenon of Quaker women’s writing in the 1650s should be understood largely in this paradigm. As has been seen, women themselves did not particularly advocate their ‘right’ to preach in their pamphlets, but preached and prophesied within a framework clearly legitimized and defended by Quaker authors. The organizational structures of the nascent Quaker movement, which facilitated the nationwide preaching and pamphleteering campaign, clearly empowered women’s preaching in a very practical sense too, as the accounts of the Kendal fund show: women received money for travel, for attendance at trials, and to pay legal costs.67 Yet, in addition to the famous justification of women’s preaching, Quaker writing, as Ann Hughes has shown for Leveller literature, also presented a more familiar version of proper familial relations: Farnworth, following conduct books like those of William Gouge, exhorted wives to ‘be in subjection’ to their husbands and not to ‘usurpe Authority over the man’: ‘for God doth forbid it’.68 Quaker ministers, while having little choice but to welcome the presence and contribution of women preachers, were also aware of the dangers of women ‘gone distracted’, warning in their letters of women whose enthusiastic preaching might have caused the ‘truth to have suffered’; scandalous reports of sexual misdemeanours were hotly (and publicly) refuted, and those accused formally disciplined or cast out.69 Thus the justification of female preaching, by largely male authors, should be understood in a broader framework of the appropriation of unruly female behaviour: outspoken women preachers, like their male counterparts, were taken out of the ministry, and licentiousness was carefully disciplined. The career of Margaret Fell is instructive in this context. Margaret Fell’s fundamental importance to the sustenance and growth of the movement cannot be overstated.70 As a gentlewoman, married to a sympathetic circuit judge and living in the remote safety of north Lancashire, Fell and her household were able to organize legal protection, financial support, and an administrative centre for the growing movement. She organized the copying and circulation of early letters between itinerant ministers, and, through her own letters, clearly commanded enormous spiritual authority within the movement. Early in 1653, the Quaker Thomas Aldam, imprisoned in York, wrote to Fell, whom he had never met: ‘my love doth breath out in the power of my fathers love made manifest in thee,’ wrote Aldam, ‘thoughe I never sawe thy face, yet hereing the language of my father proceedinge from thee, and throughe thee’.71 With Aldam, Fell was an early agent in organizing the printing and dissemination of Quaker tracts, sending some of the earliest known Quaker tracts to her husband in London for printing and overseeing their distribution via the Kendal Fund.

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Fell’s first venture into print, False prophets, anticrists, deceivers, underlines the breadth of her authority. A large portion of the tract was a prophetic denunciation of England’s ministry, ‘Given forth for the good of poor deceived people by the Spirit of God’ and exhorting her readers to ‘try your teachers . . . by the Scriptures . . . and you shall find them the Deceivers and the Antichrists, and the false Prophets’.72 Another portion of the tract was a public recantation by two Quakers, James and Elizabeth Milner, who had claimed to be Adam and Eve. In a statement, the Milners apologized for having caused ‘many slanderous reproaches upon the truth . . . occasioned by some weakness which proceeded from us, when we were young in the truth’, the appearance of which ‘severall times in print’ had clearly damaged the reputation of Quakers, and occasioned their public apology.73 Finally, Fell’s work included an admonition to the Cromwellian government for having called a fast day on behalf of the Vaudois, a community of Waldensian-Protestants in Piedmont, who had been brutally massacred at the command of the Duke of Savoy in April 1655, to the horror of European Protestant states, and Oliver Cromwell in particular. Fell criticized the hypocrisy of the Protectorate government, for objecting to religious persecution abroad while permitting it for the Quakers in England—‘we who are sufferers for a Law derived from the Pope’.74 Yet despite the crispness of her public attack on Cromwell’s regime, behind the scenes, Fell was also already practically engaged with organizing a relief campaign for the ‘distressed people of France’, coordinating a collection of twelve pounds gathered from Quaker meetings in the north of England, emphasizing that the Quaker money raised ‘might goe together’ as a single sum, so as not to be confused with money collected by ‘those that have mixed with the world’.75 The engagement of Fell with the plight of the people of Piedmont sprang in part from newsbook reports and printed proclamations, but she was also receiving reports in letters from politically well-connected Quakers in London.76 The scope of Fell’s first pamphlet reinforces a number of key features of Quaker writing in the 1650s. Fell was reading and responding to international news, organizing collections of money on behalf of persecuted groups abroad, and using the occasion to offer pertinent criticism of the government, as well as addressing more prophetic warnings to ‘the people’, and overseeing the recantation of licentious behaviour by errant Quakers. The engagement of Fell in her writing with national politics is, as Kunze argues, a reflection of her relatively elevated social status, and her connections with London politics through her husband Thomas Fell, and later through friends like William Penn.77 She went on in 1656 to write on behalf of the campaign for the readmission of the Jews to England; and, as a widow after 1658, was able to travel to London, heading the Quaker women’s anti-tithe petition in May 1659, addressing tracts to Parliaments and the army through the turbulent months of 1659 and 1660, and ultimately being among the earliest of Quaker lobbyists to address Charles II at his restoration.78 Fell’s contribution to the ‘canon’ of Quaker writing is manifold. Through her husband she established the earliest links with Giles Calvert and the London press; as a gentlewoman she oversaw the collection and distribution of money which funded

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early Quaker printing and managed much of the distribution of pamphlets during the 1650s. As an author in her own right she wrote nearly twenty tracts between 1655 and 1660 and continued to write prolifically in the Restoration, debating with other religious leaders, discussing the politics of religious liberty, and addressing the organization and purpose of the burgeoning Quaker movement, including the propriety of women preaching. Her career reminds us of the centrality of print to the religious and political culture of the 1650s. Eccentric and detestable though the Quakers may have appeared to many contemporaries, their success as a religious phenomenon is indisputable, and the alacrity and sophistication with which they employed print in the pursuit of their campaign for religious liberty of conscience is remarkable. Through a carefully managed combination of print, manuscript, lobbying, and preaching, Quakers engaged in debates of national and local significance, and, perhaps more importantly still, sought to engage ever wider audiences in these debates. Quakers appeared in the 1650s at a most fraught moment of England’s long Reformation, and as successive governments and Protestant clerics debated and tested the structures and parameters of a national church, Quakers manifested themselves as zealous and concerned participants in the religious experimentation of the Interregnum. As witnesses of persecution they sought to expose the flaws of the Protectorate’s religious settlement, to government and people alike, in order to temper its ultimate outcome. Quaker writing, then, is significant, not for its lack of constitutional proposals, but as a marker of the depth and breadth of religious debates in the 1650s.

NOTES 1. Baxter, The Worcestershire Petition, sigs. A2r–A3v; Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. Sylvester, part 1, 115–16, as cited in Keeble and Nuttall, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, i. 94; Buttivant et al., A Brief Discovery. 2. Farnworth, A Discovery of Truth and Falshood, sig. F3r. The chronology and significance of the Quakers’ exploitation of this hostile epithet are discussed in greater detail in Peters, Print Culture, 110–23. 3. Thomas Aldam to George Fox, [1652], Friends’ House Library, London, A. R. Barclay MSS 1: 71, fos. 206–7; Richard Farnworth to Thomas Aldam, February 1653, Portfolio MSS 36: 151. Unless otherwise stated, all manuscript sources cited in this paper are from collections held at Friends’ House Library, London. 4. Figures are approximate and based on a search of the online ESTC (English Short Title Catalogue), and Smith, A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books. The figures include second and later editions. See also Moore, The Light in their Consciences, esp. 241; Barbour and Roberts, Early Quaker Writings, 1650–1700; Barnard and McKenzie (eds.), The History of the Book in Britain, iv. 783; Peters, Print Culture, 43–72. 5. Thomas, Rayling Rebuked, sig. B4r; Fawne, A Second Beacon Fired, 10. 6. Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1–2; O’Malley, ‘The Press and Quakerism 1653–1659’, 170; see also Wright, Literature and Education in Early Quakerism, 8. 7. Peters, Print Culture, 91–123.

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8. Littleboy, ‘Devonshire House Reference Library’; Penney, ‘Our Recording Clerks: Ellis Hookes’. 9. The classic work in this respect is Barbour and Roberts (eds.), Early Quaker Writings. But for other works that build upon this corpus of material, as well as the very influential Journal of George Fox, see also Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism; Barbour, The Quakers in Puritan England; and Moore, The Light in their Consciences. 10. The classic and still excellent ‘ethnographic’ account of Quaker language is Bauman, Let your Words Be Few; see also Cope, ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’, Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, Ormsby-Lennon, ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse’, and Corns and Loewenstein (eds.), The Emergence of Quaker Writing. A significant sub-category in similar vein is Quaker women’s writing, which is often discussed as a literary phenomenon in its own right: this is discussed below. 11. Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution; id., ‘The Quakers, 1659, and the Restoration of the Monarchy’; Hill, The World Turned Upside Down; id., The Experience of Defeat. 12. Davies, The Quakers in English Society 1655–1725; Stephenson, ‘The Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters’; Miller, ‘ “A Suffering People”: English Quakers and their Neighbours’; Allen, Quaker Communities in Early Modern Wales. 13. Tomlinson, A Word of Reproof, 17. 14. Richard Farnworth to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore MSS 3: 45, Thomas Aldam to Margaret Fell, A. R. Barclay MSS 2: 159. 15. Richard Farnworth to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore MSS 3: 46. 16. Richard Farnworth to Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough, October 1654, Portfolio 32: 56. 17. William Dewsbery to Margaret Fell, 1655, Swarthmore MSS 4: 139. 18. A copy exists in Portfolio 116: 21, where many examples of copied papers are kept. 19. Swarthmore MSS 4: 170. 20. James Nayler to George Fox, July 1653, Swarthmore MSS 3: 60. The ‘Sands’ is a reference to Grange over Sands, a perilous stretch of coast by which Quakers travelled to Swarthmoor Hall from the main highway north. A number of Quaker missionaries drowned while crossing it: see Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism. 21. Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts, 177; Scott-Warren, ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks’, 18–37. 22. Thomas, ‘A Purveyor of Soul-Poysons’, 23–4. 23. George Taylor to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore MS 1: 209, 218. This is discussed at greater length in Peters, Print Culture, 64–72. 24. Richard Clayton to Margaret Fell, 1655, Swarthmore MSS 1: 27. 25. Braddick (ed.), The Politics of Gesture, 22; Bauman, Let Your Words Be Few. 26. Kellet, Pomroy, and Glissen, A Faithful Discovery, 35. 27. A. R. Barclay Transcripts 1: 113; ibid. 22. The judge, revealingly, waved it away on the grounds that ‘hee had received divers pamphlets’ from the Quakers already. See Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, 61, for another example of pamphlets being thrown into the King’s coach. 28. Richard Farnworth, Swarthmore Transcript 2: 19. 29. Thomas Aldam, Swarthmore MSS 3: 38; Firth, ‘Packer, William (fl. 1644–1662)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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30. Subsequent editions of two important Quaker works, Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, and Besse, An Abstract of the Sufferings, were published by subscription: Minutes of the Meeting for Sufferings, vol. 26 (1736–9), 6 and 323. See also Mandelbrote, ‘The Publishing and Distribution of Religious Books’; and Raven, The Business of Books. 31. The Atherstone carrier would have travelled out of London along Watling Street. Baddesley is about two miles north-west of Atherstone, and about twenty miles west of Swannington, Leicestershire. 32. Richard Farnworth to Francis Howgill and Edward Burrough, October 1654, Portfolio 32: 56; R[ichard] F[arnworth], Truth Cleared of Scandals. 33. John Whitehead to George Fox, November 1659, Swarthmore Transcript 3: 861; Horn, A Brief Discovery of the People Called Quakers; Whitehead (sic), A Brief Discovery of the Dangerous Principles of John Horne; Cooper, ‘Horne, John (bap. 1616, d. 1676)’. Although George Whitehead is cited as the pamphlet’s author, it is clear from the tract itself that the disputation involved both John and George Whitehead (no relation), and George Fox the younger. 34. John Whitehead to George Fox, November 1659, Swarthmore Transcript 3: 862. Although no such tract was published under Whitehead’s name, this manuscript may well have been published as A message to the present rulers of England. Whether Committee of Safety; (so called) Councell of Officers, or Others whatsoever (London, 1659), to which Edward Burrough wrote a short preface: ‘These things were upon me, to deliver . . . to the present men in power’, and which is attributed to Burrough’s authorship on the title page. It is more likely, however, that the existence of Burrough’s tract, which was published by Giles Calvert, precluded the publication of John Whitehead’s manuscript. The subordination of John Whitehead’s authorship in both pamphlets discussed here may well be significant of the greater authority of Edward Burrough and George Whitehead within the Quaker movement, and thus suggests further qualification to the argument that Quaker writing was spontaneous and apocalyptic: the process of publication required a number of pragmatic decisions. 35. Mason, The Proud Pharisee Reproved; id., A Check to the Loftie Linguist; id., The Boasting Baptist Dismounted; id., Sions Enemy Discovered; for Mason’s role as a ‘disperser’ of Quaker books, see The National Archives, SP 29/109 fo. 44; Greaves, ‘Mason, Martin ( fl. 1655–1676)’. 36. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, esp. 56–66; Dobranski, Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade; Johns, The Nature of the Book. 37. This is the subject of discussion in my as yet unpublished paper, ‘The Distribution of Quaker Tracts in the 1650s’; see also Peters, Print Culture, 61–2. 38. Barnard and Bell, ‘The English Provinces’. 39. A rough calculation based on the online ESTC suggests that between 1652 and 1660 Thomas Simmons published approximately 29%, and Giles Calvert 26%, of Quaker publications; this is probably an underestimate of their respective contributions, as some anti-Quaker works are included in the ‘total’ figure of 898 works; for Calvert’s ‘accounts’ see Peters, Print Culture, 59–60. 40. Margaret Fell to John Stubbs [1656], Spence MSS 3: 40; Lloyd, ‘The Quaker Press’. 41. Barbour and Roberts (eds.), Early Quaker Writings, 14; Vann, The Social Development of English Quakerism, 1–2; Brinton, Quaker Journals; Smith, Perfection Proclaimed; Mack, Visionary Women, 127–64; Feroli, Political Speaking Justified.

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42. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, 240; Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution, 32; Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution, 26–7; Davis, ‘Radicalism in a Traditional Society’; Condren, ‘Will All the Radicals Please Lie Down’. 43. Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth, 219. 44. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture; Lake and Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’. 45. Nayler, A Few Words Occasioned By a Paper, 3; Peters, Print Culture, 153–92. 46. Alexander Parker to George Fox, 4 May 1659, Swarthmore Transcript 3: 45. 47. I am currently preparing an article which discusses further the complex political connections of Quakers at the Restoration. 48. See e.g. Crook, Unrighteousness no Plea for Truth; or id., A Defence of the True Church called Quakers. 49. Besse, An Abstract of the Sufferings; Miller, ‘ “A Suffering People” ’; Horle, The Quakers and the English Legal System. 50. Peters, Print Culture, 210–29. 51. Edward Burrough to Francis Howgill, 24 September 1658, A. R. Barclay MSS xl; [Hubberthorn], The Record of Sufferings for Tythes in England, 49, sig. A3v; Walter, ‘Public Transcripts’, 123–48. 52. William Caton to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore Transcript 1: 388; To the Parliament of England Now Sitting in Westminster. 53. William Caton to Thomas Willan, 7 May 1660, Swarthmore Transcript 1: 408. 54. Thomas Willan to Margaret Fell, 26 November 1654, Spence MSS 3: 7, Anthony Pearson and Gervase Benson to Margaret Fell, 1 August 1655, Swarthmore MSS 4: 162. A week later Benson wrote to Fell with a long account of the trial of Thomas Aldam for his refusal to pay tithes; Swarthmore MSS 4: 156. See also Pearson, The Great Case of Tythes Truly Stated. 55. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering; Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture. 56. Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, 224–5; 269; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community, 1. 57. Feroli, Political Speaking Justified, 15–30; 148–95; Smith, Reason’s Disciples; Hinds, God’s Englishwomen; Mack, Visionary Women; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community; see also Crawford, Women and Religion in England. 58. Cotton and Cole, To the Priests and People of England, 6–8. 59. Fell, Womens Speaking Justified. 60. Feroli, Political Speaking Justified, 15–30; 148–195. 61. This is certainly the analysis of Kunze, Margaret Fell; see also Moore, The Light in their Consciences; Gill, Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community. 62. Hughes, Gender and the English Revolution, 89, 144–9. 63. Farnworth, A Woman Forbidden to Speak in the Church; Fox, The Woman Learning in Silence. 64. Audland et al., The Saints Testimony, 24, sig. Bv. 65. Audland, A True Declaration. 66. Gowing, Domestic Dangers; Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England 1550–1720; Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800; Capp, When Gossips Meet. 67. I discuss this at greater length in Peters, Print Culture, 144–5.

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68. Hughes, ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, 162–88; Farnworth, An Easter Reckoning, 18–19; compare with Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, esp. 27–8. Both texts are based on Ephesians 5: 22. 69. William Caton to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore MSS 1: 314; Richard Clayton to Margaret Fell, 5 August 1656, Swarthmore Transcript 1: 568. 70. Kunze, Margaret Fell. 71. Thomas Aldam to Margaret Fell, York, 3 April 1653, Swarthmore MSS 3: 43. 72. Fell, False Prophets, 7, sig. A2r. 73. Ibid. 12–23; see Mack, Visionary Women, 184. 74. Fell, False Prophets, 17–22, esp. 18; Vigne, ‘ “Avenge, O Lord, Thy Slaughtered Saints” ’. 75. Thomas Willan and George Taylor to Margaret Fell, Swarthmore MSS 1: 237–9. 76. Two declarations pertain to the Proclamation of 25 May to which Fell responded on 16 June: A Declaration of His Highness; and His Highness Declaration Inviting the People of England and Wales; Willan and Taylor to Fell, Swarthmore MSS 1: 239. 77. Kunze, Margaret Fell, esp. 169–83. 78. See e.g. Fell, For Manasseh Ben Israel; id., To the Generall Councill of Officers; id., This Was Given to Major Generall Harrison; id., A Declaration and an Information.

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Braddick, Michael (ed.). The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Braithwaite, W. C. The Beginnings of Quakerism. 2nd edn, rev. Henry J. Cadbury. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955. Brinton, Howard. Quaker Journals: Varieties of Religious Experience among Friends. Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill Publications, 1972. Buttivant, Samuel, et al. A Brief Discovery of a Three-fold Estate of Antichrist. London, 1653. Capp, Bernard. When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Condren, Conal. ‘Will All the Radicals Please Lie Down, We Can’t See the Seventeenth Century’, in The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Cooper, Sheila McIsaac. ‘Horne, John (bap. 1616, d. 1676)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Cope, Jackson I. ‘Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style’. PMLA 71.2 (1956), 725–54. Corns, Thomas, and David Loewenstein (eds.). The Emergence of Quaker Writing: Dissenting Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. London: Frank Cass, 1995. Cotton, Priscilla, and Mary Cole. To the Priests and People of England. London, 1655. Crawford, Patricia. ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, in Mary Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800. London: Methuen, 1985, 211–82. ——. Women and Religion in England. London: Routledge, 1993. Cromwell, Oliver. A Declaration of His Highness, with the Advice of His Council, Inviting the People of England and Wales to a Day of Solemn Fasting and Humiliation. London, 1655. ——. His Highness Declaration Inviting the People of England and Wales to a Day of Humiliation for the Distressed Protestants in Savoy. Dublin, 1655. Crook, John. A Defence of the True Church Called Quakers . . . Against . . . Independants, Separatists or Brownists, Baptists, Fift-Monarchy-Men, Seekers, and High Notionists of all Sorts. London, 1659. ——. Unrighteousness No Plea for Truth . . . Also the Doctrine and Practise of the People (Called Baptists) Examined. London, 1659. Davies, Adrian. The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Davis, J. C. ‘Radicalism in a Traditional Society: The Evaluation of Radical Thought in the English Commonwealth, 1649–60’. History of Political Thought 3.2 (1982), 193–213. Dobranski, Stephen. Milton, Authorship and the Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Farnworth, Richard. A Discovery of Truth and Falshood. London, 1653. ——. Truth Cleared of Scandals. London, 1654. ——. A Woman Forbidden to Speak in the Church. London, 1654. ——. An Easter Reckoning. London, 1655. Fawne, Luke. A Second Beacon Fired. London, 1654. Fell, Margaret. False Prophets, Anticrists, Deceivers. London, 1655. ——. For Manasseh ben Israel. The Call of the Jewes out of Babylon. London, 1656. ——. To the Generall Councill of Officers of the English Army. London, 1659. ——. A Declaration and an Information . . . to the Present Governors, the King and Both Houses of Parliament, and All Whom It May Concern. London, 1660. ——. This was Given to Major Generall Harrison and the Rest. London, 1660.

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——. Womens Speaking Justified, Proved and Allowed of by the Scriptures. London, 1666. Feroli, Teresa. Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006. Firth, C. H. ‘Packer, William (fl. 1644–1662)’, rev. D. N. Farr. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Fletcher, Anthony. Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Fox, George. The Woman Learning in Silence. London, 1656. ——. Journal of George Fox, ed. Norman Penney. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911. Friends’ House Library. Manuscript Correspondences of George Fox et al. London. Gill, Catie. Women in the Seventeenth-Century Quaker Community. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Gouge, William. Of Domesticall Duties. London, 1622. Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Greaves, Richard L. ‘Mason, Martin (fl. 1655–1676)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972. ——. The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries. London: Faber and Faber, 1985. Hinds, Hilary. God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Horle, Craig. The Quakers and the English Legal System, 1660–1688. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Horn, John. A Brief Discovery of the People Called Quakers. London, 1659. Hubberthorn, Richard. The Record of Sufferings for Tythes in England. London, 1658. Hughes, Ann. ‘Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature’, in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, 162–88. ——. Gender and the English Revolution. London: Routledge, 2012. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Kellet, Joseph, John Pomroy, and Paul Glissen. A Faithful Discovery of a Treacherous Design. London, 1653. Kunze, Bonnelyn Young. Margaret Fell and the Rise of Quakerism. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994. Lake, Peter, and Steven Pincus. ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds.), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Littleboy, Anna. ‘Devonshire House Reference Library: With Notes on Early Printers and Printing in the Society of Friends’. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 18 (1921), 1–16. Lloyd, Arnold. ‘The Quaker Press’, in Quaker Social History, 1669–1738. London: Longmans, Green, 1950. Love, Harold. The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in SeventeenthCentury England. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.

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Mack, Phyllis. Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Mandelbrote, Scott. ‘The Publishing and Distribution of Religious Books by Voluntary Associations: From the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to the British and Foreign Bible Society’, in Michael Suarez and Michael Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, v: 1695–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 613–30. Mason, Martin. A Check to the Loftie Linguist. London, 1655. ——. The Proud Pharisee Reproved. London, 1655. ——. The Boasting Baptist Dismounted. London, 1656. ——. Sions Enemy Discovered. London, 1659. Mayers, Ruth. 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004. Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Miller, John. ‘ “A Suffering People”: English Quakers and their Neighbours c.1650–c.1700’. Past and Present 188 (2005), 71–103. Moore, Rosemary. The Light in their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain 1646–1666. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Morrill, John. The Nature of the English Revolution. London: Longman, 1993. National Archives. London. SP 29/109 fo. 44. Nayler, James. A Few Words Occasioned by a Paper. London, 1654. O’Malley, Thomas. ‘The Press and Quakerism 1653–1659’. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 54 (1979), 169–84. Ormsby-Lennon, Hugh. ‘From Shibboleth to Apocalypse: Quaker Speech-Ways during the Puritan Revolution’, in P. Burke and R. Porter (eds.), Language, Self and Society: A Social History of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pearson, Anthony. The Great Case of Tythes Truly Stated. London, 1657. Penney, Norman. ‘Our Recording Clerks: Ellis Hookes’. Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society 1 (1903), 12–22. Peters, Kate. Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Raven, James. The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade, 1450–1850. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007. Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Reay, Barry. ‘The Quakers, 1659, and the Restoration of the Monarchy’. History 63 (1978), 193–213. ——. The Quakers and the English Revolution. Hounslow: St Martin’s, 1985. Scott-Warren, Jason. ‘Reconstructing Manuscript Networks: The Textual Transactions of Sir Stephen Powle’, in Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington (eds.), Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Smith, Hilda. Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Smith, Joseph. A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends’ Books. 2 vols. London: J. Smith, 1867.

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Smith, Nigel. Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Stephenson, William. ‘The Social Integration of Post-Restoration Dissenters, 1660–1725’, in Margaret Spufford (ed.), The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 360–87. Thomas, Arthur Edward. ‘ “A Purveyor of Soul-Poysons”: An Analysis of the Career of Giles Calvert, a Publisher and Bookseller in Mid-Seventeenth-Century London’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Victoria, Australia: La Trobe University, 1999. Thomas, William. Rayling Rebuked. London, 1656. Tomlinson, William. A Word of Reproof to the Priests or Ministers. London, 1653. Vann, Richard. The Social Development of English Quakerism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Vigne, Randolph. ‘ “Avenge, O Lord, thy Slaughtered Saints”: Cromwell’s Intervention on Behalf of the Vaudois’. Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London 24.1 (1983). Walter, John. ‘Public Transcripts, Popular Agency and the Politics of Subsistence in Early Modern England’, in Michael Braddick and John Walker (eds.), Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 123–48. Whitehead, George. A Brief Discovery of the Dangerous Principles of John Horne (a Priest in Lin) and Thomas Moore Junior, both Teachers of the People Called Mooreians or Manifestarians. London, 1659. Wright, Luella. Literature and Education in Early Quakerism. University of Iowa Humanistic Studies 5.2 (1933). Zaret, David. Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early-Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.

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LAMENT FOR A NATION? Milton’s Readie and Easie Way and the Turn to Satire ....................................................................................................... PAUL STEVENS

One of the scenes that seems to have haunted Milton’s imagination is the destruction of the city, the spectre of ‘temple and tower’ razed ‘to the ground’, as he puts it in his Civil War sonnet on besieged London, ‘When the assault was intended to the City’.1 The beginning of Paradise Lost itself resonates with the sound of great cities falling. Satan’s ejection from the city of God, for instance, is simultaneously, and disconcertingly, identified with both the destruction of Babylon and the fall of Troy. The evocation of Babylon is not surprising, since one of the chief biblical images of the devil’s fate is Israel’s prophesied triumph over Babylon—the ‘golden city’ of Israel’s oppressors being routinely represented as a demonic parody or negative type of the city of God: ‘How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning’, Israel rejoices over the ruins of the false city (Isaiah 14: 4–18).2 But Troy is unexpected and clearly meant to disorient. When Satan first sees Beelzebub on the burning lake, his words are not only those of Isaiah but much more immediately those of Virgil. For Satan speaks to Beelzebub as though he were Aeneas confronting the ghost of Hector on the night of Troy’s fiery immolation, the spirit’s hair matted with blood and his body lacerated with wounds: ‘If thou beest he; but O how fallen! How changed | From him’ who outshone the brightest ‘in the happy realms of light’ (I.84–5). It is hard not to feel moved as Satan reimagines his comrade in the shape of the Trojan hero who had outshone all in the defence of his native polis.3 Nor is Satan’s imagination of what that city might signify less than admirable. It conforms closely to the classical or more specifically ‘neoRoman’ ideal of a community animated by consensual government, shared aspirations, and individual virtus: ‘mutual league, | United thoughts and counsels, equal hope’ and a manly willingness to accept ‘hazard in the glorious enterprise’ (I.87–9).4 It is a measure of Milton’s extraordinary fertility of mind and rhetorical skill that he can so easily shift perspective and manipulate emotion, creating a conflict in the breast of even the most

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‘fit’ reader. What is especially confusing is the way Satan is made to sound so much like Milton himself, for the great poet must have known that many of his readers would remember him best as the polemicist who had spent most of his life writing in defence of precisely the kind of commonwealth or city the Aeneas-like Satan imagines. Milton’s fascination with the city and what it might mean is there from the beginning. In a work as early as Prolusion V (1628/9), for instance, the defence of the city signifies the mission of humanist education, its destruction the triumph of barbarism and the victory of error over truth.5 Unlike Augustine in The City of God, young Milton perceives the fall of Rome as an unmitigated disaster. Augustine glories in the way the barbarian triumph of 410 humbles the city, demonstrating that the great task Virgil assigns to Rome in the Aeneid, Anchises’ imperative ‘To spare the conquered, and beat down the proud’, is vacuous, merely an empty arrogation of God’s power (I: Preface [5]).6 For young Milton, there is no such satisfaction. No event ‘in fact or fable could be more remarkable’ in its shamefulness than the fall of Rome, he says (CPW, i. 258). The struggle to preserve the city is eternal: it is the struggle to rescue the citadel of truth from ‘the inroads which the vile horde of errors daily makes upon every branch of learning’ (258) and the mission of education is every bit as heroic as that of Aeneas. In Areopagitica (1644), this theme is given a new and more explicitly patriotic turn: the city as the academy is expanded and transformed into a new vision of what the English nation itself might become.7 The defence of learning mutates into a defence of the intellectual and civil liberty on which that learning depends, all in the service of true religion and God’s grand design. Speaking as though England were Athens and he himself a free citizen addressing his peers in that classical city’s national assembly, Milton urges Parliament to remember that it is God’s custom to reveal himself first ‘to his English-men’ and that such a revelation will allow them to see their nation in a radically new light—that in fact the city of God is here and now in England, its besieged capital, the city of London, serving as a synecdoche for the nation: ‘Behold now this vast City; a City of refuge, the mansion house of liberty, encompast and surrounded with his protection; the shop of warre hath not there more anvils and hammers waking, to fashion out the plates and instruments of armed Justice in defence of beleaguer’d Truth, then there be pens and heads there, sitting by their studious lamps, musing, searching, revolving new notions and idea’s wherewith to present, as with their homage and fealty the approaching Reformation; others as fast reading, trying all things, assenting to the force of reason and convincement. What could a man require more from a Nation so pliant and so prone to seek after knowledge’ (ii. 553–4). Only protect and cultivate this pregnant soil then, he urges the ‘High Court of Parlament’, and you will help make England the ‘Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies’ promised in Scripture (ii. 486, 554).8 It is the intensity of emotion here and the burden of innumerable disappointments over the next sixteen years that explains the grandeur and heroic desperation of his 1660 pamphlet, The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. At the heart of both editions of this pamphlet lies the same image of the city endangered—this time the danger comes from within, from the looming failure of the

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English to complete the construction of their polis as a new Rome (vii. 423). What they had done so far, Milton explains, was truly heroic. In freeing themselves from the tyranny of Charles I, they had laid the foundations of a free state, ‘a glorious rising Commonwealth’ worthy of ‘the ancient Greeks or Romans’ (420). But now the great city is faced with disaster as its own citizens backslide and more like boys than men seem set on creeping back to the ‘once abjur’d and detested thralldom of Kingship’ (422). This is a matter of the most profound shame for Milton. How could we let our attempt to rebuild Rome, a new Rome to be made great by God’s grace and Christian virtue, turn into the present Babel?9 ‘Where is this goodly tower of a Commonwealth, which the English boasted they would build to overshadow kings, and be another Rome in the west?’ he imagines England’s neighbours scoffing. ‘The foundation indeed they laid gallantly; but fell into a wors confusion, not of tongues, but of factions, then those at the tower of Babel; and have left no memorial of thir work behinde them remaining, but in the common laughter of Europ.’ And this ‘must needs redound the more to our shame’, he adds, if we but look on the example of our neighbours, the Dutch, who had none of our advantages (423). What will people say ‘of us and of the whole English name?’ asks Milton the patriot (422). At the end of the pamphlet he identifies himself with the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah: ‘Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil itself, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to’ (462–3).10 And the vision that haunts Jeremiah is the destruction of Jerusalem, its people taken into Babylonian captivity and the city left desolate, humiliated, and despised: ‘How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become a widow! she that was great among the Nations’ (Lamentations 1: 1). Quomodo sedet sola civitas. Because the grand themes of learning and liberty, patria and revelation, are supplemented, especially in the second edition of the pamphlet, by a detailed consideration of practical, constitutional arrangements, scholars like Quentin Skinner tend to single out The Readie and Easie Way as one of the great canonical works of neo-Roman political theory in mid-seventeenth-century England. Skinner places the tract alongside such 1656 works as Marchamont Nedham’s Excellencie of a Free-State and James Harrington’s Oceana and feels that Milton’s ‘final burst of eloquence’ crystallizes the ‘emergence of a full-scale republican theory of freedom and government’ (Liberty 13–16). There is much to this argument, but the pamphlet’s figurative density, especially its engagement with the complex metaphor of the city as it is idealized, endangered, besieged, or destroyed—that is, its highly imaginative engagement with classical and biblical narratives that are far removed from the everyday reality of England’s immediate political situation—suggests the degree to which it also belongs to another canon. It is much larger, less occasional, and more singular than political historians like Skinner seem willing to allow. This raises the question at the centre of the present chapter—to what extent might Milton’s pamphlet more profitably be read as literature than political polemic or theory? To what extent, to use Blair Worden’s words of Samson Agonistes, does it ‘speak beyond the context that produced it’,11 and, most importantly, what kind of new knowledge might answering this question produce? In

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other words, how is the pamphlet’s pragmatic purpose qualified, rendered more, or indeed less, effective by its expansively expressive and aesthetic qualities? In order to pursue this issue, I want to focus less on the pamphlet’s obvious role as a pragmatic or political intervention, and more on its constitution as a highly wrought expression of emotion, an expression which through Milton’s quite remarkable rhetorical skills acquires a formidable aesthetic force.12 I want to do this in order to come to a better understanding of the singularity of Milton’s temperament and its relation to his evolving imagination of England, particularly as he sees the nation at this moment of extreme crisis, both despised and simultaneously ‘extoll’d and magnifi’d’ (422). Even Milton’s enemies, much as they loathed both his politics and his person, almost always seem to have sensed the literary or aesthetic quality of The Readie and Easie Way, routinely protecting themselves from its force by dismissing it as so much spin or dazzling rhetoric, as mere eloquence, no matter how ‘goodly’ or ‘admirable’.13 Samuel Butler, in his wonderful satire The Censure of Rota (March 1660), rehearses this protective manoeuvre with characteristic acuity.14 Addressing Milton directly, Butler’s fictional ‘Harrington’ reports a member of the Rota club putting it this way: ‘you fight alwayes with the flat of your hand like a Rhetorician, and never Contract the Logical fist . . . you trade altogether in universals the Region of Deceits and falacie, but never come so near particulars, as to let us know which among diverse things of the same kind you would be at. . . . Beside this, as all your politiques reach but the outside and circumstances of things and never touch realties, so you are very solicitous about weeds [words] as if they were charmes, or had more in them then what they signifie: For no Conjuror’s Devill is more concerned in a spell, then you in a meer word, but never regard the things which it serves to expresse’ (13). In Milton’s preoccupation with words over matter, Butler sees him as a poet and orator, and ‘Orators Poets, and Fanatiques are such Ill Masters of Reason’ that they are, to follow the allusion to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘of imagination all compact’.15 Roger L’Estrange pursues the same theme of Milton the demonic sophist displaying his proud imaginations in No Blinde Guides (April 1660). Responding most directly to Milton’s pamphlet Brief Notes Upon a Late Sermon but also to The Readie and Easie Way, L’Estrange is taken aback by Milton’s superior bearing, his ‘peremptory and magisterial’ style (3).16 Uncannily anticipating the fit reader’s predicament in Paradise Lost, L’Estrange imagines himself confronted by a ‘Devil’, an ‘incubus’ or nightmare spirit, a rhetorician of Satanic proportions, in terms of both skill and excess. He remembers Eikonoklastes, for instance, where Milton would dare invade ‘the Prerogative of God himself ’, cleverly, if maliciously, fitting words to matter, the ‘Bold Design being suited with a conform irreverence of Language’ (15, 1–2). So effective are the self-defence mechanisms of Butler and L’Estrange that there is nothing in the reaction of either man to Milton’s prose that one might consider a characteristic response to the aesthetic. There is nothing like Satan’s reaction to the beauty of Eve, for instance, when the devil is so ravished by the sight of her that he appears abstracted, bereft of his animosity, feeling ‘Stupidly good’, and, for however brief a moment, admiring what he would destroy (Paradise Lost IX.457–66). But some

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of Milton’s enemies come close to it. ‘G.S.’ or George Starkey, for instance, is clearly in awe of Milton. In his Dignity of Kingship Asserted (May 1660), in a way that would have delighted the poet, he bears witness to the ‘pregnant’, if ‘pernicious’, skill with which Milton confronted Salmasius: ‘I am not ignorant of the ability of Mr Milton’, he confesses, and let’s face it, he is ‘the most able and acute Scholar living’ (2, 5).17 Even though there is now, in fact, no question of the King’s return, Starkey feels it imperative to contest The Readie and Easie Way because of its aesthetic appeal: it is so ‘dangerously insnaring, the fallacy of the Arguments being so cunningly hidden, as not to be discerned by any, nor every Eye; observing also, the Language to be smooth and tempting, the Expressions pathetical, and apt to move the Affections’, even though the drift of the pamphlet is clearly ‘of desperate consequence’ (sig. a2). This distinction between the pamphlet’s content and its form, between its pragmatic purpose and its aesthetic design, will, as Nicholas von Maltzahn intimates, be displaced onto Milton’s oeuvre in general and so determine his mainstream reception for years to come. He may be a great poet but he’s no political thinker—a position most recently espoused by Stanley Fish.18 Focusing on the expressive and aesthetic dimensions of The Readie and Easie Way, it needs to be emphasized, does not mean joining Fish and de-historicizing the pamphlet but rather enlarging the scope of its historicity. The present ascendancy of a positivist historical criticism consumed with politics is not without its problems. While, on the one hand, its rigour in producing highly nuanced local contexts is invaluable, on the other, its tin ear, the insensitivity of so many of its practitioners to the subtleties of literary texts, to the complex internal lives of their authors and the ways in which literature has its own reasons, is often reductive and encourages critics like Fish to dismiss history and politics as a temptation to irrelevance. Focusing on the literary quality of the pamphlet is, then, the best way to resituate Skinner and resist Fish. I propose to do this, first, by explaining the provenance of the pamphlet in order to indicate just how confused and conflicted are its immediate pragmatic aims, and, second, by relating it to Juvenal in order to emphasize just how essential its satiric form is to a fuller understanding of Milton’s peculiar vision of the English nation.

TOO NICE

A

CONSIDERATION

.................................................................................................................. The best-known and most routinely anthologized version of The Readie and Easie Way is the second edition which was published in early April 1660 about six weeks before Charles II landed at Dover to reclaim his throne on 25 May 1660. This edition is, however, only one of six works that Milton wrote between October 1659 and late April 1660 on the unfolding political crisis.19 When placed in the context of these six works, it becomes clear just how singular the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way is. The most obvious difference between it and the previous four works, for instance, especially the first, February version of The Readie and Easie Way, is that it has virtually no hope

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of achieving its avowed political end. It is unlikely to do anything to prevent the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. It is at best a forlorn hope. What I want to stress here, however, is that Milton’s route to this last chance is a story of emotional turmoil in which he is almost always out of step with events, continually misreads key players like General Monck, and whatever republican theory he has to offer is subject to this turmoil. However interesting it is, his new model is hardly ‘full-scale’ or even fully coherent.20 Only after a late-night discussion with an unknown friend on 19 October 1659 did Milton finally wake up to the imminent danger in which the English Republic now stood: ‘I began to consider more intensly thereon [this danger] then hitherto’, since up to this moment he had resigned himself, he says tellingly, ‘to the wisedome & care of those who had the government’ (vii. 324). Milton’s retirement ended abruptly on 13 October, when after considerable provocation, the London-based elements of the army led by Major-General John Lambert dissolved the lately reconvened Rump Parliament. In his unpublished Letter to a Friend, Milton appears to be in shock, making it clear that he considers the army’s action a coup d’état—‘illegal’, ‘scandalous’, and ‘I fear me barbarous’ (327). In focusing his attention on the inward flaw responsible for this latest and most alarming rupture in the Commonwealth, Milton reveals the central concern of what will become The Readie and Easie Way. He recognizes the imperative need for a sovereign parliament, ‘a senate or generall Councell of State’ (329), and identifies the two principles necessary for election to that national assembly, one religious and one constitutional: ‘Liberty of conscience to all professing Scripture the rule of their faith & worship, And the Abjuracion of a single person’ (330), that is, religious toleration within the bounds of Reformed or Scripture-based Christianity and no king or, it seems clear, no new Lord Protector. What is surprising, however, as numerous readers have noticed, is not only how inattentive Milton has been to political developments but how careless he is of detailed constitutional arrangements: ‘And whether the civill government be an annuall democracy or a perpetuall Aristocracy, is too nice a consideracion for the extremities wherein wee are & the hazard of our safety from a common enemie, gapeing at present to devoure us’ (331). The sine qua non is the first principle, liberty of conscience—that is, the same principle he appeals to as the core value of the new English nation in Areopagitica: ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties’ (ii. 560). This national and deeply personal value cuts to the heart of what it means to be a free person. When it comes to this particular liberty he will not, to use Skinner’s neo-Roman terms, be dependent or ‘mastered’ (‘What Does it Mean to be a Free Person?’, 16). What is significant about the new nation is that it enshrines Milton’s hope as no other local or international community can that every free-born and knowing citizen will be ‘un-mastered’. More than a little ironically, the disestablished, universal Church for which he was arguing in his earlier 1659 pamphlets, The Treatise of Civil Power and The Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings, is entirely contingent on the protection of such a nation state or free commonwealth. Everything other than this liberty is peripheral and even

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the second, constitutional principle, no rule by a single person, will fall by the wayside as the extremities intensify. So strong was the reaction against Lambert’s coup that it precipitated the prospect of a new civil war. Most dramatically, on the same day that Milton expressed his alarm, Major-General George Monck, commanding the army in Scotland, declared for Parliament and demanded its recall. For the first time in its famous history, the New Model Army was divided against itself, redcoat against redcoat. As Lambert marched north to confront Monck in early November, Milton wrote a brief position paper called Proposals for Certaine Expedients for the preventing of a Civill War now Feard & the Settling of a Firme Government. Even though the danger to the nation had increased and despite his alarmist fear of foreign invasion, Milton has now recovered his composure. Following the lead of his friend Sir Henry Vane, who had just joined the London-based army’s Committee of Safety, and sensing that negotiation might be in the air, Milton’s Proposals are surprisingly conciliatory. He offers something for everyone. Parliament should indeed be recalled, but the coup is no longer barbarous: the Committee of Safety should continue to do its good work and the officers responsible for the coup should be forgiven with an act of oblivion. His relative optimism is evident in the way minor issues cheerfully jostle with central concerns, and once again, as long as his two main principles remain inviolable, he shows only a superficial interest in constitutional detail. While the critical factor remains the first principle, liberty of conscience or the fear of being mastered, in private he already shows how flexible he might become on the second principle. In a letter to Henry Oldenburg, dated 20 December 1659, he reveals his longing for a providential leader: ‘What we need now is not one who can compile a history of our troubles but one who can happily end them’ (515). At the beginning of 1660, there were moments when that providential leader appeared to be George Monck. Over the course of December, as the London-based army’s grip on government disintegrated, the Rump Parliament reassembled, and on New Year’s Day 1660, against the wishes of its remaining forty-two members, Monck crossed the border into England. Lambert’s army melted away and on 3 February, now with the approval of the Rump and at the head of seven veteran regiments, Monck entered London. Sustained not so much by force of arms as by the popular desire for a freely elected Parliament, Monck was now the power in the land. What confused Milton about the General was what confused so many people. He was a lot like Rome’s great political general L. Cornelius Sulla, as he first appears in the pages of Sallust—impressive but impossible to read. According to Milton’s favourite Latin historian, Sulla was eloquent, shrewd, and quick to make friends, but, most importantly, his ‘skill in pretence was such that no one could penetrate the depths of his mind’.21 What made ‘black Monck’ so impenetrable was the apparent sincerity with which he simultaneously pursued contradictory policies: while, on the one hand, he was adamant that there would be no return to monarchy, on the other, he tacked his way towards the free Parliament that would ensure precisely such a restoration. This creative ambiguity enabled the nation’s rival constituencies to invest in their hopes and no one more so than Milton.

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Exhilarated by Monck’s unequivocal public declaration on 23 January not to readmit members who had been ‘purged’ from Parliament in 1648, making it perfectly clear that ‘Monarchy, cannot possibly be admitted for the future in these Nations’, Milton may well have felt he had found his providential leader.22 He wrote the first version of The Readie and Easie Way probably in mid February, partly in response to this and partly in response to the General’s alarming but still comprehensible demand that the Rump dissolve itself and issue writs for a new election—that the people be given, so Monck said, ‘a Succession of Parliaments of their own Election’ (qtd. in CPW, vii. 171). Confident that the Rump would hold the line on who was to be considered eligible for election, Milton may still have felt that in Monck he had found the leader who would end the nation’s troubles. But Monck was no Cromwell, certainly not the one Milton idealized in his 1654 Defensio secunda, and between the completion of the pamphlet and its going to press, the General made his decisive move. On 21 February, frustrated by what Milton calls the Rump’s ‘just and necessarie qualifications’ for election (vii. 368), Monck allowed seventy-three of the old purged members to be readmitted. Milton’s confusion is palpable—since writing this treatise, he says, ‘the face of things hath had some change’ (353). L’Estrange finds Milton’s predicament hilarious: ‘I could only wish his Excellency had been a little civiller to Mr Milton’, he says, ‘for, just as he had finished his Model of a Commonwealth . . . in come the secluded Members, and spoyl his Project.’23 As the hastily written opening lines of Milton’s pamphlet make clear, while he cannot now be sure that the enlarged House will not rescind the old Rump’s restrictions on eligibility, he takes comfort—‘not a little rejoicing’, he says—in the fact that Monck is still committed to a free commonwealth and opposed to ‘this unsound humour’ of returning to monarchy (353–5). Heartened by these thoughts, he decides to let the pamphlet stand as he had originally composed it, hoping it might be ‘more useful then before’ and emphasizing that as long as his central principles are protected, detailed constitutional arrangements remain if not too nice a consideration then at least a secondary one: as long as ‘the same end be persu’d’, he says, he will not insist ‘on this or that means to obtain it’ (355). Largely ignorant of the large-scale social and economic forces at work and impatient of the quotidian mechanics of governance, the constitutional arrangements he finally offers in the February pamphlet are so odd that they threaten both his main principles and would on publication invite both the dismay of republicans and the derision of royalists. As David Norbrook concedes, they ‘do indeed make grim reading’ (412). The central problem is Milton’s extraordinary proposal for what he had called in his Letter to a Friend a ‘perpetuall Aristocracy’ (331). That is, since successively elected Parliaments are no more than a ‘conceit’, it is best if once elected Parliament or the Grand Council should ‘sit perpetual’ (375). Members would sit for life without remuneration and the body as a whole might well remain ‘the same to generations’ (371). The sovereignty of the people would be delegated to this body, and it would have its own military forces, raise and manage revenue, make or propose civil laws, look after trade, and direct foreign policy. Most importantly, it would elect its own cabinet-council or Council of State so that it could pursue certain affairs with ‘more secrecie and

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expedition’ (368). Milton acknowledges that this arrangement may ‘seem strange’, but it would give the state stability, and if the ‘ambitious’ insist, there could be a rotation of a hundred or so members every two or three years—but ‘in my opinion’, he reasserts, ‘better nothing mov’d’ (370). Although he amplifies this proposal in the second edition, suggesting an innovative devolution of certain powers to local government, it remains essentially the same. Such a permanent Parliament is exactly what Milton’s republican friend and one of Skinner’s neo-Roman heroes, Marchamont Nedham, warns against in his Excellencie of a Free-State. He points out that in its earliest incarnation, the rule of the Roman senate, a permanent body without checks and balances, was no better than that of a single person: ‘Though the Name of King were exploded with alacrity, yet the Kingly power was retained with all Art and subtilty . . . The Senate having got all power into their own hands, in short time degenerated from their first Virtue and Institution, to the practice of Avarice, Riot, and Luxury; whereby the love of their Country was changed into a Study of Ambition and Faction’ (10–11).24 Only when Rome came to understand that ‘the interest of Freedom consists in a due and orderly Succession of the Supreme Assemblies’ (23) did the nation prosper. Pace Milton, successively and freely elected Parliaments are no conceit.25 If many republicans were likely to shake their heads, royalists could hardly contain their laughter. Samuel Butler wondered ‘what politique Crack in any mans Scull the imagination could enter of securing Liberty under an Oligarchy’. Indeed, ‘I could not but laugh (as they all [the members of the fictional Rota] had done) at the pleasantnesse of your fancy who suppose our noble Patriots, when they are invested for tearm of life, will serve their Country at their own charge’ (Censure, 15–16). Equally amused, L’Estrange considers Milton’s proposal simply a disingenuous means of perpetuating the Rump, the Rumpers being allowed to ‘rule us, and our Heirs forever’ (Be Merry and Wise, 6). Most importantly for the present argument, Milton’s proposal seriously compromises both his original principles. It so violates the point of abjuring rule by a single person, that is, each citizen’s right to have an ongoing say in the nation’s central government, that it should come as no surprise that by the end of April, in his last work before the Restoration, Notes Upon a Late Sermon, momentarily buoyed by Monck’s arrest of the sermon’s royalist author, Milton is ready to hold his nose, accept monarchy, and urge Monck himself to take the crown—better a king ‘out of our own number’ than one from the Stuart family, better an elected monarch than a hereditary one (vii. 482). Even liberty of conscience itself is not sacrosanct, for the particular Grand Council he has in mind is, as L’Estrange argues, not that much different from the Rump, a Parliament which had declared as recently as 23 January their determination to uphold a state-supported Church, precisely the policy Milton had expended so much energy arguing against earlier in 1659 and which he had then characterized as a ‘law against conscience’ (vii. 240).26 However committed he was to the language of the Good Old Cause, however hard he worked to revise his model of a free commonwealth in the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way, and despite its genuinely innovative moments, Milton’s neo-Roman constitution remains a muddle and reading it as uninflected political theory remains extremely

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difficult.27 The critical question becomes, then, why would he put forward what appears to be such a deeply flawed scheme? How could he bring himself to believe that oligarchy would secure liberty? How could devolving one’s affairs onto a perpetual senate be any less demeaning than onto a single person? Indeed, why had he felt from the beginning of the crisis that the difference between an annual democracy and a perpetual aristocracy was too nice a consideration? The answer I want to suggest lies not in Milton’s political thinking as such but in his temperament, especially as it was shaped by early educational experiences. It lies not in the pamphlet’s pragmatic aims but in its expressive constitution—and the most immediate route into that constitution is satire.

DIFFICILE EST NON SATURAM SCRIBERE

.................................................................................................................. No sooner had the first edition of The Readie and Easie Way come out than panic set in. Milton drafted a letter directly to Monck, urging him to remember his various declarations against monarchy and suggesting that a permanent Parliament or Grand Council be first elected from the votes of newly constituted city councils, themselves made up of ‘rightly qualifi’d’ members (393). Such a scheme would depend on the cooperation of the ‘chief Gentlemen out of every County’. If they ‘refuse these fair and noble Offers of immediate Liberty’, he says, use force. Remember the ways of the old Lord Protector, declare ‘this to be your Mind’, and remind them that you have ‘a faithful Veteran Army, so ready, and glad to assist you’ (393, 395). By the time Milton had finished the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way a few weeks later, and despite his final desperate suggestion that Monck take the crown, his sense of the General as a new Sulla seems to have taken hold. He begins the pamphlet with an epigraph adapted from Juvenal’s first satire: ‘Having given counsel to Sulla, we now give it to the people’: Et nos | Consilium dedimus Syllae, demus populo nunc. While it seems clear, as Woolrych puts it, that by Sulla ‘he can only have referred to Monck’ (CPW, vii. 205), the epigraph is something more than a gratuitous gibe at the General.28 The second edition of The Readie and Easie Way is even more unstable than the first. It is a measure of how off-key Milton is that he speaks in discordant registers. He may still be ‘rejoicing’ in the commitment of those in power to oppose the popular desire to return to monarchy, but, first, his characterization of that desire has now changed from the relatively restrained ‘unsound’ to the virulent ‘noxious’, and second, more importantly, his newly inserted conditional qualification renders the original ‘rejoicing’ bitterly ironic. His tone, as John Aubrey says of his conversation in general, turns abruptly from ‘pleasant’ to ‘Satyricall’: ‘If thir absolute determination be to enthrall us, before so long a Lent of Servitude’, Milton says, ‘they may permit us a little Shrovingtime first, wherin to speak freely, and take our leaves of Libertie’ (408–9).29 The sarcasm is deeply at odds with the avowed aim to be of ‘more use’ (408) and this kind of discontinuity is evident throughout the pamphlet. Even as Milton moves to revise and

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rationalize the practical details of his constitutional proposals, so his emotions seem increasingly out of control: he oscillates wildly between the hyperbolic extremes of idealization and demonization. Even as he still tries to appear reasonable and persuade an imagined audience of sensible and ingenuous readers, his rage increasingly articulates itself in highly imaginative literary forms, fragmented patterns of vehemence, of prophecy and satire. He seems to be arguing with the flat of his hand. As he depicts England’s monstrous aberration from its ideal, the ideal of the city he had spent his life imagining, so his pamphlet offers an accurate view less of the state of the nation than of his own state of mind. This is what I mean by the pamphlet’s expressive constitution. His anguish is such that as he resorts to satire he reveals something unexpected about his understanding of liberty. The key to his need to demonize and cast things in the particular literary form of satire is the epigraph from Juvenal. The epigraph is not a verbatim quotation from Juvenal but an adaptation. What Juvenal actually says is ‘et nos ergo manum ferulae subdiximus, et nos | consilium dedimus Sullae, privates ut altum | dormiret’ (Satire I.15–17): that is, in Peter Green’s translation, ‘I too have winced under the cane | And concocted “Advice to Sulla”: Let the despot retire | Into private life, take a good long sleep, and so on.’30 Juvenal had not literally advised Sulla—the dictator had been dead for almost two centuries—but he had received a good education, learning how to write a persuasive argument, a suasoria or stylish theme like the standard ‘Advice to Sulla’. He invokes his elite education here in order to establish his credentials and insist on his right to speak: ‘Semper ego auditor tantum?’ (Satire I.1): ‘Am I only ever to be a listener?’ What he wants more than anything else, just like Milton, is to be heard. If he is allowed to speak, if people will only listen quietly to reason, he argues, he will explain why he writes the way he does. But what they will hear, we might add, is not that reasonable. It may be magnificent in its saeva indignatio but it is hardly quiet, even-handed, or judicious. What Juvenal offers in the early books of his great work is not simply ‘anti-court satire’ but a relentless, comprehensive, and wildly exaggerated indictment of the city. It is no wonder that early Christian apologists like Lactantius admired Juvenal, for his vision confirmed them in their view that unregenerate, pagan Rome, the Rome whose destruction Augustine rejoiced in, stood as the demonic antithesis of the city of God. It is a city that has fallen from its original greatness, one in which the characters of the speaker and his friend Umbricius, once young men of great promise, are made to feel expatriated, humiliated, abject, obnoxious. Advancement is not by merit or commitment to the public good, but by every conceivable form of self-serving dishonesty. They feel themselves pushed aside by a multitude of false aristocrats and grasping proles, robbed of their national heritage: ‘Is it for nothing’, Umbricius laments, having decided to leave Rome for good, ‘that as a child I drank the air of the Aventine, and was nourished with Sabine olives’: ‘usque adeo nihil est, quod nostra infantia caelum | hausit Aventini baca nutrita Sabina?’ (Satire III.84–5). So corrupt is the great city of their ancestors, so painfully has it betrayed its ancient virtues, that it is impossible not to rage, not to write satire—‘difficile est saturam non scribere’ (Satire I.30). For Milton, this is the ground-tone of anger and humiliation that

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seems to have brought Juvenal to mind. Even minor details like the pain Juvenal recalls of having been caned as a schoolboy resonate with Milton. Over and again the English writer recalls his own schoolboy experiences as a peculiar mark of subjection. What was the point of all that hardship as a schoolboy immersed in the discipline of the academy, if one cannot now speak out, utter, argue, and be heard? ‘What advantage is it to be a man over it is to be a boy at school’, he demands in Areopagitica, ‘if we have only scapt the ferular, to come under the fescu of an Imprimatur?’ (ii. 531). ‘And what madness is it’, he says years later in The Readie and Easie Way, ‘for them who might manage nobly thir own affairs themselves, sluggishly and weakly to devolve all on a single person . . . more like boyes under age then men’ (vii. 427). This theme of agency denied and humiliation renewed is one of the predominant expressive features of the text and only satire can capture its force. Both editions of The Readie and Easie Way comprise five movements or sequences of thought: first, a history of England’s heroic achievement in ‘turning regal bondage into a free commonwealth’ (409); second, a prediction of the consequences ‘if we returne to Kingship’ (423); third, a model of the constitutional arrangements ready and easily available for the ‘timely setling’ of a free commonwealth (430); fourth, a reiteration of the dire consequences ‘if ther be a king’ (446); and fifth, a reassertion of wherein consists ‘the whole freedom of man’ (456). While the first and final sequences idealize, focusing on the glory of England’s promise and the principles that promise was meant to realize, the second and fourth sequences demonize, railing at the nation’s imminent humiliation. Unlike Juvenal, the horror is not located in the present but in an imagined future gaping to devour us (331). But just like Juvenal, what is unmistakable in Milton, despite the pamphlet’s art and elegant structure, is the unrestrained way in which the political and personal collapse into one another. England’s return to bondage is recreated in the image of Milton’s overdetermined fear of abjection, the threat of which comes from both above and below, from both the King’s court and the mad multitude. His caricature of the King’s court is unforgettable; its language and expressions are respectively ‘smooth’ and ‘pathetical’, as Starkey might put it: it constitutes satire of the highest order, reminiscent not only of Juvenal but of Rabelais or Swift. It is the kind of satire Northrop Frye would call ‘Menippean’ because it offers a caricature anatomy not so much of an intellectual system as of a social or political one.31 It displays all the preoccupation with words as ‘charms’ that Butler alleges. Indeed, it is the magically mathematical word ‘cipher’ that unlocks Milton’s tortured anatomy of royalist England. The new King appears not like his father as a man of blood, but as ‘a great cypher set to no purpose before a long row of other significant figures’ (426); he is both a blank and a secret code. As a blank his very emptiness measures and multiplies the absurdity of the infatuated people: he will have nothing to do, says Milton, but ‘set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of State . . . pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringings of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing don that can deserve it’ (426). As a code to be deciphered the only mystery this blank will reveal is putrefaction, the luxury of a court where women such as his probably foreign and popish wife or old Queen Mother,

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Henrietta Maria, will further debase the virtus of the nobility and gentry, drawing them away from public service, even to compete for such excremental offices as groom of the ‘close-stool’ (425). The people themselves, especially those bent on revenge, pamphleteers like Butler or L’Estrange, the seething advocates of this zero at the centre of things, will ride us into the dirt. As he warns the ‘new royaliz’d’ Presbyterians, let them look to the streets: ‘Let them but now read the diabolical forerunning libels, the faces, the gestures that now appear foremost and briskest in all public places; as the harbingers of those that are in expectation to raign over us; let them but hear the insolencies, the menaces, the insultings of our newly animated common enemies crept lately out of thir holes, thir hell, I might say, by the language of thir infernal pamphlets’ (452). The Presbyterians should not be misled—‘yet shall they not have the honor to yoke with these [royalists], but be yok’d under them; these shall plow on their backs’ (453), and we shall all suffer the same kind of debasement that we did under the prelates.32 We shall all become obnoxious, mastered men. Increasingly what Milton produces is, as one would expect with satire, a vision of hell—a nightmare city out of Jeremiah or Hieronymus Bosch. It is, however, central to my argument that what is a nightmare for Milton is a new dawn for others: ‘Now, as the Morne growes lighter and lighter’, says John Aubrey of the same period, as it grows ‘more glorious, till it is perfect day, so it is with the Joy of the People’ (278). As Juvenal proceeds, as he details the crimes and follies of Rome (during what was according to Gibbon mankind’s most happy and prosperous period), so all the positives disappear. This is not the case with Milton. Despite his refusal to understand the feelings of fellow citizens like Aubrey, Milton carefully adapts the Roman satirist’s line. He brings the long-forgotten suasoria ‘Advice to Sulla’ back to life and offers the adherents of the Good Old Cause some hope. For, unlike Juvenal, Milton has advised Sulla and now he will advise the ‘people’, regardless of how few of them there are to hear him. In other words, for the English poet there is a satiric norm, and the last vestige of hope, the image that throws the newly anatomized excesses of court and multitude into relief, is the backward-looking prospect of a perpetual senate. The whole freedom of man may consist in spiritual or civil liberty, but there has to be a thisworldly authority to secure it from both tyranny and ‘unbridl’d democratie’ (438). Milton is no Leveller. His perpetual senate is backward-looking for two reasons. First, it is a retrospective idealization of the ‘old famous parlament’ (324) that brought about the revolution, ‘our old Patriots, the first Assertours of our religious and civil rights’ (356). Second and more importantly, this idealized body harks back to the deep-rooted model of the nation as an academy, a model in which the wisdom and care of the masters protects and enables the learning and creativity of the students. The senate is ‘both the foundation and main pillar of the whole State’ because it comprises our ‘best and ablest’ citizens (434, 435), precisely those citizens who have been so well prepared by their education, as he explains in Of Education, that they will not in time of danger turn out to be ‘poor, shaken, uncertain reeds’, men of ‘tottering conscience’, but ‘stedfast pillars of the State’ (ii. 398). This is why the senate must be permanent, why this aristocracy of the best educated cannot change or rotate: for if it does, it is

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impossible to see how we can avoid the danger ‘of putting out a great number of the best and ablest: in whose stead new elections may bring in as many raw, unexperienc’d and otherwise affected, to the weakning and much altering for the wors of public transactions’ (vii. 435). Since we need to be governed by reason not numbers, the key to a free commonwealth is the elite humanist education Milton had lived by all his life and which is predicated on the principle of advancement by intellectual merit and moral effort, manliness and virtue, that is, virtus: ‘To make the people fittest to chuse, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education, to teach the people faith not without virtue . . . to place every one his privat welfare and happiness in the public peace, libertie and safetie’ (443). The body that is both the product and overseer of this process, as if it were the elected fellowship of some ideal college, is the perpetual senate. It may be backward-looking but it also provides a new prospect of the kind of future imagined in Areopagitica. The critical difference is that here the emphasis has switched from trial and the bold pursuit of truth to prudence and the careful management of change, from revolution to refinement, to the ‘sifting and refining of exactest choice’ (vii. 443). Liberty is increasingly associated with peace and security, the space that enables each citizen ‘to serve God and save his own soul according to the best light which God hath planted in him to that purpose’ (456). Under the protection of this permanent senate, ‘the true keepers of our libertie’ (443), religion will flourish and the nation will grow like a well-run academy ‘by degrees to perfection’ (444). Successive elections will only produce turbulence and undermine the authority of the best educated, breeding ‘commotions, changes, novelties, and uncertainties’ (434). Under the protection of this permanent senate, under ‘the wisdom & care of those who have the government’, Milton himself will not be mastered: he will have the freedom to imagine a church free of the state, devolved local government capable of preventing ‘all mistrust’, schools and academies everywhere spreading ‘knowledge and civilitie, yea religion’ (460). He will have the freedom to get on with his life, to realize his talent and write his books, most importantly, his own exposition of Christian doctrine and a poem doctrinal and exemplary to the nation. It is at this point that Milton’s pamphlet speaks beyond the conditions that produced it. It may exaggerate the triumphs of the English but their possibilities reach forward into modernity—but only, that is, to the extent that they can complete the construction of a free commonwealth, a nation state which can ensure the spiritual and civil liberties of its citizens. And that is far from certain. What reading The Readie and Easie Way as a satire reveals is two drives: the determination not to be mastered or humiliated, on the one hand, and a willingness to idealize the power that might protect one from such humiliation, on the other. The first impulse makes Stuart monarchy and all it entails demonic; the second makes oligarchy or even elective monarchy attractive possibilities. The relation between these impulses may be comprehensible but it is fraught with difficulties: the rival drives are more than likely to prove irreconcilable in practice. The tension remains unresolved in Milton and will play its way out in its most creative form in Paradise Lost. Those who emphasize the first impulse will feel, like most Romantic critics, and more recently

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Skinner, that Satan is made to sound like Milton because in his determination not to be mastered there is a degree to which the poet is of the devil’s party.33 Those who emphasize the second impulse will feel, like most twentieth-century academic critics from C. S. Lewis to Stanley Fish, that Satan’s desire for freedom is counterfeit, and the true model of the relation between freedom and authority is articulated in the dialogic or educational relationship between God the Father and his studiously faithful but independent-minded Son. Beyond this tension, however, reading the pamphlet as a satire reveals another problem—the temptation to despair so evident in Juvenal.

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.................................................................................................................. Taking her cue from Milton’s closing identification of himself with the prophet Jeremiah, Laura Knoppers re-presents The Readie and Easie Way in the literary form of a jeremiad. She sees it as a ‘performative utterance’, that is, an articulation which performs or rather enacts its own meaning: the prophecy realizes its pragmatic purpose in the very act of speaking, rather like Butler’s words as charms. Thus, when Milton uses Jeremiah’s words to acknowledge that he may have no audience other than the soil itself, ‘earth, earth, earth’ (vii. 462), the allusion transforms this expression of doubt into a curse: ‘O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord’, says Jeremiah. ‘I will cast thee out’, says Yahweh to the covenanted nation, ‘and thy mother that bore thee, into another country, where ye were born not; and there shall ye die’ (22: 29, 26). Backsliding Judah and her cipher of a king, the vain and despised ‘idol’, Coniah, will be delivered into the hands of Babylon (22: 28, 25). At the same time, however, the curse is an act of faith, for the narrative it invokes affirms that England is a covenanted nation and that God will not finally forsake his elect people—‘which Thou suffer not, who didst make mankinde free’ (463). God will not let reviving liberty expire, Milton will get his audience, and the holy spirit will breathe new life into the city. The problem is, however, as Knoppers astutely observes, that the speech act in its very vehemence renews the doubts it seeks to allay, for it is haunted by the fear that England may not after all be a covenanted nation—that all her heroism has been meaningless, that at the centre of her story there is no divine election, only a void, a cipher, ‘making vain’, Milton says with intense bitterness, ‘and viler then dirt the blood of so many thousand faithfull and valiant English men’ (423–4). It is this existential fear that reveals the centrality of Juvenal and the literary form we call satire. In this narrative, England will indeed become another Rome in the west, but not the Rome of Cicero and Virgil, a new Rome dedicated to God’s purpose; it will become the Rome of Juvenal, the nightmare city of the Satires. What makes The Readie and Easie Way such an extraordinary work is the way in which Milton is forced to confront the fear that the great patriotic narrative through which he had lived his life may in fact be an illusion, a dream built on nothing firm. For this reason, the pamphlet is suspended between the literary forms of prophecy and satire, painfully expressing his profound confusion, a confusion finally

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dependent on a contingency, on the unpredictability of what the English would do in April 1660. What the confusion at the heart of the pamphlet’s expressive constitution tells us is the degree to which it could just as easily be represented as either a prophetic lament for the covenanted nation or a satire on the foolish nation that presumed to imagine itself elect. Only the future would tell, and over the next fourteen years Milton provided many answers, all of them different.

NOTES 1. Milton’s poetry is quoted from The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler, and his prose from The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (CPW). 2. Cf. Revelation 18–19. 3. Cf. Aeneid II.274–9. 4. ‘Neo-Roman’ is, of course, Quentin Skinner’s term for the Renaissance revival of interest in classical republican thought. See Liberty before Liberalism; ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’; and ‘Free Person’. 5. See Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 41–2. 6. Augustine is quoted from The City of God, trans. Bettenson. 7. For more on this, see Stevens, ‘Milton and National Identity’. 8. Cf. Numbers 11: 27–9. 9. On Milton’s incipient anti-republicanism here, see Norbrook’s thoughtful response in Writing the English Republic, 411–12. 10. Cf. Jeremiah 22: 24–9. 11. Worden, Literature and Politics, 359. 12. See the brilliant essays of Knoppers, ‘Milton’s Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’; von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’; and Walker, ‘Rhetoric, Passion, and Belief’. See also Stevens, ‘Intolerance’. 13. [Butler], The Censure of the Rota upon Mr Milton’s Book, Entituled, The Ready and Easie Way, 8. 14. The case for attributing the Censure to Butler seems overwhelming; see von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’. 15. Butler, Observations, quoted in von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, 491. Cf. A Midsummer Night’s Dream v.i.4–8. 16. L’Estrange, No Blinde Guides. 17. GS, The Dignity of Kingship Asserted. 18. See Fish, How Milton Works, esp. 561–73, and ‘Theory’s Hope’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004). See also Stevens, ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works’, esp. 277–9. 19. The six works are A Letter to a Friend (October 1659, unpublished), Proposalls of Certaine Expedients (November 1659, unpublished), the first edition of The Readie and Easie Way (February 1660), A Letter to General Monck (February/March 1660, unpublished), the second edition of The Readie and Easie Way (April 1660), and Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon (April 1660). 20. See Austin Woolrych in his magisterial ‘Historical Introduction’ (CPW, vii. 1–228), Walker, ‘Rhetoric, Passion, and Belief’, and Campbell and Corns, John Milton, esp. 277–302.

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21. Sallust, Bellum Iugurthinum 95.3: ‘facundus, callidus, et amicitia facilis; ad simulanda negotia altitude ingeni incredibilis’. The translation is quoted from Sallust, The Jugurthine War, trans. Handford, 131. 22. Mercurius politicus 605 (26 January–2 February 1660), 1055. 23. L’Estrange, Be Merry and Wise, 6. 24. Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-State. 25. Worden, Literature and Politics, 350–1, argues that by this time Nedham may have changed his mind on the ‘desirability of elections’ and wonders if Milton had actually learned his backtracking from Nedham, a man ‘so practiced in the exact reversal of his own arguments’ (350). 26. All references to civil states meddling in ecclesiastical matters are now simply a matter of personal judgement (vii. 380) and disappear completely in the 2nd edn. 27. For an ingenious attempt to defend Milton’s constitution, one perhaps inspired by ‘the Puritan colonies of New England’, see Hoxby, Mammon’s Music, 77–92. See also Patterson, ‘Milton as a Political Prophet’. 28. Both Martin Dzelzainis and David Armitage in Armitage et al. (eds.), Milton and Republicanism, 200, 213, argue that Milton is referring to Cromwell here. As I suggest in my response, ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell’, Milton’s rejection of Cromwell is more than a little exaggerated and it remains unclear to me why he would want to foreground his alleged antipathy to the deceased Cromwell when he was immediately involved in a debate with ‘those who are in power’ now—that is, with Monck. 29. Cf. Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. Dick, 273–4. 30. Juvenal is quoted from Juvenal and Persius, trans. Ramsay. The translations are my own unless otherwise indicated; here it is from Juvenal, The Sixteen Satires, trans. and intro. Green. 31. See Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 229–31, 308–12. 32. See Stevens, ‘Intolerance’, esp. 243–56. 33. See Skinner, ‘Free Person’, 18.

WORKS CITED Armitage, David, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.). Milton and Republicanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Aubrey, John. Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Dick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984. Augustine, St. The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson, intro. John O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Butler, Samuel. The Censure of the Rota upon Mr Milton’s Book, Entituled, The Ready and Easie Way to Establish A Free Commonwealth. London, 1660. Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Fish, Stanley. How Milton Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. ——. ‘Theory’s Hope’. Critical Inquiry 30 (2004), 374–8. Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Hoxby, Blair. Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

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Juvenal. Juvenal and Persius, trans. G. G. Ramsay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. ——. The Sixteen Satires, ed. Peter Green. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. ‘Milton’s Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’, in David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (eds.), Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 213–25. L’Estrange, Roger. Be Merry and Wise, or a Sensible Word to the Nation. London, 1660. ——. No Blinde Guides in Answer to a Seditious Pamphlet of J. Milton’s. London, 1660. Maltzahn, Nicholas von. ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’. Studies in Philology 92.4 (1995), 482–95. Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe. 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler. London: Longmans, 1968. Nedham, Marchamont. The Excellencie of a Free-State. London, 1656. Norbrook, David. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Patterson, Annabel. ‘Milton as a Political Prophet: The Readie and Easie Way’, in Mary Nyquist and Feisal G. Mohamed (eds.), Milton and Questions of History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. S., G. The Dignity of Kingship Asserted: In Answer to Mr. Milton’s Ready and Easie Way to establish a Free Common-wealth. London, 1660. Sallust. The Jugurthine War; The Conspiracy of Cataline, trans. S. A. Handford. London: Penguin, 1963. Skinner, Quentin. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ——. ‘John Milton and the Politics of Slavery’, in Graham Parry (ed.), Milton and the Terms of Liberty. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002, 1–22. ——. ‘What Does it Mean to be a Free Person?’ London Review of Books 30.10 (2008), 16–18. Stevens, Paul. ‘Milton’s “Renunciation” of Cromwell’. Modern Philology 98.3 (2001), 363–92. ——. ‘Intolerance and the Virtues of Sacred Vehemence’, in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 243–67. ——. ‘How Milton’s Nationalism Works’, in David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (eds.), Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008, 273–301. ——. ‘Milton and National Identity’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Milton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 342–63. Walker, William. ‘Rhetoric, Passion, and Belief in The Readie and Easie Way’. Milton Studies 52 (2011), 34–83. Worden, Blair. Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

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THE EARLY POETRY OF JOHN DRYDEN ....................................................................................................... THOMAS N. CORNS

Viewed from a mid-career perspective, from the early 1680s and the context of the Exclusion Crisis, Dryden’s political poetry seemed starkly and straightforwardly partisan. Dryden looked to James, Duke of York, as a major patron and he enjoyed the support and protection of Charles II, who had appointed him Poet Laureate in 1668.1 Indeed, so generous was the King that in most years his remuneration for that and for other government offices was actually paid. Dryden had participated with skill and vigour on the Tory side of the controversies surrounding the succession of James and the prosecution of the Whig leader, Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–83). Indeed, his most ambitious poem on affairs of state, the first part of Absalom and Achitophel (London, 1681), though sometimes elusive in the tone of its depiction of Charles II as King David, manifests an unreserved hostility to his enemies, particularly Shaftesbury: ‘In friendship false, implacable in hate, | Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.’2 The poem ends in a full-throated asseveration of royal power, prerogative, and divine endorsement in anticipation of the happy times to be ushered in once Charles dismissed Parliament: He [Charles II] said. Th’almighty, nodding, gave consent, And peals of thunder shook the firmament. Henceforth a series of new time began, The mighty years in long procession ran; Once more the godlike David was restored, And willing nations knew their lawful lord (ll. 1026–31)

Shaftesbury was shortly afterwards arrested on a charge of high treason, though swiftly released on bail by a London jury. Whigs struck and circulated a medal in commemoration, the obverse of which showed the head of Shaftesbury beneath a sun breaking through the clouds. Dryden’s response, The Medal: A Satire against Sedition (London, 1682), appeared shortly afterwards. His partisanship took a sterner direction, as he

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entertained a scenario in which Shaftesbury’s severed head ‘would be seen to more advantage if it were placed on a spike of the Tower, a little nearer to the sun, which would then break out to better purpose’.3 Dryden’s enemies showed a remarkable degree of unanimity in the picture of him they drew in response to these two poems. He had come from lower-gentry stock and had only a moderate patrimony, though he had married the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, and had prospered as a writer for the theatre, enjoying the protection of royalty and their closest supporters. Yet his early career had been as a civil servant in the Protectorate government of Oliver Cromwell, to which he was advanced by his kinsman Sir Gilbert Pickering, Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. He had not only walked with fellow state employees John Milton and Andrew Marvell in the Lord Protector’s funeral procession but also wrote an elaborate and panegyric elegy for him, Heroic Stanzas Consecrated to the Glorious Memory Of His most Serene and Renowned Highness Oliver, Late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth, etc. Written after the Celebration of his Funeral (London, 1659). Whig satirists had a field day at his expense. The charges of turncoat and mercenary time-server were easy to make stick. Thus, The Medal Revers’d. A Satyre against Persecution by Samuel Pordage (c.1633–1691), like Dryden the author of heroic stage plays,4 lashed him in these terms: Wit rides triumphant in Power’s Chariot born, And deprest Opposites beholds with scorn. This well the Author of the Medal knew, When Oliver he for an Hero drew. He then Swam with the Tide; appeared a Saint, Garnish’d the Devil with Poetick Paint. When the Tide turn’d, then strait about he veers, And for the stronger side he still appears.5

Thomas Shadwell (c.1640–1692),6 an old rival and occasional enemy, whom Dryden had ridiculed in his MacFlecknoe (in manuscript circulation from 1676; first published in 16867), assailed him under the name of ‘John Bayes’, the character by which he was satirized in The Rehearsal, a stunningly brilliant satire on heroic drama by John Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, and others. Again, the Cromwellian past was revived, somewhat inaccurately, though the association with Pickering was true enough: ‘The next step of Advancement you began, | Was being Clerk to Nolls [that is, Oliver’s] Lord Chamberlain.’8 Examples could be multiplied from responses both to The Medal and to Absalom and Achitophel. A sequel to the latter, designed and partially written by Dryden, allowed some scope of reprisals, though Dryden had no real answer to the charge, nor did he ever find one. The campaign against him took a smart turn with the decision by his enemies actually to republish at least three times over 1681–2 the elegy for Cromwell, ‘Published to shew the Loyalty and Integrity of the Poet’.9 A spoof postscript has ‘J.D.’ confess his anxieties at being found out and shown up:

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The Printing of these Rhimes afflicts me more Than all the Drubs I in Rose-Alley bore. This shews my nauseous Mercenary Pen Would praise the vilest and the worst of Men.10

As if accepting that the attack could not be met (and recognizing his poem to have real literary merits), Dryden included it in his acknowledged oeuvre in the uniform set of his poems produced by his usual publisher in the early 1690s.11 Dryden’s triumphs and tribulations of the early 1680s eloquently demonstrate how persistently the conflicts of the mid-century decade reverberated through the political and cultural life of the Restoration. However, the later, rather brutal exchanges collaterally disguise a proper appreciation of his earlier poetry, which, if read carefully against the emerging Cromwellian ideology of the Protectorate—and its mutations in the immediate aftermath of the return of Charles II—discloses a radically different image of Dryden from the mercenary turncoat that emerges from the writings of his Whig enemies. Dryden’s elegy appeared first in an elegant little pamphlet entitled Three Poems Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, 1659). Henry Herringman, who was to prove invaluable to Dryden as friend and publisher, had registered a similar title, though had not carried the project through to completion. He had planned a volume of poems by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Thomas Sprat. In the event, the volume that finally appeared, under the imprint of the ‘little known’ William Wilson,12 substituted an already published poem by Edmund Waller for Marvell’s ‘Upon the Death of O.C.’, which remained unpublished in Marvell’s lifetime. The change of policy perhaps reflected anxieties of Marvell and indeed Herringman in the uncertain times that followed the succession of Richard Cromwell to the role of Lord Protector.13 But Dryden’s poem was profoundly shaped, not by such anxieties, but by the development of a new cultural and political ideology during Oliver’s Protectorate. The work of two figures, Sir Gilbert Pickering and John Milton, is eloquently illustrative of these changes. Pickering was the nephew of Dryden’s father. Plainly a Puritan by inclination—he opposed the celebration of Christmas, for example—he nevertheless picked a careful path through the late 1640s. He had been appointed to the court that tried Charles I, but had not signed the death warrant.14 He approved the reform of tithes, but favoured a gradual and cautious approach. He seemed to have been party to the plot that saw the dismissal of the Barebones Parliament. But Pickering emerged as a stalwart supporter of Oliver’s Protectorate, and ensured first Dryden’s father and then the poet himself in a minor way should dip their bread in the rich gravy of material gain available to its loyalists. Dryden the elder died before benefiting much, and the exact role of the poet in the Protectoral administration remains uncertain.15 Pickering, appointed Lord Pickering by Cromwell, was promoted to the ceremonial office of Lord Chamberlain, and played a prominent role in the construction of

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quasi-monarchical protocol and ritual around the Protectoral court. He supervised the reception of ambassadors, served on the Council of State, busying himself in foreign affairs (where his duties intersected with Milton’s), and supervised Cromwell’s state funeral. That was conducted with all the grandeur associated with the interment of a monarch, though its execution proved inept: Cromwell had necessarily been buried before the elaborate ceremonial could be arranged, and the hearse carried no body. Pickering walked immediately before it in the funeral procession; Dryden and Milton were almost certainly present in the train. Pickering’s engagement in the transformation of Cromwell into a figure approximating to a king found eloquent expression in Milton’s Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda (London, 1654). The tract, which was probably in part written in support of the Protectoral embassy to the court of Christina of Sweden, celebrates Oliver as a new kind of ruler, a man who could, if he wished, be king, though that would set a limit on his dignity and power, which are truly transcendent. Milton toes the emerging Cromwellian party line, that kingless England is not opposed to monarchs in general (and the Swedish monarch in particular), though it is opposed to tyrannical ones (such as Charles I).16 Milton selected a cluster of members of the Protectoral Council of State for special praise. There, alongside other substantial men of property on whom Cromwell had come to rely, we find Pickering.17 The little volume Wilson produced placed Dryden in interesting company. Edmund Waller (1606–87), an accomplished Caroline court poet and a moderate reformer in the Short Parliament and the early years of the Long Parliament, had been in exile in the aftermath of the incompetent royalist coup that bears his name, though had returned to England in the 1650s, writing panegyric to the Protector, and commemorating his death with ‘Upon the late Storme and the Death of his Highnesse Ensuing the same’, which had already been published before Wilson included it. Thomas Sprat (1635–1713) was closer in age to Dryden, and their careers followed substantially parallel courses. He, too, had benefited from the protection of a powerful Cromwellian associate, John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, and Cromwell’s brother-in-law, and like Dryden he prospered after the Restoration, ending up as Bishop of Rochester. Sprat’s poem, which he dedicated to Wilkins in a brief epistle, has much in common with Dryden’s. The epistle sets a quasi-monarchical tone, in its praise of ‘that Prince’ Oliver. Like Milton, Sprat makes much of the non-hereditary status of Oliver’s reign (‘Thy Scepter’s not thy Fathers, but thy own’); of his domestic self-discipline (he ‘Learn’d first to rule in a Domestick way’); and, crucially, of the success of his foreign policy (‘Those hands . . . were ordain’d by Fates | To change the World, and alter States’).18 Waller, too, stresses the success of foreign policy, suggesting it in some way healed the wounds of the Civil Wars: ‘From Civill Broyls he did us disengage, | Found nobler objects for our Martiall rage . . . ’. I doubt the Battle of Worcester seemed much like a ‘disengagement’ to the losing side, or even to the victors. Significantly, Waller adopts the trope of representing it in Roman and imperial (and indeed Virgilian) terms: ‘So Romulus was lost: | New Rome in such a Tempest mis’t her King . . . ’19

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That Virgilian hint is developed by Dryden to be the dominant idiom of his own elegy. Its opening lines, which refer to the funeral service of Oliver, allude to the rites for the deification of a Roman emperor, and a carefully crafted comparison of Cromwell to Romulus, founder of the Roman state, continues the web of allusion.20 Oliver’s greatness is monarchical in scale but superior to a king’s in that it was not inherited: ‘His grandeur he derived from heaven alone’ (l. 21). In lines that echo Waller’s, his death is followed by a sort of pax Romana: No civil broils have since his death arose, But faction now by habit does obey; And wars have that respect for his repose As winds for halcyons when they breed at sea. (ll. 141–4)

The core of the poem, stanzas 21 to 31, dwells on his advancement of the national interest through a successful and aggressive foreign policy, establishing an English empire at the expense of the Dutch, Spanish, and French, and extending English influence to the New World. Dryden’s senior associates had considerable anxieties following the Restoration. Charles II’s overture to the English people, the Declaration of Breda, was promulgated in early April 1660, and disclosed more widely once the Convention Parliament invited him home at its session on 1 May. It is almost an irenic document, offering ‘a free and general pardon’ to all who accepted the new regime, while ‘excepting only such persons as shall hereafter be excepted by Parliament, those only to be excepted’.21 That riddling formula left men like Milton and Pickering, relatively high-profile figures close to the Protectoral establishment, with reasonable fears that they would be excluded from indemnity and oblivion; in the event, both, eventually, were pardoned.22 Yet for all the danger posed to old friends—and Dryden continued on good terms with both Milton and Pickering in their political eclipse23—the rhetoric of the Declaration of Breda, with its emphasis on Charles’s desire for reconciliation, pervades his poetry in the early 1660s. Immediately pressing was the need for new patronage. In 1660, Sir Robert Howard, whose sister Dryden would marry in 1663 and with whose collaboration he would launch his highly successfully career as a dramatist, published his Poems (London, 1660), a collection of his works. Howard had a good record as a loyal supporter of the exiled King, and had been imprisoned towards the end of the Interregnum. On the Restoration he enjoyed ‘an impressive number of lucrative offices and profitable grants’.24 Dryden’s prefatory verse to Howard’s Poems, ‘To my Honoured Friend Sir Robert Howard, on his Excellent Poems’, has as much to say about the Restoration as about the volume it prefaces. Howard had optimistically anticipated the return of the King: ‘But what we most admire, your verse no less | The prophet than the poet doth confess’ (ll. 87–8). But, like Howard himself, Dryden is careful to build connections not only to diehard royalists but also to the newly emerging Restoration establishment, a coalition of the King’s old supporters and those former opponents who had ushered him home. General George Monck, shortly to be created Duke of Albemarle, had

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played the crucial role, and is duly honoured: he ‘thought it greater honour to obey | His country’s interest than the world to sway’ (ll. 97–8). Dryden simultaneously works to distance the misled and repentant (like himself) from Puritan hard-liners, who remain unreconcilable to the new regime; they were the men who prospered ‘When nothing flourished but fanatic bays’ (l. 52). Dryden’s greatest poem of the early 1660s was Astraea redux. A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second, published by Henry Herringman early in the summer of 1660, at a time when the press groaned under the welter of royalist panegyric. As if Dryden laboured to reverse even the details of his elegy for Oliver, the Cromwellian pax Romana is refigured as ‘A dreadful quiet felt, and worser far | Than arms, a sullen interval of war’ (ll. 3–4). While its non-hereditary status had been a positive feature of the first Protectorate, Charles II is ‘Heir to his father’s sorrows with his crown’ (l. 52). Apparently, those seeming victories of Oliver’s imperialist design were illusory. Only now will foreign enemies see a militant and effective policy: ‘Our lion now will foreign foes assail’ (l. 118). As Dryden points out, the ships sent to bring Charles back from exile had, as principal vessels of the Protectoral navy, names commemorating Civil War victories which required changing. Thus the flagship, the Naseby, was renamed the Charles, as Dryden notes (ll. 230–1). The poet seems as assiduous and fine-grained in revision of his own earlier mistakes. Three major stratagems drive the argument of the poem. Redeemable opponents are once more distinguished from reprobates, and especially their ideologues: ‘For his [Charles II’s] long absence church and state did groan, | Madness the pulpit, faction seized the throne’ (ll. 21–2). Indeed, all but the most depraved have embraced the indulgence and forgiveness extended to them: ‘The discontented now are only they | Whose crimes before did your just cause betray’ (ll. 314–15). Secondly, and perhaps not wholly confidently, the mercy of the King is celebrated; the lives and fortunes of men like Pickering were for the most part still at risk at the point Dryden published his poem: By that same mildness which your father’s crown Before did ravish, shall secure your own. Not tied to rules of policy, you find Revenge less sweet than a forgiving mind. (258–61)

There is a sense, perhaps, that a mutuality of interest binds Charles to his formerly hostile subjects, whose willingness to receive forgiveness renders them more passive than would the fear of retribution. Pragmatism, as well as mercy, are attributed to the restored monarch. The third stratagem is the careful construction of a vision of England as a new imperial Rome. The process of the Restoration had depended on the complicity of the English navy, in which the role of Edward Montagu, soon to be created first Earl of Sandwich, had been pivotal. Had the fleet stayed loyal to the Republic, the King could not have returned. Tacitly adapting his account of Cromwell’s foreign policy, Dryden develops a celebration of England’s potential as a maritime empire:

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Abroad your empire shall no limits know, But like the sea in boundless circles flow. Your much-loved fleet shall with a wide command Besiege the petty monarchs of the land . . . (ll. 298–301)

Of course, it remains unstated exactly by whom the fleet is much loved, though perhaps by Charles and his supporters, who relied on it to get him home. The English navy had triumphed in the First Anglo-Dutch War, fought under Cromwell; it would not do so well in the second and third, fought under Charles. Those generally genuine achievements of Protectoral foreign policy, against the Dutch and the Spanish, are aspirationally mapped onto the restored monarchy. In this great project, factious opposition to the crown will disappear as a wide spectrum of Englishmen are incorporated into the imperial design. Augustus, the first Roman emperor, had ushered in a golden age of domestic peace and imperial expansion in part through his irenic policy towards former opponents, of whom Horace, his later panegyrist, had been one. Explicitly, Dryden links his new England to Augustan Rome (a trick he had already used for the Protectorate), but now he insinuates poets (like himself—and like Virgil and Horace) into the great adventure: O happy age! O times like those alone By Fate reserved for great Augustus’ throne! When the joint growth of arms and arts foreshow The world a monarch, and that monarch you. (ll. 320–3)

The lines echo those that close the prophecy vouchsafed to Aeneas of the glory that will be Rome.25 Dryden’s next poem of state was To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyric On His Coronation (London, 1661), published about the time of the event. Charles had postponed the ceremony until 23 April, by which time most of the blood-letting, the execution of condemned regicides, was over and the happier fates of the likes of Milton and Pickering generally assured (though there was another wave of reprisals in that same year). The convention in England of dating the new year for most purposes from 25 March, together with the spring season, allowed Dryden to produce a sort of late Stuart Primavera, a celebration of a new beginning, a new year, a new era of peace and fertility: Soft western winds waft o’er the gaudy spring, And opened scenes of flowers and blossoms bring To grace this happy day, while you appear Not King of us alone, but of the year. (ll. 29–32)

Charles, whose acknowledged illegitimate children finally numbered fourteen (with perhaps another twenty-five less surely attributed), was unmarried, though in negotiations with Spain and Portugal for a possible bride (the latter won). His eldest son, the future Duke of Monmouth, was already 11. Dryden, however, is left somewhat floundering as he strives to establish Charles’s quasi-mythic status, and the poem ends in

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rehearsing his subjects’ uneasy speculation about the identity of the future queen. Other aspects of the poem are familiar from Astrea redux. Once more, the opposition to the King is reduced to a handful of diehard fanatics. Recent events, particularly the Fifth Monarchist uprising led by Thomas Venner, which had been bloodily suppressed in January 1661, lent credibility to the claim that ‘You have already quenched sedition’s brand, | And zeal (which burnt it) only warms the land’ (ll. 79–80). Dryden still figures himself as speaking for the repentant and misled who seek only reconciliation from a monarch still characterized by the mercy extended in the Declaration of Breda: ‘Among our crimes oblivion may be set, | But ’tis our King’s perfection to forget’ (ll. 87–8). Even the prospect of a maritime empire gets a brief airing: ‘Born to command the mistress of the seas, | Your thoughts themselves in that blue empire please’ (ll. 98–9). Three minor poems of the early 1660s show Dryden trying further to embed himself in the emerging Restoration establishment. In 1662 he published with Herringman To My Lord Chancellor, Presented on New-years-day, a gift poem to Edward Hyde, Charles’s most powerful minister, who is celebrated in effect as the King’s representative on earth. Dryden supplied a prefatory poem, ‘To my Honoured Friend Dr Charleton, on his learned and useful work’, to Walter Charleton’s antiquarian thesis Chorea gigantum, or, The most Famous antiquity of Great-Britain, Vulgarly called Stoneheng (London, 1663). Charleton argued that the monument was of Danish provenance. Dryden’s concerns substantially lie away from that improbable thesis, as he takes opportunities to praise the ‘British fleets’ that ‘the boundless ocean awe’ (l. 26), while once more celebrating the restoration of Charles, who on Charleton’s account once sheltered ‘his sacred head’ at Stonehenge, while fleeing after the Battle of Worcester (ll. 53–4). What was probably the last in this small cluster was a poem of compliment and thanks directed ‘To the Lady Castlemaine’. Barbara Villiers, wife of the Earl of Castlemaine, was Charles’s principal mistress through the 1660s, bearing him five children. Her status had gained her considerable notoriety, and Dryden, who writes to thank her for an act of patronage, most likely to do with his work as dramatist, kept it from the press for many years.26 As the stage increasingly occupied Dryden’s time and produced his income, it would take more than ‘One sovereign smile from beauty’s general heir’ (‘To the Lady Castlemaine’, l. 58) to prompt him again to write a poem on the affairs of state. Indeed, the Second Anglo-Dutch War, the visitation of the plague in 1665, and the Great Fire of London are the subject matter of the remarkable Annus mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 (London, 1667), published by Henry Herringman. Millenarian speculation about the Second Coming of Christ, the Last Judgement, and the thousand-year rule of the saints flared up occasionally throughout the early modern period, and serious divines had pondered the text of Revelation for evidence. ‘1666’ attracted attention since it combined a millennium with ‘666’, a symbolic if mysterious number drawn from Revelation 13: 18 (‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six’). By the middle of the decade, Charles had largely expended the goodwill inherited at the Restoration, disappointing most who

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had welcomed him home. To diehard Cavaliers, men who had fought for him and his father and seen their personal fortunes ruined in the royalist cause, their generally poor reward in the 1660s had seemed the action of an ingrate. Moderate Puritans, who had thought the King’s return would have been the best restraint on the excesses of sectaries and the rampant Quaker movement, found their ministers excluded from their livings and their own freedom to worship as constrained as that of the most extreme of religious radicals. Moreover, across a wide spectrum of the political nation, Charles’s evident profligacy and scandalous sexual conduct provoked condemnation and alarm, a process which accelerated as the more lawless conduct of his courtiers attracted widespread criticism.27 The major visitation of the plague in 1665 occasioned 100,000 deaths across the metropolis of London (including its suburbs).28 Plague and the Stuarts had a long association in the popular imagination: there had been major visitations in 1603 (coincident with the accession of James I) and 1625 (coincident with the accession of Charles I). However, as in previous plague years, few people of property were among the casualties, because they took themselves off to much safer rural locations. At about the same time that Milton withdrew to a rented cottage among his Quaker friends in Chalfont St Giles, Dryden and his family were on their way for a protracted stay at the country estate of his father-in-law, the Earl of Berkshire. In the poem, Dryden passes straight from the account of the naval war to his description of the fire, though his prefatory epistle, ‘To the Metropolis of Great Britain, the most renowned and late flourishing City of London’, does allude to ‘a consuming pestilence, and a more consuming fire’.29 The balance may seem a curious one to a modern readership: indeed, the fire destroyed most of London within the city walls, taking 13,000 houses, many grand buildings (most spectacularly, St Paul’s Cathedral), and leaving between 65,000 and 80,000 people homeless, though very few people died.30 However, it gave Dryden a problem he could work with; how could this catastrophe be represented as something other than God’s retribution on London for its apostasy to the republican or Puritan causes and punishment for the wickedness of the King and his court? The plague would have been less tractable to sympathetic representation. Dryden’s major stratagem is to sandwich the disaster between the early triumphs of the naval war and the prospect and indeed prophecy of its successful conclusion. In between, he plays over again the narrowness of the support for hard-line republicanism, he repositions London in terms of its dominant political ideology, and he develops a new line in royal panegyric. Londoners were daily reminded of the recent Civil Wars and the retribution they provoked; the heads of ‘traitors’ remained on prominent display at various sites. Historically, the posting of heads on London Bridge (the only crossing point) had been a long tradition. Indeed, eighteen decorate the southern entrance in C. J. Visschler’s Long Prospect of London (1616). The parts of those hanged, drawn, and quartered in Venner’s Uprising were certainly still visible, along with the remains of the regicides killed in 1660–1, and the heads of Oliver Cromwell, his son-in-law Henry Ireton, and

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John Bradshaw, judge in Charles I’s trial, would remain exhibited on spikes on Westminster Hall till the 1680s. Though they had died before the Restoration, their bodies had been exhumed and displayed, and their heads severed. Dryden represents the late republicans thus: The ghosts of traitors from the bridge descend With bold fanatic spectres to rejoice; About the fire into a dance they bend, And sing their sabbath notes with feeble voice. (ll. 889–92)

Only such fanatics could find anything to celebrate; the rest of London, far from gloating at the apparent retribution, aligns itself with the King, who extends to it a paternal care. The issue is vital to the argument of the poem, since London had been the bastion of Parliament’s support throughout the 1640s, and its population, or at least those that remained after the First Civil War started in 1642, were overwhelmingly loyal to the parliamentary cause. Indeed, Dryden patiently describes the city of London’s loyalism as manifest in their purchase of a mighty warship as a voluntary contribution to the conflict (ll. 601–16). Charles, a man of considerable personal courage, had actually behaved energetically and effectively during the fire. As a modern biographer puts it, ‘It gave Charles his first opportunity since Worcester of playing the hero in person, and he performed the part superbly.’31 Dryden’s earlier poems in praise of the King indicate a residual anxiety in their persistent assertion of his mercy to the penitent sinners (like himself and his old patron Pickering), as though he needed to reassure himself by repeating the mantra. The Charles of Annus mirabilis is more confidently depicted in heroic yet paternally affectionate terms: Nor with an idle care did he behold: Subjects may grieve, but monarchs must redress. He checks the fearful and commends the bold, And makes despairers hope for good success. (ll. 965–8)

Fortuitously, the merry monarch seizes the opportunity to metamorphose into a latterday Henry V. Dryden grasps the advantage that affords his argument. But his defence of the regime against the implied charge of divine retribution for its failings stands or falls in his account of the naval battles of the war against the United Provinces. Indeed, taking the most sanguine view of the conflict, Dryden could represent the several battles of 1665–6 as victories for the English fleet, and by the end of those campaigns, the Dutch merchant shipping lay exposed to English depredation.32 Dryden had defended Cromwell in terms of his service of the national interest through an aggressive foreign policy. His similar defence of Charles was even better founded since he had vividly associated the war on the Dutch with the mercantile interest of the city of London. Once more he reaches for the Augustan idiom. The poem ends prophetically, but this is a prophecy of a Stuart empire, not the grim threats of divine punishment rehearsed by oppositional doom-sayers, as Michael McKeon has demonstrated.33 A new and better London shall rise from its own ashes (ll. 1177–80),

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while the English navy shall complete the task, ushering in a maritime empire that will seal the city’s domination of world trade and exceed the ambitions of rival states: Already we have conquered half the war, And the less dangerous part is left behind: Our trouble now is but to make them dare, And not so great to vanquish as to find. Thus to the eastern wealth through storms we go, And now, the Cape once doubled, fear no more: A constant trade-wind will securely blow, And gently lay us on the spicy shore. (ll. 1209–16)

Dryden completes in Annus mirabilis the poetic progression initiated in his Heroic Stanzas, founding a vision of an England united around the aggressive and successful pursuit of the national interest by military means, and in so doing, he moves from the quasi-monarch Cromwell, through a diffidently represented King at the Restoration, to his heroic picture of Charles as fire-fighting war-leader. At the moment of its publication it was a tour de force. But its long-term credibility depended on the realization of the closing prophecy; by the early summer of 1667 a crueller reality had obtruded. Hutton describes it thus: On 27 May [the Dutch] fleet put out, and on 10 June it bombarded the fort commanding the entrance of the Medway into surrender. Owing to lack of money and of interest by the government, this vital defence had been only half built. Two days later the Dutch sailed upriver, burned three of the biggest vessels of the Royal Navy, and towed off its flagship as a prize. They then retired to the mouth of the Thames, which they settled down to blockade indefinitely as they attempted, with success, the innovation of supplying their ships by sea. . . . it was said in London that [Charles] had spent the evening after the disaster supping with his son Monmouth, together with his mistress Castlemaine, and joining the party in hunting a moth around the room. He was paying heavily for his long association with pleasure and negligence.34

Dryden wrote no more poems on affairs of state till Absalom and Achitophel, by which time a satiric edge and an ironic tone had largely displaced the simpler certainties of Virgilian aspiration, and the attempt at building consensus around the restored monarch had been replaced by an unrelenting and pitiless partisanship.

NOTES 1. The biographical details in this account are drawn substantially from Winn, Dryden, passim. 2. Dryden, Poems, i. 471; all references are to this edition unless stated. 3. ‘Epistle to the Whigs’, Dryden, Poems, ii. 10. 4. See ODNB. 5. Pordage, Medal, sig. C1r–C1v.

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6. The attribution of the poem to Shadwell is unconfirmed but highly likely; see ODNB on this and other biographical details relating to Shadwell’s chequered relationship with Dryden. 7. Dryden, Poems, i. 306. 8. [Shadwell, attrib.], Medal of John Bayes, 8. 9. See Dryden, Poems, i. 17; Dryden, Elegy, title page. 10. Dryden, Elegy, 8. Rose Alley was the location of a serious physical assault suffered by Dryden at the hands of unidentified assailants. 11. Dryden, Poems, i. 17. 12. Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 332. 13. On Marvell’s Cromwell elegy and similar charges of shifting loyalties, see ch. 25 by McDowell in this volume. 14. For his biography, see ODNB. 15. Winn, Dryden, 80. 16. For a fuller consideration of the argument and politics of Defensio secunda, see Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 260–4. 17. Milton, Complete Prose Works, iv. 676–7. 18. Waller, Dryden, and Sprat, Three Poems, 16–17. 19. Ibid. 30–1. 20. Dryden, Poems, i. 18 n. 24 n. 21. Gardiner (ed.), Constitutional Documents, 465–6. 22. On Pickering, see ODNB; on Milton, Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 307–17. 23. Campbell and Corns, John Milton, 370–1; Winn, Dryden, 128. 24. ODNB. 25. Virgil, Aeneid, VI.791–4; Dryden, Poems, i. 54n. 26. Dryden, Poems, i. 80. 27. Hutton, Charles II, 231–2. On the problems confronting Charles in the mid-decade years, see McKeon, Politics and Poetry, esp. chs. 2 and 3. 28. Porter, Great Fire, 2–3, 17. 29. Dryden, Poems, i. 111. 30. Porter, Great Fire, 71. 31. Hutton, Charles II, 234. 32. Ogg, Europe, 428. 33. McKeon, Politics and Poetry, esp. chs. 8 and 9. 34. Hutton, Charles II, 248.

WORKS CITED Campbell, Gordon, and Thomas N. Corns. John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dryden, John. An Elegy on the Usurper O.C, by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel. London, 1682. ——. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond. London: Longman, 1995–2005. Gardiner, Samuel Rawson (ed.). The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–1660, 3rd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979.

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Hutton, Ronald. Charles II: King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1989] 1991. McKeon, Michael. Politics and Poetry in Restoration England: The Case of Dryden’s ‘Annus mirabilis’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd edn, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, rev. Pierre Legouis with the collaboration of E. E. Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Milton, John. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. Ogg, David. Europe in the Seventeenth Century. 8th edn. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1965. Pordage, Samuel. The Medal Revers’d: A Satyre against Persecution. London, 1682. Porter, Stephen. The Great Fire of London. Stroud: Sutton, 1996. [Shadwell, Thomas, attrib.]. The Medal of John Bayes: A Satyr against Folly. London, 1682. Waller, Edmund, John Dryden, and Thomas Sprat. Three Poems Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. London, 1659. Winn, James Anderson. 1987. John Dryden and his World. New Haven: Yale University Press.

CHAPTER

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SAY FIRST, WHAT CAUSE? The Origins of Paradise Lost ....................................................................................................... ANNABEL PATTERSON

To write a chapter for an Oxford Handbook on Milton’s Paradise Lost is not a task for the timid. But to write such a chapter for a Handbook that connects ‘Literature’ to ‘The English Revolution’ by that unassuming but treacherous conjunction and is to walk right into a conceptual and methodological trap. ‘And’ is more ambiguous than ‘in’ or ‘of’. Is the connection simply one of periodicity, or is it causal? How can Paradise Lost, published seven years after the English Revolution had ground to a halt, be subsumed backwards into those twenty years of turmoil from 1640 to 1660 which we are only now, after years of terminological timidity, daring to call ‘The English Revolution’? Or if strict periodicity bows to causality, as it reasonably might since we know that great events seldom produce their literary reactions and reflections on the spot, what does it mean to believe Paradise Lost was somehow the product of the English revolutionary period and Milton’s involvement in it? If it was somehow caused by those events, does the poem in any clear way speak about them or to them? These are the questions that Milton’s readers have been asking, and fighting over, ever since the poem first appeared in 1667. Rather than recycling that controversy, it would be better to describe the poem as it appears to us today; to delineate its great and obvious subjects, for they are at least four; to recognize how astonishingly Milton’s idea of his project had grown since he made youthful plans for an epic based on ancient British history, and, a little later, actually sketched a drama based on the first book of Genesis; to consider what the experiences of 1640 to 1660 might have contributed to that growth; but to consider also other input—let us call it literary input—that might equally help to account for the difference between his original sketches and the finished product. I shall silently invoke the difference between the necessary and the unnecessary hypothesis, and conclude, unsurprisingly, that no single causal explanation will do.

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What are the four great subjects of Paradise Lost as they appear to us today? Even to place them in order of importance is problematic, because modern readers come to the poem with diverse beliefs and demands. Milton himself probably placed first in significance his own act of theological rebellion, his decision to make God not only speak—forbidden on the stage—but himself actually define a new, heterodox theology. In this radical thought, strict Calvinism with its commitment to double predestination would be discarded and replaced by something his contemporaries would recognize as Arminianism, which allowed back into the conundrum of the Fall the possibility of salvation for all. This was the heart of Milton’s claim to ‘justify the ways of God to men’, so that men could no longer complain that their spiritual fate was decided for them. The number of readers whom this project captivates has grown recently, but the theology of the poem will always seem esoteric. Milton’s second great subject, however, has claimed the attention of all readers from the start: explaining the origin of evil. The first half of the poem moves that moment back beyond the fall of the angels to a moment in the biography of Satan that Milton invented. Though of course not the first European writer to develop the character of the Adversary (Lucifer, Draco, Pluto, whatever he might be called), Milton’s magnificent version of this character grips the reader in part by his very recognizability, his likeness to people we know, his cleverness, his crowd-pleasing and heart-breaking language. Milton’s Satan has become our only image of Satan, and students may be shocked to learn from what scant biblical fragments he had gradually been assembled over time. Many readers, past and present, believe that in this thrilling, modern, reconception of Satan consists the main point of the poem. It is all the easier to believe this when Satan is the character whom we meet first, overwhelming the first two books of the poem; it will take Book III, the debate on theology between the Father and Son, to reorient us. And unlike the theological argument, it is the Satan plot that seems most likely to be resonant of early modern history, that tempts us to equate the rebellion of the fallen angels against God with that of half of England against Charles I. The true means to salvation; the relation between absolute evil and politics; these two subjects alone might well suffice for a big poem. But by the early 1660s Milton was not only interested in the relationship between God and Man or between sovereigns and subjects. He had become during the 1640s obsessed by the relationship between Man and Woman, a subject that encompasses human sexuality, the art of courtship, domestic politics, the realistic nature of fidelity, in a word, marriage. As Milton created the most full-figure Satan in Western literature, for all time, so he created our idea of Eve, who had even less biblical body than Satan. He rescued sexual beauty for the epic, consigned by Torquato Tasso and Edmund Spenser to the arena of taboo, and he made Eve more interesting than her predecessors in European literature. The books of the marriage, IV, VIII, IX, and X, rival the first two books in attracting readerly investment, some of which is necessarily personal. The Eve plot, then, constitutes a subject in itself, however brilliantly connected to the Satan plot, and its strength lies in its all-too-human interaction. But the last topic points in a different direction: literary theory, or the nature of the modern epic. By

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refusing titular obeisance to the Iliad and the Aeneid, Paradise Lost proclaimed its difference from the Thebaid of Statius, Vida’s Christiad, the Angeleida of Valvasone, the Os Lusiadas of the Portuguese Camoens, and, pre-emptively, the Dunciad of Alexander Pope. Heroism in this epic was not going to be defined by classical tradition, except negatively. The poem’s fourth subject, then, was its own genre. What kind of epic was fit for the times? Poor Sir William Davenant had thought that was his territory, and belaboured the question in his long and flat-footed Preface to Gondibert, addressed to Thomas Hobbes. The Preface, indubitably a document of the English Revolution, was dated ‘From the Louvre, January 2, 1650’, and therefore presented itself in England as a literary manifesto from the royalist court in exile. Shortly afterwards Davenant was in prison in England, captured in attempting a mission for Charles II, and one of Milton’s eighteenth-century biographers, Jonathan Richardson, heard from Davenant’s son that Milton was one of those who procured his release from the Tower and threat of execution.1 This suggests that Milton, ‘long choosing and beginning late’ on his own heroic poem, might well have studied Davenant’s theory of the modern epic: courtly, militaristic, earthbound, rigorously eschewing the supernatural. If he did so in the 1650s, by 1667 he had completely rejected it. Let us now expand on each of these four topics, to determine, if possible, when Milton became committed to them and why. And this time let us reverse the order, so that all elements of the prejudicial be removed.

THE NEW HEROISM

.................................................................................................................. That Milton in the early 1660s was in competition with royalist poets like Davenant, Cowley, John Dryden, or Sir John Denham has been less considered than his more obvious rivalry with Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tasso, and Spenser—the available precedents for writing an epic. He had dropped their great names into his minor poetry and verse letters at, it seems, any opportunity. In the 1640 Epitaphium Damonis he first sketched a plan for a British epic featuring ‘Igraine pregnant with Arthur by fatal deception’, and presumably, the fatal history that followed. But he soon abandoned that Spenserian and perhaps too fabulous topic, and his imagination suddenly filled with ideas for dramas. The Trinity Manuscript contains seven pages of suggestions for plays, sixty-seven on biblical topics, thirty-three on British history from the postlegendary era. His biblical subjects were primarily Old Testament stories, many of them conspicuously violent. It is important to note that although the story of the Fall was his first thought, returned to four times, it was not the only biblical topic on which Milton expanded at some length. It competes for space with a long sketch for a play on John the Baptist, and one about the destruction of Sodom, both of which would have been considerably more exciting. The list of ‘British Trag[edies]’ equally stresses violent moments, extracted from Holinshed and Speed, the chroniclers that Milton had used, though very differently, to fill his commonplace book. It is significant that he

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interrupts this list to remark, ‘A Heroicall Poem may be founded somewhere in Alfreds reigne. Especially at his issuing out of Edelingsey on the Danes, whose actions are wel like those of Ulysses.’2 Epic ambition has been relegated for the time being to a parenthesis. When Milton finally returned to epic as his best chance for literary, as distinct from writerly, fame, he must have returned to those old sketches for a play on the Fall of Man, especially the last. Since not everyone will have this text at hand, and since we will need it to establish the base line, here is the most detailed plan for Adam Unparadiz’d: The angel Gabriel, either descending or entering, shewing since this globe was created, his frequency as much on earth, as in heavn, describes paradise. next the chorus shewing the reason of his comming to keep his watch in Paradise after Lucifers rebellion by command from god, & withall expressing his desire to see, & know more concerning this excellent new creature man. the angel Gabriel as by his name signifying a prince of power tracing paradise with a more free office passes by the station of the chorus & desired by them relates what he knew of man as the creation of Eve with thire love, & mariage, after this Lucifer appeares after his overthrow, bemoans himself, seeks revenge on man the chorus prepare resistance at his first approach at last after discourse of enmity on either side he departs whereat the chorus sings of the battell, & victorie in heavn against him and his accomplices, as before after the first act was sung a hymn of the creation. heer again may appear Lucifer relating, & insulting in what he had don to the destruction of man. man next & Eve having by this time bin seduc’t by the serpent appears confusedly cover’d with leaves [C]onscience in a shape accuses him, Justice cites him to the place whither Jehova call’d for him in the mean while the chorus entertains the stage, and his inform’d by some angel the manner of his fall heer the chorus bewailes Adams fall. Adam then & Eve returne accuse one another but especially Adam layes the blame to his wife, is stubborn in his offence Justice appeares reason with him convinces him the chorus admonisheth Adam, & bids him beware by Lucifers example of impenitence the Angel is sent to banish them out of paradice but before causes to passe before his eyes in shapes a mask of all the evills of this life & world he is humbl’d relents, dispaires. at last appeares Mercy comforts him promises the Messiah, then calls in [F]aith, [H]ope, & [C]harity, instructs him he repents gives god the glory, submitts to his penalty the chorus briefly concludes. (CPW, viii. 559–60)

What is missing here? Everything identified above as the intellectual and emotional heart of Paradise Lost, including its place in literary theory. So Milton took a topic he had planned as a drama, and rewrote it as an epic, still with manifestly dramatic features, but with a newly sophisticated marker of the shift to narrative. A specifically Miltonic Narrator replaced the Chorus, and partially replaced the archangel Gabriel, who had in this case lost his job to Raphael and Michael, two different styles of narrator. But it is the Miltonic Narrator who discusses with his readers the meaning and values of the poem, in the four introductory passages to Books I, III, VII, and IX that we have come to call invocations. To even invoke a muse in 1667 was a deliberate act of resistance to the new courtly fashions, since Davenant’s Preface had criticized both Homer and Virgil for doing so, confusing heaven and earth. And although du Bartas had reclaimed both the invocation and the Bible as source of subject matter, he had done so in a generic statement that clearly provoked Milton. Du Bartas

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(as rendered by Joshua Sylvester) had written: ‘My heedful Muse, trayned in true Religion, | Devinely-humane keeps the middle Region: | Least, if she should too-high a pitch presume, | Heav’ns glowing flame should melt her waxen plume.’3 Milton sent out his challenge to both du Bartas and Davenant: ‘I thence | Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song | That with no middle flight intends to soar | Above th’Aonian Mount, while it pursues | Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhyme’ (I.12–16). Thus one form of the new heroism is literary daring, something the Narrator must himself exhibit. This reinvented Narrator, mediating between earth and heaven, is of course blind, but now proud of it. ‘Though fall’n on evil days . . . and evil tongues’, ‘in darkness, and with dangers compast round’ he is unchang’d | To hoarse or mute’ (VII.24–7), a statement that still haunts us, since we don’t know exactly in what way he is ‘unchang’d’. But in the opening to Book IX these implicitly theoretical moves are explained further. Announcing that he must now change the poem’s tone to ‘Tragic’, the Narrator braces himself: Sad Task, yet argument Not less but more Heroic than the wrath Of stern Achilles on his Foe pursu’d ... Since first this subject for Heroic Song Pleas’d me long choosing, and beginning late; Not sedulous by Nature to indite Wars, hitherto the only Argument Heroic deem’d . . . . . . the better fortitude Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom Unsung. (IX.5–32)

Here Milton calmly solved the puzzle he had set himself in Reason of Church-Government as to which of the higher literary genres deserved his attention. Paradise Lost was simultaneously a biblical tragedy and the site of a new anti-militaristic heroic action, compatible with Christian values as the crusades and the romances they spawned had never been. Of course this statement fudges several issues: why succumb to classical precedents by having your war after all, though in heaven?4 Who in the poem stands for the new values of patience and heroic martyrdom? The Son, theoretically and pre-emptively, but what we see him doing is driving the fallen angels out of heaven, driving a new kind of military machine. We can make the case that Adam and Eve learn patience as they discover that Death, their legal punishment, may be long delayed. In fact, it would not be until Milton’s ambition was jogged by young Thomas Ellwood to write Paradise Regained that the new passive heroism would be decisively and persuasively illustrated. When did Milton invent this Narrator? It seems transparently clear that he intended this figure to be himself, after the Restoration. Thus the new epic values of patience and heroic fortitude may be proclaimed in Paradise Lost, but they are exemplified primarily by the Narrator in his current historical predicament. I think myself that the true meaning of Patience, in her non-allegorical form, became clear to Milton when he

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waited, in hiding, those agonizing weeks after the return of Charles II to learn whether he was to be exempted from the penalties, including execution, being debated and legislated for those regicides on whom the new government could lay their hands:5 ‘in darkness and with dangers compast round’ he waited, and as he did the idea of a modern heroism, hitherto ‘unsung’, consolidated itself in thought.

THE FIRST MARRIAGE

.................................................................................................................. Now you can see how useful it is to be able to refer to Adam Unparadiz’d as the template on which Paradise Lost expanded. For nobody could have told from Milton’s sketch how important to the poem would be the story that in a few phrases Gabriel related to the Chorus: ‘what he knew of man as the creation of Eve with thire love, & mariage’. It is true that the sketch also mentions their mutual accusation after the Fall, though not how the quarrel is resolved—at Eve’s initiative. Apart from that, those parts of the poem to which modern readers respond with most passion were late developments: the love scenes in Eden, the separate accounts by Eve and Adam of their respective creations, the struggle for independence that leads Eve, against Adam’s better judgement, to go off gardening alone, Eve’s decision to involve Adam in her crime, the first lust in Eden, the discovery of shame, Eve’s proposals of suicide and sexual abstinence, and eventually the new forbearance of each other that supports them into the world outside the garden. Where, then, did it come from? How did the Eve plot become so finely developed? There are two possible answers. The first is that Milton, who in Paradise Lost borrowed from everybody, stole much of his conception of Eve from his predecessors in Europe, those who wrote dramas about the Fall. The second is that he learned about the first human marriage from his own first marriage. These answers may be compatible, or at least not mutually exclusive. Let us consider the second possibility first. We know that Milton learned about the relationship between the sexes as a consequence of his sudden decision, in the summer of 1642, to marry a girl much younger than himself, from a royalist family, and quite unsuited initially to the dour scholarly life into which he inserted her. Mary Powell was 18 when she married, whereas Milton was 34. The story is told by his nephew Edward Phillips, though years after the event. The bride, who had hitherto experienced ‘much Company and Joviality’, evidently panicked, and asked permission to go back to her family for the rest of the summer, which Milton granted. Between the middle of June and the end of September, Milton, Phillips tells us, was ‘now as it were a single man again’, visiting other women socially. But ‘Michaelmas being come and no news of his Wife’s return’, Phillips continued: [Milton] sent for her by Letter; and receiving no answer, sent several other Letters, which were also unanswered; so that at last he dispatch’d down a Foot-Messenger with a Letter, desiring her

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return; but the Messenger came back not only without an answer, at least a satisfactory one, but to the best of my remembrance, reported that he was dismissed with some sort of Contempt.

Phillips speculated that the cause of Mary’s failure to return was in part political; the royalist Powells, with the King’s party established at Oxford, imagined that the Civil War would soon be ended in their favour, and that the marriage would become ‘a blot in their Escutcheon’. But he also recorded Milton’s state of mind at this treatment: It so incensed our Author, that he thought it would be dishonourable ever to receive her again, after such a repulse; so that he forth prepared to Fortify himself with Arguments for such a Resolution, and accordingly wrote . . . Treatises, by which he undertook to maintain, That it was against Reason, and . . . not proveable by scripture, for any Married Couple disagreeable in Humour and Temper, or having an aversion to each other, to live yok’d together all their Days.6

Here was the real motive for the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, published in August of the following year, and riven with unintentional autobiography, personal steam escaping through the cracks of the dense paving of argument, largely based on Scripture, that Milton laid down. By February of 1644 he published a much expanded new edition, with a new introductory address to the Long Parliament. The Parliament he addressed as ‘our deliverers’ (ii. 226), despite the fact that its cause was not going well on the battlefield, and the Westminster Assembly, convened on 1 July 1643, was included as an afterthought on the new title page. Milton’s hope was that either or both bodies would see the reform of marriage law to be a necessary item in their overhaul of both Church and state; and he cited the precedent of Henry VIII’s wresting of control of his own divorce from the papacy (ii. 348). He saw the present moment as an opportunity for a second stage in the English Reformation, which had run out of steam under Elizabeth and James, a second stage led by himself! But already in 1644 he could see an analogy between domestic and national politics. ‘He who marries’, announced the new preface: intends as little to conspire his own ruine, as he that swears Allegiance: and as a whole people is in proportion to an ill Government, so is one man to an ill mariage. If they against any authority, Covenant, or Statute, may by the sovereign edict of charity, save not only their lives, but honest liberties from unworthy bondage, as well may he against any privat Covnant, which hee never enter’d to his mischief . . . And much the rather, for that to resist the highest Magistrat though tyrannizing, God never gave us expresse allowance . . . but in this economical misfortune . . . we have an expresse law of God [Deuteronomy 24: 1–2]. For no effect of tyranny can sit more heavy on the Common-wealth, then this household unhappiness on the family. (CPW, ii. 229)

A pretty strong statement, indeed overstatement, but it opened the way, by turning the analogy backwards, for Milton’s arguments of 1649 that the commonwealth had indeed been suffering from the tyranny of Charles I, and that it was time to cancel that contract of allegiance also. What should interest us here is that Milton approached his legal topic by focusing on the Book of Genesis. Canon law focused only on adultery or non-consummation. For Milton, this was to utterly misunderstand the institution of marriage as created by God,

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first of all, as a solution to human loneliness. Man was to get in woman a helpmeet, a phrase that neatly rendered the help dependent on the meetness, the mental and spiritual match, the fit. Procreation was secondary. When St Paul made that ungenerous concession, ‘It is better to marry then to burne’, he had failed to understand the words of Genesis. ‘What might this burning mean?’ asks Milton. ‘Certainly not the meer motion of carnall lust, nor the meer goad of a sensitive desire’: What is it then but that desire which God put into Adam in Paradise . . . that desire which God saw it was not good that man should be left alone to burn in; the desire and longing to put off an unkindly solitarines by uniting another body, but not without a fit soule to his in the cheerful society of wedlock. Which if it were so needful before the fall, when man was much more perfect in himself, how much more is it needful now against all the sorrows and casualties of this life to have an intimate and speaking help, a ready and reviving associate in marriage . . . Who hath the power to struggle with an intelligible flame, not in Paradise to be resisted, become now more ardent, by being fail’d of what in reason it lookt for. (ii. 251–2)

Thus Milton discovered for himself the concept of companionate marriage as Protestantism was still inventing it, and the engine of his discovery was personal humiliation. But this was not the end of the story. Edward Phillips explained that, given ‘the declining state of the King’s Cause’, efforts were made by the Powells and others to effect a reconciliation between the estranged husband and wife, by sneaking Mary into the house of a man whom Milton was known to visit frequently: One time . . . he was making his usual visit, his wife was ready in another room, and on a sudden he was surprised to see one whom he thought to have never seen more, making submission and begging pardon on her knees before him. He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection; but partly his own generous nature, more inclinable to reconciliation than to perseverance in anger and revenge, and partly the strong intercession of friends on both sides, soon brought him to an act of oblivion and a firm league of peace for the future. (66–7)

Significantly, Phillips’s language for the reconciliation is itself political. Milton’s own description of the scene came many years later, in Paradise Lost, where after the Fall, the first libidinous sex, and the first human quarrel, Eve returns to Adam and begs his pardon for her role in their disaster. ‘He might probably at first make some show of aversion and rejection’, Phillips had imagined; and Milton made Adam’s first response be just that: ‘Out of my sight, thou Serpent.’ But Eve, ‘not so repulst, with Tears that ceas’d not flowing, | And tresses all disorder’d, at his feet | Fell humble, and imbracing them, besought | His peace’ (X.910–13). Who could resist ‘Creature so fair his reconcilement seeking?’ Naturally, Adam ‘relented | Towards her, his life so late and sole delight, | Now at his feet submissive in distress’ (X.940–2). So, apparently, did Milton. The last of the divorce pamphlets was published in March 1645. By October, Mary was living with her husband again and immediately became pregnant with their first daughter. I believe that Paradise Lost, too, benefited from this traumatic experience, incorporating the rhythms and fluctuations

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of a modern domestic drama—a tragi-comedy if ever there were one. At the poem’s end, the First Couple go off together into the world, once more hand in hand. But now let us consider the demeaning possibility that Milton simply borrowed much of the Eve plot from European authors who had anticipated him in developing the Genesis story as a drama. The main candidates were identified by Watson Kirkconnell, in that major work of translation and scholarship, The Celestial Cycle:7 1. Hugo Grotius, whose five-act Latin drama, Adamus exsul, was published in 1601. Milton was the guest of Grotius in Paris in 1638, and so might have read the play then, or returned home with a copy. Among other features anticipated by Grotius, such as a moving soliloquy by Satan at the boundary of Eden, and the arrival of an angel to inform Adam and Eve about the creation of the world, Milton clearly borrowed from Grotius’ account of the dialogue between Eve and Satan as Serpent. Everything in Milton’s version can be found in much lengthier form in Grotius. Milton condenses to powerful effect, especially Satan’s casuistry about the threat of death, and his Eve is, if anything, a slightly tamer version of Grotius’ quite heroic and energetic figure. 2. Serafino della Salandra, Adamo Caduto, published in 1647. This begins as a morality play, with a long list of abstractions as dramatis personae, but develops the temptation scene as true drama. Adam Caduto introduces a scene where Eve, in soliloquy, schemes to make Adam share her Fall (Act II, Scene 9); and when he does, the event is marked by the appearance of the allegorical figures of Sin (a horrific male) and Death (his daughter), with Sin claiming that Adam has begotten him and that he impregnated Eve, producing Death. Milton moved this moment back to Book II of his poem, and made the original progenitor Satan, an interesting solution to the deeper theological problem, the origin of evil. 3. Joost van der Vondel, Adam in Ballingschap (Adam in Exile), published in Amsterdam in 1664. Both the date and the language make this play less likely to have entered Milton’s milieu in time for absorption into Paradise Lost. Nevertheless, Milton could read Dutch,8 and this play clearly contains in Act V the original of Milton’s scene where, after the Fall, Adam and Eve quarrel, and she blames him for allowing her to garden alone. ‘A man should still be resolute and firm | And hold his ground till woman’s nature yields’, snaps Vondel’s Eve; and his Adam responds by anticipating the soliloquy of Milton’s Adam in Book X. ‘Open thy lap, O Earth! Receive me, for all joy is lost . . . Why does Death tarry? . . . I have lived too long’ (475). Clearly (though we must rely on Kirkconnell’s translation) this is the origin of Milton’s Adam’s famous question: Why do I overlive, Why am I mockt with death, and length’n’d out. To deathless pain? How gladly would I meet Mortality my sentence, and be Earth Insensible, how glad would lay me down As in my Mother’s lap! (X.773–8)

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Note that all three precedents share with Adam Unparadiz’d the form of a play, as well as a masculinist formula for their titles, while offering portraits of Eve that complicate that assumption of superiority.

REBELLION

IN

HELL

.................................................................................................................. The Eve plot in Adam Unparadiz’d was scarcely more than its seeds in Genesis; but the Satan plot, in terms of the angelic rebellion and its motives, was not even an embryo. Its addition, late in Milton’s life, was the major motor in shifting the poem’s genre (and hence its precedents) to epic. What caused its introduction? As both life and literature compete as explanations for Milton’s tender development of the Eve plot, the same dilemma awaits us with the Satan plot. We cannot avoid the fact that to open the poem with a rebellion of angels against their monarch would immediately, in 1667, have suggested a topical analogy. The first assumption of many readers has been that, in the first two books of Paradise Lost, Milton retold from a personal vantage point the history of what Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, definitively called The Great Rebellion. The word of our Handbook, revolution, did not yet carry a political connotation. Milton in Paradise Lost uses revolution only in the older sense of cycle or circle, but uses rebellion to refer negatively to the angels’ revolt (e.g. I.360; V.715). Yet by the end of the poem he has rendered the word volatile, using it to characterize Nimrod, who after the Flood introduced hunting, meat-eating, and kingship (his own). In Eikonoklastes Milton had remarked that ‘Nimrod, the first that hunted after Faction is reputed, by ancient Tradition, the first that founded Monarchy’ (iii. 460). Conveniently, Nimrod already meant rebel, or, more precisely, his name was interpreted in rabbinical scholarship as ‘he who made all the people rebellious against God’. Milton neatly compressed the exfoliated Nimrod myths into two lines that sound like an epigram: ‘And from Rebellion shall derive his name, | Though of Rebellion others he accuse’ (XII.36–7). Thus the first human monarch is also, in essence, a rebel, a nice paradox that points forward to the interpretative problem Paradise Lost sets its readers. Does Charles I resemble God, or Nimrod? Moreover, if one is tempted to see the angelic rebellion as a representation, and hence necessarily a critique, of Milton’s party during the Civil War period, the analogy will only work at the greatest level of generality and sponginess. The English rebels, after all, won both the First and the Second Civil War and executed their King. The angelic rebels lost their war definitively, and thereafter resorted to conspiracy. In the eighteenth century, the majority of Englishmen saw the Old and Young Pretenders, James Edward and Charles Edward, as dangerous subversives, the second actually leading a failed Jacobite rebellion supported by the Scots in 1745. The impetus for this interpretative mistake derives primarily from the second book of Paradise Lost, where the fallen angels, or their leaders, gather to discuss their plans for survival. This grand meeting, which Milton himself carefully calls a ‘conclave’, a

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‘consult’, a ‘Consultation’, and a ‘Synod’, is sometimes assumed to be a parliament, and hence an allusion to the Long Parliament. There is no textual justification for this. Strictly speaking, since it is only the demonic aristocrats who convene, the proper analogy would be to either the Council of State or a royal Privy Council meeting. But it is true that several anti-parliamentary tracts of the Civil War period use the metaphor of a demonic parliament to score their points: e.g. Hell’s trienniall Parliament, Summoned five yeeres since, by King Lucifer, acquired by Milton’s friend George Thomason on September 1647, or The Parliaments Petition to the Divell (16 August 1648), which Thomason bought twice (i. 663, 670); on the title page of the second copy he wrote, ‘This came out about the beginning of Aug., but I could not get it till the beginning of Sept’ (i. 670). Sharon Achinstein, in particular, has followed this line of research, to the extent of implying that Milton would never have thought to create his particular image of Satan and his counsellors had he not been responding, in whatever complicated way, to this powerful and ubiquitous royalist metaphor.9 But it is also true that the notion of a demonic council was a literary tradition, enshrined in sources likely to be stored in Milton’s memory, and more germane to his project—to revolutionize the genre of epic—in the early 1660s. Kirkconnell, the first to draw attention to the demonic council trope in Civil War pamphlets (625), also lists a dozen works in the epic or hexameral poetic tradition containing demonic councils. The most striking precedent is an Italian epic we know Milton admired, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, where, in the fourth book, the King of Hell (here called Pluto or ‘the tyrant proud’) summons his peers to a council in response to the marshalling of the First Crusade under Godfrey of Boulogne (Bouillon). Here is the opening of his speech, in the translation of Edward Fairfax, which appeared first in 1600 and was republished in 1624: Ye powers infernal, worthier far to sit About the sun, whence you your offspring take, ... Our former glory still remember it, Our bold attempts and war we once did make Gainst him, that rules above the starry sphere, For which like traitors we lie damned here.

The King of Hell then laments the creation of man and, worse, his redemption: Nor this sufficed, but that he also gave His only Son, his darling to be slain, And conquer so, hell, death, sin and the grave, And man condemned to restore again. ... Expulsed were we with injurious arms From those due honors, us of right belong. ... Oh, be not then the courage perished clean,

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That whilom dwelt within your haughty thought, When, armed with shining fire and weapons keen, Against the angels of proud heaven we fought, ... We lost the field, yet lost we not our heart.

Pluto then sends out his devil legions to impede the crusade. The sequencing is different (Milton’s demonic council is ignorant of the promise of redemption); but the tone of grand defiance, though skimpily rendered by Fairfax, must have given Milton’s imagination a boost. There may even be one of those closer verbal connections that inspire confidence that an analogue is a source. Pluto’s mocking phrase, ‘his only Son, his darling’, reverberates with Milton’s anticipation, through Beelzebub, of the devil’s revenge: ‘when his darling Sons | Hurl’d headlong to partake with us, shall curse | Thir frail Original’ (II.373–5). But beyond the issue of the council scene, there were, as Stella Revard has shown, as many European precedents for rendering Satan (or Lucifer, or Draco) the centre of an epic as there were analogues, in plays, to the Eve plot. Vida’s Christiad perhaps initiated the new convention that Iliadic violence could be rediscovered (and hence legitimized) in the context of Christian narrative. The German writers Thomas Kirchmeyer and Friedrich Taubmann wrote epics on the war in heaven as described in Revelation, as did the Italian Valvasone in his Angeleida, and the Dutch Vondel’s Lucifer. Here we return to the vexed question of whether Milton’s decision to include the war in heaven was simultaneously a nod to the Homeric tradition on which these writers leaned and a principled rejection of it. But again, there is a temptation in the case of Milton to feel that the crazy realism of his battle, the violence of hand-to-hand combat, Satan’s invention of gunpowder, and the near destruction of the landscape of heaven represented the experience of a man who had lived through the Civil War; even if, or especially because, it had never come closer to him than a feared royalist invasion of London, against which he had written a poem protecting his own front door!10 Thus life and literature once again compete as explanations of what Milton decided eventually to include in Paradise Lost. This allows us to substitute for the theory of recantation (Milton eventually rejected the English Revolution) or sublimation (Milton abandoned the world of political thought and practice for the pure air of poetry and religion) the theory of deniability. If there is always a literary explanation for features of Paradise Lost that attract suspicion of political allegory, so much the better for the poet (and for literary criticism).

A REVOLUTIONARY THEOLOGY

.................................................................................................................. As Revard points out, however, there is one striking difference between Milton’s version of the war in heaven and those of his models. His war lasts for three days,

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not just one, and its champion, who finally puts the fallen angels to flight, is not the archangel Michael (as in Valvasone and Vondel) but the Son of God himself (Revard, The War in Heaven, 182–97). This is not only, however, ‘to demonstrate what is essentially perverse in the ethic of typical heroic poems’ (Revard, The War in Heaven, 197), but to make a theological point of great importance. It will be matched by another unbiblical move, when the Father sends the Son to judge the Fallen First Couple in his stead: Easy it may be seen that I intend Mercy colleague with Justice, sending thee Man’s Friend, his Mediator, his design’d Both Ransom and Redeemer voluntary. (X.58–61)

So now we have returned to the topic which was probably most important to Milton by the time he completed Paradise Lost; that is to say, the debate on predestination that takes place between God the Father and God the Son in Book III of the poem. Not a hint of this idea occurs in Adam Unparadiz’d, despite the late appearance of Mercy to balance the effects of Justice. Miltonists now believe that while Milton worked on Paradise Lost, from perhaps 1658 onwards, he was also expanding and revising a project that had been in the works since the 1640s, namely a summation of Christian doctrine as he had now come to understand it. The manuscript of De doctrina Christiana shows evidence, in the recopying of chapters 1–14 by Daniel Skinner, Milton’s second amanuensis for this project, that the most heterodox positions were the latest arrived at. Of these positions, the one we call Arminianism, worked out in chapters 3 and 4 of the treatise, was unavoidably also written into Paradise Lost. The Synod of Dort, held in 1619, had codified the tenets of Calvinism with respect to man’s free will and God’s decisions as to his chances of salvation. This manifesto was designed to hold back the influence of the Dutch Remonstrants, or followers of Jacob Arminius, who had proposed the more generous formula that predestination was not absolute, but conditional on human behaviour and choice, and that the atonement of Christ was offered to all, not merely to a preselected group of the elect. English Protestantism followed Dort, not without considerable internal debate lasting at least a century. In Areopagitica (1644) Milton allowed that he had been reading ‘the acute and distinct Arminius’, but maintained at that stage that Arminius was in error. But Barbara Lewalski, whose summary of this issue is invaluable,11 suggested that the arguments Milton made in Areopagitica about rational freedom ultimately entailed the Arminian position. When readying the De doctrina for publication towards the end of his life, Milton wrote for it a Latin preface, in which he explained the stages of patient study of theology, the work that led, increasingly, to radical positions: ‘there was more than I realized which still needed to be measured with greater strictness against the yardstick of the Bible, and reformed with greater care’ (CPW, vi. 120). And he appealed again to the values of Areopagitica:

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I implore all friends of truth not to start shouting that the church is being thrown into confusion by free discussion and inquiry . . . Without this freedom, we are still enslaved: not, as once, by the law of God, but, what is vilest of all, by human law, or rather, to be more exact, by an inhuman tyranny. (vi. 121, 123)

It appears, then, that the subject of Paradise Lost we might have thought the least likely to have been caused by—produced by—the English Revolution—the theological rebellion against Calvinism—was in fact generated out of Milton’s reformist and revolutionary activities, and rather directly so. The difference between it and the other three subjects of Paradise Lost is that there was no literary model to offer a competing explanation. It is good for Milton studies to consider the claims of literary models versus political experience when raising the issue of causality. But neither concept of the poem’s origins will ultimately account for the brilliance of the product. Milton’s career exemplifies the Arabian fable of the sealed bottle: once you unstop it, you never know how large a genius will emerge.

NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

See Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives, 272. Milton, Complete Prose Works, viii, appendix A, 571. Du Bartas, Divine Weeks and Works, i. 115, ll. 135–8. For the most thorough investigation of these questions, see Revard, The War in Heaven. For the quiet terror that Milton must have endured from May to 13 August, while the Commons and Lords debated who should be punished for their roles in the execution of Charles I, see Parker, Biography, i. 567–73. Darbishire (ed.), Early Lives, 64–5. Kirkconnell, The Celestial Cycle. According to Edmundson, Milton and Vondel, 17, Milton was taught to read Dutch by Roger Williams, who was in London between 1651 and 1654. Achinstein, Revolutionary Reader, 177–202. Achinstein does, however, enter the caveat that Milton rejected ‘a simple ratio of literary representation to history’, and evoked the trope of the parliament in hell ‘to convey his loyalty to the spirit of the revolution, though not to its agents’ (202). Sonnet 8, which in the Trinity Manuscript carried the title ‘On his door when the Citty expected an assault’, that is, on 13 November 1642. The title was omitted from the published Poems of 1645. Lewalski, Life, 422.

WORKS CITED Achinstein, Sharon. Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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Bartas, Saluste du. Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste, Sieur du Bartas, trans. Joshua Sylvester, ed. Susan Snyder. 2 vols. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979. Darbishire, Helen (ed.). Early Lives of Milton. London: Constable and Company, Ltd, 1932. Edmundson, George. Milton and Vondel: A Curiosity of Literature. London: Trübner & Co., 1885. Kirkconnell, Watson. The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952. Lewalski, Barbara. The Life of John Milton. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Milton, John. The Complete Prose Works, ed. Don Wolfe et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82. ——. Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Hughes. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Parker, William. Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Revard, Stella. The War in Heaven: Paradise Lost and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980.

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ACEPHALOUS AUTHORITY Satire in Butler, Marvell, and Dryden ....................................................................................................... CLEMENT HAWES

. . . the liberty of the late times gave men so much light, and diffused it so universally among them, that they are not to be dealt with as they might have been in an age of less inquiry. (The Character of a Trimmer (1688), Sir George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax)

Samuel Butler (1612–80), Andrew Marvell (1621–78), and John Dryden (1631–1700) all belong to an especially indigestible moment in English history: the English Revolution and its unsettled aftermath during the Restoration. Contemporary pamphlets and broadsides show that, as Parliament’s New Model Army clashed with the King’s army, the cosmos itself had seemed agitated. The twists and turns of the war had been accompanied by reports of monster-births, apparitions, earthquakes, comets, eclipses, and so on: all reported as direct manifestations of divine judgement aimed at one side or another. The beheading of Charles I on 30 January 1649 was universally astonishing: attended, as the explosion of printed materials from the moment attests, by every sort of prophecy and apocalyptic omen. Hence the subsequent force of Samuel Butler’s description after the Restoration of the pointy beard of his protagonist, the Presbyterian crusader Hudibras, as a portentous comet or ‘hairy meteor’: The upper part thereof was Whey, The nether Orange, mixt with Gray. This hairy Meteor did denounce The fall of Scepters and of Crowns.1

Butler plays on the fact that the Civil War astrologist William Lilly had also purported to prognosticate by ‘reading faces’, a practice similar to palmistry.2 Reducing the cosmic to the personally cosmetic, Butler pulls the millennial back to the open-ended time of journals and secular calendars. A Cavalier drinking song celebrating Canary

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wine had targeted the same enemy propagandist, averring, ‘Tis this will preserve us, ’gainst Lillies Predictions, | And make us contemn our fate and his Fictions.’3 Intellectuals of the broader era necessarily laboured to make sense, or nonsense, of revolution. The spectacle in 1649 of the King’s execution, deliberately staged as a public event, ‘turned the entire nation’, as Steven N. Zwicker writes, ‘into a stage’.4 This scene was then followed by the monarchy’s triumphant restoration in 1660. In less than two decades, this second settlement was imperilled by the Exclusion Crisis (1678–81), which featured an uprising led in 1680 by the Duke of Monmouth. Divisions of religion were again used to roil the kingdom. Monmouth failed, but there would indeed be yet one more revolution to metabolize. In 1688, the so-called Glorious Revolution broke the Stuart succession, forced the ‘abdication’ of the Roman Catholic James II, and installed on the throne a Protestant Dutch prince, William of Orange. Between 1649 and 1688, three sharp reversals took place as regards the throne of England, Ireland, and Scotland. Satires of the era reflect a historical experience of chaos at the top, of a weak and thoroughly disenchanted authority. ‘Political patriarchy’, in the phrase of Zwicker and Derek Hirst, had been ‘exploded’.5 Marvell, Butler, and Dryden all use satire to analyse this predicament and to redefine an authority no longer either natural or heroic. Satire’s traditional reliance on bodily imagery resonates in this era with the fate of the body politic. The supposedly organic body politic had in 1649 been surrealistically decapitated. ‘An Epitaph’, an anonymous Cavalier poem written for that crisis, puts it thus: The Soveraign of all command, Suff ’ring by a Common hand. A Prince, to make the odium more, Offer’d at his very door. The Head cut off ! O death to see’t! In obedience to the feet.6

The axe-blow of Charles I’s execution, moreover, had been redoubled by a republican political and judicial attack, manifest by the formal trial of the King, on the institution of monarchy itself. Charles I, who refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the trial, was convicted of making war against his own people by the High Court of Justice: a court set up by the radical remnant of the House of Commons left in place following the December 1648 purge of more conservative members. That public judicial execution, as opposed to mere assassination, was thus itself a calculated ideological assault: an attack on the King’s metaphysical as well as his natural body. Satirists such as Butler, meanwhile, were not about to forget that the politicians who signed the warrant for regicide were later termed ‘the Rump’. ‘An Epitaph’ indeed appeared in a royalist collection of 1662 called Rump. The punning trope was irresistible and well developed, as this Cavalier verse suggests: There is another Proverb which every Noddy, Will jeer the Rump with, and cry Hoddy-doddy Here’s a Parliament all Arse and no body.7

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Or, as Butler has it, ‘The few, | Because they’re wasted to the stumps, | Are represented best by rumps.’ The prevailing mood, even after 1660, was inevitably framed by a historical experience of acephalous authority: a headlessness of enormous symbolic resonance and satirical potential.8 Charles II did little after 1660 to restore a sense of regal authority at the top. For Puritans, of course, the Restoration—celebrated with bonfires signalling ‘the burning of the rumps’—entailed a certain amount of persecution. Quakers, who refused on principle to take oaths, were hit hardest as a group: the likes of George Fox and Margaret Fell were constantly in and out of jail. The Baptist John Bunyan—author of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)—wrote the century’s bestseller while imprisoned for lay preaching. The Restoration government publicly burnt certain prose works of Milton, including Eikonoklastes (1649). The courtly riposte to the plain stylings of a Puritan revolution, meanwhile, was libertinism: the defiant pursuit of polyamorous pleasures. Restoration playwrights explored pretzel-like tangles of desire. Monogamous marriage was out; multi-pronged desire was in; and mistresses were de rigueur—more than a dozen, both Catholic and Protestant, for Charles II alone. The most audacious wit in the libertine court, the Earl of Rochester, wrote a poem comparing the King’s sceptre to his hyperactive penis: they were, he said, ‘of a length’. And so the King’s personal life contributed, as George deF. Lord writes, to a further ‘evaporation’ of the ‘monarchical myth’.9 One cannot discount the republican note with which Rochester concludes this same poem: ‘I hate all Monarchs, and the thrones they sit on, | From the Hector of France to the Cully of Britain.’ The demystified Stuart dynasty, living hectically on borrowed time, would meet its demise in the Dutch invasion of 1688. Given such wide swings of the political and cultural pendulum, Butler, Marvell, and Dryden shared, above all, an atmosphere of risk. The time’s uncertainties involved conspiratorial plots and counterplots, arbitrary jailing, book-burnings, land confiscations, and censorship. For obvious reasons, anonymous or pseudonymous publication remained a frequent tactic of satirists. Thousands of irreverent satires circulated clandestinely through scribal publication.10 The popularity of such clandestine satire is suggested by Poems on Affairs of State, a frequently republished anthology, which first appeared in 1681. Much of Marvell’s oeuvre appeared as part of an identified author’s collection only posthumously, also in 1681. The satires on affairs of state testify to the inability of reigning political authority to inspire anything resembling awe. The unique freedom of enquiry that had characterized the unfettered print culture of 1640–60 meant that the common people could no longer be ‘dealt with’ as before.11 Selective recall of this era was sealed and ratified by the final revolutionary turn of 1688, which inaugurated a new politics of legitimization with regard to public opinion. We thus remember the Restoration from across the divide of a radically different political logic. Since the kingless English Republic did not survive, its short-lived manifestation has likewise been difficult to assimilate fully as an event. Cromwell— himself posthumously gibbeted and beheaded in 1661—was destined to be remembered by a nation that continues to support a monarchical head of state, however defanged and irrelevant. The aberrant ‘Interregnum’, reduced to an awkward gap in a supposedly

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gapless continuum,12 does not always get its due as a transformative moment. Literary historiography has perforce been the heir to certain amnesiac tendencies. The cross-section of Marvell, Butler, and Dryden cuts across long-standing longitudinal patterns by which English literary history has been organized and, in effect, artificially compartmentalized. Only rather recently has it become common practice to work across the partitions of warring memories. Literary history has not habitually sought to bridge the polarized and seemingly discrete worlds of republican England and the Restoration court. Moreover, the satires of Marvell, a lyric, pastoral, and devotional poet of exceptional brilliance, are often discussed as an afterthought. Butler, for his part, has been unduly neglected. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century popularity of Hudibras can scarcely even be envisioned now. We need to remember its continuing significance to William Hogarth (who illustrated it with twelve engravings), Jonathan Swift (who fashioned his own poetics from its sharp tetrameter line and outlandish rhymes), and Samuel Johnson (who praised it generously). In ‘Butler’s Ghost: or Hudibras, the Fourth Part’, Thomas D’Urfey supplied in 1682 the most competent of several continuations. Dryden has been typically paired neither with Marvell nor Butler. Though he was on speaking terms with Milton; and though he was the most accomplished playwright of the Restoration, Dryden has more often been yoked with Alexander Pope and treated as, so to speak, an honorary Augustan: a leading figure of the next age. To be sure, Dryden does deliberately refine the genre of satire—sublimating, as it were, the routine obscenities and scattershot libels of Carolean satire into a weapon far more elegant but no less deadly. Precisely that sophistication constitutes the force of his famous definition of satire by way of the trope of razor-sharp decapitation. ‘Yet there is still a vast difference’, Dryden writes, ‘betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body and leaves it standing in its place.’13 Such finesse, however, even if it anticipates the polish of ‘Augustan’ achievements, should not be an excuse for divorcing Dryden from his own era. Although satire has cut off nary a single actual head, it partakes of such symbolic gestures as the burning of effigies. Meanwhile, Dryden and his readers could remember a literal execution. That same resounding blow, indeed, forms a subtext for Marvell’s seemingly pastoral depiction in Upon Appleton House of a woodpecker’s assault on an oak tree. The good he numbers up, and hacks As if he marked them with the axe. But where he, tinkling with his beak, Does find the hollow oak to speak, That for his building he designs, And through the tainted side he mines. Who could have thought the tallest oak Should fall by such a feeble stroke!14

Marvell is not always so oblique. In An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland he presents the actual scene of the beheading: ‘we look’, as Nicholas MacDowell

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puts it, ‘through the king’s eye at the axe’s edge’.15 Neither the King nor the poet flinches. What ‘attitudes toward history’, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase, could be mustered in the face of so capricious an age? Burke notes that certain genres (epic, tragedy, comedy) gravitate towards a general attitude of acceptance, while others (satire, burlesque, elegy) incline towards rejection.16 All three authors here convey a strongly satirical take on the volatile Zeitgeist—its mood of damaged and shaky authority—but their modes of rejection are politically and stylistically distinct. Butler tends toward a poetics of the absurd that drains recent events of larger meaning. Marvell’s satirical processing of historical reversals emphasizes a piquant element of the perverse. Dryden favours a counterpoint of the grotesque and baroque. Each of the three satirists tends to pit the small and the domestic against the overblown. All three reject what they see as brainless attitudes toward recent history, narcotized manifestations of the oblivious, the forgetful, and the soothingly dull. There can be no question in their satires of merely rehabilitating the mystique of olden times. And though their satires reject presentday chaos, they do so by way of trying out newly domesticated and denaturalized configurations of authority.

BUTLER’S ABSURDISM

.................................................................................................................. An ardent royalist, Butler died in 1680, without royal patronage, during the reign of the King whom he had supported and made laugh, Charles II. He had published Hudibras in 1662 and a continuation thereof in 1663—both a bit ahead of the title-page dates— and a further sequel in 1674. Butler aimed to treat the violent events of the Civil War with Cavalier levity: in Hudibras he set out to show up recent history as more absurd than meaningful. Even for those involved, according to Butler, the events had been crazily opaque, a fog of accidental war: ‘Men fell out, they know not why.’ The opening lines of Hudibras refer to a time when ‘civil dudgeon’—a wonderful understatement— was ‘high’. Butler takes for granted that the sacred myths of left and right have both been shattered: the building on earth of a New Jerusalem, for the radical Puritans; and, for the royalists, the older religious cosmology, by which micro- and macrocosm had been metaphysically linked. Butler bids farewell to all that in Hudibras. Butler’s poetry, as Blanford Parker argues, announces the sudden and brutal end of the age of analogies.17 Parker contends that a new empirical element creates, at just this point, a violent rupture: the inauguration of ‘a poetics of contiguity and accretion’ over and against the older ‘poetics of analogy and conceit’ (9). As a poem, Hudibras—attacking both scholastic superstition and private enthusiasm—succeeds in the ‘evacuation’, as Parker puts it, of ‘the two reigning discourses of the transcendent’ (60). Much of Butler’s brilliance lies in the amusing use he makes of such cultural detritus: the broken shards of these exploded hermetic myths. Despite his royalist politics, then, Butler is in a major sense forward-looking. His satire on the Royal Society, for example—‘The

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Elephant in the Moon’—should not be read merely as an attack on ‘progress’ and its famous avatars. Given the prodigious fascination of Sir Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle with all things alchemical—and, indeed, with pursuing the Philosopher’s Stone—Butler may represent a more wholeheartedly earth-bound sensibility than such paragons of early science. Recent signs of an upturn in Butler’s reputation constitute an overdue trend. Despite the importance of his poetics to Swift, however, and despite his significance as a very early vehicle of English quixotism, Butler remains too little known. There remains more to say about the formal inventiveness of Butler’s Hudibrastics, about his playful use of multi-syllabic rhymes, and about his learned wit. There is hardly a poem in English with such an astonishing mix of diction as Hudibras: crude but vigorous slang alongside inkhorn terms from every species of bookish learning. Like Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Hudibras breaks with the affirmation in romance of a cosmos saturated with emblems of political authority. Consider the following description of a sunny morning: The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis, taken out his nap, And like a lobster boil’d, the morn From black to red began to burn. (Butler, Hudibras, 128)

We are on earth, and, indeed, in the kitchen. Compare this with another poem from the 1660s: having rejected in Paradise Lost the battle-filled themes of Homer and Virgil as ‘long and tedious havoc’, Milton shares with Butler a scaled-down understanding of what really matters. In Hudibras, the homeliness of cooking gains the authority that is stripped from solar mythology. We must specify Butler’s swerve from Don Quixote. Sancho Panza generally functions in Cervantes as a phlegmatic voice of realism that punctures his master’s belated chivalric fantasies. This dynamic is reversed in Hudibras. Despite his small brain and enormous rump, the Presbyterian country justice Hudibras is more realistic than his squire Ralpho, an Independent. Hudibras is a pompous pedant and, above all, a hypocrite. Ralpho, however, is a consummate vessel of ‘enthusiasm’. Butler changes the target of Cervantic satire—archaic chivalry—to new-fangled ‘enthusiasm’: the speculation produced by seventeenth-century Puritans on the apocalyptic left of the English Revolution. The verse ‘argument’ appended to the head of each canto echoes the form of the Faerie Queene. Butler also borrows his eponymous character’s name from a minor character in the Faerie Queene (1590, 1596)—doubtless a sardonic comment on Spenser’s battle-happy Puritan romance. Butler presents the Civil War as not much more than a crackdown on the popular pastime of bear-baiting. The activity is of course a mean blood sport pitting a chained bear against dogs. The edict by James I supporting most popular feasts and pastimes, The Book of Sports (1618), had in fact banned bear-baiting. Even so, Hudibras is more a killjoy than a hero. The Puritans, antagonistic to ‘Catholic’ and/or ‘pagan’ popular feasts and sporting pastimes, were known to be on the sour side of a state-supported

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‘politics of mirth’.18 Royalists had not been slow to exploit such a wedge issue. The royalist poetry published in Robert Herrick’s volume of 1648, Hesperides—‘The Hockcart’ is a good example—had pointedly celebrated such feasts and pastimes. Hudibras confronts, as his worthy adversary, a wooden-legged fiddler who eventually becomes a prisoner of war. The leashed bear, accustomed to thinking of dogs as his enemy, is not much more formidable: The bear was in a greater fright, Beat down and worsted by the Knight. He roar’d, and rag’d, and flung about, To shake off bondage from his snout. (Butler, Hudibras, 54)

The Presbyterian knight personifies self-righteousness, and soon enough, in a telling pun, the puffed-up ‘saint errant’ (that is, wandering and sinful) replaces the ‘knight errant’. Despite the Restoration, indeed, Butler is not overly sanguine about the prospects for royalists: Presbyterians, he knew, remained powerful. The crusade of Hudibras against bear-baiting is at best trivial and pits—rather evenhandedly—high-minded censoriousness against festive cruelty. But Hudibras and his sidekick Ralpho soon enough mutate into full-bore oppressors. The reinstatement of Charles II had been conditional, as Butler reminds us, on a nearly universal amnesty, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660). That amnesty had entailed the bitter fact that most of the royalist estates confiscated by Parliament would never be returned. The King returned to power only by means of a legislative act that included—so went the bitter saying—‘indemnity for his enemies and oblivion for his friends’.19 In Hudibras, Butler evokes this history in the following speech by Ralpho to Hudibras. The speech, given in the wake of Hudibras’s victory over Crowdero, the abovementioned fiddler, first claims a right of conquest. From there Ralpho moves to a far vaster claim: that everything belongs, by right, to the few godly saints. To take from the ungodly, then—to confiscate their land—is mere justice: What we take from them is no more Than what was ours by right before; For we are their true landlords still, And they our tenants but at will. (Hudibras, 57)

Charged words, these, especially in a poem so wilfully light. The very arbitrariness of Ralpho’s reasoning, however, maintains the absurdist tone. Amnesty or no, Butler does not mean to forget what happened; and yet his ability to walk this sort of tightrope makes his satire, like many of the best satires, a serious game.

MARVELL’S PERVERSITY

.................................................................................................................. Marvell died in 1678, just on the eve of Monmouth’s Rebellion. An MP from Hull, Marvell had nimbly negotiated the transition between the rule of the Cromwells, Oliver

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and then Richard, and that of Charles II. The forkings of history are sometimes matched, however, by the eclectic sensibility of Marvell, who can seemingly be found at various times on both sides of the conflict. In 1648 Marvell had hailed the publication of Richard Lovelace’s volume of poetry Lucasta with a commendatory poem. Lovelace (1618–58), jailed twice during the Interregnum, is of course the author of the single most famous Cavalier lyric, ‘To Lucasta, Going to the Wars’. Other parts of Marvell’s oeuvre, such as the satire ‘Tom May’s Death’, likewise have a strong Cavalier flavour. Such terms as ‘chameleon’ and ‘amphibian’ are accordingly common in Marvell studies.20 Writing about the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652–4), an English success, Marvell bashes the Dutch with exuberant wit. Like the revolutionary conflict between High Church Anglicans and Low Church Puritans, this international conflict was, for Protestants, fratricidal. Though fellow Protestants, the Dutch were commercial and colonial rivals who insisted on operating without dipping their flags to salute English supremacy on the seas. Holland resonated as well as a republic and as a haven of freedom for radical Protestant sectarians. Marvell’s satire on the Dutch in ‘The Character of Holland’ is more high-spirited than damning. A hopelessly waterlogged people according to Marvell, the Dutch are of course ‘re-baptized’ by their own country. The sophisticated banking system developed by the Dutch led to the charge that Mammon was their true God. Marvell thus links Dutch religious toleration of sectarians to their nimble financial institutions: Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew, Staple of sects and mint of schism grew; That bank of conscience, where not one so strange Opinion but finds credit and exchange. (Marvell, Poems, 252)

Their worship of money, however, is universal (‘catholic’): the fungibility of currency, as a medium of exchange, seems to make all theological opinions indifferently interchangeable as well. We have here, especially in the telling pun on credit, perhaps the first satire against something like ‘supermarket spirituality’. Whereas Milton emphasizes the liberatory edge of an emancipated press in Areopagitica (1644), Marvell picks up the more disquieting problem of cultural commodification: a levelling that is merely indiscriminate, and more cultural than political. Marvell is restrained in asserting the nature of his own poetic authority. He does not belong to the ‘visionary line’ that extends, say, from Milton to Blake to Yeats to James Merrill. Marvell often relies, like Donne and Cowley, on the compressed force of striking conceits: the strong point of ‘metaphysical’ poetry. Marvell’s satires are otherwise very similar in tone to the scandal-bearing lampoons that issued forth from the court wits around Charles II. His ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ is the fourth satire in a series drawing on the pictorial trope of telling a painter how to represent something. Marvell’s ‘pictorialism’—a paradoxical mode of iconoclasm21—depends on a manipulation of discrepant and sometimes jolting perspectives. The satire responds to a bold incursion, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1664–7), in which Dutch ships insouciantly sailed up the Thames and Medway, capturing the navy’s flagship and

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burning a fleet at Chatham. Edmund Waller had just come out with a poem in the same subgenre that implausibly hailed this as an English victory. The English navy had been underfunded and poorly provisioned: unpaid English sailors had indeed refused to fight. So humiliating a defeat reflected on everyone in charge, including the comptroller Henry Wood, whom Marvell depicts as ‘headless’ (Marvell, Poems, 374). Near the astonishing conclusion to ‘Last Instructions’, we see the King himself in thrall to nocturnal visions in which his sexual and political imagination have queasily merged. Among the most disturbing is the vision that the King finally recognizes as ‘England or Peace’: a ‘virgin-faced’ female personification—bound, blindfolded, and gagged—that his imagination conjures up. Is this an omen or a sexual fantasy? As Zwicker puts it, Marvell (like Rochester) suggests that ‘this king cannot distinguish between erotic fantasy and affairs of state’.22 He also figures the absence, in Stuart politics, of anything like consent. Consider as well the following portrait of Barbara Palmer, Countess of Castlemaine, one of the King’s favourite mistresses. Her supposed affair with a footman is the substance of what is to be ‘painted’. It is not, however, merely her ‘stooping’ in terms of social class that is at issue. Marvell depicts the Countess as turned on by what she sees through ‘her lackey’s drawers’: a masculine bulge that, along with his ‘brazen calves’ and ‘brawny thighs’, crowds out her ability to imagine his face. A relay of gazes mediates: we see him through her eyes and her through his: a poetic intrusiveness that goes beyond the mundane voyeurism, say, of peeking through a bedroom keyhole. Marvell indeed makes reference to the new microscopic technology of Robert Hooke by way of setting up his use of distance. As Zwicker points out, we are indeed somewhere near the territory of a foot fetish:23 Great Love, how dost thou triumph and how reign, That a groom couldst humble her disdain! Stripped to her skin, see how she stooping stands, Nor scorns to rub him down with those fair hands, And washing (lest the scent her crime disclose) His sweaty hooves, tickles him ’twixt the toes. (Marvell, Poems, ll. 91–6, p. 372)

Juxtaposing the dainty ‘fair hands’ unmarked by manual labour and the servant’s muscularity and ‘sweaty hooves’, Marvell zooms in close. We see as if we ourselves, against the most intimate proscriptions of class, are bathing the groom’s smelly feet. The intimate portrait of course illustrates, in the ‘big picture’, the sexual corruption of court: a nest of intrigue in which non-stop shagging fatally distracts from a competent handling of the Anglo-Dutch conflict, a war that Marvell in any case opposed. This second perspective restores the licit vantage point, so to speak, even as the first perspective edgily violates it. ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ enacts both the need for, and the repeated transgression of, authority. Although a homoerotic sensibility emerges at crucial points in Marvell’s poetry, I mean nothing more nor less by perversity than this: Marvell’s satire depends on our shock as readers.24

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Marvell’s iconoclasm finds a natural target in public statuary, as in ‘The Statue in Stocks-Market’. This poem depicts a clumsy statue of Charles II as itself a satirical plot against the King: But now it appears from the first to the last To be all a revenge and a malice forecast, Upon the King’s birthday to set up a thing That shows him a monster more like than a king. (Marvell, Poems, 416)

A similar poem about equestrian statues of Charles I and II features a dialogue between the two sculptured horses, each grumbling irreverently about his unwelcome burden. In the stanza quoted above, the rhyme in the last two lines is not the poem’s least devastating effect. In ‘Butler’s Ghost’, D’Urfey registers the same rhyming objectification of royalty. It is ‘a worse thing’, D’Urfey writes—worse than bandying for a commonwealth or church—to ‘Rebel and fight against the king’.25

DRYDEN’S FINESSE

.................................................................................................................. John Dryden, younger than Marvell by ten years and Butler by almost twenty, lived until 1700. He was born, as his snobbish counterparts among the wits at court never forgot, into a middle-class Puritan family. His satires, in perfecting the mock-heroic mode, swerve away from the epic, a heroic mode that he sometimes pursued ‘straight’, so to speak, both as a translator of Virgil and as a playwright. Having thrived during the Restoration, Dryden experienced a far less friendly regime change in 1688. Dryden indeed found himself repeatedly wrong-footed by history. Along with Milton, both Dryden and Marvell had marched in Cromwell’s funeral procession, and both wrote in 1659 odes on the death of Cromwell. Dryden’s Heroique Stanza’s, Consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his most Serene and Renowned Highnesse Oliver was published with similar exercises by Edmund Waller and Thomas Sprat. The elegy, his first major poem, is an object-lesson in unlucky public gestures: barely a year later Dryden was to hail the return of Charles II in Astraea redux. Charles II would enjoy needling him by complaining, correctly, that the poem on Cromwell was better. Dryden’s enemies would use his Cromwellian debut against him ever after.26 Dryden, a firm royalist and High Church loyalist, attempts in Absalom and Achitophel (1681) to renew traditional dynastic authority by use of a parallel episode from biblical history. Writing during the Exclusion Crisis that began in 1678, he explores the parallel relations between Charles II and his son (the illegitimate and disloyal Duke of Monmouth) with Absalom’s rebellion against the biblical King David. Yet Dryden’s poem does not simply return to pre-Civil War patriarchal modes on behalf of legitimate descent through the Stuart dynasty. Rather, Dryden mobilizes both poetic tropes and, to an extraordinary degree, critical argument: the very sort of critical rationality that, in the end, would serve to vitiate the charisma of both patriarchal authority and

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revealed religion. Monmouth (Absalom) lost, to be sure; but the rebellion’s instigator, ‘Achitophel’ (Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621–83), was ultimately acquitted of high treason. Shaftesbury, who had exploited the Popish Plot in hopes of excluding James from the throne, would die an exile’s death in Amsterdam. The handwriting, nevertheless, was on the wall: a new age was dawning. Dryden’s poem provides a fair sampling of the contractarian ideology soon to be formally articulated by John Locke, who would accompany William of Orange during the latter’s 1688 invasion from the United Provinces. Even so, Dryden’s portrait of the sinister, blindly ambitious Shaftesbury/Achitophel is a triumph: a satire at once elegant and eviscerating. We see in the very medium of Absalom and Achitophel the implicit defeat of charismatic authority by rationality. Dryden was, one might suggest, knowingly defending patriarchal ideology on enemy turf: that is the tense and paradoxical project of his celebrated ‘poetry of argument’. The intellectual pressure of that paradox, moreover, arguably makes Absalom and Achitophel the superbly poised poem that it is. As Zwicker argues, it is precisely the tonal accommodations that Dryden makes in Absalom and Achitophel—above all, his many ironies—that make his belated patriarchal ideology palatable: negotiable tender, as it were.27 Although Dryden’s politics are, as advertised, quite conservative, his means of figuring them is strikingly ‘modern’. Dryden does not solicit our immediate belief in patriarchal authority; this is not a return to the King as father of his people as in, for example, the influential Eikon Basilike. Rather, he makes the case for such authority as a confessedly mythical but expedient means of ensuring political stability. Aside from the domestic theme of a father’s conflict with his son, Absalom and Achitophel goes far to ‘domesticate’, so to speak, an authority not traditionally geared to so conversational a tone. Dryden’s quiver contained many arrows, and, like Marvell, he exploited the satirical topos of perversity, although in Dryden’s case the target was the dissenting and Whig heirs of the English Revolution. Although it embarrassed him late in his career, Dryden’s most sexed-up play, The Kind Keeper, or Mr. Limberham (1678), is effective as ruthless satire. The Kind Keeper, set in a boarding house-cum-brothel run by one ‘Mrs. Saintly’, makes use of the voguish plot whereby a middle-class ‘Cit’ (citizen) is cuckolded by a witty libertine. Meanwhile, the aging ‘Cit’, Mr Limberham, is a sexual masochist, joining on the Restoration stage the sexually twisted senator in Thomas Otway’s domestic tragedy Venice Preserved (1682). More than one critic has suggested that the character of Mr Limberham, like Otway’s nasty Senator Antonio, glances satirically at Shaftesbury. Sexual deviance works, so to speak, from the outside in: it functions not so much to unmask the ‘inner essence’ of Limberham/Shaftesbury as to crystallize his ‘kinky’ politics. In his final decade of the 1690s, when he turned mainly to the translation of Virgil, Chaucer, and others, Dryden found himself something of a reptile in a new age of sleek and shiny mammals: a Catholic convert, after 1686, among Protestants; a Jacobite, loyal to a king in exile; and a one-time libertine wit in an age devoted to a critique of theatrical naughtiness. His refusal to swear allegiance to William III cost him the

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laureateship. Small wonder that Dryden, repeatedly stranded by history on unfamiliar shores, developed such an acute historical sense. Extraordinary historical vicissitudes, with which he was repeatedly out of sync, schooled him in the ironies of historical dialectics: how suddenly, in effect, not only present conditions but the very significance of the past may change.

INTERSECTIONS

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AFFILIATIONS

.................................................................................................................. In the final years of the English Revolution and its aftermath in the Restoration, Butler, Marvell, and Dryden differ in politics and satiric targets. Butler’s absurdity is directed against enthusiasm, a kind of religious authority, while Marvell and Dryden more directly turn to the state. Marvell’s shocking disenchantments in ‘The Last Instructions’ target the restored King and court, while Dryden’s finesse addresses monarchical assumptions and the dissenting and Whig heirs of the Puritan revolutionaries. Yet despite the differing (and shifting) political affiliations among these three poets, a shared respect for literary skill as such sometimes seems to produce responses that cannot be read directly off their politics. These three poets in particular shared, as Allan Pritchard puts it, an appreciation for ‘the interplay of art, learning, and propaganda’ that can also be seen in Abraham Cowley’s unfinished poem The Civil War (1656).28 Perhaps there is a relation to be traced here between the techniques of satirical estrangement and the demythologization of the seventeenth-century English state. Each of the three poets dedicated himself to rhyme. In the wake of the 1674 edition of Paradise Lost, the decision to use rhyme had acquired political overtones. Milton had claimed in his blank verse to have recovered ‘ancient liberty’ from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’: a topos with Cromwellian overtones. For Butler, the decision to use rhyme was easy enough. Butler, indeed, defiantly churns out one ludicrously far-fetched rhyme after another. What other poet would dare to rhyme Grizel (that is, Griselda) with bull’s pizzle? Or stick with ecclesiastic? Butler’s poetry celebrates slight but deliberate bumpy imperfections and—a model for Byron in Don Juan (1819–24)— jokey self-referential comments about metre and rhyme. Like Marvell, moreover, Butler in Hudibras brings together king and thing in a passage discussing, among other sectarian enthusiasts, the Fifth Monarchists: Some were for setting up a King But all the rest for no such thing Unless King Jesus. . . . (241)

The ideological is ever a matter of the formal. Butler and Marvell both employ a punchy octosyllabic line very different from the smoother pentameter line dominant in English poetry. As for rhyme, matters were more complex for Marvell, who knowingly declines to follow Milton’s ‘republican’ poetics: ‘I too transported by the mode offend’, he confesses in his commendatory

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poem for the second edition of Paradise Lost, ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (1674). Marvell does jab at Dryden for being a man of rhymes. Dryden, having courteously called in person on Milton and gained his permission, had adapted Paradise Lost for the opera. Dryden’s The State of Innocence, and the Fall of Man (published in 1677, but never performed) is in rhyming couplets. Marvell hit back at Dryden as follows in ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’. What we find in these lines, addressed directly to Milton, is the comparison of a bad writer to a hackney horse. Marvell anticipates the Augustan theme of the ‘hack’ writer: Well mightst thou scorn thy readers to allure With tinkling thyme, of thine own sense secure: While the town-Bayes writes all the while and spells, And like a pack-horse tires without his bells. (Marvell, Poems, 184)

Perhaps Marvell, as Cedric Watts contends, should be seen as the ‘father’ of the literature we call Augustan. Marvell the Puritan and the royalists Butler and Dryden are united by the shared habit of satirical appropriation. Tracing the appropriation of topoi likewise highlights unexpected intersections, blurred boundaries, and moments of ephemeral identification. Marvell’s powerful image of Cromwell as a falcon in An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland, for example, appropriates a symbol from falconry, the royal sport par excellence. Given royalist satires about Cromwell’s large nose,29 moreover, the image of the large-beaked bird of prey both incorporates and neutralizes the hostile imagery. A similar logic of appropriation holds for the topos of divine inspiration. Although Milton had claimed to be divinely inspired—and in Christian terms that could scarcely be dismissed as a mere fossilized convention—he there staked out ground shared with the more radical elements of the English Revolution. Claiming to be the channel of the divine utterance was a practice of self-authorization that had circumvented, among those radical sectarians who broke away from the Anglican Church, the usual lines of authority. Lay preaching and pamphleteering, authorized precisely by claims of immediate inspiration, had fuelled the radical intellectual ferment of the Interregnum. Such was the much-maligned phenomenon of seventeenth-century ‘enthusiasm’: targeted both before and after 1660 as a threat to the status quo.30 In any case, all three of these poets under discussion here, including Marvell, keep a safe distance from anything like divine inspiration. Butler, as we have seen, makes religious enthusiasm his main satiric target in Hudibras. Dryden most famously mocks enthusiasm as flatulence. Mac Flecknoe concludes with the mock-prophetic mantle being passed from one bad poet (Richard Flecknoe) to his successor (Thomas Shadwell). That mantle is supported aloft by an obscene ‘subterranean wind’. And though Marvell provided the most important prefatory poem to Paradise Lost, he does not risk, as had Milton, the political opprobrium of claiming to be inspired by a ‘Heavenly Muse’. Such a supernatural grounding of authority, like the magical charisma of royalty, was not consonant with the public use of rationality. If satire relies on bodily imagery, it nevertheless solicits, above all, the

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rational judgement of readers: a spirit of public enquiry, as Halifax puts it in the observation used for an epigraph to this chapter. The Civil War did not prevent political opponents from sharing another piece of poetic ground: the topos of literary ancestry and descent. This topos, describing the transmission of a specifically literary authority, tends to encapsulate political attitudes. Both Dryden and Marvell sought to deny that certain poets and playwrights (Thomas Shadwell for Dryden; for Marvell, the poet and historian Thomas May) deserved to claim literary ‘descent’ from Ben Jonson (1537–1637). Jonson was a poet, playwright, writer of courtly masques, and satirist who had stoutly upheld the traditional system of noble patronage for poets. Dying just before the Civil War, he had also been a satirist of English Puritans: the stage-Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, from Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), may be the theatre’s best answer to decades of anti-theatrical invective by Puritans. Jonson’s poetic admirers had established his memory as a paternal authority to the ‘lineage’ of whom a younger poet, as a ‘Son of Ben’, might aspire. Marvell puts literary values first in celebrating Jonson over May. Tom May, a courtly translator of Lucan, had claimed to be a poetic heir to Jonson’s legacy. Marvell, meanwhile, broadly shared his politics with May, who had switched sides and become a supporter of Parliament and its official historiographer. In any case, Marvell’s satirical attack on May was galvanized, in late 1650, by his reportedly drunken death. In Marvell’s poem, the hapless and hung-over May is poetically transported, upon his demise, to Hades. There he is confronted by the formidable spectre of Jonson. A scathing repudiation follows, including the claim that May’s having been buried in Westminster Abbey provoked the very dust of Chaucer and Spenser to rise against him. Jonson, as ventriloquized by Marvell, goes on to insult May as a ‘chronicler to Spartacus’: a phrase that assumes that only an unworthy historian would write about the leader, during the Roman Empire, of a slave-rebellion. ‘Spartacus’ conjures up the ghost of Cromwell. This line, written shortly after An Horatian Ode, makes for a bemusing crux for any close reader of Marvell. McDowell, having explored Marvell’s ties to sharply distinct social circles as a partial explanation, highlights above all his allegiance to inventive originality, to the ‘cause of wit’. The intergenerational authority of dynastic descent is organic, familial, and—so it had once seemed—‘natural’. We encounter in Dryden’s preoccupation with the lineal descent of poets, both in his poetry and critical prose, what may look like an unmediated revival of the genealogical transmission of authority. Moreover, Dryden’s trope, for literary criticism, constitutes a profoundly influential legacy. Whether we factor in ‘mothers’, like Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, or emphasize Gothic struggles over influence anxiety, like Harold Bloom, we are still making use of Dryden’s genealogical model for literary history. We must beware of falsifying Dryden, however, by blurring the difference between filiation proper and the imaginative act of retrospective affiliation for which it is a trope. Dryden emphasizes chosen affiliations, and, as Jennifer Brady points out, he does so by way of negotiation and emulation much more than by way of an ‘oedipal’ agon.31 The surprising extent of Dryden’s own affiliation with Marvell, bridging an impressive gulf of political and religious differences, speaks to the relative autonomy of literary history as such even in the chaotic aftermath of a civil war. Dryden admired,

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emulated, and affiliated with Marvell specifically as a fellow satirist. Marvell himself, surprisingly loyal to the ‘cause of wit’, affiliated for similar reasons with Ben Jonson. Such a pointedly chosen authority is both denaturalized and reconfigured. The blows to political authority that began in 1649 created space for an authority that is knowingly artificial and to some extent responsive to a newly critical, increasingly muscular public.

CONCLUSION

.................................................................................................................. Even as they respond to the English Revolution and its aftermath, the satires of this age belong to the early Enlightenment. Satirical mockery appeals to critical rationality at the expense of reverence and awe. The satires arising from seventeenth-century dislocations express an ironic distance from a cosmos in which truth and meaning converge and reinforce one another. That would have been an official cosmos free of the sort of ironic reversals—the unmistakable contingencies—that beset England during and after the Civil War. The English Civil War as such was an assault on channels of faith and modes of social being that could never be repaired or restored to centrality. The age of analogies was over; comets were no longer divine warnings; the universe had been disenchanted; traditional theocratic authority was in a shambles; and the common people were not to be ‘dealt with’ as before. A newly visible domestic scale, by the same token, could mock the pretensions of a heroic world that had become irrelevant and laughably self-important, not to mention superstitious and intolerably gruesome. Laughter is preferable to ‘long and tedious havoc’, and satire finally appeals to a certain urbanity. So it was in the latter part of the seventeenth century, when kings became ordinary human beings and began to rhyme with things.

NOTES 1. Butler, Hudibras, ed. Wilders, 8. 2. Zachary Grey, Butler’s great eighteenth-century editor, identifies Lilly with ‘Sidrophel’ in part II of Hudibras. See Hudibras, in Three Parts, ed. Grey, II.8–9 n. 106. 3. ‘Lilly contemn’d: A Song’, in Brome (ed.), Rump, 84. 4. Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 42. 5. Hirst and Zwicker, ‘Andrew Marvell’, 650. 6. ‘An Epitaph’, in Brome (ed.), Rump, 185–6. 7. ‘Bum-Fodder: or, Waste-Paper, proper to wipe the Nations rump with, or your Own’, in Brome (ed.), Rump, 55. 8. For more about the symbolic dimension of beheading, see Janes, Losing our Heads. 9. Lord, Introduction, Anthology of Poems, xix. 10. See Love, English Clandestine Satire. 11. See Hill, Intellectual Consequences, 48–51.

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12. Laws passed in 1660, such as the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, were dated as taking place in the twelfth year of the reign of Charles II. 13. Dryden, ‘A Discourse’, in Works, ed. Dealing, iv. 71. 14. Marvell, Upon Appleton House, in Poems, ed. Smith, 233. 15. McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, 221. 16. Burke, Attitudes, 57. 17. Parker, Triumph of Augustan Poetics. 18. See Marcus, Politics of Mirth. 19. Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, 277. 20. See, however, the chapters on Marvell by McDowell in this volume for a discussion of continuities. 21. Chernaik, ‘Marvell’s Satires’, 269. 22. Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 116. 23. Zwicker, ‘Sites of Instruction’, 124. 24. It is in this precise sense, and not by way of any supposed psychoanalysis of Marvell, that I have implicitly used here a Lacanian understanding of perversion. See Dor, Structure and Perversions. 25. D’Urfey, ‘Butler’s Ghost’, 3. 26. See, however, the chapter by Corns in this volume for discussion of continuities. 27. Zwicker, ‘Irony, Disguise, and Deceit’, 145–67. 28. The Civil War, intro. Pritchard, 51. 29. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 12–21. 30. See Hawes, Mania and Literary Style. 31. Brady, ‘Dryden and Negotiations’, 51.

WORKS CITED Anselment, Raymond A. ‘Satiric Strategy in “The Rehearsal Transpros’d” ’. Modern Philology 68.2 (1970), 137–50. Brady, Jennifer. ‘Dryden and Negotiations of Literary Succession and Precession’, in Jennifer Brady, Greg Clingham, et al. (eds.), Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and Other Writers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 27–54. Brome, Alexander (ed.). Rump: or an Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times. London, 1662. Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. 3rd edn. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Butler, Samuel. Hudibras, in Three Parts, ed. Zachary Grey. 2 vols. Dublin: A. Reilly, 1744. ——. Hudibras, ed. John Wilders. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967. Chernaik, Warren L. ‘Marvell’s Satires: The Artist as Puritan’, in Kenneth Friedenreich (ed.), Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1977, 268–96. Cowley, Abraham. The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Dor, Joe¨l. Structure and Perversions, trans. Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press, 2001. Dryden, John. ‘A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Vinton A. Dealing. 20 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974, vol. iv.

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D’Urfey, Thomas. ‘Butler’s Ghost: or, Hudibras, The Fourth Part’. London, 1682. Hawes, Clement. Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hill, Christopher. Some Intellectual Consequences of the English Revolution. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980. Hirst, Derek, and Steven Zwicker. ‘Andrew Marvell and the Toils of Patriarchy: Fatherhood, Longing, and the Body Politic’. English Literary History 66.3 (1999), 629–54. Janes, Regina. Losing our Heads: Beheadings in Literature and Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Knoppers, Laura Lunger. Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lord, George de F. (ed.). Anthology of Poems on Affairs of State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975. Love, Harold. English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. McDowell, Nicholas. Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Marcus, Leah. The Politics of Mirth: Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Marvell, Andrew. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith. Rev. edn. Harlowe: Pearson Longman Press, 2007. Parker, Blanford. The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Trevelyan, G. M. England under the Stuarts. London: Methuen, 1949. Zwicker, Steven N. Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. ——. ‘Irony, Disguise, and Deceit: What Literature Teaches Us about Politics’, in David Armitage (ed.), British Political Thought in History, Literature, and Theory, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 145–67. ——. ‘Sites of Instruction: Andrew Marvell and the Tropes of Restoration Portraiture’, in Julia Marciari Alexander and Catherine MacLeod (eds.), Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2007, 123–40.

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THE CONSOLATION OF NATURAL PHILOSOPHY Margaret Cavendish and the English Revolution ....................................................................................................... RACHEL TRUBOWITZ

The English Revolution, writes Margaret Lucas Cavendish, ‘came like a Whirlwind’, obliterating everything in its path.1 As recent biographers emphasize, the catastrophic experience of civil war profoundly shaped the Duchess of Newcastle’s prodigious career as a writer and thinker.2 Long after the Civil War ended, Cavendish’s memories of England’s bloody conflict remained, for her, regrettably crisp: ‘I have Suffered so much in it as the Loss of some of my Nearest and Dearest Friends, and the Ruin of those that did Remain, that I may desire to forget it.’ Among Margaret’s ‘Nearest and Dearest’ lost in the wars was her brother Charles Lucas, who unsuccessfully led the royalist defence of Colchester and the Lucas family home. After surrendering to the parliamentary forces, Charles was courtmartialled and shot as a traitor. Parliamentary soldiers were said to follow up Charles’s execution by looting the Lucas family crypt and desecrating the bodies of the dead, including Margaret’s recently deceased mother and sister. (This was the second time the Lucas home had been plundered by parliamentary troops; soldiers first stormed the house in 1642.) In Nature’s Pictures, Cavendish commemorates her brother’s death at Colchester as a heroic martyrdom. She alludes to the royalist legend that grass would never again grow on the spot where Charles Lucas had been executed: ‘Vollyes of Shot did all his Body tear, | Where his Blood’s spilt, the Earth no Grass will bear, | As if to revenge his Death, the Earth | Was curs’d with Barrenness even from her Birth.’ In Sociable Letters, she recalls the desecration of her mother’s and sister’s graves—‘the Urns of the Dead were Digged up, their Dust Dispersed, and their Bones Thrown about’—as evidence that ‘Inhuman Acts’ are committed in ‘all Civil or Home-wars’.3 I argue that natural philosophy gives Cavendish a remedial vantage point not only on the terrible losses she suffered during the English Revolution but also on the disappointments she experienced after the Restoration. Science, for the Duchess, is

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preferable to religion as a source of consolation.4 Cavendish was attracted first in the 1640s to atomism and Hobbes’s mechanistic materialism partly because both philosophies compare nature’s primal violence to civil war. If nature is inherently contentious, civil war is the norm, not the exception. From a mechanistic vantage point, Cavendish could construe her personal losses as the unavoidable effects of a larger, natural cause, impossible to resist. In 1655, however, Cavendish renounces atomism and mechanism for vitalist materialism.5 The reconfiguration of her ideas, especially in the late 1650s and early 1660s, corresponds suggestively with advent of the Restoration, which, despite successfully returning the Stuarts to the throne, failed to revive her husband, the Duke of Newcastle’s political favour at court. The couple were compelled to retreat from London to Welbeck Abbey, one of the Duke’s ruined estates. In nature rather than in society, Cavendish comes to find true restoration. Unlike atomism, which posits a final annihilation of nature, vitalism lends systematic organization to Cavendish’s mature, female-centred view of Nature’s peaceful and never-ending renewal. Rather than affirm the naturalness and inevitability of civil war as do mechanism and atomism, vitalism instead allows Cavendish to take comfort in Nature’s peaceful resolution to disturbances caused by her moving parts. ‘In truth’, she writes in Observations on Philosophical Opinions, ‘the unity of Nature of Only and Infinite matter maketh Concord out of Discord.’ ‘Motion causeth Disturbance, but the Nature of Only Matter keepeth Peace.’6 Cavendish’s vitalist emphasis on the unity of nature also reaffirms her steadfast commitment to the plenist side of the sometimes very heated plenist–vacuist debate. Plenism can be newly understood as a Cavendishean constant, a point sometimes obscured in studies that focus exclusively on the Duchess’s changing, and often contradictory, philosophical opinions. I offer a speculative, symptomatic explanation for the Duchess’s enduring horror vacui and for her plenist view of nature’s eternal process of renewal, including the bold challenge it presents to the consolatory, orthodox doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

WAR

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SCIENCE

.................................................................................................................. Even a quick glimpse of Cavendish’s early life highlights the relationship between the Duchess’s evolving scientific interests and her formative experience and enduring memories of the English Revolution. In 1623 (or 1624) Margaret Lucas was born to Elizabeth Leighton Lucas and Thomas Lucas of Colchester, Essex.7 She was the youngest of eight children. Thomas Lucas died in September 1625, but he left his family in his wife’s very capable hands. Elizabeth expertly took control of the family’s finances; she also created a nurturing and nearly idyllic home for her children. Margaret’s childhood appears to have been almost completely carefree. Her mother provided tutors for her daughters, who were instructed in ‘all sorts of Vertues, as singing, dancing, playing on Musick, reading writing, working, and the like’, but as Margaret later recalled, ‘we were not kept strictly thereto’.8 Cavendish would later regret her lack

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of a formal, rigorous education, such as was typically given to young men of her rank; nonetheless, her memories of her early life are uniformly peaceful and sweet. In 1642, Margaret’s halcyon home life in Colchester was cut short by the beginning of English Civil War. On 22 August, Charles I set up his standard at Nottingham. On the very same day, parliamentary soldiers (for the first time) stormed the Lucas family home, which, as they correctly suspected, was being used as a secret royalist storehouse for ammunition and weapons. After the attack, Elizabeth Lucas moved her family to Oxford, where Charles I had fled from London to re-establish his court. In 1643, Margaret entered into service with Queen Henrietta Maria as a maid of honour. In 1644, she escaped with the Queen to France. While at Henrietta Maria’s court in Paris, Margaret met William Cavendish, the famous royalist commander, who fled to France in 1644, after his devastating defeat at Marston Moor. By the end of 1645, William and Margaret were married. In 1648, the Cavendish household left Paris for Antwerp, where they moved into the former home of Peter Paul Rubens, one of Charles I’s favourite painters. Upon her marriage, Margaret joined an aristocratic household that closely followed the latest developments in natural philosophy. Of particular importance to her intellectual development was her brother-in law Sir Charles, a respected mathematician, who had been a member of John Pell’s circle of scholars before his exile in France. In 1651, he accompanied the Duchess to London in an attempt to compound for their sequestered estates. Poems and Fancies, Cavendish’s first published work, which was dedicated to Charles Cavendish, was written in England. During her Parisian exile in the mid-1640s, Margaret met Thomas Hobbes (William Cavendish was one of Hobbes’s most important patrons) as well as Descartes, Mersenne, Roberval, and Gassendi, the latter, an influential champion of Epicurean atomism. Cavendish claimed that she never had an actual conversation with any of these learned men (except for Hobbes), but her newfound interest in atomism in the 1640s and her early perceptions of the state of nature seem partly to reflect her Parisian encounters with these French thinkers. One reason why Cavendish at first might have found especially Hobbes and Gassendi so compelling is that their atomist and mechanistic philosophies, although otherwise quite different, both freshly confirmed the natural primacy of war.9 Through Gassendi and Hobbes, Cavendish came to understand that, instead of an exception, civil war is the rule. Atomism allowed Cavendish to imagine natural violence even in infinitesimally small spaces. In ‘A Warr with Atomes’, published in Poems and Fancies, she describes nature’s primal unrest and inherent factiousness: Some factious Atomes will agree; combine, They strive some form’d Body to unjoyne, The Round beate out the Sharpe: the Long The Flat do fight withal, thus all go wrong.

A lady’s earring might contain hidden worlds, where ‘Lightnings, Thunder, and great Winds may blow’, but ‘the Eare [will] not know’.10 Although those ‘who have Liv’d always in Peace will not Believe it’, she, as a witness to and survivor of the English Civil War’s violence and destructiveness, could personally ratify the atomists’ depictions of

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nature as inherently bellicose. With Hobbes, Cavendish also repudiated the Aristotelian principle that stillness and rest are natural givens. Because nature is inherently violent, social order must be a wholly artificial construct (like the Hobbesian Leviathan), which requires a ruling power with sufficient strength and integrity to repress, by any means, the natural inclination toward chaos. As she writes in Sociable Letters, ‘Civil Laws Abolished, Civil Manners and Decent Customs Banished, and in all their Places is Rapine, Robbing, Stabbing, Treachery, and Falshood, all the Evil Passions and Debauch’d Appetites are let Loose, to take their Liberty.’11 As already intimated, however, in her later writings, Cavendish offers a different, more pacific view of nature’s ceaseless activity. If in her earlier writings, Cavendish, like Hobbes, identifies motion and matter, in her more mature scientific treatises, she reinterprets the union of matter and motion as proof that nature is infinitely renewable and not, as Hobbes claims, a state of perpetual, all-out war.

RATIONALISM, POLITICS, AND THE RENUNCIATION OF ATOMISM

.................................................................................................................. Just as atomism confirmed the primal contentiousness of nature, it also justified the Duchess’s enduring scepticism about the epistemological legitimacy of empiricism. Her rationalist position finds typical expression in her just-mentioned poem about the lady with the earring: while it is true that the lady’s ear cannot detect the world hidden within her earring, it does not necessarily follow that this hidden world is immaterial or unreal. In promoting rationalism, Cavendish found herself at a considerable distance from the empiricism and experimentalism that dominated new scientific thinking in mid-seventeenth-century England, and which provided the basis for the Royal Society’s intellectual charter. Thrilled by the brand-new sights that telescopes and microscopes made discernible, the new scientists grounded knowledge in sense perception. The Duchess’s five-year exile on the Continent may have played a part in shaping her antiempiricist convictions. In opposition to Locke, Hume, Hooke, and Boyle, among other British empiricists and experimentalists, who took inspiration from Francis Bacon, continental philosophers, such as Spinoza, Leibniz, and Descartes (Descartes was part of the Cavendish circle in Paris), were committed rationalists. Like Cavendish, Hobbes, a fellow exile and rationalist, was at intellectual odds with most of his native countrymen. As David Norbrook observes, in France, Cavendish indubitably also found important female role models in Marie de Gournay and Anna Maria von Schurmanm, ‘who were the two major women intellectuals in the time of [Cavendish’s] Continental exile . . . it is inconceivable that she was unaware of their existence’.12 Cavendish’s objections to the new empiricism and experimentalism centre on two interrelated issues: the new scientists’ unchecked enthusiasm for optical instruments, such as Hooke’s microscope and Galileo’s telescope; and the problematic limitations of

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the new technology of magnification. Given the inevitable imperfections of any particular instrument, the potential for distortion was enormous; as Cavendish claims, ‘the more the figure by Art is magnified, the more it appears mis-shapen from the natural’. Moreover, for Cavendish, magnification merely enlarges the surface of the objects under view; it can go ‘no further than the exterior Parts of the Object presented’. For this reason, Cavendish describes the unprecedented sights that the telescope or microscope newly brought into view as literally ‘superficial’: Art has intoxicated so many mens brains, and wholly imployed their thoughts and bodily actions about phaenomena, on the exterior figures of objects, as all better Arts and Studies are laid aside . . . But though there be numerous Books written of the wonders of these Glasses, yet I cannot perceive any such, at best they are superficial wonders, as I may call them.13

Optical instruments could not shed light on the intuitive or innate truths that reason alone (without technological assistance) could clearly ascertain. Despite the crucial support she found in atomism for her defence of rationalism against empiricism, Cavendish nevertheless came to renounce atomism as a flawed philosophical system. In Philosophical and Physical Opinions, she maintains: ‘As for Atomes, after I had Reasoned with myself, I conceived that it was not probable that the Universe and all the Creatures therein could be Created and Disposed by the Dancing and Wandering and dusty motions of Atomes.’14 In part, Cavendish’s retraction is politically motivated. She realizes that in political terms, atomism, with its emphasis on the unrestrained competition of autonomous, individual particles, can provide scientific justification for a public sphere, which had found some actual incipient expression through the pamphlet wars of the 1640s and 1650s.15 Cavendish fears that, if atomism’s liberal, individualist potential were to be politically actualized, anarchy would be the inevitable result: ‘if Every and Each Atome were a Living Substance and had Equal Power, Life, and Knowledge, and Consequently a Free-will and Liberty, and so Each and Every one were as Absolute as an other, they would hardly Agree in one Government’.16 Partly then, Cavendish surrenders atomism to her royalist vision of the political future. For Cavendish, only absolute sovereignty expressed as dynastic kingship could guarantee a true restoration of social order and national unity.

PLENISM, MATHEMATICS,

AND

DEATH

.................................................................................................................. Another less-well-understood reason for why Cavendish gives up on atomism is her overriding commitment to plenism: there are no empty spaces in nature. Atomism, by contrast, generally posits the physical reality of the void or vacuum, or matter-less space, as the field or container of atomic motion. De rerum natura, Lucretius’ Latin epic poem on Epicurean atomism, celebrates the infinitesimal materiality of atoms and the substance-less space of the void, wherein atoms randomly move. Although atoms can never perish, the void presupposes that matter can be destroyed. For Lucretius, most

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people ‘fear to believe that a time of destruction and ruin awaits the nature of the great world’ (6.565–7).17 Although we mostly successfully suppress this terror, we sometimes give in to an overwhelming horror vacui—the terrifying sense that ‘the earth should be snatched away suddenly beneath [our] feet’ and that we might ‘suddenly be borne into the abyss, and the sum of things, left utterly without foundation’ (6.601–7). In an early poem, ‘Of Earth’, Cavendish tries to reconcile atomism with plenism. Earth, she writes, ‘no Vacuum hath but full’. Atoms (specifically, sharp atoms with an ‘Edge or point’) move by cutting into other atoms, but without reducing the plenum’s totality: ‘For Atomes sharp do makes themselves a Way | Cutting through other Atomes as they stray.’18 In this, Cavendish coheres with Descartes, who vehemently opposed the idea of the void, although he formulated a theory of organic corpuscles as an alternative to classically defined atomism. As we shall soon see, the Duchess’s often-expressed fear of death as oblivion fundamentally energizes her renunciation of atomism, along with its horror vacui. Plenism, which ‘admits no empty place’, indirectly assuages Cavendish’s mortal terrors. A brief review of the vacuist–plenist controversy, however, is needed first in order fully to appreciate Cavendish’s renunciation of atomism. The debate broke down over whether or not Aristotle’s principle, ‘Nature abhors a vacuum’, could be justified in new scientific terms. For the most part, plenists agreed with Aristotle; vacuists did not. Robert Boyle typifies the views of the Royal Society when, in a letter sent by Henry Oldenberg, he rejects plenism on the grounds that it had not been confirmed by experiment. Plenism is not ‘proved by any phenomenon; but it is assumed only from the hypothesis that a vacuum is an impossibility’.19 There are exceptions, of course: Hobbes is a plenist, but he also offers one of the period’s most thoroughgoing revisions of Aristotelian ideas. Like Cavendish, Hobbes condemned the new experimental philosophy, particularly Robert Boyle’s proof that a vacuum is physically real, which was based upon results drawn from Boyle’s spectacular experiments with his air pump. Boyle performed these very same air-pump experiments for Margaret Cavendish, when she was invited to visit the Royal Society in 1667. The Duchess described Boyle’s demonstrations as fascinating, but she nevertheless remained firmly committed to her anti-vacuist views.20 A correlative plenist–vacuist debate was ongoing in the mid-seventeenth-century mathematical community. According to the classical, Euclidean point of view, there are two fundamentally distinct, but equally powerful branches of mathematics: arithmetic and geometry. Arithmetic takes numbers as its object and is concerned with discrete quantities that can be expressed as collections of units. Geometry deals with infinitely divisible magnitudes, such as lines, figures, and angles. Some seventeenth-century mathematicians disputed Euclid’s distinction, especially in light of Descartes’s discovery that geometrical ideas could be converted into arithmetical and algebraic formulae (this is analytical geometry). Against the classical view, Descartes and his supporters maintained that arithmetic was superior to geometry. Hobbes, by contrast, fiercely defended the primacy of geometry. Unlike arithmetic, which deals with discrete quantities, the classical definition of geometry could be adapted—or so Hobbes

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thought—to support his central plenist premiss that nature is comprised wholly of matter in motion. Hobbes’s attempt to make geometry compatible with his mechanistic-materialist understanding of the plenum became one of his major ambitions, bordering almost on an obsession.21 Cavendish, by contrast, dismisses all branches of mathematics as nonsensical.22 In The Blazing World, Cavendish heaps scorn on mathematicians. After the Empress’s serious discussions with her bird-, fish-, worm-, and ape-men, she turns for diversion to her spidermen (mathematicians). They present her with a table filled with points, lines, squares, circles, triangles, and so forth. The Empress can make no sense of these figures at all, even though ‘she had a very ready wit and quick apprehension’. Although she endeavours to learn about numbers and shapes, she grows more, rather than less, confounded: ‘whether they did ever square the circle, I cannot say, nor whether they could make imaginary points of lines’. The Empress can draw only one unambiguous conclusion about the spider-men’s art: ‘their points and lines were so slender, small, and thin, that they seemed next to imaginary.’ ‘[A]bstruse and intricate’, the spider-men resemble the objects they study. Lacking in substance, the diaphanous, cobweb-like minds of mathematicians can produce only the very slightest and most insubstantial ideas. Like her Empress, Cavendish believes that her mind is made of much firmer stuff than the brains of mathematicians. As she writes scornfully in The Worlds Olio: ‘it is said there is nothing truly known, but Measuring and Reckoning, the which I will leave to Arithmeticians and Geometricians, who have a Rule and Number, which my Brain can neither level at nor comprehend’.23 Unlike mathematicians, for whom ‘nothing is truly known’—and who truly know ‘nothing’, i.e. the imaginary world of points, lines, and squared circles—Cavendish’s brain, like Nature herself, cannot be reduced to an abstract ‘Rule and Number’. The Duchess’s unruly, extravagant thoughts resemble nature’s infinite variety. Hobbes relentlessly sought a reformed geometric solution to squaring the circle as a way to strengthen his scientific and social philosophies. By contrast, Cavendish turns squaring the circle into a metaphor for de-naturalized brain function, and ultimately, the death of the brain. Her poem ‘The Circle of the Brain Cannot Be Squar’d’ repudiates Hobbes’s mechanistic plenism, which is closely bound up with his obsession with circle-squaring. (Hobbes’s first attempt at circle quadrature is in chapter 20 of De corpore in 1655.) Cavendish does not mention Hobbes by name in her poem, but she does reprimand ‘men of Arts | Since Archimedes or Euclides time’ for trying to pervert the natural circle of the brain into unusual shapes: ‘each Brain | Hath on a Line been stretched’. Cavendish happily affirms that squaring the circle is impossible: ‘But, none hath yet by Demonstration found | The way, by which to Square a Circle round’. The brain’s natural roundness cannot be ruined by the perversity of mathematical demonstrations: ‘For while the Brain is round no Square will be | While Thoughts divide, no Figures will agree.’ Cavendish’s relentless mathematicians, however, are not content to stop with circle-quadrature. They also indefatigably search for the answer to doubling a cube, a problem, like squaring the circle, which Euclidean geometry deemed impossible to solve. In Cavendish’s ‘Another to the same Purpose’, the misguided attempt to double the cube leads to the specious discovery of indivisibles or infinitesimals, which

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she identifies as ‘Equall Atomes’: ‘But some the Triangles did cut so small, | Till into Equall Atomes they did fall.’ Strategically placing the word ‘fall’ at the end of her poetic line, Cavendish implies that the Lucretian idea of primal atomic rainfall is morally suspect. Unlike arithmetical lines, poetic lines (and her lines, in particular) provide perfectly just measurements. She formally renounces atomism two years after the publication of these poems.24 Despite his investment in geometry, Hobbes shares Cavendish’s hostility to the Euclidean or matter-less view of number, shape, and quantity. In Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematiques (1656), Hobbes declares that ‘if a point be not Quantity, seeing it is neither substance nor Quality, it is nothing. And if Euclide had meant it so in his definition . . . he might have defined it more briefly (but ridiculously) thus, a P-oint is nothing.’25 Hobbes’s idea of a mathematical ‘nothing’ closely resonates with Cavendish’s ‘nothing’ in the just-cited passage from The World’s Olio. For Cavendish and Hobbes, ‘nothing’ is impossible: space cannot be devoid of matter. As the Duchess writes in Philosophical and Physical Opinions, ‘If a Vacuum be allow’d, how can a Place be and no Matter, for nothing is nothing.’26 Since absence and emptiness cannot be extended, or, that is, given bodies, they have no physical actuality. Cavendish’s acute fear of death and oblivion provides one speculative, symptomatic explanation for her enduring opposition to the actuality of the vacuum. In Sociable Letters, Cavendish admits that her greatest fear is of death and oblivion: ‘there is nothing I Dread more than Death’, especially ‘the Oblivion in Death’.27 The actuality of a vacuum would provide not only an undeniable objective correlative for the matterless-ness of death but also a vivid instantiation of Lucretius’s horror vacui. On these possibilities, Cavendish’s plenist view that ‘nature’s parts are fil’d, having no hollow side’ completely forecloses.

RESTORATION AND THE UNION OF MATTER AND SPIRIT

.................................................................................................................. Indubitably, Cavendish’s mortal terrors also were intensified by her disturbing memories of the storming of her Colchester home and the horror she experienced after learning that her mother’s and sister’s graves had been desecrated and looted. The experience of living on her husband’s ruined estate, which he endlessly endeavoured to restore, additionally contributed to her philosophical hostility to the reality of ‘nothing’, upheld by vacuists like Robert Boyle. Cavendish poignantly describes her husband’s terrible dismay upon seeing his devastated estates: ‘And although his Patience and Wisdom is such, that I never perceived him sad or discontented with his own Losses and Misfortunes, yet when he beheld the ruins of that Park, I observed him troubled, though he did little express it, onely saying, he had been in hopes it would not have been so much defaced as he found it, there being not one Timber-tree in it left for

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shelter.’28 (Without too much exaggeration, one possibly could claim that the Duchess took the reality of the vacuum as a personal repudiation of Newcastle’s frustrating restoration projects.) Unsurprisingly, architecture, building, and construction serve as important metaphors of nature’s hierarchical-but-cooperative powers of renewal in Cavendish’s postatomist writings. As John Rogers observes, Cavendish conceives of matter as having three essential parts: rational, sensitive, and inanimate. In Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, she compares the ‘Rational part’ to ‘an Architect or Surveigher, who orders and designs the building, and puts the Laborers to work’. Sensitive matter is ‘the laboring or working part’, while inanimate matter represents the raw materials which sensitive matter frames according to the blueprint supplied by the Rational Architect. ‘[A]ll these degrees’, concludes Cavendish, ‘are necessarily required in every composed action of Nature.’ Motion, for Cavendish, is en masse and without empty spaces.29 In Nature, restoration is fully achievable in material terms. The plenum, or material fullness of Nature (a hedge against nothingness, absence, and oblivion), thus might be newly characterized as a Cavendishean constant—one that specifically sheds new light on the challenge that the Duchess’s animist materialism presents to the orthodox doctrine of the immortality of the soul. For Cavendish, Nature’s plenum proves that resurrection and renewal are foundationally organic experiences, not spiritual ones. In Cavendish’s natural world, there is no death, no absence, no vacuum, and no matter-less souls. Although natural bodies break down, they retain their vital motions. Death is not the soul’s pathway to eternal, immaterial life; rather, ‘what is commonly named death is but an alteration or change of corporeal motions’. Despite these changes, motion in general remains unitary, as does matter: ‘As there is but One only Matter, so there is but One only Motion.’30 Just as nature cannot be matter-less, so it can never cease to move or come to an end. Nothing can be lost or annihilated in nature. Matter continuously (and simultaneously) dissolves and reforms itself: ‘Natural Creatures are . . . produced by dissolution of Particulars by the way of Metamorphosing.’31 As Lisa Walters observes, ‘There is no death within this paradigm.’32Although Cavendish never gives up on the existence of God, she prefers the scientific demonstration of Nature’s vital, unified, and never-ending matter-motion to religion’s evanescent promise of eternal spiritual life after the death of the body. Cavendish’s emphasis on this world rather than on the afterlife accords with her aforementioned critique of the new science’s enthusiasm for optical instruments. She often complained that astronomers focused their attention on distant stars and planets, impossible to actually experience, rather than the earthly world in which we in fact live every day. Although in The Blazing World Cavendish obviously enjoys discovering new universes as much as any experimental astronomer, she strategically connects the insights she gains through her fantastic interplanetary voyages to the real need to learn about her own planetary home. As Lisa T. Sarasohn observes, ‘Cavendish’s decision to mix reason and fancy was integral to her system; her natural philosophy could be understood only by combining the philosophic and the fantastical.’33 Cavendish underscores the near-identity of reason and fancy when she appends The Blazing

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World to Philosophical Observations. For her, the fantastical world is real because it is filled with ideational substance—unlike the mathematical universe, with its slim, disembodied ideas. As already noted, the Empress tells her spider-men: ‘I do not think I should ever be able to understand your imaginary points, lines, and figures, because they are non-beings.’34 Unlike mathematical points, lines, and figures, the Empress (and Cavendish’s other characters, including the fictional ‘Duchess of Newcastle’, in the Blazing World) is a substantial ideational being: she actually exists as an embodied thought. And, because the fictional Empress is one of the Cavendish’s substantial ideas, she [the Empress] can have substantial ideas of her own. As the Duchess maintains in Philosophical and Political Opinions, ‘there is not any Motion, or Notion, Thought, Imagination, or Idea, but it is of a Corporeal Substance’.35 Cavendish’s materialist, but anti-mathematical emphasis on her own planetary home finds further expression in the Gemütlichkeit that she associates with Nature, whom she personifies as a highly accomplished, housewifely Lady (not unlike her mother, Elizabeth Lucas): ‘Nature being a wise and provident Lady governs her parts very wisely, methodically and orderly; also she is very industrious and hates to be idle, which makes her imploy her time as a good Huswif doth, in Brewing, Baking, Churning, Spinning, Sowing, &c.’ As Emma L. E. Rees observes, Cavendish frequently alludes to ‘the potency of the distaff as a domestic emblem with repercussions for the female writer’.36 Cavendish depicts ‘Great Nature’ as a nurturing housewife in ‘The Soul’s Raiment’. At death, Nature tenderly folds up the soul’s garments, ‘And lays them safe within an earthy chest’. In ‘Nature’s Cook’, Cavendish turns Death into Lady Nature’s domestic servant. ‘Death’, she writes, ‘is the Cook of Nature.’37 As I have argued, Cavendish’s ideas about natural philosophy are not easily separated from her experiences of the English Revolution. Although her emphasis changes from, in her earlier writings, the natural primacy of civil war, to, in her later writings, Nature’s pacific, restorative powers, Cavendish’s enquiries into natural philosophy consistently line up in highly suggestive ways with the evolution of her struggle to come to terms with the Civil War and Restoration. From her early atomism and mechanism to her later vitalism, and in the steadfast commitment to plenism that she maintains throughout her philosophical career, Cavendish not only finds a remedial perspective on personal and political loss, but she ultimately also discovers the consoling actuality of natural renewal.

NOTES 1. Cavendish, A True Relation of my Birth and Breeding, and Life, in Natures Pictures, 374. 2. Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind; Rees, Margaret Cavendish. 3. Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters, 240–1 (Letter CXX); Cavendish, Natures Pictures, 91–2; Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters, 239 (Letter CXIX). 4. As Battigelli notes, Cavendish ‘insists that God is unknowable and [she] articulates religious doubts’, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, 54–5. 5. Cavendish, ‘A Condemning Treatise of Atomes’, in Philosophical and Physical Opinions. John Rogers argues that Cavendish’s philosophical conversion from mechanism to

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6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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vitalism is precipitated by her recognition of ‘the masculine bias of the new materialism’. Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 186. Cavendish, Observations on Philosophical Opinions, 10. On the question of dating the year of Cavendish’s birth, see Battigelli, Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, appendix A: ‘Problems in the Dating of Margaret Cavendish’s Birth’. Cavendish, Natures Pictures, 370–1. Most probably, Cavendish learned about Gassendi’s atomic theories from Walter Charleton, physician to Charles I and the Duchess’s close friend; Charleton translated her Life of William Cavendish into Latin in 1668. Charleton’s Physiologia Epicuro-GassendoCharltoniana, or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms (1654) played a crucial role in transmitting Epicurean ideas to England. See Kargon, Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton. Stephen Clucas argues that Gassendi’s importance to the Cavendish circle is overstated and that the Duchess’s atomic theories differ significantly from those of Gassendi. Clucas, ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle’. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 16, 45. Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters, 241 (Letter CXX). Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters’, 226. Cavendish, Observations on Experimental Philosophy, 9, 8, 10. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. C2r. On Habermas, Cavendish, and the early modern public sphere see Norbrook, ‘Women, the Republic of Letters’. For a fascinating study of Cavendish and other early modern women writers as political subjects, see Suzuki, Subordinate Subjects. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, sig. C2r–v. Lucretius, De rerum natura, trans. Rouse. References are to this volume and are noted in the text. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 8. Oldenburg, The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. Hall and Boas-Hall, iii. 102; cited in Shapin, A Social History of Truth, ch. 4. Samuel Pepys describes Cavendish’s visit to the Royal Society in the 30 May 1667 entry of his Diary, viii. 243. I rely here on Jesseph, Squaring the Circle, esp. chs. 2 and 3. B. J. Sokol discusses Cavendish’s mathematical poems in ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies’. Cavendish, The Description of a New World, 55–6; Wing 1509:10; Cavendish, The World’s Olio, 130. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 47–8. Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Molesworth, vii. 201. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 4. Cavendish, CCXI Sociable Letters, 177 (Letter XC). Cavendish, The Life of the Thrice Noble and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe, 92. Rogers brilliantly relates this passage from Observations, sig. h2, to Cavendish’s idea of motion: ‘Cavendishean motion depends on a spatialized image of an entire social organization’, in Rogers, The Matter of Revolution, 192–3. Cavendish, Philosophical Letters, 411, 163. Cavendish, Observations on Experimental Philosophy, 39. Walters, ‘Gender Inversion in the Science’, 13.32.

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33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

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Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish, 39. Cavendish, The Blazing World, 55. Cavendish, Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 86. Rees, Margaret Cavendish, 114. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 127.

WORKS CITED Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998. Cavendish, Margaret. Poems and Fancies. London, 1653. ——. Philosophical and Physical Opinions. London, 1655. ——. The World’s Olio. London, 1655. ——. Natures Pictures Drawn by Fancies Pencil to the Life. London, 1656. ——. A True Relation of My Birth and Breeding, and Life, in Natures Pictures. London, 1656. ——. Observations on Philosophical Opinions. London, 1663. ——. CCXI Sociable Letters. London, 1664. ——. Philosophical Letters. London, 1664. ——. The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World. London: 1666. ——. Observations on Experimental Philosophy. London, 1666. ——. The Life of the Thrice Noble and Puissant Prince William Cavendishe. London, 1667. ——. De vita et rebus gestis nobilissimi illustrissimique Principis Guilielmi Ducis NovoCastrensis, commentarii, trans. Walter Charleton. London, 1668. Charleton, Walter. Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charltoniana, or a Fabrick of Science Natural, upon the Hypothesis of Atoms. London, 1654. Clucas, Stephen. ‘The Atomism of the Cavendish Circle: A Reappraisal’. Seventeenth Century 9.2 (1994), 247–73. Hobbes, Thomas. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, now First Collected and Edited by Sir William Molesworth, ed. William Molesworth. London: J. Bohn, 1839–45. Jesseph, Douglas M. Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Kargon, Robert H. Atomism in England from Harriot to Newton. Oxford: Clarendon, 1966. Lucretius. De rerum natura, trans. W. H. D. Rouse. Repr. Cambridge, MA: Loeb Classical Library-Harvard University Press, 1992. Norbrook, David. ‘Women, the Republic of Letters, and the Public Sphere in the Mid-Seventeenth-Century’. Criticism 46.2 (2004), 223–40. Oldenburg, Henry. The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas-Hall. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; London: Taylor & Francis, 1965–86. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews. 11 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970–. Rees, Emma L. E. Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Genre, Exile. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Rogers, John. The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Sarasohn, Lisa T. The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific Revolution. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

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Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Sokol, B. J. ‘Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies and Thomas Harriot’s Treatise on Infinity’, in Stephen Clucas (ed.), A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003, 156–70. Suzuki, Mihoko. Subordinate Subjects: Gender, the Political Nation, and Literary Form, 1588– 1688. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Walters, Lisa. ‘Gender Inversion in the Science of Margaret Cavendish’. Early Modern Literary Studies Special Issue (2004). Online: .

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FAMILY AND COMMONWEALTH IN THE WRITINGS OF LUCY HUTCHINSON ....................................................................................................... SHANNON MILLER

Lucy Hutchinson is one of the most remarkable writers—male or female—writing during the English Revolution as well as writing on the event itself. Producing works in almost every genre, her corpus includes the well-known historical account of her husband’s activities, The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, a fragmentary autobiography, a theological tract Principles of Religion written to her daughter, as well as a translation of John Owen’s Theologoumena Pantodapa (‘Of Theologie’). Hutchinson’s other works include a translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a twenty-canto biblical epic Order and Disorder: or, the World Made and Undone. Being Meditations upon the Creation and Fall (OD), elegies, and a commonplace book co-authored with her husband John. Theology, biblical epic, classical epic, lyric, and history: this range of writings makes it difficult to provide a unifying argument about her goals within her many writing endeavours.1 But her three major works—Order and Disorder, the translation of De rerum natura, and the Memoirs—show Hutchinson grappling with the very origins of existence, providing classical, Christian, and even political accounts of creation and destruction. In all three works, she is drawn to (in the case of her translation) or draws out of biblical and historical narratives the place of women within accounts of political organization. In Lucretius’ De rerum natura, Hutchinson considers biological accounts of creation while highlighting women’s significance within the construction of civic organization. This both characterizes her own biblical epic and shapes her telling of the English Civil War and restoration of Charles II. What these three major works offer, then, is a Lucy Hutchison quite different from a subservient

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wife accepting secondary status, an identity that emerged in the nineteenth century with the publication of the Memoirs. Her sustained engagement of politics and of the debates within contemporaneous political theory challenges this domestic identity. Instead, Hutchinson’s work seems in sustained conversation with the political conflicts and climate of her day as she theorizes the role that women play within these events and debates. Chronologically, Lucy Hutchinson’s translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura is her earliest major work, composed during the 1640s and 1650s. It is also the text of Hutchinson’s most contemporary with the English Revolution. Despite the importance of this text in understanding Hutchinson’s body of work, its identity as a translation combined with Hutchinson’s own description of the project poses problems for modern critics. Nonetheless, the length, complexity, and significance of the original Lucretius poem, including its being the first English translation of De rerum natura, make this a cornerstone of Hutchinson’s opus. Admittedly, Hutchinson’s disavowal of the project in her 1675 letter sent to the Earl of Anglesey poses a problem for integrating the text into her oeuvre; she writes that ‘youthfull curiositie, to vnderstand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, and without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernitious doctrines in it’ prompted her translation (2v– 3r). Critics such as Reid Barbour, Jonathan Goldberg, and David Norbrook have mulled over Hutchinson’s choice of this text in the 1640s, and her subsequent—if still ambivalent—retreat from her labours. For David Norbrook, De rerum natura was a humanist project to which Hutchinson was generally committed (OD). Barbour considers the Epicurean philosophy expressed in this text as offering to a parliamentarian supporter a response to the Civil Wars’ disruption. As Epicurean philosophy, as well as Lucretius, became associated with Restoration figures such as Rochester, this argument goes, Hutchinson would have had to distance herself from the project. Yet in her statement in the Anglesey letter, Hutchinson explicitly conflates issues of her faith with timely issues of political organization. She does remark in this passage on the atheistic aspects of Lucretius, but she links it to contemporary debates over the justification for government. About the poem’s ‘Atheisme’, she notes that ‘vast is their number, who . . . thinke religion is nothing at all but an invention to reduce the ignorant vulgar into order & Government’ (4v). In describing those who use religion to propel individuals into a political system, Hutchinson appears to critique Hobbes’s views in Leviathan. Her letter previews what emerges in the text: an early meditation on the formation of government and the place of women within that process. The contractarian thinking that underscores republican theories of government—theories on which both Hobbes and Locke publish in the second half of the seventeenth century—consequently emerges within Hutchinson’s translation. Book V of De rerum natura records this language of contractual government in two significant passages. A state of nature, possibly even war, is described in the world not as yet organized into governmental units:

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~ They did not then in Comonwealths vnite, Nor had regard to any law or right. What pray chance offerd frely, each enioyd, Their liues strengths to their owne vse employd. (V.1000–3)

The unification of human civilization occurs following the ‘mollification’ of men as accomplished by marriage. It is when: Weomen by marriage to one husband bound, Mortalls, in wedlock, chast delights possest Their pure ioyes with peculiar issue blest. Mankind begun then to be mollified Whose tender bodies could no more abide, Weakned with lust, th ayres open violence, Wherefore they found out fires for their defence Against the cold (V.1053–60)

From this ‘mollifying’ of men, a function of the civilizing nature of women, people will no longer ‘abide . . . open violence’. The result is the formation of civil units: Then begun friendships in each neighbourhood By compacts, which did violence exclude . . . Yett all men were not in such concords ioynd, Allthough the most and best part did embrace Pure leagues, which haue, till now, preserud their race Or elce mankind had perished long since. (V. 1062–3, 67–70)

The transition from the state of nature, or even war, is accomplished by ‘compacts’ and ‘concords’, agreements that combine the elements of a treaty with that of harmony. Here, the move into political societies—though not all participate—is credited with ‘preserving’ the human race.2 While the formation of civil society may have been a draw for Hutchinson, her own translation addresses the different forms of government that were much debated in the English Revolution. In Lucretius’ poem, ‘commune bonum’, or ‘common good’, is the ~ state into which humans unite.3 Hutchinson’s choice of ‘Comonwealth’ consequently designates a certain kind of government, set in opposition to monarchy and, of course, the name given to the Protectorate government under Oliver Cromwell.4 While the Latin ‘mollescere’ emphasizes the softening of men, her choice of men’s ‘mollification’ stresses reduction of severity or pacification through marriage. Contemporary translations underscore Hutchinson’s highlighting of the importance of women and marriage in this process, as well as her particularly republican slant. Thomas Creech’s translation, published at the end of the seventeenth century, describes ‘mollification’ as ‘When One to One confin’d in chast Embrace’ (171). Consequently, he elides the centrality of marriage and women in the process depicted by Hutchinson: while ‘Weoman’ is the subject of the line in Hutchinson and the Latin, Creech obscures its significance.

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~ Equally important is Hutchinson’s use of ‘Comonwealth’ and its relationship to familial and civil organization. Lucretius describes a situation in which these ‘compacts’ (Hutchinson) or ‘Leagues, and Bonds’ (Creech) will extend to defend women and children, in Creech’s translation ‘Defensless Infants, and the Women too’. In Hutchinson, only ‘Weake boyes and girles’ (1064) need protection. Women are linked to the ‘Commonwealth’, to ‘leagues’ and ‘friendship’ through their ability to ‘soften’ men to civil society, but they are distanced from the weak members of the society, children or infants. In Hutchinson, then, women are agents in the formation of civil society. They are active members of the unit—marriage—upon which civil society is built. Yet marriage too is surrounded by the dissolution that will mark the conclusion of De rerum natura: the poem is an account of creation and destruction, which Canto VI describes. But creation in Lucretius is a predominately female activity.5 Lucretius’ universe lacks a ‘first eternal Cause’, as Hutchinson will describe the Christian God in Order and Disorder. Rather, Lucretius depicts a mechanistic universe powered by female-gendered procreative power. As in many other passages within De rerum natura, reference to ‘th’earths fruitfull womb, who hence ye name | Of the greate mother gaind’ is repeated (V.833–4), ‘the human female’s reproductive life cycle provid [ing] a model for Lucretius’ understanding of the earth’s fertility’ (Nugent, ‘Mater Matters’, 185).6 When Hutchinson later turns to her own poem on creation, she distances herself from atheistic Epicurean mechanistic philosophy that necessarily displaces the control of a (Christian male) God over the universe. Yet while Hutchinson would have rejected the ‘ex niliho’ elements in Lucretius’ poem and Epicurean philosophy, the emphasis within De rerum natura on maternal power influences her future writings. Lucretius’ Book V, in which a wealth of references to female generation combines with accounts of the creation of civil society, becomes a significant influence on Hutchinson. The constellation of women, reproduction, and the formation of civil ‘leagues’ will be repeated in her own biblical epic. Instead of focusing on the ways in which Hutchinson is distancing herself from De rerum natura, then, I will suggest that certain constellations of ideas continue to resonate through her large oeuvre. Given the critical focus on Hutchinson’s refutation of De rerum natura, little attention has been paid to the themes of making and unmaking that link the earlier work with her Order and Disorder, subtitled ‘the World Made and Undone’.7 The making of the world at the centre of Lucretius’ poem is repeated in the Christianized and—in Hutchinson’s own works—redemptive opening two cantos of Order and Disorder: she ‘tak[es] occasion to vindicate my self from those heathenish authors I have been conversant in’ (4) in the 1679 preface to the first five published cantos. Her ‘Meditations upon the Creation and the Fall’ consequently produce a much more constrained Creation and Fall story than in Paradise Lost.8 Yet unmaking is also a major aspect of Order and Disorder, and one sustaining a thematic connection to the Lucretius poem: the destruction of the world is violently rendered in De rerum natura and fascinatingly conveyed in Hutchinson’s rendering of the Flood’s power in Canto VII, and then the world’s rebirth in Canto VIII.

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Yet the theme of governmental organization, specifically the establishing of civil society and the role of wives in this process, extends through this unfinished twentycanto biblical epic. The publication of the first five cantos in 1679, at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, associates the poem with current political issues, though the poem was probably begun earlier, after John Hutchinson’s post-Restoration imprisonment.9 The Exclusion Crisis prompted a flurry of royalist tracts, including Robert Filmer’s Collected Works, to be followed by his posthumous Patriarcha the next year. Filmer’s return to the garden narrative to argue for monarchy is also a narrative about the exclusion of women and wives from the formation of civil government. In Hutchinson’s account of the Creation, the Fall, and subsequent familial organization, the relationship between wives and civil society becomes a core aspect of this biblical poem. Order and Disorder ultimately gestures back both to the language of generative femininity and the relationship between wives, mothers, and political society embedded into Book V of De rerum natura. Hutchinson establishes within her account of Adam and Eve’s creation a crucial matrix of maternity, marriage, and political authority that counters royalist uses of Genesis such as Filmer’s. Initially, Hutchinson presents Order and Disorder as her rehabilitation for translating Lucretius’s atheistic text a decade earlier, a process initially observable in her elevation of God’s creative power, rather than the female creative force of Nature within De rerum natura. In language that contrasts sharply with the imagery Hutchinson translates in Lucretius’ poem, images of birth and creation in the first canto of Order and Disorder highlight the ungendered use of words such as ‘birth’ and ‘womb’: ‘Time had its birth, | In whose Beginning God made Heaven and Earth’; ‘Thus leading back all ages to the womb | Of vast Eternity from whence they come, | And bringing new successions forth until | Heaven its last revolutions shall fulfil, | And all things unto their first state restore’ (43; 163–7; my emphasis). As Order and Disorder extends the creation to the earth itself, the conventional gendering of the Earth emerges, as ‘the thirsty earth’ receives God’s ‘refreshing showers’ that ‘clothes her bosom’, becoming a ‘teeming earth’, while creatures ‘on her bosom creep’ (II. 47–8, 327, 329). Yet throughout, and marking her distancing from Lucretius’ account of creation, the ‘Word’ of God rather than an active earth takes over the procreative role. This active nature, gendered female in Lucretius’ poem, becomes properly tamed within Order and Disorder. Yet the poem will turn from this conservative portrait of God’s creation to a politically significant rendering of Adam and Eve’s creation and marriage in Canto III. Establishing a connection between Eve’s maternity and the politically resonant language of ‘dominion’, Hutchinson articulates a joint role for husband and wife that contrasts with patriarchal support for monarchy. Hutchinson’s creation account combines the first and the second book of Genesis such that Adam and Eve receive God’s commands together: God ‘give[s] you right to all her fruits and plants, | Dominion over her inhabitants . . . Are all made subject under your command’ (III.421–2, 426). Adam and Eve are thus given dominion as part of their union in marriage, a mutuality stressed within the language of the marriage ceremony: ‘We, late of one made two, again in one | Shall reunite’ (III.406–7). Adam and Eve’s unification as ‘one’ occurs as

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they receive dominion, when Adam, announces this ‘marriage’ in which ‘male and female doth combine’ (III.415). This joint dominion is further affirmed in Hutchinson’s alignment of the act of marriage with that of reproduction. In perhaps Hutchinson’s most significant revision of traditional commentaries on marriage, the language of union, which is the marriage ceremony from Genesis 2, is combined with the command to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ in Genesis 1: . . . as unto thee, Ravished with love and joy, my soul doth cleave, So men hereafter shall their fathers leave, And all relations else which are most dear, That they may only to their wives adhere; When marriage male and female doth combine, Children in one flesh shall two parents join. (III.410–16)

The primacy of marriage in this sequence is fused with the emphasis on generation, an interpretation of the language of ‘one flesh’ that distinguishes Hutchinson’s account from standard biblical commentary. The imagery of ‘one flesh’ is conventionally interpreted only as the act of marriage. Hutchinson’s reference to Matthew 19: 5–6 in the margin underscores her revision of the biblical text in order to stress the act of reproduction. In Matthew 19: 5–6 (New King James Version), the act of marriage is described as follows: And [Jesus] said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.

The Matthew citation gives us the language of the marriage ceremony, but it does not allude to the children who, in Hutchinson’s account, become the ‘one flesh’ that ‘combines’ man and woman in reproduction. Furthermore, none of the biblical references she provides in the margin utilizes the ‘one flesh’ phrase to describe the production of children; her gesture to Genesis, Matthew, and Ephesians in the margin only confirms Hutchinson’s unique application of the phrase. While Hutchinson makes explicit the metaphor embedded in ‘one flesh’, the consequence is to make the production of children—and thus the act of reproduction—much more central at this moment in her poem. Adam and Eve, in Hutchinson’s account, are thus described in a union that allows both of them access to ‘dominion’ through their act of reproduction. Since the passage that immediately follows offers ‘dominion’ to the mother and father—Adam and Eve—Hutchinson’s portrait of the first union of man and woman suggests how fully maternal power and dominion are linked. The mutuality gestured at within the marriage contract between Adam and Eve is thus consolidated by the language of generative authority as the ‘one flesh’ of the child joins the ‘two parents’ in their

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authority over the world. I am suggesting, then, that the figure of the mother in Hutchinson’s account is given greater consequence within marriage because of the intersection between the reproductive act, joint dominion as provided by God, and the resonances to the marriage contract between man and wife. The result is a form of female authority linked to maternal production. This greater emphasis on Eve’s involvement in reproduction and control is reinforced by an account of a marriage that invokes the mutual consent of a contracted union. As we will see, the possibility of greater participation in the contracted union becomes embedded in the role of mother and wife in Order and Disorder. Given the cultural and political significance of the act of marriage in the period, Hutchinson here speaks directly to contemporary issues of political and gender hierarchy. As with most debates over marriage in the period, a discussion about the organization of the family was simultaneously a discussion about state organization; the family–state analogy that lay at the base of patriarchal theory ensured that the status of marriage could not be extricated from political debates about the relationship between a monarch and his people.10 Hutchinson’s treatment of the marriage ceremony in Order and Disorder illustrates her engagement with the complicated question of contractual relationships within the emerging social contract between citizen and state. Furthermore, Hutchinson’s linking of a more mutual act of contracting marriage with an award of dominion and a complementary emphasis on generation offers a vision of the family unit at the moment of creation. Her rewriting of the language of dominion, its relationship to gender, and the location of control within the structure of the family shows her explicit engagement with the issue of contract in seventeenth-century political theory that had, in large part, propelled the English Revolution. This theoretical debate would rage before, during, and after the Civil Wars, as these thinkers debated the very underpinnings of political organization of England. As a staunch parliamentarian, Lucy Hutchinson would unquestionably have been familiar with the terms of the debate between contract and patriarchal theorists, much as we see her invoke this debate in the earlier De rerum natura. Lucy Hutchinson’s republican leanings are thus clearly identifiable in her modifications to the creation narrative. The consequence is a profound counter to the standardbearer of patriarchalist thought, Robert Filmer. While Filmer’s Patriarcha would not be published until 1680, his other collected writings were published in 1679, the same year that the first five cantos of Order and Disorder are published. Within Filmerian thought, the awarding of ‘dominion’ to Adam, and to Adam alone, in the garden was necessary to transform God’s grant into the bedrock of monarchical authority. If Hutchinson’s account of the awarding of dominion challenges Adam’s singular award of this power, it simultaneously undercuts the theory of inherited monarchical power; if Hutchinson counters Adam’s identity as a monarch through this award, she challenges—through competing narratives of Genesis—Filmer’s subsequent continuation of political obligation. Hutchinson’s integrating of women into this award of dominion is thus a highly political move, a republican rejection of an innate, biblically justified theory of monarchy. Accomplished first through the mutual award of

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‘dominion’ to father and mother, Hutchinson reintroduces ‘honour thy mother’ into debates about monarchical authority that depended on the elision of the fifth commandment to justify the analogy between father and king. In the account of the birth of Adam and Eve’s children and then in subsequent accounts of biblical families and their generation in unpublished cantos of Order and Disorder, Hutchinson links women to the formation of civil society or ‘Commonwealth’ earlier explored within De rerum natura, showing the political line of thought that unites her earlier translation and her biblical epic. Hutchinson’s rejection of the grounds of patriarchal theory—particularly the elision of mothers within Filmer’s discussion of authority—determines the account of Cain and Abel’s birth. Canto VI of Order and Disorder consequently becomes ground zero for the biological and political implications of generation. As Hutchinson’s text will detail, Adam’s position as father requires the body of the mother to make him such. The ground upon which all of patriarchal theory depends—Adam’s singular identity as and power as parent—is renarrated by Hutchinson, her Genesis account now insisting on inserting the biological mother into the narrative. In Canto VI, Hutchinson will revise the biblical text in order to highlight the role of the mother. In this sequence, Adam will become a father, making this a significant political moment in a theory of paternal and monarchical authority: once Adam is a father, for example, Filmer can apply his theory of awarded dominion. Since according to Filmer the ‘subjection of children is the only fountain of all regal authority’ (12), monarchy is actually set into motion once Adam’s children are born. Yet at this moment in the garden narrative, Hutchinson makes Eve’s body the productive site of the story. Eve asserts possession over her and Adam’s ‘fruit’ recalling the joint ‘dominion’ offered to them: ‘Then brought she forth; and Cain she called his son, | ‘For God’, said she, ‘gives us possession’ (VI. 25–6; my emphasis). Eve remembers the marriage ceremony well. In reproduction, the process through which ‘Children in one flesh shall two parents join’ (III. 416), man and woman are fused into one, and that unity offers them both ‘Dominion over her inhabitants’ (III. 422). At the very moment that Adam is made a ‘father’, and consequently becomes able to claim monarchical authority in patriarchal theory, Hutchinson’s Eve insists that children owe obligation to both father and mother. Eve’s maternal claim to a form of dominion over the child is reinforced by her naming of both Cain and Abel: ‘and Cain she called his son’; ‘Abel she called the next’ (VI.25; 29). Naming is traditionally acknowledged as a form of power within the Genesis story: Adam’s naming of the animals enacts his ‘dominion’ over them. Thus, Eve’s act of naming indicates a form of her authority over children. Hutchinson’s rearrangement, and creation, of these details offers a parallel parental form of authority granted to Adam and to Eve, one that reinforces Hutchinson’s version of the marriage scene. Throughout Order and Disorder, children provide new power for the mother, hence joining the two parents in a more mutual union characterized as ‘one flesh’. The language of maternal generation becomes significantly highlighted once figures of

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female production, such as Sarah, are at the centre of Hutchinson’s narrative. The consequence of Hutchinson’s emphasis on a maternal claim to children—while it does not undercut God’s greater power of creation—politicizes her representation of biblical families in light of debates within seventeenth-century political theory. This occurs within a range of examples throughout the text where women are positioned as in possession of their children, illustrating through the language of shared ‘dominion’ the importance of wives and mothers in the continuance of the line. We can hear such language in the Lucretius translation as ‘Woemen’ ‘preservd their race | Or elce mankind had perished long since’ (V.1053, 1069–70). This becomes particularly notable in the language describing the birth of children in Order and Disorder, such as here with the account of Sarah: ‘To comfort their disgrace, now Sarah’s womb | Grew pregnant with that promised fruit in whom | A blessing was designed for the whole earth, | And the ninth moon disclosed the joyful birth’ (XIV.253–6). Sarah does not bear a son for Abraham; they together share in the joyful birth, a modification that Hutchinson’s use of a collective pronoun illustrates. Canto XIV provides us with this unified vision of Sarah and Abraham, one that recalls the marriage sequence of Adam and Eve and the language of producing children: ‘they call their son’ Isaac since his ‘name implies | Their gladness’ (XIV.257–8; my emphasis). Sarah bears them a son, not Abraham, and this change is reflected in language offering Sarah continued, even individualized, possession over her son: God states that ‘I will thy Sarah bless | And her son shall the promised land possess, | And mighty nations out of her shall grow. | Upon her nephews I will thrones bestow, | My covenant establish with her seed’ (XII.179–83; my emphasis). God then reiterates that ‘Sarah’s [sons] shall my covenant retain’ (XII.188). Hutchinson’s modifications to biblical language suggest that mothers maintain possession of and over their children, one which they share, but do not have to concede to, their husbands or masters. These revisions by Hutchinson prepare, in the final few cantos, for the production of a more maternally identified line. While patriarchy is hardly overturned in Order and Disorder, the language in the poem suggests how Hutchinson is simultaneously highlighting maternal possession and connection: the children of Rebecca and Jacob are directed in Genesis to lands or women identified through the paternal line. Yet in Hutchinson, these are translated into maternally affiliated lines of association. When Jacob is directed by Isaac ‘to thy mother’s native country go’ (XVIII.229), Hutchinson stresses that the line is derived through Rebecca, while the Bible established the line through her father: ‘go to Padam Aram, to the house of Bethuel your mother’s father, and take yourself a wife from there of the daughters of Laban your mother’s brother’ (28: 2). In the biblical language, Rebecca’s maternal heritage is defined through male relatives, a situation repeated in the directions given to Esau to get a wife. While my claim is not that Hutchinson insists on some singularly female identification of family line, she consistently realigns accounts of familial production to reintroduce the mother. These maternal figures do not produce children for male patriarchs, but are instead a generative force that produces a matrilineal line, or produces in concert with the husband/father.

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Hutchinson explores what extending dominion to mothers, and not only to men, does to the narrative of Genesis. Hutchinson’s presentation of the maternal, then, has consistently political implications throughout Order and Disorder. Significantly, she chooses to expand the stories, emotions, and conflicts of mothers in those portions of the biblical narrative where governmental organization—represented in positive terms—is originating and spreading. The productive female body is stressed throughout the latter third of Order and Disorder, as in the description of Rebecca: Hutchinson details extensively ‘Her pregnant womb’, the quickening, and the painful experience of pregnancy. And these wives’ birthing experiences are being highlighted at the moment in the text when expansion of their families and tribes is occurring. As Abraham becomes ‘great in wealth and power’ (XV.1), we observe the expansion of this familialbased form of the ‘Commonwealth’ and, with it, a greater emphasis on the maternal line and the identification of the mother as a powerful figure. David Norbrook has noted the explicitly republican treatment of both Noah and Nimrod within Order and Disorder.11 But the republican nature of Hutchinson’s response is only half of the significance of her manner of engaging, and rejecting, the main tenets of patriarchal theory. Her engagements with patriarchal thought are fought out through the presence or absence of the maternal figure. At points in the poem when women’s bodies have entirely disappeared from the narrative, she offers accounts of the dangers of an entirely male-determined line of authority. Thus, the presence of the maternal that characterizes her accounts of Abraham and his offspring confirms his appropriate acquisition of ‘wealth and power’ (XV.1) and the corresponding expansion of governmental authority. Abraham is not represented as the drunken patriarch, embodying monarchical power. And his interactions with other kingdoms are described in the resonant language of ‘consent’ and ‘covenant’. While the account of Nimrod is marked, and marred, by the anti-parliamentarian assumption of ‘the regal title first’, he further ‘subject[s]’ his neighbours (X.10, 12). Abraham instead ‘contracts | a league with [Gerar], that not by hostile acts | Nor secret practices each should invade | The other’s right, and that this covenant, made | By them, their next successors should include, | And to their generations be renewed’ (XV.7–12). In an event that establishes long-term peace through the ‘contract’, aspects of a commonwealth emerge along with political stability, the very language we saw in De rerum natura. Given this reading of Order and Disorder, the representation of the English Civil Wars in Hutchinson’s Memoirs would seem to diverge from her fusion of maternal and wifely authority in the poem. The Memoirs, which existed only in manuscript until published by Julius Hutchinson in 1806, chronicles her husband’s activities during and after the Civil Wars, including his signing of Charles’s death warrant and his imprisonment during the Restoration for his republican activities.12 Certainly there are themes that unify Hutchinson’s three major works: Order and Disorder, in its account of the loss of Eden, shares the elegiac narrative that shapes the account of her husband’s ~ death and that of the ‘Comonwealth’ itself at the Restoration. Yet the Memoirs is also the most explicitly political text that Hutchison wrote, as much an account of the political machinations leading up to the execution of King Charles I and occurring after

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the restoration of Charles II. While most of the text recounts events in Nottinghamshire during the war, the final segment of the Memoirs turns to hagiography as John Hutchinson is arrested and ultimately dies in prison. But its overt political engagement with the reasons for and events in the war does not mean that the political implications of a ‘mutual’ marriage disappear in Hutchinson’s prose works. In a construction repeated in both the Memoirs, ‘The Life of Mrs. Lucy Hutchinson, Written by Herself: A Fragment’ locates mothers and fathers within a genealogical narrative that values the two lines of the family equally: My father was Sir Allen Apsley, lieutenant of the Tower of London; my mother, his third wife, was Lucy, the youngest daughter of Sir John St John, of Lidyard Tregooze, in Wiltshire, by his second wife. (4).

Integrating the two lines of family—mother and father; husband and wife—within a single sentence stresses the mutual production of children. These two, equally significant, family lines are likewise stressed in the opening sentence to The Memoirs: He was the eldest surviving son of Sir Thomas Hutchinson, and the Lady Margaret, his first wife, one of the daughters of Sir John Biron, of Newstead, in the same county, two persons so eminently virtuous and pious in their generations, that to descend from them was to set up in the world upon a good stock of honour, which obliged their posterity to improve it, as much as it was their privilege to inherit their parents’ glories. (31)

The ‘two persons’ of mother and father from whom ‘descend’ ‘a good stock of honour’ recalls the mutuality of husband and wife within Order and Disorder, as children ‘inherit their parents’ glories’ (31). Despite this generative focus in its opening moments, the Memoirs is filled with accounts of problematic marriages. Critics have consistently noted its negative representations of wives, especially Henrietta Maria and even Lady Fairfax, wife of the parliamentary Lord General. Meanwhile, Lucy Hutchinson represents herself, as N. H. Keeble has argued convincingly, as a ‘shadow’, speaking of herself in the second person through most of the narrative with the seeming effect of diminishing a wife’s power.13 The fallen world of history might explain an equivalently fallen portrait of marriage. As Robert Mayer has commented, the Memoirs illustrate an ‘Experience of Defeat’, common amongst republicans after the failure of the Commonwealth (322). The political implications of this loss are fully interwoven with a profound sense of personal loss, narrated through the Memoirs and imagistically rendered in Hutchinson’s elegies. The marital unit, of course, has been dissolved for Lucy Hutchinson, prompting her need to narrate her role—and her relationship to any political identity—without her husband. Yet Lucy Hutchinson’s response to political failure illustrates individual families functioning as integral aspects of state organization—even when presented in negative terms. Corrupt families, most notably Henrietta Maria’s seducing role as destructive wife to Charles 1 but also Lady Fairfax’s power over her husband, register the failure of the state through problematic marriages. But the marriage of the Hutchinsons—as in the language of mutuality that marks Lucy’s account of their

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genealogies—is set in direct contrast to these other ‘state’ marriages. While Lady Fairfax misleads her husband through her Presbyterian beliefs, in the very next segment Lucy Hutchinson sees the light on infant baptism. Hutchinson, in distinction to Lady Fairfax, then leads her husband to challenge paedobaptism and later to expose and expel a corrupting minister. Properly functioning families are thus compared to corrupted ones, just as differing modes of governing are contrasted. Men such as Charles and Lord Fairfax made bad decisions based on the recommendations of their wives, prompting the Civil War and Fairfax’s retirement that results in Oliver Cromwell’s growing military and political power. While the Commonwealth is ineffectively run by Cromwell, John Hutchinson will illustrate effective, if more ‘private’, governance of his house, grounds, lands, and the immediate area surrounding Owthorpe. Returning to his own property after Cromwell’s dissolution of the Parliament in the mid-1650s, Hutchinson becomes the leader of a small, one might even say family-centred, commonwealth. He ‘applied himself . . . to the administration of justice in the country, and to putting in the execution of those wholesome laws and statutes of the land provided for the orderly regulation of the people’ (253). These sequences underscore the relationship between family order and forms of government. During the machinations that will lead to Charles II’s restoration to the throne, Hutchinson describes how some ‘hoped to pull down the army and the Protectorian faction, and then restore the old family’ (263). Her association of monarchy with ‘the old family’ is obviously a reference to the royal family but simultaneously equates political systems with familial organization. This phrase makes explicit the foundational relationship between family and governmental organization highlighted in her other major works. The invocation of the garden in the Memoirs will extend the connection between familial organization and an ideal commonwealth. Hutchinson’s Order and Disorder, telling a story about the formation of ‘commonwealths’, begins in the garden as do Filmer’s Patriarcha and John Locke’s First Treatise of Government: Genesis, for patriarchal and contractarian thinkers alike, is the ground of the debate over governmental organization. We see this connection explored in some of the least-commented-upon segments of the Memoirs. In the first of his retirements into a garden space, Hutchinson ‘reformed several abuses and customary neglects in that part of the country’ which was ‘a rich fruitful vale’ (253). This account of good governance is contrasted with Cromwell’s increasingly corrupt government, just as John Hutchinson is an ideal figure within a world of corrupt men. For once home, John is praised for ‘the government of his own house and town which he performed so well that never was any man more feared and loved than he’ (255). Though ‘reduced into an absolute private condition’ (256), John Hutchinson’s ‘government’ is compared favourably to the larger, ‘public’ world of London and parliamentary conflicts. When Colonel Hutchinson ‘retires’ to Owthorpe, what appears a postlapsarian fall after the demise of the Republic and the exposure of a profoundly corrupt Parliament is transformed into grounds for the formation of good ‘government’, exerted over his home ‘in the county’ (255; 253). This return instead comes to invoke a pre-fallen state, one in which ‘he took up his time

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in opening springs and planting trees and dressing his plantations’ after the Restoration (292). Colonel Hutchinson, who ‘could not be idle’, prompted ‘honest labours’ among others while he ‘laboured to instruct his children and servants’ (292). Certainly this withdrawal from a corrupt court is a standard convention within Renaissance literature. Yet the connection between the reacquired garden space and the failed Commonwealth are repeated in a dream that Lucy Hutchinson recounts. After helping to direct a boat symbolizing the state, specifically ‘the commonwealth’, across the Thames, John Hutchinson will recover an Edenic-like space: ‘there, going out of the boat, [he] walked in the most pleasant lovely fields, so green and flourishing and so embellished with the cheerful sun that shone upon them, as he never saw anything so delightful’ (295). Lucy Hutchinson interprets this as the space in which John will walk after his patient and martyr-like sufferings end; she narratively locates this dream right before John’s arrest and imprisonment. Yet these associations between John Hutchinson’s labouring effectively in his garden and his energies to direct the Commonwealth make him a composite figure for Adam and Christ, while continuing to associate him with acts of political organization. In this fallen world, John will only be able to rediscover—as did Adam—that garden space after death. Yet at the loss of the Commonwealth, John Hutchinson and the narrative turns to this originary site of establishing personal and civil ‘compacts’. The historical events of the Civil Wars that constitute the bulk of the Memoirs, then, are reoriented to compensatory visions of retirement, either from the failed government or from this life. The effect on the ‘mutual’ marriage of John and Lucy Hutchinson is devastating, as she is transformed, after his death, into ‘an airy phantasm walking about his sepulchre and waiting for the harbinger of day to summon me out of these midnight shades to my desired rest’ (337). The continuity between these final portions of the Memoirs and Lucy Hutchinson’s elegies are obvious. These elegies, exploring the extent of her grief following John’s death, highlight the domestic or ‘private’ elements of Lucy’s writings. Yet as David Norbrook has astutely noted, ‘the personal and the political are never clearly separable for Lucy Hutchinson’ (‘Elegies’, 470). Just as the ‘private’ moments of retreat for John Hutchinson were also a comment on the political world from which he was forced to retire, Lucy interweaves garden references into a portion of her poems that continue to gesture to—from her perspective—the failed political events of the Restoration. As critics such as Norbrook, Pamela Hammons, and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann have noted, Lucy Hutchinson’s elegies abound in tropes of darkness, of ‘shadows’, and nature’s own act of mourning appropriate to the work of elegies. A dominant Neoplatonism also characterizes many of poems, and the gendered hierarchy embedded in the elevation of the spirit over the physical world recalls the seeming erasure of Lucy Hutchinson as wife with the Memoirs.14 Yet as in the Memoirs, the death of her husband and the ‘Good Old Cause’ are represented as a unified political and personal loss. Her second elegy, one of many to use the sun image, engages the long-standing association between the monarch and the sun to critique kingship and the events of the Restoration, including John Hutchinson’s death. ‘Thou Sawest O Thou alseeing

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Sun | The blood of Noble Patriots Shed | By Those Ingrates for whome They bled’ (6–8). The fate of her own husband and other parliamentarian supporters invoked in these lines, the ‘Sun’ then ‘guild[s] ye tyrants bloody Throne’ (16), as the past or present king is critiqued. In ‘On the Spring 1668’, ‘the restored world’ of Charles II’s England may ‘glad all other mortalls Sight’, but to Hutchinson it ‘Add[s] but more payne to my bleard Eies’, the sun of monarchy a ‘torturing light’ (4, 6–8). The fall of the Commonwealth and the personal fall of the Hutchinson family—‘Who Lies low falls no second time’ (48)—are combined through this invocation of natural, but also profoundly political, imagery. Hutchinson’s return to the garden imagery in two other elegies sustains the importance of this originary site for familial and governmental organization within her elegies. As Norbrook notes, in elegy 2A, Lucy Hutchinson takes on an Eve-like identity: If I cast back my sorrow drowned eyes I see our nere, to be reenterd paradice ye Flaming sword wch doth us thence exclude by sad remorce & ugly guilt persu’ed, if on my sinn defiled self I gaze (27–31)15

Norbrook argues that Hutchinson’s expression of guilt comes from her efforts to save her husband from arrest and imprisonment after the Restoration.16 Yet her private accounts of loss take on political overtones, as in Elegy 12’s description of ‘The trees about The Gardin Stand | Drooping for want of y:t kind hand | That Sett & Cherrisht y:m before’ (9–11). Lamenting the loss of her husband’s activities in the garden, Lucy will cast her loss in political terms as well: . . . Those glories were my [Crowne] His death hath throne my empire downe And better neuer to have bine Raysd high Then liue a fallen Queene (49–52)

The political losses of ‘fallen Queene’ Henrietta Maria parallel Hutchinson’s losses, effectively aligning Hutchinson’s ‘sin’ of encouraging her husband to escape imprisonment with the seductions of the former Queen. As the events of the Memoirs echo through the elegies, the importance of the marital unit, even in its corruption and loss, remain tantamount as in the first five cantos of Order and Disorder. It is possible that Hutchinson’s final work is On The Principles of the Christian Religion, Addressed to her Daughter, a theological tract that included a translation of John Owen’s Theologoumena Pantodapa. Her exploration of the principles of Christianity is an unapologetic account of her understanding of Scripture. Probably composed a number of years after John Hutchinson’s death, the tract invokes elements of mother’s advice books from the early seventeenth century. As mothers, she and her daughter are ‘to exercise your owne knowledge therein, by instructing your children and servants’ (7; B4). Yet the tract’s closest parallel is Milton’s On Christian Doctrine. Hutchinson ‘found the Lord to open my owne understanding and to warme my heart,

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while I have conscientiously labourd to comunicate the light he gave me’ (7; B4). Dispensing with concerns that such individual discovery of God’s light would contradict Paul’s ban on women’s preaching, Hutchinson appears to construct an identity for herself as a mother who must now operate without her husband, providing direction to her children and servants through her own religious inspiration. This may extend Pamela Hammons’s observation that in the elegies, Hutchinson begins to construct a ‘subtle and bold’ identity as an independent property owner, reforming the feme covert identity into her new role as a widow (‘Polluted Palaces’, 406). In the later Principles, which David Norbrook has tentatively dated around 1673, we see her extend the power of motherhood in keeping with the authority granted to Eve and subsequent mothers in Order and Disorder. After Lucy Hutchinson was discovered by a Victorian audience—in the 1806 Memoirs and the 1817 Principles—she was praised as a wife and mother for her ‘domestic virtue’.17 Critics over the last two decades have tended to follow this judgement, focusing their energies on more overtly ‘feminist’ writers of the seventeenth century such as Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn. Yet Hutchinson’s work, while ‘conservative’ in some aspects of its treatment of women in marriage, is nonetheless quite astonishing for its sustained engagement with the central political conflicts of the period. This is in no way meant to diminish the religious commitment of a figure like Lucy Hutchinson. While in conversation with political theory produced by both patriarchalist and contractarian thinkers, she was also in conversation with the Bible throughout her life and writings. Yet what emerges out of these startling and wideranging conversations is a writer exploring the religious, political, and social implications of a ‘mutual’ marriage in the mid-seventeenth century.

NOTES 1. Most articles on Hutchinson’s work focus on individual texts rather than synthetic readings of her work, in part a result of the recently identified Order and Disorder, the availability of her translation of De rerum natura in 1996, and the publication of her elegies in 1997. David Norbook’s general editorship of Hutchinson’s Complete Works (OUP) is likely to encourage more critical work on her as well as oeuvre-wide analyses. Robert Mayer’s ‘Lucy Hutchinson: A Life of Writing’ attempts to view her entire body of work with a particular focus on Hutchinson’s own development as a writer of history and her own awareness of the audience of her writing. 2. David Norbrook suggests that Lucretius’ own political identity might have appealed to Hutchinson (‘Republican Epic’, 45). 3. Translation from Loeb Classical Library edition. 4. This is not to suggest that Hutchinson was positive about Cromwell, about whom she is very critical in her narrative of the Civil War. 5. See S. Georgia Nugent on the ‘generative body’ as the dominant image used to portray the female body throughout the poem (‘Mater Matters’, 183).

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6. While this language does occur within the original Latin, Hutchinson’s translation often highlights metaphors of maternal production. 7. For a discussion of aspects of the ‘world-making’ at the centre of the poem, see Jonathan Goldberg’s ‘Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter’ (289). 8. For a comparison of Paradise Lost and Order and Disorder, see Miller, Engendering the Fall. 9. The majority of Order and Disorder exists in a manuscript that belonged to the Countess of Rochester. This manuscript notebook bears the date 1664, prompting David Norbrook to conjecture that the poem may have been begun around this time, but not necessarily completed by this date (OD, liv). 10. Rachel Weil’s Political Passions explores the role of family in both contractarian and patriarchist theory in the period. 11. OD, xl–xli. 12. On Lucy Hutchinson’s death, many of her papers, including the manuscript editions of the Memoirs, passed into the hands of her royalist family members. This helps to explain the much later publication date of her history of the Civil War. 13. Keeble convincingly argues that there are two Lucy Hutchinsons within the Memoirs, the figure of the wife, who is largely treated in the second person, and Lucy Hutchinson’s own construction of the argument, registered by the occasional ‘I’ that emerges at moments of specific agency on her part. 14. See Keeble, ‘The Colonel’s Shadow’. 15. Julius Hutchinson titled as ‘These verses transcribed out of my other Book’, and David Norbrook has labelled the poem ‘2A’ within his ELR article. 16. ‘Elegies’, 481. 17. Sarah Hale, ‘Lessons from Women’s Lives’, 50.

WORKS CITED Barbour, Reid. ‘Between Atoms and the Spirit: Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius’. Renaissance Papers (1994), 1–16. Creech, Thomas. Lucretius His Six Books of Epicurean Philosophy and Manilius his Five Books Containing a System of the Ancient Astronomy and Astrology. London, 1700. Goldberg, Jonathan. ‘Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter’. ELH 73.1 (2006), 275–301. Hale, Sarah J. Lessons from Women’s Lives. London: William P. Nimmo, 1877. Hammons, Pamela. ‘Polluted Palaces: Gender, Sexuality and Property in Lucy Hutchinson’s “Elegies” ’. Women’s Writing 13.3 (2006), 392–415. Hutchinson, Lucy. On the Principles of the Christian Religion. London, 1817. ——. Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. N. H. Keeble. London: J. M. Dent, 1995. ——. Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001. ——. The Works of Lucy Hutchinson, I. The Translation of Lucretius, ed. Reid Barbour and David Norbrook. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Keeble, N. H. ‘“The Colonel’s Shadow”: Lucy Hutchinson, Women’s Writing and the Civil War’, in Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 227–47. Mayer, Robert. ‘Lucy Hutchinson: A Life of Writing’. Seventeenth Century 22.2 (2007), 305–55.

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Miller, Shannon. Engendering the Fall: John Milton and Seventeenth-Century Women Writers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Norbrook, David. Introduction, in Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook. London: Blackwell, 2001 ——. ‘John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson and the Republican Biblical Epic’, in Mark Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross (eds.), Milton and the Grounds of Contention, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003, 37–63, 292–3. ——. ‘Lucy Hutchinson’s “Elegies” and the Situation of the Republican Woman Writer’. English Literary Renaissance 27.3 (1997), 468–521. Nugent, S. Georgia. ‘Mater Matters: The Female in Lucretius’ De rerum natura’. Colby Quarterly 30 (1994), 179–205. Weil, Rachel. Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

CHAPTER

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OF THE SPOILS WON IN BATTEL’ John Bunyan

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THE REVOLUTIONARY MOMENT1

.................................................................................................................. The English Revolution was (as far as this world goes) the making of the writer John Bunyan. Its energizing prospect of ‘a world turned upside down’2 by active Christian faith made authorship possible for a poorly educated provincial artisan for the first time in our literary history. No matter how talented, no previous Bedfordshire tinker, ‘of a low and inconsiderable generation’ from one of the ‘meanest, and most despised of all the families in the Land’ (Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, henceforth GA, } 2), would have been able to overcome the elitist cultural and social structures of early modern England to become the century’s bestselling writer.3 The success of The Pilgrim’s Progress was, of course, exceptional, but not Bunyan’s turning to print. Mustered in the New Model Army in November 1644 as he turned 16,4 he came to maturity in the midst of the outpouring of print through which were articulated the political and religious tensions of the first half of the century.5 The gathering momentum of the English Revolution generated an unprecedented increase in press activity which saw annual output rise from 625 titles in 1639 to over 3,666 in 1642, thereafter to continue at between 1,000 and 2,000 annually until the Restoration.6 The result was a ‘democritization’ of the press, a ‘downwards dissemination of print’,7 as radical Puritanism inspired in those such as Bunyan the confidence to access, and to participate in, a literary culture from which they had hitherto been excluded. Ministers and members of gathered churches, such as the Bedford open-communion Baptist church Bunyan joined in 1655, and of which from 1671 he would be pastor,8 as well as Levellers, Ranters, and Quakers, made repeated use of the press to disseminate

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their message, publishing broadsides, tracts, prophecies, personal testimonies, and sermons, as well as polemical and controversial pieces.9 In the second half of the century, Bunyan himself contributed nearly sixty separate titles. These were, in the words of Charles Doe, the editor of the 1692 folio edition of Bunyan’s works, ‘GospelBooks’, that is, didactic and edificatory works in the Puritan tradition.10 They included theological treatises, controversial divinity, biblical commentary, sermons and treatises developed from sermons, meditative works, and poetry. Neither Grace Abounding (1666) nor the later allegorical works were distinguished as a separate category: their intention is still to encourage readers to ‘make thy Profession shine by a Conversation [i.e. way of life] according to the Gospel’.11 These, like all Bunyan’s works, seek to transform lives.12 And to transform ordinary lives: Bunyan’s books anticipated common readers. In a population of some 3 million in 1500 and 5.5 million in 1700, full literacy (that is, the ability both to read and to write) was possessed by perhaps 15 per cent of the population at the start of this period, and no more than 30 per cent at its close.13 Puritan writers saw it as one of their tasks to increase this proportion so that believers might study the Bible and benefit from the wealth of religious works available. To this end, Bunyan’s A Book for Boys and Girls (1686) included an alphabet and numerical tables to help children learn to read and to count.14 To reach their intended market, Puritan publications were cheaply produced and sold at the lowest prices.15 Bunyan’s first wife came from a poor family, but texts were not beyond its reach: she brought with her as dowry two of the century’s bestsellers: Lewis Bayley’s Practise of Pietie (1612) and Arthur Dent’s Plaine Mans Path-way (1601; GA, } 15). This drive for readers was a key step not only in moving the patronage of literature away from privileged elites to a popular audience but in educating that audience in the responsibility of reading. Readers were admonished not to be unduly impressed by the fact of a book’s publication, nor by the reputation of its author. They were, as Bunyan’s Bedford pastor John Gifford taught, to take ‘not up any truth upon trust, as from this or that or another man or men, but to cry mightily to God, that he would convince us of the reality thereof’ (GA, } 117). In the oft-quoted words of I Thessalonians 5: 21, the godly were to ‘Prove all things, hold fast that which is good’, to assess, weigh, and analyse evidence before accepting an author’s contentions. This individual responsibility to determine truth invested the act of reading with high seriousness: faith carried the obligation to be a critical and self-aware reader.16 This is precisely the tenor of Bunyan’s frequent injunctions to his readers carefully to weigh his arguments, and, persuaded, to act accordingly: ‘read, and consider, and iudge’ (MW, viii. 51); ‘lay my Book, thy Head and Heart together’.17 An incentive to this sudden upsurge in press productivity was the collapse of prepublication censorship following the convening of the Long Parliament in November 1640. Since the time of Henry VIII print publishing had been regarded by governments as a threat to their authority and they hence sought to restrain and control the output of the press.18 At the Restoration, the Licensing Act (1662) reimposed these press controls as the penal legislation of the ‘Clarendon Code’ sought to compel conformity

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to the re-established episcopal Church, relegating those whose Puritan consciences could not comply to the status of ostracized and persecuted nonconformists.19 Like other writers, Bunyan adopted a number of expedients to circumvent the restraining authority of the censor and to avoid charges of sedition. Manuscript circulation was one such stratagem. The Pilgrim’s Progress, begun probably in 1668 and completed in 1671, was circulated in manuscript among friends before its publication in 1678 (PP, 2); the seven-year delay was perhaps due in part to apprehensions about its reception by the authorities.20 Bunyan’s much more directly inflammatory Relation of his Imprisonment remained in manuscript until 1765 (GA, xxiii–xxv) and his contentious millenarian Of Antichrist, and his Ruine, with its praise of Tudor but not Stuart monarchs, its criticism of the established Church and condemnation of Roman Catholicism when the heir to the throne was a known Catholic, its promotion of liberty of conscience and denunciation of persecutors, was published only posthumously (MW, xiii. 424–6, 441–2, 493–4, 497–8). This was one of fifteen (perhaps sixteen21) works in manuscript at Bunyan’s death, their number suggesting he withheld works from the press rather than risk their publication; certainly, the censor was hardly likely to pass the explicit association of ‘Absolute Monarchy’ with the persecuting tyranny of Nimrod in Bunyan’s Exposition on the First Ten Chapters of Genesis (MW, xii. 267–9). These unpublished manuscripts were finally printed in the 1692 folio edition of Bunyan’s works when, in the changed circumstances following the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the Toleration Act of 1689, it became ‘lawful now to print the works of dissenters, though it was not so formerly’.22 In works that did reach print, implication and suggestion might evade the censor. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, within the general allegorical representation of worldliness in Vanity Fair may be detected by attentive readers (but also denied by an author under interrogation) ‘a precise portrait of the drunken, jeering, conformist culture’ of Restoration London23 and of its preoccupations in the ‘Merchandize sold’ at the Fair: ‘Houses, Lands . . . Places, Honours, Preferments, Titles . . . Lusts, Pleasures . . . Whores, Bauds . . . Silver, Gold . . . ’; and, still more subversively, an all but treasonable allusion to Charles II in its lord, Beelzebub, ‘the Prince of this Town, with all the Rablement his Attendants . . . more fit for a being in Hell, then in this Town and Countrey’ (PP, 88, 95). Bunyan could, though, be explicit. His frequent criticisms of the manners and pretensions of persons of quality24 would hardly recommend themselves to the political authorities, and so he, like other authors, often avoided the censor altogether by resorting to unlicensed publication. Only eight first editions of the forty or so titles published during his lifetime appear to have been properly licensed,25 including the two parts of The Pilgrim’s Progress, but neither Mr. Badman nor The Holy War (1682), both of which might be readily construed as deeply critical of the social values and political practices of the Restoration. Indeed, in The Holy War Bunyan had a tilt at the licensing authorities themselves in the figure of Mr Filth, almost certainly a caricature of Roger L’Estrange, the Surveyor of the Press.26 Bunyan’s works, like those of other nonconformists, are hence to be read as oppositional texts maintaining in the hostile Restoration world, ‘though fallen on evil days,

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| . . . with dangers compassed round’, their commitment to outlawed revolutionary and Puritan perspectives and aspirations.27 Their production involved considerable risk to all concerned. Nonconformist publishing was a collaborative enterprise requiring from printers, booksellers, and other tradesmen a shared commitment with the author to challenge and outwit the agents of the state. These networks operating in Restoration London in defiance of the authorities included the publishers of Bunyan’s works.28 No bookseller risked public association with I Will Pray With the Spirit ([1662]), a defiant rejection of the restored episcopal national Church and its liturgy just when these were being reimposed by the Act of Uniformity (MW, ii. 229, 233), but otherwise Bunyan’s publishers were identified on his title pages. They were all stationers with distinctive nonconformist lists, of whom two stand out: from 1661 until 1679 the majority of his works were put out by the Baptist Francis Smith who, despite a bewildering succession of arrests, examinations, and imprisonments for publishing allegedly subversive works, survived to become a prominent Whig publisher during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis; and in 1678, Nathaniel Ponder, publisher of the works of the leading Congregationalist John Owen, who may have recommended Bunyan to him, published The Pilgrim’s Progress and thereafter, understandably, maintained his connection with Bunyan.29 In a paradox common in the Christian tradition, the determined assertiveness of Bunyan, as of other Puritan and nonconformist writers, was articulated through a persona of literary selflessness. He is described on the title page of his first work, the anti-Quaker tract Some Gospel-Truths Opened (1656), as an ‘unworthy servant of Christ’ (MW, i. 5). Anticipating the objection that Bunyan lacked the cultural resources to set up as a preacher or writer of books, its commendatory preface by a ministerial colleague spelt out the implications of this ‘unworthiness’: ‘Reader, in this book thou wilt not meet with high-flown aerie notions . . . but the sound, plain, common . . . truths of the Gospel’ delivered ‘not by humane art, but by the spirit of Christ’ (MW, i. 10, 12). Paul’s claim to preach ‘not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 2: 1–5), alluded to here, shaped Bunyan’s self-construction as an ill-educated and culturally impoverished writer whose authority lies not in academic distinction but in biblical guidance and divine inspiration: he ‘never endeavoured to, nor durst make use of other men’s lines’, for he ‘found by experience, that what was taught me by the Word and Spirit of Christ, could be spoken, maintained, and stood to, by the soundest and best established Conscience’ (GA, } 285). Unlike ‘carnal Priests’ who ‘tickle the ears of their hearers with vain Philosophy’, he ‘never went to School to Aristotle or Plato’ and ‘has not writ at a venture, nor borrowed my Doctrine from Libraries. I depend upon the sayings of no man’; instead, he offers the reader ‘a parcel of plain, yet sound, true and home sayings’ drawn from ‘the Scriptures of Truth, among the true sayings of God’ (MW, i. 345; ii. 16, viii. 51). Bunyan has not ‘fished in other mens Waters, my Bible and Concordance are my only Library in my writings’. He does not clutter his margins with ‘a Cloud of Sentences from the Learned Fathers’ because ‘I have them not, nor have not read them’: ‘I prefer the Bible before

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them; and having that still with me, I count my self far better furnished than if I had (without it) all the Libraries of the two Universities’ (MW, vii. 9, iii. 71–2). Bunyan was not in fact as ill educated or poorly read as he maintains; he certainly did not ‘loose that little I learned, even almost utterly’ (GA, } 3), and he may even have attended grammar school.30 He had indeed done a spot of ‘fishing in other mens Waters’, notably in John Foxe’s immensely influential martyrology, Acts and Monuments (1563), in the expository matter in the Geneva Bible (1560), in an English translation of Luther’s commentary on Galatians (GA, } 129), and in a range of works of practical and controversial English theology.31 Noting the precedent of Jesus’ poorly educated disciples, radical and sectarian Puritanism was generally distrustful of the association between ministry and academia. Doe pointed to Bunyan as evidence that those lacking ‘School-Education’ and ‘unlearned’ might through divine grace minister more effectually than those with university degrees, citing with some glee Bunyan’s refutation in oral debate of the ‘hellish Logick’ of Thomas Smith, Professor of Arabic at Cambridge (MW, xii. 455–7).32 Bunyan’s self-presentation is to be understood in this context. He creates a persona trustworthy precisely because it does not belong to a cultural or educational elite. To those nonconformist readers sceptical about the literary contrivances of fiction and allegory Bunyan points not to Renaissance theories of the affective power of imaginative writing but to the immediacy of divine inspiration in the unpremeditated origin of The Pilgrim’s Progress: having fallen ‘suddenly into an Allegory’, ideas multiplied ‘Like sparks that from the coals of Fire do flie’ without, it seems, his own active intervention (PP, 1). This is a view of creativity that accords no credit to the skill of the writer: Bunyan is but an ‘instrument’ in ‘the hand of Christ’ (GA, }} 298, 299).33

THE REVOLUTIONARY EXPERIENCE

.................................................................................................................. The key text in substantiating Bunyan’s claim on divine grace, and hence his authority both to preach and to write, is Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), ‘a Relation of the work of God upon my own Soul’ (GA, 1–2). It proved that, in the words of 1 Peter 4: 10 quoted by Bunyan at his trial, he had ‘received the gift’ (GA, 108) and validated the stand he took when, after being arrested in November 1660 for preaching at a conventicle (that is, an illegal religious gathering), he remained in Bedford jail for twelve years, rather than repudiate his ministry.34 It did so by reconstructing the Interregnum experience of disorientation and dislocation and the struggle to secure personal identity and stability in a collapsing world. Grace Abounding is a memory of the (enthusiastic) revolutionary 1640s and 1650s defiantly bearing witness to the (latitudinarian) reactionary 1660s, and doing so ever more pointedly through the additions made to the third (undated; 1674?) and fifth (1680) editions: only now do we hear, for example, of Bunyan’s service as a soldier (if only fleetingly), of the specious allure of the formal religious observance so valued by the Restoration Church and the

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contrary appeal of the Ranters, of the ‘errors’ of the Quakers (GA, }} 13, 32, 44–5, 124). It is as though the realization of these years grows ever sharper the further they retreat into history.35 By 1660 Bunyan had four published titles to his name, but with his arrest and subsequent imprisonment his output greatly increased and his literary persona gained sharper definition. Separated from his people by prison, writing was the one way he could continue his ministry and encourage, console, and confirm the nonconformist heirs of the Puritans—and, in particular, the Bedford congregation—in the face of persecution intended to extirpate dissent from the re-established episcopalian Church of England. Like The Pilgrim’s Progress (and many of his now less-well-known publications) Grace Abounding was a prison book, written by an author who, ‘taken from you in presence’ and unable in person to ‘perform that duty that from God doth lie upon me, to you-ward’, through print could yet address his congregation and the wider community (GA, 1). His precedent lay in the epistles St Paul had written from captivity in Rome, in Bunyan’s time thought to include the epistles (1 Timothy and Hebrews) which provided him with the titles for Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress.36 In Paul, Bunyan recognized the pattern of his own ministerial experience. From the account in Acts 23–4 of the charges preferred by the Jews against Paul before Felix, Roman procurator of Judaea, Bunyan infers that ‘an hypocritical people, will persecute the power of those truths in others, which themselves in words profess’, adding ‘I am this day. . . for this very thing persecuted by them’ (MW, iii. 204). As this indicates, far from disguising Bunyan’s circumstances, his 1660s’ texts explicitly locate themselves in jail, directly confronting readers with the fact of the author’s relegation to the ranks of the socially condemned, incapacitated, and disregarded. Title pages identify Bunyan as ‘a Prisoner of Hope’, ‘a Prisoner’ (MW, iii. 5, vi. 39). The Holy City (1665) originated ‘Upon a certain First day, I being together with my Brethren, in our Prison-Chamber, they expected that, according to our Custom, something should be spoken out of the Word . . . it being my turn to speak . . . ’ (MW, iii. 69). Grace Abounding will relate what its author ‘hath met with in Prison’ and ‘was written by his own hand there’ (GA, xliv). The ‘Denn’ upon which the narrator happens at the opening of The Pilgrim’s Progress is marginally glossed ‘Gaol’ and it is ‘from the Lions Dens’, from the prison where ‘I stick between the Teeth of the Lions in the Wilderness’, that Bunyan addresses his reader in the prefatory epistle to Grace Abounding. Lions signify here, as they do in The Pilgrim’s Progress, the cruelties of persecution (GA, 1; PP, 8, 45–6, 218–19).37 This insistence on the circumstances of his texts’ production associates Bunyan’s texts with a validating tradition of Christian witness. In the Puritan mind biblical instruction (notably Luke 6: 22: ‘Blessed are they that are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven’), the historical persecutions of Christians recounted in Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and their own experience combined to make suffering a defining characteristic of true Christianity. Evangelist warns Christian and Faithful that they ‘must through many tribulations enter into the Kingdom of Heaven’ and that ‘bonds and afflictions’ await them (PP, 87). That ‘the people of God are a

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suffering people’ (MW, x. 95) is the theme of Bunyan’s Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers (1684). Through suffering, the Christian is tried and purified: ‘Goals [sic] are Christ his Schools | In them we learn to dye’ (MW, vi. 45). Bunyan’s authority to teach lies in the education he has received in this school.38 What he taught is, however, unexpected. The evidence for experiential (or, as the seventeenth-century term was, experimental) Christianity is necessarily autobiographical, requiring a disclosure or ‘unfolding of my secret things’ (GA, } 174). This was encouraged both by the practice in gathered churches of requiring from prospective members accounts of their conversion experiences,39 and by the universally recognized duty of self-scrutiny to analyse spiritual progress. These lay behind the development of spiritual autobiography as a distinct genre of Puritan writing,40 a genre that contributed to the development not only of autobiography but also of the novel.41 Its essential three-part structure—unregeneracy, conversion, confirmation of faith through trial— is discernible in Grace Abounding, but intensified and problematized in ways that are distinctively Bunyan’s. His is no straightforward progress from sinful despair to assurance of grace. Much the greater part of the book (from } 37 to } 264) is given over to the ‘gruelling oscillations’42 between spiritual despair and hope through which he came to Christian faith. On his return from the army in 1647, he endured three or more years of intense spiritual turmoil, manifesting many features of depression and psychological disturbance, focused on fears of damnation, eventually achieving spiritual awakening about 1650, but enduring further periods of spiritual doubt and anxiety after encountering, two or three years later, John Gifford’s church in Bedford.43 The impression of inconstancy and instability created by this distribution of material is hardly moderated by the concluding paragraphs on Bunyan’s ministry (GA, }} 265–317) and the seemingly rather perfunctory paragraphs on his imprisonment (}} 318–39). There are wonderful affirmations of faith—‘Now did my chains fall off my Legs indeed, I was loosed from my afflictions and irons, my temptations also fled away’ (} 230)—but these are inextricably bound up with continuing uncertainty and doubt. When, in prison, he contemplates the possibility of hanging (a sentence to which he believed he might be condemned): I thought also, that God might chuse whether he would give me comfort now, or at the hour of death; but I might not therefore chuse whether I would hold my profession or no: I was bound, but he was free: yea, it was my dutie to stand to his Word, whether he would ever look upon me or no, or save me at the last: Wherefore, thought I, the point being thus, I am for going on, and venturing my eternal state with Christ, whether I have comfort here or no; if God doth not come in, thought I, I will leap off the Ladder even blindfold into Eternitie, sink or swim, come heaven, come hell; Lord Jesus, if thou wilt catch me, do; if not, I will venture for thy Name. (GA, } 337)

It is not assurance but doubt about ultimate destiny (or, in theological terms, about justification and election) that generates this heroic image. Willingness to risk all, and to go on risking all, not confidence that all will be well, is the mark of faith in Bunyan. Though difficult to reconcile doctrinally with the predestinarian Calvinism to which he subscribed, this is experientially authentic. Bunyan’s recognition that, whatever the

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divine decrees may have preordained, human experience, even of the faithful, is of uncertainty and misgiving is the key to the psychological accuracy of his autobiographical (and later allegorical) depictions, as, assuredly, it was to the success of his pastoral ministry.44 This impression of ongoing and open-ended struggle as the condition of faith45 is reinforced by the remarkable immediacy, intensity, and physicality of Bunyan’s realization of his spiritual experiences. These are frequently represented as externalized forces to which he is helplessly prey: when he succumbs to temptation, ‘Now was the battle won, and down I fell, as a Bird that is shot from the top of a Tree’ (GA, } 140). Spiritual powers are dramatically embodied as Bunyan engages in ‘Combate with the Devil’ (} 180): ‘I have thought I should see the Devil, nay, thought I have felt him behind me pull my cloaths’ (} 107). Most strikingly, animated biblical texts pursue him and battle over his soul. Luke 22: 31 would ‘call so strongly after me, that once above all the rest, I turned my head over my shoulder, thinking verily that some man behind me called to me’ (} 93). Desperate with fear that he has committed the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (}} 131–41, 148), he watches as Hebrews 12: 16–17 combats (literally as it seems) the contrary promise of mercy in 2 Corinthians 12: 9: ‘they boulted both upon me at a time, and did work and struggle strangly in me for a while; at last, that about Esaus birthright began to wax weak, and withdraw, and vanish; and this about the sufficiency of Grace prevailed’ (} 213).46 Inner feelings assail Bunyan as irresistibly as external powers. Spiritual despair becomes physical dismemberment, ‘as if racked upon the Wheel’ (GA, } 152): ‘I could for whole days together feel my very body as well as my minde to shake and totter under the sence of the dreadful Judgement of God . . . I felt also such a clogging and heat at my stomach by reason of this my terrour, that I was . . . as if my breast-bone would have split in sunder’ (} 164). It ‘was . . . as if the very strength of my body also had been taken away the force and power’ of despair so that ‘[I] was often, when I have been walking, ready to sink where I went with faintness in my mind’ (}} 58, 62). Temptation reduces him to the helplessness of ‘a Child, whom some Gypsie hath by force took up under her apron, and is carrying from Friend and Country; kick sometimes I did, and also scream and cry; but yet I was as bound in the wings of the temptation, and the wind would carry me away’ (} 102). Conversely, joy is an ecstasy to rival Traherne’s: ‘How lovely now was every one in my eyes, that I thought to be converted men and women! they shone, they walked like a people that carried the broad Seal of Heaven about them’ (} 74); ‘I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God . . . I could not tell how to contain till I got home; I thought I could have spoken of his Love . . . even to the very Crows that sat upon the plow’d lands before me’ (} 92). At times, external reality dissolves into hallucinatory visions and fantastical nightmares. The meeting in Bedford with the ‘three or four poor women sitting at a door in the Sun, and talking about the things of God’ that was instrumental in putting him in the way to faith (GA, } 37) becomes later ‘a kind of Vision . . . as if they were set on the Sunny side of some high Mountain . . . while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold’ (} 53). Fearing that his much-loved bell-ringing was sinful, he ‘durst not stand at the

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Steeple door any longer’, lest ‘the Steeple itself should fall’ (} 34); ‘walking to and for in a good mans Shop’ he is so taken by Hebrews 12: 25 that ‘there was as if there had rushed in at the Window, the noise of Wind upon me . . . as if an Angel had come upon me’ (} 174). Sitting one day on a bench in the street ‘methought I saw . . . as if the very stones in the street, and tiles upon the houses, did bend themselves against me’ (} 187). This is a world contorted and distorted through the prism of anguish. Looking back from the 1660s, Bunyan recognizes that ‘These things may seem ridiculous to others, even as ridiculous as they were in themselves, but to me they were most tormenting cogitations’ (} 184), but he does not allow hindsight to rationalize or moderate the experience to teleologically neat ends. No text more compellingly renders in all its extravagance and awesome limitlessness the disorienting subjective experience of a revolutionary world turned upside down.

THE REVOLUTIONARY STORY

.................................................................................................................. ‘What shall I do to be saved?’: The Pilgrim’s Progress begins with the question that had tormented Bunyan throughout Grace Abounding, and it gives the same answer; steadfastness in the face of an alienating and hostile world without assurance of success is the condition of faith (Figure 37.1).47 It is (as has been often remarked) an allegorical and narrative rendition of the same materials. Christian, in desperation and plagued by doubts, is challenged to keep on and in the way. Unlike the complacently (and tragically) confident Ignorance, the true pilgrim is spiritually alert and morally engaged at all times: ‘Departing from iniquity’, wrote Bunyan elsewhere, ‘is not a work of an hour, or a day, or a week, or a month, or a year: But it’s a work will last thee thy life time’ (MW, ix. 276). As the motto (presumably of Bunyan’s composition) to the woodcut illustrating Christian’s confrontation with the lions puts it: ‘A Christian man is never long at ease, | When one fright’s gone another doth him seize.’48 Whatever the divinely predetermined ending, from the human perspective that end is always in doubt. Having finally persevered, as it seems, to the very last, Christian all but fails when ‘a great horror and darkness’ falls upon him and but for the intervention of Hopeful he would have drowned in the River of Death (PP, 157–8). So far are doubts and misgivings from being incompatible with faith that their contrary, assurance, suggests rather pride and hypocrisy: ‘No fears, no Grace’ (PP, 254). This tenacity is most evident in Faithful, whose arrest, trial, and martyrdom at Vanity Fair (PP, 88–97) draw on Bunyan’s own experience of Restoration courts and prisons and, in the accusations levied against Christian and Faithful of disrespect for social superiors, disloyalty (at best), and sedition (at worst), represent the experience of social harassment, penal persecution, and state repression known to his nonconformist readers. What they might expect from legal process is registered in the names of the witnesses (Envy, Superstition, and Pickthank), the jurors (Mr Blindman, Mr No-Good, Mr Malice, Mr Love-lust), and of the judge (Lord Hategood). Indeed, Restoration

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37 .1 Robert White, portrait of John Bunyan in later life, graphite on vellum, finished in metalpoint, c.1679. # The Trustees of the British Museum, Gg, 1.493.

FIGURE

society generally comes badly out of Bunyan. To be socially privileged is almost invariably a sign of moral turpitude: Giant Despair owns a castle and a great estate barred to trespassers; By-ends is from ‘Fair-speech’, ‘a Wealthy place’; Mercy’s suitor Mr Brisk is ‘a man of some breeding’ but merely ‘pretended to Religion’ (PP, 98, 113, 226). Just such socially radical sentiments had circulated in Bunyan’s army days: no less a figure than Cromwell himself asserted that he would ‘rather have a plain russetcoated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’.49 For Bunyan it is readily understandable that in the parable of Dives and Lazarus ‘the ungodly [are] held forth under the notion of a rich man’, for ‘to see how the great ones of the world will go strutting up and down the streets sometimes, it makes me wonder’; by contrast, God’s own people ‘are most commonly of the poorer sort’, ‘for the most part, a poor, despised, contemptible people’ (MW, i. 252, 253–4, 255).50 The Pilgrim’s Progress casts a sharp eye over the contemporary world, but its sights are set on another. After the crushing political disappointment of 1658–60, John 18: 36

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(‘My kingdom is not of this world’) provides its theme, as it does for such other late revolutionary and Puritan works as Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671) and George Fox’s Journal (1696).51 Its allegorical vehicles were ready-made to Bunyan’s hands. In conceiving and representing the Christian life, the Puritan imagination drew on the narratives of the many migrations and historical battles through which in the Old Testament God guides his chosen people Israel and on the Bible’s many metaphorical deployments of wayfaring and of warfare, culminating in the great dominical assertion of John 14: 6 (‘I am the way’) and in the Pauline imagery of the race for salvation.52 The key to Bunyan’s representation of the Christian life as a journey lies in particular in chapter 11 of the Epistle to the Hebrews. Its image of the faithful as nomadic ‘strangers and pilgrims on the earth’ who ‘seek a country’, ‘that is, an heavenly’ (11: 13–16), structures The Pilgrim’s Progress.53 It is with these very words that Christian and Faithful describe themselves as foreigners in transit through Vanity Fair (PP, 90). Though the journey is the controlling metaphor of The Pilgrim’s Progress Bunyan’s allegory draws also upon another store of imagery: combat. Its climactic moments and exemplary figures are martial: Christian in his Pauline armour of faith confronting Apollyon; Valiant-for-Truth fighting so vigorously with his ‘right Jerusalem blade’ that his sword cleaves to his hand with blood; Greatheart the giant slayer (PP, 56–60, 290–1, 295). In such moments, Bunyan draws on popular story and chivalric romance, rather than recollections of his Civil War experience, but in truth his hero bears no resemblance to the questing knight-errant of medieval chivalry. Just as Milton, mocking the ‘long and tedious havoc’ of medieval and Renaissance chivalric romance, proposes as ‘more heroic’ than traditional epic subjects ‘the better fortitude | Of patience’ exercised by those apparently weak,54 so Bunyan too appeals to 2 Corinthians 12: 9 (’My grace is sufficient for thee; for my strength is made perfect in weakness’) in preferring an ideal attainable by those socially insignificant and unremarkable. Christian heroism is enacted not in the biblical or mythical past but in everyday social and commercial dealings. This is most strikingly the case in part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which the socially, physically, and mentally disadvantaged and disabled attach themselves to Christiana and Greatheart and, incapable as they are, succeed in reaching the Celestial City. The Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains greet the pilgrim band in part II with the words, ‘This is a comfortable Company, you are welcome to us, for we have for the Feeble, as for the Strong; our Prince has an Eye to what is done to the least of these’ (PP, 284). Of Paul’s triad in 1 Corinthians 23: 13 (‘now abideth faith, hope and charity, these three: but the greatest of these is charity’), part I had handled faith and hope; Mercy now embodies the third and greatest. This fictional representation of respect and concern for individuals regardless of their circumstances draws on Bunyan’s experience of the supportive culture of Interregnum gathered churches, and of Gifford’s Bedford church in particular. Like the social criticism so evident in part I, it recalls the revolutionary radicalism famously articulated by Colonel Thomas Rainsborough during the army debates at Putney in 1647: ‘the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee’.55 Bunyan’s pilgrims are poor in every way, socially inconsequential, but it is they, not the courtly elites of romance, who carry a narrative located not in exotic realms but in seventeenth-century

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England, rendered not by stereotypical gesture but through psychological acuity and circumstantial realism. Still more striking, in contrast to the traditional masculinist notion of heroism (and despite Rainsborough’s pronouns) Bunyan’s ideal is not gender specific. In part II it is Christiana who is the protagonist, required to take the initiative in the absence of her husband and, with whatever qualifications,56 to make her own way. Salvation is available to her, to family and friends, and to a gathering of pilgrims far less independently heroic than Christian, through engagements and encounters that are as much domestic and neighbourly as adventurous. The sense of community here, of interdependence, of marital determination, is the final achievement of The Pilgrim’s Progress as, from the democratic potentialities of Interregnum Independency, it delineates a new literary terrain and first sets out what will be the primary concerns and manner of English prose fiction for the coming centuries. Modernity’s defining sensibility, and its definitive genre, are in the making in The Pilgrim’s Progress, born of early modernity’s experience of revolution.

NOTES The title quotation is taken from John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), } 339 (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as GA), alluding to 1 Chron. 26: 27. 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

This section draws on Keeble, ‘Bunyan’s Literary Life’. Acts 17: 6. The phrase provides the title of Hill, The World Turned Upside Down. In fact, Bunyan rather overstated his social deprivation: see Greaves, Glimpses, 3–4. Ibid. 11. Bunyan served as a soldier in the garrison at Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, for two and a half years; he then volunteered for service in Ireland, but his regiment was disbanded in July 1647 and he returned to his home village of Elstow, Bedfordshire. For his Civil War experiences see Greaves, Glimpses, 11–21, and for the radical sectarian, antinomian, and Baptist preachers and ideas to which he would have been exposed in the New Model Army, ibid. 21–9, and Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, 45–60. See on this Achinstein, ‘Texts in Conflict’, 50–68, and chs. 8 and 10 above. Barnard, McKenzie, and Bell, Cambridge History of the Book, vol. iv, chs. 1, 2, and 26 (esp. 557–67), and appendix 1; Green, Print and Protestantism, 13–14 and appendix 1. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 24. See, however, the caution against over-emphasizing the social and educational disadvantages of mid-century revolutionary writers in McDowell, English Radical Imagination. Greaves, Glimpses, 54, 61–7, 271, 287. For discussions of this output see chs. 10, 14, 16, 21, and 27 above. The Works of that Eminent Servant, ed. Doe (1692) listed sixty works in a ‘CatalogueTable of Mr. Bunyan’s Books’ (Works of John Bunyan, ed. Offor, iii. 763). Fifty-eight works are known, sixteen of them posthumous. Bunyan, Mr. Badman, ed. Forrest and Sharrock, 10. The allegories’ marginal glosses and admonitions directing the reader’s response underscore this homiletic purpose; see Hancock, Key in the Window. Green, Print and Protestantism, 26; Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, esp. 72–5.

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14. Miscellaneous Works, gen. ed. Sharrock, vi. 194–6 (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as MW). 15. For examples of booksellers’ pricing (including of Bunyan) see Keeble, Literary Culture, 133–5. See further Watt, Cheap Print; Spufford, Small Books; Green, Print and Protestantism, 445–502. 16. See further Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader. 17. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Sharrock, 7 (hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as PP). 18. See on the operation of seventeenth-century censorship ch. 7 above. 19. On this legislation and its effect see Cragg, Puritanism in the Period; Keeble, Literary Culture, 25–92. 20. Greaves, Glimpses, 211, 216–18, 226. 21. Whether the posthumous Last Sermon (1689) was printed from Bunyan’s or an auditor’s notes is not known. 22. Works of John Bunyan, ed. Offor, iii. 764. 23. Turner, ‘From Revolution to Restoration’, 790. 24. For examples, see below, 694–5. 25. Greaves, Glimpses, 637–41. 26. Bunyan, Holy War, ed. Sharrock and Forrest, 312, with n. on 257. 27. Milton, Paradise Lost, VII.25–7; Keeble, ‘“Till one greater man | Restore us . . . ”’, 27–50. 28. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil, 207–25, and Enemies under his Feet, 167–90; Keeble, Literary Culture, 120–6. 29. Harrison, ‘Nathaniel Ponder’, 257–94. 30. Greaves, Glimpses, 4–6. 31. Campbell, ‘ “Fishing in Other Men’s Waters”’, 137–51; Greaves, Glimpses, 603–7. 32. Doe does not identify Smith; for the episode in 1659, see Greaves, Glimpses, 121–3. 33. The success of The Pilgrim’s Progress, however, led the late Bunyan self-consciously to fashion himself as an author with literary ambitions: The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680) is explicitly designed to partner The Pilgrim’s Progress, and part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684) follows in its turn, building up a library of related allegorical works. This new sense of ambition is most evident in the multi-layered complexity of The Holy War (1682). 34. For Bunyan’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment, see Greaves, Glimpses, 127–72. 35. This point is made in Turner, ‘From Revolution to Restoration’, 807. 36. 1 Timothy 1: 14–15: ‘the grace of our Lord was exceeding abundant . . . Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners; of whom I am the chief’; Hebrews 11: 13: ‘These all died in faith . . . and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’ See further Stranahan, ‘Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews’; Thickstun, ‘The Preface to Grace Abounding’. 37. On Grace Abounding as prison writing, and on ‘the politics of prison writing’ (including Bunyan’s), see Lynch, ‘Into Jail and into Print’, and Zim, ‘Writing behind Bars’; on Restoration nonconformist prison writing (including Bunyan’s) see Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 59–83. 38. See on this theme Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom; Keeble, Literary Culture, 187–91; Greaves, Glimpses, 493–8. 39. On the practice and its literature see Nuttall, Visible Saints, esp. 109–16; Caldwell, Puritan Conversion Narrative. 40. Watkins, Puritan Experience; Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative.

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41. See Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. 42. Stachniewski and Pacheco (eds.), Grace Abounding, xiv. 43. On the chronology of Bunyan’s experiences, see Greaves, Glimpses, 32–4, and on its psychological characteristics and interpretation, ibid. 35–61. For discussion of its theological and biblical roots, see Davies, ‘Bunyan’s Exceeding Maze’. Stachniewski, Persecutory Imagination, 127–68, argues that Grace Abounding struggles with the fear and desperation inherent in Calvinism. 44. The most persuasive and sympathetic account of these theological issues is Davies, Graceful Reading. 45. On the absence of final closure in Grace Abounding see Newey, ‘“With the eyes of my understanding”’, 189–216. 46. See in particular Camden, ‘“That of Esau”’, and on this representational device in general, Stranahan, ‘Bunyan’s Special Talent’. 47. For information on this drawing and its afterlife, see Anne Dunan-Page, ‘“The Pourtraiture of John Bunyan” Revisited’. 48. Owens (ed.), Pilgrim’s Progress, 46. 49. Abbott (ed.), Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, i. 256. 50. For further such readings of Bunyan see Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, 125–30, 212–21, 243–50. 51. See on this theme Keeble, Literary Culture, 187–214. 52. e.g. 1 Cor. 9: 24; Gal. 5: 7; Phil. 2: 16; Heb. 12: 1; Eph. 6: 11–13. 53. Stranahan, ‘Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews’, 279–96; Keeble, ‘“To be a pilgrim”’. 54. Milton, Paradise Lost, IX.14, 26–41, XII.561–71. 55. Firth (ed.), Clarke Papers, i. 30. 56. On matters of gender see Camden and Hill (eds.), Feminine Authority; Keeble, ‘“Here is her glory”’; Spargo, Writing of John Bunyan, 71–95; Swaim, Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan Progress, 160–97; Thickstun, Fictions of the Feminine, 87–104.

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Bunyan, John. The Holy War, ed. Roger Sharrock and James F. Forrest. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. ——. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman, ed. James F. Forrest and Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Camden, Vera. ‘“That of Esau”: Hebrews 12: 16–17 in Grace Abounding’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Reading Dissenting Writing. Bern: Peter Lang, 2002, 133–63. —— and Kimberly Hill (eds.). Feminine Authority. Bunyan Studies, special issue 11 (2003/4). Campbell, Gordon. ‘“Fishing in Other Men’s Waters”: Bunyan and the Theologians’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 137–51. Cragg, G. R. Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution 1660–88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957. Cressy, David. Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Davies, Michael. ‘Bunyan’s Exceeding Maze: Grace Abounding and the Labyrinth of Predestination’, in David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck (eds.), Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000, 97–112. ——. Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Dunan-Page, Anne. ‘“The Pourtraiture of John Bunyan” Revisited: Robert White and Images of the Author’. Bunyan Studies 13 (2008/9), 6–39. Firth, C. H. (ed.). The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke. Repr. London: Royal Historical Society, 1992. Greaves, Richard. Deliver Us from Evil. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ——. Enemies under his Feet. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990. ——. Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002. Green, Ian. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hancock, Maxine. The Key in the Window: Marginal Notes in Bunyan’s Narratives. Vancouver: Regents College Publishers, 2000. Harrison, Frank M. ‘Nathaniel Ponder: The Publisher of The Pilgrim’s Progress’. The Library 4th ser. 15 (1934), 257–94. Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. London: Temple Smith, 1972. ——. A Turbulent, Seditious and Factious People: John Bunyan and his Church. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Hindmarsh, D. B. The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Keeble, N. H. The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987. ——. ‘“Here is her glory, even to be under him”: The Feminine in the Thought and Work of John Bunyan’, in Anne Laurence, W. R. Owens, and Stuart Sim (eds.), John Bunyan and his England. London: Hambledon Press, 1990, 131–47.

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——. ‘“Till one greater man | Restore us . . . ”: Restoration Images in Bunyan and Milton’, in David Gay, James G. Randall, and Arlette Zinck (eds.), Awakening Words: John Bunyan and the Language of Community. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2000, 27–50. ——. ‘“To be a pilgrim”: Constructing the Protestant Life in Early Modern England’, in Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (eds.), Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 238–56. ——. ‘Bunyan’s Literary Life’, in Anne Dunan-Page (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Bunyan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 13–25. Knott, John R. Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563–1694. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Lynch, Kathleen. ‘Into Jail and into Print: John Bunyan Writes the Godly Self’. Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009), 273–90. McDowell, Nicholas. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Milton, John. Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler. 2nd edn. London: Longman, 1998. ——. The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey. 2nd edn. London: Longman, 2006. Newey, Vincent. ‘“With the eyes of my understanding”: Bunyan, Experience and Acts of Interpretation’, in N. H. Keeble (ed.), John Bunyan: Conventicle and Parnassus. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 189–216. Nuttall, Geoffrey F. Visible Saints: The Congregational Way 1640–1660. Repr. Oswestry: Quinta Press, 2001. Owens, W. R. (ed.). The Pilgrim’s Progress. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Smith, Nigel. Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1680. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Spargo, Tamsin. The Writing of John Bunyan. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. Spufford, Margaret. Small Books and Pleasant Histories. London: Methuen, 1981. Stachniewski, John. The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. —— and Anita Pacheco (eds.). Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Starr, G. A. Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. Stranahan, Brainerd P. ‘Bunyan’s Special Talent: Biblical Texts as “Events” in Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress’. English Literary Renaissance 11 (1981), 329–43. ——. ‘Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews’. Studies in Philology 79 (1982), 279–96. Swaim, Kathleen. Pilgrim’s Progress, Puritan Progress. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Thickstun, Margaret O. ‘The Preface to Grace Abounding as Pauline Epistle’. Notes and Queries 230 (1985), 180–2. ——. Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Turner, James G. ‘From Revolution to Restoration in English Literary Culture’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

702

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Watkins, Owen. The Puritan Experience. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. Watt, Tessa. Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Zim, Rivkah. ‘Writing behind Bars: Literary Contexts and the Authority of Carceral Experience’. Huntington Library Quarterly 72 (2009), 291–311.

I...................... NDEX

Absalom and Achitophel 648–9 Actaeon and Diana 501 advertisements, see printing Agreement of the People 38, 85–86, 181, 274, 281–83 ‘Ahivah’ prophetic utterances 475 alchemy recipe books and 524–5 Ancient and true prophesie of all those transactions that have already happened, An 474–5 Anglican Church, see religion Anglo-Dutch War (First) Marvell’s satire 646 Anglo-Dutch War (Second) and Dryden’s Annus mirabilis 618–21 Marvell’s satire 646–7 Annus mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 618–21 apothecaries James I’s proclamation as to 525 Arcadia 554–5 Areopagitica 148–9, 190–202 aristocracy poet as aristocrat 219–22 art; see also portraiture; theatre Dutch satirical engravings 34, 34 poetical allusions to 34 satirical printing 56 Astraea redux. A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of His Sacred Majesty Charles the Second 615 Atlantic, see colonies atomism Margaret Cavendish and 658–60 Augustine, St Confessions 427–9

authorship rise of professional 177 autobiographical writing; see also conversion narratives Civil War and development of 238–9 conventions shaping 239 diaries 243–50 interrelatedness of letters and diaries 238–9 letters 240–3

baptism, see religion Baxter, Richard and church reform 106 Beckett, J C on Ireland and Civil War 45 Bible; see also millenarianism commentaries 139 editions 138–9 imagery in Eikon Basilike 300–1 Milton’s political use of 13 and prophecy 462–75 and religious radicalism 110 Winstanley’s interpretation 337–42 Bishops’ Wars political consequences 49–50 Blake, William and Abiezer Coppe 349 blindness as divine retribution 118 book trade, see printing Boyle, Robert Theodora 556–8 Boyle, Roger Parthenissa 562–3 Bunyan, John conversion narrative 429 and English Revolution 686–97

704

INDEX

Bunyan, John (cont.) Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners 690–4 The Pilgrim’s Progress 694–7 Robert White’s portrait of 695 Butler, Samuel and divine inspiration 651 Hudibras 643–5, 650 and literary authority 652 satirical appropriation 651

Cary, Mary prophetic writings 467 Case of the Common-wealth of England, Stated, The 5–6, 380–4 Case, Thomas sermon on Battle of Edgehill 12–13 Castlemaine, Barbara Palmer, Countess of Marvell’s satire 647 Catholicism, see religion Cavalier poetry changing political background 208–9 and Charles I’s execution 209 Civil War as catalyst for 206 conception of manhood 215–19 and death 222–31 and English Revolution 205–9 Francis Villiers as Cavalier archetype 261–3 meanings of ’Cavalier’ 206–7 poet as aristocrat 219–22 political perspective 209–15 Richard Lovelace as Cavalier archetype 263–7 women and 218–19, 261–3 Cavaliers, see Royalists Cavendish, Margaret Lucas, Duchess of Newcastle and atomism 658–60 early life and evolution of thought 657–9 importance of scientific thought 656–7 and mathematics 661–3 and plenism 660–3 and plenum (material fullness) of Nature 663–5 censorship; see also Star Chamber; Stationers’ Company breakdown after 1641 11, 175, 191 Civil War 56–7 operation of 142–9

Charles I; see also Eikon Basilike; Henrietta Maria, Queen appeal to church conservatives and moderates 101–2 assault on London thwarted 10 attempted religious uniformity 46 capture and publication of letters (The Kings Cabinet Opened) 240, 293, 298–9, 509, 520 dramatic depiction 506–7 at Edgehill 9 equestrian statue of, Marvell’s satire of 648 execution Cavalier poets’ responses 209 diarists’ responses 246 effects on colonies 70–1 European responses 31–2, 34–6 Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’ 267–8 and publishing of Eikon Basilike 689 sale of personal property after 502 High Church allegiance 100–1, 112 and Irish Rebellion 52–3 limitation of powers by Long Parliament 51 poetic depiction 212–13, 216, 218, 223, 224, 509 at prayer (portrait) 297 remorse for Strafford’s execution 300 responsibility for Civil War 48 Charles II; see also Restoration colonial policies 76–8 Declaration of Breda 615 Dryden’s poetry in praise of 615–18 equestrian statue of, Marvell’s satire of 648 illegitimate children 617–18 portrait by William Dobson 1–3, 2 post-Restoration martial portraiture 18 restoration as fulfilment of prophecy 475 Church of England, see religion Cicero Milton’s references to 14 Civil War; see also specific battles e.g. Edgehill, Battle of censorship 56–57 Charles I’s responsibility for 48 and colonies, see colonies course of wars 51–3 historical context 58–9 historiography 45–8

INDEX

intertwining fates of theThree Kingdoms 44–5 Ireland, see Ireland key personalities 48–9 literature and wars 53–8 methodological approaches to study of 47 outbreak of wars 49–51 Scotland, see Scotland social and economic costs 154–5 strains of war 53 taxation 155 ’Three Kingdoms’ narrative; see also ‘new British history’ ‘confederal’ approach 47, 49–51 ‘incorporative’ approach’ 47, 51–3 ‘perfect’ approach 47, 48–9 classical literature Milton’s political use of 10, 13–15 clergy, see religion Clifford, Anne diary 247–9 Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby publication 518, 520 recipe for ‘Pressi nourissant’ (meat broth) 528–9 colonies and Civil War 67–9 conversion narratives 436–7 developments by 1640 65–7 effects of English Revolution 71–4 and English Revolution 65 and execution of Charles I 70–1 gains at Restoration 77–8 and Restoration 76–8 royalist support in 70–1 Western Design 74–6 Commonwealth; see also Cromwell, Oliver colonial trade policy 73–4 foreign policy success 31 Commonwealth of Oceana, The, see Harrington, James Company of Stationers regulation of printing 191 Confederates, see Ireland Confessions (St Augustine) 427–9, 428 Congregationalists, see religion conversion narratives anthologies 432–7

705

early church role models 426–9 historical significance 425–6 maturation through persecution and personal struggle 438 predestination and conversion experience 429–32 Coopers Hill 209–15 Coppe, Abiezer; see also Ranters education 108, 355 effect of writings 16 imprisonment 367 later life 369 as Ranter 352–3, 355, 367, 368 reactions to 348 on Reformation 88 religious observance 356 religious writings 363, 364–5 and William Blake 349 copyright regulation by Stationers’ Company 142–3, 358 Covenanters, see Scotland Cox, Robert Actaeon and Diana 501 Cromwell, Oliver; see also Protectorate Andrew Marvell and, see Marvell, Andrew on divine agency of Revolution 5 as divine agent 432, 472 dramatic depiction 502 Dutch satirical engraving 34 foreign policy success 31 and John Rogers 425 and liberty of conscience 105 as Lord Protector 467–72 Marchamont Nedham and 388–90 millenarianism 111 Milton’s support for 453–5, 614 poetic depiction 613–15 as quasi-monarch 613–14 Western Design 74–6 Cromwell, Richard Andrew Marvell and 489, 493–4 as Lord Protector 474, 613 overthrow 5, 481, 544 and Quakers 474, 576–7 Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, The (drama) 507–11

706

INDEX

Cry of a Stone, The 469–70 Cuisinier françois, Le 517–19 Culpeper, Nicholas English translation of Pharmacopoea Londinensis (London Dispensatory) 518, 525–6

Davenant, William The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru 507–11 drama under Protectorate 503–12 First Day’s Entertainment, The 504–5 The History of Sir Francis Drake 509–10 and John Dryden 511 The Siege of Rhodes 505–7 Davies, Lady Eleanor prophetic writings 466 death Cavalier poetry and 222–31 Declaration of Breda promulgation 615 Defensio regia pro Carolo I 446 Den Afgrysselikken start-Man (The Horrible Tail-Man) (satirical print) 34 Denham, Sir John political perspectives in Coopers Hill 209–15 Dewsbury, William A true prophecie of the mighty day of the Lord 473 diaries, see autobiographical writing Digby, Kenelm, see Closet Diggers, see Winstanley, Gerrard Dobson, William death 18 portrait of Charles II 1–3, 2 Dryden, John Absalom and Achitophel 648–9 Annus mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 618–21 Astraea redux 616–17 and divine inspiration 651 early poetry 611–21 To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyric On His Coronation 617–18 The Kind Keeper, or Mr. Limberham 649 and literary authority 652 Restoration satire 648–50

satirical appropriation 651 and Sir Gilbert Pickering 613–14 and William Davenant 511 Dugard, William and publishing of Defensio regia pro Carolo I 446 and publishing of Eikon Basilike 289–90

Edgehill, Battle of Bulstrode Whitelocke’s diary 244 death of Sir Edmund Verney 242 inconclusive result of 1–3 literary responses to 2–3 politicization of literary accounts of 8–10 propaganda and public opinion after 11–13 Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings act of reading 13 authenticity 290–2 Biblical imagery 300–1 bibliography 293–6 composition 296–9 Eikonoklastes as response, see Eikonoklastes frontispiece 297 impact 302 popularity 112 as publishing phenomenon 289–90 strategy 299–301 Eikonoklastes 13–15, 291, 317–20 Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers, An 259, 261–3 Eliot, T S on metaphysical poetry 207–8 English Civil War, see Civil War English Revolution and British cultural development 30–1 chronological scope of study 4 contemporary understandings of ‘revolution’ 4–7 description of contents of Handbook 15–18 and Europe, see Europe and Ireland, see Ireland meaning of ‘literature of the English Revolution’ 4–7 politicization of literary genres 10 expanded view of literature of 3–4

INDEX

scope and types of revolutionary literature 7–10 and Scotland, see Scotland Enlightenment satire and dawn of 653 episcopalianism, see religion Ermordete Majestät oder Carolus Stuardus 34–6 Europe appeals to public opinion in 54 and English Revolution 29–40, 58 Evelyn, John diary 246–7

Fallon, Stephen Milton among the Philosophers 127 Feake, Christopher 472 Fell, Margaret Quaker writings 579–81 Fifth Monarchism prophetic writings 466–72 Filmer, Sir Robert rebuttal of Milton’s Defensio 452 Fire of London and Dryden’s Annus mirabilis 618–19 First Anglo-Dutch War Marvell’s satire 646 First Anniversary, The 488–91 First Day’s Entertainment, The (drama) 504–5 Flecknoe, Richard drama under Protectorate 503–12 France prose romance 554 recipe books 517–19 responses to English Revolution 31, 37–9 freedom of conscience religion and 105 William Walwyn on 278–9 ‘freedom of the press’, see printing

Galen medical theory 119–20 Galileo and Milton 128 Gauden, Dr John, Bishop of Exeter and publishing of Eikon Basilike 112, 291–6

707

Germany responses to English Revolution 34–6 Glisson, Francis medical theory 122–3 God, see religion ‘godly republicans’ critique of James Harrington 543–4 Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners 690–4 Great Plague and Fire of London and Dryden’s Annus mirabilis 618–19 ‘Grub Street’, see printing Gryphius, Andreas Carolus Stuardus 34–6

Habermas, Jürgen theory of public sphere 174 Halkett, Anne Murray, Lady Civil War memoir 159 Hall, John and Andrew Marvell 263–4 on death of Francis Villiers 263 Harley, Lady Brilliana letters 242–3 Harrington, James The Commonwealth of Oceana biographical context 534–5 contemporary responses 541–5 content 535–41 importance 534 and ‘godly republicans’ 543–4 legacy of ideas 545–6 and Matthew Wren 542–3 political thought 92–3 Harvey, William discovery of circulation of blood 126 Hazzard, Dorothy local church leadership 162 Henrietta Maria, Queen; see also Charles I dramatic depiction 502, 506–7 exile 223, 505, 658 Lucy Hutchinson and 679, 682 Margaret Lucas and 658 Milton and 605 poetic depiction 212–13, 216, 218, 221, 223, 224, 509, 605

708

INDEX

Henrietta Maria, Queen; (cont.) political influence and role 158–9, 209 publication of letters (The Kings Cabinet Opened) 240, 509, 520 The Queens Closet Opened 520–2, 521 recipe book 517, 520, 528 religious influence 101 Herrick, Robert bust of 225 Cavalier poetry 222–31 Hesperides 221, 222, 223–31 Hesperides 221, 222, 223–31 High Commission, see Star Chamber Hill, Christopher influence on English Revolution scholarship 7 on medical theory in 17th century 123 on Ranters 349, 350 on religious radicalism 107–8 History of Sir Francis Drake, The (drama) Davenant, William 509–10 Hobbes, Thomas influence on European writers 37 Leviathan 89–91, 126, 312, 394–407, 399 and Milton, John 312 and Paduan method of study 126 philosophical thought 126–7 political thought 89–91 ‘Horation Ode’, see Marvell, Andrew Howard, Aletheia Talbot Natura exenterata 523–4 Hudibras 643–5, 650 Hutchinson, Lucy autobiographical writing 669–83 Memoirs 678–82 Order and Disorder 672–8 On The Principles of the Christian Religion 682–3 translation of De rerum natura 670–2

Independents, see religion Interregnum, see Commonwealth; Cromwell, Oliver; Parliament; Protectorate Ireland and Civil War 44–59 Confederate printing 53–4, 54–5

Confederates and Charles I 52–3 Milton and 316–17 Rebellion of 1641 50, 51, 52, 53, 101–2 Remonstrance of Grievances 52 Strafford’s Irish army 48 Italy responses to English Revolution 39–40

James I proclamation as to apothecaries 525 Reformed Protestantism 100 Johnson, Samuel on Revolution as ‘The Age of Pamphlets’ 135 Jones, Samson Vox infantis 465 journalism, see printing

Kind Keeper, or Mr. Limberham, The 649 Kings Cabinet Opened, The 240, 298–9, 509, 520 Kirke, Mary identity as ‘matchless Chlora’ 262 Last Instructions to a Painter 34 Lely, Peter post-Restoration portraiture 18 Leti, Gregorio history of English Civil War 39 letters, see autobiographical writing Levellers Agreement of the People 38, 85–86, 181, 274, 281–83 body of ideas 279–84 contemporary responses to 272–3 emergence 273–5 leadership 274–5 Parliamentarian context 273 petitioning 274 printing 273–4 Puritan context 274 Putney Debates 85–6, 310–11 religion and politics 279–84 women 160–1 writers 275–9 Leviathan, see Hobbes, Thomas

INDEX

liberty and Milton’s Areopagitica 190–202 religion and liberty of conscience 105, 278–9 licensing, see censorship Lilburne, John and Milton’s Defensio 452 political writing 275–7 portrait 276 social and legal background 274–5 literary authority Restoration satire and 652–3 literature and English Revolution; see also politicization of literature scope and types of literature generally 7–10 local politicians influence of 57–8 London Dispensatory, see Pharmacopoea Londinensis (London Dispensatory) Lovelace, Richard as archetypal Cavalier 263–7 Cavalier poetry 219–22 Lucasta 220–1, 265–6 Lycidas 219

Madan, Francis on Eikon Basilike 290, 293–5 magistrates role in church reform 103 manhood conception in Cavalier poetry 215–19 Manifestarian controversy Quakers and 573 Marprelate tracts production of 175 Marshall, William frontispiece portrait of Charles I in Eikon Basilike 297–8, 297 Marston Moor, Battle of size of armies 154 Marvell, Andrew biographical references in poetry 254–8 and Civil War 253–4 and death of Oliver Cromwell 491–5 and divine inspiration 651–2 An Elegy upon the Death of my Lord Francis Villiers 259, 261–3

709

The First Anniversary 488–91 and Francis Villiers 259, 261–3 ‘Horatian Ode’ to Oliver Cromwell 32, 44, 72, 210, 216, 253, 257–8, 260, 267–8, 381, 482, 483–7, 488, 494, 642–3, 651 and John Hall 263–4 Last Instructions to a Painter 34 and literary authority 652–3 nostalgia and ‘Horatian Ode’ 267–8 Restoration satire 645–8 and Richard Lovelace 263–7 satirical appropriation 651 shifting allegiences 258–61, 481–3 Upon Appleton House Coopers Hill compared 211, 213 view of nature 127 use of rhyme 650–51 mathematics Margaret Cavendish and 661–3 medicine and alchemy 524–5 and English Revolution 118–29 James I’s proclamation as to apothecaries 525 Memoirs (Lucy Hutchinson) 678–82 Mercurius Politicus 384–8 metaphysical poetry T S Eliot on 207–8 millenarianism and political thought 87–9 and religious radicalism 110–11 Restoration 618–19 Milton, John 613–14 anti-monarchism 87 Areopagitica 148–9, 190–202 blindness 118 and censorship 148–9 claim to divine inspiration 651 criticism of Star Chamber 198 defence of Revolution 445–56 Eikonoklastes 13–15, 291, 317–20 and Galileo 128 influence on European writers 37 and Irish peace agreement 316–17 and liberty of the press 190–202 Lycidas 219 Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels 316–17

710

INDEX

Milton, John (cont.) opposition to Presbyterians 321–4 Paradise Lost origins 624–37 philosophical context 127–28, 129 physiological ideas 121–2, 123–5 republican theories 314 political use of poetry and prose 10–11 politicization of sonnet tradition 9–11 Pro populo Anglicano defensio 446–52 Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda 452–6, 614 The Readie and Easie Way and use of satire 593–608 republican writings 309–24 response to Restoration 593–608 support for Oliver Cromwell 453–5, 614 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 310–16 and Thomas Hobbes 312 Montagu, Walter [probable author] The Queens Closet Opened 520–2, 521 Morrice, Roger and publishing of Eikon Basilike 294–5 Morrill, John ’Three Kingdoms’ narrative of English Revolution 47 Mucedorus (play) deaths at performance of 499 Muggleton, Lodowick and Ranters 362

Naseby, Battle of capture of Charles I’s secret letters 240, 293, 298–9, 520 massacre of royalist women 156 Natura exenterata 523–4 Nayler, James conviction for blasphemy 473–4, 475 Nedham, Marchamont Case of the Common-Wealth 5–6, 380–4 importance 375–7 loyalties 377–80 and Oliver Cromwell 388–90 political thought 87 Politicus 384–8

Netherlands First Anglo-Dutch War 646 responses to English Revolution 31–4, 37 Second Anglo-Dutch War 618–21, 646–7 Neville, Henry travels in Italy 39–40 ‘New British History’ disadvantages 58–9 new methodologies 59 success 58 ’Three Kingdoms’ narrative of English Revolution 45–7 Newcastle, Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of, see Cavendish, Margaret Lucas, Duchess of Newcastle New England, see colonies New Non-Conformist, The 472 news, see printing

Observations upon the Articles of Peace with the Irish Rebels 316–17 Oceana 92–3 Ohel or Beth-shemesh 425, 435–6 On The Principles of the Christian Religion 682–3 Ormond, Earl of peace with Irish rebels 316–17 Oudaen, Joachim responses to English Revolution 32 Overton, Richard political writing 277–8 social and legal background 274–5

Paduan method of study medical theory and 126 Palmer, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine Marvell’s satire 647 pamphlet dramas as political opposition to Protectorate 501–3 pamphlets, see printing Paracelsus medical theory 120, 524–5 Paradise Lost, see Milton, John Parliament; see also Commonwealth; Cromwell, Oliver; Protectorate accounts of Battle of Edgehill 8–9

INDEX

army Leveller influence 85–6 Putney Debates 85–6, 310–11 censorship 144–9, 191, 525 colonial policies 71–4 control of press 190–202 limitation of royal powers 51 political justifications for Revolution 81–2 printing during Civil War 55–6 Puritan influence 99 religious controversies 98–113 religious laws of 1640s and 50s 106–7 Solemn League and Covenant with Scotland 52, 55–6, 56 split between ‘Presbyterians’ and ‘Independents’ 53, 310, 321–4 women’s influence 682 Parsons, Sir William and Irish Rebellion 52 Parthenissa 562–3 Paul, St conversion narrative 426 Pharmacopoea Londinensis (London Dispensatory) Culpeper’s English translation 518, 525–6 publication 525 philosophy atomism 658–60 Margaret Cavendish and natural philosophy 656–5 and medical theory 118–29 philosophical context of Paradise Lost 127–8, 129 plenism 660–3 plenum (material fullness) of Nature 663–5 Thomas Hobbes, see Hobbes, Thomas Pickering, Sir Gilbert and John Dryden 613–14 Pilgrim’s Progress, The Bunyan, John 694–7 Plague of London and Dryden’s Annus mirabilis 618–19 plenism Margaret Cavendish and 660–3 plenum (material fullness) of Nature Margaret Cavendish and 663–5 Plutarch

711

Milton’s references to 10 Pocock, J G A ‘New British History’ 45–6 poet as aristocrat 219–22 poetry, see Cavalier poetry; metaphysical poetry political pamphlets, see printing political perspectives Cavalier poetry 209–15 political structure English Revolution and development of 29 political thought English Revolution and 80–1 James Harrington 92–3 John Milton, see Milton, John justifications for Revolution 81–2 key concepts pre-Revolution 80–1 key themes 93–4 Marchamont Nedham, see Nedham, Marchamont and millenarianism 87–9 Putney Debates 85–6 and religion 81–3, 279–84 royalists and republicans 84–7 Thomas Hobbes, see Hobbes, Thomas politicization of literature accounts of Battle of Edgehill 8–10 Bible 13 classical literature 10 literary genres 9–11 reading 13–15 Poole, Elizabeth prophetic utterances 163 portraiture Charles I at prayer (Eikon Basilike frontispiece) 297 Charles II at Edgehill 1–3, 2 John Bunyan 695 John Lilburne 276 post-Restoration royal portraiture 18 Queen Henrietta Maria 521 Presbyterians, see religion printing; see also censorship; Star Chamber; Stationers’ Company advertisements 141–2 and authorship 177

712

INDEX

printing; (cont.) book trade during English Revolution 135–42 and Civil War 53–8 commercial and political constraints 180–1 consumption 181–4 copyright 142–3, 358 ‘freedom of the press’ and Milton’s Areopagitica 190–202 growth of 10–13, 175–7 ‘Grub Street’ 177 historiographical overview 173–4 leisure and recreational books 139–40 Marprelate tracts 175 news 140–1, 173–4, 175–7 pamphlet dramas 501–3 prophetic writings 464–5 and public debate 178–80 and public opinion 10–13, 184–5 Quaker, see Quakers reception 181–4 recipe books 516–29 regulation by Stationers’ Company 191 religious books 138–9 religious tracts 99 satire, see satire social and political dynamics of 178–80 theatre and 498–512 propaganda, see printing prophets, see religion Pro populo Anglicano defensio 446–52 Pro populo Anglicano defensio secunda 452–6, 614 prose romance and English Revolution 551–63 Protectorate colonial trade policy 73–4 debates on liberty of conscience 105 establishment 467–8 Fifth Monarchism and 467–72 ideological development 613–14 theatre during 498–512 Protestantism, see religion public opinion appeal to European 54 politicization of reading 13–15 printing and 10–13, 184–5

public debate and use of print 178–80 public sphere Habermas’s theory of 174 puritans, see religion Puritans continuing influence post-Restoration 113 influence in Parliament 99 influence on Revolution 99, 102 millenarianism 110–11 Presbyterianism 104 ’puritanization’ in the colonies 71–3 and religious radicalism 108 women 158 Putney Debates Levellers’ arguments 85–6, 310–11 Pym, John and Protestation of 1641 101

Quakers importance of printing 567–8 Manifestarian controversy 573 print and political participation 574–81 print culture in 1650s 569–74 prophecy and political expression 472–5 published accounts of persecutions 576–7 religious radicalism 111 women writers 577–81 Queens Closet Opened, The nostalgic viewpoint 519 political significance 520–2 publication 517, 518, 520 title page and frontispiece 521

radical sects, see religion Ranters; see also Coppe, Abiezer communication of beliefs 363–7 death of Mary Adams 346–7 effect of writings 16 historiographical overview 348–51 identity 352–5 opposition 357–63 origin 355–7 Ranters Declaration 361 Ranters Monster 346–7, 347 Ranters Ranting 360

INDEX

rovting of the Ranters, The 359 suppression 367–70 Readie and Easie Way, The 593–608 reading politicization 13–15 recipe books developments during Protectorate 516–29 importance 516–17 Red Bull Theatre, Clerkenwell continuance of performances 500–1 Reformation, see religion religion; see also Bible; conversion narratives; philosophy advent of Anglicanism 100, 112–13 alliance of Crown and Church 101–2 blindness as divine retribution 118 Charles I’s attempted religious uniformity 46 Congregationalists and church reform 106 continuing Reformation 100–3 divine agency of Revolution 5 divine inspiration and satire 651–2 and English Revolution 98–9 episcopal Reformation 112–13 Fifth Monarchism 466–8 Ireland, see Ireland John Bunyan’s writings 686–97 liberty of conscience 105 magisterial Reformation 103–7 millenarianism and Revolution 87–9 and political thought 81–3, 279–84 preaching and politics during Civil War 57 Presbyterian influence 104 prophecy and political expression 462–75; see also Ranters Puritan influence on Revolution 99, 102 ’puritanization’ in the colonies 71–3 radical Reformation 107–11 Reformation and Civil War 100–3 religious books 138–9 religious laws of 1640s and 50s 106–7 religious tracts 99 Scotland, see Scotland sects and religious radicalism 109 sermon on Battle of Edgehill 12–13 sermon on evils of theatre 499 Socinians 111

713

‘spiritualising’ of sickness 118–19 split between ‘Presbyterians’ and ‘Independents’ 53, 104–6, 310, 321–4 toleration of Catholics 194–5 Westminster Assembly 103–4 women and infant baptism 161–2 women in congregations and sects 162–5 women prophets 162–3 women Quakers 163–4 Remonstrance of Grievances 52 republicanism Milton’s writings 309–24 political thought 84–7 and religious radicalism 111 Restoration; see also Charles II Church 113 colonies at 76–8 Dryden’s early poetry 611–21 as fulfilment of prophecy 475 Great Plague 619 John Bunyan’s writings 686–97 Lucy Hutchinson’s writings 669–83 Margaret Cavendish and natural philosophy 657–65 millenarian speculation 618–19 Milton’s Readie and Easie Way 593–608 origins of Paradise Lost 624–37 portraiture 18 satire 639–53 Second Anglo-Dutch War 618–21 Rogers, John Ohel or Beth-shemesh 425, 435–6 rovting of the Ranters, The 359 Rowe, John sermon on evils of theatre 499 Royalists accounts of Battle of Edgehill 9 colonies’ support 70–1 political thought 83, 84–7 theatre as political opposition to Protectorate 498–512 women’s roles 157–8, 165 Royal Society foundation 128–9 Royston, Richard and publishing of Eikon Basilike 289–90

714

INDEX

Sallust Milton’s references to 13–14 satire common features in satirists 650–3 and dawn of Enlightenment 653 and divine inspiration 651–2 engravings 34, 34, 56 Milton’s Readie and Easie Way 639–43 Restoration 639–43 satirical appropriation 651 Saumaise, Claude de (Salmasius) Defensio regia pro Carolo I 446 Schotse Nederlage 32–3 science; see also philosophy and English Revolution 118–29 Margaret Cavendish and natural philosophy 656–65 Scotland Bishops’ Wars 49–50 and Civil War 44–59 Covenanter printing 54 National Covenant 48 Solemn League and Covenant 1644 52, 55–6, 56 sculpture Marvell’s satire of equestrian statues of Charles I and II 648 Second Anglo-Dutch War and Dryden’s Annus mirabilis 618–21 Marvell’s satire 646–7 sectarian groups, see religion Sexby, Edward mission to France 38 sickness ‘spiritualising’ of 118–19 Sidney, Philip Arcadia and origins of prose romance 554–5 Siege of Rhodes, The (drama) 505–7 Socinians religious radicalism 111 Solemn League and Covenant promotion through printing 55–6, 56 swearing of 52 Solemn League and Covenant, A (print) 56 sonnets Milton’s politicization of genre 9–11

Spain responses to English Revolution 31 Western Design against 74–6 Spalding, John account of Battle of Edgehill 12 Spinoza, Baruch Hobbes’ influence on 37 Sprat, Thomas poem in praise of Oliver Cromwell 614 Star Chamber abolition 11, 51, 142, 173, 175, 191, 193, 523 Milton’s criticism of 198 regulation of printing by 523 transfer of censorship powers to Parliament 525 Stationers’ Company book trade regulation 142, 191–2 and censorship 57, 523 effectiveness 144 petition as to unlicensed and unregistered books 195–6 Register 200, 358, 510, 535 regulation of newsbooks 384 wills 138 Strafford, ThomasWentworth, Earl of and Civil War 48–9 execution 300 Strydt tusschen de Doodt en Natuur 34–6 Stuart Dynasty, see Charles I; Charles II; Henrietta Maria, Queen; James I Sydenham, Sir Edward on Levellers 272–3 Symmons, Edward and publishing of Eikon Basilike 290, 292–6

taxation Civil War 155 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The 310–16 theatre European responses to English Revolution 31–2, 34–6 during Protectorate 498–512 Theodora 556–8 Thomas Edwards and William Walwyn 278–9

INDEX

’Three Kingdoms’ narrative of English Revolution, see Civil War To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyric On His Coronation 617–18 Totney, Thomas religious radicalism 111 trade control of colonial trade 73–4 Tragi-comedy, called Newmarket Fair, A 502 Trapnel, Anna The Cry of a Stone 469–70 prophetic utterances 163, 462–3, 468–71 true narrative of the examination, tryall, and sufferings of James Nayler, A 473–4 true prophecie of the mighty day of the Lord, A 473

Upon Appleton House, see Marvell, Andrew

Varenne, François Pierre de la Le Cuisinier françois 517–19 Vaughan, Henry poetry 409–21 Vaughan, Thomas and alchemy 420–1 capture 411 loss of living 411, 420 medical theory 121 and Rosicrucianism 417, 421 Verney family letters 240–2 Sir Edmund’s death at Edgehill 242 Villiers, Francis as archetypal Cavalier 261–3 Marvell’s Elegy 259, 261–3 Vondel, Joost van den responses to English Revolution 31–2 Vos, Jan Strydt tusschen de Doodt en Natuur 34–6 Vox infantis 465

Waller, Edmund Cavalier poetry 215–19 elegy to Oliver Cromwell 614 Waller, Lady Anne as epitome of Puritan womanhood 158

715

Walwyn, William political writing 278–9 social and legal background 274–5 and Thomas Edwards 278–9 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, see Civil War Western Design success 74–6 West Indies, see colonies Westminster Assembly activities and achievements 103–4 Whitehead, John dispute with Manifestarian Quakers 573 Whitelocke, Bulstrode diary 244–6 White, Robert portrait of John Bunyan 695 Wildman, John social and legal background 274–5 Winstanley, Gerrard Bible interpretation 337–42 effect of writings 16 importance 327–8 millenarianism 88 prophetic writings 468 and Ranters 352, 358 on Reformation 88 religious radicalism 332–7 social radicalism and activism 328–32 women Cavalier poetry and 218–19, 261–3 in congregations and sects 162–5 conversion narratives 430–1 diary writing 247–9 economic protests 155 and English Revolution 154–66 and infant baptism 161–2 involvement in Civil War 156–7 letter writing 242–3 Levellers 160–1 lobbying by Royalist women 157–8, 165 political role 158–60 prophets 162–3; see also Trapnel, Anna Puritan womanhood 158 Quakers 163–4, 577–81 and recipe books 518–19 traditional views of women’s weakness 156 Wren, Matthew critique of James Harrington 542–3