English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century: Laws in Mourning (Early Modern Literature in History)

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning Andrea Brady Early Modern Literature in History Ge...

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English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning

Andrea Brady

Early Modern Literature in History General Editors: Cedric C. Brown, Professor of English and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Reading; Andrew Hadfield, Professor of English, University of Sussex, Brighton Advisory Board: Donna Hamilton, University of Maryland; Jean Howard, University of Columbia; John Kerrigan, University of Cambridge; Richard McCoy, CUNY; Sharon Achinstein, University of Oxford Within the period 1520–1740 this series discusses many kinds of writing, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. Titles include: Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (editors) TEXTS AND CULTURAL CHANGE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Andrea Brady ENGLISH FUNERARY ELEGY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Laws in Mourning Martin Butler (editor) RE-PRESENTING BEN JONSON Text, History, Performance Jocelyn Catty WRITING RAPE, WRITING WOMEN IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Unbridled Speech Dermot Cavanagh LANGUAGE AND POLITICS IN THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY PLAY Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Clarke (editors) ‘THIS DOUBLE VOICE’ Gendered Writing in Early Modern England James Daybell (editor) EARLY MODERN WOMEN’S LETTER-WRITING, 1450–1700 Jerome De Groot ROYALIST IDENTITIES John Dolan POETIC OCCASION FROM MILTON TO WORDSWORTH Sarah M. Dunnigan EROS AND POETRY AT THE COURTS OF MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS AND JAMES VI Andrew Hadfield SHAKESPEARE, SPENSER AND THE MATTER OF BRITAIN

William M. Hamlin TRAGEDY AND SCEPTICISM IN SHAKESPEARE’S ENGLAND Elizabeth Heale AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND AUTHORSHIP IN RENAISSANCE VERSE Chronicles of the Self Pauline Kiernan STAGING SHAKESPEARE AT THE NEW GLOBE Ronald Knowles (editor) SHAKESPEARE AND CARNIVAL After Bakhtin Arthur F. Marotti (editor) CATHOLICISM AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH TEXTS Jennifer Richards (editor) EARLY MODERN CIVIL DISCOURSES Sasha Roberts READING SHAKESPEARE’S POEMS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND Rosalind Smith SONNETS AND THE ENGLISH WOMAN WRITER, 1560–1621 The Politics of Absence Mark Thornton Burnett CONSTRUCTING ‘MONSTERS’ IN SHAKESPEAREAN DRAMA AND EARLY MODERN CULTURE MASTERS AND SERVANTS IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE DRAMA AND CULTURE Authority and Obedience The series Early Modern Literature in History is published in association with the Renaissance Texts Research Centre at the University of Reading.

Early Modern Literature in History Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71472–5 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century Laws in Mourning Andrea Brady Brunel University London

© Andrea Brady 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403941053 hardback ISBN-10: 140394105X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brady, Andrea, 1974 English funerary elegy in the seventeenth century:laws in mourning/Andrea Brady. p. cm. “ (Early modern literature in history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 140394105X (cloth) 1. Elegiac poetry, English“History and criticism. 2. English poetry“Early modern, 15001700“History and criticism. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies in literature. 4. Mourning customs in literature. 5. Grief in literature. 6. Funeral rites and ceremonies“Great Britain“History“17th century. I. Title. II. Early modern literature in history (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm)) PR549.E45.B73 821 .04093548“dc22 2005056489 10 9 15 14

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For my mother, Suzanne Brady

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Note on Transcriptions

x

Introduction

1

1 The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric

10

2 The Rhetoric of Grief

32

3 The Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context

62

4 Spectacular Executions of the 1640s

90

5 Contesting Wills in Critical Elegy

131

6 Grief Without Measure

174

Conclusion

207

Notes

214

Bibliography

242

Index

262

vii

Acknowledgements I am thankful to the librarians and the staff of Gonville and Caius College, the Brotherton Library, the Bodleian Library, the Nottinghamshire Archives and the Centre for Kentish Studies for their assistance. The staff of the Cambridge University library, where this project began, and the British Library deserve special recognition. Alison Shell, Marie-Louise Coolahan and Jill Seal Millman furnished me with unpublished research. Andrew Lacey and David Norbrook generously took the time to comment on specific chapters, and John Kerrigan, Simon Jarvis, Colin Burrow and Gavin Alexander offered valuable insights and practical help. Cedric Brown and Andrew Hadfield were encouraging and patient series editors, and I appreciate the professionalism of the editors at Palgrave Macmillan. I am immensely grateful in particular for the support of Raphael Lyne and Jonathan Sawday, whose critical interventions saved this project from an unjust execution. I owe my greatest debt to Jessica Martin, whose supervision and friendship saw me through to its first conclusion. Keston Sutherland was the first to read this text; our conversations and collaboration made its insights possible, and continue to shape my thinking. For health and happiness in the midst of all this grief work I am also beholden to Lekshmy Balakrishnan, Emily Butterworth, Dom Del Re, Aline Ferrari, Tom Jones, Sam Ladkin, Tim Morris, Lizzie Muller, Dell Olsen, Malcolm Phillips, Natasha Rulyova, James Thraves and Al Usher, and for encouragement over great distances to my sisters Rachel and Alexis, and my mother Suzanne. Matt ffytche got me through the conclusion; with his help, my future projects can turn to joy.

viii

List of Abbreviations (Place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.) BF Carew Cartwright DE Donne JonsVirb King Lewalski

Loxley

HS Wilcher

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Comedies and Tragedies (1647) Thomas Carew, The Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949) William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, With Other Poems (1651) John Donne, The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) John Donne, Poems (London: John Marriott, 1633) Jonsonus Virbius or, the Memorie of Ben: Johnson Revived by the Friends of the Muses, ed. Brian Duppa (1638) Henry King, The Poems, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) Barbara K. Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973) James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke and New York: Macmillan, 1997) Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1947–1952) Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism, 1628–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001)

ix

Note on Transcriptions Where modern scholarly editions do not exist, I have referred to the earliest available printed editions of texts; but for material in Latin and Greek I have attempted to use seventeenth-century translations. My transcriptions retain the orthography, punctuation, formatting and indentation of both printed and manuscript sources, though in some cases the use of inverted commas has been normalised to improve the clarity of the extract. In some instances, typefaces have been reversed from italic to roman for easier reading, and turned letters have been silently corrected. The letters u and v i and j, and long s have been regularised. Abbreviations have been silently expanded. Capitalisation of titles has been normalised. Dates are given in old style, but the year is taken to begin on 1 January.

x

Introduction

Death is never punctual. Early or late, sudden or protracted, it is never over in an instant. In early modern Europe, death began before the last exhalation and ended long after the eyes were closed. From the sickbed, through the liminal period of watching and preparing the corpse, to the commemorative ceremonies which might stretch over months or years, death took its time. Thinking of death as a rite of passage structured by separation, liminality and reintegration reveals its protracted temporality. The rite of passage does not only affect the dying – it also unfolds gradually for the bereaved, who are distinct in grief, take on mourning vestments and mourning attitudes, and eventually reintegrate with the community. Rituals punctuate the time it takes them to grieve. As Victor Turner argues, ritual ‘periodically converts the obligatory into the desirable’; it makes regenerative possibilities available to communities weakened by death.1 For Christian mourners, mortuary rituals compensate for the obligation of mortality by emphasising its benefits for the living and the dead; but many critics have suggested that funerals also make the undesirable obligations of social inequality and patriarchy acceptable, and so conserve the insufficiencies of daily life. That view will be challenged by many of the texts read here. This book reads funerary elegies as ritualised utterances in order to understand how they are affected by context, time and expectations. Chapter 1 considers the rhetorical conventionality of elegy as a kind of ritual. Rituals prescribe formal behaviour whose predictability can be comforting in moments of uncertainty and transition. The rhetorical corollary to these repeated formal behaviours is the topos or commonplace, which offers the reassurance of shared and repeated language. I examine how such conventions are learned and 1

2

English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

enforced in the agonistic context of the early modern school. From these shared origins and literary materials, elegists use criticism and satire to distinguish themselves from their peers. Their critiques are suited to the agonistic structure of the emerging literary market; but they can also turn against more explicitly political targets, as Chapter 4 will show. The combination of praise and criticism, conformity and distinction are just two of the many contradictions which can wrench elegies out of their generic shape. Elegies are at once idealistic representations which seek to immortalise their subjects, and critical responses to the decadence of the age. They offer ritualised praise with the declared intention of improving their readers morally, but display a versatility which makes them morally suspect even to their own writers. The process of making the obligatory desirable causes elegies to house other ambivalences as well. Poets proclaim the temporality of their poems, time spent recovering from grief and labouring over the composition, as well as the atemporality of these paper monuments that outlast brass or stone. They wrest their subjects from oblivion, only to impart to them the idealised attributes common to all worthy ancestors. Elegies which flatten out personal differences can seem like betrayals of the uniqueness of the dead. But we can also understand this conventionality through elegy’s association with ritual. Like ritual, elegies are sociable, uniting communities disrupted by death, promoting civic values or negotiating loyalties and allegiances within smaller sodalities. Conventions are a feature of that sociability. Paul Alpers draws attention to the etymology of ‘convention’ as a meeting point, but adds that conventions enable poets to express ‘the self-consciousness, individuation, and wit that maintain the life of conventional “kinds” ’.2 The vitality of conventions and genres depends on the overreaching of poets who use them. This generic paradox of conformity and individuation is also characteristic of ritual, I will argue. Carolyn Miller describes genres as ‘typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations’;3 elegy’s recurrent situation, of course, is death, an event which prompted repeated rhetorical as well as ritual actions. Genre has also been defined as ‘configurations of semantic resources that members of the culture associate with a situation type’, capable of determining ‘the roles taken up by the participants, and hence the kinds of texts they are required to construct’.4 These recent notions of genre stretch beyond particular literary types to incorporate social situations, contexts and ‘roles’. This expanded concept can be compared to ritual.

Introduction

3

The idea that rhetoric is a kind of literary ritual is nothing new. In the Renaissance, theoreticians such as Julius Caesar Scaliger focussed on the ritual origin of genres.5 Like rhetoric, the term ‘ritual’ has a complex history. Emile Durkheim’s classic definition of ‘rites’ as ‘the rules of conduct which prescribe how a man should comport himself in the presence of [ ] sacred objects’ reflects his premise that religious beliefs classify all things, real and ideal, into two categories, the profane and the sacred.6 Elegies themselves depict the passage between the profane, worldly human life, into the sacred, resurrection. They are also ‘ritualised’ by their attention to rules of (funeral) conduct and comportment. By submitting to a collective determination of ritual and literary decorum, the poet can access the resources accumulated in generic forms. As with ritual, literary historians frequently assume that genre and rhetoric conserve existing hierarchical social structures.7 Genre provides not only rules for the conduct of the poet, but also a ‘horizon of expectations’ for the reader.8 The comportment or decorum of a literary text could be defined as a measure of its effectiveness in matching its style to generic expectations, its conservation of traditional literary values (which may include innovation or improvisation). As Ann Imbrie argues, ‘a decorous work operates through the forms most readily accessible to the audience’ and thus ‘assigns the audience a determining position’.9 Decorum serves as one index of the collective social construction of a work, and allows readers to assess conventional and unconventional writing.10 Cicero advises that the practice of rules cannot itself impart eloquence (indeed, these rules may hinder creativity); but when they are observed by a writing community, they provide the means for judging a performance.11 Generic rules can be understood as a mechanism for conserving and evaluating traditional and collective practices, rather than a slavish obedience and failure of originality. Perceptive critics such as Ruth Wallerstein, O. B. Hardison and Dennis Kay have focussed on elegy’s generic rules, rather than on the emotional experience these poems might convey. Thanks to their contributions, these properties need only be reviewed briefly in Chapter 1. But their focus could be compared to objectivist trends in anthropology, which have investigated rites rather than the experience of loss which they serve and in part produce. Rituals and elegies can be understood to express both collective values abstracted from the memory of the dead and the individuality of emotional responses. It is easy to undervalue the spontaneity and improvisation implicit in ritual behaviour or in

4


rhetorical conventions. Describing Chinese mourning, Erik Mueggler helpfully argues that to treat ritual laments merely as strategic rhetorical positioning is to slip towards separating individuals into private, autonomous, competitive subjects. [ ] Yet to understand laments as expressive of profoundly personal states of grief and loss is to rely implicitly on another version of this same vision, in which a subject’s ultimate reality is a private, internal core or locus of the self, where all affect takes place prior to being publicly expressed.12 To read elegies critically, we must be able to incorporate both of these perspectives. Focussing on generic attributes is perhaps safer than trying to excavate the ‘real feelings’ of early modern writers and ritual participants. The truth of feeling remains partially inaccessible behind the constraints of social expectations and language. But its inaccessibility can lead to critical detachment, the choice to track ritual or generic convention as the only hard evidence of the management of emotions. Such detachment leads, Pierre Bourdieu warns, to a ‘hermeneutic representation of practices’, which reduces ‘all social relations to communicative relations and, more precisely, decoding operations’. Like anthropologists, critics must beware that the ‘exaltation of the virtues of the distance secured by externality simply transmutes into an epistemological choice the anthropologist’s objective situation, that of the “impartial spectator” [ ] condemned to see all practice as spectacle’.13 Our objective situation as contemporary readers is limiting. In addition to supplying normative models based on elegiac precedents and religious stricture, critics of elegy should study the strategies, conformities and divergences that signal participants’ dispositions, and recognise that those dispositions include the impulse not only to obedience, but also to self-determination. These strategies are the subject of Chapter 2. There, I examine early modern models for mourning and consolation. The behaviour of mourners was affected not just by ritual roles, but also by texts. Compared to the stern models advocated by Christian and Stoic texts, accounts of bereavement reveal intense emotional strain and resistance to unconditional hope or apatheia. The condolence provided by letter-writers and by elegists reflected their sensitivity to this struggle; critics too should be alert to the generic ambivalences it introduces. If these poems are part of the ritual process, they also unfold in time. John Donne says that his Anniversary poems are infused by the spirit of

Introduction

5

Elizabeth Drury; otherwise, how can ‘these memorials, ragges of paper, give / Life to that name, by which name they must live?’ Sickly, alas, short-liv’d, aborted bee Those Carkas verses, whose soule is not shee. And can shee, who no longer would be shee, Being such a Tabernacle, stoope to bee In paper wrap’t; Or, when she would not lie In such a house, dwell in an Elegie?14 The decay of the ‘carkas’ can contaminate a poem severed from the ‘soule’ of its subject; elegy is prey to the same decay as the body. But saintly relics are preserved from corruption and deserve to dwell in a magnificent paper shroud. Elegies like Donne’s offer themselves as a liminal space, where the news of death can be digested, mortality transformed into the desired goods of heaven or artistic perpetuity, and society renewed through the veneration of its virtuous ancestors. In order to preserve the memory of the dead, elegies must themselves resist neologisms and innovations which would lock them fast in their own time. As Chapter 5 will show, many elegists believed that transcendence of occasionality requires a respect for the wisdom developed over recurrent occasions. Even the greatest laureates took enormous risks when they attempted to renovate the elegiac idiom with idiosyncratic wit. Transcendence aside, time was often short for poets in demand. Few elegies reveal the material exigencies of production, namely that they were composed quickly, and often in hope of a reward. In a book of ‘Elogie with Epitaphes’ on the death of the Earl of Southampton and his son in 1624, a poet complains with unusual frankness that he had but an ‘hower’ to return a packet of verses to his patron Sir Thomas Littleton in the Low Countries. He scribbled hastily ‘in an Inn / where Caryers Tapsters ostlers did conspire / with snuffe of Candles to quench my muses fyer’.15 His elegies are of course free of smoke and rough talk. But the manuscript reminds us that writing did not take place exclusively in classrooms and closets; and text was not just part of the ritual life of early modern England. It was also part of the domestic environment. Posies were inscribed on everyday objects and keepsakes including funeral rings, while householders adorned their walls with moralising lyrics. Poems were also posted in communal spaces such as the hall of Westminster School, where scholars customarily hung copies of verses on the King’s birthday.16 Walton records that

6


after Donne’s burial, ‘some unknown friend, some one, of the many lovers and admirers of his vertue and learning; writ this Epitaph with a cole on the wall, over his grave’.17 This story hints at a material existence for poetry which also connects it to the symbolic equipment of the funeral. Such writing, Juliet Fleming argues, was a mnemonic device which served to remind readers of their moral obligations.18 Similarly, the mortuary ritual was a material reminder of the dead, and of the social and ethical responsibilities incumbent on the living. Archival evidence of elegy’s role in the funeral is presented in Chapter 3. The ubiquity of writing in the living and working spaces of early modern England has two interesting implications for funerary elegy. First, it is crucial to understand elegies not just as exemplary texts, but also as physical goods. Though poetry may outlast brass, it was connected to mnemonic objects: elegies and epitaphs were inscribed on portraits, on decorative lozenges at maiden funerals and on monuments. The elegy was one funerary document among many including sermons, epitaphs, murder pamphlets, guides to and descriptions of holy dying, mothers’ legacies, wills, confessions and last testaments. These documents joined other ritual props – such as death masks, escutcheons and other heraldic instruments, effigies, hearses, monumental sculpture, domestic funerary architecture and decorations – and other forms of writing, including musical laments and hymns. Recontextualising elegy in this material setting reveals a great deal about the conservativism of conventionality, and how poets can challenge decorum and the hierarchical structures it serves to maintain. Second, the production of text was not limited to a few authoritative, professional poets: anyone who was literate could, and often did, write poetry. Consequently, a study of funerary elegy should look beyond the laureate and the canonical to popular poems, ballads and manuscript. While this book does refer to the most famous examples of elegy from the period, I have given Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Donne’s Anniversaries rather less attention than might be expected. These laureate poems have already been the subjects of extensive scholarly discussion, and they are also somewhat exceptional examples of the genre. The material presented in this book, though less familiar to most readers, could be considered essential generic context for Donne’s or Milton’s poem. These select texts, mostly from the first half of the seventeenth century, show accomplished and modest writers responding to deaths of public figures or family members, in print and manuscript, with grace and delicacy or in clumsy clichés. While only a small sample of this enormous range of poems can be given here, it does provide a glimpse

Introduction

7

of the variety and complexity of elegiac practice in the early modern period. The decorum of privileged spaces and contexts could not always constrain ordinary elegists like the ‘unknown friend’ who wrote his own epitaph over Donne’s grave. Graffiti on churches and whitewashed walls is evidence of a willingness to intrude on protected places; likewise, one elegiac commonplace declares the poet’s compulsion to infiltrate exclusive funeral rituals out of love for the dead. This commonplace challenges the hierarchy reinforced by heralds who managed the ceremony. Or rather, elegies both confront hierarchy and commemorate it, reject the ritual legislation of feeling and reinforce ritual conventions. When Richard Corbet resolves in ‘An Elegie upon the Death of the Lady Haddington’, No, when thy fate I publish amongst men, I should have power, and write with the States pen: I should in naming Thee force publicke teares,19 he wishes that his elegy possessed the state’s power to enforce conformity. Though no ritual could promise to deliver emotional unity, the state certainly used rituals to induce emotional identifications with the king, justice system, religion and nation. These rituals ranged from the celebratory to the gloomy, from triumphal entries of the reigning monarch to the ghastly journey of the traitor to the scaffold. Chapter 4 discusses literary responses to one of the most spectacular of mortuary rituals: the public execution. The execution shares many features with the funeral; it is public, spectacular, and tends to reassert social stability and hierarchy against the anarchic possibilities and levelling powers of death. It produces rhetorical compositions, by criminals, officials, writers of pamphlets and balladeers. The criminal’s rhetoric was judged for its sincerity and persuasiveness, like elegy. And like any death, it could generate funereal poems. The executions studied in Chapter 4 also reveal how elegists interpret and affect politics. I offer case studies of three particularly important victims: Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford; Archbishop William Laud; and King Charles I. Elegists drew conspicuously on contemporary accounts of their dying speeches and on the variety of generic forms and imaginative libels which preceded their executions. Like all elegies, these mortuary documents contend over the meanings of civic and personal virtue. But death’s threat to language and consensus cast a particularly deep shadow over the elegies on the regicide.

8


Where Chapter 4 focusses on executions as radical counterparts to the conservative funeral, Chapter 5 traces the sectarian tensions of the 1640s in critical elegies, poems for dead poets. As ‘Lycidas’ shows, it is one of the genre’s most notable tendencies to disrupt timeless idealisations with timely political complaints. Especially during the interregnum, critical elegies are infused with topical references. But the connection between elegies for the condemned and elegies for the laureate is deeper than a mutual interest in politics. Foucault remarks that ‘Texts, books, and discourses really began to have authors [ ] to the extent that authors became subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive.’20 Close readings of the elegies for John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher reveal how claims to sovereignty and law-making charisma can heighten tensions within the poetic community following the death of a laureate. Chapter 5 suggests further connections between critical elegists’ defences of their fellows against persecution, and the charismatic status accorded to transgressors against the laws of poetry or politics. The transgression of the traitor or the criminal was punished in spectacular fashion. A patriarchal verse culture had its own methods for discouraging intruders. Chapter 6 argues that female elegists used manuscript as a space to express dissent against Christian restraint and imputations about biological creativity. This chapter focusses on the rituals of birth and death. Bourdieu critiques Van Gennep’s classification of rites of passage, preferring to call them rites of institution – for one essential effect of these rites is to separate ‘those who have undergone it, not from those who have not yet undergone it but from those who will not undergo it in any sense, and thereby instituting a lasting difference between those to whom the rite pertains and those to whom it does not pertain’. In his view, these rites ‘consescrate or legitimate an arbitrary boundary’.21 The gendering of the work of birth and death could result in the exclusion of both men and women from occasions of tremendous social and personal significance. The attempt to achieve social cohesion against the disruptive force of death resulted in rituals which emphasise separateness, and so enforce a ‘lasting difference’ between the men and women who participated in them. Violent grief had long been associated with women, whose restriction to the domestic sphere was validated by characterising them as irrational and emotive. When civilised Christian women grieved in public they were expected to eschew the expressiveness of traditional female lamentation. Thomas Fuller, having described a good widow as ‘a woman whose head hath been quite cut off, and yet she liveth’, commends thrifty

Introduction

9

management of grief. Though ‘some foolishly discharge the surplasage of their passions on themselves, tearing their hair’, commonly it comes to passe, that such widows grief is quickly emptyed, which streameth out at so large a vent; whilest their tears that drop, will hold running a long time.22 The husbandry of resources, a skill acquired from organising the household, helps the good woman to endure the part of a pious widow and show emotional restraint. Chapter 6 reflects on these restraints in the light of women’s elegies for children and other family members. The Neo-Platonic belief that poetry constitutes an alternate reality becomes a particularly vital consolation in these tender compositions. Women who miscarried or suffered the death of an infant often blamed themselves, for early modern obstetrics taught them that the failure to fetter their imaginations and their sinful natures could lead to disaster. Composing a poem, they could publicly proclaim their power to control those destructive powers, harnessing them prosodically to ‘body forth’ the lost person. The learned conventions of prosody restrain passionate sorrow, and prosody’s connection to the body provides a kind of liberation. A life cannot be sustained, but verse can. Perhaps all the forms of elegiac resistance examined here, to rhetorical, theological, ritual, political or literary authorities, derive their force from this ancient and radical claim.

1 The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric

The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags against elegists’ desire to individuate themselves as writers. Elegy holds exemplarity and tradition, the consolatory promise of the continuity of the same, in tension with the poet’s assertions of his or her particularity or difference. To evaluate the demands of tradition, this chapter will focus on the meaning of the term ‘elegy’ and its derivation from epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Elegy could also be understood as a particular metre, the elegiac distich. A brief discussion of the perceived faults of this metre in the early modern period will pave the way for a return to the subject of prosody in Chapter 6. As a genre, elegy is identified by its content: praise and lament. The forces shaping lament will be investigated in Chapter 2. Here, elegy’s commonalities of purpose and utility with epideictic reveal the social nature of praise, discussed in Section 1.2. Praise was perceived to improve the moral character of both writer and reader, orator and listener. This contributed to the placement of rhetoric at the centre of the early modern humanist curriculum. Section 1.3 scrutinizes a particular locus of elegiac production: the school and the university. These competitive learning environments also trained writers to consider occasional poetry as an opportunity for self-fashioning and display, Section 1.4 contends. Agonistic displays drew upon the openness of epideictic to its opposite, censure, to expand the critique of moral decadence typical of funeral sermons into a castigation of other poets. These elegiac criticisms are the subject of Section 1.5, which reveals how the material conditions of production – in particular, its venality – are projected by poets onto their competitors, but can end up indicting the entire genre. 10

The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric 11

1.1 Elegy: A note on terms Poems both of lament and love – funerary poetry, and amorous lyrics in imitation of Ovid and Propertius – were called ‘elegies’ in the early modern period. Though the two types were distinct in content, they did retain some stylistic similarities: both could include self-defence or criticism of contemporaries, critical tendencies which will be particularly evident in many of the elegies discussed in this book.1 Elegies are often thus characterised as genera mixta, poems which cohere from the blending of several traditions.2 Despite the ambiguities typical of ‘elegy’ as a generic category, the term usefully incorporates a larger range of forms and memorial practices than the epitaph, an epigram projected as or suited to monumental inscription, or the clearly funerary term ‘epicede’, which in the classical tradition refers specifically to formal songs sung in the presence of the corpse. Julius Caesar Scaliger had distinguished between the funerary genres in a similar way: an epicede is to be spoken over a body as yet unburied, the ‘epitaphium recens’ is produced for a recently buried body, and ‘epitaphium anniversarium’ commemorates the dead at yearly intervals after death, and so omits the lament.3 But poets could use the terms interchangeably in the early modern period, as Henry Peacham acknowledges: ‘The difference between an Epicede and Epitaph is (as Servius teacheth) that the Epicedium is proper to the body while it is unburied, the Epitaph otherwise; yet our Poets stick not to take one for the other.’4 George Puttenham’s reflections on the origin of the term ‘obsequies’ – that ‘the lamenting of deathes was chiefly at the very burialls of the dead, also at monethes mindes and longer times, by custome continued yearely’5 – show how the different elegiac genres commemorated the temporal processes of death and drying of the corpse, and of reconciliation of the bereaved with the community, processes celebrated in the folk and Catholic funerary rituals declining since the Reformation. Despite the prohibition of intercessory rituals, the seventeenth century still saw the composition of famous ‘anniversary’ poems by John Donne and Henry King. In terms of metre, ‘elegiac’ normally refers to distichs consisting of a dactylic hexameter and a pentameter line. This was not the form of the most ancient funerary inscriptions, however, which are now known to be hexameter verses.6 The epic connotations of hexameter made the elegiac distich appropriate for serious topics and ‘passionate meditations’ (both on love and on death).7 It could also suggest the dynamics of public performance, giving the impression ‘that the poet,

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like the old minstrel, is addressing a circle of listeners’.8 However, in the early modern period this sociability tended to be produced by tone, content and context rather than by metre. Funerary elegies were not conventionally associated with a particular metre; as a genre they were more frequently identified by their content, as when Philip Sidney listed ‘the lamenting Elegiack’ among his eight types of poetry.9 When Sidney himself died, his elegists employed a variety of metres to honour Sidney’s own versatile prosody in the Arcadia. In the seventeenth century, however, most elegies were written in rhyming couplets.10 The hobbled distich did not translate well to English. Puttenham described it as ‘pitious’, ‘placing a limping Pentameter, after a lusty Exameter, which made it go dolourously’;11 Ben Jonson translating Horace’s ‘versibus impariter iunctis’ called the elegiac couplet ‘Verse unequall match’d’, in which first sowre Laments, After, mens Wishes, crown’d in their events, Were also clos’d.12 Jonson, who identifies ‘sowre Laments’ as the original topic for the elegiac metre, attempted a few Ovidian elegies, but for the most part avoided the genre. Both in form and in content, the elegy jarred with his laureate reputation – would Jonson write ‘An elegie? no, muse; yt askes a straine / to loose, and Cap’ring, for thy stricter veyne.’13

1.2 The roots of elegy in epideictic As a genre largely determined by its content, elegy could draw on the compositional principles of the prose genres, especially epideictic. Several excellent monographs on elegy’s historical development and relation to classical and humanist rhetoric have already been written, and it is not my intention to repeat them here.14 A few basic characteristics should be established, however. As a ‘mode of enunciation’ whose function was determined by its pragmatic context, elegy was associated with epideictic in ancient and early modern rhetorical treatises, and especially with funeral sermons and secular funeral orations.15 But to praise, an orator must also persuade. Before discussing the ethical utility of praise, we should first clarify the relationship between elegy and deliberative rhetoric. While Aristotle’s resolving of the ‘modes’ into forensic, deliberative and demonstrative kinds continued to influence medieval and


Renaissance rhetoricians,16 Aristotle himself recognised the possibility of these categories overlapping. Quintilian grouped deliberative together with epideictic as forms of oratory which do not require the audience to assess the justice or injustice of a legal claim.17 Elegists use the strategies of deliberative rhetoric to persuade readers to grieve (or not to grieve). Thomas Wilson’s letter to Katherine Brandon consoling her on the death of her sons Henry and Charles are given in his Arte of Rhetorique as examples of deliberative address.18 Elegies, like funeral orations, combined persuasions against grief with warnings derived from the model of the deceased and the necessity of their deaths. The view represented by Isaiah 57:1 that ‘mercifull men are taken away, and no man understandeth that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come’ often provokes sermonists and elegists to use the occasion of a death to condemn the degeneracy of the age. In an elegy collected by Herbert Paston, God is said to have intended the ‘death of the Countesse of Rivers’ to ‘upbrade our masking age’, ‘When vertues self was growne a crime’.19 Jeremy Taylor declares that Lady Frances, Countess of Carberry, died because ‘The age is very evil and deserved her not; but because it is so evil, it hath the more need to have such lives preserved in memory to instruct our piety, or upbraid our wickedness.’20 In funeral elegies, similar critiques encourage readers to reform. Hardison observes that in Protestant funeral sermons laments are followed by a consolatio which reminds listeners of God’s mercy.21 Elegists also rail against the cruelty of providence, the frailties and iniquities of man, and the temptations to evil, before concluding with a reminder of heavenly bliss. This arc is apparent in Ben Jonson’s poem on Venetia Digby, which begins with an emotional lamentation for her ‘fall’, in which ‘I sum up mine own breaking, and wish all’. The poet rebukes his own ‘blasphemy’; persuading himself not to despair, he can laterally exhort her family not to mourn her through an elaborate ekphrasis on the joys of heaven. But it was not merely the excoriation of contemporary wickedness which encouraged listeners to reform. Praise of the dead was also intended to persuade. Barbara Lewalski observes that since Plato, rhetoricians seeking to define epideictic had focussed on virtue as the legitimate object of praise. Menander and the Ad Herennium distinguished the three topoi of praise as the goods of nature, fortune and character. The first two were external and accidental, and ‘almost all Renaissance theorists agreed with Cicero and Quintilian that the goods of nature or fortune are not properly objects of praise in themselves, but should be treated chiefly as means of displaying the subject’s virtue in using them rightly’.22 Elegies, like other works of praise, were socially

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useful because they encouraged readers to emulate the praiseworthy.23 Even Plato, despite banishing poetry from his Republic, allowed for the composition of ‘hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people’,24 because such hymns could teach the young to admire and achieve virtue, justice and nobility. The student who memorises ‘works of good poets’ finds there ‘numerous exhortations, many passages describing in glowing terms good men of old, so that the child is inspired to imitate them and become like them’.25 Aristotle also promoted the utility of poetry, for ‘Young and Magnanimous men’ tend to emulate the virtues praised in others, and thereby to improve society along with their own characters.26 Following Aristotle, Erasmus made imitation the keystone of his theories of pedagogy, because ‘Nature has given small children as a special gift the ability to imitate’27 which teachers must direct towards the good. Memorising the rules of rhetoric also helped the young to understand and imitate ‘good authors’, according to Melanchthon: ‘For no-one can become a successful author without imitating, yet no imitation is feasible without knowledge of the necessary precepts of rhetoric.’28 Hobbes summarises in his notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric that ‘Prayse, is a kind of inverted Precept.’29 Enticing readers to admire the goods of character, praise encourages ethical development more effectively than laws or rules can. Scaliger, who also recognised poetry’s conservative influence, comments that ‘Aristotle ruled that since poetry is comparable to that civic institution which leads us to happiness, happiness being nothing other than perfect action, the poet does not lead us to imitate character, but action.’30 Like Scaliger, Lucius Cary, the second Viscount Falkland, associates praise with masculine action in his praise of Ben Jonson. Jonson dispensed ‘the Bayes of Vertue’ and acted as ‘the scourge of Vice’. His poems did ‘our youth to noble actions raise, / Hoping [to earn] the meed of his immortal praise’ ( JonsVirb 3). Jonson and Falkland shared the humanist belief that the ennobling effects of praise contributed to the construction of a meritocratic society. Jonson had himself asserted in his elegiac ode on Henry Morison that ‘love of greatness, and of good’ ‘knits brave minds and manners, more than blood’.31 It is the shared regard for active virtue, not lineage, which joined these friends in ‘union’, and which also united the Tribe of Ben. As he writes in his advice to the children of Kenelm and Venetia Digby on the death of their mother, ‘virtue alone is true nobility’.32 Elevating the goods of character over fortune, panegyrists like Jonson revealed that even the most humble subject could become renowned. By distributing praise, these writers were working to improve society.33 Praise also ennobled


the praise-giver. In order to be persuasive, the rhetorician must convince his listeners that he is trustworthy and competent. This contributes to the pedagogical utility of praise, to which we will return shortly. In Falkland’s celebration of ‘noble actions’, we can hear a warlike echo of a more particular purpose of classical praise. This purpose is revealed by Polybius’ description of the Roman tradition of actors wearing funeral masks representing famous men. He muses that ‘There could not easily be a more ennobling spectacle for a young man who aspires to fame and virtue.’ Like Jonson’s pen, mask ceremonies and funeral orations inspire ‘young men to endure every suffering for the public welfare in the hope of winning the glory that attends on brave men’.34 Keith Hopkins notes that such rituals subordinated individual self-interest to the common good, inspiring young men to heroic action ‘in the hope of bringing glory to the family line’.35 Monumental art, funerals and poetry paid the wages of excellence in glorious immortality. They also ensured that glory should serve the family and the state, not the fallen individual. As Chapter 6 will reveal, elegists not only counselled the bereaved to resist effeminate mourning, but also contributed to the maintenance of a militarised society through the praise of active virtue. When writing on women and children, who rarely had the opportunity to show active virtue, elegists often focus on the goods of fortune such as family lineage. Comparatively few elegies for children were published, and those usually commemorate the child’s unrealised potential as heir to a family title. An elegy on the Duke of Cambridge, who died in his infancy in 1677, claims ‘We did it’s Father’s mighty Genius spy’ in the child’s gaze.36 Because of the status of the family, the child is mourned by all, rather than just by his mother; it is the family, rather than the individual, which is honoured by the poet. The poem focusses on what the child might have become. There is little reflection on his particularity, or the impact of his death on his family. Similarly, elegies for women often focus on their families and on their faithfulness and virtue, rather than on their more specific qualities. But not all praise was based on general categories of masculine virtue. Dennis Kay has argued that tributes to exemplary virtues in Renaissance funerary elegy were giving way to ‘the affective communication of a unique loss’.37 One unusual example of detailed and affective portraiture is the ‘Funerall Eligy’ on Cecilia Ridgeway, the Countess of Londonderry.38 Its author promises ‘a Playne True and Sumary Description of Her Life and Death without welt, Gard, or Embrodery’. This homely metaphor suggests that the anonymous author may be a woman; the poet identifies himself or herself as someone who wrote ‘not for Publique

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view’ and ‘who knew Her best and longest, and loved Her Best and Longest’. Rather than telling readers what women should be, this poem portrays Lady Cecilia as she was. It moves through the topoi of praise, recording that with the death of her brother Henry Macwilliam, Lady Cecilia and her four sisters stood to inherit the family estate. It describes her breeding and education, noting that Queen Elizabeth taught Cecilia to play ‘the Bandora and the Lute’. While the care of the monarch (for a woman named after the patron saint of music) would be significant to any elegist, this detail reaffirms female social and patronage bonds which might have assumed special significance for a female poet. Unlike many other elegies for women, this poem presents Cecilia’s personal characteristics, not all of which render her as the ideal female familiar from funeral sermons. We learn that she ‘was most adverse, to any Chainge’; that she refused to dissemble, to the point of seeming wilful; that she was a careful hoarder of all useful things; and that the ‘word, obedyence, to be Prest, on Wyves, [ˆ (though merily)], It Pleased Her not mutch’. She liked her children to read to her as she did her domestic work. She injured her forehead in a coach accident, and suffered in crossing the Irish Sea, where her husband Sir Thomas was treasurer under Sir George Cary. Their courtship had been amiable, but perhaps she sought to temper Sir Thomas’ ambitions by asserting the priority of family life: ‘for Building, Clyming, so much Publycke Service doing, as might undo the Private, / She, did oft tymes (besyds advise) with dovelike = private = murumuring somewhat vary.’ The poet shows knowledge of contemporary medicine, listing the home remedies the Countess kept on hand for the treatment of her family and servants: As Corall, Seed-Perle, Bezar, Musk, Civett, Amber Greece and Irish Slate Harts Horne and Unycorne, Crabs Clawes, Crampe curing Hares Bones, and Methridate which being well aply’d, Seldome or never came to Late besyds Hadocks Head Bones, Stags Marrow, Lemons, Pomerytorons, and Pomegranetts hardly to be had in any Marchants Shops, much less Contry Marketts This level of detail suggests careful observation of the Countess’ kitchen cabinet; perhaps the elegist herself shares these medical skills.


Likewise, the poet lists the Countess’ domestic chores, which included ‘Tent worke, Turkey Worke, Damasking, Sheets, Blanketts, Coverlets, / Cushions, Coverd Stooles, Chayrs, Testers, Curtens and foote Carpetts ’ and so on. Of these ‘good usefull works of Huswiffry / She had a Chiefe quick Hand in the Best, and in the Rest, She gave a Speciall Directory.’ Public elegies for women by male poets tend to favour women’s categorical virtues over details of their daily activities. But this poem relishes the domestic arcana for their own sake, documenting a specific life experience in the specialised vocabulary of female domestic labour. This elegy instructs the reader in prudent household management, as well as revealing some of the private tensions experienced by headstrong women in the early modern period. It conveys public status to private, domestic and gendered labour, mourning the loss of a nuanced and highly individuated person, rather than exploring the merits associated with her vocational or social status. It describes a separate institution of learning (the home) and female forms of knowledge (sewing, medicine, etc.), building a domestic repertoire through material details rather than abstract qualities. Morally engaged and didactic, the poem is nonetheless distinct in its strategies of persuasion from other male-authored examples of epideictic rhetoric in the period.

1.3 Training up scholars: Elegiac rhetoric and schools In this elegy, domestic knowledge is revealed as a kind of learning particular to women, just as the skills of rhetoric acquired in schools and universities are particular to men. Tzvetan Todorov argues that ‘in a society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalised, and individual texts are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by this codification’.39 The ‘playne’ elegy without ‘embroidery’ emerges from a particular institution, that of the home. But the properties of the elegiac genre which we have been discussing are normally ‘institutionalised’ and ‘codified’ by the early modern school, an institution from which women like Cecilia were excluded. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine comment that schools sought ‘to produce a total routineness of imaginative writing by reducing its variety systematically’ to types of verbal composition. ‘Each type is expected to become second nature to the student, so that his public utterances will be pre-shaped to the requirements of public debate – the lynch-pin skill for social and political life.’40 This rather stern Weberian account of routinisation highlights the social utility of rhetorical exercises. But it

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also undervalues the usefulness to learning of pleasure as well as discipline, which was so often recognised by early modern pedagogues. Poetry, a category which included most fictionalisations, could be especially pleasurable. Scaliger commented that imitation ‘is not the end of poetry’, but an intermediate to the end which is ‘the giving of instruction in pleasurable form, for poetry teaches, and does not simply amuse’.41 This idea that poetry sugars the pill of moral instruction can be found in many early modern treatises, from translations of Horace’s Ars Poetica to Sidney’s Defence of Poesie. The empathy and sorrow which elegies elicit could also be regarded as a kind of pleasure. This indulgence of sorrow in the imaginative freedom of poetry will be examined in Chapter 2. Poetry was not just useful because it gave pleasure: it was also morally effective. According to humanist educators, virtue and decorum were best taught through examples rather than abstract theories.42 One practical exercise in rhetoric, for example, was the sketching of Theophrastan ‘characters’. Following Aristotle (Rhetoric ii.12–17), students used characters to generalise about human nature for rhetorical effect. Such exercises directly influenced the production of poetic ‘epitaphs’, with their emphasis on vocations; but characters were also familiar from sermons, where they were adapted to illustrate ethical premises.43 This training in ethical generalisation also contributed to the generality of elegiac portraiture. Students’ ability to generalise about character was also developed through the use of commonplace books. Under a selection of usually moral headings, readers compiled and transcribed sententiae which they could use later to bulk up their occasional poems. John Brinsley advocated the use of commonplace books ‘for more store and variety of matter’. Students could turn ‘of a sodaine to matters of all sorts, in the most exquisite and pure Poets: to have some direction both for matter and imitation; whether for Gratulatory verses, Triumphs, Funerals, or whatsoever’.44 Writing an elegy does not require research into an individual’s life so much as a trawl through the commonplaces of consolation and virtue retrieved from other poems. The commonplace book epitomises the active and imitative approach to reading encouraged by early modern educators. Writing elegies could also be part of responsive reading: Roger Lowe, a south Lancashire apprentice, wrote an elegy upon reading Edward Gee’s A Treatise of Prayer and of Divine Providence, when ‘in consideracion of the man’s person and gravitie I was posesd with sadnes’.45 While Lowe’s poem commemorates a stranger, Elizabeth Lyttleton’s commonplace book includes elegies and epitaphs for famous individuals alongside memorials for her own family. Funerary elegies


and epitaphs made up the bulk of the occasional verses recorded in such notebooks.46 Students usually began by writing epistles, embarking on imitations of poetry in the fifth form or above.47 Cicero’s and Seneca’s letters offered models for consolation: they show how to manage the bereaved and apply standardised moral observations. Formulary rhetoric like Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique supplied further examples. Formularies are ‘made up of compositions drawn to illustrate rhetorical principles and presented as models for students to imitate in the process of developing themselves for the tasks of communication’.48 But to become effective communicators, students would have to learn more than rhetorical finesse: they must also develop compassion. Wilson teaches that the consoler should enter into a ‘felowshippe of sorowe’ with his audience.49 As Anthony Walker affirms in a funeral sermon, ‘their Authority is greatest in comforting the calamitous, who bear a deep share in the same calamity’.50 Through the inventio of sympathy, the speaker claims the authority of shared pain, and joins a community of loss. From there, he or she submits to an exemplary process of self-consolation which other mourners can imitate.51 To be an effective orator or writer, the student should thus learn to act out the sorrows of condolence. As the introduction suggested, these emotions should be understood as both engendered and hosted by the ritual of rhetoric. When a member of the community died, students could practice applying classical models to contemporary situations. In Brinsley’s dialogue on education, his character Philoponus describes poetry as having ‘very commendable use’, including ‘in occasions of triumph and rejoicing, more ordinarily at the funerals of some worthy personages’; therefore ‘it is not amisse to traine up schollars even in this kinde also’. Such practice did not ensure that even teachers were capable of producing a good elegy, however: his interlocutor Spondeus condemns ‘such flash and bodge stuffe as are ordinarily in some schooles’, and includes himself among som Masters, who have thought themselves very profound Poets, who would upon an occasion of a Funerall have written you a sheete or two of verses, as it were of a sydden; yet amongst all those, you should hardly have found one such a Verse as you speake of, unlesse it were stolne; and most of them such, as a judicious Poet would be ready to laugh at, or loath to reade.52 Nonetheless, adult authors would sometimes publish their schoolboy exercises and academic verses. Milton’s headmaster at St Paul’s,

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Alexander Gill included boyish funeral poems with his adult compositions; Milton added Latin and English elegies on Cambridge functionaries to his 1645 Poems.53 Like schools, the universities were regular producers of elegiac poetry, often collected together in tribute volumes. But anthologies did not only emerge in times of mourning. When Elizabeth I visited Oxford, the colleges posted poems on walls and entrances.54 Such physical displays of text were complemented by printed anthologies drawing contributions from all colleges and ranks. Contributors were usually arranged in order of precedence, with the vice chancellor coming first, college presidents and university dignitaries followed by fellows and then students, in a hierarchical procession which resembled the heraldic funeral. Some colleges dominated the anthological market. Christ Church College, Oxford, in particular was a centre for verse production in the seventeenth century. Christ Church men such as Jasper Mayne, Richard Corbet, William Cartwright, Dudley Digges, John Berkenhead, William Strode, Martin Llewellyn and Nicholas Oldisworth were serial contributors to the university volumes. Cartwright and Mayne were particularly effusive: Cartwright wrote English poems for nine Oxford anthologies, Mayne for eight. Mayne was joined by fellow alumni Henry King and Richard Corbet in contributing an elegy to Donne’s Poems of 1633. Mayne and King also joined ‘Wits generall Tribe’ ( JonsVirb 42) to pay tribute to Ben Jonson in Jonsonus Virbius, the memorial volume published four years later. The volume’s editor was Brian Duppa, the former vice chancellor of Oxford under whose auspices many of the Christ Church poets prospered. These two volumes will be discussed at length in Chapter 5. A competitor with the Jonson memorial, and with Jonsonian literary values and political allegiances, was Justa Edovardo King. As David Norbrook has elaborated, this volume – best known for its inclusion of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, discussed briefly below – was also offered by Cambridge poets in the spirit of collegiate competition.55 The educational context itself could have encouraged contests for self-distinction. Whether in the ‘challenges’ at Westminster School (examinations where students tried to outstrip each other in the precision and fluency of their Latin grammar) or the tutorial disputations at Oxford and Cambridge, students were taught to exhibit their mastery of rhetoric and thereby to differentiate themselves from their peers.56 The desire for distinction through performance also animated many elegists, and made the disparagement of competitors an elegiac commonplace. That desire, bred by the educators themselves, is most famously conspicuous in the youthful elegies of John Milton.57


1.4 Elegy and self-display Much has been written about Milton’s posture of ‘unreadiness’ which culminates in the mature production of ‘Lycidas’.58 The elegy calls attention to the poet’s youthfulness and his academic situation; it is pervaded by maternal images, including the veneration of Edward King and Milton’s alma mater, Cambridge, as that ‘self-same hill’ on which the young poets were ‘nurst’. Whether or not this maternal imagery conveys Milton’s grief at the loss of his own mother on 3 April 1637, it affords the young poet, who ‘to manhood am arriv’d so near’, an opportunity to define himself as a liminal writer, emerging from infancy to the maturity of his epic ambitions. The naming of ‘Fame’ as the spur ‘to scorn delights, and live laborious days’ identifies not only Milton’s labours preceding this composition, but also his hopes for the poem. The desire to ‘burst out’ of asceticism and obscurity ‘into sudden blaze’ is a desire to be born to fame, and especially to the ‘perfect witness of all-judging Jove’ and approval under the law of the Father. But just as Phoebus ‘touch’d my trembling ears’ to correct the misapprehension of fame, the ‘uncouth Swain’ ends the poem when he ‘touch’t the tender stops of various Quills’ and ‘twitch’t his Mantle blue’. This stilling of hectic, nervous motion resolves the agonistic tensions of each half of the poem, and aligns the fatherly god Apollo with the swain now liberated in his pursuit of ‘Pastures new’. As the first person of the poem’s opening lines transforms into this independent speaker, capable of embarking on his own journey into the world, so Milton proclaims his own independence. Even the name ‘Lycidas’, which derives from the Greek lykideus, or wolf cub, signals not only King’s (and Milton’s) youth but also a series of connections to Apollo, the god of poetry from whom the speaker derives his own authority.59 But the poem’s famous critique of the clergy who ‘Creep and intrude and climb into the fold’ and fail to feed the ‘hungry Sheep’, embedded in a pastoral discourse where both the speaker and Lycidas are identified as shepherds, audaciously asserts the poet’s prophetic role in criticising ecclesiastical abuses. The transgression against the generic decorum of pastoral elegy with the violence of St Peter’s speech is consistent, Norbrook has argued, with Milton’s tendency in many of the poems published in 1645 to make political points through modification of genre.60 The elegy’s topical critique also refers backwards to Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, not only corroborating Milton’s ambitious self-fashioning, but also drawing on the tradition of poetic licence for moralising endorsed elsewhere by the dead laureate Jonson. The pastoral

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mode singles out Milton’s elegy among the other contributions. In addition to being the genre with which Virgil preceded his epic productions, the pastoral emphasises a temporal apotheosis and renewal in literary form, rather than relying on the stock consolations of Christian piety alone. Ruth Wallerstein argues that ‘Lycidas’ ‘makes use of the power of ritual to absorb man into the experience of the race, to detach him from the disproportion of the moment and draw him into that larger experience which he shares with all men’.61 For Wallerstein, the secularisation of ritual lament and the promise of renewal in the pastoral mode transport the reader from the privacy of unique sorrow to a communal and ritually shared loss. Though ‘Lycidas’ can be regarded as exceptional in its violent renewal of pastoral conventions through religious critique, it shares in the elegiac habit of drawing attention to its writer. Cicero constrained the funeral oration as ‘by no means a suitable occasion for parading one’s distinction in rhetoric’ (De Oratore II.lxxiv.341), but seventeenth-century elegists conspicuously ignored that advice. Whether to announce his arrival or to make himself more desirable to potential employers, the elegist often dwells on his own virtues. These can be magnified rather than diminished by his use of the modesty topos. Elias Ashmole interrupts his lament for his mother’s decease to recall the glory days: When I consulted Men, and happ’ly drew From their Converse, Learning and Credit too: When Bookes I Courted, and to Joy posest Minerva’s Beauty, slept in her kind Brest: When those faire Mistresses I could behold And strike their Eyes with lookes, as safe as bold: When noble Speculacions, fil’d my Braine With pleas’d Delights; and satisfying Gaine, When no Ambitious thoughts, had skill or power, To tempt my humble Fortune 62 Though ostensibly commemorating his lost happiness and paying tribute to the woman who produced him, Ashmole is also advertising his virtues as a scholar, conversationalist and lover. Juliana Schiesari identifies this turn from lamentation to self-fashioning as a commonplace of Renaissance elegy which makes loss ‘the enabling condition of [the male subject’s] individualistic and otherwise inexplicable genius’.63 Nominating themselves as arbiters of virtue also enabled elegists to declare their own assets. Aristotle recommended that the epideictic


rhetorician, in order to be believed, must present himself as a judicious and trustworthy judge of virtue. Both Cicero and Quintilian confirmed that only someone with a personal knowledge of virtue – a good man – could praise goodness.64 These well-known principles are reflected for example in Owen Feltham’s explanation of why ‘they that do praise / Desert in others, for themselves plant Bayes’: ‘For he that praises merit, loves it: thus / Hee’s good, for goodnesse thats solicitous.’65 Elegists prove their virtue by commending virtue, but with a prosodic and rhetorical modesty suitable to modest individuals. Falkland demands that epideictic be a modest genre, giving fame rather than taking it. Those shew their Judgement least, who shew their wit: And are suspected, least their subtiller Aime Be rather to attaine, then to give Fame.66 For Falkland, panegyric should reveal the subject’s virtues, not advertise the poet’s subtlety. This also contributes to the conservativism of the genre. If the elegist does not want to be accused of using a ‘subtle’ wit to draw attention to himself, his poem should also be generically and formally ordinary. While the ‘custom’ of self-promotion casts suspicion on all praise, it is also the ground for that individuation which Alpers has said breathes new life into conventionality. Many like W. Abington warn fellow poets that ‘with what veile so’ere you hide, / Your aime, twill not be thought your griefe, but pride’ ( JonsVirb 27). Even veiled criticism through satirical examples drew suspicion. As Dolan argues, poets use criticism to ‘praeteritically display their skill in the very sort of attention-getting devices they were ostensibly condemning’ (36). One of John Donne’s admirers complains that Our commendation is suspected, when Wee Elegyes compose on sleeping men, The Manners of the Age prevayling so That not our conscience wee, but witts doe show.67 The genre is itself debased by self-interest and ‘manners’, by the elegist’s attraction to the improprieties of ‘wit’ over the modesty of decorous language. Elegists are caught in a double bind, for the greater their poems the more suspicious readers will be of their ambitions. Rhetorical decorum requires that they suit their language and topoi to particular occasions through judgements of the needs of occasion; decorum

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prompts the rhetor to attend to the ‘manners of the age’, not to contradict them. But those manners include a paradoxical performance of excellence within modesty, of distinction within similitude. The difficulty of re-establishing convincing elegiac expressions of grief and greatness in such a context was an ancient commonplace.68 As Henry King acknowledges, achieving a poetic range equal to the range of emotions inspired by diverse occasions – renewing the rhetoric which had been adapted to the situation of death itself, rather than its particular victims – proves increasingly difficult with time. Should we our Sorrows in this Method range, Oft as Misfortune doth their Subjects change, And to the sev’rall Losses, which befall, Pay diff’rent Rites at ev’ry Funeral; We must want Tears to wail such various Themes, And prove defective in Death’s mournfull Laws, Not having Words proportion’d to each Cause. (King 133–4) For King, there are finite ways to communicate grief, and death’s levelling ‘laws’ reduce human difference to the same dust and air. Frequent use of hyperbole dilutes its effectiveness in depicting intense grief; similarly, frequent idealisation of personal virtues and achievements left elegists like Thomas Jordan faltering for new words to establish human excellence. Denying the powers of inventive language to express truth, he attributes to Sir Nathaniel Brent ‘More real merit [ ] Then any Metaphor can magnifie’.69 Jordan accentuates the contrast between the ‘real’ and the ‘metaphoric’, or between the person and his reconstruction in figurative language premised on dissimilitude. Conventions were powerful tools, charged by generations of use, crucial to displays of mastery of social and literary decorum. They could not be disregarded, but at the same time, re-energising them could require virtuoso displays – which must be managed without calling attention to either the virtuosity or the display.

1.5 Base pens for hire Learning rhetoric, students acquired a moral and literary versatility which allowed them to adapt general virtues to particular social situations. But it was commonplace to critique versatility as a sign of corruptibility. In the


Gorgias, Plato defended rhetoric against the charge that the orator could be made to serve unjust or unethical ends. But the argument did not end there. For elegists, an unconvincing poem, failure to satisfy generic expectations, or expressions of hyperbolic grief might draw attention to the poet for altogether different reasons: the poet wants his reward. As I suggested in the introduction, many elegists were reluctant to call attention to the material conditions of the poem’s production. Like elegies, stone memorials were determined by fashion, expectation and creative innovation within the limits of the form.70 But unlike monumental sculptors, whom Nigel Llewellyn has described as ‘agents in formalised rituals’, not independent artists, elegists constantly assert their financial independence. It is easy to find evidence of the fees charged by monumental artists. Nicholas Stone, who also made Edmund Spenser’s monument, records that in 1629 ‘I made a tomb for my Lady Paston of Norfolk, and set it up at Paston and was very extraordinarily entertained there and paid for it £340.’71 However, no account of funeral expenses has yet been found to include payment for elegiac composition. The poems seem not to have been directly commissioned, even if a speculative elegist might hope for some ‘reward’ for his gift. Stressing their affective relationship to the dead and their struggle to scale their language to match loss, elegists protest against suspicions that they write from purely mercenary motives. But elegists also reiterate that suspicion themselves, incriminating their peers as bidding for patronage. By this risky strategy, elegists advertise their own sincerity. Poets were incredibly sensitive to the charge of insincerity, a charge to which they were especially susceptible if they had never met the dead person they eulogised. Thomas Jordan knew John Steward only ‘by Report’, but nonetheless claimed to love him for his rumoured virtues. ‘If a sad Stranger may presume to mourn’, he claims, and If you’ll conceive Sorrow can keep her Court In Souls that have the Cause but by Report, Or if the loss of virtue you believe Can make its Lover (though a Stranger) grieve:72 then ‘Admit my Wet Oblation’. Cleverly, Jordan argues that if readers believe that panegyric in general can induce a love of virtue, then he too must be allowed to become enamoured with Steward’s reputation. Corbet also declares his lack of acquaintance with his subject proves that he does not ‘strive / To winne accesse, or grace, with Lords alive’. He claims to have investigated his subject’s worth by litotes, arriving at

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a recognition of ‘negative goodnesse’.73 Corbet’s research produces the topics of praise. By demanding negatively what Haward should have eschewed – ‘Did he attend the Court for no man’s fall?’ and so on – he exposes the corrupting influences of class, property and court. Through this clever recusatio, Corbet turns his lack of specific knowledge about the dead into the virtue of negativity: Haward is not famous because he is not infamous. Corbet’s scepticism towards the court promotes him as an honest broker, the critical conscience of authority. Like Corbet, Samuel Daniel portrays himself as honest as well as financially independent. Daniel’s ‘Funeralle Poeme’ on Charles Mountjoy asserts his freedom: But Devonshire I here stand cleere with thee I have a manumission to be free, I owe thee nothing, and I may be bold To speake the certaine truth of what I know.74 Daniel’s love of virtue levels the social distinctions between him and Devonshire, who stands ‘with’ him on an equal footing. Poets like Daniel deny not only the patronage relationships which may have produced their elegies, but also the terms of gift exchange and friendly mutuality which were generally recognised in the mortuary rituals of deathbed pronouncements, bequests, funeral hospitality and the construction of memorials. But this excessive declaration of indemnity has an unintended effect: it also undermines the social relationships which those exchanges and rituals sanctioned. Lacking a credible relationship to their subject, the poets again find themselves suspected. By revealing the rhetorical or material poverty of their competitors, elegists show rhetorical confidence and deny their own needs. Thomas Philipot ridicules his competitors at ‘common Funeralls’, where ‘each vulgar quill’ falls into ‘some broken rapture’. Their ‘watry tribute of the eye’ becomes ‘some easie Elegie’.75 Although he might be judged to have incriminated all poets by this satire, Philipot distinguishes his own ‘refined verse’ from what Thomas Carew in his elegy for Anne Hay calls ‘base pens, for hire’ (Carew 67). Sometimes the act of writing did involve payment: Roger Lowe, a Lancashire apprentice and village notary, also collaborated on elegy with James Woods, who ‘told me of his sadnes for Eles Lealand’s death, and he delivered to me a paper of verses that he had made and gave me them to write out’.76 Though he was paid for his scribal work, Lowe describes their activity as inspired by grief. In other cases, the financial motive is more apparent. Nicholas Oldisworth owned in the margins


of a manuscript poem to his patron Sir Edward Hungerford that ‘for these verses I was largely rewarded with gold’.77 He also accounts for his elegiac lines on Thomas Hulbert. Hungerford ‘prescribed the mater of them to mee, intending to sett upp this Epitaph at his owne Cost, because Thomas Hulbert had diligently waited on him, when hee was high Sheriffe of Wiltshire’.78 The content was provided by Hungerford, while Oldisworth did the versifying. Needless to say, his elegy makes no mention of the financial transaction, grounding its inventio in Hulbert’s virtue alone. The salt dealer Nicholas Murford prepared an oblique memorial for Henry Ireton to achieve a specific financial outcome: he wanted to be bailed from prison. Murford sent a manuscript memorial volume to Oliver Cromwell from the Fleet on 25 February 1651, with a note that ‘These worthles papers I present to you, / To cancel th’ Bond of gratitude long due’. The bonds included the £13,000 lent by his father to Charles I in 1632. He pays his debt of praise and gratitude to Ireton, encouraging Cromwell to pay the government’s own debt in exchange. This cheeky request for repayment is embedded in an ‘Apology to his Excellency the Lord Generall CROMWELL / that these Offertures were not presented (as intended, and sent) at the Funerall’.79 Murford imagines the lying in state, funeral and interment in great detail, on behalf of a reader like himself (unlike Cromwell) who has no access to these scenes. ‘See what my still searching ey discovers’, he writes, signifying his own imagined presence at the obsequies and reminding Cromwell that he is kept a close prisoner without such freedom to range. The elegist’s insertion of himself into the privileged space of the funeral was a commonplace which, Chapter 3 will argue, sought to convince readers that the poet was not a slavish fee-pen or hanger-on, but a worthy participant in a ritual celebration of love and loyalty. Here, it might also serve to remind Cromwell of the financial dues to a forgotten guest. Such declarations of financial need are rare; more often, poets latch on to particular occasions as an opportunity to charm employers or patrons and to achieve a limited fame among readers of anthologies. Jasper Mayne rebukes ‘the small Poets of our Twilight Times’ who ‘Call in their borrowed Fires, and break in Rimes’ on the slightest provocation (Cartwright b4r ). Mayne’s criticism sets up an implicit hierarchy, with ‘small poets’ infinitely inferior to the brightest stars of the literary firmament. Like fashions in mourning wear, elegies are modish; writing elegies and fixing ‘a Labell’ to the hearse of an author’s collected works had become, Henry Vaughan admits, ‘all the mode’ (Cartwright sig. [*6]r ). Similarly, R. Mason recognises that ‘ ’Tis the World’s fashion now’ for

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false poets, like comets, to confuse the public after the real suns of poetry have set. Their poetry so throng’d, so Epidemick grown, Captains and Poets made up half the Town; Scribling as madly as the other fight, As if they try’d how scurvy they could write[.] The disease and civil disorder engendered by these poets lead, eventually, to conflict, rather than the moral edification expected from epideictic poetry. Such criticism of other poets resembles the ‘hatred of literary invention’ in seventeenth-century England which is a focus of John Dolan’s work on occasional poetics. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that hatred rarely touches the poet himself; Mason is unusual in selfconsciously reflecting on his own status: But am I not so too? I raile and curse This Riming Age, yet help to make it worse: Can that be Wit in Me that’s Fool in Them? (Cartwright [4*2]v ) Such criticism of the ‘Riming Age’ is not restricted to elegies, of course. Campion argued that ‘the facilitie and popularitie of Rime’ created ‘as many Poets as a hot sommer flies’.80 Jonson in The Underwood also rails against the ‘ryming Age’, when ‘Verses swarme / At every stall.’81 While the context of these two remarks were defences of different forms of prosody, it is notable that both poets associate verse production with vermin and the market for cheap commodities. Marvell uses the same imagery in his commendation of Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta, a collection to which we will return in Chapter 5: The Ayre’s already tainted with the swarms Of Insects which against you rise in arms. Word-peckers, Paper-rats, Book-scorpions, Of wit corrupted, the unfashion’d Sons.82 Lovelace represses the rebellion of verminous newsbook writers, who spread radical contagion. John Berkenhead, a royalist, laments that since William Cartwright is gone ‘groveling Trifles crawl / About the World’. He associates mercenary poets with libels and nonconformist ministers: ‘Small Under-witts do shoot up from beneath. / They spread, and swarm,


as fast as Preachers now’ (Cartwright *8r ). Amid the turmoil of the Civil War, criticism of mercenary production of text was regularly tied to a desire to return to earlier, more restrictive orders of literary production and of the moral, social and political authority it underpinned. ‘Em. D.’ agrees that poetry is polluted with commercialism, as he joins ten other writers to laud Thomas Beedome. In this ‘riming Age’, Thalia can be heard ‘whistling at the plow’, and All trafficke with the Muses, tis well knowne The Scullers boat can touch at Helicon. Who quaffs not there? doe we not daily see Each guarded foot-boy belch out Poetrie? Who so illiterate now, that will refuse, For some slight Minion to invoke a muse?83 Surplus traffic, water poets who ‘quaff’ the sacred waters, servants and other lower-class writers pollute Helicon’s pure streams. Like those who ‘Mourn for Ribbands, and the sadder Cloths’, and ‘Buy your Grief from th’ Shop; and desperat lye / For a new Cloak till the next Lord shall Dye’, W. Towers says, poets ‘Weepe for Gaine’.84 The bequests which are supposedly exchanged for poetic tributes are now the sole inspiration for them. The result is the commercialisation of grief. Mayne offers his sarcastic condolences to the ‘Poor soules’, who Cartwright’s death has made reluctant To their torn Black now to return again. Their Verse no longer will their Reckonings pay, Thin as their stuff Cloaks, and more lean than they, Who in a meaguer sadness walk the streets, As when a hard frost with sharp Hunger meets. (Cartwright b4r ) Cartwright has raised the commodity value of the elegy, educating tastes and making low-quality producers redundant. Their sorrow results not from compunctious grief, but from hunger and cold. Cartwright’s verse did not ‘sail / By one Wind, like theirs, who write by Retail’; the need to return marketable products did not restrict his artistic and intellectual explorations, likened here to colonial enterprise. Mercenary poets, by contrast, ‘Rime only for some life-preserving pay’, to feed themselves. Every day they churn out verse as if they were ‘the paper Merchants

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factors’,85 consuming paper, generating demand for the stationers but failing to edify readers. Such critiques express the desire for an aesthetic monopoly, simultaneously rejecting and revealing the elegy’s commercial status. Elegiac slaves to occasion write to serve their bodily needs, rather than to elevate themselves and their readers. But Mayne himself is saved from the implications of his own criticism only by his ability to distinguish Cartwright’s true virtue from his larcenist imitators. The result is a different kind of negative goodness: Cartwright and Mayne are not poetasters because they are not conspicuously in need of money. Denouncing other elegists’ insincerity and venality was an elegiac commonplace throughout the seventeenth century. Such accusations also reflected the commercialisation and professionalisation of literary production, the shift from aristocratic patronage networks to the tense and competitive realm of the marketplace. The elegist who compared his rivals to scheming mourners also recognised the increasing pressure on the rigid primogeniture system in the context of seventeenth-century social and economic developments, pressures which will be particularly apparent in the critical elegies discussed in Chapter 5. But the discourse of money, contagion and bodily needs also provokes unexpected references to sexuality. An elegy on the venerable Countess of Devonshire (who died at over 100 years of age) claims her perfections ‘dazells’ the ‘Dablers of the Quill’, Whose Prostituted Pen’s for sordid Hire, Dawb glorious Vice, and from Apollo’s Quire Filch Sacred Raptures, which profanely they Upon the Shrine of every Wanton Lay.86 ‘Borrowed’ mourning blacks and ‘wanton’ poetry are signs of moral corruption, poets prostituting their muses for wages. While the poet contrasts the Countess’ chastity with her admirers’ literary incontinence, such accusations of wantonness add their force to the exclusion of women from printed publication of commemorative elegies. Female poets would have to risk not merely the stigma of print, but also the localised elegiac charge of greed and lechery in order to intrude on the rituals of the hearse.

1.6 Conclusion Rhetorical training formed the basis of adult writers’ understanding of the rules and decorum of elegy. By making the production and consumption of praise a central fixture of the curriculum, early modern


educators sought to cultivate heroic masculinity and other communal values. Conventions, idealisation and the mechanics of persuasion worked to assimilate readers and writers to a dominant literary and social ethic; but the mastery of rhetoric as a kind of ethical superiority also helped to distinguish particular poets. The competitive structure of the school disputation and the literary marketplace exacerbated this agonistic relationship between conformity and distinction. Having established that the rhetorical machinery of elegy depended on epideictic and deliberative conventions, we will now consider exactly what the elegist was trying to persuade the bereaved to believe. I have argued that the effectiveness of elegy did not depend on dramatic violations of conventions and types; instead, elegy relied on generic expectations to portray the dead subject as a model of civic and personal virtue. This act of persuasion was premised on social consensus about the nature of virtue. It was also possible, of course, to be virtuous in grief, and models for appropriate mourning imposed their rhetorical constraints not only on the consoler, but also on the bereaved. Just as elegists exceeded classical precedents and pedagogical models while producing conformist texts, so were dying and mourning individuals influenced but not utterly controlled by Christian and Stoic moral guidance. In the following discussion of the rhetoric of mourning, it will become clear that constraints did not simply inhibit the spontaneous outflow of personal feeling, any more than rhetoric itself inhibits poetic expression. Rather, the related ‘genres’ of Christian and Stoic consolation sanctioned certain privileged modes of responding to personal loss. While some mourners resisted those modes in writing, all found themselves in the shadows of grief, below a ‘horizon of expectations’ illuminated by Christian faith.

2 The Rhetoric of Grief

One funereal text to which we will return in Chapter 3 is the seventeenth-century memorial volume for John Friend.1 In March 1673, John Friend, a gentleman commoner at St Edmund’s Hall, Oxford, died of a fever. His father Nathaniel Friend commemorated his short life in a manuscript anthology which included examples of John’s childhood precocity, school exercises, university disputations, and even signatures clipped from his books and pasted into neat rows. Friend hoped that his careful narrative would prove ‘Exemplary’, composing it as a ‘patterne fit to be imitated by any’ and ‘for the continuation of the remembrance of the passages of his life, thereby to put mee in mind of him as often as I shall read’ it (1–2). But reading ‘may likewise renew my griefe of the untimely loss of him, yet hath it much of Consolation & content’. The more exacting and detailed the commemoration, the more grief it can awaken; and yet such details also fill him with a sense of ‘content and satisfaction’. Hearing of John’s illness, Friend had hastened to Oxford where he was met by his cousin’s wife. ‘[S]hee would not tell mee at the doore but desired mee to come in and then soone gave mee the sad account of his death.’ God had denied his importunate prayers, he confesses: ‘My sorrow was soe great as I cannot express it, although I expected the worst, yet I had some small hope that God had heard my Prayers and this had a little supported mee.’ In an elegy, Friend later writes of his conviction that ‘The Sorrow and the Anguish I am in / Procured is by Reason of my Sinne’ (302). Later others arrived who encourage him not to despair. They ‘did the parts of Loving friends to perswade mee to patience, and submission to the Almighty which to the best of my Power I endeavoured, promising them that I hope they should see 32

The Rhetoric of Grief

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mee show my selfe a man’. These visitors offer standard consolatory advice, and Friend struggles to conform to both religious and gender expectations; but he admits he feels stupefied by grief. ‘I could shed but very few Teares (alas!) either now or at his Funerall.’ He diagnoses this shocked apathy according to the truism that deepest sorrows cannot be spoken, or that ‘Sad hearts, the lesse they seeme, the more they are.’2 Like the painter who veiled Agamemnon’s face because he lacked the artistry to convey such grief, elegists similarly rely on the inexpressibility topos to convey profound feelings through their absence. After the funeral, upon his cousin’s advice Friend returned home to tell his wife the sad tidings. Again, friends and family offer comfort and support. Friend recruits a neighbour to break the news to his wife, before giving her the complete story himself: [As] I came neare home mine owne care and sorrow redoubled in relation to my poore wife and how I should acquaint her with soe heavy a Providence, I therefore called upon the Widdow Margaret Holliser acquainting her with my poore sonnes death and entreated her to goe to our house before and by discourse a little prepare my wife for it which shee honestly did, supposing to her the worst, I in the meantime lingered and about a quarter of an houre after (which was neare 9 at night). I came in bringing both to my wife and to my father the heaviest tidings that ever brought them in my life. (247–8) Though his wife took it ‘exceeding heavily’, ‘the presence and company of my loving Neighbour stood us in good stead’. This company was later supplemented by letters of consolation from friends. Friend’s narrative bears witness to the difficult task of reconciling himself as a Christian, a parent and a man to John’s untimely death. Having explored his own culpability in provoking this providential loss, he calls his son a ‘patterne fit to be imitated by any’. The memorial volume maps that pattern in accordance with the epideictic exemplarity discussed in Chapter 1. It also documents this loss with a specificity not often found in early modern elegy. Revealing how a family could share its private sorrow with the community, Friend testifies to the real comfort he derived from his friends’ consolatory arguments. The ‘loving Neighbour’ enacted a difficult deliberative performance, which probably drew on Biblical aphorisms and Christian sentiments. The letters and verses the Friends received would have drawn on a body of common wisdom, but for Friend their generality did not diminish their

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effectiveness. Indeed, it is perhaps that generality which comforts the bereaved: the development of such conventions itself reveals that loss is common, universal and recoverable. This chapter will examine the community’s models for virtuous grieving, and in particular the guidance provided by Christian and Stoic writers. Just as classical and contemporary literary models shaped epideictic, so did Christian and Stoic morality influence early modern consolatory letters, sermons, poems and diaries. The transactional texts of consolation are presented in Section 2.1. The Christian and Stoic principles of mourning formed a crucial part of elegies’ persuasive tactics, and so could be considered a rhetoric of grief. To understand these principles, Section 2.2 will first look at these philosophical attitudes towards dying, the process which begins with the expiration of an individual and continues through the ritual commemorations of their life. But the consensus of Christian or Stoic writers by no means prevented the bereaved from expressing dissent and the desire to grieve immoderately. In Section 2.3, I focus on how elegies represent the dissipation of grief over time; elegists’ compensation for the absence of Catholic rituals such as the month’s mind or anniversary mass and beliefs such as purgatory are analysed in Section 2.4. This chapter concludes with a close reading of Henry King’s elegies, and on the new consolatory metaphors available to poets in a mercantile age.

2.1 Bitter medicine to treat grief Some bereaved families might have been annoyed rather than solaced by the community counsel which helped the Friends. After the death of his wife Venetia, Sir Kenelm Digby complained to his brother that ‘Ordinary frendes condolementes are but respectes of good manners; and come no deeper then from their tongue and countenance, which they compose as they come in att my doore, and the greatest sorrow they feele is that they are faine to entertaine it in their lookes and fashion.’3 The etiquette of condolence strikes him as hastily prepared (composed ‘att my doore’), an outward comportment of the ‘lookes and fashion’ rather than sincerely felt. In such situations, the consoler urgently needed to appear sincere – also a challenge for elegists. Though diversion was recommended as a treatment for melancholy, Digby refuses the ‘helpe of other pleasing thoughts to drive / from me this one’.4 He dismisses attempts to remind him of his courage in earlier adversities. As for the ‘great examples of constancy derived downe to us from former times’, he considers them


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sourced from ‘stupide and brutall nature’ rather than magnanimity.5 Nothing in the battery of consolation, from displacement, appeals to pride and masculinity, or allusions to classical literature, can dislodge his misery. Aurelian Townshend’s elegy on Venetia Digby records that ‘Doctors to Cordialls; Frendes to Councell fall’ in their treatment of her husband, but to no avail. Townshend promises Venetia that he will deliver her husband in his own ‘unusuall wayes’: with her praise, ‘Which if at first it swell him up with greefe, / At last may Drawe; and minister Releefe’.6 Complimenting Digby’s own medical expertise, Townshend asserts that praise of Venetia might cure the melancholic. Though the first application of this laudatory medicine might ‘swell him up with greefe’ like her decomposing body which swelled three days after her death, it will eventually expel sorrow’s poison. Townshend’s purgative forces Digby to surfeit on the sweetness and beauty of his wife and then draws the bad humour from him. Digby’s treatment followed conventions which can be traced throughout the consolatory discourse of the period. Many consolatory texts follow a familiar pattern of grief shared, then rejected; having commiserated the loss, the writer reminds the bereaved of their spiritual duty to rejoice for their loved one’s ascent to heaven. Elegists borrowed this pattern from the rhetorical formularies discussed in Chapter 1. Katherine Philips begins her poem ‘To my dearest friend, on her greatest loss’ with an offer of condolence which nearly overwhelms the speaker: So when my simpathy for thy dear grief Had brought me near, in hope to give relief, I found my sorrow heightned when so joyn’d, And thine increas’d by being so combin’d.7 From this expression of sympathy, Philips proceeds in careful rhetorical order through praise of the virtues of Charistus ( John Owen), a critique of the age (whose moral laxity he also abhorred), reminders of his love for his family, and finally a recommendation to Lucasia (his wife Anne) not to grieve. Philips’ elegy renders in verse the standard topoi of the consolatory letter, of which Jeremy Taylor’s epistle to John Evelyn on the death of his children in 1657 is a classic example. Taylor begins with a classic commiseration – ‘I cannot tell all my own sorrows without adding to yours’ – but comforts him ‘by telling you, that you have very great

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cause to mourn; so certain it is that grief does propagate as fire does’.8 Grief is catching, and dangerous; it is in the interest of the entire community that it be doused by Christian wisdom. Taylor proceeds to persuasion, reminding Evelyn of his sons’ benefit by death: Evelyn must put aside his own interests, for the boys are now ‘great princes in a strange country’. Taylor exhorts Evelyn to moderate his grief, for ‘It will cost you more trouble to get where they are’; and reminds the grieving father to be strong for his wife’s sake. Notably, in this mid-century letter Taylor’s argument turns on questions of interest and advantage, suggesting the possible encroachment of mercantile metaphors on private emotions, a theme to which we will return later. Like many of the consolatory texts, it is also accretive, building up an argument through multiple topoi: empathy, heavenly rewards, the family’s need for continuity and finally companionship to be confirmed by a visit. No single topos trumps the rest; rather, the letter offers a variety of consolatory resolutions from which the bereaved can select the most effective. Just as Seneca in his letter to Marcia made his rhetorical methods explicit, Taylor does not seek to console Evelyn by stealth. He concludes with the flattering assurance that such exhortations are redundant, given Evelyn’s certain resolution against sorrow. Such compliments to the receiver extend seamlessly from the praise of the dead boys, but also remind Evelyn of his patriarchal duties. The community is watching, he says, and expects an exemplary response to this misfortune. When written on the occasion of an adult’s death, the epideictic section of consolatory letters was generally much more specific and social. Sir John Trelawny, writing to Lady Grace Grenville on the death of her husband Sir Bevill, killed at the Battle of Landsdowne in the second Civil War, expressed his own uncontainable sadness before reminding her of the cruel chances of war, advising her to kiss God’s ‘Rodd Patiently’ and promising their reunion in heaven.9 This succession of sympathy, secular acceptance of fate, Christian dogma, piety and patience was a common rhetorical sequence. Praise of the dead and of herself reminded the reader of the need to keep up appearances, of her own continued engagement with earthly concerns, of her reputation. Such consolatory letters had a certain social cachet. Alice Thornton carefully enumerates the eleven she received on the death of her brother, attesting that she will not forget those ‘many kind and affectionate testimonyes of my Friends’ letters, and consolatory advices, and affectionate letters written to comfort me in my sorrowes’. She even copies into her autobiography the ‘excelent paper of verses’ Sir Christopher Wivill made ‘bewaling’ her brother’s loss.10


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2.2 Stopping the tears of nature: Christian and Stoic traditions Authors of such letters and verses drew on both scripture and classical literature for models of virtuous lives, deaths and mourning. Of all the secular philosophies, Stoicism proved most useful to writers of consolation. Like the ars moriendi, the consolatory formularies showed the influence of Stoicism’s contemptus mundi as well as Pauline precepts. Stoicism seemed to many early modern writers to be the pagan philosophy most conformable to Christianity. The desire to reconcile Stoic wisdom to Christian teaching was an ancient one: a fourth-century correspondence between Seneca and St Paul suggested that Paul had won Seneca over to Christianity.11 Though proved a forgery by Erasmus, this correspondence revealed to Peacham that ‘the vertuous and divine Seneca’ ‘is thought in heart to have beene a Christian’.12 Justus Lipsius, the most important transmitter of Stoic thought to Renaissance Europe, reflects that because of Seneca’s ‘unstayned pietie’, ‘Tertullian and the Auncients call him Ours.’13 Christian writers attempted to assimilate Stoic teaching to Christianity’s moral laws derived from revelation, while asserting that any philosophy derived from natural reason alone would inevitably fall into error.14 Stoic courage and rational control of the passions seemed generally conformable to Christian ethics of dying, but Meric Casaubon admits that the Stoic ideal of apatheia is ‘contrary to flesh and blood’ and ‘grossely and manifestly to oppose nature’. Nonetheless, ‘of all the sects and professions’ never was any ‘of more credit, or with the vulgar more plausible’ than Stoicism.15 Stoicism was amenable to early modern moralists because of its reassuring defences against the timor mortis, defences whose efficacy was confirmed by individual Stoics’ own deaths. Many of these writers acknowledged that Christianity’s opponents could accuse it of a lack of understanding of human instincts and natural weaknesses. But, they argue, if the Stoics can conquer the passions by reason alone, then Christianity can demand equal discipline of the dying. Casaubon justifies the study of Stoicism as reconfirming the legitimacy of Christianity: a pagan emperor, Marcus Aurelius, had shown how ‘mere naturall men’ without the grace and fortitude of Christian faith could overcome natural weaknesses; so Christians armed with the Gospel had no excuse for terror. Admittedly, Christianity urges the faithful throughout their lives to oppose their sinful natures, although ‘most of those things which are reproved in them as sinnes and vices, agree best with their natures’ (3). He wishes that ‘some able and judicious

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man’ would justify the ‘harshnesse’ of Christian precepts. But he hopes that those precepts are ‘mollified and lessened’ given their adoption by the Stoics, people who lacked the Christian’s ‘speciall and supernaturall illumination’ (4). Casaubon exemplifies the tendency of early modern interpreters to misread Seneca as advocating anaesthesia, not apatheia; complete indifference, not equanimity. But unlike the Cynic who refuses to feel any suffering, the Stoic sage learned to overcome the sensation of evil through reason. For the Stoic, dying well means dying gladly, not carelessly. Stoics need not suffer patiently, like Christians, because they could decide logically not to suffer at all; as Seneca advises Lucilius in his letter on ‘the Philosopher’s Mean’, the philosopher must not make a spectacle of his suffering like the Christian martyr. Seneca wryly admits that even the wisest sufferer will feel some physical pain. Whatsoever befalleth me, I will repute it good, but I desire they should be easie and pleasant, and such as should least trouble me in the handling of them.16 His self-deprecating desire to ‘chuse the best and the most pleasing’ is contradicted, however, by Seneca’s own seeking out of suffering, to inure himself to it. Moreover, he argues that exemplary suffering could improve the human condition: as Sherburne translates, Stoics withstand adversities so ‘They might teach others them to undergoe.’17 Seneca recalls a saying of Demetrius the Stoic, which as yet soundeth and tingleth in mine eares; There is nothing, saith he, more unhappie then that man that hath never beene touched with adversitie: for he hath not had the meanes to know himselfe.18 While Stoics did not seek out adversity, they used it to enhance selfknowledge and right reason. In this, their teachings are not altogether opposed to Calvin’s recommendation of suffering as a means to learn patience and obedience; the doctrinal difference lies in the perceived cause of suffering. As Gilles Monsarrat argues, ‘the Stoic philosopher is patient because he knows that what happens is both necessary and right; the Christian is patient because he believes that what happens is the will of a just and loving God’.19 Christians who seek out suffering, who go to death ‘as to a bed / That longing have been sick for’, seem perverse to the Stoic sage, while for Christians the ideal of apatheia made


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the Stoic sage (as Plutarch famously said) more elusive than anything described in poets’ fables. Calvin’s Institutes instructs Christians to eschew Stoic apatheia; they should embrace the frailty of the flesh and suffering as divinely ordained. He describes the Stoic ideal as ‘such a one, as putting off all nature of man, was alike moved in prosperitie and in adversitie, in sorrowfull and joyfull estate, yea such a one as like a stone was mooved with nothing’. However, Calvin declares, ‘we have nothing to do with that stonie Philosophie, which our master and Lord hath condemned not onely by his word but also by his example’.20 He reminds his readers that Christ himself grieved, and wept tears of blood during the Passion. This example, as well as Paul’s direction to the Ephesians (4:26) ‘Be ye angry, and sin not’, proved that the passions should be curbed rather than obliterated.21 As the Jesuit priest Thomas Wright wrote, ‘Passions, are not only, not wholy to be extinguished (as the Stoicks seemed to affirme) but sometimes to be moved, and stirred up for the service of vertue.’22 Passionate grief could promote virtuous introspection and, more importantly, active self-reform. Seneca rebuts the Aristotelian argument for the usefulness of the passions in ‘Of Anger’. Anger which can be controlled is not anger; anger which is uncontrolled overwhelms and infects reason. ‘Improvident and violent’ passions like anger or desperate grief are too dangerous for reason, and cannot be restrained except by an equally violent passion; better then to avoid them completely.23 His critique of anger reappraises what Christian moralists call human nature. ‘Not from men onely ought we to take the maske, but from things themselves, and yeeld them their true and naturall appearance.’24 For Seneca, opinions about phenomena, not the phenomena themselves, prove troubling; perturbatio results from intellectual error, not (as for the Christians) from the innate defects arising from original sin. The Stoic can remedy confusion with reason. Epictetus advises that any ‘distastfull occurrence’ is ‘but a phantasie, and not as it seemes’. The Stoic philosopher must strip that fantasy from the objective world through an ‘exact survey’.25 These recommendations of empirical and rational inquiry unclouded by fear recall Socrates’ memorable argument in the Phaedo that ‘true philosophers are nearly dead’, achieving wisdom by withdrawing their soul from its distracting sensual association with the body.26 The Stoics maintained that death, stripped to its essence, is nothing and therefore unworthy of fear. Quoting Epicurus, Seneca promises that ‘Death either consumeth us, or delivereth us. A better condition exempted from all charge, attendeth those who are delivered by death.

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To those that are consumed, there remaineth nothing more.’27 Death is that non-existence which precedes and follows the sufferings of life; it is ‘a cessation from the impressions of the senses, the tyranny of the passions, the errors of the minde, and the servitude of the body’.28 Death entails neither everlasting joy nor suffering, nor can suffering pursue the sinner beyond death. Seneca debunks ‘those things that make hell terrible unto us’ as ‘but fables’: ‘These are poeticall, and thus have they tormented us with vaine terrors. Death is both the solution and end of all sorrow, beyond which our evils passe not.’ Death ‘which of it selfe is nothing, and reduceth all things to nothing, betrayeth us to no fortune’.29 The soul is freed from its materiality by death, so cannot be consumed by fire or tormented for its earthly wickedness. In its valorisation of human reason and its dismissal of eschatology as myth, Stoicism is manifestly opposed to Christianity. But both belief systems regarded death as an opportunity for introspection and selfknowledge. The explosion of personal vanities and material attachments by Stoical contemplation of death could be incorporated into the Christian consolatory tradition without much difficulty. Comparing Stoicism to Christian ideas about mourning is more difficult, since Scripture’s proscriptions on mourning were so often contended, and many early modern writers seemed to misunderstand Stoicism’s own response to suffering. Seneca (Epistulae Morales LXIII) urged Lucilius to moderate his grief, not eliminate it. Excessive lamentation, he argued, originated in a desire to prove one’s grief to oneself through the spectacle of tears. But many elegists justify their inordinate mourning by comparing it to Stoic coldness. An elegist for Katherine Paston, for example, proclaims Nor do I Stoicall paradoxes hold; For they deliver, that no Wiseman should Give way to griefes, I rather thinke it fitter That none should drinke too deepe of cups so bitter.30 The elegist’s distinction between paradoxical Stoic refusal to give way to grief, and the Christian refusal to drink deep of the cup of bitterness, is far from clear. Attempts to reconcile and to distinguish between Stoic and Christian dogma could lead to more confusion. One manual on mourning observes that grief is ‘true and sincere, when it proceeds from the Sence of my Guilt, and not from that of my Sufferings’.31 R. W., the author of this orthodox Protestant dictum, goes on to say that passions are best when bracketed ‘between two Extreams’. He supports this observation


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with quotations from Seneca, though if grief for friends ‘falls not into Excess, I suppose there is none so much a Stoick as to condemn it’ (85). Similarly, the Senecan emphasis on tolerance supplies Dr Birch in his funeral sermon for Lady Grace Gethin with an argument for avoiding Stoic apathy. ‘A perfect Indolence and Insensibility for the Death of our near Relations, would argue us to be no better than sottish Stoicks.’ But ‘to Mourn without Measure, is no less than to shew our selves dissatisfied with the Providences of God’.32 Many elegists also endorsed such ‘measured’ grief, in their consolatory clichés and in their use of measured prosody. Resistance to proscriptions on mourning are found in many elegies. An anonymous poet wonders why he should ‘grieve, grudge or repine’ about the death of his baby grandson, but finds Biblical precedence for his resistance. ‘David Mourned for his Adultrous Childe / well then May we for one soe Meeke soe Mild’, his ‘legitimate’ grandson.33 As many elegists do, this poet contends with the perception of grief as sinful. In his ‘Elegie on the Lady Marckham’, Donne laments a world eroded by oceans of death, in which ‘even those teares, which should wash sin, are sin’.34 Donne contradicts Calvin’s clarification that moderate mourning is acceptable and natural. Calvin warns that ‘they who misuse this testimony to establish Stoic apatheia, that is, an iron sensibility, among Christians, find nothing of the kind in Paul’s words’.35 The ‘testimony’ to which he refers is Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians 4:13, cited in the Collect of the Order for the Burial of the Dead and taken by many to forbid grieving. Paul warns, ‘I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.’ Paul’s association of excessive grieving with ignorance is significant. It is similar to the Stoic principle which makes moderation and self-discipline requisite for knowledge. Nonetheless, many writers used this verse to assert that mourning for the dead was akin to hopelessness. G. W. Pigman has shown that only a minority of moralists writing in the mid-sixteenth century endorsed Christian-Stoical ‘rigorism’, the condemnation of all sorrow as doubt in the resurrection, though it remained a ‘potent force’ throughout the seventeenth century (27). Certainly, it was a commonplace in elegy to ask ‘Why should we then be Mourners to excess, / As if we griev’d at thy stoln Happiness?’ Tears are ‘More proper for poor Us, who stay behinde / In a bad World’.36 As sermonists frequently argued, the living should lament their own continuance in a corrupt world, not impugn the bliss of the dead. The Protestant denial of purgatory meant that the departed soul should be envisaged as enjoying heavenly glory immediately, even

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before the process of physical decay was complete; as Elizabeth Egerton imagined her daughter Kate whose ‘soule is singing Allelujahs, yet is her sweet body here, seized on by wormes, and turned to dust’.37 Grief then symbolises a selfish desire to recall the dead from their bliss, back to the wretchedness of earthly life. Fear that grief indicated sinful doubt about the certainty of resurrection is evident in John Coprario’s offer after the death of Prince Henry to help readers to weep yourselves heartsick, and ne’er repent: For I will open to your free access The sanctuary of all heaviness: Where men their fill may mourn, and never sin.38 That this ‘sanctuary’ could be provided by music is telling. Readers should accept elegiac expressions as tropes rather than religious ignorance. Like the musical lament, the poem moderates its grief through its artistic status, its use of metre, rhetorical topoi and figurative language. As Francis Quarles wrote, ‘Religion crosses not, but moderates the teares of naturall affection.’39 But his poem refuses moderation: do not ‘tell me, what I know, that he sits crown’d / With endlesse Joy: My sorrow does propound / The joyes that I have lost, not those which he hath found’ (8). The poet, mourning for himself, is again placed at the centre of the poem’s emotional inventio. Quarles rejects the consolatory commonplaces and seeks to ‘ease’ the storms of passion by ‘venting’ them in verse. His poem emphasises its artistic status in opposition to the religious constraints which it resoundingly rejects. John Lesley’s Epithrene shows the complexity of early modern attitudes towards the justification of grief. On the one hand, weeping is described as ‘the last meanes, by which we can helpe Soules desperately wicked’, and thus akin to the intercessory practices sanctioned by the pre-Reformation church; it is also a means to purify our own souls.40 To enter heaven, he writes, ‘wee must passe through the Purgatory of Weeping’ (43). Lesley refutes the rigorism based on the erroneous ‘Doctrine of Stoicall Apathy; That a wise man is not troubled with Griefe and other Passions; All which Christians must have (for Christ himself had them) lest they turne Stoicks’ (25). Christ taught ‘by his owne example to weepe with them that weepe in a moderate manner’, that neither ‘after the manner of mad-men wee should be swallowed up with overmuch sorrow; nor forget Christian Compassion and Humanity toward the dead’. Christ’s deep draught from the cup of bitterness in


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Gethsemane teaches Christians to embrace sorrow. Returning to the discourse of natural law, Lesley asserts that ‘Nature doth in a sort bidde our Teares, though shee barre our immoderation’ (32). Commenting on the Thessalonians verse, Lesley clarifies that ‘Paul reproveth not all Sorrow, but Heathenish, without hope or measure.’ For this reason, weeping is ‘Diabolical, when a friend’s departure into Glory is more lamented, then the departure of Christ from the Soule’ (50). Like Lesley, moralists and consolers often referred to the ‘naturalness’ of grief. But for Christians, human nature is fallen, and provokes an impious attachment to worldly goods and to the material body. In both the Christian and the Stoic tradition, such attachments can be loosened by spiritual and rational reflection. By untangling perception and emotions from the truth, the saint or sage can understand the necessity of grief. As Chapter 6 will show, this alignment of grief and timor mortis along an axis that ran from natural materiality to rational spirituality also conforms to a gendering of mourning which had persisted since classical times.

2.3 Resisting Christian and Stoic consolation Lesley’s text illustrates the ambivalence of early modern regulation of grief. The bereaved were required to engage in intense self-examination, ensuring that this grief is the right grief. Added urgency comes from the belief that sinful or selfish mourning could invoke punishment – and not just for the individual. Both Christian providentialism and pagan nemesis foretell that communities will be punished for the transgressions of their members. As Agata Preis-Smith has argued with reference to New England Puritan elegy, the ideal of personal introspection reinforced the duty of a ‘communal, collective self’ to purify itself through moral vigilance. The alternative was obliteration.41 Such fears of providential punishment were not confined to Puritan New England, however. The most dramatic exploration of collective guilt, Chapter 4 will show, can be found in funeral elegies of the Civil War and Restoration. Such guilt and fear of punishment could magnify the trauma of individual loss. Lettice, Lady Falkland, interpreted the death of her husband Lucius Cary as ‘a loud call from heaven, to a further proficiency in piety and vitue’. Falkland was memorably portrayed in Edward Hyde’s History of the Rebellion and Abraham Cowley’s Civil War as a hero, a man ‘whose Knowledge did containe, / All that the Apple promis’d us in vaine.’ Where his wife feared that her grief was an expression of her own personal sinfulness, Cowley proclaims that Falkland’s death exiled virtue

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from Britain. Consequently ‘Our publick greife [is] of private Interest.’ The nation is implicated in Falkland’s fall, and must share its public grief, just as Falkland’s ‘greife’ for Britain, his enemies and his king was ‘publick’.42 Cowley’s invocation of national guilt for Falkland’s death is typical of elegies in this period. It is instructive, however, to compare it to Lettice’s own reaction, as documented (and likely manipulated) by her minister. Lettice confesses that ‘she fears [Falkland’s death] may be a punishment also upon her, for some sin, or other, and therfore strictly examines her self, and ransacks every corner of her heart, to find out wherein she had provoked God to lay this great affliction on her’. For Lettice, her husband’s death is not the consequence of national political disaster, but of her own moral failures. When her son Lorenzo died soon after, ‘she fears being ground to powder. Now she weeps and mourns all the day long, and at night [ ] and weeping, saith, ah! this immoderate sorrow must be repented of, these tears wept over again.’ Lettice’s ‘quick sense of displeasing God’ allays the ‘vehemency’ of her mourning. Tossed between guilt and grief, she sought the advice of her minister, who ‘with his medicinal councel and direction, by Gods help, cured this her distemper’. This repressed grief returned, and Lettice suffered some ‘relapses’ into ‘fierceness and rage’. She feared that her resurgent grief proved her repentance was dishonest.43 In her anxious and repressive response to grief, Lettice struggled to reconcile herself to her Christian beliefs.44 Elegists who console the bereaved with explanations of divine justice can seem to lack sympathy. Clement Barksdale’s verses presented ‘to the imitation of yong Scholars’ include a poem ‘To Mris. Jane Commelin, upon the birth of her second Daughter, at the buriall of the first.’ Barskdale explains that her first daughter ‘God took from you, for Correction / Of your excessive love’, and warns her against repeating that mistake.45 Such advice shows that elegists thought of grief as a sickness, a time of spiritual vulnerability, when the bereaved must be inoculated against further losses. Like Townshend with his elegiac cordials, and Falkland’s minister with his ‘medicinal councel’, consolers claim the authority of rational scientists to treat the malady of grief. While Stoicism and Christianity offered models for controlling the extremities of sorrow, both philosophies also noted that bereavement could induce spiritual temptation. Hannah Allen remarked that with the death of her husband, ‘I began to fall into a deep melancholy, and no sooner did this black humour begin to darken my soul, but the devil set on with his former temptations.’46 The Scottish Presbyterian Alexander Brodie notes in 1665 that God ‘smyths me in my beloud Wyfe, the delight of my eys’.


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Quhil I was sadli shaken and broken under this, I askd at the Lord iff he could strick ani mor, for I did not esteem ani thing behind. He told me he could strick with sorer rods yet then I had felt: wherupon I was still, and onli moand, and was content to denud my self of earthlie joy. I saw flowds of temptation breaking in[.]47 To staunch these floods of temptation, Brodie turned to scripture. Similarly, on the death of Mary, one of her two surviving children out of eleven, Lady Elizabeth Walker recorded that ‘the extremity of my Affection forced me into the Chamber where she then lay, a cold piece of Clay: I there poured out my Soul to God in Prayer’. Reminding herself of God’s ‘signal Mercies’, she added that ‘Though he denied me my vehement Desires, and wrestlings with him in the time of her Sickness, for her longer continuance with me in this World, the Lord abundantly made up, and compensated my Loss.’48 Meditating on the body which lay in a liminal state ‘in the House’ awaiting burial, Walker admits that she had begged God to spare her daughter, and fears that her ‘wrestling’ incurred further punishment. Her Bible falls open to Habakkuk 1:12, a passage which would continue to provide solace throughout her life: ‘Art thou not from everlasting, O LORD my God, mine Holy One? we shall not die. O LORD, thou hast ordained them for judgment; and, O mighty God, thou hast established them for correction.’ While confirming that her daughter ‘shall not die’ but be resurrected in heaven, this verse also encourages Walker to consider herself ‘judged’ and ‘corrected’. When some months later she prayed for the recovery of her last child Elizabeth, she chastises herself that ‘I was too absolute with God for her Life, all the time of her Sickness, without express Submission to his Will’, and so was consequently punished with another death (108). Similarly, Alice Thornton sought Scriptural succour in Isaiah, the book which contributed so many phrases to epitaphs and consolatory discourse, and which seemed to legitimise grieving: ‘I dare not, I will not repine at this chastisement of the Lord, though it may seeme never soe troublesome to part with my suckeing childe of my wombe, but say, Good is the will of the Lord.’49 Though she claims not to resent the death of her daughter Joyce, the repressed emotion surfaces in her resoundingly negative syntax. The bereaved also dealt with spiritual temptation by accentuating the difference between their physical and emotional states, and the spiritual or rational certainty they strove for as Christians. Elizabeth Egerton, the Countess of Bridgewater, implored God to deliver her daughter ‘Franck’ from sickness, insisting that nothing was impossible for prayer. ‘Lay not

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my sinnes to her charge, neither punish me ô Lord in takeing her from me’, she wrote.50 Her next prayer, when she falls pregnant, asks God to ‘lay not thy heavy hand of Justice, and affliction on me, in takeing away my Children in their youth’ including ‘my last Babe Frances’ (24v ). She also grapples with the death of her son, begging God, let me not fall to wish I never had borne it, rather then to part with it; Loise it I cannot say, if I be a Christian, though that word is often pronounced by nature’s passion in this world, for in these expressions nature overflowes it selfe, into a Heathenish thought. (115) Resisting ‘a Heathenish thought’, her recourse to nature and custom distributes the blame for her weakness to ‘this world’. She recognises that God loaned her her son; so ‘why should I wish my Babe had not beene, rather than to dye?’ (117v ). The ensuing elegy ‘On my Boy Henry’ shows she has not yet resolved her contradictory feelings of grief and piety. At once, she attests that ‘my Heart and Soule sigh for to see’ the dead infant, ‘Nor can I think of any thought, but greeve’. However, she concludes that Henry is ‘happy’ in heaven, and so ‘I mourne not for thy Birth, nor Cry’ (119), Christian reason triumphing over the emotions admitted only a few lines earlier. Egerton does not demonstrate the transformation of her grief into happiness in her poem. She denies her sorrow literally, but releases it in the language of irrepressible sighs. Egerton confesses her womanly weakness and the need to come to terms with her losses gradually. She can evade proscriptions on grief by opposing the gestures and physical residues of grief to spiritual acceptance. This siting of despair in the weakness of the female body is common to many women writers in this period. Like Egerton, Mary Carey depends on Scriptural precedent to justify a sorrow which is, she says, magnified by the weakness of her pregnant body. In a dialogue between the soul and the body, Carey balances her own anxieties about legitimate grief with Biblical citation. The Body explains to the Soul that she mourns because ‘the Lord hath taken from me a Son, a beloved Son, an onely Son, an onely Child, the last of three, and it must needs affect me’. Citing Isaiah 49:15 and Zechariah 12:10 as justification, she adds ‘besides I am now neare the time of my Travell, and am very weake, faint, sickly, fearefull, pained, apprehending much sufferings before me, if not Death it selfe, the King of Terrours’.51 The proximity of death causes the Body to imagine how ‘I must lye in grave, rot, putrifie, and have no enjoyment untill our re-uniting.’ Her physical


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weakness causes her to identify with the corpse; as she lies in, waiting for what may be her own death, so the corpse awaits its resurrection. In response, the Soul offers a compendium of traditional consolations from Psalms and Lamentations, and concludes with a profession of faith. The dialogue ends with Carey’s own voice confessing ambivalently ‘I have now buried foure Sons, and a Daughter; God hath my all of Children, I have his all [beloved Christ] a sweet Change; in greatest Sorrowes, content, and happy.’ This dialogue provides spiritual resolution through a re-enactment of the struggle between grief, fear, consolation and hope, a struggle repressed in Egerton’s poem. Carey also uses the dialogue form to give equal weight to her physical, consuming grief and to reconciliation.

2.4 Temporality and decay A poem unfolds in the time of its reading, conveying thereby the temporal process of consolation. Such performances of healing and resolutions of spiritual dissonance make elegy a highly dramatic form. Carey’s use of dialogue is one way of dramatising the conflicting demands of Christian and maternal love. As Victoria Kahn argues, ‘dialogue and other instances of deliberative rhetoric are encomia of the will: the very fact of written debate is taken to be evidence of the reader’s ability to respond, and thus of the existence of free will and the genuine possibility of rhetorical persuasion’.52 Elegiac ‘encomia of the will’ abound. In a heartfelt address to his son George, who died in France in 1632, Sir John Oglander asks why he and his wife could not have had one last ‘comfortable, uncomfortable visit, that our trembling legs and shaking knees might have striven to have ministered some comfort to thy languishing body, and our fainting hands have closed up thy dying eyes, and so performed our last loves in due solemnisation of thy obsequies’. He imagines his son answering his ‘Dear Parents’: ‘could I have but entreated inexorable Death to have forborne his fatal stroke but for one week, or the Great Judge to have adjourned His irrevocable sentence or, at least, to have reprieved me for 4 days’, they might have been reunited.53 This dialogue allows Oglander to express his dejection, and to console himself. That his son speaks this consolation confirms that George is deserving of heaven. This disembodied voice reminds the grieving father of his responsibilities within the laws of Christian temperance. A particularly dramatic example of elegy documenting the process of diminishing grief is an autograph verse miscellany by William Tipping. This manuscript includes a large number of elegies for his young wife

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Hess, including one ‘putt on her Brest in her Coffin’.54 Tipping’s elegies are not just unrestrained: in some instances they verge on idolatry. Rather than regarding the private sphere as a place for Protestant introspection, Tipping claims repeatedly that it guards him against censure; who can judge him, when ‘the heart of man a secrett is’. He recalls ‘How oft Times I did kiss my deere / when dead I lovd thee soe’ (25v ). Like Oglander, he expresses his grief as a desire to tend to the dead body of his wife. His poem replaces the physical care he can no longer provide. I covetted to die And to bee buried with thee that I by Thee might Lie. with waters well perfumd I washt thy hands and face my deere fower mornings after thou wast dead Thee kiss could not forbeare. Till in a Coffin thou wast Layd And Nayled up from mee. Tipping’s intimate attention to her body, including washing it with perfumed waters, also shows his willingness to transgress the gendered division of labour which normally assigns these duties to female relatives and workers. This may be another reason for his keeping these poems ‘secret’: as Chapter 6 will demonstrate, such excessive grief and its physical expression would have been perceived as effeminising. Tipping’s poems are compulsively repetitive. They temporarily restore intimacy through an obsessive return to the site of loss. Peter Sacks describes such ritualistic repetition as creating ‘a sense of continuity, an unbroken pattern’ opposed ‘to the extreme discontinuity of death’. By poetic repetition Tipping forestalls the final ‘closure’ of the coffin. In addition to being a psychological response to trauma, repetition allows the unconscious mind to re-encounter loss until it can be accepted, and so is a common feature of funerary ritual in many cultures.55 The traditional Greek lament, as Margaret Alexiou points out, consisted of women’s reiterated cries, statements of death and appeals by name to the dead; ‘its function was to rouse the spirit of the dead and establish contact’.56 According to Christian eschatology, such contact was possible only by the death of the living partner. As Donne proposes in his First Anniversarie, Elizabeth Drury’s death offers moral gain ‘since now no other way there is / But goodnes, to see her, whom all would see, / All must endevour to be good as shee.’57 This imitation of goodness


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in order to secure the reward of a reunion in heaven does not preoccupy Tipping, however. He repeatedly fantasises about embracing his wife, but declares that he wants to go to heaven to find her, not to glorify God. His passionate fidelity seems to have been matched by Hess herself. Her devotion to William nearly prevents her from achieving the good and pious death that could save her a place in heaven. Tipping is ‘Ashamed to Tell’ how Shee said as mee, her verie soule Shee did not Love soe well. I Askt her If that Christ shee Lovd Could freely to him Goe mee Answere made shee freely Could If Ide Goe with her too. (13–14v ) This is hardly the stalwart confession of faith required by Protestant ars moriendi. By the time he has accepted Hess’s death, Tipping confesses that he ‘was an Idolater / as Greate as ere was knowne’, admitting To whom my soule did then belonge was hard for mee to knowe for with my God whom I now love I little had to doe[.] (27) Tipping’s verses formally depict the desire to cling to grief, to reject Christian consolation. Long and disorganised, they are driven endlessly forward not according to an obvious rhetorical plan, but through fear of their own cessation – that full stop which is the poem’s own death. These repetitive, haphazard quatrains themselves offer a kind of consolation, as they express a forbidden lament and forestall acceptance of his wife’s untimely passing. What Tipping’s contemporaries would see as bad poetic form and the rejection of accepted rhetorical conventions succeeds instead in articulating a heterodox emotional and spiritual condition. As we have seen, the recusant Kenelm Digby famously resisted Christian rigorist prohibitions on grief in verse, letters, religious meditations, commissioned art and monumental sculpture, and even his own deportment. Two days after the death of his beloved Venetia, he ‘caused her

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face to be moulded of by an excellent Master, to have it by that afterwardes painted as she lay dead and cast in metall’. (That master is likely to have been Van Dyck, who painted a portrait of Venetia on her deathbed.) Digby wishes to preserve his wife’s beauty, and to extend the moment of her death until he can accept it: ‘she looked (if it were possible) with more lovelinesse then while she lived; onely wannesse had defloured the sprightfulnesse of her beauty: but no sinking or smelling or contortion or falling of the lippes appeared in her face to the very last’.58 Digby’s fixation on the physical body extends morbidly to her preservation from ‘sinking and smelling’. For this Catholic widower, the absence of natural corruption might also have signified the beatification of a saintly body. But like Tipping, Digby’s idolisation of his wife seems more likely to be determined by romantic love than by Catholic hagiography. His elegiac compositions draw on a tradition of erotic poetry such as John Donne’s, which venerates the physical body by foregrounding its mortality, using a discourse of relic worship and the cult of the saints. These devotions also contradict the rumours that Digby himself had been an accessory to Venetia’s death. John Aubrey reports that ‘to avoyd envy and scandall, he retired in to Gresham = colledge at London’, where he wore ‘a long mourning cloake, a high crowned hatt, his beard unshorne, look’t like a Hermite, as signes of sorrowe for his beloved wife’. Digby maintained this state of mourning for two or three years. The hermit’s clothes and unshaven beard are visible physical markers of an interior state of deep grief. They may also have been Digby’s own penitential devices. But for what did he repent? It seems unlikely that he poisoned his wife. Rather, when he first discovered Venetia dead, Digby says he ‘knelt downe by her, and with wordes as broken as my thoughts, could not choose but pray to her, her lookes were so like an Angell’. He repeats to his brother that ‘I had much adoe to keepe my selfe from kneeling downe to her’ (141–3). Though later in a letter to his sons he described these ecstasies of grief as shameful, his reasons were pointedly not religious: he was ashamed of ‘my impotency in bearing affliction when her soddaine death gave me att unawares so furious an assault’. He worries ‘that the world should take notice that he whome she loved so much is composed of so much weaknesse’ (122). His physical and emotional consumption by love had caused him to forget himself as a man. But Digby continued to regard Venetia as ‘designed for my salvation: to sett me on fire with her lovelinesse and then to go to a place whither by goodnessee and vertue onely I can come to see her againe’. His wife’s physical loveliness, and his sexual desire for


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her, motivates him to seek salvation, so that they can be reunited in heaven. Digby’s own elegies for his wife include what one of his critics described as ‘a macabre fantasy about the disintegration’ of her body in the grave. ‘You wormes (my rivalls) whiles she was alive’ addresses the creatures who now have a freedom for which ‘many thousands [ ] did strive’ in her life: to penetrate her body and wear ‘unseemely holes in her soft skinne’.59 Morbid sexual curiosity and possessiveness animate the poem, as well perhaps as an echo of the anxiety caused by Venetia’s reputation: as the mistress of Lord Sackville, she had been known in her ‘first and unripe youth’ for ‘an easinesse’ of chastity (123). Digby commands the worms to ‘taste of her tender body’, but not to ‘deface’ her. They may only chew holes in her ears, ‘carve’ a cross on her breast and ‘grave’ this epitaph on her forehead: ‘Living, she was fayre, yong, and full of witt / Dead all her faults are in her forehead writ.’ Digby imagines stamping his beloved’s body, preserved from physical corruption, with his own epigram. This certainly heterodox meditation shows how difficult he found it reconciling himself to grief. In another ‘dolefull elegie’, he compares himself to ‘the damn’d tormented soules in hell’ who swell with horror, ‘enrag’d ’gainst God’: ‘i now growne desperate / curse my fate / and pray / all day / to loose the life i hate.’60 Perhaps recollecting Donne’s poems ‘The Extasie’ and ‘Valediction forbidding Mourning’, Digby rejects as ‘false’ the consolation of books which teach ‘that absence makes betweene two soules no breach’. For ‘our bodie doth so clog our minde’ that judgement relies on ‘the corp’orall senses’ to ‘leade the way’. The corporal senses are certainly active in ‘You wormes (my rivalls)’, and in the long description of Venetia’s physical appearance in his letters. Digby’s commemorative writings show a mind ‘clogged’ with physical preoccupations, using the elegiac form to meditate on the decomposition of a body from its ideal and desirable condition in life to a repulsive corpse inscribed with the husband’s mark.

2.5 Changing customs: From purgatory to purgation Digby’s fixation on the body mouldering in its casket seems symptomatic of dangerous melancholy. But previous to the Reformation that fixation could have been supported by the Catholic meditative tradition and by the Catholic rituals which commemorated the gradual detachment of the dead from the space of the living. Both elegies and mortuary rituals expand the instance of death and mourning into a process, an

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unfolding in time of shock, pain and finally reconciliation with God. This process has a material parallel in the body’s decomposition. Robert Hertz described funerary rites as marking the stages of the transformation of the dead into a spirit with new powers and a new status. Rather than ‘an instantaneous destruction of an individual’s life, death is to be seen as a social event, the starting point of a ceremonial process by which the dead person becomes an ancestor’.61 From spiritual preparation for death through the (sometimes multiple) interments of the corpse, this process is accompanied by a relaxing of the bond between the body and the spirit, and between the survivors and the dead. Many cultures celebrate that relaxation of bonds ritually. As Mircea Eliade explains, ‘the onset of physiological death is only the signal that a new set of ritual operations must be accomplished in order to create the new identity of the deceased’.62 The month’s mind, an anniversary mass, was one Catholic ceremony which punctuated the process of death. Although the Reformation did away with this and other mortuary observances, the need which they served persisted, as is apparent in Donne’s Anniversaries, or Henry King’s ‘The Anniverse. An Elegy’. Hester Pulter also composed an anniversary poem, on revisiting her daughter’s grave two years after her death; ‘Yet still my heart is overwhelm’d with griefe / And tears (helas) gives Sorrow, noe reliefe’. Pulter uses seasonal blossoms as an organic timepiece to commemorate the anniversary. Twice hath the earth Thrown Cloris Mantle by Imbroidered or’e with Curious Tapestry And twice hath seem’d to mourn unto our sight Like Jewes, or Chinesses in snowey white[.]63 The references to other cultures’ funerary customs voice a desire to reach for consolation beyond her own culture’s limits. With the commonplace about cruel fate blasting young life in the bud, Pulter draws on pastoral elegy, and its traditional use of the seasonal cycle as symbol of natural decay and rebirth.64 This secular consolation also regularly features in elegies for dead women and children such as Anne Bradstreet’s poem ‘In memory of my dear grand-child Anne Bradstreet’. Here, selfrecrimination mixes with the pain of loss, though she tries to cheer her ‘throbbing heart’ with thoughts of the child’s bliss. Bradstreet criticises her own grief for the child: ‘I knew she was but as a withering flour,’ so ‘More fool then I to look on that was lent, / As if mine own, when


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thus impermanent.’65 In another poem in memory of her grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, Bradstreet admits that By nature Trees do rot when they are grown. And plumbs and Apples throughly ripe do fall, And Corn and grass are in their season mown, And time brings down what is both strong and tall. But the withering of ‘buds new blown’ ‘Is by his hand alone that guides nature and fate’ (186). The death of her young grandchild is not natural, but providential. This does not remove the responsibility to accept it, of course; but it does provide an alternate, natural scheme where the toddler’s death would not make sense. Prevented by their gender or age from acquiring a complete social persona, women and children are re-assimilated to their natural origins by a pastoral discourse which confirms the dialectical relationship between nature and culture. But that discourse can also permit the poet to question unseasonal losses. It is often claimed that by refuting the doctrine of purgatory, the Reformation denied mourners the consolations of assisting the dead and of sharing space with them.66 Peter Marshall writes that ‘the doctrinal rejection of purgatory and intercessory prayers translated in cultural terms into a conscious abrogation of the hold of the past, a heedlessness of the wishes of dead ancestors, and a prioritization of resources towards meeting the needs of this world rather than the next’.67 If this is so, then secular forms of commemoration such as the elegy offer a hold on the past. Despite the reformations by the Church of England, early modern folk traditions maintained a version of the idea of purgatory. Aubrey recorded the ‘vulgar’ belief in Yorkshire ‘that after the person’s death, the Soule went over the Whinny-moore, and till about 1624 at the Funerall a woman came [like the Prœfica] and sang this following Song, “This ean night” ’ or the Lykewake Dirge.68 The mortuary customs observed by Aubrey, such as soul cakes, the sin eater and the offertory, incorporate rituals of hospitality, propitiation and the symbolic re-incorporation of the physical remnants of the dead person which are common to many religious traditions. For Maurice Bloch, such rituals represent the belief that ‘the end of the person need not be the end of the constituents themselves’, that the parts of the individual might survive the death of individuality, and that ties between both living and dead individuals are not merely social, but material: they consist of bones, dust and shared biological matter.69 Like purgatory, these rituals satisfy needs to acknowledge the absence of

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the person and the continued presence of his or her physical remains. Catholic customs such as the month’s mind, which marked the end of the ‘trigintal’ period when the soul was believed to linger near the grave, gave institutional recognition to those needs.70 Though the Reformation disallowed the endowment of masses and other good works designed to relieve the dead from purgatory, these needs resulted in an extended legacy for the ‘cult of the living in the service of the dead’.71 Requiem masses and other traditional intercessory practices and ‘superstitious’ observances such as ‘superfluous’ bell-ringing, burning candles in daylight, praying at crossroads and the use of ‘metwands or memories of idolatry at burials’ were prohibited.72 Funeral ceremonies had been ‘so farre abused, partly by the supersticious blyndnes of the rude and unlearned’ and by the thirst of the learned for ‘lucre’, according to Cranmer, that they had to be wholly extirpated.73 But many remained; and those mortuary practices which could be interpreted within a Protestant framework proved especially durable. When in 1665 Alexander Brodie was ‘kneeling down to publick prayer in the familie, the bell rang in at the window which was accompanying John Willand’s corps. This I desir’d to remark, and made some use of it in the exercyse’.74 Brodie reframes a Papist custom as an opportunity for Protestant introspection. Though reflecting on death was morally edifying, dwelling on grief as an artistic process could be hazardous. Robert Burton warns that the imagination, ‘in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continuall and strong meditation’, can at last produce ‘reall effects’ and physical maladies.75 Nonetheless, post-Reformation elegists like Pulter used literary rituals and seasonal anniversaries to expand grief into a process of sorrow, acceptance and reconciliation. That process was facilitated by the use of rhyme and metre. Rhyme requires time: time to observe decorum and order the imagination, to postulate symmetries and conjunctions between apparently disparate ideas. It can restrain inordinate passions; for Griefe is a passion, and all passions must Confined be, unto a measure just, Lest they like swelling spring-tides overthrow The bankes of Reason, and the same oreflow.76 The rationality of measured, prosodic language could restrain the excesses of passionate sorrow. An elegy by Francis Atkins for his friend


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George Rodney describes the poet as ‘thunder-struck in heart, in tongue, in brow’, his thoughts ‘too untuned then to Chime’ and feet ‘too fetter’d then to dance in rime’. The composition was thus delayed until 1652, the first anniversary of Rodney’s death, for ‘True mourners must have time e’re they can speake’ much less versify.77 Calling attention to the passage of time required not only to produce a text, but also to distance himself from grief, Atkins exemplifies his recuperation by his ability eventually to ‘dance in rime’. In other words, prosody restrains the superabundant passions and imagination by its requirement of time. While poetry allows writers like William Tipping to indulge in melancholic repetition, it also organises and recalibrates time which can seem disordered by death. To conclude this chapter, I will look at the second most famous writer of post-Reformation ‘Anniversary’ poems: Henry King. Like Donne’s Anniversaries, King’s elegies explore death as a process not through reformed or symbolic versions of Catholic rituals, but through the language of mathematics. Chapter 1 has shown how commercial metaphors intrude on elegies as measures of sincerity; for King, they offer a means of disciplining grief. But where for Donne ‘even griefe is without proportion’ because Elizabeth Drury, the soul of beauty and proportion, is dead, and the ‘new Philosophy cals all in doubt’, King uses this vocabulary as a way of giving proportion to grief and his sense of passing time. He explores the time of dying and grieving not by reappropriating religious observances, but by application to the communal disciplines of mathematics and economics.

2.6 Henry King: Rationalising death King was not alone in using the language of mathematics and mercantilism to express loss. Affection is regularly described as an expression of the survivors’ ‘interest’ in the dead, while the soul is God’s possession, a loan which may be recalled at any time. Francis Quarles warns Lady Joanna Barington that ‘moderate teares are let upon the score of naturall affection, which claimes such an Interest in Man, that God is not pleasd to strive with flesh for some infirmities’.78 The economics of this consolation are more explicit in Quarles’ exhortation to Lady Barington to submit to God’s will. The Ocean-ploughing Merchant, having lost In stormy Seas, that wealth he could not hold, Findes but poore comfort, to recount and boast,

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How rich that Diamond was; how fine that Gold; But, in his secret thoughts, he does bewaile His Merchandize in grosse; He grieves not by Retayle. (A4v ) Quarles’ mercantile metaphor suggests that human life has an abstract value. Similar tropes were used to persuade grieving parents that children can also be exchanged for each other. Barksdale urges Jane Commelin to consider her subsequent children as good trades for the ones she has lost. God corrects her surplus attachment to her children by sacrificing them, but gives her a newborn in ‘recompence’. ‘Nor need you call this child another name; / But fansy it to be the very same.’79 Here, the custom of reusing the same name – cited by Lawrence Stone as evidence of parents’ lack of attachment to their children – can show Commelin’s gratitude to God. Similarly, Ann Fanshawe recorded that in 1654 she ‘was delivered of a daughter whom we named Ann, to keep in remembrance her dear sister which we had newly lost’.80 Bereaved parents often turn to the idea of ‘recompense’ themselves. Mary Carey thanks God for the two of her seven children to survive: ‘Praisd be his name; thes tow’s [sic] full Compensation: / For all thats gone; and yet in Expectation.’81 To select such economic metaphors for elegy may seem heartless, but they can be rhetorically efficient. They impose the logic and discipline of the merchant’s profit and loss equations on excessive passions. This use of the metaphor is exemplified by Henry King’s profound elegies for his wife Anne, who was buried 5 January 1624. These poems repeatedly invoke mercantile logic in their attempts to make grief conform to the rules of reason. In his ‘Anniverse’, written when Anne had ‘bin six yeares dead’, he wonders How happy were mankind, if Death’s strict Lawes Consum’d our Lamentations like the Cause! Or that our grief, turning to dust, might end With the dissolved body of a friend!82 Grief should be consumed as quickly as the decaying body. Its persistence is a consequence of the fall: grief is ‘Life’s Vocation’, the defining characteristic of the human condition, and ‘only hee / Is Nature’s Trueborne Child, who summes his yeares / (Like mee) with no Arithmetick, but Teares’ (73). The quantification of sorrow not only rationalises psychological time; it also proves the self-awareness of a ‘true-born


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child’ of nature who takes ‘possession of the earth’, unlike the deluded ‘adopted sons’ of Fortune. King’s elegy shares with Donne’s Anniversaries an insight into the way bereavement disturbs the perception of time. Donne writes on Elizabeth Drury that ‘Some months she hath beene dead (but being dead, / Measures of times are all determined)’. After the cataclysmic event of death, all sense of duration is meaningless, unpunctuated by significance. In ‘An Exequy To his Matchlesse never to be forgotten Freind’, King looks for consolation to the regular return of the sun, which foretells Anne’s resurrection. His own individual sense of time has been disoriented, and now goes ‘Backward and most præposterous’, not taking him towards their reunion but to a melancholic dwelling on the past. Time’s slow passage oppresses him; days seem like years, just as they do to souls in purgatory.83 He realises, How lazily Time creepes about To one that mournes: This, only This My Exercise and bus’nes is: So I compute the weary howres With Sighes dissolved into Showres. (69) King’s sole ‘exercise and business’ is the computation of ‘weary hours’, with his sighs and tears as the ticking of his grief’s lazy clock, creeping ‘about’ or around the clockface. The use of the word ‘business’ in this context of weary time-filling is not accidental. A. J. Gurevich suggests that mechanisms for measuring time developed in the context of urban merchant activity, and represented a form of emancipation from the authority of the Church and its liturgical time. As cyclical time gave way to linear, ‘man for the first time discovered that time, whose passing he had noted only in relation to events, did not cease even in the absence of events’.84 It therefore became important to save time for productivity; time began to ‘impose its rhythm on [men], forcing them to act more quickly, to hurry, not to allow the moment to escape’. Gurevich draws on Jacques Le Goff’s argument that medieval time had been dominated by the Church, by ‘liturgical time, calendar time, the daily routine marked by the ringing of bells, rural time, largely determined by natural rhythms but punctuated by partially Christianized annual rites’.85 Purgatory itself was imagined as a spatial realm governed by the passage of time.86

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Gurevich’s provocative descriptions of post-medieval time – as autonomous, neutral, ‘experienced independently of its real objectrelated content’, a ‘pure categorical form’ of duration – resonate with King’s own relation of his experience of time during this period of mourning. His poem refers to time’s autonomy, its lack of regard for his wishes, and its ability to impose its own lagging rhythms on him. King wishes to hurry it onwards, to ‘empty’ it of content so that it matches his ‘empty hopes’: woe is mee! the longest date Too narrowe is to calculate These empty hopes. (69–70) He complains that, after Anne’s death, time marches on inexorably, void of events which might tie his own life to the cycle of nature. He recalls that Anne ‘scarce hadst seene so many Yeeres / As Day tells Howres’: her lifetime was so brief as to be analogous to the cycle of the day; but he lives out an eternity in her absence. He must await the apocalypse for ‘a glimpse of Thee’: that day ‘Which shall the Earth to cinders doome, / And a fierce Feaver must calcine / The Body of this World, like Thine’. This Donnean paradox, that the world will be cleansed and burnt to cinders by a fire similar to the fever which killed her, releases him to imagine the ecstasies of reunion: ‘That fitt of Fire / Once off, our Bodyes shall aspire / To our Soules’ blisse’. While the bliss of the body will begin with its freedom from illness, it ends in erotic rapture. Like Donne in the Latin epitaph for his Ann (‘Maritus olim charae charus / Cineribus cineres spondet suos / Nouo matrimonio’), King consigns Anne to a new marriage with the grave. Meanwhile, heaven has decreed that King be bound ‘Living to a Coarse, / And I must slowly wast’. This ghoulish marriage to a rotting body reminds him of his own physical decay. King addresses the grave, switching from these meditations on time to the legal lexis of property ownership. His admission of guilt that he ‘could not keep’ Anne alive becomes a proud declaration of independence: if heaven wills that ‘I might not call / Hir longer Mine’, so King shall resign to the grave all ‘My short liv’d right and Interest’ in her. This boon is surrendered ‘With a most free and bounteous grief’. He pays his debt to the grave and to God who leant Anne to him, but his grief is a free gift, the surplus added to the ‘right and interest’ he relinquishes by necessity. The indebtedness which Marcel


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Mauss argues characterises the recipient of a gift is now imposed on the grave: King is in the position to demand something in return. His request is peculiar. He wants an account of Anne’s physical ‘parcels’ to be kept in the Doomsday book, here a kind of apocalyptic accountant’s register. See that thou make thy reck’ning streight, And yeeld Hir back againe by weight; For thou must Auditt on thy trust Each Grane and Atome of this Dust[.] Fearing the dispersal of his wife’s precious remains, King uses the language of ‘audits’ and ‘reckoning’ to demand the grave be an honourable trustee of her ‘grains and atoms’. Proprietary references recur in another, related elegy on ‘two Children dying of one Disease, and buryed in one Grave’. These children are unable to ‘number many Yeeres / In their Account’: life becomes an account, a saving-up of goodness to spend at the judgement day. The speaker ‘discharges’ his debt of grief with the meagre consolation that ‘Heav’n hath decreed you ne’re shall cost mee more’: he pays out sorrow in the place of a dowry. In the ‘Exequy’, mercantile and financial language eventually displaces his sentimental interiority. Struck by the indifference of the universe to his tears, King ironically adopts the matter-of-fact terms of commodity exchange to signal his acceptance of defeat. Space is persistently related to time in these poems. King imagines time’s passage as a journey through space requiring his own physical movement, travelling towards his wife. This poetic figuration of time as space replaces the space of duration previously represented by purgatory, which Le Goff has called a ‘spatialization’ of the ritualistic penitential system of the Church. In King’s words, Each Minute is a short Degree And e’ry Howre a stepp towards Thee. At Night when I betake to rest, Next Morne I rise neerer my West[.] (71) Rejecting the empty, autonomous linear time which has no sympathy for him, King seeks solace in the diurnal cycle which marches him towards his own death. That cycle is complemented by the rhythms

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of his body itself: ‘But hark! My Pulse, like a soft Drum / Beates my Approach, Tells Thee I come’. The pulse is the body’s timer, ticking out the remnants of life, and also the drum which signals the advancing army, conquering time. The steady beat of his heart reminds him of his own mortality and his creaturely connection to nature. Modulated by feeling and by the rhythms of breathing which also govern prosody, the noise of his pulse – that is, of his own approaching death – will finally stop, and then the spirit will transcend rationalised time. The pulse and the prosody it animates defeat the nihilism grounded in an idea of time as ‘a quantity of nothings’ which makes up living experience. Simon Jarvis has argued that prosody can confound this nihilism. ‘When hours, minutes and seconds drain away in front of us as this sequence of nothings universalised into the measure of life, then outworn iambs, trochees and dactyls carry the promise of a real duration, and, with it, the almost unimaginable promise that our experience might also be for real.’87 King annotates the reality of duration in his elegies by meditating on the ‘quantity of nothings’ which occupies his wife’s place, and the presence of his own bodily rhythms. King’s descriptions of time’s variable rhythm are further illuminated by a sermon on Ecclesiastes 12:1 which he gave in 1626. Here, the measures of temporal velocity oppose those in his elegies. He urges his listeners not to delay their reckonings until the moment of their deaths. Quoting Augustine, he warns that The past time is not now, the future is not yet, onely the present may be called a time, and that, only, called ours. [ ] Thus doth Time incessantly feed on us: it eats upon our dayes, digesting them so fast and greedily, that our Future, which was a minute since before us, not yet arrived, is in the twinckling of an eye behinde us. This monstrous, devouring time, pictured both ‘before’ and ‘behind’ us, does not permit delays to conversion or reformation. King then points out how difficult it is to ‘make up our Audit with God for these summes so hastily throwne upon us’.88 The impossibility of seizing the present becomes a spiritual peril: if our earthly possessions are easier to bequeath to our heirs than the soul is to God, how can we expect to merit heaven? Again, King uses the language of finance and property as metaphors for the subjective experience of time. From a Christian perspective, a life unreconciled to God is a ‘quantity of nothings’, an abstracted march of pure and empty duration whose quality cedes to meaningless quantity. It is forgettable, and in fact impairs the salvific memory required for


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a thorough confession of sins. Only the rectified Christian, who stops that devouring kairos with praise of God, can experience true happiness or hope to be reunited with loved ones in heaven. King’s elegies use the language of audits, interest, mathematics and measures ironically to reveal the difficulties of overruling sorrow with logic. A new faith in commerce and its brokers, money and mechanised time was gradually coming to replace pre-Reformation customs and even the mysteries of religion itself. However, if Le Goff is right in arguing that ‘the creation of Purgatory combined a process of spatialization of the universe with an arithmetic logic that governed the relationship between human behaviour and the situation of the soul in Purgatory’,89 then King’s poems are not so much indicators of a radical break with pre-Reformation traditions, foreshadowing the secularisation of culture and the retreat to psychologised interiority in the experience of death, as their natural inheritor.

3 The Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context

Nathaniel Friend’s narrative of his son John’s death, introduced in Chapter 2, reveals many features of early modern consolation. It also provides evidence of how the funerary ritual incorporated elegiac verse. In this chapter, the elegiac commonplace which draws on funeral symbolism will be illuminated through attention to the historical development of funeral customs. In Section 3.2, I argue that the exclusivity of the funeral did not prevent loyal mourners or ambitious elegists from intruding to express their love for the dead. These displays of intrusive affection were not merely symbolic; elegies were actually pinned to the hearse or carpeted the grave. Conversely, some elegists asserted their bonds with the dead through a rejection of the funeral rites. Section 3.3 explains the mechanics of funerary exclusivity. The heralds sought to maintain the purity of the nobility by policing the funeral procession, but participation could also be restricted based on class or gender, and even the funeral feast was striated with social distinctions. However, Section 3.4 reveals that the heralds increasingly found their exclusive management of the funeral under threat from families who wished to memorialise their dead without interference from the state. Another form of exclusion, literacy, is the theme of Section 3.5. Textual and graphical representations of the funeral could involve a large number of participants in the obsequies of civic heroes. The funeral can also be considered as a legible occasion, whose language and visual images could be read and revised by participants. The decline of the heraldic funeral was accompanied by the decline of one of the funerary accoutrements which bore greatest resemblance to the idealised portraiture offered in elegy: the effigy. Section 3.6 concludes this chapter by studying the funeral and effigy of Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex. His rites not only typify the conservative 62

The Funerary Elegy in Its Ritual Context

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function of the early modern funeral, but also reveal how poets could manipulate funerary conventions to assert their own authority and independence.

3.1 Collaborating in grief: The funeral of John Friend For his son’s funeral, Friend commissioned a funeral sermon and a memorial inscription, and provided mourning gloves for near friends and relations. Conferring with the rectors of Hart Hall, Friend ‘desired them to order matters soe as their house might receeive noe discredit’. They were resolved at first to have gloves for none of the Schollers but onely the 6 Bearers which they appointed to bee the 6 Senior Commoners of the house, and Mr Barrow: that made his Funerall Oration. but when the schollers heard this, they resolved if they had them not otherwise they would buy themselves gloves, this made Mr March Wm Neale and my selfe to resolve to give all gloves[.] (225) The scholars’ insistence added to the social pressure on Friend. Undoubtedly, funerals could be very expensive. Claire Gittings estimates that the median funeral costs for Kent knights and esquires during the period 1581–1650 were £2375 £223 for yeomen and £147 for husbandmen.1 But it was possible to spend much more. Bridget Clitherow, the daughter of a wealthy alderman, made her will in 1680, leaving the princely sum of £800 for her funeral charges, including mourning for all her relatives, black cloth for the pulpit and ‘reading place’, and one pound each to the pall bearers.2 Testators were expected to provide funeral accoutrements in keeping with their class status; servants and the poor relied on employers and benefactors to provide these. The sixth Earl of Middlesex had paid out £36 for the funeral expenses of his tenant Robert Pennock in 1688, including gloves and ribbons.3 But even labourers like Roger Griffith could manage a small bequest. Griffith provided for new cloaks and britches to friends costing £1 6s 8d.4 Such small benevolences could be very important to guests at a funeral, and generosities (or the lack of them) were remembered. A letter to William Pepper about preparations for his mother’s funeral reminded him that he need not send any mourning to one particular branch of the family: ‘you may remember since the judge died and a brother of Sr Will: Windhams,

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and then was none of that kindness to you’.5 When Ralph Josselin’s patroness Lady Honeywood died, he notes bitterly that not only had she left him no bequest, but there was ‘not a glove, ribband, scutcheon, wine, beare, bisquett given at her burial but a litle mourning to servants’ who carried her.6 Funerals were occasions for families to act hospitably in exchange for the moral support offered by the community, and to honour the departed person’s personal charity with commemorative benefactions. They should not be opportunities for cost-cutting. Accordingly, Friend offered some simple but appropriate fare before the funeral procession began. At 8 a.m., the Masters of Art of that House fitted theire hands with gloves, as I my selfe did, the rest of their Schollers fitted themselves in other places. Then was brought in Sugar Biskets for the Chiefe and Cakes for all the rest, and wine for all. which being done, [mourners] came downe out of his Chamber and stood by the Gate. After praying around the coffin in his chamber, the mourners formed an orderly procession. The Bearers tooke up the Corps and brought it out of the Hall, one which was the Bellman going before it with his Bell and now and then striking it, they carryed it round the Quadrangle all the Schollers following. (225–7) The cortège entered the chapel, where after the sermon the corpse was interred in the floor, and in the wall Friend raised ‘a small Monument in Brass the Epitaph whereof I cut my selfe in the Brass’. The stone was carved by an Oxford mason, while ‘the Verses were made by my good friend Mr John Barrowe aforesaid that made his Funerall Oration, the rest was mine owne Composition wherein I had the advice of my honoured friend Tho: Gore’ (240). Friend provides a sketch of the memorial stone with his inscription, translating the Latin into English ‘for the Benefit of my daughters’ (243). Friend’s account offers direct evidence that elegies were used in the ceremony itself. He records that while John Barrow ‘was making his Funerall Oration, the Schollers were making Verses’. As Chapter 1 has shown, such memorial industry must have formed a regular part of the scholars’ creative work. On the day of John’s funeral, the corpse was


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prepared, the coffin sealed and the scholars’ verses attached to the pall. The night before, his father came and took my last leave of him till the Resurrection, and then he was nayled up and remooved into the Hall where a Blackcloth was laid over the Coffin and severall Copies of Verses tatched to the Cloth. (225) These poems, whose ephemerality is symbolised by their attachment to the hearse cloth, were nonetheless an important legacy of the funeral. Friend calls them ‘copies’, signifying that the originals might be obtained. The Schollers of Edmond Hall upon the death of my deare Son were pleased many of them to Exercise their Fancyes and to shew their Love to him. I shall here insert those Copies that came to my hand which at present are but few but many were made that were fixed to his hearse cloth when he was buryed, and I am promised to have them. (277–8) Their composition might be an ‘exercise’ for the imagination, but Friend assumes they also testify to the students’ genuine love for John, and so he is eager to add them to his memorial volume. Later, he received ‘of Mr John Webbe of Edmond Hall’ poems ‘that at my desire he procured for mee, and were those that were fixed to his Herse cloth’ (283). He had to rely on Webbe because of the scholars’ misbehaviour during the procession. As they entered St Peter’s Churchyard, ‘severall Schollers of other houses tore the Verses of the Cloth (which I took to be a piece of Rudenes but it seemes it is usuall)’ (227). Friend seems perplexed by this theft, which is explained to him as a collegiate custom, possibly motivated by competition between the ‘houses’. Rough treatment of a hearse was not altogether unusual, especially if valuable heraldic paraphernalia had been commissioned to adorn it; a note of expenses for a funeral of 1645 includes an item ‘for the use of the velvett Palle to lay over the body with the holland to it[.] [B]esides it is torne cruelly by snatching the schocheons’.7 Perhaps mourners or passers-by coveted the eight expensive escutcheons, which were made ‘on Buckrum in mettall’ and cost 3s 6d apiece. Clearly, social decorum did not always govern the behaviour of the funeral guests. As John’s funeral shows, in the midst of a moving ceremony of affection, an unexpectedly aggressive temper can intrude without warning.

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3.2 Participants, intruders and abstainers John Friend’s funeral provides us with a sad medium between the grand heraldic funerals organised for the nobility, with their costly black cloaks, feasts and domestic decoration, and the humble burials of the poor. It is conventional and communal, thus relieving the family from the burden of designing their own proceedings. Most notably, it is literate, requiring the production of many different texts: funeral sermons, elegiac verses, letters of consolation and the memorial volume itself.8 Friend’s compendium of funeral texts, including the epitaph, sermon and monumental inscription, is indicative of the kind of textual production which could result from a death. From such manuscript memorials to the manuscript and print anthologies prepared by poets in service to a great family of patrons, death provoked writing. Another manuscript anthology entitled the Memorials of the Rodney Family assembles Sir Edward Rodney’s family history, moral observations, funerary elegies for his father written by others and his own memorial verses for his sister. In his dedicatory letter to his daughters, Rodney writes that ‘This little tract of our family I penned in your Brother George his life time; and ment to have directed it to him’; but with the son’s untimely death, the volume passed to the women. The text opens with an elegy on his eldest son, George, and intermingles the public history of the family with private meditations. Rodney copies out a funeral sermon, along with another elegy which rehearses some of its conceits, revealing the extent to which elegists drew on other texts provoked by a death in their own compositions.9 Nor was the graphic element of Friend’s record unusual; presentation copies of Elizabeth Trumball’s epitaph include her elegy in German, English and French, with each version decorated with cupids bearing laurels, columns and epitaphs inscribed in plinths. The elegies were composed by her grandfather, George Rudolph Weckherlin, ‘secretary of foreign tongues’ for the Committee of the Two Kingdoms and later Milton’s assistant. Elizabeth’s private status as a woman resulted in generalised elegies which focus on natural imagery repeated in the drawing.10 But these sonnets are followed by a more personal poem by Robert Raworth, a maternal relative, which records such details as her dying wish to be buried in Dover, rather than in Brussels where she lived with her husband. Raworth’s gift of a poem confirms his bond of friendship with the Trumball family. A similar tribute is rendered by a collection of sonnets entitled Great Brittans Mourning Garment. Its title page declares that the book was ‘given


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to all faithfull sorrowfull Subjects at the Funerall of Prince Henry’ in 1612.11 The volume presents itself as a gift from one of the ‘strangers’ and ‘meaner men’ who admired the ceremony from afar to Henry’s ‘sad houshold’. Donating such poems was a part of the material preparations for the funeral. When Thomas Meynell’s daughter Mary died in childbirth, he briefly described her virtues and her funeral, adding a transcription of ‘an epitaphe written by her worshipfull friende Jhon [sic] Talbotte’.12 But in giving an elegy as a gift, poets risked breaching the barriers of class which separated them from their patrons; critique and condolence might transgress against expectations about the behaviour of the socially inferior. This may partially explain why elegies regularly refer to funerary conventions. As Arnold Stein argues, the elegist as ‘self-commending volunteer’ must establish his motives for appearing on a scene of private grief; those ‘who can step into a formal context and so have a position from which to perform a service for others do not have to establish [their] personal credentials as mourners’.13 The funeral incorporates the public into a private family occasion, and so justifies elegists’ participation in mourning as a public event. Puttenham corroborates this view, arguing that elegists appropriated funereal symbolism to portray themselves as ritual participants. The ‘lamenting of deathes’ included ‘many offices of service and love towardes the dead’, called Obsequies in our vulgare, which was done not onely by cladding the mourners their friendes and servauntes in blacke vestures, of shape dolefull and sad, but also by wofull countenaunces and voyces, and besides by Poeticall mournings in verse.14 By their physical comportment and poetic compositions, participants declare their ritual status as mourners. Funerary conventions also provide poets with opportunities to imagine, organise and intervene in hierarchies of power. Even as they reinforce social order, these conventions allow participants to articulate their voluntary affective bonds with the dead, bonds independent of class. At the funeral of Martin Bucer in 1551, for example, the procession included ‘about 3,000 men, many among them of the lower orders’. The ‘lower orders’ would normally be excluded from the circle of Bucer’s associates. But at his funeral, they can proclaim their loyalty to him by public mourning. Though ‘incapable of understanding his lectures and preaching’, they testified to ‘the general esteem which Bucer has acquired, by utterances, tears, and lamentations’. At dawn, all the

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students ‘brought to grace his grave such pieces as they could frame in Greek or Latin verse and prose’. They were ‘prompted by a sense of duty’, and it is the number rather than the quality of their compositions which resounded to Bucer’s praise. Indeed, never were any spots, on which it is customary to celebrate festivals, more plentifully adorned with wreaths and garlands, than the place where he was interred, distinguished by epitaphs and odes.15 Not just the hearse cloth, but the entire grave site is decorated with poetry. Frederick Burgess asserts that this custom originated towards the end of the Middle Ages, when ‘elegies for men of importance, often of some length, and probably written by a member of their household, seem to have been displayed on scrolls or tablets placed near their tombs’.16 However, previous critics of elegy have relied on internal evidence for their claim that poems were used in the mortuary rites. Alberta Turner gives no evidence for her assertions that ‘many of the university funeral verses were still tacked to the hearse, to the walls of the church or of the colleges, or even recited’.17 Symbolic evidence abounds, as when Cotton Mather referred at Nathanael Collins’ funeral to ‘a Paper winding sheet to lay him out’.18 That a Puritan congregation, with its strictures on funerary ceremonies and adornments, would dress Collins for his grave in this fashion suggests not only the prevalence of the tradition, but also that writers perceived it as secular rather than religious or superstitious. H. R. Woudhuysen suspects that the creased, ‘tear-stained’ copy of Robert Herrick’s verses for John Browne originally hung on his coffin,19 and describes a vellum manuscript with verses by Jonson, Richard Corbet and John Selden in memory of Corbet’s father Vincent as another example of this tradition, but provides no external evidence. Whether streaked with tears or rain, these documents were clearly fragile. Long processions and the customary bequeathing of the hearse cloth to the church also meant that very few examples of the papers attached to the hearse have survived. Some may have been buried: in Nicholas Stone’s records of the cost of making Spenser’s tomb, he notes that ‘Mounful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, [were] thrown into [Spenser’s] tomb’.20 Margaret Crum believes Henry King’s Latin elegy ‘In obitum sanctissimi viri Di: Dris: Spenseri’ survived being pinned to the pall. The manuscript fair copy of this poem has a black mourning border and a pinhole in the upper right-hand corner.21


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The poem on the verso of this sheet offers an interesting counterpoint to King’s formal public elegy. Written in an untidy italic, this anonymous dirge refuses to join in a spectacular display of grief. For who so doth lament thy death or straine a faigned crie Or on the earth doth grovelinge looke, with a downe fixed eye He rather doth expresse his greafe, showinge how’t should be done Then feel’t himselfe. And since I can noe greater debts pay to thy mournefull hearse Lett it suffice to decke the same, with a teare-stillinge vearse Or else I’le smother upp my greafe within my seacrete breast[.] The elegy is a conventional recantation of public shows of grief, ‘more Rhetoricall, then true affected teares’. The poet considers these shows to be not only insincere, but also obligatory – ‘sett methodes’ which show ‘how’t should be done’, social forms which restrict the creative expression of grief. Despite his rejection of the funeral as an occasion for the valid expression of emotions, the poet promises ‘to decke’ the hearse with his poem instead of tears. Though many elegists invoke the funeral ritual as emblem of their emotional participation in sorrow, many also differentiate themselves from other mourners by denigrating it. They refuse to display their feelings publicly, criticising those who do show emotions, and reminding readers that heirs and schemers could fake bodily expression as easily as poets can fake their language. Of course, elegists deliver such critiques of hypocrisy in a highly public and rhetorically ritualised genre. They affirm outward Stoicism as the most honest attitude to that grief which passeth show. But these protests call attention to all that they repress. As an elegist mourning his young friend Abigail Sherard declares, Tis ten dayes since she dy’d, and though I slept, Her solemne obsequies even then I kept: Although I wore no blacks, colours for sorrow, Which gracelesse sons and widows too oft borrow, I can scarce weep, but I can sigh my part, And keepe a solemne Funerall in my heart: I beg no ease, nor do I crave reliefe, My soule is happyest when I hug the griefe:22

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The poet ‘hugs’ his emotions close to himself, in the privacy of his body whose veracity cannot be questioned, and wants no institutional relief. He replaces the conventional ‘blacks’ with his own heart darkened by sorrow, and promises to carry on this mourning permanently, unlike the ceremony which finishes in a day. Substituting a private ‘Funerall in my heart’ for the public ritual, his elegy makes his performance of that ritual public. The funeral is simply replaced by a more authentic and private version of itself.

3.3 Social differentiation and the early modern funeral S. C. Humphreys describes formal mourning as ‘a way of signalling the assumption of a role which required correlative behaviour from others in the process of restructuring social roles after death’.23 Ritual roles are coercive, and therefore capable of providing stability and predictability. Emile Durkheim went so far as to argue that these roles are determined by the ritual itself; grief is not merely performed, but actually constituted by the funeral. For Durkheim, the elegist’s customary complaint that true grief is at odds with funeral pageantry misconstrues the nature of affect: sorrow is an efflorescence of ritualised culture, not a pure and presocial feeling struggling for space within that culture. Durkheim claimed influentially that ‘Mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions’, but a predetermined aspect of the ritual process. Grief is not ‘a natural movement of private feelings’, he continues; ‘there is no connection between the sentiments felt and the gestures made by the actors in the rite’.24 This unilateral position allows for no spontaneity or individual creativity in the internal management or external expression of feeling. It is also contradicted by the expressions of dissent discussed in Chapter 2. Durkheim’s view has nonetheless influenced anthropologists’ understanding of mortuary ritual as socially conservative and restrictive. Likewise, Bronislaw Malinowski claimed that mortuary ritual ‘counteracts the centrifugal forces of fear, dismay, demoralization, and provides the most powerful means of reintegration of the group’s shaken solidarity’.25 Although his argument is dated in its opposition of ‘tradition and culture’ to the ‘mere negative response of thwarted instinct’, it has informed subsequent understanding of these rituals as powerful tools for conservative and traditional societies, legitimating the powers founded on continuity with the ancestors and reverence for the past.26 Early modern thanatologists also assign funeral rites


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a conservative, stabilizing function through their ‘public display of social gradations’ within a coherent totality of loss.27 Joshua Sylvester’s Lachrimae Lachrimarum reveals how the funeral enforced and sentimentally affirmed hierarchy, from the poor mourners through the singularity of the king, after the death of Prince Henry. Sylvester commands readers to recognise their common loss and complements national identity with private guilt. Henry belonged ‘To all the WORLD’, both ‘To All together, and to Each a-part’.28 The individual’s separateness and integrity is preserved within the group’s shared mourning, and that shared experience penetrates into the privacy of individual feeling. Lamenting that ‘Wee were the Moving Cause’, Sylvester blames the nation as a whole for Henry’s death before assigning class culpabilities to clergy, nobles, magistrates, citizens, countrymen, poets and so on (A4r ), like Donne who in the First Anniversary apportions Elizabeth Drury’s virtues to each of the estates. Sylvester confirms the social hierarchy of which Prince Henry was the pinnacle and justification, then invites the audience to ‘weepe for our selves (alas) / (Not for our Private, or Peculiar case)’ (B3r ), but for the common loss which unites all the classes. The formality and symbolic abstraction of the funeral preserved social differentiation. Thomas Flatman complains in his elegy for the poet Katherine Philips, ‘ ’tis pity’ The Learned, as the Fool should die, One, full as low, as t’other high; Together blended in the general lot! Distinguish’d only from the common Croud By an hindg’d Coffin or an Holland Shroud[.]29 Through costly funeral accoutrements, wealthy families could retain their material dignity and provide against death’s levelling power. (The coffin prevented the remains of the beloved from mingling with strangers in the grave, even if his or her bones would eventually be dug up and stored in an ossuary, or crammed together with new occupants in the earth.) Substantiating the status quo in this way, funerals ease a community through transitional periods while minimising social change. They invite survivors to affirm their love, loyalty and service to the family, while reminding them of their station. Thomas Fairfax reciprocated Lady Carey’s ‘elogy’ (or elogium, a poem of praise) on the death of his wife in 1665, which concludes with Carey’s wish to join her friend in ‘Bilbrough church-yeard’, ‘That after death my grave waite [may] on her Tombe’ in a state of perpetual servitude.30

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Fairfax thanks Carey, threatening to displace his devotion to his wife with praise of the poet: Could I a Tribute of my thanks express As you have done in Love and purer Verse On my best selfe then I might justly raise your Elogy t’Encomiums of your Prayse And soe forgett the subject that did move Me to a thankfulnes as’t did you to Love He allows Carey’s art to remind him of his wife’s virtues, concluding that Carey’s desire to ‘wait on’ the tomb of her friend can be satisfied by a more honourable placement in the ‘Quire’ of the family chapel (598–600). To convey her modesty, Carey draws on the social differentiations within the early modern household, while Fairfax’s reply condescends to promote her from her fictional servitude through a metaphor based on the hierarchized architecture of the church. Mortuary rituals also distinguish the dead, and those touched by the mortification of bereavement, from the living. Ben Jonson in his eightieth epigram refers to the ‘ports’ of death and life, through which the sinner passes from this world to the next. This metaphor is accounted for in Van Gennep’s classification of mortuary rituals among the rites of passage which require separation, transition and incorporation in time and often in space. The period of transition sets apart ‘the mourning group, whose condition is analogous to that of the deceased, suspended between the worlds of the living and the dead’.31 In many cultures, the passage of time which ‘dries’ the corpse and prepares it for final interment is organised by spatial rites, for example, through movements across the threshold of the house, into the church and finally the grave. As Chapter 2 has shown, funerals commemorated the slow process by which the dead were detached from the community of the living; practical considerations could also delay the funeral. The interment usually took place a few days after death, ‘as well to give the dead person an opportunity of coming to life again, if his soul has not quite left his body, as to prepare mourning and the ceremonies of the funeral’.32 The transitional period during which the corpse was kept in the house and watched by friends and relatives culminated in the funeral procession, which could range from a humble march to the churchyard, to a grand procession organised by the College of Arms. Roger Lowe’s diary for 1664 records his inclusion in three funeral processions in Ashton-in-Makerfield and the surrounding villages.33


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Unlike the heraldic procession, in addition to village hierarchies, affection and family ties could determine participation in these local ceremonies. The grand heraldic funeral confirmed social distinctions while inviting communal participation in the form of spectatorship. Even as it emphasised hierarchy through its carefully ranked and controlled procession, the heraldic funeral offered all spectators an opportunity to witness a ritual of honour. It represented the rigidity of social hierarchy, but accented the sentimental bonds between classes. The desire to participate in heraldic rites could also be practical. A petition ‘of the Fortie Messengers of his Majesties Chamber in ordynarie’ requested that they be permitted such a place in the funeral of their deceased ‘Master of blessed memorie’ as their station demanded, and ‘nott permittinge others of his Majesties servauntes, of inferior rancke, to supplie the places propper to your petitioners’.34 Though the messengers rely on rank as the grounds for their petition, their claim also shows an acute awareness of the significance of participating in a procession; it would testify to a bond with the dead, grant them valuable mourning garments, and assert the social and financial continuity of the household. The procession’s testament to affection is especially apparent in women’s customary involvement in burying other women. At a merchant’s sister’s funeral held in the early 1650s, it was reported that ‘all the girls of the neighbourhood walked with the men, and 10 or 20 held the corners of the pall covering the bier. All the girls who had attended the funeral were given a pot of marmalade for their pains.’35 Adam Martindale mentions women’s generosity to his eldest daughter Elizabeth, who was so well loved ‘that though she died almost a mile from the church, and the way very foule, they would not suffer any man to carrie her bodie a foote, but conveyed her on their owne shoulders to her grave’.36 Susannah Perwich, whose father ran a school for ladies in Hackney, was so virtuous ‘her Father and all her friends, thought her worthy of a very decent Burial’, complete with a funeral procession of women decked in virginal white. Her corpse was transported in a ‘Herse covered with Velvet’ which was carryed by six servant Maidens of the Family, all in White; the sheet was held up by six of those Gentlewomen in the school, that had most acquaintance with her, in mourning Habit, with white Scarfs and Gloves; a rich costly Garland of gum-work, adorned with Banners and Scutchions, was borne immediately before the Herse, by two proper young Ladies, that intirely loved her.37

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Her immediate family was followed by the hearse, then her kin, schoolmates, neighbours and servants, ‘all in white Gloves’, ‘having been first served with Wine’. White was also used in Yorkshire for the funeral of women who died in childbirth.38 At the funeral of Mrs Anne Phelips, the coffin was attended by four female servants in hoods, who were commanded to look at it silently without moving.39 The hearse was set in the church ‘with the Garland upon it’, which suggests that like Perwich’s this was a ‘maiden funeral’. On such occasions, women dressed in white bore the coffin and a white pall, and two girls carried a garland made of linen or paper and adorned with paper flowers and streamers. In the centre of these garlands hung a white glove or oval lozenge, on which was written the dead person’s name, age and burial date along with short verses or drawings.40 Such a garland can be seen above the coffin carried by three female mourners in a popular woodcut, used to illustrate such ballads as The Brides Burial. This ballad describes a wife for whom ‘a Garland fresh and fair / Of Lillies there was made, / In sign of her Virginity, / and on her Coffin laid: / Six Maidens all in white, / did bear her to the ground.’41 Participation in a funeral could be exclusive of members not only of other genders, but also of other classes. Apart from the poor who were included in the processions as examples of the charity of the deceased, the heralds carefully restricted which ranks could march with the hearse. Elegists often use these social constraints to protest their own exclusion, and to assert their emotional connections to the dead. Alexander Brome testifies to his ability to ‘raise a summe’ of grief, distinguishing between the capacity for sincere sorrow and the ability to purchase costly blacks. He requests that he be admitted to the procession ‘as a cypher’, Who though am nothing, yet can raise a summe, And truly I can mourne as well as they, Who’re clad in sable weeds, though mine is gray.42 His social and fiscal invisibility is signified by the ‘cypher’, zero, the place holder which has no value of its own but can ‘raise’ the value of a number. Likewise, Thomas Pestell braves the scorn of the aristocracy to pay his tribute to the Countess of Huntingdon. He associates the funeral procession, organised around her body, with the procession of her ‘race’ from her physical body: ‘Alas’, my sepulchred name Appearing on hir venerable Herse (Tho washt in tears, & wrapt in sheets of verse)


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Wou’d hydeous seeme to all the race that came From royall veynes of this Heroick Dame: And him offend, whose bloud with hirs entwines A double twist of two most princely lines. Combining his own name (in an elegy) with the Countess’s name (on the hearse) would confuse the strict bloodlines commemorated in the funeral procession. Although this poem is washed and wrapped, it may seem ‘A vile attempt’ to ‘wind hir Glories up[,] hir Graces tie / In theise rough knotts of ragged poetry’.43 Pestell compares his poetic ‘knot’ to her suitable marriage to a member of her own class. Similarly, Aston Cokayne, among many fixing their poems on Olive Cotton’s hearse, asks World! pardon me my boldness, that intrude These few poor lines upon thy Multitude: They need not read them, I have my desire If they but see my name, and look no higher[.]44 Anticipating a ‘multitude’ of poets clamouring to proclaim her virtues, he admits that he seeks only recognition of his ‘name’ by fellow writers. However, such frank modesty could invite accusations of selfadvancement. Like the procession, funerary hospitality was also an occasion for differentiating between loyal elegists and mercenary ‘pens for hire’. Matthew Stevenson in his satire ‘To Mr – upon his silly Epitaph in print’ accuses a hungry interloper of using his verse as a ticket to the funeral meal. ’Twas good luck though, they to thearse were pin’d Else being lame tha’d sure been left behin’d; But have a care, least with affront you greet, The collenell, to send his wife a sheet; Sure shee was rich enough, to leave be hinde her Other gate stuffe, then thy fowle sheet, to wind her. But ah! thy muddy fancy showes me clear Thou stood’st among the beggars, serv’d with bear.45 This poet pins his hopes for a meal to the hearse cloth, and degrades the colonel’s wife with his muddy verse. In a typical expression of elegiac competitiveness, he is seen receiving his obligatory dole with the ‘beggars’ rather than the honourable mourners.

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Felicity Heal claims that hospitality ‘was one of the visible ways in which the nobility signalled their social power, and thus was one of the most important moments not to discriminate between those who appeared as mourners’.46 In principle, the liberality of funeral bequests levelled hierarchies among guests, all of whom would be dressed alike and served alike; in reality, class distinctions were protected even at the funeral feast. Ralph Houlbrooke shows in detail how class determined the distribution of food and gifts at the heraldic funeral of Sir John Stawell in 1662, and even in what room people were allowed to stand.47 The repast was the most conspicuous form of funeral hospitality, and most executors provided at least some food and drink for the mourners. When Henry Ferrers died in 1633, his estate ordered £4 of meat from five different butchers, along with bread, a hogshead of beer, butter and cheese.48 Such was the standard fare; a Lancashire merchant, William Stout, attested in the 1660s that ‘we sold much cheese to funerals in the country, from 30 lb. to 100 lb. weight, as the deceased was of ability’; a ‘penny manchet’ or loaf was usually given to all attendants. It was customary in Lancaster ‘to give one or two long, called Naples, biscuits, to each attending the funeral’. The Lancastrian Roger Lowe was irritated at one funeral where ‘we dranke and saw how they intended to serve us who ware come out of Ashton, with every one a loafe. John Potter and I ware som what Hungery and angry’.49 In the seventeenth century, financial pressure on the aristocracy and urbanisation eroded the rural custom of hospitality for all comers. Nonetheless, the funeral survived as a form of public hospitality. Perhaps this was because its purpose was more than the display of social status; Richard Hooker recommended providing a funeral feast (remembering Proverbs 31:6) as a source of ‘comfort of them whose minds are through natural affection pensive’.50 The funeral meal not only satisfied a social expectation, but was also a chance to comfort each other, to gather the support of the community through conviviality. The funeral ceremony, from the procession and interment through the feast, reconfirmed social hierarchies and bonds. Being invited to participate in the ritual did not necessarily reveal emotional intimacy between the survivors and the dead; as elegists themselves alleged, funeral guests were also selected for their status or distant family ties. Such guests might have to force themselves to display an insincere grief, out of respect to the dead and to their own ritual roles. Elegists negotiated between their own constraints of rhetoric and sincerity by reflecting on this tension between compulsory or institutionally sanctioned participation, and public confirmation of private affection. They


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also used the structure of the ritual to question the naturalness of class distinctions, most commonly through affirmations of the bonds of love.

3.4 Competing with the heralds The College of Arms contributed to the funeral’s legible code: they wrote funeral certificates which confirmed the dates of birth, marriage and death, and supervised the preparation of the heraldic escutcheons and other insignia of office. But their writing was accused of corruption, just like the elegists’. As Richard West said on the death of Lord Stafford, ‘what is’t to me’ Who am no Herald, if a Baron die? I doe not hope for fees; I’me none of those That pay downe teares for legacies, or clothes. My solemne griefe flowes in a Nobler tide[.]51 West wept for Stafford out ‘of Understanding’ of his true, inward nobility, not for money. Here, the heralds stand in for all who profit from the funeral business, while the elegist forms part of a class distinguished by its true ‘nobility’ and ‘understanding’, important terms for excluding the unworthy, as Chapter 5 will show. If true virtue lies within, the heralds should be decommissioned. Francis Quarles memorialises William Cheyne as immune to the ‘Epidemicke stayne’ of desire for ‘The Heraults deare-bought Favour’. But our sad Pencill, lists not to bewray The Gests of his faire Lineage, or display The auncient Honour of his Ensigne: Heraults may[.]52 Quarles engages with heraldic conferral of honour, but asserts his disdain for lineage, one of the ‘goods of fortune’ typically included in epideictic perorations. Henry King, on the other hand, ignores the heralds because his father’s famous virtue was self-commemorating. He assures Bishop John King that the sparse ornamentation of the grave does not reflect the son’s diffidence, but his father’s own humility. In contrast to those that in the same Earth neighbour thee Have each his Chronicle and Pedigree. They have their waving Pennons and their Flagges, (Of Matches and Allyance formall braggs:)53

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King is enshrined in his own ‘admired Parts’ and ‘hast no Heraldry but thy Desarts’. Thomas Jordan, similarly, argues that his friend John Sidney’s nobility exceeded what heraldry could represent; his own life became a legible, exemplary text at his death, ‘In whose good Acts, you might such vollumes see, / As did exceed th’extent of Heraldry’.54 The corpse and the character of the dead were legible ‘volumes’ capable of speaking for themselves. These affronts to the heralds’ role in bureaucratising the attribution of nobility were consistent with the decline of the heraldic funeral. The records of the Court of Chivalry show that executors resisted the heralds’ governance of the funeral throughout the seventeenth century.55 By the 1690s, a variety of cases brought by the Officers of Arms confirm that executors no longer widely regarded the right of the heralds to produce escutcheons, to marshal mourners in a procession and to supervise the funeral ceremony and burial.56 Beginning in the late sixteenth century, funerals had become more secular as they passed from the control of the medieval burial guilds to the College of Arms. In 1618, the Earl Marshal’s Commissioners reconfirmed the legal requirement on the nobility to allow the heralds to supervise funerals and to submit funeral certificates to the library of the College of Arms. The Commissioners criticised the ‘mechanicall Trades-men’ who presume ‘without authority, to intermeddle with the marshalling of Armes’. Their errors gave ‘great offence and prejudice’ to the nobility and gentry, ‘breeding’ doubts about their descents. But at fault was also ‘the Nobility and Gentry themselves, in the omission of Funerals, and other ceremoniall Rites heretofore used, which are now almost or altogether laid aside’.57 These complaints show that the right to represent or organise a funeral was being privatised. As a consequence, the regulation of the status and exclusivity of the nobility was slipping out of the government’s hands. Likewise, elegists (who often compared their competitors to ‘mechanical tradesmen’) may have found that the demands of their clients were changing. Rather than memorialising the lineage and other public attributes of the dead, and helping to maintain a social hierarchy centring on an exclusive aristocracy, they could focus on the private virtues and the emotional relationships among survivors. A well-known example of this ‘privatisation’ of the funeral was the rise of night burials. The heralds claimed that the chief danger of night burials was their failure to supply the ‘true Certificate of the Matches, Issues, and times of Decease’. Consequently, the Commisioners were ordered to ensure that any members of the nobility ‘that shall be either silently buried in the Night time by Torch-light, or otherwise, by Day or


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Night time, without the attendance of an Officer of Armes, shall nevertheless immediately after the death and buriall of every such Defunct, returne a true Certificate of the Matches, Issues, and times of Decease’ and so on, along with fees (107). The College of Arms was also motivated by lost revenue: simply using a funeral escutcheon at a burial would cost a gentleman £3 6s 8d, and a duke or duchess £45 in fees. John Weever agrees, describing the decline of the grand funeral as endangering the integrity of the nobility and the livelihoods of the heralds. Funerals ‘in any expensive way here with us, are now accounted but as a fruitlesse vanitie’; noblemen and gentlemen ‘are either silently buried in the night time, with a Torch, a two-penie Linke, and a Lanterne; or parsimoniously interred in the day-time, by the helpe of some ignorant countrey-painter, without the attendance of any one of the Officers of Armes’.58 These silent burials by torchlight allowed the family to stage funeral ceremonies expressive of private feeling rather than civic loss: attendance at such occasions was voluntary, the family could select chief mourners, and the offertory ritual in which the defunct title passed to an heir did not take place.59 They were less expensive, though ‘torches, flamboes, [and] taper lights’ alone at the funeral of the Countess of Middlesex in 1669 cost £13 2s.60 The cost of supplying families with blacks, the difficulty of finding enough peers of rank to attend the procession and the unwillingness to include poor mourners are some of the reasons given by the Earl of Denbigh for refusing to give his beloved wife a heraldic funeral in 1670.61 In will-making a certain mortified humility was expected, which may also explain why testators refused to provide for a grand burial. Women were especially likely to specify, as the widow Mirabella Bennett did in 1639, that ‘no herald or officer of arms should attend her funeral’, or like Judith Crisp in 1700 that she be ‘interred at eleven a Clock at night as privately as may be’.62 Henry King’s elegy on Lady Stanhope recreates such a night funeral, ‘Lightned by that dimme Torch our sorrow bears.’ Though time has torn ‘all thy Hatchments into ragges’ and ended the ‘Ceremonious Rites’, We still thy mourners without Shew or Art, With solemn Blacks hung round about our heart, Thus constantly the Obsequies renew[.]63 King attributes permanence not to spectacle, but to sentiment ritually repeated, renewing the obsequies of the heart. Elegists were not alone in challenging the social conventions of the funeral to make room for more emotional bonds between the living and

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the dead. While several historians of death have, I think, overstated the influence of developing conceptions of individuality on the performance of these rites, it is clear that elegists contributed to the creation of memorials which sought to preserve the dead from being transformed into emblematic representations of virtue. The desire for private rites to celebrate private virtues without institutional interference from the church, the state or the heralds was complemented by a possessive attitude towards the material, ethical and emotional legacies of the dead. As memorials became more private, their legibility to a universal readership would also decline.

3.5 Moist characters and legible mourning Whether produced out of love for the dead or service to the family, elegiac compositions were offered as a service, gifts which evaded systems of commodity exchange and the moral implications of mercenary creativity, because their recipients were not the family (who could reward the giver) but the dead person him or herself. A friend’s ‘last office’ to the deceased, after attending them on their deathbed, was commemoration. James Howell wrote to his ‘honoured Friend Mis C.’ in 1634, on the death ‘of my dear friend your Husband’: ‘The last Office I could do him, was to put him in his grave.’ This ‘last act of respect to so worthy a Frend’ was followed by ‘an Elegy, which my melancholy muse hath breath’d out upon his Herse. I shall be very carefull about the Tomb you intend him, and will think upon an Epitaph.’64 Such compositions could be offered in exchange for the dying person’s exhortations of friends at the death bed to faith.65 But this exchange, as Thomas Jordan laments, was imbalanced; his friend Steward’s deathbed was a holy place, where the ‘divine Dialect’ of ‘His latest precious Breathings’ were ‘committed to his mourning Friends’. When ‘He dies, and all the Duty I can do / Is on his Herse to fix a Line or two’,66 the disproportion between the dying person’s spiritual instruction and the encomiast’s flat praise provokes a characteristic expression of modesty. Sometimes memorials were commissioned in advance; requesting funerary art or verses for oneself was regarded not as vanity, but as a pious memento mori. The Countess of Warwick had asked Henry Peacham to draw up a plan for her memorial, to which he added a short inscription, leaving room for her epitaph. Her modesty prevented Peacham from writing that epitaph during her life; and her will left different directions about the disposal of her body. Peacham took it upon himself nevertheless to write the epitaph ‘at spare houres’ after her death.67


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Similarly, Henry King desired to retract his promise to elegise Lady Katherine Cholmondeley. He never Look’d my Verses should survive, As wet Records, That you are not Alive; And less desir’d to make that Promise due, Which pass’d from Me in jest, when urg’d by You.68 King, the historian of her death, can promise a lasting monument in verse; but for communicating such bad news, he laments, his poetry should be extinguished. King, ‘flinging from me my now Loathed Pen’, resolves ‘for your Sake nev’r to Write agen’ and takes ‘my long Farewell of that Art’. This is in fact the last poem King is known to have written. Since Horace, poets have advocated their art as outlasting brass monuments.69 John Gauden, in his dedication to a memorial volume of poems for Lady Anne Rich, advertised that ‘writing, for the Future, is likely to do most right both to her, and posterity against that destructive Malignity of Time; which prevayles more against any, the most durable, and costly monuments; then it can against these, which are so cheape, and easily built with inke and paper’. These papers ‘may be called the Urnes, and Repositories of their Soules’.70 For Gauden, the reproducibility of writing guarantees its durability. However, the effect of such enduring words might be more severe than consolatory. As King worried that his elegy confirmed the reality of Cholmondeley’s death, so Lucy Hastings in her copy of Lachrymae Musarum described the book as a constant and present reminder of the loss of her son Henry. The Bowells of the Earth my bowells [h]ide Whilst these Dear relicks here interrd abide Thus I die Living, thus alass mine Eyes, My funerall see, since hee before me Dyes Whom I brought forth my Dear Son here he Lies.71 She surrendered the body of her son, previously interred in her own body, to the grave and to the page. Henry’s ‘relicks’ of virtue, intelligence and achievement are entombed in the elegiac book, where Henry is revivified by language only to ‘Dye’ at the end of each reading. Such memorial volumes were not only directed to the family; they also invited a wider public to participate as observers in the funeral rites. Following a custom of the Hapsburg Dutch provinces, English funerals were occasionally depicted graphically. Usually this extended only to

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engravings of the hearse, or (less frequently) the funeral procession.72 But newsbooks, lives, sermons and elegiac volumes regularly included descriptions of funerals as well. Once published, the symbolism and grandeur of these events could be considered in readers’ homes. The first systematic pictorial account of an English heraldic funeral was Thomas Lant’s engravings of Philip Sidney’s procession.73 Aubrey saw this series of images of the procession ‘turned upon two pinnes, that turning one of them made the figures march all in order’ recreating the procession for readers.74 Ronald Strickland argues that the printing of Sidney’s funerary honours invited an emerging literate middle class to compete with the aristocracy for a share in the death of their model Protestant knight. Strickland points to such publications as evidence that funerals ‘helped produce the network of socially prescribed limits and expectations which called individual subjects into particular class positions and defined their relations with other subjects’.75 Mortuary rituals’ legibility extended beyond their representation in printed literature. They also used a language of repeated, selfreferential symbols which participants and observers could read. Gertrude Thimelby views Cannall house draped in blacks as letters symbolizing the Persall family’s loss, and reads the ‘moist characters’ of the sad owners which ‘tell our paine ith’ language of their teares’.76 Nicholas Murford begins an elegy on Lord Ireton’s lying in state at Somerset House with an admonition to observers. ‘Since you, like Children, look upon this Picture / Of the Book onely, let me read a Lecture.’ The poet provides a textual correspondence to each feature of the funeral display; ‘come! I will dare to comment on the Text’, he adds as he leads us through the physical space.77 In similar vocabulary, an elegist describes the house of Henry Vere, where ‘moorening bannours [with] theire black wings spred’ proclaim his death. [T]he reader drawing neare each Scuchione tells him tis the noblest Veare, What needes then or Epitaph or stone for theis sad Ensignes might move tearees alone.78 It is a ‘reader’ who approaches the heraldic insignia, each of which is a more legible indication of Vere’s worth than written language in ‘Epitaph or stone’. Symbolic and poetic language could interact – not only in the customary pinning of verses to the hearse cloth, but in the performance and reading of the verse within the ritual context itself. Michael


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Drayton evokes Lady Penelope Clifton’s funeral scene in order to govern the reader’s experience of his elegy which, he anticipates, will be performed for her mourners. He directs readers That you no harsh, nor shallow rimes decline, Upon that day wherein you shall read mine. Such as indeed are falsely termed verse, And will but sit like mothes upon her herse; Nor that no child, nor chambermaide, nor page, Disturbe the rome, the whilst my sacred rage, In reading is; but whilst you heare it read, Suppose, before you, that you see her dead, The walls about you hung with mournfull blacke, And nothing of her funerall to lacke[.]79 This funeral tableau provides the right environment for serious reflection. The experience of the elegy should be unadulterated by comparison with other verse not only on other topics, but even those lifeless folded sheets that will adorn her hearse ‘like mothes’. He anticipates that his poem will be read aloud, inviting listeners to imagine a room dressed in funerary blacks with her corpse actually present. However, this image is not intended to draw listeners towards contemplation of their future heavenly repose, but to induce melancholic admiration for the poet – readers should finish by casting ‘up your eyes, and sigh for my applause’.

3.6 The effigy and idealised representation Another textual feature of the funeral was the emblematic status of the corpse itself. Often, elegies, funeral sermons and orations told listeners that they had two texts before them: the undecaying scriptural text and the decaying corpse. Both of these texts could be subjected to hermeneutic analysis. The corpse and coffin were traditional memento mori symbols, used by both the dying and the bereaved to prompt reflection. On the death of her husband, Lady Grace Mildmay urged herself to behold the corpse which lieth folden in searclothes, leaded and coffined here before me yet unburied and consider: he was as I am, and as he is, I shall be.80 Watching over the corpse, she reflects on his life and learns a moral lesson which she will remember ‘so long as this my corpse is above

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earth’. William Forde encourages his listeners at the funeral of Anne Glover to remember that dead bodie, or rather that Cadaver, that Caro data vermibus, for her flesh and bones by this time are turned into dust and ashes, which is the present spectacle and object of our eyes.81 If the corpse were revivified, and were to ‘untie her winding knots, breake through her Coffin, & stand up before you’, it would urge her friends to mourn moderately. Such sermons command the audience to transform the visual sign of the corpse into a metaphysical conceit. At his own death, John Donne famously installed a coffin in his room, and had an artist sketch him in his grave clothes. But in earliest sermons, Donne had frequently used the speculum of death to illuminate his listeners’ mortality. King James himself becomes a mirror, one of two glasses, wherein you may see your selves from head to foot; One in the Text And another, under your feet, in the dissolution of this great Monarch, our Royall Master, now layd lower by death then any of us, his Subjects and servants.82 The Danse macabre tradition had taught viewers to read the exposed corpse of the king as proof that no one can resist Death. As Ernst Kantorowicz has argued, although it was necessary to reveal the corpse of the sovereign in the funerary rites to legitimate the succession, the king’s corrupted body symbolised the threat of dissolution of the monarchy. Something was needed to counteract the potentially revolutionary effects of this spectacle. The solution was the effigy, a life-sized and idealised sculptural representation of the dead which adorned the hearse during the procession and could afterward be displayed in Westminster Abbey. This undecaying artistic portrait, a doll stuffed with fodder from the Westminster stables, symbolised the continuity of the body politic. It also provoked emotional identifications and displays of grief. If art could outwit time’s destructive powers, the effigy might be able to replace the decaying corpse with an idealised representation impervious to time. Hertz maintains that society recuperates from a death by reclaiming the social identity it grafted onto a physical individual and transferring it to another.83 In heraldic funerals, it was not only social identity, but also property and other legal rights which were transferred. The funeral was a legal expression of the right of primogeniture: it exposed the temporarily vacated social role in order to immediately refill it during


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the heraldic offertory. In royal funerals, the ‘monumental body’ of the effigy facilitated this transfer of power, by representing the natural body in a more permanent form.84 The effigy was a material projection of the ideal image which Mervyn James believes rituals ‘make available for social participation’ and use to ‘surmount the stresses of change’.85 His remark reveals the paradoxical nature of heraldic pageantry: it invites the audience to participate in idealising the status quo, and by extension in the production of power. Monumental bodies locate the deceased ‘as precisely as possible in social terms, even at the cost of fabricating and manipulating history’.86 The effigy of Elizabeth I, for example, represented to the public Gloriana, the body politic whose eternal youth was praised in poetry, in place of a decayed natural body.87 As the heraldic funeral counteracted the perceived waning of national strength at the death of political officers, so the effigy denies the reality of the monarch’s death. It dramatised the inviolability of authority through a denial of history. James Shirley dramatically enacts the ritual appeal of the effigy in his elegy on King James VI and I. Searching out visual confirmation of the king’s death, Shirley moves through a palace, witnessing the heralds bringing ‘By Torch-light, the dead body of the King’ and the preparation of the corpse by ‘His people’ who ‘embalm him with their tear’. At court, After some justling with the guard, I came To th’ presence, which but mockt me with a name, For it presented nothing to my eye But blacks, and tears for absent Majesty. The mourning state here did renew my wo For the lost Presence, Velvet hangings too Made sorrow of more value, which beheld The ’Scutcheon Royal in a Sable Field.88 His imagined penetration into rooms normally reserved for privileged courtiers shows both how porous sacred spaces become in the disrupted intermediary phase of death, and how spatial metaphors can illustrate commitment, loyalty and love. But instead of entering a place made sacred by the king’s presence, the poet finds absence at the centre of the realm. Shirley finds the effigy erected in the royal bedchamber, in place of the embalmed corpse of King James. By the ‘melancholy day’ of ‘Flameless’ tapers, he discovers ‘A King, with subtile Artifice so set, / My sense did stagger at the Counterfet’ (58–9). The artificial creativity of the embalmers has ‘counterfeited’ the king, imprinting his image on

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an object of lesser worth. Shirley reads the whole scene emblematically. When he sees the figure which is supposed to represent the monarchy’s perpetuity, he is at first incredulous, believing ‘in Law, That Kings can never die’ (57), then appreciative of the psychologically satisfying visual confirmation of James’s death. Finally, he professes that the king does live – in his son and heir, Charles. The speed of this transference of loyalty and affection from James to Charles suits the constitutional requirement that the king’s body politic never dies. Shirley recognises that the law allows for the death of the natural body alone. The recuperation of social identities which was the work of the funeral takes on an additional legal significance in the obsequies of the sovereign. An effigy was also employed by Parliament for the funeral of Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex in 1646. Essex was made General of Parliamentary forces on 4 July 1642, but had occasionally fallen out of favour with his Westminster bosses. In 1644, he pursued King Charles into Cornwall against the orders of the Commons, and was defeated. He had also opposed the Commons’ measures to new model the army, and worked to negotiate a peaceful settlement. So his death on 14 September 1646 ‘of an apoplex, having been sick about a week, taking cold in hunting the stag’ was considered by many ‘an irrecoverable loss’ to the Independents, ‘and the malignants boldly say the king has lost a very good friend’.89 But by using his funeral to magnify Essex as a military commander who risked death in the service of Parliament, the Presbyterians who increasingly controlled the Commons could emphasise Parliament’s authority, military might and the cohesion of the two Houses, while undermining factions who were attempting to negotiate with the king. Broadsides and pamphlets had depicted Essex’s military valour throughout the mid-1640s. Foolscap sheets included portraits depicting him and Fairfax in full armour, astride horses or enclosed in the ensigns of military glory, with panegyric verse, lists of recent victories and registers of famous royalists captured or killed. Now, posters like Englands Sorrow for the Losse of Their Late Generall mourned his death anthologically, combining such lists and images with elegies, acrostics and funeral emblems. In recognition of his services, Parliament allotted ‘a large summe of money’ to organise an honourable funeral. Preparations engrossed ‘most of the Herrolds Painters in London’90 and, according to elegist Daniel Evance, created intense public expectation.91 Evance bragged that his ability to portray sentiments made his contribution to the civic ceremony superior to the heralds’. He can construct an effigy in verse;


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Heralds make haste, ye need not strive And tamper with a Waxen mold; You cannot make my Lord alive, Nor yet Effigies him in Gold[.] (26–7)

Evance distinguishes between honourable elegists (like himself) and those ‘Sons of Pride’ who are only interested in getting ‘themselves a name’ and capitalising on this opportunity (17). Such poets ‘Have crown’d themselves by Crowning of thy Herse’, but ‘’Tis easie grief ’ which ‘Laws in Mourning can distinctly keep’ (4). Evance associates the insincerity of artifice with obedience to the heralds: maintaining regular metre is equivalent to keeping one’s place in an orderly procession. But for Essex’s devotees, the ‘boundless passions of our hearts’ cannot ‘be taught to keep or Time or Measure’ (5). He asserts his right as a ‘Servant’ to be at the centre of the ritual by ‘his Masters Herse’, a figurative proximity to the actual close mourners which gives him distinction and rank. One account of Essex’s funeral had particularly noted the effigy’s attire, which included ‘his Creation Robes, his Earles Coronet upon his head, in Souldiers Apparell, and a Generals Leading Staffe in his hand’. The effigy was drawn ‘in an open Chariot of blacke Velvet, with six Horses covered with black Velvet to the ground’.92 Its carefully individuated clothing highlights Essex’s military and noble rank. But a month later, Thomas Juxon recorded that the effigy, erected in the Abbey following the funeral, was ‘basely and unworthily defaced and mangled, to the great scorn of the parliament’.93 Cavalier John White attacked the effigy, slashing the coat worn by Essex at Edge Hill and decapitating the statue with an axe. These actions reveal the power of the effigy as a symbol of the individual and of the institutions he defended. The damage to Essex’s auratic coat deserves special notice; the battle of Edgehill had represented a particularly bitter loss of opportunity to royalists, who had failed to capitalise when Essex retreated leaving open the road to London. Perhaps in attacking it, White was engaging in his own denial of history. White may also have objected to the effigy because in English tradition it was reserved for royal funerals (though used on a few rare occasions to represent subjects of royal blood such as the Duke of Lennox). Accounts of Cromwell’s funeral in the Commonwealth Mercury also emphasise the monarchical pretensions embodied in the effigy, which stood at Somerset House ‘being vested with Royal Robes, a Scepter in one hand, a Globe in the other, and a Crown on the head’.94 Apparently the

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‘enraged’ public pelted mud at the escutcheon hung over the gate, and thereafter the crown never employed the effigy.95 Andrew Marvell’s elegy on Cromwell nonetheless embraces the political conservativism and transfer of power associated with the ritual use of the effigy. Marvell provides ocular proof of the demise of the old political order: ‘I saw him dead’, ‘All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan.’ The mighty Protector has been transformed into a lifeless corpse; and the storms in heaven suggest not only nature’s grief, but dangerous times for the new polity. Marvell must reassert the power of the heir, Richard. He hopes that ‘A Cromwell in an houre a prince will grow’, his natural defects will be redeemed by his name, and as ‘calme peace succeeds a war, / Rainbows to storms’, so Richard to Oliver.96 Effigies substantiated the divine grandeur of royalty through the exposure of a monumental body to the public gaze. But they also had a long tradition of provoking strong emotional reactions from onlookers. These were normally used as evidence of public loyalty to the crown, as when Isaac Wake saw ‘the goodly image’ on the hearse of the Prince of Wales. It ‘did so lively represent his person, as that it did not onely draw teares from the severest beholder, but cawsed a fearefull outcrie among the people as if they felt at the present their owne ruine in that losse’.97 The ‘garments’, signs of Henry’s rank, indicate the effigy’s identity to the crowd and prompt a cry of identification. They also fear ‘their owne ruine’: that social stability and their own personal fortunes may be threatened by the death of this prince. Similar reactions to Elizabeth’s effigy are recorded. When the crowd saw it, ‘there was such a generall sighing, groning, and weeping, as the like hath not beene seene or knowne in the memory of man’.98 Here, the exposure of the regal accoutrements causes an outpouring of grief. The effigy released a palliative emotional response and sensibility of shared (national) loss. It reaffirmed an obligation (for example, to be loyal to the sovereign) as a voluntary and desirable form of participation in civic life. As Turner explains, through ritual ‘norms and values, on the one hand, become saturated with emotion; while the gross and basic emotions become ennobled through contact with social values’.99 However, some sources suggest that the heraldic funeral was not wholly affective. Martin Llewellyn reflected at the funeral of Henry, Duke of Gloucester in 1660 that Herse, Scutchins, Darknesse, the pale tapers blaze; All that invites our first, or after gaze; The Nobles, Heraulds, Mourners sable-clad; These make a solemne pomp, but not a sad.100


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The effigy’s capacity to induce emotional outpourings and assure observers of the continuity of power also put it in direct competition with elegists, whose idealised representations were themselves intended to elicit lamentation followed by reconciliation. Funerary rituals were rites of passage which occurred in time; the more permanent monuments they sanctified would also deteriorate. They extended the time of dying, from a biological moment into a process of social detachment and reincorporation of the dead into the ancestral history of the community. But these rituals were finite until literary and pictorial representations implanted them in the immortality of a perpetually regenerative readership. In this way, elegies, epitaphs, portraits and monumental art participated in the collaborative, communal ritual of the funeral. Heraldic and night funerals alike moved private grief towards public resolution. Similarly, although dying could be a private moment, it required the moriens to make pronouncements of faith suitable to public gatherings. Exhortations from the deathbed were valuable gifts to survivors which obliged them to commemorate the dead in elegies and other artistic works. Having examined the part played by elegies in the material and symbolic culture of funerary rituals, we will now look specifically at elegies for victims of executions. The execution demonstrated the state’s profound and terrifying power to enforce conformity. However, radical reinterpretations of the same scenes prove the impossibility of maintaining that conformity, both in the spoken language of the condemned and in its written treatment by supporters and opponents. Culminating in writings about the regicide, these newsbooks, ballads, elegies and satires show how authorities could not limit the interpretation of symbolic rituals. The affective energies of loss and anger which the funeral, effigy or procession managed became, in fact, more dangerous when they had to coalesce around the scaffold, being denied any other ritual expression. These execution writings should, then, usefully complicate the description of mortuary ritual as conservative offered thus far.

4 Spectacular Executions of the 1640s

Early modern rhetoric encouraged conformity to conventions, as well as spontaneous improvisation on new occasions. As Chapter 1 has shown, good orators and writers aimed to edify, to persuade and to distinguish themselves from the crowd. These same aims characterised the early modern execution. A speech from the scaffold was perhaps the most tense rhetorical performance imaginable. The condemned must observe punitive decorum, not only confessing his sins and praising the justice of the state, but also giving the impression of pious inspiration. These speeches counselled the crowd to eschew criminality and reconciled the condemned to the social order their criminal actions had disturbed. But a few, especially aristocratic rebels, used these occasions to redeem themselves and criticise the state. Their models for comportment in death were drawn from the Christian and the Stoic traditions discussed in Chapter 2. The Christian ars moriendi, and the ‘Stoic, or Roman’ death as described especially in Plutarch’s Lives, provided rational arguments against suffering. The obedience or disobedience of the moriens to these conventions had political as well as eschatological consequences. Funeral and execution are not dissimilar rituals. Just as participants could intrude on the funeral to affirm their intimacy with the dead, so could supporters of the condemned use the pathos of the execution to challenge the state. What happens, in such conditions, to the anthropological consensus that mortuary rites are conservative? What happens to the proposition that the model death is obedient, the model elegy conventional? Death, in bed or on the scaffold, was a complex ritual. It involved theatrical display, the conventions of a dying speech and the charismatic authority derived from the victim’s satisfaction of temporal law and approach to the divine. These features are discussed in Sections 4.1 to 4.3. The Christian and Stoic models already 90

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presented needed little adaptation to the situation of the condemned, as Section 4.5 reveals. Drawing on the conventions established in these sections, the bulk of this chapter attends to three particularly complex executions and the literary responses to them. Unlike many of the public figures already discussed, Charles Stuart was not celebrated with a state funeral displaying hierarchical stability. He was dramatically executed in front of Whitehall on 30 January 1649, then hurried into a private grave in Windsor Castle. As a radical political act and an unprecedented legal one, the regicide has already been subjected to copious historical analysis. But our understanding of the hagiography of his death will benefit by comparison with two important precedents: his lieutenant in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. Though separated over eight years, these three deaths continued to be associated in the popular imagination. Cowley in The Civil War follows his account of Strafford’s death by giving notice that ‘The same lowd storme blew the grave Miter downe, / It blew downe that, and with it shooke the Crowne.’1 For royalists, these secular and religious powerbrokers were the first victims of a radicalism which ended in regicide. Elegies on all three occasions negotiated with conventions, but by the regicide those conventions came under increased strain as social consensus fragmented through two civil wars. Royalist poets responding to these deaths lamented their inability to exercise a conservative influence, or to incite their readers to displays of active virtue. They also found themselves competing with a variety of forms of propaganda. In many cases elegists availed themselves of the new imaginative resources released in hybrid genres including dream poems, post-mortem confessions, reportage, correspondence, diaries and speeches. This diverse literary record invited readers to witness, relive and reimagine public suffering, and to engage in a politically charged exchange of empathies. Mourning for the passing not just of the king, but also of the forms of epideictic and lyric associated with the early Stuart period, royalist elegists also reflected pessimistically on the new challenges to language and law posed by the regicide – challenges which offered a temporary liberation to their republican countrymen.

4.1 Theatres of death and their audiences In its didacticism and representation of power, the execution mirrored the masque. Both spectacles participate in the ideological construction of sovereignty. Both were morally didactic – Jonson called the masque

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a ‘mirror of man’s life’ given by the prince to his people for their betterment, while the execution was intended to show how a life of crime led to disaster.2 The beautiful bodies displayed in masques invited contemplation of the symmetry between soul and nation, reason and the king, passions and commoners. The asymmetry of power inflicted on an abject body in capital punishment invited contemplation of the correspondence between obedient citizens and the health of the body politic. Noble audiences colluded in the mechanical extravagances of the stage, while crowds of all classes gave witness to the rituals of procession, derobing, speech and prayer on the scaffold; guards were on hand to enforce their collusion, for a peaceful execution identified the king’s will with the salus populi and the reformed convict with religious and political consensus. Thomas Laqueur notes another similarity between the masque and the execution. In the 1616 edition of Basilikon Doron, James VI and I describes a king ‘as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures, all the people gazingly do behold’; this emends the comparison of the king in the 1599 Edinburgh edition to ‘one set on a skaffold’. Both words signal the monarch’s vulnerability: the crowd peered into the very body of the condemned, and his subjects scrutinised the king. In his own masque of death, Charles mounted a ‘Tragick Scaffold’ to play out his mortal role as martyr. Marvell’s famous description of Charles as ‘Royal Actor’ initiates a theatrical conceit, where ‘the armed Bands / Did clap their bloody hands’. Included in his ‘Horatian Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’, these admiring lines affirm Charles’ heroic performance in a panegyric to the Protector: the king ‘nothing common did or mean / Upon that memorable Scene’.3 Marvell’s dramatic language was shared with many royalist commentators. At this ‘most barbarous entertainment’, John Arnway writes, theatregoers witnessed an unprecedented scene.4 Lord Chief Baron Heneage Finch would describe the setting during the trial of the regicides as ‘an Aggravation of Villany’, worse than any ‘Romance, any Fabulous Tragedy’. Whitehall was where Charles ‘used in Royall Majesty to hear Embassadors, to have His Honourable Entertainments’.5 Inside the Great Banqueting House, Charles had hosted the spectacular displays which reinforced his power.6 In the Eikon Basilike the king is said to anticipate the ‘greater formalities’ of the Whitehall setting as means for his enemies to adde (as those did, who Crucified Christ) the mockery of Justice, to the cruelty of Malice: That I may be destroyed, as with greater pomp and artifice, so with lesse pity[.]7


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Charles is alert to the power of ‘pomp and artifice’ in managing or preventing ‘pity’; it confirms the new authority of the rebels in place of his own. By contrast, Milton associates the regicide with the masque in order to undermine its sacrificial potential. He describes William Marshall’s famous frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike as ‘the conceited portraiture [ ] drawn out to the full measure of a Masking Scene, and sett there to catch fools and silly gazers.’ This picture, filled with ‘quaint Emblems and devices begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall’, is not a testimony of messianic victimhood but a deceptive stage show.8 Milton is countering the martyrology which Charles’ supporters based on his anointing at the coronation. That anointing made Charles the christos, and his death and redemptive sacrifice made him Christ-like. Charles was ‘convoy’d to his last Theatre’ where he ‘acts his Passions part’ of holy martyrdom, one wrote.9 Another elegist recalls, This Scene was like the Passion-Tragedie, His Saviour’s Person none could Act, but Hee. Behold what Scribes were here, what Pharisees! What bands of Souldiers! What fals witnesses!10 Whitehall served as the ‘Slaughter-Hous’ or ‘Calvarie’, where Charles was converted from king into ‘our MARTYR’. This poet refers to dated cultural activities; passion plays such as the Corpus Christi pageants had been in decline since the Edwardian Reformation. But the theatricality of Charles’ sacrificial tragedy would be replayed in Restoration fast sermons and anniversaries well into the eighteenth century. The role of writers in witnessing and interpreting the drama supplemented the active participation of the crowds. Huge crowds regularly gathered at Tyburn and on Tower Hill; for Strafford’s death, the authorities set up ‘divers other Scaffolds for the spectators to be hold the same whereunto did resort a great confluence of people, both men, women, and children’, but the overcrowding led to two scaffolds collapsing, ‘so that some that came to be but spectators of the tragedy, proved Actors themselves’.11 The spectators were ‘actors’ or participants in the ritual in other ways. They required victims to ‘show’ themselves ‘on each side in full view to all people’, and interpreted their speeches, prayers and body language.12 The ritual concluded with the hangman showing the head, usually eliciting roars of approval or sorrowful sighs. Pieter Spierenburg argues that the crowd’s exuberance hearkens back to the

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private vengeance practised in medieval communities, since replaced by bureaucratic justice. Revenge, Francis Bacon argued, was ‘a kinde of Wilde Justice’ which put ‘the Law out of Office’ and must be systematically expunged.13 Though managed and repressed by the law, the public’s desire for vengeance was often stirred by the execution and its preceding publicity. Peter Heylyn accused Sergeant Wilde of having used the presses to set forth Laud’s offences ‘in their foulest Colours’, and intimating to the Raskal Multitude to save the Houses the dishonor of putting him to death in a form of Law, by Stoneing him to death or Tearing him in pieces, or laying violent hands upon him[.]14 Similarly, Parliamentary pamphleteers stoked resentment of Strafford one adversary declared that; ‘three whole Kingdomes were his accusers, and eagerly sought in one death a recompence of all their sufferings’ (Eikon Alethine 11). Strafford acknowledged in his dying speech ‘I have heard the people clamour and cry out, saying, that through my occasion the times are bad’ (Two Last Speeches 4). In one falsified ‘last confession’, he appreciated that the logic of sacrifice requires a public demonstration of submission. And I must die in open publique shew, That discontented people all may know, When I am gone and being once appeas’d, Hevens grant they may of all their griefe be eas’d[.]15 His self-sacrifice is intended to appease both the ‘discontented people’ and heaven itself. Later a poet called for Laud’s beheading: for despite Strafford’s extraction the polity was ‘still sick’, and ‘Better some members perish then the whole / Body should languish in continuall thrall’.16 The crowd also expressed their desire for revenge with heckling, rival praying and complaints. Riots showing resentment of or support for the condemned were not unusual; the hangman might find himself threatened if he bungled the job.17 Sympathetic crowds could, however, recast the occasion as a holy sacrifice. One author records the crowd surging forward to collect relics of bone and hair and dip their handkerchiefs in Charles’ blood, as if he was a saint.18 Spectators also participated by influencing the convict’s performance and by interpreting the scene. The execution encouraged the crowd to interact with state ideologies of law, order, property and citizenship, even as the univocal authority of


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these ideologies was challenged by the variety of popular responses. The custom of the scaffold speech reveals the cooperation between public, victim and state; but it also exemplifies how dissenters could use the pathos of the execution to improve their reputation and to appeal directly to the public as a source of political power.

4.2 The art of dying speeches Strafford’s execution was well policed, with ‘two Trayne bands attending, with Constables and watchmen to prevent any mutany that should happen to arise’ (True Relation 2). Such discipline was recognised as a necessity in the management of executions throughout Europe: when the King of Bohemia sentenced dozens of his courtiers to death in 1621, it was reported in England that two companies of horse and three of foot were ranged ‘in order of Battell’ throughout the city. Cannon sounded warning and the companies beat their drums ‘so that thereby it was unpossible to any to heare his own wordes, much lesse such thinges as by every patient in particuler might have beene related for the last time’.19 The silencing of these last words indicates their subversive potential. English victims were generally docile on the scaffold, however, demonstrating their reconciliation with the crown according to the generic requirements.20 The astonished seventeenth-century traveller Balthasar Bekker joked that he could mistake these moralising English convicts for ministers at the pulpit, were it not for the ropes around their necks.21 A good scaffold speech proved the faith of the dying and instructed the living. Giving their own funeral sermons, criminals offered particularly grim versions of the exemplary and correctional texts already discussed, including an epideictic to the state. These didactic speeches were particularly appealing to the authorities because they provoked immense curiosity. Henry Goodcole begins his description of the death of Francis Robinson with the recognition that ‘Dying mens wordes are ever remarkable, and their last deeds memorable for succeeding posterities, by them to be instructed.’22 The abundance of pamphlets and ballads reporting dying men’s speeches testifies to the public interest in them. One balladeer wonders, Shall every Jack and every Jill, That rides in State up Holborn-Hill, By aid of Smithfield Rhymes defie The Malice of Mortality?23

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But authorities encouraged this curiosity, for victims’ good behaviour confirmed the justice of their sentence and of the law. As Bacon observed after the Overbury scandal resulted in the execution of Sir Gervase Elwes in 1615, the Lieutenant, though with great Imprecations and with high hand he denyed it, yet to the great Glory of the Kings Justice he dyed most penitently and resolutely: This is spoken to the great Praise of God, that hath crowned these just Proceedings.24 Divine and crown justice resounded when obstinate prisoners recanted their sins. Conventional wisdom held that dying speeches revealed the victim’s true character, because no one would risk his or her immortal soul by prevaricating a few minutes before meeting God. As Bacon translates from Montaigne, ‘To say that a man lieth, is as much to say, as that he is brave towards God, and a Coward towards men.’25 Montaigne himself paraphrases Seneca, affirming that ‘when that last part of death, and of our selves comes to be acted, then no dissembling will availe, then it is high time to speake plaine English, and put off all vizards: [ ] It is the master-day, the day that judgeth all others.’26 But like the elegies examined so far, the scaffold speech is a dramatic rhetorical performance, combining spontaneity with predicated form. While execution pamphlets claimed that a dying speech revealed the spiritual truth and the workings of the Holy Spirit in the recuperation of a criminal, such speeches could also set the speaker’s own charismatic authority in opposition to religious and political powers.

4.3 Criminals, charisma and seclusion Before the convicted murderer John Gerhard bowed to the axe in 1654, he reconciled himself to being ‘made such a spectacle’. ‘I have been bred upon the Theater of death, and have learned that part so well, though I confess a very hard one, as to perform it pretty handsomly, both as becomes a Gentleman, and a Christian’, he told the crowd.27 The theatrical ‘part’ of the condemned was a challenging one, requiring intense preparation if the related decorums of the ‘Gentleman’ and the ‘Christian’ were to be maintained under stress. Criminals like Gerhard were prepared to make such speeches by a period of seclusion. In this liminal state, they accrued a kind of charisma, evident in myths of the curative power of the hanged man’s ‘touch’, a cognate to the king’s touching


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for scrofula. Max Weber defines charisma as the ‘formative power in initiating, creating, governing, transforming, maintaining, or destroying what is vital in man’s life.’28 The charismatic individual becomes a law unto him or herself, discovering the values at the heart of social life and emerging ready to seize influence and reinterpret cultural values. For Maurice Bloch, the liminal person who returns to the community either submits voluntarily to its rules or maintains that charismatic authority ‘to conquer that same old identity present in others’ in what he calls ‘rebounding conquest’.29 The hangman’s victims could either submit to the expectation of a docile confession or emphasise their new autonomous identity as truth-speaking rebels. That identity resurfaced in fictions of malevolent ghosts or heroic revenants, still resisting absolutism’s excesses from beyond the grave. The early modern execution signified the condemned person’s potential recuperation as a ‘sacred individual’ symbolically: criminals were sometimes dressed in white, the colour of weddings and of martyrdom.30 Charles himself made the connection when he described his execution as both his martyrdom and his second wedding day. Edward May memorialises the execution of a murderess, When all In white (pure as her quiett thought) she to her Journeis end, was safly brought how sweetly she uppon her death bed lay31 like a bride awaiting her bridegroom. The purification of criminals represented by this wearing of white was achieved through a period of seclusion with their ‘quiet thoughts’ before the ultimate rite of passage. Liminality, Victor Turner argues, encourages displays of obedience to the elders who embody the ‘axiomatic values of society’.32 In Stuart England, those elders were ministers, responsible for turning the reprobate towards the common good. Peter Lake describes these ministers’ ‘surveillance, monitoring and display of their protégés’ burgeoning command of the conventions of Puritan self-fashioning’ as ‘almost proprietorial’. During repeated visits, they coached felons ‘in the distinctive rhetoric and behaviour patterns of the godly’.33 One minister advised the condemned John Atherton to keep his chamber dark, forswear company, fast and mortify his body, and have a coffin brought to his cell. He should meditate on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and write out his confession, all into one Inditement, wherein he might at once, as in a glasse, view the face of his soule. After this rough draught, that he might

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be the more astonished, he went over them againe with marginall aggravations.34 The successful completion of this programme requires writing, which will facilitate Atherton’s ‘emptying himselfe of himselfe’, extinguishing his sinful resistance to God and relinquishing his attachments to this world. By reading his life as a text, Atherton will be better prepared for his rhetorical self-indictment on the scaffold. However, convicts could surpass their spiritual mentors. Gerhard’s conversion to godliness disconcerted the sheriff, whom the condemned man received in the Tower so fearless and untroubled, that the Sherif told the Minister, He was sorry to see him so unfit for that condition [ ] So hard a thing it is to satisfie all curiosities, even with our blood, and nothing more ingenious then to carry this bitter cup even, when so many misconstructions shake it.35 Gerhard is the object of judicial and spiritual inspection, as well as ‘curiosity’. His over-performance of the minister’s demands, and his fearlessness and inscrutability cause the suspicious sheriff to forbid a public address. Gerhard prevails, and begins to read from a paper; but the Sheriff again warns him ‘that they must not suffer him to speak any thing that was seditious’ (4). Gerhard then promises the crowd that he will share his newfound wisdom in an execution pamphlet. This account reveals that through his impending spiritual and physical trial, the condemned is privy to a special kind of gnosis, which also makes his statements exceedingly dangerous to the crown.

4.4 Forethinking of liberty: Stoic and Christian autonomy Although there were some exceptionally troublesome prisoners, enough conformed to the punitive protocol to persuade the judiciary to maintain this custom of scaffold speeches. Exclamations of religious dissent aside, even most heretics were tractable victims who endorsed the temporal authority.36 Lacey Baldwin Smith attributes this conformity to such varied causes as a desire to retain forfeit properties and titles, profoundly internalised obedience to the sovereign’s will, belief in providentialism or fatalistic indifference.37 But it is still surprising, considering that a defiant scaffold performance could redeem the


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traitor’s immortal reputation and offer a persuasive last resistance to an unjust sentence. When one murderer continued to insist on his innocence even at the moment of his death, ‘a great many People were very inclinable to harbour some favourable Thoughts of him, and indeed a very strong Belief, that he was wrong’d’. Even the author of this pamphlet, Robert Rowe, confessed that continued protestations of innocence ‘startle and stagger a great many tender Ears; it being a little hard to conceive, that any Dying Man, especially with his professions of Piety, could look Eternity in the Face’ if really guilty.38 Such resistance was dangerous because it undermined the crowd’s faith in the justice of the state. Executed in 1618 at Westminster Sir Walter Ralegh offers a famous example of such last-minute resistance. Having requested at his trial that I may not be cutt of suddainely; for I have some thinge to doe in discharge of my conscience; something to satisfie his Majestie, and somethinge to satisfie the worlde, [ ] and heare I take god to be my Judge I was never disloyall to his Majestie; wich I will justifie where I need not feare the face of any kinge upon the earth,39 Ralegh expressed to his counsellor Robert Tounson his desire to reform his own image and ‘to persuade the world he died an innocent man’. Tounson cautioned him that ‘men in those days did not die in that sort innocent, and his pleading innocency was an oblique taxing of the Justice of the Realm upon him’. But on the scaffold, Ralegh did ‘tax’ that justice. Fearless of kings and honest in expectation of God’s judgement, Ralegh defied his enemies. Alas it were a foolishe madnes for me to lye in the presence of god to whom I am at this very instant goeinge and before whom I am nowe to make my Accompt. For what proffitt would it be to me to sett a little florishe and glosse over those things and loose my owne soule.[ ] I am nowe out of the power of all the world and am not in cause to feare or flatter kings but am nowe subject to death. Ralegh disdained the earthly judiciary, for ‘the Great God of Heaven is my soveraigne, before whose tribunall I am shortely to appeare’.40 Subject to the ultimate pain of death, he is freed from constraint, vividly embodying the Stoic assurance that (as Montaigne has it) ‘the premeditation of death, is a forethinking of libertie. Hee that hath learned to die, hath forgotten to serve, it is above all power’.41

100 English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century

If the audience does not believe in the victim’s spiritual peril, his truth claim will be less impressive. But given such consensus, the dissenting speaker can claim a veracity which surpasses the state’s corruptible will to punish. No longer is the king an absolute representative of God’s justice and mercy, correcting his subjects through his word; now the righteous servant suffers from the tyrannical exercise of temporal power and magnifies his own charismatic authority through rhetoric. Sir Lewis Stukeley, who had testified against his kinsman Ralegh, attested in a Humble Petition that ‘they say he died like a Souldier and a Saint, and therefore then to be beleeved, not only against me, but against the attestation of the State’.42 Stukeley complains that the credibility of Ralegh’s performance undermined the judiciary and state (as well as his own reputation). John Shirley also characterised Ralegh as behaving ‘with so High and so Religious a Resolution, as if a Christian had acted a Roman, or rather a Roman a Christian’.43 Ralegh displayed both secular and sacred fortitudes; but it was the Stoic freedom from tyranny, achieved through deliberate and active dying, by which he justified his own death. He wrote to his wife from the Tower around 27 July 1603, the day that he allegedly attempted suicide, that ‘I knowe it is forbidden to destroye our selfes but I trust it is forbidden in this sorte, that we destroye not ourselves dispairinge of God’s mercie.’44 That is, the sin is not selfdestruction but despair. This letter shows Ralegh struggling to reconcile the Stoic freedom of suicide with Christian ideals of fortitude. Many execution pamphlets represent the death of the criminal as voluntary self-sacrifice. Describing the comportment of Arthur, first Baron Capel on his way to the scaffold in 1649, one elegist writes, So have I seen a frolick Bridegroom come, And guild with smiles the gaudy Wedding-room, Joy dancing on his Face, whilst in his Eye The young Bride’s Blushes kept true Harmony: Just with that look the Romans Victors all In Triumph rid unto the Capital.45 The Roman allusion is not accidental, for Stoic philosophy offered a powerful model for such nonchalant dying. The Stoic must be prepared to die; waiting for a natural end, Seneca says, ‘he cutteth off the way of libertie’ (Workes 295). Marcus Aurelius elaborated on this freedom, denying that the mode of death was at all important: if others will not suffer you to live as you choose, ‘then maist thou leave thy life’,


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but so as one that doth not thinke himselfe any waies wronged. Only as one would say, Here is a smoake; I will out of it. And what a great matter is this? Now till some such thing force me out, I will continue free; neither shall any man hinder mee to doe what I will[.]46 Having stripped the veil from traditional authority, the Stoic sage (Epictetus argues) is ‘absolute Lord over everything’ and free of the ‘yoake’.47 Justus Lipsius recommends that through ratio recta ‘Thou shalt be a king indeed free indeed [sic], only subject unto God, enfranchized from the servile yoke of Fortune and affections.’48 That is, the gnosis of Stoical reconciliation with necessity – which ministers themselves encouraged the condemned to develop – actually liberated them from the authorities who would execute them. The Stoic courage of Seneca or Cato could inspire victims of painful and heroic public deaths, as well as fortify the private, homely deaths of individuals like Anne Rich, who (according to John Gauden) died ‘not onely with a Romans constancy of Spirit, but with a Christian confidence and well-grounded hope’.49 But were these two disciplines reconcilable? In contrast to the Stoics’ autonomy in choosing death, Christians should not resist providential suffering, enslavement or death. Christians were called to suffer in order to be released from sin (1 Peter 4:1). Christ himself notably suffered during the Passion, overcoming his human vulnerability to conform to God’s will – a cathartic process often imitated in martyrological accounts.50 Early Christians bore ‘witness to their faith not only at the cost of, but actually by means of, suffering and death’.51 In a gruesome corollary to Thomas Wilson’s fellowship of sorrow, the public persecution of Christians created a fellowship of pain: a sense of solidarity based on spectacular public suffering. Christian dissidents also actively gave witness to the righteousness of their beliefs at the moment of death, unlike the Stoics, who sought to erase their attachments. Stoics submitted silently in the interests of law and city. Christians spoke out, infused by the authority of the Holy Spirit. Marcus Aurelius admires the soul which ‘is ever ready’ to die, but he stipulates, this readinesse of it, it must proceed, not from an obstinate and peremptory resolution of the mind, violently and passionatly set upon opposition (as Christians are wont;) but [ ] with discretion and gravity, so that


others may be perswaded also and drawne to the like example, but without any noyse and passionate exclamations. (183) But Christian death was also an exemplary, persuasive performance. Christian martyrs welcomed suffering as the rough road to heaven, cognisant that the spectacle helped to convert the faithless. In the early modern period, Christian consensus held that Stoicism was useful to the persecuted man – as Edward Sherburne attested in dedicating his translation of Seneca’s De Clementia to King Charles in 1648 – but best when subservient to Christian fortitude. Strafford and Laud struggled to triumph in death through the combined disciplines of Stoic and Christian resistance. Strafford, unlike the Archbishop, did not lay claim to martyrdom. For readers of his execution, Strafford represented the innate and secular freedom of the Stoic rather than the Christian glory of submission.

4.5 The divider divided: Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford The physical division of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, on 12 May 1641, was advertised as a remedy for political division, though (like many executions) it also produced a division in sensibility in the audience. Soon after the calling of the Long Parliament at the beginning of November 1640, Strafford was impeached for treason; Laud’s impeachment followed on 18 December. Laud was delivered to the custody of the Tower in March 1641. That month, Strafford’s trial began. The Commons prosecutors could not exactly make the charges of treason stick on the Earl, as they would not be able to with the Archbishop; and in both cases, death was procured through an Act of Attainder. Similarly, the Lords’ refusal to endorse the Ordinance for the trial of the king led the Rump to bypass them and set up a High Court of Justice. The impeachment of Strafford and Laud required the Commons to redefine treason, which was evolving from a crime against the person of the king towards a crime against the state and the salus populi, and whose punishment could be secured through legislative fiat rather than judicial verdict.52 In this way, these cases were also legally significant in the preparation for executing the king for treason. The popular press condemned the Earl for turning the king against his kingdom, by causing Charles to favour his private over the national interest. John Pym’s opening speech of the Long Parliament had accused Strafford, Clarendon recalls, of subjecting the nation to ‘the arbitrary


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power of the Privy-Council, which governed the kingdom according to their will and pleasure’.53 Pym wedges Strafford between the king and the law. Drawing on the theory of the king’s two bodies, Pym applies a medical conceit: It is usuall to compare Politique Bodies with the Naturall, the Naturall Body is endangered divers wayes; either by outward violence, and that may be foreseene and prevented; or by lesse appearing Maladies with [sic] growes upon the Body 54 Unsurprisingly, the correlation between a divisive politician and the physical division of his head from his body appealed to many pamphleteers and poets. Many of Strafford’s enemies also went near to accusing Strafford of turning Charles into a tyrant. Sir John Glyn accused Strafford of making ‘his Majestie thinke, That his Royall prerogative is neither comprehended within the limits of Law, nor the bounds of Reason’.55 A pseudo-autobiographical ‘elegiack poem’ shows Strafford urging his nephews to take care that Where ever Justice calls you, for my sake Be all your Demonstrations faire, nor make A bad distinction, by mistaken zeale T’your Prince, ’twixt him, and ’twixt his Commonweale.56 Royalists on the other hand emphasised Strafford’s loyalty, citing a letter from him to the king which was printed in multiple editions following his execution. There, Strafford implored Charles to sign the Bill of Attainder, because he places ‘the prosperity of your sacred person, and the Common-wealth, infinitely before any private man’s interest’.57 But the king’s reported reluctance to execute Strafford suggested to some that Charles would protect his counsellors at the cost of his kingdom. Charles promised Strafford on the day of sentencing that ‘Upon the word of a king you shall not suffer in life, honour and fortune.’58 He ‘pleaded’ for Strafford on 1 May, refusing as a matter of conscience to sign the Bill of Attainder. Laud believed that this ‘hastened the Earl’s death’, and in a rare criticism of the king, adds: ‘it had been far more regal to reject the Bill when it had been brought to him, (his conscience standing so as his Majesty openly professed it did,) than to make this honourable preface, and let the Bill pass after’.59 Kevin Sharpe has argued that Charles constantly affirmed the validity of his own private conscience as protector and cipher for the public interest.60 But in Strafford’s case, the


king finally gave in to public interest in opposition to his conscience. That concession would haunt the pages of the Eikon Basilike. Clarendon records that behind the scenes the king’s counsellors persuaded him to separate his private ethics from the requirements of his public office. These counsellors included Bishop John Williams, an ancient enemy of Laud who allegedly told Charles ‘that his public conscience as a king might not only dispense with, but oblige him to do, that which was against his private conscience as a man’ (I.338). Later, the king was said to regard Strafford’s death as having taught him ‘to preferre the peace of My Conscience before the preservation of My Kingdomes’. As his own trial approached, Charles knew it ‘better for Me to die enjoying this Empire of My Soul’ than to sacrifice his conscience to the demands of rebels (Eikon Basilike 36). Richard Baxter was among many contemporaries who believed that Charles saw his own death sentence as God’s reply to his unjust execution of Strafford: ‘he much repented it, even to the last, as his speeches at his death express’.61 It was in a letter concerning Strafford’s case to his cousin the Marquis of Hamilton on 2 December 1642 that Charles first promised he would ‘be eather a glorious King or a patient martir’ and ‘no extreamitie or misfortune shall make me yeald’.62 The king now construed his battle with Parliament as a spiritual contest for his immortal soul. Strafford’s impeachment had begotten within the king a self-division which, according to his enemies, disabled his authority. In its indictment of ‘Charles Stuart’ for treason, the High Court would use definitions of tyranny – the pursuit of private interests rather than the common good – first set out by Aristotle (Politics III.7) and used to convict Strafford. Charles worked ‘for the advancement and upholding of a Personal Interest of Will and Power, and pretended Prerogative to himself and his Family, against the Publick Interest’ of the nation.63 As Charles’ personal will had been severed from the body politic, his natural body became impeachable. The cost of Strafford’s execution was thus not only the loss of moderate Parliamentary leaders, the sacrifice of the Irish army and the surrender of his prerogative to dissolve Parliament. It was also a symbolic loss for the sanctity of his office. Strafford’s dangerous charisma had demonstrated the possibility of undermining the constitutional sites of power – both the crown and Parliament – through the appropriation of their law-making power. In the Eikon Basilike, Strafford is described as a potential rival to the crown: he is ‘a Gentleman, whose great abilities might make a Prince rather afraid, then ashamed to employ him, in the greatest affairs of State’. His perceived threat to the salus populi led to petitions and


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popular demonstrations against him. Heylyn accuses the Commons of stage-managing these demonstrations: the Lords were inclined to relieve Strafford, so Parliament arranged that ‘multitudes of the Rabble were brought down out of London and Southwark, to cry for speedy Justice, and Execution’ (479). Royalist accounts depict brutal popular justice as a foil to Strafford’s eloquence at his trial, a ceremonial miscarriage of justice which ‘hath no parallel’ in legal history, according to Richard Fanshawe. At his trial, Strafford used rhetoric not to exonerate himself but to condemn Parliament. Fanshawe describes how Strafford could have appealed to the king or queen; but this would have been T’ingage in Mortalls Quarrels, Powers Divine. As artlesse Poets Jove or Juno use, To play the Mid-wife to their labouring Muse. No, he affects a labour’d Scene, and not To cut, but to untye the Gordian knot. The Gordian knot is a rather unfortunate image, given Strafford’s ultimate end. But Fanshawe’s imagery is ambivalent throughout, comparing Strafford to an artless and effeminised ‘mid-wife’ poet who calls on the gods for inspiration. Strafford’s ‘affectation’ makes the theatrical scene ‘laboured’, as he engages in a forensic ‘untying’ of the endless legal coils knotted around him, rather than ‘cutting’ through them with the conquering bravado of an Alexander. For Fanshawe, the Earl’s defiant rhetoric will ‘prove no Comedy’ but the ‘best’ of all tragedies.64 Strafford is then described as turning his own ‘conquering Eloquence’ against himself. In his letter convincing the king to sign the Bill of Attainder, he wages ‘a yet more Civill Warre’ against his own person, mirroring the internal conflict which beset Charles I. Fanshawe transforms Strafford’s death into a rhetorical performance to be ‘read’ by future admirers, though contemporary audiences may ‘hisse’ and ‘clap when he leaves the Stage’. Similarly, Abraham Cowley in The Civil War blames ‘The many-mouthed Rout’ which cried for justice and for blood in contrast to Strafford’s measured language. Amidst their ‘senceless Clamours and confused Noyse’, Strafford’s ‘rare and yet unconquered voice’ is lost. Cowley invokes Orpheus, whose ‘Thracian Lyre’ was also ‘drown’d / In the Bistonian Woemens mixed Sound’ (77). This comparison was perhaps triggered by the accounts of Strafford’s execution, popular enough to reach seven editions in the year of his death. Just as Orpheus was torn to pieces by the women, so the lieutenant of the Tower warned Strafford ‘for fear the People should rush


in upon him and tear him in pieces’ that the earl should take a coach. Strafford refused: I dare look Death in the Face, and I hope the People too; Have you a care I do not escape, and I care not how I die, whether by the hand of the Executioner, or the madness and fury of the People[.] (Heylyn 480–1) Strafford implies that the people, reclaiming their ancient right to exact retributive justice, would divide his body into ‘pieces’ (just as he had divided the kingdom). With a magisterial scorn observed by John Denham in Cooper’s Hill, where the ‘brave Hero disdaines to die / By vulgar hands’, Strafford infects the public with the hangman’s infamy. In another spurious ‘Elegy’, Strafford hopes his enemies might passe o’re my fame without a blot, And let the Vulgar scratch they know not what, Let them besmeare me by the chattering notes (Poor silly hearts) which eccho through their throates.65 But he then tempers that disgust with the wish to ‘die without the publique hate’. Strafford’s instinctive antipathy towards the polloi – which also allegedly animated his counsels to the king – did not cancel his dependence on them as guardians of his memory and a source of political power. On 12 May 1641, Strafford ascended the scaffold on Tower Hill disdaining the public spectacle of his death. He was ‘like a General in the Head of an Army’ going ‘to breath out Victory’, according to a royalist observer; not only was his death voluntary, but he retained his military authority. Beginning to make his speech, ‘by reason of the disorder and rudenesse of the multitude, hee was interrupted and forced to withdraw himselfe for a time’. The speaker begged for quiet. ‘I wish I had beene private, that I might have beene heard, my Lord’ (Two Last Speeches 9–10). Despite his aristocratic desire for privacy and ‘courtesy’, he manipulated the public spectacle to proclaim his innocence. He repented his sins, but these were conspicuously not related to the charges against him. He then diverged from the scaffold decorum to warn the audience that there was ‘a great storme impending’ if the blood of the condemned alone was to redress the nation’s political grievances.


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I [ ] doe most humbly recommend it unto every man here, and wish every man to lay his hand upon his heart, and consider seriously whither the beginning of the happinesse of a people should be written in Letters of bloud, I feare you are in a wrong way, and I desire Almighty God that no one drop of my bloud may rise up in judgement against you. (True Relation 7) Strafford reverses the dynamic of the penal scene, to predict an apocalyptic judgement where his blood sacrifice will be both judge and executioner, condemning the multitude which condemns him. To royalists, Strafford’s scaffold speech prophesied the king’s execution and the desolation of the realm by popular violence. This is also an important early occasion for the language of blood guilt, which would culminate in the Army’s demand that Charles Stuart, that ‘man of blood’, be executed for the blood he had caused to be shed in civil war. To counter his resistance during his trial and on the scaffold, Parliamentary propagandists forced Strafford to confess the justice of his sentence in elegies, letters and poems, as well as multiple narratives of his death. Some spoke for him in the first person, like the elegist who declared ‘I doe confesse I have deserved death, / And willingly submit to lose my breath’: ‘I justly die by th’Law.’66 Another writer meets his ghost, who admits his guilt and sense of responsibility for a catalogue of vile offenses committed by royalist soldiers. Despite his suffering, Strafford gushes with ‘thankfulnesse’ to the Commons for ‘freeing your Countrey of the danger my longer life would have made it lyable to [ ]. As soone as yee had tooke off my head, my minde was alter’d’:67 divine justice is exactly consonant with temporal justice. The Commons soon passed an order censoring such publications, after considering ‘the manifold lyes, and ementitious Pamphlets, that have beene published to the great ignominy and dishonour of the State’. One author cites the publications just mentioned among the ‘above three hundred lying Pamphlets’ printed since Strafford’s death, as examples of how authors will not permit delinquents ‘onely to suffer quietly Parliamentary Justice, but they also will nettle them afresh with their goosequil censure. [ ] If he be culpable, and peccant, the Law is sufficient to curb him’; but these libels are ‘an act of higher suffering, then the just censure of Law may permit’, and imply the insufficiency of the law.68 According to this writer, libels usurp the function of the judiciary, and mete out penalties which exceed the cruelty of capital punishment. The fatal scaffold scene was meant to obliterate the


victim’s debt to the state, but pamphlets pursued their victims into the afterlife. Though Strafford observed religious decorum in his prayers and speech, his dying concerns seemed impiously political to his enemies. A ballad undermines the martyrological resonance of his death by emphasising Strafford’s ‘obduracy’: That Man that for Religion dyes Has nothing more before his Eyes, But he that dyes a Criminal Dyes with a load, and none can call Religion that which makes him dream Obduracy can hide his shame.69 Unlike the martyr, who witnesses openly to God’s love, Strafford the ‘criminal’ focussed on political topics in his last hour. Calvin instructs that suffering ‘teacheth us being so humbled, to rest upon God onely’.70 But Strafford did not rest only upon God. Though Laud could not decide ‘whether his death had more of the Roman or the Christian in it, it was so full of both’ (Works III.443), many believed the Roman prevailed over the Christian ethic, to Strafford’s detriment. Strafford had been committed to the principles of Stoic philosophy since his youth; his travel diary during his Grand Tour includes many references to Cato and notes on his reading of Justus Lipsius.71 He wrote to Sir George Butler in 1636 that Stoicism may seem ‘a philosophy antiquated and grown out of fashion long ago and the practice of it for the most part an unregarded poverty [ ] yet I judge it the best morality and duty of a man in employment’.72 Richard Cust suggests that Strafford fashioned himself according to Stoic principles throughout his career, especially the value of maintaining individual conscience and integrity in the face of misfortune.73 His contemporaries compared him to Stoic heroes; Lady Brilliana Harley said he ‘dyed like a Senneca’, but ‘not like one that had tasted the mistery of godlyness’.74 For Harley, Strafford’s Stoicism displaced his Christian humility; but neither did his ‘obstinate and peremptory resolution of mind’ conform exactly to Marcus Aurelius’ prescriptions. Echoing the language of his dying speech, John Cleveland hoped that the Earl’s blood would lie ‘Speechlesse still, and never cry’ out for vengeance, and described him as ‘hurried hence / ‘Twixt treason and convenience’.75 J. F. Merritt argues that ‘the continued parliamentarian attacks on Wentworth that did emerge [after the outbreak of war] were prompted in part by royalist championing of him as the first royalist


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martyr’; but Strafford was mostly regarded as a secular victim.76 This interpretation of his death reflected the nature of his crimes. Unlike Laud, who was persecuted for his religious innovations, Strafford was depicted as an enemy of the state alone, and a victim of his own pride.77 Laud, on the other hand, was consistently revived in pamphlets and propaganda. The Archbishop’s literary afterlife reflected the persistent threat which his Church policies seemed to pose. Mounting the scaffold four years after his ally, Laud attempted to die like a martyr rather than a Stoic. His speech fulfilled Christian decorum, but it also lacked the inspiration which to early modern audiences signalled the assurance of redemption.

4.6 The forensics of martyrdom: William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury The political alliance between Laud and Strafford was well known, and often registered in pamphlets treating their impeachments and executions. They are made to admit in one libel that ‘We cannot well ourselves define / What plot was yours, or which was mine’,78 while a sympathetic Cleveland laments ‘The State in Strafford fell, the Church in Laud’, calling them ‘The twins of publike rage.’79 Though Laud was impeached only a month after Strafford, he had to wait until 1645 for his trial and execution. Throughout their captivity in the Tower, the two were forbidden any contact; but the night before his execution, Strafford sent a message requesting Laud to pray for him, and stand at the window to bestow a final blessing. Heylyn admits that the Archbishop, afraid that ‘his weakness and passion would not lend him eyes to behold [Strafford’s] last Departure’, was ‘overcome with grief’ as the Earl passed him. Laud fell to the ground in Animi deliquio. [ ] And because he feared, that it might perhaps be thought an effeminacy or unbecoming weakness in him to sink down in that manner, he added, That he hoped by God’s Assistance, and his own Innocency, that when he came to his own Execution (which he daily longed for) the World should perceive he had been more sensible of the Lord Strafford’s Loss, than of his own[.] (480) Despite Heylyn’s sympathetic gloss, this encounter predicts that Laud may not have the physical fortitude to succeed in his own impending performance.


In the interval between his arrest and his trial, Laud faded from public view, and especially from the agenda of the busy Long Parliament. With the king’s acceptance of the Root and Branch petition and promise to restore the Church to its Elizabethan purity, the chief dangers of episcopacy had been neutered. Nonetheless, several of his opponents relished Laud’s agonising wait in the Tower for the day of his own execution. Some imagined communicating directly with their subject in prison: one balladeer overhears Laud’s confession ‘As by faire Londons Tower I walkt’,80 while another claims to have interviewed the Archbishop in his cell.81 In an epistolary poem to Laud, Thomas Barlow maintains the conversation by pausing: me thinkes, I heare your grace reply (Willing to cleare your selfe) and to denie What here you are accused off[.]82 The woodcut on the title page shows a man handing to Laud a letter entitled ‘Read and Consider’. In fact, such pamphlets could find their way to their subjects. Printed condemnations of the Archbishop were especially common, and his diary shows Laud fretting over such libels throughout his career. On 29 March 1629, papers had been found in St Paul’s yard commanding Laud to ‘look to thyself; be assured thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the world’ and so on (Works III.210). As Clarendon recalls, ‘Cheap senseless libels were scattered about the city, and fixed upon the gates and public remarkable places, traducing some, and proscribing others, of those who were in highest trust and employment.’ Further ‘libels’ against Laud were distributed at Cheapside in 1637, after Burton, Bastwick and Prynne were sentenced in Star Chamber. These were ‘pasted on the cross in Cheapside, that the Arch-Wolf of Canterbury had his hand in persecuting the saints, and shedding the blood of the martyrs’.83 After his execution, his supporters would reverse these charges to portray Laud as the martyr. One author comments cynically that ‘the printing and selling of such Bookes hath been a meanes to help many a poore man in London these dead times of trading’.84 Pamphlets incited the public not only to revile Laud, but to threaten him and his property with violence. They led, Clarendon says, to the threatening of Lambeth Palace and Whitehall by ‘a rabble of mean, unknown, dissolute persons, to the number of some thousands’ (I.187–8). Like Strafford, Laud believed that public clamour influenced his prosecution. He claimed that charges were brought


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against him ‘with great noise, to bring me yet further into hatred with the people’ (Works III.297). The Brownists ‘filled the press almost daily with ballads and libels, full of all manner of scurrility, and more untruth’. These were brought ‘to Westminster, and given into divers lords’ hands, and into the hands of the gentlemen of the House of Commons’ (Works III.391). He complains that no attempt to censor these publications was made. Nigel Smith argues that the libels resumed the vindictive and egalitarian idiom of the Marprelate tracts, thus requiring an equally acerbic response from Laud’s supporters.85 In one pamphlet, Laud is made to repeat a pun which had actually originated with Archy, the king’s fool, as he complains to his secretary doest thou not heare as thou walkest along the streets, how each Schoole boys mouth is filled, with a Give little Laud to the Devill [ ] that poet is accounted of no estimation, whose fansie cannot elevate it selfe so high as to breake my (once stony) heart.86 In this account, Laud pays special attention to the role of poets in demeaning him. This first-person narrative picks up Laud’s self-pitying tone in the posthumously published History of the Troubles and Tryal of William Laud. There, Laud grumbles about such libels that ‘no sooner was [Strafford] gone into his rest, but the libellers, which during that time reviled him, fell on me’; libels and ballads were spread through the city, and sung up and down the streets.[ ] They made base pictures of me; putting me into a cage, and fastening me to a post by a chain at my shoulder, and the like. And divers of these libels made men sport in taverns and alehouses; where too many were as drunk with malice, as with the liquor they sucked in. (445–6). He is particularly troubled by the use of graphic and textual burlesque and by the function of such texts as entertainment. Many pamphleteers used creative and dramatic forms to persuade readers to revile the Archbishop. In one, Laud is found in hell, challenging Satan’s claim to the inmates’ respect.87 Another libel invades the prelate’s dreams, where the ghost of Cardinal Wolsey warns him ‘The ruine of us both was indeed in both our times the joy and the voice of the people’.88 A ‘play’ in four brief acts, sometimes ascribed to Richard Overton, finds a physician, a lawyer and a divine waiting on Laud at table. The former


ecclesiastical court judge had found himself a defendant before Parliament and Prynne; in this play, the tables are literally turned, and Laud is punished by having his nose sharpened on a grindstone before a carpenter’s wife imprisons him in her birdcage with a Jesuit.89 Another writer narrates how Laud summoned his doctor to examine his urine because he believes himself ‘diseased in all parts’. The doctor gives Laud a potion, which causes the patient to vomit up the Tobacco Patent, the Book for Pastimes on Sunday, and Star Chamber orders for the mutilation of Prynne, Burton and Bastwicke, as well as the book of Canons, a Mitre and finally the Devil himself.90 Dream visions, visits to hell, interviews with ghosts, falsified meetings in the Tower, medical allegories and theatrical burlesques are some of the genres in which the ‘fancy’ of poets corrupted public respect for Laud’s office. These genres are all interactive, using humour, dialogue, fantasy and hyperbole to engage readers imaginatively, to prompt them to take an active role in criticising not only Laud, but also the episcopacy which he represented. Such manipulations of genre, or what Mikhail Bakhtin would call ‘hybridization’, proved especially popular propaganda.91 If, as Chapter 1 argued, generic and literary conventions support and draw on social consensus, then the resurgence of hybrid genres may reflect the social and political instability of the 1640s and 1650s. John Doughty tries to correct the public taste for such ‘seditious’ publications and ‘crude indigested pasquils’. Poets ‘make at the highest, and as the Jewes once dealt by our Saviour CHRIST, forbeare not to spit in the face of Majesty it selfe’.92 The comparison to the persecution of Christ anticipates royalist responses to Charles I’s execution. Doughty also argues that libels diminish the dignity of public officers who rule through divine right – and therefore blaspheme against God. By drawing private thoughts and bodily functions into public discourse, pamphleteers associate physical indignities with the ceremonial dispersal of political sovereignty in preparation for the ultimate indignity of the scaffold. But more than just a carnivalesque reversal of power was underway. These pamphlets were also offering evidence of Laud’s treason. Under the definition given in the Act of 1534, dreams and intentions could be as treasonable as overt action: any who ‘do maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine’ the death of the king could be condemned. When William Prynne submitted his tactical editing of Laud’s diaries to the High Court, the Breviate of the Life of William Laud turned Laud’s confessions, dreams and fears into evidence. The libels were more than just creative satires: they added to the literary indictment of the Archbishop.


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The pamphlet campaign and Prynne’s manipulative edition of his personal papers caused Laud to worry about the accurate propagation of his final speech. On the scaffold, taking notice that one [John] Hind had imployed himself in writing the words of his Speech as it came from his Mouth, he desired him not to do him wrong in publishing a false or imperfect Copy. (Heylyn 536) He gave specific instructions on its printing, providing Doctor Sterne with a copy of the heads of his speech. His opponents later used this publication to justify their continued attacks on the Archbishop. Ezekias Woodward claimed that Laud’s sayings had been published ‘boldly’ ‘to make gaine of money thereby, though with the hazard of souls’.93 Laud’s opponents should not ‘let the Dead alone, and his words die with him’, but rebut him publicly, because words cannot dye; specially not the words of a Dying man; his Death gives them life, so as they have the quickest touch upon the Ear, and the more quickening power in the heart, because, he that now speakes, shall speak no more for ever. (11) Laud’s funeral sermon could be a snare to readers’ ‘perdition’, he says, chiding the audience of ‘simple men indeed and very ignorant’ who would believe of ‘a Dying man, addressing himselfe to give up his Account to God: He will be serious now’ (9). Woodward does not view Laud’s speech as a revelations of his true character. Rather, he warns that ‘it is the glory of the Divell, to hold fast and full possession of a man, to the last period of his time, and render his faithfull servant, as he can himselfe, a seeming Angell of light at his Death’ (10). For Woodward, Laud’s composure revealed his unrepentant conscience, not his spiritual assurance. However, his nervous refutation of Laud’s speech acknowledges its pathetic power to ‘quicken’ loyalty to both mitre and the crown in the hearts of readers. Laud did not speak without interruption, even on the scaffold; he was also interrogated by Sir John Clotworthy, an Irish Presbyterian who had also testified against Strafford.94 William Starbucke, whom Laud’s ecclesiastical courts had imprisoned in the Counter, relished the Archbishop’s uncomfortable responses to Clotworthy as signs of religious feebleness. Another account alleged that ‘those that have the knowledge of Christ


within them are able to expresse it to others. But my Lord satisfied us not that the Lord is within him.’95 Heylyn, Laud’s ally, treats this examination as a trial of Laud’s ‘meekness’. Laud’s humility is also evident to Heylyn in his use of a written list of topics to guide his speech: as he did not fear the Frowns, so neither did he covet the Applause of the Vulgar Herd; and therefore rather chose to Read what he had to speak unto the People, than to affect the ostentation either of Memory or Wit in that dreadful Agony: whether with greater Magnanimity than Prudence, I can hardly say. (530) But the decision to read his remarks was imprudent. Strafford apparently took a brief list of the heads of his speech to the scaffold; but Laud relied entirely on a paper. He began, Hinde records, with an apology to the ‘Good People’, You’l pardon my old Memory, and upon so sad occasions as I am come to this place, to make use of My papers, I dare not trust my self otherwise.96 Mercurius Britannicus took the unsympathetic view that his avoidance of ministerial duty had left Laud out of practice at public speaking, and his reliance on a script showed him to be spiritually unfit.97 Such responses could easily have been predicted. Although Calvin recommended the Lord’s Prayer and other memorised prayers to ‘brethren with “stammering and lisping tongues” who were not yet able to extemporize’, the godly were advised to distrust set forms.98 Starbucke says Laud’s lack of spiritual improvisation shows that he ‘hath not the Spirit to depend upon, to bring things into his memory, and hath not a mouth and wisdome given him from God’ (6), while Woodward asked readers to Remember how it fared with this man, how pent-up and restrained his spirit was at his Death.[ ] He had no help to forme his prayer but his hand; nor to suggest, or prompt, or teach him how to pray, but his eye[.] (35) Although the dying speech was essentially a scripted performance, only an impression of spontaneity could elevate its conventionality into


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a demonstration of innocence and heartfelt piety. Laud’s defenders worked to construct a martyrology from his execution, but his reliance on a prepared speech and his physical infirmities lacked the martyr’s essential fortitude. The early church believed in the plenary inspiration of those who witnessed to Christ before persecutors. Their boldness, or parrhesia, during a temporal trial would induce Christ to testify on their behalf in heaven.99 If they faced persecution, they must take no thought beforehand what ye shall speak, neither do ye premeditate: but whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye: for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost. (Mark 13:9–11) Peter and John had stunned the Sanhedrin with the ‘boldness’ of their speech (Acts 4:13); and testifying boldly distinguished the true followers of Christ (Luke 12:11–12; Phil 1:14–20). Where Charles in his dying speech overcame his stammer, Laud stumbled, equivocated and showed desperation. His speech lacked the boldness of Scriptural witnesses. Laud also reconciled himself reluctantly to the earthly ‘shame’ of capital punishment, which he found a ‘Crosse, a death of shame, but the shame must be despised, or there is no coming to the right hand of God; Jesus despis’d the shame for me, and God forbid but I should despise the shame for him’ (Hinde 7). The shame of that death is also suggested by his reference to the passage through the Red Sea – a sea of blood like that which pours from the ‘beheaded man’ in Donne’s Second Anniversary, and also, as in George Herbert’s poem ‘The Bunch of Grapes’, ‘the sea of shame’. Laud was not merely ashamed, but also afraid. As he walked to the block across the crowded platform, he pleaded ‘I did thinke here would have beene an empty Scaffold, that I might have had roome to die; I beseech you let me have an end of this misery, for I have endured it long’ (Hinde 18). The London Post thought his manner of dying also betrayed his fear of God’s judgement: ‘although he came with confidence to the Scaffold, and the blood wrought lively in his cheeke, yet when he did lye down upon the block, he trembled every joint of him’. ‘Every part of him’ was possessed ‘with an universall Palsey of feare’.100 For his detractors, Laud’s body language showed that he was not empowered by God to withstand his trial. Heylyn contradicts such descriptions: Laud approached the scaffold with ‘so brave a courage, such a chearfull countenance’ that he seemed ready to ‘behold a triumph’, not a sacrifice. Laud ‘came not


there to die, but to be translated’ and to receive ‘the most glorious Crowne of Martyrdome’. His ‘translation’ to his bishopric is retroactively legitimated by his promotion to heaven. Heylyn highlights Laud’s deliberation; every word, gesture and symbol was under control. He reports uniquely that Laud saw ‘through the chinkes of the boards that some people were got under the Scaffold, about the very place where the Blocke was seated’. In a rather clumsy bit of impromptu allegorising, Laud asks for their removal, hating to think his blood might fall on the heads of the people.101 Laud is said also to have won some sympathy by the completed spectacle, which was ‘so unpleasing’ that many returned much altered in the opinion which before they had of him, and bettered in their resolutions towards the King and the Church, whose honour and religious purposes they saw so clearly vindicated by this glorious Martyr. (25) For Heylyn, the spectacle confirmed the righteousness of the king and Church for whom Laud was sacrificed. In a short poem, Starbucke ridicules those affected by Laud’s performance, reminding them of the distinction between temporal justice and persecution. Laud’s supporters ‘applaud’ him ‘Like to a God’. Like to a martyr do they thinke he dy’d, Lo by the law a malefactor try’d.[ ] Above looke up, and see what God hath done, Admire and wonder at his Parliament[.]102 Temporal justice must not be confused with martyrdom; admiration for Laud should yield to gratitude and ‘wonder’ for Parliament as the enforcer of divine justice on earth. But the care with which both sides treated Laud’s dying speech suggests the importance to sectarian politics of execution narratives and elegies. Royalists fought to impose a matryrological interpretation on Laud’s death. But the ridicule which began early in his imprisonment, coupled with his uninspired speech, diminished the dignity of his office and damaged his claim to martyrdom. The challenge of converting a judicial and political necessity into a spiritual victory had, nonetheless, been issued; and for the vanquished royalists, Charles seemed a born actor, who could redeem their cause through a personal and somewhat familiar sacrifice.


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4.7 The Martyr King: Charles I The London Post proclaimed that Laud ‘dying, did lay his blood upon the City’.103 Like Strafford, he warned people to ‘take heed of having your Hands full of Blood’, for a time would come when God ‘makes Inquisition for Blood’ (53). Laud assumes a prophetic posture, exhorting the people to remember Jeremiah 26:15: ‘if ye put me to death, ye shall surely bring innocent blood upon yourselves, and upon this city, and upon the inhabitants thereof’. The culmination of all this bloodletting would be the death of the king. As one soldier had promised at a Windsor prayer meeting in 1648, it was ‘our duty, if ever the Lord brought us back again in peace, to call Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to an account for the blood he had shed’.104 Republicans asserted that Charles had waged war against his Parliament and the ‘people therein represented’; he was therefore guilty of all crimes committed during the civil wars. In an elegy published in 1649, John Berkenhead focuses as many royalist poets did on the legal vacuum produced by the regicide, an act ‘which Lawes Basis all Lawes structure rends’. The kingdom is now released ‘From the deare Yoke of such sweet tyrannie’, but set free only to anarchy (Loyalties Tears (cf. note 9) 1–2). Berkenhead’s paradoxical language suggests the difficulty of grieving for a king whose intransigence had led to civil war. He compares Charles to a father fighting off rebellious sons, who ‘By deare successe obtaines a bloudy field’. The prize – nothing but a blood-soaked field – costs everyone ‘dearly’. Charles, whose natural body is sacramentally connected to the body politic, is riven by an internal, physical war. ‘His slaughter’d Childrens lamentable sight / The Warre upon his Bowels doth renew’; their slaughter also ‘renews’ the war in the body politic. In Berkenhead’s poem, the disproportion of force between the crown and its enemies is not an opportunity to praise the king’s power, so much as to rue its exercise. Charles’ ‘betrayed Sword’ proves ‘too weak / To vindicate his Honour’; the failure of the phallic sword forces Charles to rely on his pen instead to conquer the rebels and to vindicate himself posthumously. Charles’ ‘forced Death’, another elegist says, forebodes ‘direfull Plagues’. It is A sad Presage, no doubt, of future ill, Or dire Prognostique of the angry Will Of Heaven[.]105 For royalists, heaven’s angry will materialised in the plague and fire that later decimated London. In the Eikon Basilike, Charles predicts these


dreadful expressions of divine wrath in a prayer to his capital, ‘upon whom I look, as Christ did sometime over Jerusalem, as objects of my prayers and teares’, and whose ‘severer scatterings’ he prophesies (227). The Eikon made a particular contribution to the construction of Charles as a holy martyr. Authorship of this text has been attributed to John Gauden, making use of Charles’ own papers.106 Interestingly, Gauden was also the compiler of the memorial volume for Lady Anne Rich mentioned in Chapter 3. There, Gauden reasserts the power of funeral elegy to maintain the reputation of the dead woman against ‘the malignity of time’. His participation in the construction of the Eikon Basilike, a literary anthology which combines Charles’ prayers and reflections on his life, may have drawn on his experiences compiling this funereal anthology. Dr Denton reported that it ‘hath amazed the whole kingdome, to see soe much courage, Christianity, and meekness in one man’, and its printing was consequently ‘much suppressed, the first printer and impression plundered and presses broken’.107 Its publication encouraged royalist morale, which Lady Anne Halkett recalled had been overwhelmed by that ‘execrable murder’, which made the royal party ‘for a time like those that dreamed; but they quickly roused up themselves, and resolved to leave noe meanes unesayed that might evidence their loyalty’.108 Their means of rousing themselves and others from the dream of history included literature. A republican satire, the Somnium Cantabrigiense, mocked one phantasmagoric response by ‘the famous Dreamer John Quarles’: the Regales Lectum Miseriae.109 The title, ‘A Cambridge Dream’, plays on the memorial volumes usually produced by the universities. Its author asks Quarles to teach him ‘how to dreame a dittie’, and makes fun of Quarles’ elaborate allegory and poor style. Everyone sleeps, But this most sorrowfull Sir would not obey, He heard the King had lost his Head that day: Frantick with rage and griefe he thus replies; How can wee have sleepe dull God without our eyes? (5) Amidst the clichés, the elegist downs a bottle of sack and, vowing ‘to write an ELEGIE’ falls asleep. The Somnium Cantabrigiense then shows England’s Genius congratulating the Army, those ‘much inju’rd soules, who did so long / About Astræa’s Throne for justice throng’:


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Now cease complaints; for Charles hath paid that due By the keen Axe, which he did owe to you. accept his head, As his Soules ransome for the blood he shed. And let this corporall punishent [sic] suffice, That blood may ne’re in judgement crying rise. (11) In its quotation of Cleveland’s elegy on Strafford, and its burlesque of the elegiac process and commonplaces, the Somnium Cantabrigiense shows an awareness of the propagandistic function of poems on the regicide. Quarles’ actual poem includes a survey of England where ‘every face imports an Elegy’, and a command to each of Charles’ subjects to ‘Review thy self.’110 It postulates a continuity of national feeling based around a central authority figure, the king, for whom the poet must substitute himself. Other elegists reduce language to silence, groans, the compulsory physical signs of unspeakable grief; for example, the hands of one poet cannot write for Trembling; let our Eie Supplie the Quill, and shed an Elegie. Tongues cannot speak; this Grief know’s no such vent, Nothing but Silence, can bee Eloquent. Words are not here significant; in This Our Sighs, our Groans bear all the Emphasis.111 These commonplace expressions of mourning in place of elegies, of the need for silence, of a world struck dumb with grief, reflects the actual suppression of the funeral rites and eulogies for the king. Quarles offers his own poem as a space where public grief can be shared, and politicises the topos of compulsive memorialising. Citizens must owne those teares, which you have spent In private, for a Publick discontent; Let not your tongues be Pris’ners to your lippes When Justice cals. (53) As an incitement to displays of active virtue, Quarles’ epideictic has a direct political goal: the revitalisation of the royalist party. His elegiac


proclamation of grief and loyalty is echoed in the Marquis of Montrose’s famous promise to ‘write thy Epitaph with blood and Wounds’.112 Montrose had been a defender of the king since the first Bishops’ War. He was not one of ‘the Regiments of the King’s Pen-and-Inkehorne men’ who compensated for royalist military weakness with literary aggression, but a soldier and a diplomat.113 But for him as for many royalist elegists, writing both inspired and constituted political resistance to Parliament’s usurped authority. Quarles resolves to speak even under pain of death: ‘I fear not those, whose powers may controul / The language of my tongue, but not my soul’ (53). Like the martyr whose testimony cannot be suppressed by flames or the amputation of his tongue, Quarles claims to obey a moral and emotional necessity at odds with political authority. The effort of Parliament to ‘control’ language was not symbolic but real: ballads and unlicensed books had been outlawed on 5 January 1649, with sellers and singers threatened with flogging.114 Another poet who rejected these interdictions considers lament to be a religious duty; ‘No, it were silent blasphemy’ to stand by silently while ‘God-like Charles’ is murdered.115 Quarles also emphasises the political usefulness of compulsive mourning: ‘language cannot ebb, when bloud shal flow’; all pens must surely ‘speak their wills’ now He anticipates that the regicide will provoke Th’ obdurest hearts, and teach that pen to write Which never fram’d a Letter, and infuse The seed of Life, into a barren Muse[.] (51) Charles’ death creates new life, impregnating the muses and inducing universal composition. This elegiac topos (which Corbet referred to as a desire to ‘force publicke teares’) here encourages a display of mournful unanimity amongst the king’s supporters. But for Berkenhead, such truths cannot be expressed in ‘generous and time-defying Strein’ until ‘the few / Shall be more worth than arte the Many’ (7). The reassertion of hierarchies is the precondition for poems which can secure Charles’ ‘immortality’. Rather than inviting universal commemoration of a universal loss, Berkenhead reverts to an early Stuart order where social and artistic hierarchies were mutually validating. In Berkenhead’s poem the modesty topos, which declares the insufficiency of any poetry to commemorate loss, is timed: only under a restored monarchy will


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appropriate elegies be written. Quarles evinces a faith in the realm’s loyalty to the slaughtered king; Berkenhead makes good poetry a preserve of the elite. While his supporters prepared for Charles’ spectacular loss of power by translating his claim to the throne of righteousness, pre-execution republican writings advertised Charles’ weakness and fear. Parliament having forced him to recognise his errors, Charles is represented (again in the first person) as fearing divine judgement: ‘In sighes by day, and groanes by night’ he thinks about his end; ‘Fear in the morning me assailes.’116 Charles Carlton reveals that Charles prepared for death by reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (347), but he is also portrayed by his supporters as maintaining a Stoical control over his own person. Royalists also spoke for him in the first person; Alexander Brome published verses which he attributed to the King during his captivity on the Isle of Wight. Shadowed by the Strafford controversy, these recognise that Charles’ ‘true interest’ is safeguarding his conscience, and that his true power lies in protecting his inner self from physical coercion. The ‘Mistaken Fooles’ try to capture his ‘crowned soul’; Alas! though I’m injur’d, my mind’s so free, Ile make my very Gaole your Liberty. Plot, do your worst; I safely shall deride, In my crown’d Soule, your base, inferior pride, And stand unmov’d, though all your plagues you bring, Ile die a Martyr, or Ile live a King.117 Although he refers to his impending ‘martyrdom’, Charles also uses Stoic principles to overrule his passions and to enforce his ‘liberty’ even in captivity. Self-rule compensates for his loss of control over the kingdom. For Berkenhead, ‘He reignes: and though his Foes He could not, yet / His nobler self He conquers’, looking down from the seat of constancy on a majesty in ‘vast Ruines’ (4). One elegist pays tribute to his self-control. Thou never wanted’st Subjects, no; when they Rebell’d, Thou mad’st Thy Passions to obeie. Had’st Thou regain’d Thy Throne of State by Power, Thou had’st not then been more a Conqueror.118 These typical Stoic sentiments are laudable; however, for early modern Christians Stoic apatheia must also incorporate godly piety. Antagonistic


publications focussed on Charles’ Stoic resistance as an atheistic and secular kind of heroism. The Moderate Intelligencer accuses Charles I of dying ‘like a desperate ignorant Roman nothing we can see in him tending to a true Christian, or the power of godliness’,119 associating his death with the Stoic’s godless suicide rather than the Christian martyr’s sacrifice. At his trial, Charles restricted himself to a questioning of the validity of the High Court, rather than refuting its charges one by one. For his party, this strategy more closely resembled Christ’s refusal to plead than it did the Stoic’s self-surrender. Revisiting Charles’ trial, Quarles imagines he hears the king speaking. Surely the prosecutor was deaf himself, and could not heare The cadence of his language: for the sound Had been sufficient to inflict a wound[.] (77) The king’s word, by passing sentence, can normally inflict torture or death; but Charles’ royal language could not rescue him now. The problem is similar to that posed to Christ on his cross by the soldiers (Matthew 27:39–43). When he arrives at the scaffold, Charles became according to John Arnway ‘more Illustrious by Accesse of Dolours’. Undaunted, he looked ‘death it selfe in the face’ and ‘was seen to smile at the feeble power of it’ (36). There, Charles declared himself ‘the Martyr of the People’, a role anticipated for him by Edward Symmons as far back as 1645–1646 (Wilcher 268–9). After the regicide, royalists like Henry King were keen to take up the theme, and to praise Charles as ‘the Glory of all Martyrologies’.120 Another elegist dramatically describes how his bare head Bow’d to the Heads-mans hand to strike him dead. Yet all this while neither in word, or deed, Oppose the traitrous axe, but mildly bleed, Instructing first with a Majestick grace, His gracelesse guard that gaz’d him in the face, Undutifully cover’d, praying too, and pardoning his murderers, as ‘God can hardly do’, since they commit ‘A sin next that against the Holy Ghost’ which alone could


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not be forgiven.121 Charles ‘instructs’ the hangman, submits and bleeds ‘mildly’, and is not provoked by the lack of deference shown by his guards. In his magnanimity, natural authority and clemency, he is not diminished by bowing to the hangman. For such writers, the exemplary death of this ‘Butcher’d Martyr King’ demonstrates his fitness for office and the evil nature of his persecutors.122 Unlike Laud, as King admiringly recounts, No palsied hands or trembling knees betray That Cause, on which thy souls sure bottom’d lay. So free and undisturb’d flew thy Breath, Not as condemn’d, but purchasing a death. Those early Martyrs in their funerall pile, Embrac’d their Flames with such a quiet smile.[ ] Thus thou our Martyr died’st.123 King characteristically returns to the mercantile language of ‘purchasing’ which distinguished his elegies for his wife Anne, discussed in Chapter 2. Despite this comparison to an innocuous transaction, he concludes that Charles is the last heir to ‘th’enthroned Martyrs Blood-stain’d Line’.124 Just as the martyrs’ charismatic self-sacrifice helped to establish the early Church, so (a Restoration poet proclaims) Charles’ death reconfirmed the legitimacy of his heirs. Given That from the Martyrs Blood the Churches Greatness grew, That for one slain Out of his Dust many should rise again; We see the mighty Sentence prov’d divine, What God-like Heroes sprang from Charles his Line, What God-like Phœnixes did re-aspire From out their Royal Father’s Funeral Pyre?125 Similarly, for Arnway, Charles’ death transformed not only his claim to the throne, but his very nature: once an earthly sovereign, he became a ‘Partaker of the Divine nature’, like to ‘God, whose Might is invincible, and Glory incommunicable’ (Arnway 37). If elegy is a genre built on social continuity, comparisons to exemplary figures from the past and the stabilizing effects of the commonplace, it is no surprise that elegists faced with an ‘unparalleled’ loss sought some classical or religious precedent. But Charles’ death is not merely exemplary; for some royalists, it is unequalled even in Biblical history.


‘Our losse allowes no Parallel to it’ in Scripture, says Henry King; ‘Charls exceeds Judea’s Parallels.’126 Cleveland similarly describes this unparalleled ‘Fall’ as such as ‘Great Christendome ne’re Pattern’d’.127 Except, perhaps, for one pattern which Charles seems to approach, and in some cases even exceed. The Scotch Souldier confesses, There have beene many Martyrs, but no Martyr-Kings that I know of but my blessed Saviour Christ Jesus, and my late gracious Soveraigne Lord King Charles.128 The comparison was already a cliché for describing Charles’ tribulations. When the king escaped from Hampton Court Palace dressed as a servant, Isaac Basire wrote: ‘I can finde no parallell for this so gallant Act, but that High Patterne of the King of Kings himselfe, who to save his People from eternall ruine, was pleased to [ ] take upon him the forme of a servant, to humble himselfe thus low.’129 Just as Charles resembled Christ, now his persecutors revealed their resemblance to Christ’s tormentors. The Scots were even worse than Judas, one elegist alleges, who after all could Say, he was not so much Christ’s Countryman; Nor bound to such obedience by the tie Of subject, or the Law of Soveraignty: Besides that Christ could not so well be stil’d, The Father of his Country, he his child[.]130 Their betrayal of Charles violates the ties of nation, family and political covenant. A Flattering Elegie also condemns London’s citizens, who had welcomed Charles like ‘the cursed Jews’ who ‘Hosanna cry’d / When Christ into Hierusalem did ride’. This elegist regards Bradshaw as worse than Pilate: Pilate was ‘not brib’d with thousands, gold, or gaine’ and ‘had full authority and power / From great TIBERIUS, Romes high Emperour.’131 But Charles was neither judged by his peers – having none – nor by justices with any valid authority. According to Henry King, he was tried by ‘Pilate Bradshaw with his pack of Jews’;132 ‘Pilates Consent is Bradshawes Sentence here’.133 Berkenhead wonders, Surely all Conquests conquer’d are by this, But Pilat’s, and the Jew’s: Yet they are not In fault, since Christ himself secured is Above the reach of Ax, or Vote, or Scot. (6)


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According to the typology of kingship in place since the Middle Ages, the king is Christ’s deputy; therefore the High Court regicides (Berkenhead says) ‘murder Him [Christ] in’s Deputy below’. These comparisons to Christ are prompted in part by the Eikon Basilike, where Charles believes that though he will die ‘a violent death, with my Saviour, it is but mortality crowned with martyrdome’ (264). His martyrdom bears direct comparison to Christ’s, who dies ‘with’ him by bringing inspiration and succour to the king during his suffering. The Eikon invokes Augustine’s famous dictum that ‘Martyrem non facit poena, sed causa’ (Epist. 89.2), advising that sober Christians know, That glorious Title [of martyr], can with Truth be applied only to those, who sincerely preferred Gods Truth, and their duty in all these particulars before their lives, and all that was dear to them in this world[.] (174) Royalists concur that Charles the martyr sacrificed himself for God. But his enemies seized on such passages from the Eikon as evidence that Charles was witnessing not ‘God’s truth’, but his own. God is glorified by obedience, even to the point of absolute abjection, not by the magnificence of the victim. It was Charles’ preoccupation with his debasement by his enemies which, Milton believed, discredited his claim to martyrdom and made him (according to the Eikon Alethine) more like Caligula than Christ.134 For example, Charles beseeches God in the Eikon: O let not My bloud be upon them and their Children, whom the fraud and faction of some, not the malice of all, have excited to crucifie Me. But thou, O Lord, canst, and wilt (as thou didst My Redeemer) both exalt and perfect Me by My Sufferings[.] (231) Milton responds cuttingly, ‘Nor is he onely content to suborn Divine Justice in his censure of what is past, but he assumes the person of Christ himself to prognosticate over us what he wishes would come’ (Eikonoklastes 567). Though Milton denigrates Charles’ Christ-like posturing as hubristic and sacrilegious, these representations of Charles can be resolved with an orthodox Pauline Christology. Paul allows for literal and imaginative reenactment of Christ’s death through baptism or martyrdom. To share in Christ’s glory, he says, the believer must identify with Christ’s suffering


(2 Timothy 2:12; 1 Peter 4:13). Consequently, martyrdom becomes a ‘consummation of so intimate a personal union with Christ that the Lord himself can be said to suffer in the person of his loyal follower’.135 Paul also told his brethren that ‘ye also are become dead to the law by the body of Christ’ (Romans 7:4). Christ had replaced the old law with love and grace.136 For some royalist writers, Charles’ death is the next turning point in the progress of England, God’s chosen nation, towards the end of Christian history. While Puritan writers compared their ‘struggle against episcopacy and tyranny to the Old Testament captivities of the tribes of Israel’ (Wilcher 269), Charles is assimilated to New Testament history. The Scotch Souldier envisions Charles’ kingdom as a culmination of two Biblical epochs. God tends towards perfection; Christ’s kingship in the Gospel is therefore ‘far more excellent’ than Moses’s kingship under the Law, just as That of Moses was more excellent than that of the Patriarchall founded in Adam, The government of Kings above that of the Judges, and the government of Christian Kings above that of the line of David. The Stuart monarchy is finally ‘that ultimate end, and that Ocean into which the blessings and promises of the Law and the Prophets doe finally determine’ (6). Elegist Thomas Pierce writes, Posterity will say, he should have dy’d No other Death, then by being Crucifi’d. And their renownedst Epocha will be Great Charles his Death, next Christ’s Nativity.137 Cleveland celebrates that Charles ‘Die’d here to re-Baptize [his kingdom] in His Bloud’ (82). Like John the Baptist, or rather Christ himself, Charles opened the door between two epochs: in the first, the anointing of the king made him untouchable, an absolute ruler in the image of God; his word was law and his prerogative could justify judicial torture. In the second, the deconsecration of the king reduced his powers and intimacy with God; his word no longer sufficed to save his life, and he became the victim of the law which he was previously believed to guarantee.138 Disregarding England’s history of deposed, assassinated and disputed kings, royalists assert that Charles’ ‘unprecedented’ sacrifice founded his heirs’ claim to the throne in an absolute, transcendent grace which actually remade the law. His was the ultimate rebounding conquest.


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The regicide also had particular constitutional and legal consequences. During the first Civil War, royalists had defended political moderation and limited government rather than the king himself. After the regicide, the veneration of absolutism replaced such moderation.139 Many were convinced that the crown would be replaced by an anarchic vacuum. Cleveland proclaimed that the regicide had Voided all Forms, left but privation In Church and State; inverting ev’ry right; Brought in Hells State of fire without light[.] (83) The formlessness of death replaced the hierarchies and rights founded on the crown. Charles himself had used a similar argument in 1642, claiming that by attacking him the Levellers and other rebels attacked all property and rights. The Famous Tragedie shares the anxiety that Our Lawes and Rights to Læthe swim, Buried forever in His death, Since they subsisted by His Breath.140 The rights guaranteed by Charles’ breath included the justification of judiciary force. Torture and execution were not, Chief Justice Coke argued in 1612, consonant with the Magna Carta; they depended on the crown’s prerogative to overrule the law of state.141 The regicide was an attack on prerogative, replacing its power to overrule common law with the supreme authority of Parliament. The sentencing of the king also made the definition of treason problematic: how could the king himself ‘maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine’ his own death? As Howard Nenner points out, murdering the king was not covered by any existing statute; consequently in the regicides’ trial, murder was not the treasonous act itself but an overt proof of treasonous intent.142 Charles’ refusal to plead should, under common law, have resulted in the application of peine fort et dure to force him to submit to the jurisdiction of the court. Because Judge Bradshaw was reluctant to take such measures with the king, Charles was convicted for his silence – a legal judgement which, to royalist observers, had no precedent other than Jesus’ conviction by Pilate.143 The argument for executive prerogative being possessed by the monarch through the people’s rescindable donation was given


impressive symbolic force by the exposure and defeat of the king’s natural body. That body was divided from the political capacities which traditionally preserved its immortality. Cleveland wrote that republicans pursued him with war and They chase Him through all His capacities; Shift lights and distances, untill they see Another self in Him, which is not He. Vex stills, and Crucibles, the furnace ply, To sift and draine a Chymick Majesty. At last their carefull sweats auspicious how’r, Drops Him apart, distinguish’t from His pow’r.144 Republicans retorted that Charles’ physical body had always been distinguishable from the body politic and the office which he held through the people’s grace. This radical position, espoused by Bradshaw, was a departure from earlier Republicanism’s limited attack on the popular basis of monarchy.145 Separated from the king’s person, the crown as legal office could become the object of allegiance.146 These legal problems were further complicated by the relationship between the law and the king’s physical body. Traditionally, the king’s body sanctified the law by speaking or signing documents. No wonder then that elegists, occupied in the production of texts which laid claim to the power to compel universal participation, focussed on Charles’ speech as a now-outmoded enforcer of justice. Charles’ scaffold performance made him more personally absolute than he had ever been politically; but the regicide disconnected the king’s word from the law, presenting new dilemmas for royalist elegy. If the king’s language could not save him, royalist elegists saw themselves as having little chance of establishing consensus or maintaining social and artistic continuity. The extinction of the court also delegitimised traditional forms of panegyric. However, the regicide and the renovated idiom of sacred absolutism which emerged in elegiac representations gave panegyric a new life. Having represented Charles I as a mere private man preoccupied with his own pleasures, prerogatives and interests, his opponents punished ‘Charles Stuart’ with physical division. His enemies declared that the abjection of Charles’ body dissolved his authority, but for his supporters the ritual execution reconfirmed the sacramental body as the transcendent source of sovereignty. The focus on the physical body as the threshold between transcendent sovereignty and physical vulnerability is not far from the Tudor jurists’ representations of the king’s two bodies.


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In a similar way, Giorgio Agamben defines sovereignty as the threshold between violence and law.147 That idea of sovereignty is present in images of the regicide as an originary moment which ‘first assur’d the forced Power’. If, in Carl Schmitt’s formulation, the sovereign is ‘he who decides on the state of exception’ and thus guarantees the law,148 the regicide unravelled the sovereign exception as the limit mark of the juridical order. Political philosophers or providentialist Protestants might therefore have worried that the regicide would open a breach to unfettered violence; Royalists hoped at least for a foreign invasion or domestic rebellion, though their allies proved more complacent.149 Among such non-events, the preclusion of traditional funerary rituals may have seemed another insignificant denouement. But the anxieties and grief which the funeral usually handled were left to cluster around the only public ritual Parliament had afforded Charles: his execution. No wonder then that this ritual was so frequently relived in the public record and in private elegiac compositions.

4.8 Conclusion Punitive decorum sought to control the language of the condemned; but the dying are evasive. As Donne argues, the house of death is hard to govern. As houses that stand in two Shires, trouble the execution of Justice, the house of death that stands in two worlds, may trouble a good mans resolution. As death is a sordid Postern, by which I must be thrown out of this world, I would decline it: But as death is the gate, by which I must enter into Heaven, would I never come to it?150 The dying person who passes through this gate also troubles those who might administer his or her last actions. The condemned can claim an absolute right to speak the truth; officials living within the relative world of social responsibility cannot share their gnosis. The victim’s transcendent language deprives law of its absolute character. If co-operation confirmed that the king’s justice accorded with God’s will, then dissent could highlight the coercion and injustice on which the ruling order depended. By his or her proximity to divine justice, the dying speaker shows the inadequacy of temporal justice. Strafford showed himself unyielding in death to the popular forces that required his public execution. But Laud’s critics repossessed his charismatic powers for their own narratives, refuting his sacramental


authority and focussing on the difference between his actions and his last words. In both cases, readers and writers paid scrupulous attention to the language spoken on this ‘master day’, and asserted their own interpretations in popular publications to suit their own sectarian goals. Appeals to the people climaxed in Charles’ death. The king’s sacred authority was impugned; but royalist mythography enforced the image of a charismatic hero and courageous martyr who had re-established the honour which underpins hereditary kingship. The rush to reconceive the king as the guarantor of the law and as an ‘earthly God, Celestial Man’,151 a kind of metaphysical chiasmus between human and divine, sought to re-establish the crown’s mythical powers founded on the monopolisation of violence, on tradition and on spectacle. But that effort itself produced confusions, synthesising as it did the human and the divine unsustainably in the Christology of Charles’ sacrificial death.

5 Contesting Wills in Critical Elegy

An anticipatory elegy attributed to Nicholas Oldisworth advises Ben Jonson to hurry up and ‘Die Johnson: crosse not our Religion so, / As to bee thought immortall. Lett us know / Thou art a Man.’ Jonson’s ‘great Creations’ make readers ‘idol’ and think him ‘eternall’.1 This morbid expressions of rivalry was not unique; Anne Bradstreet’s father Thomas Dudley, for example, received several elegies on his own death following his contest for the governorship of Massachusetts Bay Colony.2 Elegists also commonly asserted that their subject had died in order to prove the susceptibility of prodigies to death. Katherine Philips ‘left us wrapt in Admiration / That she could dye; as we’re before to see / That such Perfection in her Sex could be’;3 female excellence surprises her elegist as much as her mortality does. Jonson’s admirer, meanwhile, urges the laureate finally to recognise that praise ‘Is shortned meerly by this length of dayes’ he lives. His ‘warm breath’ ‘Casts a thick mist before thy Worth’, so he should ‘stoope, and submitt’ to ‘the Meanesse of our Witt.’ The Rhodian colossus, ere it fell, Could not bee scann’d nor measur’d halfe so well. Art’s length, Art’s depth, Art’s heighth can n’er bee found, Till thou art prostrate layd upon the ground. Coterie readers can themselves supply the causes of Jonson’s ‘misted’ glory – drink, senility (one reader of his 1616 Folio described the poet as ‘Ruin’d by age’), the paralytic stroke he suffered in 1628, or his own hubris.4 Over drinks at the Dog Tavern Thomas Carew had criticised Jonson’s arrogance, and James Howell warned him by letter that even the king reproached him for his ill-mannered contentions with Inigo Jones. Such personal flaws threaten to ‘shorten’ his reputation, which 131


Howell describes as ‘a fair structure long time a rearing, but quickly ruin’d’.5 Oldisworth’s pre-elegy converts premonitions of ruin into a tactic for judging Jonson’s legacy: only a fallen structure can be accurately measured, and when Jonson topples like the wonder of Rhodes, mere mortals will at last be able to calculate the finite dimensions of art. Oldisworth can only imagine Jonson’s apotheosis through his demolition and prostration. Like many critical elegies, this poem predicts that rivalry and decadence will follow the laureate’s death.6 In life, Jonson’s admirers cast him as a competitor with the laureates of antiquity, and later critics would accuse him of pilfering Greece and Rome’s literary treasure. He finally did die in the summer of 1637. The memorial volume Jonsonus Virbius which was published a few months later included a Latin epigraph by Sir Francis Wortley describing Jonson as the leader of a chorus of poets, who captured the laurel from Greece and Rome and brought it to Britain: ‘now has departed greater Envy from Fate, but not from his rivals’.7 The fear that these ‘rivals’ were assembling to demolish Jonson led many of his adherents to pen defensive elegies. But both admirers and defectors alike wrote combative responses to Jonson’s life and death. Such animosity was typical of ‘critical elegies’ for other poets. Robert Stapylton observed in one that ‘Some say that Poets, like Grand Signeurs, hate / Their Brothers, yet will bury them in State’.8 Like noblemen, poets scheme to inherit the sovereignty of influence made available by the laureate’s death. Expressions of scorn or thinly veiled critique frequently emerge amidst hyperbolic praise; small wonder, then, that Jonson’s elegists sought to protect the old man. Like Oldisworth, many critical elegists imply that a laureate’s inimitable poems have foreclosed literary development or generated rivalry among followers. As G. W. Pigman points out, many Renaissance rhetorical and pedagogical treatises acknowledged this rivalry. He cites Longinus, who comments that Plato’s excellence derived from his ‘struggling’ with all his heart ‘with Homer for pre-eminence, like a young competitor against an already admired one’.9 This sporting metaphor suggests a connection between critical elegy and the classical poetry of the agon. Both are characterised by ambivalence; both construct an aesthetic order to articulate, rather than resolve, conflict between poetic predecessors and their rivals.10 Pindar’s epinikion celebrated athletic victors, but also subtly critiqued tyranny by setting the clans, represented by their heroes, in opposition to the monarchy. Critical elegy uses a different trial of the body to debate powers and alignments within the poetic community and abroad, often setting the idealised monarch of

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wit against the flaws of the actual sovereign.11 Although the agon was inscribed with respect for ancestry, it honoured kairos, the epic present, and disturbed the audience’s repose in memories of the venerable past. Regular invocations of the past (Greek and Roman literary heroes, or such luminaries as Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare) in critical elegy prove the continuity of English writing, as well as the laureate’s necessary rupture with that past. Critical elegists’ references to the translatio studii promise an irenic transfer of poetic authority based on ancient traditions of literary succession. But they acknowledge that agonistic tensions seep through the gaps in the literary hierarchy left by the laureate’s death. In an elegy for the playwright John Fletcher, H. Howard envisions rivalry as plaguing the afterlife, where ‘those Ancient Laureates strive / When dead themselves, whose raptures should survive’ (BF a1v ). Publication does not guarantee perpetual fame; it must be won through a continuous post-mortem struggle. Critical elegists participate in that struggle by aligning themselves aesthetically and ethically with the dead. They also offer themselves as intended heirs to the throne of wit.12 The first section of this chapter revisits the elegiac invocation of funerary imagery, revealing how critical elegists negotiate their particular struggles over literary influence by transforming literary genius into a kind of inheritable property. The debts of influence are sometimes squared through their donation of prefatory epideictic to protect the ancestor or friend from criticism, as Section 5.2 shows; but elegists also deny the reality of an exchange between generations by asserting the laureate’s independence from praise, and their own redundancy. These exchanges also show how prefatory matter and memorial volumes can help to constitute literary communities. Section 5.3 describes the reassurance provided by such embattled but united sodalities, particularly for royalists sequestered or separated from the court during the 1640s. But even before the eruption of civil war, elegists used memorial volumes such as Jonsonus Virbius, or the elegies published in John Donne’s Poems, to create communities of ‘understanders’ which excluded unworthy readers. In Section 5.4, I investigate the claims made for these two poets by their elegists, and the critical attitude towards their powers of invention or rhetorical and metrical polish articulated in poems of purported praise. The use of imagery of sovereignty in these poems is not unusual; and having looked at this conceit in Section 5.5, we conclude by looking closely at metaphors of coinage, counterfeiting and sexual reproduction. Elegists’ ambivalence towards the authority of poetic predecessors is especially apparent in monetary and sexual imagery, which also


ensures that poetic authority is transferred through an exclusively male line.

5.1 Reading the poet’s will Unlike dedications, which are found in incunabula, commendatory verses were a Renaissance innovation. Thomas Newton was among the first to collect such occasional poems with his other work, and writers like Jonson followed – though generally the ephemeral compositions were considered not worth saving.13 However, recent studies have demonstrated the importance of these preliminaries as ‘constituting the text’s material and social identity’.14 Commendatory prefaces provide clues to reception histories and desired modes of reading.15 Tom May asserts that epideictic provides more than simple interpretations of Thomas Beedome’s plays: For unlesse tribute of some sighs are paid, Thy jealous Lover, and thy constant Maid, Cannot be read 16 ‘Tributes’ of the reader’s emotional response guarantee the work’s permanence through printed reproduction (according to May) offering the basic terms for its comprehension. They can invite sympathetic readings, as when Robert Randolph defends his brother’s poetry against the ‘rugged sect’ of ‘sly-wits’ who will ‘from thy easy flux of language guesse / The fancies weak, because the noise is lesse’. He asks the quieter, more contemplative majority to look, And with a piercing eye untwist thy book In every loome, I know the second view Shall find more lustre then the first could do.17 Anticipating particular assessments of Thomas Randolph’s work as ‘weak’ or quiet, Robert heads off critics and encourages readers to give the work a second chance. Jonsonus Virbius, the memorial volume for Ben Jonson, was compiled (according to its editor Brian Duppa) ‘to let you know the value of what you have lost, that you might the better recommend what you have left of Him, to your posteritie’( JonsVirb A2v ). Its poems direct readers to Jonson’s redemption of classical authors, technical accomplishments, accurate diction, modesty, moral temperance and his purgative effect


on English literature. The contributors attempt to mirror those virtues in their own poems, or even to outdo Jonson; but their praise also responds to perceived or anticipated criticism of Jonson. Henry Coventry apologises But th’art requited ill, to have thy herse, Stain’d by prophaner Parricides in verse, Who make mortality, a guilt, and scould, Meerely because Thou’dst offer to be old[.] ( JonsVirb 20) Coventry declares that the careers of younger poets who cannot equal Jonson should be ‘killed’ off. This threatening comparison between the father’s power and the weaknesses of the ‘Sons of Ben’ triggers a defensiveness which disrupts the elegiac decorum. In this suggestively Oedipal encounter, antagonism and envy disturb the elegists’ loving obedience to Jonson.18 But Maurice Bloch would argue that Jonson’s sons use the elegiac ritual to kill him off in his declining years. Many initiation rituals reverse the actual pattern of consumption: although in general ‘the young conquer the old and consume their product’, in ritual the young initiates are ‘killed’ (separated from the community) and then returned as representations of the elders themselves. Enacting similar reversals of consumption, violence and desire, critical elegists volunteer their own self-extinction in tribute to their patron.19 The antagonisms between generations of elegists mirrored the hostility thought to characterise heirs in general. This hostility led elegists, as Chapter 1 argued, to protest their sincerity through revisions of the funeral ceremony. During the offertory at a heraldic funeral, the insignia of title or office were transferred to the heir, making funerary imagery appropriate to negotiation over literary inheritance as well. Other analogies suggest themselves: just as the mourners marched before the corpse, so prefatory verses marched before the poetic corpus. Elegists imagine replacing the ranks of mourners managed by the College of Arms with their own sympathetic congregation, and commandeering intimate proximities to the dead. One of Thomas Beedome’s friends describes the elegies as a heraldic procession, ‘Where we thy friends, and I among the rest, / As a chiefe mourner, in the Ensignes drest / Of hearty sorrow’ follow the corpse.20 Given that the chief mourner had to be equal in status to the deceased, assuming this role in a poem


subtly asserts the speaker’s own worth. When Jonson died on 16 August 1637, he ‘was buried the next day following, being accompanied to his grave with all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentrie then in the towne’.21 In Jonsonus Virbius, Henry King stages an alternative funeral, ‘meaner Rites’ that express ‘love and justice to the dead’ ( JonsVirb 16) where affection rather than social standing guarantees inclusion. Coventry, by contrast, compares the volume to an exclusive funeral and promises not ‘t’offend duty’ nor with bold presumption presse, Midst those close mourners, whose nigh kin in verse Hath made the nere attendance of Thy herse, I come in duty, not in pride ( JonsVirb 19) Better elegists are the ‘close mourners’, whose writing established their kinship with Jonson and thus their right to participate in his funeral and inherit his legacy. King and Coventry adapt the rules of primogeniture and the exclusiveness of a traditional procession to their own advantage. Although they can release violent agonistic energies, critical elegies such as these are often conservative. They memorialise not just the dead poet, but also the existing social order, whose power relations, gender imbalances and competitive dynamics – articulated in and through the funeral – they replicate in a literary context. Explicitly patrilineal constructions of literary inheritance intensify many critical elegies. To control the redistribution of artistic wealth, elegists symbolise genius as property. Though John Fletcher had no ‘wealth’, Henry Mody predicts that poetic claimants will ‘wrangle’ over his imaginative riches: Though thou dyedst not possest of that same pelfe (Which Nobler soules call durt,) the City wealth: Yet thou hast left unto the times so great A Legacy, a Treasure so compleat, That ’twill be hard I feare to prove thy Will: Men will be wrangling, and in doubting still How so vast summes of wit were left behind, And yet nor debts nor sharers they can finde. (BF a2 r )


Fletcher is a poet of independent means, a ‘noble soul’ who dismissed material wealth as dirt, and was free from influence (‘sharers’) or plagiarism (‘debts’). However, the finitude of his ‘compleat’ treasure increases demand by reducing supply. The elegist magnifies Fletcher’s desirability by refusing to distribute his influence universally. A poet can bequeath general reformations of literary or public manners, but hieratic wit can only be stolen, not inherited, because it is always branded with its origin. The separation of these two literary values – innovation (as a marker of individuality) and exemplarity (as a socially transferable virtue) – is by no means complete in the early modern period. But the profusion of metaphors of inheritance, bankruptcy and wealth in critical elegy is one indicator that the concept of intellectual property was beginning to emerge. Falkland describes contributors to the memorial volume as Jonson’s ‘sons’, heirs obliged and fit ‘To raise his Tombe’ ( JonsVirb 8) – a duty happily obviated by Jonson’s self-commemorating works. Other elegists, Rutter adds, are merely ‘pretended Heires unto thy Mind’ who scrabbled for the poetic capital Jonson amassed during his lifetime. His Works provided ‘A stock for writers to set up withall’ ( JonsVirb 40); his didacticism transformed the ignorant age into a learned one, and his refinements benefited later generations. William Davenant acknowledges those benefits in financial terms: ‘This Debt hereditary is, and more / Than can be pay’d for such an Ancestor’.22 Davenant promises to conserve ‘that little Wit [ Jonson] left behinde’, but like ‘sullen Heires, when wastefull Fathers die’, he keeps quiet rather than displaying the Jonsonian fortune he inherits. But his praise is ambivalent. Did Jonson use up so much of wit’s natural resources that little is left, or did his lack of wit leave little behind in his Works? Either way, Davenant’s expression of literary indebtedness modestly emphasises Jonson’s independence from the praise of his successors. Davenant tactfully excuses himself from his commemorative obligations even as he fulfils them.

5.2 Independence and praise With these metaphors of financial independence, elegists project an image of themselves as a self-sustaining elite. But they also admit that they depend on readers to affirm their subject’s ethical and artistic influence. Many describe their reluctance to commemorate as a consequence of the laureate’s own, indisputable excellence, which makes any praise obsolete. A manuscript elegy rails against Donne’s and


Jonson’s apologists for just this reason. If the laureates’ accomplishments stand for themselves, so do their errors: Else what ist to Donne Though I crie twenty times, Hee’s not the sonne Of noyses and Schisme, nor did he compose His Sermones to be sung unto the nose. Meanwhile, ‘ballads’ can be ‘tried’ – assayed – by being put in ‘scales’ with Jonson’s poems, though those ballads cannot help readers to ‘value’ his poems. ‘Hee’s not by them / Valued, but they by him, whose cause appears / At his owne barre, and is tryde with his Peeres’.23 Just as King Charles would later deny that the High Court legally constituted a jury of his peers, so Jonson’s monarchical wit cannot be tried by poetasters or even his own ‘sons’. Francis Lovelace questions the decision to preface his brother Richard’s poetry with defensive panegyric: Why do these ‘season’d pens’ stand ‘lifeguard to a booke,’ and ‘with officious care thus guard thy gate, / As if thy Child were illegitimate’?24 We will return to images of childbirth and legitimacy later; but the other metaphor, a militia of ‘lifeguard’ tributes, suggests that Lovelace is critically dependent on his defenders. Perhaps Lovelace alludes to the protective presence of Parliamentarians Andrew Marvell, John Hall and Edward Fenton among the contributors. These men might have proved more reluctant to wear his heraldic insignia, according to Norris Jephson’s image of ‘the sonnes of wit’ competing ‘to be / Clad in thy Muses gallant livery’ (a4r . Through this royalist imagery, Lovelace’s admirers pay tribute to the famous prisoner’s independence. The feudal metaphor also exemplifies how critical elegists create poetic autonomy in opposition to political realities. According to William Cartwright, poets sometimes composed their own eulogies themselves. Nor hadst thou the sly trick, thy selfe to praise Under thy friends names, or to purchase Bayes Didst write stale commendations to thy Booke, Which we for Beaumonts or Ben. Johnsons tooke[.] (BF d2 v The reason for such fraud is obvious: endorsements were good advertising. Richard Brome, one of the stationers for the 1647 folio of


Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, ordained himself porter at the back gate of 14 pages of commendation by men ‘of Noble ranke and worth’. These ‘Princes of Parnassus’ provide ‘just Judgements of [Fletcher’s] worth’: their social and literary status in particular guarantees the ‘justness’ of their tributes. Brome excludes the ‘Rowt’ who would ‘crowd in’. His elitism reflects the argument maintained by Plato (Laws 659a) that ‘the productions of the Muse are at their finest when they delight men of high calibre and adequate education’. To guarantee the veracity of praise in an overcrowded market, publishers frequently enlisted ‘high calibre’ men. Stationer John Marriot defended the elegies for Donne printed in the 1635 Poems as reconfirming ‘how much honour was attributed to this worthy man, by those that are capable to give it’. That is, only the honourable can themselves dispense honour, according to the Aristotelian theory of epideictic discussed in Chapter 1. Humphrey Moseley, omitting the preliminaries to Milton’s 1645 Poems, proclaims that their worth, ‘not the flourish of any prefixed encomions [ ] can invite thee to buy them, though these are not without the highest Commendations and Applause of the learnedest Academicks, both domestick and forrein’.25 Moseley alludes to coterie conversations and conferrals of merit which both contest and legitimate the printed text. His remarks induct Milton into an intellectual elite at the same time as declaring his independence from it. After the Beaumont and Fletcher folio, one of the largest collections of seventeenth-century critical elegies was Cartwright’s Comedies and Tragi-Comedies, first published in 1651. Running to 107 pages, the prefatory matter is so extensive that Moseley warns the reader ‘if you think He hath too many Commenders, it is a sign you knew him not: we grant here are more than before other Books, and yet we give you not all we have’ (a4r . Robert Waring hears Cartwright’s ghost ‘groan’ under the weight of those commendations, which seems to have set the benchmark for prefatory epideictic; Thomas Benlowes struggles that same year in his brother Edward’s praise to prove that poetry and piety ‘dy’d not with fam’d Cartwright, though / A Score of Poets joyn’d to have it so.’26 Not all dead poets received such overwhelming support. Fuller recollected that ‘Never so eminent a poet was interred with fewer (if any remarkable) elegies upon him’ than John Cleveland was in 1658. Thomas Pecke wonders, ‘Is CLEEVELAND Dead? and not one weeping Pen / Vote him in Text The Miracle of Men?’27 Such silences often excused the interventions of lesser-known elegists. William Norris, whose broadside commemorated John Suckling’s death,28


Had thought (great King of Poets) thy death must Have rais’d the meanest Stationer from the dust, Inspir’d with sacred raptures every pen, Dead Sutlin living in the mouthes of men, [ … ] Nought seene in every towne but watry eyes, And no booke read but Sutlins Elegies.29 The death of this monarch of wit should have provoked the standard response to a king’s death – multiple memorial publications, ‘groaning’ and ‘sweating’ presses, communal rituals, and public grief. Norris especially censures Davenant, whose silence must mean he and Suckling are both ‘Dead to their Countrey.’ Clearly, Davenant ‘dares not speake for feare’; but he should be reassured, for ‘To praise thy friend, I hope will not prove treason.’ Davenant’s abstention becomes an act of political cowardice and personal infidelity, comparable to his defence of himself, Suckling and Jermyn just a year earlier in the Army plot. Then, Davenant denied the accusation that he had treasonous intentions, but admitted that something treasonous ‘might either have escaped my tongue or pen’.30 Now, Norris ironically implies, Davenant is guilty of the opposite of his former indiscretion: an impolitic silence. By the time Death’s Duell was published in 1631, only two elegies for Donne had appeared;31 his 1633 Poems included a mere 12 contributions, and these included some rather obscure penmen. As Henry Valentine trembled, ‘All is not well when such a one as I / Dare peepe abroad, and write an Elegie’ (379). This silence occasions Issac Walton’s vituperatio of the age’s ‘black ingratitude’. Asking ‘is this deare losse / Mourn’d by so few?’, he can only suggest that Donne’s admirers are ‘ambitious’ to be ‘Close Mourners at his Funerall’ (382–3). Where other elegists excuse their ‘noisy’ intrusions as expressions of love and loyalty, Walton proposes that abstention instead signifies desire to inherit Donne’s literary legacy. He identifies the private as the realm of sincere expression, withdrawing with Donne’s true heirs into a more exclusive space than that of print. Traditionally, agonistic poetry appealed through ambiguity to a privileged audience of sophoi, men educated to the symbolic, aesthetic and ethical literacy that a poem demands.32 Such exclusivity can be found in a variety of early modern poetic contexts. George Chapman consecrated Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) ‘to those searching spirits, whom learning hath made noble, and nobility sacred,’ not to the ‘prophane multitude’. Associating a ‘sacred nobility’ with literary understanding, Chapman endorses the meritocratic principles of humanist vera nobilitas. Similar


principles would shape the presentation of the 1616 folio of Jonson’s Works, which in contrast to the 1623 Shakespeare folio ‘content[ed] itself with the approval of an elite few rather than the vulgar crowd (Contentus paucis lectoribus)’, disowning the multi-headed ‘great Variety of Readers’, ‘From the most able, to him that can but spell’.33 Jonson had endorsed that elitism in his epigram 96 to Donne, which concludes that ‘A man should seek great glory, and not broad’; and it informs many critical elegists’ references to the exclusive nobility of spirit displayed by their subjects. Class is frequently drawn into the intellectual distinctions made by critical elegy. Fletcher’s beneficiaries include only educated and sympathetic ‘understanders’. He alone Who in thy Will hath part, is rich and free. But there’s a Caveat enter’d by command, None should pretend, but those can understand. (BF a2 r ) Fletcher’s poetry requires its ennobled readers to possess both artistic freedom and the political liberty associated with wealth. Similarly, Edward May honours editor Henry Glapthorne for presenting Beedome’s work ‘unto the wiser few’ (A3r . Education and a commitment to virtue, not money or family status, distinguish this sophoi as a class. But it is important to recognise that rather than rejecting class structure, these elegists replicate and sentimentalise it.

5.3 Communities by the book Elegists and other writers of critical epideictic often represent themselves and their readers as members of embattled communities united by artistic or political sympathies. For royalists during the civil wars, the community of the book helped to replace the court as an opportunity for display, solidarity and socialising. One such poet honoured his ‘unknown friend’ Sir John Beaumont, brother of the playwright Francis, whose poetry enlarged his ambit. Whiles I who had confin’d my self to dwell Within the strait Bounds of an obscure Cell, Took in those pleasing Beams Wit and Worth, Which, where the Sun could never shine, break forth,34


he re-experienced the freedoms of an earlier epoch, including the courtly discourses orphaned by Parliament’s victory. Colonel Pinchebacke sung Lovelace’s praises amidst the ‘noise of drums’ and war, when ‘peace and safety’ have fled. Now all the graces from the Land are sent, And the nine Muses suffer banishment, Whence spring these raptures? whence this heavenly rime? So calme and even in so harsh a time[.] (Lovelace a5 r ) Despite the incongruity between the shrill sounds of war and sweet lyric, Lovelace can still inspire readers to think of love. His poems offer not so much a hope for the transformation of political culture through the literary imagination, as an escapist alternative to unpleasant realities, making it easier for royalist readers to endure defeat, exile or captivity. Like Orpheus, Lovelace descends to hell and makes the dead ‘forget their smart’. Marvell similarly praises Lovelace’s anachronistic pleasures as exposing the ‘degenerate’ age, where epideictic has lost its honourable function. Marvell plays rhetorically on his political context. Ladies who include him amongst the censorious ‘rout’ rise up in ‘mutiny’ against him, but Marvell pledges his life to the ‘cause’ of theirs and Lovelace’s defence. Despite Marvell’s complex allegiances, he includes himself modestly in the number of wits who ‘have drawne th’infection of our times’. By contrast, Lovelace maintains the chivalrous ethic of the Caroline court in his poems written ‘under sequestration’. One poet with immediate access to the court in exile was William Cartwright. When Cartwright died of camp fever in Oxford in November 1643, Charles I wore black, saying that ‘since the muses had so much mourned for the loss of such a son it would be a shame for him not to appear in mourning for the loss of such a subject’.35 In an elegy for Cartwright, Jasper Mayne reconstructs the modesty topos in terms of the privations brought on by civil war: My want of quick Recruits made from the Citty, And Times which make it Treason to be witty, Times where Great Parts do walk abroad by stealth, And Great Wits live in Plato’s Common-wealth,


Have made me dull: my Friends with some remorse See me, who wrote ill alwaies, now write worse. The little fire which once I had is lost, I write, as all my Neighbours speak, in frost. (Cartwright b6 r ) Mayne’s ironic reference to Plato’s Republic declares present circumstances to be hostile to art, self-realisation, conversation and truthfulness. In some cases, the ‘common Fate’ of sequestration and lost estates is literal. Banished from London and ‘Return’d with much adoe to my own Clime,’ Jo. Leigh is ‘now just strong enough to make a Rime’ (Cartwright *1r ). Creating a literary community through mutual reference and acknowledgement heartens and restores poets like Leigh. Francis Finch tells Cartwright that ‘Thy Friends whom Five-mile Prisons do confine, / And those that breath within the larger Line’ joy to see his ‘glorious Shadow move’ through his publication. Cartwright’s genius replaces Finch’s own ‘lost fair Studies’ and ‘Plunder’d Library’ (Cartwright *2v ). This publication will also renew the readers’ intellectual freedom, as it expresses not just shared literary values, but also political resistance to defeat.36 Critical elegies were part of the intense propaganda battle discussed in Chapter 4, and likewise affected by practical and legal constraints on publication during the civil war. Marvell uses the imagery of the parasite, often invoked to describe mercenary poets, to excoriate those who are ‘envious’ of Lovelace, and to link their opprobrium to a general collapse of civility. Marvell complains that Our Civill Wars have lost the Civicke crowne. He highest builds, who with most Art destroys, And against others Fame his owne employs. I see the envious Caterpillar sit On the faire blossome of each growing wit. (Lovelace a7 r ) Marvell’s image recalls Bullingbrook’s description of ‘Bushy, Bagot and their complices’ as ‘The caterpillars of the commonwealth’ in Richard II (II.iii.165–7); it probably also responds to the restoration of government censorship in 1648. But some elegists view censorship as an opportunity. In particular, the closure of the theatres in 1642 is said to have permitted playwrights to expand their influence. Tom May claims that as laws have


silenced the theatres, and ‘three Kingdoms’ have themselves become ‘the lamented stage / Of real Tragedies’, the press alone can rescue James Shirley from oblivion; those that with skill can read, Shall be thy Judges now, and shall instead Of ignorant spectators, grace thy name, Though with a narrower, yet a truer Fame.37 May entrusts the sophoi of skilled readers with preserving Shirley’s fame rather than those ‘ignorant spectators’. Thomas Stanley argues that the closure of the theatres also redeemed Fletcher’s works from obscurity. Fletcher would have remained ‘Nothing’, ‘obscurely kept’, had they remained open, but the ephemerality of performance had now given way to the immortality of publication. Thus, ‘They that silenc’d Wit, / Are now the Authours to Eternize it’ (BF b4v . The elegies in the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio allude frequently to the political context. Peyton claims that whoever would award the bays to Fletcher must first ‘take it from the Militarie Men’. He defends himself against censorship by poetic ‘licence’ and ‘ancient priviledge’, a monarchist term; but whether to commend thy Worke, will stand Both with the Lawes of Verse and of the Land, Were to put doubts might raise a discontent Between the Muses and the – –. (BF a2 v ) Peyton argues his disputed claim to the prerogative of praise in legal terms, swiping at Parliament in the censored hemistich. The laws of poetry, the sovereignty of the Muses, stand in opposition to the laws of the land, and Peyton must decide where to cast his allegiance. He then compares his own reasonable poetry with the ‘neck-verse’ recited by ‘desperate wits’ on the scaffold, referring to benefit of clergy, the ancient legal loophole which protected the literate classes from execution. This modest comparison appeals to the understanders’ sense of persecution. Another contributor refers even more explicitly to the civil war. Fletcher can ‘Dethrone usurping tyrants, and place there / The lawfull Prince and true Inheriter.’ The elegist juxtaposes Fletcher’s theatrical representations with real rebellion; Fletcher waits,


Attending, not affecting, thus the crowne Till every hand did help to set it on, Hee came to be sole Monarch, and did raign In Wits great Empire, abs’lute Soveraign. (BF f4 v ) Fletcher’s ‘absolute’ imperial sovereignty over wit in the historical past coexists with a political sovereignty he might have brokered. After being elected unanimously to his office by popular acclaim, he is prevented by death from using his authority peacefully to restore the Stuart crown. Representations of writers like Fletcher or Cartwright as monarchs do not simply reflect their unsurpassed wit or the anxieties produced by an uncertain succession to the poetic throne; they also express shared concerns about the actual monarchy. In an elegy on Cartwright published in 1651, Katherine Philips looks forward to a time when the Muses ‘Shall rescue us from this dull Imprisonment’, Unsequester our Phansies, and create A Worth that may upon thy Glories wait; Then we shall understand thee, and descry The Splendour of Restored Poetry. (Cartwright a6 r ) William Towers also proclaims Cartwright the ‘great Prince of Numbers, too great for Applause’. For royalists, both laureate and king possess a power which ideally is independent of popular approbation. Towers refutes the urbane wits who criticised Cartwright for his bookish Oxford manners. Cartwright ‘didst most of all / Rise King when throngs of small Wits sought thy Fall’ (*12r ), his innate majesty becoming most evident during rebellion. Cartwright’s escape from London’s carping critics to the intellectual oligarchy of Oxford can be easily mapped onto the exile of Charles I himself. For George Hill, Cartwright’s book offers symbolic resistance to ‘guns’ and ‘taxes’. Let Times grow ne’r so bad, that none can thrive, When most men break, Poets we see can live; And their unbridled Muse securely run Undaunted through the rage of Tax or Gun. (Cartwright **6 v )


Here, bankruptcy through excessive taxation (‘most men break’) and violence cannot threaten the security and ‘unbridled’ freedom of the poet. This independence also sets the poet off from ‘most men’, and entices readers towards the safety poetry offers by its exclusion of topical problems and political dissent. Critical elegists report that poetry not only protects – it also acts as a kind of autonomous enclave. But for royalists, even such partial autonomy can seem a dispiriting exception to a bleak political totality. The Earl of Monmouth, for example, contextualises Cartwright’s poetic reign within the rapid decline of wit. Built like a reputation or the monarchy only gradually, wit may quickly fall, but hardly rise: Especially in these our drooping Dayes, When Bullets are in more request than Bayes. (Cartwright a7 r ) By dying, Monmouth says, Cartwright escaped a time and country no longer propitious to poetry, choosing actively to remove himself (almost like a Stoic) rather than to experience Parliamentary rule. Hill ‘grants [Cartwright is] gone’ not in defeat but only ‘To set a Spoak i’th’Wheel of Charles his Wayn’ (**6v ), a phrase from Jonson’s ‘Ode on Himself’ which often appears in elegies for royalist ‘martyrs’. Like Charles whose lustre he reflects, Cartwright found that certain political exigencies undermined his (poetic) absolutism. His ‘Imperiall Muse’ was able to write ‘Lawes to arraign and brand their weak strong lines’ (*8r ), to condemn and punish; but his ability to enforce those laws depended on the cooperation of readers. His royalist admirers identify this double bind with the crisis afflicting the monarchy. Elegists used the image of the vacant throne to reflect contemporary political realities. Just as the death of Oliver Cromwell on 3 September 1658 led to the end of the Protectorate and its fragile reconstitution of quasi-monarchical authority, so the death of Cleveland, according to one of his few memorialists, ‘made void’ ‘those Laws and Liberties / So oft confirm’d by Phœbus Parliament’. Cleveland had died earlier in April, without appointing a successor; poets ‘now shall quarrell for Supremacie’. The instability caused by Richard Cromwell’s succession parallels poets’ uncertainty about the propagation and management of literary values. Cleveland’s ability to make ‘the Powers celestiall cringe to mortall crimes’ is lost.38 The poet’s punitive power, like his laws, is extinguished


along with his life. It is to avoid similar anxieties that the doctrine of the king’s two bodies, spectacularly affirmed in the effigy, had been developed. In the context of critical elegies, the laureate’s oeuvre or book becomes the effigy, proclaiming that his poetic sovereignty will endure beyond the corruption of the physical self. It is not surprising that the commonplace elegiac desire for continuity acquired such political resonance among poets in the interregnum. The re-enactment of outmoded royalist pleasures and rituals in the work of Lovelace or Beaumont and Fletcher, or the topical sovereignty claimed for Cartwright, offer opportunities for literary resistance. These discourses of sovereignty, autonomy and exclusivity were not just features of poetry during the civil wars and Protectorate; they are especially conspicuous in the critical elegies on Donne and Jonson.

5.4 Few can follow: Negativity and propriety in the poetry of Donne and Jonson In an elegy published in Donne’s Poems of 1633, Lucius Cary, second Viscount Falkland, establishes John Donne’s goodness negatively in contrast to Puritan ethics. His refusal to assert Donne’s positive qualities invites the sophoi to define Donne’s virtues themselves. Such negativity associates distinction with the inexpressibility topos, as well as allowing the elegist to critique contemporary life. Donne’s own query in the early lyric ‘Negative Love’ – whether the ‘simply perfectest’ can only be expressed in ‘Negatives’ (Donne 293) – suggests that apophatic characterisation, often used by devotional poets, was the highest form of praise. It also appeals to epigrammatists including Jonson, who excuses himself from epigram 23 ‘To John Donne’ ‘because I cannot [praise] as I should!’39 This recognition of the limits of epideictic language accords not only with inimitability of the subject’s own writing, but also with the limits of poetic language to represent death. However, as Thomas Stanley avers, negativity can be simply negative: ‘Encomiums to their objects are exact; / To praise and not at full is to detract.’40 Faint praise draws attention to itself. Jonson warns against misreading of his praise on Shakespeare: ‘crafty malice might pretend this praise, / And think to ruin where it seemed to raise’; the poet’s own genius must be ‘proof’ against the praise of his inferiors.41 As J. Chudleigh writes on Donne, ‘So pens grow while they lessen fame so left; / A weak assistance is a kind of theft.’ By assuming the right not to praise, poets empower themselves and diminish their subjects. After Donne’s death, Henry Hyde ‘Cannot blame those men, that knew thee well, / Yet dare not helpe the world, to ring thy knell’. Hyde


uses the diction of fear, danger and illegality to signal the dangers of mirror criticism: ‘Hee that shall venture farther’ than silence, to imitation, commits ‘A pitied errour, shew[s] his zeale, not wit’ (Donne 377). But such diction suggests more than just the commonplace of inimitable excellence. Gostelow writing ‘On the death of Mr Randolph’ in 1640 recalls that When Donne, and Beaumont dyed, an Epitaph Some men (I well remember) thought unsafe; And said they did presume to write, unlesse They could their teares in their expressions dresse.42 The striking word ‘unsafe’ might recall Joseph Hall’s commendation of Donne’s First Anniversary, which assured the Drury family that ‘Death bars reward and shame: when envy’s gone, / And gaine, ’tis safe to give the dead their owne’ (DE 21). Hall acknowledges a risk of panegyric familiar to poets as far back as Pindar: that praise provokes not emulation but envy, especially when it is given to the living. In Donne’s case, the excesses of his youthful lyrics and the complexity of his elegiac triumph the Anniversaries presented particular challenges to elegists trained in praising through imitation. We have seen that one function of critical elegy was to provide readers with a guide to the values of a body of work, to anticipate criticism and to promote sympathetic readings. But to reconcile Donne’s obscure metaphysical poetry to a universal readership would violate its mechanics of exclusivity. Arthur Marotti describes Donne’s ‘intellectual complexity, paradox and irony, the appeals to shared attitudes and group interests (if not private knowledge)’ as features of ‘the coterie circumstances of his verse’. Lewalski has argued along similar lines that the allegory in the Anniversaries ‘may create a fiction or myth which hides or obscures the essential truth [ ] so as to deflect the unworthy and exercise the wits of the wise in a salutory and pleasant fashion’.43 In his first Anniversarie, Donne imagined the world after Elizabeth Drury’s death in twilight, with only ‘A faint weake love of vertue and of good’ reflecting ‘from her, on them which understood / Her worth’ (DE 24). Those who ‘understood’ Drury’s worth can achieve a faint but exceptional illumination. Nonetheless, his poem itself seems to have left many of his elegists in the dark. Mayne describes it as ‘Indeed so farre above its Reader, good, / That wee are thought wits, when ’tis understood’; just understanding the poem is enough to qualify readers to


the confraternity of wits. He blames Donne’s obscurity for the muted response to his death: Hadst thou beene shallower, and not writ so high, Or left some new way for our pennes, or eye, To shed a funerall teare, perchance thy Tombe Had not beene speechlesse, or our Muses dumbe[.] (Donne 393) Likewise, Henry Valentine admires Donne’s sacred intelligence which flew to ‘A pitch of all admir’d, known but of few, / (Save those of purer mould)’ (381). He credits the comprehension of this ambiguous writing to a sophoi ‘of a purer mould’. For Arthur Wilson, a gentleman-in-waiting to the third Earl of Essex, Donne’s readers are a higher class: in thy Fancies flight Thou dost not stoope unto the vulgar sight, But, hovering highly in the aire of Wit, Hold’st such a pitch, that few can follow it; Admire they may.44 But this praise is not unequivocal. In his History of Great Britain, Wilson shows his democratic inclinations when he writes that there is ‘no Reason why Princes should think themselves so far above ordinary Mortals, that their Actions are to be Incomprehensible.’45 As a humanist poet or a minister, it was Donne’s duty to lead his ‘vulgar’ readers to improve themselves through clarity. These images of flight and understanding may derive from Joseph Hall’s suggestion in ‘The Harbinger to the Progres’ that Donne’s Second Anniversarie deflects the unworthy. Hall describes Donne as following Elizabeth Drury ‘So fast, as none can follow thine so fast; / So farre as none can follow thine so farre’. He ‘wonders’ at Donne’s ‘flight’, Which long agoe had’st lost the vulgar sight And now mak’st proud the better eyes, that they Can see thee less’ned in thine aery way. (DE 39–40) Donne’s imagination journeys as fast as Drury’s soul, which Donne represents as stringing the stars together like beads on a cord as it zoomed


to heaven. Hall’s contention that Donne makes the ‘better eyes’ proud to see him ‘less’ned’ as he disappears into the firmament of hyperbole sounds not only ambivalent, but contrary to the didactic purposes of epideictic. Henry King resumes the metaphor of flight, asserting with similar ambivalence that To have liv’d eminent, in a degree Beyond our lofty’st flights, that is, like Thee, Or t’have had too much merit, is not safe; For, such excesses finde no Epitaph. (Donne 373) But early modern moralists may have balked at the idea of excess as an exemplary mode. Excess and transcendence require submission, not imitation, as Sir Jo. Pettus suggests when he remarks that Beaumont and Fletcher’s strange unimitable Intercourse Transcends all Rules, and flyes beyond the force Of the most forward soules; (a4 r ) by ‘transcending’ the rules of conventional exemplarity, Beaumont and Fletcher attain a sovereign autonomy to which other writers ‘must submit’, rather than one they can imitate. But their autonomy is also shadowed by lawlessness; as such, it cannot form the basis for a settled poetic government, and elegists can justify their rejection of the paternal poet’s laws by citing their exceptionality. Hyde’s inability to comprehend Donne also hints at a moral difference. If ‘there’s not language knowne / Fit for thy mention, but ’twas first thy owne’ (377), is the best language to describe Donne that of his first, erotic poems? Hyde and other elegists resist Donne’s metaphysical obscurity and strong lines, his ‘darkness of conceipt’ and occasional profanity drawn from Persius and Juvenal. These models contrast with the clarity and balance characteristic of Jonson’s own poetic hero, Horace.46 Jonson’s twenty-third epigram emphasises Donne’s ‘strife’ with ‘halfe mankind’ in his obscure poems, which cause ‘Phœbus, and each Muse’ to ‘refuse all other braines’.47 That Jonson admired Donne is obvious from his epigram 96, which conveys Jonson’s poems to Donne for censure or the ‘great glorie’ of praise which Donne


alone can give.48 Jonson and Donne may have exchanged poems in manuscript, but Jonson kept his amatory lyrics out of print during his lifetime and cultivated an Horatian literary persona in public.49 As his redaction of Martial in his second Epigrammes shows, Jonson tries to reduce literary improprieties; Donne by contrast uses lewd language even in his devotional lyrics. Thomas Browne, in his coarse critique of the ‘promiscuous printing’ of the divine and wanton lyrics together, saw Donne’s ‘Loose raptures’ as incompatible with his religious vocation (Donne 376). But several other elegists countenance his erotic lyrics as facilitating his pastoral work: Donne knew ‘the same / Angles, though darker, in our meaner frame’, the way around the ‘thousand mazes of the hearts deceipt’.50 For Carew, Donne’s ‘deepe knowledge of darke truths’ allowed him to identify with his congregation and anatomise their sins (385). Many elegists characterise his pastoral care as a kind of seduction. Falkland mirrors Donne’s paradoxical use of sexual language in religious contexts, praising sermons which ‘did flames of more devotion move / Then ever Argive Hellens could of love’ (391). Chudleigh extols Donne’s preaching and asks, Tell me, had ever pleasure such a dresse, Have you knowne crimes so shap’d? or lovelinesse Such as his lipes did cloth religion in? Had not reeproofe a beauty passing sinne?51 Donne’s ‘sacred flattery’ beguiled ‘Man to amendment’ and ‘Pension’d our vanitie and man grew well / Through the same frailtie by which he fell.’ Chudleigh implies that Donne’s beautiful erotic verse might attract readers to sin: his orthodox acknowledgement of man’s frailty also uses Biblical references to suggest that Donne snares sinners with ornament. ‘Laying nets to save,’ the Dean ‘bribe[s] appetite’ with eloquence.52 But Proverbs 29:5 warns that ‘A man that flattereth his neighbour spreadeth a net for his feet.’53 These nets are the tools not only of the fisher of men, but also of the flattering courtier. His elegists seem ready for the charge that Donne the minister had failed to discard his youthful sensuality. At the time of his ordination, Donne was conscious that his motives were suspected. Walton recounts Donne’s fear that ‘some irregularities of my life have been so visible to some men’ that they would invite a general censure of the clergy.54 The circulation of his poems also threatened to undermine his clerical gravity.55 Jonson remarked to Drummond that ‘now since he was made Doctor [Donne] repenteth highlie and seeketh to destroy


all his poems.’56 Donne’s regrets did not, however, convince him to stop writing; ‘since I have not yet utterly delivered my self from this intemperance of scribling (though I thank God my accesses are lesse and lesse vehement)’, he resolved to write for the relief of ‘poor and impotent sinner[s]’.57 Falkland recognises Donne’s reformation, but criticises him for not burning his perjuring papers. He labour’d to exclude what ever sinne By time or carelessneesse had entred in; Winnow’d the chaffe from wheat, but yet was loath A too hot zeale should force him, burne them both; Nor would allow of that so ignorant gall, Which to save blotting often would blot all[.] (Donne 391) Falkland perceives that an attempt to alienate himself from his erotic muse could also ruin Donne’s unique theological imagination. This last line recalls Heming and Condell’s preface to Shakespeare’s First Folio, which states that ‘wee have scarse received from him a blot in his papers’, as well as Jonson’s response, that he should actually have blotted a thousand of his imperfect lines.58 Falkland’s alternate use of Jonson’s phrase shows his own sensitivity to the compositional value of spontaneity and the coherence which sometimes must include error. Like Falkland and Mayne, Carew is willing to bifurcate Donne’s literary career into ‘Apollo’s first, at last, the true Gods Priest’ (388). Unlike Henry King, some of whose poems were classified as ‘Juvenilia’ to dissociate him from their improprieties, the poems of both ‘Jack Donne and D. Donne’ were mixed together in the 1633 edition. Falkland focusses on the divine ‘Anthemes (almost second Psalmes)’ (390), while Mayne’s youth piques his interest in the love poems, and thus to ‘wrong thee, Donne, and this low praise / Is written onely for thy yonger dayes’ (395). Walton, on the other hand, dates Donne’s poetic and moral indiscretions to his teens, describing him as the Church’s ‘second St. Austine’, ‘for, I think, none was so like him before his Conversion: none so like St. Ambrose after it, and if his youth had the infirmities of the one, his age had the excellencies of the other’. Donne’s carnal wit was translated once he ‘had a new calling, new thoughts, and a new employment for his wit and eloquence. Now all his earthly affections were changed into divine love.’59 With Walton, Chudleigh reads Donne’s holy writings as corrections of his erotic literary muse. Donne did not ‘banish’ wit, ‘but


transplanted it, / Taught it his place and use, and brought it home / To Pietie.’60 But those loyal to Jonson – and many of Donne’s elegists could be numbered among the ‘Tribe of Ben’ – could not have condoned this merging of erotic and religious wit. Jonson opposed what he saw as the courtier poet’s ambivalence and license; he also affirmed the values of clarity, morality and prosodic order. Some of Donne’s elegists sided with Jonson’s dislike for obscurity and profanity, and others balanced those critiques with reference to Doctor Donne’s conversion. Their reluctance to eulogise Jack Donne must be seen as more than the commonplace inhibition of the modesty topos, however; it also permits the poets to side with Jonsonian literary ethics of clarity, restraint and orderliness, and to refuse to subsume their own literary identities to this idiosyncratic laureate. The elegiac reception of Shakespeare provided a model for the clash between Donnean and Jonsonian values. For many writers, Shakespeare’s speed and occasionally bawdy instinct were opposed to Jonson’s ethic of literary labour, or as Alexander Pope disposed them, ‘Johnsons grave, and Shakespeares lighter sound’. Milton joins many of Shakespeare’s elegists in praising his ‘easy numbers’ which flow ‘to the shame of slow-endeavouring art’.61 In his elegies for Shakespeare, Leonard Digges rejected Jonson’s view that nature and art were equally essential for the production of great poetry. Digges began the attack on Jonson as a slow worker and a copyist, in contrast to that true original, Shakespeare. In his elegy to Shakespeare, Jonson had affirmed that ‘a good Poet’s made, as well as borne’; inspiration and natural ability alone do not serve, the poet ‘must sweat’ like any manual labourer.62 Jonson saw himself as struggling manfully at the anvil of poetry, hammering out reforms to the English language.63 Jasper Mayne’s elegy attributed the Shakespearian qualities of spontaneity and natural talent to Donne. Who will not say, thy carelesse houres brought forth Fancies beyond our studies, and thy play Was happier, then our serious time of day? So learned was thy chance; thy haste had wit, And matter from thy pen flow’d rashly fit, What was thy recreation turnes our braine, Our rack and palenesse, is thy weakest straine.64 Here, Donne’s carelessness and playful haste contrast with ‘our’ studiousness and torturous searching for rhyme and matter. Mayne alludes


not only to Donne’s prosodic roughness flowing ‘rashly fit’, but also to his obscurity as an impulse of leisurely ‘recreation’. Carew’s poem ‘To Ben Johnson’ uses the same terms to reverse effect: ‘Thy labour’d workes shall live, when Time devoures / Th’abortive off-spring of their hastie houres.’65 The products of Jonson’s labours may lack the flair of Donne’s or Shakespeare’s ready wit, but for Carew that laborious patience also shows his authorial ethics. These panegyrics articulate two distinct paths between an alluring metaphysical complexity and spontaneity, and a socially responsible neoclassical clarity.

5.5 Monarchs of wit In his elegy for Shakespeare, Jonson had argued that the poet must ‘turn’ his living line on the muses’ anvil, ‘And himself with it.’ The act of framing decent verses encourages the development of the writer, as Chapter 1 has argued. Jonson was regarded by his contemporaries as the reformer of metaphysical poetry’s harsh prosody and ‘wild’ conceits, as well as the antique metres of Spenserian poetry or the fierce language of England’s barbaric past. After the death of Fletcher, Berkenhead laments that a ‘Relapse of Wit’ besets poetry, and ‘What strength remaines, is like that (wilde and fierce) / Till Johnson made good Poets and right Verse’ (BF E2r ). Both Fletcher and Jonson had displayed personal ‘goodness’ alongside prosodic ‘rightness’, combining ethical and aesthetic propriety. This association was nothing new: rhetoricians frequently compared ambiguity and disorder in words to rebellion in the state, thus associating metrical with moral regularity.66 Puttenham describes poets as the first ethical philosophers, who distinguished ‘betweene vertue and vice, and then tempered all these knowledges and skilles with the exercise of a delectable Musicke’.67 The reformative powers of literature are intrinsically associated with its music. Even Plato – despite his famous prohibition of poetry in the Republic – allows for the social utility of songs. Rather than striving for metrical variety, ‘we should try to discover what are the rhythms of someone who leads an ordered and courageous life and then adapt the meter and the tune to his words, not his words to them’, Plato proposes.68 Ethical life has a rhythm which poetry can imitate. Following in this tradition, Jonson’s plain style and balanced couplets confirmed the normative ethical role of his poetry. Jonson’s facetious remark to Drummond ‘that Done for not keeping of accent deserved hanging’ makes his friend’s prosodic irregularity a kind of felony.69 While Jonson’s exemplary prosodic control set the standard for his admirers, Donne’s prosodic excesses encouraged a generation of


‘metaphysicals’ to commit crimes against metre which only Davenant ‘redeemed’, Suckling argues. Future readers Shall not account unto the Age’s crimes Dearth of pure Wit: since the great Lord of it (Donne) parted hence, no Man has ever writ So neere him, in’s owne way70 as Davenant has by combining Donne’s ‘pure wit’ with Jonsonian prosodic discretion. Donne’s excesses could be seen as challenges to the regularising authority Jonson claimed from classical literature. Like the traitors discussed in Chapter 4, Donne accrued an attractive charisma by innovating against tradition and authority. Is this why he merited the exemplary punishment of ‘hanging’? Many critical elegists paid tribute to Donne’s autonomy. The most famous of these tributes is the hic jacet that ends Carew’s elegy, ‘Here lies a King, that rul’d as hee thought fit / The universall Monarchy of wit’ (Donne 388). Carew’s adjective, according to Jeremy Maule, makes Donne a latter-day Augustus: to find an absolute and universal imperium the poetic monarchists had to look far beyond the Stuarts, to the emperors of post-republican Rome.71 However, his elegists frequently comment on the smallness of Donne’s imperium, which unlike Jonson’s did not trade with foreign principalities. R. B. claims tautologically that Donne was ‘Prince of wits’, but only to those ‘’mongst whom he reign’d, / High as a Prince, and as great State maintain’d’ (400); Falkland likewise declares that Donne reign over ‘The Kingdome of ones selfe’: ‘never any could before become / So Great a Monarch, in so small a roome’ (391). The dead laureate is at once a universal law-giver, and a prince in the little rooms of bedchambers and stanzas who cannot legislate poetry universally or perpetually. By contrast, Jonson’s elegists declared that his plays and poems made the age ‘innocent’, that they dealt more effectively with moral decadence than royal decrees could – ‘So much doth Satyre more correct than Law’ ( JonsVirb 32). Richard West’s chiastic description of Jonson as ‘Poet of Princes, Prince of Poets’ (55) glances at the royal pension whilst paying tribute to an artistic sovereignty which guaranteed Jonson’s independence. Jonson had once asserted ‘that he which can faine a Commonwealth (which is the Poet) can governe it with Counsels, strengthen it with Lawes, correct it with Judgements, informe it with Religion, and Morals’, is king, parliament, counsellor and clergy.72 Like Pindar, a Boetian rustic whose artistic reputation allowed him to advise kings,


Jonson manages an epideictic demesne where he dispenses honours and holds up the mirror of moral correction to the sovereign.73 Wayne Rebhorn describes this as a standard move in Renaissance rhetoric. Writers frequently commended the personal sovereignty and social mobility granted by eloquence, declaring themselves superiors not just to kings, but also to their audience.74 Habington asserts likewise that Fletcher didst frame governments, give Kings their part, Teach them how neere to God, while just they be; But how dissolv’d, stretcht forth to Tyrannie. (BF b3 v ) The ability to direct the monarch through praise and exemplary punishment here links the imaginative invention of a state to the direction of a real kingdom. Jonson’s drive to renew the vernacular also aligned him with King James, who had personally advised Prince Henry to write verse (if he must) in his native language: ‘it best becommeth a King to purifie and make famous his own tongue’, he said, commending plain style and moral amplitude.75 Perhaps this reformative language practice also contributed to Abington’s crowning of Jonson as ‘Wits most triumphant Monarch’ (JonsVirb 28). For Abington, Jonson conquers – or as John Dryden would later say, invades – foreign authors and brings home the spoils. In his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Dryden excuses Jonson’s lack of originality because his royal status leaves him outside the law: ‘He invades Authours like a Monarch, and what would be theft in other Poets, is onely victory in him.’76 Jonson’s sovereign exceptionality makes the law; minor poets transgress against it, the laureate transcends it. Jonson’s followers attribute to him the power to legislate poetry as well as behaviour. But despite its claims to independence through moral superiority, the poet’s sovereignty is always in negotiation with the real powers invested in the patrons and governments he serves.

5.6 Coinages and currency One of the sovereign’s most significant powers was the right to coin money. In critical elegy, metaphors of coinage, mining and minting provide terms for absolute poetic value which only the poet’s authority


could protect against plagiarism. The monarch’s imprint guaranteed the integrity of coinages; the laureate’s guaranteed the integrity of exchangeable publications. Katherine Philips crowns Cartwright poetry’s fallen sovereign; until he is restored, ‘let no bold Hand prophane thy Shrine, / Tis High Wit-Treason to debase thy Coyne’ (Cartwright a6r ). She represents originality – the poet’s capital – as coin, which belongs to him by virtue of his mark even when it enters circulation. For Robert Waring, Cartwright’s poetry is guaranteed to retain its legitimate semantic worth, unlike ‘Verse that for Charmes may pass; more Noise than Sense, / As Northern Coyn, for Pounds cheat’s us with Pence’ (*7v ). Like counterfeit coins, bad verse contaminates poetic currency and makes readers mistrustful of proclaimed values. Counterfeiting symbolises elegists’ fears about consumers’ mediation of artistic value, and the ability of work to resist plagiarism. Brideoake hopes to protect Randolph’s poetic invention against counterfeiters, at the same time as modestly diminishing his own ‘brass’ returns on Randolph’s ‘sterling’ verses. Thus have I seen a peece of Coyn, which bore The Image of my King or Prince before, New cast into some Peasant, lose its grace; Yet’s the same body with a fouler face. If our own store must pay; that Gold which was Lent us in sterling, we must turn in brasse.77 Unregulated wit, like unregulated coinage, bears a mark of legitimacy but consists of defective or inferior substance. Denham defends Fletcher’s treasury of wit from interlopers to whom thy Wit Gives not more Gold then they give drosse to it: Who not content like fellons to purloyne, Adde Treason to it, and debased thy Coyne. (BF b1v ) Counterfeiting is treason against the sovereign (of England or of poetry) because it violates the image and person of the king. For Berkenhead, the edition of Cartwright’s works reforms the poetry currently in circulation and shows up the fraudulence of counterfeit writers. It is equivalent to the Trial of the Pyx, after which they


(Who adding Brass or Pewter of their own, Of a Kings shilling made a false Half-crown) Must quit their Trade[.] (Cartwright *9 v ) King James’ monetary proclamations and Trial of the Pyx were intended to reform the corrupt reputation of the mint and guarantee the value of British coins. According to Simon Wortham, these legal mechanisms affirmed the unalloyed value of the coin in order to uphold ‘an essentialist conception of value in which the relation between the object and the sign was held to be immanent, direct and unmediated’.78 Such a relation would symbolically close the chasm between loss and suitable language. The coinage commonplace also alleviates the difficulty imposed by criticism of a ‘riming age’, by implying that the ability to distinguish between real and counterfeit value, though ethically and practically necessary, does not indict the whole system. Coins – the first widely circulating publications – can also represent the transformations of the natural resources of genius through the minting process of composition. When applied to collaborators, this metaphor is problematic: the specie may combine the same element (gold) from different sources, but only one likeness can be used for the stamp. Berkenhead simplifies the issue of discernible likeness by substituting both Beaumont and Fletcher’s names for the head on the coin. Both [muses] brought Your Ingots, Both toil’d at the Mint, Beat, melted, sifted, till no drosse stuck in’t, Then in each Others scales weigh’d every graine, Then smooth’d and burnish’d, then weigh’d all againe, Stampt Both your Names upon’t at one bold Hit, Then, then ’twas Coyne, as well as Bullion-Wit. (BF E1v ) This description recalls Jonson’s anvil of poetry; with the physical labours of beating, melting and sifting, Beaumont and Fletcher refine and legitimate their Shakespearean natural talent with Jonsonian ‘art’. Cartwright similarly praises Jonson’s translations which import the unformed ‘ore’ of classical resources into English national capital, imprinting them with his own sovereign character,


thus doth the stampe and face Make that the Kings, that’s ravisht from the mine: In others then ’tis oare, in thee ’tis coine. ( JonsVirb 38) The material, though valuable in itself, first must be ravished from a mine with labour and violence. Sovereign power alone can legitimate such acquisition. According to Carew and King, Donne also extracted his poetic luxuries from a ‘mine’. The labour spent in comprehending Donne’s extravagant wit must therefore be subtracted from the straight revenues of reading him. Donne himself approves of excavating difficult and esoteric spiritual truths from religious texts: ‘what treasure is there in the hearty and inward Mine, the Mistick and retired sense? Dig a little deeper, O my poor lazy soul’.79 But Jonson forswears esoteric imagery, since ‘God offer’d us those things, and placed them at hand, and neere us, that hee knew were profitable for us’; but the ‘hurtfull’ such as gold ‘he laid deepe, and hid’.80 For many early modern commentators, shocked by the hellish accounts of Spain’s New World enterprises, mining necessarily breeds corruption and greed. To express Cleveland’s dominion over ‘English poetry’, Winstanley highlights his independence from foreign sources of literary capital. Cleveland eschews the hard labours of translation; thus, the world No Monarch knew so absolute as He; Yet did he ne’r Excize the Natives; nor Made Forraign Mines unto his Mint bring Oar.81 Unlike the Spaniards, Cleveland’s absolutism is tempered by his lenience towards the ‘natives’. The allusion to ‘foreign mines’ invokes a nationalist rhetoric of colonial competition. Except the Cardiganshire Mines Royal, mining for precious metals was associated with foreign principalities such as the Tyrol, the Erzgebirge and the Saxony. Most European bullion came through Spain from Potosí in Peru; there was no gold in English ground.82 For this reason, Jonson complains in the ¯ Morison Ode that petty elegists ‘hads’t neaver but one sillver Caryn mine’ of praise; and so, if Morison ‘must buried be, bee it in Peru’. By describing poets as independent of foreign sources, elegists also commend English. As Winstanley’s poem suggests, coins, and the related figures of monopolies, counterfeiting and bankruptcy, can also represent the dangers of


poetic tyranny. The topos of wit’s bankruptcy (as in Jonson’s Epigram 74) localises poetic force in an individual: after that person’s death, the age will have no capital left for elegies, forcing poets to draw upon the credit of the deceased. ‘Like Banckrupts in the stocke of Fame’, elegists use their subject’s name ‘To patch our credit up’ ( JonsVirb 52). Barton Holyday applies this conceit to rather different effect, when he blames poetry’s impoverishment on Jonson’s profligacy. The Muses must now ‘beg art of thee’, ‘Who dost in daily bounty more wit spend, / Then they could ever lend.’83 Jonson indulges in a regal consumption which could impact the national economy even as it affirms his sovereignty by display. Davenant compares Jonson’s bankrupting of the muses to the great medieval lord whose household of retainers signifies his autonomy. Jonson spends so much that he leaves no revenues to his ‘sons’, and only an equally lordly heir can pay the great debts on the spendthrift estate of a poet Who living, all the Muses Treasure spent, As if they him, their Heire, not Steward meant. Forrests of Mirtle he disforrested, That neere to Helicon their shades did spred; Like Moderne Lords, w’are so of Rent bereft; Poets and they have nought but Titles left: He wasted all in Wreaths for’s conqu’ring Wit[.]84 Jonson’s deforestation of poetry in such books as Timber, and the harvesting of all the bays to crown him, leaves to his descendants a literary desert with no myrtle for his successors. However, when the crown decided to cut down the Roche and Salwood forests in 1627 to meet expenses after the disastrous Rhé expedition, the measure was apparently popular – and preferable to other forms of fundraising.85 Contemporary readers might have seen Jonson’s act as fiscally responsible, drawing on English natural resources, rather than as an environmental catastrophe. Carew declares that by opening the ‘mine’ of fancy Donne ‘didst pay / The debts of our penurious bankrupt age’ (Donne 386). Henry King concurs that Donne lent valuable poetic specie to the age. Although King refuses to squander his capital on decorative ritual, he insists that it is not fit that Donne Should’st now re-borrow from her bankrupt Mine, That Ore to Bury Thee, which once was Thine. Rather still leave us in thy debt; And know


(Exalted Soule) more glory ’t is to owe Unto thy Hearse, what we can never pay, Then, with embased Coine those Rites defray. (Donne 374–5)

Since it is impossible to borrow from a bankrupt, Donne must never expect to be paid compliments sufficient to his glory. King urges that his successors maintain their indebtedness to the past rather than debasing the coinage or forcing a loan. Such quasi-legal fundraising mechanisms were usually contrary to the public economic interest, and were often resented. The forced loan of 1626 especially roused local resistance, and became an opportunity for the aristocracy to reassert itself;86 the following year, over £100,000 in copper money was issued to continue financing war after the disgraces of Rhé and Rochelle. Debasing the coinage was both an illegal activity of counterfeiters and a legal means for the crown to raise money. Similarly, Donne’s brilliance allows him to get away with lawless challenges to the sovereignty of prosodic conventions where lesser poets would be punished as criminals. Carew forestalls the bankruptcy of the ancients by recruiting Donne as ‘Exchequer’ to the ‘ancient Brood’. With Donne installed in this office, poets who ‘in others dust, had rak’d for Ore’ would conserve poetry’s riches (Donne 386). The Exchequer was responsible for the distribution of usable, valid currency into the market. These coins need not be new: the oldest coins still in circulation in the 1620s were probably the good silver of 1551.87 Words and poetry should endure equally lasting circulation: Digges expects Shakespeare’s Poems ‘Like old coynd gold, whose lines in every page, / Shall passe true currant to succeeding age.’88 John Beaumont recommends Jonson’s durable language to poets, who should ‘pay’ him with the ‘coyne / Himselfe hath minted’ because ‘no words passe for currant now, but his’ ( JonsVirb 12). Unusual coinages could become rusted and clipped with time. This was the declared fate of other laureates inclined to neologisms and difficulty, as Francis Atterbury famously reflected in the preface to the Second Part of Mr Waller’s Poems (1690),

’tis a surprizing Reflection, that between what Spencer wrote last, and Waller first, there should not be much above twenty years distance: and yet the one’s Language, like the Money of that time, is as currant


now as ever; whilst the other’s words are like old Coyns, one must go to an Antiquary to understand their true meaning and value. (A4v ) Unless individual coinages remain in use, their value will be obscured by changing linguistic customs and habits of reading. Critical elegists sought to defend poetry against this contingency. The years in which the elegies for Donne were written saw a real decline in the standard by which monetarists could measure large values. Between 1610 and 1630, 95 to 99 per cent of coin issued was gold. Gold held a permanent, absolute value; silver was regarded as base and transient, but also vitally necessary for small transactions.89 However, the early 1630s saw a massive influx of silver specie into England as a result of an agreement to pay credit notes to Spain’s forces in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years’ War. Two-thirds of Spain’s silver imports were sent to be minted or recoined in London, where Spanish agents would buy it back with bills of exchange redeemable in Flanders. This led not only to a dramatic increase in the amount of silver in circulation in England, but also to a drain of gold to the Continent.90 England was left with a dearth of money for high-value transactions. Donne’s witty and obscure poetry also paid the bankruptcies of invention in a coin whose value elegists could not safely assay. The difficulties of his coinages set his poems beyond the ownership of the common reader, making them inappropriate for the moral and linguistic transactions of ordinary life – transactions which poets like Jonson thought poetry should regulate.

5.7 Rapes upon the will When Carew praises Donne’s ability to open ‘a Mine / Of rich and pregnant phansie,’ he pays tribute to Donne’s sovereign control of the coinage and to his fertile imagination. In love lyrics, mining frequently represents sexual intercourse, where by penetration into a ‘mine of pleasure’ the father excavates the riches of a child, imprinted with his own image. In ‘A Rapture’, Carew makes his beloved’s euphemistic ‘rich Mine’ lie ready ‘for mintage’, ‘And we will coyne young Cupids’.91 Asserting possession, this representation of the woman as a ‘mine’ denotes her womb as a repository of potential value which can only be realised by the impression of a sovereign male. In ‘To the Lady that desired I would love her’, Carew promises similarly to ‘spend’ his flattery to ‘dresse’ her beauty, if she would ‘but unlocke’ her ‘mine of Pleasure’


(Carew 139). While the female can produce natural, unrefined gold, it is the work of male artistic labour to render it a circulating commodity. The similitudes among the stamping of metal with a coined image, the coining of a phrase, the pressing of a book with inked type and the impression of the father’s image on the child made for a particularly rich metaphorical matrix. Women are represented as providing the neutral, blank page or specie which the father imprints with images and language. Printing is therefore frequently symbolised as birthing, as in Grandison’s image of the ‘lab’ring Presse’ which ‘brought forth safe a Child of happinesse’ in Beaumont and Fletcher’s folio (BF a1r ). Corbet makes daring use of another aspect of this similitude in his celebratory poem ‘On the birth of the young Prince Charles’ in 1630. Charles I had received subsidies from the 1626 and 1628 Parliaments; Corbet welcomes baby Charles as a third grant, ‘Gods Loane’, ‘Thou Mony newly coyn’d, thou rich Fleete of Plate’ who makes his father ‘rich without a Parliament’.92 The stillbirth of Princess Katherine in 1638 prompts Joseph Howe to allege that ‘to Breed be to be Coyn’t’, the beginning of a long financial conceit for Henrietta Maria’s travails.93 In another elegy, John Jeffries describes Dr Sancroft’s son as only recently excavated from the womb. Jeffries compares the young man to an ‘angel’ coin, a Fayre peece of Angel gold, which art yet hott Out of Heaven’s mint and hast but newly gott The Soveraigne Image on thee[.] Through death ‘Thou the fate hast found / Of misers gold and art intomb’d in ground.’94 Lovelace reverses this coinage trope when he flirtatiously advises Lucasta: ‘Not to be by Man imbrac’t / Makest that Royall coyne imbace’t’ (58). Lucasta’s value is ‘embased’ by not mixing with a lover to ‘coin’ children in his image. In these examples, patriarchal anxieties about basing the biological or literary legitimacy of the ‘species’ on resemblance are articulated through metaphors of uncoined ‘specie’. Replacing biological reproduction with metallurgic metaphor allows poets to govern the transmission of value to male successors, excluding women in particular from the reproduction of literary value. But this regulatory metaphor can itself provoke disturbing questions about sexuality and legitimacy. Poets attempt to protect the author’s legacy by establishing a single and exclusive line of inheritance from father-poet to son. Richard Lovelace ‘auspiciously brought forth’ his book of poems, which his brother greets in a preface as ‘thy Son, thy first born flame, / Which as


thou gav’st it birth, stamps it a name’ (a3r ). Lovelace’s book is his child, stamped with his image and sent into circulation. It is also born ‘ideally’, of the father alone. In the case of Beaumont and Fletcher’s marriage of true minds, elegist Joseph Howe sexualises their collaborative friendship even more: he says that Fletcher ‘tooke his BEAUMONT for Embrace,’ Not to grow by him, and increase, Nor for support did with him twine, He was his friends friend, not his vine. (BF f2 r ) Though he asserts that these two were friends, not ‘vine’ and elm, that image was a well-known emblem of friendship. Howe rejects the emblem’s implication that one friend was subordinated to the other; their sensuous ‘twining’ (with a pun on twinning) was pleasurable, not necessary ‘support’ for the weaker. Howe explores the asexual production of wisdom in place of the groping sexual twining of bodies which causes the belly or fancy to ‘grow’ and ‘increase’. The metaphor of pregnancy is used to describe the birth of Beaumont and Fletcher’s literary corpus from their friendly intimacy. Images of rhetorical invention as birthing by a male author were not uncommon in the Renaissance. Rebhorn argues that rhetoricians attempted ‘to appropriate for the male orator the generative powers of women, tapping into a male fantasy of power in which men produce children without having recourse to the other sex’.95 This fantasy feminises the orator, as in Oldisworth’s praise for Cowley. Ben Johnson’s wombe was great; and Wee Did doubt, what might the issue bee: But now hee brings forth to his praise, And loe, an Infant crown’d with Baies.96 While establishing continuity between poetic generations, this fantasy also imposes controls on the promiscuity of the press and the verminous proliferation of rhymers. Berkenhead, who had earlier described Beaumont and Fletcher as smiths sweating over their coinages, concludes with wonder: What strange Production is at last displaid, (Got by Two Fathers, without Female aide)


Behold, two Masculines espous’d each other, Wit and the World were born without a Mother. (BF E2 v ) As Jeff Masten points out, Berkenhead uses the image of Beaumont and Fletcher’s artistic marriage to confront the difficulty of distinguishing between collaborators – a difficulty addressed by many of the other contributors to the folio preliminaries. As the imprint of the father’s image proved the legitimacy of attributions of authorship, Berkenhead’s conceit triggers anxiety ‘within a discursive universe where dramatic writing was increasingly imagined more as singular fatherhood than as collaborative, “consenting consort”, and where the male homoerotic friendship was increasingly coincident with an idea of companionate marriage’.97 John Harris’ verses raise the agonistic temperature by registering how Fletcher’s ‘Male wit like the youthfull Sun’ Strongly begets upon our passion. Making our sorrow teeme with Elegie But th’ are imperfect births; and such are all Produc’d by causes not univocall, The scapes of Nature, Passives being unfit, And hence our verse speakes only Mother wit. Oh for a fit o’th Father! for a Spirit That might but parcell of thy worth inherit[.] (BF f4 r ) While the imagery of ‘teeming’ elegy recalls the criticism of poetry ‘swarming at every stall’ discussed in Chapter 1, Harris describes these elegiac ‘births’ as deformed because they result from single-sex reproduction. A Freudian reading might see the desire to replace ‘Mother wit’ (the hysteria of grief) with a ‘fit of the Father’ as a desire for phallic fulfilment of the feminised elegist’s sense of lack. The absence of the dead is sexualised, the desire for continuity satisfied by the male artistic insemination appropriate to patrilineal discourses of inheritance and reproduction.98 Elegists’ desire to expose themselves to the laureate’s phallic dominance as a sign of their subordination, admiration and love, also occasions violence. Violence is particularly directed against women, whose creativity (literary and biological) is prohibited or subjected to the laureate’s domination in the figures of the Muses or feminised Poetry,


and against male elegists themselves. Rape conceits are perhaps the most intense expression of the agonistic tendency of critical elegy.99 Chapter 2 revealed the punitive fantasies of the bereaved; the offer to ‘kiss the rod’ of divine penalty reveals the latent sexual sadism in discourses of mourning. In melancholic subjects, the libido withdrawn from the beloved object into the self produces inhibition, self-reproach and pathological conscience. Freud argues that such melancholic introjection of revolt against the lost object also satisfies a sadistic impulse by redirecting it against the ego. In critical elegies, this confusion of libido and revenge fantasies against the dead laureate are sometimes expressed in the language of rape. King describes bad elegies for Donne as ‘Rapes upon thy Merit’ which will cause Donne’s ‘learned Spirit’ to awaken and ‘revenge’ himself against poetasters (Donne 374); Endymion Porter writes ‘Upon Ben, and his Zany, Tom Randolph’ that even poor Shakespeare ‘could not escape’ These letter-tyrant elves; They on his fame contriv’d a rape, To raise their pedant selves.100 The dead protect themselves against this necrophilia with spectral vengeance, threatening trespassers on the territory of their wit. Revenant poets force their friends to write, or (according to Denham) awaken ‘inraged’ from their urns. Fletcher Like Ghosts of Murdred bodyes doth returne To accuse the Murderers, to right the Stage, And undeceive the long abused Age. (BF b1v ) These minatory risings of the dead to protect their poetic legacies could be read as projections of the elegists’ own repressed anger onto the conquering, acquisitive or violent dead themselves. Death can intensify survivors’ affectionate feelings for their lost companions, but residual unconscious hostility that can no longer be expressed also results in ‘the construction of the ceremonial which gives expression to the fear of being punished by demons’.101 In Freud’s view, fears of avenging spirits and taboos surrounding the dead emerge from projected hostility to and desires for the lost person. Elegists also offer themselves as conduits for the dead’s vengeful and protectionist violence, and


sometimes threaten to rape widowed poetry if she resists their sexual domination. Llewellyn, for example, describes Cartwright as language’s husband. Cartwright’s willing, but not over-eager linguistic invention is modelled on the ideal marriage, whose primary purpose seems to be the protection of the wife from rape, And yet no Rape on disproportion’d Words Thy Brain affords Our Thought allows Of Language for her Spouse: A Bride which seldome suites, When forc’d as Coy, or Free as Prostitutes. (Cartwright *9r ) This marriage conceit, while opposed to the homoerotic entanglements of collaboration, also associates writing with sexual possession; thus, Donne leaves Invention ‘Widow’d’, having originally possessed and dominated her. (We should remember that rape was originally identified as a crime against property.) An anonymous elegist declares himself widowed by Cleveland’s death: Such was the fate of my weak Streams, that ran To drown themselves in th’unbound Ocean, And lose their name in His[.]102 This aquatic conceit refers explicitly to wedlock, as the The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights reveals: ‘When a small brooke or little river incorporateth with Rhodanus, Humber or the Thames, the poore rivolet loseth her name; it is carried and recarried with the new associate, it beareth no sway, it possesseth nothing.’ Similarly, a married woman ‘hath lost her streame’.103 Legally, marriage entails the surrender of both identity and property, including the maidenhead. The laureate who ‘marries’ poetry deprives her of her independence and sends her marked by his sexual domination to all future husbands; by contrast, elegists who take on the status of wife transfer their (linguistic) property and authority to the laureate. Through modest subservience, they can contribute to the production of a new generation of poems, all imprinted with the fatherpoet’s original image. This entails the offering of a sexually receptive self to the laureate’s domination, or the substitution of the elegist for


widowed or raped poetry, in pursuit of an exclusivity of reading and influence. In Carew’s elegy on Donne, poetry ends up ‘panting’ and ‘Gasping short winded Accents’ before dying; the palpitations of his metre are at once orgasmic and mortal. Carew targeted these feminised ‘numbers without strength’, wondering ‘Can we not force from widdowed Poetry, / Now thou art dead (Great DONNE) one Elegie’ (385)? Carew proceeds to sacrifice himself to Donne’s poetic force. He has already claimed that Donne’s seductive preaching committed ‘holy Rapes upon our Will’.104 Now, Carew says that language is forced to wrap itself around Donne’s ‘Giant phansie’: to the awe of thy imperious wit Our stubborne language bends, made only fit With her tough-thick-rib’d hoopes to gird about Thy Giant phansie, which had prov’d too stout For their soft melting Phrases. (386–7) For the sake of such ‘soft melting Phrases’, Leigh later characterised ‘melting Carew’ as the effete poet of ‘smooth soft’ music (Cartwright *r ). Carew himself described his poetry as taking the ‘smooth soft way / Of Love’. Thus he opens his own poetry to Donne’s phallic dominance, inviting a literary and literal insemination. Jasper Mayne uses the same figure to describe Jonson’s power over his ‘Sons’: What thou wert, like th’hard Oracles of old, Without an extasie cannot bee told. We must be ravisht first, Thou must infuse Thy selfe into us both the Theame and Muse. ( JonsVirb 29) Jonson takes mental and physical possession of his admirers, invading them like a god to induce a literary ecstasy of praise. The conflation of sexual and artistic creativity can seem peculiar, though as a topos (in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, for example) which conveys hopes for immortality it is not unfamiliar. In strikingly incestuous language, Nicholas Oldisworth contemplates the potential of his ‘infant’ brother Giles. Oldisworth confesses ‘I cannot choose’


But strangely melt away, and sweetly loose My selfe in thy Embraces: ô, I must In love doe that, which others doe in Lust. Kisse mee; kisse mee againe: from these same lippes It is, that such delightfull Musick skippes; From these same lips. Take heed, lest with the choise And strong Enchantments of thy powrfull Voice Shortly thou ravish Virgins, and beginne To make Maides wish thee old enough to sinne. Numbers worke much on females: diverse times Those who resist Gold are ore-come by Rymes. Trust mee the issues of thy childish Penne Might well be fatherd on our ablest men.105 Artistic precocity leads to sexual precocity, with Giles bribing maidens in transactions where his verse is more valuable than with gold. After sensuously admiring the child’s white hands, Nicholas imagines Giles ‘fathering’ poetry on the ablest poets among his contemporaries. The verb means, in this instance, to fix or prove paternity; it is an expression of ownership and legitimacy rather than just creative prowess. But Nicholas boasts in the context of sexual domination that ‘our ablest men’ might be forced to assert their paternity of Giles’ illegitimate compositions. These sexual claims attack the prowess of the older generation. Oldisworth’s sexual conquests lead to artistic conquest. Sexualised metaphors exclude not only the unworthy from the community of praise, but also women, who must remain passive recipients of admiration. A telling contrast with these male panegyrics is Anne Bradstreet’s elegy of 1638 on Philip Sidney. Bradstreet begins by proclaiming her right by poetic consanguinity to eulogise the ‘renowned Knight’: ‘Let then, none dis-allow of these my straines, / Which have the selfsame blood yet in my veines’. This commonplace hesitation leads into increasingly convoluted postponements, which focus on her own inadequacies: ‘now into such Lab’rinths am I led / With endlesse turnes, the way I find not out, / For to persist, my muse is more in doubt’. Bradstreet compares herself to male mythic and literary heroes; she has no Ariadne to lead her out of the labyrinth, like Petrarch in his Rime Sparse 221. Despite these masculine identifications, the poem ends with Bradstreet driven by the Muses from Parnassus ‘in a rage’. ‘They took from me, the scribling pen I had’, blaming her for having ‘blemish’d’ their fame.106 Bradstreet develops the pathos of modesty by focussing on her forced exclusion by other females from the rights and privileges of Parnassus.


5.8 Conclusion: Traffic in praise Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that the ‘traffic in women’ across exogamous kinship relations formed the political, social and economic networks on which social organisation is based. Gayle Rubin notes Lévi-Strauss’ indebtedness to Mauss’ analysis of the gift in his postulation of woman as surplus value. Women, as signs of social organisation which they institute through their circulation, constitute a kind of material dialogue between men. But she resists Lévi-Strauss’ proposition that the traffic in women is similar not only to gift exchange, but also to word exchange, uniting societies through a mother tongue. Like coins, women are both the value which is traded and the sign of the valued relationships they constitute.107 In the early modern period, the traffic in women continued to unite communities; women could be traded from kingdom to kingdom as kinds of universal signifiers. Their only equivalent in this was the learned languages, since it was commonly noted that money was useless outside of its kingdom of origin. After the early humanist period, women’s access to the learned languages was increasingly restricted. Having complained that ‘for want of use, I longe agoe itt [Latin] lost’, Martha Moulsworth wryly noted in the margins of her autobiographical poem, ‘Lattin is not the most marketable mariadge mettall.’108 Latin, unlike a valuable metal such as gold, becomes a hindrance to the ‘marketing’ of her in matrimony. The context of acquiring the privileged literary languages might also help to explain the sodomitical imagery in critical elegies. Languages and literary knowledge were passed from father/teacher to boy/student in an educational context ‘figured almost irresistibly in opposition to notions of marriage and dynastic continuation’.109 These patrilineal inheritances were acquired in an exclusively male setting: the early modern school. The adulation of schoolboys for their masters, as witnessed for example by Jonson’s poem for William Camden, has much in common with the critical elegist’s praise for the laureate. The digressions into sexual and monetary imagery which this chapter has catalogued are not proof of generic confusion, but a means for elegists to articulate their debts, independence and aggression, and to negotiate unequal power relations similar to those between master and student. However, the struggle to install the laureate in the literary pantheon, without surrendering his exceptionality to vulgar readers who plagiarise his language but misunderstand his ethics, produces surplus agonistic energies which can corrode the elegiac structure. Again, this links critical elegy to Pindar’s epinikia, which sought to reintegrate the


individual hero’s virtuous excellence into the oikos, aristocracy and polis from which he should derive his power. The pindaric ode provides a model for critical elegy, in which rivalries between the conservation of verse form and the radical challenges of extraneous material are fought at the level of structure. The circular form of the ode might also reflect its occasion. As Leslie Kurke points out, to achieve prestige the individual must leave the household and compete for glory in the arena; his return home reinvests his glory in the oikos, and signals the porousness of the household. The hero engages, in short, in a kind of trade.110 Similarly, the individual poet’s coterie must relinquish his writing to a universal readership, whose acceptance is necessary proof of the poetry’s claims to reformative influence. While metaphors of inheritance restrict the possible readership to a sophoi of understanders, the need to trade that poetry makes the coterie porous and endangers what elegists assert is an exclusive sphere of protected transactions between writers and readers. Kurke also argues that the gift exchanges which commemorated triumphs in the agon both bound communities together, and contributed to social differentiation; they allowed the aristocracy to present itself as an integral part of the polis, and to differentiate itself from the polloi. Pindar presented his poetry as a gift, in order to associate himself with the aristocratic gift culture and to facilitate the aristocracy’s reintegration into public life.111 That is, by setting up the poet’s debt as a responsibility to ‘match the deed in words’, his praise became a gift which obliged the reciprocity of payment and thus of investment in the social relations of the city.112 This also makes sense as a description of critical elegy’s invocation of funeral rites, which reintegrated the dead into the social hierarchy, while differentiating the elegist from other onlookers. Elegists’ attention to property relations and inheritance rights suggests a more pragmatic relationship between their praise and its expected returns. Alongside this ‘traffic in praise’, poets declare their independence from the economic reciprocities of epideictic as well as from financial obligations which would invalidate its gift status. The laureate’s autonomy, like the autonomic political or artistic sodalities which cluster around him, is a convenient fiction. Like the monarchy, the poet’s sovereignty was never absolute; both depend on their subjects’ cooperation. While these sovereigns may possess law-making powers, in poetics as in English jurisprudence laws depend upon custom, upon a tradition of observance. The laureate founds a precarious dynasty, when what is majestic in his own transgressive language becomes a felony in lesser imitators. While their monarch’s immunity to prosecution seemed a cultural given, early Stuart poets also had a host of historical examples


to demonstrate the dangers of sovereign overreaching and the punitive resources of the people; the regicide made such references to law and autonomy, as we have seen, doubly complicated. The limitations of sovereignty reflect on both domesticity and politics. In fact, the only nearly absolute monarchy was the rule of the father over his household.113 In this way, we return through domestic relations to some of the problems of traffic and enclosure encountered in these elegies. Patricia Parker shows that rhetorical tropes were defined in terms of social hierarchies and anxieties about political rebellion. Those definitions demonstrate the common, ideologically motivated link ‘between the need to control the movement of tropes and contemporary exigencies of social control, including, though not limited to, the governance of the household or oikos’.114 The household as a space of fiduciary transactions, of the gifts of property (inheritance) through the controls of propriety (the fidelity of the wife), is as dangerously porous as coterie readerships. As Lorna Hutson has pointed out, the construction of the oikos as the sphere of female activity, where women are responsible for the husbandry of resources, freed men for financial productivity in the outside world.115 One of the problems which the widow posed was her ability, by necessity, to move freely between household and market, private and public spaces.116 The potentially free passage of widowed poetry provokes critical elegists to imagine acts of punitive sexual violence as a way of asserting their possession and control. Images of sodomitic domination and male reproduction guarantee legitimacy and inheritance by excluding the female; but they are also factually sterile, as Aristotle famously characterised money itself. The feminisation of husbandry might also explain the feminisation of the elegists. This links to concerns over bankruptcy of wit in (for example) Herrick’s request to Ben Jonson to teach us Wisely to husband it; Lest we that Tallent spend: And having once brought to an end That precious stock; the store Of such a wit the world sho’d have no more.117 Wit and money lack the ability of biological life to reproduce themselves. The thrift based around the Jonson author-function is, according to Foucault, a means of limiting the ‘dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty not only with one’s resources and riches, but also with one’s discourses and their significations’.118


The protection of authorial ownership in elegiac discourse limits the surplus of the imagination, a function also accorded to prosody. The traffic in glory exposes both laureate and tributary to fraud and usury. These elegies seek to negotiate the increasingly complex economic fields of commercial writing, intellectual property, patronage and publication, with reference to older forms of gift exchange. Their violence reminds us not only of the losses to community integration presented by the development of mercantile capitalism, but also of the violent exclusion of women from the domain of writing. These poems present a last glimpse of the belief in poetic sovereignty before the professionalisation of writing opened another space for women’s activity outside the home. Chapter 6 presents women’s writing from this same period, and seeks to understand how writing about the family used conventions derived from public elegies to challenge the boundaries between private and public life, or between private grief and the ethics of public mourning. This enquiry entails an examination, in part, of the physicalities of grief, restricted and unrestricted by the physical or rational influences of prosody, and of the body as a threshold of private feeling.

6 Grief Without Measure

While line breaks and rhetorical segmentation might make poetry formally analogous to the breakdown and vulnerability of the human frame, it also allows elegiac writers to master interruptions (either semantic or prosodic) and hypothetically to conquer the finitudes of mortal life with the continuity of poetry. O. B. Hardison, referring to the ancient belief in poetry’s constitutive power, notes that From the point of view of the ars metrica, poetry does not represent or ‘imitate’ a pre-existing reality. It is, rather, a medium adapted to the ‘bodying forth’ of a kind of reality that cannot be otherwise be bodied forth, and meter is the element that makes the bodying forth possible.1 In the face of the sudden loss of a loved one, this abstract principle of poetics could become compellingly literal. To conclude our discussion of elegiac regulation and excess, we will now turn to a few final examples of elegies for family members. Section 6.1 sketches out the grounds for thinking about prosody as a physical feature of verse. The characterisation of the best, most masculine and civilised of poetry as formally polished might also derive from a fear of the chaotic and seemingly uncontrolled speech of women, examined in Section 6.2. The rhetorical or ritual determination of their style of mourning was generally ignored by early modern commentators, who dwelt instead, on the ability of excessive grief to effeminise men. This perception of grief as enfeebling also reflects the medical consensus that melancholy was a dangerous illness. Another illness, pregnancy, could be just as dangerous to the bodies and souls of women. Section 6.3 reveals how rituals sanctioned the association between birth 174

Grief Without Measure 175

and death, linked by the omphalos of the Fall. But while all people could die, giving birth was women’s work; and this experience produced distinctive poems, including elegies on their own children. Having failed to create a viable child, some women turned to poetry as a consolatory act of composition. Milton describes the virtuous man as a poem, saying ‘he who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought him selfe to bee a true Poem, that is, a composition, and patterne of the best and honourablest things’.2 By making humans analogous to poems, Milton stresses the exemplarity of an honourable life. But women who wished to write or to reproduce well had an even more urgent reason to ‘pattern’ themselves on the most honourable things. Gestation was understood in the early modern period as an imaginative as well as a physical labour. Lemnius, one of the most influential early modern writers on obstetrics, warns about the ‘hidden imaginations of the woman or mother’: they are ‘of so great force and efficacy, that the things by her in mind earnestly imagined in and at the very instant time of her conception, is derived into the infant and child then begotten’.3 If her creative force later failed, a mother could express her ‘hidden imagination’ in writing. Poetry provided the solace of a new composition or pattern, ‘bodying forth’ a poem to replace the extinct child. But as Pamela Hammons points out, ‘the association of a mother’s inappropriate intellectual activity with the death of her child makes writing a poem about that loss paradoxical’.4 Just as her sinfulness was believed to induce foetal deformities, so the woman’s imagination could alter the ethical and physical composition of her child. Physicians and popular writers therefore recommended that childbirth should be preceded not only by the physical confinement of lyingin, but also by the confinement of the woman’s imagination. As this chapter will show, at the heart of these myths are patriarchal controls on female movement and intellectual life; but they also implicitly recognise the mother’s potentially subversive power to shape their children’s personality.

6.1 Confined unto a measure just Christian and Stoic writers alike encouraged the bereaved to restrain their grief, to overcome the confusions of passion through faith or rationality. In these philosophies, passionate emotions could signify ethical or religious weakness, and do harm to the health of the individual or the peace of the community. As elegist Ralph Knevet writes,


Griefe is a passion, and all passions must Confined be, unto a measure just, Lest they like swelling spring-tides overthrow The bankes of Reason, and the same oreflow.5 Faith and rationality were not the only ‘just measures’ useful in confining the passions: poetic numbers can also bridle feelings which Samuel Daniel puns are ‘often without measure’. Prosody, whose principles were traditionally allied to ethics and mathematics, could guard reason against an inundation of passion. It could force the poet’s galloping imagination to take time, obey the laws of custom and confine itself to predictable or rational language. The absence of regular prosody could also indict the poem’s ethical character: as the discussion of the opposition between Jonson’s laborious art and Donne’s improvisatory wit has shown, many early modern critics associated the techne of prosody with ethical self-discipline. When Julius Caesar Scaliger, for example, praised poetry for its capacity to give delight by presenting an image of moral order suitable for the will to contemplate and emulate, he implies also that moral order is mirrored by the regularity and predictability of prosody.6 For Scaliger, the harmony between moral and metrical order adds to the pleasure of reading which makes poetry so efficacious in teaching moral and civic virtues. It was not merely the exemplary content of epideictic poetry which made it useful to the moral reform of the ‘youth and gentry’, but also its prosody. Like music, prosody draws on the divine order of the cosmos; it echoes the harmonies which maintain the celestial bodies in their appointed spheres and so might by analogy help to maintain the earthly estates in their own divinely ordained places. According to Milton, poets are of power beside the office of a pulpit, to imbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of vertue, and publick civility, to allay the perturbations of the mind, and set the affections in right tune[.] 7 Milton’s emphasis on ‘tuning’ the affections for the sake of public civility accords with a tradition going back to the Protagoras, where Plato urges teachers to accompany their students’ recitation of poetry with music in order to foster ‘a sense of moral decency and restraint’. Drilling ‘rhythms and scales into the children’s souls’ makes them ‘gentler, and their speech and movements become more rhythmical and harmonious. For all of human life requires a high degree of rhythm and harmony.’8 Plato


uses the ethical associations by which he judges musical modes in the Republic to encourage the acquisition of personal virtue through training in rhythm and harmony. Advertising the felicities of quantitative verse, Thomas Campion observes that ‘The world is made by Simmetry and proportion, and is in that respect compared to Musick, and Musick to Poetry.’ Consequently, poetry raises ‘the minde to a more high and lofty conceite’.9 Music elevates the mind towards superior models of conduct and perception, encouraging the composer to look beyond the immediate towards transcendent harmonies and laws. Likewise, the regular structures of rhythm and rhyme allow poets to transcend their particular sentiments through obedience to metrical discipline. Elegists are quick to point out that this is one advantage poetry has over prose: its laws can also help readers to find consolation through the recognition of the universal principles at work in versification and in death. Poetry is perhaps defined by its line endings, which provide an experience of finitude and renewal that grows in intensity through the couplet, stanza and poem as a whole.10 For writers or readers grappling with an intense semantic finality, the death of a loved one and their emotional need for the possibility of renewal, this formal property of the poem might provide a kind of relief. Rhyme reminds us that ‘certaintie’ and ‘clozes’ can be pleasing; in fact, they are more natural according to Daniel than ‘the body of our imagination, being as an unformed Chaos without fashion, without day’. Nature requires order ‘if by the divine power of the spirit be wrought into an Orbe of order and forme’.11 Like God imposing order on chaos, the poet imposes prosody on the imagination. Opposing the ‘body of our imagination’ (content) as a material reality to the ‘divine power of the spirit’ (form) which regulates and shapes it, Daniel offers a typical Neoplatonic correspondence between rhyme and the mathematical principles of the cosmos. He represents the poet as creative demiurge, echoing Philip Sidney’s defense of poetry as capable of creating new worlds. For Sidney, the poet ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature’.12 This creative power offers a particular consolation to women who elegise their own children: having grown one ‘nature’ within them, they use the poem to reconstitute another, and to impose the predictability and self-discipline of composition on an experience of loss and powerlessness. Daniel, defending rhyme according to ‘the law of nature’, was interested in a romance versatility distinct from the judicious couplets advanced by Ben Jonson.13 But the laws of nature do not always result in the best art, and Jonson’s neoclassical poetics produced, according


to Dryden’s faint praise, merely ‘the most correct plays’. Neander in Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie argues that rhyme puts ‘bounds to a wilde over-flowing Fancy’ and aids the poet’s judgement. Jonson need not use rhyme, since ‘’tis onely an aid to a luxuriant Fancy, which his was not’.14 Rhyme forces the poet to take time to contemplate, to observe decorum and to exercise rational discretion in the representation of the products of the imagination. It could restrain Shakespeare’s or Donne’s overflowing wit because it requires an investment of time. This temperance also recalls the discussion in Chapter 2 of the formal efficacy of verse in assuaging grief. Like funerary rituals expanding the biological instant of death into a process, elegies allow readers to re-encounter death, to master it in time and to transform visceral grief into rational artistry. On the other hand, as Robert Burton warns, taking time to dwell on sorrow can be dangerous. The imagination, ‘in keeping the species of objects so long, mistaking, amplifying them by continuall and strong meditation’, can at last produce ‘reall effects’ and physical maladies.15 While poetry organises and recalibrates time which like social hierarchies or family relationships can be disordered by death, it can also sanction a writer’s repeated articulation of grief to the point of melancholy. Through prosody, poetry establishes a correspondence between the temporal body and the eternal principles of reason and natural law which organise the universe. Henry King’s invocation of the pulse as a kind of compulsive prosody was not unusual: numerous rhetoricians liken the ars rhetorica and ars metrica to a physical body. Cicero described the periodic structure both as ‘articulis membrisque’, joints and limbs, and as originating in ‘failure or scantiness of breath’.16 He may be drawing on Aristotle’s comparison of periodic structure to an athlete’s surge of energy at seeing the finish line. Aristotle maintains that while oratory ought not to be metrical, neither should it be continuous and unbroken: It is unpleasant, because it is endless, for all wish to have the end in sight. That explains why runners, just when they have reached the goal, lose their breath and strength, whereas before, when the end is in sight, they show no signs of fatigue.17 The periodic style is pleasant ‘because the hearer at every moment thinks he is securing something for himself and that some conclusion has been reached’, while the unforeseeable future is unpleasant. Aristotle associates ‘bounded’ speech with predictability. In his view, the organisation of speech derives from physical constraints such as the rhythm of human breathing. Physicality is an aesthetic virtue rather than a limitation.


The physical origins of poetic metre are not to be veiled because they contradict the rationality of prosody based on mathematical harmonies. Rather, the organisation and discipline of the body in a poetic performance contribute to poetry’s power to impose rational and ethical limits – on passions expressed by the undisciplined body, shaken by ragged breathing, convulsive speech and floods of tears.

6.2 Effeminate habits of sorrow The logic of metre could tune not only the affections but also the heartstrings themselves, snapped by profound sorrow. At the death of her husband, Mary Penington’s ‘very heart-strings seemed ready to break, and let my heart fall from its wonted place; [ ] I wept not, but stood silent and amazed, frozen with grief.’18 Her grief disorders her physical health, physically moving her heart in her body, and locking her in a maze of sorrow where her friends cannot reach her. Given the common wisdom that the worst sorrows cannot be spoken, the bereaved were encouraged to talk to friends or to write out their sorrows in order to prevent illness or mental distraction. George Puttenham describes it as ‘a peece of joy to be able to lament with ease, and freely to poure forth a mans inward sorrowes and the greefs wherewith his minde is surcharged.’19 Anne Laurence cites the examples of John Shaw, Richard Baxter and John Hervey, the first Earl of Bristol – each of whom sought to remit his grief by writing an account of his wife’s life or poems on her death.20 Elegy provides an opportunity to perform grief in a public context – to pour out the feelings, as described eloquently by Edward Taylor after the death of his wife: My Harp is turnd to mourning: Organ sweet Is turn’de into the Voice of them that weep. Griefe swelling girds the Heart Strings where its purst, Unless it Vent the Vessell sure will burst. My Gracious Lord, grant that my bitter Griefe Breath through this little Vent hole for reliefe.21 The elegiac ‘instrument’ converts the voice’s unregulated noise into music. Its metrical constraints ‘gird’ the swelling heart and encourage it to release its grief gradually and with control through the ‘little’ openings of versification. As Chapter 2 argued, the artistic status of the elegiac utterance could also defuse the heterodox implications of indulging in sorrow.


However, another elegiac commonplace describes rhetorical order as a betrayal of the chaos of ‘true’ grief. In an ‘Elegy Upon the death of Queene Anne’, Richard Corbet asserts his own spontaneity and ‘natural’ grief, whose ‘vitall part’ Consists in Nature, not in Art: And Verses that are Studied, Mourne for themselves, not for the dead.22 Corbet claims that by resorting to the conventions recognisable to readers of academic miscellanies rather than to their own feelings, elegists prove their insincerity. It is interesting that Corbet’s judgement is both an elegiac commonplace and a common criticism of elegy. Samuel Johnson’s famous censure of ‘Lycidas’ as ‘not to be considered as the effusion of real passion’ for ‘passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions’, denies that true feeling could accommodate elaborate mythography and ecclesiastical controversy. Arguing that ‘where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief’, Dr Johnson alludes to a correspondence between artfulness and sincerity which had already been troubling elegists since classical antiquity.23 The unusual and inventive references in ‘Lycidas’ trouble Johnson; but other elegists identify orderly metre as the best proof of insincerity. Nonetheless, elegists rarely seek to convey the derangements of grief through tormented, unpredictable versification or imagery. Francis Quarles, in a beautiful elegy for his ‘deare brother’ John Wheeler, professes not to care for ‘quaint expressions’. The mourners garbe is not to crispe the hayre, And true bread teares consult not with the Glasse; Lick not thy lines, nor scanne their carelesse feete, Unmeasur’d Griefe and Measures seldome meete: Neglected wrin[k]les best beseeme the Winding-sheete.24 Only the concluding line really disturbs the established iambic pentameter, even though Quarles asserts that perfection in prosody is indecorous or almost animalistic, a ‘licking’ of lines into shape. Quarles rejects prosodic composure by comparison to the mourners’ unkempt hair and filthy faces. Mourning poets should likewise express their uninhibited sorrow in ‘unmeasur’d’ lines. In a dramatic embodiment of Quarles’ conceit, Constance in Shakespeare’s King John (III.iv.93–102) resists the male authorities who accuse her of being ‘as fond of grief as of [her]


child’. She proclaims the power of grief to reconstitute her lost son, but then resolves not to ‘keep this form upon my head, / When there is such disorder in my wit’. Unbinding her hair as she unbinds her language, Constance signifies her distraction physically after having proven her sanity through rhetoric. As a social expression of self-control and rationality, rhetoric is opposed to madness, though it can mimic madness as part of its affective repertoire. Unregulated speech implied barbarity and destruction. Daniel uses physical terms to describe the disorder of Welsh and Irish verse, ‘whose scattered limbs we are faine to looke out and joyne together, to discerne the image of what they represent unto us’. He describes rhetorical disorganisation as the scattering of a physical body, like the corpse of Orpheus torn to pieces. Such statements not only help to characterise the writing of other cultures, but reveal presumptions about English literary values. Many elegists insist on the difference between wild laments customary among less civilised people, like the Irish, and their own regulated grief. One says he ‘cannot (as the wilder Irish use) / Or screeke or houle, and so their dead abuse.’25 Such ‘abuse’ of the dead clearly shocked English observers: Alice Thornton claims that her brother ‘hearing the great and dreadfull cry that the Irish made att my deare father’s funerall, was soe frighted that he fell into the most greivous fitts of the splen [sic], which much tormented him for many yeares after, and had like to have taken his life away’.26 More ‘great and dreadful cries’ were heard by William Camden, who observed that the Irish offer no spiritual consolation to the dying although ‘certaine women hired of purpose to lament’ stood in the crossroads ‘and holding their hands all abroad, call unto him, with certaine out-cries fitted for the nonce’. These women attempt to ‘stay his soule’ by praising earthly goods. They ‘keepe a mourning and a wailing for it, with loud howling and clapping of their hands together. Now they follow the corps when it goes to buriall, with such a peale of out-cries, that a man would thinke the quicke as well as the dead past all recoverie.’27 Classical antiquity provided further examples of excessive grief. John Aubrey notes the prevalence of women in both contemporary Irish and classical funerals,28 while in his translation of Lucan, Jasper Mayne critiques funeral customs including ‘the howlings of women, teares of acquaintance, percussion of brests, tearing of hair, cheekes bloudyed, garments rent, and heads sprinkled with dust’, as ‘play’. These customs benefit neither the dead nor the living; ‘It remaines, then, that he acts this distemper for the spectators sakes.’29 Mayne reads ritualised mourning as an insincere dramatic performance. While elegists satirise


hacks who write for a share of the funeral banquet, John Weever condemns the ancient employment of ‘suborned counterfeit hired mourners’. Control of the ritual is yielded to women of the loudest voices, who betimes in the morning did meete at appointed places, and then cried out mainly, beating of their breasts, tearing their haire, their faces, and garments, joining therewith the prayers of the defunct, from the houre of his nativitie, unto the houre of his dissolution; still keeping time with the melancholicke musicke. (This is a custome observed at this day in some parts of Ireland, but above all Nations the Jewes are best skilled in these lamentations )30 This ‘melancholic music’ lacks the harmony of English song. That such performances are typical of women, Irish, and Jews associates demonstrative mourning with the lapses of rationality and self-discipline expected of these groups.31 This association, prevalent throughout the early modern period, has many ancient precedents, particularly in Stoic literature. In a consolatory letter, Seneca urges Marcia to conquer her sorrow by recognising that male and female, civilised and barbaric, educated and uneducated people experience poverty, grief and ambition differently. Seneca defines masculine honour, Stoic valour and civilised self-control in opposition to female mourning, irrationality and wildness. In this context, admissions of grief threaten to feminise the speaker. Nicholas Grimald’s ‘funerall song, upon the deceas of Annes his moother’, a sixteenth-century example, opens with a lament before Grimald asserts, This harty zeale if any wight disproove, As woman’s work, whom feeble minde doth moove: Hee neither knowes the might [of] natures laws. Nor touching elders deeds hath seen old saws.32 He proceeds to describe the responses to death of male figures from classical literature and mythology as precedents for his own mourning. Feminine grief can only be redeemed by corroborating it with the patriarchal tradition of august ‘elders’. Later elegists continue to critique the effeminacy of grief. Henry Vaughan attempts to reconcile it to the masculine business of war, in an elegy for R. Hall, who fell at Pontefract in 1648.


Tis true, fair Manhood hath a female Eye, And tears are beauteous in a Victorie, Nor are wee so high-proofe, but griefe will find Through all our guards a way to wound the mind.33 The Royalists had, it must be said, few chances to weep for victories during the second civil war. Vaughan describes tears as a vulnerability which prettifies the victor but disfigures the loser. The nature of that disfiguration could be very concrete, as when Pierre Charron characterises grief as an effeminising wound. He urges (male) readers to consider the vestments and habits of sorrow, how strange and effeminate they are; which sheweth, that it taketh away whatsoever is manly and generous in us, and puts upon us the countenances and infirmities of women. He adds that ‘some say, that sorow makes men eunuches’. Consequently, the Romans ‘forbad these effeminate lamentations’, allowing men only ‘those first teares, which proceed from the first encounter of a fresh and new griefe, which may fall even from the eyes of Philosophers themselves, [ ] vertue not falling from the hearts’.34 Like the imagination, which might change a person’s gender overnight (66), sorrow castrates men and reduces their capacity for ‘good and honourable enterprises’. Charron warns that mourners’ self-absorption and sentimentality will interrupt civic work, order and readiness for war. Catherine Lutz explains that such critiques ascribe emotions to the unsocialised or ‘natural’ self, which is seen as egotistical and aggressive, in opposition to the socialised and intellectual self. ‘Behaviour that is not under the control of the executive self is behaviour that can be expected to be less than fully socialised and, therefore, to be dangerous’, she writes; therefore, ‘emotion becomes an important metaphor for perceived threats to established authority’.35 I have argued that rhetorical conventions are learned behaviours based on imitation; so too are women’s dramatic performances of grief. By demoting vociferous public displays of grief to wilful expressions of biological or cultural weakness, early modern writers excluded women from the community of the fully socialised. This defuses the threat female and folk rituals posed to the established authority represented by the Christian and heraldic funeral. It also was part of a historical development. Petrarch urged the rulers of Padua to restrain women from public outbursts of grief and to limit female participation in the funerary rites.36


In early modern Florence, city fathers banned women from funeral processions in order to prevent them from provoking vendettas by wild displays of grief, a legislative action which Sharon Strocchia argues coincided with the move from a corporatist to a patrilineal social order.37 For Schiesari, this move is typical of the ‘defeminisation of the public sphere’, while Allison Levy regards it as an attempt by the ‘new humanist elite to territorialise public space’. Legislative ‘defeminisation’ can be traced back at least to Solon, who restricted ritual mourning in order to diminish the power of aristocratic clans. To constrict his subjects’ loyalties to smaller, easily regulated family units, he linked inheritance to the performance of customary burial rites, decreeing that only those ‘within the degree of first cousins and their children’ could mourn publicly.38 The right to commemorate was thus associated with the right to inherit both name and property. Solon’s reforms targeted traditionally female rituals. As North’s translation makes clear, Plutarch associated this law with restrictions on female movement: Solon

appointed women their times to goe abroade into the fieldes, their mourning, their feastes and sacrifices, plucking from them all disorder and wilfull libertie, which they used before. [ ] He dyd forbid them also at the buriall of the dead, to teare and spoyle them selves with blowes, to make lamentations in verses, to weepe at the funeralles of a straunger not being their kinseman, to sacrifice an oxe on the grave of the dead, to burie above three gownes with the corse, to goe to other mens graves, but at the very time of burying the corse[ ].

Solon’s laws reduced women’s ‘liberty’, preventing them from composing verse, and restraining their financial and symbolic participation in the ceremony. The restrictions on women’s circulation outside the home contributed to the development of the domestic economy in archaic Greece, just as it would contribute to the feminisation of the domestic sphere in early modern Britain. While they enforced domestic privacy, Solon’s changes also affected masculine public space. Officers were provided

to controll and reforme the abuses of women, as womanish persones and faynte harted, which suffer them selves to be overcome with such passions and fondnes in their mourning.39


Passion and fondness could overcome not just women, but also ‘womanish persons’. Excessive grief could enervate an entire community. The undisciplined outpouring of grief remained woman’s work; so too was the preparation of the physical body for life or for death. Public funeral rites organised by men replaced the material, suffering and individuated body cared for in the family home with an idealised public body. But women continued to occupy a place of power and honour at the heart of the two most important moments in human life, both of which tended to occur in the domestic space. It is notable that Weever described the women’s prayers for the dead as summarising the individual’s whole life, from his ‘nativity’ to the ‘hour of his dissolution’: for women were present and attending at both. This may be part of the reason for the constraints imposed on female public mourning: as Gail Horst-Warhaft explains, in a patriarchal society where women are consistently undervalued, [mourning] leaves in the hands of women, who, both as child-bearers and midwives already have a certain control over birth, potential authority over the rites of death.40 Women’s domestic duties included assisting in childbirth, nursing the ill and preparing the dead for burial.41 They cleaned, dressed and sometimes embalmed the corpse, watched it and (if it were a female friend) even transported it to its final resting place. But men exercised a different kind of authority over the rites of death: a legal one. Men typically produced the documents which ordered the redistribution of the dead person’s property, for example. Their authorship of these texts affected the representation of social bonds between dying women and their friends; women’s rights to distribute their property as legacies of love and friendship were conditional upon their husbands’ and fathers’ approval.42 When Susanna Perwich was dying, for example, she said ‘that she had nothing to leave them in memorial of her, presently her Father told her, he gave her free liberty, to dispose of whatever she had; at which she was very much pleased, and thanking of him, distributed to every one according to her own mind’.43 Perwich, represented in this account as an exemplary moriens, is able to specify not only her bequests, but also the terms for her funeral, with her father’s consent. The documentary evidence for deathbed customs generally offers legal and spiritual testimony to the conformity of the dead with social expectations, and its authors are more likely to record those details relating to


those priorities. In this sense, reconstructing women’s ritual provisions for the physical and emotional well-being of those in childbirth or of the dying from these documents can be difficult. But a variety of sources reveal that the deathbed attracted gendered distributions of labour. In an elegy for Cassandra Cotton, for example, Richard Lovelace intrudes on women’s exclusive and intimate offices for their female friend. Lovelace combines elegiac mournfulness with cavalier aesthetic admiration as he directs the picturesque ‘Virgins opprest’ to open space in the earth, and ‘With trembling hands helpe to remove this Earth / To its last death, and first victorious birth’.44 Lovelace uses the imperative mood to direct and manage a ceremony from which he is excluded, like the ceremonies of childbed which he invokes. These two ritual settings were connected, I will argue, by more than just the gender of the participants. They also shared theological premises, a ritual apparatus and peculiar dangers for the woman at the centre.

6.3 Midwife death Lovelace’s image of childbirth reflects the declaration in the Order for the Burial of the Dead, amplified in many funeral sermons, that ‘Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery.’45 The eschatological view of birth to the fallen world as a kind of death, and death as a rebirth, is echoed throughout Donne’s First Anniversarie. He declares that ‘Our body’s as the wombe, / And as a midwife death directs it home’, representing the decrepitude of the world as an injured child or nature as a barren woman or uncaring mother (DE 34–5). Repeated images of childbirth and sexuality remind readers of Elizabeth Drury’s early death; in the poem, her refusal of ‘The name of Mother’ becomes a deliberate decision to escape the mortifying effects of sexual desire. Donne asserts conventionally that ‘We kill our selves, to propagate our kinde’; and as a consequence We are borne ruinous: poore mothers crie, That children come not right, nor orderly, Except they headlong come, and fall upon An ominous precipitation. (24–5) The dangers of childbirth and the laments of ‘poore mothers’ are the fruit of the Fall: children must ‘fall’ into the world. In the ‘Anatomy of


the World’, Donne recalls a prelapsarian state when nature acted as a benevolent mother: she was ‘most busie, the first weeke, / Swadling the new-borne earth’ (32). He compares the world’s subsequent death to a child who ‘did in her Cradle take a fall, / And turn’d her braines, and tooke a generall maime’. Nature’s present corruption can be compared to a deformed child: ‘now the Springs and Sommers which we see, / Like sonnes of women after fifty bee’ (27). The marriage of heaven and earth does not consistently produce rain to nourish the earth: The clouds conceive not raine, or doe not powre In the due birth-time, down the balmy showre. Th’Ayre doth not motherly sit on the earth, To hatch her seasons, and give all things birth. Spring-times were common cradles, but are toombes; And false-conceptions fill the generall wombs. (32–3) In place of these deathly births and false conceptions, Donne offers his own poem. His Muse inseminated by Drury’s own virtue, Donne’s ‘chast Ambition is, / Yearely to bring forth such a child as this’. Through the new birth of the poem, future generations of her praise will be engendered, and new poems ‘May great Grand-children of thy praises grow.’ Donne assimilates his act of commemoration to an act of literal creation. Unlike the exclusive sexual politics endorsed by his male elegists, Donne suggests that an insemination by female virtue enables his own composition to redeem the fallen world’s misconceptions. The connection between birth and death as the two fundamental rites of passage does not only reflect a theological metaphor. Childbirth and death were both publicly commemorated occasions that usually occurred in private, domestic spaces. Birth took place in a chamber possessed by women, where their own particular powers were celebrated. Though the intervention of medical guilds in the seventeenth century was stripping many midwives of their traditional status, birth remained a female occasion, dominated by the midwife and the gossips. Ironically, this custom of female support for the birthing woman was sanctioned by patriarchy as a protection for legitimacy: the Church required that at least two or three ‘honest women’ witnessed the birth who could attest to paternity.46 Bevill Grenville’s letters to his wife Grace show that husbands were not only solicitous and careful about their wives’ health, especially in childbirth, but also sometimes in the


choosing of the gossips.47 The gossips’ role was to protect the confined space of birth and to ensure husbands respected its boundaries. As Adrian Wilson argues, ‘the immersion of the mother in a female collectivity’ during her lying-in ‘elegantly inverted the central feature of the patriarchy, namely its basis in individual male property’.48 The gossips transformed the birthing room into a ritual sanctuary by blocking all apertures, including keyholes and drawing the curtains,49 though knots were loosened. Interestingly, the opposite custom took hold at the moment of death, with doors and windows opened, though here also knots were untied to allow the release of the soul.50 Aubrey also attests that the ‘Sin-eater’ was given a loaf of bread and ‘a Mazar-bowl of maple (Gossips bowl) full of beer’ to consume in order to free the soul from ‘walking after they were dead’. Perhaps this bowl was the same used for the posset or caudle prepared for a birthing woman; Aubrey continues that at Hereford ‘a woman kept many years before her death a Mazar-bowl for the Sin-eater’.51 In this feminised space, the gossips provided physical and emotional support: for childbirth, like dying, was a terrifying experience which could provoke awful temptation. Eve’s sin had damned women to bring forth in sorrow (Genesis 3:16), and her and Adam’s transgression condemned humanity to mortality. The joys of coition were accompanied by the miseries of childbirth, a relationship signalled by Psalms 51:5: ‘Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.’ The sinfulness of sexual pleasure in itself might provoke God to issue a providential rebuke, in the form of painful labour or a sick infant. Women were required to endure such trials with a patience and resignation similar to that shown by the dying or the bereaved. The comparison was not without its practical logic. One study gives 24.4 to 29.4 deaths per thousand as the most likely estimate of maternal mortality rates in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries.52 The chance of death in childbirth was increased by the frequency with which early modern aristocratic women in particular were pregnant: they gave birth on average eight to fifteen times during their lifetime.53 Unsurprisingly, the high risk of maternal mortality led many pregnant women to prepare for their lying-in according to the principles of the ars moriendi. These risks also struck fear into relatives, as an elegist writing for Abigaile Newton reveals: Hopes of an Issue, in her womb appear’d, Her Lady Mother doubted still, and fear’d;


Dreadfull the Cause! and the Effect more dire, Death strooke, both roote, and branch, made both expire!54 The death of Newton’s child is a footnote in this elegy, but birth was regularly an occasion for grief even when the mother survived. Infant mortality rates in towns were high, up to 200 per 1000 live births,55 and they increased in the first half of the seventeenth century as contact with extra-European areas led to the population being exposed to new infectious diseases.56 In some parts of seventeenth-century London, fewer than 60 per cent of children born survived to the age of 15.57 While pregnancy led women to compose legacies and spiritual testaments in expectation of their own death, recovery from childbirth was often an occasion to memorialise dead children in diary entries, letters and manuscript elegies. Though a universal consequence of Eve’s sin, birthing pains did not affect all women equally, or so it was believed. Anne Laurence points out that Irish women, savages, and the working class were all thought to give birth with greater ease than their refined English sisters.58 This view, according to the influential early modern obstetrician Jacques Guillemeau, could be traced back to Aristotle.59 London physician Thomas Willis likewise asserted that ‘poor Women, Hirelings, Rusticks, and others us’d to hard Labours, also Viragoes, and Whores’ gave birth without difficulty; but ‘Women that are rich, tender and beautiful, and many living a sedentary Life, as tho they partak’d of the Divine Curse after a more severe manner, bring forth in pain, and presently after their delivery ly in an uneasie and dangerous condition’. Such ‘nice women, and such as live idly’ undergo ‘Distractions of the animals Spirits, and disorderly motions of the Nervous Parts’, incapacitating them physically, but also making them susceptible to hysteria and mental illness.60 It is not surprising that women whose economic status enabled them to lie in for weeks following a birth, secluded from the company of their families, in darkened airless rooms, may have been more prone to ‘distraction’ and melancholy. But ‘disorder’ of the ‘nervous parts’, periods of depression and anxiety, seemed to be common to most women who documented their experiences of childbirth in this period. Women’s fear of birth could produce intense spiritual anxiety, and the lying-in chamber, like the deathbed, was regarded by many as a scene of satanic temptation. The majority of the Meditations of Elizabeth Egerton, the Countess of Bridgewater, dwell on her fears of childbirth. She prays for protection from pain and temptation as well as for the safe delivery of healthy children, asking God that ‘I may endure this height of torture, without grudging at thy holy will.’61 Similarly, on learning


she was pregnant Mary Carey started keeping a spiritual diary as a way of fortifying herself against despair. Apprehending I should die on my fourth Child, and undoubtedly expecting a Combat with Sathan at last; when he would be in the Fulnesse of Power, and Malice, and I at weakest, and desiring to be armed against him, fitted for my Death, quiet, and comfortable as to my spirituall Condition; I thought it necessary, and profitable to looke back, and take a view of the Lord’s Worke upon my Soule, and so to collect my Evidences, that I might answer Sathan, and argue for my Selfe.62 Like the condemned person who uses the liminal period between trial and execution to prepare his testimony of faith on the scaffold, Carey readies herself to ‘answer Sathan’ with written ‘evidences’. Because physical pain opens her to temptation, it can be made a sacrificial gift to God, along with her child should it not survive. Enduring the spiritual trial of childbirth with assurance proves that the mother merits heaven, where she can meet her lost children again. But the lack of assurance, complaints about pregnancy or despair during childbirth could not only threaten her with damnation, but might also affect the infant itself. According to popular medical theory, mothers could be responsible for miscarriages, stillbirths or monstrous births. Egerton shares that responsibility out with her husband, pleading that her child might be ‘borne without any deformity, so that I and it’s Father may not be punish’t for our sinnes, in the deformity of our babe’.63 But pregnant women had to protect themselves physically and emotionally. Sexual intimacy could sour breast milk; frights could bring on harelips, birthmarks and misshapen limbs. Women who ‘have been oftentimes heavy and mourning, or ill at ease’ will suffer complicated deliveries.64 William Lawrence laments that his sister was ‘so frighted and afflicted at her sudden loss’ of a husband, ‘that she soone miscarry’d’;65 similarly, the death of her son Richard with smallpox caused Ann Fanshawe to miscarry.66 Ralph Josselin records how, when in 1646 ‘Mathew Sir. Tho: Honywoods son dyed suddenly’, his mother ‘my Lady fell in travayle upon the fright’.67 Another incentive to endure the trials of pregnancy with equanimity was the belief that miscarriage was God’s punishment for ‘spiritual insufficiency’.68 Puritan Elizabeth Jekyll was among many early modern women who interpreted her multiple miscarriages as God’s chastisement for her sins.69 Another anonymous poet worried that God’s anger for the


family’s unknown transgressions, expressed in the death of his threeyear-old grandson, would also lead the mother to miscarry. Begging God to ‘Let not any further anger fall upon us’, he asks, O spare the Stock from whence this fruit did Spring; With all I beg, that its big, bellyde Mother, May with Much safety, bring forth such another.70 Though death often prompted the bereaved to engage in spiritual introspection, families’ desire for other viable children made the need to recognise and atone for their sins even more urgent. Mary Carey wrote several elegies for her miscarriages and children’s deaths as a way of placating God. In the poems, she strives to absorb the lessons of mortality and to accept her own pain, but her declarations of satisfaction seem forced. ‘That I’m made Instrumentall; to both thes; / God’s praise, babes blesse; it highly doth me please.’ Like the repentance with which she accepts another child’s death, Carey responds with ‘pleasure’ to God’s just punishments. Nonetheless, using a Biblical image suggestive of masochistic and phallocentric eroticism, she asks I only now desire of my sweet God the reason why he tooke in hand his rodd? What he doth spy; what is the thing amisse I faine would learne; whilst I ye rod do kisse:71 Answering these questions could reprieve her children. Even by posing them, the poem testifies to her spiritual openness and repentance. Thus, her elegies not only commemorate her dead children; they also prepare the conditions for future, living ones. Women were not expected to endure the trials of birth or death alone. Friends could not always prevent them from sinking into depression, however. Despite the tender attentions of her husband, Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, became distracted with ‘so deep melancholy’ during pregnancy that ‘she lost the perfect use of her reason, and was in much danger of her life’. ‘Giving full way’ to her apprehensions, she arrived at ‘plain distractedness’, although she was lucky enough to give birth to a healthy child.72 The presence of friends seemed crucial to the recovery of these afflicted women. Elizabeth Walker records that ‘In this Lying-in I fell into Melancholy, which much disturbed me with Vapours, and was very ill. It pleased God to suffer my old Enemy very impetuously to


assault me’ with temptations to despair. Consequently, she fell ill. For three months I had one or two to watch with me every Night, in which as in other long Sicknesses I was never unprovided, but had the continued readiness of Friends to me or mine in their Attendance and Help[ ]. A plain Neighbour, a poor Woman, came to see me, and [ ] told me, she never waked in the Night but she Prayed for me, and according to her plain Expression, said, that I had as many Prayers as if I were a Queen.73 It seems that this poor neighbour ‘provided’ for Walker’s spiritual and emotional needs as well as her physical ones as she recovered from childbirth. The multitude of prayers to which she refers confirms that members of the community supported each other lovingly in times of grief and sickness. Lucy Hutchinson writes about one of her relatives that God ‘alienated her most excellent understanding in a difficult childbirth’; she could not be cured by ‘the best Physitians in England’, ‘yet she was not frantick, but had such a pretty deliration that her ravings were more delightfull than other woemen’s most rationall conversations’.74 Like the fear or pain of childbirth, grief itself was known to produce melancholy. Lady Mary Verney was so distressed at the death of two of her children in 1647 ‘that she spake idly for two nights and sometimes did not know her frends’.75 Sir John Holles wrote to his son that ‘It is very trew your mother was muche afflicted with your sicknes, and thought, and dreampt of nothing else which (with my owne misfortune) was a loade too heavy for a womans weaknes’, though she didn’t die.76 Elizabeth Avery confesses that after losing her three children, ‘I was left in an horror, as if I were in hell, none could comfort me, nothing could satisfie me, no Friends, nothing’.77 Most surprising in this context is Andrew Marvell’s ‘Poem upon the Death of O. C.’, which argues at length that Oliver Cromwell surrendered to his grief for the sickness and death of his daughter Eliza. ‘The Parent-Tree unto the Grief succeeds’, and Cromwell’s ‘vital humour’ seeped away though physicians knew nothing of his secret malady.78 Marvell offers a sentimental explanation for Cromwell’s dying in bed rather than on the field. That explanation accords with the medical understanding of melancholy as a potentially fatal physical and mental illness. If melancholy could be brought on by sorrow or anxiety, then it could be self-propagating, with the fear of melancholy (which might ruin a


pregnancy) enough to induce the illness. Given a medical consensus that ‘the ill sent only of a Candle new put foorth, is enough to destroy a child in the mothers wombe’, it is not surprising that pregnant women were anxious (Guillemeau, sig. ¶2r ). Beset by dangers at every turn, they were advised not to ride in wagons or coaches, to ‘shun all great noyse and sounds, as of Thunder, Artillery, and great Bells’, and in the first four months to ‘abandon Venus for feare of shaking the child’ (18–23). Guillemeau, the expert responsible for these directions, added that concerning the passions of the minde, a woman with child must be pleasant and merrie, shunning all melancholike and troublesome things that may vexe or molest her mind. [She] ought to be preserved from all feare, sadnesse, and disquietnes of mind[ ] Discreet women, and such as desire to have children, will not give eare unto lamentable and fearefull tales or storyes, nor cast their eyes upon pictures or persons which are uglie or deformed, least the imagination imprint on the child the similitude of the said person or picture. (26) Physical care must be supplemented by the avoidance of any emotional distraction, including those provoked by ‘tales or storyes’. Women’s ability to shape the physical appearance of their child through their imagination even required that they look only at attractive images during their pregnancy. In their reception and their production of artistic work, pregnant women must exercise careful self-discipline if they were to be happily delivered. That grief and pain produced difficult or potentially fatal conditions for birthing women is another reason to restrain their mourning. The physical and social confinement of lyingin which limited their exposure to dangerous stimuli is similar to the confinement of language and form in which they should express their sorrow at a funeral. Paradoxically, the urgent need to repress the imagination’s ravings would produce in many women anxious predictions of exactly the kind that Guillemeau described as harmful. Thornton also dreamt of lying in under a white sheet sprinkled with blood – a dream which she ‘kept in my mind till my child died’ (123). The need to repress such imaginings in order to merit future safe deliveries led many women to pen anxious and ambivalent elegies. Moreover, the connection between the spiritual or mental weakness and the physical infirmity of breeding women also affected the representation of grief by male and female elegists. In conversant elegies for their son Robert, Mary and George Carey provide two contrasting responses to death. Mary’s poem is followed in the manuscripts by


George’s reply, which urges his wife to learn ‘that Skill / Of free Submission to God’s holy Will.’79 George’s poem uses pious clichés to convince his wife that human substance is not only owed to God, but also transmutable. While she has just completed the work of gestation, giving form to the baby, she is reminded that the power of creation is not hers but God’s: ‘He like a Potter is; and we like Clay, / Shall not ye Potter mould us his own Way?’ The spirit of their dead infant may return to them in another child; God is merely teaching them loyalty and repentance. Mary tries to absorb these lessons in her own poem, clearly struggling to incorporate the ethic of resignation into an exemplary testament of faith. She answers God’s ‘call’ for her son, ‘my hart breth’, my all; that mercy hath made mine frely’s surendered to be thine: [ ] Tis Jesus Christ; lord I would have; he’s thine, mine all; ’tis him I crave: Give him to me; and I’le reply Enoughe my lord; now lett me dye.80 Mary’s own heart’s breath, not God’s, gives life to the ‘clay’ invoked in George’s elegy; as a poet and a mother, her creativity imitates God’s. Mary’s weakness ‘surrendered’ her child to a greater power, leaving her impoverished and wanting. This deprivation prompts her to beg – even to demand – an exchange from God, that Christ’s love reciprocate her sacrifice. It is only upon receipt of his grace that Mary will be fully able to surrender herself to death, thus making her own demise conditional where her son’s was absolutely decided by God. Throughout the poem, possessive pronouns shift, as ownership transfers from ‘my all’ (Mary’s son Robert) to ‘thine’ (God) and ‘he’s thine, mine all’ (as Christ, God’s son, becomes Mary’s). A similar struggle with possession is signified pronomially in Carey’s poem ‘Upon the Sight of my abortive Birth’. This is no lesse; ye same God hath it donne; submits my hart, thats better than a sonne: In giveing; taking; stroking; striking still; his Glorie and my good; is. his. my will:81 Here, asyndeton imitates the inexorable speed of creation and destruction and the brevity of the foetus’ life. Though ‘void of life and feature’,


this child still belongs to God: it causes its mother to submit to the divine will, which is a greater gift than life itself. That gift is given ‘still’, in perpetuity; but that ‘still’ is also the motionlessness of death. The second, stridently punctuated couplet is ambiguous. It reads both as a question – ‘have I really accepted his will and made it my own?’ and as a firm denial of equivocation – ‘his will, for his own glory and my good, is now mine.’ God’s will has cost her dear. It has taken her child’s life, a pain worse than that of childbirth: ‘his will’s more deare to me; than any Child’. Nonetheless, she surrenders the past and the present for the future happiness of her own heavenly salvation. In her claims to revivify with her ‘heart’s breath’ the potter’s clay which her husband assures her is God’s creative material or her attempt to give ‘feature’ to an embryo and coax it into viability through the figurative and constitutive act of poetry, Carey uses poetry as a performative substitute for her own failed creativity as a mother. In a poem written after another miscarriage, Carey prays to be spiritually ‘quickened’, alluding to her urgent desire to be actually and successfully pregnant. Her miscarriage becomes a spiritual stigma, which she wants to correct by being impregnated with grace. ‘Lett not my hart, (as doth my wombe) miscarrie’, she says, self-deprecatingly comparing her own unformed conscience to the unformed countenance of the miscarried foetus. In my whole Life; lively doe thou make me: for thy praise. And name’s sake, O quicken mee; Lord I begg quickning grace; that grace aford; quicken mee lord according to thy word: It is a lovely bonne I make to thee. after thy loving Kindnesse quicken mee: Thy quickning Spirit unto me convey; and therby Quicken me; in thine own way:82 God alone can make her ‘lively’, just as she alone can bear a ‘lively’ child. The poem’s pathos builds through five repetitions of the word ‘quicken’, which refer to the instant when the child moves in the womb and is felt by its mother to be alive. Mary Carey begs to be quickened, like her namesake, by the Holy Spirit; but she also begs ‘lett it tarrie’, for the slowness of generation, the infant that ‘tarries’ into fitness for birth. That wished-for incarnation suggestively moves the


body to the centre of the quest for holiness, making the physicality of her writing (the labour of the hand, the periods determined by breath) itself a form of devotion. Carey’s poem presents a particular ‘bodying forth’, suing for the spiritual readiness which might enable a physical readiness, and testifying to – or indeed accumulating – grace through poetic composition as a devotional exercise. That is, the poem would be literally constitutive; by demonstrating her spiritual fitness, it could ‘quicken’ the process of conception and replace her lost infant with a new, blessed one. Carey describes her son as a ‘lovely boon’, a favour or gift asked for which she happily trades for her own salvation. Marcel Mauss’s theory of the gift is useful in describing this burden of cheerful giving and reciprocity. Because it bears the marks of its original possessor, the gift (and especially charity) creates an imbalance felt, Mauss says, as a kind of wound. The accipiens remains in a state of ‘quasi-culpability, spiritual inferiority and moral inequality’ until his or her debt is equalised through another gift or payment.83 Christian poets like Ben Jonson described the child as a gift from God which must be repaid with interest (sorrow). In his poem to ‘King Charles and Queen Mary’ on the death of their first son in 1629 (Underwood 63), Jonson describes God as capable of repaying their loss ‘with large interest’. Jonson exhorts the family not to ‘grutch’ or complain. While, as Pigman has argued, Jonson’s position is sternly ‘rigorist’, his advice was not uncommon. Many elegists counsel the bereaved to acknowledge that the wound of grief is produced by sin, and to repay their debts to God with penitence and prayer. The boon of repentance and gratitude also repays God for the gift of resurrection given to the child. After its death, Ann Williams assures herself that her ‘blissfull babe’ has been accepted in heaven. In another dialogue which, like those discussed in Chapter 2, serves as an ‘encomium of the will’, she addresses herself as an objectified second person, reminding herself that if she truly believed in its newfound happiness she would be happy: did thou but know from what a world of ill from what false joys, sad cares, afflictive feares, the hande of mercy hath him taken, you’d fill your mouth with Laughter, not your eyes with teares. Only by such reconciliation with God’s will ‘may my soule (o God) so happie bee / as whome I saw in paine in bliss to see’.84 Their heavenly


reunion is dependent on the mother escaping from despair. She fears ‘to Lament him as a thing that’s lost’, for how can ‘that soule miscarry, that so deere him cost’? Christ’s painful sacrifice to save souls prevents her child’s spiritual miscarriage, even if her own pain cannot prevent her physical miscarriage. Her self-reproach is underlined with a reminiscence of her child’s suffering and her own pain. As Carey did, Williams describes that pain as instrumental and corrective, a contrast to the bliss of heaven. For contrast we can draw on a famous father’s elegies. Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’ interprets the young Ben’s name as the ‘sonne of the right hand’, erasing the mother’s suffering (Rachel named her son Benoni, son of sorrow, and died in childbed). Jonson draws attention to the patronymic original of that name and to the poet’s own writing hand.85 In another elegy, Jonson projects an astonishing physical courage onto Lady Jane Paulet, who died ‘big with child’ in 1631, apparently from an infection after she ‘had an impostume upon her cheek lanced’.86 Paulet is described as treating the ‘torturers, her doctors’ with scorn, leaving the world with ‘contempt’ for her pain. Jonson turns himself to ‘marble’ in the opening of the poem, and then offers his own belly as the ‘large fair table’ on which her epitaph might be inscribed. In this inversion of Kenelm Digby’s inscription of his epitaph on his wife’s forehead, Jonson makes the body of the male poet the focus of the first half of the elegy. The female subject’s soul ‘assured’ her sufferings as if ‘the body had been away’;87 the attention to her treatment with cupping, caustics and lances also displaces the suffering of her pregnant body. In Milton’s ‘Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester’, Paulet’s death is attributed to the accidental dispatch of Atropos for Lucina, the Roman goddess of childbirth. Here, Paulet’s body becomes ‘a living tomb’ for her ‘hapless babe’ (128). Milton’s deflection of her ‘travail sore’ through an extended floral euphemism is not unusual for elegies on women who died in childbirth. However, women’s elegies on their own children often focus on the physical pain of birth, not just as a peculiar experience, but as a trial of faith which will merit the survival of their other infants.

6.4 Gender and the elegiac representation of grief The focus on emotional suffering in elegies for dead children contrasts with elegies written to commemorate the death of an adult, public person. The death of her three-year-old grandchild finds Anne Bradstreet writing ‘With troubled heart and trembling hand’. That trembling is


different from the ‘trembling verse’ she presents to her father’s hearse. Modesty makes her reluctant to intrude on the masculine social space of her father’s obsequies, but she recognises her composition as ‘duty’: By duty bound, and not by custome led To celebrate the praises of the dead, My mournfull mind, sore prest, in trembling verse Presents my Lamentations at his Herse[.]88 She praises her father as a public figure and historic personage, not as a personal loss to the family, celebrating his zeal, loyalty to truth and resistance to apostacy, and his work in founding a New England colony: ‘Nor is’t Relation near my hand shall tye’ with modesty, she promises, because familial pride and recognition of his public virtues legitimate her writing. Similarly, Gertrude Thimelby’s poem ‘Upon a Command to Write On My Father’ defers to the public identity of the father and to family duty. But the contrast between this poem and another on the death of her ‘Only Child’ shows that variations in the consequences of grief and the willingness to accept Christian consolation depend not necessarily on the gender of the author, so much as on the relationship between the elegist and her subject. Thimelby blames herself for her child’s death and attributes the infant’s blissful acceptance in heaven to her husband’s virtues. It was ‘thy mother’s fault / So soone inclos’d thee in a vault’, but ‘fathers good, that in such hast / Has my sweet child in heaven plac’d.’ Yet must confesse my frailty such My joy by griefe’s exceeded much: Though I, in reason, know thy blisse Can not be wish’d more than it is, Yet this selfe love orerules me soe; I’de have thee here, or with thee goe.89 In a poem which swings between two poles of loss and gratitude, her attempts to rule her own excessive grief with ‘reason’ are ‘oreruled’ by ‘self-love’. The balance of the couplets suggests both her theological and emotional vacillations, and her attempt to master and order them. In writing, she struggles to make ‘a vertue of necessitie’ and persuade herself to accept death.


By contrast, her elegy on her father – written on ‘command’ – shows the artful negotiation of filial duty, literary convention and Christian reason. An approach to the hearse provides the standard elegiac opening: ‘Teares I could soone have brought unto this hearse / And thoughts, and sighs, but you command a verse’. She then admits her ‘concern’ or interest in her father’s reputation, which she wishes to serve with a suitably learned and achieved poem, before suggesting in the modesty topos that loss has rendered her ‘annihilated’. She transfers the rights and powers of composition to her father, and to the male members of her family who required this poem from her. Her ‘concern’ in her father’s virtues and her grief makes her ‘unlearn’d’. But If you will [be] obay’d, Ile hold the pen, But you must guide my hand, instruct me then. Where Ben Jonson’s elegy drew attention to his own writing hand, Thimelby gives control of her own hand over to her father. She moves on to a standard inversion, with the father’s death bringing death to her and the world, before promising to dedicate herself to contemplation of his monument, which teaches her the lessons of his civic virtues and the uselessness of grief. This surrender to the influence of her family contrasts with the resistance to outside influence demonstrated in the earlier poem, which recorded a moment of doubt and (eventual) resolution as part of a grieving process which deserved to be commemorated rather than erased. Chapter 2 suggested that the different elegiac representations of dead women and men reflected the private or public social personas of those subjects. It is notable that elegies by adult men for their mothers often justify their ‘feminine’ grief through remembrance of their mother’s suffering to give birth to and educate them. Grimald’s ‘funerall song’ for his mother portrays her only as the agent of his own development. She is remembered as feeding him, teaching him to speak, educating him, conveying him to the Muses and so on, rather than for her own personality or accomplishments. As she lay dying, her last words are his name: ‘Nicholas you naamd, and naamd agayn’; and he regrets that she died before ‘My songs you might have soong, have heard my voyce’.90 The elegy produces in the grieving son a regressive desire for the complete absorption of the mother’s attention characteristic of his infantile experience. Many such elegies focus on the mother’s care of the son in the nursery. Thomas Hackett excuses his grief in an elegy for


his mother Elizabeth as compensation for his mother’s tears for him, both in his painful birth and in his infancy: Can I forgett that Nine Monthes space when I A constant burthen in her wombe did lie Or that [ ] nursery where dayly she Did empty her owne veines to suckle me. He recalls how she ‘with her owne nimble hands / Drest and undrest me in my swathing-bands’, and appeased ‘my froward fitts with kisses’, before noting that his mother took great care to instil in him a sense of grace and to teach him Scripture.91 As Chapter 1 noted, elegists frequently use the occasion of a death to advertise their own virtues; in these tributes to their mothers, the poets reveal the process of their moral and linguistic education, dedicating their adult accomplishments to the pain and sacrifice of women in the nursery. The child owes its parent a debt because of the mother’s pain in generating and birthing it, not only physically, but also through education. Though their children would soon be relinquished to the masculine domain of school, women frequently commemorate their own efforts to teach their children. Dorothy Leigh advises her sons to teach their children and servants to read, recalling her own labours with them in the nursery.92 Like many writers of mothers’ legacies, Leigh reminds her sons that reading the Bible was their ethical origin and maintenance, and that she herself was central to that ethical and spiritual birth. It was possible, drawing on Paul’s letter to the Galatians, whom he calls ‘My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you’ (4:19), to regard spiritual development as a kind of birth. Luther, worried that Paul’s ‘sweet and loving words’ might seem effeminate, points out that they are of course ‘an allegory’. ‘For the Apostles are in the stead of parents; as schoolmasters also are, in their place and calling. For as parents beget the bodily form, so they beget the form of the mind.’93 Similarly, Erasmus describes ‘the child that nature has given’ its parents as ‘nothing but a shapeless lump, but the material is pliable, capable of assuming any form, and you must so mould it that it takes on the best possible character’.94 Such imagery associates the mother’s exclusive power physically to shape her children with a shared ethical power over the child’s temperament and character. Until the child reached school age that power was virtually unchallenged. However, for mothers confronted with high mortality rates of childbearing, it was by no means assured that they would be alive to


participate in that shaping of the child into a virtuous adult. No wonder then that expectant mothers wrote so many volumes of spiritual instruction.95 Such legacies were produced by parents of both sexes and all ages and were regarded as family heirlooms.96 Alice Thornton recorded her excitement when her father’s spiritual diary was rediscovered during the Civil War (187–92). But it was far less common for women to compose them explicitly for publication; Dorothy Leigh explains her motives in the opening paragraphs of her Mother’s Blessing ‘lest you should marvell, my children, why I doe not, according to the usuall custome of Women, exhort you by words and admonitions, rather than by writing’(3–4). The publication of legacies usually resulted from the editorial intervention of a man, especially the husband. Elizabeth Joceline started writing hers as soon as she discovered she was pregnant at age 27 – after, that is, she bought herself a new winding sheet. As Thomas Goad points out in his ‘Approbation’, Joceline’s meditations are predicated on her own death and the successful birth of her child.97 Joceline reportedly told her husband Taurell, I no sooner conceived an hope, that I should bee made a mother by thee, but [ ] shortly after followed the apprehension of danger that might prevent mee from executing that care I so exceedingly desired, I meane in religious training our Childe. And in truth death appearing in this shape, was doubly terrible unto mee. First, in respect of the painfulnesse of that kinde of death, and next of the losse my little one should have in wanting mee. (B2) Her fears are assuaged by the knowledge that she can provide spiritually (if not physically) for her unborn child. Sadly, these fears were prescient, and Elizabeth died of fever nine days after the birth of her daughter. Like the prose legacy, poetic records of faith and fortitude could serve as proof of holy dying. But there may be an additional, practical association between childbirth and writing: pregnancy required long periods of waiting. During the enforced inactivity of lying-in, women could do little more than think, read and write. Brilliana Harley described her way of entertaining herself in the ‘sollatary’ place of her sickbed: ‘I made choys of an entertainement for meself, which might be eassy and of some benifit to meself; in which I made choys to reade the life of Luther, write by Mr. Callven.’ Not only did she read this book, but she also ‘put it into Inglisch’.98 Hester Pulter annotates one of her poems as having been written in 1648,


when I Lay Inn, with my Son John, beeing my 15 Child, I beeing Soe weak, that in Ten dayes and Nights I never moved my Head one Jot from my Pillow[.]99 Despite her great weakness, Pulter composed a poem which allowed her fancy to range (like Donne’s in his sickness) through a cosmology half mythical, half astronomical, far from the confined space of the lying-in chamber. Sad, Sick, and Lame, as in my Bed I lay Least Pain and Passion should bear all the sway My thoughts beeing free I bid them take their flieght Above the Gloomey shades of Death and Night. Her free association provides distraction and prevents her from conceding to pain and fear. However, given that physical health was so susceptible to the effects of emotional trauma, early modern physicians would not have recommended that pregnant woman allow their fancy to roam like Pulter’s. Guillemeau’s recommendation that women ‘not give eare unto lamentable and fearefull tales or storyes, nor cast their eyes upon pictures or persons which are uglie or deformed’ reveals that women were expected to be vigilant against disturbing narratives and images; undoubtedly, they must also restrain their imagination for the protection of the unborn child. A final metaphoric connection between writing and childbirth is suggested by Jonson. Like the mother bears who lick their cubs into shape after their birth, women physically shape their children during pregnancy, and later shape them ethically by teaching them language and reading. These activities could be compared to the inventio and dispositio by which rhetorical speech was formed. Jonson’s Timber mentions a commonplace about Virgil: ‘that he brought forth his verses like a Beare, and after form’d them with licking’.100 The influence of the mother’s imagination on the physiognomy and temperament of her offspring also seemed to correspond to the rhetorical concept of imitatio. As Gabrill Harvey wrote to Edmund Spenser, poets write better when they have admirable models to imitate, just as some Gentlewooman, I coulde name in England, who by all Phisick and Physiognomie too, might as well have brought forth all goodly faire children, as they have now some ylfavored and deformed, had they at the tyme of their Conception, had in sight, the amiable and


gallant beautifull Pictures of Adonis, Cupido, Ganymedes, or the like, which no doubt would have wrought such deepe impression in their fantasies, and imaginations, as their children, and perhappes their Childrens children too, myght have thanked them for.101 However, such ‘gentlewomen’s’ regard for beautiful pictures would undermine the value of resemblance as proof of legitimacy and complicate the transfer of property to rightful heirs. As Burton claims in a section on the pathological potential of the imagination (124), ‘If a woman (saith Lemnius [I.4]) at the time of her conception, thinke of another man present or absent, the child will be like him.’ Such anxieties about what women are looking at, reading or thinking about reveal how early modern obstetric and educational ideas actually undermined patriarchal control of female productivity. The confinement of women in childbirth, which restricted their movement and social interaction, actually opened a female-dominated space in the home; similarly, the restriction on women’s mourning recognised the subversive powers of emotions which were regularly coded as female. Like mourning, publication exposed women’s imaginations and potentially disruptive emotions to the public gaze. It was therefore subject to patriarchal controls, such as male editors framing mothers’ legacies as edifying testaments to virtuous living and holy dying. As Chapter 5 has shown, the analogy between writing and birthing was used paradoxically to exclude women from literary activity. Women were often referred to as the ‘blank page’ on which the patriarchal pen inscribes its own image. On the other hand, they were exclusively responsible for the formation of the child in the womb. In moments of (especially failed) biological creativity, the female poets discussed in this chapter reasserted their creative powers through writing. As Chapter 5 showed, the description of poems as children was an elegiac commonplace: Jonson praises Shakespeare’s writing as ‘his issue’, where ‘the father’s face / lives’. However, women such as Bradstreet who used this conceit did not make writing a kind of single-sex reproduction in order to exclude unworthy imitators. Bradstreet describes her book as ‘My rambling brat’ and the ‘ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain’ (177–78) to excuse male guides from responsibility for its imperfections.102 She also praises Du Bartas from the conspicuously inferior position of both a ‘barren I’ and a woman birthing an infant Muse (153). Making the Muse into a child, Bradstreet expresses modesty. But women poets also represent the Muses as mothers who can protect them against the stigmas and anxieties associated with publication.


These reproductive metaphors for female writing could be much more invidious, of course, especially when they were applied to women in male-authored panegyrics. In an ode ‘On Orinda’s Poems’, Abraham Cowley praises Katherine Philips’ poems as a ‘strange increase’. Women were generally believed to convey material existence to their children rather than spiritual animus; poetry, Cowley reminds us, was associated with the latter. Women as if the Body were their Whole, Did that, and not the Soul Transmit to their Posterity; If in it sometime they conceiv’d, Th’abortive Issue never liv’d. ’Twere shame and pity Orinda, if in thee A Spirit so rich, so noble, and so high Should unmanur’d, or barren lye.103 Unlike most women’s, Philips’ poems exceed expectations by living beyond conception and escaping spontaneous abortion. But Cowley’s acclaim for the output of her noble soul does not prevent him from advocating a little ‘manure’. This fecal matter which he wants to spread on top of her ‘high spirits’ tellingly contains the word ‘man’. Without a man to inseminate her, would Philips ‘lie’ – prostrate, deceitful – barren? Cowley also describes Philips’ easy production of her poems (with more Shakespearian naturalness than Jonsonian toil) as her freedom from ‘th’ancient curse to Woman-kind’: It neither Travel is, nor labour of the brain, So easily they from thee come, And there is so much room In th’unexhausted and unfathom’d Womb, That like the Holland Countess thou mayst bear A child for every day of all the fertil year.104 For women, there seems to be no happy medium between labour and ease, pain and pleasure, or infertility and the superheroics of the Dutch countess. Cowley’s extended conceit of women’s writing as childbirth exposes a grossly masculinist distaste for a womb whose limitlessness suggests its insatiable sexuality. The bottomless womb which cannot be ‘fathom’d’ by the phallic male reveals his insecurities about rival female productivity. Cowley imputes an ‘ease’ to Philips’ labours which


makes her either an exception to the original sin inherited from Eve, or a lower-class, savage or even monstrous producer. Philips’ vulnerability to charges of maternal insufficiency might perhaps be signalled by her elegies for her only son, who was born and died after seven childless years of marriage. In contrast to the poem cataloguing the virtues of her deceased stepdaughter Frances, ‘On the death of my first and dearest childe, Hector Philipps’ (1667) is simple and terse. She proclaims that ‘Tears are my Muse, and sorrow all my Art, / So piercing groans must be thy Elogy.’ Her replacement of insufficient art with an artifice of physical signs is simultaneously an elegiac commonplace, and a turn away from the consolations of intellect towards the irrepressible language of the body. The elegy concludes with a declaration that it is ‘The last of thy unhappy Mothers Verse.’ Echoing Jonson’s description of his son Ben as his ‘best piece of poetrie’, Philips consigns her own writing life to the grave with the son she could not sustain. She resolves to grieve in privacy and to ‘let the unconcerned World alone’. While her other poems display learning, wit and rhetorical range, this elegy’s simplicity conveys great pathos by saying the minimum, conforming to the locus classicus that the greatest sorrows cannot be spoken. However, her desire to retreat into private sensibility should be considered not just as a response to trauma, but also as part of Philips’ overall ethics and aesthetics of retirement.105

6.5 Conclusion The discussions of prosody in this chapter are intended to substantiate the associations suggested in Chapters 1 and 2 between learned conventions of rhetoric, ritual performance and ethical self-discipline. Prosody is akin to the funeral’s ritual frame, which organises and redistributes potentially disruptive grief within a shared, public form. Prosody also allowed the writer publicly to express sorrow or resistance to normative consolations. Through its associations with the transcendent mathematical principles which governed the universe, prosody elevated the mourner’s passionate feelings; it accorded the legitimacy of natural law and the timelessness of universal principles to occasional poetry on transient losses. However, as the poetry of Henry King demonstrated, the desire for mourning to fit inside the rationality or legality of universal laws, for death and grief to become predictable and regular, could not be fully satisfied by writing. The same repetition which prosody enables also contravenes the progress towards death through the inexorable passing of time which is heard in the pulse or the breath.


Formal and rhetorical conventions impose limits and decorum on the imagination; violations of prosody or of elegiac topoi can express the surplus of these exchanges, the griefs which will not submit to social expectation. But is it wise to read the absence of rhetorical conventions particular to educated male literary discourse, or erratic prosody which lacks clarity and balance, as rejections not only of that discourse, but also of the religious and social principles it instantiates? Wouldn’t such readings simply return us to subjective critical judgements of success and failure, given a new substance and gravity as reflections of gendered educational opportunities and subversions of patriarchy? We do not need to reduce the variety of elegiac resources discussed in this book to a simple battery of public/rhetoric/convention/privilege and private/spontaneous/unique/suppression to recognise that power courses through these poems, both the powers associated with social order and continuity, and those claimed by radical challengers to that order. Just as in scaffold speeches or critical elegy, the fetters of convention bind and console participants and offer them an opportunity to free themselves through the charisma they discover in language. That charisma is situational: it is derived not only from the manipulation of conventions, but also from contiguity with profoundly meaningful human events, with death and birth. The medical mythical understanding of the effects of women’s imaginations on the shaping of their children restricted their circulation, limiting them to sedate and pious conversations with other women in a context of confinement; but it also revealed the intensely formative influence of women on their society.

Conclusion

In his commentary on the Politics, Aquinas justifies Aristotle’s turning to political philosophy. Aquinas argues that ‘the whole which constitutes the city is the principle of all other wholes which can be known and constituted by human reason.’1 Because the city is the most perfect totality open to human reason, as well as being the most perfect community, it deserves the final attention after the work of ethics and poetics has been done. The examples he gives of wholes are bounded objects such as houses. But the irreducible bounded whole is the fundamental unit of the city, the body of the individual citizen. The city is only a whole by virtue of its boundaries. Similarly, the exclusions which this book has emphasised are part of the constitution of the whole of poetry, by which it can be known. For Aquinas’ predecessor Augustine, the idea of the whole is intrinsically related to patience in bearing grief – and it is related through language. He says in the Confessions, Had the sense of thy flesh been capable of comprehending the whole, and not for thy punishment been stinted to a part of the whole; thou wouldst have then desired that whatsoever hath existence at this present should pass away, so that the whole might have better pleased thee altogether. For what we speak, by the same sense of the flesh thou hearest, and yet wouldst not thou have the same syllables sound ever, but fly away, that others may come on, and thou mayest hear the whole sentence. [ ] All together surely must needs delight more fully, than parts single, if the pleasure of all could be felt at once.2 That is, to comprehend the beauties of the whole, we must relinquish the partial beauties of earthly life – especially the body’s pleasures. 207


Those partial beauties are equivalent to syllables and semes, units of language whose full semantic potential is only realised when they are added together. To comprehend the whole requires that we give in to the passing of time, surrender our fleeting acquaintance with individual sounds or people. The elegists discussed here have relied on the temporality of poetry as a way of surpassing their own organic life, of embedding memories of the dead in a language preserved by its fluctuations over time. Poems are at once temporary experiences and infinitely repeatable ones. They extend the passing moment (of death) into a more generous period where passionate feelings can be mastered, sharpen the dull extents of grief into an imaginative instant or the life of the bereaved into a prelude to heavenly reunion. These reflections on time should also humble our critical approach to forgotten and obscure elegies. Whatever the Horatian commonplace insists, the nature of language is to ‘pass away’, to unfold in time. These poems’ inadequacies, problems and victories are in part attributable to the clash between the temporality of language, which passes into silence as speakers pause, writers die and coinages become obsolete, and the desire to construct in language a permanent monument. In conclusion, I would like to explore ways in which the idea of the city as an ideal or problematic whole is apparent behind the analysis of particular groups of elegies offered throughout this book. Once again, that connection can be initially established through an approach to the civic purposefulness of mourning. Gillian Rose argues that the processes of mourning and reconciliation are integral to the political life of the city, a life which depends for its vitality on the loss of its citizens. She emphasises the dialectical relation between the whole of the city – a bounded space which encompasses all other forms of relation – and its lack, the departed citizens whose existence is memorialised not only in monumental art and literature but also in the products of their labour. Rose describes Antigone’s insistence on the ‘rights and rites of mourning’ as the enactment of ‘that intense work of the soul, that gradual rearrangement of its boundaries’ in interaction with the law which follows the death of a loved one. The negotiation of power, property and even time itself (the time of physical decay or of delayed reunions) through spatial metaphors has been a recurring feature of the elegies read here. But for Rose, the city’s boundaries do not constitute merely class or the borders of trade; they also constitute ethics. Mourning draws on transcendent but representable justice, which makes the suffering of immediate experience visible and speakable.

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When completed, mourning returns the soul to the city, renewed and reinvigorated for participation, ready to take on the difficulties and injustices of the existing city. 3 The obedience of these elegists to the law, of Christian consolation or of rhetorical convention, has been one of their most salient features. Rose suggests that this surrender of personal will to rhetorical, social or ethical laws in mourning, reconstitutes the city by drawing transcendent but representable justice into the life of the individual. Making the experience of loss representable, elegists also assert their faith in the representability of the transcendent in ordinary life. Even the mutism of the modesty topos must be spoken. Good subjects can also be articulated, and owe their immortality not to stones and paintings but to language. That these speech acts reinvigorate poets to deliver political or ethical critiques of their city confirms the civic usefulness of epideictic. It also acknowledges the violence inherent in the return of the writer to the profane, the profanity of language or of material relations, from the encounter with the transcendent in death. That encounter may be profoundly inspiring, but it is also deeply mundane; the temporal city may represent the transcendent, but it does not include it. In post-Reformation Christian mythology, the transcendent has to exclude itself: the soul must emigrate to heaven, and cannot be thought of as dwelling among the living. To read elegy, then, is to experience through the trials of language the absence of the transcendent, which can be suggested best through language’s negation – through apophatic characterisations, outworn figures of speech or elegists’ declarations of the deaths of poetry, language or the world. But for these writers, absence does not signify annihilation. A rite of passage must be survivable, either for body or spirit; otherwise, the purpose of the rite – producing a transcendent or transfigured self – cannot be fulfilled. In mortuary ritual, the surviving self is the resurrected spirit; in elegy, it is the memory of the dead, either monumentalised in language or living on the tongues of speakers. The rite consecrates participants, introducing them into a new status which is perceived to be fundamental to the life of the community. Even when that status no longer allows for interaction with the uninitiated, as when the Reformation prohibited the Catholic rituals of propitiation, the connection between transcendent selves and those awaiting similar transformations provides the sacred sustenance of religious, literary, social, political and family life. The elegies read here attempt to maintain a lineage between the dead and the living. They reiterate a social


pedigree or a set of virtues to enable the replication of the model life; they speak for the dead in the first person to assure that the dead confirm their own earthly designs; they address the literary values and influence of the dead to facilitate future writers’ imitation; they make the production of future children dependent on deaths gracefully accepted; and they seek reintegration with the dead and escape from terrestrial time through love. These continuities, built in language which professes its inability to do anything, induce reforms which are in effect local consecrations of the real. They bring the sacred back down to earth, not always on the universal scale the writers claim, but with the reminder that individuals can change the city. The elegy perhaps represents the reintegration phase of the mortuary rite of passage. Consecration is conveyed socially in these rituals, for as Maurice Bloch says ‘by entering into a world beyond process, through the passage of reversal, [the initiate] can then be part of an entity beyond process’.4 Being ‘beyond process’ is unsustainable if the subject is to be reintegrated into social life. Rather than seeing this reintegration into society as a peaceful process, Bloch focusses on the dissonance which the ritual subject continues to produce. Having been consecrated by society’s fundamental values, he or she can subject others to ‘rebounding conquest’, a concept whose relevance to elegy was explored in Chapters 4 and 5. Rebounding conquest entails a renunciation of native vitality (associated with the first stage of the rite of passage, separation) and the consumption of external vitality (associated with the last stage, reintegration). In this way, what Freud would see as the cannibalistic character of mourning is ritually enacted and institutionally sanctioned. Bloch argues that the violence produced by rites of passage is ‘itself a result of the attempt to create the transcendental in religion and politics’. Making an important connection to theories of statecraft, Bloch also argues that the violence of rebounding conquest is used to infuse vitality into social groups and to legitimate military expansionism and aggression (44). The execution of Charles I can be read as an instance of rebounding conquest. The lost vitality and military power of Charles’s government led to a strong identification of him with Christ, whose triumph over Roman law was won by self-sacrifice, not by the sword. Charles followed the forms of scaffold penitence and obedience which characterised most good public deaths. But his followers made his memory resist reintegration into mortal society by figuring Charles as a type of Christ. This figuration promises to reconstitute the charismatic authority on which hereditary kingship was founded. Transforming Charles into a

Conclusion 211

quasi-divine ruler, his adherents attempted to reposition monarchy at the heart of theologised politics from which they had been excluded by godly republicanism. Many of the dead laureates we have discussed are also characterised as engaging in the rebounding conquest of their followers. Bloch argues that the subjection of the initiate to the power of the ancestors (who threaten to consume them, as the sexual or violent predations of these laureates also do) reverses the actual pattern of consumption: the young live off the products of the old, consuming their material and social labours; or, as Thomas Browne wrote, ‘we live by the dead, and every thing is or must be so before it becomes our Nourishment’.5 The false economy of exchange between the living and the dead, where the living (for example) pay for chantry masses and indulgences, reverses the flow of goods from the old to the young, the dead to the living. Some critical elegists refuse their debt to the dead, others deny that it exists – but both rhetorical strategies show that obligation to the dead haunts survivors. Other elegiac inheritors offer praise and glory to compensate for their receipts from their benefactors, but even this generosity can rebound to their own benefit in demonstrating their mastery of rhetoric, poetic form or consolatory conventions. At the same time, the use of economic metaphors to regulate emotional excess, either by advocating a temperance of grief whose discipline was acquired from domestic thrift, or by quantifying a human loss in the algebra of atoms and mercantile equations, seeks to hold grief within the relations provided by the city. In contrast, chaotic mourning by women refuses the conventions which organise social speech, violates the decorum which values predictability and closure above all else and draws out the effeminacy of compassion from listeners. Though undoubtedly a socially determined display, it is construed as antisocial, irrational and unpredictable and threatening to destabilize the rational government of the city. It prevents the reestablishment of boundaries and hierarchies which the early modern funeral served. Like these women, the elegist ravished by the laureate’s ghost expresses the same kind of dramatic, divine possession and inspiration which characterises the ‘special speech’ associated with ritual. Ritual speech infuses standardised and conventional form or content with a charismatic validity derived (as in the dying speech) from occasion. It opposes its charisma to the routinisation of such features of oratory as topoi and rhythm. Social and political routinisation, which S. N. Eisenstadt describes as the individual citizen’s ‘gradual withdrawal from the mainsprings of social and cultural creativity’, produces agonistic and envious


feelings from the majority towards the charismatic individual who is not caught in its web. This leads to ‘hatred towards those who represent such creativity either in their own persons or in the offices of which they are incumbents’.6 That is, the evidence of creative autonomy which elegists admired – but which also caused anxiety – is a residue of the charismatic laureate’s transcendence of conventions, metre and forms. Egbert Bakker argues that rhythm in special speech contributes to a ‘dislocation of consciousness’, removing the responsibility for invention from the speaker and returning it to a remote source of immutable truth.7 This remote authority appears regularly in early modern poetry as the Muses, or in the Neoplatonic representation of divine fury; in the elegies we have read, it also includes possession by the dead. Possession by the rhythms of special speech produces both a dislocation in time which mirrors the loss incurred by death, and an access to continuities which transcend mortal experiences of time. Moreover, the rhythm of special speech is neither opposed nor identical to the speaker’s consciousness; it introduces dialectically those tensions between the foreign and the personal which are manifestly agonistic in critical elegy, and those accords which are figured as desire to reconstitute the lost loved one in the more personal examples examined in Chapter 6. Possession in many cultures is also represented as a physical transportation of the self into the transcendent. At the heart of all the elegies described here is a trial of the body. That body has its own rhythms – the ethical rhythms described by Plato, the rhythms of the breath and the pulse. The legibility of the corpse, its availability as a sign, provides an object lesson in mortality to the congregation; so too do funeral sermons and elegies inevitably embrace the possibilities of cognition through the (dead) body. A beheading exposed to public view the body’s most intimate interiors. Where the effigy sought to defend a body against scrutiny of its vulnerabilities and its decay, the execution allowed viewers to penetrate it visually in the moment of its ultimate defeat. For this reason, the analysis of the body’s irrepressible language on the scaffold was particularly useful in indicting criminals and charismatic traitors. The elegiac convention which protests against the visibility of sincere feelings – the profoundest sorrows cannot be spoken, especially in ritual – turns inward, withdrawing into the body’s hidden recesses as the location of truth. The polity dealt with its most dangerous dissemblers by opening up those recesses, examining not only their actions on that master day as incapable of being ‘faked’, but also the effusions of their very blood.

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In their use of sexual metaphors, by contrast, to materialise the relations of influence and literary inheritance incumbent on the death of a laureate, elegists invite the dead into their own hidden recesses. It is that vulnerability to their ancestors through recognition of their own losses, and the porousness of their own physical borders, which allows writers to become fully integrated into the literary values of the city. This metaphoric access is experienced immediately and profoundly by mothers, whose deliverance of another person into the open spaces left by death is the gift which guarantees the city’s immortality. The child cannot be faked; it reveals even in its visage the truth of its mother’s ethical and imaginative interior. And the boundaries between self and other, blurred during pregnancy, become most painfully clear in their children’s deaths. The child’s pitiful absence shows the gulf between the temporal city, with all its injustices and corruptions, and the heavenly city, which (the grieving family hopes) welcomes another soul. Poetry’s writers and readers hope that through representation they can bridge that gulf. This hope makes elegy symbolic of the bereaved person’s return to, and renewal and reinvigoration of, the existing city, through obedience to rhetorical and ethical laws.

Notes (Place of publication is London unless specified otherwise.)

Introduction 1. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1967), p. 30. 2. Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1996), p. 80. 3. Carolyn Miller, ‘Genre as Social Action’, Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151–67. 4. All cited in Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, eds, The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002), p. 2. 5. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 152. 6. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Joseph Ward Swain (George Allen and Unwin, 1915), pp. 37, 41. 7. See for example Patricia Parker, ‘Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule’, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 97–125. 8. Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature’, trans. Timothy Bahti, Modern Genre Theory, ed. David Duff (Longman, 2000), pp. 127–47 (131). 9. Ann E. Imbrie, ‘Defining Nonfiction Genres’ in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986), pp. 45–69 (51–2). 10. Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1973), pp. 8, 26. 11. Cicero, De Oratore II.lvii.232, trans. E. W. Sutton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1959), p. 368. 12. Erik Mueggler, ‘The Poetics of Grief and the Price of Hemp in Southwest China’, Journal of Asian Studies 57:3 (August 1998): 979–1008 (983). 13. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), p. 1. 14. DE, p. 36. 15. Leeds University, Brotherton MS Lt q 44, fol. 48r . 16. John Sargeaunt, Annals of Westminster School (Methuen, 1898), p. 66. 17. R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 531. 18. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (Reaktion, 2001), p. 36. 19. Richard Corbet, Poëtica Stromata ([Holland], 1648), p. 107. 20. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, trans. Josué V. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. J. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979), pp. 141–60 (148). 214

Notes 215 21. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 117–18. 22. Thomas Fuller, The Holy State (Cambridge, 1642), pp. 24–5.

1

The ritual of elegiac rhetoric

1. John E. Clark, Élégie: The Fortunes of a Classical Genre in Sixteenth-Century France (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 8–9. 2. Rosalie L. Colie, ‘ “All in Peeces:” Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary Poems’, Just So Much Honour, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1971), pp. 189–218 (194). Alastair Fowler suggests that the blending of genres was influenced by the use of the silva form in the teaching of writing. ‘The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After’, New Literary History 34.2 (2003): 185–200 (186). 3. Scaliger, Poetices (1581), pp. 425–6; Frederick Morgan Padelford, trans. Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, Yale Studies in English 26 (New York: Henry Holt, 1905); see also DE, p. 127n. 4. Henry Peacham, The Period of Mourning (1613), p. 17. 5. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker, facsim (Menston: Scolar, 1968), p. 48. 6. Bruno Gentili, Poetry and Its Public in Ancient Greece (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), pp. 33–4; see also Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation’ in Lewalski (1986), pp. 147–57. 7. Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 136. 8. R. C. Jebb, The Growth and Influence of Classical Greek Poetry (Macmillan, 1893), p. 120. 9. Lewalski, Renaissance Genres, p. 6. 10. Alberta T. Turner, ‘Milton and the Conventions of the Academic Miscellanies’ YES 5 (1975): 86–93 (91); David Norbrook agrees that ‘The elegies in Jonsonus Virbius – and most of those in Iusta Edovardo King – indicate the growing hegemony of the closed couplet as a dominating metrical form.’ ‘The Politics of Milton’s Early Poetry’, John Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 54. 11. Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie (1968), p. 39. 12. HS, vol. VIII, p. 309. 13. Ibid., p. 108; but compare The Underwood xviii, xix, xxii, xl and so on. On Jonson’s abandonment of Ovidian elegy, see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 75. 14. These include O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1962); Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1950); Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); see also Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1985), pp. 93–4, 130–44. 15. Here, I am following Gérard Genette’s use of ‘mode’ in The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992), pp. 60–72. Lewalski provides more detailed context on the relation between elegy, Protestant funeral sermons and meditations (72–107, 174–95).

216 Notes 16. Jauss, ‘Theory of Genres’, p. 133. 17. George A. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 74, 80. 18. Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), p. 105. 19. Arthur Clifford, ed., Tixall Poetry (Edinburgh, 1813), pp. 49–50. 20. Jeremy Taylor, ENIA TO. A Course of Sermons for the Whole Year (1668), p. 151. 21. Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 115. 22. Lewalski, p. 16. 23. Hardison, The Enduring Monument, p. 27. See also Plato’s Laws 801, Republic X: 607, and Protagoras 325, and Quintilian, Institutio III 7.1 for the moral utility of praise. 24. Plato, Republic X: 607a, trans. Reeve and Grube, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997), p. 1211. 25. Plato, Protagoras 326a, trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, The Complete Works, p. 760. 26. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 1388b1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1926); Thomas Hobbes, trans., The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1986), p. 84. 27. Erasmus, ‘De Pueris Instituendis’, Collected Works, ed. J. K. Sowards, vol. 26 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985), p. 308. 28. Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (first published 1531), cited in Ann Moss, ‘Commonplace-Rhetoric and Thought-Patterns in Early Modern Culture’, The Recovery of Rhetoric, ed. R. H. Roberts and J. M. M. Good (Bristol Classical, 1993), p. 50. 29. Hobbes, Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, p. 54. 30. Scaliger, Poetices VII.i.3; Padelford, p. 82. 31. Underwood 70; Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995), p. 237. 32. Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 267. 33. Richard Dutton, Ben Jonson: Authority, Criticism (Macmillan, 1996), p. 20; J. C. Hayward, ‘New Directions in Studies of the Falkland Circle’, The Seventeenth Century 3:1 (1987), p. 23. 34. Polybius, The Histories, trans. W. R. Patton, vol. 3 (Heinemann, 1923) VI.53.10–54.4. 35. Keith Hopkins, ‘Death in Rome’, Death and Renewal: Sociological Studies in Roman History, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), p. 202. 36. An Elegy on the Death of the Duke of Cambridge (1678). BL Luttrell Collection 13. 37. Kay, Melodious Tears, p. 4. 38. Leicestershire Record Office, Winstanley of Braunstone Papers, ref. DE728/970. 39. Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Origins of Genres’, New Literary History 8.1 (Autumn 1976): 159–70 (162). 40. Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities (Duckworth, 1986), pp. 131–2. 41. Padelford, Select Translations from Scaliger’s Poetics, p. 2. 42. Victoria Kahn, ‘Humanism and the Resistance to Theory’, Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), pp. 373–96; T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, vol. 1 (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1944), p. 80.

Notes 217 43. J. W. Smeed, The Theophrastan ‘Character’: The History of a Literary Genre (Oxford and New York: Clarendon, 1985), pp. 6, 41. 44. John Brinsley, Ludus Literarius: Or, The Grammar Schoole (1612), p. 196; cited in Baldwin, William Shakspere’s, vol. 2, p. 389. 45. William L. Sachse, ed., The Diary of Roger Lowe (New York: Longman, 1938), p. 54. 46. Geoffrey Keynes, ed., The Commonplace Book of Elizabeth Lyttleton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1919). 47. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s, pp. 90, 154–5. 48. Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric, p. 138. 49. Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), sig. 36r . 50. Anthony Walker, The Virtuous Woman Found (1678). 51. On the English formulary letters and their attitude to grief, see G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), pp. 11–27. 52. Brinsley, p. 191, cited in Baldwin, William Shakspere’s, vol. 2, p. 380. 53. Alexander Gil, Parerga (1632); see Stella P. Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1997), pp. 44–7. 54. Raymond Anselment, ‘The Oxford University Poets and Caroline Panegyric’, John Donne Journal 3.2 (1984): 181–201 (182). 55. Norbrook, John Milton, p. 51. See also Ernest C. Mossner, ed., Justa Edovardo King I and II (New York, 1939), pp. vi–vii. 56. Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 13. 57. Cedric Brown notes that ‘at school and university, Milton was bred to competitive performance’. John Milton: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 2. See also John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 18–55. 58. See, among others, A. S. P. Woodhouse, ‘Notes on Milton’s Early Development’, University of Toronto Quarterly 13.1 (October 1943): 66–101; Blair Hoxby, ‘Milton’s Steps in Time’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38.1 (Winter 1998): 149–72; David Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode’, Modern Philology 97.2 (November 1999): 195–219; and Jonathan Goldberg, ‘Milton’s Warning Voice: Considering Preventive Measures’, Voice Terminal Echo (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 124–58. Cedric Brown (1997), p. 186 has argued that Milton’s presentation in his 1645 Poems of his successes within his ‘educational culture’ characterised the poet throughout his life. 59. Alice Horton, ‘An Exploration into the Etymology of Lycidas’, Milton Quarterly 32.3 (1998): 106–7. 60. Norbrook, John Milton, p. 46. 61. Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic, p. 110. 62. Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, fol. 250. 63. Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1992), p. 93. On the relevance of the address to the mother see also Amy Boesky, ‘The Maternal Shape of Mourning: A Reconsideration of Lycidas’, Modern Philology 95.4 (May 1998): 463–83. 64. Lewalski, p. 17. 65. Owen Feltham, ‘On His Beloved Friend the Authour’, Poems, with the Muses Looking-Glasse, and Amyntas by Thomas Randolph (1643), sig. A8v .

218 Notes 66. Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland, ‘Another to Sandys’, A Paraphrase upon the Divine Poems, by George Sandys (1648), sig. A5r . 67. J. V. [John Vaughan?], inscribed in Christchurch copy of Donne’s 1633 Poems. Cited in John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. J. Smith, vol. 1 (Routledge, 1983), p. 105. 68. Ovid, Amores III.ix.3–4. 69. Thomas Jordan, ‘An Elegy on Sir Nath. Brent Knight’, Wit in a Wildernesse of Promiscuous Poesie ([1665?]), sig. †† 4v . 70. Nigel Llewellyn, ‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, for the Living’, Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1450–1660, ed. Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (Reaktion, 1990), p. 220. 71. The Correspondence of Lady Katherine Paston, 1603–1627, ed. Ruth Hughey (Norfolk Record Society, 1941), p. 23. 72. Thomas Jordan, ‘An Elegie on the Death of Mr. John Steward’, Piety, and Poesy Contracted ([166?]), sig. D1r . 73. Richard Corbet, ‘An Elegie on the late Lord William Haward’, Poems, ed. J. A. W. Bennett and H. R. Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), pp. 20–1. 74. Samuel Daniel, A Funeralle Poeme uppon [ ] Earle of Devonshire (1606); cited in Lewalski, p. 35. 75. Thomas Philipot, ‘On the death of Sir Simon Harcourt, slain at the taking in of Carigs-Main Castle in Ireland’, Poems (1646), p. 17. 76. Sachse, Diary of Roger Lowe, p. 29. 77. Bodleian MS Don.c.24, fol. 19v . 78. ‘An epitaph on Thomas Hulbert Cloathyer of Cosham’. MS Don c 24 fol. 28. 79. British Library Add MS 28602, fols 4r , 12r . 80. Thomas Campion, ‘Observations in the Art of English Poesie’, Campion’s Works, ed. Percival Vivian (Oxford: Clarendon, 1909), p. 36. 81. HS, vol. VIII, p. 200. 82. Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), vol. I, p. 3. 83. Em. D., ‘To his Friend the author’, Poems Divine, and Humane by Thomas Beedome (1641), sig. A5v . 84. W. Towers, ‘On the death of the Honourable Lord Vis-count Bayning’, Death Repeal’d, p. 42. 85. W. C., ‘On his deserving Friend, Master Thomas Beedom, and his Poems’, Beedome sig. A5r . 86. An Elegy on the Truly Honourable [ ] Countesse of Devonshire. BL Luttrell Collection p. 38.

2

The rhetoric of grief 1. Bodleian MS Top.Oxon.f.31. 2. ‘Elegie upon the Death of Mistress Boulstred’, DE p. 61. 3. Vittorio Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-Book: “In Praise of Venetia” ’, National Library of Wales Journal IX.2 (Winter 1955): 138. 4. Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State, 1951), p. 39. 5. Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, p. 122.

Notes 219 6. H. A. Bright, Poems from Sir Kenelm Digby’s Papers (Roxburgh Club, 1877), pp. 18–19. 7. Katherine Philips, The Collected Works, 3 vols, vol. 1: The Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas (Cambridge: Stump Cross, 1990), pp. 208–10. 8. W. Baptiste Scones, ed., Four Centuries of English Letters (Kegan Paul, 1883), pp. 105–7. 9. Bevill Grenville, Some Original Letters of Sir Bevill Grenvile (Exeter, 1893), p. 15. 10. Alice Thornton, The Autobiography, Surtees Society 62 (Durham and Edinburgh: Andrews, 1875), pp. 253, 68. 11. Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Traditions from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990), p. 16. 12. Henry Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), p. 52. 13. Justus Lipsius, ‘The Life’, The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, trans. Thomas Lodge (1620), sig. d2r . 14. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (Collins, 1952), p. 20. 15. Meric Casaubon, ‘A Discourse by Way of Preface’, Marcus Aurelius [ ] His Meditations Concerning Himselfe (1634), sig. C3r . 16. Seneca, ‘Of Blessed Life’, xxv, The Workes, trans. Thomas Lodge (1620), p. 630. 17. Edward Sherburne, trans. Senecas Answer, to Lucilus His Quaere (1648), p. 28. 18. Seneca, ‘Of Providence’, The Workes, p. 501. 19. Gilles D. Monsarrat, Light from the Porch (Paris: Didier-Erudition, 1984), p. 72. 20. John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas North (1611), III.viii: 9–11; p. 339. 21. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Anger’, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 170. See also Henry W. Sams, ‘Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, Studies in Philology 41 (1944): 68. 22. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), reprinted with an introduction by Thomas O. Sloane (Urbana and Chicago, IL: U of Illinois P, 1971), p. 17. 23. Seneca, ‘Of Anger’, The Workes, p. 518. 24. Seneca, Epistles 24, The Workes, p. 211. See also Marcus Aurelius III.11. 25. John Healey, trans., Epictetus Manuall (1616), pp. 5–6, 10. 26. Plato, Phaedo 64b–65a, trans. by G. M. A. Grube, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 55. 27. Diogenes Laertius, ‘Epicurus’, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925), x.124–5. Seneca, Epistles 24, The Workes, p. 211. 28. Marcus Aurelius VI.28; in Casaubon, VI.26, p. 86. 29. Seneca, ‘Of Consolation to Marcia’ xix, The Workes, pp. 730–1. 30. Ralph Knevet, ed., Funerall Elegies; Consecrated to the immortall memory, of [ ] the Lady Katherine Paston (1637), sig. B2r . 31. R. W., An Essay on Grief (Oxford, 1695), p. 8. 32. Misery’s Virtues Whet-Stone: Reliquiae Gethinianae (1699), sig. A2r . 33. ‘On the Death of My deare Grandchild Barnard Corbet, 3 years and [?] old.’ Bodleian MS Rawl.poet.210, fol. 43. 34. DE, pp. 57 and 178n.

220 Notes 35. Ioannis Calvini in omnes D. Pauli epistolas (Geneva, 1551), pp. 481–2, trans. G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 137, n. 3. 36. An Elegie Upon the Death of my pretty Infant-Cousin, Mris. Jane Gabry (1672). British Library Luttrell Collection, p. 58. 37. British Library Egerton MS 607, fols 119v−20v and 121v−22v . 38. John Coprario, ‘An Elegy upon the Untimely Death of Prince Henry’, The English Lute-Songs, ed. Gerald Hendrie and Thurston Dart, ser. I.17, p. vii. 39. Francis Quarles, An Elegie upon [ ] John Wheeler (1637), sig. A3v . 40. [John Lesly], An Epithrene (1631), p. 14. 41. Agata Preis-Smith, ‘Heaven the Better Country: Mourning in New England Puritan Elegy’, American Studies (Warsaw) 14 (1995): 19–35 (23). 42. Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1973), Book III, ll. 529–648. 43. John Duncon, The Returns of Spiritual Comfort and Grief in a Devout Soul (1649), pp. 155–75. 44. The idea of life as a loan, a debt paid by death, was a commonplace of both Christian and Stoic consolation. See Richmond Lattimore, Themes in Greek and Latin Epigraphs (Urbana, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1962), pp. 170–1. 45. Clement Barksdale, Nympha Libethris (1651), p. 30. 46. A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings (1683), p. 7. Quoted in Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994), p. 55. 47. Alexander Brodie, The Diary, 1652–1680 (Aberdeen: Spalding Club, 1863), p. 138. 48. Anthony Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker (1690), p. 100. 49. Thornton, Autobiography, p. 151. 50. BL Egerton MS 607 fol. 21r . 51. ‘A Dialogue betwixt the Soule, and the Body’, Bodleian MS Rawl.D.1308, fols 1–2. 52. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985), p. 20. 53. John Oglander, A Royalist’s Notebook: The Commonplace Book of Sir John Oglander, ed. Francis Bamford (Constable, 1936), pp. 82–3. 54. Bodleian MS Rawl.poet.101 fol. 15v . 55. Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985), pp. 23–4. 56. Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, 2nd rev. ed. (Lanham, Boulder, CO, New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 136. 57. DE p. 22. 58. Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-Book’, p. 132. 59. Bright, Poems from Digby’s Papers, p. 29. The phrase ‘the worms thy rivalls’ is also used in ‘An Elegie on the most beauteous and vertuous Lady the Lady Venetia Digby’, by Thomas Randolph, where the worms’ rival is Death itself (p. 26). 60. Bright, Poems from Digby’s Papers, p. 7. 61. Daniel de Coppet, ‘The Life-giving Death’, Mortality and Immortality: the anthropology and archaeology of death, ed. S. C. Humphreys and Helen King (Academic, 1981), p. 175.

Notes 221 62. Mircea Eliade, ‘Mythologies of Death’, Religious Encounters with Death: Insights from the History and Anthropology of Religions, ed. Frank E. Reynolds and Earle H. Waugh (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1977), p. 15. 63. Hester Pulter, ‘Upon the Death of my deare and lovely Daughter J. P. Jane Pulter’, Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700): An Anthology, ed. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 192. 64. G. Norlin, ‘The Conventions of the Pastoral Elegy,’ American Journal of Philology 32 (1911): 294–312 (306). 65. Anne Bradstreet, The Complete Works, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. and Allan P. Robb (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 187. 66. David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997), p. 399; see also Clare Gittings, ‘Expressions of Loss in Early Seventeenth Century England’, The Changing Face of Death, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (Macmillan, 1997), p. 21; or ‘Urban Funerals in Late Medieval and Reformation England’, Death in Towns: Urban Responses to the Dying and the Dead, 100–1600, ed. Steven Bassett (Leicester, London and New York: Leicester UP, 1992), pp. 170–83. 67. Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), p. 107; Lewalski, p. 179. 68. John Aubrey, ‘Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme’, in Three Prose Works, ed. John Buchanan-Brown (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1972), pp. 176–7. 69. Maurice Bloch, ‘Death and the Concept of Person’, On the Meaning of Death: Essays on Mortuary Rituals and Eschatological Beliefs, ed. S. Cederroth et al. (Uppsala and Stockolm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1988), pp. 11–29 (17). 70. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, p. 398. 71. See for example Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (Croom Helm, 1984), p. 22. Purgatory continued to be an option for Catholics, of course. It helped Elizabeth Cary make sense of her daughter’s baleful remarks on her deathbed. The Tragedy of Mariam, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1994), p. 202. 72. Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, pp. 399–403. 73. Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (Robert Hale, 1991), p. 126. 74. Brodie, The Diary, p. 127. 75. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), p. 122. 76. Knevet, Funerall Elegies, sig. B1v . 77. British Library Add MS 34239, fol. 1r . 78. Francis Quarles, Threnodes on the Lady Marsham, [ ] and William Cheyne (1641), sig. A2v . 79. Barksdale, Nympha Libethris, p. 30. 80. Anne Halkett and Ann Fanshawe, The Memoirs, ed. John Loftis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979), p. 136. 81. Germaine Greer, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, eds, Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (Virago, 1988), p. 159. 82. ‘Anniverse. An Elegy’, King, p. 73. 83. Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Authur Goldhammer (Menston: Scolar, 1981), p. 294.

222 Notes 84. A. J. Gurevich, ‘Time as a Problem of Cultural History’, Cultures and Time (Paris: Unesco, 1976), pp. 241–3. 85. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 290. 86. Ibid., p. 229. 87. Simon Jarvis, ‘Prosody as Cognition’, Critical Quarterly 40.4 (Winter 1998): 3–15 (6). 88. Henry King, The Sermons, ed. Mary Hobbs (Rutherford: Scolar, 1992), p. 123. 89. Le Goff, Birth of Purgatory, p. 227.

3

The funerary elegy in its ritual context 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual p. 239. London Metropolitan Archives, MS ACC/1360/341/06. Centre for Kentish Studies, Sackville MS U269/A7/14. Shropshire Public Record Office, Venables MS 484/289. Norfolk Public Record Office, Ketton-Cremeer family MS WKC 7/13, 404x1. The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–1683, ed. Alan MacFarlane (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976), p. 635. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Verney MS DR98/1651/21. Ralph Verney, writing to his uncle Dr Denton, requests communal help in planning his wife’s obsequies and notes the receipt of consolatory letters: ‘bee pleased to send your advise at large to your perplexed, distressed and most afflicted servant. M. Cordell has this day sent the Dr. the relation at large of her deportment in her sicknesse and at her death, in 6 sheets of paper.’ Frances Verney and Margaret Verney, eds, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century (New York: Longmans, 1925), p. 452. British Library Add MS 34239. British Library Add MS 74239. Great Brittans Mourning Garment (1612), n.p. Thomas Meynell’s book, County Record Office, Northallerton; reprinted in E. E. Reynolds, ed., Publications of the Catholic Record Society: Miscellanea LVI (1964), p. 32. Arnold Stein, The House of Death (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), pp. 122, 144. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 39. Letter from Sir John Cheke to Martyr, Westminster, 10, March 1551. George Cornelius Gorham, Gleanings of Few Scattered Ears (Bell and Daldy, 1857), p. 239. Frederick Burgess, English Churchyard Memorials (Lutterworth, 1963), p. 219. Turner, ‘Milton’, p. 90. Agata Preis-Smith claims that elegies were read and passed around at funerals, sent to relatives, nailed to hearse, thrown into grave, customs which ‘account for the scarcity of surviving texts’. PreisSmith, ‘Heaven the Better Country’, p. 19. Cotton Mather, An Elegy on the Reverend Nathaniel Collins (Boston, 1685), p. 2. Quoted in David Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1977), p. 113. H. R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), p. 95.

Notes 223 20. Katharine A. Esdaile, English Church Monuments 1510–1840 (B. T. Batsford, 1946), p. 113. 21. Bodleian MS Rawl.D.912. 22. An Elegie, and Epitaph for Mistris Abigail Sherard, Thomason Broadsides 669.f.12(94). 23. S. C. Humphreys, ‘Death and Time’, Mortality and Immortality: The Anthropology and Archaeology of Death, ed. S. C. Humphreys and Helen King (Academic, 1981), p. 273. 24. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 397. 25. Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (Souvenir, 1948), p. 53. 26. Peter C. Jupp, Introduction, The Changing Face of Death: Historical Accounts of Death and Disposal, ed. Peter C. Jupp and Glennys Howarth (Macmillan, 1997), p. 3. 27. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, p. 89; see also Elizabeth A. Hallam, ‘Turning the Hourglass: Gender Relations at the Deathbed in Early Modern Canterbury’, Mortality 1.1 (1996): 61–82. 28. Joshua Sylvester, Lachrimæ Lachrimarum (1621), sigs A2r –A3r . 29. Thomas Flatman, ‘To the Memory of the Incomparable Orinda’, Poems and Songs (1674), p. 3. 30. Bodleian MS Fairfax 40, fols 496–7. Also printed in Kissing the Rod, ed. Germaine Greer et al., p. 10. 31. Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990), p. 6. 32. Quoted in Christina Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century (Chatto and Windus, 1953), p. 226. 33. Sachse, Diary of Roger Lowe, pp. 64–6, 70–2. 34. Francis W. Steer, A Catalogue of the Earl Marshal’s Papers at Arundel Castle, vol. 115/16 (Harleian Society, 1964), p. 34. 35. A. G. H. Bachrach and R. G. Collmer, eds, Lodewijck Huygens: The English Journal, 1651–1652 (Leiden: Brill, 1982), p. 147. 36. Adam Martindale, The Life, ed. Rev. Richard Parkinson (Cheltham Society, 1845), p. 206. 37. John Batchiler, The Virgins Pattern (1661), p. 40. 38. W. Andrews, Curious Church Customs, p. 142. Cited in Burgess, English Churchyard Memorials, p. 250, n. 48. 39. Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘ “Public” and “Private” in the Funerals of the Later Stuart Gentry: Some Somerset examples’, Mortality 1.2 (1996): 163–76 (173). 40. Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century, p. 230. 41. The Brides Burial, BL Bagford Ballads vol. 2; see also ‘Young Unmarried Women Carrying the Coffin of Their Friend’, William Chappell and J. W. Ebsworth, eds, The Roxburgh Ballads, vol. viii (Hertford, 1869–1899), p. 121. 42. Alexander Brome, ‘An Elegy on a Lady that Dyed before Her Intended Nuptials’, Poems, ed. Roman R. Dubinski, vol. 1 (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1982), p. 269. 43. Thomas Pestell, ‘Elegie on the Noble Eliz: Countesse of Hunt:’, The Poems, ed. Hannah Buchan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1940), p. 7. 44. Aston Cokayne, ‘On the death of my dear Cousin Germane Mrs. Olive Cotton’, Choice Poems of Several Sorts (1669), p. 73.

224 Notes 45. Matthew Stevenson, Occasions Off-spring (1654), pp. 84–5. 46. Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. 82. 47. Houlbrooke, ‘ “Public” and Private” ’, pp. 167–8. 48. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Ferrers MS DR3/733. 49. The Autobiography of William Stout, p. 35; cited in Sachse, Diary of Roger Lowe, p. 130. 50. Houlbrooke, ‘ “Public” and Private” ’, p. 164. 51. Anth[ony] Stafford, ed., Honour and Vertue, Trumphing over the Grave (1640), sig. P4r . 52. Quarles, Threnodes on the Lady Marsham, sig. A6v . 53. ‘An Elegy Upon the L. Bishop of London John King’, King, p. 172. 54. Thomas Jordan, ‘On the Death of the most worthily honour’d Mr. John Sidney, who dyed full of the Small Pox’, Piety and Poesy Contracted ([166?]), sig. D2v . 55. Reports of Heraldic Cases in the Court of Chivalry 1623–1732, ed. G. D. Squibb, vol. 107 (Harleian Society, 1956), pp. 20–1. 56. Reports of Heraldic Cases, pp. 72–80 details the ordering and appointing of wakes and funerals. 57. Munimenta Heraldica 1484 to 1984, ed. G. D. Squibb, ns. vol. 4 (Harleian Society, 1985), p. 106. 58. John Weever, Ancient Funeral Monuments (1767), p. xviii. Even at such funerals, local painters and joiners were still employed to make escutcheons, which were hung on the house of the deceased as well as given to mourners. ‘your Father desired a larger Scutchion to be sett on the front of his house wch is also done.’ The joiner was paid £3 2d for ‘a Coffin lin’d within and without with Bays and for a frame for the great Schutchion’, and a painter ‘for one large Scutchion and 3 dozen and halfe of small scutchions’ earned £9 6s. Norfolk Record Office, Ketton-Cremeer family of Felbrigg Hall papers, ref. WKC 7/13, 404x1 [1669]. 59. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, pp. 34, 168; also Ralph Houlbrooke, ‘Death, Church, and Family in England between the Late Fifteenth and the Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in Death, Ritual, and Bereavement (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 34. 60. Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), pp. 142–6. Centre for Kentish Studies MS Sackville U269/A488. 61. Houlbrooke, ‘ “Public” and ”Private” ’, p. 165. 62. Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, p. 41; Fred A. Crispe, ed., Collections Relating to the Family of Crispe, vols 1 and 2 (1882), p. 49. 63. ‘An Elegy Occasioned by the losse of the most incomparable Lady Stanhope’, King, pp. 132–3. 64. James Howell, Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ (1650), p. 213. 65. Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘The Good Death in Seventeenth-Century England’, Death, Ritual, and Bereavement, ed. Houlbrooke, p. 50. 66. Thomas Jordan, ‘An Elegie on the Death of Mr. John Steward’, sig. D1v . 67. Henry Peacham the younger, Thestylis Atrata (1634), sig. A2v . 68. ‘An Elegy upon My Best Friend L. K. C.’, King, p. 134. 69. See also Horace IV.viii.28, 9; IV.ix; Tibullus I.iv.65, 6; Statius Silvae III.iii.38 and V.i.11–3 and so on.

Notes 225 70. Bodleian MS Eng.misc.e.262, fols 2–2v . 71. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson, eds, Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 246. 72. Sander Bos, Marriane Longe and Jeanine Six, ‘Sidney’s Funeral Portrayed’, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend, ed. Jan Van Dorsten et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1986), p. 46. 73. Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 75. 74. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, vol. 2 (Oxford, 1898), p. 247. 75. Ronald Strickland, ‘Pageantry and Poetry as Discourse: The Production of Subjectivity in Sir Philip Sidney’s Funeral’, ELH 57 (1990): 19. 76. Clifford, Tixall Poetry, pp. 100–1. 77. BL Add MS 28602, fol. 6v . 78. ‘Epitaphicall Verses uppon the Death of Henry Veare’, Leeds Lt.q.44, fols 54–55r . 79. Michael Drayton, ‘An Elegie upon the Death of the Lady Penelope Clifton’, Poems, ed. John Buxton, vol. 1 (Routledge, 1953), p. 140. 80. Linda A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay 1552–1620 (Collins and Brown, 1993), p. 40. 81. William Forde, A Sermon preached at Constantinople Lady Anne Glover (1616), p. 56. 82. John Donne, The Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, vol. 6 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1953), p. 286. 83. Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, trans. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Cohen and West, 1960), pp. 77–8. See also Bloch’s argument with Hertz in ‘Death and the Concept of Person’ in On the Meaning of Death: Essays on Mortuary Rituals and Eschatological Beliefs, ed. S. Cederroth et al. (Uppsala and Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1988), pp. 11–29. 84. See also Paul S. Fritz, ‘From “Public” to “Private”: The Royal Funerals in England, 1500–1830’, Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in Social History of Death, ed. Joachim Whaley (Europa, 1981). 85. Mervyn James, ‘Two Tudor Funerals’, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), p. 176. 86. Nigel Llewellyn, ‘Claims to Status through Visual Codes: Heraldry on PostReformation Funeral Monuments’, Chivalry in the Renaissance, ed. Sydney Anglo (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1990), p. 105. 87. Woodward, Theatre of Death, p. 93. 88. James Shirley, ‘Upon the death of K. James’, Poems & c. (1646), pp. 57–9. 89. Thomas Juxon, The Journal, eds Keith Lindley and David Scott, Camden 5th ser. vol. xiii (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 1999), pp. 134–5. 90. A Perfect Relation of the Memorable Funerall of Robert Earle of Essex (1646), sig. A2r . 91. Daniel Evance, ‘Upon the Adjournings of my Lords Funeral’, Justa Honoraria (1646), p. 26. 92. C. G., True Mannor and Forme of the Proceeding to the Funerall of Robert, Earle of Essex (1646), pp. 15–16; see also A Brief and Compendious Narrative of the Renowned Robert, Earle of Essex (1646), p. 12. 93. Juxon, The Journal, p. 140. 94. Commonwealth Mercury 18–25 November 1658.

226 Notes 95. Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, eds, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 12. 96. Marvell, Poems and Letters, vol. I, pp. 135–7. 97. Letter to Lady Carleton quoted by Roy Strong, Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (Pimlico, 1986), p. 1. 98. John Stow, Annales or a Generall Chronicle of England (1631), p. 815. 99. Turner, Forest of Symbols, p. 30. 100. Elegie on Henry Duke of Gloucester (Oxford, 1660), sig. A2r .

4

Spectacular executions of the 1640s 1. Abraham Cowley, The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 77. 2. Ben Jonson, Loves Triumph through Callipolis (HS, vol. VII, p. 735). 3. Marvell, Poems and Letters, vol. I, p. 95. 4. [John Arnway], The Tablet or Moderation of Charles the First Martyr ([The Hague], 1649), p. 4. 5. Heneage Finch, An Exact and Most Impartial Accompt of [ ] Twenty Nine Regicides (1679), pp. 16–17. 6. R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, 1987), p. 218. 7. Eikon Basilike ([1649]), p. 256. 8. John Milton, Eikonoklastes, reprinted in Complete Prose Works, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, vol. 3 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1962), pp. 342–3. 9. [John Berkenhead], Loyalties Tears Flowing after the Blood of the Royal Sufferer (1649), p. 5. 10. An Elegie upon the Death of Our Dread Soveraign Lord King Charls the Martyr ([16 June 1649]). 11. A True Relation of the Manner of the Execution of Thomas Earle of Strafford (1641), p. 1. 12. The Two Last Speeches of Thomas Wentworth (1641), p. 8. 13. Francis Bacon, ‘Of Revenge’, The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), p. 16. 14. Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (1668), p. 516. 15. Great Straffords Farewell to the World (1641), sig. A2v . 16. Fortune’s Tennis-Ball ([1641]), p. 3. 17. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), pp. 15–31; Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), p. 139. 18. Charles Wheeler Coit, The Royal Martyr (Selwyn and Blount, 1924), p. 366. 19. A True Relation of the Bloudy Execution, Lately Performed in Prague (21 July 1621), sig. B4v . 20. J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), p. 142. See also David Nicholls, ‘The Theatre of Martyrdom in the French Reformation’, Past and Present 121 (1988): 49–73. 21. Spierenburg, Spectacle of Suffering, p. 66. 22. Henry Goodcole, A True Declaration of the Happy Conversion [ ] of Francis Robinson (1618), sig. A4r .

Notes 227 23. Upon the Execution of the Late Viscount Stafford (1680). 24. Francis Bacon, A True and Historical Relation of the Poysoning of Sir Thomas Overbury (1651), p. 101. 25. Bacon, ‘Of Truth’, Essayes, pp. 8–9; cf. Michel Montaigne, ‘Of Giving the Lie’, Essays, trans. John Florio, vol. 2 (Dent, 1965), p. 394. 26. Montaigne, Essays , I, p. 72. On the consequences of this claim to credibility for representations of female deaths, see Frances E. Dolan, ‘ “Gentleman, I Have One Thing More To Say”: Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563–1680.’ Modern Philology 92:2 (1994): 172–4. 27. A True and Impartial Relation of the Death of M. John Gerhard ([1654]), p. 7. 28. Max Weber, ‘The Sociology of Charismatic Authority’, From Max Weber, trans. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Routledge, 1948), p. 245. 29. Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), p. 44. 30. This was well-documented in the eighteenth century: Peter Burke, ‘Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century London’, Popular Culture in SeventeenthCentury England, ed. Barry Reay (Croom Helm, 1985), p. 35. Charles preferred white to traditional purple at his coronation, an omen read by royalists as prophesying his eventual martyrdom; Anthony Wood describes it as a fulfilment of ‘Merlin’s prophecy’ of the White King, ‘which some allude to the White Sattin his maj. wore when he was crowned in Westm. abbey, former kings having on purple robes at their coronation’ (quoted in Loxley, pp. 146–7). Richard Head also parsed Mother Shipton’s prophecy that “The White King then (O grief to see) / By wicked hands shall Murthered be’ as ‘concerning the Execrable Murther of that pious Prince King Charles the First’, The Life and Death of Mother Shipton (1677), p. 43. 31. ‘An Elegye on Mistris Brante, Burned In smithfeild for poysoning her husband’, Bodleian Ashmole MS 38, fol. 193. 32. Turner, Forest of Symbols, p. 100. 33. Peter Lake, ‘Popular form, Puritan content? Two Puritan Appropriations of the Murder Pamphlet from Mid-seventeenth-century London’, Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 325. 34. Nicholas Barnard, Dean of Ardagh, The Penitent Death of John Atherton (Dublin, 1641), p. 3. 35. A True and Impartial Relation of the Death of M. John Gerhard, p. 3. 36. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ’Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric Under the Gallows’, Past and Present 153 (November 1996): 77. 37. Lacey Baldwin Smith, ‘English Treason Trials and Confessions in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 15.4 (October 1954): 471–98. 38. Robert Rowe, Mr Harrison Proved the Murtherer (Randal Taylor, 1692), sig. A2r . 39. Cambridge University Library MS Ee.5.23, fol. 464. 40. Cambridge University Library MS Mm.6.33, fols 181–2. 41. Montaigne, Essays, 1, p. 80. 42. Sir Lewis Stukeley, The Humble Petition (1618), pp. 16–17. For a more detailed analysis of Ralegh’s death and a comparison to that of the second Earl of Essex, see Anna R. Beer, Sir Walter Ralegh and His Readers in the Seventeenth Century (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997) and Stephen J. Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1973). 43. John Shirley, The Life of the Valiant and Learned Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight (1677), p. 238.

228 Notes 44. Walter Ralegh, The Letters, ed. Agnes Latham and Joyce Youings (Exeter: U of Exeter P, 1999), p. 248. 45. An Elegy upon that Renowned Hero and Cavalier, the Lord Capel ([18 July] 1683). BL Luttrell Collection 21. 46. Meric Casaubon, trans., Marcus Aurelius Antoninus the Roman Emperor, His Meditations Concerning Himselfe, 5.29 (1634), p. 73. 47. John Healey, trans., Epictetus Manuall, Ch. 20 (1616), pp. 22–4. 48. Justus Lipsius, Two Bookes of Constancie, trans. John Stradling (1595), p. 14. 49. Bodleian MS Eng.misc.e.262, fol. 25r . 50. David Seeley, The Noble Death (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1990), p. 101. 51. G. W. H. Lampe, ‘Martyrdom and Inspiration’, Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament, ed. William Horbury and Brian McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), p. 118. 52. Jacqueline Collins, ‘Treason and Tyranny: Some Thoughts on the Trial and Execution of Charles I’, Rice University Studies 60.4 (1974): 23–31 (26). 53. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1888), p. 222. 54. The Substance of Mr Pymms Speech to the Lords in Parliament (1641), p. 1. 55. The Replication of Master Glyn (1641), p. 16. 56. The Earle of Strafford his Elegiack Poem (1641), n.p. 57. The True Copies of the Three Last Letters ([1641]), sig. A3v . 58. Quoted in Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 225. 59. William Laud, The Works, ed. William Scott and James Bliss, 7 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1847–60), vol. 3, p. 441. 60. Kevin Sharpe, ‘Private Conscience and Public Duty in the Writings of Charles I’, The Historical Journal 40.3 (September 1997): 643–65; David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c. 1640–1649 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 208. 61. Richard Baxter, The Autobiography, abr. J. J. Lloyd Thomas, ed. N. H. Keeble (Dent, 1974), p. 29. Cited in Patricia Crawford, ‘Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood’, Journal of British Studies 16.2 (1997): 41–61. 62. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), p. 301. 63. J. Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice for the Tryal of K. Charles I (1684), p. 31. 64. Richard Fanshawe, ‘On Earl of Strafford’s Tryall’, Shorter Poems and Translations, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1964), pp. 67–8. 65. ‘An Ellegy written by himselfe a little before his death’, True Copies of Three Last Letters, sig. A4v . 66. Great Straffords Farewell, sig. A4v . 67. The Earl of Straffords Ghost (1644), p. 6. 68. J. B., The Poets Knavery Discovered, in All Their Lying Pamphlets (1641), sig. A2v . 69. Upon the Execution of the Late Viscount Stafford (29 December 1680). 70. Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, p. 336. 71. J. W. Stoye, English Travellers Abroad, 1604–1667 (Jonathan Cape: 1952), p. 65. 72. The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Despatches, ed. W. Knowler, 2 vols (1739), vol. II, p. 39. Quoted in Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1992), p. 235.

Notes 229 73. Richard Cust, ‘Wentworth’s “change of sides” in the 1620s’, The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1641, ed. J. F. Merritt (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), pp. 63–80 (65). 74. Brilliana Harley, Letters, ed. Thomas Taylor Lewis (Camden Society, 1853), p. 131. 75. John Cleveland, ‘Epitaph on the Earl of Strafford’, Poems (1653), pp. 57–8. See also Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, p. 65. 76. Merritt, Political World of Thomas Wentworth, p. 5. 77. Terence Kilburn and Anthony Milton, ‘The Public Context of the Trial and Execution of Strafford’ in Merritt, ed., pp. 230–251 (242). 78. The Discontented Conference betwixt the Two Great Associates ([1641]), sig. A1v . 79. John Cleveland, ‘On the Arch-Bishop of Canterbury’, Poems, p. 60. 80. Canterburies Conscience Convicted (1641), n.p. 81. An Exact Copy of a Letter Sent to William Laud (1641). Generally, access to prisons was easy to obtain; three hundred people a day supposedly visited Elizabeth Caldwell (Lake, Religion, Culture and Society, p. 326). When her husband was imprisoned by Parliament at the Bowling Green, Whitehall, Ann Fanshawe went nightly to stand beneath his window and converse with him. Anne Halkett and Ann Fanshawe, The Memoirs, p. 134. Access to political prisoners was more stringently regulated, however; see Clifford Dobb, ‘London’s Prisons’, Shakespeare Survey 17 (1964): 100. 82. T[homas] B[arlow], A Christian Admonition or Friendly Exhortation (1641), p. 4. 83. William Prynne, A Breviate of the Life, of William Laud Arch-bishop of Canterbury (1644), pp. 15, 21; Laud, History of the Troubles and Tryal, p. 391. 84. Sions Charity towards her Foes in Misery (1641), p. 5. 85. Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1994), pp. 297–9. 86. Canterbury’s Will, with a Serious Conference Betweene His Scrivener and Him (1641), pp. 3–4. ‘On one occasion, when Archy had been permitted to pronounce grace in Laud’s presence at Whitehall, he had said, “Great praise be to God, and little laud to the Devil”. ’ Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573–1645, 2nd ed. (Phoenix, 1964), p. 364. 87. A Charme of Canterburian Spirits (164[4]), p. 8. 88. Canterburies Dreame (1641), sig. A4r . 89. A New Play Called Canterburie His Change of Diot (1641). For ascription to Overton see Margot Heinemann, ‘Popular Drama and Leveller Style’, Rebels and Their Causes, ed. M. Cornforth (Lawrence and Wishart, 1978). 90. The Bishops Potion (1641), pp. 3–4. 91. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981), pp. 358–66. 92. [John Doughty], The Kings Cause Rationally, Briefly and Plainly Debated ([Oxford], 1644), p. 10. 93. E[zekias] W[oodward], The Life and Death of William Lawd (1645), sig. A1r . 94. William Starbucke, A Spiritual Cordial For my Lord of Canterbury (1644). 95. A Brief Relation of the Death and Sufferings of the L. Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1644), p. 13. 96. John Hinde, The Archbishop of Canterburys Speech: or His Funerall Sermon (1644), p. 6.

230 Notes 97. Mercurius Britannicus 10 (13–20 January 1644): 520. 98. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), p. 241. 99. Lampe, Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament, pp. 123–9. 100. The London Post 19 (14 January 1644): sig. T1v . 101. [Peter Heylyn], A Brief Relation of the Death and Sufferings of [ ] the L. Archbishop of Canterbury (Oxford, 1644), p. 23; reprinted as Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, p. 536. 102. William Starbucke, A Briefe Exposition, [ ] upon the Lord of Canterburies Sermon (1645), pp. 14–15. 103. The London Post 19 (14 January 1644): sig. T1r . 104. Cited in George Hibbard, ‘The Early Seventeenth Century and the Tragic View of Life’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 5 (1961): 5–28. See also John Morrill and Philip Baker, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the Regicide and the Sons of Zerviah’, The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, ed. Jason Peacey (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 19. 105. An Elegy, Sacred to the Memory of [ ] King Charles [1649]. On institutional support for the belief that the regicide must be expiated, see John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1991), pp. 20–1, 238–44, 335–6. 106. See Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, pp. 277–86. 107. Frances Verney and Margaret Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century, p. 446. 108. Lady Anne Halkett, The Autobiography, ed. John Gough Nichols, n.s. 13 (Camden Society, 1875), p. 26. 109. Somnium Cantabrigiense (1649), p. 1. 110. John Quarles, Regales Lectum Miseriae (1649), p. 47. 111. An Elegie upon the Death of Our Dread Soveraign Lord King Charls. Thomason 669.f.14[42]. 112. James Graham, Marquis of Montrose, ‘Epitaph upon King Charls Written with the point of his sword’, Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ (Hague, 1650), p. 355. 113. Henry Parker, The Contra-Replicant (31 January 1643), p. 3. 114. William L. Sachse, ‘English Pamphlet Support for Charles I, November 1648–January 1649’, Conflict in Stuart England, ed. William Appleton Aiken and Basil Duke Henning (Cape, 1960), p. 151; Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), p. 81. 115. An Elegie and Epitaph on Charles I, p. 4. 116. T. J., The Kings Last Farewell to the World (1648). 117. [Alexander Brome], A Copie of Verses, Said to be Composed by His Majestie, upon His First Imprisonment in the Isle of Wight (1648). 118. An Elegie upon the Death of Our Dread Soveraign. 119. The Moderate Intelligencer (30 January–6 February 1649): 295. 120. [Henry King], A Deepe Groane, Fetch’d At the Funerall ([1640]), p. 6. 121. An Elegie and Epitaph on That glorious Saint, and Blessed Martyr, King Charles I, p. 10. 122. The Monument of Charles the First, King of England (1649). 123. [King], Deepe Groane, pp. 5–6. 124. [Henry King], An Elegy upon the Most Incomparable Charles I ([1649]), p. 18. 125. A Pindarique Ode on the Murder of King Charles the First, A Century of Broadside Elegies, ed. John W. Draper (Ingpen and Grant, 1928), pp. 85–6.

Notes 231 126. King, An Elegy upon the Most Incomparable, pp. 4–5. 127. John Cleveland, ‘Chronostichon Decollationis Caroli Regis, tricessimo die Januarii’, Poems, p. 82. 128. The Scotch Souldiers Lamentation, p. 18. 129. Isaac Basire, Deo et Ecclesiae Sacrum (Oxford, 1646), p. 126. Quoted in Loxley, p. 169. 130. An Elegie and Epitaph On Charles I, p. 9. 131. A Flattering Elegie upon the Death of King Charles (1649), pp. 6–7. 132. King, An Elegy upon the Most Incomparable, p. 17. 133. King, A Deepe Groane, p. 2. 134. John Roknott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature 1563–1694 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), p. 160. Eikon Alethine attested (2): ‘I never read of any that canonized themselves, but those that knew no body else would do it for them. Thus Caligula indeed made himself a God while alive, because he knew the Senate would hardly decree him divine honors after his death.’ 135. Lampe, Suffering and Martyrdom in the New Testament, p. 119. 136. Sarah Barber argues that while republicans worked through biblical examples, royalists turned their emphasis ‘away from judgement and onto New Testament values such as mercy and fortitude’. The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, p. 110. 137. Thomas Pierce, ‘Caroli’, Monumentum Regale 26; quoted in Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1990), p. 216. 138. Doughty (5) argues, ‘If it be here replied (as some have done), that this Resistance of theirs is meerely against the King his Private, not his Publique, his Personall, not his Royall commands’, then ‘when or where will they be able, I mervaile, to finde the King on this wise divested of a Royall influence into all commands of state, not repugnant to the lawes already being?’ 139. Wilcher, Writing of Royalism, pp. 145, 205. 140. The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I, Basely Butchered (1649), p. 42. 141. James Heath, Torture and English Law (Greenwood, 1982), pp. 160–8. 142. Howard Nenner, ed., ‘The Trial of the Regicides: Retribution and Treason in 1660’, Politics and the Political Imagination in Later Stuart Britain (Rochester, NY and Woodbridge: U of Rochester P, 1997), p. 26. 143. Daniel P. Klein, ‘The Trial of Charles I’, Journal of Legal History 18.1 (April 1997): 1–25 (13). 144. John Cleveland, An Elegie on the Meekest of Men, [ ] Charles the I (1649), p. 12. 145. On the inseparability of these two bodies, see D. Alan Orr, ‘The Juristic Foundation of Regicide’, Regicides and the Execution of Charles I, pp. 117–37. 146. Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), p. 37. 147. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995), pp. 31–5. 148. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 149. Dr Denton writes to Ralph Verney on 25 January, ‘It is thought there will be a risinge or combustion in every country of the kingdome at once, soe

232 Notes generally are people’s hearts against these proceedings.’ Verney, Memoirs, p. 444. See also C. V. Wedgwood, ‘European Reaction to the Death of Charles I’, From the Renaissance to the Counter-Reformation. 150. Donne, The Sermons, p. 359. 151. J. H., ‘An Epitaph upon King Charls’, Reliquiæ Sacræ Carolinæ, p. 352.

5

Contesting wills in critical elegy 1. ‘A letter to Ben. Johnson. 1629’, Bodleian MS Don.c.24, fol. 8. Printed in Wit Restor’d (1658), pp. 79–81. 2. Norman S. Grabo, Edward Taylor (New York: Twayne, 1961), p. 116. 3. J. C., An Elegie, upon Mrs. Katharine Philips [1664]. British Library Luttrell Collection 153. 4. Cited in The Jonson Allusion Book, ed. Jesse Franklin Bradley and Joseph Quincy Adams (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1922), p. 188. 5. James Howell, Epistolæ Ho-Elianæ, vol. 2 (1650), pp. 2–3. 6. Avon Jack Murphy, ‘The Critical Elegy of Earlier Seventeenth-Century England’, Genre 5.1 (March 1972): 75–105. 7. Wayne H. Phelps, ‘The Date of Ben Jonson’s Death’, Notes and Queries 27 (April 1980): 146–9 (147). 8. Robert Stapylton, ‘On Mr Cartwright, and his Poems’, Cartwright, sig. b2r . 9. Longinus 13.4–5; cited in G. W. Pigman, ‘Versions of Imitation in the Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 33.1 (1980): 1–32 (16). 10. William Fitzgerald, Agonistic Poetry (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1987), p. 142. 11. Alex Hardie, Statius and the Silvae (Liverpool: Arca, 1983), p. 77. 12. On the gendering of such competitions among a poet’s successors, see Celeste M. Schenck, ‘Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 5.1 (Spring 1986): 13–27. 13. Franklin B. Williams, Index of Dedications and Commendatory Verses in English Books before 1641 (Bibliographical Society, 1962), p. xi. 14. Margreta de Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). 15. ‘Donne’s “Strange Fire” and the “Elegies on the Authors Death” ’, John Donne Journal 7.2 (1988): 197. 16. Ed. May, ‘On the deceased Authour, Master Thomas Beedom, and his Poems’, Poems Divine, and Humane by Thomas Beedome (1641), sig. A2v –A3r . 17. Robert Randolph, ‘To the Memory of his Dear Brother’, Poems, with the Muses Looking-Glasse, and Amyntas by Thomas Randolph, 3rd ed. (1643), sig. A3v . 18. For a psychoanalytic approach to this Oedipal violence, see A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘ “Poets be silent”: Self-Silencing Conventions and Rhetorical Context in the 1633 Critical Elegies on Donne’, John Donne Journal 12.1–2 (1993): 108. 19. Maurice Bloch, Prey Into Hunter, p. 19. 20. R. W., ‘On the Poems of his worthy friend, Master Thomas Beedom, the lately deceased Author’, Beedome, sig. A8v . 21. Sir Edward Walker, quoted in Jonson Allusion Book, p. 99. 22. William Davenant, ‘To Doctor Duppa An Acknowledgement for his collection in Honour of Ben. Johnson’s memory’, The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), p. 78.

Notes 233 23. ‘Upon Elegies to Ben. Johnsons memory’, Bodleian MS Rawl.poet.147, fols 141–144. 24. Francis Lovelace, ‘To my best Brother on his Poems, called LUCASTA’, Lucasta: Epodes, Odes, Sonnets, Songs by Richard Lovelace (1649), sig. a3r . 25. Humphrey Moseley, ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, Poems by John Milton (1645), sig. a3r . 26. T. Benlowes, ‘Those Ladies, Sir, we Virtuosa’s call ’, Theophila or Loves Sacrifice by Edward Benlowes (1652), sig. C1v . 27. T[homas] P[ecke], An Elegie upon the Never Satisfactorily Deplored Death of John Cleeveland (1658). 28. Suckling, who had flown to France on the revelation of his part in the Army Plot, probably committed suicide in 1641. The Works of John Suckling: The Non-dramatic Works, ed. Thomas Clayton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. lvii–lxi. 29. [William Norris], An Elegie upon the Death of the Renowned, Sir John Sutlin (1642), p. 1. 30. To the House of Commons, assembled in Parliament. The Humble Remonstrance of William Davenant (1641). 31. Graham Roebuck, ‘Elegies for Donne: Great Tew and the Poets’, John Donne Journal 9.2 (1990): 125–35 (125). 32. Gregory Nagy, ‘Early Greek views of poets and poetry’, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 11; see also Stella Revard, ‘Building the Foundation of a Good Commonwealth: Marvell, Pindar, and the Power of Music’, The Muses Common-Weale, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1988), pp. 178–9. 33. De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim, pp. 34–7. 34. Ja. Cl., ‘Upon the Honoured Poem of his Unknown Friend, Sir John Beaumont, Baronet’, John Beaumont, p. 16. 35. The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1951), p. 21. 36. On the political nature of the Cartwright volume see Carol Barash, ‘Women’s Community and the Exiled King’ in English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996), p. 63; Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989), p. 21; Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, ‘High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions’, The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 250; Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric, pp. 247, 259; and Loxley, p. 233. 37. Thomas May, ‘To my honoured Friend M. Ja. Shirley’, Shirley, sig. A5r . 38. S. H., Funerall Elegies, or the Sad Muses in Sables (Tho. Wilson, [1655]), sig. A4r . 39. HS, vol. VIII, p. 34. 40. Thomas Stanley, ‘On M. Halls Essayes’, Poems (1651), reprinted The Poems and Translations, ed. Galbraith Miller Crump (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), p. 65. 41. Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, p. 308. 42. Randolph, Poems, sig. B1v . 43. Lewalski, p. 144. A similar argument has been made about the allegory of St. Peter’s speech in ‘Lycidas’: James S. Baumlin, ‘William Perkins’s Art of Prophesying and Milton’s “Two-Handed Engine”: The Protestant Allegory of “Lycidas” ’, Milton Quarterly 33.3 (1999): 66–71. 44. Arthur Wilson, ‘Upon Mr J. Donne, and his Poems’, Donne, p. 397.

234 Notes 45. Arthur Wilson, The History of Great Britain, being the Life and Reign of King James the First (1653), sig. A2v . 46. Ian Jack, ‘Pope and “The Weighty Bullion of Dr. Donne’s Satires” ’, PMLA 66 (1951): 1014. 47. HS, vol. VIII, p. 34. 48. Ibid., p. 62. 49. Riggs, Ben Jonson, p. 77. 50. Sidney Godolphin, Poems by John Donne (1635), sigs Cc6v –Cc7r . 51. J. Chudleigh, ‘On Dr John Donne, late Deane of S. Paules, London’, Poems by John Donne (1635), sig. Cc7v . 52. Sig. Cc8r . Jasper Mayne repeated this trope in his elegy to Cartwright, ‘the deceased Author of these POEMS’ (Cartwright sig. b5v : ‘How have I seen Thee cast thy Net, and then / With holy Cosenage catch’d the Souls of Men?’ 53. Cf Job 18:8–10 and 19:6; Psalms 10:9, 31:4, 69:22 and 35:7–8. 54. Izaac Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr Richard Hooker, and Mr George Herbert (1670), p. 26. 55. Allan MacColl, ‘The Circulation of Donne’s Poems in Manuscript’, John Donne: Essays in Celebration, ed. A. J. Smith (Methuen, 1972), p. 44. 56. Ben Jonson, Conversations with Drummond ll. 135–7 (HS, vol. I, p. 136). 57. John Donne, Letters to Several Persons of Honour (1651), p. 228. 58. Timber ll. 647–50 (HS, vol. VIII, p. 583). 59. Walton, Life of Donne, p. 37. 60. Donne, Poems (1635), sig. Cc7v . 61. John Milton, The Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London and New York: Longman, 1968), p. 123. 62. ‘To the memory of my beloved, The Author Mr. William Shakespeare’, ll. 59–64 (HS, vol. VIII, p. 392). 63. HS, vol. VIII, p. 3303; John Freehafer, ‘Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry’, Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970): 63– 75 (69). 64. Donne, p. 394. 65. ‘To Ben. Johnson. Upon occasion of his Ode of defiance annext to his Play of the new Inne’, Carew, p. 65. 66. Parker, ‘Motivated Rhetorics’, pp. 99–101. 67. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, p. 4. 68. Plato, Republic III 399e–400a, trans. Reeve and Grube, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1037. 69. Conversations with Drummond, HS, vol. I, p. 133. 70. John Suckling, ‘On his other Poems’, Davenant, p. 7. 71. Jeremy Maule, ‘ “To the memory of the Late excellent Poet John Fletcher”: A New Poem by John Ford’, EMS 8 (2000): 148. 72. Jonson, Discoveries ll. 1034–8 (HS, vol. VIII, p. 595). 73. Pindar’s Nem 4, 83, cited in Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), p. 427. 74. Wayne A. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995), pp. 16, 28–9, 36–40. 75. James VI and I, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), p. 55.

Notes 235 76. John Dryden, The Works, ed. H. T. Swedenburg Jr., vol. 17 (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1970), p. 57. 77. Randolph, Poems, sig. A6r . 78. Simon Wortham, ‘Sovereign Counterfeits: The Trial of the Pyx’, Renaissance Quarterly 49 (1996): 334–59. 79. John Donne, Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952), p. 74. 80. Timber ll. 1382–5 (HS, vol. VIII, p. 606). 81. W. W., ‘An Elegy in Memory of Mr John Cleaveland’, John Cleveland Revived (1662), sig. A6. 82. Edward Besly, Coins and Medals of the English Civil War (National Museum of Wales, 1990), p. 15. Charles Kindleberger, A Financial History of Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), p. 27. 83. Barton Holyday, ‘To Ben Jonson. Epode’, HS, vol. XI, p. 353. 84. Davenant, The Shorter Poems, p. 78. 85. Frederick C. Dietz, English Public Finances 1585–1641 (Frank Cass, 1932), p. 236. 86. R. Cust, ‘Charles I, the Privy Council and the Forced Loan’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 208–35. 87. Besly, Coins and Medals, p. 17. 88. Leon[ard] Digges, ‘Upon Master William Shakespeare, the Deceased Authour, and His Poems’, Poems by Wil. Shakespeare (1640), sig. *4r . 89. J. D. Gould, ‘The Royal Mint in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Economic History Review 5.1 (1952): 240–8. 90. Besly, Coins and Medals, p. 4. 91. Thomas Carew, Poems (1640), p. 84. 92. Richard Corbet, ‘On the Birth of the Young Prince Charles’, Poëtica Stromata, p. 69. 93. Musarum Oxoniensium. Charisteria pro Serenissima Regina Maria (Oxford, 1638), sig. b4v . 94. ‘Upon Dr Sandcrofts sonne Mr of Emanuel Coll’. The poem is attributed to Jo. Jeffries in Bodleian MS Tanner 465, fol. 73v . 95. Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, pp. 172–3. 96. ‘On Abraham Cowley the yong pöet laureat’. MS Don.c.24, fol. 62v . 97. Jeffrey Masten, ‘My Two Dads: Collaboration and Reproduction in Beaumont and Fletcher’, Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994), p. 295. 98. Kate Lilley, ‘ “True state within”: Women’s Elegy 1640–1740’, Women, Writing, History 1640–1740, ed. Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman (BT Batsford, 1992), pp. 72–3. 99. On the evocation of rape in rhetorical treatises and specifically in Carew’s elegy for Donne, see Rebhorn, The Emperor of Men’s Minds, pp. 158–63. 100. Jonson Allusion Book, p. 189. 101. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, vol. 13 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (Hogarth, 1955), pp. 60–3. 102. ‘An Elegy on Mr. Cleaveland, and his Verses on Smectimnus’, John Cleveland Revived, sig. A8r . 103. T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights (1632), pp. 124–5.

236 Notes 104. Being ‘raped into virtue’ was a common expression of conversion or spiritual influence: cf. Falkland, ‘To my noble friend Mr. Sandys, upon his Job, Ecclesiastes, and the Lamentations’, A Paraphrase upon the Divine Poems by George Sandys (1648), sig. A4r : I ‘Suffer a Rape by Vertue’; Sandys’ translations ‘by a Power, which conquers all controule, / Doth without my consent possesse my Soule.’ 105. ‘To his little Brother Giles Oldisworth’, Bodleian MS Don.c.24, fol. 62v . 106. Bradstreet, ‘An Elegie upon that Honourable and renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney’, The Complete Works, pp. 149–52. 107. Gayle Rubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York and London: Monthly Review, 1975), pp. 157–210. 108. Martha Moulsworth, ‘My Name Was Martha’, ed. Robert C. Evans and Barbara Wiedemann (West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill, 1993), p. 5. 109. Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997), pp. 102–3; Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1991), pp. 84, 194. 110. Leslie Kurke, The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell UP, 1991), p. 16. 111. Patricia Bulman, Phthonos in Pindar, Classical Studies 35 (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992), p. 12. 112. Kurke, The Traffic in Praise, p. 104. 113. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome: Three Books Written in French, trans. Samson Lennard (Amsterdam and New York: Da Capo, 1971), p. 184. ‘There are many sorts and degreees of authoritie and humane power, Publicke, and Private; but there is none more naturall, nor greater, than that of the father over his children. In former times almost every where it was absolute and universall over the life and death, the libertie, the goods, the honor, the actions and cariages of their children’. 114. Parker, ‘Motivated Rhetorics’, pp. 98–9. 115. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an example of elegiac praise for a women’s ‘Oeconomique and Domestique Cares’, see On the Death of Her Illustrious Grace ANNE Dutchess-Dowarger of Albermarle [London, 1669], BL Luttrell Collection 3. 116. See Thomas Fuller’s characterisation of the widow in Holy State, p. 25. 117. Robert Herrick, ‘An Ode for Him’, The Complete Poetry, ed. J. Max Patrick (New York: New York UP, 1963), p. 381. 118. Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’, p. 159.

6

Grief without measure 1. O. B. Hardison, Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1989), pp. 25–6. 2. John Milton, ‘An Apology against a Pamphlet’, Complete Prose Works, vol. 1, (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1692), p. 890. 3. Levine Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton, I.vii (1581), sig. 40r .

Notes 237 4. Pamela Hammons, ‘Despised Creatures: The Illusions of Maternal SelfEffacement in Seventeenth-Century Child Loss Poetry’, ELH 66.1 (Spring 1999): 25. 5. Knevet, Funerall Elegies, sig. B1v . 6. Scaliger, Poetices III.ii; cited in Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic, p. 22. 7. Milton, preface to book II, Reason of Church Government, Complete Prose Works, vol. 3, pp. 816–18. 8. Plato, Protagoras 324a, 326b, trans. Stanley Lombardo and Karen Bell, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, p. 760. 9. Thomas Campion, Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), sig. A2r . 10. See also Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), pp. 109–15. 11. Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1930), pp. 130, 138. 12. Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesy’, Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine DuncanJones (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1989), p. 216. 13. Hardison, p. 262. 14. Dryden, The Works, vol. 10, pp. 67, 79–80. 15. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), p. 122. 16. Cicero, De Oratore III.xlvii and III.xlvi, pp. 186 and 181. 17. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric III.1409a3, trans. John Henry Freese, p. 387. 18. Mary Pennington, Experiences in the Life (Headley, 1911), pp. 93–4. 19. Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, pp. 37–8. 20. Anne Laurence, ‘Godly Grief: Individual Responses to Death in SeventeenthCentury Britain’, Death, Ritual and Bereavement, ed. Houlbrooke, p. 72. 21. Edward Taylor, The Poems, ed. Donald E. Stanford (New Haven: Yale UP, 1960), p. 472. 22. Richard Corbet, ‘An Elegy upon the Death of Queene Anne’, Poëtica stromata, pp. 103–4. 23. Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Milton’, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), p. 163. For more recent examples, see A. L. Bennett, ‘The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy’, Studies in Philology 51 (1954): 107–26 or Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich: Boydell, 1977). For a critique of contemporary critics’ focus on sincerity, and a contextualisation of the charge of insincereity in early modern poetry, see John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), esp. pp. 6–10. 24. Francis Quarles, An Elegie upon my Deare Brother, p. 2. 25. An Elegie, and Epitaph for Mistris Abigail Sherard (n.p., n.d.). 26. Alice Thornton, The Autobiography, p. 39. 27. William Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description, trans. Philémon Holland (1610), p. 147. 28. John Aubrey, Three Prose Works, p. 176. 29. Jasper Mayne, Part of Lucian Made English from the Original (Oxford, 1663), p. 211. 30. John Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631), p. 15. 31. As proof that not only women ceded to such excessive grief, Raymond Anselment cites the Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (published

238 Notes

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

in 1848), pp. 29–31, where her husband ‘cried out so terribly’ at news of their only son’s death ‘that his cry was heard a great way away.’ ‘ “The Teares of Nature”: Seventeenth-Century Parental Bereavement’, Modern Philology 91.1 (August 1993): 30. Nicholas Grimald, The Life and Poems, ed. L. R. Merrill (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1925), p. 398. Henry Vaughan, ‘An Elegie on the Death of Mr. R. Hall, Slain at Pontefract, 1648’, Olor Iscanius (1651), p. 23. Peter Charron, Of Wisdome, pp. 97–9. Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1988), p. 62. Allison Levy, ‘Augustine’s Concessions and Other Failures: Mourning and Masculinity in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany’, Grief and Gender, 700–1700, ed. Jennifer C. Vaught and Lynne Dickson Bruckner (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 81–93 (87). Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, p. 49; Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Funerals and the Politics of Gender in Early Renaissance Florence’, Refiguring Women: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1991). Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974), p. 20. Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (1579), p. 99. Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 99. Patricia Phillippy, Women, Death and Literature in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), esp. pp. 17–26; Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘In sickness and in health: A seventeenth century family’s experience’, Patients and Practitioners, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), p. 118. Hallam, ‘Turning the Hourglass’, pp. 61–82 (66); Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe, p. 48. John Batchiler, The Virgins Pattern, p. 33. Richard Lovelace, ‘An Elegie. On the Death of Mrs. Cassandra Cotton, only Sister to Mr. C. Cotton’, Lucasta (1649), pp. 112–14. John E. Booty, ed., The Book of Common Prayer 1559 (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976), p. 301. Beier, Patients and Practitioners, p. 105. Grenville, Some Original Letters, p. 3. Adrian Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and Its Interpretation’, Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, ed. Valerie Fildes (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 87. Adrian Wilson, ‘Participant or Patient? Seventeenth century childbirth from the Mother’s Point of view’, Patients and Practitioners, p. 134. Hole, The English Housewife in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 135, 223. Aubrey, ‘Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme’, p. 179. B. M. Willmott Dobbie, ‘An Attempt to Estimate the True Rate of Maternal Mortality, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries’, Medical History 26 (1982): 88. Louis Schwartz, ‘ “Conscious Terrours”: Seventeenth-Century Obstetrics and Milton’s Allegory of Common Sin in Paradise Lost, Book 2’, Arenas of Conflict:

Notes 239

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

Milton and the Unfettered Mind, ed. Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham (Associated UP, 1997), p. 212. Lincolnshire Archives, Monson papers, ref. Mon 7/14/69. Laurence, Women in England 1500–1760: A Social History, p. 37. Roger Schofield and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Infant and Child Mortality in England in the Late Tudor and Early Stuart Period’, Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1979), p. 69. R. Finlay, Population and Metropolis: the Demography of London 1580–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981), pp. 50, 101. ‘Infantile’ causes accounted for 33 per cent of deaths in mid-seventeenth century London, and plausibly another one sixth of deaths from a range of other causes also fell on infants and children. Vanessa Harding, The Dead and the Living in Paris and London, 1500–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), p. 18. Anne Laurence, ‘The Cradle to the Grave: English Observation of Irish Social Custom in the Seventeenth Century’, The Seventeenth Century 3.1 (1988): 73. James [Jacques] Guillemeau, Childbirth or, the Happy Deliverie of Women (1612), p. 23. Thomas Willis, The London Practice of Physic (1685), pp. 631–2. British Library Egerton MS 607, fol. 36v . ‘To my most loving, and dearly beloved Husband, George Payler, Esq.’ Bodleian MS Rawl.D.1308, fol. 1. British Library Egerton MS 607, fol. 33v . Eucharius Roeslin, The Birth of Mankind, trans. Thomas Raynalde (1545). Quoted in Joan Larson Klein, ed., Daughters, Wives, and Widows (Chicago, IL: U of Illinois P, 1992), p. 189. See also Patricia Crawford, ‘ “The Sucking Child”: Adult Attitudes to Child Care in the First Year of Life in SeventeenthCentury England’, Continuity and Change 1 (1986): 27. G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Diary of William Lawrence (Beaminster: Toucan, 1961), p. 28. Halkett, Autobiography, p. 139. Josselin, The Diary, p. 56. Hammons, ‘Despised Creatures’, p. 44. Beinecke Osborn MS b.221; quoted in Elizabeth Clarke, ‘ “A heart terrifying Sorrow”: The Deaths of Children in Seventeenth-Century Women’s Manuscript Journals’, Representations of Childhood Death, ed. Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 71. Bodleian MS Rawl poet 210, fol. 43. ‘Upon the Sight of my Abortive Birth’, Kissing the Rod, ed. Germaine Greer et al., p. 159. Cary, Lady Falkland, The Tragedy of Mariam, p. 195. Walker, The Holy Life of Mrs Elizabeth Walker, p. 93. Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973), p. 19. Frances Parthenope Verney and Margaret M. Verney, eds, Memoirs, p. 382. P. R. Seddon, ed., Letters of John Holles 1587–1637, vol. 1 (Nottingham: Thoroton Society 31, 1975), p. 102. Cited in Laurence, Death, Ritual and Bereavement, p. 68. Marvell, Poems and Letters, p. 133.

240 Notes 79. George Payler, ‘Written by my dear Husband at ye Death of our 4th (at that time), then only Child, Robert Payler’, Bodleian MS Rawl D.1308, 177. 80. Mary Carey, ‘Wretten by me att the same tyme; on the death of my 4th, and only Child, Robert Payler’, Kissing the Rod, pp. 156–7. 81. Germaine Greer et al., eds, Kissing the Rod, p. 158. Bodleian MS Rawlinson D.1308, fols 215–24 has different orthography and punctuation. 82. Carey, ‘Upon the Sight of My Abortive Birth’, Kissing the Rod, p. 161. 83. Marcel Mauss, The Gift, trans. W. D. Halls (New York: Routledge, 1990), pp. 67, 83. 84. Ann Williams, ‘Greifes farwell, to an Inherritor of joy’, Early Modern Women Poets, pp. 363–4. 85. Jonquil Bevan, ‘Jonson’s “On My First Son” and Common Prayer Catechism’, N&Q 242.1 [n.s. 44] (March 1997): 90–2. 86. John Milton, The Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (New York: Longman, 1968), p. 126. 87. Ben Jonson, ed. Donaldson, pp. 257–8. 88. Bradstreet, Complete Works, p. 165. 89. Gertrude Thimelby, ‘Mrs Thimelby, on the Death of Her Only Child’, Early Modern Women Poets (1520–1700), ed. Jane Stevenson and Peter Davidson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), p. 255. 90. Grimald, Life and Poems, pp. 398–400. For an alternate reading of this poem, see Pigman, pp. 47–51. 91. Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, MS ref. D-X464/1/1. The poem is on the verso of a letter from Roger Hackett, North Crawley, to his son Thomas, about arrangements for conveying his sister’s corpse from London to Crawley. 92. Dorothy Leigh, The Mothers Blessing (1634), pp. 14–16, 57. 93. Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, revised trans. based on the ‘Middleton’ edition of the English version of 1575 (James Clarke, 1953), p. 411. 94. Erasmus, Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 305. 95. Kristen Poole, ‘ “The fittest closet for all goodness”: Authorial strategies of Jacobean Mothers’ Manuals’, Studies in English Literature 1 (1995): 83–5. 96. Victoria E. Burke, ‘Elizabeth Ashburnham Richardson’s “motherlie endeauors” in Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 9 (2000): 98–113 (98). 97. Elizabeth Joceline, The Mothers Legaacie, To Her Unborne Childe (1625), reprint (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1852), sig. A7v . 98. Brilliana Harley, Letters, p. 52. 99. Leeds University, Brotherton MS Ltq32, fol. 67r (129). 100. HS, vol. VIII, p. 638. 101. Edmund Spenser, The Works: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1949), pp. 467–8. 102. For more examples of this trope, see Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–1700’, Women in English Society 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 211–82. 103. Cowley, Poems, p. 404. 104. Ibid., p. 405. 105. Philips, Collected Works, p. 220.

Notes 241

Conclusion 1. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Susan Ziller, Cary Nederman, and Kate Langdon Forhan, Medieval Political Theory – A Reader: The Quest for Body Politic 100–1440, ed. Cary Nederman and Kate Langdon Forhan (Routledge, 1993), p. 137. 2. Augustine, Confessions, trans. William Watts, 1631 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977). 3. Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), p. 35. 4. Bloch, Prey into Hunter, p. 4. 5. Thomas Browne, ‘A Letter to a Friend, upon Occasion of the Death of his Intimate Friend’, Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), p. 186. 6. S. N. Eisenstadt, Introduction, On Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers by Max Weber (Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1968), p. xv. 7. Egbert J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997), p. 136.

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Index agonistic poetry, 8, 132–3, 135, 136, 170–1, 212 Aquinas, 207 Aristotle, 12–14, 22, 39, 104, 139, 172, 189, 207 Rhetoric, 18, 178 Arnway, John, 92, 122, 123 Ashmole, Elias, 22 Atherton, John, 97–8 Aubrey, John, 50, 53, 82, 181, 188 Augustine, 125, 152, 207 Bacon, Francis, 94, 96 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 112 Barksdale, Clement, 44 Basire, Isaac, 124 Baxter, Richard, 104 Beaumont, Francis, 138–9, 144, 148, 150, 158, 163–6 Beaumont, John, 141–2, 161 Beedome, Thomas, 29, 134, 135, 141 Benlowes, Thomas and Edward, 139 Berkenhead, John, 20, 28, 117, 120, 121, 124–5, 154, 157, 158, 164–5 Bloch, Maurice, 53, 97, 126, 135, 210–11 Bradshaw, John, 124, 127, 128 Bradstreet, Anne, 52–3, 131, 169, 197–8, 203 Brinsley, John, 18–19 Brodie, Alexander, 44, 54 Brome, Alexander, 74, 121 Brome, Richard, 138–9 Browne, Thomas, 151, 211 Bucer, Martin, 67–8 Burton, Robert, 54, 178, 203 Calvin, John, 38–9, 41, 114, 201 Camden, William, 170, 181 Campion, Thomas, 28, 177 Carew, Thomas, 26, 131, 151–2, 154, 155, 159, 161, 162, 168

Carey, George, 193–4 Carey, Mary, 46–7, 56, 190, 191, 193–7 Cartwright, William, 20, 27–30, 138, 139, 142–3, 145–7, 157–9, 167, 168 Cary, Elizabeth Lady Falkland, 191 Cary, Lettice Lady Falkland, 43–4 Cary, Lucius second Viscount Falkland, 14–15, 23, 43, 137, 151–2 Casaubon, Meric, 37–8 censorship, 143–4 Chapman, George, 140 charisma, 96–7, 104, 123, 155, 206, 210–12 Charles I, 7, 27, 86, 91, 92, 94, 102–3, 107, 115, 116–30, 142, 163, 196, 210–11 Charron, Pierre, 183 childbirth and pregnancy, 46, 74, 162–5, 174, 186–97, 204, 206, 213 children, 15, 44–7, 52–3, 56, 59, 175, 188–203, 205, 213 Chudleigh, J., 147, 151, 152 Cicero, 3, 13, 19, 22, 23, 178 Clarendon, see Hyde, Edward Cleveland, John, 108, 109, 119, 124, 126–8, 139, 146, 159, 167 coinage, 156–62 Cokayne, Aston, 75 commonplaces and topoi, 7, 20, 22, 23, 24, 30, 35–6, 41, 42, 119, 120, 147, 153, 160, 180, 199, 203, 205, 206 consolation, 19, 32–7, 42, 44–61, 67, 182, 198 Coprario, John, 42 Corbet, Richard, 7, 20, 25–6, 68, 120, 180 Coventry, Henry, 136 Cowley, Abraham, 43, 91, 105, 164, 204

262

Index 263 critical elegy, 8, 131–73 Cromwell, Oliver, 27, 87–8, 146, 192 Daniel, Samuel, 26, 176–7, 181 Davenant, William, 137, 140, 155, 160 decorum, 3, 7, 23, 24, 30, 65, 96, 106, 109, 211 deliberative rhetoric, 12–15, 31 Denham, John, 106, 157, 166 Devereux, Robert third Earl of Essex, 62, 86–8, 149 Digby, Kenelm, 14, 34–5, 49–51, 197 Digges, Leonard, 153, 161 domestic, 5–6, 17, 172, 184–5 Donne, John, 41, 51, 58, 84, 129, 137–8, 139, 141, 147–55, 159, 176, 178, 202 Anniversaries, 4, 6, 11, 48, 52, 55, 57, 71, 115, 148–9, 186–7 Poems (1633), 20, 23, 133, 140, 147–54, 159–62, 166–8 Doughty, John, 112 Drayton, Michael, 83 Drummond, William, 154 Dryden, John, 156, 178 Duppa, Brian, 20, 134 Durkheim, Emile, 3 effigy, 62, 83–9, 147 Egerton, Elizabeth Countess of Bridgewater, 42, 45–6, 189–90 Eikon Basilike, 92, 93, 104, 117–18, 125 elegiac distich, 10, 11–12 Elizabeth I, 85 epicede, 11 Epictetus, 101 Epicurus, 39 epideictic, 10, 12–16, 22–3, 28, 91, 95, 119, 128, 137–9, 150, 155–6, 169, 176, 209 epitaph, 11 Erasmus, 14, 37, 200 Essex, see Devereux, Robert third Earl of Essex Evelyn, John, 35 executions, 7, 89, 90–130, 144, 190, 211–12

Fairfax, Thomas, 71 Falkland, see Cary, Lucius second Viscount Falkland Fanshawe, Ann, 56, 190 Fanshawe, Richard, 105 Feltham, Owen, 23 Fenton, Edward, 138 Finch, Heneage, 92 Fletcher, John, 133, 136, 144–5, 150, 154, 156, 157, 158, 163–6 Foucault, Michel, 8, 172 Freud, Sigmund, 165–6, 210 Friend, John and Nathaniel, 32–4, 62 Fuller, Thomas, 8–9 funeral, 6, 20, 27, 62–89, 90–1, 95, 119, 129, 135–6, 171, 185, 211 maiden funeral, 74 Gauden, John, 81, 118 genre, 2–3, 10–13, 112, 123 Gerhard, John, 96, 98 gifts, 25–6, 59, 66–7, 80, 171, 173, 196, 213 Grimald, Nicholas, 182, 199 Guillemeau, Jacques, 189, 193, 202 Hackett, Thomas, 199–200 Halkett, Anne, 118 Hall, John, 138 Hall, Joseph, 148–50 Harley, Brilliana, 108, 201 Harris, John, 165 Harvey, Gabriel, 202–3 Hastings, Lucy, 81 Henry, Prince of Wales, 66–7, 71, 88 heraldry, 20, 62, 65, 73, 74, 77–80, 84, 86, 135 Herbert, George, 115 Herrick, Robert, 68, 172 Heylyn, Peter, 105, 109, 114, 115–16 Hill, George, 145 Hobbes, Thomas, 14 Hooker, Richard, 76 Horace, 18, 81, 150, 208 hospitality, 53, 62, 75–6 Howard, H., 133 Howe, Joseph, 163, 164 Howell, James, 80, 131–2 Hutchinson, Lucy, 192

264 Index Hyde, Edward, 43, 102–3 Hyde, Henry, 147–8 imitation, 14–15, 18–19, 32, 48–9, 135, 175, 202–3, 210 Ireton, Henry, 27 James VI and I, 85–6, 92, 158 Joceline, Elizabeth, 201 Johnson, Samuel, 180 Jonson, Ben, 8, 12, 13, 21, 28, 68, 72, 91–2, 131–8, 141, 146, 147, 150–6, 158–61, 168, 170, 172, 176, 177–8, 196–7, 199, 202, 203, 204 Cary Morison Ode, 14, 159 Works (Folio 1616), 141 Jonsonus Virbius, 20, 132, 133–7, 160 Jordan, Thomas, 24, 25, 78, 80 Josselin, Ralph, 64, 190 King, Henry, 20, 24, 34, 52, 55–61, 68–9, 77, 79, 81, 122–4, 136, 150, 152, 159, 160–1, 166, 178, 205 Knevet, Ralph, 40, 175–6 Laud, William, 7, 91, 94, 102, 103, 108, 109–17, 123, 129–30 Leigh, Dorothy, 200–1 Lemnius, Levine, 175, 203 Lesley, John, 42–3 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 170 libels, 107–8, 110–13 Lipsius, Justus, 37, 101 Llewellyn, Martin, 20, 88, 167 Lovelace, Richard, 28, 138, 142, 143, 163–4, 186 Lowe, Roger, 18, 26, 72, 76 Luther, Martin, 200 Lyttleton, Elizabeth, 18 Marcus Aurelius, 37, 100–2, 108 Marriot, John, 139 martyrs and martyrdom, 38, 97, 101–2, 109, 115–16, 121–6, 130 Marvell, Andrew, 28, 87–8, 92, 138, 142, 143, 192 Mauss, Marcel, 58–9, 196 May, Tom, 134, 143–4

Mayne, Jasper, 20, 27, 29–30, 142–3, 152, 153, 168, 181 melancholy, 34–5, 83, 166, 174, 189, 191–3 Melanchthon, 14 Menander, 13 metre, see prosody Mildmay, Grace, 83 Milton, John, 19–20, 66, 93, 125, 153, 176, 197 Lycidas, 6, 8, 20–2, 180 Mody, Henry, 136 Montaigne, Michel, 96, 99 Montrose, James Graham first Marquis, 120 monuments, 25, 49–50, 64, 66, 81 Moseley, Humphrey, 139 Moulsworth, Martha, 170 Murford, Nicholas, 27, 82 Neo-Platonism, 9 Norris, William, 139–40 Oglander, John, 47 Oldisworth, Nicholas, 20, 26, 131–2, 164, 168–9 orations, see sermons Orpheus, 105, 142, 181 Overton, Richard, 111 Ovid, 11 Paul, 37, 39, 41, 43, 125, 200 Paulet, Jane Marchioness of Winchester, 197 Peacham, Henry, 11, 37, 80 persuasion, see deliberative rhetoric Perwich, Susannah, 73–4, 185 Pestell, Thomas, 74 Petrarch, 169, 183 Philipot, Thomas, 26 Philips, Katherine, 35, 71, 131, 145, 157, 204–5 Pindar, 132, 155, 170–1 Plato, 13–14, 25, 39, 132, 139, 143, 154, 176–7, 212 Plutarch, 90 Pope, Alexander, 153 Porter, Endymion, 166 praise, see epideictic

Index 265 pregnancy, see childbirth and pregnancy Propertius, 11 prosody, 9, 10–12, 41, 42, 54–5, 60, 133, 154–5, 174–81, 205, 206 Prynne, William, 110, 112–13 Pulter, Hester, 52, 201–2 purgatory, 41–2, 53–4, 57, 59, 61 Puttenham, George, 11, 12, 67, 154, 179 Pym, John, 102–3 Quarles, Francis, 42, 55, 77, 180 Quarles, John, 118–20, 122 Quintilian, 13, 23 Ralegh, Walter, 99–100 Randolph, Thomas, 134, 148, 157, 166 rhetoric, 1, 2, 10–31, 49, 69, 76, 90, 95–6, 98, 113–15, 133, 156, 164, 174, 180–1, 183, 202, 206 Rich, Anne, 81, 101, 118 Ridgeway, Cecilia, Countess of Londonderry, 15–17 rites of passage, 1, 8, 72, 89, 97, 209, 210 ritual, 2–4, 6, 22, 27, 48, 51–4, 62, 70–1, 72, 76–7, 88, 90, 93, 129, 135, 160–1, 171, 174, 183–6, 188, 209–12 Rodney family, 55, 66 Rose, Gillian, 208–9 Scaliger, Julius Caesar, 3, 11, 14, 18, 176 schools, 2, 10, 17–20 Seneca, 19, 36–41, 96, 101, 182 sermons, 10, 13, 18, 63, 64, 66, 82, 95, 186 Shakespeare, William, 133, 141, 143, 147, 152, 153–4, 158, 166, 178, 180–1, 203, 204 Sherburne, Edward, 38, 102 Shirley, James, 85–6, 100, 144 Sidney, Philip, 18, 82, 169, 177 Solon, 184–5 Spenser, Edmund, 25, 68, 133, 161, 202

Stanley, Thomas, 144, 147 Starbucke, William, 113–14, 116 Stevenson, Matthew, 75 Stoicism, 34, 37–41, 69, 90, 98–102, 108, 121–2, 146, 175 Strafford, see Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford Suckling, John, 139–40, 155 Sylvester, Joshua, 71 Taylor, Edward, 179 Taylor, Jeremy, 13, 35 Theophrastus, 18 Thimelby, Gertrude, 82, 198–9 Thornton, Alice, 36, 45, 181, 193, 201 time and temporality, 2, 4–5, 11, 47–61, 77, 88–9, 118, 178, 205, 208, 212 Tipping, William, 47–9, 54–5 tombs, see monuments Towers, William, 145 Townshend, Aurelian, 35 treason, 102–3, 112, 127 Trelawny, John, 36 Trial of the Pyx, 157–8 Valentine, Henry, 140, 149 Vaughan, Henry, 27, 181–2 Walker, Anthony, 19 Walker, Elizabeth, 45, 191–2 Waller, Edmund, 161 Walton, Izaac, 5–6, 140, 151, 152–3 Waring, Robert, 157 Weckherlin, George Rudolph, 66 Weever, John, 79, 182, 185 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 7, 91, 93, 94, 95, 102–9, 110, 111, 114, 117, 119, 121, 129–30 Williams, Ann, 196–7 Wilson, Arthur, 149 Wilson, Thomas, 13, 19, 102 women, 15–17, 30, 66, 105, 164–6, 173 marriage, 167–8, 170 mourning, 8–9, 15, 45–6, 48, 73–4, 179–86, 211 Woodward, Ezekias, 113, 114 Wright, Thomas, 39

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