Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions

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P O E T RY A N D T H E C RO M W E L L I A N P ROT E C TO R AT E

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Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate Culture, Politics, and Institutions E DWA R D H O L B E RTO N

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Edward Holberton 2008 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Holberton, Edward. Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate : culture, politics, and institutions / Edward Holberton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN–13: 978–0–19–954458–5 1. English poetry—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Great Britain—History—Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660. 3. Literature and society—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—17th century. 5. Cromwell, Oliver, 1599–1658. 6. Social institutions in literature. I. Title. PR508.H5H65 2008 821’.30935841065—dc22 2008009778 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–954458–5 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my parents, Jane and David


Preface Few witnesses to the Protectorate’s improvised beginnings on 16 December 1653 could have thought that they promised the lively and innovative culture of poetry explored in this book. Oliver Cromwell had been persuaded by a group of army oYcers to rule as Lord Protector, under the constitution known as the Instrument of Government, parts of which were unWnished, and had to be mumbled at the inauguration ceremony. The constitution appeared to be a compromise between a monarchy and a republic, to govern a population seemingly unable to make either system work. Yet it is precisely from its entanglements with the compromises, instabilities, and contingencies of the settlement that Protectorate poetry draws its vitality. Between 1653 and 1659, Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, Marchamont Nedham, William Davenant, John Dryden, and other lesserknown poets exploited the potential of diverse poetic forms—panegyric, elegies, and other forms of occasional verse, even masques, pageants, and opera—to probe the fault-lines of Protectorate culture. This poetry explores a shifting matrix of institutions within which the Protectors were obliged to rule and act, but which contested their powers ceaselessly. The verse of this period has often seemed one-dimensional when it has been interpreted as panegyric focused on Oliver Cromwell and his merits. This book seeks to bring Protectorate poetry out from Cromwell’s shadow, by locating its contexts in the Protectorate’s institutions and the crises that brought the roles and authority of those institutions into question. The Protectorate began whilst a crucial embassy to Sweden was in progress, which had been sent to win international support for a young republic, and was then required to represent the new regime. This book begins by discussing the dilemmas of ambassador Bulstrode Whitelocke, as he endeavoured on the one hand to demonstrate his cultivation and Xuency in courtly decorum, and on the other to uphold a plainness in his behaviour which would beWt the representative of a godly commonwealth. He presented Queen Christina with poems by Andrew Marvell, Sir Charles Wolseley, and Daniel Whistler. They represent the Protectorate in relation to the contingencies of international politics, as a regime turning to Sweden’s friendship and historical example after disappointments in Anglo– Dutch diplomacy. From the outset, the Protector counted on Wnancial and political support from the City of London. Chapter 2 discusses the ways in which this relationship revitalized, but also exposed, the civic values discussed in City pageants, and how economic pressures caused London to re-imagine itself as a commonwealth within a commonwealth. The University of Oxford compiled an anthology of poetry in celebration of the Anglo–Dutch peace treaty signed in the spring of 1654. In Chapter 3 this anthology’s array of allusions and images

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of rebirth is related to the university’s task of educating a post-war elite—a role which gave the university power and authority, but subjected it to external interference and pressures to reform. The chapters forming the central section of this book concern two parliamentary crises. The Wrst parliament of the Protectorate would not accept the powers allotted to it by the constitution, and refused to ratify the Instrument of Government. As the crisis undermined the state’s legitimacy, republican colonels in the army attempted a coup. I look closely at how Waller’s A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector and Marvell’s The First Anniversary responded to these events, particularly at the force of circumstance in the rhetoric of these poems, and in their diVerent perspectives on the Protectorate’s cultural possibilities. A chapter on the reform of Atlantic trade involves a second parliamentary crisis, which resulted in the revised constitution known as the Humble Petition and Advice. Waller’s interest in the development of the Commonwealth’s maritime power is discussed in relation to topical revisions of Upon the Present War with Spain, which urge merchants and landowners to grasp a common cause in civilianizing the state. After the constitution was settled, the project of an expansion of English trade and naval power in the Atlantic remained controversial. I look at the contributions made to these debates by William Davenant’s innovative operas, as the regime’s trade reforms drew protests from colonial settlers. The poetry examined in the Wnal two chapters of the book addresses institutions of marriage and death, and arrangements for the succession of a Cromwellian dynasty, including the new Protector. Entertainments for the 1657 weddings of Cromwell’s daughters express tense hopes for securing the Protectorate through dynastic unions. Chapter 6 discusses Marvell’s manipulation of irony in writing a masque for the wedding of Mary Cromwell into a family known for their royalism. The Wnal chapter reads elegies for Cromwell against the disintegration of Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate and the staging of an elaborate, anachronistic, state funeral for his father. Works by Waller, Marvell, Sprat, and Dryden probe the hyperbole and scripted rites of mourning in search of Cromwell’s real cultural legacy: the institutional foundations on which a new Protectorate might be built, and the limitations that it must negotiate.

Acknowledgements Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate is a revised version of a Ph.D. dissertation, submitted to Cambridge University in 2005. My research between 2002 and 2004 was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Board and Trinity College, Cambridge. I am grateful to St John’s College, Cambridge, for electing me to a Research Fellowship, which has enabled me to complete this book. A version of Chapter 6 appeared in The Seventeenth Century, and I thank the University of Manchester Press for permission to reprint it here. I have beneWted greatly from the generous advice of those who read draft chapters: Yota Batsaki, Colin Burrow, Paulina Kewes, Sam Ladkin, Patrick Little, John Morrill, Victoria Moul, David Norbrook, Neil Pattison, Carla Pestana, and David Smith. I thank also all those who have assisted me with their expertise along the way, particularly Paul Hunneyball, Madeleine Jones, Hilton Kelliher, Myles Lavan, Liz Lloyd, Raphael Lyne, Nicholas von Maltzahn, Simon McKeown, Leo Mellor, Maíre Nı´ Mhaonaigh, David Money, James Morrison, Reitha Pattison, Tim Raylor, Roy and Doreen Sherwood, Nigel Smith, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Angus Vine, Blair Worden, and Neil Wright. My examiners, Martin Dzelzainis and Jason Scott-Warren, gave me invaluable help. I am privileged to have incurred a great debt of thanks to John Kerrigan, who supervised my doctoral thesis, and has continued to encourage, advise, and comment on revised drafts of the book. I thank all those involved in the process of publication at OUP for their time and eVort, especially Andrew McNeillie, Jacqueline Baker, and Claire Thompson, Jean van Altena for her careful work on the typescript, and the readers for their constructive criticism. I am also grateful to Godfrey Waller of the manuscripts department in Cambridge University Library and Kate Harris, the archivist at Longleat House.


Contents Introduction 1. Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden 2. London’s Triumphs and Civic Culture 3. The Oxford Muses in the Protectorate 4. The First Protectorate Parliament, Waller’s A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector, and Marvell’s The First Anniversary 5. The Western Design 6. ‘Soe Honny from the Lyon came’: Wedding Entertainments for the Protector’s Daughters 7. Oliver Cromwell’s Legacy: Elegies, Funerals, and the Succession Epilogue

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143 163 205

Bibliography Index

221 243

87 119


Introduction In 1654, Ralph Bathurst, vice-president of Trinity College, Oxford, wrote this poem for a university verse anthology published in celebration of peace with the Dutch: Though all are Statesmen now, and ’tis the guise These times have taught, not to be Wits but Wise; Though Playes be downe, and our more serious Age Acts all in earnest on a wider Stage: ’Tis yet (we hope) no trespasse that we dare Usurpe a Verse, and sing the good we share: So when Augustus with his Warlike hand Had brought home Triumphs both from Sea and Land, And ( Janus Temple shut) now conquer’d more By arts of Peace, then feats of Armes before; Then swarmes of Poets came, and made him known Deckt by Their Bayes, no lesse then by his owne. As if one sacred heat did Wrst incite Him to Atchieve great things; next, Them to Write. And thus much we have done, only to show We can be Poets when you make us so.1

Bathurst’s poem raises problems of interpretation that are in many ways typical of Protectorate poetry. What is the argument of the Wrst four lines, with their tense mix of irony and sobriety? How are we to understand the ambiguity in the Wnal couplet, which ostensibly claims modest poetic ambition, but also suggests an edgily conditional endorsement of the Protector (who, it should be noted, had not yet had much of a chance to prove himself in the arts of peace)? Customarily, critics have sought to elucidate such texts by relating them to the overarching political conXicts of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms2 and Interregnum. It could be asked how irony and ambiguity in this poem might encode a royalist’s 1 Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria (Oxford, 1654), 59. 2 As argued by a number of historians, this term is preferable to ‘The Civil Wars’ when referring to the interlinked conXicts which were fought through the kingdoms of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, between 1639 and 1651. See John Morrill, ‘The War(s) of the Three Kingdoms’, in Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1999), 65–91.

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Introduction

dissatisfaction with the engagement forced upon him. This text has been picked out to illustrate how an Augustan literary tradition emerged in support of the Protector in opposition to republican writing.3 Yet Bathurst’s poem implies that his praise has conditions, and inscribes relationships that resist polarized commitments and discourses: he speaks for himself, but also for the University of Oxford, and the comparison with Augustus focuses the university’s concerns on the ways by which Cromwell will consolidate a domestic peace. The poem witnesses a political sensibility informed by institutional interests and an eye for compromise; it calls for reading that is sensitive to the complex practicalities of its political moment. Protectorate poetry has been caught up in a lively scholarly debate over the cultural stakes of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This debate has brought the ends of literary and historical scholarship into question and nurtured innovative interdisciplinary approaches. Studies have revealed literature’s densely creative interaction with the visual arts, the symbolic and material cultures of authority, and a surge in print publication.4 A number of scholars have reWned an incisive combination of close literary and historical analysis. Among these, Warren Chernaik, Martin Dzelzainis, and David Norbrook have developed theses that are particularly inXuential. Chernaik and Dzelzainis draw on Quentin Skinner’s historiography to argue that the political poetry of the later seventeenth century can be grouped in two rival traditions separated by diVerent conceptions of political liberty, which were developed in the course of the political conXicts of the 1640s and 1650s: Marvell, Milton, Harrington, Locke, Shaftesbury, Sidney, and Neville constitute a ‘neo-roman’ literary-political tradition, while Hobbes, Parker, Filmer, and Dryden form a second, rival continuity.5 Norbrook contends that a healthy republican literary tradition pre-dated the wars and excited the seminal cultural debates of the 1640s and 1650s. His Writing the English Republic examines the attempts of authors including Fisher, Harrington, Marvell, May, Milton, and Wither to overturn the culture of monarchy with a republican social vision and aesthetic. These eVorts to recover seventeenth-century republicanism have been a resounding success, exciting a lively, productive, and international scholarly discussion. There is a danger in this success, however, that the impress of republican thought on mid-century writing might be exaggerated into the deWning contest of this literature, providing a schema by which to divide 3 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 301. 4 See Laura Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Roy Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell: King in All but Name, 1653–1658 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997). 5 Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 5–7. See also Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and his ‘Liberty and the English Civil War,’ in Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ii. 308–43.

Introduction

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the period’s key texts and authors. The cost of that reduction would be to obscure a diVerent kind of literary-political engagement, practised through innovative and ambitious poetry. This book contends that Protectorate verse is animated by circumstantial commitments and perspectives. These poems explore contingencies and compromises arising from shifting cultural tensions, which have hitherto been distorted by a tendency to represent them as polarized controversies: republican against monarchist, Nonconformist against Anglican, or radical against conservative. The crux of this argument is that Protectorate poetry develops complex entanglements with the cultural institutions of the Protectorate, institutions that could no longer be taken for granted, yet which variously constrain, encourage, or complicate political beliefs. The poetry examined here was written for the occasions of embassies, universities, parliaments, mayoral elections, dynastic marriages, and state funerals. These were the building blocks with which a settlement had to be constructed after the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. They came under intense scrutiny from diverse political interests, which argued for their reform in parliamentary debates, sermons, and printed publications. Poets inherited rhetorical conventions and emblems of authority from the institutional occasions of pre-war culture. Ploughed over by the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s, these literary materials now provided a language rich with historical and cultural associations, which could be used to explore the dilemmas of the Protectorate settlement, through semantic possibilities unavailable to other forms of writing. The revival of interest in republicanism has led critics to read Protectorate poetry against the background of a regime gradually reverting to the institutions of monarchy. In this perspective, Protectorate poetic culture is a contest between republican literary activism and monarchist (or ‘Augustan’) writing, which encouraged the Protectorate’s apparent drift towards monarchy by praising the Cromwells with iconography and poetic forms derived from the culture of the old royal court. I argue that the Protectorate’s elite and its poets reused cultural materials that past kings had exploited, certainly, but they could not replicate the original ideological import of these materials any more than they could erase the regicide. Protectorate verse often engages with this problematic directly, as it seeks to deWne the settlement’s cultural possibilities. This contention entails another, that Protectorate poetry is not as preoccupied with the charisma of Cromwell as some critics have argued. For instance, in Laura Knoppers’s reading of The First Anniversary, Marvell’s account of Cromwell’s near-fatal coaching accident is the key to a poem that ‘foregrounds and problematizes the process itself of constructing a Cromwellian image’.6 It will be argued below that Marvell narrates this episode precisely to make his readers think about national life beyond Cromwell, and the coherence of the polity that will survive him. These 6 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 98–102.

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poems reveal a Protector who has inXuence, but by no means complete control, over the Protectorate’s infrastructure and matrix of cultural institutions. Even in the context of his daughters’ marriages, I Wnd a Cromwell who is somewhat awkward and overwhelmed: a Wgure who impedes as well as encourages a cultural settlement. This begs the question of how most of the poems studied in this book came to be read—or dismissed—as panegyric to Cromwell, and the Epilogue seeks to tease apart some of the historiographic and literary processes that have induced this conXation. The contextual approach taken in this book is inXuenced by methodologies developed in the work of J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner. Historians interested in Parliament’s conXict with the Crown have always studied institutions, but these scholars sought to disentangle the texts and political ideas of this period from the assumptions of ‘Whig’ history concerning the progressive development of English institutions. Broadly speaking, this view of history construed the wars in the middle of the seventeenth century as a crucial phase in the evolution of an unwritten constitution, which had safeguarded political liberty as empire expanded. To escape the conceptual anachronisms produced by these teleologies, Skinner and Pocock ask what an author or speaker was practically trying to achieve by writing a text in a particular moment. Skinner’s methodological essays urge close attention to the relationship between such a ‘speech act’ and the context of linguistic conventions with which it engages. He asks how an argument might extend shared vocabularies or methodologies, and how this act was intended to impact the ideological and political contests of its moment.7 The pertinence of these questions to diVerent kinds of poetry has been made more apparent by a parallel interest in rhetoric among scholars of early modern literature, who have explored the pervasive inXuence of rhetorical education in seventeenth-century writing. Many kinds of poetry appear to have a rhetorical purpose, to move or persuade, and demand close attention to the rhetorical contexts in which they were deployed, and the eVects that even ostensibly commonplace or naı¨ve statements might have been intended to produce. This requires picking through the cultural baggage that lines of verse can carry: the historical associations that certain images or Wgures of speech might connote, the expectations that their deployment excites, satisWes, or Wnesses, or the diVerent kinds of authority transmitted by particular topics and forms through conventional usage. To focus these concerns on an understanding of Protectoral panegyrics, elegies, or epithalamia, it is necessary to examine cultural institutions as both linguistic and political contexts: universities, weddings, or state occasions supplied conventions for poetic language, but they frequently became objects of rhetorical debate too. This kind of close reading is not without its hazards. Many of the poems in the following pages would have been categorized as epideictic rhetoric, the branch of 7 Skinner, Visions of Politics, i. 103–27.

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classical oratory concerned with praise. It is a diYcult mode to interpret: covert or illocutionary messages are often key to a poem’s meaning within its political moment, and criticism can masquerade as compliment. These interpretative problems are exacerbated by the speciWc conditions of post-regicide culture, which inherited a language of praise freighted with problematic associations: when Marvell compares Cromwell to Amphion in The First Anniversary, did he expect readers to register that Waller had likened Charles I to Amphion too, in ‘Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls’? Marvell’s rhetorical facility with irony and allusion is well appreciated, and the case for this intention has been argued by some of his most convincing interpreters. But Protectorate verse was written by poets of diVering abilities and sensitivities, and it is not always immediately clear when an image is awake or asleep to the ironies of its deployment. This poetry challenges today’s reader to think carefully about the kinds of circulation and reading that a poem anticipates. Leading Protectorate poets cultivated a readership that would be alert to topical nuances: Marvell and Waller drew heavily on news, and the latter’s variant texts bear witness to Wne topical revisions over short intervals of time. This is a selective reading of poetry written under the Protectorate. There are writers, including the would-be laureate Payne Fisher, who would receive more attention in a comprehensive study, but whose productions are not so responsive to the contexts outlined here. This is to acknowledge that the institutional perspective employed in this book does not claim to excavate the poetic attitude of the times, or forms of practice which sprang from the shared reading of an identiWable school. It will be seen that the Protectorate brought into dialogue poets with diverse cultural perspectives and literary resources. Their attention to circumstance and contingency may in some cases have been inXuenced by debates in political or epistemological philosophy, but to explore this context would be a substantial and multi-layered project in itself, which would perhaps have to take in the treatment of circumstance and necessity in moral and legal thought too. This book aims to show that what these poems share is rather an urgency that stemmed from a series of institutional crises, which moved their authors to discuss the potential of the Protectorate settlement.

1 Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden In November 1653 Bulstrode Whitelocke set out on an embassy to Sweden. He was apprehensive, but he had been bullied into it by Cromwell, with whom his relations were frosty. Parliament’s choice had been Viscount Lisle after Whitelocke had declined its nomination, but L’Isle now withdrew on grounds of ill health and, notwithstanding Mrs Whitelocke’s pregnancy, Cromwell would not be refused.1 Whitelocke’s journal shows him nervous: the wartime voyage was hazardous enough, but hitherto the republic’s diplomacy had been disastrous. Two of the republic’s diplomats had been assassinated: Isaac Dorislaus, an envoy to Holland, in May 1649, and Anthony Ascham, the agent in Spain, in June 1650. Foreign states had reopened diplomatic channels soon after the regicide, and the Rump Parliament quickly became adept at receiving representatives of rival powers and playing them against one another.2 Sean Kelsey argues that by reviving and adapting ceremonial forms the republic successfully ‘invented’ itself. However, Steven Pincus’s account of the diplomatic manoeuvres surrounding the Dutch war and peace oVers a diVerent view on republican diplomacy.3 Oliver St John and Walter Strickland set out on a grand embassy to the United Provinces in the spring of 1651, to develop an ‘intrinsical’ ideological alliance between the Commonwealth and its Protestant republican neighbour.4 The Dutch political system had previously allowed the House of Orange (which had close ties to the Stuarts) to exercise inXuence through the quasi-hereditary oYce of stadtholder, though William II had recently died, leaving an heir too young to take up this oYce. The English ambassadors were surprised to Wnd that the Orangist–Stuart interest yet had power to obstruct their negotiations, and to aVront and attack violently the English party many times.5 1 Bulstrode Whitelocke, A Journal of the Swedish Ambassy, in the Years M.DC.LIII and M.DC.LIV, from the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, ed. Charles Morton, 2 vols. (London: T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1772), i. 1–36 (hereafter, Journal ); The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675, ed. Ruth Spalding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13 (hereafter, Diary). 2 Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 61–2. 3 Steven Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1668 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 11–168. 4 See the ambassadors’ instructions quoted ibid. 25. 5 Ibid., 15–39; Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, 66.

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The republican pride expressed in the pomp of the Rump’s diplomatic ceremonies encouraged idealistic and unrealistic expectations of the Dutch. Marvell’s ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas’ mixes prophetic and republican allusions to oVer the Dutch a stark choice between a treaty and war. The poem reads this choice in the name Oliver St John (an olive signifying peace, and St John the herald of war), and contrasts that bald message favourably with the dissemblances of conventional diplomacy.6 The newsbooks explained that the embassy of St John and Strickland had failed because Dutch republicanism was debased and materialistic, while the Rump heard emotive accounts of the Amboyna massacre (an incident in 1623, when Dutch oYcials in Indonesia executed ten English merchants) and passed the punitive Navigation Act.7 Subsequent attempts to negotiate a peace, both before and during the war, were overwhelmed by a combination of idealism and xenophobia that spread forcefully through English society.8 Dutch deputies came to London, but they met with a crescendo of unrealistic demands from Parliament’s commissioners, who, even though they did not go to the extremes of popular and radical belligerence, took the view that the Dutch must reform their society before war could cease. The negotiations were followed keenly in the courts of Europe: the French ambassador reported to his masters ‘unprecedented’ English demands.9 Dutch deputies were Xabbergasted when the English commissioners proposed a union of sovereignties, which, they reasoned, would guarantee Dutch social reform.10 The proposal enraged even the republican end of the Dutch political spectrum; it shows, Pincus argues, a complete failure by the English commissioners to understand the nature and culture of Dutch republicanism.11 English diplomacy was also badly aVected by conXicts and uncertainty in the republic’s administration, which played into the hands of royalists and Orangists, who sought to represent the republic as an illegitimate regime of rebellious zealots.12 Cromwell’s ambiguous authority complicated diplomatic relations: Mazarin’s representative Bordeaux took to loitering in St James’s Park in the hope of bumping into Cromwell on a walk.13 Their informal negotiations were conducted against the spirit of a protocol established by the Rump (and nominally continued under the Protectorate) that forbade diplomats from meeting

6 Andrew Marvell, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Longman, 2003), 258 (hereafter, Marvell ). 7 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 40–69. 8 This is to simplify changing tensions between the newsbooks, the increasingly unpopular Rump and then Barebone’s Parliament, and the commissioners, who sympathized with popular idealism in many respects, but in others were constrained by it. See Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 51–148. 9 Ibid. 159. 10 Ibid. 140–3. 11 Ibid. 141. 12 Journal, ii. 135–6. 13 Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Knopf, 1973), 406, 456.

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state oYcials other than those commissioned to treat with them; this rule was disregarded when it suited the English, and succeeded only in exasperating the quarantined foreign diplomats.14 The inception of the Protectorate in December 1653 made Cromwell’s status less ambiguous, but the change made English diplomacy, if anything, yet more irregular: diplomacy became the business of a small number of ‘grossly overworked’ ‘amateurs’ who infuriated visitors with their eccentricities and lapses in protocol.15 Whitelocke’s instructions were issued by Parliament, but Cromwell met Whitelocke privately to discuss them. Cromwell’s foreign policy in the Baltic has been vindicated from the claim that it was dominated by a naı¨ve and anachronistic nostalgia for the campaigns of Christina’s father, Gustavus Adolphus: Michael Roberts has shown how carefully Protectoral policy appeased and encouraged Sweden as a natural ally without further provoking the Dutch.16 Whitelocke’s alliance was similarly grounded in pragmatic strategy. Publicly, he was instructed to make sure that royalists were obstructed from access to Christina, and to challenge misrepresentations of the English, so that a ‘good understanding and correspondence’ might be kept between the states, which would at once protect trade and the interests of the Protestant church.17 Secretly, Parliament instructed him to see what preparations could be made for an alliance against the Dutch and the Danes to open the Sound. Cromwell agreed, but told Whitelocke that the priority was to make a public treaty quickly: Sweden was the only state disposed to make such a treaty, and Whitelocke had to move fast because the Dutch were ‘tampering’ with the Queen.18 An outline treaty, with the particulars and any aggressive alliance to be negotiated later, would make that tampering more diYcult, but it would also grant the English government an international legitimacy that no other state had oVered, and which peace negotiations with the Dutch had been doing little to promote.19 In the course of Whitelocke’s negotiations in Sweden, he presented three Latin poems to Christina in manuscript, by Daniel Whistler, Charles Wolseley, and Andrew Marvell. These poems were written shortly after the inception of the Protectorate, the stability and legitimacy of which would to a large degree depend on the regime securing recognition and allies abroad. Whitelocke recorded the

14 Michael Roberts, ‘Cromwell and the Baltic’, English Historical Review, 76 (1961), 402–46 (410–11); Lodewijck Huygens, The English Journal, 1651–1652, trans. Alfred Gustave Herbert Bachrach and R. G. Collmer (Leiden: E. J. Brill and Leiden University Press, 1982), 50. 15 Roberts, ‘Cromwell and the Baltic’, 410–12. 16 Ibid.; see also Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 138–52. 17 Journal, i. 84–92. 18 Ibid. i. 15. 19 See the introduction to the 2nd edn. of Whitelocke’s journal: A Journal of the Swedish Embassy, in the Years 1653 and 1654 . . . , ed. C. Morton, 2nd edn., rev. Henry Reeve, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), i. p. xliv.


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embassy’s progress in a journal which provides a vivid context for these poems:20 it reveals Whitelocke’s struggle to impress with his civility and competence in courtly language and behaviour, yet maintain a distinctively English plainness, religiosity, and didactic vocation at Christina’s famously punctilious court.21 She had sent an envoy to England early in 1653 to solicit an alliance, but expected an ambassador of high rank to come to Sweden to negotiate terms. Whitelocke was one of the few men available to Parliament of adequate dignity and ‘abilities’: he was Commissioner of the Great Seal, but he was also a lawyer and a political survivor who had helped to organize the Inns of Court masque The Triumph of Peace for Charles I, negotiated with the King on behalf of Parliament, and sat as a Rump MP.22 The newsbook Mercurius Politicus had portrayed Sweden as the Commonwealth’s natural ally against the Dutch, but the Swedes were by no means uniWed by good intentions to the republic, and Whitelocke needed constantly to be alert to attempts to insult it.23 Whitelocke’s Diary and Journal record many instances of abusive and sometimes violent attacks on the ambassadorial ‘family’. Christina had at Wrst been horriWed by the regicide, and some of her servants continued to challenge Whitelocke. The ‘cavalier’ William Ballenden slighted Whitelocke openly.24 Points of tension between puritan or republican doctrine and Swedish culture presented opportunities for antagonistic courtiers to score points. Christina’s Master of Ceremonies embarrassed Whitelocke by proposing a series of healths to the Commonwealth and Cromwell in the knowledge that the English government disapproved of health drinking and that Whitelocke could not be seen to participate.25 The son of Milton’s opponent 20 Whitelocke’s Journal exists in several manuscripts: the earliest version is a volume (Longleat House, Whitelocke Papers, MS 124a) into which he and his secretaries copied correspondence, oYcial documents, and records of conversations and interviews, in French, English, Latin, and cipher. At some point in the period between the embassy’s return and the Restoration, Whitelocke reworked this manuscript, very probably using another source of memoirs, into a much larger didactic work in which records of correspondence and audiences are interspersed with lengthy meditations on moral and political topics (British Library, Additional MSS 37346–7). This version of the Journal was by stages cut and polished into a less prosaically didactic account of the embassy (British Library, Additional MS 4902), upon which the two printed editions are based. These manuscripts reveal the development of Whitelocke’s literary account of his behaviour (below, pp. 10–11, 13–14). Longleat MS 124a yielded the previously unknown presentation text of Marvell’s ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’: see Edward Holberton, ‘The Textual Transmission of Marvell’s ‘‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’’: The Longleat Manuscript’, English Manuscript Studies, 12 (2005), 233–53, where I also discuss the relationship between the journals in more detail. For ease of reference I will quote from the Wrst printed edition of the Journal where it is not contradicted by Longleat MS 124a. Where these texts diverge signiWcantly, I will refer to Longleat MS 124a by date instead of folio, because the folio numbers are illegible in the microWlm of this document available in some libraries: ‘Longleat MS 124a’, in The Whitelocke Papers from the Archives of the Marquess of Bath, 22 microWlm reels (East Ardsley: EP Microform, 1972), reel 22. 21 Journal, i. 13; Fabian Persson, ‘The Courts of the Vasa and Palatines c.1523–1751’, in John Adamson (ed.), The Princely Courts of Europe (London: Seven Dials, Cassell, 2000), 275–93 (280). 22 Journal, i. 14. 23 See, e.g., Mercurius Politicus, 24 Mar. 1653, 23[2]8–30. 24 Diary, 336. 25 Journal, i. 227–8.

10


Salmasius attempted to take up his father’s arguments with Whitelocke, but Whitelocke tactfully replied that the matter was too high for their judgement.26 Christina herself asked Whitelocke provocative questions on occasion, including whether or not the English were hypocrites in their piety.27 She repeatedly tested how far Whitelocke’s principles would prevent him from participating in court social life. He refused an invitation to a Sunday ball because it was on the Lord’s Day, only to be invited to another on a diVerent day soon afterwards; worrying that he might appear ‘too severe and morose’, he accepted this and a number of subsequent invitations.28 In its later literary incarnations, the Journal proudly reports the success of his attendances at Christina’s masques: at the Wrst, the Swedish ladies invited the English gentlemen to dance English country dances with them, and the gentlemen taught them some more; at the next masque Christina announced: The Hollanders reported to me a great while since, that all the noblesse of England were of the king’s party, and none butt mechanicks of the parlement party, and not a gentleman among them; now I thought to trye you, and to shame you if you could not daunce: butt I see, that you are a gentleman, and have bin bred a gentleman . . . I take it as a favour, that you were willing to lay aside your gravity, and play the courtier uppon my request; which I see you can doe so well when you please.29

However, the Wrst version of the Journal suggests that the earlier masque, at least, was more awkward. A lady took Whitelocke’s son James to dance a corranto, ‘at wch he is not very apt’; afterwards he and two other English gentlemen ‘daunced some English Country daunces wth the Queene and her Ladies and Caviliers’.30 This reads rather as if the court took up English country dances because the ambassador’s retinue could not dance anything else, which would not have helped dispel the impression that the parliamentarians were an ill-bred party. Whitelocke’s task in dispelling detrimental impressions was not made any easier by the English tendencies towards idealism and lax protocol in the diplomacy outlined above. He needed considerable skills to answer the demands of those whom he was supposed to represent at the Swedish court without seeming rude. At one of his Wrst private audiences, Whitelocke artfully presented a letter and a mastiV dog on behalf of Hugh Peters.31 As Cromwell’s trusted chaplain and an enthusiastic campaigner for closer unity among Protestant states,

26 Ibid. i. 203. Christina had patronized Salmasius, and his son was a captain in the Swedish army. 27 Ibid. i. 297. 28 Ibid. i. 304. 29 Ibid. i. 304–5; ii. 155–7. 30 Longleat MS 124a, 6 Jan. 31 I have been unable to Wnd this letter, but the Dutch agent Jongestall reported that it was written in defence of the regicide and Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump: John Thurloe, A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch, 7 vols. (London, 1742), i. 583 (hereafter, Thurloe Papers).


11

Hugh Peters had been using his ambiguous status to conduct Cromwell’s private diplomacy, to the annoyance of the Council of State.32 Whitelocke was conscious that it risked appearing presumptuous for a low-ranking oYcial to address the Queen through the highest channels, irrespective of his closeness to Cromwell, so the ambassador arranged an elegant accident: The great MastiVe dogge Lyon comming into the chamber after me where the Queene was, she made much of him, & asked me if he were a good conditioned dogge, I sayd yeas, butt I did not well knowe whose dogge it was, she asked me if it were not mine, I sayd I could not tell, for some of my people informed me that one Mr Peters had sent him for a present to her M, she asked who that Mr Peters was, I sayd he was a gentleman of a good family & had bin in all our Warres, & a Collonell, & was also an excellent preacher, she sayd that was much that he should be a preacher & a soldier, I tould her we had many who were so, then she sayd that Mr Peters had sent her a letter, I told her I heard so butt did not thinke it Wtt to deliver either the letter or the Dogge from a private man to her M, she sayd that she had had many letters from private men & that the dogge and the letter did belong to her, and she would have them, I answeared that she might commaund in this place, & all must obey her & so I would also.33

Even though Christina anticipated the letter, Whitelocke allows her to take the initiative for receiving the letter and gift, and so emphasizes his respect for protocol and social distinction in semi-serious scorn of Peters’s actions. Yet he praises Peters by criteria ordered for Christina’s ear: Wrst, he is a gentleman, then a colonel (the Swedish court was still heavily militarized), and only lastly a preacher, although he defends the combination quite Wrmly when Christina all but scoVs at it (Whitelocke would later be questioned on this alien feature of English culture in greater detail).34 Whitelocke’s presentation involves a measure of daring which elicits playful responses from Christina, even to the point of Xirtatiousness (‘she sayd that she had had many letters from private men’). He makes audacity charming, and so, by association, Peters’s boldness perhaps seems less uncouth. In a later version of the Journal, Whitelocke introduces the dog almost as if it represents the English character: ‘It is an English mastiVe . . . The more courage they have, the more gentle they are.’35 The episode shows Whitelocke beginning to transform a potentially disruptive English bluVness into something more creditable at Christina’s court. Whitelocke’s attempts to displace hostile caricatures of the English polity often took the form of compliments and arguments aiming to persuade the Swedes of 32 Raymond Phineas Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan: Hugh Peters, 1598–1660 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1954), 391. 33 Longleat MS 124a, 30 Dec. Peters sometimes seems to have lacked the judgement required of a diplomat: when he showed a party of Dutch diplomats his series of expensively commissioned, but apparently amateurish paintings of battles from the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the visitors strained not to laugh: Huygens, English Journal, 50–1. 34 Persson, ‘Courts of the Vasa’, 287. 35 Journal, i. 278. The mastiV symbolizes the English in the poem ‘Anglia Victrix’, translated and published in Mercurius Politicus, 10 Mar. 1653, 2296–7.

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homologies between English and Swedish cultures. On several occasions during his negotiations, Whitelocke was pressed to give an account of English authority. When Christina’s chancellor Axel Oxenstierna asked how Cromwell was declared Protector, Whitelocke understated the agency of the army oYcers: By the generall consent of the people; of the governours of the citties of London and Westminster, of the magistrates, and of the parliament ittself, who, by writing, did resigne their power unto the lord protector, and agreed upon this forme of government. Besides, the oYcers and souldiers of the army and navy, in whose hands the strength of the nation is, freely consented hereunto.36

Whitelocke encouraged Christina’s speculations that Cromwell was on the verge of becoming a king by asserting continuities between the present regime and previous monarchies.37 To Oxenstierna he insisted: ‘we hold the governement of England, as to the fundamentalls of it, to be the same now, as when we had a king; the same lawes, the same supreame power, and the same magistrates’.38 Whitelocke not only played down the constitutional signiWcance of the regicide, but his legalistic deWnition of the continuing ‘fundamentalls’ of government Wtted them to a perspective that can be shared by the two lawyers. In numerous subtle ways, Whitelocke misrepresented the structure of English government to make it appear more like the Swedish court. Foreign policy matters were usually discussed by the Council of State, but Whitelocke allowed both Christina and an exiled Danish courtier to believe that information would be passed conWdentially to Cromwell alone.39 At one point he showed Christina a secret ink, which he claimed made his letters unreadable by any but Cromwell and Thurloe; only one letter written in this ink survives.40 Diminishing the apparent diVerence between the English government and the Swedish monarchy was necessary to win the sympathies of the Swedish court, but it answered more pressing needs too. A battle for diplomatic precedence developed between Whitelocke and the Danish ambassador, who argued that the English should be demoted in the ceremonial pecking order because Cromwell was not an anointed king. Whitelocke contended: ‘I understand no diVerence of power between king and protector, or anointed, or not anointed, and ambassadors are the same publique ministers to a protector or common-wealth as to a prince or sultan.’41 Whitelocke also pointed to broader kinships between the two states. When Christina commended the New Model Army, Whitelocke replied that it learnt its piety

36 Thurloe Papers, ii. 42. Contrast the account of the Protectorate’s genesis given in Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 352–90. 37 Journal, i. 296. 38 Ibid. i. 320. 39 Ibid. i. 265, 268–74; ii. 34; Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 16–18. 40 Journal, i. 277; Ruth Spalding, Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 66–7. 41 Journal, ii. 48.


13

from Gustavus Adolphus’s army.42 A draft of a speech survives for the presentation to Christina of an English grammar (Christina was famed for being a prodigious linguist): Whitelocke promised that ‘itwill be the lesse troublesome toyour Mty bicause many of our wordes are the same with yours of Sweden’.43 In conversation with commissioner Eric Oxenstierna, Whitelocke proposed English equivalents of Swedish customs and encouraged his speculations that English and Swedish customs developed from a common ancient root.44 Whitelocke even encouraged Eric’s father, Chancellor Oxenstierna, to identify the two states’ legal constitutions: ‘Your lawes are founded uppon great reason and prudence; and in these, and most other main parts and particulars of them, our’s are the same in England.’45 Whitelocke had to be suYciently truthful about English politics to preserve his credit at a well-intelligenced court (itself no easy task during the shift between the republic and the Protectorate), but he shaded these truths, dropped hints, and intimated that in more fundamental respects Cromwell sat atop a monarchy in all but name. The later versions of his Journal feature several conversations with Christina about Cromwell’s likelihood of becoming king, which do not appear in the Wrst version of the Journal. This does not indicate that they are Wctions. The Journal is a product of the embassy chancery and is written by several hands.46 Whitelocke was wary that members of his retinue might be spying for diVerent interests in England, so details of more sensitive discussions may have been reserved for his pocketbook. Blair Worden has written that Whitelocke’s revisions tend not to transform, but to ‘heighten and improve’, his recollections, and Whitelocke wrote up his private conversations in French with Christina as polished rhetorical dialogues in English.47 He creates a literary drama around Christina’s attempt to understand the Instrument of Government. Before news of the change reaches Sweden, they discuss Cromwell presciently: Qu[een]: Much of the story of your generall hath some paralell with that of my auncestor Gustavus the Wrst, who, from a private gentleman of a noble family, was advanced to the title of marshall of Sweden, bicause he had risen up and rescued his country from the bondage and oppression which the king of Denmarke had putt uppon them, and expelled that king; and for his reward, he was att last elected king of Sweden; and I believe that your generall will be king of England in conclusion. Wh[itelocke]: Pardon me, madame, that cannot be, bicause England is resolved into a common-wealth; and my generall hath already suYcient power and greatnes, as generall of all their forces both by sea and land, which may content him. 42 Ibid. i. 253–4. There were, of course, great diVerences between the two armies, in organization and supply. See Whitelocke’s representation of the Swedish army: Journal, ii. 135; and the account in Michael Roberts (ed.), Swedish Diplomats at Cromwell’s Court, 1655–1656: The Missions of Peter Julius Coyet and Christer Bonde (London: Royal Historical Society, 1988), 9. 43 Longleat House, Whitelocke Papers, XV, fo. 43r. 44 Journal, ii. 194. 45 Ibid. ii. 227. 46 See Holberton, ‘Textual Transmission of Marvell’s ‘‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’’ ’. 47 Blair Worden, ‘The ‘‘Diary’’ of Bulstrode Whitelocke’, English Historical Review, 108 (1993), 122–34 (129).

14


Qu[een]: Resolve what you will, I believe he resolves to be king; and hardly can any power or greatnes be called suYcient, when the nature of man is so prone (as in these dayes) to all ambition. Wh[itelocke]: I Wnd no such nature in my generall. Qu[een]: It may easily be concealed till an opportunity serve, and then it will show itselfe. Wh[itelocke]: All are mortall men, subject to aVections.48

Christina develops the parallel between Cromwell and heroes of the house of Vasa that Whitelocke pointed up repeatedly during the embassy.49 Whitelocke responds in a plain rhetorical style. First he uses the Wgure of parrhesia (begging pardon in advance for necessary candour), hard upon which follows his stark contradiction.50 Then he contradicts the Queen a second time, and, asked a third time, he gives a reply that sounds similarly plain, being pithy and aphoristic, but is more ambiguous, and hints that he might secretly agree with Christina. After news of the Protectorate arrives, they resume their discussion. Qu[een]: Why is the title, Protector, when the power is kingly? Wh[itelocke]: I cannot satisfy your majesty of the reasons of this title, being att so great a distance from the inventors of it . . . Qu[een]: Is your protector sacred as other kings are? Wh[itelocke]: He is not anointed and crowned; those ceremonies were not used to him. Qu[een]: His power is the same with that of king, and why should not his title have bin the same? Wh[itelocke]: It is the power which makes the title, and not the title the power; our protector thinkes he hath enough of both. Qu[een]: He is hardly a mortall man then; butt he hath brought his buisness notably to passe, and hath done great things: I give you my hand for it, that I have a great value of him.51

Whitelocke evades the question at Wrst, but after a series of provocative questions from Christina, he gives a fuller reply. Again he endeavours to make ambiguousness sound plain, abruptly paring down a chiasmus (inverting the order of repeated words or phrases) with zeugma (where one word is used to govern several congruent words or clauses), before gathering the terms into an economic Wnal clause. In the above dialogues, Whitelocke may well have heightened his Xair for negotiating the tensions of his interviews with Christina, but in his eVorts to speak plainly, yet suggest cultural homologies that might be conducive to an alliance, his strategy is consistent with the persona that Whitelocke adopted in better-documented speeches, including his Wrst public speech at court. After presenting his credentials, this address was read in English by Whitelocke, with 48 Journal, i. 296. 49 See, e.g., Whitelocke’s Wrst speech to the court, discussed below, pp. 15–16. 50 Here and throughout I use deWnitions of rhetorical Wgures derived from Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 51 Journal, i. 328–30.


15

his chaplain Charles de la Marche translating it into French (the language imposed on the court by Christina) clause by clause.52 The speech is subtly reticent with names. The English parliament is mentioned only twice, as the victorious party in Whitelocke’s mini-narrative of the Civil War and as the origin of Whitelocke’s proposal of friendship, thus blurring the Long Parliament and Barebone’s Parliament. Whitelocke refers three times to ‘the common-wealth of England’, which he identiWes at the beginning as ‘his superiors’, and afterwards refers to the wishes of his superiors and the responsibilities of their servant. Similarly, the Stuart kings are identiWed only as ‘those who followed queen Elizabeth’, the royalists are called ‘our adversaries’, the phrase used twice to mean the royalists of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the present regime’s enemies, and the regicide is referred to obliquely as a change in government. Whitelocke’s use of the Wrst person plural is similarly blurred: it slips between meaning the English, the British, the parliamentarians, and his ambassadorial ‘family’. The combined eVect of these blurs is to simplify the present English body politic, its evolution, and its enemies. It is remarkable, therefore, that the Wrst person plural is at no point used to refer to the English and the Swedish together, who are repeatedly called ‘the two nations’. One should not make too much of this, but it is part of a diVerent tendency in this speech, of aVected confrontation with Whitelocke’s auditors. Thus, halfway through his opening speech Whitelocke plunges into a narrative of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, which is surprising given that until very recently Christina had sympathized with the royalists. This surprise is combined with a series of rhetorical Wgures of brevity: the Wrst four sentences each feature a form of zeugma; three periods begin with an occultatio (emphasizing something by pointedly seeming to pass over it). The Wrst of these identiWes the plain style as a national characteristic, and particularly with the new English government: I shall not weary [your majesty] with many wordes, or expressions, bejond meaning. I am not sent hither for that cause, and it is as diVerent from my own spirit, as contrary to the practice and commaunds of my superiors; from whom, and from their servant, (according to the english reality) your majesty will Wnd all manner of plainness and truth in our transactions.

The repetition of occultatio at the beginning of three out of four consecutive periods emphasizes the Wgure cumulatively. In the third instance the Wgure becomes more self-consciously rhetorical: I shall not inlarge my discourse with observations concerning both nations, of their likeness in language, lawes, manners, and warlike dispositions, arguments more natural, then artiWciall, for a neerer union: butt this I may not omit (the fruits whereof I have tasted) the present happy governement under your majesty, which remembers unto us, 52 The speech is reprinted in Journal, i. 235–42.

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those blessed days of our virgin queen Elizabeth, under whom, above forty years, the people injoyed all protection and justice from their prince, and she, all obediece and aVection from her people.

Whitelocke animates this occultatio with a distinction derived from Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The rhetorician would divide arguments into artiWcial arguments, points needing discovery, and unartiWcial, directly observable persuasions needing no discovery: the textbooks’ usual example of unartiWcial arguments is the testimony of witnesses.53 The allusion to a stage in the composition of rhetoric is itself a gesture of openness. Yet the occultatio undercuts this and its own profession of the plain style with a subtle irony: by claiming to pass over these similarities because they are manifest, Whitelocke is presenting them to the audience as artfully, if not more artfully, than the ‘discovered’ arguments that an alliance will beneWt Anglo–Swedish trade and the Protestant religion. The irony is clearly intentional and draws attention to the rhetorical sophistication of Whitelocke’s speech. The auditor is primed to listen for alliance-inducing similarities between England and Sweden, notwithstanding Whitelocke’s promise to leave them out of his argument. The attentive auditor will hear plenty. Whitelocke’s subsequent narrative of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the telling of which, as noted above, is an act of plain speaking, dates the origin of the troubles to the accession of James I. The peace was lost through the ill government of the followers of Elizabeth I. The Stuarts attempted ‘to ravish from us our highest interest, the orthodoxe religion and just liberty’, and Whitelocke cites Gustavus Adolphus as a defender of these values. Thus Whitelocke synchronizes the Wars of the Three Kingdoms with the Thirty Years War, and Cromwell appears to follow Adolphus’s example in Wghting for the same ‘just liberty’. The two soldiers are ‘crowned alike, with gratious successe by the Almighty’, a metaphor that harmonizes with Christina’s views on the divine origins of monarchical authority. By placing Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus on the same trajectory, Whitelocke invites speculation that Cromwell’s career will follow a similar path to consolidating a royal dynasty. Thus Whitelocke’s plainness is supple and rhetorical, and in these respects it is an idiom adjusted to the milieu of Christina’s court. Even by the standards of early modern princes, she was immoderately fond of theatrum mundi (the world is a stage) commonplaces, littering letters with theatrical metaphors and composing maxims such as ‘to be unable to dissimulate is to be unable to live’.54 A good performance pleased Christina, as the presentation of Peters’s letter demonstrated. Whitelocke observed a more extreme example at the departure 53 William Kneale and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 302–3; Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 106–7. 54 See Monica Setterwall, ‘Queen Christina and Role-Playing in Maxim Form’, Scandinavian Studies, 57 (1985), 162–73 (162).


17

of the favoured Spanish ambassador, who made himself pale and shake to please the Queen.55 Christina sought a similar response from Whitelocke at his Wrst audience, ‘coming up close to him, [and] by her looks and gestures (as was supposed) would have daunted him’, but she seems not to have been displeased that he instead assumed a posture and rhetorical style that seems all but deWant compared to the behaviour of the Spanish ambassador.56 Indeed, Whitelocke’s sternness seems to have excited her as a guise that could be put on and oV as occasions demanded: hence her compliment that Whitelocke could ‘lay aside [his] gravity, and play the courtier uppon my request’.57 Whitelocke also had to answer to the expectations of the English government, which received reports of Whitelocke’s progress from various sources, and English newsbook readers. His speech was published in Mercurius Politicus along with frequent newsletters from a member of his entourage.58 One of these proudly reports how Christina had tried to intimidate Whitelocke; yet ‘those that have been used in AVairs of the Commonwealth of England, are not so soon put out of countenance, as some other publick Ministers have been by her Majesty’.59 A member of a London congregation wrote to Whitelocke in response to reports of his refusal to drink healths or masque on a Sunday: My soul and many more have bin sett a praysing God on your behalfe, for that noble christian testimony and dislike of that wicked custome of cup-health pledging; wheras a christian’s health is God, and his cup, salvation. And blessed be the Lord, that did give you to dislike the balle of pleasure; and that the Lord of that day was so pretious. Goe on nobly for the Lord; give your testimony against the wicked customes of a strange countrey, or dying world; beare his image in all your transactions, and follow his steppes, who was the most glorious ambassador that ever was.60

He transcribed this letter with words of approval in the Wrst version of the Journal and read it to his retinue, which is one of many indications that he tacked between these diVerent sets of cultural expectations not by dispassionate calculation, but with anxious reference to his beliefs. The later versions of the Journal represent more of this reXection. Shortly before departing from England, he meditated on ‘the buisines and duety of ambassadors’ by consulting Genesis 24 and its expositions.61 His notes on the duties of an ambassador (probably written after the embassy) are dominated by questions of the place of moral precepts in determining an ambassador’s actions: As he is not to publish every thing that he knows, so he is not to declare any thing contrary to his knowledge, but all things in plainness and clearness of truth, which cannot be contradicted, nor is liable to shame and penitence.62 55 Journal, ii. 8. 56 Ibid. i. 235. 57 Ibid. ii. 157. 58 Perhaps Whitelocke’s Master of the Horse, Robert Stapleton, who seems to have been corresponding with Marchamont Nedham during the embassy: see Nedham’s letter reprinted in Spalding, Contemporaries of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 218. 59 Mercurius Politicus, 26 Jan. 1654, 3243. 60 Ibid. 19 Jan. 1654, 3026; Journal, i. 507–8. 61 Ibid. i. 61. 62 Ibid. ii. 460.

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Moral topics were addressed by most writers of early modern diplomatic handbooks in relation to other requirements of an ambassador, but Whitelocke’s exclusive concentration on Wdelity and plainness give the maxims a unique character.63 Whitelocke achieved success through a mixture of careful planning and more opportunistic gestures. After the treaty was signed, he gave Christina an English Bible, admonished her to observe Sundays and be mindful of her soul, although the confrontational gesture disguised diplomatic work, in that the Bible was richly decorated, and thus more attuned to the ceremonious liturgy of Swedish Lutheranism than the devotions of Protectoral Whitehall.64 But an exchange at least as eVective (and which Whitelocke was clearly very proud of ) took place when he had been invited to a courtier’s wedding masque as the guest of honour. Whitelocke hatched a ‘drollery’ that gently parodied the fears which a royal court might have of an English ambassador.65 Christina had extended the masque for hours of dancing, but Whitelocke desired an end and said to Bundt, one of Christina’s senators, that he thought Christina was ‘a tyrant’. Tyranny was a highly sensitive term: its deWnition and legitimate remedies had become the crux of European controversy over the regicide, and even though Salmasius had fallen out of favour with Christina, she yet expressed to Whitelocke her uneasiness with the arguments in Milton’s First Defence. Unsurprisingly, Bundt looked shocked, and with a little prodding told the Queen, who came over and asked Whitelocke’s meaning ‘in some quicknes and seeming distast’. Whitelocke told her that the bride and groom wanted to go to bed rather than dance, ‘and this is all the cruelty and tyranny wherwith I can accuse your majesty’. Christina laughed and promised, ‘you shall see a present reformation’. Whitelocke’s physician, Daniel Whistler, had been singled out for favour by Christina, who summoned him to her bedside while she was ill to discuss medicine.66 Whistler’s poem was presented to Christina a month after this interview, when Christina had announced her plan to abdicate, and she seemed to be losing interest in the treaty with England. The reasons for Christina’s abdication and the delay in signing Whitelocke’s treaty are highly complicated, and at the time when Whistler composed the poem, Christina’s true motives and intentions were a matter of intense speculation. Axel Oxenstierna and the commissioners for negotiation showed anxiety that an alliance with England, if made on the wrong terms, would drag them into the Anglo–Dutch war and thus also war with Denmark, which was allied with the United Provinces. They stalled to see the outcome of England’s negotiations with the Dutch, yet, as the success 63 For a discussion of diplomatic handbooks, see Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955), 211–23. 64 Journal, ii. 100–2; Diary, 355; Longleat House, Whitelocke Papers, XIV, fos. 43r–v. 65 Journal, ii. 156–8. 66 Journal, i. 408–9; Diary, 332.


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of that treaty appeared more likely, Oxenstierna became reluctant to seal a treaty with England before Christina’s successor was crowned.67 These obstructions coincided with the decay of Christina’s interest in the treaty, as she negotiated the conditions of her abdication with her successor Charles, and seemed to be acquiescing to a tacit shift of power over the treaty to him.68 Whitelocke found it increasingly hard to get access to Christina, and when he could, her attention was sporadic, or she proposed new, sometimes unrealistic, amendments.69 The Protector’s secretary, John Thurloe, hinted darkly that Whitelocke’s treatment at the Swedish court was beginning to resemble the ignominious treatment of Oliver St John in the United Provinces.70 Whitelocke resolved to use ‘all the means of courtship and civilities’ to encourage Christina to take the negotiations into her own hands. Whistler’s poem was presented just after Christina had agreed to discuss the articles privately with Whitelocke, in parallel with his negotiations with Oxenstierna.71 It is a declamation on the subject of Christina’s abdication, and begins with a series of abrasive questions addressed to Christina. Ergone Hyperboreum cœlum indignata recusat, Sustentare humeris nova terra incognita Atlantis? Æternis regere imperiis Christina, Suecos Delassata paves? percussis fascibus horres Regia Virgo (velut Conjux Plebeia Stolonis) Sceptra cui crepitacula erant? quæ terminat astris Famam jam non ferre potest servire pararis Imperium: regnum, et pannus Bombycinus urit. Quænam hæc mollities animi? tu Martia proles Gustavi: tanti talem quæ fulmina terrent? Obstrepat usque licet Umbratica turba togata: Divitias non posse pati: si prospera ringant InWrmi est animi indicium quem Jupiter ipse Vix sanare potest: facilis Deus hisce salutem Toxica propinat, reddens optantibus Orcum. (ll. 1–15)72

Whitelocke composed his own translation of the poem:

67 Journal, i. 491–4. Whitelocke suspected that the chancellor’s family had economic interests which would be harmed by the treaty: Ruth Spalding, The Improbable Puritan: A Life of Bulstrode Whitelocke, 1605–1675 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), 175. 68 Journal, ii. 40. 69 e.g. the binding of Cromwell to protect her interests if any of her successors turn against her: ibid. ii. 3, 62–3. 70 Ibid. ii. 87. 71 Ibid. i. 376, 475–7. 72 Whistler’s poem is reproduced from the Journal, ii. 474–6. I give Whitelocke’s own translations (i. 508–10), though in places it expands on the Latin. I am indebted to Victoria Moul for help with allusions in this poem and the other Latin poems connected with the embassy.

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Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden What then tho’ northern heaven do’st thou disdaine, New Atlas on thy shoulders to sustaine? Wearied Christina, se’est thou any feare Eternall empire ore the Swedes to beare? O princely virgin, do’st abhorre the strife Of fasces, like the vulgar Stolo’s wife, That sceptres look’st for rattles? Who doth bound With starres her fame, yett cannot now be found Content to governe those, who ready are To serve, with all aVection and care. What doth a kingdome, or silke garments burne? Unto what softnes of the mind doth turne Gustavus’ martiall race? of one so greate, What thunder-bolts doe fright thee from thy seate? Lett croudes of gownmen prattle what they please; Wealth not to suVer, and if prosperous ease Torment, a feeble mind this doth reveale, Which hardly Jupiter himselfe can heale; Who easy to their health can poyson frame, And give the grave to those that wish the same.

Whitelocke’s English does not do justice to the pointedness of the Latin. Lines 3 and 6 allude to the Aeneid, vi. 851 and i. 287, where the imperium of Rome and Caesar is prophesied. The allusions hint that by abdicating, Christina is neglecting a duty like that taken up by Aeneas. This prophetic language is deployed satirically, and combines with an allusion to Juvenal’s sixth satire, against marriage (l. 260).73 Whistler echoes Juvenal’s jab at the imputed luxuriousness of elite women. His questions in the Wrst half of the poem aVect harshness: the sonorous ‘Regia Virgo’ is juxtaposed with the diminutive ‘crepitacula’; alliteration throws ‘mollities’ and ‘Martia’ into a jarring antithesis, and the thunderbolt is followed bathetically by the academics’ prattle. The reference to Stolo’s wife (l. 5) is an allusion to Livy.74 Stolo was galvanized to pursue a reformatory political career by his plebeian wife, after she was ridiculed for being startled by the ceremonial knock of the fasces. Whistler exploits the potential of Latin verse to be more familiar with Christina than he could be in person.75 Invoking Livy, who was reputed for succinct and independent-minded moral analysis, helps to temper the satire into a frank didactic voice. Whistler creates his own version of Whitelocke’s plain-speaking emissary. However, this is only to set up a volte-face at line 40, when Whistler accepts the Queen’s abdication. He exclaims ‘heu vanus vates sim talia fando’ (‘What a 73 Juvenal and Persius, ed. and trans. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 258. 74 Livy, ed. and trans. E. H. Warmington et al., 14 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), iii: Books V, VI and VII, trans. B. O. Foster, 312–17. 75 For a discussion of intimacy in neo-Latin verse, see Fred J. Nichols (ed. and trans.), An Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 1–3.


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vaine prophet am I this to say!’), and the high register of ‘vates’ deXates the prophetic language deployed in the Wrst section of the poem. In the preceding lines, Whistler implores Christina to submit to the fate allotted to her and reign until she becomes stelliWed as a new North Star. This image is revised by the realization that Christina is greater than fate (l. 41), and because fortune cannot lessen her innate and singular virtues, she will always command the poet’s obedience. Even among private citizens, her superior native light cannot be eclipsed: Sis privata licet, quæcunque per Arva pererras Non potes, ut cupias, nativaˆ luce refulgens DeWcere eclipsi; repacta crepuscula tanti Syderis extinguent Lucem vulgaribus astris. (ll. 48–51) Should’st thou stray (As private persons doe) in any way, Thou can’st not be conceal’d, thy native light To suVer an eclipse doth shine too bright. Refracted twylight of so great a starre Obscures the light of those that vulgar are.

The violent contrasts that deWned Christina’s singularity in the earlier sections are resolved into the more sublime image of Christina outshining the vulgar. The image of abdication as death is also revised, by the pastoral image of wandering the Welds and the attractively delicate refracted twilight. The reXexive violence of Christina’s wilfulness becomes an image of self-suYciency: she can strike herself into happiness (‘sibi cudere læta’, l. 44). The poem’s outspoken opening takes a liberty with protocol like those that Whitelocke takes in his plainness and drolleries: it steps outside the bounds of conventional obsequiousness, only to set up a turn that might appeal to the Queen’s taste for courtly theatre. It also revives an intimacy with Christina that both Whistler and Whitelocke had previously enjoyed, but which now seemed to be waning. Christina’s court, like most other European courts, created symbolic theatre from access to the monarch; she had invited Whistler to her bedside when she was ill to make another show of esteem for the English.76 Whistler’s poem struggles to understand her abdication from another position of theatrical familiarity. I have suggested that courtly theatricality excited Christina’s imagination in a way that for Whitelocke posed problems of conscience and judgement over the extent and implications of his own acting. Whistler’s poem, however, has the alibi of inconsequential fun; yet he argues with Christina about her abdication in terms that he observed shrewdly. Whistler wrote directly to Cromwell to 76 See John Adamson, ‘The Making of the Ancien-Re´gime Court 1500–1700’, in idem, Princely Courts of Europe, 7–41 (13); also Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003).

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explain that Christina had invested the imperial ambassador Montecuculi in her chivalric order of Amaranta: Whilst shee was more bookishly given, shee had in her thoughts to institute an order of Parnassus; but shee beeing of late more addicted to the court than the schooles, and having in a pastoral comedie, herselfe acted a sheapheardesse part called Amaranta, wherein the pastoral song in Italian had viva Amaranta, the humor tooke her to institute for her order that of Amaranta.77

His poem engages competently with the theatrical rhetoric and personae current at Christina’s court. In the Wrst part of his poem, amid tragic images of abdication, he accuses her of sacriWcing Pallas. During the period in which Christina had been ‘more bookishly given’, she had been frequently represented as Pallas, including on a medal that she awarded to continental scholars.78 In lines 48–51 Whistler comes to accept the abdication as assuming a pastoral disguise, like the princes who disguise themselves as shepherds in pastoral comedies and romances. He oVers Christina new formulations of her abdication by which she might enhance her charisma if she circulated the poem, but in doing so she would reendorse the familiar relationship between them implied by the poem. Even though he ostensibly avoids touching on topics related to Anglo–Swedish relations, Whistler deWnes Christina’s relations with him and her subjects to suggest that certain kinds of political action would beWt the type of dignity he argues for her. An emphasis on Christina’s independence persists through the positive reinterpretation of her abdication. In the Wrst sections of the poem, Christina’s action is deWned by contrasts with the wills of others: the poet, God, the people. When the poet revises his interpretation of the abdication, it is because he realizes that Christina triumphs over fortune, which can at most ‘disguise’ the Queen, but will not succeed in eclipsing her innate and singular light—her ability to command obedience—from shining through. This superiority to fate is also her triumph and vindication over the wishes of the other speakers in the poem, the poet and the people who paradoxically rebel through love; they had feared that abdication would be a kind of death, but her majestic will commands obedience even after she has abdicated. The poem places special emphasis on reXexive verbs: the violent instances of ‘sibi’ are transformed into a positive image of reXexive violence as independence and self-suYciency in ‘sibi cudere læta’, but the reiterated ‘sibi’ emphasizes that she is subject (or object, to put it grammatically) only to herself. By blaming, then praising, Christina’s agency as singular, unrestricted, and, ultimately, immutable, Whistler discourages Christina from acquiescing to a premature shift of power to her successor. In reality there were several groups 77 Thurloe Papers, ii. 104. 78 Iiro Kajanto, Christina Heroina: Mythological and Historical ExempliWcation in the Latin Panegyrics on Christina Queen of Sweden (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1993), 50.


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which could inhibit Christina’s apparent desire to sign the treaty. The Swedish Parliament was to meet to discuss the abdication. Three senators had been appointed to manage the succession, and with the Swedish Privy Council might well have concurred with Oxenstierna’s view that it was better to renegotiate the treaty under the new king.79 Whistler notes in the letter to Cromwell that Christina is ‘of such authority amongst her councel, that she overrules them in most actions’. Whistler tries to break up the reciprocal dependencies of the Swedish body politic by dramatizing the triumph of independent action. The poem develops a thematic tension between political consensus and charismatic acts: by ‘speaking out’ against the Queen, the poet immediately steps into the posture of the maverick, deWned against an implicit verbal consensus. Other oppositions reinforce this tension: the scholars form a crowd to moralize against wealth, their message counterpoised to the independence that the poet urges to Christina; in going against the wishes of her ‘populo’, Christina is herself standing one against the many. Her abdication is imagined as annihilation, because in becoming a private citizen, she will be dissolved into that which her virtues are deWned against. Whistler’s correction of this logic reexpresses the tension by showing Christina outshining the ‘vulgar’ stars. Even as the harshness of the outspoken declamatory voice lessens, there is a compensatory hardening in the words used to describe Christina’s subjects, from ‘populo’ to ‘turba’ to ‘vulgus’. Consistently, the body politic is deWned and deWnes through the struggle of the one against the many. Mediatory institutions or relationships are excluded from the poem, encouraging Christina, on the eve of her abdication, to exercise an absolute prerogative. The Horatian ode sent to Whitelocke by Charles Wolseley,80 a member of the Council of State, also uses classical role playing to take engaging liberties with Christina: he imagines her as Circe delaying Whitelocke’s Ulysses, and exaggerates the harshness of Sweden’s climate and terrain. On Wrst reading, the poem might not seem intended for readers other than its addressee, but the ambassador had few scruples about translating it into English and showing both texts to Christina, who seems to have enjoyed it. Wolseley achieves a genial and lightly ironic tone, which allows him a degree of licence, but does not detract from the political implications of his central theme. Wolseley imagines the embassy to Sweden as the Wrst step in a pan-European irenic programme. Galliam, Hispaniam mox cum Britannis Fœdere perpetuo ligabis. (ll. 14–16)

79 Journal, i. 469. 80 Wolseley’s ode is printed in the Journal, ii. 476. I give Whitelocke’s translation (ii. 10–11), even though it expands Wolseley’s Latin.

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Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden Straight wilt thou see the french and spanish coast; And them fast bind to thy lov’d Britanny, In a perpetuall league of amity.

This is deliberately naı¨ve. Spain and France were vying for an alliance with England so that they could better attack one another, and Cromwell was determined to ally with one against the other to prevent them combining to attack him.81 Christina, Whitelocke, and Wolseley would have known that peace between all three was extremely unlikely. Likewise, as a Councillor of State, Wolseley would have known that Whitelocke was discussing an oVensive alliance with Sweden to open the Sound. But the theme allows Wolseley to stress Whitelocke’s legal credentials: Vitloce, Martis deliciæ, decus Gentis legatæ; te sine, languidum Mœret tribunal, et cubili In viduo Themis ingemiscit. Denso cientes agmine cursitant, Et sempiternas te sine consuunt Lites, neque hic discordiarum Finis erit, nisi tu revertas. (ll. 1–8) Whitelocke, delight of Mars, the ornament Of gowne men, from thy countrey being sent, Tribunalls languish, Themis sad is led, Sighing unter her mourning widdowes bed: Without thee suitors in thick crowdes doe run, Sowing perpetuall strife, which once begun, Till happy fate thee home againe shall send, Those sharpe contentions will have no end.

Whitelocke’s career is separated into two praiseworthy strands: legal and martial. After being separated under their respective deities, these strands are recombined by the metaphor of the strife-creating suitors moving in battle columns (‘agmine’) in his absence, aligning Whitelocke’s activities as a military oYcer with his practice as a lawyer and judge. The connection implies that Parliament’s campaign in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms was consistent with the law. This interpretation of the wars is similar to that advanced in Whitelocke’s speech, but here it is without the religious connotations of Whitelocke’s ‘just liberties’. The ode continues to assimilate Whitelocke’s duties to the law’s maintenance. As a broker of international peace treaties, he will be an arbitrator of peace and a universal chancellor:

81 Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 38–54.


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Sic pacis author, sic pius arbiter Gentes per omnes qua sonuit tuba Dicere; cancellariusque Orbis eris simul universi. (ll. 17–20) So wilt thou arbitrator be of peace, Her pious author; thou wilt cause to cease The sound of war, our ears it shall not pierce; Thou wilt be chancellor of the universe.

Wolseley’s stress on the primacy of law is intended to reassure readers that the new English governors are not rebels. His choice of form sets oV this emphasis: he adopts the metre (Alcaics) used by Horace’s Roman odes, which often connotes a grounded, incorruptible civility, even in a poem that is ostensibly light-hearted.82 Oxenstierna had questioned the legitimacy of the Protectorate with precisely the argument that Wolseley wants to confute, asking Whitelocke if it had not been established arbitrarily by force of the sword. Wolseley might also be defending his own instrumentality in its inception to Whitelocke (Wolseley had taken a leading role in the dissolution of Barebone’s Parliament).83 Horace oVers a model of supple, undogmatic constancy which helps dignify practical political behaviour of the type in which Wolseley and Whitelocke were both enmeshed.84 A conservative apology for recent events in English politics is made more plausible by the act of sending a genial Horatian ode on the subject of Whitelocke’s respectability, which links both men to the diversions and practical ethics of past elites. The playfulness of Wolseley’s characterization of Christina and Sweden helps to determine how the poem’s political naı¨vety should be interpreted. Whitelocke journeys through a Swedish landscape portrayed as inhospitable, and remote from the implied civilization of the ode’s author: this is an ironic joke coming from an Englishman who knows Horace’s representations of Britain as the distant, dangerous frontier of civilization.85 Thus, if the irony is properly understood, it serves to liken the two countries and perhaps gently to remind Christina that Sweden has, like Britain, a Northern European cultural heritage (however many Italian musicians make up her music).86 With similar daring, and a touch of Xirtatiousness, Whitelocke is compared to Ulysses, Christina to Circe: Christina dulcis nympha diutius Ne te moretur: qui merito cluis 82 See Joanna Martindale, ‘ ‘‘The Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom’’: The Horace of Ben Jonson and his Heirs’, in Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (eds.), Horace Made New, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 50–85 (62). 83 Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 343. 84 Martindale, ‘ ‘‘Best Master of Virtue and Wisdom’’ ’, 62–4. 85 Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 88, 154, 258. 86 Persson, ‘Courts of the Vasa’, 284–5.

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Bulstrode Whitelocke’s Embassy to Sweden Prudens Ulysses, sperne doctæ Popula deliciasque Circes. Te casta tentum Penelope vocat, Vocant amici, teque aliæ vocant Legationes (ll. 21–7) Christina, that sweet nimph, no longer shall Detaine thee, be thou carefull not to fall, Prudent Ulisses under those delights, To which the learned Circes thee invites: Thy chaste Penelope doth call thee slowe, Thy friends call for thee home, and they doe knowe New ambassyes

These are not only the poem’s most audacious lines, but its most Xorid lines too. The repeated calls are onomatopoeic: the repetition and the vocat/vocant halfrhyme form a patterned, rhythmical representation of the sound of a voice calling an unseen person. The daring and sweetness of this allegory make it a climax to the poem, at which point a political problem (the delay of the treaty) is sublimated into amorous, mythological role playing; something more delightful and engaging, that yet keeps Christina’s mind on the problem. Whitelocke’s role as universal chancellor of peace is to be interpreted similarly. It is an idealization of his and England’s aims, not to be understood literally, but as a masque-like entry on to the European stage that allegorizes the objectives sought at this juncture in English aVairs. The Commonwealth wants to be accepted by other countries as lawful and to make peace with them. By representing this intention Wguratively and playfully the poem states the kind of intent (England does not intend to suck Sweden into a European war) that cannot be written bindingly in a treaty, subject as such an intention is to the dynamics of international tectonics. The poems by Whistler and Wolseley each recommend policies that might surprise a reader in search of ‘Cromwellian’ perspectives; but Whistler’s poem should not be taken to show his respect for absolutism any more than Wolseley should be judged a naı¨ve irenicist by his. Each work asks not to be taken too seriously, but implies through its humour competence in the reWned languages, iconography, and pastimes of Christina’s court, and uses them to exert subtle pressure on Christina to sign the treaty. Their diVerences illustrate the contingency of literary attempts to give the English governors a credible and legitimate voice. The best-known poem connected with Whitelocke’s embassy, Marvell’s ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’, is also the most elegant and the most sophisticated in the political pressures it exerts. It was sent to Nathaniel Ingelo, Whitelocke’s chaplain and rector chori, whom Marvell knew as a fellow at Eton, where the poet was tutoring Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton. Ingelo showed the poem to


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Whitelocke, who presented it to Christina at the same time as Wolseley’s ode.87 Marvell chooses an epistolary form that weighs its praise of Christina against an anticipated reply from Ingelo, and thus makes it gently conditional. It also gives him Xexibility to range through (and at times beyond) the topics of Christina’s praise that were circulating in European art and literature. Erasmus prescribes an epistolary structure of sections based on time, place, person, or subject matter, joined with transitions to promote coherence.88 Marvell’s poem corresponds with this model enough to sustain the surface Wction of a letter from one humanist to another seeking substantiation of Christina’s famed virtue and literacy. Thus a loose division in lines 13–14 sets out the themes of Christina as civilizer (ll. 15–18), her majesty (ll. 21–60), her patronage of the muses (ll. 61–84), and as Protestant leader (ll. 85–114). Yet he ironizes that persona to suggest other political demands and values. The elegance of ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ lies in the way Marvell makes the conditionality of his praise of Christina apparently proceed from generic decorum. He asks Ingelo three times if what he has heard about Christina is true (ll. 19, 113, 128), opening the possibility of disappointment if the embassy returns frustrated. Yet the questions are themselves Xattering, because they take Christina’s fame to be a proper subject for humanist dialogue; she is an impressive but garbled text, and Ingelo’s journey to Sweden becomes a mission to return with the authoritative version. Marvell’s enquiries begin by asking Ingelo a series of questions about the hostility of the Swedish climate. Wolseley makes a similar joke by portraying Sweden with a ‘classical’ disdain for the inhospitable North, but Marvell suspects that Sweden is so remote that it might hide a temperate land; the mythical fortunate land of the Hyperboreans: Quis hominum genius, quæ sit natura Locorum, Sint homines potius, dic ibi, sintne loca? Num gravis horrisono Polus obterit omnia lapsu? Jungitur et præceps Mundus utraˆque nive. An melius canis horrescit campus aristis? Annus Agricolis et redit orbe labor? Incolit, ut fertur, sævam gens mitior oram Pace vigil, Bello strenua, justa Foro? (ll. 5–12)89

87 See Holberton, ‘Textual Transmission of Marvell’s ‘‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’’ ’. 88 Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Erasmus on the Art of Letter Writing’, in James J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 331–55 (355). 89 I use the presentation text from Longleat MS 124a (see Holberton, ‘Textual Transmission of Marvell’s ‘‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’’ ’); I also give Nigel Smith’s translation (Marvell, 265–6), amended according to variants found in this text, except where the variants appear to be errors.

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What kind of men are there, what is the nature of the place? Are men there? Tell me rather, is there such a place? Does the heavy Pole ravage all with the awfull sound of its motion, and does the precipitous earth blend one winter’s snow with the next? Or rather does the Weld bristle with icy ears of grain? And is the farmer’s seasonal toil better repaid? A milder race, it is said, inhabits the harsh region, vigilant in peace, vigorous in war, just in public life?

The distance between England and Sweden is creative, because the gulf between the countries necessitates mediatory representations of Christina and Sweden. This imaginative speculation feeds on—and is itself becoming—report, in the process of which it generates the topics and images of Marvell’s epideictic copia. Marvell allows Christina to overhear her fame proliferating over distance: Dic quantum liceat fallaci credere famæ Invidia num taceat plura, sonetve loquax. Ac si vera Wdes mundi melioris ab ortu Sæcula Christinæ nulla tulere parem. (ll. 19–22) Tell me how much one may trust in deceptive rumour, which, envious, sometimes omits many things and sometimes babbles too loquaciously. And if the report is true, since a better world began, no age has borne the equal of Christina.

Despite the poet’s profession of scepticism, Fame’s loquaciousness sways him and infects his fancy, which ranges for Christina’s likenesses with a wit which is itself eVusive, elliptical, and even self-contradictory. Having said that no age since Christ has borne the equal of Christina, the poet adds: ‘Ipsa licet redeat nostri decus orbis Eliza j Qualis Nostra tamen Quantaque Eliza fuit?’ (ll. 23–4) (‘Though Eliza herself (the glory of our realm) should return, is she like, and as great as Eliza was?’). Marvell adds another exemplum (a true or mythical example for illustration), even though his previous hyperbole has already conceded that it is inadequate. In the speed and eclecticism with which Marvell’s fame-like idiom piles up exempla, it Xatters the overhearing Queen, but the logical leaps required by this compression invite ironing out in Ingelo’s projected reply. There is an element of competitive display in this idiom, because it shows oV a resonant and masterful assimilation of the explored historical and mythological exempla used by Christina’s court panegyricists. Iiro Kajanto has shown the great volume of printed panegyrical material on Christina, some of which was published outside Sweden and might have been encountered by Marvell on his European travels. A brief glance through Kajanto’s compendium of Christina’s exempla will Wnd precedents for most of those that appear in ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’. Yet part of Marvell’s ingenuity in Wnding an idiom that allows him to assimilate fragments from such a variety of panegyrical forms is that he can also avoid the conventional and problematic Xatteries of Christina’s appearance. She was self-conscious about her lack of beauty, which Marvell inverts by stating that,


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preferring to stay up all night to study, ‘neque consuluit fugitivæ prodiga formæ’ (l. 61) (‘she has given no thoughts to Xeeting beauty’).90 Marvell’s competitive demonstration of his Xuency in panegyrical languages associated with Christina is most apparent in the ecphrastic section on Christina’s portrait. This painting, now lost, had been sent to Cromwell in the spring of 1653.91 Marvell elaborates its image of Christina with an acrobatic wit unavailable to her court painter: her face shows the spirit and the lightning of Gustavus Adolphus (l. 30); she shines brighter than Callisto (l. 32); she is more similar to Diana than Diana herself (l. 36); her hairstyle is an emblem of her justice (l. 39); as Diana she leads her nymphs in a dance along the peaks of Cynthus (probably an allusion to Christina’s coronation ballet ‘La Diana Victorieuse’, or to Heinsius’s related poem to the ‘Dancing Diana’, Ad Dianam Saltantem92) (l. 44); her eyes are hunter’s darts (Christina’s tomboyish love of hunting was a component in her identiWcation with Diana); she bears the burden of the world more gracefully than Hercules (ll. 49–50); she modestly beats Juno, Minerva, and Venus in the Judgement of Paris (l. 57). Unlike the painter, Marvell can praise Christina’s appearance without recourse to the conventional criteria and idealizations of physical beauty, a superiority that he rubs in with gently gleeful irony and characteristically reXexive wit: ‘Et simulet falsaˆ ni pictor imagine vultus, j Delia tam similis nec fuit Ipsa sibi’ (ll. 35–6) (‘And, unless the painter represented her features with a false image, Delia herself was not so similar to her’). Marvell has the resource of paradox to say that Christina looks more like Diana than Diana herself; Christina’s appearance is still uniquely her own, even though she looks as Diana-like as grammar can sustain. Marvell again proves his competence in an exclusive courtly language; but by intensifying a standard compliment in this language he solicits yet greater admiration. In ironic tension with Marvell’s loquacious, Fame-like idiom is enough rhetorical structure to give the double impression of sprezzatura in its most paradoxical sense of artiWcial ease. Marvell’s mediation of the portrait is not just ecphrasis (a self-contained description, often appealing to the visual imagination), but a particularly formal version of it, eYctio (the head-to-toe itemization of a heroine’s charms), albeit curtailed with an occultatio.93 Marvell invites the reader to recognize how persuasively this informality has been wrought. What on Wrst reading might sound like breathless gossip is in fact a demonstration that Marvell has mastered the epideictic types of Christina circulating in the art of her court, but his ironically articulated sprezzatura also appeals to the idea of international courtly languages. R. Malcolm Smuts has argued that royal-collection paintings of this period were viewed by few courtiers, and that the 90 F. W. Bain, Christina Queen of Sweden (London: Allen, 1890), 93–5. 91 Andrew Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 3rd edn., rev. Pierre Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), i. 315. 92 Kajanto, Christina Heroina, 50–1. 93 See Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 39.

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art of their interpretation was part of the arcana imperii (the mysteries of statecraft).94 Thus, by indicating that he has seen Christina’s portrait suYciently to note the details of tied-back hair, a fur worn around the neck, and armour, Marvell implies that he is among Cromwell’s more prestigious courtiers, and in making a rhetorical competition of his dialogue with the painting, he also demonstrates that he is Xuent in a fashionable hermeneutics of painting that read brush strokes in rhetorical terms; Henry Wotton’s panegyric on the royal art collection praises ‘The tongueless eloquence of light and shadows’.95 The writer of elegant Latin epistles ‘overheard’ by Christina moves among an implied courtly elite who have access to Cromwell’s portrait collection, and include Ingelo and Benjamin Rogers, the composer whose music had been presented to Christina previously.96 But just as Whitelocke at times misrepresents the Cromwellian elite in the image of the Swedish court, so Marvell makes this group seem more courtly than they are. The embassy to Sweden was the zenith of Ingelo’s political career, and he seems to have spent most of his life at Eton. Rogers was employed on at least two occasions to write diplomatic gifts, but he was not one of Cromwell’s salaried musicians, and he can be found advertising as a private tutor in Playford’s Musicall Banquet.97 Similarly, Marvell was an obscurely born tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton, living most of the time at Eton. His access to Cromwell is a matter of speculation, but he was certainly not a courtier. Towards the end of ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’, Marvell presents this group as Thames-side shepherds, allowing imaginative slippage from Eton and Windsor, the real homes of Marvell, Ingelo, and Rogers, to ‘barren Welds’ closer to London and its riverside palaces. The pastoral guise of Marvell’s imaginary court mirrors the pastoralizing inXuence of Christina’s humanist court, where every ‘grove’ resounds with song (l. 78), and perhaps responds to the kind of intelligence seen in Whistler’s letter concerning Christina’s new love of all things pastoral. The poem pursues a strategy similar to that of Whitelocke, Whistler, and Wolseley in preparing the ground for alliance by misrepresenting the English elite as sharing Swedish courtly values, pastimes, and languages. The liberty Marvell takes with Christina’s portrait is matched by an Ovidian liberty with classical myth. Marvell changes the story of the Judgement of Paris: Christina beats the three goddesses and wins not the apple marked ‘the fairest’, 94 R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Art and the Material Culture of Majesty’, in idem (ed.), The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 86–112 (101). 95 Quoted in R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 158. 96 Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 318; Anthony a` Wood, Fasti Oxonienses, 3rd edn., rev. Philip Bliss, 2 vols. (London: Rivington, 1815–20), ii. 306. According to Wood, around this period Rogers’s airs were esteemed and commissioned by ‘great personages’, and some were sent to the court of Archduke Leopold, who had his musicians play them. 97 John Playford (ed.), A Musicall Banquet Set Forth in Three Choice Varieties of Musick (London, 1651).


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but the bribes they oVered Paris. She gets martial renown from Minerva, and sovereignty from Juno, but she rejects the bribe of love oVered by Venus.98 Similarly, Marvell’s praise of Christina’s patronage of the arts is subtly nuanced: In literas Gothus sic quod peccaverit olim, Vindicat, et studijs expiat Illa suis. Exemplum dociles imitantur nobile gentes Et geminis infans imbuit ora sonis. Transpositos Suecis credas migrasse Latinos Carmine Romuleo sic strepit omne nemus. Upsala nec priscis impar memoratur Athenis Ægidaque et currus hic sua Pallas habet. (ll. 73–80) Thus, whatever sins the Goth may have committed against letters, she vindicates and expiates with her studies. The people, eager to be taught, follow her noble example, and the infant Wlls his mouth with double sounds. You would think the Latins, transposed, to have moved as immigrants among the Swedes, so does every grove resound with Romulean song. Uppsala is thought not unequal to ancient Athens, here Pallas has both her aegis and chariot.

By teaching the Swedes Latin, Christina has vindicated and expiated Sweden’s Gothic heritage. Christina’s humanism was largely imported, with scholars invited from central and southern Europe, like the artists and musicians of her court. Yet Marvell does not let her forget the Gothic, even anti-Roman, history of Sweden. Humanism does not create a new Rome or Athens in Sweden, but it puriWes the Gothic heritage of northern Europe and creates a rival Athens, in favour of which Athena has deserted southern Europe. The Swedes are not turned into Latins, but vice versa. Thus Marvell is praising a type of humanism which does not seek to turn the clock back but is self-consciously progressive; which is superior for its ‘double sound’. The migration of the muses to new cultures was a favourite topic in neo-Latin verse composed outside Italy, particularly by northern Europeans. Thus Marvell’s claim Xatters Christina, but it also evokes humanist poems (those of Conrad Celtis, for instance) that represent the dignity of Gothic culture and arts, which in this context might encourage Christina to ally with England.99 Marvell’s poem itself contributes to this tradition, and he describes a world in which all virtue is connected to it: Christina’s disregard for beauty is the happy cost of reading all night (ll. 60–1); she is a wise ruler for studying what acts of kings are lawful (l. 71), and as we shall see, its critical typology has shaped her sense of religious duty. 98 Andrew Marvell, The Latin Poetry of Andrew Marvell, ed. and trans. William A. McQueen and KiYn A. Rockwell (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), 62. 99 Nichols, (ed.), Anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry, 5, 62–3; see also Celtis’s allusion to Swedish campaigns in ‘Ad Rhenum Ortum et Exitum Eius Commemorans, Rogans, ut Puellam Descendentem Aquis Grani Numine suo Tueatur’, ibid. 452–9.

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At line 85 Marvell turns to the last of his topics, religious leadership, with an invocation to the Uppsalian muses that parodies the opening of Eclogue IV. The tone changes: ‘Upsalides Musæ paulo majora canemus j Quæque mihi famæ non levis aura tulit’ (ll. 85–6) (‘Upsalian Muses, let us sing of things a little greater: everything that the solemn breath of Fame has borne to me’). The allusion is poignantly ironic: for many seventeenth-century Christian readers Virgil’s invocation was of uniquely moving signiWcance in golden-age classical literature, because Virgil’s child from heaven seemed to show an incomplete or misinterpreted perception of the Messiah. The next lines focus this irony with allusions to Revelation 7: 3 and 2: 17: ‘Creditur haud ulli Christus signasse suorum j Occultam gemmaˆ de meliore notam’ (ll. 87–8) (‘Christ is believed to have impressed upon none of his chosen the secret mark with a better seal’).100 This is the Wrst time since the division set out the theme of Christina’s ‘templa Deo’ that Marvell has mentioned Christian worship in the poem, which has otherwise featured pagan deities. Marvell develops the irony of the Eclogue IV allusion by describing Christ’s promise as a ‘secret’ sign; the signiWcance has been withheld from Virgil. The sadness of the allusion to Eclogue IV inheres in the quasidramatic irony by which the Christian reader, armed with the Gospel as a context, interprets these lines of classical literature diVerently from the Augustan reader; their meaning has been changed radically and irrevocably by the dissemination of the Gospel. Thus Marvell calls for inspiration with a reXection on Virgil’s incomplete inspiration; his call to the Uppsalian muses of progressive humanism indicates the limitations of Augustan discourse. The apocalyptic teleology introduced in lines 85–6 allows Marvell to extend the signiWcance of Christina’s classical types beyond the limitations of the dominantly Ovidian paradigm of lines 1–84, and into the Weld of political negotiations that form the poem’s immediate political context.101 One of the most common mythological representations of Christina was as Diana, a type she acted in life as well as masques by resisting pressure to marry and hunting insatiably.102 But to resist Cupid’s Xame like Diana is pointless in a Christian context unless it is because Christ’s Xame alone ‘virgineas depascit . . . medullas’ (l. 91) (‘consumes her virgin marrow’). Similarly, the hunt is extended into Protestant symbolism as a hunt to protect the German godly Xocks (also an extension of Christina’s pastoral iconography) and chase away the German eagle and the Roman wolf (ll. 100–4). This re-evaluation and adaptation of classical virtues to a northern European Christian context is in keeping with the 100 Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 316. 101 See ibid. i. 316, for the identiWcation of several allusions to Metamorphoses. 102 Kajanto, Christina Heroina, 50–1. One of the most magniWcent of Christina’s portraits was an equestrian portrait by Sebastien Bourdon sent to Philip IV, which includes a hawk, a page, and hunting dogs: see Go¨rel Cavalli-Bjo¨rkman, ‘Christina Portraits’, in Marie-Louise Rodeń (ed.), Politics and Culture in the Age of Christina (Stockholm: Swedish Institute in Rome, 1997), 93–105 (97).


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progressive humanism praised in the previous section. The allusion to Eclogue IV focuses that re-evaluation on a speciWcally messianic historical shift. In the seventeenth century, Christina’s Diana-like virtues should take her into war against Rome and the Holy Roman Empire. This is where ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ apparently diVers strikingly from the other poems connected with the embassy: at the poem’s climax Marvell urges an aggressive foreign policy which is made to appear implicit in the languages and tastes shared by the courts of Cromwell and Christina. Yet the other embassy literature provides a context that might make us question whether such an unrealistic proposal, from a manifestly well-informed author, should be taken at face value. I have argued that the English diplomats were anxious to dispel a stereotype of the new English as belligerent mechanical preachers. Marvell anchors a Protestant belligerent voice, and the related martial Wgure of Cromwell, in the language of Swedish aspirations and heritage. The proposed crusade features hints that it would be a revival of Gustavus Adolphus’s objectives in the Thirty Years War. Christina’s father had campaigned with mixed religious and territorial ambitions, and Christina’s interests in scholarship and art were weened on the booty brought back from Rudolf II’s collection in Prague. Thus lines 103–4 catch a mixture of aspirations that is more Adolphus than Cromwell (who generally tried to prevent plundering during his English and Scottish campaigns): ‘Vos etiam latos in prædam iungite campos j Impiaque arctatis cingite lustra plagis’ (‘You two should join your broad Welds in hope of booty, and surround the dens of iniquity with tightened nets’). The following lines describing Cromwell’s bearing in this crusade also seem un-Cromwellian: Victor Olivarus nudum caput exerit armis Ducere sive sequi nobile lætus iter. Qualis jam senior, Solymæ Godfredus ad arces Spina cui canis Xoruit alba comis. (ll. 105–8) Victorious Oliver exposes his bare head in battle, glad to lead or to follow a noble course, just as once to the citadel of Jerusalem went Godfrey the Elder, on whose grey hairs Xowered the white thorn.

Cromwell’s willingness to follow a Swedish-led campaign here refers more to the problems that the Swedes had had with their Thirty Years War allies, who were reluctant to Wght for the establishment of a Swedish empire, than any reasonable expectation that Cromwell would take orders from a Swedish empress.103 Just as historically incongruous is the allusion to Tasso’s hero Godfrey of Bulloigne, who also lays down his armour, and, having conquered Jerusalem, refuses the opportunity to make himself King.104 This allusion weaves Cromwell’s political 103 Bain, Christina, Queen of Sweden, 31. 104 See Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 317.

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humility among allusions to a narrative that celebrates a multinational unity of purpose, projecting his self-denial in domestic politics on to a European political stage, and into the European literary canon. Marvell is assimilating Cromwell to European martial and literary paradigms as a humble Wgure, who is not going to rock the boat. The Swedes were anxious that an alliance with England might drag them into a war with the United Provinces and Denmark. Marvell’s proposed Protestant crusade sounds belligerent, but it really seeks to reassure Christina that Cromwell is not going to use the alliance to compromise Swedish interests (delicately balanced as they were by her Peace of Westphalia) with an aggressive attempt to expand the Commonwealth’s inXuence in northern Europe. Again the letter-form is used subtly, because the eVusiveness of the earlier sections helps Christina read the belligerence of this section as the ebullient political naı¨vety of a young humanistic courtier. Yet the diplomatic work of the poem is in how it alters stereotypes: at its most excited, the religiosity of the new English courtiers is not that of the radical Mu¨nster Anabaptists, but something that sounds more like a young Swedish courtier recalling the glories of Gustavus Adolphus; they idealize Cromwell not as a revolutionary Wgure but as an inheritor of a northern European sensibility constructed from the experience of the Thirty Years War and a ‘Gothic’ form of humanism, which this poem praises, and in which it participates. Gustavus Adolphus had set himself up as a champion of religious, social, and territorial values that were still alive in the self-mythologizing culture of the Swedish court, even now Sweden was at peace.105 Marvell implies that those values, Cromwell’s ‘nobile . . . iter’, are also still alive in the English imagination, but that nostalgia for Gustavus Adolphus limits as much as it excites English militancy. The Wnal section exerts more acute political pressures. The lines on the Protestant crusade give the poem a climax which almost bursts the Wction of a private letter to Ingelo: line 85’s invocation is followed by another echo of Eclogue IV at line 93, when Marvell addresses Christina directly under the disguise of an apostrophe (a ‘turning away’, that breaks the discourse to address a person or thing). This section ends at line 114 before a slightly abrupt turn, as Marvell again asks Ingelo to validate his expectations of Christina. The shape of the poem invites the reader to read the subsequent lines, book-ended by the appeals to Ingelo at lines 115 and 131, as a peroration to the previous parts, a focusing of themes raised to a climax on the Anglo–Swedish ‘nobile . . . iter’. Yet this peroration unXinchingly opens several new cans of worms: the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the current war with the Dutch, and the consequent delay in the Anglo–Swedish treaty:

105 See the engraving of Helie Poirier’s poem for Christina’s coronation reproduced in Kajanto, Christina Heroina, 27, or the description of the triumphal arch at her coronation in Bain, Christina, Queen of Sweden, 119.


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Dicitur et nostros mærens audisse labores Fortis et ingenuam Gentis amasse Fidem. Oblatæ Batavam nec paci commodat aurem Nec versat Danos insidiosa dolos. Sed pia festinat mutatis fædera rebus. Et Libertatem, quæ dominatur, amat. (ll. 121–6) She is said, lamenting, to have heard of our travails, and to have loved the inborn faith of a brave people. Neither does she please the Dutch ear with oVered peace, or deceitfully consider Danish tricks. But she hastens honest treaties as aVairs change, and she who has dominion loves liberty.

These assumptions are stated barely where the reader would expect to encounter material that has been developed or introduced previously. Their position within the poem implies a logical connection with the previous themes which would be much more tricky to set out explicitly. Instead, Marvell uses the formal syntax of the epistle to associate ‘the free-born faith of a brave people’ with the ‘nobile . . . iter’ that Sweden might direct Cromwell along in Europe. Hostility to the Dutch and the Danish slots into the same implied moral consistency. This is the real edge with which the poem impacts its political moment: Christina was not hastening, but delaying, the treaty, because she wanted to be friendly with the Dutch too, and the regicide was still used, not least by the Dutch, to compromise the Commonwealth’s legitimacy in the courts of Europe.106 But Marvell makes Whitelocke’s demands—that Christina legitimize the Cromwellian regime by making an alliance with the English which is not conditional on Anglo–Dutch peace—seem expected by the northern European Protestant heritage shared by the two countries. The previous lines sharpen the literary consequence of disappointment with an allusion to the idea that words are slowed by the cold. The conceit is that because sun-like Christina warms Sweden, Marvell anticipates that Ingelo’s negotiations will not be hindered by slow words. But it could be construed ironically to mean: ‘because I know the negotiations are not meteorologically slowed, other agencies must be responsible’; and in the light of the poem’s thematic interest in the spread of fame, it might also be read as a threatening hint that if Ingelo is delayed much longer, Marvell will quickly know of it by post. Lines 129–36 describe the Thames-side scene mentioned above, in which a band of shepherds featuring Marvell and Rogers are depicted mourning Ingelo’s absence with music. They might remind the reader of the parody of Eclogue IV introducing the poem’s climax, and the crescendo through which the pastoral imagery describing Christina’s inXuence on Swedish learning modulates into the Xock-protecting image of a Protestant crusade; thus it pulls the poem back into shape after Marvell’s pressing faux peroration in lines 106 M. S. Anderson, The Rise of Modern Diplomacy, 1450–1919 (London: Longman, 1993), 60.

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115–28, sweetening the close of the poem with an Ecloguian melancholy which yet appeals to Christina, albeit less sharply, to dispel it. Christina signed the Treaty of Uppsala on 11 April 1654. Apparently, she circulated Marvell’s poem, because it reached Jean ScheVer, an antiquarian and philologist at Christina’s court, who copied it for posterity.107 107 Holberton, ‘Textual Transmission of Marvell’s ‘‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’’ ’, 236.

2 London’s Triumphs and Civic Culture James Howell’s Londinopolis (1657), a history of London’s landmarks and institutions, includes diverse illustrations of the capital’s predisposition to monarchy.1 In a section praising London’s livery companies, he acknowledges—without clearly rebutting—a perception that the cultural independence of these civic societies had undermined royal power: Now every of these Companies hath a handsome and well-furnish’d stately Hall, with a Clark, and other Ministerial OYcers thereunto belonging, to attend them, when they meet there to consult, and inorder what may conduce to the better regulation of the Society, and promoting of the publique good; They also use to meet there frequently to rejoyce, and make plentiful Feasts, for the increase of love and good Neighbourhood among themselves; And though there be some, who hold such Corporations, and little Body politiques, of this kind, to be prejudicial to Monarchy; yet they may be said to be one of the Glories of London, and wherein she surpasseth all other Cities.2

Under kings, the pageant dramas sponsored by the livery companies had asserted that their privileged independence complemented royal power to the beneWt of the public good. The regicide gave London’s civic institutions an opportunity to claim a stronger political role as the natural guardians of London’s citizens, but other events of the 1640s and 1650s exposed these institutions to new kinds of scrutiny. At an enquiry in 1650 into the mismanagement of the City’s fund for orphans, the Leveller John Wildman had asked why London’s political leaders were elected by liverymen, a political franchise based not on wisdom or abilities, but on a membership fee.3 Ostensibly, Protectorate London witnessed the revival of London’s old political order, under the aegis of a pact between Cromwell and the City elite. The civic pageants returned too, but the City’s poets found that Protectorate culture demanded innovative responses to the task of representing the City as a ‘Body politique’ for the ‘promoting of the publique good’.

1 James Howell, Londinopolis: An Historicall Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London (London, 1657), 356–65 (e.g.). 2 Ibid. 46. 3 London’s Liberties, or a Learned Argument of Law and Reason . . . Before the Lord Mayor, Court of Aldermen, and Common Councell at Guild Hall, London (London, 1651), 32. See also the account of this debate in James Farnell, ‘The Politics of the City of London, 1649–1657’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Chicago, 1963), 178.

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London’s Triumphs and Civic Culture

By ‘the City’ is meant a geographical area within the ancient boundaries of London, and the political body of its citizens, or freemen, who had earned, bought, or inherited the right to trade in the city. Both were set apart by legal privileges and franchises, and were regulated by a complex of political institutions. The most important of these institutions were the twelve great livery companies, the Common Council, the Court of Common Hall, and the Court of Aldermen.4 The livery companies were guilds to which citizens aYliated (often, but not always, according to their trade) and from which London’s leaders were chosen. From the upper echelons—the livery—of these companies were selected the master, wardens, and assistants who governed the lower echelons of bachelors, yeomen, journeymen, and apprentices. The governing body of the City was the Court of Aldermen, from which the Lord Mayor was elected annually. Aldermen were elected for life, and the court formed an oligarchic executive and judicial body, which controlled the City’s Wnances, markets, courts, and jails, heard complaints, and issued licences. They were supplemented by the Common Council, a legislative assembly, directed and sometimes vetoed by the aldermen, which regulated civic order and taxation. It had 200 members, who were elected by London’s freemen. The Court of Common Hall was formed by the guild liverymen, who elected the mayor, sheriVs, and the City’s four MPs. At least, that was the status quo. The upheavals of the 1640s fractured relationships which had previously made the City a remarkably stable polity.5 Pym’s allies successfully fought for political control of the Common Council in 1642, and thereby brought a conservative, royalist-leaning City to support parliamentary opposition to the King.6 Over the following decade, independents in Parliament and the City increased their power by wresting the Common Council from the direction and veto powers of the aldermen, rigging elections to Wll it with their supporters, and establishing its political supremacy, including its right to select most of the City’s oYcers.7 These reforms were achieved with the help of radicals who protested against the favouring of elite interests by the old oligarchic structures, and who succeeded in mobilizing support from London’s lower-ranking freeholders.8 James Farnell argues that there came a turning point when radicals re-channelled their energies towards the domination of central government via Barebone’s Parliament, where they alienated the party of ‘moderate’ independents who then supported the institution of the Protectorate.9 This party found it in its political interest to support a conservative counter-reaction 4 This summary is indebted to the more detailed account of London’s institutions in Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2–4. 5 See Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 6 Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 197–275. 7 Farnell, ‘Politics of the City of London’, 131–4. 8 Ibid. 137–42. 9 Ibid. 185–6, 268.


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in the City, led by Mayor Fowke, who began to claw back many of the old powers of the aldermanic oligarchy. Thus began the Protectoral compromise, whereby the power of the aldermen and the old City elite was re-established with tacit support from the Protectoral government, albeit with limited powers retained by the Common Council, which was no longer dominated by radical independents.10 The restoration of the City oligarchy was proclaimed with civic pageantry. But the City’s poets found that the conventional languages of pageants, particularly topics relating to civic virtue, were entangled with the republicanism of its would-be reformers. Recent research on the history of republicanism in seventeenth-century England has shown that civic virtue, a concept derived from classical republicanism, had become a fairly commonplace political concept in English political discourse well before radical models of republicanism came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. A Jacobean councillor, judge, or alderman could model a life of civic participation with the help of advice books which drew on humanist discussions of republics.11 Accordingly, the values of participation also became part of the language of seventeenth-century Lord Mayor’s Day pageants: the City was represented as a nursery of civic activism, fraternity, and virtue, which bestows honour upon its dignitaries in recognition of their merits.12 When civic pageantry revived under the Protectorate, however, these conventions were brought into question by crises and radical critiques, which challenged the limited freedoms of London’s citizenry and the oligarchic interests that these limitations preserved. The conventions inherited by the writers of Protectorate pageants came fraught with tensions. City poets responded to these tensions by experimenting with new poetic forms, processional routes, and rationales for the pageantry itself. The Protectorate’s instabilities became creative opportunities too, demanding from the City elite political compromises and fresh responsibilities, in which the language of civic virtue could be grounded anew. On 8 February 1654, two months after Cromwell’s investiture as Protector, the City marked its support for the new regime with a civic entry and reception. This was modelled on the ceremony by which the City had previously celebrated the coronation of a monarch, but the speeches and entertainment organized on this occasion suggest a political partnership rather than submission to Cromwell’s rule. The entry commenced with a ritual that transformed the traditional 10 Ibid. 309–11, 331–2. 11 Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 136–89. See also Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 51–60. 12 For an account of the civic values discussed in London pageants and entertainments, see James Knowles, ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 157–89.

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reception of kings. The mayor, aldermen, and civic oYcials met the Protector at Temple Bar, the boundary of the City’s authority. Here the mayor surrendered the sword of state, the symbol of his special authority, only to have it returned to him by Cromwell. The departure from royal precedents occurred in an oration by the City’s recorder, which fell in line with the nominal republicanism of the Protectoral constitution, by avowing the supremacy of the salus populi (the common good of the people) as a tradition deriving from the Roman republic.13 But the speech also took advantage of Cromwell’s show of political humility (he arrived at Temple Bar in a coach, and wore subdued civilian clothes). It eVectively inverted the symbolic meaning of the sword exchange, suggesting that the City was delegating power to the new Protector: The solemnity of this day, wherein the Citizens of this great City appear in their several Companies, as so many Cities within the City, speaks much to this: they leave it to other Nations to salute their Rulers and victorious Commanders with the name of Cæsares and Imperatores; and after Triumphs, to erect for them their Arcus Triumphales: But if I mistake not, their end, this day, is not any such outward Pomp or Glory, but that those who have been delivered together, might rejoice together; and to express their Desires, That the Civil Sword might be as prosperous for Publick Ends, in the Hand where it is placed, as the Military Sword hath been in the same hand.14

The recorder expropriates to the City companies the mediation of the gathered public’s ‘Desires’, and implicitly its consent. The customary triumphal arches of the coronation entry were omitted, and he stresses this, even suggesting that they were a foreign importation. The speech forecloses an interpretation of the entry whereby Cromwell might be seen to enter London as its conqueror. The ceremony of legitimization has been reWgured: London enfolds the Protector within a local ethos of godly fellowship and humility. The City could welcome the Protector like a brother, because its endorsement oVered him much-needed legitimacy. This oration exploits the Protectoral state’s dependence upon the City, on behalf of a conservative elite. By stressing the antiquity of the institutions which now welcome Cromwell, the recorder’s speech ties the legitimacy bestowed upon the regime by the City to the continuity of the City’s traditions and, by implication, to the Protector’s ongoing support for the City’s conservative counter-revolution. The recorder chose an image which heightened the City’s originality, as an animating centre in its own right, which produces its own representations of power. The recorder cites the authority of an early historian of London, William Wtz Stephen (X. 1162–74):15 13 Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), 174. 14 Mercurius Politicus, 9 Feb. 1654, 3266–7. The Protector’s inauguration on 16 December had featured a similar exchange, but then Cromwell had returned the sword of state to the mayor with an exhortation to use its power well (see Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 9). 15 Stephanides’ account of London was printed as an appendix in John Stow’s A Survay of London (London, 1598), 473–83.


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This City seldome goes alone in Publique Actions: it was anciently called by Stephanides, The Heart of the Nation; and if the Heart be in a Politique consideration, as it is in the Naturall, it will communicate Life and Spirits into the other Members, by which means the whole Body may unanimously contribute their desires and endeavours to oppose the common Enemy, and after all our Distractions, see the Nation established upon the Wrm Basis of Peace and Righteousness, which is the end of Government.16

In the recorder’s view, the Protectorate is yet to be consolidated, which is why its endorsement by the nation’s ancient ‘Heart’ is vital. With the inverted exchange, the City rises to, or even reaches beyond, the role conceded to London through the Protector’s expediencies of legitimation: it presents its ancient institutions as engines on which the consolidation of Protectoral authority depends. The City’s welcome, and the pivotal role it thereby claimed for itself in the consolidation of the Instrument of Government, inspired Latin poems on the occasion from Edmund LitsWeld and Marchamont Nedham.17 Their poems show just how pressured the word ‘citizen’ had become in this moment: positively, by the legitimacy it could transfer to a constitution designed by army oYcers, but also, critically, by more radical republican constructions of citizenship, which some supporters of the Protectorate yet hoped to see disseminated in London. Both poems compared the Court of Aldermen, the oligarchic body that met Cromwell at Temple Bar, to the Roman senate. In 1650s literature especially, analogies between British and Roman political institutions more usually construed Parliament as the new Roman senate (see, e.g., pp. 96–7 below); but with no Parliament sitting, LitsWeld and Nedham each use this analogy to explore the ways in which London’s Court of Aldermen might supply equivalent or even better forms of legitimacy and consent to the new settlement. LitsWeld’s aldermanic senators oVer legitimacy through the continuity of their authority. They are a patrician class that guards the laws, perhaps somewhat more plausibly than recent parliaments: Inde Magistratus subeunt, sanctique Senatus Patritii, queis Sacra Fides & Fœdera Legum Æqua placent. Stat Wda Ducum custodia Juris Quæ servet statuatque modum, bene legibus Arma Conveniunt, sociasque manus in fœdera jungunt. Cedunt Arma Togæ. Leges tamen Arma tuentur Mistaque procedit Belli Pacisque Corona. (ll. 55–61) Then come the magistrates and the senate of the revered fatherland, who value holy faith and the rule of balanced law. The faithful vigilance of the lords stands Wrm to set and

16 Mercurius Politicus, 9 Feb. 1654, 3267. 17 Edmund LitsWeld, Triambeisis Celsissimi Domini Oliverii Cromwelli, Trium Regnorum Protectoris (London, 1654); Nedham’s poem was published in Mercurius Politicus, 9 Feb. 1654, 3270.

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preserve the measure of law. Force of arms sits well with law: they have clasped hands in alliance. Arms yield to the toga, but arms protect the law. The crown of war and peace combined marches on.

The day’s ostensible rapprochement between the army (oYcers were prominent in the Protector’s entourage) and the City is refracted through an allusion (‘Cedunt Arma Togæ’) to Cicero’s poem ‘De Consulatu Suo’, which celebrates the defeat of Catiline’s conspiracy as a triumph of legitimate government over force of arms.18 The allusion reinforces LitsWeld’s hope that the army now works to uphold, rather than undermine, the laws; the procession might be seen as the army Wnally submitting to the direction of legitimate authority. London’s oligarchic elite welcomed the Protector with a banquet at Grocers’ Hall. The various feasts that punctuated London’s civic calendar had become vital to the City elite’s self-image as a polity uniquely structured and lubricated by an ethos of fraternity and commensality (the sociability that comes from eating at the same table).19 As such, the extension of this custom to Cromwell would seem to oVer something more than merely passive acceptance of his rule: a conviviality that demonstrates consent. The City put on a sophisticated musical entertainment tailored to the tastes of the Protectoral court. A song from this oVering was printed in The Weekly Intelligencer. Come away, and cast your eyes On this humble SacriWce: We no golden apples give, Heer’s no Adam, heer’s no Eve, Not a Serpent dares appear, Whilst your Highness stayeth here. Oh then sit, and take your due, Those the Wrst fruits are that grew.20

The song’s godly modesty strikes a note of fellowship-in-humility similar to that which informs the City recorder’s professed distaste for the triumphal pageants of foreign cities. But this fellowship cannot be taken for granted. The allusion to the Jewish oVering of the Wrst fruits is simple, but well chosen.21 It Xatters the Mosaic imagination of the godly party, the mirror in which many independents who took up political oYce or arms had seen themselves as ancient Israelites with an elect destiny. But it also makes the present coming together into a seasonal ritual that will have to be renewed. The banquet is a 18 Cicero, De OYciis, ed. and trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 78–9. 19 See Knowles, ‘Spectacle of the Realm’, 158–61; see also Patrick Wallis, ‘Controlling Commodities: Search and Reconciliation in the Early Modern Livery Companies’, in Ian Gadd and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450–1800 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research in association with the Guildhall Library, 2002), 85–100 (92). 20 The Weekly Intelligencer, 7 Feb. 1654, 159–60. 21 Deut. 26: 1–11.


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sacriWce to harmony, which will dispel discord and rebellion as symbolized by the golden apples of Eris, goddess of discord, and the Edenic serpent. Cromwell’s presence is the force producing a seemingly fragile tranquillity: it hints that the success of the new peace hangs on his continued willingness to meet and negotiate with the City. LitsWeld’s banquet eVects more decisive transformations. The conviviality of London’s reception helps to dissolve Cromwell’s ferocity, perhaps even the bitter memory of him bullying London with the New Model Army in 1647, into reciprocal love: It Pacis Cromwellus amans: stat mitis in alto Ore nitor: stat dulcis honos: it gratia risuˆs Per placidas diVusa genas: oculique micantes Sydera suYciunt blandam spirantia pacem. Terror abest, desuntque minæ, nunc totus amatur Nullaˆ parte ferox. (ll. 84–9) Cromwell goes a lover of Peace. On his high brow stands a gentle sheen, a sweet renown. The grace of laughter pours over his restful cheeks. His sparkling eyes are like stars breathing wonderful peace. Terror is gone; there are no more threats. Now he is entirely loved; all the Werceness has left.

At the Grocer’s Hall banquet a new civilian order arranges itself with ease: Unus in elato Cromwellus culmine sedem Accipit: hæc sola excludit subsellia mensa. Succedunt alii queis munera publica, tecto Diversaˆ quanquam mensaˆ excipiuntur eodem Mox aliis sternunt domibus Triclinia, mensis Et plena & distincta suis: ubi cætera turba Ordine quisque suo sedeat. (ll. 104–10) On a raised pedestal, Cromwell alone takes his seat. This table by itself stands out from the lower benches. He is followed by others in public oYce—they are received under the same roof, although at a diVerent table. Soon they set up dining rooms in other buildings, Wlled and adorned with their own tables for the rest of the throng to sit, each with his own class.

Commensality overXows Grocers’ Hall, almost spontaneously. Where newsbook accounts represented the occasion as one of exclusive luxury, a ‘sumptuous banquet’ of ‘choisest delicates’,22 LitsWeld instead emphasizes a great eVort of diverse, but communal labours, which drains nature of birds and Wsh throughout the Protectoral dominions, and signals the centrifugal spreading of civilian 22 The Perfect Diurnall, 6 Feb. 1654, [3332]; The Weekly Intelligencer, 7 Feb. 1654, 159.

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co-operation. The newsbooks also reported that Cromwell dined at a table with army oYcers and the mayor;23 but LitsWeld imagines him installed alone on a kingly dais. It is remarkable that LitsWeld seemingly feels no tension here with the poem’s republican imagery. Republican and monarchical turns combine to lift the Protector from his military origins. The connotations of citizenship in Nedham’s poem are potentially more radical, and he claims less for the immediate eYcacy of London’s civic customs, to much greater rhetorical eVect. His rhetoric ampliWes neither Cromwell’s victories nor the City’s generosity, but speaks slightly over the heads of the City elite to possibilities that hinge on the deeper metropolis’s consent to a Protectoral commonwealth. Nedham also uses the analogy of republican Rome to imagine London as a city of enduring institutions, but he oVers a contrast too: Barbara Cæsareæ sileant Magnalia Romæ, Cæsar adest melior, Sidus ut orbe novum. Cæsare major adest, quia noluit esse: Coronam Arripiant alii; Se potuisse sat est. (ll. 1–4) Let the barbarous works of Caesar’s Rome be silent. A better Caesar is here, like a new star in the Wrmament. Here is one greater than Caesar, because he did not wish to be Caesar. Let others seize kingship; for him it suYced that he could.

By resisting the temptation of a crown, Cromwell ensures the survival of the republican institutions that have elevated him. Thanks to his refusal, London eludes the historical typology of Rome’s descent into despotism. An involved idiom allows Nedham to acknowledge that there remains in London resistance or suspicion towards Cromwell. Appealing directly to Londoners through the pages of Mercurius Politicus, he assures that Cromwell ‘Corda hominum quærit . . . & non mediaˆ pegmata celsa viaˆ’ (ll. 17–18) (‘seeks the hearts of men and not the scaVolding in the centre of the street’). This is one of several echoes of Martial’s ‘De Spectaculis’ (II. 2);24 but Nedham blends the allusion with details of the City’s spectacle, to show the particular contrasts that make Cromwell diVerent: the scaVolding is the seating from which the elite livery members of the City’s companies watched the procession, so Nedham refutes an implied imputation that Cromwell’s concern is merely to seal the endorsement of London’s ruling estate. Nedham also uses Roman imagery to assure that the Protectorate settlement, in spite of its military origins, will be developed within existing laws and institutions: ‘victor Miles . . . Fascibus arma, j Legibus & mutat, sumit & inde Togam’ (ll. 23–4) (‘the victorious soldier exchanges arms for the fasces and the laws and puts on the toga’). However, Nedham’s persuasions are 23 The Perfect Diurnall, 6 Feb. 1654, [3332]. 24 Martial, Epigrams, ed. and trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), i. 13; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 329.


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addressed to a city poised between chaos and a ‘novus orbis’ (l. 26) (new world) which might be brought from that chaos. The occasion’s momentousness springs not only from these extremes of possibility, but also from the pivotal role that the gathered citizens must play in the consolidation of Protectoral power. A string of imperatives urges transformations that are imminently possible, but yet to be achieved: Erige te nostro, Regina Britannia, ponto, Auspice cromwello, ponito jura mari; Cæruleos accerse deos, & Naiadas omnes In Thamesin, totus concinat inde chorus. Tuque agesis, nova troia, novus simul indue vultus. (ll. 11–15) Extend yourself over our sea, Queen Britannia, and bless Cromwell, let him give law to the ocean. Summon the sea-blue gods and all the Naiads to the Thames. Let the whole chorus sing in harmony. And you too, New Troy, put on a new face.

Nedham draws on his own translation of John Selden’s Mare Clausum, which was prefaced by an emblem of Britannia as a symbol of sovereignty over the seas.25 But Nedham crowns her here as a foil to Cromwell’s humble instrumentality. She embodies a territorial claim advanced by the success of the Dutch war, but which the under-consolidated Protectorate cannot practise without the City’s support. The Naiads would appear like London’s water pageants in the Jacobean and Caroline Lord Mayor’s Day shows (which often represented sea-deities26), but their chorus represents to the capital a new power more expansive than that comprehended by Wtz Stephen, and which makes his vision and that of the pageantry alike seem limited by comparison. This is the maritime imperium claimed by Mare Clausum, which was deemed expandable ‘By new acquests’ and commercial exploitation in Nedham’s republican translation.27 Finally, however, these auspices of British glory can be fulWlled only by New Troy’s populace, to whom all this show is directed: the moment of possibility hinges on Londoners showing a ‘new face’ of consensus. Norbrook has shown how Nedham’s poem ironically reverses Augustan readings of Roman history, with an energy typical of republican poetics:28 London’s civic institutions and customs, its ‘togas’ and its water pageants, can become genuinely republican instruments, if only the City’s welcome draws after it a wider consent. Now,

25 Nedham’s translation used the Wgure of Britannia for the Wrst time: John Selden, Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea, trans. Marchamont Nedham (London, 1652). 26 See, e.g., Thomas Heywood, Porta Pietatis, Or, The Port or Harbour of Piety (London, 1638), B1r–v. 27 Selden, Of the Dominion, sigs. [B1]r–v; see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 119. 28 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 328–30.

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Nedham writes, in a sentiment unlikely to impress the aldermen, Londoners are citizens for the Wrst time. The poems by LitsWeld and Nedham make London’s institution of citizenship bear great weight in the genesis of the Protectorate. They exploit the origins of this institution in republican Rome—origins which in other circumstances the City might be more willing to hyperbolize—to suggest that it can legitimize a military regime. But Nedham’s poem also reveals the liability of these origins to subversion, such that they might be used to embarrass the traditional, but comparatively limited, freedoms of London’s citizenry. This liability makes more understandable the City’s attempts to hedge its endorsement of the Protectoral republic with conditions and the authority of Wtz Stephen, who could hardly be turned against the City’s institution of ‘freedom’. It might also explain the City’s unwillingness to invoke its old languages of civic participation when it revived Lord Mayor’s Day pageants the following year. Since the mid-sixteenth century, the Lord Mayor’s inauguration had been celebrated with a civic pageant on 29 October each year. The dramatic conventions of these pageants had been developed by Jacobean and Caroline writers, notably Anthony Munday, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood. The mayor would process to Westminster by barge to take his oath of oYce, a trip that was usually marked by the water pageants mentioned above. After returning to the City, he processed along a customary route through the streets with the aldermen, where they would meet with spectacular dramatic tableaux mounted on pageant wagons. Worthies and famous mayors from London’s past would instruct the mayor in the antiquity of London’s institutions, and glorious episodes in its history. Mythological heroes would discuss the allegorical signiWcance of their stories for London or the mayor’s livery company, which sponsored the pageant. The pageants drew on an extensive stock of emblems. Jason’s golden Xeece represented London’s honour, or a rhinoceros would appear as an allegory for the mayor’s protection of the innocent.29 The Lord Mayor’s Day show celebrated the prestige of the mayoralty and the companies, but it also lectured the mayor in the virtues rewarded by civic honour, especially those he needed for oYce. This didactic function could develop into plots with dramatic tension: Thomas Dekker’s Troia-Noua Triumphans drew the mayor into a confrontation between Virtue and Envy, in which Envy assaulted the throne of Virtue with a Wrework display.30 London appears to have been unique in reviving its civic pageantry under the Protectorate. Norwich, a city with comparable traditions (an annual procession with performers and a pageant dragon called ‘Old Snap’), resurrected them only 29 Thomas Middleton, The Sunne in Aries (London, 1621), sig. B1r; Heywood, Porta Pietatis, B2v–B3v; see also David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, rev. edn. (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona State University, 2003). 30 Thomas Dekker, Troia-Noua Triumphans (London, 1612); Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 168–9.


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at the Restoration.31 Stephen Roberts has found evidence of a resurgence of civic spirit in towns of the Severn Basin, which enjoyed something of an economic boom in the 1650s as the Atlantic trade in sugar, tobacco, and indentured labour took oV.32 In Bristol, public celebrations, including a procession, bonWres, and gun salutes from ships, were organized for Oliver Cromwell’s second inauguration in 1657 and for Richard’s accession.33 But it was more in public works that the civic pride of towns in the south-west was expressed: Gloucester founded a municipal library.34 London’s grand civic traditions had never lapsed completely: on 9 June 1649 the City had thrown a banquet for Parliament, Cromwell, and Fairfax, in thanks for the suppression of the Leveller revolt in 1649.35 Protectorate London even saw the institution of civic traditions, which reveal new forms of metropolitan consciousness: London citizens began to organize county feasts in the capital, which helped them maintain an interest in the political and religious life of their native counties.36 The Wrst of the Protectoral Lord Mayor’s Day pageants was produced by the Company of Mercers in 1655. It featured no spoken drama, but it was praised in a poem by Edmund Gayton, titled Charity Triumphant.37 His dedication to Mayor Dethicke does not show whether his poem was actually commissioned by the Mercers, or whether it was a speculative endeavour designed to solicit patronage. The pageant was a young woman dressed in luxury fabrics, seated on an elaborate pageant wagon, which was drawn by six white horses and accompanied by pages. It went down so well with the crowds that it was recreated for the 1686 Lord Mayor’s Day.38 It is probably Gayton’s elaboration that this represented charity. The Mercers very likely intended nothing more than a representation of the company’s arms: a woman’s head with Xowing blonde hair. Gayton’s poem is interesting for the way that it seeks to buttress a very partial revival, in which the Mercers conspicuously avoided addressing the traditional pageant themes of civic virtues cultivated by company fraternity. Gayton supplies the virtue of charity, but attempts to ground it in a restricted culture of civic virtue and participation.

31 David Underdown, Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603– 1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 259. 32 Stephen K. Roberts, ‘Cromwellian Towns in the Severn Basin: A Contribution to Cis-Atlantic History?’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 165–87 (173–4). 33 Ibid. 186. 34 Ibid. 180. 35 Oliver Cromwell, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937–47), ii. 79. 36 Newton E. Key, ‘The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654–1714’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 223–56. 37 Edmund Gayton, Charity Triumphant, Or, The Virgin-Shew (London, 1655). 38 The Swedish ambassador Peter Coyet described the procession: British Library, Additional MS 38100, fos. 161v–162r; for the 1686 revival see Jean Imray, The Mercers’ Hall (London: The London Topographical Society, 1991), 332–3.

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London’s livery companies were attractive trustees for charitable bequests, because they oVered prestigious memorials to the dead, and because as corporations they could defend their claims to an inheritance in a court of law. Charity was vital to the corporate prestige of the companies, which represented themselves as the Protestant successors to the church-driven charity of pre-Reformation England. They supported institutions for the relief of the poor, and funded university scholarships.39 However, the companies’ charity had been sharply reduced by the deprivations of war. They had lost Irish estates between 1641 and 1652, and had been pressured to supply Parliament’s armies with massive loans, many of which had not been repaid, leaving the companies themselves in debt.40 In a humanistic oration to the Mayor in September 1654, Thomas Sheppie, a Christ’s Hospital orphan, addressed the topic of London’s charity. He praised the City’s beneWcence, but he also tactfully motivated the City to live up to its past glories, by using the decayed tradition of Lord Mayor’s Day pageants for an allegory: You have seen (most worthy Patrons) your City, like a puissant Princess, presented before you, and carried in state in the Triumphant Chariot . . . Me thinks the main Body is composed of Charity; the Wheels by which it is supported, are Piety and Christianity; the Horses that draw it, are Mercy and Compassion; the Charioteer is Prudence; the Canopy is Protection; and all are bedecked with Bounty and Liberality; and we in our Blew Liveries are those, whom her Grace hath vouchsafed to accept of for her Pages, to wait upon her in her Triumph.41

In the absence of company money, other schemes for poor relief, some of which were associated with radical religious and political activists, had made inroads upon the companies’ monopoly of spectacular charity.42 A Corporation for the Poor had been instituted during the republic, to provide the needy with education and employment. Its orange-liveried orphans processed to sing witty and pathetic verses to Parliament and audiences of government oYcials, praising their gifts or exhorting them to greater support.43 The Mercers’ 1655 pageant could have taken Sheppie’s allegory for a design. However, Gayton expounds the Mercers’ charity in terms that oVer no foothold 39 Ian Archer, ‘The Livery Companies and Charity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Gadd and Wallis (eds.), Guilds, Society and Economy in London, 1450–1800, 15–28 (16). 40 Ian Doolittle, The Mercers’ Company 1579–1959 (London: Mercers’ Company, 1994), 64–6; Ben Coates, The Impact of the English Civil War on the Economy of London, 1642–50 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 70–2. 41 William Wills and Thomas Sheppie, Oratio Habita in Schola Christi Orphanotrophii (London, 1654), 11–12. 42 See Valerie Pearl, ‘Puritans and Poor Relief: The London Workhouse, 1649–1660’, in D. Pennington and K. Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 206–32 (219–29). 43 The songs were printed on broadside ‘reports’: The Corporation for the Poor, Poor Out-Cast Childrens Song and Cry (London, 1653); idem, The Report of the Governours of the Corporation for Imploying and Releiving the Poor of this City of London (London, 1655).


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to radical republican critiques of City institutions. His preface tries to separate the gift of pageantry from the culture of civic participation demanded by Sheppie. Gayton classiWes the pageant as a universal ‘reason of state’, through a survey which implies that republican ‘democracy’ leads to tyranny, even as it diminishes the Roman republic’s importance as a precedent for the occasion: View the Roman State under which Government soever you please, whether in the beginnings, under many happy kings, or in its change from Monarchy to Democracy, under the Marian and Scyllan Tyranny, or then in its exaltation into Empire, and absolute Soveraignty; you shall alwaies Wnd every Age, and sort of Governours, adorning and exemplifying their severall Authorities by Anniversary Shews and Pomps to the People, who are naturally pleas’d with such Gleames and Irradiations of their Superiors, and gaines at once Honour to the Magistrate and eVects content to the People. The severest and in other matters most rigid Policies or Common-wealths (to wit the Spartan, and Lacedamonian, and Athenian) smooth’d the rugged Front of their power in this Puctilio and reason of State.44

Gayton’s reclassiWcation of the pageant as ‘reason of State’ is consistent with his thinly veiled royalism. The phrase had come to denote the science of all political activity in some courtly and absolutist reinterpretations of humanism (this is the sense in which Marvell disparages the concept, below, p. 110): it is the art of preserving power or order, the basis of Gayton’s defence of civic spectacle.45 The pageant is an ‘Act of Charity’, in that it is a gift of order from the company to London. In Jacobean and Caroline pageants, charity was presented to the spectators as a personal virtue to honour and emulate: Thomas Middleton’s Triumphs of Integrity features representations of past company members famous for their charitable giving.46 Gayton’s spectacle, by contrast, excludes the ‘Commons of the City’ from civic activism: the spectacle does not inspire them to good works, but charms them into obedience instead. He slightly mocks their pleasure: they ‘rejoyce alwaies to see some of their money spent upon themselves’.47 The show defeats envy by rendering it harmless. It is transmuted into the silent aspiration of young girls who wish they too could join the Mercers’ Company, so that they could be dressed in the Wnery of the Mercers’ processional virgin. This desire forms the refrain of Gayton’s poem: ‘And every Virgin who stood by, j Wish’d secretly, O would that I j Were of the Mercers Company!’ Suggesting a parallel with the Doge of Venice’s ceremonial marriage to the sea, the poem represents the pageant as a ‘Dower’ of authority for the mayor. Charity Triumphant takes the Mercers’ unwillingness to stage a pageant on traditional themes as an opportunity to experiment with a more authoritarian 44 Gayton, Charity Triumphant, 3. 45 Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); but see also Peltonen’s qualiWcation of this argument in Classical Humanism and Republicanism. 47 Ibid. 4. 46 Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Integrity (London, 1623), sig. B1v.

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rationale for Lord Mayor’s Day pageants. Gayton’s experiment perhaps reXects an anxiety that he shared with the Mercer elite, that the customary drama of civic activism seemed permeable to the culture of republicanism disparaged in Gayton’s preface. His design failed, however, to impress the Company of Skinners, who produced the following year’s pageant. London’s Triumph, for Mayor Robert Tichborne, reclaimed civic virtue for London’s political institutions, and imagined them in the mirror of republican Rome. It featured two dramatic tableaux, written by an author recorded only by the initials ‘I. B.’. He rejects Gayton’s ‘reason of state’, and presents the pageant as a communal production, which generates not just obedience, but civic love, pride, and energetic participation. Why did London wait until 1656 to revive its drama of civic participation? A company committee would have organized the pageant, but the new mayor might be expected to exert an inXuence on its direction. Mayor Tichborne was an extraordinary mayor, who had shown sympathy for republican values. He was a veteran of the City’s Honourable Artillery Company and had been a captain of a regiment of London’s Trained Bands, which were given an especially prominent role in his pageant. Civic virtue was at the heart of the culture fostered by the Artillery Company, an innovative voluntary organization which had sought to emulate in discipline the best militias of northern Europe.48 Tichborne was also a regicide, and had been a republican MP and a councillor of state before he grew alienated from the radicals of Barebone’s Parliament. He maintained a good relationship with Cromwell and the Council of State (he was nominated to the Other House in 1657), which may have helped his election, either through inXuence from Whitehall or from the hopes of the other aldermen that his connections might prove advantageous to the City. I. B. perhaps protests too much by repeatedly stressing that the elections were free and open: Though Honours, Marks of Envy are, we see That your Election (Sir) was Envy free: The Peoples Love; not sinister regard, Gave to your Virtue, Sir, its just reward. (I. 5–8)

The political condition of the Protectorate state provided additional incentives to assert the vigour and unity of London’s citizenry. After the failure of the Wrst Protectorate parliament to legitimize the Instrument of Government (see Chapter 4), the regime had sought to increase its authority across England and Wales by constructing a system of regional military rule by major-generals. In the spring 48 Keith Roberts, ‘Citizen Soldiers: The Military Power of the City of London’, in Stephen Porter (ed.), London and the Civil War (Houndmills: Macmillan 1996), 89–116 (90–101). For the importance of an armed citizenry in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century discussions of civic greatness see also Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism, 209–13.


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of 1656, the government had reassured the City that its powers and liberties would not be invaded by this system, but from the City’s point of view, a show of its political steel would have been timely.49 At the same time, the war with Spain rendered the Protector in desperate need of loans from the City, so London’s oligarchs had an opportunity to press for the consolidation of its power and independence. Indeed, in a satirical ballad on this Lord Mayor’s Day pageant, the Protector is reduced by Wscal need to a remote and acquiescent Wgure, waving at the mayor’s barge from Whitehall palace: ‘To Westward they went . . . To shew the Protector they had yet more mony, j For which he thanked them from a Bellcony’ (ll. 33–6).50 Furthermore, the language of civic virtue perhaps now seemed less vulnerable to subversive appropriation by radical republicans, following the failure of the republican coup of 1655 (below, p. 88) and the death of John Lilburne, the most eVective Leveller critic of London’s aldermanic oligarchy.51 In the 1656 pageant, the history and institutions of City politics and company membership mesh powerfully with the virtues cultivated by civic humanism. I. B.’s preface argues that the mayoralty was an initiative of the citizenry, established in the time of Richard I. London’s military record is a source of pride for the city: ‘it is a City glorious for manhood, potent in Arms, and furnish’d with such store of munition and inhabitants, insomuch that it hath shew’d in a muster roll above 20000 Horsemen, and threescore 1000 footmen Wt for war’.52 Civic virtue is nurtured by company fraternity: ‘above Wfteen of those who have sate in this seat of honour and dignity, have been members of the worshipful company of Skinners; so fruitful hath that society been of worthy Patriots and Magistrates to uphold the government of this City’.53 The pageant presents the annual election of the mayor as the fulcrum of a civic meritocracy that rewards virtue. In the mayoral pageants produced under kings, such republicanizing syntheses had usually been hedged with obsequies to monarchical sovereignty. Lawrence Manley has argued that the relationship between the inner civic polity and the outer monarchical polity drove the development of the pageant’s form. It is a liminal rite, which ‘negotiated ceremonially between two jurisdictions’ and ‘articulate[d] . . . the conXict between diVerent forms of rule, diVerent styles and modes of life, diVerent perceptions of time, history and the place of the city and individual within them’.54 But in 1656, with the Protector lacking a sound legal footing and the will to enforce his personal authority over the capital, the 49 Christopher Durston, Cromwell’s Major Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 90–1. 50 M. T., The Cities New Poet’s Mock-Show ([London, 1656]). 51 See, e.g., John Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains (London, 1646). 52 I. B., Londons Triumph (London, 1656), 8. Wiseman (Drama and Politics, 255) questions the attribution of this pageant to John Bulteel. 53 I. B., Londons Triumph, 7–8. 54 Manley, Literature and Culture, 221.

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shackles came oV the republican imagination.55 In what was becoming a key analogy, reiterated in the following year’s pageant too, I. B. parallels London’s present polity to the political structure and genesis of republican Rome. The Wrst pageant represented ‘a City pensive and forlorn, for want of a Zealous governor: [with] Moors and Leopards, like evill customs tyrannizing over the weak Virginitie of undefended Virtue’.56 A ‘dejected’ old man leads the pageant, only to greet Tichborne and the aldermen as saviours: Amazement vanish! Joy, instruct my Tongue, T’expresse our wishes, such as the Romans sung To their Patroni, when that Glorious State By free Elections, became fortunate. (I. 1–4)

Where earlier pageants had acknowledged civic institutions as grants and privileges from the monarch, now the aldermen could be represented as an ancient noble estate, of original and autonomous authority. Roman patricians chased tyrannical kings from Rome, so the parallel with Tichborne might even suggest that he, more than Cromwell, was saving London from tyrannical practices; that the aldermen and their trained bands are the real protectors of ‘undefended Virtue’. The pageant makes no mention of the Protector, and in I. B.’s narrative of the day’s events, Cromwell cannot even muster the presence that he does in the satirical ballad. He makes a brief appearance with his Council, to make gestures of ‘grace and courtesie’ to the mayoral barge as it passes Whitehall.57 The Protectorate pageants curtailed the heroic allegories and roll-calls of company worthies which featured in Jacobean and Caroline pageants, and experimented with simpler expository speeches. In I. B.’s second pageant, Orpheus appears seated among wild beasts, which are charmed by his song to move in time with the music, and provide an emblem of the harmonious order that a magistrate brings to the city. This tableau is very similar in design to productions from 1619 and 1639. The revival oVered a visual demonstration that the City was returning to norms of order which existed before the upheavals of the 1640s and early 1650s. However, I. B.’s speeches are shorter and plainer than those of the earlier pageants, which use copious rhetoric to develop the aVective power of the spectacle: in 1619, Middleton’s Orpheus enhanced the visual allegory by piling up examples of the vices symbolized by the landscape’s briers; in Heywood’s 1639 pageant, Orpheus enumerates the diVerent predators and prey which have been charmed into companionship by Orpheus’s music, only to 55 Here I am indebted to Susan Wiseman’s argument that the Protectorate shows ‘use the vocabulary of Roman entertainments to enhance the importance of the City’ in the ‘absence of a chain of speciWcally regal authority linking the City to the nation’ (see Wiseman, Drama and Politics, 176–8). 56 I. B., Londons Triumph, 12. 57 Ibid. 10.


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Wnd that the sociability created by a good mayor’s rule is a sweeter harmony.58 In 1656, however, Orpheus pares the emblem down to general principles: Order, saith Plato, is the Soul of things, And from that Fountain every good Art springs; Beasts become tame and usefull, Man would be, More Werce then they, did not Authority Awe his unruly Actions, and loose will, Making distinctions ’twixt the Good and Ill. (II. 1–6)

This might seem a poor dramatic revival in comparison with the lively dialogues of some Jacobean and Caroline pageants, but the retention and development of the declamatory form in the remaining Protectoral pageants suggest that the committees organizing them preferred to simplify the dramatic element of the pageant and focus on a few key themes. Perhaps the companies were wary of producing a drama too close in form to proscribed public theatre, though their employment of actors from a troupe that performed illegally at the Red Bull Theatre would suggest that they saw little wrong with theatricality per se (indeed, the actors perhaps provided another means of trumpeting the City’s independent authority, in keeping with the companies’ patronage of writers noted for their royalism).59 It seems more likely that ostentatiously courtly language was considered inappropriate to the times or to a godly mayor like Tichborne. Even in John Tatham’s pageants of 1657 and 1658, which use more courtly poetic forms, the ‘neo-feudal’ manners by which earlier pageants had welcomed the mayor as the equal of an earl60 give way to plainer addresses. Tatham’s dedication to Sir John Ireton, another godly mayor and ally of the Cromwells, states that his merits should be commended in ‘modest Attire’, without the ‘vanity of Hyperbolizing’, because ‘your Lordship is a known Enemy to such Aereall Nothings’.61

58 Thomas Middleton, The Triumphs of Love and Antiquity (London, 1619), B1v–B3v; Thomas Heywood, Londini Status Pacatus (London, 1639), B3v–B4r. 59 According to an entry in the Stationers’ Register (G. E. B. Eyre and Henry R. Plomer (eds.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers: From 1640–1708, 3 vols. (London, 1913–14), ii. 93 (hereafter, TRCS), actors named Wintersall and Walter Clunn featured in the 1656 pageant. An actor called Wintershall was associated with surreptitious performances between 1648 and 1660, and was prosecuted for being part of the illegal Red Bull Theatre troupe in May 1659. Clunn was associated with this troupe in 1659, so it seems likely that he too had been acting illegally during the earlier Protectorate (Philip HighWll, Kalman Burnim, and Edward Langhans, A Biographical Dictionary of Actors, Actresses, Musicians, Dancers, Managers and Other Stage Personnel in London, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), iii. 366–7, xvi. 192–3). In addition to Gayton, Tatham, and Thomas Jordan, other Citypatronized royalist authors included James Howell and John Ogilby (see his 1654 payment ‘for a booke called Virgill’, in James Foster Wadmore, Some Account of the Worshipful Company of Skinners of London (London: Blades, East, and Blades, 1902), 109). 60 Manley, Literature and Culture, 129, 221, 267. 61 John Tatham, Londons Tryumph Presented by Industry and Honour (London, 1658), A2.


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Tatham, Wrst employed to write the Skinners’ 1657 pageant, was more adventurous than his predecessor. He keeps to the form of expository speeches, but develops the topical application of traditional themes. His pageants are conceived as displays of civilizing eloquence: ‘Eloquence is a comely Ornament to a Magistrate; it insinuates into the very hearts of men, and is of that eYcacie and power, that it civilizeth the rudest People.’62 The rhetorical verse address proved more Xexible in Tatham’s hands. He adapted a traditional conception of the pageant as a gift of honour63 to new occasions for civic eloquence. His 1657 pageant for Mayor Chiverton of the Skinners, London’s Triumphs, began with a double tableau: a pilgrim was seated on a wagon that represented beasts in the wilderness (the Skinners recycled the previous year’s Orpheus pageant); to his left stood a new pageant representing the four continents of the world trading with London, surmounted by Fame. He addressed the mayor and aldermen with a speech that represents the wilderness as the danger of ignorance into which London might fall without the civic virtues embodied in Mayor Chiverton. The pageant of fame achieved by success in trade is Wrst presented as a gift of honour to the City, but becomes a compliment to Chiverton too: Grand City; Thou Minerva, Nursery To Arts and Arms, Fames Garden Military. The Merchants Treasure, and their safety too, What parts in all the World but trade with you? Europe, wherein you seated are, doth Wll Your lapp with choice varieties: The IllComplexion’d AVrican into your Breast Poures forth his Spicie Treasure; and the rest Crown you with Gold and Onix stones; Thus they (As once to Rome) now to you Tribute pay. If such a Power in her wee may inferr, What must remain in him that Governs her? (I. 5–16)64

It was hardly unconventional to present London’s trade as an aspect of its fame or honour, but here the suggestion that it makes London the inheritor of Rome’s glory primes the aldermen for a more topical rhetorical intervention. London’s civic pageants conventionally appeared along the street of Cheapside, which formed the City’s ceremonial ‘spine’,65 but Tatham broke with this customary geography, and scripted a third pageant to lie in wait for the mayor outside the door of his house. This pageant reinterpreted an older tradition: before the wars, the pageants were typically played out prior to a grand banquet 62 63 64 65

John Tatham, London’s Triumphs (London, 1657), sig. A3v. Manley, Literature and Culture, 262. Tatham, London’s Triumphs, sig. B2v. Manley, Literature and Culture, 237.


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for the livery, after which they would follow the mayor to his home. Upon arriving there, a leading character from one of the pageants would remind the mayor of the civic responsibilities addressed in the day’s pageant. The grand banquets appear to have been scaled down under the Protectorate, perhaps owing to the City’s reduced Wnancial resources, and a more exclusive dinner took place at the mayor’s house. Tatham resurrects a dramatic moment of doorstep advice, but it becomes a startling rhetorical intervention from a pageant representing Neptune. He interjects an urgent political matter, which the mayor might do well to discuss over his inaugural dinner with the aldermen. When o’re the Bosome of the Baltick Seas Your lofty Vessels Rode, we did appease The Angry Surges, and did smooth each Wave, With Our Commanding Trydent, the which gave an open Passage to your TraYque; Thus The East-land Merchants stand Oblig’d to us; Nor shall they want our favour, whilst wee sway The Watry Region, Billows shall Obey The Burden of their Treasure; You are one, Next to Our self, whom they depend upon For a Protection: Then, as you are made, Great by your Worth, be still a Friend to Trade. Actions are Rivers Wisdom onely feeds, As the Spring-head from whence their name proceeds. Themistocles could make a City greater In Power and Riches: A renowned Prætor, Whose fame out-lives him, an Uncoppy’d story For others to Achieve like lasting glory. If his like Actions in your breast Wnd room, Your Fame will out-last Mauseleums Tombe. (II. 5–24)66

Chiverton had become rich as a member and governor of the Eastland Company, which had secured a royal charter to monopolize trade to the Baltic region, allowing its members to spread the risk of individual voyages by investing in joint stock. In 1657, the Eastland Company was petitioning the Protectoral regime for the renewal of its monopoly charter, because war and competition from interlopers had all but halted its trade. The charter of the East India Company had been renewed that year, and there survives an unratiWed draft of a Protectorate charter for the Eastland Company, suggesting that the merchants brought the Protector to the verge of signing it. His failure to do so probably reXects the interests of the navy, which depended upon supplies from the Baltic, and thus 66 Tatham, London’s Triumphs, sigs. B3v–B4r.

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beneWted from the low prices induced by competition from interlopers.67 The Skinners were quite closely associated with the Baltic trade, which included furs.68 It was not unprecedented for City pageants to celebrate the trading syndicates of leading members of their company, but Neptune’s intervention represents an entirely new mode of lobbying. His appeal for the renewal of the Eastland Company’s charter takes the form of a reminder, of long-standing ties and obligations, and of the City’s prosperity before the hardships of recent wars. The situation of the mayor’s house, on Dowgate, which ran downhill southwards to the banks of the Thames, would allow for Neptune to appear as though he had emerged from the river visible at the end of the street, like one of the water pageants that had initiated the more elaborate Jacobean and Caroline productions, bursting its conventional bounds of place and time. Yet, even as he exploits the power of nostalgia to appeal for the restoration of a City institution, Neptune oVers an original vision of London’s potential as a virtually independent trade republic. With a powerful mayor so wise in matters of trade, Chiverton might become another Themistocles, who made Athens great by developing its maritime resources and trade. This analogy is so fresh that it oVers something of a rebuV to the ‘neo-Roman’ republicanism of Nedham’s poem above: history contains examples of diVerent kinds of republics, some of which became great through trade—as opposed to military expansion perhaps, which, critics of Protectoral foreign policy had argued, undermined the Roman republic.69 Neptune demands that the Eastland merchants are not forgotten in Chiverton’s election to civic greatness, because loyalty to trading relationships should be part of civic virtue. ‘Protection’ (II. 15) is a loaded word for this responsibility, for the Protector’s war with Spain, pursued in part to keep a potentially mutinous standing army employed, was increasingly blamed for a recession in trade.70 London’s aldermen and mayor are presented as an alternative, more hopeful, focus of power and authority to a Protector locked into a state logic that made military expansion necessary. Neptune’s Wnal enticement is that a trade-minded mayor might enjoy more durable fame than that of the warrior Mausolus, whose tomb had been destroyed by the Knights of Rhodes in the Wfteenth century. Perhaps Chiverton, rather than a mere conqueror such as Cromwell, could be remembered as the real founder of London’s greatness. In the image of London’s potential as a commonwealth of trade, Tatham had found a telos for the city companies, their banquets and languages of civic virtue, and their willingness to challenge Protectoral foreign 67 Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Cromwellian Protectorate, 2nd edn. (London: F. Cass, 1962), 125–9. 68 Maud Sellers (ed.), The Acts and Ordinances of the Eastland Company (London: Royal Historical Society, 1906), p. lii. 69 David Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 531–55 (550). Also see below, p. 125. 70 Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 141–4; though this recession may have hit certain parts of the country and certain merchants more than others (see p. 47 above).


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policy. To some extent, the way had been prepared for him by other City-patronized writers, notably Howell, who in Londinopolis traces the evolution of London’s liberty and monuments to the point where they might compete with Venice for glory. It took a crisis, however, to turn this possibility into an occasion for public eloquence, whereby the problem of the Eastland Company’s charter could be made to seem crucial to the salus populi of London itself. What Tatham might not have foreseen in 1657 was the election of the next year’s mayor from the Company of Clothworkers. The artisan members of this company had questioned the City elite’s claim to rule in the interests of all London’s freemen. Their challenge stretched Tatham’s languages of a civic commonweal to fresh syntheses of dramatic and poetic forms. Tatham’s 1658 pageant addresses the relationship between honour and industry.71 Wool was England’s major export, and the vast majority of this trade was shipped from London. For a century or so, the industry of ‘Wnishing’ cloth for export had been made volatile by a combination of foreign competition and some of the Crown’s most disastrous attempts to sell monopolies and inXuence markets.72 Events and policies in the 1640s and 1650s had made matters worse. European conXicts and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms had brought large numbers of migrant workers to London’s suburbs. This inXux of ‘aliens’ prompted protests from yeomen members of some companies: they complained that migrant craftsmen were ignoring employment regulations and using cheap labour to undercut them; the livery turned a blind eye to these suburban practices, because they could charge foreigners ‘enhanced’ entrance fees to join the companies.73 Protectorate foreign policy introduced additional pressures: Cromwell had not required the United Provinces to reopen their markets to English cloths after the 1652–4 war, and subsequently he had initiated a conXict with Spain, which cut English producers oV from essential raw materials and from a major market.74 These diYculties heightened tensions in the Clothworkers’ Company during the period 1641–59, during which artisan members of the company staged several revolts against the power of the livery to elect company oYcers and police the clothworking trade. As Norah Carlin has shown, these and similar artisan revolts within other London companies during the 1640s and 1650s drew on radical arguments. Levellers, including Lilburne, himself a member of the Company of Clothworkers, had criticized the elitism of London’s companies and political institutions, which, he argued, privileged monopolizing interests at the expense of the artisan traders they were supposed to protect.75 Though the 71 Tatham, Londons Tryumph Presented by Industry and Honour. 72 G. D. Ramsey, The English Woollen Industry, 1500–1750 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), 62–3. 73 Norah Carlin, ‘Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans’ Protests, 1635–1659’, International Review of Social History, 39 (1994), 223–54 (228, 236–9). 74 Ramsey, English Woollen Industry, 64. 75 Lilburne, Londons Liberty in Chains, 40–1.

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radicals’ victories in shifting civic power from the Court of Aldermen to London’s Common Council had been almost completely reversed (the Common Council retained limited rights to nominate certain oYcials, but the aldermen eVectively recovered most of their old powers76), artisan members of some companies also accused their leaders of elitism, and demanded greater powers to protect their own economic interests. In the Company of Clothworkers, the artisans protested that the merchant-dominated livery knew nothing about the clothworking industry, and won some concessions of rights to elect the oYcials who regulated and policed their trade.77 A further revolt in 1659 suggests that by the time of Tatham’s 1658 pageant for the Clothworker mayor John Ireton, this compromise had not completely allayed tensions between the diVerent orders of the company. Tatham’s pageant answers the protest that the company elite have little regard for artisan clothworkers, and celebrates the harmony that had supposedly been restored to relations between the livery order of the company and its artisan ranks. It stages a pastoral tableau, glossed by the Wgure of Industry, in which the sub-trades of clothworking demonstrate their arts, dance and sing about their happiness: a life of work and mirth in harmony with nature. It was unusual for a City pageant to pay such close attention to crafts: Anthony Munday’s 1611 pageant of Old Drapery features non-speaking parts that represent processes from cloth making, but more often industry was mythologized, worked into elaborate iconographic schemes, or exoticized—as Indians ‘set at worke’ for the sake of London’s glory, for example.78 Tatham honours the crafts of clothworking by setting them centre stage. The conventions of pastoral and pageants alike are extended in celebration of their arts. The song elaborates the dramatis personae of pastoral to name and dignify not just shepherds, but others who work with wool: ‘The Picker, Carder, and the Spinner too; j The Weaver, Fuller and the Dyer’ (II. 35–6). The inclusion of a pastoral song set for diVerent voices is also innovative, adapting a form of entertainment usually reserved for the houses of the great and good. Harmony in the industrial orders of the Company of Clothworkers becomes the foundation of the company’s honour. The two pageants produced for the 1658 Lord Mayor’s Day formed a pyramidal structure: the Wrst tier was the opening pageant of six artisans; the second pageant, representing honour, featured tiers of Wgures representing the four cardinal virtues and the three theological virtues, over which sat the Wgure of Honour. The tiers present factors of twelve, a number which, Honour explains, has a special signiWcance: it being 76 Farnell, ‘Politics of the City of London’, 309–10. 77 Carlin, ‘Liberty and Fraternities’, 236, 242. 78 Anthony Munday, Himatia-Poleos: The Triumphs of Olde Draperie (London, 1614), 7 (Manley (Literature and Culture, 288) has suggested that this too is a particularized response to criticism, showing that urban growth was not the alleged cause of decline in agrarian prosperity, but a source of wealth and energy); Thomas Dekker, Londons Tempe, or The Field of Happines (London, 1629), sigs. B2v–B3r; Thomas Middleton, The Tryumphs of Honor and Industry (London, 1617), sig. A4r.


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‘twelve times twelve years’ (III. 25) since the company’s institution. Mayor Ireton is the twelfth mayor to be drawn from its ranks. Previous pageants had often represented honour as the natural reward of the mayor’s civic virtue, but here honour is seen to be supported by the harmony established in the lower ranks too. The company’s good wishes for the mayor’s term of oYce include ‘May no intestine broyles disturbe your rest’ (II. 43). Geographically, too, the pageant enacts and celebrates the harmonization of artisan production and a merchant elite. When the mayor returned from his investiture at Westminster, he disembarked at St Paul’s stairs as usual, but where, conventionally, he would process northwards up to St Paul’s along Knightrider Street, he now turned east along Thames Street, where the crowds and ranked livery companies awaited him instead. Thames Street was the site of many merchants’ warehouses, and on working days became London’s most frenetic interface between industrial production and its merchant traders.79 The new route of 1658 began to map its processional representation of harmonious order along this economic seam. A desire to set limits to civic participation structures Tatham’s pageant for the Clothworkers, but it is more focused than that which informs Gayton’s Charity Triumphant. Tatham does not retreat from the central topics and tenets of civic virtue. Honour’s pageant frames the cardinal and theological virtues as examples for the ‘standers by’ (III. 18) to emulate, in expectation that the City will reward the deserving with honour. The reciprocal ‘love’ between company and mayor spurs Ireton to ‘expose j [his] large Endowments to their best repose’ (III. 33–4) in civic oYce. However, Tatham turns to more courtly registers of verse to represent the relationship between artisan industry and civic honour. His declamations use more closed couplets than his previous pageant verse, and echo the prosody and Latinate diction that was being made fashionable by Waller (below, pp. 131, 168): urbane taste in poetry appears to go hand in hand with Wscal moderation, which many would see as having deserted the high-taxing, overmilitarized centre of Protectorate Whitehall. Industry is a Cities glory, and in part, Is to the Governour or Head, a Heart, To which he is a very welcome guest; not to devoure, but temperately to Feast. (II. 27–30)

The pageant celebrates a heightening of the City’s responsibilities. These stretch beyond the City’s walls, where the sub-trades of clothworking become ‘various vains [from which] many do feed, j And are supply’d with succour in their need’ (III. 39–40). However, Tatham’s courtly poetic registers also deWne the limits of civic participation, commensurate to the limited political concessions allowed to 79 Fran C. Chalfant, Ben Jonson’s London: A Jacobean Placename Dictionary (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1978), 177–8.

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the artisan clothworkers. When Industry introduces their crafts, his Herrickian diction of moderation gently separates them from civic culture, massaging the fractious suburbs back into an idealized countryside: My Lord your Pardon if my People doe Exceed their wonted Bounds to honour you; And laying work a side, presume to play; The sight of you gives them a Holli-day. Such season’d harmless pastime cannot hurt, That labor’s hard, ’s not soften’d with some sport. (III. 1–6)

Here, the mayor’s presence induces not emulation and civic activism, but a festive break from exertion. The pageant expresses respect for the artisan clothworkers, but its courtesies also renew and naturalize the political distinction between artisans and an enfranchised elite. The revival of civic pageantry under the Protectorate was at once colourful and limited, but it was not the Protector who limited it. The City’s prominent role in the genesis of the Protectorate settlement allowed it to represent itself as an original and independent power within the state. Subsequent Lord Mayor’s Day pageants developed this authority with suggestions that the City’s institutions could provide the political force to challenge military interests. By urging Mayor Chiverton to model himself on Themistocles, or comparing the aldermen to a quasi-aristocratic bulwark against tyranny, the City presented itself as an independent champion of metropolitan prosperity. In more private entertainments, this role becomes more explicitly antagonistic. A song survives from an entertainment written by Thomas Jordan, probably performed at a civic banquet in 1658, which features a citizen, a countryman, and a soldier. Jordan represents the soldier as a tyrannizer, demanding free quarter of the rural population and imposing high taxes on the city.80 The soldier is portrayed as an opportunist who has abandoned legitimate trade for a more lucrative career in bullying, and the song leaves no doubt that the City elite recognized army power as a force to contest within the Protectoral state. But the City’s image of itself as the real protector of the Commonwealth was eventually limited by the vulnerability of civic languages and institutions to diVerent forms of radical critique. The innovations and compromises of Protectorate civic pageantry illuminate developments by which more radical constructions of citizenship continued to question and pressure City institutions and power: not only through Nedham’s republican verse, but by the revolts of artisan clothworkers too. 80 University of Nottingham Library, Portland MS, PwV 18, 62–7. The manuscript is discussed in Lynn Hulse, ‘ ‘‘Musick & Poetry, Mixed’’: Thomas Jordan’s Manuscript Collection’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 7–26.

3 The Oxford Muses in the Protectorate In a July 1654 oration to the University of Oxford, vice-chancellor John Owen tried to rally its scholars to the work of reformation by describing a university struggling against disfavour, popular superstition, and radical attacks: It is vain to contemplate Xight, hiding and withdrawal: it is useless to plead the prejudices of men, the unfairness of the times, the superciliousness of great personages to the community of the gown; and the ingratitude of your country, which has scarcely spared its bones. Either you must Wght the good Wght with valour or, however skilful you are, perish in disgrace . . . Let the ill-bred and ignorant masses gape at rope-walkers and the cups of jugglers; let them be amazed at astrologers, fortune tellers and readers of horoscopes . . . Let little men of savage cruelty and brutality extend their threats and weapons; let sun-struck good-fornothings blaspheming everything they do not understand, scoV at knowledge, truth and virtue itself, and greet them with facetious wit; let the timid fear that the oppressive eye of superstition and darkness might return; but let us adorn the Sparta we have found, let us campaign in earnest, let us burst into the camp of truth, let us make for heaven itself with courage, despairing of nothing, with the Hon. Chancellor raising our standard on high, with Christ our leader and Christ our inspiration.1

The battle between Oxford’s conservatives and Owen’s vision of a reformed and reforming university provides the central narrative of Blair Worden’s account of ‘Cromwellian Oxford’; but the month before Owen delivered this oration, the university published a book that shows a more disparate, but no less bold, struggle, over the university’s place within the Protectoral settlement.2 A collection of supposedly laudatory poems on the Protector’s peace with the Dutch, Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria, variously seeks to advise, daunt, and entice the people shaping the new Protectoral regime, negotiating not just with the Protector (who was also the university’s chancellor), but with members of the wider elite, many of whom had already proved themselves ready to help the university confound its would-be reformers.3 The commemorative anthology had become an important way for the university to demonstrate its genius and public spirit, and for contributors to 1 John Owen, The Oxford Orations of Dr. John Owen, ed. Peter Toon, trans. John Glucker (Linkinhorne: Gospel Communication, 1971), 17–18. 2 Blair Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 733–72. 3 Ibid. 735.

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The Oxford Muses in the Protectorate

establish reputations for accomplishments that might lead to preferment.4 The university set great store by its occasional verse as an expression of corporate prestige: it sent presentation copies to eminent men who might support its interests, and in 1654 paid a bonus to its printers for speeding up the work so that the celebratory moment was not missed.5 Yet Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria questions the signiWcance of that moment, and probes the auspiciousness of the peace. The April 1654 Treaty of Westminster ended the Wrst Anglo–Dutch war. It also sealed the Protector’s political victory over the apocalyptic radicals of Barebone’s Parliament and gave the regime inXuence in Europe.6 Some of the joy expressed in the poems of Oxford scholars on this occasion no doubt reXected genuine relief at the marginalization of such radicals, after MPs in Barebone’s Parliament had proposed the abolition of the university and excited a pamphlet debate on university reform.7 But the occasion also confronted the Oxford muses with a settlement fraught with uncertainties. The Protectorate’s matrix of institutions was yet being formed, and presented the university with both dangers and opportunities to build its own cultural alliances. Worden has revealed how skilled the university’s scholars became at exploiting divisions within the republic;8 in their poetry, the rhetoric of civility and reformation is refracted through the cultural compromises and opportunities of the early Protectorate. The literary narrative of this chapter is that as they explore these fault-lines, the Oxford muses render even the most seemingly stable identities contingent. James Loxley has shown how Oxford’s Caroline anthologies planted the seeds of an engaged royalist poetic: ‘the structure and the cultural practices of Caroline Oxford revealed royal authority as their strongest determinant . . . the subjection of the university’s poetic activities to the authority of the King was itself a consequence of, and element in, the broader dynamic of the personal rule.’9 Loxley’s study follows this institutionally grounded poetry to an ‘invisible university’ of poets collected in loyalist anthologies of the 1650s; but another route leads from 1630s Oxford to Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria. Though some of the poems in this volume may not strike today’s readers as Wne verse, they repay close attention by revealing perspectives inXected by the Protectorate’s shifting and fractious institutions. The conXicting pressures assailing the university in 1654 push contributors to examine the ways in which their verse can create and inXuence authority. They transform the Oxford muses’ heritage of deWning subjection and royalism into conditional, contingent materials of negotiation, 4 David Money, ‘Free Flattery or Servile Tribute? Oxford and Cambridge Commemorative Poetry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in James Raven (ed.), Free Print and NonCommercial Publishing since 1700 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 48–66 (48, 63). 5 Such bonuses were paid infrequently: ibid. 50. 6 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–191. 7 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 750–1. 8 Ibid. 735. 9 James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: The Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 42–3.


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and contest the loyalists’ claim to the cultural capital of university poetics. The importance of this contest is registered in the publication of Momus Elencticus— to my knowledge the only satirical riposte to a university anthology. Attributed to a royalist Oxford wit, Thomas Ireland, this poem disparages the new muses’ authority in every way that he could think of, suggesting that he was rattled by the university turning a vital constituent of royal subjection and loyalty into a means of reconstituting itself within the Protectorate.10 Many of the Oxford poets wield hyperbolic licence adeptly, over-spilling the topic of peace with the Dutch to assert political pressures even in their eVusive avowals of loyalty to the Protector. Cumulatively, these ostensibly generous hyperboles become importunate, and begin to sound like the expectations of the politically embodied university itself, setting terms that the Protectorate’s powers will have to accommodate. Cromwell’s peace with the Dutch certainly helped to consolidate the new regime.11 However, several poems bend the idea that the peace marks a new beginning into a conservative projection of settlement. In a number of poems, the peace is the return of spring, in images that connote a reversion to an order that pre-existed recent troubles. Nathaniel Hodges compares the peace to ‘the drooping Xower j Lift[ing] up his head after an Aprill shower’; John Forde refers to ‘showres of blessings’.12 These images draw topical force by resonating not just with the season, but also with the coincidence of the Treaty of Westminster with rain after a long drought (a day of prayer was declared in thanks for both).13 John Wall makes the timeliness of peace and rain the theme of a short Latin poem ‘De Pace & Pluviaˆ mature` Stillantibus’ (2). By developing the coincidence into a courtly vignette, Nicholas Brookes suggests that the peace brings the restoration of the old elite culture: So lovelie’s Flora when shee Dubbs the howres With fruitfull bloomings, gildes the earth with Flowers After a Winters dearth, thus oft appeares A Queen of Love out of a Xood of Teares. (60, ll. 13–16)

Brookes has already compared the peace to a heraldic device and sunrise, and this Wnal analogy completes the braiding of peace, the protocols of courtly elites (here, dubbing), and natural cycles. The imagery represents the peace treaty as a deeper restoration than it was, perhaps deliberately overinterpreting the direction 10 [Thomas Ireland(?)], Momus Elencticus: Or a Light Come-OV upon that Serious Piece of Drollerie Presented by the Vice Chancellor of Oxon ([London(?)], 1654). 11 See Fraser, Cromwell, 496. 12 Musarum Oxoniensium, 67 (l. 12), 100 (l. 37). Hereafter, references to this volume are given in the text by page and line number. 13 Oliver Cromwell, A Declaration of his Highness, Setting Apart Tuesday the 23. of this Present May for a Publique Day of Thanksgiving, for the Peace Concluded between This Commonwealth, and That of the United Provinces, and for the Late Seasonable Rain (London, 1654).

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of the Protectorate from Cromwell’s new, relatively courtly style of negotiation and ambassadorial ceremony.14 At any time of the year, this web of imagery would make the restoration of elite protocols seem natural and inevitable, but Brookes shades the prospect of cultural restoration into what must have been a very broad national sense of relief that the weather had turned. Yet his reference to a ‘Queen of Love’ stops just short of predicting a new king; rather, it seems to hint that a reconsolidation of the kinds of elite relationships marked out by heraldry, dubbing, and courtly verse is now possible, to everybody’s relief. The experience of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms is depoliticized irenically as ‘a Xood of Teares’, which is at once grief, ultimately beneWcial rainfall, and perhaps a hint of the biblical Flood. For members of the Protectorate’s government who knew Brookes from his post-war delegacy in London to lobby for the university’s established rights, the subtext would have been especially clear: the fellowship’s obedience rests on the preservation of its privileged relationships within the elite.15 These are but a few examples of the anthology’s images of peace which idealize it conservatively as a return to old forms or landscapes: it is also a reset bone that grows back stronger, or a Weld refertilized by a winter Xood (97–8, ll. 1–8, 41–2). Such images seem commonplace and unspeciWc, but they eVace the chiliastic constructions of England’s constitution and global destiny which had driven the Anglo–Dutch war and shaped signiWcantly the terms of peace negotiated by the Protector.16 When placed in the context of attacks on the university from millenarian reformers, these images of a return to naturalized norms of bodily structure and landscape sound more urgent. A number of poems feature allusions to closing the gates of Janus, which provide another means of bracketing the militant politics of recent years and claiming that the peace represents a return to pre-war institutional relationships; but, as Ralph Bathurst’s English poem best exempliWes, this topic can also suggest that the ceremonialized return to these relationships is in itself a civil institution stronger even than Cromwell. The Roman temple of Janus had doors that were left open in time of war and closed when the imperial armies were at peace: Augustus claimed to have closed the gates three times, Wrst after defeating Marc Anthony, implying thereby that his victory heralded a resumption of ancient civil norms.17 In Bathurst’s poem, the gates are invoked to assert a dichotomy between the emergencies and expediencies of wartime government and the conciliatory arts of peace. So when Augustus with his Warlike hand Had brought home Triumphs both from Sea and Land, 14 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 20. 15 Ian Roy and Dietrich Reinhart, ‘Oxford and the Civil Wars’, in The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 687–731 (723). 16 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–191. 17 Plutarch’s Lives, ed. and trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), i. 373; Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti, trans. P. A. Brunt and J. M. Moore (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 24.


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And ( Janus Temple shut) now conquer’d more By arts of Peace, then feats of Armes before; Then swarmes of Poets came, and made him known Deckt by Their Bayes, no lesse then by his owne. As if one sacred heat did Wrst incite Him to Atchieve great things; next, Them to Write. And thus much we have done, only to show We can be Poets when you make us so. (59, ll. 7–16)

Bathurst transforms a martial triumph into the moment when more powerful cultural institutions prevail, one that must be revered as even Augustus revered them: the temple of Janus becomes a metonym for the instituted Oxford muses themselves, who deWne and proclaim the most important watersheds, between war and peace, or conquering and ruling. The Protectorate regime depends upon such institutions for its legitimacy. R. Gorges makes a similar claim with the lines ‘Here Swords Thou turn’st to Ploughs, there storms to Peace: j Let other Volumes Crowne Your Lawrells; Here j We sing not cromwell, but an oliver’ (60, ll. 2–4): the transition to peace empowers the university’s arbiters of civility over soldiers and the apologists of conquest. His iterated ‘Here’ stakes out this occasional mandate forcefully with rhyme and a rhetorical Wrework (he combines the Wgures of epanalepsis (repetition at the end of a clause or sentence of the word or phrase with which it began) and mesarchia (repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning and middle of successive clauses or sentences)) that binds his couplets and propels the reader onwards, implying too that the moment of peace is a moment for cultured oratory. The Wrst line hails Cromwell’s ‘Cath’lique valour’, as if to sift out vulgar readers who would not understand the positive meaning of ‘catholic’. He probes the cultural power of this poetic occasion at the expense of writing that aspires to treat Cromwell’s career exhaustively, touching on the sticky issue of Cromwell’s mooted coronation only to dismiss it as a problem for those other volumes. This poem speaks only of the outbreak of peace, yet claims the privilege of occasional verse in proclaiming and thence deWning the hopes for that peace, here combining moderate chiliasm (the swords turned to ploughs alludes to Isaiah’s vision of the last days18) with a mutually empowering alliance between Oxford and Cromwell that will secure ‘Strength abroad, and Wealth and Fame’ (l. 14). Similarly, but with a stronger implication of conditions, Bathurst’s Wnal couplet maintains solicitously that this beginning is only the beginning of a new, reciprocal tie between Protector and university, and that Cromwell has yet to accomplish the works of reconciliation (the reader cannot but think of the university’s settlement Wrst) which will bring him the full dividends of praise. 18 Isa. 2: 4.

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Bathurst and Gorges claim that their occasional poems constitute a powerful institution, in spite of the fact that university verse anthologies had been established only since the turn of the century, and it was by no means obvious which public events under the Commonwealth warranted an anthology—they had previously celebrated the births, deaths, and deliveries of royalty.19 Bathurst is not maintaining an institution so much as extending it, taking advantage of the uncertainties of the early Protectorate to advance the entwined interests of himself, his college, and the University of Oxford. This anthology also attempts to reconsolidate the university’s traditional standing by concerning itself with problems of provincial settlement, trade, the global condition of Protestantism, and Welds of arcana vacated by the royal court. Knowledge of these matters was becoming a prerequisite of civility. Sixteenth-century conduct books had Wrst formulated civility as an aristocratic code of conduct, to regulate bodily decorum and forms of address.20 During the seventeenth century, a growing gentry elite took to espousing these manners, such that civility came to represent ‘modes of urbanity’: a guide to social behaviour in the city and at court, which prepared individuals for social and commercial exchange.21 These protocols could be permeable to republican categories of thought, which made the communal identities that they produced especially fraught during the 1650s. According to the Memoirs of Lucy Hutchinson, her husband, John Hutchinson, found that his godly political allies in Nottinghamshire distrusted civility as a royalist attribute, even though Lucy Hutchinson identiWed these manners with the values of civic republicanism. Aristocrats dependent upon the private interests of the monarchy, and self-interested members of a puritan, urban elite, she described as ‘uncivil’.22 The universities also contended to deWne civility, because they had become inculcators of civility to young gentlemen. Civility demanded linguistic polish, perhaps some wit, and learning that was perceived as useful and conducive to wise counsel, rather than pedantic.23 For the University of Oxford to retain its cultural capital in the Protectorate, its teachers and students had to show a worldly understanding of the serious issues of the day: at the same time, it had to maintain the irreducibility of civility, as an ethos which is more than the sum of the competencies taught by the curriculum, and thereby resist the attempts of 19 See Harold Forster, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Cambridge Muses (1603–1763)’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1986), 141–70. The Oxford and Cambridge muses also celebrated the funerals of university Wgures. 20 Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 58–70. 21 Ibid. 159; Jennifer Richards (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 2. 22 David Norbrook, ‘ ‘‘Words More than Civil’’: Republican Civility in Lucy Hutchinson’s ‘‘The Life of John Hutchinson’’ ’, in Richards (ed.), Early Modern Civil Discourses, 68–84. 23 Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility, 184; Helga Robinson-Hammerstein (ed.), European Universities in the Age of Reformation and Counter Reformation (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1998), pp. vii–ix.


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would-be educational reformers to question the utility of the two universities’ monopolies on learning. Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria provided an opportunity for university poets to situate the new concerns of government within historical and global civil contexts. Their poems address issues of trade and Protestant struggle, to show that Oxford men are up to date, certainly; but they also contend their access to the greater historical and cultural signiWcance of the Protectorate’s successes, which members of the new elite would only embarrass themselves to undervalue. Even in the relatively near Weld of British relations, the muses reWgure old identities to place themselves at the centre of the Protectorate’s urgent aVairs of state. Loxley Wnds that the number of poems in English in the 1630s university anthologies increases substantially. The poems identify the English language with the British Stuart dynasty that the royal couple were so assiduously securing throughout the 1630s. The vernacular is incorporated as an identifying mark of this dynasty, and vernacular poetry takes its place in the formal relations between the university and the monarch.24

The linguistic eclectisicm of Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria, which features poems in French, Old English, Hebrew, and Welsh, as well as the standard Latin, Greek, and English, advertises competencies that might be helpful to a new elite. The anthology includes an englyn, a Welsh bardic hymn, to the British (pp. 69–70); it responds to controversy over the reformation of Wales, and might even have been prompted by similar Welsh hymns written by the millenarian radicals Morgan Llwyd and Vavasor Powell, champions of the godly project in Wales.25 The hymn’s sentiments are hardly adventurous: it praises God for the blessings of peace and rain, and commends John Owen, ‘a jewel among Welshmen’.26 But it is written by Michael Roberts, the president of Jesus College (traditionally the destination of young Welsh gentry), and by its very language and form asserts that college’s claim to established cultural ties in a region that the regime was anxious to subjugate, and which needed educated Welsh-speakers for the ministry.27 Welsh support for Charles I was a product of its religious backwardness in the minds of parliamentarians and Rump MPs, who instituted a commission for the ‘Propagation of the Gospel in Wales’, although by 1654—from the moderates’ point of view at least—this project had backWred: Powell and his allies had provoked Werce local opposition, and he now preached and wrote against 24 Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 27. 25 See Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 270–5. 26 I am grateful to Maíre Nı´ Mhaonaigh and Liz Lloyd for helping me to translate this poem. 27 Lloyd Bowen, ‘This Murmuring and Unthankful Peevish Land: Wales and the Protectorate’, in Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 144–64 (154); A. M. Johnson, ‘Wales during the Commonwealth and the Protectorate’, in Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (eds.), Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 233–56 (238).

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the Protectorate.28 Ambiguously, Roberts alludes to a drought that might be of ‘wisdom’ as well as rain, hinting that his college’s education of the sons of Welsh gentry could provide a more reliable means of spreading reformation in Wales. Though not a member of Jesus College, the Welshman Roland Guynne presents himself as the right kind of gentleman to conduct this university-driven reformation. He composes a Latin eclogue between a Welsh Thyrsis and an English Meliboeus (pp. 30–1). His swains diVerentiate the Welsh experience of Britain’s troubles by discussing a decade of suVering which has kept them from meeting (seriously disruptive Wghting in Wales began in 1644, when royalist troops under Colonel Charles Gerard began to Wght their way through South Wales).29 This detail is unexpected enough to suggest that provincial gentry like Guynne might understand that experience better. Thyrsis informs his English counterpart of his land’s suVering and present regeneration; the latter comes as a happy surprise to Meliboeus. Guynne oVsets his praise for the Protector, who has rescued his land from chaos and become the ‘patron’ of Astraea’s return and the rule of law, with hints that Welshmen can solve their own problems: ‘se Wallia luctu j Solvit’ (ll. 8–9) (‘Wales has freed herself from her lamentation’). Guynne proves his godly credentials by reforming pastoral convention such that his swains agree that it is more appropriate for shepherds to send their prayers to heaven than to praise their hero with songs: crucially, it is the Welsh shepherd who suggests this doctrine. The poems by Roberts and Guynne explore responsibilities that are hinted at in the Oxford anthologies of the 1630s. Loxley notes the ubiquity of references to the popular modes of celebrating royal occasions by bell ringing and lighting bonWres. In some of these poems, the poet directs provincial celebrations. Thus, in Abraham Wright’s exhortation to ‘Keepe up your Feasts and Fires’ (l. 1) in celebration of the birth of Princess Anne, one might glimpse a credible university self-image as a didactic link between the King and the parish, where it sent educated ministers and gentry to civilize the realm.30 This cultural role is realized more tangibly in Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria, where the university picks out British problems that it might help to resolve. The Anglo–Dutch war coincided with the rise of the newsbook to bring issues of trade and maritime dominion into an emergent public sphere.31 The Oxford 28 Stephen K. Roberts, ‘Powell, Vavasor (1617–1670)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter, DNB); (accessed 10 Sept. 2007); Lloyd Bowen, ‘Representations of Wales and the Welsh during the Civil Wars and Interregnum’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 358–76 (361–2); A. M. Johnson, ‘Wales during the Commonwealth’, 240–1. 29 Geraint H. Jenkins, The Foundations of Modern Wales, 1642–1780 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 13. 30 Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 32–4; Coronae Carolinæ Quadratura (Oxford, 1635), sig. 2A3v. 31 The work of Ju¨rgen Habermas on the emergence of the public sphere in the late seventeenth century (The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)) has in recent years been challenged by several early modern scholars who trace its English origins to the 1640s: see David Norbrook,


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muses search out their place in the brave new world opened up by the war and peace. Call us the new found land and Hee that Wrst The Terra Wrma of our Unity Discover’d to us our Columbus bee. Mauger the Oceans schisme, silver Thames And Texel mix their undivided Streames: Joyn’d by the Isthmus of confederate Peace, We are now no more an Isle but Chersonese. (97, ll. 30–6)

For many early modern Englishmen, national or British identity was formed in the image of Virgil’s description of an Atlantic people ‘wholly sundered from all the world’.32 John Ailmer redraws this map using the vocabulary of geography and navigation (subjects taught by the Savilian professor of astronomy33). Alliance with the United Provinces means that Britain is no longer isolated. It has become part of a northern European peninsula. But Ailmer’s conceits actually displace Cromwell from his successes by making him only the discoverer of his expanse of peace rather than its ruler. Consolidation is the province of learning, which supplies the language and wit needed to grasp and project a changed geo-political order. Gorges tries more explicitly to resituate learning and civility within the new vistas of England’s possibilities: ’Twas not enough You gave Us Peace at home; Such Peace tame Begg’ry were without Sea roome: Englands Exchequer is the Sea, and while That’s barr’d, We are but Prisoners in an Isle. But as Physitians Wrst cure the Disease, Then give the Patient beauty, strength, and Ease: So thou didst Wrst quench Our Domestick Xame, Then gav’st us Strength abroad, and Wealth, and Fame. (60, ll. 7–14)

Fame, the province of the muses, takes the ultimate place in his catalogue of Protectoral achievements. Uniquely, he credits the admirals Blake, Deane, and ‘Areopagitica, Censorship, and the Early Modern Public Sphere’, in Richard Butt (ed.), The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–33; Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in EarlyModern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 32 Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 157. 33 Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies’, in Tyacke (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 359–448 (379).

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Monke with winning the naval war, reserving for Cromwell the greater praise of preserving learning: The Seas thus swolne with Rage, and Xesht with Blood, Had drown’d the Muses Hill, had you not stood Upon its Top, as set, to check their pride, And made us safe because to you Ally’d. (61, ll. 23–6)

Pincus has revealed the crucial part played by the radical millenarian ideologies that dominated Barebone’s Parliament among the causes of the Anglo–Dutch war, from which also stemmed the parliamentary proposal to abolish the University of Oxford:34 Gorges can thus believably represent the war’s disruptions assailing the university itself, even if crediting Cromwell with the university’s preservation simpliWes the attendant battles over university reform. Yet Gorges is giving little away: the Protector saves the university not graciously, but as an ally, and he ambiguously omits to say what set Cromwell on Parnassus: Providence, certainly, but he was also elected chancellor by the university itself.35 As Gorges elaborates on Oxford’s preservation, he reclaims for the university the iconography of the republic’s ideological war with the Dutch: The Muses too are safe, who could not rest While Neptune and Minerva did contest, Whose should their Athens be; But as forlorne Their Delos shooke ’till Their Apollo’s borne; Thus Thou like that Great Conq’rour, who Calcin’d The Barbarous World to Ashes, straight reWn’d The Stagirit’s soyle, Betrothing her to be, The sole Espousall of his Victory. (61, ll. 35–42)

To support the legal case for war, Selden’s Mare Clausum was translated by Nedham and published with an engraving depicting Neptune begging Britannia-Minerva to extend her sovereignty over the seas (above, p. 45). Gorges, however, alludes to the contest between Minerva and Neptune for Athens (Oxford University was known as the English Athens), to imply that the war was also a battle for the centre of learning, which shook the university until an Alexander who respected letters brought it to a close.36 This skewed representation of the war is to some extent justiWed by the occasion of the muses’ thanks to Cromwell, and reminds the Protector of his oYcial and cultural responsibilities to learning; but it also reveals a poet struggling to locate the traditional images 34 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–191. 35 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 736. 36 John Dougill, Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of ‘the English Athens’ (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998).


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and status of university learning in an exploded cultural Weld, in which Oxford had to compete with the aVairs of state for its chancellor’s attention.37 Edward Bagshaw strikes out more conWdently into economic concerns. Bagshaw’s biography indicates Fifth Monarchist sympathies, but nothing to suggest a special interest in trade. His poem defends the Protector’s terms with the Dutch, which had been criticized for not forcing them to make greater trade concessions.38 He begins by hailing a peace in which ‘our Navy serves for what ’twas made j To guard our own not spoyle another’s Trade’ (62, ll. 1–2). The poem expounds the viewpoint that the peace establishes fair terms of trade against which the Dutch would only show themselves foolish and greedy to rebel. It features a rhetorical turn between stanzas 2 and 3, the Wrst of which represents the culmination of the war as military stalemate: ‘When Victory; like the furl’d sailes did hover, j And to each Part, an equall face discover’ (62, ll. 9–10). The third stanza, however, develops this imagery of counterbalance into unequal exchanges: Now may the Hollanders securely try To vent with us their Native Frippery As Turfe and Cheese more hard then that: which is Only when Lead is scarce good Marchandise. We in exchange will send them Corne and Meat, And so returne our Amber for their Jet. Weele feed the famish’d soules that they may be Fit for our swords, or grace our Amitie. (62, ll. 17–24)

This is hardly penetrating economic insight, and Bagshaw’s presentation of military stalemate is generous to the Dutch; yet this stanza makes the Navigation Act, which aimed to reduce Holland’s commerce by preventing Dutch trade to England carrying non-Dutch cargoes, into the touchstone of England’s graciousness and natural superiority.39 The shift between the second and third stanzas is a rhetorical surprise, accenting a moment of realization that commerce oVers a sphere and measure of national glory beyond conventional martial achievements. Bagshaw credits the Protector with expanding by personal example England’s horizons from the hobbled insularity of Stuart foreign policy, and beyond even war with the Dutch: But that we durst try dangers in the Sea, And in all Elements ayme at Victorie; To your Examples due, Great Sir, whose Soule 37 Worden (‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 736) notes that while at the time of his election to the chancellorship, Cromwell was ideally placed to be an intermediary between the university and government, that advantage was lost when he became Protector. 38 N. H. Keeble, ‘Bagshaw, Edward (1629/30–1671)’, in DNB; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 170. 39 Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 153; see also Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 40–51.

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The Oxford Muses in the Protectorate Full of its Native Fire without Controule Breakes through all lets; as if it had been sent From Heaven, to be like it, an Instrument Of such a Providence, that we confesse Who shall compare it, will but make it lesse. For thus of you must following ages tell You are Your Selfe, without a Parallell. (62–3, ll. 25–34)

This Wnal stanza makes Cromwell’s sublime, godly inexpressibility into the inspiration for the new possibilities of foreign policy. It bridges the diYcult interface between economic and godly constructions of England’s potential in the world by making commercial adventure seem an emanation of Protestant liberation.40 But, as Ireland was quick to point out, leaving Cromwell without a parallel is not wholly convincing praise. This may be more intentional than Ireland allows, because Bagshaw’s inexpressibility topic carefully retains common ownership of the new world it discovers beyond the stalemate of the Anglo–Dutch war: Cromwell is the inspiration behind the Commonwealth’s new possibilities, but not their genius (the Anglo–Dutch war and the Navigation Act were republican initiatives). Bagshaw makes him an unknown quantity, and by describing him as uncontrollable Wre, he invites the question of for how long will the strategic interests of the Commonwealth cohere with Cromwell’s incendiary energy. The poem shares in an ongoing popular distrust of the Dutch, but it also opens up a space for statesmanship and rhetoric between Cromwell’s sublime, perhaps not entirely civilized, energy and the Protectoral state’s strategic potential.41 By reaching into this space with informed occasional verse, assessing and proclaiming the Commonwealth’s new vistas of possibilities, Bagshaw claims a stake in it for the civil arts. William Godolphin, who became a Restoration diplomat, is more generous to Cromwell. Like Bagshaw, he praises expanded horizons of commercial power self-consciously, reserving for the civil arts the role of projecting and deWning those horizons and situating them historically. Yet he explicitly credits the institution of the Protectorate with stabilizing the state’s new potential. Ld Protect. But since that *Power which now informes our Age, Hath reconcil’d the strength, and quel’d the rage Of the Disturbed Sea, the Fire, the Wind, And (what is more) the Tempests of our mind. Farre now our Shipps their Canvas Wings shall stretch, And the worlds Wealth to richer England fetch. (98, ll. 13–18) 40 Armitage (Ideological Origins, 117–19) argues that while England spreading its dominion over the seas was by no means a new idea, republicans fused it with the cause of liberty, and thence planted a key tenet of imperial ideology. 41 For popular attitudes to the Dutch, see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–168.


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The Protectorate is an international phenomenon, promising a new global epoch as England prosecutes a ‘designe . . . to make our Isle the Worlds Exchange’ (98, l. 22). Godolphin projects the Protectorate’s ships as ‘the Sun, they Round the World, their Might j Becomes as Universall, as his light’ (98, ll. 29–30). In this context, the word ‘universal’ suggests that the Protectorate’s naval and commercial power will be an answer to the ‘universal monarchy’ that the Habsburgs were supposed to be pursuing. This conception of the Protectorate’s future engages with the wider foreign policy debates of the early 1650s: it commends (though perhaps simpliWes) a moderate position close to that which prevailed as radical MPs were sidelined by the demise of Barebone’s Parliament.42 Godolphin does not merely endorse a current projection of policy, however; rather, he frames the occasion as a moment in which English horizons are opened to the extent that conventional hyperboles are refreshed by being made tangible, implicating the civil arts in the process of opening those horizons and consolidating a new, powerful, and worldly vision of England’s destiny. The poem begins with an analogy comparing the Anglo–Dutch war to rivers converging, bursting their banks, and Xooding the surrounding plains, only to fertilize those Welds for the summer. Like the anthology’s many images of spring, this analogy naturalizes itself by its seasonableness; but it also alludes to the Wnal, admonitory image of Denham’s poem Coopers Hill, which had become particularly associated with Oxford, where it was republished in 1643 under the author’s supervision.43 Noting Godolphin’s close reworking of Denham’s images and allusions, Brendan O Hehir judges Godolphin’s poem a plagiarism. This is unfair, because it obscures Godolphin’s response to Coopers Hill. Denham draws an analogy between Englishmen’s attempts to limit the King’s power and a constrained river which then bursts its banks destructively. By adapting this image to the Anglo–Dutch war, and extending it positively to show how that war has set England on a stronger footing internationally, Godolphin stresses a climacteric expansion of Oxford’s concerns, from insular problems to global projects. Godolphin’s adaptations make the horizon surveyed in Coopers Hill seem like a limited political vision. In places he exceeds Denham’s hyperbole to calibrate a ‘richer England ’ (98, l. 18) and the greater ‘Limits, cromwell, of thy large Command’ (98, l. 32). In others he corrects them to make them seem like parochial exaggerations: Denham’s Thames is called the world’s exchange, but Godolphin uses the same phrase to project a ‘design’ that the Protectorate’s ships might now realize. As his poem builds, Godolphin praises a Cromwell who ‘makes Greeke Fables, English Historie’ (98, l. 36). This compliment extends the theme of literary conventions made real, and hence belittles encomia of the past by suggesting that Greek examples—perhaps even Denham’s comparison of Coopers Hill with 42 Ibid. 149–91. 43 John Denham, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill, ed. Brendan O Hehir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 26.

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Parnassus—have been over-Xatteringly compared to meagre political Wgures, events, and places. An Oxford education gives him the authority to make this judgement, not only because the university has fostered a revival of learning in Greek literature,44 but also because the university has witnessed momentous national conXicts and change. This experience is inscribed in the poem through its reworkings of Coopers Hill according to the beneWts of hindsight. Godolphin’s Wnal lines return to the pivotal images of meeting rivers, Xoods, and fertilization to amplify further the Anglo–Dutch peace: his metaphors represent Greek myths literalized by the unfolding international history of the Protectorate, and he intercuts these images of expansion and promise with arcana from the natural sciences, which were also undergoing a surge of interest at the university:45 Stormes oft Enrich the Soile: and since our Peace Proceeds from Warre, we hope for more Encrease. So Bones, which have beene broke become more sound, And Hydra stronger from its fruitfull Wound. Then war nought could our States have closer ty’d, They’re joyn’d by Kind who are by blood Ally’d. Such our agreement is, as when one Flame Meeting another, both become the same. Hermophroditus so and Salmacis (Whose Bodyes Joyn’d in a perpetuall Kisse) With our two States receiv’d like Union; Went Two into the Streame, Return’d but One. (98, ll. 39–50)

The Dutch rejection of a union of sovereignties based on shared ideological and religious interests formed a crucial cause of the war and its perpetuation.46 Strikingly, Godolphin suggests that the experience of war has transformed the Commonwealth and the United Provinces such that a union now exists in fact. This assertion seems quite tenuous, given that the war revealed unbridgeable dissimilarities between English and Dutch republicanism, and helped to push Britain and Ireland into the Protectorate.47 But it makes more sense as a representation of a shift from ideological conceptions of similarity to a deeper sympathy based on the experience of a naval war and the perception, growing partly as a consequence of that war’s hardships, that the interests of both states lay in the vitality of their trade.48 Godolphin suggests that the suVering caused by 44 Mordechai Feingold, ‘The Humanities’, in Tyacke (ed.), History of the University of Oxford, iv: Seventeenth-Century Oxford, 212–357 (256–69). 45 See Feingold, ‘Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies’. 46 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–191. 47 Ibid. 102–14. 48 Pincus argues that an important tenet of this growing perception of the state’s interests is that both English and Dutch trade could be multiplied without rivalry: ‘political economy was not a zero-sum game’ in the minds of ‘moderate’ theorists like Slingsby Bethel. See Steven Pincus, ‘Neither


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war has united the English and the Dutch by proving them maritime bloodbrothers, vigorous powers which can resist the designs of other states by annexing the world’s commerce. This conclusion is a little at odds with the poem’s earlier emphasis, which projects Britain alone as the centre of global trade. But the implication that this poem Wnds a better union in the Anglo–Dutch peace, based on painful experience rather than republican ideology, coheres with Godolphin’s eVacement of ideological controversy as ‘Tempests of our mind’ (98, l. 16), and his attempt to ground distinctly his understanding of the new global possibilities opened up by the Protectorate. After indicating that this understanding is based on reWned learning by praising Greek myths turned into history, Godolphin inserts an apostrophe that both ampliWes his register and distinguishes it more: ‘Tell Me, Astrologers, th’Event; and make j From this Conjunction a new Almanacke’ (98, ll. 37–8). Almanacs had become very popular reading during the civil wars and the republic, and some were instrumental in producing a climate of public, ideologically-tinged Hollandophobia.49 In the oration quoted at the beginning of this chapter, Owen represents popular astrology as a threat to true learning, and Godolphin is not the only university poet to refer to almanacs dismissively. He disparages the more vulgar science to set oV further a reWned perception grounded in learning and experience. The Dutch peace is a conjunction more genuinely auspicious than those interpreted by popular astrology, such that it renders extant almanacs out of date. The conclusion of the Anglo–Dutch war excited hopes not just for commercial domination, but for the advance of the international Protestant Reformation, even though the Protectorate marked the end of the apocalyptic foreign policies that had driven the Dutch war. Oxford University was well placed to contribute intellectually to the Reformation. Throughout the seventeenth century, refugee Protestant scholars were received sympathetically at Oxford and were attracted by the Bodleian, which had collected an unrivalled storehouse of anti-Catholic learning: Oxford had become a ‘Protestant Vatican’, and Whitelocke and Cromwell later tried to found a centre at the university where an international Protestant dogma could be developed.50 However, for some reformers who saw Oxford as a potential nursery for a new godly elite, the university’s orthodoxy would need to be closely monitored from outside, an unwelcome prospect for most fellows, who had been more or less united against the visitations of the republican parliaments.51 Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria provided an opportunity for the university to pre-empt further interference and perhaps win Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth’, American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 705–36 (721). 49 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 61–2, 67, 90. 50 R. A. Beddard, ‘A Projected Cromwellian Foundation at Oxford and the ‘‘True Reformed Protestant’’ Interest, c.1657–8’, History of Universities, 15 (1999), 155–91 (167). 51 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 751.

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greater independence by proving its godly credentials. Joshua Hoyle’s Latin poem concludes on a note of Protestant militancy, imagining the fall of Rome, the toppling of the Pope, and Purgatory passing into oblivion (2, ll. 12–13). Henry Langley, Master of Pembroke, also writes chiliastic Latin verse threatening the Pope (4, l. 17). These apocalyptic postures are fairly conventional (Ireland represents them as forced bluster), and the fact that they feature only among the anthology’s Latin poems suggest that they are not literal expectations so much as a way of asserting that the university’s scholarship has European horizons, and a role to play in the global struggle for reformation. Ralph Button composes and translates a psalm in Hebrew. He celebrates the peace as the opening of ‘New doores of hope’ (6, l. 4), but among the blessings praised he includes ‘The Merchant safely trades againe’ (6, l. 12). By combining Hebrew scholarship with an alert grasp of the state’s interests, Button oVers a taste of what the university might do under the Protectorate: it can teach the linguistic arts and rhetoric that will help new elites square the state’s interests with godly projects for international reformation. John Locke’s poem similarly seeks to reWne a new godly civility from the mix of cultural aspirations excited by the peace, in which hopes for Protestantism on the world stage meet the possibility of commercial dominance. Locke hails the returning ships as a Xeet transformed: Our reunited Seas, like streams that grow Into one River doe the smoother Xow: Where Ships no longer grapple, but like those, The loving Seamen in embraces close. We need no Fire-ships now, a nobler Xame Of love doth us Protect, whereby our name Shall shine more glorious, a Xame as pure As those of Heaven, and shall as long endure: This shall direct our ships, and he that stears Shall not consult heavens Wres, but those he bears In his own breast. Let Lilly threaten Warrs: Whil’st this conjunction lasts wee’l feare no starres. Our ships are now most beneWciall growne, Since they bring home no spoiles but what’s their owne. Unto these branchless Pines our forward spring Owes better fruit, then Autumn’s wont to bring: Which give not only gemms and Indian ore, But adde at once whole Nations to our store: Nay if to make a World’s but to compose The diVerence of things, and make them close In mutuall amitie; and cause Peace to creep Out of the jarring Chaos of the deep: Our ships doe this, so that whilst other take Their course about the World, Ours a World make. (94–5, ll. 21–44)


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England’s ships are now made ambassadors of an irenic godly conviction; Locke too alludes disparagingly to the bloody predictions of popular astrology, to distinguish a moderate vision as an alternative to ideological belligerence. After the more courtly lines with which he Wrst describes the return of peace, his prosody begins to soar, almost to a prophetic register, as he looks to what the ‘conjunction’ (again, a more genuinely auspicious conjunction than the stellar events interpreted by Lilly) of Protestant trade states now makes possible. But, while musically, Locke’s enjambments and patterned references to Wre, Xames, and stars suggest a release into sublime spaces, the idea teased out by those references is the internalization of peace. This inner Xame independently guides irenic voyages, and resembles a godly covenant: the global expansion of reformation will be entwined with the spreading commerce of an elect Xeet. Tensions between the Commonwealth’s economic interests and the cause of reformation bedevilled Cromwell throughout his political career; but Locke’s poem supplies a powerfully vivid image of economic and religious policy converging, which helps to legitimize the new regime’s compromises.52 The contrast of this vision with popular astrology makes that discourse seem superstitious and vulgar, while Locke’s moderation seems all the more civilized. Locke thus takes up a position on behalf of the university in the Protectorate’s cultural vanguard, developing rhetoric that gives lucidity, credibility, and so, perhaps, direction, to a problematic area of policy. One reader of Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria has argued that its forays into trade matters are attempts to avoid political controversy.53 Only a very narrow conception of politics could sustain this view. For students like Godolphin, the anthology oVered an opportunity to demonstrate his qualiWcations for oYce or the patronage of great men. But in so doing he joined his teachers in a collective political exercise to extend the university’s corporate ethos of civility within a changing cultural Weld, even though this institutional interest might have been only dimly perceived. This is not simply an attempt to prove the ongoing relevance of a university education to aVairs of state. These poems emphatically situate the Protectorate’s new possibilities in wider histories of civilization and global struggle, and in the nearer contexts of urgent contingencies, to reveal the deeper signiWcances of the Dutch peace and the issues surrounding it. They thereby assimilate these possibilities to an irreducible ethos of civility which was arbitrated by university learning and had drawn sons of the elite to Oxford through the previous century. To proclaim that the Protectorate’s commercial potential could make Cromwell greater than Alexander is not subservient Xattery; rather, it subjects the new regime to criteria that will be judged ultimately by the civilizers of Oxford. Should Cromwell disappoint 52 See Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 11–191, and Ch. 5 below. 53 Gerald M. Maclean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 236–9.

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them, the muses’ glimpses of a great English maritime civilization will remain in poetry to shame his reputation, or to excite more cultured members of the elite to pursue the horizons clariWed by the university, in its renewed capacity as an arbiter of English civility. Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria’s representations of the Anglo–Dutch peace are inXected by the possibilities of what the Oxford muses might contribute to that peace. More acutely than previous university anthologies compiled for monarchs, it reXects upon the cultural force of its own monuments within the very moment that it celebrates: Charles I could never have been presented with so poised an invitation as Bathurst’s ‘And thus much we have done, only to show j We can be Poets when you make us so’ (59, ll.15–16). Holding Cromwell up to classical paragons, the Oxford muses subject him to their own criteria of distinction and legitimacy. Before examining how he stands up to two particular classical examples, it should be noted that several poems construe their competence, apparently less ambitiously, as the exercise of wit: I will argue, however, that this becomes an especially potent and self-conscious distillation of the Oxford muses’ symbolic capital. The anthology features several very short poems formed around somewhat ivory-towered conceits on academic practices. In these cases maybe, wit beats a retreat from the uncertainties of the university’s place in Protectoral culture. But for Ailmer, the approval of university wits gives Cromwell vital legitimacy Rise now, by whom both Arts and pollicy stood, Thou One Seth’s Pillar in a double Floud! To Thee we prostrate Crowne and Booke: with it Rule Champion of our State, with that of wit. (97, ll. 43–6)

The crown was not Oxford’s to bestow, and given that Cromwell’s possible coronation had already become one of the most intractably divisive issues of the day, Ailmer’s conclusion at Wrst seems a particularly unhelpful eVusion of thanks; yet he invokes this thorny issue to set oV a diVerent form of anointing, which might supply the Protector with credibility where a crown was barred.54 The poem’s praise exposes Cromwell’s want of legitimacy: he is ‘a budding Star j Full blown a Sun’ and ‘with a ray j Of his own light creates us a new Day’ (96, ll. 7–8), implying that Cromwell has made himself king-like (the sun being a standard image of monarchy) without the reXected but useful lustre of dynasty, election, or sacred rites. Wit is a substitute or—in the circumstances—a better anointing in recognition that Cromwell has supported the arts (Seth’s pillar recorded and passed on the technologies of generations before the Flood55). 54 Ailmer perhaps alludes to the university arms, which feature three crowns and a book, but this hardly excludes the topical context of the Protector’s coronation. 55 See Marvell, 406.


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Ailmer solicitously intensiWes the relationship between the university and its chancellor by representing Cromwell as the saviour of civility in an hour of darkness. But in doing so he deWnes wit as the practice of learning, which the desolations of war and radicalism have left to survive only within college walls and the esteem of the Chancellor-Protector. This association had long been made through the kudos accorded to university wits, but Ailmer’s account of recent history distils it into a form of capital at the exclusive disposal of the university. The wartime poetry of John Cleveland turned university wit into royalist polemic, although by 1654 the political identity connoted by the Cleveland style had been contested by republican imitations in satires against the Dutch.56 Ireland’s satirical response to this anthology might be read as a loyalist protest that the present members of the University of Oxford are not the true inheritors of Cleveland’s spirit, and among the various ways in which he seeks to challenge their claims to cultural authority—suggesting that contributors had their Greek verse ghost-written, or that they were compelled to write ‘To save their bacon’ (l. 138)—he reserves most energy for the new wits, labelling one ‘CleavelandiWed’ (l. 170), and representing him as a horse frisking under the inXuence of a playful muse.57 Yet in many of the poems in Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria, the political value of university wit is heightened by its previous association with royalism. Ailmer runs images of conceded defeat through clever rhetorical turns: the usual paragons are made humble supplicants when the valour of Hannibal, Caesar, and Alexander ‘courts an Amnestie’; ‘Their Battells if [compared] with His they’l make their Peace, j May chance compound for handsome Skirmishes’ (97, ll. 23–4). Subsequently, when the poem professes that Cromwell has ‘won’ both our sword and our heart and so ‘we prostrate Crowne and Booke’ (97, l. 45), the poem itself becomes a kind of witty compounding and praise by one’s enemies (an established rhetorical form).58 Oxford’s past royalism is no embarrassment, but helps to constitute the credibility of the wit that now oVers Cromwell legitimacy beyond a mere crown. Godolphin similarly implies that the support of the Oxford muses is particularly precious to the new regime because Oxford had been the bastion of royalism: by reworking Coopers Hill to show that the university’s cultural horizons are expanded by the Treaty of Westminster, he makes Oxford’s royalism a valuable part of its heritage and wisdom. Perhaps the best examples of this anthology’s capitalization on its royalist heritage are several poems that adopt identiWably ‘CleavelandiWed ’ poetics, a demanding ‘hard line’ that combines energetic and compressed rhetorical Wgures with rapid, urbane allusions to topical events. Cleveland’s canon became less stable through the 1650s, as editions of his works appeared including many spurious attributions. Although these volumes featured polemical works on 56 See Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’ and Smith’s introductions to this poem and ‘The Loyal Scot’ in Marvell, 247–8, 399–400. 57 [Ireland?], Momus Elencticus, sig. *3r–v. 58 A form of concessio (Lanham, Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 26).

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diverse subjects, royalism and university life remained characteristic themes in the poetry associated with his name.59 Yet some of the poems in Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria exploit the instability of these identities. Richard Paige uses Cleveland’s idiom to contend that while peace makes redundant its wartime lexicon of subsidies and musters, wit is yet a festive spirit rooted in university customs such as the ‘Gaudy-day’ (68, l. 7): the poem implies that the condition of its praise is the university being left to its traditions, although it somewhat awkwardly curtails itself as if not entirely sure how to sustain its Clevelandisms without the martial bravado it would surrender. Robert Mathew harnesses the nexus of political associations connoted by this style more adeptly to pressure the question of the university’s place in the Protectorate settlement. His professions of inadequacy to the task of celebrating Cromwell are double-edged. Tis usuall when full-mouth’d Canons roare, To let Xie Pistolls of a lesser bore; When Homer tuggs at Tenor, sure ith’Peale Poor Chærilus may serve at Treble well. (65, ll. 1–4)

Mathew’s self-eVacements are belied by the scope of his references. In disparaging his poetic skill, he yet parades knowledge of an obscure poet. He uses a soldier’s analogy, and thereby invokes the wartime identity (created in no small part by Cleveland) of a university wit proWcient in arms as well as arts. The allusion to Choerilus, mentioned by Horace as an example of a dreadful hireling poet employed by a tasteless conqueror, tests the limitations of the reader more than it confesses those of Mathew.60 It also begs the question of who the Protectorate’s Homer might be: it is hard to imagine that Mathew is thinking of Payne Fisher, so the reference actually serves to throw into relief the fact that the praises of university poets are more or less unaccompanied, and perhaps should be more valuable to the new regime as a consequence. Mathew continues to profess the inadequacy of his muse somewhat backhandedly: Nay Hee that would Thee speake, must dwell with Wounds, Studie the noise of Drums, learne Trumpetts sounds; Must truckle under Ætna, know the tones Of huge Typhœus when he Earthquakes groanes; Be Pupill to a Whirlewind, get the knack T’outvoice and drowne th’Ægyptian Cataract. Under some knocking Cyclop serve seav’n yeares; Be skill’d i’th Accents of the cracking sphears; 59 See Marvell, 399–400, and J. Cleaveland Revived, Second Edition 1660: A Facsimile Edition, intro. Hilton Kelliher (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990). 60 Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 417, 481.


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Take up his Quarters with the Tearing Thunder; Then may he cromwell speake, the Worlds great wonder. (66, ll. 11–20)

By sustaining the conceit that Cromwell’s military reputation requires more bombastic, elemental studies than a university education can oVer, Mathew’s hyperboles actually amplify an incongruity between Cromwell’s energies and those of university civility. In the memories of Caroline Oxford that Cleveland’s style could not but provoke, there are altogether more sophisticated solutions of arms and arts,61 in contrast to which the Cromwell described here seems like a wild Achilles. Mathew’s echoes of Cleveland’s To Prince Rupert (most clearly in making a conceit around ‘Green-sick-Girles’ (66, l. 35)) invite these works to be compared, and Cleveland’s openly satirical professions of insuYciency—‘O that I could but vote my selfe a Poet!’ (l. 1)62—prime the reader to look for suggestions of disdain in Mathew’s apparent modesty. These expectations of critical disdain are answered by Mathew’s apostrophe to Cromwell, which focuses the hinted tensions between Cromwell’s martial achievements and the cultural sympathies of his panegyrist: Sir your pretendments are against the Pope, ’Gainst Superstition, but (I pray) what hope? For if You thus goe on, You will engage Whole Nations unto a Pilgrimage. (66, ll. 27–30)

Apostrophes conventionally raise the volume of an oration or mark out a critical issue; this does both; but despite its superWcial compliment, it also cuts Cromwell down to size, addressing him with the barely deferential ‘Sir’ and almost blunt abruptness. Its Xippancy indicates the limits of the sympathy that this poem celebrates: it implies that Mathew and other university wits would not take seriously the idea of a belligerently chiliastic foreign policy, or even, as might be insinuated knowingly by ‘pretendments’, that they are willing to take Cromwell’s public avowals of militant Protestantism only as part of the necessary dissimulations of power. Mathew undermines militant constructions of the peace to indicate the drift of policy that men like Mathew could respect, and make respectable, under the Protectorate. The ostensibly inappropriate choice of the Cleveland idiom helps to deWne the conditions of a crucial rapprochement made possible by the peace, and at the same time it gives a taste of the symbolic capital with which Oxford wits can anoint the powerful men who support their interests. 61 See Loxley, Royalism and Poetry, 18–48, 79–91. 62 John Cleveland, The Poems of John Cleveland, ed. Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 33.

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Mathew’s apostrophe turns the question of what kinds of praise are adequate to the achievement into the question of which kind of peace is adequate to his praise. The remainder of the poem answers that question, outlining the signiWcance of a peace that might be favourably construed by university wits. Drawing heavily on not just Cleveland’s style, but on phrases from the poems of his canon, Mathew represents the peace as a restoration of norms in the cultural, social, economic, and institutional orders. The historical logic of this restoration makes radicalism an eVect of economic depression: Black was the Fate of Colliers, their Eyes Ran Ink enough to write their Miseries. But London Chymnies, which, like Green-sick-Girles, On Coales and Ashes made their cheifest meales Have now their due Provision which is sent, And are not sconc’t by th’other Element. This joyes the Alderman, who now appeares Like four-leg’d-Watt only in Furr and Eares, His Quakings quite have left him; such oˆ such Is our Agrement that’s made with the Dutch! Holland and Wee are reunited Lands Wee that have shaken Armes, do now shake Hands. (66, ll. 33–44)

The Dutch navy had blocked the traYc of coal from Newcastle to London, making the winter of 1652–3 particularly harsh for many Londoners and causing a recession in some industries.63 Conventionally, hares were named Watt, while London’s aldermen wore fur-trimmed gowns, and ‘appeared’ in the Protector’s civic entry of February 1654 (above, pp. 39–41).64 The conceit appears to be that with fuel for heating available again, Mathew’s alderman does not need to wear extra layers or a cap in addition to his proper attire. His ‘Quakings’ that cease are shivers, yet they also suggest radicalism (‘Quaker’ was often used as a catch-all pejorative for religious radicals), implying that now the economy has recovered and supplies everyone his ‘due Provision’, religious enthusiasm has lost its foothold in the City of London. Pincus shows evidence that ideology drove the war in spite of economic interest, and so caused these hardships. By inverting this causality, Mathew degrades radicalism from a cultural force to an accident of history. His insinuation that it can be associated with London aldermen makes it even more local: he reduces it to a metropolitan phenomenon, bound up with the

63 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 175–6. 64 See, e.g., Venus and Adonis, l. 697, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton MiZin, 1974), 1713; The Corporation of London Court of Common Council, The Order of My Lord Mayor, the Aldermen, and the SheriVes: For Their Meetings and Wearing of Their Apparrel throughout the Whole Year ([London], 1655).


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Xux of City politics, from which cultured university fellows stand aloof.65 That critical distance is marked by ‘sconc’t’, a university word for a disciplinary Wne: the metaphor suggests that this economic crisis will not disturb the way of life at Oxford, where it can be imagined nonchalantly as an imposition of discipline. The inappropriateness of this image encapsulates the poem’s other inappropriatenesses, suggesting distance and restricted sympathy between the Protectorate’s merely political centres and Oxford’s guardians of civility. It even hints that the condition underpinning Mathew’s support is not so much the new regime’s total disavowal of radicals as the regime keeping them away from the university: Mathew’s choices of words and idiom argue that wit’s praises depend upon the university’s cultural diVerences and privileges, because the language-games of this obscure but highly prized wit are inseparable from the independent traditions that reformers would reduce to limbs of policy. These nuances are not messages aimed squarely at the Protector; they might appeal to powerful friends of the university such as Whitelocke, or to less directly inXuential men involved in shaping the legitimacy of a new elite. Edward Bysshe, for example, a Presbyterian royal herald and alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford, made both Garter King of Arms (1646) and Clarenceux (1650) by Parliament to prevent the state’s monopoly of heraldic authority slipping into decline, owned a copy of Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria; in dedicating his 1654 tract on heraldry to Oxford’s old MP John Selden, one can see him forging the ties of a new kingless cultural elite, in which the university and its wits might Wnd diVerent kinds of support.66 Mathew’s poem makes the political identities connoted by the style of Cleveland subject to change, to realignments structured by institutional interests; the peace makes these realignments possible, and therein lies the particular signiWcance of the peace as represented in this poem. This verse resists readings that would interpret the use of royalist idioms in praise of Cromwell as a sign that he was seen as a substitute king or ‘Augustus’; it points, rather, to a recognition that the Protector was a more limited Wgure politically, enmeshed in a culture that oVered new opportunities for poetry to participate in the reconsolidation of its institutions, not least the Protector himself. This reading brings the anthology’s courtly topics into sharper focus too: where J. Stanley represents the peace as a masque in which ‘the Flouds rejoyce j And dance Coranto’s to the Tritons voice’ (63, ll. 17–18), he suggests that courtly reWnements remain part of university 65 Woolrych refutes the thesis that the radicalism of Barebone’s Parliament was driven by City politicians: Commonwealth to Protectorate, 124–8. 66 Peter Sherlock, ‘Bysshe, Edward (c.1610–1679)’, in DNB. His library is catalogued in Bibliotheca Bissaeana (London, 1679), where Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria is the only university anthology listed (p. 13). I have not been able to trace his copy, but this makes it tempting to speculate that the university presented it to him. See also Nicolai Uptoni de Studio Militari, Libri Quatuor. Iohan. de Bado Aureo, Tractatus de Armis. Henrici Seplmanni, Aspilogia, ed. Edward Bysshe (London, 1654), sigs A2v–r.

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civility, despite its change of allegiances to the ‘better Neptune’ (63, l. 21). Here or in Brookes’ analogies that use heraldic codes, the muses signal that at Oxford the old guarantors of distinction have survived the wars and tests of obedience, and that in the absence of a court, the university oVers a locus for a new elite to take root, with or without the blessing of its chancellor. This chapter ends with a contrast between the ways in which the anthology’s Wrst and last contributions address and represent the Protector: in calling him Augustus and Caesar respectively, each uses an appellation that might seem indicative of Protectoral culture’s ‘monarchical’ tendencies, by which the ornaments of royalty were reproduced to dignify Cromwell’s autocracy.67 Yet the comparison reveals how the occasion became a moment to expose the uneasy alliances and compromises that supported the Protector and limited him at the same time. John Owen opens the anthology by asking ‘PaciWca Augusti quem non fecere Poetam?’ (‘Whom have the peace-oVerings of Augustus not made a poet?’), but the following lines unpack from this appellation a set of reciprocal dependencies: Quod nisi Consiliis Academia fulta fuisset Cæsaris, Auspiciis Gensque Togata Tuis; Excideras Auguste tibi, victoria Noctem Senserat, haud Pacis Gloria Tanta foret. (1, ll. 7–10) For if learning were not propped up by the counsels of Caesar, and the people of the toga by your auspices, you, Augustus, would have fallen away, victory would have been obscured, nor could the glory of peace have been so great.

Owen warns Cromwell that the fates of the Protector and the university are bound together. His metaphors of collapse and night make more ominous the conventional warning that victory and peace might disappear from history uncelebrated: in the context of the recent wars, these images intimate that learning can buttress the Protector’s achievements against a return to chaos. In the line ‘Ex humili subitus vate Poeta cano’ (l. 4) (‘raised from a humble bard I sing, a poet’), Owen stresses his humble origins; but this is perhaps something more than a poetic convention, or puritan humility pastoralized: it begs the question of for what purpose Providence has raised him to the position of vicechancellor, at a time when Owen’s vision of reform lacked adequate support from the centre.68 The subsequent prediction that Cromwell will be known by one peace abroad and one at home exposes a more particular danger: that the consolidation of the domestic settlement could be neglected if the Protector becomes consumed by the demands of foreign relations. By naming Cromwell 67 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 301; Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 34. 68 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 741.


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‘Augustus’, Owen is not thereby acclaiming a Protector made more princely by international glory; rather, he tries to resist this movement: Augustus’s famed cultural achievements help Owen stress the critical problem of combining domestic institutional reform with building Britain’s international security and power. The peroration quoted at the beginning of this chapter suggests that Owen attempted to rally the support of members of the university by representing it as an institution in peril; his poem’s appeal for support from the centre reveals a prescient fear that the Protector’s contingencies will overtake the project of university reform and leave his deputy impossibly isolated.69 Leonard LichWeld’s poem addresses Cromwell as Caesar, but records a relationship of expedient compromise in place of a true subject’s ardour. Printer to the university, LichWeld had suVered mixed fortunes during the years of war and the republic: having printed royalist literature for the Oxford court, he was ejected from his Bedel’s oYce in 1651, but began from this year to enjoy the full monopoly of the university’s printing (a right hitherto leased to the Stationers’ Company), and in 1653 he was re-elected a Bedel.70 My Art speakes through those Poets which I made: I owne their Verse, only your Name can give My Printing life, by whom all others live. Oh that I had the Pen of Fate to write, Or the same Ardour which you use in Fight! Then might I tell the World how great you are, And whil’st I tell them, in those glories share: But since my Fortunes made and form’d by You, Aske more then I can say though lesse then’s due, Doe You, Great Sir, accept of what I showe As part oth’Tribute I to Cæsar owe. (104, ll. 6–16)

LichWeld’s Wnal line deXates his praises by catching at the distinction made by Christ between the tax owed to Caesar and the love due to God.71 The echo suggests an unspirited acquiescence to merely temporal power. In Oxford’s 1642 anthology, LichWeld had avowed his loyalty to Charles far more passionately, imagining his type as soldiers arrayed against an ‘Unlettered Crew’ (l. 1) of rebels in ‘That Babel London’ (l. 18).72 Here, the unsettling ending makes the poem’s deference seem somewhat forced, and brings out the literal content of LitchWeld’s 69 For Owen’s eventual humiliation after the conservatives of Oxford won Cromwell’s support, see ibid. 747–8. 70 See John de Monins Johnson and Strickland Gibson, Print and Privilege at Oxford to the Year 1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 28–32. 71 In Luke 20: 22–5, spies hope to lure Jesus into a seditious statement by asking ‘Is it lawful for us to give tribute unto Caesar, or no?’ He replies, ‘Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s’. 72 Musarum Oxoniensium Epibathpia (Oxford, 1643), sig. 2E1r.

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remarks that his fortunes are made by Cromwell and that his printing depends on Cromwell’s name (university printing fell under the nominal authority of the chancellor). LichWeld’s ‘Tribute’ indeed begins to sound like a tax on the conquered. The grudging undertones of this poem mark a diVerence between passionate subjection and the compromise necessary for LichWeld to make a living with the King’s conqueror head of the university too. Cromwell has some way to go before his ardour rubs oV on this poet, and LichWeld’s poem documents his alienation from the ‘glories’ in which this volume supposedly participates. Thus the comparison with Caesar, like Owen’s with Augustus, does not make Cromwell a king-like sovereign so much as it distinguishes him from one. LichWeld’s hints of reservation demonstrate that Cromwell cannot yet command the enthusiastic participation in the celebratory moment that animated royal university anthologies, and which helped to deWne subjection in the 1630s anthologies. Despite their past attachments, LichWeld and Owen write poems that share an alertness to the ways in which circumstances condition what might be written of the Protector: they each rework paragons associated with absolute power to show the contingency both of the Protector’s authority and of the images by which it can be imagined.

4 The First Protectorate Parliament, Waller’s A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector, and Marvell’s The First Anniversary Marvell’s The First Anniversary and Waller’s A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector have long been considered the major poems of the Protectorate; yet they seem muted until returned to their historical moment. They reward close reading against a crisis in which the future of the Protectorate was thrown into doubt, and from which each builds a circumstantial deliberative argument. The problem of Parliament’s role in the Protectoral state is the occasion and crux of Marvell’s The First Anniversary, published as Cromwell was emerging from a bruising series of crises sparked by the Wrst parliament of the Protectorate, which by inconclusively contesting the structure of the Instrument of Government undermined its legitimacy. The Panegyrick was printed four months later.1 For Waller, Cromwell’s troubles with Parliament presented an opportunity to cast the Protectorate into a diVerent mould. He imagines Cromwell as a unifying, moderate Augustus, in whom the hopes of all but radicals can be invested. Yet, to sustain this vision, Waller has to Wnesse and elide problems that Marvell refuses to avoid. The First Anniversary is a more vigilant poem, which acutely captures the uncertainties of its moment, by exploring instabilities and limitations that deWned the political and cultural possibilities of the Protectorate. The parliamentary session which commenced 3 September 1654 sparked a series of interrelated crises.2 The gathered MPs disregarded Cromwell’s inaugural exhortation that necessity demanded speedy ratiWcation of the Instrument and

1 [Andrew Marvell], The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector (London, 1655); [Edmund Waller], A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector by a Gentleman that Loves the Peace, Unity, and Prosperity of the English Nation (London, 1655). Thomas Newcomb registered both poems with the Stationers’ Company on 29 May, although Marvell’s poem was advertised in the 1 Jan. edition of Mercurius Politicus and was received by George Thomason on 17 Jan. Thomason also received a quarto edition of Waller’s poem, printed by Richard Lowndes, on 31 May. All quotations are taken from the Newcomb editions of the poems unless otherwise stated. 2 Eric Porter gives a detailed account of the connections between the parliamentary debate and dissent in the army in ‘A Cloak for Knavery: Kingship, the Army, and the First Protectorate Parliament 1654–55’, The Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 187–205.

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The First Protectorate Parliament

the reforms already instigated.3 They began to debate the ‘fundamental’ provisions of the Protectorate constitution. Cromwell quickly intervened, making them sign a declaration of consent to government by a parliament and a protector, which Xushed out a number of recalcitrant MPs; these joined several excluded by the Council before the session.4 The exclusions provided a platform for a republican resurgence through the autumn that escalated into the most serious army challenge to Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. In October a petition was published, written by John Wildman, the excluded MP for Scarborough, and signed by three hitherto obedient colonels; two of these, Thomas Saunders and John Okey, had also been excluded from Parliament.5 It argued that the Protector’s command over the army rendered Parliament’s share of power nominal, because it would or could not challenge the Protector’s will. It alluded to the exclusions as an illustration of the eVectively tyrannous power established by the Instrument. The three colonels argued that they had fought for principles formulated in the army’s June 1647 Declaration, and rejected signing ‘any new Engagements’ until a ‘full and truly, free Parliament, may, without any imposition upon their Judgments and Consciences, freely consider of those Fundamental Rights and Freedomes of the Commonwealth, that were the Wrst Subject of this great Contest’.6 The remaining MPs continued to debate constitutional modiWcations that would give Parliament supreme authority in key prerogatives, which could only have encouraged the republican campaigners. Packets of the printed petition were intercepted en route to the army in Scotland.7 At the same time, in a series of meetings in the Edinburgh quarters of Colonel Overton, a group of oYcers, several of whom had served under the recently dismissed Fifth Monarchist Colonel Rich, formed ‘Overton’s plot’, to march into England with regiments of republican soldiers. The plot was discovered in mid-December; fearing an uprising, Cromwell twice increased the size of the Tower garrison in that month.8 Thomason received The First Anniversary Wve days before 3 For Cromwell’s inaugural speech to the parliament and the ensuing debates, see Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 434–593; see also David Smith, ‘Oliver Cromwell, the First Protectorate Parliament and Religious Reform’, Parliamentary History, 19 (2000), 38–48. 4 See Peter Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge? Exclusions and the First Protectorate Parliament’, Parliamentary History, 6 (1987), 1–22. 5 [ John Wildman], Thomas Saunders, John Okey, and Matthew Allured, To His Highness the Lord Protector, etc. and our General: The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army ([London(?)], 1654). I can Wnd no deWnitive list of excluded MPs, although the exclusions are discussed by Patrick Little and David Smith in Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 80–7, and extensive biographical details for Wildman and the three colonels are given in Barbara Taft, ‘The Humble Petition of Several Colonels of the Army: Causes, Character, and Results of Military Opposition to Cromwell’s Protectorate’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 42 (1978), 15–41 (see also p. 37, above). 6 Thomas Fairfax, A Declaration, or, Representation from His Excellencie, Sir Tho. Fairfax, and the Army under his Command. Humbly Tendred to the Parliament . . . (London, 1647). 7 The petition was also distributed by Ludlow to regiments in Ireland: see Taft, ‘Humble Petition’, 32–4. 8 Ibid. 37–8.


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Cromwell angrily dissolved the parliament, and in May, Waller’s Panegyrick appeared in print. In the interim, a desperate royalist rising, which drew little support, could only have convinced Waller that the Stuart cause was dead.9 Waller’s Panegyrick oVers a vision of an autocratic Protectorate untroubled by refractory parliaments. It quickly drew outraged responses from republicans and royalists alike.10 The poem has to some readers typiWed the Protectorate’s ‘trend towards monarchy’; opposing the republican literary tradition, it encourages and anticipates the more regal Protectorate established by the 1657 Humble Petition and Advice by portraying Cromwell as an Augustus.11 But to credit Waller’s poem with such prescience risks occluding the oratorical boldness of its attempt to reconcile supporters of monarchy to the Protectorate. Timothy Raylor has challenged these dichotomized interpretations by revealing a Machiavellian strand in the poem’s representation of Protectoral authority.12 Our readings converge in identifying the importance of trade and Cromwell’s conquest of Britain and Ireland to the poem’s projection of empire, though where he reads these concerns against a syncretic discursive context of political theory, I will argue that the poem’s logic of interest becomes lucid only when the poem is restored to a rhetorical context that makes its critical silences and slippages eloquent and revealing. Published after the Protector’s power had come under concerted and damaging attack from previously supportive radicals and republicans, it attempts to bring together a new basis of support for the Protector, and constitutes an attempt to alter the political landscape. Waller had cultivated a reputation for bridge building. In Parliament during the early 1640s he had presented himself as a moderator, composing eloquent speeches to reconcile the dissenting party with loyalty to the King, some of which were later published.13 Even after most royalists left London, Waller tried to persevere in this role, and it seems that the conspiracy in which he became disastrously enmeshed began as an attempt to create a moderate party that would ‘stand betwixt the gappe, and in the gappe, to unite the King and the Parliament’.14 After imprisonment, exile, and a period of retirement from political life, Waller saw a fresh opportunity to reconcile with eloquence. The Panegyrick identiWes a present ‘Conjunction’ that oVers new hopes of settlement, but as it unpacks this proposition into a vision of 9 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 594–656. 10 See David Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson versus Edmund Waller: An Unpublished Reply to Waller’s A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector’, The Seventeenth Century, 11 (1996), 61–86. 11 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 299–310. 12 Timothy Raylor, ‘Waller’s Machiavellian Cromwell: The Imperial Argument of A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector’, Review of English Studies, 56 (2005), 386–411. 13 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 101–8; Edmund Waller, An Honourable and Learned Speech ([London], 1641); idem, Mr. Wallers Speech in Parliament (London, 1641); idem, A Speech Made by Master Waller Esquire, in the Honorable House of Commons, Concerning Episcopacie (London, 1641); idem, A Worthy Speech Made in the House of Commons (London, 1641). 14 Richard Challenor, Mr. Challenor His Confession and Speech Made Upon the Ladder before His Execution on Wednesday the Fifth of July 1643 (London, 1643), 4.

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Cromwell as a new Augustus, it self-consciously makes its own junctions between royalists and Cromwellians, and between the culture of the old British monarchy and that of the Protectorate. In the folio’s epigraph, there is even a suggestion of the panegyric’s instrumentality in the ‘exaltation’ of Cromwell to an Augustan Wgure under whom old and new supporters can unite: ‘Gaudet enim virtus testes sibi jungere Musas, j Carmen amat quisquis Carmine digna gerit’ (‘For valour is always fain to seek alliance with the Muses that they may bear witness to her deeds; he loves song whose exploits deserve the meed of song’).15 This quotation from Claudian draws attention to the reciprocity of the ‘alliance’ between Cromwell and his panegyrist. The muses testify to an identity that could otherwise be misconstrued, and it perhaps hints that Cromwell’s revolutionary fame is a misrepresentation. Waller’s praises adhere closely to classical rhetorical templates, even where this leads him to tackle rather unpropitious material (for example, in praising Cromwell’s breeding and early life).16 This classical conscientiousness digniWes not only the Protector and his poet, but also the poem’s moment. Waller directs the reader speciWcally to Claudian’s example of occasional praise. Before Claudian, verse panegyrics on such occasions as consular inaugurations were uncommon, and the term ‘panegyric’ was used infrequently.17 It was rare in the early seventeenth century too, and Waller’s distinctive quatrains re-create Claudian’s characteristic rhythm. Dryden remarked that ‘All the versiWcation, and little variety of Claudian, is included within the compass of four or Wve Lines, and then he begins again in the same tenour’.18 The Panegyrick marks no recognized public event, but by signalling this speciWcally occasional model, he invests the identiWed opportunity for reconciliation and renewal with the momentousness of a stately new beginning. The standard apology for epideictic hyperbole is thus bent a little: Waller’s praise makes tangible not so much how the Protectorate ideally ought to be, as how it could be. At the centre of the Panegyrick, a new state appears in a metamorphosis that he compares both to daybreak and to the smooth transformation of masque scenery: Still as you rise, the State exalted too, Finds no distemper, while ’tis chang’d by you. Chang’d like the Worlds great Scene, when without noise, The rising Sun Nights vulgar Lights destroyes. (ll. 141–4) 15 From Claudian’s preface to Book 3 of ‘On Stilicho’s Consulship’ (l. 5); see Claudian, ed. and trans. Maurice Platnauer, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), ii. 38–9. 16 See O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 32. 17 Alan Cameron, Claudian: Poetry and Propaganda at the Court of Honorius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 254; James Garrison, Dryden and Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 8. 18 Garrison, Dryden, 10–13; John Dryden, Sylvæ, or the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London, 1685), sig. A5v.


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The mid-century upheavals broadened the ambiguity of the word ‘state’: it could yet refer to territories of a crown, but Hobbes had used it to signify a republic, and Dryden followed him: ‘Monarchys may own Religions name, j But states are Atheists in their very frame.’19 Waller uses the word to cut across republican and royalist loyalties and discover deeper continuities through the revolutions, leading to a power that brings such manifest advantages to the Protectorate’s subjects as to render those loyalties obsolete. This transformation meshes with historical shifts whereby the state was also forming a sense closer to its modern usage. Michael Braddick has argued that the reform and success of the Cromwellian navy played a crucial role in bringing the state into view of Englishmen in the 1650s as a distinct body with autonomous needs.20 In describing a new state built on maritime power, Waller made a forceful case for his readers to reconceptualize their political loyalties and identities. The 1655 editions of the Panegyrick have diVerent subtitles, which each direct the reader to the crux of its persuasions. The quarto points up the ‘joynt Interest of His Highness, and this Nation’; the folio sounds a little less pragmatic with ‘by a Gentleman that Loves the Peace, Union, and Prosperity of the English Nation’. ‘Union’ is the union of three kingdoms as well as a union of interests: the poem develops an argument that peace, British–Irish union, and prosperity consolidate one another to produce the greater union indicated by the quarto’s subtitle. The poem’s opening stanzas set out the themes of this argument. The Wrst stanza introduces the idea of a social unity secured from division and the threat of invasion by Cromwell’s conquest and consolidation of Britain and Ireland: While with a strong, and yet a gentle Hand You bridle Faction, and our Hearts command; Protect us from our Selves, and from the Foe; Make us Unite, and make us Conquer too; Let partial Spirits still aloud complain. (ll. 1–5)

The Protector yokes and unites antitheses. The coherence that he brings to the Commonwealth renders dissent so manifestly unreconstructed that it is unthreatening: ‘partial Spirits’ (l. 6) can be left to their grudges. The opening ‘While’ is arrestingly unconventional, yet ambiguous: it marginalizes the voices of dissent by representing processes of reconciliation as continuities in spite of them, or making those voices interim accidents of these processes. Above the Waves as Neptune shew’d his Face To chide the Winds, and save the Trojan Race; 19 s.v. ‘state, n.’ (senses 22, 26, 28, 31), in The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), online edn. accessed Sept. 2005 [hereafter, OED]. 20 Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern Britain, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 218–21.

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The First Protectorate Parliament So has your Highness rais’d above the rest Storms of Ambition tossing us represt: Your drooping Country torn with Civill Hate, Restor’d by you, is made a glorious State; The seat of Empire, where the Irish come, And the unwilling Scotch to fetch their doome. The Sea’s our own, and now all Nations greet With bending Sayles each Vessel of our Fleet; Your Power extends as farr as Winds can blowe, Or swelling Sayles upon the Globe may goe. (ll. 9–20)

Waller describes a restoration that might appease royalists. Cromwell’s rise is compared to Neptune’s intervention in Book I of the Aeneid, when he saves the Trojan ships from a storm by upbraiding the escaped winds for defying his authority. The analogy makes Cromwell’s part in recent history into a powerful, but legitimate, intervention to restore order, after the politically ambitious had been let loose. This restoration unfolds into an empire (in the sense of an independent authority) with pacifying sway over Ireland and Scotland, a power that Henry VIII, Edward VI, and the Stuarts aspired to, but could not achieve:21 Waller represents the Irish and Scots collecting orders from a London executive. This refers to, but also Wnesses, the gathering of Irish and Scottish MPs for the Wrst Protectorate parliament. Waller eVaces their power as representatives within a British–Irish government, using doom to suggest not only orders taken, but a fate which sacriWces them to the greater destiny of a British–Irish imperium. Waller’s allusion to the Aeneid might remind readers that this too is a restoration, of the legendary Trojan King Brut’s authority over England, Wales, and Scotland.22 The Irish quickly slip from view, as Waller focuses on the powerful conjunction of ‘The greatest Leader, and the greatest Ile’ (l. 24). By representing Britain with the Virgilian image of a ‘little World’ (l. 49), Waller evokes an important topos of Stuart panegyric; yet he goes further by arguing that only Cromwell has truly tamed the Scots. The political unity of the island is the basis for the particular argument for dominion over the British seas advanced in support of the republic’s war with the United Provinces.23 Through the Wrst section of the Panegyrick, Waller elaborates on these themes with an expansive vision of the beneWts of the Protector’s rule, culminating in a copious description of the beneWts brought by the revival of trade after the Dutch war. The conquest and consolidation of Britain is a personal achievement that lifts Cromwell above Alexander and Caesar (ll. 72, 84). Yet the ‘joynt Interest’ lies in the dividends that this personal glory additionally brings to the Protector’s 21 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 34–6, 56–8. 22 Ibid. 38. 23 See ibid. 113, 117–20, and Selden, Of the Dominion. Waller’s copy of this book is preserved at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shelfmark S2432.


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subjects. The territorial integrity of Britain brings inXuence and prosperity by making it a maritime power. Heav’n, that has plac’d this Island to give Lawe, To balance Europe, and her States to awe, In this Conjunction does on Brittain smile, The greatest Leader, and the greatest Ile; Whether this portion of the World were rent By the rude Ocean from the Continent, Or thus Created, it was sure design’d To be the Sacred Refuge of Mankind. Hither th’oppressed shall henceforth resort, Justice to crave, and Succour at your Court; And then your Highness, not for ours alone, But for the Worlds Protector shall be known: Fame, swifter then your winged Navie, Xyes Through every Land that near the Ocean lyes, Sounding your Name, and telling dreadfull newes To all that Piracy and Rapine use: With such a Chief the meanest Nation blest, Might hope to lift her Head above the rest; What may be thought impossible to doe For us embraced by the Sea and You? Lords of the Worlds great Waste, the Ocean, wee Whole Forrests send to Raigne upon the Sea, And ev’ry Coast may trouble or relieve, But none can visit us without your leave; Angels and we have this Prerogative, That none can at our happy Seat arrive, While we descend at pleasure to invade The Bad with vengeance, or the good to aide: Our little World, the Image of the Great, Like that amidst the boundless Ocean set, Of her own Growth has all that Nature craves, And all that’s Rare as Tribute from the Waves. (ll. 21–52)

Waller describes a strategic and political tipping point. Providence has shaped and positioned the island such that the combination of its kingdoms under a single executive is greater than the sum of their parts. Pushing the borders of this dominion back to the sea makes it easier to defend with a strong navy, which then gives English military power the mobility to threaten other states and support its trade globally. A rhetorical question expands the aspirations of Protectoral power beyond even the British horizons of Stuart epideictic: not only has Cromwell consolidated this powerful imperium, but the combination of that strategic footing and his leadership makes even greater power feasible; Raylor notes the

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ambiguity of the Panegyrick’s ending, where an occultatio (drawing attention to a matter by pointedly seeming to pass over it, or, in this case, postponing its discussion) enticingly trails martial glories that might yet be in the future as well as the past—depending, maybe, on the eventualities of the Western Design—yet delineates too the present poem’s focus on cultural transformations that necessarily succeed domestic conquests and precede the state’s future battles.24 The union between the Protector and his people is a political synergy that arises from this ‘Conjunction’ (l. 23) of Britain’s leader and strategic advantages, when the inXuence and dominion naturally pursued by an aspiring conqueror reaps dividends for his people. Waller enacts this conjunction by entwining the languages of conventional imperial glory and economic expansion: trade is the sea’s tribute. The Panegyrick anticipates a perception of the state’s objects of governance that became more widespread after the Restoration: The failure to conclude wars of religion created the ideological space necessary to reconceptualize the state; the eVects of those wars, especially the Anglo–Dutch conXicts, determined the nature of that reconceptualization. After the Restoration, people no longer believed that wars were won by the most godly or the most virtuous soldiers. Trade and economic vitality had become the key to political power and military might as well as domestic tranquillity.25

A similar logic underpins the Panegyrick’s argument that the coalescence of peace, union, and prosperity brings about greater unions: a harmony of interests between the Protector and the people, and the social cohesion that this produces. The Panegyrick’s appeal to political and cultural unity includes an innovative conceptualization of the state and the interests that produce it; but the poem tries to bridge the old and the new by representing the Protectoral state as a development and reconsolidation of the old order. Waller softens the novelty of prosperity as an interest of state by framing it carefully: the folio’s title-page introduces the word with the credentials of a gentleman, while the epigram from Claudian’s ‘On Stilicho’s Consulship’, which praises Stilicho for securing a revival of trade, gives Waller’s economic arguments classical respectability. By praising the Protectorate as a restoration, Waller reaches out to readers who might look back nostalgically to monarchy. His metaphors assert legitimizing continuities between royal regimes and the Protectorate; but this argument compels Waller to Wnesse the Protectorate’s constitutional innovations and institutional peculiarities. It is particularly striking that a poem addressed to the Lord Protector at the turn of 1655—when the form and legitimacy of the constitution were being questioned by Parliament and attacked by radicals—does not mention the Instrument of Government. Waller centres the state’s authority 24 Raylor, ‘Waller’s Machiavellian Cromwell’, 390. 25 Steven Pincus, ‘From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: the Study of Population and the Intervention of the State’, in Alan Houston and Steven Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 272–98 (293–4).


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on a Protectoral court, where the oppressed come for relief. Through the republic and the Protectorate, Cromwell met representatives of the Huguenots and other troubled European Protestants with an eye to helping their cause with Wnancial or military assistance.26 Traditionally, Protestant refugees looked to the royal court for protection and permission to establish expatriot communities;27 so, to this very limited extent, Cromwell had established his own court, where a distinct and personal species of justice might be sought. Waller expands the idea of a court from one part of its semantic range to imply a power more attractive to royalists, a centre that unites the highest court of justice with the fount of military and economic policy. This is not to say that the Panegyrick takes very seriously Cromwell’s professed desire to help the international Protestant cause. His seaborne justice threatens ‘all that Piracy and Rapine use’ (l. 36); in other words, his navy protects the state’s trade. Waller eVaces the revolutionary character of the Protectorate’s military institutions. He represents the New Model Army as if it were a militia: ‘Things of the noblest kinde our own soyle breeds, j Stout are our men, and Warlike are our Steeds’ (ll. 65–6). He makes its power chthonic, rather than a consequence of innovative reforms that specialized the soldiery and created a unique meritocracy within its ranks, which in turn fostered the radical politics that Waller would have Cromwell disown. Waller Wnesses reforms instrumental in making the navy into a global power: the couplet ‘Lords of the Worlds great Waste, the Ocean, wee j Whole Forrests send to Raigne upon the Sea’ (ll. 41–2) alludes to the November 1653 Act for the DeaVorestation, Sale and Improvement of the Forests.28 The royal forests had provided a lucrative income for the Crown, and in some places encroached on common land.29 The 1653 Act cleared the forests, returned land to those who could claim that it had been unfairly taken from them, and sold oV what remained. It supplied timber and funds for a programme of ship building and naval reform.30 Waller takes the well-established Wgure of imagining ships as trees,31 and makes it topical, without conceding that the Act marked 26 See Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 34–69. 27 Bernard Cottret, The Huguenots in England: Immigration and Settlement, c.1550–1700, trans. Peregrine and Adriana Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 37, 51–2, explains the legal basis for the attachment of immigrant groups to the Crown: the King gave special permission for such groups to establish their own churches, and letters patent from the Crown could make a foreigner a denizen (exempt from most of the strict laws that restricted the rights of foreigners); only Parliament, however, could naturalize an immigrant. 28 The Parliament of England and Wales, An Act for the DeaVorestation, Sale and Improvement of the Forests (London, 1653). 29 Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England, 1485–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 57, 81, 208. 30 Parliament of England and Wales, An Act for the DeaVorestation, Sale and Improvement of the Forests, 7; Braddick argues that navy reforms between 1649 and 1653 went hand in hand with the professionalization of the army. They rationalized its public role and built ships accordingly. See Braddick, State Formation, 219–21. 31 See, e.g., Angel Day’s deWnition of synecdoche in The English Secretorie . . . , 2 vols. (London, 1625), ii. 78.

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a break with previous ways of organizing the navy. The Act becomes a smooth expansion from royal authority: the King’s forests now ‘Raigne’ on the seas over which he had somewhat emptily claimed dominion. Waller’s ‘To the King on his Navy’, which represents Charles I imposing a new law on the seas, features a similar conceit upon the material origin of the ships: ‘Those towers of oake ore fertile plaines might goe j And visit mountains where they once did grow’ (ll. 25– 6). The Panegyrick reworks topics from this earlier poem closely, and perhaps provocatively, praising ‘so much power and piety in one’ (l. 124), where previously Charles combined ‘such power with so much piety’ (l. 32) and contending that only angels can visit Britain uninvited, where previously Britain was only vulnerable to ‘Pegasean horse’ (l. 16).32 The adaptations hint that the Protector realizes an authority aspired to in the design for Charles’s ship-money Xeet.33 But the most revealing liberty that Waller takes with the Instrument of Government is his representation of Parliament as an Augustan senate. It was really in Parliament that the Protectorate’s bond of British–Irish union lay; Scotland and Ireland had their own councils to manage particular diYculties of consolidation, but in Westminster MPs representing the two kingdoms gathered with their English counterparts to debate and pass British–Irish laws.34 The Panegyrick seizes upon the Britishness of the Parliament, but imagines it a one-way conduit of power. The Irish and Scots attend only to fetch directives, and by eVacing their role as representatives, Waller eVaces the power of the institution itself. Waller expands upon this crux in subsequent stanzas: A Race unconquer’d, by their Clyme made bold, The Calidonians arm’d with want and cold, Have, by a fate indulgent to your Fame, Bin, from all Ages, kept, for you to tame, Whom the old Roman wall so ill conWn’d, With a new chain of Garisons you bind, Here forraign Gold no more shall make them come, Our English Iron holds them fast at home; 32 Edmund Waller, Poems &c. (London, 1645), 2–3. The quarto’s ‘power and piety’ is changed in the folio Panegyrick to ‘Power and Clemency’; perhaps Waller reXected that this particular echo went too far. 33 Braddick (State Formation, 210–21), lends some support to the continuity that Waller suggests. He argues that Charles’s ship-money Xeets were a prototype for the navy of the 1650s in so far as Charles’s policy attempted to lessen the navy’s increasingly untenable reliance on private vessels: the reforms went some way to clarifying a distinct public role for the navy that could be distinguished from the private interests of the merchants who had previously contributed ships to the national Xeet. The navy of the 1650s developed this role, and consequently helped to deWne the concept of a public interest served by a Wscal-military state. See also Armitage, Ideological Origins, 113–20. 34 The councils of England, Ireland, and Scotland had many diYculties co-operating: see Patrick Little, ‘The Irish and Scottish Councils and the Dislocation of the Protectoral Union’, in idem (ed.), Cromwellian Protectorate, 127–43.


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They, that henceforth must be content to know, No warmer Region then their Hills of Snow, May blame the Sun, but must extoll your Grace, Which in our Senate has allow’d them place; Preferr’d by Conquest, happily o’rethrowne, Falling they rise, to be with us made one; So kinde Dictators made, when they came home, Their vanquish’d Foes, free Citizens of Rome. Like favor Wnd the Irish, with like Fate Advanc’d to be a portion of our State; While by your Valour, and your Courteous mind Nations divided by the Sea are joyn’d. (ll. 81–100)

The ‘place’ allowed to the Scots and Irish is dignity and status, rather than an opportunity to contest laws by which they are ruled.35 By reducing Parliament to a senate which is merely a prestigious layer of the executive, Waller makes it more like the Roman senate under Augustus.36 Parliament oVers distinction, and even though Waller states that it is a distinction extended to the represented as much as the representatives, an advancement of a people akin to making them Roman citizens, his lexicon buttresses the essentially pyramidal hierarchy that the Panegyrick imposes upon the Protectorate. Cromwell’s clemency in allowing the Scots and Irish access to this body shows his courteousness, which is a generosity of spirit bounded by, and consolidating, social hierarchy—if the Scots and Irish members are reciprocally courteous, they will behave respectfully towards their superiors.37 The British–Irish Parliament is an important proof in the Panegyrick’s argument that Cromwell has consolidated a British empire that provides conditions for new, mutually proWtable relations between the ruler and ruled; but to examine its constitutional role as a power centre in its own right—as, I will argue, Marvell’s The First Anniversary does—would be to upset the logic of this ‘joynt Interest’: the Instrument gave Parliament powers to check and balance the power of the Protector; but defending this design would entail admitting that the Protector and his subjects are not so Wrmly bound together by complementary interests as the Panegyrick insists. Raylor argues that Waller Wrst conceived of writing a panegyric to Cromwell shortly after the Treaty of Westminster in April 1654, and developed it through the rest of the year.38 The draft couplets that he discovered jotted in the back of Waller’s copy of The Prince suggest that the relationship between British unity, 35 OED, s.v. ‘place, n.’. 36 See Karl Loewenstein, The Governance of Rome (The Hague: NijhoV, 1973), 278–83. 37 OED, s.v. ‘courteous, a.’. 38 Timothy Raylor, ‘Reading Machiavelli; Writing Cromwell: Edmund Waller’s Copy of The Prince and its Draft Verses towards A Panegyrick to My Lord Protector’, Turnbull Library Record, 35 (2002), 9–32.

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maritime dominance, and the healing beneWts that they bring was the original kernel of the poem. Cromwell’s struggle to make Parliament ratify the constitution through the autumn appears only to have convinced Waller that there was no place for a powerful parliament in the new state; Raylor notes that an abandoned line among the drafts echoes Cromwell’s speech to the opening of Parliament.39 A textual variation between the two editions of the poem suggests that Waller responded to the progress of the session: the quarto, which is probably a pirated printing from a manuscript in circulation,40 reads ‘And now you heal us with the Acts of Peace’ (l. 110), where the folio, which was very likely authorized, reads ‘arts of Peace’. If this reXects an emendation rather than a simple misreading, it registers Cromwell’s diYculty in getting Parliament to legitimize the ordinances that he issued in the Wrst months of the Protectorate, which could only become acts when passed by Parliament.41 By the time of the folio’s publication, it had become likely that the Parliament’s session would be ended without it having passed many acts, and so the latter reading became more appropriate. The timing of publication suggests that Waller saw Cromwell’s problems with Parliament as an opportunity to imagine a diVerent kind of Protectorate, which might win a new column of support for Cromwell and open up new political possibilities. Waller sent Cromwell a copy of the poem, but the ironic courtliness of the Protector’s acknowledgement suggests a sceptical reception: I have no guilt upon me unless it be to be avenged for you so willingly mistaking me in your verses. This action will put you to redeem me from yourself, as you have already from the world. Ashamed, I am, your friend and servant,

oliver p.42 Cromwell’s thanks to Waller for redeeming him from the world might be read as a suggestion that the poem has altogether removed him from the real world of Protectorate politics.43 Cromwell is the only centre of power in Waller’s Panegyrick. After the expansive copia of the early stanzas, the poem winds back in on itself to locate the

39 Raylor, ‘Reading Machiavelli’, 22. 40 Norbrook, ‘Lucy Hutchinson versus Edmund Waller’, 71. 41 See Ivan Roots, ‘Cromwell’s Ordinances: The Early Legislation of the Protectorate’, in G. E. Aylmer (ed.), The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement 1646–1660 (London: Macmillan, 1972), 143–64; and Oliver Cromwell, A Catalogue and Collection of all those Ordinances, Proclamations, Declarations, etc. which have been Printed and Published since the Government was Established in His Highness the Lord Protector (London, 1654). 42 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 748–9. 43 Although Cromwell appears to have responded to its themes in other respects by appointing Waller a Commissioner for Trade: see Warren Chernaik, ‘Waller, Edmund (1606–1687)’, in DNB, and below, pp. 125–33, 170–2.


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fulcrum of its argument and its imperium in the personal qualities of the Protector. His military vigour conquers an empire, but his magnanimity consolidates it. He oVers toppled opponents a gentlemanly hand up: Less pleasure take, brave minds in battails won, Then in restoring such as are undon, Tygers have courage, and the rugged Bear, But man alone can, whom he conquers, spare. To pardon willing, and to punish loath, You strike with one hand, but you heal with both, Lifting up all that prostrate lie, you grieve You cannot make the dead again to live: When Fate, or Error had our Age mis-led, And o’r these Nations such confusion spred, The onely cure which could from Heav’n come down, Was so much Power and Clemency in one. One, whose Extraction from an ancient Line, Gives hope again that well-born Men may shine, The meanest in your Nature milde and good, The noble rest secured in your Blood. Oft have we wonder’d how you hid in Peace A minde proportion’d to such things as these? How such a Ruling-spirit you could restrain? And practice Wrst over your self to raign? Your private Life did a just pattern give How Fathers, Husbands, pious Sons, should live. (ll. 113–34)

Waller could not credibly represent the Cromwell family as an illustrious line, but he contends that its ancientness makes the Protector innately sympathetic to the nobility and the restoration of social degree. Waller also appeals to Cromwell’s example as a father. This ‘pattern’ might draw together ex-royalists, who would remember Charles I’s self-presentation as an ideal father and husband, with more bourgeois readers attracted by domestic values and the idea of Cromwell bringing a ‘prosp’rous end’ (l. 140) to the conXict. Thus Waller is not simply trying to persuade old royalists to support the Protector by representing him as a king waiting for a crown. Rather, he portrays Cromwell as a truly Augustan Wgure who can bring diVerent social groups together after a period of civil conXict. It is because his qualities oVer beneWts to diVerent sections of the elite that he is a Wgure of restoration. Yet, for all the ways in which the Panegyrick makes Cromwell into an Augustus, Waller waits until the end of the poem to make the parallel explicit. When the analogy comes, it comes almost as a warning, implying to Waller’s readers that the peace, union, and prosperity of Britain depend on the Protector now more than ever.

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The First Protectorate Parliament But living Virtue, all atchievements past, Meets Envy still to grapple with at last. This Cesar found, and that ungrateful Age Which losing him, fell back to blood and rage: Mistaken Brutus thought to break their yoke, But cut the Bond of Union with that stroke. That Sun once set, a thousand meaner Stars, Gave a dim light to Violence and Wars, To such a Tempest, as now threatens all, Did not your mighty Arm prevent the fall. If Romes great Senate could not weild that Sword, Which of the Conquer’d world had made them Lord, What hope had ours, while yet their power was new, To rule victorious Armies but by you? You that had taught them to subdue their Foes, Could Order teach, and their high Spirits compose, To every Duty could their Minds engage, Provoke their Courage, and command their Rage. So when a Lyon shakes his dreadfull Mayn, And angry growes, if he that Wrst took pain To tame his youth, approach the haughty Beast, He bends to him, but frights away the rest. As the vex’d World to Wnde repose at last It self into Augustus arms did cast; So England now does with like toyle opprest, Her weary Head upon your Bosome rest. (ll. 147–72)

Cromwell is an Augustus because he can control the army that the republican parliaments could not. He is not just the promoter of union in bringing security and prosperity, but the very bond of union, the linchpin of the state, without whom it would quickly fall back into civil conXict. But he is yet threatened by the same mixture of envy and mistaken republicanism that culminated in the assassination of Caesar. To seal his argument, Waller moves from persuading his readers that they beneWt from the Protector’s authority, to pointing out that they depend on it. This conclusion draws additional force from its pertinence to the dissenting MPs’ attempts to increase their own constitutional power over the armed forces.44 They made little headway in Parliament, but the controversy spilled over into the petition of the three colonels, which argued that Cromwell’s command of a standing army eVectively gave him greater power than Charles I had claimed, and would overawe Parliament. Even though the Panegyrick dismisses these voices of republican dissent as ‘partial’ (l. 5), envious, or at best mistaken, the timeliness of Waller’s reminder that Parliament could not tame the 44 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 541, 562, 574; Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 16–17.


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army makes all the more compelling his alternative vision of an Augustan Protector. The diVerences between The First Anniversary and the Panegyrick have been understood in terms of political theory. The two poems mark a Wssure between supporters of the Protectorate who would hold it to account as a republic and those who anticipated its development into a pragmatic quasi-monarchy, which might be underpinned by a Hobbesian rationale of power.45 David Norbrook and Joad Raymond have interpreted The First Anniversary as the work of a republican poet becoming wary of the Protector’s charisma through the strain of trying to accommodate him within republican poetics and literary culture. Raymond argues that the poem advocates a more supple republicanism, but that its endorsement of Cromwell and the Instrument of Government is ultimately provisional.46 While my reading of the poem is indebted to these interpretations, I suggest that the poem’s commitment to republicanism has been overstated, partly because polarizing critical treatments of the First Anniversary and the Panegyrick have hidden what these poems have in common: namely, a rhetorical attitude. Waller makes a case for an autocratic Protectorate not by its formal superiority to other power structures, but circumstantially. Cromwell’s power oVers an opportunity to consolidate peace, union, and prosperity, whereas the republican path will in these conditions only foster division and the army’s fractiousness. Marvell’s poem gives even greater rhetorical force to circumstance, because the ‘state of Things’ (l. 43) at the turn of 1655 included conditions which alienated him from those who would undermine the Instrument of Government, and perhaps peace, for the sake of republican tenets. Notwithstanding Marvell’s social and literary connections to prominent republicans,47 the poem blames 45 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 299–357; Warren Chernaik argues that Waller’s poem expounds a Hobbesian defence and that The First Anniversary takes up a position closer to Harrington’s Oceana, yet for all its ‘scaVolding of constitutionalism . . . [it] rests Wnally on a bedrock of obedience and submission to ‘‘one with highest Pow’r’’ ’: ‘ ‘‘Every Conqueror Creates a Muse’’: Conquest and Constitutions in Marvell and Waller’, in Chernaik and Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty, 195–216 (210). 46 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 337–57; Joad Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 62 (2001), 313–50. 47 Topical references suggest that the poem was substantially written in the month before publication, and that Marvell had been following events closely in newsbooks and pamphlet literature through the autumn (Marvell, 281–5). A letter to Milton in June suggests that Marvell was particularly keen, and well placed, to Wnd out about Overton’s growing disillusionment with the Protectorate. He wrote: ‘I have an aVectionate Curiosity to know what becomes of Colonel Overtons businesse’ (Marvell, Poems and Letters, ii. 306); but the blithe phrasing disguised more complicated interests. As governor of Hull, Overton was prominent in the web of Hull connections by which the two poets knew one another and which had secured Marvell jobs tutoring Fairfax’s daughter and Cromwell’s ward. Overton had just been called to a meeting with the Protector on the suspicion that he had been plotting a revolt among the forces in Scotland, at which he had promised Cromwell his loyalty unless he ‘perceived his Lordship did only design the setting up of himself, and not the good of these nations’ (ibid. ii. 379). Milton had written a lavish panegyric to Overton in the Second Defence (the subject of Marvell’s letter), which might now have seemed ill-judged.

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Parliament’s eVorts to win greater powers, for holding a door open to Overton’s plot, and for allowing republican critics of the Instrument to become entrenched. The poem searches backwards and forwards through time, to Wnd a deliberative perspective that can bring the Commonwealth’s potential into focus with its immediate necessities. It defends the Instrument as a work in progress, hedged around by dangers that demand greater co-operation; particularly, for a consensual and practical redeWnition of liberty more attuned to those dangers, which inevitably shape the construction of the state and tie even Cromwell’s hands. The First Anniversary is composed of distinct sections which combine, accelerate, extend, and literalize rhetorical Wgures with great originality to discover the new faultlines of settlement: Marvell begins by comparing eVective diVerences between monarchy and the Protectorate; he then describes the impressive rise of its institutional structure in spite of its refractory materials; he focuses the question in hand by digressing on the unreadiness of the people for chiliastic government, extends a soteria (thanksgiving for a person’s delivery from danger) into Wctional elegy to expose the new polity’s fragility, before an encomium on Cromwell is used unconventionally to refute charges that Cromwell aimed at his own elevation; and Wnally, a peroration praises the international power of the Protectoral state through the mouth of a foreign prince who would seize it. The poem’s couplets and verse paragraphs stitch these elements together by forming lucid structures of sense that concatenate—many begin with conjunctions—to build argument assuredly and forcefully. The First Anniversary’s Protector restores too; but where Waller’s restoration is a reconsolidation of Britain’s established social order and strategic ambitions, Marvell’s Cromwell confounds expectations from day to day: Cromwell alone with greater Vigour runs, (Sun-like) the Stages of succeeding Suns: And still the Day which he doth next restore, Is the just Wonder of the Day before. Cromwell alone doth with new Lustre spring, And shines the Jewell of the yearly Ring. (ll. 7–12)

Marvell’s solar imagery aVronts royalism by representing Cromwell as a better sun, eVecting greater restorations than a mere royal ‘Return’ (l. 15). In praising the day-upon-day rhythm of Cromwell’s restorations, Marvell also digniWes the Protector’s industrious yet hand-to-mouth work during his Wrst nine months of oYce: with the Council of State he had quickly begun to reform institutions, laying down a patchwork of limited-term ordinances for later ratiWcation by Parliament.48 Cromwell is compared to a restored sun again at the close of The First Anniversary, by which time his restoration Wgures a more complex triumph over the political setbacks of the autumn, and throws further into relief the 48 See Roots, ‘Cromwell’s Ordinances’.


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diVerences between himself and the princes to whom such images invite comparison. Marvell seals the contrast describing Cromwell’s singular energy in time with a particularly courtly image. He ‘shines the Jewell of the yearly Ring’, evoking a customary topos of Caroline New Year poems. Compare Carew’s ‘A New yeares gift. To the King’: Happie auspitious dayes appeare, Mark’d with the whiter stone, that cast On the darke brow of th’Ages past A dazeling luster, let them shine In this succeeding circles twine, Till it be round with glories spread, Then with it crowne our Charles his head, That we th’ensuing yeare may call One great continued festivall.49

Where ‘auspitious dayes’ bejewel Carew’s royal crown, Marvell makes Cromwell’s activity the focus of time—thus glossing positively the festive calendar’s suppression.50 The Protectorate’s anniversary fell on 16 December, so the conventional occasion is also accelerated, which, combined with Cromwell’s ever-brightening lustre, suggests an authority of more intense energy than that of monarchs. By 1655, New Year poems had featured in the published collections of several royalist poets: in Herrick’s ‘A New-yeares Gift Sent to Sir Simeon Steward’, the new year becomes a literary occasion on which cultural and political tensions might be cast away through ritual observance, good cheer, and the reaYrmation of relationships; William Cartwright’s ‘A New-years Gift’ acknowledges an aZicted kingdom, but Wnds solace in the ‘Propriety’ of the day’s ceremonies.51 The First Anniversary presents a rejoinder to this festive expiation of social troubles. By invoking a quintessential Caroline courtly topos in order to reWne a distinction concerning cultural reform, it addresses the calendar’s politicization and oVers a further contrast: rather than providing an opportunity to dispel problems with ritual, the anniversary gives Marvell a temporal vantage point from which to explore what might next be made from the diYcult cultural materials of the recent past. As The First Anniversary surveys the events of the previous year, it also repeatedly reworks topics from courtly poems (many of 49 Thomas Carew, Poems by Thomas Carew Esquire (London, 1640), 151. 50 During the Interregnum, Christmas and other holy seasons were suppressed, although 5 Nov. remained as a national day of common celebration: see David Cressy, ‘The Protestant Calendar and the Vocabulary of Celebration in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 29 (1990), 31–52 (40–1). 51 Robert Herrick, Hesperides, or the Works Both Humane & Divine of Robert Herrick, Esq. (London, 1648), 145–7; see also Janie Caves McCauley, ‘Herrick’s New Year’s Poems’, George Herbert Journal, 14 (1990–1), 72–96 (81); William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems (London, 1651), 279–81.

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which, such as Herrick’s ‘To the King, To Cure the Evill’, themselves address kinds of social renovation52) to distinguish and clarify new concepts of restoration; the Protectorate’s fraught literary heritage helps to deWne the new cultural project and is worked into its fabric. The First Anniversary thus produces its own poetic renewals: the anniversary is reinaugurated as an occasion not simply to wish for better times, but to look back and work through diYculties constructively. The Humble Petition of Several Colonels argued that the Instrument of Government gave Cromwell greater arbitrary power than that claimed by Charles I, and that its principles of balanced power were a sham. Marvell’s opening contrast between man’s entropy and Cromwell’s restorations develops into a critical comparison of the eVective diVerences between a constitutionally limited Protector and kings. Conventionally, comparisons of deeds clinch an encomium or form the climax of a sinkrisis (a comparison between two things or people); but by opening his poem with this Wgure, Marvell gets straight to the heart of the matter with a precipitance worthy of Cromwell; a scrupulous exordium (the introductory section of an oration) would perhaps lose sight of its object.53 Kings pursue arcane dynastic policies: Their earthy Projects under ground they lay, More slow and brittle then the China clay: Well may they strive to leave them to their Son, For one Thing never was by one King don. (ll. 19–22)

The Instrument made the Protectorate elective, aiming to reduce the scope for conXicts of interest that might inhibit a head of state from acting for the common good. With allusions to the year’s petty wars between Louis XIV and Philip IV, Marvell argues that monarchy sets kings against their own people. They Wght by Others, but in Person wrong, And only are against their Subjects strong; Their other Wars seem but a feign’d contest, This Common Enemy is still opprest; If Conquerors, on them they turn their might; If Conquered, on them they wreak their Spight: They neither build the Temple in their dayes, 52 For The First Anniversary’s reworking of Waller’s ‘Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls’ and Herrick’s ‘To the King, To Cure the Evill’, see below, and Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 75–9. In upbraiding a monarch’s ‘wide Return, j Longer, and more Malignant than Saturn’ (l. 16), Marvell also turns back a common topos of Caroline courtly praise, that the King returns England to the age of Saturn: see, e.g., ‘A New Year’s Gift’, in William Strode, The Poetical Works, ed. Bertram Dobell (London: Bertram Dobell, 1907), 98–9. 53 See, e.g., Hermogenes’ elementary exercises, trans. Charles Sears Baldwin in his Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), 33.


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Nor Matter for succeeding Founders raise; Nor sacred Prophecies consult within, Much less themselves to perfect them begin. (ll. 27–36)

These lines imply that a monarchical state is constituted of two bodies: the commons and a king who stands outside them and, inevitably, against them too. The distractions of their distinct interests prevent kings from works that better the condition of their subjects. This argument simpliWes monarchies so as to set oV the harmonic institutions of the Protectorate; Marvell’s ‘Common Enemy’ might bring to mind the House of Commons and the problem, which the poem will develop, of organizing and representing popular interests. In the context of perfecting the godly reformation of Church and State, the constitutionalized disregard that kings have for such tasks renders them mere ornamental heads, who ‘[no] more contribute to the state of Things, j Then wooden Heads unto the Violls strings’ (ll. 43–4). The implied contrast is the Protector, who had already started to build the temple by planning a reformed national church. But Marvell also introduces the idea of the state by punning on the state of things: this is the status rerum, the critical forensic question of how aVairs stand in relation to one another; but because the question in hand is state reformation, it also suggests a state composed of institutions and structures that can break up the monarchical pattern of one against the many. Consolidating this state is a problem not of domination, but of contribution to a project, of raising ‘Matter for succeeding Founders’ (l. 34). Cromwell’s part in this construction is nevertheless crucial. He is compared to Amphion, who built the walls of Thebes with the supernatural music of his lyre. The analogy opens up the baroque convention of a harmonic state in tune with the music of the spheres, and critically reworks a comparison used in Waller’s ‘Upon His Majesties Repairing of Pauls’, in which Charles I is compared to Amphion for completing his father’s design for the portico of St Paul’s, which was by 1655 already collapsing.54 Whereas The Panegyrick suggests continuities between the royal courts and the Protectorate, The First Anniversary invokes the topics of Caroline courtly poetry only to surpass its hyperboles and pick out new political objects. The year’s events give inherited materials new life and versatility, which make the aspirations of the old court appear, not as an ideological alternative, but limited, even unambitious: Marvell’s Amphion constructs not merely walls or a jerry-built portico, but a palace, a tower, and temples. The expansion shows a fresh conception of state building as the development of mutually supportive institutions. In one version of the myth, Amphion learns the Lydian mode from the 54 There is some doubt over whether the portico was ever fully completed, and shops had been built against it during the wars (Paul Hunneyball, personal communication). In 1655, newsbooks reported that the structure was in such disrepair that the government was considering its demolition: Marvell, 284.

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Lydians; but here, Amphion plays in diVerent keys to build diVerent ediWces.55 Marvell describes an awesome, but reciprocal, creative power: Amphion wonders at the concatenation of structures, and it excites him to ‘try’ new musical variations. The Amphion myth is reworked to represent a genius who does not build according to an already completed design, but constructs the institutions of the polis piecemeal, working out inspired new relations between them. The analogy digniWes the hand-to-mouth development of the Protectorate settlement, but it also lays a ground against which Marvell can examine sympathetically Cromwell’s conXicts with parliaments. Marvell turns to praise the great work of the Protectorate polity by making a further contrast, to distinguish the Protectorate from the old republicanism. Sudden notes on Cromwell’s sacred lute cast out the republic’s ‘tedious Statesmen’, who many years did hack, Framing a Liberty that still went back; Whose num’rous Gorge could swallow in an hour That Island, which the Sea cannot devour. (ll. 69–72)

The idea of a recoverable ancient constitution, cherished by Whitelocke and other prominent parliamentarians under the republic, is a mirage that recedes ever further into history.56 This dismissal is particularly striking if compared to Nedham’s A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (an explication of the Instrument that the Protector endorsed), which justiWes the Protectorate as a reversion to ‘our antient way of Government’.57 Marvell reminds the reader of the unpopularity of the Rump MPs at the time of their dismissal: their long session and disorderly numerousness had produced only avarice. He does not here distinguish Barebone’s Parliament, but imagines a single moment in which ‘The Commonwealth . . . Wrst together came, j And each one enter’d in the willing Frame’ (ll. 75–6). The frame (a structure of government) is willing, in that it is both accommodating and compelling to the subjects who enter into it at the moment of ‘wondrous Order and Consent’ (l. 67). The musical connotations of ‘Consent’ are only thrown into relief by the suppressed musical sense of ‘num’rous’. Marvell thus places great emphasis on the acceptance of the Instrument of 55 Pausanias, Description of Greece, ed. and trans. W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod, 5 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959–65), iv. 193; John Hollander, ‘Marvell’s Commonwealth and ‘‘The Empire of the Ear’’ ’, in George de Forest Lord (ed.), Andrew Marvell: A Collection of Critical Essays (Engelwood CliVs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 29–41 (34). 56 William Klein, ‘The Ancient Constitution Revisited’, in Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 23–44 (43). 57 [Marchamont Nedham], A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Dominions Thereto Belonging; in Reference to the Late Established Government by a Lord Protector, and a Parlament (London, 1654), 27.


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Government at its inception as evidence of consent to it. He was not alone: Cromwell referred back to the congratulatory addresses of various counties, corporations, the City of London, and the army as evidences of a legitimizing popular consent.58 But Marvell imagines this point dramatically, as a moment in which normally ‘stubborn Men’ enter into a political structure that is inclusive and powerful at the same time. However, in elaborating upon the human refractoriness in spite of which Cromwell produces the musical consent and structures of the Protectorate, Marvell glances at the proceedings of the Protectorate’s parliament as well as the republic’s: All other Matter yields, and may be rul’d; But who the Minds of stubborn Men can build? No Quarry bears a Stone so hardly wrought, Nor with such labour from its Center brought; None to be sunk in the Foundation bends, Each in the House the highest Place contends, And each the Hand that lays him will direct, And some fall back upon the Architect. (ll. 77–84)

Extricating MPs from their centres had proved diYcult indeed: some results had been contested, and Parliament had to issue a deadline for appeals against the elected MPs.59 Subsequent refusals to sign Cromwell’s subscription to government by a parliament and a protector, and the attempts by remaining MPs to win more executive powers for Parliament, challenged the fundamental structure of the Protectorate. Nedham’s A True State had used the foundation image to circumscribe Parliament’s role: ‘the Foundation of this Government [is] laid in the People. Who hath the power of altering old Laws, or making new? The People in Parlament; without them nothing of this nature can be done; they are to be governed only by such Laws as they have chosen.’60 Marvell’s ‘House’ is both an allegorical building and the House of Commons. The lines evoke the republican resurgence and the MPs’ eVorts to claim greater powers. That the MPs would direct the hand that lays them could refer to their eVorts to reduce the power of the Protector, or win executive power over their constituents. Those that fall back upon the architect could not but bring to mind Okey and Saunders, among others. The paragraph suggests that the sitting parliament is no less proving a nest of ambition and obstruction than its recent forerunners.

58 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 456–7. 59 The Parliament of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, Tuesday the Fifth of September, 1654. Resolved by the Parliament, That No Petition against Any Election of Such Members as Are Already Returned for England or Scotland, Shall Be Received (London, 1654). 60 [Nedham], True State of the Case of the Commonwealth, 28.

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Marvell’s dispraise is also an extenuating context for the slow progress of the Instrument’s ratiWcation. The very existence of the Protectorate, which has to be built with men’s minds, is a greater achievement than the architecture of Thebes. Subsequent lines sustain the imagery of recalcitrant human materials, but enact an ongoing process whereby their tensions are organized to produce durable structures. Strong conjunctions and pronouns bind couplet clauses into a towering period. The Common-wealth dos through their Centers all Draw the Circumf ’rence of the publique Wall; The crossest Spirits here doe take their part, Fast’ning the Contignation which they thwart; And they, whose Nature leads them to divide, Uphold, this one, and that the other Side; But the most Equall still sustein the Height, And they as Pillars keep the Work upright; While the resistance of opposed Minds, The Fabrique as with Arches stronger binds, Which on the Basis of a Senate free, Knit by the Roofs Protecting weight agree. (ll. 87–98)

Marvell echoes an ancient deWnition of God, who has a circumference everywhere and a centre nowhere; the Commonwealth similarly resists a single centre with a circumference that involves everyone. Yet it is composed of structures. The more refractory subjects secure a public wall; their combativeness can serve a purpose in the defence of the polis, hinting perhaps that idealism is simply an aspect of the army’s robustness. The most equal are individuals who are fair, just, and impartial, and maybe alike in stature too.61 That they ‘still’ sustain the height implies a structural continuity with previous regimes and a reference to the Councillors of State who advise the Protector like a Privy Council. The Council in fact exercised far more executive power than a monarchical Privy Council, and was composed of oYcers and civilians; but Marvell contends that the principle of selecting able and just councillors to assist a ruler persists.62 The upward movement of Marvell’s description is interrupted to describe the relationship between Parliament and the Protector; even though Parliament is the ‘basis’ of the structure, the way it shares power and responsibility with the Protector is the most important part of the passage and gives the foothold (l. 99) necessary for him to defend and advance the Commonwealth’s interests internationally. The opposed minds in Parliament (Marvell’s use of ‘senate’ does not imply the passivity of Waller’s senate) provide an arch-like structural support that yet 61 OED, s.v. ‘equal, a.’. 62 The Council of State had the constitutional right to vet MPs and examine election appeals independently: Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge?’, 4–5.


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requires downward weight from the roof to cohere. Thus pressure from the Protector on Parliament (in calling elections, limiting its term, and excluding recalcitrant members) does not impinge upon its role, but is a necessary part of creating agreement, parliaments otherwise being liable to collapse into the tedious politicking that prevents them from delivering consensual laws (their ‘fundamental’ function under the Instrument). Rhyme emphasizes ‘agree’; the structure is organized not to restore and safeguard a chimerical ancient liberty, but to produce workable consensus. Historians have argued that throughout the 1650s, Cromwell consistently sought to build consensus on issues that had bedevilled a settlement, and Marvell describes a conWguration directed to this aim.63 By using the present tense he represents an ongoing process whereby political structures are involving individuals in diVerent roles, and transforming their antagonisms into legitimate, mutually supportive institutions. The passage is thus both apologetic—it justiWes Cromwell’s interventions, exclusions, and the present incompleteness of the Instrument—and critical of parliamentarians who slow the process by acting in a diVerent spirit. Later in the poem, Marvell risks an even more trial-and-error image of Cromwellian architecture: Choosing each Stone, and poysing every weight, Trying the Measures of each Bredth and Height; Here pulling down, and there erecting New, Founding a Wrm State by Proportions true. (ll. 245–8)

These lines make Cromwell’s conXicts with republican parliaments continuous with the constructive spirit of the Protectorate. No king could be imagined creating in such a way; Cromwell Wnds out true proportions by getting involved practically. The Wrm state is not planned, but built up piecemeal. In attempting to distinguish the Protectorate from other forms of government, and to examine the function of Parliament within it, The First Anniversary had to make its case not only against royalist and republican arguments that the Protectorate was eVectively a monarchy, but also against Fifth Monarchists, who argued that there was a godly imperative to vest the supreme power in an assembly of saints. London Fifth Monarchists had published a joint manifesto to coincide with Parliament’s opening, and tried to circulate a petition through the army which urged Parliament to pull down the new tyranny and restore ‘a state of perfect liberty’.64 In a tract published on 1 September, John Spittlehouse accused Cromwell of high treason for breaking the act against government by a single 63 J. C. Davis, Oliver Cromwell (London: Arnold, 2001), 162–92. 64 Livewell Chapman, A Declaration of Several of the Churches of Christ . . . (London, 1654); Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber, 1972), 105.

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person.65 Marvell’s eschatological digression exhorts the reader to readiness for apocalyptic events, and so perhaps seeks to win the sympathy of readers receptive to millenarian preaching; but it also deXects millenarian anticipation of a government of saints from the immediate question of Parliament’s place in the state. Praising the inXuence that Cromwell now exerts in Europe, Marvell contrasts the Protector’s mindfulness of the international Protestant cause with the ‘Reason . . . of State’ (l. 111) that directs the foreign policy of other princes; were they not thus distracted, Cromwell might lead them in ‘The great Designes kept for the latter Dayes’ (l. 110). The argument that Cromwell cannot bring in the apocalypse on his own alleviates the burden of expectation that some had placed upon him. Hence oft I think, if in some happy Hour High Grace should meet in one with highest Pow’r, And then a seasonable People still Should bend to his, as he to Heavens will, What we might hope, what wonderfull EVect From such a wish’d Conjuncture might reXect. Sure, the mysterious Work, where none withstand, Would forthwith Wnish under such a Hand: Fore-shortned Time its useless Course would stay, And soon precipitate the latest Day. But a thick Cloud about that Morning lyes, And intercepts the Beams of Mortall eyes, That ’tis the most which we determine can, If these the Times, then this must be the Man. (ll. 131–44)

Marvell’s velleities dissipate the immediate millenarian hope for a parliament of saints. ‘The mysterious Work’ depends not upon such an assembly, but upon Grace and a seasonable people. The passage resolves into a plainer idiom to conclude that Cromwell would be an ideal millenarian leader if circumstances allowed him to be. Marvell’s latent contention here is that parliaments have no immediate role to play in beginning the Wght against Antichrist, and the passage deftly redirects millenarian hopes towards conditions outside the speciWc questions of constitutional settlement which The First Anniversary pursues and clariWes. The First Anniversary stresses the urgency of these questions in a section addressing the coaching accident which incapacitated Cromwell for much of October: Marvell draws upon unlikely materials to highlight the present fragility 65 John Spittlehouse, Certaine Queries Propounded to the Most Serious Consideration of Those Persons Now in Power (London, 1654); the perceived danger of such attacks is attested by Cromwell’s opening speech, in which he presented the Fifth Monarchists as a threat that should induce Parliament to co-operation (see Abbott, iii. 434–43), and by Nedham’s prompt reply to Spittlehouse’s publications, which he linked to the colonels’ petition (see The Observator, 24 Oct. 1654).


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of the Protectorate settlement and compel his readers to a new spirit of political co-operation. Cromwell had crashed his coach after taking the reins of horses sent as a gift from the Count of Oldenberg, providing ready material for satirists, who seized upon the incident as an illustration of Cromwell’s unWtness for government; even apologists conceded the indignity of the episode.66 Patterson identiWes this passage as an example of soteria, a species of occasional verse popular among seventeenth-century poets which celebrates a subject’s recovery from danger, and praises by exploring the implications of his or her near loss.67 The best examples, such as Waller’s ‘To my Lord Admiral of his Late Sickness and Recovery’, are hyperbolic, but imagine the subject’s death with sensitive circumlocutions, if at all. Marvell, however, extends his hyperbole into a Wctional elegy, as if the occasion is so momentous that it justiWes generic (and perhaps legal68) transgression. This extension further deWnes its occasion as a point of cultural, not just political, crisis, in which the old forms that deWned social value are somewhat inadequate to the challenges of the Protectorate, but yet may be reworked to meet them. An anonymous manuscript satire links Cromwell’s coaching accident to Parliament.69 With biting irony, it upbraids the ‘foreign ill-tutored jades’ for bolting, when the sitting MPs would gladly have oVered to take their place: Had the mild Britons dreamed your Highness meant, To pass through all degrees of Government, The all subscribing Parliament that sate, Would have prevented this sad turn of State; They would themselves have drawn the coach and borne The awful lash, which those proud beasts did scorn.

The satire challenges the legitimacy of Parliament and the consent that it represents by alluding to the exclusionary engagement and then portraying the remaining MPs as beasts of burden, concluding that ‘The measure of the power is their base fear’. Aiming to reveal the myopia of the ‘impious Men’ (l. 189) who laughed at the accident, Marvell extends his adversary’s conceit to imagine the consequences had ‘Our brutish fury strugling to be Free’ (l. 177) succeeded in killing the Protector. Brutish can also mean British, and the pun points to a moment when the republican challenge took on an archipelagic dimension. The 66 See John Denham, ‘A Jolt on Michaelmas Day. 1654’, in Alexander Brome (ed.), The Rump: Or, a Collection of Songs and Ballads . . . (London, 1660), 15–18; George Smith, God’s Unchangeableness . . . (London, 1655), 15. 67 Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, 80. 68 ‘Compass or imagine the death of the Lord Protector’ was declared high treason in one of the Wrst Protectoral ordinances: this attached to the Protectorate an ambiguous deWnition of treason that had applied to kings: Mercurius Politicus, 19 Jan. 1654. 69 Anon., ‘An Elogy Written on the Late Unhappy Accident which Befell the Lord Protector’, reproduced in Historical Manuscripts Commission (hereafter HMC), Thirteenth Report, Appendix, pt. I: Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, preserved at Welbeck Abbey (London: HM Stationers, 1891), 678.

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Irish and Scottish MPs returned to the Wrst elected parliament were not all placemen. There is no reliable record of the excluded members, but Okey, elected for Linlithgow, Queens Ferry, Perth, Culross, and Stirling, was very probably one of them (others among nine or ten Scottish MPs who did not take their seats might have been excluded).70 Some of the members for Ireland also proved less than subservient to the Protector in the course of debates.71 As the republican campaign following the exclusions targeted the army in Scotland and Ireland, and Overton’s plot came to light, Cromwell and Thurloe became gravely worried that the conquests of those kingdoms could dissolve into power bases for their most dangerous opponents.72 Waller’s reference to the fate of the Trojans indirectly legitimizes the Protector’s British imperium via the royal legend of King Brut; but, by creating a pun on incivility and British which includes that name, Marvell makes it connote the grand historical scale of an ingrained unruliness in the Protectorate’s subjects. Britain’s heritage is itself a diYcult pressure reproducing itself among the problems of settlement. He pushes the identiWcation of radicalism and native primitivism even further in his later attack on Quakers and Fifth Monarchists, who are ‘Bent to reduce us to the ancient Pict’ (l. 318). Marvell extends the Wction of Cromwell’s death to provoke sober reappraisal of the Protectorate’s instabilities. He solicits a shift of attitude in his reader by imagining the Wction as an elegiac thread in a tapestry, introduced ‘So with more Modesty we may be True j And speak as of the Dead the Praises due’ (ll. 187–8); ‘Modesty’ is a temperance and plainness peculiar to sifting the achievements of the dead, when factional loyalties or jealousies should be put aside. This quasielegy is a means of avoiding more conventional panegyric, of representing Cromwell’s importance to the state while arguing that the Protector is only part of a state, which must be built to outlast its oYcers. The passage imagining Cromwell’s fall continues to answer republican criticism with distinctions between Cromwell and kings: the accident ‘soyl’d in Dust thy Crown of silver Hairs’ (l. 180); instead of a kingly crown, Cromwell has the pathos of age, and the informal ‘thy’ (contrast Waller’s use of the more deferential ‘you’) intensiWes the plainness in a representation of vulnerability that could not be written of a king. Marvell telescopes the horses’ reaction to Cromwell’s death. They are the ‘headstrong People’ (l. 224) of Britain who would overthrow Cromwell in the name of liberty, but they are aimless in their new freedom, and their magniWcence turns to fear and regret: 70 Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge?’, 9. Elections could not be held in at least seven Scottish constituencies: see Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 387; and Little and Smith, Parliaments and Politics, 57–8, 85–6. 71 Gaunt, ‘Cromwell’s Purge?’, 10; Taft, ‘Humble Petition’, 36. 72 Thurloe had strong intelligence of the plot, and Overton’s loyalty was questioned earlier in the year: see Taft, ‘Humble Petition’.


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First winged Fear transports them far away, And leaden Sorrow then their Xight did stay. See how they each his towring Crest abate, And the green Grass, & their known Mangers hate, Nor through wide Nostrils snuVe the wanton aire, Nor their round Hoofs, or curled Manes compare; With wandring Eyes, and restless Ears they stood, And with shrill Neighings ask’d him of the Wood. (ll. 193–200)

Marvell imagines the chaos that would follow Cromwell’s death as structural collapses unfolding from one another, reversing the movement of the poem. Hyperbolic images of disorder are elegiac conventions, but Marvell literalizes them by warning of real anarchy. Standard metaphors—the cosmos overthrown and a sinking ship of state—segue into and from a more pointed projection of disaster: ‘A dismall Silence through the Palace went, j And then loud Shreeks the vaulted Marbles rent’ (ll. 209–10). A palace can be any grand building of state, including Westminster Palace, where Parliament met in St Stephen’s Chapel, a gothic structure which—unlike the stately rooms of Whitehall or Hampton Court—had a vaulted roof.73 The reference is just lucid enough to reXect the catastrophe back upon those who would be so instrumental in it. They will Wnally be lost for words before their screams break up the roof of their chamber, which recalls the arches knit by the constitution that they have been trying to contest. Cromwell is apotheosized like Elijah, but he leaves behind a new civil war (l. 216), because his mantle (the means by which Elijah nominated Elisha as his successor74) is broken (l. 220). The First Anniversary confronts its reader with the lack of consensus and legitimate rules to manage a succession: the protocols for arranging such a succession had provoked Werce debate in Parliament without a convincing resolution.75 Eric Porter argues that the problem was so intractable 73 The vaulting in St Stephen’s Chapel was in fact made of wood in imitation of a stone vault. At this time the roof was hidden from the view by a ceiling. Marble columns ran up the walls, but these too were covered, by tapestries or wainscoting. The lower chamber, or Chapel of St Mary, had a stone vaulted ceiling: see Maurice Hastings, Parliament House, the Chambers of the House of Commons (London: Architectural Press, 1950), 65–7, 130–1. 74 2 Kgs. 2: 11–14. 75 A party had proposed to make the oYce of Protector hereditary in the hope that this would lessen the Protector’s dependence upon the army, but the motion was defeated, and Parliament eventually voted that the Council should elect a new Protector between parliaments, but it would be Parliament’s choice if sitting. The French ambassador Bordeaux thought that supporters of a hereditary Protectorate had been caught out by the vote, and suspected that they were merely waiting for another opportunity to Wght for amendment, although the proposal had drawn forceful protests in Parliament and the press. See Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iii. 482; Derek Hirst, ‘ ‘‘That Sober Liberty’’: Marvell’s Cromwell in 1654’, in John M. Wallace (ed.), The Golden and the Brazen World: Papers in Literature and History, 1650–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 17–53 (19); Colonell Shapcott . . . His Speech in Parliament the 30 of October, 1654 with the Case of the Secluded Members of This Parliament ([London], 1654).

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and far-reaching that both Parliament and the Protector endeavoured to conceal it from the public,76 which throws further into relief The First Anniversary’s refusal to paper over the problems of the settlement. Marvell proposes no formal solution; he simply stresses the terrible implications of this instability in order to galvanize fellow citizens into a new spirit of co-operation. The fragile, mutual dependency of the people and their Protector (who is invulnerable to everything except their rebelliousness (ll. 170–4)) is both the state’s Xaw and a recognition that might impel the reader beyond the entrenched political animosities that obstruct consensus and settlement. The First Anniversary represents the Protectorate as a project to build a lasting settlement of reciprocally supportive institutions; the Protector himself plays a crucial part in the process of building, yet he is only part of the settlement. The poem tries to free the question of how such institutions should be organized and consolidated from the polarities of the radical discourses assailing the Protectorate, whereby a state is either a tyranny or a free republic, a Fifth Monarchy of saints, or a colony of Antichrist. It consistently criticizes the sitting parliament, which encouraged such discourses by itself reducing an opportunity to ‘tune’ and legitimize the Instrument to a battle for supremacy. The penultimate section of The First Anniversary develops these themes by pursuing an elegiac transition from the demonstration of loss into an encomium for Cromwell, but this encomium also forms a refutation of his alleged tyrannical designs by a historical argument of necessity.77 Marvell tackles Cromwell’s fraught relations with republican parliaments, arguing that they produced instabilities which forced Cromwell to assume unlooked-for powers over them; and thus the Protectorate rationalizes and legitimizes compromises of power that history has proved necessary. The encomium is ingeniously structured within the broader argument to argue against the conventional expectations of panegyric: it insists that Cromwell’s eminence is involuntary by contending that internal and external threats to peace superseded his virtuous personal inclinations towards privacy and modesty. Marvell compares Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump to Gideon’s actions in suppressing the elders of Succoth. They had refused to victual Gideon’s army as he marched to expel invading forces from Israel, and the Rump had similarly sought to restrict funding of the armed forces in a time of war.78 The analogy justiWes Cromwell’s intervention as necessary for the defence of the Commonwealth, which the Rump would have undermined, and argues that had he wanted to, he might then have established a Cromwellian royal line with the power that he had, but he refused. A second scriptural analogy represents Cromwell moving to suppress an internal threat to stability: 76 Porter, ‘A Cloak for Knavery’, 190–1. 77 More usually, an elegy praises its subject before the lament, but the order of parts was Xexible: see Hardison, Enduring Monument, 113–14, 119. 78 Hirst, ‘ ‘‘That Sober Liberty’’ ’, 31–2; Judg. 8: 16.


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Thou with the same strength, & an Heart as plain, Didst (like thine Olive) still refuse to Reign; Though why should others all thy Labor spoil, And Brambles be anointed with thine Oil, Whose climbing Flame, without a timely stop, Had quickly Levell’d every Cedar’s top. Therefore Wrst growing to thy self a Law, Th’ambitious Shrubs thou in just time didst aw. (ll. 257–64)

Following a reference to the Rump’s dissolution, these levelling brambles suggest the radicals who rose to inXuence in Barebone’s Parliament. Marvell’s source, a parable in Judges 9: 7–15, recounts the trees’ attempt to Wnd a king, in which the bramble puts itself forward after the olive refuses to reign. Marvell turns the bramble into brambles, suggesting republican rule, and also refers to them as shrubs, an image used by the Fifth Monarchist prophetess Anna Trapnel, for the saints whose rule would follow the casting down of kings.79 She had denounced the Protectorate and implored Cromwell to follow the example of Gideon.80 Here, as throughout the poem, Marvell closely contests radical interpretations of Parliament’s place in the state and history; his analogy of Charles with King Ahab may well have been suggested by John Spittlehouse’s unfavourable comparison of Cromwell and Ahab.81 He contends that Cromwell is a Gideon, who wanted no more power than was necessary to build a Commonwealth secure from external and internal threats. To pull down parliaments that supported ‘climbing’ (l. 261) radicals, and endangered that project, is part of the work of construction. That so reluctant a governor as Cromwell, for whom privacy was ‘a greater thing, j Then ought below, or yet above a King’ (ll. 225–6), was forced to intervene, shows the necessity of a constituted check on parliamentary power. Marvell argues that the basis of Cromwell’s legitimacy in such actions is his inhibition from acting arbitrarily, except when it is absolutely necessary: while the radicals of Barebone’s Parliament threaten to level, and Cromwell grows ‘to [him]self a Law’ (l. 263) (he had argued that serving oYcers, including himself, should not sit in that assembly82), his timely intervention can only be ‘just’ (l. 264). Marvell takes the argument even further with an analogy that summarizes Cromwell’s actions under the republic. The ship of state and its weary passengers are caught in a tempest, and its giddy crew—the republican parliamentarians— make for dangerous rocks that they misapprehend for land. Cromwell is the ‘lusty Mate’ (l. 273) who ‘Counted the Hours, and ev’ry Star did spy’ (l. 274). He takes control of the ship, and ‘Saving himself he dos their loss prevent’ (l. 278). The pressure of republican and radical attacks on Cromwell’s alleged hypocrisy 79 80 81 82

Marvell, 294; Anna Trapnel, The Cry of a Stone . . . (London, 1654), 12–13. Trapnel, Cry of a Stone, 29. Spittlehouse, Certaine Queries, 2. John Morrill, ‘Cromwell, Oliver (1599–1658)’, in DNB.

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pushes Marvell to a uniquely plain representation of the Protector’s authority. Cromwell is an ordinary member of the collective, distinguished principally by his timeliness, who simply did what anyone would do having realized that they were in such an emergency. This version of recent history is brought to bear on the concept of liberty, which the republican resurgence had returned to the centre of debate. ‘Tis not a Freedome, that where All command; Nor Tyrannie, where One dos them withstand: But who of both the Bounders knows to lay Him as their Father must the State obey. Thou, and thine House, like Noahs Eight did rest, Left by the Warrs Flood on the Mountains crest: And the large Vale lay subject to thy Will, Which thou but as an Husbandman wouldst Till: And only didst for others plant the Vine Of Liberty, not drunken with its Wine. That sober Liberty which men may have, That they enjoy, but more they vainly crave: And such as to their Parents Tents do press, May shew their own, not see his Nakedness. (ll. 279–92)

The crises of the republic help to deWne legitimate liberty. Cromwell has simply resisted the excesses of democracy, making practical distinctions informed by a sober grasp of the state’s emergencies and instabilities. The First Anniversary steadily develops sobriety to mean a self-controlled, grounded, and circumspect apprehension of crisis and necessity; it is a component of the ‘Modesty’ (l. 187) urged upon the reader earlier in the poem, and it is Cromwell’s principal credential. Again, Marvell stresses that Cromwell has stepped back from a position of arbitrary power, and by choosing to tend the vine of liberty for others, he becomes a patriarch like Noah. Marvell reaches for an image of Protectoral authority commensurable with the plainness and practical logic forced into his defence of the Protectorate by the political context of the poem. Even the notion of Cromwell as a father is not taken very far, lest it evoke the connotations of Caroline monarchy that Waller shades into the Panegyrick. The analogy with Noah argues that as Protector, Cromwell consolidates an unlookedfor authority born of crisis and the interest of survival. Marvell contends that this case for obedience is so plain that the heady dissenters who press around the Protector’s tents merely expose their foolishness to the world. Their drunken nakedness leads Marvell into a Wnal excoriating attack on the radicals who had seized the opportunity oVered by Cromwell’s conXict with Parliament. The speciWcity of his references intensiWes the immediacy of their threat: Marvell names the leading Fifth Monarchists Feake and Simpson, who led calls for a new


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government of saints on the anniversary of the Protectorate; he compares radical preaching to prophecies delivered by Mohammed during his epileptic seizures, perhaps catching at the call by Spittlehouse that the Koran should be circulated freely.83 Glancing also at the army’s mutinous republicans and Fifth Monarchists, Marvell works military metaphors into his satire of their activities: they form a ‘frantique Army’ and ‘muster Heresies’ (ll. 299–300). He returns their allegations that the Protectorate is a new monarchy by describing them being spat from a centralized, monarchical Hell. In their rantings and quakings they cannot distinguish between diVerent kinds of liberty, and the imagery of drunkeness and epilepsy provides a foil for the civic virtues of sober practicality and selfrestrained co-operation called for by the poem. Cromwell revives like a restored sun. The image allows The First Anniversary to make the radicals’ resurgence seem like a premature reaction to Cromwell’s incapacity, and argue that a counter-revival is under way. Marvell alludes to a classical fable of the Wrst man, who was shocked at the return of the sun after night: the allegory predicts the confounding of radical expectations, picking up on Marvell’s satire of their doctrines as primitivism; but it also extends to the shock felt by an unidentiWed European king, who had assumed that troubled Protectorate Britain and Ireland were his for the taking. The First Anniversary ends with this rallying note of light brought out of darkness, which rhymes with the poem’s opening description of sun-like Cromwell producing ever better restorations in spite of expectations. Thus book-ended, the poem’s frank critique of the Protectoral state’s instabilities, its sustained questioning of the role of Parliament within it, implicitly becomes the groundwork for a greater restoration, of new consensus and co-operation. The speech of the foreign king allows the poem to end with a peroration that ranges through topoi similar to those of Waller’s Panegyrick, but is bracketed as an outsider’s imperfect perception, and so does not undermine the force of Marvell’s critique of the state’s instabilities. Ultimately, the prince cannot quite grasp the unique constitutional relations that the poem has set out, particularly that the Protector is only part of a greater commonwealth: He seems a King by long Succession born, And yet the same to be a King dos scorn. Abroad a King he seems, and somthing more, At Home a Subject on the equall Floor. O could I once him with our Title see, So should I hope yet he might Dye as wee. (ll. 387–92)

His wish to see the Protector crowned is a hope that the power of the Protectorate might wane with the man. It implies a counter-argument to the Panegyrick’s idealization of a state uniWed by an Augustus, which is only as strong as the 83 John Spittlehouse, Rome Ruin’d by Whitehall (London, 1650), 302.

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person at its centre. The King’s speech combines peroration and the Wgure of praise by one’s enemies, providing a fresh statement of the poem’s key themes: namely, that the genius of the Protectorate is to compose institutional structures into a state more durable and more powerful than the greatness of one man, and that imminent dangers to peace (here the threat of invasion) are the overriding practical conditions under which these structures must be built and organized. Marvell’s Wnal line braces the reader for new political upheavals in the name of this project: again critically reworking a courtly image of Charles I (from Herrick’s ‘To the King, to Cure the Evill’), he pictures Cromwell as the angel of the pool at Bethesda, who ‘Troubling the Waters, yearly mak’st them Heal’.84 Patterson argues that the relation of this passage to Herrick’s allusion is a rebuV to the idolatrous pretensions of that poem: ‘Cromwell comes merely as the Angel of the pool, whose mysterious but regular ‘‘Troubling the Waters’’ manifested the workings of Providence in a less than miraculous form’;85 this image of instrumentality within an inscrutable Providence provides a Wnal sympathetic context for the uncertainties of Protectorate politics and Cromwell’s part in them; it perhaps also suggests that readers would do well to make the most of what succour he can provide. Waller and Marvell each responded to the crises sparked by the Wrst Protectorate parliament with poetry that seeks to push readers beyond entrenched positions to new perceptions of the objects of politics. Waller’s vision of an Augustan Protectorate hinges upon a new coalescence of interests, which grounds the Protector’s legitimacy in the security and prosperity that he brings to the Commonwealth. Cromwell realizes and surpasses an authority anticipated in the encomia of the Stuart courts, but which eluded the island’s monarchs. The First Anniversary breaks with established monarchical and republican conceptions of the English constitution. It urges readers to help build a Protectorate that might outlast its founder, that seeks out practical consensus and consolidates it with institutions structured vigilantly against internal and external dangers. When compared in context, these poems each reveal the boldness of the other: the tensions probed by The First Anniversary throw into relief the ambitiousness of Waller’s vision of settlement, and the Panegyrick seems far less to anticipate the inevitable; that Waller could so smoothly project Cromwell from and into the conventions of courtly culture in turn renders all the more impressive The First Anniversary’s inventive and restless search for surer cultural foundations. Yet, despite their diVerences, these poems are linked by their understanding of occasion: the uncertainties of their circumstances are worked into their rhetoric, as dangers that necessitate new political attitudes and objects, and as opportunities to be seized for reforming both the Commonwealth and the reader. It is this circumstantiality that makes them as distinctively of their moment as they are distinctive within it. 84 See John 5: 4. 85 Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, 78.

5 The Western Design The invasion of Jamaica in 1655 has been described as the Protectorate’s ‘imperial moment’, but it did not inspire an outpouring of celebratory verse from the English muses.1 The mission was widely perceived as an expensive disaster. The ‘Western Design’ had been planned as a self-Wnancing raid to capture Spanish possessions in the New World, and the Xeet Wrst targeted the wealthy island of Hispaniola; but the attack was badly mismanaged and repelled. Only then did the expeditionary force invade the poorer, less well-defended island of Jamaica. Even the most courtly of panegyrics to Cromwell Wnds it diYcult to elicit praise from the episode: You needed not have sent so far about To fetch the mines & beat the Spaniards out This Island scornes Spaine and Domingo to She’l want no treasure can she keep but you. (ll. 73–6)2

The failure to capture Hispaniola caused a twofold crisis: it severely exacerbated the state’s Wnancial problems by plunging it into an intercontinental war with Spain, and it gave the regime’s republican critics a stick with which to beat the Protector. The Western Design seemed to illustrate Machiavelli’s dilemma of republican decline: a commonwealth can choose to protect its institutions of liberty and leave itself militarily vulnerable, or it can expand aggressively and surrender the citizens’ power to military dictators and the ‘necessities’ of their soldiers.3 Sir Henry Vane’s A Healing Question argued that the Protectorate had taken the latter path.4 Waller and the poet ‘R. F.’ responded to this crisis by developing innovative verse defences of the war with Spain, which projected the regime’s aggressions as the extension of a maritime imperium composed of benign economic institutions. Their poems transform the neo-Elizabethan discourses 1 Armitage, ‘Cromwellian Protectorate’, 533. 2 The Unparalleld Monarch. Or, The Portraiture of a Matchless Prince, Exprest in Some Shadows of his Highness my Lord Protector (London, 1656), sig. I4v. 3 Armitage, ‘Cromwellian Protectorate’, 550. See also David Armitage, ‘Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds.), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ii. 29–46. 4 Henry Vane, A Healing Question (London, 1656).

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that in the 1640s and early 1650s had tended to deWne the horizons of writing about policy in the Atlantic. Questions of trade and Wscal-military supply set the Anglo– Spanish conXict and constitutional crisis in perspectives tailored to develop a new consensus among civilian members of the Protectoral elite. For a wider audience, William Davenant’s ‘moral representations’ on New World themes develop new resources of spectacle, music, and drama to convince theatre-goers that the consolidation of naval power in the Atlantic can be an exciting heroic project. Davenant answers the Western Design’s domestic and colonial critics by representing the state’s westward expansion as a test of national honour. His Wnal Protectorate opera, The History of Sr Francis Drake, turns an Elizabethan pirate into a legitimizing, unifying, prototype for the state’s most contentious claims to an Atlantic imperium. David Armitage has argued that ‘the impress of Empire upon English literature in the early-modern period was minimal’, on the grounds that the English language features no complete epic which, like Camoens’s Lusiads, or Ercilla y Zuniga’s Araucana, celebrates colonial warfare against alien peoples, or sets the extension of dominium and imperium within ‘the old co-ordinates of literary chivalry’.5 This chapter argues that Armitage’s focus on epic poetry provides too partial a view of the question: it overlooks the important contributions of poetry in other genres to debates concerning the organization of English plantations in the Atlantic world. The decade before the Western Design witnessed a cascade of London publications from religious refugees who had participated in the great migration of the 1630s. These included prophetic verse which represented the plantations of the Atlantic world as a crucible in which the Reformation had been saved and re-energized. Poets exploited the resources of satire, elegy, and the metrical psalm to deWne a special Providence that set certain plantations apart from those exploited by the empires of other European powers. Many of these rhetorical interventions came from New Englanders, some of whom returned to England in the 1640s to preach, write, and participate in government.6 Their poetry often represents the Atlantic colonies as cultural engines in their own right, driving a reformation that had foundered in the Established Church. In this perspective, the struggles and migrations of the godly are continuous with the contests of an Elizabethan golden age, particularly an anti-Catholic and anti-Habsburg foreign policy. In Good News from New-England, Edward Johnson surveys the ‘reasons moving this people to transplant themselves and Families to those remote parts’.7 He places the Wrst, merely entrepreneurial, American settlers 5 David Armitage, ‘Literature and Empire’, in W. Roger Louis, (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–9), i. 99–123 (102, 117). 6 Harry S. Stout, ‘The Morphology of Remigration: New England University Men and their Return to England, 1640–1660’, Journal of American Studies, 10 (1976), 151–72; David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 198–205. 7 [Edward Johnson], Good News from New-England (London, 1648), 1–3; for the attribution of this poem to Johnson, see Harrison T. Meserole (ed.), Seventeenth-Century American Poetry (New York: Anchor Books, 1968), 156.

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at the same teleological pole as the gold-hungry Spanish. The former are swept aside as ‘straglers’ by the ‘godly ones [who] seek, a place of new abiding’ (l. 41). These carry to North American shores the spirit of the Elizabethan reformation, which in England has faltered before ‘the pride of Bishops’ and the ‘loosenesse of the Laity’ (ll. 33–9). Anne Bradstreet’s ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’, in a version apparently dating from 1642, casts the parliamentary cause as a revival of the Elizabethan Protestant militancy that had been championed by the second earl of Essex, and is now continued by his parliamentarian son: Go on brave Essex, shew whose son thou art, Not false to King, nor Countrey in thy heart, But those that hurt his people and his Crown, By force expell, destroy, and tread them down. (ll. 240–3)8

In an elegy for Sidney, Bradstreet makes an unconventional literary claim, which is suggestive with respect to how upheavals in the three kingdoms complicated the godly colonists’ sense of community across the Atlantic. It has been argued that New England residents saw themselves as part of an English polity.9 Accordingly, Bradstreet identiWes herself as English in some poems, and she takes no interest in the Scots, Irish, or Welsh as partners in the colonial project. However, her elegy for Sidney, with whom she claimed a relationship by blood, praises him not only as a product of England’s ‘Halsion dayes’ (l. 1), but as ‘an Honour to our British Land’ (l. 3), and the ‘ReWner of our British Tongue’ (l. 40).10 The elegy is dated 1638, the year in which the Scots signed the National Covenant, news of which Wrst prompted some godly colonists to consider reemigrating.11 That challenge to Laudian integration seems to have pushed Bradstreet to decentre the Protestant cause within a dynamic triangle of Atlantic communities: New Englanders might now locate Sidney’s spirit in Scottish dissent as well as English courtly verse. Migrant poets of the 1640s represent the Atlantic world as a Protestant diaspora with shifting centres of religious and cultural renewal. Nathaniel Ward sent The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America to England shortly before returning to preach and contribute to the Westminster Assembly (an attempt to reform the Anglican church along Presbyterian lines). He refers to the example of a West Indian island that has instituted complete freedom of conscience, only for

8 Anne Bradstreet, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (London, 1650), 188. 9 Robert Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 10 Ibid. 191–2. See also Christopher Ivic, ‘ ‘‘Our British Land’’: Anne Bradstreet’s Atlantic Perspective’, in Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor (eds.), Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1550–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 195–204. 11 Cressy, Coming Over, 199.

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the settlement to have been ‘blasted’ by God, as a caution against the institution of a similar toleration in England.12 Ward reports that many New Englanders would like to return home, but that the balance of migration depends, now as much as ever, on the course taken by England’s reformers of the church.13 The pamphlet ends with a warning that migration can Xow both ways: So farewell England old If evill times ensue, Let good men come to us, Wee’l welcome them to New. And farewell Honor’d Friends, If happy dayes ensue, You’l have some Guests from hence, Pray welcome us to you. (ll. 1–8)14

This prospect of a new exodus implies the possibility that England might be abandoned by the elect. In Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung up in America, the balance of religious authority has tipped towards New England. England’s troubles, particularly a resurgence of Catholic practices under Laud, have thrown the burden of prophecy on to her ‘daughter’ New England. ‘A Dialogue between Old England and New’ presents an inverted mother–daughter relationship, in which New England consoles Old England, diagnoses the providential cause of her mother’s woes, and urges her to a reformation that will accommodate her to ‘these latter dayes’ (l. 216). The condescension of New England to Old England in Bradstreet’s poem parallels pamphlets from American authors recommending Congregationalism, ‘The New England Way’, as a model for English church reform.15 At Wrst these proposals were received sympathetically by independents, but this transatlantic synergy faded in the second half of the 1640s, as reports of religious intolerance in the Massachusetts Bay community circulated in England.16 By 1649, English independents and New England Congregationalists were ‘estranged’ on matters of church reform. Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’ looks to previous poems associated with settlement in the Atlantic in order to situate historically the republic’s consultations over a new and integrated Atlantic policy—plans that would be put into eVect by the Protectorate’s Western Design. England might have ceased to look to New England for models of church reform, but Marvell’s poem recovers the idea

12 ‘Theodore de la Guard’ [Nathaniel Ward], The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America, 3rd edn. (London, 1647), sig. A2v. 14 Ibid. sig. L3r. 13 Ibid. sig. B2v. 15 Carla Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 57–9. 16 Ibid. 68–9.

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that the policies of the godly republic have a heritage in the narratives of Atlantic ‘exiles’. To Marvell and his friend John Oxenbridge, the Atlantic world remains vital to the realization of the republic’s special destiny. ‘Bermudas’ draws heavily on Waller’s ‘The Battell of the Summer Islands’, a mock-heroic poem on the Bermudas which reproduces some of the unfavourable discourses often used to represent early colonists in the Caribbean.17 Waller represents colonists greedily and unsuccessfully attempting to hunt stranded whales, perhaps intending the Earl of Warwick, a fellow shareholder in the Somers Islands Company and the poem’s addressee (Waller praises Warwick for spreading his name through the New World), to share in a joke that could distance their aspirations from those of the reputedly grasping colonists.18 Marvell’s response was very likely composed between 1653 and 1654 for John Oxenbridge, who had Xed Laudian church reforms to settle on the islands between 1635 and 1641. He then returned to England, eventually to become a fellow of Eton, where Marvell lodged with him as tutor to Cromwell’s ward, William Dutton.19 Oxenbridge had helped to bring Congregationalism to the Bermudas. It grew after his departure, and caused disputes among some islanders, especially when the remaining ministers attempted to force Oxenbridge’s catechism ‘Baby Milk’ upon them.20 Marvell represents the islands as a place of refuge, and a token of grace for religious exiles, which reassures a group of godly planters rowing towards an island that they are the instruments of a special providence. He reworks Waller’s images of paradisal nature in ‘The Battell of the Summer Islands’, by stressing the divine plan behind the island’s natural beauties. They are given emblematic and typological resonances that make Waller’s vision of merely abundant nature seem myopic. Just as God nourished the wandering Israelites with quails, so he ‘sends the Fowls to us in care, j On daily Visits through the Air’ (ll. 15–16). Providence not only frames a temple in the rocks, but stocks the islands with the wood used for Solomon’s temple: ‘With Cedars, chosen by his hand, j From Lebanon, he stores the Land’ (ll. 25–6). The poem vindicates activities that had earned Oxenbridge opprobrium. Marvell’s singers Xee the ‘Prelat’s rage’ (l. 12); Archbishop Laud had castigated Oxenbridge in a dispute over discipline at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, where Oxenbridge had been tutor.21 The biblical typology that re-sanctiWes Bermudan nature frames Oxenbridge’s escape as a providential exile. The planters’ thanks are sung in anticipation, seemingly as they approach the island for the Wrst time.

17 18 19 20 (212 21

Marvell, 54–5. The Works of Edmund Waller, ed. Elijah Fenton (London, 1729), p. xlvii. Marvell, 55. Tay Fizdale, ‘Irony in Marvell’s ‘‘Bermudas’’ ’, English Literary History, 42 (1975), 203–13 n.). Michael P. Winship, ‘Oxenbridge, John (1608–1674)’, in DNB.

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The historical ironies created by this setting include suggestions of future troubles over church reform on the island, as if those struggles are a source of further credibility for Oxenbridge: the approaching planters thank God for the ‘Pearl’ (l. 30) of the Gospel, hinting proleptically of its rejection by some islanders, who could be the pigs of Matthew 7: 6 (‘neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet’). The poem’s enigma is how these ironies might be interpreted in the moment of its presentation to Oxenbridge. His appointment to the republic’s new Committee for the Government of the Bermudas adds a further, redemptive, irony. The singers’ hopes might Wrst have seemed misconceived, but their reading of the islands’ part in a providential design has now been vindicated. Despite the tribulations and scandals, the refuge has proved a turning point in God’s design for the elect, which now raises a Bermudan independent minister to a position of responsibility over the islands and the development of English foreign policy. ‘Bermudas’ ends by looking forward to how these origins might yet unfold in the wider providence of the reformation in the Atlantic: Oh let our Voice his Praise exalt, Till it arrive at Heavens Vault: Which thence (perhaps) rebounding, may Eccho beyond the Mexique Bay. (ll. 33–6)

The planters’ uncertainty about their song’s destination is appropriate to the moment: Oxenbridge’s committee drew together the islands’ religious reformer, leading members of the Somers Island Company, and Maurice Thomson, the champion of a subordinated, integrated Atlantic trade bloc exclusive to English merchants, just as rumours of a grand military expedition to the West Atlantic began to circulate.22 Oxenbridge’s moment of vindication is sealed by Marvell’s adaptation of poetry by the old court’s arbiters of taste and attitude towards Atlantic colonization. ‘Bermudas’ draws images not only from Waller, but from the celebrated psalm translations of the one-time Virginian George Sandys.23 Marvell’s poem reclaims these cultural materials for a new government of returned exiles, turning their once-marginal narratives—Marvell emphasizes the remoteness and seclusion of their refuge—into praise inXected by the tastes of the centre, urging the importance of the Atlantic context to the culture of the republic. The tension felt

22 W. Noel Sainsbury (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 45 vols. (London, 1860), i. 405–6. Maurice Thomson is pivotal to Robert Brenner’s account of commercial change during the Interregnum: Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political ConXict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 23 C. B. Hardman, ‘Marvell’s ‘‘Bermudas’’ and Sandys’s Psalms’, Review of English Studies, 32 (1981), 64–7.

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by some critics between a ‘courtly’ psalm and ‘puritan’ refugees only ampliWes how far providence has brought them, and how credible their experience has become. The poem digniWes a well-travelled godly elite, which—notwithstanding the eclipse of the intolerant New England Way—now stands poised to shape a reformed Atlantic. The perceived failure of the Western Design undermined the plausibility of the Atlantic world projected by Marvell: a ‘Stage’ (l. 11) on which the godly regime would Wght out its elect destiny. Republicans were able to wrest from Cromwell the language of biblical typology which he had invoked to justify unprecedented military-Wscal demands on the Commonwealth and its western colonies in support of the oVensive.24 The most damaging attack came from a republican and ex-colonist, Sir Henry Vane. His exilic credentials had been versiWed by Johnson,25 and his tract A Healing Question cast Cromwell in the typology of Achan, the man who had lost the Israelites God’s favour by pillaging spoils from Jericho, in deWance of God’s instruction to annihilate the city and everything in it: the parallel implied that Cromwell had chosen gold and tyranny over liberty and reformation.26 There was seemingly little to distinguish between Habsburg tyrant and Lord Protector. However, the parliament recalled to tackle the Wnancial crisis supplied occasions for the poetic reconstruction of the state’s relationship with the Atlantic world. Waller and his remarkable imitator ‘R. F.’ essay possibilities created by the regime’s attempts to use the 1651 Navigation Act in support of the Western Design.27 Waller had been appointed to the Protectorate’s advisory Committee for Trade, which would have encouraged him to develop his interest (above, pp. 92–6) in the military-Wscal institutions that policed and protected commerce.28 The Xeets sent to prosecute the Western Design consolidated these institutions by demanding that Atlantic colonies contribute resources and migrant labour to support a permanent naval presence in the Caribbean.29 In many places, this presence was able to enforce legislation designed to place all trade between the colonies in the hands of English 24 For the greater Wscal and military resources available to the Protectoral regime, see Michael J. Braddick, ‘The English Government, War, Trade, and Settlement, 1625–1688’, in Louis (ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. i. 286–308 (288–92). 25 Edward Johnson, A History of New-England (London, 1654), 72. 26 Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan’, in Derek Beales and GeoVrey Best (eds.), History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 125–45; Vane, Healing Question, 15. 27 It is important to stress the complexity of interests and motivations behind the passage of the Wrst Navigation Act (see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 40–58), which nevertheless provided a coherent legal foundation for the promotion of a regulated ‘free’ trade exclusive to English merchants in the Atlantic during the 1650s. See Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 58–60; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 592–3, 625–8; Pestana, English Atlantic, 170–2; and Braddick, ‘English Government, War, Trade and Settlement’, 294. 28 Charles M. Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations: 1622–1675 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1908), 40–1. 29 Pestana, English Atlantic, 178.

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merchants. Some colonies tried to resist this regulation.30 Trade becomes part of the elegiac language with which William Bradford mourns the passing of Boston’s own golden age of independence. ‘Of Boston in New England’ (c.1652–7) warns the ‘great and wealthy’ town that it might again be brought ‘low and desolate’: ‘The trade is all in your own hand, j Take heed ye doe not wrong the land’ (ll. 43–4).31 In England, the state’s new commitments in the Caribbean allowed Waller and R. F. to develop an alternative Atlantic teleology. These poets were too tactful to refer directly to the attack on Hispaniola, or the costly guerrilla war that was still being fought in Jamaica; but they directed readers to the possibility of a colonial network that would foster the growth of English trade. Waller’s Upon the Present War with Spain, and the Wrst Victory Obtained at Sea celebrates the interception of a small Spanish plate Xeet near Cadiz. The connection between Waller’s heroic narrative and the poem’s Wnal plea for Cromwell to accept a crown has seemed tenuous to recent readers,32 but becomes more lucid in the political context of the parliamentary session of 1656–7. This witnessed a campaign by the ‘New Cromwellians’ (a predominantly civilian, conservative party gathered around the nobles Admiral Montague and Lord Broghill) to uproot the system of the major-generals, and pressure Cromwell to accept a crown under the rewritten constitution known as the Humble Petition and Advice.33 News of the attack’s success had reached Parliament shortly after it had Wrst been called to tackle the Wnancial crisis caused by the failure of the Western Design to recover its own costs.34 Reports that Captain Stayner, the commander of the attacking squadron, had taken enough gold to clear the government’s debts proved greatly exaggerated when the bullion reached England. Much of the shipment had been sunk with several of the Spanish vessels, and substantial sums were reported to have been embezzled by its captors.35 Waller’s poem turns the mixed mood of triumph and disappointment to the advantage of Admiral Montague’s political campaign to rewrite the Instrument of Government. He transforms the loss of the Spanish gold into a heroic triumph which reveals the new stakes of Anglo–Spanish conXict: the war is a matter not only of religious diVerences (the theme that dominates most other poems on the war36), but of diVerent priorities in trade and the military-Wscal organization of the state, which have set England and Spain on a collision course in the Atlantic. 30 Pestana, English Atlantic, 172. 31 Meserole (ed.), Seventeenth-Century American Poetry, 388–9. 32 Margarita Stocker and Timothy Raylor, ‘A New Marvell Manuscript: Cromwellian Patronage and Politics’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 106–62 (137–8). 33 Austin Woolrych, ‘Last Quests for a Settlement 1657–1660’, in Aylmer (ed.), Interregnum, 187. 34 C. H. Firth, ‘Blake and the Battle of Santa Cruz’, English Historical Review, 78 (1905), 228–50 (232). 35 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iv. 326. 36 See, e.g., [George Tooke], An Encomiastick: Or, Elegiack Enumeration of the Noble Atchievements . . . [of ] Robert Blake (London, 1658).

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Waller’s poem adds momentum to a new, Parliament-written constitution by making it seem a question of organizing a fair and sustainable system of revenue for the military. His representation of a rapacious and bullionist Spanish war economy not only casts shadows across expedient proposals for supply—perhaps the original Western Design itself, and certainly the army oYcers’ attempts to raise money by increasing punitive taxes on royalist estates—but also makes such policies appear to destabilize the very foundation of ‘moderate’ English values. The heroic sentiments crafted by his narrative urge the commensurability of mercantilist wisdom and the interests of the landed classes. Waller’s poem focuses these arguments and interests upon a present opportunity to ‘Wx’ the state. The poem’s relation to its context has been obscured somewhat by a misleading early publication history. It was printed Wrst as a broadside in 1658, but then a substantially revised version appeared in Samuel Carrington’s The History of the Life and Death of his Most Serene Highness Oliver, Late Lord Protector in 1659.37 P. Wikelund, who teased apart a manuscript of drafts relating to the poem’s revision, argues that Waller revised the text between these dates.38 But the concluding ten lines point to an earlier date: ‘But now returnes victorious montague’ refers to the admiral’s return from sea on 24 October 1656. Montague quickly became involved in the campaign to crown Cromwell under the Humble Petition and Advice,39 which Waller endorses with the suggestion that captured Spanish gold might be melted down for a crown to ‘Wx’ the state. It seems unlikely that Waller would have written these lines after 8 May 1657, when Cromwell accepted this constitution, but refused the crown. When Waller revised the poem, the possibility that Cromwell would be crowned appears still to have been topical, but Montague’s return was less so: line 105 becomes ‘With these returns Victorious Mountague’. This suggests that Waller circulated the text in manuscript as, or shortly after, Montague returned, but revised it as the political campaign to rewrite the Instrument of Government gathered pace.40 37 The Wrst text appeared as A Lamentable Narration of the Sad Disaster of a Great Part of the Spanish Plate-Fleet that Perished Neare St Lucas . . . in the Yeare, 1657 (London, 1658). The second text is reproduced in Samuel Carrington, The History of the Life and Death of his Most Serene Highness Oliver, Late Lord Protector (London, 1659), 195–9. The broadside would appear to be an unauthorized printing of the unrevised text. It misdates the naval battle to 1657 and was registered with the Company of Stationers by Nathanial Butter, who more usually published newsbooks, and did not print anything else by Waller (TRCS, ii. 177; Henry R. Plomer, A Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: The Bibliographer’s Society, 1907), 40–1). It was perhaps produced to capitalize on fears of a Spanish invasion in early 1658, although Stocker and Raylor have suggested that this publication was part of a ‘concerted propaganda campaign’ to counter republican and royalist objections to a proposal to oVer a crown to Cromwell (Stocker and Raylor, ‘New Marvell Manuscript’, 134–7. I quote from Carrington’s revised text, unless otherwise stated. 38 Philip R. Wikelund, ‘Edmund Waller’s Fitt of Versifying: Deductions from a Holograph Fragment, Folger MS. X. d. 309’, Philological Quarterly, 49 (1970), 68–91. 39 Woolrych, ‘Last Quests for a Settlement’, 187. 40 A manuscript copy of Waller’s poem reached the author of ‘Of the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards’ in May–July 1657: see below, p. 133, and Marvell, 424.

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The precise dating is important, because events following Montague’s return help Waller to sharpen the topical valencies of his narrative. The gold reaching the mint proved far less than expected, but Montague also brought back an aristocratic hostage, the young Marquis de Baydes, whose poignant story circulated in the weeks following Montague’s arrival.41 The elder marquis had rebuilt his family’s decayed estates by serving as governor in Peru, and he had embarked for Spain in the plate Xeet with his family and his entire fortune. The marquis and his wife died in Stayner’s attack, but their 16-year-old son survived to become the new marquis, though he was left with neither family nor Wnancial means.42 Montague wrote that the boy’s fate is ‘the saddest, that ever I heard or read oV to my remembrance’.43 Waller’s most substantial revision of the poem is to insert lines that heighten the pathos of this boy’s story by arguing that English sailors were moved to neglect their pursuit of bullion by the nobility of the elder marquis and the tragedy of his son’s destitution. This revision Wnesses the Wnancial disappointment following Montague’s return, but Waller’s ‘Tragick play’ (l. 43) of aristocratic chivalry and loss also makes emergent concepts of political economy appear more fundamental to Parliament’s business. The introductory lines of Waller’s poem rework Machiavelli’s dilemma. Waller invokes mercantilist economics in order to deXect the principle of imperial decline on to the Spanish. Only empires built on crude bullionism decline inevitably: the Protector begins war with a ‘disdain’ for Spanish power based on the knowledge that ‘Empire must decline, j Whose chief support, and sinews, are of Coyn’ (ll. 15–16). The Spanish crown’s mismanagement of gold and silver imports from its American mines was thought to have plunged it into a century of insolvency and desperate Wnancial expediencies. It was considered not only to have provoked pan-European price inXation, but to have created a state geared to war, which depressed the prosperity of its subjects for the sake of supplying the Crown’s belligerence: Spanish monarchs legislated to prevent their merchants from exporting treasure to pay overseas debts, and thought that thereby they could hoard and control the nation’s wealth, conceiving of it as a war chest, which they then frequently overspent and borrowed against to support the Crown’s military campaigns.44 Following Thomas Mun’s A Discourse of Trade (1621), ‘mercantilist’ thought in England reconceptualized the nation’s wealth as a favourable Xow of trade, such as the Dutch had

41 Thurloe Papers, v. 433. 42 Firth, ‘Blake and the Battle of Santa Cruz’, 232. 43 Thurloe Papers, V. 433. 44 Lewes Roberts, The Treasure of TraYcke, or, A Discourse of Forraigne Trade (London, 1641), 22–7; J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 62–3; J. N. Hillgarth, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 469.

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achieved.45 Waller’s poem reWnes with economic theory the moral ambivalence that characterized Spenser’s treatment of New World ‘Gold-hunger’.46 Waller overlooks the attack on Hispaniola and the conquest of Jamaica, but develops a long-term rationale for the state’s interventions in the New World: Now for some Ages had the pride of Spain, Made the Sun shine on half the World in vain; While she bid War, to all that durst supply The place of those, her Cruelty made dye. Of Nature’s Bounty men forbare to taste, And the best Portion of the Earth lay waste. (ll. 1–6)

Defences of the Western Design had invoked the ‘black legend’ of Spanish New World atrocities to support the attack on Hispaniola.47 Waller redirects this Protestant commonplace by integrating the black legend with an argument that had been used to justify English dominions in the New World through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This case defended colonists’ claims to dominions in the Americas on the grounds that they were vacant lands and could be ‘improved’ for trade by people adopting a sedentary, agricultural existence.48 Waller’s Spaniards are so cruel that they depopulate and waste the fertile lands now eyed for development by the English, giving the English a charter—even an imperative—to invade, according to their ‘naturall right to replenish the whole earth’ and improve the ‘vacant places’.49 Lines that at Wrst appear merely to set the scene for Stayner’s attack, in fact shift it into an Atlantic context that would appear more promising to readers sensitized to mercantilist arguments. Waller sifts the materials of current propaganda to suggest that the Protectoral navy’s dominance could be the foundation of an empire based on maritime domination, trade, and the improvement of colonies. As a member of the Committee for Trade, Waller would have been all too aware of the problems of attributing these economic perspectives to Cromwell: recent studies of the Protectoral regime’s foreign policies have argued that the

45 See Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 3–23; Thomas Mun, A Discourse of Trade, from England unto the East Indies, Answering to Diverse Objections which are Usually Made Against the Same (London, 1621). See also Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 22–5; and Blair Hoxby, Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). 46 See David T. Read, ‘Hunger of Gold: Guyon, Mammon’s Cave, and the New World Treasure’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 209–32. 47 See, e.g., Bartolome´ de Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians Being an Historical and True Account of the Cruel Massacres and Slaughters of Above Twenty Millions of Innocent People, Committed by the Spaniards in the Islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Jamaica, trans. John Phillips (London, 1656). 48 Armitage, Ideological Origins, 97. 49 Ibid., quoting from Samuel Purchas, Hakluytus Posthumus: Or Purchas his Pilgrimes, 4 vols. (London, 1625), iv. 1811.

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regime’s concern to develop trade was compromised by other political necessities and priorities.50 The new base in Jamaica enabled the state to organize the trade of its Caribbean colonies to the beneWt of English merchants, but the Western Design appeared to some as an economically short-sighted grab for gold, at the expense of Anglo–Spanish trade.51 Waller’s praise looks beyond controversy concerning the short-term objectives of the regime’s attacks on Spanish colonies and gold, to reveal a war with Spain informed by the best economic intentions. Waller develops a language of maritime consolidation with images of stability and groundedness in praise of English naval actions. Their virtue is ‘sollid’ (l. 17); their ships are ‘Oaks secure, as if they there took root’ (l. 29). In his drafts towards revision, Waller also experimented with dispraise for ‘unsteady passions’,52 an epithet which already carries weight in the line ‘We tread on Billows with a steady foot’ (l. 30). The word perhaps preoccupied him because of its derivation from ‘stead’, which could mean a locality, estate, or place properly assigned to someone. By placing these qualities in apposition with the subversive eVects of New World gold and silver—‘The Pay of Armies, and the Pride of Courts . . . j Those seeds of Luxury, Debate, and Pride’ (ll. 68–74)—they seem to look forward to a commensurately ‘steady’ political economy. The poem’s conclusion channels this thematic apposition into opposed movements: ‘Let the rich Oare forthwith be melted down, / And the State Wxt, by making him a Crown.’ The Wgure of zeugma reduces the liquidation of the gold and the consolidation of the state into one movement, which encapsulates the poem’s ambivalence towards the accumulation of bullion, and introduces the politically divisive crown and regalia as if they are simply the best use for captured gold in present circumstances. Waller makes the oVer of a crown appear an opportunity to consolidate a better economic policy in the Atlantic; this had some plausibility, in that the new constitution was accompanied by new measures for supply, and had Wrst been proposed in Parliament by a leading City merchant and trade adviser, Alderman Packe.53 The rhetorical moment of this poem is revealed as it blends mercantilist perspectives into a ‘moderate’ discourse consistent with the best values of aristocracy and the landed gentry. Waller’s diction veils the novelty of his syntheses. The heroes of the navy renew a heritage of English chivalry: They that the whole Worlds Monarchy design’d Are to their Ports by our bold Fleet conWn’d:

50 Pestana, English Atlantic, 171–7; see also Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 168–91, and Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 241–50. 51 Lambert argued this case against the Western Design: see Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 245. 52 Wikelund, ‘Edmund Waller’s Fitt’, 77. 53 C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1909), i. 128–9.

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From whence our Red Cross they triumphant see, Riding without a Rival on the Sea. (ll. 21–4)

The cross of St George had been adopted by the navy in 1649, but by developing the chivalrous connotations of this symbol, Waller assimilates to the Protectorate state iconography associated with Charles I, who had used the story of St George and the dragon as an allegory of his rule.54 Waller’s couplet contains an etymological pun on ‘Rival’ which makes this assimilation especially apt, and perhaps embarrasses the insular paciWsm which Caroline chivalry had come to represent. The Latin rivalis referred originally to ‘those who have or use the same brook’.55 This Latin root renders the transference of chivalrous characteristics to the navy topically appropriate, because its rival power in the Atlantic, the Spanish Xeet, had been laid up for seasonal repairs in Cadiz harbour, only for the English to begin the unprecedented feat of maintaining a naval blockade over winter.56 Throughout the poem, Waller’s Latinity invests controversial materials with a sense of superior discrimination and appropriateness. He tends to expose the Latin foundations informing his diction particularly at points which show critical contrasts between Spanish and English actions: Spanish galleons are ‘capacious’ (l. 39), an epithet made appropriate by its derivation from capere—to take, or steal. As he builds a thematic distinction between the grounded, ‘solid virtue’ of the English and the rapacious expedients of the Spanish, the contrast appears as a cultivated distillation of current news and inherited cultural materials. Upon the Present War with Spain sifts not only the best rhetorical topics, but also the most noble passions. Describing the battle, his rhetorical Wgures displace and depersonalize its pathos and passions (‘Through yielding Planks the angry Bullets Xy, j And of one Wound hundreds together dye’ (ll. 47–8)), but he ampliWes the turn by which the aristocratic chivalry and poignancy of the Marquises’ plights inspires a correspondingly ‘noble’ pity in the English sailors: These dying Lovers, and their Xoating Sons, Suspend the Fight, and silence all our Guns. Beauty and Youth, about to perish, Wndes Such noble pitty in brave English mindes; That the rich Spoil neglecting, and the Prize, All labour now to save their Enemies. How frail our Passion’s? How soon changed are Our wrath and fury to a friendly care?

54 Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of the Royalist Tradition, 247–9; the allegory Wgured Charles in some royalist poetry: ‘A Mock-Song’, in The Poems of Richard Lovelace, ed. C. H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 154–5. 55 s.v. ‘rivalis’, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879). 56 Firth, ‘Blake and the Battle of Santa Cruz’, 229–33.

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The Western Design They that but now to gain the Spanish Plate, Made the Sea blush with Blood, forget their Hate; And their young Foes, while sinking, they retrive, With greater danger then they fought, they dive. (ll. 93–104)

Waller thus makes his poem’s disdain for bullionism seem a sentiment stemming as much from poignant aristocratic experience as mercantilist theory. The reaction of the English sailors to the dynastic ‘Tragick play’ (l. 43) of the de Baydes family forms a watershed in the revised text, crystallizing the contrast between a destabilizing Spanish empire which reduces the most noble estates to bullion, to be sunk, captured, or become ‘The Pay of Armies’ (l. 68), and a peculiarly ‘English’ virtue which is moved to extraordinary sympathy and actions by such pathos. Waller’s celebration of the sailors’ supposed noble turn of passions hints gentle criticism of the regime’s expedient, and largely unsuccessful, project to fund an expanded military with plundered Spanish gold and taxes heaped on royalist estates. Circulated during the formulation of the new constitution, this construction of English heroism demands a better, sustainable reconciliation between the Wscal demands of the state and the protection of estate. The rhetorical force of Waller’s narration lies also in the propagation of this emergent conception of state: he makes the organization of military supply appear to be a fundamental issue that can now expose the landed classes as gravely, if not more gravely, than any joint-stock trader. A merchant cargo provides the Wreworks that frame the greater loss of the marquis and his wife: ‘Spices and Gums about them melting fry, j And Phenix-like, in that rich nest they dye’ (ll. 83–4). The process of drafting the new constitution required a new ‘civilian’ alliance of gentry, aristocracy, and merchants to be held Wrmly against the protests of the leading army oYcers. Waller’s ‘Tragick play’ (l. 43) seeks to entangle the sympathies of these groups, around a common conceptual reduction of constitutional problems to an apparently fundamental issue of military-Wscal stability. Upon the Present War with Spain suggests that the Anglo–Spanish war is not simply a religious conXict, but a war that forces into question the military-Wscal organization of the Cromwellian state. Readers familiar with Waller’s Caroline verse might spot a quietly allusive self-revision that ampliWes the historical stakes of this issue. His poem ‘To the King on his Navy’ compares Charles I to Jove, as he builds a Xeet that will realize his hope to assert sovereignty over the seas around Britain and protect trade from Barbary and Dunkirk pirates.57 So Iove from Ida did both hoasts survey, And when he pleas’d to thunder part the fray. Ships heretofore in seas like Wshes sped,

57 Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 208–13.

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The mightiest still upon the smallest fed. Thou on the deep impos’st stricter lawes, And by that justice hast remov’d the cause Of those rude tempests which for rapine sent, Too oft alas, involv’d the innocent. (ll. 5–12)58

A new version of this conceit suggests that Charles’s claims to maritime imperium have been superseded by a greater navy and a greater contest for power: Once Jove from Hyda did both Hoasts survey, And when he pleas’d to Thunder, part the Fray: Here Heaven in vain that kinde Retreat should sound, The louder Canon had the thunder drown’d. (ll. 61–4)

When restored to the context of debates over the Humble Petition and Advice, which ranged over many legal, religious, dynastic, and ideological problems, Waller’s poem makes the issue of a permanent Wscal-military solution appear as the crucial and pressing question that unites the interests of the landed and merchant elites, overriding whatever diVerences they might have over issues such as church reform or the institution of the new Other House of Parliament. In his Panegyrick, Waller had harnessed the ambiguity of the word ‘state’ to cut across ideological contests; but here he exploits an even wider range of established and emergent meanings in his appeal to Wx the state: it is not simply the stateliness of Cromwell’s public appearances and the divisive regalia and title of monarchy, but, more fundamentally, the taxes that will secure both England’s maritime dominance and the property of English citizens. Here Waller’s building association of English values with solidity, rootedness, and steadiness might even push ‘state’ towards the semantic range now present in ‘estate’; after all, unWxing estate is what the Spanish colonial economy does in Waller’s poem. The Humble Petition and Advice is presented as a compromise that seems to unfold from the shifting meaning of the word ‘state’. ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards’, by an author recorded only as ‘R. F.’, is heavily inXuenced by Waller’s Upon the Present War with Spain, and repeatedly echoes its thematic images.59 The presence of manuscripts of R. F.’s poem among the papers of inXuential Wgures in, or close to, the Protectoral government suggests that it was distributed to solicit employment.60 In response 58 Waller, Poems &c., 2–3. 59 The poem was printed as Marvell’s in Miscellaneous Poems by Andrew Marvell, Esq. (London, 1681), 104–8. Marvell’s authorship has been rejected, on the basis of an attribution to R. F. in another manuscript of the poem. This text cuts some lines, so I use the longer version of the poem from Marvell’s folio. See Elsie Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F., and the Authorship of ‘‘Blake’s Victory’’ ’, English Manuscript Studies, 5 (1995), 107–26. 60 Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F., and the Authorship’, 119.

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to a decisive victory over Spanish power in the Atlantic, R. F. develops Waller’s opposition of Spanish and English colonial economics into a bolder, more explicit, vision of Atlantic imperium than that projected by Upon the Present War with Spain. Admiral Blake had intercepted a large plate Xeet waiting to sail for Spain from the harbour of Santa Cruz on the island of Tenerife. English ships entered the harbour and destroyed the plate Xeet.61 Even though the gold had been unloaded ashore, by stranding it there with little hope of recovery, Blake crippled Spain’s capacity for war.62 Reports of this success reached England three weeks after Cromwell had refused the crown pressed on him by the Humble Petition and Advice, at least partly because of army pressure. R. F. celebrates Cromwell’s command of a maritime empire stretching across the Atlantic main: ‘That boundless Empire, where you give the Law’ (l. 14). This vision hinges on R. F.’s anticipation that Tenerife will shortly be annexed by Blake’s Xeet, after which Cromwell could become king of the Canary Islands. Rumours of this invasion had circulated as early as December 1656.63 The navy had been looking for a naval base from where it could continue to protect English trade in the Mediterranean, and obstruct Spanish shipping to the New World; Gibraltar had been considered but was deemed inappropriate.64 The Canary Islands might not be ideal for Mediterranean missions, but they were Spain’s gateway to its New World colonies, where ships stopped for resupply as they ferried goods and plate across the ocean. If the navy could supplant the Spanish in the Canaries, they might supplant the Spanish in the Atlantic, and Blake’s attack on the Xeet and fortiWcations in Santa Cruz harbour left him seemingly well-placed to invade. Yet R. F.’s praise of the islands goes some way beyond the military advantage that they would oVer. He stresses what their conquest might contribute to English commerce in the Atlantic. The poem follows Pliny and other classical sources by identifying the Canaries as the Fortunate Islands,65 and he enumerates paradisal conditions that render not just health, but ‘proWt’ (l. 33), to the islands’ inhabitants. R. F. contrasts Tenerife’s chief export with the Spanish traYc in gold: There the indulgent Soil that rich Grape breeds, Which of the Gods the fancied drink exceeds; They still do yield, such is their pretious mould, All that is good, and are not cursed with Gold. With fatal Gold, for still where that does grow, Neither the Soyl, nor People quiet know. 61 For an account of this battle and its consequences, see Firth, ‘Blake and the Battle of Santa Cruz’. 62 Firth, Last Years of the Protectorate, i. 260–1. 63 The Publick Intelligencer, 62 (8–15 Dec. 1656), 1039. 64 See Firth, ‘Blake and the Battle of Santa Cruz’, 228; Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, v. 641. 65 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, ed. and trans. H. Rackham and W. H. S. Jones, 10 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–63), ii. 489.

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Which troubles men to raise it when ’tis Oar, And when ’tis raised, does trouble them much more. Ah, why was thither brought that cause of War, Kind Nature had from thence remov’d so far? (ll. 53–62)

By the outbreak of the Anglo–Spanish war in 1655, the English had developed such a taste for Canary wine that England had become its principal market. Demand had driven a steep price rise, which was slowed by neither wars nor a shortage of Canarian currency with which to feed the imbalance of trade.66 By contrasting wine with gold, R. F. concretizes Waller’s suggestion that the English can build an empire of productive colonies, which will be superior to Spain’s bullionist war economy. The Canaries constitute a ready-made example of such a colony, the capture of which would reverse a particular trade deWcit. R. F. therefore frames the English attack on Santa Cruz as a heroic attempt to purge the islands of corrupting bullion within the grander project of piecing together a comparatively benign English trade empire. He bends the outcome of the battle with the Wction that the gold has been sunk, and makes it into an enactment of the Protector’s motto pax quaeritur bello (‘peace is sought through war’): Their Gallions sunk, their wealth the Sea does Wll, The only place where it can cause no Ill. Ah would those Treasures which both Indies have, Were buryed in as large, and deep a grave, Wars chief support with them would buried be, And the Land owe her peace unto the Sea. Ages to come, your conquering Arms will bless, There they destroy, what had destroy’d their Peace. (ll. 151–8)

R. F.’s velleities imply that other battles are to come; but he oVers a more lucid prophecy of victory and peace than Waller. These lines build the project of supplanting Spanish power with an English Atlantic trade empire into a teleology that might replace merely confessional chiliasm. By identifying this destiny with his armorial motto, R. F. tries to bind Cromwell more closely to a trade project he had hitherto been willing to compromise.67 Cromwell’s conquest of the Canary Islands would allow him to adopt the title of their king, but R. F.’s anticipation of this possibility has wrong-footed some readers,68 who have thought that his reference to ‘these isles’ switches the topic under discussion from the Canaries to Britain and Ireland: 66 George F. Steckley, ‘The Wine Economy of Tenerife in the Seventeenth Century: Anglo– Spanish Partnership in a Luxury Trade’, Economic History Review, 33 (1980), 335–50 (338, 340–5). 67 Pestana, English Atlantic, 172. 68 See, e.g., Stocker and Raylor, ‘New Marvell Manuscript’, 144, and Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F., and the Authorship’, 112.

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The Western Design Your worth to all these Isles, a just right brings, The best of Lands should have the best of Kings. And these want nothing Heaven can aVord, Unless it be, the having you their Lord; But this great want, will not a long one prove, Your Conquering Sword will soon that want remove. (ll. 39–44)

If the crown referred to would rule England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, this would not only ignore the drift of events forming the poem’s immediate political context—the prospect of Cromwell becoming king of the Three Kingdoms had receded with his refusal of the crown—but it would require the reader to overlook lines 40–4: Cromwell was already ‘Lord’ of those kingdoms, and R. F. has been expounding the delights that make the Canaries ‘the best of Lands’. The reading is tricky, given the courtly resonances of the play on ‘best of Lands’ and ‘best of Kings’: the latter phrase was frequently attached to Charles I (for instance, in Denham’s Coopers Hill, St Paul’s is sung by ‘the best of Poets’ (Waller) and ‘Preserv’d from ruine by the best of Kings’ (ll. 23–4)).69 R. F.’s line is perhaps intended to wrong-foot the reader slightly, forcing her or him to consider how the old iconography of Stuart courtly poetry takes on diVerent valencies in an expanded English Atlantic. Britain and Ireland had often been represented as the Fortunate Isles in courtly writing;70 but the power of the Protectorate’s navy had brought the Canaries, a more classically ‘correct’ interpretation of the Fortunate Isles’ location, within the reach of English power. R. F.’s correction makes the old court’s identiWcation of those isles with Britain and Ireland seem embarrassingly inward-looking; poets who should know their Pliny and Plutarch better had praised Britain’s supposed paradisal fertility, stereotypically whilst drinking expensive Canary wine which their land could not produce for itself.71 The recalibration of courtly topics in ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards’ perhaps owes something to Waller’s suggestive self-revision in Upon the Present War with Spain, but again R. F. risks a bolder claim. By asserting that Cromwell can be king of the real Fortunate Isles, he deXates not just the Stuart court’s pretensions, but the very controversy over Cromwell’s kingship within the old Stuart dominions. Cromwell’s status is now being deWned by a more powerful, more complex, matrix of Atlantic institutions. If annexed for the purpose of its integration within a centrally regulated Atlantic trade bloc, Tenerife could be allowed no greater powers of self-government than the very limited autonomy envisaged for other Atlantic colonies. This had become the key 69 [John Denham], Coopers Hill: A Poeme (London, 1642), 2. 70 Josephine Waters Bennett, ‘Britain among the Fortunate Isles’, Studies in Philology, 53 (1956), 114–40: Ben Jonson, The Fortunate Isles, and Their Union ([London], 1625). 71 For the incorporation of Canary wine into the language of royalist nostalgia, see, e.g., the song concerning ‘canary’s coronation’ in Thomas Jordan, Fancy’s Festivals . . . (London, 1657), sigs. C2v–C3r.

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problematic of the Protectoral Atlantic: planters claimed that the right to selfgovernment via their own local assemblies was an equivalent political liberty to that demanded by the citizens of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, who were represented in Parliament. The Protectoral regime endeavoured to resist this claim, so that it could subjugate the colonies’ trade.72 For the new acquisition of the Canary Islands, the ideal political solution—from the standpoint of building a trade empire—might be for Cromwell to adopt the existing title of king of the Canary Islands (presently claimed by the Spanish Crown), by right of conquest or treaty. ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards’ overreached its occasion. There was no invasion of Tenerife, and R. F. cut the lines predicting it in later versions of the poem.73 But this excision hardly removes the impress of R. F.’s enthusiasm for the commercial empire that he had glimpsed, and cannot reduce the poem to Waller’s more suggestive perspective on the Anglo–Spanish conXict. On the contrary, it bears further witness to the volatility of the horizons created by the intersection of Atlantic expansion and constitutional transformations under the Protectorate. The poetic revisions made within a few months by Waller and R. F. reveal an institutional matrix that could excite the imperial imagination powerfully; but even as it organized war and trade on an unprecedented scale, that matrix appeared far from ‘Wxt’, or credibly consolidated. Waller and R. F. imagine how an Atlantic trade bloc and a constitutional settlement might consolidate one another reciprocally. As they revised their rhetoric in response to the vicissitudes of the war and constitutional debate, William Davenant looked beyond parliamentary occasions to a public that remained to be convinced of the state’s imperial potential. Since the inception of the Protectorate, Davenant had solicited government support for his ‘moral representations’ on these grounds: a reformed, operatic drama would excite the better passions of a new generation of metropolitan theatre-goers, including the children of old royalists; it would inspire them ‘to Heroicall Attempts, when the State shall command them’.74 In a 1656 letter to Secretary Thurloe, he proposed an opera on the theme of ‘the Spaniards’ barbarous conquests in the West Indies and of their severall cruelties there exercis’d upon the subjects of this nation: of which some use may be made’.75 However, public dissatisfaction following the failure of the attack on Hispaniola apparently proved too great a challenge, and Davenant shelved this work in favour of The Siege of Rhodes, which ampliWes English overseas exploits, but situates them far from Hispaniola in space 72 Pestana, English Atlantic, 163–77. 73 Duncan-Jones, ‘Marvell, R. F., and the Authorship’, 113. 74 [William Davenant], A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie, By a New Way of Entertainment of the People (London, 1653), 22. See also James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and A Proposition for Advancement of Moralitie by Sir William Davenant’, The Seventeenth Century, 6 (1991), 205–50. 75 C. H. Firth, ‘Sir William Davenant and the Revival of the Drama during the Protectorate’, English Historical Review, 70 (1903), 319–21 (321).

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and time.76 In 1658, Davenant belatedly staged The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru; but this work struggles with the same ideological contradictions that were encumbering the state’s attempts to subordinate its colonies. The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru concludes with the enactment of a ‘prophecy’ in which redcoats from the Protectoral armies liberate Peruvians from their cruel Spanish masters. Davenant portrays the Spanish torturing English mariners as well as native Peruvians, and thus elaborates dramatically Cromwell’s legal justiWcation for the Western Design: namely, that it was a reprisal for Spain’s abuses of English subjects in the Americas.77 At the climax of this representation, shuttered perspective scenery replaces the painted representations of torture with a battle painting in which Peruvian and English armies are shown Wghting in alliance, vanquishing Spanish forces. Davenant adapts the scenic transformations of the Caroline court masque to represent a decisive expansion of the Protectoral state into the New World: the New Model Army’s redcoats are the focal point of the triumphant image, Wghting in the vanguard against Spanish troops. This image is cast as the Peruvian Sun Priest’s quasimillennial prophecy, a future event which will restore the Peruvians to the Edenic simplicity that they enjoyed before their lapse into civil war. It will also end the English army’s problems of supply: For those whom the insulting Spaniards scorn, And slaves esteem, The English soon shall free; Whilst we the Spaniards see Digging for them. (vi. ll. 33–7)78

Yet this rearrangement of the New World pecking order does not resolve the contradiction between an expansion that would pay for itself by annexing natural resources or trade and the ideal of bringing liberty to that state’s subjects in the New World. In this entertainment, Davenant could get no further than the paradox of a ruling guest: After all our dysasters The proud Spaniards our Masters, When we extoll our liberty by feasts, At Table shall serve, Or else they shall starve; Whilst th’English shall sit and rule as our guests. (vi. ll. 69–74)79 76 [William Davenant], The Siege of Rhodes (London, 1656); Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 236–7. 77 Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 60. 78 [William Davenant], The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (London, 1658), 25. 79 Ibid. 27.

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Davenant’s next production, The History of Sr Francis Drake, is a more Wnegrained response to the problems and controversy attending the regime’s policies in the North Atlantic. The opera is closely based on the account of Drake’s 1572 voyage to the Spanish Indies given in Francis Nichols’s Sir Francis Drake Revived, but Davenant transforms Nichols’s essentially piratical adventure into a legitimizing precedent for the Protectoral state’s expansion into the Caribbean.80 It was performed during Richard Cromwell’s Protectorate, as criticism of the regime’s Atlantic policies mounted. The navy had been using its new base in Jamaica to raid Spanish possessions, which some observers had denounced as dishonourable state piracy.81 Davenant inXates Drake’s expedition such that it appears as the origin of the state’s new American commitments. Drake Wrst built a raiding base at ‘Port Pheasant’, a natural harbour used previously by himself and fellow adventurer John Garret, who had been chased away by the Spanish. The scenery of Davenant’s Wrst ‘entry’ depicts the construction of a pinnace and a fort, with trees being cut down in nearby woods, while in the background an English ship tows a prize ship towards its new base. These details come from Nichols’s narrative, but take on the signiWcance of origins when presented within a spectacular visual opening. That the image appeared surmounted by an emblem Wrst used in The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, a Habsburg eagle vying with an Incan sun, indicates that these constructions are the beginnings of a decisive English intervention in a great contest, and a hint of the manner in which the painting might have inXated them is oVered by Davenant’s Wrst proposal for ‘moral representations’, in which he suggests inspiring images in the manner of ‘Historicall Painting’.82 At Port Pheasant, Drake welcomes Captain Rouse (who commands the ship towing the prize), but where in Nichols’s account the two sea-dogs soon fall out and Rouse disappears, Davenant portrays Rouse as a devoted subordinate, as if they were members of a navy. Rouse is left to ‘Wnish and secure the Fort’ (i. 110), a work of lasting strategic import that foreshadows the present occupation of Jamaica. The jealous Spaniards long have understood The danger of this Harbour’s neighbourhood, ’Tis therefore Wt That thou shouldst leave behind, To govern it, A great experienc’d Mind. (i. 102–7)83

80 81 82 83

Philip Nichols, Sir Francis Drake Revived (London, 1626). Pestana, English Atlantic, 180. Davenant, Proposition for Advancement, 23. [William Davenant], The History of Sr Francis Drake (London, 1659), 7.

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Davenant similarly inXates Drake’s attacks against the Spanish to suggest the deployment of a far bigger and more organized military force than the band of raiders that feature in Nichols’s text. Davenant describes an army with a ‘Van’, ‘Wings’, and ‘Rere’ (vi. 47–52), performing battleWeld manoeuvres.84 Drake’s exploits establish a heroic colonial heritage of precedents for the Protectoral state’s commitments in the Caribbean. The History of Sr Francis Drake connects most acutely with controversy surrounding Protectoral colonial policies by addressing the relationship between national honour and Drake’s pursuit of Spanish ships and gold. The recitativo dialogues twice give way to songs in a lower register, in which sailors and soldiers debate their claims to the spoils of the mission, and plot to cheat the state of its ‘tithe’ of captured gold. Through their seeming conventionality, these comic interludes normalize the state’s expansion into the New World. The singers’ stock ambitions to subvert the protocols by which the state shares and collects revenue from war in the Caribbean presupposes that those protocols are, to some degree, established practice. The Wrst song includes the chorus of ‘Then cry, One and all! j Amain! for Whitehall! ’ (ii. 19–20) which transforms the administrative centre of the Protectoral government into a kind of home (this sense of the state’s centrality to the sailors’ aVairs was perhaps reinforced metatheatrically by the actual proximity of Whitehall, just up the road from the Cockpit Theatre).85 Yet even as these vignettes normalize the colonial projects advanced by the regime’s Caribbean machinery, the mere acquisitiveness of the opera’s ‘low’ characters provides a foil against which Davenant can suggest a set of higher principles guiding English actions in the New World. To this end, he interpolates a heroic episode that has no basis in Nichols’s text. Drake suspends his plan to surprise a Spanish gold convoy in order to free a Spanish bride captured from a wedding party by his Symeron allies (the Symerons were escaped African slaves). Even though he achieves the bride’s release without bloodshed or a breach with the Symerons, his actions demonstrate that he is quite willing to jeopardize the alliance and the prize of gold for the sake of ‘honour’. This eruption of chivalrous respect for the Spanish enemy may well have been inXuenced by Waller’s construction of heroic action in Upon the Present War with Spain; it answers those who would criticize the present regime’s piratical forays against Spanish possessions, by showing that raiding is commensurable with honour. The entry also endows the English adventurers with a civility superior to that of their Symeron allies, which would implicitly legitimize foreseeable attempts by the English to assert their authority over American peoples. Davenant thereby evades some of the contradictions that encumber his ‘liberation’ of indigenous Peruvians in The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru. 84 [William Davenant], The History of Sr Francis Drake (London, 1659), 25. 85 Ibid. 9.

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But the most contentious claim advanced by the rescue of the Spanish bride lies in the slippage between Drake’s heroic chivalry and national honour: Arm! Arm! the honour of my Nation turns To shame, when an aZicted Beauty mourns. Though here these cruel Symerons exceed Our number, yet they are too few to bleed When Honour must revengeful be For this aVront to Love and me. (v. 109–14)86

The extent to which colonial adventurers acted on behalf of their nation had become an issue of the greatest importance. When the Interregnum governments tried to regulate, police, and reap proWts from Atlantic trade, they argued that the colonies were national enterprises: they ‘were planted at the Cost, and setled by the People, and by the Authority of this Nation’.87 This claim overlooked the individual contributions made by the original investors, planters, and proprietors, not to mention the ongoing energies of colonists. These groups protested vigorously, arguing that they had earned the ‘liberty’ of governmental autonomy and the full proWts of their labours: They went out hence haveing onely publick leave for it as a free people, to digg out their owne fortunes, in a Strange Land, which they possessed & Improved at their own charge without the publick purse, & never had so much as protection from hence . . . But they have allwayes defended themselves by their owne Lawes, & Rules of Government, as hath from time to time best Suited their little common Wealth.88

By claiming that national honour is at stake in the bride’s plight, Drake suggests that he embodies national justice, as might an ambassador or a general. His lofty sense of responsibility makes a merely Wnancial construction of the obligations between adventurers and the core nation seem as limited as the aspirations voiced by the opera’s materialistic sailors. His vindication of national honour thus contributes to the state’s ideological history of New World actions conducted on behalf of the nation. By according primacy to the English nation, Davenant’s opera also develops the tenuous claims underpinning Protectoral trade reform. The projected Atlantic trade bloc privileged English merchants, disregarding the fact that the supposedly ‘national’ colonial enterprises had been advanced by Scottish, Irish, and Welsh colonists, investors, and proprietors too.89 The New World represented in The History of Sr Francis Drake is a place where English hegemony prevails. 86 87 88 164. 89

Ibid. 28. Quoted in Pestana, English Atlantic, 163. ‘An Essay, Evenly Discussing the Present Condition and Interest of Barbadoes’, quoted ibid. Ibid. 172.

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If Davenant was to inspire his audience to ‘Heroicall Attempts, when the State shall command them’, he Wrst had to persuade his audience of the legitimacy of the state’s claims to imperium in the Atlantic world. The History of Sr Francis Drake engages closely with the controversies surrounding those claims. It inXates Drake’s adventure into a legitimizing prototype for the Protectoral state’s westward expansion. The plot of national honour superseding the pursuit of gold also seeks to displace the prevailing domestic view of the British Atlantic as a world peopled by the dregs of British society, and dominated by Mammon—the stereotypes that animate Waller’s ‘The Battell of the Summer Islands’. Davenant alleges that the British Atlantic has been, and can be, shaped by honour as well as proWt. The opera makes the trade protests of resistant colonists appear narrowminded, even as it represents the annexation of Atlantic trade as a national glory.

6 ‘Soe Honny from the Lyon came’: Wedding Entertainments for the Protector’s Daughters In November 1657, as a new session of Parliament approached and Cromwell deliberated with his Council over the members of the new Other House of Parliament, the French ambassador wrote home to remark that the atmosphere in Whitehall appeared to be changing: There seems to be a diVerent spirit, dances having been held there again during these past days, and the preachers of the older times are withdrawing from it . . . The subalterns of the army grumble at it; but their superiors being won over, everything will be arranged without any disturbance.1

Bordeaux perceived change and new promise at a moment that is often overlooked. The dancing accompanied the marriages of the Protector’s youngest two daughters. First came Cromwell’s younger daughter, Frances, who after negotiations so prolonged and tumultuous that Mary Cromwell called them ‘the gratest confusion and troble as ever poor famly can be in’, was Wnally allowed to marry the man she had set her heart on: Robert Rich, the sickly Presbyterian grandson of Cromwell’s old ally, the Earl of Warwick.2 Mary’s marriage, on the other hand, had been arranged by her father. She married Thomas Belasyse, Viscount Fauconberg, whose family was otherwise noted for its continuing devotion to the royalist cause: his father and brother had distinguished themselves in the service of Charles I, and his uncles, Henry Slingsby and John Belasyse, had been in the thick of the disastrous 1655 uprising.3 The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘the union has caused universal amazement’.4 The marriages were gossiped about because they were politically and dynastically important. Cromwell’s older children had married earlier in his career, to humbler spouses; but Frances and Mary were considered suYciently princessly 1 Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iv. 670. 2 Thurloe Papers, v. 146. 3 Mark Noble, Memoirs of the Protectoral-House of Cromwell, 2nd edn., 2 vols. (Birmingham: Pearson and Rollason, 1787), ii. 388; GeoVrey Ridsdill Smith, In Well Beware: The Story of Newburgh Priory and the Belasyse Family, 1145–1977 (Kineton: Roundwood Press, 1978), 36–7. 4 Edward Razzell and Peter Razzell (eds.), The English Civil War: A Contemporary Account, 5 vols. (London: Caliban Books, 1996), v. 64.

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‘Soe Honny from the Lyon came’

that rumours repeatedly circulated that they would marry into the European elite, including the persistent linking of Frances with Charles Stuart (allegedly Lord Broghill oVered to mediate).5 It is perhaps testament to Cromwell’s prudence that, while Frances was widowed the following February, Mary’s marriage to Fauconberg was long and apparently happy, and owing to the great favour her husband enjoyed after the Restoration, Mary was able to help Frances and, legend has it, rescue Cromwell’s body after it was dug up and hanged.6 The celebrations for the two weddings featured works by three of the Commonwealth’s leading poets. Marvell and Waller wrote ‘Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Mary Cromwell’ and ‘On the Marriage of Mts. Frances Cromwell wth Mr. Rich Grandchild to the Earle of Warwicke’ respectively.7 The Stationers’ Register records an epithalamium for Mary’s wedding by Davenant ‘to bee sung in recitative musicke’, and Henry Herbert mentions a Davenant epithalamium for Frances, which is likely to be a confusion with the former, but no such piece survives.8 As far as I know, Waller’s text has been ignored since its discovery, while Marvell’s songs have received little critical attention. An important exception to this neglect is Roy Sherwood’s argument that the songs constitute a revival of the Stuart court masque—low key, but unmistakably regal.9 This chapter argues that reviving courtly forms under the Protectorate was more problematic than Sherwood allows. The Protectorate’s elite reused cultural materials that had been exploited by kings, but it could reproduce the original import of these materials no more than it could forget the regicide. The entertainments by Waller and Marvell are alert to this diYculty, and the ironies that it could produce. The reports of the wedding celebrations agree that Frances’s entertainment at Whitehall was grander than Mary’s at Hampton Court. William Dugdale writes that Henry Scobell, as Justice of the Peace, tied the knot for Frances and Rich, and there followed festivities attended by nobles, including the Countess of Devonshire (Rich’s grandmother) and the Earl of Newport, with music provided by a large orchestra and mixed dancing.10 Mercurius Politicus corroborates that the countess and ‘many other persons of high honor and quality’ were present, and Frances’s marriage certiWcate, in Scobel’s hand, lists Cromwell, Warwick, 5 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 112; Noble, Memoirs, i. 149–50; Charlotte Fell Smith, Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick: 1625–1678 (London: Longmans & Green, 1901), 136–7. 6 Robert William Ramsey, Studies in Cromwell’s Family Circle, and Other Papers (London: Longmans, 1930), 48–50; Fell Smith, Mary Rich, 46. 7 Perhaps because of the couple’s eminence after the Restoration, Marvell’s songs were not removed from his 1681 Miscellaneous Poems (pp. 135–9) with his other poems in English that praise Cromwell (see below, p. 207)); Beverly Chew, ‘An Unpublished Poem by Edmund Waller’, in Essays and Verses about Books (New York: [n. pub.], 1926), 29–32 (30). 8 TRCS, ii. 157; Henry Herbert, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73, ed. N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 264–5. 9 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 115–17. 10 HMC, Fifth Report (London: HM Stationers, 1876), 177.


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Newport, Robert Lord Rich, and Lord Strickland as witnesses.11 Other accounts mention expensive gifts given by Frances’s elder sister Elizabeth Claypole and the Countess of Devonshire.12 Less is known about Mary’s wedding. Mercurius Politicus predicts that it will be performed in the presence of ‘many noble persons’, but no account that I have found lists any of them. The Venetian ambassador says that it was conducted ‘secretly’, with no rejoicing having been seen in London, perhaps by contrast with the bell ringing and Wring of the Tower guns that accompanied Frances’s wedding.13 Several accounts stress that despite its lavishness, Frances’s wedding too was a ‘private’ aVair: ‘It was very magniWcent and sumptuous, attended by parents and friends only, no ministers or other foreigners being invited’; ‘The solemnities of the nuptialls Wednesday and Thursday last were kept with much privacy and honour’.14 Both weddings restricted access to a greater extent than the court weddings celebrated in the masques of Jonson and Campion, or that attended by Whitelocke in Sweden. A hostile description of celebrations at Frances’s wedding indicates some of the problems facing the poets: The Protectour threw about sack posset among all the ladyes to soyle their rich clothes, which they tooke as a favour, and also wett sweetmeates and dawbd all the stooles, where they were to sitt, with wett sweetmeates; and pull’d oV Riches his perucque, and would have throwne it into the Wre, but did not, yet he sate upon it. An old formall courtier that was gentleman usher to the Queene of Bohemia, is enterteyned among them, Sir Thomas Billingsley, senza barba; and he danced afore them in his cloke and sword, and one of the four of the Protector’s BuVons made his lip black like a beard, whereat the Knt. drew his knife, missing very little of killing the fellow.15

Sack posset was traditionally drunk at weddings by the bride and groom, but the Protector’s use of it here is boorishly indecorous, even if his alehouse horseplay is interpreted as sign of favour by the glittering ladies. Rich’s ‘perucque’ is a periwig, a new French fashion reXecting the rising prestige of the French court.16 Billingsly had been appointed a Gentleman of his Highness’s Bedchamber when some of the old court’s protocols had been reinstituted for the Protectorate.17 This old gallant becomes a parody of the intended revival of courtly entertainment by dancing with sword and cloak like a Jacobean. He has shaved oV his beard to Wt in with the new fashions, but one of Cromwell’s clowns humiliatingly 11 Mercurius Politicus, 5 Nov. 1657; Noble, Memoirs, i. 319. 12 HMC, Fifth Report, 177, 183. 13 Razzell and Razzell (eds.), English Civil War, v. 65; The Clarke Papers: Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, ed. C. H. Firth, 4 vols. (London, Longmans and Green, 1891–1901), iii (1899). 127. 14 Razzell and Razzell (eds.), English Civil War, v. 63; Clarke Papers, iii. 127. 15 British Library, Harleian MS 991, 23. 16 Norman Hartnell, Royal Courts of Fashion (London: Cassell, 1971), 32, 36, 52; C. Willett Cunnington and Phillis Emily Cunnington, A Handbook of English Costume in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd edn. (London: Faber, 1972), 75, 163. 17 Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 71.

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restores it with another practical joke.18 The anecdote, which claims to be based on the testimony of Hatton Rich, the bridegroom’s uncle, represents a court liable to volatile tensions over class, history, and fashionability. Caricatures of Cromwell that present him in conXict with the pastimes of the elite must be carefully weighed against evidence that Cromwell favoured the toleration of masques under the right circumstances. An account from earlier in the period provides a glimpse of the semi-clandestine domestic masques that form a dramatic context for the wedding entertainments by Waller and Marvell. Lodewijck Huygens accompanied the Dutch ambassadors who visited the republic in the winter of 1651–2. He describes being taken to some kind of masque (Huygens uses the word ‘balet’) organized at the house of Lady Newport: We found a great number of ladies and lords already there, all people of quality but of the King’s party. . . When we had been there for about an hour, somebody came to tell us that this evening there was no means of obtaining the protection General Cromwell had promised us, and that without this it would be inadvisable to begin anything for fear of the soldiers who, not long ago on a similar occasion, had entered the house by force, with swords and riXes, and had carried away all they could get, even hats, rapiers, and ladies’ muVs. They sent an emissary to the General again but without making any headway. Then it was resolved that the party should be postponed for three or four days to see if, in the meantime, it would be possible to obtain protection. Before we parted, however, we heard two ladies sing some Italian airs. One of them sang very well according to everyone’s judgement; the other had a stronger voice but not so good a delivery. When I rode home with Sir Thomas Ingram and two or three ladies, we still met a number of coaches all going there, but in vain. (Later we heard that, soon after we had gone, the soldiers had come and had been very insolent.)19

This account shows Cromwell in a rather diVerent relation to the chaotic conditions of Interregnum entertainments: it implies that even when his power was formally quite limited, he was prepared to use his inXuence to shield private masques from other powers in the republic; yet his blessing could be overridden by other concerns or authorities. When a masque was too risky, it seems that the women might provide a safer entertainment by singing instead, and the party’s readiness to criticize their performances suggests that the singing was fashionable and competitive. The attempts by Davenant and Richard Flecknoe to secure toleration for a ‘reformed drama’ would rationalize this dramatic culture. Each proposed to reform drama by—superWcially, at least—moving it closer to Italian opera.20 In dedicating one of his patterns for a ‘reformed stage’ to Elizabeth 18 From 1650, clean shaving was fashionable: Cunnington and Cunnington, Handbook of English Costume, 71. I can Wnd no other mention of Cromwell employing clowns. 19 Huygens, English Journal 1651–1652, 58–9. 20 Their programmes for reform have been discussed most comprehensively by Robert Shore in ‘ ‘‘Lawrels for the Conquered’’: The Dilemmas of William Davenant and Abraham Cowley in the Revolutionary Decades of the Seventeenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Cambridge University, 1994), 146–52; also see Jacob and Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience’.


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Claypole, Cromwell’s favourite daughter, Flecknoe anticipates her sympathy with ‘the nobler and better sort’ who would like to watch productions like Love’s Dominion (1654).21 Cupid and Death appears to have been performed under conditions corresponding to those recorded by Huygens: the 1653 quarto refers to a performance at an unoYcial entertainment for the Portuguese ambassador.22 Members of Whitelocke’s ambassadorial retinue would entertain him with masques, although on one occasion he censured them for using ‘undecent postures’.23 Surveying the Interregnum’s ‘Mungrel Masques and their kin’, Dale Randall observes that after the demise of the Stuart court masque, masques became so heterogeneous and amorphous as to make generic deWnition almost impossible.24 In the absence of regular theatre, the public found other communal entertainments: rope dancing at the Red Bull Theatre sometimes provided cover for surreptitious dramatic performances, but it was enjoyed in itself, notably by John Evelyn.25 Davenant’s The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru catered to the new taste for variety: it includes tumbling, juggling, and acrobatics. Even productions that can be more conWdently called masques are porous to the pastimes that their audiences had come to enjoy together in the absence of public theatre. Breathtaking scenic metamorphoses had become the most important element in the court masque; but without the court’s resources, the authors of these domestic masques had to impress audiences with a diVerent kind of variety. In Thomas Jordan’s Fancy’s Festivals, printed in 1657 after a London performance by ‘many civil persons of quality’, Poetry rejects a deńouement by ‘Five Senses with a Devil and a Zany’, however such a resolution might have satisWed some of the masquers, whose ‘motley humours’ and wild requests give Poetry cause for complaint at the beginning of the masque.26 This masque attempts to resist the dissolution of the traditional masque, yet it includes a drinking song and several dialogue-like songs of the types to be found in Playford’s song-books, which themselves provided material for private entertainment in the absence of public drama.27

21 Shore, ‘ ‘‘Lawrels for the Conquered’’ ’, 142–5; Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Dominion . . . (London, 1654), sigs. A3r–v. 22 Shore, ‘ ‘‘Lawrels for the Conquered’’ ’, 125–8; Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649–60, 153. 23 British Library, Additional MS 37347, fo. 68v. 24 Dale B. J. Randall, Winter Fruit: English Drama, 1642–1660 (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 157. 25 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), iii. 197. 26 Jordan, Fancy’s Festivals, sigs A4r, D3r. 27 Ibid. sigs B1r, B3v–B4r; C2r–C3r; John Hilton (ed.), Catch that Catch Can: Or, a Choice Collection of Catches, Rounds & Canons for 3 or 4 Voyces (London, 1652); Henry Lawes, Ayres and Dialogues, for One, Two, and Three Voyces (London, 1653).

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Fancy’s Festivals uses its own variety both to indict the times and as camouXage to break up the outline of Jordan’s incendiary design. In his dedication Jordan oVers some post hoc poetic theorizing which is as disingenuous as his prologue’s promise to avoid touching on matters of religion and government: ‘I have strayed from the regular road of Masks as they were formerly presented on publike Theaters, not aiming so much at concatination, as variation.’28 Masques had not been presented in public theatres, but Jordan wants to make a direct link between the government’s suppression of public theatres and the masque’s informality during the 1650s. The masque stages its own makeshiftness as evidence of social deterioration. The organs of literary production are personiWed and presented in fugitive disarray. In the Wrst act, Poetry, Truth, and Fancy unexpectedly meet each other at the site of performance; Poetry is on the run because Ignorance is besieging Parnassus, while Truth has not been seen in ‘this City’ for a while and must seek out corners in which to be spoken.29 Together they assist a pregnant Fancy give birth to Invention, which she fears will be ‘abortive’, but instead it proves to be an under-weight script for a masque. The allegory of Truth’s midwifery, ‘When Fancy’s working, Truth must come behinde’, is a loose translation of the masque’s Horatian motto ‘Ficta, voluptatis causa, sint proxima veris’, and the reconstruction of Fancy, Truth, and Poetry’s proper society is the main theme of the masque. Through a mixture of resourcefulness, coincidence, and surreptitiousness, these characters together shape the masque, and that shaping itself becomes an act of resistance against the entropy of the times. Correspondingly, the masquers are also recusant shapers. They provide a climax for the masque, representing royalist martyrs dancing at a heavenly, incorruptible court. The preceding antimasques concatenate to make the masquers’ representation feel resourceful and surreptitious, politicizing participation and form. Dancing a part in a masque is framed as deWantly giving form to society. The second anti-masque of soldiers and statesmen in turn Wght one another for the ‘supream places’ on the stage, representing the present kingless and courtless society.30 The following antimasque represents a scene of roaring boys in a tavern who deWantly drink healths and sing a song that orders types of wine in an allegory of a king and court. The printed text attempts to give the critical reader an equivalent sense of his or her own participation in the text as a political act. A disingenuous preface attempts to stupify the censor with its claim that the anti-masques, here called ‘acts’, do not cohere, and that the masque is a mere variety performance. The critical reader who looks through the decadent tastes of the times and traces out a coherent design in the piece is, like Jordan, the masquers, and the roaring boys, resisting anarchy with art.

28 Jordan, Fancy’s Festivals, sig. A2v. 30 Ibid. sig. B4r. 29 Ibid. sig. A4v–B1r.


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Fancy’s Festivals admits of no social forms between the old order and present anarchy, except for secretive representations of the old order: the second antimasque represents the government in 1657 as engaged in irresolvable jostling, while the drinking song and masque in the underworld deWantly reWgure the court in occluded spaces, just as the masque itself is claiming to do. The performance of Fancy’s Festivals can hardly have been as clandestine as Jordan makes out; the text indicates a London performance, elaborate costume, and substantial moving scenery, and hints that the performers and spectators have clubbed together to pay for it. Jordan is using the opportunity presented by increasing government toleration of drama to dramatize the world of performance during the 1640s and early Interregnum, when participation implied royalism. Waller’s stanzas can be quoted in full: Peace ye lowd Violins, Peace, When the Bride begins to charm us with her Voice, Rivers their course And winds their force Suspending listen to the noise. Play ye lowd Violins, Play! When the Bride begins to celebrate the Ball, With measured pace And sprightly grace The Nimphs in Dance outshining all. Noe less than Venus doth the throng Of Stars that round about her bee. Faire Venus from the Ocean sprang, She from the Prince that rules the Sea. Her Beauty and his martial fame Are theames for Lasting Song, Soe Honny from the Lyon came, And sweetness from the strong.31

These stanzas were discovered as an autograph manuscript in a copy of Waller’s 1645 poems.32 They leave much to conjecture. There is no external evidence of their performance, so the possibility cannot be discounted absolutely that they constitute a poem written about the entertainment. However, I shall argue below that Marvell’s songs for Mary appear to allude to Waller’s analogy of Frances with Venus. Furthermore, the transition between stanza forms at line 11 appears to mark stages in the entertainment: the Wrst stanza hushes the orchestra in anticipation of a speech or song by Frances, and the second rouses it for a dance; the third and fourth stanzas reXect on the scene, while the dance continues or after it 31 Chew, ‘An Unpublished Poem’, 31–2.

32 Ibid. 30.

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has ended. Waller has written a symbol in the manuscript between stanzas 1 and 2, which supports the conjecture that Frances spoke or sang at this point. That the bride sang on her wedding-day at Wrst seems improbable; I can Wnd only two examples of noblewomen singing in masques: Henrietta Maria in Fletcher’s The Faithfull Shepherdesse and Alice Egerton in Milton’s Comus.33 Yet Frances took music lessons from John Hingston during the time that private performances by noble ladies became fashionable, as illustrated in Huygens’s journal and by Henry Lawes’s song-book prefaces, which praise Lady Dering and the now married Egerton sisters for their musical skill.34 Cromwell’s love of music is well documented, and in ‘A Poem Upon the Death of O. C.’, Marvell remembers Cromwell listening to Frances sing, albeit in more intimate circumstances (‘Francisca faire can nothing now but weep, j Nor with soft notes shall sing his cares asleep’ (ll. 245–6)).35 Whether Frances speaks or sings in the interlude between stanzas, Nature suspends itself to listen as though she were another Orpheus. The music too is suspended: violins are not normally considered loud instruments, but by addressing them as loud, Waller emphasizes the grandeur of the orchestra (Dugdale notes that Cromwell hired a large orchestra for the occasion36), and the imperatives create drama between the parts of the spectacle: the orchestra becomes an unruly competitor to Frances. Her performance is not part of an organic whole supported by the instruments, or part of a dialogue with the chorus; it is a personal attempt to win over the audience. Frances will appear amid other ‘Stars’, but the dance is a competitive display of courtly ability, in which her extraordinary grace legitimizes her social position; the use of ‘Ball’, a relatively recent word, suggests that her distinction is proved in new tastes.37 In masques, dances often Wgure social relationships, yet Waller’s Wrst two stanzas make performance individualistic. In Fancy’s Festivals the Wnal dance represents a transWgured royalist aristocracy, and the anti-masque of soldiers and politicians comically Wgures social contention in its absence. The Hatton Rich anecdote makes the cultural diVerences between elements at Cromwell’s court animate a similar comic drama. Characteristically, Waller directly addresses the perceived problem of contentiousness in the Protectoral court and elite; he aestheticizes contentiousness, making it the organizational principle of the entertainment, in the foreground of which is Frances proving her courtly abilities to the new court. 33 John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepherdesse (London, 1634); John Milton, A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (London, 1637). 34 Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, 136; Ian Spink, English Song: Dowland to Purcell (London: Batsford, 1974), 131; idem, Henry Lawes: Cavalier Songwriter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94–106. 35 Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 135. 36 HMC, Fifth Report, 177; Cromwell maintained a group of eight musicians and ‘two boys brought up to music’ (Sherwood, Court of Oliver Cromwell, 136). 37 OED, s.v. ‘ball, n.2’.


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The problem with getting Frances to show oV her voice, grace, and sprightliness so individualistically is that without making Cromwell turn similar tricks—which would be as indecorous as it would be out of character (and probably his capabilities)—the entertainment threatens to make the sedentary Wgure of Cromwell seem lumpish by contrast. In recent memory the Caroline masque had been built around a dancing king. A survivor from this world, almost exactly the same age as Cromwell, danced with Frances: Mountjoy Blount, Earl of Newport and a kinsman of Rich, had progressed from ‘a popular athletic pinup boy in the early 1620s’ (he featured in a series of engravings of young men framed by sporting borders), to a regular masquer under Charles I.38 Blount was evidently up to some kind of dance, but Cromwell had the previous summer become quite frail in health.39 James I had not been a dancer, but aided by an iconographic tradition of praise and a court more complicit than Cromwell’s, the Jacobean masque had made the watching monarch a participant. In Samuel Daniel’s Tethys Festivals, in which the Queen and the Duke of York performed, a trident was presented to the seated king.40 Cromwellian iconography was much less stable, and the wedding guests were divided more intransigently, and potentially more explosively, than the courtiers of James and Charles (fractious though those courts were).41 They had neither the history together nor the will to form the interpretative community that made the semiotics of the Stuart masque cohere, which is another reason why Frances’s performance was relatively limited in this respect (or so it appears from Waller’s verses). The problem of balancing the charismas of Cromwell and his daughters within the spectacle is partly a generic problem. Waller and Marvell write within not only the court masque tradition, but also the epithalamic tradition, which usually places the bride at the centre of the celebrations.42 Jonson’s attempts to combine the traditions produced the formal problems evident in Hymenaei, where his notes complain bitterly that in performance his closing epithalamium was cut to one valedictory stanza; the form was changed so that the masque would end as it started, honouring the royal couple, to make them unambiguously the origin and end of the performance.43 Cromwell was as imposing and ungraceful as James, but he professed to be a plain man too.44 Waller’s solution to these problems is to 38 HMC, Fifth Report, 177; Timothy Raylor, The Essex House Masque of 1621: Viscount Doncaster and the Jacobean Masque (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2000), 74–5. 39 Fraser, Cromwell, 619. 40 David Lindley (ed.), Court Masques: Jacobean and Caroline Entertainments, 1605–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 54–65 (58). 41 See Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell. 42 Heather Dubrow, A Happier Eden: The Politics of Marriage in the Stuart Epithalamium (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 42–92. 43 Ben Jonson, The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 90. 44 Laura Knoppers, ‘The Politics of Portraiture: Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1992), 1283–1319 (1290–5).

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idealize the contrast of Frances and Cromwell. His third and fourth stanzas interpret the scene of the bride dancing before her father. In his Panegyrick to the Protector, Waller developed the theme of balance between martial strength and peaceable gentleness in Cromwell’s actions. Here those qualities are divided between him and his daughter. Cromwell is honoured as the martial counterweight to the graceful and courtly bride. Their qualities are forecast as the complementary themes of future song, of which this is a foretaste, albeit with a bias towards Frances, and Waller changes to an alternate-rhymed octosyllabic quatrain that emphasizes balance in an even metre. This music binds together diVerent images of the contrast between father and daughter. Venus is a central Wgure in epithalamia after Catullus; but Waller makes her an image of birth that praises Cromwell’s naval success, yet keeps Frances in the foreground.45 This too returns to a theme of Waller’s Panegyrick, where naval dominion secures the beneWts of peace. Here Waller refers to Hesiod’s version of the birth of Aphrodite, who was born mature from the sea-foam after Cronus’s genitals were thrown into the sea.46 But this is a deliberately unnatural, ungenetic image of Wliality, which by encouraging the audience to imagine Frances born out of sea-spray, as she appears now, melliXuously obscures the point that it is ostensibly illustrating; that she is Cromwell’s daughter. Waller idealizes the fact that Frances has no lineage to speak of, yet has emerged with the courtly manners her father eschews. The contrast between Frances and her father is ampliWed in the closing image of honey from the lion. This is an allusion to the riddle that Samson asks the Philistines in Judges 14–15: Samson kills a lion on his journey to Timnath to arrange his marriage. On his return, Samson Wnds bees using its carcass for a hive and uses the discovery at his wedding feast as a riddle for the bride’s suspicious kinsmen: ‘out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness’.47 The riddle is an example of God’s providence, and the inscrutability of this image further obscures the relation between them while pushing them apart to the antitheses of strength and sweetness. The image is yet more apt because it alludes to Protectoral iconography: a lion dominates the Protectoral seal, where it holds from behind a coat of arms adapted from the Stuart monarchs. The closure balances Cromwell and Frances, and stately and godly resonances. Waller ends his entertainment with resonant balance, but the balance struck signiWes a diVerent understanding of Protectoral politics from that of the Panegyrick published two years previously. The entertainment makes martial and more peaceful virtues antitheses to be divided between Cromwell and his 45 Virginia Tufte, The Poetry of Marriage: The Epithalamium in Europe and Its Development in England (Los Angeles: Tinnon-Brown, 1970), 24, 58–69, 186. 46 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica, ed. and trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, rev. edn. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 92–3. 47 Judg. 14: 14.


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oVspring, where previously he had been able to describe a balance of both in the Protector himself. This shift in the way in which Waller idealizes political balance oVers a reassurance to those who might be frustrated by Cromwell’s enduring attachment to the army. As described in the previous chapter, the parliamentary session of 1656–7 had seen Cromwell stand by whilst a faction of moderate nobles, led by Admiral Montague and Lord Broghill (an ex-royalist kinsman of Warwick), uprooted the system of government by regional major-generals, and galvanized parliament to oVer Cromwell the crown. Though the Humble Petition and Advice was accepted, Cromwell refused the crown, at least in part to appease the army. The nobles had continued to push for a civilianization of government, but Cromwell dragged his feet, apparently reluctant to abandon the army politicians whom they had so successfully attacked earlier in the year. By the time of the wedding, the civilian faction, which would have made up the bulk of the wedding party, were ‘pittyfully out of countenance’.48 Waller seeks to refocus the spectators’ hopes. The guests’ memories of Judges might supply what Waller’s couplet elides: Samson’s lion is dead. Frances represents what will come after Cromwell. Waller makes the courtiers look hopefully towards Cromwell’s children rather than critically towards Cromwell (or seditiously towards each other). Cromwell is a stiVold soldier, but he happily watches his daughter dance like a courtier as the Cromwells marry into the nobility. This image hints that as long as no one rocks the boat, the return to a courtly government will be smooth, bloodless, and probably quite soon. Marvell develops Waller’s tentative revival of the courtly entertainment to suit a more intimate celebration and a tenser atmosphere. The two conditions were closely related. The Venetian ambassador explains that the wedding was celebrated ‘secretly’ (no one seems even to have known the date until Mercurius Politicus announced them married), because when Cromwell oVered to give Fauconberg and Mary a wedding even more lavish than Frances’s, Fauconberg delighted Cromwell by saying that he could spend the money on more important things.49 This explanation smacks a little of face saving. Fauconberg’s three most distinguished kinsmen would have been unlikely to attend such a celebration: Sir Henry Slingsby was under arrest in Hull; John, Lord Belasyse, was a founder of the Sealed Knot and a Catholic; and there was renewed friction between Lord Fairfax and Cromwell over the marriage of his daughter Mary (Marvell’s former pupil) to the Duke of Buckingham.50 Nigel Smith prompts Marvell’s readers that the ‘use of Platonic elements points up the revival of Caroline masque themes in Protectoral circles’.51 48 Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell, 121. 49 Razzell and Razzell (eds.), English Civil War, v. 65–6. 50 GeoVrey Ridsdill Smith, Without Touch of Dishonour: The Life and Death of Sir Henry Slingsby, 1602–1658 (Kineton, Roundwood Press, 1968), 137; idem, In Well Beware, 36–7; Fraser, Cromwell, 640. 51 Marvell, 315.

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A ‘Caroline reading’ of the Wrst song is certainly possible, and in the same way as Frances’s performance presaged a return to a more courtly elite, implicated by Marvell’s Platonism is a courtly lexicon of authority. Cynthia is an inhabitant of the realm of pure reason, from where she rules clouds and seas and bears responsibilities too great for her to take a consort. But Endymion dissuades her from thinking her estate incommensurable with his by arguing that the way she sorts the clouds resembles how he sorts his sheep, that his ardour for her transcends mortality, that his tears are her responsibility to restrain, that unequal lovers set each other oV, and, Wnally, having climbed to the top of Mount Latmus, Endymion points out that even though he cannot ascend any higher, she is at liberty to descend to meet him. They meet in a dark cave which Luna’s light makes as bright as the sky, while the chorus sings the moral ‘to be honest, valiant, wise, j Makes Mortals matches Wt for Deityes’ (ll. 57–8).52 Thus Endymion’s success is more than amatory; his love is also a love of the Platonic Good, and even though he cannot rise absolutely to the realm of pure reason, his devotion to it allows him to meet Cynthia in a space that her light makes both of the earth and of the sky. The Platonic cosmos is mapped on to an ideal body politic in which the Cromwells, because they are princes, inhabit the spheres of inXuence in the realm of pure reason. In describing Cromwell’s approval as his ‘serenest inXuence’ (l. 54), Marvell sustains the macrocosm of rule; ‘serene’ can be both an honoriWc epithet given to ruling princes and the calm, clear quality of light emitted by heavenly bodies.53 Part of Endymion’s triumph is to assert a congruence between his condition and the rulers’, restoring the ideal that the noble’s estate is a microcosm of the Commonwealth. The rival stars are other rulers (alluding to the rumours that Mary and Frances would marry European royalty); but they are Wxed in their places, and Mary chooses to lower herself to a mere sublunary viscount, which pleases Jove (Cromwell) because he prefers not to marry his progeny ‘above the Air’ (l. 56). The allegory literalizes Waller’s simile of Frances being like Venus, pleasantly excusing the other couple’s absence and the fact that Frances, the younger of the two daughters, married before Mary. chorus Courage, Endymion, boldly Woo, Anchises was a Shepheard too; Yet is her younger Sister laid Sporting with him in Ida’s shade: And Cynthia, though the strongest, Seeks but the honour to have held out longest. (ll. 29–34)

52 Marvell, Miscellaneous Poems, 135–9. 53 OED, s.v. ‘serene, a.’.


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The diVerence between the two sisters’ courtships becomes part of the play. Fauconberg came to woo an ostensibly unsuspecting Mary after the match had been all but sealed with her father.54 The negotiations for the wedding of Frances and Rich had taken over a year, complicated by the hostility of Rich’s father and unnamed family members.55 Surviving correspondence alludes darkly to escapades that the Countess of Devonshire (who helped the couple) refers to as a ‘romance’: the couple may have deWed their parents with some kind of pre-contract, and Rich was apparently in hiding for some of the year.56 By contrast (perhaps as a consequence) Mary’s courtship was so hurried that she apologized to her brother after the wedding that she had not had time to tell him that she was getting married: ‘You have a great deal of reason, I must confess, to think I did not put that esteem on you which I ought, if the suddenness of my marriage did not speak for me . . . I cannot but hope God has given me this as a blessing, although He has been pleased to dispose of my heart, so that I have been obliged to my parents.’57 Compared to Mary’s acquiescent aVections, Frances’s passion for Rich seems Venus-like indeed. In making an acute sense of responsibility part of Cynthia’s coyness, Marvell tactfully praises Mary’s dutifulness. Represented as Endymion, Fauconberg re-courts Mary as a coy and superior Cynthia in a version of their story that is much more Xattering to Mary and makes its awkwardnesses seem like virtues. But this is not escapism: Fauconberg’s presumably good-humoured collusion in the Wction (he would have to look pleased when it was sung to him) shows that he shares the ideals of a civilian court and moderate Anglicanism implicit in the nostalgic iconography with which Mary, Cromwell, and he himself are praised. Yet a series of ironies sharply delimits the meaning in such shared idealism. Marvell’s version of the Endymion and Cynthia story is strikingly original. Edward Semple Le Comte’s survey of the Endymion myth in English literature shows that Marvell’s masque is almost unique in portraying Cynthia as coy.58 The story is usually told the other way around, with a love-struck Cynthia descending on the innocent, often sleeping, shepherd. By rewriting a familiar story so boldly, Marvell draws attention to what he is not saying. He characterizes Cynthia, like her father, as a serenely disinterested Platonic ruler; but the memory of how the story is usually told forms an ostentatiously suppressed allegory in ironic tension with this characterization: it catches something of how Cromwell and his oYcials encouraged Fauconberg’s advances. Not so much Mary’s, but Cromwell’s interestedness is the subtext 54 R. W. Ramsey, Studies in Cromwell’s Family Circle, 38–9. 55 Thurloe Papers, V. 146; HMC, Report of the MSS of Mrs Frankland-Russell-Astley (London: HM stationers, 1900), 22. 56 HMC, Report of the MSS of Mrs Frankland-Russell-Astley, 21–3. 57 R. W. Ramsey, Studies in Cromwell’s Family Circle, 41–2. 58 Edward Semple Le Comte, Endymion in England: The Literary History of a Greek Myth (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1944), 12.

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of Marvell’s masque. This dissonance is subtle, but it reminds the audience, including the mildly humiliated Fauconberg, that the reality of the political present is diVerent from the courtly ideals projected here. The masque’s Wction that the initiative is entirely Fauconberg’s echoes a similar, earlier Wction. A letter from Cromwell’s ambassador in Paris shows a complex of initiatives and incentives concealed beneath an idealized protocol of courtship. The ambassador writes: I waited last night on the gentleman [Fauconberg] and told him the advantage his pretensions might receive from his own addresses to the person principally concerned, and assured him of a good reception from the nearest relations. He professed much zeal in the business, but said he expected a clearer invitation, and asked my authority for encouraging him. I said that in these cases custom settled rules of modesty, which straitened my liberty, and I feared I had gone too far when I assured him of welcome, and left the rest to his own merit and application.59

The masque develops the courtly lover act encouraged by Lockhart. As a shepherd whose merits win a deity, Fauconberg is empowered in several senses. Through its Platonic allegory, the masque solemnizes not only his marriage to Mary but his access to power. This solemnization is manifested in revived media that, like Frances’s entertainment, presage a shift of power back to an aristocratic court. But the degree to which the Cromwell–Belasyse alliance was a political coup for Cromwell was the degree to which it was potentially dangerous. As shown above, the marriages and celebrations were widely interpreted as Cromwell throwing in his lot with the nobility, in a climate where the increasing courtliness of the Protectoral household was alienating many in the army.60 At the same time, the alliance empowered a man whose loyalty was hardly beyond doubt. Fauconberg’s earliest biographer, Mark Noble, is keen to defend him against insinuations by Clarendon and Sir Philip Warwick that Fauconberg saw his marriage as an opportunity to further the royalist cause.61 Recent accounts have taken Noble’s line, but such doubts must have occurred to Cromwell’s family and political allies. Marvell celebrates Fauconberg’s merits, the match that they have won, and the courtly revival that it heralds. Yet Marvell’s ironies make that courtly revival subtly utopian. The images of power set before Fauconberg and the invited members of his family are intersected by dissonant ironic reXections of the moment’s realpolitik. The climactic meeting place of Cynthia and Endymion is a cave, reminiscent of

59 Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series: Commonwealth, 1649–1660, Mary Anne Everett Green (ed.), 13 vols. (London: Longman, 1875–86), x. 386. 60 J. S., The Picture of a New Courtier Drawn in a Conference, between Mr. Timeserver and Mr. Plain-heart ([London], 1656). 61 Noble, Memoirs, ii. 390.


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Plato’s cave; only here Cynthia’s light makes it as bright as the sky, and frees Endymion’s perceptions from the shadow-bound earthly condition: endymion

cynthia endymion

The Stars are Wx’d unto their Sphere, And cannot, though they would, come near. Less Loves set of each others praise, While Stars Eclypse by mixing Rayes. That Cave is dark. Then none can spy: Or shine Thou there and ’tis the Sky.

(ll. 45–51) This exchange is perfectly poised to sustain the allegory and yet suggest a less highminded understanding. There is nothing in Cynthia’s response to acknowledge Endymion’s reasoning; it could be a lingering objection or a bathetic capitulation. Their shared line could symbolize concord or be Endymion hastily rationalizing this capitulation, Wrst taking her hint that she wants a place too dark for anyone to see them (a preference that would not only collapse the Platonic allegory, but also reXect darkly on Fauconberg’s desire for a modest, ‘secret’ wedding), then Wnding a more decorous, Platonic rationale. In that bathos the more conventional version of Diana’s behaviour is remembered again at the climax of the masque; the match is, in a sense, a capitulation for both the Cromwells and the Bellasyses, who fought one another for a decade in the name of the loftiest ideals. But there is something subtly humiliating about representing Fauconberg in these lines, which read straight or ironically put him in his place. Read straight, Fauconberg is the social climber, marrying above his station; his acquiescence to the Wction is an acquiescence that the Wghting Bellasyses would consider a dishonourable surrender. Read ironically, these lines show Fauconberg tenuously rationalizing just such a capitulation in his wife; a sharply ironic theatrical reXection. The second song begins with a shepherd, Hobbinol, announcing the celebration of the wedding: hobbinol Phillis, Tomalin, away: Never such a merry day. For the Northern Shepheards Son Has Menalca’s daughter won. phillis Stay till I some Xow’rs ha’ ty’d In a Garland for the Bride. tomalin If thou would’st a Garland bring, Phillis you may wait the Spring.

(ll. 1–8) The shepherds’ unpreparedness sets up celebrations that promise to be wholesomely improvised and simple in accordance with the Spenserian motto that ‘The Courts of Kings heare no such straines, j As daily lull the Rusticke

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Swaines’.62 But the spontaneity of their celebration is heavily ironized: when Phillis attempts to fetch Xowers, Tomalin has to tell her what season it is, somewhat undermining her natural authority. Marvell throws into relief a Protestant literary cliche´. A pastoral wedding masque written for the wedding of John Worthington in October 1657 shows some of the genealogy and contemporary application of that cliche´. Worthington was the intruded master of Jesus College, Cambridge, and had written Marvell a reference in 1655 (he probably knew Marvell through preaching at Eton).63 Like his friend Benjamin Whichcote, who married the couple and was the bride’s uncle, he preached an irenic version of Protestant doctrine, which in many respects anticipated Latitudinarianism.64 However, the idea of pastoral presented by his wedding masque is rather dogmatic. Worthington’s shepherds are exemplary for being plain. Philotas announces to an unnamed second shepherd Why dost not know! It is the day Two of the neighbring plains By artless love, like turtles pair’d And Hymen ty’d the banes. (ll. 5–8)

Then the chorus exhorts them: Do jolly swains, sing, sing, & play, Tis love and virtue’s marriage day. You shepherds sing with best of arts; Plain words, & notes, & plainer hearts. (ll. 9–12)65

Parts of this masque are developed from Sidney’s epithalamium for the marriage of Lalus and Kala in The Old Arcadia.66 In addition to the commonplace epithalamic topics of turtle-doves and vine around the elm (which Sidney and Spenser made ubiquitous in English epithalamia), the author wishes that the couple will be as fruitful as sheep, and in ‘discontent, sad strife, & jealous doubt’ condenses the list of evils warded oV in Sidney’s didactic stanzas. The anthropomorphism of those discontents, which threaten to seek out the key with which the couple have been locked fast, echoes Sidney’s vital and active temptations.

62 John Bodenham (ed.), Englands Helicon or the Muses Harmony, rev. Richard More (London, 1614), sig. [A]1r. 63 Stocker and Raylor, ‘New Marvell Manuscript’, 120. 64 John T. Young, ‘Worthington, John (bap. 1618, d. 1671)’, in DNB. 65 The text is printed in John Worthington, The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. J. Worthington, ed. James Crossley, 3 vols. (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1847–86), i. 89–90. It does not distinguish the parts of the dialogue accurately, but they are clear enough. 66 Philip Sidney, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 91–4.


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However, Worthington’s shepherds are associated with plainness quite literally: they sing in a folksy rhythm made by folding common metre into hemistichs (exempliWed in the Wrst stanza quoted above). Marvell deXates the convention of shepherds’ plain spontaneity by revealing its artiWciality with Tomalin’s literalism, but from this deXation stems an elegant and original compliment to the couple, which is set oV by Phillis’s conventionality: Tomalin continues: ‘They ha’chosen such an hour j When She is the only Xow’r’ (ll. 9–10). By emphasizing their choice in spite of convention, Marvell makes the couple as independent-minded as a Protestant couple should be in waiting for the workings of grace to bring them together. Puritans and The Directory for Publique Worship of God held that marriage was no sacrament.67 This position was theorized into a concept of marriage whereby the couple would feel grace inwardly as they came together, and then choose to solemnize the marriage, as opposed to the sacramental concept by which a couple wait for the ceremony to deliver grace.68 More ritualistic epithalamia would often discover Hesperus calling the couple to bed, after Catullus’s Carmen 62.69 Jonson’s epithalamium in Hymenaei begins ‘Glad Time is at his point arriv’d, j For which Loves hopes were so long-liv’d’.70 By personifying time as an arriving traveller, he becomes the primary agent in the event. The consummation of the marriage is subject to his arrival, and the couple’s freedom to choose what happens when is nulliWed. No such timetable shapes the marriage of Mary Cromwell and Fauconberg, who pointedly subject time to their choice. A second compliment, to Cromwell, springs from the deXation of the garlandmaking convention. With no Xowers in season, Phillis suggests that they at least bring some evergreen to the wedding, but Hobbinol replies: Fear not; at Menalca’s Hall There is Bayes enough for all. He when Young as we did graze, But when Old he planted Bayes. (ll. 13–16)

Instead of deWning itself in opposition to the court, the pastoral landscape now includes one. Like the previous compliment, these lines are set oV by Phillis’s conventionality. The contrast accentuates the originality of this feature in the pastoral landscape; it is a self-conscious generic innovation. Menalcas is a shepherd in the Eclogues who grows up through the sequence, from a young shepherd to a community leader, whose song fails to save the other shepherds 67 A Directory for the Publique Worship of God . . . (London, 1656), 39. 68 James Turner Johnson, A Society Ordained by God: English Puritan Marriage Doctrine in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1970), 33–6. 69 Tufte, Poetry of Marriage, 27. 70 Ben Jonson, Hymenaei: Or the Solemnities of Masque, and Barriers (London, 1606), sig. D1r.

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from displacement. Marvell’s ‘Menalca’ (the printer of the 1681 folio probably misplaced the apostrophe; Smith emends to ‘Menalcas’ ’) is perhaps a more successful version of Virgil’s leader, for whom the conventions are reshaped. Cromwell’s pastoral guise digniWes his East Anglian yeoman origins; it implies a rough social parity between him and ‘the Northern Shepheard ’ (l. 3), Fauconberg’s late father. It perhaps also suggests that Cromwell used to be more willing to play at pastoral, and that pastoral is a young person’s game. Like Waller, Marvell seems to be glossing a potential awkwardness in how Cromwell Wts into the spectacle. But Hobbinol’s couplet balances young and old and grazing and planting such that the processes seem organically linked, as if Cromwell’s experience as a shepherd makes him a sympathetic prince. That Cromwell is old when he plants bays—representing both military victory and patronage of the arts—invests in the present political conWguration a great sense of future growth; the growth of the constitutional settlement and the growth of the dynasty in power. A concluding entry and chorus focus the organic society projected in Hobbinol’s praise of Menalca. The couple make an entry accompanied by the shepherds’ enthusiastic commentary: Tomalin praises Mary’s ‘catching’ (l. 18) eyes that lead innocent lambs astray; brieXy, he makes her sexy as an anti-shepherd, but without the hint of dispraise in the earlier reference to Frances, who as Venus sports with Anchises in the shade, like the bad shepherds in ‘Lycidas’. The shepherds collect themselves and resolve in a new carol to ‘Pay to Love and Them their due’ (l. 28). Their commentary on the entry has further diVerentiated them dramatically, giving their chorus an almost democratic authority. They sing of the social change eVected by the marriage; the pastoral community has been suspended about Marina and Damon’s unrivalled eligibility, but now that they have chosen one another, the community’s ‘Despair’ ends and the other shepherds can start to pair oV. The gentle Swain No more shall need of Love complain; But Virtue shall be Beauties hire, And those be equal that have equal Fire. (ll. 41–4)

These lines answer two traditions of political allegory—the court masque and Spenserian pastoral—that had contested the justice of access to power under the early Stuarts. The couple represent virtue and beauty, symbolism drawn from court masques such as Aurelian Townshend’s Tempe Restored, where the King and the Queen led masquers representing heroic virtue and beauty, and rewarded each with the other.71 In Spenserian pastoral, unrequited love often encodes political dissatisfaction.72 Here the gentle swain does not need to complain of 71 Lindley (ed.), Court Masques, 164. 72 See David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 59–156, 195–234.


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love any more, because the couple’s union realizes the reward of virtue always promised in masques like Tempe Restored. But the authority with which the chorus declares the couple the initiators of a new meritocracy is neither that of the prophetic outsider nor that of the court masque. The couple’s merits are enthusiastically asserted by the shepherds, their chorus, and the community of shepherds and nymphs, who will not marry before their leaders have picked matches. The justice to which those judgements adhere is presented as autonomous through commercial imagery: the shepherds resolve in chorus to ‘Pay to Love and Them their due’ (l. 28); ‘Virtue shall be Beauties hire’ (l. 43). The Stuart masque would typically unite political ideals with personal loyalties; even The Triumph of Peace has Dice forsake Jove’s court for her new father Charles’s.73 But Menalca only watches as the shepherds celebrate a political enfranchisement that is just according to their own appraisal, rather than by princely Wat. Furthermore, the marriage is only an auspicious instance of social change. The chorus’s refrain ‘Joy to that happy Pair, j Whose Hopes united banish our Despair’ (ll. 29–30) at Wrst sounds grandiloquent and authoritative, but the intervening lines develop the sense that it only dispels hopelessness. Damon and Marina release their society from its suspension, but its right ordering will be piecemeal: Now lesser Beauties may take place, And meaner Virtues come in play; While they, Looking from high, Shall grace Our Flocks and us with a propitious Eye. (ll. 35–40)

The chorus’s optimism is less serene than that of the deities that proclaim the transformations in the Stuart masques. As it touches the shepherds’ immediate interests, the verse suggests excitement with more rapid rhymes. The chorus’s authority is unchallenged within the second song; but the ironic dissonances of the Wrst song inXuence how an attentive and informed spectator might interpret their somewhat parochial hopefulness. In the earlier song, Cromwell’s power and interest are Wgured ironically through counter-narrative and ambiguity. The irony does not contradict the main narrative so much as throw it into relief as an attractive idealization of a complex of political and ideological compromises; Fauconberg has impressive merits, but his Wtness for oYce is subject to political contingencies. The second song re-allegorizes the alliance as the satisfaction of aristocratic social justice. That Cromwell used to be a shepherd implies sympathy, but not an identity of interests, with the shepherds singing the chorus. Their parochialism accentuates Cromwell’s apartness: they have the beginnings 73 James Shirley, The Triumph of Peace: A Masque (London, 1633), 15–16.

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of democratic authority, but for all its inheritance of masque imagery, the conclusion lacks Menalca’s gesture of endorsement. Waller’s entertainment ultimately writes Cromwell out of its ideal political settlement. There he is a benign military dictator who has secured the nation for the coming generation of politically moderate aristocrats. Marvell similarly looks forward to the Xedging of a new political generation, but more subtly nuances the representation and contingency of that future. The chorus of shepherds looks forward to the inXuence of Mary and Fauconberg, when from on high they will look after their interests. But Marvell makes a new pastoral which is at once politically hopeful and self-consciously innocent. Fauconberg will, like Cromwell, have to grow out of it before he can bring about the changes it intimates. He will have to engage with the real political world that the Wrst song placed in ironic tension with the gallant version of the couple’s story. To similar eVect, the second song ends by celebrating the propitiousness of the match with a chorus that sounds at once democratic and politically vulnerable. Marvell makes Cromwell’s awkwardness within the courtly spectacle unsettling for the imagined community of its participants. For Fauconberg’s merits to win him political power, he needs the backing of Cromwell. For Fauconberg’s ascent to turn into a more general revival of aristocratic liberties, the aristocracy depends on Cromwell’s continuing political support.

7 Oliver Cromwell’s Legacy: Elegies, Funerals, and the Succession Oliver Cromwell’s death prompted diverse and innovative elegies from Marvell, Waller, Dryden, and Thomas Sprat. But critics have on the whole found them unconvincing: they are ‘marked by uncertainty and a sense of dislocation’, and reveal ‘the impossibility of giving any kind of intellectual or emotional coherence or promise to the event of Oliver’s death in the generic terms available to funeral panegyric’.1 This chapter reads them against a number of rapidly published elegies that prematurely read the succession of Richard Cromwell, and the organization of a quasi-royal heraldic funeral, as a return to traditional dynastic order and values. Soon after Oliver’s death, the Council commissioned a state funeral, and by modelling it closely on the funeral of James I, including even a crowned eYgy of the Protector, it suggested to some another stage in the drift towards a Cromwellian monarchy, the groundwork for which had been laid in the previous year’s Humble Petition and Advice. During the funeral’s gestation, broadside elegies were published that conWdently celebrated Oliver’s martial achievements with heraldic and royal imagery, but the army also grew restless in this period, and oYcers began to challenge Richard’s authority from within the Council of State. For the later elegists at least, the revival of traditional state iconography and pageantry failed to provide a stabilizing focus for their disappointment, fears, and hopes for renewal. Marvell, Sprat, and Dryden in various ways distance themselves from the spectacle and its intimations of traditional orders re-established. Their poems, together with Waller’s prompt, but ambiguous, elegy to Oliver, sift Cromwell’s cultural legacy for the institutional foundations on which a new Protectorate can be built and the limitations that it must negotiate. They are marked not by dislocation but by a particular understanding of situation: of horizons that structure and restrict what might credibly be hoped for the future.

1 Hirst, ‘The Lord Protector, 1653–1658’, in John Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Longman, 1990), 119–48 (120); M. L. Donnelly, ‘‘‘And Still New Stopps to Various Time Apply’d’’: Marvell, Cromwell, and the Problem of Representation Midcentury’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1992), 154–68 (167).

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Oliver Cromwell’s Legacy

Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658. Over the next three months, a number of broadside elegies appeared which imply that he would be mourned in the manner of a king.2 The contributors to a Cambridge University anthology, which was published in 1658 and shows signs of hasty composition, must also have penned their elegies fairly promptly, and many of these works too stress conformity with traditional mourning patterns.3 A scholar compares the anthology’s publication to taking part in a stately funeral procession: Ask not why such poor cripple Alms-house verse Attend upon this noble persons herse; As hospitalls at funerals we see, So Cambridge here attests his charitie. (ll. 15–18)4

This avowal of participation picks up the identiWcation of occasional poetry with subjection that Loxley Wnds in the university anthologies of the 1630s, yet it also anticipates that the propriety of this form might be questioned; the selfdeprecation in its modesty perhaps masks anxiety over where the university’s proper place is in relation to this occasion, and how the university should display its grief. Oxford University, where vice-chancellor John Owen had been eVectively marginalized under Richard Cromwell’s chancellorship, stayed silent, allowing the writer of An Oxford Elegie and Thomas Sprat to speak for that institution. Similar anxieties are detectable in Peplum Olivarii, one of surprisingly few sermons on Oliver’s death to be published, which goes to a length in justifying Oliver’s grand and stately funeral rites that suggests nervousness that their propriety might be challenged.5 The preacher was George Lawrence, 2 Thomas Mayhew, Upon the Death of His Late Highness, Oliver Lord Protector (London, 1658); T. M., An Oxford Elegie . . . ([London(?)], 1658); John Rowland, Upon the Much Lamented Departure of the High and Mighty Prince, Oliver Lord Protector ([London(?)], 1658) [Thomason annotates 2 Oct.]; Thomas Davyes, The Tenth Worthy. . . ([London(?)], 1658) [Thomason annotates 5 Oct.]; Edmund Waller’s Upon the Late Storme, and the Death of His Highnesse Ensuing the Same (London, [1658]) was published as a broadside by Henry Herringman, which must have appeared shortly after Oliver’s death judging from a number of publications that echo, reply to, or satirize it (below, p. 168). On 20 Jan. 1659 Henry Herringman entered in the Stationers’ Register a volume of elegies by ‘Mr Marvell, Mr Driden, Mr Sprat’ (TRCS, ii. 211), but Marvell’s elegy was replaced by Waller’s when the collection was published later in the spring by the printer William Wilson as Three Poems upon the Death of His Late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector . . . (London, 1659): see Smith’s discussion in Marvell, 299. 3 The Wrst gathering is signed ‘*’, suggesting that the Wrst poems in the anthology, by senior university Wgures, were brought to the press late: Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio: Ille in Funere Oliveri Angliæ, Scotiæ & Hiberniæ Protectoris; Hæc de Ricardi Successione Felicissima ad Eundem (Cambridge, 1658). 4 Ibid. sig. H3. The link between ritual participation and elegy writing was especially strong in universities, where it was customary at the funerals of academics for colleagues to pin their elegies to black hangings in the church and to the pall. See Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 135. 5 George Lawrence, Peplum Olivarii: Or, A Good Prince Bewailed by a Good People . . . (London, 1658).


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a leading Presbyterian who may have hoped that a Ricardian Protectorate or monarchy (he anticipates a royal succession) would give Presbyterians more inXuence over the Church settlement; but his praise for Oliver’s ecclesiastical reforms is conciliatory.6 In fact, his political support for the Protectors is so indeterminate that he has to split hairs to distinguish them from Charles I, who, Lawrence insinuates, mourned his father insincerely.7 A characteristic common to many of the early elegies is that they imagine Oliver and Richard as constant, sustaining stays or centres in an unchanging social structure. Medical, cosmic, and architectural images are used liberally; even Benjamin Whichcote’s poem, which is more apocalyptic than most of the early elegies, uses physiological analogies to contrast the eVects of Christ and the Pope, implying that leadership should aspire to constancy.8 Oliver is ‘the States Atlas’ (l. 1) in John Rowland’s elegy, Richard is another Atlas in An Oxford Elegie (l. 57), and in Thomas Davies’s The Tenth Worthy he is ‘Europe’s Corner-pillar’ (l. 33). Such images are commonplaces, but they also reXect an impulse to elide the revolutionary episodes of Oliver’s career: generally the early elegies suppress the regicide, the interruption of parliaments, and the invention of a constitution, or at most touch on them euphemistically. Thus the Protectors are praised for virtues conducive to statecraft as the art of sustaining a political structure: Rowland stresses Oliver’s wisdom (ll. 3, 25); his legacy is that ‘most things do stand j In a fair posture’ (ll. 89–90). The Tenth Worthy celebrates how Oliver ‘whipt the Spaniard with an English rod’ (l. 26), turning him into a schoolmaster maintaining European discipline. In two elegies the rupture of Oliver’s death is imagined as the preservation of a higher institution: Rowland makes Oliver bow to the ‘Statute-Law that all must dye’ (l. 8); Mayhew’s Protector ‘by resignment of his dearest Breath j Proclaims aloud th’authority of Death’, which appears as a ‘meager Serjeant’ who ‘Arrests his Life’ (ll. 31–4). Language stressing the conservation of order is to be expected in elegies marking the death and succession of heads of state: the vulnerability of existing political structures at such times naturally made the eminent argue the attractiveness of preserving the status quo. However, the facility with which many of these early elegies call Oliver or Richard ‘king’, and use symbols of monarchy as metaphors, suggests that some who favoured the coronation of Richard used the conventionality proper to the occasion as an alibi under which to apply political pressure. Some authors of the broadside elegies have proved diYcult to identify, but John Rowland’s biography suggests that he would have been happy with a return

6 E. C. Vernon, ‘Lawrence, George (bap. 1613, d. 1691x8)’, in DNB; Lawrence, Peplum Olivarii, 26. 7 Lawrence, Peplum Olivarii, 22. 8 See, e.g., the poem by B. Turner in Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio, sigs. H1v–H2r; T. M., An Oxford Elegie, ll. 30–3; Mayhew, Upon the Death, ll. 43–4; Benjamin Whichcote’s poem in Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio, sigs. *2r–v.

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to monarchy.9 His elegy for Oliver praises him for his reluctance to take the crown, but compares him to Henry IV as he does so, inviting the inference that a new dynasty has begun (ll. 19–20). Many conceits in the early elegies assimilate Oliver’s life and legacy to heraldic language and imagery. An Oxford Elegie alludes to the Protectoral motto pax quaeritur bello as a paradox that sums up Oliver’s historical achievement (ll. 66–7), and re-imagines the victory at Dunbar and the prospect of a crusade against Rome and the Turk with heraldic imagery (ll. 75–6). Similarly, in several poems, the hurricane that swept England just before Oliver’s death becomes a heraldic funeral, which strips it of its ambiguous portentousness: ‘The Heav’ns seem’d hung with black’; ‘the Sun, j Hath put his Mourning Cloke, and dark Suit on’.10 Generally, these are obvious conceits, some of which are loosely based on the concept of heraldry encoding feats of valour. But the Good Old Cause or the omen at Oliver’s death did not smoothly and ineluctably resolve into the pageantry of a quasi-royal funeral in the eyes of everyone. Wither’s Salt Upon Salt criticizes the emptiness of the conceits in the early elegies (he refers to a number of ‘paper-monuments’ and speciWcally to Rowland and Waller), as prelude to a long critique in which he satirizes facile literary interpretations of the storm, and highlights discontinuities between Oliver’s expressions of Protestant plainness and the traces of Catholic ceremony in his funeral rites.11 The early elegies frequently allude to successions between Old Testament Wgures, but the parallels are rarely developed in such detail that they distinguish Oliver from other rulers.12 In the space of four lines, Thomas Mayhew compares Richard’s succession to those of Joshua, Elisha, and Solomon (ll. 49–52). These comparisons were also rehearsed in the congratulatory messages sent to Richard from counties, corporations, and regiments, which were published in Mercurius Politicus; indeed, a later pamphleteer took the ubiquitousness of the allusions for proof that Thurloe had ghost-written all the addresses.13 9 Rowland had been a royalist chaplain during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, and after his rectorship had been sequestered, he Xed abroad and wrote two tracts against Milton’s Wrst Defensio: [John Rowland], Pro Rege et Populo Anglicano Apologia Contra Iohannis Polypragmatici (Alias Miltoni Angli) Defensionem Destructivam, Regis & Populi Anglicani (Antwerp, 1652); idem, Polemica sive Supplementum ad Apologiam Anonymam Pro Rege . . . ([Antwerp(?)], 1653). Both Rowland and Mayhew greeted Charles II with panegyrics: John Rowland, His Sacred Majesty Charles the II. His Royal Title Anagramatiz’d (London, 1660); Thomas Mayhew, Upon the Joyfull and Welcome Return of His Sacred Majestie, Charls the Second (London, 1660). 10 Mayhew, Upon the Death of His Late Highness, l. 39; An Oxford Elegie, ll. 15–16. 11 George Wither, Salt Upon Salt: Made out of Certain Ingenious Verses upon the Late Storm and the Death of His Highness Ensuing (London, 1659), 1–5, 18–21. For Oliver’s funeral rites see Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 143–64; Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death . . . (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), 199–201, and below. 12 See, e.g., Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio, sig. H1r; Rowland, Upon the Much Lamented Departure, ll. 87, 94. 13 A True Catalogue: Or, an Account of the Several Places and Most Eminent Persons in the Three Nations, and Elsewhere, Where, and by Whom Richard Cromwell was Proclaimed Lord Protector . . . (London, 1659), 4.


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The iteration of these and other standard comparisons has the eVect of conventionalizing Oliver’s career rather than showing its signiWcance. Similarly, illustrating Oliver’s life with metaphors from heraldry, a code that asserts the constant values of aristocracy, assimilates history to an ostensibly timeless discourse, reasserting the adequacy of traditional codes and practices to contain political change. The plainest example of this kind of reduction occurs in Thomas Davyes’s The Tenth Worthy, which transforms Oliver into an inert national totem: He is not dead; nor can he die, whose Fame Will ever live in honor, and his Name So great in Albion, that S. George hath been Forgotten there, till on a Sign-post seen: S. David’n Wales, and Andrew for the Scot, Were ne’r so great as was this Patriot. S. Patrick was for Ireland renown’d, And France for glory have S. Dennis crown’d; Th’ Italian Anthony, and James for Spain, Did ne’r for them, as He for us did gain: The Dutch-man’s Champion that did Trump about, And for the ninth take in Gustavus stout; Yet read them all together in true story, You’ll Wnd them short of Oliver his glory. (ll. 39–52)

The European context implies a tacit comparison with Charles I’s ineVectiveness on the continental stage, but the diversity of the constitutional forms that supported leaders such as Gustavus Adolphus and Van Tromp makes Oliver’s power seem less anomalous. Davyes strips Oliver’s fame of any ideological signiWcance by his parallels, which reduce diverse historical Wgures to national champions, and homogenizes the passions that they might raise. But Waller’s elegy, which was also printed soon after Oliver’s death as a broadside, implies that Oliver’s heroism is a little more diYcult to assimilate to national culture and interests. He makes the great storm that occurred four days before Oliver died his leading theme, and renders it an instance of the pathetic fallacy: it ‘shakes our Isle’ (l. 3) and ravishes continental towns, but the violence of its destruction is answered by Waller’s consoling account of Oliver’s achievements, which he arranges as a smooth movement, a freeing of the English into maritime empire, permitting grief in the last lines so gentle that it almost seems like relief: And sighing swel’d the Sea, with such a breath That to remotest shores her Billowes rould, Th’approching Fate of her great Ruler told. (ll. 30–2)

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George Wither criticized this elegy at length in Salt Upon Salt: he reports that Opinion holds it ‘a smart neat Peece’, but argues that its ‘watrie-Circles’ elide the problems and contradictions of Oliver’s policies to make a poem of superWcial lightness.14 Wither is unfair in deeming Waller’s elegy uncritical, but right that Waller irons out Oliver’s career. Images of emancipation describe the successes of Oliver’s foreign policy: The Ocean which so long our hopes conWn’d Could give no limits to His vaster mind; Our Bounds inlargment was his latest toyle; Nor hath he left us Prisoners to our Isle; Under the Tropick is our language spoke, And part of Flanders hath receiv’d our yoke. (ll. 15–20)

Oliver’s political career began in the name of liberty, and even though he continued to use that rhetoric in his speeches, by 1658 it had come to Wgure a limited set of social freedoms.15 Increasingly, as the broadside elegies illustrate, attempts were made to justify the later Protectorate not by the condition of its subjects, but by rhetoric that fused conventional languages of empire with moderate chiliasm, to argue that Britain has a Protestant imperial destiny and that the Protectors are the instruments with which to realize it. Mayhew’s ‘Heav’n decreed that Conquest, so begun, j Should Wnish’d be by His Illustrious Son’ (ll. 25–6), and the projections of Rome humbled in An Oxford Elegie and The Tenth Worthy, are consistent with the prevailing tone of the elegies written after the 1657 death of Admiral Blake, who was celebrated as ‘Truths defender, Spains destroyer’ and ‘A Zealous Enemy of the Scarlet Whore’.16 Waller’s elegy for Oliver eschews Protestant militarism. Instead, it celebrates empire with images of liberation, smoothing Oliver’s career into an outward movement, through which Oliver unknots Britain into the realization of its overseas ambitions: From Civill Broyles he did us disingage, Found nobler objects for our Martiall rage; And with wise Conduct to his Country show’d Their ancient way of conquering abroade. (ll. 21–4)

14 Wither, Salt Upon Salt, 4–5. 15 See Oliver’s speech at the opening of parliament in Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iv. 718; I refer primarily to the abolition of the Star Chamber and increased liberty in worship. 16 Armitage, ‘Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, 546; Stocker and Raylor, ‘New Marvell Manuscript’, 124–46; George Harrison, An Elegie on the Death of the Right Honourable Robert Blake ([London], 1657), ll. 60, 171.


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By addressing the Wars of the Three Kingdoms after describing Oliver’s liberating imperialism, they are made to seem continuous with that outward-moving project and rhetoric. Oliver is compared to Romulus, a type for the Machiavellian principle of jus gentium: when the fabric of society has disintegrated, and it becomes unclear where the subject’s loyalty should lie, if a man of the sword steps forward and seizes power eVectively, his victory is a sign of God’s will, and he deserves loyalty.17 During the engagement controversy of 1650, when the Government decided to test its opponents by forcing them to sign a declaration of obedience, a republican version of this de facto argument had been advanced in government propaganda, and became the crucial dilemma of Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode’.18 But while Waller’s Romulus looks back to these arguments, the language also implies that Oliver’s ‘Conduct’ is justiWed and sustained by a mix of imperatives: ‘our Martiall rage’ is a constant, but Oliver restores it to its nobler objects, where noble is normative, suggesting the restoration of aristocratic dignity, and thus elevating the rhetoric of liberty above any insinuation of levelling; that our way of conquering is ancient accordingly suggests ambitions excited by the chivalrous heritage, and the movement concludes with the image of maritime dominion quoted above. Yet, where other early elegies integrate Oliver into structures and institutions of state, Waller’s man of the sword has restless, dynamic relations to his people: he acts upon or to them, disengaging them, Wnding them better objects of belligerence, and reminding them of their martial heritage; yet he does not settle in any kind of centre. In the above-quoted lines 17–20, the alternating possessive pronouns accentuate a drama played out between ‘our hopes’ and ‘His vaster mind ’. Notwithstanding Waller’s forceful elision of liberty, empire, and heritage, Oliver’s continental conquests are, however, somewhat bathetic: ‘part of Flanders hath receiv’d our yoke’. The disappointment is heightened by the building rhetoric of expansion, and the elegy’s brevity intensiWes these eVects. Waller hints that for all his heroic dynamism, Oliver’s campaigns produced only limited success on the continent, and that his liberating imperialism has perhaps found its natural end in dominion over the seas, which forms the elegy’s Wnal image. These dissonances cohere with some of the less Xattering connotations of Waller’s earlier analogy of Oliver’s death with Hercules’. The destruction caused by Waller’s storm metamorphoses into funeral rites that resemble the fate of that hero: On Oeta’s top thus Hercules lay dead With ruin’d Okes, and Pines about him spread;

17 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 175, 192–4, 280, 368, 379–80. 18 Blair Worden, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 525–47 (532–9).

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Oliver Cromwell’s Legacy Those his last fury from the Mountaine rent, Our dying Hero from the Continent Ravish’t whole Townes; and Forts from Spaniards reft As his last Legacy, to Brittain left. (ll. 9–14)

Waller is not the only elegist to compare Oliver with Hercules.19 But he alludes to the frightening violence of Hercules’ death, when the hero uprooted trees for his own funeral pyre while agonized by a poisoned robe.20 In Waller’s poem, his destructive fury is both pious, in that he builds the customary pyre, and destructive towards the social aspirations of his own culture, in that he tears down symbolic trees; a couplet omitted in the broadside publication, but later printed as lines 11–12, includes the poplar ‘whose bough he woont to wear j On his Victorious head’.21 In making their own funeral pyres, Hercules and Oliver are magniWcently autonomous; yet, while these qualities beWt ancient heroes, they are more awkward in a Protector. Oliver’s continental conquests are thus analogized as the actions of a great, but wild and singular, Wgure. Waller’s appraisal of Oliver is therefore more ambiguous than Wither’s reading allows: it hints that Oliver’s violence might not always have been productive. These suggestions of ambivalence are consistent with the Panegyrick’s vision of the Protectoral state’s interests and potential, and might also reXect Waller’s involvement with the Committee for Trade (above, p. 125). At the very least, his role would have entailed listening to the opinions of the merchant community, some members of which had become vocal against the Spanish war because it damaged their proWts.22 By 1658, an economic depression had begun, and merchants petitioned and pamphleted for an end to the war.23 By this point the Xaws in Oliver’s foreign policy were evident: maintaining and occupying the army and navy that Oliver required to secure himself and keep France and Spain in conXict was

19 Davyes, Tenth Worthy, l. 54; Mayhew, Upon the Death of His Late Highness, l. 24. 20 See, e.g., Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. and trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd edn., 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1977), ii. 16–17. 21 Three Poems upon the Death of His Late Highnesse, 31. 22 Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 100, 141; Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 241–6. Venning argues that the political vulnerability of the Protectorate forced Oliver Cromwell to prioritize the security of his government above all other interests in foreign policy: he determined to Wght Spain in order to keep France and Spain in conXict. When the war was debated by the Council of State, Lambert led a faction that opposed it, and one of his main arguments was the damage to trade: ibid. 46–9, 58–61. In the run-up to the 1656 election, the Protector was blamed for ‘the treasure exhausted, trade and commerce destroyed’: Englands Remembrancers: Or, a Word in Season to All English Men about their Elections of the Members for the Approaching Parliament (London, 1656), sig. A4r. 23 Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 141–4; see also Richard Baker, The Marchants Humble Petition and Remonstrance to His Late Highness (London, 1659), and Samuel Lambe, The Humble Representation of Samuel Lambe of London, Merchant ([London, 1658]).


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bankrupting the state.24 The Western Design had failed to Wnance itself, Dunkirk was proving very costly to garrison, and the City refused to loan Oliver any more money.25 Thus even though with the conquests in Flanders Oliver’s prestige rose in the gossip of European diplomats and courts, his glories would have seemed dreadfully precarious to more economically minded observers.26 Waller’s couplet ‘The Ocean which so long our hopes conWn’d j Could give no limits to His vaster mind ’ (ll. 15–16) might be read as a polite way of saying that Oliver’s territorial ambitions were unrealistic. Waller’s equivocations raise questions of where those limits should be, and by what they should be deWned: should Oliver’s heroic example and an ancient martial heritage inspire continental conquests or colonialism? Or is a maritime imperium a more sustainable and popular hope? Norbrook points out that Waller’s analogy of Oliver and Romulus hardly helps Richard (whom Waller does not mention), because after Romulus’s death, power to name his successor reverted to the Roman people, while Richard’s claim rested on the Humble Petition and Advice’s controversial emendation of the Instrument of Government, allowing the Protector to name his successor.27 But this is to pare the allusion’s implications down to a question of constitutional forms. Its ambiguity is more generously open. Livy’s Romulus vanishes in the middle of a sudden tempest, and is presumed to have been swept up by the gods. After an unstable year-long interregnum, the senate bows to the people’s wish for a king and elects Numa Pompilius, a man of justice and gentler piety who negotiates treaties with neighbouring tribes, and transforms Rome by making the people more devout and prosperous in the arts of peace.28 The Roman interregnum is so unsatisfactory that the example might discourage factional politicking and encourage quick acceptance of Richard, whose gentle manner corresponds to Numa’s typology: Machiavelli analyses Numa as a type of the peaceful ruler who succeeds the man of the sword.29 Explicitly, Waller’s 24 Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 104–5; For a publication that addresses the economic problems faced by the Protectorate regime at this time, see John Bland, Trade Revived, or, a Way Proposed to Restore, Increase, Inrich, Strengthen and Preserve the Decayed and Even Dying Trade of this Our English Nation . . . Whereby Taxes May Be Lessened . . . as also for the Payment of All the Souldiers Just Arrears (London, 1659). 25 Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy, 101, 142; France paid the regime a subsidy to maintain the war, but this did not balance the books, and could hardly be relied on for the future. See Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 231. 26 Venning, Cromwellian Fereign Policy, 248–51. 27 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 386. Thomas Mayhew ‘corrects’ Waller’s ambiguity, also beginning his elegy by comparing the storm to that which accompanied Romulus’s death and which appears to threaten ‘a Breach upon this State’ (l. 6); yet Richard appears as a sun that dispels the portent. 28 Livy, ed. E. H. Warmington et al., i: Books I and II, trans. B. O. Foster, 61–75. 29 Earl Malcolm Hause, Tumble-Down Dick: The Fall of the House of Cromwell (New York: Exposition Press, 1972), 78–85; Plutarch, Lives, i. 308–13; Niccolo` Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, trans. Leslie J. Walker, rev. Brian Richardson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 165–7; for Waller’s earlier reading of Machiavelli, see Raylor, ‘Reading Machiavelli; Writing Cromwell’, and Ch. 4 above.

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allusion parallels the sudden discontinuity of the two founding princes’ apotheoses. It provides a means of bracketing Oliver’s belligerence, so that his achievements can be celebrated with a tacit caveat that his successor might have to pursue a diVerent course. The ambivalence informs Waller’s stress on considered gratitude: ‘Ungratefull then, if we no Teares allow j To Him that gave us Peace, and Empire too’ (ll. 25–6), whereby he reminds readers of their debt to the Protector as if some might be liable to forget it. Maybe it also suggested the elegy’s surprising beginning, ‘We must resigne’ (l. 1): the sophisticated analogies with Romulus and Hercules insinuate that it is not simply Oliver who must be relinquished, but also a type of policy, because national potential is deWned by geography and economics—constituents of the unifying interests represented by the Panegyrick and Upon the Present War with Spain—as much as its leader’s heroism and vision. Waller’s elegy celebrates a Protector who might have overstepped the state’s interests, and by its ambiguous brevity suggests that his endorsement is determined more by those interests than by dynastic loyalty. The merchants’ protests also mark Samuel Slater’s A Rhetorical Rapture, but he construes Oliver’s awkwardness favourably as his resistance to an incompletely reformed world.30 Slater adopts a style close to satire to expose the points of conXict, and, like Marvell, he addresses the Protector’s funeral as the focus of deeper social tensions. After Cromwell’s death, the Council quickly determined to celebrate his funeral ‘with all honour and magniWcence’, despite the state’s near-bankruptcy and the threat of an army mutiny over pay arrears.31 By 23 November, when the procession took place, it would have displayed only lost solidarity: the Council had ceased to function eVectively, and Gilbert Pickering and Viscount Lisle distanced themselves from Richard, who sought advice from a small circle of advisers; Pickering marched in front of the crowned eYgy of Oliver as Lord Chamberlain, and Fleetwood marched after it as chief mourner, yet he and Desborough were at the same time challenging Richard openly and moving to limit his power.32 The replicated rites themselves would also have appeared less coherent than they had at the funeral of James I. Royal funerals were shows of continuity in government; yet many of the oYces instrumental in the Protectoral funeral’s organization and performance were created, adapted, or revived ad hoc. Recent studies have questioned the symbolic coherence of royal funerals generally, arguing that they were patchworks of conventions modishly imported from other courts and ceremonies. But funeral sermons provided a means of indicating how the elements of the funeral might be interpreted and related to one another.33 Thus, at the funeral of James I, Bishop 30 Samuel Slater, A Rhetorical Rapture as Composed into a Funeral Oration ([London], 1658). 31 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 164; Hause, Tumble-Down Dick, 107. 32 Hause, Tumble-Down Dick, 106–58; H. D., The Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness Oliver Late Lord Protector etc. In His Life and Death (London, 1659), 67–8. 33 Woodward, Theatre of Death, 175.


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Williams glossed the eYgy as an ‘ArtiWciall Repræsentation [which] shews . . . no more then his outward Body; or rather the Bodie of his Bodie’, to show that Charles was a better, ‘breathing Statue’ of his father.34 However, unlike James’s funeral, or the grand state funerals of Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex (1646) or Henry Ireton (1652), Oliver’s funeral omitted a homily. It made its way to Westminster Abbey; but once there, the eYgy and hearse were simply put on display. It has been suggested that this was simply because the procession overran, and reached the Abbey in darkness, where no provision had been made for lighting.35 On the other hand, funeral homilies could be doctrinally controversial. Scottish members of the Conference of Westminster boycotted Pym’s funeral, because it featured a sermon in the presence of the body, which they believed could be seen as part of the popish error of praying for the departed soul.36 Oliver’s funeral procession was justiWable as a civil ceremony by a loophole provided in A Directory for the Publique Worship of God, which condemns superstitious funerary practices such as praying for the dead, but allows whatever rites are deemed necessary to pay due ‘civil respects’: accordingly, sympathetic publications emphasized the funeral as a ‘ceremony of honor’.37 By accident or design, the ceremony was left without without its traditional climax and explication. Anecdotal evidence also suggests that the procession lacked authority: a schoolboy broke from the crowd and stole an escutcheon from the passing procession, and George Wither refers to this incident as evidence that the funeral was mere ‘formal mourning’; Evelyn reports that the soldiers hooted and drank; Wither also reports jeering by spectators about the funeral’s cost to taxpayers.38 Slater’s subtitle A Funeral Oration At the Mournfull Moving of his Highnes Stately EYgies from Somerset-House oVers the poem as an argument occasioned by the funeral procession, and even though the elegy’s tone is closer to the satire of Marston or Hall than the rhetoric of a sermon, it addresses the implications of the funeral rites in the place of an authoritative interpretation. Slater argues that Oliver’s fame is so great that Henry VII’s chapel in Westminster Abbey, where he was buried, could be renamed ‘Cromwell ’s Chappel’ (l. 11), and he concertinas history so that apocalyptic trumpets and Oliver’s resurrection in ‘bright Armour’ (l. 16) answer the present sounding of

34 Ibid. 179–80; John Williams, Great Britains Salomon: A Sermon Preached at the MagniWcent Funerall, of the Most High and Mighty King, James (London, 1625), 75–6. 35 John Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)’, in DNB. 36 John Morrill, ‘The Unweariableness of Mr Pym: InXuence and Eloquence in the Long Parliament’, in Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 19–54 (44–5). 37 Directory for the Publique Worship of God, 49; Gittings, Death, Burial, 230; H. D., Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness, 69. 38 Sherwood, Oliver Cromwell, 161; Evelyn, Diary, iii. 224; Wither, Salt Upon Salt, 16–18.

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his martial fame. Slater then uses this apocalyptic frame to question the procession’s destination: But soft, Must cromwell to an Abbey goe? The name of Abbeys is to Cromwell’s Foe: ’Tis true, That Nobles zeal was very hot; According unto Knowledge, Was it not? Knew Hee not too-too-well the Tromperies, The fond Fripperies of the Friaries, Dull Abbey-lubbers glutt’nous Luxury? (ll. 17–23)

Slater does not directly justify Oliver’s burial in the abbey. Rather, he triumphantly celebrates the reshaping of heraldic conventions according to a distinctively Protestant eschatology, and Oliver is the fulcrum around which the major changes occur. Slater reinterprets the heraldic elegy’s lineage topic imaginatively, showing how Oliver’s relatives have displaced Catholic practices and made Westminster Abbey their own, as he anticipates that Oliver’s name will ultimately replace Henry’s: Wrst Thomas Cromwell (the Cromwell alluded to as a foe of abbeys); then he mentions Oliver’s mother and daughter Elizabeth who are already buried there; the earth is described with martyr imagery as another mother; then Slater remarks that the exemplary Protestant princes Edward VI and Elizabeth I are buried in the chapel, and their dust Deposited in rich Carcanets, in trust Till glorious morn of Resurrection, Will (in a Land-skip of th’Ascention) To congratulate thy Sereness, rise, Flying quick into thy Followers eyes: Whence such an Inundation of Tears, That out-vied Thamesis, shrinking with Fears, Glides ghastly to the Main-Guard for recruit. (ll. 54–61)

At James I’s funeral, Charles I had made himself chief mourner (an importation from aristocratic funerals, where the heir was usually the chief mourner—Charles was the Wrst adult royal male to be available for this role since 1483), so that at the climax of the service he might perform exchange rituals symbolizing succession.39 These rituals were widely used, but risked identiWcation with their intercessionary roots.40 Slater imagines an ironic substitute exchange: the Protestant monarchs’ dust rises and gets into the eyes of Oliver’s followers, causing them to cry. The irony antithesizes the dust and Slater’s hints of pagan or Catholic rites: their dust rises as if parodying a church painting, and ‘rich Carcanets’ suggests ritual 39 Woodward, Theatre of Death, 180–4.

40 See ibid. 46–50.


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uses of wealth in burials, or merely pointless decoration of a corpse with jewellery.41 Slater makes morbid materialism an antidote to obsolete ceremony. An even more literal exchange follows: Go down into thy Western Vault . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Where, Worms do drive a very subtle Trade I’th Royal ’Change of (the Moons Hieroglyphick) The Arched Vault; by the Mysterious trick Of Bartering growing big as Burgesses, Trucking their Snips of Prince-worn TaVeries For whole pure Peeces of God-like durance: But (see the Wit of Justice!) though t’advance Themselves a-while by gourmandizing gains, They neither Day nor Night spare any pains, But to Corpulentize ravenous Wembs Anthropophagize even Royal Stems; Vengeance at last doth Covetousness repay, All Merchant-worms quite Breaking on Doomsday. (ll. 79–96)

Slater attempts to redress the anticlimax at the end of Oliver’s funeral by representing the omission of the sermon and exchanges as the positive reformation of the ceremony. Mystery surrounds the actual interment of Oliver’s body, which was performed secretly at some point before the funeral and was the subject of conXicting rumours at the time.42 But Slater creates an interment at the end of the procession and makes it a fulcrum in history: it harmonizes state ceremony and Protestant eschatology, and Oliver’s body becomes the powerful, reformative centre of national culture and the funeral’s ceremonial space. After the exchanges at an aristocratic funeral, the heir would process away from the church with the symbols of succession, the heralds, and the mourners, leaving the deceased’s servants to attend the interment. Slater contrasts how Oliver’s honour will not ‘back go with the Heralds: but fairly j Hovering o’re Thee, out of thy memory j Brood numberless Protectors to this Isle’ (ll. 125–7). Oliver’s charisma does not have any symbolic, transferable aspect that might be bestowed ceremonially on the heir; rather, it lies simply and unmovingly in his example, which will induce future Protectors to continue the work of reformation. But Slater’s reformative interment is not very convincing. He struggles to work the eYgy of Oliver, which was the ceremony’s true centre of attention, into the poem’s focused spatiality. He describes both the corpse and its eYgy as a ‘Center’, as if by 41 I take land-skip not to mean a genre of painting, but in one of its transferred senses of a representation or a view (OED, s.v. ‘landscape, n.’). 42 The secret interment was probably because the body had been badly embalmed and had started to putrefy. See John Morrill, ‘Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)’, in DNB.

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iteration alone he could unify them: the congregation watches, ‘each Heart j Entombing Thee our entombed Center’ (ll. 98–9); and Stand, in thy fair EYgies, erect, Admired Center of all Eyes: ReXect The Royal rayes of thy Majestick form Calmly on thy Spectators. (ll. 115–18)

Slater tries to make sense of an incoherent, anachronistic funeral, yet he himself represents it anachronistically: compared to the elegies by Waller, Dryden, Sprat, and Marvell, Slater’s language of cultural conXict and resolution seems dated. He aims at something like the voice of Marston or Joseph Hall at a time when tastes for satire preferred the melancholic wit of James Smith and John Mennes.43 His animus is unreconstructed: an insular heritage of Protestant worthies (Thomas Cromwell, Edward VI, Elizabeth I) is threatened by ‘Popish Potentates’ (l. 112), battle lines that reXect the anti-episcopal controversies of previous decades rather than the salient conXicts of the Protectorate. Praise of Oliver’s achievements is limited by these horizons: he makes the reparations that the Dutch agreed to pay for the 1623 massacre of English Protestants in Amboyna the deWning feature of Oliver’s treaty with the Dutch, and even though Slater is clearly preoccupied with Church reformation, the most he can say of Oliver’s institution building is that he ‘ReWn’d Parliaments’ (l. 188).44 Oliver is recommended as a ‘Mirrour to Christian Magistrates’ (l. 111), an allusion to A Myrroure for Magistrates, the insular collection of moral histories of princes that had been popular between 1559 and 1610 and culminated in an edition that framed Elizabeth I as the redeemer of British history.45 Slater’s nostalgic vision is not a product of political innocence, in so far as he was an active minister not only in London (he was a Lecturer at St Katherine by the Tower), but also in Bury St Edmunds, which had a history of religious radicalism: his correspondence shows that he took a keen interest in issues dividing the churches of SuVolk, and dedicated to the people of Bury a sermon delivered to local Justices of the Peace on the occasion of Oliver’s death, warning that the town harbours ‘many enemies to the Churches purity’.46 Slater’s nostalgia 43 N. Smith, Literature and Revolution, 310. Smith notes that John Phillips unconvincingly attempted to revive the voice of Hall in A Satyr against Hypocrites (London, 1655); see also Timothy Raylor, Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture: Sir John Mennes, James Smith, and the Order of the Fancy (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses, 1994). 44 The Amboyna issue was emotive, but hardly the pressing concern in treaty negotiations: see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 92–3, 181. 45 Paul Vincent Budra, ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the De Casibus Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 37–8. 46 Joel Halcomb, ‘Congregational Church Practice and Culture in East Anglia, 1642–1662’ (unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, Cambridge University, 2006), 45; Samuel Slater, The Protectors Protection: Or, the Pious Prince Guarded by a Praying People (London, 1659), A3r. Slater’s The Two Covenants from Sinai, and Sion (London, 1644) implies earlier links to puritan East Anglia. He was


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is perhaps, rather, an indication that Protectoral institutions had failed to create a new world in SuVolk, where the East Anglian puritan hegemony of the 1640s and early 1650s (a hegemony that had been instrumental in Oliver’s rise) had enabled the church to be purged more drastically than in other counties, but that inertia faltered under the Protectorate, as radicals challenged the development of a Church settlement, and a depression in trade damaged the county’s economy and provoked political dissent.47 Perhaps to compensate for these frustrations, Slater tries to represent Cromwell’s funeral as a symbolically reformed institution, which might crystallize a Cromwellian cause and achievement more persuasively than the heraldic elegies’ lists of his triumphs. Yet the contradictions surrounding the funeral perhaps prove too stubborn; he addresses them only by displacing them to the vault of Westminster Abbey, where the ghosts of Tudor reformation can be invoked to marginalize protesting merchants. Marvell wrote ‘A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’ at a crucial moment in his career and the history of the Protectorate: he was preparing to enter politics as a court party MP in Richard’s Wrst parliament, but as Marvell’s star seemed poised to rise, Richard’s began to decline. Marvell was to contest the Hull election against the republican leader Sir Henry Vane, and even though the dubious electoral methods of Richard’s court party ensured that he beat Vane on 20 January 1659 (ten days before Henry Herringman registered Marvell’s elegy with the Company of Stationers), the increasingly blatant deWance of Richard shown by a party of army oYcers meeting at Wallingford House would have made it very apparent to Marvell that the authority of Richard’s court was weak.48 Marvell’s elegy is intended to elicit sympathy for Richard, but it is also realistic about the nature of Protectoral authority. It sets the uncertainty of that authority and Oliver’s achievements in a light that makes them seem consequences of changes in the aspirations and religiosity of the elite. Yet, at the same time, Oliver is shown as the embodiment and champion of those changes. The architect of The First Anniversary, the man who had found an Archimedian purchase on the spinning world and who could resist watery time, has gone: Oliver is the prince who is also a man, and Xuidity becomes an image of Oliver’s humility, which is both his political talent and his limitation. It Wts him to be the readiest ejected by the 1662 Act of Uniformity, after which he began a long career as a Dissenting minister. He published a number of sermons and a collection of poems during his lifetime: see John William Draper (ed.), A Century of Broadside Elegies . . . (London: Ingpen and Grant, 1928), 80. 47 Alan Milner Everitt, SuVolk and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660 (Ipswich: SuVolk Records Society, 1960), 11–16, 31, 36; Bury St Edmunds had always been more politically divided than East SuVolk. See B. G. Blackwood, ‘Parties and Issues in the Civil War in Lancashire and East Anglia’, in R. C. Richardson (ed.), The English Civil Wars: Local Aspects (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 261–85 (270). For an assessment of the successes and failures of East Anglian Congregationalist churches under the Protectorate, see Halcomb, ‘Congregational Church Practice’, 78–86. 48 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 389; Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (London: Little, Brown, 1999), 96.

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instrument of an unpredictable providence, yet it is grounded in the practices and liturgies of the puritan household: institutions far more contentious than those that distinguished authority in the past. Norbrook characterizes the diVerence between The First Anniversary and ‘A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’ as a shift from the sublime to the beautiful: the abandonment of the Instrument of Government in favour of a form of government closer to monarchy necessitated Marvell soliciting a diVerent kind of sympathy for the new dynasty, praising Oliver’s feminine attributes rather than his Machiavellian virtu´, so that Richard might seem less disappointing.49 My reading diverges in the character of the beauty that Marvell attributes to the Protectoral family: it is distinguished not so much by gender as by class. In the Wrst section, Marvell represents Oliver’s death as provoked by the death of his daughter a short while before, but the familial tenderness shown in this passage sets the Cromwells apart from royal and aristocratic families. Streight does a slow and languishing Disease Eliza, Natures and his darling, seize. Her when an infant, taken with her Charms, He oft would Xourish in his mighty Arms; And, lest their force the tender burthen wrong, Slacken the vigour of his Muscles strong; Then to the Mothers breast her softly move, Which while she drain’d of Milk, she Wll’d with Love. (ll. 29–36)50

Puritan writers urged maternal breast-feeding from the beginning of the seventeenth century, but with the exception of a few puritanically minded aristocrats, the upper classes continued to use wet nurses into the later eighteenth century.51 The women likely to breast-feed in the 1650s belonged either to the lower classes or to the middle-class families targeted by the tracts.52 Similarly, most aristocrats saw their children rarely, or sent them away; but in the seventeenth century, professional people, wealthy merchants, and the squirearchy, and especially the more godly members of these groups, began to devote regular time to their children, playing with them and encouraging physical aVection.53 Thus, in describing how the Protector ‘with a Grandsire’s joy her Children sees j Hanging

49 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 386–8. 50 There are problems regarding the relative authority and completeness of early texts of this poem (see Marvell, pp. xiv, 299), so I quote from Margoliouth’s old-spelling edited text (Poems and Letters, i. 129–37). 51 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977), 426–9. 52 Ibid. 429; Mary Abbot, Family Ties: English Families: 1540–1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), 105. 53 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 405–8, 433, 451–2.


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about her neck or at his knees’ (ll. 49–50), Marvell implies that behind Hampton Court’s walls, the Protectoral family lived in a manner that would have appealed to these powerful classes, and particularly the godly among them. As he narrates the family’s double tragedy, he delineates a tenderness that is formed through restraint as much as generosity. Just as Oliver checks his force when cradling the baby Eliza, so he veils his grief as she dies: She lest He grieve hides what She can her pains, And He to lessen hers his Sorrow feigns: Yet both perceiv’d, yet both conceal’d their Skills, And so diminishing increast their ills. (ll. 61–4)

Marvell sets oV the sober aVections of the Cromwell family against cruder passions. Oliver’s death would appear anti-climactic to the theatre-going mob: The People, which what most they fear esteem, Death when more horrid so more noble deem; And blame the last Act, like Spectators vain, Unless the Prince whom they applaud be slain. (ll. 7–10)

In 1658 tragedies would have been performed secretly and rarely, if at all.54 Marvell refers to public theatre banned many years before; his scorn is therefore directed at preferences that are somewhat outdated as well as common. My previous chapter argued that chamber music and singing were fashionable, and more to the liking of the Protector as well as the groups that might admire breastfeeding; so when Marvell compares the mutual sympathy of Eliza and Oliver to notes plucked on a stringed instrument, or laments that Oliver will no longer be able to listen to Frances singing, he equates Cromwellian emotions with tastes to which the puritan constituency would aspire. Indeed, his readers might be forgiven for suspecting that the theatres were really closed on grounds of taste. Marvell praises humility which is yet socially inXected: Who now shall tell us more of mournful Swans, Of Halcyons kind, or bleeding Pelicans? No downy breast did ere so gently beat, Or fan with airy plumes so soft an heat. For he no duty by his height excus’d, Nor though a Prince to be a Man refus’d. (ll. 79–84)

The bird emblems are heavily associated with Oliver’s adversaries. The swan, halcyon, and pelican are used as Catholic emblems of martyrdom, the Virgin, 54 Randall, Winter Fruit, 37–50, 248–74.

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or the cruciWxion, and they were taken up by Charles and his supporters: the halcyon became an image of Charles’s rule in the iconography of his court, and the pelican is a code for the martyred Charles in at least two posthumous publications, The Princely Pellican (1649) and Sir William Denny’s Pelecenicidium (1653).55 Marvell’s question might be construed: ‘what prince could better explicate the meaning of these royal emblems?’ or ‘who, after this, will continue to go on about royalist emblems?’ Oliver’s humility surpasses Charles’s, and renders its iconography obsolete. Thus Marvell’s argument that Oliver dies anti-climactically is ironic: he mourns and dies not like any man, but like a reWned, well-to-do puritan, and only the uncouth or unreconstructed would Wnd it bathetic. I have argued that Oliver was mourned awkwardly; Marvell’s ironies seek to redirect the disappointment or frustration with Protectoral aulic ceremony that sceptical readers like Slater might have felt. Throughout the poem Marvell stresses that, despite its apparent reversion to quasi-monarchical protocols, Oliver’s court was driven by the ‘tempered’ humility shown Wrst through his family life: We (so once we us’d) shall now no more, To fetch day, presse about his chamber-door; From which he issu’d with that awfull state, It seem’d Mars broke through Janus’ double gate; Yet always temper’d with an aire so mild, No April sunns that e’re so gently smil’d; No more shall heare that powerful language charm, Whose force oft spar’d the labour of his arm: No more shall follow where he spent the dayes In warre, in counsell, or in pray’r, and praise; Whose meanest acts he would himself advance, As ungirt David to the arke did dance. (ll. 231–42)

Marvell anticipates a pamphlet written by ‘one that was then Groom of his bedchamber’ (probably Charles Harvey or Henry Walker), which also seeks to persuade readers that Oliver’s court was diVerent from those of other princes.56 It makes the court insider a witness to Oliver’s humility as his daughter dies and his own health fails, and it echoes the Marshall frontispiece to Eikon Basilike (1649) by describing Oliver anticipating ‘a better Crown’.57 It implies that 55 See Huston Diehl, An Index of Icons in English Emblem Books: 1500–1700 (Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), 112, 161, 201. Dolores Palomo, ‘The Halcyon Moment of Stillness in Royalist Poetry’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981), 205–21. 56 [Charles Harvey(?), or Henry Walker (?)], A Collection of Several Passages Concerning His Late Highnesse Oliver Cromwell, in the Time of His Sickness . . . (London, 1659). 57 Ibid. 3.


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Oliver’s inaccessibility was a condition of his attractive spiritual simplicity, and the obstructive attendant turns expositor. Traditionally, protocols of access regulated a hierarchy aspiring to intimacy and privacy with the King, but this principle is here overlaid with distinctively puritan aspirations: at the centre of the court is Oliver’s exemplary covenant with God. The intimacy of being privy to a prince’s hidden counsels is altered to the ‘intimate acquaintance’ that Oliver’s ‘nearest and narrowest observers’ enjoyed with him ‘in the Lord’.58 The author re-spiritualizes the arcana imperii by making the Protectoral chamber a space that oVers invaluable instruction in ‘the Mysteries of godliness’, and ‘the wonderful Insight hee had attained unto, and clearness in the Covenant of Grace . . . that great secret of Gods election’; ‘in these things hee was wonderfully instructed, and able to instruct’.59 The author stresses that what he discloses is only a small part of Oliver’s spiritual insights, but the book’s purpose is not entirely didactic: its preface addresses Oliver’s example to his family and personal relations, ‘in order to a Timely Return, lest a worse thing befall us . . . than . . . wee (at present) feel or fear’, and to ‘such in great place and power’ so that they might not succumb to temptations that Oliver had resisted.60 The concluding paragraph hopes that the remaining ‘branches’ of the Cromwell family will continue his work of reformation.61 Thomason’s date notwithstanding, this call for order in the Cromwell family suggests that the book was completed while Fleetwood and Desborough (who were both Richard’s near relations) were threatening Richard, but before his cause was lost completely in early May. The book argues to the divided puritan constituency that the now-cracking Protectorate system was not merely a political court, one system among many that might lead the nation, but a concentration of grace and a means of distributing it to the godly, as the groom is doing in this book. Marvell too is a witness to the inner life of Oliver’s court, and while his position is not so clearly stated as the groom’s, his voice is more personalized and situated than it is in The First Anniversary, particularly at the climax of the poem when he describes the appearance of Oliver’s corpse, which was never displayed to the public. Marvell certainly had insider knowledge of the workings of the court, as his diplomatic duties in the Protectoral Latin OYce included taking messages to Hampton Court and explaining Oliver’s incapacity to foreign ambassadors.62 Indeed, it appears from Herringman’s entry in the Stationers’ Register of an elegy by ‘Mr Marvell’ that the poet might at one stage have planned to publish the poem under his name (The First Anniversary was published anonymously). But whereas the groom implies that Oliver’s example oVers a solution to political woes, in Marvell’s elegy, Oliver’s humility is also frustrating:

58 Ibid. 3. 59 Ibid. 4–5. 60 Ibid. 2–3. 61 Ibid. 21. 62 Nicholas von Maltzahn, An Andrew Marvell Chronology (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 52–3.

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Oliver Cromwell’s Legacy If some dear branch where it extends its life Chance to be prun’d by an untimely knife, The Parent-Tree unto the Grief succeeds, And through the Wound its vital humour bleeds; Trickling in watry drops, whose Xowing shape Weeps that it falls ere Wx’d into a Grape. So the dry Stock, no more that spreading Vine, Frustrates the Autumn and the hopes of Wine. (ll. 93–100)

In the Wrst of several images that associate his virtues with elusive Xuidity, Oliver Xows away before he can be Wxed into something socially useful; the qualities that make him an attractive family man have ultimately disappointed a wider society. This image, rich in pastoral and biblical symbolism, concludes the Wrst section of the poem; but it also sets as Marvell’s central concern the social eYcacy of Oliver’s virtue, particularly his humility, in relation to the regeneration of the elect nation. Scaliger’s formal analysis of the elegy, which was very inXuential in the early modern period, prescribes Wve parts: praise, demonstration of loss, lament, consolation, and exhortation.63 ‘A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’ features similar movements, but they are integrated with a more sophisticated formal syntax that questions how the conventions of public praise and grief, which include the funeral, elegies, and the heraldic codes that they each draw on, can oVer consolation and guidance appropriate to Oliver’s case. Marvell’s description of the storm suggests the magnitude of the nation’s loss. Waller’s storm conXates the portent of Oliver’s death (the storm occurred shortly before Oliver died) with his funeral and apotheosis.64 For Marvell the signiWcance of the storm is not quite as apparent. After several hypotheses he settles on the secret cause being ‘Heav’n, which us so long foresees, j Their fun’rals celebrates while it decrees’ (ll. 107–8). Like Waller and others, Marvell makes the storm into a natural funeral for Oliver, but his pathetic fallacy includes images of destruction that further develop the theme of a frustrated harvest. The thunder is like an artillery salute, and the winds attempt to match its force: ‘Out of the Binders Hand the Sheaves they tore, j And thrash’d the Harvest in the airy Xoore’ (ll. 117–18). He reverses images of the creation from Virgil’s Georgics, where Neptune created warlike horses from the earth; but Marvell’s storm sees them dying in hecatomblike numbers (ll. 123–6).65 Payne Fisher and George Wither, among others, drew

63 G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 42–3. 64 Wither criticizes the conXation, but himself antedates the storm to a week before Oliver died: Salt Upon Salt, 8. 65 Marvell, 307.


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on Georgic themes and images in panegyrics of Oliver.66 Marvell’s destruction seems to symbolize the undoing of ‘Georgic’ national reconstruction. Again Oliver is described as Xowing, and his motion, like a sunset in a clear sky, is contrasted to the storm’s noise and the natural civil war he leaves behind: And as through Air his wasting Spirits Xow’d, The Universe labour’d beneath their load. Nature it seem’d with him would Nature vye; He with Eliza, It with him would dye. He without noise still travell’d to his End As silent Suns to meet the Night descend. (ll.131–6)

The verse paragraphs accentuate discontinuity in Oliver’s death and apotheosis: Oliver has already died at least once in the poem, and his sunset here adds another death. But amid these disjointed omens of chaos and despair, the poet Wnds a sign that is a blessing: fate determines his death for 3 September, the date of his pivotal victories at Dunbar and Worcester; the coincidence was ubiquitously remarked as a sign of Providential endorsement in the elegies and addresses, but Marvell makes it a more active grace, in that it reminds those who would have joyed at his death of their own griefs, while those who would have despaired are cheered at the memory of his achievements; accordingly, the day rallies an anti-Spanish push in Flanders (ll. 153–4). The tone and meaning of Marvell’s framing hypothesis—the storm is heaven foreseeing and commemorating Oliver’s death—changes with this graceful coincidence of dates. The storm is a natural, heaven-endorsed funeral to refocus and rally the nation’s elect: O Cromwell, Heavens Favorite! To none Have such high honours from above been shown: For whom the Elements we Mourners see, And Heav’n it self would the great Herald be . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Then let us too our course of Mourning keep: Where Heaven leads, ’tis Piety to weep. (ll. 157–66)

The authority of the heraldic funeral depended on the heralds. They organized the procession, authorized the heraldry used, and wore the King’s arms to show the origin of their authority. At Oliver’s funeral the heralds wore the Protectoral

66 Payne Fisher, Veni, Vidi, Vici: The Triumphs of the Most Excellent & Illustrious Oliver Cromwell . . . , trans. Thomas Manley (London, 1652), 63–4; Anthony Low, The Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); see also Nigel Smith’s discussion of Low’s argument in Literature and Revolution, 285.

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arms and carried symbols of Oliver’s authority before the eYgy; these included golden spurs and a gauntlet, and the lead herald carried a crown.67 But in Marvell’s elegy heaven displaces them with its greater authority. The storm is the culmination of a series of signs that Oliver’s actions are particularly blessed, and becomes the focus for transformations in the authority and meaning of the public mourning rites. To imagine Oliver’s relationship with heaven as courtly favour, and providence’s signs of that favour as a heraldic funeral, is both to legitimize and reform the traditional courtly protocols of mourning. Heaven authorizes them in the sense that it consoles the poet that rites of grief and commemoration are appropriate; but to do so, heaven usurps the symbolism of the King and the aristocratic structures signiWed in heraldry, making the old social meanings and eYcacies of those rites relatively unimportant. This logic meshes importantly with two strands of the social and political context. First, the authority of the heralds had been decaying since the turn of the century, as some aristocrats created a fashion for less arcane night-time funerals.68 Secondly, the founders of the Protectorate had to challenge the paradigm in which English law and institutions were an unchanging sempiternal body, upon which ground many had Wrst resisted the King.69 Oliver often justiWed the piecemeal constitutional innovations by appeals to the higher authority of divine calling.70 Marvell represents Oliver’s funeral as a watermark, a moment of lucidity perhaps, in these processes of change, through which the authority of God has become more direct in aVairs of government, but at the expense of traditional hierarchies of order. By calling Oliver heaven’s favourite (as opposed to heaven’s chancellor), Marvell likens heaven’s delegation of authority to the most contentious form of earthly empowerment: the lines would perhaps remind the reader more of Buckingham’s funeral than that of a broadly respected earl.71 They hint that this quality of authority is unstable. Heraldic conventions extend into elegy: the deceased’s lineage and chivalrous achievements, represented through banners in a funeral, were standard elegiac topics, and many elegies for Oliver list predominantly military achievements. Marvell reinterprets these generic conventions in the wake of his pivotal redeWnitions of Protectoral authority around the aspirations of the well-to-do puritan family, and the logic of humility, grace, and human agency consistent with those aspirations. Towards the end of his epideictic section, Marvell lists a set of human Cromwellian qualities to challenge the heroic consensus: ‘Valour, 67 H. D., Pourtraiture of His Royal Highness, 15. 68 Woodward, Theatre of Death, 140–3; Gittings, Death, Burial, 188–215. 69 See Klein, ‘Ancient Constitution Revisited’. 70 See, e.g., Oliver’s speech at the opening of the second Protectorate parliament: in 1656: Cromwell, Writings and Speeches, iv. 277–8. 71 Buckingham’s torchlight funeral procession to Westminster Abbey was greeted with joy by some among the crowd: see Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1592–1628 (London: Longman, 1981), 458.


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religion, friendship, prudence’ (l. 224). Marvell characterizes these virtues as expansions of the conventional topics of heraldic elegy: chivalrous achievement and good breeding. Marvell Wrst lists Oliver’s glories as they were standardly enumerated by Waller and the other broadside elegists: Who once more joyn’d us to the Continent; Who planted England on the Flandrick shoar, And stretch’d our frontire to the Indian Ore; Whose greater Truths obscure the Fables old, Whether of British Saints or Worthy’s told; And in a valour less’ning Arthur’s deeds, For Holyness the Confessor exceeds. (ll. 172–8)

As Oliver surpassed Charles in his typical qualities, he now surpasses the other British types, and these lines oVer a clarifying contrast with the facile comparisons in Davyes’s The Tenth Worthy.72 He is superior because he combines conventional noble virtues with godly passions. ‘He Wrst put Armes into Religions hand, j And tim’rous Conscience unto Courage man’d’ (ll. 179–80); he is ventriloquized teaching his soldiers that by marrying these seeming opposites they extend their compass: ‘Those Strokes he said will pierce through all below / Where those that strike from Heaven fetch their Blow’ (ll. 183–4). The paragraph addressing Oliver’s lineage exalts his great-grandfather’s taking the Cromwell name after he had been adopted by Thomas Cromwell. The house is founded though friendship, a ‘sacred virtue’ (l. 201), which makes Oliver expand his fatherly aVection to all ‘the children of the Highest’ (l. 212). His tendernesse extended unto all. And that deep soule through every channell Xows, Where kindly nature loves itself to lose. (ll. 204–6)

Here, as with the strokes from heaven, Marvell creates images of an extension of movement and reforms elegiac conventions radically, melding constituent concepts that more traditionally deWne by contrast, such as pity and violence (ll. 196–7) or blood and friendship. The godly family can channel the tenderness which might overwhelm a more narrowly genealogical tree; yet the image and cadence of ‘lose’ hints again that Oliver’s nourishing virtue dissipates; perhaps there is even the suggestion that Oliver overextended himself in distributing the animating virtues of his family through the nation. By assimilating noble values to a godly perspective (the opposite of the assimilation typical of more conventional elegies), Marvell changes the criteria for what counts as an achievement. Self-consciously challenging his own slickly 72 Marvell, 308.

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Wallerian couplet on Jamaica and Dunkirk (ll. 173–4), Marvell writes a new list of exemplary battles to a diVerent rhythm. Cityes strong were stormed by his prayer; Of that for ever Preston’s Weld shall tell The story, and impregnable Clonmell. And where the sandy mountain Fenwick scal’d, The sea between, yet hence his pray’r prevail’d. What man was ever so in Heav’n obey’d Since the commanded sun ore Gibeon stay’d? (ll. 186–92)

The salient conquests are not the famous strategic victories, but occasions when Oliver prevailed supernaturally. The examples illustrate the multiformity of Heaven’s intervention as much as its force. Marvell turns the siege of Clonmel, Cromwell’s most famous military defeat, into a victory by grace (Cromwell lost 2,000 soldiers in a botched assault, but eventually reduced the town by conceding generous terms with town’s mayor after the enemy slipped away).73 Cromwell presided over a day of fasting and prayer at court while Lieutenant-Colonel Fenwick fought a battle for Dunkirk in his name.74 Marvell’s question demands an understanding of the complex dynamics of grace that encompasses Joshua’s direct command to the overhead sun—an inversion of a conventional image of authority—and Oliver’s distant prayers for a blessing on his proxy.75 His greatness is not a matter of military endeavour alone, as his more conservative elegies would have it, but the ways in which his prayers and humility were answered with success: how he ‘conquer’d God, still ere he fought with men’ (l. 194). Marvell is shown the way by providence superseding the heralds at Oliver’s obsequies, but such an authority changes the nature of those obsequies and the task of giving the dead their due. Funeral conventions no longer assert the immutability of the aristocratic order and its criteria of honour; instead, they become instruments of teleology, revealing Oliver’s crucial, reformative intimacy with the divine purpose. In this respect Marvell’s argument resembles Slater’s elegy, in which Oliver’s burial is the fulcrum around which funeral ceremony aligns itself with Protestant eschatology. But whereas Slater anchors Oliver’s cultural centrality in a particular place in time and London, Marvell’s Oliver is a more mobile centre: his covenant with God prevails at Preston, Clonmel, and Dunkirk; he dies at Hampton Court, but is also shown bursting into the thick of government at Whitehall; his funeral procession follows a violent and unpredictable heaven rather than an urban route to Westminster Abbey. Oliver’s mobility is set oV by the formal complexity of Marvell’s elegy, which deliberately frustrates the reader’s expectation of a more 73 Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution: 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 476–7. 74 Ibid. 309. 75 Josh. 10: 12–14.


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conventional syntax of parts, such as Scaliger’s ‘course of Mourning’ through praise, demonstration of loss, lament, consolation, and exhortation. Heaven’s show of favouritism is only ambivalently a consolation, or perhaps only praise and proof of great loss: it leads Marvell’s narrator to feel more desperately abandoned: ‘we death’s reVuse nature’s dregs conWn’d j To loathsome life, alas! are left behind’ (ll. 229–30). At line 247, Marvell focuses and intensiWes his themes. Hitherto he has set the disappointments of Oliver’s life and death in a syntax to provoke critical reevaluations: Oliver’s apparently anti-climactic demise is inextricably linked to the qualities that made him a man for the times socially, politically, and eschatologically. He reveals the limitations of inherited literary forms as much as they reveal his. It is entirely Wtting, therefore, that the poem climaxes with a startling breach of decorum, when Marvell describes the corpse of the Protector, which had been hidden from public view and buried secretly. I saw him dead, a leaden slumber lyes, And mortal sleep over those wakefull eyes: Those gentle rays under the lids were Xed, Which through his looks that piercing sweetnesse shed; That port which so majestique was and strong, Loose and depriv’d of vigour, stretch’d along: All wither’d, all discolour’d, pale and wan, How much another thing, no more than man? Oh! humane glory, vaine, oh! death, oh! wings, Oh! worthlesse world! oh transitory things! Yet dwelt that greatnesse in his shape decay’d, That still though dead, greater than death he lay’d; And in his alter’d face you something faigne That threatens death, he yet will live again. (ll. 247–60)

Marvell stresses a near-paradoxical greatness that impresses through its humanity; yet, by contemplating it so starkly, he shows another instance of puritan practice at the heart of the Protectoral court. In addition to its loophole for ‘civil respects’, the Directory of Publique Worship of God recommends ‘Christian friends, which accompany the dead body. . . do apply themselves to meditations, and conferences suitable to the occasion’; these are deWned against the ‘customs of kneeling down and praying by or toward the dead corps, and other such usages in the place where it lies, before it be carried to Burial, [which] are superstitious: and for that praying, reading, and singing both in going to and at the grave have been grossely abused, [and] are no way beneWcial to the dead’.76 The corpse provides visual cues for a meditation on the eschatological topics of bodily death and judgement; 76 Directory for the Publique Worship of God, 49.

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but, for all its apocalyptic resonance, the lingering, consoling greatness that Marvell Wnds in Oliver’s corpse resists visual Wxity. Subsequent lines elaborate this diYculty, explicating Oliver’s frustrating resistance to monumental praise with a modiWed analogy of social authority. Marvell compares the corpse’s intimation of rebirth to a ‘sacred oak’, which is a conduit between heaven and earth and also a civic focus bearing victors’ wreathes. Enraged by human sin, God strikes down his own plant; but fallen, it becomes greater: The tree ere while foreshortned to our view, When fall’n shews taller yet than as it grew: So shall his praise to after times encrease, When truth shall be allow’d, and faction cease, And his own shadows with him fall; the eye Detracts from objects than itself more high: But when death takes them from that envy’d seate, Seeing how little we confess, how greate; Thee, many ages hence, in martial verse Shall th’English souldier, ere he charge, rehearse. (ll. 269–78)

The analogy might be contrasted with an elegy for James I by Thomas Heywood, in which he compares the King to an oak sheltering his subjects. By his protection cheer’d and kept alive, Their growth and beauties multiply and thrive, Sweld with increase, their boughs on him depending, Laden with ripe fruits to the ground even bending, Both shadowed from the Winters bleake extremes, And (in the Summer) the Sunnes scorching beames. Yet this faire Dodon Oake, late all-commanding, Hath in his mightie ruine left them standing: And not (as we have seene) great buildings fall, Crushing and shattering beneath them, all. (ll. 11–20)77

James’s shadows are protective, and he falls miraculously without damaging his subjects; but Marvell’s oak is obscured by its shadows, which signify factious detractors, and falling it ‘groanes, and bruises all below’ (l. 267). It is signiWcant, too, that whereas Marvell’s oak is a centre that might grow anywhere, Heywood’s Dodon oak is marked by an established, numinous location (at Dodona a grove of oaks grew around the oracle of Zeus). In Heywood’s poem, the only hint of disharmony is his insinuation that some courtiers have not mourned James 77 Thomas Heywood, A Funeral Elegie, Upon the Much Lamented Death of the Trespuissant and Unmatchable King, King James (London, 1625).


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adequately (ll. 28–9); but Marvell’s disharmony includes envy of Oliver’s position, which all but conWrms the unsayable, that a new Protector could come from anywhere. It is sometimes remarked of Marvell’s analogy that he is dressing Oliver in royal clothes; but the analogy implies diVerences between the era of royal power and a new dispensation, in which the eYcacy and appearance of greatness are less manifest and more painfully contentious.78 This is the consequence of the changed authority that Marvell describes throughout his elegy: Oliver is a legitimate leader to the extent that he embodies the ideals of a powerful social and spiritual constituency, and his part in history has been to make those values more pertinent to questions of government; yet this is a mixed blessing politically, because others aspire to or profess the same spirituality and intimacy with God’s purposes that underwrite Oliver’s political charisma. The most that Marvell can claim is that Oliver’s historical signiWcance will appear in time; but the period of the present hiatus is as diYcult to gauge as his height when living. The analogy states that as soon as the tree falls its true height can be measured without interference from the laws of optics or dissenting shadows, which suggests that Oliver’s true greatness is plain now, and that imminently truth will be allowed and faction will end; but this hardly seemed plausible at the time when Marvell wrote, and the soldiers cast ‘many ages hence’ pull towards a diVerent eventuality. Finally Oliver Wnds his element in heaven, where he ‘in seas of blisse, j Plunging dost bathe’ (ll. 289–90). His liquidity is a restless and single-minded pursuit of conversation with the divine. He travels to heaven ‘unconcern’d’ by the destruction wrought by the storm. While Marvell struggles to deWne Oliver’s legacy to the world, Oliver is similarly unconcerned, excitedly seeking out Moses, Joshua, and David. Whereas Slater and the groom in A Collection of Several Passages localize Oliver’s intercourse with heaven to the interment or the court, in Marvell’s elegy it is a moving target: the heavenly herald leads; the divine help at Preston is compared to the momentarily arrested sun over Gibeon; in heaven Oliver Wnds that blessedness is quickened sociability: There thy great soule at once a world does see, Spacious enough, and pure enough for thee. How soon thou Moses hast, and Joshua found, And David, for the sword and harpe renown’d; How streight canst to each happy mansion goe? (ll. 291–5)

Royalist elegies often describe heaven as a royal court of martyrs, encouraging those left behind that the regime which was lost on earth awaits incorruptibly for them above.79 But Marvell’s vision of the apotheosized Oliver gives little help to 78 Marvell, 310. 79 Several of the elegies for Lord Hastings imagine heaven as a royal court, Marvell’s particularly vividly: Lachrymae Musarum: The Tears of the Muses: Exprest in Elegies (London, 1649), 79.

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those below, who ‘Wander like ghosts about thy loved tombe’ (l. 300). The contrast is suggestive in respect of Mary Douglas’s observation that institutions tend to be consolidated when individuals make analogies between the structure of the institution and structures in reason and nature.80 By projecting upon the cosmos a social structure that to royalists seemed at risk of disappearing permanently, yet was vital to the fabric of their beliefs, such poems fought to preserve the legitimacy of a royal court. In Marvell’s elegy the analogies are more sophisticated, suggesting consistencies between the authority and genesis of the Protectorate and patterns in the daily life, piety, and the macrocosm of those readers most likely to determine its immediate future. Thus there are perhaps subtle cosmic analogies at work in Marvell’s portrayal of the apotheosized Oliver after all: his busy seeking and socializing naturalizes his political restlessness in the structure of heaven and the sociability of the well-to-do; but by contrast to the royalists’ heavenly court, there is little in this imagery, other than movement, that might help deWne hierarchical authority in the Protectoral court. Marvell makes it clear that Richard will soon have to show something like the energetic piety that sustained his father’s charisma. With images of rainbows, diadems, pearls, and gems, Marvell acknowledges that Richard’s manner is presently more courtly than his father’s; but he questions whether Richard’s apparent mildness might be an eVect of grief, which veils a deeper toughness: And Richard yet, where his great parent led, Beats on the rugged track: he, vertue dead, Revives; and by his milder beams assures; And yet how much of them his griefe obscures. He, as his father, long was kept from sight In private, to be view’d by better light; But open’d once, what splendour does he throw? (ll. 305–11)

The path left by his father will be demanding: Richard is described as a horseman winding his reins in preparation for a gallop, accommodating Richard’s love of hunting within another image of government as movement. But it also implies that Richard has begun slowly, and beneath Marvell’s conWdence that ‘A Cromwell in an houre a prince will grow’ (l. 312) lurks the subtext that Richard must quickly gain momentum. Describing how heaven marked his succession with ‘A pearly rainbow, where the sun inchas’d j His brows, like an imperiall jewel grac’d’ (ll. 317–18), Marvell indicates that for Richard as much as for Oliver, signs of providential favour have displaced the old trappings of royalty as marks of authority, and the Wnal lines credit Richard with clemency, as Marvell earlier praised his father for the same restraint (l. 14): ‘Tempt not his clemency to try his 80 Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 45–54.


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pow’r, j He threats no deluge, yet foretells a showre’ (ll. 323–4). The warning is addressed to those who would test Richard’s power (the Wallingford House Party and its republican allies), but maybe it is also advice to Richard and the advisers around him. The shower is ambiguously threatening: the word often distinguishes regenerative rain from destructive torrents; but Marvell’s allusion to the Flood gives it an edge of menace. Richard is not going to plunge the country into renewed, catastrophic violence (he is the rainbow which promises that the recent disaster will not be repeated), but by Wrst likening rain to conXict, Marvell hints that the fertilizing shower might yet involve some political upheaval.81 Marvell’s images of Xuidity and water build up complex meanings in ‘A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’. They represent Cromwellian action and eYcacy: energetic and vitalizing, yet elusive or under-consolidated. Around this theme Marvell develops a critical apology for an unstable Protectorate, which has depended upon the highly contestable charisma of a yeoman-class puritan. In the elegy’s transformations of the conventions of mourning, from the funeral led by a heavenly herald to the achievements that illustrate the complexities of grace, Marvell celebrates a Protectorate that adapts existing institutions and protocols to the priorities of godliness; yet, in so doing, these instruments lose some of their power to deWne authority beyond the actions that providence smiles upon. Richard inherits this commonwealth, and even though Marvell explores the transformations of authority with a logic designed to turn godly frustration and disappointment into sympathy, those transformations are also a warning to Richard’s courtly supporters that the old rites of monarchy will not by themselves make Richard a prince. Thomas Sprat praises the ‘domestick worth’ (l. 78), from which Oliver’s greatness grew, but his Protector is more Augustan than Marvell’s family man, and, unlike other elegists, Sprat boldly contends that a distinctively Cromwellian renaissance is about to Xower. Yet Sprat too distances himself from conventional funerary practices; he draws instead on the authority of the Oxford University elite to win credibility for his unique conWdence in the cultural achievements of the Cromwell line. His Pindaric ode for Oliver is the most formally adventurous of the elegies. Around the time of its composition he was also working on another essay in Pindarics, The Plague of Athens (1659).82 Sprat had been so excited by Cowley’s ‘Pindarique Odes’ (1656) that he became known as ‘Pindaric Sprat’, and in both his odes he reworks numerous themes and images from Cowley’s. The preface to Cowley’s 1656 Poems claims to renounce royalist polemic in favour of philosophical contemplation: ‘the unaccountable Will of God has determined the controversie . . . we must march out of our Cause it self, and dismantle that, as well as our Towns and Castles’.83 Correspondingly, ‘The Exstasie’ describes an 81 Oliver Cromwell, Declaration of His Highness, 1; William Fulke, Meteors, or, a Plain Description of All Kind of Meteors, as Well Fiery and Ayrie, as Watry and Earthy (London, 1654), 106–9. 82 Thomas Sprat, The Plague of Athens (London, 1959). 83 Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), sig. A4r.

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apotheosis from war-ravaged Britain to a heaven populated by alchemist-angels.84 Critics have questioned the ingenuousness of these professions by exploring the volume’s latent royalism, and Sprat’s elegiac ode to Oliver hardly renounces political rhetoric.85 However, Sprat does develop Cowley’s association of Pindaric and sublimity; he makes it a mode of privileged lucidity that oVers distinctive insights into Oliver’s reformative genius. Throughout the ode Sprat equates virtue with light, clarity, or whiteness. In the Wrst stanza he predicts: Thou canst the force and teeth of Time endure; Thy Fame, like Men, the elder it doth grow, Will of itself turn whiter too Without what needlesse Art can do. (ll. 4–7)

He lists the ‘unnecessary’ (l. 20) funerary clutter in spite of which Oliver’s fame will whiten: epitaphs, roses, and perfumes will be revealed as ‘oYcious folly’ and ‘pious Nothings’ (ll. 16–20). This beginning reworks the conventional elegiac claim that poetry is inadequate to the purpose of expressing profound loss, and Sprat naturally includes his own elegy among the redundancies; but it also implies (contradicting Sprat’s modesty) that Sprat, unlike other elegists, can see the true nature of his example through the clutter, and the elegy’s thematic images of clearness and light often include precise perceptions of complex phenomena: the operation of Wre in the sun, optical rays, or the relation of colour to light. Cumulatively these images associate not only Oliver, but also Sprat’s poetic, with emerging clarity, and in several places Sprat swells his Pindarics to stress that this kind of perception is a prerogative of the genre, in spite of the fact that Pindaric was often associated with obscurity:86 Others great Actions are But thinly scatter’d here and there; At best, all but one single Starr: But thine the Milkie way, All one-continued-light, and undistinguish’t day. (ll. 53–7)

These lines approach lucid prose, and there is a hint of disdain for the heroic couplet when Sprat argues that Oliver’s fame ‘Will live beyond thy breath, beyond thy Hearse, j Though it were never heard or sung in Verse’ (ll. 8–9): the couplet brieXy becomes a metonym for funerary conventionality, with the 84 Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), sigs. 3G1r–3G2r. 85 Thomas Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 268; T. R. Langley, ‘Abraham Cowley’s ‘‘Brutus’’: Royalist or Republican?’, Yearbook of English Studies, 6 (1976), 41–52. 86 See Shore, ‘ ‘‘Lawrels for the Conquered’’ ’, 90–7.


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Hearse/Verse rhyme suggesting that elegies (most of Oliver’s elegies are in heroic couplets) and hearses both contain and carry the dead at a stately pace; Sprat’s repeated ‘beyond’ urgently indicates spaces beyond this conventionality. Sprat emphasizes cultural reformation at the centre of Oliver’s achievements, and he implies that the brightening of Oliver’s reputation will accompany the fruition of his projects: Letters and Learning rose, and were renew’d. Thou fought’st not out of Envy, Hope or Hate But to reWne the Church and State And like the Romans, what e’re thou In the Field of Mars didst mow, Was, that a holy Island thence might grow. Thy Wars, as Rivers raised by a Shoure Which Welcome Clouds do poure; Though they at Wrst may seem To carry all away, with an inraged Stream, Yet did not happen, that they might destroy Or the better parts annoy; But all the Wlth and Mud to scower And leave behind a Richer Slime, To give a birth to a more happy power. And make new fruits arise, in their appoynted time. (ll. 162–77)

But Sprat’s analogies suggest a renaissance that is not yet fully developed. The Xood scouring the land appears initially to be a catastrophic deluge. ‘Richer Slime’ promises growth in the future, and ‘in their appoynted time’ counsels patience, suggesting, like the Wnal analogy of Oliver to Moses and Richard to Joshua, that Oliver died too early to see the fruits of his labours. Sprat thus gives his elegy a visionary edge, making Pindaric into a mode that penetrates conventional representations of Oliver’s greatness to Wnd a developing cultural legacy. Sprat claims credibility for this vision by rooting it in the interests and politics of a successful group of men at the University of Oxford. Many of Sprat’s images evidence a fascination with optics and material properties. In combination with the signposts in Sprat’s preface, this associates the elegy’s lucidity with the milieu of the dominant party at the university. The preface is addressed to John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College and the leader of this group, who was also Oliver’s brother-in-law and Sprat’s patron. Wilkins’s Oxford Experimental Philosophy Club had for a number of years been attracting enthusiasts of empirical science.87 Sprat’s preface claims that Wilkins has ‘moulded’ him, directing the informed 87 In 1657 this club discussed the creation of an institution for Baconian science, speciWcally a ‘Magneticall, Mechanicall and Optick Schoole, furnished with the best instruments’: see Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 171.

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reader to trace his elegy’s images of closely observed natural phenomena back to the Baconian interests of the Wilkins circle.88 These relationships are also political, in that Wilkins led a conservative faction that opposed, and eventually prevailed over, the party of reformers led by the vice-chancellor John Owen, who had campaigned to impose stricter conformity on the university (above, p. 61). Reformers like Owen thought that such measures would help the university nurture a new holy elite and formulate doctrine under which they might unify.89 But Wilkins’s party won support from Oliver, and when Richard succeeded his father as chancellor of the university in 1657, Wilkins became Richard’s right-hand man, and a more conservative mood prevailed. Even if Oliver came to see that bringing in outsiders to impose orthodoxy on the university created only dissent, he continued to share the reformers’ broader dream that the university would become a driving force for the holy nation: he consistently used his chancellorship to plant pious men at the university, and he planned a new college where Protestant scholars would formulate ‘a generall synopsis of the true reformed Protestant Christian Religion proposed in this commonwealth’.90 Worden has written that such aspirations are not necessarily inconsistent with the hopes of those active with Wilkins against the reformers: most die-hard royalists were purged early on, leaving conservatives who objected primarily to the reformers’ methods.91 But even though Wilkins’s conservative faction had beaten Owen at Oxford, there remained powerful Wgures in the national sphere who sympathized with Owen’s campaign.92 This context reveals the defensive edge in Sprat’s vision of national reformation. The contention that the Cromwellian cultural reformation is yet growing in soils fertilized by a purging Xood has a speciWc Oxford valency, in that it implies that patience, not more purging, is needed to further the cause of that reformation. But by couching his forceful projection of a Cromwellian renaissance in language that implies privileged perception, Sprat also suggests that the dominant party at Oxford has a distinctive conWdence in Oliver’s cultural legacy. Sprat contextualizes this conWdence in the political alliance at Oxford between Wilkins’s party and the Cromwells. The preface alludes to Wilkins’s relation to the family. In the ode, it is manifested in Sprat’s emphasis on Oliver’s choice of Richard as his successor: Nor hadst thou Him design’d, Had he not bin Not only to thy blood, but vertue Kinn;

88 Three Poems, sig. C2. 89 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 736–7. 90 Ibid. 736; see also Beddard, ‘A Projected Cromwellian Foundation’. 91 Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 748. 92 Reformers tried to organize a new visitation in 1659, and Lambert, who had shown some sympathy with more radical educational reformers, remained a potential leader for an anti-Richard party: Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, 748.


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Not only heire unto thy Throne, but Minde. Tis He shall perfect all thy Cures And, with as Wne a Thread, weave out thy Loom. So, One did bring the Chosen people from Their Slavery and Feares, Led them through their Pathlesse Road, Guided himselfe by God, He brought them to the Borders: but a Second hand Did settle and Secure them, in the promis’d Land. (ll. 349–60)

Richard’s succession was tenuously legitimate. By the Humble Petition and Advice, Oliver had a duty to name his successor. He did not publicly name anyone, and it was left to Thurloe to vouch that the dying Oliver had made a sign indicating Richard.93 Fleetwood, for one, had grounds to contest the succession. In Richard’s favour, he had been nominated by his father to succeed him as chancellor at Oxford. Where most elegies tactfully fudge the topic, Sprat twice describes Richard as chosen by his father, and elaborates on the reasons for the choice, contrasting mere primogeniture. This conWdence is another way in which Sprat forcefully asserts a distinctive institutional logic: the succession looks less doubtful to the Oxford University elite, to whom Richard has already proved himself worthy of his father’s expectations; he has shown Wilkins and his party, which has nurtured and endorsed him, the same mature insight into reformation that Sprat explores and praises in his father. The genealogy of Sprat’s version of Pindaric also helps him to situate his vision of regenerate Cromwellian culture. The model that Cowley provided for Sprat was steeped in royalism, and both men found it ideally suited to the praise of kings after the Restoration.94 But Sprat adapts his model to Oliver with a measure of political self-consciousness: Cowley’s Pindaric rendition of Isaiah 34 had ominously advised those who draw their sword against a prince to throw the scabbard away, but Sprat praises Oliver’s clemency by inverting the image: ‘Thou didst not draw the Sword, and so j Away the Scabbard throw’ (ll. 141–2).95 This riposte is a kind of literary counterpart to Oliver’s clemency, absorbing royalist language into Cromwellian moderation. Sprat certainly wanted readers to think about his ode in relation to Cowley and royalism: his 93 Hause, Tumble-Down Dick, 33–74. There remains doubt as to whether Oliver Cromwell did nominate Richard or a military man instead. Strong conWrmation of the former appears in The Clarke Papers: Further Selections from the Papers of William Clarke, ed. Frances Henderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2005), 271–2. 94 See Stella P. Revard, ‘Cowley’s ‘‘Pindarique Odes’’ and the Politics of the Interregnum’, Criticism, 35 (1995), 391–418; Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 268; but see also Robert Shore’s discussion of Cowley’s political ambiguities in ‘‘‘Lawrels for the Conquered’’’. 95 Cowley, Poems, sig. 3H1r.

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preface praises Cowley for making this way of writing ‘free of our nation’—in other words, importing it from the French court, where Cowley had spent the early 1650s with the royalist exiles.96 Correspondingly, under Wilkins’s inXuence some royalists had been reintegrated into university life, including Cowley, who had been given an M.D. in 1657 by government order.97 Sprat situates Pindaric in history as well as place: its lucid vision of a future renaissance has been made possible because the necessary materials—rhetoric, learning, piety, amnesty, and political cooperation—are coming together within a leading institution. Sprat’s situated optimism informs his Augustan reading of Interregnum history, by which Oliver alone can see the correct path of moral leadership. Oliver is the sailor who found a safe port for the ship of state: ‘When now the Ship was welnigh lost j After the Storme upon the Coast, j By its best Mariners endanger’d most’ (ll. 320–2). The storm is the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, but the best mariners are parliamentarians who panicked afterwards, all but running the state aground before Oliver steered it towards the Protectorate. Before thou hadst what Wrst Thou didst deserve, Others by thee did great things do, Triumph’st thy self, and mad’st them Triumph too: Though they above thee did appear, As yet in a more large and higher sphere Thou the Great Sun, gav’st light to every Starre. Thy self an Army wert alone And mighty Troops contain’dst in one: Thy only Sword did guard the Land Like that, which Xaming in the angel’s hand From Men God’s Garden did defend: But yet thy Sword did more than his, Not only guarded, but did make this Land a Paradice. (ll. 188–200)

Sprat insinuates that what good the republican parliaments did was merely derived, almost parasitically, from their Lord General. He also condenses the army into Oliver, and so eVaces its place in history as the force which propelled Oliver’s triumph over these parliaments. Yet, ‘Thy only Sword did guard the Land’ implies that other swords pursued other interests: the factions of the army that cannot be remembered as Oliver’s appendages are included, presumably with royalist and republican plotters, among the men from whom Oliver guards paradise. The evolution of the Protectorate, on this reading, is the triumph of Oliver’s intelligence, moderation, and valour against other political forces; but 96 Three Poems, sig. C2r. Shore examines the French derivation of Cowley’s Pindarique Odes; see also Revard, ‘Cowley’s ‘‘Pindarique Odes’’ and the Politics of the Interregnum’, 393. 97 Alexander Lindsay, ‘Cowley, Abraham (1618–1667)’, in DNB.


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these political forces had hardly gone away. The implications of this history extend into Sprat’s present, and implicitly draw lines for future battles. Oliver’s legacy will be protected by a moderate elite with the resources to understand it, not the army men or the republicans who were attempting to reduce Richard’s power through the autumn of 1658. This again places Wilkins and his allies at the forefront of the Cromwellian cause: Evelyn wrote that Wilkins took it upon himself to protect the university against ignorant soldiers, and the early visitations had inspired no great love of republicanism among Oxford’s conservatives either. Sprat’s elegy projects the political co-operation of Wilkins and Richard at Oxford into a future where it will take on a national dimension; this co-operation is deWned by common understanding and aspirations, but also by common fears. Thus the notional elite who identify with these aspirations and enjoy reading reWned verse—‘the most knowing part of the world’ which holds Wilkins in high esteem98—is also something of an imaginative refuge for Richard and his allies; Sprat consoles them that they have fended oV their enemies before and will beat them again. Dryden’s ‘Heroique Stanzas’ was the last completed of the elegies in the 1659 volume, but he makes a virtue of its lateness. The elegy situates itself by multiple references to timeliness. It begins by comparing its own moment with those seized by hastier elegists: And now ’tis time; for their OYcious haste, Who would before have born him to the sky, Like eager Romans ere all Rites were past Did let too soon the sacred Eagle Xy. (ll. 1–4)

Dryden had been working as a Latin secretary alongside Marvell and Milton, probably since October 1657 at least, although he perhaps began his association with the Protectoral government as a clerk for his uncle, Gilbert Pickering.99 He also worked in some capacity for Henry Herringman, who published Waller’s broadside elegy and Wrst registered the elegies by Marvell and Sprat.100 Hammond notes several places where Dryden replies to Sprat’s elegy, which suggests that he had access to Sprat’s poem before it was published, probably through his work with Herringman.101 Pickering continued as Lord Chamberlain to Richard, but distanced himself as the new Protector’s problems mounted.102 Pickering, the Latin oYce, and Herringman allowed Dryden various insider views; but his elegy assumes a more detached, sceptical tone, with which he 98 Three Poems, sig. C2r. 99 See Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden’s Employment by Cromwell’s Government’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1981), 130–6. 100 John Dryden, The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1995), i. p. xxx. 101 See Hammond’s notes, ibid. i. 19–23, 26, 27. 102 Hause, Tumble-Down Dick, 147.

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probes the language of classical heroism common to many panegyrics of Oliver. This language became established during the republic, when Payne Fisher and his translator Thomas Manley published panegyrics which compare Oliver to great lists of classical heroes.103 Similar comparisons were inevitably made in Oliver’s elegies, although not always very eVectively: Rowland’s ‘Nor Pompey, Cesar, great Alexander . . . j Prevail’d so farre, counting the time He steer’d’ (ll. 73–5) deXates somewhat by special pleading.104 Dryden’s comparisons are more discriminating and work harder, and often on contemplation they become more critical than they Wrst appeared. But Dryden’s elegy does not quite succeed as a critique to the degree that Marvell’s does: Stephen Zwicker argues that it yields neither political principles nor a political ‘point of view’.105 This, I suggest, is a consequence of the elegy’s lateness, both in the sense that Richard’s crises rendered the future murky (particularly to statesmen like Pickering, who did not align themselves with either the court party or the Wallingford House Party), and more positively in that Dryden attempts to make good timing into a substitute for a political or even a cultural perspective. Most of the later elegies that I have examined in this chapter Wnd Oliver’s cultural legacy in some way frustrating or underdeveloped. Dryden’s elegy acknowledges the Xaws in his heroic armour most coolly; but even though these judgements show some aYnities with those of other elegists, they are made primarily by reference to literary and historical exempla which are diYcult to relate to social principles or moral criteria. Following his scornful allusion to more eager elegists, Dryden announces that his problem is to represent Oliver’s fame analytically: How shall I then begin, or where conclude To draw a Fame, so truly Circular ? For in a round what order can be shew’d, Where all the parts so equall perfect are? (ll. 17–20)

But Dryden quickly begins to make analytical distinctions. He distinguishes Oliver’s innate heroic virtue from his military success, which requires both endeavour and fortune: His Grandeur he deriv’d from Heav’n alone, For he was great e’re Fortune made him so; And Warr’s like mists that rise against the Sunne Made him but greater seem, not greater grow. (ll. 21–4) 103 Fisher, Veni, Vedi, Vici, 10–11 (e.g.). 104 Rowland, Upon the Much Lamented Departure. 105 Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 70.


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The distinction owes something to Machiavelli, although Davenant made it a key principle in Gondibert’s programme for a new literary heroic, and that poem also supplied Dryden with his stanza form.106 But the implications of the analogy are perhaps more critical of Oliver’s established reputation than a brisk reading might register: his martial achievements are compared to mists raised by the sun shining on the morning dew, which are merely an eVect of a pre-existent, enduring greatness, not the material of that greatness. The implication of this analogy—helped along by the analogy’s likening of wars to nebulous matter—is that the reader should look beyond the martial successes celebrated by other elegies for the important objects of praise. A series of images of measurement and ordering heightens the impression that this elegy is about discrimination. The success of Oliver’s foreign policy is described with scales, in which Oliver’s inXuence tips the balance even when Spain’s gold weights the other side. Oliver aVects the landscape such that new maps of England might be charted. Dryden too invokes natural philosophy; but where as Sprat’s scientiWc topics point to sublime truths, for Dryden they supply another means of classifying people: For from all tempers he could service draw, The worth of each with its alloy he knew; And as the ConWdent of Nature saw How she Complexions did divide and brew. (ll. 97–100)

Dryden uses ‘ConWdent’ in the new sense of ‘a person entrusted with secrets or private matters’, hinting that Cromwellian success is built through political relations more private than those that previously structured government.107 Close attention to Dryden’s discriminations sometimes reveals that Oliver’s achievement falls short of the equivalence that an analogy at Wrst seemed to show: When absent, yet we conquer’d in his right; For though some meaner Artist’s skill were shown In mingling colours, or in placing light, Yet still the faire Designment was his own. (ll. 93–6)

This refers punningly to the Western Design (above, Chapter 5). The artist who paints it with meaner skill refers to those who arranged and executed the expedition, which was inadequately provisioned and used poor quality troops.108 Dryden’s image disappoints the imagination. It refers to a somewhat mediocre 106 William Davenant, The Preface to Gondibert, an Heroic Poem (Paris, 1650), 7, 26. 107 OED, s.v. ‘conWdent, a. and n.’. 108 See Armitage, ‘Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, 538–46. The expedition was planned practically by a committee including the eventual commanders, Admiral William Penn and Colonel Robert Venables: Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy, 81–2.

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painting, a ‘studio of ’, rather than a more expensive painting entirely executed by the master.109 The perceived failure of the episode is acknowledged; but Dryden exonerates Oliver in part by implying that his plan, at least, was not faulty. Dryden sets his elegy apart from more superWcial panegyric by addressing the problems of Cromwell’s career. Dryden’s allusions sometimes use topicality in conjunction with more timeless conventions to insinuate that Oliver’s fame is (or will prove) limited in other respects. Dryden ostensibly praises Oliver’s ability to shape his own fate with the very conventional classical Wgure of commanding the stars, but it turns into a more innovative image: When such Heroîque Vertue Heav’n sets out, The Starrs like Commons sullenly obey; Because it draines them when it comes about, And therefore is a taxe they seldome pay. (ll. 105–8)

Dryden again gives only to take back: both Oliver and Richard needed parliaments to ratify their taxation to give it legitimacy; but, like Charles I, each found that once summoned, Parliament did not tend to co-operate. During the month or so after the funeral, when Dryden probably composed his elegy, Richard was preparing to call a parliament because he needed to pay at least some of the debts with which his father’s foreign policy had burdened him, even though high taxes were already causing great resentment. Dryden’s image thus turns into an image of limitation: Oliver’s heroism was unsustainable to the point of irresponsibility. That the stars are compared to commons is ironic, in that it is Parliament’s sullenness that would prevent Richard from matching his father’s campaigns, not any classical cosmic law. The irony, which is not wholly unsympathetic, highlights the anachronism involved in simply comparing Oliver’s conquests to those of classical, cosmos-shifting heroes; Alexander did not have to get permission from Parliament before he conquered; nor is he judged by his success in parliamentary politicking or his Wscal responsibility, as Oliver has to be. The halcyon with which the poem ends has a similar limiting topicality: No Civill broyles have since his death arose, But Faction now by Habit does obey: And Warrs have that respect for his repose, As Winds for Halcyons when they breed at Sea. (ll. 141–4) 109 James Anderson Winn, ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood’: Love and the Arts in the Age of Dryden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 305. Winn writes that this stanza makes Oliver the master painter and Blake an assistant whose duties would include only ‘drapery and backgrounds’; but in OED, which quotes this line, ‘designment’ means ‘Artistic representation, delineation; an outline, sketch; an original draught or design’. Dryden’s distinction is between the stages of the drawn composition and the actual painting, when mixing colours and placing light brings the outline to life.


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In Ovid’s Metamorphosis XI, Ceyx and Alcyone are each turned into a halcyon, a kingWsher which builds its nest in the sea. Aeolus grants the halcyon seven days of calm before the winter solstice (ll. 747–53). The halcyon supplied a versatile image of political calm to Caroline poets: to some the halcyon calm warns of disaster, signifying a temporary stillness before a storm; others eVaced its portentous implications, making it an emblem of Charles’s peaceful rule while Europe was at war.110 By deploying the image so aptly in a midwinter elegy, Dryden renews its edginess, adding portentous implications to his delicately ambiguous assessment of political stability: it is Oliver’s achievement that factions are now habitually obedient, yet nothing more than habit and lingering respect keeps them so. The halcyon allusion, like that to the Commons, intensiWes the topicality of the literary past in order to sharpen its deWnition of the present. The precision of such analogies, speciWcally Dryden’s attention to the aptness of his literary comparisons and distinctions, encourages the reader to follow their implications through, and sift them not only for the likenesses between Oliver and heroes of old, but for ways in which the past resists comparison to the present; ways in which Oliver’s heroism is diVerent and peculiar. Again, this is not always unXattering to Oliver: Oliver harnessed fortune at the age when it abandoned the republican hero Pompey; his time spent watching politics from obscurity gave his leadership maturity and adaptability. I suggested that the distinction between success and endeavour which Dryden uses to probe Oliver’s martial reputation might have been encouraged by reading Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert; but where Davenant aims to rationalize the moral critique of literary heroic, Dryden employs the distinction to reveal a phenomenon that is ultimately strange, one that can be pinpointed, but not pinned down: His Name a great example stands, to show How strangely high endeavours may be blest, Where Piety and valour joyntly goe. (ll. 146–8)

A Wnal but ambiguous Roman analogy raises questions that Dryden leaves unanswered. His latest Victories still thickest came, As, near the Centre, Motion does increase; Till he, pres’d down by his own weighty name, Did, like the Vestall, under spoyles decease. (ll. 132–6)

The vestal virgin Tarpeia betrayed Rome to the Sabines and asked as payment what they wore on their left arms, meaning their gold bracelets.111 Instead, they 110 See Palomo, ‘Halcyon Moment’. 111 Livy, I. 42–5.

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heaped their shields upon her until she died under the weight. There are several possible points of contact between this narrative and Oliver’s, which prompt searching questions about the qualities for which Oliver is standardly praised. Can he really be said without irony to have died under spoils when he all but collapsed under debt? Has Oliver’s self-interested pursuit of foreign conquest actually betrayed his country to an army, in that the army dominates the state and has nearly bankrupted it with its wage bill? The image is apt, in that the shields could represent Oliver’s militarism, which he used to shield himself, and which eventually overwhelmed him. But the image is almost saved as praise by the appropriateness of Oliver dying under massed arms; he could hardly die under piled gold. What beneWt did Dryden hope to draw from writing, circulating, and then publishing such an elegy while the Protectorate appeared to be so precarious? Can Zwicker’s conclusion that the poem has no point of view be reconciled with Dryden’s interests during the winter of 1658–9? Dryden compares the more oYcious elegists to eager Romans botching an imperial funeral. His Wrst readers could hardly not have been reminded of Oliver’s funeral, especially seeing that his title marks the moment by stating that he composed the elegy after Oliver’s funeral. This does not amount to outright criticism of the funeral, which was oYcially the responsibility of his uncle and patron, Pickering; Dryden himself walked in the procession. However, it does distance Dryden from anything that might have appeared unseemly about that pageant, as well as earlier elegies’ uncritical, hyperbolic professions of national unity and settlement, which by winter would have seemed at best naı¨ve. Dryden makes a virtue of his lateness in addressing his topic, perhaps because he felt it wise to set himself apart from such manifestations of oYciousness; he himself might be branded a court bureaucrat, or a ‘Committee-man’ (as Shadwell later called him112), just as Richard’s administration looked vulnerable. Dryden’s allusions demonstrate that he read the classics carefully, but also that his learning was broad and up to date: Guicciardini, Machiavelli, Davenant, and some familiarity with painting and theories in natural philosophy. But whereas Sprat parades his learning as exclusive reWnement, Dryden marshalls his to provide the clear rational framework by which Oliver can be judged. Timing is key to this rationality. OYciousness is a criticism which implies that the demands of oYce or duty have overwhelmed the other elegists’ sense of decorum. They act in time, but time also acts on them: when Dryden writes among his formulae of poetry’s inadequacy to the elegiac task, ‘they whose muses have the highest Xown j Add not to his immortall Memorie, j But do an act of friendship to their own’ (ll. 10–12), he writes aware that the more extravagant praises by Sprat and others, particularly claims that Oliver left aVairs ‘In a fair posture’ (Rowland, l. 90), have been embarrassed by political 112 Thomas Shadwell, The Medal of John Bayes: A Satyr against Folly and Knavery (London, 1682), 8.


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developments, and that readers might be advised to question the motives behind such overestimations; he acknowledges his own ‘interest’ (l. 13) at the beginning of the poem. Dryden both praises and dispraises Oliver’s timing: Oliver watches other rulers patiently and emerges at the right time, like the Machiavellian man of the sword who steps forward in crisis and whose violence is justiWed by his timing.113 But this praise also questions Oliver’s timing later in his political career: his virtue was not ‘poyson’d soon as born j With the too early thoughts of being King’ (ll. 27–8)—but when is the right time to think of being king? Dryden leaves this question open, perhaps to suggest that it will be revealed in time by Richard’s success in consolidating the dynasty, although Dryden’s silence on Richard hardly demonstrates faith in that success. Dryden’s sense of decorum, of how the passage of time reveals things, and of the topicality of history and the literary past, gives time a structure that bounds what the poet can see and say. Indeed, Winn argues persuasively that by comparing his epideictic problem to dividing up a geometric circle, Dryden has in mind a round painting, directly analogizing the analytical proportionality of a painted perspective, and apt divisions in time (‘How shall I then begin, or where conclude’ (l. 17)).114 This understanding adds a unique critical dimension to Dryden’s elegy, which has developed its insights by waiting and taking stock, whereas the elegies by Marvell and Sprat pursue privileged insights. The political tumults that Dryden anticipates would oVer a bright young man great opportunities, providing that he does not get sucked down with their political casualties: Dryden would have been watching Marvell’s trajectory from clerk in the Latin OYce, which Dryden had just joined, to diplomatic oYcer and candidate for Parliament, albeit one favoured by an ill-starred party. In his elegy for Oliver he steps up while trying to dissociate himself from ‘OYcious’ poetic positions built up through institutional and political situation; he shows his useful, learned scepticism with a logic designed to conceal its own involvement. Dryden’s elegy has been deemed ‘the weary end-point of Protectoral Augustanism’ at the expense of its context.115 Its silence concerning Richard is not weary, but the brave beginning of a moderate and sceptical idiom which the Restoration, which few could have anticipated in the winter of 1658–9, curtailed or transformed. By testing the language of neoclassicism, Dryden certainly anticipates poetic developments characteristic of an Augustan literary epoch; but Oliver is not Dryden’s Augustus, and neither is Richard. Rather, Oliver is a Wne mixture of the limited and the prodigious, and by publishing his keen awareness of how those qualities are related, Dryden advertises an acumen that might appeal to those who wanted to Wnd a way past the impasse engulWng Richard. 113 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 378–80. 114 Winn, ‘When Beauty Fires the Blood ’, 305. 115 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 394.

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During the Wrst months of 1659, the army and a conservative majority in Parliament became increasingly antagonistic, until army oYcers forced Richard to dissolve the parliament on 22 April and recall the Rump. Richard’s power was formally dismantled over the following month, culminating in his letter of resignation on the 25 May. A long, but modest, life in exile and seclusion awaited him. Fresh attempts to govern the Commonwealth as a republic collapsed, and eventually, on 1 May 1660, the Convention Parliament voted to bring back Charles Stuart as king. It is argued that many of Richard’s diYculties were inherited: he was obliged by the Humble Petition and Advice to summon an unmanageable parliament that could not be prevented from debating and exploiting the constitution’s Xaws, and could only heighten political tensions at Richard’s expense.116 But the poems written in the Wnal months of the Protectorate make its disintegration seem less inevitable. Though some early verses fell in line with the funeral’s show of continuity and heraldic pageantry, and Slater’s hybrid of praise and satire fails to Wnd its target, the political tensions spurred Waller, Marvell, Sprat, and Dryden to probe Cromwell’s legacy more resourcefully, to Wnd the foundations of renewal. Waller’s poem qualiWes its admiration for Oliver’s heroic ambition with critical hints that it overreached the natural and sustainable aspirations of British unity and maritime dominance. Oliver’s real achievements and cultural legacy are not fully manifest or consolidated in the elegies by Sprat and Marvell. The former’s use of Cowleian Pindaric for an elegy is a bold experiment, which allows him to represent a renewal which is in the making, and more lucid from within Cromwellian Oxford, where a fruitful consensus has been established. Marvell’s involvement with the Protectoral court helps him to assess what has changed in the nature of political authority since the time of kings: the instabilities in Richard’s political inheritance are part of wider, positive, cultural changes that Oliver Cromwell has eVected by installing godly values at the heart of government; Richard cannot fall back on the old ceremonies of monarchy for authority. Dryden read the elegies by Waller and Sprat, and probably Marvell too, and his taut classical analogies enhance their sense of connections between Oliver’s virtues and his limitations. His elegy is sensitive to the hidden costs of Oliver’s triumphs, and is wary of the passions which they raise and the tensions which they conceal. It is hard not to wonder how, if Richard had managed to broker some compromise between parliament and the army, Waller or Marvell might have responded to Dryden’s innovatively sceptical idiom of praise. 116 Jason Peacey, ‘The Protector Humbled: Richard Cromwell and the Constitution’, in Patrick Little (ed.), The Cromwellian Protectorate, (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 32–52.

Epilogue Poets could take little for granted under the Protectorate. Parliamentary revolts, battles over university reformation, depressions in trade, a questionable succession—these crises cut across occasions of praise and celebration, and Protectorate poetry seeks new groundings for the language of renewal, in emerging institutions and political compromises. The more acute poets made their hopes all the more persuasive by paying close attention to how and why the contingencies of settlement made the Protectorate’s potential uncertain. Even ostensibly slight verses written for an Oxford anthology could adapt inherited forms—the ‘strong line’ of Cleveland, or a well-known topic from Coopers Hill—to show how their political interests and values were moving on from the positions forced upon scholars by the wars. It has become an orthodoxy that the Protectorate gradually reverted to institutions used by previous monarchs, but the poems continue to test these revivals and ask how they can be consolidated in language and culture. Waller’s position as the champion of a Cromwellian monarchy has been questioned. His poems show a declining faith in the Protector’s personal capacity to resolve the state’s instabilities. If the 1655 Panegyrick dares imagine what the Protectorate could be if Cromwell were allowed the power to become a truly unifying figure, the new courtly protocols and the Humble Petition and Advice did not reassure Waller. He finds the Protector’s role increasingly out of harmony with other Protectoral institutions. During the war with Spain, Waller’s plea for a coronation is directed not to Cromwell, but to a powerful civilian elite, within a poem that urges a unified response to the economics of an overstretched state. His elegy hints that Cromwell had become detached from the ‘joynt Interest’ which the Panegyrick had projected between people and Protector. By pulling up short without comment on the succession, the elegy resists even Waller’s previous conclusion that a Cromwellian monarchy might consolidate the state’s interests. A few months later, the young Dryden’s elegy reflects lessons learned from fellow Protectorate poets as it bids for his preferment: a timely consideration of what the funeral pageantry has left behind might win a poet most admiration. The value of this poetry to those who would understand the complex upheavals of the seventeenth century lies in its willingness to look beyond Oliver Cromwell to cultural tensions and shifts that produced crises during, before, and after his rule. In the verse generated by Whitelocke’s embassy to Sweden, early

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literary representations of the Protectorate had to define the regime in dialogue with the dynamics of international relations and the compromises of diplomatic discourse. When The First Anniversary addresses the constitutional instability created by the first Protectorate parliament, Marvell argues that the limits to the powers of Protector and Parliament are dictated in part by emergencies of international politics and problems with the army. Protectoral poems make telling connections between institutional shifts that were reshaping their culture: changes in the conceptualization of the state and the national interest, in the imperium and naval organization which could secure trade or the Protestant cause, in the civic and familial mores wherein power is more deeply consolidated or contested. Quentin Skinner and other scholars of intellectual history have located the ‘foundations’ of modern institutions in the usage of concepts and language. This poetry illuminates contingent moments in which those foundations were developed linguistically and disseminated through different spheres of Protectorate culture: where, for instance, Waller dignifies ‘state’, in its emergent, imperial, and fiscally demanding senses, through a narrative of aristocratic pathos and chivalry, a cultural history of the state might try to bring such a revealing rhetorical intervention into dialogue with Hobbes and Locke. Another conclusion that emerges from this poetry’s lively entanglements with institutions, political compromise, and contingencies, domestic and foreign, is that the Protectors were obliged to act within a matrix of institutions which contested their role ceaselessly. I have argued that even in the courtly setting of his daughters’ weddings, Cromwell seems a rather awkward, retiring presence. Marvell and Waller turn to a new generation to provide glamour and the possibility of future harmony; as Waller’s martial lion and Marvell’s old shepherd, Cromwell appears to have done all that he can. When critics have questioned whether the Protectorate developed its own canons of taste in literature, drama, and art, they have looked to representations of the Protector or poems and entertainments written for him; but when Marvell’s elegy attempts to locate the fountain-head of the Protectorate’s cultural achievements at court, it finds their grounding there to be problematic—Cromwell’s exemplarity and influence are not sufficiently appreciated and elude expression in the ceremonies scripted for him. I have argued that even the innovations of Davenant’s ‘moral representations’, which have a claim to be drama reformed according to the tastes of a puritan elite, direct the audience’s passions not to Hampton Court, but to emerging institutions: Davenant found rich material for dramatic experimentation in the ideological contradictions into which the Atlantic colonial project had stumbled. Major works by Marvell and Waller consistently treat the Protector’s position as under-consolidated, a problem that loomed larger, and seemed a more threatening instability within the state, as time went on. On the other hand, London’s civic pageants, which conventionally were so careful to praise kings for respecting the City’s liberties, almost completely ignored the Protector. Even in London poems and private entertainments that voice political

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discontent, the Protector is a remote figure—remoter at least than power struggles between civilian statesmen and the army, which threaten the City’s interests more immediately than the Protector’s necessarily laissez-faire relationship with the civic elite. This interpretation runs counter to many critical accounts of Protectorate verse, in which Cromwell’s centrality and supremacy are taken for historical facts. In some of these readings, the representation of Cromwell’s personal authority in writing and spectacle becomes a fundamental cultural problem, as if praise that could come to terms with his genius might resolve the instabilities of 1650s politics and the Protectoral settlement. The disagreement between such readings and the interpretations offered in this book warrants some further consideration here, because it throws into relief the neglect of an important phase in the reception of seventeenth-century verse. Cromwell’s privileged place in literary criticism bears traces of Protectorate verse’s collision with later historiography, particularly Cromwell’s nineteenth-century rehabilitation, when his career was transformed into a narrative of liberal convictions triumphing over circumstance. The remainder of this epilogue follows some of this critical and historiographical reception, which has canonized certain poems, even passages from certain poems, to make the Protectorate the story of one man. The reception of Protectorate verse in the eighteenth century has especially interested scholars working on Marvell, because the critical neglect of his preRestoration verse and the suppression of the works now known as his ‘Cromwell poems’ (‘An Horatian Ode’, The First Anniversary, ‘A Poem upon the Death of O. C.’) appear to have been a precondition of his reputation as a patriotic MP and prose-writer. The first edition of Marvell’s Miscellaneous Poems appeared in 1681, as part of a Whig publishing campaign.1 It aimed to flesh out a reputation that Marvell had earned as a pamphleteer writing against courtly absolutism, particularly the very successful The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677). It has been suggested that the cancellation of ‘the Cromwell poems’ stems from an editorial fear, heightened by a crisis in Whig fortunes, that praise for Cromwell might have caused the entire volume to be proscribed.2 Though a manuscript of Marvell’s verse containing the three cancelled poems seems to have passed through the hands of Whig publishers at the turn of the eighteenth century, they were not published under his name until 1776.3 These poems would have been difficult to reconcile with the image of Marvell constructed by such publications as Thomas Cooke’s 1726 edition of his works, in which Marvell appears as a heroic proto-Whig.

1 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Marvell’s Ghost’, in Chernaik and Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty, 50–74 (53–5). 2 Ibid. 55. 3 Ibid. 65–6.

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The difficulty stems from Cromwell’s reputation. He tended to be represented as a tyrant by courtly and oppositional writers alike, even in satire that looked back wistfully to the perceived success of his foreign policies: I freely declare it, I am for old Noll. Tho’ his Government did a Tyrants resemble, Hee made England great and it’s enemies tremble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Commonwealth a Common-wealth wee proclaim to the Nacion; The Gods have repented the Kings Restoration.4

Whig hostility to Cromwell became more focused in the 1690s, when radical publishers established a ‘real Whig’ canon around authors who viewed the Protectorate as Cromwell’s betrayal of the cause of liberty. This canon helped to establish the teleological Whig view of seventeenth-century history as a struggle for constitutional liberty, which eventually prevailed—or at least put down institutional foundations—in the 1689 Bill of Rights. Patriots who struggled for constitutional liberty were identified with the virtues of ‘disinterest’ (impartiality, particularly an imperviousness to the corruptions of party politics) and ‘inflexibility’ (an unswerving adherence to principle).5 During the eighteenth century, Marvell came to be seen as the paragon of these virtues, on the basis of biographies such as that attached to Cooke’s edition, his prose works and constituency letters, and Restoration verse satires attributed to him (many spuriously). This reputation could have been undermined by Marvell’s Protectorate rhetoric of compromise, necessity, and circumstance, and his praise for Cromwell and the Protectorate’s innovations. The First Anniversary, for instance, contradicts an influential Whig apology for the Long Parliament: namely, that it stood in defence of an ancient constitution, which was reasserted in 1689. Marvell represents the ancient constitution as a red herring (ll. 69–70). Captain Edward Thompson recovered the lost poems whilst his strenuously patriotic edition of Marvell’s Works was in the press. He added them in an appendix, and justified Marvell’s praise for Cromwell with the argument that the latter had ‘paved the way for the accession of freedom’ under William III.6 This view of Cromwell became more prevalent in the nineteenth century, until which time the once omitted poems were largely ignored. John Aikin’s response to Thompson’s edition is indicative of the resistance that Thompson’s argument encountered from established constructions of Marvell’s heroism: ‘he was a greater panegyrist of the usurper than might be wished, but the vigour with which Cromwell ruled contending

4 Marvell, Poems and Letters, i. 212. [‘A Dialogue between Two Horses’, ll. 138–40, 161–2]. 5 See Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations (London: Penguin Press, 2001), 185–7. 6 The Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Edward Thompson, 3 vols. (London, 1776), i, sig. 1A3v–1A4.

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factions, and the honour acquired by the nation under his government, seem to have dazzled men of undoubted patriotism’.7 Though some of Marvell’s Protectorate poems remained in obscurity throughout the eighteenth century, other poems from the Protectorate were relatively well known, and became instrumental in bringing fresh perspectives on the period to the fore. Their provenance suggests that the nineteenth-century rise in appreciation for certain Protectorate poems is not so much a rediscovery as a forceful re-evaluation, built on particular arguments that won greater currency as cultural conditions changed. As illustrated by the satire reproduced above, even in the later seventeenth century, the Protectorate could be represented as a high water mark of English foreign policy, particularly when monarchical governments failed to match the successes of the Protectorate’s army and navy. Protectorate poems by Dryden and Waller, which had previously been republished or quoted only to embarrass their authors,8 began to appear under more positive editorial rubrics in the series of miscellanies titled Poems on Affairs of State (1689–1707). These developed a poetic ‘secret history’ of the previous reigns. This genre derived from oppositional prose polemics, which had compiled different kinds of insider testimonies that exposed courtly designs to subvert English institutions of liberty.9 Diverse poems from the second half of the seventeenth century were now attributed to ‘Great Persons as were near the helm’, and presented as authoritative witnesses to a secret history that absolutist statecraft would suppress.10 Protectorate verse provided a leading edge for this poetic history at variance with the official history of the state. It included not only Waller’s Panegyrick, Dryden’s elegy for Cromwell, and The First Anniversary (albeit published under Waller’s name), but even a selection of poems from Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria, which might embarrass William III’s alleged readiness to sacrifice English money and liberty to protect his interests in the United Provinces: readers encountered verse monuments to a glorious occasion in 1654 that appeared to transcend party division (the authors selected were men known for divergent political trajectories since), when a Cromwellian peace humbled the Dutch and even excluded the young William from power. The secret history compiled by Poems on Affairs of State has been credited with a germinal role in new constructions of literary authority in apposition to 7 John Aikin, General Biography; or Lives of the Most Eminent Persons, 22 vols. (London: Printed for G. G. and J. Robinson, 1818), xiv. 607–9; reproduced in Elizabeth Story Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 122–3. 8 John Dryden, An Elegy on the Usurper O. C. by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel, Published to Shew the Integrity of the Poet (London, 1681). See also the use made of lines from Waller’s Panegyrick in T. Lucretius Carus the Epicurean Philosopher, his Six Books De Natura Rerum, trans. Thomas Creech (Oxford, 1682), 175, where they become a metonym for the cultural degeneration that follows the overthrow of legitimate kings (I thank David Norbrook for bringing this passage to my attention). 9 Annabel Patterson, ‘Marvell and Secret History’, in Chernaik and Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty 23–49. 10 Poems on Affairs of State (London, 1697), sig. A2v.

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political power.11 The editors drew on a Whig political vocabulary to idealize poetry as the language in which authors might transcend the pressures of party and necessity and deliver uncompromised judgements. These terms of valuation are antipathetic to the interest of Protectorate verse as I have argued it in this book, and Waller’s Panegyrick, reprinted throughout the eighteenth century in editions of his works, was sometimes scorned as the work of a ‘prostituted’ pen.12 Yet Protectorate poetry also retained the power to bear witness to Cromwellian achievements, as when Isaac Kimber reproduced Waller’s elegy to close his evenhanded biography of Cromwell, which went through eight editions between 1724 and 1778, or John Bancks, again in a popular biography, reprinted the elegies by Waller, Dryden, and Sprat with the explanation that they ‘could not help paying that tribute to his remains, which the muses never bestow voluntarily but on the greatest of men’.13 It should be noted too that Marvell’s poems written for Whitelocke’s embassy to Sweden were not removed from the 1681 edition of his works, and helped to sustain the charisma of the Protector as a usurper who made England powerful on the international stage. His Latin lines for a portrait of Cromwell sent to Christina were translated by Voltaire, who was struck by the audacity with which to him they seemed to make light of the regicide, and offer her Cromwell’s portrait to ‘make amends’.14 The poetic record of the Protectorate thus remained alive throughout the eighteenth century, and could remind readers that the Protectorate was a troubling, paradoxical episode in history, of national glory as well as illegitimate tyranny. Bearing this circulation in mind helps us understand why eighteenthcentury histories were more or less obliged to respond to Protectorate verse as they characterized events of the 1650s. Cromwell’s relationship with the literary culture of his age became an important means of situating him in history, and would form an important strand in his rehabilitation. David Hume’s History of England (1754–61) constructed an ‘impartial’ historical synthesis that allowed weight to the arguments of select royalists and parliamentarians in the 1640s. These arguments were conducive to the liberties established by the Glorious Revolution and preserved by the Hanoverian establishment. The independents were Hume’s scapegoats; they had hijacked an essentially moderate parliamentary movement for reform, murdered the king, and installed a despotic, duplicitous, and fanatically puritan Cromwell in his place. This reading of seventeenthcentury history required Hume to deal with poetic evidence that the Protector’s intentions had been praised by admired writers, not least Waller. Hume’s literary 11 Michael McKeon, ‘What Were Poems on Affairs of State?’, 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, 4 (1998), 363–82, 368–76. 12 Edmund Waller, The Works of Edmund Waller, ed. Percival Stockdale (London, 1772), p. l. 13 John Bancks, A Short Critical Review of the Political Life of Oliver Cromwell, Lord-Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2nd edn. (London, 1742), 262–3. 14 Oeùvres de Voltaire, ed. M. Beuchot, 72 vols. (Paris, 1829), xxviii. 265–6; repr. in Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 112.

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judgements sound very conventional, but the consensus that seems to echo through his account of mid-century literature masks an original, partisan argument that the Protectorate had a degenerate and profoundly regrettable effect upon English literary culture. Hume remarks briefly on Marvell’s association with the government, but does not acknowledge his extant Protectorate verse. Waller’s poems are superficial, lacking sublimity and pathos: they ‘abound in panegyric, without exciting admiration’. The Panegyrick ‘contains more force than we should expect’, but an earlier remark insinuates the origin of that force: the ‘barbarian’ Cromwell ‘caressed’ Waller, which does not quite invert the poet’s old reputation for sycophancy. Hume’s compilation of judgements on Milton provides the most damning evidence of Cromwell’s cultural influence: Milton was ‘deeply engaged with these fanatics, and even prostituted his pen in theological controversy, in factious disputes, and in justifying the most violent measures of the party’. Hume has high praise for the pre-war Comus and postInterregnum Paradise Lost. Qualities of that epic are superior to Homer, Lucretius, and Tasso, but a third of it lacks harmony and elegance, and vigour of imagination. It is infected with the ‘cant’ of the puritans. Were it not for their influence, Milton could have been a contender: ‘had he lived in a later age, and learned to polish some rudeness in his verses; had he enjoyed better fortune, and possessed leisure to watch the returns of genius in himself; he had attained the pinnacle of perfection, and borne away the palm of epic poetry’.15 Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France echoes the ambivalence of many other eighteenth-century writers in his portrayal of Cromwell as a prodigy who raised the dignity of England by means of criminal ambition.16 But the comparison with events in Revolutionary France took him to Waller’s Panegyrick, and some new, influential claims. He contrasts Cromwell with the men whom he saw driving the French Revolution: not intellectuals, in this case, but a narrow ‘monied interest’ which grows wealthy from trading the paper bonds issued to finance public expenditure, and which he sees seeking to profit further from the confiscation of church lands as security for more paper bonds and an even greater public debt. What especially worries Burke about the shortterm schemes of these men is that they operate outside the nexus of landed and commercial economic interests which inhibits the English government from taking on too much public debt; that nexus is glued by the social codes of manners, chivalry, and intellectual patronage, which Burke sees as having been uprooted by events in France, along with the landed interest in government.17 Burke brings home this argument by alleging that even the despotic Cromwell 15 David Hume, The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar to the Revolution in 1688, new edn., 8 vols. (Edinburgh, 1792), vii. 341–5. 16 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1968), 136–7. 17 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Political Economy of Burke’s Analysis of the French Revolution’, Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 331–49.

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remained committed to this symbiosis of landed and commercial interests, and the ‘long view’ of governmental self-preservation which it supports, notwithstanding his means of institutional reform and military dictatorship. Thus, in Burke’s account, Cromwell becomes a figure of practical reforming energies. Burke’s contrast is rather broad brush; he does not elaborate on how the Protectoral constitutions coalesce with his sense of a peculiarly English, unrevolutionary spirit of constitutional evolution, via innumerable practical renovations, which maintain the continuity and integrity of the ancient constitution. Indeed, it is hard to see how he could; but the stanza that he quotes from Waller’s Panegyrick does much of the work for him: Still as you rise, the state, exalted too, Finds no distemper whilst ’tis changed by you; Chang’d like the world’s great scene, when without noise The rising sun night’s vulgar lights destroys. (ll. 141–4)

Waller provides testimony to the continuity of the state under Cromwellian policies, and this testimony bears the authority of one enacting the polite manners which sustain that continuity: Burke redeems the poem from notorious flattery to a ‘compliment made . . . by [Cromwell’s] kinsman, a favourite poet of that time’. Perhaps one might even see a canny push against the drift of patriotic canon formation in Burke’s neglecting to cite Waller by name. Instead, he invokes an authority more illustrative of the cultural transactions that kept Cromwell conservative: local relationships and the tastes produced by notquite-obsolete manners. Or perhaps Burke never intended to link Cromwell so particularly with the indigenous, cautious spirit of reform, in harmony with nature, which Reflections on the Revolution in France sought to distinguish and defend. But this is the sense attributed to Waller’s lines when they were quoted in Parliament during controversy over major nineteenth-century reforms, twice by Peel in 1828 and 1831 in debates over reform of the common-law courts and of Parliament, and again by Richard Lalor Sheil in the 1842 debate over the Income Tax Act.18 These speeches stopped short of fully endorsing Waller’s view of Cromwell, but they show that the stanza had become something of a political commonplace, which could be deployed as a touchstone of the English way of practical reform, or stand in for a more positive view of Cromwell as a paragon of this Burkeian spirit; a view which became better established as the century wore on. By 1900, Waller’s verses could be quoted by the historian C. H. Firth with no hint of ironic tension, to encapsulate the transition between republic and Protectorate, by 18 Robert Peel, The Speeches of the Late Right Honourable Robert Peel, 4 vols. (London: George Routledge, 1853), i. 571; ii. 327; R. L. Sheil, The Speeches of the Right Honorable Richard Lalor Sheil, ed. Thomas MacNevin (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1847), 220. Sheil was criticizing Peel at the time, and so perhaps intended an ironic allusion to Peel’s earlier speeches.

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which Cromwell, the ‘saviour of society’, effected a return to order which was ‘as peaceful as one of the ordinary operations of nature’.19 In the interval between the writings of Burke and Firth, Cromwell’s reputation underwent its dramatic reassessment. It is worth noting that the Romantic poets remained unenthused by Cromwell and poetry of the Protectorate. Wordsworth made a copy of ‘An Horatian Ode’ at a time when that poem had few admirers, but his patriotism, like that of earlier Whigs, found no place for Cromwell among the heroic seventeenth-century politicians and writers ‘who called Milton friend’ (indeed, a reading of Milton’s sonnet to Cromwell prompted him to reflect upon Napoleon Bonaparte’s betrayal of liberty’s cause, as if both leaders had disappointed the hopes once invested in them).20 The drafts of Shelley’s unfinished drama ‘Charles the First’ do suggest that Cromwell might have been given a more heroic role, but in the surviving early scenes, Hampden appears to be the genius of Shelley’s revolution.21 Cromwell’s rehabilitation was driven by relatively mainstream writing. Among the most powerful early contributions to this process was an 1825 essay on Milton by Thomas Babington Macaulay in the Edinburgh Review.22 Like Burke, Macaulay mobilized literature to identify a spirit of Cromwellian activism beyond received narratives of his military despotism; but Macaulay provided another crucial strand for the Victorian rehabilitation of Cromwell by turning to Milton’s canon to frame a more visionary construction of Cromwell. Macaulay examines the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the light of the established view that 1688 witnessed the legitimate deposition of a tyrant: his comparative argument finds that most reasons for deposing James II also apply to the deposition of Charles I. But when he argues that the wars, republic, and Protectorate witnessed the birth-pangs of modern liberty, he vindicates Cromwell’s intentions by their endorsement in Milton’s ‘sublime’ vision of England’s political possibilities. Cromwell and Milton share a commitment to liberty which outstripped what was practicable in the short term. Macaulay praises the Protectoral constitutions, but argues that political circumstances inhibited their proper consolidation, so they lived only as long as Oliver Cromwell.23 For Macaulay, Milton’s canonical texts better reveal the temper of the leader Milton elected to serve than any Protectoral panegyric caught up in the 19 C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England (London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900), 345. 20 Duncan Wu, Wordsworth’s Reading, 1800–1815 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), 142–3; William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest De Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936), 244; John Bard McNulty, ‘Milton’s Influence on Wordsworth’s Early Sonnets’ PMLA, 62 (1947), 745–51 (745). 21 Peter Kitson, ‘ ‘‘Not a Reforming Patriot But an Ambitious Tyrant’’: Representations of Cromwell and the English Republic in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Timothy Morton and Nigel Smith (eds.), Radicalism in British Literary Culture, 1650–1830: From Revolution to Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 183–200 (195). 22 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘[Milton]’, Edinburgh Review, 42 (1825), 304–46; repr. in his Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols. (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1961), i. 150–94; subsequent citations refer to the Essays. 23 Ibid. 183.

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actualities of settlement. At one point, Macaulay quotes Comus to pin down the difference between Milton’s commitment to intellectual freedom and the relatively myopic freedoms that preoccupied most of his peers.24 Cromwell became a hero whose energies had helped to consolidate institutions that now protected England from the wave of revolutions sweeping through Europe. The nineteenth century witnessed the decline of country, anti-courtly sentiment, and radical Whiggism along with it, and Cromwell appealed to new oppositional positions: religious Dissenters became less afraid to praise him as an early champion, and working-class radicalism, appealing for parliamentary reform, created a plebeian interpretation of his dismissal of the Rump.25 Victorians could look on the Humble Petition and Advice as a prototype for their own parliamentary rule and constitutionalism, but Cromwell’s activism and practicality became the enabling force in the history of constitutional development. Blair Worden describes how these different stands of reappraisal coalesced: From one angle, constitutional arrangements seemed vital to the Victorians. Yet from another they could be judged to occupy only the surface of political life. In times of crisis constitutional forms must expect to yield to the deeper forces of society and to the energizing force of leadership. A new, more dynamic conception of the hero had replaced the patriot Stoicism of the previous age.26

Napoleon Bonaparte became the ubiquitous and pivotal parallel, by which diverse historians—Henry Hallam, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and Thomas Carlyle—triangulated Cromwell’s heroic impress on their own present.27 Admittedly, this comparison could denigrate Cromwell, magnifying the Protector’s militarism and disregard for the constitution; but after the Napoleonic Wars ended, it began to reveal more favourable aspects of the Protector: Cromwell was an active leader like Bonaparte, but superior because he combined energetic military genius with the ‘English’ virtue of constitutionalism.28 Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode’ became particularly esteemed as a representation of Cromwell’s practical activism, while Marvell’s Protectoral works were glossed to shore up this image: in Alexander Grosart’s edition of Marvell’s poems, his notes to The First Anniversary include the comment that Bonaparte, like Cromwell, survived a coaching accident. The annotation distracts readers from intimations of the Protectorate’s fragility.29 24 Macaulay, ‘[Milton]’, 191. 25 For a fuller account of these developments, see Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 215–63. 26 Ibid. 233. 27 Henry Hallam, The Constitutional History of England, 2 vols. (London, 1827), ii. 120–2. Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘[Hallam’s Constitutional History]’, Edinburgh Review, 48 (1828), 96–169; repr. in Critical and Historical Essays, i. 1–76 (49–55); Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: J. Fraser, 1841). 28 Timothy Lang, The Victorians and the Stuart Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 96; Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 233–4. 29 Andrew Marvell, The Complete Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 4 vols. (London, 1872), i. 187.

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The rehabilitation of Cromwell was conditioned in part through shifts whereby the puritan heritage seemed less continuous with current dangers to stability. Timothy Lang and Worden have argued that the Puritan example became less threatening throughout the nineteenth century, as the state ceased to be regarded as an Anglican stronghold, and religious Dissenters won concessions that brought them in from the margins of Victorian culture.30 Nonconformists, including John Forster and Robert Vaughan, now presented Puritanism as a contribution to the emergence of a liberal England that could accommodate sectarian plurality.31 S. R. Gardiner viewed a heritage of religious partisanship as a danger to the project of liberal nationalism. Only an objective account of that heritage could truly unify the nation, and his ‘scientific’ researches produced a history that praised the positive moral effect wrought by seventeenth-century puritanism on national culture.32 From a literary point of view, perhaps the richest case for the integration of Cromwell’s spirituality into the nation’s heritage was presented in Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) and The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell (1846), a collection of Cromwell’s letters and speeches concatenated with vividly imaginative contextual reconstructions. Carlyle rejected the constitutional focus of Whig history to write history conceived as a narrative of luminous moments of action guided by heroic men. The Life and Letters revealed that the foundation of Cromwell’s heroism was his religious conviction and sincerity. This edition pays little attention to seventeenth-century poetry—perhaps because Carlyle conceptualized history itself as ‘the only Poetry. . . could we tell it right’33—but by transforming the language and interiority of puritanism into a heroic resource, Carlyle’s work opened Protectoral verse to a new axis of valuation, which placed particular emphasis on representations of the private and interior Cromwell. Marvell’s elegy was praised as superior to those of Dryden and Waller, because it rooted Cromwell’s activism in his gentler, godly inner conviction. In the eyes of some, this made it an even better representation of Cromwellian puritanism than the Life and Letters: the ‘Elegy, in parts noble, and everywhere humanly tender, is worth more than all Carlyle’s biography as a witness to the gentler qualities of the hero, and of the deep affection that stalwart nature could inspire in hearts of truly masculine temper’.34 Such readings also helped to centre Cromwell within a patriotic tradition that had once regarded him as a tyrant. Like Milton’s sonnets ‘Cromwell, our chief of men’ and ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints’ (which was often taken to 30 Lang, Victorians and the Stuart Heritage, 3, 91–138; Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 250–8. 31 Lang, Victorians and the Stuart Heritage, 93–138. 32 S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 10 vols. (London, 1883–4), v. 355; discussed by Lang, Victorians and the Stuart Heritage, 175–6. 33 The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. C. E. Norton, 2 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), i. 25. 34 James Russell Lowell, The Writings of James Russell Lowell, 10 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890), iii. 118–19; repr. in Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 232.

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address Cromwell), Marvell’s elegy was interpreted as a poem which situated Cromwell’s personal religious conviction as the energizing origin of a political culture which inspired influential literary-political worthies. This was a judgement endorsed and extended by Grosart’s edition of Marvell’s Works. Although Grosart’s project was dedicated to Carlyle with express permission, and draws on the Life and Letters for glosses, it breaks with Carlyle’s critique of Whig history and reconciles Carlyle’s heroic Cromwell to a heroic image of Marvell derived from the eighteenth-century pantheon of patriots.35 Grosart reorganizes the poetic career mapped by Marvell’s 1681 folio around a Protectoral encounter between Marvell, Cromwell, and Milton. The edition privileges the once omitted ‘state poems’ as sublime responses to Cromwell’s heroism. They form an original narrative episode in which Marvell’s merely ‘theoretical’ monarchism is swept aside by the Carlylian man of action, an experience that seems to ground in practical wisdom Marvell’s subsequent patriotic energies. This narrative reflects the increasingly prevalent esteem for Marvell’s ‘An Horatian Ode’ as a key to perplexed historical affiliations: ‘Marvell . . . never indulged in abstract political speculation; his mind, on that side, being wholly of a practical, ready-working kind; he would have loved a free constitutional monarchy if any such could have been established.’36 The 1776 edition of Marvell’s poems included lines from James Thomson’s Liberty on the title-page, as if to reassure readers that the sublime moment of English history was the 1689 settlement, to which Marvell’s and Cromwell’s efforts ‘paved the way’. Grosart’s edition contributed to a shift in the nature and historical focus of the sublime, beyond the exclusion crisis and the 1689 constitutional settlement, and back to an original collision of practical, spiritual, and literary energies within an imagined social circle that surrounded the Protector. Taste played its part too. A review of Grosart’s edition in the Spectator heaped praise on ‘An Horatian Ode’, but regretted the ‘obscenity’ of the Restoration satires.37 Cromwell’s centrality to the historical and literary map of seventeenth-century revolutions was sealed by a growing harmony between the above developments and ideological tenets that were becoming established in the Liberal Party. The narrative whereby Cromwell had developed ‘character’ which lifted the nation could be presented for emulation. J. S. A. Adamson has shown how S. R. Gardiner’s representation of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Interregnum as a drama centred on Cromwell’s career can be related to Gardiner’s involvements with the Liberal Party: the problems which Gardiner’s Cromwell 35 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Prehistory of Whiggism’, in David Womersley, Paddy Bullard, and Abigail Williams (eds.), ‘Cultures of Whiggism’: New Essays in English Literature and Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005), 31–61 (42). 36 [Lord Henry Brougham], Old England’s Worthies: A Gallery of Portraits (London: Charles Cox, 1847), 150; repr. in Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 189. 37 [W. D. Christie], ‘Mr Grosart’s Edition of Andrew Marvell’, Spectator, 46 (15 Feb. 1873), 210; repr. in Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 236–8.

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rises to, particularly the need to reconcile the protection of property and liberty to democracy, had parallels in specific problems faced by Gladstone, and these parallels informed Gardiner’s esteem for Cromwell as the leading actor in a drama that had introduced many values of Victorian liberalism to political debate.38 Gardiner’s depiction of Cromwell’s liberal ‘character’ could inspire the urban middling rank as well as would-be prime ministers. Gardiner’s Cromwell is also ‘the most typical Englishman of all time’, and firmly middle class.39 As pointed out by J. W. Burrow and Stefan Collini, the triumph of character over circumstance offered an instructive mirror to those hoping to prosper in a liberal economy and build the ‘moral collateral’ that would reassure business associates and employers.40 The man of character ‘was most typically thought of as forging that character through struggle, through competition’.41 Gardiner’s Cromwell develops character through contests in the Lower House and through his early military engagements of the 1640s. It is this character-centred, liberal perspective on the upheavals of the mid-century which informs the most balanced and appreciative reading of Protectorate verse included in Elizabeth Story Donno’s anthology of Marvell criticism. W. J. Courthope compares Marvell’s works from the 1650s with Waller’s Panegyrick, and finds that they are diversely ‘instructive’ for what they reveal about the relationship between Cromwell’s ‘private character’ and his achievements as a ‘representative of England’.42 The culmination of liberal esteem for Oliver Cromwell was the erection of his statue outside the Houses of Parliament. It was fashioned to downplay his sectarian identity and belligerence, and paid for by Lord Rosebery, the Liberal Party leader, who had especially hoped that it would boost his appeal to Nonconformists.43 Ostensibly, Cromwell’s heroic reputation suffered at the hands of twentiethcentury historians. They questioned the connection between Cromwell’s motivations and the ideals of liberals or socialists. Preparing a new edition of Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches during the build-up to the Second World War, W. C. Abbott came to see Cromwell not as a liberal hero, but as a proto-fascist dictator. Marxist historiography turned its attention to the radical groups that came to prominence during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the 1650s. Even though it is now widely accepted that the Diggers, Ranters, and Levellers anticipated Communist, socialist, or liberal values only in a heavily qualified sense, debate over the radical heritage revealed that Cromwell had little 38 J. S. A. Adamson, ‘Eminent Victorians: S. R. Gardiner and the Liberal as Hero’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 641–57 (648). 39 Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Cromwell’s Place in History (London: Longmans & Green, 1897), 113, 116. 40 See J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 89; Stefan Collini, ‘The Idea of ‘‘Character’’ in Victorian Political Thought’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 35 (1985), 29–50 (39). 41 Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, 89. 42 Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell, 299–302. 43 Worden, Roundhead Reputations, 296–315.

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sympathy with most of their demands. Cromwell’s heroic reputation was damaged further by the revival of interest in republican thought. In the wake of attacks on the propensity of ‘Whig’ and Marxist histories to read the ends of late modern politics into the intentions of seventeenth-century actors, the new history of ideas pioneered by J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner argued that seventeenthcentury republicans developed a ‘neo-Roman’ concept of liberty which is distinct from the liberties cherished by Whigs and liberals, and which characterizes the thought of the republican opposition to Cromwell during the 1650s.44 Cumulatively, these debates installed a paradigm within which the Protectorate is seen as a conservative cultural reaction in recoil from ideas that were too radical to win acceptance, and from which Cromwell edged away. Historians writing after these discussions, notably John Morrill and Derek Hirst, have developed a sympathetic account of Cromwell’s policy and agency by emphasizing the practical limitations of his power.45 His godly ambitions were sometimes impossible to realize programmatically; at others they were obstructed by parliaments, a powerful army, and an overwhelming bureaucratic workload. In his vision of society, he was an instinctive conservative, who prioritized an inclusive settlement. It has been argued that he left no personal legacy of lasting reform, although the Protectoral state is also seen as the origin of important institutions: a modern navy, a central post office, a civil service, and a colonial trade policy. In many faculties of English, the later twentieth century witnessed a historicist turn. Increasingly, critics interpreted early modern writing by situating it in historical contexts. Studies of 1640s and 1650s verse could no longer take Cromwell’s heroism for a historical fact; yet Cromwell’s career, character, and dilemmas—the structuring co-ordinates of Victorian Cromwellianism—have continued to provide the dominant contextual theme for much of this period’s poetry. John Wallace’s Destiny His Choice (1968), Annabel Patterson’s Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978), and Laura Knopper’s Constructing Cromwell (2000) each locate the problem of what to make of Cromwell at the heart of Protectorate literary culture. Though the question has not been posed as a matter of literary context, Ronald Hutton has asked why Cromwell’s privileged place in the cultural history of the seventeenth century often seems to have survived the assaults of twentiethcentury historiography.46 He draws attention to the tendency of contemporary culture, particularly in England, to reproduce Cromwell as a key historical figure. The material presence of Victorian esteem for Cromwell in English daily life— not only the monument outside the palace of Westminster, but in the ubiquitous streets and buildings named after him—combines with the accessibility of Gardiner’s densely researched historiography and Abbott’s edition of the letters 44 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism. 45 See, e.g., their essays in Morrill (ed.), Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution. 46 Ronald Hutton, Debates in Stuart History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 93–131.

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and speeches, to make Cromwell an appealing subject for popular biographies. These have sustained him in the public eye as a military genius, conviction politician, and champion of religious toleration. Furthermore, the richness of the letters and speeches as primary sources continues to draw academic energies back to biographical and ‘top-down’ arguments: Cromwell’s responses and motivations in 1650s politics, and the effectiveness of his executive power, have become densely contested debates. Thus the cultural history of the Protectorate to a large extent remains the history of Oliver Cromwell. When one contrasts the vigorous and methodologically heterodox debate over the causes of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, it becomes clear that the collapse of constitutional government in 1659 has not been explored with anything like the same interest or commitment.47 The Victorian perspectives that Hutton sees being reproduced inside and outside the academy have met with insufficiently sceptical scrutiny from critics of seventeenth-century literature. Victorian historiography has often fallen outside the focus of debates concerning the extent to which Marvell’s political culture has been distorted by later historiographic perspectives. Where critics have addressed the perspective of Grosart, they have emphasized continuities between his view of Marvell as a disinterested poet of liberty and the patriotic reputation cultivated by Marvell’s earlier editors. This elision is surprising, because the origins, defining tenets, and historical specificity of what might be identified as a Liberal tradition of freedoms is at stake in debates over ‘Whig’ interpretations of mid- and late seventeenth-century poetry. Scholars disagree considerably about whether later editors and literary historians introduced anachronistic perspectives to the cost of present-day Anglophone political culture, or whether in fact Marvell, Milton, and Nedham helped to create a tradition of political values that needs to be elucidated and defended now. Focusing upon the transmission of ideas between radical Whig publishers and the authors of the American Constitution, Annabel Patterson’s Early Modern Liberalism (1997) takes the latter view. She defines liberalism as the defence of certain human rights, a commitment shared by Marvell and Milton, their radical Whig editors, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. She praises Grosart’s edition as part of this tradition.48 In opposition to this view, Nicholas von Maltzahn argues that Marvell’s ‘disinterested’ commitment to liberty has become a stubborn anachronism, repeated in the works of Patterson and a critical school of self-described ‘New Whigs’, which distorts Marvell’s real political affiliations.49 Norbrook too views liberalism as a more recent political tradition which has helped to occlude republican concepts of liberty. Writing the English Republic is finely tuned to the 47 Notable exceptions to this tendency include Derek Hirst, ‘Concord and Discord in Richard Cromwell’s House of Commons’, English Historical Review, 103 (1988), 339–58, and Peacey, ‘Protector Humbled’. 48 Patterson, ‘Marvell and Secret History’, 25. 49 Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Prehistory of Whiggism’.

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part played by heroic images of Cromwell in obscuring seventeenth-century republicanism. His polar model of Protectorate literary culture as a contest between republican writing and Protectoral Augustanism throws into relief not only the aesthetics of republican writing, but the distortion in images of Cromwell as an activist in the tradition of moderate constitutionalism: Cromwell’s rise, Norbrook argues, actually became the hope of a deeply conservative cultural programme, which is why its images in Waller’s poetry appeal to conservatives such as Burke.50 I have argued that images of Cromwell’s political heroism (and Burke’s reading of Waller) can be questioned and decentred to an even greater extent. This epilogue, restricted as it is to the critical reception of a small number of poems, can only propose that more work be done to unpack the cultural legacy of Grosart, Gladstone, and Gardiner. But, as the history and values denoted by ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ seem ever more fractured across different academic, cultural, and geopolitical spheres, such a project could be important and timely. 50 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 305–6.

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Index Abbreviations, OC ¼ Oliver Cromwell RC ¼ Richard Cromwell Abbott, Wilbur Cortez 217 actors 53 Adams, John 219 Aikin, John 208–9 Ailmer, John 69, 78–79 Alexander the Great, compared to OC 70, 77, 79, 92, 198, 200 Allured, Matthew 88 n. 5 Amaranta, Swedish chivalric order 22 Amboyna, massacre of 7, 176 Anglican church, 121, 215 Anglicanism 155 apocalypticism and international politics 32–4, 64, 65, 70, 81, 135, 165, 168 and institutional reform 64, 65, 67, 70, 109–10 and OC’s death 165, 173–5, 187–8 see also Fifth Monarchists; Protestant militancy Aristotle 16 Armitage, David 72 n. 40, 92, 96 n. 33, 120 army, new model attempted republican coup from within 88–9, 112, 117 and the City of London 41–4, 48, 50–1, 60, 207 culture of 12–13, 33, 44, 95, 108, 156, 185 and Parliament 87–9, 100–1, 108, 109, 112, 113 n. 75, 114, 127, 132, 134, 153, 196, 202, 204 and public finance 126, 127, 132, 138, 140, 170–1, 202 relationship with OC 100–1, 107, 109, 113 n. 75, 134, 143, 153, 156, 185, 196–7, 202, 206, 218 relationship with RC 163, 172, 177, 197, 204 reputation in later years 209 role in genesis of the Protectorate 12, 41–4, 107 and the University of Oxford 81, 197 see also Major-Generals Ascham, Anthony 6 astrology 61, 75, 77 Athens, ancient 31, 56, 70, 191 Augustus Caesar, OC compared to 64–5, 83, 84–6, 87, 89–90, 99–101

Augustan culture and poetry 2, 3, 32, 45, 49, 90, 96–7, 99–101, 117–18, 191, 196, 203, 220 Bagshaw, Edward 71–2 Bancks, John 210 Bathurst, Ralph 1–2, 64–6, 78 Baydes, Marquis de, see Zufiiga, Don Francisco Lopez de Belasyse, John 142, 153 Belasyse, Mary (neé Cromwell), Countess Fauconberg 143–5, 153–62 Belasyse, Thomas, Viscount Fauconberg 143–4, 153–62 Bermuda Islands 122–5 Bill of Rights (1689) 208, 210, 216 Billingsly, Thomas 145–6 Blake, Robert 69, 133–7, 168, 200 n. 109 Blount, Mountjoy, First Earl of Newport 144–5, 151 Bonaparte, Napoleon 213–14 Bordeaux-Neufville, Antoine de 7, 113 n. 75, 143 Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill 126, 144, 153 Bradford, William, ‘Of Boston in New England’ 126 Bradstreet, Anne ‘A Dialogue between Old England, and New’ 121–2 ‘An Elegie upon that Honourable and Renowned Knight, Sir Philip Sidney’ 121 Bristol 47 Britannia 45, 70 Britishness 1 n. 2, 15, 45, 67–9, 91–101, 111–12, 121, 136, 141–2, 185, 204 Broghill, Lord see Boyle, Roger Brookes, Nicholas, 63–4, 84 Brut, mythical king of Britain 92, 112 bullionism 128–32 Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France 211–13, 220 Button, Ralph 76 Bysshe, Edward 83 Caesar, Julius 20 compared to OC 44, 79, 85–6, 92, 100 Cambridge, University of 66 n. 19, 158, 164–5 Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio 164–5

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Canary Islands 133–7 Canary wine 135–6 Carew, Thomas 103 Carlyle, Thomas, The Life and Letters of Oliver Cromwell 214–16 Carrington, Samuel 127 Cartwright, William 103 Cavendish, Christian, Countess of Devonshire 144–5, 155 Celtis, Conrad 31 Charles I, King conflict with parliament 15–16, 38, 89 in courtly poetry and art 68, 78, 85–6, 99, 103, 105, 116, 118, 132, 133, 136 execution of 6, 9, 10 n. 31, 12, 15, 18, 35, 37, 50, 144, 165, 210 power of, compared with Protector’s 92, 96, 100, 104–5, 118, 105, 132, 133, 136, 167 as martyr 179–80, 189 masques for, 9, 151 see also Eikon Basilike; monarchy; royalism Charles II, King 144, 166 n. 9, 204 Chernaik, Warren 2–3, 101 n. 45 chivalry 22, 120, 130–2, 140–1, 169, 184–5, 206, 211 Christina, Queen of Sweden abdication 18–23 audiences with Bulstrode Whitelocke 8, 11, 13–17, 18, 19, 27 culture of her court 9–13, 16–19, 28–33 education and patronage 10 n. 26, 13, 18, 22, 27, 29–33 portrait of 29–30 relationship with OC 12, 13–14, 16, 29, 33–4 represented as Diana 29, 32–3 represented as Pallas 22, 31 theatrical imagination 16–17, 22 see also Sweden Chiverton, Richard, Lord Mayor 54–7, 60 Choerilus 80 Cicero 42 civility 9, 25, 62, 65–84 Civil War, the see Wars of the Three Kingdoms Claudian 90, 94 Claypole, Elizabeth (neé Cromwell) 145, 147, 178–9 Cleveland, John 79–84 Clothworkers, Company of 57–60 Congregationalism 122–3, 125 Cooke, Thomas 207–8 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury 2 Council of State 11, 12, 24, 50, 52, 88, 96, 102, 108, 113 n. 75, 143, 163 Cowley, Abraham, ‘Pindarique Odes’ 191–2, 195–6 Cromwell, Elizabeth see Claypole, Elizabeth

Cromwell, Frances see Rich, Frances Cromwell, Mary see Belasyse, Mary Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector attitude to drama 146–7 coaching accident 3, 110–12 controversy of proposed coronation 13–14, 16, 33–4, 78, 99, 112, 117, 126–130, 133, 135–7, 153, 163, 165–6, 203, 205 courtliness of 30, 42, 64, 94–5, 98, 118, 143–7, 149–62, 177–82, 184–91, 206 diplomatic activity 7–8, 10–11, 12, 21–3, 24, 29, 62, 63–4, 84 dynastic negotiations of 143–4, 156 entertainments for 42–3, 149–62 funerals 163, 164, 169–70, 172–7, 180–4, 186–90, 192, 202 origins and lineage 90, 99, 152, 159–60, 174, 177, 185, 191 posthumous reputation 165–74, 176, 177–90, 192–202, 207–20 relationship with the City of London 39–46, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 57, 59, 107 relationships with parliaments 62, 87–92, 94–102, 104–18, 126–33, 143, 153, 165, 176, 196, 200, 206, 210, 212–13, 214, 217–18 relationship with Queen Christina of Sweden 12, 13–14, 16, 29, 33–4 relationship with the University of Oxford 61, 64, 65, 69–71, 77–86, 164–6, 193–7 response to Waller’s Panegyrick 98 spiritual life 180–91 support for the development of trade 8, 55–6, 71–2, 76–8, 92–5, 128–30, 133–7, 169–72 (see also trade) triumphal entry to London 39–46 see also Charles I, King, power of, compared with Protector’s Cromwell family, 143–5, 149–62, 177–91, 193–5, see also Cromwell, Oliver, origins, and lineage; Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Richard, Lord Protector 163–6, 171, 172, 177, 178, 181, 190–1, 193–7, 198, 200, 202–4, 219 n. 47 Cromwell, Thomas 174, 176, 185 Daniel, Samuel 151 Davenant, William 120, 137–8, 144, 146, 199, 201, 202, 206 The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru 138–40, 147 The History of Sr Francis Drake 139–42 The Siege of Rhodes 137–8

Index Davyes, Thomas, The Tenth Worthy 164–7, 170, 185 Deane, Richard 69–70 Dekker, Thomas 46 Denham, John, Coopers Hill 73–4, 136 Denmark 8, 12–13, 34–5 Desborough, John 172, 181 see also Wallingford House group Dethicke, John, Lord Mayor 47 Devereux, Robert, Earl of Essex 121, 173 Devonshire, Countess of, see Cavendish, Christian diplomacy, Anglo-Dutch 6–11, 18 Anglo-French 24 Anglo-Spanish 24 Anglo-Swedish 6–36 humour in 11, 18, 25–6, 27 morality in 17–18 protocols and organisation, 6–11, 21, 181 diplomatic gifts 11–12, 18, 19, 23, 27, 29–30 Dorislaus, Isaac 6 Drake, Francis 120, 139–42 Dryden, John 90, 91 ‘Heroique Stanzas’ 163, 176, 197–204, 205, 209–10, 215 Dutton, William 26, 30, 123 Dzelzainis, Martin 2–3 East India Company 55 Eastland Company, 55–7 economic inflation 128 Edward VI, King 92, 174, 176 Eikon Basilike 180–1 elegy see funeral elegy Elijah, OC compared to 113 Elizabeth I, Queen 15–16, 28, 120–1, 174, 176 emblems and iconography 29–30, 32, 45, 46, 47, 48, 52–3, 58, 63–4, 70, 78, 123–4, 131, 139, 151–2, 163, 179–80, 188–9, 201 emigration see migration empire, 20, 33, 45, 56, 89, 92–4, 96–7, 99, 112, 119–20, 125–42, 167–72, 206 epithalamium 152, 158–9 Erasmus 27 Essex, Earl of, see Devereux, Robert Eton College 26, 30, 123, 158 Evelyn, John 147, 173, 197 F., R., ‘On the Victory Obtained by Blake over the Spaniards’ 119, 125–6, 133–7 Fauconberg, Countess, see Belasyse, Mary Fauconberg, Viscount, see Belasyse, Thomas Feake, Christopher 116–17 Fenwick, Roger 186

245

Fifth Monarchists 88, 109–110, 112, 114–17 Filmer, Robert 2 Firth, Charles Harding 212–13 Fisher, Payne 2, 5, 80, 182–3, 198 Flecknoe, Richard, Love’s Dominion 146–7 Fleetwood, Charles 172, 181, 195 see also Wallingford House group forests 95–6 Forster, John 215 Fowke, John, Lord Mayor 39 French Revolution 211–14 funeral elegy 102, 111–17, 163–203 formal structure 182, 186–7 heraldic 163–7, 174, 177, 184–7 Gardiner, Samuel Rawlinson 215, 216–17, 218–19, 220 Gayton, Edmund, 53 n. 59 Charity Triumphant 47–50, 59 Gideon, OC compared to 114–15 Gladstone, William Ewart 217, 220 goths 31 Godfrey of Bulloigne 33 Godolphin, William 72–5, 77, 79 gold 121, 126–30, 132–3, 134–5, 140, 142, 199, 202 Gorges, R 65–6, 69–70 Grosart, Alexander 214, 216, 219, 220 Gustav II Adolph, King of Sweden (Gustavus Adolphus) 8, 13, 16, 33–4, 167 Guynne, Roland 68 Hall, Joseph 173, 176 Hallam, Henry 214 Hampden, John 213 Harrington, James 2, 101 n. 45 Harvey, Charles 180–1, 189 Heinsius, Nicolas 29 Henrietta Maria, Queen 151, 160 Henry IV, King 16 Henry VII, King 173–4 Henry VIII, King 92 heraldry 63–4, 83–4, 166–7, 174, 175, 182, 183–6, 189, 191, 204 Herbert, Henry 144 Hercules, compared to OC, 169–72 Herrick, Robert 60, 103–4, 118 Herringman, Henry 164 n. 2, 177, 181, 197 Heywood, Thomas 45–6, 52–3, 188–9 Hirst, Derek 218 Hispaniola 119, 126, 129, 137, 199–200 Hobbes, Thomas 2, 91, 101, 206 Hodges, Nathaniel 63 Horace, 25, 80, 148 Howell, James 53 n. 59 Londinopolis 37, 57

246

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Hoyle, Joshua 76 humanism 27, 30–4, 39, 48, 49, 51 Humble Petition and Advice 89, 126–34, 153, 163, 171, 195, 204, 205, 214 The Humble Petition of Several Colonels 88, 100, 104 Hume, David, History of England 210–11 Hutchinson, Lucy 66 Hutton, Ronald 218 Huygens, Lodewijck 146–7 independents 38–9, 42, 122–4, 210 industry 57–60 Ingelo, Nathaniel 26–7, 28, 30, 33, 34, 35, Instrument of Government vii, 13, 41, 50, 87–8, 94–7, 101–18, 126–7, 171, 178 Ireland 1 n. 2, 48, 74, 88 n. 7, 89, 91–2, 96–7, 112, 117, 136, 137, 186 Ireland, Thomas 63, 72, 76, 79 Ireton, Henry 173 Ireton, John, Lord Mayor 53, 58–60 Jamaica 119–20, 126, 130, 139, 186, 199–200 James VI of Scotland and I of England, King 15–16, 51, 71, 92, 105, 151, 163, 172–4, 188–9 James VII of Scotland and II of England, King (formerly Duke of York) 151, 213 Jefferson, Thomas 219 Johnson, Edward 125 Good News from New-England 120–1 Jonson, Ben 145 Hymenaei 151, 159 Jordan, Thomas 60 Fancy’s Festivals 136 n. 71, 147–9 Juvenal 20 Kimber, Isaac 210 Knoppers, Laura 3, 218 Koran, the 117 Langley, Henry 76 Laud, William, Archbishop 122–3 Lawrence, George 164–5 Levellers 57, 169, 217 Liberal Party 216–17 Lichfield, Leonard 85–6 Lilburne, John 51, 57 Lisle, Viscount, see Sidney, Philip Litsfield, Edmund, Triambeisis Celsissimi Domini Oliverii Cromwelli 41–6 Livy 20 Llwyd, Morgan 67 Lockhart, William 156 Locke, John 2, 76–7, 206

London, civic ceremony 39–46, 54–5, 82 banquets 42–4, 47, 54–5, 56, 60 charity 47–9, 59 London, civic institutions 37–9, 82, 107, 206–7 Common Council 38, 39, 58 Corporation for the Poor 48 Court of Aldermen 38, 41, 58 Court of Common Hall 38 livery companies 37–9, 44, 46–60 Lord Mayor 38–40, 44, 46–60 military forces 50–2 Louis XIV, King of France 104 Loxley, James 62, 67, 68, 164 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, essay on Milton 213–4 Machiavelli, Niccolo` 89, 97–8, 119, 128, 169, 171, 178, 199, 202, 203 Major-Generals 50, 126, 153 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 219 manuscript circulation of poetry 8, 19, 23, 26–7, 36, 98, 111, 127–8, 133, 137, 149, 207 Marche, Charles de la 15 Martial 44 Marston, John 173, 176 Marvell, Andrew, 26–7, 30, 123, 177, 181 An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government 207 ‘Bermudas’ 122–5 The First Anniversary, 87, 101–18, 177–8, 181, 206, 207–9, 214 ‘An Horatian Ode’ 169, 207, 213–14, 216 ‘In Eandem Reginae Sueciae Transmissam’ 210 ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas’ 7 ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ 26–36, 205–6 Miscellaneous Poems (1681) 133 n. 59, 144 n. 7, 207, 210, 216 ‘A Poem Upon the Death of O.C.’ 150, 177–91, 197–8, 203–4, 206, 207, 215–16 posthumous reputation 207–8, 216–17, 219 The Rehearsal Transpros’d 207 ‘Two Songs at the Marriage of the Lord Fauconberg and the Lady Cromwell’ 153–62, 206 masques 90, 138 for the Cromwell family 146–7, 149–62 cultural acceptability 17, 146–9 reform of 137–42, 146–7, 160–1 at the Swedish court 10, 17–18 see also musical entertainments Mathew, Robert 80–3 Mausolus 56

Index May, Thomas 2 Mayhew, Thomas, Upon the Death of His Late Highness, Oliver Lord Protector 164–8, 170 Mennes, John 176 mercantilism 128–30, 132 Mercers, Company of 47–50 Mercurius Politicus 9, 17, 40–1, 44–6, 87 n. 1, 144–5, 166 (see also newsbooks; Nedham, Marchamont) Middleton, Thomas 46, 49, 52–3 migration 31, 57, 75, 95, 120–5, 129, 141–2 Milton, John 2, 9, 101 n. 47, 197, 217 ‘Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints’ 215 ‘Cromwell, our chief of men’ 213, 215 First Defence 18, 166 n. 9 ‘Lycidas’ 160 A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle (‘Comus’) 150, 211, 214 Paradise Lost 210 posthumous reputation 211, 213–16, 219 Second Defence 101 n. 47 monarchy continuities with Protectoral culture 12–16, 30, 34, 37, 63–4, 68, 73, 79, 84, 91–7, 99, 103–4, 112, 118, 131, 132–3, 136, 153–4, 163–7, 172–7, 180–1, 184, 188–9, 190, 191, 201, 205, 206–7 ceremonies of 12, 39–40, 51–2, 78, 103, 118, 172–4, 180–1, 184 London’s predisposition to 37 private interests of 66, 104–5 see also Charles I, King, power of, compared with Protector’s; Cromwell, Oliver, controversy of proposed coronation; royalism Montague, Edward 126–8, 153 Montecuculi, Raymondo 22 Morrill, John 218 Mun, Thomas 128–9 Munday, Anthony 46, 58 musical entertainments 30, 35, 42–3, 48, 52, 60, 137–42, 144, 146–62, 179 Navigation Act 7, 71–2, 125 navy 55–6, 71, 91, 93, 95–6, 125–37, 139–42, 170–1, 209, 218 Nedham, Marchamont 17 n. 58, 70, 92, 106–7, 110 n. 65, 219 ‘Barbara Cæsareæ sileant Magnalia Romæ’ 44–6, 56, 60 see also Mercurius Politicus Neville, Henry 2 New England 120–5, 126 newsbooks 7, 9, 17, 42–6, 68, 101 n. 47, 105 n. 54, 110 n. 65 new year poetry 103–4

247

Noah, OC compared to 116 Norbrook, David 2–3, 45, 66 n. 31, 101, 171, 178, 203, 219–20 Norwich 46 Okey, John 88, 107, 112 opera, see musical entertainments Orpheus 52–4 Overton, Robert 88–9, 101–2, 112 Ovid 30, 32, 201 Owen, John 61, 67, 75, 84–6, 164, 194 Oxenbridge, John 123–4 Oxenstierna, Axel 12–13, 18–19, 23, 25 Oxenstierna, Eric 13 An Oxford Elegie 164–8 Oxford, University of attempts to reform 61, 64, 67, 70, 84, 193–5 curriculum 69, 74 history of verse anthologies 61–2, 67, 85–6 Musarum Oxoniensium Elaiophoria 62–86, 205, 209 printing at 85 and Protestant interest 75–7, 194 university wit 78–84 Packe, Christopher 130 Patterson, Annabel 111, 118, 218, 219 Parliament 41, 165, 176, 200, 212, 214, 218, 217 Barebone’s Parliament 7 n. 8, 8–9, 15, 25, 38, 50, 62, 70, 73, 75, 83 n. 65, 106, 115 The Convention Parliament 204 First Protectorate Parliament 50, 87–118, 206 the Long Parliament and Rump 6–8, 15, 24, 38, 47, 48, 67, 75, 83, 89, 106, 114–15, 204, 208, 214 parliament of RC’s Protectorate 177, 203, 204 Second Protectorate Parliament 125–33, 153, 184 n. 70 see also Westminster Palace pageants, civic 37, 39, 45–60, 206–7 Paige, Richard 80 pastoral 21–2, 30–2, 35, 58–60, 68, 157–62 Peel, Robert 212 Peru, Peruvians 138–140 Peters, Hugh 10–11 Philip IV King of Spain 104, 137 Pickering, Gilbert 172, 197, 198, 202 Pindaric odes 191–7 piracy 95, 120, 132–3, 139 Platonism 154–7 Playford, John 30, 147 Pliny 134, 136 Pocock, J. G. A. 4, 218

248

Index

Poems on Affairs of State 209–10 Pompilius, Numa 171 Powell, Vavasor 67–8 Presbyterians, Presbyterianism 83, 121, 143, 165, 173 Primrose, Archibald, earl of Rosebery 217 Protestant interest, role in foreign policy 7–8, 10, 16, 32–5, 75–7, 81, 95, 110, 120–5, 135, 168, 176, 206 Protestant militancy 7, 32–5, 64, 76, 81, 121, 166, 168 Pym, John 38, 173 Quakers 82, 112 Raylor, Timothy 89, 93–4, 97–8, 127 n. 37 Raymond, Joad 101 reason of state 49–50, 110 republicanism 2–3, 6–7, 9, 39–46, 49–52, 56, 66, 70, 74–5, 79, 88–9, 91, 100, 101–2, 106, 107, 109, 111–17, 118, 119, 123–5, 169, 191, 196–7, 204 Rich, Frances (neé Cromwell; later Russell) 143–5, 149–53, 154–5, 156, 160, 179 Rich, Hatton 145–6, 150 Rich, Nathaniel 88 Rich, Robert, Earl of Warwick (1587–1658) 123, 143–4, 153 Rich, Robert, Lord Rich (1611–59) 145 Rich, Robert (1634–58) 143–6, 149–53, 155 Richard I, King 51 Roberts, Michael 67–8 Rogers, Benjamin, composer 30 Rome, ancient anti-Roman historical perspectives 31–2 London as inheritor of Rome’s glory 54 origins and early history, compared to Protectorate 52, 171, 201 republican institutions in 40–1, 44, 46, 49–50, 52, 56 republic’s descent into despotism 44, 119 senate of, compared to Parliament 96–7 Temple of Janus in 64 Rosebery, earl of, see Primrose, Archibald Rowland, John, Upon the Much Lamented Departure of the High and Mighty Prince, Oliver 164–6, 198, 202 royalism, royalists 7–8, 15, 38, 66, 67–8, 89, 95, 99, 102–3, 109, 127, 131–2, 137, 143, 153, 156, 194 efforts to reconcile to Protectorate 89–92, 95, 99, 137, 195–6 royalist writing 49, 53, 62–3, 79–85, 89–92, 136 n. 71, 148–9, 166 n. 9, 180, 189–90, 191–2, 195, 210

St John, Oliver 6–7, 19 St Paul’s Cathedral 59, 105, 136 Salmasius 10, 18 Sandys, George 124 satire 20, 51–2, 63, 72, 76, 79, 111, 117, 120–2, 172–7, 208–9, 216 Saunders, Thomas, 88, 107 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 182, 187 Scheffer, Jean 36 Scobell, Henry 144 Scotland 1 n. 2, 88, 92, 96, 101 n. 47, 112, 136–7 Selden, John 45, 70, 83, 92 Shaftesbury, Earl of see Cooper, Anthony Ashley Sheil, Rochard Lalor 212 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, ‘Charles the First’ 213 Shirley, James 147, 161 Shadwell, Thomas 202 ship-money 96 Sidney, Algernon 2 Sidney, Philip, Elizabethan writer 121, 158 Sidney, Philip, Viscount Lisle 6, 172 Simpson, John 116–17 Skinner, Quentin 4, 206, 218 Skinners, Company of 50–7 Slater, Samuel, A Rhetorical Rapture 172–7, 180, 186, 189, 204 slaves, escaped 140 Slingsby, Henry 143, 153 Smith, James 176 Smith, Nigel 153–4 Somers Isles, see Bermuda Islands soteria 102, 111 Spain diplomatic relations with 6, 24 war with 51, 56–7, 119–20, 125–42, 168, 170, 183, 199, 205 speech act theory 4 Spenser, Edmund 129, 158 Spittlehouse, John 109–10, 115, 117 Sprat, Thomas ‘To the Happie Memory of the most Renowned Prince Oliver’ 163–4, 176, 191–7, 199, 202–4, 210 Stanley, J 83 state, the, political concept of 89–91, 101–2, 105–6, 109–20, 125–33, 137–42, 206 Stayner, Richard 126, 128, 129 Stephen, William fitz (Stephanides) 40–1 Strickland, Walter 6–7, 145 Sweden advantages of alliance with Commonwealth 8–9, 16, 24 cultural similarities with the Commonwealth 12–13, 14, 16, 25, 27, 30–5 cultural tensions with the Commonwealth 9–12, 17

Index institutions of Government 12, 23 obstructions to Anglo-Swedish negotiations 9–10, 18–19, 22–3, 34–5 see also trade; Queen Christina; Bulstrode Whitelocke; diplomacy Tasso, Torquato 33 Tatham, John London’s Triumphs 54–57 Londons Tryumph 57–60 taxation 38, 59, 60, 85–6, 120, 125–7, 132–3, 140–1, 171 n. 24, 173, 200, 206, 212 theatres, closure of 53, 137, 147–8, 179 Themistocles 55–7, 60 Thirty Years War 16, 33–4, 39 Thompson, Edward 208–9, 216 Thompson, James 216 Thomson, Maurice 124 Thurloe, John 12, 19, 112, 137, 166, 195 Tichborne, Robert, Lord Mayor 50–3 Townshend, Aurelian 160 trade 54–60, 71–8, 82, 93–5, 120, 125–37, 138, 141, 142, 170–2, 177, 206 with Baltic states 8, 16, 55–6 Committee for Trade 98 n. 43, 125, 129, 170 Trapnel, Anna 115–16 United Provinces English embassy to, 1651 6–7, 19 first Anglo-Dutch War, 1653–4 6–11, 18, 34–5, 57, 62–5, 68–78, 82–4, 92, 94, 209 proposed union of sovereignties 7, 74 trade rivalry with the Commonwealth 71–8, 82–3, 92 Uppsala, treaty of 36 Vane, Sir Henry 119, 125, 177 Vaughan, Robert 215 Virgil The Aeneid 20, 92 Eclogues 32–6, 159 Georgics 182–3 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) 210 Wales 1 n. 2, 67–8 Walker, Henry 180–1, 189 Wall, John 63 Wallace, John 218 Waller, Edmund 89 ‘The Battell of the Summer Islands’ 123, 142 letter from Cromwell 98 ‘On the Marriage of Mts. Frances Cromwell wth Mr. Rich’ 143–5, 149–53, 206 A Panegyrick to my Lord Protector 87–101, 105, 116, 117–18, 133, 152, 170, 172, 205–6, 209–12, 217 parliamentary speeches 89

249

posthumous reputation 209–13, 215, 217, 220 ‘To my Lord Admiral of his Late Sickness and Recovery’ 111 ‘To the King on his Navy’ 96, 132–3 ‘Upon his Majesties Repairing of Pauls’ 104–5, 136 Upon the Late Storme 163–4, 166, 167–72, 176, 182, 185–6, 197, 204, 205 Upon the Present War with Spain 126–33, 134, 140, 172 Wallingford House group 177, 191, 198 Ward, Nathaniel, The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America 121–2 Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1–3, 11 n. 3, 15–16, 24, 34, 39, 57, 64, 67–8, 73, 75, 79, 84, 85, 169, 196, 210, 213, 216–19 see also royalism Warwick, Earl of, see Rich, Robert Westminster Palace 46, 96, 113–14, 217, 218 Westminster, Treaty of 62–3, 74, 79, 97, 176, 209 see also United Provinces, first Anglo-Dutch War Whichcote, Benjamin 158, 165 Whigs 207–10, 213–16, 218, 219 Whistler, Daniel, ‘Ergone Hyperboreum coelum indignata recusat’ 19–23, 26, 205–6 Whitehall 18, 50, 51, 52, 59, 140, 143, 144, 186 Whitelocke, Bulstrode, ambassador to Sweden A Journal of the Swedish Embassy 9–10, 13–14, 17 attendance at court entertainments 10, 18 ‘Notes on the Duties of an Ambassador’ 17 plainness of 15–18, 21 speech to Swedish court 14–18 audiences with Queen Christina 8, 11, 13–17, 18, 19, 27 and the University of Oxford 83 see also diplomacy; diplomatic gifts Wildman, John 37, 88 Wilkins, John 193–7 William II, Prince of Orange 6 William III, King 208–9 Wither, George 2, 182 Salt Upon Salt 166, 168, 170, 173 Wolseley, Charles, ‘Vitloce, Martis deliciæ’ 23–6, 205–6 wool 57–60 Wordsworth, William, 213 Worthington, John 158–9 Zufiiga, Don Francisco Lopez de, Marquis de Baydes 128, 131–2 Zwicker, Stephen 198

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