From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and departures 9781526107510

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
List of figures
List of tables
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: from Republic to Restoration
1660: restoration and revolution
Monarchy and commonwealth: ‘republican’ defences of monarchy at the Restoration
Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history in The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) and Cromwell’s ...
‘Plots’ and dissent: the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663
Visions of monarchy and magistracy in women’s political writing, 1640–80
The battle of the books: the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer at the Restoration
Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65
‘Far off the public stage’: Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65
Projecting the Experiment: science and the Restoration
The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England
‘The Sport of Bishop-Hunting’: Marvell and the neo-Laudians
Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration
The French connection: luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II
Restoration opera and the failure of patronage
‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’: republicanism, exclusion, and the name of king in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius ...
‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis – the revision of a republican mode
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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From Republic to Restoration

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From Republic to Restoration Legacies and departures Edited by Janet Clare

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Manchester University Press 2018 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7190 8968 8 hardback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

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Contents

List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration Janet Clare 1 1660: restoration and revolution Blair Worden

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2 Monarchy and commonwealth: ‘republican’ defences of monarchy at the Restoration Glenn Burgess 3 Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history in The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) and Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660) Marissa Nicosia 4 ‘Plots’ and dissent: the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 Alan Marshall

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5 Visions of monarchy and magistracy in women’s political writing, 1640–​80 Amanda L. Capern

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6 The battle of the books: the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer at the Restoration David Bagchi

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Contents 7 Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–​65 Janet Clare 8 ‘Far off the public stage’: Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–​65 Keith McDonald 9 Projecting the Experiment: science and the Restoration Ted McCormick 10 The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England Paul Seaward

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11 ‘The Sport of Bishop-​Hunting’: Marvell and the neo-​Laudians Martin Dzelzainis

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12 Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration Warren Chernaik

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13 The French connection: luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II Laura L. Knoppers 14 Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Bryan White 15 ‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’: republicanism, exclusion, and the name of king in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus  Lisanna Calvi 16 ‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis –​the revision of a republican mode Christina M. Carlson Bibliography Index

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Figures

13.1 Charles II at Court (oil on canvas), Henri Gascar (1635–​1701) /​The Trustees of the Goodwood Collection /​Bridgeman Images page 269 13.2 Louis XIV (1638–​1715) holding a plan of the Maison Royale de Saint-​Cyr (oil on canvas), French School (seventeenth century) /​Château de Versailles, France /​ Bridgeman Images 270 13.3 Portrait of Françoise-​Athénaïs Rochechouart de Mortemart (1640–​1707) Marquise de Montespan (oil on canvas), French School (seventeenth century) /​Musée de Tesse, Le Mans, France /​3 Bridgeman Images 274 13.4 Portrait of Louise-​Renée de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and Aubigny (1649–​1734), mistress of Charles II, Henri Gascar (1635–​1701) /​Private Collection /​ Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London /​Bridgeman Images 275 13.5 Portrait of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland (oil on canvas), Henri Gascar (1635–​1701) /​Private Collection /​ Photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London /​Bridgeman Images 277 13.6 Portrait of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, with her daughter, Lady Barbara Fitzroy, Henri Gascar, after his own painting, c. 1675. © Trustees of the British Museum 278 13.7 Portrait of Madame de Montespan (1640–​1707) reclining in front of gallery of the Château de Clagny (oil on canvas), Henri Gascar (1635–​1701) /​Private Collection /​Bridgeman Images 279 13.8 Portrait of Louise-​Renée de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, holding a dove, with Cupid, Etienne Baudet, after Henri Gascar, c. 1673. © Trustees of the British Museum 281 vii

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List of figures 16.1 The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade (London, 1680) /​ Published by Mary Clark for Henry Brome after Sir Roger L’Estrange (1616–​1704) /​British Museum Satires 1080 /​© The Trustees of the British Museum 16.2 ‘The Royall Oake of Brittayne’/​Taken from: Walker, Clement (died 1651), Anarchia Anglicana: or the History of Independency (London, 1649) /​British Museum Satires 737 /​Representation of Oliver Cromwell /​ © Trustees of the British Museum 16.3 A Ra-​ree Show (London, 1681) /​Designed by Stephen College (c. 1635–​81) /​Satire against Charles II /​ © The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford. Shelfmark: Don c. 13 (1), A Rare Show

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14.1 Significant musical-​theatrical works presented at court during Charles II’s reign for which texts (and in some cases music) are extant 14.2 Large-​scale musical-​theatrical productions in the commercial theatres, 1660–​85

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Contributors

David Bagchi is Senior Lecturer in Ecclesiastical History and Co-Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull. His major publications include The Cambridge Companion to Reformation Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2004), co-​edited with David Steinmetz, and Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–​25 (Fortress Press, 2nd edn, 2009). More recently he has written on the use of the Bible in the Book of Common Prayer and on the Great Bible of 1539, and is currently collaborating on Susan Felch’s edition of William Tyndale’s independent works for the Catholic University of America Press. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Glenn Burgess is Deputy Vice-​Chancellor, Pro-​Vice-​Chancellor (Academic Affairs), and Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Hull. He is the author of The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Palgrave, 1992), Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (Yale University Press, 1996), and British Political Thought 1500–​1660 (Palgrave, 2009); and the editor or co-​editor of eight books, including (with Matthew Festenstein), English Radicalism 1550–​1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and (with Howell A. Lloyd and Simon Hodson) European Political Thought 1450–​1700 (Yale University Press, 2007). Professor Burgess is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and has served on its Council. Lisanna Calvi is Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Verona, Italy. Her main research interests have focused on Restoration and early modern drama and literary culture. She is the author of a book on Restoration and early eighteenth-​century tragedy, Kingship and Tragedy (QuiEdit, 2005)  and on James II’s devotional papers and Imago Regis (ETS, 2009). She has written articles on John Dryden, Robert Browning, Thomas Otway, Edmund Gosse, The Tempest and x

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List of contributors the commedia dell’arte, madness and autobiography in seventeenth-​century England, and Shakespeare in nineteenth-​century Italian theatre. She authored an Italian translation of the autobiographical writings of Dionys Fitzherbert and Hannah Allen (Pacini, 2012)  and  edited, with Silvia Bigliazzi, a miscellany on The Tempest (Palgrave, 2014) and Romeo and Juliet (Routledge, 2016). Amanda L. Capern is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Women’s History at the University of Hull where she is PI leading on the Gender, Place and Memory 1400–1900 research team. She is author of The Historical Study of Women: England, 1500–1700 (2010), editor of Women, Wealth and Power (2007), specialist sub-editor of Mary Hays’s Female Biography, 6 vols (2013/2014) and editor of the Palgrave series Gender and History. She has published widely on early-modern women’s writing, and on gender, property and family relations. She is currently working on a monograph on family inheritance, debt and litigation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Christina M. Carlson, Lecturer in Literature at Emerson College in Boston, MA, has published several articles on political and satirical engraving in seventeenth-​century England as well as on topical drama during this period. She is working on a book-​length manuscript on the subject. Warren Chernaik is Emeritus Professor of English, University of London. He was the founding Director of the Institute of English Studies, University of London, and is now a Senior Research Fellow of IES. He is the author of Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Myth of Rome in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Cambridge University Press, 2011), The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge University Press, 2007), a study of The Merchant of Venice (Northcote/British Council, 2005), Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1995), The Poet’s Time:  Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge University Press, 1983), and essays on such authors as Marvell, Milton, Shakespeare, Jonson, Herbert, Traherne, Rochester, Pepys and Behn. He has co-​edited books on topics as diverse as detective fiction, changes in copyright law and Andrew Marvell. Janet Clare is Professor of Renaissance Literature and with Glenn Burgess is the Founding Director of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Hull. She is the author of Art Made Tongue-​Tied by Authority:  Elizabethan and xi

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List of contributors Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (Manchester University Press, 2nd edn, 1999); Drama of the English Republic, 1649–​1660 (Manchester University Press, 2002); Revenge Tragedies of the Renaissance (Northcote/​British Council, 2006). She has published many articles on Renaissance and Early Modern literature and drama and co-​edited the Journal of Early Modern Studies 2 (2013), Shakespeare and Early Modern Popular Culture. Her most recent work is Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre, published by Cambridge University Press in 2014. She is editing What You Will for the forthcoming Oxford critical edition of The Complete Works of John Marston. Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Thought at the University of Leicester. He is currently editing the Histories for The Complete Works of John Milton; Andrew Marvell’s verse and prose for the 21st-​Century Oxford Authors series; and (with Edward Holberton) The Oxford Handbook of Andrew Marvell (all for Oxford University Press). He is also General Editor, with Paul Seaward, of the Oxford edition of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. Laura L. Knoppers is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, USA. She is the author of Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–​1661 (Cambridge University Press, 2000)  and Historicizing Milton:  Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (University of Georgia Press, 1994). Her Oxford scholarly edition of Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (Oxford University Press, 2008) won the John Shawcross Award from the Milton Society of America. Knoppers has edited five essay collections, including most recently The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2012). Since 2010, she has served as the editor of Milton Studies. Alan Marshall is Professor of History at Bath Spa University and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His current research focuses on intelligence and espionage in the early modern era. His forthcoming book entitled The Secret State in Early Modern Britain, c.1598–1715 (Manchester University Press) examines  the idea of ‘arcana imperii’ and the cultural meanings of the series of plots that were undertaken to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. He is the author of ‘ “Pax quaeritur bello”: The Cromwellian Military Legacy’ in J. Mills, ed., Cromwell’s Legacy (Manchester University xii

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List of contributors Press, 2012); ‘ “Woeful Knight”: Sir Robert Walsh and the Fragmented World of the Double Agent’ in D. Szechi, ed., The Dangerous Trade: Spies, Spymasters and the Making of Europe (Dundee University Press, 2010); The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 1660–​1702, New Frontiers in History (Manchester University Press, 1999); Intelligence and Espionage in the Reign of Charles II: 1660–​1685 (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Ted McCormick is Associate Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. He received his PhD from Columbia University in 2005. He is the author of William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University Press, 2009), which was awarded the 2010 John Ben Snow Prize by the North American Conference on British Studies. He has written extensively on science, religion and social engineering in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century England, Ireland and the Atlantic, and is completing a study of population thought in relation to ideas of nature, providence and government from the early Tudor era through Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. Keith McDonald joined the University of London International Academy in 2015 following spells teaching Renaissance Literature at the University of Leicester and the University of Geneva. He completed a doctoral thesis on Andrew Marvell in 2013 and is working towards the publication of his first monograph. In addition to his website, WritingPrivacy.com, his work has featured in English Studies, Marvell Studies, and in England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (Ashgate, 2014). Marissa Nicosia is an assistant professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, Abington College where she teaches and conducts research on early modern English literature, book history and political theory. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Marissa’s book manuscript studies the history play in the seventeenth century to argue that the genre forged speculative political futures. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Folger Institute, the University of Pennsylvania and the Andrew W. Mellon –​Rare Book School Fellowship in Critical Bibliography. Paul Seaward is British Academy/Wolfson Foundation Research Professor at the History of Parliament Trust, and was from 2001 to 2017 the Trust’s Director. He is the editor, with Martin Dzelzainis, of the Oxford edition of the works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. He edited a selection from Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion for the Oxford World’s Classics Series xiii

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List of contributors (2009), and edited Behemoth for the Oxford edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes (2010). Among current projects is a biography of Clarendon. Bryan White is a senior lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Leeds where he contributes to the Leeds University Centre for English Music. He is a member of the editorial committee of the Purcell Society for which he has edited Louis Grabu’s opera Albion and Albanius and G. B. Draghi’s setting of Dryden’s From harmony, from heav’nly harmony. He has published articles on the music and culture of the Restoration period in Music & Letters, The Musical Times, Early Music and Early Music Performer. He is completing work on a book: Music for St Cecilia’s Day from Purcell to Handel. Blair Worden is Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford. His publications include The Rump Parliament 1648–​1653 (Cambridge University Press, 1974); an edition of Edmund Ludlow’s A Voyce from the Watch Tower (Royal Historical Society, 1978); Part I  of David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society 1649–​ 1776 (Stanford University Press, 1994); The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics (Yale University Press, 1996); Roundhead Reputations:  The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (Allen Lane, 2001); Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford University Press, 2007); The English Civil Wars 1640–​1660 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009); an edition of Marchamont Nedham’s The Excellencie of a Free State (Liberty Fund, 2010); and God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford University Press, 2012).

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Acknowledgements

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his volume has evolved from an international conference held under the auspices of the Andrew Marvell Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, University of Hull, partly supported by funding from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. I would like to thank colleagues in the Andrew Marvell Centre: Martin Arnold, David Bagchi, Lesley Coote, Ann Kaegi, Jason Lawrence, Richard Meek, Christopher Wilson and, especially, Veronica O’Mara, for support with the organisation of the conference. I am grateful to Professor Glenn Burgess for help with the initial planning of the project. My thanks are due to Matthew Frost, Commissioning Editor of Manchester University Press, and to the anonymous readers for the Press for their perceptive comments. I am grateful to the contributors, with whom it has been a pleasure to work. I would like to express sincere thanks to Emer McManus for her invaluable help in the preparation of the typescript and for the creation of the bibliography and index.

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration Janet Clare

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Republic to Restoration brings together the work of historians, literary scholars, cultural and music historians with a shared interest in the crossing of the common period boundary of 1660. While recent, more inclusive studies of the seventeenth century have dislodged 1660 as a rigid historiographical divide, relatively few critics have examined the continuum of Republic to Restoration, investigating the features of the Restoration in the context of the legacies, traumas and achievements of the Republic.1 On one level, such a historiographical treatment of the seventeenth century may be seen as an acceptance of the political discourse which accompanied the return of kingship in 1660, mirroring the Restoration’s repudiation or casting into oblivion the entire social order preceding it. Charles II dated his reign from 1649 and ignored the so-​called Interregnum in his regnal years calculation. But, as C.  V. Wedgwood argued over half a century ago, ‘the problems and achievements of the Restoration epoch, including Parliament, the Church, social or economic history, literature, the arts and the sciences have their beginnings in the earlier period’.2 Historians and scholars of theatre, drama and the arts who end or begin their work at the Restoration can obscure continuities between the first and second halves of the seventeenth century. As chapters in this volume illustrate, reconstruction of the old order did not mend the political, religious and cultural divisions that had opened up during the civil wars. Nor did the political experiments and the artistic and scientific achievements of the 1650s fail to leave an imprint on the rest of the century. While there might have been an understandable reluctance to lay claim to the legacies of the Republic, at various moments in the Restoration there was a resurfacing of ideologies and genres formulated during the previous decades. The genesis of the political parties which emerged near the end of Charles’s reign lay in the 1650s and cannot be understood fully without attending to the presbyterian and republican debates of that era. rom

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From Republic to Restoration In studies of the literature and culture of the mid-​seventeenth century (with the arguable exception of drama and theatre studies, which frequently end in 1642 and begin at 1660) dating is often subsumed under the term ‘early modern’, a fluid period definition which can include Tudor, Stuart and Commonwealth literature. Nevertheless, mid-​ seventeenth-​ century writers are often inserted into specific period traditions, such as ‘Civil War’ or ‘Restoration’, which can raise distorting questions. Is John Milton a poet and prose writer of the Republic or a poet whose great literary works were stimulated by the Restoration? Is William Davenant the laureate of the Caroline court, the chief dramatist of a reinvented theatre of the 1650s or the theatre manager and Restoration adapter of Shakespeare? Is Margaret Cavendish the royalist poet and dramatist in exile during the 1650s or the first female philosopher and only female participant in the early activities of the Royal Society? Is Andrew Marvell a puritan lyric poet of the 1650s and panegyrist of Cromwell or a post-​Restoration satirist? Is Hobbes’s philosophy primarily shaped by civil war and the establishment of the Protectorate or by the chasms that he saw opening up in the Restoration settlement? Answers to these questions have to accommodate the fragmented experience of writers as the trajectories of their careers were driven by the tumultuous political reversals of the mid-​seventeenth century and involved negotiations and renegotiations with changing regimes. The chapters in this volume pay attention to the work of seventeenth-​century poets, dramatists and prose writers, religious and secular, whose careers, spanning the Republic and the Restoration, were shaped equally by ideas, events and experiences on either side of the political and ideological divide. In establishing links between periods often regarded as discrete, thus initiating new period conversations, From Republic to Restoration takes a transdisciplinary approach, undertaken in the firm belief that by drawing on diverse expertise a more nuanced and variegated perspective on the culture of the mid-​to late seventeenth century will emerge.3 In practice, with the expansion –​or disregard –​of the literary canon and with both literary scholars and historians working on Milton, Hobbes, Cavendish and Nedham, for example, the seventeenth century has been for some time hospitable to interdisciplinarity. This volume aims to take literary and historical approaches a step further, moving beyond the familiar measures of Church and State to take into account wider questions of social and cultural influence. The effects of the national predicament are evident in all areas of life: religion, science, language, politics, drama, memoirs, diaries and social relations. The juxtaposition of discussion on religious dissent, prophecy, memoirs and historical writing, theatre, art and music, for example, enables a fuller image of an age than could possibly emerge from a more narrowly focused, or, indeed, a single-​authored approach. Employing 2

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration a range of sources, contributors capture the voices of authors such as Hobbes, Milton, Marvell and Pepys as well as those –​such as dissenters, plotters against the regime and women prophetesses –​that lie deeper in the archives. Listening to such contesting voices self-​evidently offers insight into how the causes and effects of the Civil War, Republic and Restoration were perceived by different people and at different times. But, more than that, hearing the voices of both the victorious and the defeated, those in the political ascendency and those exiled or marginalised, challenges any notion of a monolithic cultural formation, illustrating instead ideological and cultural heterogeneity in the periods under examination. Republican rhetoric, for example, was appropriated for royalist panegyric, while absolutist theories were used in support of the Cromwellian Protectorate. As Amanda Capern observes, female religious writers –​such as Mary Pope, Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Poole  –​could use prophetic providential ideas to defend the King. Opera, which was associated with European courtly culture, was performed in a hybrid form during the Commonwealth. A belief in providentialism bridged parties and factions during the civil wars, the establishment of the Commonwealth and its demise. The Restoration court was criticised not only by the ‘godly’ party, but by royalists disillusioned by displays of excessive luxury and conspicuous consumption, believing, along with dissenters, that the Plague and Fire were a judgement on a profane nation.4 How to define the 1650s has long divided historians, who have variously described the period from 1649 to 1660 as a Commonwealth, a Republic, a Protectorate and Republic, or simply as the Interregnum. The purpose of this volume is not to force uniformity of interpretation; accordingly, contributors, in line with the diverse opinions of the seventeenth-​century men and women under discussion, have employed constitutional terms appropriate to their perception and their subjects’ perceptions of events. The problem of definition was present and divided the winning side in the Civil War, from the time a ‘free commonwealth’ was declared in 1649. Inherently, radical Protestants were constitutionally anti-​formalist. In this volume, Blair Worden comments on the Presbyterians’ lack of a theoretical basis to their constitutional objectives, both in 1649 and 1660.5 Glenn Burgess demonstrates the period’s flexible use of the term ‘commonwealth’ and points out that the Engagement, the loyalty oath imposed on the Council of State in February 1649, referred to ‘the future in way of a Republic’, whereas the Engagement that was required of all adult men in early 1650 avoided defining the Commonwealth in terms of a republic. Looking back in 1660, the victors employed various obfuscations to avoid giving the Commonwealth regime any definition other than dismissive pejoratives: ‘tyranny’, ‘Oliver’s time’, ‘the late horrid rebellion’. If the non-​monarchical state was denied 3

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From Republic to Restoration the name of state it could, in theory, be more easily forgotten. Among the defeated, naturally, the kingless age represented a lost ‘godly commonwealth’ which now had to be redefined. In Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671), discussed by Warren Chernaik in this volume, Satan’s worldly presentation of monarchy is refuted by Jesus and replaced with the idea of a kingdom within. Such a view touches on the fierce, spiritual consolation offered by another republican, Henry Vane, in his appeal to the ‘invisible church’, imprisoned in the Babylon of Restoration England.6 The idea that God could be worshipped essentially anywhere was powerfully articulated by the Quaker, Margaret Fell, who was persecuted and imprisoned at the Restoration. As Amanda Capern points out, this vision placed Quakers and, potentially, all noncomformists in a sacralised domestic space beyond the reach of the temporal monarch. This volume has adopted in its title the term ‘Republic’ to define the decade between the execution of Charles I and the restoration of his son. In one sense, this is a useful shorthand for the different regimes –​Republic, first Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, second Protectorate of Richard Cromwell, Republic –​variously constituted during the decade. However, ‘Republic’ with its derivation from ‘respublica’, commonwealth, registers the extraordinary innovation in the state constitution following the regicide. One critique of the term ‘interregnum’ is that it seems to make an assumption that monarchy was the natural order and that a period without one was an exception, a gap in the true and significant progression of affairs.7 This is how supporters of the King may have seen things in 1660, but earlier, the situation looked very different. After the regicide, Marchamont Nedham was convinced that ‘the corruption of the old form’ of monarchy had given way to a commonwealth ‘setled in a way visible and most Substantiall, before all the world’. Besides, ‘seldom was there a case in history where kings were readmitted after they had been expelled’.8 Commenting on his return to London in 1652, John Evelyn writes ‘there being now so little appearance of any change for the better, all being entirely in the rebels’ hands … I was advised to reside in it, and compound with the soldiers’.9 Compounding and negotiating with the republican regime in the 1650s, or accommodating to its strictures, seemed the only viable course for those who wanted to resume work, business and family life after the Civil War. In England’s Culture Wars, his study of the implementation, resistance and evasion of reform in the 1650s, Bernard Capp concludes that the great majority of the gentry and clergy had come to terms with the regime established under Cromwell and that it is by no means impossible that the nation would have grown to accept it.10 This is neatly illustrated by the case of William Cooke, a Gloucestershire cavalier, who adjusted so thoroughly to living under the Protectorate that he commissioned a statue of Cromwell 4

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration as Hercules.11 In a different register, the prophetic providential works of Eleanor Davies following the regicide imagine, as Amanda Capern shows, the ushering in of a new Christian republic and a conviction that there will be no Charles II. In religious works by women, kingdoms are destroyed and the power of temporal kings lost forever in the wake of God’s wrath. Even at the cusp of the Restoration, there was a belief among those who had come of age with the Commonwealth that monarchy had been consigned to the past. John Aubrey took part in the debates at James Harrington’s Rota Club, where the principles of republican government were debated and rotation of government by balloting was advocated as the best way forward. Aubrey commented in 1659 that ‘the doctrine was very taking’ for ‘as to human foresight there was no possibility of the king’s return’.12 As Blair Worden observes in his chapter in this volume, before ushering in the Restoration regime, General Monck employed the language of the republican Harrington to support the view that a return to monarchy would reduce the nation to ruin. Further, Worden demonstrates just how uncertain was the presbyterian support for the Restoration in early 1660, with some inclining more to a republic than to a limited form of monarchy.

Memory and oblivion

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he year 1660 presented the nation with an opportunity to revive memories of the regicide, mourn and officially promote the sacrificial image of the dead King. In her discussion of the rewriting of the pamphlet play, The Famous Tragedie of Charles I (1649), as Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660), Marissa Nicosia traces the shift from the embattled royalism of 1649 to the tenuous yet revitalised royalism of 1660 exemplified in these two texts. Yet, while the tragicomedy Cromwell’s Conspiracy celebrates the triumph of the royal cause towards which The Famous Tragedie can only gesture, it was the latter, with its commemoration of Charles the martyr, that was not only reprinted in 1660, but persisted in print from the late seventeenth to the eighteenth century. As part of the process of naturalising the Restoration, the martyr image of Charles was used in the services of his son. The service of commemoration on 30 January included a sermon carrying the message of the inherent sinfulness of rebellion and republic; in 1664 the commemorative service closed with a prayer that the King inherit the martyr’s virtues, with the supplication that those virtues should not be put to the same cruel test as his father’s.13 Alongside such acts of commemoration, the restored regime staged public acts of retribution. Pepys witnessed the hanging, drawing and quartering at Charing Cross of the first of the regicides, 5

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From Republic to Restoration Major-​General Harrison, and records the people’s ‘great shouts of joy’ at being shown his head and heart, apparently finding some personal satisfaction that, after watching the King’s beheading, he had witnessed ‘the first blood shed in revenge’.14 Thousands of people who, according to John Evelyn, had witnessed the regicides ‘in all their pride’ were spectators of the exhumation of their corpses on 30 January 1661.15 Lest the deaths of the regicides promote another cult of martyrology, the King promoted a swift counter-​offensive in the publication of Rebels no Saints, recounting the deaths of Harrison, Carew and others, not ‘to insult their miseries’ but to ‘undeceive … light judgments’: the regicides’ ‘simulata sanctitas’ was ‘duplex Iniquitas’.16 As memories of the regicide were naturally divided, so were responses to the punishment of the regicides, although dismay could hardly be published. In exile in Geneva, Edmund Ludlow after reading ‘in the Gazet’ of the executions witnessed by Pepys records that ‘the shedding the blood of those eminent servants of the Lord’ was demonstrative tyranny, a tragic act done ‘to gratify Nero’17 –​an indictment of the King that Ludlow’s late-seventeenth-​century editor chose to omit.18 Although it was sanctioning acts of commemoration and retribution, the restored regime also promoted active forgetting –​ an erasing of memories of the Republic. As is evident in royal declarations and acts, there was a will –​initially, at least –​to heal a divided nation. The Restoration reconstruction of the institutional fabric of the old order  –​Church and State –​was accompanied by acts calling for oblivion and erasure. Charles II’s Declaration of Breda of April 1660 ordained that ‘all notes of discord, separation and difference of parties [are] to be utterly abolished among all our subjects’. Promising liberty of conscience, with an eye to toleration for Catholics, the Declaration of Breda sought to conciliate and prevent nonconformist resistance to the Restoration. In an address to both houses on 13 September 1660 Edward Hyde, as Lord Chancellor, urged his audience to follow the King’s example and ‘learn this excellent art of forgetfulness’ to avoid the reanimation of divisions.19 Exempting the regicides, the Restoration ‘indemnity and oblivion act’ offered a general pardon: all seeds of future discords were to be buried by erasing ‘remembrance’ of the conflicts of the previous twenty years.20 Such orders for active forgetting had limited effect in practice. As the chapters in this volume illustrate variously, religious division could not be erased or easily dealt with through acts of oblivion. Martin Dzelzainis examines the episcopal restoration and the power wielded by the aggressive Anglicanism of the Oxford neo-​Laudians with their insular brand of Protestant episcopalianism. Alan Marshall points out that few MPs shared the King’s desire for mild toleration and, following the rising in January 1661 of Thomas Venner and the Fifth Monarchists, exaggerated fears about 6

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration nonconformists were to lead to the Act of Uniformity (followed by the Conventicle Act and the Five Mile Act). David Bagchi considers the reintroduction of the Book of Common Prayer in 1662 which led to the ejection of one fifth of Church of England clergy who refused to accept it, creating a situation in which the national Church was no longer the Church of the whole nation. Puritanism, which had occupied a beleaguered position in the Church of England before the wars, was at the Restoration fractured into dissent.21 There is, of course, a difference between public and individual memory: public memory may be designed to collect individual memory or to override it; individual memory, in turn, is shaped by identity and allegiance. As part of a crowd of spectators at the execution of the regicides, Pepys apparently shared a sense of retribution, identifying with the cause of Charles the martyr. On another occasion, his memory of the regicide was more fraught. Dining, on 1 November 1660, with several country gentlemen including an old school fellow, a Mr Christmas, Pepys records that Christmas had remembered that Pepys had been a ‘great roundhead’ when he was a boy, and was fearful that Christmas would recall his response to the regicide: ‘I was much afeared that he would have remembered the words that I said the day that the King was beheaded (that were I to preach upon him, my text should be: “The memory of the wicked shall rot”).’22 To his certain relief, Pepys learns that Christmas left the school too soon to hear his pronouncement. Pepys’s remembrance of his reaction to the regicide and his chosen text entrusted to his diary in 1660, at a time when very different kinds of commemorative texts were in force, and his discovery that his words would not be remembered and made public are symptomatic of the anxiety attached to memory, often resulting in pragmatic reconstructions and, indeed, willed oblivion. At both national and local levels, individuals had pasts to disown and remake. For some there was professional continuity. The printer, Edward Husbands, for example, printer to the House of Commons during the civil wars, whose work included the printing of the official declaration after the regicide that forbade the naming of a successor, retained a position as a printer of official documents, including The Grand Memorandum.23 In the Church, some ministers, like John Gauden, appointed Bishop of Exeter at the Restoration, had begun their ministries during the 1650s.24 While it would be a mistake to see panegyric as a display of inherent disposition, nevertheless poets negotiated the regimes and without seeming compunction demonstrated changed allegiance. Within the space of a year, John Dryden had published ‘Heroique Stanzas, Consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his most Serene and Renowned Highnesse Oliver, late Protector of this Common-​wealth’ and ‘Astraea Redux’ celebrating 7

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From Republic to Restoration the King’s restoration.25 In my chapter in this volume, I examine the promotion of theatre by William Davenant and Richard Flecknoe during the Republic and their later attempts to obscure it. In his dedication to the Earl of Clarendon of the 1662 revised edition of the 1656 The Siege of Rhodes, for example, William Davenant ignores the reformed drama performed during the Protectorate. Davenant’s appeal to Clarendon as a patron of the drama sits uneasily alongside his correspondence with Cromwell’s ambassador and Commissioner of the Seal, Bulstrode Whitelocke, and the Cromwellian Secretary of State, John Thurloe, in the 1650s in which he sets out the case for his theatrical revival, explicitly in support of protectorate politics. Contemporaries across the political spectrum revived memories of the civil wars, deliberating in memoirs, histories, pamphlets and prefaces over the causes and course of the civil wars and the part they had played in events. Unsurprisingly, memoirs of parliamentarians and republicans  –​ Thomas Fairfax, Lucy Hutchinson, Edmund Ludlow, for e­ xample –​were to remain unpublished until later in the century.26 Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir of her husband, Colonel John Hutchinson, undertaken, so she says, from the personal motive of preserving the memory for his children of the Colonel’s ‘holy, virtuous, honourable life’, was begun after his death in 1664, but first published in 1806 and republished throughout the century.27 Episodes in Lucy Hutchinson’s version of her husband’s life have come under scrutiny, constituting a case study of historical memory and its partial reconstruction under pressure of events.28 Notably, attention has been focused on circumstances leading to John Hutchinson’s pardon. According to Ludlow, Hutchinson was included in the act of indemnity because ‘he had got the king’s pardon before his coming over, and had joyned with Monke in his treachery’.29 According to his wife’s memoir, following a letter of abject repentance sent to the Speaker of the House of Commons, Hutchinson’s life was spared. Further, Lucy Hutchinson affirms that it was she who wrote the letter in an effort to bring her husband within the terms of the Indemnity Act. The truth and –​if she was not directly responsible for writing the letter –​her possible motive for reconstructing events have been the subject of speculative debate. Did she intervene, against his principled resolve, to save him, or did she deliberately downplay his role in securing indemnity for the regicide in order to save his honourable reputation and bring his position closer to her own republicanism? Whether husband or wife was responsible for the letter, it was effective in removing Hutchinson’s name from the list of those who had subscribed to the regicide, his signature passing into ‘legal oblivion’.30 The incident in the memoir is particularly fascinating in revealing not only the negotiations of one family with republican sympathies at the transition from Republic to monarchy but the partiality and selectivity of memory evident in acts 8

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration of elision: little attention is paid to the letter or to the political compromise needed to effect John Hutchinson’s pardon. In contrast, as an observer of the Restoration, the republican Lucy Hutchinson makes no attempt to temper or conceal her reaction to the servile political temporising that accompanied the King’s return: Indeed it was a wonder in that day to see the mutability of some, and the hypocrisy of others, and the servile flattery of all. Monk, like his better genius, conducted him, and was adored like one that had brought all the glory and felicity of mankind home with this prince. The officers of the army had made themselves as fine as the courtiers, and all hoped in this change to change their condition, and disowned all things they before had advised. Every ballad singer sang up and down the streets ribald rhymes, made in reproach of the late commonwealth, and of all those worthies that therein endeavoured the people’s freedom and happiness.31

Even allowing for the partiality of memory, and within the security of a family memoir, Lucy Hutchinson offers a counter-​voice to the hyperbole which surrounded the Restoration and a memory not subject to acts of oblivion. In part, memoirs were constructed as acts of exoneration. Thomas Fairfax makes this explicit in his memoir of the Civil War, claiming that he will ‘truly set down’ the grounds for his actions ‘during that unhappy war’. The second part –​‘Short memorials of some things to be cleared during my command in the army’ –​is indicative of a need to record if not to publish his version of his role in the Civil War.32 Eventually published by his cousin, Brian Fairfax, in 1699, the intentions of Fairfax’s memoir were to reiterate that he had been ‘sincerely opposed’ to the execution of the King (a view opposed in Lucy Hutchinson’s memoir of her husband, Colonel Hutchinson),33 that he had never been motivated by personal ambition and, more specifically, to vindicate his decision to execute Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas after the siege of Colchester. According to him, the latter were ‘mere soldiers of fortune’ and, as such, in ordering their execution, he had done nothing that did not accord with his commission and the trust reposed in him.34 Fairfax’s great misfortune, according to the dedication of Brian Fairfax to the current Lord Fairfax, ‘was to be engaged in the unhappy wars whereof he desired no other Memorial than the Act of Oblivion’. Fairfax’s exoneration of his role in the deaths of Lisle and Lucas is an explicit move to counter royalist mythology that had accrued around the siege of Colchester evident in an ostentatious act of commemoration on 7 June 1661 when Lisle and Lucas were given a funeral and burial in Colchester.35 Further, as Marissa Nicosia demonstrates, in the revival of the play The Famous Tragedie of Charles I there is an explicit call for Lisle and Lucas to be remembered as well as their royal master. This drama 9

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From Republic to Restoration anticipates a history that will validate the loyal acts of Lisle and Lucas. At the same time, it memorialises Fairfax’s role, but not in the way he would have wanted. Debate on the origins of the Civil War, as illustrated in John Selden’s Table-​Talk, went back to the 1650s. Selden, as Martin Dzelzainis observes in this volume, had decisively laid the blame on ‘incendiaries of the state’, the servants of the Crown, the judges and the lawyers.36 Margaret Cavendish, as Amanda Capern points out, argued that liberty had led tradespeople to strangle the body politic and destroy religion, law and civil society. Royalist and republican memoirs alike were shaped by matters of allegiance and identity and preoccupied with whom to blame for the civil wars. For some, a primary cause of the Great Rebellion was a puritan rebellion. Paul Seaward demonstrates that Thomas Hobbes and Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon –​despite their very different philosophical and political ideas –​ share common ground in describing the effects of clerical intervention in political affairs during the 1630s. In Behemoth –​Hobbes’s dialogue of events in England from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1637 to the Restoration of 1660 –​and what became Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, there is agreement that the civil wars could not have occurred without the preaching of factious and schismatical clergymen who stirred up the lower orders. Events of 1640 to 1660 came to be seen as driven by powerful clerical ideologues of a specifically puritanical cast of mind. While republican memoirs were concerned with the past, personal exoneration and setting the record straight, royalist accounts of the civil wars and Commonwealth reflect covertly on the present and betray anxieties about the future. Seaward argues that Hobbes and Clarendon, both writing in 1668 of the civil wars and rebellion and, coincidently, in exile in France, reveal fault lines in the constitutional and religious politics of the Restoration then beginning to open up. In Behemoth, Hobbes seized the moment, implicitly offering to the King an entire reduction of the civil and ecclesiastical State to the royal will, a view which would have been anathema to Clarendon, whose position was that religious practices are made acceptable through counsel, deliberation and in accordance with local custom and tradition. Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society, composed in 1663–​67, follows the pattern of royalist memoirs in so far as its history of experimental science is written not only from the perspective of the Restoration but from specific moments in the Restoration. In his chapter in this volume, Ted McCormick examines the continuation of Baconian science from the Commonwealth to the early years of the Royal Society, epitomised in the person of William Petty, one of the Surveyors in Ireland for Parliament in the 1650s, and considers Sprat’s very partial account of the Commonwealth 10

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration legacy. McCormick identifies tensions between Sprat’s various references to the advancement of natural knowledge during the Commonwealth, which he attributes to Sprat’s changing views of the public role of science in the early years of the Restoration. Initially, as illustrated in Part I  of Sprat’s History, written before the calamities of the Plague and the Fire and widening divisions over religious toleration and Indulgence, Sprat had intimated a relatively constructive approach to the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s. Holding up the reign of Augustus as the model for the Restoration, commenting that it was in the latter’s peaceful reign that Rome’s ‘perfect historians appeared’, Sprat advocated that an activity for a modern academy for language might be the compilation of a history of the civil wars. In Part III of The History, however, composed in different circumstances, after the fall of Clarendon, when Charles was seeking greater toleration of dissent, Sprat ignores the achievement of organised science during the Commonwealth, instead emphasising experimental philosophy’s independence of civil matters, a balm for a divided nation. In failing to mention the work of Samuel Hartlib  –​Milton’s friend and pensioner of Cromwell  –​and his circle, which included Thomas Petty, a future member of the Royal Society, Sprat practised his own art of oblivion.

Censorship reconstructed

T

he call to expunge ‘remembrance’ of the conflicts of the previous twenty years was underpinned by the imposition of censorship, reconstructed to suppress republican and dissenting books and pamphlets. In favouring such a policy, the King appeared to be following advice offered in a letter by William Cavendish, first Duke of Newcastle, on the eve of the Restoration, urging him to assert authority over sermons, political disputations and publications of the realm.37 A royal proclamation of 13 August 1660 called in Milton’s Eikonoklastes, which was written in response to Eikon Basilike, attributed to Charles I. Along with Milton’s pamphlet ‘Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio’ of 1650, Eikonoklastes was condemned on the grounds that subjects might be corrupted ‘with such wicked and traitrous principles’.38 Chief magistrates, vice-​chancellors and Justices of the Peace were ordered to seize the works, and to hand them to sheriffs in order that they could be burnt at Assizes by ‘the hand of the Common Hangman’. Two years after the Restoration, institutional censorship was restored, with the 1662 Printing Act restricting presses and requiring books and pamphlets to be registered and licensed. The following year, in August 1663, Roger L’Estrange, who had argued in Toleration Discussed that the link between societal disintegration and an unlicensed press had been proved in 11

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From Republic to Restoration the events of the 1640s, was appointed as Surveyor of the Press and, at the same time, granted a monopoly on publishing news. L’Estrange accompanied his bid for the post of press controller –​‘Considerations and Proposals in Order to the Regulation of the Press’ –​with a list of ‘treasonous and seditious pamphlets’ to be suppressed, including Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Richard Baxter’s A Holy Commonwealth and Marchamont Nedham’s The Case of the Common-​Wealth of England Stated. L’Estrange’s operation of censorship immediate to the Restoration was naturally orientated towards the past rather than the present. It was to be accompanied by the publication of ‘news’, which, as Christina Carlson demonstrates in her chapter, served as extraordinarily effective propaganda during the Popish Plot and succession crisis. In a series of pamphlets and political prints, An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678), The History of the Plot (1679) and, notably, The Committee (1680), L’Estrange rewrote the history of the civil wars, projecting Catholic loyalism in opposition to religious dissent and drawing a parallel between the current controversy over the succession of the Catholic Duke of York and that of 1641. As several chapters in the volume illustrate, Restoration censorship could be subjected to competing authorities and prerogatives indicative of institutional tensions. Martin Dzelzainis describes how Marvell’s satire, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, depicting events of the 1620s and 1630s as driven by clerical ideologues, notably Laud, was allowed by L’Estrange  –​ subject to some censorship  –​but only after the King had intervened. Hobbes’s Behemoth, however, suffered a different outcome after submission to the King. According to John Aubrey, Charles liked it, but was not prepared to intervene to enable publication because he knew in this case that the bishops would not allow it.39 It was only after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 that Behemoth was printed, in an unauthorised text, with the safeguard of a dedication to the Earl of Arlington. As with censorship in any historical period, the censorship revived at the Restoration induced writers to practise self-​censorship and artful circumventions in critiques of State and Church. The poetry and prose of Andrew Marvell offers a particularly salient example. An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677), in which Marvell presents the attempt to strengthen press controls as evidence of the ‘growth of popery’, was published anonymously without imprint, the title page recording only the date and Amsterdam as the spurious place of publication. Dzelzainis describes how in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, instead of attacking directly the neo-​Laudians for their opposition to Indulgence, Marvell does so indirectly through satire of deceased bishops and clergy  –​ John Bramhall, John Cosin, Peter Heylyn and 12

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration Herbert Thorndike –​and an exposure of Laud himself. In his chapter on Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’, Keith McDonald comments that throughout his career Marvell displays a reluctance to release his works to the press. Of the triptych of Cromwell poems composed during the 1650s only The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector was printed, and that unsigned, in January 1655. From the premise that Marvell seems to have tightly controlled manuscript and print publication of his poetry and prose, McDonald interprets the composition, revision and publication of ‘The Character of Holland’ across the Republic/​Restoration divide. The satirical poem on Dutch manners, composed in and around 1653, following an English naval victory over the Dutch at Portland, was first printed anonymously in London and York at the outbreak of the Second Anglo-​Dutch War in 1665 with a tribute to the Duke of York grafted on to it. In analysing the relationship of the poem with its changing contexts and considering Marvell’s possible involvement with the process of its publication, McDonald illuminates how the publication of this specific text was carefully controlled and  –​ probably with Marvell’s interventions  –​recast to speak to different occasions. In the theatre, censorship was the responsibility of the Master of the Revels, Thomas Killigrew, manager of one of the two London theatre companies, the King’s Company, and, for the early years of the Restoration, theatre was mostly self-​regulatory. This was to change when –​with the crises of the Popish Plot and succession –​ drama was brought into the political arena. Playwrights aligned their plays with faction and party and, for the first time in the Restoration, oppositional drama reached the stage and –​with the lapse of the Licensing Act  –​circulated in print. 40 Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was allowed by Killigrew as Master of the Revels, but suppressed by the higher authority of the Lord Chamberlain, Henry Bennet, the Earl of Arlington, on the grounds that it contained ‘scandalous expressions and reflections upon the government’. Lisanna Calvi questions the conventional Whig reading of the play as a traditional tale of republican heroism, arguing that it is Brutus (rather like Milton’s Satan, we could say) who takes over the power and interest of kingship. Such ironies and ambivalence of interpretation may well have escaped Arlington as Lord Chamberlain. To invite suppression in the midst of the Exclusion Crisis, it was presumably enough that in its depiction of the deposition of the Roman monarchy following a successful rebellion, inspired by republican rhetoric, the play was raising the spectres of 1641 and 1649. 13

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From Republic to Restoration Continuity and change

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homas Carlyle’s quaint metaphor for the silent movement of history –​ ‘our clock strikes when there is a change from hour to hour; but no hammer in the Horologe of Time peals through the universe when there is a change from Era to Era’  –​is not entirely apt for the Restoration.41 Bells did peal, bonfires were lit and contemporaries seemed in no doubt that  –​whether for good or ill  –​they were ushering in a new era. The King returned to London amid triumphs and shows and much rhetorical hyperbole, although feelings and attitudes may have been less jubilant in England’s boroughs and cities.42 Following a decade of republican and protectorate rule the unpredictable actions of General Monck were to precipitate what Blair Worden describes as a revolution. For some royalists this revolution signified simply the circularity of history, a view expressed by Interlocutor B in his penultimate statement at the end of the fourth and final dialogue of Behemoth: Howsoever, I must confesse that this Parliament has done all that a Parliament can doe for the securing of our peace; which I think also would be enough if Preachers would take heed of instilling evill principles into their Auditory. I have seen in this revolution a circular motion, of the Soveraigne Power through two Usurpers Father and Son, from the late King to this his Son. For (leaving out the power of the Councell of Officers, which was but temporary, and no otherwise owned by them but in trust) it moved from King Charles the first to the long Parliament, from thence to the Rump, from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell, and then back againe from Richard Cromwell to the Rump, thence to the Long Parliament, and thence to King Charles the second, where long may it remaine.43

From the political-​theoretical position of Hobbes’s speaker, the revolution is integrated into the restitution and resumption of royal supremacy: ‘the circular motion of Soveraigne power’. What the interpretation manifestly leaves out, of course, are the fundamental changes to the political, religious and social landscape brought about through the experience of civil war, regicide and Republic. The act of regicide meant that sovereignty could hardly be the same again, nor could the nation expect to pick up where it had left off in 1641. In religion, the years of the Protectorate had witnessed a degree of liberty, according to one early modern historian, in practice remarkable in early modern Europe.44 The failure to graft the idea of the gathered church –​including Independent and Baptist congregations –​onto a wider ecclesiastical system meant there was no legally enforceable organisation for clergy or their congregations beyond the parish.45 Baptists and Quakers had relative freedom to preach, congregate and evangelise while many among the royalist clergy chose to conform.46 Traditionalists, of course, mourned 14

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration the loss of liturgy, prayer and ritual and resented the abolition of festivals and holidays. Aspects of the old Church of England did remain: as David Bagchi points out, the Authorized Version of the Bible remained in use throughout the Commonwealth. The Book of Common Prayer, however, was banned by Parliament in 1645 and replaced by The Directory for the Public Worship of God, a handbook for clergy on a Continental Protestant model. As Bagchi observes, it proved easier to eradicate the Prayer Book from churches than it did from people’s affections. Clandestine prayer-​ book services took place, but, as Bagchi illustrates, at some risk of intimidation and arrest. The religious settlement negotiated at the Restoration was based on a conspicuously narrower interest than the political settlement.47 Alan Marshall comments that post-​1660, Protestant dissent shared a role once reserved for papists and, in his chapter on the local and national response to alleged plots in the North-​East, illustrates how religious dissent had become associated with sedition. Marshall quotes the regime’s chief agent of propaganda, Roger L’Estrange, who proclaimed that the ‘Tolerated party’ was ‘a sanctuary for all the seditious persons in the kingdom’. The penal legislation of the 1660s, enforcing uniformity of worship and forbidding the gathering of more than five in any congregation or conventicles, resulted in a high number of nonconformists leaving the Church, including Richard Baxter, who had been chaplain to the parliamentary army and was for a brief period a chaplain to Charles II. With the passing of the Act of Uniformity he was forced to give up the position, retire to the country and live ‘out of the world’.48 The Book of Common Prayer continued to be controversial. Its imposition in 1637 on Presbyterian Scotland had first ignited a rebellion which was to spread to England. Its re-​establishment in the Uniformity Act of 1662 was one of the most divisive acts in the reconstruction of the Church, although Bagchi cautions against hasty interpretation of what nonconformists referred to as the ‘Great Ejection’, commenting that the imposition of any fixed liturgy, as opposed to a directory of worship, would have alienated Presbyterians and Independents. Even shorn of some of the more alienating and controversial aspects of Laudism, the re-​established Church could not command anywhere near universal loyalty. This was especially apparent in the regions. In his examination of the abortive ‘Northern Rebellion’ of 1663, Marshall illustrates the deep roots of nonconformity, particularly among Baptist congregations, in pockets of the North-​East and the resistance of nonconformists to persecution by the established Church of Durham and Yorkshire. The years of civil war and republican experiment had led to a ferment of political and religious ideas articulated in an expanded public sphere of popular print culture, lay preaching, widening participation in sectarian debate and, consequently, changes in public language.49 As Amanda Capern 15

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From Republic to Restoration observes, the republican decade generated an enormous outpouring of religious works –​of different confessions –​by women, projecting in some cases a feminine godly republic. Several chapters in this volume demonstrate the linguistic instability, mutability and appropriation concomitant with political change. A rhetoric of tradition and conservation, of terms such as freeborn, liberty of the subject and commonwealth, was ready to be co-​opted by both sides, while a rhetoric associated with tyranny, treason, popery, slavery and bondage, arbitrariness and rebellion remained to be distributed among opponents.50 Blair Worden comments that the theme running through popular demands and parliamentary negotiations in 1659/​60 was for a ‘free parliament’ and in this way the Puritan upheaval, having begun as a struggle for the liberties of the subject, ended where it began. But the ownership of those terms had shifted away from the Puritans. Appeals to liberty in the 1640s had come from those opposed to the King; in 1659 it was royalists, as the excluded and oppressed political class of the Republic, who co-​opted the language of freeborn Englishmen. In examining the changes to the term ‘commonwealth’ from its early uses to its royalist application in the later seventeenth century, Glenn Burgess shows how the regicide increased the repertoire and range of republican and commonwealth political arguments in English political thought. Republican, commonwealth principles insinuated themselves in 1660 into monarchy, persuading some that notions of a free commonwealth were not incompatible with monarchy. Edmund Peirce in Englands Monarchy Asserted, for example, argued that the Restoration marked the return of a real commonwealth, while the staunch royalist James Arderne, later Dean of Chester and defender of James II, in The Kingdom of England the Best Commonwealth argued that the King’s prerogative was compatible with the Liberty of the Subject. But in 1678, Marvell reinvested commonwealth with its radical potential, stating, tactically –​perhaps ironically –​‘that to alter our Monarchy into a Commonwealth were Treason; so by the same Fundamental Rule, the Crime is no less, to make that Monarchy Absolute’.51 Tory propaganda promulgated during the tumultuous years of the Popish Plot and succession crisis, examined by Christina Carlson, redefined the terms of political engagement. Again orchestrated by Roger L’Estrange, Tory politicians redeployed Whig arguments against ‘popery’, promoting their own brand of popery, by which commonwealth men, as advocates of resistance to tyranny, were akin to Jesuits with their principles of dethroning Protestant monarchs. Accordingly, ‘popery’ was present not only among those who called themselves papists, but also among ‘Whigs’, with their presbyterian roots, who intended to revive the Commonwealth. Lucius Junius Brutus, performed, as Lisanna Calvi observes, in the same month as the Earl of Shaftesbury was attacking in Parliament the hateful 16

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration popish inclinations of the court, taps into the current instability of political rhetoric. In Brutus’s exhortations Calvi notes a borrowing from the revolutionary vocabulary of James Harrington, Milton and Nedham and interprets Brutus’s language as resonant of the classical republicanism of the 1650s. Brutus assumes –​as did Milton –​that royal power is based upon an original covenant between the people and a worthy individual who, ‘for the eminence of his wisdom’ may be ‘call’d a King’. And, yet, Calvi argues, the play calls into question this assumption of republican rhetoric when Brutus ‘takes over “the Power and Interest of Kingship” and foists his own will on his associates, his friends, his sons’. The ambivalence and irony that Calvi finds in Brutus’s exploitation of republican argument is suggestive of how men once in position of power might move away from professed principles; at the same time, the apparent contradiction between Brutus’s speech and action demonstrates how in politically volatile moments language and its uses become highly unstable, mutable and subject to appropriation. For republicans like John Milton royalist appropriation of the language of ‘free born Englishmen’ could only be seen as a dreadful perversion of earlier calls to liberty. As Warren Chernaik observes, Milton makes a last-​ditch attempt in The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, written at the cusp of the Restoration, to stop the people’s voluntary embracing of servitude, ‘to adore and be slaves of a single person’, extinguishing the hopes aroused by an interval of freedom. In his resonant phrase in the peroration, Milton expresses the hope that while the people seem to be choosing ‘a captain back for Egypt’, there may still be time for them to ‘consider whither they are rushing’. Chernaik examines the Restoration poems, Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained as works coloured by the experience of defeat. Loss of liberty, the crushing of hope and the temptations that face those who seek to serve God in a hostile and unjust society are arguments which resonate across these late works. Further, Chernaik identifies Milton’s preoccupation with a people’s failure to live up to the responsibilities of ‘strenuous liberty’, preferring the ease of bondage and, thus, enabling tyrants to thrive. Yet, as Chernaik observes, the conclusion of Samson Agonistes, in which Samson destroys the carousing Philistines, could be interpreted as a fantasy of revenge on the part of those excluded from power, and, as such, remains highly unsettling. In The Readie and Easie Way, Milton’s alarm at the prospect of a returning monarchy was epitomised in the absolutism of Louis XIV and his crew of servile courtiers seeking their own advancement and not the public good. Milton’s fears were not entirely exaggerated, for the court, as the centre of restored ‘sovereign power’, was reconstructed, as Laura Knoppers illustrates in her chapter in this volume, not by recourse to the rarefied court culture of Charles I, or by what had happened in republican England, but 17

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From Republic to Restoration by what was happening in Grand Siècle France. Knoppers comments that much of the luxury and splendour of the French court was unattainable in Restoration England: Charles was not in a position to emulate Louis XIV’s grand architecture or his theatre of war, but he could import French painters to depict his mistresses in splendid dress and luxurious surroundings as part of a broader cultural programme. In discussing the portraiture of the King and that of the royal mistresses, Knoppers observes that luxury was a conscious mode of representing monarchical power rather than a reaction to Puritanism or a reflection on the personality and moral laxness of the King (although this was how it came to be seen). Charles’s French Catholic mistress, Louise-​Renée de Kéroualle, the Duchess of Portsmouth, was kept in sumptuous apartments and her portraiture modelled on the Marquise de Montespan, Louis XIV’s politically powerful mistress. Such French-​style luxury could not but feed into a general fear or opprobrium that the regime was far too close to ‘popery’ and had predilections towards French absolutism, ‘arbitrary government’, and what Marvell denounced as the introduction of ‘French slavery’.52 Knoppers’s chapter demonstrates how a regime which had been popular in principle became rapidly unpopular in practice, court luxury and French influence being deplored as much by loyalists, who witnessed it, as by exiled republicans and dissenters who could only imagine it. The illustrations that accompany the chapters of Knoppers and Carlson potently convey how the restored monarchy wished to be perceived and how it came to be perceived by its critics. The baroque splendour of Henri Gascar’s portrait of Charles II depicts him in sumptuous coronation robes with full regalia and in a pose reminiscent of portraits of the absolutist Louis XIV. As Knoppers comments, Gascar portrays Charles as a powerful Renaissance monarch, no humble servant of the Commonwealth. The iconography of A Ra-​ree Show (1681), a satirical cartoon by the Protestant joiner, Stephen College, depicts a Janus-​faced King as a ‘ra-​ree’ showman, with a pack on his back from which peeps out Parliament. Gascar’s career in England had ended by the time College’s cartoon was published, but not before the French artist had been substantially rewarded for his sumptuous court paintings. College’s cartoon, on the other hand, exposing the King’s duplicitous and shifty policies, led to College being branded a traitor and to his execution. The French influence on Charles’s court also figures in Bryan White’s chapter on opera and musical entertainment at the Restoration. White detects some continuity with the Caroline court, commenting that Charles II did share some of his father’s taste for dancing and masque, but sees in the King’s sporadic promotion of musical theatre and opera a failed attempt to model his court on French lines. Musicians were 18

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration imported from France and the marriage of the co-​religionists James, Duke of York and Mary of Modena, for example, was celebrated with a ballet in French and Ariane, an opera published in French and English. In examining these productions, White shows how ambitions of bringing opera to the English theatre were bound to be disappointed. The King was unable or unwilling to subsidise opera on the public stage and the allegorical, panegyrical and propagandist nature of court musical theatre meant that it was hardly likely to be commercially viable if transferred to the London theatres. In comparing the musical culture of the two courts, White points out that in France the operas of Lully were potent representations of the power and taste of Louis XIV and substantially subsidised by him. Charles supported musical-​theatrical works, but sought subsidy from the two theatre companies and here there was an evident clash of propagandist and commercial interests. France had a Royal Academy of Music, while petitions to establish a similar institution in England met with no success. White concludes his chapter with a discussion of Albion and Albanius, an opera with a libretto by Dryden, composed as an extravagant panegyric to Charles and James, Duke of York, and comments that the emphasis on royal propaganda far eclipsed any contemporary French opera. Employing familiar allegorical figures, Albion and Albanius looks back at the King’s reign from the rejoicing at the Restoration to the troubles of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis to the King’s providential deliverance from the Rye House Plot. As Stuart propaganda, Albion and Albanius may have been ‘an assertion of triumph’,53 but, as White illustrates, as a test of the potential of royal patronage to support an English equivalent of French opera it was a complete failure. In the social sphere, however, as the chapters demonstrate variously, court propaganda was highly effective in staving off the political crises generated by the Popish Plot and subsequent attempt to change the succession. Eighteen years after the return of the King, Charles II faced opposition similar to that which destroyed his father. The Exclusion Bill, introduced by the Whigs –​heirs to commonwealth Presbyterians –​called into question the essence of monarchical rule based on dynastic right. That there was no circular motion of history was in part due to the mobilisation of the very anxieties that there might be. Parallels with 1641 were explicitly and sometimes hysterically drawn. In replying to Marvell’s attack on popery and arbitrary government, L’Estrange reminded his readers that such spectres were ‘likewise the Pretext and the very Foundation of the Rebellion in 41’.54 There is ‘a strange Fatality in the number Forty’, claimed one pamphlet writer in 1681, before continuing with a dire warning of what that fatality might be: 19

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From Republic to Restoration It is now near forty years, since the late horrid and unnatural Rebellion began, wherein our Royal Sovereign was murdered by the barbarous hand of usurping Common-​wealth Protestants; and let them look to it, and assure themselves, if they break out into Tumults, Sedition, or Rebellion, his prophetick Threatening will fall upon them.55

In 1678–​81, Stuart propaganda was highly effective in ensuring that there was no circular motion of commonwealth or republican power and in delaying another revolution. There is a degree of irony in the fact that a regime which began with calls to cast into oblivion memories of past conflicts at a later moment of crisis worked so assiduously to evoke and harness those memories for its own security.

Notes 1 In 1996 Derek Hirst commented on the dearth of new approaches to ‘the moment of the English republic’, observing that debating the novelty as against the continuity of the Restoration ‘can only be answered against a detailed backdrop of what went before’, see Derek Hirst, ‘Locating the 1650s in England’s Seventeenth Century’, History, 81.263 (1996), 359–​83 (pp. 360–​61). Beyond surveys of the seventeenth century, recent works which take a more inclusive view of the period include Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-​ Century English Political Instability in a European Context (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2000); The Nature of the English Revolution Revisited, ed. by Stephen Taylor and Grant Tapsell (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013); Jonathan Scott, ‘Radicalism and Restoration:  The Shape of the Stuart Experience’, Historical Journal, 5.31 (1988), 458–​62; Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660: Public Remembering in Late Stuart England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013). 2 C.  V. Wedgwood, ‘Fields of Study in the Restoration:  Introductory Remarks at the Conference’ in The Restoration of the Stuarts:  Blessing or Disaster? A  Report of a Folger Library Conference Held on March 12 and 13 1960 (Folger Shakespeare Library, 1960), 30–​32 (p. 31). 3 Even the Oxford handbooks on the seventeenth century have separate categories of literature and history; see The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. by Michael J. Braddick (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015). 4 See, for example, Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. by Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), Part II, p. 448, Part III, p. 2, pp. 16–​19; The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by William Bray, 2 vols (New York and London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), ii, 26. 5 See also Scott, England’s Troubles, p. 35. 6 See Henry Vane, An Epistle General, to the Mystical Body of Christ on Earth, the Church Universal in Babylon, who are Pilgrims and Strangers on the Earth, Desiring and Seeking after the Heavenly Country (London, 1662), p. 2 and p. 35. 7 A point made by Ronald Hutton, see The British Republic 1649–​ 1660, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), xxiii–​xxiv. 8 Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Common-​Wealth of England Stated  …  With a Discourse of the Excellencie of a Free State, above a Kingly Government (London, 1650), p. 5. 9 Evelyn, Diary, i, 273–​74. 10 Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars:  Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 262. See also Barry

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Introduction: from Republic to Restoration Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 177–​83. 11 See Timothy Mowl and Brian Earnshaw, Architecture without Kings: The Rise of Puritan Classicism under Cromwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 184–​88. 12 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. by Kate Bennett, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 319–​20. 13 See Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–​1714 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 81–​82. 14 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970–​83), i, 265. 15 Evelyn, Diary, i, 340–​41. 16 Address ‘To the Reader’, Rebels no Saints: or, a Collection of the Speeches, Private Passages, Letters, and Prayers of Those Persons Lately Executed (London, 1661), A2v. The address concludes ‘Murder (especially of kings) never passeth unrevenged’. 17 Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower:  Part Five, 1660–​1622, ed. by A.  B. Worden, Camden Society, 4th ser., 21 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), p. 199. 18 See The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, ed. by C.  H. Firth, 2 vols (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1894), p. 302. Worden examines the relationship between the extant manuscript of the memoirs and their publication in 1698–​99, see Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, pp. 1–​17. 19 See ‘His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellors, to the Two Houses of Parliament, on Thursday the 13 of September, 1660’, p. 12. 20 12 Car. II c. 11. 21 See N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-​Century England (Leicester:  Leicester University Press, 1987), pp. 17–​33. See also Michael P. Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England:  Richard Baxter and Others Respond to A Friendly Debate’, The Historical Journal, 54.3 (2011), 689–​715, and John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–​1689 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1991), p. 42. 22 Pepys, Diary, i, 280. 23 The Grand Memorandum or, A True and Perfect Catalogue of the Secluded Members of the House of Commons Sitting 16 March 1659 (London, 1660). 24 See Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, pp. 8–​12. 25 See Three Poems upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland (London 1659); the other contributors were Edmund Waller and Thomas Sprat; John Dryden, Astraea Redux: A Poem on the Happy Restoration and Return of his Sacred Majesty Charles the Second (London, 1660). 26 John Toland was instrumental in the publication after 1689 of republican writing from the 1650s, see Justin Champion, Republican Learning:  John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–​1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 27 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson … Written by his Widow Lucy (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1846), p. 22. 28 See Derek Hirst, ‘Remembering a Hero: Lucy Hutchinson’s Memoirs of her Husband’, The English Historical Review, 119.482 (2004), 682–​91, and David Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and Oblivion:  Lucy Hutchinson and the Restoration’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 75.2 (2012), 233–​82. 29 Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, p. 175. 30 Norbrook, ‘Memoirs and Oblivion’, p. 243. 31 Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, pp. 402–​03. 32 Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax. Written by Himself (London, 1699), p. 93. 33 See Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, p.  133, and also Ludlow’s version, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, p. 125. 34 Fairfax, Short Memorials, p. 123.

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From Republic to Restoration 35 See Andrew Hopper, ‘Black Tom’:  Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 87–​88. 36 Richard Tuck discusses Selden’s long career, bridging the Jacobean period and Commonwealth, and his constitutional opposition to the King for breaching the legal rights of the subject, see Tuck, ‘ “The Ancient Law of Freedom”: John Selden and the Civil War’, in Reactions to the English Civil War, ed. by John Morrill (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1982), pp. 137–​61. 37 See William Cavendish, Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration:  Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II, transcribed and with an introduction by Thomas P.  Slaughter (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1984). 38 See Censorship and the Press, 1580–​1720, ed. by Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott, 4 vols (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), iii: 1660–​1695, ed. by Geoff Kemp. 39 See Behemoth, or, The Long Parliament, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), pp. 10–​17. 40 See Janet Clare, ‘ “All run now into Politicks”: Theatre Censorship during the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–​81’ in Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. by Paul Hyland and Neil Sammells (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 46–​56. 41 Thomas Carlyle, ‘On History’ (1830) in A Carlyle Reader, ed. by G.  B. Tennyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 55–​66 (p. 59). 42 See Phil Withington, ‘Views from the Bridge:  Revolution and Restoration in Seventeenth-​Century York’, Past and Present, 170 (2001), 121–​51; Andrew M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire, 1649–​1689 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 81–​83 and Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–​1715 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 30–​31. 43 Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 389–​90. 44 See Ann Hughes, ‘Religion, 1640–​1660’ in A Companion to Stuart Britain, ed. by Barry Coward (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 350–​73 (p. 357). 45 Hughes, ‘Religion, 1640–​1660’, pp. 354–​58. See also Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 152–​59. 46 See Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–​1660’ in Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, ed. by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 18–​43. 47 See Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, p. 42. 48 Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, p. 441. 49 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–​1660 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 16–​22. See also Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed:  Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–​1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). 50 See Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-​ Century England (London: Macmillan and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 157–​62. 51 Andrew Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (London, 1678), p. 8. 52 Marvell, An Account of the Growth of Popery, p. 8. 53 See Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden’s Albion and Albanius: The Apotheosis of Charles II in The Court Masque’, ed. by David Lindley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 169–​183 (p. 182). 54 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery, under the Pretended Fears of Arbitrary Government and Popery. With a Parallel betwixt the Reformers of 1677, and those of 1641, in their Methods and Designs, p. 8. 55 [John Nalson], The True Protestants Appeal to the City and the Countrey (1681), Alr.

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Chapter 1

1660: restoration and revolution1 Blair Worden

O

n the face of it the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 is not hard to explain. An unforeseen and mostly unwanted civil war had had unforeseen and mostly unwanted consequences. The fracturing of the parliamentarian cause by the regicide; the inability of the regimes of the 1650s to root themselves in public feeling or establish coherent principles of government; their dependence on military rule and on the massive taxation that sustained the army and navy; the powers and intrusiveness of a swollen bureaucracy; the pastoral failures of Puritanism and the obstinacy of alternative social values and ecclesiastical allegiances; the fears and hatreds provoked by religious sectarianism: those liabilities may or may not have been insuperable, but at least we can say that they could not have been overcome without the basis of political stability which Puritan rule failed to secure. The two great works of political theory of the 1650s, Hobbes’s Leviathan and Harrington’s Oceana, offered contrasting answers to the same question: how could the nation escape from its convulsions? The convulsions multiplied in the last year of the Interregnum, especially after the military coup of October 1659, when the Rump –​the regime of 1649–​53 which had been expelled by the army but restored by it in May 1659 –​was deposed by it for a second time. A severe trading depression, acute problems of poverty, urban tumults and the disruption of the law courts  –​ evils generally blamed on the political disorder  –​ produced a chorus of demands for ‘peace’ and ‘quiet’ and a ‘real, settled, and regular government’.2 The image of tranquillity offered by Harrington appealed to readers who had learned the truth of his assertion that ‘for a nation to be upon the cast of a die, to be ever upon trepidation as to the main chance of government, is a dreadful state of things’.3 The political breakdown heightened two sentiments, anti-​sectarianism and anti-​militarism. Until its twilight the Cromwellian Protectorate of 1653–​59 had curbed the 23

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From Republic to Restoration clamour of religious radicalism. After its fall the clamour swelled again, as did the hostility to it and the demand for ecclesiastical regulation. Under the Protectorate military rule had at least kept order. In 1659–​60, when the army fell apart, the soldiery became a source of disorder and was increasingly drawn into clashes with the civilian population, especially in those towns and cities which bore the heaviest burdens of military occupation or troop movements or free-​quarter.4 Military interventions in politics provoked mounting vilification, particularly in the autumn of 1659, when the committee of safety, the army’s political instrument, ruled with not a vestige of constitutional sanction. Protests multiplied against what George Monck –​who by a necessary paradox would use his own military dominance to end the military domination of politics –​called ‘that intollerable slavery of a sword goverment’, which ‘I know England cannot, nay, will not indure.’5 Yet it was one thing to seek an exit from chaos and military rule, another to suppose that the Stuart monarchy could provide it. Harrington’s solution was republican, not monarchical. His determinist claim that changes in the balance of social and economic power had consigned the monarchy to the past became ‘very taking’ in the winter of 1659–​60 ‘and the more because, as to humane foresight, there was no possibility of the kings returne’.6 In early 1660 Monck used Harrington’s language to explain that any attempt to restore the monarchy would reduce the nation to ruin.7 He also insisted that the proliferation of religious attachments over the past two decades, and the parliamentarian purchases of Crown and Church and royalist lands, had created new ‘interests’ incompatible with the return either of the monarchy or of the episcopal system of Church government that had fallen with it.8 There were other ‘interests’ in the way of a restoration too, among them the takeover of parishes by Puritan from Anglican clergy and, in Ireland, the acquisition of Catholic lands by English parliamentarians. The last year of Puritan rule may seem to us to have been a helpless slide towards the Restoration. Yet events that in retrospect punctuate the collapse of that rule –​the death of Oliver Cromwell, the two restorations of the Rump in 1659, and the brutal suppression of resistance to it in the city of London in February 1660  –​seemed at the time, to royalists, to entrench it.9 In early 1660, the newly restored Rump surprised royalists by becoming, in the face of its towering difficulties, a ‘formidable’ body, ‘perfect sovereigns’, governing, at least to appearances, with ‘reputation and triumph’.10 How might the exiled Stuarts, against the might of the Puritan army and navy, hope to regain their throne, or anyway resume it without those dreaded prospects: renewed civil war, invasion by foreign troops, and the further deepening and further prolongation of disorder? It was a common perception that Charles II was attracted to ‘popery’ and that, like his 24

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1660: Restoration and revolution father, he would find a Catholic wife. As the Restoration approached, publicity on his behalf scrambled to portray him, to a readership that knew little of him save through government propaganda against him, as a benign, trustworthy, Protestant figure. It no less urgently disowned the generally remarked and, on the parliamentarian side, widely feared ‘rage’ and taste for ‘revenge’ among the Crown’s followers. Royalism (by which I mean an overriding commitment to the cause of the exiled Stuarts) had become an increasingly conspicuous and restless force at least since the sitting of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament in the spring of 1659. Behind it lay a reaction not only against the Republic but against all Roundhead and Puritan rule. Yet the more assertive it became the greater and wider the anxiety it aroused. The animating principle that created the impetus towards the Restoration was not royalism. It was the authority of Parliament. Many participants in the Puritan upheaval remarked on the reverence, even ‘idolatry’, commanded by the institution of Parliament, ‘a word’ which, to royalist dismay, ‘carried armies in it’. Royalists who hoped that the perversion of the institution by the rule of the Rump had discredited it were proved wrong.11 Instead the fund of devotion had been enlarged by anti-​militarism. Victims of the coup of October 1659 spoke for a wider range of opinion than their own in alleging that it had been intended ‘to affright Englishmen out of their love to (and their very discourse of ) a parliament’; to eliminate ‘their hereditary and birth-​right privilege of making their own laws’; and to overrule the ‘many thousands’ who ‘know no help, under God, like that of a parliament’.12 Monck shared the outrage.13 In 1659–​ 60 conflicting parties agreed in acknowledging Parliament to be, at least in a time of breakdown and emergency, the arbiter of the nation’s quarrels. The principle supplied a constitutional mechanism, the only one available, for the resolution of the nation’s crisis. If the principle had been unanimously held there would have been no civil war. Many of those who espoused it in 1660 did so solely for tactical reasons. Royalist leaders, having failed to beat parliamentarianism, joined it. Yet the tactic succeeded because of the breadth of public sentiment, wider than the range of party allegiances, to which it appealed. The Restoration was the restoration of Parliament before it was the restoration of the King. Though the first made the second possible, it should not be conflated with it. The first development began on 21 February 1660 with the readmission to the Commons of the ‘secluded members’, those MPs whose participation had been terminated, mostly by force though in many cases by choice, at Pride’s Purge, the military coup of December 1648 that had cleared the way for the regicide and the rule of the Rump. Next the newly reunited Parliament arranged fresh parliamentary elections, which followed its dissolution on 16 25

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From Republic to Restoration March. The result was the Convention which met on 25 April and in May welcomed the King’s return. The Puritan upheaval could end peacefully only if the two sides that had gone to war in 1642 came together. The heart of the parliamentarian cause had been ‘presbyterian’. The label was applied in 1659–​60, with a looseness which for shorthand we must replicate, to parliamentarians who had wanted to limit but also to preserve the monarchy, and whose political programme was allied –​sometimes by conviction, sometimes by pragmatism –​to an ecclesiastical one that sought the replacement of the episcopal Church by a Calvinist system. Before their eviction by Pride’s Purge in 1648 presbyterians had brought the defeated King to accept conditions that would have subjected him to parliamentary control. After the purge royalists and presbyterians had common enemies, in military, republican and sectarian rule. Neither side could afford to leave the opposition to the Republic, whether military or political, to the other, and so risk its own subjugation in the event of the Republic’s overthrow. Yet the differences between the parties, and the memories of the wars they had produced, ran deep. They would persist in the decades ahead,14 even when the parties assumed different names, for the memories would then help to shape Tory and Whig interpretations of seventeenth-​century history.15 Yet in 1659–​60 royalists and presbyterians formed an effective common front. They did so in animating a public demand for a ‘free parliament’, a term that had grown in usage during the civil wars and Interregnum in protest against military interventions in Parliament’s proceedings and against military restrictions on its membership. Cries for a free parliament mounted in 1659. In the winter of 1659–​60 they were universal and were commonly taken to be expressions of a national will.16 The movement drew together gentry and citizens, rich and poor. Declarations for a free parliament were published on behalf of more than half the counties of England, as well as of townsmen and apprentices. The outcome of the movement, the Convention, was generally agreed to be ‘a free parliament’, or at least to have the moral and political authority of one. Its origins lay in negotiations in January between emissaries of the exiled court and leading secluded members. The bargaining was tough, for the two parties had divergent ambitions, even though both often saw tactical merits in supporting the other party’s plan. After the Restoration the continuing divisions between the two parties produced bitter reflections on each other’s conduct during the movement for a free parliament.17 In 1659–​60 royalists wanted a wholly new parliament, freely elected and free from military interference in its proceedings. Presbyterians at least agreed about military interference, which had excluded many of them from parliament not only under the Rump but during the Protectorate. But their goal was not, 26

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1660: Restoration and revolution at least for the time being, a new parliament. It was the reversal of Pride’s Purge. After the long interval of tyrannical usurpation, by the army which had thwarted them in 1648, they would at last be free to settle the nation on their own terms. Some manifestos and protestations produced by the movement for a free parliament favoured the royalist position. Others adopted the presbyterian one. But the most common practice, for which the negotiators on both sides had to settle, was to demand one or other of the two courses and to indicate that either would serve. The acceptability of that formula to public opinion again points to yearnings wider than party allegiances could accommodate. The movement kept almost entirely quiet about the nation’s future constitutional arrangements and left them to the free parliament to determine. The movement was and is often portrayed as a disguise for a desire for the return of kingship. Up to a point the description is quite right. In the last year of the Interregnum royalist statesmen and agents regarded the movement as a means to an end which it would have been imprudent or dangerous to state publicly. Even the demand for a free parliament, a number of whose supporters were sent to the Tower or other prisons, was hazardous enough. We do find individuals, though it is hard to say how many, crying out for ‘a king’ or ‘Charles Stuart’, or drinking his health, when crowds gathered in the cause of a free parliament,18 but the royalist leaders, though they may have been gratified by those outbursts, never endorsed them. Only after 21 February, when the movement had done its main work, did more than a few brave spirits dare advance the King’s cause in print. It is also true that a great deal of the royalist support for the movement was deliberately concealed, both by presbyterians who wanted to make the cause their own, and by royalists who hoped that the movement would do the King’s work for him and feared that the announcement of their purpose would drive the divided parliamentarians together.19 Yet royalism was only one half, and most often the subordinate half, of the political leadership of the movement, which could never have prospered solely on a royalist base. Of course presbyterians too were monarchists. To that extent the movement was, on both the royalist and the presbyterian side, a monarchist one –​although we should beware of mistaking sentiment in favour of monarchy for agreement about the kind of monarchy that should be restored; of equating monarchism with royalism, the creed of a party; and of supposing that early in 1660 anyone could have predicted the character of the restored monarchy. But the view of the movement as a mere mask for monarchical sentiment simplifies both the political activity which created the campaign and the public opinion on which the campaign drew. Two distorting sets of sources lie behind the perception: propaganda for 27

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From Republic to Restoration the Republic, which used the imputation to divide its enemies and scare its readers; and statements made after the Restoration, either by people eager to demonstrate that they had supported the King in the period before his return or by men whose memories merged developments of early 1660 with their eventual outcome. Until very shortly before the restoration of Charles II, there were question marks against the presbyterians’ support for it. Presbyterians might detest the Republic, but at least they had been on the same side as its civilian leaders in the fight against Stuart absolutism, in which they had invested so much of their lives. Presbyterians wanted the return of the Stuarts –​if they could control it. But what if they could not? Might not Charles II, they asked, ‘be more absolute than his father was in the height of his prosperity’?20 Might he not rule by ‘swordmen … ignorant’ of ‘law’ and ‘property’?21 Would presbyterians not then be at the mercy of the King’s ‘violent and vindictive’ ministers, particularly if he should ‘come in by tumult’?22 Presbyterians were themselves not shy of military methods or of provoking public disturbances on their own behalf. Though the movement for a free parliament produced a peaceful restoration, it had often been allied to military projects. Nonetheless presbyterians instinctively preferred a constitutional route. A ‘free parliament’, they hoped, would place limits on the Crown’s powers that would obviate the hazards of absolutism and of royalist revenge.23 But they wanted the scope to turn the parliament in a different direction if that aspiration failed. On 11 February, the day Monck turned against the Rump, the French ambassador, who had long worked with presbyterians,24 judged that ‘some’ of them were ‘inclined to a republic’ and reckoned that they might ally with Monck to prevent the Stuarts’ return.25 Royalists distinguished between ‘moderate’ presbyterians, with whom they expected to be able to work, and ‘rigid’ ones, with whom compromise would be harder if not impossible. The distinction, though too simple, reminds us that the presbyterians were a coalition, tied to no common formula. The royalists were a coalition too, divided between those ready and those unready to bargain. The ecclesiastical issue was especially problematic, for on both the royalist and the presbyterian side there were those who allowed for a middle way between episcopalian and presbyterian positions and others who were alarmed by that prospect. Some presbyterians, who had long regarded episcopacy as inherently ‘popish’, ‘greatly feared the return of the prelates, an exasperated party that had been before subdued’.26 Among the presbyterian clergy ‘great contests’ arose, ‘some’ being ‘for monarchy, others against it’.27 There were in any case devout presbyterians to whom forms of civil government, being of less moment than the cause of godly reformation,28 might have to be sacrificed to its needs. 28

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1660: Restoration and revolution The increase of open Anglican practice in the late Interregnum, and of the taste for ceremonialism of worship, which accompanied the royalist resurgence of that time alarmed presbyterians, though the contribution of Anglican belief –​another creed tied to a political cause by conviction in some cases, by calculation in others –​to the political developments of 1660 would need a chapter for itself. No less troubling was the swaggering profanity of the early months of the year, which reminded all Puritans that the civil wars had set ‘all the enemies of serious godliness’ against its ‘friends’.29 In January a prominent presbyterian divine remarked on the ‘lascivious scurrilous ballads’ now being sung in ‘alehouses and taverns’, on ‘carrowsings’, the drinking of healths and other ‘sinfull jollities’, and warned ‘God’s owne people’ that ‘now is the time of their trial’, when they ‘may be brought into straits and miseries’.30 At least the Rump was Puritan. During the Interregnum presbyterian divines had sometimes worked with congregationalists, the religious party to which the Rump looked  mostly for support, in initiatives to restore ecclesiastical discipline to the parishes and promote moral reformation. Many in the Rump leant towards a presbyterian Church or towards a middle way between the presbyterian and congregationalist formulae. In 1659–​ 60 the Rump, even as it asserted its unwavering commitment to republican rule, portrayed itself, in opposition to the sectarian threat, as the friend of the orthodox ministry and its financial maintenance.31 The regime’s dependence on sectarian support repeatedly undermined that stance. Yet in early February the French ambassador spoke of a ‘presbyterian faction’ in the House that would ‘prevail over the sectaries’.32 In the previous month the Parliament had reached out to presbyterians not only by insisting on the strict observation of the Sabbath but by inviting leading presbyterians to preach before the House.33 When Monck restored the secluded members he explained that the nation could be settled only by a republic and a presbyterian Church.34 Might not ‘rigid’ presbyterians accept his reasoning? The Rump, too, was a coalition. Many of its members had been reluctant to accept the revolution of 1648–​49. Many felt closer in spirit to the civilian MPs who had ceased to sit in 1648 than to the army that had evicted them. Many apparently wanted the return of the secluded members to the House.35 Their hopes were dashed in January by the forceful leadership of the Commons by Sir Arthur Hesilrige and his allies. But need their defeat be permanent? In the Rump’s final days, when negotiations were being held  between it and the secluded members whom it would soon restore, the  French ambassador thought that it would take the secluded members back of its own volition if they would meet certain conditions. The main one was a readiness to accept the Rump’s oath of ‘abjuration’, which would require them to pledge themselves unequivocally 29

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From Republic to Restoration against the return of the Stuarts.36 But the oath was a source of bitter contention within the Parliament, which might be prevailed on to jettison it. Secluded members were alive to the Rump’s divisions. When they did return to the Commons on 21 February they were careful to present their restoration not as the termination of the Rump or a return to legality but as the recreation of the ‘union’ of the Long Parliament37  –​even if, as so often, their language was influenced by their fear of provoking an army committed to kingless government.38 Seventeen days after the return of the secluded MPs the rumpers still had ‘many friends’ among the secluded members.39 As late as 16 April, there was fear among royalists that ‘the rigid presbyterians’ might join John Lambert’s last-​ditch attempts to save the Republic.40 Eleven days later, when the Convention had assembled, Pepys was alarmed by a report that the presbyterians and royalists would break over the terms of the King’s return.41 The monarchical principles of presbyterians were not unqualified. They were in tension with two other premises, which had acquired a novel potency from the disorder of the Interregnum. The first, which gave conceptual dignity to Monck’s insistence on the necessity of a republic, was that nations are entitled to alter, in a pragmatic spirit, their forms and rules of government in accordance with altered realities of power. The principle was strengthened by the convulsions of civil war, which produced claims that the ancient constitution had been ‘dissolved’ –​a transformation perhaps to be attributed to the behest of a divine Providence ready to overturn man-​made institutions. The premise was espoused by the Rump in its moves to abolish the monarchy in 1649. It was invoked again, this time in support of monarchy, eight years later, when the prominent secluded member Nathaniel Fiennes spoke for what roughly can be called a presbyterian parliament in urging Cromwell to accept the throne.42 That parliament had unanimously renounced the Stuarts’ claim to the throne,43 the requirement made of the secluded members by the Rump in 1660 –​though the ban had been endorsed by a collective vote, not by the individual oaths demanded in the second instance. The premise resurfaced again on the restoration of the Republic in 1659, when leading politicians who endorsed the change judged there to be ‘not so much difference of good between one forme of government and another as worth to purchase it at rate of blood’,44 or reluctantly accepted the return of the Republic in the hope that it would bring the ‘peace’ that had higher claims than ‘formes of government’.45 The second belief, which overlapped the first, and which would have given a free parliament carte blanche in achieving a settlement, was that the authority of Parliament is higher than that of forms of government, which must be left to Parliament’s disposal. Monck’s protracted refusal to readmit the secluded members to the Commons provoked, on their 30

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1660: Restoration and revolution behalf, the indignant assertion that ‘it is not the form of government, but the consent of the people, that must settle the nation’.46 The potency of the principle was enhanced by the reaction against military interference in parliaments and by a consequent tendency to equate parliamentarian with civilian rule. In March 1660 the Earl of Lauderdale, a royalist recently released from the Tower –​whence he seems to have sent messages inciting demands for a free parliament47 –​stated that ‘the question is not what government we shall have’. It was ‘whether a sword shall prevaile … or if England shall returne againe to be governed by parliament. This I thinke is a cleire duety to be endeavoured’.48 The secluded member Richard Norton, outraged by the military coup of October 1659, declared ‘freedome of parliament’ to be ‘the just right & interest of the nation, and if [Parliament] thought it fit to bringe in the Turke they ought not to be imposed on to the contrary’.49 The same position was adopted by politicians who knew that its implementation might be fatal to their interests or even their safety. In Ireland in March, the presbyterian grandee Lord Broghill, who had supported the movement for a free parliament but had stood back from attempts to restore the King, had ‘verry sensible apprehensions’ on his own and his compatriots’ behalf of the consequences of ‘a free parliament’, but declared his hope that ‘whatever such a parliament shall enact, we shall actively or passively obey’.50 For the hands of the free parliament for which the movement called must not be tied. ‘The whole frame and settlement of the government’, it was argued, should be ‘entirely referred to’ the ‘unanticipated considerations’ of MPs, ‘the proper judges thereof ’.51 Declaration after declaration for a free parliament pledged its subscribers to ‘submit to’ or ‘acquiesce in’ or ‘obey’ or ‘stand by’ ‘whatsoever’ such a parliament ‘shall enact or ordain’. Royalists and presbyterians alike had their own ideas about what it would or ought to ‘enact or ordain’, but no one could be sure of the outcome. The only declaration for a free parliament to say anything about future constitutional arrangements was published in the name of the apprentices of Bristol, though penned with the help of that voluminous champion of free parliaments the secluded member William Prynne.52 A  muddled passage, evidently the result of last-​minute rewriting, appears to mean that the apprentices would prefer the rule of a ‘single person’ to a republic  –​but only if that were the preferred solution of a free parliament.53 London’s apprentices, with whom those of Bristol collaborated, resolved ‘to try their fortune for a free parliament and bring in freedom that way the parliament should think best of ’.54 Royalists joined the chorus. As the Convention approached, but before its decisions, or the balance of power within it, could be known, men who by now felt it safe to proclaim their 31

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From Republic to Restoration allegiance to the Crown undertook through public declarations to ‘acquiesce’ in or ‘submit’ to the resolutions of the assembly.55 In the public appetite for a free parliament, we sometimes find a spirit akin to that expressed by the New Model Army when in 1647 it declared that, once the proper authority of Parliament had been established, it would ‘acquiesce’ in its decisions and ‘commit our stock or share of interest in the kingdom into this common bottom of parliaments; and though it may, for our particulars, go ill with us in one voyage, yet we shall thus hope, if right be with us, to fare better in another’.56 In 1660 there would have to be give and take, even if the politicians behind the movement were determined to give as little and take us much as possible. A free parliament, it was commonly said, would resolve the nation’s ‘differences’ or, as ‘the most hopeful means of reconciling different parties’, ‘compose’ or ‘settle’ its spirits.57 Amid the disintegration of Puritan rule in 1659–​60 it became common to analyse politics, as Monck himself did, in terms of competing ‘interests’, which any settlement would have to include and satisfy. By the calling of a free parliament, it was urged, ‘all interests may be considered and provided for’ or ‘reconciled’.58 Monck’s view that they could be accommodated only by a republic made as much sense as any other. Monck’s own readiness to be ‘faithfull to what a full and free parliament shall determine’, or ‘positively’ to ‘acquiesce in the determinations of a free parliament’, a commitment he believed to accord with ‘the opinion of the people’, is the thread of continuity through his changes of course (even if his definition of a free parliament required more than one adjustment).59 Everyone knew that there could be a peaceful resolution of the crisis only if the army, which was used to altering governments at will, submitted to civilian authority. A crucial moment was Monck’s decision in late March to impose on the regiments a pledge to ‘acquiesce’ in, or ‘stand by’, ‘what a free parliament shall determine’.60 The soldiers wriggled, seeking to impose limits to their acquiescence’,61 but found the principle impossible to resist. For the movement for a free parliament had the capacity to demoralise the Republic and its backers, and to open wounds among them, by its use of the very language of parliamentary authority and liberty with which the Republic had justified its own rule. Although some of the manifestos for a free parliament adopt a tone of pragmatism, recommending it as the most expedient solution to the nation’s crisis, the majority are impassioned documents, which appeal to convictions about the nation’s history and identity. Free parliaments, maintained Prynne, were ‘in all times the darling of the English nation’,62 and the pacification of the nation by a free parliament would follow ‘the prudence of antiquity’.63 A  declaration on behalf of the county of Suffolk approvingly observed that ‘the nation’  was ‘in general lifting up its vows to heaven’ for a free 32

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1660: Restoration and revolution parliament, ‘the great patron and guardian of our persons, liberties and properties’ and the remedy ‘whereunto our ancestors recours’d in resembling exigencies’.64 Presbyterians in Dublin, joining their English allies in the campaign, remembered that ‘by experience of former ages’ free parliaments in England had ‘been found to be the best and only expedient … to be applied to so great general mischiefs’.65 In December 1659 a declaration by ‘young men’, demanding ‘a free parliament’ on behalf of ‘themselves and the apprentices of London’, hailed ‘the freedome and priviledges of our parliaments’ as ‘the great Charter of the people in England’.66 Their manifesto takes us back to a remonstrance of the ‘youngmen and apprentices of the City’ in 1649, which had supported the Levellers against the military rule of the Republic. Likewise calling for ‘a free parliament’, it had recalled that ‘the great Charter of England’ had been ‘above thirty times confirmed in open and free parliament’.67 The language of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right features often in the movement for a free parliament. Still more pervasive is the vocabulary, to which appeals in the declarations to ‘ancient’ or ‘fundamental’ laws or rights are tied, of ‘native’ rights, of ‘undoubted birthrights’, of the entitlements of the ‘freeborn’, and of ‘liberty’ and ‘property’. Liberty, not kingship, is the unifying aspiration of the movement for a free parliament. As Monck explained in his letter of ultimatum to the Rump on 11 February, in which he told the Parliament of the nation’s hunger for ‘a free and full parliament’, he and his officers ‘find that the asserting of the just liberties of the people, is that which the generality of the nation is much in expectation of ’.68 The yearning for peace had produced not, as we might expect, an instinct to surrender to a Hobbesian sovereign, but an insistence on rights of the subject, which alone could bestow political authority and thus stability. The Puritan upheaval, having begun as a struggle for the liberties of the subject, ended where it started –​and where 1688 would begin. Yet if, in the Civil War, appeals to liberty had been for the greater part a Roundhead theme, there is no sign of such preponderance in the movement for a free parliament. The language of freedom was voiced most stridently in populist urban manifestos, and it was in urban gatherings and tumults, which royalists were seeking to turn into an uprising in their cause, that we hear cries for ‘a king’ accompanying demands for a free parliament. Royalists, who had learned the language of the liberties of freeborn Englishmen in defeat in the 1640s, espoused it again as the oppressed and excluded political class of the Interregnum. Their occasional contacts with Levellers drew on a common sense of victimhood and of suppressed rights. Although the two parties could never have agreed on a concrete political programme, they or their kindred spirits could concur in demanding a free parliament that would end the evils that angered them both. They could 33

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From Republic to Restoration also agree in detesting the memory of the trial of Charles I, which had introduced the military tyranny, and in hating the machinery of republican and Cromwellian justice. The leading royalist figure in the movement, Viscount Mordaunt, when accused of treason before another high court in 1658, protested at the deprivation of ‘the rights’ due to him by ‘the Great Charter and the Petition of Right’.69 Although the royalist leadership was opportunistic, even cynical, in its encouragement of such sentiments, they were essential to the popular base of the Restoration. That base extended far beyond anything that can in any straightforward sense be called royalist. When, together with the street cries for ‘a free parliament’, we witness demands for ‘a king’ –​or hear apprentices of London proclaiming that ‘a free parliament … would produce a kinge and liberty’70 –​we encounter a longing for escape, not any discernible commitment to a royalist political programme. The words liberty and freedom –​the unspecified ‘freedom’ which the London apprentices wanted a free parliament to bring in by ‘that way the parliament should think best of ’ –​became animating forces in themselves. At other social levels, too, it might be a mistake to attribute much theoretical precision to the hunger for kingship. It was commonly observed in the late Interregnum that the King’s cause appealed particularly to young men, who had ‘grown up since 1646’.71 What did that generation know of monarchy except that under it the nation had not endured what it had come to suffer without it? If the movement for a free parliament repeated the language of 1640–​ 42, it also appealed to another principle which had become more widely held since that time: the powers due to Parliament –​since 1649 the unicameral Parliament of the House of Commons –​as the representative of the people, on whose consent its legitimacy depended. That premise, too, was adopted by royalists and presbyterians alike. In the words of a manifesto agreed between agents of both parties, and adopted by the counties of Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Leicestershire, ‘every free-​ born subject is supposed to be present in parliament by the knights and burgesses of the place where he liveth, and thereby is presumed to consent to all things that passe in parliament’.72 Those who made such assertions turned the principles of the Rump, and of the Levellers before it, against the present regime by taking the sovereignty of the House of Commons, the people’s representatives, for granted –​even if that must often have been only a temporary, tactical position. The movement for a free parliament kept quiet about the constitutional claims of the House of Lords no less than about those of the King. Prynne believed vigorously in the authority and privileges of the upper House, and cast a sceptical eye on any claims for the subject’s rights of consent that might challenge them.73 Yet in inciting demands for a free parliament he tended to conceal those positions. 34

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1660: Restoration and revolution Elsewhere, too, he disparaged the kind of tumultuous public petitioning which he incited in 1660 and on which the movement throve.74 If we are puzzled to find principles that had inspired the Long Parliament in 1642, or Levellers in 1647, producing in 1660 an assembly that permitted the return of the King without formal limitations on his power, we should notice what the movement for a free parliament did not demand. It did not revive the constitutional issues of the 1640s. Whatever their own views and wishes the promoters did not invite the public to concern itself with the working relationship between (or with the respective rights of ) Parliament and the executive –​ the issue that had brought civil war and had the capacity to bring it again. Rather they in effect called for a free parliament to act as the great council of the realm, whose job it would be to resolve a national emergency. Equally the resemblances to Leveller thinking did not extend to provisions for making MPs accountable to their constituents. The movement deployed the principle of consent in order to legitimate the decisions of a free parliament, not to make that parliament answerable to its electors, from whose control the literature of the movement explicitly exempted it, for its decisions would ‘binde all the free people of this nation’, who had entrusted themselves to them.75 The movement expressed no view about parliaments of the future. The Levellers had adopted the principle of ‘successive’ parliaments, that is, of frequent and regular choices of new assemblies. The army and the Rump had committed themselves to it too, even when they did not observe it. The campaign for a free parliament eschewed it, despite the unwelcome longevity of the Parliament which had met in 1640. The exiled King did, it is true, think it worthwhile in 1659 to promise to call ‘free and frequent parliaments’ if he were restored,76 but the offer of frequency did not reappear in his subsequent tenders of a free parliament. The term ‘successive parliaments’ was normally associated with republican rule –​not least by Monck while he argued for it77 –​and became a code word for it.78 The calling of a great council, on the other hand, was compatible with at least a swathe of the royalist opinion that secured representation in the Convention, as long as it allowed for the return of the king and Lords, which the Convention indeed reabsorbed into the constitution. When the assembly unanimously declared that ‘the government of England is, and ought to be, by king, Lords and Commons’, the term ‘the government’ signified not, as it would today, ‘the executive’ –​a definition which in that context no royalist and, unless from necessity, no presbyterian would have countenanced –​but the ultimate source of authority.79 The paradox, which the ensuing decades would expose, was that a parliament possessed of that authority might make choices inimical to it. There would prove to be a parallel paradox about the theory of political consent, which the movement 35

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From Republic to Restoration for a free parliament so potently articulated and which it enabled to prevail. Even the most distressed or embittered Puritans and anti-​monarchists conceded that the Restoration –​which would lead to frontal challenges to the subject’s rights of consent –​had the ‘consent’ of the nation behind it, albeit, in their eyes, of a credulous and debauched nature.80 Royalists of the 1640s, aggrieved at their own exclusion from Westminster, had in that decade taken up the call for a free parliament in protest. In the Interregnum there had been intermittent indications of the Crown’s willingness to call a free parliament,81 a position confirmed in 1660 by the King’s commitment in the Declaration of Breda to resettle his and his subjects’ rights ‘in a free parliament’.82 Until well into the spring of that year, it is true, royalists viewed their encouragement of the movement as only one strand of a strategy that also depended on the organisation of conspiracy and uprisings. Indeed occasional hard-​line royalist voices derided the movement. They claimed that the support for it was exaggerated;83 or maintained that the presbyterians’ demand for a negotiated settlement itself precluded negotiations with them; or scorned mere ‘addresses’ which were not allied to military action against the Republic;84 or insisted that a ‘free parliament’ was unthinkable until the King had returned and could legally call it.85 That last stance was always a reserve position for the Crown itself if the movement for a free parliament should go wrong. Yet the hard-​ liners had a limited following. There were royalists as well as presbyterians who saw in the movement a welcome alternative to a restoration ‘by tumult’. The King’s ‘friends’, as he was told by an agent in late December 1659, ‘apprehending the invasion of foreiners and the consequences of a conquest … doe generally desire your restoration by a parliament’.86 ‘All the king’s party, as well as the neutrall’, claimed another agent in March, ‘wish the king were here upon any tearmes, rather then leave it to the uncertain issue of a war, made by forraigners’.87 The Crown itself, while encouraging the campaign, viewed it with mixed feelings. It struggled to find verbal formulae that would pledge it to respect the wishes of a free parliament without committing it to obey it.88 When possible it promised only to take its ‘advice’.89 It also took care to pre-​empt any suggestion that the legitimacy of its restoration owed anything to the Convention’s support for it.90 Yet it grasped the advantages of restoration by the ‘consents’ of its subjects rather than by ‘war’,91 and knew what a fund of authority parliamentary approval would bestow on the King’s return. It underlined its ‘esteem’ for parliaments, that ‘vital’ component of the constitution, without which ‘neither prince nor people can be in any tolerable degree happy’.92 It also grasped the argument that only a ‘free parliament’ could overcome the ‘jealousies’ of contending parties and produce a settlement that would make Charles 36

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1660: Restoration and revolution monarch of the nation rather than merely of a ‘faction’.93 In declaring, at Breda, his readiness to leave contentious issues to the assembly that the demand for a free parliament had produced, the King caught the national mood, even if he also conveniently shifted awkward problems of settlement to MPs. The Crown’s sponsorship of the movement for a free parliament gave it a breadth of support that it could never have attained without it. It also offered it a counterweight to its overzealous followers, whom it exhorted ‘to expect with patience what it shall please … a free parliament to do for them’.94 The King’s subjects, it was declared a week after the announcement of the calling of the Convention, ‘are conquered by his judgement in referring himself to a free parliament’.95 Some people, either naively or for their own party purposes, read more into the King’s pronouncements on the subject than was there.96 Pepys, apparently with pleasure, took the royal letter to the Commons from Breda to mean that the King had decided to ‘submit himself and all things’ to the Convention.97 It was easy enough for the Crown to make itself seem a friend of the principle of consent when the Rump was obviously its enemy. Pride’s Purge had removed a majority of MPs from the Commons and left rows of empty benches. Only around 110 MPs, scarcely more than a fifth of the full membership of the Commons, can be glimpsed at Westminster between May 1659 and February 1660.98 Declarations for a free parliament, complaining sometimes on behalf of the shires or towns for which they spoke, sometimes of the nation at large, listed or counted unrepresented constituencies or secluded members. The clamour for ‘a free parliament’ was commonly paired with a demand for ‘a full parliament’. Almost everyone agreed that if the presbyterian formula –​the return of the secluded members –​were adopted, there must be by-​elections to replace MPs who had died since 1648. The right of representation was no abstract ideal. In those hard times one issue above all others angered the nation’s vacant constituencies: the levying of taxation, which affronted the ‘maxim, Unrepresented, Unconcluded’.99 The movement for a free parliament overlapped and built on regional initiatives for a tax strike, first against the committee of safety, which levied taxes with no parliamentary authority,100 and then against the Rump, which to finance its forces reverted to the high level of taxation of the early Republic and imposed a massive, backdated, assessment.101 The swelling of the military presence in 1659 had made free-​quarter the intense grievance it had been in the 1640s. Many of the declarations for a free parliament announced or threatened the withholding of taxes until the calling of a free parliament. Military supervision always made the collection of taxes hard to prevent, for, as the French ambassador wryly observed, ‘the sword 37

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From Republic to Restoration usually can produce gold’.102 Yet by early February, the challenge to illegal taxation had become formidable. It was London’s refusal to pay taxes that led the Rump to send Monck to crush the City. The manifestos for a free parliament listed many grievances alongside the denial of parliamentary representation, high among them the assaults on religious orthodoxy by sects and heresies, but the fiscal one was the most prominent. Many of the manifestos announced or threatened the withholding of taxes until a free parliament were called. Sometimes the remonstrators were uncertain whether to place illegal taxation or the lack of parliamentary representation at the top of their lists of complaints.103 For most of the people who signed declarations for a free parliament, non-​parliamentary taxation was a more immediate grievance than the absence of kingship. * As the movement for a free parliament developed, so it increasingly focused on Monck. From late January it sought, by a rapid succession of declarations and deputations, to bring him round to its cause. Historians will never agree about his intentions as he marched from Scotland to London in the first five weeks of 1660 or after his arrival in the capital. Contemporaries were perplexed too. Essentially he had committed himself to two positions, which proved to be incompatible: that military authority must be subordinated to civilian authority; and that the Republic must be preserved. The first position was one of principle; the second was a practical assessment. Under the pressure of the movement for a free parliament the practical assessment was gradually revised and the second position yielded to the first.104 His ultimatum to the Rump on 11 February, which gave it a week to make arrangements to fill its benches, proved in retrospect to have begun that transition in his thinking  and to have inaugurated the process that produced the King’s return. It was greeted by perhaps the most sensational and spectacular outburst of public rejoicing within living memory, or at least since the return of Prince Charles and Buckingham from Spain in 1623. It lasted into the next day in London and spread rapidly to the provinces.105 The famous scene in the capital, with the ringing of bells and lighting of bonfires, ‘past imagination, both the greatness and the suddenness of it’,106 transformed the political mood and began a momentum of change that would culminate in the return of the King. Yet how distant was that eventual outcome from the concerns of the crowds of 11 February. They had received no indication that Monck would abandon the Republic. On the contrary, even as he moved against the Rump he announced his firm commitment to kingless rule. He did the same in restoring the secluded members ten days later, a move followed 38

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1660: Restoration and revolution by a comparable outburst of public celebration. It is the irony of Monck’s interventions of the 11th and 21st that measures which were intended to maintain the Republic, by removing its objectionable features and widening its support, would prove to have undermined it. Yet only slowly did that consequence reveal itself. When reports of the events of the 11th reached royalists around Bristol, who were seeking to convert the local agitation for a free parliament into an uprising, the ‘great joy’ of the citizens who received the news was a blow to the local Cavaliers, and ‘stopped all’ their ‘further proceedings’. But for it, claimed the royalists’ regional leader Edward Massey, the uprising ‘would have g[one] forward’.107 In the constant cries for ‘a free and full’ or ‘full and free parliament’ there is sometimes a tension between two priorities. Which mattered more to the remonstrators, the freedom of parliament (which would meet the royalists’ priority by enabling both voters and MPs to make their own decisions) or the fullness (which was the one thing presbyterians unambiguously offered)? Many of the attacks made on the Rump before Monck turned against it placed less emphasis on its political programme than on the fact that it was an ‘oligarchy’, the government of ‘a few’ in the name of ‘a whole parliament’.108 Monck evidently judged that the holding of by-​elections, by removing that objection, would provide an acceptable basis of settlement. Polemicists found it necessary to warn their ‘country-​men’ not to be ‘cheated’ by the Rump’s proposal, which would provide ‘a full House, indeed’, but one ‘full of the brats, the kindred, and the partizans of those that sit already’.109 It is true that Monck warned the Rump that the nation would not stomach excessively narrow electoral qualifications. Yet he also declared that the Parliament was justified in requiring MPs, as any regime would, to submit to the form of government under which they were summoned.110 Even after his intervention against the Rump on 11 February he signalled his acceptance of its decision to admit only MPs ready to pledge themselves against single rule.111 It was on the ‘filling’ of the House’s membership, not on its capacity to reflect the free opinions of the electorate, that he concentrated before and on 11 February. As he told the Rump in the momentous letter he sent it that day, ‘the grand cause of the present heats and disaffections in the nation is, because they are not fully represented in parliament’. So he could not ‘but insist’ on the Rump’s ‘filling up your number’ by holding the elections which it had promised but not provided.112 At the same time, it is true, he also called for a subsequent set of elections, to be held by May, for a new parliament. Yet that requirement, which the Rump judged that it could ignore, was subordinately positioned in his ultimatum and was less forcefully worded. It is not clear how widely it was known about by the ecstatic crowds. The numerous contemporary accounts 39

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From Republic to Restoration of the celebrations are divided between two explanations of them: the first, the public’s delight in the prospect of ‘a free parliament’; the second, the prospect of the ‘filling up’ of the House. The two hopes easily merged in the public mind because both solutions were aimed at the destruction of the Rump. As the roasting of rumps in the streets on the night of the 11th suggests, the focus of the celebrators was on what would end, not what would replace it. The free parliament would be the means to its termination. There was plenty of comment in the winter of 1659–​60, though most of it came from royalists, to the effect that the nation wanted a return to kingship. If it had been possible, in some political vacuum, to ask the celebrators if they would like the return of monarchy, perhaps at least most of them would have said yes, although the kind of monarchy they would have liked cannot be known. But they did not live in a political vacuum. They lived under a mighty army which, it seemed, could be overthrown only by invasion or civil war, and whose commitment to the Republic the most powerful man in England, Monck, had emphatically endorsed. Who could have expected, before or during the crisis of Monck’s interventions of February, that a release from the military Republic would take the form of the events which May would produce? Yet as February turned to March and March to April, the ancient constitution of king, Lords and Commons had an ever-expanding place in political conversation, not least in discussions of the prospects of a free parliament, in which the subject had until then been mostly evaded. The process that culminated in the Restoration has a modern parallel in another transformation achieved by a tide of opinion sustained by the belief that it represented national sentiment:  the overthrow, in a series of stages, of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, when hopes of limited change gave way to the prospect of unlimited change. In both cases unexpected moments of emancipation widened hopes and enlarged the politically imaginable. In 1660, as in 1989, a climate of fear was gradually lifted, the freedom of movement for dissidents was unexpectedly increased, and the scope of what could be safely said broadened.113 There is the same sense of unforeseen release from a seemingly impregnable regime, and the same pushing at unexpectedly open doors. Even the weather of 1660 conspired with the mood of liberation, as a bitter winter gave way to a cheerful spring, when the loveliest sunshine seems to have fallen on moments of celebration.114 The sensation of liberty sharpened the appetite for it. It was the movement for a free parliament that made the return of the King first a mentionable ambition and then a practicable one: not by demanding it, but through the mental liberation produced by Monck’s interventions in response to the campaign. On 11 February the hitherto formidable Rump

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1660: Restoration and revolution was shown to be disposable. Monck’s army, which in the previous days the Parliament had used to crush and humiliate the opposition to it in London, turned against the Parliament itself. After the 11th nothing could be the same again. It became instantly clear that the ‘filling’ of the House through elections would not serve. On the 12th the Rump was alarmed by the realisation that ‘many persons’ had ‘groundlessly and falsely’ misinterpreted Monck’s move and were claiming that ‘he had declared for a full and free parliament’ in a ‘sense’ that would destroy the Republic.115 The celebrations were not mere acclamations. They pressured Monck to go further. Ten days after his ultimatum his position changed dramatically, even though the Rump had made substantial concessions to his demand that it fill the House. Now, instead of holding elections on its own terms, the Rump was to be reunited with the secluded members, who outnumbered them. That reversal of Pride’s Purge broke a second mental barrier in the public mind. A third was removed by the dissolution of the Long Parliament, after two decades, on 16 March. ‘We are now in another world’, observed one royalist when the Parliament ended.116 Given Monck’s commitment to a presbyterian republic, his insistence on the termination of the Parliament is a surprise. Having restored the secluded members on 21 February he could have left the assembly in power; he could have required it –​as he had required the Rump –​to fill the vacant seats; he could have claimed that the demand for a free parliament had been met; or he could have insisted that the secluded members reach agreement with the rumpers and the army on the republican and civilian future to which he was publicly committed. Instead he made new elections, for which he had called as a secondary demand on the 11th, a primary one. On the 21st he required the reunited Parliament merely to sit for a few days, during which they were to arrange the elections for a new parliament. It was a fundamental decision. Why did he make it? There were weaknesses in his position after the 11th. The Rump threatened his power base, by refusing him undivided control of the army. Yet the return of the secluded members, who promptly awarded him the generalship, would by itself have been enough to solve that problem. It would have been enough, too, to supply him with the money which his army might have struggled to collect while the Rump endured. It is doubtful whether Monck, as a politician, ever saw far beyond his nose. Yet by the 21st, he evidently understood that presbyterians could not settle the nation unless new elections confirmed their supremacy. The readiness of ‘most’ of the secluded members to go along with his demand suggests that they had  grasped the same point, even though they would soon backtrack.117

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From Republic to Restoration Again the movement for a free parliament, which was now in its late stages, had pressed itself on his thinking. In late January declarations had been presented to him from counties through or near which he passed on his march south from Leicester. Although backed by public meetings and local tumults which alarmed the government, the campaign in those shires had been in no position to pose a military threat to it or to him. Instead it looked to him to resolve the crisis on their behalf. But further afield –​in the West Country, and in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire –​February brought developments which threatened to turn the campaign into a national uprising. After the 11 February Yorkshire and Lincolnshire delivered to Monck ‘very sharpe’ and ‘smart’ and ‘high’ declarations, backed by threats of armed force, in support of the movement.118 The combination of that incendiary development with the sense of liberation created on the 11th made it doubtful whether the accommodation of presbyterian demands could any longer contain the movement. Monck’s stipulation for a new parliament blighted the triumph of the secluded members’ return to the rights they had been forcibly denied since 1648. Henceforth they were on the defensive. Now it was their turn to try to contain the tide of opinion. Now it was they who attempted to stifle public rejoicing, even at their own return,119 for the celebrations remained a source of pressure. Some secluded members reverted in alarm to the solution of 1657 and attempted to revive the claims of the house of Cromwell to single rule as an alternative to the Stuarts.120 But the reputation of the house of Cromwell had slumped since its fall,121 and the proposal was stillborn. Notwithstanding their pledge to Monck the secluded members managed to delay the dissolution of the Parliament until 16 March, in which time they did what they could to fortify their authority. They gave the presbyterian ecclesiastical programme a renewed legislative base. They also set up county militias as a counterweight to any opposition, whether from royalists or Monck or republican troops, a move which won some approval for the regime by restoring a degree of local military autonomy.122 They provided for the new elections demanded by Monck, but disqualified not only former supporters of Charles I but their sons from standing (though not from voting). It was a huge proscription  –​undone by a huge decision by Monck. The scale of the disqualification can be inferred from the elections to the Cavalier Parliament in 1661 or in by-​elections in the six years thereafter. More than half of those elected had supported Charles I in the civil wars of the 1640s or had plotted on his son’s behalf in the 1650s or were sons of royalists,123 even if those categories contained a wide range of opinion and varying degrees of commitment. Yet the electoral arrangements laid down by the reunited Long Parliament in 1660, though they are likely to have had some effect, were in many and perhaps most places thwarted once Monck 42

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1660: Restoration and revolution had resolved not to use force to implement it. Head-​counts of parties in the Convention are not realistic, as many of those who were returned, especially the younger ones, are hard to classify. But at least in the county seats, the most prestigious ones, royalists, though doing nothing like as well as they would in 1661, seem comfortably to have out-​performed presbyterians.124 Whether elections held on the same terms, say, two months earlier would have produced similar returns we cannot know. The elections to the Convention made possible the resolution of England’s crisis. The mechanism of parliament absorbed and reflected and implemented opinion. It had happened in 1640–​41, and it happened again now. Parliament gave voice to electors who would never have risked civil war as the price of the King’s return. Yet even when the election results of 1660 trickled in, indeed even after the Convention had assembled, the returns seemed likely to soften rather than remove the conditions on which the King would be restored.125 How did his return come to be unconditional, at least in any formal or any fundamental sense? Two main explanations may be suggested. The first lies in practicalities of politics. The House of Lords, which had been ignored by the movement for a free parliament, proved an inescapable subject once the Convention had met. When it was restored the presbyterians tried to confine its membership to former parliamentarians, but those peers were so far in a minority that their unaccompanied restoration would have made a rump of the second chamber. The return of the royalist peers was a critical event in the defeat of the presbyterians. Second, the King, although he and his advisers might earlier have agreed to negotiations and until March might have accepted some constitutional restraints, would not have accepted the terms of 1648 or anything like them. In 1650 he had been drawn into a humiliating alliance with presbyterians in Scotland and might have made a similar alliance in England. But now his leading minister Edward Hyde and his allies were adamantly set against constitutional concessions that would put ‘fetters and manacles about’ Charles II and make him at most ‘half a king’.126 As the Restoration neared, presbyterians tried in vain to get the King to move to France, where the party of Hyde’s rival Henrietta Maria, the queen mother, might prevail. Presbyterians also hoped to see Hyde confined to exile, or anyway excluded from office, on the King’s return.127 It was a doomed wish. In any case, the reopening of negotiations between Crown and Parliament would have raised intractable practical questions, for the terms of 1648 would have had to be adapted to altered circumstances. Hyde maintained that agreement on wording to adjust them would be ‘absolutely unpractical’.128 Treaties between Parliament and Charles I had been protracted enough when they had been conducted on English territory. Now parliamentarian negotiators would have had to cross back 43

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From Republic to Restoration and forth to the Continent. Oliver St John, that experienced Roundhead negotiator, estimated that a treaty would take at least two years.129 Some presbyterians might be willing to wait, but who else would? The opportunity for settlement between March and May seemed a brief window. The balance of parties achieved by Monck in England was so precarious, the containment by the court of its more ardent followers so difficult, and above all the dread of renewed civil war,130 and the danger that ‘the army might get breath, and find an opportunity to revolt’131 so pressing, that the urgency of the situation was recognised on both sides. Against that background Monck’s insistence on fresh elections, which were held in a constitutional vacuum and took nearly six weeks, is striking testimony to his recognition that a settlement could be achieved only if it were felt to have a free parliament behind it. No other precondition of a settlement was allowed to slow the pace. As Pepys put it when noting in May the failure of the presbyterian attempts to impose terms on the King, ‘everybody’ was ‘willing to submit to anything’ that would end the turmoil.132 The public ‘excitement’, observed the French ambassador, swept talk of a treaty, and of presbyterian constitutional formulae, aside.133 That mood spurned not only the prospect of negotiation but the compromises and calculations, even perhaps the realities, of politics. Yet if circumstances militated against the presbyterians, they had their own inherent weaknesses, some of them perhaps induced by overconfidence arising from their strengths. Not being, like the royalists, a proscribed political class, they could meet and organise and publish with relative ease. In January 1660 royalists feared that presbyterians would monopolise the effective opposition to the Republic and scrambled to keep up with them. Over the spring the tables would be turned. The dissolution of the Long Parliament was a psychological turning point, for until then the secluded members, in a land otherwise so shorn of plausible claimants to constitutional legitimacy, held (at least in their own eyes) a unique legal authority as survivors of that elected body. After 16 March, by contrast, they merely belonged to the crowd of politicians. In that new setting an old liability became more transparent: the lack of a firm theoretical or argumentative basis to their constitutional objectives. Although they intermittently took up or appealed to theories of mixed monarchy, their objective, in 1660 as in 1648, was not to redesign or reboot the constitution but to restrain the proclivities of a particular king. Their behaviour, and their attitude to Charles II, varied with their prospects. In the early spring they reportedly expected to carve up the offices of state among themselves if the King came back. As the mood changed, what royalists called the ‘accustomed insolence’ of the presbyterians134 was modified or replaced by anxiety about the preservation of their estates, even of 44

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1660: Restoration and revolution their heads. Nervously they insisted that the legitimacy of their war against Charles I be formally acknowledged135 and that the difference between their own honourable wartime aims and the villainy of the regicides be publicly recognised.136 Under the pressures of retreat the ‘knot’ of presbyterian leaders loosened. The French ambassador sensed a failure of spirit among them as the Interregnum neared its close. He thought them more concerned with their interests than their principles.137 Ever fewer of them were ready to stand up to the Crown. The presbyterians had their moments in the Convention, where a prominent secluded member was made Speaker. Yet there was apparently a fatal occasion when a powerful group of presbyterians planned to ‘second and third one another’ in favour of the terms of 1648, but when only Thomas Bampfield, who had delivered Devon’s declaration for a free parliament to the Commons, got to his feet.138 Presbyterians appeared to have wide and powerful support in the nation. They had some standing as the ‘sober’ party, free of the destructive urges of sectaries on one side and vengeful Cavaliers on the other. Their return on 21 February ‘without bloud-​sheddinge’,139 the abatement of the insurrectionary mood, and the ‘happy … balance’ which Monck’s move had achieved ‘in these unsteady times’140 occasioned rejoicing and relief and calmed some provincial nerves. As in 1647,141 the presbyterians had a determined following in the city of London. In early 1660 they were called ‘the best governours in all the world’.142 They were commended for their ‘wise and moderate counsels’ or for the ‘singular and superlative evidence’ of their ‘fitness’ to finish the work of 1648.143 They were ‘heroes’ or ‘patriots’.144 Although most of the tributes came from among their natural supporters or from men who found it tactically useful to join them, there is independent testimony that in the immediate aftermath of their restoration to the Commons, when the presence of the secluded members swelled representation at Westminster and when they liberated political prisoners of the Rump, the presbyterian MPs, or anyway the ‘moderate’ ones, ‘were universally beloved’ and were ‘applauded by the people’.145 Yet those sentiments, of a kind easily attracted by governments that replace detested ones, diminished once the resolve of restored members to hold on to power became plain. The presbyterians were not a doomed political class. Even after the King’s return presbyterians were appointed to high offices of state, and an ecclesiastical compromise between Presbyterianism and Anglicanism  seemed likely. Yet royalists had long suspected that the real strength of presbyterianism lay in its leadership rather than its base.146 When the leadership disintegrated the base proved inadequate. So long as freedom of expression was confined to parliamentarian or Puritan opinion, Presbyterianism had seemed something close to a mainstream position, its goals thwarted only by the armed force, 45

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From Republic to Restoration which denied it parliamentary representation. Once alternative views could be freely aired, the reaction against Roundhead and Puritan government acquired a standing that itself facilitated its development, although only in the elections of 1661 would its full potential be realised. The momentum generated by Monck’s moves of 11 and 21 February exposed the limits of the ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ that the presbyterian formula for a free parliament allowed, and raised the questions whether the appetite for freedom would be satisfied by half-​ freedom, and whether any restrictions on electoral freedom were sustainable without armed force. It may be that royalism prevailed in 1660 less because it was the party of the King than because it was the party of liberty. Monck’s decision to enable royalists to vote in the new elections, on which he had insisted, allowed the triumph of the principles of consent and representation on which the movement had been based and to which the conceptions of liberty that it had advanced were tied. The relationship (or perhaps contradiction) between that tendency and the anti-​Roundhead sentiment that profited from it remained to be resolved. The movement for a free parliament, the means by which the presbyterians had overthrown the Rump, became the instrument of their defeat. No one would attribute the Restoration, or the form it took, to public sentiment alone. When it suited them, men of all parties bypassed both the movement and the deliberations of the Convention which it produced. Yet seventeenth-​century politicians, who referred so often to the views of ‘the people’ and took them so seriously, knew that there was a world beyond their own, with opinions and grievances that did not necessarily conform to party labels, but which demanded expression and with which they realized they must reckon. The language of free parliaments would persist. After the Restoration the Crown, which had often stated that parliaments were only free under monarchy, tried to make the language its own.147 Yet the vocabulary would come to the political forefront again in the century’s second great political convulsion, after William of Orange had invaded with a promise of a ‘free parliament’ on his lips.148 Historians apply the term ‘revolution’ to the events both of 1640 and of 1688–​89.149 In both cases resistant opinion overcame power and was translated into it, with profound consequences. The same happened in the winter and spring that preceded the Restoration. If we mean by ‘revolutions’ the fundamental and transformative overthrowing of regimes –  and do not restrict the term to events of which the course or outcome conforms to our conceptions of progress or modernity – then 1660 has as strong a claim to the label as those other years. 46

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1660: Restoration and revolution Notes 1 I am grateful to Henry Reece, David Scott and Paul Seaward for their comments on a draft of this chapter. 2 Matthew Hale, A Happy Handfull; or, Green Hopes in the Blade (London, 1660), p. 20. 3 The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 692. 4 For those events and their background see Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England 1649–​1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), c­ hapter 9. 5 The Clarke Papers, ed. by C. H. Firth, 4 vols (London: Camden Society, 1891–​1901), iv, 153 (cf. iv, 87, 90). The intensity of anti-​military sentiment, though most frequently expressed by political actors who fell victim to the army, extended far beyond them: e.g., The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg 1659–​1661, ed. by William L. Sachse, Camden 3rd ser., 91 (London:  Royal Historical Society, 1961), pp. 8, 9, 14, 21; F.  P.  G. Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell and the Restoration, trans. by A.  R. Scoble, 2 vols (London, 1856), ii, 293. 6 John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. by Kate Bennett, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), i, 319–​20. 7 Compare The Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, 24 vols (London, 1752–​ 63), xxii, 141, with Pocock, ed., Political Works of James Harrington, p. 312. 8 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 68–​69. 9 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, ed. by W. D. Macray, 6 vols (Oxford, 1888), vi, 98 (cf. Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, i, 232–​37), 105 (cf. Edward Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, ed. by G. F. Warner, 4 vols (London: Camden Society, 1886–​1920), iv, 126), 122, 162, 177. 10 Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, ed. by O. Ogle, W. H. Bliss and others, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1869–​1970), iv, 512, 555, 611; Peter Barwick, The Life of the Reverend Dr. John Barwick (London: J. Bettenham, 1724), p. 480; cf. State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, ed. by R. Scrope and T. Monkhouse, 3 vols (Oxford, 1767–​86), iii, 491. 11 Robert Harris, A Sermon Preached to the Honorable House of Commons (1642), p. 50; John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve (1643), sig. A3; State Papers Collected, iii, 650; Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 105, 152; State Papers Collected, iii, 289; [Bodleian Library,] Clarendon MS 69, fol. 60; William Sedgwick, Animadversions upon a Letter and Paper (1656), p.  67; The Grand Concernments of England (London, 1659), p.  40; John Gauden, A Sermon Preached in St Pauls Church London (1660), p. 37; The Copy of a Letter from a Lincoln Shire Gentleman (1660), p. 3; State Papers Collected, iii, 650; Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 105, 152; Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p.  240; Blair Worden, ‘Oliver Cromwell and Parliament’, Cromwelliana, ser. iii, 3 (2014), 10–​28. 12 A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. by Thomas Birch, 7 vols (London, 1742), vii, 772. 13 Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, iv, 66, 114, 236 (cf. 93, 102); Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 100. 14 The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, ed. by Mark Goldie and others, 7 vols (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007–​09), i, Chapter 4. 15 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2001). 16 See my ‘The Campaign for a Free Parliament, 1659–​60’, in Parliamentary History, 36.2 (2017), 159–84 and my ‘The Demand for a Free Parliament, 1659–​60’, in Revolutionary England, c.1630–​c.1660: Essays for Clive Holmes, ed. by George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (London:  Routledge, 2017)  pp. 176–200. Some points about the movement made briefly here are extended or documented in those essays.

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From Republic to Restoration 17 For example, John Heydon, The Idea of the Law (London, 1660), p. 118; A Lively Pourctrait of a New Cavalier (1661), p. 9; William Assheton, Evangelium Armatum (London, 1663), p. 18; Assheton, The Presbyterians Unmask’t (1676), pp. 68–​69. 18 The significance of the phenomenon is discounted by Clarendon in his History of the Rebellion, vi, 174. 19 See my ‘The Demand for a Free Parliament’. 20 State Papers Collected, iii, 527. 21 Ibid., 655. 22 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 351; The Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, 1658–​1660, ed. by Mary Coate, Camden 3rd ser., 69 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1945), p. 163. 23 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 310. 24 Ibid., 431, 435. 25 Ibid., 351. 26 Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. by Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), Book i, p. 21; cf. Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 351. 27 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Ormonde, New Series, vols 1–​2 (1902–​03), new series I, p. 336. 28 Richard Baxter, The Holy Commonwealth (London, 1659), p. 224. 29 Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, i, p. 217. 30 Henry Wilkinson Jr, Three Decads of Sermons (Oxford, 1660), Part iii, pp. 160, 170; cf. Ralph Farmer, A Plain-​Dealing, and Plain-​Meaning Sermon (1660), p. 21. 31 Journal of the House of Commons, 27 June 1659, pp.  694–​95, 818; Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 59–​61. 32 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 340. 33 Journal of the House of Commons, pp. 803, 804; Mercurius Publicus, 29 December 1659 –​5 January 1660, p. 16. 34 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 141–​42. 35 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1659–​1660, p.  347; State Papers Collected, iii, 660; cf. Oliver St. John, The Case of Oliver St. John, Esq. Concerning His Actions During the Late Troubles (London, 1660), p. 40. 36 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 354. 37 Journal of the House of Commons, p. 850. 38 See Mercurius Publicus, 23 February –​1 March 1660, pp. 132, 136. 39 The National Archives [TNA], SP 77/​33, fol. 29. 40 Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, iv, 662. 41 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, ll vols (London: Bell & Hyman, 1970–​83), i, 117. 42 Worden, God’s Instruments, pp. 284–​85. 43 C. H. Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 2 vols (London: Longmans, 1909), i, 41. 44 Diary of Sir Archibald Johnston of Wariston, ed. by G. M. Paul and others, 3 vols, Scottish History Society (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1911–​40), iii, 106. 45 Birch, ed., State Papers of John Thurloe, vii, 684 (cf. The Diary of Bulstrode Whitelocke, ed. by Ruth Spalding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 517). Cf. Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, pp. 48–​49; Journal of the House of Commons, p. 850. 46 A Letter from the Gentlemen of Devon (London, 1660); Roger L’Estrange, L’Estrange his Apologie (London, 1660), p. 58. 47 Robert Wodrow, The History of the Sufferings of the Church of Scotland, 4 vols (Glasgow, 1835), i, 8. 48 Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, ed. by N.  H. Keeble and Geoffrey Nuttall, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), i, 430. 49 Andrew M. Coleby, Central Government and the Localities: Hampshire 1649–​1689 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 81. (Although Norton had briefly sat in the Rump he counted as a secluded member: Mercurius Politicus, 16–​23 February 1660, p. 1117.)

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1660: Restoration and revolution 50 Birch, ed., State Papers of John Thurloe, vii, 859. 51 Hale, Happy Handfull, p. 45. 52 See my ‘The Demand for a Free Parliament’. 53 A Letter of the Apprentices of the City of Bristoll (1660), pp. 4–​5. A biblical allusion (to Judges 17. 6) by remonstrators of Cornwall was perhaps intended as a covert indication of a desire for kingship, but the passage was eliminated when the county leaders took over their demands: To the Right Worshipful our Worthy Patriots of our County of Cornwall (1660). 54 Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 19. 55 Hale, Happy Handfull, pp. 65, 72, 76, 78, 80; A Declaration of the Nobility … of Oxon (London, 1660); A Declaration of the Gentry of the County of Salop (London, 1660); and see Three Letters of Publick Concernment (1660), p. 19. 56 Puritanism and Liberty, ed. by A.  S.  P. Woodhouse (London:  J.  M. Dent, 1938), pp. 407–​08, 409. 57 Clarendon MS 64, fol. 50; A Probable Expedient, for the Present and Future Publick Settlement (London, 1658), p. 1; John Collop, Charity Commended (London, 1658), p. 11; Considerations Divine, Rational and Political (1660). Here as elsewhere the movement echoed demands for a free parliament made during the second civil war in 1648: e.g., The Declaration of the Genlemen [sic] and Others now in Armes in the County of Hereford (1648). 58 An Apologie and Vindication of the Major Part of the Members (London, 1660), p.  13; Animadversions upon Generall Monck’s Letter to the Gentry of Devon (London, 1660), p. 8. 59 Clarendon MS 69, fol. 83; David Lloyd, Modern Policy Compleated (London, 1660), pp. 8, 49; Clement Walker, The History of Independency:  The Fourth and Last Part (London, 1660), p. 93; Mercurius Politicus, 26 January –​2 February 1660, p. 1060. 60 Clarendon MS 70, fol. 34; MS 71 fols 99, 112; Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 201, 206; Pepys, Diary, i, 108; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1876), p. 149. 61 Mercurius Publicus, 23 February –​2 March 1660, pp. 141–​43; 15–​22 March, pp. 178–​80, 194; Select Tracts Relating to the Civil War, ed. by Francis Maseres (London, 1815), p. 780. 62 William Prynne, A Brief Narrative (London, 1660), p. 2. 63 William Prynne, A Plea for Sr George Booth (1660). 64 Hale, Happy Handfull, p. 32; Alan Everitt, Suffolk and the Great Rebellion (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society, 1960), pp. 141–​42. 65 Hale, Happy Handfull, p. 59. 66 Ibid., pp. 8, 10. 67 An Outcry of the Youngmen and Apprentices of London (1649), pp. 1, 6. 68 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 99. 69 Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p. xi. 70 Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 34. 71 State Papers Collected, iii, 331. 72 Hale, Happy Handfull, pp. 24, 26; Declaration of the County of Oxon. 73 William Prynne, A Plea for the House of Lords (London, 1659), p. 14. 74 William Prynne, The First Part of a Brief Register (London, 1659), pp. 8–​9. 75 Hale, Happy Handfull, p. 40. 76 Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 180. 77 See, e.g., Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 51, 102, 143; State Papers Collected, iii, 678–​9. 78 See, e.g., Mercurius Publicus, 29 December 1659  –​5 January 1660, pp.  121–​23; 23 February  –​1 March 1660, pp.  141–​42. Equally, there was no attempt to redefine the normal relationship between parliament and the nation. The ‘Convention’ was so named because, in the king’s absence, there was no legal mechanism for calling a parliament. When another ‘Convention’ was called for the same reason in 1689, there were attempts, albeit in vain, to cap it by a constitutional ‘convention’, whose authority would exceed that of parliaments and whose members would redesign the constitution

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From Republic to Restoration from the beginning. Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People:  The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988; repr. 1989), pp. 107–​10. Nothing of that kind was envisaged by the movement of 1659–​60. 79 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 257–​58; cf. Keeble and Nuttall, eds, Correspondence of Richard Baxter, i, 430. 80 Algernon Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. by Hans W. Blom, Eco Haitsma Mulier and Ronald Janse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 3–​7, 42–​43; Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. by James Sutherland (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1973), p.  223; Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007; repr. 2009), pp. 362, 367. 81 His Majesties Last Answer to the King of Scots (London, 1649); A Declaration from his Majestie the King of Scots (1659), p. 1; A Message Sent from the King of Scots, and the Duke of York’s Court in Flanders (Aberdeen, 1659), p. 6. Cf. State Papers Collected, iii, 289,710; R. S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement (London: A & C Black, 1951), p. 107. 82 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 240. 83 William Williams, The King, and None under God, but the King (London, 1660), p. 8. 84 Clarendon MS 68, fols 107–​08; MS 69, fol. 39. 85 The Royall Virgine (1660). 86 Clarendon MS 68, fol. 6v. 87 Clarendon MS 70, fol. 140v. 88 Clarendon MS 71, fol. 362. 89 His Majesties Last Answer; Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 240. 90 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1659–​1660, p. 433. 91 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 247–​ 48; cf. State Papers Collected, iii, 496, 514. 92 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 241–​42. 93 Clarendon MS 71, fol. 81v. 94 State Papers Collected, iii, 727. 95 Clarendon MS 71, fol. 27c. 96 Clarendon MS 64, fol. 64; A Letter Written to a Member at Westminster (London, 1660), p. 7. 97 Pepys, Diary, i, 122. 98 The names are those to be found in Journal of the House of Commons. 99 Happy Handfull, p. 70. 100 Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, iv, 301 (cf. IV, 125); Clarendon MS 67, fol. 117v; Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p. 136; Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, iv, 469; William Prynne, A Short, Legal, Medicinal … Prescription (1659), p. 7; Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 293, 294. 101 For example, Pepys, Diary, i, 9; Mercurius Publicus, 5–​12 January 1660, p. 32; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts of F. W. Leybourne-​Popham Esq., of Littlecote, Co. Wilts, 51st ser. (1899), pp. 148, 153; Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 354. 102 Ibid., 342. 103 Compare Clarendon MS 68, fol. 214v with Hale, Happy Handfull, pp. 29–​30. 104 See the assessment of his conduct in Clarendon MS 69, fol. 167v. 105 For the provincial reception, see, e.g., The Public Intelligencer 20–​27 Feb. 1660, p. 1117; Aubrey, Brief Lives, i, 57; Borthwick Institute, York, 15/​2 PRY/​MS 5. 106 Pepys, Diary, i, 52. 107 Clarendon MS 69, fol. 161v. 108 Ibid., fols 60, 164, 167v; Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 27. 109 A Declaration of Many Thousand Well-​affected Persons [London,  1660]; L’Estrange, Apologie, p. 76.

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1660: Restoration and revolution 110 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 89. 111 Mercurius Publicus, 16–​23 February 1660, p. 118 (a news-​book produced by a favourite printer of Monck, John Macock [cf. Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 254], who would hardly have invented the material printed there). 112 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 98–​103. 113 Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p.  xviii; Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 48; Pepys, Diary, i, 79, 89, 112–​13; Carte, ii, 310; cf. Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 350. 114 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. by Alan Macfarlane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 459, 463; Pepys, Diary, i, 121. 115 TNA, SP 25/​99, pp. 54–​57. 116 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1879), p. 463. 117 Parliamentary or Constitutional History of England, xxii, 171. 118 Clarendon MS 69, fols 127v, 162v, 164, 172, 176 (cal. iv. 557, 564, 566, 566–​67); HMC, Leybourne-​Popham, pp. 147–​48; The Copy of a Letter from a Lincolne Shire Gentleman (1660); The Declaration of Thomas Lord Fairfax (London, 1660); cf. Pepys, Diary, i, 55n.; my ‘The Campaign for a Free Parliament’. 119 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1659–​1660, pp. 375–​76. 120 For example, Clarendon MS, 70, fol. 23; State Papers Collected, iii, 701–​02. 121 State Papers Collected, iii, 493; Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 10; Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 154. In the literature for a free parliament Oliver figures principally (and half-​misleadingly) as the miscreant of Pride’s Purge. 122 Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p. 51. 123 Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–​ 1667 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 36. 124 Godfrey Davies, ‘The General Election of 1660’, Huntington Library Quarterly 16 (1952), 211–​35. 125 State Papers Collected, iii, 722, 723; Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 414. 126 State Papers Collected, iii, 631 (cf. iii, 724, 733, 739); Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p. xvi; Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion, VI, 180 (cf. vi, 150). 127 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 384ff.; Bosher, Making of the Restoration Settlement, p. 111; Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, iv, 641, 653 (cf. iv, 622). Cf. State Papers Collected, iii, 738–​39; Mercurius Politicus, 19–​26 January 1660, pp. 1047–​48; T. H. Lister, Life and Administration of Edward, First Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols (London, 1837–​38), iii, 90, 96–​97; HMC, Fifth Report, p. 149. 128 Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p. 111. 129 Nicholas, The Nicholas Papers, iv, 194. 130 Pepys, Diary, i, 81, 111; Carte, ii, 312, 313. 131 Maseres, ed., Select Tracts, pp. 788–​89. 132 Pepys, Diary, i, 152. 133 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 420, 429. 134 State Papers Collected, iii, 714. 135 Journal of the House of Commons, p. 871; OPH, xxii, 286–​87. Cf. Maseres, ed., Select Tracts, p. 790; HMC, Seventh Report, p. 463. 136 For example Godfrey Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 305. 137 Guizot, History of Richard Cromwell, ii, 384, 412, 430, 434–​35. 138 Dr Williams’s Library, Morrice MS J1640 (24); Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, i, 160. 139 Everitt, Suffolk and the Great Rebellion, p. 126. 140 HMC, Leybourne-​Popham, p. 159; cf. York City Archives, H. B. 37, fol. 134.

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From Republic to Restoration 141 Valerie Pearl, ‘London’s Counter-​Revolution’, in The Interregnum, ed. by G. E. Aylmer (London, 1972), pp. 29–​56. 142 Keeble and Nuttall, eds, Correspondence of Richard Baxter, i, 393. 143 An Exact Accompt, 25 February –​9 March 1660, p. 748; Declaration of Thomas Lord Fairfax. 144 HMC, Leybourne-​Popham, p. 160; Edward Reynolds, Divine Efficacy (London, 1660), p. 39; Walker, History of Independency, p. 92. 145 Sachse, ed., Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, p.  49 (where, as often in that text, the dating should be ignored); Clarendon MS 70, fol. 21 (cal. iv. 572). 146 See, e.g., Coate, ed., Letter-​Book of John Viscount Mordaunt, p. 170. 147 A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts … Lord Somers, ed. by Walter Scott, 13 vols (London, 1809–​15), vii, 545. 148 See, e.g., The Declaration of the Nobility … at the Rendezvous at Nottingham (1688); By the King: A Declaration (London, 1688); A Review of the Reflections on the Prince of Orange’s Declaration (1688), pp.  1–​4; To His Highness the Prince of Orange, the Humble Address of the Lord Mayor (London, 1688); Nathaniel Crewe, To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty (1688); The Petition of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal for the Calling of a Free Parliament (1689); A Collection of Papers Relating to the Present Juncture of Affairs (1689), title-​page and pp.  11–​14; The Common Interest of King & Kingdom, in  …  A Free Parliament (1689); James Montgomery, Great Britain’s Just Complaint (London, 1692), p. 25; A Letter from a General Officer to a Colonel [1692(?)]; Goldie, ed., Entring Book of Roger Morrice, iv, 339, 374, 386, 424, 479; v, 6. 149 Christopher Hill, The English Revolution, 1640 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1940); Steven Pincus, 1688:  The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 2009).

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Chapter 2

Monarchy and commonwealth: ‘republican’ defences of monarchy at the Restoration Glenn Burgess

I

t can sometimes seem that the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy was received gratefully by a nation weary of confusion and worried by disorder. But whatever there was of weariness soon gave way to resurgent and uncompromising monarchism: in the Restoration ‘the cult of kingship flourished as never before’. This cult took various forms (Augustan, Platonic, Davidic, miraculous and feudal); but mostly it appeared as an absolutist theory of the divine right of kings, hard-​nosed, rationalistic and juridical more than mystical.1 Of course, this is not all that there was to the Restoration; it is not even all that there was to Restoration royalism. Republican or quasi-​republican critiques of monarchy were, before long, to make a powerful return, whereas royalist ideas are too easily caricatured as unthinking and uncritical enthusiasm for monarchy. A lot of recent research has shown that royalist political thought is more complicated and diverse than was once imagined. Most of this research has concentrated on the 1640s and 1650s,2 but it has implications for the later period: The very diversity of Royalist experiences during the Interregnum ensured that when Charles II returned to England his followers were scattered along a wide spectrum of attitudes and beliefs. This must surely have had profound implications –​more than has often been appreciated –​for the nature of the Restoration Settlement and the politics of the 1660s.3

The present volume seeks to confront some of the easy caricatures, and to work across the divide of 1660, identifying continuities as well as ruptures. This chapter, as a contribution to this task, will explore one facet of ‘the broad, variegated and fractured identity’ of royalist thought,4 namely the use of Interregnum republican ideas to support and praise the restored monarchy. Thus, to the list of forms that the cult of kingship could take, we can now add a republican one.

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From Republic to Restoration ‘Republican’ means, in this context, a position defended by reference to ‘commonwealth principles’, using words and ideas inherited from the political writing of the 1640s and 1650s. ‘Commonwealth’ –​particularly as embedded in the terms ‘commonwealthsmen’ and ‘commonwealth principles’ –​was a word central to the republicanism of the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, in the eyes both of contemporaries and of modern historians.5 Commonwealth ideas have a long history in English political and social thought; but their association with anti-​monarchical republicanism developed in the context of the regicide of 1649. The Rump Parliament, perhaps stunned by the huge scale of its actions, took its time, only declaring in March 1649 that monarchy was abolished, since it had ‘been found by experience, that the office of a King  …  is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty and safety, and public interest of the people’.6 After a little further thought, the Rump declared in May that ‘the people of England … are and shall be, and are hereby constituted, made and established, and confirmed, to be a Commonwealth and Free State’.7 Before all its declaring and enacting, however, the Rump had begun to impose a loyalty oath, an Engagement, initially in February on members of the Council of State. This asked for loyalty to Parliament ‘in the maintenance and defence of their resolutions concerning the settling of the government of this nation for the future in way of a Republic, without King or House of Lords’.8 ‘Commonwealth’ and ‘republic’ were in essence the same word, and the Engagement that was now to be required of all adult men in early 1650 read more simply but more ambiguously, ‘I do declare and promise, that I will be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a King or House of Lords’.9 The republic that dare not speak its name demanded loyalty in a distinctly low-​key fashion.10 Before this time, ‘Commonwealth’ (like the Latin respublica, of which it was the usual English equivalent, and indeed like the English ‘republic’, and similar terms in the European vernaculars) was generally understood as a generic term for a body politic or state, not as having an anti-​monarchical implication.11 Kingdoms –​as much as any other form of state  –​were commonwealths.12 In Sir Thomas Smith’s words, published in 1583, ‘A common wealth is called a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves aswell in peace as in warre’; and commonwealths came in three simple forms, namely, monarchy, aristocracy or democracy, as well as in mixed forms.13 As Maitland put it, ‘Prince and Republic were not yet incompatible’.14 Edmund Dudley’s Tree of Commonwealth (1510) revealed no qualms about mixing terms appropriate to a kingdom (realm, subject) into its discussion of the ‘commonwealth’: 54

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Monarchy and commonwealth His [the king’s] wealth and prosperity standeth in the wealth of his true subjects, for though the people be subjects to the king yet are they the people of God, and God hath ordained their prince to protect them and they to obey their prince. The common wealth of this realm or of the subjects or inhabitants thereof may be resembled to a fair and mighty tree growing in a fair field or pasture, under the covert or shade whereof all beasts both fat and lean are protected and comforted from heat and cold as the time requireth. In like manner all the subjects of that realm where this tree of common wealth doth surely grow are there by holpen and relieved from the highest degree to the lowest.15

Over time, republican overtones developed, though quite when is difficult to determine. Take, for example, Sir Robert Filmer –​a man very careful with words –​writing in Patriarcha (c. 1630): The best order, the greatest strength, the most stability and easiest government are to be found all in monarchy, and in no other form of government. The new platforms of commonweals were first hatched in a corner of the world, amongst a few cities of Greece, which have been imitated by very few other places. Those very cities were first for many years governed by kings, until wantonness, ambition, or faction made them attempt new kinds of regiment. All which mutations proved most bloody and miserable to the authors of them, happy in nothing but that they continued but a small time.16

Was Filmer saying that monarchy and ‘commonweal’ (republic) were two forms of constitution, or that monarchy was a better form of commonweal than the ‘new platforms’ or republic that first developed in the Greek cities? It is not immediately obvious, but note that Filmer was one of few writers who distinguished ‘commonweal’ from ‘commonwealth’. He objected to use of the latter by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. I wish the title of the book had not been of a commonwealth, but of a weal public, or commonweal, which is the true word carefully observed by our translator of Bodin De Republica into English [Richard Knolles, who translated Bodin in 1606]. Many ignorant men are apt by the name of commonwealth to understand a popular government, wherein wealth and all things shall be common, tending to the levelling community in the state of pure nature.17

This suggests that Filmer used ‘commonweal’ innocuously. A commonweal was a body politic; so indeed was a commonwealth, for most if not for Filmer. Margaret Judson quoted a neat formulation of the point from Bodleian Tanner MS 233, ‘Though there be not a kingdom in every commonwealth, there is a commonwealth in every kingdom’. Judson believed that these words were Filmer’s; sadly, few now believe that the manuscript engagement tract from which this quotation is drawn was written by him.18

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From Republic to Restoration The thought expressed in Tanner MS 233 was not a new one. John Craig, speaking in 1564, had said much the same thing: my judgement is that every kingdom is, or at least should be, a commonwealth, albeit that every commonwealth be not a kingdom; and therefore I think that in a kingdom no less diligence ought to be taken that laws be not violated than is [in] a commonwealth; because that the tyranny of princes who continually rule in a kingdom is more hurtful to the subjects than is the misgovernment of those that from year to year are changed in free commonwealths.19

A ‘monarchy’ and a ‘free commonwealth’ thus shared a commitment to ‘commonwealth’ values  –​that is they shared the principle that good government is government for the public or common good. However, the distinction between ‘monarchy’ and ‘free commonwealth’, found here and elsewhere, was to prove fateful. For, over time, the ‘commonwealth’ values that were served by and protected in every healthy monarchy became occluded. Writers distilled from a complex conceptual field a simpler contrast between monarchy and commonwealth. Thus Charles I’s advisors, Jermyn, Culpeper and Ashburnham wrote on 6 August 1646 to warn him, of the danger that, if his opponents were successful in negotiating the Newcastle Propositions, they ‘will upon the advantage of such weakness in you, and strength in their hands, instead of restoring the powers thus given them, take their first opportunity to drive on the business to the greatest extremities by an avowed changing of Monarchy into a Commonwealth’.20 A generic term (commonwealth meaning a body politic which could come in many forms, including the monarchical) came to be a term associated with a distinction between monarchical and non-​monarchical forms of rule: monarchy and commonwealth came to represent a distinction; they became mutually exclusive. Thus, to use an example from the years on which this chapter focuses and to add to those from 1649 that have been quoted already, George Starkey’s The Dignity of Kingship Asserted (1660), which was a lengthy reply to Milton’s Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, clearly opposed ‘Kingly Government’ to ‘Republicks or common-​wealths’.21 ‘Never,’ he wrote, ‘shall we finde the magnificence of a Common-​wealth comparable to that of Monarchies’.22 There are three things to note about the process of linguistic change that has been sketched here. First, republican implications became integrated into a widely used term of English socio-​political discourse. Republicanism was naturalised in England by the ability to see it as an implication of a core term in the political vocabulary. It became domesticated. With care, monarchy could be undermined in the name of the commonwealth values it once shared. The argument was as follows. England was and always had been a commonwealth, with a limited and constrained monarchy. But experience now showed, after the Civil War, that no true and lasting commonwealth 56

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Monarchy and commonwealth could be a monarchy, because even the most limited of monarchies carried with it an unacceptable risk of degeneration into tyranny. It was therefore incumbent on the people of England to remove forever the vestiges of monarchy. First of all, this argument was a defence of what has been called ‘exclusivist republicanism’, the idea that a republic was the only legitimate form of government.23 Second, the simplified distinction between a monarchy and a commonwealth (or republic) was never ubiquitous. It jostled with more complex linguistic and conceptual usages. It was always a position more than a language. Thus John Toland, writing in 1717, used a complex set of terms that was always teetering on the edge of collapse into simple dichotomy, in the end just managing to maintain its balance. His purpose (and in this he resembled many who wrote in support of parliament in the 1640s) was to show that absolute monarchy could never be a legitimate form of rule because it was incompatible with commonwealth principles. But it was not quite clear how much of any sort of monarchy was left once ‘absolute hereditary’ monarchy was ruled out of bounds: As for the word Commonwealth (which is the common-​weal or good) whenever we use it about our own Government, we take it only in this sense: just as the word Respublica in Latin, is a general word for all free Governments, of which we believe ours to be the best. This is the sense in which King James I, call’d himself, the great servant of the Commonwealth; and in which Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State to more than one of our Princes, entitles his account of the English Government, the Commonwealth of England. Now with us there is no medium in the case: for whoever is not for this form of Government, is for absolute hereditary Monarchy, and consequently for unlimited arbitrary Power in the Monarch.24

Third, the conceptual shift that brought ‘commonwealth’ and republicanism (in our sense) into close conjunction was not initiated by the regicide of 1649. But that event did much to entrench it, and to increase the repertoire and range of republican and commonwealth arguments in English political thought. The rest of this chapter explores one particular dimension of this enrichment. The events of 1649 were pivotal in the further development and establishment of a republican meaning to the word ‘commonwealth’, especially the declaration that England had become a ‘commonwealth and free state’. Had become? The phrase actually used by the Rump was one of studied ambiguity, asserting both change and continuity. Possibly England had always been a commonwealth and free state, without quite knowing it, and without realising that it might never securely retain its freedom while it remained formally a monarchy. Had not England always been a commonwealth in which people had freedoms?25 A  cluster of writers in the Engagement Controversy  –​the pamphlet debate about whether or not a man of good conscience could take the Oath of Engagement to a 57

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From Republic to Restoration government that might be considered to be illegitimate –​thought so. They defended the new government not because it was an improvement on the monarchy, not even because it was a good government; they defended it because they wished to be loyal to a ‘commonwealth’ that had survived, more or less intact, the various changes of ruler that England had suffered since 1642. Even an imperfect government would be a better means to protect the commonwealth and its people from harm than allowing continued anarchy, violence and civil discord. Thus, Thomas Paget explained, ‘Englishmen for many generations, have as a Nation lived Nationally in England, and been combined in a politike Body, or Common-​wealth, according to the Rights and Customes of this Nation, chosen and consented unto by the people’.26 Englishmen had a ‘natural and fundamental’ tie to the commonwealth, which was ‘the same Common-​wealth that it hath been for very many ages and generations successively’.27 Its continuity through time was evident in language, geography, law and the administration of justice, the profession of the ‘true Christian Religion’, and the principle that, when necessary, new laws were made and old ones annulled by authority of parliament. ‘[W]‌ayes of governing’ varied, as the commonwealth had been ruled successively by Britons, Saxons and Normans; and, in more recent times, both the civil and ecclesiastical government had needed considerable reform, including ‘suppressing of arbitrary power’. ‘[Y]et notwithstanding it is the same Commonwealth still.’28 It followed therefore that ‘English Patriots in their love and zeal of their native Countrey, should show themselves to be true and faithfull to the Commonwealth of England, in whose hands soever the Government is established’.29 Certainly, there were ‘manifold commodious advantages to people in Free-​States’; but the continuity of the commonwealth was not breached by regicide because ‘the same power and authority which at first erected a King for common good … it is in their power, whether they will continue his Kingly power, or change it to a better’. That power consisted in ‘the agreement of the people’.30 Others shared this view. John Dury declared that ‘in a Kingdom there is a Common-​wealth, as the intrinsicall substance of the Being thereof ’.31 There was a ‘Nationall tye and association, by which we were a Common-​ wealth while we were yet called a Kingdome’. He also held that law-​making power in every nation or commonwealth ‘by the law of Nature’ lay ‘in the convention of the Representatives of the whole body of the people’. Therefore, though England may have abolished its monarchy and House of Lords, it remained still the commonwealth it had always been, one in which sovereign power lay, as it always had, in parliament.32 Henry Parker also pointed out that ‘[b]‌y our subscriptions, we onely binde our selves to be true and faithfull to the Common-​wealth of England, as it now governed 58

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Monarchy and commonwealth without King, or Lords. To ask, what the Common-​wealth of England is, is ridiculous; tis the same now under this form of Regiment, as it was before under Monarchy.’33 The English people were bound, by previous oaths and declarations as well as by the Engagement, to the government of this commonwealth, regardless of its form. This sense of the perdurance of the commonwealth, intertwined with a developing sense of the true commonwealth’s republican character, formed the materials from which it could be argued in 1660 that the purposes of a republic –​a ‘free State’ –​were best achieved when it was governed (once again) as a monarchy. In 1659–​60, there were three publications –​among the great flood of works welcoming the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy  –​that contained in their main title the words: Monarchy Asserted. Taken together, the three works nicely indicate the variety of ways in which monarchy could be asserted at the Restoration. One of them was an account of discussions preceding the offer of the Crown to Oliver Cromwell in 1656, and claimed to defend monarchy as ‘the best, most Ancient and legall form of Government’; another was Matthew Wren’s continuation of his defence of monarchy against the republicanism of James Harrington; while a third aimed to prove monarchy ‘to be the Freest State, and the Best Common-​ wealth Throughout the World’.34 All are suggestive of the ways in which ‘commonwealth principles’ could insinuate themselves into the language of monarchy; but it is the last of them, and related tracts, on which I wish to concentrate. Englands Monarchy Asserted was written by Sir Edmund Peirce, a royalist and civil lawyer. His writings presented his royalist credentials:  he defended English episcopacy as an institution endorsed by the leaders of the reformed faith; he was a co-​presenter of a declaration by Essex royalists to General Monck; and author of an earlier defence of monarchy in 1659.35 His other political writings from the years 1659 to 1660 were relatively conventional, though they certainly made some play with the language of free State and commonwealth. In Peirce’s view the republican government of the 1650s had been a tyranny trampling over fundamental laws, traditional rights, and the freedoms hitherto enjoyed by the English people. The English people had been denied since 1649 an essential bulwark of liberty: a free parliament.36 However, in Vox Verè Anglorum Peirce advanced this argument: If we be a free people (as it is said we are) and the supremacy forfeited for breach of trust, by the late King, and reverted to us, as some vainly prate and scrible, why should we then (in such case,) be denyed that, wherein onely this Freedome chiefly consists, which is, that since this forfeiture, and the Seizure of the Supremacy into our hands, we may enjoy the free choyce of our Government and Governours, and that in such a fair free and open way, That all who are to

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From Republic to Restoration be obliged to subjection, may manifest their consents unto it: Must we be told we are a free people, and yet must this be denyed us? Nay, when the worst and basest kind of slavery, that ever was in any age since Adam, imposed on any sort of men, is violently thrust upon us.37

Building on this, England’s Monarchy Asserted, and Proved to be the Freest State, and the Best Common-​wealth Throughout the World was both an attempt to exploit earlier meanings of commonwealth, and a rhetorical redeployment of republican language. ‘It is possible, a People may live happily enough, under any of the three chief forms mentioned in Story, viz. Monarchy, Aristocracy, or Democracy, so they have good Laws and good Magistrates’, Peirce said.38 Nonetheless, experience demonstrated the superiority of England’s ancient form of government, monarchy. Confronting arguments for exclusivist republicanism, which he attributed to publicists for the governments of the 1650s, Peirce urged his readers to consider the monarchy of England: Let us reflect a while upon the government here amongst us, as it stood twenty years ago; which though truly Monarchical, yet did it by a frequent refining of it self … raise it self to such a mirrour of perfection, That it became the envy of Monarchies, and shame of all Common-​wealths, who therein might behold themselves so ecclipsed and silenced in all the pretensions to Liberty and Freedom; That it might be truly asserted by us, That … we injoyed all the Immunities and Priviledges of A Free State, and Common wealth.39

The freedoms of English people included the right not to be deprived of their property, except by their own consent or by laws made in Parliament, freedom from arbitrary imprisonment, and justice administered in public and according to law.40 The king’s ‘negative voice’, his right to veto proposed legislation, did not undermine these freedoms. It was ‘a meer weapon of defence, to shield the Government from being prostituted to alteration, at the will and pleasure of inferiority’.41 The experience of the 1640s and 1650s revealed the need for such a check, for in that decade England ‘lost the substance of an opulent flourishing and happy Free-​State and Common-​ wealth, which really and indeed we injoyed in all its essentials, and perfections, and caught and embraced onely, an empty shadow, and sound of one in our ears’.42 The Restoration marked the return of a real commonwealth, and the end of ‘the Utopian Free State or Commonwealth’ that had sacrificed substance for name.43 Peirce’s arguments hint at the potential for turning republican language on its head –​or putting it back on its feet –​but they are superficial. Others went further. Perhaps the best known of the tracts that did so –​it is discussed, for example, in Carolyn Edie’s essay on ideas of monarchy at the Restoration44 –​is a Plea for Limited Monarchy As It Was Established before the

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Monarchy and commonwealth Late War (also addressed to General George Monck).45 Published anonymously, the pamphlet has been attributed to Sir Roger L’Estrange, though it was not included in the collected publication of his political pamphlets from 1659 to 1660.46 Furthermore, its political complexion is very far from that displayed in L’Estrange’s other writings. The attribution cannot be credited.47 A Plea for Limited Monarchy also appeared in a shortened version as a single-​sheet broadside, No King But the Old Kings Son (from which most of my quotations are drawn).48 It combines several lines of argument, including the claim that republics were volatile and unstable, and the view that ‘Monarchy in these Nations is more ancient then Story or Record, and more venerable then Tradition itself.’ But the greatest weight was placed on this argument:49 Our old Kingly Government included all the perfections of a Free State, and was the Kernel, as it were, of A  Common-​wealth, in the shell of Monarchy; the essential parts of a Commonwealth are these, viz. the Senate or Parliament, if ever a Free Parliament were, it was here, where the Deputies of the whole Nation, most freely chosen, did with like Freedom, meet, propound, debate and vote all matters of common Interest.

The king’s negative voice was again discussed, but this time its compatibility with freedom was emphasised: ‘there was a wise and sweet necessity, for the King and likewise for the Lords … to confirm all such Bills, as were convenient for the people, and not greatly hurtful to the Prince’ (whatever precisely that might mean). Other royal prerogatives were similarly not all they seemed on paper. The King indeed had the power of making War, but he had not the means; and therefore it signified no more than giving him leave to fly if he could get wings, or to go beyond Sea so he went without shipping: He had a Sword, but he alone could never draw it, for the Trained-​bands were a weapon, which he decently wore, but the Nation only could use it: He chose Ministers. But alas he was accomptable for them to the Tryennial Parliament, which none but the soundest integrity could abide.

In this realm, ‘Liberty was no lesse sacred than Majesty’ and ‘our Lives, Liberties and Estates were secured established … as well as any thing, on this side of Heaven’. An interesting feature of this work is that its author had a very clear understanding of why a separation of powers might be considered important to the preservation of freedom, and returned to this matter in his Echo to the Plea for Limited Monarchy, expressing some slight hesitation –​‘the Legislative and Ministeriall power are, I suppose, sufficiently severed, or if they be not, his Majesty I am sure is not in fault’.50 The same hesitation was

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From Republic to Restoration evident also in the earlier broadsheet pamphlet, and some obvious shoe-​ horning became necessary. It is worth quoting in full. We can never hope under our Common-​wealth,51 what ever promises may be made us, so perfectly to distinguish the Legislative from the Ministeriall Authority, as once we did; when the House of Commons had not the power of a Court Leet to give an Oath, nor of a Justice of the Peace to make a Mittimum: Which distinction, doubtless is the most vitall part of Freedome, and far more considerable to poor Subjects than us, than the pretended Rotation; As on the contrary, the confusion of them is an accomplishment of servitude; For which the best Republick, I fear, have more to answer, than any limited Prince can have: Certain, it is, that our King in his personal capacity as he made no Laws, so neither did he by himself interpret Laws. His Privy Seal ever buckled to the great Seal, as being the Nations more than his.52

There would appear to be an acceptance that the separation of proposing, resolving and executing laws was one of the ingredients of liberty. The ancient English monarchy was difficult to reconcile with the sort of separation of powers advocated by Harringtonian republicans, for the monarch (executive) was part of the legislature, and the legislature had some judicial functions. Nonetheless, the effort was made to place monarchy and ancient constitution into such a frame, and there are faint echoes of Harrington’s definition of the equal republic: ‘An equal commonwealth … is a government established on an equal agrarian, arising into the superstructures or three orders, the senate debating and proposing, the people resolving, and the magistracy executing by an equal rotation through the suffrage of the people given by the ballot.’53 The longer version of the Plea for Limited Monarchy concluded: ‘That with all the Ornaments of the noblest Kingdome, we had likewise, all the enjoyments of the Freest State’.54 The work essentially brought together two things. At one level, it praised England’s monarchical ancient constitution, which embedded freedoms in common law and understood that law to limit and moderate monarchs. Yet it also entered into engagement with distinctive idioms of the 1650s (classical mixed government and the separation of powers) that located them in, and returned them to, the context of a longer and less republican usage of the language of commonwealth. Perhaps the most adept deployment of the ‘republican’ defence of restored monarchy is to be found in James Arderne’s The Kingdom of England the Best Commonwealth, which declared on its title page that its case would be made by ‘demonstrating from Common-​wealth principles’.55 Arderne was to become Dean of Chester, in July 1682, and a staunch royalist. In that role, he delivered on 27 August 1687 a speech to the visiting James II, fulsome in its praise and comparing him to God, ‘whom in Governing power, You Represent upon Earth’.56 In Michael Mullett’s

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Monarchy and commonwealth words, Arderne was someone in the ‘extreme minority wing of Anglicanism prepared under James II to stand up for the interests of the crown rather than of the church itself ’.57 Before the Restoration, however, and before his ordination, he is said to have attended meetings of James Harrington’s Rota Club, which met in Miles’s Coffeehouse at the Turk’s Head in London.58 The Rota met between November 1659 and February 1660, and Arderne’s Kingdom of England may be understood as a bridge between the debates he heard in that group and his later royalism. Arderne was, not surprisingly, said to have become ‘somewhat ashamed of his connection with the [Rota] club’ in later life.59 Arderne began his republican defence of monarchy with a ‘concession’ to republicans  –​or, in his terms, to ‘them that style themselves more popularly than truly Commonwealths-​men’  –​ ‘That no civil Constitution is any further obligatory to obedience, then as it hath some relation to a Commonwealth, either as tending to erect such a scheme of Government, or else as proceeding from the Authority thereof so erected’.60 This, Arderne’s first principle, was presented as a hypothesis not an axiom. A number of points were then established. Grotius was cited, to confirm that a power originally in the people may be alienated; Buchanan’s view that religion might justify resistance to rulers (or worse) was rejected in favour of the view that virtue was not a requirement for legitimate rule, dominion was not founded in grace;61 the prince was ‘Gods Interpreter to me’, though Arderne disavowed Hobbes’s more extreme version of this principle (in De Cive)62 ‘as a subtle design to introduce irreligion and Atheism into the world’.63 Passive obedience and acceptance of the punishment that would follow were as much disobedience to evil commands as God allowed to Christians.64 The oaths of princes to obey the laws of the land obliged only in conscience.65 In short, ‘the inference of an unquestionable Power in a Monarch from the resignation of this power to him by the People … seems valid and unexceptionable’.66 Citing Grotius again, Arderne emphasised that supreme and irresistible authority had been alienated to princes by the people.67 This does not sound much like a ‘republican’ argument. The second principle, however, led to a more interesting discussion. It was ‘That the Government of England by a King, House of Lords, and House of Commons, is the best sort of a Commonwealth’. Arderne explored the applicability of the concept of ‘commonwealth’: It may perhaps seem an improper speech in the judgement of some, to call a Society of men gathered into a Political compact, under the Supremacy of a single Person, a Commonwealth, but more strange that it should deserve the name of the best Commonwealth … That a Kingly Government is a species

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From Republic to Restoration of a Commonwealth, is plainly asserted by Polybius a good Historian, and no worse Polititian, in his 6 book of History  …  concerning the several sorts of Commonwealths.68

Other authorities were cited:  commonwealths could be monarchical, aristocratic or democratic. Some used the term to refer only to popular governments, but in fact both monarchies and aristocracies were ‘justly styled Commonwealths’.69 So what was a ‘commonwealth’? It was ‘A Publique society of men under Sovereign authority, administrable for the Common good’. Teasing the definition apart, Arderne distinguished a society from the state of nature, and its public character from the private character of a family or household. Being under sovereignty distinguished it from anarchy, while the stipulation that it served the public good enabled good and bad forms of government to be severed (monarchy from tyranny, the latter incompatible with commonwealth).70 Was there any reason, then, why the monarchy of England should not be considered a commonwealth? The only exception which can be made against a mixt Government, where a single Person hath the praeeminence above the Nobility and Commonalty, why that should not be numbred amongst Commonwealths, according to this definition, is this, That where the Government and the Power annexed thereunto doth lie in any one, it cannot be administrable for the common good, in that a single Person looks after his own peculiar interest, not regarding at all, or else very little, the concerns of the Community.71

Arderne’s reply to this concern indicated that he was, in essence, recasting the ideas of ‘constitutional royalism’ in the language of republicanism.72 In England, ‘the Kings Royal prerogative, and the Liberty of the Subject, like stones in an Arch, do mutually uphold one another’, and ‘there is no danger that a King who understands his own concernments, will invade the liberty of the Subject’.73 Commonwealth interests were secure in the monarchy of England. Many of the familiar arguments used by defenders of constitutional monarchy were unrolled by Arderne, but with some interesting commonwealth touches along the way. The encouragement of ‘Trades-​Men and Farmers’ was as much a feature of England ‘as any Commonwealth whatsoever’.74 A commonwealth was a public society constituted for the common good. The monarchy of England was not just a commonwealth in this sense; it was, in Arderne’s eyes, ‘the best sort of a Commonwealth’.75 This was because England was not a pure monarchy but ‘a mixt, compounded Government’, the sort that ‘Polybius doth highly approve of ’.76 England’s constitution mirrored that of Rome, in which the monarchical element was represented by the consuls.77

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Monarchy and commonwealth It can be concluded, therefore, that: Monarchy being joined to good written Laws, is the best of all Governments. If our Laws in England be not such as are here spoken of, the people themselves are chiefly faulty, in that their concurrence is necessarily required, either in abrogating the old, or in making new ones: so that no Law can be made prejudicial to any of the three parts of the Commonwealth, except upon good considerations any of them be willing to recede from their own right.78

Such a government represented the rule of law not rule by will, it achieved ‘tranquility and mutual concord’, and was all the better for the fact that its monarchical element was hereditary and not elective.79 James Arderne had listened well at those meetings of the Rota that he had attended. Though Harrington might have been dismayed at the use to which he put his understanding of the best state of a commonwealth, he might nonetheless have detected echoes of his own commonwealth principles. How should we read, understand and interpret these tracts? It could be argued that they do not amount to much, except cynical attempts to exploit the language of anti-​monarchists; yet another episode in a long series of attempts to twist the meanings of words for political advantage. We might doubt their sincerity in presenting the arguments that they did. My interest, though, lies in placing them within the history of the concept of ‘commonwealth’. They remind us that the republican project to exploit that concept could be undone or turned on its head. There was a deep commonwealth tradition that could be drawn on at the Restoration to persuade people that commonwealth principles not only were compatible with monarchy, but justified a monarchy’s claim to be the best form of government. The year 1649 exploited the ambiguities and richness of the idea of commonwealth; 1660 could do so too. A term so malleable provided a fair mixture of strengths, opportunities, risks and threats. In relation to the spectrum of royalist discourse, it is important also to see the continuities between a pre-​1640 discourse, capable of rooting monarchy and commonwealth together within an ancient constitution, and the moderate royalism evident in 1659–​60 in the material explored in this chapter. David Smith, of course, has made us aware some time ago, of the legacy of ‘constitutional royalism’ after 1660; although that is, in my view, a misleading label.80 Evident here is the distance from one of the dominant elements in mainstream Restoration royalism, which was a legal theory of sovereignty. The tracts explored in this chapter are of royalism that picks up elements of republican commonwealth theory, and uses them to buttress an argument for a restrained monarchy that was, like its pre-​1640 antecedents, a little hazy regarding sovereignty in the strict legal sense.

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From Republic to Restoration Notes 1 Mark Goldie, ‘Restoration Political Thought’ in The Reigns of Charles II and James VII & II, ed. by Lionel K. Glassey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997), pp. 14–​16. 2 For example, David L. Smith, Constitutional Royalism and the Search for Settlement, c.1640–​1649 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars, ed. by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). There are exceptions: Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-​Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007) goes further forward. 3 Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, ed. by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), p. 15. 4 McElligott and Smith, eds, Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, p. 15. 5 Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2004); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1998); Maurizio Viroli, Republicanism (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999). 6 The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–​1660, ed. by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), p. 385. 7 Gardiner, ed., Constitutional Documents, p. 388; Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), Chapter  7; Glenn Burgess, ‘Tyrants, Absolute Kings, Arbitrary Rulers and the Commonwealth of England:  Some Reflections on Seventeenth-​ Century English Political Vocabulary’ in Monarchism and Absolutism in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Cesare Cuttica and Glenn Burgess (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), chapter 10. 8 Gardiner, ed., Constitutional Documents, p. 384. 9 Ibid., p. 391. 10 For the events following the regicide see also Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648–​ 1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), ­chapters 9 and 10. 11 David Wootton, ‘The True Origins of Republicanism: The Disciples of Baron and the Counter-​Example of Venturi’ in Il repubblicanesimo moderno: L’Idea di repubblica nella riflessione storica di Franco Venturi, ed. by Manuela Albertone (Naples:  Bibliopolis, 2006), pp. 271–​304. 12 The remainder of this section repeats material, with some variations, from Burgess, ‘Tyrants, Absolute Kings, Arbitrary Rulers and the Commonwealth of England’, pp. 151–​53. 13 Sir Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, ed. by Mary Dewar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 49, 52, 57. 14 F. W. Maitland, ‘The Crown as Corporation’ in Maitland: State, Trust and Corporation, ed. by David Runciman and Magnus Ryan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 38. 15 The Tree of Commonwealth: a Treatise Written by Edmund Dudley, ed. by D. M. Brodie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), p. 31. I have modernised the spelling and punctuation. 16 Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. by Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 24. 17 Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, p. 186. 18 Margaret A. Judson, From Tradition to Political Reality: a Study of the Ideas Set Forth in Support of the Commonwealth Government in England, 1649–​1653 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1980), p.  54; Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, p.  xxxvii; James Daly, Sir Robert Filmer and English Political Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 194–​98. 19 This was in conclusion to the June 1564 debate in the General Assembly of the Scottish Kirk: John Knox, On Rebellion, ed. by Roger Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 207–​08.

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Monarchy and commonwealth 20 Jermyn, Culpeper and Ashburnham to King Charles I, 6 August 1646, in State Papers Collected by Edward, Earl of Clarendon, ed. by Richard Scrope and Thomas Monkhouse, 3 vols (London, 1767–​86), ii, 244–​45. 21 George Starkey, The Dignity of Kingship Asserted: In Answer to Mr. Milton’s Ready and Easie Way to Establish a Free Common-​wealth (London, 1660), pp. 76–​77. 22 Ibid., p. 97. 23 On this, see the valuable essay by James Hankins, ‘Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-​Monarchical Republic’, Political Theory, 38.4 (2010), 452–​82. 24 John Toland, The State-​Anatomy of Great Britain: Containing a Particular Account of its Several Interests and Parties, Their Bent and Genius (London, 1717), pp. 10–​11. 25 Judson, ‘The Continuing English Commonwealth’, ­ in From Tradition to Political Reality­, chapter 3. 26 [Thomas Paget], A Faithfull and Conscientious Account for Subscribing the Engagement (London, 1650), p. 9. 27 Ibid., pp. 11, 12. 28 Ibid., pp. 12–​13. 29 Ibid., p. 14. 30 Ibid., p. 16. 31 J.  D. [John Dury], Considerations Concerning the Present Engagement (London, 1649), p. 3. 32 Ibid., pp. 17, 16. 33 Henry Parker, Scotlands Holy War (London, 1651), p. 68. 34 [Nathaniel Fiennes or Bulstrode Whitelocke?], Monarchy Asserted to be the Best, Most Ancient and Legall Form of Government in a Conference Held at Whitehall (London, 1660); Matthew Wren, Monarchy Asserted, or, The State of Monarchicall and Popular Government, in Vindication of the Consideration upon Mr Harrington’s Oceana (London, 1659); Edmund Peirce, Englands Monarchy Asserted, and Proved to be the Freest State and the Best Common-​ wealth Throughout the World (London, 1660). Quotations in the text are from title pages. 35 N. G. Jones, ‘Peirce, Sir Edmund (d. 1667)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2004) www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​70495 [accessed 9 April 2016]; Edmund Peirce, The English Episcopacy and Liturgy Asserted by the Great Reformers Abroad (London, 1660). 36 Edmund Peirce, Anglorum Singultus: or, The Sobbs of England Poured Out: To be Presented to his Excellency, General George Monke (London, 1660), pp. 4–​6, 8–​10; Peirce, Vox Verè Anglorum: or Englands Loud Cry for Their King (London, 1659), [‘written by a hearty Well-​willer to the Common-​weale’] pp. 5–​6. 37 Peirce, Vox Verè Anglorum, p. 4. 38 Peirce, Englands Monarchy Asserted, p. 1. 39 Ibid., p. 3. 40 Ibid., pp. 3–​4. 41 Ibid., p. 7. 42 Ibid., p. 8. 43 Ibid., p. 11. 44 Carolyn Edie, ‘The Popular Idea of Monarchy on the Eve of the Stuart Restoration’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 39 (1976), 343–​73. 45 A Plea for Limited Monarchy, As It Was Established in this Nation Before the War (London, 1660). 46 Roger L’Estrange, L’Estrange his Apologie (London, 1660). 47 See Geoff Kemp, ‘The Works of Roger L’Estrange: An Annotated Bibliography’, in Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. by Anne Dunan-​Page and Beth Lynch (Aldershot: Routledge, 2008), c­ hapter 10, pp. 181–​223. Kemp does not include the Plea amongst L’Estrange’s works, and lists it by its Wing catalogue numbers (L1285 and L1285A) among ‘works erroneously listed by Wing as L’Estrange’s’ (p. 182, n. 9). 48 Quotations unless otherwise noted are therefore from the broadsheet No King But the Old Kings Son: Or, A Vindication of Limited Monarchy (London, 1660).

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From Republic to Restoration 49 A follow-​up tract described this as ‘My maine Proposition’:  An Echo to the Plea for Limited Monarchy (London, 1660), p. 4. 50 Echo to the Plea, p. 6. 51 Does this refer to the monarchy in its present form or to the republics of the 1650s? Either reading is possible. 52 No King But the Old Kings Son: Or, A Vindication of Limited Monarchy (broadsheet). 53 James Harrington, Oceana [1656], in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 181. 54 Plea for Limited Monarchy, p. 8. 55 James Arderne, The Kingdom of England the Best Commonwealth: A Discourse Concerning Obedience to Kingly Government, Demonstrating from Common-​wealth Principles the Lawfulness and Excellency Thereof, As It Now Stands Restored (London, 1660). 56 James Arderne, The Dean of Chester’s Speech to His Majesty, August the 27th, 1687 (London, 1687), p. 2. 57 Michael Mullett, ‘Arderne, James  (bap.  1636,  d.  1691)’,  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​ 635 [accessed 17 January 2016]. 58 Mullett, ‘Arderne, James’, ODNB; on the Rota see H. F. Russell Smith, Harrington and his Oceana: A Study of a 17th Century Utopia and its Influence on America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), pp. 101–​ 08; and Charles Blitzer, An Immortal Commonwealth: The Political Thought of James Harrington (New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1960), pp. 56–​62. 59 Smith, Harrington and His Oceana, p.  103. John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Chiefly of Contemporaries, ed. by Andrew Clark, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898), i, 294: ‘Sir John Hoskyns etc., deane Arderne, etc., would not like to have their names seen’. 60 Arderne, Kingdom of England, pp. 1–​2. 61 Ibid., pp. 3–​5. 62 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ­chapter 17. 63 Arderne, Kingdom of England, p. 8. 64 Ibid., pp. 9–​10. 65 Ibid., p. 11. 66 Ibid., p. 12. 67 Ibid., p.  13. Cf. Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories:  Their Origin and Development (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1979) for the English uses of the Grotian argument that allowed absolute authority to rest on the total alienation of rights by the people. 68 Arderne, Kingdom of England, p. 15. 69 Ibid., p. 16. 70 Ibid., p. 17. 71 Ibid., pp. 17–​18. 72 On constitutional royalism, see Smith, Constitutional Royalism, especially in this context ­chapters 8 and 9. 73 Arderne, Kingdom of England, p. 18. 74 Ibid., p. 22. 75 Ibid., pp. 25–​26. 76 Ibid., p. 26. 77 Ibid., p. 29. 78 Ibid., p. 35. 79 Ibid., pp. 37–​40. 80 For my reasons, see Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500–​1660:  The Politics of the Post-​Reformation (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 203–​04; Smith, Constitutional Royalism.

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Chapter 3

Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history in The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) and Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660) Marissa Nicosia

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Famous Tragedie of King Charles I (1649) is the first dramatic account of the defeat and execution of King Charles I.1 It is neither a conventional history play representing the King’s exploits nor a masque allegorising monarchical power, but rather a play pamphlet, a short, polemical play printed in the same pamphlet format as contemporary news. Like other play pamphlets from this era, The Famous Tragedie documents and dramatises current events with a strong partisan slant –​in this case, a royalist one.2 The first four acts chronicle the struggle of Charles I’s generals at the ill-​fated siege of Colchester, Cromwell’s pursuit of power, and the King’s trial and execution. The action culminates in a funereal fifth act devoted to mourning the deceased King and his fallen supporters.3 But the end of the play is not the end of the story of The Famous Tragedie, which had an important afterlife in the Restoration. The play was reprinted only a few months after King Charles II’s coronation. In the same year, a much revised version of the play was published as Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660).4 Instead of concluding with the King’s demise, this revision narrates the dissolution of Cromwell’s government and espouses the inevitable return of England’s monarchy. Although The Famous Tragedie and Cromwell’s Conspiracy were composed at two different, if equally pivotal, moments in the mid-​seventeenth century, both plays aspire to create a seamless royalist history of an era marked by civil war, political upheaval and social unrest.5 The Famous Tragedie may document the siege of Colchester and Cromwell’s Conspiracy may dramatise Cromwell’s rule, but the overarching project of these plays is to construct an uninterrupted history of Stuart reign. Additionally, despite the fundamental differences in their plots, they contain much of the same text, and, particularly important for this chapter, both plays include he

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From Republic to Restoration identical rhyming couplets that are set off typographically from the rest of the text. These couplets encapsulate parliamentarian and royalist perspectives on history, governance and futurity, which are also articulated in the plays’ speeches, dialogues and songs. Typographically marked as commonplaces, or aphorisms, they are intended for extraction and later use in other contexts. This marking encodes a historiographic impulse in the plays, an impulse that is constitutive of the historiographic project of the play pamphlet as a genre. In this chapter, I  argue that The Famous Tragedie and Cromwell’s Conspiracy use these typographically marked commonplaces to promote a royalist political history of the mid-​seventeenth century. Both plays forge a new royalist historiography committed to the preservation of partisan narrative through extractable, portable content. The typographical features of these formally delineated couplets, including commonplace marks, indentation and italicisation, are as critical to the historical project of the texts as their narrative content. By including couplets marked as commonplaces, these plays anticipate readers who will read them for historical narrative and aphoristic sentences. The creation of history I  allude to in my title is simultaneously fuelled by the historiographic practice of dramatising recent events in a popular news genre and the commonplacing practice suggested by the material features of the printed playbooks themselves. But while both The Famous Tragedie and Cromwell’s Conspiracy write a royalist account of recent events into the historical record by inviting the participation of a reading and commonplacing public, the historical account created by the couplets in these plays also documents a shift from the embattled royalism of 1649 to the tenuous, yet revitalised, royalism of 1660.

Tragic and sententious news

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lay pamphlets were especially well suited to fictionalise and politicise current events because they were short, cheap and looked like newsbooks or polemical pamphlets.6 Susan Wiseman suggests that the genre is concerned with an ‘active shaping of the reader’s views’ and at the same time aware of its ‘own status as news’.7 The mid-​seventeenth century play pamphlet was an innovation in news media that brought the traditions of the public stage to the burgeoning national press.8 Publishers printed them in the same quarto format as newsbooks, using one or two sheets of paper to create small pamphlets of eight to sixteen pages. Like newsbooks, play pamphlets were written by journalists, authorised by ‘Mercury’ titles, and displayed brief ballads on their title pages that captured current events in verse.9 Like printed professional plays, play pamphlets were often divided 70

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history into five acts and included, variously, character lists, scene divisions, prologues, epilogues and stage directions. Play pamphlets thus appeal to both dramatic and journalistic traditions and refashion these traditions to fit their specific literary and political projects. By dramatising current events in five acts, play pamphlets document the history of the Stuart line in an era of upheaval. Conventional early modern history plays might trace the rise and fall of a reign: by contrast, especially when read serially, play pamphlets document the rise of Cromwell, the continual corruption of Parliament, and attempts to preserve an unbroken line of monarchical succession.10 Noting continuities with the history play, Barbara Ravelhofer suggests that by ‘feeding on current news, these plays combined the didacticism of martyr drama and morality play with the conventions of histories, revenge tragedy and broad farce, thus appealing to learned as well as popular tastes’.11 What is most interesting about this proposition is that the ‘conventions of histories’ might be used not only to represent recent events, but also to engage in a new kind of historical writing.12 Conventional histories may interweave present concerns into accounts of the past, but innovative news media often gesture beyond the present to the unknown future. Accordingly, the play pamphlet is characterised by its close proximity to events and its innovative historiography obsessed with futures and consequences that are uncertain and unknowable at the moment of composition. As experimental historical plays, The Famous Tragedie and Cromwell’s Conspiracy are necessarily part of a longer tradition of using literary depictions of events to contemplate political theories and historical narratives. From Philip Sidney’s argument in the Defence of Poesie that the poet ‘coupleth the generall notion with the particular example’, to William Davenant’s insistence in the ‘Preface’ to Gondibert that the poet should provide clear examples for his noble readers, the sedimentation of philosophical precepts and historical examples in literary texts was an accepted poetic practice in early modern England.13 Marked commonplaces in play pamphlets provide a kind of material correlative of this process, a process in which ephemeral play pamphlets participated as much as the celebrated classics of the era. Early modern readers were trained to select, sort and copy maxims into commonplace books organised by personal or prescribed categories, and to use these aphorisms in letter-​writing, deploy them in argumentative prose, and ponder them for moral and intellectual benefit.14 While these readers were trained to choose material for commonplacing on their own, authors and publishers began to capitalise on commonplacing culture by marking commonplaces in printed books and selling stand-​alone collections of commonplaces.15 When English authors included marked commonplaces 71

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From Republic to Restoration in printed works they were most often original sentences, even if the ideas they presented were rooted in humanist commonplacing traditions. This material would be identifiably sententious, but originally phrased.16 While we can never know exactly how a reader interacted with a playbook that included marked commonplaces, we can establish what a playbook’s typography suggested a reader might do. In a study of Gabriel Harvey’s commonplacing practices, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton persuasively argue that early modern readers ‘persistently envisage action as the outcome of reading –​not simply reading as active, but reading as trigger for action’.17 Early modern readers gathered commonplaces from texts and copied them into their own books with a purpose in mind. Reading was a trigger for copying, copying a trigger for concentrated thinking, and that thinking a trigger for action, composition, reuse and discussion. It is through this action that marked couplets in a play pamphlet might become material for future historical writing. The play pamphlets’ use of distinct typography and the couplet form to indicate commonplaces is hardly surprising, for English rhetorical theorists had long promoted the use of rhyme, and particularly couplets, as a mnemonic aid. In The Art of English Poesy, George Puttenham insists upon the relationship between rhyme and memory and reminds poets that they ‘may rhyme with words of all sorts, be they of many syllables or few, so nevertheless is there a choice by which to make your cadence (before remembered) most commendable’.18 Almost a century later, John Dryden writes in his ‘Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ ‘that the labour of rhyme bounds and circumscribes an over-​fruitful fancy’, and this highlights the bounded cohesion of the couplet, the containment performed by rhyme that creates a complete unit of meaning for contemplation and also extraction.19 By binding and circumscribing, couplets fossilise factual and conceptual content into compact poetic units. The formal containment of rhyme and the typographic features of the printed playbook both mark these commonplaces as fodder for future historical thinking. As discussed above, pamphlet plays are not the origin of the strategy of using poetic form and typographical features to forge historical narratives and promote political principles. However, unlike maxims marked in contemporary printed works, many of the marked couplets in The Famous Tragedie are neither general nor timeless. Rather, these marked sentences are topical, partisan and exact. Because play pamphlets depict specific political situations and events, they include commonplaces that negotiate narrow political and historical particulars. Whereas Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass treat the marked commonplaces in printed playbooks as ‘the opposite of the topical: suitable in any period, always potentially applicable but never specifically rooted in any given moment or political situation’, the 72

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history marked commonplaces of mid-​seventeenth-​century play pamphlets demonstrate the polemical and historical potential of topical commonplaces.20 In The Famous Tragedie, for example, an exchange between military leaders before a battle at the siege of Colchester includes two typographically distinct couplets: [Lucas]  Thou true Jehovah, now owne thine owne Cause, Thou know’st we fight for thee, our King, & Lawes. Fair. Draw up our Troups, we’l make these Boasters feel The potent rigour of our strong-​edg’d steel. (C2v) These sentences bind together generally applicable sentiments and markedly specific information. In conventional form, Lucas appeals to Jehovah to uphold a divinely sanctioned monarchy. This appeal, however, also notes the existence of a royal ‘Cause’, the precise moment of fighting and the fact that both the King and laws of the realm are under assault. Fairfax’s couplet also doubles as a call to arms related to this particular battle and a general rallying cry. This tension between the general and the specific would have been present for readers studying this text for political maxims and political histories. Just as Sidney claimed that the poet is the ‘right popular philosopher’ here we also see the poet acting as a popular historian, using commonplacing in a cheap-​print genre to convey examples from history and precepts of political philosophy.21

The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I and the promise of ‘story’

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Famous Tragedie imagines a reader who would study the play for action as well as indulge in anti-​Cromwellian satire, appreciate the valour of the royalist generals, and even cherish the occasion to mourn. The play’s preliminary materials include a ‘Prologue to the Gentry’ that invokes an audience of learned, royalist literary enthusiasts. The prologue entreats the ‘gentry’ to think on ‘Johnson, Shakespeare, Goffe, and Devenant, /​Brave Sucklin, Beaumont, Fletcher, Shurley’, explaining that these playwrights are despised ‘by the Monsters of the times’, or the parliamentarians who closed the theatres, and rallying the gentry readership to defend dramatic literature (A4r). This list of playwrights mixes professional and non-​professional playwrights from multiple eras of theatrical history. It nostalgically incites the gentry to draw connections between an attack on art  –​closing the theatres –​and attacks on the monarchy recorded in the play’s plot –​the siege of Colchester and the King’s execution. The prologue also claims that in the future the anti-​theatrical and anti-​monarchical parliamentarians will he

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From Republic to Restoration ‘be recorded, villaines, upon Story’ (A4r). In this formulation, the ‘story’ the prologue invokes is not only literary or theatrical production, but also the historical record since ‘story’ was a common abbreviation for history itself. According to the prologue, this play is part of that ‘story’ and thus becomes an incriminating historical document that will serve as testimony to the new government’s violence against both political tradition and artistic production. ‘The Prologue to the Gentry’ also includes the first marked commonplace in the printed playbook. Like some of the royalist commonplaces included in the play, these marked couplets bemoan the state of the polity in 1649 after the trial and execution of Charles I: “For having kill’d their KING, where will they stay “That thorow GOD, and MAjESTIE, make way, “Throwing the Nobles, and the Gentry downe “Levelling, all distinctions, to the Crowne. (A4r)

This total levelling would bring all down to the level of the debased Crown and precipitate the end of the ‘English world’ (A4v). Through the accusation of social, economic and political levelling, the prologue yokes contemporary radical movements to regicide. Later in the play, Cromwell actually repeats this argument verbatim. When he reflects on his accomplishments in a soliloquy at the beginning of the third act, he describes his ambition to rule and imagines his plan enacted on the stage of the world where monarchy and gentry make way for a new order, by claiming, ‘now my plots worke, the Stage growes great with horror, the English Monarchy growes sick to death, its very Basis hath an Ague-​fit, which wil not cease to shake it, till it be Levell’d to the humble earth’ (D2v). Cromwell insists on the very outcome the prologue mourns by using the same language that the prologue mocks. It is almost as if Cromwell’s soliloquy demonstrates a misappropriation of the prologue’s marked commonplace. Moreover, the prologue is not the only place where the play reflects on its aphoristic content. In the play’s opening scene Oliver Cromwell and Hugh Peters demonstrate an investment in just this kind of reading: they plan to ‘render Kingly Government obnoxious and incompatible with the Peoples Rights’ by using the ‘Presse and Pulpit’ to disseminate their message (B3r, B2v). Peters has, apparently, been working tirelessly towards this goal, most recently, by expanding an axiom –​‘The Peoples right transcends the power of Kings’ –​into a long ballad on the subject (B3r). He tells Cromwell: ‘I have performed, after a tedious pumping: the Theame you gave me … Sir, I have done my best to justifie your learned Axiome on this scroule’, and 74

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history the axiom itself is helpfully set in italics and indented to alert readers of the play to its sententious nature (B3r). The characters in this play know that axioms can be expanded, that commonplaces can be studied for action and transformed into new, persuasive documents. While Cromwell himself admits that he is not a gifted ‘Versifier’, ‘Versemaker’, or ‘Trimeter-​m[a]‌n’, he values the impact that Peters’s verse will have in the service of their cause (B3r). This scene could easily be read as a satire of Cromwell’s government (will he really keep control of the nation by asking Peters to write ballads?) and yet the fact that it is included in a play that uses aphorisms to advance a political cause troubles any argument that would reduce this scene to satire alone. Whether in a satirical mode or otherwise, The Famous Tragedie suggests that axioms can be put to great political use and that the choice of selecting and ‘pumping’ an effective maxim is in the reader’s prerogative. As the dialogue between Cromwell and Peters suggests, the commonplace is a partisan form in The Famous Tragedie. Commonplaces appear among the speeches of both royalists and parliamentarians, but there is a persistent partisan divide in their content, the temporalities they inhabit, and the theories of monarchy and government they promote. The parliamentarians tend to present commonplaces characterised by an administrative short-​ term view on power and rule. They are directed to an immediate future of meetings to be held and battles to be fought in the coming hours, days and weeks. For example, as Cromwell prepares to seduce Lady Lambert, he expresses his desire for secrecy in axiomatic form:  ‘Set on unto the Chamber of delight, /​Doe not dream (Lambert) thou art horn’d to night’ (F2v). And near the end of the play in a now-​familiar move, Cromwell calls Hugh Peters to assemble the government with the topical couplet: ‘Come (Hugh) lets poste unto the famous Cittie /​To sit in Councell with the State Committee’ (G1v). In these marked couplets practical and administrative matters trump aphoristic norms and historical longevity. By emphasising in the parliamentarian couplets the short-​term needs of staging a rebellion and running a government, The Famous Tragedie mocks Cromwell and his agents as time-​serving opportunists more concerned with immediate influence than the long-​term health of the nation. In contrast, royalist commonplaces are concerned with futurity, destiny and legacy. While Cromwell and Peters announce their commonplaces as immediate plans, their royalist counterparts direct their commonplaces at future generations and written histories. Even before the siege of Colchester has begun, Lord Capel insists that he and his troops will enjoy a legacy of martyrdom if they die in battle: ‘Our comfort is, though we be left i’th’lurch, /​We Martyrs, fall, for God, the King, and Church’ (C2r). Using similar language, Sir George Lisle also reflects on the legacy of the siege in a marked couplet: ‘But should all faile (by 75

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From Republic to Restoration force of Destinie) /​Our comfort is, we (when we list) can die’ (C3v). With his dying breath, Sir Charles Lucas wishes future restitution for the crimes of his enemies through a topical maxim: ‘Therefore great Jove, if thou lov’st loyall breath, /​Take vengeance on the Authors of my death’ (E3r). By orienting royalist couplets towards the future, rather than the present, this play pamphlet looks towards a restoration of the monarchy. It anticipates a history that will validate loyal acts rather than a present in which these acts are deadly. Furthermore, the royalists’ maxims demonstrate a vexed relationship to the timeline of Charles I’s life and death. In the time depicted in the play, the King is alive until a letter from the scaffold arrives in the penultimate scene, but when the play was written, published and read by its earliest audience the King was already dead. After all, the title page insists that this play is a tragedy, concerning the death of a king who was ‘Basely BUTCHERED’ by the ‘machinations’ and ‘designe’ of rebellious citizens (A1r). Even though The Famous Tragedie does not include the execution scene, the King’s death is the occasion for its composition and pervades even scenes in the play that document a time when the King was still alive. This temporal disjunction is revealed by the strange confusion expressed in a royalist couplet about whether the King is alive or dead. Sir Charles Lucas coins this telling anachronistic couplet when, after royal forces have defeated the parliamentary troops in battle, he stands over the bodies of the dead and delivers a long prose speech punctuated with marked commonplaces. Amid praise for the fallen and blame for their adversaries, Lucas asks, ‘Was ever any Nation bles’d with so good a Prince (as CHARLES our King) that so opprobriously deserted Him?’, and Lucas’s answer is that future generations will blame the parliamentary army for their rebellious actions (C3r). In his words, ‘succeeding Ages cannot chuse but say’ what he sets forth in the play’s most temporally confused and historically compelling commonplace: ‘Nations have suffer’d ’cause their Kings were ill, /​ But Britains CHARLES, His Peoples sinnes did kill’ (C3r). In the narrative of the play, Charles is still alive, but Lucas says that the sins of the British people ‘did kill’ Charles, rather than do or will kill Charles: Charles the martyr was killed by the sins of his people. Here Lucas breaks the linear temporality of the play he inhabits –​in which Charles still lives –​to reflect upon the realities of the time of the play’s composition –​when the King is already dead. Lucas’s couplet juxtaposes a typical sentiment about the bad behaviour of kings with the specific report of Charles’s execution. Of course, an alternative interpretation of this couplet might prioritise Lucas’s depiction of Charles’s good kingship over any temporal breach. In other words, the couplet might suggest that Britain has a strong monarch who kills his peoples’ sins by encouraging virtue, especially while suffering, 76

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history imprisoned and disenfranchised. This variant reading, however, also supports the martyrological argument embedded in Lucas’s couplet. Charles may have been killed by the sins of his people, but he can still redeem their sins through his martyr’s death. In both its syntax and its content, Lucas’s commonplace is poised to write the history of the King’s death. Lucas’s speech returns to the temporal frame of the play’s plot, but he continues to contemplate future readers who will negotiate the inheritance of this tumultuous age: ‘But let it hap as God shall appoint, if it be written in the Booke of Fate the Rebels shall dissolve the English Monarchy, with the life-​bloud of their most gracious prince, yet let us hinder that dire ominous day’ (C3r). He suggests that the monarchy still stands and the ‘life-​bloud’ of the King is still preserved even if God might ‘appoint’ a different fate (C3r). Yet Lucas again points to the future, an unknown possible future rather than the parliamentarians’ immediate, practical future. In other words, he implores his companions to consider how their ‘hard achievements and heroic acts’ will provide them with everlasting fame on the physical monuments where their names will be ‘filed with those that durst passe through all horrors by death and vengeance for their KING and Soveraigne’ (C3r). He further reflects on how the ‘next Age … shall read the Story of this unnatural, uncivill Warre’ in the marked couplet at the close of his speech (C3r). Lucas hopes that future generations, ‘may sing Peans to our valiant Acts, /​And yield us a kind plaudit for our facts’ (C3v). This concern with poetic and historical memory ties the commonplace to the issue of historiography writ large in the play. The Famous Tragedie asks, who will write the history of the war? Who will write and sing songs of praise? It simultaneously answers these queries by writing the history of the present in the form of distinct couplets in a play pamphlet. The commonplaces would create a piecemeal narrative of events. In time and in combination, these pieces foreshadow the paeans and accounts that Lucas imagines in his speech. They offer the historical facts and political principles that Lucas promotes and might one day generate the memorial history he desires. While the partisan commonplaces in The Famous Tragedie imagine real and speculative political formulations, the play’s final scene reminds readers of the present state of affairs. Lucas’s temporal confusion is superseded by the arrival of a moment when the King is dead in both the time of the play and the time of the implied reader. In this strange scene, a chorus of surviving royalists sing a funereal song over the bodies of the fallen King and his soldiers. The King has been ‘basely butchered’ off-​stage, but his body is now on-​stage. The chorus delivers the play’s final song, beginning with the accusation, ‘Now all is lost to humane sense, /​ The King is murther’d on pretence /​ He was a Tyrant’, and continuing to honour the deceased royalist generals (G1v). By mentioning not only the King’s dead body, but also 77

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From Republic to Restoration those of the Lords Capel, Hamilton and Holland, the chorus of royalists draws attention to the fact that the King is dead in both the internal plot of the play and external timeline of history. Stage directions to the right of the text list the bodies discovered ‘behind the travers’ and indicate the appropriate point at which to gesture, ‘Pointing to Hamilton’, and later to Holland and Capel (G1v).22 But tellingly, the King’s body is not pointed to in this way, perhaps because it is inevitably the focus of attention, an emblematic figure imagined on the page or represented on the stage. The King’s execution is viscerally present as his body is on display, even if the scene of death is not represented. This final scene privileges the legacy of Charles the martyr over the death of Charles the King. Indeed, the potential for Charles I’s martyrdom was immediately apparent in 1649 and even registered in Sir Charles Lucas’s couplet.23 If Charles was killed by his people’s sins, as Lucas asserts, he was also a Christ-​like martyr for the sins of the nation. The Famous Tragedie denies the reader the execution scene, supplying instead a set of commonplaces that contain the promises of future rule, assured statements of monarchical prowess, brief chronicles of bravery in battle, and the possibility of the King’s legacy at the moment of the King’s death. Rather than providing an elegy that might precipitate immediate public mourning, The Famous Tragedie, like its royalist characters, gestures to future commemoration. Cromwell’s Conspiracy and the Restoration paean

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ublished just after the Restoration of Charles II, Cromwell’s Conspiracy is, by contrast, celebratory. Even the play’s title page insists that although it begins ‘at the Death of King CHARLES the First’ it ends ‘with the happy Restauration of KING CHARLES The SECOND’ (A1r). While its precursor was a tragedy in which ‘rebels’ tried to ‘destroy the ROYAL POSTERITY’, Cromwell’s Conspiracy takes up the historical content of The Famous Tragedie and transforms it into ‘A TRAGY-​COMEDY, Relating to our latter Times’.24 Thus, Cromwell’s Conspiracy participates in the historiographic project proposed by the earlier play. By reusing verse, prose and commonplaces from The Famous Tragedie and extending the play’s plot to conclude with Cromwell’s downfall and the Restoration rather than the King’s execution, Cromwell’s Conspiracy celebrates the triumph of the royal cause.25 Although the play begins with the same opening scene as The Famous Tragedie, it quickly skips over the civil wars, stages the execution of Charles I, and devotes the remainder of its plot to Cromwell’s rule, abuses and demise.26

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history The typographically distinct couplets in Cromwell’s Conspiracy offer a different historical account from The Famous Tragedie: while one couplet briefly mourns the King, the couplets overwhelmingly mock the futility of a caricatured Cromwell’s attempt to govern and rejoice in the coming restoration of the Stuart line. Only couplets spoken by parliamentarian characters in The Famous Tragedie are reused in Cromwell’s Conspiracy, and they are redeployed for comic effect. This is not entirely surprising for a tragicomedy that ends with ‘People’ rallying in the streets of London shouting ‘a King’, ‘a Free Parliament’, and ‘King Charles’ (F2r). While the reused couplets were initially intended as satire, they are even more ironic and damning in a Restoration context as the plans, coups, meetings and seductions that 1649 anticipates have proven futile by 1660. For example, Cromwell’s high ambition is descried in commonplaces like ‘A King and Kingdome is my valours prize, /​ By both their ruines I intend to rise’ (B2r). This was always a joke at Cromwell’s expense, but to a reader in the 1660s Cromwell’s ruin echoes in the second line. Owing to the new focus on satire instead of battles like the siege of Colchester, none of the evocative pronouncements of Sir Charles Lucas or his compatriots are preserved in Cromwell’s Conspiracy. The only new typographically distinct couplets in Cromwell’s Conspiracy appear in the play’s most significant added scenes: Cromwell’s king-​making dream and the execution of Charles. After a dream offering him ‘a Throne from Heaven sent’, Cromwell awakes certain that he is destined for personal rule (C3r). His couplet insists that this vision has told him ‘That I must rule the State, now Cromwell comes, /​ Courage my hearts, sound Trumpets, beat up Drums’ (C3r). By including his proper name, Cromwell renders this phrase especially topical. From the perspective of 1660, these lines evoke the beginning of Cromwell’s downfall as much as the beginning of his rise to power. Like the reused parliamentarian maxims, Cromwell’s insistence on prerogative in this scene is lampooned by context. The play later shows him on his deathbed confessing to murderous deeds and calling himself a traitor, rather than a ruler. In Cromwell’s Conspiracy, the execution scene that was markedly absent from the earlier play is marked by a new couplet that performs a brief requiem for Charles. Dr Juxon, Archbishop of Canterbury, coins this couplet directly after Charles is executed and a stage direction reads ‘Executioner cuts off his Head’ (B4v). Juxon laments the King’s death, saying: Dr. Jux.  Thus Britains Oak is fallen, the stay and Prop. Of true Religion, Vertues chiefest Patron, True to his friends, too kind to his worst foes, Now his blest Spirit is ascended up 79

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From Republic to Restoration Where souls of Heroes do enjoy their bliss And all Celestial comforts meet and kiss. (B4v–​C1r) Juxon mourns the King, ‘Britains oak’, throughout the elegiac speech and his final marked phrase is firmly assured of the King’s salvation. However, this maxim is also rather generic. The playwright marks a significant event, the execution of Charles, with a general, sententious commonplace that is completely void of specific content. Unlike the topical commonplaces in The Famous Tragedie, and even the other new commonplace in Cromwell’s Conspiracy, the aphorism that renders mourning at the execution is the most conventionally sententious of them all. Taking a different path from Sir Charles Lucas’s particular and anachronistic couplet, Juxon’s commemorative maxim appeals to common and general practices of mourning. Ultimately, Cromwell’s Conspiracy moves beyond mourning to celebration. However rare and powerful this execution scene may be through the combination of the King’s final prayers, Juxon’s lament, and the staged beheading, it occurs in the second act of a tragicomedy that culminates in the Restoration. The scenes that follow the execution lampoon Cromwell and his associates for sexual depravity and unquenchable greed, trace Cromwell’s incremental decline, and document General Monck’s plans to return the Stuarts to the throne. Cromwell’s Conspiracy begins by rewriting the last days of Charles I, but it is overwhelmingly a panegyric welcoming Charles II. The play’s final line, ‘A King you crave, you shall have your desires’, invokes Charles II as the ruler the people desire in the present, not the King who was lost to the vicissitudes of the past (F2r).

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hile one might expect the triumphant tone of Cromwell’s Conspiracy to translate into popularity, the actual legacy of this work does not realise that expectation: Cromwell’s Conspiracy was printed only once in 1660 and never reprinted. In a curious case of literary history, The Famous Tragedie was reprinted not only in 1660, but also several times in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.27 Although the relative popularity of The Famous Tragedie and Cromwell’s Conspiracy cannot be entirely reduced to the legacy of Charles the martyr outliving Restoration panegyric, The Famous Tragedie’s print history suggests that its focus on the last days of Charles’s reign, rather than on his successor, seems to have inspired lasting interest. The 1680 edition of The 80

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history Famous Tragedie was the first to include an engraving that depicts the last moments of Charles’s life.28 The engraving shows the King’s execution on the scaffold at Whitehall and supplements the play text by displaying a scene that is neither included nor enacted in the play itself. In the foreground the executioner’s axe is raised and a diminished Charles prepares for the blow. From a short distance Cromwell points to the prostrate King and the men with him wear a mix of frowns and smiles on their faces. The scaffold is ringed in spears and soldiers on one side and a crowd at the front. One sceptical gentleman with a broad hat is shown in profile, half-​looking away from the execution and half-​looking out at the reader. Finally, the 1680 edition of The Famous Tragedie has supplied what had been missing all along. The scene depicted in this supplementary engraving, however, would not have been an entirely unfamiliar sight to a Restoration reader.29 Both covert and overt mourning, aided by texts about and images of the deceased King, were widespread, as the popularity of works like Eikon Basilike suggests. As Kevin Sharpe reminds us, ‘we should not forget that 1660 offered the nation the first opportunity for public expression of the shock, grief and sin of regicide as well as an occasion for celebration’.30 The Restoration saw an outpouring of documents claiming Charles as a royal martyr to galvanise support for Charles II, ward off controversy and strife in the afterglow of the Restoration settlement, and even, in some cases, criticise the actions of the later Stuarts.31 The image of the royal martyr was popular, pervasive, and served as precisely the memorial for future ages that The Famous Tragedie’s Sir Charles Lucas so desperately desired. The Famous Tragedie’s persistence in print feeds on a desire to remember, and not set aside, the tragedies of the past. This desire to remember, and to be remembered, emerges again and again in the marked couplets that punctuate this play. If Cromwell’s Conspiracy rewrites history for the victors, The Famous Tragedie is still perhaps the best source for material to create the evocative, informative and transformative paean that Sir Charles Lucas imagined. This tragic play pamphlet might be studied for action, and the dissemination of its topical and sententious couplets might create histories, paeans and memorials for future generations.

Notes 1 THE FAMOUS TRAGEDIE of King Charles I ([London], 1649), Wing F384. Further references to this play are given after quotations in the text. George Thomason dates this play as 26 May 1649. In The Famous Tragedie commonplaces are marked by indentation.

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From Republic to Restoration 2 This play was most likely written by Samuel Sheppard, who also published an array of other royalist play pamphlets, pamphlets, poetry, and newsbooks. Nigel Smith, Literature & Revolution in England, 1640–​1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 81. 3 Because the King’s death is the central tragedy but not the central plot, Dale B.  J. Randall suggests that this play’s title is both misleading and calculating; Randall, Winter Fruit:  English Drama 1642–​1660 (Lexington, KY:  University Press of Kentucky, 1995), pp. 103, 109. 4 CROMWELL’S Conspiracy. A TRAGY-​COMEDY, Relating to our latter Times. Beginning at the Death of King CHARLES the First, And ending with the happy Restauration OF KING CHARLES The Second. Written By a Person of Quality (London, 1660), Wing C7193. Further references to this play are given after quotations in the text. George Thomason dates this 8 August 1660; W. W. Greg lists the second 1649 issue as a false imprint of a 1660 publication. Greg, A Bibliography of the English Printed Drama to the Restoration, 4 vols (London: Bibliographical Society, 1939–​59), ii, p. 680 (b). 5 Jason McElligott characterises popular royalism in the late 1640s as a view that prefers reconciliation between king and parliament, ideally on the king’s terms, over continued strife or radical political change. McElligott, Royalism, Print and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007). 6 I follow the precedent established by Rachel Willie’s recent work and use ‘play pamphlet’ to describe these texts. Willie, Staging the Revolution: Drama, reinvention and history, 1647–​72 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2015); Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 53; Susan Wiseman, ‘Pamphlet Plays in the Civil War News Market: Genre, Politics, and “Context” ’, in News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain, ed. by Joad Raymond (London:  Frank Cass, 1999), pp. 66–​83; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–​1649 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), pp. 202–​03; Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641–​1660 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 28–​29; Drama of the English Republic, ed. by Janet Clare (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 8–​18. 7 Wiseman, ‘Pamphlet Plays’, p. 70. 8 Play pamphlets first appeared in the early 1640s, but most of the plays that survive date from the late 1640s. There is no definitive bibliography of play pamphlets. In my research so far I have discovered twenty-​eight unique titles. Eleven of these titles include printed commonplace marks. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis includes a table listing dialogue pamphlets from the Thomason collection that were printed in 1641 to 1642. Butler, Theatre and Crisis, 1632–​1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), Appendix 1, pp. 289–​91. 9 Raymond, Invention of the Newspaper, pp. 165–​68; Jason Peacey shows the importance of title page ballads for house style. Peacey, ‘ “The counterfeit silly curr”: Money, Politics, and the Forging of Royalist Newspapers during the English Civil War’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 67.1 (March 2004), 27–​57 (p. 33). 10 My argument about serial history draws on Nicholas Grene’s claim that Shakespeare’s history plays were intended for serial performance. Grene, Shakespeare’s Serial History Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11 Barbara Ravelhofer, ‘News Drama: the Tragic Subject of Charles I’, in English Historical Drama, 1500–​1800: Forms Outside the Canon, ed. by Teresa Grant and Barbara Ravelhofer (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2008), pp. 179–​201 (p. 179). 12 Ravelhofer, ‘News Drama: the Tragic Subject of Charles I’, p. 193. 13 Philip Sidney, Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. by Katherine Duncan Jones (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1989), p.  221; William Davenant, Sir William Davenant’s Gondibert, ed. by David F. Gladish (Oxford:  Clarendon, 1971), p. 13.

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Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history 14 The practice of commonplacing is an essential political skill as András Kiséry explains in his discussion of early modern political knowledge. Kiséry, Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 30–​33, 62–​9. 15 Anne Moss notes that the commercial choice to include commonplace markers in printed texts ‘served the habit of looking for excerpt-​able material’ common at the time. Moss, Printed Commonplace-​ Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) p. 201; Zachary Lesser and Peter Stallybrass suggest that marginal commas, whether inverted or not, and the use of an italic font were the primary ways of marking English vernacular commonplaces in play texts, Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet and the Commonplacing of Professional Plays,’ Shakespeare Quarterly, 49, 4 (2008), 371–​420 (p. 400). Play pamphlets use an array of methods to indicate commonplaces: indentation, italics, and marginal commas. Many of the examples from both professional plays and play pamphlets include commonplaces that take the form of couplets. 16 Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’, 378. 17 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy’, Past & Present, 129 (1990), 30–​78 (p. 39). 18 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, ed. by Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), p. 171. 19 John Dryden, ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy,’ Essays of John Dryden, ed. by W.  P. Ker, 2 vols (New York: Russell & Russell, 1961), i, p. 90. 20 Lesser and Stallybrass, ‘The First Literary Hamlet’, 412. 21 Sidney, ‘Defence of Poesy,’ p. 223. 22 Randall, Winter Fruit, pp. 108–​09. 23 Joad Raymond even argues that ‘two years before the execution the image of the royal martyr shifts into the foreground’ as Charles suffered in captivity. Raymond, ‘Popular Representations of Charles I’, in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, ed. by Thomas N. Corns (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 47–​73 (p. 60); Andrew Lacey also cites this gloss on the people’s sinful nature in his study of Charles’s martyrdom. Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge:  Boydell Press:  2003), p.  103; Rachel Willie has also discussed the iconography of Charles I’s martyrdom. Willie, Staging the Revolution, pp.  52–​79; Willie, ‘Sacrificial Kings and Martyred Rebels: Charles and Rainborowe Beatified’, Études Épistémè, 20 (2011). 24 Famous Tragedie (A1r); Cromwell’s Conspiracy (A1r). 25 In Cromwell’s Conspiracy, commonplaces are indented and italicised. New commonplaces and reused commonplaces from The Famous Tragedie are represented with the same typography. 26 Another play about the last days of Charles I’s life was published in 1660 and it does not include the execution scene. The Tragical ACTORS or the Martyrdom of the late KING CHARLES ([London], 1660), Wing T2015; Randall, Lois Potter, and Nancy Klein Maguire note the exceptional nature of the inclusion of the execution scene in Cromwell’s Conspiracy. Randall, Winter Fruit, p. 109; Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing, pp.  165–​70, 190; Maguire, Regicide and Restoration:  English Tragicomedy, 1660–​1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 6. 27 The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I. As it was Acted before White-​hall. By the Fanatical Servants of Oliver Cromwell (London, [1680]); The Famous Tragedie of K.  Charles I (London, 1709); The Famous Tragedy of King Charles I. As it was Acted before White-​hall. By the Fanatical Servants of Oliver Cromwell (London, 1710). 28 These engravings may have been added to specific copies at a later date, but they appear to have been produced contemporaneously with these Restoration editions. Some copies of the 1649 edition also have images of Charles from other works pasted in on flyleaves or bound in with the text.

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From Republic to Restoration 29 Lois Potter, ‘The Royal Martyr in the Restoration’, in Corns, ed., The Royal Image, pp. 240–​62; Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, pp. 129–​74. 30 Kevin Sharpe, ‘ “So hard a text”? Images of Charles I, 1612–​1700’, The Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 383–​405 (p. 394). 31 Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Reviving the Martyr King:  Charles I  as Jacobite Icon’, in Corns, ed., The Royal Image, pp. 263–​87 (p. 264); Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr, pp. 213–​35.

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Chapter 4

‘Plots’ and dissent: the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 Alan Marshall

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riting his regular letter to the Duke of Ormond in Ireland on 24 October 1663, the Secretary of State, Sir Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, noted that: ‘The examinations of the prisoners taken at York, sent to the King by the duke of Buckingham, show that there was a real and dangerous plot.’1 Arlington was referring to a recently uncovered plot against the royal regime in the autumn of that year in the North of England, a series of events that Charles II, speaking before Parliament on 24 March 1664, would call ‘the late treason in the North’.2 It was centred on a supposed plot to stage an armed rising on 12 October 1663, which would begin across the counties of Yorkshire, Durham and Westmorland, and erupt into a nationwide rebellion.3 Was the 1663 plot really a dangerous threat to the government by some ‘desperate men’, supporters of the ‘good old cause’, who wanted to bring back the English Republic, as it has been so frequently depicted? Or was it a mere folie du jour from a few scattered and disgruntled dissenters? Or was it, as some thought at the time, a conveniently manufactured and exaggerated affair designed for public consumption by a government who were scaremongering for their own reasons? In effect, we must determine the serious nature of this plot and its potential Northern rebellion. Known to some contemporaries as the Northern Rebellion of 1663, the plot has also been more often labelled by the names of its local constituent parts: the Muggleswick Park plot, the Derwentdale plot, the Kaber Rigg plot, the Farnley Wood Plot, or the Yorkshire plot.4 The confusion of contemporary and historical nomenclature in relation to these events is perhaps a sign of some provincial-​ centre tension in the period.5 Although the plot was certainly something that happened far from metropolitan London, at the local level in the North it had serious consequences. The affair led to hundreds of arrests, interrogations, trials and the executions of over twenty men, as well as

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From Republic to Restoration fervent proclamations of loyalty from the northern gentry and internal arguments among the elite in Durham, with much subsequent backbiting between the authorities in Durham and Yorkshire.6 This particular treason raises a number of questions about the political, religious and social experience of the Restoration as well as its acceptance at the local level in the aftermath of the turbulent 1650s. It also raises questions about whether inherited notions of plotting and the character of the informer at the time may have influenced the reception of this particular plot. Understanding the nature and, indeed, the very idea of political plotting as an early modern phenomenon in the texts of the early Restoration is important. For it is arguable that what we really need to know is not just the surface detail of the alleged numerous plots in the period, but how such plot accounts were actually constructed. In February 1664 at the trial of the printer John Twyn, Mr Serjeant Morton described the essentials of the plot and rebellion of 1663: it was in the beginning of October, your lordship knows, and I  do not doubt but the Jury have heard, that there was a great and dangerous design in this nation, set on foot by men of dangerous principles, to embroil this nation in a new war, for the destructions of the king and his government. It was executed in part, as far as time and other circumstances would give way and leave to the undertakers (the 12th of October last); and my lord, it was proved upon the execution of a Commission of Oyer and Terminer at York, that there was a council here in London, that sat to prepare matter for a universal rebellion all England over. They sent their agitators into the north, west, and all parts, to give notice to their party to be ready to rise at a certain time.7

In claiming that the Northern plot was an organised and a dangerous scheme, Morton also aimed to convince a jury of the possibility of a new civil war. His words gesture towards some of the main existential fears of the day: anarchy, death and destruction; memories common to the generation of the Restoration. Morton’s address to the jury thus not only linked these new events of plotting in 1663 with the experiences of civil wars and regicide, but also insinuated that plotters, like the poor, were always there and always bent on trouble. A pamphlet –​drawn up from the conspirators’ trials at York over 8–​13 January 1664 –​supplements Morton’s version of the plot and offers more factual information as its base. It reveals the names and identities of several of the participants and the plot’s original location: The designe came from Bishoprick [of Durham] in March last; and an intelligence was settled betwixt the disaffected there and in Yorkshire; and also in Ipswich in Suffolk, and other Counties; and Oath of Secrecy taken and Agents employed to London and the West of England, for assistance.8

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 According to this report, the plotters aimed at a very different restoration, namely that of the Long Parliament, and at curbing the power of the clergy, the gentry and lawyers. Secret meetings were held in Durham, Yorkshire and elsewhere before the plotters were routed (hence the trials). So it seemed that these men had actually tried to strike at the base of early modern society and the Restoration of 1660 –​property –​as they had threatened anarchy in both Church and State. The main evidence of the plot, supplied in March 1663 by the Baptist turned informer, John Ellerington of Blanchland, in Northumberland, was crucial to the uncovering of the plot in Durham itself. As an informer he revealed that ‘he hath known divers seditious meetings in Muggleswick Park, within these last six months’.9 Ellerington then went on to name various individuals who had been present at these secret meetings: where they did mutually take an oath of secrecy not to discover their design, which was to rise in rebellion against the present government and to destroy the present parliament, which had made a law against liberty of conscience, and to murder all bishops, deans and chapters, and all the ministers of the church, and to break all organs in pieces, to destroy the common prayer-​books and to pull down all churches, and farther to kill the gentry that should either oppose them, or not join with them in their design.10

In this version, the plot on the ground looks less like a major plot to overthrow the royal government in London and more like one which had sprung from the religious tensions in the Palatinate of Durham. Even so, Ellerington was later keen to stress its magnitude, claiming that there were ‘thousands of Anabaptists and Independents that were to join with them’ and speaking of stores of arms, ammunition and secret ‘letters and messengers’, all classic tropes of the plots of the period.11 Asked why he had uncovered the plot to the authorities, when he had been so recently ‘re-​baptised’ by the very same congregation he was now betraying, Ellerington replied that being ‘pricked in conscience at the horror of such a bloody design, he could have no rest nor quietness in his mind, till he had discovered the same’.12 The official image of the rebellion of 1663 was now set up by the authorities and it was revealed to a shocked public as a dangerous threat to the State on a number of levels. There is, in fact, little doubt that something serious had been taking place in that spring, summer and autumn of 1663 in the North of England. What is of interest here is how these ideas of plotting were then transmitted in print to readers, some of whom had, as has been noted, their own recent turbulent historical memories upon which to draw. It is evident that political plots were considered highly plausible in the seventeenth century. Plot mentalité itself stretched back at least to Catholic conspiracies against Elizabeth I and more especially to the most 87

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From Republic to Restoration famous foiling of a major plot, celebrated each year on 5 November: the Gunpowder Treason of 1605.13 The latter indeed contained many of the elements of plot that would reappear time after time. It was a paradigm of sinister machinations, secret dealings, danger and drama, a plot that was foiled and England saved, spies, plotters and lots of ‘might-​have-​beens’. The death, destruction, risings, military coups and assassination attempts of the 1640s sustained plot mentalité. Plots offered some explanation for the apparent chaos of the era. The execution of the King in 1649 confirmed for some that the sacred majesty of monarchy could be overthrown by a plot. The political experiments of the Republic had also been accompanied by Leveller, royalist and Fifth Monarchist plots. It was therefore to a State with some deep-​rooted memories and inherent fears of plotting (both real and fictional) that Charles II came back in May 1660. Some ministers had themselves been plotters against the Cromwellian Government: for example, Buckingham, Clarendon and Ormond, as well as the King himself. Consequently, they now expected plots. It was religious dissenters, soon branded as ‘fanaticks’, who were now believed to be behind them and indeed behind every religious nonconformist it seemed there lurked a regicide and republican, who was probably, if one looked hard enough, also a disguised papist as well.14 All creeds tended, in any case, to view any religious opponent as heretical, underhanded, sinister and prone to plotting. Within the new political world, post-​1660, power was located in the royal court and the Restoration court was famously replete with factions and plot.15 Plots at court, or accusations of plot, were frequently used as devices to hide the accuser’s own schemes, and, as a matter of course, the ‘opposition’ was alleged to be always plotting somewhere. Lastly, there were historical examples of plots to be read in the annals of England’s past and they at least seemed finally to settle the matter: plots were, as John Dryden later noted, important, for ‘Plots, true or false, are necessary things, /​To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings’.16 Thus the plot as a concept makes its appearance everywhere in contemporary evidence: newssheets, pamphlets, letters, diaries, on the stage and in other such literature in the public sphere.17 Yet, it is important to bear in mind that the ‘reality’ of a plot was mainly conveyed through official State print media, as well as varied manuscript correspondence, and as a result was subject to mediation and distortion. Accounts of plots were related by authors with their own political and religious convictions and experiences in mind and, though they might purport to be, were never neutral stories. Plot narratives frequently have an artificial and even fictional political narrative embedded within them, a moral

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 tale, or a constructed vision that we must, and should, use with caution. Tellingly, Roger L’Estrange noted: There are as many sorts of Plots as there are Narratives. There are Plots of Passion, and Plots of Interest; Plots Generall and Particular; Publick and Private:  Forreign and Domestique; Ecclesiastical and Civill. There are plots to Undermine Governments, and Plots to support them; Plots Simple, and Counter-​Plots; Plots to make Plots; and plots to Spoil Plots; plots to give Credit to Sham-​Plots; and Plots again to Baffle, and Discountenance Great and Small; High and Low.18

L’Estrange alludes to the formulaic and the rhetorical quality of plots, and plots did have identifiable tropes:  plotters conspired in particular places (taverns, pubs, or secret congregations); they had odd habits of talking loudly and leaving sinister documents about to be discovered in a timely manner; they fled, if possible, once exposed; they acted in a similar manner and behaved alike when caught –​denial and defiance, or moral collapse, sought mercy, or tried to betray the others involved.19 While it was also obvious, perhaps even to the authors, that the actual numbers claimed to be involved in such dark schemes were in reality small, such elements were nearly always exaggerated to make the threat seem all too real. The plot’s links with external threat (former statesmen and regicides in prison, or in exile, and foreign powers) was another familiar trope of such texts. Lastly, of course, all these plots failed or else they would not have been plots, for, of course, as the old adage had it: ‘Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’20 Within the early Restoration plot one distinctive element of the narrative was always that of the ‘enemy within’. Protestant dissent post-​1660 shared the role once reserved only for papists.21 While the Declaration of Breda in April 1660 had promised nonconformists liberty of conscience, it also aimed to curb nonconformist fears and thus prevent any possible resistance to the political Restoration. Yet, while it was a natural political move by the King he failed to gain support or deliver on his promise.22 In the 1660 parliament, few MPs shared the King’s desire for mild toleration, allowing the newly restored Church of England to exploit, in part, questions of uniformity. Following the rising in January 1661 of Thomas Venner and the Fifth Monarchists, fears about nonconformists were soon blown out of all proportion. The threat of subversion now led to persecution against the nonconformist sects who were seen as potential harbingers of renewed civil war and social disorder.23 Roger L’Estrange in his 1663 pamphlet Toleration Discussed, for example, depicted nonconformist conventicles as not only potential sites of rebellion, but of social discontent and gender disorder: ‘For those assemblies which you call Religious

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From Republic to Restoration Meetings; What are they, but close Appointments, where the Men meet to Cuckold Authority; and the Women (if they please) to do as much for their Husbands?’24 Hence society could only be undermined by latitude in religion: ‘We are perpetually Alarm’d with plots … [and] what better means then a Toleration, to draw the Conspirators into a Body?’25 Toleration it seemed could only make things worse, ‘for the Tolerated party becomes a sanctuary for all the seditious persons in the Kingdom.’26 The resulting ‘Clarendon code’ even led to the ejection of those ministers who had earlier refused the prayer book on 24 August 1662.27 It was particularly resented by nonconformists in Durham. Traditionally, Durham had been, and was, a conservative area in religious terms. Arminianism had been established under Bishop Neile in 1617 and Laudian sympathies had been prominent there prior to the Civil War. In the urban sprawl of Newcastle, however, nonconformity, aided by the Toleration Act of 1650, came to gain something of a foothold,28 and in the later 1640s and 1650s, there is some evidence of Presbyterians and Independents working together, at least until the 1660s.29 The sale of the Dean and Chapter lands in Durham after 1647 temporarily broke the back of the Church’s power, and with the establishment of a society for the propagation of the gospel in the northern counties to augment livings and appoint schoolmasters, there had been a largely passive acceptance of the Commonwealth’s religious regime.30 Although pockets of Roman Catholicism were still seen as an ongoing issue in the Palatinate throughout the period, by the early 1660s it was to be nonconformity and the Baptist congregations, in particular, that were seen as the major threat. In Durham, as elsewhere in the country, religious dissent now tended to be associated with sedition, and the strength of the newly restored Church was soon used to impose some control on the area. The returning bishop, John Cosin, also held the post of Lord Lieutenant. The latter position enabled him not only to press religious uniformity, but to use his civil power to encourage informers, use the local militia and play upon the loyalties of the local gentry (particularly those with recent dubious pasts) to reassert the Church’s authority. The early Baptist movement in the North-​East of the 1650s was located in Newcastle, where it was nurtured by the presence of both an army garrison and the benevolent government of Robert Lilburne and Colonel Paul Hobson, who had served under Sir Arthur Hesilrige in the city.31 The group was led by a pastor, Thomas Gower, and by 1652 was regularly meeting in a chapel on Tyne Bridge with both Hobson and Gower as its leaders.32 Arguments in this growing community, however, began with the further establishment in Hexham of a second group of Baptists, led by Thomas

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 Tillam,33 who had been sent North as a ‘messenger’ from the Baptist Church in Coleman Street in London. An off-​shoot of the Hexham Church was soon located in the remote and religiously turbulent Muggleswick Park in Durham. It proved to be fertile ground for the sect. Other Baptists also appeared in South Shields, at the end of the Tyne, where the notable leaders included Lewis Frost, a prominent merchant, mariner and landowner, and Michael Coatesworth.34 The Hexham Baptists grew in membership from twenty-​six men and twenty-​one women by 1653 to forty-​five men and thirty-​eight women by 1654.35 Tillam proved to be a vigorous propagandist for his cause locally and acted to spread the word into the areas beyond Hexham. Enthused, the Hexham group sought to have him recognised as their preacher.36 Yet, Tillam’s rather aggressive message began to raise alarm elsewhere and caused reaction in the sister congregation of Newcastle. Thomas Gower’s theological and personal attacks on Tillam were bolstered by the latter’s own follies over the ‘false-​Jew’ affair and Tillam was eventually forced out of the North.37 Yet some of the members of the church lingered on in Hexham, where they continued to be led by Richard Orde. The splinter group at Muggleswick also survived, with John Ward acting as their pastor.38 It was this group and their supposed ‘seditious meetings’ who were to be a focus of the 1663 plot in Durham. Plots in the period were customarily foiled by an informer whose role could be conveniently interpreted as providential, a point made by Sir Orlando Bridgeman at the trial of the Tonge plotters in 1662: ‘Where there are works of darkness, these are things men will not do by daylight, but in darkness, and who can discover these works of darkness better than they who have to do with them, if God turn their hearts [to it.]’39 Given a pre-​modern society that lacked a police force, informers were necessary, albeit hated, figures. The informer’s success lay in his credibility or the credulity of those to whom he told his tales and who took down his depositions. The stories of informers, with details of secret oaths and nationwide revolt, while often exaggerated, were often surprisingly well put together. The interrogator’s own fears would give the informer certain nuggets of ‘fact’ to exploit, which could in turn be manipulated to bring anger, or fear, or joy to the wider world. Although the Stuart Government’s officers, post-​1660, exploited such information for political purposes, they were equally receptive to such fears, believing, at least in part, what they were being told. The world, after all, was a complex of wild rumour, some of it even true. The Durham informer, John Ellerington, exemplifies some of the informers’ attributes of the day. He can be seen as an early version of Titus Oates,

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From Republic to Restoration albeit without the latter’s flexibility of mind, cunning and grand ability to lie. Ellerington had been a servant of Lady Foster of Blanchland, a royalist in the 1650s, who had assisted fellow royalists with ‘money, horse and entertainment’.40 He was to claim that he had become a Baptist in 1661/​ 62 as part of the Muggleswick congregation that held its meetings nearby. In the depositions that the regime took from him he gives an account of the various meetings he attended and the people he associated with (and betrayed). His intelligence has a studied and somewhat sinister tone. He chose to depict these meetings as dangerous, with their oaths of secrecy and their secret plans for seizing Durham city, although he strayed too far when he brought Catholics into the mix, as the unlikely allies to the plotters. It may be that some of what he heard really was rebellious, but it is important to remember that the deposition was oral evidence, mediated through interrogation, and converted into a narrative. It was formed by specific questions from the interrogators and responses from the informer that were then mediated into a text by a scribe; usually the text was in the third person, with reported speech sometimes included. How far these versions of plots had any basis in fact remains an open question, and, as with other such areas of accusation in the seventeenth century, it is a question that needs to be asked.41 Ellerington remains at the centre of his evidence as the somewhat puzzled and disappointed letter carrier; a task he claimed to have been recruited to undertake as early as August 1662. Unfortunately for his fellows he was a letter carrier who suddenly had qualms about what was happening within this particular congregation and decided to inform the authorities.42 According to Ellerington’s deposition, the rebellion aimed to destroy the present parliament; however, he also claimed the plotters were rational, or merely dilatory, enough to want to wait to see what the same parliament would do concerning ‘indulgence to tender consciences and toleration of their party’.43 This hardly smacks of the urgent overthrow of central government, although the plotters’ bloody nature was depicted in their intent to ‘murder all bishops, deans and chapters, and all ministers of the church’ and kill the gentry that opposed them. Given that the Church was at the centre of the government in Durham, Ellerington was able to exploit this allegation to the full with his talk of plans to kill clergy, burn church organs and destroy prayer books.44 It is difficult to equate Ellerington’s claims with many of the men who were subsequently arrested. That there were meetings going on at this time there is little doubt, for once arrested some of the accused themselves admitted as much. However, what the men arrested said of these meetings was that they were entirely religious in character and they also ‘stiffely den[ied] … the contents of the information to be true’, only that their ‘frequent meetings together in severall numbers [were] for teaching, praying, and exhorting one 92

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 another to constancy in enduring persecution’.45 In other words, they were religious congregations for support in the face of persecution. Ellerington gave his information about the plot to Samuel Davidson and Cuthbert Carre, who were justices of the peace alongside Thomas Featherstone and Richard Neile. The initial account was written down on 22 March 1663 by the JPs, or their clerk, at Bishop Auckland Castle, the Bishop of Durham’s residence. It was subsequently shaped and moulded into a sketchy narrative along the normal rules of judicial evidence. Ellerington of course was initially working in an environment of orality and thus his memory, once verbally recorded, became a text governed by the ‘wider contemporary habits of explanation, description and evaluation’.46 In its various literary forms, Ellerington’s story gradually became smoother. Names, places and times of the actual ‘seditious meetings’ were added. Ellerington detailed not only the aims of the plot, but also the oaths that were taken and the alleged links with wider schemes in the country. Having taken an oath, he later said, ‘they lift up their hands and pray’d that God would deny them their portion in heaven if they discovered the design’.47 He had now betrayed the same oath, but what of that, for was he not now under a new oath? True or perceived repentance in this era could count for much. Why then should his interrogators disbelieve him? Mainly, it seems, they did believe him. For, as Thomas Hobbes remarked, the use of spies and informers was ‘necessary for the people’s defence’ and rulers are bound ‘to prevent the evills they suspect, lest peradventure they may happen through their negligence’.48 Satisfied they had now done their duty, Davidson and Carre then wrote to the Privy Council in London, after first showing the evidence and their letter and, no doubt, their witness to Bishop Cosin.49 Ellerington’s initial group of names led to imprisonments, but, then, events seemed to stall. And, as the Durham officers lacked a second witness for the misdeeds of the alleged plotters, the men involved were soon out on bail. Over the next few months Ellerington continued to claim to have had meetings with the ‘plotters’, who in turn tried to persuade him to leave the country, but he stubbornly refused. When the plot was finally broken in October 1663, he could be again used as a witness and was sent to York for the numerous trials. Lastly, in May 1664 he was sent to London for further interrogations by the Secretary of State.50 As his information proceeded, Ellerington began to widen the scope of his evidence, claiming the involvement of the middling kind of the county and the gentry. Possibly he was now being encouraged to do so, for rivalries soon broke out among his interrogators who were naturally anxious to catch bigger fish than the ones Ellerington was initially giving them and who they believed had to be involved.51 The wealth of evidence that 93

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From Republic to Restoration emerged in Durham and elsewhere later in the year suggests that most of the men who were arrested by the local regime were unlikely to have been truly plotting the overthrow of the government; though some of them had been discontented enough to have incautiously expressed their views about its religious policies. Even Ellerington was eventually forced to distinguish between his victims, citing those ‘inconsiderable for their Quality’ and the names of those who were already more familiar troublemakers to the government in the region. This latter group was made up of mainly former middle-​ranking officers of the republican or the Cromwellian army, or pastors of the nonconformist churches who were undergoing persecution and included Captain John Mason, former deputy governor of Carlisle, Doctor Edward Richardson, a troublesome physician, and Paul Hobson, who, as we have seen, was a prominent Baptist in the area. Hobson had a long history of dissent and trouble going back into the 1640s and had seemingly told the others involved that he had confessed and undertaken to discover any ‘plott’ by playing ‘double part’, but Robert Atkinson was convinced he was playing the government false too.52 Two other men of note were John Joplin, the former gaoler of Durham, a ‘furious Fifth Monarchy fanatick’ from Muggleswick, and Lewis Frost, merchant, salt manufacturer, ship’s master and a Baptist who was certainly of strong opinions, claiming, according to Ellerington, that ‘the king was a reprobate & brought false worship into ye nation. And set up priests with White sarkes, and that he [Frost] was as good a man as the king, with manie other wicked expressions.’53 Another figure associated with this plot provides a good example of a common post-​1660 occurrence:  a man whose former reputation alone got him into trouble. Captain Robert Hutton was a former Cromwellian officer who had once served with Monck in Scotland and was present at the storming of Dundee (where Durham locals later alleged he had looted his wealth). He lived in Houghton Hall in Houghton-​le-​Spring in south Durham. His name was prominent in a list later submitted by the interrogated Baptist elder, John Ward of Muggleswick, mainly because Hutton was well known for not going to his parish church and for picking arguments with his local parish priest.54 Suspicion proved sufficient in most cases. As a result of Ellerington’s revelations some nine or ten of the most prominent of those involved were now held in custody for the next assizes, although by the time the ‘plot’ was revealed, others had fled the scene. Having only one witness, however, continued to be a problem, forcing the prisoners’ release.55 The Yorkshire authorities later argued that the Bishopric had bungled the investigations. Sir Thomas Osborne and his colleagues noted:

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 One Ellerington will shortly be at London to informe you of theire guilt. If you will please to afford him the freedome of discourse, you will find what opportunities have bin lost of his intelligence for want of good management, and the relation of his usage will shew you how the Kings witnesses have bin discouraged.56

To be fair, Bishop Cosin and his officers tried hard to find their second witness.57 Ellerington stuck to his story and even promised to bring in coded letters, though he then slyly claimed the Bishop’s men had moved too quickly to arrest their suspects before he could bring in these mysterious documents.58 Cosin eventually turned against the informer, dismissing him as a ‘foolish fellow’.59 Seen from another perspective, there are clear signs that in their approach to the plot the Durham officers had opened up a great deal of tension between themselves and their neighbours. Many in the Bishopric and in Newcastle in particular saw little merit in prosecutions based on tales from such as Ellerington. Yet clear strains in the county government were now exposed at the trial of John Joplin in August 1664. Colonel John Tempest, one of the deputy lieutenants, was attacked for being too slow in seizing Joplin’s valuable papers for revealing evidence. It was claimed that Sir Nicholas Cole, the former mayor of Newcastle and also a prominent City Hostman, had visited Joplin in prison, even sharing wine with him, and had arranged for Joplin to make overnight visits to Newcastle and South Shields.60 There were further disputes when the Restoration regime intervened directly in the North and the Duke of Buckingham sent for Joplin to be carried to York for further interrogation. The authorities in Durham now disputed as to whether Joplin should be sent south at all. The jury at Joplin’s trial, including Nicholas Cole, as its foreman, Cuthbert Carre, Sir John Jackson, Lodowick Hill and Samuel Peacock, was later described by one somewhat prejudiced commentator, as ‘Joplin’s bosome friends’ and very ‘strongly obliged to the prisoner’. It duly acquitted Joplin and naturally there was more trouble.61 Going against the King’s pleasure in such a case and at such a time was a dangerous game to play. Yet, gossip soon had it that it was outright bribery that had swung the jury, for Joplin was reputed to have been the plotters’ treasurer. Others blamed the ‘peevish vainglorious [Judge Richard] Weston’ who had apparently mishandled the prosecution by overplaying the limited evidence. In fact, the evidence had proved too insubstantial for a conviction and so the jury had no choice but to acquit Joplin on legal grounds. In spite of this, Joplin was soon incarcerated again, for safety’s sake, or so it was said, in Scarborough Castle, where he entertained himself by writing on the walls of his cell slogans about King Jesus.62

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From Republic to Restoration Rumours about the whole affair continued to rumble on throughout the next months. In Durham both officers and the local gentry complained in particular about ‘the malice and backbiting of the Yorkshiremen against this county’, while Dean Guy Carleton, a prebendary of Durham and a nervously aggressive hater of dissenters, who could not help making enemies among his own side, struck out with claims of guilty parties within the ranks of the Durham gentry and the Newcastle elite.63 He attacked Nicholas Cole, John Tempest and William Blakiston, in particular, royalists who had compounded in the 1650s and unlikely sympathisers for a man like Joplin.64 Richard Neile, who observed the affair, labelled Carleton as a ‘worse ratt’ than Thomas Gower of Yorkshire and a ‘devil in sheep’s cloathing’65 and noted that the real reason for Carleton’s obloquies on Colonel Tempest was that both his and Tempest’s wife had been fighting over pews in church, advising that it was up to Cosin to rather ‘stick to yt gentry &c’ than listen to the likes of Carleton and create division.66 With the county government and gentry in turmoil, Cosin attempted to enforce some kind of unity, ordering the deputies to ‘find some expedient to try the affections of the country in the case of sodain danger’.67 A ‘strict eye’ was to be kept on conventicles and ‘all disaffected persons’.68 Thereupon certain gentlemen of ‘known integrity’, ‘great sufferers in the late troubles’, some of those indeed who had been accused of helping Joplin, called ‘their friends together … for a rendezvous’ and marshalled their forces and the trained bands for review by the Bishop as Lord Lieutenant.69 Members of the country’s gentry also subscribed before Cosin to oaths of loyalty and voluntary agreements to offer both horse and foot.70 In the aftermath of the plot, Durham’s elite was thus forced together again, loyally proclaiming that if ‘every county in the Kingdome do but their part, as well as we have done, and we shall never need to fear conspiracies’.71 So the plot was foiled and unity was temporarily restored to the Durham hierarchy. In London ‘all the court are alive a day after the 12th … after a very warm alarm, of which nothing hath appeared’, noted Arlington.72 The regional issue of nonconformity,  however, could not simply be eradicated by public demonstrations of loyalty initiated by the Bishop of Durham. Nonconformity had evidently put down some roots in the North and  it remained in spite of persecution to trouble the established Church both in Durham and Yorkshire.73 In its textual redaction, the Northern Plot had undoubtedly  been influenced by earlier accounts of plots, and in turn was to have an influence on plot literature post-​1663. There is little doubt that the early Restoration plot narratives influenced the later conspiracies revealed, imagined, or invented by Titus Oates and his cronies in 1678 and beyond. The 96

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 Popish Plot  –​a textual fiction if ever there was one  –​only emerged as it did due to the pre-​existence of plot literature and myth.74 Yet, ironically, although most historians naturally and sensibly dismiss the very idea of a Popish Plot in 1678, they sometimes appear reluctant to dismiss even some of the more unlikely republican plots of the early 1660s.75 Our approach, as opposed to contemporary acceptance, therefore, must be to treat such accounts critically, much as has been done for other cultural phenomena of the day, those ‘unnatural’ events and ideas: witchcraft; providences; the criminal ‘underworld’; the occult; monstrous births; folk tales and moral panics. All of these in turn captivated the early modern mind and all have cultural explanations.76 Why then should we treat all these ‘events’ with caution, as cultural outcomes of early modern society, and yet treat plots differently? Such narratives, as has been argued, reached out to the recent past, to its devices and tropes. On their surface, visions of Restoration plot might well be replete with apparently empirical claims based on the personal observations of spies, or informers, or participants, but this very empirical viewpoint itself could, more often than not, be just so much part of a disingenuous presentation. Informers were believed because not believing them might imperil the nation. At the Restoration, plots belonged to the anxiety of the period, they blurred past and present. For early modern society lived in an age of uncertainty, an era in which inexplicable disaster, social and political upheaval formed a significant part of the human environment, together with the fears they engendered. It is against such a background that the plot literature dealing with 1663 should be placed. Notes 1 Bodleian Library [Bod. Lib.], MS Carte 46, fol. 102. 2 Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 11: 1660–​1666, 123 vols (1767–​1830), 21 March 1664, 582. 3 Journal of the House of Lords, vol. 11, 21 March 1664, 582. Modern interpretations of seventeenth-​century plotting have varied from sober dissections of their existence to exaggerated evaluation of their importance. 4 On these plots, amongst others, see, for example: Bod. Lib. Carte MS 81, 195–​6, 197–​197v, 198, 199, 200–​201v, 203, 214–​5, 220, 221; Carte MS 222, fols 26, 36v, 40v, 42, 43, 25, 48; Henry Gee, ‘The Derwentdale Plot 1663’ in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 11 (1917), 125–​142; Henry Gee, ‘A Durham and Newcastle Plot in 1663’, Archaeologia Aeliana, xiv (1917), 145–​56; Andrew Hopper, ‘The Farnley Wood Plot and the Memory of the Civil Wars in Yorkshire’, Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 281–​303; C.  E. Whiting, ‘The Great Plot of 1663’, Durham University Journal, 22 (1920), 155–​67; J. Walker, ‘The Yorkshire Plot, 1663’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 31 (1934), 348–​59; Depositions from the Castle of York, Relating to Those Offences Committed in the Northern Counties in the Seventeenth Century, ed. by J. Raine, Surtees Society, 40 (1861); J. C. Davis, ‘Radical lives’,

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From Republic to Restoration Political Science, 37 (1985), 166–​72; Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us from Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–​1663 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 159–​206. 5 Helen M. Jewel, The North-​South Divide:  The Origins of Northern Consciousness in England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 72–​73. 6 Durham University Library [DUL], Mickelton and Spearman MSS 31, fol. 64. 7 A Complete Collection of the State Trials, ed. by Thomas Bayly Howell, 34 vols (1809–​28), vi, 521. 8 An Exact Account of the Daily Proceedings of the Commission of Oyer and Terminer at York (1664), 2; The Intelligencer, no. 5 (18 January 1664); see also The National Archives [TNA]: SP 29/​70 fol. 130. 9 Robert Surtees, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, compiled from original records, 4 vols (London, 1816–​40), ii, pp. 389–​90. 10 Ibid., pp. 389–​90. 11 Ibid., pp. 389–​90. 12 Ibid., pp. 389–​90. 13 For the Gunpowder Plot, see Pauline Croft, ‘The Gunpowder Plot Fails’ in Brenda Buchanan and others, Gunpowder Plots (London: Allen Lane, 2005), pp. 9–​33; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, What Gunpowder Plot Was (London: Longmans, 1897); Alan Haynes, The Gunpowder Plot (Stroud:  History, 2010). For conspiracies in general, see David Coady, Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 1–​12; Complots et Conjurations dans l’Europe Moderne, ed. by Yves Marie Bercé and Elena Fasano Guarini (Rome: École Franҫaise de Rome, 1996), pp. 425, 436. 14 [William Hill], A Brief Narrative of that Stupendous Tragedie &c (London, 1662); Royce MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague:  Marinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 209. 15 Jenny Uglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration, 1660–​1670 (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), pp. 56–​57, 132–​33, 134–​39; Alan Marshall, The Age of Faction: Court Politics, 1660–​1702 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1999) pp. 35–​41; Anna Keay, The Magnificent Monarch Charles II and The Ceremonies of Power (Continuum, 2008), pp. 93–​102. 16 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, ll. 83–​84. 17 For the concept of the public sphere see Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the public sphere in early modern England’, Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006), 270–​92; Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000), 153–​82. 18 Roger L’Estrange, Narrative of the Plot (London, 1680), pp. 1–​2. 19 Rumours of plots were in existence almost from the day of the arrival of the King. The most notable plots include the Yarrington Plot (1661), Fifth Monarchist plot and rising (1661), the Tonge Plot (1662), the Dublin Plot (1663) and later in the reign, the Popish Plot which set a new standard, almost rivalling that of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. 20 Harrington, The Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams of Sir J. Harrington ... Digested into Foure Bookes (London, 1618), Book 4, Epistle 5. 21 Popery in such earlier schemes still occupied a role, for the background to this, see John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–​1688 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1973). 22 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters:  from the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 221–​27; John Spurr, The Post-​Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603–​1714 (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), pp. 147–​54; Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660–​ 1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), pp. 1–​31; D. T. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons, 1663–​1674 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1966), pp. 5–​6. 23 London’s Glory, or the Riot and Ruine of the Fifth Monarchy Men and all their Adherents (London, 1661); London’s Allarum, or the Great and Bloody Plot of the Fifth Monarchy

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 Men Dismissed (1661); A Judgment and Condemnation of the Fifth Monarchy Men, their late Insurrection (London, 1661); Champlin Burrage, ‘The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections’, EHR, 25 (1910), 723–​47; Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation and Reform, 1660–​1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and Their Diocese (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 181–​86. 24 Roger L’Estrange, Toleration Discussed (London, 1663), p. 2. 25 L’Estrange, Toleration Discussed, p. 41. 26 Ibid., p. 38; See also The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–​1725, ed. by Margaret Spufford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 27 Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, p. 8. 28 See Roger Howell, Newcastle upon Tyne and the Puritan Revolution: a Study of the Civil War in North England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 218–​45. 29 Ibid., pp. 242–​43. 30 Ibid., pp. 269–​70. 31 TNA: PRO 11/​321, fols 79–​80; SP 29/​40, fol. 68, 118; SP 29/​63, fols 2, 62, 91; SP 29/​101, fol. 89; SP 44/​16 fol. 121; SP 29/​111 fol. 136; SP 44/​15 fol.171; SP 44/95 fol. 173; SP 29/​70, fol. 201 SP 44/​5, fol. 272; SP 29/​95, fol. 145; SP 29/​97, fol. 136; Records of the Committee for Compounding  …  with Delinquent Royalists in Durham and Northumberland During the Civil War  …  1643–​1660, Surtees Society, 111 (Durham, 1905), 74–​75 illustrate Hobson’s work with John Joplin in 1659; W. T. Whitley, ‘The Rev. Colonel Paul Hobson’, Baptist Quarterly, 9 (1938–​39), 307–​10; Roger Howell, ‘The Army and the English Revolution: The Case of Robert Lilburne’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 9 (1981), 299–​315; Richard L. Greaves, ‘Hobson, Paul (d. 1666)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) www.oxforddnb.com/​ view/​article/​37554 [accessed 31 July 2013]. 32 Roger Howell, ‘Puritanism in Newcastle before the Summoning of the Long Parliament’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 4th ser., 41 (1963), 135–​55. 33 David S. Katz, ‘Tillam, Thomas (d. in or before 1674)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com. exproxy.bathspa.ac.uk:2048/​view/​article/​69134, [accessed 11 December 2014]. 34 For the history and documents relating to the Hexham church, see Records of the Churches of Christ, Gathered at Fenstanton, Warboys, and Hexham, 1644–​1720, ed. by Edward Bean Underhill (London: Hanserd Knollys Society, 1854), 289–​372; Roger Howell, ‘Conflict and Controversy in the Early Baptist Movement in Northumberland: Thomas Tillam, Paul Hobson, and the False Jew of Hexham’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5th ser., 14 (1986), 82–​97; David Douglas, History of the Baptist Churches in the North of England from 1648 to 1845 (Newcastle, 1846); W. T. Whitley, ‘Militant Baptists, 1660–​1672’, Transactions of the Baptist Historical Society, 1 (1909), 148–​55; George B. Hodgson, The Borough of South Shields: from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Newcastle, 1903), pp. 99, 100, 101, 126, 178, 244, 275, 277–​81; Monopoly on the Tyne, 1650–​58: Papers Relating to Ralph Gardiner, ed. by Roger Howell (Newcastle: Society of Antiquaries, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1978), pp. 111–​17. 35 Underhill, ed., Records of the Churches of Christ, pp. 289–​372. 36 Ibid.; Adrian Johns, ‘Coleman Street’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71 (2008), 33–​54. 37 A Scottish Catholic, Thomas Ramsey, landed at South Shields in April 1652, claiming to be Joseph ben Israel. He was subsequently ‘converted’ by Tillam and widely claimed a convert. The truth of his identity was soon revealed and damaged Tillam’s reputation and caused much disorder in the Baptist community. See T. Weld, A False Jew: or, a Wonderful Discovery of a Scot &c (Newcastle, 1653). Joseph Ben Israel, The Converted Jew:  or the Substance of the Declaration and Confession Which Was Made at the Public Meeting House at Hexham, the 4th Month, the 5th Day, 1653 (1653); Thomas Tillam, Banners of Love Displaied over the Church of Christ, Walking in the Order of the Gospel at Hexham (London, 1654); Howell, ‘Conflict and Controversy’, 82–​97. 38 Parliamentary Survey of Muggleswick, 1649, ed. by Muriel Sobo (Durham:  Durham County Local History Society, 1995), pp. 5–​6, 25.

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From Republic to Restoration 39 A Brief Narrative of that Stupendous Tragedie &c (1662), p. 47. The Tonge plot of 1662 is an example of an early Restoration plot much of which was engineered by agents provocateurs and informers. It took some ‘meane people’ and disgorged them into the maw of treason trials where they had little chance of pleading their case. Even at the time there was some dispute over the reality of what was being described in court and in print. 40 Lady Foster was prominent in assisting royalists, see Records of the Committee for Compounding … &c, Surtees Society, 111 (1905), 77, 85. 41 See James C. Scott, Domination and the Art of Resistance:  Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 1–​18; Pascal Girard, ‘Conspiracies and Visions of Conspiracies in France and Italy After the Second World War’, European Review of History/​ Revue Européenne d’Histoire, 15 (2008), 749–​ 65; D.  W. Sabean, Power in the Blood:  Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1984); Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 22–​27. 42 TNA: SP 29/​170, fol. 130. 43 Surtees, The History and Antiquities of the County Palatine of Durham, ii, pp. 389–​90. 44 The Correspondence of John Cosin, Lord Bishop of Durham:  Together with Other Papers Illustrative of his Life and Times, ed. by George Ornsby, 2 vols, Surtees Society (Durham:  Andrews & Co., 1869–​72) ii, pp.  314–​17; Doncaster Record Office, DD/​ CROM/​11/​84; SP 29/​97, fol. 55. 45 Ornsby, ed., Correspondence of John Cosin, ii, p. 105; DUL, Mickleton and Spearman MSS 31, fol. 64. 46 Natalie Zemon Davies, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-​ Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), p. 4. See also Nicholas Canny, ‘The 1641 Depositions:  A Source for Social and Cultural History’, History Ireland, 1 (1993), 52–​55. 47 Ornsby, ed., Correspondence of John Cosin, ii, p. 316 48 Thomas Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society (London, 1651), p. 197. 49 Ornsby, ed., Correspondence of John Cosin, ii, pp. 105–​06; 107. 50 The social side of the plot was clear. Ordinary folk, it was thought, could not possibly lead such a rebellion, there had to be gentlemen or aristocrats taking up the reins of leadership. Ellerington was later attacked by the Whittinghams, gentry father and son, for his accusations against them, see below. They had him arrested and then locked into Morpeth gaol in July 1665, where he was beaten again and claimed that he had been badly used (Ornsby, ed., Correspondence of John Cosin, ii, p. 318), or so Dean Carleton said. See also TNA: SP 29/​127, fol. 46; SP 29/​136, fol. 55. 51 Timothy Whittingham of Holmside was one of these. Ellerington noted he had taken the oath and was to have ‘a company’ in any future rebel army. TNA: SP 29/​96, fol. 94; also SP 29/​97, fol. 55; SP 29/​98, fol. 6; Doncaster Record Office, DD/​CROM/​11/​ 82; DD/​CROM/​11/​83; TNA: ASSI 45/​6/​3/​223. ‘The Diary of Timothy Whittingham of Holmside’, ed. by J. C. Hodgson, Archaeologia Aeliana, 3rd ser., 21 (1924), 197–​211. 52 Captain Robert Atkinson was a prominent plotter of the day; TNA: SP 29/​84, fol. 85; for more on Atkinson see ODNB. 53 TNA: SP 29/​96, fol. 94. For Joplin see below, and for Lewis Frost see DUL, DPRI/​1/​ 1693/​F7/​1; TNA: SP 25/​65, fol. 131; SP /​165, fol. 131; SP 29/​180, fol. 263 where is described ‘a Master of a ship, a great Anabaptist yt rides about Newcastle yt brought in ye Hull of his three hundred Blunderbusses’  –​the master is undoubtedly Frost; Also George B. Hodgson, The Borough of South Shields from the Earliest Period to the Close of the Nineteenth Century (Newcastle: Andrew Reid, 1903), pp. 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 112, 125, 242, 471, 473n, 474n; P. E. Mather, ‘An Old Local Family’s Estate’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 2nd ser., 22 (1900), 20–​29.

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The abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663 54 TNA:  SP 29/​107, fol. 49; The Letters of George Davenport, 1651–​1677, ed. by Brenda M. Pask, Surtees Society (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011), pp. 15–​16; 89–​90; Bernard Burke, Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Landed Gentry, ed. by P. Townsend, 4 vols (London: Burke’s Peerage, 1965–​72), iii, 306–​07; Robert W. Ramsey, ‘The Records of Houghton-​le-​Spring, 1531–​1771’, EHR, 20 (1905), 673–​92. 55 Such was Cosin’s fear, TNA: SP 29/​91, fol. 115. 56 Andrew Browning, Thomas Osborne, Earl of Danby and Duke of Leeds, 1632–​1712, 3 vols (Glasgow: Jackson, 1951), ii, 27. 57 TNA: SP 29/​91, fol. 115. 58 TNA: SP 29/​98, fol. 6. 59 TNA: SP 29/​91, fol. 115; SP 29/​98, fol. 6-​v. 60 For Joplin abroad, see TNA: SP 29/​103 fol. 139. For John Tempest see TNA: SP 29/​61, fol. 100. 61 TNA: SP 29/​103, fols 39–​40, TNA: SP 29/​103, fol. 139. 62 TNA: SP 29 29/​180, fol. 105. For earlier views of Joplin see SP 29/​63, fol. 62. 63 DUL, Mickleton and Spearman MSS 31, fol. 64; TNA: SP 29/103, fol. 139. 64 TNA: SP 29/​103, fols 139–​139v. See also Records of the Committee for Compounding…&c, 45. 65 Neile’s letter is reprinted in Eneas Mackenzie and Marvin Ross, An Historical, Topographical and Descriptive View of the County Palatine of Durham, 2 vols (Newcastle: Mackenzie and Dent, 1834), i, 249–​50. 66 TNA: SP 29/​103, fols 139–​139v; SP 29/​180, fol. 105. Mackenzie and Ross, An Historical, Topographical and Descriptive View of the County Palatine of Durham (i, 250) notes an economic reason might also have lain behind Carleton’s hostility as he had been seeking a share in the lead mines round Muggleswick. 67 The Intelligencer (August 1664), 489. 68 DUL, Mickleton and Spearman MSS 31, fol. 51. 69 The Intelligencer (August 1664), 489–​90. 70 DUL Mickleton and Spearman MSS 31, fols 97–​113. 71 The Intelligencer (August 1664), 489–​90. 72 Bod. Lib., MS Carte 221, fol. 81. 73 For nonconformity in the North see Edward Hughes, North Country Life in the Eighteenth Century, the North-​East 1700–​1750 (Oxford, 1969); Jack Binns, Yorkshire in the 17th Century: Religion, Rebellion and Revolution, Yorkshire 1603–​1702 (Pickering: Blackthorn Press, 2007). 74 W.  C. Abbott, ‘The Origins of Titus Oates’ Story’, English Historical Review, 25 (1910), 126–​29; Barbara J. Shapiro, Political Communication and Political Culture in England, 1558–​1688 (Palo Alto:  Stanford University Press, 2012); Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions 1660–​ 1740:  Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). 75 The historiography of plots and plotting is still a clouded one; see A. Marshall, The Secret State in Early Modern Britain, c. 1598–1715 (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). 76 Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion:  The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984); Christina Larner, ‘Witchcraft Accusations and Prosecutions in Scotland’ in A Source-​book of Scottish Witchcraft, ed. by C. Larner and others (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1977); Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, 2nd edn (Oxford:  Blackwell, 2002); Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Reporting Murder: Fiction in the Archives in Early Modern England’, Social History, 23 (1998), 1–​30; Malcolm Gaskill, ‘Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England’, Past and Present, 198 (2008) 33–​70; Linda Woodbridge, ‘Imposters, Monsters and Spies:  What Rogue Literature Can Tell us about Early Modern Subjectivity’, Interactive Early Modern Literary Studies Dialogues (1999) 4.1–​11 purl.oclc.org/​emls/​iemls/​dialogues/​0I/​woodbridge.html [accessed 19 February 2014]; Frances E. Dolan, True Relations:  Reading, Literature and Evidence in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).

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Chapter 5

Visions of monarchy and magistracy in women’s political writing, 1640–​80 Amanda L. Capern

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t is now three decades since Patricia Crawford wrote a survey of women’s published writing in the seventeenth century, observing that the ‘impact of the Civil Wars and Interregnum upon women’s publications was remarkable’.1 The suggestion echoed Joan Wallach Scott’s theory that wars and political turmoil produce shifts in gender and politics.2 Crawford calculated that women’s print output may have accounted for 1.2 per cent of all publications after 1640, up from just 0.5 per cent before war.3 The fi ­ gures –​which are hardly startling in themselves –​have been broadly confirmed by Joad Raymond.4 Two secondary sources covering the period –​Elaine Hobby’s Virtue of Necessity and the recent anthology Women’s Political Writings 1610–​1725  –​note that religious texts written by prophetic and radical religious writers were the dominant form of women’s political writing.5 Indeed, the quantitative analysis carried out during the research for this chapter clearly revealed the dominance of religious works and also that there was only, in fact, a very small increase in the number of published secular works by women before the 1670s.6 It is known that social, familial and epistolary networks formed extraordinary ‘sites of [intellectual] production’ between women, yet, apart from the works of Margaret Cavendish in the 1650s, there were virtually no secular works of political thinking by women that went from manuscript to print.7 Only in the mid-​1670s, around the time when Bathsua Makin published the first pedagogical work by a woman in An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, did a trebling of secular works by women occur.8 In other words, politics during the war and then the long restoration of monarchy was almost entirely framed and understood by women through religious ideas. At least 250 women were engaged in preaching and prophesying over the seventeenth century, though not all of them published written works and there are some intriguing chronological patterns.9 From 102

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy 1640 to 1648, over fifty religious texts were published by women. In 1649 there was a handful of petitions and over twenty other religious works. Although about half of them were written by Lady Eleanor Davies, the figures still suggest a marked response to the King’s execution. After the regicide, though, roughly 100 new works were written and it can be concluded that it was the republican decade that really generated the enormous outpouring of religious works in print by women.10 Many of them were written by Quakers. A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers & People of Plimouth by Margaret Killin and Barbara Patison of 1656 is exemplary; it questioned ceremony and used the language of equity and conscience that was shared across political pamphlets and petitions alike.11 Some texts were published personal spiritual meditations, or conversion narratives, such as Jane Turner’s epic Choice Experiences of 1653, which took her on a journey to an understanding that salvation came ‘from a Christ within and not from Christ without’.12 However, most women writers in the 1650s were writing unique works of religion for a new republican age. One of the main legacies of pre-​war skirmishing, war and republic was the politicisation of women through pamphleteering and a female religious activism that could be Puritan, Anglican or Catholic.13 The results were complex and allegiances not clear-​cut –​especially in the 1630s –​and were transformed by the experience of war itself. Clergymen who were in-​ fighting over the rise of Arminianism in the 1620s and 1630s had their female counterparts in women writers; one example is Mary Fage, whose Fames Roule of 1637 represented the King and Queen as god and goddess.14 Great Britains Beauties, or The Female Glory Epitomized of 1638, written by several women of Henrietta Maria’s court, transformed the Queen into Minerva, Diana, Astraea and represented her name with the anagram ‘I AM A  TRU STAR’.15 The title echoed Anthony Stafford’s The Femall Glory of 1635, a controversial biography of the Virgin Mary, indicating a female crypto-​Catholicism; yet while the women who were ‘Great Britain’s Beauties’ responded negatively to the Calvinist critique of Laudian Church reforms, Catholic ambassadors complained that some of the Queen’s associates were actually ‘puritans’.16 Despite the complexity of women’s political texts in context, there has been a tendency in the historiography to cluster women’s publications, somewhat anachronistically, into a royalist (broadly secular) and parliamentarian (broadly Puritan prophetic) binary model of politics. The aristocratic women Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips have been regarded as royalists par excellence, while the reforming Calvinist visionary writing of godly women has been represented in the historiography by the less affluent Katherine Chidley, Hannah Trapnel and Mary Cary, in the 1640s, and Quakers in the 1650s.17 The observation that women were, for 103

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From Republic to Restoration gender reasons, attracted to religious radicalism and wartime sectarianism has had a powerful life in the historiography and tended to push historical analysis of royalist writing by women in the direction of the secular texts.18 Yet, the statistics of female publication would suggest that many royalist women writers were engaged in developing Christian as well as classical models of the monarchy and polity. The binary historiography has, thus, had the unfortunate effect of obscuring some of the ideas shared by women across what may have been a range of partisan political views and theological positions, particularly those texts which were written before the full consequences of war had been felt. One of the most hidden groups has been that of royalist Puritans, most notably Mary Pope. Pope was an ordinary tradeswoman, but while her contemporary and social equal, Mary Cary, has been called a ‘politically astute mind’ who created the basis for the Fifth Monarchist movement, Pope has had her work described as ‘anything but clear cut in its allegiances’.19 She wrote three royalist tracts between 1644 and 1649. The first was A Treatise of Magistracy, which was only published in 1647, three years after being started, and which was accompanied by an epistle at the beginning to Charles I, three epistles to Parliament and an address ‘To the Christian Reader’. Pope framed some of what she had to say as a charitable appeal to Parliament on behalf of the poor, including the ragged soldiers she witnessed returning from battle. However, the rest of her text was an attempt to present her interpretation of disruptive events, including the introduction of the Book of Sports, a concern for all Puritans. Pope used her own understanding of the ‘slowings up and downe of Gods providence’.20 She spoke of ‘wonderfull confusion in the Citie … the Church and Common-​wealth’ and she challenged Parliament’s authority to act on ordnances, blaming it for the ‘spiritual pride’ and ‘blinde zeale’ of the gathered congregations.21 Mary Pope’s puritan royalist position should not be surprising. She wrote A Treatise of Magistracy in the context of European tension within Calvinism itself. She drew a direct line from the defenestration of Prague through to the Irish rebellion and civil war in the three kingdoms. ‘God hath been exceedingly displeased with Us, and with Ireland, and with Bohemia’, she said, and she used the metaphor of the birth of Benjamin, one of the four sinless ancient Israelites, to prophesy the beginning of a sinless age.22 In her next two works –​Heare, heare, heare, heare, A Word or Message from Heaven and Behold Here is a Word or, an Answer to the Late Remonstrance of the Army  –​she brought godly prophecy to bear on the crisis of 1648 to 1649. Both texts were written in the wake of the Army Remonstrance of November 1648 and represent her shocked response to the rise of the political power of the army and the trial of Charles I. Her puritan royalism –​which never quite imagined Parliament as a force for regicide –​was 104

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy quickly transformed as she spoke of ‘the monstrous Remonstrance’.23 Pope understood clearly that the King was accused of starting an unjust war and spilling innocent blood, but the very thought of salus populi suprema lex was terrifying to her. Therefore, on 29 December 1648, she warned the council of officers that they colluded with ‘Covenant-​breakers, whom God hates’ and who may, therefore, have committed the sin of witchcraft.24 Puritan women writers shared anxieties about covenant-​breaking across the divide of support for king or parliament. Anti-​Catholicism could be found in both camps, and it was often expressed as concern about the work of Antichrist as a point of explanation for political conflict. The iconic pamphlet in the historiography  –​Katherine Chidley’s Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ of 1641 –​was not really a visionary text, but did say that ‘the beauty of Christs true worship, would quickly discover the Foggy darknesse of the Antichristian devised worship’.25 At one point, Chidley called her tract a petition, but it was not this either, and instead it emulated theological debate, taking the arguments of its protagonist, Thomas Edwards, one by one, and refuting them, before challenging him to a debate with six orators on each side in front of a moderator.26 Elizabeth Warren, the nonconformist writer of three theological works between 1645 and 1649, similarly spoke of ‘our almost ruined Kingdome’, assailed by Antichrist, who left Ireland ‘ready to expire by her wounds of sword and famine’.27 Her biographer, Julia Gasper, argues that she focused on religion and church government without really defending episcopacy or denouncing sectarianism, but Warren was actually a supporter of king and clergy while using the same tools as those who critiqued both.28 In The Old and Good Way Vindicated, published very late in 1645 and reprinted several times, she said that ‘our nationall, personall, and particular aberrations, ingratefully sinning against meanes of mercies’ (i.e. the established form of worship) meant ‘the Lord himselfe hath roared out of Sion’.29 Even though London was awash in political pamphlets after the fall of the hated Star Chamber in 1641, the number of women’s tracts actually remained quite low. The real surge of women’s publication came first in 1649 when female response to the debate about temporal monarchy ran high. Elizabeth Warren, whose belief in the sacrosanctity of monarchy was balanced with her commitment to ‘the Priviledges of Parliament’ and ‘the Libertys of free-​borne people’, published A Warning-​peece from Heaven, arguing that ‘if wrath be gone forth from the King of Kings, against a Nation not worthy to be loved, how sorely and suddainly is his hand lifted up, to root up and consume both the Cedars and the shrubs?’30 Mary Pope’s advice to Parliament cohered around repairing the breach between the monarch, subjects and lawmakers and accepting the jure divino authority of the King. If the magistrates of ‘the Parliament of Heaven’ relied on 105

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From Republic to Restoration God’s sufficiency ‘he will make our King to be a King of Praises’.31 She used the standard text for jure divino kingship –​Romans 13 (‘Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’) –​saying that kings derived their power from Old and New Testament making them ‘not accountable to any on earth’.32 However, she went well beyond this, saying that only the King could call a parliament, but they ‘have moulded the Parliament to your Modle’, setting forth ‘your Magna Carta, which is to kill your Lord and King’.33 ‘[P]‌reposterous doings’, she said, and she warned them to fear God and Christ who ‘will come in an hour when people are not aware of him’ –​ having deserted the Law of the two testaments ‘your great fabric will fall’.34 The response of women writers to regicide included the work of Elizabeth Poole, who was arguably the most important woman thinker of the 1640s on the office of monarchy and its theoretical inviolability. Her first work, A Vision Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome, written in 1648, laid out her ‘vision … of the distresses of this Land’.35 Poole also addressed the army council, calling herself their messenger ‘with a word of Interpretation’ and a knowledge of the tongues of division by which ‘shall all bee reconciled’.36 Claiming the salvific powers of the woman of Tekoah she said to the army officers that the mandate of ‘Kingly power  …  is undoubtedly fallen into your hands’, not because of military power, but because ‘the spirit of Judgement and Justice is most lively appearing in you’.37 Poole’s work indicates the degree to which women had to recalibrate their understanding of the locus of magisterial power in 1648 and 1649. She warned the army that if it betrayed the trust of God, as King and Long Parliament had previously done, judgement would follow. They could convict the King in his conscience, but they could not destroy his person because ‘the King is your Father and husband’ and they should be like Abigail who ‘lifted not her hand against her husband to take his life’.38 Thus, Poole’s prophetic Calvinist anti-​resistance paradigm was based on the duties of wifely obedience in marriage. After the regicide, Poole was forced to think –​providentially –​again. In An Alarum of War, she linked the justice of those in temporal authority with truth and equity and warned the regicides that they were dead in God’s judgement because ‘the blood Royall was running in your veines’.39 Using language that could have been borrowed from the court of Chancery, she said ‘I will proceed in equitie saith the Lord’.40 Through special providence, God removed Charles I and, she warned, the next in line for judgement was ‘the name and remnant [the Rump] that the Lord will cut off’.41 However, just as Mary Pope, Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Poole could use prophetic providential ideas to defend the King and/​or register their shocked dismay at regicide, so too could an aristocratic woman  –​ Eleanor Davies –​articulate her lack of surprise (or empathy) at the death 106

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy of Charles I. Davies is another woman writer whose work destabilises the historiographical binary, a fact that is historically significant because she wrote no less than thirty-​seven of the fifty religious texts by women in the 1640s. Indeed, Davies produced around sixty tracts in her lifetime, or 10 per cent of the first editions written by women over the entire seventeenth century. Davies’s works, therefore, completely skew publishing statistics for women writers in the years before her death in 1652.42 Her first prophetic providential work –​A Warning to the Dragon of 1625 –​indicates her involvement first in the war of so-​called ‘Puritan’ and ‘Arminian’ for the Calvinist mainstream. Deeply influenced by the anti-​Catholic Puritanism of the pre-​rebellion Irish Church, Davies appealed in 1625 to Charles I to defend pan-​European Calvinism against the Arminian threat. She made a direct (and negative) comparison between Charles I  and James I.  She framed the latter as ‘the great Prince that defend[ed] the faith’, saying also that while she sat at ‘the bridegroom’s feast’ at ‘the building of the New Jerusalem’, like Daniel she would not be defiled by ‘the king’s [Charles I] rich food, or the wine which he drank’.43 Right through to 1649 Davies sustained her attack on the monarchy, claiming at the time of the regicide that the King’s ‘folly’ of making the Book of Common Prayer ‘equivolent [sic] with the Alsufficient Scriptures’ led directly to his final walk through ‘Baals or James Chappel’ (the Banqueting House) to his death.44 As an outspoken puritan woman writer who managed to publish (illicitly) through the 1630s, Davies all but stood alone. However, in the 1640s she was joined by a chorus of female Calvinist militants who sometimes held connections with churches in the Netherlands and New England, while pinning their hopes on the progress of the saints in old England. For example, Davies’s continuous promotion of the Bezan Calvinism found in the Irish Articles of 1615 can be seen repeated in the double predestination of Dorothy Burch’s A Catechisme of 1646. Burch was the wife of a Dutch fisherman living in Kent.45 Equally, Davies’s brand of Calvinist internationalism was endorsed in the work of Sarah Jones, who said in To Sions Lover of 1644 that war had brought her from silence to the promotion of gospel preaching and covenanting by women. ‘Looke not to Scottish, nor Dutch, [or] New-​England’, said Jones; instead her plan was to set up an English apostolic rule.46 Jones, who was the wife of a dyer, did not deny the internationalism of the Calvinist cause in this statement, but rather wanted to locate England very centrally within it.47 In other words, in the 1620s and 1630s Eleanor Davies was a female political writer who was ahead of her time for her sex. However, when she was joined in the 1640s by tradeswomen who spoke the same language of Calvinist militancy as herself, she became an elite woman writer doomed to historical eclipse by the social definitions of political radicalism found in Christopher Hill’s ‘world turned 107

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From Republic to Restoration upside down’.48 At the time, Davies spoke of a ‘new song’ heard only by the saints now, and this was understood completely by her contemporaries.49 It is easy to overlook the fact that Eleanor Davies’s original connection with the royal court actually lent her words legitimacy during the 1640s. In 1646 Davies was still recounting to her readers how the King had interrupted her as she advised Henrietta Maria that she would miscarry in a year and that her period of happiness would be time-limited.50 Davies’s pamphlets were located within a subversive feminine religious zeitgeist that contributed to the destabilisation of the English Church and that led, ironically, to anti-​resistance theorists identifying the root causes of rebellion in the religion of the rabble or demos. For example, Davies’s social peer, Margaret Cavendish, recognised no aristocratic agency in the demise of the monarchy in 1649 and instead argued that liberty had led tradespeople and the ‘Enemies of Spight’ to strangle the body commonwealth and destroy religion, law and civil society.51 Yet, Davies’s prophetic works continuously came back to the idea that kingdoms could be destroyed and the power of temporal kings lost forever in the wake of God’s wrath. ‘What if God willing to shew his wrath, and make his power known’, she said in Je le Tien; then ‘this kingdom, like Davids, reduced by degrees, made wait for his promises’.52 Indeed, not to take at face value the intrinsically republican implications of Eleanor Davies’s texts is to mistake her very real intention to outlive her temporal monarch and see in the New Jerusalem. She was willing –​over a very long and revolutionary writing career –​to imagine a Christian republic ushered in by the death of Charles I. During the crisis of late 1648 and 1649, when ten other women wrote prophetic warning pieces about the consequences of king-​killing, Davies released a torrent of words in a dozen works that were all written in just one year. In 1649, in a tract called The New Jerusalem at Hand, she said there would be no Charles II. She drew parallels with the overthrow of Saul and the relief of the seed of Abraham [the elect] as they heard Christ’s message, ‘I am the first and last king’.53 In 1649, in For the Most Honorable States Sitting at Whitehall, she noted ‘Bishops Lands sold’, ‘Great Britains Union dissolv’d’ and, as for ‘their Kings, he beheaded’; now, she said, God had announced ‘in that day I will raise up the Tabernacle of David that is faln down &c. and will build it again, as in days of old’.54 Davies was utterly unmoved by the plight of ‘Great Britains last King’, commenting that Charles I  was ‘Englands late Tyrant, into whom many Devils were entred from several parts’.55 She consistently used the fable of Belshazzar’s feast and Daniel’s interpretation of the writing on the wall –​‘mene, mene tekel, upharsin’ –​to warn Charles I that his kingdom had been weighed up and found wanting,56 and said that he was ‘a Monarch turn’d a slave’.57 At the time she was taken seriously by radical co-​religionists. In 1649 the 108

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy writer of Strange and Wonderfull Prophecies adopted Davies’s authorial voice and quoted from her work on Belshazzar’s feast: ‘Here shee prohecyed that Monarchy should cease in England’.58 Davies’s central idea –​namely that Charles I had hindered the arrival of Christ –​was the one that transformed, for many, the new realities of the 1650s and its re-​imagined models of kingship. So even though Davies has been largely forgotten by historians of civil war radicalism, it is not at all surprising that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers stood in her barn one day –​as, indeed, they did –​listening to her prophesying in the voice of Melchizedek.59 Calvinist militancy ultimately undermined the spiritual authority of the temporal monarchy. Colin Davis once pointed out that the concept of a particular providence could be used rhetorically to destroy all ‘forms of the ancient constitution, including monarchy’, because the writer became just the instrument of God’s plan.60 Mary Cary’s The Little Horns Doom and Downfall of 1651 provides a good example. Cary argued that temporal kings rose and fell according to God’s plan and all kingly reigns simply heralded the coming of the real king  –​Christ.61 The ‘unworthy king’ [Charles I] made war against ‘all well-​affected people in Ireland, and also in England’, and against the saints or those ‘holy Christians, whom he [Charles I] called Puritans’.62 The current kingless State –​or republic –​was intended, decreed and beneficial; otherwise Charles I would not have lost towns, cities and countryside. Parliament killed Charles I because ‘he was a man of blood’ and ‘God having given him up into their hands, took away his dominion’ and executed him according to ‘THE JUDGEMENT WRITTEN … that he should be slain, and his body destroyed and given to the burning flame of justice.’63 Cary suggested that all temporal monarchs would be destroyed before the day of judgement in 1701.64 Eleanor Davies also revised the crucial date from her original 1645 (when William Laud was executed) to 1700. Some women’s political writing of the 1640s helped to rock Calvinist theology on its axis permanently, shifting it away from confessional repetition and exegesis to a visualised eschatology that could have a geography and a spatiality. Elizabeth Avery’s Scripture Prophecies Opened of 1647 said that Babylon ‘doth evidently appear to be this Island of Great Britain … which arbitrary power hath not onely been in the Monarchical State, but in the foregoing Parliament of England’.65 In a Skinnerian sense, Avery imagined a freedom that was the absence of all arbitrary power on earth, which was achieved through utter prostration to the will of a terrifying and all-​ powerful God.66 Avery’s Scripture Prophecies suggested a newer, spiritualised and godly republicanism that used the symbolism of the Revelation of St John. She spoke of the throne of God appearing and heaven and earth rolling together as the 144,000 of the tribes of Israel were given their seal and ascended ‘in a cloud in to heaven … unto the confusion of their enemies’.67 109

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From Republic to Restoration The 1640s and 1650s legacy of the reinvented majesty of the Calvinist God was that a soul’s predestined State could be seen and felt, and the actual moment of spiritual transformation given full expression. Jane Turner’s Choice Experiences of 1653 spoke of ‘true EXPERIENCE’, ‘glory, perfection, immediate communion with the father’ that was ‘seen and known’ sufficiently.68 The radical religious political texts of the feminine godly republic essentially became more sensate in construction in their response to the chaos of civil war. Ann Collins wrote her nearly one hundred pages of Divine Songs in 1653, in which she transformed biblical texts that focused on God’s witnesses –​the saints –​into verses to be sung.69 Timothy, Peter and Matthew were composed afresh by Collins as New Testament harbingers of the heavenly crown worn by the saints whose bodies were ‘freed from their drosse’.70 Hannah Trapnel, the daughter of a shipwright, spent much of 1654 crying out about the ‘King of Kings’, ‘the onely King’ of the new covenant and the Gospels.71 ‘A Christ as Lord and King’, she sang, ‘He will himself open their Mouth, /​And make for them to sing’.72 Of course, the most simplified, sensate double predestination of all was embedded in Quaker theology in the concept of walking either in the dark or the light. The Quakers brought a visionary religious culture to 1650s England that threatened the sovereignty of all civil magistrates and may have hastened the Restoration because of the visceral reaction they invoked in others against their spiritual body language.73 Quaker popularisation of visions of salvation eroded doctrinal rigidity in a way that brought more women into writing, many of whom could claim considerable success when they preached via print. Jeane Bettris’s A Lamentation for the Deceived People of the World of 1657 appealed directly to people in the small village of Aylesbury to repent; she said that temporal kings counted for nothing and that shaking off sin for the light of enlightenment was all, ‘for the kingdome of heaven is at hand’.74 ‘The National Congregations are made up of … all kindes of sinners’, Bettris warned  in Spiritual Discoveries of 1657, and so –​notwithstanding Cromwell’s godly rule –​‘the streams of this fourth Romish Monarchy stil run’.75 It was an idea echoed in Ann Bradstreet’s poetry, which first arrived from New England in 1647. Bettris saw herself as ‘selling my Sermons’; and, indeed, they sold well: ‘I have printed before 500. and now 500. more’.76 Similarly, Bradstreet’s work sold well when it was published as The Tenth Muse in 1650. The doctrine of grace (and the doctrines of sin and reprobation), thus, became complicated by a visualised, heard and felt reception of the elect that was to become an extremely important component of post-​Restoration women’s writing both in manuscript and print. Perhaps feeling exiled in her nonconformist thinking Ursula Wyvill spent all of the 1660s recording 110

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy in a diary her experiences as she saw herself meeting the Lord in the air and singing songs of praise and Hallelujah.77 Of course, the most influential (and certainly most prolific) religious writer in the last decades of the seventeenth century –​Jane Lead –​was actually a product of the 1650s. Lead spent time in the Behmenist family of Mary and John Pordage during the Cromwellian regime and in her first work of 1681 –​The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking –​she literally visualised, complete with full descriptions of physical feelings, sights and sounds, the moment of the ascension of the 144,000 elect as prophesied in Revelation 7.78 The decade of the 1650s was more important than the 1640s in the development of this feminine doctrinal legacy, not only because more women were prompted into publication by the regicide but also because once Charles I was removed –​along with any last authority of his church ministry –​women’s writing became a very powerful weapon in the resulting battle for souls. The Protectorate government found itself to be just one player in that political phenomenon. For example, on 8 October 1655, Joseph Caryl, Cromwell’s preacher at Whitehall and Westminster Abbey, licensed Elizabeth Major’s Honey on the Rod in the hopes that her lengthy disquisition on sin would bolster adherence to the Westminster Confession and the Cromwellian regime’s desired Presbyterian Church government.79 In a dialogue between the soul and consolation, Major tackled (and rejected) one sin after another –​pride, covetousness, profanity, and so on.80 ‘Christ hath dropt honey into her soul from the Rod’, Major’s readers were told. In other words, in an emulation of Jonathan in I Samuel 14:27 Major knew instinctively to break the oath to a paternal figure on earth in order to lead the Israelites to righteousness and safety. It was a powerful message in post-​regicide England and it reached at least one of Elizabeth Major’s female readers: Rose Mollett inscribed her copy of Honey on the Rod with the words ‘God give her grace here on to Look’, as if her own soul was in dialogue with the material hamartiology of the text.81 Thus, women’s political writing acted in tandem with texts written by men to shape the religious and cultural complexities of the 1650s kingless state. Ideological warfare meant that the spiritual battle ground of the 1650s was populated not only by Quakers and Cromwell’s godly warriors. The purity of the crypto-​Catholic royalist woman-​in-​exile was celebrated, too, when Anthony Stafford, writer of the 1635 The Femall Glory, popped up again in 1656 with A President of Female Perfection with the aim of celebrating the piety and learning of Theophila Coke.82 Stafford claimed that he had not ‘swerved from the tenents [sic] received in the English Church’, but a Latin Ave Maria followed, accompanied by acrostics on the ‘pure Virgin, blessed Mayd’.83 The text resonated with English Catholic royalist women, and while it circulated so too did 1657 and 1658 reprints of Helen More’s 111

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From Republic to Restoration The Holy Practices and Spiritual Exercises.84 Printed in Paris and brought secretly across the channel, More’s tracts offered the Catholic alternative route to feminine perfection, the sinless state of grace and purity of the soul.85 Such works buoyed up Catholic families living under strain during the Republic when there was no monarchy to protect their isolationist interest. However, they were female texts that also directly challenged the theological grounds of puritan sectarianism. It is interesting that Helen More’s notes on Isaiah 2:5, which were appended to her Spiritual Exercises, recorded that ‘happy are they that walke in this light’.86 A Quaker woman could not have said it better. Thus, women writers in England were integrated into an internationalised religious politics in the 1650s –​Protestant and Catholic –​more fully than at any other time during England’s long reformation. They responded to travel and migration by writing and they lived in a globalising world of political tension that centred on religious debate. For example, Elizabeth Avery, who first wrote in the late 1640s, had been brought up in exile in the Netherlands in the two decades before war. She spent time in the Fifth Monarchist congregation of John Rogers inside the Protestant Pale in Dublin and her brother was a Congregationalist minister in Boston.87 The missionary travel of Quaker women also exemplifies the lived experience of women politicised by their times. Quaker Anne Gargill travelled to Portugal in 1655 to speak to the Catholic monarch in person about his beliefs; she then wrote A Warning to all the World in 1656. Gargill lived and wrote her religious radicalism. She argued that ‘the Potentates of the earth shall be confounded, and their glory brought to nought … and innocencie shall overspread the Nation … and the Lamb shall be throned in the hearts of the simple for ever & ever’.88 Her publisher, the radical bookseller Giles Calvert, worked in London alongside booksellers arriving from Boston with works from New England. However, no woman exemplifies this world better than the Quaker convert and writer, Margaret Fell. After Fell inherited Marsh Grange and then Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire from her father and husband respectively, she set up, in 1658, an organisational hub for Quaker travel and campaigning for the prison release of George Fox and many other Quakers.89 The print war of religious ideologies became intense during the months leading up to and just after the arrival of Charles II and women’s political writing contributed to the formation of a sharper political divide in these transition years. Indeed 40 per cent of all the published works of women that appeared through the 1650s were written between 1659 and 1660. The Quaker Dorothy White alone wrote a half a dozen tracts in 1659 and 1660, ‘fashioning a role for herself as a spokesperson for the Quaker cause’.90 This gendered publishing phenomenon suggests that some women, at least, had 112

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy a sense of even greater purchase on the political future than had been felt during the crisis of trial and regicide in 1648 and 1649. The new lines of political demarcation had their origins in the experience of exile for royalists and in-​fighting among religious conformists and nonconformists alike during the 1650s. Despite the Declaration of Breda there could be no easy accommodation between evangelical Calvinists and the non-​evangelical Anglicanism that emerged from the years of the Republic. Indeed, a reinvigorated and redefined Anglicanism lurked in the wings in 1659 which was released as waves of relieved jubilation at the return of monarchy.91 Women participated in this celebration of monarchy. Rachel Jevon, for example, in 1660, delighted in the idea that Charles II would ‘live ever Monarch in Coelestial Light … [the] Off-​spring of Heaven’ breathing new spiritual life into the souls of his subjects.92 It has been estimated that during the civil wars and through to the beginning of the Protectorate in 1654 possibly only 5 per cent of the English population formed religious assemblies outside their original parish church.93 Indeed, 75 per cent of the English clergy hung onto their livings through all the violence and social turmoil of civil war and republic. Many Anglican clergymen were sheltered by women.94 Thus, one legacy of royalist exile in the 1650s was a revitalised, and even a new, feminised Anglicanism that shook off the last vestiges of Puritanism found in the thinking of earlier royalist women writers. Dorothy Pakington, for example, can be said to have aided in redefining Anglicanism in the 1650s. She gathered into her household several outcast ministers who were –​according to George Ballard  –​‘edified by her conversation, and instructed by her writings’.95 Later, in the eighteenth century, Ballard attributed The Whole Duty of Man to her instead of Henry Hammond, who had been one of her exiled house guests.96 The Whole Duty of Man, of course, was one of the seminal texts of post-​1660 godly Anglican conformity. An equally important factor in drawing up the lines of partisan divide after the Restoration was the preaching and conversion success of the Quakers and  –​perhaps even more importantly  –​the vitriolic popular response to their visible separatism and martyrdom in public and in print. Quakers developed quite clear models of a holy commonwealth and thought that women as well as men were given stewardship and ‘an Office in the Truth’.97 Their gender inclusivity undoubtedly encouraged the accusations of witchcraft, popery and covenanting with the Devil that became central to the carnival horn-​humour that was aimed at them.98 James Naylor’s blasphemy –​riding into Bristol in a re-​enactment of Christ’s ride to Jerusalem (with Martha Simmonds) –​was one episode that prompted the Protectorate government to revise what it meant by liberty of conscience and this led to the persecution and imprisonments 113

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From Republic to Restoration of the 1650s, which just continued in the 1660s under the new King.99 Pamphlets and woodcut images deriding Quaker women in the 1650s for claiming to know more of God than the scriptures, simply resurfaced in multiple reprints long after the Protectorate gave way to the Stuart monarchy restored.100 Quaker women’s writing was a critical component of the legacy of irreparable religious divide. No less than seven thousand Quaker women petitioners –​headed up by Margaret Fell –​signed their name as ‘hand-​maids and daughters of the Lord’ against tithes, temples and priests. Again, the language of property and contract dispute was used as they asked the central government ‘to do equity’.101 The powerful critique of tithes and oaths undermined the spiritual and fiscal power base of the established Church. Mary Web actually warned the MPs who had been recalled to the Rump Parliament in 1659 that they might think they were towers of strength and mountains of men, but they could not take the Crown from the (Quaker) righteous.102 Web mocked returning ministers and parishioners as they re-​ entered their ‘houses to be called churches’.103 Like all Quakers –​and other nonconformist congregations after the Restoration  –​Web could comfortably transform her house into a place of worship. Quaker militancy may have been migratory, but their concept of a holy commonwealth at the time of the Restoration was also re-​imagined as domiciliary. In 1659, Priscilla Cotton articulated her concept of ‘a true Common-​wealth’, by saying that if ‘ten or twelve sorts of people … inhabit a fruitfull island’, then the magistrate’s job was to ensure that one congregation could not take precedence over another.104 She wanted tolerance for Quaker meetings held in people’s houses. Changes of ‘Governments into new titles and names’, said another Quaker, Grace Berwick, were of little consequence because people like herself could go on living and worshipping the truth in perfect freedom at home.105 Thus, when Charles II arrived he was met not only by the aspiring courtier Rachel Jevon, waving a pamphlet filled with purple-​prose adulation; he was also personally lobbied by Margaret Fell (who hung around his court all through 1661 writing him letters and petitions) and other Quaker women, such as Anne Clayton and the self-​styled ‘Ahivah’. Ahivah advised him –​prophetically –​that the success of his reign was dependent on him granting ‘liberty for my own practice of my own Household Ordinances’.106 Meanwhile Anne Clayton said that she had seen and felt his coming before he arrived, but added that Christ ‘will take to him his great Power, and rend the Kingdom from man’.107 Like all Quakers, Clayton made it clear that the power of the sword resided not with the King, but with Christ, ‘the SON of Equity the KING of Justice’.108 Here, again, the language of equity law proved useful to this female writer when dealing with a monarch who had 114

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy ostensibly returned to preside over justice dispensed in the temporal law courts.109 However, the women writers who appealed to Charles II immediately upon his arrival were doomed to political disappointment. This was not least because the ‘latitudinarian moment’ that may have existed between 1661 and 1662 was lost, not because of the failure of agreement between Anglicans and Presbyterians over church government, but because of the ongoing battle for souls that had started in the 1650s.110 Post-​Restoration dissenting literature was littered with texts like John Batchiler’s The Virgins Pattern of 1661 which were designed to motivate the female puritan warrior, but they were not well received outside nonconformist communities. More importantly, the continued publication by female Quakers through the 1660s (when there were very few other written works by women at all, bar a few by Margaret Cavendish) made the penal laws of 1662 (including the Quaker Act) even more likely. The Quaker works by women invited persecution and resulted in imprisonment for some. Brought to trial for her writing and political activism in 1664, Margaret Fell demanded liberty of conscience and worship, asking of the judge at the Lancaster assizes: ‘[w]‌hat law have I broken for worshipping God in my house’.111 The idea that God could be worshipped essentially anywhere, placed Fell, all Quakers and, potentially, all nonconformists, in a sacralised domestic space that was beyond the reach of the temporal monarch. Directly addressing Charles II, in a pamphlet published during her trial, Fell asked him why he had turned the English state into a place where magistrates had become ‘Law makers against Christianity’.112 Fell asked: ‘what Lawes have you made or changed, save such as have laid oppression and bondage on the Consciences of Gods People’.113 She spent the next four years in prison.114 During Margaret Fell’s imprisonment she continued to write, including the work for which she is most well known, her Womens Speaking Justified of 1667. However, a chorus of other female Quaker writers kept her literary company through the 1660s, including Ann Gilman, Sarah Cheevers, Katherine Evans, Elizabeth Coleman and Anne Travers. Ann Bathurst, for example, published The Saints Freedom from Tyranny Vindicated in 1667. Bathurst cautiously only put her initials on the tract, but in it she spoke in inflammatory ways about the corrupt ‘Power of Pagan Caesars, and Antichristian Kings’.115 Her vision of monarchy, then, was clear –​Christ was glorious and all other kings were just sent to try the strength and suffering of those who knew God’s truth. Suffering became the topos that was integral to the Quaker concept of holy community. Indeed, it was designed to say less about endangerment, than resilience and survival. The idea had powerful purchase throughout the later seventeenth century, not least because it was the Quakers who received the 115

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From Republic to Restoration worst reception at a popular level, as violence against them peaked in the 1660s and then again in the 1680s. In 1677, Anne Wentworth claimed that a saint’s life should be read as ‘a living prophecy’, or a domestic visible expression of the invisible Church.116 Her warnings about the state of the nation were addressed and sent directly to the King in 1677.117 During the Exclusion Crisis, such was the ongoing vilification of Quakers that they were blamed equally with Catholics for a religious dissent that undermined ‘simple Protestants’.118 The result of the Exclusion Crisis was that Protestant nonconformity again led to imprisonment. Margaret Fell spent 1683 in jail. The ‘secret Smitings of that Spirit … seeks to Divide and lay Waste the Heritage of God’, said Mary Forster in 1685. However, in that one political idea –​namely that her writing was authorised by God –​lay the motivation for her to pull together a large number of works by other Quaker women, which she collectively called A Living Testimony.119 By the 1680s the quest for the holy commonwealth meant that some women writers rejected entirely the religious authority of the temporal monarch –​this was a legacy of the Republic. Anne Docwra’s An Epistle of Love and Good Advice of 1683 put it this way: after requesting that the King ‘preserve our Protestant-​Interest’ she said that God alone was ‘King and law-​giver in mens Consciences, in matters of Faith and Worship’.120 Examining quantitative change in women’s political writing from 1640 to 1680 is enlightening. The long, hegemonic moment of puritan religiosity for women –​which included the production of Calvinist, Arminian/​Anglican and Catholic texts alike  –​was shaken twice by political events. The first change came in 1649, when it became no longer acceptable to be a puritan royalist,​ a change that permanently affected women’s political writing. The second alteration was a more gradual transition that took place in the mid-​ 1670s, after which some women –​many of them writing within a post-​war, loyalist ideational framework –​finally found a secular political voice. Before the 1670s, Sarah Jinner’s vicious satirical almanacs of 1658 to 1664 about rebellion and the multitude stood virtually alone in a female genre that only later emerged in the libertine voice of Aphra Behn, and then only from the very late 1660s.121 Margaret Cavendish also stood alone, a busy anti-​resistance writer whose secularism stands in marked contrast to the religiously inspired royalism of Mary Pope, Elizabeth Warren and Elizabeth Poole. Arguably, it was Mary Astell’s texts from the 1690s that represented the first coming-​of-​ age in women’s secular political writing and it is interesting to note that she marked it by wanting to know why the authority vested in a husband was so much greater than that of princes. Astell maintained that the power of kings was no longer ‘sacred and inalienable’.122 She recognised that when it came to political models of kingship, the biblical authority underpinned by I Corinthians had been lost forever by the end of the century. 116

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy By contrast, between 1640 and 1680 the women’s voices of militant, internationalist Calvinism –​which began before the civil wars with Eleanor Davies’s A Warning to the Dragon –​gathered very considerable strength as a direct result of the experience of conflict and king-​killing. However, it was only after the regicide that the real flood of women’s prophetic political tracts and visionary and doctrinal works expanded dramatically in their number and range. This was a trend that ensured women’s contribution to the English monarchy’s loss of the jure divino sovereignty that it had once –​in theory, at least –​enjoyed. Women’s political ideas, refracted as they were through a largely biblical lens, became central to the shaping of a post-​Restoration political culture that was forced to come to terms with religious pluralism and the spiritual authority that became vested in domestic space. Thus, in the 1680s, when Jane Lead wrote The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, she asked, with remarkable boldness and perspicacity, ‘[w]‌ho in this World shall Kings, and Monarchs be?’123 Lead’s vision of monarchy was firmly focused on Christ alone and she thought nothing of completely dismissing the authority and sovereign power of temporal kings.124 However, her political thinking –​and her claim of a licence to preach –​was inherited from the very large number of women writers who had gone before her and for whom the civil wars, but, more significantly, the Republic, represented an authorising moment in English history. Therefore, when Patricia Crawford once argued that the impact of the civil wars and Interregnum ‘was remarkable’, she was absolutely correct. However, this chapter offers an addition to her analysis, finding that the most far-​reaching consequences for gender and political thought came about as a direct result of regicide and the possibilities opened up by the period of the Republic. Once women writers did enter more fully the realm of politics in the 1650s, bolstered by the authorisation of God himself, they never retreated from playing that role in society. If Margaret Cavendish has entered the historiography as the foremost female political writer of the 1650s and 1660s, it is because historians privilege secular visions and models of monarchy over those informed by biblicism and piety. Cavendish’s role was to contribute to the rejection of a more greatly feminised Protestant dissent. However, there were far more women writers who spoke of God and state/​monarchy in the same breath than wrote secular romances, literature, drama and poetry before 1680, and their writing helped to shape the political culture of the Restoration period. Furthermore, they contributed to crucial changes in religious thinking, as the pre-​war, rigid Calvinist doctrinal schema –​which spoke of divine monarchy in legalistic (mercy/​judgement) ways –​gave way to something that was more spiritual and informed by the doctrinal concept of knowing, sensing and maybe even seeing that highest of magistrates –​God. In important ways this brought subtle shifts in the range of views that women held about temporal monarchy too. 117

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From Republic to Restoration Notes 1 Patricia Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings 1600–​1700’, in Women in English Society 1500–​1800, ed. by Mary Prior (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 213. 2 Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 49. 3 Crawford, ‘Women’s Published Writings’, pp. 212–​13, 222–​25 and Richard Bell and Patricia Crawford, ‘Appendix 2: Statistical Analysis of Women’s Printed Writings 1600–​1700’ in Women in English Society 1500–​1800, pp. 265–​69. The sampling method used by Bell and Crawford was problematic, involving a multiplier process applied to Philip Rider’s A Chronological Index to the Revised Edition of Pollard and Redgrave, Short Title Catalogue, 1475–​1640 (Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1978), followed by a random sample of 900 works per lustrum. Nevertheless, it remains a useful starting point for assessing continuities and changes in women’s published writing in the seventeenth century. 4 Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 299–​300. 5 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity:  English Women’s Writing 1649–​88 (London:  Virago Press, 1988); Women’s Political Writings 1610–​1725, ed. by Hilda L. Smith, Mihoko Suzuki and Susan Wiseman, 4 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007). 6 All the calculations that follow in this essay, unless otherwise stated, have been completed as part of the research for this chapter, the raw data being collected and collated using multiple bibliographies of women’s works. 7 James Daybell, Women and Epistolary Agency in Early Modern Culture, 1450–​ 1690 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016); Daybell, ‘Women’s Letters, Literature and Conscience in Sixteenth-​Century England’, Renaissance Studies, 23.4 (2009), 516–​33; Daybell, ‘Gender, Obedience and Authority in Sixteenth-​Century Women’s Letters’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 41.1 (2010), 49–​67; The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Laura L. Knoppers (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–​1730 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); ‘Cultures of Knowledge: Networking the Republic of Letters 1550–​1750’ project (embracing EMLO [Early Modern Letters Online] and WEMLO [Women’s Early Modern Letters Online]): www.culturesofknowledge.org. 8 Bathsua Makin, An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen in Religion, Manners, Arts and Tongues (London, 1673). Earlier examples of vocational works include Hannah Woolley, The Ladies Directory (London, 1661); Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London, 1671). 9 Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women:  Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992) and Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2006). 10 Author’s calculations. Cf. Joad Raymond who has found that women’s publications rose only to just over 0.5 per cent in the 1640s and the jump to more than 1 per cent occurred in the 1650s. Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering, pp. 299–​300. 11 [Margaret Killin and Barbara Patison], A Warning from the Lord to the Teachers & People of Plimouth with a Few Queries (London, 1656[7]), p. 1. 12 J[ane] Turner, Choice Experiences of the Kind Dealings of God before, in, and after Conversion (London, 1653), p. 114. 13 Cf. Thomas N. Corns, ‘Radical Pamphleteering’, in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. by N. H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 72. 14 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-​ Calvinists:  The Rise of English Arminianism, c.  1590–​ 1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th Series, 34 (1984), 155–​78; Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles:  Seventeenth-​Century English Political Stability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Mary Fage, Fames Roule: or, The Names of our Dread Soveraigne Lord King Charles, his Royall Queen Mary, and his Most Hopeful Posterity … Anagrammatiz’d and Expressed by Acrosticke Lines on their Names (London, 1637). 15 Francis Lenton, Great Britains Beauties: or The Female Glory Epitomized (London, 1638), pp. 2, 5–​7, 17. 16 [Anthony Stafford], The Femall Glory: or, The Life of the Virgin Mary (London, 1635); R. M. Smuts, ‘The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s’, English Historical Review, 93 (1978), 26–​45. 17 For a classic portrayal see Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers 1650–​1689 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004). 18 Keith Thomas, ‘Women and the Civil War Sects’, Past and Present, 13.1 (1958), 42–​62; Claire Cross, ‘ “He-​Goats before the Flocks”: A Note on the Part Played by Women in the Founding of the Civil War Churches’, Popular Belief and Practice:  Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical Historical Society, ed. by G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 195–​202. 19 Jane Baston, ‘History, Prophecy and Interpretation:  Mary Cary and Fifth Monarchism’, Prose Studies, 21.3 (1998), 1–​18 (quoting from 1, 15); Catie Gill, ‘Pope, Mary (d. 1653?)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008)  www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​69153 [accessed 29 August 2016]. 20 [Mary Pope], A Treatise of Magistracy, Shewing, the Magistrate Hath Beene, and For Ever Is To Be the Chiefe Officer in the Church, out of the Church, and over the Church ([London], 1647), Sig. A1r-​Sig.C4, pp. 116–​131 (quoting from Sig. C2r, pp. 99–​100, 115, 122). George Thomason’s copy of The Treatise has annotated it as ‘by Mrs Pope … Novemb: 29 [1647]’ and one epistle is signed ‘M. P.’. 21 Pope, A Treatise of Magistracy, ‘To the most high and mighty Prince, Charles …’, Sig. B1r-​B1v and ‘To the Christian Reader’, Sig. C2r, p. 4. 22 [Pope], ‘The Copy of a Letter sent unto the Parliament, bearing the date 16. of April, 1647’ appended to A Treatise of Magistracy, pp. 111, 128. 23 Mary Pope, Heare, heare, heare, heare, A  Word or Message from Heaven (London, 1648), p. 8. 24 Mary Pope, Behold, here is a Word or, an Answer to the Late Remonstrance of the Army (London, 1649), Frontispiece, Sig. A2r; Heare, heare, heare, heare, p. 12. 25 Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ (London, 1641), Epistle ‘To the Christian Reader’, Sig. A2. 26 Chidley, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ, p. 80 (two pages, same numbering). 27 Elizabeth Warren, The Old and Good Way Vindicated (London, 1646[5]), pp. 30–​31. 28 Julia Gasper, ‘Warren, Elizabeth (bap. 1617)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​ 67194 [accessed 3 August 2016]. 29 Warren, The Old and Good Way Vindicated, pp. 36, 38. 30 Elizabeth Warren, A Warning-​peece from Heaven, against the Sins of the Times, Inciting us to Fly from the Vengeance to Come (London, 1649), p. 7; Warren, The Old and Good Way Vindicated, p. 21. 31 Pope, A Treatise of Magistracy, Frontispiece. 32 Pope, Behold, here is a Word, p. 2; Pope, A Treatise of Magistracy, p. 86. 33 Pope, Behold, here is a Word, pp. 13, 18; Pope, Heare, heare, heare, heare, pp. 13, 15. 34 Ibid., pp. 16–​18. 35 E[lizabeth] Poole, A Vision Wherein is Manifested the Disease and Cure of the Kingdome (London, 1648), Frontispiece, p. 1.

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From Republic to Restoration 36 Elizabeth Poole, An Alarum of War, Given to the Army And to their High Court of Justice (so called) by the Will of God (London, 1649), The Epistle Dedicatory, Sig. A2v. 37 Poole, A Vision, pp. 2–​3. 38 Ibid., pp. 4–​6. 39 Poole, An Alarum of War, pp. 2–​3. 40 Ibid., p. 11. 41 Ibid., p. 12. 42 Amanda L. Capern, ‘Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem’ in Women during the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity, ed. by Julie A. Chappell and Kaley A. Kramer (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 91–​114 (pp. 95, 108). The standard biography is Esther S. Cope, Handmaid of the Holy Spirit: Dame Eleanor Davies, Never Soe Mad a Ladie (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). The modern edition of her works is Teresa Feroli, Eleanor Davies, Writings 1641–​1646 and Eleanor Davies, Writings 1647–​1652 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 43 Capern, ‘Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem’, p.  94, citing Eleanor Davies, A Warning to the Dragon and All His Angells (London, 1625), pp. 4, 50. 44 Eleanor Davies, A Sign Being Given to them Being Entred into the Day of Judgement to Set their House in Order (London, 1649) in Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. by Esther S. Cope (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 281. 45 Dorothy Burch, A Catechisme of the Severall Heads of Christian Religion (London, 1646), ‘To the Reader’, Sig. A2v; Paula McQuade, ‘A Knowing People: Early Modern Motherhood, Female Authorship, and Working-​Class Community in Dorothy Burch’s A Catechism of the Several Heads of the Christan Religion’, Prose Studies, 32.3 (2010), 167–​ 86 (especially p. 172). 46 [Sarah Jones], To Sions Lover, Being a Golden Egge to Avoide Infection ([London], 1644), Sig. A3r, A4r, A5r-​B2v. 47 Ibid., Frontispiece. 48 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down:  Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1972). 49 Eleanor Davies, The Lady Eleanor Her Appeale (London, 1646), p. 14. 50 Eleanor Davies, ‘The Lady Eleanor Her Appeal’, in Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, ed. by Esther S. Cope (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 186–​88. 51 Margaret Cavendish, The Worlds Olio (London, 1655), in Women’s Political Writings, i, 223; Cavendish, ‘A Dialogue between a Bountifull Knight, and a Castle ruin’d in War’ and ‘A Dialogue betwixt Peace, and War’, Poems and Fancies (London, 1653) in Women’s Political Writings, i, 210–​14. 52 Eleanor Davies, ‘Je le Tien’, in Cope, ed., Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies, pp. 205–​06. 53 Eleanor Davies, The New Jerusalem at Hand (London, 1649), pp. 5, 8. 54 Eleanor Davies, For the Most Honorable States Sitting at Whitehall (London, 1649), Frontispiece. 55 Ibid., p. 7. 56 The writing on the wall inscribed by a mysterious hand during the feast of Belshazzar and interpreted by Daniel as fortelling the destruction of the king and his dynasty (Daniel 5:25–​26). 57 Capern, ‘Eleanor Davies and the New Jerusalem’, p.  102, quoting from Given to the Elector (Amsterdam, 1633), pp. 4, 8–​9. 58 ‘Eleanor Davies’ [apocryphal], Strange and Wonderfull Prophesies by Lady Eleanor Audeley (London, 1649), p. 3. The tract used Given to the Elector of 1633. 59 The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. by Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes and David Loewenstein, 2 vols (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2009), ‘Letter to Lady Eleanor Douglas’, 4 December 1650, ii, 422–​29. 60 J. C. Davis, ‘Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3 (1993), 265–​88 (p. 282).

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy 61 Mary Cary, The Little Horns Doom and Downfall: Or a Scripture Prophesie of King James, and King Charles, and of this Present Parliament Unfolded (London, 1651), p. 5. 62 Ibid., pp. 11–​13. 63 Ibid., pp. 40–​41. 64 Mary Cary, ‘A New and More Exact Mappe or Description of New Jerusalems Glory’, in Cary, The Little Horns Doom and Downfall. 65 Elizabeth Avery, Scripture Prophecies Opened (London, 1647), p. 15. 66 Quentin Skinner, ‘Freedom as the Absence of Arbitrary Power’, in Republicanism and Political Theory, ed. by Cécile Laborde and John Maynor (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 83–​101. 67 Avery, Scripture Prophecies Opened, p. 10. 68 Turner, Choice Experiences, pp. 143, 176. 69 An[n]‌ Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London, 1653), p. 45. 70 Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions, p. 44. 71 [Hannah Trapnel], Strange and Wonderful Newes from Whitehall (London, 1654), Sig. A3r, Sig. M2r, pp. 1, 6, 14, 20. 72 [Hannah Trapnel], The Cry of a Stone (London, 1654), p. 72. 73 Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (New  York:  St Martin’s Press, 1985), p. 81. 74 Jeane Bettris, A Lamentation for the Deceived People of the World (London, 1657), p. 2. 75 [Jeane Bettris], Spiritual Discoveries (London, 1657), pp. 6, 8. 76 Ibid., ‘To the Reader’. 77 Ursula Wyvill, ‘Devotional Miscellany 1662–​1672’, Beinecke Library, Yale, MS b.222, ff. 26, 33, 35, 38, 50–​51, 56. 78 Ariel Hessayon, ‘Pordage, John (bap. 1607, d. 1681)’ and ‘Pordage, Mary (d. 1668)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​22546 [accessed 15 September  2016]; Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy, ed. by Ariel Hessayon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Jane Lead, The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking: The Lord Christ’s Ascension Ladder Sent Down (London, 1681). 79 P. S. Seaver, ‘Caryl, Joseph (1602–​1673)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​4846 [accessed 23 September 2016]; Sarah Ross, ‘Major, Elizabeth (fl. 1656)’, ODNB www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​68092 [accessed 7 April 2016]. 80 Elizabeth Major, Honey on the Rod: Or a Comfortable Contemplation for One in Affliction with Sundry Poems on Several Subjects (London, 1656). 81 Major, Honey on the Rod, To the ‘Courteous Reader’, and Rose Mollett, annotation in Honey on the Rod, p. 1. Copy is British Library, Wing (end ed.) microfilm position M305. 82 [Anthony Stafford], A President of Female Perfection. Presented to the Serious Meditation and Perusal of All Modest Women, Who Desire to Live under the Government of Vertue, and Are Obedient to her Laws (London, 1656), ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’. 83 [Stafford], A President of Female Perfection, Sig. C3r. 84 Gertrude [Helen] More, The Holy Practises of a Devine Lover (Paris, 1657) and The Spiritual Exercises of the Most Vertuous and Religious D. Gertrude More (Paris, 1658). 85 More, The Holy Practises, Sig. A2v, pp. 8–​9. 86 More, The Spiritual Exercises, p. 300. 87 Jane Baston, ‘Avery [née Parker], Elizabeth (fl. 1614–​1653)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb. com/​view/​article/​69074 [accessed 20 September 2016]. 88 Anne Gargill, A Warning to All the World (London, 1656), pp. 3–​5. 89 Bonnelyn Young Kunze, ‘Fell [née Askew], Margaret (1614–​ 1702)’, ODNB www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​9260 [accessed 16 April 2016]. 90 Catie Gill, ‘White, Dorothy (d. 1686)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​45832 [accessed 9 June 2016]. 91 Robert Wilcher, The Writing of Royalism 1628–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 240, 248–​49, 252–​54. 92 Rachel Jevon, Exultationis Carmen: To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty upon his Most Desired Return (London, 1660), Frontispiece and pp. 1–​2, 5, 7.

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From Republic to Restoration 93 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), p. 24. 94 Cf. Grant Tapsell, ‘Royalism Revisited’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 881–​906 (pp. 892–​93, 905) dx.doi.org/​10.1017/​S0018246X11000288; Tapsell cites the important work of Kenneth Fincham and Stephen Taylor, ‘Episcopalian Conformity and Nonconformity, 1646–​1660’ in Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum, ed. by Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). 95 George Ballard, Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for their Writings or Skill in the Learned Languages, Arts and Sciences (Oxford, 1752), i, 316, 320. 96 Hugh de Quehen, ‘Hammond, Henry (1605–​1660)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​ view/​article/​12157 [accessed 15 September 2015]. 97 Elizabeth Bathurst, The Sayings of Women (London, 1683), p. 23. 98 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, pp. 26, 120, 126–​27, 139, 169, 177. 99 Ibid., p. 18. 100 Ibid., p. 126. 101 These Several Papers Was Sent to the Parliament the Twentieth Day of the Fifth Moneth, 1659 (London, 1659), pp. 51, 71–​72. 102 Mary Web, I Being Moved of the Lord, Doth Call unto You that Are Gathered Together in Parliament (London, 1659), pp. 1–​2. 103 Ibid., p. 2. 104 Priscilla Cotton, A Brief Description by Way of Supposition Holding forth to the Parliament  …  Wherein a True Common-​wealth Consisteth (London, 1659), Sig. A1r, pp. 3–​4. 105 Grace Berwick, To All Present Rulers, whether Parliament, or whomsoever of England (London, 1659), pp. 1–​2. 106 A Strange Prophecie Presented to the Kings most Excellent Majesty, by A Woman-​Quaker (all in white) Called Ahivah (London, 1660), pp. 1–​3; Arise Evans, To the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II (London, 1660), pp. 2, 6–​9. 107 Anne Clayton, A Letter to the King (London, [1660]), Broadside. 108 Ibid. 109 For the petitionary, emotive language used by women in Chancery, see Amanda L. Capern, ‘Emotions, Gender Expectations, and the Social Role of Chancery, 1550–​ 1650’, in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. by Susan Broomhall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 187–​209. 110 Walsham, Charitable Hatred, p. 256. 111 The Examination and Tryall of Margaret Fell and George Fox (London, 1664), pp. 216–​17. 112 Margaret Fell, A Letter Sent to the King from M. F. ([London(?)], 1666), pp. 6–​8. 113 Ibid., Frontispiece, p. 2. 114 Kunze, ‘Fell [née Askew], Margaret (1614–​1702)’, ODNB. 115 A[nn] B[athurst], The Saints Freedom from Tyranny Vindicated (London, 1667), Frontispiece. This tract has been wrongly attributed to the Fifth Monarchist Thomas Palmer: Stuart B. Jennings, ‘Palmer, Thomas (b. 1611/​12, d. in or after 1667)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​21219 [accessed 4 May 2015]. 116 Hilary Hinds, ‘Prophecy and Religious Polemic’, in The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Women’s Writing, ed. by Knoppers, p. 244. 117 Catie Gill, ‘Wentworth, Anne (1629/​30–​1693?)’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​ article/​67075 [accessed 21 May 2015]. 118 A Dialogue Between a Papist and a Quaker [London, 1680(?)], p. 3. 119 Mary Fo[r]‌ster and others, A Living Testimony [London, 1685], pp. 1–​4. 120 Anne Docwra, An Epistle of Love and Good Advice [London, 1683], p. 8. 121 For example, Sarah Jinner, An Almanack or Prognostication for the Year of our Lord 1658 (London, 1658); Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London: Allen Lane, 2012).

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Visions of monarchy and magistracy 122 Mary Astell, ‘Some Reflections upon Marriage’, in Astell: Political Writings, ed. by Patricia Springborg (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 7–​80 (p. 17). 123 Lead, The Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, p. 40. 124 Capern, ‘Jane Lead and the Tradition of Puritan Pastoral Theology’, in Jane Lead and her Transnational Legacy, ed. by Hessayon, pp. 91–​117.

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Chapter 6

The battle of the books: the Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer at the Restoration David Bagchi

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he years 2011 and 2012 saw, respectively, the four-​hundredth anniversary of the Authorized (or King James) Version of the Bible and the three-​hundred-​and-​fiftieth anniversary of the Restoration Book of Common Prayer. The proximity of their commemorations was appropriate, for these two pillars of English-​speaking Christianity are alike in many ways: both were literary products of the Stuart age but owed much to Tudor antecedents, tracing their origins back to the Great Bible of 1539 and the first Edwardian Prayer Book of 1549; both were spread through the Empire to the far corners of the globe; both are still wholeheartedly championed by defenders of the value of traditional language when speaking of or to God, and both are wholeheartedly loathed by the trendier sort of clergy; both were and indeed remain recipients of royal patronage;1 and the anniversaries of both were marked in a variety of ways from parish celebrations to celebrity endorsements to prestigious academic conferences to the publication of handsome new editions. Despite these similarities, there was a strong sense, noted for instance by the editor of a popular history magazine, that the celebrations for the English Bible were more successful than those for the English Prayer Book.2 One example from that time demonstrates the ease with which the Authorized Version won the propaganda battle over the Book of Common Prayer. The official website of the King James Bible Trust stated that the decision of Prince William and Catherine Middleton to use a ‘traditional language’ Book of Common Prayer service for their wedding in 2011  ‘was made indirectly to honour’ the Authorized Version in its four hundredth year.3 This claim was an astonishing example of counter-​factual, pro-​Authorized Version, spin. The one lesson read at that service (from Romans 12) was from a modern English translation, the New Revised Standard Version of 1989. The motet, based on I John 4, was in Latin. The introit and anthem, though compiled from traditional-​language psalms, used the texts from 124

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer the Book of Common Prayer, which are those of Miles Coverdale’s translation of 1535, not those of the Authorized Version. In fact, for a traditional-​ language service, this royal wedding was surprisingly devoid of any trace of the Authorized Version: any honour being paid to it was therefore very ‘indirect’ indeed.4 The more natural conclusion  –​ that the choice of rite was a direct affirmation of the Book of Common Prayer on the eve of its own anniversary –​ was not drawn.5 Instead, another victory was chalked up to the Authorized Version. This recent minor battle of the books echoes a far more fateful one which took place at the Restoration, and which had a not dissimilar outcome. The Bible translation commissioned by King James VI and I was not universally acclaimed in its early years; but it was one aspect of religious life in England which remained largely unscathed by the upheavals of the Civil War and the Interregnum. More than that, by 1661 it had achieved such widespread acceptance across all religious factions that both Independents and the heirs of Laudian Anglo-​Catholicism demanded its official restoration. Having seen off its only real competitor (the Geneva Bible) in 1644, it gained widespread support and affection to become the symbol and embodiment of English-​speaking Christianity worldwide. The Book of Common Prayer, by contrast, never succeeded in winning support across the spectrum of English religious life. Being outlawed under Queen Mary for being too Protestant did not endear it to the nonconformists and barely conformists of her sister’s reign, and (in the Laudian version in which it was imposed on Scotland in 1637) it became the trigger for the Solemn League and Covenant and an important casus bellorum of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Under the Commonwealth it was outlawed for the second time in its life, this time for being too Popish. Its reintroduction in 1662 brought about the secession of some two thousand ministers –​one fifth of Church of England clergy –​and created the situation whereby the national Church was no longer the Church of the whole nation. It is therefore easy to portray one of these books at the Restoration as a symbol of comprehension and the other as a symbol of division, and in broad terms to judge one a success and the other a failure. In this chapter, I shall consider the process by which these portrayals have emerged, and suggest that, in one respect at least, such a judgement is unfair.

The Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) and the Book of Common Prayer (1662): mistaken identities

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artly because of their significance for English-​speaking Christianity, and partly for their wider cultural impact, these two books have tended 125

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From Republic to Restoration to attract a number of cherished misconceptions, both among those who have never read them, and among their most ardent supporters. Before examining in detail their fates at the Restoration, therefore, it is perhaps worth defining our subjects more carefully. The Authorized Version of 1611 has such a strong literary identity in its own right that it is natural to see it as an original work; but this is a mistake. Those of its champions who laud it as ‘a literary masterpiece from the age of Shakespeare’ and suchlike are more often than not praising early sixteenth-​ century prose unawares: it has been calculated from random sampling that 83 per cent of the Authorized Version’s New Testament and 76 per cent of its Old Testament are taken verbatim from Tyndale.6 This should not surprise us, given that the book was intended from the first to be merely a revision of the previous authorised version (the Bishops’ Book of 1568), which was itself a revision of its predecessor (the Great Bible of 1539), which in turn was largely a compilation of William Tyndale’s translations from the 1520s and Miles Coverdale’s from the 1530s. No record of the Authorized Version is to be found in the Stationer’s Register of new books, for the simple reason that it was not considered to be a new translation, still less a new book, but merely a new edition of an old one.7 In contrast, the Restoration Book of Common Prayer does not have such a strong individual identity. It is true that church noticeboards throughout England and Wales still announce services as ‘1662’, but the reality behind that apparently precise date is chronologically fuzzy. Those attending a ‘1662’ service in England or Wales today will most likely find themselves confronted with the words of its 1928 revision. This is partly because of the success of The Shorter Prayer Book, which found its way into many pews after the Second World War and which blurred the distinction between ‘1662’ and ‘1928’ for generations of churchgoers. Since 2000, when the Church of England adopted a new service book, versions of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer services of morning prayer, evening prayer and Holy Communion, with further tweaks, were included alongside more modern orders. As the preface to Common Worship disarmingly admits, these services are not Book of Common Prayer proper but ‘the services of The Book of Common Prayer as they are used today’.8 While fans of the Authorized Version tend to exaggerate its originality and ignore its debt to Tudor antecedents, devotees of the Book of Common Prayer err in the other direction, and tend to attribute everything between its covers to the sole authorship of Thomas Cranmer, regardless of when it was written. The result is that Cranmer usually gets the credit both for Robert Sanderson’s ponderous preface (‘It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England … to keep the mean between two extremes’) and for Edward Reynolds’s stirring General Thanksgiving (‘We bless thee for our 126

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer creation, preservation, and all the blessings of this life; but above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ’), both of which were added in 1662, a century after Cranmer’s execution.9 This is in a way understandable. The Restoration Prayer Book is recognisably the same book as the 1604 Book of Common Prayer, which was itself not so different from the 1559 version, which in turn was in all essentials the same as that of 1552. It has been estimated that the 1662 version lost 4,500 words from the previous edition and gained 10,500. Admittedly, that sounds a lot; but not all the changes were to the words of the services. Many affected only the rubrics and the prefatory matter, which would have been far less noticeable to lay worshippers. Brian Cummings, whose recent edition of the Book of Common Prayer helpfully presents the texts of 1549, 1559 and 1662, concludes that ‘anyone who compares the various versions now might still be surprised how close 1662 is in substance to 1552. It is more of an old book than a new book’.10 One reason why both the Authorized Version of the Bible and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer have been victims of mistaken identity is our need to identify a definite author. Both books were in effect the products of committees, but it is difficult to accept that readers can be affected so personally and for so many centuries by an impersonal process. Cranmer, whose conscience during his last hours on earth was famously torn first one way then another, strikes us as the perfect author for a liturgy which seems at times to be confessionally elusive. The magisterial style of the Authorized Version, on the other hand, calls for an equally magisterial author, and it is not surprising to hear that, in the United States, it is often credited to King James VI and I himself, or even to St James.11 No doubt this need also explains the frequently heard suggestion (heard more frequently now that the internet has given free rein to conspiracy theories) that Shakespeare had a hand in the work.12 Needless to say, the story of how both texts came about is a good deal more complicated. To that story we now turn.

‘Not justly to be excepted against’: the genesis and early evolution of the Authorized Version

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y an interesting irony, the Authorized Version was born, or at any rate conceived, out of dissatisfaction with the Book of Common Prayer. Radical English clergy had petitioned their new King on his way down from Scotland in 1603. Claiming to be ‘all groaning as under a common burden of human rites and ceremonies’, they asked ‘to be eased and relieved’ from subscription to the Prayer Book. Some of them had accepted it, they explained, only because otherwise the Church would have been deprived of 127

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From Republic to Restoration the benefit of their ministry.13 They neglected to mention that they would have been equally deprived of the benefit of their stipends. This ‘Millenary Petition’ (so named after the thousand signatures it was said to have attracted –​the original no longer exists, though its principal demands can be reconstructed from other sources) rehearsed some of the objections that had been raised against the Prayer Book under Edward and Elizabeth. It is, however, significant that the petitioners targeted not the substance of the Prayer Book, the services and prayers themselves, but its rubrics. Directions to use the sign of the cross in baptism, and the ring in the marriage service, and to wear the surplice, along with references to ‘the priest’ and ‘absolution’, all smacked overmuch of popery. Puritans did have criticisms of the script as well as of the stage directions, but the petitioners did not mention them on this occasion, either for reasons of brevity or because they wished to strengthen their case by highlighting only those aspects of the book for which there was no manifest support in Scripture.14 Nonetheless, the book’s status as a conductor of Puritan lightning was undiminished: its shortcomings were placed at the head of the Millenary Petition’s demands. The petition was heeded. Early the following year, 1604, the King summoned the leading churchmen of his new realm –​bishops and Puritans –​ to a conference at Hampton Court. The issues raised by the petition were discussed, but in the event the Puritans came away from the conference with little to show for their protest. Some minor victories were won, such as deleting from the Prayer Book the rubric permitting laypeople to administer emergency baptism, which Puritans claimed allowed women a toehold in the Church’s ministry; but otherwise the Elizabethan book of 1559 emerged largely unchanged. The one solid achievement the Puritans could claim had not even been on their agenda, namely John Reynolds’s proposal at the conference for a new Bible translation to address the linguistic shortcomings of previous versions. Reynolds’s objection was to the quality of the Bible passages included in the Prayer Book. These were taken from Henry VIII’s Great Bible of 1539, the deficiencies of which had become increasingly evident over the course of sixty years. The Geneva Bible of 1560, which had been produced by English refugees able to draw upon cutting-​edge Continental biblical scholarship, offered generally sounder readings. In addition, its numerous aids for the reader, consisting of maps, diagrams and extensive expository notes in the margin, had made it the Bible of choice for the Elizabethan home. The ecclesiastical establishment also attempted to update and correct the Great Bible, and from 1568 the ‘Bishops’ Bible’ gradually supplanted it in the nation’s pulpits. But as a work of scholarship and as vernacular Holy Writ it left much to be desired. Most of the bishops entrusted with the work of translation were not gifted linguists (few of 128

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer them were proficient in Hebrew, for example) and some seem to have been distinctly lukewarm about the project: the bishop of Rochester, given the Psalms to translate, and the bishops of Norwich and Chichester, entrusted with the Apocrypha, apparently dodged their homework completely.15 Even when bishops did the work assigned them, the resulting translation was Latinate and overblown.16 However, the combination of the verbosely formal Bishops’ Bible in church and the accessible Geneva Bible in the home was one that seems to have served people well. If Shakespeare’s use of the Bible is indicative, it seems that many Elizabethans were equally familiar with both.17 The validity of Reynolds’s criticism of the biblical passages in the Prayer Book would therefore have been widely acknowledged by 1604. So it is strange that the examples of poor translation Reynolds offered the King were trivial, and seem to smack more of pedantry than of any desire to edify the faithful. That, at least, is the impression given by the account of the conference provided by William Barlow, who was unsympathetic to the Puritans’ cause.18 But if Reynolds believed the King could be persuaded simply to remove the Great Bible passages from the Book of Common Prayer and replace them with material from the Geneva Bible, he was mistaken. James (according to Barlow) was dissatisfied with all the English Bibles he had seen –​above all with the Geneva, which in its marginal notes urged disobedience to princes.19 The King instead resolved to commission a fresh translation of the whole Bible, not just of the pericopes used in the liturgy. The academic shortcomings of the Bishops’ Bible would be avoided by having the work done by scholars and by involving prelates only at the approval stage. The political shortcomings of the Geneva Bible would be avoided by omitting marginalia altogether. The King’s design for a new translation was put into effect. By the end of June that year, the team of about fifty translators had been assembled and had received royal approval. They were divided into six companies, two each based in Oxford, Cambridge and Westminster, and the various books of the Bible and Apocrypha were apportioned between them. The translators were chosen principally for their linguistic ability and were among the ablest scholars of their generation. Naturally they were also among the busiest, and included heads of houses like Reynolds (president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), college fellows such as Barlow (of Trinity Hall, Cambridge; soon to be elevated to the bishopric of Rochester), and Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster. Their work was not rushed, as the Bishops’ Bible had been; but the fact that the project took over six years from inception to completion should not be seen as proof of indolence either. The sprightly letter from the translators to the reader prefaced to the 1611 Authorized Version explained why the project had taken them longer 129

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From Republic to Restoration than the mere seventy-​two days that the authors of the Septuagint, according to legend, had required: [T]‌he worke hath not bene hudled vp in 72. dayes, but hath cost the workemen, as light as it seemeth, the paines of twise seuen times seuentie two dayes and more: matters of such weight and consequence are to bee speeded with maturitie: for in a businesse of moment a man feareth not the blame of conuenient slacknesse.20

In one respect the commission given the translators, simply to revise and improve the Bishops’ Bible, seems very limited, and explains why questions might have been asked about the time taken to complete it. However, it is evident that they interpreted this brief very broadly, not only comparing the English with the original languages (Hebrew, ‘Chaldean’ or Aramaic and Greek), but also with the most recent Latin and vernacular translations, in order to hit upon the mot juste. The translators’ preface explained the process. Neither did wee thinke much to consult the Translators or Commentators, Chaldee, Hebrew, Syrian, Greeke, or Latine, no nor the Spanish, French, Italian, or Dutch; neither did we disdaine to reuise that which we had done, and to bring backe to the anuill that which we had hammered: but hauing and vsing as great helps as were needfull, and fearing no reproch for slownesse, nor coueting praise for expedition, wee haue at the length, through the good hand of the Lord upon vs, brought the worke to that passe that you see.21

The preface tells only half the story. The translation team included William Bedwell, England’s leading Arabist, which suggests that his colleagues were keen to apply the lessons of comparative Semitic philology to the Bible’s Hebrew and Aramaic. Many, perhaps a majority, of the team had facility with Hebrew, and we know that the First Oxford Company under Reynolds, at least, had access to the important rabbinic commentaries of Moses Maimonides and David Kimchi, among others. The work was painstaking, and even included efforts to identify the precise species of flora and fauna to which the biblical writers referred.22 The relationship of the Authorized Version to the Bishops’ Bible is often summarised in the self-​deprecating words of the translators’ preface: ‘Truly (good Christian Reader) wee neuer thought from the beginning, that we should need to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better.’ However, the continuation of this sentence gives a more just summary both of their intention and of their methods: ‘or out of many ones, one principall good one, not iustly to be excepted against; that hath bene our indeauour, that our marke’.23

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer The Authorized Version: a book of comprehension?

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espite the status it eventually achieved as the definitive English Bible, the Authorized Version had been intended, by all parties at Hampton Court, principally to supply the deficiencies of the biblical translations prescribed for Book of Common Prayer services. This liturgical function was announced in its very title (‘Appointed to be read in Churches’), and by the inclusion in the front matter to the first edition of elements more appropriate to a prayer book than to a Bible: a calendar indicating the portion of the Psalter and the lessons for morning and evening prayer to be read daily, and the chief dates in the Christian year; an almanac setting out the dates of the movable feasts for the following thirty-​nine years; a table for calculating the date of Easter in any year; and a further table and calendar setting out how (in accordance with the principles of the Prayer Book), the Psalter was to be read once a month and the entire Bible in the course of a year.24 All these aids were, of course, already present among the Prayer Book’s preliminaries, and their inclusion in the Bible could be seen as unnecessary, or even as a deliberate provocation of the ‘godly’, who generally objected as much to set lectionaries as to set prayers.25 Whatever the reason for the Authorized Version’s liturgical preliminaries, they corroborate Lori Anne Ferrell’s verdict that it ‘was not designed to be a Bible for study and instruction but a text aimed at supporting the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer’.26 The Authorized Version was therefore closely correlated with the Prayer Book. It was the sole beneficiary of Archbishop Laud’s efforts to drive the Geneva Bible out of England. And it was more explicitly a royal Bible than any since Henry VIII’s of 1539. One might have expected that the Authorized Version would have become a hated symbol of the high Anglican royalist establishment, and that during the Commonwealth it would have been suppressed at least as thoroughly as the Prayer Book itself, and free rein given once more to the Geneva Bible. That this did not happen must surely be regarded as one of the clearest examples of continuity in an age of upheaval. The warrant to publish Authorized Versions simply passed from one king’s printer (Robert Barker, who died in 1645) to others (Henry Hills and John Field). The royal arms still appeared in the book and even the famously effusive dedication to his ‘most Sacred Majesty’ King James remained until 1652. Cromwell granted the monopoly to print the Authorized Version to Hills and Field in 1656, and business carried on as usual.27 This is not to suggest that the Authorized Version escaped criticism entirely under the Commonwealth; but what criticism existed was largely concerned with relatively minor details, and in any case came too late in the day to effect any change. An official attempt to revise the translation

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From Republic to Restoration was begun in January 1657, when Parliament’s Grand Committee for Religion entrusted the task to a sub-​committee. We are told that it met frequently and that a great deal of work was done in identifying mistakes in the English translation. It conceded nonetheless that the Authorized Version was ‘the best of any translation in the world’.28 This was just as well, for the Restoration put a premature end to the sub-​committee’s proceedings. Similarly, it was not until 1659 that a critique of the Authorized Version appeared in print, Robert Gell’s modestly entitled Essay toward the Amendment of the Last English Translation of the Bible. The essay was in fact a substantial tome, but (as with Whitelocke’s committee) the need for extensive revision was not seen as pressing, and Gell himself granted that the Authorized Version was so exact ‘that it needs no essay towards the amendment of it’. This half-​hearted blast of the trumpet was also the last printed attack on the Authorized Version to appear in the seventeenth century.29 Although some may still have hankered after the Geneva version, the ‘last English translation of the Bible’ proved to be beyond substantive criticism. A good indication of the extent to which the Authorized Version had supplanted the Geneva Bible in the hearts and minds of the majority is provided by the phenomenon of the Authorized Version with Geneva notes. Between 1642 and 1715, at least eight editions of the Authorized Version were printed with the marginalia abstracted from the Geneva Bible, despite the obvious drawback that the annotations were keyed to a different translation.30 This number of editions over a relatively long period does not mean that these hybrids flooded the market, though there was clearly some continuing demand for them; but the fact that they exist at all says much for the adaptability of the Authorized Version. (In fairness, it is worth pointing out that the Geneva notes themselves were also adaptable. Despite the fulminations of King James, Archbishop Laud and others, the vast majority of the notes were simple aids to understanding. The anti-​monarchical and anti-​prelatical content which attracts the attention of modern scholars was a small proportion of the whole.) We can propose with some confidence that the adaptability of the Authorized Version assisted its acceptance across a broad range of religious opinions, and that there is some basis for designating it as a sort of book of comprehension in a way that the Restoration Prayer Book would not be.31

‘We know it impossible … to please all’: the genesis of the Restoration Book of Common Prayer I went with my Wife to London to celebrate Christmas day … Sermon Ended, as [the minister] was giving us the holy Sacrament, the Chapell was surrounded with Souldiers: All the Communicants and Assembly surprised & kept Prisoners by them,

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer some in the house, others carried away … These wretched miscreants, held their muskets against us as we came up to receive the Sacred Elements, as if they would have shot us at the Altar.32

The diarist John Evelyn gives here a striking example of the intimidation which users of the Book of Common Prayer could expect to suffer at the hands of the authorities, even as late in the life of the Commonwealth as 1657. An irony which might have occurred to some of these communicants as they queued at musket-​point was that similar scenes had been played out exactly one hundred years before, when use of the Prayer Book had last been criminalised, under Bloody Mary. In the space of a century, the symbol of militant Protestantism had itself become anathema to other militant Protestants. The melancholy incident also illustrates another round in the battle of the books. The Authorized Version of the Bible had finally triumphed over its rival, the Geneva Bible, in 1644. Thereafter, it went from strength to strength. By contrast, the Prayer Book fared much less well against its Genevan nemesis. In 1645 it was banned by Parliament and the fixed liturgy was replaced by a handbook for clergy on the Continental Protestant model, the Westminster Directory. The use of the Prayer Book was now punishable by heavy fines and, for repeated offences, by imprisonment, to say nothing of the bully-​boy tactics experienced by Evelyn and his wife. Why had the Book of Common Prayer become such an object of hatred and distrust to the regime? The reason lay in the distant past, in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign. By the later 1560s, the initial euphoria at the accession of a Protestant queen had evaporated and many of the hotter sort of Protestant felt disappointed by the limitations of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion. They were frustrated that the outward appearance of the Church of England did not match the reformed message it proclaimed, and laid the blame almost entirely on the Book of Common Prayer. On the one hand, they claimed that its prayers (especially the Collects and the Litany) too slavishly followed the medieval forms from which they had been adapted. Fixed forms of prayer were in any case inimical to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit which, they believed, could find expression most readily through the impromptu prayers of the clergy.33 On the other hand, its rubrics permitted the use of liturgical props, costumes and gestures, which had no place in a fully reformed Church: the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, of the ring in matrimony, the wearing of a surplice by the minister, and the custom of kneeling to receive Communion, for example, all had ‘the outward show of evil, from which we must abstain’.34 These objections were published in the anonymous Admonition to the Parliament of 1572, which marked the beginning of a long battle against the Prayer Book from within the Church.

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From Republic to Restoration As we have seen, the same litany of complaints (including complaints about the Litany) occasioned the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. To the Jacobean establishment, the objections of the Admonitioners and their spiritual successors must have seemed mere quibbles over matters indifferent to the faith, and this undoubtedly explains their readiness to grant only the most trivial concessions to them. But to the critics, these vestiges of popery were worse than the real thing, which at least made no claim to be reformed. The fear that they might even act as Trojan horses, allowing the revival of popery in the English Church, seemed to be fully realised in the following reign. A group of divines under William Laud (Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 until his execution in 1645) made a determined effort to restore the Psalmist’s ‘beauty of holiness’ to the Church of England by means of a return to medieval ritual. Key measures included railing off the altar. This had the effect of creating a most un-​Protestant sanctum sanctorum, a sanctuary for the priest from which the laity was effectively excluded. More practically, the rail physically prevented the holy table from being moved into the nave during Communion in the manner prescribed by the Prayer Book rubric.35 Indeed, the Prayer Book as it stood was an obstacle to the further medievalising of the liturgy, and so recourse was made to Cranmer’s first Book of Common Prayer of 1549. This version contained a service of Communion which was essentially an Anglicised and lightly revised form of the Sarum Rite, shorn of its sacrificial and Mariological elements, which could be interpreted in a manner supportive of a doctrine of Christ’s real physical presence in the consecrated bread and wine. It was this version which formed the basis of Laud’s 1637 Scottish Prayer Book which occasioned Jenny Geddes’s famous faldstool protest (‘Dare ye say Mass in my lug?’) and precipitated the civil wars.36 Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that Parliament would wish to excise the Prayer Book from the body ecclesiastic at the earliest opportunity. Not only was it seen, as before, as containing the dregs of popery; but Laud and his supporters had demonstrated how easily these dregs could be reconstituted into a potent, poisonous vintage. The Westminster Directory, which replaced it (properly, The Directory for the Public Worship of God), was, as its name suggests, less of a book of prayers than a book of directions, and therefore designed for clerical, not congregational, use. Its framers expected the clergy to be gifted and devout enough, and sufficiently confident in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to utter the appropriate prayer at the appropriate moment without having to resort to a set form. The congregation, in turn, was expected to remain silently attentive to the minister’s impromptu petitions: their verbal participation –​the ‘amens’ and longer set responses which Cranmer had incorporated from the monastic offices –​was struck out from the Directory. 134

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer In the event, it proved easier for Parliament to eradicate the Prayer Book from churches than it did to uproot it from the people’s affections. The Directory was never popular, and seems to have been adopted only in a minority of parishes. Prayer Book services, especially for the burial of the dead, and at times recited from memory, continued to be used. Indeed, it has been claimed that ‘[t]‌here is much more evidence of clandestine and not so clandestine use of the banned Book of Common Prayer during this period than there is for the use of the Directory’.37 But, as Evelyn’s account of his own arrest on Christmas Day in 1657 shows, Prayer Book worship remained the exception rather than the rule. Evelyn’s diary entry for Advent Sunday three years earlier gives a flavour of the difficulties he and like-​ minded worshippers outside the capital city faced: There being no Office at the church but extemporary prayers after the Presbyterian way, for now all forms were prohibited, and most of the preachers were usurpers, I seldom went to church upon solemn feasts; but, either went to London, where some of the orthodox sequestered divines did privately use the Common Prayer, administer sacraments, etc., or else I procured one to officiate in my house; wherefore, on the 10th, Dr Richard Owen, the sequestered minister of Eltham, preached to my family in my library, and gave us the Holy Communion.38

Sympathetic ministers were not always available, however, and on occasion Evelyn was forced to celebrate such feasts by reading the services himself. The Prayer Book had been banned for nearly a decade when Evelyn wrote this entry. By the time of the Restoration, it had been absent from public life for fifteen years. That was long enough for a generation of young adults to grow up without significant exposure to it, and for its words and rhythms to begin to pass from people’s memories more generally. Such was the view even of its supporters.39 The testimony of another diarist, Samuel Pepys, concerning a tentative anticipation of the Prayer Book’s restoration, seems to confirm it: when in November 1660 his parish priest began ‘to nibble at the Common Prayer, by saying “Glory to the Father, &c” after he had read the two psalms’, the congregation ‘had been so little used to it that they could not tell what to answer’.40 Its memory –​or at least that of the doxology –​was no longer green. And while communal memories might have been jogged by recourse to printed copies, even these seem to have been purged thoroughly in the capital, where reportedly only one copy could be found by 1659.41 Opponents had good grounds for hoping that ‘the mass in English’ had been dealt a mortal blow by legislation and desuetude. They would have been further encouraged by King Charles II’s Declaration of Breda of April 1660. This promised ‘liberty to tender consciences’, which could be interpreted as liberty to reject the Prayer Book 135

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From Republic to Restoration and continue to use the Directory.42 In their first loyal address to the King, the Presbyterians warned that inasmuch as the Book of Common Prayer hath in it many things that are justly offensive and need amendment, [and] hath been long discontinued  … if it be again imposed, will inevitably follow sad divisions, and widening of the breaches which your majesty is now endeavouring to end.43

To the authors, the return of the ‘long discontinued’ Prayer Book, ‘if it again be imposed’, was by no means inevitable. However, their tactic of threatening the King with civil unrest if he failed to do their will was counter-​productive, and in his Worcester House Declaration six months later, the younger Charles showed that he was proof against intimidation, coming down explicitly in favour of the Prayer Book, and implicitly against the Directory: we do esteem the Liturgy of the Church of England, contained in the Book of Common Prayer, and by law established, to be the best we have seen; and we believe that we have seen all that are extant and used in this part of the world.

This clear endorsement occurred, however, within a paragraph announcing that ministers with tender consciences could continue not to use the Prayer Book, at least until the disagreements could be settled.44 Its effect was to grant the Directory an extra lease of life, and again could be taken to mean that the restoration of the Prayer Book, in all its ‘offensiveness’, was not inevitable. The Worcester House Declaration promised a royal commission to settle the question of the nation’s worship, and this duly met in April 1661 at the Master’s Lodge of the old Savoy Hospital. The Savoy Conference, as it became known, was carefully balanced, with twelve commissioners from each side of the divide. By rights, the senior bishop present (the Archbishop of York) should have taken the chair. But he stepped down in favour of the Bishop of London, Gilbert Sheldon. This was not just a recognition that Sheldon, who was Master of the Savoy, was on home turf but a bit of pre-​ arranged ‘business’: it was well known that Sheldon had the King’s ear, and the King had Sheldon’s. The Savoy Conference can be seen as a replay of the Hampton Court Conference. Both were summoned shortly after the accession of a new Stuart king, both were supposed to compose differences over the Prayer Book, and both were scrupulously balanced, at least numerically, between the contesting parties. But 1661 was a rather different proposition from 1604. After long years of conflict, positions on both sides were deeply entrenched, with one side scenting the opportunity of exacting significant concessions over an already moribund liturgy, the other convinced that the 136

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer restoration of the monarchy and the episcopacy necessarily entailed full restoration of the Book of Common Prayer as well. But which Book of Common Prayer was it to be? The 1604 version, which emerged from Hampton Court, would seem to have offered a reasonable compromise. But among the bishops assembled at the Savoy were John Cosin and Matthew Wren, men who kept the Laudian spirit alive. For them, the beauty of holiness was best exemplified by Cranmer’s 1549 Prayer Book, especially its service of Holy Communion (‘commonly called the Mass’), which they saw as essentially the medieval Sarum Rite in English, though shorn of the worst excesses of popery. Indeed, they had supported Laud’s ill-​fated 1637 revision (the Scottish Prayer Book), which had been an attempt to strip the Book of Common Prayer back to its original version. Wren made good use of his eighteen years’ detention in the Tower during the Commonwealth by preparing his Advices on revising the Prayer Book, and these were duly incorporated by Cosin into his famous ‘Durham Book’ of 1660.45 In any attempt to update the Prayer Book to make it more acceptable to Restoration England, it was obvious that the ‘Back to 1549’ movement would be a formidable counter-​balance to the ‘Forwards with the Directory’ interest. The Savoy Conference therefore met with opinions on both sides strongly polarised. Sheldon invited the Presbyterians to provide a list of objections to the Prayer Book for the bishops to consider. (This followed the procedure outlined in the Worcester House Declaration, but it had the effect of putting the Presbyterian party at a tactical disadvantage. Rather than negotiating with the bishops on an equal footing, the Presbyterians became in effect petitioners presenting a case for change.)46 The Presbyterians’ Exceptions to the Prayer Book, consisting of eighteen general points and seventy-​eight particulars, were completed in less than three weeks. In a larger sense, they had been in preparation for ninety years, since the first Admonition controversy, a point enthusiastically underlined in the preface to the Exceptions, which states that ‘many godly and learned men have from the beginning all along earnestly desired the alteration of many things therein’.47 Most of the points raised at Hampton Court in 1604 were raised again at the Savoy Hospital. All were aimed at giving ministers more freedom: freedom from formalistic ritual and questionable theology; freedom for spontaneous exercise of their spiritual gifts. The Presbyterians objected to outward forms, such as the use of the sign of the cross in baptism (which recalled medieval sacramentals), kneeling to receive communion, and the need for ministers to wear the surplice. They objected to the many ‘repetitions and responsals’ and to the alternate reading, by minister and congregation, of verses of the Psalms, on the grounds that the result was ‘a 137

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From Republic to Restoration confused murmur in the congregation’.48 They objected to the exclusive use of set prayers, on the grounds that some ministers are blessed with the gift of extemporising and should be allowed to exercise it in God’s service.49 The chief theological objection, although it is somewhat buried, appearing only fifteenth in the list of eighteen general exceptions, was to the principle known to later generations as ‘the charitable assumption’: XV. That whereas throughout the several offices, the phrase is such as presumes all persons (within the communion of the church) to be regenerated, converted, and in an actual state of grace (which, had ecclesiastical discipline been truly and vigorously executed, in the exclusion of scandalous and obstinate sinners, might be better supposed; but there having been, and still being a confessed want of that (as in the liturgy is acknowledged,) it cannot be rationally admitted in the utmost latitude of charity:) we desire that this may be reformed.50

The charitable assumption, that all who partake of the Church’s ministrations are among the elect, was built in to the fabric of the Book of Common Prayer by Cranmer, and indeed it is difficult to see what other approach the liturgy of a national Church could take. But by the seventeenth century, such a notion smacked of Arminianism, which to Presbyterians seemed at best to take the doctrine of predestination too lightly, and at worst was an ill-​disguised form of papistry. The limits upon the exceptors’ ‘utmost latitude of charity’ is clear from this objection to a petition in the Litany: Rubric [sic]: That it may please thee to preserve all that travel by land or water, all women labouring with child, all sick persons and young children, and to shew thy pity upon all prisoners and captives. Exception: We desire the term ‘all’ may be advised upon, as seeming liable to just exceptions; and that it may be considered, whether it may not better be put indefinitely, ‘those that travel’ &c., rather than universally.51

The grounds for this apparently mean-​spirited objection are obscure, unless it reflects the general antipathy to the charitable assumption. However, it illustrates that the Exceptions brings together a catalogue of long-​standing grievances of different magnitude, some clearly important, some apparently petty. The result was uneven, for reasons that the compilers themselves admitted: ‘Some [parts of the Prayer Book], we grant, are of inferior consideration, verbal rather than material … but some there be that seem to be corrupt, and to carry in them a repugnancy to the rule of gospel.’52 The very comprehensiveness of the Exceptions was a second tactical error. Some evident deficiencies in the Prayer Book, which would have been acknowledged as such by a broad range of churchmen, are interspersed with, and vastly outnumbered by, a host of seemingly trivial objections. The overall impression is therefore of a long list of small-​minded or vexatious complaints, and it offered the bishops some easy targets while 138

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer allowing them to sidestep the greater issues. For instance, the objection that the collects are too short was countered by the Mozartian response that they are as long as they need to be, and that there are examples in Scripture of much shorter prayers.53 To the somewhat mocking objection that ‘the whole body of the common-​prayer also consisteth very much of meer generals: as, “to have our prayers heard, to be kept from all evil, and from all enemies, and all adversity, that we might do God’s will”; without any mention of the particulars in which these generals exist’, the bishops observed drily that that the Presbyterians’ pastiche was in fact a tolerable paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer, ‘so that they must reform that before they can pretend to mend our liturgy’.54 Exchanges such as this show that despite the desire on both sides to conduct their dealings in a reasonable spirit as befitted a royal commission, feelings ran high. For the Presbyterians, it was a matter of spiritual life and death. Never far below the surface of their critiques was a sensitivity to the danger represented by the Book of Common Prayer, bluntly summed up by a Cheshire curate earlier in the century: ‘I am perswaded that the reading of Common Prayer hath beene the meanes of sending many souls into hell.’55 For supporters of the Prayer Book, memories of the sacrifices they and their comrades had suffered under the Commonwealth were still vivid. In their response to the Exceptions, they were quick to recall the ‘loss or hazard of estates, lives, and fortunes’, which adherence to the Book of Common Prayer after 1645 entailed.56 The Savoy Conference had been held under very different circumstances from those which prevailed at the time of the Hampton Court Conference. And yet the end results in both cases were similar. The opponents of the Prayer Book came away with little but the promise that the book’s Bible readings for Sundays would be replaced by better translations. (It was not until 1662 that the Authorized Version was used for this purpose. For reasons of scansion, the Psalter remained in its old Coverdale translation.) In September, Sheldon came across the Cosin/​Wren Durham Book. Not only did Sheldon decide to use this as the base text for revising the Prayer Book, but also recruited Cosin himself as an adviser. Here was an opportunity for the royalists to complete their revenge by imposing on the Restoration Church of England not the moderate Jacobethan Prayer Book of 1559/​1604 but the Laudian experiment of 1637, turning the clock back to the very moment before the civil wars began. The conference having closed, the work of liturgical revision now passed to Convocation, which opened in November. It did its work quickly, in well under a month. Further concessions were made to the Presbyterian interest, though some of those (such as the omission of the Benedicite, a canticle drawn from the Apocrypha) were withdrawn again. However, the 139

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From Republic to Restoration wholesale Laudianisation of the liturgy, which might have been expected, did not happen. In particular, the Durham Book’s canon, which would have gone far towards introducing a Catholic understanding of Eucharistic sacrifice and also a doctrine of the real presence to the Church of England, was firmly excluded. It is true that some of the fruits of Cosin’s labours can be found in the final version, but not anything to frighten the horses. So, in the Communion service there is the merest suspicion of a prayer for the dead (‘[a]‌nd we also bless thy holy Name, for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear’).57 The ‘manual acts’ (instructions to the priest as to the position and actions of his hands during the blessing of the bread and wine) were restored from 1549, but not the epiclesis (the invocation of the Holy Spirit, which could be interpreted as the priest requesting some physical change in the bread and wine).58 And while in 1552/​59, any bread and wine left over from the service, consecrated or not, was to be taken home by the incumbent for his own domestic use, now any consecrated elements left over were to be consumed by the priest and communicants at the end of the service ‘reverently’.59 This hinted at some transformation of the elements following the prayer of consecration without stating as much explicitly. In spite of these changes (which are more evident in the rubrics than in the prayers and therefore largely invisible to the worshipper), the final draft of the revised Prayer Book was in essence that of 1604. The opportunity was also taken to update the Prayer Book in ways unconnected with Laudian reforms. If anything, the two new additional services address Presbyterian concerns. The first was a form of adult baptism, necessitated partly by the neglect of infant baptism by Baptist families in England, and partly by the need for a rite appropriate for adult converts to Christianity among native populations in colonies abroad. Another was prayers for use at sea, inspired by those introduced during the Interregnum. The new book was signed off by both Convocations on 21 December 1661 and was established as law by the Act of Uniformity of May 1662, to come into effect on 24 August –​St Bartholomew’s Day or, in the memory of the nonconformists, Black Bartholomew’s Day.

The Restoration Book of Common Prayer: a book of division?

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t cannot be denied that the 1662 Book of Common Prayer does reflect a degree of Restoration triumphalism. Open it at the new preface and one can see an example of victors’ justice and victors’ history-​writing. The motives of those who opposed the book, in whole or in part, during and before the Savoy Conference, are here routinely given an uncomplimentary construction: 140

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer [T]‌hose men who under the late usurped powers had made it a great part of their business to render the people disaffected thereunto [towards the Book of Common Prayer], saw themselves in point of reputation and interest concerned (unless they would freely acknowledge themselves to have erred, which such men are very hardly brought to do) with their utmost endeavours to hinder the restitution thereof. But such alterations as were tendered to us (by what persons, under what pretences, or to what purpose soever tendered) as seemed to us in any degree requisite or expedient, we have willingly, and of our own accord assented unto. [A]‌lthough we know it impossible (in such variety of apprehensions, humours and interests, as are in the world) to please all; nor can expect that men of factious, peevish, and perverse spirits should be satisfied with anything that can be done in this kind by any other than themselves: Yet we have good hope, that what is here presented, and hath been by the Convocations of both Provinces with great diligence examined and approved, will be also well accepted and approved by all sober, peaceable, and truly conscientious Sons of the Church of England.60

Robert Sanderson, Bishop of Lincoln and the author of this preface, clearly did not know how to be gracious in victory.61 The route from this preface to St Bartholomew’s Day, 1662, which saw the secession of one fifth of the Church of England’s clergy who could not in conscience use the new-​old service book, seems to be not only direct but also inevitable.62 From the perspective of the nonconformists (who have typically referred to this secession as ‘the Great Ejection’, and who nowadays would have a strong prima facie claim for constructive dismissal), the Restoration Book of Common Prayer certainly was a book of division. From another perspective, however, the 1662 Prayer Book can be seen as a successful exercise in damage limitation. Sheldon’s decision to use Cosin’s Durham Book as the basis of Prayer Book revision seemed to raise the spectre of a return to Cranmer’s 1549 draft. This had been tried before, disastrously, in Scotland in 1637, and Laud’s liturgical innovations in England had met with opposition not just from Puritans but from a broad spectrum of Church of England opinion.63 In the event, remarkably little of the spirit of William Laud survived into the final text of 1662. There were some tweaks, of course, which differentiate 1662 from the most ‘Protestant’ of all the prayer books, Cranmer’s revision of 1552. But the end result was far closer to the Elizabethan Prayer Book of 1559 and the Jacobean of 1604 than to the Caroline versions. In fact, it was probably never intended that the Durham Book should influence the finished article. Its co-​option might have been a diplomatic move by Sheldon to keep the Cosin–​Wren axis happy. Or it might simply

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From Republic to Restoration have been a convenient text for the commission to use as the basis for its own deliberations. Had the 1662 Prayer Book been more dependent on the Durham Book, and had it therefore approximated to the 1637 Prayer Book, it would have alienated the majority of clergy and laity in the land. The prospect of widespread ecclesiastical rebellion, by laity as much as clergy, would have been a real possibility in a country where civil war was a not-​too-​distant memory. A via media between Cranmer’s rite of 1547 and Cranmer’s rite of 1552, even at the risk of losing two thousand ministers, no matter how great their pastoral gifts, must have seemed to the newly restored King to have been a far wiser course to steer.

Conclusion

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o describe the relationship between the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer at the Restoration in Swiftian terms as a battle of the books is both appealing and misleading. It is appealing because, from one point of view, there was a winner. Some of those members of the Church of England who awoke on 24 August 1662 to find themselves unchurched by the Act of Uniformity, because of their unwillingness to use the Prayer Book, would seek freedom of worship in America. Fleeing from the imposition of one book, they took with them another. The Authorized Version became a symbol of their liberty, and would become a worldwide publishing phenomenon not least because it became an American Bible.64 The Book of Common Prayer would also be carried, and be established, worldwide. But by a process of local adaptation, starting with the 1789 book of the Episcopal Church of America, its identity overseas would become diluted. This narrative is simple and compelling, but it is misleading if one book is seen as an agent of unity and the other, one of division. The role of the Book of Common Prayer in occasioning an important  –​perhaps the defining  –​cleavage in the religious life of post-​Restoration Britain should not be allowed to eclipse its role in averting a far greater fragmentation of the kingdom itself. The imposition of any fixed liturgy, as opposed to a directory of worship, would have alienated some Presbyterians and Independents. The fact that the 1662 Prayer Book alienated relatively few is, in the context of the age, extraordinary. There is also a case to be made for asserting the Restoration Prayer Book’s wider contribution to the culture of the English Church and of England more generally, a role which is admittedly more frequently ascribed to the Authorized Version of the Bible. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer significant in this respect because it guaranteed the essentially lay character of the national Church. By resisting the rampant clericalism which was part and parcel of both the Laudian and Presbyterian alternatives on offer, it represented no less than the victory of the laity. In rejecting the Durham Book, the 1662 Prayer Book rejected the sacerdotalism which had been part of Laud’s project, and which doctrines such as the real presence were designed to buttress. In maintaining the principle of fixed prayers and congregational responses, and in resisting calls to free ministers to conduct each service largely as they wished, the 1662 Prayer Book also resisted the cult of charisma, by which many nonconformist ministers tried to raise themselves and their cadre above the rank and file of Christians. The fact that the liturgy is fixed and cannot legally be adapted to the vagaries of ecclesiastical fashion or to the personal whims of individual celebrants serves the needs of the consumer, and ensures that the religious professional is just that, not a mediator between God and his people. The 1662 Prayer Book is not, of course, the only guarantee of the Church of England’s lay character: the fact that its supreme governor is always a lay person is also essential, as is lay representation in its legislature (formerly through Parliament, latterly through General Synod). But the Book of Common Prayer represents uniquely the everyday empowerment of the laity at the level of the parish. It may be one reason why (since the Restoration) anti-​clericalism, secularisation, and the desire to separate Church and State have not been particularly notable features of English public life, and have never attained the political status they have enjoyed in some other countries. The four-​hundredth anniversary of the Authorized Version of the Bible in 2011 garnered more attention than the three-​hundred-​and-​fiftieth anniversary of the Book of Common Prayer in the following year, partly, no doubt, because its continuing cultural value was more readily recognised, whereas the significance of the latter was restricted to its historical, its political and even its narrowly religious value.65 That is, however, to ignore what has rightly been called the ‘cultural centrality’ of the Prayer Book as ‘one of the deepest taproots of subsequent English identity’.66 The Restoration Book of Common Prayer might easily have lost that cultural centrality, had it been allied exclusively with the narrow, ritualistic churchmanship of the Laudians. Not only did its revisers consciously avoid that pitfall, but they created a liturgy which both reflected and fostered a characteristically English lay spirituality: devout, in a practical and predictable way; deeply suspicious of priestcraft and religious huckstering alike; and profoundly but unflamboyantly royalist. It not only helped to forge the identity of the English worshipper, but went some way to forging the identity of English people as a whole.

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From Republic to Restoration Notes 1 HRH The Prince of Wales is patron of the Prayer Book Society and of the King James Bible Trust. 2 Paul Lay, ‘From the Editor’, History Today, 62 (June 2012), 2. 3 www.kingjamesbibletrust.org/​news/​2011/​04/​29/​royal-​wedding [accessed 11 July  2013]. The website is no longer active, although the Trust has a continuing Web presence through a series of videos entitled ‘the YouTube Bible’, in which the likes of Boris Johnson (Isaiah 11) and Richard Dawkins (Song of Solomon 2) read their favourite passages from the Authorized Version. 4 The Royal Wedding 2011 Official Programme. Available from www.dukeandduchessofcambridge.org/​node/​5995 [accessed 20 January 2015]. 5 The order for the solemnisation of matrimony used at the royal wedding was in fact from the proposed 1928 Prayer Book, not from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The 1928 form was permitted by bishops but was blocked by Parliament and, ironically for the royal couple, did not receive royal assent. See John Maiden, National Religion and the Prayer Book Controversy, 1927–​1928, Studies in Modern British Religious History 21 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009). 6 John Nielson and Royal Skousen, ‘How Much of the King James Bible is William Tyndale’s?’, Reformation, 3 (1998), 49–​74. 7 Gordon Campbell, Bible: The Story of the King James Version, 1611–​2011 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 87. 8 ‘Preface’, Common Worship: Services and Prayers for the Church of England (London: Church House, 2000), p. ix (my emphasis). The result is that there are currently at least three versions of ‘Book of Common Prayer’ services commonly in use in the Church of England: the 1662, the 1928, and the 2000. Confusingly, all three are commonly referred to as ‘1662’. 9 See The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. by Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 748 (on Sanderson’s Preface), and p. 762 (on Reynolds’s General Thanksgiving). In an article written for the American Spectator in 2012, the Book of Common Prayer aficionado and former MP Jonathan Aitken gave due credit to the non-​Cranmerian elements of the Prayer Book, only to fall victim to another species of Cranmer-​centrism. He noted that Cranmer ‘did not hesitate to borrow from the finest spiritual writers of the time such as … Archbishop Reynolds, who authored the prayer of General Thanksgiving’, and that Coverdale’s version of the Psalms ‘had become so popular by the start of the 17th century that Cranmer did not dare replace it with the King James Version’. Cranmer is here presented as exceptionally long-​lived. He could not have borrowed anything from Bishop Reynolds (never elevated to the archiepiscopate), who was not born until thirty years after Cranmer’s martyrdom. It was even less possible for him to have used the KJV translation of the Psalms. See spectator. org/​articles/​36214/​common-​prayer-​uncommon-​beauty [accessed 12 August 2013]. 10 Brian Cummings, ‘The 1662 Prayer Book’, in Comfortable Words: Polity and Piety and the Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Stephen Platten and Christopher Woods (London: SCM Press, 2012), pp. 69–​82 (p. 81). 11 David Daniell, The Bible in English:  Its History and Influence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. xv. 12 Stephen Prickett, ‘Language within language: The King James Steamroller’, in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic, and Cultural Influences, ed. by Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 27–​44 (pp. 35–​37). 13 ‘The Millenary Petition’ in Documents Illustrative of English Church History, ed. by H. Gee and W. J. Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 509. 14 Gee and Hardy, eds, ‘Millenary Petition’, p. 511. 15 Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 340. 16 Campbell, Bible, p. 30.

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The Authorized Version and the Book of Common Prayer 17 Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark:  University of Delaware Press, 1999). 18 William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference (London:  John Windet, 1604), pp. 45–​46. On Barlow, see the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography by C. S. Knighton. 19 Barlow, Summe and Substance, p. 46. 20 ‘The translators to the reader’ in Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 790. Most copies of the Authorized Version printed today carry only the dedication to King James, and not this much fuller preface ‘to the reader’ in which Miles Smith (canon of Hereford and one of the final revisers of the Authorized Version) sets out the translators’ modus operandi. The most readily available version of the preface is to be found as an appendix to David Daniell’s The Bible in English, at pp. 775–​93. 21 ‘To the reader’ (Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 790). 22 Gareth Lloyd Jones, Helen Moore and Julian Reid, ‘Materials and Methods’, in Manifold Greatness:  The Making of the King James Bible, ed. by Helen Moore and Julian Reid (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011), pp. 87–​115. 23 ‘To the reader’ (Daniell, The Bible in English, p. 789). 24 Campbell, Bible, pp. 302–​06. 25 See Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, pp. 750–​57 for the history of the Prayer Book’s preliminaries. 26 Lori Anne Ferrell, ‘The Church of England and the English Bible, 1559–​1640’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–​1700, ed. by Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith and Rachel Willie (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 261–​71 (p. 268). I  would, however, take issue with Ferrell’s succeeding statement, that the Authorized Version ‘became a sacred companion piece to sacralized worship and has remained in that supporting role ever since’ (p. 268), for reasons given at the beginning of this essay. As a cultural artefact, the supporting role has long-​since eclipsed the star turn. 27 On the fortunes of the Authorized Version under the Commonwealth, see David Norton, A History of the Bible as Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 94–​103. On the misfortunes of Robert Barker, see Daniell, The Bible in English, pp. 451–​60. 28 Norton, Bible as Literature, p.  97, quoting Bulstrode Whitelocke, a member of the sub-​committee. 29 Ibid., p. 103. 30 These are nos 571 (1642), 620 (1649), 708 (1672), 742 (1679), 743 (1679), 782 (1683), 897 (1708), and 936 (1715) in Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible, 1525–​ 1961, ed. by Arthur Sumner Herbert (London and New York: the British and Foreign Bible Society and the American Bible Society, 1968). 31 Peter McCullough and Valentine Cunningham (in their chapter ‘Afterlives of the King James Bible, 1611–​1769’, in Manifold Greatness, ed. by Moore & Reid, pp. 139–​61) suggest ‘that Nonconformists were helped in accepting the KJB by the hybrid editions, KJB text with the Geneva notes’ (p. 157). They point out that Bunyan’s biblical quotations are mainly from the Authorized Version but often contain Geneva glosses, suggesting that he may have been using one of these hybrids. On this, see also Hannibal Hamlin, ‘Bunyan’s Biblical Progresses’ in King James Bible, ed. by Hamlin and Jones, pp. 202–​18 (p. 214). 32 Entry for 25 Dec. 1657, cited in Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, p. xli. 33 John Field, An Admonition to the Parliament (Hemel Hempstead, 1572), sig. Aiijv. 34 Ibid., sig. Avr. 35 ‘The table, hauyng at the Communion tyme a fayre whyte linen cloth upon it, shall stand in the body of the churche’ (Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, p. 124). 36 For an excellent account of the context, see Hannah Cleugh, ‘The Prayer Book in Early Stuart Society’, in Comfortable Words, ed. by Platten and Woods, pp. 35–​48. 37 Judith Maltby, ‘The Prayer Book and the Parish Church:  from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Restoration’, in The Oxford Guide to the Book of Common Prayer: A

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From Republic to Restoration Worldwide Survey, ed. by Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck (New  York:  Oxford University Press USA, 2006), pp. 79–​92 (p. 90). 38 Entry for Advent Sunday 1654, in The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by William Bray, 2 vols (New York and London: M. Walter Dunne, 1901), i, 302–​03. 39 Cummings, ‘The 1662 Prayer Book’, p.  72, citing the view of Matthew Wren, the Laudian Bishop of Ely. 40 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970–​83), i, 282 (entry for Sunday, 4 November 1660). 41 Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales, 1658–​1667 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 172. 42 The text of the Declaration of Breda can be found in Documents, ed. by Gee and Hardy, pp. 585–​88. 43 A History of Conferences and Other Proceedings Connected with the Revision of the Book of Common Prayer, From the Year 1558 to the Year 1690, ed. by Edward Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1849), p. 282. 44 Ibid., pp. 294ff. 45 The Durham Book, ed. by Geoffrey J. Cuming (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 46 Cardwell, ed., Conferences, p. 295. 47 Ibid., p. 304. 48 Ibid., p. 305. 49 Ibid., pp. 306f. 50 Ibid., p. 308. 51 Ibid., p. 316. 52 Ibid., p. 313. 53 Ibid., p. 343. 54 Ibid., pp. 309 and 345. 55 Maltby, ‘Prayer Book and the Parish Church’, p. 81. 56 Cardwell, ed., Conferences, p. 337. 57 From the Prayer for the Church Militant, 1662 (Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, p. 395). 58 From the Prayer of Consecration, 1662 (Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, p. 402). 59 From the closing rubrics for the Order for Holy Communion, 1662 (Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, p. 406). 60 Book of Common Prayer, ed. by Cummings, pp. 210f. 61 In mitigation, it should be noted that, under the Commonwealth, he had suffered deprivation of the regius chair of divinity at Oxford and, for a time, imprisonment. On the other hand, he had a track record of writing ‘strongly worded prefaces’ to collections of his sermons, aimed at Presbyterians and Independents. See J.  Sears McGee, ‘Robert Sanderson (1587–​1663)’, ODNB (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). www. oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​24627 [accessed 1 March 2016]. 62 For a recent study of the aftermath of ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’, see N.  H. Keeble, ‘Setting the Peace of the Church’: 1662 Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 63 Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ­chapter 3. 64 Campbell, Bible, p. 238. 65 ‘Of course, the Bible, in any form, especially when its language is as beautiful as the King James Version, can be read as literature pure and simple, while the Prayer Book, with its impulses of unity and devotion, appears more alien to our secular and individualistic age’ (Lay, ‘From the Editor’, 2). 66 Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 6.

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Chapter 7

Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–​65 Janet Clare

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he establishment of the Republic, the Protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy were accompanied by acts of pardon and oblivion. The 1652 Commonwealth ‘Act of General Pardon and Oblivion’ offered a free pardon  –​albeit with numerous exceptions  –​to those who took the ‘Oath of Engagement’.1 At the meeting of the First Protectorate Parliament on 4 September 1654, Cromwell stressed the necessity of ‘healing and settling’, after ‘so many changings and turnings’.2 In 1660, the Restoration ‘indemnity and oblivion act’ offered a general pardon with the exception of certain crimes and those who had been involved in the regicide. All seeds of future discords were to be buried by erasing ‘remembrance’ of the conflicts of the previous twenty years.3 Charles II’s Declaration of Breda of April 1660 had similarly sought to abolish ‘all notes of discord, separation and difference of parties’.4 In an address to both houses on 13 September 1660, Edward Hyde, Lord Chancellor, urged his audience to follow the King’s example and ‘learn this excellent art of forgetfulness’ to avoid the reanimation of divisions.5 In theory, acts of oblivion offered a template for transition from monarchy to Republic and from Republic to Restoration, while in practice high-​minded principles were to be muddied by calls for revenge, religious intoleration and the inevitable continuation of faction. In parallel with such political gestures towards civil concord, poets and dramatists accommodated themselves to the new regimes. In the preface to his Poems, published in 1656, Abraham Cowley declared that as an act of conciliation he had cast away work, including his ‘Book of the Civil War’, composed during ‘the late troubles’. Since the victor had offered a ‘general amnesty’, it behoved supporters of the defeated cause to lay down their pens as well as their swords, to give up ‘names of party, and titles of division’. Further, Cowley exhorted that no writer should keep alive by ‘artificial memory’ previous struggles, but should instead desire the ‘art of oblivion’.6 A change of regime later and practising another art of oblivion, 147

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From Republic to Restoration Cowley’s editor, Thomas Sprat, removed this passage in the posthumous edition of Cowley’s works which included his essay, An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr Abraham Cowley, in which he claimed that Cowley had had the intention of omitting the passage because ‘so much clamour’ had been raised about it. Sprat evidently felt it necessary to square Cowley’s pragmatic observation with the poet’s loyalism. According to Sprat, Cowley believed that it would be ‘a meritorious service to the king’ if loyalists could ‘insinuate into the Usurpers’ minds’ that men of his principles were now willing to be quiet and, at the same time, persuade ‘poor oppressed royalists to conceal their affections for better occasions’.7 Cowley’s advocating an art of oblivion towards the past and Sprat’s suppression of his remarks, coupled with his interpretation of Cowley’s motives, point towards ‘oblivion’ in various forms and directions as an expedient artistic practice across the period divide. Writers who had sought to revive and reframe drama during the Commonwealth were keen to distance themselves at the Restoration from their earlier activities, proclaiming their loyalty to the restored regime through new plays, revisions of old ones and in paratextual material. Yet, in examining dramatic production of the transitional years of the early Restoration –​when the regime took on a definite and secure appearance, aided and abetted, it has to be said, by an art of non-​oblivion, vilifying depictions of the previous decade –​what we see is the adaptation of practices in place during the 1650s. The reframing of drama during the Protectorate and its influence on the theatre production of the early Restoration will be the focus of this chapter. Scholars, too, have tended towards an art of oblivion with regard to the drama that not only resisted Puritan hostility, but had even gained a limited acceptance during the Commonwealth. It is not unusual in studies of Restoration theatre, or more general histories of theatre, to find the Restoration viewed as a Caroline continuum, or, more commonly, as a new era; drama was not so much revived as ‘reinvented’.8 Consequently, the survival and reconstitution of drama during the intervening decade has been largely ignored. Under the auspices of the two playing companies, Restoration theatre production brought us nearer to a recognizably modern theatre –​so goes a certain narrative. David Roberts, for instance, proposes that 1660  ‘was a watershed for how plays looked, sounded, felt and read’, claiming that Restoration theatre practice brought in a number of ‘revolutions’, including movable scenery, the playing of female parts by actresses in the theatre and the formation of a new canon.9 An examination of theatre practice from the Commonwealth through the early years of the Restoration, before the disasters of the Plague and the Great Fire, produces, however, a more nuanced revolutionary narrative. 148

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 Despite the parliamentary decrees and ordinances in 1642 and 1648 for the suppressing and abolishing of stage plays, play production was not eradicated from public life.10 The explosion of print culture, which is well-​documented by literary historians, included the production of topical, satirical plays in pamphlet form.11 It is probable that some of the many pamphlet plays –​improvising news through satirical skits on parliament, committees, the religious sects, army grandees and their wives  –​which circulated during the 1640s and 1650s were performed in venues such as inns and fairs. Some scholars have been reluctant to accept any kind of performance of the pamphlet plays and have not categorically differentiated them from the popular medium of newsbooks. I would argue, however, that pamphlet plays presented typographically as performance texts were designed for the illiterate as well as literate population and that with their potential for oral delivery they extended the propagandist function of the newsbook. Whether by being read aloud or having parts acted out, pamphlet plays conveyed and in some instances, like that of Newmarket Fair, or a Parliament Outcry of State Commodities (1649), for example, even anticipated news purveyed in the royalist mercuries.12 Pamphlet plays of the civil wars and Commonwealth retained some popularity in print and performance at the Restoration and, as will be discussed later, in the targets and characterisations of early Restoration comedies there are residues of the pamphlets’ satirical and propagandist thrust. Before more elitist audiences, resuming during the Protectorate patterns of pre-​civil war social life, plays were performed indoors, in halls, private houses and other spaces. Dorothy Osborne writing to William Temple in July 1654 tells him of a production of William Berkeley’s The Lost Lady at Knowlton in Kent in which she takes the part –​reluctantly –​of the ‘lost lady’.13 James Wright recalls private performances during ‘Oliver’s Time’ for ‘the nobility and gentry’ in ‘noblemen’s houses’, mentioning Holland House in Kensington, the home of the Earl of Holland, Henry Rich.14 With the parliamentary orders for the demolition or closedown of playhouses  –​apart from the Red Bull  –​new performance spaces developed, including the indoor tennis court.15 In March 1653 preparations for a performance of Thomas Killigrew’s Claracilla at Charles Gibbon’s tennis court in Vere Street, Clare Market, were interrupted by soldiers. The event was reported in Mercurius Democritus which added that the intended performance had been betrayed to the soldiers by one of the actors, an actor who, ironically, had had ‘divers tragedies and comedies acted in his own house’ since the prohibition.16 Gibbon’s tennis court continued in use as a theatre at the Restoration when it became the Theatre Royal, a playhouse which was occupied for three years by the King’s Company, headed by Killigrew, until the company moved to the new Theatre Royal, between Bridges Street 149

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From Republic to Restoration and Drury Lane. Another tennis court –​Lisle’s Tennis Court, Lincoln’s Inn Fields  –​was converted by Davenant who, drawing on his experience at Rutland House and the Cockpit, oversaw the construction of a scenic stage. A small-​scale theatrical revival led by William Davenant sanctioned by the Council of State began in 1655 with the production in Davenant’s home, Rutland House, of The First Day’s Entertainment. The Siege of Rhodes was performed in the same venue before the production moved to the Cockpit in Drury Lane, some time before 1659 when the text was published advertising the Cockpit as the venue.17 In several respects, this public theatre production was highly innovative: the female part was acted (and sung) by a woman, Catherine Coleman, and shutters and reliefs, which were designed by Inigo Jones’s pupil, John Webb, created the scenic illusion of Rhodes and the Turkish camp. Davenant had previously made the case for the use of scenes through the persona of Aristophanes in the first of the staged debates in The First Day’s Entertainment.18 In response to Diogenes’s complaint that scenes are illusory, deceptive of place and motion, inculcating deception in general –​a long-​standing Puritan objection to the theatre –​Aristophanes replies that pictorial representations are ‘the safest and shortest way to understanding’. The use of scenes is thus incorporated into the overall argument for the renewal of drama. In fact, although they were put into practice during the Republic, plans for a scenic stage pre-​date it:  in 1639 Davenant had been granted a patent for a project for a playhouse ‘wherein plays, musical entertainments, scenes, or other like presentments may be presented’.19 Like Davenant’s, Webb’s career had begun at the Caroline court and spanned the Caroline, Commonwealth and Restoration periods; his achievement was to convey the scenic designs of the Caroline court masque to the stages of Rutland House and the Cockpit in Drury Lane during the Republic and to the Duke’s theatre, as well as the Whitehall Court theatre, at the Restoration. Webb’s extant designs for the frontispiece, reliefs and shutters of The Siege of Rhodes reveal, as John Orrell has demonstrated, the extent to which Webb worked in the tradition established by Jones.20 Further, Webb’s designs for The Tragedy of Mustapha, by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, acted by the Duke’s Company, at Lincoln Inn Fields Theatre in 1665, and also in the scenic theatre for the Court at Whitehall, evidently recall his designs for The Siege of Rhodes. This is particularly notable in the respective drawings of Solyman’s camp and pavilion. There are other instances where Commonwealth scenic designs were reused or copied at the Restoration. The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru along with The History of Sir Francis Drake had been performed at the Cockpit during the years of the Protectorate and Republic; both were revived by Davenant as ‘entries’ in a theatrical miscellany performed at the Duke’s theatre in 1663, The Play-​house to be Lett.21 Much later, in Dryden’s 150

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 Amboyna or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, performed by the King’s Company in 1672, a scene in which an Indian prince is being basted upon a spit was borrowed from The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru.22 In these cases, it is not simply the scenery from the Commonwealth which is being replicated at the Restoration but the plays’ subjects. The Siege of Rhodes initiated a fascination with the might of the sixteenth-​century Ottoman Empire –​exemplified in Solyman the Magnificent and his subjugation of foreign and domestic opposition –​whereas The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru self-​evidently represents the cruelties of colonisers who were rivals to the English. Davenant’s original representation of these themes had been in part expedient, having been well chosen to appeal to Cromwell and the Council of State. In 1653, he presented to the Council of State A Proposition for the Advancement of Morality by a New Way of Entertainment of the People, in which he argues for the moral and educative values of a reformed stage, advocating that the subject matter of the reformed drama would be heroic and virtuous action.23 Three years later he approached Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, outlining further benefits of theatre, both economic and ideological. If London is not to be impoverished by the absence of those with expendable income, entertainment in the form of ‘pleasant assemblies’ must be provided. Moreover, his ‘moral representations’, as they are termed, could have political capital. He suggests the subject of ‘the Spaniards’ barbarous conquests in the West Indies and of their several cruelties there exercised upon the subjects of this nation’, adding ‘of which some use may be made’.24 In The Siege of Rhodes, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and The History of Sir Francis Drake Davenant puts into practice objectives for a reformed stage enumerated in his correspondence with the Council and Secretary of State. The Ottoman Turk, the knights of Rhodes and the Sicilian Duke of The Siege of Rhodes seem to vie with each other in demonstrating heroic virtue, not without an occasional show of jealousy. The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru and The History of Sir Francis Drake serve Cromwell’s Western design in depicting apocryphal English conquests in South America executed with virtue and restraint in contrast to the mendacity and gross cruelty of the Spanish, Catholic rival.25 Such subjects and settings continue in the Restoration in the plays mentioned above, Mustapha, Amboyna or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, and in plays –​such as Howard and Dryden’s The Indian Queen and Dryden’s The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards –​that exploit new-​world locations as settings for heroic conquest and conflicts between love, honour, virtue and friendship. Davenant had not been alone during the Protectorate in putting forward arguments for a reformed drama. Richard Flecknoe made a bid to realign and reconstitute the drama by dedicating Love’s Dominion (1654) to 151

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From Republic to Restoration Lady Elizabeth Claypole, Cromwell’s daughter.26 The play was advertised as ‘a dramatic piece full of excellent morality’ written as a pattern for the reformed stage; the play itself is infused with a neo-​Platonism reminiscent of the court theatre of Charles I and Henrietta Maria in the 1630s. In the ‘Preface to the Reader’, Flecknoe implies that a new tolerant era has been ushered in with the Protectorate. Now that the nation is rid of its ‘sullen Masters’ which had shook the country ‘into Religion with fear and trembling’, there is hope of a ‘reformed stage’ licensed by a ‘coadjutor of the pulpit to teach Morality’. Flecknoe’s reformed drama, though, had to wait until the Restoration for its performance. Love’s Dominion was first performed by the Duke’s Company in 1663 in a revised version with the title Love’s Kingdom or a Pastoral Trage-​comedy, and published the following year ‘with a short Treatise of the English Stage’. Unsurprisingly, when castigating the ‘fanatick spirit’ that had banished both king and theatre, Flecknoe casts a veil over his earlier attempts to revive the drama. Despite the treatise’s aspect of time-​serving, including praise of the King for his purging the drama of ‘vice and obscenity’, it does contain pertinent observations on contemporary theatre. Flecknoe points out that ‘scenes and machines’ are not new inventions, but were used in masks and ‘plays of former times (though not so ordinary)’, where they were rather better, he claims, ‘than any we have now’.27 Whether the former, ‘not so ordinary’ times, is an oblique reference to Davenant’s experiments with scenes at Rutland House and the Cockpit is unclear. Certainly, Flecknoe had himself devised operatic, scenic and ideological entertainments during the Commonwealth which, although they went unacted, should be read alongside Davenant’s successful stage production.28 Moreover, in subject matter, in one early opera, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus, Flecknoe seems to have anticipated the Restoration opera, Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus promoted in 1673 by Thomas Killigrew.29 The language of moral reform –​a seeming response to the puritanical anti-​theatrical polemic that went back to the 1580s –​is carried over to the royal grant of 21 August 1660 authorising Killigrew and Davenant to build or hire playhouses and maintain two companies. The grant completely blots out the advances in the ‘reformed’ drama of the Commonwealth. Alluding to current plays that ‘doe for the most part tende to the Debauchinge of the Manners of Such as are present at them, and are very Scandalous and offensive, to all pious and well diposed persons’, the grant concedes that ‘if well Mannaged’, entertainments ‘might serve as Morall instructions in Humane life’.30 Even the institution of the actress, as recorded in the patent granted to Killigrew on 25 April 1662, is presented as moral reformation, a response to the offence caused by ‘the woman’s part … acted by men in the habit of women’. From henceforth, all women’s parts in both companies 152

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 are to be performed by women, ridding the drama of scandal and offence so that it can be esteemed ‘not only harmless delight’, but offer ‘useful and instructive representation of human life’.31 Any theory that plays might act as moral instruction blatantly and ironically contradicts a popular notion of the sexually promiscuous drama of the Restoration stage and knowledge of the off-​stage life of the actresses as mistresses of the royal patrons, the King and Duke of York. This is hindsight. In 1660 the royal grant  –​in justifying the Davenant/​Killigrew monopoly  –​gestures towards Puritan appeasement and, while echoing arguments for a reformed stage expressed in the 1650s, behaves as if Davenant’s representations of heroic and chaste virtue had never taken place. Playwrights who promoted plays and entertainments, as well as their polemical defence, during the 1650s  –​William Davenant, Richard Flecknoe, Abraham Cowley, Thomas Killigrew, John Tatham –​continued to furnish plays for the Restoration stage. Tatham had written city pageants during the years of the Protectorate,32 composing in 1658 London’s Tryumph, Presented by Industry and Honour, funded by the cloth workers in honour of John Ireton, Lord Mayor and brother of the regicide, General Henry Ireton. Prudence and Industry, puritan virtues, are celebrated as hallmarks of the city, but also Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice and Fortitude. Honour’s address to Ireton refers to the recent death of Cromwell –​‘dark clouds do interpose our joy’, an act of remembrance –​before Ireton is showered with the panegyric required by the occasion.33 By adapting the terms of veneration, city pageants were one form of entertainment that continued a fairly seamless performance from Monarchy to Commonwealth to Restoration. The first Restoration city pageant, by John Tatham, London’s Glory Represented by Time, Truth and Fame at the Magnificent Triumphs and Entertainment of his most Sacred Majesty Charles the II,34 announced on its title page that the triumph took place on 5 July 1660, ‘the 12th year of his Majesty’s most happy Reign’. Yet, despite the erasure of the Republic, the descriptive text records a celebration of the King’s restitution. Truth proclaims that she now has a tongue. Fame welcomes Charles to the City, announcing that ‘even those fiends (for sure none else could be your enemies) admire your constancy’. Performed the same year, Tatham’s Lord Mayor’s pageant, The Royal Oake, taking its name from the tree that had sheltered Charles after his defeat at Worcester, has Time drawing a chariot of Peace, Truth and Plenty. Time puns that he hath ‘brought home a sovereign remedy’.35 The title page repeats the wording of the title page of London’s Glory. It, too, was performed in the twelfth year of Charles’s ‘happy reign’. At the same time, deviser and publisher are keen to draw attention to the special nature of the 1660 show, which, it was claimed, contained ‘twice as many pageants and speeches’. London’s Glory effects an art of oblivion, although in full 153

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From Republic to Restoration memory of the techniques of flattery and celebration that were practised in the previous decade. Tatham’s Commonwealth career had combined the writing of city pageants with occasional plays. His The Distracted State, published in 1651, deals with the familiar themes of rebellion and usurpation, although in the play there are no fewer than five rebellions from within the army, enabling a variegated commentary on transfers of power and different forms of government, including the virtues of republicanism.36 Whereas The Distracted State had portrayed fictional reversals of power in a tumultuous kingdom, Sicily, his transitional play, The Rump: or the Mirrour of the late Times, could not be more local and contemporary in its depiction of political instability.37 The title comes from the derisive and retrospective naming of the Parliament, purged by Colonel Pride in 1648, dissolved by Cromwell in 1653 and recalled in 1659 to force the abdication of Richard Cromwell. The Parliament was dissolved and replaced by a military junta by Major General Lambert, reconvened by Fleetwood and treated as a temporary expedient by General Monck before the recall of the members purged by Pride.38 Although The Rump is a full-​length play with acts and scenes, in style and content it is indebted to the political pamphlet plays of the previous decade. In pamphlets and plays, such as The Life and Death of Mrs Rump (1660), Mistris Rump brought to Bed of a Monster (1660), and The Character of the Rump (1660), the Parliament features as a political cartoon of government malfunctioning. What is remarkable in Tatham’s play is the way all the major players in the political turns and counterturns following the recall of the Rump and the failure of the second protectorship are represented on stage. Prominent in the play are members of the Committee of Safety –​the rival Major Generals, Lambert and Fleetwood, the President of the Committee and a stage ‘laird’, Warestone, Bulstrode Whitelocke, here depicted as a tricky and temporising lawyer, and the lesser players, the former cobbler, John Hewson, Robert Duckinfield and John Desborough, Major General and Cromwell’s brother-​in-​law. But, equally, as in the pamphlet plays the satire focuses on the coarsely drawn roles of women in the Commonwealth. Mrs Cromwell becomes a figure of ridicule as she laments her family’s declining fortunes and the seeming rise of Lambert’s wife. Her daughter and her husband, Fleetwood –​a poor match in Mrs Cromwell’s eyes when compared to her daughter’s first husband, Henry Ireton –​are the hapless recipients of her outraged complaints: Mrs Cromwell  Would I were dead; Nothing Torments me more, than that thy Father, who whilst he liv’d was called the most Serene, the most Illustrious and most Puissant Prince (whilst that the fawning Poets Panegyricks swell’d with Ambitious Epithetes) is now call’d th’ fire-​brand

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 of Hell, Monster of Mankind, Regicide, Homicide, Murtherer of Piety, a Lump of flesh sok’d in a Sea of blood, Traytor to God and goodness, an Advancer of Fiends and Darkness; such as these and worse, could I but think on ’em, are daily cast into my Ears; by every idle fellow. Fleetwood  I pray take their Names, I profess Mother, I’le Order them, as I am here. Mrs Cromwell  Thou Order’um, alas! They value not so poor a thing as thou art, had Dick continued, he had kept Our Fame up fair it [sic] the World, none durst have blemish it. They tell me that the time is coming I must make a Stall my Court, and learn to thrive by footing Stockings, and if that won’t do it, must be (what I ne’r was) a Woman of Carrriage, either for Tubs of Ale, as Suiting best with my Original Condition, or else for Oysters:  I was made for Burthens, and am too Old, and Ugly to cry Oringes; If these Trades fail me, then I must turn Bawd, they think me tough enough t’endure that Tempest, and tell me there’s a place call’d Sodom will receive me and my Retinue; I know it not, but thus I am made a Publick scorn by all Men: and in that, thee nor thine, nor any other that claim relation to Us are exempted; And all this by thy foolery. (II.i) The irony of Mrs Cromwell naively taking residence in Sodom conforms with a favourite trope of the pamphlet play, like The Jovial Crew, or The Devil Turned Ranter (1651), which depicts libidinousness among the sects, thinly disguised by piety. Liberty is loosely equated with licentiousness. Such satire continues with Mrs Lambert, who, anticipating her husband’s and her own elevation, summons the wives of the men rewarded by Cromwell, to act as their petitioner to the Committee of Safety. The women set an agenda: the Act of Fornication is to be repealed;39 it should not be a crime to consort with Cavaliers; nor should it be obligatory to walk or talk with one’s husband (II.i). The role of Priscilla, who serves Lady Lambert, represents another mode of contravening residual cultural models of feminine silence and containment. She is the pert observer, mockingly aware of her mistress’s airs and graces and has very much the upper hand in dealing with her suitor, Walker, clerk to Lambert –​probably a skit on Secretary John Thurloe –​congratulating herself on the way she manipulates him: ‘’Tis a sweet thing for a Woman of Knowledge to meet with a Man of Ignorance’ (IV.i). The vocal women in The Rump imitate female roles in pamphlet plays, such as A Bartholomew Fairing, A Jovial Crew and The Second part of the Tragicomedy called Newmarket Fair or Mrs Parliament’s New Figaries, dramatising another prong in the attack on the Puritan revolution, that it had adversely turned the world  –​including gender relations  –​upside down. Equally, the female self-​expression in these plays demonstrates that the assertive, witty and independently minded woman, often seen as a

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From Republic to Restoration paradigm of Restoration comedy, was not a novel construct. The paradigm had been set up earlier and was then further developed on stage with the institution of female players. Like the pamphlet plays of the preceding decades, The Rump succeeds in capturing and communicating news, subject to quick turns and rumour. Fleetwood recalls the Rump dissolved by Lambert –​much to the consternation of Mrs Lambert. The city is up in arms with the citizens ‘mad for a Free Parliament’. The apprentices rest their hopes in General Monck (here referred to as Philagathus), even though it is rumoured that he is in favour of recalling the Rump. Instead, the Convention Parliament convenes. As rumps of mutton are touted on spits ready for roasting, a sight common to Londoners in the early months of 1660, we witness on stage the symbolic demise of the detested Parliament. The congruence between The Rump and the satirical pamphlet plays is brought home in the plays’ punitive or retributive endings, depending on ideological interpretation. New Market Fair had presented the army grandees and their wives, in the aftermath of the regicide, disputing over power sharing and culminating in the wild fantasy of the regicides falling on their swords. In The Second Part of the Tragicomedy Called Newmarket Fair or Mrs Parliament’s New Figaries Mrs Fairfax kills Mrs Cromwell and is carried off to prison by the people. The ending of The Rump –​depicting the members of the Committee of Safety and their wives peddling goods –​is comic satire not fantasy. Political rivalries are reduced to a babble of voices as the erstwhile leaders of the Commonwealth, wives and servants are reduced to selling their wares. Mrs Cromwell’s prophecy that she will become a ‘woman of carriage’ is realised as she appears with a tub, calling out for kitchen stuff. When he read the play in November 1660 Pepys records that he thought the play ‘very silly’.40 A few days earlier he had read the trials of the regicides, ‘finding good satisfaction in reading thereof ’.41 Life had overtaken art and what Tatham treats as political farce had in actuality turned to acts of public revenge. The Rump exists in two editions published within a year. The first edition published in 1660 claims that the play had been many times acted ‘at the Private House in Dorset Court’, probably the Salisbury Court theatre, raising the interesting question of how much mimicry and impersonation went into the performance. The text conceals –​although barely –​the identities of the alleged competitors for the Protectorship so that Lambert takes the pseudonym Bertlam, Fleetwood Woodfleet, Warestone Stoneware and Whitelock Lockwhite. The re-​issue of 1661 dispenses with the pseudonyms. What lies behind this singular element of caution, possibly abandoned in performance? Tatham was evidently composing close to tumultuous events whose outcome was not at all clear. Pepys recorded on 18 April that the ‘sectaries do talk high what they will do’, about which he was sceptical while 156

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 also noting that ‘the Cavaliers are something unwise to talk so high on the other side.’42 Only in April 1660 was Lambert captured, foreclosing any further designs of a republic and, according to Pepys, making ‘things now very open and safe’.43 Written and performed during the months of transition from Republic to monarchy and from the Rump to the Convention Parliament, The Rump is very much a mirror of the moment, and Tatham’s decision to conceal Lambert as Bertlam and Fleetwood as Woodfleet, however clumsy, suggests a cautionary gesture towards the unpredictable times. Popular pamphlet plays of the 1650s continued to circulate  –​sometimes in revised form  –​at the Restoration. Marissa Nicosia has discussed the rewriting and republication of The Famous Tragedie of King Charles 1 as Cromwell’s Conspiracy in 1660.44 A Tragicomedy Called New Market Fair, or a Parliament Outcry of State Commodities, first published in 1649, was reprinted in 1661 ‘at the request of some gentlemen to act in Christmas holidays’. The satire of Puritans, committee men and sexually voracious sectarians in early Restoration comedy carries the mark of the pamphlet play. A common trope in the latter was the proliferation of committees associated with the Council of State and the self-​interest of committee men and their wives. An early example, Samuel Sheppard’s farcical The Committee-​man Curried (1647), had presented the hypocrisy of the committee men through the figure of Suck-​dry, who openly proclaims that he indulges in drink and sex behind the scenes. The committee in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee, first performed by the King’s Company, at court in 1662, is the committee for sequestration, set up to deal with the estates of so-​called delinquents, allowing them to reclaim their estates if they showed loyalty to the Commonwealth by taking ‘the solemn league and covenant’ and paid to the committee a portion of the estate’s value. As one of the commissioners appointed to compound ‘for all lands etc received before May 25, 1660, belonging to the king and discovered by them’, this was a process Howard was empowered to reverse.45 Satire on the underhand dealings of the committee is conjoined to romantic intrigue in which clever loyalist women outwit their Puritan guardians and in so doing secure their cavalier admirers. In contrast to the mercenary and deceitful actions of the committee, the Cavaliers, Colonels Blunt and Careless, are, naturally, honourable and principled. Before the committee, they refuse to take the Covenant and therefore they cannot compound for their estates. The situation prompts valorisations of royalist honour: C. Bl.  The day may come, when those that suffer for their consciences and honour may be rewarded. Mr. Day  I, I, you make an idol of that honour. C. Bl.  Our worships then are different, you make that Your idol which brings you interest; we must obey that which bids us lose it. (II.i; N3r) 157

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From Republic to Restoration The self-​interest of committee men and Puritan hypocrisy were familiar royalist targets and Howard is not interested in ideological blurring. Pepys first saw The Committee at the Theatre Royal on 12 June 1663, judging it both ‘merry’ and ‘indifferent’, further commenting that only the part of the Irishman Teague, played by the comedian John Lacy, was ‘beyond imagination’,46 possibly implying that the rest was predictable. Perhaps it was the comic motif of Teague’s misunderstanding of ‘taking the covenant’ –​literally snatching a copy of the document from a bookseller –​which Pepys found to be creative in comparison with the stereotyping of the rest of the comedy. When he saw the play four years later, he again admired Lacy’s part, but revised his overall view. Allowing that he went to see the play again ‘with some prejudice’, he now judged it a very good play with ‘a good deal of good invention in it’.47 As is usual, Pepys does not expand on his point and his reasons for revising his opinion are left to conjecture. The diary entries Pepys made after his visits to the theatre remain a valuable record of the London repertoires and their make-​up of old, new and revised plays. Scholars of Restoration theatre are right to claim the formation of a canon, but this should not blind us to the extent to which the repertoires of the two companies were reliant on revisions, revivals and adaptations of Elizabethan, Jacobean, Caroline and Commonwealth plays. Plays were revised in part for new political ends. Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman Street, a substantial revision of his earlier play, The Guardian, performed before Prince Charles at Cambridge in 1641 and first published in 1650, is a case in point. As his first title suggests, Cowley presents  –​ like Howard –​a scenario of intrigue over inheritance. There are several set scenes and those depicting the lovers are particularly pedestrian. However, there is some effective comedy in handling the motif of a faked poisoning (aimed at extracting a deathbed concession) and in the depiction of a faked Puritan conversion. Acting with great gusto the part of the visionary sectarian, Cutter, a swaggerer, claims that his vision has told him that he and the puritan Tabitha are to be married and sings his bride a ditty: Come to my bed, my dear; my dear; Come to my bed; For the pleasant pain, And the loss with gain, Is the loss of a maidenhead. (V.vi) To which Tabitha responds, ‘Is this a Psalm, brother husband, that you sing?’ Tabitha is the sexually innocent sectarian, but with the help of drink, she shows herself ready to be corrupted by Cavalier ways as she dances and sings Cutter’s ditty. The scenario recalls earlier Puritan satire, such as 158

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, where the Puritan visitors to the fair are sucked in to the sensual pleasures of the fairground. The version published in 1663 under the title of Cutter of Coleman Street revises and updates the play –​the title page states that the scene is London ‘in the year 1658’ –​making it at once more dramatically effective and topical. Cutter’s assumed conversion becomes more central to the latter part of the comedy. Cutter, now self-​named as Abednego, enters with the widow Barebottle and Tabitha ‘in a puritanical habit’, which he later abandons when the ‘vision’ commands him to dress as a Cavalier. In a parody of the apocalyptic prophecies of the Book of Revelation, which had gained such currency during the Puritan revolution, Cutter proclaims that he will suffer ‘martyrdom’ for the truth and will return: I say again I am to return, and to return upon a Purple Dromadary, which signifies Magistracy, with an Ax in my hand that is called Reformation, and I am to strike with that Ax upon the Gate of Westminster-​hall, and cry, Down Babylon, and the Building called Westminster-​hall is to run away and cast it self into the River, and then Major General Harrison is to come in Green sleeves from the North upon a Sky-​colour’d Mule, which signifies heavenly Instruction … And he is to have a Trumpet in his mouth as big as a Steeple, and at the sounding of that Trumpet all the Churches in London are to fall down. (III.xii) Cowley exploits the gap between the play’s historical setting and its performance. Audiences watching the play would have known that Major General Harrison, a Fifth Monarchist and millenarian, was the first of the regicides, in October 1660, to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The play mockingly alludes to Harrison’s promise on the scaffold –​recorded by Pepys, who witnessed the execution –​that he would return to judge them that judged him.48 Cutter promises to declare his prophetic vision to the ‘Congregation of the Lovely in Coleman-​street’ (III.xii) and Tabitha similarly urges him to pronounce ‘before the Congregation of the Spotless in Coleman-​Street’ (IV.v). Coleman Street was the hub of London’s religious radicalism, particularly Quakerism and the Fifth Monarchism of Harrison, as well as Cowley’s Widow Barebottle and her daughter, Tabitha. As Alan Marshall mentions in his chapter, a minister from Coleman Street had been sent to support the Baptist community in Hexham in 1652.49 There are only two references to Coleman Street in Cowley’s play, but their inclusion and the change of title shifts the focus of the play from deceptions over inheritance to the satire of the sectarian congregations of Coleman Street. Adrian Johns has argued that Coleman Street denoted not only a parish and a congregation, but was a synecdoche for radicalism itself.50 Cutter’s appropriation 159

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From Republic to Restoration of the extravagant apocalyptic language of sectaries is evidently satirical, although it is comparatively mild when compared to the satirical abuse in a pamphlet play such as The Jovial Crew or the Devil Turned Ranter. The play’s ideological differences are in a sense dissolved. The puritan widow, if ‘the guardian’, Jolly, is to have his way, will come to enjoy more theatre than the ‘puppet show of Ninevah’ she has hitherto experienced, and Tabitha’s pleasure in drinking and dancing presages some kind of anti-​Puritan revolt. Cutter of Coleman Street was a popular if controversial play. Pepys referred to it as a ‘very good play’, noting that it was set in 1658  ‘with reflection much upon the late times’.51 John Downes records that ‘it was perform’d a whole Week with a full Audience’, while a marginal note reveals that the play was perceived as ‘injurious’ to the ‘Cavalier indigent Officers:  especially the characters of Cutter and Worm’.52 In the 1663 Preface, Cowley was to complain that it met with ‘no favourable reception’ and that the play had been misunderstood as ‘a piece intended for abuse and Satyre against the Kings party’. The idea provoked an indignant response from Cowley: Good God! Against the Kings party? After having served it twenty years during all the time of their misfortunes and afflictions, I must be a very rash and imprudent person if I chose out of their Restitutions to begin a Quarrel with them.53

In justification, Cowley presents a classic defence of the ‘edg’d tool’ of comedy, that a particularised image of degeneracy and corruption cannot be said to speak for a whole party. That Cowley should encounter a complaint for his less-​than-​idealised view of the royalist party in opposition, and their regaining of power by fake conversions and inter-​marriage is indicative of how ideologically conformist comedy was expected to be. When the play was revived in 1668, tellingly, it reverted to its earlier form as The Guardian, in Pepys’s view a decidedly retrograde step.54 Cowley’s reshaping of earlier work is symptomatic of the continuities in dramatic and theatre practice across the ideological divide. Davenant revised his own work at the Restoration, most successfully The Siege of Rhodes, the first of his sung dramas to be produced during the Protectorate. Of the production, Dryden was later to comment that in order not to offend ‘those good people, who could more easily dispossess their lawful sovereign than endure a wanton jest’, Davenant had been forced to introduce ‘the examples of moral virtue, writ in verse and performed in recitative music’.55 Historians of theatre and opera have tended to follow suit and regard The Siege of Rhodes as the first English opera, arguing that the introduction of recitative music enabled Davenant to circumvent the prohibition on dramatic performances. Dryden’s emphasis is, though, equally on the ‘moral virtue’ on display in The Siege of Rhodes, and this is consistent with arguments Davenant had put forward, along with Richard Flecknoe,

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 for a reformed stage. Intertwined with the story of Solyman’s siege of Rhodes is that of the Sicilian Duke, Alphonso, and his wife, Ianthe, who assume roles in a drama of love and honour –​ a theme that was amplified in the later heroic plays of Dryden. Alphonso declines Solyman’s offer of safe passage to Sicily on the grounds that honour demands he should remain with the Christian knights of Rhodes and defend the garrison. In allowing Ianthe safe passage to Rhodes and suppressing his feelings for her, Solyman is no less a man of honour. ‘He seemed in civil France’ exclaims Ianthe, as she reports her capture and release to Alphonso and the knights of Rhodes. The Siege of Rhodes was one of the earliest of plays to be revived by the Duke’s Company, performed and printed in 1663 in an expanded text with part two. The plays were dedicated to Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon –​ a dedication retained in the 1670 quarto and 1673 Folio text  –​ despite Clarendon’s impeachment and exile. Even in 1663, the address seems out of step with the times. Davenant roots his defence of theatre in the present while implying that the Puritan opposition to theatre –​on both moral and political grounds –​is prevalent and in need of refutation: Dramatick Poetry meets with the same persecution now, from such who esteem themselves the most refin’d and civil, as it ever did from the Barbarians. And yet whilst those virtuous Enemies deny Heroique Plays to the Gentry, they entertain the People with a Seditious Farce of their own counterfeit Gravity … for as others have purg’d the Stage from corruption of the Art of the Drama, so I have endeavour’d to cleanse it from the corruption of manners: nor have I wanted care to render the Ideas of Greatness and Virtue pleasing and familiar … My Lord, it proceeds from the same mind, not to be pleased with Princes on the stage, and not to affect them in the Throne; for those are ever most inclin’d to break the Mirrour, who are unwilling to see the Images of such as have just authority over their guilt.56

The performance of The Siege of Rhodes during the Protectorate helps to explain the oddly disingenuous wording in Davenant’s defence of theatre. Members of the gentry had been then entertained by the heroic action and moral virtue displayed in The Siege of Rhodes and it is a remarkable act of oblivion to claim that the Commonwealth had no purchase on the production of heroic drama. Davenant is implicitly guarding against opponents who might seek to present him as a temporiser with the Cromwellian regime. Henry Herbert, the Caroline Master of the Revels, attempted at the Restoration to recover the privileges of his former Office, several of which –​including the censorship of the plays in their repertoire –​had been granted to Davenant and Killigrew. Accordingly, he castigated Davenant, who, he claimed, had recognised ‘the unjust and tyranicall authority’ of those who had perpetuated ‘the late horrid’ rebellion, gaining permission ‘to vent his operas’.57 In the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the Preface is an awkward display of loyalism.

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From Republic to Restoration The revision of the first part of The Siege of Rhodes is telling on both political and aesthetic grounds. Contemporary references become more explicit. In the first addition, for example, at the end of the first entry, Ianthe enters with her women, Melosile and Madina, bearing two open caskets with jewels that Ianthe is preparing to sell to enable her to make the journey to Rhodes, as she sees it, to rescue Alphonso: ‘If by their sale my Lord may be redeem’d /​Why should they more than trifles be esteem’d’. As several scholars have observed, the addition resonates with Henrietta Maria’s selling of her jewels to help her husband’s cause. In 1642 she wrote to Charles that she had pledged or pawned jewels which he had given to her and others that she had bought herself in order to raise ‘a pretty considerable sum, to commence our design’.58 In The Kings Cabinet Opened (1649) selected letters of the King’s –​captured after his defeat at Naseby –​had been published, framing Charles as dangerously uxorious and Henrietta Maria as his equally dangerous consort, martial, aggressive and politically scheming.59 At the Restoration, Henrietta Maria’s past began to be rewritten to the effect that what had been vicious vilifying of her 1642 and 1643 trips to the Hague and other places actively turned into a picture of romantic heroism. Davenant’s extension of Ianthe’s role, projecting the allusions to Henrietta Maria, latent in the first edition, offers a royalist counter-​narrative to the one earlier promulgated by Parliament, aligning the text much more explicitly with his loyalist declaration in the dedication to Clarendon. In his original address to the reader, Davenant apologised for the lack of ‘turns and counterturns’ and ‘double walks and interweavings of design’ appropriate to a history;60 there was some compensation for this lack in his Restoration revision. Besides giving greater scope to the part of Ianthe, exploiting the stage presence of the actress, he introduces an additional female role, Roxolana, consort to Solyman. Very soon, for the theatre-​ going public, the two female parts became synonymous with the actresses who portrayed them.61 Roxolana’s jealousy of Ianthe and her distrust of Solyman’s motives mirror Alphonso’s distrust of Solyman’s motives and his distrust of Ianthe. The restructuring anticipates the kind of reworking of Shakespeare’s plays with the introduction of new characters to produce more symmetrical plots. Roxolana’s role enlarges and complicates the dramatic narrative. She is introduced in the third entry; in response to Pirrhus’s questioning, ‘The Sultan wonders why in Rhodes you land’, Roxolana iterates her belief that she has lost Solyman’s love to Ianthe. From a personal as well as a political perspective, the first part ends on a moment of stasis with Solymon offering to Roxolana some kind of reconciliation: My war with Rhodes will never have success Till I at home, Roxana, make my peace.

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 I will be kind, if you’l grow wise; Go, chide your Whisp’rers and your spies, Be satisfy’d with liberty to think; And, when you should not see me, learn to wink. (The Fifth Entry) Jealousies are regnited in the second part, as Ianthe, in the hope of negotiating a treaty between Solyman and Rhodes, arrives in the Turkish camp where she resides in Roxolana’s tent. War and Love become the subjects of a rhyming debate between Solyman and Roxolana with the latter asking the Sultan why ‘dominion’ is prized above Love. For Solyman Love and War should both be governed by the same unhesitating and decisive action: ‘In progresses of Warr and Love /​Victors with equal haste must move, /​And in attempts of either make no stay: /​They can but Visit /​Conquer and away’. At the same time, he recognises the paradoxical nature of conquest:  ‘Of spacious Empire what can I enjoy? /​Gaining at last but what I first Destroy’ (The Fourth Act). Later, to Ianthe, Roxolana scorns the ‘domestick pity’ which governs ‘western courts’ and asserts that ‘in tracing human story we shall find /​the cruel more successful than the kind’ (The Fifth Act). Yet, despite such assertions about the nature of power and military strength, Solyman’s last words –​and the play’s –​convey a different meaning. Ianthe is to be given a free passage to return to Rhodes, for Love is ‘Nature’s Darling’ and must be guarded by ‘Giant Virtue’. In Solyman Davenant has constructed an Eastern potentate whose sense of honour and respect for chaste virtue goes back to the love and honour play of the Caroline period, adapted to fit a reformed agenda of honour and moral virtue, and further modified at the Restoration. Dryden acknowledged that with The Siege of Rhodes Davenant gave the ‘first light’ to the heroic play: in ‘rebellious times’ he had introduced ‘examples of moral virtue in verse’. According to Dryden, Davenant heightened his characters, through the influence of Corneille and other French poets, but he did not finish his project to ‘the fullness of a plot and the variety of characters’.62 This, Dryden claims to have done. But the play which most directly takes over the themes and design of Davenant’s Protectorate drama is Mustapha, by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, formerly supporter of Cromwell.63 The cross-​over in the scenic design of the two plays has already been mentioned, but in other ways audiences would have seen one play through the lens of the other. Betterton played Solyman, as he had in The Siege of Rhodes, while Mrs Betterton –​famed as ‘Ianthe’ –​took the role of Roxolana. Mustapha’s complicated plot is adumbrated in the fourth act of the second part of The Siege of Rhodes where Roxolana refers to the brutal custom of killing younger sons (by mutes) and Solyman hints at her desire 163

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From Republic to Restoration to murder Mustapha. It is perhaps this compact kind of writing which led to Dryden’s comment that The Siege of Rhodes wanted the fullness of a plot. Certainly, in comparison with Mustapha it does.64 Composed with greater artistic if not necessarily ideological freedom, Mustapha has an expanded story and complex emotional dynamics. Solyman’s two sons by different wives, Mustapha and Zanger, are sworn together in friendship, they both love the captive Queen of Hungary; Roxolana wants her son, Zanger, to succeed to the Ottoman throne, and plots against Mustapha, while Solyman, jealous of Mustapha and believing he is plotting against him, orders his murder, following which Zanger commits suicide out of love for his brother. In Mustapha, Davenant’s heroic drama of the Protectorate evolves into an heroic and political tragedy of the Restoration. In relation to The Siege of Rhodes, the elaborate action and emotional conflicts of Mustapha could be said to exemplify Dryden’s comment that it ‘it is an easy thing to add to what already is invented’, a point relevant to early Restoration theatre in general.65 The view –​promulgated by practitioners rewriting their engagement in the debates of the previous decade –​of Restoration theatre as essentially a fresh start and a new era in theatre production has to be revised, seen as a further example of artificial memory and the art of oblivion. This chapter has challenged conventional scholarly periodisation of theatre in which 1660 is a point of departure, moreover one soon left, as critics turn to later Restoration drama: the witty social comedies of Etherege, Behn and Congreve, the Shakespeare adaptations of Dryden and Davenant and the heroic plays of Dryden. The conjoining of plays, theatre production and theories of drama in the Commonwealth, specifically the years of the Protectorate, with the theatre of the early Restoration gives us another perspective. It is evident that theatre at the Restoration was not immune from the revision of aesthetics or the politics and polemics that had stimulated the reframing of drama during the Puritan revolution. There is considerably more continuity than was or is generally allowed. Notes 1 See Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–​1660, ed. by C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, 3 vols (London, 1911), ii, 565–​77. The Engagement Act, which required all adult males to declare their loyalty to the Commonwealth, was passed in January 1650. 2 Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. by Ivan Roots (London: Dent, 1989), pp. 28–​40. 3 12 Car. II c. 11. 4 See The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–​1660, ed. by S.  R. Gardiner, rev. 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), pp. 465–​67. 5 See ‘His Majesties Most Gracious Speech, Together with the Lord Chancellors, to the Two Houses of Parliament, on Thursday the 13 of September, 1660’, p. 12. 6 Abraham Cowley, Poems (London, 1656), (a) 3r.

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 7 The Works of Mr Abraham Cowley: Edited, with an Account of the Life and Writings of Cowley, by Thomas Sprat, Bishop of Rochester (London, 1668). Acting as apologist for Cowley, Sprat observed that these remarks prefaced a book of poetry and could therefore be put down as a matter of ‘fancy and invention’ (b1r). 8 See Edward A. Langhams, ‘The Post-​ 1660 Theatres as Performance Spaces’ in A Companion to Restoration Theatre, ed. by Susan J. Owens (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 3–​18 (p. 3). 9 David Roberts, Restoration Plays and Players (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 32. 10 Leslie Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage (Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1928). See also Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic 1649–​1660 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 2–​8. 11 See Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 202–​75 and Susan Wiseman, Drama and Politics in the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 19–​40. 12 See Clare, Drama of the English Republic, pp. 8–​18. 13 The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, ed. by G. C. Moore Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), pp. 172–​73. 14 James Wright, Historia Histrionica: An Historical Account of the English Stage Showing the Ancient Use, Improvement and Perfection of Dramatic Representations in the Nation (London, 1699), p. 9. 15 See Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, pp. 82–​132. 16 Mercurius Democritus, 2–​9 March 1653. On the grounds that Claracilla was the property of the company playing at the Cockpit, Hotson suggests that it was Will Beeston, lessee of the Salisbury Court playhouse (‘his own house’) who betrayed the performance. See Hotson, The Commonwealth and Restoration Stage, p. 50. 17 Dawn Lewcock is one of the few scholars writing on the Restoration stage to trace the links between masque staging, Davenant’s productions at Rutland House and the Cockpit in the 1650s and the staging at the two patented theatres after the Restoration. See Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque and the English Seventeenth-​Century Scenic Stage, c.1605-​c.1700 (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2008). 18 The First Days Entertainment at Rutland House, by Declamations and Musick: after the Manner of the Ancients (London, 1657). 19 See Mary Edmond, Rare Sir William Davenant (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 75. 20 John Orrell, The Theatres of Inigo Jones and John Webb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 188. 21 The title is a probable pun on the House of Commons. Following Cromwell’s dissolution of the Rump in 1653, a broadside, ‘Hvys is Te Hver /​This House is to Let’ (BM Satires 858), depicted Cromwell and the Generals forcibly removing the MPs from the Chamber. 22 See James Anderson Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), p. 219. Following the destruction by fire of the Theatre Royal in January 1672, the King’s Company played at Lisle’s Tennis Court vacated by the Duke’s Company. The King’s Company evidently borrowed scenery from the Duke’s Company. 23 See James R. Jacob and Timothy Raylor, ‘Opera and Obedience: Thomas Hobbes and “A Proposition for Advancement of Morality” by Sir William Davenant’, The Seventeenth Century, 6.2 (1991), 205–​50. ‘A Proposition’ was published anonymously in 1653, but dated 1654. 24 See C.  H. Firth, ‘Sir William Davenant and the Revival of Drama during the Protectorate’, English Historical Review, 18 (1903), 103–​20. 25 For a more detailed discussion of the ideological nuances of Davenant’s entertainments, see Clare, Drama of the English Republic.

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From Republic to Restoration 26 A restored, reformed stage would, Flecknoe argues, return to its first institution ‘of teaching virtue, reproving vice, and amendment of manners’, see ‘The Epistle Dedicatory’ ‘To the Lady Elizabeth Claypole’, Love’s Dominion:  A Dramatique Piece, Full of Excellent Moralitie; Written as a Pattern for the Reformed Stage (1654). 27 Richard Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom a Pastoral Trage-​comedy:  Not as it Was Acted at the Theatre near Lincolns-​Inn, but as it Was Written, and since Corrected by Richard Flecknoe; with a Short Treatise of the English Stage & by the Same Author (London, 1664). 28 Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus (London, 1654) sets out in theory and practice ideas for Continental-​style operatic entertainment. The Marriage of Oceanus and Britannia (1659) is more obviously propagandist, celebrating British naval power. See Clare, Drama of the English Republic, pp. 31–​32. 29 See Bryan White’s essay, ‘Restoration opera and the failure of patronage’, in this volume. 30 See The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama:  The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–​73, ed. by N. W. Bawcutt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 226–​28. 31 See David Thomas, Restoration and Georgian Theatre 1660–​1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 17–​18. See also Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 26–​27. 32 The Lord Mayors’ shows had lapsed before the civil wars and were revived in 1655 which, according to Kevin Sharpe, denoted ‘a recognition of a new official acceptance of ritual’, see Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 517. 33 John Tatham, London’s Tryumph, Presented by Industry and Honour; with other Delightfull Scaenes, Appertaining to Them:  Celebrated in Honour of the Right Honourable Sr John Ireton, Knight, Lord Mayor of the Said City (London, 1658). 34 John Tatham, London’s Glory Represented by Time, Truth and Fame at the Magnificent Triumphs and Entertainments of his most Sacred Majesty Charles the II (London, 1660). 35 John Tatham, The Royal Oake … Celebrated in Honour of Sir R. Brown, Bart., Lord Mayor (London, 1660). 36 John Tatham, The Distracted State, A Tragedy (London, 1651). The title page claims that the play had been written in 1641, thus disavowing any comment on the present, although this begs the question as to whether the play had been revised in the interim. For expression of republicanism, see Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649–​1660, pp. 25–​26. 37 The Rump: or The Mirrour of the Late Times. A New Comedy (London, 1660). Quotations are from this text. 38 See Blair Worden’s essay, ‘1660: restoration and revolution’, in this volume for the succession of depositions and reinstallations of the Rump. 39 ‘An Act for Suppressing the Detestable Sins of Incest, Adultery and Fornication’, Acts and Ordinances, II, 387–​89. 40 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons Ltd, 1970–​83), i, 289. 41 Ibid., i, 284. 42 Ibid., i, 111. 43 Ibid., i, 115 44 See Marissa Nicosia, ‘Couplets, commonplaces and the creation of history in The Famous Tragedie of King Charles 1 (1649) and Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660)’ in this volume. 45 See H.  J. Oliver, Robert Howard:  A Critical Biography, 1626–​1698 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1963), p. 39. 46 Pepys, Diary, iv, 181. Pepys noted that Cromwell’s daughter Mary, wife to Lord Falconbridge, was at the performance. 47 Ibid., viii, 384. 48 Ibid., i, 265. For a discussion of the continuing impact of the English apocalyptic tradition, see Warren Johnston, ‘Revelation and the Revolution of 1688–​1689’, The Historical Journal, 48.2 (2005), 351–​89.

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Acts of oblivion: reframing drama, 1649–65 49 Marshall, ‘ “Plots” and dissent:  the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663’ in this volume. 50 Adrian Johns, ‘Coleman Street’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71.1 (2008), 33–​54. 51 Pepys, Diary, ii, 234. 52 Roscius Anglicanus, or an Historical Review of the Stage from 1660 to 1706 by John Downes, A Fac-​simile Reprint of the Rare Original of 1708 with an Historical Preface by Joseph Knight (London: J. W. Jarvis & Son, 1886), p. 25. 53 Cutter of Coleman-​Street: A Comedy (London, 1663), A2v. 54 Pepys, Diary, ix, 272. In contrast with his opinion of Cutter of Coleman Street (a ‘very good play’), Pepys commented that The Guardian was ‘a silly play’. 55 John Dryden, ‘Of Heroic Plays: An Essay’ in John Dryden: Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. by George Watson, 2 vols (London: E. M. Dent and Sons, 1962), i, pp. 157–​58. 56 ‘To the Right Honourable the Earl of Clarendon Lord High Chancellor of England’, The Siege of Rhodes: The First and Second Part (London, 1663). All quotations are from this edition. The first part retains act division as ‘entry’, as in the earlier text, while the second part uses acts. 57 See Bawcutt, The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama, p. 229. 58 Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria, ed. by M. A. E. Green (London, 1857), pp. 112–​13. 59 The King’s Cabinet Opened: or Certain Packets of Secret Letters & Papers, Written with the King’s own Hand, and Taken in his Cabinet at Nasby-​Field, June 14 1645  …  Published by Special Order of the Parliament (London, 1645). For a discussion of the propaganda arising from the letters and surrounding the allegedly disordered royal househould, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 42–​67. 60 See The Siege of Rhodes (1656), ed. by Janet Clare in Drama of the English Republic, 1649–​ 60, p. 195. 61 Ianthe was played by Mary Sanderson (later Mrs Betterton) and Roxolana by Hester Davenport who gave up acting when she became mistress to the Earl of Oxford. When Pepys saw The Bondman on 3 April 1662, he commented ‘Ianthe acting Clerora’s part very well now Roxolana is gone’ (Pepys, Diary, iii, 58). At a revival of The Siege of Rhodes on 20 May 1662 he considered it not as well done ‘as when Roxalana [sic] was there’ (Pepys, Diary, iii, 86). 62 Dryden, ‘Of Heroic Plays:  An Essay’ in John Dryden:  Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, i, 156–​66 (p. 158). 63 Orrery, like Davenant, had sought accommodation with the Protectorate, serving as President of the Scottish State council in 1655 and allegedly suggesting to Cromwell that he should marry his daughter to Charles Stuart. See Rev. Thomas Morrice, ‘Memoirs of Roger, Earl of Orrery’ in A Collection of the State Letters of Roger Boyle the First Earl of Orrery, Lord President of Munster in Ireland (Dublin, 1743), p. 40. 64 The Tragedy of Mustapha, the Son of Solyman the Magnificent was published in 1668. Pepys saw it on 3 April 1665. He was critical: the play ‘made Betterton’s part and Ianthes but ordinary too’ (Pepys, Diary, vi, 73). In January 1668, he revised his view, ‘a most excellent play for words and design as ever I did see’ (ibid., viii, 5). 65 Dryden, ‘Of Heroic Plays: An Essay’, p. 158.

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Chapter 8

‘Far off the public stage’: Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–​65 Keith McDonald

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o describe Andrew Marvell’s controversial ‘Horatian Ode’ of 1650 as ‘the most private of public poems’, as Blair Worden does, is to emphasise the perplexing dichotomy that lies behind some of his most significant works: between public voice on the one hand, and private handling on the other.1 The poem’s ‘forward youth’, who faces the adjustment from books to military service in the summer of 1650, came from a poet who must have realised that the brief period he had spent on the periphery of literary coteries was soon to reach its conclusion. Sure enough, by the autumn of that year, Marvell had settled into life at Nun Appleton as a language tutor to Lord Fairfax’s daughter, penning two commendatory poems for Robert Witty’s translation of the Popular Errours (1651) that would mark the beginning of a departure from print during the Republic. With the sole exception of The First Anniversary, published anonymously in 1655, Marvell’s absence from print would last from 1651 until well after the Restoration, in 1665. One’s instinctive reaction is to attribute this to the need for political prudence. Unlike Edmund Waller and John Dryden, who saw their elegies upon Cromwell’s death in 1658 into print, Marvell withdrew his own from publication, preserving the discretion that would later allow him to state the following without fear of contradiction:  ‘I never had any, not the remotest relation to publick matters, nor correspondence with the persons then predominant, until the year 1657’.2 But it is not merely caution that stays Marvell’s hand during these years. His attitude towards publication is also clearly a complex one, and much of his work prior to 1651 reveals a deteriorating relationship with the medium of print. Concerns surrounding licensing, censorship, and the marketplace of print pervade, for example, his 1648/​49 prefatory poem for Richard Lovelace’s Lucasta.3 An elegy to Lord Hastings, published in the 1649 anthology Lachrymae Musarum, is devoid of the personal attachment that had been afforded to 168

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 Francis Villiers the previous year, suggesting that Marvell saw the frequent publication of occasional poems as something that could compromise the integrity of personal elegy. And the Latin poem written for the Popular Errours, ‘Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie’, refers disparagingly to a ‘base plague’ of writing (‘improba scribendi pestis’) that could only be cured through the burning of the contaminating books that had arisen from it.4 While Marvell was marking occasions through his involvement in these volumes, equally, he appears to have been establishing his distance from contemporaries who were more committed to participating in a literary climate dominated by the demands of patronage. Recent critical works have provided valuable insight into the social context of this early published verse in the later 1640s and early 1650s, investigating connections between Marvell and Thomas Stanley’s patronage circle, the ‘Order of the Black Ribband’, which included poet, John Hall, and journalist, Marchamont Nedham.5 The central notion this has challenged is the influential view of Marvell which emerged in the 1920s as ‘the creator of an acutely private art’; that is, a private man who sat alone reading new volumes of poetry, experimented with his own compositions for amusement, and then locked his scripts away.6 Indeed, as Nicholas McDowell has observed, how might such a solitary man receive invitations to contribute to such volumes in the 1640s or be expected to support himself without some form of patronage?7 But Marvell’s name is missing from Stanley’s commemorative verse, ‘Register of Friends’, and, aside from Lucasta, from all of the output of that ensemble. And since he does not appear alongside other poets between 1651 and 1674, when ‘On Mr Milton’s Paradise Lost’ featured in the second edition of Milton’s epic, there is little solid evidence to suggest that his early record of collaboration presents a pattern for his future career. The absence of Marvell from the volumes of John Evelyn, Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley seems particularly striking, for example, given their mutual contemplation of solitude and its psychological complexities. With scholars now pursuing further evidence of Marvell’s participation in manuscript circles during the Republic, it has become necessary to address this revised critical orthodoxy which leaves behind the ‘acutely private’ artist and assumes that ‘publication’ of some form occurred almost invariably.8 Marvell’s attitude towards writing and publication clearly differed from the likes of Milton and Dryden. Very few of his poems appeared in print during his own lifetime, and the very few clear echoes of his work in that of others also make it possible to infer (even if impossible to prove) that he wrote solely for himself on most occasions. Furthermore, the growing assumption that poetry had become a public and social medium by the mid-​seventeenth century threatens to overshadow his remarkable practice 169

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From Republic to Restoration of non-​disclosure. ‘Publication’ for Marvell was neither systematic nor accidental, but rather a conscious choice, influenced by reticence and self-​ doubt, but also patriotism and occupational opportunism.

Forms of publication

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o cast Marvell’s output against a definition of publication such as Harold Love’s, for example, is to appreciate the private, even antiquated, nature of his authorship. Publication, according to Love, is ‘a movement from a private realm of creativity to a public realm of consumption’. To qualify this ‘public realm’, he differentiates between degrees of public availability: a ‘strong’ sense, in which a text is shown to be clearly available, such as its presence in a bookshop or coffee house; and a ‘weak’ sense, in which a text merely ceases to be a private artefact.9 So, from strong to weak, a gradient of the forms of publication implied by this definition would consist of the following: 1. The ‘strongest’ form:  texts written for publication and published in print. 2. ‘Promethean’ disclosure: texts that were originally concealed but which were later printed.10 3. Texts that circulated in manuscript, eliciting many copies. 4. Texts that elicited a small number of manuscript copies, suggesting that the channels of publicity, for whatever reason, remain restricted. 5. Texts intended for a select audience and dissemination, but which do leave the writer’s control. 6. The ‘weakest’ form of publication: a text is shown to another person but control of it is never relinquished. The focus upon the social and occupational function of seventeenth-​ century verse creates the danger of assuming that publication in one or more of the above senses was simply a matter of course. However, Marvell’s model of authorship appears to suggest a different story. Beyond a handful of prefatory poems which appeared in print on or before 1651, Marvell’s poetic career provides very few incontrovertible examples of the ‘strongest’ form of publication during his own lifetime. The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector, his only print involvement between 1651 and the mid-​1660s, was printed unsigned by the government printer, Thomas Newcomb, in January 1655. Upon its release, the poem was promoted in the government’s main newsbook, Mercurius Politicus, directing public attention towards Marvell’s work 170

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 in a way that was unfamiliar to him. One wonders if the tensions identified by Raymond and Norbrook in this poem arise from the inhibitions associated with public verse clashing with the flexibilities and freedom of private verse.11 Such differences in textual transmission remind us of the need for caution before reading The First Anniversary as part of a routine triptych on Cromwell. The distinctive public nature of The First Anniversary compared to the ‘Horatian Ode’ and the withheld Cromwell elegy, of which the scope of circulation (if any) is difficult to determine, requires that these poems should be understood in relation to their availability in the public domain, taking into account potentially differing intentions between private or public poems. The movement of the relinquished works was among a select few. If Marvell’s work was handled by exterior agents, there might be an assigned chain of recipients. The titles of ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo, then with my Lord Whitelocke, Ambassador from the Protector to the Queen of Sweden’, which was presented to Queen Christina in March 1654, and the unsigned ‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmittam’, which separately accompanied a portrait of Cromwell to Sweden, are concerned solely with the path of transmission towards their regal recipient. The path of transition could even have been, paradoxically, a static one. Marvell’s four epitaphs, to Jane Oxenbridge (1658), John and Edmund Trott (both 1667) and Frances Jones (1672) must also count as entering the public domain. Yet, they subvert conventional modes of publication and reception by requiring readers to visit the memorial artefact rather than await the arrival of a circulating text.12 Any transmission of these four inscriptions required a reader to copy them and then to publish them in another form, and surviving evidence shows only one example of this taking place. The Oxenbridge inscription appeared in a small number of manuscript miscellanies compiled during Marvell’s lifetime –​studies of chapels and topography in 1661 and 1677  –​which suggests a small, localised, and specialised readership based in Windsor rather than any broader appeal.13 Yet, even before the first of these miscellanies appeared, the monument displaying the Oxenbridge tribute was deemed to have ‘[given] offense to the Royalists at the King’s Restauration’ and was covered with paint to erase the epitaph from view.14 Even secluded forms of public verse that were not intended for circulation in the conventional sense could provoke an aggravated response, and this act demonstrated that Marvell had every reason to fear the consequences of verse moving from the private to public domains, however modest that public sphere might have seemed. Occasionally, there are signs that, despite the obvious risk, Marvell did compromise his stance on print, though it is not always clear whether the scrupulously careful poet knowingly and willingly released his work into 171

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From Republic to Restoration the public domain on each occasion or whether he sometimes unintentionally lost authorial control. That both the publisher and the transcriber of Directions to a Painter (1667) had ease of access to manuscripts of the Advice-​to-​a-​Painter poems, Martin Dzelzainis notes, entertains two very different possibilities: that Marvell had lost the authorial control he normally cherished, or that he willingly became involved in ‘a high-​profile, high-​risk print venture’.15 This conundrum emphasises the opportunities that were available to Marvell to further his ties with underground literary networks, and has even raised speculative reasons for the poet’s disputed marriage to his housekeeper, Mary Palmer, in 1667.16 But equally, there is remarkably little to suggest that this ‘sociability’, in whatever form it took, always extended to sharing his own verse, even in the ‘weak’ sense of Love’s definition. As noted above, Marvell’s name is always missing from records of collaborative engagements, both pre-​and post-​ Restoration. Moreover, the elegiac distichs from 1676 on the abbé and graphologist, Maniban, ‘Illustrissimo Viro, Domino Lanceloto Josepho de Maniban Grammatomanti’, present an uncompromising response to the loss of control that occurs once writing leaves the author’s possession. Marvell’s poem expresses concern that private letters sent to his nephew, William Popple, had been viewed by others in Bordeaux. He rues the ‘ignorant hand’ (‘ignarum manum’) that, while too easily compelled to write, was equally prone to share writing too readily with others. Although Marvell came to accept the value of print at various points of his career, especially when he turned to prose, he often seemed uncomfortable with the idea of ‘weak’ publication. Around the same time as the poem on the graphologist, he states in a letter that ‘I am naturally (and now more by my age) inclined to keep my thoughts private’.17 It should come as little surprise, then, that the poems mentioned above are very much the exception to the rule in the ‘strength’ of their publication. A  select few others elicited at least one manuscript copy during Marvell’s lifetime. In 1678, two folio leaves containing ‘A Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure’ were taken by Samuel Pepys from the lodgings of his nemesis, Colonel John Scott, an explorer and schemer with ties to the Duke of Buckingham. Additionally, a manuscript copy of ‘Eyes and Tears’ in a miscellany compiled by William Sancroft could date to 1656.18 Both ‘A Dialogue between Thyrsis and Dorinda’ and ‘On the Victory obtained by Blake over the Spaniards in the Bay of Santa Cruz, in the Island of Tenerife, 1657’ exist in manuscript, the former in many copies, though doubts have been raised over Marvell’s authorship in both cases.19 And a raunchy version of ‘To His Coy Mistress’ appears alongside works by Rochester and Dryden in a 1672 manuscript anthology belonging to Sir William Haward. In the majority of cases, however, if Marvell’s poems did 172

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 leave his hands, this would only have been in Love’s ‘weak’ sense of merely ceasing to be private, and even the evidence for that is often tenuous.20 One might expect that Fairfax at least managed to see Upon Appleton House, but this can hardly be proven. The possibility should not be discounted that the majority of the lyrics published posthumously in the 1681 volume Miscellaneous Poems may never have been intended for dissemination at all. While this may not seem particularly remarkable, given the wide critical insistence upon Marvell’s secrecy, there are poems clearly fashioned as public verse, such as the ‘Horatian Ode’, that may nevertheless have remained private, or for which no evidence of publication survives. In the case of the Ode, some limited evidence (though none of it incontrovertible) suggests that Dryden may have encountered the poem and alluded to it in Annus Mirabilis in 1667, long after its initial composition.21 But even if this was the case, it is unlikely to have influenced the poem’s private handling in its early years. Had Dryden learnt of the poem after Marvell joined the government in 1657? If so, why had it taken him a decade to refer to it? Or, does Marvellian involvement in the 1665 edition of ‘The Character of Holland’ (to be discussed below) coincide with this evidence of weaker publication to reflect a revaluated stance on privacy and publication at this political watershed?

‘Promethean’ publication: ‘The Character of Holland’

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hile Marvell’s methods of publication may have been unorthodox, ‘The Character of Holland’ poses a different problem. The poem is usually dated by scholars to 1653, following an English naval victory over the Dutch at Portland.22 But before its first full appearance in print in 1681, an abridged version was printed anonymously in London and York at the outbreak of the Second Anglo-​Dutch War in 1665.23 With no evidence of the poem having left Marvell’s control in 1653, it may have remained completely private for the whole of that twelve-​year period. Furthermore, there is a distinct possibility that the poem found its way into the public domain not through an instance of ‘weak’ publication, where the poem had been allowed to languish in the archive for someone to take it up twelve years later, but through Marvell authorising the printing himself in 1665. Was this, then, as has been suggested of the Advice-​to-​a-​Painter poems, a ‘Promethean’ act?24 Why did the poem support military engagement publicly in the Second Anglo-​Dutch War when it seems that it had only done so privately in the first war? Were prudence and diplomacy prominent factors, given the changes in Marvell’s status and profession between these years? Or, was it more to do with external factors in the 1660s, notably 173

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From Republic to Restoration the loss of Hull’s reliance on Dutch trade? Either of these explanations is plausible. Marvell’s interest in the Dutch first appeared in the 1651 Latin poem, ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John ad Provincias Foederatas’, which was written about (although not necessarily for) Oliver St John, the former solicitor general who led an embassy with Walter Strickland to form a ‘strict and intimate alliance and union’ with the Dutch.25 Through this, the Rump hoped to eradicate the influence of the Stuart-​favouring House of Orange from the United Provinces. The existence of this poem promotes the possibility that Marvell, a competent Dutch speaker, may have joined the embassy at some point, despite the general assumption that he was quietly settled at Nun Appleton from late 1650.26 Yet, while the poem has been described as ‘public’, inferring that ‘weak’ publication must have taken place, the preposition of the title, which translates to ‘On the Embassy’ rather than ‘To Oliver St John’, avoids any such commitment.27 The nervousness in the poem, which anticipates a collapse in the strained relations between the two nations, shows the poet sympathising with St John while expressing concerns about committing to the new government: Et tu, cui soli voluit respublica credi, Foedera seu Belgis seu nova bella feras; Haud frustra cecidit tibi compellatio fallax, Ast scriptum ancipiti nomine munus erat[.]‌ (As for you, to whom alone the Republic wanted to be entrusted, Whether you bring to the Dutch treaties or new wars, It was not in vain that this elusive encounter has befallen you; Rather the duty was inscribed in your twofold name.) (5–​8)

With the Republic still in its infancy, there were clear risks associated with acting on its behalf. This was especially true of an envoy to the Netherlands, given the swift assassination of the Republic’s first nomination for the role, Isaac Dorislaus, in 1649. Marvell would have been aware of St John’s reluctance to undertake the mission when addressing him as the lone carrier of the Republic’s hopes, and he encourages the ambassador to keep his sentiments guarded rather than ‘to bury deceptiveness in forms of guile’ (‘Non opus … /​varia licitos condere fraude dolos’ [11–​12]). As such, ‘compellatio fallax’ seems to go beyond ‘elusive encounter’ as translated by Estelle Haan. ‘Fallax’ clearly implies some form of deceit behind the mission, while ‘compellatio’ suggests that it was forced upon the reluctant leader. Like Bulstrode Whitelocke, sent to Sweden in 1653, St John had found himself forced into accepting the mission by an increasingly self-​assured government looking to assert itself on the Continent. ‘I was sent against my will’, he declared in 1660. ‘For both by Petition to the House, and otherwise, I used all means 174

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 to avoid it.’28 Although it is often difficult to take such Restoration apologia at face value, Marvell’s 1651 poem affords the ambassador’s reluctance some legitimacy. Far from the zealous Cromwell of the ‘Horatian Ode’, St John is said to hold the keys to the iron bolts of Janus (‘Clavibus his Jani ferrea claustra regis’ [10]) –​or the ability to prevent war –​in his hands. Whatever Marvell thought of the proposed union, he may have wished to see it succeed if only to avoid the inevitable alternative. In February 1653, Milton, seeking a new assistant, recommended Marvell to John Bradshaw, President of the Council of State, for the appointment. It has often been assumed that ‘The Character of Holland’, which commemorates English resurgence in the First Anglo-​Dutch War, was written and delivered as part of this job application.29 But, as with ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John’, there is no evidence that it was released, even in the weakest sense, at the time. If the poem was completed in time for the interview with Bradshaw, about which we cannot be sure, it does not seem to have helped Marvell’s cause, as the role was granted to Philip Meadows instead. Furthermore, if the poem was submitted with preferment in mind, it seems remarkably odd that it did not end up in print, given that his poetic talents were deemed capable of helping the government to establish international relations with Sweden later in the same year.30 Marvell also had reasons to seek publication of his own accord, despite apparently not doing so. If he had experienced the slipperiness of Dutch politics first-​hand, as ‘compellatio fallax’ in 1651 seems to imply, it may well have roused his ire sufficiently –​as political events did in later years –​ prompting him to set his lines to print. The delaying tactics of the Dutch Orangists left St John, like the assassinated Isaac Dorislaus before him, as an open target for exiled royalists and the Dutch factions that supported them. Accordingly, Marvell’s lines ‘Half-​anders, half wet, and half dry, /​ Nor bear strict service, nor pure liberty’ (53–​54) expose a culture of secrecy and corruption in the Hague along with a populace who were, according to Pincus, neither good Protestants nor committed republicans.31 Marvell may also have been tempted to react to Dutch print culture, a subject that had clearly roused him domestically. The integrity of Fairfax’s retirement, constructed with such care in his Nun Appleton verse, was being actively undermined by Dutch propagandists, who labelled the former general an ‘epitome of deviousness’ at the outbreak of the First Anglo-​Dutch War. Additionally, Dutch pamphlets associating Cromwell with the Devil were taking their lead from printed works of English royalists in 1648, using the rhetoric of a fractured England against itself.32 Marvell’s poem acts in self-​defence against the stereotypes and insults made in Dutch propaganda, while conforming to views of the Dutch as a fallen, lesser race, ‘seduced by Mammon and monarchy’.33 175

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From Republic to Restoration As with all of Marvell’s heightened political verse penned between 1650 and 1651, however, there is no firm evidence to suggest that ‘The Character of Holland’ emerged, even anonymously, at the time of writing. Claims that the poem was ‘republished’ or ‘reissued’ in the 1660s have never substantiated their assumption of earlier publication.34 Instead, we find ourselves asking why Marvell might have chosen to withhold it at that time, despite these obvious temptations and opportunities. Had Marvell restrained his animus because he concluded that the future economy of his hometown of Hull could still rely on Dutch custom? If so, publication may have become much more appealing in 1665 when this reliance had ended and the Earl of Carlisle had discussed alternative trade links with Northern Europe. Or was it because of lingering doubts about the Rump Parliament’s aggressive foreign policy? The war represented a clear move to take by force that which the 1651 embassy and Navigation Act had attempted to achieve by statutory methods. Though Oliver St John maintained a strong relationship with Cromwell, his reflections on the 1651 embassy, which, like ‘The Character of Holland’, were published in the Restoration, revealed that there had been no room for negotiation with ‘those who then, de facto, though not de jure, exercised the Supream Power of the Nation’.35 Marvell may have harboured similar unspoken reservations at the time. As Warren Chernaik reminds us, his writings of the early 1650s do not even offer an argument for the de facto legitimacy of Cromwell’s rule let alone the de jure legitimacy.36 The most plausible reason for withholding the poem, perhaps, comes from Marvell’s own pen. His note in the poem on St John, ‘Non opus arcanos chartis committere sensus’ (11; ‘There is no need to entrust hidden meanings to paper’), echoes closely his much later lines on the graphologist, Maniban, ‘Quis posthac chartae committat sensa loquaci’ (1; ‘Who henceforth would entrust his feelings to talkative paper?’). In 1651, just months after his final prefatory contribution for more than two decades, he is found expressing private fears that words would return to haunt him. It suggests that, even at this stage, any transmission at all was too great a risk. Despite losing out to Meadows in 1653, Marvell would have known that his multilingual abilities had uses in foreign affairs, especially while diplomatic work requiring language expertise was still a priority for the government.37 He may well have concluded that if his identity had become known to any Dutch diplomats, he risked compromising future diplomatic involvement by contributing to public anti-​Dutch satire in 1653. Discounting ‘The Character of Holland’ as part of a bid for employment does not, however, complete the story of the poem in the 1650s and the potential ramifications of withholding publication. By not submitting the work to Bradshaw, Marvell perhaps saw an opportunity to seek patronage 176

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 from select individuals within the Rump instead. The final fifty-​two lines of the 1653 version, which would later be replaced, are strongly in support of the Republic, emphasising the English claims to sovereignty over the seas that the Rump had continued to insist upon. Marvell’s sneering reference to Hugo Grotius’s notion, that order should be maintained through respect of rights, defends English sovereignty against the Dutch.38 And the Dutch ‘burgomaster’, Maarten van Tromp, whose failure to acknowledge Captain Robert Blake off the Dover coast became one of the incendiary actions that triggered the war, gets cast off in shame as Marvell’s poem celebrates the navy’s (and by association, the Rump’s) resounding success. Yet, for all these efforts, Marvell could not have known that Cromwell would disband the Rump in April 1653, ending what was a small window of opportunity for the poem to have procured rewards from that readership. A third plausible possibility for non-​publication is that Marvell was seeking patronage from Cromwell himself. On the face of it, Marvell’s occasional poems from 1649 and his close affinity with Lord Fairfax at Nun Appleton from 1650–​52 make any alliance with Cromwell seem an unlikely prospect at this point. The Latin poem, ‘In Legationem’, shows Marvell to be far from a convinced Cromwellian in 1651, and ‘The Character of Holland’ may have eulogised the actions of a parliament with which Cromwell found irreconcilable differences. And yet, somehow, Marvell ended up in Cromwell’s employ as a tutor to William Dutton in 1653, for which he wrote in thanks, addressing Cromwell as ‘so eminent a person’.39 Did this employment come about due to ‘weak’ publication of ‘The Character of Holland’, as many have suspected? Had Milton’s endorsement of Marvell’s language skills finally paid dividends? Or did Oliver St John, who proposed the disbanding of the Rump with Cromwell, recommend him instead? Marvell’s residence with William Dutton at the Oxenbridges, St John’s in-​laws, not only strengthens the case for Marvell’s hypothetical participation with the 1651 embassy, but it also offers a plausible explanation as to how Marvell might have manoeuvred his way into the reaches of government without the assumption of distribution of a poem for which there is no other evidence of transmission prior to 1665. Marvell’s aptitude for caution seems to have paid off. Had the decision not to publish the poem procured greater reward than publication might have done? There is no way of knowing how public Marvell might have intended it to be at the time of writing, but credible reasons exist as to why there is no contemporary evidence of publication that has survived to this time. The assumption that ‘The Character of Holland’ was written solely to support Marvell’s application for a government role is then, on investigation, questionable. Hence, the other widespread assumption, that Marvell had no involvement in an ‘unauthorised’ publication in 1665, needs to be 177

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From Republic to Restoration similarly examined.40 The truncated version of the poem sees the final fifty-​ two lines on the Commonwealth in the original replaced by a new eight-​ line conclusion: Vainly did this Slap-​Dragon fury hope, With sober English valour ere to cope: Not though they Primed their barb’rous mornings-​draught With Power, and with Pipes of Brandy fraught: Yet Rupert, Sandwich, and of all, the Duke. The Duke has made their Sea-​sick courage puke. Like the three Comets, sent from heaven down With Fiery Flailes to swinge th’ingratefull Clown.41

Any case for ‘Promethean’ publication on Marvell’s part would be immediately rebuffed if, as critics have long believed, the poem displayed evidence of alternative authorship. But strong arguments now support the case that he did construct these lines himself.42 The ‘new’ ending compares and introduces three comets presaging the naval champions of the moment (‘Rupert, Sandwich, and of all, the Duke’). The language here is significant because the appearance of comets (or ‘blazing stars’) in 1665 had been seen as a prodigious omen by those who resented the loss of religious toleration under the restored monarchy, and it sparked a growing fear of apocalypse in the year 1666. Almanacs and works of astrology foretold war, natural disasters, pestilence and heavy casualties, many of which came to pass.43 Samuel Danforth (1626–​74) issued a bleak reminder in 1664 that ‘The Histories of former Ages do abuntantly testifie that Comets have been many times Heralds of wrath to a secure and impenitent World’.44 Consequently, part of the purpose of the revised ‘Character of Holland’ is to act as nationalist propaganda by reinterpreting the language of comets to portend national success rather than disaster. Further evidence supporting Marvell’s authorship can be found in the language from the revised ending, which resonates closely with that of The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector, published anonymously in 1655. If the first and last couplets of this new conclusion are compared with The First Anniversary: ‘And stars still fall, and still the dragon’s tail /​Swinges the volumes of its horrid flail’ (151–​52),45 the concentrated parallels between the two texts not only support the case for Marvell’s authorship but also show a conscious reprisal of his own ‘public’ language from his last foray into print a decade earlier. The question remains as to what might have prompted Marvell to become proactive in one or more publications of the poem in 1665 –​the ‘Promethean’ revelation of what appears to be a twelve-​year-​long animosity against the Dutch. Had his ire against Dutch treachery finally superseded his dislike of the presses? In 1657, John Thurloe, who was soon to become 178

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 Marvell’s employer, discovered Dutch involvement in seditious literature advocating the death of Cromwell. Fourteen hundred copies of Killing No Murder were discovered on a Dutch ship which had contravened the Navigation Act to deliver them on English soil.46 The slippery nature of the race described by Marvell as ‘Half-​anders’ had surfaced once again. Or was it owing to his personal experience with the Dutch, which took on new significance in 1662 when he departed on the first of two missions to the United Provinces? Marvell was initially evasive about his involvement in these embassies, telling his superiors at the Hull Corporation only of his dealings with ‘severall persons of quality whom it is not necessary to name but are friends to your interest’.47 Several signs point to espionage here, Nigel Smith suggests, though Marvell could have been representing Hull’s commercial interests at the same time.48 Soon after his return from the first expedition, in June 1663, Marvell sought leave again for a further embassy to Muscovy as the Earl of Carlisle’s secretary. However, like the Dutch embassy of 1651, this, too, proved ill-​fated and ended in failure shortly in advance of another Anglo-​Dutch War. During the return journey from Russia, Carlisle’s considerable influence almost paid dividends as he attempted to strike an ambitious alliance with Sweden, the fastest growing empire by conquest in Europe, which would have proven excellent news for Humberside.49 But as the embassy’s financial resources ran thin and the threat of war with the Dutch loomed, the decision was made to travel at speed, with a lengthy detour to avoid the Netherlands. These challenges clearly took their toll on Marvell, who allegedly drew his gun on a coach driver in Hamburg as mounting rancour and frustration boiled over. By 1665, Marvell’s professional position, far from the apprentice judiciously seeking employment twelve years earlier, gave him the opportunity not only to aid economic recovery for his home town, but also, given a souring opinion of the Dutch, to vent publicly about them. The loss of Dutch commercial hegemony in the 1660s, aided by a revised Navigation Act which further marginalised them, and Carlisle’s attempts to eschew the United Provinces altogether, would have made them a considerably easier (and diplomatically less damaging) target for public invective at the outset of the second Dutch war in 1665 than during the first war in 1653. Hull soon overlooked its lost commercial ties, celebrating when reports emerged in late July 1666 of ‘the greatest victory that ever was yet acquired’ by the English fleet.50 It was also now incumbent on Marvell to follow the party line, which he does in the revised ending to ‘The Character of Holland’ by praising the Duke of York and likening the English defence to comets. His activity in the Provinces during the early 1660s would have positioned him better than most to witness the redevelopment of the Dutch navy, which 179

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From Republic to Restoration had added military vessels to its fleet of cargo ships in a heavy investment programme. Consequently, the acerbic take on the Dutch –​the scourge of the sea –​perhaps adopts a note of caution alongside the ridicule. Where the Dutch had built their economy from the sea, they had now adapted their navy to a point at which it could just as capably wage battles at sea. Although the poet would have sympathised with dissenters who had interpreted the comets as a sign of retribution for the loss of religious toleration under Charles II, his overriding priority would have been to promote a united front that would prevent further civil division instigated by the Dutch. There remains the issue of how to account for Marvell’s involvement in this act of propaganda, given his criticism of governance that followed in subsequent years. The Earl of Sandwich in particular receives much harsher treatment in The Second Advice to a Painter (1666), which presents a far less optimistic view of events than the new ending to ‘The Character of Holland’. And the Duchess of York, Anne Hyde, becomes satirical bait in The Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), as Marvell makes crude references to her ‘oyster lip’ (61), ‘Chancellor’s belly’ and ‘so large a rump’ (63). This apparent inconsistency, although it is typical of Marvell, has inevitably cast doubt upon his involvement in the revised 1665 publication. However, his stance seems less contradictory if we consider the more lenient treatment afforded to the royal lineage, Prince Rupert of the Rhine and James, Duke of York, in the Second Advice.51 Here, Rupert ‘knew not fear’ (91), resolved to fight ‘like a lion’ (101) and ‘did others and himself excel’ (227), while the Duke of York is presented as ‘fearless’ (187). Both regal figures retain credit in Marvell’s depiction of the haphazard management of the English war effort. Was the poet still mindful of York’s words in favour of his friend and patron Philip, Baron Wharton, that had allowed him (and his wealth) to survive the Restoration relatively unscathed?52 Marvell’s bond with Wharton had strengthened by the mid-​1660s and the poet may have already been received at one of the baron’s Buckinghamshire estates. It seems reason enough to assume that Marvell might have reserved some favour for the Duke, who had overturned a plot to have Wharton excluded from the general pardon of 1660. What seems clear enough is that in 1665, at least, Marvell does not appear to be quite the zealous anti-​Yorkist that most imagine him to be. This leaves us with little reason to doubt the poet’s complicity in the authorship and production of the revised ‘The Character of Holland’ –​his first foray into print in a decade. Once in the public domain, the poem transcends its context, becoming significant not only in the context of the second, but also in the Third Anglo-​Dutch War. It was initially entered into the Stationers’ Register ten days after the Duke of York had defeated 180

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 the Dutch off Lowestoft, and subsequent reprints from Robert Horn in 1672 coincided with the ‘near disintegration’ of the Dutch army, marking the fall of an empire which had held commercial dominance over the English only twenty years before.53 In a translation of the Second Chorus from Seneca’s Thyestes, thought to date to the early 1670s, Marvell’s own voice penetrates through, wishing to be ‘far off the publick stage’. The irony is, of course, that in terms of publication, he seems to have re-​established himself back there in 1665. The dedication to private autonomy that became further ingrained during the Republic would continue throughout his lifetime, but the rejection of publication did not. Challenging largely uncontested views concerning ‘The Character of Holland’ in the broader context of Marvell’s published output provides an insight into his decision-​making during both Republic and Restoration. The poem represents a fascinating cross-​section of his unusual career in print, revealing a Marvell of strategic opportunism but of a consistently strained attitude towards the medium. Although he remained extremely cautious about voicing antagonistic opinion while personal and communal gains could still be compromised, he spared no opportunity to do so when the odds were in his favour. Moreover, if we accept the possibility that Marvell held complete control of this poem from 1653 until a point at which he chose actively to re-​engage, this fortifies the case that where no evidence exists for publication, Marvell handled his compositions, temporarily or permanently, with almost complete privacy in mind.

Notes 1 Blair Worden, ‘Andrew Marvell, Oliver Cromwell, and the Horatian Ode’, in Politics of Discourse: the Literature and History of Seventeenth-​Century England, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 147–​80 (p. 150). 2 The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Annabel Patterson and others, 2 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), i, p. 288. 3 See Randy Robertson, ‘Lovelace and the “barbed Censurers”:  Lucasta and Civil War Censorship’, Studies in Philology, 103 (2006), 465–​98 (pp. 477–​80). 4 All references to Marvell’s poetry are from The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007). The Latin translations quoted from this volume are supplied by Estelle Haan. 5 Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England:  John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007); Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6 Barbara Everett, ‘The Shooting of the Bears: Poetry and Politics in Andrew Marvell’, in Andrew Marvell: Essays on the Tercentenary of His Death, ed. by R. L. Brett (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the University of Hull, 1979), pp. 62–​104 (p. 65). 7 McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance, p. 4.

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From Republic to Restoration 8 Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell:  Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 164–​77. Note also Smith’s supposition that ‘the lyric poems circulated in MS form on a very limited basis’ (Smith, Poems, xiii). 9 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 36, 39. 10 Love, Scribal Publication, p. 184. 11 Joad Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty:  Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (1999), 313–​50. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic:  Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–​1660 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 340. 12 This idea featured in Martin Dzelzainis’s 2009 proposal to Oxford University Press for the 21st Century Oxford Authors series, which I am grateful to have consulted. 13 Smith, Poems, p. 192. 14 Ibid., p. 192. 15 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems’, The Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), 395–​410 (p. 399). 16 If Palmer, who signed the preface to the posthumously published Miscellaneous Poems as Marvell’s widow, was related to a ‘Thomas Palmer’, a printer and bookseller, who was pilloried in 1671 for selling one or more of the Advice-​to-​a-​Painter poems, Marvell could have married her either to further his connections to the radical press, or to guarantee her silence if he was ever prosecuted, since wives could not testify against their husbands. See Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 224–​25; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), p. 198. 17 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. by H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), ii, 166. 18 Hilton Kelliher, Andrew Marvell: Poet & Politician (London: British Library, 1978), p. 49. 19 Margarita Stocker and Timothy Raylor, ‘A New Marvell Manuscript:  Cromwellian Patronage and Politics’, English Literary Renaissance, 20 (1990), 106–​62. 20 James Loxley has identified a number of ‘epistemological questions’ that cloud the straightforward use of poetic resemblance as evidence for particular claims. ‘Echoes as Evidence in the Poetry of Andrew Marvell’, Studies in English Literature 1500–​1900, 52 (2012), 165–​85 (p. 168). 21 George deF. Lord, ‘Absalom and Achitophel and Dryden’s Political Cosmos’, in Writers and their Background: John Dryden, ed. by Earl Miner (Athens, GA: Ohio University Press, 1972), pp. 156–​90 (pp. 172–​73). 22 On the 1653 dating of the poem, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 296; Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p.  120; Nigel Smith, Literature & Revolution in England, 1640–​ 1660 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 315. 23 On the York edition of 1665, see John Barnard, ‘The 1665 York and London Editions of Marvell’s “The Character of Holland”’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 81 (1987), 459–​64. 24 Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground’, p. 395. 25 Cited in Steven C. A. Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–​1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 26. 26 Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, pp. 399–​404. 27 Estelle Haan, Andrew Marvell’s Latin Poetry: from Text to Context (Brussels: Latomus, 2003), p. 14; Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England, p. 118. 28 Oliver St. John, The Case of Oliver St. John, Esq. Concerning His Actions During the Late Troubles (London, 1660), p. 8.

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Marvell’s public and private writings, 1649–65 29 For example: Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–​ 1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 310; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, p. 281; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 90. 30 On Marvell’s diplomatic verse to Sweden, see Edward Holberton, ‘Bellipotens Virgo’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 November 2008, pp. 14–​15. 31 Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic:  Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–​ 1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 701; Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 14. This description was particularly relevant to Zeeland (p. 28, n. 70). 32 Elizabeth Staffell, ‘The Horrible Tail-​Man and the Anglo-​Dutch Wars’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63 (2000), 169–​86 (pp. 171–​74). 33 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, p. 75. 34 Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, p.  123; Richard Todd, ‘Equilibrium and National Stereotyping in “The Character of Holland” ’, in On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Claude J. Summers and Ted-​Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), pp. 169–​91 (p. 174). 35 St. John, The Case of Oliver St. John, p. 9. 36 Warren Chernaik, ‘ “Every conqueror creates a muse”:  Conquest and Constitutions in Marvell and Waller’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 195–​216 (p. 200). 37 See Leo Miller, John Milton’s Writings in the Anglo-​ Dutch Negotiations, 1651–​ 1654 (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1992), pp. 56–​67. 38 For example, on the sea: ‘if any part of the Sea come into the propriety of any people … dominion might be introduced, with a reception of such use’; and on those not at war: ‘necessity ought to be extreme, that it may give a right over what belongs to another man’. The Illustrious Hugo Grotius, of the Law of Warre and Peace with Annotations, trans. by Clement Barksdale (London, 1655), pp. 212, 645. 39 Margoliouth, Poems and Letters, II, 304. 40 Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p.  136, believes the 1665 amendments were not Marvell’s; likewise Margoliouth, Poems and Letters, I, 309. Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time:  Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.  164, together with Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, pp.  240–​41, and Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown, p.  123, all believe that the later imprint(s) appeared without consent. 41 Anon., The Character of Holland (London, 1665). 42 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Dutch in 1665’, in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts, ed. by Edward Jones (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015), pp. 249–​65. 43 One anonymous commentator observes, ‘This present Plague was fore-​ told by… learned and famous Artists; as Mr. Gadbury, in his Ephemeris… Mr Lillie, Mr Booker, Mr Trigge, and Mr Andrews’; The Prophecies, and Predictions, For London’s Deliverance (London, 1665), p. 6. John Gadbury (1627–​1704) was prolific in this field in 1665. 44 Samuel Danforth, An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star as it Appeared in New England in the 9th, 10th, 11th and in the Beginning of the 12th Moneth, 1664 (Cambridge, 1664), pp. 16–​17. 45 Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Dutch in 1665’, p. 259. This comparison initially featured in the 21st Century Oxford Authors series proposal. 46 Jason Peacey, ‘Cromwellian England: A Propaganda State?’, History, 91 (2006), 176–​99 (p. 183). 47 Margoliouth, Poems and Letters, II, 253. 48 Smith, The Chameleon, pp. 170–​72. The Humberside port had been looking anxiously towards Norway in an attempt to offset the impositions of the Navigation Acts and

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From Republic to Restoration the subsequent slump in trade. Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 16–​18, 35–​36. 49 Smith, The Chameleon, p.  179; Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 179. 50 Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, pp. 285–​86. 51 Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Dutch in 1665’, p. 261. 52 Stephen Bardle, The Literary Underground in the 1660s: Andrew Marvell, George Wither, Ralph Wallis, and the World of Restoration Satire and Pamphleteering (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 99. 53 Israel, The Dutch Republic, p. 644.

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Chapter 9

Projecting the Experiment: science and the Restoration Ted McCormick

Introduction

T

he history of seventeenth-​century English science has often been written as the history of the institutionalisation of experimental natural philosophy. A  classic narrative account of the growth of English science might begin with Francis Bacon (d. 1626), culminate with Isaac Newton and the Principia (1687), and pivot around the formation of the Royal Society shortly after the Restoration in 1660.1 As knowledge of and interest in the London-​based intelligencer Samuel Hartlib (1600–​62) and the activities of his ‘circle’ of philosophers, inventors and projectors have grown, however (from disputes about the Royal Society’s ‘true’ origins to the recent digitisation of the Hartlib Papers), attention has increasingly focused on the era of the Civil War, Commonwealth and Protectorate as a crucial time not only in the formation of an English scientific community, but also in the application of experimental and empirical methods to social, political, economic and religious challenges.2 One way of looking at the relationship between Commonwealth and Restoration science is thus to look at the relationship between the Hartlib Circle and the Royal Society. But this raises a number of historiographical questions. Perhaps the most influential set of approaches to early English science in the twentieth century grew out of the extension of the ‘Puritan thesis’ associated with Max Weber and R. H. Tawney from economy to science.3 Arguments about Puritan science have certainly taken many forms. In the 1930s, Richard Foster Jones –​whose tripartite periodisation of English science made ‘the Puritan era’, and the Puritan contribution, central –​suggested that Bacon’s emphasis on the utility of science and his concomitant separation of science from theology appealed to Puritans, who recognised in the new science a programme of reform akin to their own.4 Later, the sociologist Robert Merton argued that the secularising implications of 185

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From Republic to Restoration Calvinist theology, together with the radical expansion of political possibilities in the wake of the civil wars, reoriented engagements with the natural world.5 The leading scholar of the ‘English Revolution’ in the 1960s and 1970s, Christopher Hill, looked to Puritans’ emphasis on law and Providence as well as to their rejection of scholastic authority as fostering the new science.6 Charles Webster described a multitude of links between Puritanism and the Baconianism of the Hartlib Circle, and emphasised in particular the role of Puritan eschatology in sustaining new ideas of historical progress and thus legitimating the new kinds of experiment and invention.7 More recently, Peter Harrison has suggested an indirect link between Puritanism and science, centring on Protestant reformers’ turn from allegorical exegesis to more literal interpretations of Scripture as the key to a new practical approach to the natural world.8 Others have long questioned the relationship between science and Puritanism, for reasons relating both to the practice of early modern science and, in an English context, to the history of the Church.9 One alternative to the ‘Puritan’ thesis, pioneered by Barbara Shapiro, saw ‘latitudinarian’ Anglicans (those committed to an inclusive established Church and –​on Shapiro’s reading, at least –​opposed to the persecution of nonconforming Protestants) as the vital proponents of science before and after 1660.10 In some cases predating major research on the Hartlib Circle, defenders of the latitudinarian thesis looked back instead to the philosophical works of the Cambridge Platonists for the pre-​Civil War origins of experimental science in England.11 More recent studies of early modern science in transnational European or global contexts, on the other hand, have sometimes downplayed confessional identities and religious motivations altogether as causal factors in the growth of science, emphasising instead the dynamism of textual or disciplinary traditions or the social circulation of artisanal practices and procedures.12 Much recent work on the Hartlib Circle, meanwhile, has emphasised its transnational dimensions as well as its spiritual goals rather than straightforwardly material or scientific aims.13 These historiographical developments have inevitably produced a range of divergent views on the origins, nature and significance of the Royal Society to the history of seventeenth-​century science. If we are concerned with the scientific impact of the Restoration, however, questions about the Royal Society’s formation and progress, its members and the work they pursued remain obvious, even inescapable, starting points. What may be more easily and productively jettisoned is the vocabulary of faction in which these questions have so often been couched. Was science predominantly parliamentary or royalist in political terms, Puritan or Anglican in religious affiliation, natural-​historical or mathematical in methodological outlook? Who ‘won’ at the Restoration, and who lost? 186

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Projecting the Experiment Certainly, these are imposing questions that imply bold answers and clear narratives. That they are tractable or nuanced ways of understanding the relationship between Commonwealth-​era and Restoration science, or interpreting the scientific careers of figures who bridged the two periods, is much less obvious. Even where the confessional and political allegiances –​to say nothing of the inward convictions –​of experimental philosophers whose careers bridged the Restoration can be known with any certainty, such commitments were neither uniform nor stable over time. Such men often survived precisely because they were not wedded to a faction. This makes it difficult to infer anything meaningful about ‘Restoration science’ by ascribing fixed, collective political or religious allegiances to its practitioners at the outset; biographical details, interpersonal dynamics and conceptual nuances that clearly mattered elude that sort of tabulation. Moreover, to speak of seventeenth-​century science as a readymade pursuit that people possessing certain qualifications might simply join, or which political developments might straightforwardly help or hinder, begs important questions. What kind of enterprise did specific actors understand, or shape, science to be? How did the Restoration of the monarchy and the foundation of the Royal Society impinge on their capacity to pursue this work, their understanding of its purposes, or the way it was received? And how might we assess this? This chapter approaches these questions in a modest way and from an oblique angle. It begins by looking at how the history of science during the Civil War, Commonwealth and Protectorate was written from the perspective of the Restoration, specifically in Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal-​ Society (1667).14 Criticised by scholars as an overly simplistic portrayal of experimental method, if not a simple piece of Anglican and royalist propaganda, Sprat’s book was nevertheless an important attempt to present and justify the history of experimental philosophy to audiences witnessing its putative institutionalisation.15 Inasmuch as Sprat’s account of the Royal Society’s origins involved claims for the Society’s capacity to solve problems that had hampered the pursuit of science under the Commonwealth, it implied judgements about both the history of England between 1640 and 1660 and the possibilities for science then and since. It thus offers us a yardstick for measuring the expectations of at least some Restoration men of science, irrespective of its fidelity to the details of scientific practice or, indeed, to historical truth. As will further be discussed, Sprat’s views of history, the history of science, and the relationship between the two before and after 1660 were not as two-​dimensional as his politics might lead one to predict. Even this most triumphalist of Restoration works saw the events of the 1640s and 1650s, in the field of battle as well as in the workings of the 187

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From Republic to Restoration intellect, as functionally connected to later developments. No Civil War, no Royal Society. The chapter then turns to one of the figures and one of the experimental efforts Sprat singled out for attention:  the physician, projector and later inventor of ‘political arithmetic’, Sir William Petty, and his major project of 1661–​65, the ‘double-​bottom’ or double-​hulled ship. Like his celebrated colleagues John Wilkins and Robert Boyle, Petty featured in Sprat’s narrative as a scientific child of the Civil War and one of the key early organisers and founding Fellows of the Royal Society; like Boyle and Christopher Wren, on the other hand, he actively exemplified the empirical methodology and the practical orientation that defined the Restoration experimental philosopher –​qualities especially evident, for Sprat, in his sustained, public attempts to improve ship design.16 Yet both Petty’s unique career and the fate of his flagship Restoration project jarred with Sprat’s optimistic narrative in significant ways. Juxtaposing Sprat’s representation of the development of experimental science with the actual trajectories of both Petty and his project shows important continuities in outlook, rhetoric and goals, as well as in the challenges facing practical science before and after 1660; it also reveals discontinuities not only in the institutional environment but also in the role of the state. Rather than a straightforward institutionalisation of science tout court after 1660, this suggests that the Restoration reconfigured the landscape in which scientific projects took shape, imposing a new set of boundaries –​as much political as methodological in nature –​that were as apt to hinder as to promote specific practical applications of scientific knowledge.

Remembering the Commonwealth

E

arly Royal Society apologetic and Sprat’s contribution to it have been much studied and much criticised; returning to them thus requires some justification. The work not of a philosopher but  of a writer and a cleric, The History of the Royal-​Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge offered an outsider’s vulgarisation of experimentalism and a misleadingly monolithic portrayal of a Royal Society membership that was in fact as heterogeneous in its methodology and goals as in its politico-​religious composition.17 Paradoxically, Sprat’s work might even be seen as too much a product of the Restoration to be of much use in understanding the science practised at the time. As it was motivated by the need to establish the political orthodoxy of the new science and to support its practitioners’ efforts to secure patronage, the History sought not so much to explain the experimental operations as ‘to align the new science with as 188

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Projecting the Experiment many consensus values as possible’.18 At a time when philosophical novelty inherently threatened the traditional values, hierarchies and institutions on which the Restoration rested, Sprat portrayed a Royal Society uninterested in ideological debate or radicalism of any kind. At best, it has been suggested, he channelled the views of his immediate supervisors, Wilkins and Secretary of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg.19 Far from being a guide to experimentalists’ self-​understanding, the final portion of the History, its defence of the new science, was an exercise in public relations. Despite its limitations as a guide to experimental science in action, however, the History nevertheless represents an important attempt to articulate a positive role for the new natural philosophy in relation to Restoration society and polity  –​possibly the most sustained and certainly the most prominent such attempt of the day. To put it another way, Sprat argued for a particular set of connections between specific ways of pursuing natural knowledge, on one hand, and specific political and religious arrangements, on the other. Even if his particular view of these connections was not universally shared, still the categories and the vocabulary that he used to capture these relationships were common currency. Sprat can therefore tell us a great deal about how his contemporaries might have thought about the questions we are trying to answer. But there is a further dimension of Sprat’s work to consider. While his use of rhetoric, his relationship to the Royal Society, and his handling of experimental methodology have each attracted a great deal of critical attention, the historical dimension of his History, including his comments on the Civil War and the fate of knowledge during the Commonwealth, has not. For Sprat and for his audience, establishing a place for science under the restored monarchy required sorting out, or cleaning up, its role in the preceding period. The composition of the History was itself the work of several eventful years. Sprat was commissioned to write the book in 1663. Both Part I, a potted history ‘of the Antient, and Modern Philosophy’, and much of Part II, on the origins and work of the Royal Society, were written by late 1664, before the disasters of the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London intervened.20 Thus much of the properly historical portion of the History was the product not just of the Restoration in general but more specifically of a period during which the new regime took on a definite, secure, but also in many respects negative, appearance. The last serious anti-​monarchical plots had fizzled out by the summer of 1663; while Charles seemed to abandon business for the pleasures of court life, the Cavalier Parliament was setting in place a harsh religious settlement, the so-​called Clarendon Code, anchored by the 1662 Act of Uniformity and elaborated by further legislation in 1663 to 1664. When Sprat resumed Part II and completed the History with his defence of experimental philosophy in Part III, however, 189

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From Republic to Restoration the political pendulum was in full swing in the other direction: in the wake of domestic catastrophe and disastrous defeat in the Second Anglo-​Dutch War, Clarendon fell from power, and an increasingly unpopular Charles sought greater toleration of religious dissent, as well as his own liberation from Parliament. This is not to suggest that different portions of Sprat’s text be indexed to individual events during the years 1663 to 1667. But it should remind us that the monarchy, the Restoration and, by implication, the Commonwealth looked quite different at different points over the course of the work’s composition, not least with respect to the politico-​religious questions that have been important to the historiography of science. Reading the History as a history therefore requires alertness to the possibility of internal tensions. If there is anything like a prevailing view of the book’s historical significance, independent of its reliability as a mirror of scientific practice, this view centres on Sprat’s presentation of the new philosophy as balm for a divided nation.21 Experimental philosophy, embodied institutionally in the Royal Society, promised to heal party rifts and neutralise the political threat of scientific debate by creating a space for rational enquiry from which the raw materials of faction –​discussions of political and religious principle –​ were barred. This was premised, intellectually, on the acceptance of a reading of Baconian methodology that shunned theoretical commitments and the construction of philosophical systems in favour of the piecemeal and collaborative accumulation of verifiable observations. Socially, meanwhile, it required the adoption of a new scientific persona in which modesty and liberality were core values. By thus reorganising both the practice of science and the identity of the scientific practitioner around a set of tangible, visible and philosophically humble operations, the Royal Society offered an antidote to the Commonwealth’s mingling of science, politics and religion, to dogmatism and sectarian enthusiasm, to the confusion of private and public interests –​above all to everything that would, in modern parlance, be called ‘ideology’.22 As far as it goes, this matches Sprat’s argument in Part III, which was devoted to showing experimental philosophy’s independence of civil matters and its compatibility with the (re)established political, social and religious order. Running through the earlier portions of the History, however, is a series of tensions that suggest a more complex attitude towards the Commonwealth’s legacy for the advancement of natural knowledge. Most obviously, there is the matter of the Commonwealth period itself. Sprat’s account of the formation of the Oxford philosophical club under Wilkins’s tutelage ‘some space after the end of the Civil Wars’ initially appears to suit the account just given. ‘Their first purpose’, Sprat wrote, was simply ‘the satisfaction of breathing a freer air, and of conversing in quiet with 190

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Projecting the Experiment one another, without being ingag’d in the passions, and madness of that dismal Age’.23 Natural philosophy was a private escape (and a contingent one, in the sense that it was an ‘entertainment’ rather than a vocation) from a ‘gloomy season’ of civil and theological discord, ‘confusion and slavery’.24 Presenting Wilkins’s group as ‘the foundation of all that follow’d’ and avoiding any mention of Hartlib and his associates set the stage for Sprat’s preposterous celebration of philosophy as ‘always Loyal [to the monarchy] in the worst of times’ and of the Royal Society, accordingly, as the Church of England’s philosophical counterpart.25 Yet in Part I, Sprat had suggested, if not a wholly positive, then at least a more constructive role for the political upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s in the growth of organised science. This occurred in the course of his survey of the new philosophy, which took in the work of ‘Modern Dogmatists’, ‘Revivers of Ancient Sects’, ‘Modern Experimenters’ (led by Bacon), and ‘Chymists’, before considering various specialised institutions, among them ‘Modern Academies for Language’.26 Here Sprat, as a writer and a poet, was on home ground, and he held forth on the usefulness of a pet project, ‘the compiling of a History of our late Civil Wars’ as a crowning achievement of linguistic reform. Not only was civil strife a fitting subject for such a work; recent experience of conflict was also a condition for its success, as a comparison with Rome made clear: ‘it was in the peaceful reign of Augustus, after the conclusion of their long Civil Wars, that most of their perfect Historians appeared. And it seems to me, that we may expect the same progress among us.’ Rebellion and revolution provoked extreme behaviour at every level, rapidly augmenting the nation’s stock of political experience so that ‘there lye now ready in Bank, the most memorable Actions of Twenty years: a Subject of as great Dignity, and Variety, as ever pass’d under any Mans hands’.27 Peacetime labour would harvest these fruits of war. Although Sprat did not immediately translate this insight into the nature of progress from the realms of politics and language to that of natural knowledge, many of his readers would have done this for themselves. Contemporary histories of the arts and sciences emphasised the close connections between linguistic development, scientific advance and political cohesion –​ties evident at least since the confusion of tongues at Babel.28 Bacon had derided as ‘idols of the marketplace’ scholastic abstractions that lacked real-​world referents; such figments of language stood in the way of true learning.29 Accordingly, repairing the relationship between ‘words’ and ‘things’  –​whether by recovering the original natural language spoken by Adam, inventing a language suitable for philosophical discourse, or more simply restraining the use of rhetoric and reforming language teaching in the vernacular  –​was a major concern for the Hartlib Circle and the Royal Society alike.30 Dogmatists and enthusiasts, both enemies of real 191

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From Republic to Restoration philosophy, were characterised by their equivocal use of terms, their propagation of empty jargon, and their dependence on rhetorical flourish rather than empirical substance. The reform of knowledge implied the reform of language; this, in turn, was a politico-​religious struggle. Each aspect of this reforming effort suggested continuities between the Commonwealth and the Restoration. Just as Sprat’s reformed civil history would work upon a massive ‘bank’ of facts that the civil wars had bequeathed to posterity, so the experimentalists’ ‘primitive’ style of communicating experimental phenomena –​‘preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits, or Scholars’ –​reflected a programme predating the Restoration, associated (as at least some of Sprat’s readers would know) with Hartlib and his coterie of Baconian reformers.31 Sprat returned to these connections late in Part II, and he now explicitly allotted the Commonwealth the same role in the progress of science that he had earlier assigned it with respect to the improvement of language: ‘The late times of Civil War, and confusion, to make recompense for their infinite calamities, brought this advantage with them, that they stirr’d up mens minds from long ease, and a lazy rest, and made them active, industrious, and inquisitive: it being the usual benefit that follows upon Tempests, and Thunders in the State, as well as in the Skie, that they purify, and cleer the Air, which they disturb’.32 The Commonwealth might have been a political disaster, but for that very reason it had created the conditions and the models needed for the new science to triumph. This view resurfaced in Part III. Here, Sprat elaborated a twofold account of the political benefits of experimental philosophy. First, as mentioned above, the Royal Society’s eschewal of politics and theology promised to heal party rifts. In this sense, however, the methodological bracketing of theoretical questions was not just a means of disarming factional resentments by focusing on agreed matters of fact; it was also a corrective to specific defects in the English national character, which included a weakness for ‘Prodigies, and conceits of Providences’  –​‘one of the most considerable causes of those spiritual distractions, of which our Country has long been the Theater.’33 But experimental philosophy also contributed to political cohesion in a second way, through the Society’s inclusion of fellows from diverse professions and social levels  –​shopkeepers and physicians, nobles and divines –​bridging horizontal distinctions in a collective enterprise of knowledge production.34 Here, the Baconian ideal of science as co-​ordinating countless eyes and hands in the pursuit of practical knowledge suggested a social division of intellectual labour, mediated by the Royal Society, that would make men of all kinds the engines of one another’s gain.35 Here, again, the 1640s had set the precedent, specifically with the Hartlibian project for an ‘Office of Address’. Based loosely on 192

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Projecting the Experiment the model of ‘Salomon’s House’ –​described in Bacon’s New Atlantis as a hierarchically arranged institution for empirical data-​gathering and experimentation –​the Office of Address would serve as a clearing house for the communication of both discoveries and desiderata, replacing traditions of craft secrecy with a new model of scientific collaboration, facilitating the search for patronage and promoting the dissemination of knowledge for the common good.36 Sprat was predictably silent about this precursor to the Royal Society, but he did suggest that greater familiarity between different classes and a new-​found openness among the elite to learning and trade were products of ‘the travails of the King’, and perhaps even of ‘the Civil War itself; which is alwayes wont to be the cruelest Tyrant, or the best Reformer: either utterly to lay wast, or to civilise, and beautify, and ripen the Arts of all Countries’.37 Even as he excluded radical politics from the realm of philosophy, Sprat asserted philosophy’s debt to the social disruptions of the Civil War and Commonwealth.

Projecting in the Restoration

I

nformed readers would have recognised the contradictions involved in Sprat’s excision of radical politics from the history of natural philosophy. In particular, his portrayal of Wilkins’s Oxford group as a lone beacon of scientific learning amid the darkness of political upheaval –​and hence as the sole precursor of the Royal Society –​belied the close and often public ties that several of the key founding fellows of the Royal Society had enjoyed with the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes as well as with the reform projects of Hartlib and neo-​Baconian associates.38 Indeed, among the fellows that Sprat singled out for their contributions to Restoration science were the following: his patron Wilkins (Oliver Cromwell’s brother-​in-​ law); Robert Boyle (a friend of Hartlib and –​perhaps through an ‘Invisible College’ of alchemical adepts –​of the radical Benjamin Worsley); and the polymathic projector, physician, and surveyor William Petty.39 Petty was indebted to both the Hartlibians and the Protectorate regime as few could be; indeed, historians of science have sometimes identified him as a Puritan on the strength of his Commonwealth career.40 Low-​born but quick-​witted, he exemplified the active, mobile life Sprat had attributed to men in times of civil strife. After pursuing medicine training in the low Countries and spending a season with Hobbes and other royalist exiles in Paris, Petty made his way to London in late 1646, and met Hartlib soon thereafter. He quickly found favour as a talented and energetic inventor and polemicist, and dedicated a New Atlantis-​style utopian tract to Hartlib in 1648 in which, among other things, he extended the idea of an Office 193

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From Republic to Restoration of Address to the promotion of innovation in mechanical trades and medicine.41 Moving to Oxford to complete his MD, he hosted meetings of Wilkins’s club at Wadham College and, with Hartlib’s assistance, secured professorships of anatomy (at Oxford) and music (at Gresham College in London). Then, in 1652, he decamped to Ireland to take up another Commonwealth appointment, this time as physician to the Cromwellian army under General Fleetwood. In Ireland, Petty branched out from medicine to surveying –​a major practical task, since the settlement of the conquered country was predicated on the seizure of massive amounts of Irish-​owned and royalist land and its reassignment to the government’s London creditors and to English soldiers in payment of arrears. With the support of Henry Cromwell, who replaced Fleetwood as Ireland’s effective ruler in 1654–​55, Petty designed and oversaw the ‘Down Survey’ of Ireland, a massive effort of measurement, mapping and classification in the service of expropriation and colonial resettlement. It was the most important state-​backed technological achievement of the 1650s, if not the entire century, and the first scientific survey of any European country. It also set the seal on Petty’s rise. Taking his payment in debentures for confiscated land, Petty was henceforth not merely a recognised expert on Irish matters but also a major landowner in his own right and thus a direct beneficiary of the Cromwellian conquest.42 It was on the strength of this record that he survived the Restoration and became Sir William Petty –​founding Fellow of the Royal Society, member of its original Council, and experimentalist par excellence. One way to grasp the ideological and practical continuities and discontinuities between Commonwealth and Restoration science, then, is to juxtapose Petty’s place in the History with the work that put him there. Given the History’s purposes and the Royal Society’s politically mixed membership, it is no surprise that Sprat should whitewash certain fellows’ ties to the pre-​Restoration order, or their links to surviving undesirables like Hobbes.43 At the same time, however, some of the projects Sprat chose to trumpet as examples of the Royal Society’s modest, non-​ideological, apolitical natural philosophy were thoroughly rooted in a Hartlibian agenda of reformation through improvement and an ethos of State support for scientific projects. This inclusion of politically problematic examples of science was not the result of Sprat’s ignorance or his supervisors’ inattention. On the contrary, the biographies of the men he celebrated and the nature of the institution they had created made such continuities inevitable. So too, perhaps paradoxically, did the broad aspirations for science expressed by Sprat, the Royal Society and many others, including even King Charles II. Sprat’s presentation of the Society as a node for communication across social boundaries, and as a support system for scientific projects beyond 194

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Projecting the Experiment the capacities or interests of private individuals to pursue, substantially repeated –​without, however, the same utopian or republican overtones –​ Hartlibian arguments for an Office of Address.44 Moreover, as Petty’s case suggests, the first great projects of the Royal Society failed for some of the same reasons that Hartlib’s had done. In short, neither the aspirations of Restoration science nor the challenges it faced had changed nearly as much as Sprat pretended. Petty’s place in Sprat’s account depended not only on his role in establishing and governing the Society but also, more importantly, on the exemplary nature of his experimental work. As a specimen of the latter, in fact, Sprat’s History reproduced Petty’s ‘Apparatus to the History of the Common Practices of Dying [i.e. Dyeing]’ in its entirety.45 This was a contribution to the Society’s ambitious ‘History of Trades’ project, and thus an attempt to produce and publicise visibly useful scientific knowledge –​or at least to appropriate it from mechanic tradesmen and reproduce it in a format their betters could recognise.46 It was also politically innocuous, in the sense that whatever regulatory implications the publication of dyers’ practices might have had were left unexplored. Petty began his account instead with an enumeration of instances of light and colour before proceeding to a discussion of the chemicals involved, and concluded by hoping eventually to explain ‘how any Colour may be superinduced upon any kind of Material’.47 There was nothing in the nature of the information gathered, or the broadly Baconian orientation of the project, to differentiate it from the kind of work Petty had done in connection with Hartlib, whose journals included Petty’s thoughts on manufactures, artisans and inventions.48 But the regenerative significance of that earlier work  –​the radical reading of Baconianism’s social and political implications –​was absent. Only the most bluntly material of Bacon’s transformative aspirations –​ here the superinduction of colours on materials –​ remained.49 Apolitically rendered and detached from any larger vision of society, Petty’s history of dyeing suited Sprat’s apologetic purposes to a tee. Yet Sprat’s discussion of Petty gave pride of place to a different project. The ‘Double-​Bottom’d-​Ship’, of which three prototypes were built between 1662 and 1664 (a fourth was constructed when Petty returned to the idea in 1684), was designed to be faster and more manoeuvrable than conventional shipping while requiring fewer hands and carrying more freight.50 In an era of heightened competition with Dutch shipping, it was an eminently practical invention.51 It was also a safely royalist project, for –​although Sprat may not have known this  –​Charles II himself had encouraged Petty to pursue his naval ideas.52 And, as the Society struggled to deflect mockery of its more recondite endeavours (Boyle’s efforts at weighing the air provoked special mirth), a full-​size, working ship was tangible proof of experimental 195

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From Republic to Restoration science’s creative power. Above all, it was news. The first prototype, the Invention, won a race in January 1663; the second, the Invention II, beat the fastest packet-​boats from Holyhead to Dublin the following summer, leading Sir Thomas Clarges, a member of the Irish Privy Council, to suggest to Secretary of State Henry Bennet (later Earl of Arlington) that the King have one or two built for the royal fleet.53 The third and largest model, the Experiment, was launched in December 1664 with Charles officiating and the Duke of York in attendance.54 It impressed John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, the latter of whom defended the idea against coffee-​house critics, some of them shipwrights.55 Sprat’s own 1665 attack on French philosopher Samuel Sorbière’s account of England described the ship as a familiar London sight: ‘For, [Sorbière] says, that the double-​bottom’d Vessel has two Masts in the Front, when every Sculler on the Thames knows it has but One’.56 The History punningly dubbed it ‘the most considerable Experiment, that has been made in this Age of Experiments’.57 By 1667, however, Petty’s ship was a dubious object for such praise. For one thing, the Experiment had sunk in the Bay of Biscay two years earlier, with the loss of all hands. Sprat, and later John Evelyn, emphasised that this had happened in a storm that also claimed a large number of conventional ships (fifteen according to Evelyn, seventy according to Sprat), ‘so that the Ancient Fabricks of Ships have no reason to triumph over that new Model’.58 Nevertheless, sufficient damage had been done to confirm the doubts and satirical jabs of many, particularly at court.59 Second, and even more remarkable given the purpose of Sprat’s book, the Royal Society had itself foresworn involvement in the project in May 1663, long before the Experiment had even been built –​‘the matter of navigation being a state concern’.60 Whether this reflected a genuine change of policy (the Royal Society had itself assigned Petty to a committee on navigation in 1661), or whether it was a cover for the Society’s attempt to distance itself from arguments that arose between Petty and his partners and financial backers, is not entirely clear.61 But in either case, the Experiment’s fate gave the lie to Sprat’s hopeful portrayal of the project and to the status he accorded it as an example of the Royal Society’s experimental work. Far from being the coming thing in navigation, the double-​bottomed vessel was ‘a wreck’d Ship’ that the Society had had no hand in building and in which it was not officially concerned. Sprat invoked once more the advantages of publicly supported research as against private projecting: ‘though this Invention succeeded not while it was only supported by private Purses: it will undoubtedly produce great effects, if ever it shall be retriev’d upon the publick Stock of a Nation’.62 Under the circumstances, this must have rung hollow. The Janus-​faced figure of the double-​hulled ship, which was presented both as evidence of the Royal Society’s capacity to solve problems associated 196

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Projecting the Experiment with private projecting and as a victim of those same problems, raises questions about the place of science –​specifically, the empirical and practical science Sprat championed as a motor of improvement –​in the Restoration order. These questions extend to the career trajectories of its practitioners. Petty had entered the Restoration disavowing the label of ‘projector’, and he assisted in the work of institutionalising experimental science with enthusiasm.63 Yet five years on, his unwittingly tragic insistence to Oldenburg that he would have the better of ‘ye Jests & pitty bestowed upon my Navall Undertakings’, written just as news of the Experiment’s fate was on its way to England, suggests a lonely and frustrated existence.64 Despite his prominence, growing reputation and massive personal wealth, Petty’s Restoration career in the kind of practical science that he cared about bore little comparison with the salad days of the Down Survey a decade earlier. In 1655, he had headed a scientific bureaucracy in Dublin and directed a thousand-​man army of surveyors as they traversed Ireland, armed with mass-​produced instruments of his own devising, classifying, measuring and transforming forever the landscape of an entire nation.65 Ten years on, he was the ridiculous architect of a wreck that even the institution he helped found would not touch. In a particularly ironic twist, the Irish land settlement that Petty’s Down Survey had underpinned was itself in trouble during these same years. Beholden to both his own supporters in exile and the erstwhile Cromwellians who restored him, Charles had confirmed Cromwellian grants to adventurers and soldiers while also promising restoration to dispossessed royalists and giving still more Irish land away to family, mistresses and other favourites. By 1663 it was evident that Ireland was too small to satisfy all the claims made upon it in the Act of Settlement; an ‘explanatory’ act followed in 1665, by which Cromwellian holdings were retrenched by a third, and wrangling over Irish estates, Petty’s included, would continue for the rest of the reign and beyond. Drawing the obvious comparison between Petty’s two most public scientific projects, Sir Winston Churchill –​a commissioner of the settlement and a Fellow of the Royal Society –​wrote that, like the settlement, the double-​bottomed boat ‘may hold in fair weather but never in a storm’.66 Turning Churchill’s comparison around, one might see both failures as having at least partly analogous causes. In each case, a project initiated by or on behalf of an institution –​the English State in one case, the Royal Society in the other –​was abandoned to the vagaries of fortune and private interest before it could be seen through to completion. Petty perennially deplored ‘ye Ignorance Incapacity & obstinacy of the World’, whether defending his Down Survey work and emoluments in the late 1650s, his myriad schemes for Irish improvement in the 1670s and 1680s, or his nautical innovations. Yet in the light of Sprat’s suggestion 197

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From Republic to Restoration that the Royal Society would solve the inefficiencies, snuff out the radical potentialities, and redeem the value of efforts otherwise lost in private projecting, Petty had reason to complain. If the Experiment was less successful than Sprat’s encomium indicated, the Royal Society delivered less than Sprat promised. Far from an updated, royally sanctioned Salomon’s House or Office of Address, it was a loose and suspicious affiliation of amateurs, aristocrats, academics and virtuosi. While the Society’s sparsely attended meetings focused ever more on entertainments for the non-​expert, the fellows’ most important work was done outside its purview.67 Thus by the mid-​1660s, with respect to the court and the public alike, those projects most closely tied to the neo-​Baconian tradition of improvement arguably benefited the least from the Society’s existence. For someone of Petty’s stamp and interests, meanwhile, the key difference between the pre-​and post-​1660 worlds was not the institutionalisation of science, its insulation from the politics of religion, or its joyful reunion with the monarchy, but its abandonment by the State and its failure to find alternative supports.

Conclusion

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ecades of contradictory pronouncements about the identity, background and allegiances of the average Fellow of the Royal Society have succeeded mainly in casting doubt on the existence of any such person.68 Certainly, Petty was not he. Identifying a typical Restoration scientific project seems equally hopeless, and the double-​bottomed boat is in any case a most unlikely candidate. Yet the juxtaposition of Sprat’s History and Petty’s boat can still reveal something both about the persistence of scientific aspirations from the Commonwealth and their interaction with the new institutional and political environment of the 1660s. Sprat’s projection of the Royal Society as an engine of social cohesion that linked different segments of the population in a productive process of discovery and improvement, while suffocating faction by redrawing the boundaries of experimental discourse, drew heavily on the experiences and ideas of the Commonwealth world in which Petty’s scientific persona took shape. That persona reflected a peculiar mixture of English and Continental, philosophical and artisanal influences. Yet perhaps the most important experiences for Petty’s thinking about the purposes and possibilities of science were two whose wider significance Sprat tacitly admitted: the Hartlib Circle’s programme of improvement, and the Commonwealth’s erosion of traditional hierarchies. The first of these helped Petty connect philosophy, technology and social change on a conceptual level. The second, inasmuch as it broadened the spectrum of possible relationships between scientific 198

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Projecting the Experiment projectors and the state, let him put these linkages to work in the Down Survey, with far-​reaching and long-​lasting results. What the Protectorate had allowed in the case of the Down Survey –​ and in the colonial context of a defeated Ireland –​the early Royal Society could not, and the Restoration court would not: the direct application of science to the transformation of society. Certainly, the double-​bottomed vessel was less ideologically freighted than the survey, which itself lived on in the political battles around the land settlement.69 But the ship would have fitted comfortably alongside the other inventions Petty had pursued in connection with Hartlib, from seed drills and duplicating machines to new medical and educational institutions. Like these earlier projects, the ‘double-​bottom’ promised to be both ‘luciferous’ and ‘lucriferous’, demonstrating a new set of naval architectural principles while improving the speed of communications and the efficiency of English trade (and perhaps of military operations).70 It was through this combination of intellectual and practical goals that the value of science inhered, for Petty and for other self-​professed Baconians of the Commonwealth era. An essentially similar combination of philosophical merit and material significance explains the double-​bottomed boat’s appeal to Sprat. In this sense, the double-​bottomed vessel’s emblematic role in Sprat’s History bears witness to the persistent appeal of a neo-​Baconian view of natural philosophy, according to which the scientific worth of a project depended on its potential to transform the scale and scope of human power in the real world. The Experiment’s fate, on the other hand, points to the Royal Society’s failure to realise the essentially Hartlibian ideals Sprat had adopted on its behalf. Far from becoming the object of collaborative support, the ‘double-​ bottom’ remained a private project whose progress was merely reported to the Society’s secretary by correspondence  –​until the Society as such declined to hear more. Rather than finding a mechanism for perfecting the communication of scientific advances and aligning the interests of private projectors with the common good, the Society here drew a line excluding from its concern projects touching matters of state. Whether the line was drawn in an attempt to preserve the Society from unwanted entanglements with the State or to quash the emergence of faction from within its ranks, drawing it revealed a fundamental tension between the institution’s cohesiveness and its practical potential. Staying above the fray precluded transforming the world, even in the small ways the ‘double-​bottom’ promised. Practical improvements of any size, whether to land, trades, communications or social arrangements, almost inevitably impinged upon the sphere of policy.71 Declaring State concerns as off limits to organised science curtailed any contribution the early Royal Society might have made to public improvement. Instead, schemes like Petty’s were consigned to a 199

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From Republic to Restoration no-​man’s-​land between the State and the self-​appointed scientific public –​ the haphazard world of private projecting. This episode may also help us connect the legacy of Commonwealth-​era neo-​Baconianism to the proliferation of decentralised forms of enquiry during the Restoration and into the eighteenth century –​Defoe’s ‘Projecting Age’.72 Despite the bold vision of Salomon’s House in Bacon’s New Atlantis, the various, more practicable proposals for an Office of Address, and the powerful example of the Down Survey, centralised collaborative projects fared poorly during the Restoration. The ‘History of Trades’ programme, the Royal Society’s one major attempt at a large-​scale collaboration for practical ends, is a frequently cited case in point.73 Yet beyond the Royal Society’s physical and social confines, scientific collaboration did take place –​not through the central orchestration of a neat hierarchy of intellectual labor, as in Salomon’s House, but rather through the piecemeal and comparatively more democratic mobilisation of professional networks, personal contacts and emergent forms of voluntary association. As historians examining the use of questionnaires in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have shown, for example, new kinds of natural history depended on contact between philosophers, merchants, diplomats and other travellers, who were themselves in touch with local informants of all kinds.74 New strains of scientific interest in public health and population, similarly, took root not at first in the bureaucratic efforts of the central State but rather through the circulation of data through national, regional and even intercontinental correspondence networks of physicians and parish clergy.75 It was private projects of public benefit such as these –​massive compilations of data, inoculation programmes, hospitals –​that most nearly realised the Hartlibian ideal of scientific improvement, and that help to define for us the meaning of Enlightenment. In this, as in other respects, the Restoration avoided without solving the problems of the preceding period. The answer to the challenge of bringing science to bear on the common good came not from a new institution, but rather from the emergence of an informed and active public.

Notes 1 See, for example, Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-​Century England (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1961); Dorothy Stimson, Scientists and Amateurs:  A History of the Royal Society (New York: Henry Schuman, 1948). 2 On the Royal Society’s origins, see, for example, P. M. Rattansi, ‘The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 23 (1968), 129–​43; A. Rupert Hall and Marie Boas Hall, ‘The Intellectual Origins of the Royal Society –​London

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Projecting the Experiment and Oxford’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 23 (1968), 157–​68. On the outlook and work of the Hartlib Circle, see especially Charles Webster, The Great Instauration:  Science, Medicine and Reform, 1626–​1660 (London:  Duckworth, 1975); Samuel Hartlib and the Universal Reformation:  Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. by Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). For the Hartlib Papers, see Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and M. Hannon, The Hartlib Papers (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2013), available at www.hrionline.ac.uk/​hartlib [accessed 27 August 2015]. 3 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by Talcott Parsons (London: Routledge, 2001); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: Penguin, 1938). 4 Jones, Ancients and Moderns, pp. 87–​180. 5 See Robert K. Merton, On Social Structure and Science, ed. by Piotr Sztompka (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 223–​40. 6 Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman:  Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 238; Hill, The Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 86. 7 Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 484–​520, especially p. 509. 8 Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 8. 9 For criticisms of Webster in particular, see Thomas Leng, Benjamin Worsley (1618–​1677): Trade, Interest and the Spirit in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge:  Royal Historical Society/​Boydell Press, 2008), pp. 1–​12; see also Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, ‘Introduction’, in Samuel Hartlib, ed. by Greengrass and others, pp. 1–​25. 10 See especially Barbara J. Shapiro, John Wilkins, 1614–​1672:  An Intellectual Biography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969); Shapiro, ‘The Universities and Science in Seventeenth-​Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 10 (1971), 47–​82; and, more recently, Shapiro, ‘Natural Philosophy and Political Periodization: Interregnum, Restoration and Revolution’, in A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration, ed. by Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 299–​327. For a more sceptical view of the latitudinarian ‘moderation’, see Richard Ashcraft, ‘Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–​1700, ed. by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 151–​77. 11 Early contributions to the debate are reviewed in Lotte Mulligan, ‘Civil War Politics, Religion and the Royal Society’, Past and Present, 59 (1973), 92–​116, at 92–​94, which then offers a quantitative analysis of ‘royalists’ and ‘parliamentarians’ in the Royal Society. On the Cambridge Platonists, see the essays collected in Philosophy, Science, and Religion, ed. by Richard Kroll and others. 12 See, for example, William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 319–​50; Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); William T. Lynch, Solomon’s Child: Method in the Early Royal Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); see also Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 13 See Samuel Hartlib, ed. by Greengrass and others; Leng, Benjamin Worsley; J. T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999). 14 Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal-​Society of London, for the Improving of Natural Knowledge (London, 1667). 15 See Paul B. Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics:  Thomas Sprat’s “History of the Royal Society” ’, British Journal for the History of Science, 13 (1980), 1–​26; Michael

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From Republic to Restoration Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism and the “Ideology” of the Early Royal Society:  Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) Reconsidered’, in Philosophy, Science, and Religion, ed. by Richard Kroll, and others, pp.  199–​229; Lynch, Solomon’s Child, pp. 157–​96. 16 On Sprat’s utilitarian emphasis, see Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’. 17 Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’; Hunter, “Latitudinarianism”. But compare Lynch, Solomon’s Child, pp. 157–​96. 18 Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism’, 209. 19 Sprat, History, p. 94. 20 Ibid., p. 120; Hunter, ‘Latitudinarianism’, 204. 21 Lynch, Solomon’s Child, p. 167. 22 Sprat’s view as presented here is broadly similar to Boyle’s as presented in Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​Pump; but compare Wood, ‘Methodology and Apologetics’. 23 Sprat, History, p. 53. 24 Ibid., pp. 55–​56, 58. 25 Ibid., pp. 53, 59, 363 [371]. 26 Ibid., pp. 28–​51. 27 Ibid., p. 44. Italics in original. 28 See, for example, Matthew Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (London, 1677), pp. 151–​65. These connections are retraced in Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. by L. G. Cochrane (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), especially pp. 193–​270. See also Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 146–​57; David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 179–​210. 29 On the idols of the marketplace, see Francis Bacon, The New Organon, trans. and ed. by Lisa Jardine and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 41–​42. 30 Abraham Cowley, for example, proposed ‘That a Method be here established for the infusing, Knowledge and Language at the same time into [… pupils …] and that this may be their Aprenticeship in Natural Philosophy’; Cowley, A Proposition for the Advancement of Experimental Philosophy (London, 1661), p. 45. On the Royal Society’s posture, see Peter Dear, ‘Totius in Verba: Rhetoric and Authority in the Early Royal Society’, Isis, 76 (1985), 145–​61. For the ‘idols of the marketplace’, see Bacon, New Organon, pp. 41–​42, 48–​49; compare Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 24–​31. See also Stephen Gaukroger, Francis Bacon and the Transformation of Early-​Modern Philosophy (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.  125; Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), p.  6; Jon Parkin, Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England:  Richard Cumberland’s De Legibus Naturae (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/​Boydell Press, 1999), p. 34. On attempts to create an artificial language, in which Wilkins was a key figure, see Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), especially pp. 64–​109 and 146–​87; Lynch, Solomon’s Child, pp. 116–​56. 31 Sprat, History, p. 113. 32 Ibid., p. 152. Italics in original. 33 Ibid., pp.  362, 426. Italics in original. On the political significance of prodigies, see Richard L. Greaves, Deliver Us From Evil: The Radical Underground in Britain, 1660–​ 1663 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 215; Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England 1550–​1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 86–​104. See also Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

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Projecting the Experiment 34 Sprat, History, pp. 63–​67, 130–​33. 35 Ibid., pp. 84–​85, 100, 310–​11. 36 For the description of Salomon’s House (sometimes rendered Solomon’s House by later writers, as by historians), see Francis Bacon: The Major Works, ed. by Brian Vickers (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.  480–​88. On the Office of Address, see Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 67–​77; Koji Yamamoto, ‘Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector in the Hartlib Circle’, The Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 375–​97. On the longer-​term conflict between secrecy and openness in science, see William Eamon, ‘From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge:  The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science’, Minerva, 23 (1985), 321–​47. 37 Sprat, History, p. 407. Italics in original. 38 Shapiro notes that the Oxford group, like the Royal Society but unlike the Hartlib Circle, prohibited discussion of politics and religion; Shapiro, Culture of Fact, p. 163. 39 The nature of the Invisible College is highly contested: compare Charles Webster, ‘New Light on the Invisible College:  the Social Relations of English Science in the Mid-​ Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Fifth Series, 24 (1974), 19–​42; Charles Webster, ‘Benjamin Worsley: Engineering for Universal Reform from the Invisible College to the Navigation Act’, in Samuel Hartlib, ed. by Greengrass and others, pp. 213–​35; Leng, Benjamin Worsley, pp. 28–​30; and Michael Hunter, Boyle: Between God and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 57–​69. On Boyle’s chemical interests see Lawrence M. Principe, The Aspiring Adept:  Robert Boyle and his Alchemical Quest:  Including Boyle’s “Lost” Dialogue on the Transmutation of Metals (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). 40 See, for example, Webster, Great Instauration, pp. 95–​96. 41 William Petty, The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib, for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (London, 1648). See Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 40–​118. 42 On Petty’s time in Ireland, see McCormick, William Petty, pp. 84–​118. 43 Sprat had earlier expounded on Hobbes’s dogmatism in his Observations on Monsieur de Sorbier’s Voyage into England (London, 1665), pp. 232–​35. The work was an overblown response to the travel account of French philosopher, and friend of Hobbes, Samuel de Sorbière; see below. On Hobbes’s relationship to the Royal Society, see Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan, pp.  283–​331; compare Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes, pp. 316–​35. 44 Sprat, History, p. 194. On Hartlibian approaches to private projecting, see Yamamoto, ‘Reformation and the Distrust of the Projector’. Hartlib’s Office was inspired by Théophraste Renaudot’s ‘Bureau d’adresse’, which had flourished in Paris in the 1630s, under the protection of Cardinal Richelieu; see Justin Stagl, A History of Curiosity: The Theory of Travel 1550–​1800 (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 134–​47. From Sprat’s perspective, a French provenance for the Royal Society would have been just as problematic as a radical or sectarian one, though for different reasons. 45 Sprat, History, pp.  285–​306. See William Petty, ‘The History of Dying or Tinctures’ (1662), British Library, Additional MS 72897, fols 1–​37. 46 On the project and its contexts, see W. E. Houghton, Jr., ‘The History of Trades: its Relation to Seventeenth-​Century Thought: as Seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (1941), 33–​60; Kathleen H. Ochs, ‘The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: an Early Episode in Applied Science’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 39 (1985), 129–​58; Eamon, ‘From the Secrets of Nature’, Minerva, 321–​47. 47 Sprat History, pp. 284–​87, 306. 48 See McCormick, William Petty, p. 46. 49 On transformation, or ‘superinducing’ new natures on substances, as the task of science, see Bacon, New Organon, pp. 102–​05. 50 McCormick, William Petty, pp. 150–​56.

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From Republic to Restoration 51 Petty would emphasize the role of shipping in Dutch and potentially English commercial success in his later Political Arithmetick, printed posthumously but composed and circulated in manuscript c. 1671; William Petty, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690), pp. 1–​34. 52 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, from its First Rise, 4 vols (London, 1756–​57), i, 7. For communications to and from the Secretary of the Royal Society regarding the ship(s), see R.  Southwell to H. Oldenburg, 10 December 1662; Southwell to Oldenburg, 4 and 11 February, 26 April, 16 May, 17 June, 13 October 1663; Oldenburg to R. Boyle, 22 October 1664; and W. Petty to Oldenburg, 18 November 1665, in The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ed. by Alfred R.  Hall and Marie B.  Hall, 13 vols (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 1965–​75), i, 477–​79; II, 20–​23, 48–​49, 56–​57, 72–​74, 118–​20, 272, and 611–​12. On Charles II’s support for Petty’s work on navigation, see W. Petty to J. Petty, 5 February 1661, British Library, Additional MS 72850, fol. 26. 53 Sir T. Clarges to [Secretary Bennet], 25 July 1663, SP 63/​314 fol. 94. 54 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970), v, 353. 55 John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn, F.R.S., ed. by William Bray, 3 vols (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1862), i, 409, ii, 101–​02; Pepys, Diary, v, 24–​33, vi, 33, 38. 56 Sprat, Observations, pp. 112–​13. Italics in original. Sprat’s attack was later reprinted as an appendix to the English translation of Sorbière’s account: see Samuel Sorbière, A Voyage to England, Containing Many Things Relating to the State of Learning, Religion, and Other Curiosities of that Kingdom (London, 1709), p. 11. In point of fact, Sorbière did not claim to have seen the ship, but only to have heard it discussed. 57 Sprat, History, pp. 240–​41. Italics in original. 58 Ibid., p. 240; Evelyn, Diary, ii, 102, iii, 393. Italics in original. 59 For anonymous satire and royal derision see, respectively, ‘In Laudem Navis Geminae E Portu Dublinij ad Regem Carolum IIdum Missae’ (1663), in Verse in English from Tudor and Stuart Ireland, ed. by Andrew Carpenter (Cork: Cork University Press, 2003), pp. 390–​401, and Pepys, Diary, v, 32–​33. But for an assertion of Charles’s genuine interest, compare P. Pett to R. Wood, 27 November 1664, British Library, Additional MS 72894, fol. 46. 60 Oldenburg to Southwell, late May 1663, in Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ii, 58. See also Birch, History, i, 249. 61 In July 1663 Robert Southwell informed Henry Oldenburg of differences between Petty and John Clotworthy, Viscount Massareene, over taking the Invention II from Ireland to England: Southwell to Oldenburg, 11 July 1663, in Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ii, 80–​81. But this disagreement appears to postdate the Society’s decision to distance itself from the project. 62 Sprat, History, pp. 240–​41. All italics in original. Sprat may have punned here on the name of Petty’s first prototypes. 63 In sending proposals for the improvement of Ireland to the Marquis of Ormond, recently reinstalled as Lord Lieutenant, Petty wrote that ‘I do not appear a projector to shark for my necessities’, and emphasised the steady maturation of his thoughts since the years of the Down Survey; W.  Petty to the Marquis of Ormond, 1 March 1661, in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde, K. P., Preserved at Kilkenny Castle. New Series, 3 (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1904), p. 11. 64 Petty to Oldenburg, 18 November 1665, in Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, ii, 611. 65 Petty’s own account, though defensive in purpose, is very detailed and reproduces a substantial amount of documentation:  William Petty, History of the Cromwellian Survey of Ireland, A.D. 1655–​6, Commonly Called “The Down Survey”, ed. by T.  A. Larcom (Dublin:  Irish Archaeological Society, 1851). See also Yann Morvran Goblet, La Transformation de la géographie politique de l’Irlande au XVIIe siècle dans les cartes et essais anthropogéographiques de Sir William Petty, 2 vols (Paris:  Imprimerie

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Berger-​Levrault, 1930); J. H. Andrews, Shapes of Ireland: Maps and Their Makers 1564–​ 1839 (Dublin:  Geography Publications, 1997), pp. 118–​48; William J. Smyth, Map-​ making, Landscapes and Memory:  A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.  1530–​1750 (Cork:  Cork University Press, 2006), pp. 166–​97; McCormick, William Petty, pp. 84–​118. Winston Churchill to Henry Bennet, 25 July 1663, in Calendar of State Papers relating to Ireland, Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1663–​1665, ed. by Robert Pentland Mahaffy (London: Stationery Office, 1907), p. 185. On contemporary dissatisfaction with the Society, see Michael Hunter and Paul B. Wood, ‘Towards Solomon’s House:  Rival Strategies for Reforming the Early Royal Society’, History of Science 24 (1986), 49–​108; see also Michael Hunter, The Royal Society and its Fellows, 1660–​1700:  The Morphology of an Early Scientific Institution, 2nd edn (London: British Society for the History of Science, 1994), pp. 35–​49. See Hunter, Royal Society. On the land settlement and its effects, see Michael Perceval-​Maxwell, ‘The Irish Restoration Land Settlement and its Historians’, and Kevin McKenny, ‘The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland:  a Statistical Interpretation’, both in Restoration Ireland: Always Settling and Never Settled, ed. by Coleman A. Dennehy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 19–​34 and 35–​52; John Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: The Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–​1680 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2011). On ‘lucriferous’ projects, see Kevin Dunn, ‘Milton among the Monopolists: Areopagitica, Intellectual Property and the Hartlib Circle’, in Samuel Hartlib, pp. 177–​92. On earlier projecting, see, for example, Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Vera Keller, ‘The “framing of a new world”: Sir Balthazar Gerbier’s “Project for Establishing a New State in America,” ca. 1649’, William and Mary Quarterly, 70 (2013), 147–​76. On improvement, see Toby C. Barnard, ‘The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland’, in Samuel Hartlib, pp.  281–​97; Paul Slack, From Reformation to Improvement:  Public Welfare in Early Modern England (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1999); Joanna Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-​Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Daniel Defoe, An Essay upon Projects (London, 1697), p. 1. Ochs, ‘Royal Society’; Hunter and Wood, ‘Towards Solomon’s House’. Adam Fox, ‘Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles, 1650–​1800’, Historical Journal, 53 (2010), 593–​621; but for Petty’s use of the form see McCormick, ‘Governing Model Populations: Queries, Quantification, and William Petty’s “Scale of Salubrity” ’, History of Science, 51 (2013), 179–​98. Shapiro traces the form of the questionnaire to an older tradition of ‘empirical political reporting’; Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘Empiricism and English Political Thought, 1550–​ 1720’, Eighteenth-​Century Thought 1 (2003), 3–​35. Innes (Inferior Politics, pp. 123–​24) notes the use of queries by the Church of England. See also Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge:  From Gutenberg to Diderot (Cambridge:  Polity Press, 2000), pp. 116–​48. See, for example, Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-​ Century England and France (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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Chapter 10

The view from the devil’s mountain: Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes, and the past, present and future of the Church of England Paul Seaward

I

t is one of several coincidences of their interrelated lives that both Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and Thomas Hobbes were writing accounts of the English Civil War in 1668.1 Behemoth, Hobbes’s narrative of events in England from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1637 to the Restoration of 1660, was written, according to Hobbes himself, in his sixtieth year. At least part of it was being worked on after an attempt to introduce a new statute to combat atheism –​transparently aimed at Hobbes –​collapsed in the House of Lords in April that year.2 In the same month, Clarendon (who was exiled in France after his hasty exit from England under threat of attainder in December 1667) survived a drunken assault by a mob of sailors who blamed him for the fact that they had not been paid for their service in the navy.3 Three months later, more comfortably settled in the south of France, he began to compile his own memoir: the beginning of the manuscript of his Life is dated at Montpellier, 23 July 1668. Completed two years later, it was eventually brought together with the Historical Narration he had written at the end of the Civil War in 1646–​48 to become what is now known as the History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England.4 Hobbes and Clarendon were very old acquaintances, who –​although half a generation apart –​shared Wiltshire origins, an Oxford college and an association with much of the intellectual elite of Caroline England. Since the 1650s, Leviathan and Hobbes’s forced decision to return to the England of the Commonwealth (in which Clarendon had had a hand), they could scarcely have been called friends.5 There is no evidence that either knew about the other’s writing of history. Had they done so, they might very well have seen their differing approaches to the past not only as emblematic of their very different philosophical and political ideas, but also as indicative of faultlines in the constitutional and religious politics of the Restoration which in 1668 were beginning to open up (for Clarendon) alarmingly or (for Hobbes) enticingly wide. 206

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes Although it coyly avoids naming him, Behemoth’s account of royalist policy in the 1640s carried an explicit criticism of a set of ideas and policies associated strongly with the fallen Lord Chancellor: constitutionalism, legalism, a preference for negotiation with the parliamentary rebels rather than outright military victory, and support for a Church of England that claimed a religious monopoly and at least a spiritual authority independent of the Crown.6 Clarendon’s History and Life are nuanced and complex defences of the royalist position; but at their core is a critique of the misgovernment of Charles I in the 1620s and 1630s and a defence of the very values that Hobbes so strongly attacks. In the 1640s and 1650s, Clarendon had been closely identified with the protection of the identity and integrity of the Church of England; after 1660 he had been associated with its vigorous reassertion of its ecclesiastical monopoly. Clarendon saw in Hobbes a powerful and growing threat to religion and the Church as well as to lawful government. Prominent among Hobbes’s enemies in Paris in 1651, he was closely allied to his clerical antagonists.7 Yet in their histories, on one area in which –​on the face of it –​Clarendon and Hobbes were diametrically at odds, there is some common ground, at least when it comes to describing the effects of clerical intervention in political affairs during the 1630s. Both emphasise the centrality of the disastrous decision to introduce the Book of Common Prayer into Scotland to the trajectory of events in England;8 both provide balanced and charitable accounts of the man both held largely responsible for encouraging Charles I to pursue this policy, William Laud, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, while both stress his political ineptitude.9 For Hobbes, this is scarcely surprising: Hobbes’s anti-​clericalism and Erastianism was consistent, straightforward and highly provocative. But for Clarendon, it indicates that his views about the Church and its relationship with the State were far from simple. Indeed, Clarendon’s attitude to the politics of religion has been a minor puzzle ever since the Restoration episcopate found that his apparently fervent support for the Church of England did not prevent him from working towards loathed compromises over the Act of Uniformity in 1662, or Presbyterians bitterly discovered that friendly conversations concerning comprehension did not translate into effective assistance.10 Our understanding of Clarendon’s attitudes to the Church and its relationship with the State is still dominated by two books, both published in 1951. One was Robert Bosher’s The Making of the Restoration Settlement: the Influence of the Laudians, which portrayed Clarendon not just as the Church’s key ally in the period 1649–​62, but the key ally of the ecclesiastical heirs of William Laud, one of the architects of an exceptionally Machiavellian policy designed to ensure that the restoration of a Church of England would involve no concessions to even moderate 207

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From Republic to Restoration puritan opinion concerning its government, doctrine or liturgy. The other was Brian Wormald’s highly influential study of Clarendon’s politics and thought, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion, which sought to temper Clarendon’s reputation as High Church zealot and instigator of the ‘Clarendon code’ by arguing that in the early 1640s he was not in the forefront of the defence of the Church of England, and only became one of its chief defenders much later, writing in the History an account that exaggerated a support that had been much more equivocal in reality. Wormald used Clarendon’s writings during his post-​1667 exile to show how his thinking had been closely touched by his association with the sceptical salon run by Viscount Falkland at his house in Great Tew, Oxfordshire in the 1630s, and with the thought of its most eminent theologian, William Chillingworth. Wormald stressed the rationalism, the anti-​clericalism and ‘latitudinarianism’ of the so-​called ‘Great Tew Circle’, with which Hobbes had also been in close contact.11 But while for Falkland and Chillingworth, he argued, ‘liberal Anglicanism’ was ‘an end in itself ’, Clarendon was a ‘political Chillingworthian’, not simply (and cynically) because his acceptance of the idea that the necessary doctrines of religion were very modest ‘enabled him to subordinate religion to immediate political needs as they arose’, but because he regarded the public exercise of religion as variable, depending on what might best secure unity and peace.12 Wormald adopted Clarendon’s term ‘Religion of state’ to refer to all aspects of the doctrine, worship and discipline of the Church that could be classed as indifferent, and which could be adjusted to secure the fundamental aim of peace and unity. These two accounts of Clarendon’s attitudes to the Church and its relationship with the State have struggled to co-​exist ever since. In 1960, an article by G. R. Abernathy, which was strongly influenced by Wormald and in opposition to Robert Bosher’s view, tried to portray Clarendon as a convinced, though unsuccessful, advocate of comprehension in 1662. Others have seen him as a much more reluctant agent of the King’s preference for comprehension.13 More recent research exploring the attitudes of the English hierarchy to the relationship between the Church and State after the Restoration has introduced a new element into the debate, recognising the enormous tension and unease produced by Charles II’s lack of support for the Church. One response, it has been argued, was for it to become more aggressive in defence of its status and authority. In some ways this was simply to exacerbate a jure divino turn in the thought of the Church of England that had been visible from the late sixteenth century.14 But it has been widely argued that the Restoration Church accelerated this journey towards a much stronger theological identity and a more assertive style of churchmanship. Severance of the Church 208

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes of England from its institutional roots in the Civil War helped to foster an idea of the Church as independent of those structures, more reliant for its identity on theological ideas rather than institutional embodiment. Jacqueline Rose has traced how a number of Restoration writers became more insistent about their claims for episcopacy, and anxious to draw a red line over which the monarch could not legitimately step.15 Jeffrey Collins, in an earlier article, called it the ‘anti-​Erastianism’ of the Restoration episcopate. The result was, he wrote, ‘a degree of hostility between the royal court and the English episcopate unprecedented since the Reformation’.16 In this developing confrontation Collins placed Clarendon firmly on the side of the Erastians. Clarendon, he has argued, following Wormald and Abernathy, rejected the divine right of bishops, taking a ‘truly Erastian position’, a ‘utilitarian view of church form [that] could not be reconciled with the defense of episcopacy dominant in the Restoration Church’. Though committed to tying the king’s prerogative into English law, he would not tolerate an alternative source of divinely sanctioned authority.17 He went on to argue that Clarendon sought to ‘prevent the dominance of the Laudian party and that there were reasons to doubt the compatibility of court royalism and church royalism’.18 Although Clarendon was undoubtedly an Erastian, this may be to exaggerate both his Erastianism and his sympathy towards a liberal and comprehensionist approach to dissent in the Church, something that even Wormald’s rich and subtle reading of his thought does not completely avoid. For though it may be right to refer to his anti-​clericalism, and though it may be right to accept an increasing theological assertiveness on the part of some clergy, there is less evidence that Clarendon was concerned about the existence of a clerical, especially a Laudian, party, or recognised a danger that it might become dominant. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that he worried much more keenly about threats to the Church. In reading Clarendon’s writings of the late 1660s and 1670s to illuminate his attitudes to the politics of the 1640s or the early 1660s, Wormald and those who followed him listened hard for the resonances of discussions with Falkland and Chillingworth that had taken place more than thirty years earlier at Great Tew. Those resonances were certainly there. But what was also there, and what they listened out for rather less, were resonances with other pasts, with other old acquaintances, with the present and with an imagined, and feared, future. Clarendon most directly confronted the views on the relationship between Church and State of one of those old acquaintances in his long examination of Leviathan. His A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr Hobbes’s Book, entitled 209

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From Republic to Restoration Leviathan, was completed, according to its preface, in April 1670 in Montpellier.19 The book makes a series of attacks on Leviathan, more political and polemical than philosophical. Often cited in the present context is its praise for Chapter 39 in which Hobbes had insisted that a Church was ‘a company of men professing Christian Religion, united in the person of one Soveraign; at whose command they ought to assemble, and without whose authority they ought not to assemble’, and condemned the idea of a universal Church, of any other government other than temporal government, or that any doctrine might be taught against the will of the sovereign. The chapter emphasises the power of the civil State over the Church, including over the appointment of bishops, and the limitation of the power of ordination to state-​appointed bishops.20 Clarendon may have shared Hobbes’s views about the need to avoid a division between temporal and spiritual power, but if A Brief View and Survey applauded some of Hobbes’s Erastianism, it supports only a highly tempered version of it. Clarendon rebutted Hobbes’s attacks on clerical power-​seeking: even in Roman Catholic countries many, he claimed, objected to the doctrine that their monarch could be deposed by the Pope.21 He rejected Hobbes’s arguments for the extension of the authority of the temporal governor beyond jurisdiction over the Church into spiritual matters, such as his claims that the Israelites had covenanted with Moses to take whatever he told them for the word of God, and that ‘they that have the place of Abraham in a Common-​wealth, are the onely Interpreters of what God hath spoken’.22 He drew from Christ’s instructions to the apostles an affirmation that they and their successors had power to publish and interpret the Scripture ‘and are obliged to declare and teach the Doctrine of Christ before the Doctrine of the King’, and he denied that churchmen have simply to ‘publish whatsoever the king bids them, in the Name, and as the commands of God’.23 He insisted that even if they had no power of compulsion, their power of instruction and ‘the Keys’ remain; and since Christ had trusted princes to assist them, princes were obliged to do so, to protect churchmen and ensure that they are ‘obeyed and reverenc’d, whil’st they do their duty’. ‘God hath left, and requir’d them to be Nursing Fathers to his Church … and if they are not good and faithful Nurses, the miscarriage of the Children shall be imputed to them’.24 He dismissed Hobbes’s claim that subjects owe to sovereigns simple obedience in all things wherein their obedience is not repugnant to the Laws of God, because this is ‘meant only till the sovereign declares that it is not repugnant to the Law of God’.25 Hobbes’s insistence that the word of the sovereign on (for example) transubstantiation should determine the issue, he argued, has 210

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes made the Pope, and the Roman Church amends for the many merry reproches he hath cast upon them, in allowing it to be good Divinity in all those Dominions where the Sovereign is Popish, and of which no private reason or conscience, but the public reason, the reason of the King is Judg. And tho he preserves to himself, and other private men, the prerogative of believing or not believing in his heart, because thought is free, yet that must not be discover’d, because he makes it the obligation of Subjects, not only to do, but to say all that their Soveraign commands them to say or do; by which he introduces such a licence of dissimulation and hypocrisies, as is odious in the civil actions of our life.26

An Erastianism of this kind was the default position of the pre-​Civil War Church of England, embedded not just in the thinking of Chillingworth, Falkland and Great Tew, but in the late sixteenth-​and early seventeenth-​ century anti-​Presbyterian, anti-​Romanist conformist thought of men such as Hooker and Bancroft, in its basic acceptance of a jurisdictional royal supremacy over the Church and its rejection of a royal sacerdotal role –​ no powers to administer sacraments, consecrate bishops or ordain clergy –​ the power ‘of direction and enforcement’.27 It was close to the position held among a number of conformist writers in the 1660s, notably Edward Stillingfleet.28 It was certainly distant from more clericalist conceptions of the authority of the clergy; but in its vehement defence of the independent moral authority of the Church and its insistence that the civil power should act as the Church’s partner, rather than its master, it retained for the Church and its hierarchy a role of central importance. Clarendon made no comment about the application of Hobbes’s ideas to current religious policy in the Brief View and Survey. Nevertheless, parts of it, at least, especially its discussion on the Church, might be read as a sign of Clarendon’s alarm at the drift of religious policy since his departure from England. He had indeed sponsored projects to achieve the comprehension of moderate dissent within the Church during 1662, and may have done so again in the weeks of crisis following the catastrophic defeat by the Dutch in the summer of 1667 and preceding his own downfall.29 But in all of these projects there had been a risk, of which Clarendon had been intensely wary, of extending royal intervention in the Church much further than was necessary to ensure the maintenance of religious peace within a structure of uniformity; of bringing into being forces that might use royal patronage to chip away at the position of the Church of England, even, perhaps, to permit the toleration of the Catholic Church. An attempt to assert the Crown’s prerogative powers over the Church and the laws concerning religion in 1663 had been resisted by Clarendon at much political cost. The debate over comprehension in 1667–​68 might not have worried him very much. But a number of nonconformists were keen in the course of 1667–​70 to emphasise the way the clergy had entrenched on the power of kings, and Hobbes was by no means alone in ratcheting up 211

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From Republic to Restoration appeals for the King to smash the arrogance of his overmighty prelates.30 Furthermore, plans to exalt executive authority over religion were revived in Scotland with the Supremacy Act of November 1669, and in England with an attempt in March 1670 to insert a proviso into the Conventicle Bill vindicating the right of the king to exercise a personal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs. A  more determined attempt was the Declaration of Indulgence, promulgated two years later, in mid-​March 1672. It is hard to imagine that Clarendon would not have reacted with the same horror at this assertion of the royal prerogative over religious policy as did the great majority of the Cavalier Parliament in 1673, or as he had done to the indulgence bill back in 1663. There may, of course, be no direct connection between A Brief View and Survey and the political turmoil in England. The Conventicle Bill and the Declaration of Indulgence were still in the future when Clarendon wrote against Hobbes, and if the developing pamphlet debate on the supremacy was part of the background to his attack on Hobbes, it is never made explicit: given Clarendon’s desire, in exile, to be allowed to return to England, he was unlikely to have wanted to be seen to be commenting directly on English affairs, or to risk the King’s renewed irritation with him. Clarendon should, in fact, have been isolated from affairs in England: the Act for his banishment banned correspondence with the former chancellor to anyone except his children or others licensed by the King in council ‘concerning his estate and domestic affairs’. But it is clear that Clarendon was aware of political developments over the channel. Montpellier, his home from the summer of 1668 until spring 1671, was a resort for English visitors, including one of his principal antagonists, Sir Richard Temple. One of his visitors described how Clarendon had supplied him with recent news from England and was avid for more.31 An old ally, Viscount Mordaunt, certainly wrote to him with English news in 1669 (his wife, who seems to have settled permanently at Montpellier, was a close friend of Clarendon’s).32 He remained a figure of some significance in English politics, the subject of frequent rumour that he would be recalled and resume his dominance. In mid-​1668 the ‘chancellor’s party’ was still seen as a force to be reckoned with; Arlington, in particular, was worried about his possible return, though by the spring of 1669 he was said to see him as a potential ally.33 The Secretary of State the Earl of Arlington employed the Oxford don and cryptographer John Wallis in deciphering his correspondence.34 Mordaunt wrote in August that Arlington might now support Clarendon’s return, and in October 1669 Arlington was certainly discussing his return to England.35 In 1671, Clarendon moved further North, to Moulins, another spa town frequented by the English.36 (By a curious coincidence, James FitzJames, the illegitimate son of Clarendon’s son-​in-​law, the Duke of York, and 212

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes Arabella Churchill, his daughter’s lady in waiting, had been born there the previous year.37) If he had been receiving regular reports from England, another issue might have prompted a different set of concerns about religious policy. This was the onward march of Catholicism into the heartlands of the Church of England, particularly where it so closely affected himself. Gabriel Glickman has described the ambitions of a group associated with the Queen Dowager, Henrietta Maria, at Somerset House during the 1660s both to establish a toleration for Catholics and perhaps to reunite the Church of England with Rome, an effort that harked back to previous speculative discussions on a reunion during the reign of her husband, and the pressure for toleration exercised on her son, Charles II, during exile.38 One of the first indications of Catholic success within the royal family was the conversion of Clarendon’s daughter, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, in 1669–​70. Brought up in Clarendon’s pious and very Anglican household during the Commonwealth, Anne Hyde was one of the last people who might have been regarded as a likely convert to Roman Catholicism, and observers naturally assumed that her change of religion had something to do with her husband’s influence.39 The Duchess’s movement towards conversion perhaps began, on her own account, in late 1669. Her own note telling the story, dated August 1670, explains how her reading of Peter Heylyn’s History of the Reformation the previous November had initiated her doubts. Her discussions with ‘two of the best Bishops we have in England’ (identified in the margin as Gilbert Sheldon, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Walter Blandford, Bishop of Worcester) had failed to assuage her doubts.40 After that Christmas, she claimed to have begun discussions with a Catholic priest, whose identity is not stated. By August 1670 she was prepared to write her note ‘to satisfy her friends’.41 On Boxing Day of that year, Clarendon’s eldest son, Viscount Cornbury wrote a deeply alarmed letter to the Duke of York, underlining that the rumours reflected closely on himself.42 George Morley, Clarendon’s former chaplain, and now the Bishop of Winchester, wrote to the Duchess too at the end of January 1671, in an attempt to dissuade her.43 But she lived only a few months more, dying at the end of March 1671. The visit of Clarendon’s second son, Laurence Hyde, to Moulins in (probably) May/​June 1671 would have provided him with a chance to tell his father the full story and for them to discuss its implications;44 but although little of Clarendon’s own correspondence from his period of exile survives, Cornbury’s letter to York in December 1670 makes clear that Clarendon had been very well aware of the rumours. Clarendon himself wrote much-​circulated (but undated) letters to his daughter and son-​in-​ law, appealing to her not to make what he called an ‘odious mutation’.45 213

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From Republic to Restoration The conversion of his daughter is clearly the background to Clarendon’s 1672 essay, ‘Against the multiplying controversies, by insisting upon particulars that are not necessary to the point in debate’, though perhaps by the time he wrote it he was aware too (though he did not refer to it) of the Declaration of Indulgence promulgated in March that year. The essay begins by criticising the manner in which religious controversies have been conducted, and how this had tended to embitter the debate; concentrating on the division between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, it makes a familiar point about the small number of points of faith required for salvation; it stresses the points in which the two churches were in agreement; and argues that the wars of religion had been as much to do with temporal domination as spiritual submission. Clarendon remarked that the virulence of the debate had, to some extent, abated; but recently, ‘the quiet and ungrateful humour and temper of some of the Roman party’ had ‘by their virulent and seditious writings’ revived a ‘bitter and reproachful spirit’ of contention.46 Instead of attempting to dissuade others in other countries from abandoning customs that were not only deeply embedded in religious practice, but were also enjoined by the law of those countries, the Church of England’s controversialists, he argued, should concentrate on what distinguished the position of Catholics in England from those anywhere else in Europe: their refusal to acknowledge their allegiance to the civil sovereign. Catholics who remained in England, he emphasised, were not blamed for their purely religious opinions, but for their loyalty and allegiance to the Pope: ‘the religion professed by them who would be thought catholics in England, and for which they undergo any prejudice there, consists only of the pure dictates of the bishop of Rome; and for which they have no other foundation in scripture, fathers, or councils, but only his dictates’.47 Although he accepted that many Catholics would be content to renounce the Pope’s temporal authority within England, ‘they all insist alike … upon his spiritual power and jurisdiction, which their conscience will not suffer them to decline’.48 Much of what was regarded as religion, he argued, was unnecessary for salvation, and could be determined by the state: all liturgies, which have ever been instituted for the service and worship of God, are purely forms of state … all jurisdictions and precedencies are of the grants and authority of princes, and consequently matters of state: the taking the cup from the laity in the sacrament is purely religion of state, for it was instituted in both kinds: all ceremonies, festivals, fasts and Lent itself (all which make up the bulk of the Roman religion) are so many constitutions of state.49

He condemned the effect of an intolerant religious minority on the political health of a community, where one part of a kingdom ‘presumes to think that the other, though much superior in number, and that hath the 214

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes countenance and support of the law and of the government, is so far from being in a state of salvation, that they shall inevitably be damned if they do not change their religion’. This, he argued, ‘is the case of the Roman Catholics in England’. The conclusion to the essay is startling. If they could not conform to the Church and to the law, peace between them and the Protestants could not be guaranteed. The Catholics must therefore leave the country.50 When he wrote of the ‘virulent and seditious writings’ of ‘some of the Roman party’ Clarendon might conceivably already have been referring to a book written by an old acquaintance: Hugh Cressy’s Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Church of Rome, which was published at Paris in the same year as Clarendon wrote ‘Against Multiplying Controversies’. Cressy is the only contemporary divine to be referred to other than in passing in Clarendon’s essay.51 The themes it handles –​in particular the small extent of the differences between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church, and the tendency of theologians to exaggerate them –​ were also Clarendon’s.52 His interest in the book may be amply explained by his interest in the subject and his acquaintance with Cressy –​an acquaintance which, as he wrote in his response to the work, went back nearly fifty years, and probably began at Oxford, where both men attended Magdalen Hall (as, indeed, Hobbes had done, nearly twenty years earlier), before they were both close friends of Lord Falkland; Cressy, like Clarendon, had been involved in the meetings at Great Tew in the 1630s.53 But it is also possible that it was because it was related to the case of the Duchess of York: that Cressy was the Catholic divine referred to in her 1670 note. That possibility is more strongly suggested by Stillingfleet’s original book, published in 1671, to which Cressy responded, A Discourse concerning the Idolatry Practised in the church of Rome … Wherein a particular Account is given of the Fanaticism and Divisions of that Church. Stillingfleet’s preface describes the genesis of the work in papers written in an attempt to prevent an unnamed woman converting to Rome.54 It seems more than possible that the woman concerned was the Duchess of York; and the fact that a good deal of the treatise is directed at Hugh Cressy  –​particularly those elements of it that ridiculed the Roman Church’s confidence in miracles and what he referred to as its fanaticism –​makes it quite likely that the man who tempted her into conversion was Cressy. Cressy, a chaplain to Charles II’s queen and based at Somerset House, was by 1669 engaged in intense correspondence and discussions with Sir Thomas Clifford (later Baron Clifford of Chudleigh), the architect of Charles II’s secret treaty of Dover with Louis XIV, which would result in Clifford’s conversion and the notorious ‘catholicity’ clause of the treaty.55 Gabriel Glickman has identified a short paper among the Clarendon manuscripts apparently from 215

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From Republic to Restoration 1670, arguing that the differences in discipline and doctrine between the two Churches were insignificant or based on misconceptions and misunderstanding, as by Cressy.56 There is no direct evidence that the paper came into the Clarendon collection because it had been addressed to the Duchess of York. Nor is there any direct evidence that Cressy and Stillingfleet were involved in what one imagines was a strenuous effort on the one side to achieve, and on the other side to prevent, the conversion of so tempting a catch as the Duchess of York. But it is easy to see how Clarendon might have put two and two together, if indeed he was not very well aware of it. Clarendon took the attack on Cressy much further in a direct book-​ length response to Cressy’s work, Animadversions upon a Book, which was published in England at the end of 1673 or early 1674, by which time the bombshell of the Duke of York’s failure to take the oaths under the Test Act made the prospect of a popish successor a reality. Ridiculing Cressy’s mysticism, as well as making conventional attacks on transubstantiation and the invocation of saints, the book’s main fire was directed at the Pope’s claims to temporal jurisdiction, and ambitions to unite Christians under a single Church. ‘Nothing is more mistaken, or more misapplied, than this precious word unity’, he wrote, in relation to those ambitions.57 Christ never intended unity in the form envisaged by Cressy, but recognised it depended more on the civil magistrates than the ecclesiastical power, prescribing only a small core of doctrine. The book vigorously rejects the claim that there is only one Church in which salvation is possible. Clarendon had a long-​term interest in the relationship between the Church of England and Rome. His massive library and formidably thorough and up-​to-​date reading leave no doubt about his knowledge and understanding of the issues in contention. And there is plenty of evidence of a continued engagement with the themes that had concerned him, and Cressy, as Falkland’s visitors in the 1630s. Falkland and his circle themselves had a much more than academic concern with these matters, for his life, like the lives of many aristocratic and gentry families, was entangled in numerous ways with Catholicism: in Falkland’s own case the conversion of his mother, and her spiriting away to the Continent of his younger brothers and sisters (the sisters would become nuns at Cambrai, where Hyde went to visit them on his journey from the Hague to Madrid in 1649); and the long on–​off saga of William Chillingworth’s conversion during the 1630s.58 For Clarendon, moreover, Catholicism had become during the 1650s one of the central issues of royalist policy, as he struggled with the incompatible objectives of on the one hand seeking financial or military support from the Catholic powers to help Charles II regain his throne, and on the other avoiding the disintegration of the Church of England and any prospect of a Restoration. Hyde’s negotiations with Spain, and (indirectly at least) with 216

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes the papacy in 1658/​59 involved a cautious commitment to remove the persecution of Catholics.59 Although (given their lack of success) they created no obligation to act after the Restoration, Charles II’s wish to assist English Catholics resulted in a series of discussions in 1660 and 1661, which broke down for reasons that are still obscure. In Religion and Policy Clarendon explained that the Jesuits had prevented the Catholic community from agreeing to reject the authority of the Pope in temporal affairs.60 Clarendon’s request to William Prynne in the early 1660s to compile a history of the papacy and its relationship to secular powers (a work from which Prynne was diverted into a massive study of parliamentary writs) suggests a long-​ standing interest in the work that would become Religion and Policy.61 Yet if these writings reflected a lifetime’s reflection and engagement with the subject, the nature and vehemence of the attack on Cressy, as well as its target, suggest that Clarendon’s motive in writing these two works was not just an attempt to think through, in his leisure, the issues with which he had grappled as chief minister to Charles II. They were just as much designed as a contribution to a more specific debate and moment, and, like his critique of Leviathan, they were a response to a perception of a current and particularly dangerous new threat to the English Church and State. Like the critique of Leviathan, it involved debate with a man whom he had known since the 1620s, and mingled a personal history inextricably with political and religious anxieties. Alongside the dangers from Hobbes, from the aggressive assertors of the royal supremacy and from Roman Catholic encroachment, did Clarendon sense a threat from Anglican clericalism –​the assertion by the hierarchy of the Church of England of an independent claim to religious authority? Clarendon’s support for the English clergy is (and was) well known. His substantial agreement with a clerical campaign against the Reformation expropriation of Church lands –​a preoccupation of Laud and his followers in the 1630s –​is reflected both in his works against the Catholics and in the 1647 essay on sacrilege. Both echo writings by Joseph Mede and others on the subject; though the use of these facts to impugn the Reformation by men such as Peter Heylyn –​one of the reasons that the Duchess of York cited for her disenchantment with the Church of England –​was certainly something Clarendon strenuously resisted.62 In the Brief View and Survey, Animadversions and ‘Against Multiplying Controversies’, Clarendon was deeply protective of the position of the English Church, carefully distinguished it from its Continental cousins, and was fulsomely complimentary about its clergy. He would not have agreed with it entirely. Clarendon’s long essay, which had been written at Montpellier in 1670 against the claims for the importance of antiquity and religious tradition, might be taken as a response to the tendency among some within the Laudian tradition to 217

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From Republic to Restoration emphasise the patristic foundations of the Church of England –​although respect for antiquity was far from the exclusive property of Laudians.63 It is possible that Clarendon recognised –​and deprecated –​the more strenuous assertion of sacerdotal power by some of the more aggressive legatees of Laud within the Church of England –​men like Peter Heylyn and Herbert Thorndike. They were certainly not Clarendon’s ideological soulmates (and Heylyn’s –​admittedly posthumous and inadvertent –​role in the Duchess of York’s conversion would not have endeared Clarendon any more to him).64 Yet the evidence usually cited for Clarendon’s rejection of jure divino episcopacy is more equivocal: his reference to the subject in a letter of 1646 is brief and ambiguous, but it certainly does not explicitly state his opposition to it.65 His silence on the subject in his writings is telling evidence that he thought of the subject as of little practical significance. A reference in 1659 to Herbert Thorndike’s latest publication –​probably An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England –​as the ‘greatest scandal’ may have indicated disapproval of Thorndike’s elevated view of the status of the episcopate and the powers of the Church (or, indeed, some elements of its sacramentalism), and Clarendon would certainly have disagreed with Thorndike’s complex anti-​Erastian and anti-​Hobbesian views about the separation of Church and State; but it is much more likely that he was astonished by Thorndike’s apparent acceptance that a restoration of the Church in its old form was impossible, and that an accommodation towards Roman Catholic forms and traditions was essential.66 If the History betrayed an anxiety about the clergy, it was not that it might seek power independent of the secular state, but the lengths to which it might go in association with it. Like Hobbes, Clarendon identified the attempt to impose a new liturgy and new canons on the Scottish Church in the 1630s as the catastrophic policy which sparked off the chain of events leading to the Scottish Revolution, the bishops’ wars, and ultimately, to the Civil War itself. He commented on the ‘insolence and petulance’ of the Scottish bishops, their ‘overmuch fervour and too little discretion’; it was, he wrote, their ‘unhappy craft’ to get the King to believe that the canons were acceptable to the Scottish Church.67 The first canon was of particular concern, because it [d]‌efined and determined such an illimited power and prerogative to be in the king, according to the pattern (in express terms) of the kings of Israel, and such a full supremacy in all causes ecclesiastical, as hath never been pretended to by their former kings or submitted to by the clergy and laity of that nation.68

Clarendon made the point again about the clergy’s tendency to exalt royal power in a discussion of Chapter 20 of Leviathan, in which Hobbes sought to buttress his claims about the absolute power of sovereigns with scriptural 218

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes evidence and cited the notorious passage in Book 1 of Samuel (in Hobbes’s translation) which referred to the rights of the king to make use of the property and even the children of his people for his own purposes.69 ‘Too many divines’, Clarendon wrote, had used the passage to endeavour ‘maliciously to render Monarchy odious and insupportable, by the unlimited affections, and humors, and pretences, and power of a single uncontroulable person’. But many others had used it to try to exalt monarchical power, in a mistaken belief ‘that the dispositions, natures and hearts of the people, cannot be appli’d to the necessary obedience towards their Princes, nor their reverence and duty be so well fix’d and devoted to them, as by thinking that they have nothing of their own, but whatsoever they enjoy they have only by the bounty of the King, who can take it from them when he pleases’.70 Earlier in the Brief View and Survey he had likened Hobbes’s arguments against the liberty and property of the subject to those of the two notorious divines of the 1620s, protégés of William Laud and celebrators of divine right monarchy, Drs Maynwaring and Sibthorp.71 Such concerns were probably not uppermost in Clarendon’s mind when writing in exile, since to Clarendon and other conformists the Church by then appeared to pose no serious challenge to liberty or property. It was the dangers for the peace and unity of the State and the survival of the Church from aggressive nonconformity –​Catholic or Protestant –​that worried him more. No more of a friend to tender consciences than most other Anglican royalists, his little-​read essay ‘On Conscience’, dated from Montpellier in March 1670 or 1671, is a vigorous and conventional attack on those who would use conscience as a reason to rebel or resist lawful authority, which argues (as he does in Animadversions) that those who genuinely believe that compliance with the law would be to rebel against God have no option but to leave that jurisdiction.72 His thought experiment about Catholicism in ‘Against Multiplying Controversies’ relies on the individual accepting that the secular State had the authority to impose religious practices, even if these were indifferent, and may not be in accord with his own beliefs.73 As these, and many other passages in his writings of the 1670s show, Clarendon, like some other contemporary Anglican theologians, combined an anti-​dogmatic approach to religion with a strong sense of the authority of the State to determine religious practice. Incontrovertibly an Erastian, his views on ‘religion of state’ and the power of the secular State over the Church can, on occasion, seem to contradict his position in A Brief View and Survey, and sound perilously close to Hobbes’s. What makes them very different is a claim about the limitation of both secular and religious power. The common thread running through his works of the late 1660s and early 1670s –​the attacks on resurgent Catholicism, his condemnation of Hobbes, and even his criticism of the pre-​Civil War episcopate –​is an argument about the way in which power is controlled by 219

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From Republic to Restoration law or counsel. A characteristic phrase of Clarendon’s is ‘wildness and illimitedness’. In Animadversions, he refers to the ‘wildness and illimitedness’ of the burdens imposed on new Catholic converts through the authority of the Pope and the Church.74 In his Life, he describes how he was goaded by Lord Ashley into using the same phrase in response to the power given to the Crown in ecclesiastical affairs by the indulgence bill of 1663.75 Where Clarendon differs from Hobbes on the government of the Church is not over who holds authority over the public exercise of religion, but over how it was limited and legitimised. Throughout these works, Clarendon emphasises how religious practices are made acceptable: they need to be in accordance with local custom and tradition –​the apostles had had regard to the ‘customs and natures of the several people’ and had accepted different religious practices in different places76 –​and they need to be created with proper consideration and counsel. Clarendon claimed that the particular virtue of the Reformation in England had been that it was achieved with all the deliberation, all the circumstances of order, peace and authority, that ever hath been held necessary, and lawful, and justifiable, by the laws of god and man … upon consultation with, and approbation of the bishops and clergy of the land; upon the advice and counsel of the nobility of the kingdom, with the consent and ratification of the crown[.]‌77

These ideas –​counsel, deliberation, due process –​are essential features of Clarendon’s ideas about legitimacy and authority. His analysis of the politics of the 1620s and 1630s emphasised the failure of all of these processes, from the imposition of a Scottish prayer book in the face of the hostility of the Scots; the premature dismissal of parliaments; the perversion of law. As his historical writings attest, Clarendon could be as acutely concerned by the Church failing to accept the traditions of English political arrangements as he could by the misgovernment of the secular State itself. In this sense Clarendon might have been worried by any assertive tendency of the Church of England. Yet there was no simple parallel with the situation in the late 1660s or early 1670s and that of thirty years before. There was little practical prospect of the King making an anti-​ constitutional alliance with the Church, and Clarendon would hardly have identified by 1670 the possibility of the Church creating a serious interest of its own. There were, however, plenty of reasons to worry that the integrity of the Church and the peace and unity of the State were threatened by, on the one hand, the anti-​constitutionalism of Hobbes, and on the other by the schemes of Cressy. Right at the beginning of Behemoth, the leading interlocutor in the dialogues, ‘A’, as a way of introducing the discourse, suggests that someone who had observed men’s actions between 1640 and 1660 ‘as from the devil’s 220

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes mountain’, might have had ‘a prospect of all kinds of Injustice, and of all kinds of folly that the world could afford, and how they were produced by their dams hypocrisy and self-​conceit’.78 It is a striking image. The oblique reference to Christ’s temptation is surely intended (and perhaps there is a hint of Hobbes’s local landmark, the Devil’s Peak in Derbyshire as well), and maybe the implication –​albeit as a very Hobbesian joke –​is meant as well. For in Behemoth Hobbes seized a very fertile moment to offer the King the temptation of a radical turn in religious policy, and one that did a lot more than simply permit nonconformists to worship freely. It was an obvious opportunity to lay before the King the attractions of a Hobbesian religious policy. What Hobbes explicitly offered the King was the State taking control of the universities. What he implicitly offered was an entire reduction of the civil and ecclesiastical State to the royal will. Had he seen Behemoth, Clarendon would have been appalled. Hobbes was aiming in effect at the whole edifice of Church and law that Clarendon saw as the essence of English government. Flanked by Hobbes and Cressy, Clarendon’s prospect from the devil’s mountain would have been of the ancient landmarks of the English law and constitution, with on one side the Pope’s bulldozers, on the other side Hobbes’s, lined up to sweep them all away.

Notes 1 For the relationship between Hobbes and Hyde, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Edward Hyde and Thomas Hobbes’s Elements of Law, Natural and Politic’, Historical Journal, 32.2 (1989), 303–​17. 2 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 6–​10; the latest and most sophisticated account of the attack on Hobbes in 1666–​68 is Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: the Anglican attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–​58. 3 Richard Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends (London:  Hamish Hamilton, 1987), pp. 299–​319. 4 Oxford, Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS 123. For the composition of the History, see C. H. Firth, ‘Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion’, English Historical Review, 19 (1904), 26–​54, 246–​62, 464–​83. 5 Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan:  the Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England, 1640–​1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 103–​07. 6 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 263. 7 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England … written by Himself, 2 vols (Oxford, 1857) i, 304–​09; William Lucy’s Observations, Censures and Confutations of Notorious Errours in Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan (London, 1663), is dedicated to Clarendon. 8 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 143; Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. by W. D. Macray, 6 vols (Oxford, 1888), i, 109–​50. 9 Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 201–​02.

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From Republic to Restoration 10 For a discussion of Clarendon’s role in the religious settlement in 1660–​62, see Paul Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions:  Clarendon, Comprehension and Uniformity’, in ‘Settling the Peace of the Church’:  1662 Revisited, ed. by N.  H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 57–​84. 11 B. H. G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 268, 276. 12 Wormald, Clarendon, pp. 288, 297. 13 G. R. Abernathy, ‘Clarendon and the Declaration of Indulgence’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960), 55–​73; see also Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions’. 14 Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1640–​1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 454–​61, 491–​92. 15 Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: the Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–​1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 137–​62. 16 Jeffrey R. Collins ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, Church History, 68 (1999), 549–​80 (p. 549). 17 Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops’, 577. 18 Ibid., 574. 19 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, A Brief View and Survey of the Dangerous and Pernicious Errors to Church and State, in Mr Hobbes’s Book, entitled Leviathan ([Oxford], 1676), p. 4. The epistle dedicatory, dated 10 May 1673, was a later addition, written in anticipation of the book’s presentation to Charles II by his son. The work is also referred to in a letter of Clarendon’s to the King probably of June 1672. Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers, v, 638. 20 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Brief View and Survey, p. 249. 21 Ibid., p. 24. 22 Ibid., p. 234. 23 Ibid., p. 247. 24 Ibid., pp. 248–​49. 25 Ibid., p. 187. 26 Ibid., pp. 214–​15. 27 Rose, Godly Kingship, pp.  48–​ 60; J.  P. Sommerville, ‘The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy “jure divino” ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 34 (1983), 548–​58. 28 For Stillingfleet’s Erastianism, see Rose, pp.  141–​44 (especially pp.  143–​44), particularly for his insistence on the obligation to profess Christianity in the face of hostile sovereign power. 29 Paul Seaward, The Cavalier Parliament and the Reconstruction of the Old Regime, 1661–​67 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 172–​85, 318–​19. 30 For a synopsis, see Rose, Godly Kingship, pp. 171–​83. 31 Ollard, Clarendon and his Friends, pp. 310–​17. 32 British Library, Add MS 32499, f.25, Mordaunt to Clarendon, 27 Aug. 1669; Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Life, ii, 518. 33 TNA, PRO 31/​3/​119, p. 25, Ruvigny to Lionne, 28 May /​7 June 1668, PRO 31/​3/​121, pp. 22, 23, Colbert to Lionne, 21/​31 Jan. 1669, Colbert to Louis XIV, 10/​20 Feb. 1669; Bodleian, Carte 48, f.268, Ormond to Ossory, 30 June 1668; BL, Add MS 36916, f.122, 22 Dec. 1668; Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, p.  315. Pepys, Diary, ix, 536 (28 April 1669). 34 An Act for Banishing and Disenabling the Earl of Clarendon, Statutes of the Realm, v.628; The Correspondence of John Wallis, ed. by Philip Beeley and Christoph J. Scriba, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), iii, 252; see T. H. Lister, Life and Administration of Edward First Earl of Clarendon, 3 vols (London 1837), iii, 482–​84 for references to cipher being employed between Clarendon and his son Viscount Cornbury. 35 BL, Add MS 32499, f.25; PRO 31/​3/​123 p. 13, Colbert to Lionne, 4/​14 Oct. 1669. 36 See, for example, Lister, Life of Clarendon, iii, 483, for Clarendon expecting Sir William Portman to come there in the summer of 1671.

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes 37 John Callow, ‘Churchill, Arabella (1649–​1730)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​5394 [accessed 13 May 2015]. 38 Gabriel Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion, the Anglo-​French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination, 1660–​ 72’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 263–​ 91; for Charles II’s interest in toleration for Catholics, and pressure from continental powers during exile, see Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Life, ii, 532–​9. 39 Burnet recounted the story that it was linked to the possibility that Charles II’s Queen might be persuaded to become a nun, creating an excuse for a divorce and the King’s remarriage, and that this explained the friendship that was struck up at this time between the Duchess and the Countess of Cleveland, Charles’s long-​term mistress:  Gilbert Burnet, A History of my Own Time, ed. by Osmund Airy, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897–​1900), ii, 475. 40 F.  J. Routledge, in Calendar of the Clarendon State Papers Preserved in the Bodleian Library, 5 vols (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1970), v, 633, n.2, suggests that one of the bishops was George Morley, rather than Sheldon: Morley had been Clarendon’s chaplain in exile, and in the letter to the Duchess that he published in 1683 he refers to an interview he had with her probably in 1670. Morley makes it clear in A Letter Written by the Bishop of Winchester to her Highness the Dutchess of York (London, 1683) that he had indeed met the Duchess to discuss her conversion. He also discusses the case in Several Treatises Written upon Several Occasions; by the Right Reverend Father in God George Lord Bishop of Winton, Both before and since the King’s Restoration (London, 1683), preface, ii–​v. Morley was reported by Burnet to have been the Duchess’s confessor, a role later taken by Blandford: Burnet, History of My Own Time, i, 556. See also the letter from Clarendon to Cornbury of June 1671 in which he responds to Cornbury’s account of how the Duke of York had been angry with two bishops, who were also ‘divided from’ Sheldon, suggesting that Sheldon had not been one of those who had tried to dissuade the Duchess: Lister, Life of Clarendon, iii, 483. 41 The Duchess’s note was published by James II in 1686 along with the note allegedly written by Charles II, as Copies of Two Papers Written by the Late King Charles II together with a Copy of a Paper Written by the Late Duchess of York (London, 1686); other versions were printed, though it is not clear whether they appeared before or after the official publication: A Copy of a Paper Written by the Late Duchess of York ([n.p., n.d.] Wing Y46). It is clear, though, that they were not published in 1670 or 1671 as they are sometimes dated. The existence of the paper surprised Morley in 1682 or 1683, when he refers to a version in French published by the Jesuit Louis Maimbourg in his Histoire du Calvinisme (Paris, 1682), 507–​12: Morley, Several Treatises, ii. The paper’s authenticity is clear from a copy, in Cornbury’s hand in the Clarendon collection, which refers to it being in the Duchess’s own hand: Clarendon MSS 87, fols 62–​63. Burnet describes being shown the paper by the Duke of York, after seeing the reference to it by Maimbourg, and discussing it with Morley: Burnet, History of My Own Time, i, 556. See the discussion in The Works of John Dryden:  Prose 1668–​91:  An Essay of Dramatick Poesie and Shorter Works, xvii, ed. by Samuel Holt Monk (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), p. 474. 42 State Papers Collected by Edward Earl of Clarendon, ed. by Richard Scrope and Thomas Monkhouse, 3 vols (Oxford, 1767–​86), iii, supplement, xli. 43 Morley, A Letter. 44 Ollard, Clarendon and His Friends, pp. 317–​18; Lister, Life of Clarendon, iii, 478–​84. 45 The letters are published in State Papers Collected by Edward Earl of Clarendon, iii, supplement, xxxviii–​xl. Ollard argues (Clarendon and His Friends, pp. 324–​25) that the fulsome tribute to the Duchess and her husband in the dedication to his children of his ‘Contemplations and Reflections on the Psalms of David’ dated from Montpellier on 18/​28 Feb. 1671 suggests that he was as yet unaware of her conversion, about six weeks before her death, and ‘supports Burnet’s view that he had only heard rumours of her

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From Republic to Restoration inclination and that his anxious letter arrived after her death’:  A Collection of Several Tracts of the Right Honourable Edward, Earl of Clarendon (London, 1727), pp. 375, 377. In fact Burnet does not speculate on how much Clarendon knew, writing that ‘Her father, when he heard of her shaking in her religion, was more troubled at it than at all his own misfortunes. He writ her a very good and long letter upon it, inclosed in one to the duke but she was dead before it came into England.’ Burnet, History of My Own Time, i, 558. 46 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Essays, Moral and Entertaining, on the Various Faculties and Passions of the Human Mind, ed. by J. S. Clarke, 2 vols (London, 1815), ii, 175. 47 Ibid., ii, 208. 48 Ibid., ii, 214–​15. 49 Ibid., ii, 198–​99. 50 Ibid., ii, 236–​37. 51 Ibid., ii, 252. 52 Gabriel Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion, the Anglo-​French Alliance and the English Catholic Imagination 1660–​ 1672’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 263–​ 91 (pp. 272–​73). 53 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions upon a Book, Intituled, Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Catholick Church by Dr Stillingfleet and the Imputation Refuted and Retorted by S. C. (London, 1674), p. 8; see also Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: the Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 68. Clarendon responds at Animadversions (p. 24) to a reference made by Cressy to the sermon preached by Thomas Lushington at Oxford at Easter 1624, suggesting that both of them were present. 54 A Discourse Concerning the Idolatry Practised in the Church of Rome (London, 1671), sig. a. 55 Glickman, ‘Christian Reunion’, 263, 271–​73. 56 Ibid., 272–​73. 57 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions, 108–​09. 58 For accounts of the concerns of Great Tew, see Blair Worden, ‘Clarendon, History, Religion, Politics’, in his God’s Instruments:  Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford, 2012), 373–​400; J. C. Hayward, ‘The Mores of Great Tew: Literary, Philosophical and Political Idealism in Falkland’s Circle’ unpublished University of Cambridge PhD thesis 1982; Hugh Trevor-​Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle’ in Hugh Trevor-​Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-​Century Essays (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1987), and Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 63–​87. For Clarendon’s visit to the Carey sisters, see Clarendon MS 137, f. 11v. 59 F. J. Routledge, ‘The Negotiations between Charles II and the Cardinal de Retz, 1658–​ 59’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vi (1956), 49–​68. 60 Religion and Policy and the Countenance and Assistance Each Should Give to the Other, 2 vols (Oxford, 1811), ii, 669–​70; Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Life, i, 291–​99. 61 William Prynne, The Second Tome of an Exact Chronological Vindication and Historical Demonstration of our British, Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English Kings Supream Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction (London, 1665), epistle dedicatory. 62 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘ “Undoubted realities”: Clarendon on Sacrilege’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), 515–​40; Milton, Catholic and Reformed, pp. 333–​35, 500–​01. 63 Ibid., pp. 272–​77. See the similar comments of Stillingfleet on the subject, in Irenicum, cited by Rose, p.  142, and, generally John Spurr, ‘ “A special kindness for dead bishops”:  The Church, History and Testimony in Seventeenth-​Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), 313–​34. 64 See Anthony Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic in Seventeenth-​Century England: The Career and Writings of Peter Heylyn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 190. Cf. p. 123 for Heylyn’s private remarks about the death of Falkland in 1643.

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Clarendon, Cressy and Hobbes 65 Seaward, ‘Circumstantial Temporary Concessions’, 71–​72; see also Justin A. Champion’s remarks on Stillingfleet on the status of bishops in The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and its Enemies, 1660–​1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 62–​63. 66 Hyde to Dr Barwick, 4 May 1659, printed in Peter Barwick, The Life of the Reverend Dr John Barwick (London, 1724), pp. 398–​402. See Thorndike’s An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England (London, 1659), especially pp. 401–​26. 67 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, i, 143, 139. 68 Ibid., i, 140. 69 i Sam. 8.11–​17. 70 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Brief View and Survey, p. 75. 71 Ibid., p. 55. 72 Trevor-​Roper, Essays, i, 195–​209. 73 Ibid., ii, 180–​90. 74 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions, pp. 249–​50. 75 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Life, ii, 98. 76 Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions, pp. 128–​29. 77 Trevor-​Roper, Essays, ii, 146; cf. Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Animadversions, p. 65. 78 Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 107.

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Chapter 11

‘The Sport of Bishop-​Hunting’: Marvell and the neo-​Laudians Martin Dzelzainis

W

hen John Selden’s Table-​Talk was first published more than thirty years after his death in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, it offered readers a pair of contrasting reflections on how an earlier revolution, that of the 1640s, had come to pass. On the one hand, Selden laid the blame squarely at the door of the ‘Incendiaries of the state’; that is to say, the servants of the Crown, the judges and the lawyers who in the decades before the outbreak of the Civil War had facilitated a series of encroachments on the liberty and property of the subject that included the Forced Loan of 1626, the imprisonment of MPs (among them Selden himself ) after the dissolution of the stormy 1629 session of Parliament, and Ship Money, which was introduced in 1634 but first levied nationwide in 1635. Although those who had ‘first set [the state] on Fire’ now regretted their actions, ‘and would fain quench’ the blaze, he nevertheless thought ‘they deserv’d most to be punish’d, for being the first Cause of our Distractions’.1 On this view, it was the Crown’s own innovations –​widely perceived as such notwithstanding the fact that they involved the resuscitation of antiquated laws –​that had destabilised the monarchy.2 Although Selden sympathised with the parliamentary cause he was also sharply critical of Puritan opponents of the Caroline Church for manufacturing discontent with the Personal Rule of Charles I. He made the point in the form of a striking analogy between ancient Athens and England. ’Tis observable, that in Athens where the Arts flourisht, they were govern’d by a Democrasie, Learning made them think themselves as wise as any body, and they would govern as well as others; and they spake it as it were by way of Contempt, that in the East and in the North they had Kings, and why? Because the most part of them follow’d their business, and if some one man had made himself wiser than the rest, he govern’d them, and they willingly submitted themselves to him. Aristotle makes the Observation. And

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians as in Athens the Philosophers made the People knowing, and therefore they thought themselves wise enough to govern, so does preaching with us, and that makes us affect a democrasie: For upon these two grounds we all would be Governours, either because we think our selves as wise as the best, or because we think our selves the Elect, and have the Spirit, and the rest a Company of Reprobates that belong to the Devil.3

This explanation of the origins of the conflict, while not incompatible with the first, is along radically different lines. Selden’s notorious anti-​clericalism is evident in the picture he gives of Puritan divines over-​inflating their auditors’ sense of their intellectual and spiritual self-​worth. Just as the Athenian citizenry had been encouraged by their philosophers to think of themselves as fit to govern and hence to hold in contempt those who were content to be governed by kings, so the English populace had been led by their preachers to ‘affect a democrasie’ and self-​righteously to consign to perdition anyone who thought differently. Selden was by no means original in making this observation since the same complaint about preachers and democracy is found in Basilikon Doron, the advice book addressed by James VI of Scotland to his then heir, Prince Henry, but published in an Anglicised version upon James’s accession to the English throne in 1603.4 The passage in question occurs when James relates how he had been subjected to a campaign of clerical abuse, especially during the years of his minority between 1567 and 1578. ‘The occasion of the Tribunat of some Puritanes’, as a marginal note puts it, was when some fierie spirited men in the ministerie, got such a guiding of the people at that time of confusion, as finding the gust of government sweete, they begouth to fantasie to themselves a Democraticke forme of government: and … after usurping the libertie of the time in my long minorities, setled themselves so fast upon that imagined Democracie [margin: Such were the Demagogi at Athens], as they fed themselves with the hope to become Tribuni plebis: and so in a popular government by leading the people by the nose, to beare the sway of all the rule. And for this cause, there never arose faction in the time of my minoritie, nor trouble sen-​syne, but they that were upon that factious part, were ever carefull to perswade and allure these unruly spirits among the ministrie, to spouse that quarrell as their owne: where-​through I was ofttimes calumniated in their populare Sermons, not for any evill or vice in me, but because I was a King, which they thought the highest evill.5

The ulterior aim of the Scottish ministers in pursuing ‘a Democraticke forme of government’ was for them rather than the people to ‘beare the sway of all the rule’. In this, they resembled both Athenian demagogues and Roman tribunes of the people.6 However, the ministers were themselves merely the instruments of the ‘factious part’ among the Scottish laity who had their own interest in ‘populare Sermons’ denouncing the King.

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From Republic to Restoration For James, then, “democracy” was shorthand for the theory of popular sovereignty articulated by the so-​called monarchomachs of the later sixteenth century, of whom his former tutor George Buchanan was the most radical.7 The same nexus dominated the thinking of Selden’s friend, Thomas Hobbes, as is most apparent in Behemoth, or The Long Parliament. First printed in 1679, this was his historical survey of the ‘highest of time’, as he called the years between 1640 and 1660. The first of the four dialogues locates the ‘seed’ of the Civil War in ‘certaine opinions in Divinity and Politicks’, and throughout it Hobbes harps on the fatal alliance between ‘the Presbyterians and other Democraticall men’ (or, ringing the changes, ‘the English Presbyterians and Democraticalls’, ‘the Democraticall and Presbyterian English’, or ‘Preachers and Democraticall Gentlemen’) when ‘attempting the change of government from Monarchicall to Democraticall’ –​even if, he admits, ‘They did not challenge the Soveraignty in plaine termes, and by that name, till they had slain the King’ in 1649.8 However, Hobbes was here only elaborating views he had formed much earlier. Indeed, he explained the genesis of his masterpiece, Leviathan (1651), in just these terms:  ‘The cause of my writing that Book, was the consideration of what the Ministers before, and in the beginning of the Civil War, by their preaching and writing did contribute thereunto.’9 To say this was to subscribe to a very powerful and, as it proved, enduring narrative in which the events of 1640 to 1660 were to be seen as driven by clerical ideologues of a specifically Puritan cast of mind. On this view, the Great Rebellion was actually a Puritan Revolution. However, there was also a counter-​narrative –​one that became increasingly prominent in the years after the Restoration  –​according to which events had been driven not by ideologues opposed to Anglicanism but by clergymen promoting an innovative version of it in the 1620s and 1630s. And whereas the former favoured ‘democracy’ the latter were proponents of absolutism. As we shall see, this counter-​narrative eventually became somewhat of a ‘Whig cliché’, but the aim of this chapter is to examine the part played by Andrew Marvell in the early stages of its formation.10 The key texts to be considered are Marvell’s prose satire, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), and an anonymous counterblast to it, The Transproser Rehears’d (1673). While the former found admirers from the start, the latter has recently attracted attention by virtue of the suggestion that its author was not the insipid Richard Leigh as formerly supposed but the formidable Samuel Butler. Even so, the title of the article in which Nicholas von Maltzahn made the case for Butler’s authorship tells its own story: ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’.11 What matters primarily, it seems, is the nature of Butler’s ad hominem attacks on Marvell’s friend and Interregnum colleague, John Milton, rather than his barbed remarks about Marvell himself. It is true 228

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians that these jibes have been pored over by Paul Hammond and others speculating about Marvell’s sexuality, but this still leaves us in the dark about the substance of the quarrel between this pair of literary heavyweights –​ the two most accomplished satirists of the early Restoration.12 My contention is that the topic that really exercises them is, in Butler’s pungent phrase, ‘The Sport of Bishop-​Hunting’, and the hunting of one in particular: Archbishop William Laud.13 At issue was the question of who was ultimately to blame for the English Civil War. Marvell’s answer was simple: it was Laud, who, in his view, personified a fatal commitment to Arminian teachings on matters such as universal grace and free will conjoined with a defence of divine right monarchy. Despite condemnation by the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort in 1619, the Arminians went on to enjoy great success in England under the auspices of Laud, who was a leading figure in the Caroline regime by the mid-​1620s. He eventually succeeded George Abbot as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 (fulfilling a royal promise made in 1626), thereby allowing him to complete the so-​called ‘Arminianisation of the Church of England’.14 However, when the King and Archbishop tried to impose liturgical conformity on the Calvinist Scots they provoked a rebellion that ended Charles I’s Personal Rule and led eventually to the fall of the monarchy itself. Or, as Marvell summarises the story in The Rehearsal Transpros’d: the Arminians, ‘having made the whole business of State, their Arminian Jangles, and the persecution for Ceremonies, did for recompence assign [Charles I] that imaginary absolute Government, upon which Rock we all ruined’.15 But how did Marvell come up with this historical scenario, and why had it become necessary to deploy it in the early 1670s?

Laud and the neo-​Laudians

I

t is a striking fact that within the space of fifteen days in July 1663, two archbishops of Canterbury were buried in the chapel of St John’s College, Oxford. The first was William Juxon, whose body entered Oxford on Tuesday 9 July attended by ‘sixty men in mourning on horseback’ and was laid in state in the Divinity School. On Thursday afternoon, following a eulogy by the University orator, Robert South, it was taken in procession to St John’s and, after anthems sung by the College choir joined with that of Christ Church, a speech, and prayers, was duly interred. The second was William Laud, who had been beheaded on Tower Hill in January 1645 and buried nearby in All Hallows Church. Although the president  –​Laud’s kinsman, Richard Baylie  –​and fellows had first consulted about having his body ‘removed’ from there to St John’s at the time of the Restoration they only ‘resolved on the business after the sepultre there of archbishop 229

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From Republic to Restoration Juxon, and that with convenience and privacy’. Compared with the exequies afforded Juxon, Laud’s re-​interment was a hugger-​mugger affair, taking place ‘at 10 of the clock in the night’ with only a few in attendance.16 At first sight these events appear to bear out Thomas Fuller’s remarks, published a year earlier, to the effect that Laud was a uniquely toxic figure: Of him I have written in my Ecclesiastical History, though I confess it was some what too soon for one with safety and truth, to treat of such a Subject. Indeed I could instance in some kind of co[a]‌rse Venison, not fit for food when first killed, and therefore cunning Cooks bury it for some hours in the Earth, till the rankness thereof being mortified thereby, it makes most palatable meat. So the memory of some Persons newly deceased are neither fit for a Writers or Readers repast, untill some competent time after their Interment.17

Fuller’s views had been hotly contested by Peter Heylyn, a strident apologist for Arminianism in the 1630s, whose influential biography of Laud, Cyprianus Anglicus, was, however, to remain unpublished until 1668.18 And even Fuller himself was ‘Confident that unpartial Posterity, on a serious review of all Passages, will allow [Laud’s] Name to be reposed among the HEROES of our Nation’.19 In fact, by 1663 the process of detoxification was already well underway at Oxford, led by a trio of Christ Church clerics –​ John Fell, Richard Allestree and John Dolben –​with the backing of Gilbert Sheldon, Juxon’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury, and, between 1667 and 1669, chancellor of the university.20 Laud’s rehabilitation was signalled in 1667 by the publication of an edition of his prayers, A Summarie of Devotions, prepared by his literary executor, Baylie, and personally licensed by Sheldon at Lambeth and Fell in Oxford.21 Indeed, before the decade was out even the awkward events of July 1663 had been smoothed over by the royalist biographer, David Lloyd, such that Laud could resume his status as Juxon’s senior partner; just as Juxon ‘had gone on in the same course, acted on the same principles, enjoyed the same honors, so he lieth in the same Grave, with his friend and patron Archbishop Laud’.22 The Oxford neo-​ Laudians were distinguished by their ‘militant Anglicanism –​a doctrinally assertive, politically aggressive, insular brand of protestant episcopalianism’.23 Although intent on reviving Laudian norms and practices at Oxford, in some ways they went further than Laud had himself. In particular, they were much less sanguine about the royal supremacy than he had been. The Declaration of Breda (1660), the Worcester House Declaration (1660), and the first Declaration of Indulgence (1662), unnerved Anglicans because they showed that Charles II, in being more open to comprehension and toleration than the bishops would countenance, was liable to abuse his powers if left to his own devices.24 Accordingly, the Anglican hierarchy turned to the Cavalier Parliament for political leverage. Acting in 230

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians concert with their parliamentary allies, the bishops forced the withdrawal of the first Declaration of Indulgence (as they would the second one of 1672)  and pushed through the persecutory Conventicle Act (1664) and Five Mile Act (1665). And when the time-​limited Conventicle Act lapsed (thereby nullifying the Five Mile Act also), they secured the enactment of a more draconian version in 1670.25 When the King issued his second Declaration of Indulgence suspending penal legislation against nonconformists and Catholics in March 1672, Marvell was at the forefront of its defence. Anticipating a Cavalier-​Anglican onslaught on it in the next parliamentary session, The Rehearsal Transpros’d was in print by early November, though, as it turned out, the session was prorogued while still in recess on 20 October. To defend indulgence was necessarily to find oneself at odds with the bishops, but rather than mount a frontal assault on the episcopal bench –​Marvell was reluctant even to name ‘our present Bishops’ –​he instead satirised a number of deceased bishops and clergymen, including John Bramhall, John Cosin, Peter Heylyn and Herbert Thorndike.26 Chief among them was, of course, Laud, who thus became a stalking-​horse for the neo-​Laudians. In discussing the dire consequences of Laud’s influence over Charles I, Marvell was actually warning Charles II not to fall in with Archbishop Sheldon –​or with Sheldon’s chaplain, Samuel Parker, to whose edition of Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy From the Presbyterian Charge of Popery, As it is managed by Mr. Baxter in his Treatise of the Grotian Religion. Together with a Preface Shewing What Grounds there are of Fears and Jealousies of Popery (1672) Marvell was responding in the first instance. As we shall see, the precautionary tactic of not naming names was one Hobbes also adopted when threatened by proponents of ‘the Oxford neo-​ Laudian agenda’.27 The first time he deployed the anti-​Arminian scenario was however during his earlier quarrel with John Bramhall (nominated Bishop of Derry in 1634 and Archbishop of Armagh in 1660). In The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance (1656), Hobbes explained how it had come to pass that he and Bramhall had found themselves debating these matters when both were in exile in 1645. The arc of his narrative actually begins at several removes from the Marquess of Newcastle’s house in Paris; that is, with the scholastic ‘Doctors of the Roman Church’, who brought in a Doctrine that not onely Man, but also his Will is Free, and determined to this or that action, not by the Will of God, nor necessary causes, but by the power of the Will it Self. And though by the reformed Churches instructed by Luther, Calvin and others, this opinion was cast out, yet not many years since it began again to be reduced by Arminius and his followers, and became the readiest way to Ecclesiastical promotion; and by discontenting those that held the contrary, was in some part the cause of the following

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From Republic to Restoration troubles; which troubles were the occasion of my meeting with the Bishop of Derry at Paris, where we discoursed together of the Argument now in hand.28

That Arminianism was the cause of the ‘troubles’ that ultimately resulted in the philosopher and the bishop debating free will, Hobbes slyly insinuates, is itself proof of the proposition that all events are the necessary effects of antecedent causes (one of the main points at issue between them).29 Such a wittily self-​reflexive argument might well have caught Marvell’s eye when preparing his reply to Parker, if not before. Hobbes supplied a more detailed account of the Synod of Dort and its English fall-​out in Behemoth. This was one of a sequence of works he wrote in the 1660s in the (correct) belief that he was under threat of prosecution for heresy by the bishops.30 His response in Behemoth was to launch a comprehensive attack on the Anglican hierarchy –​from its ideological control of the universities to its political unreliability.31 Accordingly, he subjects the best-​selling work of Anglican devotion, The Whole Duty of Man (1661), to a withering critique though without identifying its author (the neo-​Laudian Allestree).32 And his animus takes an openly anti-​Laudian turn when Interlocutor B mildly enquires whether Archbishop Laud ‘was perhaps a very great Politician?’. A’s acid response is that That did not appear by any remarkable event of his Councells. I never heard but that he was a very honest man for his Moralls, and a very zealous promoter of the Church government by Bishops, and that desired to have the service of God performed, and the house of God adorned, as suitable as was possible to the honour we ought to doe to the divine Majesty. But to bring as he did into the State his former controversies, I mean his squablings in the University about Free Will, and his standing upon punctilio’s concerning the Service booke and its Rubricks, was not in my opinion an argument of his sufficiency in affaires of State.33

The outcome was that ‘unlucky busines’ of the Prayer Book in Scotland from which all else followed.34 Unsurprisingly, as John Aubrey told John Locke in 1673, although Behemoth was a work that ‘the King has read and likes extremely, [he] tells him there is so much truth in it he dares not license it for fear of displeasing the Bishops’.35 Only after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679, was it possible for it to be printed. In his letter to Locke, Aubrey also mentions that the manuscript of Behemoth was available for inspection at the bookseller William Crooke’s premises at the Green Dragon without Temple-​Bar. This raises the intriguing question of whether Marvell read Behemoth (probably completed by 1669 at the latest) before he composed The Rehearsal Transpros’d or The Rehearsall Transpros’d:  The Second Part (published in December 1673). After all, by 1675 Crooke was advertising in print that he held several 232

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians manuscripts by Hobbes, and we know that in 1676 Marvell’s patron, the Earl of Anglesey, arranged for a copy of Hobbes’s An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, to be made and sent to Thomas Barlow in Oxford for comment.36 Furthermore, when discussing Hobbes in The Rehearsall Transpros’d:  The Second Part, Marvell told Parker that ‘I do not see but your Behemoth exceeds his Leviathan some foot long, in whatsoever he saith concerning the Power of the Magistrate in Matters of Religion and Civils’. However, this need not necessarily indicate knowledge of Behemoth given that Hobbes had also suggested to Bramhall in the Questions that ‘Behemoth against Leviathan’ might make a good title for a book.37 Such nevertheless was the ideological company Marvell was keeping in the early 1670s.38 One difference, however, is that whereas the King deferred to Anglican sensibilities in the case of Behemoth, he stood his ground when The Rehearsal Transpros’d ran into trouble.39 After the second edition was stopped in the press by the Stationers’ Company early in December, the bookseller, Nathaniel Ponder, took Roger L’Estrange, Surveyor of the Press, to see the Earl of Anglesey, who reportedly said Look you Mr L’Estrange there is a Book come out (the Rehearsall Transpros’d) I presume you have seen it. I have spoken to his Ma:ty about it, and the King says he will not have it suppresst, for Parker has done him, wrong, and this man has done him Right: and I desired to speak with you to tell you this. And since the King will have the Book to passe, Pray give Mr Ponder your License to it.40

A deal was brokered whereby L’Estrange would license the work subject to some minor but telling alterations to the text. In particular, ‘upon reading the discourse over’ with Ponder after the interview, L’Estrange ‘changed and struck out several sharp Reflexions upon B.pp Laud, and Dr Parker’. One of several such ‘Reflexions’ in gathering T, for example, characterised Laud as a meddling, politically ambitious cleric (‘who was in the business, and a Rising man at Court, undertook an Answer’). The offending phrase was replaced with an anodyne form of words and several dashes to fill up the space (‘who understood the whole business, went to answer them in Writing.–​’).41 Here as elsewhere, the point of the exercise was to blunt the edge of Marvell’s anti-​clericalism. Significantly, Marvell extends the anti-​Laudian narrative ten years further back than Hobbes does, from the Scottish disturbances over the liturgy to the Forced Loan controversy of 1626–​28.42 Having dissolved Parliament in 1626 to protect his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, Charles I was unwilling to recall it when faced with a crisis: the need to supply military aid to his uncle, Christian of Denmark. Instead, he decided to compel his subjects to lend him the money. Although Laud was not actually made a privy councillor until April 1627, he was behind the policy from the start 233

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From Republic to Restoration and so when Charles and Buckingham asked him in September 1626 to draw up instructions to the clergy (‘partly Political, partly Ecclesiastical’) to justify the loan from the pulpit he ‘chearfully conformed’. Within two days he had produced a draft in the form of a letter from Charles to George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, that ‘received  …  a very favourable acceptation’ from the Duke and the King and which was then circulated to the bishops with a covering letter from Abbot.43 The outcome was a series of sermons preached before the King by Matthew Wren, Isaac Bargrave, and Roger Maynwaring, and outside the court by Peter Titley, Robert Sibthorp and others, in which they collectively descanted on Laud’s theme that ‘ayde and supply for the defence of the Kingdome, and the like affaires of State … are due to the King from his People, by all Law both of God and men’.44 Although it is true that the sermons by Sibthorp and Maynwaring in particular are somewhat ‘academic exercises in the application of absolutist theory’, the campaign turned into a political scandal when Abbot refused to bow to sustained pressure from the court to license the printing of Sibthorp’s sermon.45 Abbot’s refusal was eventually overridden; he was banished to Kent and his metro-​political authority was entrusted to five bishops  –​including Laud. For his part, Abbot strongly suspected that the episode had been orchestrated by his political enemies, Laud and Buckingham, and wrote a detailed memoir setting out his side of the story. It was on the version of this published by John Rushworth in his Historical Collections of 1659 that Marvell relied in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, pages 285 to 290 of which largely comprise extracts from Abbot’s text. And it was with Marvell’s handling of these materials that Butler in turn took issue. Butler was in no doubt about the anti-​Arminian and hence anti-​Laudian thrust of Marvell’s work. At one point, he pictures Marvell as a politico in a coffee-​house who is taking notes while another client opines on the news of Louis XIV’s incursion into Gelderland: this is a Plot, I plainly see’t, a Plot of the Arminian Party; this has been a brewing any time this Thirty years and upwards, thus it always has been, and thus it always will be, as long as any of the Race of Barnevelt and Grotius are left alive. I  gad, Sir, and you speak a great deal of Truth (says our Coffee-​house Notary, whose hand was moving all this while) these Arminians are the rudest ill bred’st persons, and all that, in the whole world. There has been a party of ’em in England, that shall be nameless; of such a Pontifical stiffness, as if they were Companions for none but Princes and Statesmen forsooth. Well, I’le say no more, they shall know what a Satyrist I am, I’le Lampoon, and print ’em too, I gad.46

Here Butler latches on to Marvell’s characteristic unwillingness to name names where the living are concerned. His central objection, however, is

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians that Marvell has fabricated the illusion of an English ‘Arminian Plot’ by his unethical manipulation of Abbot’s memoir. A better enquiry into the story of Sibthorps Sermon and the Loan, will free the Clergy, and Bishop Laud in particular, from many unworthy and false imputations of our Author, if not Sibthorp too in some measure from being thought to play the Bishop in the States-​mans Diocess. For the truth on’t is, he has omitted so many material passages, and dislocated the rest, that the Story as he has castrated it, is so mutilate and deficient, as the Narrative which he gives us, pag. 285. is not so much Arch-​Bishop Abbots, as the Reverend Animadverters.47

This is the point at which the ideological difference between Marvell and Butler assumes a narrowly textual form, though one might just as easily say that it is a narrowly textual dispute of great ideological significance. For an example of what Butler calls Marvell’s ‘disingenuity’, we can pick up the story at the point in Abbot’s memoir (as printed by Rushworth) where he had submitted his objections to Sibthorp’s sermon to the King in written form: It should seem, that this Paper did prick to the quick, and no satisfaction being thereby accepted, Bishop Laud is called, and he must go to answer to it in writing:  This man is the onely inward Counseller with Buckingham, sitting with him sometimes privately whole hours, and feeding his humour with malice and spight. His life in Oxford was to pick quarrels in the Lectures of the Publick Readers, and to advertise them to the then Bishop of Durham, that he might fill the ears of King James with discontents, against the honest men that took pains in their Places, and setled the truth (which he called Puritanism) in their Auditors.48

To make Butler’s point for him, we can compare this with Marvell’s text (in its uncensored from): Archbishop Abbot, not being satisfi’d of the Doctrine delivered, sent back his reasons why he thought not fit to give his Approbation, and unto these Bishop Laud, who was in this whole business, and a Rising Man at Court, undertook an answer. ‘His life in Oxford’, saith Arch-​bishop Abbot, ‘was to pick quarrels in the Lectures of publick Readers, and to advertise them to the Bishop of Durham that he might fill the Ears of King James with discontent against the honest men that took pains in their places, and setled the Truth (which he called Puritanism) in their Auditors.49

What is immediately obvious is that Marvell has excised the first Duke of Buckingham from the narrative, thereby ascribing agency solely to Laud. Of course, it is no surprise that he did so. The first duke was father of his presumed patron, the second duke, who was in turn author of The Rehearsal, the play that Marvell was appropriating to satirise Parker.50 To airbrush out the Duke’s father therefore achieved two objectives at a stroke: it protected

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From Republic to Restoration the sensibilities of the Villiers family while blackening the reputation of the former Villiers client, Laud, who had become the first duke’s chaplain and confessor in 1622.51 The comparison also throws further light on the process whereby Marvell’s text was censored. Whoever came up with the alternative form of words did so by consulting a copy of Rushworth: a change of tense apart, ‘went to answer them in Writing’ is very close to Abbot’s ‘go to answer to it in writing’. But who was it? L’Estrange specifically deposed that ‘he did not love to tamper with other mens Copyes, without the Privity and Allowance of the Author’, to which Anglesey replied that ‘he could not say any thing of the Author, but that such alterations might be made without him’.52 So it may well have been L’Estrange who made the changes, though it remains possible that it was Marvell himself.53 Butler’s response by way of exculpating Laud was straightforward:  if Marvell had written Buckingham out of the story, then Butler was going to write him back into it. However, this was not altogether unproblematic for Butler either. After all, he too had been one of the second duke’s circle, and may even have had a hand in composing the burlesque Rehearsal.54 Nevertheless he made it clear that the licensing plot against Abbot had been primarily Buckingham’s work. The sermon, says Butler, being brought unto the Duke, it cometh into his Head, or was suggested unto him by some malicious body, that thereby the Arch-​Bishop might be put to some remarkable strait: For if the King should send the Sermon unto him, and command him to allow it to the Press, one of these two things would follow. That either he should Authorize it, and so all men that were indifferent, should discover him for a base and unworthy Beast; or he should refuse it, and so should fall into the Kings indignation, who might pursue it at his pleasure, as against a man that was contrary to his Service. Out of this Fountain (says the Arch-​Bishop, if he may be allowed to speak for himself, and not our Animadverter for him) ‘flow’d all the water that afterwards so wet’.55

However, when there was no sign of progress in the plot, alleges Butler, the Duke of Buckingham said to the King, ‘Do you see how this business is defer’d, if more expedition be not used, it will not be Printed before the end of the Term; at which time it is fit that it be sent down into the Countries’. Which so quickned the King, that the next message which was sent by Mr. Murrey, was, that if the Bishop did not dispatch it, the King would take some other course with him. Whereupon finding how far the Duke had prevailed, he thought fit to set down in writing his Objections, wherefore the Book was not fit to be publisht, which he did, and sent them to the King. These Bishop Laud was commanded to answer in Writing, and upon this the Arch-​Bishop flies out into a Rage, and taxes Laud so severely, as the Animadverter tells us, Pag. 286.56

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians From all of this it followed that Marvell had indeed ‘castrated’ Abbot’s narrative so as to make it appear that the real villain of the piece was Laud rather than, as Abbot himself had alleged, Buckingham. On the narrow textual issue, then, Butler was in the right. Marvell had indeed misrepresented the memoir by excluding Buckingham, even if to argue, as Butler does, that Buckingham fomented the licensing plot is not to deny that Laud was politically identified with the Forced Loan. To round off his account of the critical events of the 1620s, Marvell once more draws on Rushworth, and particularly his report of John Pym’s parliamentary speech of 9 June 1628, in order to condemn Maynwaring’s no less incendiary sermons.57 It was, Marvell argues, because of what he now pointedly calls ‘this Ecclesiastical Loan’ that ‘the Kingdom was turned into a Prison’ –​ and that from there the high road to civil war lay open.58 Notwithstanding Butler’s best efforts, it was to be Marvell’s version of events that gained traction. His polemical intervention in 1672 was crucial in popularising the counter-​narrative according to which blame for the outbreak of the Civil War could be laid at the feet of the Arminian clergy in general and Laud in particular; although he was ‘so learned, so pious, so wise a Man’, Laud had ‘seem’d to know nothing beyond Ceremonies, Arminianism and Manwaring. With that he begun, and with that ended, and thereby deform’d the whole reign’ of Charles I.59 What happened next was that in the mid-​1670s the anti-​Laudian baton was handed on from Marvell to Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, and his secretary, John Locke.

Marvell and priestcraft

C

harles II was not the only high-​ profile backer of The Rehearsal Transpros’d. When Marvell’s bookseller, Nathaniel Ponder, was cross-​ examined on 25 January 1673 about allegedly having told another bookseller ‘That he might sell the Book, for he had those that would bring him off & justify it’, he confirmed he had done so. On being asked to identify them, he named ‘the Lord Chancellor & Earle Anglesey; and gave this reason for it, because (as he said) they liked the Book’.60 Shaftesbury had only became Lord Chancellor on 17 November 1672, shortly before The Rehearsal Transpros’d appeared, but he had long been a leading proponent of the view that the King should use his ecclesiastical prerogative to suspend the penal laws against nonconformists and Catholics –​the doctrine that Marvell was promoting.61 It is hardly surprising, therefore, that we should find traces of Shaftesbury’s reading of Marvell in his speeches and writings, even after the collapse of the policy of indulgence, his subsequent

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From Republic to Restoration loss of office, and his move into opposition to the Anglican royalist regime of the Earl of Danby. On 20 October 1675, Shaftesbury gave a speech on Shirley v. Fagg, a case involving the two Houses’ privileges and jurisdiction over which they had disagreed so bitterly as to bring about the prorogation of June 1675 (and would do so again in November, although Shaftesbury was actually seeking a dissolution). He concluded with a full-​scale denunciation of ‘Laudean Doctrine’: there is another Principle got into the World, my Lords, that hath not been long there; for Arch-​Bishop Laud was the first Author that I remember of it: And I cannot find, that the Jesuites, or indeed the Popish Clergy hath ever own’d it, but some of the Episcopal Clergy of our British Isles; and ’tis withal (as ’tis new,) so the most dangerous destructive Doctrine to our Government and Law, that ever was. ’Tis the first of the Cannons published by the Convocation, 1640. That Monarchy is of Divine Right. This Doctrine was then preached up, and maintained by Sibthorp, Manwaring, and others … and how much it is spread amongst our Dignified Clergy, is very easily known.62

Although the reference to the 1640 Canons disrupts the chronology, this is recognisably the Marvellian counter-​narrative. It seems likely that Shaftesbury’s speech was prepared with a draft of the famous Letter from a Person of Quality (1675) to hand (the Letter went on sale within two weeks of the speech and on 8 November was condemned by the Lords to be burnt), since the conclusion to that work is similarly worded, even if the reference to Sibthorp and Manwaring is omitted.63 While the Letter is manifestly Shaftesburian, its authorship, and especially the extent to which Locke may have had a hand in its composition, is uncertain, though the most recent authoritative assessment is that his role was that of putting ‘into coherent form material which had been supplied by others’ –​including Shaftesbury himself.64 What can be said, however, is that whoever was responsible was an attentive reader of Marvell. Thus a passage in The Rehearsal Transpros’d in which Marvell describes ‘Pillories, Whipping-​posts, Gallies, Rods, and Axes’ as being ‘Ratio ultima Cleri, a Clergy-​mans last Argument, ay and his first too’, appears to be alluded to in the Letter, as has been noted.65 The same applies to the concluding image in the peroration to the Letter, where the clergy are accused of having truckt away the Rights and Liberties of the People … that they might be owned by the Prince to be Jure Divino, and maintain’d in that Pretention by that absolute power and force, they have contributed so much to put into his hands; and that Priest, and Prince may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipt together as Divine in the same temple by Us poor Lay-​subjects[.]‌

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians It is hard to imagine a more compelling emblem of what Mark Goldie calls the ‘corrupt mutuality’ at the heart of “priestcraft”; that is to say, ‘the symbiosis of crown and clergy: the claim that the institutional power of the latter is predicated on their ideological services to the former’.66 The twinning of prince and priest on the one hand and of the Roman deities Castor and Pollux on the other was, however, first put into circulation by Marvell in The Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part (1673) where, by way of puncturing clerical pretensions, he shows Caligula assuming the role of priest: The Priest being ready to offer a Sacrifice at the Altar, he took upon himself, according to the unalterable dictates of Natural Reason, to exercise the Priesthood in person, and having vested himself as in the Power, so too in the Sacerdotal habit, he took up the Mallet, and feigning to knock the Beast down, instead thereof struck down the Officer who stood by with the Knife. Which should methinks be a sufficient caution unto Church-​men hereafter how they trust the Civil Magistrate with exercising the tools of the Priesthood. But this is nothing in respect of what follows. He commanded that the Statue of Jupiter Olympius among many others should be brought over from Greece, and their heads taken off to place his in the room of ’m. He seated himself often in the middle betwixt Castor and Pollux to be adored by the People.67

It is true that Caligula here insinuates himself between the twins rather than becoming one of them, and that the anecdote is offered as a warning to the clergy to beware of the royal supremacy rather than serving as a measure of their presumptuous equality with it. Moreover, Marvell’s phrasing derives from an anonymous 1672 translation of Suetonius that would have been readily available to Locke and others.68 Nevertheless, it is still more likely than not that Marvell’s prose supplied the rhetorical flourish with which the Letter finished. One reason for finding this assumption plausible, particularly in Locke’s case, is that he had all of Marvell’s prose works in his library, together with three of the replies to The Rehearsal Transpros’d (though not Butler’s).69 Locke had read and responded to Samuel Parker’s Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) on his own account before Marvell entered the fray.70 But this only makes it more likely that he read Marvell’s responses to Parker as they appeared. One indication that he did so can be found in an addition to the manuscript of his Essay concerning Toleration (1667). One of the most striking features of the Essay is the absence of anticlerical sentiment other than that directed against Catholic priests and the Jesuits. But this changed when Locke revisited the manuscript, probably in 1675. Now the clergy were condemned because they still pressed, as a duty on the magistrate, to punish and persecute those whom they disliked and declared against. And so when they excommunicated, their under officer, the magistrate, was to execute; and to reward princes for this

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From Republic to Restoration doing their drudgery, they have (whenever princes have been serviceable to their ends) been careful to preach up monarchy jure divino; for commonwealths have hitherto been less favourable to their power. But notwithstanding the jus divinum of monarchy, when any prince hath dared to dissent from their doctrines or forms, or been less apt to execute the decrees of the hierarchy, they have been the first and forwardest in giving check to his authority, and disturbance to his government.71

Locke can find no phrase more expressive of the undignified subordination of the prince to the clergyman than ‘doing their drudgery’. But this too may be an echo of Marvell, who, in The Rehearsal Transpros’d, had similarly pictured Parker (‘Bayes’) seeking to divest himself of the wearisome task of persecution: So that Mr. Bayes must either do it himself in person, or constitute the chief Magistrate to be his Deputy. But Princes do indeed understand themselves better most of ’m, and do neither think it so safe to intrust a Clergy-​man with their Authority, nor decent for themselves to do the drudgery of the Clergy.72

And to underline the point, Marvell summons up the completely implausible ‘Spectacle’ of Charles II busying himself in a torture-​chamber. The year 1675 may thus mark the moment when the Marvellian counter-​ narrative entered the mainstream of political discourse. By the time Locke opened his Two Treatises of Government with a recapitulation of it, it was already a cliché, pressed into service when rejecting the idea that we ‘must believe’ those who ‘tell us we are all born slaves’. But, he says, ‘By whom this Doctrine came at first to be broach’d and brought in fashion amongst us, and what sad Effects it gave rise to, I leave to Historians to relate or the Memory of those who were Contemporaries with Sibthorp and Manwering to recollect’.73

Notes 1 John Selden, Table-​Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden Esq; or His Sence of Various Matters of Weight and High Consequence Relating especially to Religion and State (London, 1689), p. 24, s.v. ‘Incendiaries’. 2 See Richard Tuck, ‘ “The Ancient Law of Freedom”: John Selden and the Civil War’, in Reactions to the English Civil War, ed. by John Morrill (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), pp. 137–​62. 3 Selden, Table-​Talk, p. 31, s.v. ‘Learning’. See Aristotle, Politics, 1327b. 4 See James Doelman, ‘ “A King of Thine Own Heart”:  The English Reception of King James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron’, The Seventeenth Century, 9.1 (1994), 1–​9. 5 James VI and I, The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, James (London, 1616), p. 160. See Kinch Hoekstra, who points out that ‘James I anticipated many of the themes of [Hobbes’s] Behemoth’: ‘A Lion in the House: Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations of Modern Political Thought, ed. by Annabel Brett and James Tully with Holly Hamilton-​Bleakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 191–​218 (p. 202, n. 57).

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians 6 James effectively subsumes the Roman republic under democracy. On Rome as an ‘extreme democracy’, see Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Democracy’, in Rethinking the Foundations, pp. 171–​90 (pp. 177–​83); but cf. Hoekstra, ‘A Lion in the House’, p. 195. 7 See Martin Dzelzainis, ‘The Ciceronian Theory of Tyrannicide from Buchanan to Milton’, in George Buchanan: Political Thought in Early Modern Britain and Europe, ed. by Caroline Erskine and Roger A. Mason, St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 173–​87. 8 Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 106, 107, 133, 141, 146, 148, 158. 9 Thomas Hobbes, Six Lessons to the Professors of the Mathematiques (London, 1656), p. 56. 10 Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31.1 (1983), 61–​85 (p. 67). 11 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Samuel Butler’s Milton’, Studies in Philology, 92 (1995), 482–​95. 12 See Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 191–​95, and Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 43–​44. 13 [Samuel Butler], The Transproser Rehears’d: Or the Fifth Act of Mr. Bayes’s Play (Oxford, 1673), p. 95 (Wing L1020). 14 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and Counter-​Revolution’, reprinted in his Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–​1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 145. 15 Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d (London, 1672), p. 302 (M879; Edinburgh University Library copy, Reel 1235.01); The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Annabel Patterson, Martin Dzelzainis, Nicholas von Maltzahn and Neil H.  Keeble, 2 vols (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), i, 191. 16 The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. by Andrew Clark, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), i, 479, 484–​85. See A. J. Hegarty, ‘Baylie, Richard (1585/​6?–​1667)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008) www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​65650 [accessed 22 January 2016]. 17 Thomas Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662), p. 93 (F2440). Discussing Laud in the earlier work, Fuller remarked –​less provocatively –​that ‘the matter, whereof China-​dishes are made, must lie some Ages in the earth before it is ripened: so great persons are not fit for an Historian’s use to write freely of them, till some years after their decease, when their memories can neither be marred with envy, nor mended with flattery’:  The Church-​History of Britain (London, 1655), sig. Mmmm1v/​ p. 90 (Book X) (F2416); and see John Spurr, ‘ “A special kindness for dead bishops”: The Church, History, and Testimony in Seventeenth-​Century Protestantism’, Huntington Library Quarterly [special issue on The Uses of Early Modern History] ed. by Paulina Kewes, 68.1 & 2 (2005), 313–​34 (p. 331). 18 See Robert Mayer, ‘The Rhetoric of Historical Truth:  Heylyn contra Fuller on The Church-​History of Britain’, Prose Studies, 20.3 (1997), 1–​20. 19 Fuller, History, p. 93. 20 See R.  A. Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford and the Remaking of the Protestant Establishment’, in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. IV: Seventeenth-​Century Oxford, ed. by Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 803–​62 (esp. pp. 804–​08, 818–​19, 820–​28, 840–​41). 21 See William Laud, A Summarie of Devotions (Oxford, 1667), facing title page (L600). There was also an inferior London edition (L600A) bearing only Sheldon’s imprimatur. 22 David Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths of those Noble, Reverend and Excellent Personages that Suffered by Death, Sequestration, Decimation, or otherwise, for the Protestant Religion (London, 1668), p. 595; see also p. 248 and pp. 256–​70 (‘A Character of Arch-​Bishop Laud’). 23 Beddard, ‘Restoration Oxford’, p. 853.

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From Republic to Restoration 24 See Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘The Restoration Bishops and the Royal Supremacy’, Church History, 68 (1999), 549–​80; Jacqueline Rose, Godly Kingship in Restoration England: The Politics of the Royal Supremacy, 1660–​1688 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 130–​37. 25 See Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Locke on Toleration’, in Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. by Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1990), pp. 153–​71 (pp. 155–​56). Although Tuck’s essay has been subjected to a stringent critique, it broke new ground intellectually; for criticisms, see Philip Milton, ‘Hobbes, Heresy, and Lord Arlington’, History of Political Thought, 14.4 (1993), 501–​46. 26 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 71; Prose Works, i, 79. 27 Jon Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear: The Anglican Attack on Hobbes in the later 1660s’, History of Political Thought, 34.3 (2013), 421–​58 (p. 458). 28 Thomas Hobbes, The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance. Clearly Stated and Debated between Dr. Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, and Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (London, 1656), pp. 1–​2 (‘The Occasion of the Controversie’). 29 See Hobbes and Bramhall on Liberty and Necessity, ed. by Vere Chappell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. xi. 30 See Parkin, ‘Baiting the Bear’, passim. 31 See Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or, The Long Parliament, ed. by Paul Seaward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 24–​29, 69. For the contrasting view that Hobbes’s ire was directed not against the Anglicans but the Presbyterians, and furthermore that Hobbes ‘defended Laud’, see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Behemoth: Church-​State Relations and Political Obligation’, in Hobbes’s Behemoth: Religion and Democracy, ed. by Tomaž Mastnak (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), pp. 93–​110 (p. 105). 32 See Hobbes, Behemoth, pp. 25–​26, 169–​74. 33 Ibid., pp. 201–​02. 34 Ibid., p. 143. 35 John Aubrey to John Locke, 11 February 1673, TNA, PRO 30/​24/​7/​493, quoted in Hobbes, Behemoth, p. 11. 36 ‘A Catalogue of the Works of Mr. Hobbes’ is appended to Thomas Hobbes, A Supplement to Mr. Hobbes his Works, Printed by Blaeu at Amsterdam, 1661 (London, 1675), sig. [C4r-​ v] (H2262), but is also found separately (H2216); see Justin Champion, ‘An Historical Narration Concerning Heresie:  Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Barlow and the Restoration debate over “Heresy” ’, in Heresy, Literature and Politics in Early Modern English Culture, ed. by David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 221–​53 (pp. 235–​36). 37 Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsall Transpros’d:  The Second Part (London, 1674), p.  139 (M883); Prose Works, i, 301–​02; Hobbes, Questions, p. 20. 38 See Jon Parkin, ‘Liberty Transpros’d: Andrew Marvell and Samuel Parker’, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. by Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp.  269–​89; Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell Transpos’d’, English, 33 (1984), 139–​45. 39 See now Martin Dzelzainis, ‘ “The second Edition, corrected”:  A Revised Printing History of Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672)’, Notes and Queries 63.1 (2016), 62–​66. 40 Leicestershire Record Office, Finch MSS, DG7, Box 4985, Bundle IX, p. 9/​2. See also Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Allan George Finch, Esq., 71st ser., 4 vols (1913–​65), ii, pp. 9–​10; Historical Manuscripts Commission, Appendix to Seventh Report, pp. 517b-​518a. 41 Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 286 (M879); Prose Works, i, 184. EEBO supplies several different sets of M879 images; for the changes made to page 286 in the forme, compare the uncensored state in the Edinburgh University Library copy (1235:01, at image 144) with the censored state in the Harvard University Library copy (283:06, at image 146).

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Marvell and the neo-Laudians 42 See Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics: 1626–​1628 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 43 Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus:  Or, the History of the Life and Death, of the Most Reverend and Renowned Prelate William by Divine Providence, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1668), p. 161, and see pp. 162–​65 for the Instructions (H1699); cf. Instructions Directed from the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie, Unto all the Bishops of this Kingdome, and Fit to be put in Execution, Agreeable to the Necessitie of the Time (London, 1626), STC9247. 44 Instructions, sig. [B1]r; see Cust, Forced Loan, pp. 49–​50, and Johann P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–​1640, 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999), pp. 119–​24. 45 Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, p. 122. 46 [Butler], Transproser, p. 39. 47 Ibid., pp. 56–​57. 48 Ibid., p. 147; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State. Weighty Matters in Law. Remarkable Proceedings in Five Parliaments. Beginning the Sixteenth year of King James, Anno 1618. And ending the Fifth Year of King Charls, Anno 1629 (London, 1659), p. 440 (R2316). Butler’s pagination matches this edition rather than the other one of 1659 (R2316A), and is followed here. 49 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 286 (italics in the original); Prose Works, i, 184. 50 There is some circularity in the argument: Marvell appropriates the work of his patron, the evidence for such patronage being the appropriation. But see Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow:  Pearson/​Longman, 2007), p.  362. See also Neil H.  Keeble, ‘Why Transprose The Rehearsal?’, in Marvell and Liberty, pp. 249–​68. 51 See Anthony Milton, ‘Laud, William (1573–​1645), archbishop of Canterbury’, ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​16112 [accessed 18 September 2015]. 52 See Marvell, Prose Works, i, 184. 53 For an instance of Marvell supplying, or acquiescing in, changes to a text, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Dutch in 1665’, in A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts, ed. by Edward Jones (Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2015), pp. 249–​65. 54 On the question of multiple authorship, see Plays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Writings associated with George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, ed. by Robert D. Hume and Harold Love, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), i, 334–​41. 55 [Butler], Transproser, pp. 60–​61. 56 Ibid., p. 62. 57 See Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, pp.  291–​93; Prose Works, i, 187–​88; cf. Rushworth, Historical Collections, pp.  423, 599, 603. The Yale editors suggest that Marvell was directly paraphrasing a text of Maynwaring’s two sermons before the King, printed by royal command as Religion and Allegiance (1627). But this is unlikely, even if there was a copy in the Earl of Anglesey’s library, to which Marvell would have had access (see Annabel Patterson and Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Earl of Anglesey: A Chapter in the History of Reading’, Historical Journal, 44 (2001), 703–​26). Not only do Marvell’s supposed paraphrases agree exactly with the text in Rushworth, but the latter supplies Pym’s summary of a third sermon by Maynwaring from which Marvell also quotes. 58 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 295; Prose Works, i, 188. 59 Ibid., p. 301; Prose Works, i, 191. 60 Marvell, Prose Works, i, 26. 61 See Paul Seaward, ‘Shaftesbury and the Royal Supremacy’, in Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–​1683, ed. by John Spurr (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 52–​76. 62 Two Speeches. I. The Earl of Shaftsbury’s Speech in the House of Lords the 20th. of October, 1674. II. The D. of Buckinghams Speech in the House of Lords the 16th. of November 1675 (‘Amsterdam’ [London?], 1675), p. 10 (S2907). There was a corrected edition not known

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From Republic to Restoration to Wing; see John Locke, An Essay Concerning Toleration: And Other Writings on Law and Politics, 1667–​1683, ed. by J. R. Milton and Philip Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2010), pp. 9, 92, 208. See the first article (‘Concerning the Regall Power’) of Constitutions and Canons Ecclesiasticall (London, 1640), sig. B4r-​v (STC10080): ‘The most High and Sacred order of Kings is of Divine right, being the ordinance of God himself ’. 63 See House of Lords Journals, 13:13; cf. Locke, An Essay, p. 375. 64 See the exhaustive discussion in Locke, An Essay, pp. 97–​118 (p. 118), and, more generally, J. R. Milton, ‘The Unscholastic Statesman: Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury’, in Shaftesbury, ed. by Spurr, pp. 153–​81. 65 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 208; Prose Works, i, 147; Locke, An Essay, p. 372. 66 Mark Goldie, ‘Priestcraft and the Birth of  Whiggism’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern  Britain, ed. by Nicholas T. Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 209–​31 (p. 225). 67 Marvell, The Rehearsall Transpros’d:  The Second Part, pp.  145–​46; Prose Works, i, 305–​06. 68 For the claim that Marvell was in any case responsible for the 1672 translation, see Annabel Patterson, ‘A Restoration Suetonius: A New Marvell Text?’, Modern Language Quarterly, 61.3 (2000), 463–​80. 69 See The Library of John Locke, ed. by John Harrison and Peter Laslett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), pp. 185–​86 (items 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936) and (for the replies) pp. 154 (1447), 203 (2199), 241 (2792). 70 See John Locke, Political Essays, ed. by Mark Goldie (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 211–​15; Locke, An Essay, ed. by Milton and Milton, pp. 322–​26. 71 Locke, Political Essays, ed. by Goldie, p.  234; cf. Locke, An Essay, ed. by Milton and Milton, p. 314. 72 Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, p. 131; Prose Works, i, 108. 73 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), p. 177 (I § 4, 5).

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Chapter 12

Choosing a captain back for Egypt: Milton and the Restoration Warren Chernaik

Introduction

J

ohn Milton viewed the prospect of the Restoration with dread. In The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, written in 1660 when the re-​establishment of monarchical government had become inevitable, he warned against ‘the precipice of destruction’ towards which ‘a misguided and abus’d multitude’ seemed to be rushing: Can the folly be paralleld, to adore and be slaves of a single person for doing that which it is ten thousand to one whether he can or will do, and we without him might do more easily, more effectually, more laudably our selves? Shall we never grow old enough to be wise? … Is it such an unspeakable joy to serve, such felicitie to bear a yoke?1

The republican Milton consistently characterised the rule of ‘a single person’ as ‘bondage’, using a characteristic rhetoric contrasting freedom and slavery. Critics disagree about the extent to which Milton’s early writings in poetry and prose express a nascent republicanism.2 Certainly, by 1649, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates and Eikonoklastes (tracts explicitly justifying tyrannicide) Milton is contemptuous of ‘the gaudy name of Majesty’ as inimical to the preservation of ‘Libertie’. To Milton, ‘exalting one person and his Linage’, as though ‘Kings breath’d not the same breath with other mortal men’, accompanied by claims ‘that we should yeild them subjection to our own ruin, or hold of them the right of our common safety, and our natural freedom by meer gift’, are by their very nature contrary to ‘the intent of God, whose ways are ever just and equal’.3 He maintained this stance in The Readie and Easie Way and other writings of 1658–​60 and in his writings after the Restoration. Milton uses the metaphor of ‘Egyptian bondage’ to characterise ‘servile minds’, the fear of freedom and its consequences, presenting the history

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From Republic to Restoration of the Jews in the Old Testament as providing cautionary parallels to the immediate situation of contemporary England.4 Near the end of the Defence of the English People (1651), as in The Readie and Easie Way of nine years later, he warns against the voluntary embracing of servitude, extinguishing the hopes aroused by an interval of freedom: All slavery indeed is a stain upon any freeborn man, but for you to wish to … return to slavery after your freedom had been won by God’s assistance and your own valor … would be not simply a shameful act, but an ungodly and criminal act! Your sin would equal the sin of those who were overcome with longing for their former captivity in Egypt and were at length destroyed by God in countless disasters of all sorts, thus paying to their divine deliverer the penalty for their slavish thoughts.5

Milton is referring here to the Jews in the wilderness who, defying their leader and promised ‘deliverer’ Moses, wished to return to Egypt, thinking that even as slaves they would enjoy greater comfort there.6 An angry God, he predicts, will punish such backsliding severely. A letter to Milton by Moses Wall in 1659 uses the same biblical analogy in criticising political leaders who, in seeking power, betray the principles they profess:  ‘when those being instated in power, shall betray this good Thing committed to them, and lead us back to egypt, and by that Force which we gave them, to win us Liberty, hold us fast in Chains’.7 In The Readie and Easie Way, Milton conflates two such biblical incidents, the flight from Egypt and the Babylonian captivity. Blinded by idolatry and fearing the uncertainties of freedom, the English people, like the Israelites before them, prefer ‘bondage with ease’ to ‘strenuous liberty’: ‘To put our necks again under kingship, as was made use of by the Jews to return back to Egypt and the worship of their idol queen, because they falsly imagind that they then livd in more plentie and prosperitie.’8 Achsah Guibbory brings out the ‘ominous’ implications of Milton’s argument as applied to the circumstances of 1660:  ‘Those who want Charles II to return and who think they will be more prosperous under monarchy are like those Jewish Israelites –​idolatrous, slavish, feminised, and materialistic. They will be cast off by God, no longer chosen, replaced by others’.9 When Milton deploys a similar comparison in the moving peroration of The Readie and Easie Way, it is with a hope, admittedly slim, that a disaster might be avoided: ‘Though they seem now chusing them a captain back for Egypt’, there may still be time for those faced with this momentous choice to ‘bethink themselves a little and consider whither they now are rushing’.10 The major works Milton wrote and published after 1660, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, are all coloured by ‘the experience of defeat’. In the invocation to Paradise Lost, Book VII, Milton speaks of 246

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Milton and the Restoration himself as ‘unchang’d … though fall’n on evil dayes … and evil tongues; /​In darkness, and with dangers compast round, /​And solitude’.11 These dangers were real, since Milton was arrested and threatened with death, at a time when many of his former associates, adherents of the Good Old Cause, were brutally executed and the corpses of Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw were dug up and desecrated.12 The horrific public spectacle of hanging and disembowelling, with the bodily parts of the regicides ‘throwne together like butchers meat brought from the shambles’, was intended as a public warning. Milton went into hiding for a time, fearing for his life, and his books ‘against the late king’ were burnt by the common hangman. Though his life was spared, he was imprisoned in the Tower for several months.13 The powerful lines in Samson Agonistes, describing how even those devoted to the service of God could be plunged in an instant from prosperity to degradation and humiliation evoke the fate of the regicides, and the grim prospects for former commonwealthsmen in Restoration England. What makes the pain especially hard to bear is the feeling of having been abandoned by God, who ‘throw’st them lower then thou didst exalt them high’, and so cast into a darkness from which there seems no escape: Oft leav’st them to the hostile sword Of Heathen and prophane, thir carkasses To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captiv’d: Or to the unjust tribunals, under change of times, And condemnation of the ingrateful multitude … Just or unjust, alike seem miserable, For oft alike, both come to evil end.14

Even during the 1640s and 1650s, a strain of pessimism runs through Milton’s writings, along with the hope, expressed memorably in Areopagitica, of revolutionary England as ‘a towardly and pregnant soile’, potentially ‘a Nation of Prophets, of Sages, and of Worthies’.15 At the beginning of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), Milton comments on the propensity of ‘most men’ to ‘base compliances’ with tyranny, out of self-​interest: ‘Being slaves within doors, no wonder that they strive so much to have the public State conformably govern’d to the inward vitious rule by which they govern themselves.’16 In a passage in the History of Britain, which might have been written any time between 1648 and 1660, Milton cites recent and ancient history as evidence that ‘Libertie hath a sharp and double edge fitt onelie to be handl’d by just and vertuous men’.17 In Paradise Lost, Books XI–​XII, and Samson Agonistes, Milton’s tone darkens markedly. The Archangel Michael’s grim narrative, presenting post-​ lapsarian history to the stunned Adam as a series of disasters, presents ‘true Libertie’ as ‘lost’ after the fall, in a world inexorably declining ‘from bad to 247

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From Republic to Restoration worse’. Tyranny now becomes the default mode of man as a political animal. Rather than sanctioning or permitting the overthrow of tyrants, God ‘in Judgement just’ punishes his ‘unworthie’ creatures by subjecting them to ‘violent Lords’, as he leaves them ‘to thir own polluted wayes’: ‘Tyrannie must be, /​Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse’.18 In Samson Agonistes, Milton’s protagonist struggles against despair, the feeling that he has been abandoned by God. As Sharon Achinstein, Blair Worden and others have shown, the poem has a specific Restoration historical context, in the situation of former commonwealthsmen and Dissenters, at a time of religious persecution and political unrest.19 Samson’s anguish comes in part from an overwhelming sense of disappointment, of great hopes crushed: Why was my breeding order’d and prescrib’d As of a person separate to God, Design’d for great exploits; if I must dye Betray’d, Captiv’d, and both my Eyes put out, Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze?20

In dramatising Samson’s journey out of despair, with its violent tragic conclusion, Milton raises a number of ethical and political questions: To what extent does one owe allegiance to an unjust regime? How binding are the commands of conscience? What are the limits and consequences of resistance? Here as elsewhere, Milton, through Samson, suggests a fear of freedom, an unwillingness to accept the responsibilities of ‘strenuous liberty’, as an explanation for why tyrants thrive: But what more oft in Nations grown corrupt, And by thir vices brought to servitude, Then to love Bondage more then Liberty, Bondage with ease then strenuous liberty.21

The underlying theological and ethical position of Samson Agonistes is essentially that of Paradise Lost, distinguishing itself from more orthodox Reformed theology by its emphasis on ‘strenuous liberty’, freedom of choice. In a providentially ordered universe, ruled by a demanding (and omniscient) God, each individual is ‘sufficient to have stood, though free to fall’.22 But if Samson Agonistes like Paradise Lost seeks to ‘assert Eternal Providence, /​And justifie the wayes of God to men’, the ways of God depicted in Milton’s tragedy are deeply problematical.23 In the poem’s most powerful passages, the dominant emotion is the sense of loss, a despair that Samson, for much of the poem, finds ‘hopeless  …  all remediless’.24 The successive confrontations with Dalila, Harapha and the Philistine Officer show Samson as combating this overwhelming feeling of inadequacy and failure. But the poem’s violent, blood-​soaked conclusion, with Samson 248

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Milton and the Restoration dying amid the mass slaughter of his enemies, wiping out the ‘choice nobility and flower’ of the Philistine nation (except for those fortunate enough not to be able to buy tickets into the arena), is unsettling.25 In some ways, it can be seen as a fantasy of revenge by those excluded from power, turning the tables on their oppressors.

Tyranny and ‘true liberty’

M

ichael’s admonition to Adam, pointing out the loss of ‘true Libertie’ as a result of his transgression, can be interpreted in a number of ways. Theologians differed over whether original sin, a ‘depravity which all human minds have in common’, ‘transmitted to posterity by our first parents’, brought about the extinction of pre-​lapsarian liberty. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton hedges his bets, speaking of ‘the loss or at least the extensive darkening of that right reason, whose function it was to discern the chief good … We have all committed sin in Adam, therefore we are born slaves’.26 After Adam inveighs against Nimrod as an ‘execrable Son so to aspire /​Above his Brethren’, Michael explains to him that ‘Tyrannie must be’ in the fallen world:     Yet know withall, Since thy original lapse, true Libertie Is lost, which always with right Reason dwells Twinn’d, and from her hath no dividual being: Reason in man obscur’d, or not obeyd, Immediately inordinate desires And upstart Passions catch the Government From Reason, and to servitude reduce Man till then free.27

Both Luther and Calvin held uncompromisingly that ‘man has no free will, but is a captive, servant and bondslave, either to the will of God, or to the will of Satan’, and that, as a consequence of the Fall, ‘the mind of man has been so completely estranged from God’s righteousness’ that ‘man has now been deprived of freedom of choice and bound over to miserable servitude’.28 The influential readings of C. S. Lewis and Stanley Fish both assume that ‘fallen man is hopelessly corrupt’, in effect turning Milton into a strict Calvinist: Adam and his descendants must be taught the bitter lesson of unswerving obedience. William Walker, writing in 2009, argues a similar line: servitude is a ‘permanent condition’ for postlapsarian man, who lives in ‘a state of bondage’, incapable any longer of acting ‘in accordance with reason’.29 Mary Ann Radzinowicz interprets this passage in more optimistic terms, arguing ‘that Adam’s freedom as well as his punishment 249

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From Republic to Restoration are inherited by all his sons’ and that the fall of Adam and Eve is extended into ‘a sequence of falls that, far from necessitating man’s fate, reaffirms religious and political liberty’.30 The lines that follow, suggesting some political consequences of the fall, tend to bear out Radzinowicz’s reading, and are in keeping with Milton’s assertion in De Doctrina that ‘some traces of the divine image still remain within us, which are not wholly extinguished’.31 Those who choose a captain back for Egypt, exercising their free choice to an ‘unworthie’ end, get the tyrant they deserve:     Therefore since hee permits Within himself unworthie Powers to reign Over free Reason, God in Judgement just Subjects him from without to violent Lords, Who oft as undeservedly enthrall His outward freedom; Tyrannie must be, Though to the Tyrant thereby no excuse.32

The lines suggest a repeated pattern: ‘oft’ (or in the next lines, ‘somtimes’, when entire ‘Nations will decline so low /​From vertue’) the descendants of Adam and Eve will be faced with a choice and may, ‘Authors to themselves’, choose wrongly and suffer the consequences. The loss of inward liberty, presented here as voluntary (‘since hee permits /​Within himself ’), precedes the loss of ‘outward freedom’ as the just punishment of a stern God. What can happen within the ‘Government’ of man, when ‘sensual Appetite’, a usurper, is allowed to rule over ‘sovran Reason’, can have its parallel in ‘Nations’.33 There are very few crumbs of comfort for Adam in Michael’s dispiriting account of postlapsarian history in Paradise Lost, XI and XII: ‘the whole Earth fill’d with violence, and all flesh /​Corrupting each thir way’: a world in which ‘Oppression, and Sword-​Law’ alternate with ‘luxurie and riot’ holding unchecked sway.34 These evils, as Michael presents them, are the result of erroneous choice: even ‘a sober Race of Men’ who sought ‘to worship God aright’  –​as Samson the Nazarite once did  –​can fall into the snare and ‘yield up all thir vertue, all ther fame /​Ignobly, to the traines and to the smiles’ of temptresses.35 The lessons that Adam learns in Books XI and XII are humbling and painful. Longing for comfort in a fallen world, Adam is repeatedly swatted down by his unrelenting interlocutor, rendered ‘comfortless, as when a Father mourns /​His Children, all in view destroyd at once’.36 In a series of powerful, unsettling tableaux, images of destruction and desolation predominate, dwarfing any offered hope of redemption.37 At one point, God is presented as ready to give up on creatures who seem incapable of learning from their experience: 250

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Milton and the Restoration Then will the latter, as the former World, Still tend from bad to worse, till God at last Wearied with their iniquities, withdraw His presence from among them, and avert His holy Eyes, resolving from thenceforth To leave them to their own polluted wayes.38

In any given age, one just man, a tiny, embattled remnant, may have the courage to stand out, in ‘a pattern of individual resistance to corrupt, sinful and violent societies’.39 But in Books XI and XII, as elsewhere, Milton regularly presents the warnings of prophets and heroes of faith as unheeded. If the only hope remaining in ‘a World devote to universal rack’ is for the rare survivor ‘to save himself and houshold’, this would leave little or no scope for the amelioration of present ills.40 Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, in their different ways, both concern themselves with the problems and temptations facing those who seek to serve God in a hostile, unjust society. The emphasis throughout Paradise Regained is on the humanity of Jesus, as he stands firm against the tempter. Though aware that he is ‘no Son of mortal man’, he cannot predict what ‘the mighty work’ to which he is called might entail, ‘How to begin, how to accomplish best /​His end of being on Earth, and mission high’.41 In keeping with Milton’s Arian theology, the Son in Paradise Regained does not share the Father’s omniscience: in refuting Satan’s arguments, he relies on the same capacities of reason as any ‘true warfaring Christian’. In some respects, as Achinstein says, Paradise Regained can serve as ‘a handbook for talking back to the ungodly’, particularly appropriate to ‘the Restoration context of religious persecution’.42 The sense of uncertainty about the future, ‘high hope’ mingled with fear and rising ‘doubt’, is conveyed movingly in the ‘troubl’d thoughts’ of Mary, who has experienced only ‘Afflictions’ and is puzzled by what is ‘meant’ by her son’s actions.43 The disciples, at the beginning of Book II, are equally troubled, thrown into ‘perplexity’ and doubt: Alas, from what high hope to what relapse Unlook’d for are we fall’n. … Now, now, for sure, deliverance is at hand; The Kingdom shall to Israel be restor’d: Thus we rejoyc’d, but soon our joy is turn’d Into perplexity and new amaze: For whither is he gone, what accident Hath rapt him from us?44

In the wilderness, Jesus, like his disciples, initially felt that his appointed task might be to become a heroic liberator, a second Judas Maccabeus, the 251

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From Republic to Restoration ‘great deliverer’ that Samson had once promised to be, freeing his oppressed people from the tyrant’s yoke. The prospect, for Jesus as for his disciples, is an attractive one, couched in language that combines republican fervour and apocalyptic hope:     Yet this not all To which my Spirit aspir’d; victorious deeds Flam’d in my heart, heroic acts, one while To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke, Then to subdue and quell o’re all the earth, Brute violence and proud Tyrannick power, Till truth were freed, and equity restor’d.45

Reza Aslan’s recent book Zealot (2013) presents Jesus in exactly this way, as a threat to Roman power, whose ‘messianic aspirations threatened the occupation of Palestine’ by Rome. The establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, in which ‘the powerful would be displaced by the powerless’, would mean ‘the destruction of the present order’, an imminent danger both to the Roman authorities and to the priestly hierarchy.46 To the disciples, it is the apparent dashing of such hopes, the fear of remaining in slavery, subjected to the ‘pow’r unjust’ of their Roman conquerors, that is most troubling. The words echo the lament of the Psalms, coupled with the hope that God would wreak vengeance upon the heathen and ‘break them with a rod of iron’:  ‘The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed.’47 ‘Now, now’, the disciples cry out, hoping that the prophesied ‘time is come’:    God of Israel, Send thy Messiah forth, the time is come, Behold the Kings of the Earth how they oppress Thy chosen, to what highth their pow’r unjust They have exalted, and behind them cast All fear of thee; arise and vindicate Thy Glory; free thy people from thir yoke.48

What is at issue, as John Coffey has argued, is whether such a long-​awaited moment is at hand, and whether the promise of deliverance would be fulfilled.49 In Samson Agonistes, after Samson’s battle of wits with the Philistine giant Harapha, the Chorus sets forth alternative paths for ‘the spirits of just men long opprest’. It is possible that they will find a ‘deliverer’, armed by God with ‘Heroic magnitude of mind’ to overthrow ‘Tyrannic power’ in ‘the mighty of the Earth’. ‘More oft’, however, in accordance with the will of God, they are assigned the lot of suffering, patience, endurance

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Milton and the Restoration under hardship as ‘the trial of thir fortitude’.50 As Milton puts it, in the voice of ‘patience’, in the sonnet on his blindness, ‘who best /​Bear his milde yoak, they serve him best … /​They also serve who only stand and waite’.51 Though in the invocation to Paradise Lost, Book IX, Milton speaks of ‘Patience and heroic Martyrdom’ as ‘better’ as a subject for poetry than ‘Warrs, hitherto the onely Argument /​Heroic deem’d’, there is no denigration of ‘heroic acts’ in defiance of tyrants and oppressors, in Samson Agonistes or in Books I  and II of Paradise Regained.52 When in Book III Satan reminds Jesus of the prophecy that ‘to a Kingdom thou art born, ordain’d /​To sit upon thy Father David’s Throne’, Jesus answers that ‘all things are best fulfill’d in their due time’ and that he must accept whatever lot has been assigned him:53 What if he hath decreed that I shall first Be try’d in humble state, and things adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence[?]‌54

An implication in such a passage, in the context of Restoration England as ‘an age of acute trials and uncertainty’, is that the just man will continue to suffer ‘contempts, and scorns’, and that any deliverance from oppression may be long delayed.55 When in Books III and IV, Satan dangles before Jesus the prospect of regaining ‘the Throne of David’ and bringing about ‘deliverance of thy brethren’ from ‘servitude’,56 it is one of a series of temptations, presented by Milton as glittering but shoddy. The implicit condition, revealed by an angry, defeated Satan at the end of the display, is that Jesus fall down and worship him. Jesus realises that ‘the Kingdoms of the world’57 are Satan’s domain, and rejects the gift as tainted. Satan’s offer of ‘David’s royal seat’58 is a central part of the temptation of the kingdoms, which takes up nearly half of the poem, beginning with Satan’s taunt: Great acts require great means of enterprise; Thou art unknown, unfriended, low of birth … Which way or from what hope dost thou aspire To greatness? Whence Authority deriv’st? What Followers, what Retinue canst thou gain[?]‌59

These trappings of monarchy –​‘sumptuous courts … the multiplying of a servile crew  …  bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court office’  –​are what Milton portrays as most objectionable about a threatened ‘returne to Kingship’ in The Readie and Easie Way.60 Jesus’s reply redefines monarchy, presented by Satan in wholly material terms, as a kingdom

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From Republic to Restoration within. These egalitarian lines allow for the possibility that there can be good kings, servants of the public, conscious of their responsibilities, but dismiss the visual emblems of royal power as ‘golden in show’.61 The only true kingship is rule over oneself. Milton had praised Cromwell in the Second Defence as one who by demonstrating his government over himself had proved his fitness to rule, and such qualities of self-​discipline were common to ‘every wise and vertuous man’.62 For therein stands the office of a King, His Honour, Vertue, Merit and chief Praise That for the Publick all this weight he bears. Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King –​ Which every wise and vertuous man attains; And who attains not, ill aspires to rule Cities of men, or headstrong Multitudes, Subject himself to Anarchy within, Or lawless passions in him which he serves.63

Satan then turns to glory, prowess in arms, holding up for emulation such great classical figures as Alexander, Scipio, Pompey and Julius Caesar, ‘whom now all the world admires’.64 Jesus’s reply is one of Milton’s strongest attacks on false notions of military glory, contrasting ‘the flourishing works of peace’ with the slaughterhouse of war.65 Milton is not simply saying, as in his sonnet to Cromwell, that ‘peace has her victories /​No less renownd than warr’.66 Here, as in Michael’s remarks to Adam in Paradise Lost, XI, Milton describes ‘great Conquerours’, praised by those who foolishly admire ‘Might onely’, as ‘destroyers rightlier call’d, and Plagues of men’.67 Milton’s sympathies in both passages plainly lie with the victims of conquest rather than the arrogant conquerors. The ‘just man’ living in humble circumstances is praiseworthy, where those who ‘swell with pride’, demanding to be worshipped as gods, are ‘men not worthy of fame’.68 They err who count it glorious to subdue By Conquest far and wide, to over-​run Large Countries, and in field great Battels win, Great Cities by assault: what do these Worthies, But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter, and enslave Peaceable Nations, neighbouring, or remote, Made Captive, yet deserving freedom more Than those thir Conquerours, who leave behind Nothing but ruin wheresoe’re they rove, And all the flourishing works of peace destroy.69

All the ‘cumbersome /​Luggage of war’, Jesus says in a later passage, is vain ostentation, and is a sign ‘of human weakness rather then of strength’.70 254

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Milton and the Restoration The temptation of direct political action, fulfilling prophecies that Jesus as Messiah would be the deliverer of his captive, suffering nation, now ‘reduc’t a Province under Roman yoke’, is harder to resist. As we have seen, the idea of a sacred ‘Duty to free /​Thy country from her Heathen servitude’ was one shared by Jesus and his disciples, and exiled or outlawed republicans such as Algernon Sidney, Edmund Ludlow and Sir Henry Vane looked forward to the imminent overthrow of the Stuart monarchy.71 In his answer to Satan, Jesus does not reject the ideal as false or chimerical, but makes two points. His initial response is that the overthrow of earthly tyrants at this time was not in accordance with the will of God. God has decreed for him and for others who dedicate themselves to the service of their divine master a period of suffering and trial. Later, when Satan takes him up to a mountain top and shows him a vision of how, faced with the power of the contending Roman and Parthian empires, he might come into his inheritance and gain ‘that which alone can truly reinstall thee /​In David’s royal seat, his true Successour’, Jesus’s response is that those he might save are unworthy.72 It is another version of ‘Tyranny must be’, another example of choosing a captain back for Egypt: As for those captive Tribes, themselves were they Who wrought their own captivity, fell off From God to worship Calves, the Deities Of Egypt, Baal next and Ashtaroth, And all the Idolatries of Heathen round … Should I of these the liberty regard, Who freed, as to their antient Patrimony, Unhumbl’d, unrepentant, unreform’d, Headlong would follow, and to thir Gods perhaps Of Bethel and of Dan? no, let them serve Thir enemies, who serve Idols with God.73

The history of the Jews in the Old Testament is one of recurrent backsliding, falling off from their professed principles to follow false gods and tawdry earthly values, abusing their gift of freedom. Serving the tyrant within, they succumb to earthly tyrants: ‘let them serve’.74 Samson Agonistes: resistance and revenge

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here the Jesus of Paradise Regained is a model of conduct, standing firm against temptation, Milton’s Samson is a deeply flawed figure, who is conscious of having abused his calling and, after succumbing to temptation, suffers severe punishment, for which he blames his own weakness. Throughout the poem, both he and his fellow Jews see him as a 255

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From Republic to Restoration potential ‘deliverer’ from the yoke of an unjust conqueror, who has been reduced to the ignominy of slavery, fallen to a state worse than that of a ‘beast’:    O glorious strength Put to the labour of a Beast, debas’t Lower then bondslave! Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver; Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke.75

As Guibbory says, he is both like and unlike his fellow Jews, a Hebrew prophet not fully accepted by the people he has tried to serve as divine warrior: ‘a Nazarite who has betrayed his vows, he is like biblical Israel –​ apostate, fallen, but also set apart’ in the sense of being chosen.76 From the outset, Samson recognises that he is entirely responsible for the terrible situation in which he finds himself, blinded and in chains. Free to choose and conscious of having been ‘design’d for great exploits’ in his earlier state, he has, in effect, enslaved himself: Nothing of all these evils hath befall’n me But justly; I my self have brought them on; Sole Author I, sole cause: if aught seem vile, As vile hath been my folly, who have profan’d The mystery of God giv’n me under pledge Of vow.77

‘Sole Author’ echoes the repentant Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, Book X: ‘On mee, mee onely, as the sourse and spring /​Of all corruption’; and ‘On me, sole cause to thee of all this woe, /​Mee mee onely just object of his ire’.78 For much of the poem, Samson’s awareness of his own responsibility simply serves to increase his suffering and sense of failure: Now blind, disheartn’d, sham’d, dishonour’d, quell’d, To what can I be useful, wherein serve My Nation, and the work from Heav’n impos’d?79

Once again, Milton presents the citizens of a country as proving themselves unworthy of freedom, having an opportunity for great accomplishments but throwing it away. In responding to the Philistine giant, Harapha, one of three enemies whose taunts serve to lift Samson out of his sense of helplessness and despair, Samson tells him that although ‘my Nation was subjected to your Lords’, the force of conquest can legitimately be met with equivalent force.80 In effect, Milton is denying the position of Hobbes and others that conquest implies the tacit consent of the conquered and that rebellion against those holding power is unjustified. 256

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Milton and the Restoration I was no private but a person rais’d With strength sufficient and command from Heav’n To free my Countrey; if their servile minds Me their Deliverer sent would not receive, But to thir Masters gave me up for nought, Th’unworthier they; whence to this day they serve. I was to do my part from Heav’n assign’d[.]‌81

The republican principles expressed here are identical with those in the two Defences, Tenure, and Eikonoklastes: resistance against an unjust ruler or conqueror is a sacred duty, and fidelity to God outweighs any earthly ties. In describing himself as not acting merely as a ‘private person’, but as motivated to resistance by an ‘extraordinary vocation’, being ‘raysed by God to be a Deliverer’, Samson echoes arguments justifying resistance to tyranny in Tenure and the First Defence.82 According to the Defence, ‘the heroic Samson’, when ‘his countrymen reproached him’ for rising against his Philistine masters, nevertheless, like the righteous tyrannicide Ehud, ‘thought it not impious but pious to kill those masters who were tyrants over his country, even though most of her citizens did not balk at slavery’.83 Earlier in the poem, after the Chorus says that ‘Israel still serves with all his Sons’, Samson answers that in spite of ‘those great acts which God had done /​Singly by me against their Conquerours’, the political leaders of Israel refused to assist him or even acknowledge the ‘deliverance offer’d’, but instead surrendered him to the Philistine authorities.84 The situation of Samson, his father Manoa and the Chorus of Danites, representatives of Samson’s ‘own Nation’ who seek to comfort him in his affliction, is that they live under the ‘civil power’ of the Philistine conquerors.85 Samson, in deciding whether or not he should attend the feast celebrating Dagon, as demanded by the Philistine Officer, makes a distinction between religious duties, as commanded by conscience, and ‘corporal servitude’:86 Not in thir Idol-​worship, but by labour Honest and lawful to deserve my food Of those who have me in thir civil power.87

In A Treatise of Civil Power, Milton argues that ‘the civil power hath neither right nor can do right by forcing religious things’, thus violating the ‘birthright of everie true believer, Christian libertie’. ‘God by his Secretary conscience’, he says elsewhere, presents commands that must be obeyed, even if they constitute ‘the meanest under-​service’.88 As Achinstein and others have said, issues addressed in Samson Agonistes, immediately relevant to those suffering persecution under the Restoration regime, were ‘how to live under oppressive conditions’ and, under such conditions, ‘how to maintain readiness to serve God’s command’.89 257

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From Republic to Restoration In the biblical Book of Judges, Samson’s betrayal by Dalila and his captivity, with his spectacular revenge on his enemies, comprise the final episode among several, all of which involve violence, where Samson’s ‘anger was kindled’, enabling him to perform ‘great slaughter’. In Judges, Samson does not, as in Milton’s poem, suffer agonies over his blindness, folly and humiliation, but immediately after his imprisonment we are told that ‘the hair on his head began to grow again’, as the Philistines rejoice that their enemy is in their power.90 The Samson of Judges, ‘who leaves a trail of blood wherever he goes’, according to David Grossman in Lion’s Honey: The Myth of Samson, far from being an independent agent, is used by the deity as an instrument of destruction, ‘planted in the world and operated as a lethal weapon of divine will’. ‘Samson the hero,’ Grossman argues, can be seen from two complementary perspectives. On the one hand, the biblical figure serves as a model for those willing ‘to apply force without any restraint or moral inhibitions’. But the biblical Samson can also be seen as a tragic figure, doomed by his special gifts –​ ‘a lonely man, forever tortured, enslaved by a God who has chosen him for a demanding mission’, with no allowance for human frailties.91 Milton’s Samson, in contrast, is presented throughout the poem as a free moral agent. To Manoa and the Chorus, he accepts his responsibility for his downfall and his present wretched state, as one who ‘like a foolish Pilot have shipwrack’t /​My Vessel trusted to me from above’. At a key moment in the drama, Samson maintains that in going along with the Philistine messenger to the ‘Idolatrous Rites’ of the Philistines, he is acting freely and not under compulsion.92 Like the Lady in Milton’s Ludlow Masque, Samson, responding to the troubled remarks of the Chorus, announces his adherence to ‘the freedom’ of the ‘minde’, even in the most difficult circumstances, asserting the sanctity of conscience, unmoved by the mere ‘corporal’ power of outward force.93 Commands are no constraints. If I obey them, I do it freely; venturing to displease God for the fear of Man, and Man prefer, Set God behind: which in his jealousie Shall never, unrepented, find forgiveness.94

The situation here is complex. As a Jew and a Nazarite, bound to the service of God by strict vows, Samson is forbidden from the pollution of participating in the ‘unclean, prophane’ ceremonies of the Philistines  –​ like Shylock, who says, when invited to dinner by a Christian Venetian, ‘I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you’.95 To do so, Samson says, would be ‘prostituting holy things to Idols’, doing ‘honour to their Dagon’ rather than to God, and therefore he initially refuses to go. 258

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Milton and the Restoration But ‘something extraordinary’ in his thoughts, some unspecified ‘rouzing motions’ within him, dispose him to believe that God will allow him, on this special occasion, to ‘dispense with’ the normal rules forbidding such behaviour, and not in doing so ‘dishonour /​Our Law, or stain my vow of Nazarite’.96 One reason that Samson Agonistes has given rise to endless debate among critics is that at the central crisis of the poem we are not given access to Samson’s thoughts. The ‘rouzing motions’ that Samson tells the Chorus he feels can be interpreted in different ways, as can the poem’s final moments, with the death of Samson among the slaughtered Philistines. Several critics have seen Samson’s gradual recovery from despair in theological terms, as evidence of regeneration, with Samson as a ‘hero of faith’, whose actions are directed by the hand of Providence. Mary Ann Radzinowicz finds the tragic action to be ‘exemplary of the acquisition of true knowledge’, in which Samson overcomes his human weaknesses. In this view, the encounters with Dalila, Harapha and the Philistine Officer are what Milton describes in De Doctrina as ‘good temptations’, sent by God with the end that men ‘may become wiser, and others may be instructed’: Good temptations are those which God uses to tempt even righteous men, in order to prove them. He does this … either to exercise or demonstrate their faith or patience, as in the case of Abraham or Job, or to lessen their self-​confidence and prove them guilty of weakness.97

Yet the pattern of the successive confrontations does not, in homiletic fashion, present ‘the progressive steps in repentance’, leading to ‘the spiritual rebirth’ of the exemplary hero.98 If there is a change in Samson in the course of the poem, it is not from a state of sin to sainthood, or from blindness to insight, but a gradual recovery from despair, the sense of being abandoned by God. Samson’s response to the taunts of Harapha not only acknowledges the justice of his punishment, but, for virtually the first time in the poem, envisages a God who may at last be merciful to his fallible creatures.     These evils I deserve and more, Acknowledge them from God inflicted on me Justly, yet despair not of his final pardon Whose ear is ever open; and his eye Conscious to readmit the suppliant[.]‌99

This passage, as Radzinowicz has noted, reflects Milton’s distinctive theology, as expressed in De Doctrina Christiana, in its treatment of free will, conditional election, and the ‘final pardon’ available through God’s grace. It is one of the few moments in which the deity of Samson Agonistes appears to be a God of love, rather than relentlessly punishing disobedient sinners with ‘wrath divine’.100 259

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From Republic to Restoration A number of readers, including Irene Samuel and Joseph Wittreich, have found the closing moments of the poem deeply disturbing and problematical, not at all conducive to ‘calm of mind’.101 The sight of mass slaughter is not normally consoling. One problem with the readings of the poem which confer a kind of sainthood on Samson as ‘faithful Champion’ is that the poem is so firmly grounded in its Old Testament setting, with a fierce and jealous God demanding absolute loyalty. The final lines of the Chorus, beginning with the words ‘All is best’, are an attempt at closure, drawing a providential lesson from the events portrayed in the play’s action:  the storms of passion give way to a healthy, serene calmness, ‘all passion spent’.102 These lines suggest a cleansing purgation as response to the tragic action, in keeping with the version of Aristotelian theory set forth in Milton’s Preface, in which the tragic emotions of pity and fear are seen as unhealthy and need to be brought under control by a dramatist who acts as a kind of physician: tragedy has the power ‘to purge the mind’ of potentially disturbing passions, ‘that is to temper or reduce them to just measure’.103 Yet this curative, homeopathic model does not do justice to the complex tragic experience or to the extraordinary violence of the play’s denouement. One thing that may complicate responses to the blood-​soaked ending, with Samson slain in the midst of his enemies, is that the tragic denouement fails to bring about the promised liberation. Samson may have felt himself to have ‘strength sufficient, and command from Heav’n /​To free my Countrey’, and the Chorus may claim that in his ‘dearly bought revenge’ he has ‘fulfill’d /​ The work for which thou wast foretold /​To Israel’.104 Manoa at the end of the poem attempts to present ‘a death so noble’ in wholly positive terms as a fitting end to ‘a life Heroic’, worthy to serve as a model to future ‘valiant youth’ paying visits to his monument.105 But to the Messenger, staggering under the weight of the news he brings, Samson’s climactic act of violence is a ‘horrid spectacle’, pursuing him in his imagination even after he has left ‘the place of horror’, and powerful enough to evoke the tragic emotions of pity and fear.106 As with the Messenger scenes in such Greek tragedies as Hippolytus and Heracles, a central moment in the action, both unexpected and inevitable, is narrated by a horrified observer, tasked with bringing the news back and reluctant to do so. The closest equivalents to the tragic denouement of Samson Agonistes in Greek tragedy, Milton’s acknowledged model in his play, evoke the tragic emotions in response to something beyond human comprehension, rather than any feelings of exultation or consolation. Manoa’s reaction to the tragic events is understandable for a father trying to come to terms with his son’s death, but it falls short of the full tragic response. Samson is a highly equivocal hero, a warrior whose deeds are counted in the number of ‘slaughter’d foes’, both early and late in his blood-​stained 260

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Milton and the Restoration career.107 In Samson Agonistes, as Michael Lieb has argued, ‘deity is portrayed in its most archaic and terrifying form’. In this ‘work of harsh and uncompromising violence’, Samson acts as embodiment of an implacable ‘God of Dread’, who demands that he be worshipped ‘with trembling’, and is merciless towards those who would deny or resist his awesome power.108 The fierce tribal deity of Samson Agonistes, victorious over his rival deity Dagon, can welcome the slaughter of multitudes, leaving a legacy of ‘years of mourning, /​And lamentation’ to the stunned survivors.109 This is an Old Testament deity, ruling by fear, in the kind of ‘servile discipline’ Milton disavows in contrasting the Mosaic Law and Gospel in De Doctrina Christiana  –​ a deity who, through Moses, can say of those who fail ‘to observe and do all his commandments’: The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee, until he have consumed thee from off the land, whither thou goest to possess it … The Lord shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed … And thy carcase shall be meat unto all the fowls of the air, and unto the beasts of the earth.110

The problematical aspects of the play’s violent conclusion have been brought out in John Carey’s polemical essay, written after 9/​11, where he compares Milton’s Samson to a suicide bomber, who justifies his actions by the conviction that ‘his massacre is an expression of God’s will’.111 None of the many responses to Carey, often indignant, satisfactorily answers Carey’s objections to readings of the poem that insist ‘that we have no alternative but to consider Samson’s massacre “virtuous” and “praiseworthy”, provided he believes he has divine sanction’. Simply on the basis of ‘rouzing motions’, which cannot be authenticated (since, as Carey says, Milton ‘hides Samson’s thoughts’ at this moment in the play), there is, according to Carey, no way of distinguishing between Samson’s motivation in slaughtering the Philistines and those of any jihadi intent on martyrdom in pursuit of his cause –​or that of Dalila, who was impelled to rid her fellow Philistines of a dangerous enemy.112 Samson’s God is presented by Milton as the true God, and Samson’s victory over the Philistines as a manifestation of God’s Providence, entailing the sudden overthrow of the mighty of the earth and the punishment of tyrannical oppressors. Prophecies that ‘a day of vengeance is coming’ when God’s ‘indignation and fury’ will break out upon the ungodly and ‘utterly consume’ his enemies were, as Loewenstein has shown, common currency among radical dissenters living under a hostile, persecuting Restoration regime.113 But the ending of Samson Agonistes can be unsettling to twenty-​first-​century readers, who have lived through many instances of demonising the Other in order to justify violence, either by states or by individuals claiming divine sanction. 261

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From Republic to Restoration Notes 1 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols, ed. by Don M.  Wolfe and others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–​82), vii, 448, 462. A version of this chapter has been published as Chapter 8 of my book Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 2 See Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘How Radical Was the Young Milton?’ in Milton and Heresy, ed. by Stephen Dobranski and John Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 49–​72; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 109–​39. For a more sceptical view, see Thomas N. Corns, ‘Milton before “Lycidas” ’, in Milton and the Forms of Liberty, ed. by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: Brewer, 2002), pp. 23–​36; and ‘Milton and the characteristics of a free commonwealth’, in Milton and Republicanism, ed. by David Armitage, Armand Himy and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 25–​42. 3 Milton, Eikonoklastes in Complete Prose Works, iii, 338, 485–​86. 4 Samson Agonistes, 1213, in John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. by Stella P. Revard (Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2009). 5 Milton, First Defence in Complete Prose Works, iv, 1.532. 6 Numbers 14. 1–​4. 7 Moses Wall, letter to Milton, 26 May 1659, Complete Prose Works, vii, 511. For other instances of the metaphor of Egyptian bondage by Milton’s contemporaries, see Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the English Jeremiad’, in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. by David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 211–​25; and my ‘Biblical Republicanism’, Prose Studies, 23 (2000), 147–​60. 8 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 271; Milton, Readie and Easie Way in Complete Prose Works, vii, 462. 9 Achsah Guibbory, Christian Identity, Jews, and Israel in Seventeenth-​Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 253–​55. 10 Milton, Complete Prose Works, vii, 463. 11 Paradise Lost, vii. 24–​28, in John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. by Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). 12 See Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Samson Agonistes and the Regicides’, in Historicizing Milton:  Spectacle, Power and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens:  University of Georgia Press, 1994), pp. 41–​66; and Blair Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, in Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration, ed. by Gerald MacLean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 111–​36. 13 Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, pp. 42–​57; Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 398–​404. 14 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 689, 692–​96, 703–​04. In these lines, God is addressed as ‘thou’. See the discussion of these lines in Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes and the Restoration’, pp. 122–​25; and Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, pp. 56–​57. 15 Milton, Complete Prose Works, ii, 554. 16 Ibid., iii, 190–​92. 17 Ibid., v, 449. On the probable date of the ‘Digression’ in the History of Britain, see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s History of Britain (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 20–​24, 31–​39; and Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 386–​98, 410–​26. 18 Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 83–​84, 90–​96, 106, 110. 19 See Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 130–​33, 138–​44; Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, pp. 112–​28; and Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘England’s Case: Contexts of the

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Milton and the Restoration 1671 Poems’, in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. by Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 571–​88 (pp. 572–​76, 586–​88). 20 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 30–​34. 21 Ibid., 268–​71. 22 Milton, Paradise Lost, iii. 99. For a fuller discussion of Milton’s distinctive theological position, see Chernaik, Milton and the Burden of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 23 Milton, Paradise Lost, i. 25–​6. 24 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 648. 25 Ibid., 1646–​59. 26 Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, i. xi, in Complete Prose Works, vi, 389; xii, in Complete Prose Works, vi, 395. 27 Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 64–​65, 82–​90. 28 Luther’s Doctrine of Free Will and Calvin’s Institutes, quoted in Maurice Kelley’s introduction to De Doctrina Christiana in Complete Prose Works, vi, 77; on the doctrine of original sin and total depravity, see also C.  A. Patrides, Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966), pp. 97–​102; and Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor (Chapel Hill, NC:  University of North Carolina Press, 1948), pp. 247–​52. 29 Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin, 2nd edn (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 38–​45; C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 66–​ 72; William Walker, Paradise Lost and Republican Tradition from Aristotle to Machiavelli (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2009), p. 60. According to Lewis, ‘Milton’s version of the Fall story is substantially that of St Augustine, which is that of the Church as a whole’ (p. 66). 30 Mary Ann Radzinowicz, ‘The Politics of Paradise Lost’, in The Politics of Discourse, ed. by Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 204–​29 (pp. 217–​18). For a similar view of renewal of ‘lapsed powers’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, iii. 176) through God’s grace, allowing ‘the possibilities of contingent freedom’, see Benjamin Myers, ‘Prevenient Grace and Conversion in Paradise Lost’, Milton Quarterly, 40 (2006), 20–​36. 31 Milton, Complete Prose Works, vi, 396. 32 Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 90–​96. 33 Ibid., iii. 122; xii. 97–​101; ix. 1127–​31. 34 Ibid., xi. 672, 715, 888–​89. 35 Ibid., xi. 578, 621–​24. 36 Ibid., xi. 760–​61. 37 On the possible conflict in Books xi and xii between ideas of history as tragic and as redemptive, see David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 92–​101, 118–​21; and Louis Martz, The Paradise Within (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), pp. 150–​53. 38 Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 105–​10. 39 On the ‘one just man’ in Paradise Lost, xi and xii, see Thomas N. Corns, Regaining Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1994), pp. 86–​93; and Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History, pp. 101–​07. 40 Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 820–​21. 41 Milton, Paradise Regained, i. 186, 234; ii. 113–​14, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. by Revard. 42 Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England, pp.  131–​33. On Arianism in Paradise Regained, see Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic (London:  Methuen, 1966), pp. 134–​48. 43 Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 11, 30, 65, 92, 99. 44 Ibid., ii. 30–​31, 35–​40. 45 Ibid., i. 214–​20.

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From Republic to Restoration 46 Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Westbourne Press, 2013), pp. 79, 119. Aslan’s revisionist study, which compares Jesus and his disciples with other would-​be Messiahs and opponents of Roman power at the time, was a bestseller in the United States. 47 Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 45; Psalms, 2: 2, 9. This Psalm is often interpreted as a Messianic prophecy. 48 Ibid., ii. 42–​48. 49 John Coffey, ‘Pacifist, Quietist, or Patient Militant? John Milton and the Restoration’, Milton Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 158–​63. On the concept of ‘waiting for God’, not knowing when the ‘due time’ will arrive, see David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 262–​65; and Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, pp. 137–​40. 50 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1269–​75, 1279, 1287–​88. 51 Sonnet 19, ll. 8, 10–​11, 14. 52 Milton, Paradise Lost, ix. 28–​32. 53 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 152–​53, 182. 54 Ibid., iii. 188–​91. 55 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, p. 268; on militant action and patient suffering as ‘alternative models of radical sainthood’, see pp. 292–​95, and Coffey, ‘Pacifist, Quietist, or Patient Militant’, pp. 169–​71. 56 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 374, 381–​83. 57 Ibid., iv. 182. 58 Ibid., iii. 373. 59 Ibid., ii. 412–​13. 417–​19. 60 Milton, Complete Prose Works, vii, 423, 425. 61 Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 458. 62 Milton, Second Defence in Complete Prose Works, iv, 1.667–​68; Paradise Regained, ii. 468. 63 Milton, Paradise Regained, ii. 463–​72. See the discussion of this passage as a ‘critique of the values and practices of secular monarchies’ in Lewalski, Life of Milton, pp. 416–​19. 64 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 39. 65 Ibid., iii. 80. 66 Sonnet 16, ll. 10–​11. 67 Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 689–​97. 68 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 62, 70, 81. 69 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 71–​80. Lewalski sees the influence of stoicism here (Milton’s Brief Epic, pp. 234–​41), and Loewenstein and others find parallels in the religious and political beliefs of Quakers like Milton’s friend Thomas Ellwood (Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, pp. 251–​59). 70 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 387, 400–​02. 71 Ibid., iii. 158, 175–​76. On the unstinting opposition to the post-​Restoration regime by the republicans Ludlow, Sidney, and Vane, see Worden, ‘Milton, Samson Agonistes, and the Restoration’, pp.  112–​26; and Coffey, ‘Pacifist, Quietist, or Patient Militant’, pp. 150–​55. 72 Milton, Paradise Regained, iii. 372–​73. 73 Ibid., iii. 414–​18, 427–​32. 74 On ‘the relation between the English and biblical Israel’ in Paradise Regained, see Guibbory, Christian Identity, pp. 276–​82. 75 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 36–​42. 76 Guibbory, Christian Identity, p.  285. On the Jews as ‘one peculiar Nation’ selected by God ‘from all the rest’, who nevertheless frequently fell into apostacy, see Milton, Paradise Lost, xii. 111–​13. 77 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 32, 374–​79.

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78 Milton, Paradise Lost, x. 832–​33, 935–​36 79 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 563–​65. 80 Ibid., 1205–​07. 81 Ibid., 1211–​17. 82 See R.  W. Serjeantson, ‘Samson Agonistes and “single rebellion” ’, Oxford Handbook, pp. 613–​31. According to Serjeantson, Reformed commentaries on the Book of Judges regularly make a similar distinction between ‘a private person’ and one acting under a ‘command by God’: ‘by all the accepted canons of good Protestant political theory, his actions are just’ (pp. 625–​27). 83 Milton, Complete Prose Works, iv, i. 401–​2. Tobias Gregory, in ‘The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes’, Studies in English Literature, 50 (2010), 175–​203 (pp. 186–​87), points out how this passage uses the figure of Samson ‘to evoke heroic precedents for the regicide’, countering the arguments of Salmasius. 84 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 240–​46, 259–​61. 85 Ibid., 218, 1367. 86 Ibid., 1336. 87 Ibid., 1365–​67. 88 Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power in Complete Prose Works, vii, 262; Milton, The Reason of Church Government in Complete Prose Works, i, 822. 89 Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England, p.  152. See also Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, pp. 269–​76; and Knoppers, ‘England’s Case’, pp. 586–​88. 90 Judges 14:  19, 15:  8, 16:  22–​23. See the discussion of the Biblical Samson in David Grossman, Lion’s Honey:  The Myth of Samson, trans. by Stuart Schoffman (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006). This paragraph and parts of the discussion of Samson Agonistes that follows are adapted from my essay ‘Tragic Freedom in Samson Agonistes’, in The European Legacy, 17 (April 2012), 197–​211. 91 Grossman, Lion’s Honey, pp. 66, 77–​8, 124. On the Biblical Samson as embodiment of ‘a blind, uncontrolled force, leaving a terrible swath of destruction behind, finally consuming itself together with what stands in its way’, see Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 95. 92 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 198–​99, 1378. 93 A Maske, 662–​64, in Complete Shorter Poems, ed. by Revard: ‘Thou canst not touch the freedom of my minde /​With all thy charms, although this corporal rinde /​Thou haste immanacl’d, while Heavn’n sees good’. 94 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1372–​76. 95 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, i. 3. 32–​33; Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1362 96 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1358–​69, 1377, 1381–​86. 97 Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, i. viii; Complete Prose Works, vi, 338; Mary Ann Radzinowicz, Toward ‘Samson Agonistes’: The Growth of Milton’s Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 104–​8, 230–​37. Other critics who see Samson’s ‘spiritual rebirth’ as enacted in the poem include John M. Steadman, ‘ “Faithful Champion”: The Theological Basis of Milton’s Hero of Faith’, Anglia, 77 (1959), 12–​28; and Ann Gossman, ‘Milton’s Samson as the Tragic Hero Purified by Trial’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 61 (1962), 528–​41. 98 Steadman, ‘Faithful Champion’, p. 13. 99 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1169–​73. 100 Radzinowicz, Toward ‘Samson Agonistes’, pp. 335, 339–​47; Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1683. 101 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1758. See Irene Samuel, ‘Samson Agonistes as Tragedy’, in Calm of Mind, ed. by Joseph Wittreich (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Press, 1971), pp. 235–​ 57; and Joseph Wittreich, Interpreting ‘Samson Agonistes’ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 165–​66, 221–​22. 102 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1745, 1755–​58: ‘His servants he with new acquist /​Of true experience from this great event /​With peace and consolation hath dismist /​And calm of mind all passion spent’.

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From Republic to Restoration 103 Preface, ‘Of that sort of Dramatic Poem which is call’d Tragedy’, Complete Shorter Poems, p. 461. On the medical analogy in Milton’s interpretation of catharsis, see John M. Steadman, ‘ “Passions Well Imitated”: Rhetoric and Poetics in the Preface to Samson Agonistes’, in Calm of Mind, pp. 175–​207. 104 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1212–​13, 1660–​63. 105 Ibid., 1724, 1711, 1738–​40. 106 Ibid., 1542–​44,1550. On the ‘limited vision’ of Manoa and the Chorus, see Irene Samuel, ‘Samson Agonistes as Tragedy’, pp. 250–​53; and Derek Wood, Exiled from Light: Divine Law, Morality, and Violence in Milton’s Samson Agonistes (Toronto:  University of Toronto Press, 2001), pp. 52–​59. 107 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1667. 108 Michael Lieb, ‘ “Our living dread”: The God of Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies, 33 (1997), 3–​25 (pp. 4–​5, 10, 20). Cf. Regina Schwartz, ‘Samson Agonistes: the Force of Justice and the Violence of Idolatry’, Oxford Handbook, pp. 632–​48; and, on violence and the construction of the Other, Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 5, 19–​20. 109 Milton, Samson Agonistes, 1712–​13. 110 Deuteronomy, 28: 21, 24, 26. For the contrast of ‘an elementary, childish and servile discipline’ under the Old Testament, which, Milton argues in De Doctrina Christiana, has been abolished by the coming of Christ and the promulgation of the Gospel, supplanted by a new ‘Covenant of Grace … written in the hearts of believers’, see De Doctrina Christiana, i. xxvi and xxviii, Complete Prose Works, vi, 517, 521; and A Treatise of Civil Power in Complete Prose Works, vii, 259. 111 John Carey, ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2002, pp. 15–​16. 112 Carey, ‘A Work in Praise of Terrorism?’, pp.  15–​16. Carey is attacking Stanley Fish’s claim that Samson’s acts are ‘praiseworthy’ because he believes he is submitting to the divine will: see Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 426–​28. For responses to Carey, see, e.g., Feisal Mohamed, ‘Confronting Religious Violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, PMLA, 120 (2005), 327–​34; and essays by Loewenstein, Lieb, and Fish in Milton in the Age of Fish: Essays on Authorship, Text and Terrorism, ed. by Michael Lieb and Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2006), pp. 203–​64. 113 Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, pp. 280–​91.

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Chapter 13

The French connection: luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II Laura L. Knoppers

W

hen, writing in 1660, John Milton made a frantic, last-​minute attempt to stave off the seemingly inevitable return of kingship to England, he contrasted the virtues of a commonwealth, ‘wherein they who are greatest are perpetual servants and drudges to the public at thir own cost and charges’, with a king who ‘must be adored like a demigod, with a dissolute and haughty court about him, of vast expense and luxury’.1 If attacks on luxury had marked republican defences of liberty throughout the English Republic, in works by Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington, and in Milton’s own earlier prose, Milton imagined a king returning in the manner of the absolutist Louis XIV, ‘to set a pompous face upon the superficial actings of state, to pageant himself up and down in progress among the perpetual bowings and cringing of an abject people, on either side deifying and adoring him for nothing done that can deserve it’.2 Pointing directly to the ‘French court, where enticements and preferments daily draw away and pervert the Protestant nobility’, Milton envisions, with the return of the king, the ‘multiplying of a servile crew, not of servants only, but of nobility and gentry, bred up then to the hopes not of public, but of court offices, to be stewards, chamberlains, ushers, grooms, even of the close stool’.3 The European and, in particular, French connection to which Milton points (however negatively) gives a new perspective on the restored court of Charles II. That luxury –​sexual licentiousness as well as material excess –​ did indeed return with the court of ‘the merry monarch’ is notorious. But such luxury is often viewed as a reaction to Puritanism or attributed to the personality and moral laxness of the King. In a European context, the luxury of Restoration court culture can be recognised as a conscious mode of representing monarchical power. Given that Charles II spent much of his exile in France in the orbit of the splendid court of Louis XIV, the culture of the restored court was shaped not only by what had happened 267

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From Republic to Restoration in republican England, but what was happening in Grand Siècle France. When the English prince and heir was sent on his travels, he learned a thing or two that had not been anticipated –​or desired –​by his opponents. And that journey (as we shall see) also complicated things for the royalists, who, by taking up the critique of luxury in the 1660s and 1670s, end up themselves echoing earlier republican themes. As scholars have become increasingly aware of the importance of studying the politics of cultural forms, placing such analysis alongside more traditional studies of monarchs and ministers, parliament and elections, faction, parties and popular movements, new scrutiny has been brought to the arts, architecture, music and literature associated with the court of Charles II.4 These important studies have shown a new seriousness and aesthetic merit in court culture. Less explored, however, is the extent to which court culture and particularly the mode of luxury, modelled itself upon the French, although the political ties with France are well known. Portraiture, in particular, shows us how the restored court imagined itself –​and how it reconstructed its power. An examination of links between French portraiture of the age of Louis XIV and of the court of Charles II will help us to explore the representational mode of luxury by which the court strove to remake itself and to see new complexities in the broader issue of change versus continuity from Republic to Restoration. If the blind Milton had had access to the portraiture of Charles II, he might have thought that his worst fears had been fulfilled. A full-​length seated portrait of Charles II in ermine and scarlet (see Figure 13.1), executed by Henri Gascar [Gascard], presents the King in full baroque splendour. Charles wears a dark, full-​bottomed wig, lace cravat and coronation robes of scarlet and ermine, whose sumptuousness is highlighted by careful attention to light, texture and folds. A figure of grace as well as majesty, Charles shows a single shapely silk-​stockinged leg and a foot with a square-​toed, high-​heeled shoe tied with a lace ribbon. The scarlet throne-​like chair on which Charles sits, the crown and orb atop a scarlet-​and-​gold cushioned gilt stool to the lower left, and the richly embroidered gold drapery in the upper left background, frame the diagonal figure of the King, accentuating his splendour and majesty. If Charles is not actually pageanting himself up and down, as Milton had feared, the portrait does include a half dozen attendants, wearing flat-​brimmed, black velvet Tudor hats, and gold-​embroidered scarlet doublets and breeches, who seem ready to compete for service of the kind that Milton had so scorned. Luxurious fabrics, sumptuous colours of gold and scarlet, royal ermine, and the regalia: such material signs of majesty show vividly that the restored Charles II is no humble servant of the Commonwealth but a Renaissance monarch with all the baroque trappings of Continental, and specifically French, monarchy. 268

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Figure 13.1  Henri Gascar, Charles II at Court.

The extent of the French connection here is clear from examining a characteristic (albeit later) full-​length, frontal portrait of Louis XIV (see Figure  13.2) from the French School. The viewer looks up at the figure of the seated King, who is on a dais, and hence made to seem taller and more imposing. His return gaze is unsmiling, lofty, imperious. The resemblances between the two portraits in composition, subject matter, pose, style and treatment are striking and significant. The French monarch is dressed in a full black peri-​wig, intricate lace cravat and cuffs, heavy gold chain and majestic coronation robes of blue-​velvet brocade ornamented with the royal gold fleur-​de-​lis and lined with ermine. As in the portrait of Charles II, the monarch’s artfully draped robes reveal a shapely, silk-​ stockinged leg and ornately attired foot. Louis’s fashionably gloved right hand holds a second glove, while his uncovered left hand gestures towards the plans for the maison royale de Saint-​Louis, a ‘pensionnat’ or boarding school for girls set up in 1684 at Saint-​Cyr at the request of his mistress and (later) morganatic second wife, Madame de Maintenon. A golden crown rests on the scarlet-​and-​gold table behind the building blueprints. (Gascar’s portrait of Charles, it might be noted, follows the French fashion of having 269

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Figure 13.2  French School, Louis XIV (1638–​1715) holding a plan of the Maison Royale de Saint-​Cyr.

the monarch gesture with the left hand, although seemingly towards nothing in particular.) Complementary colours of the gold/​orange and deep blue add vibrancy to the portrait of Louis XIV, while the diagonal of the draperies, coming down from the upper right of the portrait, leads the eye to the centrally placed and dominant figure; the massive column and pillar in the upper right lend further authority and majesty.5 The compositional 270

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Luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II similarities make these two sumptuous portraits  –​like their first-​cousin sitters –​very close relatives indeed. The largely unexplored influence of French portraiture on the court of Charles II complicates the usual art historical narrative of continuity between the early Stuarts and the Restoration period. Although a concern with continuity versus change is relatively recent in history and literary history, art historians have long made the case for continuity from the 1620s and 1630s to the 1660s in the English portraiture of the Flemish artist Sir Anthony van Dyck and the Dutch Sir Peter Lely.6 Such continuity is, however, often based on the assumption that nothing much happened in English art during the Commonwealth and Protectorate  –​that Cromwell vainly attempted to imitate royal forms but that neither the Republic nor the Protectorate found a new aesthetic. Hence, the royalists come back with renewed force after 1660, and Lely adapts van Dyck to the decadence and sexual libertinism of the new court.7 My own earlier work has argued that this story is, at best, partial, given that the Cromwellian Protectorate developed its own anti-​ formalist aesthestic and ‘plain-​style’ mode of representation, including portraiture, to which Charles II had to respond.8 The most recent work on portraiture of the court of Charles II has sought to counter the moral opprobrium which has accrued around the King’s mistresses and shaped interpretations of their portraits and to take Peter Lely and his craft more seriously.9 This chapter will show a new political force and seriousness to the even-​more-​denigrated French painters and will suggest that greater attention should be paid to the largely unexplored links in visual culture between the English and French courts. If Charles admired and imitated the court of his cousin, Louis XIV, much of the luxury and splendour of the Sun King was unattainable in England. But the portraiture of Charles II and his mistresses more closely adopts the French model than has been recognised. The highly ornate, decorative style of Henri Gascar (a French-​born portrait painter, who also studied in Rome) epitomised French style for contemporaries, as it has subsequently for art historians, in contrast to the more realistic (if idealised) manner of Sir Peter Lely, the portrait painter most often associated with the court of Charles II.10 Some thirty years after Gascar painted both the leading figures of the Grand Siècle in France and the reigning beauties of the English Restoration court, Bainbrigg Buckeridge wrote disparagingly of the artist that ‘what he wanted in the graceful Part, in draught, and a good choice of Nature  …  he usually made up with Embroidery, fine cloaths, lac’d drapery, and a great Variety of Trumpery, Ornaments’.11 Standard histories of British art are no more charitable: Ellis Waterhouse writes that Gascar’s ‘ladies and children wear torrents of lace 271

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From Republic to Restoration and simper in the most Frenchified manner’, while for Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, Gascar represented ‘the nadir of decadent French court portraiture’.12 Yet some of the most distinctive 1670s depictions of mistresses are fashioned by French painters, particularly Gascar, and derive closely from portraits of the mistresses of Louis XIV. If Charles could not emulate his French cousin in the building of a Versailles or in extravagant war-​making, his mistresses could compete with their Continental counterparts in their look of luxury: beauty, sex appeal, material excess and wealth. The French influence reflects not the imposition of a second-​rate painter on native English art, but a broader cultural programme and representational mode of restored monarchical power. The vogue for French fashions was at a height from the court’s return. Within the first year of his return, Charles favoured French musicians over English, causing some offence.13 The Count Grammont, coming to London from Paris in 1662, ‘found so little difference in the manners and conversation of those with whom he chiefly associated, that he could scarcely believe he was out of his own country’, but felt instead ‘as if the pleasures of the court of France had quitted it to accompany him in his exile’.14 By 1670, the English connection with France had tightened considerably with the Secret Treaty of Dover, negotiated through Charles’s much beloved younger sister, Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orleans, by which Louis XIV would provide Charles with a lucrative French pension in exchange for his political alliance and promised public conversion to Catholicism. In March 1672, the Test Act prohibited Catholics from holding public office, forcing James, Duke of York, openly to avow his conversion to Catholicism. In September, James married (by proxy) an Italian Catholic princess, Mary Beatrice d’Este of Modena. Increasingly, the French connection raised fears of popery and arbitrary government within England itself. At a time when one might expect the Restoration court to be particularly cautious, French painters found themselves in fashion. Why was that the case? Returning once more to the portrait of Charles II, in comparison to the depiction of Louis XIV in much the same pose, we notice that, in one major difference, Gascar has changed from a more traditional vertical to a horizontal format. Indeed, in some ways, the portrait seems off-​balance, with the prominent diagonal figure of the English monarch largely confined to the left half of the composition. Why the change to the horizontal format? The addition of the figures of the attendants on the right seems inadequate as a thematic or compositional rationale. Closer examination reveals that Charles is gesturing towards something (or someone) after all. This is, in fact, a double portrait –​perhaps as explicit as could be made –​of Charles and his new reigning mistress in the 1670s, the French Catholic Louise de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, who appears with her women 272

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Luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II as small and colourful, if somewhat unfocused, figures in the classicised gallery of the right upper corner of the composition. Portsmouth’s power and influence as mistress and her patronage of Gascar heightened the French connection in the arts, including portraiture, as she strove to control and shape her own self-​display in the image of the court of Louis XIV.15 Portsmouth had first arrived in England in spring 1670, as a beautiful maid of honour to Charles II’s sister, Henrietta Anne, and she immediately caught the eye of the King. She returned to England the following year after the sudden death of her mistress, sent by the canny Louis XIV to console the bereft King but also to promote French interests in the English court. Taking up a position in the household of Charles’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, Louise was pursued by the amorous King, although she resisted for some time. But on 9 October 1671, Evelyn writes that ‘[i]‌t was universaly reported that the faire Lady was bedded one of these nights, and the stocking flung, after the manner of a married Bride … she was for the most part in her undresse all day, and … there was fondnesse, & toying, with that young wanton’.16 Subsequent to the mock-​marriage ceremony of bedding, Louise became the most powerful of Charles’s mistresses, given the title of Duchess of Portsmouth and supplanting Barbara Villiers, Countess of Castlemaine and Duchess of Cleveland, whose tumultuous relationship with Charles had lasted for ten years and produced five children. In a court known for the display of its beauties, including the royal mistresses, Louise’s own luxurious self-​fashioning with jewellery, clothing, art and furniture was notable: and notorious. If Charles II imitated the Sun King, his mistresses imitated the longest-​ dominant French mistress of Louis XIV, Françoise-​Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan. Considered a second queen for her influence and power, and bearing the King seven children during a relationship that lasted more than a dozen years, Montespan was a highly visible patron of the arts and a lover of luxury. A three-​quarter frontal portrait of the seated Montespan (see Figure 13.3) shows the beauty, artifice and ornament characteristic of French portraiture in this period. Montespan wears a pearl necklace, earrings and clasp, a scoop-​necked chemise edged with lace, a gold silk gown with split bodice and a dark green wrap. Facing forward, but turning her body slightly to the right, she looks left and out of the frame. The dark drapery frames and sets off Montespan’s light-​bathed figure, although her averted gaze denies full intimacy. Much attention has been given to the folds and light on the rich satin and silk fabrics of Montespan’s clothing and to the lustrous golden colours of the dress and dark green of the wrap, foregrounded in the composition. The pink, gold, green and white colours of the delicately rendered flowers echo and parallel Montespan’s white chemise, golden dress and green wrap; the pink and white of the flowers is 273

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Figure 13.3  French School, Portrait of Françoise-​Athénaïs Rochechouart de Mortemart (1640–​1707) Marquise de Montespan.

echoed in her lightly rouged skin and red lips. The delicacy of the pearl earrings and necklace is conveyed by a single asymmetrical white dot painted on each pearl, while much broader brushstrokes highlight the folds and texture of the rich fabrics of the wrap and dress. This is an image of beauty, elegance, ornament and decoration. Like the fabrics, jewels and flowers, Montespan herself is an exquisite, beautiful, highly wrought object. 274

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Figure 13.4  Henri Gascar, Portrait of Louise-​Renée de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth and Aubigny (1649–​1734), mistress of Charles II.

A three-​ quarter-​ length frontal seated portrait of the Duchess of Portsmouth by Henri Gascar (see Figure 13.4) is closely modelled on the portrait of Montespan. Portsmouth wears a low-​cut, richly embroidered cream dress, with quarter-​length puff sleeves and a natural waistline marked by a pink ribbon; a lace chemise peeks out from under the vee neckline of the dress. Matching pearls appear on her earrings, necklace and jewelled clasps, 275

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From Republic to Restoration and she wears a dark-​green satin wrap. Portsmouth leans her left elbow on the ornately carved table and gestures with her right hand towards the flowers arranged in a silver vase. Her centrally placed, light-​encased figure dominates the composition, in contrast to the dark trees and cloudy sky in the background. The gold, white and pink flowers echo the white and gold fabric of Portsmouth’s dress, the pink ribbons at her waistline and neckline, and the white lace of her chemise; the red flowers complement her rouged lips and cheeks. Flowers and sitter alike are decorative and ornamental: this too is an image of beauty, taste and luxury. It is likely that Gascar was called to England from France in 1672 by Portsmouth, who was his principal patron until his return to France in 1677, perhaps prompted by the heightened anti-​Catholic and anti-​French sentiment evoked by the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. During his time in England, Gascar painted not only the King and Portsmouth, but the mistress whom she supplanted, Barbara Villiers, as well as other ladies of the court and James, Duke of York. As a painter of court luxury, Gascar’s mannered and ornate style threatened the more realistic Sir Peter Lely and seemed better to capture the tone and character of the restored court. Gascar used a highly similar composition (see Figure 13.5) for Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, no longer the reigning mistress but still powerful as the mother of five of the King’s fourteen illegitimate children.17 Cleveland’s face dominated early Restoration portraiture, and she was painted often by Sir Peter Lely.18 A convert to Catholicism since 1663, Cleveland also sought out the French Catholic Gascar, who painted her seated in profile at a marble-​topped table with gilt decoration, upon which sits a vase of flowers. The composition foregrounds a profusion of ornament, subtly varied textures, and vibrant, complementary colours; the sitter is as decorative as the rich fabrics, flowers and throne-​like chair, with two whispering cupids on its finial. The warm colours of the orange and gold draperies and of the red seat cushions move forward, so that the space of the portrait is largely closed off; while the small triangle of dark foliage and outdoor space on the upper right of the painting does add some depth, the space feels foreshortened, dominated by the illuminated and centrally placed sitter. The curving upper diagonal formed by the fringed golden drapery also pulls the eye towards the sumptuously attired Cleveland, framed on the lower left by the horizontal and vertical lines of the ornate gold chair. Cleveland’s ­figure –​porcelain-​like skin, dark tightly coiffed hair, rouged cheeks and lips  –​repeats the colours, textures and shapes of the ornamental objects. Like the artificially posed and arranged flowers, Cleveland herself is both ‘natural’ and ornate, subject and object of luxury. 276

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Figure 13.5  Henri Gascar, Portrait of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland.

In another version of the painting (see Figure 13.6), made into a mezzotint by Gascar himself, the flowers are replaced by Cleveland’s young daughter, Lady Barbara Fitzroy, who wears a richly embroidered, square-​ necked gown, and holds a dove on a leash. This composition (reversed in direction in the mezzotint) uses an oval, horizontal framework, opening up the background space opposite Cleveland with expanded foliage and sky, and adding a decorative tree in a sculpted urn. The intricate detail of the oval mezzotint calls attention to the decorative, even fussy, composition that is characteristic of Gascar’s work. Portraits of both Cleveland and 277

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From Republic to Restoration

Figure 13.6  Henri Gascar, Portrait of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, with her daughter, Lady Barbara Fitzroy.

Portsmouth with their children were engraved by Gascar and hence circulated more widely. Another compositional format seen in portraiture both of the French and English courts derives ultimately from Titian’s 1538 Venus of Urbino.19 Titian’s large horizontal painting foregrounds the nude figure of a woman, who looks directly at the viewer while reclining on a red-​floral day-​bed in front of a dark vertical screen; the upper left opens onto a sumptuous palace interior room, in which two maidservants search through a chest, presumably for clothing. Gascar seems to have drawn upon the Titian in his similarly large full-​length portrait of Madame de Montespan (see Figure  13.7) reclining en déshabillé (with one nipple peeking out) on a baroque canopied daybed, in front of magnificent grand gallery of the Château de Clagny, built adjacent to Versailles by Louis XIV specifically for his reigning mistress. Designed by Jules Hardouin-​Mansart, with gardens by André Le Nôtré, the magnificent château became a showcase for Montespan’s artistic taste and luxury, as she had considerable say over its lavish architecture and opulent interior furnishings. 278

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Figure 13.7  Henri Gascar, Portrait of Madame de Montespan (1640–​1707) reclining in front of gallery of the Château de Clagny.

Hence, while Titian’s nude Venus takes up half of the horizontal composition, Montespan is a comparatively small-​sized figure in the lower foreground of a large, vertical portrait; the composition is dominated by the interior decoration and spaces of the château, attesting to Montespan’s taste, wealth and power. Rather than the large shapes of contrasting tones, textures 279

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From Republic to Restoration and colours of the Titian portrait, busy details of lace, flowers, jewels, fabric, furniture and interior decoration fill Gascar’s painting. Significantly, this new Venus is dressed, lavishly if revealingly. Montespan, whose gaze is averted, wears a low scooped-​neck white chemise with elaborate lace at the neck and an open blue gown; her jewelled shoes lie alongside the couch or daybed, which is mounted with gilt gold and upholstered with rich velvet embroidered and trimmed with gold and silver metal-​wrapped thread. The curtains of the couch, festooned with ostrich feather panaches and garlands of flowers, are held up by three chubby cupids. Behind Montespan is the barrel-​vaulted grand gallery of the Château de Clagny, in which rich gilded furniture and ornate wall decoration form a harmonious whole. Along the wall of the gallery seen on the right are two Japanese lacquered cabinets, mounted on sumptuously wrought European stands, and laden with rich pieces of Chinese porcelain. Other furnishings are equally luxurious: a large mirror in a gilded frame, and richly carved stools, chairs and tables, with scrolled legs made more brilliant by gilding. Gascar also painted several three-​quarter-​length frontal portraits of the Duchess of Portsmouth as Venus, holding a white dove and sometimes accompanied by her young son as Cupid. In an oval-​framed version engraved by Etienne Baudet (see Figure  13.8), Portsmouth reclines on a day-​bed in front of a dark curtain, wearing a lace-​edged chemise and gown that is deeply opened, fully exposing one breast. The outline of her ­figure –​ long flowing curls, opened gown and bent knees –​closely resembles the full-​length Montespan portrait by Gascar, although (in this version) the couch on which she sits and the pillow supporting her right elbow, as well as the draperies, are far less ornate. Rather than opening onto the splendours of a baroque gallery, the upper right shows an antique building and classical figures. This is altogether a more intimate portrait. Portsmouth’s son, Charles, depicted as Cupid with wings, quiver and arrows, reaches out to his mother with both hands, and, in a tiny detail, strands of her hair fall on the little boy’s right arm. Baudet has reserved the fussiness and ornament for the rich lace on the edges of Portsmouth’s neckline, gown, and three-​quarter-​length puff sleeves, as well as the foliage that frames the outside view. Another Gascar painting of Portsmouth as Venus, which he himself did in mezzotint form, features the more ornamented and luxurious draperies and clothing that marked French or Continental portraiture.20 The look of luxury in portraiture was complemented in person and in court. If Charles II (like Louis XIV) displayed his own power and virility through his mistresses, the mistresses, in turn, refined, shaped and controlled their own images in paint, person and property. Like Montespan, Portsmouth also established and demonstrated her power by 280

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Figure 13.8  Henri Gascar, Portrait of Louise-​Renée de Kéroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth, holding a dove, with Cupid, engr. Etienne Baudet.

the use and display of luxurious accommodations. Of the King’s many mistresses, only the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth were given lodging in Whitehall Palace. Portsmouth’s apartments in Whitehall eventually extended to some twenty-​five rooms. On 10 September 1675, Evelyn records, ‘I was Casualy shewed the Dutchesse of Portsmouths splendid Appartment at Whitehall, luxuriously furnished, & with ten times the richnesse & glory beyond the Queenes.’21 Nearly a decade later, on 4 October 1683, he gives a more detailed account, having gone with the King and a few attendants ‘into the Dutchesse of Portsmouths dressing roome, within her bed-​chamber, where she was in her morning loose garment, her maides Combing her, newly out of her bed: his Majestie & the Gallants standing about her’. Evelyn, however, claims that what ‘ingag’d my curiositie’ was not the Duchess herself, but her opulent possessions: ‘the rich & splendid furniture of this woman’s Appartment, now twice or thrice, puld downe, & rebuilt, to satisfie her prodigal & expensive pleasures, whilst her Majestie dos not exceede some gentlemens Ladies furniture & accommodation’.22 Portsmouth’s apartments not only showcase luxury goods, but those luxury goods are decidedly French, evoking the splendour of Versailles. Evelyn continues: 281

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From Republic to Restoration Here I  saw the new fabrique of French Tapissry, for designe, tendernesse of worke & incomparable imitation of the best paintings; beyond any thing, I had ever beheld: some pieces had Versailles, St. Germans & other Palaces of the French King with Huntings, figures, Landscips, Exotique fowle & all to the life rarely don: Then for Japon Cabinets, Skreenes, Pendule Clocks, huge Vasas of wrought plate, Tables, Stands, Chimny furniture, Sconces, branches, Braseras, &c, they were all of massive silver, & without number, besides of his Majesties best paintings.23

An abundance of rich furnishings, paintings and, above all, priceless tapestries, made in the Gobelins Manufactory and sent by Louis XIV as a gift to Charles II, have somehow found their way into the Duchess’s apartments. Although such an acquisition differed largely in degree rather than in kind from the other mistresses, Portsmouth’s Whitehall apartments offered courtiers and foreign dignitaries crucial access to the King, and she assiduously promoted both her own and French interests. Evelyn, however, denigrates the luxury objects in Portsmouth’s apartments: ‘Lord what contentment can there be in the riches & splendor of this world, purchas’d with vice and dishonor.’24 Concerns with the Frenchified court, however, had come from the beginning of the Restoration period. According to the republican Edmund Ludlow, the exiled Charles had been ‘altogether Frenchyfied (not only being so by birth of the surer die, but also by education and inclynation)’.25 The French connection evoked luxury  –​sexual excess and conspicuous consumption. As a royalist observer of the court, John Evelyn would later lament that the returning court had brought ‘open & avowed luxurie and prophaness … a la mode de France’.26 Lookers-​on increasingly critiqued the court’s French culture, or even saw Charles II as worse than Louis XIV. On 26 April 1667, Samuel Pepys walked for two hours in Westminster Hall with Evelyn, his friend and confidante, ‘talking of the badness of the Government, where nothing but wickedness, and wicked men and women command the King. That it is not in his nature to gainsay anything that relates to his pleasures’.27 Having observed that trouble arises in England from Charles’s ‘negligence of the Clergy… a Bishop shall never be seen about him, as the King of France hath always’, Evelyn goes on to praise Louis XIV at the expense of Charles II. Evelyn, Pepys records: tells me mighty stories of the King of France, how great a prince he is. He hath made a Code to shorten the law. He hath put out all the ancient commanders of castles that were become hereditary. He hath made all the Fryers subject to the Bishops, which before were only subject to Rome, and so were hardly the King’s subjects. And that none shall become religious but at such an age –​which he thinks will in a few years ruin the pope, and bring France into a patriarchate.28

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Luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II Evelyn and Pepys, not unusually, also focused on the mistresses of the two monarchs: ‘He tells me the King of France hath his Maistresses, but laughs at the foolery of our King –​that makes his bastards princes, and loses his revenue upon them –​and makes his mistresses his maisters. And the King of France did never grant Lavaliere anything to bestow on others; and gives a little subsistence, but no more, to his bastards’.29 Despite Evelyn’s gossip, Charles was in fact only following suit. Louis did legitimise and find marriages for his illegitimate offspring with his two principal mistresses, Louise de La Vallière and Françoise-​Athénaïs, marquise de Montespan. That the restored court depicted itself in the luxurious trappings of Continental Catholic and absolutist monarchy was therefore not lost on contemporaries, and former republican voices of critique were once again heard. State Papers for the 1670s reveal anxiety about the Duchess of Portsmouth’s spending and her political influence, increasing with the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–​81. An informant writes Secretary of State Sir Joseph Williamson in January 1679 that: The Green Ribbon men meet at Starkie’s and Collen’s, booksellers, within Temple Bar, and thence go to their clubs, where the ordinary discourses are, that the nation is sold to the French; that … Popery and arbitrary government is intended, that a Parliament is not to come again, if they at Whitehall can live without it and, if any be suffered to sit, it must be in effect a French Parliament or be gone, for all is governed by the Duchess of Portsmouth, the Duke of York, the Lord Treasurer, and the French ambassador, who all often meet the King at her lodgings and what is there agreed is next to be put in execution.30

Former supporters of the Republic and Commonwealth used the restored court’s own tools against it. Satires on the court (often necessarily covert or indirect) used the visual in the form of word-​images to undercut the voluptuous display and to critique luxury as a disease in the body politic. An early and well-​known example, Andrew Marvell’s biting and graphic Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), counters the idealised portraiture of the court by positing a negative kind of luxury –​appetite, excess, physical and moral deformity –​against luxury as opulence, splendour and power. Adjuring his painter to ‘draw our luxury in plumes’ (l. 31), Marvell’s first-​person narrator undresses the court figures, taking away their expensive apparel and exposing the bodily deformities that align with deformity in the body politic.31 Painting imagery (originally stemming from Edmund Waller’s ill-​advised panegyric, Instructions to a Painter, on an early naval victory in the Second Anglo-​Dutch War) dominates and unifies the otherwise diffuse satire. Having offered scabrous accounts of several prominent court figures, the narrator turns to Parliament:  ‘Here, painter, rest a little, and survey /​With what small arts the public game they play. /​ For so too Rubens, with affairs of state, /​His lab’ring pencil oft would 283

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From Republic to Restoration recreate’ (ll. 117–​20). Later, the narrator urges the painter to focus on the Speaker of the House of Commons: ‘Dear painter, draw this Speaker to the foot; /​Where pencil cannot, there my pen shall do’t’ (ll. 863–​64). Marvell’s response to the later, even more Frenchified court culture would be to raise the spectre of popery and arbitrary government. Milton, who had dourly warned against the luxury returning with the restored court, presents in his 1671 classical tragedy, Samson Agonistes, a carousing Philistine court and a Samson ensnared by a Dalila who comes in like a bedecked ship, all ornament, silken veil, waiting women, rich clothing, perfume and decoration. That all of this luxurious finery is put on to visit a blind man, Samson now imprisoned and toiling in the Philistine mill, shows, perhaps, the opinion of the still-​defiant Milton of the trumpery of the court of Charles II.32 Other vivid and even scathing satires by former republicans re-​draw the image of Charles II to underscore the incursion of French absolutism. ‘Britannia and Raleigh’ (c. 1674–​75), attributed to republican John Ayloffe, uses vivid, direct language and strong verbs as the visage of Charles II merges with and is replaced by that of the absolutist Louis XIV: A colony of French possess the court; Pimps, priests, buffoons i’th’ privy-​chamber sport … I’th’ sacred ear tyrannic arts they croak, Pervert his mind, his good intentions choke, Tell him of golden Indies, fairy lands, Leviathans, and absolute commands. Thus fairy-​like the King they steal away, And in his place a Louis changeling lay.33

The poem draws a devastating word-​image of Charles II that contrasts with the splendid baroque image of the enthroned King, as well as the beautiful and ornate portraits of his mistresses: ‘Like a tame spinster in’s seragl’ he sits, /​Beseig’d by whores, buffoons, and bastard chits; /​Lull’d in security, rolling in lust, /​Resigns his crown to angel Carwell’s trust’.34 Yet the story is not simply one of republican critiques of luxury restored. Rather, in an ironic continuity, some of the most persistent voices against luxury in the 1660s and 1670s are those not of former republicans but of royalists. Evelyn, some of whose reactions we have already glimpsed, can serve as an example of how royalists took up the critique of luxury that was earlier a republican mantra. Shocked by the regicide and viewing the Restoration as miraculous, Evelyn initially looked to the restored monarch to reform English society. A  lavish panegyric he composed on the coronation of Charles II ends with a vision of the King riding triumphantly

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Luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II with ‘Empire, Faith, Love, and Justice’, while underneath the wheels of his chariot ‘perfidie is now vanquished, popular fury chayn’d, crueltie tamd, luxury restrained’.35 In 1662, Evelyn published Tyrannus or the Mode, a satire on the French style of dress then popular in England. His vivid word-​picture catches the absurdity of court fashion –​‘It was a fine silken thing which I spied walking th’ other day through Westminster-​Hall, that had as much Ribbon on him as would have plundered six shops, and set up twenty Country Pedlers; All his body was dres’t like a May-​pole, or a Tom-​a Bedlam’s Cap.’36 Despite the obvious fact that it was Charles II himself who had brought the rage for French fashion and high living, Evelyn pins his hopes for reform on the King. By banishing absurd fashions and other affectations as ‘noyse, and empty shadows ministring only to Lux’, the ‘Court shall become the universal Idea for the rest of the Princes to reform by’.37 The court, however, would be no model of reformation: far from it. The wary Evelyn was guarded, even in his diary, but we saw how Pepys reports in the mid-​1660s on Evelyn’s criticism of Charles II and his mistresses, ‘the King minding nothing but his ease’. By this time, fire, plague and war seemed national punishments for lust to Evelyn, who himself writes in his diary on 10 October 1666 that ‘the late dreadfull Conflagration, added to the Plage & Warr’ [are] the most dismall judgments [that] could be inflicted, & indeede but what we highly deserved for our prodigious ingratitude, burning Lusts, disolute Court, profane & abominable lives, under such dispensations of Gods continued favour’.38 Similarly, on 30 January 1671, having heard a sermon on the anniversary of the Martyr King, Evelyn worries that ‘the leudnesse of our greatest ones, & universal luxurie, seemed to menace some yet more dreadfull vengeance: we have had a plague, a Warr, & such a fire, as never was the like in any nation since the overthrow of Sodome’.39 We also saw earlier Evelyn’s dual interest in and disapproval of the luxurious lodgings of the Duchess of Portsmouth. But Evelyn’s most extensive and overt moral critique of courtly and royal luxury comes when the King is dead. Luxury figures prominently in Evelyn’s vivid memory, in early February 1685, of the final days of Charles II: I am never to forget the unexpressable luxury, & prophanesse, gaming, & all dissolution, and as it were total forgetfullnesse of God (it being Sunday Evening) which this day sennight, I was witnesse of; the King, sitting & toying with his Concubines Portsmouth, Cleaveland, & Mazarine: &c: A french boy singing love songs, in that glorious Gallery, whilst about 20 of the greate Courtiers & other dissolute persons were at Basset round a large table, a bank of at least 2000 in Gold before them … it being a sceane of uttmost vanity; and surely as they thought would never have an End: six days after was all in the dust.40

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From Republic to Restoration The loyal but nonetheless critical royalist Evelyn redraws this clearly delineated word-​image –​‘a sceane of profuse gaming, and luxurious dallying & prophanesse, the King in the middst of his 3 concubines’.41 In his final assessment, Evelyn writes that Charles II, ‘A prince of many Virtues, & many greate Imperfections’, had ‘brought in a politer way of living, which passed to Luxurie & intollerable expense’.42 In an unexpected and even ironic continuity, the luxury that republicans had earlier decried and warned against continued to haunt royalist observers in Restoration England.

Notes 1 Milton, Ready and Easy Way, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 885. 2 Ibid., p.  885. Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-​State:  Or, The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth, ed. by Blair Worden (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2011); James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington: Part One, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). On Milton, see L. L. Knoppers, ‘Consuming Nations: Milton and Luxury’, in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. by David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), pp. 331–​55. 3 Milton, Ready and Easy Way, p. 885. 4 On the reconstitution of sacred monarchy through such ceremonial forms as the King’s touch, see Anna Keay, The Magnificent Monarch: Charles II and the Ceremonies of Power (London and New York: Continuum, 2008); on the politics of space that increasingly restricted access to the monarch, see Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003); for a broad-​ranging analysis of how court culture both produced and contained dissent, even a sharp critique, of the King, see Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–​1685 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2010). 5 For a classic study of the careful crafting of the image of Louis XIV, see Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992). 6 On Van Dyck’s influence on Restoration painters like Lely, see Karen Hearn, ‘Van Dyck’s Impact During the Seventeenth Century’, in Van Dyck & Britain, ed. by Karen Hearn (London: Tate, 2009), pp. 171–​203. 7 For the most extensive argument that Cromwellian Portraiture simply (and badly) aped monarchy, see Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–​1660 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2010). 8 L.  L. Knoppers, ‘The Politics of Portraiture:  Oliver Cromwell and the Plain Style’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 1283–​ 1319. See also L.  L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–​1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 9 See Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II, ed. by Catharine MacLeod and Julia Marciari Alexander (London and New Haven, CT: National Portrait Gallery in Association with Yale Center for British Art, 2001). 10 Julia Marciari Alexander, ‘Gascar, Henri (1634/​5–​1701)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, September 2010) www.oxforddnb. com/​view/​article/​10419 [accessed 21 April 2016]. 11 Bainbrigg Buckeridge, ‘An Essay Toward an English School of Painting’, in The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters, ed. by R. de Piles, 3rd edn (London, 1754), p. 421.

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Luxury, portraiture and the court of Charles II 12 Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530–​1790, 2nd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 106; Margaret Whinney and Oliver Millar, English Art, 1625–​1714, in Oxford History of English Art, vol. VIII, ed. by T. S. P. Boase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1957), p. 175. C. H. C. Baker compares Gascar’s sitters with wax dummies in Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters, 3 vols (London: P. L. Warner, 1912), ii, 4. 13 Andrew R. Walkling sees the appropriation (and later more creative adaptation) of French art and music in the court of Charles II as part of an aesthetic programme of absolutism, ‘ “Big with New Events and some Unheard Success”:  Absolutism and Creativity at the Restoration Court’, in Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-​Century England, ed. by Rebecca Herissone and Alan Howard (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 15–​34. 14 Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of Count Grammont, ed. by Gordon Goodwin, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1908), i, 99. 15 N. K. Maguire looks at Portsmouth in relation to the political role of the French mistresses, although she does not examine the arts. See ‘The Duchess of Portsmouth: English Royal Consort and French Politician, 1670–​85’, in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, ed. by R. Malcolm Smuts (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 247–​73. 16 Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), iii, 589. 17 On Cleveland’s agency and influence in arranging marriages for her children, and her power at and beyond court more broadly, see Sonya Wynne, ‘The Mistresses of Charles II and Restoration Court Politics’, in The Stuart Courts, ed. by Eveline Cruickshanks (Stroud: Sutton, 2000), pp. 171–​90. 18 See MacLeod and Alexander, eds, Painted Ladies, on Portsmouth (pp.  136–​51) and Cleveland (pp. 16–​35). 19 See the reproduction and discussion of the Venus of Urbino in The Paintings of Titian, vol. III:  The Mythological and Historical Paintings, ed. by Harold E.  Wethey (London: Phaidon Press, 1975), Plates 72 and 73, and pp. 203–​04. 20 The mezzotint is reproduced and described in MacLeod and Alexander, eds, Painted Ladies, pp. 146–​47. 21 Evelyn, Diary, iv, 74. 22 Ibid., iv, 343. 23 Ibid., iv, 343. 24 Ibid., iv, 344. 25 Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, ed. by A. B. Worden, Camden Society, 4th ser., 21 (1978), p. 285. 26 John Evelyn, Letter to Samuel Pepys, 12 August 1689, quoted in Diary, iii, 493, n. 6. 27 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William G. Matthews, 11 vols (1970–​83), viii, 181. 28 Ibid., viii, 181–​82. 29 Ibid., viii, 183. 30 The National Archives, State Papers 29/​411 f.54. [Jan. 13?] 1679. 31 Andrew Marvell, The Last Instructions to a Painter, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. by Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007). Also see Steven N. Zwicker, Chapter 4: ‘The Politics of Pleasure: Annus Mirabilis, The Last Instructions, Paradise Lost’, in Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–​89 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 32 John Milton, Samson Agonistes in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. by Hughes. On Dalila as a critique of Restoration luxury, see Knoppers, ‘Consuming Nations’. 33 Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660–​1714, ed. by G. deForest Lord, 7 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963–​75), i, 230. 34 Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs of State, i, 233. 35 John Evelyn, A Panegyric to Charles the Second, Presented to his Majestie … the Day of his Coronation (London, 1661), p. 16.

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From Republic to Restoration 36 John Evelyn, Tyrannus or the Mode:  In a Discourse of Sumptuary Laws (London, 1661), p. 11. 37 Evelyn, Tyrannus, pp. 22–​23. 38 Evelyn, Diary, iii, 464. 39 Ibid., iii, 569. 40 Ibid., iv, 413–​14. 41 Ibid., iv, 403. 42 Ibid., iv, 409–​10.

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Chapter 14

Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Bryan White

T

he development of opera in England has been a vexed subject since the seventeenth century. ‘Experience hath taught us that our English genius will not rellish that perpetual singing’ was Peter Motteux’s assessment in 1692.1 For much of the twentieth century, scholarly opinion was not markedly different. In Foundations of English Opera Edward Dent asserted that ‘music for the Italian is the exaggeration of personality –​for the Englishman its annihilation’.2 For him and other critics some combination of a strong theatre tradition, an aversion to sung dialogue, and the influence and popularity of foreign musicians and operatic styles stymied the growth of through-​sung English opera. ‘Through-​sung’ denotes opera in the Italian style pioneered at the turn of the seventeenth century, or the French style, largely defined by J. B. Lully during the 1670s; in either guise all of the text is sung. Since the through-​sung model came to be the primary form of opera in Europe even to the present day, critics have tended to see genres that deviated from this norm –​and so much of what was called ‘opera’ in Restoration England –​as somehow inferior. In the 1980s, however, Curtis Price and Richard Luckett reshaped the understanding of English opera. Luckett argued that dramatic opera of the Restoration period, which took the form of a play intermixed with music, dance and scenic display, was not a bastard child of the true through-​sung line, but rather ‘an exotic but rational entertainment’, clearly supported by contemporary theories of drama.3 Price, in Henry Purcell and the London Stage, wished ‘not to explain why England failed to produce true opera during the Baroque period, but rather to show why the English showed no compelling need to have it’.4 Largely overlooked in this debate is the issue of economics, a lacuna that has been addressed by theatre historians, Judith Milhous and Robert Hume. Milhous, in chronicling the balance sheets of musical-​theatrical entertainments in the commercial theatres, argues that ‘until 1706, no one had ever imagined that opera could be a self-​sustaining enterprise in 289

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From Republic to Restoration London’.5 Hume notes the ‘radically different’ model of financing opera in England as compared to elsewhere in Europe, whereby until 1708 ‘virtually all “opera” performances in London were given under the auspices of the patent theatre companies’.6 This chapter pursues the issue of the economic foundations of musical theatre productions in Restoration England in the form of royal patronage. Nowhere on the Continent did through-​sung opera thrive without support of royalty or nobility. Italian opera originated in entertainments celebrating dynastic weddings, and even in Venice, the putative cradle of ‘public’ opera, the patronage of the resident nobility was crucial to its success. In France, the operas of Lully were potent representations of the power and taste of Louis XIV and substantially subsidised by him. In England. we must look to Charles II’s choices in supporting musical-​theatrical works in order to understand fully the lack of through-​ sung opera in the Restoration period. Central to this consideration is Albion and Albanius, a through-​sung opera in English with a word-​book by John Dryden, set to music by Louis Grabu, and performed by the United Company at Dorset Garden theatre in 1685. Over the last half century, it has undergone a re-​evaluation similar to that of English opera as whole. Dent saw it as ‘a monument to stupidity’, composed by a ‘second-​rater from abroad’, as his protégé Dennis Arundell described Grabu.7 More recently, Franklin Zimmerman and Curtis Price have partially rehabilitated the opera, placing the blame for its failure to secure more than six performances on political events rather than artistic incompetence.8 All modern commentators agree that the opera was a major financial setback for the United Company, with a loss of approximately £2,000.9 By implication, the opera was a commercial failure. Such a view is at once a misunderstanding of its purpose and a serious impediment to understanding the phenomenon of opera in England. Albion and Albanius can be more profitably understood in the context of court patronage, designed specifically to promote the image and interests of Charles II. In fact, it is a work that might be seen as the last manifestation of pre-​Commonwealth masque. As such it was not primarily aimed at commercial return, nor was it offered as a test of the commercial potential of through-​sung opera on the public stage. It may –​in part –​have been a test of the potential of royal patronage to support an English equivalent to the French opera; in this respect it was an unmitigated disaster.

Musical-​theatrical productions at court, 1660–​85

I

n order to understand better the place of through-​ sung opera in Restoration England, and why the great impresario of the Restoration 290

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Table 14.1.  Significant musical-​theatrical works presented at court during Charles II’s reign for which texts (and in some cases music) are extant Ballet et musique pour   le divertissement du roy   de la Grande Bretagne Calisto Rare en Tout Venus and Adonis Dido and Aeneas

Ballet/​Pastoral [in French]

1674

Play with musical intermedii Play with musical intermedii [in French] Masque/​Opera Masque?/​Opera

1675 1677 1683? 1684?

stage, Thomas Betterton, hazarded a rumoured £4,000 of the United Company’s funds on an extravagant piece of royal propaganda, we must survey the musical-​theatrical works mounted at court and in the public theatres during Charles II’s reign, and consider what these can tell us about the King’s interest in through-​sung opera and related genres. First, to the court (Table 14.1). Among several striking features of Table 14.1 is the lack of any major production in the first thirteen years of Charles’s reign. The precariousness of the royal finances was no doubt a factor. Payments to court musicians, for instance, were in severe arrears throughout this period. Charles’s interest in plays may also have drawn his attention away from opera. He attended plays –​as a paying customer –​in the commercial theatres, but also paid for them to be staged at court, causing the old Great Hall at Whitehall to be converted into a theatre.10 The conclusion that this list indicates a complete neglect of musical-​theatrical entertainments at Charles’s court during this period is misleading, however, as it ignores the primary area into which he chose to allocate his limited funds, namely court entertainments, which were often performed at Shrovetide. Their form varied from year to year, but always included different combinations of dancing, spectacular costumes, vocal music and staging, sometimes within the context of a play.11 Contemporary terminology for these events is varied and unclear; in particular ‘ball’ and ‘masque’ are used –​ sometimes in conjunction with one another  –​and it is rarely possible to know with certainty whether or not there was a staged component to such entertainments.12 John Evelyn recorded ‘masques’ at court on several occasions in the 1660s. On 2 July 1663, he saw ‘the greate Masque at Court’, on 2 February 1664/​65 ‘a fine Mask at Court perform’d, by 6 Gent: & 6 Ladys, surprizing his Majestie, it being Candlemas day’, and in February 1666/​67 ‘a magnificent Ball or Masque in the Theater at Court, where their Majesties & all the greate Lords & Ladies daunced infinitely gallant:  the Men in their richly imbrodred, most becoming Vests’.13 291

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From Republic to Restoration The best documented of these events is the ‘Queen’s Masque’ performed on several occasions in February 1670/​71.14 An eyewitness account by Lady Mary Bertie, who attended on 20 February, describes an event akin to the pre-​Commonwealth masque: I was on Munday at Court to see the grane ballet danced. It was so hard to get room that wee were forced to goe by four a clocke, though it did not begin till nine or ten. The[y]‌were very richly [dressed] and danced very finely, and shifted their clothes three times. There was also fine musickes and excellent sing[ing] some new song made purpose for it. After the ballet was over, several others danced, as the King, the Duke of Yorke, and Duke of Somerset, and Duke of Buckingham. And the Dutchesse of Cleveland was very fine in a riche petticoat and halfe shirte, and a short man’s coat very richly laced, a perwig cravatt and a hat: her hat and maske was very rich.15

A much later account of the event by Roger North provides the theme: Once he [Charles II] took a fancy to have a sort of opera in his theater at Whitehall; and the designe was, that every nation should shew upon the stage a piece of their best musick, after the manner of their severall countrys, So there came Germanes, Spaniards, Italians and French; the English brought up the ’rere.16

Peter Holman and Sandra Tuppen have emphasised the French influence in this entertainment. A manuscript containing music that was almost certainly used for this performance includes two minuets from the French section of the Ballet des nations that concludes Molière and Lully’s comédie-​ ballet Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670).17 In the same period several plays at court featured ‘masques’ in between acts. Waller’s Pompey the Great concluded with a masque when it was performed at court in January 1663/​ 64 and a masque was performed between each act of Katherine Philips’s Horace on 4 February 1667/​68.18 The emphasis on masque and dancing suggests that Charles’s tastes in musical-​theatrical entertainments followed those of his father in many ways, if on a rather reduced scale. This should not come as any surprise. As a boy of six, Charles danced as Prince Britomart in The Entertainment at Richmond and attended Sir Francis Kynaston’s Corona Minervae.19 No doubt he also witnessed other masques at his father’s court before its collapse. Charles himself wrote to his sister the Duchess d’Orléans on 9 February 1662/​63 about a masque-​like entertainment with ‘entrées’ which he was personally involved in organizing, though it is not clear if it came to pass: Ici nous avons eu le projet d’organiser une mascarade et nous en avions assez bien dessiné le plan général, mais il n’y a pas eu moyen d’en venir à bout, n’ayant pas ici un seul homme en état de faire une entrée supportable.20

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage [We had the idea of organizing a masque, and had more or less planned it, but there was no way to get around the lack of even one man capable of dancing a tolerable entry.]

Apart from plays, balls and masques –​in which members of the court participated as dancers  –​were the favoured entertainment at Charles’s court until the 1670s. Some of these were staged events; Boswell took the event Evelyn saw on Candlemas 1664/​65 to be ‘the original masque pure and simple, a remarkable piece of what appears to be deliberate archaism, rather than the survival of the Caroline masque’.21 The entertainment, as described by Lady Bertie and Roger North, included a staged element and appears to have mixed aspects of the pre-​Commonwealth masque with the French comédie-​ballet. Whether we see in these entertainments Boswell’s archaism, or clear continuity with the past, overlaid with experience at the French court and constrained by financial austerity, one obvious absence is through-​sung opera. While cost was surely significant in shaping Charles’s entertainments, he was nevertheless happy to loosen the purse strings from time to time; Boswell calculated tradesmen’s bills relating to the ‘Queen’s Masque’ at £2,316.1.2, and that was certainly not the limit of what he was willing to pay.22 The first large-​scale musical-​theatrical work at court for which the text survives was composed by the Frenchman Robert Cambert who came to England in 1673, where he became a musician to the Duchess of Portsmouth.23 His Ballet et musique pour le divertissement du roy de la Grande Bretagne is a through-​sung pastoral, which begins with a prologue addressed to the King.24 The work comprises eight scenes and six danced entries; scenic spectacle, apart from costumes –​about which little can be determined from the printed text –​was apparently not a significant part of the entertainment. There were thirteen singing roles, some of which may have been doubled, and a male and female chorus. Only a fragment of the music is extant, but the French text was printed in full. The librettist, Sébastien Brémond, claimed that Cambert and the choreographer Favier originally planned on ‘presenting half an hour of mixed entertainment of both music and dance to the King of England’, but subsequently requested that it be held back to celebrate the marriage of the Duke of York to Mary of Modena (a proxy marriage on 30 September 1673 was confirmed on the bride’s arrival in England on 21 November); Brémond was forced to expand the work slightly in response to the occasion.25 In a later memoir Brémond called the work an opera, suggesting he had written it on the King’s instructions.26 He blamed ‘the scarcity of actors capable of singing it well’ for ‘the lack of incident and the constraint that was needed everywhere’.27 The singers were most likely French but their identities are unknown; the instrumental music was probably executed by 293

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From Republic to Restoration members of the English court music. At the first performance, Brémond was accosted by Symon Cottereau, the Italian musician in ordinary to the King’s Private Musick, who snatched one of the specially bound copies of the libretto for the King’s party.28 Brémond encountered Cottereau the next day at Covent Garden, challenged him with his sword, and mortally wounded him. Cottereau’s presence at the performance may indicate that he was one of the performers (Brémond is not explicit on this point), but in what capacity is unclear. Brémond was subsequently arrested, and the timeline surrounding his conviction, imprisonment and eventual pardon on 7 March has been used to suggest a performance date of late January or early February 1673/​74.29 The date of the performance of Ballet et musique is significant in light of several sketchy records from late December and early January of operatic activity at the court. In December 1673, Richard Vokins, Yeoman of the Wax Chandry, provided candles ‘at the practising for an Opera for his Majestie at Whitehall’.30 Carpenter’s bills for the Hall Theatre in January 1673/​74 mention dancing and opera practices.31 John Evelyn, in a diary entry of 5 January 1673/​74, recorded ‘an Italian Opera in musique, the first that had ben in England of this kind’.32 Evelyn’s account has long puzzled students of English opera. He had seen Italian opera at first hand in the 1640s, and it is hard to imagine him mistaking it for a French pastoral like Ballet et musique. However, if by ‘Italian opera’ he simply meant something through-​sung, Ballet et musique meets that criterion; as far as the evidence extends, it was the first such entertainment for the Restoration court. Furthermore, if Cottereau, a member of the Italian music in ordinary (with a suspiciously French name), participated in the performance, other Italian musicians may have been involved; if they were known to Evelyn, this could have influenced his description of the performance as an ‘Italian’ opera. As we shall see when we turn to the public theatre, Ballet et musique seems to have encouraged Cambert, with the support of Thomas Killigrew and the court, to mount a more extravagant French work in the spring, his opera Ariane. Cambert was also called to Windsor in July, where the select band of twelve violins was ordered to perform music –​unspecified, but probably his own –​before the King.33 If this activity is indicative of the King’s enthusiasm for Cambert and French opera, it was short-​lived. By late 1674, the court was being mobilised for the grandest musical-​theatrical spectacle of Charles’s reign  –​judged by expenditure  –​John Crowne’s Calisto, a work in English intermingling court masque with a play. While it featured some of the French dancers involved in Ariane, and its musical scenarios were influenced by comédie-​ballet, the music was composed by the Englishman, Nicholas Staggins, who supplanted Louis Grabu as Master of 294

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage the King’s Musick in the latter part of 1673.34 It was first performed at the Hall Theatre in February 1674/​75. Crowne called the work a masque on the title page of the printed text. It begins with a sung, allegorical prologue in praise of the King and Queen, and it recalls the pre-​Commonwealth masque in as much as royalty and other nobility participated:  the Duke of Monmouth danced, as did Princesses Mary and Anne, who with other ladies of the court also took roles in the play. Thomas Betterton, now leader of the Duke’s Company, coached the princesses for the production. Calisto was rehearsed at court semi-​publicly for months, performed numerous times, and employed significant stage scenery along with music and dance. Boswell estimated that the work cost around £5,000 to put on, making it the most expensive production of any sort at court or in the public theatres in the period from 1660 to 1700.35 The prologue is of particular interest in the context of this investigation; it seems to have been strongly influenced by that for Ariane. It presents the nymph Thamesis (an allegorical representation of the river Thames) leaning on an urn, in consternation over the ‘mournful cryes’ of ‘some Neighb’ring shore’ and over weeping Augusta (an allegorical representation of London). Thamesis is attended by the nymphs Peace and Plenty, and by the four parts of the world (Asia, Africa, America and Europe), who, bringing gifts, promise never to forsake her shore. The Genius of Europe enters, disturbed by Augusta’s cries. He notes her penchant for causeless fears, and suggests that Europe alone has reason to lament: ‘The Nymphs of his fair Continent. /​Some Gyants do pursue’. Two heroes, one on sea and one on land (allegorical representations of Prince Rupert and the Duke of Monmouth respectively) have been sent to aid Europe and now return in triumph. Dances by ‘Sea-​gods and Tritons’ and ‘Warriors’ celebrate the heroes, at which point the Temple of Fame appears. The Genius now sees ‘both the great Divinities’  –​‘Turning to the King & Queen’, according to the marginal note in the play text –​whom all join in praising. These emblems are familiar from the pre-​Commonwealth masque; they appear in other entertainments for Charles’s court and finally in Albion and Albanius.36 The extravagant entertainments of 1674 and 1675 may have left the court entertainment budget somewhat depleted and it was not until 1677 that another, more modest, musical-​theatrical work was staged in the Hall theatre. Anne de la Roche-​Guilhen’s play with musical interludes, Rare en Tout, was performed before the King on his birthday. How much music it contained is unclear, but it begins with a partially sung allegorical prologue similar to that of Ariane and Calisto. The scene is the palace at Whitehall. La Thamise, leaning on her urn, is approached by L’Europe who asks aid in requesting the King to act as arbiter of peace among her princes. He alone of all kings rules over a happy people as Fame has made universally 295

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From Republic to Restoration known. La Thamise receives these obsequies assuring L’Europe that the King’s council will end war and bring peace. Music breaks out as a crowd of nations come from either side of the stage to sing and dance: ‘The sound of his [Charles’s] name fills the universe; together we sing in a thousand different places on land and sea that his virtue charms the whole world’.37 The play, punctuated by music between the acts, follows.38 John Verney described it as a French opera, ‘but most pitifully done, so ill that the king was aweary on’t  …  however the dances and voices were pretty well performed’.39 The Lord Chamberlain’s book records instructions for the court musicians to attend rehearsals as directed by La Roche, and Mr [James] Paisible, who must have written the music.40 The date of the court performance of John Blow’s Venus and Adonis is not known, but it is likely to have been early in 1682/​83, perhaps on 19 February, Shrove-​Monday.41 Here, for the first time at court, we have a through-​sung work in English, which Bruce Wood describes as standing ‘at the crossroads between masque and opera’.42 The performers included the former royal mistress, Mary Davis, and her daughter by the King, Lady Mary Tudor. It begins with a sung prologue but rather than an allegorical panegyric it pokes fun at the lasciviousness of the court. The fact that the prologue differs so much from those of other court works examined here may be a function of the position of its author. James Winn has offered Anne Finch, maid of honour to Mary of Modena, as a possible author of the anonymous word-​book.43 She may either have lacked ‘control over heavy-​duty allegorical machinery’, or may have found it, as a member of the court –​and not dependent on Charles for patronage in the same way as a professional writer –​not pertinent to her use.44 Venus and Adonis is modest in spectacle, but of high musical quality; it must have been a fraction of the cost of Calisto. The final work on this list, Dido and Aeneas, cannot be assigned to the period of Charles’s reign with absolute confidence. The only performances of which we can be certain were given at the Chelsea School for girls run by Josias Priest, the first taking place no later than the summer of 1688.45 The work, sung throughout, is closely modelled after Blow’s Venus and Adonis, though the prologue, the music of which is not extant, is allegorical rather than satirical. Andrew Pinnock has persuasively linked the allegory with the series of paintings executed by Verrio and his workshop decorating the state apartments at Windsor, and with the allegorical designs of Albion and Albanius and King Arthur.46 In fact, paintings in the two rooms Pinnock associates particularly with the Dido prologue, the King’s Drawing Room and the King’s Presence Chamber, also show a close affinity to the prologues we have already encountered. On the drawing room ceiling Charles is depicted ‘riding in a triumphal car, 296

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage drawn by horses of the sun, attended by Fame, Peace and the polite arts’, and in the presence room in a portrait unfurled by Mercury ‘who shows it to the four quarters of the world, introduced by Neptune; Fame declaring the glory of that prince … Over the canopy Justice … shewing the arms of Britain to Thames and his river nymphs, with the star of Venus, and this label, Sydus Carolinum; at the lower end of the chamber Venus in a sea car, drawn by Tritons and sea nymphs’.47 Certainly, the Dido prologue shows a family resemblance to other prologues investigated here; it can be credibly associated with Charles’s court, whether or not it received a performance there. What can we take from this survey of musical theatre at the court? One obvious conclusion is Charles was unwilling or unable –​most likely both –​to put the limited royal purse towards a regular diet of musical-​theatrical entertainment, much less through-​sung opera, for which he seems to have had no particular interest. Instead, he supported a mélange of musical-​theatrical pieces in a variety of forms, and in a rather desultory way. An interest in French-​style works is evident, no doubt influenced by experience of the French court during his exile, where, among other entertainments, he probably witnessed the Ballet de nuit in which Louis XIV danced.48 Charles left France well before native opera developed there, and there is no record of him attending Italian opera during his exile. His first experience of through-​sung opera was almost certainly in England in 1674; his reaction was to spend his money on Calisto. Charles liked music, especially, as Roger North and others report, if he could beat time to it, and so dancing and music for dance was important to him; all of the musical-​theatrical works he supported contained danced elements. Significantly, those musical-​theatrical works that Charles sanctioned for performance at court –​and for which he presumably paid –​begin with sung, or partially sung, prologues. All are allegorical in nature, and their purpose is to glorify the King (or in the case of Venus, to gently satirise his court). Furthermore, they draw upon, or at least inhabit, the same world as the allegorical paintings Charles commissioned for the state apartments at Windsor. When Charles paid for musical theatre, his choices conformed to the pattern set for musical drama in the seventeenth century, which Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker have identified as ‘an instrument and demonstration of authority’.49 Although it seems that Charles did not have any particular affinity for opera, he nevertheless seems to have encouraged false hopes in those for whom it held more interest. As early as October 1660, Giulio Gentileschi was granted royal privilege to establish Italian opera in London, a scheme which came to nothing. Throughout the 1660s another impresario, Thomas Killigrew, talked of mounting Italian opera, encouraging the King 297

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From Republic to Restoration to employ a group of Italian musicians towards this end. This he did, providing for nine musicians at the princely sum of £200 each per annum.50 Although they had a notable impact on music at the court, the performance of Italian opera was not part of it. Samuel Pepys’s testimony indicates that one of the Italians, Giovanni Baptista Draghi, had written an opera, part of which Pepys heard at Lord Brouncker’s in February 1666/​67.51 Yet despite Killigrew’s plans ‘to have some times of the year these Operas to be performed at the two present Theatres’, which Pepys learned from him on the same occasion, no Italian opera made it to the public or the court stage. In the following decade, Killigrew may have been involved in promoting French opera to the King. In early 1673/​74, perhaps with Killigrew’s aid, Robert Cambert and Louis Grabu (recently removed from his position as Master of the King’s Musick by the vicissitudes of the Test Act) collaborated in an attempt to establish a ‘Royall Academy of Musick’, probably similar to that in which Cambert had been involved in Paris before Lully’s intervention. The Ballet et musique was no doubt part of this move, as was the French opera Ariane, ou le Marriage de Bacchus staged at Drury Lane, the theatre of the King’s Company led by Killigrew, on 30 March 1674. The title page of the libretto, which was published in French and English versions, reads: An Opera, or, a Vocal Representation. First Compos’d by Monsieur P[ierre]. P[errin]. Now put into Musick by Monsieur Grabu, Master of His Majesties Musick. And Acted by the Royall Academy of Musick, At the Theatre-​Royal in Covent Garden.52

In fact, the music was almost certainly Cambert’s, since he had composed an opera to this text in France in 1659, marking the marriage of Louis XIV to Maria Theresa, the Infanta of Spain, though it was not performed. A new prologue was written to adapt the opera to the occasion of James’s marriage to Mary of Modena, and this may have been set by Grabu.53 Ariane was not included in the list of court musical-​theatre productions examined above, since there is no conclusive evidence to demonstrate how it was paid for. It seems likely that the production was a partnership between the court and the commerical theatre in which the latter met most of the costs of the production and Killigrew offered the rebuilt Theatre Royal and its infrastructure on favourable terms.54 Such an arrangement would have allowed Killigrew to realise his earlier plans to stage an opera, but without endangering the King’s Company finances. Circumstantial evidence is available to support this speculation. Grabu requisitioned scenery from the Hall Theatre in Whitehall for use in the production and the work was sung in French, probably by the same singers who performed in Ballet et musique.55 French dancers also participated; they became embroiled in a contract 298

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage dispute with Killigrew and the King’s Theatre that may have been connected to their work in Ariane.56 The work’s allegorical prologue in praise of Charles and celebrating James and Mary’s wedding is unambiguous royal panegyric; it repays careful consideration, since it sets a pattern followed in prologues for the court works we have already explored. The scene is a ‘prospect of Thamise opposite to London’. The river nymph Thamis sings ‘Cupid himself raignes in this Isle: /​E’r since, Venus resol’vd to quit /​Her Native Throune, to come dwel in it. /​Fair Albion now will new Cythera prove, /​And must be call’d, The sweet Island of Love’. She is approached by the nymphs of the Tyber and Seine. The former praises Charles for establishing his power over the seas, thereby welcoming commerce and the arts to his land. The Seine praises the exploits of Thamis’s sons, to whom the ocean submits, while on land the famous Duke [Monmouth] ‘Maestrickt-​ Wals subdues’. Thamis praises her heroes; Tyber and Seine join her. The Nymph of the Po enters, bringing her Princess [Mary of Modena] to join ‘thy Great Heroe’ [James]. All four join voices to move ‘These Royal Eares to mind our tender Love’. It is difficult to imagine a work such as this being undertaken solely at the risk of the King’s Company, whatever Killigrew’s personal interest in bringing opera to the English stage might have been. A royal panegyric, celebrating a marriage of Catholic co-​religionists James and Mary Modena  –​creating the potential (eventually realised) for a Catholic heir to the throne –​sung in French, hardly looks like the stuff of box-​office gold. More likely the evidence of loaned scenery, and the probable loan of court-​employed French singers, is the sign of court subsidy, of which we might imagine there was significantly more. A single performance of the work on 30 March can be verified, though there may have been others. Giovanni Salvetti, a Florentine agent in London reported on 4 May 1674 (24 April, O.S.) ‘their Majesties have spent the greater part of the present week of Easter in devotions, in seeing English comedies or hearing the French operas performed to music. These last are a novelty in this realm and have aroused everyone’s curiosity to see them’.57 A letter from the Lord Chamberlain’s department dated 27 April demanded from Killigrew the return of those scenes originally requisitioned by Grabu.58 Cambert, Grabu and possibly Killigrew may have hoped that Ariane would encourage the establishment of the Royal Academy mooted on the title page of the libretto. If so, their hopes were misplaced, for nothing more is heard of it. One further attempt to develop an operatic endeavour under royal auspices was made in 1683. In April, Blow and Staggins petitioned the King ‘for the creating an Academy or Opera of Musick, & performing or causing to be performed therein their Musicall compositions’.59 This petition, made just a few months after the likely date on which Venus and Adonis was staged at court, may have been an attempt to capitalise on a perceived 299

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From Republic to Restoration interest on Charles’s part with regard to opera. Like the Italian and French schemes before, however, it came to nothing. It is difficult to view these operatic endeavours in isolation; it must be concluded either that each was led by different sets of over-​optimistic individuals hoping to interest the King in their personal operatic enthusiasms, or that Charles had a tendency to encourage with fine words that he had no intention of supporting with cold, hard cash. Such a conclusion is consistent with assessments of the King’s character, both by contemporaries and later historians. Ronald Hutton, for instance, notes Charles’s ability ‘to make every individual whom he encountered feel to be of special interest to him’. At the same time ‘he fled from personal unpleasantness’ and had a ‘habit of agreeing to importunities rather than to have the bother of refusing them. … His classic way of ruling, especially in foreign affairs, was to have different lines of policy running at once, conceived with different groups of advisers and often mutually contradictory’.60 These failed operatic schemes may have suffered in part from just such an approach on Charles’s part.

Musical-​theatrical productions in the commercial theatres, 1660–​85

T

he list of the large-​scale musical-​theatrical productions on the public stage during Charles II’s reign is even shorter than the list of court productions (Table 14.2). It has been argued that Ariane inspired a response by Thomas Betterton and the Duke’s Company at Dorset Garden in the form of The Tempest and Psyche. Both are dramatic operas, that is, plays intermixed with significant amounts of music, dance and elaborate scenery. The approach to The Tempest established what was to become the more usual plan for dramatic operas: it was cut and adapted to receive music and spectacle. In contrast, Thomas Shadwell’s Psyche was newly written with music and spectacle conceived as crucial components from the outset. These responses are indirect in their relationship to Ariane since both are in English, and neither is sung throughout. The Duke’s Company would have been in no position to mount a through-​sung French opera without using the same singers who performed Ariane, or importing another set from France. It seems that Psyche had been in development from at least 1673, but was not ready to be staged at the point when the Duke’s Company wished to answer Ariane. Instead, The Tempest was the hastily prepared response; Psyche was staged in the following season. The Duke’s Company could have responded with a through-​sung English opera. Two such works had been successfully mounted in the Commonwealth period by William Davenant: The Siege of Rhodes (1656) and The History of Sir 300

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Table 14.2.  Large-​scale musical-​theatrical productions in the commercial theatres, 1660–​85 Ariane Tempest Psyche Albion and Albanius

Through-​sung opera Dramatic opera Dramatic opera Through-​sung opera

1674 1674 1675 1685

Francis Drake (1659).61 Neither, however, was seen as an appropriate rejoinder to Ariane. The reasons lie in their nature and the context of their origins. Davenant turned to opera in 1656 in part to evade Commonwealth restrictions on dramatic representations.62 For a variety of reasons, Commonwealth censors were willing to tolerate these ‘moral representations’ when delivered wholly or significantly through music. The exigencies of the performance of The Siege of Rhodes, given initially at Rutland House, limited the cast to seven singers. The History of Sir Francis Drake, which was offered at the more commodious Cockpit theatre, may have been somewhat grander, but neither production would have matched the musical, choreographic or scenic splendour of Ariane. In terms of subject matter, they likewise failed to meet the usual expectations of opera, that is, stories based on mythological or classical themes. The exigencies of theatrical and musical reorganisation occasioned by the Restoration put an end to further through-​sung experiments. Davenant revived The Siege of Rhodes in 1661 using speaking actors rather than singers.63 Of the singers listed in the 1656 play text, all but Catherine Coleman were employed in the court music in 1661, and therefore were presumably not available for work in the theatre. Moreover, Davenant, in organising the Duke’s Company, could ill-​afford distractions from his primary mission of staging plays. Without royal encouragement in the early years of the Restoration, commercial opera was simply not possible. Despite the rather ad hoc approach taken to The Tempest in 1674 it was immensely successful. John Downes records that ‘not any succeeding Opera got more money’.64 Furthermore, it benefited from limited royal patronage in the form of singers borrowed from the Chapel Royal. Psyche was successful, too: The long expected Opera of Psyche cam forth in all her Ornaments; new Scenes, new Machines, new Cloaths, new French Dances: This Opera was splendidly set out, especially in Scenes; the Charge of which amounted to above 800l. It had a Continuance of Performance of about 8 Days together, it prov’d very Beneficial to the Company; yet the Tempest got them more Money.65

The Company was forced into charging high ticket prices for Psyche because of its expense: triple prices for the first performance, and probably double 301

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From Republic to Restoration after that.66 Charles attended, paying for the first performance ‘the highest price he ever paid for theatregoing’.67 Downes’s emphasis on profit is salient. He approaches Purcell’s later dramatic operas with the same hard-​ nosed attention to the bottom line. These works had to make their way without any subsidy. Notably, they do not peddle any royal propaganda. Nothing on the scale of Psyche was attempted subsequently by the Duke’s Company. Judith Milhous suggests that a combination of revivals of The Tempest and Psyche, theatrical hard times brought on by the Popish Plot and succession crises, and the failure in 1682 of the King’s Company, forcing its merger with the Duke’s Company, militating against any further spectacular musical-​theatrical productions.68 Only after the United Company found its feet in 1683 was a new large-​scale work considered. At this same point, Charles II had largely overcome his opponents, and could look forward to political and financial stability. He seems to have been ready to turn his attention again to a musical-​theatrical work. The convergence of these two interests was to result in the production of Albion and Albanius. A brief consideration of the progress of opera in France is warranted here. From 1659, experiments in through-​sung theatrical works in French met with interest, but only royal patronage provided a model for lasting success. The first important through-​sung works produced under royal privilege were composed by Robert Cambert:  Pomone of 1671 to a text by Pierre Perrin and Les peines et les plaisirs de l’amour of 1672 by Gabriel Gilbert. The former was performed for upwards of six months, and the latter was poised for similar success when financial mismanagement on Perrin’s part compromised the venture, allowing Lully to wrest the royal patent for opera from him.69 With no royal support apart from the disputed privilege, Lully went into partnership with the architect and set designer Carlo Vigarani in 1672 to produce a pastiche drawing together scenes from several comédies-​ballets, a successful venture, which they followed with a newly composed work, Cadmus et Hermione in mid-​April 1673. The latter, described as a tragédie en musique, was extremely popular; Louis XIV not only came to see the work, he subsequently gave Lully the right to perform operas free of charge at the Palais Royal in Paris. For the next ten years the King provided Lully with significant support for the opera, while Lully enforced his patent to prohibit theatrical productions with dancing, or those that used more than two voices and six violins without his permission. To curb the criticism that ensued, the King had Lully’s operas performed first at court, with the rehearsals supported by the royal treasury. In addition, the set designs and some of the costumes for the royal performances were gifted to Lully and Vigarani for use in revivals at the Palais Royal.70 Over time Lully used the prestige of his productions to increase prices at the Palais Royal. He also 302

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage gained royalties for the sale of librettos and printed scores of his operas thanks to another royal privilege. Lully produced new operas regularly until his death in 1687. By this time, opera was well established in Paris, and the Académie Royale de Musique survived into the next century despite a marked decline under the direction of Lully’s son-​in-​law. This is a story rather different from that in England. Lully’s Machiavellian consolidation of power  –​which is not to deny his undoubted skill in dramatic music –​combined with a French monarch with the money and interest to support opera. Each tragédie en musique began with an allegorical prelude in praise of Louis XIV, and the grandeur of the productions, which boasted elaborate costumes, scenic display and dancing, was a lavish form of royal propaganda. The French model awakened ambitions in London. On 14 August 1683, the Newdigate Newsletter reported that ‘the managers of ye Kings Theatre intend wth in short time to pforme [sic] an Opera in like manner of yt of ffrance. Mr Betterton wth other Actrs are gone over to fetch ye designe’.71 Just over a month later, the Duke of York received a letter from Lord Preston, English Envoy Extraordinary to the French court: Mr Betterton coming hither  …  by his Majestyes command to endeavour to carry over the opera & finding that impracticable, did treat with Monsr Grabue to go over with him to endeavour to represent something at least like an Opera in England for his Majestyes diversion. He hath also assured him of a pension from the House, & finds him very willing and ready to go over. He desireth only his Majestyes protection when he is there, and what encouragement his Majesty shall be pleased to give him if he finds that he deserves it.72

Both the King and the theatre company took a part in instigating the project. Charles seems to have had in mind something like Ariane of 1674, a through-​sung opera in French, which was executed by French singers. Betterton instead brought back Grabu, who was able to write opera in the French style.73 Dryden was given the task of providing a libretto. On 1 January 1685, Edward Bedingfield reported to the Countess of Rutland: We are in expectation of an opera composed by Mr. Dryden, and set by Grabuche, and so well performed at the repetition that has been made before his Majesty at the Duchess of Portsmouth’s, pleaseth mightily, but the rates proposed will not take soe well, for they have set the boxes at a guyny a place, and the Pitt at halfe. They advance 4000l. on the opera, and therefore must tax high to reimburse themselves.74

The expense and the semi-​public rehearsals recall the court production of Calisto. The opera’s subject is an allegorical retelling of the trials of Charles’s 303

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From Republic to Restoration kingship, in which Albion represents Charles, and Albanius his brother James. Albion and Albanius draws clearly upon earlier allegorical prologues, including roles for Thamesis, Augusta, and Fame, and dances for Peace and Plenty and the ‘Four parts of the world’.75 Its emphasis on royal propaganda far eclipses Lully’s and Quinault’s operas, where only the prologue was direct royal panegyric; the subsequent five acts presented a separate drama. In contrast, Dryden’s libretto is a three-​act, topical prologue. Such undisguised royal panegyric seems a poor prospect for commercial success. Judith Milhous, in examining the accounts of the United Company for a ten-​year period beginning in 1682, found that production costs totalled £85,394: roughly £8,500 a year.76 If Bedingfield’s letter is correct, Albion and Albanius represented about half of a full year’s budget. Milhous shows that a run of approximately twenty-​one days playing to full houses, with quadruple charges for the first day, lowered to double charges for subsequent days, would have been required for the production to cover its costs.77 Even if the opera had opened in February 1685, as originally planned, expectations of such a run would have been optimistic. The eventual run of performances fell far short of meeting the cost of the production, as John Downes reports: ‘[it was] perform’d on a very Unlucky Day, being the Day of the Duke of Monmouth, Landed in the West: The Nation being in great Consternation, it was perform’d but Six times, which not Answering half the Charge they were at, Involv’d the Company very much in Debt.’78 Unless we imagine that Betterton, with seventeen years of managerial experience in the London theatres, hoped to make £4000 on this production, we must conclude that he expected a significant subvention from the Crown, predicated on the style and subject matter of the opera, and on the King’s initial involvement in the project. When Charles died before the opera reached the stage, whatever financial support he might have promised to Betterton and the United Company evaporated. On succeeding to the throne, James set about reorganising the court finances, including, for instance, repaying several hundreds of pounds of arrears in Grabu’s salary from the 1670s, but he did not see fit to bail out the United Company over their opera.79 He attended the first performance in June, paying double rather than the quadruple prices Bedingfield had anticipated.80 Although Grabu dedicated the published score of the opera to James, the composer had to fund it by subscription; James may have considered the steps he took to ensure that Grabu was paid arrears for his work in the court music of the previous reign a suitable acknowledgement of the dedication of the opera. I draw two sets of conclusions from this evidence, one related to Albion and Albanius, and the other more generally to opera in the Restoration period. With regard to the first: Albion and Albanius was envisioned as a joint venture between the court and the public theatre from the outset. 304

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Betterton could never have expected an opera of this expense to pay its own way, and the evidence of subject matter shows the unmistakable fingerprint of the court. The financial failure of the opera was not a commercial failure –​since commercial success would not have been anticipated –​but a failure of the United Company to sufficiently tie down the Crown to its commitments; on Charles’s death, James was able to ignore the Company’s outlay and losses. It cannot be said that Albion and Albanius failed to generate popular momentum for regular performances of through-​sung opera in England, since no such achievement was likely to have been expected of it. It seems to have been planned as a singular, or at best, a once-​in-​a-​great-​ while sort of project. This latter point is relevant to a wider understanding of opera in Restoration England. The commercial theatre could not make money on through-​sung opera. There can be little surprise about that, since the genre did not flourish without patronage in Italy or France either.81 The difference in England was that the Crown was unwilling to pay for opera on a regular basis. Neither did Charles see fit to support other large-​scale musical-​theatrical works with regularity, as demonstrated by the erratic attention he gave to such entertainments during his reign. This apparently did not preclude him from encouraging persons with a predilection for opera to make plans, or even to layout significant sums of money for it. English composers and dramatists did not fail to develop through-​sung opera because they were not able, but rather because there was no financial support for it. Instead, a musical-​theatrical genre that delivered much of the thrill of through-​sung opera in a form that could pay its way on the stage was created:  dramatic opera. Thomas Betterton was the prime mover in its development. Richard Luckett sees Dryden’s wry comment in the prologue to King Arthur on the dearth of patronage –​spoken by Betterton –​ as a boast of what the United Company could achieve ‘without royal or aristocratic bounty’.82 Large-​scale musical-​theatrical works in Restoration England were in large part shaped by the exigencies of finance. The success of dramatic opera was a triumph of the ingenuity of the English stage; the lack of through-​sung opera was a failure of patronage.

Notes 1 Peter Anthony Motteux, Gentleman’s Journal (January 1692), 5. 2 Edward Dent, Foundations of English Opera (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1928; repr. New York: Da Capo, 1965), p. 2. 3 Richard Luckett, ‘Exotic but Rational Entertainment: The English Dramatic Operas’, in English Drama: Form and Development. Essays in Honor of Muriel Clare Bradbrook, ed. by Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 123–​41.

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From Republic to Restoration 4 Curtis A. Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 3. 5 Judith Milhous, ‘Opera Finances in London, 1674–​ 1738’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 37 (1984), 567–​92 (p. 571). 6 Robert D. Hume, ‘The Sponsorship of Opera in London, 1704–​1720’, Modern Philology, 85 (1988), 420–​32 (p. 420). 7 Dent, Foundations of English Opera, p.  165; Dennis Arundell, The Critic at the Opera (London: Ernest Benn, 1957), p. 136. 8 ‘Commentary’ to Albion and Albanius in The Works of John Dryden, Volume XV, ed. by Earl Miner, George R. Guffey and Franklin B. Zimmerman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976); Price, Henry Purcell and the London Stage, pp. 265–​70. 9 This sum represented around a quarter of the United Company’s production budget for a full season. Based on the percentage increase of the retail price index, £2000 in 1685 would be equivalent to £272,600 in 2014. Lawrence H.  Officer and Samuel H. Williamson, ‘Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present’, MeasuringWorth (2014) www.measuringworth.com/​m/​calculators/​ ukcompare [accessed 20 August 2015]. For the difficulties with historical equivalents of the value of money, see Robert Hume, ‘The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–​ 1740’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 487–​533 (pp. 490–​92). 10 Plays, which normally included incidental music, have been excluded from consideration as musical-​theatrical works, apart from cases in which a masque has been interpolated between the acts, as in performances of Pompey the Great and Horace (see below). For the theatre at Whitehall, see Eleanore Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage (1660–​ 1702) with a Particular Account of the Production of ‘Calisto’ (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1932). 11 Sandra Tuppen, ‘Shrovetide Dancing: Balls and Masques at Whitehall under Charles II’, The Court Historian: The International Journal of Court Studies, 15 (2010), 157–​69. 12 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, pp. 135–​39. 13 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. by E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), iii, 357, 397, 476. 14 Peter Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540–​1690, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 359–​66. 15 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 139. 16 Roger North on Music, ed. by John Wilson (London: Novello, 1959), p. 300. 17 Tuppen, ‘Shrovetide Dancing’, 166–​69. National Library of Scotland, MS 5777. See also Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, pp. 364–​65. 18 Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, p. 360. 19 Peter Walls, Music in the English Courtly Masque (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 265, 277–​79. 20 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 136. 21 Ibid., p. 137. 22 Ibid., p. 139. 23 John Buttrey, ‘New light on Robert Cambert in London, and his “Ballet et Musique” ’, Early Music, 23 (1995), 198–​220. 24 Buttrey, ‘New Light on Robert Cambert in London’, 210. An abridged text with translation is provided on pp. 213–​20. 25 Ibid., 211–​12. 26 Pierre Danchin, ‘The Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music in 1674 and Pierre Perrin’s Ariane’, Theatre Survey, 25 (1984), 55–​67 (p. 56). 27 Buttrey, ‘New light on Robert Cambert in London’, 211–​12. 28 Edwin P. Grobe, ‘S. Bre., French Librettist at the Court of Charles II’, Theatre Notebook, 9 (1954), 20–​21. Nothing is known about Cottereau apart from his appointment as Italian musician in ordinary to the Private Musick, dated 9 July 1670. Biographical Dictionary of English Court Musicians (BDECM), ed. by Andrew Ashbee and David

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Restoration opera and the failure of patronage Lasocki, assisted by Peter Holman and Fiona Kisby, 2 vols (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), i, 308. 29 Grobe argued for the first week of February and Danchin argued for the last week of January. 30 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 94. 31 Ibid., p. 111, quoted at p. 252. 32 Evelyn, Diary, iv, 30. 33 Records of English Court Music [RECM], comp. by Andrew Ashbee, 9 vols (Snodland and Aldershot, 1986–​96), i, 140. 34 Tuppen, ‘Shrovetide Dancing’, 165–​66; Andrew Walkling, ‘Masque and Politics at the Restoration Court: John Crowne’s “Calisto” ’, Early Music, 24 (1996), 27–​62. 35 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, p. 226. 36 Thamesis, for instance, appears in Jonson’s The Masque of Beauty and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s Masque of the Inner-​Temple and Gray’s Inn. 37 ‘Que le bruit de son Nom remplisse l’Univers, /​Unissons nous sur la Terre & sur l’Onde, /​Chantons en mille endroits divers, /​Que sa Vertu doit charmer tout le monde’. 38 For a synopsis of the play, see Spire Pitou, ‘A Forgotten Play:  La Roche-​Guilhen’s Rare en Tout (1677)’, Modern Language Notes, 72.5 (1957), 357–​59. 39 Boswell, The Restoration Court Stage, pp. 122–​23. 40 Ibid., p. 99. Paisible may have come to England with Cambert, and probably performed in Ballet et musique and Ariane, as he certainly did in Calisto (see BDECM, II, 852–​66). 41 Tuppen, ‘Shrovetide Dancing’, 168–​69. 42 John Blow, Venus and Adonis, ed. by Bruce Wood, Purcell Society Companion Series, 2 (London: Stainer & Bell, 2008), ix. 43 James A. Winn, ‘ “A Versifying Maid of Honour”: Anne Finch and the Libretto for Venus and Adonis’, Review of English Studies, 59 (2008), 67–​85. 44 Andrew Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina: A Royal Witness to the Court Origin of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 40 (2012), 265–​78 (p. 276). 45 Bryan White, ‘Letter from Aleppo: Dating the Chelsea School Performance of Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 37 (2009), 417–​28. 46 Pinnock, ‘Deus ex machina’, 265–​78. 47 Ibid., 267–​68. 48 Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers, p. 289. 49 Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function of Seventeenth-​Century Opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 209–​96. 50 Margaret Mabbett, ‘Italian Musicians in Restoration England (1660–​90)’, Music & Letters, 67 (1986), 237–​47. 51 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1970–​83), viii, 54–​55. 52 Ariadne, or, The Marriage of Bacchus an Opera (Printed by Tho. Newcombe, 1673/​4). 53 Danchin, ‘The Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music in 1674 and Pierre Perrin’s Ariane’, and Christina Bashford, ‘Perrin and Cambert’s Ariane, ou le Mariage de Bacchus Re-​examined’, Music & Letters, 72 (1991), 1–​26. 54 Andrew Walkling suggests that one factor in staging the work at the Theatre Royal was a mark of gratitude from the King’s Company for Charles’s financial support in rebuilding the theatre following a fire in 1672, see ‘ “Big with New Events and some Unheard Success”: Absolutism and Creativity at the Restoration Court’ in Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-​Century England, ed. by Rebecca Herissone and Alan Howard (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 15–​34 (p. 19). 55 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–​1900, vol. 1:  Restoration Drama, 4th edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 354–​55. 56 Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–​1900, vol. 1, p. 355. 57 Danchin, ‘The Foundation of the Royal Academy of Music’, p. 61.

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From Republic to Restoration 58 Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–​1900, vol. 1, p. 355. 59 Bruce Wood and Andrew Pinnock, ‘ “Unscarr’d by turning times”?:  The Dating of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’, Early Music, 20 (1992), 372–​90 (p. 387). 60 Ronald Hutton, Charles the Second:  King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 448, 454. 61 Davenant’s related experiments, The First Dayes Entertainment at Rutland House (1656) and The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), contained significant passages of music, but were not through-​sung. 62 See Janet Clare, Drama of the English Republic, 1649–​1660 (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 29–​35, 185–​87. 63 John Protheroe, ‘Not so much an Opera … a Restoration Problem Examined’, Musical Times, 106 (1965), 666–​68. 64 John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708), pp. 34–​35. 65 Ibid., pp. 35–​36. 66 Judith Milhous, ‘The Multimedia Spectacular on the Restoration Stage’ in British Theatre and the Other Arts, 1660–​1800, ed. by Shirley Strum Kenny (London: Associated University Presses, 1984), pp. 41–​66 (p. 48). 67 Ibid., p. 48. 68 Ibid., p. 50. 69 Christina Bashford, ‘Cambert, Robert’, in Oxford Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com [accessed 16 December 2013]. 70 Jérôme de la Gorce, ‘Lully, J. B.’, in Oxford Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com [accessed 16 December 2013]. 71 J.  H. Wilson, ‘Theatre Notes from the Newdigate Newsletters’, Theatre Notebook, 15 (1961), 82. For a more detailed discussion of the origins and performance history of the work see Louis Grabu, Albion and Albanius, ed. by B. White, Purcell Society Companion Series, 1 (London: Stainer & Bell, 2007), xi-​xix. 72 Letter of 22 September 1683: London, British Library, Add MS 63759, p. 91. 73 Grabu, owing to severe financial hardship, had left England for France in the spring of 1679. For Grabu’s knowledge of French opera, see B. White, ‘Grabu’s Albion and Albanius and the Operas of Lully:  “… Acquainted with all the Performances of the French Opera’s” ’, Early Music, 30 (2002), 410–​27. 74 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Twelfth Report, Appendix, Rutland MSS., Part V, ii (London, 1889), 85. 75 Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden’s Albion and Albanius:  The Apotheosis of Charles II’, in The  Court Masque, ed. by David Lindley (Manchester:  Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 169–​83. 76 Milhous, ‘The Multimedia Spectacular’, p. 55. 77 Ibid., p. 55. 78 Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 40. 79 Between December 1686 and April 1687 Grabu received £450 in pay arrears (RECM, II, 211). 80 Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–​1900, vol. 1, p. 350. 81 Bianconi and Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political Function’ (in particular, pp. 227, 239, 241). 82 Luckett, ‘Exotic but Rational Entertainment, p. 134.

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Chapter 15

‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’: republicanism, exclusion, and the name of king in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus Lisanna Calvi

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s Odai Johnson had it in an article on Nahum Tate’s Richard the Second, ‘[t]‌here’s little cryptic about Lee’s treatment of the expulsion of tyrants’.1 Indeed, Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus: Father of His Country, first performed in 1680, exclusively revolves around the ousting of Rome’s last king, Tarquinius the Proud, and the rise of a republican regime, led by Lucius Junius Brutus. The premiere of Lee’s new play was reportedly well received by the audience but not by the Lord Chamberlain, and Brutus’s run was soon cancelled. A closer look at the play reveals that Lee’s depiction of a republican hero, Brutus, takes some ambiguous turns and discursive clashes, which are worth investigating. Throughout the play, Brutus is the mouthpiece of anti-​monarchical and libertarian issues and his public speeches even echo the republican discourse of the 1650s, although at the same time, those ideals become distorted and maimed by his actions and motives. (Mis)guided by some devastating ambition, which overrides even familial bonds and eventually transforms him into a tyrannical father, Brutus appears to be directed by egotism and a thirst for absolute power. This conflicting portrayal not only adds to the dramatic quality of the play, it also blurs the boundaries of what was ultimately held to be a traditional ‘tale of republican heroism’.2 But what was the political landscape in which the play made its appearance? Following Titus Oates’s ‘popish forgeries’,3 the Catholic Duke of York’s suitability to the throne was called sharply into question in parliamentary debates. On 23rd December 1680, the Earl of Shaftesbury delivered a speech in the Lords strongly supporting the Duke’s exclusion from succession. Shaftesbury pronounced especially harsh words against the court’s ‘hateful’ religious inclinations:  ‘For there must be (in plain English) My Lords, a change; We must neither have a Popish Wife, nor Popish Favourite, nor Popish Mistriss, nor Popish Counsellor at Court, or any new Convert’.4 This attack did not come unannounced, as it were, for the preceding two 309

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From Republic to Restoration years had seen a heated parliamentary debate over the succession, later known as the Exclusion Crisis, during which a series of proposals for dealing with the thorny question of a Catholic heir apparent were discussed and voted upon, calling into question the very essence of monarchical rule based on dynastic right. In this context, the production of a play that not only celebrated the birth of a republic but also fiercely satirised Catholicism and its dogmas might have seemed imprudent, but this did not stop Nathaniel Lee from having his Lucius Junius Brutus staged at Dorset Garden Theatre in early December 1680. Oedipus, Lee’s and Dryden’s joint dramatic effort, had triumphed the year before, largely due to its spectacular stage effects, which included ‘Charm! Song! and Show! a Murder and a Ghost!’.5 Lee gave his new play to the same Duke’s Company and indeed on its opening night Brutus, whose title role was played by the most prominent actor of the day, Thomas Betterton, was well received and ran for several days ‘with great applause’6 before the Lord Chamberlain prohibited it out of ‘very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government’.7 The ban proved to be a permanent one and the play was never brought back on stage, although commentators did not cease to consider it praiseworthy. In his An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), Gerard Langbaine commends Lee’s drama, noting that there are ‘few plays that I know, being writ with more Manly Spirit, Force, and Vigour’;8 later, in 1719, Jacob Giles held it to be Lee’s masterpiece:  ‘He writ Eleven Plays, and has shewn a Master-​piece in Lucius Junius Brutus, which scarce any of his Contemporaries equall’d, and none has excell’d’.9 In terms of the play’s political expression, it is not difficult to understand the reasons that led to its suppression. In Act I, Brutus explicitly refers to a ‘plot upon the court’:  [Enter Fabritius, with courtiers] … Brutus.  Hark you, gentlemen, if you would but be secret now, I could unfold such a business. My life on’t, a very plot upon the court. Fabritius.  Out with it. We swear secrecy. Brutus.  Why thus then. Tomorrow Tullia goes to the camp, and I being master of the household have commanded to sweep the court of all its furniture and send packing to the wars. Panders, sycophants, upstart rogues; fine knaves and surly rascals; flatterers, easy, supple, cringing, passing, smiling villains. All, all to the wars. Fabritius.  By Mars, I do not like this plot. Brutus.  Why, is it not a plot, a plot upon yourselves, your persons, families, and your relations; even to your wives, mothers, sisters, all your kindred? (I.140–​89) 310

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ As Alan Marshall discusses in this volume, the Restoration regime lived in anticipation and fear of plots;10 moreover, Brutus’s allusion to plotting in a play performed only two years after the Popish Plot hysteria was especially provocative. The Tarquins and their followers are described as a bunch of minions, scoundrels and prostitutes: an obviously far from flattering depiction of a royal court and also distantly echoing the contemporary nonconformist opinion that read the Popish Plot as God’s scourge against the moral laxity of Charles II’s court. This might have sounded greatly offensive to aristocratic (Tory) theatregoers, whereas it could at the same time have pleased a Whig audience. However, at this stage Brutus is still hiding behind a veil of feigned idiocy, and his words could have passed for an indirect reference to the perjured and therefore discredited revelations of Titus Oates and his accomplices. This again places the drama on the verge of political ambiguity, in that it could also voice a Tory ‘anti-​Oates’ standpoint. Yet this is not the only potentially offensive allusion to the court’s current troubles. Later in the play, the audience is presented with a macabre ritual performed by priests in the Fecialian gardens, possibly located on the Capitoline Hill:11 The scene draws, showing the sacrifice: one burning and another crucified; the Priests coming forward with goblets in their hands, filled with human blood. (IV.103, s.d.) Visual horror is reinforced by the asides of Vinditius, a grotesque rabble-​ rousing figure, who overlooks the ghastly scene from a nearby slit:12 Vinditius. [from window] O the gods! What, burn a man alive! O cannibals, hell-​ hounds! Eat one man and drink another!  …  What, drink a man’s blood! Roast him and eat him alive! A  whole man roasted! … No; if a man can’t go to heaven unless your priests eat him and drink him and roast him alive, I’ll be for the broad way, and the devil shall have me at a venture. (IV.120–​29) This blunt description directly hints at the propagandistic accusation of cannibalism with which Catholics were commonly charged, while the scene itself parodies the liturgy of the Eucharist by blasphemously re-​ enacting the dogma of transubstantiation. Likewise, the priests’ cruelty is heavily resonant of the malice and brutality anti-​popish pamphlets attributed to the Jesuits. In the anonymous pamphlet The Tears of Rome (1680), it is the Devil himself who bestows on the Jesuits the power to unleash slaughter and destruction on earth: I [the Devil] will part with my Authority, and release unto them the power I have of doing any mischief; I declare publickly, that I do resigne my Devilship unto the Jesuits, give them power to Hurt, Kill, undo whatever they please upon

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From Republic to Restoration Earth, Sea, Air and Hell; and I do engage my honour, in the word of an honest Devil, that I will never recal this Priviledge.13

But these are just peripheral details; the truly problematic issue at stake for the censor was of course the fact that Lee’s play dramatised the ousting of a royal family and the establishment of a republican regime, which was more than enough to stir the fear of a new ‘Commonwealth without a king’. As John Loftis points out, ‘the celebration of constitutionalism and the denunciation of royal tyranny … is inherent in the subject’;14 similarly, Douglas Canfield believes that ‘the conflict is resolved in favor of republicanism’.15 Among other scholars, Susan Owen and Laura Brown share this interpretative viewpoint,16 which reads Lucius Junius Brutus as a ‘Whiggish play’.17 But was it really so? Lee looked back at ancient Rome as a political paradigm to depict a moment of crisis and transition, but, at least from a Tory point of view, the late 1670s were not to bring about any constitutional revision or shift, let alone a republican one.18 Sextus’s rape of the chaste Lucrece (the event after which the drama begins) is the outrage that acts as justification for liberating Rome from Tarquinian debauchery and wickedness. This is how Brutus expounds his plan to his son, Titus, revealing early his powerful rhetorical skills, which will later pave his way to the consulship: Brutus.  … now’s the time, To shake the building of the tyrant down. As from night’s womb the glorious day breaks forth, And seems to kindle from the setting stars, So from the blackness of young Tarquin’s crime And furnace of his lust, the virtuous soul Of Junius Brutus catches bright occasion. I see the pillars of his kingdom totter. The rape of Lucrece is the midnight lantern That lights my genius down to the foundation. Leave me to work, my Titus, O my son; For from this spark a lightning shall arise That must ere night purge all the Roman air, And then the thunder of his ruin follows. (I.266–​79) His speech plays upon the antithesis between light and darkness, and Tarquin’s defeat appears as inevitable as night surrendering to daylight, even though this is no painless course. The break of day is described as labour with daylight emerging ‘from night’s womb’, an allusion to Lucrece’s violated one. As Warren Chernaik points out in his commentary to the play, ‘the rape of a defenseless woman by an absolute monarch is a powerful

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ metaphor for the forcible suppression of liberty, the dangers of arbitrary rule’.19 The time for revenge and the overthrow of tyrannical rule has finally come. Later, in the Forum, Brutus delivers an impassioned speech, which roughly follows the configuration of a classical oration, in order to gain both aristocratic and popular support. Addressing ‘Patricians, people, friends, and Romans all’ (II.139) and calling their attention to Lucrece’s body lying in state in the Forum and as well as to the statues of Romolus and Numa, the fathers of the country, Brutus lists the royal family’s black deeds. Provocatively, he appeals to the bystanders by rhetorically calling into question their past dignity: Brutus.  … O, Rome! O, glory! What are you now? What has the tyrant made you? The slaves, the beasts, the asses of the earth, … Yoked you like bulls, his very jades for luggage, Drove you with scourges down to dig in quarries, To cleanse his sinks, the scavengers o’ th’ court; … O all the gods! What are you Romans? Ha! If this be true, why have you been so backward? O sluggish souls! O fall of former glory That would not rouse unless a woman waked you! (II.194–​208) He ultimately seals his peroratio with an emotional entreaty for the revenge of Lucrece’s death, employing a prosopographic depiction of her ghost hovering over those assembled and urging them to battle: Brutus.  Behold she comes and calls you to revenge her; Her spirit hovers in the air and cries ‘To arms, to arms; drive, drive the Tarquins out.’ Behold this dagger taken from her wound, She bids you fix this trophy on your standard, This poniard which she stabbed into her heart, And bear her body in your battle’s front. (I.209–​15) This display of stage eloquence was undoubtedly played to good effect by Betterton and provides evidence of Lee’s admiration for and debt to Shakespeare’s Roman plays, especially Julius Caesar. Yet, the substance of Brutus’s argumentation against Tarquin is resoundingly Miltonic and suggestively republican. Brutus assumes  –​as John Milton did  –​that royal power is based upon an original covenant between the people and a worthy individual who, ‘for the eminence of his wisdom’ may be ‘call’d

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From Republic to Restoration a King’.20 This assumption is illustrated in Milton’s The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, written in 1649 during Charles I’s trial (as indicated by an internal reference to ‘the proceedings now in Parliament against the King’)21 and published just two weeks after the King’s execution. The purpose and justification of Milton’s treatise is plainly illustrated in its long subtitle that reads: ‘it is lawfull, and had been held so through all ages, for any, to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King and after due conviction to depose, and put him to death’.22 Milton declares that a king receives Allegeance from the people, that is to say, bond or Covnant to obey them in execution of those Lawes which they the people had themselves made, or assented to. And this ofttimes with express warning, that if the King or Magistrate prov’d unfaithfull to his trust, the people would be disingag’d.23

A ruler who casts off his subjects, breaching that original pledge, is therefore liable to be deposed, and this is exactly what Brutus is asking for Tarquin who has been: Invading fundamental right and justice, Breaking the ancient customs, statutes, laws, With positive power and arbitrary lust; (I.179–​81) Indeed, the accusations against Tarquin recall Milton’s charges against Charles I  as expounded in his Eikonoclastes, a pamphlet written as a response to the royal Eikon Basilike. Questioning the sixth meditation of Eikon Basilike, in which King Charles objects to his forced retirement from Westminster in 1642, Milton obliquely addresses him as tyrant in that he expects to impose his own will  –​which the King deceitfully calls conscience –​upon the people thus invading their liberty: Might not he, both as a Man and as a Christian, have raignd within himself in full sovranty of soule, no man repining, but that his outward and imperious will must invade the civil Liberties of a Nation? … It was not the inward use of his reason and [of ] his conscience that would content him, but to use them both as a Law over all his Subjects, in whatever he declared as a King to like or dislike. Which use of reason, most reasonless and unconscionable, is the utmost that any Tyrant ever pretended over his Vassals.24

But Milton is even more specific in a later passage from Eikonoclastes in which he denounces Charles’s refusal to comply under the Nineteen Propositions, which would have implied his reduction to a private citizen and his renunciation of his arbitrary administering of justice and religious matters: And whereas he blames those propositions for not containing what they ought, what did they mention, but to vindicate and restore the Rights of Parliament invaded by Cabin councels, the Courts of Justice obstructed, and the Government of the Church innovated and corrupted?25

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ Once again, Brutus seemingly resumes this argument when he condemns Tarquin’s personal rule which completely excluded the voice of the Senate in the management of state affairs: Brutus.  And those affairs which were before dispatched In public by the fathers, now are forced To his own palace, there to be determined As he and his portentous council please. (I.182–​85) This is what, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton dreaded happening. Kings may easily fall into prejudice and, forgetful of laws and limits, follow their own wills and likings: [T]‌he temptation of such a power, left absolute in thir hands, perverted them at length to injustice and partialitie. Then did they who now by trial had found the danger and inconveniences of committing arbitrary power to any, invent Laws either framed or consented to by all, that should confine and limit the authority of whom they chose to govern them: that so man, of whose failing they had proof, might no more rule over them, but law and reason, abstracted as much as might be from personal errors and frailties.26

This also recalls Aristotle’s definition of tyranny, corresponding to the ‘arbitrary power of an individual which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage’, so that ‘[n]‌o freeman, if he can escape from it, will endure such a government’.27 In order to justify his action to the people and his peers, Brutus has renamed the King as tyrant: ‘What has the tyrant made you?’ (II.195) he asks in the Forum; and later, once Tarquin has been expelled from Rome, he congratulates the Patricians in the Senate who ‘long stood and scaped the tyrant’ (III.2.1). As Thomas Hobbes had it, such ‘linguistic shiftiness’28 could validate the killing (or, in this case, expulsion) of a king: [A]‌s to Rebellion in particular against Monarchy; one of the most frequent causes of it, is the Reading of the books of Policy, and Histories of the antient Greeks, and Romans … in their books, and discourses of Policy, make it lawfull, and laudable, for any man so to do; provided before he do it, he call him Tyrant. For they say not Regicide, that is, killing of a King, but Tyrannicide, that is, killing of a Tyrant is lawfull. From the same books, they that live under a Monarch conceive an opinion, that the Subjects in a Popular Common-​wealth enjoy Liberty[.]29

But Brutus is not just potentially anti-​royalist: Brutus is the hero of republicanism. In his final oration, he ultimately remarks how the good of the res publica derives from the differentiation between ‘partial tyrants’ and ‘freeborn people’ (V.2.44), and in doing so he clearly shows his commitment

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From Republic to Restoration to the paramount value of political liberty. This he means to pursue by establishing a consulship based on: … a balanced trade, Patriots encouraged, manufactors cherished, Vagabonds, walkers, drones, and swarming braves, The froth of states, scummed from the commonwealth, Idleness banished, all excess repressed, And riots checked by sumptuary laws. O, conscript fathers, ’tis on these foundations That Rome shall build her empire to the stars. (V.1.54–​61) To a late-​seventeenth-​century audience, these words might well have seemed to reflect Whig middle-​class positive ideals of nationalistic pride (‘Patriots encouraged’) and commercial welfare (‘Manufactors cherished’), but might also have served as an implicit reminder of legalistic, Puritan-​ like issues of reforming and purgation of customs. This second notion of ‘scumming’ the Commonwealth, that is, to clear it of impurity and froth might have piqued contemporary audiences with their libertine, impure ways but could also have sounded ominously familiar, being too close to what England had experienced during the Republic, when the Puritans had sought to establish a godly, moral society by imposing fines for drunkenness, and imprisonment for adultery or other sexually offensive behaviour. Yet, the similarities to the events of the civil wars are even deeper. In 1649, the Act Declaring England to be a Commonwealth finally stated that the establishment of a ‘free state’ was to be carried out ‘without any King’. This is what Brutus also declares in front of Lucrece’s dead body, when he invites her kin to swear ‘from this time never to suffer them [the Tarquins], /​Nor any other king to reign in Rome’ (I.446–​47). All in all, the building of an ‘empire to the stars’ arises from the erasure of royalty; it is not merely at Tarquin’s or at his family’s downfall that Brutus seems to aim but at the crushing of monarchy itself. It seems he wants to extirpate it, as he earlier announced: Brutus.  I see the pillars of his kingdom totter. The rape of Lucrece is the midnight lantern That lights my genius down to the foundation. (I.273–​75) In his Pour enclouer le Canon (A Discourse on the Advantages of a Common-​ wealth), published in 1659, James Harrington had hailed Brutus as the one who first gave the Roman people the ‘taste of liberty’ by abolishing monarchy:

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ [T]‌he Romans, upon the death of Romulus … could not be brought unto the abolition of monarchy, till it was imposed upon them by Brutus to abjure it. Nevertheless, this people having once tasted of liberty, were of all others the most constant assertors of the same.30

As we have seen, Brutus justified his action by conflating ‘king’ with ‘tyrant’, but now he wishes to go further and erase the name of king altogether. The new consul wants to obliterate it and forces Collatinus, Lucrece’s husband and kinsman to the King, into exile, saying:  ‘[T]‌ill the name  …  /​ Of Tarquin be removed, Rome is not free’ (III.2.78–​79). This resolution springs from a dispute over the appointment of a new ‘king of sacrifices’.31 Collatinus is one of the candidates, but Brutus refuses him the title. The consul’s other son, Tiberius, who stays with the royalist faction, reports his father’s reasoning to Collatinus: Tiberius.  … remember but your last disgrace, When you proposed, with reverence to the gods, A king of sacrifices should be chosen, And from the consuls. Did he not oppose you, Fearing, as well he might, your sure election, Saying it smelt too much of royalty, And it might rub up the memory Of those that loved the tyrant? Nay, yet more, That if the people chose you for the place, The name of king would light upon a Tarquin (III.1.58–​67) Once again, Brutus’s choice of words seems to borrow from the Revolution’s vocabulary. In his Excellencie of a Free-​State: or, The Right Constitution of a Commonwealth (1656), Marchamont Nedham refers to this very same episode as an example of how a ‘Free State’ should be rightly and firmly established: Now when Rome was thus declared A Free State, the next work was to establish their Freedom in some sure & certain way: & in order to this, the first business they pitch’d upon, was, not onely to ingage the people by an Oath against the return of Tarquin’s Family to the Kingdom, but also against the admission of any such Officer as a King, for ever, because those brave men, who glorified themselves in laying the foundation of a Commonwealth, well knew, that in a short Revolution, others of a less publick Spirit would arise in their places, and gape again after a Kingdom.32

To those who show a ‘publick Spirit’, that is, those who are committed to the welfare of the nation, naming the name of king would prove as dangerous as plotting for his return. The Tarquinian monarchy is like an infection one ought to avoid with all one’s strength; Tarquin’s blood bears a ‘natural contagion in it’ (I.218), as Brutus says to his son Titus when he confesses he has married Teraminta, Tarquin’s daughter. 317

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From Republic to Restoration As Ian Donaldson rightly points out, ‘blood is a prominent idea and image in the play’ and ‘it is Brutus, quite as much as Tarquin, who is responsible for its shedding’.33 Brutus is apparently obsessed with Tarquin’s blood: he harshly prohibits Titus from consummating the marriage because of the bride’s royal parentage; he bars Collatinus’s aspiration to become ‘king of sacrifices’ because of his relation to the former King and abhors the possibility that his other son, Tiberius, may assume a similar role: ‘I would have none of Brutus’ blood /​Pretend to be a king’ (III.2.152–​53). Yet there is one detail in particular that Lee omits: Brutus is of Tarquin’s blood too. Livy recalls how he was the King’s nephew (‘sorore regis, natus’),34 as does Madeleine de Scudéry in her romance Clélie,35 one of the play’s sources along with Ab Urbe Condita and Machiavelli’s Discourses upon Livy. The audience might have been aware of this detail, but in Lee’s play Brutus allows for just a passing reference to it when he mentions the fact that Lucrece has summoned ‘all her blood’ (I.103), including himself, to her house at Collatia. This may be accounted an unimportant detail but Brutus’s insistence on distancing himself from the King’s family, when in fact he is part of it, is questionable and actually revealing of the character’s ambiguity which, as we will see, colours his actions and motives throughout the play, leaving them open to a variety of interpretations. In Act I, after hearing his babbling about a secret ‘plot upon the court’ (I.176), Fabritius and Lartius light-​heartedly leave Brutus with laughter and mockery, ascribing his behaviour to downright madness; yet the audience is already acquainted with the true nature of Brutus’s own ‘secret’. The idea of having him feign madness came to Lee from Livy and Machiavelli. In Ab Urbe Condita, the artificiality (‘ex industria factus ad imitationem stultitiae’)36 of Brutus’s folly is explicitly introduced as a strategy to get rid of Tarquinian oppression.37 The same motivation is later expanded by Machiavelli who dedicates a whole chapter to it, entitled ‘Come egli è cosa sapientissima simulare in tempo la pazzia’.38 In his opinion, this is the safest way for ‘all those who are discontented by a prince’ to be perceived39 and who wish to act prudently in order to gain their final goal; that is, ‘crushing the king and freeing … [their] own fatherland whenever opportunity would be given’.40 This is what Lee’s Brutus has in mind, too, as he later explains to his fainthearted son, Titus, yet his reasons appear to be ambiguous. Brutus makes his first appearance on stage with a Flamen, a priest, with whom he comments upon Sextus Tarquinius’s ‘last abode at Collatine’s’ (I.95). All men, Brutus says, have, sooner or later, felt the ‘unlawful itch’ (I.84); he has felt it, so has the Flamen himself; but once the priest has left him, Brutus dismisses the playful tone of fool (I.91) and voices his true nature:

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ Brutus.  … O Brutus! Brutus! When will the tedious gods permit thy soul To walk abroad in her own majesty, And throw this visor of thy madness from thee? O, what but infinite spirit, propped by fate, For empire’s weight to turn on, could endure As thou hast done the labors of an age, All follies, scoffs, reproaches, pities, scorns, Indignities almost to blows sustained, For twenty pressing years, and by a Roman? (I.108–​17) The future republican hero, the defender of the rights of ‘freeborn people’ displays here an interesting choice of words that belong to the discourse of absolute royal power. Obscured by fake madness for many years, his soul is now ready to show its own ‘majesty’; his spirit is one on which an ‘empire’ could find its centre or pivot and is accordingly ‘infinite’. This sounds rather audacious and even presumptuous for a man, or even a king, to conceive, since, as Hobbes had it: Whatsoever we imagine is Finite. Therefore there is no idea, or conception of any thing we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude; nor conceive infinite swiftness, infinite time, or infinite force, or infinite power.41

Brutus unequivocally contradicts this assumption. Not only does he imply that his spirit cannot be crushed by any suffering or humiliation whatsoever, he also implies that it defies measurement and is therefore godlike in its substance as opposed to man’s finiteness. Correspondingly, his virtue is yet nameless in its unprecedented magnificence: Brutus.  O Rome, O mother, be thou th’impartial judge If this be virtue, which yet wants a name, Which never any age could parallel, And worthy of the foremost of thy sons. (I.130–​33) He asks that Rome be his judge and pleads for fairness and objectivity, but at the same time he already suggests the verdict and posits his virtue as unique and therefore beyond compare; in fact, he aspires to be the most worthy son of Rome, and invites mother Rome to be his judge. The motives that guide his rebellion against the King therefore seem dictated by the will to satisfy his own ambition and pride, rather than by an authentic love of liberty. In a later exchange with Titus, Brutus is almost physically transfigured by his fierceness as shown by the performative

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From Republic to Restoration allusions that crowd these lines. Titus has just confessed to his father his recent nuptials with Teraminta, Tarquin’s illegitimate daughter, much to Brutus’s dismay: Titus.  O, is this possible? This change that I behold? No part of him The same; nor eyes, nor mien, nor voice, nor gesture! … Brutus.  Look on my face, view my eyes flame, and tell me If aught thou seest but glory and revenge, A blood-​shot anger, and a burst of fury, When I but think of Tarquin … (I.223–​35) His eyes are streaked with blood and reflect his lust for glory and thirst for revenge, while no place is left for rational or political argument. Brutus’s motives seem indeed to be guided by personal ambition rather than by a genuine interest in the commonwealth’s or the people’s good. Thus his change into an ‘awful, godlike, and commanding Brutus’ (I.2.45), as Titus describes him, casts an ambiguous shadow on his later oration in which he publicly lashes out at Tarquin’s hold on absolute power, when he himself looks and acts so imposingly. As Marchamont Nedham reminds us, in the sixth century BC, once the king was driven from Rome, his power was appropriated by Senate and consuls: for, with the Tarquin’s (as it is observed by Livy, and others) onely the name King was expelled, but not the thing; the Power & Interest of Kingship was still retained in the Senate, and ingrossed by the Consuls.42

In the play, it is Brutus alone who takes over ‘the Power & Interest of Kingship’ and foists his own will on his associates, his friends, his sons. The problematic divergence between his speech and his actions gradually increases:  while he publicly reveres the senators, acknowledging them as the ‘[e]‌ngines of power’ (III.2.5) and indulges the people by talking about liberty, his behaviour is that of one charged with some divinely inspired undertaking. Significantly, both his supporters and his antagonists rely on kindred images of absolute and divine-​like power to define Brutus’s newly acquired position. Royalist Vitellius describes the consul’s arrival at the Capitol as the ascent of a god to his heavenly mansion: Vitellius.  Triumphant Brutus, Like Jove when followed by a train of gods, To mingle with the fates and doom of the world, Ascends the brazen steps o’ the capitol. (III.1.5–​8) 320

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ In Valerius’s words, Brutus acts as Jove’s deputy, evoking James I’s divine lieutenancy of kings rather than radical republican ideology: Valerius.  … he’s no more a man; He is not cast in the same common mold, His spirit moves not with our springs and wards. He looks and talks as if Jove had sent him To be the judge of all the under world; (V.1.8–​21) This explicitly reverses Montaigne’s famous allusion to equality in An Apology for Raymond Sebond and places Brutus in a (usurped) monarch-​like station: The soules of Emperors and Coblers are all cast in the same mould. … They are moved, stirred and removed in their motions, by the same springs and wards, that wee are in ours.43

While, on the one hand, Brutus stands as the advocate of the people and lectures on ‘common liberty’ (III.2.42) and a ‘free government, /​Where every man is master of his own’ (III.2.59–​60), on the other hand, he acts as if he were a supernaturally inspired judge whose godlike resolution may be neither questioned nor entreated. When his sons are found guilty of conspiring against the republic, he ignores the Senate’s decree, which would have allowed for mercy, and ruthlessly condemns them both to death. Hence, his inflexibility is finally branded tyranny by Sempronia, his wife, and by Teraminta, his daughter-​in-​law: Sempronia.  Yet hold thy bloody hand, tyrannic Brutus[.]‌(V.2.133) Teraminta.  Ah, thou inhuman tyrant! (V.2.156) On his part, Tiberius describes his father’s justice as a ghastly show, no less dreadful than the human sacrifice formerly performed by the Fecialian priests: Tiberius.  Enjoy the bloody conquest of thy pride, Thou more tyrannical than any Tarquin, … Perfect thy justice, as thou, tyrant, call’st it, Sit like a fury on thy black tribunal, Grasp with thy monstrous hands these gory heads, And let thy flatt’ring orators adore thee For triumphs which shall make thee smile at horror. (V.1.115–​16; 125–​29) In fact, it was Brutus himself who called for blood to seal, to ‘cement Rome’s flaws, /​And heal her wounded freedom with thy [his son’s] blood’ 321

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From Republic to Restoration (IV.524–​25). He may therefore have erased the name of king but has gained instead that of tyrant by disfiguring the power he has been given into bloody despotism. In Cromwell’s time, Commonwealth writers themselves dreaded an ominous shift into dictatorship and expressed their anxiety about the ‘crooked ways’ of power in both prose and drama. This was the case in the anonymous The Tragedy of that Famous Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651), in which the ailing Roman republic is endangered by Antony’s and the triumvirs’ lust for power. In the play, republicanism is repeatedly associated with virtue and civic freedom, for which Cicero will eventually sacrifice his own life. Yet, as Janet Clare points out, if The Tragedy of Cicero ‘resoundingly endorses the values of the Republic’, it also problematically voices contemporary criticism towards Cromwell’s possible ‘aspiring at that office which he had helped to destroy’.44 Similarly, Brutus’s misleading and duplicitous attitude, which is populist and cruelly authoritarian at the same time, may be read as a warning against, rather than a celebration of, the ‘cause of liberty’, therefore heavily challenging the ‘Whig quality’ of the play. In the 1670s, political adversaries often accused the Whigs of deceptively relying on rabble-​rousing strategies and of aiming at reviving a Cromwellian-​like repressive government.45 If criticism of Brutus’s action is predictably voiced by the royalist faction led by Tiberius, whose harsh words are dictated by the fact that his plot has been foiled and he himself has to face death, the consul’s followers stand in awe of Brutus and are almost overwhelmed by admiration of his monarch-​like status: ‘There is no help’, one of them says when Titus and Tiberius are sentenced to death, ‘But thus to shake your head and cross your arms /​And wonder what the gods and he intend’ (V.2.23–​25). Has Rome removed one tyrant only to earn another? Brutus’s deeds seem to be governed by some personal and arbitrary notion of justice, and what he calls ‘th’austerity of my virtue’ (II.309) is in fact an unrestrained, upstart pride that, when Valerius stabs Titus to spare him the scaffold, makes him exclaim: ‘Why, my Valerius, didst thou rob me of my justice?’ (V.2.150). His sole aim is to live up to a personal notion of righteousness, even at the price of forfeiting his own kin. In order to achieve his purposes, he is ready to lie and to feign mercy only to withdraw it the very next moment: Titus.  … O all the extremity Of cruel rigor, to behold me too, To sit unmoved and see me whipped to death? Where are your bowels now? Is this a father? Ah, sir, why should you make my heart suspect That all your late compassion was dissembled? (IV.541–​46)

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ In spite of Titus’s pathetic plea, Brutus –​‘father of the country’, as the subtitle of the play styles him, but not a father to his sons –​will hold on to his dreadful justice and have his ‘bowels’ sacrificed on the altar of a self-​made republican ideal. A warning against the dangers of power, be it republican or not, Lucius Junius Brutus eventually seems to evade any political or party labelling, and stands as a definitive, and often misinterpreted, critique of an age in which it was ever more difficult ‘to be assured of what is vice or virtue’ (IV.277).

Notes 1 Odai Johnson, ‘Empty Houses: The Suppression of Tate’s Richard II’, Theatre Journal, 47.4 (1995), 503–​16 (p. 508). 2 Susan Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 90. 3 In the late summer of 1678, Titus Oates fabricated the existence of a popish plot hatched to kill Charles II and place his Catholic brother, James, on the throne. Albeit forged, Oates’s revelations fuelled paranoia against Catholicism and contributed to intensifying old religious as well as constitutional concerns about the pro-​Catholic leanings of the court and the threat to the independence of Parliament. For a lucid and balanced account of the plot and of its consequences, see Mark Kishlansky, A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603–​1714 (London: Penguin, 1996), pp. 213–​39 and Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–​1715 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 52–​79. 4 Anthony Ashley Cooper, A Speech Lately Made by a Noble Peer of the Realm (London, 1681), p. 146r. 5 John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee, Oedipus:  A Tragedy (London, 1679), Epilogue, l.  32. Antony Hammond has rightly observed how this collaboration with Dryden calls into doubt Lee’s Whig sympathies; see Hammond, ‘The “Greatest Action”:  Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus’, in Poetry and Drama 1570–​1700:  Essays in Honour of Harold F.  Brooks, ed. by A. Coleman and A. Hammond (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), 173–​85 (p. 175). 6 Jacob Giles, The Poetical Register: or, the Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets, 2 vols (London, 1719–​20), i, p. 162. 7 P.R.O., L.C. 5/​144, p.  28, quoted in Nathaniel Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus, ed. by J. Loftis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), xii. See also Janet Clare, ‘ “All run now into Politicks”: Theatre Censorship during the Exclusion Crisis, 1679–​81’, in Writing and Censorship in Britain, ed. by P. Hyland and N. Sammells (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 46–​56 (p. 49). 8 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 332. 9 Giles, The Poetical Register, i, p. 160. 10 See Alan Marshall, ‘ “Plots” and dissent: the abortive Northern Rebellion of 1663’ in this volume. 11 Giles, The Poetical Register, i, p. 54. 12 The stage direction (‘from window’) lets us suppose that the actor playing Vinditius probably stood either at one of the two balconies that overlooked the stage or in the music room situated above the proscenium arch. 13 The Tears of Rome:  or the Despair of the Pope for the Ill Success of the Plot (London, 1680), p. 3. 14 Introduction to Lucius Junius Brutus, p. xviii.

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From Republic to Restoration 15 Douglas Canfield, ‘Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679–​89’, Studies in Philology, 82, 2 (1985), 234–​63 (p. 262). 16 Susan Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002) and Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660–​1760 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981). Antony Hammond sees it differently and questions the play’s stable political significance by problematically categorising it as ‘a sensitive study of the cost of political power’, see ‘The “Greatest Action”: Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus’, in Poetry and Drama 1570–​1700:  Essays in Honour of Harold F.  Brooks, ed. by A. Coleman and A. Hammond (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), pp. 173–​85 (p. 183). This proves the drama’s controversial nature, which goes beyond a mere registration of one or the other political perspective; see also Victoria Hayne, ‘ “All Language Then is Vile”:  The Theatrical Critique of Political Rhetoric in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus’, ELH, 63.2 (1996), 337–​65. 17 Owen, Perspectives on Restoration Drama, p. 89. 18 Of course, the episode of the ousting of Rome’s last king, Tarquin the Proud, and of the birth of the Roman republic in 509 BC come from Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. Livy’s account traditionally made Brutus the republican hero par excellence and indeed the founder of the republic as having been the first to swear to drive out the Tarquins after the rape of Lucretia. His fame was later confirmed by Machiavelli in his Discourses on Livy (posthumously published in 1531), where he calls him ‘padre della romana libertà’. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, in Tutte le opere, ed. by Mario Martelli (Torino: Einaudi, 1971), p. 265. 19 Warren Chernaik, ‘Sex, Tyranny, and the Problem of Allegiance: Political Drama during the Restoration’, in Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England, 1650–​1737, ed. by C. Gill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 87–​106 (p. 87). 20 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. by Don M. Wolfe and others, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1953–​82), vol. III: 1648–​1649, ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes (1962), 189–​258 (p. 199). 21 Ibid., p. 222. 22 Ibid., p. 189. 23 Ibid., p. 200. 24 John Milton, Eikonoclastes in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, iii, 337–​601 (p. 412) (my emphasis). 25 Ibid., p. 465. 26 Milton, The Tenure, pp. 199–​200. 27 Aristotle, Politics, trans. by Benjamin Jowett (Los Angeles, CA:  Indo-​ European Publishing, 2009), p. 88. 28 Joad Raymond, ‘The King is a Thing’, in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. by G. Parry and J. Raymond (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2002), pp. 69–​94 (p. 69). 29 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 225–​26. 30 John Harrington, Pour enclouer le Canon, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. by J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 727–​34 (p. 728). 31 In republican Rome, rex sacrorum or sacrificulus was a title bestowed upon a Patrician, who was charged with a series of religious duties formerly performed by the king. 32 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-​State:  or, The Right Constitution of a Common-​Wealth (London, 1656), pp. 13–​14. 33 Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and its Transformations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 135. 34 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, ed. by H.  E. Gould and J. Lacy Whiteley (Bristol:  Bristol Classical Press and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 56. 35 In Clélie, Brutus is identified as ‘un Neveu de Tarquin’. A  typical example of roman précieux, famously including the carte de tendre, Clélie was first published in Paris in 1654

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‘The Name of King will light upon a Tarquin’ and translated into English as early as 1655. Lee’s version of the love intrigue between Titus and Teraminta is indebted to it. 36 Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, p. 56. 37 Here is Livy: ‘…ex industria factus ad imitationem stultitiae, cum se suaque praedae esse regi sineret, Bruti quoque haud abnuit cognomen ut sub eius obtentu cognominis liberator ille populi Romani animus latens opperiretur tempora sua’. Lee might have read both the original version or its translation, possibly Philemon Holland’s: ‘And therefore composing and framing himself to purpose to counterfeit a noddy and a very innocent, as suffering himself and all that he had to fall into the kings hands as an escheat, he refused not be misnamed Brutus, a name appropriate to unreasonable creatures; that under the shadow & colour of that surname, that courage of his lying close hid, which should one day set free the City of Rome, might abide the full time and appear in due season.’ The Romane Historie written by T. Livius of Padua … Translated out of Latine into English, by Philemon Holland (London, 1659), pp. 32–​33. 38 Machiavelli, Discorsi, in Tutte le opere, p. 265. 39 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. by H. C. Mansfield and N. Tarcov (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 213. 40 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, p. 213. 41 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23. 42 Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free-​State, p. 155. 43 Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes, or Morall, Politike, and Militarie Discourses, trans. by John Florio (London, 1632), p. 264. 44 Drama of the English Republic 1649–​60, ed. by Janet Clare (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 46–​47. 45 Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, pp. 94–​102.

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Chapter 16

‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’:1 political prints of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis –​the revision of a republican mode Christina M. Carlson

A most scandalous libel against the Government for which with other things [Stephen] College was most justly executed. — Narcissus Luttrell, hand-​written comment on College’s political cartoon, A Ra-​ree Show (1681)

Introduction

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his chapter analyses popular forms of political and propagandistic response to the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis of 1678–​81, focusing on political cartoons and satirical engravings. The term ‘political cartoons’ encompasses the vast panoply of illustrated printed propaganda on topical political issues, including broadsides, title-​page illustrations, engravings, woodcuts and pictorial representations accompanying contemporary ballads, from the end of the seventeenth century onwards.2 Addressing the difference between Whig and Tory accounts of this period provides a useful means of comprehending the nature of oppositional political discourse from the 1670s and 1680s and of understanding, in particular, how the more radical, Presbyterian Whigs persisted in an anti-​popish discourse that held traces of the republican argument of the 1630s–​1650s. This was exploited by Tory polemicists in order to argue against religious toleration for dissenters and Catholics alike.3 More specifically, the political prints of the Tory Licenser to the Press, Sir Roger L’Estrange,4 are compared with those of the most notorious of the Whig cartoonists, Stephen College, a ‘Protestant joiner’, who, as punishment for his scurrilous and vulgar efforts to make fun of the King’s exclusionist policies, was executed for treason against the state. As B. J. Rahn notes: ‘It may be the only time [in English history] that a man was martyred for writing some naughty verses and drawing a cartoon to illustrate them’.5 326

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints In his print, A Ra-​ree Show; To the Tune of I am a Senceless Thing (1681), College attacks Charles II’s ambivalent religious policies, caricaturing the King’s lukewarm Protestantism and his crypto-​Catholicism. College critiques Charles II’s inability to work effectively with Parliament, his decision to prorogue Parliament, his absolutism and his ‘secret’ negotiations with Louis XIV for financial gain. But College does so in the language of republicanism, anti-​Catholicism and anti-​monarchism. He equates the three in a way that depends upon a view –​which L’Estrange and other Tories were actively trying to demonise –​that popery and arbitrary government went hand in hand. What made College’s print so contentious and controversial  –​as this chapter argues –​is that it was produced in a culture in which Tory polemic –​ emblematised by L’Estrange –​had problematised the Foxean view of anti-​ popish rhetoric, turning it into the potentially subversive hallmark of religious sectarianism (Presbyterianism) and political radicalism (republicanism). In the wake of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, the move, on the part of the Whigs in general and College in particular, to evoke fears of popery and arbitrary government, as the republicans had done throughout the period of the English civil wars, had the effect, according to the Tories, of raising the spectre of a repeat performance: another ‘’41’. This shows how republicanism was rewritten in the pro-​Tory polemic of the Restoration in order to neutralise anti-​Catholic sentiments and to paint the threat to monarchy and peace as a feature of religious radicalism (Presbyterianism) and political rebellion. In An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678) and The History of the Plot (1679), as well as in a series of political prints decrying the Whigs more generally, including, most notably, The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade (British Museum Satire No. 1080),6 L’Estrange rewrote the past history of the civil wars, attempting to demonise both religious and political dissent by separating out Catholic ‘loyalism’ from Presbyterian ‘radicalism’. L’Estrange rejected the argument that the Papists had been disloyal during the civil wars, asserting instead that they had been faithful, while the more radical dissenters had acted in opposition to both Church and State. He contended that there was ‘now a Presbyterian plot against crown and church, just as there had been in 1641’7 and argued that the Whigs of the late 1670s and early 1680s were using the cover of the Popish Plot in order to bring back a Presbyterian and republican ascendency in the Church and State, on the model of the 1640s and 1650s. College’s error stemmed from his belief that public opinion supported his efforts to attack Charles II in the old republican rhetoric of the English civil wars. He appears to have misunderstood the public shift away from this republican idiom, and so risked aligning Presbyterian factionalism with political opposition and civil strife.8 327

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From Republic to Restoration What the cartoons of L’Estrange and College allow us to see, in a way that echoes the historiography of modern historians of the Restoration period such as John Spurr, Tim Harris and Mark Knights, is the relationship between ‘oppositional’ politics and more popular forms of political expression like satiric engravings. If, for the Whigs, ‘popery’ became linked up with ‘arbitrary government’ and their critique of the pro-​Catholic policies of Charles II, this was, in part because they distrusted his efforts to secure toleration for Catholics, even though, at least in its original formulation, such toleration would have ostensibly included nonconformists under its auspices. The Whigs believed –​perhaps correctly –​that Charles II was simply using the false promise of toleration for dissenters in order to gain their support in Parliament for toleration for Catholics. After such toleration was secured, Charles II would, so the dissenters feared, then renege on his promise to secure toleration for Protestant nonconformists, returning to an earlier policy of sectarian persecution.9 For the Tories, by contrast, ‘popery’ was not –​at least insofar as their anti-​Whig propaganda was concerned –​about Catholicism at all. Instead, ‘popery’ became a code-​word for religious and political dissent, a label, which in their view, more accurately characterised the Presbyterians and nonconformists who, according to the Tory polemicists –​of whom L’Estrange was the most vocal representative –​ were using the Popish Plot in order to achieve their own republican and anti-​monarchical ends. This capacity to redefine the terms of political engagement was one of the hallmarks –​and strengths –​of Tory political propaganda of the period. It constituted a savvy and intelligent reading of the political environment c. 1679–​81, during which most of L’Estrange and College’s prints were published and which, by contrast, is almost totally lacking in College’s work. What the Tories understood differently from the Whigs was the nature of political opinion. Given the strong links between religious radicalism (Puritanism) and republicanism throughout the 1620s through to the 1660s, it was natural for a more ‘conservative’ opinion to emerge in the Restoration, with fears that religious dissent would give way to more political opposition, with the possibility of renewing the strife of recent decades. The Whig effort to advocate toleration of religious dissent became linked, in both the Tory propaganda and the public imagination, with republicanism and threats to overthrow the monarchy. As a result, Whigs of all political and religious temperaments (from the most radical to the most conservative) were seen by the public at large as a threat to the Restoration settlement, the status quo, and the peace and harmony of the body politic in general. It was, Harris suggests, this Whig bias towards dissent which was to give the Tories room for manoeuvre in their counter-​propaganda campaign, in which the politics of dissent became linked, via Tory propaganda, 328

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints not simply to popery, but also to a radical and republican effort to undermine the authority of the Church and State.10 For the Tories, Harris argues, there was a clear-​cut programme to discredit the Whigs by turning the radical Whig discourse against them. Thus, to take just one example, in the papers of Francis North, Lord Chief Justice of Commons Pleas and a close adviser to the King, one finds a specific list of guidelines for using Tory propaganda to ‘undeceiv[e]‌ the people about the late popish plot’. In this list, North stressed the necessity of blaming England’s troubles on republicans, Presbyterians and sectarians, who had been disaffected ever since the restoration of monarchy and episcopacy.11 The ‘logic’ was that because the Whigs were nonconformists they must also be republicans  –​religion and politics were closely tied and much of the Whig problem represented the continuation of a decades-​long prejudice against the dissenters, stretching back to the English civil wars and the contemporary (i.e. post-​1660) view that religious dissent had been at the base of the violence that had erupted during those years. The Committee

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’Estrange’s print, The Committee:  or Popery in Masquerade (British Museum Satire No. 1080) provides an excellent example of these central aspects of the Tory anti-​Whig propaganda campaign (see Figure 16.1).12 In this visual satire, L’Estrange echoes many of the earlier arguments that he put forth in his 1679 History of the Plot, an extended discussion and analysis of the chief actors and events of the Popish Plot.13 Mary Dorothy George summarises the content of the print as follows: This is a satirical representation of 1641 and after with a pointed application to Whig tactics. The Committee are representatives of different sects with John Presbyter as chairman. A  plotting cabal, the Junto in debate, look down on them from a balcony ‘T’inspire and push an Enthusiast Rabble’; these join hands across the room with a seditious Lord Mayor with the Pope beside him. The deluded rabble, grouped round the Committee, have banners inscribed ‘A thorough Reformation’, ‘Liberty Property’ (a first appearance in print for this slogan), and ‘Religion’. Discarded on the ground are ‘Magna Charta’, ‘Biblia Sacra’, ‘Councills’, ‘Laud against Fisher’, and ‘Hooker’ –​that is the Law, the Truth, and the Church. There are other incidents and allusions. The verses make some shrewd hits: First, make the People Sure; and That must be By Pleas for Conscience, Common Liberty: By which Means, we secure a Popu’lar Voyce For Knights, and Burgesses, in the next Choyce … In the mean while, the Pulpits and the Presses

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Figure 16.1  The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade (London, 1680).

Must ring of Popery, Grievances, Addresses, Plots of all Sorts, Invasions, Massacres …14

The description of this print in the British Museum Catalogue (Stephens) is as follows: British Museum Satire No. 1080: ‘The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade’: The interior is a room, with nine persons seated at a table, ‘D’: ‘Mugleton’, raving; ‘Ranter’, raving; ‘Quaker’, telling arguments on his fingers;

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints ‘Anabaptist’, with a dagger; ‘Presbyt’., as chairman, holding ‘Thanks to the Petitioners’; ‘Indepen.’, arguing with the next, ‘Fifth Mon.’; ‘Nailor’, preaching, and ‘Adamite’, naked. Over their heads a scroll, ‘Behold wee are a covenanting people’. On the table lie papers, inscribed ‘Church and Crown Lands’, ‘Sequestrations’, ‘Remonstrances’, ‘Petitions’, ‘Court of Iustice’, and ‘Humiliation’. At a small table in front is seated ‘F’, a secretary, with a paper, inscribed ‘P’s Narrat: Nar. of Fires, Corrante, Tom & Dick’; on the table are an ape, a pipe, broken pot, &c. At one side of the table, ‘E’, the ‘Elders Mayd’, with the ‘Protestutor’, a book, tied to her girdle, and crying, ‘No Service book’, and the dog, ‘Swash’, crying ‘No Bishops’. At the other side, ‘The Colchester Wedding’, ‘E’, the man, crying, ‘No Popish Lords’; the mare crying ‘No evill Councillors’. On the ground are books: ‘Magna charta’, ‘Biblia Sacra’, ‘Councills’, ‘Laud against Fisher’, and ‘Hooker’. On one side of the picture is a mob of men, ‘G’, carrying a crown, mitre, and banners, inscribed ‘A Thorough Reformation’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Property’, and ‘Religion’; before their feet are the sceptre, orb, and bust of Charles I.  They lead in chains ‘Gournay’, ‘Strafford’, and ‘Laud’. On the other side, a female holds the head of a parson, ‘H’, with a label on his breast, that is inscribed ‘Sequestered livings’, and vomiting ‘Cannons’, ‘Com. Prayer’, ‘Surplice’, ‘Apocrypha’, ‘in Bapt’. At his side is a night-​stool, ‘I’, swarming with imps. Above them, a bookcase, containing, ‘Excise’, ‘Army Accounts’, ‘Directory’, ‘Ordinances’, ‘Iournall’, also two bottles of ‘a Cordial for ye Dr.’, ‘Widows tears’, and ‘Blood of Orphans’. Through a window at one side are seen ‘The close Caball’, ‘A’, whence issue a streaming ray upon the Committee, and a scroll, inscribed ‘Root and Branch’, terminating in a hand joined to another hand at the end of another scroll, which is inscribed, ‘Wee’l be true to you’, and issues from the mouth of ‘Little Isaack’, ‘B’, who is standing at an opposite window, where also is the ‘Pope’, ‘C’, exclaiming ‘Courage mes enfans’. Under this window is a placard, ‘A Solemn League and Covenant. Come and let us joyn ourselves unto the Lord in a perpetuall Covenant, yt shall not be forgotten’. Jer. 50, 5.15

What is most notable about L’Estrange’s print is that its satire is not, as with political prints pre-​ 1660, against Catholics but against the Whig, Presbyterian and dissenting polemical use of the rhetoric of anti-​ Catholicism. In An Account of the Growth of Knavery (1678), L’Estrange outlined his opposition to the Whigs in even more dramatic terms. Drawing upon the parallel between the events of 1641 and those of 1677, L’Estrange argued for the sovereignty of law and against rebellion of all kinds. He rejected the voice of the people, warning against repeating the mistakes that led to civil war, the execution of Charles I, and the instability of the English Republic. According to L’Estrange, the sharing of power with the people: makes them Partners of the Sovereignty, and turns the Monarchy of England into a Tripartite and Coordinate Government; which is as well Destructive of Parliaments, on the One hand, as of Royalty, on the Other. Upon the Admittance of this Coordination, any Two of the Three may destroy the Third:  the Two Houses may destroy the King, and the King, with Either of the Houses, may destroy the Other.16

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From Republic to Restoration From L’Estrange’s perspective, patriotism and loyalism are at odds with any criticism of the King or his ministers. Anything even remotely critical is not simply oppositional, but also treasonous. Accordingly, the only way of preventing a renewal of civil war is to maintain a hard line on dissent. Such dogmatic conservativism issued in part from L’Estrange’s role as press licenser and censor. But it also skilfully mobilised anxieties about a return to the circumstances that led to the English civil wars, in a more polemic and propagandistic vein of its own. This strategy was particularly effective in combating the Whig assertion of loyal Protestantism, as against the possibility of a resurgence of popery and absolute government. In The Committee, L’Estrange connects his anti-​dissenting perspective with an anti-​republican stance through a strategy of complex and intertextual allusion, in which his engraving appears not simply as an explicit attack on religious and political opposition, on the part of the Whigs, but also as a veritable bricolage of political pamphlets and prints, both royalist and republican, from the period of the 1640s and 50s. In this incredibly detailed visual satire, L’Estrange directly evokes many of the principal slogans, catch-​phrases, actors and events from these texts. The engraving thus engages a readership that would have been familiar with the satirical rhetoric and imagery of the earlier period, drawing upon the connection with earlier political and religious tracts in order to drive home the more general argument that the period of the late 1670s and 80s was experiencing a return to the religious and political tensions of the English civil wars and Interregnum. The intent is clearly to demonstrate the links between topical political satire of the 1640s and 1650s and that of the Restoration period. In a way that explicitly builds upon the anti-​sectarian rhetoric of these tracts, The Committee attacks religious dissenters, primarily Presbyterians, but also Independents of various religious persuasions, including Ranters, Quakers, Anabaptists, Presbyterians, Independents, Fifth Monarchists and naked Adamites.17 These nonconformist religious sects make up the body of the ‘Committee’, the leader of which is John ‘Presbyter’, the representative Presbyterian type, a stock figure of abuse who symbolically represents the most flagrant of Presbyterian attacks against the established Church and State. He is allegorically figured in a series of pamphlets and satirical prints from the mid-​to late 1640s, including accompanying woodcuts.18 A contemporary pamphlet which has not, to my knowledge, previously been used to illuminate L’Estrange’s print, provides an in-​depth commentary on The Committee, offering one of the few extant interpretations of a political cartoon from the period. According to one ‘E. P.’, in The dialogue 332

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints betwixt Cit and Bumpkin answered in another betwixt Tom the Cheshire piper, and Captain Crackbrains … (1680), the references in The Committee to John Presbyter, as well as to the Quakers in general, to the Quaker James Naylor more specifically, and, additionally, to the Muggletonians,19 locate the print in an historic temporality that extends beyond the strict timeline of the English civil wars: [L’Estrange’s The Committee] is not so much a dumb narrative of what’s past, as a Scheme of what he [i.e. L’Estrange] would intimate is at present designed: That it is not a narrative of what’s past I offer this, the things are so mistimed, for he displays all the Rabble of Sects, upon a consult joyntly petitioning, & J. Presbyter Chairman; now he that knows anything, must know (and that Author is old enough for a personal knowledge in that Case) that those Sects of Muggletonians, Quakers, especially J. Naylor (who suffered his punishment by order of a number of men called a Parliament in the Protectorate of Oliver) were not so much as heard of, when John the Presbyter was Chairman; nay the Independents themselves were not lookt upon as considerable at that time, tho’ afterwards they supplanted their elder Brother, & at such a rate that the time wherein he layes his hopeful harmony for petitions, the Presbyterians had as little power perhaps as they have now.20

Thus, ‘E. P.’ attempts to call into question and to significantly undermine the basis for L’Estrange’s analogy between the religious sectarianism of the 1640s and that of the 1670s and 1680s, stating that the nonconformist religious sects are represented anachronistically. In his Answer to a Whole Litter of Libels, L’Estrange quotes this passage and attempts to refute it, saying that, in making the analogy between the religious and political dissent of the English civil wars and the contemporary moment, he was ascribing a more general sectarianism and republicanism than ‘E.  P.’ suggests.21 In the image of various books, including ‘Magna Charta’, ‘Biblia Sacra’, ‘Councills’, ‘Laud against Fisher’ and ‘Hooker’, littered on the ground, in the bottom left quadrant of the engraving, The Committee seems to allude to the fold-​out engraving of the anti-​Presbyterian, anti-​republican and anti-​ Cromwellian tract, by Clement Walker, entitled Anarchia Anglicana:  or, The History of Independency, The Second Part, by Theodorus Verax … (1649),22 (See Figure 16.2.) Walker’s text stands alongside other royalist responses to the regicide, including the famous frontispiece to Eikon Basilike (1649) itself.23 Unlike the books alluded to in The Committee, however, in Walker’s pamphlet, ‘Magna Charta’ and ‘Biblia Sacra’ are suspended in the branches of the ‘royal oak’ of Britain, an emblem for Charles I. According to Stephens’s description, in the engraving to Anarchia Anglicana the republicans are cutting down the oak, ‘in the branches of which are … the royal arms, crown and sceptre,

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Figure 16.2  ‘The Royall Oake of Brittayne’.

and so many volumes, labelled ‘ “EIKON BASILIKH’, ‘BIBLIA SACRA’, ‘MAGNA CHARTA’, ‘STATUTES’, and ‘REPORTES” ’, while Cromwell stands to the left, overseeing the whole process.24 In Anarchia Anglicana, the tracts hanging in trees represent royal, ecclesiastical, constitutional and legal power. In The Committee, by contrast, L’Estrange depicts the conclusion to the work of felling the Royal Oak; the books are no longer connected to the Royal Oak of monarchy, but instead reduced to discarded volumes. What is more, L’Estrange extends the metaphor of limbing and trampling upon such important texts by representing, in his print, not simply ‘Magna Charta’ and ‘Biblia Sacra’, but also specific Anglican works, Laud’s A relation of the conference … and Hooker’s Laws were two of the texts that Charles I gave to his daughter in order to represent the ‘corpus of Anglicanism’.25 In placing Laud’s pamphlet alongside Hooker’s Laws, L’Estrange emblematises the divisive potential of dissenting interests to undermine the tendency towards moderation and conservatism that both Laud and Hooker represent.26 Indeed, L’Estrange presents a generally sympathetic view of Laud, throughout the print, depicting Laud, along with Sir Richard ‘Gurney’ and Thomas Wentworth, Earl of ‘Strafford’, being led to trial and execution, the victims of republican and sectarian opposition to the Caroline Church and State. 334

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints In a general sense, what L’Estrange’s intervention into the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis illustrates is the way in which the Whig emphasis on ‘traditional’ values (i.e. Protestantism and anti-​Catholicism) could, given the events of the civil wars, be seen to have radical implications. No one wanted a return to civil war, but what the dissenters did not realise is that in maintaining the old rhetoric of dissent and anti-​popery they risked re-​ animating fears of just such an occurrence. As L’Estrange surmised, most English men and women had a greater fear of revisiting the civil wars than of having the Catholic Duke of York on the throne. In the 1670s and 1680s, the rhetoric of anti-​popery that had dominated the opposition from the 1620s to the 1660s had become subversive, a testament to rebellious instincts that reinvoked the spectre of regicide. By seeking to exclude James from the succession, the Whigs were attempting to thwart the normal constitutional channels and to restructure the English monarchy in ways that were affirmative of their own political and religious interests, but potentially undermined both the constitution and the Stuart Church and State.

A Ra-​ree Show

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n College’s A Ra-​ree Show, by contrast, the emphasis is clearly on the kind of Whig ideology that, in Harris’s terms, stressed both the importance of the ‘people’s liberties and properties’ and the greater potential of Parliament –​over that of the monarch –​to aid in the securing and extending of these rights.27 (See Figure 16.3.) In College’s view, Charles II has continued the absolutist tendencies of his father, animating concerns about a return to the arbitrary policies that led to the English civil wars. He protests against the King’s endless

Figure 16.3  A Ra-​ree Show (London, 1681).

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From Republic to Restoration prorogations and adjournments of Parliament, and comes out in opposition to the implicit ‘popery’ and ‘arbitrary government’ that everywhere characterises Charles II’s rule, most notably in Charles’s controversial pro-​ French foreign policy, and his so-​called ‘secret’ treaties with Louis XIV to negotiate financial support in order to rule without parliamentary checks and balances. It was precisely such ‘treasonous’ sentiments that led to College’s trial and subsequent execution. ‘A most scandalous libel against the Government for which with other things [Stephen] College was most justly executed’, reads Narcissus Luttrell’s handwritten comment on his copy of A Ra-​ree Show, thus setting the stage for the interpretation of the print that follows. The print depicts Charles II as a ‘ra-​ree show’ man, illustrated by a pack on his back, from which the Parliament (of Oxford in 1681) peeps surreptitiously. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a ‘ra-​ree show’ is defined as follows: A set of pictures or a puppet show exhibited in a portable box for public entertainment; a peep show. Now hist. 1677 Smithfield Jockey 21 To be qualified for a rary Show in Bartholomew-​Fair. 1681 Ra-​ree Show (broadsheet), Where e’re about I go, Attend my Ra-​ree show.28

Charles II’s strategy is, in College’s imaginative rendering, one of furtive dissembling, but also of inhabiting contradictory ideological views. He not only conceals the Parliament in his pack, but also embodies the satirical figure of the Janus face, looking in opposite directions, half-​Papist and half-​ Protestant. The implied critique in College’s libel is that Charles II is no more straightforward in his parliamentary proceedings than in his religious policies, attempting to promote both Catholic and Protestant causes. It is, so College implies, impossible to be both Catholic and Protestant. The King’s efforts to secure religious toleration for Catholics (and secondarily for Protestant dissenters) were regarded by contemporaries, in the tradition of anti-​popery that had characterised the English nation for decades, as an overt threat to the security of the Protestant faith.29 College’s attack on Charles II is not content, however, with branding the King as a Catholic, a dissembler, a Machiavellian embodiment of force and fraud, and a theatrical con man. In a metaphor drawn from the popular Restoration association of Charles II with Hobbesian absolutism and anti-​populism, College depicts the co-​conspiracy of ‘Leviathan’ –​an allusion to Hobbes’s most famous work of political philosophy, and also to the monster Leviathan of the Commonwealth itself –​and Topham, Charles II’s Sergeant at Arms. According to the verses that accompany the print, the two have been dispatched, by the House of Commons (the Tory Parliament at Oxford), to arrest both political and religious ‘dissenters’. Indeed, what 336

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints these odd bedfellows remark upon most consistently is Charles II’s confidence and arrogance in pursuing his ‘devilish’ scheme of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. As Topham chants: ‘That monstrous Foul Beast, with a hey, with a hey, /​Has Houses Twain in’s Chest, with a ho’. In order to get out of the Chest, the House of Commons and Lords are put under the compulsion of yielding ‘up all they have’ (i.e. seemingly infinite monies and power) and of freeing the Catholic peers who have been imprisoned in the Tower: ‘and Tower Lords to save’. It is unlikely that College would have read such a complex and philosophical text as Leviathan, but the prevalence of the anti-​Hobbesian metaphor in contemporary polemic would have been sufficient for College to have sensed the spirit of Hobbes’s political tract. Presumably, College appropriates the imagery of the famous frontispiece to Hobbes’s text in an effort to brand Charles II as a political despot, in conflict with the will of the people and the freedoms and liberties of the English subjects. College questions Hobbes’s emphasis on a strong central government, and points to the problems in giving one man absolute rule, when sovereignty and the social contract stand opposed to one another. Moreover, his print captures the political optimism with which the Whigs went to Oxford in 1681, believing wholeheartedly in their ability to pass the Exclusion Bill, to make the King into ‘a Doge of Venice’,30 or less, and to bring the Parliament under Independent rule: ‘The Parliament’s Ours’, as College writes.31 The King responded by dissolving Parliament, and the leaders of Exclusion were ‘hung out to dry’, brought up on charges of treason by the very Parliament that they had depended upon for support in their oppositional pursuits.32 College’s criticism of the King is manifold, operating narratively as well as schematically, spreading horizontally across the political print and vertically in terms of its interpretative frame. His attack on the King’s ambivalent religious policies (his professed Anglican Protestantism warring with his suppressed, but more genuinely felt, Catholicism), on his ‘political’ inability to work effectively with Parliament, his decision to prorogue Parliament, on his absolutism, and on his ‘secret’ negotiations for personal finance from Louis XIV, and so forth, all work together to render the religious and political as interchangeable dynamics within a single satiric attack. According to Mark Knights, it was during the period from the elections for the Oxford Parliament to that of its first (and almost immediately prorogued) sitting, that the Tory propagandists were able to turn the tide of public opinion away from the Whigs –​and College’s print represents a very clear example of why this might have been possible.33 Without doubt, College’s print was extreme, and not simply in its satirical depiction of Charles II as a Hobbesian atheist and absolutist, intent on asserting his royal prerogative and making the Parliament (and English People) submit 337

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From Republic to Restoration to his personal will. For what College makes abundantly clear in the most striking of visual forms is that it is not the King’s ministers or policies that are the focus of his attack, but rather, the King himself. College thus puts into relief the very real differences that appeared c. 1680–​81 between ‘loyal’ and ‘radical’ Whigs –​a division that ultimately undermined any coherent party ideology within the Whig faction itself. As Knights has similarly contended, although there were certainly Whigs in the 1670s and early 1680s who believed that Charles II’s policies had subverted the rights of both Parliament and the people, ‘most hesitated to openly accuse the present King of arbitrary government –​Charles was, after all, the only thing standing between the nation and a popish king’.34 The result was an increased tension between moderate Whigs, who preferred to continue in their efforts to alter the Succession, and more radical and extremist Whigs, who more blatantly attacked Charles’s actions. Once the loyalists ‘could insist that the opposition aimed not at the security of the nation, but at the overthrow of monarchy and rebellion, they had effectively won the argument against the succession’.35 At a moment in which the tide of public opinion had begun to shift, College created an overt satire against Charles II, reproducing an older discourse of anti-​popery and republicanism, which was no longer widely accepted by the English populace, whether Tory or Whig. Instead of victory for dissenters, and the securing of toleration for Presbyterians, the Succession/​Exclusion Crisis was ‘resolved’ with the accession of James II. By 1681, L’Estrange’s propaganda, emphasising the links between religious and political radicalism, and using ‘popery’ as a watch-​word that covered any threat to the state, from Presbyterianism to republicanism, had achieved its end. And College’s political engraving, by essentially reproducing precisely those connections between religious and political radicalism, played right into L’Estrange’s hands. This chapter has contrasted the work of Sir Roger L’Estrange, Tory Licenser to the Press, with that of Stephen College, a Protestant Joiner, in the domain of political cartooning, post-​1660. It is argued that L’Estrange cannily insisted on the links between Presbyterianism and republicanism in order to brand the Whigs as both religious and political dissenters and undermine their cause in the period of the English Restoration. By contrast, College, seemingly blind to L’Estrange’s efforts, continued to insist upon these links, and to use political radicalism in order to argue in favour of religious dissent. In his eyes, Charles II’s actions constituted political treason, on a par with his father’s royal absolutism. The effect, however, was to have College branded a traitor and an immediate threat to the monarch and English state. His execution indelibly records this transgression. But it also marked an endpoint in the association of political cartooning and treason in English history. To 338

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints perceive treason in ‘A Ra-​ree’ show was one thing. To turn College into a martyr for the Whig cause was quite another. What purpose was served –​ really? –​by killing a man for composing a few scatological and subversive political verses and appending them to a bawdy and humorous visual image? After College’s death, somewhat paradoxically, political cartooning became more possible, no doubt facilitated by the popular outcry at his execution. Indeed, political cartooning became even more prevalent and no less satirical, particularly in the great age of English caricature in the eighteenth century. Although visual satire was often tried in the courts under charges of seditious libel, the response to College’s print and his trial marked the last effort, on the part of any English government, to conflate libel and treason.36

Notes 1 The reference is to the ballad verses that accompanied the illustration to Stephen College’s A Ra-​ree Show (London, 1681). See www.britishmuseum.org/​research/​collection_​online/​collection_​object_​details.aspx?objectId=3069059&partId=1&people=3081 0&peoA=30810–​2–​60&page=1 [accessed 20 July  2015]. ‘Hobbs’ is obviously Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan (London, 1651). 2 For an overview of the terms ‘cartoon’, ‘political cartoon’, and ‘political caricature’, see ‘cartoon, n.’ Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford University Press, September 2015). www.oed.com.ezp-​prod1.hul.harvard.edu/​ view/​Entry/​28312?rskey=CWarhW&re sult=1&isAdvanced=false [accessed 22 November, 2015]. Also see M. D. George, English Political Caricature to 1792:  A Study of Opinion and Propaganda (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1959). For more precise historical accuracy, I have used the words ‘satirical engravings/​woodcuts’ and ‘political prints’ to describe the printed forms that are represented in this essay. These refer to the method of printing (engraving or woodcut), the style of representation/​theme (‘satire’), and the domain of discussion (‘politics’ –​though religion constitutes a general purview as well). The term ‘political cartoon’ does not emerge until the eighteenth century with the work of William Hogarth and James Gillray. 3 For discussions of the terms ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ and of the nature of party politics in the Restoration period, see Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1990); Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–​ 81 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1994); and John Spurr, England in the 1670s: This Masquerading Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). 4 For general discussions of L’Estrange, see Peter Hinds, The Horrid Popish Plot:  Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-​Century London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. by Anne Dunan-​Page and Beth Lynch (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Geoff Kemp, ‘L’Estrange and the Publishing Sphere’ in Fear, Exclusion and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s, ed. by Jason McElligott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 47–​90; George Kitchin, Sir Roger L’Estrange:  A Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1913); Joseph George Muddiman, The King’s Journalist, 1659–​1689:  Studies in the Reign of Charles II (London:  John Lane, 1923); Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis; Harold Weber, Paper Bullets:  Print and Kingship Under Charles II (Lexington, KY:  University Press of Kentucky, 1996); Harris, London Crowds; Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History

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From Republic to Restoration of his Own Time, ed. by Thomas Burnet, 2 vols (London, 1724–​34), and Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1857). Also see Harold Love, ‘L’Estrange, Sir Roger (1616–​1704)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2007)  www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​16514 [accessed  10 April 2015]. 5 B.  J. Rahn, ‘A Ra-​ree Show  –​A  Rare Cartoon:  Revolutionary Propaganda in the Treason Trial of Stephen College’, in Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History 1640–​1800, ed. by Paul J. Korshin (Menston: Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 77–​98 (p. 78). 6 For a description of the print, see Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum: Division I. Political and Personal Satires (No. 1 to No. 1235). Vol. 1,​1320 to April 11, 1689, ed. by Frederick George Stephens (London: Chiswick Press, 1870). 7 John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660–​ 1688 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 178–​79. 8 See, for instance some of the pamphlet dialogues that appeared in the wake of College’s execution, including: The Last Speech and Confession of Mr. Stephen Colledge, Who Was Executed at Oxford on Wednesday August 31, 1681 (London, 1681); and Anon., Strange News from Newgate: or, A Relation How the Ghost of Colledge the Protestant-​Joyner Appeared to Hone the Joyner (London, 1683). 9 See Spurr, England in the 1670s, p. 236. 10 Harris, London Crowds, p. 129. 11 Ibid., p. 132. 12 See Stephens, ed., Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. 13 Roger L’Estrange, The History of the Plot, or, A  Brief and Historical Account of the Charge and Defence of Edward Coleman, Esq., William Ireland, Thomas Pickering, John Grove: Robert Greene, Henry Berry (London, 1679). 14 Mary Dorothy George, English Political Caricature to 1792 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). These lines are directly applicable to 1679–​80 as well as to 1641. See pp. 54–​55. 15 Stephens, ed., Catalogue, pp. 623–​27. 16 Roger L’Estrange, An Account of the Growth of Knavery under the Pretended Fears of Arbitrary Government and Popery with a Parallel betwixt the Reformers of 1677 and those of 1641 in their Methods and Designs: in a Letter to a Friend, 2nd edn (London, 1681), p. 44. 17 One example of this kind of general anti-​sectarian satire from the late 1640s is British Museum Satire No. 703, described by Stephens as the ‘TITLE-​PAGE to ‘Heresiography or A description of the Hereticks and Sectaries of these latter times, By E: Pagitt. The third Edition with some Additions’, Etc. In MS. ‘W.  H.’ p. is. 6d.’ London printed for W:  L:  are to be sould at his shop in Fleet street, 1647’. According to Stephens, ed., Catalogue, ‘The title is written between two columns, upon which are small circular engravings, representing an “Anabaptist”, “Familist”, “Divorser”, “Jesuit”, “Antinomian”, and “Seeker”.’ Stephens, ed., Catalogue, p. 390. See also ‘ “The Brownists Conventicle”, No. 246,1641; “A Catalogue of the Severall Sects”, &c, Jan. 19, 1647, No. 666, 1647; and “The Church”, Feb. 27, 1647, No. 674, 1647’, as well as multiple other engravings and woodcuts from the period. Stephens, ed., Catalogue, pp. 186–​87; pp. 367–​69 and p. 372. For a similar representation of ‘naked’ Adamites, see ‘A Catalogue of the Severall Sects’. British Museum Satire No. 666, pp. 367–​69. 18 See, for example, British Museum Satire No. 692: The Ghost of Sr. John Presbiter, Wherein he desireth that the rest of that faction may desist, and prosecute no further that Monster of Presbytery, Printed in the yeare, of the Presbyterian feare, 1647. Stephens, ed., Catalogue, pp. 383–​84. In his notes to this print, Stephens refers the reader to other satires of ‘John’ or ‘Jack’ Presbyter, including: ‘ “The Disconsolate Reformado”, July 30, 1647, No. 687, 1647; “Sir John Presbyter not dead”, E. 400/​32; “The Infamous History of Sir Simon Synod and his Sonne Sir John Presbyter, Describing the Acts of their Youth”, 1647, E. 401/​31; “The Arraignment of Mr. Persecution”, E. 276/​23; and John Cleveland’s “Hue

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‘A Child of Heathen Hobbs’: political prints and Cry after Sir John Presbyter”, 669, f. 14/​25, and 669, f. 14/​64 (reprinted with his works, as a broadside; and, again, in 1683).’ He directs the reader as well to:  ‘C. 20, f.  “Luttrell Collection”, vol. ii. p.  121) and “A Quarterne of Quearies”, 669, f.  11/​61’. British Museum Satire No. 702 similarly satirises, in visual form, The Atchievement of Sr John Presbiter, Stephens, Catalogue of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, pp. 389–​90. As Stephens notes, this print ‘was probably published about 1647 or 1649, when the Puritans, &c. were very violent in their attacks on the Presbyterians and their Directory, which had been established in 1645’. Stephens also lists the following broadsides and pamphlets on the subject of John Presbyter: ‘ “The Ghost of Sr. John Presbiter”, “Aug. 11”, 1647, No. 692, 1647, “The Coat of Armes of Sir John Presbyter”, 1661, a broadside, similar to the present, 816, m. 19/​39, “The Last Will and Testament of Sir John Presbyter”, 1, 1647 (E. 399/​22), [and] “The Nativity of Sir John Presbyter”, No. 431, 1645’. 19 The leader and founder of the Muggletonian sect was Lodowicke Muggleton. See William Lamont, ‘Muggleton, Lodowicke  (1609–​1698)’,  ODNB (Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2008) www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​19496 [accessed 7 April 2015]. It is unclear whether the reference to ‘Mugleton’ in The Committee is to the person Muggleton or a generalized Muggletonian type. 20 ‘E.  P.’, The Dialogue betwixt Cit and Bumpkin Answered in Another betwixt Tom the Cheshire Piper, and Captain Crackbrains Dedicated to Right Worshipful the Mayor of Quinborough (London, 1680), p. 5. 21 Roger L’Estrange, A Short Answer to a Whole Litter of Libels (London, 1680), A3r–​B2v. 22 ‘Theodorus Verax’ is Walker’s pseudonym. This is British Museum Satire No. 737, ‘‘‘the Royall Oake Of Brittayne.” (no. 1) [Jan. 30, 1649]’. The print is taken from: Clement Walker, Anarchia Anglicana: or the History of Independency (London, 1649). 23 See Eikon Basilike the Pourtraicture of his Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (London: [1649]). 24 For a more in-​depth discussion of this print, see, for example, Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–​1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 39. Knoppers also refers to this on p. 43. 25 Kevin Sharpe, ‘Archbishop Laud’, History Today, 33.8 (1983), 26–​30. 26 The inclusion of Hooker’s Laws also presumably stems from Laud’s own interest in Hooker. According to the ODNB: ‘In 1621, echoing Richard Hooker, [Laud] preached that “Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies made up of many into one, and both so near allied that the one, the Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Commonwealth”. Laud went much further, however, in associating the fortunes of the English monarchy with the specific rights, fortunes, and health of the Church of England. He insisted that “the Commonwealth can have no blessed and happy being, but by the Church” (Works, 1.6). He argued in 1626 that anyone who was sacrilegious towards the church would inevitably offer violence towards princes too’, see Anthony Milton, ‘Laud, William  (1573–​1645)’,  ODNB www.oxforddnb.com/​view/​article/​16112 [accessed 13 April 2015]. 27 The plate to the Ra-​Ree Show is contained on the title-​page of the printed text: A Ra-​ ree Show to the Tune of I am a Senceless Thing (London, 1681). For a description of the Ra-​Ree Show, see George, English Political Caricature, pp. 56–​57. Also see Rahn, ‘A Ra-​Ree Show –​A Rare Cartoon’, pp. 77–​98. According to Rahn, there are two extant and slightly different versions of the print in the Bodleian Library. The first was donated to the library by Sir Charles Firth in 1929 and ‘conforms to the description of the print in College’s trial and in Sir Roger L’Estrange’s Notes upon Stephen College (1681)’. See ‘The Trial of Stephen College, at Oxford, for High Treason, A.D. 1681’, in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols (London, 1809–​28), viii, 596–​97. Also see Roger L’Estrange, Notes Upon Stephen College (London, 1681), p. 13; p. 33. The second copy, a ‘rotograph of a broadside from the collection of Mr. G. Thorn-​ Drury, follows the first in general configuration. However, the engraving is not so

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From Republic to Restoration clear or detailed. Although the cartoon appears above the ballad … [it appears] that it was pasted on’. In the correspondence between Sidney Hodgson, former Master of the Stationers Company, and R. H. Hill of the Bodleian Library concerning the two versions, Hodgson states: ‘The engraving in his [Thorn-​Drury’s] copy is pasted on, in fact it is printed on slightly different paper, and not quite the same size’. 1 November 1930, Bodleian Library, MS Don. c. 13. The other prints that are attributed to College are: A Prospect of a Popish Successor: Displayed by Hell-​bred Cruelty: Popish Villainy: Strange Divinity: Intended Slavery: Old Englands Misery: &c. (1681) [British Museum Satire No.  1110]; The Contents (Hats for Caps) Contented (1680) [British Museum Satire No. 1087]; and The Catholick Gamesters or a Double Match of Bowleing (1681) [British Museum Satire No. 1077]. For a description of each of these prints, see the British Museum Catalogue. Also see George, English Political Caricature, pp. 57–​59. 28 The broadside referred to here is College’s print. See ‘raree-​show, n.’ OED Online (Oxford University Press, September 2015), 23 September 2015. 29 See Peter Lake, ‘Anti-​Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–​1642, ed. by Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), pp. 72–​106. 30 See Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, p. 350. 31 College, A Ra-​ree Show, p. 1. 32 Knights describes how the loyalists had ‘succeeded by 1681 in creating an image of all opposition as dissenting, republican, and rebellious’. See Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, p.  363. He refers to the Popish Plot and the Meal Tub Plot in particular. 33 See ibid., pp. 356–​68. 34 Ibid., p. 364. 35 Ibid., p. 314. 36 John Barrell has written extensively about the difference between imagining and compassing the king’s death, particularly in printed forms of polemic and satire in England. His focus is on the late eighteenth century. What Barrell describes is the continued discussion about what constitutes treason. He addresses the question of whether simply imagining the monarch’s death is the same as attempting a treasonous plot against his or her life. Clearly, the issues raised by College’s political print and subsequent execution do not go away. But my point is that College’s execution created a more permissive atmosphere in England, as registered by the explosion of political cartooning during the eighteenth century. Although censorship still remained an issue, eighteenth-​century cartoonists could create political satires under laxer conditions than College faced. See Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–​1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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Bibliography

Manuscripts Beinecke Library, Yale, MS b.222 Bodleian Library, Carte MS 46 —​—​ Carte MS 48 —​—​ Carte MS 81 —​—​ Carte MS 222 —​—​ Clarendon MS 64 —​—​ Clarendon MS 68 —​—​ Clarendon MS 69 —​—​ Clarendon MS 70 —​—​ Clarendon MS 71 —​—​ Clarendon MS 87 —​—​ Clarendon MS 123 —​—​ Clarendon MS 137 —​—​ MS Don. c. 13 Borthwick Institute, York, 15/​2 PRY/​MS 5 British Library, Additional MS 32499 —​—​ Add MS 36916 —​—​ Add MS 63759 —​—​ Add MS 72850 —​—​ Add MS 72894 Dr Williams’s Library, Morrice MS J1640 Durham University Library, Mickelton and Spearman MSS 31 Leicestershire Record Office, Finch MSS, DG7, Box 4985, Bundle IX The National Archives of the UK, Public Records Office 31/​3/​119 TNA, PRO 31/​3/​121 TNA, PRO 31/​3/​123 TNA, PRO 11/​321 The National Archives of the UK, State Papers 25/​99 TNA, SP 29/​40 TNA, SP 29/​63 TNA, SP 29/​70 TNA, SP 29/​95 TNA, SP 29/​97 TNA, SP 29/​101 TNA, SP 29/​111

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Bibliography TNA, SP 29/​411 TNA, SP 44/​5 TNA, SP 44/​15 TNA, SP 44/​16 TNA, SP 44/95 TNA, SP 77/​33 National Library of Scotland, MS 5777 York City Archives, H. B. 37

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Index

Note: bold type indicates page ranges for full chapters; italic type indicates illustrations. Literary works can be found under authors’ names; anonymous works appear under their titles. Abbot, George, archbishop of Canterbury (1562–​1633) 229 memoir 234–​37 refusal to license printing of Sibthorp sermon 234–​36 Abernathy, G. R. 208, 209 Achinstein, Sharon 248, 251, 257 Act Declaring England to be a Commonwealth (1649) 316 Act of Fornication (1650) 155 Act of General Pardon and Oblivion (1652) 147 Act of Indemnity and Oblivion (1660) 6, 8, 9, 147 Act of Settlement 197 Act of Supremacy (1669) 212 Act of Uniformity (24 August 1662) 7, 15, 140, 142, 189, 207 see also Black Bartholomew’s Day Ahivah Strange Prophecie, A (1660) 114 Aitken, Jonathan 144n.9 Allestree, Richard (1621/​2–​1681) 230, 232 Alter, Robert 265n.91 Anabaptists 87, 100n.53, 330, 331, 332, 340n.17 see also Baptists Andrewes, Lancelot, Dean of Westminster (1555–​1626) 129 Anglesey, Arthur Annesley, Earl of (1614–​1686) 233, 236, 237, 243n.57 Anglicanism 45, 63, 103, 113, 115, 208, 228, 333

Anglican clergy 24, 113, 217, 228, 230, 232 Anglican royalism 29, 131, 213, 219, 238, 334 Anglican texts 116, 187, 232, 334 latitudinarian 115, 186, 201n.10, 208 neo-​Laudian 6, 226–​37 see also Erastianism; Hobbes, Behemoth; Hyde, Edward; Laud, William; Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d; Monck, George; Sprat, Thomas Anglo-​Dutch War First (1652–​1654) 175 Second (1665–​1667) 13, 173, 179, 190, 211, 283 Third (1672–​1674) 180 see also Marvell, Andrew; Netherlands apprentices 26, 31, 33, 34, 156 Arderne, James (bap. 1636, d. 1691) 62–​65, 68n.59 Kingdom of England the Best Commonwealth, The 16, 62–​65 speech praising James II 62–​63 Arminianism 90, 103, 116, 138 Hobbes’s criticisms of 231–​32 and Laud 229–​37 Marvell’s criticisms of 229, 234–​37 perceived threat of 107 see also Heylyn, Peter; plots Army Remonstrance (1648) 104–​05 Arundell, Dennis 290 Ashburnham, John (1602/​3–​1671) 56 Aslan, Reza 252, 264n.46 Astell, Mary (1666–​1731) 116 Atkinson, Robert (d. 1664) 94, 100n.52

375

376

Index Aubrey, John (1626–​1697) 5, 12, 232 Authorized Version (King James Bible) 15, 124–​46 debt to earlier translations 126 early evolution of 127–​30 hybrid versions (with Geneva notes) 132, 145n.31 as literature 126–​27, 146n.65 misconceptions about 125–​27 reception of 125, 126, 131–​32 under the Commonwealth 131, 145n.27 see also Bible; Book of Common Prayer; Hampton Court Conference; Savoy Conference Avery, Elizabeth (fl. 1614–​1653) 112 Scripture Prophecies Opened (1647) 109 Ayloffe, John (c.1645–​1685) ‘Britannia and Raleigh’ (c.1674–​75) 284 Bacon, Francis (1561–​1626) 185, 191, 195 Baconian science 10, 190, 192 Baconianism 186, 195 Baconians 199, 200 neo-​Baconians 193, 198, 199, 200 New Atlantis 193, 200 see also Hartlib, Samuel; Petty, Sir William; science; Sprat, Thomas Ballard, George (1705/​6–​1755) 113 Ballet des nations 292 Bampfield, Thomas (1622/​3–​1693) 45 Baptists 14, 15, 87, 90–​91, 92, 94, 140 in Hexham 90–​91, 99n.34, 99n.37, 159 see also Anabaptists Barker, Robert (c.1568–​1645) 131, 145n.27 Barlow, Thomas (1608/​9–​1691) 233 Barlow, William, bishop of Rochester and Lincoln (d. 1613), 129, 145n.18 Batchiler, John Virgins Pattern, The (1661) 115 Bathurst, Ann (b. c.1638, d. c.1704) Saints Freedom from Tyranny Vindicated, The (1667) 115, 122n.115 Baudet, Etienne (c.1636–​1711) 280–​81 Baxter, Richard 15 Holy Commonwealth, A 12 Baylie, Richard (1585/​6?–​1667) 229, 230 Bedingfield, Edward 303, 304 Behn, Aphra (1640?–​1689) 116, 164 ben Israel, Joseph see Ramsey, Thomas Bennet, Henry, Earl of Arlington (bap. 1618, d. 1685) 12, 13, 85, 96, 196, 204n.53, 205n.66, 212 Berkeley, William (1608–​1677) Lost Lady, The 149

Bertie, Lady Mary (1655–​1709) 292, 293 Berwick, Grace 114 Betterton, Mrs [Mary Sanderson] (c.1637–​1712) 163, 167n.61 Betterton, Thomas (bap. 1635, d. 1710) 163, 167n.64 and development of English opera 291, 295, 300–​05 in role of Lee’s ‘Brutus’ 310, 312 Bettris, Jeane Lamentation for the Deceived People, A (1657) 110 Bianconi, Lorenzo 297 Bible ‘Biblia Sacra’ 329, 330, 331, 333, 334 Bishops’ Bible (1658) 126, 128, 129, 130 Geneva Bible 125, 128, 129, 131, 132, 133, 145n.31 Great Bible (Henry VIII, 1539) 124, 126, 128, 129, 131 New Revised Standard Version (1989) 124 and Shakespeare 126, 127, 129 translation of 125–​26, 128–​32, 139, 144n.9 see also Authorized Version; Book of Common Prayer; Hampton Court Conference; Savoy Conference ‘Black Bartholomew’s Day’ (24 August 1662) 140, 141, 146n.62 see also Act of Uniformity Blake, Captain Robert (bap. 1598, d. 1657) 172, 177 Blow, John (1648?–​1708) petition for academy of music 299–​300 Venus and Adonis (1683?) 291, 296, 297, 299 Book of Common Prayer 7, 15, 107, 124–​46 the charitable assumption 138 criticisms of 127–​29, 133–​34 Exceptions (to the Prayer Book) 137–​39 imposition of in Scotland 15, 125, 141, 207, 220, 232 misconceptions about 124–​27 outlawed during Commonwealth 15, 125, 132–​33, 135, 145n.27, 146n.61 outlawed under Mary I 125, 133 reintroduction (1662) 125–​27, 140–​43, 144n.5, 144n.8 use overseas 127, 140, 142 versions 126–​27 see also Authorized Version; Bible; Cosin, John; Great Ejection; Hampton Court Conference; Laud, William; Savoy Conference; Westminster Directory

376

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Index Book of Sports, The 104 Bosher, Robert 207, 208 Making of the Restoration Settlement, The 207 Boswell, Eleanore 293, 295, 306n.10 Boyle, Robert (1627–​1691) 188, 193, 195, 202n.22, 203n.39 Boyle, Roger, Lord Broghill, first Earl of Orrery (1621–​1679) 31, 150, 163, 167n.63 Tragedy of Mustapha, The 150, 151, 163–​64, 167n.64 Bradshaw, John (bap. 1602, d. 1659) 175, 176, 247 Bradstreet, Ann (1612?–​1672) Tenth Muse, The (1650) 110 Braganza, Catherine of, queen consort of Charles II (1638–​1705) 273 Bramhall, John (bap.1594, d. 1663) 12, 231, 233 Brémond, Sébastien (c.1646–​c.1705) 293–​94 killing of Symon Cottereau 294 Bridgeman, Sir Orlando (1609–​1674) 91 Broghill, Lord see Boyle, Roger Brown, Laura 312 Buckeridge, Bainbrigg (1667/​8–​1733) 271 Buckingham, Duke of see Villiers, George Burch, Dorothy Catechisme, A (1646) 107 Butler, James, first Duke of Ormond (1610–​1688) 85, 88, 204n.63 Butler, Martin 82n.8 Butler, Samuel (bap. 1613, d. 1680) 228–​29, 234–​37, 239, 243n.48 see also Marvell, Andrew Calvinism 104, 107, 117 Scottish 229, 232 and women’s writing 106, 107, 109–​10, 113, 116–​17 see also Book of Common Prayer; Charles II; James, Duke of York Cambert, Robert (c.1628–​1677) Ariane (1674) 19, 152, 294–​96, 298–​99, 300–​01 Ballet et musique 291, 293, 294, 298, 307n.40 Les peines et les plaisirs de l’amour (1672) 302 Pomone (1671) 302 Cambridge Platonists 186, 201n.11 Canfield, Douglas 312 Capel, Lord Arthur (1604–​1649) 75, 78 Capp, Bernard England’s Culture Wars 4

Carleton, Guy (1604/​5–​1685) 96, 100n.50, 101n.66 Carlisle, Earl of (Charles Howard, 1628–​1685) 176, 179 Carlyle, Thomas (1795–​1881) 14 Carey, John 261, 266n.112 Carre, Cuthbert 93, 95 Cary, Mary (b. c.1621) 103, 104 Little Horns Doom, The (1651) 109 Caryl, Joseph (1602–​1673) 111 Catholicism 90, 103, 105, 125, 310, 327, 328, 335 alleged plots to re-​establish 87–​88, 92 see also plots, Popish anti-​Catholic sentiment 105, 107, 215–​16, 239–​40, 276, 311, 315, 326 conversions to 213–​16, 272, 276 ‘popery’ 12, 16, 18, 24, 113, 128, 134, 137, 272, 283, 284, 326–​342 passim satirized 310–​11, 335, 327, 337 and temporal authority of Pope 210, 214, 216, 217 toleration for 6, 11, 89–​90, 211, 213, 326, 328, 336 see also Charles II; Cressy, Hugh; Declaration of Breda; Exclusion Crisis; Hyde, Anne; Hyde, Edward; James, Duke of York; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Louis XIV; Rome; Stafford, Anthony; Stillingfleet, Edward; Test Act Cavalier Parliament 42, 189, 212, 230–​31 Cavaliers 39, 45, 155, 157 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (1623?–​1673) 2, 10, 102, 103, 108, 115, 116, 117 Cavendish, William, first Duke of Newcastle (bap. 1593, d. 1676) 11, 231 censorship 11–​13, 161, 168, 342n.36 of Marvell’s work 233, 235–​37, 242n.41 see also L’Estrange, Sir Roger; College, Stephen Character of the Rump, The (1660) 154 Charles I 17, 42, 43, 45, 56, 69–​84, 103–​05, 152, 153, 207, 226, 330, 333, 334 Eikon Basilike 11, 81, 314, 330, 333, 334 execution of 4, 9, 88, 314, 331 depicted in drama 76–​81, 82n.3, 83n.26 women’s writing in response to 103, 106–​07, 108, 109, 111 as martyr 5, 7, 75–​78, 80–​81, 83n.23, 285 ‘Royall Oake of Brittayne, The’ 333, 334 seen as influenced by Laud 229, 231, 233–​34, 237

377

378

Index Charles I (cont.) trial 34, 104, 113, 314 as tyrant 77, 108, 109, 314 see also Cromwell’s Conspiracy; The Famous Tragedie of Charles I; Henrietta Maria; Marvell, Andrew; Milton, Eikonoklastes; regicide Charles II (1630–​1685) 24, 28, 85, 108, 112, 194, 197, 208–​09, 232, 237, 267 death 285, 304, 305 defence of Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d 233 excesses criticised 3, 282–​84 influence of French court on 18, 267–​88, 289–​303, 336 lobbied by Quakers 114–​16 mistresses 223n.39, 271, 272–​73, 280–​86, 296 see also Kéroualle, Louise de; Villiers, Barbara panegyric for 113, 296, 299, 303–​04 participation in entertainments 292–​93 patronage of opera 289–​308 plots against 85–​101 see also plots, Popish as pro-​Catholic 24–​25, 94, 215–​17, 223n.38, 237, 327, 336 representation in masques 296–​97, 299, 303–​04 restoration of 23–​52, 113, 114–​15, 147, 216 satirized in A Ra-​ree Show 18, 326–​27, 335, 335–​39 in ‘Britannia and Raleigh’ 284 see also Marvell, Andrew and toleration 6, 11, 89, 178, 180, 190, 213, 223n.38, 230, 328, 336 viewed as absolutist 18, 35, 267, 283, 337–​38 see also Book of Common Prayer; Braganza, Catherine of; Declaration of Breda; Exclusion Crisis; Hobbes, Thomas; Hyde, Edward; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Louis XIV; Milton, John; monarchy; Petty, Sir William; Savoy Conference Charter of England, great 33–​34 Chernaik, Warren 176, 312 Chidley, Katherine (fl. 1616–​1653) 103, 105 Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ 105 Chillingworth, William (1602–​1644) 208, 209, 211, 216 Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626–​1689) 171

Church see Act of Uniformity; Anabaptists; Anglicanism; Authorized Version; Baptists; Bible; Book of Common Prayer; Calvinism; Catholicism; Church of England; dissent; Erastianism; Hampton Court Conference; Hyde, Edward; Milton, John; nonconformists; Presbyterianism; Quakers; Savoy Conference; toleration Churchill, Arabella (1649–​1730) 213 Churchill, Sir Winston (bap. 1620, d. 1688) 197 Church of England 7, 15, 89, 114, 125, 126, 133–​43 passim, 206–​25, 229 see also Act of Uniformity; Anglicanism; Authorized Version; Bible; Book of Common Prayer; Calvinism; dissent; Erastianism; Great Ejection; Hobbes, Thomas; Hyde, Edward; Laud, William; Milton, John; nonconformists; Presbyterianism; Savoy Conference; toleration Civil War 3, 4, 9, 10, 23, 24, 25, 30, 33, 35, 40, 49n.57, 56, 90, 104, 110, 125, 147 accounts of 206, 218, 228, 229, 237 positive legacy for scientific enquiry 186, 187–​88, 190–​93 threat of renewed 43–​44, 86, 89, 142, 331–​32, 335 see also Cromwell, Oliver; Cromwellian Protectorate; Hyde, Edward; Hobbes, Thomas; Interregnum; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Milton, John; Presbyterianism; Puritanism; Selden, John civil wars 1, 26, 29, 42, 86, 102, 113, 117, 134, 139, 316, 327, 329, 332–​35 passim accounts of 8, 10, 11, 12 see also Civil War Clare, Janet 322 Clarendon code 90, 189, 208 Clarendon, Earl of see Hyde, Edward Clarges, Sir Thomas (1617?–​1695) 196 Claypole, Elizabeth (bap. 1629, d. 1658) 152, 166n.26 Clayton, Anne 114 Cleveland, Duchess of see Villiers, Barbara Clifford, Sir Thomas (1630–​1673) 215 Cockpit Theatre 150, 152, 165n.16, 165n.17, 301 Coffey, John 252 Coke, Theophila (1596–​1643) 111

378

379

Index Colchester, siege of (1648) 9, 69, 73, 75, 79 Cole, Sir Nicholas 95, 96 Coleman, Catherine (actress) 150, 301 Coleman Street 91, 159 see also Cowley, Cutter of Coleman Street College, Stephen 326–​42 ‘martyr’ for the Whig cause 338–​39 Ra-​ree Show, A (1681) 18, 326–​27, 335, 335–​39 trial and execution of 336, 338–​39, 340n.8, 342n.36 Collins, Ann Divine Songs (1653) 110 comédie-​ballet 292–​94, 302 comets 178, 179–​80 committee of safety 24, 37, 154, 155, 156 commonplaces 69–​84 intended use of 71–​73, 83n.15 as a partisan form 72, 75, 77 topicality of 72–​76, 79–​81 typographical arrangement of 70–​73, 79, 83n.25 Commonwealth 3–​4, 16, 53–​68, 90, 267, 278, 271, 317, 322, 336, 341n.26 art during 271, 286n.7 compatibility of ideals with monarchy 16, 56, 59–​65 declaration of 54, 57, 316 drama reframed during and after 147–​67 holy 113–​14, 116 opera during 3, 300–​01 scientific advancement during and after 10–​11, 185–​205 shifting definitions of 53–​59 see also Authorized Version; Book of Common Prayer; Charles I; Charles II; Cromwell, Oliver; Cromwell, Richard; Cromwellian Protectorate; Davenant, William; Evelyn, John; Harrington, James; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Milton, John; Nedham, Marchamont; Parliament; Pepys, Samuel; Presbyterianism; Tatham, The Rump; Whigs constitution 4, 24–​36 passim, 40, 43–​44, 49n78, 335 Conventicle Act (1664) 7, 231 Conventicle Bill 212 Convention Parliament (1660) 26, 30, 31–​32, 35–​37, 43, 45, 49n78, 156, 157 Convocation (1661) 139–​41 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, first Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–​1683) 16–​17, 237–​38, 309 Corns, Thomas N. 183n.40, 262n.2, 263n.39

Cosin, John, bishop of Durham (1595–​1672) 12, 90, 93–​95, 96, 100n.55, 231 and the ‘Durham Book’ (1660) 137, 139, 140, 141 Cottereau, Symon (d. 1673) 294, 306n.28 Cotton, Priscilla (d. 1664) 114 Coverdale, Miles (1488–​1569) 125, 126, 139, 144n.9 Cowley, Abraham (1618–​1667) 147–​48, 153, 165n.7, 169, 202n.30 Cutter of Coleman Street (1663) 158–​60, 167n.54 alleged anti-​royalism of 160 Poems 147 see also Sprat, Thomas Craig, John (1512/​13?–​1600) 56 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury (1489–​1556) 126, 127, 134, 137, 138, 141–​42, 144n.9 Crawford, Patricia 102, 117, 118n.3 Cressy, Hugh (1605–​1674) 215–​21, 224n.53 and Charles II 215–​16 Clarendon’s attacks on 215–​16, 220, 224n.53 Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed to the Church of Rome 215 Cromwell, Henry (1628–​1674) 194 Cromwell [neé], Mary, Countess Falconbridge (bap. 1637, d. 1713), 166n.46 Cromwell, Mrs (character in The Rump) 154–​56 Cromwell, Oliver (1599–​1658) 4, 24, 34, 42, 110, 111, 131, 147, 151, 175, 193, 254, 271, 322 and Andrew Marvell 2, 13, 170–​71, 175, 176–​77 and Davenant’s plays 151–​52, 161 death 153, 179, 247 depicted in Anarchia Anglicana 333, 334 depicted in Famous Tragedie 69, 71, 73–​75, 78–​79 dissolution of Rump (1653) 154, 165n.21, 177 and Earl of Orrer y163, 167n.63 elegies for 168, 171 fears of his dictatorship 321–​22 offer of the Crown to 30, 59 and Oliver St John 175–​76 subject of Cromwell’s Conspiracy 69, 70, 71, 73, 78–​81 see also Charles I; Commonwealth; Cromwell, Henry; Cromwell, Mary; Cromwell, Mrs; Cromwell, Richard; Hobbes, John; Milton, John; Monck, George; Parliament; regicide; Tatham, The Rump; Thurloe, John; Whitelocke, Bulstrode

379

380

Index Cromwell, Richard (1626–​1712) 4, 14, 25, 154 Cromwellian grants 197 Cromwellian Protectorate (1653–​59) 3, 8, 14, 111, 113–​14, 187, 193, 199, 333 immediate effects of fall of 23–​24 portraiture during 271, 286n.7 reframing of drama during and after 147–​67 Cromwell’s Conspiracy (1660) 5, 69–​71, 78–​81 inclusion of execution scene in 79–​80, 83n.26 print history of 69, 80 and Restoration paean 78–​81 re-​use of couplets from The Famous Tragedie 78–​79, 83n.25 see also commonplaces; Famous Tragedie of Charles I, The Crowne, John (bap. 1641, d. 1712) 294–​95 Calisto (1675) 291, 294–​95, 296, 297, 303, 307n.40 Cummings, Brian 127 Danforth, Samuel (1626–​1674) 178 Davenant, William (1606–​1668) 2, 8, 73, 150–​53, 160–​64, 165n.17, 165n.25, 167n.63 Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, The 150–​51, 308n.61 First Day’s Entertainment, The 150, 308n.61 Gondibert 71 History of Sir Francis Drake, The (1659) 150–​51, 301 Proposition for the Advancement of Morality, A 151, 165n.23 Siege of Rhodes, The 8, 150–​51, 160–​64, 166n.56, 166n.61, 300, 301 Davenport, Hester (actress, 1642–​1717) 167n.61 Davies, Lady Eleanor (1590–​1652) 5, 103, 106–​08, 117, 120n.42 For the Most Honourable States (1649) 108 Je le Tien (1646) 108 New Jerusalem at Hand, The (1649) 108 prophecies against monarchy 107–​09 Warning to the Dragon, A (1625) 107, 117 Davis, Colin 109 Davis, Mary (c.1651–​1708) 296 Declaration of Breda (1660) 6, 36–​37, 89, 113, 135, 146n.42, 147, 230 Declaration of Indulgence 212, 214, 230–​31 Dent, Edward (1876–​1957) 289, 290 Foundations of English Opera 289 Desborough, John (bap. 1608, d. 1680) 154

Dialogue betwixt Cit and Bumpkin, The (1680) 332–​33 Dido and Aeneas (opera, 1684?) 291, 296, 297 Directory for the Public Worship of God see Westminster Directory dissent 85–​101, 115, 116, 117, 190, 209, 211, 286n.4, 327–​29, 342n.32 dissenters 3, 18, 85, 88, 96, 180, 248, 261, 326–​29 passim in The Committee 327, 332, 335 in A Ra-​ree Show 336, 338 see also Great Ejection; nonconformists; plots; toleration; Whigs divines 29, 134, 135, 192, 215, 219, 227 see also Cressy, Hugh; prophecy Docwra, Anne (c.1624–​1710) Epistle of Love and Good Advice, An (1683) 116 Dolben, John (1625–​1686) 230 Donaldson, Ian 318 Dorislaus, Isaac (1595–​1649) 174, 175 Dorset Garden theatre 290, 300, 310 Downes, John (d. 1712?) 160, 301–​02, 304 Draghi, Giovanni Baptista (c.1640–​1708) 298 drama 1, 2, 8, 13, 71, 117, 289, 309–​25 commonplacing in 69–​84 female players in 148, 150, 152–​53, 154, 155–​56, 162, 163, 167n.61 musical see music; opera reframing of (1649–​65) 147–​67 scenery and scenic staging in 148, 150–​51, 152, 163, 165n.17, 165n.22, 289, 293, 295, 298, 299, 300, 301 see also censorship; pamphlets; Pepys, Samuel; satire Drury Lane 149, 150, 298 Dryden, John (1631–​1700) 88, 150, 160–​61, 163–​64, 168, 169, 172, 173, 290, 303–​04, 305 Albion and Albanius (with Grabu, 1685) 19, 290, 295, 296, 301, 302, 304–​05, 308n.71 Amboyna 151 Annus Mirabilis (1667) 173 ‘Astraea Redux’ 7 ‘Essay of Dramatic Poesy’ 72 ‘Heroique Stanzas’ 7 Indian Emperor, The 151 Indian Queen, The (with Howard, 1664) 151 King Arthur 305 Oedipus (with Lee, 1679) 310, 323n.5 Dudley, Edmund (c.1462–​1510) Tree of Commonwealth (1510) 54–​55

380

381

Index Duke’s Company 150, 152, 161, 165n.22, 295, 300, 301–​02, 310 Duke’s Theatre 150 Dundee, storming of 94 Durham 85–​93 passim Bishop of 86, 93, 96, 235 see also Cosin, John; Ellerington, John; plots; Neile, Richard Durham Book (1660) see Cosin, John Dury, John (1596–​1680) 58 Dutch army 181 Dutch navy 179–​80 Dutch shipping 195, 204n.51 Dutch trade 174, 176, 179 Dutton, William (1642–​1675) 177 Dzelzainis, Martin 172, 182n.12

Famous Tragedie of King Charles I, The (1649) 5, 9, 69–​84 death of Charles I in 74–​78, 79–​81, 81, 83n.26 engraving of execution in 81, 83n.28 likely author of 82n.2 Oliver Cromwell in 69, 71, 73–​75, 78–​79 omission of execution scene in 76–​78 print history of 69, 80–​81 ‘Prologue to the Gentry’ 73–​74 see also Colchester, siege of; Cromwell’s Conspiracy Fell, John (1625–​1686) 230 Fell, Margaret (1614–​1702) 4, 112, 114 trial and imprisonment 115, 116 Womens Speaking Justified (1667) 115 Feroli, Teresa 120n.42 Ferrell, Lori Anne 131, 145n.26 Field, John (printer) 131 Fiennes, Nathaniel (1607/​8–​1669) 30 Filmer, Sir Robert (1588?–​1653) Patriarcha (c.1630) 55 Finch, Anne (1661–​1720) 296 Fish, Stanley 249, 266n.112 Fitzroy, Lady Barbara (1672–​1737) 277, 278 Five Mile Act (1665) 7, 231 Flecknoe, Richard (b. c.1605, d. c.1677) 8, 151–​52, 153, 160, 166n.26 Ariadne Deserted 152 Love’s Dominion 151–​52 Fleetwood, Charles, Major General (c.1618–​1692) 154–​57, 194 Forced Loan (1626–​28) 226, 233–​35, 237 Foster Jones, Richard 185 Fox, George (1624–​1691) 112 France Charles II, exile in 267–​68 Château de Clagny 278–​80 French ambassador 28, 29, 37, 44, 45, 283 French dancers 298–​99 French musicians 18, 272 French school of painting 269, 270, 274 see also Gascar, Henri Gobelins Manufactory 282 maison royale de Saint-​Louis 269–​70 Montpellier 206, 210, 212, 217, 219, 223n.45 Moulins 212, 213 Paris 112, 193, 203n.44, 207, 215, 231–​32, 272, 298, 302–​03, 324n.35 Versailles 272, 278, 281–​82 see also Cambert, Robert; Charles II; Kéroualle, Louise de; Grabu, Louis; Hyde, Edward; Louis XIV

Echo to the Plea for Limited Monarchy 61–​62, 68n.49 Edie, Carolyn 60 Edward VI (1537–​1553) 128 Edwardian Prayer Book (1549) 124 Ellerington, John (Durham informer) 87, 91–​95, 100n.50, 100n.51 Elizabeth I (1533–​1603) 87, 128 Elizabethan Prayer Book 128, 133, 141 Elizabethan Settlement 133 Engagement Act of (1650) 164n.1 Controversy 57–​59 Oath of 3, 54, 147 Erastianism 207, 209–​11, 218, 219, 222n.28 Evelyn, John (1620–​1706) 4, 6, 169, 196 on entertainments at court 291, 293, 294 on excesses of Restoration court 273, 282–​86 on suppression of Book of Common Prayer 132–​33, 135 Tyrannus or the Mode (1661) 285 Exclusion Crisis (1678–​81) 13, 19, 116, 276, 283, 309–​10, 326–​42 and political prints 326–​27, 334–​35, 338 see also Catholicism; James, Duke of York; Test Act Experiment (‘Double-​Bottom’d-​Ship’) see Petty, Sir William Fage, Mary (fl. 1637) Fames Roule (1637) 103 Fairfax, Lord Thomas (1612–​1671) 8, 9–​10, 73, 168, 173, 175, 177 Falkland, Viscount (Lucius Cary, 1609/​10–​ 1643) 208, 209, 211, 215, 216, 224n.64

381

382

Index free parliament, movement for 16, 26–​46, 47n.16, 49n.57, 51n.121 see also Cromwell, Oliver; Hyde, Edward; Monck, George; Parliament; Pride’s Purge; Prynne, William; Rump Frost, Lewis 91, 94, 100n.53 Fuller, Thomas (1607/​8–​1661) 230, 241n.17 Gargill, Anne (b. c.1625, d. c.1659) Warning to all the World, A (1656) 112 Gascar, Henri (1635–​1701) royal portraits by 18, 268–​73, 275–​76, 278–​79, 287n.12 Gasper, Julia 105 Geddes, Jenny (fl. 1637) 134 Gell, Robert (1595–​1665) Essay toward the Amendment 132 Gentileschi, Giulio (fl. 1660) 297 George, Mary Dorothy (1878–​1971) description of The Committee 329–​30 Gibbon’s tennis court 149 Gilbert, Gabriel (1620?–​1680?) 302 Glickman, Gabriel 213, 215 Goldie, Mark 239 Gower, Thomas (pastor) 90, 91, 96 Grabu, Louis (fl. 1665–​1694) 290, 294, 298–​99, 303–​04, 308n.73, 308n.79 Albion and Albanius (with Dryden, 1685) 19, 290, 295, 296, 301, 302, 304–​05, 308n.71 Grafton, Anthony 72 Grammont, Count [Philibert] (1621–​1707) 272 Great Britains Beauties, or The Female Glory Epitomized (1638) 103 Great Ejection, the (1662) 7, 125, 141 Great Tew Circle 208, 209, 211, 215, 224n.58 Gregory, Tobias 265n.83 Grene, Nicholas 82n.10 Grotius, Hugo (1583–​1645) 63, 68n.67, 177, 183n.38, 235 Guibbory, Achsah 246, 256, 264n.74 Gurney, Richard (bap. 1578, d. 1647) depicted in The Committee 330, 334 Hague 162, 175, 216 see also Netherlands Hahn, Estelle 174, 181n.4 Hall, John (bap. 1627, d. 1656) 169 Hammond, Anthony 323n.5, 323n.16 Hammond, Henry (1605–​1660) 113 Hampton Court Conference (1604) 128, 131, 134, 136–​37, 139

Hardouin-​Mansart, Jules (1646–​1708) 278 Harrington, James (1611–​1677) 5, 17, 23–​24 Oceana (1656) 23 Pour enclouer le Canon (1659) 316 republicanism of 24, 59, 62, 267, 316 and The Rota Club 5, 63, 65 Harris, Tim 328–​29, 339n.3 Harrison, Peter 186 Harrison, Thomas, Major General (bap. 1616, d. 1660) 6, 159 Hartlib Circle 185, 186, 191, 198, 201n.2, 203n.38 Hartlib, Samuel (1600–​1662) 11, 185, 191–​92, 193–​95, 199, 200, 203n.44 see also science Harvey, Gabriel (1552/​3–​1631) 72 Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans (1644–​1670) 272, 273, 292, 295 Henrietta Maria, queen consort of Charles I (1609–​1669) 43, 103, 108, 152, 162, 167n.59, 213 Herbert, Henry, Master of the Revels (bap. 1594, d.1673) 161 Hesilrige, Sir Arthur (1601–​1661) 29, 90 Hewson, John (fl. 1630–​1660) 154 Heylyn, Peter (1599–​1662) 12, 217–​18, 224n.64, 230, 231 Cyprianus Anglicus 230 History of the Reformation 213 Hill, Christopher 107 Hills, Henry (c.1625–​1688/​9) 131 Hirst, Derek 20n.1 Hobbes, Thomas (1588–​1679) 2, 10, 33, 93, 193, 194, 202n.30, 203n.43, 206–​25, 228, 231–​33, 242n.31, 242n.36, 256 Behemoth 10, 12, 14, 206–​07, 220–​21, 221n.2, 228, 232–​33, 240n.5 Clarendon’s criticism of 209–​12, 217–​221 De Cive 63 Historical Narration Concerning Heresie, An 233 Leviathan 23, 55, 206, 209, 228, 233, 315, 319, 336–​37, 339n.1 Questions Concerning Liberty, The (1656) 231 Hobby, Elaine 102 Hobson, Paul (d. 1666) 90, 94 Holland see Netherlands see also Marvell, ‘The Character of Holland’ Holland House 149 Holman, Peter 292 Hooker, Richard (1554–​1600) 211 Laws 333, 334, 341n.26

382

383

Index referenced in The Committee 329–​30, 333–​34 House of Commons 7, 8, 25, 29–​30, 34, 35, 37, 40, 45, 62, 165n.21, 284, 336–​37 see also Parliament House of Lords 34, 43, 54, 58, 206, 309, 337 Howard, Sir Robert (1626–​1698) Committee, The (1662) 157–​58 Indian Queen, The (with Dryden, 1664) 151 Hull 174, 176, 179 Hume, Robert 289–​90 Hutchinson, Lucy (1620–​1681) memoir of John Hutchinson 8–​9 Hutton, Captain Robert 94 Hutton, Ronald 20n.7, 300 Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York (1637–​1671) 180 conversion to Catholicism 213–​16, 217, 218, 223n.40, 223n.41, 223n.45 Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon (1609–​1674) 6, 43, 88, 147, 190 ‘Against Multiplying Controversies’ 214, 215, 217–​19 Animadversions 216, 217, 219, 220, 224n.53 attacks on Cressy 215–​17, 220, 224n.53 attitudes to relationship of Church and State 206–​25 Brief View and Survey, A 209–​10, 212, 217–​19, 222n.19 criticism of Hobbes 209–​12, 217–​221 exile in France 10, 206, 207, 208, 212–​13, 217, 219, 223n.38, 223n.40, 223n.45 History of the Rebellion 10, 11, 48n.18, 206, 207, 208, 218, 221n.4 Life 206, 207, 220 ‘On Conscience’ 219 Religion and Policy 217 ‘religion of state’ 208, 214, 219 and Scottish Church 207, 218 Siege of Rhodes dedicated to 8, 161, 162 views on toleration of Catholicism 210, 211, 213–​20 see also Charles II; Clarendon Code; Hyde, Anne; Hyde, Henry; Hyde, Laurence Hyde, Henry, Viscount Cornbury (1638–​1709) 213, 222n.34 Hyde, Laurence (bap.1642, d. 1711) 213 Interregnum 1, 3, 4, 23–​45, 53, 102, 117, 125, 140, 332 see also Civil War; civil wars; Commonwealth

Ireland 31, 85, 104, 105, 107, 109, 204n.61 Dublin 33, 112, 196, 197 land seizure and settlement in 24, 194, 197, 205n.69 Petty’s ‘Down Survey’ of 10, 194, 197, 199, 200, 204n.63, 204n.65 Ireton, Henry (bap. 1611, d. 1651) 153, 154, 247 Ireton, John (1650–​1690) 153 Jackson, Sir John 95 James VI and I (1566–​1625) 57, 107, 240n.5, 321 Basilikon Doron 227 and translation of Bible 125, 127–​29, 131, 132, 145n.20 see also Authorized Version; Hampton Court Conference James, Duke of York [later James II and VII] (1633–​1701) 16, 62–​63, 153, 196, 212, 213, 223n.40, 223n.41, 276, 292, 303 failure to patronise musical theatre 304–​05 fears about succession of 12, 19, 309–​10, 335, 338 influence at court 283 marriage celebrations for 293, 298–​99 praised in ‘The Character of Holland’ 13, 179, 180–81 and Test Act 216, 272 see also Arderne, James; Catholicism; Charles I; Exclusion Crisis; Hyde, Anne; Modena, Mary of Jardine, Lisa 72 Jenkinson, Matthew 286n.4 Jermyn, Henry (bap. 1605, d. 1684) 56 Jesuits 16, 217, 239–​40, 311 Jevon, Rachel (bap. 1627) 113, 114 Jinner, Sarah (fl. 1658–​1664) 116 ‘John Presbyter’ (stock figure) 329, 330, 332–​33, 340n.18 Johns, Adrian 159 Johnson, Odai 309 Jones, Inigo (1573–​1652) 150 Jones, Sarah To Sions Lover (1644) 107 Jonson, Ben (1572–​1637) Bartholomew Fair 159 Joplin, John (Muggleswick) 94 trial of 95–​96 Jovial Crew or the Devil turned Ranter, The 155, 160 Juxon, William, archbishop of Canterbury (bap. 1582, d. 1663) 79–​80, 229–​30

383

384

Index Kéroualle, Louise de, Duchess of Portsmouth (1649–​1734) 18, 272–​73, 280–​83, 285, 287n.15, 293, 303 Gascar’s portraits of 275, 275–​76, 278, 280, 281 Killigrew, Thomas (1612–​1683) 13, 149–​50, 152–​53, 161, 294, 297–​99 Claracilla 149, 165n.16 Killin, Margaret (d. 1672) Warning from the Lord to the Teachers & People of Plimouth, A (with Patison, 1656) 103 Kimchi, David (1160–​1235) 130 King James Bible see Authorized Version King James Bible Trust 124, 144n.1 King’s Company 13, 149, 151, 157, 165n.22, 298–​99, 302, 307n.54 Kishlansky, Mark 323n.3 Knights, Mark 328, 337–​38, 342n.32 Knoppers, Laura 167n.59, 262n.7, 341n.24 Lacey, Andrew 83n.23 Lambert, John, Major General (bap. 1619, d. 1684) 30, 154–​57 Langbaine, Gerard (1656–​1692) Account of the English Dramatick Poet, An (1691) 310 La Roche-​Guilhen, Anne de (1644–​c.1707) 295–​96 Rare en Tout (1677) 291, 295, 307n.38 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury (1573–​1645) 12–​13, 15, 90, 103, 109, 217–​18, 219, 229, 241n.17, 242n.31 criticized by Hobbes 232 depicted in The Committee 329–​31, 333–​34, 341n.26 funeral 229–​230 influence on the Book of Common Prayer 131–​43 influence over Charles I 207, 209, 231, 237 ‘and the neo-​Laudians’ 229–​37 Summarie of Devotions, A 230, 241n.21 Lauderdale, Earl of (John Maitland, 1616–​1682) 31 Lead, Jane (1624–​1704) Heavenly Cloud Now Breaking, The 111, 117 Lee, Nathaniel (1645x52–​1692) Lucius Junius Brutus (1680) 13, 16–​17, 309–​25 Miltonic argument in 313–​15 seen as ‘Whiggish’ 311–​12, 316, 322, 323n.5 suppressed 309–​11

Oedipus (with Dryden, 1679) 310, 323n.5 Leigh, Richard (1649/​50–​1728) 228 Lely, Sir Peter (1618–​1680) 271, 276, 286n.6 Le Nôtre, André (1613–​1700) 278 Lesser, Zachary 72, 83n.15 L’Estrange, Sir Roger (1616–​1704) 11–​12, 15, 16, 89–​90, 233, 236, 326–​35, 338, 341n.27 Account of the Growth of Knavery, An (1678) 12, 19, 327, 331 analogies between religious sectarianism of 1640s and 1670s/​80s 327, 332–​33 Answer to a Whole Litter of Libels (1680) Committee; or Popery in Masquerade, The 12, 327, 329–​35 History of the Plot, The (1679) 12, 327, 329 licensing and censorship of Marvell’s Rehearsal Transpros’d 233–​36 Narrative of the Plot (1680), quoted 89 Plea for Limited Monarchy, A (1660) 60–​62, 67n.47 Toleration Discussed (1663) 11, 89 Letter from a Person of Quality (1675) 238 Levellers 33–​35, 88 Lewalski, Barbara K. 263n.42, 264n.63, 264n.69 Lewcock, Dawn 165n.17 Lewis, C. S. (1898–​1963) 249, 263n.29 liberty of conscience 6, 87, 89, 113–​14, 115 Licensing Act (1679) 12, 13, 232 Life and Death of Mrs Rump, The (1660) 154 Lilburne, Robert (bap. 1614, d. 1665) 90 Lincoln Inn’s Fields 150 Lisle, Sir George (d. 1648) 9–​10, 75–​76 Lisle’s Tennis Court 150, 165n.22 Livy (b. c.59BC, d. c.17AD) Ab Urbe Condita 318, 320, 324n.18 on Brutus 324n.37 Lloyd, David (1635–​1692) 230 Locke, John (1632–​1704) 232, 237–​40 Essay concerning Toleration (1667) 239–​40 Loewenstein, David 261, 263n.37, 264n.49, 264n.69 Loftis, John 312 London apprentices 31, 33–​34 Great Fire and Plague of 3, 11, 148, 189 Long Parliament 4, 30, 35, 106 dissolution of 41–​42, 44 plotted restoration of 87 see also Hobbes, Behemoth; Parliament Louis XIV (1638–​1715) 17, 297, 336 aesthetic influence of his court on Charles II 18–​19, 267–​88 incursion into Gelderland 234

384

385

Index marriage of 298 mistresses 272, 273, 282–​83 patronage of musical theatre 299, 302–​03 portrait of 269–​72, 270, 286n.5 praised at expense of Charles II 282 see also Montespan, marquise de; Treaty of Dover Love, Harold 172, 173 forms of publication 170 Lovelace, Richard (1617–​1657) Lucasta 168, 169 Lucas, Sir Charles 9–​10, 73, 76–​78, 79, 80, 81 Luckett, Richard 289, 305 Ludlow, Edmund (1616/​17–​1692) 6, 8, 255, 264n.72, 282 Lully, Jean-​Baptise (1632–​1687) 19, 289, 290, 292, 298, 302–​03, 304 Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (with Molière, 1670) 292 Luttrell, Narcissus 326, 336 McDowell, Nicholas 169 McElligott, Jason 82n.5 Machiavelli, Nicolò on Brutus 324n.18 Discourses upon Livy 318 Magna Carta 33–​34, 106 depicted in The Committee 329, 330, 331, 333–​34 Maguire, Nancy Klein 83n.26, 287n.15 Maimonides, Moses (1135–​1204) 130 Maintenon, Madame de [Françoise d’Aubigné] (1635–​1719) 269 Maitland, F. W. 54 Major, Elizabeth (fl. 1656) Honey on the Rod (1655) 111, 121n.81 Makin, Bathsua (b. 1600, d. c.1675) Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, An 102 Maltby, Judith (quoted) 135 Marshall, Alan 159, 311 Marvell, Andrew (1621–​1678) 2, 3, 16, 18, 19, 168–​84, 226–​44, 283–​84 Account of the Growth of Popery, An (1677) 12 Advice-​to-​a-​Painter poems 172, 173, 180, 182n.16 alterations to work 233, 235–​37, 239–​40, 242n.41 ‘The Character of Holland’ 13, 173–​81, 182n.23 and Cromwell 2, 170–​71, 175–​77, 179 differences with Butler over Abbot’s memoir 234–​37

disputed marriage 172, 182n.16 and Dutch politics 173–​81 First Anniversary, The 13, 168, 170–​71, 178 four epitaphs 171 ‘To His Coy Mistress’ 172 ‘Horatian Ode’ (1650) 168, 171, 173, 175 ‘In Legationem Domini Oliveri St John’ 174, 175, 177 Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) 180, 283 missions to the United Provinces (Netherlands) 174, 179 Nun Appleton 168, 174, 175, 177 poems in manuscript 169, 171–​72 purported espionage 179 Rehearsal Transpros’d, The (1672) 12, 228, 229, 231, 232–​40, 242n.41, 243n.57 Rehearsall Transpros’d: The Second Part, The (1673) 232, 233, 239 support for the Rump 176–​77 see also Arminianism; Charles II; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Milton, John Mary, princess royal (1631–​1660) 295 Mary I (1516–​1558) 125, 133 masque 18, 69, 150, 165n.17, 258, 291–​93, 294–​95, 296, 306n.10 Massey, Edward (1604x09–​1674) 39 Maynwaring, Roger (1589/​90?–​1653) 219, 234, 237, 238, 240, 243n.57 Meadows, Philip (bap. 1626, d. 1718) 175, 176 Mercurius Democritus 149 Mercurius Politicus 170 Mercurius Publicus 51n.111 Merton, Robert 185 Milhous, Judith 289, 302, 304 Millar, Oliver 272 Millenary Petition 128 Milton, Anthony 66n.2 Milton, John (1608–​1674) 2, 3, 13, 228, 245–​66, 263n.22, 266n.103, 267–​68 Areopagitica 247 Defence of the English People (1651) 246 De Doctrina Christiana 249, 250, 251, 259, 261, 266n.110 Eikonoklastes 11, 245, 257, 314 endorsement of Marvell 175, 177 First Defence 257 History of Britain 247 imprisonment 247 on monarch as tyrant 314–​15 on monarchy as ‘bondage’ 17, 245–​48, 262n.7, 267 Paradise Lost 17, 169, 246–​56, 263n.30, 263n.39, 264n.76

385

386

Index Milton, John (1608–​1674) (cont.) Paradise Regained 4, 17, 246, 251–​55, 264n.63, 264n.69, 264n.74 ‘Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio’ 11 Readie and Easie Way, The (1660) 17, 56, 245–​46, 253 Samson Agonistes 17, 246–​53, 255–​61, 265n.90, 265n.97, 265n.102, 266n.112, 284, 287n.32 Second Defence 254, 257 Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, The 12, 245, 247, 257, 314–​15 Treatise of Civil Power, A 257 see also Lee, Lucius Junius Brutus; prophecy Mistris Rump brought to Bed of a Monster (1660) 154 Modena, Mary of, queen consort of James II and VII (1658–​1718) 19, 272, 293, 296, 298–​99 monarchy abolition of 30, 54, 58, 316–​17 assertions of compatibility with commonwealth ideals 16, 59–​65 as bondage 17, 115, 245–​48, 267 divine right 53, 219, 229, 238, 244n.62 dynastic right 310 jure divino 105–​06, 117, 238, 240 prophecies against 107–​10 ‘republican’ defences of 53–​68 restoration of 23–​52 risk of tyranny under 56–​57, 314–​15 royal supremacy 14, 211, 217, 239 in women’s political writing 102–​23 see also Charles I; Charles II; Commonwealth; Cromwell, Oliver; Hobbes, Thomas; Hyde, Edward; James, Duke of York; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; plots Monck, George (1608–​1670) 5, 14, 24, 25, 51n.111, 59, 61, 94, 154, 156 insistence on Republic 28–​33, 35, 38–​46 Monmouth, James, Duke of (1649–​85) 295, 299, 304 Montespan, marquise de [Françoise-​Athénaïs] (1640–​1707) portraits of 18, 273–​75, 274, 278–​80, 279, 283 Mordaunt, John, first Viscount Mordaunt (1626–​1675) 34, 212 More, Helen (1606–​1633) 111 Holy Practices, The (1657) 112 Spiritual Exercises (1658) 112 Morley, George, bishop of Winchester (1598?–​1684) 213, 223n.40, 223n.41 Morton, Serjeant 86

Moss, Anne 83n.15 Motteux, Peter (1663–​1718) 289 Muggleswick 85, 87, 90–​92, 94, 101n.66 Muggletonians 300, 333, 341n.19 Mullet, Michael 62 Music 1, 2, 18, 19, 194 at court of Charles II 268, 272, 287n.13, 289–​308 Master of the King’s 294–​95, 298 musical theatre 18, 19, 150 musical-​theatrical productions at court 290–​300 in commercial theatres 289, 300–​05 recitative 160 Royal Academy of 19, 298, 299 see also opera musicians court 291, 296 French 18, 272 Italian 294, 298, 306n.28 Myers, Benjamin 263n.30 Navigation Act (1651) 176, 179, 183n.48 Naylor, James (1618–​1660) 113 referenced in The Committee 330, 331, 333 Nedham, Marchamont (bap. 1620, d. 1678) 2, 4, 17, 169, 267, 320 Case of the Common-​Wealth of England Stated, The 12 Excellencie of a Free-​State (1656) 317, 320 Neile, Richard (justice of the peace) 93, 96, 101n.65 Neile, Richard, archbishop of York (1562–​1640) 90 Netherlands 107, 112, 174, 179 see also Anglo-​Dutch Wars; Lely, Sir Peter; Marvell, Andrew; van Tromp, Maarten Newcastle Propositions 56 and Northern Rebellion 90, 91, 95–​96, 100n.53 New England 107, 110, 112 New Market Fair (1649) 149, 156, 157 New Model Army 32 newsbooks 70, 82n.2, 149, 170 Newton, Isaac (1642–​1727) 185 No King but the Old Kings Son (1660) 61–​62, 67n.48 see also L’Estrange, A Plea for Limited Monarchy nonconformists 88, 89, 90, 105, 110, 101n.73, 125, 211, 221, 311 and Book of Common Prayer 140, 141, 143, 145n.31

386

387

Index feared as plotters 88–​90, 94, 328–​29 legislation against 6–​7, 15, 89–​90, 140, 231, 237 persecution of 15, 89, 94, 96, 116, 186, 328 in political prints 328–​35 toleration for 89–​90, 328 women writers as 105, 110–​117 see also Act of Uniformity; Declaration of Breda; Declaration of Indulgence; dissent; Great Ejection; Hobbes, Thomas; L’Estrange, The Committee; plots North, Roger (1651–​1734) 292, 293, 297 Northern Rebellion (1663) 15, 85–​101 see also Newcastle; plots Oates, Titus (1649–​1705) 91, 96, 309, 311, 323n.3 see also plots, Popish Oath of ‘abjuration’ 29–​30 Office of Address 192–​94, 195, 198, 200, 203n.36 Oldenburg, Henry (c.1619–​1677) 189, 197, 204n.52, 204n.61 Ormond, Duke of see Butler, James Orrery, Earl of see Boyle, Roger Osborne, Dorothy (1627–​1695) 149 Osborne, Sir Thomas (1632–​1712) 94 opera 3, 152, 160, 161, 166n.28 and patronage of Charles II 18–​19, 289–​308 scenery in 150–​51, 152, 160, 163, 165n.22, 295, 296–​97, 298, 299, 300, 301 singers 293, 298, 299, 300, 303 replaced by actors 301 see also Betterton, Thomas; Cambert, Robert; Crowne, John; Davenant, William; drama; Dryden, William; Grabu, Louis; Killigrew, Thomas; music; United Company Owen, Susan 312 Oxford 129, 130, 190, 192, 206, 215 neo-​Laudians 229–​35 Oxford Parliament (1681) 337 Oxenbridge, Jane 171 Oyer and Terminer, Commission of at York 86 Paget, Thomas (d. 1660) 58 Paisible, James (c.1656–​1721) 296, 307n.40 Pakington, Dorothy (bap. 1623, d. 1679) 113 attribution of The Whole Duty of Man to 113

Palmer, Thomas (b. 1611/​12, d. c.1667) misattribution of The Saints Freedom to 122n.115 pamphlets 8, 11, 12, 19, 57, 88 and female religious activism 103–​05, 108, 114, 115 political 61–​62, 86, 175, 212, 311, 332–​35, 341n.18 play 5, 69–​84, 149, 154–​60 see also Charles I, Eikonoklastes; commonplaces; The Famous Tragedie of Charles I; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Milton, John; newsbooks; political prints Parker, Henry (1604–​1652) 58 Parker, Samuel (1640–​1688) 232, 233, 235, 240 Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself (1672) 231 Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie (1669) 239 Parliament see Cavalier; Convention; free; Long; Oxford; Rump defended and attacked in women’s writing 104–​14 general references to 10, 14, 15, 18, 57–​61 passim, 71, 82n.5, 85, 89, 92, 149, 162, 190, 226, 233, 283, 314, 323n.3, 327, 335–​38 and pre-​Restoration negotiations 16, 23–​52 see also Book of Common Prayer; Commonwealth; Cromwellian Protectorate; Monck, George; regicide; Tatham, The Rump; satire Peirce, Sir Edmund (d. 1667) Englands Monarchy Asserted (1660) 16, 59, 60 Vox Verè Anglorum (1659) 59–​60 Pepys, Samuel (1633–​1703) 135, 156–​57, 172, 196, 298 on plays 156, 158, 159, 160, 166n.46, 167n.54, 167n.61, 167n.64 on the return of Charles II 7, 30, 37, 44, 282–​83, 285 witness to regicides’ executions 5–​6, 7, 159 Perrin, Pierre (c.1620–​1675) 298, 302 Petition of Right 33, 34 Petty, Sir William (1623–​1687) 10, 11, 188, 193–​99, 203n.43 ‘Apparatus to the History of the Common Practices of Dy[e]ing’ 195 assigned to committee on navigation 196 career in Ireland 194, 197, 203n.42, 204n.63 depiction in Sprat’s History 188, 193–​99

387

388

Index Petty, Sir William (1623–​1687) (cont.) ‘Double-​Bottom’d-​Ship’ 188, 195–​99 Experiment 188, 196–​99 Invention (first prototype) 196 Invention II (second prototype) 196, 204n.61 ‘Down Survey’ of Ireland 194, 197, 199, 200, 204n.63, 204n.65 encouragement from Charles II 195, 196, 204n.52 non-​naval inventions 199 Political Arithmetick 204n.51 Philips, Katherine (1632–​1664) 103, 169 Horace (1667) 292 Pinnock, Andrew 296 Play-​house to be Lett, The (1663) 150 plot(s) 15, 85–​101, 180, 189, 236–​37 ‘Arminian’ 234–​35 constituent plots within ‘Northern Rebellion’ (1663) 85 Dublin (1663) 98n.19 Fifth Monarchist (1661) 88, 89, 98n.19 Gunpowder (1605) 88, 98n.13, 98n.19 L’Estrange on 89 Leveller 88 in Lucius Junius Brutus 310–​11, 317, 318, 322 mentalité 88–​89 Muggleswick Park 85, 87, 90 Popish 12, 13, 16, 19, 96, 98n.19, 276, 302, 311, 323n.3, 326–​42 Rye House 19 Tonge (1662) 91, 98n.19, 100n.39 Yarrington (1661) 98n.19 see also Ellerington, John; Oates, Titus political prints 326–​42 Ponder, Nathaniel (1640–​1699) 233, 237 Poole, Elizabeth (bap. 1622?, d. c.1668) 3, 106, 116 Alarum of War, An (1649) 106 Vision Wherein is Manifested, A (1648) 106 Pope, Mary (d. 1653?) 3, 104–​05, 106, 116 Behold Here is a Word (1649) 104 Heare, heare, heare (1648) 104 Treatise of Magistracy, A (1647) 104, 119n.20 Popple, William (1700/​01–​1764) 172 Pordage, John (bap. 1607, d. 1681) and Mary (d. 1668) 111 Portraiture 18, 268–​79 see also Charles II; Louis XIV; Gascar, Henri Portsmouth, Duchess of see Kéroualle, Louise de Potter, Lois 83n.26 Presbyterianism

and Book of Common Prayer 15, 135–​43, 146n.61 and restoration of monarchy 23–​52 and satire 326–​342 see also Act of Uniformity; Church of England; Declaration of Breda; Exclusion Crisis; Hobbes, Behemoth; Monck, George; Pride’s Purge; toleration; Whigs Preston, Lord Richard (1648–​1695) 303 Price, Curtis 289, 290 Henry Purcell and the London Stage 289 Pride’s Purge (1648) 25, 26–​27, 37, 41, 51n.121, 154 Priest, Josias (d. 1734/​5) 296 Prince William, Duke of Cambridge 124 Printing Act (1662) 11 prophecy 2, 20, 156, 159 in Milton 247, 251, 252, 253, 255, 258, 261, 264n.47 in women’s writing 3, 4, 102–​23 Prynne, William (1600–​1669) 31, 32, 34, 217 Purcell, Henry (1659–​1695) 289, 302 Puritanism 7, 18, 107, 113, 235, 267, 328 decline of Puritan rule 23–​36 links with science 185–​86 satire of in drama 149–​60 Puttenham, George (1529–​1590/​91) Art of English Poesy, The 72 Pym, John (1584–​1643) 237, 243n.57 Quakers 4, 14, 102–​23 passim depicted in The Committee 330, 332 persecutions and imprisonments of 113–​16 visionary religious culture of 110–​11 writing by female 103–​05, 110–​16 see also Charles II; Naylor, James Radzinowicz, Mary Ann 249–​50, 259 Ramsey, Thomas [‘Joseph ben Israel’] (fl. c.1647–​1653) 99n.37 Randall, Dale 82n.3, 83n.26 Ravelhofer, Barbara 71 Raymond, Joad 83n.23, 102, 118n.10 Red Bull (playhouse) 149 regicide (execution) 4, 5, 6, 8, 14, 16, 74, 86, 103, 147, 265n.83, 284, 333, 335 depicted in Cromwell’s Conspiracy 79–​80, 83n.26 effect on Parliamentarian cause 23, 25 engraving of in The Famous Tragedie 81, 83n.28

388

389

Index influence on ideas of ‘commonwealth’ 54, 57–​58 women writers’ response to 106, 111, 113, 117 see also Charles I; The Famous Tragedie of Charles I; Pride’s Purge; regicides regicides (enactors) 6, 44–​45, 88, 89, 106, 153, 156, 159 executions of 5–​6, 7, 159 exhumation of corpses 6, 247 see also Bradshaw, John; Cromwell, Oliver; Harrison, Thomas; Hewson, John, Ireton, Henry republicanism aligned with ideas of ‘commonwealth’ 54, 56–​59 and critiques of Restoration court 9, 282, 284–​86 exclusivist 57, 60 language of, used in defence of monarchy 3, 17, 53–​68, 327–​28 Lee’s Brutus as hero of 13, 312–​16 linked with popery 88, 329, 338 linked with radicalism 18, 94, 97, 327–​28, 338, 342n.32 in texts 8–​9, 10, 11, 21n.26, 103, 108, 267, 302–​25, 326–​42 see also Commonwealth; Cromwell, Oliver; Evelyn, John; Harrington, James; Hobbes, Thomas; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Milton, John; Monck, George; Nedham, Marchamont; Pepys, Samuel; Pride’s Purge; Rump, secluded members Respublica 4, 54, 57, 315 Reynolds, Edward, bishop of Norwich (1599–​1676) 126, 144n.9 Reynolds, John (1549–​1607) 128–​29, 130 Richardson, Doctor Edward 94 Roberts, David 148 Rogers, John (b. 1627) 112 Rome 11, 64, 191, 241n.6, 252, 271, 309–​25 passim Church of 214–​16, 282 see also Catholicism; Cressy, Hugh Rota Club 5, 63, 65, 68n.59 Roundhead 7, 25, 33, 44, 46 Royalism 23–​52, 70, 82n.5, 209 and Book of Common Prayer 131, 139, 143 constitutional 64, 65 and drama 148, 157–​62 royalist appropriation of republican language 3, 16, 17, 53–​68 royalist criticism of Restoration court 3, 268, 282–​83, 285

and women writers 102–​05, 111, 113, 116 see also Anglicanism; Arderne, James; Commonwealth; Cowley, Abraham; Hyde, Edward; monarchy; regicide; Sprat, Thomas; Tatham, John; Walker, Clement Royal Society 2, 10, 11 formation of 185, 186, 187–​88, 200n.2 heterogeneity of 188, 192, 194–​95, 201n.11 ‘History of Trades’ programme 195, 200, 203n.46 Sprat’s History of (1667) 10, 187–​99 see also Petty, Sir William; science Rump, the (parliament) 14, 23–​52 passim, 174, 177 abolition of monarchy 30, 54, 58 declaration of ‘commonwealth and free state’ 54, 57, 316 and Marvell 176–​77 oath of ‘abjuration’ 29–​30 Poole’s prophecy against 106 satire of 75, 79, 154–​57, 165n.21 secluded members 25, 26, 29–​31, 37, 38, 41–​42, 44, 45, 48n.49, 114 see also Commonwealth; Cromwell, Oliver; Cromwell, Richard; Engagement; Monck, George; Parliament; Pride’s Purge; republicanism; Tatham, The Rump Rupert, prince of the Rhine (1619–​1682) 178, 180, 295 Rushworth, John (c.1612–​1690) 234–​36, 243n.57 Rutland House 150, 152, 165n.17, 301 see also Davenant, William St John, Oliver (c.1598–​1673) 44, 174–​75, 176, 177 Salisbury Court Theatre 156, 165n.16 Salomon’s House 193, 198, 200, 203n.36 Salvetti, Giovanni (fl. 1657–​1680) 299 Samuel, Irene 260, 266n.106 Sanderson, Robert, bishop of Lincoln (1587–​1663) 126, 141, 146n.61 Sandwich, Earl of (Edward Montagu, 1625–​1672) 178, 180 satire 12, 176, 196, 204n.59, 283–​86, 297 in The Famous Tragedie 73, 75, 79 in political prints 18, 326–​42 in Restoration drama 149–​60, 165n.21 satirical almanacs 116 see also Catholicism; College, Stephen; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Marvell, ‘The Character of Holland’, Rehearsal

389

390

Index satire (cont.) Transpros’d, Last Instructions to a Painter; pamphlets; Presbyterianism; Tatham, The Rump Savoy Conference (1661) 136–​41 see also Book of Common Prayer science 10–​11, 185–​205 collaborative 190, 193, 199, 200 empirical 185, 188, 192–​93, 197, 205n.74 and Puritanism 185–​86 see also Bacon, Francis; Hartlib, Samuel; Petty, Sir William; Office of Address; Royal Society; Sprat, Thomas Scotland 38, 43, 94, 127, 141, 212 Prayer Book in 125, 134, 137, 207, 220, 233 Scott, Joan Wallach 102 Scottish Church 207, 218 ministers pursuit of democracy 227–​28 Scottish Revolution (1637–​1644) 10, 206, 218 Scudéry, Madeleine de (1607–​1701) Clélie 318, 324n.35 Selden, John (1584–​1654) 10, 22n.36, 226–​28 Serjeantson, R. W. 265n.82 Shadwell, Thomas (c.1640–​1692) 300 Psyche (opera) 300–​02 Shakespeare 2, 73, 82n.10, 126, 127, 129, 162, 164 Julius Caesar 313 Shylock (Merchant of Venice) 258 Shapiro, Barbara 186, 203n.38, 205n.74 Sheldon, Gilbert, archbishop of Canterbury (1598–​1677) 136, 137, 139, 141, 213, 223n.40, 230, 231, 241n.21 Sheppard, Samuel (c.1624–​1655?) 82n.2 Committee-​man Curried, The (1647) 157 Sibthorp, Robert (d. 1662) 219, 234–​35, 238, 240 Sidney, Algernon (1623–​1683) 255, 264n.71 Sidney, Philip (1554–​1586) 71, 73 Defence of Poesie 71 Solemn League and Covenant (1643) 125, 157, 331 Smith, Sir Thomas (1513–​1577) 54, 57 Sorbière, Samuel (1615–​1670) 196, 203n.43, 204n.56 Sprat, Thomas, bishop of Rochester (bap. 1635, d. 1713) 10–​11 on civil wars’ effect on scientific enquiry 186, 187, 190–​93 criticism of 187, 188–​89 editing of Cowley’s works 148, 165n.7

equivocal portrayal of Royal Society’s allegiances 189–​92, 193 experimental philosophy 185–​94, 202n.30 History of the Royal Society (1667) 10, 11, 187–​99 on reformative value of civil wars 191–​93 on reform of language 191–​92, 202n.30 see also Petty, Sir William Stafford, Anthony (b. 1586/​7, d. c.1645) Femall Glory, The (1635) 103, 111 President of Female Perfection, A (1656) 111 Staggins, Nicholas (d. 1700) 294, 299 Stallybrass, Peter 72, 83n.15 Stanley, Thomas (1625–​1678) 169 Star Chamber 105 Starkey, George (1628–​1665) Dignity of Kingship Asserted, The (1660) 56 Steadman, John M. 265n.97, 266n.103 Stephens, Frederick George 330, 333, 340n.17, 340n.18 Stillingfleet, Edward, bishop of Worcester (1635–​1699) 211, 215–​16, 222n.28, 224n.63, 225n.65 Discourse concerning the Idolatry Practised, A 215 Strange and Wonderfull Prophecies (1649) 109 Sweden 171, 174, 175, 179, 183n.30 Tapsell, Grant 122n.94 Tate, Nahum (1652–​1715) Richard the Second 309 Tatham, John (fl. 1632–​1664) 153–​57 Distracted State (1651) 154, 166n.36 London’s Glory Represented (1660) 153–​54 London’s Tryumph (1658) 153 Royal Oake, The (1660) 153 Rump, or the Mirrour of the late Times, The (1660) 154–​57 Tawney, R. H. (1880–​1962) 185 taxation 23, 37–​38 Ship Money 226 see also Forced Loan Tears of Rome (1680) 311 Tempest, the (opera) 300–​01, 302 Tempest, Colonel John 95, 96 Test Act (1672) 216, 272, 298 Theatre Royal 149–​50, 158, 165n.22, 298, 307 Thorndike, Herbert (bap. 1597?, d. 1672) 13, 218, 231 Thurloe, John (bap. 1616, d. 1668) 8, 151, 155, 178 Tillam, Thomas (d. c.1674) 91, 99n.37 Toland, John (1670–​1722) 21n.26, 57

390

391

Index toleration 6, 89–​90, 92, 338 for Catholics 6, 211, 213, 328, 336 and Charles II 6, 178, 180, 223n.38, 230, 328, 336 religious 11, 147, 178, 180, 190, 326–​28 see also Declaration of Breda; Exclusion Crisis; Hyde, Edward; L’Estrange, Sir Roger; Locke, John; Test Act Toleration Act (1650) 90 Tory polemic and propaganda 16, 326–​29, 337, 338 stance and Lucius Junius Brutus 311–​12 see also College, A Ra-​ree Show; L’Estrange, Sir Roger Tragedy of Cicero, The (1651) 322 Transproser Rehears’d, The (1673) 228 see also Butler, Samuel Trapnel, Hannah (fl. 1642–​1660) 103, 110 Treaty of Dover 215, 272 Tuck, Richard 22n.36, 68n.67, 241n.6, 242n.25 Tuppen, Sandra 292 Turner, Jane Choice Experiences (1653) 103, 110 Twyn, John (trial, 1664) 86 Tyndale, William (c.1494–​1536) 126 United Company (musical theatre) 290, 291, 302, 304–​05, 306n.9 Vallière, Louise de la (1644–​1710) 283 Vane, Sir Henry (1613–​1662) 4, 255, 264n.71 van Dyck, Sir Anthony (1599–​1641) 271, 286n.6 van Tromp, Maarten (1598–​1653) 177 Venner, Thomas (1608/​9–​1661) 6, 89 Vigarani, Carlo (1637–​1713) 302 Villiers, Barbara, Duchess of Cleveland (bap. 1640, d. 1709) 223n.39, 273, 276–​78, 277, 278, 281, 287n.17, 292 Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham (1592–​1628) 38, 233–​34, 235–​37 Villiers, George, second duke of Buckingham (1628–​1687) 85, 88, 95, 172, 292 von Maltzahn, Nicholas 228, 262n.17 Walker, Clement (d. 1651) Anarchia Anglicana 333–​34 ‘The Royall Oake of Brittayne’ 334 Walker, Thomas 297 Walker, William 249

Walkling, Andrew 287n.13 Waller, Edmund (1606–​1687) 21n.25, 168 Instructions to a Painter 283 Pompey the Great 292 Ward, John (Baptist pastor) 91, 94 Warren, Elizabeth (bap. 1617) 3, 106, 116 Old and Good Way Vindicated, The (1645) 105 Warning-​peece from Heaven, A (1649) 105 Waterhouse, Ellis 271 Web, Mary (fl. 1659) 114 Webb, John (1611–​1672) 150 Weber, Max (1864–​1920) 185 Webster, Charles 186, 201n.9 Wedgwood, C. V. 1 Wentworth, Anne (1629/​30–​1693?) 116 Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford (1593–​1641) 330, 334 Westminster Directory (1645) 15, 133, 134–​36, 137 referenced in The Committee 330, 331, 341n.18 Weston, Richard (1620–​1681) 95 Wharton, Philip (1613–​1696) 180 Whigs 16, 19, 26, 311 and anti-​Catholic propaganda 326–​28 as audience for Lucius Junius Brutus 312, 316, 322, 323n.5 and College’s A Ra-​ree Show 335–​39 and L’Estrange’s The Committee 329–​35 Whinney, Margaret 272 White, Dorothy (d. 1686?) 112 Whitehall 81, 111, 295 Duchess of Portsmouth’s apartments in 281–​82, 283 Theatre 150, 291–​92, 298, 306n.10 Whitelocke, Bulstrode (1605–​1675) 8, 132, 145n.28, 171, 174 depicted in The Rump 154, 156 Whittingham, Timothy 100n.50, 100n.51 Wilkins, John (1614–​1672) 188–​94 passim, 202n.30 Oxford group 190–​91, 193, 203n.38 William of Orange (1650–​1702) 46 Williamson, Joseph (1633–​1701) 283 Willie, Rachel 82n.6, 83n.23 Winn, James 296 Winstanley, Gerrard (bap. 1609, d. 1676) 109 Wiseman, Susan 70 witchcraft 97, 105, 113 Wittreich, Joseph 260 Witty, Robert 168 Popular Errours (trans. 1651) 168, 169

391

392

Index Worcester House Declaration (1660) 136, 137, 230 Worden, Blair 66n.10, 168, 248, 262n.14, 264n.71 Wormald, Brian 208–​09 Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion 208 Worsley, Benjamin (1617/​18–​1677) 193 Wren, Christopher (1632–​1723) 188 Wren, Mathew (1629–​1672) 59

Wren, Matthew, bishop of Ely (1585–​1667) 137, 139, 141, 146n.39, 234 Wyvill, Ursula (1619–​1680) 110–​11 York, Duchess of see Hyde, Anne York, Duke of see James, Duke of York Yorkshire 15, 42, 85, 86, 87, 94, 96 Zimmerman, Franklin 290

392