Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations 0198778171, 9780198778172

Table of contents :
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Introduction • Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae
PART I. MOMENTS
1. Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession • Richard A. McCabe
2. Writing the King’s Death: The Case of James I • Alastair Bellany
3. ‘He seems a king by long succession born’: The Problem of Cromwellian Accession and Succession • Steven N. Zwicker
4. Charles II and the Meanings of Exile • Christopher Highley
5. 1685 and the Battle for Dutch Public Opinion: Succession Literature from a Transnational Perspective • Helmer Helmers
6. ‘A great Romance feigned to raise wonder’: Literature and the Making of the 1689 Succession • John West
7. The Last Stuart Coronation • Joseph Hone
PART II. TRANSFORMATIONS
8. ‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’: Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England • Paulina Kewes
9. Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric • Andrew McRae
10. ‘I have brought thee up to a Kingdome’: Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I • David Colclough
11. ‘Eyes without Light’: University Volumes and the Politics of Succession • Henry Power
12. Stuart Coronations in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity • Jane Rickard
13. Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions • Ian W. Archer
14. Royal Mothers, Sacred History, and Political Polemic • R. Malcolm Smuts
15. ‘Stampt with your own Image’: The Numismatic Dimension of Two Stuart Successions • B. J. Cook
16. The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715 • Mark Knights
Afterword: The Disenchantment of Monarchy • Paul Hammond
Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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S T U A RT S U C C E S S I O N L I T E R AT U R E

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Stuart Succession Literature Moments and Transformations Edited by

PAU L I N A K E W E S and

A N D R E W Mc R A E

1

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3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © the several contributors 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945292 ISBN 978–0–19–877817–2 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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In memory of Kevin Sharpe (1949–2011)

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Acknowledgements This book derives from The Stuart Successions Project, a collaboration between the Universities of Exeter and Oxford. We are grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding both this project and the follow-on project that led  to the creation of Stuarts Online (http://stuarts-online.com/). The Stuart Successions Project also produced Literature of the Stuart Successions: An Anthology, ed. Andrew McRae and John West (Manchester University Press, 2017), as well as two PhD dissertations and a number of articles. Its open-access database of Stuart succession writing (http://stuarts.exeter.ac.uk/database/) is intended as the basis for further research in this rich field. We are also grateful to our excellent core project team: our postdoctoral research associate, John West, and our PhD students, Joseph Hone and Anna-Marie Linnell. In addition, these projects were supported by the University of Exeter; Jesus College, Oxford; the University of Oxford English Faculty; the Bodleian Libraries; the Ashmolean Museum; the Huntington Library; the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust; and Historyworks. Numerous individuals contributed to the intellectual development of The Stuart Successions Project, and also to the essays included in this volume. In particular, we would like to acknowledge the audience at our 2013 project colloquium, at which most of our authors presented initial versions of their work. Others to have supported the project include: Tim Amos, Charlotte Campton, Justin Champion, Susan Doran, Alexandra Franklin, Gabriel Glickman, Tim Harris, Clive Holmes, Jessica Knight, Nicholas McDowell, Gerald Maclean, Roger Mason, John Morrill, Glyn Parry, Giovanna Vitelli, and Blair Worden. Joseph Hone provided invaluable help in preparing the manuscript for publication. At Oxford University Press, we have benefited from the expert guidance and support of Jacqueline Norton and Eleanor Collins. The Stuart Successions Project was conceived and developed in collaboration with the late Kevin Sharpe. Although Kevin died in 2011, shortly after the grant was awarded, the project remained greatly indebted to his work. This volume aims to honour his memory.

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Contents List of Figures Notes on Contributors

xi xiii

Introduction Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae

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PA RT I .  M O M E N T S 1. Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession Richard A. McCabe 2. Writing the King’s Death: The Case of James I Alastair Bellany 3. ‘He seems a king by long succession born’: The Problem of Cromwellian Accession and Succession Steven N. Zwicker 4. Charles II and the Meanings of Exile Christopher Highley 5. 1685 and the Battle for Dutch Public Opinion: Succession Literature from a Transnational Perspective Helmer Helmers 6. ‘A great Romance feigned to raise wonder’: Literature and the Making of the 1689 Succession John West 7. The Last Stuart Coronation Joseph Hone

19 37

60 75

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PA RT I I .   T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S 8. ‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’: Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England Paulina Kewes 9. Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric Andrew McRae 10. ‘I have brought thee up to a Kingdome’: Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I David Colclough 11. ‘Eyes without Light’: University Volumes and the Politics of Succession Henry Power

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x Contents 12. Stuart Coronations in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity Jane Rickard 13. Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions Ian W. Archer 14. Royal Mothers, Sacred History, and Political Polemic R. Malcolm Smuts 15. ‘Stampt with your own Image’: The Numismatic Dimension of Two Stuart Successions B. J. Cook 16. The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715 Mark Knights Afterword: The Disenchantment of Monarchy Paul Hammond Select Bibliography Index

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257 282

303 319 336 345 361

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List of Figures 1.1. Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie Delivered to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire (1603). 24 4.1. A Mad Design: or a Description of the King of Scots Marching in His Disguise After the Rout at Worcester (1651). Lemon broadside 525. 88 5.1. Adriaen Haelwegh, Portrait of Arghibald, Graaf van Argyl (c.1685).107 5.2. Stuarts koninglijk huis, door rampen verdrukt en verheerlijkt (1685). 109 5.3. Kort begryp van’t leven van Titus Oates/Abrege de la vie Titus Oates (1685). 111 8.1. Annotations by Thomas Barlow in a copy of Persons’s Conference (1594/5).  161 13.1. The Londinium arch erected in Fenchurch Street for the 1604 entry, from Stephen Harrison, Arch’s of Triumph (1604). 263 13.2. The first triumphal arch on the theme of loyalty and rebellion, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). 269 13.3. The second triumphal arch on the theme of navigation and trade, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). 271 13.4. The third triumphal arch, on the theme of Concord, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). 272 13.5. The fourth triumphal arch, the Garden of Plenty, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). 273 15.1. Gold unite (£1) of James I, second coinage (1604–19), initial mark castle (1612–13). 309 15.2. Silver half-crown (thirty pence) of Charles II, hammered coinage (1660–2). 314 15.3. Gold guinea (£1) of Charles II (1663).  317

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Notes on Contributors Ian W. Archer is Fellow, Tutor, and Associate Professor in History at Keble College, Oxford. He is the author of The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (1991) and numerous articles on the social and cultural history of early modern London. He has recently edited (with Douglas Price) English Historical Documents 1558–1603 (2011) and (with Felicity Heal and Paulina Kewes) The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013), and is working on a general survey of the capital in the period 1550–1700. Alastair Bellany  is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (2002), co-editor (with Andrew McRae) of Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (2005), and co-author (with Thomas Cogswell) of The Murder of King James I (2015). He is currently writing a general history of the British Isles from the beginnings to 1715. David Colclough is Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary University of London. He has published extensively on early modern religion, political thought, and rhetoric, and has, most recently, edited John Donne’s Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I (2013). This is volume three of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, of which he is Deputy General Editor, and for which he is currently preparing a further volume. Barrie Cook has been curator of medieval and early modern coinage in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum since 1985 and is currently the department’s senior curator. He has published widely in his specialist area of numismatics and monetary history in both academic and popular fields. He has curated fifteen numismatic exhibitions and contributed to a range of other major exhibitions and galleries within the British Museum and beyond. He has also worked on broader projects, including Neil MacGregor’s four radio series and books, A History of the World in 100 Objects (2010), Shakespeare’s Restless World (2012), Germany: Memories of a Nation—for which he was lead curator for the accompanying exhibition, in both its British Museum (2014) and Berlin (2016) versions—and Living with the Gods (2017/18). Paul Hammond is Professor of Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (1999), Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (2002), The Making of Restoration Poetry (2006), The Strangeness of Tragedy (2009), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Original-Spelling Text (2012), Milton and the People (2014), and Milton’s Complex Words: Essays on the Conceptual Structure of Paradise Lost (2017). He was co-editor (with David Hopkins) of The Poems of John Dryden in the Longman Annotated English Poets series (5 vols, 1995–2005). Helmer Helmers  is Lecturer in Early Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Amsterdam. His recent book The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere (2015) a­ nalyses Dutch publicity on the English Civil Wars. His new project, a study of public diplomacy in the Thirty Years’ War, is funded by the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO).

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xiv

Notes on Contributors

Christopher Highley is Professor of English at the Ohio State University. His books include Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (1997) and Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (2008). He is writing a book called Blackfriars: Playhouse, Church, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern London, and also working on the afterlives of Henry VIII. Joseph Hone is the Lumley Research Fellow in English at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (2017) and is one of the editors of The Oxford Edition of the Writings of Alexander Pope. His research centres on literature and political culture in the early eighteenth century, on which he has published articles in The Review of English Studies, English Literary History, Studies in Philology, Philological Quarterly, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about Alexander Pope. Paulina Kewes is Professor of English Literature and Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She has published widely on early modern drama, historiography, and politics. She is the author of This Great Matter of Succession: England’s Debate, 1553–1603 (forthcoming from Oxford University Press) and Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710 (1998), and editor of The Uses of History in Early Modern England (2006) and Plagiarism in Early Modern England (2003). She is co-editor (with Ian W. Archer and Felicity Heal) of The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (2013) and (with Susan Doran) of Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2014). She is currently working on a study of monarchy and counsel on the early Elizabethan stage. Mark Knights is Professor of History at Warwick University. He is the author of Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (1994), Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (2005), and The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (2011). He is currently working on a book about corruption in Britain and its colonies, from the Reformation to Reform. Richard A. McCabe is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Merton College. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007 and held a Major Leverhulme Fellowship 2011–14. He is author of Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (1982), The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1989), Incest, Drama, and Nature’s Law 1550–1700 (1993), Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (2002), and ‘Ungainefull Arte’: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era (2016). He is the editor of the Penguin edition of Spenser’s Shorter Poems (1999) and the Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser (2010). Andrew McRae  is Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Exeter. His publications include God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500– 1660 (1996), Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (2004), and Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England (2009). He was co-editor, with Alistair Bellany, of Early Stuart Libels (2005), and was principal investigator on the AHRC-funded Stuart Successions Project. Henry Power is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Epic into Novel: Henry Fielding, Scriblerian Satire, and the Consumption of Classical Literature (2015) and co-editor (with Nicholas McDowell), of The Oxford Handbook of English Prose, 1640–1714 (2019). He is now writing a book on the midseventeenth-century reception of Virgil.

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Jane Rickard  is a Senior Lecturer in Seventeenth-Century English Literature at the University of Leeds. Her publications include Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (2007) and Writing the Monarch in Jacobean England: Jonson, Donne, Shakespeare and the Works of King James (2015). She is also co-editor (with Richard Meek and Richard Wilson) of Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (2008). Her current project is on Jonson and the construction of the reader. R. Malcolm Smuts is Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston. His publications include Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (1987), Culture and Power in England 1585–1685 (1998), and several articles, book chapters, and edited works dealing with the political and cultural history of early modern England and Europe. He is also the editor of two collections of essays: The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (2016) and (with Luc Duerloo), The Age of Rubens: Diplomacy, Dynastic Politics and the Visual Arts in Early Seventeenth-Century Europe (2016). John West is Assistant Professor of Seventeenth-Century Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on seventeenth-century literature, politics, and religion, with a particular interest in the Civil Wars and Restoration periods. He is the author of Dryden and Enthusiasm: Literature, Religion, and Politics in Restoration England (2018) and co-editor (with Andrew McRae) of Literature of the Stuart Successions: An Anthology (2017). Steven N. Zwicker is Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at Washington University, St Louis. He has published widely on Restoration literature and especially on the relationship of literature and politics in the early modern world. He has written on Dryden in Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry (1984) and in Lines of Authority (1993), and has edited Dryden’s poetry for Penguin. He has edited (with Kevin Sharpe) several volumes of interdisciplinary essays including Refiguring Revolutions (1998), Reading, Society and Politics (2003), and Writing Lives (2008). Most recently he co-authored (with Derek Hirst) Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (2012), and currently he is at work on the culture of gossip in Restoration literature.

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Introduction Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae Royal successions mattered in Stuart Britain. The Stuart dynasty, which spanned the years 1603 to 1714, encompassed six successions: of James I in 1603, of Charles I in 1625, of Charles II in 1660, of James II in 1685, of William III and Mary II in 1689, and of Anne in 1702. This period also included the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, established in 1653, and the succession into the same role of his son, Richard, in 1658. Moreover, since James I arrived in London as James VI of Scotland, subsequent Stuart successions, unlike those of the Tudors or any of their predecessors, would be marked in three kingdoms: England, Ireland, and Scotland. Of all the Stuart successions, only that of Charles I was relatively unproblematic, with power passing peacefully from father to son. Others were moments of genuine crisis.1 For these reasons, concerns about succession, no matter how young and vital the reigning monarch, were a constant presence in the minds of early modern British men and women. But the moments of succession—the moments at the centre of our attention here—remained pivotal. The significance of succession years is registered in the myriad texts produced in response to these transitions of power. The sheer volume and variety of these texts was wholly unprecedented: there was nothing like it either before, under the Tudors, or later, after the advent of the Hanoverians. As print culture expanded and British citizens became increasingly engaged in public debate—polarized, on key occasions, doctrinally and ideologically—types of succession writing multiplied. The Stuart Successions Project, out of which this book has been developed, has quantified the high numbers of printed works responding to successions: for example, identifying 128 items (or 23 per cent of all surviving items published that year) in 1603, and 546 (17 per cent of all surviving items) in 1660.2 Elegies 1  For an overview of the period, see Tim Harris, Rebellion: Britain’s First Stuart Kings, 1567–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy, 1685–1720 (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 2  These figures are derived from the Stuart Successions database, http://humanities-research.exeter. ac.uk/stuarts/public/pub. The figures are based on items available in Early English Books Online, which offers a fair, though inevitably incomplete, representation of publications from the period. While recent work stresses the significance of scribal circulation of political ideas in the early seventeenth century, there is little evidence that contemporaries used this mode of transmission to discuss the Jacobean or Caroline successions. See Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

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Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae

on the dead monarch and panegyrics on his or her successor remained important throughout the era, and form a significant proportion of publications in succession years. Other kinds of succession writing include political tracts, sermons, prayers, ­genealogies, songs, ballads, newsbooks, histories, and satires, as well as official documents such as royal proclamations. Most of the leading imaginative writers of the time—including Ben Jonson, John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Aphra Behn and John Dryden—seized upon these occasions. Some wrote on consecutive successions, returning to the challenge as required across long writing careers. These texts were all involved, in different ways, in efforts to determine the public perception of the previous reign, and to shape the image and values of the incoming monarch. They were also engaged in debates over the meanings of monarchy and the nature of the British constitution. Though overwhelmingly celebratory and often overtly compliant, these texts performed important work, politically and culturally. Neither the scale nor the significance of Stuart succession literature has been properly explored. While there are several studies of the Elizabethan succession question that variously elucidate contemporary writings on the subject,3 only one, Howard Nenner’s pioneering The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603–1714, whose scope is confined to polemical tracts, deals with the whole of the Stuart era.4 Granted, numerous historians and literary critics have recognized the phenomenon, even if they have described it in different ways.5 Studies of panegyric as a genre have been drawn, by the sheer weight of material, to literature of succession, while historical analyses of key moments of transition, such as the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, repeatedly document the importance of printed texts.6 Kevin Sharpe’s monumental three-volume survey of 3  Mortimer Levine, The Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558–1568 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966); Marie Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977); Jean-Christophe Mayer (ed.), The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Astraea Collection, 2004); Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014); Paulina Kewes, This Great Matter of Succession: England’s Debate, 1553–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), forthcoming. 4  (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995). Cf. J. A. Downie, To Settle the Succession of the State: Literature and Politics, 1678–1750 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 5  On James I’s accession, see e.g. James Doelman, ‘The Accession of King James I and English Religious Poetry’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34 (1994), 19–40; Judith M. Richards, ‘The English Accession of James VI: “National” Identity, Gender and the Personal Monarchy of England’, English Historical Review, 117 (2002), 513–35; Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); and Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Restoration, see Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984) and Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Lorna Clymer (ed.), Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 103–31. On the Glorious Revolution, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 573–664. 6  See James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Jose, Ideas; N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell,

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Introduction

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representations of Tudor and Stuart monarchy, meanwhile, touches upon each succession, considering the ways in which literature, as well as forms of visual and material culture, helped to establish lasting images of kings and queens, and contributed also to documenting the debates and divisions of the time.7 Yet most recent work on politics and literature of this period has been characterized by certain biases which our book helps to redress. First, it has attended relatively little to the values of monarchy—the category through which contemporaries most commonly approached questions of power—preferring to focus on expressions of dissent and the emergence of radical political theories such as republicanism.8 Second, most relevant studies have been highly specific in their attention to particular p ­ eriods, and have thus sidestepped some of the bigger questions of change—for instance, in the shifting rituals and perceptions of monarchy, and in the functions of political literature—across the longue durée.9 No single study has taken the literature of all  six Stuart successions, along with texts associated with Oliver and Richard Cromwell, as its topic. Stuart Succession Literature: Moments and Transformations responds to this challenge, aiming to situate succession writing within the context of the upheavals and struggles of the Stuart era. On the one hand, the chapters that follow aim to illuminate individual moments of succession, approaching each one from a distinctive perspective. On the other hand, they endeavour to trace how particular problems, themes, or kinds of writing emerged and were transformed over time. The chapters respond also to evidence presented by the Stuart Succession Project’s database of succession writing. What, for example, might the wealth of sermons for the early Stuart successions tell us about the priorities of those years? What impact, to take one more example, might the development of news, for a continental as well as a narrowly British readership, have had upon the later Stuart monarchs? In pursuit of such questions, each essay presents a specific argument in relation to a subset of the huge range of material available, producing a thorough, if necessarily not a complete, account of the functions and achievements of Stuart succession literature. 2002); Harris, Revolution; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Steven A. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). On the emergence of republican iconography at mid-century, see Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). 7  Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 8  Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). For a rejoinder, see Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience’, in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), I, 307–27 and ‘Liberty for Export: “Republicanism” in England, 1500–1800’, in Gaby Mahlberg and Dirk Wieman (eds), European Contexts for English Republicanism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 13–32. 9  e.g. Perry, Making of Jacobean Culture; Jose, Ideas; Keeble, Restoration.

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Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae PRACTICES OF SUCCESSION

On his journey from Edinburgh to London in the spring of 1603, the new King James VI and I was greeted not just by his new subjects but also by texts.10 Orations—whether ‘learned and eloquent’, ‘grave, learned, briefe and pithie’, or merely ‘long’—were a recurrent feature of the journey, while at least one poem, Samuel Daniel’s Panegyrike Congratulatorie, was recited before the king.11 In due course, many such texts, including Daniel’s poem, were also printed, and survive to tell us a great deal about the character of James’s accession. In part, their authors were motivated simply by relief at a succession so long anticipated and debated, yet so swiftly and professionally managed; in part, they represent individual appeals for patronage; and in part, also, they attempt to influence the policy and priorities of the new king. The first Stuart succession established a dynasty in many ways, but not least through this flurry of writing. Much was at stake for British men and women in 1603, as in each of the subsequent years of succession. For those at higher levels of society, a change of monarch could lead to preferment at court, but could equally lead to downfalls for ­individuals and families. For those across the nation, it could have equally profound effects. In the sixteenth century, the rapid changes from the Protestant Edward VI to the Catholic Queen Mary, and then from Mary to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth, caused massive disruption in the lives of clerics and commoners alike, frequently resulting in persecution, exile, or death. A new monarch could also have a profound impact on the direction of the government, perhaps most notably in terms of its ecclesiastical or foreign policy. In August 1604, a year-and-a-half after his accession, James I concluded peace with Spain, thus bringing to an end the wars that blighted Elizabeth’s twilight years; in the mid-1620s, Charles I was equally eager to abandon his father’s pacific stance and attack Spain. And monarchs helped to shape culture, from their patronage of the arts to their wider influence over practices and values within the nation. This fact fuelled the feverish response to the Restoration, which would change the fortunes not only of writers and artists but equally of genres and institutions. Those involved in London’s theatres had as much reason as any to celebrate, while those who were most closely associated with the Commonwealth cause, such as the fiercely republican John Milton, faced much more challenging circumstances.12 While similar examples could be drawn from across the medieval and early modern periods—and even into the modern era, when the constitutional role of 10  Doelman, ‘Accession’; Richards, ‘English Accession’; Perry, Making of Jacobean Culture. 11  T. M., The True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royal Majestie (London, 1603), sigs F1v, F3r, D2v; John Pitcher, ‘Daniel, Samuel’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7120. 12  Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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the monarch is greatly constrained yet individual kings and queens continue to leave marks upon their nations—there are good reasons to concentrate upon the Stuart dynasty. After the traumas wrought upon England by the Tudors, and the intense anxieties about succession that shadowed the reign of the childless Elizabeth, it is perhaps easy to overlook the Stuart successions. But this would be a mistake. The seventeenth century’s two revolutions stand as the most notable reminders of the often fragile relations binding Stuart monarchs and their subjects. The execution of Charles I marked the culmination of seven years of civil war, and initiated a period of extraordinary ideological ferment and constitutional experimentation; the Glorious Revolution that ended the short-lived reign of the Catholic James II in 1688–9 was swifter and less violent, but arguably had the more long-lasting consequences.13 Other transitions, though less dramatic, were nonetheless observed anxiously by contemporaries: from the changes in the character of English Protestantism signalled from the early days of Charles I’s reign, through the ill-fated efforts of James II to establish a new religious and constitutional settlement, and on to the accession of Queen Anne, a monarch unprecedentedly entrenched in the nascent party politics of the early eighteenth century.14 The Stuart century was also that in which the project to create a new nation of Great Britain, out of the existing kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, gradually took shape.15 England and Wales had been treated as one unit for most administrative purposes—albeit not without tensions—by the Tudors. Scotland, however, was an entirely independent country, the legal system and customs of which mark it as distinct to this day. And Ireland, though widely seen by contemporaries as a colonial outpost, stood as the third British kingdom. The complex political and cultural dynamics that characterized relations between the three kingdoms helped to define the Stuart era. One of the first goals proclaimed by James in 1603, in fact, was the union of England and Scotland. While this was supported by court poets, and was certainly in the mind of Shakespeare when he wrote Macbeth, the policy also served to galvanize opposition to the court within Parliament and failed to progress.16 Indeed Anglo-Scottish union was not achieved until the reign of Anne in 1707, at the very end of the Stuart era.17 In the middle of the seventeenth century Scotland and England were at war, with Charles II 13  J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Blair Worden, God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 7; Pincus, 1688. 14 Joseph Hone, Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 15  Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill (eds), The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1500–1707 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999); Brian Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 16  Sarah Waurechen, ‘Imagined Politics, Failed Dreams, and the Beginnings of an Unacknowledged Britain: English Responses to James VI and I’s Vision of a Perfect Union’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), 575–96, and literature cited therein. 17  Allan I. Macinnes, Union and Empire: The Making of the United Kingdom in 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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briefly king in the northern kingdom while he was considered an outlaw south of the border. Ireland, meanwhile, consistently instilled anxiety on account of the cultural and religious difference of its people, and was subjected to brutal projects of pacification and plantations across the Stuart century. Oliver Cromwell and William of Orange, both in their way conquerors of England and Scotland, turned their respective forces almost immediately to Ireland, simultaneously suppressing dissent in one kingdom and bolstering their image of authority in the others.18 The practices and ceremonies of succession in this period combined elements of tradition with aspects distinct to the context and the individuals involved. Most of the successions were occasioned by the death of the previous monarch. The resulting imperative to look back elegiacally at the same time as celebrating the i­ nauguration of a new reign placed strains on poets, who risked appearing disrespectful as they positioned themselves for patronage under the fresh regime. Incoming monarchs also set a tone in this respect; Charles I broke with tradition by placing himself as the chief mourner at his father’s elaborate funeral, and it is perhaps no surprise in this context that a high proportion of the succession literature of 1625 was concerned with James rather than Charles. National memory was still more urgent and contested in 1660. The Parliament of that year swiftly declared Charles I a saint, while even those regicides who had died since 1649 were symbolically punished by being exhumed and hanged. For William and Mary in 1689, meanwhile, the challenge—which had cultural as well as political and military dimensions— was to create an impression of continuity when the old king was alive and unwilling to accept the loss of his kingdoms. The past, in different ways, always held its challenges for those looking to the future. The ceremonies of transition presented vital opportunities to establish images of rule, and provided catalysts for much of the period’s succession literature. Coronations were the most visible enactments of change, manipulated to represent the interests and character of the incoming monarch. Anne looked as much to the example of the Tudor Elizabeth as to her Stuart forebears, keen to signal change and to shun associations with William and Mary. Others choreographed the moment in different ways. Charles II entered London as king on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660, then delayed his coronation for eleven months, to 23 April, St George’s Day. The deferral of ceremony not only associated the restored king with England’s patron saint, but stretched the celebrations over two successive springs, prompting a resurgence of panegyric verse in 1661. Royal entries to the capital (the subject of Ian W. Archer’s essay, Chapter 13 in this volume) in p ­ rinciple preceded a coronation, but might well be detached from that event one way or another. James I had to postpone his entry for a year on account of an outbreak of plague in 1603. Charles I faced uncannily similar circumstances, but curiously chose never to revive his plans for a royal entry; half-constructed pageants, as well as the dramatist Thomas Middleton who had been enlisted for the event, were in due course decommissioned. And sermons, the subject of David Colclough’s essay (Chapter 10 in this 18  Allan I. Macinnes and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century: Awkward Neighbours (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002).

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volume), assumed a central position at any succession. Not surprisingly, the publication of such sermons peaked at successions that were mired in doctrinal dispute: at the accession of Charles I, for instance, when the influence of the future Archbishop Laud and doctrines of Arminianism threatened to undermine the longstanding ‘Calvinist consensus’, and to bolster arguments for the divine right of the king. Given the questions raised, at any moment of transition, concerning the future of the dynasty, spouses and families added further dynamics to the Stuart successions. James I brought with him to England two sons and a daughter, thus promising to secure the Stuarts in power for at least two generations. The last Stuart monarch, Anne, took the throne aged thirty-seven and with a history of miscarriages, raising almost immediately questions about the end of the dynasty. In between, Charles I managed to conclude marriage negotiations within days of his father’s death, returning to the capital for the first time shortly afterwards as both king and husband. In 1660, debates over Charles II’s bride became a matter of immediate public concern, with poets urging him to act on the matter. By contrast, for James II the birth of a male heir in the summer of 1688 marked, arguably, the beginning of the end, as the prospect of further generations of Catholic monarchs prompted increasing numbers of his subjects to contemplate rebellion. As much as the royal family line mattered, the history of seventeenth-century Britain demonstrates that subjects were prepared to put their own interests, in extreme circumstances, into confrontation with those of the Stuarts. T H E C U LT U R A L C O N D I T I O N S O F S U C C E S S I O N L I T E R AT U R E When James assumed the English throne in 1603, he was not only initiating a new dynasty, but doing so within cultural conditions that had changed radically since Elizabeth’s accession in November 1558. The sense of novelty was epitomized by the employment of playwrights from the commercial theatres that had emerged in the reign of Elizabeth—Jonson, Middleton, and Thomas Dekker—to produce the  script for James’s entry pageant of 1604.19 The accompanying neoclassical ­ceremonial arches, designed by Stephen Harrison, were equally redolent of the cultural ambition of the time.20 James himself claimed almost to embody the sense of change, marking as he did the inauguration of a new dynasty, a new century, and just possibly a new nation as well. James’s commitment of his own works to the printing presses of London in 1603 was a clear sign of this new age. Under the Tudors, court poetry had predominantly been circulated in manuscript form among elite coteries of readers and writers. While a certain prestige continued to attach itself across the Stuart century 19  The best edition of the pageant script can be found in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 20  The Arch’s of Triumph (London, 1604).

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to poets who enjoyed access to kings and queens, the commercial printing press was creating a world of new opportunities. The growth in numbers of printed items is clear: only 112 items printed in 1558, the year of Elizabeth’s accession, survive to this day; the equivalent figure for 1603 is 428.21 Moreover, even when print was not the original mode of transmission—as was generally the case, for instance, with most songs, ballads, and sermons as well as civic shows and plays— such works were increasingly brought to the press. Print provided a new stream of income for authors who did not have easy access to the court, and opened the way to audiences across the nation. In turn, it was a medium that facilitated debate and dialogue, albeit within constraints of censorship, at once among subjects and between subjects and their rulers. In 1685, for instance, in the wake of years of publications warning about the impending accession of a Catholic, James II sought to allay fears by arranging swift publication of his reassuring first address to his Privy Council and his no less masterful inaugural speech to MPs.22 Print also created new kinds of writing. The panegyric poem may change in character when opened outwards towards a wider reading public, but it remains in essence an address to a monarch. Printed ballads on successions, though, represent a different kind of writing, celebrating a new reign by addressing the common reader. Other forms, such as dynastic histories and genealogies, emerged through the course of the century. And arguably the most important textual innovation of all was news. The printing of news of domestic political events was heavily restricted through the first four decades of the seventeenth century, on account of anxieties about popular engagement in affairs of state. But printed newsbooks proliferated in the 1640s and 1650s, and survived, albeit in somewhat more constrained forms, through subsequent decades.23 As a result the British were for the first time able to read, in cheap printed texts, about the actions and policies of their rulers. Moreover, as Helmer Helmers’ essay (Chapter 5 in this volume) makes clear, these discussions of authority were transmitted across Europe, as readers on the Continent took a close interest in British affairs. The symbiotic relationship between print and ­politics, indeed, would lend shape to the Stuart century. Religion, the great and constant presence in British lives from an age before print, continued to inform cultural and political discourse through the Stuart era. Hence, while a certain amount of the material produced in response to successions, such as sermons and prayers, may be described as explicitly religious, questions of religious identities and doctrine moulded a great deal more of the texts we consider. The struggles between Catholicism and the fledgling English Church had dominated the Tudor period, and much of the debate over Elizabeth’s successor

21  John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘Statistical Tables’, in D. F. McKenzie et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–), IV, 779–91. The figures are for extant publications, and do not attempt to account for those that have not survived. 22 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 242–3. 23  Joseph Frank, The Beginnings of the English Newspaper (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961); Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

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centred upon this confessional divide.24 This was a matter of deep significance, of course, since the king or queen in England assumed the role, after the break with Rome, of head or supreme governor of the Church. For most men and women of the time, James’s Protestantism was therefore a positive factor, promising stability; for others, his faith was anathema, and the only hope was that he might, if not convert, at least grant his Catholic subjects toleration. As Paulina Kewes’s essay (Chapter 8 in this volume) demonstrates, arguments about the principles of succession and rights of resistance to a prince of contrary faith were not only influential in the 1590s, but provided a focal point for debate throughout the Stuart era. Hence the degree of anxiety that surrounded Charles I and Charles II, against whom the charge of ‘popery’ became an easy yet potent weapon. And hence the more tangible threat posed by the succession of the openly Catholic James II. Historians continue to argue over the importance of religion—as opposed to his ideological shift towards absolutism—to his downfall after only three years as king.25 For many of his subjects, however, there is no question that his Catholic faith weighed heavily against him. Indeed, with the example of Louis XIV’s France before them, many saw popery and arbitrary government as two sides of the same coin. As had become apparent in the final decades of Elizabeth’s reign, though, religious divisions were not simply binary, between Protestant and Catholic, but were equally pronounced within Protestantism. The rise of puritanism and Presbyterianism in England under Elizabeth raised insistent challenges to the teachings and structures of the Church. James came from Scotland, where the Church was organized under Presbyterian principles, without the English Church’s hierarchies of bishops and archbishops; however, he willingly embraced the structures of his southern kingdom. The relative merits of different models were debated vigorously upon James’s accession, and again at the accession of his son, but episcopacy survived intact.26 Although these structures were overthrown in the 1640s, they were reconstituted at the Restoration and the divergent models between the churches of England and Scotland survive to this day.27 Issues of Church government, meanwhile, overlapped with fundamental questions about an individual’s perceived relationship with God, and the extent to which this should be shaped or mediated by the authorities of the Church. The puritan movement rejected much of the authority of the Established Church, and this led in the seventeenth century to the emergence of a range of nonconformist sects. The fact that leading Quakers wrote succession panegyric in 1660 is thus more than a mere curiosity, since this sect had much at stake at this moment.28 For the reign of Charles II, in fact, the 24  Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous. 25 Harris, Revolution; Pincus, 1688. 26  Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993). 27  Christopher Durston and Judith Maltby, Religion in Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2009). 28 See The Copies of Several Letters Which Were Delivered to the King, Being Written by Sundry Friends in the Truth (London, 1660); A Strange Prophecie Presented to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty, by a Woman-Quaker (London, 1660).

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degree of toleration to be afforded to Catholics on the one hand and nonconformists on the other hand was to become one of the most intractable and divisive questions of government. By comparison with religion, which determined so much of everyday life, the concept of the political, which we take for granted in modern democracies, was contested and often confused. Throughout the period, indeed, politics was i­ nextricably linked with religion, the Bible being invoked to support a whole spectrum of political positions, and codes of providentialism being deployed to explain changes.29 But other, more recognizably modern, political models were also emerging. Many were indebted to religion; resistance theory, which argued over the limits of a subject’s duty to obey secular authority, was principally developed by Calvinists and then appropriated by Catholics.30 Others were more secular. Under the Tudors, political actions and motivations were increasingly analysed through the medium of history, with writers looking back to the domestic or classical past for examples.31 This approach was extended, and significantly revised in tenor, by the growing influence late in the sixteenth century of the Roman historical writing of Tacitus.32 The rediscovery of Tacitus also underpinned the flowering of controversial continental theory, by writers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Justus Lipsius, and Hugo Grotius, which posited radically sceptical and rational models for the analysis of contemporary politics.33 For Europe’s monarchs, these strains of political theory posed uncomfortably pertinent questions about governmental structures and the respective rights of subjects and rulers. Hence when James assumed the throne, the fact that he was himself engaged in these debates, as the author of books of political advice and theory, was seized upon by the English.34 While it would have been impolitic to confront the new king, responses to the Jacobean succession evidence a range of efforts to engage with his arguments, as Richard A. McCabe’s essay (Chapter 1 in this volume) demonstrates. The subsequent hundred years became arguably the great era of British political theory. From the very early years of the Stuart dynasty, questions surrounding the respective rights of the monarch and the people were a constant source of tension. Revealingly, the London recorder Richard Martin, amid the welter of 1603 prose and verse hailing James’s birthright, emphasized the subjects’ consent, alongside 29  Patrick Collinson, ‘The Politics of Religion and the Religion of Politics in Elizabethan England’, Historical Research, 82 (2009), 74–92; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 30  Burns and Goldie (eds), Cambridge History of Political Thought. 31  Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino: Huntington Library Press, 2006). 32  R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Court-Centred Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c.1590–1630’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1994), 21–43; Paulina Kewes, ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 74 (2011), 515–51. 33  Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Skepticism and Reason of State’, in Burns and Goldie (eds), Cambridge History of Political Thought, 479–98. 34  James I and VI, Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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that of God, as grounds of the king’s legitimacy; others went so far as to style James’s elevation as a species of election.35 As the early Stuart period unfolded, the contested relation between consent and the royal prerogative would dominate successive parliaments, becoming a key fault-line in the state. Subsequently, the absence of monarchical control in the 1640s and 1650s stimulated the generation of radical thought, from the republicanism of John Milton, James Harrington, and Marchmont Needham, through to Gerrard Winstanley’s remarkable vision of common ownership of land. A conservative reaction, though, gathered force through the same years, evident in works such as Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. Later in the century, the Glorious Revolution prompted a fresh outpouring of constitutional debate. Indeed the dominant genre of succession writing in 1688–9 was the political pamphlet rather than the p ­ anegyric poem. This was the age, among others, of John Locke, and the overthrow of James precipitated some of the most wide-ranging constitutional reforms in all of British history, broadly moving power away from the hands of the monarch and in effect establishing limited and elective monarchy. The authors of succession literature in these years were thus playing for very high stakes. T H E F O R M S O F S U C C E S S I O N L I T E R AT U R E The label ‘succession literature’ offers a way of grouping together the wide range of material that responded in some way to a change of monarch. We do not view it as a ‘genre’; it is more helpfully approached as a category that enables us to consider common approaches and concerns across different genres. Although succession might be discussed at any time, and arose as a particularly urgent matter of controversy at moments, such as the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s and early 1680s, when subjects dared to challenge dynastic logic, our approach tends to favour writing that responds to a succession. While much of this, as more than one of our contributors argues, might better be labelled accession literature, the broader c­ ategory remains usefully capacious. Panegyric stands as the archetypal response to royal accession. While royal ­panegyric can be traced through preceding centuries in Britain, and was beholden to classical models, the seventeenth century became the golden age of this genre. In the hands of some of its most skilful exponents, panegyric on men and women of state, including monarchs, became a powerful vehicle for political expression, typically though not necessarily conservative in nature. Indeed the established trope of laudando praecipere—telling great men and women what they should aspire to become, in the guise of telling them what they already are—provided considerable scope for a skilled writer. The Stuart era contained the careers of some of the finest panegyrists in British literary history: from Jonson, Daniel, and 35  A Speach Delivered to the Kinges Most Excellent Majestie in the Name of the Sheriffes of London and Middlesex (London, 1603), sig. B1v. For discussion of competing constructions of James’s title in 1603–4, see Kewes, This Great Matter of Succession.

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William Drummond in the early seventeenth century, through to Dryden, Behn, and Abraham Cowley after the Restoration. A few long-lived poets, such as the indefatigable Edmund Waller, wrote for successive rulers. Some of the better works, as essays by Richard A. McCabe, Steven N. Zwicker, and Andrew McRae investigate (Chapters  1,  3, and  9 in this volume, respectively), reflect not only upon the greatness of the incoming monarch, but more profoundly upon the nature of the state and the role of the subject within it. Panegyric overlaps with, and informs, other kinds of writing. In this context, one of the more interesting textual developments of the second half of the seventeenth century is the loyal address, considered by Mark Knights (Chapter 16 in this volume). These assertions of loyalty, couched in fulsome prose rather than verse, emerged first at the transition of power from Oliver Cromwell to his son, Richard, but flourished in the later Stuart decades. Ballads and other kinds of poem aimed at a popular audience similarly assume the burden of praise, but commonly abandon any pretence of addressing the monarch. For other writers, ­panegyric provided a vehicle for more radically forthright engagements in political debate. George Wither’s massive and controversial poem Britains Remembrancer, for example, was not printed until 1628 but was first constructed as a shorter poem presented in manuscript form to Charles I as a New Year’s gift within the first year of his reign. Whatever else this poem became, it began as a statement of support for the king.36 In 1660, the ageing Wither was even less inclined to follow the expected narrative, publishing a poem addressed to Charles II which effectively inverts the conventions of panegyric, placing instead the outspoken and recently dispossessed poet at the centre of attention.37 In such texts, in fact, we are reminded of the porous boundaries between panegyric and satire, a mode that became increasingly prominent across the century. The Restoration prompted renewed vilification of Cromwells père et fils, while the ascendancy of William and Mary generated venomous attacks on James II and his queen in popular ditties, sexually explicit secret histories, and satiric pamphlet plays masquerading as tragicomedies. Much succession literature also assumes the task of informing subjects, across the three nations, of these momentous transitions of power. Even before the advent of the newsbook, authors and printers found ways of disseminating information, ranging from official proclamations to descriptions of funerals, coronations, and other ceremonies. By the Restoration, the publication of such material was well established; at the outset of the dynasty, while there were fewer such texts, there are nonetheless multiple accounts of the lavish Jacobean royal entry. Dekker, one of the authors of that pageant, also produced a pamphlet, 1603. The Wonderfull Yeare, which mixes royal elegy and panegyric with vivid prose descriptions of the plague. Its subject was the nation’s capital as much as its rulers, and it was written for the increasing numbers of citizens who bought and read such texts. News accounts, 36  Andrew McRae, ‘Remembering 1625: George Wither’s Britain’s Remembrancer and the Condition of Early Caroline England’, English Literary Renaissance, 46 (2016), 433–55. 37  Speculum Speculativum (London, 1660).

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meanwhile, could also assume scurrilous forms. George Eglisham’s pamphlet, The Forerunner of Revenge (1626), considered by Alastair Bellany (Chapter 2 in this volume), purports to be a factual account of an illicit truth, the murder of the king at the hands, among others, of the court favourite George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Drama was in many respects the pre-eminent genre of royal succession. The history play circles relentlessly around narratives of succession and questions of ­legitimacy, situating events from the nation’s past not only as pivotal moments of dynastic change but as richly suggestive exemplars for subsequent political debates. More explicitly than much other imaginative writing, drama in this tradition probed the viability of competing constitutional solutions, and staged its speculations for a common audience. Dramatists also dared to imagine the psychological experiences of monarchy. Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, perhaps most strikingly, centre attention on the future King Henry V as he prepares himself for the longanticipated death of his father. Despite the significance of drama, however, we have decided not to accord it close attention in this volume for two ­reasons. First, drama tends not to function in the same way as the bulk of succession literature, as we define it. Although topical plays on successions were doubtless produced, these do not commonly survive; older plays were often reshaped for the occasion of succession, but they tend to lack the direct and immediate engagement with their context that we find elsewhere. Second, it would unquestionably have been difficult to do justice to drama, alongside so many other forms of writing, in the space of one volume. Drama, we propose, might better be approached on its own terms, as indeed others have already done.38 Visual and material culture also flourished at moments of succession. New monarchs required portraits, statues, and medals, as well as much of the paraphernalia that the royal family has generated in the centuries since the Stuarts. A long-lived tradition of commemorative porcelain, for instance, can be traced back at least as far as the seventeenth-century successions.39 While these practices warrant further analysis, we want to maintain a principal focus on written texts, albeit with some important exceptions. In a number of essays, the nature of the texts under consideration demands attentiveness as well to visual and material sources. The visual image is indeed integral to many succession texts: a point made most notably in Joseph Hone’s study of the coronation of Queen Anne. The royal entry, considered by Archer, also requires interpretation as a celebratory form combining pageantry, music, and theatre. And our most extensive engagement with material culture is B. J. Cook’s analysis of the implications of succession for coins (Chapter 15 in this volume): an essay that explores the relation between the iconography of coins and practices of royal representation more widely across British culture. 38 Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies; Martin Wiggins, Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Paulina Kewes, ‘History Plays and the Royal Succession’, in Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 493–509. 39 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 445–6.

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Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae L I T E R AT U R E O F T H E S T U A RT S U C C E S S I O N S

Each of the chapters that follows is an original piece of research, framed within the context of The Stuart Successions Project. The volume is organized to cover at once the breadth of the period and the range of extant material, yet the core focus is on historical and literary analysis of the highest quality. Although the majority of contributors are scholars of literature, the volume’s underlying aims are interdisciplinary, and it includes work by several leading historians of the Stuart period, as well as a chapter by the Curator of Medieval and Early Modern Coinage at the British Museum. It is a volume, in other words, that aims to set the writing that surrounded successions in precise historical contexts. Part I of the book’s two sections contains one essay attending to each of the Stuart successions, as well as one concerned with the accession of Oliver Cromwell to the Protectorate and the succession to this role of Richard Cromwell. (Despite the inherent interest of 1649—and Charles II’s subsequent dating of his reign from the moment of his father’s execution—we have decided not to pause upon this year. It is many things, but not in any recognizable sense a year of Stuart succession.) These are synchronic studies, interpreting literature of succession years in ways that lead to arguments about those moments, though also to consideration of cultural practices across the period. Richard A. McCabe, in his study of the Jacobean succession (Chapter 1), takes as his starting point the remarkable outpouring of panegyric, and argues that in this material one might identify not merely affirmations of the new regime but also efforts to manage and contain the underlying anxieties that characterized the transition to the Stuart dynasty. Alastair Bellany (Chapter 2) addresses a different kind of succession, that of Charles I, which produced a significant volume of material that looked back to the death of James. His essay is in part concerned with rituals and practices surrounding royal death across the period, but essentially focuses on the unusual character of the Caroline succession, dogged as it was by rumours of James’s murder and by wider concerns about shifts of foreign and military policy. Steven N. Zwicker (Chapter  3) attends to poetry on the Cromwells: rulers who, though never kings in name, inspired some of the seventeenth century’s most thoughtful poetry of power. Marvell and Dryden, two poets who would assume different political stances in subsequent decades, were the most notable men drawn into this project. Christopher Highley (Chapter 4) considers the return to Britain in 1660 of Charles II, and asks how contemporary writers described and interpreted the religious identity of a king who had been in exile for most of his adult life, creating narratives that positioned him as a suitable—or, in some instances, profoundly unsuitable—man to lead the British kingdoms. Helmer Helmers (Chapter 5) approaches the accession of James II through the lens of continental news reports, specifically those published in the Dutch Republic. British domestic politics, especially as regards religion, and relations between British monarchs and European governments, were closely observed across the period; in retrospect, given the successful invasion that would be launched from the Netherlands in 1688, continental perceptions of an incoming British monarch were never more significant than in 1685. John West, in his study of the literature of 1688 and 1689

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(Chapter  6), examines the challenge posed to authors by a succession that was imposed militarily and legitimated by an act of Parliament. Despite widespread support for the regime of William and Mary, writers struggled to find appropriate codes of celebration for a regnal transition that was so evidently engineered. And Joseph Hone, in his analysis of the ceremony of Queen Anne’s coronation (Chapter 7), addresses her significance as the last Stuart monarch. Anne’s Stuart lineage posed challenges for royal image makers, who sought to present her as a constitutional monarch and supporter of the future Protestant succession. The chapters in Part II work diachronically, looking across the Stuart era, or parts of it, in order to ask fresh questions about changes in political and literary culture. Instead of focusing on particular monarchs and moments, these essays concentrate on genres, sites of cultural production, and recurring arguments about the foundations and limits of civil authority. Paulina Kewes (Chapter 8) takes the most controversial text from the debates that preceded the Jacobean accession, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594/5), by the Jesuit Robert Persons, and traces its influence upon debates over the relative merits of hereditary and elective kingship, and the desirability of regulating succession by statute, across the Stuart century. The late Elizabethan text becomes, for Kewes, a gauge for the changing ideas on monarchy and succession. Andrew McRae (Chapter 9) studies panegyric over three successions in which monarchs were welcomed into England—those of 1603, 1660, and 1688–9—and considers poems as evidence of changing relations between subjects and their rulers. For all their determined professions of loyalty, he argues, panegyrics can present sophisticated reflections upon the nature and constraints of political subjectivity. The sermon, one of the staples of the early modern press and a vital genre at moments of national transition, is the subject of David Colclough’s essay (Chapter  10). Scrutinizing early Jacobean and Caroline sermons by, among others, Donne and Laud, Colclough attends at once to key occasions for pulpit oratory such as coronations and the opening of Parliament, while reflecting more widely on the functions of the sermon as a form of counsel. Henry Power’s essay (Chapter 11) takes up the volumes of poetry, in various learned languages, published by the English ­universities at times of national celebration. By focusing in particular on one long-lived Oxford poet, he is able both to outline the aims and achievements of these volumes, which intervened in national as well as academic politics, and to trace changes in tone and allegiance across the period. Jane Rickard (Chapter 12) examines Scottish coronations of Stuart monarchs: Charles I’s in 1633 and Charles II’s in 1651. Her chapter analyzes panegyrics and published reports of events, reading these within the context of ongoing tensions between Scotland and England. Ian W. Archer (Chapter 13) shifts attention to the City of London, which had a close and complex relationship with the nation’s monarch and his or her court. By comparing the texts and iconography of the royal entries of 1604 and 1661, he u ­ ncovers evidence of ideological tensions, which made it increasingly difficult to stage myths of civic unity and national harmony. R. Malcolm Smuts (Chapter 14) reassesses encomiastic and hostile representations of royal consorts across the period, pausing most notably on Mary of Modena, James II’s second

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wife and mother of James Francis Edward, who would spend almost his entire life in exile as the Jacobite pretender. Textual conventions established through preceding reigns were unsettled by the pressured circumstances of the 1680s, with results that prompt reflection upon the status and imagery of consorts, both male and female. B. J. Cook (Chapter 15) explores the changing iconography of the Stuarts on their coins, teasing out the ways in which such officially sponsored images, together with the accompanying text, shaped perceptions of individual Stuart rulers and of Stuart monarchy more generally. And Mark Knights (Chapter 16) elucidates a genre which adapted existing conventions of panegyric to the medium of prose. The loyal address emerged in the late 1650s and flourished within the often unstable political conditions of the subsequent decades, and into the Hanoverian era. Finally, in the Afterword, Paul Hammond draws out some of the implications of the book as a whole for our understanding of Stuart literature and politics. The ascendancy of the Hanoverians in 1714, like that of the Stuarts at the outset of the previous century, was by no means inevitable. These outcomes turned, in large measure, on what John Morrill has termed dynastic roulette.40 Yet they also depended upon the preferences of British men and women, which were increasingly shaped by debates and polemics evident in the printed record. Stuart Succession Literature helps to explain these processes by mapping the development of succession writing across a century of momentous political change. By placing the literature within wider contexts of political thought and culture, the volume aims to demonstrate how Stuart succession writing, a category that purported to be unifying, functioned in a polity that was consistently unsettled, and increasingly divided.

40  John Morrill, ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain 1504–1746, The Stenton Lecture 2003 (Reading: The Department of History, University of Reading, 2005), 14, and ‘Dynasties, Realms, Peoples and State Formation, 1500–1720’, in Robert von Friedeburg and John Morrill (eds), Monarchy Transformed: Princes and Their Elites in Early Modern Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 17–43. See also Ronald Asch (ed.), The Hanoverian Succession (The Historische Kommission für Niedersachsen, 2014); Andreas Gestrich and Michael Schaich (eds), The Hanoverian Succession: Dynastic Politics and Monarchical Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015); and William Gibson, Elaine Chalus, and Roberta Anderson (eds), Religion, Loyalty and Sedition: The Hanoverian Succession of 1714 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016).

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1 Panegyric and Its Discontents The First Stuart Succession Richard A. McCabe Praise is more commonly the medium than the message of panegyric. Its familiar stock of laudatory tropes and epithets was largely created by Classical writers such as Statius, Claudian, and Pliny, and its customary hyperbole responds less to the merits of the subject than the conventions of the form. Plagiarism, indeed, is endemic to panegyric.1 Yet even the closest ‘imitation’ should not be mistaken for identity of purpose. All pretence to the contrary, the eulogist’s praise is seldom disinterested, and the subject of political acclaim, like that of the amorous lyric, is generally objectified in the image of the speaker’s desire. Public adulation seeks patronage, as private devotion seeks requital—and the reign of Elizabeth saw their semantics coalesce.2 At stake may be personal ambition, factional advantage, or sectarian promotion, but these are by no means mutually exclusive categories. Personal advancement, for example, is commonly justified in terms of the public cause it is deemed to serve; in such cases an aspiring ‘I’ not infrequently ventriloquizes a communal ‘we’. This was all the more acceptable because the technical distinction between panegyric and encomium was the former’s delivery before a public assembly—a condition that print could be seen to replicate. Such being the case, virtually any genre—heroic, pastoral, elegiacal, or homiletic—might ­profitably adopt a ‘panegyrical’ or eulogistic mode and inflect its language accordingly. The present essay will consider examples from many genres to relocate the formal verse panegyric of 1603–4 in the context of the wider polemical discourse in which it was situated, with particular regard to the problems arising from (1) the advent of a ‘foreign’ king; (2) the questionable nature of his relationship to Elizabeth; (3) the uncertainty of his ecclesiastical outlook; and (4) the implications of his plans for the creation of Great Britain. Taking note of the fault-lines the discussion reveals, the final section of the essay pits the rhetoric of succession against the reality.

1  J. D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 1–37. 2  See Arthur Marotti, ‘ “Love is not Love”: Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order’, English Literary History, 49 (1982), 396–428. See also Chapter 9 in this volume by Andrew McRae, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’.

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Always vulnerable to allegations of sycophancy, panegyric found its surest defence in the claim that it sought to educate through admiration, proleptically attributing to its subjects the virtues it wished to inculcate, much as a teacher might encourage a child.3 In 1603, for example, all shades of religious opinion hailed James VI and I as a godly prince in the hope he might be led to understand ‘godliness’ as they understood it. This was not just a matter of laudando praecipere, but attributed to epideictic rhetoric what Philip Sidney termed ‘praxis’, the power to shape the world in its own image. James agreed, up to a point. In Basilikon Doron, he instructed Prince Henry to learn from Claudian’s ‘Panegyric on the Fourth Consulship of the Emperor Honorius’ that ‘the world shapes itself according to the pattern of the king, and edicts cannot sway men’s minds as much as their ruler’s life’ (ll. 299–301).4 While the king’s gesture towards Claudian is telling, the choice of quotation is even more so. Here, as elsewhere in James’s writing, two competing forms of authority resist accommodation: poets might counsel kings, but it was kings who ‘shaped’ the world. In honing the conception of kingship articulated in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), James had resolutely rejected his poet-tutor George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apus Scotos (1579) with its flattering dedication to a young king ‘instinctively averse to flattery’.5 In that instance James was neither flattered nor fooled, and after Buchanan’s death the work was called in for ‘correction’ by its dedicatee.6 James knew better than most both the power and the limits of Humanist rhetoric, proffering in his Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie (1584) a pithy translation of Du Bartas’s reflections on the dubious ethics of panegyric: While thought I to set foorth with flattering pen: The praise untrewe of Kings and noble men, And that I might both golde and honours have, With courage base I made my Muse a slave.7

In whatever genre they laboured, the panegyricists of 1603 had a more knowing reader than many of them realized. THE SHOCK OF THE NEW Part of the problem facing everyone in 1603 was the largely unknown character of the Scotsman proclaimed king on 24 March just one hour after Elizabeth’s death.8 As a mere pretender to the throne he had given out consciously ambivalent signals 3  See David Rundle, ‘ “Not so much Praise as Precept”: Erasmus, Panegyric, and the Renaissance Art of Teaching Princes’, in Y. L. Too and N. Livingstone (eds), Pedagogy and Power: Rhetorics of Classical Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 148–69. 4  James VI and I, Selected Writings, ed. Neil Rhodes, Jennifer Richards, and Joseph Marshall (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 218. 5  De Iure Regni apus Scotos (Edinburgh, 1579), sig. A2v. 6  Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI and I (London: Chatto and Windus, 2003), 74. 7  Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh, 1584), sigs D1r, D2r. 8  For the text, see Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–83), I, 1–4.

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to avoid alienating any major faction south of the border. His works, it was therefore hoped, would provide the true key to his character and the proclamation signalled a rush to print as many as possible, mostly in carefully Anglicized versions, to meet the demands of an insatiable market. Along with Basilikon Doron there appeared from the London presses Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun, Ane Meditatioun upon the boke of Chronicles, Lepanto, and True Lawe of Free Monarchies.9 Most popular was Basilikon Doron which may have sold as many as 16,000 copies, and was commonly read as a personal manifesto, a prognostic, according to Joseph Hall’s The Kings Prophecie: or Weeping Joy (1603), of the nature of the coming reign.10 But this was to take the work at face value, as the ‘private’ instructions of a father to his son never intended for popular dissemination. Yet it might well be read, alternatively, as an extended exercise in self-panegyric, one powerful example among many of how James crafted his kingly image through his authorial p ­ ersona.11 The royal canon prior to 1603 was the work of a pretender anxious to secure as broad support as possible by sending out mixed signals.12 On his journey to London that April James created over 300 knights, apparently acting as a ‘universal patron’, and the resulting sense of excited opportunity was brilliantly captured by John Chamberlain in a private letter to Dudley Carleton: ‘these bountiful beginnings’, he wrote, ‘raise all mens spirits and put them in great hopes, insomuch that not only protestants, but papists and puritanes, and the very poets with theyre ydle pamflets promise themselves great part in his favor’.13 Yet the ‘pamflets’ in question were far from ‘ydle’. Most of them directly engaged with the wider debate.14 Both poets and prose writers, for example, employed the myth of Brutus, the supposed Trojan ancestor of Tudors and Stuarts, to present radical plans for the creation of ‘Great Britain’ as a restoration of primordial unity. What prose polemicists rehearsed in legalistic terms, the poets registered in a heroic key.15 And where uncertainty reigned, the poetic press functioned to 9  See Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 10  See Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron, and the Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–54 at 51–2; James Doleman, ‘ “A King of Thine Own Heart”: The English Reception of King James VI and I’s Basilikon Doron’, The Seventeenth Century, 9 (1994), 1–9. 11  Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Poetics of Succession, 1587–1605: The Stuart Claim’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of the Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 192–211. 12  See Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown, AD 1602, ed. C. R. Markham (London, 1880), 107. 13  John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939), I, 192. 14  See Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 15–49; James Doleman, ‘The Accession of King James I and English Religious Poetry’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 34 (1994), 19–40. 15  For the political use of Brutus in 1603, see Tristan Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages Under James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 1–51; for challenges to the historicity of Brutus and their political implications, see T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950), 99–133.

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drown visceral fear in manufactured euphoria—a feature particularly noticeable in Jonson’s Panegyre.16 As publication after publication bears witness, the proclamation of James’s accession was so sudden as to be stunning. ‘Upon Thurseday’, Thomas Dekker reported in The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), ‘it was treason to cry God save king James king of England, and upon Friday hye treason not to cry so.’17 Many had anticipated a lengthy period of anarchy as rival claimants battled for recognition and, while certainly relieved, struggled to comprehend what had actually occurred in constitutional terms. The outcome, after all, was unprecedented: no ‘foreign’ king, let alone the king of an ancestral enemy, had ever acceded peacefully to the English throne, crossing an international border to receive the voluntary submission of the nation. The implications were unfathomable. Were there now two kingdoms or one? Two Churches or one? Two legal systems or one? Two Parliaments or one? Two citizenries or one? During the succession debates of the 1590s the Jesuit Robert Persons had warned that a Scottish succession would effectively entail a Scottish conquest. James, according to this view, was an ‘alien’ born and would always favour his old over his new subjects.18 That touched a very raw nerve, and the rhetoric of a united ‘Britain’ was honed, in very large measure, to allay English fears of subjection. In charting James’s progress south, contemporary commentators are at pains to emphasize his ceremonial re-appointment of former Elizabethan office holders, especially the former Privy Council.19 Pamphlet after pamphlet follows the e­ xample of Drayton’s ‘gratulatorie Poem’ in cataloguing James’s ‘English’ genealogy and descent from Henry VII. According to Robert Fletcher’s A Briefe and Familiar Epistle Shewing his Maiesties Most Lawfull, Honourable and Just Title to All his Kingdomes (1603), for example, James was ‘a Prince of our English Tribe extracted from the loines of our most famous Kings and Queenes’.20 And tribalism was soon in evidence. Rumours began to spread that the astonishing proliferation of knighthoods owed as much to the bribery of Scottish officers as the merits of the recipients and, when James’s first Parliament finally met in 1604, many speakers opposed both the concept of ‘Great Britain’ and the granting of English citizenship to the ‘post-nati’, those born in Scotland after the accession.21 The debate was protracted, but all such future problems were present in embryo from the outset. To attend closely to the language of celebration is to detect very audible echoes of disquiet. Among the first poets to thrust their ‘ydle’ pamphlets on the new king was Samuel Daniel, introduced to James through the good offices of the Countess of 16  The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), I, 471–82. 17  Thomas Dekker, The Wonderfull Yeare (London, 1603), sig. C1v. 18  Robert Persons, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (Antwerp, 1594), 111–21. 19  See Thomas Millington, The True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royall Maiestie, from the Time of His Departure from Edenbrough; till His Receiving at London (London, 1603); and John Savile, King James His Entertainment at Theobalds: with His Welcome to London (London, 1603). 20  Robert Fletcher, A Briefe and Familiar Epistle Shewing his Maiesties Most Lawfull, Honourable and Just Title to All his Kingdomes (London, 1603), sig. B3v. 21  See Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–08 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1986), 1–78.

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Bedford at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire. He may well, as John Pitcher suggests, have read A Panegyrike Congratulatorie (1603) (Figure 1.1) to the king personally, activating a tradition of oral praise that stretches back to the ancient world, but the published version differs significantly from the presentation manuscript.22 The latter consists of fifty-eight stanzas, the former of seventy-three, and the additions show the poet cautioning the monarch against indiscriminate patronage and the seductions of ‘flattery’.23 In print the poet was publicly positioning himself as counsellor and, for all its praise, his panegyric is riddled with anxiety. ‘They feare the humours of a future Prince’, he tells James, ‘Who either lost a good or felt a bad’—a remark relevant only to the king’s new subjects. But this common fear of the unknown ruler is offset by the ‘evidence’ of Basilikon Doron, which is treated for all intents and purposes as a sort of affidavit: We know thee more, then by report we had, We have an everlasting evidence, Under thy hand, that now we neede not dread, Thou wilt be otherwise in thy dessignes Then there thou art in those judiciall lines.

‘Feare’ and ‘dread’ are unusual components of panegyric, but common responses to ‘change’. Daniel’s hope, therefore, is ‘that this great passage and mutation, will / Not seeme a change, but onely of our ill’.24 What that means in effect becomes clear in the following stanza. The much vaunted ‘union’ of peoples will occasion no change to ‘this estate’ of England. The overt celebration of novelty is disarmed by the diction of continuity: We shall continue and remaine all one, In Law, in Justice, and in Magistrate, Thou will not alter the foundation Thy Ancestors have laide of this Estate, Nor greeve thy Land with innovation, Nor take from us more then thou wilt collate: Knowing that course is best to be observ’de, Whereby a State had longest been preserv’d.

Here as elsewhere ‘Thou will not’ hovers ambiguously between the indicative and imperative moods, and serves as prologue to even darker fears. As Daniel knew, James had frequently been urged to avenge his mother, but that is no longer possible: A King of England now most graciouslie, Remits the iniuries that have beene done T’a King of Scots, and makes his clemencie To check them more than his correction.25 22  John Pitcher, ‘Editing Daniel’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghampton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1993), 57–73 at 64–7. 23  British Library (hereafter BL), MS Royal 18 A LXXII. 24  Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie (London, 1603), sigs A6r, A7v. 25  Ibid., sig. A8r.

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Figure 1.1. Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie Delivered to the King’s Most Excellent Majestie at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire (1603). © The Bodleian Libraries.

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In Mary’s case ‘th’Authors are extinct that caus’d that shame’, but far more is at stake than family honour.26 The deeper concern was the settling of ancestral scores. On that issue Daniel’s message to the nation is ‘have no fear’. Precisely because James desired the creation of Great Britain, an ‘empire’ unifying both kingdoms, there could be ‘No Scot, no English now, nor no debate’ among ‘subjects all to one imperiall Prince’.27 E L I Z A’ S H E I R How the Stuart succession had come about remained a mystery to many. Yet while the vast majority of eulogists had recourse to providence, there were those who recognized the shaping hand of human agency. Perhaps the most telling is the anonymous author of Englands Welcome to James (1603) who described his p ­ ersonal response to the text of the proclamation: Long had I not thus look’t with mixed dint, When loe, I saw fast fixed on a poast A long broade scrole, in Proclamation print, And Nobles names upon it were imbost, Which did adorne the paper in the poast, I started up thinking to reade the names: When underneath I saw, God save King James.

The speaker proceeds to praise the ‘pollicie’ of the signatories.28 Retrospect should not obscure the difficulty or danger they faced. Despite her advanced years, the shock of Elizabeth’s death was considerable—a matter of national ‘distraction’ according to Thomas Powell’s A Welch Bayte to spare Provender (1603).29 The majority of the population, Dekker observed, ‘never shouted any other Ave than for her name, never sawe the face of any Prince but her selfe, never understoode what that strange out-landish word Change signified, how was it possible, but that her sicknes should throw abroad an universall feare, and her death an astonishment?’30 Elizabeth had been the dominant figure in life and literature for forty-five years but now, as Robert Fletcher informed the nation almost in a tone of disbelief, ‘your honour, glory, beauty [are] turnde to drosse, / Your wealth, your peace, your plentie, lapt in Lead’.31 The heavily Spenserian flavour of the verse, evident here and in so many other elegies, enforced the stark message that the fairy queen was mortal after all—and the referencing of Spenser is so pervasive that one could be forgiven for thinking it was not Elizabeth but 26  For the issue of revenging Mary, see J. E. Phillips, Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in SixteenthCentury Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), 168, 172; Susan Doran, ‘Revenge Her Foul and Most Unnatural Murder? The Impact of Mary Stewart’s Execution on Anglo-Scottish Relations’, History, 85 (2000), 589–612. 27 Daniel, A Panegyrike, sig. A3r. For the concept of ‘empire’ see Marshall, Theatre and Empire, 17–23. 28  Englands Welcome to James (London, 1603), sigs B2r, B4r. 29  Thomas Powell, A Welch Bayte to Spare Provender (London, 1603), sigs C2v–D2v. 30  The Wonderfull Yeare, sig. B2r. 31 Fletcher, Briefe and Familiar Epistle, sig. B1r.

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Gloriana who had died.32 The shock of her death was that of failed propaganda. Yet the sheer finality of the fact bred its own resistance. The focal point of the funeral cortège was the queen’s ‘lively’ effigy, and its effect on the crowd is powerfully captured in Henry Petowe’s aptly titled Elizabetha quasi vivens [Elizabeth as though living], Eliza’s Funerall: her Princely head Lay on a pillow of a crimson dye, Like a sweet beauty in a harmlesse slumber: She is not dead, no sure it cannot be, Thus with unlikely hopes, the vulger number Flatter themselves (oh sweet lyv’d flattery.) Indeed a man of judgement would have thought, Had he not knowne her dead (but seene her so Tryumphant drawne in robes so richly wrought, Crowne on her head, in hand her Scepter too) At this rare sight he would have sworne and sayd, To Parliament rides this sweet slumbering Maide.33

People were commonly said to survive in their offspring but Elizabeth had neither produced children nor nominated an heir. Precisely for that reason, James needed to be presented as her natural successor. Preaching at Paul’s Cross on 27 March, just three days after the queen’s passing, John Hayward described a godly deathbed and a succession justified by ‘propinquity of blood’ and identity of religion. Thus James succeeded Elizabeth ‘as Salomon succeeded David ’.34 But that in itself was hardly sufficient. The story quickly circulated that the dying Elizabeth had expressly nominated James as her heir. Elegy and eulogy accordingly provided each other with mutually sustaining subtexts and those who, like Drayton, rushed to welcome the king before mourning the queen were publicly taxed with a breach of ­decorum.35 In death Elizabeth was made to confer on James the legitimacy she never granted him in life. According to Richard Mulcaster’s A Comforting Complaint (1603), for example, Nor when she died, she did forget hers here, As many mothers doe forget their babes, But left us such a King whose vertues might Abridge the griefe which lacke of her might breed.36 32  Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 78–90. 33 See The Order and Proceeding at the Funerall of the Right High and Mightie Princesse Elizabeth, printed with Henry Chettle, Englands Mourning Garment (London, 1603), sig. F2r. Henry Petowe, Elizabetha quasi vivens, Eliza’s Funerall (London, 1603), sig. B3r. The Order of the funeral was also printed with this text. See W. A. Jackson, ‘The Funeral Procession of Queen Elizabeth’, The Library, 4th ser., 26 (1945), 262–71. 34  John Hayward, Gods Universal right proclaimed. A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse, the 27 of March 1603 (London, 1603), sig. C7v. See also Englands Welcome to James, sig. B5r. On the accession sermon generally, see Chapter 10 in this volume by David Colclough, ‘ “I have brought thee up to a Kingdome”: Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I’. 35 See The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel et al., 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931–41), V, 53. 36  Richard Mulcaster, The Translation of Certaine Latine Verses Written upon Her Majesties Death (London, 1603), sig. B1v.

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The wonderful play on ‘her’ and ‘heir’ in the final line encapsulates the matter better than reams of argument, consigning to oblivion the ‘lack’ that had provided the leitmotif for the political discourse of the previous four decades. So powerful was the drive for continuity that the poetics of succession could not allow ‘Eliza’ to die without being reborn in James. Hence the recourse to the sort of pseudo-history and prophecy that effectively appropriated Tudor iconography to the Stuarts.37 And recurrent throughout the elegies and eulogies alike is the image of the phoenix, symbolizing the rebirth of Elizabeth in James. Addressing the country’s disappointed recusants in the comprehensively titled Elizaes Memoriall. King James his Arrivall and Romes Downefall (1603), Anthony Nixon asserts, you ment (as all men well do know) Elizaes death should worke our overthrow. O! But is not your hope frustrate and vaine? Succeedeth not King James our Soveraigne? A Phœnix from Elizaes ashes bred, Though she possesse a place among the dead? What, is she dead?38

Andrew Willet thought not, and informed James in a specially prepared edition of his Synopsis Papismi that, ‘she shall not dye as long as you live’.39 What this meant to Willet, however, was quite different from what it meant to many others. Hayward’s dying queen is a religious conformist; Willet’s dead queen a religious reformer. Elegiacal panegyric of Elizabeth is thus generally used to fashion the ‘phoenix’ that arises from her ashes: Henry Chettle’s Englands Mourning Garment (1603), for example, presents Elizabeth to James as the pattern of successful English monarchy. In reality they had more often been at loggerheads than in accord, but everything was now done to present them as loving kin and, as in so many other matters, the Basilikon Doron could readily be cited in evidence.40 G O D LY K I N G S H I P As John Chamberlain noted at the time, the accession of James afforded new hope to everyone engaged in England’s ongoing religious controversies, whether ‘protestants’, ‘papists’ or ‘puritanes’.41 Suddenly it was in everyone’s interests, even Jesuits like Persons, to support the legitimacy of the Stuart succession in order to negotiate their particular agenda. In James’s notoriously difficult relationship with the Kirk the episcopal establishment saw an opportunity for quelling the 37  See, for example, Sir William Herbert [Harbert], A Prophesie of Cadwallader, last King of the Britains (London, 1604); The Whole Prophesie of Scotland (London, 1603); Edward Wilkinson, Isahacs Inheritance (London, 1603). 38  Anthony Nixon, Elizaes Memoriall: King James his Arrivall and Romes Downefall (London, 1603), sigs D2v–D3r. 39  Andrew Willet, Synopsis Papismi (London, 1603), sig. A3v. 40  See Christopher Muriell, An Answer unto the Catholiques Supplication, Presented unto the Kings Maiestie, for a Toleration of Popish Religion in England (London, 1603), sig. B3r. 41 Chamberlain, The Letters, I, 192.

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clamour for reform articulated in the so-called Millenary Petition presented to the king by the ‘puritanes’; in his professed godliness, the petitioners saw an opportunity to discomfit the establishment; in the respect he expressed for his mother in Basilikon Doron Catholics saw the hope of toleration.42 But the advantage lay with the establishment, and flattery enhanced it. James regarded himself as an authority on ecclesiastical matters and quickly noted the contrast between the conspicuous deference accorded to his views by the bishops and the marked discourtesy they had encountered in Scotland. The more the petitioners sounded like Presbyterians, or could be argued to resemble them, the more ground they lost. Bishop Bilson’s coronation homily of 1603 duly drew an elaborate correspondence between the ceremonies of coronation and those of the Established Church, a correspondence James publicly endorsed during the Hampton Court Conference of 1604—called in direct response to the Millenary Petition—in the dictum ‘No Bishop, No King’.43 For that information we are indebted to William Barlow’s highly partial account of the king as impartially judging between the opposed pressure groups to ‘settle’ the state of the Church once and for all. The tactic enabled him to dismiss Willet’s appeal beyond the conference to Parliament in Limbo-mastix (1604) as a sign of distrust in the sufficiency of the royal judgement— a consummate piece of flattery in itself.44 But Willet had played the game unwisely in any case. Though generally supportive of the Established Church, if not of episcopacy by ‘divine right’, he feared the encroachments of Catholicism from within and launched a pre-emptive campaign against it. No fewer than three publications were rushed from the press in 1603 to greet the accession: a new edition of Synopsis Papismi with a dedication to James, replacing that to Elizabeth; An Antilogie or Counterplea to an Apologicall . . . Epistle published by a Favorite of the Romane separation, again dedicated to James; and Ecclesia Triumphans: that is, The Joy of the English Church, for the happie Coronation of the most vertuous and pious Prince James, dedicated to Queen Anne and articulating twenty similarities between James and King David.45 The burden of all three publications is that the reformation advanced by Elizabeth remains to be completed by James, the Joshua to her Moses. While conventional modes of compliment are readily employed, they are qualified by the expression of doubts, hesitations, and fears. In An Antilogie, for example, the praise expressed in the Latin dedication gives way in the English preface to a request for freedom of speech—as guaranteed, so Willet believed, in Basilikon Doron (cited in the margin by page and line). Taking the king at his word he begins, ‘let me be bold in the feare of God to utter my mind to your 42  For an account of the Millenary Petition and the subsequent Hampton Court Conference, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 448–67. 43  Thomas Bilson, A Sermon Preached at Westminster before the King and Queenes Maiesties (London, 1603), sigs A6v–B3r and passim. 44  William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference at Hampton Court (London, 1604), sig. A3v, 36. 45  See John N. King, ‘James I and King David: Jacobean Iconography and its Legacy’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 421–53.

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Highnesse’. ‘You are our Solomon’, James is told, yet the biblical Solomon ‘strangely fell and declined from his integritie’—an issue also tactlessly raised in Ecclesia Triumphans.46 This was to carry a familiar analogy where the ecclesiastical establishment dared not go, but Willet is determined to speak to James ‘not onely with reverence as to a King; but plainely in singlenesse of hart, as to a Christian’. The Church he has inherited from Elizabeth is beset by ignorant ministers, corrupt patrons, illegal impropriations, and books ‘too much declining to poperie’— doubtless including Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, one of James’s favourite works. Particularly dangerous to the new king was panegyric itself because—and here Willet sails very close to the wind—‘popular applause and flatterie doth often work upon some infirmitie’.47 As the proceedings developed at Hampton Court, however, it became quite clear where James’s sympathies lay, and he appears to have taken a vicarious revenge on the Scottish Presbyterians by participating in the rout of the English petitioners. Harder to deal with in the long term, however, especially in relation to calls to assist the Palatinate at the outbreak of Thirty Years War in 1618, were the ­expectations of those who, like Robert Pricket in A Souldiers Wish (1603), hailed the advent of an interventionist monarch, more belligerent in the cause of continental Protestantism than his female predecessor: And thus King James shall to his Crowne retaine, The glory of our late Elizaes Raigne. And adde unto his glories now begun, More then could by a mayden Queene be done. In which attempt, when Justice gives the word, I then desire to use a Souldiers sword: And in my heart thus much I contemplate, I shall not need the lines effeminate . . .48

More was expected, Pricket makes it clear, of a male sovereign than a female. After forty-five years of female rule, sexual prejudice was still very much in evidence in 1603: what had arisen from Eliza’s ashes, Robert Mavericke imagined, was ‘a new Phœnix, of the more worthier gender’.49 But belligerence was emphatically not the image that James was attempting to project in 1603. As an exponent of union he presented himself rather as the bringer of peace. Careful consolidation of that image over the coming years led militant Protestants to deflect their hopes unto Prince Henry thereby posing a fundamental challenge to the father–son relationship delineated in Basilikon Doron.50 46  Andrew Willet, An Antilogie or Counterplea to an Apologicall (he should have said) Apologeticall Epistle published by a Favorite of the Romane separation (London, 1603), sigs *1v, *2r. For James’s personal iconography, see Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 1–39. 47 Willet, Antilogie, sigs *2r, *2v. For James’s respect for Hooker, see Stewart, The Cradle King, 187. 48  Robert Pricket in A Souldiers Wish (London, 1603), sigs C1r–v. 49  Robert Mavericke, Three Treatises (London, 1603), sig. E4r. 50  See J. W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart, A Study in SeventeenthCentury Personation (New York: AMS Press, 1978), 75–107.

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Not represented at the Hampton Court Conference but closely watching developments were James’s Catholic subjects. Prior to 1603 he had maintained a usefully ambivalent position on Catholicism, even to the extent of writing an obsequious letter to Clement VIII, later published to his embarrassment by Cardinal Bellarmine.51 James’s motivation in such matters was entirely pragmatic, but he played a sufficiently astute game to convince many recusants, including the poet Henry Constable, of the potential benefits of a Stuart succession.52 This had the desired effect of splitting the Catholic community south of the border and raising opposition to Persons’s advocacy of the Spanish Infanta.53 The hopes his Catholic supporters invested in James are most eloquently expressed in Matthew Kellison’s A Survey of the New Religion (1603), which recalls the ‘glorious Martyrdome’ of Mary Queen of Scots, her longing for her son’s conversion, and the consequent imperative to allow, at the very least, ‘libertie only of our conscience, and Religion, which the nature of bothe requireth’.54 Not surprisingly, given this atmosphere of expectation, the Catholic community looked closely for signals of  intent as James rode to London—and were generally disappointed. While he received the Millenary Petition courteously if not enthusiastically, he responded far less well to a petition delivered by a ‘seminary priest’ ‘in the name of all the English Catholikes’. ‘The priest’, Thomas Millington records with satisfaction, ‘was the next day committed’.55 Denied personal access to the king, Catholics took to the press. On the news of the accession Persons hastily added a new prefatory epistle to A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603). Its aim, unlike that of the year’s Protestant publications, is to establish discontinuity between the reigns of the persecuting Elizabeth and the son of the Catholic queen she martyred. The suggestion now—and this from the author of the notoriously anti-Stuart Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5)—is that English Catholics had always hoped James would succeed for his mother’s sake. And James has good reason to accept their sincerity for, according to Basilikon Doron, ‘in all his troubles, straytes and daungers, he hath found none so sure and confident unto him, as those that remayned loyall and faithfull to his good Mother the Queene’. Religion only excepted, Basilikon Doron was ‘a golden gyfte’ and ‘discovereth so many rare partes in the writer, as may justely give all Catholiks good hope to see one day that fulfilled in his Majestie, which most they desire’. What that was is made clear by analogy with Constantine, a fit subject for panegyric even before he became Christian. But on the subject of panegyric, Persons tells us, ‘I will goe no further . . . least I may seeme to flatter, which I hate with my hart, and his Majestie detesteth the vice most prudently and Christianly in this his booke.’56 51 See The Letters of King James VI & I, ed. G. V. Akrigg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 171, 173, 206. 52  Maurice Lee, Jr, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in his Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 98–101. 53  See Joel Hurstfield, ‘The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England’, in S. T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C. H. Williams (eds), Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale (London: The Athlone Press, 1961), 369–96. 54  Matthew Kellison, A Survey of the New Religion (London, 1603), sig. aviiiv. 55 Millington, The True Narration, sig. D3v. 56  Robert Persons, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (St Omer, 1603), sigs *3v, *4, *5v.

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Of all those that appeared in 1603, Persons’s appropriation of Basilikon Doron is perhaps the most breath-taking in its determination to read against the grain of the text, but the subject he struggles with, the necessity of bestowing praise on a former subject of critique, left Catholic authors peculiarly vulnerable to attack. The formal case for the toleration of Catholicism was put in The Catholikes Supplication, cast in the form of a panegyrical address to James. By way of reply, Gabriel Powell, notable for declaring himself as sure that the pope was Anti-Christ as that Christ was the son of God, printed the ‘Catholic Supplication’ and ‘Protestant Reply’ on facing pages, the latter parodying the language of the former throughout. The comparison is richly instructive of the nature of the genre and the purposes to which it is put: How gratefull will it bee to all Catholike Princes abroad, and honourable to your Majestie, to understand how Queene Elizabeths severitie is chaunged into your royall clemencie: and that the lenitie of a man reedified that which the misinformed anger of a woman destroyed: That the Lion rampant is passant, whereas the passant had been rampant? (Catholikes Supplication) How gratefull wil it be to all Christian Princes abroade, and honourable to your Majestie, to understand how Queene Elizabeths sinceritie is continued by your royall constancie, and that the courage of a man reedified that which the not-informed Iustice of a woman winked at? That the Lyon rampant trampleth under foote the enemies of God and his truth, of their Prince and Countrie; whereas the passant had been nothing lesse then rampant? (Protestant Counterpoyse)

The message to James was quite clear: one could not, while retaining any ­semblance of integrity, be the equal subject of Protestant and Catholic panegyric. Ambiguity nullified faith, and there was need for choice not compromise. Arguments for ‘toleration’ aimed at ‘alteration’, and alteration was betrayal.57 In a further response to The Catholikes Supplication, again addressed to James, Christopher Muriell drew attention to what he regarded as the slander of a queen who ‘at and before her death resigned unto your highnes, as unto whom of right it appertained, the royal scepter of al her dominions’.58 Regarded from this viewpoint, slander of Elizabeth automatically entailed denigration of James. The whole enterprise in which Persons and the Supplicant had engaged was hereby rendered inherently self-contradictory: for James to endorse their critique of Elizabeth was to undermine the validity of his own accession. T H R E E C ROW N S , O N E K I N G Nowhere was this debate followed more closely than in Ireland where the majority population remained solidly Roman Catholic. For that very reason the Protestant minority was peculiarly anxious. Although the Nine Years’ War had ended in the 57  Gabriel Powell, The Catholikes Supplication Unto the Kings Maiestie; for toleration of Catholike Religion in England . . . Whereunto is annexed Parallel-wise, a Supplicatorie Counterpoyse of the Protestants (London, 1603), 12–15, 27. 58 Muriell, An Answer Unto the Catholiques Supplication, sig. B2r.

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collapse of Catholic insurgency—and almost at the moment of James’s accession— it had demonstrated the acute vulnerability of Irish Protestantism, and the prospect of toleration in the moment of victory was in no sense comforting.59 Dedicating the first Irish translation of the New Testament to James—a project funded by Elizabeth as an instrument for proselytizing the Gaelic population—William Daniel adopts a vigorously anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, and anti-Gaelic stance, while praising the late queen as the protector of the Protestant community and the victorious Lord Mountjoy as ‘the blessed instrument of our deliverance’. As the ‘assured hope of our full peace and reformation’, James is the work’s natural patron as the providential inheritor of the queen’s mantle.60 So much was only to be expected, but the advent of a Stuart monarchy, with its inescapably Celtic associations, raised contrary expectations in the country’s Catholic communities, Gaelic and Old English alike. If Protestant authors insisted on continuity, Catholics luxuriated in the prospect of change. From their point of view the very nature of the monarchy had altered fundamentally. Gaelic chronicles such as the Annála Ríoghachta Éireann [Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland ] never fail to term Elizabeth the ‘English’ queen, ‘an bhanrion Saxsan’, rather than Queen of Ireland, but James was different.61 As the scion of ancient Celtic stock and the son of a Catholic martyr he enjoyed a different level of legitimacy.62 The bardic poet Eochaidh Ó h’Eódhasa accordingly presents his accession as a sort of Ovidian transformation, symbolic of the regenerative powers of nature. If Ovid were still living, he asserts, he would rush to incorporate this new miracle into the Metamorphoses. The death of Elizabeth is here seen as freeing all three kingdoms from conflict by putting England firmly in its place under a Scottish monarch: The curtailment of the sovereignty of the men of London has enabled them to escape from rivalry: on the day of their great grief their sorrow died . . . The brilliant sun lit up: King James is the dispersal of all mist: the joint mourning of all he changed to glory; great are the signs of change. Indeed more remarkable than that are we, the troubled people of Ireland, in that each one of us forgot the tribulation of all his anxieties.63

Ó h’Eódhasa’s joy was shared by Fergal Óg Mac an Bhaird who, in ‘Three Crowns in James’s Charter’, carefully recounts the monarch’s genealogical claim to Ireland. This was essential to offset the insistence of English commentators on his inheritance of a conquered territory from Elizabeth. Such language, the bard argues, is inappropriate: ‘Oh prince . . . I will now say this to thee, talk not of “taking in new territory” seeing thou hast already a right to red-sworded Ireland.’ There is no need, 59  See Rory Rapple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck: Ireland, the Nine Years’ War and the Succession’, in Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous, 236–56. 60  Tiomna Nua (Dublin, 1603), sig. 2r. 61 See Richard A. McCabe, ‘Ireland’s Eliza: Queen or Cailleach?’, in Brandan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds), Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 15–39. 62  See Brendán Ó Buachalla, ‘James our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in D. G. Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan (eds), Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), 7–35. 63  Quoted from Pádraig A. Breatnach, ‘Metamorphosis 1603: Dán le hEochaidh Ó hEódhasa’, Éigse, 17 (1977), 169–80.

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in other words, for further military activity—or the programme of plantation that O’Neill’s defeat by Mountjoy was feared to herald. Fully au fait with James’s personal iconography, the bard asks ‘Solomon’ to be wise enough to understand his accession as placing Ireland on an equal footing with his other kingdoms.64 This was particularly important because the notion of a united ‘Britain’ excluded Ireland by very definition—a definition invariably couched in English. The emphasis on identity of language that underpins all pro-union propaganda necessarily relegated to secondary status not just the Gaelic-speaking peoples of Ireland, but also those of the Scottish Highlands. The bards were making a crucial point by addressing James in the ancient language of his Briton ancestors. Writing in 1603 they were not to know that the concept of Great Britain would prove to be even more problematical in ‘Britain’ itself. When Parliament finally met in 1604, the members of the House of Commons showed themselves remarkably unwilling to embrace the vision of constitutional unity articulated in James’s first address to the Lords.65 Their discussions gave cause for concern on many levels, but particularly worrying was the remarkable prevalence of anti-Scottish sentiment. The majority saw the benefits of union as lying entirely on the Scottish side, with nothing but loss for England—even of its ancient name. Ironically, all the concerns formerly expressed by Persons were now reiterated by those who despised him.66 Attention was drawn, in particular, to the Scottish dominance of the royal bedchamber, and resident Scots were subjected to the sort of racial satire later evident in plays such as Eastward Ho! (1605).67 Scottish writers such as John Russell responded vigorously to what they saw as the denigration of their countryman and the characterization of Scotland as an ancillary kingdom.68 The debate on the union, that is to say, evoked the still largely unspoken anxieties of the Scots concerning the prospect of an absentee monarch and rule from London.69 In the congratulatory literature of 1603 national pride had for the most part luxuriated in the peaceful attainment by a Scottish monarch of something so many Englishmen had failed to achieve through conquest. Officially sponsored works such as John Gordon’s A Panegyrique of Congratulation for the Concord of the Realmes of Great Britaine in Unitie of Religion, and Under One King (1603) or Elizabethae Reginæ Manes de Religione et Regno (1604)—in which Elizabeth’s ghost gifts England to James—employ the notion of ‘union’ to elide the implications of the departure from Scotland not just of James, but the entire royal family.70 Yet the 64  Quoted from Lambert McKenna (ed.), Aithdioghluim Dána: A Miscellany of Irish Bardic Poetry, Historical and Religious, 2 vols (Dublin: Educational Company of Ireland, 1939–40), I, 177–80. 65  James VI and I, Selected Writings, 292–306. 66  The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604, ed. Bruce R. Galloway and Brian Levack (Edinburgh: Clark Constable, 1985), xv–xvi, xxii, xxiv–xxvi. See Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 98–117. 67  For the bedchamber, see Stewart, The Cradle King, 174–5. 68  For Russell, see The Jacobean Union, ed. Galloway and Levack, 75–142. See also Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, 38, 39–40, 45–6, 51–3. 69  See, in particular, Robert Pont, ‘Of the Union of Britayne’, in The Jacobean Union, ed. Galloway and Levack, 31. 70  For Gordon see Galloway, Union of England and Scotland, 31, 48–9.

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effect was stark, as Alexander Craig admitted in his Poeticall Essayes (1604): Holyrood House, for centuries the centre of royal government, now stood empty. ‘What art thou Scotland then?’, Craig asked, ‘no Monarchie allace?’ And what would the future bring? Shall our estate allace from state be thus downthrowne, Shal Scotland hensforth have againe no cround King of their owne? Shal wee from King, Queene, Prince, and all their brood dissever? And shall not Scotland be againe inhabited for ever?71

James promised to return every three years if not more frequently, but it was fifteen before Edinburgh saw him again.72 The Scottish Privy Council continued to operate in the meantime, but increasingly as an adjunct to its English counterpart. In England, pro-union commentators, such as Francis Bacon, frequently cited Henry VII’s remark that in the event of a Scottish succession the greater kingdom would dominate the lesser, and so it was to prove.73 THE LIMITS OF PERSUASION According to The True Narration of the Entertainment of his Royall Majestie, from the time of his departure from Edenbrough; till his receiving at London (1603), James’s journey south was a matter of unalloyed national jubilation as hoi polloi rushed to view, and their betters to host, England’s new monarch. According to this account James behaved as the perfect prince, graciously acknowledging the jubilation of the crowds, and expressing his ‘Royal thankfulnes’ by creating scores of knights—whose names are ‘diligently’ recorded region by region. But documents not intended for public consumption supply a very different picture. James rapidly tired of the public’s attention and became irritable and ill-tempered: ‘God’s wounds!’ he swore in a moment of particular frustration, ‘I will pull down my breeches and they shall also see my arse.’74 By the time he reached London the fear had already taken hold that what had arisen from the Phoenix’s ashes was no second Elizabeth. Most of the pageantry prepared for his formal entry into London was deferred for a year because of a serious outbreak of plague, but Dekker’s eventual account of The Magnificent Entertainment (1604) suggests a monarch far less at ease with the performance of majesty than his predecessor.75 As the years passed and disillusionment supplanted jubilation, the image of Elizabeth was carefully crafted as a tool of political critique, the symbol of a lost golden age.76 71  Alexander Craig, The Poeticall Essayes (London, 1604), sigs C2r, C3r. 72 Stewart, The Cradle King, 167. 73  See Sir Francis Bacon, A Briefe Discourse Touching the Happie Union of the Kingdomes of England, and Scotland (London, 1603); Joel J. Epstein, ‘Francis Bacon and the Issues of Union, 1603–1608’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 33 (1970), 121–32. 74  David Harris Willson, King James VI and I (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 165. 75 See Jacobean Civic Pageants, ed. Richard Dutton (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), 19–115. 76  See Perry, Making of Jacobean Culture, 153–87.

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Amid all the celebratory publications of 1603 one is remarkable for casting a cold eye on both monarchs. Deputed to deliver A Speech . . . to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie in the Name of the Sheriffes of London and Middlesex, Richard Martin undermined customary panegyric with hard fact. ‘It shall bee the comfort of mine age’, he told James, ‘to have spoken the truth to my Lord the King . . . to make knowne to an uncorrupted King, the hopes and desires of his best subjects.’ And the corruptions of power are Martin’s major theme. It was in England, he asserted, that James would really be tested—by flattery.77 The ‘truth’, as he saw it, was that forty-five years of Elizabeth’s government had left the country in urgent need of physic. His aim was ‘to shew your Majestie the agues which keepe lowe this great body, whereof your Majesty is the sound-head’. The nobility was ‘neglected’, the commons ‘wearied’, and trade depressed through Elizabeth’s preference for ‘seawolves’ over merchants. The hope was that under James ‘extorted sutes’, ‘odious and uniust monopolies’, ‘unconcionable Lawiers’, ‘bribes’, financial cheats, and simoniacal priests would become things of the past. James was up to the job ‘if constant fame have delivered us a true inventory of your rare qualities’.78 ‘If ’ what panegyric had reported was true, ‘we have now a King that will heare with his own eares, see with his own eyes, and be ever jealous of any great trust which . . . may be abused to an unlymmitted power’. This was what James had promised in Basilikon Doron, as Martin interpreted it, ‘nor dooth any wiseman wish, or good man desire, that your Majestie should followe other Counsells or examples then your owne, by which your Majesty is soe neerelye bound’. The key to just government, Martin concludes, in what amounts to an indictment of the former regime, is open access: ‘They meane to sell the King to his subjects at their owne price, and abuse th’authority of his majesty to their private gayne, and greatnes, who perswade him, that to shut himselfe up from the accesse of his people, is the meanes to augment his state.’79 Within a remarkably short time, as favourites, factions, and cliques began to abound, Martin’s words must have come to seem all the more prescient. Largely engineered by Sir Robert Cecil and his allies, the proclamation of James VI of Scotland as James I of England offered the English nation a very plausible solution to the apparently intractable problem of the succession, and one that was likely to endure, as virtually every commentator noted, because of James’s ample progeny. James was more blue-blooded than the House of Suffolk, more able than Arbella Stuart, and more generally acceptable, at home and abroad, than the Spanish Infanta. The Stuart accession secured England’s northern borders while maintain­ ing its dominance—with or without ‘union’ there was never any prospect that James would rule from Edinburgh. Yet the outcome had never been i­nevitable. James had gone through periods of intense unpopularity south of the border and his claim, though strong, was far from irresistible.80 The documents that secured the Stuart succession were none of those I have discussed but the technically 77  Robert Martin, A Speech . . . to the Kings Most Excellent Majestie in the Name of the Sheriffes of London and Middlesex (London, 1603), sig. A4v. See also Chapter 13 in this volume by Ian Archer, ‘Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions’. 78 Martin, A Speech, sigs A4r, B1r–v, B2r. 79  Ibid., sigs B1v–B2r. 80 Stewart, The Cradle King, 86.

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treasonable correspondence conducted in cypher between Elizabeth’s Secretary of State and a foreign monarch.81 The sheer repetitiveness of the succession rhetoric suggests a claim attempting to validate itself through constant iteration, to drown objections in an officially orchestrated chorus of approval. The devil of Scottish succession was in the detail and no one had thought it through. Not surprisingly, the celebratory literature of 1603–4 displays an alarming tendency for the rhetoric of unity, continuity, and kinship to unwittingly disclose division, confusion, and distrust. The problem was exacerbated by the unprecedented nature of what had occurred, and the continuing uncertainty as to what it meant. This was an accession like no other and there were no obvious templates upon which to draw: hence the sheer number of conflicting avatars drawn from scripture, history, and myth, such as Brutus, Lucius, Joshua, David, Solomon, Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Constantine. There were simply too many problems, too many stake-holders, and too many readerships to satisfy simultaneously. Thus even the notion of ‘Britain’, intended to harmonize multiple constituencies, was commonly seen as compromising England, relegating Scotland, and excluding Ireland. Poetically speaking, the Stuart succession marked a return to the island’s primordial unity. But was it ever unified? ‘Beginne with Brute’, says Henry Chettle, immediately adding, ‘(if that of Brute be true) / As I’le not doubt, but give old Bards their due’.82 But he has doubted, and there lingers the unsettling sense of using myth in what might now be termed a Barthian sense, as a pragmatic fiction serving the political needs of the moment. As would soon become clear, the ­rhetoric of succession had taken flight from the reality, and what John Fenton presciently identified in King James His Welcome to London (1603) as the residual ‘Idea’ of Elizabeth quickly developed into a counter-discourse.83 By unilaterally proclaiming himself ‘King of Great Britain’ in frustration with Parliament, James declared himself head of a state with romantic associations stretching back to Geoffrey of Monmouth but no iota of constitutional validity. If the eulogists failed to shape the king, the king also failed to shape the nation. The celebratory literature of 1603–4 is valuable not least for exposing the dynamics of political ­panegyric to comparative scrutiny as competing factions attempted to flatter the king into compliance with their view of him. That the subject/object of their endeavours was a proficient self-publicist who had crafted an image ambiguous enough to invite such diversity of response serves to remind us of the remarkable similarity between the art of the eulogist and that of the coney-catcher.

81  Alexander Courtney, ‘The Scottish King and the English Court: The Secret Correspondence of James VI, 1601–3’, in Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous, 134–51. 82  Englands Mourning Garment (London, 1603), sig. F3v. 83  King James His Welcome (London, 1603), sig. A4r.

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2 Writing the King’s Death The Case of James I Alastair Bellany James I died at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire on Sunday, 27 March 1625. Almost immediately, an administrative and ritual process of royal succession was set in motion. The privy councillors at Theobalds drafted a proclamation and posted it on the palace gates. A copy was then taken to London where, later that afternoon, a delegation of councillors and nobles publicly promulgated it at major landmarks in Whitehall, Westminster, and the City; this highly choreographed process concluded with a salute from the guns at the Tower of London. The day’s procedure, noted the Florentine agent Amerigo Salvetti, followed the ‘customary ceremonies’ to ‘evident appearances of satisfaction’.1 The next day, 28 March, the Council sent printed copies of three different proclamations marking the new reign into the shires, to Scotland, and to the fleet.2 News of James’s death circulated fairly quickly, though the precise details often lagged behind. News reached Dorchester ‘48 hours’ after the event, and Charles I was proclaimed king ‘by the  Towne clarke’ with the ‘magistrates assisting’ on the evening of 30 March.3 Authorities in Cambridge also proclaimed Charles king on 30 March. Edward Tilman reported the proclamation but added, ‘The day of the King’s death wee are not yet certaine of, ’tis thought ’twas March 24th because the Lord Mayor was not at Pauls Crosse that day; but the 27th is given out for the day, and then was K.  Charles first proclaimed at London.’ Somewhat anxiously, Tilman gauged popular reactions and even examined portentous weather patterns for ‘omens’ about the new reign: ‘I know not what the omen of it was, but the joy of the people 1  Acts of the Privy Council of England, ed. John Roche Dascent et al., 46 vols (London: HMSO, 1890–1964), XL, 2–3, 5–6; The National Archives (hereafter TNA), SP 16/1/1–2; Sir Simonds D’Ewes, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, ed. J. O. Halliwell, 2 vols (London, 1845), I, 264; Edmund Howes and John Stow, Annals (London, 1630), 1036; Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. Horatio F. Brown et al., 38 vols (London: HMSO, 1864–1947), XIX, 2–3; Eleventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 7 vols (London: HMSO, 1887–8), I, 3 (hereafter Salvetti); Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the Happy Restoration of King Charles the Second, 4 vols (Oxford, 1853), I, 1. 2  Acts of the Privy Council, XL, 4, 5; John Rushworth, Historical Collections of Private Passages of State (London, 1659), sigs Z1v–Z2r. 3  William Whiteway of Dorchester, His Diary 1618 to 1635, ed. David Underdown (Dorchester: Dorset Record Society, 1991), 70.

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devoured their mourning’, he wrote. ‘Wee had Thunder the same day, presentlie upon the Proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all feares and sorrowes are swallowed up in joy of so hopefull a successor.’4 Royal successions typically occurred in the shadow of royal deaths, and to a significant, perhaps even unique, extent the writing around the succession of Charles I in 1625 dwelled extensively on the manner and circumstances of the death of his father, the first Stuart king of England. As we shall see, this abundance of writing on James I’s death worked both to recharge and to subvert royal authority. It also exposes to critical analysis significant tensions within early Stuart p ­ olitical culture— about religion and monarchy, kings and court favourites, domestic and foreign policy, and royal authority and the public sphere—that were to have important long- as well as short-term consequences. The extensive cultural production around James’s death has received remarkably little attention from mainstream political historians of the 1620s who until recently tended to be more comfortable working with parliamentary diaries and Privy Council correspondence than interpreting poems, libels, and broadsides. But as the battles around revisionist interpretations of early Stuart England retreat to the margins of historiographical interest, the field is clear for new ways of telling the political history of the seventeenth century. As Thomas Cogswell and I have shown, arguments about the nature of James I’s last illness and the cause of his death played a remarkably polarizing role in English political culture for nearly four decades, and I will return briefly to some of that history towards the end of the chapter.5 My primary goal here, however, is to use a series of fresh close readings to explore the tensions complicating the political work of a diverse range of mostly complimentary texts, images, and rituals produced around James’s death and Charles’s succession. Interdisciplinary cultural histories of the politics of royal succession offer one new way to refigure our historiographical paradigms; but they also provide an ­opportunity to better understand old questions and problems, casting new light on the ideological stresses that underlay the first systemic political crisis of the Stuart era.6 A monarch’s death always generated anxiety and uncertainty—it was a time to look simultaneously backward and forward, to reckon the past and ponder the future, and as Tilman’s report suggests, it could generate a sometimes disorienting mix of emotions, as obligatory shows of mourning combined with required expressions of joy. Anxieties could be assuaged, emotions channelled and royal authority successfully reproduced in a number of ways. Royal funerary rituals—which for James I would be unusually lavish—were one important mechanism of succession, 4  Original Letters, Illustrative of English History, ed. Henry Ellis, 2nd ser., 4 vols (London, 1827), III, 244. 5  Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 6  The classic revisionist work on the politics of the 1620s remains Conrad Russell’s Parliaments and English Politics, 1621–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), a book almost completely disinterested in the kinds of questions explored in this essay. For a particularly rich example of what an interdisciplinary cultural history can add to a classic problem of the 1620s—the politics of favouritism—see Curtis Perry, Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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functioning simultaneously to signal continuity and to legitimate change. In the presence of large metropolitan audiences, these rituals symbolically reasserted royal authority, deploying structured movement, spectacle, material magnificence, and an array of discourses to re-present a sacralized, dynastic, confessionally orthodox, and chivalric monarchy as the natural, uncontested, and legitimate pinnacle of the socio-political hierarchy.7 The king’s death also prompted a flood of writing. The official proclamations were among the earliest and widest circulated of many written responses, in many genres and media, to James I’s final illness, death, and funeral. Courtly, metropolitan, and provincial newsletters reported the course of the king’s illness, tracking symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and prognoses, and narrating his final days and hours.8 Foreign agents, acutely aware of the diplomatic and military consequences of Charles’s succession, also paid close attention; resident ambassadors and hostile foreign powers relied on sources at court to update them on the king’s health, and many ambassadorial reports described the succession process, especially its rituals, with the fascination of connoisseurs.9 Some of the news sent to the Continent eventually made it into print—the 1625 edition of the official Mercure François, for instance, included reports on James’s illness, last words, and funeral, highlighting (significantly, given the vexed geopolitical context) the king’s supposed deathbed request of Charles to ‘restore’ the Elector Palatine’s ‘lands and titles’.10 After James’s death, a variety of more formal, commemorative writing circulated in both print and manuscript. Courtly sermons given during his illness, shortly after his death, or at his funeral were quickly printed, some quite lavishly, and a diverse selection of cheap printed elegiac verse accompanied them into broader circulation.11 Some of these printed works incorporated engraved or woodblock images and other visual effects, including commemorative portraits, icons of 7  On James’s funeral, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 44–62; Jennifer Woodward, The Theatre of Death: The Ritual Management of Royal Funerals in Renaissance England 1570–1625 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1997), ch. 10; Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 231–2; Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 10; and David Howarth, Images of Rule: Art and Politics in the English Renaissance, 1485–1649 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1997), 174–7. 8  On these letters, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 68–91. 9  See the reports of the Venetian ambassador Pesaro, the Florentine agent Salvetti, and the Habsburg court spies, discussed in Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 44–91. 10  Le Mercure François, ou, Suite de L’Histoire de Nostre Temps (Paris, 1626), 335–40. 11 The Stuart Successions database, http://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/stuarts/public/pub, provides the comprehensive overview of the writing from 1625. My arguments rely on the following printed texts: (1) Sermons: John Williams, Great Britains Salomon: A Sermon Preached at The Magnificent Funerall, of the Most High and Mighty King James (London, 1625); Daniel Price, A Heartie Prayer, In a Needfull Time of Trouble. The Sermon Preached at Theobalds, Before His Majestie, and the Lords of the Privie Councell, an Houre Before the Death of Our Late Soveraigne King James (London, 1625); Phineas Hodson, The Last Sermon Preached Before His Majesties Funerals, at Denmark house (London, 1625). (2) Printed elegies: Francis Hamilton, King James his Encomium (Edinburgh, 1626); Thomas Heywood, A Funeral Elegie Upon the Much Lamented Death of the Trespuissant and Unmatchable . . . King James (London, 1625); Hugh Holland, A Cypres Garland. For the Sacred Forehead of Our Late Soveraigne King James (London, 1625); and John Taylor, A Living Sadnes, in Duty Consecrated to the Immortall Memory of Our Late Deceased Albeloved Soveraigne Lord, The Peereless Paragon of Princes, James (London, 1625).

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majesty, and symbols of mourning. Meanwhile, individuals close to the king or present during his final hours produced more private narratives of the king’s death. The royal physician Sir William Paddy, for instance, transcribed an account of the inspirational scenes around the royal deathbed into his copy of the Book of Common Prayer.12 Paddy’s memoir was almost entirely religious in tone, but other reports included significant medical commentary on the king’s illness and death: although the royal doctors’ daily bulletins to the Council are now lost, copies of a lengthy official medical account of James’s illness, death, and autopsy circulated among learned physicians, while fragmentary (and often inaccurate) reports of observations made during the autopsy appeared in English scribal newsletters and in the Mercure François.13 The politics of all this discourse on the royal illness, death, and funeral are ­complex, and open up important perspectives on the ideological instabilities complicating Charles I’s succession. Much of the writing was concerned with the monarchical mythmaking so brilliantly delineated by Kevin Sharpe, constructing narratives that legitimated the possession of power, and thus giving Stuart kingship, in Clifford Geertz’s words, that ‘aura of being not merely important but in some odd fashion connected with the way the world is built’.14 The king’s ‘good death’, for instance, was a crucial element in the mythology of early modern monarchy, and much of the writing about James’s final days told a story of royal spiritual virtuosity—piety, confessional orthodoxy, submission to God’s will, confidence in salvation—in the face of bodily mortality.15 These narratives of James’s good death were supplemented by elegiac celebrations of the royal virtues that had sustained his rule. Much of this panegyric writing on James also ­incorporated Charles into the twinned legitimating scripts of religious orthodoxy and virtuous government. Present at the old king’s deathbed, the new king was a privileged witness to his predecessor’s good death who took invaluable spiritual and political counsel from the dying Solomon; and Charles was widely represented as the heir to the old king’s virtues as well as to his throne. This textual mythologizing of the old king echoed many of the symbolic discourses deployed during James’s funerary rituals, the first in a sequence of large-scale public ceremonies, culminating in Charles’s coronation, that marked the transition from one king to the next. We can, of course, read the funeral itself as a kind of text, a potent piece of public royal mythmaking that smoothed the process of death and 12  The Booke of Common Prayer, and Administration of the Sacraments, And other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1615), St John’s College, Oxford, gift of William Paddy in 1634 (shelfmark Cpd.b.2.upper shelf.5). Another copy of these prayers and meditations can be found in Bodleian Library (hereafter Bod.), MS Tanner 73, fols 525r–27r. 13 Two copies of the official report survive: Bod., MS Barlow 54, fols 2r–5r; and W. S. Munk, ‘Marvodia: Being an Account of the Last Illness of James I and of the Post-Mortem Examination of his Body’, The Genealogist, 1 (1884), 230–4. 14  Clifford Geertz, ‘Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power’, in Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 121–46 at 124. On this process more generally, and on the key legitimating scripts deployed in early Stuart England, see Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), and Image Wars. 15  Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 25–9.

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succession—Charles himself was acutely aware of the power of these rituals, and elected to make his first major public appearance in the guise of chief mourner during his father’s funeral procession, a decision that suggests the young king was far more attuned to the politics of public self-presentation than some historians have claimed.16 But we can also explore how writing about the funeral—the ritual in ink—played with the intended meanings of the ritual text. As several scholars have argued, the meanings of ritual action and symbol are heavily mediated by textual representation, and ritual communication and function can be stabilized, reworked, invented, or undermined by written or visual texts.17 The writing on James’s funeral ranged from heraldic scripts that gave the events a single, stable meaning to news reports that noted oddities, conflicts, and innovations, while some of the more innovative elements of James’s funeral rites also attracted sophisticated poetic attention.18 These varied responses to the funeral rituals offer revealing glimpses of how some contemporaries received the ritual communication of what we might call the ‘authorized version’ of James’s illness and death. The manufacture, by written and ritualized panegyric, of this authorized version was, however, a peculiarly fraught process, occurring at a moment of sharp p ­ olitical and ideological tension, especially over foreign policy, that complicated the work of monarchical legitimation.19 The narratives of James’s good death, for instance, endorsed an intrinsically controversial version of what it meant for a Protestant to die well. Furthermore, the writing on James’s death not only had to praise the old king while anticipating the new; it also had to negotiate areas of political difference between the two rulers. Charles’s accession marked the definitive reorientation of English foreign policy towards military confrontation with Spain, and some writers struggled to idealize James the peacemaker while simultaneously praising his more bellicose son. And, as Cogswell and I have shown at length, in the shadows of the authorized version there also emerged an unauthorized version—a ‘secret history’ of James’s final illness and death which claimed that the king had been poisoned by his (and now Charles’s) favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The seeds of the unauthorized version can be found in some of the newsletters written in late 16  For the debate about Charles I and public ritual, see Judith Richards, ‘“His Nowe Majestie” and the English Monarchy: The Kingship of Charles I Before 1640’, Past & Present, 113 (1986), 70–96; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65–93; Mark Kishlansky, ‘Charles I: A Case of Mistaken Identity’, Past & Present, 189 (2005), 41–80; and Sharpe, Image Wars. 17  The classic intervention here is Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); see too Mary Beard, The Roman Triumph (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Alastair Bellany, ‘Libels in Action: Ritual, Subversion and the English Literary Underground, 1603–42’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 99–124. 18  For the finalized heraldic scripts, see the ‘True Order’ in John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, 4 vols (London, 1828), IV, 1037ff.; and British Library (hereafter BL), MS Landsdowne 885, fols 115ff. For various drafts of these scripts, see TNA, SP 16/1/98–100, 102; 16/2/28–29, 31–32; and Bod., MS Dugdale 28, fols 101ff. For the disruptions, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 50. 19  These clashes over foreign policy are analysed in Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 68–91.

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March 1625 that reported sickroom confrontations over Buckingham’s use of a plaster and posset to treat the ailing king. But the secret history would not take full shape until nearly a year later, when George Eglisham’s Forerunner of Revenge appeared across the Continent in Latin, English, and German editions. Eglisham’s secret history, circulated widely in England and Scotland in both printed and scribal copies, would poison the politics of Charles’s first years on the throne, encouraging the 1626 Parliament-men to charge Buckingham with recklessly causing James’s death by unwarranted medical interference, and adding the murder of James I to the catalogue of crimes rehearsed by the verse libellers who hounded the favourite to his grave. To an important extent, the early Caroline monarchy, unable to police the literary underground where Eglisham’s pamphlet circulated, and unwilling to mount the public relations campaign necessary to defuse Eglisham’s charges, effectively failed to control the narrative of royal succession. The longterm effects were devastating. Eglisham’s pamphlet would not fade from political memory: coupled with accounts of the 1626 parliamentary proceedings, it would eventually play a significant aggravating role in the regicidal politics of 1648–9.20 The remainder of this chapter explores these political dynamics and tensions revealed (and shaped) by the writing around James I’s death by looking more closely at a handful of texts: a poetic response to the ritualized lying-in-state of James’s corpse that exposes the tensions between the meanings of ritual-in-action and the meanings of ritual-in-ink; John Williams’s narrative of the king’s good death, retold in the funeral sermon intended as the authoritative celebration of James’s virtues, yet riddled with potential religious controversy; a broadside elegy for James that used visual images and poetry to negotiate the transition (but also uneasily efface the contradictions) between a peace-loving king and his war-making son; and a set of medical and lay writings about James’s post-mortem autopsy that allow us to explore some key features of the confrontation between the authorized and unauthorized versions of James’s death. R I T U A L , E F F I G Y, A N D A B S E N T M A J E S T Y From early April to early May 1625, James’s body lay in state at Denmark House on the Strand.21 This extended lying-in-state was an innovation in English royal funerary ritual, most likely borrowed, at least in part, from French precedents.22 James’s corpse arrived on the Strand after a procession from Theobalds, and his bedchamber servants carried the coffin from its chariot through the public spaces of Denmark House into the heart of the royal residence. Then—either in the Privy Chamber, in a lobby just beyond it, or in the royal Bedchamber—the king’s ­servants placed the coffin on a ‘frame of boards lyke a large bedd’. A sheet and a ‘large pall of velvet blacke’ covered the coffin and the supporting ‘frame’, 20  For the history of Eglisham’s pamphlet, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, passim. 21  See, especially, ‘True Order’, 1038–9; and Salvetti, 15–16. 22 Woodward, Theatre, 186–92.

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and a canopy was erected above. The chamber itself was draped in black cloth, while the royal coat of arms, ‘sewed in cloth of gold’, hung upon the wall at the head of the coffin. Every night for more than a month, six candles in tall Spanish silver candlesticks placed around the coffin illuminated the darkness, while groups of courtiers and nobles kept vigil. Several of the most important rooms in the palace were also draped in black and decorated with the royal arms, with the quality of the decorative drapes decreasing—from velvet to ‘cloth’ to ‘baize’—the further one moved from the sacred royal body. Signs of mourning appeared too on the building’s exterior, where the royal arms were painted onto a black velvet square over the palace gates.23 Supplementing the material signs of mourning and mortality, the rituals of lying in state also deployed various symbols and gestures to express a continued monarchical vitality, re-presenting the dead king in the guise of his still-living ‘political body’. James’s household servants moved into Denmark House with their master, and their behaviour fascinated contemporary observers. One noted that their ‘service contynewed in all points as if his Majestie had byn lyveinge’, while Salvetti reported that James’s body was ‘watched daily’ by the household, ‘with every mark of respect and ceremony, as during his lifetime’.24 These behavioural patterns and gestures signalled claims about the immortality of certain aspects of royal power, and similar claims were implied by the use of a potent symbolic object—an effigy of the late king. As soon as the coffin had been set upon the special frame and the pall placed over it, ‘a representation of his Majestie was layd upon the said pall over the Body, in his robes of estate and Royall diadem, and so it contynewed untill the Funerall’.25 The Denmark House effigy was one of two made for use during the funerary rituals—the second was probably used during the funeral procession and was certainly laid on James’s catafalque inside Westminster Abbey—and the decision to use an effigy for the lying-in-state appears to have been made relatively late in the planning process. As the Venetian ambassador noted, the effigy was intended to be ‘life-like’. Although Maximilian Colt had constructed the effigy’s torso from roughly hewn wood and padding, this crude, non-representational work remained hidden beneath the royal robes. Only the face and hands were visible to spectators, and these were made to appear as realistic as possible. Colt ‘curiously wrought’ the face using the death mask he had taken from the king at Theobalds, and painted it and the hands (also ‘curiously wrought’) in realistic flesh tones. The court wigmaker, Daniel Parkes, embellished the effigy with fake hair, beard, and eyebrows. Colt also made and helped paint the insignia and regalia accompanying the effigy—crowns, a ball and sceptre, and a shield bearing the royal arms. Salvetti thought the ‘figure’ to be ‘an excellent likeness of the late King . . . dressed in the Royal costume and robes, with the Imperial crown upon its head, the sceptre in the right hand, and the globe in the left’. A French report thought the effigy ‘so 23  ‘True Order’, 1038–9; Thomas Birch (ed.), Court and Times of Charles I, 2 vols (London, 1848), I, 3. 24  ‘True Order’, 1038–9; Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, I, 3; Salvetti, 15. 25  ‘True Order’, 1038–9.

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well fashioned . . . that one would have said he was still alive’, lacking nothing but the ability to speak.26 As the funerary rituals progressed, the effigy of James I played varied roles and acquired different meanings and symbolic resonance at different stages of the proceedings.27 Although the English effigy never quite played the central role that such representations enjoyed in French royal funerals, it too clearly represented that part of the king that had not died: his immortal political body, his dignity, his authority—all that outlived his frail natural body and provided a guarantee of continuity across the breach opened up by a royal death. As Nigel Llewellyn puts it, the effigy was a mechanism that ‘helped ensure the transfer of power within the body politic’.28 And it did so by using symbolic visual cues and codes to articulate the core myths, or legitimating scripts, that sustained Stuart royal authority. The lifelike appearance created the illusion that the king’s natural body survived, in effect articulating the myth of a mystical fusion between the king’s natural and political bodies. The survival of the political body was further signalled by the effigy’s ceremonial dress: it represented a king in coronation garb, surrounded by regalia that not only signified the essential functions of royal government, but also recalled the ritual of coronation, in which the divine right of kings and the divine origins of royal power, were visually displayed. The continuation of regular household service at Denmark House also implied that during this initial stage the effigy was, in effect, alive, emphasizing the continuity of royal power through the king’s immortal body politic. The effigy’s realism also served to elicit emotional responses from those who saw it, focusing their grief and channelling their thoughts toward the universality of mortality.29 And stored (eventually) alongside older royal effigies in the Abbey, the king’s effigy would become his memorial, a monument to royal authority that served some, though by no means all, of the functions performed by elite and royal tomb monuments elsewhere in the church.

26  On the effigies’ construction and appearance, see the Lord Chamberlain’s Accounts, TNA, LC 2/6 fols 5v, 14r–15r, and the documentary material printed in W. H. St. John Hope, ‘On the Funeral Effigies of the Kings and Queens of England, with Special Reference to Those in the Abbey Church of Westminster’, Archaeologia, 2nd ser., 60 (1907), 517–70 at 557–8; and Anthony Harvey and Richard Mortimer, The Funeral Effigies of Westminster Abbey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 67 and 69. See too Salvetti, 15–16; Mercure François, XI, 339; and Woodward, Theatre, 193–4. 27  The classic account of the early modern royal funeral effigy remains Ralph Giesey, The Royal Funeral Ceremony in Renaissance France (Geneva: Droz, 1960), updated in Cérémonial et Puissance Souveraine: France XVe–XVIIe Siècles (Paris: Armand Colin, 1987). The most important considerations of the English royal effigy are Gittings, Death, 222–4; Nigel Llewellyn, ‘The Royal Body: Monuments to the Dead, For the Living’, in Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion, 1990), 218–40 at 229; and Woodward, Theatre, 181–2, 193–5. 28  Llewellyn, ‘Royal Body’, 229; and see too, Gittings, Death, 222. On the differences from France, see Gittings, Death, 223; Woodward, Theatre, 194. On the myth of the king’s two bodies, see Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). 29  James Cleland, A Monument of Mortalitie, Upon the Death and Funerals, of the Gracious Prince, Lodovick, Late Duke of Richmond and Lenox (London, 1624), 46–7; Gittings, Death, 224; Woodward, Theatre, 194.

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It is difficult to ascertain who had access to the royal effigy and coffin in Denmark House. Salvetti thought that ‘crowds of the people’ would visit ‘the chamber where the body lies in state’, but other evidence suggests that access to James was more restricted.30 Certainly, courtiers, nobles, and ambassadors might visit. The Venetian Pesaro thought that upwards of forty ‘noblemen and cavaliers’ kept vigil at Denmark House both ‘day and night’, and when William Laud attended prayers at Denmark House on 10 April, he and Lancelot Andrewes took the opportunity to visit the ‘the body of the late King James, which rested there till the day of his funeral rites’.31 But perhaps the most penetrating contemporary response to the lying in state and its symbolic meanings appears in a poem, James Shirley’s elegy ‘Upon the death of K. James’.32 Early in 1625, Shirley was embarking on his career as a London playwright, and he engaged with the ritual and symbolic politics of James’s funeral ceremonies in a variety of interesting ways.33 Observers of the night-time procession that brought James’s body from Theobalds to Denmark House fretted that ‘fowle weather’ had literally dampened the effect of the torchlight parade through London’s streets. But Shirley rewrote this ritual mischance, transforming the wet weather into a sign of cosmic mourning for James: when ‘the dead body of the King’ was brought to London, ‘every star, like kinsmen to the dead, / That night close-mourners, hid their golden head’.34 More interesting still are Shirley’s meditations on James’s lying-in-state. Whether Shirley actually made his way inside Denmark House or merely imagined that he did is ultimately beside the point: what matters is his poetic interrogation of the ritual’s intended meanings. The poem begins from a position of doubt. Shirley will give the voice of ‘busie Fame . . . no credit’ when he hears reports of James’s death; he needs to see for himself— ‘I would trust my eye’. Still unable to believe the news, the poet eventually makes his way to Denmark House. He arrives in a courtyard filled with men in black, their outward garb supplying ocular proof that the news of James’s death is true. Still unconvinced, however, the poet jostles his way past the guard into the Presence Chamber, which ‘mockt me with a name, / For it presented nothing to my eye / But blacks, and tears for absent Majesty’. Majesty’s absence, ‘the lost Presence’, continues to haunt the poet as he moves deeper into the palace. In the privy chamber, he meets more men in mourning but is confronted once again by the conundrum of royal absence. The ‘mourning state’—the ceremonial draping of the privy chamber in black—intensifies the poet’s grief: it ‘did renew my wo / For the lost Presence’. His sorrow deepens yet further at the sight of the ‘Velvet 30  Salvetti, 6; and compare the evidence on access in Cleland, Monument, 46. 31  Calendar of State Papers, Venetian 1625–26 (Pesaro report: 15 April 1625); The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, 7 vols (Oxford, 1853), III, 161. 32  James Shirley, Poems &c (London, 1646), 57–9. 33  Ira Clark, ‘Shirley, James (bap. 1596, d. 1666)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e25427. 34 Shirley, Poems, 57. On the weather, see, e.g. John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman E. McClure, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), II, 609; Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, I, 3.

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hangings’ and ‘Scutcheonn Royal in a Sable Field’. Finally, the poet reaches the royal bedchamber, where, he has now learned, ‘the pale body of the King was laid’. The room at first appears like a tomb—the house of the pale natural body, the house of death—draped in black, the ‘Tapers round about / Flameles’, signifying that ‘our light was out’. But instead of an absence, and instead of the dead natural body, the poet finds ‘on his monument / A King’. Confronted by James’s effigy, the poet is startled: fashioned by ‘subtle Artifice’, the effigy appears alive. ‘My sense’, Shirley writes, ‘did stagger at the Counterfet’. But wonder gives way to questions: ‘was this the way to gain belief / That he was dead, to paint him now to life? / As if, when we had lost him, it had been / Enough to have thought him but alive agen’. It is at this moment of confusion that the poet realizes just how the old king could be both dead and alive—not at Denmark House, but at Whitehall; not in symbolic effigy, but in the living body of his son and successor: From thence to White-hall when I came, with wing Nimble as fear could make, I found the King, I triumph’d here, and boldly did revive, King James not dead, he was in Charles alive.

Shirley’s poem records an impressively rich emotional and intellectual response to the symbolic apparatus and visual effects of the lying-in-state, a response that manages simultaneously to endorse and question various myths of monarchy. Some claims to royal immortality are fictions—potent, but fictions nonetheless. Shirley knows that ‘in Law’ kings ‘can never die’, but also that all men, kings included, are mortal. Yet royal mortality is differentiated from universal mortality—kings may ‘resolve to . . . the dust’, like all men, but the bodies of kings are of ‘purer mould’, and so their dust remains ‘Distinguish’d . . . from the common men’ by being ‘Royal’. Here royalty appears to inhere in the body, even at its most mortal. The effigy in Denmark House is also a fiction, a product of ‘subtle Artifice’, but it is a fiction that points the poet towards a truth: that the dead king does live on, not simply in legal fictions or lifelike effigies, but in the pulsing, breathing natural body of the new king. James lives on in Charles, but so too does kingship.35 The ritual turned into ink was thus destabilized, but not subverted; and in writing about the dead king, Shirley was eventually able to anticipate and celebrate the succession of the new. ‘ G R E AT B R I TA I N S S A L O M O N ’ John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, made similar claims about the mystery of royal succession towards the end of the sermon he delivered in Westminster Abbey at James’s funeral on 7 May. Throughout, Williams dwelt on James’s Solomonic virtues, and, with a royal effigy lying in the hearse before him, Williams concluded by ruminating on the myth of the king’s multiple 35  Woodward argues that the use of two different effigies functioned ‘to affirm the fictive nature of the effigy ritual’: Theatre, 194.

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bodies. James had been Solomon’s ‘statue’, the biblical king’s contemporary embodiment. But James’s royal body lived on, not in funerary effigies but in the person of his son: God hath provided another Statue yet to adorne the Exequies of our Late Soveraigne. I doe not meane this Artificiall Repraesentation within the Hearse; for this shews no more then his outward Body . . . . But I meane the Statue which (beyond all former praesidents of Pietie) walk’t on foot this day after the Hearse . . . A breathing Statue of all his Vertues . . . . Though his Father be dead, yet is he, as though hee were not dead, for he hath left One behinde him most like himselfe.36

Williams’s peroration performed the work required by the rituals of succession, fusing the mythic image of the dead king with the image of the living one and evoking the continuity of virtuous kingship and good governance across the rupture opened up by royal mortality. But the process of commemoration in Williams’s sermon, which had by far the highest profile of the several sermons written around James’s death, was more strained than this peroration implies. Some of Williams’s glosses upon controversial past events—whether James’s handling of the 1615–16 Overbury murder scandal or the clash between king and prince over the breach with Spain in 1624—generated unease.37 Other tensions threatened to undercut or complicate the sermon’s panegyric thrust. Williams’s biblical text proved slippery, generating mixed political signals. If James was Solomon’s ‘statue’, for instance, did that mean the Stuart king shared his biblical prototype’s vices as well as his virtues? Williams’s chosen text—I Kings 11:41–3 (or perhaps the virtually identical II Chronicles 9:29–31)—contained a further trap. Williams deliberately ended his text before the conclusion of the forty-third verse, stopping with Solomon’s death and omitting the words on his successor, the religious apostate Rehoboam. The lawyer and antiquarian Sir Simonds D’Ewes claimed, however, that ‘some conceived the [new] King took just offence’ at Williams’s choice of text, ‘as if by reason of the mention of Rehoboam in the 43rd verse, his Highness was necessarily paralleled with him’.38 A later assessment of the controversy thought that ‘some auditors’ had come rather to ‘cavil than observe’. Some of these critics claimed that Williams had overpraised James’s eloquence and overstated its essential role in good governance, implicitly rebuking the new king, ‘whose impediment in speech was known to be great, and mistook to be greater’. Still others felt that the bishop had spent too much time ‘praising the past’ and too little in ‘promising for the present king’.39 Such sniping no doubt reflected the political and factional divisions in both court and church that would soon precipitate Williams’s fall from office. But the controversy 36 Williams, Salomon, 75–6. 37  Ibid., 44, 54–5; on the Overbury allusion, see Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 245–7. 38 D’Ewes, Autobiography, I, 267–8. 39  Thomas Fuller, The Church History of Britain; from the Birth of Jesus Christ Until the Year 1648, ed. J. S. Brewer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1845), VI, 10–12. See the defence of Williams in John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: A Memorial Offer’d to the Great Deservings of John Williams (London, 1693), part 1, 223. On Williams’s skill as a funeral orator, see Cleland, Monument, 48–51.

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also suggests the difficulty of negotiating succession, of praising one king while simultaneously anticipating another. Williams’s sermon also reveals the potential controversy embedded in the story at the centre of much of the royal mythmaking in 1625: the narrative of James’s good death. The idealizing of good deaths was deeply rooted in the Christian ­tradition, and narratives of the good deaths of kings had routinely helped invest monarchy with sacred and confessional authority.40 But what exactly constituted a good death in a confessionally fractured, post-Reformation world? Reformed theologies of salvation profoundly challenged the late medieval ars moriendi, but while Calvinists denied in principle that a good or bad death could determine the fate of the soul, a broad spectrum of English Protestant opinion continued to valorize the good death—whether as an outward sign of the dying person’s election or as an act of religious edification for those who witnessed it. Thus, it was important to show that James had died well. But Williams had to make a public case for exactly how the king had died well, which meant wading, even if only implicitly, into areas of religious controversy. For although Protestants agreed on many features that signified a good death—the use of prayer and Scripture, displays of patience, and edifying testaments of personal faith—different strains of English Protestantism emphasized different modes of dying well.41 The godly death idealized in prescriptive and descriptive Puritan writing, for instance, was to a great extent de-ritualized— freed from the contamination of ‘popish’ ceremony and less reliant on a minister’s orchestration.42 Other Protestants, however, valued a more ritualized death that maintained greater continuities with the Catholic past and inevitably required greater clerical involvement. Many had come to cherish the Prayer Book’s triad of rituals designed for the comfort of the sick and dying: the confession of sins, the granting of clerical absolution, and the taking of ­communion, rituals that some Puritans found troublingly popish.43 By the 1620s, however, other, increasingly influential churchmen hoped to elaborate the Prayer Book’s rituals yet further: 40  See Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), ch. 9; and Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 6. On Catholic mythologizing of the monarch’s good death, see Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and John Fisher’s funeral sermon for King Henry VII, published in 1509 and reprinted in The English Works of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London, 1876), 268ff. Williams studied Fisher’s sermon as he wrote his own for James. 41  On this, see Houlbrooke, Death, ch. 6, which identifies five early modern English variations on the ‘craft of dying’—a Catholic version, a harder-line Puritan version, a ‘moderate’ Puritan version, a Prayer Book conformist version, and an avant-garde conformist/proto-Laudian, Restoration Anglican version. 42 Houlbrooke, Death, 157–65. See, too, the de-ritualized order for the ‘visitation of the sick’ in A Directory for The Publique Worship of God (London, 1645), 31–4. 43  The Prayer-Book of Queen Elizabeth 1559 (London, 1890), 129–35; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49–50. For a Puritan critique of the Prayer Book’s sections on clerical absolution and private communion, see A Survey of the Booke of Common Prayer (London, 1606), 134–41; on debates about private communion, see Arnold Hunt, ‘The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England’, Past & Present, 161 (1998), 39–83 at 68–70.

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enhancing the clerical role at the sickbed, adding a range of additional spiritual supports and required texts, and focusing more intently on the powerful role of confession, absolution, and communion in the management of the dying.44 Williams himself had orchestrated James’s good death at Theobalds, and his sermon included powerful intimate details of the king’s final hours.45 But there was no escaping potential controversy, for the king’s dying had been clerically managed and highly ritualized: it exemplified one, contested version of the good Protestant death. Williams insisted that James had faced death with the requisite patience and confidence, and that, prepared in his soul, he had been fully aware of how and why he would be saved. ‘Never’, Williams declared, ‘have you read of any King, that left this world more resolved, more prepared’, spending ‘[a]ll his Latter dayes . . . in prayer’, and sending his hopes and thoughts up to Heaven ‘to bee the Harbingers of his happy Soule’.46 Williams then described a five-stage deathbed ritual in which the first four stages acted as spiritual preparation for the fifth: first, a declaration of faith; second, a declaration of and petition for forgiveness to place the dying king in a state of ‘Charitie’ with all men; third, a confession of sins and a petition for divine mercy; fourth, a clerical ‘forme of Absolution’ in which the priest, by virtue of his office, can ‘pronounce and declare Remission of sins, to such as being penitent doe call for the same’; and finally, at the ritual apex, the administration of holy communion. Williams stated that James had declared his faith by repeating ‘the Articles of the Creede one by one, and said hee beleeved them all, as they were received and expounded by that part of the Catholique Church which was established here in England’. The king also stated with ‘a kinde of sprightfulnesse, and vivacitie, that what ever hee had written of this Faith in his life’ in his extensive catalogue of religious meditations and anti-popish polemic, ‘he was now ready to seale with his Death’.47 It was from this point that the king’s good death entered contested territory, incorporating elements that some might have found unnecessary, distracting, or too reminiscent of Catholic rites. His clergy required James to put himself in a state of charity before he could proceed to communion, and Williams’s sermon recorded that James did this in general terms, stating his forgiveness of all those who had offended him and asking the forgiveness of those whom he had offended. The king then had to confess his sins and petition for absolution. Some Protestants found any formal deathbed confession troubling, and it seems that James confessed his sins in only the most general terms—Williams reported that the king declared himself ‘a miserable sinner’ who humbly petitioned God to absolve him.48 He thus did not engage in the detailed confession of sin that Puritans found 44 Houlbrooke, Death, 165–73. For an extensive avant-garde conformist or proto-Laudian gloss on the ritualized good death, see Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Manual for the Sick’, printed in The Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrews Bishop of Winchester, 2nd edn (London, 1839), 223ff.; cf. ‘The Country Parson’, in George Herbert: The Complete English Works, ed. Ann Pasternak Slater (New York: Everyman, 1995), 219–20. 45  Williams’s account hews closely to that given by the eyewitness William Paddy in his notes to the St John’s College, Oxford, Book of Common Prayer: shelfmark Cpd.b.2.upper shelf.5. 46 Williams, Salomon, 67–9. 47  Ibid., 69–70. 48  Ibid., 70–1.

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q­ uintessentially popish, but that some royal churchmen, including such avant-garde conformists as Lancelot Andrewes, had recently begun to favour.49 After confession, James asked Williams to grant him absolution—that ‘you, that are [God’s] servant in that high place . . . affoord me this heavenly comfort’.50 Clerical absolution was another controversial issue, and Williams trod carefully, glossing the practice with additional narrative details that confirmed absolution as a legitimate function of Protestant ministry. He reported that the clergy at James’s bedside had asked the king if he was aware that ‘Men in Holy Orders in the Church of England doe challenge a power, as inhaerent in their Function, not in their Person, to pronounce and declare Remission of sins’ and that the ‘forme of Absolution for that very purpose’ was written down in the Prayer Book. James acknowledged this and declared, according to Williams, that such ‘power in you’ was ‘evident demonstration’ that the English Church was ‘without all question the Church of Christ’.51 Despite this dialogue, Williams was nervous enough to add a marginal note to the printed sermon recalling James’s endorsement of clerical absolution of the sick and dying as an ‘Apostolicall function’ and ‘very godly ordinance’ at the 1604 Hampton Court conference. The note emphasized that this form of absolution was also permitted by various German Protestant confessions of faith, a point that the anti-Puritan Bishop Richard Bancroft had made at Hampton Court.52 Williams’s caution here was political—he had to make clear that the king had received no popish rites on his deathbed, and he had to soothe the qualms of ­readers who might be aware that the form of absolution in the visitation of the sick derived from late medieval Catholic sources.53 But other observers, far less concerned by the persistence of ‘popish’ remnants in the Prayer Book, may have read the king’s acceptance of clerical absolution as encouragement for their own avant-garde thinking on the spiritual utility of these contested rituals. In his twenty-nine articles commenting on James’s life and death, William Laud included at number twentysix the king’s ‘Royall Censure of the Moderate Reformation of the Church of England: And particularlye for the care of Retayninge of Absolution, the Comfort of distressed soules.’ Laud’s gloss, intended for Buckingham, is interesting, arguing that James’s acceptance of clerical absolution indicated his endorsement of a particular interpretation of the English Church’s relationship to the Catholic past, a relationship that Laud characterized as ‘moderate’ reformation, not absolute repudiation. An early reader of Laud’s manuscript marked this article with a cross; whether alarmed or sympathetic, the reader was clearly aware that the statement had more than descriptive significance. A decade later, aggressive (and, to some

49  Compare, for instance, the elaborate rules for confession set out in Andrewes, ‘Manual for the Sick’, 233, 273ff., and William Perkins’s unease lest Protestants return to the ‘Popish doctrine’ requiring ‘a particular enumeration of all a mans sins’ in A Salve for a Sicke Man (London, 1632), 107–8. 50 Williams, Salomon, 70–1. 51  Ibid., 70. 52  Ibid., referencing William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference at Hampton Court (London, 1604), which discussed clerical absolution on 7–8 and 12–14. 53  See Houlbrooke, Death, 156; and Survey of the Book of Common Prayer, 134–8. Court newsletters made a similar point that this was no ‘popish’ absolution: see TNA, SP 84/126/111.

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minds, ‘popish’) claims about the powers of clerical absolution were to become a controversial feature of the Laudian Church of England.54 Laud also thought James’s ‘devout receiving of the blessed sacrament’ worthy of note.55 Some godly Protestants worried that a last communion smacked too much of popery, especially if the dying person was the only communicant—‘the supper of the Lord’, noted William Perkins, ‘is no private action, but merely Ecclesiasticall: and therefore to be celebrated in the meeting and assembly of Gods people’—and ideal Puritan deaths often did not include it.56 The Prayer Book was also leery of private communion, allowing it only in cases of contagious sickness, but its rubrics did permit communion to be celebrated in the sickroom if others besides the sick person and the minister were present.57 Several contemporary narratives of James’s good death treated his reception of communion as the high-water mark of the dying man’s spiritual experience, and Williams described communion as a ‘blessed Bait, that the devout soule useth . . . to take in this life, when it is ready to travaile for the other life’, noting that James had taken it with an amazing ‘Zeale and Devotion, as if hee had not beene a fraile Man, but a Cherubim cloathed with flesh, and blood’. The king, Williams added, had then testified to his son and his favourite the blessings he had received and told them of the ‘ease, and comfort he found in himselfe’ after taking the sacrament.58 Moving into less controversial territory, Williams then detailed how, in the hours following communion, James had become progressively more passive, as ‘the sicknesse prevailed more and more upon his Body’. But believing ‘his Sense, and Memory’ to be ‘not much impaired’, Williams and the other clergymen continued to recite prayers at the bedside ‘from houre to houre, for the comfort of his Soule’.59 ‘There were selected’, Williams recalled, ‘some short sentences of Devotion’ in English and Latin to ‘raise, and lift up his Soule into Heaven’.60 Mostly drawn from Scripture—primarily from the Psalms, the Gospels, the Pauline Epistles, and the Book of Revelation—Williams’s sentences and prayers voiced the king’s patient acceptance, indeed welcoming embrace, of death, his trust in God and in the saving power of Christ’s sacrifice, and his confidence in his own salvation. In Williams’s telling, James’s responses to these fragments of prayer and Scripture were yet more compelling evidence of his piety and confidence at the hour of his death. James was ‘so ravished and Comforted’ by the litany of devotional sentences that although ‘he groaned now under the pangs of Death, yet was hee ever still, and as quiet, as a Lambe, when these Eiaculations were infused into Him’. And at least twice the dying man summoned a verbal response. When Williams recited in Latin Christ’s words from the cross to the saved thief, James responded that ‘it was the voice, and promise of Christ’. When Williams read, ‘Veni Domine Iesu, veni cito’, the king

54  TNA, SP 16/1/31 (no. 26); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 19, 72–5, 472–3. 55  TNA, SP 16/1/31 (no. 25). 56 Perkins, Salve, 89. 57  The Prayer-Book, 134–5. 58 Williams, Salomon, 69, 71; Hacket, Scrinia, part 1, 223; and Hamilton, Encomium, sig. B3. 59 Williams, Salomon, 71. 60  Ibid., 72.

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repeated it ‘twice, or thrice’.61 Williams presented the king’s final moments as a godly apotheosis: his hastning . . . towards his End, hastned us also to that Prayer usually said at the houre of Death; the which was no sooner ended . . . but[,] his Lords, and Servants, kneeling on the one side, his Archbishop, Bishops, and other of his Chaplaines on the other side of his Bed, with out any pangs, or Convulsion at all, Dormivit Salomon, Salomon slept.62

Williams’s sermon quickly appeared in a striking edition from the press of John Bill, the royal printer.63 Its frontispiece incorporated an engraved image of the late king enthroned before a tapestry decorated with his IR monogram and ‘Beati Pacifici’ motto. Crowned, dressed in robes of state, with the Garter badge about his neck, James held the orb and sceptre, while an accompanying verse gently undercut the iconic image by noting that even kings must die. The text itself was richly ornamented. A Tetragrammaton encircled by the sun sat above Williams’s controversially truncated scriptural text while icons of James’s kingship—crowntopped rose, thistle, harp, and fleur-de-lis—ornamented the first page of the sermon proper, where a decorative initial capital ‘M’ depicted an angel blowing two horns. Although Williams’s marginal notes revealed his nervous awareness of the potential for controversy, the lavishly printed text was clearly intended to fix the bishop’s image of ‘Great Britains Salomon’ as the authoritative statement of the late king’s virtues and exemplary good death.64 But the potency of the panegyric, amplified though it was by Williams’s unusually vivid eyewitness testimony from the dying king’s bedside, was undercut and compromised, not simply by the factional sniping against its author, but also by the pre-existing and incipient theological and ecclesiological divisions within English Protestantism. A SECOND CHARLEMAGNE Great Britains Salomon was one of a number of printed elegiac and commemorative publications that used visual images or effects to enhance their power. The titlepage of Hugh Holland’s Cypres Garland set the book’s title within a tombstoneshaped box against a black background, while the title-page of Thomas Heywood’s Funeral Elegie featured a woodcut of James’s effigy on its hearse printed inside a thick black border. The title-page of John Taylor’s A Living Sadnes was perhaps the most visually interesting of these cheap printed images. At the foot of the image, a decayed corpse—in the transi tomb idiom—represented the king’s mortal body, while at the apex of the image, the royal crown, sceptre, and sword symbolized the immortal body of kingship. In the middle, the stone carrying the poem’s title was flanked by allegorical figures of Time and Fame that evoked a third royal body: the king as memory, a royal body built in part out of verse. 61  Ibid.; compare the similar account in William Paddy’s notes, 5. 62 Williams, Salomon, 72–3. 63  On the publication date, see BL, Harley MS 389, fol. 444r. 64 Williams, Salomon, sigs A1v–A2r; Fuller, Church History, 6.12.

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All three pamphlets used woodcuts, typography, and visual effects to enhance what were primarily poetic texts. But at least one contemporary publication was dominated by its visual imagery. In June 1625, the émigré Huguenot Abraham Darcie published an engraved broadsheet presented to English readers as a visual and poetic ‘Sacred Monument’ to James I.65 Darcie had already established himself as a specialist in elegiac print mementos for the Anglo-Scottish elite, publishing two works lamenting the death of the king’s cousin the Duke of Lennox in February 1624, so it is not surprising that he turned his attention to James.66 Darcie’s broadsheet is dominated by Robert Vaughan’s extravagant, if technically clumsy, image of a fictional royal funerary monument rising to pierce the heavens, with Darcie’s verses arranged in columns on either side. This imaginary structure replicated features of the catafalque designed by Inigo Jones for James’s funeral service—it is, for instance, dotted with statues representing royal virtues—but Vaughan’s image also incorporated elements commonly used in contemporary church monuments.67 James’s effigy lies on its right side, its open eyes gazing at the viewer. Dressed in his robes of state, a laurel wreath around his head, James grasps in his left hand an empty scabbard. At the front, the orb and crown sit between two columns, flanked by a heraldic lion and unicorn, while the royal arms adorn the vault underneath. Ten columns ascend from the plinth, supporting two mantels and an archway upon which perch yet more heraldic icons. Six platforms, rendered in an unconvincing perspective that makes them appear to tip towards the viewer, ascend from above the archway, forming a pyramidal stairway of virtue leading to heaven. Each step holds statues—twenty-one in all—representing the animating virtues of Jacobean rule, and finishing at the monument’s apex with the Pauline trinity of Faith, Hope, and Charity. Many of these virtues correspond to those endlessly hymned in the funerary rites, sermons, and elegies of 1625—Justice, Temperance, Liberality, Fortitude, Magnificence, Courtesy, Glory, Prudence, Piety, and Religion. All these, Darcie notes, ‘grac’d’ the king, and ‘By these Sublim stepps his rare soule ascended / Up to the Starry Heav’n’. In many ways, the image unproblematically recapitulated the authorized version of James’s life and death. But it is also strained by ideological and political complications and tensions. Peace, so central to James’s self-presentation, is conspicuously absent from the pyramid of virtues, and its absence allows Darcie to negotiate the difficulty of commemorating the pacifist James while celebrating the bellicose Charles. But the verses and visual imagery also attempt to rework James’s pacifism to represent the succession not as a decisive rupture in foreign affairs, but as a smooth evolution. The ‘brave Succeeding Son’ was to act what his father had intended but ‘left undone’: what James’s ‘wisdom thought to prosecute’, Charles was ‘[r]eady 65  Abraham Darcie and Robert Vaughan, Majesties Sacred Monument Erected by A.D.V. Darcie in Memorie of K. James Qu. Anne and the Nobility that died between these two Apparitiones (London, 1625). 66  Frances Duchesse Dowager of Richmond and Lenox &c. her Funerall Teares (London, 1624); A Monumentall Pyramide to All Posterities Erected to the Ever-Living Memory of the All-Vertuous Lodwick, Late Duke of Richmond and Lenox (London, 1624). 67  On Jones’s catafalque, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 50–1; and John Peacock, ‘Inigo Jones’s Catafalque for James I’, Architectural History, 25 (1982), 1–5 and 134–5.

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with a drawne sword to Execute’. The image depicts a crowned and enrobed Charles standing beside James’s tomb, his sword drawn, a figure of monarchical action and vitality. His blade carries the concluding part of the famous tag from Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘Debellare Superbos’, ‘to tame the proud’. But the image makes it clear that Charles had drawn the sword from the scabbard by James’s side, upon which the tag’s first part, ‘et parcere subiectis’, ‘to bring peace to the conquered’, is engraved. The royal sword, charged with an Augustan imperial ­mythology, is both a sword of peace and a sword of war, handed off from father to son, its purpose changed but its underlying rationale and authority the same. With this sword, Charles would fulfil James’s intentions and restore the Palatinate and Bohemia to his sister and her husband. Darcie and Vaughan depict James’s grieving daughter Elizabeth sitting in mourning surrounded by her ‘fruitfull progeny’, but they insist that Elizabeth will be ‘chear[e]d with an other / A King, a Comforter, and a Brother’: To Her I heare this second Charlemaine say As farr as the fierce English Lions may Now dubly with the Flower de luces quartered By auncient Heraldry Cround, Georgd & Gartered Ile See thee once more as thou erst hast been (As th’art anoynted) reinvested Queene Of Bohem.

The broadside not only effaces the significant tensions between James and Charles over how best to restore Elizabeth, but it also (somewhat controversially) defines the war’s goals and motivation. Charles intends not simply to return Elizabeth to her husband’s ancestral territories seized by the Habsburgs, but to restore her as Queen of Bohemia, and this objective is represented, both visually and textually, not primarily as the confessional struggle of Protestant against Catholic imagined by many of Charles’s subjects, but rather as a chivalric, dynastic, familial obligation, uniting the deceased father and his two children in a common cause.68 At the top of the broadsheet image, just beneath the Tetragrammaton, sit the saved souls of James and his wife, Anne, while around and beneath them glitter an array of ‘glorious lamps’ representing a host of recently deceased great aristocrats, each ‘stellified’ noble now part of the king’s celestial entourage. Darcie and Vaughan thus drew attention to the conspicuously large number of aristocratic deaths, clustered in a relatively short span of time, which had deeply troubled court observers. An epidemic of ‘purple’ or ‘spotted’ fever (probably typhus) was widely blamed, but many sought a divine rationale. Like a number of elegists’, Darcie’s gloss is providential, noting that these deaths had occurred between two celestial a­ pparitions, the ‘blasing starr’ of 1618 and a ‘Starr’ that ‘appear’d within the Moone to shine’

68  Darcie, Vaughan, and Humble also collaborated on a mid-1620s image of Frederick, Elizabeth, and their children—Vera effigies Regis et Reginae Bohemiae cum prole (London, 1625?)—that urged this ‘Royall Offspring of Imperiall Stem’ to stand, ‘like Columbes fix’t by Heavns strong hand’ against those ‘That now uniustly ’gainst your right doe stand’.

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shortly before ‘Iames was made Divine’. God had decreed these signs and these deaths, and His will was beyond question.69 AU TO P S Y, F E V E R , A N D S E C R E T H I S TO RY The workings of divine providence could explain why James died when he did. But contemporaries were equally fascinated by naturalistic medical explanations of the king’s illness and death, and many felt that some explanation was necessary. Early in March 1625, James had been diagnosed with a pure tertian ague, an intermitting fever widely believed by both physicians and laymen to pose little danger. So why had he died? Some elegists dwelled inconclusively on the question. One, who could not believe that James had escaped so many popish plots only to be destroyed by a mere fever, metamorphosed the king’s morbid pathology into royal m ­ ythology, arguing that only royal blood distempered by a fever’s heat had sufficient power to kill a king: For hee being mortall[,] fate could not invent His passage by a nobler Instrument, Then his owne bloud, which made him comprehend Within himselfe, the glory of his end.70

The royal physicians had much to say about the causes of James’s death, and these medical writings deserve consideration as part of the archive of writing on succession. One or more of the king’s physicians drew up an official account of his final illness, sketching James’s medical history, unhealthy lifestyle, and pathological predispositions and telling a compelling story of an old and distempered man ‘invaded’ by a ‘malignant’ fever that manifested initially as an intermittent tertian ague but eventually mutated into something more serious. The report offered two reasons for the mutation—James’s initial refusal to follow his physicians’ advice made his illness ‘more vehement’, and the pre-existing vicious humours in his body were always liable to complicate any illness. Though James eventually consented to treatment, his fever ‘overcame all remedies’ and ‘changed its nature’ into something more dangerous.71 The official report supported this narrative with details from a post-mortem inspection of James’s internal organs. By 1625, a crude form of pathological autopsy was becoming increasingly common in elite circles, in part as a byproduct of the surgical procedures used to prepare corpses for embalming, an absolute necessity if remains were to be preserved during the planning of a lavish funeral. James was embalmed the day after his death—his torso and head were opened, his brain and soft organs removed, encased, and buried, and his hollowed cavities filled with 69  On the cluster of deaths and the elegists’ explanations, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 60–1, 68–74. 70  BL, Stowe MS 182, fols 74v–75r; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 60–1. 71  Bod. MS Barlow 54, fols 2r–5r; Munk, ‘Marvodia’, 230–4. Thanks to Frederic Clark for invaluable help translating this document.

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aromatic and preservative herbs.72 His physicians took this opportunity to inspect—by sight and by touch—the body’s interior for traces of the distempers that had killed him. Their report identified patterns of burning and dryness that James’s fever had left throughout the body and tallied the signs of the putrid humours that had caused his distemper. The physicians also described clues to the fever’s mutation and potency: putrid black liquid around the gallbladder provided proof of the ‘rotting humours’ that had ‘bastardized’ the intermitting ague, while a fatty layer around the heart suggested one reason why the febrile heat could not be safely evacuated from James’s body. The narrative of post-mortem inspection corresponded neatly with the report’s earlier account of the king’s illness: James’s documented external symptoms all left matching traces in the body’s interior. The report did not circulate widely beyond elite medical circles, but summary accounts of James’s autopsy travelled through scribal news channels, where they found eager and well-informed audiences. Many contemporaries were familiar with morbid pathology and comfortable discussing the royal body using naturalistic, medical discourse. But these autoptic signs could be read in multiple ways, not only as clues to the cause of death but also as clues to the late king’s morality, ­political inclinations, and character, a hermeneutic of the autopsied royal body encouraged in part by medical discourses that explained human temperament— including what we might term ‘character’—in physiological terms. In James’s case, reports of his autopsy thus stimulated talk not only about the causes of his death but also about his political virtues and failings. Joseph Mead was told that when James’s ‘body was opened by the Physitians, they found his heart of an extraordinary bignes, all his vitalls sound, as also his head, which was very full of braines; but his blood was wonderfully tainted with melancholy & the corruption thereof supposed the cause of his death.’73 Mead’s hermeneutic was pathological, but other contemporaries read the same details very differently. James’s ‘harte was found to be great but soft’, noted one account, and Simonds D’Ewes, thinking back on James’s problematic aversion to war, added that this ‘argued him to be as very considerate’ but also ‘so extraordinary fearful, which hindered him from attempting any great actions’. The king’s head, which was so hard to open it could hardly be breached ‘with a chissell and a sawe’, was found to be ‘so full of braynes as they could not, uppon the openninge, keepe them from spillinge’. William Neve interpreted this cerebral superabundance as ‘a great marke of his infinite judgement’, the autopsied royal body thus confirming the royal myth of Solomonic wisdom.74 72  On techniques of embalming, see ‘[William] Clowes’ manner of preserving dead bodies’, BL, Sloane MS 1845, fols 47r–48r. On James, see ‘True Order’, 1037; Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, I, 3; TNA, LC 2/6, fols 3v and 13v. On the pre-history of pathological anatomy, see David Harley, ‘Political Post-Mortems and Morbid Anatomy in Seventeenth-Century England’, Social History of Medicine, 7 (1994), 1–28. 73  BL, Harley MS 389, fol. 420r. 74 D’Ewes, Autobiography, I, 263; Birch, Court and Times of Charles I, I, 3. The report of James’s opening in the Mercure François, XI, 336, differs in detail: ‘Being opened after his death, all his primary organs were found to be whole and sound, except for his spleen (rate) which was rotten (pourrie).’ See too the brief discussion in Richard Sugg, Murder After Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 89–90. For other examples of autoptic physiological

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As Thomas Cogswell and I have argued, George Eglisham’s 1626 pamphlet The Forerunner of Revenge used the alleged post-mortem condition of James’s body as compelling evidence for its explosive claim that the king had been poisoned by his controversial favourite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. When James died, wrote Eglisham, his body ‘swelled above measure, his haire with the skin of his head stucke to the pillow his nayles became loose upon his fingers and toes. Your petitioner needeth to say no more to understanding men.’75 Precious little in the official autopsy reports supported Eglisham’s claims, but in the context of his artful secret history of James’s death, it was clear what conclusions ‘understanding men’ might draw from these signs. Eglisham’s account of Buckingham’s murderous rampage through the late Jacobean court was grounded throughout in Eglisham’s own medical expertise, and his claims about James’s post-mortem symptoms matched his far more detailed presentation of the symptoms seen on, and within, the body of a supposed earlier victim, the Marquis of Hamilton.76 Eglisham’s diagnosis of poison was further supported by the common belief, shared by physicians, lawyers, and laymen alike, that poison produced visible effects on a victim’s body, and that unusual swelling and the disarticulation of nails and hair were all signs of poison at work.77 But Eglisham’s secret history of James’s death did not rely solely on the physician’s clinical gaze. For Eglisham claimed to decipher more than bodies. He claimed to reveal political secrets hidden from most contemporaries and to make sense of puzzling or unexplained phenomena, thus appealing to readers increasingly f­ ascinated by the dark arts of courtly dissimulation.78 Eglisham directly and flamboyantly subverted the authorized version of James I’s death, presenting the late Jacobean court as a theatre of appearances behind which lurked insatiable ambitions, vicious passions, bitter debates, and murderous desires. In this kind of writing, royal courts were not places of virtue but arenas where masked rivals fought, where ambition ruled, where gender and social order dissolved, where kings were weak, and where signs read as signs of character, see Kenelm Digby’s comments on the ‘perfect and sounde’ condition of his late wife’s heart, in Vittorio Gabrieli, ‘A New Digby Letter-Book: “In praise of Venetia” ’, National Library of Wales Journal, 9 (1955), 113–48 at 134, where the role of commonplace language of humours and temperaments as support for this kind of physiological and characteriogical conflation is very clear; and Mercure François, XII, 482, which records a post-mortem opening which not only identified the drying out of the lungs by the ‘excessive and continual heat of the fever’ but also a small heart, crowned with ‘a crown of small bones (offelets) and cartilage’, read as signs of great courage and destined greatness. 75 George Eglisham, The Forerunner of Revenge Upon the Duke of Buckingham (Frankfurt [i.e. Brussels], 1626), 22. 76  Ibid., 15. 77  For a more detailed discussion of Eglisham’s deployment of the post-mortem symptoms of poisoning, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 178–84. 78  On this fascination and the modes of reading it inspired, see Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, Past & Present, 223 (2014), 77–127; Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); and Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 137–63.

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dissimulation allowed the wicked and irreligious to thrive. The trustworthiness of the royal physicians who had offered the official version of James’s death, Eglisham suggested, was compromised by their dependence on Buckingham’s patronage. The favourite’s own extravagant grief for both Hamilton and James was mere dissimulation, easily exposed by comparing Buckingham’s outward public behaviour with reports of what he had done in private. And Eglisham made clear that there had been deep and bitter political conflict between the king, his son, and his favourite over the direction of foreign policy, undercutting those, like Williams or Darcie, who had papered over the disagreements between father and son. Eglisham insisted that, outmanoeuvred by Buckingham and Charles in 1624, James had never abandoned the chance of rapprochement with Spain. Buckingham had decided to murder James when the king threatened to rehabilitate the disgraced Hispanophile Earl of Bristol and to allow the Spanish agent Gondomar to return to Whitehall. In Eglisham’s telling, the military endeavours of the ‘second Charlemaine’ were the direct result of his father’s murder.79 Eglisham’s claims compelled in part because of his self-presentation as an honest man in a corrupt world; he touted his independence from Buckingham and presented himself as a faithful royal retainer and as a true Roman, a frank-speaking truth-teller willing to risk death to see justice done.80 He offered explanations for what had been hard to explain—why a tertian ague had proved fatal to the king, and why so many courtiers had died suddenly during 1624 and 1625. And a significant number of his contemporaries—including men with ideological orientations markedly different from those of the Catholic Scottish doctor—believed all or part of what Eglisham said. His secret history of James’s death influenced the attempts by the Parliament-men of 1626 to impeach Buckingham; it inspired libellous poets to construct politically damaging images of the favourite as a papist, poisoner, and witch; and it prompted some readers to ask uncomfortable questions about what Charles knew of his father’s murder and why he had refused to surrender the killer to justice. Eglisham’s secret history would reappear in multiple editions in the autumn of 1642, when it hardened political antagonisms in the opening months of civil war. It would reappear again in early 1648, when it was used to justify breaking off talks with the king, and would later offer partial justification for executing Charles Stuart as a ‘man of blood’.81 Of all the writing around James’s death and Charles’ succession, Eglisham’s libel had by far the longest political impact. A  book that subverted the official narrative about the end of one reign helped legitimate the violent end of another. Writing around royal successions could thus focus as much on the dead as on the living monarch, and the marvellously diverse writing around James I’s death and Charles I’s succession offers much for the political and literary historian to ponder: evidence of political anxiety and its (partial) containment; evidence of the 79 Eglisham, Forerunner, 20–2; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 164–88. 80  On the frank-speaker, see David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001). 81  On these long-term afterlives, see Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 194–511.

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reproduction of royal authority, but also of its destabilization by the questioning of its animating fictions; evidence of how royal rituals could be glossed, reinforced, and queried by textual and poetic re-presentation; evidence of seemingly straightforward panegyric strained by religio-political fissures and tensions; evidence of widespread fascination with royal bodies, both mythologized and diseased; evidence of conflicting modes of looking at and representing monarchy (and court politics) that could either idealize or demystify the workings of power; and evidence of the monarchy’s inability to control the narrative of royal death and succession. For all the panegyric that dominates the corpus of Stuart succession writing, we must not lose sight of the instabilities and ideological frictions, the religious and political fault-lines, that complicated even the most routine mythologizing of royal authority, nor should we marginalize the dissident voices whose libellous texts not only reflected, but also shaped the conflicts that made the Stuart century a century of revolution.

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3 ‘He seems a king by long succession born’ The Problem of Cromwellian Accession and Succession Steven N. Zwicker To observe that the Cromwells, father and son, presented certain problems to those who would imagine the person, the office, and the transfer of power of a Lord Protector is to remark only the most obvious of literary challenges c.1658–9. There were forms and formulas for the accession of monarchs and the rule of lineal descent, but what might one say of a Lord Protector? Especially of a Lord Protector who, some thought, might herald the latter days? And what might one say of the son’s accession to the office and authority of a Lord Protector when the father had explicitly turned aside from kingly rule? Panegyrics on the succession of monarchy offered a copybook for the celebration of such rule, but a Lord Protector was a different matter. My aim in this chapter is to address some of the dilemmas facing those who would fashion Cromwellian celebrity and succession, and to do so by focusing on a small pamphlet of funerary verse issued rather late in the season of mourning and published as Three Poems Upon the Death of his late Highnesse Oliver Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The volume initially registered as ‘Three Poems to the happy memory of the most renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth’ promised verse by ‘Mr Marvell, Mr Driden, Mr Sprat’;1 when it was issued, Mr Marvell had disappeared and a poem by Edmund Waller was substituted. The published volume—together with the ­strategies and equivocations of its verse, and of the verse promised by Andrew Marvell which appeared and then disappeared from the 1681 folio of Marvell’s poetry—express, perhaps to a surprising degree, the broader challenges and contradictions of Cromwellian rule and succession, and the anxieties over what lay ahead in the spring of 1659 when Three Poems finally appeared. Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658; that day the Privy Council declared Richard Cromwell Lord Protector, and ordered a day of humiliation for 10 September. Perhaps as early as the day of Cromwell’s death a broadside of ‘Several Anagrams in Latine, Welsh and English’ was printed ‘upon the Name of

1  This is the title of the pamphlet as entered by Henry Herringman into the Stationers’ Register 20 January 1659; dates throughout are given new style with the year beginning January 1st.

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that most highly Renowned Worthy of Worthies, Oliver Late Lord Protector’;2 the next day (4 September) the Privy Council issued in print their declaration of Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector;3 and in the weeks that followed—if we trace our steps along the chronology provided by the Catalogue of the Thomason collection—declarations of public fasting and humiliation were mixed together with various p ­ roclamations, an abundance of spiritual matter, and Milton’s revision of Pro Populo Defensio (October 1658).4 By the end of the year a series of print publications on the event of Cromwell’s death, his funeral, and Richard Cromwell’s succession to the office of Lord Protector had appeared, including a university volume from Cambridge scholars, a single broadside elegy from Oxford, semi-official verse from Payne Fisher, styled Cromwell’s laureate, and a variety of other verse elegies including Henry Herringman’s single-sheet issue of Edmund Waller’s Upon the Late Storme, verse to which we shall return.5 Soon thereafter, in the new year, the market in printed goods began to return to what looks like a familiar medley of singles, pamphlets, and books—sermons, of course; tracts and treatises; drolleries and miscellanies; humble petitions; books of astrology; and some fairly overt political matter including the oration of Agrippa to Octavius Caesar, Against Monarchy Taken Out of the 52nd Book of Dion the Philosopher and Put into English (1659). It looks as if the elegizing, eulogizing, and sermonizing on the death of Oliver Cromwell and the succession had almost run their course by the end of the 1658.6 The funeral had been celebrated on 23 November—six weeks after Cromwell’s death—and Thomason records the appearance of The True Manner of the Most Magnificent Conveyance of His Highnesse Effigies from Somerset House to Westminster on 25 November.7 For December, Thomason records the dates for only seven printed items on whatever subject, and in January there is one mention of the late and one mention of the new Lord Protector among the printed matter that Thomason dates, though there are some materials associated with Oliver’s death and Richard’s accession in the following months including George Wither’s Salt 2  G. K. Fortescue, Catalogue of the Pamphlets, Books, Newspapers, and Manuscripts Relating to the Civil War, The Commonwealth, and Restoration, Collected by George Thomason, 2 vols (London: British Museum, 1908), II, 214 records that date, though the broadside itself is marked, in manuscript, ‘Octob 5’. 3  See Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘ “Not in any doubtfull dispute?” Reassessing the Nomination of Richard Cromwell’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), 281–300 at 292. 4  On the October dating, see John T. Shawcross, ‘Using the Thomason Tracts and Their Significance for Milton Studies’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 49 (2009), 145–72. 5  The single-sheet edition of Waller’s poem was published by ‘H. H.’; this is almost certainly Henry Herringman who published Waller in the 1660s and would on occasion enter copy into the Stationers’ Register and there identify himself on the title page as ‘H. H.’; see, for example, A Short Discourse upon the Desires of a Friend (London, 1660). 6 In addition to the Thomason Tract chronology, see also the database created for The Stuart Successions Project at http://humanities-research.exeter.ac.uk/stuarts/public/pub. 7 See David L. Smith, ‘English Politics in the 1650s’, in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 186–203 at 197; Laura L. Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 133–6; see too James Caulfield, Cromwelliana: A Chronological Detail of Events in which Oliver Cromwell was Engaged (London: Machell Stace, 1810), 180–2.

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upon Salt, a caustic response to Waller’s Upon the Late Storme, and Richard Flecknoe’s eighty pages of reflection on The Idea of His Highnesse Oliver, Late Lord Protector (1659), prefaced by a dedication that gives ample evidence of ‘the war of Pens’ already circling around and disputing the memory of Oliver Cromwell.8 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL PUZZLES It is within this calendar—3 September 1658 when Oliver Cromwell died to 25 May 1659 when Richard Cromwell resigned his office—that I want to place the bibliographical puzzles of Three Poems: its delayed publication; the disappearance of Andrew Marvell from among its contributors; and the disappearance of the name of the stationer. On 29 January 1659 Henry Herringman, already by the late 1650s something of a high-end publisher who had issued dozens of books, entered into the Stationers’ Register ‘a booke called Three Poems to the happy memory of the most renowned Oliver, late Lord Protector of this Commonwealth, by Mr Marvell, Mr. Driden, Mr. Sprat’. The operative word here seems to be ‘late’, for when the book was entered into the Register it was nearly five months after Cromwell’s death, and by the time it appeared, perhaps some weeks, even months later, Herringman had walked away from the issue and Marvell had disappeared as well. Now the title page of the pamphlet bears the name of William Wilson as printer and, for the trade, the address of his shop in Well-yard near Little St Bartholomew’s Hospital.9 What happened to Herringman and Marvell? How did the book come to William Wilson who was busy as a printer in the 1650s, but only very occasionally as a publisher? How did Waller’s Upon the Late Storme turn up in place of Marvell’s verse, and how do these puzzles and uncertainties provide a way of reading Cromwellian succession itself ? From this distance, the pamphlet seems an uncertain commercial project: it is promised rather late in the season of mourning, issued even later, and the poets entered into the Stationers’ Register had not the least bit of name recognition. Would Sprat have been recalled from his initials in the miscellany Naps upon Parnassus of 1658? Would anyone have remembered ‘Johannes Dryden’—as Dryden had styled himself—from the publication, nearly a decade earlier, of Lachrymae Musarum? Or would the promise of ‘Mr. Marvell’ have signalled much, had anyone seen his name in the Stationers’ Register? And then of course he is gone by the time the pamphlet is issued. Edmund Waller was a different matter, but his poem Upon the Late Storme had already appeared as a single half sheet. That Dryden’s Heroic Stanzas would go on to achieve notoriety as A Poem on the Death of the Late Usurper, turning up four more times during Dryden’s life, has of course nothing to 8 Wither’s Salt upon Salt was not the only negative response to Waller; see as well Richard Watson, The Storme Raised by Mr Waller in His Verses ([Bruges?], 1659); on Wither’s response to Waller, see Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 166–8. 9  For St Bartholomew and the book trade, see Henry Wheatley, London, Past and Present (London: John Marry, 1891), I 109–10.

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do with name recognition in 1659, and everything to do with Dryden’s subsequent publicity.10 But would the pamphlet registered in January of 1659 and published some time later have been much of a loss to Herringman when his name was removed from the project? There were some costs involving the pamphlet even before the compositor set the type and the pamphlet was printed; the registration would have cost sixpence, perhaps the paper had been purchased, and the copy may have been paid for.11 Herringman may have sought to transfer the project, recouping his investment in some fashion, and in 1659, William Wilson would have been a likely candidate. In that year he had also printed or would print for Herringman Davenant’s History of Sr Francis Drake. He had already printed for Herringman Epicurus’s Morals (1656), D’Urfe’s Astrea (1657), Walter Charleton’s Immortality of the Human Soul (1657), and the poems of Henry King (1657), and after the Restoration he continued working with Herringman, printing Cowley, Davenant (again), a translation of Corneille, and Tuke’s Adventures of Five Hours. Wilson’s first printing job had been for the Company of Stationers—an almanac of 1646—and between that year and his issue of Three Poems he was associated with at least thirty-eight other imprints, almost always as printer and often for publishers whose names we recognize from these years: Humphrey Moseley, Abel Roper, Humphrey Robinson, Thomas Dring, and George Sawbridge. But twice in the 1650s Wilson did act as both printer and publisher, issuing books by Samuel Smith—The Great Assize (1654) and Moses His Prayer (1656)—and selling the books ‘at his house in Well-yard’.12 By the mid 1650s Wilson was a ‘master printer’ in the Stationers’ Company, hardly the obscure, ‘onetime printer’ that William Plomer and Hugh Macdonald describe.13 In fact he left a distinct set of tracks in the publishing records of the middle decades of the seventeenth century, and these records remind us of the loosely networked character of printing and publishing at mid-century and as well of the flexibility of stationers’ roles and of what seems if not the adventitious then surely the opportunistic character of the trade. There are some patterns of a­ ssociation between and among printers and publishers, and between and among their spiritual and political affinities and printing and publishing jobs, but more characteristic of this trade was a willingness to move back and forth, often seamlessly, across what we might be tempted to read as clear lines of affiliation and demarcation. The trade was, after all, a trade. 10  On Dryden, publicity, and the derisive reprinting of his works, see Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Why Are They Saying These Terrible Things About John Dryden?: The Uses of Gossip and Scandal’, Essays in Criticism, 64 (2014), 158–79. 11  On the cost of producing pamphlets, see Joad Raymond, Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 3. 12  Soon after John Okes’s death in 1644 Wilson married Mary Norwood Okes, widow of John Okes; Okes’s business which had passed first to his widow then passed to Wilson. Smith’s The Great Assize was first published by Nicholas Okes in 1617; then his son John Okes began to publish Smith’s book in 1638, and it was repeatedly published by William Wilson between 1645 and 1663. On Wilson’s marriage to Mary Norwood Okes, see Peter Blayney, The Texts of King Lear, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), I, 311. 13  See Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden, A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 4.

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The differences between the book registered with the Stationers’ Company and the book distributed sometime later has of course been noticed, and for sure, of the two disappearances, Marvell’s is easier to understand. His was a career of furtiveness; both as poet and polemicist he was remarkably cautious in allowing his name to be associated with the things that he wrote, and many of these things saw no form of publication or circulation at all. A few of Marvell’s writings were published anonymously, including the Elegy upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers (1648), The First Anniversary (1655), and polemics from the 1670s—the first part of The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672) and An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677). With the inflammatory Account, he was so cautious that he referred to its author only in the third person, and this in an unsigned letter to his intimate correspondent, William Popple.14 Of the Cromwell elegy, some have speculated that it was written soon after the Lord Protector’s death, others that Marvell was slow in composition and hence left behind. Perhaps in the months between Cromwell’s death and the publication of Three Poems, Marvell thought better of his association with both the late Lord Protector and the new Lord Protector whose grip on the office had loosened by the end of 1658, and continued to wane in the early spring of 1659.15 Marvell’s extraordinary caution may be in play, but the elegy was present in that cache of papers that Mary Marvell brought to the stationer Robert Boulter in 1681. The poet may have been nervous about association with the Cromwells, but he was not so nervous that he destroyed the elegy (or the other two poems that he wrote on Cromwell): the elegy appeared posthumously in the 1681 folio, only to be removed once again, apparently from all but two surviving copies of Miscellaneous Poems—and this time after rather than prior to printing. But why would Herringman have been cautious about this publishing opportunity? Printers and publishers throughout this period worked across what we might think of as ‘party lines’. The most spectacular example is Henry Hills: involved with the Levellers in the 1640s, printer to the Army, to the Commonwealth, to Richard Cromwell, to the Rump, to the Committee of Safety, and then, in 1660, to Charles II. In the late 1670s he printed pope-hunting pamphlets, then turned Catholic and became royal printer to James II. The only trick he seems to have missed was becoming printer to the new regime after 1688. The twists and turns of Hills’s career seem to have done nothing to impede his success; he negotiated just about every political tide over the course of his long career. Would Herringman, also operating in such a context, have been worried over his association with this slim pamphlet?16 14 See The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson et al., 2 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), II, 197–8. 15  For speculation on the removal of Marvell’s poem from Three Poems, see Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell, The Chameleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 157; Joad Raymond, ‘A Cromwellian Centre?’, in The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell, ed. Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 140–57 at 148–50. 16  We should note that on 19 November 1661 Herringman registered J. Vincent Caen’s Fiat lux, or a generall conduct to a right understanding in the great combustions and broils about religion here in England; the Register then observes that ‘This entrance was importunately desired to be cross’t out by

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And if so, why not Waller, Sprat, and Dryden? Of course Waller’s own various colours had been highly visible since the early 1640s; first he associated with Falkland and Hyde, then plotted against Parliament in 1643, suffered banishment, returned to England in 1651, published a panegyric to Cromwell in 1655, the elegy in 1658, and then a panegyric on the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Waller seems to have been happy to sign and display his wares whenever, however. And Sprat too wavered between lavish praise of Cromwell in the 1659 elegy and the very proximate expression of regret over the revolution, the wars, and the Commonwealth in The Plague of Athens, a publication Thomason dated 25 October 1659. Was anyone looking? Did anyone care about these remarkable shifts of loyalty?17 And of course we know the career of Dryden’s elegy and of its author, but would Heroic Stanzas have been noticed had Dryden not made such a spectacular success as laureate and irritated so many of his contemporaries?18 Three Poems likely appeared in the spring, though not likely as late as June of 1659 when the two other books that Herringman had entered into the Stationers’ Register that week of January were acquired and dated by Thomason.19 The ­circuitous route of Three Poems into the world was surely an expression of the wariness and caution, the limited horizons and uncertain loyalties, widely felt in the winter and early spring of 1658–9.20 Was it an emblem too of the perplexity and discomfort of rhetoric and argument in poems on Cromwell’s death and Richard’s accession, perhaps even an emblem of Cromwell’s own seeming reluctance to name a successor, to determine the future? How far could anyone—publisher, panegyrist, or politician—have seen ahead after the storms of early September, the death of the Lord Protector, and uncertainty of Richard’s nomination, or after the delayed funeral rites of November, or indeed after the entry of Three Poems into the Stationers’ Register that January day in 1659? How clear-sighted, indeed clairvoyant, were the book’s principals? Marvell’s prescience was notable, as were his p ­ owers of calculation, and there is no more certain document of calculation than the Horatian Ode, never mind that it may not have been seen by anyone. Indeed, withholding may have been part of both Marvell’s caution and calculation. And if his anniversary poem on the first year of Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector seems, by contrast, bold and committed, it is the bold commitment of ‘anonymous.’

Mr Herringman, who, as he had no hand in printing it, so he protests not to have knowne the nature of it sooner, & that he did it only to secure it to ye author on his request. 7 Dec. 61’; see A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, ed. G. E. Briscoe Eyre and C. R. Rivington, 3 vols (London: Privately Printed, 1913–14), II, 304. 17  On the repeated shifts of loyalty over the middle decades of the seventeenth century, see Steven N. Zwicker, ‘On First Looking into Revisionism: The Literature of Civil War, Revolution, and Restoration’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 78 (2015), 789–807. 18  On Dryden’s contemporary reputation, see Zwicker, ‘Terrible Things’, 158–79. 19  Thomason marked Davenant’s History of Sr Francis Drake 16 June 1659, and Walter Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron June 1659. 20  See Henry Reece, The Army in Cromwellian England, 1649–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 174: ‘The army in London dissolved . . . a strange and imaginary confusion’.

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In the First Anniversary Marvell ventured the question of succession, but only under the shadow of mortality; indeed he seems determined to imagine together, and to imagine as one, human mortality and the lineal descent of rule: He seems a king by long succession born, And yet the same to be a king does scorn. Abroad a king he seems, and something more, At home a subject on the equal floor. O could I once him with our title see, So should I hope yet he might die as we. (ll. 387–92)21

In the anniversary poem Marvell seized on the argument of difference to leverage Cromwell’s rule over and against all others. The very structure of the poem turns on the thrusts and eddies of distinction and discrimination: first, the drumbeat of Cromwell’s freedom from convention and constraints, then his escape from the coils of mortality, then the counterpointing of Cromwell and ‘earthy projects’— the China clay, the proxy victories, the useless time of mortals and monarchs. He is the lusty mate seizing the ship’s helm, the captain ‘returning yet alive’, the rising sun startling those foreign princes and their credulous ambassadors. The argument on behalf of Cromwell is not merely the conventional matter of conquest and triumph—it is as if the indefatigable Cromwell moves from civic mastery to a higher sphere, a spiritualized realm where he becomes the subject of holy oracles, the captain who will raise those designs ‘kept for the latter days’. And yet for all the dwelling on immortality, on Cromwell’s escape from the realm of transience and necessity, the anniversary poem is shadowed by the knowledge of mortality—a shining wave in the ‘purling ore’ of this song. It is as if the great truth of Cromwell’s achievements must be shadowed by another great truth that does and does not want to be acknowledged. For when Marvell returns at the end of the poem to questions of succession and mortality, indeed to their insistent coupling—‘a king by long succession born . . . so should I hope yet he might die as we’—he makes an odd feint, a move away from contest and contention, transforming Cromwell into ‘the angel of our commonweal’, a phrase that echoes the idiom of the Lord Protector’s own address to Parliament in September of 1654 and imagines Cromwell as the healing angel at Bethesda, resolving into one figure both his worldly powers and his transfiguration—mortality but without the wages of sin.22 This may have seemed—failing the Second Coming—a way to escape the ­rhetorical dilemma of Cromwellian succession, but who now would herald the latter days and finish the course of ‘foreshortened Time’? Marvell seems both to acknowledge that overwhelming question and to sidestep its answer by wishing The First Anniversary into another sphere. Yes, the poem is darkened by the knowledge of 21  Citations are to The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007). 22  On the figure of Elijah in Marvell’s First Anniversary, see David Haley, Dryden and the Problem of Freedom: The Republican Aftermath, 1649–1680 (New Haven: Yale University Press 1997), 68–71.

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mortality but it is also turned away from mortality’s implications, a resolution—if it were that—that could not be sustained after 3 September, even if the fancy of Cromwell’s immortality were only a matter of rhetoric. And so we come to the verse solicited by Herringman before the stationer stepped aside from Three Poems. The anniversary poem had been fully situated in the public sphere, but Marvell’s poem on this very civic death opens with a striking turn away from that realm of freedom and permanence. And if in The First Anniversary the Lord Protector is displayed in civic mastery as architect of the state—tuning the Instrument of Government, bending a seasonable people to his will, resigning privacy to become the ‘people’s charioteer’—the elegy returns Cromwell to the privacy he had long ago resigned. In the imagination of The First Anniversary, Cromwell had given up not only those private gardens where he lived ‘reserved and austere’, but the very selfhood that derived from paternal and domestic relations.23 Here in the anniversary poem patriarchy is figured through architectural metaphors and in the language of statecraft and civic mastery; in the elegy patriarchy is narrowed into paternity—the sphere of domestic affections, the realm of gentle passions. Sensibility was not of course the only way to celebrate Cromwell’s transformative life, and while later in his elegy Marvell allows the Lord Protector’s military triumphs, it is the pathos of his affective life that washes over the opening moves of the poem. Here Cromwell is joined so intimately with his Eliza that they seem to live and die in a kind of harmonic resonance, ‘No trembling String compos’d to numbers new / Answers the touch in Notes more sad, more true’. Bound together, each soul depends on the other’s fate. And in a startling apostrophe to the children of Elizabeth Claypole (Cromwell’s second daughter), Marvell urges, ‘Hold fast, dear Infants, hold them both or none! / This will not stay when once the other’s gone’. Pierre Legouis wrote of the elegy that it was Marvell’s love song to Oliver Cromwell; that may be so; it seems as well Cromwell’s love song to Eliza.24 And yet, in the midst of this startling idealization—this liebestodt—we discover an Ovidian tale that speaks to quite different emotions: ‘And now Eliza’s purple locks were shorn, / Where she so long her father’s fate had worn: / And frequent lightning to her soul that flies, / Divides the air, and opens all the skies: / And now his life, suspended by her breath, / Ran out impetuously to hasting death’ (ll. 67–72). The shearing of purple locks belongs not to the story of Elizabeth Claypole and Oliver Cromwell but to that of Scylla and Nisus told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; there a daughter driven by illicit passion for a foreign king cuts from her father’s head the purple lock on which his life and throne depend. Nigel Smith’s annotation to these strange lines suggests that in his retelling of this episode from Metamorphoses Marvell has ‘entirely removed’ the elements of deceit and disloyalty—that is, of the subversion of the father by the child; accordingly, Elizabeth becomes Nisus and 23  Cf. Sprat’s ‘To the happie memory’, in Three Poems, ll. 101–2, 127–8: ‘Thou didst begin with lesser Cares / And private thoughts, took up thy private years . . . Thou left’st thy more delightfull peace / Thy Private life and better ease’. 24  Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), 114–15.

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Cromwell the city of Megara.25 There is surely transformation in Marvell’s lines, but is it simply one more variation on idealized love, as Smith would have it? Marvell’s strange reversal or transformation of Ovid catches up the story of this father and daughter in the fraught drama of patriarchy and paternity played out often and elsewhere in Marvell’s writings.26 He found in Ovid not a parallel for the story of Elizabeth Claypole and Oliver Cromwell but a drama of attachment and betrayal. It is an odd way to fold together the vulnerability of the parent and the attachment of the child, but as always in Marvell the emotions excited by the family constellation stirred feelings of yearning and subversion; both are present and in a powerful way in this scene. There is little in this episode that points to ideology, much that suggests psychology, and not of Oliver Cromwell but of Andrew Marvell. By its close, the poem seems to have lost both its energy and its way. What should we make of the casual manner in which Marvell handles that momentous family relation brought to crisis by the death of the Lord Protector: Richard Cromwell’s succession to his father’s rule? Historians are still not sure what exactly transpired in Oliver Cromwell’s instructions to the Council of State regarding the succession,27 but the eldest son succeeded the father as Lord Protector on the day of Oliver’s death—a succession that must have seemed to some (once again) a betrayal of republican ideals and a tacit confirmation of the move towards Cromwellian kingship that seemed imminent when the crown was offered to Oliver in 1657, and was perhaps signalled again in the regal trappings of the funeral service for Oliver in November of 1658. What was Marvell’s view? He had pressed the case against the Crown and the lineal descent of office in The First Anniversary; now he seems to hover uncertainly over the question of office: ‘A Cromwell in an hour a prince will grow’ (l. 312). Does ‘prince’ denote royal sovereignty, or simply rule and command? More generally, the nineteen lines devoted to Richard Cromwell seem but indifferently attached to the body of the elegy—they have nothing of the emotional turmoil so vivid elsewhere in the poem and they disclose little of Marvell’s own feelings, and this in a poem flooded by an excess of the poet’s emotions. Nor does Marvell offer a political vision or a programme, ‘And Richard yet, where his great parent led, / Beats on the rugged track: he, virtue dead, / Revives, and by his milder beams assures; / And yet how much of them his grief obscures’ (ll. 305–8). There is something unsettled here in the syntax and in the incomplete figures of speech; yes, the tempests glimpsed earlier in the poem return as showers under the milder auspices of Richard’s promised rule, but the very disproportion of attention devoted to father and son—Oliver, 324 lines; Richard, twenty lines—says something about the imaginative force with which Marvell handles the death of the late Lord Protector and the succession of the new. In some fashion Cromwell’s paternal role—the fraught drama of Oliver and Elizabeth, the image of Eliza’s clinging children, the weeping Francisca—anticipates his presence as pater familias at the close of the poem, twice so identified in the last 25 Marvell, Poems, 305–6. 26  See Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell, Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), especially ch. 2. 27  See, most recently, Fitzgibbons, ‘Not in any doubtfull dispute?’, 281–300.

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handful of lines. Marvell may have prepared the poem’s close by narrowing patriarchy into paternity from the poem’s beginning, sheltering Richard under the shadow of Oliver. Perhaps ‘sheltering’ also suggests the difficulty of imagining the office of Lord Protector absent the person of Oliver Cromwell. But it may simply be that the political future could not be discerned at this point in the unfolding of Richard Cromwell’s rule, though in order to say that with any confidence we would need a more exact sense of ‘this point’—when it was that Marvell wrote the Poem upon the Death of O. C. If he wrote shortly after Cromwell’s death, then the hesitation over Richard would be more difficult to understand. That it was withdrawn sometime after Herringman registered Three Poems in January of 1659 makes sense since even by the late winter of 1658–9 the likelihood of Richard’s success was doubtful, and if the poem had been written later rather than earlier, that might explain Marvell’s pale evocation of Cromwellian succession. Sprat’s ode, To the happie memory, also appearing in the pamphlet, like Heroic Stanzas, without his name, does fuller justice to the succession, figuring the inheritance as breeding, blood, and election.28 His language allows the suggestion of primogeniture and underscores Richard’s rights of inheritance—the office of Lord Protector passing by election, by spiritual affinity, and as a property from father to son: Thou him to bear thy burthen chose, Who might (if any could) make us forget thy losse: Nor hadst thou Him design’d, Had he not bin Not only to thy blood, but vertue Kinn; Not only heire unto thy Throne, but Minde. (E4r)29

Though we should note that even Sprat is reluctant to name the new Protector. And neither in Waller’s Upon the Late Storme nor in Dryden’s Heroic Stanzas is Richard mentioned in any fashion. If for these elegists the father is replete with meaning, the son is registered as a kind of absence of meaning, and literally so for Waller and Dryden—he is simply not there. A RO M A N C A S T O F M I N D For Dryden, this proved no problem at all. Heroic Stanzas is clear of the future; it is located distinctly in the moment, as the opening lines announce, ‘And now ’tis time; for their Officious haste, / Who would before have born him to the sky, / Like eager Romans ere all Rites were past / Did let too soon the sacred eagle fly’ (ll. 1–4).30 This may be an apologetic gesture for the lateness of Dryden’s own contribution, 28  It should also be noted that the order of authors’ names on the title page of Three Poems does not match the order in which the poems appear. 29  Citation to the text in Three Poems (London, 1659). 30  Citation to the text in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), I, 6–12.

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perhaps for the untimely publication of the whole; more importantly the quatrain announces the wholly secular realm of time in which the elegy is to unfold. There is nothing here of redemptive history, nor even of that Marvellian providence ‘which had so long the care / Of Cromwell’s head, and numbered ev’ry hair’ (A Poem upon the Death, ll. 1–2). If the life celebrated by Heroic Stanzas took place under the aegis of higher powers, it would be a Roman fortuna rather than the redemptive time so brilliantly imagined by Marvell in The First Anniversary and still resonant in the elegy where Marvell scans Providence for signs of care and seeks models from Scripture for the late Lord Protector. In Marvell’s elegy Nature is deeply responsive—storms and deluge and ‘winged tempests’ witness the great climacteric of Cromwell’s death; in Heroic Stanzas nature pays cool and fleeting tribute, sending ‘That Gyant Prince of all her watery Heard’ (l. 138). But the poem affords no apotheosis, no transfiguration. As Dryden addresses the force and meaning of Cromwell’s death, he fixes the poem in a quizzical and paradoxical present tense: His Name a great example stands to show How strangely high endeavours may be blest, Where Piety and valour joyntly goe. (ll. 146–8)

The Roman cast of Dryden’s funeral rites for this ‘great Protector and patron of the Evangelical Profession’31 surely opens interpretive questions, but so does Dryden’s insistent play on the problem of interpretation itself, ‘His name a great example stands to show / How strangely high endeavours may be blest’. The adverb conveys a sense of the exceptional, of singular character, but ‘strangely’ also carries a charge of strangeness, of the alien, the unexpected, the unknown. The effect of estrangement in these lines is striking, but this quizzical ending is not the only place where the poem thrusts the problem of interpretation into its celebration of the Lord Protector. There is indeed a rhythm of assertion and irony that seems to define the structure of the whole, rendering the point of view in the poem nearly impossible to determine, a kind of matching of the puzzles and contradictions of the life with a sense of the difficulty the poem has with the act of interpretation.32 It is not the most polished exemplar of this practice of imitative form where puzzles, ironies, and contradictions in the language, figures, and argument of a piece do more than simply reflect the difficulty of thinking about its subject; they actively convey, they construct, the experience of bafflement and indecision. That prize belongs alone to the Horatian Ode, but of all Dryden’s poems, Heroic Stanzas comes closest to the ethos of Marvell’s poem and surely that is in part because Dryden stood, late in 1658 or early 1659, in the same place as Marvell had a decade before, on the cusp of revolutionary change but uncertain of which way the winds were blowing. Nor are the indeterminacy of the poem’s conclusion or that insistent ‘now’ (a word Dryden repeats four times and one that defines the opening of Heroic Stanzas) 31  Cromwelliana, 175. 32  For the rhythm of assertion and irony in Heroic Stanzas, see Steven N. Zwicker, Politics and Language in Dryden’s Poetry: The Arts of Disguise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), ch. 3.

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the poem’s only points of contact with the Marvell of either the Horatian Ode—a poem that similarly insists on ‘now’—or the Poem upon the Death of O. C.33 We have paused over the puzzling way that Marvell seems to misapply the story of Ovid’s Scylla and Nisus to Eliza and Oliver, the allusion pointing uncertainly to desire, betrayal, and subversion—but whose? And of what? Can we see these elements as well in another strange move, this time within Dryden’s elegy? And this too in a story drawn from Roman mythology where Tarpeia, the daughter of the commanding general of the citadel, betrays her father and Rome out of love for Tatius, opening the citadel’s gates to the Sabine enemy, then dying beneath the crush of shields hurled on her by the invading army: ‘His latest Victories still thickest came / As, near the Center, Motion does increase; / Till he, pres’d down by his own weighty name, / Did, like the Vestall, under spoyles decease’ (ll. 133–6). As in Marvell’s elegy, there is the strange inversion of gender—Cromwell as Scylla, Cromwell as Tarpeia—and, even stranger, the motif of civic betrayal mixed with death and desire: daughters betraying their fathers and their city states for love of foreign kings. Why allow this material to shadow—even at a certain distance—the celebration of Oliver’s life and achievements? Or indeed to shadow Richard’s succession to office? It is hardly the case that Dryden’s unsettling application of Roman mythology to English politics has deep or abiding resonance in the private experience of the poet, but it is a puzzling move, and one that seems even stranger when you realize that the stories of Scylla and Tarpeia are linked in antiquity. In Propertius’s telling of Tarpeia’s betrayal (Elegies IV), the Vestal Virgin herself recalls Scylla’s betrayal of her father and homeland as she poses a series of rhetorical questions to justify her traitorous resolve, ‘What wonder that Scylla savaged her father’s hair, / and her ivory loins turned into savage dogs?’34 Had Dryden read Marvell’s elegy? Had Marvell read Heroic Stanzas? Had they both read Propertius? Did anyone pause over Dryden’s poem to ask what exactly he could have had in mind? Of course the poetry-reading population of London had more pressing things to do in the spring of 1659 than explicate the Roman analogies of Heroic Stanzas. But the Roman cast of mind would not now point to an auspicious way of imagining futurity for the Cromwellian state: first a triumvirate to govern the republic, then civil war and a second triumvirate, then the death of the republic with Augustus as sole ruler of the Roman Empire, and following Augustus, a series of emperors including Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero. Do we need to go further? What did it mean to invoke the history of Rome for the English Commonwealth at this date or to adapt the figure Caesar to crown the Lord Protector’s rule? And on whom in this line of successors to Caesar might the civic aspirations of Richard Cromwell be modelled? Not that poets lamenting the death of Cromwell were shy of the Roman analogy. Adaptations of Augustan poetry are broadly scattered 33  See Shankar Raman, ‘Marvell’s “Now”’, Early Modern Culture, 6 (2007): http://emc.eserver. org/1-6/raman.html. 34  See the commentary by Propertius, Elegies, Book Four, ed. Gregory Hutchinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 116–18: ‘It is a dominating theme of the poem that Tarpeia wishes to marry the enemy. This is bad enough in Peisidice, but for a Vestal Virgin it is the most wicked and extraordinary of intentions.’

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through the elegies and panegyrics and, of course, and not unexpectedly, they can be found in the Latin verse composed for Musarum Cantabrigiensium (1658).35 These are more than schoolboy exercises though they keenly echo Martial, Horace, Virgil, and Statius as they apply the idioms of Latin funeral tributes in their verses lamenting Oliver’s death and celebrating Richard’s accession to power; they are also filled with tears, with setting and rising suns, with references to Caesar, Pompey, and Alexander; but they do not offer the political reflections and selfawareness or indeed the sense of perplexity that Marvell and Dryden displayed on these occasions. Marvell had explored the ambiguities of Roman history in the Horatian Ode and there confronted the problem of what to look back with, and the yet more difficult question of what to look forward with—to ask what language would allow futurity: ‘And for the last effect / Still keep thy sword erect: / Besides the force it has to fright / The spirits of the shady night; / The same arts that did gain / A pow’r must it maintain’ (ll. 115–20). It is a remarkable performance—the neutralism, the penetrating gaze, the chilling disinterestedness of this pronouncement, wreathed as it is with ambiguous allusions. The end of the poem stands at the brink of a future that Marvell refuses to soften or extenuate with an interpretive scheme; and that is where Dryden found himself as he brought to a close his poem marking, commemorating, Cromwell’s death: ‘His Ashes in a peacefull Urne shall rest, / His name a great example stands to show / How strangely high endeavours may be blest, / Where Piety and valour joyntly goe’. Heroic Stanzas does not close with quite the dark authority of Horatian Ode—Dryden’s rhythms and diction do not achieve Marvell’s epithetic power—but the assurance of Heroic Stanzas is remarkable enough for a debut poem, and one which Dryden was willing to sign and release into the market of printed goods on the eve of . . .? Well, that of course was the problem—a future that had no signposts, that was difficult to approximate to interpretive schemes. Marvell had faced that future in the summer of 1650 and then produced and withheld his masterpiece. Dryden wrote Heroic Stanzas at a moment of deep political uncertainty; the life of his poem in the career that would unfold in front of Dryden—of which of course he had no knowledge—suggests some of the costs of signing and circulating words in print, cool and uncommitted as they now might seem. It is not that Heroic Stanzas is an attempt to balance praise and blame, to calculate the rhetorical position that would allow most mobility; it is, rather, that Dryden lacked either the prescience or the caution to keep his meditation under wraps. Whatever else the pamphlet that carried Dryden and Sprat and Waller into the marketplace in the spring of 1659 conveyed, its material and commercial uncertainties wrote in miniature the political and ideological unsteadiness of that time, as well as the vagaries of polemics and political reputations in the succeeding months and years when the pamphlet was sold, circulated, republished,

35  On the Latin verse in the university volumes, see Chapter 11 in this volume by Henry Power, ‘ “Eyes without Light”: University Verse Collections and the Stuart Successions’.

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read, marked, retitled, and rewritten.36 There is first the unsteadiness, the furtiveness of its creation—Henry Herringman soliciting, registering, and then disappearing from its production; William Wilson, a sometime printer for Herringman, next appearing as stationer, and the pamphlet itself now consisting of new verse by Dryden and Sprat and a reprint of Waller’s Upon the Late Storme. No one other than Herringman, Wilson, and the warden of the Stationers’ Company would likely have known of Marvell’s promised contribution, though perhaps Dryden knew of it; maybe Dryden even solicited it for Herringman since he worked for Herringman at the end of the 1650s and had been a colleague of Marvell’s in the Protectorate’s Office of Foreign Tongues. The pamphlet would likely have been produced that spring of 1659 in a print run of 500 copies; at least two dozen of these survive, a surprising number for a thin pamphlet published in the late 1650s, especially since William Wilson’s shop in ‘Well-yard near Little St Bartholomew’s Hospital’ was close to St Paul’s Churchyard and there in the Great Fire of 1666 the shops and stock of a number of booksellers were burned, a reminder surely of the contingencies of place (as well as of persons) in the history of print.37 Herringman—whose shop in the New Exchange was spared the Great Fire of London—though unwilling to appear as publisher, likely took copies of Three Poems from Wilson as compensation for what he had invested in the pamphlet, hence perhaps the surprising survival rate for the pamphlet.38 When Dryden’s poem next appeared, in 1681, it had separated from the pamphlet and was called An Elegy on the Usurper O. C. by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel, Published to Shew the Loyalty and Integrity of the Poet. Now Dryden’s name or rather non-name is centrally featured since Absalom was published anonymously and the title of this reprint trades on the wholly transparent anonymity of the laureate, indeed mocks the idea of Dryden’s anonymity by adding a postscript that writes the well-known humiliations of the laureate into this new edition of the elegy. The following year a Dublin reprint of the Elegy on the Usurper appeared; in 1682 the entire pamphlet reappears, set from a copy of the 1659 publication but with the embarrassing title Three Poems Upon the Death of the Late Usurper Oliver Cromwel; and in 1687 Heroic Stanzas was again reprinted, and now called A poem upon the death of the late 36  The first page of my own copy of Three Poems (1659) is extensively marked—or rather, defaced— by contemporary manuscript marginalia. 37 See The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London, G. Bell, 1970–83), VII, 309: ‘This day, coming home, Mr. Kirton’s kinsman, my bookseller, come in my way; and so I am told by him that Mr. Kirton is utterly undone, and made 2 or 3000 l. worse than nothing, from being worth 7 or 8,000 l. . . . He do believe there is above; 50,000 l. of books burned; all the great booksellers almost undone: not only these, but their warehouses at their Hall, and under Christchurch, and elsewhere being all burned. A great want thereof there will be of books, specially Latin books and foreign books.’ And, see Marc Bloch’s remarks on archives and contingencies, The Historian’s Craft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 59: ‘Despite what the beginners sometimes seem to imagine, documents do not suddenly materialize, in one place or another, as if by some mysterious decree of the gods. Their presence or absence in the depths of this archive or that library are due to human causes which by no means elude analysis. The problems posed by their transmission, far from having importance only for the technical experts, are most intimately connected with the life of the past, for what is here at stake is nothing less than the passing down of memory from one generation to another.’ 38  The English Short Title Catalogue lists over twenty separate copies in institutional libraries.

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usurper, Oliver Cromwel. By the author of the H___d and the P____r in honour of Dryden’s most recent apostasy. Then, in a striking turn, Jacob Tonson reprinted Heroic Stanzas in 1692 in order to complete his made-up sets of Dryden’s Works, the elegy with its original title making an unembarrassed reappearance as part of Dryden’s canon, reprinted not only in Tonson’s sets but as well in the first part of Miscellany Poems of 1696, reprinted in 1697, and also appearing in three of the Poems on Affairs of State volumes published in 1689, 1697, and 1705 together, in these miscellanies, with Waller and Sprat, though not of course with Marvell’s Poem upon the Death of O. C. which made its own nervous and momentary reappearance in 1681, a moment of high partisan drama. What is striking about the bibliographical history of Three Poems and of its individual parts is how sensitively the original pamphlet registers its moment of issue, how charged its contents remained through the time of popery and Exclusion, and then how the elegies were assimilated to a literary canon after the Glorious Revolution when Heroic Stanzas seems to have become a literary property.39 After the tumultuous decades at mid-century, and after Oliver Cromwell’s accession to the office of Lord Protector and the climacteric of his death had been safely rendered as, reduced to, literature, the rule of Richard Cromwell came to be seen as something of a burlesque starring Tumbledown Dick—the subject of astrological treatises, joke books, and, finally, nursery rhymes.40 In October of 1659 the Venetian Ambassador reflected on the ‘variations and instability [that] have continued without interruption for so many years that to foreign countries such constant motion must appear incredible and excite laughter at such a long comedy which must infallibly be turned one day into a tragedy’.41 But by the end of the century, the ambassador might well have written something different of Oliver’s accession to power and of Richard’s succession to office—that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.42

39  Heroic Stanzas appears together with Waller’s and Sprat’s elegies in the 1689 Collection of Poems on Affairs of State and twice again in Poems of Affairs of State and in the 1716 and 1717 Miscellany Poems. 40  Tom Brown, Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London (London, 1700), 134: ‘The Old Fellows Talk of what they have done in the Days of Queen Dick.’ 41  Horatio F. Brown et al. (eds), Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 38 vols (London: HMSO, 1931), XXXII, 71–85. 42  Karl Marx’s reflection on Hegel: the opening words of The Eighteenth Braumire of Louis Napoleon (1852).

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4 Charles II and the Meanings of Exile Christopher Highley The restoration of the Stuart monarchy in May 1660 after a decade of republican rule marked an unprecedented kind of succession in English history. For royalists, Charles II had already become King of Great Britain by hereditary succession upon the death of his father on 30 January 1649. But he was not crowned in Westminster Abbey, anointed with holy oil, or accorded the other ancient coronation rites until 23 April 1661. True, Charles had been crowned King of Scotland almost a decade earlier on 1 January 1651, when he was invested with the full trappings of ancient Scottish monarchy at Scone.1 No other hereditary English monarch had to wait so long from the moment he technically assumed the regal state to the public ­ceremonies that ratified that status in the eyes of God and his subjects. Between 1649 and 1660, Charles II was therefore a king and no king: as well as not occupying his English throne, he had not, with one brief exception, lived in his own dominions. Charles’s father had dispatched his eldest son abroad at the height of the Civil War in 1646, aged sixteen. The Stuart heir first stayed in Jersey and then joined his mother in Paris. After his father’s execution and his own coronation in Scotland, Charles led an army into England that was decisively defeated by Cromwell’s forces at the Battle of Worcester in 1651. Charles survived, but was forced into hiding, slipping out of England to France six weeks later. He would not set foot in his kingdoms again until the Restoration. The prospect, in the months leading up to May 1660, and then the reality, of a restored Stuart monarchy prompted an avalanche of succession literature that welcomed and counselled the king. In poems, sermons, letters, petitions, character sketches and other genres, writers tried to make sense of this sudden political transformation. Most works attributed the change to the inscrutable workings of divine providence, while acknowledging the role of human agents like George Monck, the military commander instrumental in Charles’s repatriation. Many works of panegyric looked forward to a new era of unity and prosperity under Stuart rule. Others, though, looked to the immediate past to make sense of this ruler who had lived for so long outside his kingdoms and who was unknown to most of his subjects.2 1  Also see Chapter 12 in this volume by Jane Rickard: ‘Stuart Coronations in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity’. 2  Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory’, in Lorna Clymer (ed.), Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Repetition in Early Modern British and European Cultures (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 103–31.

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This chapter examines the ways in which succession literature interpreted Charles’s prolonged absence from his kingdoms. Expectant English readers wanted to know where and how Charles had spent his time abroad, and how it had affected him. For writers of different political views, then, the period of royal exile became a battleground for contesting questions about Charles’s identity and his fitness to govern. Hostile representations of Charles in exile circulated from early on and went largely unanswered once the republican regime suppressed the publication of royalist literature.3 Only in the months before May 1660 did sympathetic royalist treatments begin to rewrite the republican narrative of royal exile. This narrative, I argue, also encompassed Charles’s brief sojourn in Scotland and England in 1651, which should be seen not as a hiatus in his exile, but as another form of banishment, albeit a domestic one. Although the circulation of royalist representations of Charles’s exile for public consumption was relatively belated—a response to the real possibility of his ­restoration—the king’s overseas followers had been discussing their displacement amongst themselves in more restricted forums for over a decade. The correspondence networks they developed throughout Europe were crucial in sustaining a virtual royalist community. Letter-writing allowed the king’s scattered supporters to connect to each other to air grievances about displacement from familiar places and routines, and to accuse fellow exiles of betraying their political or religious principles in order to survive in their new surroundings.4 Writers for and against Charles’s restoration depended upon a shared vocabulary of exile. Both groups exploited tropes of displacement and suffering: royalists saw these experiences as trials before eventual triumph, whereas their opponents considered them a sign of personal failings or divine punishment. These discourses had developed over centuries, serving the needs of groups across the confessional landscape. Yet because they were available to serve different religious agendas, they were also ideologically flexible and interpretatively slippery. For instance, works ostensibly meant to bolster support for Charles’s return from exile by assuaging anxieties about how he had spent his time abroad, might stir up new doubts in readers about the king’s moral probity or religious reliability. This potential for confusion was compounded by the fact that the Protestant loyalists committed to clearing Charles from charges of religious wavering, or even apostasy, had to depend on discourses about exile that by the second half of the seventeenth century 3  Jason McElligott has shown that by the summer of 1650, the new regime had suppressed the printing of the influential royalist newsbooks Mercurius Pragmaticus and The Man in the Moon, as well as other works favouring ‘the Malignant party at home and abroad’. The regime’s efforts to stamp out royalist propaganda were bolstered by the draconian Printing Act of September 1649 and by the defection of Marchamont Nedham, the main royalist printer, to the Commonwealth in June 1650: McElligott, Royalism, Print, and Censorship in Revolutionary England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 173–82. For a succinct account of the publishing scene in 1660, see Gerald MacLean, ‘1660’, in Joad Raymond et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), I, 619–28. 4  The scattered and often fractious diaspora of royalist exiles is well examined by Mark R. F. Williams, ‘The Devotional Landscape of the Royalist Exile, 1649–1660’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (2014), 909–33 at 917.

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had become inextricably associated with the Catholic experience of exile under Elizabethan and Stuart regimes. FIGURES OF EXILE Early modern English writers had at their disposal a range of secular and religious paradigms, figures, and tropes for representing the individual and collective experience of exile. Royalist writers welcoming Charles might turn to the English past and to stories of monarchs who had spent time outside their homeland before returning in triumph to claim the throne. In the royalist ballad Maiestie irradiant, Anthony Sadler described Charles’s enforced absence from his home ‘as a weary Pilgrimage; / and / (like our best Progenitors) / A Sojourners Condition / from one Kingdom, to another people’.5 But which of Charles’s ‘Progenitors’ did Sadler have in mind? Readers may have remembered that Henry Bolingbroke—the future Henry IV—and Henry, Earl of Richmond—the future Henry VII—had been exiles in Brittany before returning to England and taking the throne. Both men, though, were troubling prototypes. After all, they had gained power not via peaceful succession, but through violent acts of usurpation. A less problematic ‘Progenitor’ of Charles, who had also trodden ‘the stranger paths of banishment’, was Edward the Confessor, whom Thomas Fuller declared Was both Your Parallel and Predecessor, Exil’d He many years did live in France, (From low Foundations highest Roofs advance) The Yoak in Youth with patience he bore, But in his Age the Crown with honour wore.

Edward, having survived a turbulent youth to achieve an unprecedented reputation for piety, was the kind of ruler royalists hoped Charles II would become.6 Royal panegyrics also turned to the Greco-Roman past for patterns of exile and stories of adversity overcome. Royalists presented the danger-filled wanderings of Ulysses, Aeneas, and Romulus as paling in significance alongside the ‘sad and long Parenthesis’ that had separated Charles from his subjects.7 It was the Bible, though, that furnished writers with the most familiar yet morally complex figurations of exile in protagonists such as Moses, Abraham, and David, as well as the ancient Israelites as a people. The analogy between David and Charles was especially attractive, yet also fraught with interpretative dangers because his career in Scripture was morally chequered. Like Charles, David had been driven into the wilderness by his enemy (Saul), only to return later as the ruler of God’s chosen people. But David was also a great (if ultimately repentant) sinner, whose most serious lapse was to commit adultery with Bathsheba and then arrange the death of her husband. 5  Maiestie Irradiant: or The Splendor Display’d of Our Soveraigne King Charles (London, 1660). 6 Fuller, A Panegyrick to His Majesty on His Happy Return (London, 1660), 11. The Duke of Hereford is forced ‘to tread the stranger paths of banishment’ by his king in Richard II (1.3.145). 7  William Fairebrother, An Essay of a Loyal Brest (London, 1660), 1.

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The royalist writer Henry Oxinden in Charls Triumphant (1660), hailed the king as a second David, but ignored David’s status as an embodiment of human weakness, by insisting that Charles was ‘Unmixt with vice’.8 Further complicating the Charles–David analogy was the fact that, for royalists, David the adulterer could also suggest their late nemesis, Oliver Cromwell, who was shown in anti-Puritan satires seducing the wife of fellow republican, John Lambert. Thus the royalist author of Iter Australe mocked Cromwell’s supporters for allegedly comparing their hero with David and with another Old Testament exile figure, Moses: One would have [Cromwell] a David, (cause he went To Lamberts wife, when he was in his Tent.) A second, Moses styled him, (for why His shining Nose made the Synecdoche:).9

What connects Cromwell and Moses in this satirical coupling is not their status as God’s chosen leaders but their ruddy facial features: while Cromwell’s pimply complexion was notorious, Moses’s skin allegedly glowed after he received the tables on Mount Sinai.10 For every narrative of exile that ended with return and redemption could be found a counter-narrative that equated exile with punishment and loss. For  English Protestants, Mary Queen of Scots—Charles II’s great-grandmother—embodied this negative version. Mary was driven out of Scotland into England by her rebellious subjects, but unlike Henry IV and Henry VII, whose exiles proved an enabling condition of their claiming the throne, Mary was executed in banishment. The archetype of the wicked exile acknowledged by both Protestants and Catholics was Cain—anti-type to the heroic exiles of the Old Testament such as Moses and David. Cast out of Eden by God for murdering his brother, Abel, Cain was doomed to wander the earth as ‘a fugitive and a vagabond’.11 For Charles’s enemies, Cain was an obvious figure to invoke, but again he was a problematic model, partly because the Stuart heir had not murdered his brother or anyone else for that matter. Republicans finessed the analogy by referring to the more generalized ‘curse of Cain’, as in the statement: ‘for the rest of the [Royalist] runnagates, the curse of Cain pursues them beyond the hope of a pardon’.12 The Charles–Cain analogy probably made republicans nervous because their own execution of an anointed monarch resonated powerfully with Cain’s transformative act of primal murder. At the Restoration, royalists exploited this betrayal when imagining how the defeated enemies of the Stuarts

8 Oxinden, Charls Triumphant, 24. 9  Iter Australe Attempting Something upon the Happy Return of Our Most Gracious Soveraign Lord Charls II from Banishment to His Throne (London, 1660), sig. B2v; also see Thomas Mayhew, Upon the Joyfull and Welcome Return (London, 1660); on Cromwell and Lambert, see Newes from the New Exchange; or the Commonwealth of Ladies, Drawn to the Life in Their Severall Characters and Conceivements (London, 1650). On representations of Cromwell’s body, see Laura Lunga Knoppers, ‘Noll’s Nose or Body Politics in Cromwellian England’, in Amy Boesky and Mary Thomas Crane (eds), Form and Reform in Renaissance England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 21–44. 10  Exodus 34:29–35. I owe this insight to Hannibal Hamlin. 11  Genesis 4:14. 12  A Rope for Pol: or, A Hue and Cry After Marchemont Nedham (London, 1660), 6.

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would flee like Cain into the land of Nod, ‘Wandring from Land to Land, from shore to shelf’, afflicted with overwhelming guilt.13 The prolific newswriter Marchamont Nedham, found a more fitting figure of a wicked—and justifiably banished—exile to set alongside Charles in the Roman Sextus Tarquinius, who was expelled from Rome after raping the matron Lucrece. Tarquinius and his father, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the tyrannical king of Rome, were prevented from regaining power by Lucius Junius Brutus, whose victory signalled the end of monarchy in Rome and the beginning of the Republic. This Roman parallel worked for Nedham because it fit well with England’s own transition from monarchical to republican government and because in both cases the defeated monarchs were a father and son. Thus Nedham christened Charles I ‘Tarquin’, and his son, ‘the young Tarquin’ or ‘Tarquin the second’.14 And yet, as with King David, the story of the Tarquins’ exile proved ideologically malleable and could also serve royalist ends when repurposed, for instance, in Martin Lluelyn’s poem, To The Kings Most Excellent Majesty: When Tarquin had receiv’d his exil’d Fate, Not Porsena his Royal Advocate, Nor potent Armes his Restoration shape; Oppos’d by his own Pride, and Lucrece Rape. His Armies, are by Armies overcome. And Porsena’s grave Legats reason’d home: In Fights or Parlyes still they disagree; He strugling to be King, Rome to be Free. How different are these Sames! Your exiles friend, Princes nor Aides, nor Intercessors send.15

Lluelyn’s retelling of Tarquin’s banishment focuses on the efforts of his ‘exile’s friend’, King Porsena, to restore him to power. Lluelyn’s point is that even with Porsena’s help, Tarquin never returns home to Rome, unlike Charles II who has recently returned to England without military assistance from a foreign power. ‘How different are these Sames!’ crows Lluelyn, apparently unbothered by the fact that this difference relies upon an underlying sameness between Tarquin and Charles. Perhaps readers of the poem found the similitude more unsettling. RELIGIOUS EXILE Whatever their source, the figures and stories writers used to illuminate Charles’s exile were inexact, broke down under scrutiny, and did not provide the framework for sustained allegories. When royalist and anti-royalist writers came to depict 13  True and Good News from Brussels (London, 1660), 5; Fuller, A Panegyrick, 9. 14  Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Common-Wealth of England Stated: or, The Equity, Utility, and Necessity of a Submission to the Present Government (London, 1650), 15, 89. Also see Bernard Capp, England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67–8. 15  Martin Lluelyn, To The Kings Most Excellent Majesty (London, 1660), 6–7.

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Charles’s exile, in fact, specific figures and stories were often less significant than the generic tropes of exile that underlay not only historical, classical, and biblical narratives, but also more recent accounts of early modern religious exile. Under the Tudors and Stuarts, the experience of religious exile was a p ­ redominantly Catholic one. It is true that during the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary Tudor, evangelical Protestants unwilling to reconcile with reforming regimes chose exile or were banished to reformed cities on the continent like Geneva and Strasbourg, thereby avoiding persecution, imprisonment, or even death at home. Works by writers including John Bale and John Foxe memorialized the fates of these exiles, as well as of those who rejected flight and stayed home to face martyrdom. But many more Catholic subjects of Henry VIII, Edward, Elizabeth, James, and Charles I endured banishment overseas, whether self-imposed or enforced, and their experiences were widely written about from both sympathetic and hostile perspectives. Even in the late 1650s, the exiled Catholic priest George Leyburn saw no let-up in the sufferings of his co-religionists, ‘who, at this instant, doe grone, under the burden of as heavy a persecution, as hath happen’d (perhaps) since the change of Religion’.16 When, in 1659–60, writers explored the nature and meaning of Charles II’s exile, their imaginings were inevitably shaped by a discourse strongly coded at this time as Catholic. A central trope of religious exile depicted life in banishment as one of constant and frustrated wandering in search of a stable refuge. The trope aligned well with Charles’s experiences: unable to establish his court-in-exile in one place, he was  forced to shuffle among Paris, Cologne, Brussels, and elsewhere. Nedham’s ­republican periodical, Mercurius Politicus, described Charles and his followers as ‘runnagates’ and ‘fugitives’ to mock their restless movement in a world where they were permanently out of place.17 In another issue, Nedham depicted Charles and his ‘Illustrious Beggars’ going on a ‘rambling progresse’—an image that evokes the meanderings of vagabonds and the profligate royal progresses of the Stuart court. Nedham’s evocative language echoed descriptions of the plight of exiled English Catholics that had circulated for several generations. Catholic and Protestant writers shared a rhetoric of homelessness to make these conditions seem either pitiful or deserved. Catholic Thomas Dorman, for instance, protested the harsh treatment suffered by young scholars at the universities who ‘wander now abroad in dispersion, lamenting the estate of their miserable country’.18 On the other side, Protestant preacher John Howson predicted that Queen Elizabeth’s exiled Catholic subjects would likely ‘perish miserably like runagates and vagabonds, or exiled malefactors in a foreign country’.19 Protestant polemicists argued,

16  George Leyburn, Epistle Declaratorie ([Douai?], 1657), 48. 17  These and other passages attacking Charles in Nedham’s periodical were reprinted by royalist Roger L’Estrange in A Rope for Pol in an effort to shame ‘the late s[c]urrulous newswriter’ (6, 23). 18  Rope for Pol, 34; Thomas Dorman, A Proufe of Certeyne Articles in Religion, Denied by M. Iuell (Antwerp, 1564), 2. 19  John Howson, A Sermon Preached at St. Maries in Oxford, the 17. day of November, 1602. in Defence of the Festivities of the Church of England (London, 1603), sig. D1r.

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furthermore, that the very Englishness of English Catholics was jeopardized through exposure to foreign cultures and that Englishmen and women who ended up in Catholic ­seminaries or religious houses in Habsburg territories became ‘Jesuited’ or ‘Hispaniolized’. Catholics, of course, could not deny that under persecuting Protestant regimes in England many of their fellow believers ‘wander now abroad in dispersion’, but they could contest Protestant claims that such wandering somehow imperilled their national identity and loyalties.20 Similar fears of a compromised Englishness swirled around Charles from the beginning of his exile. Because by the late 1650s, he had spent most of his banishment in the Catholic courts of Europe, notably France and Spain, it was easy to call his allegiance to the Church of England into question. In a royalist pamphlet of March 1660, ‘Charles’ himself expressed astonishment at recent insinuations that while overseas he had either converted to Catholicism or at least betrayed a ­predisposition toward Rome. For the past decade, he protested, his enemies had mocked him in ballads for his supposed light behaviour, but had been ‘unconcerned with his religion whether it were Christian or Muhametan’. Only ‘now, just now in this crisis of affairs when [his enemies’] cause is manifestly withering’ did they call his fidelity to the Anglican Church into question.21 The month of March 1660 was indeed a moment of ‘crisis of affairs’ for Charles and his enemies, but it was certainly not the first time they had impugned his faith. In fact, from the start of his exile, republican propagandists had consistently tied him and his family to European Catholicism, playing on long-held and deep-seated prejudices about the essential foreignness of the Stuarts.22 It did not help Charles’s standing in the eyes of his Protestant subjects back home that several members of his court in exile and in the royalist diaspora generally had converted to Rome. As Geoffrey Smith, Mark Williams, and others have recognized, these conversions were often engineered by the queen mother, Henrietta Maria, in Paris, or by English Catholic expatriates resident in the Spanish Netherlands, who used both threats and promises to win over the newly transplanted, and thus vulnerable, royalists in their midst. While Charles ostracized some of these converts from his inner circle, including George Digby, Earl of Bristol, others such as Stephen Goffe remained close to the exiled court.23 20 See my Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 21  True and Good News from Brussels, 3. Charles is quoted in one of several printed responses to the sensational pamphlet, Newes from Brussels (London, 1660), in which Marchamont Nedham, adopting the voice of an unscrupulous follower of the king, revealed the Cavaliers’ Machiavellian scheming and their plans for revenge against their enemies once back in England. For more on the flurry of pamphlets occasioned by Newes from Brussels, see Joad Raymond, ‘The Cracking of the Republican Spokes’, Prose Studies, 19 (1996), 255–74. 22 See, for example, The King of Scotland’s Negotiations at Rome for Assistance Against the Commonwealth (London, 1650). On ubiquitous fears of a Catholic threat during and after the civil war, see Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics During the English Revolution’, Past & Present, 52 (1971), 23–55; Ian Y. Thackray, ‘Zion Undermined: The Protestant Belief in a Popish Plot During the English Interregnum’, History Workshop, 18 (1984), 28–52. 23  Geoffrey Smith, The Cavaliers in Exile, 1640–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 51, 67–72; Williams, ‘The Devotional Landscape’, 927–32; Sarah Mortimer, ‘Exile, Apostacy, and

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On the eve of the Restoration, Nedham and other republicans made uncertainty about Charles’s Protestantism central to the campaign to undermine his legitimacy and prevent his return to England. Nedham wrote in Interest will not Lie. Or, a View of England’s True Interest (17 August 1659) that Charles’s protestations of allegiance to the Church of England were disproved by his recent visit to an English Jesuit College in Flanders.24 Here, when he saw ‘the Effigies of several good Fathers of that house which had been Sainted at Tyborne, he pulled his Hat over his eyes, and turned aside to the Wall’. If Charles’s dramatic gesture of at the spectacle of Jesuit priests executed at Tyburn wasn’t enough to convince readers that their king was ‘sufficiently affected, if not sworn to Popery’, Nedham listed other evidence of Charles’s apostasy: he had been raised by the devout Catholic Henrietta Maria, sought refuge in Flanders (‘the most Jesuited place in the World’), and depended in exile ‘upon forein Priests and Papists’.25 Other attacks on Charles’s assertion that he remained a resolute Protestant after his years abroad painted him as a religious opportunist of no settled beliefs, rather than a committed Catholic. Writers implied that his physical wanderings outside England had fostered in him a spiritual errancy that eschewed any stable religious or political commitment: ‘He sometimes professes himself to be a Lutheran, sometimes to be a Papist, but never appears to be of the Reformed Religion; and that gives a very strong suspition of him among the Orthodox professours, who thereupon do openly pronounce, that his bad fortune is a just judgment of God upon him.’26 To many Protestants, the period Charles had spent in Scotland negotiating with the Kirk and Parliament for aid proved him religiously suspect. As a condition of being crowned King of Scots at Scone, Charles had subscribed to the Solemn League and Covenant, thereby repudiating episcopacy and promising—when in possession of his other realms—to impose Scottish-style Presbyterianism on them.27 Republican accounts of the episode argued that Charles’s submission to the Kirk caused lasting confusion among his supporters, alienating many by stirring new doubts about his religious convictions. For example, The King of Scotland’s Negotiations at Rome for Assistance Against the Commonwealth (6 September 1650), scoffed at Charles’s pretense to ‘Presbyterian Religion; his heart being at Rome’, and pointed out that his capitulation had an important precedent. After all, Charles’s maternal grandfather, Henri IV of France, had also converted when, to hold onto power, he renounced ‘the Reformed Religion [for] Poperie’, and famously remarked ‘that the Crown of France was worth little, if it were not worth a Mass or two’. The same work predicted that just as Charles had sworn the covenant out of political expediency, he would as readily repudiate it whenever convenient. Anglicanism in the English Revolution’, in Philip Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile in the English Revolution and Its Aftermath, 1640–1690 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 94–7; Philip Major, Writings of Exile in the English Revolution and Restoration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 24  Where available, I give the date (in parentheses) that George Thomason recorded on his copy of a work. See Stephen Greenberg, ‘Dating Civil War Pamphlets’, Albion, 20 (1988), 387–401. 25 Nedham, Interest will not Lie (London, 1659), 6. 26  A Rope for Pol, 33–4. 27  Nicole Greenspan, ‘Charles II, Exile, and the Problem of Allegiance’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), 73–103.

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Charles’s maneuverings in Scotland suggested he had no core religious convictions. To his enemies, he was always something other than he seemed—feigning his intentions in order to conceal either a secret Catholic self, or the absence of any religious principles.28 REWRITING CHARLES’S EXILE Writers welcoming Charles’s return needed to rewrite the exile narrative that his adversaries had controlled for more than a decade, when royalists’ access to print had been severely curtailed.29 The problem for Charles’s supporters was that they found themselves in the awkward position of using a Catholic-coded discourse to argue against claims of Charles’s Catholicization. One royalist strategy was to reconceive the king’s exile as a divinely ordained trial of his religious resolve. The anonymous author of Englands Faiths Defender Vindicated (15 March 1659) could not deny that Charles had spent his banishment ‘amongst the chiefest Upholders of Popery’, or that ‘Popish Potentates’ had tried to seduce him with offers of support if he would convert. But, the author argued, these pressures had tested Charles’s commitment to the reformed faith but in the end only strengthened it. Englands Faiths Defender relates how Charles, at a meeting with the French Cardinal Mazarin, declared he would rather die a martyr than renounce the Church of England, rather endure ‘perpetual Exile’ than betray his conscience.30 Charles sounds a similar note of heroic Protestant defiance in another account of this meeting in the pamphlet Certamen Brittanicum, Gallico Hispanicum . . . How much it hath been endeavored to make him turn Catholic with his constant resolution to live and die in the true Protestant religion (7 November 1659): ‘I shall sooner choose to dye an exile from my native Country then to banish or change the Religion I have been bred and born in for a settlement there.’ Protestant readers of the pamphlet were further encouraged by Charles’s robust defence of the antiquity of the reformed faith and by his appeals to the early reformers Wycliffe, Hus, and Jerome of Prague. At the same time as accounts of Charles’s Protestant resilience would have heartened reformed readers, these works ran the risk of evoking the same spirit of religious steadfastness so often associated with the community of Catholic exiles and martyrs.31 Charles’s supporters dismissed concerns about his indebtedness to foreigners by arguing that he had received not a friendly, but a hostile reception in France and elsewhere. According to The Royal Pilgrimage or the Progresse and Travels of King Charles the Second Through the Most and Greatest Courts of Europe (26 March 1660), Charles responded to a lack of respect shown to him at the French court by ‘stud[ying] 28  The King of Scotland’s Negotiations at Rome (London, 1650), 2 and 4–5. Also see An Eye-Salve for the English Armie (London, 1660). 29  See note 3. 30  Englands Faiths Defender, 5–6. 31  Certamen Brittanicum, 7–8. For Catholic works published in this period, see Thomas H. Clancy, English Catholic Books, 1641–1700: A Bibliography (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1974).

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to forget’ the French language in an act of retaliation.32 Poet Rachel Jevon claimed that both France, ‘The barbarous Vine’, and the Netherlands, ‘th’unstable Willows’, had refused Charles succor as he ‘wandr[ed] through inhospitable lands’. For Charles’s supporters, his cold reception in foreign courts was not a reflection of his failings, but evidence he had remained a self-sufficient and upright Englishman: ‘God would not have You beholden to Strangers’, nor would He allow Charles to be restored with foreign military aid.33 Charles not only battled allegations that he had been spiritually seduced by foreign Catholics, but claims, like those levelled at earlier Catholic exiles, that an itinerant life promoted a dangerous liberty and bred moral laxity, profligacy, and self-indulgence. Mercurius Politicus reported, for example, that the banished Charles ‘is daily seen among the Pastimes of the Common people; he misses of no Comedy or Stage-play, and is a constant spectatour of all kinds of Puppet-plays; he is seen every where, and therefore is neglected of all; and having lately received a very considerable summe of money, he presently wasted it.’34 Royalists countered these claims that Charles had forfeited a disciplined Protestant self and was thus disqualified from rule by recasting his exile as an educational and morally fortifying preparation for governing. Arthur Brett declared that Into affliction [Charles] was hurl’d The great Free-school of all the world, And yet (which seemeth strange and odd) Hath thrived under too much rod, For Losses, Crosses, Banishment, Never were for Thalia’s meant; He has heard with’s ears, seen with’s eyes Enough to make him richly wise; Has that Experience attain’d Which by study can’t be gain’d, That which others learn by scraps, Or read in books, or see in maps; In times of war he dares to fight, And in times of peace can write.35

The idea that Charles’s education in exile was more valuable because holistic and experiential rather than fragmentary and book-based echoed through other defences. According to The Royal Pilgrimage, Charles’s ‘great experience, the knowledge of all places, men, and manners acquired by his own view’, had ‘fitted and accomplished [him] to Reign and Rule well’. A Character of Charles the Second 32  Royal Pilgrimage, 6. 33  Rachel Jevon, Exultationis Carmen to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty upon His Most Desired Return (London, 1660), 4; An Humble Acknowledgment of His Majestie’s Incomparable Grace (London, 1660), 4. On Charles’s alleged ill treatment at foreign courts, also see John Danvers, The Second Part of the Royal Oake: or, The Royall Pilgrimage of His Sacred Majestie King Charles II; an Exact Narrative and Relation of His Most Sacred Majesties Escape from Worcester on 3 Sept 1651 (London, 1660). 34  Rope for Pol, 34. 35  Arthur Brett, The Restauration: or, A Poem on the Return of the Most Mighty and Ever Glorious Charles the II (London, 1660), 10–11.

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(30 April 1660) by Samuel Tuke argued that the king’s exile abroad had been a valuable ‘school of adversity’.36 The Three Royall Cedars (21 May 1660), by Edward Sanders elaborated on Charles’s productive use of his exile: ‘Having during his expulsion travelled through and lived in the Countries of three [of ] the most potent Princes in Christendom, viz. the Emperour’s of Germany, and the Kings of Spaine and France’, Charles had imbibed ‘the Germain resolution added [to] the Spaniards prudence, and the Frenchmans expedition’.37 The idea that Charles had parlayed his exile into an opportunity to learn about politics, geography, and statecraft helped construct him as a different kind of monarch from his father. As David R. Evans argues in ‘Charles II’s “Grand Tour” ’, sympathetic narratives presented Charles’s European travels as a source of his new-found royal authority, conferring on him a ‘performative superiority’ to his  predecessors. New forms of legitimation like this served Charles well in an environment where ‘the mythology of divine-right monarchy so carefully nurtured by James I and so foolishly relied on by Charles I was no longer functional as a primary support for kingly power’.38 This is not to say that older conceptions of sovereignty based on inheritance and divine right disappeared, but that multiple theories of kingship now worked together to legitimize his rule, sometimes in complementary, but also in contradictory ways.39 Framing Charles’s European wanderings as a form of educational travel helped royalist writers explain away potentially damaging rumours that called into question his Protestantism. In March 1660, for example, when hopes of a Stuart restoration were gathering momentum, allegations circulated that Charles had been seen attending Mass at St Jean de Luz in France. Several responses were quickly printed.40 One writer admitted that Charles may indeed have gone ‘for curiosity . . . to see the diverse mysterious Ceremonies of the Masse, and hear the Musick us’d at certain solemnities, whereof there is so much talk’. But simply witnessing the Catholic Mass did not a Catholic make. The author argued it was common for ‘strangers’ in Catholic countries to attend Mass ‘without bending knee’ or ‘approving’ the ritual. If the presence of these ‘strangers’ at Mass was an ‘indifferent’ act of cultural tourism, why should Charles’s attendance be considered something more sinister? Similarly, Charles’s visit to ‘the Jesuites house at Antwerp, one of the most sumptuous structures of Europe’, was excused as ‘an innocent curiosity’ on his part—a purely educational excursion.41 All the same, even to some of Charles’s fellow exiles the king’s casual interest in the Roman rite would  have proved disturbing. For example, the Anglican clergyman George Morley (sometime chaplain to Charles I) proclaimed his steadfastness in the 36  Royal Pilgrimage, 8; A Character of Charles the Second, 8. 37 Sanders, The Three Royall Cedars, 3. 38  David R. Evans, ‘Charles II’s “Grand Tour”: Restoration Panegyric and the Rhetoric of Travel Literature’, Philological Quarterly, 72 (1993), 53–71 at 58. 39  N. H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 64–8. 40  The Royal Pilgrimage, 8; True and Good News from Brussels. 41  Samuel de L’Angle, A Letter Farther and More Fully Evidencing the Kings Stedfastnesse in the Protestant Religion (London, 1660), 22–3.

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Protestant faith by boasting that he was never ‘so much present at a Mass, nor kneeled at the exposition or meeting of the Host, while I was in the Popish countries; though I was many times threatened to be complained of, to the bishop of Antwerp, by the English Papists that were there, and especially by those that were apostates from our Church.’42 More fanciful versions of the exile-as-education trope cast Charles as both pupil and sage—a kind of Prince Hal figure, who ‘mastered there a double spirit / Of teaching and of learning instantly’.43 One poet transformed what could have been a disabling exile into a missionary exercise: ‘Heaven him exiled not, but sent him abroad, / To shew the matchlesse art of our great God / In framing matchless spirits, and to each / Of these strange Nations, / Patience preach.’ Charles here becomes a latter-day apostle or itinerant preacher of the reformed faith sent to spread true religion to benighted foreigners. Another writer opined: ‘Your Banishment, which Your Foes did designe / To cloud Your Virtues, made them brighter shine. / Thus Persecution did but more dispence / Throughout the World the Gospels influence.’44 A N E X I L E I N H I S OW N R E A L M One episode of Charles’s exile was especially important for his supporters to rewrite in a way that turned loss and sorrow into a triumphant achievement. This was his defeat at the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and his narrow escapes afterwards from Cromwell’s soldiers. The weeks Charles spent as a fugitive in his own realm came to be seen as a kind of second, internal exile. As one poet wrote, after the battle, Charles Resolved for us, Your [foreign] Exile to forgo, And something more than Exile know To suffer double banishment. First, from Your Country, th[e]n the place Where You had Covert got i’th’Chase, And by a Fate more grievous went.

‘Covert . . . i’th’Chase’ refers to when Charles took refuge from his enemies in the countryside, specifically the forest near Boscobel House in Shropshire. It was here that Charles famously hid in a hollow oak with the help of a few diehard s­ upporters. For the poet, this ‘double banishment’ was an experience more abject than exile in a foreign land—a type of unprecedented displacement no words could adequately convey (‘something more than Exile’).45 Charles’s enemies seized on his defeat and flight in side England as a nadir in his  campaign to seize the throne, and depicted these setbacks as essentially a 42  Quoted in Major, Writings of Exile, 93. 43  1 Henry IV, 5.2.66–67. 44  Edmund Waller, To the King, upon His Majesties Happy Return (London, 1660), 2. 45  Epinicia Carolina: or, An Essay upon the Return of His Sacred Majesty, Charles the Second (London, 1660), 14. In To The Kings Most Excellent Majesty, Martin Lluellyn also refers to Charles suffering a second banishment when already in exile: ‘where have then Thy carefull dayes been spent, / Whose very Exile suffer’d Banishment!’ (4).

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continuation of his mishaps in exile. For example, the illustrated satirical broadside, A Mad Design or a Description of the King of Scots Marching in His Disguise After the Rout at Worcester (1651), presented Charles in a series of postures that adapt the tropes of exile. In the vignette marked as ‘1’ (centre left) (Figure 4.1), Charles is linked with the exile’s characteristic ‘melancholy’ as he sits atop a globe and leads a straggling procession of supporters.46 The exile’s incessant physical movement—a symptom of his ceaseless, yet futile, search for a place in the world, and a reflection of his mental instability— is conveyed in the image of the revolving globe and the winding procession that is headed for ‘Roma’ (Vignette 1 and bottom left). It is also suggested in Vignette 6 that shows a panicked Charles fleeing the battle as a ‘Fool on horseback, riding backward, turning his face every which way in fear’, and in the revelation that ‘he went up and down London in a gentlewoman’s habit’. Charles the fugitive can find no rest in the broadside’s vision of a frenetic, topsy-turvy world. This carnivalesque world in which men, women, children, and animal–human antics mingle promiscuously alongside figures of misrule like the fool riding a hobby-horse, is also an unmistakably Catholic one. Mockery of it is conveyed not just in the image of a kneeling priest celebrating Mass at a high altar, but in the comparison between the fugitive Charles and a hermit on pilgrimage. In the early modern religious imagination, discourses of exile were intertwined with the figure of the hermit and the practice of pilgrimage. The exile’s physical separation from his homeland could readily be seen as an enforced version of the hermit’s self-imposed detachment from his surrounding community. But while the hermit stayed fixed in one place, the exile like the pilgrim was defined by his movement. In some literary treatments, the wanderings of the exile become a kind of penitential exercise or, a form of pilgrimage—one thinks of Spenser’s Red Cross knight. Historically some exiles used their banishment as an opportunity to embark on pilgrimage.47 When rewriting republican narratives of Charles’s ‘double banishment’ after Worcester, royalists repurposed the tropes of exile and other Catholic imagery evident in A Mad Design. In the woodcut, for example, Charles’s cross-dressing ‘in a gentlewoman’s habit’ is meant to arouse derisory laughter, whereas in royalist revisions of Charles’s flight, his use of disguise confirms his delightfully performative 46  Whoever orchestrated the publication of Mad Design clearly thought that its potential to damage Charles II’s credibility as a Protestant prince was worth the expense of commissioning a bespoke and one that seems never to have been reused. Robert Ibbotson, the printer of this broadside, had produced other works that connected the Stuarts with Catholicism before, including A Great and Bloody Plot (London, 1647), and several other illustrated single-sheet broadsides like The True Manner of the Crowning of Charles II King of Scotland (London, 1651). All these woodcut images, however, were either recycled or reused, or both. On Ibbitson, see Martin Dzelzainis, ‘1649’ in Raymond (ed.), Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, I, 613–16. For an overview of the visual conventions of antiCatholicism, see Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 47  The royalist Brian Duppa thought of himself as an anchorite, even though his exile was ‘internal’, sequestered as he was on his country estate: Marika Keblusek, ‘A Tortoise in the Shell: Royalist and Anglican Experience of Exile in the 1650s’, in Major (ed.), Literatures of Exile, 83–4; Judith Champ, The English Pilgrimage to Rome: A Dwelling for the Soul (Leominster: Gracewing, 2000).

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Figure 4.1.  A Mad Design: or a Description of the King of Scots Marching in His Disguise After the Rout at Worcester (1651). Lemon broadside 525. © Society of Antiquaries of London.

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self. John Danvers’s The Royal Oake (1660), for instance, tells how, to avoid capture, Charles dressed as a lowly servant and conducted menial tasks. When he is told by an unsuspecting maidservant to wind up a clock, he fumbles the job. The maid chastises him as a ‘clownish booby’, at which the king only smiles. For a time, Charles remains incognito, but when another servant recognizes him, the narrator interjects: ‘so easily will Majesty appear though veil’d in the utmost disguises’.48 Danvers rewrites the trope of the exile/fugitive’s unstable self as embodied in Mad Design’s ridiculous figure of the cross-dressed king, to ensure that Charles’s essential sacred identity remains unthreatened by whatever witty role he assumes. C AT H O L I C ROY A L I S T S A N D C H A R L E S ’ S INTERNAL EXILE Catholic royalists who remained in England during the interregnum faced a dilemma. If they made known their support of the Stuart cause they risked treason charges and confirmed popular suspicions that Charles’s was religiously disloyal. If they remained silent, however, they might seem ungrateful to, or insincere in their affection for, a restored monarchy. For some of Charles’s Catholic supporters in 1660, the memory of his ‘double banishment’ and plight as a fugitive in his own realm was an episode that served their interests perfectly. After all, it was Catholic gentry of Shropshire and their servants who had preserved Charles during this ‘second banishment’. In Boscobel or the History of His Sacred Majesty’s Most Miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester (1660), the Catholic author Thomas Blount gave a full account of Charles’s dangerous predicament after his defeat.49 Yet Blount does not reveal his own confessional sympathies or the Catholic identity of Charles’s protectors until late in the narrative, nor does he suggest that Charles is a sort of crypto-Catholic. On the contrary, the title’s reference to His Sacred Majesty’s Most Miraculous Preservation echoes John Foxe’s Protestant martyrology The Acts and Monuments of the Christian Religion or The Book of Martyrs, specifically its account of the Tudor Princess Elizabeth’s ‘miraculous preservation . . . from extreme calamitie and daunger of lyfe, in the tyme of Queene Mary her Sister’.50 For Blount’s Protestant readers at least, this allusion to Foxe’s work would endow 48  The Royal Oake, 3–4. In White-Ladies: or His Sacred Majesties Miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester (London, 1660), Charles has to be untaught and turned into a ‘Royal Clown’; but ‘Innate Royalty betrayes its worth in Rags and clouts’ (15). 49  On Blount, see Theodorus Cornelis Gerardus Bongaerts, The Correspondence of Thomas Blount (1618–1679), a Recusant Antiquary; with an Introductory Account of his Life and Writings (Amsterdam: Holland University Press, 1978), and Dorothy Turner, ‘Royalism, Romance, and History in Boscobel: or, The History of His Sacred Majesties Most Miraculous Preservation’, Prose Studies, 22 (1999), 59–70. Harold Weber writes that Blount’s Boscobel redefined ‘the king’s courage and heroism. Patience, not military prowess comes to describe Charles’s highest virtue . . . Charles “conquers” not as a military victor, but as a patient martyr’: ‘Representations of the King: Charles II and his Escape from Worcester’, Studies in Philology, 85 (1988), 489–509 at 501. 50  The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2011), 1570 edn, 12:2328, http//www.johnfoxe.org.

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Charles with a reassuringly reformed pedigree, while at the same time preparing the ground for Blount cautiously to reveal that the king owed his survival after Worcester to the kindness of loyal Catholics, albeit of a very different stamp from Mary Tudor.51 In fact, Blount only gradually reveals the Catholic agency responsible for Charles’s ‘miraculous preservation’. On page fourteen of this fifty-five page  pamphlet, Blount calls Boscobel ‘a recusant house’, an ideal place for a fugitive to hide because historically its residents, ‘(being accustomed to persecution and searches)’, possessed ‘the readiest means and safest contrivances to preserve [Charles]’,52 the ‘contrivance’ that ‘preserve[s]’ the king is one of the so-called priest holes—the secret spaces in chimneys, under floors, and behind walls—built to harbour Catholic missionary priests in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Wisely, it turned out, Blount does not reveal the whereabouts of these ‘secret places’ in the house in case they are needed in the future to protect co-religionists from arrest.53 Only on the final page does Blount acknowledge in a  periphrasis the Catholic identity of Charles’s helpers, when he writes that the king was ‘concealed by persons, for the most part, of that religion which has long suffered under an imputation (laid on them by some mistaken zealots) of disloyalty to their sovereign’.54 Blount builds his narrative toward this revelation, winning the reader’s admiration for the men and women of Boscobel before finally ‘outing’ them as Catholics but without using the word. It is hardly surprising to find Catholic royalists like Blount using his co-religionists’ discourses of flight, exile, and hiding to represent Charles’s tribulations during this period of internal exile. Blount had to proceed warily, though, not to alarm the  dual audience likely to read his work. On the one hand, Blount wanted to assure Catholic readers that the returned king would look more favourably upon them, now he had personally experienced the miseries of exclusion and persecution in his own realm. On the other hand, Blount did not want to scare Protestant readers into thinking that the king had formed a special bond with, or incurred a powerful debt to, his Catholic subjects who were now waiting eagerly to reap their reward. If Blount had sound religious reasons for presenting Charles’s post-Worcester adventures as a version of the Catholic exile or martyr narrative, writers of a reformed persuasion also exploited a Catholic lexicon in welcoming the return of the king. As we have seen, writers who defended Charles against charges of apostasy characterized his wanderings in exile as a ‘pilgrimage’. Two works had the words Royal Pilgrimage in their titles; another noted how after the Battle of Worcester, Charles ‘Pilgrimaged from one Sanctuary to another in England near the space of five weeks’.55 Arthur Brett’s poetic narrator imagined ‘trac[ing]’ 51 In Calendarium Catholicum (London, 1661), Blount differentiated his own loyalist brand of Catholicism from the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605—those ‘desperados of a religion that detests such treason’ (sig. A3r). 52  Thomas Blount, Boscobel or the History of His Sacred Majesty’s Most Miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester (London, 1660), 14. 53  Ibid., 42. 54  Ibid., 55. 55  The Royal Pilgrimage; Danvers, The Second Part of the Royal Oake, 17.

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Charles ‘in his pilgrimage’, while Martin Lluelyn declared that in Charles’s ‘tempted Pilgrimage, we find, / That you have changed your Aire, but not your Mind’.56 Other allusions to Catholic practices, objects, and beliefs occur in Protestant works addressed to or describing Charles. For example, r­ elics—those quintessentially Catholic artefacts—are frequently associated with Charles. In White-Ladies or His Sacred Majesties Miraculous Preservation After the Battle of Worcester (1660), one of the king’s followers is told to burn the recently shorn royal locks, but instead he saves them to give ‘to persons of honor who cabinet them up as devoutly as the most sacred relic of Rome; admirable indeed is the gracious loveliness of each curl; it’s true it’s black but comely’.57 Other works depict as holy and worthy of veneration, not portable objects, but places visited or traversed by the king. Henry Oxinden, for example, described the spot where Charles disembarked on his return to England as a ‘sacred place’, Oxinden instructed visitors to bow and kiss it just as pilgrims had once kissed the (less) holy footsteps of St Thomas à Becket.58 Perhaps, by the late seventeenth century, Protestant culture was comfortable accommodating the metaphorical use of once polemically-loaded Catholic practices and objects. By 1660, after all, supporters of the Stuarts had developed an elaborate cult of King Charles I as an Anglican martyr that drew explicitly on a  Catholic vocabulary of relics and devotion. However, Stuart Anglicans who claimed that objects soaked in the old king’s blood could work miracles rejected charges of Catholic superstition by arguing that only the sacred remains of an anointed king had such power, rather than the remains of all martyrs.59 After all,  even the unambiguously reformed bodies of Charles’s godly predecessors, Elizabeth I and James I, had possessed the miracle-working power of the royal touch. Likewise, as the work of John Bunyan illustrates, the pilgrim was no longer (and in fact had long ceased to be) an exclusively Catholic figure. From a reformed perspective, all men were pilgrims engaged on an inner quest for spiritual enlightenment.60 Further complicating Protestant writers’ use of a Catholic lexicon at Charles’s restoration was the satirical play they made on the name of the godly General Monck, whose presence in London at the head of a parliamentary army had paved the way for Charles’s safe return. Shortly after Charles’s return, John Collop reprised what was already a well-worn pun: To our conversion now Rome lay no claim Monck, Austine, Patrick nor Palladius name; Three more then Pagan Nations now we see Can by a Monck of ours Converted be.

56 Brett, Restauration, 15; Lluellyn, To The Kings Most Excellent Majesty, 7. 57  White-Ladies, 25. 58 Oxinden, Charls Triumphant, 16. 59  Andrew Lacey, The Cult of King Charles the Martyr (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003). 60  Hebrews 11:13: ‘These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth.’

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Christopher Highley Nay your three, Spain, France, Italy, are out done Though every Monck is there a Champion. One English Monck hath here converted more, Then all your Moncks perverted heretofore.61

If there were still fears that Charles had converted to Rome while in exile and that his restoration would mean the return of Catholic monkery, Collop wittily disarms them by celebrating the reforming work of ‘One English Monck’. Yet no matter how commonplace and apparently shorn of Catholic meaning words such as ‘relic’, ‘pilgrimage’, and ‘monk’ had become by the second half of the seventeenth century, they could not be entirely drained of confessional power. Alexandra Walsham argues that in post-Reformation English culture, relics, for example, gradually changed in significance from conduits of the miraculous into objects of wonder and historical curiosity. And yet during this long and complex process of secularization, there was always a ‘potential for slippage’ in the oscillation of relics ‘between souvenir and sacramental, sign and receptacle of spiritual virtue’.62 We cannot discount the possibility that a similar slippage occurred when English readers encountered accounts of Charles’s exile that referred to relics, pilgrimages, and sacred spaces, or that couched his experiences as a fugitive in terms evocative of Catholic sufferings. Readers of Stuart succession literature in 1659–60 were on the lookout for clues about Charles’s religious sympathies. When they examined works purporting to support his restoration that recycled tropes and images of exile associated with his Catholic subjects they may have been more confused than reassured about the king’s status as an upright Protestant Englishman. As Charles’s restoration began to seem inevitable, his supporters intensified their efforts to keep the spectre of a Catholic Stuart at bay. Not content with simply denying allegations of Charles’s apostacy, they turned them against republicans by arguing that the king alone could stop a Catholic takeover of the three kingdoms. Royalists claimed that Jesuits had infiltrated radical sects like the Quakers and were ready, in the event that Charles did not return, to carry out a long-planned popish plot.63 By lumping together all enemies of the Church of England, Charles’s allies warned that radicals like Lambert and Vane were ready to grant toleration to Catholics. Charles’s party also took practical measures at the king’s return to ensure his religious image was unsullied. Notably, his unapologetically Catholic mother Henrietta Maria was absent from the royal entourage when it crossed the channel. When she did return a few months later she stayed only briefly.64 61  John Collop, Itur Satyricum (London, 1660). For further discussion, see Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 10. 62  Alexandra Walsham, ‘Skeletons in the Cupboard: Relics after the English Reformation’, Past & Present, Supplement 5 (2010), 121–43 at 136. 63  Thackray, ‘Zion Undermined’, 40. 64  Some admirers of the queen mother noted her absence, including Abraham Cowley in Ode, upon the Blessed Restoration and Returne of His Sacred Majestie (London, 1660): Where’s now the Royall Mother, where, To take her mighty share In this so ravishing sight, And with the part she takes to add to the Delight?

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Charles publicized his reformed credentials in the months after his return and explained how he had spent his exile. In His Majesty’s Declaration Concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs (30 October 1660), Charles described the time he had encountered Dutch Presbyterians. They were, he proclaimed, men ‘full of affection to us, of zeal for the peace of the church and state and neither enemies (as they have been given out to be) of Episcopacy or Liturgy, but modestly to desire such alterations in either, as without shaking foundations, might best allay the present distempers’. But clearly, Charles could not convince all his subjects that the Church of England would be safe in Stuart hands. Charles recognized as much in the Declaration, chastising those ‘unquiet and restless spirits’ who continued to cast doubt on his allegiance to the Protestant faith.65 Future events, however, like his marriage to a foreign Catholic princess, Catherine of Braganza, only served to perpetuate these doubts.66 As long as Charles remained an exile from, or a fugitive within, his own kingdoms, he was vulnerable to his enemies’ narratives that questioned the pretender’s religious identity and intentions. Even Charles’s physical appearance became a cause for concern once he disappeared from public view. Therefore, on the eve of his repatriation, Charles told General Monck not to credit reports that he was ‘white haired and crooked’.67 Samuel Tuke’s A Character of Charles II (30 April 1660) was one of several works to appear at this time that ‘exposed’ Charles ‘to public view’, by righting misconceptions about the king’s looks. Tuke described Charles’s impressive height—‘somewhat Taller then the middle stature of Englishmen’—his ‘Quick and Sparkling eyes’, and ‘the Majesty of his Countenance’. He reserved special praise for the king’s shoulder-length curly hair ‘which he hath in great plenty’ and which ‘is of a shining Black, not frizzled. but so Naturally Curling into

Ah! why are Thou not here, Thou always Best, and now the Happiest Queen, To see our Joy, and with new Joy be seen? Also see, John Crouch, The Muses Joy for the Recovery of that Weeping Vine, Henretta Maria, the Most Illustrious Queen-Mother, and Her Royal Branches (London, 1661). John Thurloe was informed by a correspondent in Paris on 16 April 1660 that ‘The com. de Souvray tould him besids, that he had spoken freely to the queene, and let her know, that she ought not to thinke of going suddenly into England; and that those, who would advice her to it, or intertaine her with such hopes, were not her freinds; that length of time would be requisit for setling matters there.’ A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, ed. Thomas Birch, 7 vols (London, 1742), VII, 888–98. 65  His Majesties Declaration, 5–6. 66  John Milton reminded readers in The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth—his final appeal on behalf of the republic—that allowing Charles to return would in time mean a new ‘queen . . . in most likelihood outlandish and a Papist; besides a queen mother such alreadie’: John Milton, Selected Prose, ed. C. A. Patrides (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), 335. Also see Chapter 13 in this volume by Ian Archer (‘Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions’) on the strongly reformed character of London’s civic leaders at the Restoration and the ongoing attacks from city pulpits on ‘popery and prelacy’. 67  Quoted in Jenny Uglow, A Gambling Man: Charles II’s Restoration Game (London: Faber, 2009), 35. Also see Carolyn A. Edie, ‘News from Abroad: Advice to the People of England on the Eve of the Stuart Restoration’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University of Manchester Library, 67 (1984), 382–407.

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great Rings that it is a very comely Ornament’.68 For Tuke, Charles’s natural curls helped distance him from the artifice of the stereotypical cavalier, an association that the returning king was keen to downplay. Another admirer read Charles’s flowing hair as a sign of innate majesty, noting how the king’s ‘black shining locks naturally curled into great rings [that] hath been hitherto his ornament and crown’.69 Along with these descriptions, woodcut or engraved portraits of Charles appeared in pamphlets during the spring and summer of 1660. Blount’s Boscobel and the anonymous White-Ladies, for example, both feature flattering portraits opposite their title pages. In these royalist works, the physical image of the king works with the narrative of his survival after the battle of Worcester to create a new mythology for Charles. Indeed, once Charles was safely back on the throne he looked with a sort of nostalgia upon his period of internal exile, embellishing the story of his adventures, and encouraging others to write about them. By now Charles was in control of the narrative about his exile and was determined to use it for his own benefit. 68  Samuel Tuke, A Character of Charles II (London, 1660), 4. 69 David Lloyd, Eikon Basilike: or, The True Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majesty Charls the II (London, 1660), 6. For negative accounts of Charles’s hair and of his dark complexion in general, see Capp, England’s Culture Wars, 163.

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5 1685 and the Battle for Dutch Public Opinion Succession Literature from a Transnational Perspective Helmer Helmers The 1686 issue of the Dutch chronicle De Hollandse Mercurius, or The Dutch Mercury claimed to contain ‘the most important business of state that had occurred in the previous year in and around the United Netherlands’.1 It would soon have been clear to any reader that according to the editor of this influential publication, the royal succession in England outweighed all the other important business.2 Opening with an elaborate, spine-tingling description of Charles II’s death—based on an eye-witness account provided by the Dutch ambassador—this digest of the news of 1685 related in more than fifty pages the details of James II’s succession, his coronation ceremony, his relations with the Dutch government, and his dealings with the invasions by Charles II’s bastard son, the Duke of Monmouth, and Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyll. Based on a wide range of published material in Dutch—including detailed descriptions of James’s coronation procession and the coronation sermon preached by the Bishop of Ely, printed state documents, as well as histories of the rebellions of Monmouth and Argyll—the newsbook captured both the wealth of Dutch news sources on the succession of James II, and their tone. Neither the Mercurius’s avid interest in the British succession, nor the fact that its editor had so many sources at his disposal, should be surprising. Succession literature in general was a particularly mobile, international literary category, subject to all kinds of political translation and exchange that are beginning to be studied by scholars of early modern history.3 In contemporary confessionalized 1  This work is part of my research project ‘Transnational Publicity in Early Modern Europe’, which is financed by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. I would like to thank The Huntington Library for awarding me a short-term fellowship that enabled me to complete the research for this essay. 2  De Hollandse Mercurius, verhalende de voornaemste saken . . . die, in en omtrent de Vereenigde Nederlanden, en elders in Evropa, in het jaer 1685, zijn geschiet (Haarlem, 1686). 3  e.g. Henk van Nierop, ‘Eender en anders in de Nederlandse Opstand en de Franse godsdienstoorlogen’, in Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen (eds), Een wonder weerspiegeld. De Nederlandse Republiek in Europees perspectief (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2005), 25–52; Andrew Pettegree, ‘France and the Netherlands: The Interlocking of Two Religious Cultures in Print During the Era of the Religious Wars’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 84 (2004), 319–37; Hugh Dunthorne, ‘Anglo-Dutch Publishing During the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648)’, in Lotte Hellinga et al. (eds), The Bookshop of the World: The Role

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Europe, news of royal deaths and successions spread quickly since every succession could change the balance of power, and even relatively minor ones such as those in Jülich-Cleves or Mantua could hurl the great powers into war, and attract the attention of both the political elites and the wider public for years. In the Dutch Republic, whose religion, economy, and political culture were so deeply i­ nterwoven with England’s, Stuart successions in particular were accompanied by great outbursts of publicity.4 From a Dutch perspective, the deeply contested 1685 succession was especially important: not only because James’s Catholicism was disquieting to many Dutch Protestants, but also because Monmouth and Argyll launched their rebellions against James from Dutch soil, and because William III, Prince of Orange and stadholder of most Dutch provinces, was son-in-law to the new King of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet the Mercurius’s representation of James’s succession is also more problematic than the above suggests. Jason Peacey has recently shown that its publisher, the solidly Protestant Casteleyn Press, had been a major source for Whiggish ­publishers in the late 1670s, when Castelyn’s publications influenced newsletters such as the Impartial Protestant Mercury.5 For an independent, former Whiggish newspaper press, Casteleyn represented the succession of the Catholic James II in a remarkably positive way. While harping on Charles’s and James’s greatness, De Hollandse Mercurius portrayed Monmouth and Argyll not as champions of international Protestantism, but as treacherous rebels who had used the Protestant religion only as a cloak for their ambition. Casteleyn’s newsbook reflected a wider trend. As this chapter will show, after James’s succession, Dutch succession literature in general was uncritical of the new king, and dismissive of his opponents. For students of Anglo-Dutch relations and political publication in this period, this might come as a surprise, for the scholarship on this period quite understandably tends to highlight Dutch opposition to James’s reign. In the past decades historians have stressed that the Dutch Republic in the second half of the seventeenth century was a haven for nonconformist, republican, and anti-Stuart propaganda. Much attention has been given to the British exile community, which after the failure of the Rye House Plot in 1683 came to include both leading figures such as the Earl of Shaftesbury, Monmouth, of the Low Countries in the Book-Trade, 1473–1941 (Houten: Hes & De Graaf, 2001), 109–17; Keith L. Sprunger, Trumpets From the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Jason McElligott (ed.), Fear, Exclusion, and Revolution: Roger Morrice and Britain in the 1680s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 6–8; Helmer Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 4  On 1603, see Astrid Stilma, A King Translated: The Writings of King James VI & I and Their Interpretation in the Low Countries, 1593–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012); Rod Lyall, ‘The Marketing of James VI and I: Scotland, England and the Continental Book Trade’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002), 204–17. On 1625, see Helmer Helmers, ‘The Spanish Match and Anglo-Dutch Publicity’, in Valentina Caldari and Sara Wolfson (eds), Stuart Marriage Diplomacy: Dynastic Politics in their European Context, 1604–1630 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2018); on 1649 and 1660, see Helmers, Royalist Republic. 5  Jason Peacey, ‘Managing Dutch Advices: Abraham Casteleyn and the English Government, 1660–1681’, Media History, 22 (2016), 421–37. I thank Jason Peacey for sharing his manuscript with me.

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and Argyll, as well as prominent Whig authors such as John Locke, Robert Ferguson, and John Partridge.6 The fact that this community was allowed to organize and propagate opposition to the Crown in the cities in Holland from the Exclusion Crisis onwards seems to confirm this image.7 This is also in line with studies of Williamite propaganda during the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, which have emphasized how Dutch print propagated the stadholder’s image as the defender of the Protestant religion, and the enemy of arbitrary rule.8 In the light of this scholarship, one would have expected Protestant Dutch publishers such as Casteleyn to have opposed rather than glorified James, and to have been less dismissive about Monmouth and Argyll, whose 1685 rebellions, after all, were fought in the name of Protestantism and liberty as much as the Dutch invasion of England three years later. The Dutch pro-Stuart publicity of 1685 and 1686 epitomized by Casteleyn’s chronicle has never been noted. Yet it is only by recognizing the contrast between this pivotal moment in Anglo-Dutch relations and what came before and after that we can gain better insights into the entanglements of political print and Anglo-Dutch relations that would eventually help to shape the outpouring of Anglo-Dutch succession literature in 1688–9. For publications such as De Hollandtsche Mercurius highlight the fact that the forces shaping international succession literature were too complex to be explained by easy dichotomies derived from contemporary propaganda, such as Protestant vs Catholic, tyranny vs liberty, or monarchy vs republic. This chapter argues that the key to understanding the international circulation of succession literature is to recognize that it was a form of diplomacy, and as such, subject to a complex interplay of political interests and influences.9 It shows that the exile propaganda generated by dissenter presses and exiled Whigs initiated a 6 For instance, Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Richard Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Cory Cotter, ‘Anglo-Dutch Dissent: British Dissenters in the Netherlands, 1662–88’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Virginia, 2011). 7  Cotter, ‘Anglo-Dutch Dissent’; Ginny Gardner, The Scottish Exile Community in the Netherlands, 1660–1690 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2004); Geoffrey Nuttall, ‘English Dissenters in the Netherlands, 1640–1689’, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis, 59 (1978), 37–54; John Walker, ‘The English Exiles in Holland During the Reigns of Charles II and James II’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (1948), 111–25. 8  On Williamite propaganda, see Tony Claydon, ‘William’s Declaration of Reasons and the Glorious Revolution’, The Historical Journal, 39 (1996), 87–108; Jonathan Israel, ‘Propaganda in the Making of the Glorious Revolution’, in Susan Roach (ed.), Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries (London: The British Library, 1991), 167–77; Richard Velthuizen, ‘De verovering verslagen: publieke reacties en propaganda in de Engelse en Hollandse pamfletliteratuur tijdens de Glorious Revolution 1688–1689’, Jaarboek voor Nederlandse Boekgeschiedenis, 18 (2011), 97–114; Arie F. Th. van Deursen, De hartslag van het leven: Studies over de Republiek der Verenigde Nederlanden (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), 138–51; Emma Bergin, ‘Defending the True Faith: Religious Themes in Dutch Pamphlets on England, 1688–1689’, in David Onnekink (ed.), War and Religion After Westphalia, 1648–1713 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 217–46; Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Press and Parliament in the Revolution of 1689’, The Historical Journal, 20 (1977), 545–67. 9  Cf. Helmer Helmers, ‘Public Diplomacy in Early Modern Europe: Towards a New History of News’, Media History, 22 (2016), 401–20.

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British propaganda battle in the Dutch Republic calculated to shape Dutch opinion on the succession and through it Dutch foreign policy.10 British agents, then, sought to manage Anglo-Dutch relationships through public opinion. Analysis of this British battle for foreign support, the succession publications it generated, and the responses it elicited, reveals that authorities allowed this battle to continue, and even stimulated it, as long as the Dutch remained divided on foreign policy. It was the position of the stadholder, the future King of England William III, which eventually caused the change. As soon as James’s Crown was secure, and William openly supported his father-in-law, the majority of succession texts soon conformed to the official line established by James’s agents. T H E O P P O S I T I O N P R E S S , T H E E XC LU S I O N C R I S I S , AND ENGLISH DIPLOMACY Throughout the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic offered refuge to British opposition presses. Especially in the printing centres of Amsterdam, Leiden, and The Hague, exiled English and Scottish printers and authors of varying social and ideological backgrounds were allowed to publish material challenging the policies of governments in Britain.11 The political and religious affiliations of such exiles could vary. The Puritan press has received most scholarly interest, notably by Keith Sprunger.12 From the 1620s onwards, English Puritans such as Thomas Scott cooperated with their Dutch co-religionists in opposing the policies of James I and Charles I in published propaganda aimed at English, Scottish, and Dutch audiences simultaneously. Although at times such ventures were facilitated and even supported by the Dutch authorities, it was not only the Puritans who profited from the Dutch ‘bookshop of the world’.13 In the 1650s, when many Puritan printers had returned to England, the royalist press-in-exile similarly made use of Dutch hospitality and protection. In these years, the Dutch Republic became, in the words of George Downing, the ‘nursery’ of cavalierism.14 Rather than being the centre of militant Protestant propaganda, the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century developed into Britain’s ‘countersphere’: the place where literature repressed in England and Scotland was produced both for British and continental publics, and where exiled Brits could appeal to local governments for assistance.15 10  See also Jason Peacey, ‘ “My Friend the Gazeteer”: Diplomacy and News in Seventeenth-Century Europe’, in Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham (eds), News Networks in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 420–42; Peacey, ‘Managing Dutch Advices’. 11  Paul Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers bij de beurs: de geschiedenis van de Amsterdamse boekhandels Bruyning en Swart, 1637–1724 (Amsterdam: Holland Universiteitspers, 1987); Marika Keblusek, Boeken in de Hofstad. Haagse boekcultuur in de Gouden Eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997). See also Marika Keblusek, ‘The Exile Experience: Royalist and Anglican Book Culture in the Low Countries, 1640–1660’, in Hellinga et al. (eds) The Bookshop of the World, 151–8. 12 Sprunger, Trumpets From the Tower. 13  The phrase used in Hellinga et al. (eds) The Bookshop of the World. 14  Cited in Jonathan Scott, ‘ “Good Night Amsterdam”: Sir George Downing and Anglo-Dutch Statebuilding’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 334–56 at 345. 15  See Helmers, Royalist Republic, 23–61.

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The tide turned again after the Restoration. When royalist printers such as Samuel Browne in the Hague and John Crosse in Amsterdam returned to England and stopped printing books for Dutch audiences, they were replaced by newly exiled dissenter presses and bookshops, such as those of John Starkey, Samuel Harris, and Francis Smith. An especially prominent centre of anti-Stuart propaganda in this period was the bookshop of Steven Swart, whose case has been studied extensively by Paul Hoftijzer.16 Swart had started his career in 1661 with printing a conciliatory work of succession literature (a Dutch translation of John Corbet’s Interest of England ), but his press became radicalized in the 1670s, and his shop turned into a hub for oppositional printing.17 Importantly, Swart not only produced propaganda in English to be shipped across the Channel, but also played a crucial role in publicizing the Exclusion Crisis in Dutch. Remaining in regular correspondence with both English printers and the opposition, printers such as Swart acted as information brokers, and regularly published texts in translation for Dutch audiences. The opposition in the late 1670s and early 1680s, then, targeted both English and Dutch vernacular audiences, precisely as the Covenanters had done in the late 1630s and the royalists in the 1650s. As more prominent Whig politicians, such as Shaftesbury and Argyll, arrived in Holland in the early 1680s, Anglo-Dutch exchange of political information only increased. As the exiles maintained in correspondence with their friends in England and Scotland, they were ideally placed to address publics on both sides of the Channel in print. It is suggestive, in this context, that when Gilbert Burnet settled in the Dutch Republic in the later 1680s, Richard White, Marquis d’Albeville, reported that he ‘hath two printers and two translators at wages’.18 For Burnet, at least, printing seemed an inherent part of political exile. During and directly after the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81, most Dutch p ­ ublicity supported the exclusion of the Catholic James, Duke of York. This can be seen especially when comparing the popularity of Dutch translations of exclusionist literature. Exclusionist addresses to the king were regularly reported in Dutchlanguage corantos, and frequently translated throughout the years 1678–81.19 Shaftesbury’s vehement speeches in Parliament were translated, as were historicizing apologies for James’s exclusion such as John Somers’s Whiggish Brief History of

16 Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers. 17  Swart regularly asked his contacts in England to send ‘anything worth sending nieuwly printed’. 18  Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 154. 19  Reports on addresses can be found, for instance, in the Amsterdamsche Courant (23 March 1673; 22 April 1677; 12 April 1678) and the Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant (15 June 1677; 17 February 1678; 19 February 1678; 24 February 1678; 2 June 1678; 7 January 1681). Translations include: Het addres van’t parlement van Engelandt aen sijn koninglijcke majesteyt . . . Gedaen den 25 may, oude stijl, 1677 (Amsterdam, 1677); Willem P. C. Knuttel, Catalogus van de pamfletten-verzameling berustende in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Utrecht: HES, 1978), no. 11655 [hereafter Knuttel]. Een aanspraak en addres, van’t volck van Engelandt aan de stadt Londen; tot bewaaring van zijn majesteyts persoon . . . en van de protestantsche religie (Utrecht, 1679); Knuttel 11703. Het tweede ootmoedigh addres van het Huys der Gemeente, gepresenteert aen sijn majesteyt, op dingsdag den 21/31 december, 1680 (London, 1680).

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the Succession.20 ‘Men, generally, at present, busy themselves in discoursing about the succession’ was its appropriate first sentence, and it was equally appropriate for those who read the Dutch translation across the Channel.21 Throughout the Exclusion Crisis, Dutch printers and newsmakers, including Abraham Casteleyn, supported the Whig Exclusionists. Partly as a result of this widespread publicity on the English succession, Dutch public opinion showed itself to be deeply worried by the possibility of a Catholic succeeding to the English throne. When Charles II’s envoy Thomas Chudleigh wrote of the ‘Great and surprising newes of the Dukes return to the Church of England’, in 1683, the Dutch were ecstatic, and Chudleigh predicted that ‘it will cause bonfires when it is confirmed’—which of course it was not.22 The proliferation of Dutch exclusionist literature, and its reverberation amongst Dutch audiences, greatly aggravated the English government. The appointment of Robert Plott and William Carr as special envoys in Holland was designed to secure greater control over the foreign press.23 In the early 1680s, these Stuart envoys, supported by ambassador Chudleigh, monitored Dutch print closely and were outraged by all ‘the impudent & horrid libell[s]’, as Chudleigh called them, which he diligently traced and sent home to his masters. Chudleigh was especially concerned by the news printed in the periodical press, the Dutch corantos, which he promised carefully to observe, possibly because they also circulated internationally.24 One reason for the English government’s agents’ veritable obsession with the negative publicity in Holland was the fact that they deemed it dishonourable for the king of England. In 1681, William Carr, the influential consul of the English merchant community in the Dutch republic,25 complained that: By yesterdayes post came to Mr. Swarts shopp 6 or 7 libells and seditious papers here exposed to view, the which makes some Dutch people conclude that either the King hath no freinds, or power to stope such papers comeing over. [They] do great hurt & I shall not be silent so long as I see them.26

Carr was not only concerned about the effect such publications might have on the Dutch, but also worried about their wider dissemination, noting anxiously that they were ‘sent from Amsterdam into Germanie’. The international reputation of the Stuarts was clearly at stake, and to salvage it, the English representatives were constantly trying to have the opposition’s literature suppressed. 20  Knuttel 11765. Een korte historie van de Successie, ofte Erffenis tot de Croon. Gecollecteert uyt de Cronyken . . . tot satisfactie van de graeve van H. Getranslateert nae het Engelsch origineel (1681). 21  Somers used historical precedents to reassure his readers that Parliament’s altering the succession was not a revolutionary action, but a way of proceeding sanctioned by ancient rights going back to Saxon times. 22  Frederick Arnold Middlebush (ed.), The Dispatches of Thomas Plott (1681–1682) and Thomas Chudleigh (1682–1685), English Envoys at The Hague (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1926), 7. 23  Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis: 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 159. 24 Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 142. 25  Amongst others, Carr had access to the Great Pensionary of Holland, Caspar Fagel. 26  Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 213.

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Managing censorship in the Dutch Republic, however, was difficult. Even when foreign diplomats managed to obtain a ban, it was not always easy to put it into effect due to the country’s decentralized structure of government: censorship was enforced locally and there were often cities with good reasons to allow the printing and distribution of banned texts to continue. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, Charles II’s representatives did not even succeed in getting the ban. The central authorities were at this point sympathetic to the exiles and only counselled the booksellers not to sell their pamphlets.27 As a result of the inadequate support of the Dutch authorities, Carr and Chudleigh took matters into their own hands both by seeking to prevent the distribution of  ‘seditious’ prints and by producing their own Dutch-language propaganda. Carr set up his private counter-propaganda office ‘to undeceive the Amsterdammers from beleiving our English phanaticks’. He was similarly aware of the wider European picture.28 ‘On friday last’, he wrote about one of the ­pamphlets he published, ‘I received from a freind . . . His Majesties declaration, the which I presently got translated into Dutch, and printed 500 of them and dispersed amongst the Magistrates, and likewise gave them unto the boys to cry upon the Dam, the which hath exceedingly taken amongst the Dutch.’ Evidently pleased with himself, and keen to shape opinion elsewhere on the continent as well, Carr proceeded to send these pamphlets on to ‘Hambrugh, denmark, Sweed, Brandenburgh and Hedelburgh, and some as farr as Italy, hoping that it may meet with the like sucksess [sic] in these parts’.29 In the same period, he also published Dutch translations of An Answer to Lord Shaftesbury’s Speech and The Loyall Adress of the Leftenants & Other Loyall Subjects in London. In addition to publishing translations of government propaganda, the king’s representatives also became more aggressive towards both booksellers and exiles. As Mark Knights observed, Plott gave ‘a very sharp reprimande’ to the Rotterdam Gazette in November 1680 for reporting that the affairs of England were ‘in such confusion that a revolt was daily expected’.30 Carr adopted similar tactics to curb the Haarlem Courant. In the spring of 1681 Carr reprimanded Casteleyn for printing news detrimental to the king in his coranto, the Haarlemsche Courant. Indeed, during the Exclusion Crisis, Jason Peacey has shown, Casteleyn’s publications had been so Whiggish that the ‘Whig newspapers that began to emerge after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 were using Casteleyn's newspaper as one of their main sources.’31 Carr told Casteleyn that he would have to face severe repercussions if he continued to publish any more ‘lies’ about Charles II. This may have played a role in persuading Casteleyn to be more positive about James thereafter. As Peacey 27  Joop Koopmans, ‘Dutch Censorship in Relation to Foreign Contacts’, in Hanno Brand (ed.), Trade, Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange: Continuity and Change in the North Sea Area and the Baltic, c.1350–1750 (Hilversum: Verloren, 2005), 220–37 at 227. 28  Cited in Paul Hoftijzer, ‘ “Such Onely as a Very Honest, Loyall, and Active: English Spies in the Low Countries, 1660–1688”: English Spies in the Low Countries, 1660–1688’, in Cecil C. Barfoot and Paul Hoftijzer (eds), Fabrics and Fabrications: The Myth and Making of William and Mary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 73–96 at 85. 29  Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 213. 30 Knights, Politics and Opinion, 159. 31  Peacey, ‘Managing Dutch Advices’.

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noted, Thomas Chudleigh later ‘reassured Secretary Jenkins that he had not “met with anything worthy of complaint” in recent issues of the Haarlem Courant, whose editor “had changed his note and was become one of the kindest relators of our affairs by means of a sharp rebuke that he received some time ago”’.32 The efficacy of Carr’s threats was undoubtedly aided by an important change in Dutch politics: the Dutch stadholder distanced himself from the Exclusionists. As Mark Knights has shown, William III had supported Parliament in 1678–80, even to the point of embarking on a publicity campaign in favour of James’s exclusion. In this period, it was clearly in William’s interest to support the exclusion of James in favour of his daughter Mary, William’s wife. Not only would this enhance his own position, it would also further his foreign policy, which was aimed at building an international coalition against France. The Dutch ambassador, Aernout van Citters, therefore worked together with both the Spanish ambassador Ronquilo and the pro-Orange English ambassador Henry Sidney, to promote exclusion in print.33 No wonder that before 1681, the stadholder was hardly inclined to suppress exclusionist literature in the Dutch Republic; he published it himself. This situation changed in March 1681, when Charles dismissed the Oxford Parliament. William now had to be careful not to antagonize his uncle, and from this point onwards, he kept his distance from the opposition. Wout Troost has pointed out that William now started to play a waiting game, not showing any particular favours towards any party. The stadholder acted his part admirably. When he received Monmouth with great honours in 1683, for example, English and Scottish Whig exiles had great expectations of support, while William claimed he only treated Monmouth in this way because he was the natural son of the king of England. Although James later suspected that William had supported Monmouth’s rebellion, this is highly unlikely, if only because Monmouth’s success would have been fatal to Mary’s chances to ever reign in England.34 Given the uncertain developments and the wide support the Whigs enjoyed amongst the stadholder’s Protestant allies at home, it was also in William’s interest to wait and equivocate. The subtle shift of the stadholder’s position in March 1681 had the desired effect. It probably convinced Casteleyn to change his tune at exactly this moment: in addition to facing Carr’s threats, the publisher now lacked encouragement from the Prince, which was worth a lot in the Orangist city of Haarlem. It is no coincidence that the greatest success of the English envoys’ bullying campaign came in another Orangist city, Leiden, where Chudleigh successfully kidnapped the Rye House conspirator Sir Thomas Armstrong with the assistance of the local magistrate in June 1684.35

32  The National Archives, SP 84/217, fol. 84. 33 Knights, Politics and Opinion, 90. 34  Steven N. Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 113–14; Wout Troost, ‘Willem III en de Exclusion Crisis, 1679–1681’, BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review, 107 (1992), 28–46. 35  Roderick Clayton, ‘Chudleigh, Thomas (b. 1649/50, d. in or after 1702?)’, diplomat, Oxford Dic­ tionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128. 001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5384.

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These small triumphs did little to change public opinion, however. Opposition pamphleteers kept inveighing against the Stuart government in popular print and managed to make Chudleigh’s success backfire by publishing the scaffold speeches of the Rye House plotters Armstrong, Algernon Sidney, and William Russel, which generated a great deal of sympathy.36 The fates of these men could not but reflect badly on Charles’s government. English representatives could not allow such sentiments to remain unopposed. An answer to Russel’s scaffold oration was published in Dutch to offset the damage, with a dedication to Chudleigh in English, in which the translator outlined his motivations: If the judgement of the Communaulty here in Holland, had been left in tranquility . . . it wer unnecessarij for me, to translate the following animadversions . . . but since that meny men here are of opinion, that the Lord Russel had of himself composed that speech (which is very much to be doubted) . . . that he was altogether innocent . . . and . . . that his Judges dealt with him . . . through passion and wickked design . . . I could not omit . . . to vindicate the foresaid proceedings . . . and to undeceive the people, by letting them see in the Hollandts-Tongue, the equity of the case.37

To this translator, who certainly expected to be rewarded by Chudleigh, and might have been acting on his orders, Dutch opinion clearly mattered. Because the ‘fanatical press’ was appealing to it with great success, the king’s cause needed to be vindicated in public. Again, the wider European audience was not forgotten, since the translator added that he was ‘ready upon your desire, to put the same, alsoo in Latin and French; That not onely we in this our Contrey, but the whole Christian World, may be convinced of the . . . righteousnesse of their Sentence.’38 Despite the English envoys’ strenuous efforts and the changed attitude of the Prince of Orange, however, most Dutch publications continued to favour the Whig opposition to James’s succession. Armstrong’s case in particular caused ­popular outrage. In one of the Dutch pamphlet dialogues written in response to his death, the ghost of the ‘honest’ Armstrong complained to a former hero of the Dutch Revolt, the Leiden burgomaster Pieter Adriaansz van der Werff, that he had been betrayed to a ‘tyrannous court’ by the Leiden magistrates, who had handed him over to the English ambassador without considering the fact that he had been born in the Dutch Republic. The iconic Dutchman agreed with the English plotter that Armstrong had been maltreated and lamented the fact that the Dutch had apparently lost the spirit of freedom with which they had won their independence from Spanish tyranny in his day.39 The Rye House plotters had become Dutch popular martyrs (Armstrong had indeed been born in Leiden), or at least were defended as such. More importantly, regarding the succession, the pamphlet suggested an affinity between Armstrong and the valiant Dutch leader. The implication clearly was 36  De laetste aenspraeck, van den Lord Russel, door hem aen de sherriffs overgelevert ter plaetse van de executie op den 21 en 31 july 1683 (1683); Knuttel 11838. Colonel Sidneys Oratie. 37  Knuttel 11839. Antwoordt op de oratie van den lord Russel (1683), sig. A2v. 38  Ibid., sig. A3r. 39  Knuttel 11917. De klaagende geest van Thomas Armstrong, aan het eerlijk gebeente van den zaligen burgermeester Johan vander Werf (1684).

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that the conspiracy against the state in which Armstrong had been involved—a radical option which few Whigs supported—was in fact fully in line with the Dutch spirit opposing popery and royal tyranny. Another particularly successful publication aiming to stigmatize the Stuarts’ arbitrary rule was Robert Ferguson’s pamphlet arguing that Arthur Cappell, Earl of Essex, had been murdered in the Tower of London in the summer of 1683. A Dutch translation of this pamphlet was widely disseminated, both in 1683 and in the following years. According to one report, Monmouth’s servants handed them out in the stadholder’s court.40 While they may not have succeeded in winning over the Prince of Orange to the rebels’ cause, Monmouth’s propaganda did convince many other Dutchmen, before James’s succession was a fact. After that, however, things soon changed. THE SUCCESSION, AMSTERDAM, AND THE MAKING OF THE REBELLION News of James’s accession took the Dutch Republic by surprise. Because extreme frost had caused the North Sea harbours to freeze over, the story of Charles II’s short illness and death and his brother’s succession reached the continent all at once in mid-February, and Dutch audiences were suddenly confronted with a new and unexpected reality that had a profound influence on the Dutch printed media.41 After James’s succession, William felt compelled to cooperate with his father-in-law. Chudleigh’s successor, Bevil Skelton, put much effort into broadcasting the good relations between the new monarch, the stadholder, and the States General. James’s assurances of friendship and goodwill towards the Dutch Republic were widely disseminated. And when the States responded by sending James the English and Scottish regiments serving in the Dutch army to fight Monmouth and Argyll, James’s note of thanks, too, was published in Dutch. Skelton evidently meant to emphasize that the Dutch authorities had denounced Monmouth and worked in harmony with the Catholic king.42 The tide in the Dutch press was indeed turning in his favour. One anonymous Dutch author published a pamphlet named after a famous 1641 Protestant pamphlet, British Lightning, arguing that James was the rightful monarch supported by the States General and the stadholder, and that Dutchmen supporting Monmouth were unpatriotic.43 Such criticisms were new, and appear to have been stimulated by the succession. The fact that Monmouth and Argyll were able to continue preparing and promoting their invasions was mainly owing to the city of Amsterdam. In contrast to the stadholder, Amsterdam favoured a settlement with France and steered an anti-English course. With the support of the French ambassador, the city embarked on a public 40 Knuttel 11910. Robert Ferguson, Ondersoek en ontdekking van de Grouwsame moord, began tegens den gewesen grave van Essex (Amsterdam, 1684); Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 142. 41  Gilbert Burnet, Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time, 2 vols (London, 1818), II, 244. 42  Knuttel 12346. Missive van sijn Koninklyke Majesteyt (s.n., 1685). 43  Knuttel 12362. Den Brittannischen Blixem (s.n., 1685).

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spat with the prince about foreign policy that started in 1683 and c­ ontinued well into 1685.44 Amsterdam, under the formidable Coenraad van Beuningen, feared English economic competition more than anything.45 A 1684 resolution of the city council recognized that Amsterdam’s advantage over London was ‘artificial’, and that without action being taken the city would lose out to London.46 The burgomasters were keen to support a rebellion, since even if its chances of success were slight, it would create political instability in England that would greatly harm English trade. As an extra benefit, it might weaken the domestic position of William III.47 Throughout the early 1680s, therefore, Amsterdam had tacitly aided the exiled English and Scottish rebels. It welcomed large numbers of exiles who fled to Holland, and did all it could to protect them from prosecution. Various political exiles, including Shaftesbury, were granted poorterschap (i.e. became legal citizens of the city), which was a way to circumvent the Anglo-Dutch treaty stipulating the mutual extradition of rebels.48 The English ambassador, Chudleigh’s successor Skelton, remarked during Monmouth’s rebellion that ‘there are noe greater villaynes upon earth then the most part of the inhabitants of [Amsterdam], & they are as inveterate ennemeyes to his Majestie as either Arguil or Monmouth’.49 When James had become king, the city ignored both James’s request and the orders from The Hague to arrest the English and Scottish rebels, including Argyll, Ferguson, Monmouth, and the Rye House plotter Richard Rumbold.50 Skelton compiled a long list of names of the ‘most notorious . . . rebellious subjects’, which was printed and disseminated amongst Dutch officials.51 Yet at every turn, Amsterdam frustrated his attempts to stop the rebels. Indeed, Argyll at his trial even confessed that the ‘Lords’ of Amsterdam had incited him to commence his rebellion, complaining that they had not supported him sufficiently afterwards.52 Even if Amsterdam’s backing was inadequate materially, it was vital to the ­opposition press. As long as the burgomasters espoused the rebel cause, Amsterdam, the capital of European print, allowed the opposition to publish whatever they liked. It was largely in Amsterdam, therefore, that Monmouth and Argyll could continue to build on the foundation laid by the dissenter press and the exclusionist publicity of the previous five years even when the stadholder opposed them.53 In the first months of 1685, the Amsterdam printing presses facilitated Monmouth’s and Argyll’s 44  Martinus Franken, Coenraad van Beuningens politieke en diplomatieke activiteiten in de jaren 1667–1684 (Groningen: Wolters, 1936), 220–38. 45  Jonathan Israel, ‘England, the Dutch, and the Struggle for Mastery of World Trade’, in Dale Hoak and Mordechai Feingold (eds), The World of William and Mary: Anglo-Dutch Perspectives on the Revolution of 1688–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 75–86 at 75–6. 46 Franken, Coenraad van Beuningen, 13. 47  Piet Muller, ‘Een Brandenburgsche zending in Nederland in 1685’, Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidskunde, 2 (1870), 77–109. 48  On Shaftesbury in the Dutch Republic, see Kenneth Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 727–33. 49  Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse boekverkopers, 145. 50  J. Z. Kannegieter, ‘Amsterdam betrokken bij de invallen van Argyll aen Monmouth’, Bijdragen voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidskunde, 6 (1927), 79–100 at 82. 51  Cotter, ‘Anglo-Dutch Dissent’, 121. 52  Kannegieter, ‘Amsterdam’, 99. 53  On Monmouth’s Rebellion, see Robin Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1985).

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campaigns to ‘educate’ the Dutch. Given their need for money and cooperative authorities, this vernacular audience was vital to their success. Yet Monmouth’s and Argyll’s propaganda aimed at an international audience as well as images and translations were an integral part of their publishing efforts. Various engraved portraits of Argyll and Monmouth, made by Dutch artists, were printed in Amsterdam, some with English captions, others with captions in Dutch, or French (Figure 5.1). The capacity of such pictures to influence public opinion should not be underestimated. Portraying the revolutionaries as noble, trustworthy men, they were in fact an essential part of the campaign. The more provocative publications, however, were texts, including the reprint of Ferguson’s Essex pamphlet. Monmouth’s propaganda campaign culminated with the publication of his Declaration, which was largely written by Ferguson. Given the need for speed, it was printed both by Jacob van der Velde (a known supporter of Argyll and ‘a ­notorious bookseller for the rebels’ interest’) and other Amsterdam printers.54 Like so many declarations of war and apologies for rebellions, Monmouth’s declaration addressed a variety of vernacular audiences.55 The pamphlet appeared in English, Dutch, French, and German editions which were disseminated amongst the citizens in Holland, in multilingual London, as well as amongst European elites.56 Monmouth’s Declaration has had a rather bad press.57 Besides the charges of Catholicism and arbitrary government, it also contained the wild allegation that James had murdered his brother. Yet both contemporaries and modern scholars who have denounced Monmouth’s efforts to win popular support argued with hindsight, after James had struck down rebellion, and the Declaration can hardly be blamed for Monmouth’s failure. It continued the line of Ferguson’s earlier rebel propaganda that had in fact met with wide approval before, and there are few indications that it was ill-received by the Dutch public. Murder accusations, as the recent work of Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell has shown, were not uncommon in succession disputes, and may not have seemed as outrageous to ­contemporaries as modern commentators have thought.58 Indeed, the fact that Skelton took the trouble of publishing a Dutch refutation (‘so that foreigners lacking knowledge of our affairs and government, will not be easily misled’) is an indication that it was at least expected to harm the Stuart cause.59 It was only after the rebels’ defeat was all but certain that Dutch authorities took belated action. On 26 June, shortly before Argyll’s execution, the Amsterdam ­burgomasters ceased their opposition to the Prince of Orange and sent groveling apologies to James II, effectively admitting prior support of the rebellion.60 54 Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, 462. 55 On this genre, see Konrad Repgen, ‘Kriegslegitimationen in Alteuropa: Entwurf einer historischen Typologie’, Historische Zeitschrift, 241 (1985), 27–49. 56  Knuttel 12359. Historie van de op ende onderganck der Rebellie, in de koninckrijcken van Engeland en van Schotland, in de maenden van mey, juny en july, in den jare 1685 (s.l.: s.n., 1685), sig. B1r. 57  See, for instance, Pincus, 1688, 13–14. 58  Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). See also Chapter 2 in this volume by Alastair Bellany, ‘Writing the King’s Death: The Case of James I’. 59  Knuttel 12336. Aanmerkingen, 2. 60  Kannegieter, ‘Amsterdam’, 99.

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Figure 5.1.  Adriaen Haelwegh, Portrait of Arghibald, Graaf van Argyl (c.1685). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

A week later, William issued a ban on Monmouth’s Declaration, condemning its ‘outrageous expressions and harmful and detestable theses’. In order to prevent people claiming to be ignorant of the ban, William ordered that it should be read out and posted throughout Holland and Zealand after the ringing of bells, which may be an indication of the Declaration’s success more than anything

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else.61 Faced with the inevitable, William finally showed his hand, and publicly endorsed his father-in-law. With no opposition left at home, Dutch censorship was finally operational. T H E P RO - S T U A RT M O M E N T After James’s victory over Monmouth, the king’s representatives could argue from a position of strength. The English government could now impress its version of recent succession history upon a Dutch audience. James’s ambassador Skelton lost no time emphasizing James’s unassailable right to the throne and asserting that his Catholicism posed no danger to the Dutch state. He published a pamphlet in which he rhetorically asked his Dutch audience whether they preferred the king to ‘feign and wear the liverey of Reformation’ or to be an honest believer and a trustworthy ally.62 Skelton felt so self-assured that he even arranged the translation and publication of the letters of Charles II and James’s first wife, Anne Hyde, in which they explained their conversion to Catholicism.63 It is questionable whether emphasizing the deep-rooted Catholicism of the Stuart family did James II’s reputation in the Dutch Republic much good, but the publication was probably meant to be a sign of confidence as much as anything else. Skelton firmly took control of the Dutch press, acting as one of Casteleyn’s informers, and becoming a public figure himself.64 Partly due to his influence, the Dutch press kept reiterating Skelton’s two most important points: James’s right to the throne, and his sincere and moderate Catholicism. A recurring theme in the discourse on the Stuarts’ right to the throne was the history of the Civil Wars, which surfaced numerous times in Dutch succession publicity of 1685–6. One notable example is the engraving entitled Stuart’s Royal House Oppressed and by Disasters Glorified, printed by the Catholic Amsterdam printer Adriaan Schonebeeck (Figure 5.2). Schonebeeck placed the rebellion in a providential light, showing how the Stuarts’ divine right had allowed them to survive the upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s with God’s help. Pride of place was given to the martyrdom of Charles I, whose bust in the background is surrounded by a nimbus of divine light. The personal histories of his three sons, displayed in the foreground, were then retold to show that God had upheld the right of the House of Stuart and punished their opponents. Monmouth, it concluded, ‘has 61  Van Alphen 448. [Untitled Placard against Monmouth’s Declaration] (The Hague, 1685). 62  Knuttel 12336. Aanmerkingen, 2. 63  Knuttel 12319. Copye, van twee geschriften geschreven door wylen koning Karel de II (s.l.: s.n. 1686). Knuttel 12487. Copye van een seecker papier, geschreven door de laetst gewesene hertoginne van Yorck (1686). On James’s involvement in publishing the copies of the papers of Charles II and Anne Hyde, see Frans Korsten, ‘The Religious Controversy under James II: A Collection of Tracts and Pamphlets at Nijmegen University Library’, LIAS 16 (1989), 61–79 at 65–6. On the English pamphlets, see also Edward T. Corp, A Court in Exile: The Stuarts in France, 1689–1718 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 239–41. 64  Oprechte Haerlemse Courant, 24 (12 June 1685).

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Figure 5.2.  Stuarts koninglijk huis, door rampen verdrukt en verheerlijkt (1685). Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum.

been a man of great physical beauty, who had all the possible advantages bestowed on him by his father, but it was his tragic fate to become yet another example that no one should rise to his lawful Prince . . . Let us pray, therefore, with all affection, God save the King.’65 At the same time, efforts were made to discredit Monmouth and discount his claim to the throne. A pamphlet describing Monmouth’s life was disseminated—probably by James’s agents—in many French, German, and Dutch editions to demonstrate his bastardy and discredit stories that Charles had married Monmouth’s mother while in exile in Holland.66 The Dutch translation of Thomas Sprat’s A True Account and 65 Adriaan Schonebeeck (engr.),  Stuarts Koninglijk Huis, Door Rampen Verdrukt en Verheerlijkt (Amsterdam: Adriaan Schonebeeck, 1685), Rijkmuseum, Amsterdam. 66  Knuttel 12338. Jacob Scott, voor desen hartoog van Monmouth onegt bewesen; Jaques Scott, ci devant duc de Monmouth convaincu batard (S.l.: s.n., 1685); Umbständlicher Bericht von der Geburt, Aufferziehung,

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Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy, on the Rye House Plot, was published in March 1686 with the Utrecht printer’s dedication to Bevil Skelton.67 As the printer explained in the preface, the entire purpose of the defamation was that the Dutch ‘could understand the procedures of His Majesty, which can only be advantageous to the good correspondence between the British nations subjected to his Majesty and ours’.68 Whether Skelton initiated and funded the publication, or whether the printer acted on the expectation of a reward, the Utrecht publication is another indication that Skelton’s version of events was now dominant. It was difficult to dispute James’s claim to the throne, especially since the Dutch censor was now much more active in repressing the opposition press. One of Monmouth’s Dutch supporters nevertheless defended Monmouth against English government slander, but even he refrained from arguing that Monmouth had a just title, writing instead that ‘whether King Charles married [Lucy Walters] or not, time will tell. The truth remains that never a son was treated more worthily by his father than he . . . and he was neither murderer or usurper.’69 Stuart propaganda also sought to contrast James’s religious moderation with the rebels’ fanaticism, and to render Protestant religious fervour suspect to continental audiences. The public punishment of Titus Oates, the man who had instigated the Popish Plot, was now broadcast in a bilingual, Dutch–French print made and published by Jochem Bormeester in Amsterdam (Figure 5.3). The engraving shows Oates in the stocks, surrounded by portraits of the seven Jesuits executed because of his perjured evidence.70 The contrast between Oates’s murderous lies and his relatively moderate punishment showcased the difference between religious fanatics and a rightful king to audiences in the Low Countries and beyond. Support for James was not only aired in pamphlets that were published by his agents. Skelton’s arguments convinced at least some Dutch readers, who now felt free to publish their thoughts too. When the Rotterdam regent Adriaen Paets wrote to his friend the philosopher and Huguenot exile Pierre Bayle on the ‘­memorable play of the astonishing succession of the Duke of York’, he expressed his admiration for James, whose right to the throne he considered to be ‘unassailable’. Paets— who had witnessed the succession as one of the Dutch commissioners negotiating Lebenslauff und Todt dess Jacob Scott, Gewesener Hertzog von Monmouth: Worinnen erwiesen wird, daß er nicht Echt gebohren, noch die geringste Ansprach auff die Cron Engelands gehabt (Hamburg, 1685). 67  Shortly after Sprat’s appointment to Westminster in September 1683 the king had asked him to write an account of the Rye House Plot. A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy (1685) was based on the documentary evidence of the case. It condemned zeal and proved particularly hostile to William, Lord Russell, while also criticizing Burnet. That both Charles and then James II ‘made divers alterations’ to the text may help to explain the extreme vilification of the conspirators (Bodleian Library, MS Tanner 31, fol. 22). 68  Johannes Ribbius, Een waerachtigh verhael van de afgrijsselijcke t’samensweeringh tegen den laetstoverledene koningh van Engeland (Utrecht, 1686), 2. 69  Knuttel 12339A. Antwoord op het vuile pasquil (Amsterdam, 1685), 3. 70 Frederic George Stephens and Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 11 vols (London: British Museum, 1870), no. 1138; G. van Rijn and C. van Ommeren, Atlas van Stolk: Katalogus de historie, spot en zinneprenten betrekkelijk de geschiedenis van Nederland, 11 vols (Amsterdam: Frederick Muller, 1895–1933), no. 2710; Kort Begryp Des Levens Van Titus Oates/Abrege De La Vie De Titus Oates (Amsterdam, 1685).

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Figure 5.3.  Kort begryp van’t leven van Titus Oates/Abrege de la vie Titus Oates (1685). © Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.

in London on behalf of the Dutch East India Company—claimed to admire James’s perseverance in the Catholic faith hated by his people, and lauded his attempts to further religious tolerance, which both he and Bayle thought to be essential to the well-being of the state.71 Monmouth and Argyll were repudiated as deceivers, who only sought to gain worldly power under the banner of religion.72 Central to Paets’s letter, which was published as a pamphlet both in Latin and in Dutch, was not religion, but the rule of law, which he expected would bring international stability. Like the Casteleyn press, Paets chose to support Skelton’s assertions, thereby also showcasing his support for the foreign policy of both the Prince of Orange and the States General. Evidently, the now dominant story did not convince everybody. The strategy followed by the Anglo-Dutch Whiggish press after the collapse of the revolt was to evade debate and the question of birthright altogether. Instead, they presented 71  Cornelia Roldanus, ‘Adriaen Paets. Een republikein uit de nadagen’, Tijdschrift voor geschiedenis, 50 (1935), 134–66 at 164. 72  Knuttel 12480. Ad B****, de nuperis Angliæ motibus epistola. See also Knuttel 12480a. Adriaen Paets. Brief van H.V.P. aan B**** over de beroerten onlangs in Engeland voorgevallen (Rotterdam, 1686).

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Monmouth as a martyr, as they had done with Armstrong and Essex, and thus implicitly turned him into a victim of James’s Catholic tyranny. Building on Monmouth’s final words, in which he claimed to die a martyr for the people, elegies describe him as ‘the flower of brave men’ and ‘the hope of the pious’.73 It is significant, however, that the only martyr play written on Monmouth’s execution in the immediate wake of the event, Ludolph Smids’s Konradyn (1686), took the guise of a rather obscure historical allegory: to openly criticize the Stuart king at this moment was deemed impossible even in Amsterdam.74 Not explicitly about the succession, and often not even mentioning James, these martyrological texts eluded the newly awakened censor.75 But they kept Dutch hostility towards James II alive. And when Skelton continued his machinations and attempted to kidnap Monmouth’s accomplice Sir Robert Peyton in Rotterdam with the assistance of some English army officers, a Dutch mob freed Peyton, crying ‘what, will you murther us here as you have done the duke of Monmouth in England!?’ Skelton’s dominance in the press had left public opinion unaltered, and he recognized that in these circumstances it was impossible to arrest any rebels, since ‘the canaille would certainly rescue them & knock out the brains of those who should attempt to take them’.76 Indeed, three years later the 1685 succession martyrs had their posthumous, public triumph when they were appropriated by Williamite propaganda. It is certain that Fagel and William III had learned from Ferguson’s mistakes when they published their much more famous and acclaimed declaration upon the Dutch invasion of England. But they, too, could accuse James of murder. Dutch sermons preached in 1688 remembered that the tyrant James had shed the blood of Monmouth and Argyll,77 and engravings of the ‘Glorious’ Revolution suggestively showed the execution of Monmouth in the background. Monmouth now became part of the Orangist providential myth.78 In Gouda, where he had lived for a ­couple of weeks, a martyr play was performed for the local Rhetoricians’ Chamber (a poetical society), in which the Duke was represented as the noble defender of the Protestant religion who had stood up against the Catholic tyrant. Whereas Smids’s 1686 martyr play had been shrouded in historical mists, the Gouda play explicitly presented Monmouth’s rebellion as a prefiguration of William III’s Glorious Revolution. The local poet had evidently followed the news closely, since he added not only references to the executions of Russel and Armstrong, but also to Skelton’s

73  Knuttel 12358. Rou-klagt over de Dood des hartoogs van Monmouth (1685), sig. A1r. 74  Ludolph Smit, Konradyn, Treurspel (Amsterdam: Albert Magnus, 1686). 75  Cited in Matthijs Wieldraaijer, ‘Good Government and Providential Delivery: Legitimations of the 1672 and 1688/89 Orangist Revolutions in Dutch Sermons’, Dutch Crossing, 34 (2010), 42–58 at 47. 76  Cited in Hoftijzer, Engelse Boekverkopers, 147. 77  Cited in Wieldraaijer, ‘Good Government’, 47. 78  Engeland beroerd onder de regeering van koning Jacobus de II. En hersteld door Willem en Maria, prins en princesse van Orangie (Amsterdam, 1689), 64–5.

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machinations in The Hague.79 That the Prince of Orange had done little to aid his nephew, and had suppressed publications that supported him, was conveniently forgotten. That, indeed, was the entire point of remembering the 1685 rebels in 1689: it served to obfuscate the ways in which William had supported James’s succession for his own dynastic gain. The result was a manufactured story of Protestant continuity that deeply affected later historiography. 79  J. de Groot, Jacobus hertoog van Montmouts. Treur-spel (Gouda, 1689).

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6 ‘A great Romance feigned to raise wonder’ Literature and the Making of the 1689 Succession John West In the opening of Elkanah Settle’s 1688–9 succession poem, A View of the Times, the Muse of Britain is described seeking retirement and shelter from the changes affecting the country. In particular, she despairs at the prospect of poetry’s ability to alter the course of worldly politics. To expect as much would be like hoping to calm ‘changing Winds . . . / . . . to constant breeze’ or to quell ‘mounting waves’ that ‘ruffle all the seas’.1 Drawing on the well-worn metaphor of the ship of state on stormy seas, this is as much a vision of poetry’s redundancy at the 1689 succession as it is of the political upheaval surrounding it. Settle’s Muse seems self-aware, and deeply sceptical, about their chances of intervening in succession politics. Political change happens regardless, and maybe to the detriment, of poetry. On the face of it these lines corroborate a common view among literary critics that the writing produced in response to the 1688–9 succession and after was lacklustre in comparison to preceding decades. For one such critic, the 1690s produced writers ‘not of creative genius or vivid expression, but people of high competence’.2 That view is shared by Steven Zwicker in his examination of the impact of the 1688–9 succession on literary culture. For Zwicker, passivity and the absence of a distinct heroic idiom are the key features in Williamite panegyric which was hamstrung by the constitutional uncertainties that beset William and Mary’s accession.3 Abigail Williams has convincingly challenged such conclusions by showing how Williamite poets celebrated the new monarchs as providential heroes and discussed topics omitted from pamphlets, like the theme of right by conquest.4 But poetry and imaginative writing were not just media used to communicate responses to the 1  Elkanah Settle, A View of the Times, with Britain’s Address to the Prince of Orange. A Pindarick Poem (London, 1689), 1. 2  Thomas N. Corns, A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 413. See also Bruce King, Seventeenth-Century English Literature (London: MacMillan, 1982) who argues that in the 1690s ‘no new poets of stature appear’ (255). 3  Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), ch. 6. 4  Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1678–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). For the longer-term impact of 1688–9 on the literature of the eighteenth century, see the essays in the special issue of Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture 1660–1700, 39 (2015).

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succession. Images of poetry, fiction, and romance were also commonly used in pamphlet literature as ways of articulating debates about the succession’s legitimacy. Recent historical scholarship has shown that the events of 1688–9 were not straightforward and bloodless but popular, violent, and uncertain, the roots and planning of which stretched back into the 1680s and across different nations.5 Unlike other, notably difficult, transfers of power, like the change of dynasty in 1603 and its restoration in 1660, in 1689 it was unclear whether there were grounds for a succession to happen at all. There had been no monarchical death. The debates in the Convention in early 1689 showed it was not obvious that James’s flight could be interpreted as a demise.6 Whenever William actually chose to take the throne, it was unclear in early 1689 that there was a throne to take.7 William and Mary’s rule depended therefore on the cultivation and believability of a narrative of recent events where their succession was a legitimate rescue of a nation imperilled by James’s illegal reign. The images of literature in pamphlet polemic of 1688–9, I want to argue, register contested understandings of the Williamite succession as artificial, something that had been made to happen. By tracing this strain of imagery in the voluminous pamphlet writing of late 1688 and early 1689, I want to show how it placed ­unusual pressure on poets responding to the same events. Despite the arguments about whether or not Williamite literature created a successful heroic idiom, critics have not addressed in enough detail how the idea of the succession as an artifice affected the production of one of the most important forms of political literature in the Stuart era: verse panegyric. Panegyric, of course, remained a powerful genre through which poets represented the new monarchs. Ideally, it was a mode through which advice could be offered. Yet the analogy made by some pamphleteers between literary invention and the purported illegality of the succession presented problems for poets wishing to use their writing to intervene in political matters. It led, I will suggest, to the erasure of panegyric’s claims for political agency, which was replaced by an insistence that the form was merely meant to reflect the self-evident truth of William and Mary’s rule. By examining the interaction of p ­ amphlet rhetoric with poetry, we can both gain a new understanding of the concerns of Williamite panegyrists and develop a more nuanced understanding than has hitherto been

5  See, inter alia, Chapter 5 in this volume by Helmer Helmers, ‘1685 and the Battle for Dutch Public Opinion: Succession Literature from a Transnational Perspective’; Tim Harris and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Final Crisis of the Stuart Monarchy: The Revolutions of 1688–91 in their British, Atlantic, and European Contexts (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013); Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy 1660–1714 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013); Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Tim Harris, Revolution: The Great Crisis of the British Monarchy (London: Allen Lane, 2006). 6  The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century accounts of these debates are gathered in David Lewis Jones (ed.), A Parliamentary History of the Glorious Revolution (London: HMSO, 1988). 7  For the view that William chose to take the Crown after James’s first flight from London on 12 December, see Robert Beddard, ‘The Unexpected Whig Revolution of 1688’, in Beddard (ed.), The Revolutions of 1688 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 14. For evidence that his aim was always to take the Crown, see W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 75.

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offered of why the literary culture of 1688–9 has continually proved a problematic disappointment for many literary critics. The first half of the essay will explore pamphlet responses to the succession from late 1688 through early 1689 before moving on to look at examples of verse panegyric from early 1689 that celebrated the new monarchs. But I also want to argue that some literature explored and challenged the way that this contest over political rhetoric restricted panegyric’s function. The second half of the essay returns to an extended analysis of Elkanah Settle’s A View of the Times. Although the opening remarks of that poem, as we have already seen, present the Muse in a state of despair, Settle’s poem, along with its prefatory material, actually satirizes the increasingly common representation of the succession as an unbelievable, true fiction. A more combative and interventionist model of panegyric emerges from that satire on Williamite rhetoric than is initially suggested as Settle argues that William should reject the Crown and oversee James’s restoration. But the struggle to navigate the shifting politics of the early weeks of 1689 leaves its mark on the poem as Settle remains conscious that his claim to intervene with effective advice might be restrained by ongoing political instability.

D R E A M , F I C T I O N , A N D RO M A N C E James II fled England for France on the morning of 23 December 1688. Later that same day William of Orange sat down at St James Chapel to listen to Gilbert Burnet preach. Burnet had arrived in England with William’s forces at Torbay on 5 November, and in his sermon he reflected on the expedition’s swift progress from the West Country to London over the previous seven weeks. The text he preached on was Psalm 118:23: ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvellous in our eyes’. The choice was not novel: many preachers in 1660 used the same text to celebrate the restoration of the Stuart dynasty.8 Like those preachers, Burnet’s use of this text honours the guidance of providence in the nation’s affairs, though his celebration of events that would soon see the restored dynasty split in two perhaps carries an intentional irony: this is a sermon that concludes by denouncing the ‘Criminal Excesses of the year Sixty’.9 William’s arrival alone, Burnet suggests, reveals God’s protection of the nation. Things do sometimes speak, and Times call aloud; and as all Men are before-hand with me, in the choice of this Text, at least in applying it to the present time, so that amasing Concurrence of Providences, which have conspired to hatch and bring forth, and perfect this extraordinary Revolution, would lead one very naturally to use these 8 For example, J. W., The Parallel Between David, Christ, and K. Charls, in their Humiliation and Exaltation (London, 1660) and William Price, Gods Working and Brittains Wonder: A Sermon Congratulating the Most Happy Establishment of His Sacred Majesty Charls the II. on His Throne (London, 1660). 9  A Sermon Preached in the Chappel of St. James’s, Before His Highness the Prince of Orange, the 23d of December, 1688 (London, 1689), 22.

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words, even tho we had no such Verse in Scripture; for we have before us a Work, that seems to ourselves a Dream, and that will appear to Posterity a Fiction.10

The providentialist rhetoric here is clear enough.11 But what is also striking is the way Burnet mingles the marvellous with the commonplace. William’s progress is momentous enough to demand the psalmist’s inspired words. Even if they did not exist in Scripture, though, those words would still have come ‘very naturally’. The biblical text frames 1688 in a prophetic idiom of signs and wonders. Yet it does not yield gifted insight. Burnet claims instead simply to give expression to a ubiquitous, popular comprehension of history’s unfolding providential pattern: ‘as all Men are before-hand with me’. The privileged sense of experiencing history in the making was unique neither to Burnet nor to the writing of 1688–9.12 But his sermon inspired other Williamite apologists in early 1689 to adapt similar rhetoric to represent the succession. One interlocutor in a pamphlet dialogue printed in January claims that William’s progress ‘looks like a Dream, but to Posterity it must certainly seem a Romance; and the Histories of Don Quixot, or Gargantua will seem the more authentick Relations of the Two’.13 Celebrating William and Mary’s acceptance of the Crown in February, an anonymous preacher commented: [I]f they scarce gain belief in the next Age, no marvel, when even we can hardly think our selves awake as oft as we now take them into our thoughts; for that the Change effected looks so like a great Romance feigned to raise wonder, rather than like a Modern History, that has all the Nation for sensible Witnesses to vouch its Certainty.14

The amplification of fiction into romance echoes royalist rhetoric of the Interregnum. In romances from the 1650s, some authors had claimed that an accurate account of rebellion and, ultimately, restoration required a generic framework capable of narrating sudden change and resolution. Extraordinary fiction was the best means of capturing historical truth.15 The re-purposing of the topos in 1689 helped to neutralize any accusation that lineal descent had been broken or forcefully diverted. James’s reign was the historical anomaly now corrected by a succession that miraculously returned the country to normal. 10  Ibid., 1. The image of the dream may also allude to Psalm 126.1: ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream’. 11  Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 12  George Treby claimed that ‘late Posterity will celebrate your ever-glorious Name, till Time shall be no more’: The Speech of Sir George Treby, Kt. Recorder of the Honourable City of London, to His Highness the Prince of Orange. December the 20th. 1688 (London, 1688), 2. For earlier examples of similar rhetoric, see John Vicars, Former Ages Never Heard of, and After Ages Will Admire (London, 1654). 13  A Dialogue Between Dick and Tom; Concerning the Present Posture of Affairs in England (London, 1689), 7. 14  A Sermon Preach’d in a Country Church, February 14, 1688 upon the eminent Occasion of Thanksgiving for the Great Deliverance of this Kingdom from Popery and Arbitrary Power (London, 1689), 1–2. 15  Amelia Zurcher, ‘The Political Ideologies of Prose Romance’, in Laura Lunger Knoppers (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 551–66.

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The romancing of succession can also be seen in the poetry of 1689 in which William’s arrival was transformed from an aggressive conquest into a benevolent rescue.16 Yet by the late seventeenth century, romance was a term with multifaceted and not altogether clear-cut associations. Prose romances were less popular than they had been in the mid-century and were often ridiculed. ‘Romance’, moreover, was a prevalent, and largely pejorative, keyword in partisan polemic of the 1680s where it was used to dismiss as either delusional or deceptive the opinions of a political opponent.17 Romance’s reliance on supernatural and miraculous narrative resolutions was a way of figuring questions about what constituted political truth and who warranted political trust. These questions were as crucial as ever in 1688–9. As Rachel Weil has argued, since William and Mary’s authority was based more on popular consent than hereditary right their legitimacy relied on the ­ongoing credibility of the argument that James had abdicated by acting contrary to the interests of the nation.18 Representing William’s arrival as a romance-like ­resolution to dire peril was one way of advancing such an argument. Yet to see the succession as an extraordinary fiction also left open the possibility that the origins and status of the new regime could be criticized as an unreal artifice engineered to depose a lawful king. There was, indeed, sharp awareness in early 1689 that the circumstances whereby the succession of William and Mary would happen could not be taken as read but needed to be argued for. The 1689 succession, that is to say, was brought about through an effort of political imagination. The Convention’s scrutiny of words like  ‘deposition’, ‘abdication’, and ‘vacancy’ generated different versions of what had actually happened over the previous few months: had James fled voluntarily or been forced out? That the answer to this question hinged on whether the word ‘demise’ was literal (James needed to die before he could be replaced) or metaphorical (James had in effect ceased to live by fleeing) shows how the succession rested on imaginative interpretation. The most radical political writing of the period took this a step further in arguing that monarchy necessarily changed with the state.19 As the ex-Leveller John Wildman wrote in early 1689: ‘Monarchies do indeed seem most Natural but Common-Wealths the more Artificial sorts of Government [. . .] for Art always corrects the defects of Nature, and pollishes it up to a greater Lustre.’20 The vocabulary of Renaissance poetics—the idea of nature 16 Williams, Whig Literary Culture, 99. One poet described the astonishing changes of 1688–9 going beyond even romance: ‘So strange, so suddain, that the Relation seems / T’ out-do Romances, or Luxuriant Dreams’: To His Highness the Prince of Orange (London, 1689), 5. 17  For Tory uses of romance to deride Whig truth-claims during the 1679–82 succession crises, see  Advice to the Patrons of the Test (London, 1682?), 2. On fiction and party see Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 18  Rachel Weil, A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 19  On this radical strand, see Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, Journal of the History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), 195–236. 20  Some Remarks upon Government, and Particularly the Establishment of the English Monarchy Relating to this Present Juncture (London, 1689), 12. The pamphlet is anonymous. For the attribution to Wildman, see Goldie, ‘True Whiggism’, 212.

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raised to ‘greater Lustre’ echoes Philip Sidney—becomes a way to envisage ­monarchy as one part of a state-artifice that could be re-made. Far from showing a return to normality, images of creative artifice in this instance articulated a positive case for massive constitutional overhaul. There was relatively little appetite, however, for the kind of upheaval that Wildman described. The rhetorical feints and argumentative turns taken by Williamite succession literature tend to emphasize deference to precedent and following of historical example rather than offering political innovation. The reigns of Richard II, Edward II, or Sigismonda of Sweden were mobilized to prove how rightful monarchs had previously forfeited their thrones.21 When one member of the Convention claimed ‘we have found the Crown vacant . . . we have not made it so’ they painted the impending succession as the inevitable consequence of a pre-existing political situation.22 To counteract any suggestion that it was the result of fabrication, the succession needed to be represented by its defenders as a piece of mundane procedure. But it was as a fabrication that critics attacked the authority of the new monarchs. One satirical squib reduces to absurd ends the interpretation that James’s own actions had lost him the Crown: if one thing (deposition) is called another (abdication) then anything is permissible. In this case, the new regime is little more than a flimsy conjuring trick: ‘Now unless the word abdicate bears this strange sense / New King and New Parliament are vanish’d hence’.23 Despite setting out an argument in favour of William’s arrival, another pamphlet attacks the succession by inverting Burnet’s rhetoric: ‘Was it any honest Man’s meaning to subvert this Government, to make way for his own Dreams of some Poetical Golden-Age, or a Fancifull Millenium?’24 Whereas dreams in Burnet’s sermon signalled a collective sense of the reality of extraordinary providence, here they are private—‘his own’— and explicitly linked to fantasy, ‘some Poetical Golden-Age’. Here, Williamite providentialism becomes fanaticism; the succession, merely a poetic fiction. P O E T RY Images of and ideas about imaginative writing were figures for arguments made in 1689 both defending and attacking the succession’s legitimacy. But how far did this affect the production of actual imaginative writing in the period, especially that which was most fundamental to supporting early modern successions, verse panegyric?

21 Jones, Parliamentary History, 104, 112–13. The history of Richard II was not exclusively used to justify replacing James. See A Speech Spoken by the Bishop of Carlisle in the House of Lords (London, 1689). 22 Jones, Parliamentary History, 109. 23  On the Word Abdicate (n.d.). The argument of the poem’s first stanza (that a man set upon by thieves who gives up his purse to save his life could by the logic of the Convention be deemed to have voluntarily forfeited his money) is the same as that made by Henry Pollexfen in the debates at the Convention: Jones, Parliamentary History, 235. 24  Reflections upon Our Late and Present Proceedings in England (London, 1689), 5.

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William and Mary are often celebrated in these poems as martial heroes protecting the nation from Catholic aggression.25 But there are also times when Williamite panegyrists appear restrained by the unusual conditions under which the succession had taken place. Some of these poems conclude abruptly as if their authors have suddenly run out of momentum or lost confidence in their subject.26 They exemplify a jarring mixture of heroic bravado and poetic reticence. In one ode, William is celebrated for his remarkable combination of classical and biblical heroism. He is an Achilles and a David mixed into one who will ignite poetic and political revival throughout Britain. The concluding lines, however, are couched in a hesitant conditional mode that defers those greater poetic ventures: ‘Some footsteps of the Golden Age may yet appear agen. / Then, if propitious Heav’n permit, my Muse may mount higher, / Mean while into some private Grove she hastens to retire.’27 The agency of the Williamite poet remains dependent on heaven, but that, as the tentative ‘if ’ suggests, might yet prove unforthcoming. The postponement of the Golden Age may also glance anxiously at the ironic use of that trope in some pamphlets. The poem thus ends by practising an awkward pastoral retreat from William’s unparalleled heroism. The opening up of such a gulf between the actions of the new king and the ability of poets to write about him reflect contemporary anxieties about panegyric’s own complicity in maintaining corrupt political regimes. In his October ­declaration, William had used the familiar trope that poor counsel rather than James’s own actions had brought the nation to the brink of ruin. This strategy helped him to duck the accusation that he was planning to usurp the throne. But it also gave mileage to the idea that James’s court had been a hotbed of sycophancy. This idea was taken up in the satirical treatment in ballads and lampoons of court figures like James’s Jesuit confessor Edward Petre.28 The way that panegyric specifically became bound up in this critique is exemplified in the insistent targeting by Williamite poets of the ex-Poet Laureate John Dryden. The attacks on Dryden were part of a long polemical campaign that had reached its zenith during the succession crisis of the early 1680s where his early elegy for Oliver Cromwell was often invoked as a sign of untrustworthiness.29 The continuation of the attacks in 1688–9 registered the belief that the platitudes and lies of panegyric were the chief tool that had kept James in power. Noting that ‘Tyrants have need of Lies’, one poet condemned ‘fulsom Flatterers . . . from Noll [i.e. Cromwell] to James’ and their thoughtless numbers, which ‘like the Gold which bought ’em chink in

25  For William as Achilles, see To His Highness the Prince of Orange (London, 1689), 6; and as Hercules see Lux Occidentalis (London, 1689), 16. Mary was also imagined as an agent of aggressive British expansionism who could ‘Bomb Mexico and subjugate Peru’: The Protestants Ave Maria (London, 1689), 2. 26 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 382. 27  An Ode upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition of His Highness the Prince of Orange, Now King of England. Who Landed Novemb. 5, 1688 (London, 1689), 7. 28  Popery Routed: Or, Father Petre’s Farewel to London City (London, 1689). 29  On the attacks, see Steven N. Zwicker, ‘Why Are They Saying These Terrible Things About John Dryden? The Uses of Gossip and Scandal’, Essays in Criticism, 64 (2014), 158–79.

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the close’. Dryden’s silence on William’s arrival only proves his own incapacity to write of ‘real Virtue’.30 A focus on the real and the truthful is a theme to which accession poetry in 1689 repeatedly returns. William, one poet claimed, should be ‘Conscious of Real worth, disdain / The empty Forms of Pageant pride’.31 Poems on the coronation of April 1689 followed such advice by elevating inward truth above external ceremony. One poet claimed that Mary’s ‘better Glories are unseen, / And modestly with-draw within’ whilst Robert Fleming described William being presented with ‘A Scepter, not of Gold, but Golden Righteousness’: here, it is the virtue signified by the sceptre rather than the grandeur of the display that matters.32 This accenting of the real and the truthful was driven in part by hostility to Catholic ritual and display. An ode on Mary’s return to England, which describes her arrival with ‘Real and not Fantastick Ornament’, claims that she ensures ‘Sacred Truth shall Reign / Where Legend was in Danger to Obtayn’.33 But anti-Catholicism was one part of a broader critique concerned with how fiction—be that out-and-out lies or spiritual errors—supported political power. The function of panegyric was fully implicated in this critique, but this left poets needing to avoid appearing complicit in the same process. Williamite poets in 1689 were therefore faced with the challenge of reforming the panegyric mode. In large part this meant reorienting it away from the verse which had been produced on the accession of James II. A large amount of verse elegy and panegyric was written in response to the death of Charles II and the accession of his brother in February 1685, and much of it was formally and ­stylistically extravagant.34 The Cowleyan Pindaric ode, for example, was widely used, and its lengthy irregular stanzas and descriptions of dream-like transports licenced poets to give fulsome lament and praise for the Stuart lineage.35 The Pindaric allowed poetic passage to transcendent realms, be it to chart Charles’s apotheosis or to witness the divinity of the new king and queen. One elegy describes Charles ascending to heaven in a chariot, whilst a similar scene of apotheosis occurs

30  A Poem on the Coronation of King William and Queen Mary (London, 1689), 1. In linking the chink of gold with the sound of rhyme, this poet channels the proto-Whiggery of Andrew Marvell’s attack on Dryden’s couplets in ‘On Mr. Milton’s Paradise Lost’ (1674): ‘While the Town-Bays writes all the while and spells, / And like a Pack-Horse tires without his Bells’. See The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (Harlow: Longman, 2003), 180–4. 31  Poem on the Coronation, 7. 32  A Poem on the Accession of their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Orange to the Imperial Crown of England; Being a Paraphrase on the 45 Psalm (s.n., 1689), 2; Robert Fleming, Britain’s Jubilee. A Congratulatory Poem on the Descent of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England; and Their Highnesses Accession to the Crown; and Solemn Coronation April 11. 1689 (London, 1689), sig. A2v. 33  Henry Beeston, ‘The Queen’s Arrival’, in Vota Oxoniensia Pro Serenissimis Guilhelmo Rege et Maria Regina M. Britanniae &c. (Oxford, 1689), sigs U1v–U2r. The same collocation of ‘lying legends’ and Catholicism appears in T[homas] S[hadwell], A Congratulatory Poem on his Highness the Prince of Orange his Coming into England (London, 1689), 2. 34  On the 1685 verse, see Patricia Gael, ‘Kingship and Catholicism in Posthumous Representations of Charles II, 1685–1714’, The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2014), 173–96 at 175–7. 35  Stella Revard, Politics, Poetics, and the Pindaric Ode: 1450–1700 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2009), 159.

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at the conclusion of Dryden’s opera Albion and Albanius.36 In The Vision by the Anglican minister and poet Edmund Arwaker, the speaker is transported to a gloomy plain ultimately brightened by the reassurances of angels who point out Charles’s seat in heaven. In a sequel printed later the same year, Arwaker’s speaker embarks on a transcendent journey to heaven where they witness the coronation of James and Mary of Modena in the company of angels.37 Whether the accession of a Catholic king influenced such baroque poetics is hard to prove not least because most of the poets who wrote for James were Anglicans. But through the lens of 1689 it was likely that the succession poems of 1685 looked like popishly inclined ‘Fantastick Ornament’ that had supported a corrupt regime. The way the Pindaric became a vehicle for the pro-William sublime poetry in the 1690s, indeed, needs to be seen in the context of attempts to retrieve the poetic form from the associations it had accrued with the spiritual and political culture of James’s court. In the work of poets who celebrated both the 1685 and 1689 successions there are signs of a retreat from earlier extravagance. Arwaker, for instance, had, like many Anglicans, come to believe that the Church was no longer safe in James’s hands and required new defenders. The poem he wrote celebrating William and Mary as those defenders retains the Pindaric form. But in this poem there are no visionary flights. Its shorter length and more controlled stanzaic structure also suggest comparable restraint, a point addressed in the poem’s penultimate stanza: No airy Methods of applause, No Exultations in so great a Cause, Lessen the strict Regard due to its Gravity, Since by example Royal led, We thus a King’s and Prophet’s footsteps tread.38

This is a defence of deserving praise; applause and exultation will not deny William’s worth. But Arwaker also presupposes an objection that ‘airy Methods of applause’ might misrepresent or distract from objects of praise. His claim to follow royal footsteps thereby attempts to legitimize praise so long as it just describes the actions of the king. Panegyric’s ability to construct royal authority is flattened since true praise does not embellish with visionary ramblings or lengthy digressions. Rather, it follows and reflects what it finds. Other contributors to this volume emphasize how panegyric was not only a form of praise but also a forum for offering advice.39 What such analyses share is a 36  Joshua Barnes, The Apotheosis of the most Serene and Illustrious Monarch, Charles the II with an Humble Address to His Most Sacred Majesty, King James II: and a Poem to the Queen Dowager (London, 1685); Dryden, Albion and Albanius: An Opera (London, 1685). On Dryden, see Paul Hammond, ‘Dryden’s Albion and Albanius: The Apotheosis of Charles II’, in David Lindley (ed.), The Court Masque (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 169–83. 37  Edmund Arwaker, The Vision (London, 1685) and The Vision: The Second Part (London, 1685). 38 Arwaker, A Votive Table Consecrated to the Church’s Deliverers, The Present King and Queen (London, 1689). 39  See Chapter 9 in this volume by Andrew McRae, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’, and Chapter  16 by Mark Knights, ‘The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715’.

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sense of succession literature’s active participation in political debate. Yet many poets writing on the 1689 succession saw their task not so much as one of participation in the construction of authority but the reflection William and Mary’s innate and unchanging power. One ‘plain-dealing Muse’ who criticized ‘Fawning Poets of the Late age’ for ‘engag[ing] their flattery too soon’ by writing for James presented William as deserving of poetic praise: You that would heroes write, and yet write sense Judiciously observe this great good man He’ll teach you more and juster Excellence Than past example or Invention can. Though Painters from Licentous Fancy take Monsters and Bulky Gyants at command; Yet when a perfect Beauty they would make, They copy the best Works of Nature’s Hand.40

The slight at those who ‘would heroes write’ criticizes the representations of James, which had been as militaristic as those of William would become. But maybe there is also a disparaging glance to those images of William as a new Moses or Achilles. Praise for someone who truly deserves it, this poet argues, is strictly mimetic and requires little more from the poet but to observe, be taught, and then to copy. Once again, confessional divides are a crucial driving force in this espousal of what looks like Protestant plain style. But this was also an assertion of the new regime’s credibility, in juxtaposition to James’s regime and also in the face of polemical opposition to the succession. Although the simile is of painting, the image of the giants and monsters of licentious fancy returns suggestively to the aesthetics of romance only to reject them as unnecessary. There is an ingenious nonchalance in making the case for the 1689 succession by arguing that its legitimacy was so selfevident that nobody need make the case. The sacrifice to be made, however, is the active participation in political debate of verse panegyric itself. A VIEW OF THE TIMES Kevin Sharpe’s work has shown that early modern monarchical authority was not simply transmitted but constructed by literary, visual, and performative representations. Yet despite this emphasis on cultural participation in representations of rule, Sharpe’s model remained predominantly top-down and offered relatively little analysis of how competing constructions of monarchical image circulated especially in the infancy of a regime.41 As was the case with the pamphlet literature in 1689, Williamite accession panegyric was indeed the subject of criticism. Aphra Behn’s ode to Burnet is an anti-panegyric in which she refuses to write on William’s 40  J. D., A Poem upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England (London, 1689), sig. A1r. 41 For a detailed critique of Sharpe, see Anthony Parr, ‘“Cut in more subtle angles”: History, Historicisms, and the Art of Representation’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 78 (2015), 825–34.

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arrival (although, as we will see, she did write for Mary). Dryden’s Don Sebastian, a later dramatic entry into the controversy, also deconstructed the vocabulary of the succession.42 I want to spend the remainder of this essay, though, focusing on a neglected poem of early 1689, A View of the Times, or Britain’s Address to the Prince of Orange, which criticizes the vocabulary of the revolution whilst constructing a different version of political authority for William in the uncertain moment before he took the throne. A View of the Times, or Britain’s Address to the Prince of Orange has been described as a Williamite poem.43 One reason for this may be its author’s notorious capacity for switching sides. The poem appeared anonymously but has been attributed to Elkanah Settle.44 Perhaps better known today for his dramatic works, Settle was known equally well in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a ­pamphleteer and political poet. He was perhaps most infamous, however, for being a turncoat. He defended the Exclusionist cause in print during the early 1680s. But like some other Whigs, including the polemicist and newspaper editor Henry Care, Settle changed his view on James. In 1683 he published a recantation of his earlier politics and professed a new-found loyalty to the Duke of York. In the panegyric Settle subsequently wrote for James’s coronation in 1685 he lavishes praise on the new king and how he banishes ‘Painted Dangers and Fictitious Fears’ but remains silent on his own role in cultivating such dangers and fears. At the same time he imagines several former comrades descending to hell, ‘Alarm’d, and stagger’d’ at James’s succession.45 Considering his history of backing the winning side only after their victory, it appears fair to suspect that, amidst the uncertainties of 1688–9, Settle’s political commitments were unlikely to stand long. A View of the Times, however, is not the work of someone who has already jumped ship. For one thing, the choice of James Hamilton, Earl of Arran as the poem’s dedicatee suggests that Settle wished to present the poem as a work of steadfast Stuart loyalism. Arran’s family was known for its Stuart allegiances. He was the eldest son of William Hamilton who, in 1653, had joined a Scottish force raised in the Highlands at the commission of Charles Stuart, and, in 1681, voted for the Scottish Bill that kept James in the line of succession. Arran himself fought for James against Monmouth’s army in 1685 and he joined the king again during the aborted military confrontation at Salisbury in November 1688. In 1688–9 William Hamilton went over to the Prince of Orange’s side. Arran, however, remained loyal 42  On Behn, see Chapter 9 in this volume by McRae; for Dryden, see Zwicker, Lines of Authority, ch. 6. 43  See Abigail Williams, ‘Settle, Elkanah (1648–1724)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128e-25128; F. C. Brown, Elkanah Settle: His Life and Works (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1910), 26. 44  Brown noted that in the only copy of the poem he had seen ‘Settle’s name is given as the author in a table of contents, written in a contemporary hand and placed in the volume of folios with which [the] copy was bound’ (Brown, Settle, 110). The attribution has remained ever since and evidence from within the poem seems to back it up. In stanza III, for instance, the Muse suggests they first saw the ‘British light’ around the time of the regicide: Settle was born in 1648. 45  An Heroick Poem on the Coronation of the High and Mighty Monarch, James II. King of England, &c. (London, 1685), 2, 6.

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to James. During the meeting of Scottish nobility that took place at Whitehall on 8 January, he celebrated Scotland’s deliverance from Catholicism but stressed that ‘I must distinguish between [James’s] Popery and his Person. I dislike the one, but have sworn and do owe Allegeance to the other.’46 Copies of this speech were printed in Edinburgh and London so when Settle, in his dedication, describes, with italics, how Arran’s ‘Glorious Principles of Loyalty and Honour even now shine forth to the World’, he is surely alluding to the speech that was currently in circulation. Arran demanded that James be recalled to the throne but his intervention went unheeded. He was to spend several of the following months incarcerated in the Tower of London, suspected of Jacobite plotting. In dedicating his poem to Arran, then, Settle was not only addressing a Stuart loyalist but also a would-be rebel. As will become clear, A View of the Times was written before William and Mary’s acceptance of the Crown in mid-February. The allusion to Arran’s speech therefore helps to fix a publication date between 8 January and mid-February. It also aligns the ideological positions of Arran and Settle: for both, loyalty to the man they saw as rightful king overrode concerns about that man’s religion. How far the work can be described as Williamite therefore depends upon a precise contextualization of the term. Insofar as he supports James’s right, Settle is clearly opposed to any attempt by William to take the throne. If that seemed increasingly likely to happen in early 1689 then A View of the Times should be seen as an oppositional poem. Yet its opposition to William is not absolute. Rather, this is a work that seeks to hold William to account in the crucial weeks following James’s flight. Settle, for e­ xample, echoes parts of the October declaration in which the original intentions of William’s expedition had been expressed. There, William had claimed that ‘Peace and Happiness’ would never be preserved whilst law and liberty were violated by the imposition of a foreign religion. So long as James received evil counsel from Catholic enemies, Britain’s liberties would be lost. Observing the law, the ­declaration went on, was the only way to secure ‘the Happiness of . . . Subjects and People’. Settle makes several references to the interconnectedness of law, liberty, and national well-being. He reminds his readers in the dedication that ‘making both King and People Happy’ was of chief importance.47 In the concluding verse address, William is asked: ‘Then (as your Gracious Declarations speak) / My King and People Once more Happy make’.48 What Settle adds, however, is a sense of the people’s happiness being interconnected with James’s. National happiness, Settle goes on, cannot be found ‘by forcing his Majesty to an exile’ and ‘brand[ing] him with all the infamy that Malice can invent’.49 The verbs ‘forcing’ and ‘branding’ imply that it is William’s supporters who are guilty of the legal violations they accuse James and his advisers of perpetrating. Whilst initially admirable and timely, Williamite claims to protect law and liberty are now undercut by a descent into lawlessness. 46  A Speech Made by the Right Honourable the Earl of Arran To the Scottish Nobility and Gentry, Met together at the Council Chamber in White-Hall, on the Eight of January 1689. About an Address to His Highness the Prince of Orange, to Take upon Him the Government of the Kingdom of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1689). 47 Settle, A View of the Times, sig. A1r. 48  Ibid., 12. 49  Ibid., sig. A1v.

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Quoting and paraphrasing the vocabulary of Williamite argument but re-purposing it to warn against the decline of the Williamite cause from its original intentions, Settle can be seen carving out a voice with which to express a complex balancing of allegiances. The question of how to create and maintain poetic-political voice in unpredictable times is of particular importance to Settle in the dedication and the poem. Writing to Arran, Settle describes his poem as ‘unseasonable’. But he appears to draw authority from that sense of speaking out of turn. He worries about offending Arran, for presumptuously dedicating the poem to him, and also ‘the present State’, but claims: I am infinitely more Aw’d by my first Fear than my Last, for that I hope will allow Liberty of Conscience, even to the Poets themselves, (provided they be no Papists) though there ought to be no Toleration for Indiscretion and Ill Manners; which, at this time, take too Saucy a Liberty, and treat even Crown’d Heads with that Disrespect and Contempt, as if the British World had agreed they would be Govern’d by no more Kings.50

The language of conscience and toleration is a reminder that Settle publicly supported James’s policies of indulgence in the late 1680s even though he remained an Anglican.51 The language of religious liberty is mobilized here, however, to ­legitimize political poetry. Settle essentially figures himself as a poetic dissenter for whom the right to speak out depends upon an indulgence from the state. What he has to say, of course, is not so much spiritual as it is ethical. Confessional allegiance need not be monitored but political behaviour, ‘Indiscretion and Ill Manners . . . Disrespect and Contempt’, should be. Hence the parenthetical reference to the persecution of Catholics seems an ironic rebuke to the political limits of religious toleration under a prospective Williamite monarchy. Liberty, in turn, might be transformed into licence, the ‘too Saucy a Liberty’ that makes the deposition of kings possible. Retrieving the principles of religious liberty that he had defended during James’s reign from politically expedient misappropriation by William’s supporters is foundational to Settle’s sense of his own literary-political agency. In a pamphlet printed in late 1688, he argued that the Dutch claim to defend religious freedom was a ‘Spetious Declaration’ and a ‘Masque’ disguising mere ‘Interest’.52 His position had not softened by early 1689, as is demonstrated by his treatment of Burnet’s rhetoric of providence. Referring to the ‘great Design’ of William’s arrival and progress, Settle claims: But though we have not yet found the effects of it, wholly to doubt it, were to call in question the Integrity of a great Prince, and the Loyalty of the Noblest Part of the Nation, and suspect the most astonishing and unprecedented Atchievment that ever was surprizing in History, and the most considerable Turn of State that the Universe ever saw.53 50  Ibid., sig. A1r. 51  Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 131–2, 134. 52  Elkanah Settle, Insignia Bataviae: Or, The Dutch Trophies Display’d (London, 1688), sig. B1v. 53 Settle, A View of the Times, sig. A2v.

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With its as-yet-undisclosed effects, Settle appears to acknowledge the role of providence behind William’s progress. He maintains, however, a right to suspend judgement. The rhetoric of providence becomes a subject of sceptical inquiry and, increasingly, ironic imitation. The style of the passage echoes Burnet. Yet in the amassed adjectives (‘astonishing’, ‘unprecedented’, ‘surprizing’, ‘considerable’), the repeated superlatives (‘most astonishing . . . most considerable’), and the graduation of these sentiments from historical to universal significance, Burnet’s imagery of the marvellous is pushed further and further into hyperbole. In effect, Settle adopts the stance of incredulity that Burnet and others had displaced onto posterity. In so doing, he questions the use of such rhetoric. The criticism of Burnet becomes more transparent at the end of the poem when the December sermon is quoted as an example of pulpit propaganda that can to th’ Occasion, Sute the Sacred Word, T’advance some New Design, and Enterprize, Then, ’Tis the Doings of the Lord, And Marvellous in our Eyes.

The rhyme that couples the sight of biblical marvels with the bold action denoted by ‘Enterprize’ reads a call-to-arms lurking behind Burnet’s insistence on passive submission to providence. The point becomes clear immediately afterwards when the marvels of Psalm 118:23 morph into the subjection of kings described in Psalm 149:8: Perhaps in some of these Perverted Strains, (For which this Land has paid so Dear) ’Twill be at last, We’ll lead their Kings in Chains, And all their Peers shall Iron Fetters wear.54

If the dedication offered an ironic unpicking of Burnet’s providential rhetoric, then in the poem Settle explicitly condemns that same rhetoric as a front for rebellion. There is a confident polemical drive in Settle’s dedication, and especially in his demand for a poetic indulgence with which to confront the Williamite claim to secure liberty and religion. But, as the shift from ironic scepticism to blunt attack in dealing with Burnet may suggest, there is also an inherent instability in the way Settle handles this voice. It was a narrow window of time, perhaps lasting only weeks from the middle of November to the end of December, during which it was feasible to support both William’s invasion and James’s right to the throne. By January 1689, the use of liberty and religion as justifications for James’s removal were, as Settle recognized all too well, already ‘Countenanced, and seemingly Credited’ at least by the ‘ill-minded’ and the ‘disaffected’.55 If rhetoric like Burnet’s was already widely credited, was Settle’s sense of poetic authority only an allowance to speak from the wrong side of history? Indeed, it is in this context that the loss of poetic voice we have already seen in the poem’s opening lines seems most crucial. Here, only commonplace motifs of pastoral elegy are mustered: ‘As late my melancholy 54  Ibid., 11. The black letter print is reproduced as in the original.

55  Ibid., sigs A1v–A2r.

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Muse retir’d / With thoughtful Grief, not noble Song inspir’d’.56 Elegy may well have articulated a sense of royal absence in a way that was more politically pointed in 1689 than in other years. Aphra Behn uses the same imagery in the anti-William poem she wrote on Mary’s arrival in mid-February: ‘While my sad Muse the darkest Covert Sought, / To give a loose to Melancholy Thought’.57 When Behn describes how her Muse ‘lay resolv’d to tune no more / Her fruitless Songs on Brittains Faithless Shore’, she is possibly borrowing from Settle, whose Muse declares: ‘Farewell, false Britain! on thy faithless Shore / No more my Songs I’ll tune in vain’.58 Defiance stated through resignation, though, is an unpromising starting point from which to affect political challenge. A View of the Times is an important witness to the awkwardness of trying to maintain a coherent poetic-political voice at a moment when allegiances were dividing dramatically. The muse that Settle imagines abandoning Britain takes over the narration of the poem after the opening stanza. As the poem proceeds, she maps a story of poetic loss onto a political history of rebellion in Britain from the Civil Wars up to the present. Starting with the regicide, when Britain ‘A bleeding Body ’twas without a Head’, the poem repeatedly maps the vocabulary of 1688 onto the politics of republic and exclusion.59 Within this historical trajectory, sighs and tears dominate. Perhaps glancing at the dedication’s challenge to Williamite rhetoric, Settle’s Muse sees satire as the only poetic voice able to ‘move her daring tongue’ in the 1650s.60 Poetic renovation is secured by the recognition of Stuart hereditary right in 1660 when ‘the Muses left the sheltering Grove’.61 But, again, all this is a predictable repetition of tropes that had been in circulation for decades. Lamenting the Muses as much as James, Settle condemns the Revolution for ­inaugurating an era of imaginative failure like the 1650s. In the process, though, the struggle to make a poetic intervention that goes beyond literary-political cliché encapsulates the failure he would claim to condemn. One aspect of Settle’s poem that does offer a novel and innovative rendering of succession politics in 1689, however, is found in his use of the image of conquest. Pamphleteers tended to steer clear of justifying William’s rule by conquest because it undermined arguments from succession. Williamite poets, however, used the image freely to depict a grateful nation rescued from imminent danger. The image was part and parcel of the topos of the Revolution as romance.62 In early 1689, though, Settle’s purpose in using it was different to poets in later months. There are two conquerors in A View of the Times. The first is Oliver Cromwell, for whom the ‘mangl’d Members of the noble Dead’ become ‘Trophies of [his] impious Conqueror’s sword’.63 For many supporters of James, of course, William’s ascent to the throne was a usurpation of hereditary rule on a par with Cromwell’s. Settle, however, declines the option of mapping 1689 onto 1649, William onto Cromwell. Instead, he turns 56  Ibid., 1. 57  Aphra Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary, Upon Her Arrival in England (London, 1689), 1. 58 Behn, A Congratulatory Poem, 2; Settle, A View of the Times, 1. 59 Settle, A View of the Times, 2. 60 Ibid. 61  Ibid., 6. 62 Williams, Whig Literary Culture, 101–2. 63 Settle, A View of the Times, 2.

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to a second conqueror, George Monck. When the Muse recollects the tangled politics of 1659–60, they recall Monck being approached by the Speaker of the Rump Parliament who seeks ‘To ask the Conqueror, What he meant’. Monck cuts a mysterious figure in Settle’s poem. In contrast to Cromwell, he is a ‘bloodless Victor’, but his importance can only be intuited. The Wallingford House committee are ‘amaz’d’; the ‘City on the wonder gaz’d’; his ‘Entrance brought a Universal Change, / And the whole World appear’d surprising, new, and strange’.64 Settle’s representation of Monck is modelled on the language of miraculous intervention associated with William in 1688–9. In the dedication and elsewhere in the poem, as we have seen, Settle ironically imitated and strongly attacked such imagery. Here, he re-appropriates it and highlights a history that might be exemplary to 1689. This is brought out clearly in the verse address to William appended to A View of the Times. On the face of it, ‘Britains Address to the Prince of Orange’ reverts to stock images of praise. William is valorized as a ‘Great Prince’ easing the fears of the nation. Britain’s relationship to him seems subservient, weak, and dependent. Oh! Hero, more than half Divine! Whose Glories, and replenish’d Virtues first Made me my Willing Shores resign Up to your Conquering Hands in Trust.65

The exaggeration of ‘more than half ’ outdoes the image of the merely semi-divine deliverer that would appear in accession and coronation panegyric later in the year, as does the erotic and tactile union of a willing nation falling into William’s ‘Conquering Hands’. But the word ‘trust’ carries great weight. This relationship remains conditional. The credibility of William as the heaven-sent conqueror depends, Britain implies, on him keeping his word. James lost the trust of the nation by going back on his pledge in 1685 to protect the Church of England, and William, by declaring that he will protect ‘Laws and just Religion’, has become ‘Britain’s Noblest Choice’. Whatever sense there is of being passively dependent on William, Britain retains a right to choose. In this context she demands that William fulfil the aims of his Declaration to make the people and their king happy. William turns out to be subservient to a nation that ‘strictly will exact this Truth from you’. Settle adapts the rhetoric of providential, conquering heroism, then, but uses it to hold William to account. Britain speaks not to a new monarch but to a prince holding the balance of power. If Behn’s poem to Burnet is an anti-panegyric, then Settle’s address retrieves panegyric in its fullest form, as a political intervention that mixed praise with sage advice. Britain does not simply ask William to keep the word of his Declaration. She also makes explicit what this must entail. The Mighty Work’s but half yet done, Your Glories cannot be compleat, Till by a Justice more Illustrious yet, You bring Great Caesar to his Rightful Throne. 64  Ibid., 4–5.

65  Ibid., 12.

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John West Brave Offspring of the Royal Martyr’s Blood, By Nature Pious, Merciful and Good, Maintain this Empire in its Lawful Line; This Empire, which Succeeding Time, By Right of Birth Heaven may to you resign.

William’s glory is wholly dependent upon his ability to restore the sacred right of James, and any claim by William to succeed is made neatly subservient to ‘Succeeding time’. Britain may resign her shores to William but the throne can only be resigned to him by time and God. William’s conquering heroism, in this case, is something far more modest than that which would appear in panegyrics later in the year. His role is to maintain right rule. This is William as a second Monck. Indeed, as Britain goes on to urge William not to accept the ‘too Restless Burthen of a Crown’, the adjective ‘restless’ echoes the earlier description of the Crown Monck refused in 1660: That restless Glory rather now resign’d To that Illustrious Brow, To which alone the Sacred Load was due, Than by it Deify his own.66

Burnet emphasized how 1688 was a distinct break from the false dawn of the Restoration. Settle, by contrast, argues that that history needs to be repeated. The lessons of 1660 offer William in early 1689 a political model that he should follow. The ‘Address’ offers a potentially constructive intervention into an as yet incomplete process. By re-appropriating Williamite rhetoric to offer a historical exemplar that his contemporaries were rejecting, Settle stakes a claim for poetry’s power to advise rulers and shape political events, something that is not so visible in other 1689 panegyric. However, the lines addressed to Mary at the very end of the ‘Address’ seem rather less sophisticated. Mary is urged not to ‘Rob’ her father or wear a ‘Lawless Crown’, and is warned to note ‘The Faith False Britain paid an Injur’d Queen’ (Mary of Modena had fled to France ahead of James). The invocation of ‘False Britain’ links the end of the ‘Address’ back to the disconsolate opening stanzas of the main poem. But considering that this is an address by Britain herself, these lines also seem less like a warning than a threat. If there is a hint of aggression there, it maybe betrays a despairing sense that, by early 1689, the transfer of the Crown might have been a fait accompli and the chance of a Jacobite restoration doomed to failure. Equally, though, it suggests that the power of poetry to criticize and advise that Settle sought to harness might fold under political pressure. With its sense of combined poetic and royal loss, A View of the Times can appear a pessimistic reflection on the impact of the 1689 succession on literary production. Whilst the ‘Address’ in some ways mitigates that, its conclusion nevertheless sees the likelihood of poetic advice being heeded rapidly looking little more than a fiction. Settle went fairly quiet in the immediate aftermath of William and Mary’s accession. His next work, the play Distress’d Innocence, or, The Princess of Persia, was 66  Ibid., 4.

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printed in 1691, and in the dedication to it he claimed ‘to quit all pretensions of State-Craft’.67 He reappeared in 1702, however, with another succession poem, Eusebia Triumphans: The Hannover Succession to the Imperial Crown of England. In this celebration of the Act of Settlement, Settle praised William as a champion of liberty who secured the return of justice to Britain.68 James is not mentioned by name but Settle does glance towards the threat posed to England by the monarch he once supported or his son: ‘Beware the Stuart Ear that shou’d presume / To hear th’ enchanting Sorceries of Rome!’69 Settle had reconciled himself to William and Mary’s rule at some point in the 1690s. But what A View of the Times and the accompanying ‘Address’ show is that this was not an unprincipled action. The ­flexibility of Settle’s allegiance emerged from hard thought. One benefit of focusing closely on moments of succession is that they offer an opportunity to trace fluctuations of political allegiance at close quarters and to uncover the pressures and compromises such moments placed on individual ­writers. The literature produced at these moments, as Settle’s poem does, can examine this process in complex detail. But what I have suggested in this essay is that the problems of legitimacy raised by the 1688–9 succession placed much imaginative literature under unique pressure that hindered its ability to address political controversy. Succession panegyric in 1689 echoed many of the justifications for William and Mary’s ascent, and even added a few of its own. But the tendency of many writers to flatten poetry’s role to intervene in politics produced a body of verse in which analytical and advisory gestures are strangely absent. Settle’s poem is important because it challenges that emerging consensus and anticipates the quotation and deconstruction of Williamite rhetoric present in the more familiar works by Behn and Dryden. Whilst exemplifying the possibilities available to poetry for political intervention, however, it also reveals the fragile nature of poetic authority in relation to the 1689 succession.

67  Elkanah Settle, Distress’d Innocence, or, The Princess of Persia (London, 1691), sig. A3v. 68  Elkanah Settle, Eusebia Triumphans: The Hannover Succession to the Imperial Crown of England (London, 1702), sig. A2v and 25. On Settle’s poem, see Joseph Hone, Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 39–40. 69 Settle, Eusebia Triumphans, 29.

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7 The Last Stuart Coronation Joseph Hone On 23 April 1702 the youngest and only surviving daughter of the exiled James II, Princess Anne, was crowned queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland at Westminster Abbey. She had acceded to the throne six weeks earlier, on 8 March, upon the death of her brother-in-law William III. Anne was crowned in the midst of a deepening political crisis. She had no heir of her body and the nature of her legitimacy as queen was far from clear cut. Officially, Anne’s claim came not primarily from her Stuart lineage, but the 1689 Bill of Rights and the 1701 Act of Settlement, which also stipulated that, upon Anne’s death without a bodily heir, the throne should pass to her Protestant cousin, Sophia, Electress of Hanover, and thereafter to the House of Brunswick. In other words, Anne claimed the throne by statute, not common law. But there were still many who viewed Anne’s claim as hereditary. Her coronation needed to negotiate such partisan constructions of royal succession. Coronation was the most important ceremony in any monarch’s life. It formalized the process of succession within a set of ancient ritual conventions centred on a royal oath, the crowning, the presentation of the regalia, and other features such as a sermon and the distribution of medals.1 The medieval coronation ceremony was substantially revised after the Reformation, although the ritual was not fully gutted of its Catholic aspects and reconstructed around a Protestant confessional framework until the accession of James VI and I in 1603. In 1689 William and Mary introduced legislation that stipulated the conditions for all future ­coronations. With the exception of the Scottish coronations discussed by Jane Rickard in this volume,2 all early modern coronations took place in Westminster Abbey. And some coronations, such as those of Elizabeth and Charles II, were accompanied by elaborate civic pageantry on the eve of the ceremony. But this display should not be confused with the coronation itself, which was the religious ritual occurring in the Abbey.

1 See Roy Strong, Coronation: A History of Kingship and the British Monarchy (London: HarperCollins, 2005); Percy Ernst Schramm, A History of the English Coronation, trans. Leopold G. Wickham Legg (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937). 2  See Chapter 12, ‘Stuart Coronations in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity’.

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Much previous scholarship has concentrated on Tudor and early Stuart c­ oronations.3 Later Stuart coronations, including Anne’s, have received considerably less attention.4 Where Anne’s coronation has been examined, it has generally been considered a public relations failure. Toni Bowers, for instance, opines that Anne’s coronation iconography had ‘surprisingly destructive implications for the new queen’s claims to authority and legitimacy’.5 And in an influential essay of 1990, Carolyn A. Edie dismissed the importance of Anne’s coronation altogether, arguing that she ‘had no need to declare her authority. Unlike Charles’s, and James’s, and William and Mary’s, her succession had never been in question. In 1702, legitimacy was not the issue it had been in 1661, 1685, or 1689, nor was obedience.’6 I want to suggest otherwise. By looking at the last Stuart coronation alongside earlier ones we witness how arguments for the legitimacy of Stuart rule shifted from hereditary right to law—arguments that were broadly mapped onto emergent party political divisions. The aims of the coronation were thus twofold: to represent the new queen, firstly, as a constitutional monarch and, secondly, as a supporter of the future Protestant succession. In this chapter I want to examine the ways in which Anne established her reign, through a focus on her coronation, considering how established customs were modified to accommodate the last Stuart monarch. My purpose, within the context of the volume, is twofold. Firstly, I aim to provide the volume’s only extended analysis of a single coronation. Secondly, I want to work through this close analysis of ceremony to reflect on the changing position of the Stuart monarchy in the nation’s political life. The chapter will thus begin by tracing public access to the coronation, and move on to consider how the ceremony was adjusted to portray Anne as a constitutional monarch. The coronation sermon and medals were of particular importance because both had a continued existence beyond the ceremony. By looking at the distribution of medals and printed coronation sermons abroad, the final section of the chapter will explore how the coronation served an important diplomatic function. Tensions were aggravated by the rival claim of Anne’s 3  Some recent studies include: Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Sybil M. Jack, ‘ “A Pattern for a King’s Inauguration”: The Coronation of James I in England’, Parergon, 21 (2004), 67–91; Dale Hoak, ‘A Tudor Deborah? The Coronation of Elizabeth I, Parliament, and the Problem of Female Rule’, in Christopher Highly and John N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 73–88; Richard C. McCoy, ‘ “The Wonderful Spectacle”: The Civic Progress and Elizabeth I and the Troublesome Coronation’, in Jànos M. Bak (ed.), Coronations: Medieval and Early Modern Monarchic Ritual (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 217–27; Tracey Sowerby, ‘Anne Boleyn’s Coronation’, in Thomas Betteridge and Greg Walker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 386–98. 4  For discussions of Anne’s coronation, see James Anderson Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 286–93; Anne Somerset, Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (London: HarperPress, 2012), 187–8; Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (London: Routledge, 1980), 154; Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51–72. 5 Bowers, Politics of Motherhood, 54. 6  Carolyn A. Edie, ‘The Public Face of Royal Ritual: Sermons, Medals and Civic Ceremony in Stuart Coronations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 53 (1990), 311–36 at 326–8.

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Catholic half-brother, James Francis Edward, whose title had been recognized by the French king, Louis XIV, upon James II’s death in exile in September 1701. Moreover, Britain and her allies were preparing for war with Louis over the contested Spanish succession. Given that Louis also supported the Catholic claim of ‘James III’, this was a War of the British Succession too. The effects of those political pressures could be felt, I will argue, in the ritual fabric of the coronation ceremonial. EXPENDITURE AND PUBLIC ACCESS On 29 March, three weeks after her accession, Anne issued a proclamation appointing an organizing committee.7 She had already settled on 23 April, St George’s Day, as the date for the coronation. Like Charles II in 1661 and James II in 1685, who were also crowned on that date, Anne chose to exploit the day’s patriotism for her coronation.8 However, it allowed less than a month to complete the necessary arrangements. Heading up the committee and in overall charge of the event was Charles Howard, Earl of Carlisle and Earl Marshall. He issued orders to Sir Christopher Wren, Master of the Queen’s Works, for erecting scaffolds and galleries across Westminster; to Ralph, Earl of Montagu and Master of the Great Wardrobe, for new robes, coats, gloves, and hats; to John Blow, Composer to the Chapel Royal, for the music; to Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, for coronation medals; and to innumerable others to print admission tickets and programmes, coordinate guards, organize the ceremonial feast, and so on.9 Newton complained to Sidney Godolphin, Lord High Treasurer, that the time allotted for making medals was ‘very short’.10 Others likely lodged similar grievances. Even without the elaborate pageantry that had accompanied some earlier Tudor and Stuart coronations, Anne’s coronation proved hugely expensive. Roy Strong calculates that £4,677 was expended on the basic infrastructure in Westminster Abbey alone, nearly four times James II’s outlay in 1685, with a further £8,288 spent on the wardrobe for the occasion.11 The overall expenditure was actually much higher than Strong allows. An additional £10,000 was paid to the goldsmith 7  The National Archives (hereafter TNA), PC 1/1/135 and 136. 8 Before the proclamation was issued, rumours circulated that the coronation would be on 29 May, Royal Oak Day, the holiday celebrating the Stuart restoration. This would have been an even more pointed statement. Royal Oak Day had become a key date on the Jacobite calendar under William. Anne sensibly shunned this date. For the rumours, see Margaret Maria, Lady Verney (ed.), Verney Letters of the Eighteenth Century From the Manuscripts at Claydon House, 2 vols (London: Benn, 1930), II, 107. 9  TNA, Work 24/2/1; William A. Shaw (ed.), Calendar of Treasury Books: Preserved in the Public Records Office, 32 vols (London: HMSO, 1904–57), XVII, 219. 10  The Correspondence of Isaac Newton, ed. H. W. Turnbull, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959–77), IV, 384. 11 Strong, Coronation, 350. The basic estimate was £10,000: but this was probably just for the trappings of the Abbey: Calendar of Treasury Papers, ed. Joseph Redington, 6 vols (London: Longman, 1868–89), III, 16. To afford this, money had to be siphoned into the Wardrobe fund from the Civil List: see Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, XVII, 23. On the expenditure at earlier coronations and the economic implications for London, see Ian W. Archer, ‘City and Court Connected: The Material Dimensions of Royal Ceremonial, ca. 1480–1625’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71 (2008), 157–79.

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Charles Shales ‘for plate, jewels &c. to be provided for the service of the Queen’s Coronation’, and the same amount was allotted each to Sir Benjamin Bathurst for the coronation banquet and to Newton for the medals.12 Bathurst overspent wildly and required an extra £4,000.13 By contrast, the medals came in well under budget, at a total cost of just £2,485 18s. 3½d., although Newton did make the medals thicker than in previous years, to ‘take the impression better’.14 A new crown was made especially for the ceremony, although here some costs were cut: the jewels for the crown, worth an estimated £79,000, were hired for the occasion from the prominent goldsmith Sir Francis Child for a fee of £100.15 Using Robert D. Hume’s multipliers, the present-day value of the coronation budget would be somewhere between £8 million and £12 million.16 Little wonder that one contemporary described Anne’s coronation as ‘more magnificent than any in England till that time’.17 Public access to the ceremony was a priority. Much of the expenditure went on seating for spectators. Since the coronation of Charles I seating for public spectators had been installed in Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, and along the processional route between the two.18 As Samuel Pepys recalled of the coronation of Charles II in 1661: ‘I went out a little while before the King had done all his ceremonies and went round the abby to Westminster-hall, all the way within rayless, and 10000 people, with the ground coverd with blue cloth—and Scaffolds all the way.’19 In 1685 more seating was crammed into the upper galleries of the Abbey which had been left unoccupied in 1661. By 1689 the visibility of the monarchs to spectators actually began to shape the choreography of the ceremony; after taking the oath the new king and queen moved to the east side of the Abbey so ‘that they might be more Conspicuous to the Members of the House of Commons’.20 Coronation organizers in 1702 wanted Westminster to be a more public arena than ever before. Carlisle emphasized this in his warrant to Wren: ‘Care must be taken to make Galleries and Seats for as many as possible on each side of the Quire & Great Theatre (and elsewhere Convenient).’ He also gave Wren permission to 12 Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, XVII, 188; R. Mahaffy (ed.), Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Anne, 2 vols (London: HMSO, 1916), I, 30. 13 Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, XVII, 46. 14  TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 336r for a full breakdown of the costs. It seems doubtful that Newton ever received his £10,000: he was still petitioning Godolphin for remuneration in December. On the medal thickness, see TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 319r. 15  Tessa Rose, The Coronation Ceremony of the Kings and Queens of England and the Crown Jewels (London: HMSO, 1992), 29; British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 61407, fol. 23r. Anne would later complain that the fee was ‘very extravagant’: see Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, XVIII, 5. 16  See Robert D. Hume, ‘The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 487–533, and ‘The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power—and Some Problems in Cultural Economics’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 77 (2014), 373–416. 17  Nicholas Menin, The Form, Order, and Ceremonies of Coronations (London, 1727), 221. 18  On public access to the coronation of Charles I, see David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 72; Strong, Coronation, 329. 19  The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell, 1970–83), II, 83–5. 20  An Account of the Ceremonial at the Coronation of Their Most Excellent Majesties King William and Queen Mary (London, 1689), 3.

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‘make use of the Crown Arches over the Upper Galleries between the great Pillars of the Musick Gallery as you did the last Coronation’.21 We know that the scaffolds were completed by 15 April, when Wren was summoned by the Lords to inform them of his progress.22 The travelling diarist Celia Fiennes was in the crowd, and recorded ‘prodigious numbers in scaffolds built in the Abbey and all the Streetes on each side to Westminster Hall’.23 The expanding public dimension of the coronation is reflected in the escalating expenditure. Who would have been in the crowd on the day? Entrance to the Abbey was strictly ticketed. The political elite were, of course, required to attend. Peers were delegated eight gratis tickets each, and bishops four.24 Otherwise anyone could purchase tickets at five shillings apiece.25 This was hardly cheap. Even the most expensive seats at a patent theatre were less costly, at four shillings, which was still a substantial sum. Cheaper seats were available, though, in the scaffolds built along the wall that parted the churchyard from the sanctuary, and also in the adjoining area.26 These seats also provided a view of the procession from the Hall to the Abbey, but came with risks; as one newspaper reported, ‘There were a vast number of Scaffolds erected for the Conveniency of Spectators, some of which were so slightly built, that we hear they fell, and severall People hurt thereby.’27 One advertisement in the lead-up to the event touted a safer option: ‘places of the Leads of the Gatehouse at the West end of the Abby, and several Rooms for entire Companies to be let’. It added, ‘There is no danger of Scaffolding, and you have accommodation of eating and drinking.’28 The classifieds indicate that the solemn ritual of coronation was now being marketed as a consumer event.29 On the day, many who did not want to pay for tickets occupied nearby roofs and windows to get a view of the procession for free. Recurring health problems meant that Anne could not walk the processional route from the Hall to the Abbey. Samuel Aubrey, London’s premier coach maker, was paid £250 to design and build a sedan chair and carriage for the queen. Again, public visibility was made Aubrey’s priority. He designed the chair with a low back so that Anne could be seen by the audience gathered in Wren’s scaffolds.30 Fiennes was struck by Anne’s coronation robes ‘of Gold tissue, very Rich Embroydery of 21  Westminster Abbey, Muniments 51140. 22  Journal of the House of Lords, 64 vols (London, 1767–1830), XVII, 98. 23  Celia Fiennes, The Journeys of Celia Fiennes, ed. Christopher Morris (London: Cresset Press, 1947), 302. 24  Journal of the House of Lords, XVII, 97. 25 Strong, Coronation, 386. Arrangements for the purchase of tickets in 1702 are unclear. 26  Westminster Abbey, Muniments 51136. 27  English Post, 240 (24 April 1702). There is other evidence to suggest Wren botched the job: one official document describes ‘great disorders’ caused by the procession, probably because there was not enough room between scaffolds (Westminster Abbey, Muniments 51157). This may have been the cause of the queen losing ‘ten small Diamonds singly set in silver’ worth ten guineas from her robes in the procession: see Post Boy, 1083 (25 April 1702). 28  The Post Man, 955 (14 April 1702). On publicans renting out rooms, see Robert O. Bucholz, ‘ “Nothing but Ceremony”: Queen Anne and the Limitations of Royal Ritual’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), 288–323 at 297. 29  On the broader commercial impact of the coronation, see Joseph Hone, Literature and Party Politics at the Accession of Queen Anne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 63–70. 30  Calendar of Treasury Papers, III, 20.

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jewelry about it, her peticoate the same of Gold tissue with gold and silver lace, between Rowes of Diamonds’. She recalls the queen giving ‘obligeing lookes and bows to all that saluted her and were spectatours’.31 The subsequent banquet at Westminster Hall was likewise open to spectators. The feast itself cost an exorbitant £14,000, of which £10,000 was paid on 17 April and the further £4,000 in June, when the Treasury had greater cash flow.32 Eccles composed a suite of music for the banquet that reflected the ‘different musical idioms’ of the queen’s kingdoms of Scotland, England, and Ireland.33 Before the second course, as convention demanded, the royal champion Charles Dymoke rode into the Hall fully armed to defend Anne’s claim against any challenger.34 He was rewarded for his service with a ‘gold bowl’ from which Anne drank during the feast.35 The seating plan in the Hall was strictly hierarchical. Peers dined at two long tables and ‘Persons of Quality’ were given honorary seats.36 But, due to constraints on space, MPs were forced to eat in the adjoining exchequer chamber.37 Anne dined in a position of especial importance at an elevated table ‘under a fine Canopy’. After the opening formalities, she invited her consort, Prince George, to dine with her—significantly taking the seat to her left outside the royal canopy. Again, Fiennes is our best eyewitness. She was alert to differences between this coronation banquet and those that preceded it: ‘When King James was Crown’d he sate soe: at his left hand sate his Queen under another cannopy, but King William and Queen Mary being both principals sate under one large cannopy on one large throne.’38 Anne was a stickler for ceremonial decorum. When William and Mary were proclaimed on 13 February 1689, she had refused to sit until her stool was moved outside the royal canopy, as protocol demanded.39 Now, as queen regnant, Anne held sole authority and was thus careful to ensure that her consort sat in his proper place. This move emphasized to observers that she reigned alone. P ROT E S TA N T I S M A N D C O N S T I T U T I O N A L M O N A RC H Y Unlike her predecessors, Anne used her coronation to downplay her Stuart lineage. Instead she was portrayed as a constitutional Protestant monarch. This was a prudent 31 Fiennes, Journeys, 302. 32  Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Anne, I, 30; Shaw, Calendar of Treasury Books, XVII, 191 and 46. 33  On Eccles’s suite, see Matthias Range, Music and Ceremonial at British Coronations: From James I to Elizabeth II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 120; Peter Holman’s booklet notes to Sound the Trumpet: Henry Purcell and His Followers, CDH55258 (Hyperion, 2008), originally released as CDA66817 in 1996. John Church’s anthem for the procession survives in the BL, Harl. MS 7341, fol. 547. 34  Wren had to erect a tent for Dymoke to arm himself in New Palace Yard: see Gloucestershire County Archives, D2002/8/1. 35  Narcissus Luttrell, A Brief Historical Relation of State Affairs from September 1678 to April 1714, 6 vols (Oxford, 1857), V, 166. 36  London Gazette, 3804 (27 April 1702). 37 Luttrell, Brief Historical Relation, V, 166. 38 Fiennes, Journeys, 303. 39 Winn, Queen Anne, 138. This anecdote was recorded by John Anstis and relayed by Agnes Strickland in Lives of the Queen of England, 8 vols (Bell, 1885), VII, 198. The original manuscript has not been traced.

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move. In the immediate aftermath of William’s death, Tories and some Jacobites had eagerly claimed that Anne’s accession signalled a return to divine right Stuart monarchy. To avoid such partisan associations, Anne needed to emphasize that her legitimacy was founded in the revolution settlement and that her Stuart blood was of secondary importance. On the other hand, Whigs suggested that Anne should prioritize Dutch and German interests in the struggle against Louis XIV. While Anne and her government were indeed eager to continue war with France, they did not want to appear pawns of the Whigs. How would the coronation navigate these partisan stances? Responsibility for arranging the actual coronation liturgy fell largely to Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury. He did not have much to do. The Act of Settlement demanded that Anne’s coronation should precisely follow the model established by Henry Compton, Bishop of London, for the coronation of William and Mary in 1689.40 Compton had radically overhauled the coronation liturgy in 1689 after William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, modified the ceremony to accommodate a Catholic monarch in 1685. The resulting formula underscored certain religious and political principles within the framework of the traditional ceremony; the Protestantism of the new regime was emphasized, the ritual modified to accommodate dual monarchs, and the sermon gestured to Charles II and the earlier Stuarts as a means of reinforcing the new regime and mollifying its Tory opponents.41 The coronation oath was the crux of the ceremony. Following extensive debate in Parliament and the press, the oath was revised by a select committee in 1689.42 The 1689 Act for Establishing the Coronation Oath was designed ‘to the end therefore that one uniform oath may be in all times to come taken by the Kings and Queens of this Realm, and to them respectively administered at the times of their and every of their coronation’.43 In 1701 the Act of Settlement clarified that this legislation was intended to prohibit Catholics from claiming the British throne.44 Like her immediate predecessors, then, Anne promised to govern ‘according to the statutes in Parliament agreed on’, that she would execute ‘law and justice in mercy’, and ‘maintain the laws of God, the true profession of the gospel, and the Protestant reformed religion’.45 One of the most salient debates in 1689 pertained to the nature of this contract: was the coronation oath between God and the sovereign, or between the sovereign 40  The details of Anne’s coronation survive in four manuscripts, all of which appear to be rehearsal documents prepared according to order for the officials presiding over the ceremony, and are probably the ‘four Manuscript Books’ ordered by warrant: TNA, LC 2/15, N.34; see Benjamin Klein, ‘A Coronation Manuscript Bound by Robert Steele, 1702’, The Book Collector, 53 (2004), 567–71. Surviving manuscripts fitting this bill include Earl Gregg Swem Library, MS 2008.11; Lambeth Palace Library, MS 1078; BL, Add. MS 6336, fols 16–28, and Harl. MS 6118; Beinecke Library, MS Osborn fc87. 41  See Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘The Coronation of William and Mary, April 11, 1689’, in Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 107–30. 42  Ibid., 120–3. 43  Statutes of the Realm, ed. John Raithby, 11 vols (London, 1810–28), VI, 56–7. 44  Ibid., VI, 637. 45  BL, Add. MS 6336, fol. 19r.

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and the people? Supporters of James II maintained that the king was above the polity and thus not bound by its laws. Whigs, on the other hand, argued from a variety of positions that sovereign power derived from the people and that the coronation oath was a binding covenant between the king and the polity. Daniel Whitby typified one strand of Whig argument, stating that ‘kings of England were kings by virtue of an Original Compact, made between them and the people . . . by oaths that they took at their Coronation’. A king such as James II, who breaks that oath, ‘is no such King as our Constitution knows’.46 The new oath reflected the need for a formal contract between the sovereign and the polity, subject to parliamentary statute. Requiring her to defend Church and state, Anne’s oath similarly reinforced the constitutional basis of her claim and thus distanced her from her deposed Catholic father. Anne was the first monarch to take the Test at her coronation—that is, a declaration against transubstantiation and the worship of saints designed to prevent Catholics from taking public office. This was a significant addendum. The wording came from the Test Acts of 1673 and 1678, the latter of which served as a confessional test in the wake of the Popish Plot. Again, the Test was another component of Compton’s reforms, stipulated in the 1689 Bill of Rights, although one not included in William and Mary’s coronation. Before taking the oath, Anne declared that she ‘believe[d] that in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper there is not any transubstantiation of the elements of bread or wine into the body and blood of Christ, at, or after the consecration thereof, by any person whatsoever’, before announcing that ‘the invocation or adoration of the Virgin Mary or any other saint, and the sacrifice of the Mass, as they are now used in the church of Rome, are superstitious and idolatrous’.47 This was a public declaration of religious allegiance and an important statement against her Catholic half-brother and his supporters, the Jacobites. It functioned as both an announcement of the new queen’s role as the defender of the English Church from popery, and as a public commitment to the security of the Protestant succession. By taking the Test before the audience crammed into Wren’s scaffolds, Anne ensured her reputation as a true-blue Protestant. The coronation sermon allowed more freedom for expression than either the oath or Test. Nonetheless, it reinforced their message, suggesting that Anne was keen to emphasize the constitutional dimension to her claim. However, Anne could not afford to isolate the prominent Tories in her ministry. The sermon would need bipartisan appeal. Anne selected her trusted confidante, John Sharp, Archbishop of York, to preach. His text was Isaiah 49.23: ‘Kings shall be thy Nursing Fathers, and their Queens thy Nursing Mothers’. It was also the verse chosen for a new anthem by Jeremiah Clarke, accompanying the enthronement and crowning.48 This was a stock text for royal sermons and therefore a deliberately uncontentious choice for the coronation. Elizabeth’s preachers had frequently 46 Daniel Whitby, An Historical Account of Some Things Relating to the Nature of the English Government (London, 1690), 43–4, 46. 47  BL, Add. MS 6336, fol. 19r. 48 Range, Music and Ceremonial, 111–14.

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­ tilized it, as had preachers to Anne’s Stuart forebears.49 Sharp’s exegesis of the u ­passage is conventionally typological: the prophecy of Isaiah’s ‘Nursing Mother’ is realized in ‘Her Present Majesty upon the Throne of Her Ancestors’.50 The sermon suggested that Anne would support the Protestant succession. With the exception of a few lines on the royal martyr, Charles I, Sharp ignored the Stuart dynasty entirely. He understood that discussion of Anne’s ancestors could undermine arguments that she succeeded by the constitution. Instead, he focused on four historical British figures: King Lucius, Emperor Constantine, Henry VIII, and Elizabeth. The importance of those figures was religious. Lucius was, in Sharp’s words, ‘the first Christian King in Europe’, and Constantine the first Christian emperor of Rome, and of supposedly British descent.51 Henry VIII established the Church of England and Protestantism flourished under Elizabeth: ‘It was an English King that first threw off the Foreign Yoak; and it was an English King also, that first begun the Reformation of Religion. But the Honour of perfecting that great Work was reserved for a Queen.’52 By likening Anne to those figures, Sharp was suggesting that the Church would once again flourish under Anne. Equally importantly, by recalling these figures from British history, Sharp appealed to Tory nationalists who celebrated Anne as a ‘native’ queen after the reign of a Dutchman. Thus Sharp’s portrayal of Anne as a ‘Nursing Mother’ was not simply to surmount her lack of issue, but rather to emphasize her commitment to the Church: Christian princes should ‘think themselves obliged above all things to take care of the Church of God; remembring that it is chiefly with respect to That that they have the Charge of being Nursing-Fathers and Nursing-Mothers. As such therefore, they would make it their business to maintain and defend the true Religion.’53 Like the addition of the Test to the coronation liturgy, this emphasized Anne’s role as a ‘mother’ to the Church of England, whose chief duty was the defence of the Protestant nation. Making the Church of England stand in for a bodily heir, Sharp tacitly suggested that Anne’s first priority should be to enforce the Act of Settlement and thus secure the Protestant succession after her. Like Lucius, Constantine, and Henry VIII, Sharp proposed, Anne would establish an enduring Protestant state. By situating Anne in a framework that emphasized both patriotism and Protestantism, Sharp was working in an idiom that traversed conventional markers of partisanship: evoking simultaneously Tory traditionalism and Whig religious and constitutional reform. As such, the sermon had a clear message: Anne’s right to the throne came not by patrilineal descent, but rather by her piety, personal virtue, and fidelity to the Church of England: features required of a monarch after the revolution and emphasized in the wording of the 1689 oath. Although the symbolism of the 49  See Helen Hackett, ‘The Rhetoric of (In)fertility: Shifting Responses to Elizabeth I’s Childless­ness’, in Jennifer Richards and Alison Thorne (eds), Rhetoric, Women and Politics in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 149–71. 50  John Sharp, A Sermon Preach’d at the Coronation of Queen Anne (London, 1702), 2–3. 51  Ibid., 14. See Felicity Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do For You? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, English Historical Review, 120 (2005), 593–614. 52 Sharp, A Sermon Preach’d at the Coronation, 15. 53  Ibid., 6.

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c­oronation medals is more convoluted than Sharp’s argument, they purvey a ­complementary message. This cannot have been accidental. The obverse bust of the queen was based on a portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, William’s preferred court painter, done in early April.54 The reverse was co-designed by the engraver John Croker and the current Master of the Mint, Isaac Newton, and represents Anne as Pallas Athene, goddess of wisdom and war; she stands ready to hurl a thunderbolt at a many-headed monster with four arms and snaky legs, identified in Newton’s notes and reports in the newspapers as a ‘gyant’.55 Newton was probably thinking of the Gigantomachia: that is, the war between the classical pantheon and the Giants, a motif that had previously featured on a medal for the accession of Charles II, engraved by George Bower.56 The legend reads ‘vicem. gerit. illa. ­t onantis.’, meaning, she is the vicegerent of the thunderer. The design drew freely on the iconography of William and Mary’s coronation medal, which showed William as Jupiter, hurling a thunderbolt at Phaeton, who has lost control of the reins of power and thus stands in for James II, protégé of Louis XIV, whose iconography was that of the sun-king. In order to cast Anne as William’s constitutional successor, Newton consciously echoed the symbolism of that earlier medal, portraying Anne as Pallas Athene, the favourite daughter of Jupiter.57 The mythic genealogy links the two medals and thus the two rulers. There are other symbolic connections between the medals, too. In an elaborate exposition of the design, likely presented to Anne for her approval, Newton explained that the motto ‘relates to the last Coronation medal’, and that the ‘Thunderer’ of the motto is William, ‘for Thunder signifys War, & that King was a Warriour all his life-time’.58 According to Newton, the defeated ‘gyant’ is likewise emblematic of ‘any Enemy with which Her Majty hath or may have War’: in this case, the double Catholic threat posed by Louis XIV and James Francis Edward, the two faces of the monster.59 The distilled message of the medal, Newton

54  The portrait is number 46 in J. Douglas Stewart’s catalogue raisonné of Kneller’s works: Sir Godfrey Kneller and the English Baroque Portrait (Oxford, 1983), 91. See The Post Man, 951 (4 April 1702). 55  Recent scholars have erred in identifying the monster as a ‘hydra’. The misinterpretation stems from Abel Boyer, writing two decades later in A History of the Life and Reign of Queen Anne, Illustrated with All the Medals Struck in This Reign (London, 1722), 718. See Joseph Hone, ‘Isaac Newton and the Medals for Queen Anne’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 79 (2016), 119–48; Richard S. Westfall, Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 621–3; Sir John Craig, Newton at the Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946). 56  For Newton’s take on the Gigantomachia, see Jed Z. Buchwald and Mordechai Feingold, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 379. 57  Athene had also featured in William’s medallic iconography: see Sir Mark Jones, ‘The Medal as an Instrument of Propaganda in Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Numismatic Chronicle, 142 (1982), 117–26 at 119. 58  TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 289r. Cf. Isaac Newton, The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London, 1722), 226. 59  TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 289r. Here I disagree with Winn, who argues that ‘the monster on this medal, with its vulgar faces and crude weapons, makes no sense as an image of Louis XIV, who presided over the most elegant court and most centralized government in Europe’: Queen Anne, 291. Newton’s explanation reveals why the monster makes symbolic sense as an image of Louis.

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explains, ‘signifys that her Majesty continues the Scene of the last Reign’.60 Anne will fight both Louis and James for the Protestant succession of Britain. However, whereas Sharp successfully balanced Whig and Tory rhetoric in his sermon, Newton’s medal design proved too overtly partisan. The message that Anne would simply continue with William’s policies pleased Whigs and, as we shall see in due course, foreign ambassadors. Opportunistic Whig panegyrists such as John Hughes and John Dennis, for instance, used the medal to fashion Anne as William redivivus: Hughes writing that Anne ‘shall supply the Thunderers Place’ and go to war against ‘the Giants impious Race’.61 Tory writers pointedly omitted to mention the medal in any of their many succession panegyrics, suggesting that Whig interpretations of its symbolism had become entrenched.62 Indeed, our only record of the Tory response comes from Oxford, where the Vice Chancellor—a Tory high-flyer named Roger Mander—prohibited a student from reading ‘a copy of Verses upon the Inscription on the Medal, at Her Majesties Coronation, v i c e m gerit ill a to n an t i s ’.63 For Mander, and those who shared his political outlook, the medal was an objectionable piece of Whig propaganda. Tories viewed Anne’s accession as an opportunity for real political change, away from the Whig dominance of William’s reign. Whether Newton was aware of the partisan ­resonance of his design is unclear. But the Master of Mint was a committed Whig and occasional MP. It should not surprise us if he attempted to smuggle a partisan message into the design. The entire coronation ritual had been intended to portray Anne as a constitutional monarch and supporter of the Protestant succession. Newton conveyed this message, but in a way that isolated the Tory masses. DIPLOMACY Such messages were not only aimed at Anne’s subjects. The coronation was attended by a range of foreign envoys and visiting and resident diplomats. Under William, international negotiations for a renewed state of war with France had gone smoothly. Dutch and German ambassadors now required guarantees of the new regime’s commitment both to the war with France and the future Protestant ­succession in Britain. They had good reason to doubt Anne’s dedication to the war. In her first speech to Parliament on 11 March (and perhaps under the guidance of her High Tory uncle, Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester) Anne proclaimed ‘I know mine own Heart to be entirely English’, a deliberate echo of Elizabeth’s famous 60  TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 289r. 61  John Hughes, The House of Nassau: A Pindarick Ode (London, 1702), 12; see John Dennis, The Monument: A Poem Sacred to the Immortal Memory of the Best and Greatest of Kings, William the Third (London, 1702), 9–10; Essays Serious and Comical (London, 1707), 239. 62  On Anne’s Tory succession panegyrics, see Joseph Hone, ‘Politicising Praise: Panegyric and the Accession of Queen Anne’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2014), 147–57. 63  [Richard West?], The True Character of a Church-Man, Shewing the False Pretence to That Name. Together With the Character of a Low Church-Man Drawn in Answer to It, With Remarks (London, 1702), 40.

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speech at Tilbury.64 The motto ‘entirely English’ soon became a Tory rallying cry, and reappeared adorned with oak leaves—an established emblem of the Stuarts— on her accession medal. Anne’s speech was read by many as a reflection on her Dutch predecessor, whose foreignness had not endeared him to the English Tories. Hence Dutch and German ambassadors were understandably worried by the likely direction of the new queen’s foreign policy following this isolationist rhetoric. As the well-informed English diplomat Sir Robert Southwall observed, only ‘her pressing to support our allyances abroad will commute for what the Dutch may take amiss in that emphasis which Her Majesty layd on her English heart’.65 The new government needed to persuade its allies of their commitment to war with France. The coronation provided them with an opportunity to do so. Medals were one means of expressing such assurances. The partisan message of Newton’s coronation medals, though irksome to Tories, would certainly have assuaged doubts about the new queen’s commitment to the war. Besides the 1,200 silver medals for the crowd and the 518 gold medals for Parliament, Mint records also mention another ‘40 Medals of Gold (most of them double ones) for foreign Ministers & Persons of quality’.66 Frustratingly there are no further traces of these forty medals in diplomatic correspondence, diaries, the state papers, or elsewhere in the National Archives. We can only guess how they were received abroad. Equally problematically, no example of Anne’s coronation medal at this ‘double’ size is extant. But, as I have argued elsewhere, a puzzling and undated medal from Anne’s reign, known as the Palladium, is probably a later recast version of this alternative coronation medal described in Newton’s records.67 Once again, it represents the queen as Pallas, this time with the motto ‘novæ. palladivm. troiæ.’, alluding to the statue of Athene on which the safety of Troy was said to depend in The Iliad. Certainly, the Palladium would have made an excellent diplomatic gift.68 Not only was it exquisitely wrought—an inherently valuable object—but it also conveyed another important political message. According to eighteenth-century numismatists and historians such as Paul Rapin de Thoyras and Johann Hieronymus Lochner, the medal showed ‘the great importance of the queen to the alliance of the time’.69 In this reading, the ‘new Troy’ of the motto was the alliance of Britain, Holland, and the Holy Roman Empire. Anne was a Palladium keeping those 64  The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 5 vols (London, 1742), III, 197–8. 65  Second Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1871), 242. 66 TNA, Mint 19/3, fol. 336r. Due to lack of funds, the 518 gold medals for the House of Commons were only ‘made afterwards’ (fol. 332r). Robert Harley, Speaker of the Commons, took delivery of those medals on 9 May: BL, Add. MS 70020, fol. 179r. 67  Hone, ‘Isaac Newton and the Medals for Queen Anne’, 130–1. 68  On the giving of medals to diplomats, see Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 175; Larry Kreitzer, ‘Paying for Gold with Chocolate: Thomas Simon and a Gift for the Swedish Ambassador in 1656’, The Medal, 64 (2014), 10–15. 69  Johann Hieronymus Lochner, Samlung Merkwürdiger Medaillen (Nurenburg, 1744), cited and translated in David Pickup, ‘John Croker and the Alchorne Manuscript’, The Medal, 20 (1992), 19–31. For de Thoyras’s comments, see The Metallick History of the Reigns of William III and Queen Mary, Queen Anne and King George I (London, 1747), 1.

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nations safe from the popish encroachments of France. Iconographic objects such as these ones ensured that the coronation was not just a public display of royal power, but also conveyed a shrewd diplomatic message: Britain would stand by her Protestant allies in the coming war against Louis XIV. Sharp’s coronation sermon was no less important as a diplomatic act. Within the week the sermon was printed and issued for sale by Walter Kettilby and William Rogers, two of London’s foremost publishers of divinity.70 It circulated widely in print. The historian Ralph Thoresby recorded in his diary that he had a copy in Yorkshire by 5 June.71 Besides the standard quarto edition, Kettilby and Rogers also produced a limited run in folio. Those folios were given to Sharp for him to send abroad. The most important figure to whom Sharp intended to send a copy was Electress Sophia. When the radical deist John Toland visited Sharp in late April, the Archbishop innocently accepted Toland’s opportunistic gesture to act as his courier to Hanover. Sharp recorded their encounter in his diary: ‘He told me, upon that, he did not mean to stay here, for he was going very suddenly to the Princess Sophia of Hanover . . . and that he now meant to buy one of my c­ oronation sermons, and present it to her. I told him, he should not need to buy one, for I would send her one; and that when my sermon came out, I would send one for my Lady Clayton, and therewith one for the princess.’72 Upon learning of Toland’s reputation as a radical, though, Sharp had second thoughts about employing him as an official messenger: ‘I very well saw what prejudice it might do me. And thereupon resolved to get this sermon into my hands again.’73 Unfortunately Toland sailed for the Continent before Sharp could intercept him. Correspondence between Gottfriend Leibniz and the Hanoverian Prime Minister, Franz Ernst von Platen, confirms that Toland delivered Sharp’s sermon by 29 July 1702.74 Although Sophia did not particularly like Toland, she wrote to Sharp personally expressing her gratitude for the sermon and her satisfaction with its message.75 Sharp could have predicted how his coronation sermon would be received by the next in line to the British throne. He understood that the sermon would need to serve a diplomatic purpose and judged its rhetoric to appeal to supporters of the Hanoverian succession. His emphasis on Anne’s duty to maintain and enforce the Act of Settlement was surely calculated, among other things, to please Anne’s statutory successor. Anne returned from the banquet at Westminster Hall to St James’s Palace at 8.30 in the evening. The coronation was over. It had aimed to resolve debates about 70  A supposed pirate octavo edition of Sharp’s sermon (actually a completely different text) was issued two days before Kettilby and Rogers’ edition by the scurrilous printer James Read. He was arrested and sent to Newgate on 28 April: Daily Courant, 9 (29 April 1702). 71  The Diary of Ralph Thoresby, ed. Joseph Hunter, 2 vols (London, 1830), I, 365. 72  Thomas Sharp, The Life of John Sharp, D.D., Lord Archbishop of York, ed. Thomas Newcome, 2 vols (London: Rivington, 1825), I, 274–5. 73 Ibid. 74  Die Werke von Leibniz, ed. Onno Klopp, 11 vols (Hanover: Klindworth Verlag, 1864–84), VIII, 357; see Justin Champion, Republican Learning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696–1722 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 119. 75 Sharp, Life of John Sharp, I, 276.

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Anne’s legitimacy as sovereign. The ceremony projected images of Anne as a ­constitutional monarch and defender of the Church of England. Such imagery was designed to suggest that Anne was queen by statute and to quell arguments that she claimed the throne by hereditary right alone. By expanding the coronation’s audience through improved infrastructure and distributing tokens from the ­coronation abroad, this message was disseminated effectively. We have seen that the coronation sermon and medals, in particular, were calculated to negotiate Anne’s fraught position as the last Protestant Stuart. Sharp achieved this in his ­sermon with references to early Christian history, Newton by alluding to classical myth and William’s medallic iconography. Newton was less successful than Sharp in avoiding partisan controversy, or perhaps deliberately embedded a partisan message into the coronation medal. Nonetheless, both tacitly rebuffed the Catholic and Jacobite threats to Anne’s title, and thus signalled the new regime’s key priority: securing the Protestant succession. This message was meant both to appeal to the masses and to assuage Dutch and German doubts about Britain’s commitment to war against France. Anne’s coronation was extraordinarily successful in establishing her royal ­iconography. The ensuing panegyrics, newspapers, and pamphlets all picked up on Anne’s image as a nursing mother, a defender of the Church, and a warrior queen— albeit the weighting given to each of those representations varied according to the writer’s political allegiance.76 The nature of Anne’s legitimacy, though, continued to trigger controversy. Although the coronation had rejected hereditary succession outright, many of Anne’s subjects remained unable to define precisely her right to the throne over a decade after her accession. In 1712 Daniel Defoe was still r­ uminating how ‘If her Majesty Reigns by Right of Blood, then the Pretender must be spurious; if the Pretender be Legitimate, then you make the Queen have no Claim by Line, and consequently her Majesty must have some better Right than a Succession by Birth, or have no Right at all, and be an Usurper.’77 For the Whig Defoe, that ‘better Right’ was underpinned by statute. But rival representations of Anne as either a constitutional monarch or hereditary Stuart queen or, for diehard Jacobites, a usurper of James Francis Edward’s throne remained controversial. Each of those positions entailed a different stance on the future settlement of the British throne in the Protestant House of Brunswick or the Catholic House of Stuart. The coronation, far from permanently resolving the debate, actually provided an iconographic framework for such partisan constructions of Anne’s title and the future succession of the crown.

76  See Hone, ‘Politicising Praise’. 77  Defoe’s Review, 1704–1713, ed. John McVeagh, 9 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003–11), IX, 74.

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PA RT I I T R A N S F O R M AT I O N S

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8 ‘The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’ Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England Paulina Kewes Controversial works take on lives of their own, distant from their authors’ purposes. The most daring political tract of the Elizabethan era, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland written by the Jesuit Robert Persons and published in the summer of 1595 under the name of Robert Doleman, not only made an immediate mark on the succession controversy: its influence endured through the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Though close attention has been paid to its place in the late-Elizabethan debates, its afterlife, which will be my theme, has been underexplored.1 Mainstream histories of political thought typically sideline Persons or else bracket him with Continental Jesuits known as the neo-scholastics—Mariana, Suárez, and Bellarmine, even though his argument in A Conference was substantially different I am grateful to Justin Champion, Sue Doran, Mark Goldie, Clive Holmes, and Blair Worden for their trenchant comments on earlier drafts. Barbara Donagan, George Garnett, Tim Harris, Matthew Innes, Mark Knights, John Morrill, Sarah Mortimer, Glyn Parry, Jason Peacey, and Malcolm Smuts, deserve thanks for conversation and advice. Kelsey Jackson Williams provided expert research assistance. 1   Robert Doleman [Robert Persons, sometimes spelt ‘Parsons’], A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland ([Antwerp], 1594 [i.e. 1595]). Principal studies of A Conference in its original context include: Peter Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England ’, The Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 415–29 and Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 149–57; Peter Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 14 (2004), 243–60; Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 71–87; Stefania Tutino, ‘The Political Thought of Robert Parsons’s Conference in Continental Context’, The Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 43–62. For a summary of A Conference’s mid-seventeenth-century appropriations, see J. B. Williams [vere J. G. Muddiman], ‘Puritan Piracies of Father Persons’ Conference’, The Month, 117 (1911), 270–8; for discussions of its influence in the later period, see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke and Anglican Royalism’, Political Studies, 31 (1983), 61–85 at 72–3 and Post-Revolutionary Locke, in preparation; Howard Nenner, The Right to be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1603–1714 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), passim; David Andrew Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought: Charles Blount’s Impious Learning’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2003), ch. 7. I am grateful to Professor Goldie for sending me his work in advance of its publication, and to Professor Justin Champion for directing me to Wilson’s brilliant thesis.

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from theirs.2 Meanwhile, scholarship on the mid- to late-seventeenth-century English polemic often ignores or dismisses as mere bile contemporary allegations that anti-Stuart writers stole from him.3 This chapter takes issue with both these approaches. It explains what is distinctive about A Conference, gives an overview of its transmission and reception, and traces its signal and varied influence on Protestant thought from the first Stuart succession to the last one and beyond. This concern with the longue durée sets the chapter apart from recent studies of early modern political writing and thought, as does its focus not only on actual changes of regime but also on anticipated ones, in particular an abortive attempt to make Oliver Cromwell king and the failed campaign to exclude Charles II’s Catholic brother and heir, James, Duke of York. The choice of method should be clarified at the outset. A literary scholar by training and institutional affiliation, here I write intellectual history but one grounded in circumstance, controversy, archive, book history, and the history of scholarship. To recover the influence of political ideas we need to recover the form, circulation, readership, and appropriation of the texts which conveyed them. Hence the emphasis in what follows not only on the generic and rhetorical properties of Persons’s text, but also on its multifarious iterations and adaptations in manuscript and print, and the responses to it, and them, by individual readers. The value of this approach in a volume dealing with Stuart succession literature broadly conceived should be self-evident. Mine is one of several contributions exploring works which could not be classed as imaginative writing. In attending to the uses of one crucially important political tract, I provide a new vantage on how contemporaries understood, and argued about, the proprieties of succession at a time when Shakespeare and Jonson, Milton and Dryden composed their finest works. The chapter invites a rethinking of the republican and Whig traditions in English political thought by revealing their dependence on the work of an Elizabethan Jesuit. Naturally, Persons was hardly the sole Catholic author to influence later writers. Seventeenth-century people had a strong sense of medieval conciliarism and of the broad character of late scholastic Catholic political theory—in Leviathan,

2   Paulina Kewes, ‘Translations of State: Ancient Rome and Late Elizabethan Political Thought’, in Kewes (ed.), Ancient Rome and Early Modern England: History, Literature, and Political Imagination, forthcoming. Unlike his Continental confrères, Persons earns no mention in Quentin Skinner’s The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). He is likewise unremarked in Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) or Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (eds), Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). For discussion of Persons alongside other Jesuit thinkers, see J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Catholic Resistance Theory, Ultramontanism, and the Royalist Response, 1580–1620’, in J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (eds), The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 219–53; J. H. M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c.1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), passim. 3  For example, Jacqueline Rose lists the Tory attacks on the Whigs as appropriators of Persons but does not probe whether they had a point: see her ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History and Royalist Anti-Popery in Restoration England’, The English Historical Review, 122 (2007), 1287–317.

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for example, Hobbes dwells on Bellarmine.4 Yet, because of Persons’s status as the foremost English Jesuit intellectual, missionary, educator, diplomatic agent, and plotter; his intimate engagement with his nation’s history, political culture, and law; and his zesty prose—a prose which still won accolades from no less a stylist than Jonathan Swift in the eighteenth century5—he enjoyed dubious distinction in the wider Catholic tradition that is often regarded as the evil genius behind radical Protestant thought. Aside from the case for the considerable impact of Persons, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of arguments for elective kingship in the period which has been overshadowed by recent preoccupation about ‘republicanism’.6 Except during the brief republican moment at mid-century, the dominant drive, we shall see, was towards limiting monarchy’s powers by breaking the back of the doctrine of hereditary succession. This is the pervasive tradition that needs to be recuperated, and that this method enables us to grasp. Persons was the first English author to challenge the hereditary principle headon. For several hundred years, he observed, the principle had in practice barely prevailed either in England or in Scotland or on the Continent. Persons went further. He questioned not only the hereditary principle but the pre-eminence of monarchy itself. Forms of government, he maintained, were man-made and were replaceable according to circumstance of the public interest. The ancient Romans and the modern United Provinces, he observed, had prospered under kingless rule.7 Alongside those unnerving assertions Persons advocated the right of political resistance. However strong a tyrant’s hereditary claim, his subjects were entitled to overthrow his rule. They could also prevent the enthronement of a hereditary successor if that would serve the public good. Persons’s was the most dazzling and the most overt espousal of popular sovereignty in England to that date. 4  Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck, rev. edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 378–402: Hobbes challenges Bellarmine’s assertion of the Pope’s temporal power, a claim Persons did not make in the English version of A Conference. J. N. Figgis’s classic, Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931), argues for the Catholic conciliarist roots of Whiggism. See also those who followed Figgis, such as Francis Oakley, ‘On the Road from Constance to 1688: The Political Thought of John Major and George Buchanan’, Journal of British Studies, 1 (1962), 1–31 and The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 6. The ‘on the road’ phrase was coined by Harold Laski. 5  The Tatler 230, 28 September 1710, in The Works of Jonathan Swift, 4 vols (Dublin, 1735), I, 318–19. 6 See, inter alia, Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995); John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen (eds), Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic, 1623–1677 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). In emphasizing the obsessive theorizing of monarchical succession, my chapter complements John Morrill’s important ‘Uneasy Lies the Head that Wears a Crown’: Dynastic Crises in Tudor and Stewart Britain 1504–1746, The Stenton Lecture 2003 (Reading: The Department of History, University of Reading, 2005). 7 Kewes, ‘Translations of State’. To Continental Jesuits Persons’s seeming endorsement of the Dutch republic set up by the Protestant rebels against Spain would have been anathema.

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Intended to block the Stuart succession, A Conference paradoxically boosted the chances of the main hereditary contender, James VI of Scotland.8 Vilified by a papist, James became more attractive to Protestants of all hues; meanwhile, the tract’s treasonable drift—Persons subtly promoted the title of the Spanish Infanta— alienated loyalist Catholics who hoped that the Scottish king would convert, or at least grant them toleration. The gap between intention and result widened after the Stuart succession, as Persons’s arguments were adapted to contexts he could not have foreseen. Yet the power and incisiveness of the treatise carried it across those transitions. A Conference was a continuous presence in print and public argument. The first edition numbered 2,000 copies—a large run for a polemical tract, though understandable given the danger of a consignment being seized by the authorities.9 There were at least three abridgements, in 1648, 1655, and 1689. Extracts from Part I, moreover, were surreptitiously serialized in a radical newsbook, The Moderate (1648–9). A complete reprint of A Conference appeared in 1681; and the Stationers’ Register entry for 30 January 1689 suggests that another reprint was in the offing.10 Dozens of rebuttals and adaptations were published across the Stuart age. The treatise was appropriated by polemicists and political thinkers from Henry Walker and Henry Parker during the Puritan Revolution and Charles Blount, John Somers, and Algernon Sidney during the Succession Crisis of 1679–81 to the defenders of the Revolution of 1688–9.11 In most texts I discuss the engagement with Persons is incontrovertible. Resemblance does not mean influence, but a few cases where the evidence is circumstantial rather than conclusive are adduced to open up new lines of reflection for the reception and mutability of concepts and discourses in political thinking in the later period. Persons’s reputation effectively came to rest on A Conference—in Peter Holmes’s apt judgement ‘arguably the best political work written by an Englishman between More’s Utopia and Hobbes’s Leviathan (excluding Hooker)’.12 The Jesuit’s earliest, blisteringly hostile, biographer, Thomas James, excoriated the invidious drift of ‘the Booke of Titles’, as did the eminent historian William Camden, who gave it a penetrating review in his Latin annals of Queen Elizabeth.13 The greatest apologist for jure divino absolute hereditary monarchy, Sir Robert Filmer, singled out A Conference (alongside Buchanan’s De iure) for special opprobrium in the opening pages of his 8  Paulina Kewes, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit, and the Jacobean Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 47–70. 9  Holmes, ‘Authorship’, 421. 10  A Transcript of the Registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640–1708, ed. G. E. Briscoe Eyre, 3 vols (London, 1913–14), III, 345. 11  The stupendously successful assimilation of Persons’s devotional work, The Christian Directory (1582), by the Church of England cleric Edmund Bunny provides a nice counterpart to the story of A Conference. See Introduction to The Christian Directory (1582): The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertaining to Resolution, by Robert Persons, ed. Victor Houliston (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 12 Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, 135. 13  James I, The Iesuits Downefall . . . Together with the Life of Father Parsons an English Iesuite (Oxford, 1612), 58; Camden, Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum, regnante Elizabetha (London, 1615), 71–4.

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Patriarcha.14 As late as 1703, Persons would be decried by a Scottish non-juror as ‘the Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’.15 The influence of the work was the more remarkable because of its Jesuit purpose. A tract written in a Catholic cause which Protestantism identified with resistance and conspiracy was taken up by Protestants, often in anti-popish causes. Not surprisingly, seventeenth-century users of Persons tended to conceal their debts to him. Persons himself had concealed his own confessional motives, which is one reason why his tract could be exploited across the religious spectrum. Rarely does A Conference disparage the Protestant faith or assert the papal authority in t­ emporal matters, a key premise of Continental Jesuits. Only in the confidential Latin version which Persons presented to the pope did those principles come to the fore.16 Another source of the work’s appeal was its apparent impartiality. A Conference combines the perspective of reason of state with an empirical scholarly method. No previous succession tract was so exhaustive in reviewing all manner of history, from Scripture and classical antiquity to the present. Structured as a learned dialogue between a civilian and a common lawyer, and encrusted with intricate chapter headings, marginal glosses, and an elaborate fold-out genealogical tree, A Conference masquerades as a dispassionate scholarly enquiry. With calculated artifice, Persons declares plausibly—if also outrageously—that not just conscience but also policy must guide one’s political choices. Hence to accept an heir of a hostile religion, he insists, would be both a sin and the height of folly irrespective of one’s confession.17 No writer, whether Protestant or Catholic, had said anything remotely like this. Persons’s forensic analysis of England’s dynastic past proved equally devastating. Earlier succession polemic tackled national history piecemeal. By contrast, A Conference drew systematically on major chronicles such as those by Holinshed 14  Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 3. Filmer does not mention Persons in his published Civil War tracts. 15 Thomas Craig, ‘De Jure Successionis Regni Angliae, Libri Duo’, trans. and pub. by James Gadderar as Concerning the Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England, Two Books (London, 1703), Translator’s Preface, sig. D2v. 16  See ‘Cap. 12. De iure pontificorum Romanorum in regnum Angliae atque Hyberniae’, in ‘De regiae successionis apud Anglos iure libri duo . . . Anno Domini 1596’, Biblioteca Nacional de España MS 6449 (digital version); Holmes, Resistance and Compromise, 152–7; Tutino, ‘Political Thought’, 45ff. There were also two partial Spanish translations, one for Philip II and the other one for the Pope (Holmes, ‘Authorship’, 420, 421). The original made numerous claims bound to alienate Rome, Madrid, and the wider international Catholic opinion, which explains why Persons, who had masterminded previous propaganda campaigns aimed at a European audience, did not try to have it printed either in Latin or in any of the Continental vernaculars. 17 Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought; Harro Höpfl, ‘Orthodoxy and Reason of State’, History of Political Thought, 23 (2002), 211–37 at 235. Persons is reflecting the new fashion for Tacitean ‘reason of state’ described in Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Skepticism and Reason of State’, in Burns and Goldie (eds), Cambridge History of Political Thought, 479–98. However, in a work of 1596 which circulated in scribal copies till the following century, Persons advanced a directly contrary argument in favour of entrenching the Catholicity of the English Crown by statute: see The Jesuit’s Memorial for the Intended Reformation of England, under their First Popish Prince . . . with an Introduction, and some Animadversions, ed. Edward Gee (London, 1690), 213–14: ‘first of all to assure the Succession of the Crown by good provision of Laws, which Hereticks, of later years, have so much confounded, and made so uncertain; and in such manner must be link the state of Catholick Religion and Succession together, as the one may depend, and be the assurance of the other’.

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and Stow, and a host of minor ones. It portrayed England as a quasi-elective ­monarchy, a view shared by many Elizabethan Protestants except that they had never articulated it so bluntly or compellingly in print.18 This too recommended the book to its seventeenth-century appropriators. Having failed to avert the enthronement of the Stuarts, A Conference, we shall see, was successfully enlisted to secure that of William of Orange and of the Hanoverians. E A R LY J A C O B E A N R E B U T TA L S It is often assumed that the unexpectedly smooth transition from Elizabeth to James extinguished debate about the succession at a stroke. This is not quite true. While there was no realistic alternative to James, his elevation arguably violated both common law and statute. And the myriad attempts to explain and justify it in press and pulpit reflected the very partial and provisional embrace of the hereditary principle even in 1603. Taking a cue from the proclamation of James as king on 24 March, most writers stressed his birthright and providential calling, and marvelled at the auspicious unanimity of the proclamation’s architects. Scores of poems, sermons, and addresses reported that Elizabeth had named James as heir in her dying moments. There was pointed emphasis too on the nation’s consent, and a few reformers came perilously close to framing James’s enthronement as a species of election. The Puritan Miles Mosse, for one, styled the Scottish king as another Numa Pompilius, a Sabine chosen king by the Romans—and, coincidentally, one of Persons’s heroes.19 Some authors set out to bolster the new dynasty—and curry favour—by countering the Jesuit’s attack. These early Jacobean ripostes illustrate the continuing hold of A Conference on political discussion. Take Leonell Sharpe’s sermon-turnedsuccession tract delivered at Cambridge’s University church on 28 March and soon printed by royal command. As well as harping on the new king’s lineage, merit, divine appointment, robust following, and nomination by Elizabeth, Sharpe challenged Persons’s animadversions on James’s foreign birth, apparent exclusion by Henry VIII’s will which favoured the Suffolk line over the Stuarts, and the bar allegedly imposed by the Act for the Queen’s Surety (1585). Sharpe protests that bit too much. The sermon’s internal discrepancies no less than infelicitous comparison of James to Saul betray the tenuousness of the Stuart claim. Hailing the 18  Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), 51–92; Paulina Kewes, ‘History Plays and the Royal Succession’, in The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer, and Felicity Heal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 493–509; Paulina Kewes, ‘Parliament and the Principle of  Elective Succession in Elizabethan England’, in Writing the History of Parliament in Tudor and Early Stuart England, ed. Paul Cavill and Alexandra Gajda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 106–32. 19  Paulina Kewes, This Great Matter of Succession: England’s Debate, 1553–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Mosse, Scotlands Welcome. A Sermon Preached at Needham in the Countie of Suff. on Tuesday, April 5, 1603 (London, 1603), 20; Persons, A Conference, Pt. I, 25.

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miraculous accord of the irregular assembly that proclaimed James—Sharpe calls it the ‘councell of State’—the sermon is ambivalently caught between invoking divine and human agency.20 Civil lawyer and historian John Hayward prudently omitted to refute Persons’s legal–genealogical objections to James’s title which ‘with generall both liking and applause are now determined’.21 Instead Hayward’s Answer to the First Part of a Certain Conference (1603) took aim at Persons’s defence of resistance and exclusion, and broader constitutional argument. Like the Scottish civil lawyer Thomas Craig whose Latin reply to the first part remained unpublished, Hayward imitated the empirical bent of the Jesuit’s treatise, offering a comparative survey of ancient and modern polities. For all its erudition and legal acumen, however, Hayward’s apology for hereditary monarchy was logically flawed. For in denying the people’s right to free themselves from a tyrant or reject an unpromising successor, Hayward fell back on the notion of constitutional difference which had underpinned King James’s covert reply to Buchanan and Persons, A Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598, repr. 1603), and Hayward’s own scandalous history of King Henrie the IIII (1599).22 Rulers are only accountable to their subjects in elective regimes such as Poland– Lithuania or Venice, Hayward reasoned, and not in hereditary ones such as England. The snag was that having conceded the customary variation of forms of government he was then unable to rescue the hereditary principle as the only valid mode of transferring sovereignty according to natural law.23 Filmer would remark on the problem in his Patriarcha. Pervasive in the writings of Sharpe, Hayward, and others, the tensions and ambiguities surrounding the Stuart claim might not greatly matter in the first flush of enthusiasm for the new monarch. The Act of ‘A Moste joyfull and juste Recognition’ of the king’s title passed in March 1604 by James’s first Parliament set out the official interpretation: the Crown descended to him ‘by inherent birthright and lawful and undoubted succession’.24 Even so, residual doubts resurfaced during the union debates of 1604–8 and during the clash over impositions in 1614, when one audacious MP complained that James had no right to levy extra-parliamentary 20  A Sermon Preached at Cambridge . . . the 28. of March (Cambridge, 1603), 8–9; cf. Chapter 10 in this volume by David Colclough, ‘ “I have brought thee up to a Kingdome”: Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I’. 21  Craig, ‘De Jure’; Hayward, An Answer to the First Part of a Certaine Conference, Concerning Succession (London, 1603), sig. A4v. 22  The same distinction had powered Elizabethan propaganda justifying England’s support for the Dutch Protestant rebels against Spain. On James’s engagement with Persons, see Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit’. Alongside James’s other writings, A Trew Law and Basilikon Doron were reprinted in London in 1603. The latter was also available in a versified Latin–English abridgement authorized by the king: William Willymat, A Princes Looking Glasse . . . Excerpted and Chosen Out of . . . Basilikon Doron . . . and Translated into Latin and English Verse (Cambridge, 1603). 23  Matthew Innes, ‘The Threat of Popular Authority and the Jacobean Succession’ (unpub­ lished M.Phil. thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016) and ‘Robert Persons, Popular Sovereignty, and the Succession Debate of the 1590s’, Historical Journal (2018), https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0018246X17000553. I am grateful to Mr Innes for sending me copies of both essays. 24  1 Jac. I, c. 1, in The Statutes of the Realm, ed. John Raithby, 11 vols (London: G. Eyre and A. Strahan, 1810–28), 4, pt. 2, 1017–18.

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taxation, having been ‘to some extent chosen’:25 the elective principle was thus invoked to delimit royal prerogative. In time such questions about the nature of the royal title—if not dismay about the character and policies of the Jacobean and then Caroline regime—apparently receded. After decades when the Stuarts’ divine-hereditary right seemed invincible, questions about its legal basis, and the corresponding scope of kingly authority, returned to the fore in the tumultuous circumstances of the 1640s and 1650s which also mark a resurgence of interest in A Conference. P E R S O N S T H E RO U N D H E A D At his trial in January 1649, the shocked Charles I heard that as an ‘Elected King’ he was directly answerable to ‘the People of England ’.26 John Bradshaw, the Lord President of the High Court, reminded the king of the contractual obligation he had incurred by taking the coronation oath, and challenged point-blank the primacy of hereditary right.27 Granted the variety of influences upon the Rumpers’ stance, how far might such thinking derive from Persons? Charles’s opponents had both the means and motive to quarry the Jesuit’s book: copies of A Conference were readily available, and its limpid theorization of England as a limited, quasi-elective monarchy where the people had the upper hand was still unsurpassed. The Sidneys, to take one example, had the original Antwerp edition at Penshurst, probably acquired by the first Earl of Leicester Robert (brother to Sir Philip Sidney).28 At some point, perhaps in the earlier 1630s, the grandee Robert Sidney, second Earl of Leicester (a significant figure in the lead-up to the Civil War and father of Algernon Sidney, author of Discourses Concerning Government) thought it worth engaging with the Jesuit’s arguments. ‘Doleman’, he noted, ‘sayth much for the capitall punishment of Kings, instancing in Saul—but I think rather craftily than ingeniously or rightly.’ Whereas the second Earl baulked at A Conference’s justification of regicide, he jotted down, though did not contest, its incendiary claim ‘that “the whole body is of more authoritie than the head” ’.29 Meanwhile, Persons’s insistence on the supposed Puritan ascendancy in the Elizabethan fin de siècle caught the attention of Sir William Drake, that voracious reader and endless note-taker. Under the heading ‘Dolman 242 of Succession’, we find Drake loosely transcribing a passage that appears on page 244 of Part II of the 25  Antonio Foscarini to the Doge and Senate (27 June 1614) in Calendar of State Papers Venetian, 1613–5, 138; Rei Kanemura, ‘Kingship by Descent or Kingship by Election? The Contested Title of James VI and I’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), 317–42. 26  John Bradshaw, King Charls His Tryal: or A Perfect Narrative of the Whole Proceedings of the High Court of Iustice (London, 1649), 6; John Nalson, A True Copy of the Journal of the High Court of Justice for the Tryal of K. Charles I . . . With a Large Introduction (London, 1684), 35. 27 Bradshaw, King Charls His Tryal, 32–9. 28  The Library of the Sidneys of Penshurst Place Circa 1665, ed. Germaine Warkentin et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013) shows that the Sidneys also owned several other works by Persons and counterblasts to them. 29  Centre for Kentish Studies, Maidstone, De L’Isle and Dudley Papers, U1475/Z47. I owe this and the following reference to Professor Blair Worden.

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1594/5 text, starting ‘The Puritan parte’ and ending ‘on their side’.30 My guess is that he wrote this in the Civil Wars about the parliamentarian armies.31 Even those who had not read A Conference may have been au fait with its argument. As well as being scathingly summarized in Camden’s Annales—which was now accessible in rival English translations, the gist could be deduced from published replies such as Hayward’s Answer, which was reprinted in 1623 in a volume of Hayward’s Works.32 Persons’s unorthodox claims continued to exercise the upholders of strong royal authority. In his Patriarcha, a thumping vindication of divine-right hereditary monarchy written before 1631 but not printed until 1680, Filmer impugned Part I’s defence of resistance and ‘Popular Sedition’, and praised Hayward’s and others’ rejoinders, while complaining that they too had regrettably embraced ‘the Natural Liberty and Equality of Mankind’.33 The earliest parliamentarian statements of the elective principle appeared in the 1640s. Illustrated with material from the chronicles, they exhibit knowledge of both Persons’s text and the works of Continental Jesuits while distancing themselves from all things popish. Take the Presbyterian William Prynne’s The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments (1643), which explicitly refers to ‘Doleman’.34 Sponsored by the Long Parliament, this sought to justify its actions against Charles I by demonstrating that Catholic parliaments had often chastised peccant kings: if that were deemed legitimate, Prynne demanded, what was to stop the present godly Parliament from following suit? Another Presbyterian Nathaniel Bacon’s considerably more eloquent An Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England (1647) depicted Saxon and Norman kings as elective: beholden for their title to the people, Bacon argued, they were accountable to them. Taking in the Tudors and the Stuarts, Bacon’s Continuation (1651) summed up the ideological fault-line succinctly: ‘Kings ever loved the rule of inheritance . . . The people ever loved the title of Election.’35 In the historiography, Prynne, Bacon, and other mid-century ancient constitutionalists are seen as path-breakers, but Persons had been there before, and they must have known it.36 30  University College London, MS Ogden 7/41, papers of Sir William Drake, reverse foliation fo. [4]. Drake’s familiarity with Persons is not recorded in Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 31  Seventeenth-century Catholics too were avid readers of Persons, though they found his Treatise of the Three Conversions (1603) more apposite. See Liesbeth Corens, ‘Dislocation and Record Keeping: The Counter Archives of the Catholic Diaspora’, in Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, and Alexandra Walsham (eds), The Social History of the Archive: Record Keeping in Early Modern Europe, Past and Present Supplement 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 269–87. 32  The First Volume of the Workes of Sir Iohn Hayward Knight . . . Contayning, 1. The Liues of the Three Normane Kings. 2. The History of K. Henry the Fourth. 3. An Answer to Doleman (London, 1623). 33 Filmer, Patriarcha, 3. 34 Prynne, The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes (London, 1643), 99, 199. Naturally Prynne used many other sources, mostly the Huguenot Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos and the writings of Hugo Grotius. 35  Historical Discourse Continuation (London, 1651), 277. Blair Worden discusses Bacon’s espousal of the elective principle in his God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 254–6. 36  Persons goes unmentioned in J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Janelle Greenberg remarks on the ‘ancient constitutionalism’ of

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While Presbyterian writings betray familiarity with A Conference, and often echo its ideas, direct influence is ultimately unprovable. By contrast, Cromwell’s allies brazenly turned to Persons’s text, conniving in the publication of two anonymous abridgements attributed to the publicist Henry Walker, in 1648 and 1655 ­respectively. Extracts from Walker’s 1648 redaction were subsequently cloaked as editorials in The Moderate, a radical newsbook initially associated with the Independents and the New Model Army before acquiring a more overt Leveller complexion. These, and the other, less blatant appropriations, exemplify the contrasting purposes the treatise could serve around the time of the regicide and then under the Protectorate. In 1648–9, it was used to lay the ground for, and justify, the trial and execution of Charles I. Seven years later, it provided ammunition in favour of settling the protectoral succession in Cromwell’s lifetime, even making him king. Reading the adaptations alongside contemporary responses to them usefully illuminates their significance. Walker’s Severall Speeches Delivered at a Conference Concerning the Power of Parliament, to Proeeed [sic] Against Their King for Misgovernment (1648) was an opportunistic abbreviation of Part I of A Conference. Apparently, the original had been given to Walker by ‘Mr Darly a Yorkshire, and Part. man [who] bought Dolman . . . att ye Kings Armes in little Brittain’.37 This must be one of the grandees, Henry Darley, later member of the Council of State.38 Contemporary ­pamphlets corroborate the story of the grandees’ promotion of ‘Doleman’, and the handsome remuneration paid to Walker.39 Advertised in Perfect Occurrences—a Walker newsbook—for 21–8 January 1648, and available by 3 February, Severall Speeches bore the imprimatur of Gilbert Mabbot, parliamentary licenser of the press, dated 31 January.40 Walker must have been confident that his pamphlet would gain official approval or else he inserted the license illicitly to insinuate that it had.41 It was produced by Robert Ibbitson, who became a leading printer for the republic. Severall Speeches intervened in the ongoing debate about the fate of the defeated Charles I. The tract was the product of a particular context—the Vote of no Addresses A Conference in The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 124–5; she does not, however, consider the possibility that the mid-century radicals whose work she discusses might have been influenced by it. 37  See the note on the flyleaf of the Oxford don and cleric Thomas Barlow’s copy of Severall Speeches in the Bodleian Library (hereafter Bod.), C. 3.3.Linc., and Figure 8.1 on p. 161 below. 38 See David Scott, ‘Darley, Henry (c.1596–1671)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-66712. 39 Theophilus Verax (vere Clement Walker), Relations and Observations Historical and Politick ([n.p.] 1648), 113; [John Crouch], The Man in the Moon, 12 (4 July 1649), 90. I owe these references to Dr Clive Holmes. 40  Perfect Occurrenes of Every Daie journall in Parliament, no. 56, 21–8 January 1648, p. 393; no. 57, 28 January–4 February 1648, p. 402: ‘Thursday. Feb. 3. His Maj. is very melancholy. The Speeches at the Conference came this day abroad in print, concerning the King.’ 41  In his ODNB article on Mabbot, Frances Henderson comments on his waning control at this time: see ‘Mabbott, Gilbert (bap. 1622, d. in or after 1670)’, http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37706. See also Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 157–8.

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in January 1648.42 During and after the Civil War, Parliament had repeatedly conducted negotiations with the king to end the conflict. Now, exasperated by evidence of the king’s insincerity in the talks, it resolved to put an end to them. Even so, terminating negotiations with Charles was one thing, removing him another. Most of those who supported the Vote of no Addresses would have expected Parliament to impose its own settlement on the defeated king. But there was also the more radical solution, as yet barely voiced, which would be adopted in January 1649. Walker daringly pointed towards it. Unlike so much anti-royalist polemic which abounded in savage ad hominem assaults on Charles, his French Catholic queen and close associates, Severall Speeches went back to first principles. Shunning libellous tone and personal invective, it traded on A Conference’s aura of aloofness and scholarly sophistication. Cleverly mimicking recently published titles, the abridgement masqueraded as a record of an actual conference between the Lords and Commons. Gone is A Conference’s faux-dialogic form. Instead, the title page lists headings of the putative speeches culled from Persons’s summaries of the first nine chapters. These sound like assertions of unassailable truths: ‘I. That Government by blood is not by Law of Nature, or Divine, but only by humane and positive Laws of every particular Common-wealth, and may upon just causes be altered’ or ‘IV. The lawfulnesse of proceeding against Princes . . . ’ The reader, led to believe that such arguments had carried the day in Parliament, was encouraged to accept their validity. Severall Speeches cannibalizes Persons to furnish a theoretical justification of resistance predicated on the contractual dimension of kingship. It discredits the hereditary principle as both impracticable and undesirable, and cites foreign and native examples of successful depositions, chief among them that of Richard II. Walker repeatedly substitutes ‘parliament’ for the original’s ‘commonwealth’ to underscore Parliament’s authority to bring a wayward prince to book, and so further the case for Charles’s dethronement. He also recycles Persons’s insistence on the providential sanction for both deposition and exclusion. Printed in type larger than the preceding tightly-packed seventy-nine quarto pages, the conclusion dwells on the repugnance of ungodly rulers, and the necessity to take action against them. This too was apposite given rampant accusations of popery against the king. One might easily infer that, following Charles’s removal, Parliament should proceed to elect a suitable replacement—perhaps another, less obnoxious Stuart. (Such plans were actually afoot at this time, the preferred candidate being the king’s third son, Henry, Duke of Gloucester.43) Yet, like its prototype, Severall Speeches also subtly undermined the institution of monarchy. Historians disagree as to when the parliamentarians became serious about overthrowing not just the king but also kingship. Taking issue with those who locate the origins of constitutional republicanism well before the regicide, 42  This was passed by the Commons on 3 January and by the Lords after the intervention of the army on 17 January. 43  Sean Kelsey, ‘ “The Now King of England”: Conscience, Duty, and the Death of Charles I’, The English Historical Review, 132 (2017), 1077–109 (1100ff.).

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Blair Worden has argued persuasively that even Charles’s most implacable enemies did not initially set out to abolish the monarchy, and that its dissolution was largely down to contingency.44 Severall Speeches did not advocate a constitutional revolution. However, by retaining Persons’s bravura defence of the Commonwealth’s ‘power to chuse their own fashion of Government, as also to change the same upon reasonable causes’, while deleting his overview of English royal successions, it considerably strengthened the original’s republican subtext.45 The retention of Persons’s example of the successful Dutch republic had a similar effect.46 Walker’s piracy was soon unmasked. George Thomason marked his copy ‘Doleman’.47 Walker’s alterations were sarcastically dissected in the royalist salvo The Kings Most Gracious Messages for Peace and a Personal Treaty (May 1648).48 Its unnamed author derides ‘this blessed Reforming Parliament’ and its frontman Mabbot for foisting ‘the Iesuites Doctrine’ on the unsuspecting public. Walker’s corrupt and hypocritical sponsors, he argues, perpetrated the fraud to advance their malignant ends. This is the first eagle-eyed detection of how Persons’s very words were used to subvert the Stuart monarchy. But if here the topic occupies one out of 138 pages, by the 1680s, we shall see, whole pamphlets would be devoted to it. At stake was not just that an unscrupulous hack re-packaged Persons’s seditious text to entice the unwary. Equally sinister was the apparent espousal of A Conference by those who knew it for what it was. Did the royalists have a point? After all, aside from foreign books available in England, a great deal else was published in defence of resistance and tyrannicide. Take, for example, the anonymous translation of the Huguenot monarchomach treatise attributed to Philippe du Plessis Mornay, the Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos, which Thomason purchased on 1 March 1648, and for which again Walker may have been responsible, though on this occasion he did not disguise his source.49 Why should we think that, in the ocean of polemical literature, anyone had Persons’s tract in mind? Protestant resistance writings such as the Vindiciae or Buchanan’s De iure or Ponet’s Treatise and the works of Continental Jesuits—Mariana, Suárez, and Bellarmine—undoubtedly fed into the Roundhead cause. But, as Walker’s redactions prove, so did A Conference. Persons’s promotion of the elective principle ­coupled with his prudential stance and provocative handling of English history made the work uniquely valuable to Charles’s enemies. Echoes of its argument, transmitted by Walker, may be latent in both the Army’s Remonstrance of November 1648, authored by Cromwell’s son in law Commissary-General Henry Ireton, and the speech delivered by the Lord President of the High Court—and Milton’s friend— John Bradshaw at the king’s trial the following January. Rife with the language of 44 Worden, God’s Instruments, 260–312. 45  Severall Speeches, 6; A Conference, Pt. I, 12. See Kewes, ‘Translations of State’. 46  Severall Speeches, 4; A Conference, Pt. I, 9. 47 Thomason/E.521[1]. 48  The Kings Most Gracious Messages for Peace and a Personal Treaty ([London?], 1648), 126. 49  A Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants . . . A Treatise Written in Latin and French by Junius Brutus (London, 1648); George Garnett, ‘Law in the Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos: A Vindication’, The Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 877–91, esp. 888 n. 80 and private communication.

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public interest, the Remonstrance declared the principle of elective m ­ onarchy and, improving on Persons, called for ‘more clear’ guarantees of monarchical probity ‘then heretofore in the Coronation Oath’.50 Bradshaw’s indictment recited lawful depositions, on the Continent and in the British Isles, as per A Conference/Walker’s Severall Speeches and Mariana’s De rege, concluding that most kings since the Norman Conquest were so ‘not merely upon the point of discent’.51 The royalists not only made political capital by exposing Walker and his masters as users of Persons. They also gave vent to their indignation in private. Consider the libri annotati of Thomas Barlow, Fellow of The Queen’s College Oxford and future Bishop of Lincoln. Barlow owned copies of both Walker productions. His copy of the 1648 edition of ‘Doleman’ in the Bodleian Library is bound together with the 1655 Treatise (C. 3.3.Linc). On the respective title pages Barlow described the former as ‘taken out of Dolemans book’ and the latter as ‘ye same with the former a little altered’. He remarked on the regicides’ debt to the Jesuit, and crossreferenced the Antwerp edition in further marginalia (Figure 8.1). Barlow’s copy of

Figure 8.1.  Annotations by Thomas Barlow in a copy of Persons’s Conference (1594/5). The  Queen’s College Library, shelfmark KK. b. 235. By permission of the Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College, Oxford. 50  A Remonstrance of His Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax, Lord Generall of the Parliaments Forces (London, 1648), 67. 51 Bradshaw, King Charls His Tryal, 36–8, 6, 38.

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the latter survives in The Queen’s College Library (KK. b. 235); the flyleaf bears two notes in his hand made at different times: the first draws on Camden to record the book’s disputed authorship; the second paraphrases an extract from a 1658 anti-Jesuit tract stigmatizing the Machiavellian politics of both Persons (who opposed James’s succession) and his Scottish confrère William Crichton (who promoted it), ‘to the end that whosoever came to the Crowne of England, they might be in a capacity to aduance their Order’.52 Few attempts have been made to discover the intellectual origins of Ireton’s or Bradshaw’s arguments. Seen as the outcome of contingent developments and shifting alliances, they are normally traced to clashes between rival groups, in particular the Putney debates. When a more precise genesis is postulated, for instance of Bradshaw’s conception of elective kingship, this is sought in the wider tradition of Roman law rather than lately published texts.53 Significantly, there is evidence of wider diffusion of Persons’s ideas at this time. For choice excerpts from Walker’s Severall Speeches upholding popular sovereignty and advocating concerted action against evil kings were coming out in the guise of weekly editorials in the newsbook The Moderate between 21 November 1648 and 9 January 1649, during a temporary rapprochement between the Independents and the Levellers.54 The anonymous editor’s scattered interpolations—such as the dig at ‘his Majesties fawning favourites’—further enhanced their topicality.55 The proximity of the newsbook to the New Model Army hints at possible collusion 52  I am grateful to The Queen’s Librarian Ms Amanda Saville for enabling me to consult Barlow’s copy of Persons. Barlow cites The Policy of the Jesuits, Their Insinuation into the Courts of Princes, and Most of the Noble Families of Europe; Discovered (London, 1658), sigs D3r–v. Another annotated copy of A Conference (Bod. Vet. B1. f. 115), bought and re-bound in 1656, was turned by its unnamed— and unlike Barlow, sympathetic—owner into a cross between a commonplace book and a miscellany, with a variety of poems by (mostly) Catholic authors inscribed in the endpapers alongside extracts from religious polemic and historical and devotional works, including Persons’s Christian Directory. Calculating the time elapsed since the date of the dedication, 31 December 1593––‘63 yeares since’ (Conference, sig. *3r), this reader was so engrossed as to scribble on every page. See Christopher Archibald, ‘Calculating History: An Interregnum Reader of Parsons’ A Conference about the Next Succession (1594)’, forthcoming. I am grateful to Mr Archibald for sending me a copy of his brilliant exploration of this intriguing volume before its publication. 53  D. Alan Orr, ‘The Juristic Foundation of Regicide’, in Jason Peacey (ed.), The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 117–37. Meanwhile, J. G. Muddiman overstates the extent of Bradshaw’s reliance on Persons. See his Trial of King Charles the First (Edinburgh and London: William Hodge & Company, 1928), 114, passim. 54  The appropriation was first noted in Luc Borot, ‘ “Vive le Roi!” ou “Mort au tyran!”? Le procès et l’exécution de Charles Ier dans la presse d’information de novembre 1648 à février 1649’, in F. Laroque and F. Lessay (eds), Figures de la royauté en Angleterre de Shakespeare à la Glorieuse Révolution (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1999), 143–64 at 148. For further discussion, see Laurent Curelly, An Anatomy of an English Radical Newspaper: The Moderate (1648–9) (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017), 50–4. Unaware of their Jesuit provenance, previous deductions of Leveller principles from the plagiarized editorials unwittingly underscore A Conference’s radicalism: see Jürgen Diethe, ‘The Moderate: Politics and Allegiances of a Revolutionary Newspaper’, History of Political Thought, 4 (1983), 247–94; David E. Brewster and Roger Howell Jr, ‘Reconsidering the Levellers: The Evidence of The Moderate’, Past & Present, 46 (1970), 68–86; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641–1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 65–7; Rachel Foxley, The Levellers: Radical Political Thought in the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 160–2. 55  The Moderate, 25 (2 January 1649), 226.

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between the editor and the grandees. Might not one of them have instigated ­propagation of Severall Speeches in the same way Darley had encouraged Walker to abridge Persons? In any case, The Moderate, cheaper and accessible to a wider audience than Severall Speeches, did a sterling job of infusing the Jesuit’s ideas into mainstream political discourse. By winter 1648–9, the revolutionaries’ dependence on A Conference drew fire not only from die-hard royalists but also from the king’s erstwhile foes, the Presbyterians, who sided with him in the Second Civil War. In a stern rebuff to the warmongers, delivered in the Commons on 4 December 1648 and soon published in print, the Presbyterian MP William Prynne, veteran critic of the Caroline regime and now champion of accommodation, accused those behind A Remonstrance of being in thrall to Jesuitical arguments. For Protestants to put a Protestant monarch to death despite repeated protestations to the contrary, argued Prynne, would be worse than popery. Although Prynne bandied about the names of several Jesuits—Mariana, Bellarmine, Contzen, he homed in on Walker’s recension of Persons, anatomizing its secret sponsorship and timely distribution. So too Prynne denounced the plan to ‘set up a new King by Election, either of the Kings line or otherwise’ as both illegitimate and a recipe for permanent instability. Abandoning his own position in The Soveraigne Power of Parliaments, Prynne excoriated what he saw as the false imputation in Walker that ‘a protestant Parliament’ had endorsed ‘the book and doctrine of a Jesuit’.56 Prynne’s impassioned oration inspired the majority in Parliament to accept Charles’s latest concessions. This in turn precipitated the so-called Pride’s Purge on 6 December—the forcible expulsion of MPs opposed to the New Model Army who comprised more than half the members of the Commons, and the king’s trial.57 The Presbyterians’ earlier arguments in favour of elective kingship mirrored Persons’s which made the intra-Protestant bust-up all the more bitter. Quite apart from rising against the king and previous attempts to check his power—courses which the Stuart loyalists would forever hold against them and revile as tantamount to popish sedition, and of which Milton and other apologists for the regicide did not stint to remind them, Presbyterian writings after Pride’s Purge mark a curious ideological mutation. Take Prynne’s treatment of medieval depositions. His speech of 4 December negated the legitimacy of such acts point blank: ‘For the presidents of Edward the Second, and Richard the Second in times of Popery, they were rather forcible resignations by power of an Army, then judiciall deprivations, neither of them being ever legally arraigned and brought to tryall in Parliament.’58 But once the Rump’s hegemony made the king’s trial and execution virtually ­inevitable, Prynne changed tack. In A Brief Memento to the Present Unparliamentary Junto (4 January 1649), his position is much closer to both A Conference and his own earlier Soveraigne Power, with its stress on Parliament’s orderly proceedings against 56  William Prynne, The Substance of a Speech Made in the House of Commons . . . On Munday the Fourth of December, 1648, 3rd edn (London, 1649), 85, 95–6, 108–9. 57  David Underdown, Pride’s Purge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971). 58 Prynne, Substance of a Speech, 92–3.

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errant English kings. Prynne now maintains that Edward II and Richard II were made to resign their crowns ‘in a formall manner’, their depositions, though occurring in popish times, confirmed ‘in a full Parliament’, not a rump of one, and with no Army looming over its deliberations.59 Was this a case of poacher turned gamekeeper? Did Prynne return to Persons the more effectively to expose the illegal doings of England’s new masters? The Independent John Sadler’s important treatise Rights of the Kingdom, published later that year, adopted a similar line.60 Whether Prynne’s new tack should be seen as sign of indebtedness to Persons is a moot point; what is certain is that in developing it the Presbyterian was fully cognizant of the Jesuit’s ideas. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), the most weighty vindication of the regicide, John Milton sought to rationalize and defend the Rump’s actions in the face of Presbyterian (and of course royalist) protests. Yet he did not respond directly to Prynne’s charge that those who had brought the king to the block were following Jesuit doctrine as expounded inter alia in A Conference and its recent offshoots. Rather, contradicting himself on the question of whether individuals or inferior magistrates and representative institutions such as parliaments were authorized to proceed against a tyrant, and do so contrary to the wishes of the majority, he was at pains to emphasize the Protestant foundations of the case for resistance and tyrannicide—‘the examples which follow shall be all Protestant and chiefly Presbyterian’.61 The enlarged second edition of Tenure added a roll-call of Protestant apologists—‘These were the true Protestant Divines of England, our fathers in the faith we hold.’62 Milton thus distanced himself and the cause for which he stood from Jesuitical principles which royalists and now also Presbyterians argued had been responsible for the destruction of the person of the king and the whole fabric of the state. But was Milton himself in some way swayed by A Conference? He must have been familiar with Walker’s reprint if not necessarily with Persons’s original. Yet A Conference—and Jesuit political thought generally—have not been considered a possible influence on The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.63 In The Tenure, Milton repeatedly cited Scripture, respectable historians ancient and modern (Livy, Gildas, du Haillan, and Guicciardini), and Protestant authorities (Luther, Knox, Buchanan, the author of the Vindiciae). What better way to throw off the scent anyone suspicious 59  William Prynne, A Brief Memento to the Present Unparliamentary Junto Touching their Present Intentions and Proceedings to Depose and Execute, Charles Stuart, Their Lawfull King (London, 1649), 13–14. 60 John Sadler, Rights of the Kingdom; or, Customs of our Ancestours: Touching the Duty, Power, Election, or Succession, of our Kings and Parliaments (London, 1649). 61  John Milton, The Tenure of Kings And Magistrates (London, 1649), 15–16. 62  The Complete Works of John Milton, gen. eds Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns et al., 11 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008–), VI, 181. 63  There is no reference to Persons in the following: The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Neil Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (eds), Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, in Milton, Complete Works, VI; David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds), Milton and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Nicholas McDowell, The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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that he might be reliant on the popish tract which the recent furore over Walker’s doctored version had placed firmly in the public eye? A Conference could easily have served as a model for The Tenure’s approach to constitutional change and the role of coronation oaths, its deployment of the idiom of reason of state (which both Prynne and Bacon eschewed), and its extensive historical and geographical scope. Compare also what Persons says of monarchy, viz. that according to Peter, ‘by man’s free choice this particular Forme of Government (as al other also) is appointed in every Common-wealth’, with Milton’s claim that ‘Peter . . . calls the same autority an Ordinance of man’, and his vocal endorsement of the people’s ‘right of choosing, yea of changing thir own Goverment’, no less than his dismissal of indefeasible hereditary right as preposterous.64 At a minimum, the two works could profitably be read together. More generally, we need to ask how far the midcentury radicals made use of the neo-scholastic tradition, notwithstanding their much-vaunted anti-popery.65 The following year, in 1650, Henry Parker, a better writer and abler political thinker than Henry Walker, and like both Walker and Milton in the service of Cromwell, drew on Persons in his stridently anti-monarchist A Trew Portraiture of the Kings of England, a cross between collective historical biography, polemical tract, and libel. Parker’s was a far more ambitious undertaking than Walker’s cutand-paste job: not an abridgement of Part I but a loose imitation of Part II. His earlier, immensely divisive tract Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses (1642) may already have utilized Persons, and in any case had been publicly charged with doing so, inter alia, in Bishop John Bramhall’s The Serpent Salve (1643).66 Besides, like Milton, Parker must have been aware of the backlash against Walker’s Severall Speeches. Parker’s debt to Persons is clearer than Milton’s. Yet it too has gone unnoticed.67 A Trew Portraiture, published when the survival of the new republic was at stake, and when the exiled Charles II—the King of Scots— was raising troops in the northern kingdom, strove to prevent the dreaded Stuart restoration. Its dedicatee was ‘the Parliament of England’.68 Parker pretended to be the editor and not the author of A Trew Portraiture, a ruse for which even Quentin Skinner has fallen.69 He mounted a lethal attack on 64 Milton, Complete Works, VI, 160, 159, 157. Milton’s approving account of the lawful deposition of King John (and election of the French dauphin Lewis) and of Richard II in his Observations on the Articles of Peace Made with the Irish Rebels (1649), in Complete Works, VI, 48, likewise resembles the Jesuit’s treatment of those episodes in A Conference. 65  There is no mention of possible Catholic influences in Ted Vallance’s ‘Political Thought’, in Michael J. Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 430–46, nor an index entry for either Persons, Catholicism, popery (or anti-popery), or the Jesuits in that volume. 66  John Bramhall, The Serpent Salve ([n.p.], 1643), 75. 67  For instance, Persons is not mentioned in Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s ‘Privado’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 68  Henry Walker, The True Portraiture of the Kings of England, Drawn from Their Titles, Successions, Raigns and Ends (London, 1650), title page. 69 Walker, True Portraiture, 3: ‘The Author of this Book is unknown to me’; Skinner, ‘History and Ideology in the English Revolution’, The Historical Journal, 8 (1965), 151–78 at 157 n. 38. Cf. Michael Mendle, ‘Parker, Henry (1604–1652)’, ODNB, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/21307.

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the hereditary principle as an instrument of oppression and bondage. Building on the second part of A Conference, his clinical demonstration that there had been no true kingly descent since the Norman Conquest had points in common with both Prynne and Bacon. Parker’s predilection for the perspective of reason of state in his earlier polemical writings, including the Observations, made Persons’s approach all the more germane. The difference is that Persons maintained, however provisionally or disingenuously, that monarchy—albeit shorn of its prerogative powers—is the best form of government; by contrast, Parker lauds acephalous rule and seeks to dissuade his countrymen from abandoning it. Referencing royalist historians such as Samuel Daniel and John Speed, Parker first traces the recurrent breakdown of royal succession in England and then ­anatomizes the tyrannies committed by the various kings, including endemic violations of the Magna Carta. He strongly endorses the parliamentary depositions of both Edward II and Richard II and asserts the legitimacy of the elections of their successors. Positive in his assessment of royal minorities when power was in the hands of the nobles, Parker is scathing about England’s monarchs. Elizabeth, ‘the best Queen that ever England had’, was merely the best of a bad lot. Thankfully, ‘the Parliament of England’—Parker has no compunction so to describe the Rump— has now cut off ‘that race of usurpers and tyrants’ and reduced ‘affairs to their first naturall and right principle’.70 Even so, Parker worries that the English, enjoying freedom after centuries of enslavement, might nevertheless choose to bring back the Stuarts, a wistful memory of what had happened in early December 1648 and a premonition of what would come to pass in 1660. If shortly before the regicide and in its aftermath, A Conference inspired monarchomach and republican recensions, following the establishment of the Protectorate the thrust of its appropriations was transformed. Walker’s distillation of both parts in A Treatise Concerning the Broken Succession of the Crown of England (30 May 1655) epitomizes the magnitude of the change. Now A Conference was used in the cause of hereditary monarchy not against it. Cromwellian hereditary monarchy, that is. Back in 1648 Walker had been disgraced as purveyor of the Jesuit’s work. On revisiting it, he made no attempt to hide his source. Rather, Walker converted A Treatise’s dubious provenance into a polemical asset by performing a double bluff. The title page openly proclaims the contemporary relevance of the original first ‘Inculcated, about the later end of the Reign of Queen Elisabeth’. Meanwhile, the postscript explains, accurately enough, that A Treatise comprises ‘the substance of what was written and published by Father Parsons the Jesuit’, while disingenuously crediting the abridgement to an unnamed Catholic priest. This revelation is in turn accompanied by a stiff health warning: papists being papists, the abridger’s ends, like the original author’s, must be nefarious. Only by making his noxious brew public will it be possible to frustrate them and avert a latter-day Gunpowder Plot.71 An elegant quarto, A Treatise dazzles with its fancy captions, headings, ­capitalization, and interplay of italic and roman type. Its opening gambit is suitably double-edged: ‘The Purpose of this Treatise is to prove, That the next Successor of 70  Walker, True Portraiture, 37, 15.

71  Ibid., 166–7.

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England must needs be very doubtful.’72 Walker homes in on Persons’s malevolent and, as it transpired, erroneous prediction that without a declared successor England would descend into chaos upon Elizabeth’s death. Is Cromwell, then, another Elizabeth? In May, the month the tract appeared, there were moves within the government to make Cromwell king, or maybe give him the title Emperor, though unfortunately the evidence is shadowy.73 A Treatise was part and parcel of that campaign, also promoted in Walker’s newsbook Perfect Proceedings for 3–10 May: ‘I think we may beg his highnesse to take the crowne.’74 It evinces anxieties about what would happen after Cromwell’s death. The 1653 Instrument of Government had mandated that the Council would elect the new protector after the death of the current incumbent.75 But many thought the provision inadequate, for it rendered the protectoral succession both uncertain and unstable. Worries about a potentially ­divisive interregnum were exacerbated by a series of royalist plots. The latest one, the so-called Penruddock Rising had been put down in March 1655. As a result, calls to crown Cromwell and vest the succession in his line became louder and louder, despite Cromwell’s known distaste for hereditary kingship.76 In this context, Persons’s pronouncements on resistance and election conveniently reiterated the justice of expelling the Stuarts and lent support to the creation of a new dynasty. The succession to Cromwell, Walker suggested, must be settled forthwith to avert another civil war, or, worse yet, a Stuart restoration. In sharp contrast to Parker who, preying covertly on A Conference, undercut the hereditary principle in order to strengthen the republic, Walker, truer to its letter if not spirit, favoured an admixture of heredity and election: Cromwell, we are led to deduce, is the obvious candidate for the throne but to avoid future upheavals he should be succeeded by his offspring. Walker, however, had another target in sight. By attributing the redaction to an unnamed popish cleric, he took a swipe at the secular priest Thomas White (Blackloe). Since 1648 White and his faction, having abandoned their allegiance to the Pope (and the Stuarts), were pursuing rapprochement with Cromwell in the hope of winning toleration.77 Their efforts proved futile. A government ­proclamation 72  A Treatise Concerning the Broken Succession of the Crown of England (London, 1655), 3. 73  The background is given in S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 3 vols (London: Longmans, 1894–1903), III, 136ff. 74  An important forerunner was A Copy of a Letter Concerning the Election of a Lord Protector. Written to a Member of Parliament (London, 1654), repr. 1656 as A Copy of a Letter Written to an Officer of the Army to a True-Commonwealths-Man and No Courtier (London, 1656). See Jason Peacey, ‘Cromwellian England: A Propaganda State?’, History, 91 (2006), 176–99 at 192–3. 75  S. R. Gardiner (ed.), The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 415. 76  See Cromwell’s impassioned speech, on 22 January 1655, to the first Protectorate Parliament, in Thomas Carlyle (ed.), The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. S. C. Lomas, 3 vols (London, 1904), II, 422. 77  Albert J. Loomie, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Policy Toward the English Catholics: The Appraisal by Diplomats, 1654–1658’, The Catholic Historical Review, 90, (2004), 29–44; Jeffrey Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649’, The Historical Journal, 45 (2002), 305–31; Simon Johnson ‘ “Papists of the New Model”: The English Mission and the Shadow of Blacklow’, in Nadine

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of 24 April 1655 unleashed fresh reprisals against Catholics, both priests and laymen. Its promulgation coincided with the publication of White’s The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), a tract enjoining acceptance of Cromwell’s de facto authority.78 White justified resistance to the Stuarts and debunked the hereditary principle at the exact moment when those around Cromwell were pressing for him to inaugurate a new dynasty. This explains why Walker smeared both Jesuits and Blackloists as enemies of the English state.79 A Treatise advocated permanent exclusion of the Stuarts and installation of the hereditary monarchy of the Cromwells. Walker and his sponsors succeeded in the former but failed in the latter goal. An exclusionary statute, passed in 1656, ruled that no Stuart should ever again be eligible to hold power in England. The following year the parliamentary constitution, The Humble Petition and Advice, entitled Cromwell to nominate his successor, its architects perhaps drawing comfort from Hobbes’s claim in the Leviathan (1651) that if ‘an Elective King’—which Cromwell was in all but name—‘have Right to appoint his Successor, he is no more Elective but Hereditary’.80 Yet Cromwell not only refused the Crown, but also failed to name a successor. In consequence, the proclamation of his son Richard as Protector in September 1658 uncannily mirrored that of James I more than half a century earlier.81 The Council who engineered it clutched at every possible argument for legitimacy, including his father’s putative deathbed nomination, divine ordinance, and salus populi. The trouble was that Richard, a lesser and less respected man than his father, faced a Britain riven with discord and discontent incomparably more acute than the England of 1603. Unlike the widespread relief and enthusiasm at the first Stuart succession, the elevation of Richard was greeted with satisfaction but scarcely extravagant rejoicing. His resignation was not long in coming, though at that point—in May 1659—few could have foreseen that a Stuart restoration would follow in less than a year. While there were no new reprints or adaptations of Persons in the volatile months following Richard’s demission, the influence of his ideas continued to be Lewycky and Adam Morton (eds), Getting Along?: Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England—Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 213–36. 78  Loomie, ‘Oliver Cromwell’s Policy Toward the English Catholics’, 33; B. C. Southgate, ‘Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government: A Note of the Dating of the First Edition’, Notes and Queries, 28 (1981), 208–9. 79  Jeffrey Collins claims that Blackloists attacked Jesuit theories of divine right; rather, they found a kindred spirit in one Jesuit: Father Persons. See Collins, ‘Restoration Anti-Catholicism: A Prejudice in Motion’, in Charles Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds), England’s Wars of Religion Revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 281–306 at 290–1. 80  Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, The English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 1095–128 (Fitzgibbons makes no attempt to probe the intellectual origins of the campaign to make Cromwell king); Hobbes, Leviathan, 134. 81 On its genesis, see Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘ “Not in any doubtfull dispute?” Reassessing the Nomination of Richard Cromwell’, The Historical Research, 83 (2010), 281–300. For the public reception, see Amy Calladine, ‘Public Ritual and the Proclamation of Richard Cromwell in English Towns, September 1658’, The Historical Journal (2017), 1–24, and Chapter  16 in this volume by Mark Knights, ‘The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715’.

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felt. Amid the welter of conflicting proposals and scenarios, from unconditional reinstatement of monarchy to unconditional reinstatement of republican government, the notion of England as a quasi-elective polity first given a coherent expression in A Conference—and then effectively domiciled by Prynne, Bacon, and others—informed contemporary perceptions of events. As Tim Harris and Blair Worden have variously demonstrated, in 1660 Parliament was restored before the monarchy.82 And this is significant because the process by which the Stuarts’ return was secured could be seen as a form of election in Persons’s sense. The exiled Charles II’s conciliatory messages to various constituencies and the invitation issued by the ‘free parliament’, for which everyone had clamoured in the fraught months between January and February 1660, seemed to promise, however fleetingly, that the second Stuart monarchy would rest on a more stable constitutional footing than the first.83 Again, as in 1603 in respect of James’s succession, there is evidence that at least some contemporaries viewed the Restoration as an election of sorts. The conceptual rifts and contradictions permeating the literary response to monarchy’s return evince different understandings of why and on what terms kingship had been brought back. Most agreed—or affected to agree—that the Restoration was the work of providence. But had God willed the restitution of hereditary Stuart kingship? Or had the people been divinely inspired to install Charles II in the venerable vein of vox populi, vox Dei? The latter view was tantamount to saying that Charles had been elected king. Perhaps the clearest proof that many shared it came from two opportunistic characters, William Prichard and Henry Vaughan, who, on 4 July 1660, tried to settle personal scores by accusing one John Casebeard of making treasonable remarks about the king—Casebeard had allegedly called him ‘that rebell Charles Stuart’. The supreme irony is that the deponents unwittingly revealed they themselves did not regard Charles as a divine hereditary monarch but as one who ‘was voted Kinge’.84 Algernon Sidney, whose father had been an avid reader of A Conference and whose own later work drew inspiration from it, rationalized his reluctant acceptance of, or perhaps surrender to, the Restoration in remarkably similar terms: ‘the Parliament hath acknowledged a king’. Sidney nevertheless saw the settlement as potentially revocable, precisely in the way suggested in Part I of A Conference; his Court Maxims (c.1665–6) states bluntly that ‘nothing is more

82  Tim Harris, ‘The Restoration in Britain and Ireland’, in Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, 204–42; Blair Worden, ‘The Demand for a Free Parliament, 1659–60’, in George Southcombe and Grant Tapsell (eds), Revolutionary England Essays for Clive Holmes (London: Routledge, 2017), 176–200; Blair Worden, ‘1660: Restoration and Revolution’, in Janet Clare (ed.), From Republic to Restoration: Legacies and Departures (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 23–52. 83  Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Lorna Clymer (ed.), Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 103–31. 84  The National Archives, SP 29/7, fol. 53r.

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reasonable than that they should repent of their choice and endeavour to unmake what they have made’.85 Within months, this brief ‘elective moment’, which might have ushered in restrictions on the royal prerogative, had passed. The Stuart monarchy’s power continued as untrammelled as it had been before the outbreak of the Civil Wars. Charles I’s concessions and the Presbyterian demands for their renewal by his son were not so much forgotten as publicly lamented and vilified. (Though even the ultra-royalist writer Henry Foulis, the last person one would expect to agree on anything with Persons or Persons’s Puritan acolytes, as good as acknowledged, in his aptly titled History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of our Pretended Saints (1662), that the Restoration was down to the English people: ‘the Nation resolved for Kingship’.86) It would take the fabrication of a Popish Plot and the all too real prospect of a popish successor for such expedients to be revived, close to thirty years later, once again with the help of the tried and effectual resource: Persons’s Conference About the Next Succession. PERSONS THE WHIG A Conference proved a defining influence on the polemic of the late Stuart Succession Crisis in a way it had not been at mid-century. Resistance theory could be had from innumerable Protestant sources, as also from other Catholic ones, both native and foreign, but A Conference, a work closely aligned with the Catholic League’s polemic aiming to exclude the Huguenot Henri, King of Navarre from succession to the French throne, supplied the sharpest rationale for pre-emptive exclusion of an heir of a contrary religion: just what the Whigs demanding exclusion of James, Duke of York, an avowed Catholic, required.87 It also furnished a ready-made template for limiting the royal prerogative. Critics of both Stuart despotism and popery hurried to assimilate the text to their cause while concealing their dependence on it. The scale of the Whigs’ debt to the Jesuit has escaped the attention of even the most penetrating modern commentators. Characteristically, they interpret loyalist imputations of plagiarism as part and parcel of partisan mud-slinging, and, when they mention Persons at all, lump him together with the Continental neo-scholastics and radical Calvinists. Yet he was surely sui generis. One reason for the misunderstanding 85  Sidney to his father, second Earl of Leicester, 28 May 1660, in R. W. Blencowe (ed.), Sydney Papers (London: John Murray, 1825), 186; Sidney, Court Maxims, ed. Hans Blom et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. Cf. Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 365 and 367. 86  History of the Wicked Plots and Conspiracies of Our Pretended Saints (Oxford, 1662), Preface, sig. A3v. 87 In his definitive study of the Whig campaign, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), Mark Knights stresses that expedients other than exclusion—a Protestant regency; oath of association; anti-Catholic legislation; a royal divorce; re-conversion of York to Protestantism—were also fielded to defuse what he prefers to call the Succession Crisis.

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is the implicit disbelief that the vehemently anti-Catholic Whigs would take anything from so disreputable a source. Another has to do with the existence of an obvious and unimpeachably Protestant model for the Whig endeavour. That was the campaign to forestall the succession of the Duke’s great-grandmother, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, underway from the 1560s through to the 1580s. Patrick Collinson described the phenomenon as the Elizabethan ‘Exclusion Crisis’, drawing on the historiography of the later Stuart period, which has since replaced the term with the more expansive ‘Succession Crisis’.88 Collinson’s inspired coinage enabled us to discern salient parallels between the two national emergencies, notably the abiding fear of popery and arbitrary government, mistrust of the current incumbent— Elizabeth I and Charles II respectively, and the determination to debar the hereditary popish successor. However, Collinson was mainly interested in what the Whigs tried to achieve, and less in how they justified their actions on paper. Emphasizing the commonality of purpose that united Elizabethan and late Stuart exclusionists, he overlooked the resemblance between the radical Catholic case against James VI of Scotland, and the radical Protestant case against his grandson. The Whigs emulated the parliamentary initiatives of their Elizabethan forebears and looked even further back to Edward VI’s bungled bid, in 1553, to block the accession of his Catholic half-sister Mary, and Henry VIII’s succession legislation of the 1530s and 1540s.89 In order to forge a respectable pedigree for their schemes, they routinely pointed to two Elizabethan statutes: the 1571 Treasons Act (13 Eliz. I c. 1)—‘the Palladium of the Excluders’, which had vested the power to regulate the succession in the monarch-in-parliament;90 and the 1585 Act for the Queen’s Surety (27 Eliz. I c. 1), which had disabled any pretender complicit in, or benefiting from, rebellion, foreign invasion, or regicide, as well as his or her heir. If less often, the Whigs also cited two other Elizabethan precedents: the bishops’ bold admonition, in 1572, urging the queen to prosecute Mary with the utmost severity; and the 1584 Bond of Association, an ostensibly spontaneous, but in fact meticulously scripted, provision of public oath-taking designed to mobilize the Protestant political nation in defence of the queen and established religion. The Bond had in effect licensed lynch law against both the Catholic Mary and her Protestant son. Both the admonition and the Bond were deeply problematic, however, for they could be construed as incitements to murder.91 Aside from reprints of the two acts 88  Patrick Collinson, ‘The Elizabethan Exclusion Crisis and the Elizabethan Polity’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 84 (1994), 51–92 at 52. Neither Knights in his Politics and Opinion nor Richard Aschcraft in his Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986) nor Jonathan Scott in his Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) refers to Persons and his book. Cf. Goldie, ‘John Locke’; Nenner, Right; Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought’. 89 Kewes, ‘Parliament’, and ‘The 1553 Succession Crisis Reconsidered’, Historical Research, 90 (2017), 465–85. 90  George Hickes, Jovian, or, An Answer to Julian the Apostate by a Minister of London (London, 1683), fol. 16v; Nenner, Right, 133–6. 91  Gerald Bowler, ‘ “An Axe or An Acte”: The Parliament of 1572 and Resistance Theory in Early Elizabethan England’, Canadian Journal of History, 19 (1984), 349–59 at 351–3; Collinson, ‘Exclusion Crisis’, 63 passim. For a rehearsal of the Elizabethan bishops’ case against Mary Queen of Scots, see Samuel Johnson, Julian the Apostate: Being a Short Account of His Life, the Sense of the Primitive

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and the Bond, as also of John Dodderidge’s and others’ The Antiquity and Power of Parliaments in England (1679), hitherto unpublished compilations of Elizabethan parliamentary proceedings went into print at this time: Haywood Townshend’s Historical Collections: or, An exact Account of the Proceedings of the Four Last Parliaments of Q. Elizabeth (1680) and Sir Simonds D’Ewes’s Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (1682).92 Published a year after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in March 1681, when the Whig cause lay in ruins, the latter boasted an iconic frontispiece representing Elizabeth in Parliament, while the dedication stressed that ‘some Acts of Parliament of those times . . . are now controuerted’.93 Yet, ultimately, Elizabethan legislation, extra-parliamentary initiatives, and polemical literature offered slim pickings to advocates of statutory exclusion. After all, Mary had never been formally put aside on account of her religion, and none of the semi-official plans for an interregnum or parliamentary election was ­available in print. Even if they had, these working proposals anyway lacked the conceptual edge and stylistic flair of A Conference. As a result, both the giants of the Whig cause such as Algernon Sidney and the smaller fry variously repurposed Persons to justify exclusion, or otherwise to contest Stuart absolutism. That they did so in spite of the book’s infamy—now made worse by the revelations of the supposed Popish Plot to kill the king and restore England to Catholicism under his brother’s Frenchbacked tyranny—underscores just how irresistible they found its argument. Access to the text was easy. Copies of both the original Antwerp edition and Walker’s abridgements remained in circulation. The former informs earlier exclusionist pamphlets, inter alia, The Case of Succession to the Crown of England (1679) by one W. G., the explosive An Appeal from the Country to the City (1679) by the radical free-thinker Charles Blount, The Great and Weighty Considerations Relating to the Duke of York (1680) by the Gray’s Inn lawyer Thomas Hunt, and the ­anonymous A Letter to a Friend in the Country (1681). John Somers, also a lawyer and likely author of another adaptation of Persons, A Brief History of the Succession (1681), owned a copy of the 1655 Treatise Concerning the Broken Succession.94 In 1681, A Conference was reprinted in toto; Locke, among others, acquired a copy.95 The Whigs were probably behind this new edition. How better to expose the pusillanimity of the Anglican Tories doggedly loyal to a popish Stuart than by publishing a notorious Jesuit work calling for the exclusion of a Protestant one? If a late Christians About His Succession, and Their Behaviour Towards Him. Together with A Comparison of Popery and Paganism (London, 1682), Preface, ix–xiv. 92  Note the suggestive title of the revived Bond: The Instrument, or Writing of Association That the True Protestants of England Entred into in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth While Her Life, and the Protestant Religion, by Hellish Popish Plots, was Attempted. Together with the Act of Parliament then for Confirmation, and Several Observations Thereupon. Usefully Accommodated to Our Present Day ([London], 1679). 93  Simonds D’Ewes, Journals of All the Parliaments During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1682), sig. *2r. 94  William L. Sachse, Lord Somers: A Political Portrait (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), 15. 95  A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England: Divided into Two Parts ([n.p.,] 1681); John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), no. 1533.

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Elizabethan papist opposed the advent of his confessional enemy, the more reason for Protestants to do so now. The Tory divine Edward Pelling was in no doubt that ‘there is some ugly design on foot now, when this very Book is brought upon the Stage again’.96 Keen to disseminate its subversive message, one appropriator, the militant Whig Charles Blount ‘sent to mr Pool of Radbourn Dolmans Succession of ye Crown’.97 Presumably others of his ilk did so too. Ten years later, Anthony Wood asserted, rather disingenuously, that the sole object of the reprint, which he misdates to 1683, had been ‘to lay open the author’s pernicious Doctrines in that juncture of time when the Parliament was zealously bent to exclude James D. of York from the Imperial Crown of England’. Wood went on to review the ­mischievous pilfering of A Conference by ‘the then Fanatical’.98 Either way, there was no shortage of copies, which facilitated both new appropriations and forensic demonstrations of plagiarism. What precisely did the exclusionists and other heterodox thinkers take from A Conference? Given the artfully contradictory thrust of its two parts, reinforced by quasi-dialogic structure, the treatise could lend weight to disparate positions. We can distinguish two main kinds of borrowing, though of course there was a good deal of crossover and overlap. The first, and the more common, involved c­ ataloguing England’s royal successions in imitation of Part II to illustrate Parliament’s customary competence to oversee them. The second involved developing, and often radicalizing, the argument of Part I in support of a right of resistance or even republican aspirations. Instances of the former were often under-theorized; those of the latter, by contrast, reduced appeals to history in favour of abstract political reasoning. In different ways, both challenged the absolutist creed purveyed by royalist clerics and publicists, and enshrined in Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha (1680).99 If, in Part II, Persons invented the genre of polemical succession history, his Whig heirs popularized it for their own ends. Among a cascade of tendentious dynastic overviews, Somers’s A Brief History of the Succession stands out. Feigning impartiality and scholarly prowess—the margins brim with citations of ‘the Records, and the most Authentick Historians’, this showed that English kings had been routinely appointed by Parliament, which Somers, like Persons, traces to Saxon times: ‘it hath been the constant opinion of all ages that the Parliament of England had an unquestionable power to Limit, Restrain and Qualify the Succession as they pleased, and that in all Ages they have put their power in practice’.100 Far from a radical departure, Somers suggests, the statutory preclusion of an unsuitable heir would be entirely consonant with past precedent on view in his book. Compared to the acrimonious missives by W. G. and Thomas Hunt, 96  The Apostate Protestant. A Letter to a Friend, Occasioned By the Late Reprinting of a Jesuites Book. About Succession to the Crown of England, Pretended to Have Been Written by R. Doleman (London, 1682), 4. 97  Blount’s note as reproduced in Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought’, 220. It is unclear whether this was the first or second edition. 98  Athenae Oxonienses . . . The First Volume (London, 1691), 307. 99  For Anglican clerics as popularizers of Filmer, see Goldie, ‘John Locke’. 100  John Somers, A Brief History of the Succession (London, 1681), 14–15.

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both of which contained potted dynastic histories à la Persons, A Brief History sounded measured and moderate.101 In conclusion, Somers sprinkled a few provocative reflections inspired by Part I, further undermining ‘this (now so much talk’d of) sacred Right’.102 Granted that all power derives from God, ‘can it be proved from hence’, he asked rhetorically, ‘that the Government cannot be moulded into several Forms agreeable to the Interest and Dispositions of several Nations, and may not be varied from time to time as occasion requires, by the mutual consent of the Governours, and of those who are Governed?’103 A Brief History triggered furious Tory rebuttals, and was reprinted at two critical moments, in 1689 and 1714 respectively, sure sign of its continued utility. In refurbishing Persons, Somers wisely refrained from naming names. Not once did he mention the Duke of York. Nor did he give an inkling of who might be a suitable alternative. And, at least on the face of it, he in no way challenged the authority of Charles II, even if his discussion of Edward II’s and Richard II’s parliamentary depositions sailed close to the wind. Other appropriators, notably Charles Blount, were less circumspect. Alarmist response to the sinking of the first Exclusion Bill, Blount’s An Appeal from the Country to the City (1679) concealed the author’s identity under the ­pseudonym ‘Junius Brutus’. This was to announce its descent from the Huguenot monarchomach work Vindiciae, contra Tyrannos (1579), probably by Philippe du Plessis Mornay, published under the pseudonym ‘Stephanus Junius Brutus, the Celt’. (Despite being pilloried and fined, Benjamin Harris, An Appeal’s publisher, did not divulge Blount’s name.) Rife with anti-popish jibes, Blount’s was in fact a timely extension of the civilian’s claim in Part I that ‘nothing in the world can so iustly exclude an heyre apparent from his succession, as want of religion’.104 Like Somers, Blount rationalized sidestepping a lineal successor. But he deviated from Somers in brazenly plumping for Charles II’s bastard son the Duke of Monmouth in the manner recommended by A Conference. Blount was adamant that the pretender with ‘the worst Title’ makes the best prince, ‘as being constrain’d by a gracious Government, to supply what he wants in Title’.105 Instead of plodding his way through medieval history, moreover, he used pragmatic and utilitarian arguments: his title-page motto proclaimed ‘Salus Populi, Suprema Lex’.106 Firm believer in the Popish Plot and outspoken critic of its handling by the king, Blount gloomily foretold the impending popish takeover, complete with rapes, 101  W. G., The Case of Succession to the Crown of England Stated in a Letter to a Member of the Honorable House of Commons ([n.p.,] 1679), 10–11; Hunt, The Great and Weighty Considerations Relating to the Duke of York or Successor of the Crown . . . Whereunto is Added a Short Historical Collection Touching the Same (London, 1680). Having drawn on Pt. II in the appendix to this pamphlet, Hunt rifled Pt. I in the postscript to his An Argument for the Bishops Right in Judging Capital Causes in Parliament (London, 1682). 102 Somers, Brief History, 5. 103  Ibid., 16. 104 Persons, Conference, Pt. I, 212; Blount, An Appeal from the Country to the City, for the Preservation of His Majesty’s Person, Liberty, Property, and the Protestant Religion . . . Salus Populi, Suprema Lex (London, 1679). See Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought’, 208–17. 105 Blount, Appeal, 25. 106  Cf. Persons’s stress on ‘publique necessity or vtility’, ‘reason of state . . . and worldly pollicie’: Conference, Pt. I, 185, 217.

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infanticide, and fires aflame at Smithfield. The perfect antidote to this lurid s­ cenario, he submitted, would be to advance the Protestant Monmouth, for ‘no person is fitter’ to lead the country against the papists and the French. Blount’s vindication of rebellion and, implicitly, regicide, smacks of Persons waxing lyrical about the providential support for usurpers who turned out to be good kings, indeed better ones than the legitimate heirs they had toppled.107 Blount further built on Persons’s warning not to trust to the pretender’s promises, ‘for let the bargaines and agreements be what they wil . . . yet . . . the prince once made and setled, must needes proceede according to the principles of his owne religion’.108 Blount’s own admonition to London citizens was correspondingly stark: ‘Wherefore if ever a Popish Successor comes amongst you, let his promises of keeping your Religion and Laws, or of his Conversion, be never so plausible, credit ’em not; for if you do, you will infallibly be deceiv’d’.109 Blount also heeded the common lawyer’s prediction in Part II that the City of London, where the hottest Protestants held sway, might well tip the balance in any armed conflict: ‘Greatly wil import among other poyntes which waye inclineth the cittye of London.’110 He exhorted the City under the leadership of the Lord Mayor to ‘revenge our Soveraigns violent death’, and install Monmouth in defiance of York’s superior hereditary pretensions.111 This again cut close to the bone, given both the memory of the City’s disloyalty in the 1640s, and its present unrest, which the government would punish in 1682 by revoking the City’s Charter. Blount went on to plunder A Conference elsewhere. Both his succession treatise, probably composed after the fiasco of the Rye House Plot in 1683, which survives in Blount’s commonplace book at the Athenaeum Club in London, and his historical and parliamentary jottings of c.1684, contain near-verbatim transcriptions of Persons.112 To deflect suspicions of treasonable intent, the former, in which Blount’s Green Ribbon Club associates may have had a hand, bore the deliberately misleading title ‘Out of Dolman Milton & others from wnce our late disloyal Invectives agst his R. H. were stolen by Trenchard & other hotheaded Republicans’. In reality, as David Wilson has ably shown, A Conference was its principal source. Blount’s tract, which in calling for outright rebellion rendered the Jesuit’s message even more inflammatory, was likely meant for public circulation, but in the event remained unprinted.113 That Somers, Blount, and other exclusionists mined Persons is undeniable. What, though, of anti-Stuart writers who favoured other solutions to crisis, whether stringent limitations of the royal prerogative or even obliteration of the monarchy? Here my case becomes more speculative, as I consider radical works which, unlike the polemical defences of exclusion indubitably cribbed from Part II, may—but only may—have drawn on Part I alongside various other sources.

107 Persons, Conference, Pt. I, ch. 3: ‘Of the great reuerence and respect dew to kings, and yet how diuers of them, haue bine lawfully chastised by their common wealthes for their misgouerment, & of the good and prosperous suecesse that god commonly hath giuen to the same; and much more to the putting back of an vnworthie pretender.’ 108  Ibid., Pt. I, 217. 109 Blount, Appeal, 4. 110 Persons, Conference, Pt. II, 244. 111 Blount, Appeal, 26–7, 25. 112  Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought’, 218–36. 113  Ibid., 151, 218, passim.

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The evidence is elusive, and my purpose in raising the possibility is simply to encourage a fresh look at the intellectual ancestry of late seventeenth-century ­radicalism. Armed with parallel passages, loyalist sermons and pamphlets decried Henry Neville and Algernon Sidney in particular as plagiarists of ‘Doleman’ and other subversive texts. So it makes sense to probe if not direct links at least patent similarities of thought and argument between their work and Persons’s. Take the quondam commonwealth-man Neville’s Plato Redivivus (1681), a ­sparkling political dialogue published in time for the Oxford Parliament.114 In contrast with Blount’s shrill harangue, Neville’s Plato was a major work of political theory. Its foremost intellectual debt, moreover, was to James Harrington’s Oceana (1656) not Persons’s Conference, which is perhaps why the latter has been largely overlooked in the standard accounts.115 Plato Redivivus features three interlocutors: a Noble Venetian and two Englishmen—a Doctor, usually identified as the physician Richard Lower, and a Gentleman, Neville’s alter-ego.116 The Venetian enquires after the causes of, and possible remedies for, the crisis gripping the nation. In response, the Doctor ventriloquizes the Whig solution of bypassing the popish heir: once the Duke of York is out of the way, and the Protestant faith secured in the person of Monmouth, he assumes, all will be well. The Gentleman disagrees. He sees the predicament as far more fundamental: the country’s constitutional architecture, once a harmonious blend of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, is out of step with the sweeping socio-economic changes, whose onset in the late fifteenth century tellingly predated the Reformation: ‘in England by degrees Property came to shift from the few to the many, so the Government is grown heavier and more uneasie both to Prince and People’.117 With political and economic power thus at odds, ‘the present Politick Distemper’ cannot be cured simply by cutting out York and electing Monmouth, a ‘dangerous and pernitious’ course bound to incite civil war and more upheavals down the line. Instead, the Gentleman boldly decouples religion from the succession. He proposes comprehensive constitutional reform to curb the royal prerogative, meanwhile insisting that York should succeed unopposed: ‘it is needless to make any Provision against a Popish Successor if you rectifie your Government’.118 With sufficient restraints in place—inter alia, the creation of four several councils under the supervision of Parliament to manage war and peace, the army, ministerial 114  Two editions followed in rapid succession. All quotations are from the second, expanded one which devotes more attention to the candidacy of Monmouth: Plato Redivivus, or, A Dialogue Concerning Government Wherein, by Observations Drawn from Other Kingdoms and States Both Ancient and Modern, an Endeavour is Used to Discover the Present Politick Distemper of Our Own, with the Causes and Remedies . . . The Second Edition, with Additions (London, 1681). 115  There is no reference to Persons in Caroline Robbins’s edition of Plato in Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) or Blair Worden, ‘Republicanism and the Restoration’, in David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 139–93. Cf. Gaby Mahlberg, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 14–15, 165–82, 207–10. 116 Robbins, Two English Republican Tracts, 71 n. 2; Mahlberg, Henry Neville, 165–6. 117 Neville, Plato, 165–6. 118  Ibid., 199.

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appointments, and revenue—whether the monarch is Protestant or Catholic becomes irrelevant, for he or she will have no discretionary powers to abuse: ‘whoever is Prince, can never violate the Laws’.119 If the Gentleman’s diagnosis of the country’s ills owes a lot to Harrington, what about his intended cure? The limitations plan, of which Plato contains the most revolutionary formulation, had originated with Charles’s court. Conceived as a counter to exclusion, the proposal to restrict the powers of a Catholic successor had been put before Parliament in April 1679. Widely distrusted, it was later discarded by the king for fear of irrevocably eroding the Crown’s powers.120 Yet, for all that Neville looked to Greco-Roman authors, ‘the Divine Machiavil ’,121 and current polemic, his blueprint for a quasi-republican government may, I suspect, also owe something to Persons. Yet the debt, if any, is less overt—and less easy to pinpoint—than Somers’s or Blount’s. Neither Neville’s comparative method, advertised in the subtitle, Observations Drawn from Other Kingdoms and States Both Ancient and Modern, nor his use of dialogue, a device which some accused him of lifting from A Conference, could clinch it.122 I referred earlier to the premeditated inconsistencies between Parts I and II. There were premeditated inconsistencies even within the former. Persons’s spokesman the civil lawyer professes reverence for monarchy. He nevertheless justifies constitutional change, even a violent one, and hymns kingless rule in ancient Rome and the Dutch republic alike. A Conference’s incipient republicanism, acidly stigmatized in the early retorts by Hayward, Craig and others, had already served Walker and his masters at mid-century. So, too, the Jesuit’s tract could be read as a denunciation of both Stuart absolutism and Filmerian patriarchalism avant la lettre. Allied in its ideological commitments to Leaguer propaganda, A Conference singles out as its whipping boy the French politique Pierre de Belloy, strident supporter of Henri, King of Navarre. It berates de Belloy for gross flattery of princes, whom he regarded as accountable to none but God.123 Persons’s espousal of popular sovereignty, and his debunking of hereditary jure divino kingship, had provoked Filmer’s counter-offensive in Patriarcha, and naturally attracted Filmer’s later critics such as Neville, Sidney, and Locke.124 Former champion of constitutional republicanism—the Good Old Cause—in Plato Neville opts for constitutional monarchy. He promotes theories of contract and consent, absent from Harrington, but present in Persons. Although Neville does not do away with kings, he envisages royal power as strictly limited. This is 119  Ibid., 200. 120  Knights, Politics and Opinion, 99–100; Mahlberg, Henry Neville, 170–2. 121 Neville, Plato, 46. 122 Pelling, Apostate Protestant, 35. 123 Persons, Conference, Pt. I, 122–5. See de Belloy, Apologie catholique contre les libelles declarations, advis, et consultations faictes, escriptes, & publiees par les Liguez perturbateurs du repos du Royaume de France (1585), which champions the House of Bourbon and denigrates elective kingdoms, and De l’autorité du roi (1587). In attacking de Belloy, Persons drew on the second edition of a recent Leaguer tract, De Justa Reipublicæ Christianæ in Reges Impios et Hæreticos Authoritate (1592), perhaps by the English Catholic émigré William Rainolds, though he drastically revised Rainolds’s ideological drift, above all abandoning his papalism. See Kewes, ‘Translations of State’. 124 Filmer, Patriarcha, 3–4.

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manifest in his critique of the royal veto, which echoes Persons in describing the ends of government and function of coronation oaths. ‘[I]f our Kings have such a Power’, claims Neville, ‘it ought to be used according to the true and genuine intent of the Government, that is, for the Preservation and Interest of the people, and not for the disappointing the Counsels of a Parliament, towards reforming Grievances, and making provision for the future execution of the Lawes; and whenever it is applyed to frustrate those ends, it is a violation of Right, and infringement of the King’s Coronation-Oath.’125 Likewise, there was ample warrant in A Conference for imposing new legal constraints on the Crown. If the Commonwealth can choose her own type of government, we read in Part I, so can she ‘limite the same with what lawes and conditions she pleaseth’.126 But Neville parted ways with the Jesuit in not making religion a crucial determinant of the succession. By means of the Doctor’s persona, Neville wittily voiced—if only to dispel—the charge that he ‘would be nibbling at the pretence which some had before his Majesties Restauration, of a Commonwealth or Democracy’.127 He rightly foresaw that such a charge would be levied against him. Persons too had been mocked as a closet republican. In Neville’s case, this was compounded by imputations of anticlericalism, crypto-papistry, and barefaced theft. ‘Sir Positive Statesman’, railed the cleric Edward Pelling who coined this contemptuous moniker for Neville, ‘is not Doleman all over . . . but seems to have only the Guts and Garbage of the Jesuit’.128 Pelling recognized that although Neville and his ilk ‘might have been abundantly furnished with Anti-Monarchical and Republican Principles out of other Authors’, they nevertheless kept returning to Persons for both ideas and tropes. Thus in Plato Neville ‘slights the Plea of a Monarchs Divine right to his Crown, as a piece of Court-Flattery; just as Parsons doth in answer to Belloy, Dolman, part. 1. cap 6’. So, too, Pelling avers, Neville commandeers the Jesuit’s ‘fine Similitude’ of the sick head which the body politic is apparently at liberty to cut off and replace with another, insisting that even if, as ‘in our Politick disease’, the corruption originates in other parts of the body, ‘in the Cure, applications must be made to the Head, &c’.129 Neville may have pleaded for radical constitutional innovation, but he also vouched, however sincerely is another matter, that Charles should be petitioned by Parliament, not compelled by force, to yield to reforms.130 Neville’s disavowal of violence paid off. Plato Redivivus would be printed and reprinted without any adverse repercussions for the author save a tide of irate sniping from the loyalists, which only increased the cachet of his book. Algernon Sidney, like Neville ‘Of Commonwealth kidney’, was at once more reckless and less fortunate.131 A bald exponent of armed resistance and prominent actor in anti-Stuart conspiracy, Sidney died a traitor’s—for some, a martyr’s—death on 125 Neville, Plato, 129. 126  Persons, Conference, Pt. I, 13. 127 Neville, Plato, 227. 128  Pelling, Apostate Protestant, 35. 129  Ibid., 37–8. 130 Neville, Plato, 237. 131  Blair Worden, ‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 1–40.

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7 December 1683. At his trial, a few sheets from his unfinished Discourses Concerning Government—which he at first disowned—were sensationally brought in as the second witness against him. In that work, Sidney went one better than his father, the second earl of Leicester, who had briefly conversed with Persons in his private notes. Sidney, I want to suggest, drew on A Conference for a withering assault on hereditary rule, twinned with an eloquent defence of election on merit. Sidney’s conclusions about the blight of royal absolutism, the origins and l­ egitimacy of popular power, and the right to revolution, also echoed Persons’s. So too did his paean to Rome’s republican glory. Yet, puzzlingly, neither Jonathan Scott, who has made the study of Sidney’s life and works his own, nor Thomas West, modern editor of the Discourses, takes notice of Sidney’s traffic with the Jesuit; Blair Worden alone has appreciated that ‘Sidney’s discussion of hereditary and elective monarchy in his Discourses concerning Government surely takes a lead from the tract’.132 The Discourses were written between 1681 and 1683, when the Whigs, destitute of a parliamentary platform, faced political eclipse. A minority fell on desperate courses. Some, Sidney among them, hatched plans for a general insurrection, to be aided by invasion from Scotland. Others concocted the abortive Rye House Plot to assassinate the king and his brother. Satisfied of Sidney’s embroilment in the former, though short of incriminating evidence, the regime did not flinch from exploiting his manuscript no matter it had never been made public: mere writing being accepted by the judge as conspiracy to treason in line with the maxim that ‘scribere est agere’. After Sidney’s execution, the offending passages were printed in a constellation of pamphlets which detailed his trial and conduct on the scaffold, or else juxtaposed his incendiary remarks with selections from other seditious writings, including A Conference.133 There was also his Last Paper, a worthy substitute for a last speech. In it, Sidney proudly avowed his revolutionary beliefs. A complete edition of the Discourses in 1698 prepared by the deist John Toland, energetic popularizer of what became the Whig canon, has been seen as a symbol of the radicals’ disillusionment with the 1688 Revolution, though it may also reflect the Whigs’ continuing fear and loathing of Tory arguments that still needed refuting.134

132  See Jonathan Scott, ‘Patriarchy, Primogeniture and Prescription: Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698)’, in Cesare Cuttica and Gaby Mahlberg (eds), Patriarchal Moments: Reading Patriarchal Texts (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 73–80; Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis; Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1996); Worden, ‘Afterword’, in Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous, 295–303 at 298. 133  See esp. William Assheton, The Royal Apology: or, an Answer to the Rebels Plea. First, Published by Doleman the Jesuite, to Promote a Bill of Exclusion Against King James. Secondly, Practised by Bradshaw and the Regicides in the Actual Murder of King Charles the 1st. Thirdly, Republished by Sidney and the Associators to Depose and Murder his Present Majesty, Are Distinctly Consider’d. With a Parallel Between Doleman, Bradshaw, Sidney and Other of the True-Protestant Party (London, 1684). Without access to the manuscript of the Discourses, Assheton had to make do with what Sidney’s trial had thrown up; coupled with his determination to place Sidney on a par with the regicides, this explains his emphasis on contract and resistance. 134 Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil Wars and the Passions of Posterity (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2001), 122–81.

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Sprawling and repetitive, the Discourses confute Filmer point by point. They encapsulate both Sidney’s lifelong antipathy to over-mighty executive, whether Cromwell or the Stuarts, and his profound esteem for the republican ideals of classical antiquity. In the only overt reference to Persons, or, rather, Persons’s nom de plume, Sidney execrates Filmer for ‘joining the Jesuits to Geneva, and coupling Buchanan to Doleman, as both maintaining the same doctrine’. To do so is an egregious error, Sidney contends, for the two concur in nothing beyond what is sanctioned by ‘the evidence of truth’, and ‘common to mankind’.135 This is a crafty denial. As historians have known at least since the early writings of Quentin Skinner, radical Calvinists had drunk deep of medieval scholasticism, and their theory of resistance bore a natural resemblance to its Jesuit offshoots.136 It is that whole tradition that informs revolutionary Protestantism, not necessarily just Persons. Elizabethan conformist clerics, Thomas Bilson and Richard Bancroft, had been the first to swoop on that shameful affinity, a tactic diligently copied by their Stuart descendants. As for Buchanan and Persons, their constitutional arguments, the former directed against Mary Queen of Scots, the latter against her son, had converged on a number of scores—chiefly in seeing all monarchies as at bottom elective. King James duly took a shot at both in A Trew Law of Free Monarchies, if without identifying his targets by name.137 Sidney is closer in substance as well as method to the English Jesuit, not the Scottish Calvinist. First, he is more concerned about the principles of succession than modern historians, typically engrossed by his case for resistance, have allowed. That overarching concern allies the Discourses with A Conference, as does the priority Sidney accords to representative assemblies—‘the power of every people is either wholly, or to such a degree as is necessary for creating kings, granted to their several gemotes, diets, cortes, assemblies of estates, parliaments, and the like’.138 The English Crown, he insists, cannot but be elective, for there have been too many breaks in the succession. (Buchanan, while committed to the elective ­principle, has less to say about the iniquities of hereditary kingship than either Persons or Sidney, and nothing on rival claimants to the Scottish or any other throne. Nor does he insist on majoritarian election by Parliament, a point highlighted in Persons’s account of Henry IV’s elevation, and made much of by Sidney.) Secondly, Sidney appeals to both ‘reason’ and ‘matters of fact’ to prove the inferiority of absolute monarchy, which he derides as unstable and corrupt, to ‘that which is mixed, regulated by law, and directed to the publick good’.139 Like A Conference, which roamed across the histories of states ancient and modern, the Discourses are indeed steeped in history—scriptural, classical, English. (By comparison, Buchanan was relatively modest in his use of history, anyway confining himself to Scotland.) But for Sidney, as for Persons, reason not history is the final arbiter of political truth, a position 135 Sidney, Discourses, 44; elsewhere Sidney speaks of generic Jesuits or specifically of Suárez and Bellarmine. 136  Skinner, ‘The Origins of the Calvinist Theory of Revolution’, in Barbara Malament (ed.), After the Reformation (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1982), 309–30. 137  Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit’. 138 Sidney, Discourses, 122. 139  Ibid., 145.

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that comes to the fore in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government.140 Sidney’s—and Neville’s and Locke’s—anti-Filmerian animus echoes Persons’s against de Belloy. The afterlife of the Discourses, and the posthumous reputation of their author, marks a split between the Whig and republican traditions. This duality may be related to the Discourses’ use of Persons. Like Blount and other Whigs, Sidney employed A Conference to defend elective modes of appointment to royal or any other office, for ‘’tis only wisdom, justice, valour, and other commendable virtues, which are not hereditary, that can give the preference’; and like Neville, to argue for constitutional change, conceived not as a return to some ideal status quo ante, but, rather, as a vital improvement on the present: ‘Changes therefore are unavoidable’.141 But whereas Neville was ready to countenance hereditary ­monarchy, provided its powers should be severely curtailed, Sidney stood firm in his principled opposition to it. Derived in part from Persons, Sidney’s insurrectionary creed, which helped prepare ideological ground for the 1688 Revolution, would abrade post-Revolutionary sensibilities but endear him to America’s Founding Fathers. The latter also drew on Persons, though without knowing it. There are enough similarities between A Conference and the Discourses, above all the fixation on elective and hereditary modes of royal succession, to render the Jesuit’s influence plausible, though more needs to be done to ascertain its nature and significance. What about Locke’s Two Treatises? Could Locke too have taken something from Persons’s book, which, we know, he had to hand?142 Unlike Somers, Neville, and Sidney, Locke was never accused of theft from Persons. That the two works broadly overlap in espousing election, contract, and consent, and upholding the right of resistance, or in rejecting strict primogeniture and the divine right of kings, proves nothing, because by then those were all points shared with hosts of other heterodox writings by both Protestants and Catholics; besides, we find no rhetorical borrowings in Locke of the kind remarked in Neville.143 Admittedly, Locke’s magnum opus, composed, like Blount’s manuscript succession treatise and Sidney’s Discourses, in the early 1680s, and only published in autumn 1689, could be seen as, among other things, a succession tract; its stated aim ‘to establish the Throne of our great Restorer, Our present King William, to make good his title in the consent of the people’, and the final chapter of the First Treatise

140  Worden, ‘Commonwealth Kidney’, 16. 141  Sidney, Discourses, 101, 175. Cf. ‘Section  6: God Leaves to Man the Choice of Forms In Government; and Those Who Constitute One Form, May Abrogate It’ and ‘Section  17: Good Governments Admit Of Changes In The Superstructures, Whilst The Foundations Remain Unchangeable’ with Persons’s Conference, Pt. I, chs 1 and 2. 142 Persons goes unmentioned in Peter Laslett’s magisterial edition of the Two Treatises on Government, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970) and, more recently, Matthew Stuart (ed.), A Companion to Locke (Oxford: Blackwell, 2015). Meanwhile, Locke’s reliance on Continental Jesuits, Suárez, Bellarmine, and Mariana, and beyond them the scholastics, is widely acknowledged. 143  Locke’s snappy ‘The People shall be Judge’ between princes and the legislative is a fair match for Persons’s ‘the common wealth which gaue them [princes] ther authority for the common good of al, may also restrayne or take the same away agayne, if they abuse it to the common euel’. Two Treatises of Government (London, 1690), 269; Persons, Conference, Pt. I, p. 72.

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resoundingly titled ‘Who Heir?’144 However, whereas for Sidney and Blount, and for Persons before them, history, if not the ultimate court of appeal, was still a reservoir of political wisdom, Locke, a natural rights theorist, relegated it to the sidelines, with only the occasional glance at the indigenous peoples of the Americas or the historical implications of Conquest. This, more than anything, sets him apart from Persons and most people. Yet, the tacit reproduction, side by side, of extracts from Persons and Locke in Political Aphorisms (1690), a best-selling encyclopedia of Whig thought that in the 1770s made waves across the Atlantic, demonstrates that they were seen as ideological kin.145 Historians who hail the Aphorisms as a key vehicle for popularizing the ideas of Locke have missed their extensive reliance on Persons, reminiscent of Blount’s conflation of Milton and Persons in his manuscript tract.146 Although the volume, which in its various incarnations sold tens of thousands of copies, contains snippets from other, mostly Protestant, works, those from A Conference and The Two Treatises make up its bulk. As David Wilson and Mark Goldie have brilliantly shown, the unknown compiler melded together the two men’s very words: the Whig philosopher and the Elizabethan Jesuit spoke with one voice.147 Tellingly, this was not the first time Persons had been pressed into defending the Revolution: licenced in July 1689 and published shortly afterwards, the anonymous A Brief Vindication of the Parliamentary Proceedings Against the Late King James II is nothing but an anti-popish rehash of Part I.148 Different people took different things from Persons. Late seventeenth-century appropriations ranged from polemical dynastic histories and radical exclusionist tracts to quasi-republican manifestoes and apologias for the Revolution. Unlike less accomplished borrowers, moreover, major figures such as Somers or Sidney never transcribed the original verbatim, and in any case looked to an array of other texts for inspiration. While discussing the Stuart monarchy’s future, their writings laid bare its shaky foundations: in Neville’s cutting phrase, ‘the Original Want of Title’.149

144 Locke, Two Treatises, sig. A3r. 145  Political Aphorisms; or, the True Maxims of Government Displayed (London, 1690). The work was reprinted in multiple editions, including as Vox Populi, Vox Dei (1709) and The Judgment of Whole Kingdoms and Nations (1710). Two editions appeared in America just before the Revolution. For an account of the influence of Catholic political thought on the American Revolution along the lines parallel to mine (though not on Persons himself ), see Michael D. Breidenbach, ‘Conciliarism and the American Founding’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 73 (2016), 467–500, and The Pope’s Republic: Liberties and Loyalties in America, forthcoming. These look not so much to the neo-Scholastics but to the later medieval Conciliarists. I am grateful to Professor Breidenbach for sending me his work before its publication. 146  e.g. Richard Ashcraft and M. M. Goldsmith, ‘Locke, Revolution Principles, and the Formation of Whig Ideology’, The Historical Journal, 26 (1983), 773–800. 147  Wilson, ‘Reading Restoration Freethought’, 236–41; Goldie, Post-Revolutionary Locke. 148  A Brief Vindication of the Parliamentary Proceedings Against the Late King James II Proving that the Right of Succession to Government (by Nearness of Blood) is Not by the Law of God or Nature, but by Politick Institution. With Several Instances of Deposing Evil Princes, Shewing, That No Prince Hath any Title Originally, but by the Consent of the People (London, 1689). 149 Neville, Plato, 203.

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The royalist polemical revanche further broadcast Personian doctrine. Laymen and divines worked to embarrass the Whigs by exposing their thefts; and to prove them wrong. Tory counterblasts duly named and shamed the plagiaries. They printed parallel passages from A Conference and its recensions or else gave exact page references to both. They charted the tract’s baneful influence from the moment of its publication to the present. The more learned such as the formidable Tory historian Robert Brady seized on errors of fact in Persons and his Whig acolytes, imitating the format pioneered by him while inverting his argument.150 These sundry condemnations were assisted by new editions of old rebuttals. On 21 July 1683, the book’s ill fame and enduring currency earned it a public burning in the quadrangle of Oxford’s Bodleian Library alongside ‘Pernicious Books’ by Buchanan, Hobbes, and Milton, as also reprises of Persons by Somers, Hunt, and the fiery Whig cleric Samuel Johnson.151 THE JESUIT ’S LEGACY OR DOLEMAN CANONIZED The paradoxes of A Conference’s transmission and reception in the long seventeenth century stem from its protean and malleable quality which warranted subtly divergent applications. Even its two parts appear to clash, the first part’s latent ­republicanism undermining the ideal of limited, quasi-elective monarchy delineated in the second. Nor should we forget that back in the earlier 1590s Persons was principally addressing Protestants. He vocalized, and pretended to espouse, many assumptions they held dear while seeking to advance the Catholic cause, which is why his treatise proved so disconcerting and so lastingly relevant. To assert that seventeenth-century Protestant imitators of Persons were following popish doctrine is thus something of a misnomer. The Jesuit may not have meant—indeed almost certainly did not mean—much of what he said but that is what later assured A Conference’s utility to his confessional adversaries. No Catholic author seems ever to have turned to it. The seventeenth century saw a transformation in Catholic attitudes to the Stuarts: except for the few Blackloists, in the Civil War and after they were resolutely loyal Cavaliers; so English Catholicism ditched the tradition of resistance and its theoretical baggage. In 1648, Walker—and, by default, The Moderator’s anonymous editor who cannibalized his text—had recourse to the first, theoretical part of A Conference which justifies resistance, even king-killing, and constitutional revolution. And one could argue that what happened in winter 1648–9 bore out the scenario outlined by Persons, if with one crucial exception. A Conference, especially as manipulated by Walker, presumed the (parliamentary) majority acting against a tyrant. But the Long Parliament had refused to oblige and so was lopped back which precipitated 150  Rose, ‘Robert Brady’s Intellectual History’. 151  The Judgment and Decree of the University of Oxford Past in their Convocation July 21, 1683, Against Certain Pernicious Books and Damnable Doctrines Destructive to the Sacred Persons of Princes, their State and Government, and of All Humane Society ([Oxford], 1683).

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accusations of illegitimacy against its Rump not just from the royalists but also from the Presbyterians and the Levellers. The regicides, especially Bradshaw, drew fire for allegedly re-enacting the Jesuit’s evil schemes. If the Roundheads found Part I of A Conference particularly congenial,152 the Presbyterians (in the 1640s and again in 1660, when calling for a free Parliament) embraced the postulates of Part II, which reviewed post-Conquest successions to show the conditional nature of royal power. Presbyterian exponents of ancient constitutionalism wanted to formalize the contract that Persons saw as intrinsic to kingship, and manifest in the coronation oath. The unstated threat was that if the king (Charles I in the 1640s, Charles II in 1660) did not accept their proposals, they would choose someone else, if possible from within the bloodline, but if not, from outside it; a tactic with which the Cromwellians may also have flirted in late 1648. And though the Presbyterians were defeated both times—first by those more radical than they and then by those more conservative in their politics and religion, it is precisely this sort of stance that, while again crushed in 1681, ultimately prevailed in 1688/9 and beyond. The Revolution, rather than the last hurrah of medieval conciliarism—a foreign import153—could be seen as a perfect application of Persons’s more home-grown teachings. For now the Jesuit’s arguments for both resistance and combining the hereditary and elective principles to thwart an incumbent of a contrary faith were put into practice. Enshrined in the Bill of Rights (1689), the exclusion of a Catholic successor was reaffirmed in the 1701 Act of Settlement (12 & 13 William III, c. 2). On this account, the architects of the Revolution emerge as tacit followers of Personian doctrine.154 William III, however, would hardly conduct himself like the sort of limited king envisaged by Neville or Sidney. After the Revolution, both older and new textual appropriations of A Conference, and rejoinders to them, poured off the press. Works as different as the non-juror Anthony Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses (1691) and the proto-feminist Mary Astell’s Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War (1704) contained mini-reception histories of the infamous text, as did the Scottish non-juring divine James Gadderar’s preface to his translation of Craig’s mammoth Latin reply to Persons, by now over a hundred years old.155 All these attest to A Conference’s dubious pre-eminence in the loyalists’ gallery of rogue texts, Gadderar’s denunciation of Persons as ‘the Idol of State Innovators and Republicans’ sarcastically echoing Locke’s denunciation of Filmer as ‘the Idol of those who Worship [absolute 152  As Walker’s second abridgement illustrates, by 1655 they turned their attention to Part II. 153 Figgis, Studies of Political Thought; Oakley, ‘On the Road from Constance to 1688’. 154  We should probably add A Conference to the intellectual ancestry of the various Whiggisms discussed in Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, Journal of the History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), 195–236 and ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 573–664. 155 Wood, Athenae Oxonienses . . . The First Volume, 307–8; Astell, An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in this Kingdom: In an Examination of Dr. Kennett’s Sermon, Jan. 31. 1703/4. And Vindication of the Royal Martyr (London, 1704), 28–9; Gadderar, ‘Preface’ to Craig’s Concerning the Right of Succession, sigs D2r–G1r.

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Power]’.156 They starkly underline the conundrum at the heart of this chapter: why did anti-popish opponents of the Stuarts continue to draw on a popish catechism of sedition knowing, as they must have done, that their debt would be instantly recognized and turned against them? A Conference About the Next Succession has never been a classic in the history of political thought. There is no modern edition, and the text rarely if ever features in either History or Politics syllabuses. Nor has scholarship on the Stuart era matched the resurgent interest in the writings of Elizabethan Catholics.157 Yet Persons’s treatise, passionately controverted in its own time, proved seminal for Protestant thinkers and polemicists of the later age. Not only public argument but also ­political events and legislation were directly or indirectly energized by it. How differently might the ‘republican’ tradition from Milton to Sidney look if we factored in the influence of the Jesuit’s text? The only author whose Elizabethan works had a comparable following under the Stuarts was Shakespeare. Adaptations of his plays, rife, like those of A Conference, during the late Stuart Succession Crisis, in the long run assured Shakespeare’s canonical status. It is high time to canonize Persons, and, more generally, re-think the cross-confessional currents in Stuart political literature and thought.

156  Gadderar, ‘Preface’, sig. D2v; Locke, Two Treatises, 2. 157  Gabriel Glickman’s The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (Boydell, 2009) is an honourable exception.

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9 Welcoming the King The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric Andrew McRae One recurrent motif of Stuart succession panegyric centres on the sense of sight. At these key moments in poems of praise, the speakers stand as representatives for all subjects. For Ben Jonson in 1603, for example, the eyes of the people are ‘covetous’, as though transfixed by ‘a wonder’.1 In 1660, John Dryden proclaims of Charles II, ‘All eyes you draw, and with the eyes the heart’.2 Other poets imply through the act of sight a commitment of allegiance: one celebration of the Restoration endorses the subjects’ ‘Loyal Eyes’; at the same time, Edmund Waller, whose own loyalty had wavered in the 1650s, admits trepidation in an ­acknowledgement of ‘our weak sight’.3 As these various instances demonstrate, at moments of arrival the simple act of witnessing—or even, in some cases, imagined witnessing—provided poets with a vehicle for political engagement within their nation. The seventeenth century was the golden age of English panegyric. The genre had impeccable classical roots, including works by the Greek Isocrates and the Romans Claudian and Pliny the Younger. Erasmus experimented with it towards the end of the fifteenth century, and the earliest efforts in the genre in England can be traced back to Latin pieces by Sir Thomas More at the court of Henry VIII.4 Since praise for Elizabeth tended to assume other forms—in part, no doubt, because of her gender—the outpouring of poetry in 1603 marks the genuine foundation of the genre in English.5 Indeed the word itself is introduced into the language in these 1  ‘A Panegyre’, ed. Martin Butler, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), II, 471–82 (l. 34). 2  ‘To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on His Coronation’, in The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols (London: Longman, 1995–2005), I, 55–61 (l. 33). Unless otherwise stated, all Dryden references are from this edition. 3  To The King, Upon His Majesties Happy Return (London, 1660); republished in The Return of the King: An Anthology of Poems Commemorating the Restoration of Charles II, ed. Gerald Maclean, http:// cowley.lib.virginia.edu/MacKing/MacKing.html (l. 85); Waller, ‘To The King, Upon His Majesties Happy Return’, in Poems, ed. G. Thorn Drury, 2 vols (London: Routledge, 1905), II, 35–45 (l. 1). 4  James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 38–82; David Rundle, ‘A New Golden Age? More, Skelton and the Accession Verses of 1509’, Renaissance Studies, 9 (1995), 58–76. 5 See esp. Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Susan Frye, Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 348–57.

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years: Jonson opted for ‘panegyre’, while Samuel Daniel’s ‘panegyrike’ provides the Oxford English Dictionary with its first native use of the classical term.6 The best modern study of English panegyric, by James D. Garrison, dates the most intense and successful period of panegyric in English literary history from the reign of James I through to that of James II.7 While panegyric served a variety of functions across this period, it was always drawn most logically to the figure—or, in the case of William III and Mary II, figures—at the pinnacle of the state. And there was no greater stimulus to the production of panegyric than the transition from one reign to another. The achievements of Stuart panegyric are deceptively complex. Indeed one of the underlying goals of the present volume, within which panegyric is a recurrent topic of interest, is to reflect afresh, from multiple perspectives, on this neglected genre of political writing. Garrison perceives panegyric as a ‘ceremonial confirmation’ of power.8 This influential interpretation positions the genre as essentially compliant in its politics; its function, when the poet gets it right, is to undergird authority. There is no question that this is one of this genre’s principal functions; assent mattered, particularly at moments when there were alternative rulers or models of rule. The importance of the multi-authored prose addresses that became so prevalent in the second half of the Stuart era further attests to the political need for straightforward and transparent expressions of loyalty.9 Yet panegyric always carried the potential for a greater range of political expression. Within a humanist tradition, as one of the few authorized genres through which a subject might directly address a monarch, panegyric was seized upon as a legitimate vehicle for counsel. This would become a declared foundation for the poetry of Jonson, just as it informed the court masques of his time.10 Moreover, since epideictic rhetoric taught writers that praise and blame were in many respects inseparable, notes of satire might quite reasonably find their way into poems of panegyric.11 While praise of one ruler or form of rule may not necessarily imply blame of another, panegyrics in this period are commonly clarified by satiric passages, just as satires may in turn provide a glimpse of an ideal. In fact, as I will suggest at the close of the chapter, the histories of these two genres, each critical to our understanding of early modern political literature, are closely intertwined. The genre was also shaped by the complex and contested politics of the Stuart era. For panegyric flourished in an age that was by no means characterized by universal compliance; instead it was absorbed by debates over the rights of subjects 6  Oxford English Dictionary, ‘panegyric’, n. and adj., A2; Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie (London, 1603). 7 Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric. 8  Ibid., 115. 9 See Chapter  16 in this volume by Mark Knights, ‘The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715’. 10  On Jonson’s modes of praise at court, see esp. Martin Butler, ‘ “Servant, but not Slave”: Ben Jonson at the Jacobean Court’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 90 (1996), 65–93; Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson and the Monarchy’, in Robin Headlam Wells et al. (eds), Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 71–90. 11  Brian Vickers, ‘Epideictic and Epic in the Renaissance’, New Literary History, 14 (1983), 497–537; David Colclough, ‘Verse Libels and the Epideictic Tradition in Early Stuart England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 69 (2006), 15–30.

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and the limitations of political speech, and was marked by momentous challenges to monarchs and monarchy. Much of the most valuable seventeenth-century literary and cultural history published in recent decades has attended to the ways in which literature engaged with these debates. In practical terms, such scholarship has stretched the canon, inviting readers to position poems by writers such as Jonson and Dryden within richer contexts. In its attention to the history of ­political thought, it has helped to reposition authors and their texts in relation to formative modern developments, from the early engagement with theories loosely grouped together within the category of ‘reason of state’, through to the concern later in the century with the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and his contemporaries.12 And throughout such work has emerged an interest, critical within the current context, in the nature and limitations of political speech. Debates over speech fractured a succession of early Stuart parliaments, and served across the Stuart era as a litmus test for variant models of political subjectivity.13 The model of counsel could transform into more assertive and confrontational forms in the Commons, and even more so on the pages of printed pamphlets or manuscript libels.14 In the context of these developments, Garrison’s definition of panegyric begins to look somewhat narrow and dated; indeed it threatens to sideline, as unworthy of consideration, many poets who adopted more critically engaged approaches, even when explicitly committed to acts of affirmation. In this chapter, then, I want to entertain the hypothesis that panegyric was a more dynamic and malleable genre than has previously been assumed. The chapter will focus on panegyrics produced for the three Stuart reigns that began with monarchs arriving in England from elsewhere: those of James I in 1603, Charles II in 1660, and William III and Mary II in 1688–9. These successions not only produced unusually large quantities of panegyrics, but also situated poets in the intriguing position of subjects welcoming, if not inviting, new rulers into a country in which both speaker and addressee would in future belong. I want to consider 12  See Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004); Alessandro Arienzo and Alessandra Petrina (eds), Machiavellian Encounters in Tudor and Stuart England: Literary and Political Influences from the  Reformation to the Restoration (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992). 13 See David Colclough, Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); David Colclough, ‘ “Better Becoming a Senate of Venice”? The “Addled Parliament” and Jacobean Debates on Freedom of Speech’, in Stephen Clucas and Rosalind Davies (eds), 1614: Year of Crisis (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 51–62; Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘ “Now thou may’st speak freely”: Entering the Public Sphere in 1614’, in Clucas and Davies (eds), 1614: Year of Crisis, 63–80; Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Christopher Thompson, The Debate on Freedom of Speech in the House of Commons in February 1621 (Orsett, Essex: Orchard Press, 1985). 14  See Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Andrew McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing Like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, Past & Present, 223 (2014), 77–127.

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these as liminal moments, at which poets take an opportunity to reflect not only upon the momentous arrivals, but more widely upon the nature and politics of their art, and their status as subjects of the realm. Arguably, as I will suggest at the chapter’s close, panegyric remained limited, unable to accommodate the new ­models of citizenship and political identity that assumed clear shapes around the turn of the eighteenth century. Yet the genre flourished for most of the Stuart century in part because of its capacity to document the desires and anxieties of ­political subjects operating under conditions of constrained expression. It documents the struggles of poets to craft voices for themselves within the Stuart nation. The chapter cannot promise a universal account of the rise and fall of panegyric. It operates instead through engagement with the literature of particular moments, acknowledging from the outset the need to set a wealth of relevant material aside, and to approach some long and complex poems in a selective way. It finds considerable continuity between the writing of 1603 and 1689, as poets faced many of the same fundamental challenges and dilemmas. Yet it also identifies fresh strains in the later decades of the century, due in large part to the pressing reality, in both 1660 and 1689, of alternative forms of government. The chapter moves chronologically, while a final section ties the strands of argument together by considering two authors who, at key moments for themselves and their nation alike, overtly rejected panegyric. George Wither in 1660 and Aphra Behn in 1689, though coming from very different ideological positions, responded to unwelcome transitions not by retreating from political engagement, but by reflecting openly upon the constraints of this important genre of the Stuart era. T H E A R R I VA L O F J A M E S I The poets welcoming James may not have been working with an entirely new genre, but were establishing it within a fresh and distinctive cultural context. Panegyric in Stuart England would be a fundamentally public genre. Daniel’s Panegyrike, for instance, was presented to James in a manuscript copy (and p ­ ossibly recited to him) within a month of Elizabeth’s death, yet it was also published in an extended form in the year of the succession.15 Other writers went straight to print. Indeed, while authors of panegyric had always needed to address their works towards both the object of praise and a wider audience, the medium of print repositioned the poet.16 If a poem was recited to the new monarch, it could be situated firmly within a humanist model of praise as counsel; however, addressing the king through the medium of vernacular printed publication was another matter. Poets were facing the reading public, in the process assessing not only the Scottish king but also the implications of the succession for their own authorial and political identities. 15  The title page declares that it was ‘delivered to the kings most excellent majestie at Burleigh Harrington in Rutlandshire’ (i.e. Burley on the Hill, the home of Lord and Lady Harington of Exton); John Pitcher, ‘Editing Daniel’, in W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1993), 57–73 at 64–7. 16  Cf. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, 59.

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The Jacobean poems, situated within this context, are marked by tensions between self-effacement and self-assertion. In many pieces, poets devise strategies to remove themselves from the poem. In Daniel’s closing image, for instance, the poet collapses into the mass of the body politic: ‘The pedestall whereon thy Greatnesse stands’, he assures the king, ‘Is built of all our hearts, and all our hands’.17 Others adopt strategies of authorial displacement. Jonson invokes Themis, the goddess of justice, who takes over from the poet the role of active agent of investigation in his Panegyre. Sir John Davies may well have been among the ambitious would-be courtiers who rode to greet James in the spring of 1603, yet he similarly writes his poem as though fixed in place and awaiting the momentous arrival, sending his ‘muse’ to seek intelligence of the nation’s new ruler.18 But poetic egos impress themselves regardless. Davies thus cannot help reminding James that his muse has demonstrated, in the author’s previous works, a capacity not only ‘the soule of man to viewe’ (l. 18), but also to see past the ‘faire outward formes’ that serve to mark James as a king to ‘the vulgar sorte’ (ll. 13, 15). James, that is, will benefit from the poetic exposition of Davies. Jonson in 1603 had less of a reputation on which to draw—standing, in fact, askance to the centre of power on account of his Catholicism and his unsuccessful efforts to secure patronage at court under Elizabeth—but nonetheless uses Themis as a vehicle to lay the foundations for the laureate voice that would become so familiar in his Jacobean poetry.19 From this position his poem artfully pursues the conventional goal of counsel through praise, positing a mystified interdependence between subject and prince.20 Themis thus ‘draws aside / The king’s obeying will’ from the vanity of courtly displays of authority, ‘and to his mind suggests / How he may triumph in his subjects’ breasts / With better pomp’ (ll. 73–7). Obedience, in this constitutional model, can be uncannily reciprocal. While Jonson was too politic to consider directly the means by which James assumed the throne, this question pressed itself upon almost all who wrote to ­welcome his succession. The authorized explanation for James’s emergence as the legitimate successor to Elizabeth, of course, was the mysterious operation of providence. Some poets even tried to identify providential signs of monarchical virtue in James himself. In line with a trope familiar from Shakespearean romance, James thus presents himself as a man whose natural powers of leadership would make him an obvious king for England regardless of any more mundane considerations. For Daniel, even if James did not have the ‘title’ of king, ‘We yet must now have beene inforcde t’have cast / Our selves into thy armes’ (st. 47). Yet, like a number 17  Panegyrike Congratulatorie, st. 73. 18  Sean Kelsey, ‘Davies, Sir John (bap. 1569, d. 1626)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-7245; ‘The Kinges Welcome’, in Robert Krueger and Ruby Nemser (eds), The Poems of Sir John Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 228–30 (l. 1). 19  Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35; cf. Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 101–84. 20  Butler, ‘ “Servant, but not Slave” ’, 92.

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of his peers, Daniel also felt obliged to acknowledge the uncertainty that had ­preceded the succession. As much as his poem ascribes this to ‘th’impious workings . . . / Of vile disnatur’d vipers’, it equally recognizes the act of will required subsequently to ‘Bury’ the ‘question’ of the succession ‘in th’eternall grave’. Indeed a trace of stoic resignation merges with a loyal subject’s elation in the conclusion: ‘Suffice we have thee whom we ought to have’ (stanzas 13, 15). The publication in London, to mark the succession, of James’s own writings on the arts of rule encouraged poets to question further the nature of relations between subjects and king in Stuart England.21 In particular, the re-issue of Basilikon Doron, his treatise on government written in the form of a letter to his first son, Prince Henry, introduced the king to his new subjects through the printed page. Daniel’s Panegyrike begins by proclaiming the people ‘tractable’ before the authority of James; they are, he writes, ‘Apt to be fashion’d by thy glorious hand / To any forme of honor’ (st. 6). But the voice of the poet’s professedly ‘humble Muse’ becomes increasingly more outspoken as the poem progresses, fashioning a constitutional dialogue with James: We have an earnest that doth even tie Thy Scepter to thy word, and binds thy Crowne (That else no band can binde) to ratifie What thy religious hand hath there set downe, Wherein thy all-commanding Sov’raintie Stands subject to thy Pen and thy Renowne, There we behold thee King of thine owne hart And see what we must be, and what thou art. (stanzas 10, 22)

Basilikon Doron is here translated into a ‘contractual document’, with the poet assuming the right to underscore limitations upon the king’s power.22 The implication is the preservation of the individual subject’s will even within a profession of submission. Daniel proclaims: God makes thee King of our estates, but we Do make thee King of our affection, King of our Love, a passion borne more free, And most un-subject to dominion. (st. 5)

The nature of the subject’s ‘freedom’ was a matter that would underpin the great constitutional debates of the century. Daniel, though working conventionally through the plural pronoun, reserves the prerogative to assent. Even if it is ‘God’ who has set James in place, it is the subjects—the poem’s collective ‘we’—who ‘Do make thee King of our affection’.

21  See Chapter 1 in this volume by Richard McCabe, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’. 22 Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, 92–3.

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Michael Drayton, one of the first to publish a panegyric on the new king, was even more forthright about the process that had brought James to England. Drayton’s poem, To the Majestie of King James, is often presented as an example of unsuccessful panegyric.23 At the time of publication it attracted criticism from Henry Chettle, who argued that ‘’twas a fault to have thy Verses seene / Praising the King, ere they had mourned the Queen’.24 Unlike some of his peers, moreover, he failed to attract royal patronage, and within less than a year he was writing anti-court satire. Though ­unquestionably abrupt, this transition is not entirely surprising in light of the poem’s brooding over a nation which seemed not only ready to be torn apart by the question of succession, but equally susceptible to corruption under the incoming regime. He begins: The hopefull raigne of a most happy King, Loe thus excites our early Muse to sing, Of her own strength which boldly thus presumes, That’s yet unimpt with any borrowed plumes, A Counsailes wisedome, and their grave fore-sight, Lends me this luster, and resplendent light: Whose well-prepared pollicie, and care, For theyr indoubted Soveraigne so prepare, Other vaine titles strongly to withstand, Plac’d in the bosome of a peacefull Land: That blacke destruction which now many a day, Had fix’d her sterne eye for a violent pray, Frustrate by their great providence and power, Her very nerves is ready to devoure, And even for griefe downe sincking in a swound Beats her snak’d head against the verdant ground.25

The precise nature of the group of men who declared James the rightful king was a matter of dispute, since the Privy Council ceased to exist at the point of Elizabeth’s death.26 While Drayton sidesteps this particular debate, he is notably insistent on the significance of ‘A Counsaile’; indeed even ‘providence’ is radically rewritten here as a product of human agents. Despite his publication with the poem of an elaborate genealogy for James, these opening lines thus stubbornly foreground the functions of ‘pollicie’ in the succession. In this context, the adjectives ‘hopefull’ and ‘happie’, used in the opening line to announce the new reign, might betray the fragility as much as the grandeur of James’s rule. Drayton also propounds, more than any of his contemporaries, the authority of the poet and the importance of forthright speech. As he states in the poem’s opening lines, his ‘Muse’ is not only ‘early’ but ‘bold’ in her presumption to 23  See Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and his Circle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), 126–7; The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel et al., 5 vols (Oxford: Blackwell, 1931–41), V, 53–5. 24  Henry Chettle, Englandes Mourning Garment (London, 1603), sig. D3r. 25  ‘To the Majestie of King James. A Gratulatorie Poem’, in Works, I, 469–75 (ll. 1–16). 26  Paulina Kewes, ‘Hamlet and Politics’, forthcoming.

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pass judgement upon the succession. Setting his own art against the popular ­acclamation, he continues: But whilst the ayre thus thunders with the noise, Perhaps unheard, why should I straine my voyce? When stirs, & tumults have been hot’st & proudest, The noble Muse hath song the stern’st & lowdest; And know great Prince, that Muse thy glory sings, (What ere detraction snarle) was made for Kings. (ll. 17–22)

A prickly Draytonian egotism strains here against the bounds of a genre that was being more carefully nurtured by his peers. In the poem’s self-serving logic, the pointedly ‘noble Muse’ will do James such good service that he ultimately must, as Drayton urges in the final passage, ‘deigne to favour us’ (l. 157). Moreover, his plea for favour betrays a politically pragmatic conception of the role of poetry, parenthetically reminding the king that ‘detraction’ must be confronted by the loyal voice. Drayton’s poem reminds us what was at stake for poets writing in praise of monarchy. Drayton may well have misread the codes of his genre; however, partly as a result of this apparent miscalculation he articulates with some eloquence the ­typically unstated panegyric contract linking the poet and his royal subject. The value of assent within a monarchical regime may easily be overlooked. Within the ­political context of Stuart England, however, assent emerges from the beginning as markedly dynamic and fraught, as poets seek variously to negotiate the grounds upon which they will acknowledge the authority of their new king. Their poems strain against generic expectations of passive compliance, establishing a model for subsequent Stuart panegyric very much in the image of the nation in 1603. THE RETURN OF CHARLES II The return to England of Charles II in 1660 posed challenges for poets, who in some instances had accommodated themselves all too closely to the Cromwellian regime.27 For Waller’s To the King, Upon His Majesty’s Happy Return, the keynote is sounded in the early lines: ‘You must not, sir! too hastily forgive. / Our guilt preserves us from the excess of joy’ (ll. 13–14). Dryden similarly confesses ‘our former guilt’ in Astraea Redux (l. 275), though he artfully displaces the blame onto the tardiness of time in the ‘guilty months’ of ‘To His Sacred Majesty’ (l. 18). Both poets had cause for concern, having published elegies on Cromwell.28 Part of the function of their poems was thus to abjure positions of the past, repositioning themselves as loyal subjects. The act of assent assumed unusual importance at this 27  The most complete source of Restoration panegyrics (cross-referenced hereafter) is contained in Return of the King, ed. MacLean. 28  See Chapter 3 in this volume by Steven Zwicker, ‘ “He seems a king by long succession born”: The Problem of Cromwellian Accession and Succession’.

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time, since the Restoration had been manufactured as one possible solution to a radically unstable situation, and required as a result a massive display of popular support.29 The sheer quantity of publications, like the size of the crowds that greeted Charles, served as valuable and highly public endorsement of the new monarchical order. Yet the often awkward accommodations to the return of monarchy in panegyric also represent, as I want to explore, renewed efforts to define voices that might matter to the state beyond their mere affirmations of power. The commitment to speech, and in turn to the medium of print, appears in retrospect obvious. Some writers, in fact, justified their publications by proclaiming an unquenchable need to acclaim Charles: ‘I find it here / More easie task to write then to forbear’, stated Abiel Borfet.30 But the public statement of political commitment was inevitably more charged than such a pronouncement admits, at a moment when poets were concerned to negotiate the limits of political speech under a restored monarchy. Waller, among others, appealed afresh to the humanist model of education through praise: ‘Well-sounding verses are the charm we use’, he wrote elsewhere, ‘Heroic thoughts and virtue to infuse’.31 Richard Brathwaite echoed Drayton when he laid claim to ‘a modest boldnes’, while William Davenant expanded upon the same quality: Your Valour has our rasher courage taught To do, not what we dare, but what we ought; Not to pretend renown from high offence; Nor brave boldness turn to impudence?32

While assent to the Restoration may appear in retrospect to have required little political courage, these lines are stretched taut under the strain of imagining the possible consequences of monarchical rule for an author. Monarchy did not necessarily equate to tyranny, any more than the republic had truly established liberty; nevertheless Davenant registers an anticipated education in restraint. His lines enact a learned submission, dismissing the specious appeal of ‘pretend[ed] renown’ yet dwelling intently on what remains for an author. Although political expression is shadowed by memories of republican ‘impudence’, Davenant reserves for himself a quality of ‘brave boldness’. Some poets sought to bolster claims to authority with statements of their own physical positions in relation to the events of the Restoration. The final sections of Abraham Cowley’s Ode, Upon The Blessed Restoration and Returne of His 29  Cf. Jonathan Sawday, ‘Re-Writing a Revolution: History, Symbol, and Text in the Restoration’, The Seventeenth Century, 7 (1992), 171–99 at 172. 30  Postliminia Caroli II (London, 1660), 1 (Return of the King, 6.10). 31 ‘Upon the Earl of Roscommon’s Translation of Horace, “De Arte Poetica”; and the Use of Poetry’; quoted in Warren L. Chernaik, The Poetry of Limitation: A Study of Edmund Waller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 133–4. 32 Brathwaite, To His Majesty Upon His Happy Arrivall In Our Late Discomposed Albion (London, 1660), 12 (Return of the King, 8.7, l. 293); Davenant, ‘Poem Upon His Sacred Majestie’s Most Happy Return to His Dominions’, in Sir William Davenant: The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 82–90 (ll. 191–4).

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Sacred Majestie, Charls the Second, for instance, are structured around authorial experience: ‘I saw’, ‘I saw’, ‘I hear’, ‘I hear’.33 Numerous other writers claimed to have witnessed Charles’s arrival at Dover, the event that famously provides the focal point for Dryden in Astraea Redux.34 In these moments Restoration panegyric draws upon the conventions of news, which had so radically reshaped political discourse over the preceding decades. While Brathwaite speculated hopefully that the Restoration might render newspapers redundant, in fact the transformation that news brought about in the relation between the observer and events of state was impossible to reverse.35 The significant point here is the authority that the relation of news may accord to the witness. The function of witnessing events—to return to the image with which this chapter began, of combining powers of sight with a capacity of interpretation—underpinned assumptions of agency. Other poets tactically seized the opportunity to promote claims to a stake in the celebrations of those variously removed from the political centre. For Ralph Astell, writing from ‘Tyne’s Banks’, the north of England demands recognition.36 For Rachel Jevon, the female voice proves at once distinctive and irrepressible: ‘Though for my Sexes sake I should deny’, she declares, ‘Yet EXULTATION makes the Verse, not I’.37 Praise, here, underwrites claims to enfranchisement. For many of these writers, there was a point to be made not only about being there in 1660, but having been there as well through the preceding decades. Those who had suffered for the royalist cause were understandably keen to make this clear. Astell narrates his military service in Scotland and his subsequent losses, reduced to the ‘rags’ that became ‘a Badge of Honour to a Cavalier’ under Cromwell; Brathwaite likewise declares his ‘ruin’d fortunes’.38 There were doubtless cases to be made for recompense, as there were for royalists across the country; however, the point to such statements is not solely material, but rather a matter of establishing authorial identities founded upon a consistent biography. A commendatory poem in Henry Oxinden’s Charls Triumphant recalls texts the author had written in opposition to the Cromwellian regime.39 For William Fairebrother, meanwhile, service in the royalist forces is no more worthy of recollection than his authorship of a poem for Charles I in 1641.40 Brathwaite took the logical next step, attacking those whose ‘Seditious Pens’ had written panegyrics on Cromwell; however, in 33  Abraham Cowley, Ode, Upon The Blessed Restoration and Returne of His Sacred Majestie, Charls the Second (London, 1660), 15–16. 34 See Return of the King, part 5. 35  To His Majesty, 10 (Return of the King, 8.7, ll. 235–42). 36  Vota, Non Bella. New-Castle’s Heartie Gratulation to her Sacred Soveraign King Charles the Second (Gateshead, 1660), 5 (Return of the King, 8.11). 37  Exultationis Carmen To the Kings Most Excellent Majesty Upon His Most Desired Return (London, 1660), 1 (Return of the King, 11.3, ll. 9–10). 38  Vota, Non Bella, 7 (Return of the King, 8.11); To His Majesty, 7 (Return of the King, 8.7, l. 127). 39  Charls Triumphant, sig. A6r (Return of the King, 12.5); referring to the Latin satire Religionis Funus, & Hypocritae Finis (London, 1647). 40  An Essay of a Loyal Brest (London, 1660), 1 (Return of the King, 6.23, ll. 1–2); referring to his contribution to the Cambridge volume welcoming Charles back to England from Scotland in 1641, Irenodia Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge, 1641), sigs K2r–K2v.

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an  atmosphere of reconciliation—or, to use the term preferred by Charles, ­‘oblivion’—this position is notably rare.41 Despite the manifest constraints of their genre, such poets were in turn sustaining the century’s debates over the nature of political agency. Unlike Cromwell, who had been so effectively celebrated for his military heroism, the conventions of p ­ anegyric required poets to figure Charles as inactive, an agent of divine providence.42 More than one panegyrist focuses accordingly on the wind majestically drawing Charles to English shores: ‘And since he hath been Exil’d for our Sin’, writes Thomas Edwards, ‘Our Pray’rs shall be the Winde to bring him in’.43 But this mythology could not be squared with the experience of the preceding months, let alone years. Hence, just as Drayton had openly acknowledged the role of human decisions in the face of competing claims to the throne in 1603, so a number of Restoration poets were drawn to the figure of General George Monck. Indeed the poems addressed to Monck form an intriguing subset of writing on the return of the king, while he also figures recurrently in pieces addressed more conventionally to Charles. The inscrutable general threatened constantly to assume the role of hero—diverting attention from the king—on account of his miraculous achievement of bringing the settlement into being with relatively little bloodshed. ‘I hope we may not fear’, one poem impoliticly proposes, ‘To style the King, Monks Privy Councellor’.44 Most critics tend to argue that Restoration panegyric typically dodges constitutional issues, aiming instead to set the momentous alteration of state in a context larger than that of political interest.45 But uncertainty about the foundation of the settlement brought about by Monck and others seeped into the poems. Indeed the arguments of Thomas Hobbes, as much as the actions of Monck, remind us that even submission requires an act of will, an intentional subordination of selfhood to  ‘a system of discipline’.46 Restoration panegyrics were therefore performing ­important acts of political labour, reassessing myths of monarchical authority within the context of these radical changes. This is surely the context in which to read Dryden’s Astraea Redux, with its extended efforts to rationalize and constrain the furious political energies unleashed over the preceding decades. The poem’s defining ideological strategy is to take the ‘wild distempered rage’ of popular revolt and re-coin it as a yearning for monarchy (l. 112). Politics, in all its fury, is uneasily aligned with providence. The prayers of the people, the poem asserts, ‘stormed the skies and ravished Charles from thence, / As heaven itself is took by violence’ (ll. 143–4). In due course the ‘wilder torrent’ of the crowd, exhibited in 1660 by the people 41  To His Majesty, 9 (Return of the King, 8.7, l. 223). Charles’s ‘Act of Oblivion’ is discussed in Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Lorna Clymer (ed.), Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 103–31. 42 Garrison, Dryden and the Traditions of Panegyric, 113–14. 43  Francis Fane, A Panegyrick to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty (London, 1662), 6. 44  Iter Australe (London, 1660), 13 (Return of the King, 5.14, l. 205). 45 e.g. Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984), 32. 46 Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 348.

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gathered to welcome Charles at Dover, requires the benign direction of God, ‘Guiding our eyes to find and worship you’ (ll. 279, 291). Waller similarly figures the people’s ‘noble rage’ which ‘their King require[s]’ (l. 60), yet strikingly recognizes at the end of his poem an old debate about balances of interests: Of this vast empire you possess the care, The softer part falls to the people’s share. Safety, and equal government, are things, Which subjects make as happy as their kings. (ll. 105–8)

The adjective ‘equal’ is carefully weighted. Technically, it indicated fairness and equity in the new regime (Oxford English Dictionary, A5); it allows a suggestion of balanced interests, yet assumes a willed subjection in the greater cause of ‘Safety’. ‘Happy’, another word that echoes through the political discourse of the century, applies here not merely to subjects pacified into subjection, but equally to a king whose reign is manifestly dependent upon his subjects’ acquiescence. The poets of 1660 thus engage in determined, yet stubbornly qualified, acts of subjection. For Dryden in ‘To His Sacred Majesty’, poets merely articulate the emotions of all subjects, who respond to the return of Charles II ‘like Angels in expressing joy’ (l. 68). Such a fantasy of self-effacement perhaps held certain attractions for those whose expressions of interest had left them exposed in 1660. Yet it was unsustainable even for the most compliant, while others were prepared to worry more openly over the matter. Thus Davenant writes: Too boldly (awful Monarch) am I gone, Through all your Guards, to gaze about your Throne. Yet ’tis the use of Greatness to excuse The daring progress of the sacred Muse. (ll. 227–30)

If political courage may be contracted into the desire to ‘gaze’ upon the ‘Throne’, panegyric may rightly be said to have achieved a stunning level of compliance. Yet, as the works of Davenant and his contemporaries repeatedly demonstrate, the genre consistently facilitated more urgent expressions of political engagement. Even in Davenant’s poem there remains something ‘daring’ about his address, shadowing as it does the monarch’s ‘progress’ and appropriating for the poet the ‘sacred’ authority more commonly associated with monarchy itself. Panegyric, in response to the political machinations that brought about the Restoration, and in line with a trend that may be traced across the century, was struggling to constrain the impetus towards independent political expression. T H E G L O R I O U S R E VO LU T I O N The events of 1688 and 1689, which even a supporter of William of Orange described as a ‘brave Experiment’, placed new pressures upon panegyric.47 The 47  Britain Reviv’d: in a Panegyrick to their Most August Majesties, William and Mary (London, 1689), 2.

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question of legitimacy was not new to supporters of seventeenth-century ­monarchs, but presented particular challenges in the weeks and months following William’s invasion, as the legitimacy and precise nature of the new regime were negotiated between the presumptive monarchs and their subjects. For one poet, there was an appropriate precedent: ‘Like Seventh Henry you’ve of Titles choice, / Succession, Marriage, War, the Peoples Voice’.48 But the claim to a multiplicity of justifications betrays unease, while the rhyme on ‘choice’ and ‘voice’ underscores one of the ­central questions of the recent regime change, the respective roles in the events of William and his ‘people’. Notably, tracts of political theory became the dominant textual form of the Glorious Revolution: a phenomenon initially driven by an orchestrated justificatory campaign launched by William and his supporters, and sustained by commentators seeking to comprehend the momentous c­ hanges.49 Given the unique circumstances, such arguments in prose were perhaps inevitably more important than poetic expressions of assent. Yet panegyric remained crucial, and the challenges that poets faced were not categorically different, though admittedly more extreme, than those faced by their predecessors in 1603 and 1660. These difficulties are perhaps most sharply evident in the poets’ struggles to reconcile providence and heroism. Providence, as already observed, remained the default narrative of historical causation in panegyric throughout the seventeenth century. The doctrinal division in 1688–9, moreover, prompted writers to recall other instances in which Protestantism had triumphed, looking back especially to the accession of Elizabeth. (Thomas Shadwell provocatively added the conquest of Laudianism to this narrative, positing a decidedly Whiggish interpretation of history.50) Like any operation of providence, the transformation revealed its meaning to the people only after the event. As Edmund Arwaker reflected: ’Tis wondrous strange indeed That the great Work was almost done, E’re the Design was known.51

As much as he presented himself as a military leader, ready by 1689 to conquer Ireland and maybe even France, William was thus more typically figured in ­panegyric as a ‘quiet Conqu’ror’, his heroism subordinated to his place in an unfolding ­religious narrative.52 One poem even imagines an angel being sent to William in the Netherlands, inspiring his actions: ‘God sent this Hero’, the author declares, ‘to Defend our Cause’.53 John Dennis similarly dwells upon the ‘Secret Reserve of Providence’ that had brought ‘this Immortall Heroe’ to England. William, he writes, took the English people ‘gently by the Heart; / And made them bend to

48  A Poem on the Coronation of King William and Queen Mary (London, 1689), 10. 49  Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–89’, The American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 843–74. 50  A Congratulatory Poem on His Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (London, 1689), 3–4. 51  A Votive Table, Consecrated to the Church’s Deliverers, The Present King and Queen (London, 1689), 5. 52  A Poem on the Coronation, 10. 53  T. S., Englands Great Deliverance (London, 1689).

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Heavens design’.54 For Dennis, as for so many of his contemporaries, this was an act of ‘Deliverance’: a word that echoes throughout panegyrics of the Williamite revolution, establishing for readers an authorized—if not a sufficient—explanation of the extraordinary transformation in the nation’s government. But the panegyrics of 1688 and 1689 are even more interesting, I would argue, for the ways in which they stretch the limits of the genre, embracing the kind of political debates that are evident in contemporary prose tracts. A number of poems expand upon what had been a minor linguistic strain in earlier panegyric, examining the competing ‘interests’ in the state. The language of interests was anchored in political theories that were still considered threatening: of a piece for many observers with ‘reason of state’ theories, and associated more recently with a perceived collapse of reason in the 1640s and 1650s.55 William and Mary, as a result, are positioned ambiguously, as both agents of providence and actors in an altogether more rational and secular drama. One poem concludes firmly in favour of a Hobbesian submission: ‘When, though we both our selves and Kingdoms give, / That and much more’s our Interest to do’.56 For Shadwell, meanwhile, the Revolution is the latest manifestation of a long conflict between the ‘great Prerogative’ power of the monarchy, on the one hand, and ‘the Peoples Int’rests’, on the other hand. His narrative is therefore less about the heroism of one man than the supremacy of the people and their ‘Voices, uncontroul’d’. Appropriately, William most powerfully assumes a providential position in this poem when he cedes power to his people: ‘Inspir’d by Heaven, thus the Great Orange said, / Let there be liberty, and was obey’d’.57 In the paradox of the second line, as the conqueror commands liberty, one recognizes the essential difficulty of panegyric under a regime of constitutional monarchy. As these divergent interpretations of events indicate, it was uncommonly difficult in 1689 to sustain the model of panegyric as a mere expression of assent. Significantly poets, in their efforts to ascribe authorized meanings to the events of the preceding months, turned not only upon James II and his supporters but also upon each other. One writer angrily dismissed the ‘Dull Whiggish Lines’ of the likes of Elkanah Settle and Nahum Tate, that in his view had ‘early’, though deceptively, ‘propt the deep Intrigues of State’.58 Others, though, countered by representing the opposing political party as having been opposed to the Revolution from the outset. When William landed at Torbay, Robert Fleming writes, London was ‘full of Villains, Tories / . . . Lies and Stories’.59 In the conditions of 1689, as these poems make clear, loyalty was becoming an insufficient political position. Although the earlier Stuart accessions, such as those of James I and Charles II, raised manifold political questions, not least about the respective powers of the 54  An Ode Upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition, of His Highness the Prince of Orange, now King of England (London, 1689), 5, 3, 4. 55 Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 38–9, 222–3; Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric, 426–37. 56  J. D., A Poem Upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England (London, 1689), 4. 57  Congratulatory Poem, 2, 3, 2, 7. 58  The Deliverance a Poem: To the Prince of Orange (London, 1689), 8. 59  Britain’s Jubilee (London, 1689), sig. A3r.

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monarch and his subjects, an age of nascent party politics presented poets with more troublesome questions of allegiance. One writer looked back scornfully on the poetry of the short reign of James II, seeking in the process to delineate a reformed poetics of praise. ‘Where are you all, you lewd ignoble Race’, the anonymous author questions in the opening couplet, ‘Who even Tyrants with your Praise disgrace?’ Such poets are accused of shameless, unprincipled flattery, as evidenced by their willingness to switch their allegiance so rapidly in the recent past: ‘No side, no Master your Profession shames, / Still fulsom Flatterers you, from Noll to James!’60 Dryden was in the author’s mind here, as throughout this poem; the laureate’s youthful elegy on the death of Cromwell— which had pointedly been reprinted, without his consent, in the midst of the Exclusion Crisis—tarnished his reputation throughout his career.61 But the author maintains that panegyric, despite the threats posed by dishonest and incompetent writers, can survive. The poem asks: ‘How nice a thing is Praise—how secret be / The narrow Lines ’twixt that and Flattery?’62 The mystification of poetic insight was by this time a familiar trope, but in the context of the Glorious Revolution—a context of ideological division deftly outlined in the poem—the convention becomes increasingly strained. ‘Nice’, in this context, carries implications, despite the author’s apparent intentions, of subtlety, even sophistry. T H E L I M I T S O F PA N E G Y R I C : G E O RG E WITHER AND APHRA BEHN While most poets across the Stuart era were prepared to accept loyalty to the monarch as a precondition for public poetry, in some instances this contract became unsustainable. In order to explore this tension, I want in this final section to consider two poets coming from very different political positions, at distinct historical moments, yet each reaching the conclusion that panegyric could not contain their expressions of political commitment. These poets—George Wither in 1660, Aphra Behn in 1689—rejected the overwhelming cultural impetus towards praise, and in the process forged poems that explore the inherent tensions within the genre of panegyric in seventeenth-century England. Though they were by no means alone in opposing the transitions at these particular moments, they are especially articulate in their reflections upon the literary, as well as the personal, implications of their positions. Wither, one of the most prolific poets of his century, had history with the monarchy. He had enjoyed a fraught yet surprisingly close relationship with James I, while the accession of Charles I prompted him to write one of the century’s longest poems,

60  A Poem on the Coronation, 1. 61  An Elegy on the Usurper O. C. by the Author of Absalom and Achitophel; Published to Shew the Integrity of the Poet (London, 1681). 62  A Poem on the Coronation, 12.

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the prophetic and idiosyncratically political Britain’s Remembrancer (1628).63 Throughout his early career, and subsequently in the course of a series of publications that punctuated the troubled 1640s and 1650s, he cultivated an authorial identity founded upon a combination of religious inspiration, political independence, and moral integrity.64 While he was by 1660 perhaps too deeply steeped in opposition to the monarchy to be able to turn, his journey towards that point of recognition is nonetheless instructive. As David Norbrook notes, Wither believed that his approach towards authority had been consistent throughout a career that he depicted as fifty years of ‘duty’ to his ‘country’.65 Even in 1660 he professed loyalty, albeit somewhat provisionally, to the returning king. Yet for Wither mere praise had always been suspect, and at the Restoration he reserved his greatest scorn for those who praise ‘all Kings alike’.66 The year before he had reprinted Waller’s elegy on the death of Cromwell in his own Salt Upon Salt, purely for the purpose of demolishing it as a piece of empty rhetoric.67 The following year, as Waller’s attentions shifted to Charles, Wither’s scorn was redoubled. His target in his most substantial response to the Restoration, Speculum Specula­ tivum (1660), was a genre rather than an individual.68 Wither claimed that mere expressions of praise were vacuous because they lacked the kind of integrity he had so consistently claimed for himself throughout his career. His ‘remembrances’, he insisted, were more valuable to the new king than ‘a PANEGYRICK’ (p. 119). His own more critical response to the Restoration contained not only greater value to Charles but a more reliable profession of loyalty: By not commending, it much more commends Than all their Panegyricks who bestrow Those men with praises whom they do not know. (sig. A2v)

As he had done since the reign of James I, Wither appealed rather to an internalized site of authority, scripted by God: ‘if my heart you could as plainly see / As what you now read’, he assured Charles, his pronouncement of ‘welcome home’ would be appreciated as truly loyal (sig. A2r). This is not merely oppositionist writing; it is a poem determined to challenge the prevailing genre of praise. Wither’s poem also interrogates, with searing honesty, the material foundations of the political voice. For, despite a career founded upon declarations of independent 63 See Andrew McRae, ‘Remembering 1625: George Wither’s Britain’s Remembrancer and the Condition of Early Caroline England’, English Literary Renaissance, 46 (2016), 433–55. 64  Cf. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 173–223 and ‘Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642–1649’, English Literary Renaissance, 21 (1991), 217–56; Michelle O’Callaghan, The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture 1612–25 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–86. 65 Wither, Speculum Speculativum (London, 1660), sig. A4v; Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 15. 66  Speculum Speculativum, sig. A2r. 67 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 384. 68  On the publication of this text, and Wither’s circumstances at the Restoration, see 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), 12–77.

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judgement, by 1660 Wither’s personal fortunes were uncomfortably yoked to the Commonwealth, on account of his possession of confiscated episcopal lands. By the time he wrote Speculum Speculativum, in the middle of the year, these were already lost.69 Therefore, as much as he wants to reclaim his accustomed position of godly commentator upon his nation, Wither is drawn recurrently back to this immediate personal trauma. Speculum Speculativum, as a result, is a distracted text, in which Wither’s material concerns insistently impose themselves upon the poet’s consciousness. At one point he tries to position his work as an act of defiance, brought to the press at a moment when the interests of ‘policy’ would recommend that he ‘delay / To publish this’, given that he ‘hast a Game to play / For Prelates lands’ (sig. A5r). Yet, as much as it worries him in material terms, as a 62-year-old man with a family and household to maintain, he is still more painfully aware of the threat this struggle poses to his authorial identity. ‘I must confesse’, he concedes towards the end of the work, ‘my own sad cause broke in, / As soon as ere I did therewith begin’ (p. 121). What this realization forces him to acknowledge is that identity can never entirely be insulated from individual interests. This recognition undermines his efforts to distinguish himself from supposed timeservers such as Waller, yet leads him as a result to a deeper, more scrupulous understanding of political speech. The position of Aphra Behn twenty-eight years later was uncannily similar. Behn had forged a reputation, and established also a degree of prosperity, on the basis of her outspoken loyalty to the Stuart monarchy, and above all to James II. When James fled the country in the wake of William’s invasion, Behn found herself incapable of changing her position. Goaded for her silence—among others, it seems, by the Williamite apologist Gilbert Burnet—she responded with one of the outstanding poems of the Glorious Revolution. ‘A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet, on the Honour he did me of Enquiring after me and my Muse’ appropriates the Pindaric ode—the panegyric form of the moment, and one she had used herself to mark James II’s accession—for a statement of resistance.70 Behn’s ‘Muse’, not unlike Wither’s, proves ‘stubborn’ in the face of the national transformation (l. 48). She cannot, in other words, adapt her poetics of praise to the demands of the time, as poets such as Waller and Dryden had done in 1660. For her, instead, ‘Loyalty Commands with Pious Force’ (l. 51). She compares herself with Moses, ‘the Excluded Prophet’, who is ‘forbid by Fates Decree / To share the Triumph of the joyful Victory’ (ll. 62, 64–5). More tellingly, perhaps, she appeals to secular values of ‘Sense and Reason’, which cannot be reconciled to ‘this Unpresidented Enterprise’ (ll. 92–3). For Wither, reason was essentially religious, roughly synonymous with the conscience. Behn, by comparison, is more attuned with her time in gesturing towards a political identity, even in the midst of a crisis for English Catholics, which is rather more detached from religious commitment. 69 Michelle O’Callaghan, ‘Wither, George (1588–1667)’, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-29804. 70 Behn, Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: William Pickering, 1992); unless otherwise stated, all Behn references are from this edition. Cf. her ‘Pindarick Poem on the Happy Coronation of His most Sacred Majesty James II’. On the Pindaric ode in 1689, see Chapter 6 in this volume by John West, ‘ “A great Romance feigned to raise wonder”: Literature and the Making of the 1689 Succession’.

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Even as she overtly turns away from engagement, then, Behn’s poem appreciates the discursive dimension of political division. In particular, she grudgingly acknowledges that Burnet has achieved for William what she has been unable to do for her patron. Her response is sarcasm. She professes herself humbled by ‘the Honour’ of Burnet’s ‘Choice’ (l. 5): With Pow’rful Reasoning drest in finest Sence, A thousand ways my Soul you can Invade, And spight of my Opinions weak Defence, Against my Will, you Conquer and Perswade. (ll. 16–19)

The lines ironically invoke a discourse of erotic conquest, reminding the reader in the process of Behn’s reputation for sexual as well as political outspokenness. But the central focus remains politics. ‘Opinion’ is pivotal in this regard, momentarily conceding the extent to which allegiance has become at this historical moment a matter of personal preference. Panegyric, in this context, loses its purpose as an affirmation of authority, lurching uneasily instead towards propaganda.71 She tells Burnet at the close that his ‘Pen shall more Immortalize [William’s] Name, / Than even his Own Renown’d and Celebrated Fame’ (ll. 102–3). These lines articulate not only the bitterness of a writer on the wrong side of history, but the despair of a poet rejecting the genre which for her has been emptied of substance, revealed as merely another weapon in a battle for public opinion. For Wither and Behn, panegyric is thus exposed as a compromised genre, subordinated to the forces of interest and party. While they are unusual in their explicit rejections of it, they help in different ways to identify pressures which were becoming acute, especially within the context of 1688–9. The response of Dryden in these years was equally telling. As a number of his rivals were delighted to note, the greatest panegyrist of his age simply fell silent. In the words of one, Dryden stood now as ‘A loose Apostate Bard ’, stained at once by his Catholicism and his militant allegiance to James II.72 For another he remained the epitome of poetic skill, albeit fatally marked by a lack of ‘honest[y]’.73 And for a third, Dryden’s failure to respond in any way at this key moment in British history was his definitive mistake: ‘Silence is a Damning Errour, John, / I’d or my Master, or my self bemoan’.74 By the logic of this poem, even a lament for James would be better than Dryden’s apparent retirement from public poetry. This critic of Dryden recognizes, as clearly as Behn, that political poetry in 1689 was conditioned by division. It was impossible to praise the new regime without at least implicitly criticizing the one that it had replaced, just as loyal supporters of James were being forced to adopt oppositional stances. On the one hand, these conflicts help to explain the demise of panegyric in the form that had been i­ nherited from writers earlier in the Stuart century. The consensual myth, maintained so 71  Cf. Virginia Crompton, ‘ “For when the act is done and finish’t cleane, / what should the poet doe, but shift the scene?”: Propaganda, Professionalism and Aphra Behn’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–53 at 139–44. 72 Arwaker, A Votive Table, 4. 73  A Poem on the Coronation, 2. 74  The Deliverance A Poem, 8.

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consistently throughout the panegyric considered in this chapter, became at this time almost impossible to justify. On the other hand, poems of praise direct attention to the rise of satire as an altogether more vital genre of public political writing. While satire had a long and deep presence within English literary culture, the late seventeenth century was arguably the moment when it assumed a new status as the genre that could describe and define—in public contestations as opposed to the illicit and libellous satiric discourse of earlier decades—the nation’s emergent ­political divisions.75 Through decades in which Jacobites continued to assert the presence of an alternative regime, and in which a modern structure of party politics took shape, satire would subsume panegyric as the most pertinent form of public political writing. The purpose of the present chapter has been to demonstrate that panegyric, despite the limitations that became increasingly apparent by the end of the c­ entury, was always a more sophisticated genre than is sometimes acknowledged. While overtly committed to the affirmation of authority, panegyric held the c­ apacity at once for subtle reflections upon alternatives, and for negotiations over the agency of subjects within monarchical regimes. In this regard the chapter, like several others in this volume, offers support to arguments that the development of a public sphere of rational political discourse was a longer process than might once have been thought.76 While the political interaction of the final decades of the century was undoubtedly distinctive, as evidenced by the open confrontations between poets in 1689, the English public sphere had its roots very firmly planted in the early Stuart decades. As I have argued elsewhere, the political literature of these decades was not open and rational, yet it was deeply engaged in debates about forms of government and the rights of the subject.77 Panegyric, for all its overt celebration of power, was a product of this culture. It was by nature a constrained genre, but it was not necessarily passive or compliant. It proved capable, on occasion, of surprisingly subtle reflections upon relations between subjects and monarchs, and upon the nature of political speech.

75  On early Stuart satire, see McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. On satire of the mid-century, see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic; and Benne Klaas Faber, ‘The Poetics of Subversion and Conservatism: Popular Satire, c.1640–1649’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Oxford, 1992). 76  Debate on the formation of a public sphere in England derives from Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). For arguments that date its origins in the early seventeenth century, or even earlier, see esp. Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); and Joad Raymond, ‘The Newspaper, Public Opinion, and the Public Sphere in the Seventeenth Century’, in Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: F. Cass, 1999), 109–40. 77 McRae, Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State.

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10 ‘I have brought thee up to a Kingdome’ Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I David Colclough Moments of royal succession in early modern England were surrounded by s­ ermons. They were preached in commemoration of the dead king or queen, both before and during their funeral; they were (at least from the accession of Edward VI in 1547)1 a part of the elaborate ritual of coronation; they were delivered to the court of the new ruler and at the opening of their first parliament; and beyond the centre of power in London, preachers marked moments of succession, addressed new monarchs in their travels around the country, and frequently printed their ­sermons. From the late 1560s, sermons also served to memorialize successions through the annual preaching of accession day sermons throughout the monarch’s reign.2 In common with other cultural media produced around royal successions and studied in this volume, sermons undertook the traditional tasks of panegyric, including balancing praise with advice, or using praise to proffer advice in the convention of laudando praecipere. Like them, sermons also needed to find ways of speaking to the anxieties of a nation in transition. For comments on earlier versions of this chapter I am grateful to participants at the Stuart Successions colloquium held in Oxford in September 2013, and to Katrin Ettenhuber. Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae have helped me greatly in revising it for publication. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Kevin Sharpe. 1   On Edward’s coronation sermon (and the question of whether one was preached at the coronation of Henry VIII), see Alice Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26, 78ff. On the coronation sermons for Charles II in Scotland in 1651, and for Queen Anne in 1702, see Chapter 12 in this volume by Jane Rickard, ‘Stuart Coronations in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity’ and Chapter 7 by Joseph Hone, ‘The Last Stuart Coronation’; on coronation sermons for Charles II in England, James II, William and Mary, and Anne, see Carolyn A. Edie, ‘The Public Face of Royal Ritual: Sermons, Medals, and Civic Ceremony in Later Stuart Coronations’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 53 (1990), 311–36. On coronation sermons, see further David J.  Sturdy, ‘English Coronation Sermons in the Seventeenth Century’, in Heinz Duchhardt (ed.), Herrscherweie und Königskrönung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983), 69–81. As coronation sermons have received some attention, in this chapter my attention lies mainly elsewhere. 2  See Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons 1558–1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 136–44 and ‘Presenting James VI and I to the Public: Preaching on Political Anniversaries at Paul’s Cross’, in Ralph Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 107–22; Elena Kiryanova, ‘Images of Kingship: Charles I, Accession Sermons, and the Theory of Divine Right’, History, 100 (2015), 21–39.

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There were, however, also tasks peculiar to the sermon as a genre (and the preacher as speaker and writer) that stood outside the expectations of panegyric, among them attending to the spiritual state of the former and current rulers and counselling the new monarch on ecclesiastical policy.3 As ministers of God’s word, the authors of sermons possessed a special kind of authority in relation to their monarchs. A sermon could posit scriptural types of the old or new monarch (David, Solomon, or Josiah, for example), analyse models of kingship, and trace the mysterious workings of divine providence. It could, too, make the dead monarch live again, through vivid imagery or by imagining their place in heaven; but in doing so it needed to attend to the living presence of the new ruler. It is, then, somewhat surprising that preaching has—with a few notable exceptions—received very little attention in studies of monarchical successions, all too often being regarded, perhaps, as mere background noise or as dutiful celebration by comparison with the supposedly more complex and ambiguous manoeuvres performed by panegyric poetry or by pageants and the like. Here I aim to counter the neglect or, at best, cursory treatment of sermons preached around early modern successions, and to argue for their central importance to such events. Preachers, like poets, sought to establish their status at the start of a new reign, and to catch the monarch’s eye or ear. Their sermons, though, were perforce also bound to approach the political present through the exegesis of Scripture, thus placing the present in the much broader context of Christian history, and eschatology. In this chapter I concentrate on sermons preached around the successions of the first two Stuart monarchs: James VI and I in 1603, and Charles I in 1625. This focus is in part pragmatic: a general survey of sermons preached during all of the Stuart successions would slip too easily into broad outline and lose any i­ nterpretative purchase on its subject. But at the same time, my choice is driven by a conviction that these two successions have a special significance in relation to sermon literature. James was known to be a careful interpreter of Scripture himself, and clearly some preachers saw in him (or wished to flatter him as) a fellow exegete; they also, though, faced particular challenges in explaining or justifying his succession to Elizabeth I. His son, Charles, came to the throne at a time of still greater religious division, with his own doctrinal allegiances very much a matter of debate. This is not to imply that preaching lost its significance at later moments of succession, or that similar pressures to those apparent in 1603 or 1625 were not felt in 1660, 1685, 1689, or 1702. By examining two years at the earlier stages of the dynasty, however, I hope to lay the groundwork for further studies of these texts. In doing so, I consider both the hopes and expectations that preachers had of their royal masters and the delicate decisions made by those kings, and their advisers, 3  However, for the complex tasks undertaken by writers of panegyric on the accession of James I (including some of these topics), see Chapter 1 in this volume by Richard A. McCabe, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’, and for the malleability of panegyric as a genre, see Chapter 9 in this volume by Andrew McRae, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’. See also Richard A. McCabe, ‘The Poetics of Succession, 1587–1605: The Stuart Claim’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 192–211.

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over who should be chosen to speak to—and to some extent for—the monarch at the beginning of his reign. As Kevin Sharpe has stated, the printed texts of sermons were ‘invaluable media of royal representation’;4 as he also notes, the representation of royalty was not a top-down process but one that involved often tricky and sometimes prickly negotiation. While Elizabeth I may have famously attempted to ‘tune the Pulpits’, it might be better to see the periods of succession of the first two Stuart monarchs as a drawn-out collective tuning process, with all the discordance that implies, and no guarantee that it would conclude in harmony.5 After analysing a number of sermons that grappled with the various justifications of James’s succession, and which evince an equal concern with placating the people and with appealing to the new monarch, I turn my attention to the opening year of Charles’s reign. There I concentrate on sermons preached by John Donne and William Laud, which demonstrate that even when a succession was untroubled by issues of legitimacy, preachers confronted the fear that the nation’s ‘foundations’ (a term employed by both of my subjects) might be at risk. ‘ F E A R E S T U R N E D I N TO J OY E S ’ ? THE ACCESSION OF JAMES VI AND I Recent scholarship has called into question accounts of James’s accession that treated it as an easy transfer of power, or even a source of relief and enthusiasm at the conclusion of a reign that had dragged on for too long.6 In fact, as Richard A. McCabe’s chapter in this volume shows, the arrival of James was greeted with as much anxiety as optimism, and this was reflected in the sermons preached in 1603–4 as well as in the panegyric literature of the time.7 This should hardly be surprising, when we bear in mind that James was coming from a church culture quite different from that of the Elizabethan establishment; that on his journey south he was beset by petitioners (including those who delivered the ‘Millenary petition’, expressing godly hopes for further reformation); that both Catholics and the godly hoped (perhaps with equal reason) that he would champion their cause, 4  Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 54. 5  Peter Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus (London, 1671), sig. Y1r. On such ‘tuning’ at the moment of Elizabeth’s accession, see Peter E. McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 59–61. 6  See McCullough, Sermons at Court, 105–6. The latter interpretation was bolstered by persuasive analysis of the problems of the 1590s, on which see Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous; John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On James’s accession and the early years of his reign, see generally Diana Newton, James VI and I and the Government of England, 1603–1605 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2005). 7  The best accounts of preaching on the accession of James VI and I are McCullough, Sermons at Court, 102–7; Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–1625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 31–50; and most recently, Clare Frances Whitehead, ‘Performing for the New King: Continuity and Change at the Early Jacobean Court’(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2014), 82–130. I am very grateful to Dr Whitehead for supplying me with a copy of her thesis.

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and that several among the clergy had been opposed to a Scottish succession (including Bishop Tobie Matthew of Durham, who preached to the new king both at Berwick and Newcastle on the early stages of his progress into his new kingdom).8 Richard Eedes’ assertion in a sermon preached before the new king at Hampton Court on 3 August 1603 that the nation was witnessing a ‘change . . . without change’ was more hopeful and polemical than merely descriptive.9 A sense of continuity, as Peter McCullough has demonstrated, was achieved through energetic machinations on the parts of secretary of state Robert Cecil and Archbishop of Canterbury Whitgift to continue the court Lent sermon rota in the midst of which Elizabeth had died; although the fact that two sets of court sermons were being preached (those at the court of the defunct queen, only officially disbanded after her interment, and those delivered to James on his travels) might have highlighted differences as much as it elided them.10 Some sense of the tensions that this period of transition generated is evident in the sermon preached at Paul’s Cross by John Hayward on 27 March, the Sunday after Elizabeth’s death. Hayward acknowledged that the people would be subject to ‘contrary affections’, but hoped that they would carry themselves in ‘an euen reuerence’, repeating the phrase in an antimetabole that attempted to figure the difficult balancing act this entailed: ‘I say in an euen reuerence, and reuerent euennes’.11 He went on to survey the complicated set of outward signs that this would produce: whomsoeuer I do here behold, with chearfull countenances and bright apparrell, I suppose that they doe mourne in wedding garmentes, hauing both sorrow and ioye at their hearts, hiding inwardly their sorrowe for hir that is departed, and showing outwardly their ioye for him that is comming. Whom otherwise I see with heauie countenances and darke apparrell, I suppose that they reioyce in mourning weeds, hauing both ioy and sorrow at their hearts, hiding inwardly their ioy for him that is coming, and showing outwardly their sorrow for hir that is gone.12

After emphasizing Elizabeth’s quiet and godly end (which, Hayward points out, both frustrated Catholic attempts to kill her and contrasted with the recent violent deaths of European monarchs),13 the sermon concluded by placing hope in James and asserting the right of his claim to the throne. ‘His name’, Hayward asserts, ‘hetherto onelye proclaimed in our streetes, hath stilled the ragings of the people, 8  See McCullough, Sermons at Court, 103. 9  Richard Eedes, ‘The dutie of a King’, in Six learned and godly Sermons (London, 1604), sig. B1v. On Eedes’ sermon see McCullough, Sermons at Court, 105; Whitehead, ‘Performing for the New King’, 97; 103; 104. 10  See McCullough, Sermons at Court, 102. As well as maintaining the Lent rota, Whitgift (along with Bancroft) attempted to retain in post as many of Elizabeth’s royal chaplains as possible; see McCullough, Sermons at Court, 106–7. 11  John Hayward, Gods Universal Right Proclaimed (London, 1603), sig. C8v. 12 Hayward, Gods Universal Right Proclaimed, sigs C8v–D1r. 13  Ibid., sigs D3r–D4v. Hayward is not afraid to use a heavy-handed paralipsis: ‘I will not give offence by remembring, how farre different from her ende, the ende of the last Catholike King of Spaine, and most Christian King of France was’ (D4r). For a supporting statement, see Robert Parker Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple, 1602–1603 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1976), 208: ‘This morning about 3 at clocke hir Majestie departed this life, mildly like a lambe.’

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danting the enimies of true religion, and causing the enimies of peace, that thought now to looke out, to hide their heades.’14 James’s claim is underwritten by a ­mixture of lineage and experience: For propinquity of bloud, he is the next and rightful heire of Henrie the seuenth of famous memorie, of the house of Lancaster, & of Elizabeth his wife ayre of the house of Yorke. His education hath bin Godly; of his wisedome for gouernment, and of his sincerity for religion, he hath already giuen proofe, not onely in the gouernement of his kingdome of Scotland, but otherwise also, to the content of many that could not so fully obserue his gouernement, as peruse his writings.15

So—with a return of the antimetabole that syntactically enacts regnal transition— Hayward called on his auditory to bear the change ‘with such mindes as become wise men, mingling heauinesse with our ioy, and ioy with our heauinesse, and let vs lift vp the Trumpet of our lowdest voyces, and say, God saue King Iames’.16 Hayward’s conviction that the proclamation of James’s succession, issued a few hours after the queen’s death, ‘stilled the ragings of the people’ and confounded the nation’s enemies at one stroke was not shared by all, as warnings against ‘intestine discord’ in John King’s Lent court sermon of 27 March, the first preached after Elizabeth’s death, indicate.17 John Manningham’s notes of this sermon (the only record of its content to survive) show King praising the state of peace in the land and stressing that there was ‘Noe vacancy, noe interregnum, noe interruption of government, as in Rome an[d] other places, where in such tymes the prisons fly open, &c.’; but another entry made by Manningham on the same day contains the news that ‘It was bruited that the L[ord] Beauchamp, the E[arl] of Hartfordes sonne, is up in armes, and some say 10,000 strong . . . An other bruit that Portsmouth is holden for him, that the French purpose against us, that the Papistes are like to rise with Beauchamp.’18 Nonetheless, celebration of the absence of outright revolt or chaos was a common theme among preachers in the first days of James’s reign,19 as was the early identification of the new king with Solomon.20 Both of these are found in a sermon preached at Great St Mary’s in Cambridge on 28 March by Leonel Sharpe. Away from the queen’s court in London and the travelling court accompanying James, it was perhaps even harder to rely upon the mere hearing or 14 Hayward, Gods Universal Right Proclaimed, sig. D6v. 15  Ibid, sig. D7r. For a similar list of James’s claims and qualities see Miles Mosse, Scotlands Welcome. A Sermon Preached at Needham in the Countie of Suff. On Tuesday, April. 5. 1603 (London, 1603), sig. E2r. 16 Hayward, Gods Universal Right Proclaimed, sig. D7v. 17  Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 213. On King’s replacement of Giles Thomson, Dean of Windsor, see McCullough, Sermons at Court, 102. Manningham recorded James’s proclamation as king by Cecil (accompanied by ‘the Counsell and diverse noblemen’) at Whitehall gate and then Cheapside (p. 208), and observed that it ‘was heard with greate expectation, and silent joy, noe great shouting’ (p. 209). He speculated that ‘the sorrow for hir Majesties departure was soe deep in many heartes they could not soe suddenly shewe any great joy, though it could not be lesse then exceeding greate for the succession of soe worthy a King’ (p. 209). 18  Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 217. 19  In addition to Hayward and King, see Mosse, Scotlands Welcome, sig. E4v. 20  On James as Solomon, see Hayward, Gods Universal Right Proclaimed, sig. C7v; King cited in Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 217; Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 46 and n. 57.

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reading of the proclamation (which had been printed on 25 March);21 this might explain why Sharpe—addressing ‘the Vniuersitie, the Knights, and chiefe gentlemen of the shiere, the Maior and townesmen’—went out of his way to deliver a forensic analysis and justification of the king’s claim to the throne.22 While the proclamation began by emphasizing James’s claim to the throne by lineage, through descent from Margaret Tudor, daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, along with a number of responses to the succession, it employed a range of different legitimating strategies.23 Sharpe took his cue from this in announcing that he would ‘explaine some branches of the proclamation’,24 adding five more proofs of the king’s rightful claim to the fundamental one of blood: the might of James’s party; the merit of his person; Elizabeth’s consent; the benefits of his succession, and the miseries that would befall the nation if he had not succeeded.25 Standing above all six of these justifications, however, was a still more weighty and significant one: divine providence.26 Sharpe took as his text 1 Kings 10: 9–‘the words of the Queene of Saba to King Salomon, vttered in way of thankes, to the great Lord of heauen & earth, for his loue to Salomon, and the state of Israel, in setting him vpon the throne, to rule his people’.27 Just so, he argued, should the people rejoice at their acquisition of a ‘seco[n]d Salomon’;28 even more, in fact, since if the Queen of Sheba, beeing a stranger in Israel, did blesse the Lord before Salomon, for the benefits that another people did receiue, by hauing a Salomon set ouer them; how much more ought we, which are no strangers but borne in Syon, be thankefull for our Salomon, though not before Salomon, wherein our dutie is more free from all suspition of flatterie, for the innumerable blessings we our selues begin to feele.29

The hand of God had worked to establish James as king, ensuring that in the wake of Elizabeth’s death the people saw their ‘so grieuous sorrowes so suddainely comforted, and feares turned to ioyes’.30 Fears there certainly had been, Sharpe a­ dmitted; not least because the country had seen so many ‘alterations of the state’ over recent years (he surveyed the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth):31 now though, in part due to the prompt and wise action of ‘the h ­ onourable councell of State, and the noble Peeres’,32 the nation had ‘another Iosias’ at its helm, who would unite the kingdoms and the churches of England and Scotland, and who brought with him in the form of his two sons a guarantee of peaceful succession

21  See Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 210. 22  Leonel Sharpe, A Sermon Preached at Cambridge (Cambridge, 1603), title page. 23  These strategies are discussed in Paulina Kewes, ‘Hamlet and Politics’, forthcoming; I am very grateful to Dr Kewes for showing me a typescript of her paper. The proclamation is STC 8297. 24 Sharpe, A Sermon, sig. A8r. 25  Ibid., sig. B1r. 26  ‘For whose worke can this be,’ asked Sharpe, ‘but Gods alone’ (ibid., sig. A7r). 27  Ibid., sig. A1r. 28  Ibid., sig. A3v. 29  Ibid., sigs A4r–v. 30  Ibid., sig. A4v. 31 Ibid. 32  The body which proclaimed James was in fact more amorphous and ad hoc than Sharpe suggests; its status is discussed in Kewes, ‘Hamlet and Politics’.

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to come (he is ‘a royall Aeneas of a noble Ascanius’, says Sharpe, adding a classical reference to his largely scriptural register).33 Sharpe’s loquacity in justifying James’s succession was in part motivated by the fact that such discussion was no longer proscribed by statute (as he said, ‘the Statute did so silence vs through feare’, although traitors felt free to question it in their ‘malitious books’);34 it was positively encouraged by the fact that ‘though the ­magistrate of this place with many others, would & could haue done it better’, he had given Sharpe ‘leaue, speaking by his approbation’ to do so.35 He was, though, at pains to emphasize that the proclamation was an acknowledgement of James’s existing right, not that which brought his right into being: ‘it is he that giues force to the proclamation, and not the proclamation right to him.’36 In addressing the proclamation’s assertion of lineal succession, Sharpe not only reiterated the line of descent from Henry VII, but refuted three ‘barres’ that had been objected against it: foreign birth, a ‘pretended testament of Henrie the 8.’ (in favour of the Suffolk claim), and ‘an Act of Association’ (against Mary Queen of Scots, and taken to apply to her son).37 Next Sharpe turned to ‘the might of [James’s] partie’, and argued that rather than suggesting he reigns by conquest or holds his Crown ‘by feare’ this should demonstrate to ‘Spaine and all the factours of Spaine’ that ‘he hath a puissant might to abet his royal right’, with allies comprising ‘the kings of Denmarke, many of the Germane Princes, the Netherlonders’.38 The merit of James’s person was evident from his reign in Scotland, and from his published writings. Under the overarching appeal to providence in James’s succession, Sharpe had moved from historical proof (genealogy) to contemporary fact (military might) and the evidence of experience ( James’s time as king of Scotland and his writings on kingship). Next he made use of testimony, in claiming that he had been ‘most credibly informed’ that Elizabeth had given her ‘plaine consent’ to James’s inheritance of the throne, even quoting her alleged words (‘who, saide shee, is more fitte, to be my successour, then he which is by right, the king of Scots? Doe you not see how well he hath gouerned his owne realme?’).39 Finally he turned to the future, imagining two alternative scenarios: the possibilities offered by James and the 33 Sharpe, A Sermon, sigs A6r, A6v. Sharpe also wrote a dialogue in praise of the Union: Dialogus inter Angliam & Scotiam (Cambridge, 1603). In A Sermon he goes on to refer to the united kingdoms as ‘Great Britannie’ (sig. B8r). 34  The statute in question is 23 Eliz. c. 2, which forbade speculation about, or astrological calculation or prophecy of, the queen’s death or the succession; see The Statutes of the Realm (1819), iv.I.659–60. For a discussion of illicit sermons on the succession, see Arnold Hunt, ‘The Succession in Sermons, News and Rumour’, in Doran and Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous, 155–72. 35 Sharpe, A Sermon, sigs A7v, A8r. 36  Ibid., sig. A7v. 37  Sharpe was looking back to, among other texts, Robert Persons’s pseudonymous tract of nine years previously: R. Doleman, A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (Antwerp, 1594 [i.e. 1595]), which was answered by John Hayward, An Answere to the First Part of a Certaine Conference concerning Succession (London, 1603). Manningham’s diary contains extensive notes from Hayward’s book; see Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 236–44. On Persons and Hayward, see Chapter  8 in this volume by Paulina Kewes, ‘“The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans”: Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England’. 38 Sharpe, A Sermon, sigs B7v, B8r. 39  Ibid., sig. C3r. On Elizabeth’s nomination of James, see also Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham, 245.

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‘­miseries, from which we are now deliuered’, having been spared the equally ­terrifying potential successions of ‘the title of Suffolke’ and ‘the title of Arbella’.40 The former are presented more as a kind of shopping list, and therefore as indirect advice to the king, than as a record of benefits that are already evident: Sharpe referred to them as ‘what we can with conscience, reason, and humilitie desire’, and trusted that they should ‘neuer be denied to the Commonwealth’.41 Established religion (‘without any toleration’) should continue; Elizabeth’s servants (the officers of the Crown) should be retained; the nobility should receive their former favour, and the gentry in the localities should have access to the new monarch; the ‘godly, learned, painefull, and modest’ clergy should continue to receive respect, while the factious should be restrained and the Jesuits exiled; loyal subjects should be rewarded; the universities should receive support; soldiers should be paid; and the Commons should be ‘kept from the oppression of the mightie’ (and therefore learn obedience to their superiors).42 Sharpe concluded with one piece of counsel directed at Parliament, and one heartfelt prayer, both emphasizing the dangers he perceived at home and abroad. ‘Let vs not with-hold the subsidie’, he pleaded, for the Spanish still threatened by sea and land; and may God protect the king and his children, ‘least through his princely affabilitie in opening himselfe vnto his subiects, some crouching Iesuite, or some Iesuited nouice creepe in to hurt him.’43 If fears had turned to joys, there was nevertheless still a frightening possibility that the ­situation could be reversed. Despite Sharpe’s claim that because he was preaching out of the king’s presence in Cambridge he should be free from the suspicion of flattery, the printing of his sermon by the University Press meant that its loyal sentiments—and those of his dialogue on the Union—could easily reach the king and his advisers.44 Indeed, Sharpe emphasized not only that he had delivered the sermon with the support of the Vice-Chancellor, John Howson, but that he was publishing it with the endorsement of James’s envoy (perhaps implying that he had revised it since delivery).45 The strategy appears to have been successful, since Sharpe was appointed a royal chaplain by 1604.46 Sharpe’s sermon is a revealing instance of a preacher ‘selling’ the new king to an auditory distant and distinct from the court and the king. Unlike many of the sermons preached before James himself in the period immediately following his accession, Sharpe’s does not engage with the details of the king’s political philosophy (even Thomas Bilson’s coronation sermon, for instance, 40 Sharpe, A Sermon, sigs C5v, C6r, C6v. Sharpe warns that either claim prevailing would have led to civil war and most likely to Spanish invasion at a time of weakness (C6v). On James’s own views on his succession, and his actions in publicizing it, see Susan Doran, ‘James VI and the English Succession’, in Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government, 25–42. 41 Sharpe, A Sermon, sigs C3v–C4r. 42  Ibid., sigs C4r–v. 43  Ibid., sig. C7v. 44  On the dialogue, see note 33. 45 Sharpe, A Sermon, sig. A8v. I owe this observation to Paulina Kewes. 46  He attended princes Henry and Charles, and later became chaplain to Henry. Like his earlier service to Essex, this was a patronage relationship that would end in disappointment on Henry’s death in 1612; Sharpe’s subsequent attachment to Buckingham was no more successful. See Paul E. J. Hammer, ‘Sharpe [Sharp], Leonell (bap. 1560, d. 1631)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-25214.

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offered what McCullough describes as ‘a significant caveat to the subjection of peoples to kings’ while responding to James’s published views).47 Other preachers were less enthusiastic than Sharpe about the Union, and a degree of ecclesiastical anxiety is discernible in several sermons preached shortly after the Hampton Court conference of January 1604, which James called to debate the state of the English Church.48 But for all his loyal enthusiasm, Sharpe was prescient in raising the issues of the subsidy and of James’s affability (which would be variously received in the years to follow), and in warning of potential Catholic threats to his person and his family, as the abortive Main and Bye Plots of 1603, and later Gunpowder Plot, would demonstrate.49 His sermon expresses eloquently the sensation of standing on this particular regnal threshold. However much men such as Cecil, Whitgift, and Bancroft attempted to maintain continuity and conformity in the chapel royal, a far wider range of ecclesiastical voices, of varying doctrinal allegiance, were directed at parishioners and at the new king. In 1603 much seemed to be up for grabs as James’s inclinations and nature were assayed (a similar uncertainty obtained, as I shall discuss, at the opening of Charles’s reign). But this was a brief moment, and at Hampton Court many of the questions that had seemed open were answered— to the relief or disappointment of churchmen depending on their ecclesiastical stripe. James, though, was never easily pigeonholed, and much of the jostling for primacy that characterized his arrival in England would recur at moments throughout his reign, be it the aftermath of Catholic plots, the abortive plans for the Spanish match, or the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Far from being a source of relief and an opportunity for unity, his succession generated a discordance that would continue in volume for the next two decades.50 ‘ THE SONNE OF BLESSED ASSURANCE’: THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I Like his predecessor Elizabeth I, James VI and I died in the midst of the Lent court preaching rota, on Sunday, 27 March 1625. His passing was, however, even more 47  See Thomas Bilson, A Sermon preached at Westminster before the King and Queenes Maiesties, at their Coronations (London, 1603); McCullough, Sermons at Court, 104. For a contrasting view of Bilson’s sermon as echoing James’s position, see Sharpe, Image Wars, 54–5. On the sermon, see further Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 41, 149; Whitehead, ‘Performing for the New King’, 103, 105–7; Sybil M. Jack, ‘“A Pattern for a King’s Inauguration”: The Coronation of James I in England’, Parergon 21 (2004), 67–91 at 85–7. 48  See Whitehead, ‘Performing for the New King’, 118–20. On James’s ecclesiastical policies more generally, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169–207; Alan Cromartie, ‘King James and the Hampton Court Conference’, in Houlbrooke (ed.), James VI and I: Ideas, Authority, and Government, 61–80. 49  On James’s first parliament, see Newton, James VI and I and the Government of England, ch. 2; S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642, 10 vols (London: Longman, 1883), I, 163–92; David L. Smith, The Stuart Parliaments 1603–1689 (London: Arnold, 1999), 101–7. 50  For other textual responses to the passing of Elizabeth, see Catherine Loomis, The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

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embedded in sermons: an hour before his death at Theobalds, Daniel Price had preached before the dying king and the Lords of the Privy Council, a sermon later published as A Heartie Prayer, in a needful time of trouble.51 Meanwhile, the news of James’s death arrived at Whitehall at sermon-time. That Sunday, the Bishop of St David’s, William Laud, was preaching at court. He recorded in his diary that ‘I  ascended the pulpit, much troubled, and in a very melancholy moment, the report then spreading that his Majesty King James, of most sacred memory to me, was dead. Being interrupted with the dolours of the Duke of Buckingham, I broke off my sermon in the middle.’52 Charles was proclaimed king at around 5 p.m. on the same day.53 The following Friday Laud noted that he had received letters from William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke and Lord Chamberlain, including the new king’s command that he should preach a sermon to Charles and the Lords at the opening of Parliament—at that point scheduled for 17 May, but in fact to be delayed until 19 June.54 A routine sermon (Laud was preaching on a Sunday in Lent as part of the court practice by which a bishop always occupied this slot) interrupted by the death of one king was succeeded, then, by arrangements for a ceremonial sermon ordered by another. There were other arrangements to be made (in addition to the slew of renewals of office that litter the pages of the State Papers from this time), including in due course the choice of a preacher to deliver the sermon at Charles’s ­coronation. That took place on 2 February 1626, and the man chosen was Richard Senhouse, Bishop of Carlisle.55 Senhouse’s sermon has acquired a certain notoriety from Heylyn’s comment that ‘he had chosen such a Text, as was more proper for a Funeral than a Coronation, his Text being this, viz., I will give thee a Crown of life, Apoc. 2.10. and was rather thought to put the new King in mind of his Death than his duty in Government’; but this, like Charles’s allegedly ominous decision to wear white rather than purple, should be treated with the scepticism due to all such exercises in hindsight: no negative reactions are apparent in the contemporary record.56 Charles’s succession contrasted with that of his father in some obvious ways. Since he had been heir apparent following the death of his elder brother in 1612, there were no rival claimants to the throne and thus no need to justify his lineal 51  Daniel Price, A Heartie Prayer in a Needful Time of Trouble: The Sermon Preached at Theobalds, Before His Majestie and the Lords of the Priuie Councell, an Houre Before the Death of Our Late Soueraigne King James on Sunday, March 27 (London, 1625). 52  James Bliss (ed.), The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D., 7 vols (Oxford: Parker, 1847–60), III, 158 (‘Turbatus et tristissimis temporibus ascendi suggestum, rumoribus tum prævalentibus Regem serenissimum Jacobum, et sacratissimæ mihi memoriæ, mortuum esse. Avocatus doloribus Ducis Buckinghamiæ, sermonem abrupi medio’). 53  Ibid., III, 158 (‘eo die horam circiter quintam, proclamatione Carolus Princeps’). 54  Ibid., III, 159 (‘Die Veneris, accepi literas a Comite Pembrochiae, Camerario Regio, in iis mandatum sereniss. Re. Caroli de concione per me habenda in Comitiis Parlamentariis coram ipso et proceribus regni, Maii 17, proxime futuro’). 55  Richard Senhouse, Fovre Sermons Preached at the Court vpon seuerall occasions (London, 1627), sigs B1r–E1v. The editor, Thomas Blechynden, comments that he expanded the sermons from imperfect copies, and that as a result ‘they are indeed his; but so his, as a man that’s rob’d and wounded, & hath his tongue taken out, is himself ’ (sig. A4v). 56 Heylyn, Cyprianus Anglicus, sigs T4v–V1r.

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inheritance of the Crown. Although born in Scotland, he had lived at the English court since James’s accession. And following the debacle of the Spanish Match, he and Buckingham appeared to lead a war party with substantial popular support. Yet the death of a king necessarily entailed anxiety, and this was only heightened by rumours about James’s last days, uncertainty over Charles’s doctrinal allegiance and likely foreign policy, and the outbreak of plague.57 It is, then, unsurprising that in several sermons preached shortly after Charles’s accession there is a clear concern with the need to shore up (and to define) the ‘foundations’ of the kingdom.58 Among these was the very first sermon preached before Charles as king, delivered by John Donne. As Peter McCullough has pointed out, Donne’s selection was highly significant, and necessitated a last-minute change in the existing preaching schedule.59 It was without question effected at Charles’s personal request: Donne wrote in a letter to Sir Robert Ker of 2 April that ‘This morning I have received a signification from my Lord Chamberlaine [William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke], that his Majesty hath commanded to morrows sermon at S. James’, while after the sermon Samuel Albyn wrote to Sir Simonds D’Ewes that ‘The prince hath manifested the piety of a sonne in a trew sorrow for his dissesed father, keepinge himselfe very privat at St Jamses tyl this last Sunday he went to the Chapple whear he especially commanded dr Donne that day to preach.’60 As chaplain-in-ordinary to James, Donne routinely delivered a court sermon on the first Friday in Lent, and then several more on weekdays throughout April (the months being divided between the various court chaplains). The solemn Lent Sunday sermon was always delivered by a bishop, and 3 April had already been allocated to the Bishop of Durham, Richard Neile; Donne’s office (‘D.[ean] of Paules’) was added in the margin of Pembroke’s list of Lent preachers next to ‘L.[ord] B[isho]p of Durham’.61 Like Charles’s choice of Senhouse to preach at his coronation, his selection of Donne seems to have been intended to signal both continuity and change: the two men had been, respectively, chaplains to Charles as Prince of Wales and to his father as king; neither was associated with the anti-Calvinist group of churchmen increasingly favoured by James during the latter stages of his reign.62 57  In 1623, bishops Andrewes, Laud, and Neile had summoned Charles’s chaplain Matthew Wren to give them an account of the prince’s views on the Church of England; see Stephen Wren, Parentalia or, Memoirs of the Family of the Wrens (London, 1750), 46. On the development of Charles’s ecclesiastical policies, see Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I’, in Kenneth Fincham (ed.), The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 36–59. 58  In addition to the sermons discussed below, see William Fuller, A Sermon Preached Before his Maiestie At Dover Castle, On Tuesday the seauenth of June 1625 (London, 1625), sig. D2r. 59  See Peter E. McCullough, ‘Donne as Preacher at Court: Precarious “Inthronization”’, in David Colclough (ed.), John Donne’s Professional Lives (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003), 179–204 at 188–92. 60  John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (London, 1651), sig. 2S1r; British Library, Harl. MS 385, fol. 4r. I am indebted to Arnold Hunt for the latter reference. 61  The National Archives, LC5/183, fol. 1; see McCullough, ‘Donne as Preacher at Court’, 189, n. 33. 62  See McCullough, ‘Donne as Preacher at Court’, 189–90. Donne also preached over James’s body at Denmark House, before his funeral; see The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953–62), VI, 280–91.

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Not only the time, but the place of the sermon was unfamiliar to Donne. As Albyn’s letter to D’Ewes notes, because the deceased monarch’s household remained intact until his interment, Charles, although proclaimed king, remained in and attended chapel at St James’s, the official residence of the Prince of Wales since James established Prince Henry there in 1604.63 There is a certain amount about this occasion, then, that is out of joint, and perhaps unsurprisingly so; not least for Donne himself, who in his letters to Ker—both that of 2 April, quoted above, and another written on the morning of the sermon itself—sounds understandably nervous.64 How did Donne respond to this last-minute call, and to what aspects of the succession might he have felt driven to respond? For those tasked with representing the old and the new kings to the court and to subjects at large, one challenge was to confront potential contrasts and contradictions between father and son, not least in the arena of foreign policy. Those speaking to the king, and in a royally-sanctioned voice and location, though, also needed carefully to balance the acknowledgement of loss, and of the potential for disquiet in the country, with a celebration of the accession of England’s second Stuart monarch. James himself had been aware in his last days of the danger of rumour, especially concerning his religion, spreading after his death—as they had done following the death of James, second Marquess Hamilton on 22 March.65 Pembroke was instructed to remain at Theobalds to be a witness against any such rumours, and this may also be partly behind James’s repeated calls for Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, to attend him as he was dying (Andrewes was kept away by a simultaneous attack of gout and the stone).66 It is perhaps worth noting that Laud took care in his account of James’s death in his diary to note that the king ‘breathed forth his blessed soul most religiously, and with great constancy of faith and courage’, and that the king’s faith was a major topic in John Williams’s funeral sermon, Great Britains Salomon.67 So when Donne declaimed his text, Psalm 11:3, ‘If the Foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous doe?’, there may well have been many among his hearers who felt that if the foundations were not actually destroyed, they could well be in need of reinforcement. He begins his sermon in sombre tones, immediately confronting the king’s, and the nation’s, loss: ‘Wee are still in the season of Mortification; in Lent:’, he announces; ‘But wee search no longer for Texts of Mortification; The Almightie hand of God hath shed and spred a Text of Mortification ouer all the land. The last Sabboth day, was his Sabboth who entred then into his euerlasting Rest.’68 However, he immediately moves to reassurance: ‘bee this our Sabboth, to 63  James would not be buried until 5 May; see further Chapter 2 in this volume by Alastair Bellany, ‘Writing the King’s Death: The Case of James I’. 64  See Donne, Letters, sig. 2R4r. 65 Gardiner, History of England, V, 312, 314. 66 See Norman Egbert McLure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), II, 608–9. 67  See Bliss (ed.), Works, III, 158 (‘religiosissime et constantissima fide intrepidus emisit animam beatam’); John Williams, Great Britains Salomon (London, 1625). 68  John Donne, ‘The First Sermon Preached to King Charles, At Saint James: 3˚ April. 1625’, in The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, ed. Peter McCullough et al., 16 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013–), III, 3 (ll. 6–9). All further quotations from Donne’s sermon are to this edition, and appear parenthetically in the text by line number.

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enter into a holy and thankfull acknowledgement of that Rest, which God affords vs, in continuing to vs our Foundations; for, If foundations be destroyed, what can the righteous doe?’ (ll. 9–12). The alternative to rest is tumult and division, and it is these that have the potential to destroy foundations, Donne argues. They may come from within: a readiness to believe that foundations have been destroyed, to fall too readily into a state of anxiety and distrust, is identified as a cause of such destruction. In order to avoid this, it is essential carefully and accurately to distinguish between fundamental matters and those which are indifferent—in the latter case, we should follow the advice of 1 Thessalonians 4:11 and ‘studie to bee quiet’ (l. 70). Donne is playing on the literal and figurative senses of ‘fundamental’, as pertaining to the foundation of a building or as forming an essential or indispensable part of a system.69 It is this paronomasia that structures the sermon’s argument, as Donne identifies instances where inessentials are mistaken for fundamentals and goes on to ‘Suruay’ in turn four ‘houses’ and their foundations: the Church (of which the foundation is Christ, in the Scriptures); the state (of which the foundation is the law); the family (of which the foundation is peace); and the self (of which the foundation is conscience) (ll. 307–32). There is a risk, he admits, in the Protestant Churches, which have at times fallen into internecine quarrels (here he is surely glancing at the controversy over Richard Montagu’s books A Gagg for the New Gospell? (1624) and Appello Caesarem (1625), which were accused of promoting Arminian doctrine), but the main threat comes from without, in the shape of the Roman Catholic Church. It is full of faults, he argues. And yet, in the face of those faults, Protestants refrain from condemning the Catholics as heretical: ‘wee are quiet’ (l. 253). By contrast, Catholics are continually multiplying and inventing ‘fundamental’ matters of faith, without which the Christian cannot be saved and by denying which he or she becomes a heretic. And so, ‘In a word, wee charge them with vncharitablenesse . . . that they will so peremptorily exclude vs from Heauen, for matters that doe not appertaine to Foundations’ (ll. 274–7).70 This is the case in three of the four ‘houses’ that Donne has promised to survey: the Church is threatened by denying its members access to or reliance on Scripture; the state is threatened by attempts to make it subject to a foreign power; and the family is threatened by Roman Catholic imputations of heresy or by a total breakdown in order (in the last section, Donne mentions the possibility that Jesuits may argue that a Catholic has no matrimonial duties to a heretical spouse; an observation that could have been somewhat risky in the light of Charles’s impending marriage to Henrietta Maria, celebrated by proxy on 1 May 1625). The foundations of the final house, the self, are threatened by despair. 69 See Oxford English Dictionary, ‘fundamental’, A.1.a and A.3.a. 70  On the polemical use of the rhetoric of charity, or of moderation, see Achsah Guibbory, ‘Donne’s Religion: Montagu, Arminianism and Donne’s Sermons, 1624–1630’, English Literary Renaissance, 31 (2001), 412–39 at 422; Peter Lake, ‘Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner and the Rhetoric of Moderation at the Early Stuart Court’, in Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600–1750 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 167–85.

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Donne thus shifts concern from what might appear to be a fundamental issue (the change in the person of the monarch) to what he contends are true fundamentals: the integrity of the Church and state and sureness of personal faith. By maintaining these through continuing in innocence, praying to God, suffering what ills might come, and rejoicing in blessings, the people will see their ‘houses’ stand firm, and be built up (ll. 515–655). In his peroration Donne shows that from establishing the righteous with a good conscience, the foundation of the self, God will in turn build them up in the family, the state, and the Church. This neat chiasmus, reversing the order in which he had previously treated the four houses, reinforces the argument that Donne has made throughout the sermon, that each of the houses is a microcosm, or contains the others. He thus knits together the various houses he surveys into one, brilliantly performing what he is discussing: the establishment of a kingdom all of whose members are united and in which each part is the whole and vice versa. Finally, he directly invokes James for the first time since the opening of the sermon, and Charles for the first time altogether. Donne repeats Ezekiel’s words ‘Now I haue brought thee vp to a Kingdome’ (ll. 659–60; Ezekiel 16:13) and deliberately modifies them from the Authorized Version translation, which has ‘Thou didst prosper into a kingdom’. Donne’s rephrasing here is striking, and quite deliberate. He uses the word ‘kingdom’ to effect a transition to the first mention since his opening words of the death of the old king and the accession of Charles; he directs the prophet’s words at the new king, while in adopting the first person and thus making them his own he implies that his sermon has brought Charles, and the rest of his auditory at St James’s, to the beginning of a reign and to a vision of the kingdom of heaven. From this point on, the two kingdoms—on earth and in heaven—are analogized, and the foundations of both are found to be secure. The sermon concludes with a series of images of continuity in change which reimagine the loss of James as something more like an extension of Stuart rule, since now he is with the Triumphant Church in heaven and his son with the Militant on earth: to this Lambe of God, who hath taken away the sinnes of the world, and but changed the Sunnes of the world, who hath complicated two wondrous workes in one, To make our Sunne to set at Noone, and to make our Sunne to rise at Noone too, That hath giuen him Glorie, and not taken away our Peace, That hath exalted him to Vpperroomes, and not shaked any Foundations of ours, To this Lambe of God, the glorious Sonne of God, and the most Almightie Father, and the Blessed Spirit of Comfort, three Persons, and one God, bee ascribed by vs, and the whole Church, the Triumphant Church, where the Father of blessed Memorie raignes with God, and the Militant Church, where the Sonne of blessed Assurance raignes for God, All Power, Praise, Might, Maiestie, Glory, and Dominion, now, and for euer.  (ll. 663–74)

Charles’s order for William Laud to preach at the opening of Parliament was finally fulfilled on 19 June 1625 at Whitehall; he did the same at Westminster on 6 February 1626. Both sermons were printed shortly afterwards by the King’s Printers, Norton and Bill.71 Laud was, of course, addressing a rather different ­auditory to 71  [William Laud], A Sermon Preached Before His Majestie, On Sunday the XIX. of June, at White-Hall. Appointed to be Preached at the Opening of the Parliament (London, 1625); [William Laud], A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, At Westminster: at the Opening of the Parliament (London, 1625).

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Donne’s, although some of the same men may have been in attendance, since his hearers included members of the House of Lords (as well as the king). His scriptural texts were both taken from the Psalms, as Donne’s had been, and both of them interestingly led him to hone in on and develop some similar architectural imagery.72 The June 1625 sermon was preached on Psalm 75, verses 2–3: ‘When I shall receiue the Congregation, (or, when I shall take a conuenient time) I will iudge according vnto right. The earth is dissolued, (or, melted) and all the inhabitants thereof; I beare vp the pillars of it.’73 The February 1626 sermon, meanwhile, was on Psalm 122, verses 3, 4, and 5: Ierusalem is builded as a Citie that is at vnitie in it selfe, (or compacted together). For thither the Tribes goe vp, euen the Tribes of the Lord, to the Testimony of Israel, to giue thankes vnto the Name of the Lord. For there are the Seats (or the Thrones) of Iudgement; euen the Thrones of the house of Dauid.74

In both sermons, taking his cue from his texts’ mention of ‘judging’ and ‘judgement’, Laud emphasizes the necessity of justice and judgement, and of judging according to right. These are qualities or obligations that bind God, the king, and the peers (in their capacity as ‘subordinate Magistrates’),75 and facilitate his larger argument for the necessity of ‘vnitie’ (as the February 1626 sermon has it). In contrast to Donne’s elegant formal establishment of stability and unity across the four ‘houses’ he discussed, and relegation of intra-Protestant dispute to the status of a secondary concern, though, Laud is less sanguine about the actual unity of the state. Even when, in June 1625, he asserts that by comparison with the rest of Europe, England has avoided ‘dissolving’ or ‘melting’, he admits that ‘I can give no firme reason [for this], but God and his mercy’.76 And the spectre of faction hovers over both sermons, especially that of 1626. There he takes an example from Britain’s ancient past as a warning for the present: So it seemes Tacitus his obseruation was too true vpon vs, That nothing gaue the Romanes, powerfull enemies though they were, more aduantage against the ancient Brittans then this, Quod factionibus & studijs trahebantur, that they were broke[n] into fractions, & would not so much as take counsell and aduise together. And they smarted for it. But I pray what’s the difference for men not to meete in counsell, and to fall in pieces when they meete? If the first were our Forefathers errour, God of his mercie grant this second be not ours.77

And he goes on to warn, ‘Would you keepe the State in vnitie? In any case take heed of breaking the peace of the Church.’78 Given the none-too-harmonious events of the 1625 Parliament, where Charles’s demands for supply had met with MPs’ determination to press for anti-Catholic measures, and the storm clouds 72  In his second sermon Laud draws attention to the fact that he is redeploying the same imagery of pillars and foundations; see Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, sig. B2r. 73 Laud, A Sermon on Sunday the XIX. of June, sig. B1r. On this sermon see also Sharpe, Image Wars, 184. 74 Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, sig. B1r. The parentheses show the extent to which Laud wished to exploit varieties in translation. 75 Laud, A Sermon on Sunday the XIX. of June, sig. D1r. 76  Ibid., sig. C3r. 77 Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, sigs C2r–v. 78  Ibid., sig. C4v.

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gathering over that of 1626, which would see requests for supply frustrated by movement towards the impeachment of Buckingham, Laud’s concern is perhaps understandable.79 But it adds a certain fragility to his assertion in 1626—echoing Donne almost a year earlier—that God ‘will neuer vndermine his owne house, nor giue his people iust cause to be iealous of a shaking foundation’.80 Similarly, his bald assertion in June 1625 that in the succession of Charles I ‘wee liue to see a miracle, Change without Alteration’, is considerably less effective than Donne’s deliberate figuring of continuity through form and image-sets.81 As I have suggested, one reason for the difference in approach and tone between Laud’s and Donne’s sermons may be that crucial aspect of preaching: location. In the king’s chapel, a week after his father’s death, Donne preached a sermon of ­reassurance and consolation; months later, before Parliament, Laud saw the need to warn against division in Church and state. Both were alive to the dangers of controversy over the theology of grace, but while Donne placed this threat firmly in the arms of Rome, Laud was anxious (and waspish) about ‘foolish, and vnlearned Questions’ being raised by English churchmen.82 Donne’s sermon was, perhaps, intended to act as a speculum principis, holding before the king an image which he should aspire to emulate; Laud’s was directed firmly at those who were about to sit in Parliament, and counsel—but also, he and Charles hoped, aid—the king. Donne invites his auditory to join in the thought processes of his sermon—indeed, its complex imagery requires that they do so—and he assumes that they are all participants, and willing ones, in the maintenance of his various foundations. Laud, by contrast, takes a more detached and magisterial tone towards a group among whom he suspects vandals may lurk; an approach to political discourse not far from that so unsuccessfully adopted by Charles in his own dealings with Parliament. All three sermons were, though, as we have seen, printed soon after their delivery, and thus directed at a larger, secondary audience than their immediate hearers: they took their place alongside other print reactions to the succession on the bookstalls. Donne and Laud, however, possessed particularly significant, and multiple, voices: they spoke both to and on behalf of the monarch; but they were also invested with a further, divine authority. Compelled to look backwards at the dead king’s reign in order to look forward to that of his son, they put both into the far broader perspective of sacred and providential history. Seeking to balance an acknowledgement of novelty with a comforting message of continuity, they also offered alternative models of how to define and reinforce what each believed to be the foundations of Church and state. Like all those who preached at moments of royal succession, they assessed the security of those foundations, and provided sketches of what might be built upon them. Whether those designs would be accepted, however, what shape the new reign would take, and whether it would 79  See Christopher Thompson, ‘Court Politics and Parliamentary Conflict in 1625’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (London: Longman, 1989), 168–92. 80 Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, sig. G4v. 81 Laud, A Sermon on Sunday the XIX. of June, sig. C2v. 82 Laud, A Sermon Preached on Munday, the Sixt of February, sig. D1v.

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stand firm, remained open questions. It is, perhaps, unsurprising that an accession with no obvious precedents, like that of James, should produce such a multiplicity of legitimizing—but also questioning—voices from the pulpits; or that preachers responding to Charles’s more secure inheritance should seize on the notion that there were foundations to be built upon. What these two successions solidified, though, was the sermon’s status as a major part of political discourse in early modern England. Whether printed by royal command or at the behest of their authors, these sermons shared, as I have argued, the fundamental duality of their genre, addressing at once the local and the eternal. They deployed, and contested the interpretation of, common exempla—Solomon, Josiah, Hezekiah, David—and in many ways set the terms within which subsequent succession preaching would operate. While tuning the pulpits may have always been beyond the capacity even of Stuart monarchs, attending to their notes was a crucial aspect of the arts of ­government, as it should be of our own study of the Stuart successions.

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11 ‘Eyes without Light’ University Volumes and the Politics of Succession Henry Power During the seventeenth century, the relationship between monarch and u ­ niversities was, inevitably, a highly political one. Oxford and Cambridge served as battlegrounds in which various political and (especially) religious factions competed for royal patronage. In the middle of the century, they were deeply involved in the actual conflicts which arose.1 Cambridge became a centre for puritan, parliamentarian— and even republican—scholars, while Oxford served for four years as the royalist capital (1642–6)—and as a haven for fellows excluded from Cambridge colleges for their royalist sympathies. Thereafter, the universities continued to provide an arena for the unfolding religious and political struggles; the intrusion of Catholic fellows into senior academic positions during James II’s reign is only an extreme example of the constant tussles over control of the institutions. The traces of these struggles can be seen not only in overtly controversial publications, but also in a series of verse collections which are not obviously political—and which have (perhaps as a consequence) been largely neglected by scholars.2 Between the end of the sixteenth century and the mid-eighteenth century, the universities regularly issued volumes of commemorative verses written by academics, by undergraduates, and by alumni; both institutions produced a volume to mark the succession of every Stuart monarch. The (mostly Latin) poems contained within them are occasionally bad, and more often bland; there are plenty of examples of students (and scholars) going through the motions. But the protocols which surrounded the production of these volumes nonetheless allowed for a certain amount of political 1  There is no space here for more than a very brief sketch of the situation of the universities in relation to the Civil War. A much fuller account is given in Blair Worden, ‘Cromwellian Oxford’, in T. H. Aston et al. (eds), The History of the University of Oxford, 8 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984–), IV, 733–72. Worden developed this chapter in God’s Instruments: Political Conduct in the England of Oliver Cromwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 2 The best account of these volumes (though it focuses exclusively on Cambridge) is Harold Forster, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Cambridge Muses (1603–1763)’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 8 (1982), 141–72. The volumes are also touched upon by J. W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990), 38–40 and 60–1. However, the lack of scholarly attention the volumes have received is exemplified by the fact that they go unmentioned in the relevant volume of the generally comprehensive History of the University of Oxford, 8 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984–2000).

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self-expression; these volumes became, over the course of the seventeenth century, a means by which the universities could establish a relationship with the reigning monarch. I will argue in this essay that among senior academics, and those intimately involved in compiling the anthologies, close attention was paid not only to their content, but to their relationship with previous volumes. In the first half of the essay, I will chart the emergence and the operation of a set of protocols for producing these university volumes. In the second half, I will offer a case study: the moment when Cambridge, which had (as one would expect of a parliamentarian stronghold) published a commemorative volume on Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, was forced to adjust its position after Charles’s ­restoration in 1660. The close dialogue between these two volumes tells us a great deal about the importance which leading figures at the universities attached to them. ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT These books of verses had their origins in the sixteenth-century practice, at both universities, of displaying occasional poems in public places in order to commemorate significant events such as the death of a benefactor or a royal visit. When Elizabeth visited Cambridge in 1564, she was greeted by verses pinned to church walls—and was later presented with a bound volume of ‘all the verses bothe of greeke and laten hebrew Caldee [i.e. Arabic] and Englishe which were made of her commynge and other ways set vp in divers places of the towne’.3 Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford in 1566 was marked in a similar way: As the Queene entered in the Churche, there were diverse schedes [papers] of verses in Greeke, Latine, and Hebrew set upon the dore & walles of the saide Churche; and so there were in like sorte the Wensdaie and Thursdaie following, even a little before the Queenes coming to heare Disputations.4

The existence of such a practice, together with the re-establishment of the university presses in 1584 (Cambridge) and 1585 (Oxford), meant that by the time of Elizabeth’s death in 1603 both institutions were in a position to publish their own tributes. It seems (though there is a lack of positive evidence in most cases) that these volumes were always presented to the incoming monarch. In 1603 a delegation of  Cambridge scholars presented James I with a copy of Threno-thriambeuticon (‘Mourning in Triumph’; the title and contents of this volume will be discussed in due course) while he rested at Hinchingbrooke on his way from Scotland to London—and there are other references to the timely presentation of commemorative volumes. It is impossible to know to what extent the collections were scrutinized by their recipients, since there is almost no external evidence pertaining 3 Elizabeth Goldring et al. (eds), John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), I, 417. 4  Ibid., I, 665.

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to the volumes’ reception. The internal evidence, however—that is, the way in which the volumes are constructed and the way in which they refer back to earlier volumes—suggests that their contents were subjected to intense scrutiny within the institutions, as indeed was the participation and placement of individuals within the anthologies. That said, it should be acknowledged that the university volumes are not concerned exclusively with succession; they deal with every major state event, especially those which correspond to Greek—or pseudo-Greek—poetic forms; there are volumes of propemptika (panegyrics for someone about to undertake a journey), prosphonetika (panegyrics on someone returning from a journey), epithalamia (wedding songs), thriambeutica (triumphal poems), and genethliaca (celebrations of a birth). Even Charles I’s recovery from smallpox in 1632 was enough to prompt an outpouring of Latin verses.5 The succession volumes (which do not particularly fit one of these classical genres) form only a small proportion of these anthologies. Indeed, the earliest university volumes commemorated not the death of a monarch, but that of Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen in 1586. The presence in Cambridge’s 1587 volume of a sonnet by the future James I means it is the only university volume in which a royal poet commemorated the deeds of a commoner.6 Cambridge’s volume on Sidney, we might note, was printed in London—although the university press was up and running by this point. Oxford’s two volumes on Sidney’s death were, however, both published by the university printer, Joseph Barnes. Sidney was not the last non-royal figure to be honoured in this way. In the decades which followed, Oxford occasionally issued volumes marking the death of ­benefactors and prominent figures, such as Sir Christopher Hatton (1592), Sir Henry Unton (1596), Sir Thomas Bodley (1613), Sir Henry Savile (1622), and William Camden (1624). There is a more specific origin for volumes which commemorate the deaths of significant figures; at the funerals of scholars at Oxford and Cambridge, scholars would pin commemorative verses to the black cloth hung up in college chapels.7 The 1603 volumes marking the death of Elizabeth and the succession of James are, however, notably more formal in their organization and presentation than any of the books mentioned above. It is hard to draw a sharp distinction between an ‘official’ university publication and a ‘private’ volume produced from within a community of scholars—but there are some telling differences. The 1603 volumes are, in every case, introduced by the Vice-Chancellor of the university in question. The fiction at least is that he has been responsible for organizing the production of the anthology. The Oxford volume, Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officium, 5  Anthologia in Regis exanthemata: seu Gratulatio Musarum Cantabrigiensium de felicissime conservata Regis Caroli valetudine (Cambridge, 1632). 6  Academiae Cantabrigiensis Lachrymae Tumulo Philippi Sidneii Sacratae (London, 1587), sig. K1r. For a discussion of James’s poem, see Jane Rickard, Authorship and Authority: The Writings of James VI and I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 41–2. 7  The connection is noted by Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics, and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 164n. See further Clare Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1984), 135.

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also ends with a poem from the Vice-Chancellor, in which he begins by addressing the book itself: Grata licet toties des carmina, parve libelle, Quælibet & meritâ pagina laude sonet: Diligeris populo non propter Carmen; Eliza, Propter te populus flebile carmen amat. Little book, although you give us so many delightful poems, and every page resounds with deserved praise, you will not be loved by the people on account of your verse. Eliza, it is on your account that the people love mournful verse.8

The conceit, in which a poet addresses a small book which will shortly act as his proxy, recalls the opening of Ovid’s Tristia: ‘parve—nec invideo—sine me, liber, ibis in urbem’. It gives a clear signal that the university has presided over the assembly and distribution of the volume. The Oxford volume for Sidney, on the other hand, had been presented as a retrospective gathering together of a number of poems written as private expressions of grief. In the volumes marking Elizabeth’s death, by contrast, both universities seem entirely comfortable with the fact that these volumes have been put together specifically for the purpose of display—for extrapolating an institutional position and message out of various private feelings of grief. One feature that marks out what might be called ‘official volumes’ from mere miscellanies produced within a university context is that the official volumes show a clear preoccupation with rank within the university. In what seems like a nod to their origins in the pageantry of royal visits, each volume begins with a series of poems by the university’s leading figures; the volumes are in this respect a verse counterpart to Encaenia (the annual academic ceremony at Oxford, preceded by a strictly hierarchical procession of the great and the good). Inevitably, some placeholders were better equipped to produce the expected verses than others, and it is not uncommon to find a Head of House able only to squeeze out a half-hearted quatrain. Gager’s explanation of his role in the volume for Sidney sheds some light on the official university volumes of the seventeenth century. It became customary for a scholar with a reputation for writing Latin verse to be put in charge of organizing the volume, and eliciting contributions from members of the university. We know, thanks to Harold Forster’s assiduous ­examination of the University of Cambridge audit accounts that these Praeli Correctores (correctors of the press) were paid for their work in organizing and editing the volumes.9 The editor of the 1625 volume, Ralph Winterton of King’s (later to become Regius Professor of Physic) contributes the final poem to the collection, apologizing for the lateness of the verses, and explaining that the printer was ill. 8  Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officiumin Memoriam Honoratissimam Serenissimae et Beatissimae Elisabethae Nuper Angliae, Franciae, & Hiberniae Reginae (Oxford, 1603), 182. 9  Forster, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Cambridge Muses’, 144.

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As the protocols for royal commemorative volumes became more firmly established, private offerings continued to be published. One such volume is the book of verses on the death of Edward King, Justa Eduardo King Naufrago, best known now for containing Milton’s ‘Lycidas’. This volume carries the imprimatur of the printers to the university, Thomas Buck and Roger Daniel. It does not, however, include poems by the great and the good; the various authors whose poems are collected here are part of King’s circle of acquaintances, which explains why so many contributors are from Christ’s College (and why King’s former schoolmaster, Thomas Farnaby, contributed a poem to the collection). The volume for King, though not positioned in the same way as the succession volumes under discussion, may have played an important role in their evolution. Harold Forster suggests that the example of this anthology, which ended with a section of English poems, ‘may have persuaded the editors of Voces Votivae, celebrating the birth of Henry Duke of Gloucester in 1640, to admit a similar final section of ten English poems’.10 For the next four decades, an increasing number of English poems appear in university volumes. These are always placed in a separate section at the back, and are excluded from the formal procession of poems in learned languages at the start of the book. The Cambridge volume of 1603 set the tone for the university succession volumes of the next century by calling itself Threno-thriambeuticon Academiae Cantabrigiensis—a title which stresses the volume’s dual function. The opening poem by the Vice-Chancellor, William Smith, glosses the term: Ut threnos lachrymas, sic læta trophæa thriambos, Anceps hinc nomen Threno-thriambos habet. Principe defunctâ luctus, nascente triumphus. Vtraque cùm fuerint, vtraque mixta placent. This book contains both tearful laments and triumphal hymns as its happy memorials. Hence it takes the double-edged name of Threnothriambos. There is grief at the monarch’s death, triumph at the monarch’s birth. Since both events have taken place, both responses—mixed together—are fitting.11

Smith offers an apology for the hybrid classical form of the anthology, citing in defence the peculiar situation which it commemorates. Later in 1603 the printers to the university published a further volume which consisted largely of English poems, and whose title, Sorrowes Ioy, clearly glosses the earlier, official volume. Sorrowes Ioy—like the Oxford volume for Sidney and the later volume for Edward King—can hardly be counted as an official volume; the contributions are not listed or arranged according to their formal status (although a handful of scholars contributed to both anthologies) and there is no attempt to position the volume as the work of the institution. Nonetheless, it shares with Threno-thriambeuticon

10  Ibid., 141. 11  Threno-thriambeuticon Academiae Cantabrigiensis ob damnum lucrosum, et infoelicitatem foelicissimam, luctuosus triumphus (Cambridge, 1603), n.p.

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an overwhelming interest in the combination of mourning and rejoicing. The contribution of Giles Fletcher (the younger brother of Phineas) is fairly typical: In greatest griefe, came the greatest pleasure: Weepe we would, but ioy gives us no leisure. In griefe we doe sing, in weeping ioy: Our Queene we weepe, and sing VIVE LE ROY.12

In the same year, Oxford published two separate volumes: one mourning Elizabeth’s death and the other rejoicing in James’s accession. In most volumes, though, both universities offered tears and congratulations simultaneously. This tends to be reflected in the titles of the collections: in 1625 Cambridge offered the Cantabrigiensium Dolor et Solamen; 1685 saw the Maestissimae ac laetissimae Academiae Cantabrigiensis Affectus. The volume put out by Cambridge in September 1658 to mark the death of Oliver Cromwell and the succession of Richard to the Protectorship (on which I will have more to say in due course) was similarly framed: Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus & Gratulatio. In 1702, Oxford showed its pietas in remembering William and offered gratulatio at Anne’s accession.13 Even in volumes such as the Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officium of 1603, which purports to address Elizabeth’s demise rather than James’s accession, the emphasis is still on the commingling of sorrow and joy. This double approach provides the structuring principle for most contributions—which typically open with a lament on the deceased monarch before finding consolation in the accession of a new one. It also provides contributors with a limited range of conceits, on which they draw repeatedly. The most prominent of these conceits is the figure of the monarch as Phoenix. In 1625 Roger Bertle, writing in the Cambridge volume on Charles’s succession, spells out the significance of the comparison: Quum vitam Phoenix tradit reparabilis igni, Atq; abit in cineres, nascitur inde novus: Tristia ducuntur Phoenicis funera nostri, Et novus ex eius pulvere natus adest. The repairable Phoenix yields his life to the fire. When he has turned into ashes, then a new one is born. The sad funeral rites of our Phoenix have taken place, and a new one is here, born from his dust.14

The conceit would be familiar to readers of Threno-thriambeuticon, in which the third poem (among many others) focuses on succession as rebirth. The poem is entitled ‘On Thursday, the fatal and deadly day for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, 12 Sorrowes Joy: or, A Lamentation for our Late Deceased Soveraigne Elizabeth, with a Triumph for the Prosperous Succession of our Gratious King James (Cambridge, 1603), 19. 13  Pietas Universitatis Oxoniensis In Obitum Augustissimi Regis Gulielmi III. Et Gratulatio In exoptatissimam Serenissimae Annae Reginae Inaugurationem (Oxford, 1702). 14  Cantabrigiensum Dolor & Solamen: sev Decessio Beatissimi Regis Jacobi Pacifici: et Successio Augustissimi Regis Caroli: Magnae Britanniae, Galliae, & Hiberniae Monarchae (Cambridge, 1625).

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and—most lamentably—our Elizabeth’; the title seems calculated to remind the reader that the current succession is not an unimaginably traumatic event—but one in a series of successions.15 The poem ends with a turn to the figure of the Phoenix: Vulnere sanatur; rediviva morte virescit, Vt reparat lumen luna renata suum. Et, ne deficerent tenebroso lumina mundo, Fulgidus e Borea sol nouus ecce tibi. Sic pater ipse sibi Phoenix longaeuus eisdem Nascitur ex flammis, queis perijisse putes. She is healed by her wound; restored, she flourishes in death, just as the moon—reborn—renews its light. And, lest light should be lacking to the dark world, look! a new sun shining for you from the North. Thus the aged father Phoenix himself is born from his own flames, by which you think he has perished.16

The editors of the recent Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I contextualize this passage (which rounds off Smith’s extensive contribution to the volume) by pointing out that one of Elizabeth’s personal mottoes was ‘Foelicior Phoenice’ and that the phrase was widely used as an emblem to describe James I’s succession.17 It should be stressed, though, that the trope recurs throughout the university volumes. Indeed, there is a grim irony to the way in which this figure of uniqueness is endlessly duplicated and rehashed; in every volume (except those where the notion of the Phoenix is politically unpalatable) countless Phoenixes jostle for position. Partly this is for the simple reason that the Phoenix provides an opportunity to put a triumphalist gloss on an unarguable fact—that dead monarchs are replaced. Even when the process of replacement has been far from straightforward, we still find the Phoenix evoked. Thus in 1660, Edward Foxcroft writes ‘Quod Carolus Carolo, Phoenix Phoenice natus’ (Just as Charles is born from Charles, so a Phoenix is born from a Phoenix).18 Other frequently encountered themes include the suggestion that the night of grief must give way to the sunshine of a new reign—or alternatively that the setting of the sun has not resulted in night. A typical example is Thomas Bayly’s quatrain in Cambridge’s 1625 volume: Quae miseros lamenta manent, quae fata Britannos Sol Solis medio cum cadat ipse die? Sol cecidit, sed quod Solem nox nulla cadentem Excipiat, virtus (Carole Magne) tua est. 15  ‘Eiusdem in diem Iouis Henrici 8. Edwardi 6. Mariæ, et quod dolendum maximè Elisabethæ nostræ fatalem et mortiferum’. 16  Threno-thriambeuticon Academiae Cantabrigiensis, n.p. 17  Goldring et al. (eds), The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, V, 316. See further John Watkins, ‘“Out of Her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise”: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England (London: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 116–36. 18  Academiae Cantabrigiensis Σῶστρα: Sive, Ad Carolum II reducem, de regnis ipsi, musis per ipsum feliciter restitutis gratulatio, sig. H3r.

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What laments and what calamities are in store for the people of Britain, when the Sun itself sets in the middle of the day? The Sun has set, but the reason that no night has followed the setting son, is your virtue (great Charles).19

The poet’s inability to compass his topic is another recurring trope, with many contributors seeking to make a virtue of their brevity. Henry Masterson in 1660 managed only a two-line epigram: ‘Cura levis loquitur; stupet ingens / Vive Deo gratus Carole, Vive pius’ (‘Small matters are talkative; great ones are struck dumb! / Charles, may you live in God’s grace, and piously’).20 Phoenixes, setting suns, and mixed feelings are tropes to be found in much succession literature—and it must be acknowledged that a large proportion of the poems in the university anthologies are highly conventional. Indeed, the tendency to fall back on a relatively small number of familiar tropes is perhaps especially pronounced in a volume of this type, since one of the most immediate resources for a struggling composer of Latin verse were the efforts of his forebears on similar occasions. But a number of contributors offer tributes which reflect on the specific situation of the universities at the moment of succession. Contributors from both Oxford and Cambridge play frequently on the idea of the two universities as the ‘eyes’ of England. Thus, Richard Astley in Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officium: Anglia, quae quondam geminis radiabat ocellis Musarum, miseris Ponte Vadoque, perit. Sunt oculi sine luce vagi; Dea lucis honora Occidit, atque silens occupat vmbra diem. England, which once shone with two eyes of the Muses, perishes with wretched ’bridge and ’ford [Ponte Vadoque is an attempt to pun on the names of the two universities]. Eyes without light are weak; the goddess who brought honour to light has fallen and now a dark shadow blackens the day.21

The poem, like many others, turns the image of the eye—which usually highlights the universities’ status—into one of fragility. This is not mere confected humility; a change of monarch was inevitably a risk for the universities uncertain both as to  how far existing networks of patronage and preferment would survive, and as to the continuing status of the institution. As we shall see, the very different ­situations of Oxford and Cambridge during the 1650s led to some innovative uses of the ‘eye’ conceit. For similar reasons, many contributors also draw attention to the deceased monarch’s role as a supporter of the arts and of learning. The volumes are presented as the work of the Oxford or Cambridge Muses, and the deceased monarch is frequently praised for having fostered the Muses. In these instances—as in for example the anonymous assertion that Elizabeth has brought ‘ancient religion to churches, and peace to the Muses’—the Muses serve as synecdoche for 19  Cantabrigiensum Dolor & Solamen, 5. 20  Academiae Cantabrigiensis Σῶστρα, sig. A2r. 21  Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officium, 91–2. See also Sorrowes Joy, 1: ‘Sent-pleasing flowers of gladnesse that had growne / a twentie two redoubled summers pride, / this eie dropt inundation makes unknown’.

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the university as a whole, and praise for a deceased monarch equates to a request to an incoming one.22 The various protocols of the university volumes become most interesting when they are put under pressure. As a rule, the volumes become more formulaic as the century progresses and the ritual patterns more entrenched. But the comfortable recycling of previous tropes—of grief giving way to joy—has to be put on hold when the event being marked is not a conventional succession but a deposition. Francis Knapp of St John’s College contributed to the Oxford volume of 1689 a poem which seeks to explain away the outpouring of affection that had taken place for James II only four years previously: In dull commanded Strains the Royal Boy We lately greeted with dissembled Joy, In such low notes our rugged Numbers flow’d, At once our Loyalty and Minds we shew’d. But now a nobler Song commends my Choise, Great, unconfin’d, Serene as are our Joys, Of Mighty Nassau I will sing ------------That bravely justifyed our dying Cause, Who guards our Nation, and protects our Laws.23

There is—as might be expected—little sense in the 1685 Oxford volume that the contributors are writing under duress. There is, however, a palpable effort by some of the 1689 contributors, and by the organizers of the volume, to demonstrate the sincerity of the tribute to William and Mary. The third poem in the collection is by John Hough, and anticipates an end to tyranny under William. Hough had been elected President of Magdalen by the fellows in 1687, in direct opposition to James who had attempted to intrude a Roman Catholic, Anthony Farmer, as head of house. The visitation imposed by James later that year ordered Hough to step aside from the role. It was only after the revolution of 1688 that Hough could resume the post of president, and he is listed accordingly in the Oxford volume. The status of the fourth contributor, Henry Aldrich, is similarly significant: James had imposed John Massey (himself a fulsome contributor to the 1685 volume) as Dean of Christ Church. Shortly after his appointment, Massey had converted to Catholicism and appointed a Jesuit as his chaplain.24 He was replaced with Aldrich after the revolution. Aldrich’s poem is forthright in its condemnation of James’s actions, presenting them as part of a long history of Roman Catholic tyranny at Oxford; he calls on the shades of Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley to take comfort from the fact that the citadels of Oxford will from now on be free of bloodshed.25 And those contributors who wrote poems both in 1685 and in 1689 are understandably keen to stress that their true sympathies lie with William. Henry Beeston, 22  ‘Templis prisca redit relligio; quies / Musis’: Oxoniensis Academiae Funebre Officium, 61. 23  Vota Oxoniensia Pro Serenißimis Guilhelmo Rege Et Maria Regina M. Britanniae & Nuncupata (Oxford, 1689), sig. Z1v. 24  For an account of James’s attempts to Catholicize Oxford, see Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 174–6. 25  Vota Oxoniensia, sig. A2v.

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the Warden of New College, compared James II to Apollo in 1685. In 1689 he tells William: ‘nam post Pythona subactum / Verus eris Mundo, non qui se finxit, Apollo’ (‘For having defeated Python, you will be the true Apollo for the World— not he who pretends to be’).26 Two messages can be derived from the 1689 volume. One is that by then, the artificiality of the volumes is sufficiently well-established to provide a hiding place for those who have compromised themselves politically. The other is that a major part of the book’s message lies not in the poems contained within it, but in their authorship and arrangement. CHANGING DIRECTION: THE CAMBRIDGE VO LU M E S O F 1 6 5 8 A N D 1 6 6 0 By the time of Cromwell’s death in 1658, Cambridge (which fell within Cromwell’s parliamentary constituency) had been a parliamentarian stronghold for fifteen years, having been purged of royalist fellows in 1644. Meanwhile, Oxford—besides acting as a haven for many of the Cambridge scholars deprived of their fellowships—had served as Charles I’s capital from 1642. Neither the defeat of the king’s cause nor the fall of the city in 1646 appears to have dampened the fervour of the university’s royalism, despite Parliament’s imposition of a series of ‘visitations’, intended to remodel the university along puritan lines. Indeed, as Blair Worden has put it, ‘Oxford’s royalism was intensified by defeat and by the university’s treatment at its conquerors’ hands’.27 From 1651 Oliver Cromwell served as Chancellor of Oxford, until his son Richard took over in 1657—a calculated foreshadowing of the protectoral succession the following year. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in 1658 Cambridge issued a volume, Luctus & Gratulatio, which mourned Oliver Cromwell’s death and celebrated Richard’s succession as Lord Protector. It is equally unsurprising that there was no Oxford counterpart; indeed, a maypole was set up in Oxford on the announcement of Cromwell’s death, and scholars pelted the city authorities with vegetables during the announcement of Richard’s succession, jeering the elevation of their own Chancellor.28 So the Cambridge scholars were in a unique predicament in 1660, when the shadow of their 1658 volume dampened their outpourings of joy at the Restoration. At first glance these volumes seem—like many of the volumes published earlier in the century—to offer little more than off-the-peg panegyric; and they have consequently attracted little scholarly interest. However, closer attention reveals the extent to which the volumes make a bold statement about the position of the university in relation to the incoming monarch: in 1658 Cambridge 26  Ibid., sig. B2v. 27 Worden, God’s Instruments, 3. 28  Ibid., 147. Although the Oxford muses wisely kept silent in 1658, both Oxford and Cambridge had produced volumes in 1654 to mark the treaty with the Dutch; these are effectively succession volumes, as many contributors take the opportunity to mark the shift to a Protectorate. Indeed, both volumes have punning titles which identify Cromwell as being central to the peace. Cambridge’s offering is called Oliva Pacis, and Oxford goes one better with Elaiophoria, from the Greek ἐλαιοφόρος (‘olive-bearing’).

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sets itself up as having displaced the reprobate Oxford as the nation’s most significant seat of learning; in 1660 the university assumes the position of a penitent runaway slave. And one of the crucial ways in which the university stresses this change of position in 1660 is through occasional references to the 1658 volume (and sometimes to still earlier anthologies). The contributors to Luctus & Gratulatio work hard to present this as a royal succession; Steven N. Zwicker is no doubt correct in saying that their contributions lack the self-consciousness and indeterminacy that characterize Dryden’s ‘Heroic Stanzas’ and Marvell’s ‘A Poem Upon the Death of O.C.’.29 But we do find, in a handful of contributions, precisely that atmosphere of studied perplexity that Zwicker identifies in Dryden. There is an awareness that this is a strange undertaking, and that questions might be asked of those contributing to such a volume. The final poem in the collection—by Samuel Fuller of St John’s—tackles such questions head-on: Don’t ask me why the court in black is clad, The Sun is set, there needs must be a shade: Don’t ask why Englands face a sadness shrowds, The setting Sun o’re-casted us with clouds: Ask not why grief like rhewm falls on our eyes, When Cesar dy’d then Tyber’s tide did rise: Ask not why England weepeth out her daies, No measures fit sad times but Clepsydraes: . . . Ask not why such poor cripple Alms-house verse Attend upon this noble persons herse; As hospitals at funerals we see, So Cambridge here attests his charitie. Well may the eye of England weep, whose bliss Was knit and enterwoven so with his.30

As Edward Holberton remarks, the poet labours to ‘stress conformity with traditional mourning patterns’.31 He does so partly by playing on the similarity between university commemorative verses and funeral processions—reminding readers that these volumes have their origin in the public display of mourning verses. He also canters briskly through the limited number of poetic conceits available to the university elegist: a setting sun, the need to weep, the confinement to certain measures (though there is learned play here on the sense of measure; the reader is expecting to encounter the name of a funereal poetic metre, but instead meets with the Greek word for ‘water clock’, clepsydra). The predictability of the university volumes here strengthens the author’s argument; it is hardly a matter of 29  See Chapter 3 in this volume by Steven N. Zwicker, ‘“He seems a king by long succession born”: The Problem of Cromwellian Accession and Succession’. 30  Musarum Cantabrigiensium Luctus et Gratulatio: Ille in Funere Oliveri Angliae, Scotiae, & Hiberniae Protectoris; Haec de Ricardi Successione Felicissima ad Eundem (Cambridge, 1658), sigs H2v–H3r. 31 Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate, 164.

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controversy that scholars should behave exactly as they usually do. Nonetheless, at the very moment that he brings this argument home Fuller points to the particular nature of Cambridge’s relationship with Cromwell—and to the fact that Oxford has remained silent: ‘Well may the eye of England weep, whose bliss / Was knit and enterwoven so with his’. The figure of the universities as the eyes of England has been self-consciously altered so that Cambridge now serves as the sole eye of the nation (unfortunately anticipating the Restoration trope of interregnum England as a time of Cyclopean wildness). The sense of Oxford having fallen by the wayside occurs frequently within the volume—with contributors at pains to stress that it is Oxford, rather than Cambridge, which has deviated from normal ritual observances. There was no sitting Vice-Chancellor in 1658, so the volume for Cromwell opens with a poem by Anthony Tuckney, then principal of St John’s and Regius Professor of Theology. Tuckney’s poem is entitled θρηνοθριαμβος (again, ‘mourning in triumph’). The Greek glosses the Latin title of Luctus & Gratulatio, and also echoes the title of the volume issued by Cambridge in 1603 for Elizabeth. It is a fairly conventional poem, beginning by painting a picture of a personified Anglia, with unkempt hair, sad eyes, and torn clothes. Anglia addresses the dead Cromwell directly; she regrets that she can no longer place laurels on his brow, and that Cromwell has—in dying—rejected the expected honours of peace. She refers to him as a bountiful father, as the great glory of the English, and as the people’s bulwark. Then the poet steps forward to console Anglia: Ecce! novus Cromvellus adest è funere patris Phœnix de Phœnice novo reparabilis ævo. Hic tua bella geret, pacem legés fovebit. Ille reformatæ fidei tutela perennis Regnabit, sacris præstabit & otia Musis. Lo, a new Cromwell is come from his father’s funeral, a phoenix recovered from a phoenix in a new age. He will fight your battles; he will foster peace and laws; he will reign as a lasting protection for a reformed faith, and will offer leisure both for religion and for the muses.32

Again, what is most significant about the poem is its similarity to other contributions to university volumes. As we have seen, the comparison between the monarch and a phoenix is frequently encountered in succession volumes (and in succession literature more broadly); Tuckney’s use of the image normalizes both Richard’s succession and (more significantly) the university’s decision to celebrate it. This tendency continues throughout the volume. The image of the Phoenix appears on six further occasions; one English poem is fairly representative in saying that ‘Though Englands Phoenix’s dead, yet we look on / The Father’s resurrection in the Son’.33 32  Luctus & Gratulatio, sig. *1v. 33  Ibid., sig. H2r (B. Turner). Further phoenixes appear at sigs D1v (G. Horne), D4v (G. Perse), E2v (Turner junior), F1v (Charles Darby), F4v (T. Haymes), and G2v (J. Cutlove).

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Throughout the volume, there is a strong tendency for contributors to resort to well-worn tropes, familiar from earlier commemorative volumes. The setting and rising of suns is another theme, familiar from the 1603 and 1625 collections, which recurs here: ‘Meethinks I see a Rising Sun display / His golden beams and chase those clouds away. / It is Illustrious Richard . . . ’.34 There is, in some poems, an emphasis on the Cromwells’ role as champions of Protestantism—and a strong vein of antiCatholicism. Tuckney’s remark that Richard will preside over and defend a ‘reformed faith’ is one example. But this, again, is not an innovation; the 1603 Cambridge volume dwelt, as we have seen, on the animosity between Elizabeth and the Pope. Such parallels can be seen as part of a republican identification with Elizabeth, as opposed to her Stuart successors.35 It also represents a determined backwards glance at the 1603 volume—a template for the later succession anthologies. There are no signs of dissent, though one or two contributions are more guarded than they might be. James Duport, who would play a crucial role in the ­conciliatory volume of 1660, contributed a long, notably Lucanic poem in which the horrors of civil war are described, but which ends with an image of a dove settling on an olive branch (thus revisiting the title of the 1654 volume). Duport’s poem opens by borrowing directly from Lucan’s Bellum Civile, and the rest of the poem continues in the same vein: Cui non displicuit belli civilis Enyo Iusque datum sceleri?36 Who does not abhor the strife of civil conflict, and of legality conferred on crime? bella per Emathios plus quam civilia campos, iusque datum sceleri canimus I sing of war that is worse than civil, fought on the plains of Emathia, and of legality conferred on crime. (Lucan 1.1–2)

Given the tendency for other contributors to cast Oliver as a second Caesar (as in the Samuel Fuller poem quoted above), to depict him as the peaceful victor following a Lucanic civil war is a highly ambiguous form of praise.37 This is unsurprising, given Duport’s well-known royalist leanings, though it does bring into question the tendency to regard Lucan as a merely republican totem during the period.38 34  Ibid., sig. H2r (B. Turner). 35  For a direct comparison between Cromwell and Elizabeth, see Robert Mathew’s contribution to the Oxford volume of 1654, which speaks of ‘CROMWELL, the Worlds great wonder, / Whose Acts outstare and high Atchievements cramp / Rochell and Agen-court and Tilbury Camp. (Where the brave Queene with many valiant men / Drew out her sword and put it up agen).’ Musarum Oxoniensium Ελαιοφορία, sive Ob Faedera Auspiciis Serenissimi Oliveri Reipub. Ang. Scot & Hiber. Domini Protectoris (Oxford, 1654), 66. See further John Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 97–107. 36  Luctus & Gratulatio, sig. A3v. 37  On the identification of Cromwell with Caesar throughout this volume, see Estelle Haan, Sporting with the Classics: The Latin Poetry of William Dillingham (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2010), 104–6. 38  This view is exemplified by David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 23–62.

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More commonly, contributors attempt to assimilate Cromwell into an existing tradition—and to absolve him from any charge of tyranny. The poem that is most partisan in its praise of Cromwell is by Benjamin Whichcote, the Provost of Kings. This poem begins with an attack on Roman Catholicism—and specifically with a contrast between the love of Christ and the cruelty of the Pope—before proceeding towards a comparison between the different ends which await tyrants and good leaders: Sobrius ausculta veterum quid pagina narrat. Fata trahunt homines cruciatibus ingeniosos. Decumbunt tremuli non sicca morte Tyranni. Arte sua pereant semper (justissima Lex est) Artifices nequam, quos inclementia pulsat. At Pater hic patriae non est tormentis minatus Annosusque expirat, & alta in pace quiescit. Now listen temperately to what the chronicle of the ancients tells us: the Fates will bring down men who are skilled at applying torture. Tyrants fall trembling—and die a bloody death. Experts in evil—those who are driven by cruelty—always die by their own art. (The Law is most just.) But this man, the father of his country, was not threatened by torments, died at a good age, and now rests in deep peace.39

This poem requires some massaging of the facts, because Cromwell was not especially old when he died—and nor was his death (probably from septicaemia) especially pleasant. It is atypical of the volume (whose contributors generally take refuge in convention) in forcing a direct comparison between Charles and Cromwell. Nonetheless, it is striking that views as different as Whichcote’s and Duport’s could both find expression within the opening pages (both were senior figures in the Cambridge establishment) of the same commemorative volume. Both men also contributed to the Cambridge volume of 1660 (although Whichcote would be ejected from his fellowship shortly afterwards), and I will look at those contributions shortly. A number of verses assert Cambridge’s particular relationship with Cromwell. Fuller’s English poem, quoted above, offers an image of Cambridge’s destiny as being ‘enterwoven’ with Cromwell’s. Fuller’s tone is defensive, anticipating the possible objections to the Lord Protector being given the honours normally due to a monarch—and explaining that this is inevitable given Cambridge’s identification with the parliamentarian cause. Other contributors are more defiant. One poem, whose author is identified only as S.S. of Jesus College, presents Cambridge— Cromwell’s alma mater—as having saved Oxford by supplying its ultimate saviour: Oxonium infantem jactat novisse sororem, At nos bis pueros novimus esse sense. Oxonio linguam, & senio sibi lumen ademptum 39  Luctus & Gratulatio, sig. *2v.

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The poem is labelled as a congratulatory hymn to Richard, but it becomes increasingly clear that the poet is speaking to Oliver. He is the Cambridge alumnus. He has attempted to reform Oxford (although Richard was by now installed as Chancellor there). He, and not Richard, has subdued Ireland—or, as the poet puts it, ‘made the Irish harp resonate with his warlike plectrum’ (‘Et percussa Chelys bellaci Hibernica plectro / Contremit’). But the poet’s real emphasis is on the fact that Cambridge is speaking at this crucial moment. Oxford boasts, we are told at the start, that it has an infant sister—literally, a sister who has not acquired the gift of speech. But in fact it is Oxford whose tongue is palsied by age, while Cambridge plays a central role in the affairs of the nation. S.S. makes the Cambridge motto, Hinc Lucem et Pocula Sacra (‘Hence Light and Sacred Draughts’) central to his poem—and highlights Pocula Sacra so that the reference cannot be missed. He is one of several contributors to do so. Another (anonymous) poem suggests that benign Cromwellian rule will survive for as long as Cambridge continues to exist: ‘Dum Lucem Grantana dabit, dum Pocula Mater, / Dum pergit solitas reddere Camus aquas’ (‘as long as the Grantan mother gives Light and Draughts, / as long as the Cam continues to provide its accustomed waters?’). Again, a direct connection is drawn between the operation of the Cambridge muses and the flourishing of the protectorate. And again, this contributor associates the muses with the terms of the Cambridge motto—one of several in the volume to do so. Less than two years later Cambridge was called upon to celebrate the return of Charles II. The volume Cambridge produced on that occasion was inevitably overshadowed by the 1658 volume. In one copy of the 1658 volume, now in the British Library, a contemporary reader has added next to the name of every senior contributor the name of the evicted professor or head of house who had made way

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for them in 1644. The Cambridge volume was hurried out after the Restoration, so that these intruded fellows (rather than the returning evictees) were obliged to contribute to the volume. Indeed, for many of them it was one of their final acts of public life, before they were relieved of their responsibilities. The volume is entitled Academiae Cantabrigiensis Σῶστρα. The word σῶστρα means thank-offerings for deliverance from danger—but also carries connotations of atonement; it is sometimes used in Greek as the word for the payment made for the return of a runaway slave. So the title fits into the general pattern of celebrations of the king’s return— but it also suggests penitence, in a way which might cause the reader to reflect on Cambridge’s particular situation at the moment of Restoration. The Cambridge volume, both in its title and in its contents, is a perfect encapsulation of how (in Kevin Sharpe’s words) ‘new images jostle with the traditional in lauding and ­validating kingship’ in the panegyrics of 1660.40 The opening poem, by the Vice-Chancellor, William Dillingham, rather nervously asks Charles to accept the verses with a changed countenance—with that face, he says, with which you once looked upon us. And the underlying conceit behind the title is reinforced by the language in which Dillingham describes the renewed relationship between monarch and muses. The muse, we are told, can sing again—like a nightingale that has been snatched from the clutches of a hawk—or from the talons of Harpies: dulcis erepta accipitri Philomela triumphat gratum soteri et fundit ab ore melos. Harpyiarum ungues cum nos iamiamque tenerent, Caesar ades vindex; hinc tibi Σῶστρα damus The sweet nightingale exults, snatched from a hawk, and as a tribute to her saviour pours out songs from her mouth. When, just now, the claws of Harpies were gripping us, you came as a rescuer, Caesar; thus, we present you these thank-offerings.

These, then, are poems in thanksgiving for deliverance from a predator. Dillingham is presumably hoping to erase or excuse the closing lines of his 1658 contribution, in which he urges Richard to favour and to nurture the muses, so there will be someone who can sing of his future deeds.41 Among many senior contributors there seems to be a compulsion, whether conscious or not, to revisit the theme of their earlier poem. So, for example, Benjamin Whichcote, who had drawn a comparison between Charles I’s execution and Cromwell’s peaceful death in his own bed, contributes a short poem which appears to be going through the motions (it is structured around the conceit that 40  Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 49. The conceit of the panegyrist as penitent is not confined to the Cambridge volume, though it is especially prominent there; the most striking instance is in Astraea Redux, ll. 254–5, where Dryden pictures the white cliffs of Dover approaching Charles: ‘The Land returns, and in the white it wears / The marks of Penitence and Sorrow bears’. 41 For a wonderful analysis of Dillingham’s Latin poetry, including his contributions to the Cambridge volumes of 1658 and 1660, see Haan, Sporting with the Classics, 102–11.

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Charles II was born in May/Maius and that Mercury/Maius is now returning him to England) but whose first words seem to refer rather brusquely back to the earlier poem, in which he has drawn a precise connection between moral worth and longevity: ‘Carole vive diu’ (‘Charles, live for a long time’). There is no doubt that Antony Tuckney, who introduced the 1658 collection, in 1660 refers consciously and conspicuously to his earlier poem. Tuckney’s 1658 poem shows Anglia with unkempt hair, sad eyes, and torn clothes. His 1660 poem shows a happy Britannia pulling off her dark clothes, and disentangling her hair. This kind of self-reference must be based on the expectation that readers are likely to make comparisons; one gets a consistent sense of cautious dialogue between the two volumes. From this point of view, perhaps the most interesting set of contributions is that of James Duport. Duport had been from 1639 the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, but was deprived of the position in 1650, apparently for refusing to take the engagement oath (that is, the expression of loyalty to ‘the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without a king, or House of Lords’, which all holders of public posts were expected to take from October 1649). Duport was allowed to continue as a fellow of Trinity, and even to take the position of Vice-Master in 1655, but there is no doubting his royalist credentials. In April 1660, he preached a sermon in St Paul’s heralding Charles II’s imminent return and celebrating the re-establishment of the national Church. And, as we have seen, his poem in the 1658 volume was alone in resisting the application of standard ­commemorative formulae to Cromwell’s death; though his poem ends in praise of the Protector, it is studiedly non-committal—and (viewed in a certain light) even quietly subversive. It thus remains something of a puzzle that Duport contributed to Luctus & Gratulatio at all. He had at least one poem in every volume produced between 1625 when he contributed, as an undergraduate, to a volume on the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria and 1677 when, as master of Magdalene College, he contributed to one on the marriage of William and Mary. The best explanation, then, for his participation in the volume for the Cromwells is that he was committed to the ritual—or the processional—dimension of the volumes. In 1660 he was given responsibility for closing the volume, and contributes several poems. Although we do not have a record of the Praeli Corrector for 1660, it seems likely that it was Duport. His first poem is dedicated to the memory of Charles I, and reminds the reader of Duport’s long association with university volumes, by quoting the final couplet of his poem on the marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria: CAROLE MAGNE vige: tu nunc eris alter ab illo, GALLIA quem CAROLI decoravit nomine MAGNI. Ex tripode haec olim puero mihi fudit Apollo, Cum cecini thalamus, Carole Magne, tuos, Infans Musa licet, tamen est praesaga future; Crede mihi, vates enthea turba sumus. Great Charles, may you flourish. From now on you will be second only to the man, whom France has marked out with the name of Charlemagne.

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Apollo once poured these [lines] out from the tripod for me while I was a boy, while I was singing of your marriage, Great Charles. Granted, it was a childish muse, but it foretold the future. Believe me, we poets are an inspired crowd.

A marginal note lets the reader know that Duport is quoting from an earlier ­commemorative volume.42 Our response is perhaps not to marvel at Duport’s gift of prophecy. Even after twenty-five years, this seems like conventional fare. But it is hard not to be struck—as he intends us to be—by his constancy. And it is also striking that Duport works so hard to set the volumes in dialogue. The Σῶστρα is a volume whose meaning must inevitably be coloured by its immediate predecessor, but he asks us to see it as part of a much larger tradition. Duport also contributes to the 1660 version a pointedly Virgilian account of Charles II’s heroic escape after Worcester—pointed, because the shift from a Lucanic to a Virgilian model marks a transition from a time of internal bloodletting to an age of peace and triumph; this new Virgilian mode is entirely in keeping with the turn to Virgil which marked Charles II’s restoration, and which is best exemplified by the Virgilian title and tone of Dryden’s Astraea Redux and by the Virgilian theme of the coronation pageant devised by John Ogilby.43 The most interesting poem in the volume, though, is Duport’s final poem, in which he reasserts the fact that Cambridge is presenting Σῶστρα—these offerings that indicate both gratitude and repentance—and stresses the troubles that have afflicted the university. The poem is headed with an anagram: CAROLUS STUART AT TU ROS CLARUS Ante tuum reditum, Princeps, heu! quanta malorum Ilias, & nubes, & nox horrenda Britannis Incubuit, Clero imprimis, Gentiquae togatæ! AT TU ROS CLARUS nocturnas discutis umbras, Mane novo cum Sole micans, pulsisque tenebris Languentem recreas geniali sider terram: SOL, an ROS? an uterque? Hinc lucem, & pocula sacra, Et Musas, vitamque; tibi, ter Maxime Regum, Acceptam Alma refert Mater, suaque; omnia debet, Teque; suum agnoscit Grantana Academia Phœbum. Hinc tibi Σῶστρα damus, qui pro te Σῶστρα vovemus, Quod Tu, Rex, nobis, tibi quod Deus ipse salutem Reddiderit, Pylios idem Te servet in annos.

42  The volume in question is Epithalamium Illustriss. & Feliciss. Principum Caroli Regis, et H. Mariae Reginae Magnae Britanniae, &c a Musis Cantabrigiensibus Decantatum (Cambridge, 1625). 43  On Ogilby’s pageant, see Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 154–5, as well as Chapter 13 in this volume by Ian Archer, ‘Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions’. For the less conventional (and more politically diverse) uses to which Virgil was put during the interregnum, see Henry Power, ‘The Aeneid in the Age of Milton’, in Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam (eds), A Companion to Virgil’s Aeneid and its Tradition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 186–202.

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Alas, Princeps—before your return, what a great Iliad of troubles and clouds and terrible night hung over the Britons— above all over the clergy and over scholars. BUT YOU CLEAR DEW, with night’s shadows shaken off, sparkling with the sun in the new morning, refresh the tired earth with your life-giving star. SUN, or DEW? Or both? Hence we have light and sacred draughts, and the muses—and the Alma Mater ascribes life to you, thrice great King—and owes everything to you. Hence we give you these thank-offerings, we who dedicate these thank-offerings to you. Because God himself has returned you, King, to us, and safety to you. May the same God keep you in Pylian years [i.e. may you live for as long as Nestor of Pylos, who fought in the Trojan war at the age of 110].44

Duport’s anagram of Carolus Stuart to At Tu Ros Clarus allows him to speak of the King as refreshing the barren earth in the new morning of the Restoration. But Duport’s subsequent quandary over whether to characterize Charles as Sol or Ros (the sun, or the dew) allows him to return to the university motto which, as we have seen, was extensively used by contributors to the 1658 volume. Duport’s final poem ties the volume together, as is always the function of the closing poem in university volumes. Besides this, it reclaims a major strand of imagery from the 1658 volume—and having reclaimed the university’s motto and crest, places it emphatically at the bottom of the page. What Duport’s contributions underline is that among the relatively circumscribed group who felt obliged to speak for the university on these occasions, close attention was paid both to the relationship between poems within a volume, and, perhaps more significantly, to the contents of previous volumes. External evidence for the reception of these volumes is thin on the ground. Though we know that a copy of the Σῶστρα was presented to Charles II, it is impossible to determine the extent to which it would have been scrutinized at court.45 But the internal evidence, as displayed in Cambridge’s 1660 volume, is convincing; these anthologies were scrutinized closely by those who compiled succeeding volumes. And for all the bland and turgid verse produced to pad out the commemorative volumes, these scholarly exercises were—for those well-versed in their quirks and codes— capable of communicating a significant political message.

44  Luctus & Gratulatio, sig. N1v. 45  I cannot resist mentioning at this point that Charles himself would have struggled to read these poems. When he and Abraham Cowley consulted the Sortes Virgilianae (or Virgilian Lots) in Oxford in 1643, Cowley had to translate the selected passage (Dido’s curse from Aeneid IV—one of the best known passages of Latin poetry) for the prince, who ‘understood not Latin well’. The story is recorded by John Aubrey in his Remaines of Judaisme and Gentilisme; see Aubrey, Brief Lives, with an Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers, ed. Kate Bennett, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), II, 1292.

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12 Stuart Coronations in SeventeenthCentury Scotland History, Appropriation, and the Shaping of Cultural Identity Jane Rickard After the succession of the Scottish King James VI to the English throne, only two further coronations would ever take place in Scotland. Charles I returned to the land of his birth eight years after succeeding his father for an elaborate royal entry and coronation. Charles’s son would also have two coronations but in reverse order: Charles II was crowned by the Scots nine years before the English set him on the throne. These Scottish coronations were in different ways controversial events and their political significance extended beyond Scotland and beyond the coronation years. These events have, however, been sidelined by a wider historiographical tendency to pay little attention to the Scottish dimension of seventeenth-century ‘British’ history. In the 1990s and early 2000s a number of historians began to recognize and redress this longstanding neglect. Clare Jackson remarked in 2003 that such reappraisal is ‘all the more urgently required as it has become increasingly acknowledged that anglocentric histories of historical events and ideological traditions can no longer remain as an unreflective synecdoche for “British history” ’.1 Jackson and others have provided new accounts of ‘historical events’ and ‘­ideological traditions’ in seventeenth-century Scotland, including those of and informing the two coronations. A corresponding movement within literary studies has seen scholars begin to take an interest in anglophone literature and in how England and Scotland interacted with each other as well as with Ireland and Wales in this

I am grateful to the other participants in the ‘Stuart Successions’ symposium for questions and suggestions which have informed the development of this essay and to Roger Mason for reading a draft. 1  Clare Jackson, Restoration Scotland, 1660–1690: Royalist Politics, Religion and Ideas (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 4. Roger Mason emphasizes that even in the sixteenth century the English treated English history as British history: ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 161–86 at 186.

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­period.2 Nevertheless, the extensive succession literature through which the two Scottish coronations were enacted and recorded remains underexamined. Kevin Sharpe’s recent work has drawn attention to this literature as part of a diachronic narrative about monarchs and regimes. This approach has yielded vital insights into how successive rulers performed their power and how that power was contested.3 What it does not foreground is the interconnections, and the temporal and geographical movements, of the succession texts themselves. Bringing together literary and historical approaches, and Scottish and English materials, the present chapter explores those interconnections and textual histories. It considers how Scottish succession literature both selectively rewrites history and becomes part of other histories, and both continues and engenders intertextual and cross-cultural dialogue. Complicating the notion of a ‘usable past’, the discussion highlights how the ‘past’ can be employed in different ways by different interest groups and does not always wait to be used but sometimes spills disruptively into the present or simply refuses to be erased.4 The first part of the chapter explores how panegyrists in 1633 sought to accommodate the visiting king within longstanding narratives of Scotland’s independence and uniqueness while also ­engaging with English cultural models. The second part examines the attempt of the 1651 coronation ceremony to mark a decisive break with the recent past. The fraught circumstances and deliberately austere nature of the ceremony meant that it was not accompanied by the usual panegyric and civic display. But the official account published in Scotland and an English relation highlight just how contested and contestable the meaning of this extraordinary event was. The final part considers how the official account of the 1651 coronation resurfaced amidst the celebrations of 1660 and met hostile response as writers on both sides of the border sought to reconcile the past—or at least specific versions of the past—with the present. The chapter demonstrates the importance of Scottish succession literature in shaping perceptions of the monarchy, of Scotland as an ancient and independent kingdom, and of Scotland’s past and present relationship with England. It shows that both Charles I and Charles II were at times positioned uncomfortably between their Scots ancestry and their experience in England. Charles I, like his father, may  have seemed Scottish to those south of the border, and Charles II would exploit Scottish allegiances in an attempt to secure the Crown, but to many of the Scots themselves both men were troublingly foreign. The coronations provided an opportunity for the Scots to confront such concerns. The chapter argues, then, that succession literature both illuminates and plays a dynamic, unpredictable role in shaping Scottish cultural identity and Anglo-Scottish relations in the period. 2  The key work here is John Kerrigan, Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 3 See Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 4  I take the phrase ‘usable past’ from Roger Mason’s discussion of how national identity was defined in Renaissance Scotland: ‘Chivalry and Citizenship: Aspects of National Identity in Renaissance Scotland’, in Mason and Norman McDougall (eds), People and Power in Scotland: Essays in Honour of T.C. Smout (Edinburgh: Donald, 1992), 49–73 at 51. Mason is here building on Anthony D. Smith’s sociological study The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).

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‘ O U R N AT I V E K I N G ’ : T H E S C OT T I S H C O RO N AT I O N O F C H A R L E S I , 1 6 3 3 Charles I’s much delayed return to Scotland for a royal entry and coronation eventually took place in 1633. The king was seeking to extend the union of the two kingdoms and, more specifically, to bring the Scottish Church closer to the English one. The coronation ceremony gave him an opportunity to introduce change in accordance with these goals, especially because, with no adult reigning monarch having been crowned in Scotland since 1390, there was no stable Scottish tradition to follow.5 Charles requested information concerning the coronations of his Scottish predecessors and then departed provocatively from many of those native precedents. He decided that his coronation should take place in the Holyrood kirk, not at Scone, the ancient coronation site of Scottish kings.6 According to royal orders, the ceremony was conducted with Anglican rites, with richly clad bishops and prominence given to the act of kneeling.7 These rites shocked the Scots and, according to contemporary accounts, bred fears of popery. Perhaps for this reason, no official account of the ceremony was printed in Scotland.8 Charles also seems to have bred resentment among the Scots by returning to the palace and dining privately after his coronation rather than participating in the public celebrations that had been planned, as well as by heavy-handedly forcing a number of policies through Parliament during his month-long stay.9 For Maurice Lee, the overriding problem was cultural: Charles, he suggests, gave a general sense of being a stranger to the Scots, anglicized and distant.10 5  Dougal Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place in Britain’s Coronation Tradition’, The Court Historian, 9 (2004), 41–60 at 47–8. 6  This decision does not, however, mark a departure from recent Scottish precedents: Queen Anne had been crowned at Holyrood. Dougal Shaw contends that the real choice for Charles was not between Holyrood and Scone but between Holyrood and St Giles’ Church: see Dougal Shaw, ‘St. Giles’ Church and Charles I’s Coronation Visit to Scotland’, Historical Research, 77 (2004), 481–502. 7  Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place’, 51, 45, 54–5. Shaw suggests that, while the structure of the coronation was largely based on English practice, Charles was trying out new ideas which would have been more difficult to implement first at Westminster Abbey ‘where the ceremony was constrained by the enormous weight of tradition’ (59). 8  Our main source of information about the ceremony is the manuscript account of a contemporary chronicler: see John Spalding, Memorialls of the Trubles in Scotland and in England, A.D. 1624–A.D. 1645, ed. John Stuart, 2 vols (Aberdeen: William Bennett, 1850–1), I, 36–7. Spalding writes that the ceremony ‘bred gryt feir of inbringing of poperie’ (36). There are a number of surviving manuscript accounts: see Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place’, 54–5. 9  For further detail see Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 778–83. 10  Maurice Lee Jr, The Road to Revolution: Scotland under Charles I, 1625–37 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 136. See also David Stevenson who suggests that the distance from his subjects that Charles insisted on maintaining was excessive even by English standards: Union, Revolution and Religion in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), 135–6. Siobhan Keenan counters that throughout his progress to and time in Scotland Charles was willing to interact with his people but only to promote, not to discuss, his policies, leaving him open to the charge of being distanced and unresponsive, in ‘The “Great” Progress of 1633: Charles as “Accessible” Monarch?’, part of a forthcoming study of ‘The Progresses, Processions and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–42’. I am grateful for the opportunity to read this work before publication. David Cressy also re-evaluates the king’s accessibility in Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), but

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To understand the visit and its associated literature solely in terms of a conflict between Scottish and English expectations would be a simplification. William Drummond of Hawthornden epitomizes a willingness, at least among the Scottish cultural elite, to engage with forms and traditions that had developed in England. Yet Charles’s approach to the visit exacerbated the problem faced by his hosts and supporters in Scotland of how to position him—and the Stuart dynasty—as Scottish. As we shall see, Drummond carefully presents Scottish concerns within a transnational cultural framework, but in other panegyric of the time anxiety about Charles’s identity is made more explicit and left less fully resolved. Drummond prepared the pageantry and speeches for Charles’s entry into Edinburgh. This event shared some allegorical features with earlier Scottish royal entries, particularly the two immediately preceding ones (Queen Anne’s in 1590 and James VI’s in 1579).11 These echoes helped to establish a cultural continuity that reflected the present king’s Scottish parentage and birth. But, with the use of triumphal arches, in the detail of some of the pageantry, and in being memorialized in an official printed text, the entry also harked back to English royal entries, most immediately that of James into London in 1604. Details of that event had been disseminated in Scotland: the official account, penned by Thomas Dekker, was printed in Edinburgh in 1604 and read by Drummond two years later.12 Drummond had other opportunities to investigate English pageantry models and their relationship to Scottish traditions too: he had visited London in 1606 and 1610; he had been involved in the entertainments provided for James’s 1617 visit to Scotland; and he was personally acquainted with Ben Jonson, hosting him in 1618–19. Jonson was, of course, one of the creators of the 1604 entry. His account of his part of that event was published in 1604, and included in his Workes of 1616, a book owned by Drummond.13 Jonson also contributed to the planned entry into London for Charles of 1626 (which did not take place) and provided an entertainment for Charles at Welbeck on his way north in 1633.14 For Drummond, the Edinburgh entry may have been less an opportunity to assert a distinctive his account of the 1633 progress concentrates on events in English cities along the way not on what happened in Scotland (167–8). 11  An astrological pageant representing the configuration of the planets at the time of the monarch’s birth, for example, appeared in 1579, 1590, and 1633. For a description of the two earlier entries see Michael Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual During the Personal Reign of James VI’, in Julian Goodare and Lynch (eds), The Reign of James VI (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), 71–92. 12  Thomas Dekker, The Magnificent Entertainment (Edinburgh: Thomas Finlason, 1604). Drummond lists ‘Dekkars part of the kings entreance into London’ under his reading in 1606: Robert H. Macdonald (ed.), The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), 228. Lynch notes that no royal entry in Scotland before 1633 has an official printed text (‘Court Ceremony and Ritual’, 77). 13  See Macdonald (ed.), Library of Drummond. 14  On Jonson’s work in 1626, see James Knowles, ‘Royal Entry (1625–6; Lost)’, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), V, 717–21. For the entertainment at Welbeck, see VI, 659–80 and for Drummond’s record of his conversations with Jonson in 1618–19, see V, 351–91. On the preparations that were made for the abortive Caroline entry into London and hypotheses as to the likely content, see Martin Wiggins, Drama and the Transfer of Power in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 4.

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Scottish identity than a means of participating in a transnational literary culture and classical heritage. Or, rather, those two concerns may not have been incompatible, as we can see by looking at Drummond’s account of the entry more closely. In places the parallel with Jonson’s account of his contributions to the 1604 London entry are surprisingly close. Here is Jonson describing one of the a­ llegorical figures at the first arch: THEOSOPHIA, or Diuine wisedome, al in white, a blew mantle seeded with Stars, a crowne of Stars on hir head . . . Her word, PER ME REGES REGNANT. Intimating, how by her, all Kings do gouerne, and that she is the foundation and strength of kingdomes . . .15

Drummond would place a similar figure at the first of the arches designed for Charles some three decades later: Religion, all in white taffeta, with a blew Mantle seeded with starres, a Crowne of starres upon her head . . . with the word, Coelo descendet ab alto. Beneath her feete lay Superstition trampled . . .16

The echo of the words describing the figure’s appearance suggests that Drummond was working with Jonson’s text in front of him. But of course this is not slavish imitation: Drummond is entering into dialogue with the earlier work. Jonson’s figure is divine wisdom; Drummond’s is religion. Jonson emphasizes a form of monarchical rule founded upon divine wisdom; Drummond emphasizes religion as the manifestation of heaven on earth. In Jonson’s imagery, notions of the divine prop up kings; in Drummond’s they hold down superstition. Drummond appears to be reaching beyond 1604 to the previous English royal entry: the pageantry provided for Elizabeth in 1559, as recorded in the printed account attributed to Richard Mulcaster, included a portrayal of ‘Pure religion [who] did treade vppon Superstition and Ignoraunce’.17 That pageant too had been in 15  Ben Jonson, B. Jon: His Part of King James his Royall and Magnificent Entertainement (London, 1604), sigs A2v–A3r. None of this detail is in Dekker’s account, but, as noted above, Jonson’s account was reproduced in his Workes (1616), which was part of Drummond’s library. David M. Bergeron also recognizes parallels between the 1604 and 1633 texts in ‘Charles I’s Edinburgh Pageant (1633)’, Renaissance Studies, 6 (1992), 173–84 (esp. 179–80) but is more concerned with the developing ­conventions of civic pageantry than with the specific resonances created by such parallels. 16  William Drummond, The Entertainment of the High and Mighty Monarch Charles King of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland, into his Auncient and Royall city of Edinburgh, the Fifteenth of June, 1633 (Edinburgh, 1633), sigs A3v–A4r. This account was published anonymously. Kerrigan suggests that its use of English does not necessarily reflect an ideological or strategic position; such Anglicization was by this time common in printed texts (see Archipelagic English, 150–2). 17  The Passage of our Most Drad Soveraigne Lady Quene Elyzabeth through the Citie of London to Westminster the Daye Before her Coronacion (London, 1559), sig. B2v. This account was reprinted in 1604. For further details, see Germaine Warkentin (ed.), The Queen’s Majesty’s Passage & Related Documents (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2004), 139–41. This edition, evidently issued to coincide with James’s royal entry, is more likely to have been consulted by Drummond than the original 1559 one.

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close dialogue with its predecessor, redeploying images and tropes from Mary I’s royal entry five years earlier to contrast the recent Catholic past with the expected Protestant reformation under Elizabeth. The representation of such virtues as ‘Pure religion’ suppressing their opposite vices was recognized by spectators to be anti-Marian.18 Drummond continues this dialogue. By reworking Jonson’s text in accordance with the 1559 work, he expresses a key Protestant concern which had not been central to the pageantry for King James. Drummond thus creates a subtext available to those familiar with Jonson’s work (including, potentially, Jonson himself ), entering into a literary dialogue that extends beyond the immediate context and inviting well-informed readers to compare him to one of England’s most successful poets. But through this dialogue Drummond is also articulating specific Scottish concerns: reflecting apprehension about Charles’s plans for the coronation ceremony, and for the Scottish Church more generally, his pageantry promotes the claims of religion over the claims of divine right kingship. The intertextual web established creates the further implication that Scotland is continuing to uphold a reformed position in relation to what it terms superstition and that this position had been important to the English in 1559 but neglected more recently.19 By responding to an English tradition, Drummond’s royal entry both reflects its author’s membership of a transnational literary community and confronts Charles with local concerns and pointed criticism. While entering into dialogue with English precedents, Drummond’s pageantry also foregrounds ancient Scottish history. A key part of Scottish political m ­ ythology was that there was an unbroken line of over one hundred kings stretching from Fergus to the present.20 Such was the legitimizing force of this mythology that the recitation of the genealogy of the monarch had long been a distinctive feature of Scotland’s coronation tradition.21 The pageantry for the royal entry of 1633 featured pictures of 107 past Scottish kings. Fergus was played by an actor and gave a speech in Latin, but this is omitted from the printed account.22 Other panegyric 18  For further discussion of how the pageantry for Elizabeth reworked Marian iconography, see Paulina Kewes, ‘Godly Queens: The Royal Iconographies of Mary and Elizabeth’, in Anna Whitelock and Alice Hunt (eds), Tudor Queenship: The Reigns of Mary and Elizabeth (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), 47–62. Kewes quotes one spectator’s response to this part of the pageantry on p. 51. 19  For further discussion of the complexities of Drummond’s politics as one of the ‘Scottish royalists’ who was ‘galvanised by what historians call the British problem’, see Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, ch. 4 (quotations at 161, 145). Kerrigan emphasizes the critical tone of the royal entry pageantry and relates the depiction of superstition and religion to the coronation ceremony (154–5). He does not recognize the use made of Jonson’s text or the connection to the pageantry for Elizabeth. 20  For a brief overview of how this mythology was contested, adapted by Buchanan to argue for the elected nature of monarchy, reclaimed by James VI, and maintained largely in the form established by Buchanan through the seventeenth century, see Colin Kidd and James Coleman, ‘Mythical Scotland’ in T. M. Devine and Jenny Wormald (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Scottish History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 62–77. 21  Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place’, 45. 22 Drummond, The Entertainment, sig. C1r. Though in a less elaborate form, James VI’s 1579 entry into Edinburgh also featured paintings representing the genealogy of Scottish kings going back to Fergus (see Lynch, ‘Court Ceremony and Ritual’, 76). The line of kings was an important part of the literature celebrating the Stuart lineage issued by Scots at the time of the union of the crowns; see Roger A. Mason, ‘Certeine Matters Concerning the Realme of Scotland: George Buchanan and Scottish Self-Fashioning at the Union of the Crowns’, The Scottish Historical Review, 92 (2013), 38–65.

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of the time, such as William Lithgow’s poem Scotlands Welcome to her Native Sonne, and Soveraigne Lord, King Charles, offers similar depictions. As Lithgow’s title highlights (Scotlands Welcome to her Native Sonne), Scottish panegyrists were keen to claim Charles as part of this proud history. Indeed, John Monipennie’s Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles . . . from Fergusius, the first King of Scotland, vntill his Royall Maiestie, now happily raigning over all Great Brittaine and Ireland, first printed in London in 1612 and dedicated to James, was reprinted in Edinburgh in 1633 with Charles added as the latest king in the line. The account of James’s reign is considerably expanded in this edition (and, we might note, gives particular prominence to his 1617 visit to Scotland). The addition ends with a paragraph that celebrates Charles as the ‘second Monarch of Britaines Monarchie’ and transfers to him a plea that was ­originally directed at James: ‘The Lord increase al royall vertues in his Highnesse, that he may remaine a comfort vnto Christs Church, within his owne Dominions.’23 That plea must have seemed still more charged in 1633 than it had in 1612. Significantly, the recitation of genealogy did not feature in the coronation ceremony for Charles.24 The king may have had this aspect of the ceremony omitted because he recognized that a key element of the underlying mythology was that Scotland was an ancient and independent kingdom, which had never been conquered by outsiders. Monipennie’s dedication to James had put it plainly: God has preserved the ‘auncient Kingdome of Scotland unconquered, under the Empyre and government of an hundreth and sixe Kings, your Majesties royall progenitors’.25 The panegyrists who welcomed Charles and his followers from England did not avoid this element, awkward as it was in the present context, but negotiated it in different ways. William Forbes’s panegyric, for example, tactfully mentions only that the Goths, the Danes, the Saxons, and the Normans felt ‘the furie of [Scotland’s] Steele’ while Caesar’s ‘conquering hand was stayed’.26 Drummond’s pageantry confines its visual depiction of enemies vanquished by the Scots to Romans and Picts.27 Lithgow, however, does not hold back: Scotland, personified as the speaker of the poem, has kept her crown free, 23  John Monipennie, The Abridgement or Summarie of the Scots Chronicles . . . from Fergusius, the First King of Scotland, vntill his Royall Maiestie, now happily raigning over All Great Brittaine and Ireland (Edinburgh, 1633), sig. M5v. This work was also reprinted in Edinburgh at the key junctures of 1650 and 1662, but without the historical narrative being any further extended. On the ‘symbolic potency’ of the line of kings and the corresponding popularity of Monipennie’s work throughout the seventeenth century, see also Roger A. Mason, ‘Debating Britain in Seventeenth-Century Scotland: Multiple Monarchy and Scottish Sovereignty’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies, 35 (2015), 1–24 at 11. 24  Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place’, 54. Shaw lists but does not comment on this omission. 25 Monipennie, Abridgement or Summarie, sig. A2r. These words, addressed to James in 1612, appear unchanged in this 1633 edition. The number 106 is a mistake: though some versions of the line of kings made James 107, Monipennie, following Buchanan, numbers him as 108 within the work. This version became standard. On the relationship of Monipennie’s work to earlier Scottish chronicles, see Mason, ‘Certeine Matters’, 58–61. I am grateful to Professor Mason for drawing Monipennie’s work to my attention and for helpful discussion of the complicated regnal numbering. 26  Walter Forbes, Panegyrick to the High and Mightie Monarch, Charles by the grace of God, King of Great Britaine, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. (Edinburgh, 1633), sigs A2v–3r. 27 Drummond, The Entertainment, sig. B1v. By striking contrast, Jonson’s part of James’s royal entry refers to how England has been under ‘The Roman, Saxon, Dane, and Norman yoke’ (Jonson, B. Jon: His Part, sig. B3r).

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Jane Rickard Whilst neither Danes, nor English, Saxons could, With awfull Romans, this Crowne, get, or hould, Such were my forces, in my Champions strong, That still keept, it and Mee, from forraine wrong.28

Lithgow’s emphasis on Charles’s Scottish birth enables him to reconcile this ­anti-English sentiment with praise of the king, but still there is a note of warning here. Charles is being welcomed as a descendent of Scottish kings not as the King of England. He is being advised that Scotland is in no mood to yield to English demands or to conform with English ways, but will continue to resist anything it perceives as ‘forraine wrong’.29 The hints of anxiety and ambivalence evident in these poems become more apparent in a panegyric by William Douglas, Earl of Morton. Douglas was Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, part of the committee that prepared for Charles’s visit, and host to the king on the eve of his royal entry to Edinburgh.30 His poem, which presumably formed part of the entertainment for Charles but was also printed in 1633, begins with a mini-drama of misidentification. The speaker, a personification of Scotland, thinks that ‘incroching nigh’ are a ‘gorgious people’ who all gaze upon ‘some golden man’. Horrified, she asks herself, What may this meane? Shall strangers so molest My state, and in my Throne themselves invest? Did ever I with purpose robe adorn A man, who was not in my bowels born? Or did I ever yet install a King, Who from the line of Fergus did not spring? Shall my unconquered Caledonian crown Lose now her ancient glorie and renown?

She begins to call on the Scots to arm themselves, but then pauses, wondering if ‘my dim and aged eye / Not rightly prying puts my wits awry’. Looking again, she sees that the approaching figure is in fact ‘CHARLES, the son of sacred JAMES’, ‘great CHARLES our native King’, and the poem turns to celebration of his a­ rrival.31 On one level, the fear of invasion that the poem raises is quelled by the recognition of Charles. But on another Morton has acknowledged contemporary concerns about how Scottish Charles really is, about whether he has become a stranger to his native land, about whether installing him on the Scottish throne will encourage him to ‘molest’ the Scottish state. There is an odd proleptic gesture too; the poem 28 William Lithgow, Scotlands Welcome to Her Native Sonne and Soveraigne Lord, King Charles (Edinburgh, 1633), sig. A4r. 29  For further discussion of the complaints and advice Lithgow’s poem presents to Charles, see Lisa Hopkins, ‘We Were the Trojans: British National Identities in 1633’, Renaissance Studies, 16 (2002), 36–51 at 46–9, and Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 153. 30  J. R. M. Sizer, ‘Douglas, William, seventh earl of Morton (1582–1648)’, Oxford Dictionary of  National Biography (hereafter ODNB), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/ 9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7933. 31  William Douglas, Earl of Morton, Grampius Gratulatius to his High and Mightie Monarch, King Charles (Edinburgh, 1633), no sigs.

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implies that Scotland would not crown ‘A man, who was not in my bowels born’, but Charles’s son and heir had been born in London three years e­ arlier.32 Less than two decades later, the Scots would have to reconsider this stipulation. In 1633, then, it was possible for anxieties about the relationship between the two countries to be aired and negotiated through historical reference and literary trope, and, in the case of Drummond’s contribution, for English precedents to be assimilated not rejected. Charles and his advisors were left with the impression that the visit had been a success.33 At the same time, however, these succession texts help to cement a long-standing narrative that would shape Scottish responses to events to come. In particular, the emphasis on embracing Charles within a long line of Scottish kings helps to explain the force of Scottish opposition to the ­regicide. There may have been concern in 1633 that Charles was too anglicized, and, of course, Scotland’s resistance to his religious reforms in the late 1630s would escalate into military conflict and contribute to the outbreak of the Civil War. But, from the perspective of the panegyric that greeted him on his coronation visit, what the English did in 1649 was to kill a Scottish king and to jeopardize that treasured unbroken line stretching back to Fergus. ‘A G O D LY PA RT Y ’: T H E S C OT T I S H C O RO N AT I O N OF CHARLES II, 1651 The Scottish coronation of Charles II in 1651 was a remarkable event. Charles and his supporters maintained that he had acceded to the throne upon the death of his father in January 1649.34 Now the Scottish kirk party provided him with an official coronation ceremony. But they were not simply accepting Stuart rule: they were registering opposition to the regicide, defying Cromwell’s regime, asserting Scotland’s right to play a key role in ‘British’ politics, and, of course, preventing the rupture of that long line of kings. Charles himself had been forced to agree to strict conditions before returning to Scotland. He would have to accept the National Covenant and the Solemn League and Covenant, committing him to uphold and continue the process of reformation. He was also made publicly to admit to his faults and those of his predecessors. During his year in Scotland he seems to have had little agency or freedom.35 The coronation itself was far more an assertion of kirk authority than an affirmation of royal authority. There would be no entry, no panegyric or celebration. A struggle to control the meanings of this event would nevertheless ensue.

32  This birth had been celebrated in Scotland: see Keith Brown, ‘The Vanishing Emperor: British Kingship and its Decline, 1603–1707’, in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons, 58–90 at 70. 33 Sharpe, Personal Rule, 782–3. 34  Sharpe notes that Charles would always date his reign from January 1649: Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 3. 35  Lee suggests that Charles was a virtual prisoner: see Maurice Lee, ‘The Inevitable Union’, in The ‘Inevitable’ Union and Other Essays on Early Modern Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2003), 217.

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Charles was crowned by the marquis of Argyll, the political leader of the kirk party.36 Robert Douglas, the kirk’s leading minister, officiated, delivered the sermon, and appears to have been responsible for the official account, The Forme and Order of the Coronation of Charles the Second, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. This highly detailed account tells us not necessarily exactly what happened but exactly how the regime wished the event to be viewed. Charles was being proclaimed King of England as well as Scotland; indeed, the text of the Oath accepting the covenants even styles him ‘King of Great Britain, France and Ireland ’.37 But he was also being made into a covenanted king whose power was limited by the kirk. The provocative implication was that he was to rule the whole island as one according to the Scottish covenants. The situation was unprecedented and the kirk, like Charles I in 1633, took the opportunity to draw selectively on c­ oronation traditions. The ceremony did this time take place at the ancient site of Scone and Charles II had to forgo anointing on the grounds that it was superstitious. As far back as the coronation of Queen Anne in 1590, a group of Presbyterians had petitioned for the removal of the unction rite from the ceremony; in 1651 that ‘vision of a fully stripped down coronation service’ was finally realized.38 But this final Scottish coronation ceremony reached further back too. In 1567, following the forced abdication of his mother, the infant James VI had been crowned by the confederate lords with the support of the kirk. As part of the attempt to legitimize what was Scotland’s first Protestant coronation, Parliament had ratified a prescribed form for the coronation oath. In 1633 Charles I did not use that form.39 In 1651 it was reinstated and, at least in the printed account, explicitly presented as deriving from James’s first parliament. The recitation of the king’s genealogy back to Fergus likewise reappeared, emphasizing the notion of unbroken tradition even as, ironically enough, its inclusion enacted a departure from the previous coronation.40 The form of the 1651 ceremony established a direct line back to a time nearly a century earlier when the kirk had held considerable sway and almost entirely wrote out what had happened in 1633. This attempt to rewrite recent history is extended and made more explicit in the sermon, reproduced in full as part of the official account. Douglas reminds Charles that in the time of his grandfather James ‘there was a godly party in the land, who 36 On Argyll, see Edward J. Cowan, ‘The Political Ideas of a Covenanting Leader: Archibald Campbell, Marquis of Argyll 1607–1661’, in Mason (ed.), Scots and Britons, 241–61. For further discussion of the Scottish regime’s conceptions of monarchy in the 1640s and 1650s, see Sharon Adams, ‘In Search of the Scottish Republic’, in Adams and Julian Goodare (eds), Scotland in the Age of Two Revolutions (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 97–114. 37  Robert Douglas, The Forme and Order of the Coronation of Charles the Second, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland. As it was acted and done at Scoone, the first day of January, 1651 (Aberdeen, 1651), 19. On the British style, and how surprising and provocative its use was in 1651, see Brown, ‘The Vanishing Emperor’, 63–4. 38  Shaw, ‘Scotland’s Place’, 50. 39  Ibid., 56. On the 1567 coronation and its relationship to its predecessors, see Michael Lynch, ‘Scotland’s First Protestant Coronation: Revolutionaries, Sovereignty and the Culture of Nostalgia’, in Luuk Houwen (ed.), Literature and Religion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Scotland: Essays in Honour of Alasdair A. Macdonald (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 177–207. 40 Douglas, The Forme and Order, 20, 22.

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did put the Crown upon his head’. James himself, Douglas continues, ‘did thank God, that he was borne in a reformed kirk, better reformed then England’. Later, however, James ‘made a foule defection: He remembred not the kindnesse of them who had held the crown upon his head; yea he persecuted faithful Ministers . . . ’. ‘In a word’, Douglas concludes, ‘he laid the foundation, whereupon his Son our late King, did build much mischief to Religion all the dayes of his Life.’41 James is thus cast as a defector and Charles I, his Scottish coronation discreetly omitted from the narrative, as an inveterate enemy to reformed religion. The references to the act of crowning emphasize the role of those who lay the crown, not the claims of its wearers. Douglas even implies that presenting the crown was one of the instances of the ‘kindness’ of the godly that James forgot. Charles II is being warned not to be ungrateful to those now crowning him, a warning that he would not heed. The publication of this account—in several different issues within the year— was evidently part of the kirk party’s attempt to validate the coronation itself. The account, that is, is not just a record but part of the process of making Charles king. It would not be printed in England until 1660, as we shall consider later, but ­readers outside Scotland were keen for news about Charles.42 An English relation of the coronation, which seems to have been cobbled together from unofficial reports not based on Douglas’s account, was printed in London in 1651. This relation, The True Manner of the Crowning of Charles the Second King of Scotland, appeared as a broadside with an arresting image of Charles on horseback, which gives the initial impression of a royalist publication.43 As Sharpe observes, this image emulates not only previous depictions of monarchs but also engravings of Cromwell and, further back, Essex.44 The engraving may indeed have been designed to promote Charles as a legitimate successor to the English throne and have originally circulated in other contexts. Here, however, the image—while still functioning as a marketing device—is made to serve satiric purposes. The broadside follows the standard format of giving a relatively neutral summary of events, enabling the pretence of objectivity, followed by an excoriating commentary. Thus the first half appears simply to summarize the coronation (though it repeatedly emphasizes that Charles has been crowned King of Scotland only, not, as the Scots themselves claimed, of England too). The description of Charles’s life, throne, court, and counsel which is

41  Ibid., 18–19. 42  The arrival of Charles in Scotland and his willingness to accept the Covenant was met with ­anti-Scottish pamphlets such as The Changeable Covenant (1650) and The False Brother (1651) (see Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, 233). Royalist publications, most of which were printed in the Dutch Republic, also circulated throughout the 1650s: see Helmer Helmers, The Royalist Republic: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Anglo-Dutch Public Sphere, 1639–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. ch. 6. On the reports of Charles that circulated in England during his exile, see Chapter 4 in this volume by Christopher Highley, ‘Charles II and the Meanings of Exile’. 43  The True Manner of the Crowning of Charles the Second King of Scotland, on the First day of January, 1650 [i.e. 1651]. Together with a Description of His Life and Throne; and a Cleare View of his Court and Counsell (London, 1651). The summary of the ceremony is accurate in some details but leaves a lot out and gives a different order of events, suggesting that it was based on a report, not the official account. 44 Sharpe, Image Wars, 454 and note.

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appended beneath gives an unequivocal condemnation of Charles and casts the coronation as an act of delusion and deception. This description begins by emphasizing that Charles’s ‘Crown carrieth no luster, but what assumes a fained aspect to the pur-blind Jockeys, between Fife and Orkney, who deale with him’. The term ‘Jockey’ was a diminutive form of ‘Jock’, a ‘generic name for any man of the common people’ which was coming to mean a Scotsman specifically.45 In the 1651 broadside we see anti-Scots prejudice both fuelling and being fuelled by opposition to the Stuart monarchy, as becomes still more apparent towards the end of the second column: the Scots are ‘a dissembling people (from whence ariseth the proverb, as false as a Scot)’. The text even implicitly challenges the symbolic message of the engraving of Charles on horseback. This traditional image of rule is recast as suggestive of the inevitability of Charles’s fall, the author claiming that none of the Scots ‘deales so plainly with him as the horse he rides on, who gives warning by careering, that (being neither flatterer nor Courtier) hee wil cast him to the ground, as wel as the poorest Groome of his Stable’.46 The comparison of the king to ‘the poorest Groome of his Stable’ not only emphasizes that Charles is as physically vulnerable as other men but also adds to the implicit message that to be king over a land of ‘Jockeys’ is to be a ‘poor’ king. Yet the horse in the engraving is performing a standard, highly controlled movement; this is an image that might still be read more conventionally as signifying Charles’s control and authority. This broadside thus highlights how the traditional symbols and images of power are endlessly available to appropriation and contestation, and how no single text can stabilize those meanings. The kirk may have put the crown on Charles’s head in a carefully orchestrated and painstakingly recorded ceremony, but it could not control how that ceremony would be perceived, at the time or subsequently. And here the striking engraving and relatively neutral summary remain open to interpretations other than the scornful and dismissive ones that the commentary attempts to impose. ‘ H O M A G E TO T H AT S A C R E D B ROW ’: T H E E N G L I S H C O RO N AT I O N O F C H A R L E S I I , 1 6 6 1 Charles II’s restoration to the English throne was greeted with widespread rejoicing in Scotland as well as England. The coronation ceremony, which took place in April 1661, did not acknowledge the earlier Scottish one. It was Anglocentric and 45  Oxford English Dictionary (hereafter OED), ‘Jockey’ (1) and ‘Jock’ (1). The OED’s first listed usage of ‘Jock’ to mean a man from Scotland or northern England is 1788, but this broadside suggests that the association developed much earlier. We might note that such anti-Scots prejudice was alive and well in the UK general election of 2015, Mayor of London and Conservative candidate Boris Johnson describing the prospect of a Labour–SNP coalition as ‘Ajockalypse Now’: see http://www.dailymail. co.uk/news/article-3066185/It-s-Ajockalypse-Boris-warns-chaos-Labour-SNP-deal-mocks-Milibandone-legged-millipede-goes-left-left-left.html. By incorporating the condescending term ‘Jock’, Johnson’s punning phrase betrays the class as well as racial assumptions that underlie the continuation into the twenty-first century of hostility towards the idea of Scotland playing a significant role in the governance of the UK. 46  The True Manner, single sheet.

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deployed little British iconography.47 Indeed, as Sharpe observes, the ceremony not only emphasized the sanctity of kingship (this time Charles was anointed) but presented the Stuart king as St Edward’s successor. St Edward, or Edward the Confessor, was one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings and the only English king to be canonized. His crown, long used for coronations, had been destroyed in the Interregnum. A reconstruction was made for Charles II’s coronation.48 Like the kirk party in 1651, the newly restored monarchy was trying to overwrite painful recent history by reaching further back into the past for symbols and precedents. By having this reconstructed crown placed on his head Charles was establishing a link not only with pre-Civil War but with medieval English history. The gesture highlights how the props and texts that constitute kingship are not only mobile and malleable but even if destroyed can be recreated and reinvested with meaning. Despite such ceremonial gestures, however, the question of which aspects of the past should be forgotten and which should be reinvented continued to animate Charles’s subjects too. Robert Douglas’s account of the 1651 coronation was reprinted in London in multiple editions at the time of the Restoration. One of these editions states that it  is ‘Printed according to the Authors own copy, to prevent any counterfeit’.49 Evidently Douglas, who had helped effect the Restoration but was also attempting to secure a Presbyterian settlement for the Scottish Church, remained determined to remind Charles and his supporters of exactly what the king had promised nine years earlier.50 The reprinted account provoked an immediate attack, under the title The Scotch Covenant Condemned, and the Kings Most Sacred Majesty Vindicated by an author presenting himself as ‘a loyall orthodox hand ’. Where in 1651, as exemplified in the broadside considered above, the actions of the Scots had been condemned from an anti-monarchical perspective, they were now being refuted from a royalist position. The Scotch Covenant Condemned works through Douglas’s account page by page, rejecting all of its claims and rewriting its rewriting of history. For example, where Douglas’s sermon claimed that James had been godly in his youth but then defected, this work celebrates ‘What King James did when he came to riper years and more experience’ and claims that these later actions ‘give a Testimony that he was under Force in his younger time’. It maintains that Douglas’s work can only have been reprinted to cause trouble in England, asking ‘why may we not think that it was proposed as a pattern to some rigid and refractory Spirits to hold him to the same hard meat here which they had so liberally fed him with in Scotland ’. The ‘loyall orthodox’ author is clearly opposed to the particular—covenanted—version of kingship that the 1651 coronation had upheld, but is also, perhaps more fundamentally, resistant to the notion that the Scots should hold any sway in England. That antagonism is best distilled in one of the rhetorical questions he poses: ‘is all 47 Brown, ‘The Vanishing Emperor’, 65. For a contemporary account, see The Manner of the Solemnity of the Coronation of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles (London, 1660 [i.e. 1661]). 48 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 162, 104. 49 Douglas, The Form and Order, title page. 50  K. D. Holfelder, ‘Douglas, Robert (1594–1674)’, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ 10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-7916.

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the World oblig’d to Dance after the Scotch Bagg pipe?’51 The Scotch Covenant Condemned highlights the extent to which debates over the monarchy in midseventeenth-century Britain were bound up with debates about the relative power of Scotland and England. Again, however, to see relations between the two only in terms of this kind of antagonism would be a simplification. Scottish Restoration panegyric has many features in common with English panegyric of the time, some of which was reprinted in Scotland. For example, Laetitiae Caledonicae, or, Scotlands Raptures, upon the Thrise Happy Return of her Sacred Soveraign Charles the Second, Monarch of Great Britain, &c, an anonymous poem printed in Edinburgh, shares with Samuel Holland’s poem, To the Best of Monarchs, printed in London and reprinted in Edinburgh, a number of tropes. These include the claim of unutterable joy, the styling of Charles as King of Great Britain, references to the biblical foundations of monarchical authority, and the emphasis on the king as a healing figure.52 Laetitiae Caledonicae even explicitly rejects the terms of the earlier coronation. This poem asks rhetorically, ‘Shall we renewing covenants, engage?’ and answers emphatically, ‘No He’ll ne’er trust’s thee more; (and who can blame him?)’. We should instead ‘do homage to that sacred brow’ which has ‘undone / Those miseries, our follies had begun’. The poem goes on to enjoin the people of Scotland to make ‘recompense’ and unite in loyalty to ‘the Lord’s Anointed’, a pointed term since Charles had only been anointed in London in 1661, not in Edinburgh in 1651.53 In stark contrast to Douglas, this author suggests that Scotland should forget the earlier ceremony and show absolute obedience to the king in the terms of his English coronation. Such poems remind us of the existence of conflicting and changing political views within Scotland, and of ongoing cross-border traffic in conceptions and depictions of monarchy. The styling of Charles as ‘monarch of Great Britain’, which features in this poem’s title and recurs across Scottish and English Restoration panegyric, was of course a means of attempting to smooth over continuing political and religious differences between the two realms. Charles had made one coronation oath to the people of Scotland and one to the people of England, but neither ceremony had invoked the people of Great Britain.54 The republication of Douglas’s 1651 account alongside the panegyric of 1660–1 only highlights the extent of the conflicting views among Charles’s subjects that remained far from being reconciled. The king’s own feelings 51  The Scotch Covenant Condemned, and the Kings Most Sacred Majesty Vindicated in Some Animadversions on a Paper intituled The Form and Order of the Coronation of Charles the II, King of Scotland, England, France, and Ireland, as it was acted and done at Scoon, Janu. 1. An. 1651. by R. Dowglas Minister (as he calls himselfe) at Edenburg. Written by a Loyall Orthodox hand (London, 1660), 26, 4. 52 See Laetitiae Caledonicae, or, Scotlands Raptures, upon the Thrise Happy Return of her Sacred Soveraign Charles the Second, Monarch of Great Britain, &c (Edinburgh, 1660) and Samuel Holland, To the Best of Monarchs, His Majesty of Great Britain, &c. Charles the Second, A Gratulatory Poem on the Most Happy Arrival of his Most Excellent Majesty, Charles the Second, by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, who landed at Dover, Friday, May 25. 1660. to the most unspeakable Joy of his Subjects (London, 1660; reprinted at Edinburgh in 1660). 53  Ibid., single sheet. 54 For a discussion of the constitutional distinctions that resurfaced after 1660, see Kerrigan, Archipelagic English, ch. 9.

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about his Scottish coronation may be determined from the fact that he had Argyll, who had crowned him, executed in May 1661, one of the few exempted from a general indemnity. Charles, who would never visit Scotland again, was to be the last British monarch crowned on Scottish soil. This diminishing of Scotland’s ceremonial role, along with the refutation of Douglas’s account and the execution of Argyll, may appear to suggest that the Restoration monarchy was making a concerted effort to obscure Scotland’s contribution to seventeenth-century British ­political history. Yet aspects of Scottish history remained ‘usable’. In 1684 the Dutch painter James De Wet received a royal commission for portraits of the 110 kings to have reigned over Scotland, a list that ran from Fergus to Charles II. These portraits were to decorate the new hall of the renovated Holyroodhouse Palace. In a striking instance of recycling, some of the portraits that Charles I saw as he progressed through Edinburgh in 1633 seem very likely, Steve Bruce and Steven Yearley ­suggest, to have been among the models that De Wet was asked to follow. As they put it, ‘the mythical kings and their real successors [had] acquired a new purpose in symbolising the ancient connection between the success of the kingdom and the institution of monarchy’. That purpose was lent particular importance by the Exclusion Crisis in which part of the English Parliament was determined to exclude Charles’s brother James from the succession. The paintings appear to have been arranged to give the impression of orderly succession, an unbroken royal line, and culmination in the Stuarts. In the event, Charles died before the commission was completed and his brother, now James VII and II, was added to the list.55 This commission, combined with Charles’s unwillingness to return to Scotland in ­person, suggests that the land of his father’s birth was much more appealing to the king as a malleable historical narrative than as a contemporary reality. But these portraits also powerfully underline what we have seen throughout this chapter: the desire of individuals and regimes on both sides of the border carefully, selectively, reductively to exploit the potent symbolic value of the past. Examining the coronation writing published in Scotland and its interactions with that published in England thus highlights the importance of succession literature in not only recording but shaping the meanings of the events in question. These texts are in a constant process of negotiation with other texts and signify most fully through these intertextual relationships. They do significant cultural work in either negotiating or obscuring political and religious differences. They intervene in and provoke debate, and, as Douglas’s 1651 account and its republication in 1660 epitomizes, their potential was disruptive as well as constructive. More specifically, the coronation literature published in Scotland played a vital part in shaping debates about Scotland’s relationship to (various versions of ) its past, to England, and to the challenges of a shared future—about, that is, Scotland’s 55  Steve Bruce and Steven Yearley, ‘The De Wet Portraits of the Scottish Kings’, Review of Scottish Culture, 6 (1990), 11–19 at 11–15; quotation at 11. Sharpe notes that James was also supported at this time by historians who emphasized his English lineage and associated him with great English kings of the past, including Edward the Confessor (Rebranding Rule, 259).

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cultural identity. The texts that have been the focus of this chapter also remind us that that cultural identity has never been simple, singular, or self-contained. In reading this coronation literature we hear multiple voices, helping us to resist joining such contemporary writers as the ‘loyal orthodox hand’ in treating individuals like Robert Douglas as representing the political views of all Scots. And in reading this literature we find instances of tropes, ideas, images, words moving backwards and forwards across the border, emphasizing that ‘Anglo-Scots’ relations in the period entailed a considerable degree of cultural as well as political interdependence. Recognizing the complexity of those relations, and attending to both English and Scottish perspectives, can enrich our understanding of other historical—and current—‘British’ events too, and make us more aware of the extent to which political, ideological, economic, and institutional factors still determine what version of those events gets told.

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13 Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions Ian W. Archer The customary protocols of royal succession demanded that on the day preceding the coronation, the monarch would process through the streets of the city of London from the Tower to Westminster, accompanied by the magnificently apparelled royal entourage. The lord mayor took his place in the procession carrying the sword before the king, while the citizens’ primary role was as spectators, with the guildsmen lining the streets in a careful articulation of the civic hierarchy. The processional route was punctuated by a series of pageants; modelled on continental festivals, and appropriating classical forms, the decoration of the temporary canvas and wooden arches, and the accompanying speeches provided an elaborate celebration of the monarch’s virtues.1 Royal entries like these were a form of political communication. To understand how they worked we need to know who is speaking to whom, what is being said, and with what effect. Although there has been a vast amount of work on European entries in recent years, these basic questions are not always clearly addressed.2 Much of the scholarship concentrates on decoding the complex iconography and the messages of the speeches: we know a lot about what is being said. But it is harder to understand the kind of political intervention they were making without a greater appreciation of the dynamic forces behind their creation, and of the ­variety of ways in which auditors and spectators responded. Most historians are now uncomfortable with seeing these rituals as simple exercises in propaganda. Their creation involved dialogic elements between rulers and subjects rather than a one-way communication; and scepticism has been expressed about the ability of 1  R. Malcom Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: The English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James M. Rosenheim (eds), The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 65–93. 2  Pierre Béhar and Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (eds), Spectaculum Europaeum: Theatre and Spectacle in Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999); J. R. Mulryne and E. Goldring (eds), Court Festivals of the European Renaissance: Art, Politics and Performance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Anna C. Knaap and Michael C. J. Putnam (eds), Art, Music and Spectacle in the Age of Rubens: The Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi (London: Hareby Miller, 2013); J. R. Mulryne et al. (eds), Ceremonial Entries in Early Modern Europe: The Iconography of Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015).

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the audiences to grasp the meanings.3 This chapter will explore issues relating to the reception of the two Stuart accession entries of James I in 1604 and Charles II in 1661. What were they trying to communicate, and how successful were they? How did changing ideological circumstances shape the communicative strategies deployed and their effectiveness with metropolitan audiences? Doubts might be raised about the ideological coherence of the entries for a number of reasons. They were collaborative events. They required poets and playwrights to work alongside the artificers responsible for the construction of the arches. In 1604 Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker composed the speeches with some input from Thomas Middleton; the small army of artificers was coordinated by the joiner and designer of the arches, Stephen Harrison. In 1661 the City hired the services of John Ogilby, a classical poet with court connections, for the ‘poetical part of the show’, while the design of the arches was entrusted to Peter Mills, City surveyor and architect, and Balthasar Gerbier, art agent, architect, and failed spy, who had connections with Rubens, the deviser of the Pompa Introitus, ­commemorating Prince Ferdinand’s triumphal entry into Antwerp in 1635 which provided a model.4 Still more fundamentally, royal entries required collaboration between the committees of citizens who organized the pageantry and the royal councillors who were doubtless consulted over the broad agenda, though this process is largely opaque. The rhetoric of love, service, order, and fidelity stood in tension, as we shall see, with the rather messy facts of London’s past and present circumstances, its reputation for loyalty in 1604 perhaps compromised by its recent sympathy for the rebel earl of Essex and the critical attitude of some of its citizens to aspects of the late Elizabethan polity, and even more obviously in 1661 by its role in the Civil War and its ambivalent attitude to the restoration regime. The balance between the civic and courtly elements in an entry was in any case always a delicate one. Entries offered not only legitimation to new rulers, but also operated as a form of negotiation in which praise for the monarch might take the form of counsel (laudando praecipere), and in which the citizenry might make pitches for reciprocating royal favour. The city’s loyalty might therefore have a conditional element. The enthusiasm of the crowds for the event might also be tempered by an awareness of the cost: the livery companies which had to stump up the cash complained about the inequity of the assessments, more vocally in 1661 than in 1603–4. There were also those who doubted the value of this conspicuous pomp. Collaboration was fraught with tension, as clashing artistic temperaments 3  Sydney Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London: B. A. Seaby, 1992); Dougal Shaw, ‘Nothing but Propaganda? Historians and the Study of Early Modern Royal Ritual’, Cultural and Social History, 1 (2004), 139–58; Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 22–6. 4  The best edition of the 1604 entry texts is in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), ‘The Whole and Magnificent Entertainment’, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I, 219–79, II, 498–506; Jonson’s contribution is available in David Bevington et al. (eds), The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), II, 421–67. For the 1661 entry, the best edition is John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II in his Passage Through the City of London to his Coronation, ed. Ronald Knowles (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987).

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potentially compromised the message of harmony, most notoriously when Jonson and Dekker issued competing accounts of the 1604 entry; there was a greater effort to produce an authorized version in 1661, but it occluded possible tensions among the organizers, and it is striking that Gerbier’s role was downplayed, probably because of his dubious credentials as a critic of Charles I. Finally, it proved difficult to maintain the protocols. Circumstances conspired to decouple the coronation and the entry in 1603–4. James was crowned on 25 July 1603, but because of the plague access was restricted and his entry was postponed until 15 March 1604. Charles I also had to delay his entry because of the plague, but then infuriated the City (who had already built the arches) by cancelling it.5 Perhaps this was, as stated at the time, on the grounds of cost, but relations between Crown and City were tense as financial and religious grievances mounted. Charles II’s coronation entry on 22 April 1661 was the last, and it is the only one under the Stuarts where the entry did indeed occur on the eve of the coronation. It will already be clear that the message of entries might be both less coherent than at first apparent, and that the message might have been understood by participants and observers rather differently from what was intended by the devisers. But the nature of the sources makes it very difficult to access contemporary responses. The official texts tell us rather about what was supposed to happen than about what actually happened; they are often selective as to which aspects of the entertainments they cover, often occluding the citizen element; and they tend to describe the event as it would have unfolded to the ruler’s eyes rather than to other spectators. The beguilingly detailed illustrations of the arches by the engravers do not always match up with the descriptions provided by the accompanying texts.6 Financial accounts can enrich our understanding of the material dimensions of the ceremonial, but on their own give little sense of the impact of the different components of the experience.7 We can go some way with eyewitness accounts, few in number and skewed though they might be to elite observers, and they will play a key role in the analysis which follows. But we cannot rely on eyewitnesses alone, and in order to address the issue of reception, we need to go beyond the descriptions of individual events, and look at the broader cultural and political contexts in which they were performed. We need to look at two key aspects of that context; first, an examination of the ­performances in terms of their relationship to the other forms of cultural production available at the time to their audiences; and second, an assessment of current political preoccupations as they related to the messages being communicated. By these means we can determine something of the range of registers within which audiences might understand the performances. In adopting this approach I am drawing upon the work of Robert 5  Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma’, 82–4. 6  David M. Bergeron, ‘Harrison, Jonson, and Dekker: The Magnificent Entertainment for King James 1604’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 31 (1968), 445–8; Christine Stevenson, The City and the King: Architecture and Politics in Restoration London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 70–2, 95–117. 7  Ian W. Archer, ‘City and Court Connected: The Material Dimensions of Royal Ceremonial, ca. 1480–1625’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 71 (2008), 157–79.

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D. Hume on the relationship between text and context, which insists on the importance of engaging with the ideas current at the time as well as recognizing the plurality of those ideas, and their different social registers.8 It is important to stress that we are concerned with a range of cultural and ­political registers to avoid the dangers of falling into crude binary categories such as City vs court, or elite vs popular. Some of the early work on the entries which compared them with the lord mayor’s shows (the processions and pageants which inaugurated each lord mayor’s term of office) detected tensions between the citizen and courtly genres, which could be mapped onto the competition between the City and the court.9 Such views rather neglect the very basic point that for many spectators, the experience of the event would have emphasized the mutual interdependence of City and court. The dazzling procession of the royal entourage through the city streets (liveries were provided by the Crown for 1,125 participants in 1604) was an attempt to project the solidarity of the political elite before the citizens who bankrolled the monarchy; and the whole event underscored the close ties between city and court, not least because of the citizens’ role in providing the luxury fabrics and jewels worn by participants in the procession.10 As we shall see, many contemporaries paid more attention to details of the processional order and dress than they did to the iconography and speeches. That is not to say that the ritual necessarily succeeded in incorporating all the citizens, however much the message of unity was pressed. Awe at royal pomp and delight in celebrity spotting would jostle with other sentiments. That brings us to another problem with the City vs court model: its assumption that citizen values were monolithic. On the contrary, it was precisely the variety of political opinions among the citizenry that made the task of governing London so challenging. In 1603–4 Londoners were divided over their attitudes to the recently executed earl of Essex, James’s policy of rapprochement with Spain, and over religion. By 1661–2 those divisions over religion were being institutionalized in Dissent, and the sects had proliferated. The greater pluralism of the city’s merchant community entailed real divisions over commercial and foreign policies. Likewise we need to avoid the trap of crudely dichotomizing popular and elite responses. The pervasive power of that binary owes something to the way in which it is inscribed into the pageant texts themselves. Ben Jonson in 1604 notoriously sneered at the ignorant spectators, who with their ‘grounded judgements gazed, said it was fine, and were satisfied’.11 But we should be wary of taking this at face value. It is true that the task of reconstructing the cultural milieu of the London 8  Robert D. Hume, ‘Texts Within Contexts: Notes Toward a Historical Method’, Philological Quarterly, 71 (1992), 69–100. 9  Muriel C. Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry: Social Implications in Jacobean London’, in Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond (eds), Poetry and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1981), 60–75; Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Idea of London in Masque and Pageant’, in David Bergeron (ed.), Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 48–64; Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 212–93. 10  Archer, ‘City and Court Connected’. 11  Smuts (ed.), ‘Magnificent Entertainment’, ll. 763–4.

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citizenry is in its infancy. Patterns of book ownership might suggest a preference for divinity over classical works, while in the decorative schemes of their livery company halls (with some exceptions like the Barber Surgeons) biblical themes prevailed over classical ones.12 But some merchants played a crucial role as arbiters of taste and mediators of new cultural forms; the first triumphal arches were built by the Merchant Adventurers in the entries in which they participated in the Low Countries in the mid-sixteenth century.13 Londoners were highly literate, and significant numbers of the trading community had benefited from a few years of grammar school education which suggests that a basic working Latinity may have been more widespread.14 In his description of the arch erected in Fleet Street in 1604 Dekker assumed a familiarity with the essentials of the iconography of the figure of Justice among ordinary readers: ‘I hope you will not put me to describe what properties she held in her hands, sithence every painted cloth can inform you.’15 There may have been more familiarity with the classical idioms in which the iconography of the arches was steeped than the stereotypes suggest. A comparison of the political dynamics of the 1604 and1661 entries shows us that the ideological divisions generated by the Civil War and its legacy made Charles II’s entry highly problematic; it was too difficult to provide a loyalist idiom that would paper over the fissures. By contrast James’s entry of 1604 occurred in more propitious circumstances where there was a greater degree of ideological consensus. Panegyric that was too obviously at odds with citizen perceptions of the Crown could only hold limited traction, and the increasing ideological divisions of the seventeenth century help explain why entries lost their appeal. T H E 1 6 0 4 E N T RY There is no doubting the enthusiasm with which Londoners greeted the arrival of the new dynasty. On James I’s arrival in Middlesex, multitudes of people ‘covered the beauty of the fields’; the song of the children of Christ’s Hospital prepared for him at the Charterhouse was drowned out by the ‘rudeness of the multitude’; the foreign ambassadors were amazed by the numbers of Londoners who flocked to Greenwich to witness receptions at court; James’s attempts to arrange an incognito private viewing of the pageants before his formal entry were frustrated by the

12  Richard Grassby, The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 350–5; Jasmin Kilburn-Toppin, ‘Crafting Artisanal Identities in Early Modern London: The Spatial, Material and Social Practices of Guild Communities, c.1560–1640’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Royal College of Art, 2013); Anya Matthews, ‘London’s Livery Halls, c.1603–c.1684: Their Architecture and Political Uses’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, 2015). 13  Mireille Galinou (ed.), City Merchants and the Arts 1670–1720 (Wetherby: Oblong, 2004); Le Triumphe d’Anvers faict en la susception du Prince Philips (Antwerp, 1550), sigs Kiiv–Kiiiiv. 14 Grassby, Business Community, 350–60. 15 Smuts (ed.), ‘Magnificent Entertainment’, ll. 2069–71. Cf. Anthony Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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enormous crowds who flocked to the Exchange.16 Emotions would have been mixed: relief at the passing of the queen, the secure succession of an apparently fertile monarch, and James’s sheer novelty value played a role. There was also a real hope among Londoners that James would reform the abuses that had flourished under the late queen. Their expectations are revealed in the remarkable oration given at Stamford Hill on behalf of the City by Richard Martin, the ‘oraculum Londiniensi’, as James approached his capital for the first time on 7 May 1603. Martin, the rising lawyer and noted wit, and an outspoken opponent of monopolies in the parliament of 1601, engaged in a classic instance of laudando praecipere. The new king was praised as the ‘bright star of the north’, but he was also addressed as ‘a most skillful and faithful physician to our true griefs’. As Martin elaborated upon the ills of the Commonwealth, he was touching close to the quick, looking forward to a time when ‘the people shall every one sit under his own olive tree, and anoint himself with the fat thereof, his face not grinded with extorted sutes, nor his marrow suckt with most odious and uniust monopolies . . . No more shall bribes blinde the eyes of the wise, nor gold be reputed the common measure of men’s worthinessse.’17 James apparently got the message (which was being pressed upon him from various quarters), issuing a proclamation against controversial monopolies and rescinding the hated pre-emption of tin.18 But there were other issues on the agenda, and it did not take long for London’s governors to get down to the mundane business of renewing their charter, and lobbying for the repayment of the debt of £60,000 due to the City by Elizabeth; and many were involved in the row over the renewal of the Levant Company charter which divided opinion at City and court. This was the real business of London politics in the accession year. Those concerns, however, were barely present in the postponed royal entry of March 1604. Its main themes were the legitimacy of James’s descent from Henry VII, the fulfilment of the British imperial destiny as the heir of the Trojan Brutus reuniting the divided kingdoms of Britain, his providentially sanctioned rule, his virtues as a philosopher king, his phoenix-like regeneration of the kingdom’s virtues, and his revival of the arts and muses through peace and plenty, in sum the ushering in of a new Golden Age and the fulfilment of an imperial destiny in the pax Iacobi. There were real limits as to the degree to which the City’s reform agenda as set out by Martin could be articulated within the constraints of panegyric. Whereas in Elizabeth’s entry of 1559 one senses a conditional element in the praise of the queen as she is nudged towards a particular religious agenda, in 1604 the much 16  John Stow, The Annales of England . . . Continued unto the End of 1614. By E. Howes (London, 1615), 823–4; John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James I, 4 vols (London, 1828), I, 128–32, 139, 140; Horatio F. Brown et al. (eds), Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 38 vols (London: HMSO, 1864–1947), X, 33, 39, 189 (hereafter CSP Venetian). 17  A Speech Delivered to the Kings Most Excellent Maiestie (London, 1603), sig. Bi; The National Archives (hereafter TNA), SP 14/1/71; Robert Zaller, ‘Martin, Richard (1570–1618)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-18206. 18  Stuart Royal Proclamations, ed. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973–83), I, 28–9, 37–8.

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Figure 13.1.  The Londinium arch erected in Fenchurch Street for the 1604 entry, from Stephen Harrison, Arch’s of Triumph (1604). © The Bodleian Libraries.

stronger classicizing elements drawing on the tropes of Roman imperialism, admitted of much more limited possibilities for counsel (Figure 13.1). There were, it is true, occasionally jarring notes where the ideological coherence of the entry was fractured. James’s commitment to the ending of the war with Spain which had sapped England’s treasure since 1585 was called into question by the themes of the arch erected by the Dutch merchants, recalling Elizabeth’s support for the rebels in their struggle for independence from Spain, and petitioning James to continue it.19 19 Smuts (ed.), ‘Magnificent Entertainment’, ll. 1066–340; Gervase Hood, ‘The Netherlandic Community in London and Patronage of Painters and Architects in Early Stuart London’, in Juliette Roding et al. (eds), Dutch and Flemish Artists in Britain 1550–1800 (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2003),

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Elsewhere praise for James might imply criticism of Elizabethan abuses, but only rarely do these come into focus, as when Jonson referred to the ‘former age’s stain’ where the innocent were the ‘spoil / Of ravenous greatness’, and the wealthy subject to false accusations by informers.20 But if there were ideological tensions within the show no one said so at the time, and much as Dekker and Jonson might have joshed each other over the place of classical learning in what they were trying to communicate, there was little real difference in the messages they sought to convey.21 That in itself perhaps indicates a degree of consensus over the show’s main claims. Take the issue of peace which was powerfully present in the 1604 entry. Whereas the Venetian ambassador talks of a ‘general disaffection to the peace’ because of the abandonment of the Dutch, the chronicler Edmund Howes distinguishes between the ‘true merchant and honest citizen’ who welcomed the peace, and ‘the multitude of pretended gallants, bankrouts, and unruly youths’ who had become addicted to piracy. There was a minority of merchants who were deeply invested in the war, but for most peace was welcome, and we should not read back to 1603–4 the concerns about limits on trade with Spain that emerged as the decade progressed.22 Likewise, it is true that James’s accession engendered anxieties about the constitutional implications of his Union project, particularly in light of his views on monarchy (avidly consumed by a metropolitan readership within days of his proclamation, up to 10,000 copies of Basilicon Doron being printed in the accession year), but James moved to allay Londoners’ concerns over Union in a speech at the knighting of the lord mayor on 22 May 1603.23 As revisionist historians have suggested, there were different understandings of the constitution in the early seventeenth century, but there was also considerable overlap and room for negotiation between the differing viewpoints. The City authorities were only too happy to appropriate elements of the king’s own rhetoric as in one of the earliest mayoral precepts of the reign, when they described the capital as ‘this his highest city, chamber of his imperial crown’.24 C ROW N A N D C I T Y, 1 6 6 0 – 1 The success of entries as a form of political communication depended then on a degree of rough-and-ready political consensus between Crown and City. As has been suggested developing tensions between Crown and City may have led to the abandonment of the entry by Charles I in 1626. There was some hesitation in the planning committee as to whether to hold an entry in 1661, but Charles II 143–56; Ole P. Grell, Calvinist Exiles in Tudor and Stuart London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996), 165–74. 20  Smuts (ed.), ‘Magnificent Entertainment’, ll. 2469–78. 21  James D. Mardock, Our Scene is London: Ben Jonson’s City and the Space of the Author (London: Routledge, 2008), ch. 2. 22  CSP Venetian, X 185; Stow, Annales, 845. 23  Report on the Manuscripts of Mrs Frankland-Russell-Astley of Chequers Court, Bucks., Historical Manuscripts Commission (London: HMSO, 1900), 17. 24  London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), COL/CC/01/01/042, fol. 78.

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(who was present when the decision was taken) seems to have been consciously seeking to correct his father’s mistakes in creating a more accessible monarchy.25 In staging the entry he was very much emphasizing the return to normality, as Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon put it, so ‘that the novelties and new inventions with which the kingdom had been so much intoxicated for so many years together might be discountenanced and discredited in the eyes of the people’.26 But, as we shall see, the City was deeply compromised by its previous disaffection from the government of Charles I, its collaboration with the Protectorate, and the religious position of many of its leaders was at odds with the prevailing views at court. In these circumstances the projection of harmony and unity between Crown and subjects was going to be difficult to achieve. On the face of it the City greeted the Restoration with an extraordinary outpouring of enthusiasm. Charles’s initial entry into the capital on his thirtieth birthday, 29 May 1660, a stunning mix of civic, military, and aristocratic elements, was a far more impressive opening encounter between the monarch and the citizenry than that of 1603, and it was the beginning of a series of exchanges between Charles and the Londoners which exceeded the expectations of the succession ­protocols and showed the king’s willingness to engage with the citizens in ways his father had for much of his reign shunned. On 5 July he was invited along with members of both Houses of Parliament to dine at Guildhall, providing an excuse for another elaborate procession.27 On 13 July, through the mediation of Lord Montague’s son, the Grocers’ Company carried off the coup of getting the king to accept the freedom of the City in their own company.28 When the City petitioned about its Irish estates forfeited in the Star Chamber judgement of 1635, the king told them in a widely reported speech that ‘he would perform what his father had promised and more . . . That His majesty found they dealt honestly with him and His majesty would deny them nothing’.29 The City reciprocated with extravagant gestures of loyalty. The king’s letter to the City enclosing the Declaration of Breda was immediately printed; so too was its reply.30 On the day the declaration was received, common council ordered that the late king’s statue be set up in Guildhall chapel once again; a few days later a gift of £10,000 to the king and £1,000 each to the Dukes of York and Gloucester was voted; within days of Charles’s arrival in his capital the City returned the New Park at Richmond to the king, making it clear 25  British Library, Stowe MS 580, fol. 17. 26  Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, Lord High Chancellor of England, and Chancellor of the University of Oxford, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1857), I, 454–5. 27  LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fols 235v, 236v–7v; COL/CHD/CT/010, acct. for 1660–1; The Diurnal of Thomas Rugg, 1659–61, ed. William L. Sachse (London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society, 1961), 98–9; The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell, 1970–83), I, 193; The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond Samuel de Beer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 408. 28  Guildhall Library, MS 11588/4, 512, 513. 29  LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fol. 243. 30  Ibid., fols 231, 233v; The Answer of the . . . City of London to His Majesties Gracious Letter and Declaration (London, 1660); A Common-Councell Holden . . . the 21 day of May 1660 (London, 1660); James Heath, The Glories and Magnificent Triumphs of the Blessed Restitution of His Sacred Majesty K. Charles II (London, 1662), 14.

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that it was done ‘by way of restitution and not gift’, while the king responded that the citizens were ‘still loading him with their kindness’, and telling them on the contrary that he would receive it as a gift from them.31 But many of the new king’s followers were very sceptical of the Londoners’ claims to loyalty. The collapse of the government of Charles I, according to a royalist pamphleteer, was due to the ‘the proud, unthankefull, schismaticall, rebellious, bloody City of London’.32 Clarendon wrote of the ‘unruly and mutinous spirit’ of Londoners; the capital was ‘the sink of all the ill humour of the kingdom’.33 Advising Charles II on the Restoration, the Duke of Newcastle saw the mastery of London, ‘that great leviathen, that monster . . . that rebellius citteye . . . that cursed citie’ as the key to the new monarch’s security, and the way to achieve it was by disarming them totally: ‘no more citie captins or collonells, artilery yeard, or miletary yard’. ‘The cheefe busines is to master London . . . master London & you have done your worke’.34 For all its centrality to the Restoration process, the City had to perform some delicate manoeuvring to establish its loyalist credentials.35 The Venetian ambassador reported in early April 1660 how ‘many of the king’s enemies seek to curry favour with excuses’, reinventing themselves as ‘men of sobriety and integrity’.36 On 30  April, the eve of the proclamation of the new king, the common council adopted the Vindication which asserted that the ancient and happy form of government of king, lords, and commons was ‘the most prudent constitution of trust for the preservation of the societies of mankind that ever any nation enjoys or counsel can contrive’; this ancient legal government had been ‘razed by a successive force and usurpation’. The City’s apparent complicity in the act of regicide and in the republican regimes that followed was explained by the overturning of the City constitution in the ‘general deluge of disorder’ in 1648, as its government was ‘delivered into the hands of men of loose and dangerous principles who intruded themselves into the common council of this city by an usurped power derived from the grand overturners’; the records of common council had been stained ‘with most horrid acts tending to the murder of the late king and total extinguishment of kingly government’. These acts it now repudiated and ordered its Vindication to be printed and copies delivered to every MP and all members of the Council of State.37 But commentators were well aware of the hypocritical twistings and turnings of some 31  LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fols 230–1, 232v, 234. 32  A Letter from Mercurius Civicus to Mercurius Rusticus (London, 1643), 32. 33  Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1839), I, 323. 34  T. P. Slaughter (ed.), Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984), 6–7, 9, 40–1. 35  Paulina Kewes, ‘Acts of Remembrance, Acts of Oblivion: Rhetoric, Law, and National Memory in Early Restoration England’, in Laura Clymer (ed.), Ritual, Routine, and Regime: Institutions of Repetition in Euro-American Cultures, 1650–1832 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 106–31. 36  CSP Venetian, XXXII, 137. 37  LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fols 225–229v; A Declaration and Vindication of the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Commons of the City of London (London, 1660).

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members of the elite. Lucy Hutchinson noted the ‘mutabillity of some, and the hipocrisie of others, and the servile flattery of all’.38 And there were developing tensions between court and City. The City was cautious about lending money to the Crown, stalling on a loan of £100,000 intended for the disbandment of the army in mid-August. It was reported that this was because of an understandable reluctance to lend until the terms of the act of indemnity and oblivion were known, but the minutes of the court of common council suggest that it was because of ‘the dissatisfaction of the City by reason of the many grievances lying upon them’. They listed the inequality of poll money, the excise, the proposed tax in lieu of the court of wards, and religion.39 Disagreements of this nature were part of the normal currency of exchange between court and City and were not threatening to the basic stability of the relationship. But much more worrying was the legacy of the civil war’s ideological divisions. The radical fringe in the city had not been silenced. As Matthew Jenkinson has argued, the trials and executions of the regicides did not necessarily run according to the official script. The publication of the trials and of the scaffold speeches allowed arguments in defence of the regicide to be aired once more, while the victims sought to appropriate the status of martyrdom enjoyed by Charles I, and there were expressions of sympathy for those executed.40 The rising of the fifth m ­ onarchist Thomas Venner and his fifty followers between 6 and 9 January 1661 was a powerful reminder of the disloyal elements in the city. Loyalists made much of the folly of the small band ‘insensated to that heighth of enthusiastick valour that they thought themselves strong enough to encounter the whole armed force of one of the greatest and most populous cities in the world’, but others claimed that ‘it did much dampe the spirit of the prophane court party to observe such high courradge and resolution amongst those they thought wholy subdued and trodden under foote’; and the flurry of publications that came in the rising’s wake suggests that it was taken seriously.41 Venner’s followers did indeed represent just a thin sliver of metropolitan opinion, but others, though horrified at the prospect of rebellion, were drifting away from the court. The Restoration in London had been the work of reformed Protestants, not of the cavalier interest, and Dissent remained very powerful, with probably half of the common councillors elected in December 1660 identifiable as dissenters.42 By the spring of 1661 there was real disillusionment at the direction of religious policy, and former foes were building alliances. The pulpits rang out with sermons denouncing popery and prelacy. Zachary Crofton railed against the bishops to packed congregations, until he was sent to the Tower on 23 March, which ‘doth please some 38  Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 227. 39  CSP Venetian, XXXII, 187; LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fols 239v, 240. 40  Matthew Jenkinson, Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660–1685 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2010), 21–47. 41  Richard Baker, A Chronicle of the Kings of England (London, 1674), 757; Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, ed. Blair Worden (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978), 279. 42  Gary S. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75–6.

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and displease others exceedingly’.43 Although London parishes were unquestionably divided over religion, there was much less momentum behind the grass-roots Anglican reaction in the capital than in provincial England.44 The strength of feeling in the city was made very evident in the elections to Parliament held on 19 March 1661. There was an enormous turnout and court opponents, two Presbyterians and two independents, carried the day, reflecting a temporary common front among dissenters.45 The Venetian ambassador saw the result as a real blow to the court, ‘showing that evil humours still remain’; the king was reported to be furious, and some may have advised him to put off the entry to the city and travel between the Tower and Westminster by water.46 Within days a court supporter responded with a squib which attacked the ‘factious locusts’ swarming at the Guildhall, and the ‘City vermin’ who had voted in ‘vild scabs’.47 Another satirical response came in the form of a dialogue between the Guildhall giants, traditional features of mayoral pageantry, spruced up for the reception of the king the previous year, but now so disgusted by the antics of the ‘presbyterian cabal’ and the turncoat Crofton that they want to leave ‘this thankless hall’ and rather be set up ‘on both sides some street in London in room of a pageant’ at the coronation.48 T H E 1 6 6 1 E N T E RTA I N M E N T: M E S S A G E S Such was the fraught state of relations between the court and the City as London prepared to greet its monarch in the entry of 22 April 1661. The iconographic scheme shared much in common with that of 1604, but it was difficult to escape the fact of the recent rebellion. So, the first arch stressed Stuart legitimacy through representations of James, Charles I, and in the central panel Charles II and the Royal Oak (Figure 13.2).49 It warned of the dangers of rebellion with panels depicting the severed heads of the traitors on one side and the King’s arrival at Dover on the other. Beneath the Royal Oak was a painting showing Charles calmly putting to flight the figure of Usurpation ‘with many ill-favoured Heads, some bigger, some lesser, and one particularly shooting out of his Shoulder, like CROMWELL’S; 43  Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Charles II, 1660–1, ed. Mary Anne Everett (London: HMSO, 1860), 536–9, 546 (hereafter CSPD 1660–1); Pepys, Diary, II, 58–9. 44  Ronald Hutton, The Restoration: A Political and Religious History of England and Wales 1658–1667 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 172; Paul Seaward, ‘Gilbert Sheldon, the London Vestries, and the Defence of the Church’, in Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 57–63; Kenneth Fincham and Nicholas Tyacke, Altars Restored: The Changing Face of Anglican Worship, 1547–c.1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 318–21. 45  CSPD 1660–1, 536, 538–42, 546; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 76–8. 46  CSP Venetian, XXXII, 272, 275; Ludlow, Voyce from the Watch Tower, 285–6. 47  The Loyall Subjects Lamentation for Londons Perversenesse, in the Malignant Choice of Some Rotten Members (London, 1661). 48  The Dialogue Between the Two Giants in Guildhall (London, 1661). 49  The best discussions of the entertainment are Ogilby, Entertainment, 1–51; Jenkinson, Culture and Politics, 47–74; Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy 1660– 1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 153–60; Stevenson, City and the King, 95–117.

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Figure 13.2.  The first triumphal arch on the theme of loyalty and rebellion, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). © The Bodleian Libraries.

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Another Head upon his Rump, or Tayl; Two Harpies with a Crown chased by an Angel; Hell’s Jaws opening’. The figure of Rebellion riding a Hydra ‘making the vulgar in fanatique swarms / court civil war’ is put to flight by Monarchy: No more these walls shall breed intestine strife Henceforth your people only shall contend In loyalty each other to transcend[.]

The show thus tried to disassociate the city from the toxic charge of rebellion by emphasizing its loyalism: the figure of Monarchy was dressed in a mantle with a map of Great Britain upon it, and carried London on her head and Dublin and Edinburgh in her hands; the delivery of the keys of the City was shown on southwest face of the first arch, while the Goddess of Concord on the third arch was accompanied by a citizen figure presenting the king with an oaken garland.50 Another powerful theme, much more strongly asserted than in 1604, was the linkage between military and naval strength, and commercial prosperity. The central panel over the second arch by the Royal Exchange showed Charles I with a youthful Charles II and The Sovereign of the Seas (Figure 13.3). In the lower register were figures of Mars and a painting of the Tower on one side, and on the other the figure of Neptune and a painting of the Royal Exchange. Surmounting the whole was the figure of Atlas bearing the globe with a ship aloft. The figure of the River Thames linked the imperial theme to English maritime supremacy (‘the whole sea is your highway . . . you alone the watery worlds command’). Thames’s speech punctuates two rousing seamen’s songs: All merry boys and loyal Our pockets full of pay.

These celebrate their martial exploits in an outpouring of patriotic fervour: We who so often bang’d the Turk Our Broad sides speaking Thunder We’ll care not a fig For France, the Netherlands, nor Spain[.]51

The third arch took the theme of the Temple of Concord, whose speech stresses the harmony of the three kingdoms under Charles (‘three nations glory’), but also resumes the theme of commerce (Figure 13.4): Peace and Concord, never poor Will make with wealth this City shine Ships freight with spice and golden ore[.]52

At the fourth arch representing the Garden of Plenty, Plenty offers the homage of Ceres, Flora, Pallas, and Bacchus in yet another celebration of peace and prosperity (Figure 13.5).53 50  John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majestie’s Entertainment Passing through the City of London to His Coronation (London, 1661), 3–9. 51 Ogilby, Entertainment, 43–110. 52  Ibid., 111–38. 53  Ibid., 144–65.

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Figure 13.3.  The second triumphal arch on the theme of navigation and trade, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). © The Bodleian Libraries.

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Figure 13.4.  The third triumphal arch, on the theme of Concord, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). © The Bodleian Libraries.

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Figure 13.5.  The fourth triumphal arch, the Garden of Plenty, from John Ogilby, The Entertainment of His Most Excellent Majestie Charles II (1662). © The Bodleian Libraries.

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It is noticeable, however, that the East India Company entertainment (not part of Ogilby’s scheme) was much more explicit about the materiality of trade and the role of chartered privileges and royal protection in sustaining it. It owed a lot to the populist elements of the mayor’s shows, with spices being thrown amongst the crowd from an artificial camel. On the front of East India Company House was a painting ‘of gallant ships sailing in the ocean’. A youth in Indian habit attended by two blackamoors addressed the king from the camel, praising Charles for having extended their privileges ‘and dispelled our fears / Of the encroaching Holland’s rival force’.54 This is a more explicitly civic agenda than the Londoners had been able to project in 1604, when overtly commercial themes had been present only on the Dutch arch. But one should be wary of seeing any oppositional agenda in the commercial theme in 1661, for the need to support trade was acknowledged by all, even conservatives like the Duke of Newcastle, and the East India Company entertainment included patriotic flourishes such as the claim that Charles’s imperial title was for real while Spain’s existed but in name.55 T H E 1 6 6 1 E N T E RTA I N M E N T: R E C E P T I O N Ogilby’s texts, our main source for the content of the entertainment, are to some extent an obstacle to discussing the way it was understood.56 They are selective, written from a court perspective, and attempt to construct a particular reading which would have been remote from the experience of those who witnessed the event on the day. There were in fact three London editions of the quarto 1661 text, the first two appearing very close to each other, and the first probably in time for the event itself to act as a programme for the day. It offered a relatively clear account of the iconography of the arches and the speeches delivered, details of the processional order, the artisans employed, and the names of the Guildhall committee. The third edition adds the text of the speeches delivered by the Recorder and the Christ’s Hospital boy which may not have been available at the time of printing the first edition.57 It also changes all present tenses into the past. But it is clear from his monopoly grant (11 April 1661) over publications relating to the entry that Ogilby always intended a fuller illustrated version. For the deluxe folio of 1662 he added an account of the coronation penned by Elias Ashmole, Windsor Herald, vetted and corrected by Sir Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms. The text of the entry was now swamped by a vast array of classical references from 131 authorities, but also enriched by the engravings of the coronation procession by Wenceslas Hollar and of the front façades of the arches by David Loggan.

54  Ogilby, Relation, 9–10. 55 Slaughter, Newcastle’s Advice, 35–42. 56 For the bibliographic issues on which this paragraph draws, see Fredson Bowers, ‘Ogilby’s Coronation Entertainment (1661–1689): Editions and Issues’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), 339–55. 57  Both speeches circulated separately in print: The Speech Spoken by Sir William Wylde (London, 1661), A Speech Spoken by a Blew-Coat Boy of Christs Hospital (London, 1661).

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There were some significant omissions from the 1662 folio. Reference to the East India Company show was cut; the dedication to the lord mayor and aldermen and the details of civic management and the artificers dropped. Also removed were the civic speeches inserted in the third edition of the previous year. Ogilby’s was always a pretty sanitized version of the show, downplaying its more populist ­elements like the acrobatic performances and some of the pageants separately supplied by the companies,58 and it would not have pleased citizen readers that there is no reference to the City’s gift of £1,000 in gold to the King at what for them was the high point of the proceedings near the third arch in Cheapside. The effect of the 1662 cuts, however, was to occlude the citizen involvement altogether. To the reader of the text, the citizen spectators now become invisible. The liverymen and trained bands are lining the route, but you would not know it. This is now a text for the court in denial about the city. Ogilby’s lengthy expositions on the classical themes imitated and to some extent plagiarized his source text, the Pompa Introitus Ferdinandi, but they were also part of the mission to reclaim the classical literary heritage for the royalist tradition, as is suggested by accompanying translations from the royalist poets Thomas Stanley and Thomas Ross.59 It was not, however, a text likely to enjoy popularity in the City: when the Clothworkers’ Company was approached with presentation copies of the 1661 version, they politely declined, in contrast to their purchase of copies of the text of the lord mayor’s show a few months earlier.60 What did the citizens make of it all? Individual spectators on the day would only have been able to see a portion of the performance, and the processional element may well have made the greater impression; the speeches would only have been heard by those in the king’s immediate entourage, and unless spectators had Ogilby’s programme—it is likely that some had—they would not have known what was going on at other locations. But the arches did remain standing for some time after the event, and the printed texts may have aided interpretation. Ogilby’s classicizing references might have been an obstacle to understanding, though as we have seen classical learning may not have been quite so much the preserve of the courtiers, and in any case, Ogilby’s classicism was more superficial than Jonson’s, ‘lacking in dramatic focus, and consisting chiefly in the large number of legends and mottoes scattered over the arches’.61 So, those with a limited classical education could have readily grasped the core themes. Truth, the daughter of Time, and the contrast between the decayed and flourishing Commonwealth were familiar themes from previous entertainments. And there were concessions to popular taste in devices like the seamen’s song. By looking at the 1661 entry in the context of the various other performances of the City’s loyalty over the previous year, we can get a further sense of the cultural 58  Eric Halfpenny, ‘The Citie’s Loyalty Displayed’, Guildhall Miscellany, 10 (1959), 32; Clothworkers’ Company, Court Minutes, 1649–65, fol. 168. 59 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 301–8, 364–9, 374–8, 382–3, 431–2. 60  Clothworkers’ Company, Court Minutes, 1649–65, fol. 169v. 61  Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 219.

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framework in which Londoners might have interpreted it. The core themes, the return of peace and prosperity, the righting of injustice, and the triumph of monarchy over rebellion were all ones that had been well developed in the 1660 entertainments that were clearly civic productions. These included a remarkable series of dinners with songs and dramatic tableaux, most of them authored by Thomas Jordan, that had been put on for the chief military agent of the Restoration, General Monck, in the crucial period from late February to early April after the return of the MPs who had been purged in December 1648, an essential precondition for Charles’s return. These entertainments had projected the blame for the republican catastrophe onto the fanatics, attacked the violation of City privileges, and looked forward to the revival of trade. Monck is praised as the restorer of liberty, the rescuer both of the  Church, hitherto ‘a sacrifice to the Phanatique’s lust’, and of the laws, so recently ‘a Prey unto the Monstrous Jawes / Of wolves and vermin’. Unsurprisingly the speeches and songs for Monck are insistent on the dangers of rebellion and the fact that in due course the perpetrators will get their just deserts. At the entertainment at Fishmongers’ Hall the ghost of the fisherman Masaniello, the leader of the Neapolitan rebels of 1648, warns how fleeting his dominance was, now being ‘into Perdition hurl’d’, and reminds all of the heroism of William Walworth who slew the rebel Jack Straw, a telling example of the City loyalty the guildsmen were seeking to re-inscribe. The return to political stability, they hoped, would lead to commercial prosperity. ‘Is not Navigation / The only glory of the Nation?’ asked the Goldsmiths’ entertainment.62 The main theme of the pageant sequence authored by John Tatham and provided for the city entertainment when the king was received at the Guildhall on 5 July 1660 was forgiveness. The king was greeted by the figure of Time on bended knee craving pardon: Having been made a Property to Slaves; A Stalking-horse unto their horrid Crimes[.]

Charles’s arrival, however, revives Time, and gives life to his subjects: Such is the Vertual Fervour of your Beams, That not Obliquely but directly Streams Upon your Subjects; So the Glorious Sun Gives growth to th’ infant Plants he smiles upon.

62  Quotations from A Speech Made to His Excellency the Lord General Monck and the Councell of State at Drapers-Hall (London, 1660); A Speech Made to His Excellency the Lord General Monck and the Council of State at Fishmongers-Hall (London, 1660); A Speech Made to His Excellency the Lord General Monck and the Council of State at Goldsmiths Hall (London, 1660). See also A Speech Made to His Excellency the Lord General Monck at Clotheworkers Hall (London, 1660); A Speech Made to His Excellency George Monck General &c. the Twelfth Day of Aprill MDCLX at a Solemn Entertainment at Vintners Hall (London, 1660); Bacchus Festival. Or a New Medley being a Musical Representation at the Entertainment of His Excellency the Lord General Monck at Vintners Hall (London, 1660); A Song to His Excellency the Ld. General Monck at Skinners-Hall (London, 1660); A Pleasant Dialogue Between the Country-Man and Citizen Presented to my Lord Generall and Councell of State at their Last Dinner at Drapers Hall (London, 1660).

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Truth, as the daughter of Time, addresses the king and acknowledges the need for penance on the part of the citizens, while recognizing the king’s power ‘to refine / Sublunar things to species more divine’. Fame praises the king’s constancy, courage, and wisdom in adversity, and celebrates the joy of the citizens.63 Tatham had more opportunity to develop loyalist themes into his pageant sequence, The Royal Oak, for the inauguration of the new lord mayor, the Merchant Tailor woodmonger, Sir Richard Browne on 29 October 1660, where we find a more diverse set of images, many of which were to be followed up in the royal entry the next year. A speech by Oceanus from a ship and rock moored by Whitehall invites the lord mayor as a royal substitute to look to the increase of trade that is made possible by the advent of peace, just as had happened, it was claimed, under Charles’s grandfather James. The second pageant in Paul’s churchyard followed a standard theme of Merchant Tailor pageants and inscribed loyalism into a civic framework by emphasizing the royal connections of the company (of which eight kings had been free), but the speech makes more general points about the benefits of ‘God-like’ monarchy over democratic anarchy and ‘licentious freedom’, and stresses Charles’s legitimacy. Another pageant in Cheapside presented Browne with the emblematic Royal Oak itself, where Sylvanus tells of Charles’s miraculous preservation. In the final pageant Time saluted the mayor and explained how justice had been brought upon the traitors. Time had brought about the restoration of peace and the triumph of Truth, and with them came plenty. Peace closes the show with a celebration of the taming of the ‘monsters . . . of Caucus den / whose ­sulphurous nostrils breathed intestine jars / sword, fire and famine, the effect of wars’, and with Peace comes the revival of trade. There is no doubting the loyalist imperatives that drove this pageant sequence (indeed they become more strident as it progresses), but there is also a strong insistence on peace and prosperity which link the first and fourth pageants. The City was loyal but expected its commercial interests were to be looked to.64 So, it would seem that the messages of the 1661 royal entry were not so ­impenetrable as to be inaccessible to wider audiences and they chimed in with elements of previous civic entertainments. But is there any evidence that people actually did get the point? It has to be admitted that most contemporaries have very little to say about the arches and paid far more attention to the ordering of the procession and the extraordinary display of wealth it entailed.65 It is noticeable that several of the accounts published abroad are more attentive to the details of dress than to the iconography of the arches or the content of the speeches.66 Samuel Pepys does not mention the speeches at all. Both Pepys and the seasoned 63  John Tatham, Londons Glory Represented by Time, Truth and Fame (London, 1660); The Royall Entertainment Presented by the Loyalty of the City (London, 1660). 64  John Tatham, The Royal Oake with other Various and Delightfull Scenes Presented on the Water and the Land (London, 1660). 65 Evelyn, Diary, 420; Pepys, Diary, II, 83; The Travels of Peter Mundy in Europe and Asia, 1608–1667, ed. R. C. Temple and L. M. Anstey, 5 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1907–36), V, 132–3. 66 Abraham Aubry, Abbildung und Denkwürdige Erzehlung der Konigl: Crönung Caroli desz Zwentum (Frankfurt, 1661); Bericht von der Crönung Ihr Konigl. Maiestät von Grosz-Britannien Caroli II ([s.n.], 1661), Egentlige Relation aff Londen Om den Kongelig Croning Caroli II (Copenhagen, 1661);

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traveller Peter Mundy were most impressed by the paintings on the front of East India House in Leadenhall Street, which were not part of the overall design by Ogilby and Gerbier. Thomas Rugg, the Covent Garden barber with strong court connections, drew on the brief account of the arches and speeches in the Kingdom’s Intelligencer, but adds some detail not found in other accounts about a heraldic show of a richly carved lion and unicorn on a balcony by Temple Bar, where an old man delivered a golden key to the king as he left the city. Rugg also copied out the speeches by the Recorder in Cheapside and by the blue coat boy of Christ’s Hospital.67 The ‘civic’ elements suppressed in Ogilby’s later version are thus more prominent. There was a tendency among loyalists to be dismissive of dissenting voices, or to ignore them altogether. The ballad Joyful News to the Nation claimed that ‘only the Phanaticks . . . stood very mute’, but as we have seen the disaffection in the months running up to the coronation was more widespread. What did reformed Protestants make of it all? During the republic a more restrained and civic-orientated form of celebration had emerged. The Recorder in welcoming the Lord Protector to the city on 8 February 1654 had deliberately distanced the celebrations from the imperial triumphs held elsewhere.68 Many Presbyterians shared the views of ­ Richard Baxter, preaching in St Paul’s on 10 May 1660 that the king’s restoration must be celebrated with sobriety and not with ‘fleshly mirth’.69 It is not surprising that we find considerable uneasiness about the form of the entertainment in this group. A correspondent sympathetic to the recently elected London MPs described the coronation pageants as ‘ye highest vanity ever my eyes beheld much more then I could imagine’.70 The Baptist Henry Adis, a victim of Lord Mayor Browne’s persecution, attacked the ‘vainglorious citizens’ who ‘do little good by your high towering Babel-like Pagions’.71 The Essex Presbyterian, Ralph Josselin who visited the capital on 3 May was troubled by the first arch, particularly by the inscriptions flanking the effigies of James I and Charles I: ‘Imperium sine fine dedi’. He notes the ‘effigie of stakes and fagotts to burn people; of the heads of the regicides on poles; and warrelike instruments broken’. Josselin thinks the arches smack of ‘heathnisme’ and reflects upon ‘vain flattery’; he asks the Lord to prevent ‘villainous wickednes’.72 Milton was doubtless thinking of the coronation procession when he Francesco Valuasense, Il Trionfo d’Inghilterra overo Racconto et Relatione Delle Solemnita fatte & offerante nella Gloriosa Incoratione della Maesta di Carolo Secundo (Venice, 1661). 67 Evelyn, Diary, 419–21; Pepys, Diary, II, 81–3; Rugg, Diurnal, 169–76; Kingdom’s Intelligencer, 17 (29 April 1661); Travels of Peter Mundy, V, 132–3. 68  Mercurius Politicus, 191 (9 February 1654), 3266–7; Edward Holberton, Poetry and the Cromwellian Protectorate: Culture, Politics and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37–60; Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 385–537. 69  Richard Baxter, Right Rejoicing (London, 1660), 20, 30. 70  TNA, SP 29/32/104. 71  Henry Adis, A Fannaticks Alarm Given to the Mayor (London, 1661). 72  The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683, ed. Alan Macfarlane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 479.

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wrote of ‘the tedious pomp that waits / On princes’.73 On the sectarian fringe the arches were a target for arson, as a group of fifth monarchists allegedly sought to burn them down on the night of 16 April 1661.74 It is quite clear that ideological division made it very hard for the rituals to work the kind of magic the Duke of Newcastle envisaged when he claimed that ‘nothing keepes upp a king more than seremoney & order which makes distance’.75 Even if people did view the arches closely, there is no guarantee that they would get the right message. There is a very interesting misreading in a brief tract entitled The Cities Loyalty Displayed which George Thomason acquired on 19 April 1661; it was doubtless this kind of opportunistic publication that Ogilby was so keen to suppress. The pamphlet has tended to be overlooked because its errors and omissions are so egregious, although it claimed to be offering the key to ‘the private meanings and perfect actions at the day of public view which is not yet discovered’. On the first arch, it correctly identifies the importance of the representations of the monarchs and the Royal Oak, though there is no mention of the rebellion theme at all, so the point is rather missed. Likewise, his account of the second arch says nothing about trade and concentrates on the notion that four kings are giving homage to Charles. His description of the third arch confuses the figure of Concord on the top of the arch with Apollo, and calls the structure the temple of Diana when it is in fact the temple of Concord. The only thing he gets roughly right is the fourth arch which is described as the garden of plenty, though little detail is given. That said, the tract then goes on to give a fascinating account of the erection of the  enormous maypole at Charing Cross, supplying us with details about the Westminster celebrations that Ogilby ignores.76 The other problem was that reports were circulating about the scheme which reflected the hopes and aspirations of the correspondents rather than what was actually represented. William Smith writing on 13 April was confident about the scheme. He got the point about the first arch (‘it presenteth anarchy and the confusion which that government brings’), but gave the others a determinedly different ideological spin. The second arch, he claimed, ‘holds forth presbytery and with it the decay of trade’. Warming to his theme he suggested that the third ‘showeth the restoration of episcopacy’; the king was to be entertained to a banquet in the structure, and ‘to show the power which episcopacy has over presbytery, just at His Majesty’s departure will arise the form of the old Cross, which anciently stood at the place, at whose appearance presbytery vanisheth’. The fourth, he asserted, ‘represents Monarchy whereby the former disorders are brought into their conformities’.77 The destruction of the Cross, a key marker of civic devotion and monarchical loyalism, had become emblematic of the destructive force of the revolutionaries,

73  John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler (London: Longman, 1971), 278 (Book V, 354–5). 74  A True Discovery of a Bloody Plot Contrived by the Phanaticks Against the Proceedings of the City of London (London, 1661). 75 Slaughter, Newcastle’s Advice, 45. 76  The Cities Loyalty Display’d (London, 1661). 77  Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Part I (London: HMSO, 1876), 175.

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undermining order in Church and state.78 Perhaps this apparent royalist fantasy culminating in the resurrection of the Cross was just wishful thinking? Part of the rumour mill at court? It is perhaps significant that at the time Smith was writing the arches were not complete, Pepys reporting them ‘almost done’ four days later, so perhaps he was just muddled.79 But Smith was not alone in seeing messages supportive of the restored Anglican order in the entry. John Crouch in his verses Loyal Reflections published just after the coronation, describes Cheapside as ‘all gold to recompence the Cross’, and refers to Fair Concord (the theme of the third arch) as the Church’s emblem.80 Another set of panegyric verses celebrating the king’s passage, Gloria Britanica, used the conceit of the three triumphal arches of religion, loyalty, and love erected in each subject’s heart; but while adopting the language of moderation and calling for a middle way, it nevertheless warns against factions and ‘pretended healings’ which might ‘gain us wound’, a reference perhaps to the abortive efforts to accommodate Presbyterians in the Anglican church that were being discussed at that moment at Savoy House.81 By 1662 Ogilby was more explicit about the religious message. The figure above the trophy of decollated heads on the first arch ‘hath on her shield a mountain burning, cities and vineyards destroyed and ruined’ and the phrase Impia Foedera. In the 1662 edition this is glossed as referring explicitly to the Solemn League and Covenant, which had been burned by the common hangman in New Palace Yard, Cheapside and the Royal Exchange by order of Parliament on 22 May 1661 soon after the coronation. The 1661 text, by contrast, makes no explicit reference to the Covenant. That it does not might reflect differences of opinion among those in charge of the show. There was certainly some uncertainty about the place of bishops in the processional order. Some of the accounts, including that of Pepys who may have been using Richard Williams’s processional order, wrongly record the bishops as being present, so there may have been some doubt about whether they should be included.82 The republican exile Edmund Ludlow notes that their ‘places were voyd, it being sayd they durst not ride in their habits for feare of the people’.83 It was too risky to put Anglicanism on display in a city which had hooted down the bishops at its election a month earlier. The City had been determined that its entertainment should testify to ‘the unspeakable love and loyalty of this city, His Majesty’s royal chamber, to his sacred person and government’.84 But there were too many tensions to make it an ­unqualified success. It is true that reformed Protestants might claim that they had 78  David Cressy, ‘The Downfall of Cheapside Cross: Vandalism, Ridicule, and Iconoclasm’, in Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 234–50. 79 Pepys, Diary, II, 77. 80  John Crouch, To His Sacred Majestie: Loyal Reflections upon His Glorious Restauration, Procession and Coronation (London, 1661). 81  Gloria Britanica: or, A Panegyrick on His Sacred Majesties Passage Thorow the City of London (London, 1661). 82 Pepys, Diary, II, 82; A True Copie of the List, or Roll, of the Kings Majesties Most Royall Proceedings from the Tower Through London to White-Hall (London, 1661). 83 Ludlow, Voyce from the Watch Tower, 286. 84  LMA, COL/CC/01/01/042, fol. 245v.

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been central to bringing it about, and they could try to project blame for the disasters of the last twenty years on to the fanatics, but by the time of the coronation their disagreements with a resurgent Anglicanism were all too palpable. The script of entries attempted to paper over the cracks in a celebration of civic loyalty; that had been easy enough to do in the circumstances of the accession of James I, but by 1661 the ideological fissures that were the legacy of the Civil Wars made the claims to unity that underpinned the entry hollow. The question of staging an entry did not even arise in 1685. This may have been because of the constraints of the coronation timetable, as Kevin Sharpe suggested: James II wanted to move quickly to  insure himself against challengers. Perhaps, as Malcolm Smuts argues, the conspicuous consumption that the entries entailed was increasingly at odds with changing aristocratic mores.85 But another factor was surely the bitter legacy of the political divisions occasioned by the Exclusion crisis; much of London’s political establishment had recently been purged because of its opposition to the king’s succession; the City’s charter, the fundamental guarantee of its autonomy, had been forfeited, and London stood naked before royal power.86 The disjunction between the notion of consensus on which the entries relied and the messy realities of a deeply divided city doubtless made the prospect of a procession through the streets deeply unappealing. Better to have a spectacular fireworks display on the river, which mingled populist (the Guildhall giants were there, stuffed with fireworks) and absolutist ( James as sun king and pater patriae) elements, but keeping the king at a safe distance from his factious subjects.87

85 Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, 288–9; Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma’, 87–9. 86  For a discussion of the effect of political division on the performance of the lord mayors’ shows in this period, see Ian W. Archer, ‘The Social and Political Dynamics of the Lord Mayor’s Show, c.1550–1700’, in J. Caitlin Finlayson and Amrita Sen (eds), Civic Performances: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (London: Routledge, forthcoming). 87  A Representation of the Fire-Works upon the River of Thames, Over Against Whitehall, at Their Majesties Coronation Ao. 1685 (London, 1685); R. Lowman, An Exact Narrative and Description of the Wonderfull and Stupendious Fireworks in Honour of their Majesties Coronations, and for the High Entertainment of Their Majesties, the Nobility, and City of London; Made on the Thames, and Perform’d to the Admiration and Amazement of the Spectators, on April the 24, 1685 (London, 1685). Cf. Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 91–127.

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14 Royal Mothers, Sacred History, and Political Polemic R. Malcolm Smuts On 15 March 1604, James I made his triumphal entry into his new capital of London before tens of thousands of spectators. His young son Prince Henry rode a short distance ahead of him, while about twenty yards further back in the procession Queen Anna of Denmark sat on a throne atop a brightly painted chariot, ‘in a long robe of crimson velvet lined with ermine, without other ornament, simply girt, hair down’, like a bride’s on her wedding day, ‘and a crown of plain gold on her head’. Around her a troop of countesses, in similar crimson robes but with ‘their hair done up, and small crowns on their heads’, proceeded on foot.1 All three royal figures had rich canopies carried over their heads, emphasizing their sacred status. As they paused before the second of seven triumphal arches erected along their route they saw a Latin inscription: Cuique frui tota fas est uxore marito Et sui fas simil pignora nosse patri. Ecce ubi pignoribus circumstipata coruscis It comes, et tanto vix minor ANNA viro. Haud metus est, regem posthac ne proximus heres, Neu successorem non amet ille suum. It is right for the husband to enjoy his wife; and it is right for the same father to recognize his offspring. Behold his consort comes, surrounded by a brilliant retinue, Queen ANNA scarcely less magnificent than her great husband. There is no fear that the next heir does not love the king, nor that the king does not love his successor.2

An actor then recited a speech by Ben Jonson announcing that the English were welcoming not just a new king but a ‘Godlike race’ of kings that would thereafter I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Paulina Kewes and Andrew McRae, for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter. 1  Horatio F. Brown et al. (eds), Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 38 vols (London: HMSO, 1864–1947), X, 75. 2 R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), ‘The Whole Royal and Magnificent Entertainment’, in Thomas Middleton, The Collected Works, gen. eds Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), I, 240.

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shelter Britain beneath its spreading ‘branches’, and ‘shoot o’er the main and knit with every shore / In bonds of marriage, kindred and increase’. Although royal consorts—usually although not always women—fulfilled ­multiple roles in seventeenth-century courts, the most important was producing children.3 By doing so they perpetuated the royal bloodline, while also creating opportunities for future marriage alliances with other royal families that were a ubiquitous feature of international politics in the period. Sometimes these alliances eventually led, through the operation of dynastic inheritance, to the creation of new ‘multiple kingdoms’, as in the case of the union of England and Scotland under Stuart rule in 1603. The significance of a queen consort in a royal succession therefore differed in important ways from that of her husband. Whereas his elevation to the throne marked the start of a new reign that would last for a single lifetime, her role was more connected to a social and biological process of royal marriage and procreation that provided for future successions, while s­ imultaneously forging bonds of royal kinship across national frontiers that affected relations between different states and at times the very definition of a kingdom. For James VI and I, the procreation of children through dynastic marriages possessed not only a legal and political but a deep religious significance. In his view the biological accidents that determined which dynasties died out and which survived to inherit multiple kingdoms were really no such thing. They were instead providentially determined events, through which God directed the course of human affairs. This claim amounted to an effort at removing contentious issues involved in royal successions, especially pertaining to confessional identity, from the realm of politics to that of sacred history. If God rather than men chose kings through the operation of known rules, then subjects had a duty to submit even when the outcome affronted their own consciences. These views gained traction in Britain, as well as contemporary France, because they suited the needs not only of the newly established Stuart and Bourbon dynasties but of subjects looking for a way to avoid violent confessional conflicts. Once James made clear his commitment to Protestantism and Henry of Navarre converted to Catholicism, the principle of divine right hereditary legitimacy offered an effective guarantee that the dominant religion in each kingdom would preserve its position for the foreseeable future. Paradoxically the same principle also made it easier for French Protestants and British Catholics to negotiate arrangements under which they might hope to enjoy a measure of de facto toleration in return for political submission. Treating royal marriages and childbirths as religious mysteries made it easier to accept the king’s right to arbitrate religious differences and impose confessional compromises. But in practice it proved impossible to prevent discourses about royal consorts and their children from becoming contaminated by confessional politics, for several reasons. Dynastic marriages invariably had religious implications that were subject to different constructions. In celebrating these unions, writers therefore found opportunities to stake out opposing interpretations of the providential 3  Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben (eds), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting Across Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

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designs in which God intended the ruling dynasty to participate. The fact that Charles I, Charles II, and James II all married Catholic brides further complicated matters by raising questions about whether a dynasty that depended for its long-term survival on Catholic women could be relied upon to sustain British Protestantism. The present chapter sets out to examine literary representations of Stuart consorts from a perspective at once narrower and broader than that of existing scholarship on the subject. It is narrower in being concerned not with depictions of queens in general, but ideas specifically connected to dynastic marriages and the birth of heirs to the throne, especially as these related to religious controversies. It will therefore have little to say about such topics as queens’ participation in court theatricals and patronage of literature and material culture, which have been well treated in existing scholarship.4 On the other hand it adopts an unusually long chronological perspective, spanning the entire century between Anna of Denmark’s arrival in Scotland in 1589 and the Glorious Revolution. By doing so it seeks to identify both broad continuities over this period and points of inflection, when representations of consorts changed in significant ways. It will be argued that some influential studies have exaggerated the degree to which misogynist and anti-Catholic attacks on consorts were a continuous feature of seventeenth-century p ­ olemical culture between the 1620s and the 1680s, rather than responses to particular moments of crisis.5 Close investigation shows that attacks on Catholic queens were both episodic, erupting during fairly brief periods and then subsiding for longer intervals, and varied in content, as writers responded to changing political contexts. Broadly speaking we can identify three main issues in this polemical literature, involving the consort’s potential role as a rallying point for disloyal British Catholics aligned with a foreign dynasty, her direct influence over her husband, and the threat that she might produce a Catholic heir to the throne. But it is rare to find a single pamphlet that emphasizes all three at once, and over time the emphasis shifted from the first problem to the last. This suggests, on the one hand, that the Catholic marriages that provided for the production of future heirs to the throne remained a source of continuing anxiety that flared up at periodic intervals, not only at the time of royal successions but at other moments of tension. But the precise ways in which these unions were perceived as threatening to Protestant rule altered as surrounding circumstances changed. Although a single chapter cannot hope to survey the full range of polemical material relating to Stuart consorts written during the century under review, this discussion seeks to identify several substantially different patterns of argument that developed around the roles of Stuart consorts in perpetuating the royal lineage, while linking it through ties of kinship to foreign ‘popish’ dynasties.

4  For example Leeds Barroll, Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Karen Britland, Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Erin Griffey, On Display: Henrietta Maria and the Materials of Display at the Stuart Courts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 5  Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), ch. 3; Laura Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity from Henrietta Maria to Milton’s Eve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chs 1 and 2.

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D Y N A S T I C M A R R I A G E , ROY A L P RO C R E AT I O N , AND GOD’S WILL The story really begins even before James’s arrival in England, since his marriage to Anna of Denmark in 1589 quickly contributed to narratives about the Stuarts’ future role as Protestant British monarchs. Because he had no siblings or close cousins, the survival of the Stuart dynasty had previously depended on the uncertain prospect that James would live long enough to produce heirs. More than once during his turbulent adolescence noble factions had threatened his life, while rumours circulated that Catholics might try to abduct him, carry him to the Continent, marry him to a Catholic, and force his conversion to Rome. Either event would have plunged Scotland into turmoil, while further embroiling the problem of the English succession. By wedding Anna—the daughter and sister of Lutheran kings of Denmark—James put a damper on these speculations, signalled his commitment to Protestantism and demonstrated his intention to sire an heir who stood to inherit both the Scottish and English thrones. The lavish reception given Anna when she arrived in Scotland, in May 1590, and the publication of a tract in both Edinburgh and London describing the event, underlined these messages.6 The consort’s welcome was an emphatically Protestant event, punctuated by the singing of psalms and a sermon by the Presbyterian Robert Bruce. But the scenic apparatus that the printed account described in detail—including t­ riumphal chariots, richly embroidered cloths, artillery salutes by the town militia, pageants with mechanical stage scenery and prodigious quantities of food and wine—also marked the return of royal magnificence to Scotland on a scale not seen since at least the 1560s. A pageant representing historic kings of Scotland alluded to Anna’s role in perpetuating the royal lineage. One king lay sick on the ground until she approached, whereupon he revived and delivered a Latin oration, suggesting that she had cured the disease threatening Scottish kingship.7 The ceremonies also affirmed that any child born to Anna would eventually rule all Britain. A Latin oration delivered before her and then published separately by James’s official printer, Robert Waldegrave, hailed the marriage as presaging the future peaceful unification of England and Scotland: Nec amplius divisis, accedet Laeta pax Britannis: Faustus, felixque Maius verno tenerum Pingens honore solum: cuius suavissima luce, haec nobis accesserunt gaudia. A happy peace will approach the no-longer divided Britons as auspicious and fertile May colours the soil with the honour of spring. With his [May’s] most agreeable light these joys have approached us.8

6  The Joyfull Receiving of James the Sixt . . . and Queen Anne His Wife, into the Townes of Lyeth and Edenborough the First Daie of May Last Past (London, 1590). 7  Ibid., 6. 8  John Russell, Verba Ioann Ruselli iureconsulti pro senatu populoque Edinburgensi habit ad serenissimam scotorum reginam Annam dum Edinburgum ingreditur 19 Maij An. 1590. I thank my colleague, Kenneth Rothwell, for help with the translation.

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In alluding to the season of Anna’s arrival these lines also refer to the classical myth of the Golden Age, a time of perpetual spring, which Vergil and other Silver Age poets had associated with the reign of Augustus. The oration thereby anticipated a theme of later English masques and panegyrics, that the Stuarts are destined to establish a neo-Augustan empire of peace encompassing all Britain. This was a provocative gesture, since Elizabeth strongly disliked any public discussion of her successor. Four years later, when the Presbyterian minister Andrew Melville wrote another Latin poem hailing James and Anna’s first child as a ‘Scoto-Britannic Prince’, the English ambassador lodged a strong formal protest, forcing James to disclaim all knowledge of how the poem had found its way into print not only in his own realm but on the Continent. We may doubt whether he was really as innocent as he pretended. Predictions of dynastic union implicitly raised questions about the role that the new British state would play in European affairs. Melville’s poem gave an emphatic answer: Britons would join with their dynastic allies the Danes, along with the French under Henry of Navarre and German Protestant princes, to wage victorious war against Spain and destroy the Kingdom of Antichrist.9 This militant and apocalyptic rhetoric would have appealed to English Puritans, further reassuring them of James’s identity as a godly king. But while the image of Henry as a staunchly Protestant and warlike prince persisted until his death in 1612, his parents soon began displaying other tendencies. Anna may have secretly converted to Catholicism in the 1590s, while James, in an effort to mollify English Catholics and Catholic rulers on the Continent, started signalling his support for irenic ­policies. In 1604 he ended England’s long war with Spain. At the start of his English reign it had therefore become possible to imagine the Stuart succession in either of two ways, as foreshadowing the rise of a militantly Protestant Great Britain or alternatively as an event that would heal religious divisions at home while bringing peace with foreign states. Not surprisingly the Catholic Jonson adopted the latter position in his pageants for the 1604 entry, especially one staged at Temple Bar. For this he devised an arch representing the Temple of Janus, graced by statues of ‘Irene or Peace’ and ‘Plutus or Wealth’, standing over a ‘grovelling’ figure of Mars with broken weapons. They were accompanied by ‘Esychia or Quiet, the first handmaid of peace’, with ‘Tarache or tumult’ lying at her feet. Before this backdrop a pageant unfolded in which an ancient Roman Flamen or priest, awakened by the noise of the entry, concludes that the celebration must be for the feast day of the goddess Anna Perenna, whom Jonson in a marginal note associates with the Moon and the turning of the seasons, although the Flamen calls her ‘Mars his companion’. The Genius of London quickly corrects the Flamen’s error: Lo, there is he Who brings with him a greater Anne than she, Whose strong and potent virtues have defaced 9  For a brief discussion, see Malcolm Smuts, ‘Prince Henry and his World’, in Catherine MacLeod et al. (eds), The Lost Prince: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013), 19–32 at 20 and references cited therein.

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Stern Mars his statues, and upon them placed His and the world’s blessed blessings: This hath brought Sweet Peace to sit in that bright state she ought, Unbloody or untroubled

Like the 1590 oration, Jonson’s speech plays upon the date of a royal celebration (15 March) to associate Stuart rule with the passing of ‘Mars his month’ and arrival of spring, the season of the Golden Age. But the Ides of March also had a more famous significance in Roman history, to which the Genius refers by wishing that ‘these Ides’ may prove as fortunate to James ‘as they to Caesar fatal were’. He then closes the gates to Janus’s temple, signalling the passage from war to peace, a gesture towards negotiations with Spanish diplomats then underway in the city. Through its pattern of associations the pageant suggests not only that James will establish a new ‘Augustan’ age but that he will do so without any of the violence that accompanied the ancient Roman transition from Republic to Empire, and that his consort and heir are essential to this pacific outcome. In the printed account the Genius’s speech is followed by a description of an altar whose two Latin inscriptions clinch the point. One hails James, Anna, and Henry, whose arrival is credited with clearing ‘the funereal and most intemperate air’, while the second proclaims James ‘Caesar Augustus, Father of his Country’ (IMP. JACOBUS MAX. Caesar Aug. P. P.), and announces that ‘because peace has been brought forth for the British people on land and sea, a decree of the Senate closes the gate’ (PACE POPULO BRITANNICO TERRA MARIQUE PARTA IANVM CLVSIT. S. C.).10 Jonson’s pageant insistently links the dawn of a new age of British peace not merely to James’s arrival but to Anna and Henry, who provide for the future continuation of Stuart rule, and thus to the fertile royal marriage and the principle of hereditary succession. Alert readers may have recalled that the absence of such a principle, along with infighting among members of the Julio-Claudian dynasty soon ended the Augustan peace. In subsequent texts Jonson extended the equation between royal domestic happiness and civic tranquillity. A ‘Panegyre’, written to commemorate James’s opening of his first parliament just four days after the entry, inverted the formula by alluding to arguments previously advanced by the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sanders, associating the adulterous sexuality of Henry VIII with spoliation for the Church and persecution of the innocent. James’s reign will put an end to an age Where acts gave license to impetuous lust To bury churches in forgotten dust, And with their ruines raise the panders bowers.11

Henry’s lust, which broke the constraints of law and religion to produce an age of sacrilege and tyranny is implicitly contrasted to James’s monogamous love that will preserve his subjects’ rights by confining passion within lawful bounds. Jonson’s 10  Smuts (ed.), ‘Magnificent Entertainment’, 264–73. 11  Jonson, ‘A Panegyre’, ed. Martin Butler, in The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington et al., 7 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), II, 471–82.

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court masques and those of his Caroline successors further extended this pattern of argument by treating love as a unifying force within nature, a social and political force uniting the king to his subjects, and an erotic force in every conjugal union that assures the perpetuation of the human species and the social order.12 The harmonious family relations of royal couples—celebrated through portraiture and printed engravings as well as literature—became emblematic of civic peace. Although Jonson was the most important architect of an early Stuart cult of royal domesticity and marital love, other writers and artists also contributed. Even before the 1604 entry, Samuel Daniel had composed a long poem welcoming James to Robert Cecil’s house of Theobolds on his progress south in 1603 that in two key stanzas commemorated the descent of the Crown through a woman, Margaret Tudor, the daughter of Henry VII and wife of James IV of Scotland, through whom the Stuarts derived their English title: Thus hath the hundreth year brought backe againe The sacred blood lent to adorne the North, And here return’d it with a greater gaine, And greater glory than we sent it forth: Thus doth the all-working Providence retaine, And keepe for great effects the seede of worth, And so doth point the stops of time thereby In periods of uncertain certainty.

Unlike Jonson, Daniel explicitly describes the operation of dynastic inheritance as  providentially directed. But he is also willing to see royal women as willing instruments of Providence because of their role not only as mothers but royal matchmakers: Margaret of Richmond (Glorious grandmother Unto that other precious Margaret, From whence th’Almighty worker did transfer This branch of peace as from a roote well set) Thou mother, author, plotter, Counsellor Of union that didst both conceive, beget, And bring forth happiness to this great state, To make it thus entirely fortunate.13

Margaret of Richmond (today more usually known as Margaret of Beaufort) was Henry VII’s mother and a great-great-granddaughter of Edward III; it was through her that the Tudors derived their claim to the throne. She helped arrange her son’s marriage to Elizabeth of York, uniting the two royal dynasties that had fought the Wars of the Roses and, Daniel implies, the marriage of her granddaughter and namesake to the king of Scotland. She thus ‘conceived’ and gave birth to ‘Union’ in a double, political and biological sense. 12  A classic study is D. J. Gordon, ‘Hymenai: Ben Jonson’s Masque of Union’, reprinted in Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Renaissance Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 157–84. 13  Samuel Daniel, A Panegyrike Congratulatorie to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty (London, 1603), stanzas 48–9.

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These stanzas dovetail into the central concern of Daniel’s poem with the b­ enevolent operation of dynastic inheritance, which necessarily requires the participation of women, in settling, pacifying, and unifying ‘the state’ (a term Daniel uses repeatedly), in ways that are more lasting and profound than the results of violent conquest. Jonson and Daniel effectively replaced the apocalyptic vision of Stuart rule promulgated by figures like Melville, with an alternative political eschatology that saw royal marriages as elements within a divine plan to reconcile enemies and establish peace on earth. Given James’s professed dislike of religious war and the Catholic sympathies of his own consort and the next two Stuart queens, we might have expected this alternative vision to have quickly triumphed, as indeed happened in court culture produced for James, Anna and, subsequently, Charles I. Nevertheless more militant views of Stuart dynastic alliances proved remarkably persistent. They were given a new lease on life by the 1613 marriage of the king’s daughter, Elizabeth, to the Calvinist Elector Palatine, head of a recently formed Protestant Union of Calvinist and Lutheran princes in the Holy Roman Empire.14 As the Stuart consort of a militantly Protestant foreign sovereign, whose children remained residual heirs to the British throne, Elizabeth provided an alternative focus for dynastic loyalty among Britons who wanted a more robust foreign policy, especially after she and her husband were driven into exile by Catholic armies in the early stages of the Thirty Years War. More surprisingly, an ‘Epithalamium’ on Charles I’s marriage to the Catholic Henrietta Maria, published by George Marcelline in 1625, also sounded an apocalyptic note by hailing the wedding on its title page as an event ‘presaging the destruction and ruine of Antichrist, the establishment of the true Faith . . . the overthrowing of the Enemies designs’.15 Marcelline portrayed the Anglo-French marriage alliance as a blessing not only to the two kingdoms directly involved but ‘neighboring Nations’, especially Venice and the Low Countries.16 It also promised to revive the spirits of Princess Elizabeth, who would find in Henrietta Maria ‘a Sister by marriage, though not by birth, with whom She might make a mutuall exchange of intire affection’. Marcelline predicts that the new queen will produce children who will continue to befriend Elizabeth’s offspring in future generations, eventually reversing the Palatine couple’s defeat and bringing about ‘the ruine of Antichrist’.17 While expressing confidence that a princess as wise and virtuous as Henrietta Maria would eventually convert to Protestantism,18 Marcelline was also happy to incorporate French Catholics within his vision of a crusade against Antichrist, whose rule he associated primarily with Spain. He admitted that ‘some sicke queasie stomackt people’ would refuse to accept his argument because they feared that 14  See Sara Smart and Mara Wade (eds), The Palatine Wedding of 1613: Protestant Alliance and Court Festival (Wesbaden: Harrassoweitz, 2013) and the items cited in the extensive bibliographies of its individual essays. 15  George Marcelline, Epithalamium Gallo-Brittanicum: or, Great-Britaines, Frances and the Most Parts of Europes Unspeakable Joy, for the Most Happy Union, and Blessed Contract of the High and Mighty Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and the Lady Henrietta Maria (London, 1625). 16  Ibid., 47–8, 50. 17  Ibid., 52–3. 18  Ibid., 84.

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‘this Contract should bring an innovation in religion’. They would point to the example of ‘Saloman seduced and brought to idolatry by marrying’ as a warning.19 But ‘no doubt Gods wisedome doth oftentimes see beyond the reach of mans apprehension, and may match a diversity of Religion to make a uniformity of faith’. He warmly praised Louis XIII as a worthy successor to his father, Henry IV (who, Marcelline insisted, was always a Protestant at heart, whatever his outward actions) and predicted that through their common relation to Henrietta Maria the kings of France and England would soon join to ‘satisfy their thirsty blades with the bloud of Tyrants and die their swords with the enemies of truth and equitie’.20 Marcelline’s efforts to portray French Catholics as allies in a godly crusade are not as implausible as they may appear, since France did frequently ally with Protestant states in the early seventeenth century, while at times in the 1630s Henrietta Maria opposed Spanish interests within her husband’s court in ways that brought her into alignment with strong Protestants. Marcelline’s tract shows how, by defining the Antichristian enemy as Spanish, it remained possible to incorporate even a Catholic consort within a militantly Protestant vision of the Stuarts’ providential destiny. Even as late as 1662 two poems celebrating Charles II’s marriage to Catharine of Braganza—John Crouch’s Flowers Strowed by the Muses and the anonymous Iter Luisticanum—emphasized her family’s anti-Spanish credentials by stressing its role in liberating Portugal from Habsburg ‘tyranny’. This made the situations of the Portuguese and English royal dynasties fundamentally similar: ‘you’ll find both [Britain and Portugal] gain / Their Crowns, like spoils of Salmacis, again. / One to Insulting Regicides gives Laws, / Th’other from Spanish yoak the neck with-draws.’21 The old eschatological emphasis on fighting Antichrist has here given way to a theme of resistance to tyrannical oppression from either extreme of the religious spectrum but the impulse to define Stuart virtue in opposition to an evil Spanish Other remained alive. Marriages of Stuart princes to Catholic consorts were not always automatically regarded as compromising the dynasty’s commitment to Protestant causes. Because European politics was never in practice organized along strictly confessional lines it became possible to regard some Catholic dynasties as potential allies in conflicts against others and perhaps even as instruments of a providential plan to overthrow Antichrist. P O P I S H C O N S O RT S A N D R H E TO R I C S OF DISCLOSURE Nevertheless, the arrival of a Catholic consort undoubtedly did raise sensitive issues, for precisely the reasons Marcelline identified in his reference to the ‘queasy stomackt people’ who disliked Charles’s union with Henrietta Maria. In addition to fears that a popish consort might introduce ‘innovations’ in religion, the establishment of a Catholic chapel within her household invited comparisons to Solomon and other Old Testament kings who, by permitting idolatrous worship under the influence of their pagan wives, had provoked God’s wrath against Israel. Scholars 19  Ibid., 100–1.

20  Ibid., 102, 103, 106.

21  Iter Lusitanicum, sig. B2v.

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have almost universally assumed that Henrietta Maria’s Catholic piety must have produced strong adverse reactions. Frances Dolan and Laura Knoppers have attempted to show more specifically that fear of Catholic consorts fused with misogynist prejudices against women who dominated their husbands, thereby violating paternalistic concepts of masculine rule.22 Both scholars describe the resulting amalgam of religious prejudice and sexual anxiety as a potent and durable feature of Stuart political culture. Dolan sums up: ‘in the controversies regarding the proposed Spanish marriage [between 1618 and 1623] . . . anxiety focused on the power of a Catholic queen consort to transform the religious identity of king and country. Although these fears were briefly assuaged when the Spanish marriage fell through, they found a new form only a few years later, when another foreign alliance was transacted . . . In the escalating attacks on Charles and his rule, the bed that is obsessively imagined and discursively searched is the marriage bed; the scandal discovered therein is his wife.’23 Knoppers similarly claims that ‘it is striking . . . that some of the most strident criticism of Charles in the 1630s and 40s focused on a sexualized royal marriage’.24 Since anti-Catholicism and disapproval of domineering women are both welldocumented in the period these arguments appear outwardly plausible and it is certainly possible that some Britons did react to Charles I’s marriage in the way Dolan and Knoppers describe. But hard evidence for such reactions before the Civil War is decidedly thin and neither Dolan nor Knoppers provides much of it. Aside from a few comments about Henrietta Maria’s devotional practices during the very early period of her marriage, when she was often estranged from Charles, the only direct evidence Dolan provides of ‘obsessively imagined’ worries about royal sexual intimacy dates from the 1640s. Knoppers’s documentation of such anxiety for the period before 1641 consists of a single unpublished Scottish letter. In a more circumspect analysis, Michelle White concludes ‘that it is incredibly difficult to gauge popular perceptions of the queen during the period 1624–1640’ because of the paucity of recorded commentary. The Scot Alexander Leighton referred to the queen as a ‘daughter of Heth’ in a pamphlet of 1629, while William Prynne probably intended to smear her moral character when he attacked female actors in Histriomastix, shortly after she performed in a play at court.25 But these are the only examples of printed attacks from before 1640 that White found. David Cressy’s thorough study of popular reactions to Charles I turned up two examples of seditious speech about Henrietta Maria before 1640, not counting a few complaints about her refusal to participate in a coronation, a small number over a fifteen-year period.26 The online compilation, Early Stuart Libels, includes two poems that cast aspersions on the chastity of members of the queen’s entourage but neither attacks her directly.27

22 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, ch. 3; Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, chs 1–2. 23 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 97. 24 Knoppers, Politicizing Domesticity, 37. 25  Michelle Anne White, Politicizing Henrietta Maria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 25–6. 26  David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 2, 149. 27  Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources, ed. Alistair Bellany and Andrew McRae (Early Modern Literary Series, 2005), http://purl.oclc.org/emls/texts/libels/.

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Censorship and the threat of savage punishment help explain why so few libels of Henrietta Maria survive for the period before 1641 but it may also be significant that people unhappy with Charles’s rule had alternative targets, notably the Duke of Buckingham in the 1620s and the Laudian clergy in the 1630s, who did attract a fair amount of public opprobrium. The fact that the queen had strained relations with both Buckingham and Laud and also generally opposed pro-Spanish policies perhaps made it more difficult to perceive her as deeply implicated in those aspects of the Caroline regime that many subjects most disliked. The paucity of evidence makes it difficult to judge with any certainty. But if we turn from speculations about largely unrecorded thoughts to the evidence of printed tracts, a more complex picture emerges. Although Dolan is right that the Spanish match stirred considerable controversy, her claim that this centred on a belief ‘in the power of a Catholic queen to transform the religious identity of king and country’ needs qualification. Such a belief was implied by the lecturer of St Martin-in-the-Fields John Everard, who was imprisoned in 1622 for preaching a sermon on the sin of matching with idolaters.28 On the other hand the most notorious secular pamphlet against the match, Thomas Scott’s Vox Populi, devoted only one paragraph in forty-eight pages to the potential influence of the Infanta once she became Queen of England. In this passage Scott says nothing about the risk that a Spanish queen might induce her husband to abandon his faith but instead focuses on the danger that her arrival will encourage wealthy and socially prominent English Catholics, who have already transferred their allegiance from their own monarch to the king of Spain, ‘to fight under her colors . . . by buying Offices and the like, whether by sea or land, of Justice civil and ecclesiasticall, in Church or State (all being for money exposed to sale)’, until they are in a position to overthrow the government from within.29 A Spanish consort is pictured as dangerous not because of her intimacy with her husband but because it is assumed that she will have plenty of help from other British Catholics in seeking to overthrow Protestant rule. In the remainder of the pamphlet Scott ignores the Infanta to concentrate instead on portraying Spain’s ambition to establish a universal ­monarchy throughout Christendom, and various forms of weakness and corruption that render Britain vulnerable to Spanish plots. He is obsessed not with royal sexuality but civic virtue and its absence.30 Scott’s preoccupation with corruption and Catholic infiltration of the government was shared by others and persisted throughout the remainder of the 1620s, finding expression, for example, in repeated parliamentary attacks on Buckingham 28 Elizabeth Allen, ‘Everard, John (1584?–1640/41)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e8998; John Everard, The Gospel Treasury Opened (London, 1659), epistle to the reader, unpaginated. 29  Thomas Scott, Vox Populi ([London?], 1620), sig. B2r. 30  Cf. the thorough discussion of Scott’s thought in Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 5. Other discussions include Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, The Historical Journal, 25 (1982), 805–25. The best general historical survey of the politics of the period remains Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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and other royal ministers after the duke’s assassination in 1628. But although Buckingham’s Catholic mother was occasionally mentioned as a source of popish corruption, Henrietta Maria did not figure prominently in this criticism of the king’s favourite, with whom she had very strained relations. She first provoked public protests during the crisis that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War and became the target of printed attacks in the years that followed. White notes a particular upsurge in 1643.31 While the collapse of Crown censorship may have unleashed previously pent-up criticism, the queen’s own behaviour in this period also fuelled hostility, especially her efforts to buy arms for royalist armies on the Continent and her attempts to enlist the aid of foreign states in suppressing Parliament’s ‘rebellion’, which were widely reported in the press. For our purposes what matters is how far criticism of the queen’s political behaviour and influence during the Civil War became linked to perceptions of her role as a wife and mother, and hostility to the dynastic alliance that brought her to England. Dolan argues that contemporaries did make these connections, so that the consort’s function of perpetuating the royal bloodline became inseparably bound up with anxieties that she would subvert both religion and ‘gender order’ within the royal family and therefore the monarchy. Dolan goes on to argue that contemporaries saw an analogy here to the exaggerated reverence Catholics accorded to the Virgin Mary, as ‘ruler of heaven’.32 In this case she does find supporting evidence, especially in a passage from Prynne’s The Popish Royall Favourite (1643), which directly compares Henrietta Maria’s role as a ‘Mediatrix’ for English Catholics ‘in the King’s own bed and bosome’ to the blasphemous view of Catholic theologians that the Virgin exercised the ‘greatest Authority in the Kingdome of Heaven’, and might dispense ‘Grace and Mercy to whom she pleaseth’.33 It seems clear that by 1643 Henrietta Maria’s intimacy with Charles did appear as a significant threat to many of Parliament’s supporters and that in attacking that threat pamphleteers like Prynne were able to fuse anti-Catholic stereotypes with anxieties about the domination of men by women, in much the way Dolan and Knoppers describe. But if we examine Prynne’s entire tract rather than a few isolated passages the picture again becomes more complex and equivocal. At times he certainly does go out of his way to highlight Henrietta Maria’s direct influence. For example, early in his pamphlet he reproduces a long series of royal warrants freeing priests, Jesuits, and recusants from legal penalties. In the minority of cases where these acts of mercy were procured through the queen’s intercession, Prynne highlights the fact by setting the relevant phrase in capital letters. He then concludes that the warrants prove ‘that there is and hath beene all his Majesties Reigne until this instant, a most strong, desperate cunning confederacie prosecuted (wherein the Queens Majestie hath been the chiefe) to set up popery in perfection and extirpate the Protestant Party and Religion in all his Majesties dominions, which plot now visibly appears above ground’.34

31 White, Henrietta Maria, 98. 33  Ibid., 120. 34  Ibid., 35.

32 Dolan, Whores of Babylon, 118–34, esp. 131.

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But in several other passages Prynne traces the origins of the plot ‘to set up popery’ not to the queen’s machinations but to concessions Charles and his father had already made before her arrival in England, during negotiations over his marriage with Spain and France. Citing as his source ‘the French Mercury’ (the Mercure françois, a newsbook of the period), he reports that Charles took a solemn oath in Spain in 1623 that he would listen to anyone at any time who presented him with arguments in favour of Catholicism, and would absolutely prevent all attempts to tamper with the faith of the Infanta if she became his wife. The Prince thereby ‘irresistably exposed himself to all temptations, seducements to the Antichristian Religion’, while binding himself never ‘to make the least opposition against it’. The same pledge was renewed during negotiations for the French match, Prynne claims, and has constrained Charles’s actions ever since.35 To reinforce the point he reproduces an exchange of letters between Prince Charles and the Pope, during the former’s visit to Madrid in 1623, as evidence that ‘Articles in favour of Papists’ in the draft marriage treaty were ‘even such as the Pope himselfe approved’, as steps towards ‘the seducing of the King and Realme to the Roman religion’.36 Prynne asks rhetorically ‘whether these Oathes and articles bee not the reall ground of the late horrid Irish conspiracy . . . and his Majesties connivance at, if not approbation of these horrid, bloody, esecrable practises’?37 While his repeated use of the verb ‘seduce’ may gesture towards sexual anxieties, Prynne effectively represents Catholic dynastic alliances as a double threat, not only because they bring a popish queen into ‘the King’s owne bed and bosome’ but because their negotiation requires dangerous concessions to the Pope and foreign states. He extends the argument by pointing to ways in which other Catholics have taken advantage of the royal marriage to manoeuvre and conspire against British Protestantism. Drawing on a 1624 book by a former Catholic missionary, John Gee, he claims that after the ratification of the marriage treaty with France hundreds of priests and monks flooded into England, where they formed ‘private societies’ and lobbied for the establishment of an English Catholic episcopate.38 Informers against them were ‘discountenanced’ and in many cases imprisoned by Secretary of State Windebanke, while ‘painful’ Protestant clergy and laymen were ‘disgraced, persecuted, silenced, fined, imprisoned, banished and thousands of them were enforced to flee the Realme’. Prynne also asserts that Charles’s entourage was full of papists and men inclined to popery, in addition to the queen: Buckingham, Lord Treasurer Richard Weston, Windebanke, the Earl of Arundel, and the bedchamber servant Endymion Porter are all given as examples. He quotes Catholic authors approving of the reintroduction of altars and crucifixes by the Laudian clergy to suggest that the ‘Court Priests and Prelates’ had long since joined with ‘the Masse-Priests and Jesuits’ to restore Catholic worship. Although the ramifications of Catholic marriage alliances provide the main organizing thread of Prynne’s pamphlet that tied together otherwise disparate arguments, the queen’s sexual sway over her husband was presented as only one among ­several reasons for Charles’s subservience to popery. In some passages The Popish 35  Ibid., sig. ¶1v.

36  Ibid., 43.

37  Ibid., 51.

38  Ibid., 54.

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Royall Favourite did describe Henrietta Maria as the main source of conspiracies to overthrow British Protestants. But in others Prynne shifted the blame to foreign diplomats, missionary priests, and male members of the royal court. Charles’s subservience to his wife therefore appeared as only the most conspicuous example of the king’s consistent weakness in the face of Catholic demands from any and all sources, a theme that dominates Prynne’s discussion in much the way that an obsession with the absence of civic virtue dominated Scott’s Vox Populi. It is also worth noting that Prynne never pushed his argument about Charles’s failure to uphold his patriarchal authority over his wife to its ultimate conclusion. Contemporaries widely assumed that wives who dominated their husbands would usually cuckold them,39 and rumours had occasionally circulated about Henrietta Maria’s excessive intimacy with the courtier Henry Jermyn. But neither Prynne, nor other writers discussed by Dolan, Knoppers, and White, ever seems to have pursued this line of attack. Had they done so they might have raised questions about the paternity of the queen’s children that would have undermined the fundamental concept of a legitimate royal bloodline. This barrier would not be breached until another political crisis erupted in the next generation. ROY A L P RO C R E AT I O N A N D PA RT I S A N P O L E M I C : T H E T R I B U L AT I O N S O F M A RY O F M O D E N A Initially that crisis centred on Charles II’s brother, James Duke of York, rather than a popish consort. Between 1679 and 1681 three successive parliaments attempted to exclude James from the throne because he had openly converted to Rome a few years earlier. This provoked a reaction from people who rallied to the principle of hereditary divine right, which had become a central tenet of the Church of England, eventually enabling James’s supporters to prevail. But the duke’s second wife, Mary of Modena, further complicated matters. The problem was not so much that she might influence her husband, who needed little encouragement to advance his faith. It was instead the possibility that she might bear him a son who would be raised Catholic and whose claim to the throne would take precedence over those of James’s two Protestant daughters from a previous marriage, the princesses Mary and Anne. Every time Mary became pregnant she raised the stakes in this contest pitting the hereditary principle against fear of a Catholic monarchy. For the first time in the century, the consort’s role in perpetuating the royal lineage had become directly implicated in a profoundly divisive controversy. The effects of this new configuration are already apparent in poetry written about Mary in early 1682, when she returned, quick with child, from the Scottish exile to which she and her husband had been consigned until the political crisis blew over. Established poets mostly hailed her arrival in conventional terms, but 39 For a discussion, see Susan D. Amussen, ‘Cuckold’s Haven: Gender Inversion in Popular Culture’, in R. Malcolm Smuts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook to the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 528–42.

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even these tributes now had an implicitly partisan edge. Work published by several lesser known writers openly engaged in political skirmishing. An anonymous poem printed in Edinburgh adopted a tone of belligerent Tory partisanship tinged with Scottish Anglophobia, because Mary’s child had been conceived in the northern kingdom: Let the disquieters of CHARLES be gone, Since JAME’S Young-Hanse may rebels think upon. The Factious-Buzlers, fear the Time may come When th’Unseen-Blew-Cap pays your Treasons home: For who will needs the Uncle still Disturb May find a Nephew who their Oy’s may Curb. Meanwhile GREAT PRINCESS, may the happy Babe Breathe, Live and Grow, within the secret Shade, Of Your sweet Royal Self . . .40

After Mary instead gave birth to a girl this poem elicited a mocking riposte, under the misleadingly conventional title of A Poem to Her Royal Highness upon the Birth of her Daughter (1682): Who e’er did think the Angry Planets wou’d Turn Bonny Blue Cap to a Silken Hood? . . . We had design’d in Racy Gossips Bowls And Christening Candles to refresh our Souls, When the Majestick Boy should once apper We’d Swim in Wine, and wou’d Carouze in Beer And Feast our Bellys with the Richest Chear, Proving a Girl, alas it proves our Woe! Our Feast is spoil’d, and all our Cakes are Dough.

More radically, the poet goes on to suggest that if the queen fails to deliver a son, York’s supporters may try to produce one by alternative means: But if it be a Maid, we’le Chear our Hearts, And once again Rely upon our Arts: Nature shall never our Fledg’d Hopes destroy; I’le swear if it be a Maid, we’ll mak’t a Boy. But ’twas a Boy, the Fault is only this, The Midwife Circumcis’d the Babe amiss. And if it be cut off, we won’t Complain, The Child is young and it may grow again.

The ribald image of a clumsy midwife unsexing the infant prince by accidentally severing his penis and the sarcastic reference to Tory claims about sexual organs regenerating themselves are obviously intended to deflate the aura of religious reverence that normally surrounded royal births. 40  A Rapture Upon the Report of Her Royal Highness being with Quick-Child (Edinburgh, 1682), 1.

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In the summer of 1682 a printed dialogue attempted to meet the challenges posed by this poem head-on. It denied that Tories were disappointed over the sex of Mary’s child, ‘for we are of a Religion that does not so much as wish for any thing, but with a Resignation to Divine Providence. And then it’s not the Wit, but the Honesty of the Health that we value our selves upon; which methinks sounds as well from the Mouth of a Christian, and a Subject, toward every Branch of the Royal Family, as your way of Quaffing their Damnation and Confusion . . . And let me tell ye farther, Whigg; the secret Counsels of Almighty God, in the ordering and disposing of Princes and Empires are not a subject for Drollery and Sport.’ Having reiterated the conventional Stuart view of royal births, it then accuses Whigs of planning stratagems to deny the birth of a legitimate heir. ‘If it had pleased God to have given the Duke a Son’, Whigs would have argued that ‘the Dutchess had not been with Child; for that was the Knack on’t, to prepare the People beforehand, by one Imposture, for the entertaining of another. There has not been any false Rumour distributed through the Nation with more Industry than this; and in case of an Issue Male, they’d e’en have Black Box’d it off with a Pillow, and Imposture; and an Eavesdropper or two perhaps, in a Closet or through a Key-hole, would have made the whole History as current as Gospel.’41 Not only the sanctity but the very existence of a royal heir was already seen in 1682 as a potential object of controversy. Over the next several years James, Mary, and their supporters redoubled their efforts to restore the aura of reverence surrounding royal marriages and births. In 1685 Mary became the first English queen since Anna of Denmark to undergo a coronation. The ceremony and its accompanying ritual paraphernalia, including Mary’s robes, crowns, and sceptre, were described in detail in a printed tract.42 Panegyrics again called upon the people to ask God for royal progeny,43 while poets praised Mary’s piety, loyalty, patience in adversity, humility, and ‘Saint-like Carriage’.44 Aphra Behn compared her to the virgin Venus rising from the sea.45 After suffering two miscarriages, Mary again became pregnant in late 1687. By then James had antagonized not only Whigs but many of his earlier Tory allies. His fraught relations with the majority of the political nation further heightened the significance of the child in his consort’s womb. During previous royal pregnancies the Crown had routinely prescribed forms of prayers for the queen’s safe delivery that subjects were ordered to recite in their parish churches. This time the language was particularly ornate and explicit. The people were told to acknowledge that ‘the fruit of the Womb are a Gift and Heritage that cometh only of Thee [God]’ before praying that God would make Mary ‘a Fruitful Vine upon the Walls of his [James’s] 41  Some Passages Taken out of Two Observators, of August 1682. Written in Dialogue betwixt Whigg and Tory (London, 1682), 1–2. 42  An Account of the Ceremonial at the Coronation of their Most Excellent Majesties King James II. And Queen Mary, at Westminster the 23 April 1685 (London, 1685). 43  Englands Royal Renown in the Coronation of Our Gracious Soveraign King James the 2nd and his Royal Consort Queen Mary (London, 1685). 44  On the Coronation of King James II and Queen Mary (London, 1685) and A Poem on and To Her Majesty Upon Her Happy Coronation (London, 1685), 3. 45  A Pindarick Poem on the Happy Coronation (London, 1685), sig. b4v.

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House’, whose ‘Children like Olive branches’ would continue to increase so that ‘the King’s Seed may endure for ever, and his throne be as the Sun before Thee’.46 The birth of James Edward Stuart in June elicited additional prescribed prayers of thanksgiving, and tributes from loyal poets like Behn: The Mighty BLESSING is at last arriv’d; Heav’n has at last, the Wondr’ous WORK atchiev’d. Long did th’ALMIGHTY pause, and long debate; For MONARCHS are not fashion’d at a Heat.47

But it had by now become a virtual necessity for a substantial segment of the ­political nation to deny that the queen had given birth, and reports quickly circulated that the son of a miller or tile-maker had been smuggled into her bedchamber in a warming pan.48 This line of argument was necessary because under English common law the son of a married woman was presumed to be legitimate even if the identity of his father was in doubt. Nevertheless, scandalous stories about Mary’s alleged dalliances did begin to circulate. In the Netherlands, beyond the reach of English censorship, they gave rise to suggestive prints of the Queen with lecherous clerical confidantes.49 The most extensive literary attack on Mary’s reputation was a roman-à-clef ­entitled The Amours of Messalina, Late Queen of Albion, published serially in four parts in 1689, with a sequel the following year. It evidently sold briskly, and not only in Britain. The publisher’s epistle to a related work, Love Letters Between Polydorous the Gothick King and Messalina (1689), claimed that Amours of Messalina had gone through fourteen editions in four languages—English, French, Dutch, and Italian— within the space of ten months. Although this may be an exaggeration, at least three settings survive of the English edition of Part One alone, while separate Dutch editions of Part One and Parts Two, Three, and Four, and three French editions are also extant.50 This novella presents itself as a translation of a confidential report by a ‘woman of quality, a late confidant of Queen Messalina’. The English and Dutch editions begin with an epistle ‘from the translator’, claiming that the document corresponding to Part One surfaced in Cologne, where the ‘woman of quality’ was living among exiles from the French court after falling out with her royal mistress, and where the original was being printed. A breathless postscript then announces that a sequel (Part Two), containing the story of the warming pan, has just arrived in the latest post and will appear shortly. By contrast the French editions, which 46  A Form or Order of Thanksgiving and Prayer (London, 1688). 47  Aphra Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to Her Most Sacred Majesty, on the Universal Hopes of All Loyal Persons for a Prince of Wales (London, 1688), 1. 48  For a discussion, see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England 1680–1714 (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1999), 86–104. 49  Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 155. 50  Ibid.; WorldCat (https://www.worldcat.org/) lists six Dutch copies or editions, of which some but apparently not all are said to be taken from the London original printed by John Lyford, but since I have not been able to examine these specimens I cannot vouch for the information. The Dutch publisher is given as Johannes van Veen.

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bear a Cologne imprint on their title pages, claim to be translations of the published English text by the London printer John Lyford. These contradictory signals leave the origins of the text unsettled. It has often been attributed to the prolific Italian historian and polemical writer, Gregorio Leti,51 who resided in London in the early 1680s, working under the patronage of Charles II, before moving to the Netherlands. Leti had written an earlier novel about the alleged ‘amours’ of a duke of Mantua and another scandalous Life of Donna Olimpia Maldachinu, the sister-in-law and alleged mistress of Pope Innocent X, both of which had been translated into English. They are examples of a Continental genre of salacious stories of political and sexual intrigue to which Amours of Messalina is indebted.52 But no firm evidence exists that he wrote the latter tract and Kate Loveman, the only modern scholar to have given Amours of Messalina serious attention, considers the attribution dubious.53 She thinks the piece was probably written in English and then translated into other languages. While this is possible, an alternative explanation is that the text was produced in the Netherlands, either by Leti or someone else, with the intention of more or less simultaneous publication in multiple languages, a common practice for Dutch propaganda on international affairs. This hypothesis is reinforced by evidence Loveman cites that the Cologne imprint of the French editions is almost certainly spurious, masking publication in the Netherlands. Although Messalina was the name of the adulterous wife of the Emperor Claudius, whose sexual infidelities and political intrigues had been recorded by Tacitus and Suetonius, the character in the 1689 text is unmistakably Mary of Modena. She is described as a beautiful, proud, and ambitious woman whose ‘great delight in Musick and Amour’ made it difficult for her doting husband, Lycogenes to keep her ‘within such rules as were most agreeable to his honour’.54 After the couple attains the ‘Imperial Dignity’ her impatience with his ‘decayed’ strength and vigour increases, especially because she considers his aged appearance a ‘Memento Mori to her own glory and Ambition’, since his many enemies will undoubtedly try to ruin ‘at least her Honour, if not her life’ once he has died. Her anxiety provides an opening for two male counsellors sent by ‘the High-Priest [Pope] to promote the interest of the Pagan [Catholic] Faction in the Kingdom of Albion’, Father Pedro, and Count Davila (the queen’s Jesuit confessor Sir Edward Petre and the papal envoy to James’s court, Ferdinando d’Adda).55 They enlist the aid of a crafty older woman, the 51  The attribution to Leti is accepted by the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as well as the Wing Short Title Catalogue (the latter now incorporated in the English Short Title Catalogue at the British Library). 52  The former was translated into English as The Loves of Charles, Duke of Mantua, and of Margaret, Countess of Rovera (London, 1669); the English translation of the latter went through two editions in 1667. 53  Kate Loveman, Reading Fictions, 1660–1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002), 114. 54  The Amours of Messalina, Late Queen of Albion in Which are Briefly Couch’d Secrets of the Imposture of the Cambrian Prince, Gothick League, and Other Court Intrigues (London, 1689), 6. This edition contains all four parts, separately (and somewhat inconsistently) paginated. 55  Ibid., 9.

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Marchioness de Tomazo (the Countess of Tyrconnell, wife to James II’s Catholic Lord Deputy of Ireland). Together this group easily persuades Messalina that she must bear a son to perpetuate her own influence and the grandeur of the ‘Pagan interest’ after Lycogenese’s death. But since, as Tomazo puts it, Lycogenese has grown as incapable of siring a child as she is of growing a new set of teeth, Messalina must find an alternative father.56 Pedro and Davila compete for this role and the latter eventually succeeds, in a steamy seduction scene.57 But he fails to impregnate Messalina and Part One ends with her imploring him to summon a ‘Convention’ of discreet priests and ‘pagan’ ­courtiers to devise an alternative plan for providing her with a son. Part Two begins with the growing tension between ‘Pagans’ and ‘Christians’ in Albion and the efforts of Lycogenes’s advisors to persuade him to adopt violent policies, including the assassination of his heirs Anaximander, Artemesia, and the Princess Philadelphia (William of Orange, Mary, and Anne).58 The Marchioness de Tomazo suggests instead that they should help Messalina pretend that she is pregnant, by staging processions and prayers for the safe delivery of her child, and then smuggle a baby into her chamber. There follows a version of the warmingpan story. Part Three picks up after Messalina has moved to the court of Gothland (France), where the king, Polydorous (Louis XIV) tries to seduce her. She decides to submit but initially pretends to be reluctant, until he promises to massacre 100,000 Christians (Protestants) if she will share his bed. She thereupon agrees, exclaiming ‘a Hundred Thousand Christian Lives . . . Such Merit, such Transcendant Merit’.59 In Part Four and the sequel to the novella published in 1690 matters are further complicated by the appearance of an Italian lover from Messalina’s youth, with whom she has a new affair, even as she also sleeps with Polydorous. From the beginning of Part Three the political implications of the novella’s stories become progressively less pointed, while stories of sexual escapades, involving lovers stumbling around in darkened rooms, sleeping with the wrong partners, and getting themselves into humiliating but amusing situations, take over the plot. This suggests that a text that began as a political libel took on a life of its own as it attracted readers more interested in racy stories than confessional politics. The epistle at the start of Part Three, which admits that many readers had found Part Two disappointing because it did not contain enough sex, strengthens the impression. It would make sense, since the need to discredit James, Mary, and their son was much more acute at the beginning of 1689 than would be the case several months later, after Parliament had proclaimed William and Mary joint monarchs. Kevin Sharpe has commented on the intense contest over perceptions of royal legitimacy and illegitimacy that peaked in early 1689 and the ‘systematic programme of counter-representation’ and ‘demonization of James Stuart’ mounted by William’s supporters.60 We should situate the first two parts of The Amours of Messalina in this context. Like some earlier polemics, it associated a royal consort with the 56  Ibid., 12. 57  Ibid., 23. 58  Ibid., 31–2. 59  Ibid., 78. 60  Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy, 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 325.

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plots of Jesuits, papal diplomats, corrupt courtiers, and a faction of English Catholics to subvert the kingdom’s religious and political order. But unlike them it added a new element of sexual scandal that effectively reduced royal marriage and procreation from sacred mysteries to subjects of voyeuristic pornography and low farce. In doing so it also reminded readers that since we can never be certain that a king is the true father of his consort’s children, the concept of a ­legitimate royal bloodline will always remain open to doubt. This obscene irreverence indicates that a threshold had been crossed making it possible for writers not only to criticise monarchs for their religious and political acts but to insult and ridicule their most intimate behaviour. Even at the time of his trial and execution, Charles I had retained a certain dignity: his enemies might describe him as ‘a man of blood’ but no one suggested in print that he was an impotent cuckold too foolish to recognize his wife’s flagrant infidelities. By 1689 the domestic lives and bodily functions of kings and queens had become targets not only for sport and raillery but titillating fantasies. ‘Secret histories’, satires, and visual caricatures continued to perpetuate this sort of degrading treatment of royalty throughout the eighteenth century.61 Religious reverence for kings and queens survived attacks on Henrietta Maria’s popery and her husband’s trial and execution for high crimes against the English people, as the cult of Charles the Martyr demonstrates. Casual disrespect and mocking humour would prove more effective ­solvents of ideals of sacred monarchy. Previous studies of representations of Stuart consorts too often seem to rely on a tacit assumption that because Catholic queens must have provoked strongly hostile reactions we do not have to be overly concerned with tracing when public attacks on them actually occurred. This attitude has justified a procedure of culling evidence from large numbers of texts produced over many decades, to build up a composite picture of how religious and misogynist attitudes combined to produce a powerful backlash that is depicted as an enduring feature of seventeenth-century political culture. But if we look closely, we find not only that printed attacks on Catholic royal marriages and queens tended to cluster in specific periods when particular circumstances help to explain why they occurred, but that the main emphases of these attacks also changed from one period to the next. Around 1620 James I’s pursuit of the Spanish match seemed closely connected to his failure to intervene in support of his daughter and the cause of German Protestantism, his easing of restraints on English recusants, and the growing influence of cryptoCatholics within his court. In attacking the match Thomas Scott accordingly stressed not only the potential threat that a Spanish queen might pose but ways in which the king’s addiction to peace, the presence of wealthy and disloyal Catholics in the court’s vicinity, the venality of royal offices, and other forms of moral and political corruption, weakened Britain’s ability to resist both external and internal threats to religion. In the 1640s Charles waged a war against Parliament in which he seemed eager to enlist the aid of foreign Catholic monarchs and Irish Catholic 61  Rebecca Bullard, The Politics of Disclosure, 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009).

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troops. Parliament’s publicists needed to stress not only his reliance on popish support but the conclusion that if he won the war he would inevitably reward that support by making dangerous concessions to popery. Prynne accordingly stressed not only the direct influence of Henrietta Maria over her husband but evidence of earlier Stuart concessions to foreign Catholic states made during the negotiation of marriage treaties, and the upsurge in Catholic missionary activity that had a­ llegedly resulted. The queen’s role was presented not only as a danger in itself but a symptom of the king’s more general tendency to cave in to Catholic demands from any and all quarters. In the 1680s Mary of Modena’s pregnancies threatened to transform Catholic rule from a temporary aberration that would end with her husband’s death into a permanent condition. This meant that for the first time in the century religious polemic came to focus not only on the consort’s influence but her basic function of providing heirs to the throne. In this series of pamphlets we are not dealing with a uniform prejudice exhibiting a consistent structure, so much as with a series of tactical rhetorical arguments tailored to particular political situations. This is not to deny that powerful currents of anti-popery existed in Stuart political culture or even to rule out the possibility that Catholic queens may sometimes have elicited forms of hostility that are hard to prove because they left few direct traces in the historical record. But it is to insist that anti-Catholicism, like English Catholicism itself, needs to be recognized as a highly complex and varied phenomenon about which it is hazardous to generalize loosely. Stuart consorts were often directly involved in tensions arising from the intersection of dynastic issues with confessional conflicts. But they were involved in different ways that provoked varied reactions.

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15 ‘Stampt with your own Image’ The Numismatic Dimension of Two Stuart Successions B. J. Cook When our new coyne (all that was mine is gone) Shall bear the Kings Face and Superscription; When noble Spain shall bring her Indies wealth Unto our King, wishing him peace and health; All Princes fearing our Kings potent Strength, Shall court him to an Union . . .  Thomas Saunderson, A Royall Loyall Poem (1660)

Thomas Saunderson was one among a number of royalist writers at the time of the Stuart Restoration to focus attention on one aspect of the Restoration in particular: the return to the realm not only of the king but of his coinage; and specifically a coinage with his image and titles, the most widespread and familiar representation of royal authority there was. That the monarch was represented at all was, at this moment, as crucial as how he chose to depict himself. Coins are complex things. On the one hand they have, historically, been the principal manifestation of that strange phenomenon, money, carrying the value and purpose their users agree that they have; on the other they are little metal packets of messages that represent authority and authenticity.1 Coins are ­simultaneously functional artefacts and material metaphors of lawful rule, as encapsulated in the stamp of authority that defined their nature as coins. This stamp itself fused image and text to create, it was intended, a unity of message. Coins thus combine text and image, substance and form, to make a unique type of object. They are transactional in their essential nature, moving always between the issuer and the user, the buyer and the seller, the giver and the receiver, the loser and the winner. 1  For an exploration of some of these issues, see Joe Cribb, ‘Money as Metaphor’, in four parts: Numismatic Chronicle, 165 (2005), 417–41; 166 (2006), 493–517; 167 (2007), 361–95; 169 (2009), 461–529.

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When the head of the Scottish royal dynasty took power in England in 1603 he moved from one tradition of coinage to another.2 While Scottish coinage had been greatly influenced by the English over the centuries, each tradition retained its distinctive character. In the wider European context, English coinage in 1603 was unusual in a number of ways. It was based on large units: the pound, the shilling, even the penny were each high value in international terms. Unlike its neighbours, including Scotland, England still had coinage wholly of precious metal, of gold and silver, with no base-silver or copper-alloy component. It would be the Stuarts who would introduce this element, in a halting, drawn-out process that spanned most of the seventeenth century.3 The majority of English coins across the ­denominational range carried a representation of the ruler, something that had been a feature of the English coinage since the eleventh century. From about 1504 this increasingly became a profile portrait, a realistic image of the incumbent monarch. This was again unusual. Among England’s neighbours and rivals, the coinage of Spain did not feature royal portraits; they were used only intermittently in Scotland before 1603 and in France before the 1640s; the Dutch Republic, for obvious reasons, did not use them. The subjects of the monarch of early modern England, however, knew what their ruler looked like from his or her coins, by far the most common and familiar image of monarchy available to the population at large. Some historians of the English and British royal image have acted as though the coinage can be dismissed from any serious account of the subject.4 Others have acknowledged its possible impact, though sometimes relying on outdated, partial, or insufficiently digested numismatic research when engaging with the material.5 The Stuarts themselves certainly acted as though how they were depicted on their coinage was important, and indeed that they were depicted at all was crucial. At no point was this more the case than at the start of a reign, and at the commencement of two Stuart reigns, those of James I and Charles II (to be discussed in detail below), there were two coinage redesigns in quick succession, doubling the impact of such monetary messages, both versions of which remained in currency thereafter.

2  The best recent summary of James VI’s coinage is in J. D. Bateson, Coinage in Scotland (London: Spink and Son, 1997), 112–28. 3  See the introduction to C. Wilson Peck, English Copper, Tin and Bronze Coins in the British Museum, 1558–1958, 2nd edn (London: British Museum Press, 1964); there is no recent extensive treatment of this development. The base-metal coinage was rarely an early priority of a new reign and will feature little here. 4  Sydney Anglo’s comments in Images of Tudor Kingship (London: B. A. Seaby Ltd, 1992) are particularly surprising (118). In Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) the ubiquity of coins get brief mentions in passing by two of the contributors, Thomas N. Corns, ‘Duke, Prince and King’, 1–25 at 14; and Joad Raymond, ‘Popular Representations of Charles I’, 47–73 at 49. John Peacock’s contribution pays them more significant attention in ‘The Visual Image of Charles I’, 240–62. 5  Kevin Sharpe’s important treatments are sometimes undermined by slips consequent of such issues, despite their welcome engagement with numismatic material: see Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), and Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

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This obviously does not mean that the users of coins necessarily felt the same way as the issuers. But it was a world where the physicality of coined money was important. Was a given coin genuine? Was it full, or at least acceptable, weight? If it looked unusual, was it usable and what was its value? Examining a coin, weighing it, and testing its fineness were all routine occurrences. A new coin would always stand out and receive extra attention, because the national currency was usually more than any single ruler’s own coinage. Coins stayed around long after reigns ended.6 The issues of successive reigns accumulated in the circulating medium and the new issues were usually the better ones,7 to be examined curiously then culled, selected, hoarded, used for special purposes and on special occasions. There was no wholesale recoinage and only one partial one between 1560, when Elizabeth I drove the mid-Tudor debasement issues out of currency, and the Great Recoinage of 1696 under William III, which converted the surviving hand-struck silver coins (some now nearly 150 years old) into machine-made ones.8 The Stuart currency was enormously varied in both type and condition and a century of successions could run through the hands in a single transaction. This complex variety of the currency inspired a wide range of reactions. Printed royal proclamations regulated it, sometimes with illustrations, showing what was acceptable and what was not, warning of counterfeits and valuing and re-valuing old and (occasionally) foreign coin as the case required. Coins also sat at the heart of important ceremonies, their transactional nature elevated to the symbolic sphere. The literature of the period is full of money, referencing both its physical nature and metaphorical potential.9 Plays and poems, sermons and satires all make play with coins, their designs and their names: Edward shillings and Elizabeth sovereigns, angels and crowns, jacobuses and caroluses. Similarly, the ways coins could be handled and used was a rich source of imagery: the language of testing, touching, and weighing; of counterfeiting and clipping; hoarding and saving.10

6  Coin hoards provide the clearest evidence of this and relatively huge numbers were deposited during the Civil War, which have been reviewed by Edward Besly, English Civil War Coin Hoards, British Museum Occasional Paper 51 (London: British Museum Press, 1987) and Edward Besly and Stephen Briggs, ‘Coin Hoards of Charles I and the Commonwealth of England, 1625–1660 from England and Wales’, British Numismatic Journal, 83 (2013), 166–206. For a discussion of coin hoards of the Commonwealth period, see B. J. Cook, ‘New Hoards from Seventeenth-Century England’, British Numismatic Journal, 69 (2000), 146–72. 7  This would generally mean the heaviest examples, towards the top of the remedy (the officially acceptable range of weights). 8  There is no focused study of coinage and currency in Stuart England to match C. E. Challis, The Tudor Coinage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978) for the Tudor period, although C. E. Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) provides a major survey of the activity of the mint. 9  See, for example, Stephen Deng, Coinage and State Formation in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Peter F. Graf, Shakespeare and the Economic Imperative: ‘What’s aught but as ’tis valued?’ (New York: Routledge, 2008); and David Landreth, The Face of Mammon: The Matter of Money in English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 10  B. J. Cook, Angels and Ducats: Shakespeare’s Money and Medals (London: British Museum Press, 2012) and ‘“This is the very coinage of your brain”: Shakespeare and Money Revisited’, British Numismatic Journal, 84 (2014), 140–64 discuss many of these in the context of the works of Shakespeare.

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The coinage designs of a new monarch would not wait long after each succession. The mint wanted to begin coinage of the new ruler as soon as possible and a new monarch was thus immediately placed in the position of establishing his or her (or, for William III and Mary II, their) preferred names, titles, images, and (in broad terms) message on display in this ubiquitous medium. In some cases this was a relatively straightforward process. An uncontested succession nonetheless required the new monarch to engage immediately with his or her coinage and of the three Stuart successions that occurred in the least problematic way, those of Charles I, James II, and Anne, both Charles and Anne focused significant care and attention on their inaugural numismatic representations.11 James I, Charles II, and William and Mary faced broader issues which greatly affected their approach to the coinage. Two of these, James and Charles, turned to what seemed to have been stopgap coinages, while they refined their policies of royal representation. For both, the matter of ‘the Kings Face and Superscription’12 on the coinage addressed fundamental questions of authority, their own and that of previous regimes, to such an extent that they engaged on a very rare swift revision of their coinage, something that would consume considerable amounts of time and resource, not only at the mint. It is on these two successions that the following discussion will concentrate. This double revision of monetary representation—first acknowledging the change of reign but then significantly refocusing the numismatic message—is otherwise unparalleled in Britain or indeed any other major monarchy in early modern Europe, although its novelty has never been acknowledged or received sustained comment. THE UNION OF THE COINAGES Queen Elizabeth died on 24 March 1603 and King James entered London on 7 May. Among his first decisions were ones about the coinage. As long-established king of Scots, James came to the English throne well-accustomed to presiding over a coinage, having already been represented both literally and symbolically in this medium in nearly a dozen different ways and having as recently as 1601 authorized his eighth Scottish coinage.13 He had a good idea of the potential of numismatic representation, something which came to the fore in probably the most important policy of the early years of his reign. The king recognized in the coinage one of the most powerful tools at his disposal in constructing his desired union of the Crowns and hence the identity of Great Britain.

11  For Charles his numismatic depiction was a persistent interest, to which he would periodically return. 12  See note 1. 13  See Ian Stewart, ‘Coinage and Propaganda: An Interpretation of the Coin-Types of James VI’, in Anne O’Connor and D. B. Clarke (eds), From the Stone Age to the Forty Five: Studies Presented to R. B. K. Stevenson (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1983), 450–62. The most accessible illustrated survey of James’s Scottish coinage is volume two of Spink’s Standard Catalogue of British Coins (London: Spink and Son Ltd, 2003).

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This was still in the future on 21 May, when James authorized his first mint indenture.14 This covered the coins that would be included in what is now known as his First Coinage: the angel in fine gold, four denominations in 22-carat crown gold, and seven denominations in sterling silver. In honour of the new king, the inaugural initial mark of the reign was the thistle.15 The denominations issued were all carried over from the late queen’s reign but the appearance of the coins was totally transformed by the advent of both a new monarch and a new dynasty. The mint output records of the reign also commence on 21 May, for gold and silver, with no output recorded between the day of the queen’s death and this date.16 Although some preparatory work could have been carried out, it seems improbable that any serious decision on the design of the coinage was made before the arrival of the king, which would give a little over a fortnight for designs to be agreed and for the mint engraver, the Elizabethan veteran Charles Anthony, to create the punches and dies at the mint.17 Many of the design elements were not, of course, created specifically for the coinage. The new king’s titulature and the redesigned royal coat of arms were ­elements that featured across a range of governmental media. Some things were, however, specific to the coinage. The most important was the form of portrait they carried. The result of whatever consideration took place was a very different image of royal authority from what had immediately gone before. The existing currency was dominated by the issues of Elizabeth, the consequence of a major recoinage in 1560 and four decades of continuous output thereafter, to spread throughout English society a universally familiar feminine image of rule. In its place came a very emphatic opposite. Not content with the obvious masculinity provided by his appearance, James chose to depict himself in a distinctly martial way: his coin portraits from the start show him wearing a crown but also decorated armour, in some ways an odd choice for someone who generally presented himself as a rex pacificus, peacemaker, scholar, and sage, rather than warrior and conqueror.18 This was not a novel mode of representation for James, however. He had already used this sort of mailed image at various times on his Scottish coinage well before 14  For this and other indentures referenced in this paper, see Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 699–758. 15  The initial mark was the symbol that marked out periods of production for internal mint purposes: samples from each period were set aside for testing at the Trial of the Pyx. 16  Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 687. 17  There is sadly no detailed study of the career of Charles Anthony or his predecessor and father Derek Anthony, but see C. E. Challis, ‘Mint Officials and Moneyers of the Tudor Period’, British Numismatic Journal, 45 (1975), 51–76 at 54 and H. Symonds, ‘English Mint Engravers of the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 1485 to 1688’, Numismatic Chronicle, 13 (1913), 349–78 at 359–60. 18  See Sharpe, Image Wars, especially 118–20 and 131–2; Pauline Croft, ‘Rex Pacificus, Robert Cecil and the 1604 Peace with Spain’, in Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence (eds), The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 140–54; R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Making of Rex Pacificus: James VI and I and the Problem of Peace in an Age of Religious War’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), 371; however, John N. King, ‘James I and King David: Jacobean Iconography and Its Legacy’, in Fischlin and Fortier (eds), Royal Subjects, 421–54 has shown that James’s frequent identification with the more militant King David should not be downplayed.

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1603.19 It was clearly an aspect of his official persona that he periodically wished to emphasize, since it was not, in European terms, a common way to depict a king. Among his contemporaries, only Henri IV of France, a genuine warrior king, used a mailed coinage portrait, and even his were rather more discreet and only appeared on a limited number of denominations. James’s portraits in other media do not usually follow this pattern: he is depicted in civilian costume or ceremonial robes, not war gear.20 Yet there is no need to see this form of depiction as innately aggressive or bellicose: martial is not necessarily militant. Rather he is here a king ready and able to defend his kingdom and people should the need arise.21 It may not be too far-fetched to see James, as Elizabeth’s successor in England, using the coinage to stress the apparent advantages of masculine kingship, as his coinage gradually mingled with hers.22 James’s portrait, in different degrees of elaboration, was used on the gold and most silver throughout his reign, despite subsequent alterations to other aspects of the design. The detailed execution of the mailed portrait went through several permutations in the years immediately following the accession, a tweaking someone—presumably the king—was inspiring, although no documentation appears to survive to give it context. There were four versions between 1603 and 1605 (against only two more for the rest of the reign), but the armour was an unfailing presence. Alongside the portrait type, a further design was employed on the two largest silver coins, the crown and half-crown. This was an equestrian figure of the king, still mailed but on horseback brandishing a sword. The equestrian figure was a long-standing part of English royal iconography: the Great Seal traditionally had the monarch enthroned on one side and on horseback on the other. Edward VI had shifted the image to the coinage on the first English silver crowns and halfcrowns issued in 1551–3 (coins he designed himself ),23 but Elizabeth did not do so on her late and brief issues of these denominations in 1601–3. This equestrian martial style had been part of James’s own Scottish royal iconography, used on the gold coins of his seventh coinage in the 1590s.24 Another change specific to the coinage affected the reverse inscriptions. The English coinage had traditionally featured a small repertoire of phrases, but the 19 Spink, Coins of Scotland, nos 5486–90 and nos 5493–6. 20  This presumably accounts for the mistaken claim for James, ‘Here was a king who would never wear, or even be depicted wearing, a single piece of armour’, in the introduction to Timothy Wilkes (ed.), Prince Henry Revived: Inage and Exemplarity in Early Modern England (London: Southampton Solent University Press, 2007), 11. 21  As Richard McCabe discusses in this volume, some of James’s new subjects welcomed the martial potential of a male ruler (Chapter 1, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’). James’s successor, Charles I, would immediately revert to a civilian image for his coinage representation. 22  For the dominance of Elizabethan coinage in Jacobean hoards, see, for example, B. J. Cook, ‘Four Seventeenth-Century Treasure Troves’, British Numismatic Journal, 60 (1990), 87–98 and Gareth Williams, ‘A Jacobean Silver Hoard From Bull Wharf, London’, British Numismatic Journal, 67 (1997), 105–8. 23  H. Symonds, ‘The English Coinages of Edward VI’, British Numismatic Journal, 11 (1915), 123–67 at 148–9. 24 Spink, Coins of Scotland, nos 5458–9.

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majority of the current ones were all jettisoned by James in favour of a new suite.25 In his first year, there were just two, one for the larger coins, gold and silver: exvrgat devs dissipentvr inimici (‘Let God arise and let his enemies be scattered’, a phrase from Psalm 68) and a second on the smaller gold denominations: tveatvr vnita devs (‘May God guard these [kingdoms] united’). This latter, with its explicit reference to the newly united British kingdoms, was a foretaste of what was shortly to come. Alongside this English coinage, there was a new coinage for Ireland, authorized in an indenture of 20 August; this echoed the English one in its details, although only silver shillings and sixpences were involved. Each denomination used one of the two new inscriptions and the mailed portrait of the king was also utilized. Despite all this effort, production of James’s coinage in this initial form was brief. Coinage was a medium under his direct control that was more pervasive than any other of the so-called ‘outward marks of government’, even his printed ­proclamations, so he could use it to advance the cause of the union of the kingdoms. The new title was proclaimed on 10 October 1604. A new English coinage followed, authorized by a new mint indenture dated 11 November, which employed the mag brit title instead of the initial version ang, sco. The new coins were proclaimed current on 16 November.26 In addition, the reverse legends were changed again. The highly appropriate tveatvr vnita devs was retained for the small gold and added to the smaller silver. James’s first revival of angel gold used a legend already employed by Mary and Elizabeth (‘This is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our sight’), but this

Figure 15.1.  Gold unite (£1) of James I, second coinage (1604–19), initial mark castle (1612–13). © Trustees of the British Museum. 25  See Sharpe, Image Wars, 83–4, although the discussion of all the reign’s coin legends in one place leaves the chronology and relative sequence confused; also, the failure to make clear that some of the inscriptions he discusses were used by earlier rulers (‘This is the Lord’s doing . . . ’) may mislead. 26  Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: J. Donald, 1986), 59–60 and 82.

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was essentially now a ceremonial coinage, with limited currency role. The pound coin, however, had its name changed formally from sovereign to unite and received the new reverse legend faciam eos in gentem vnam (‘I will make them one nation’, Ezekiel 37:22) (Figure 15.1).27 The half-pound, or double-crown carried a rare non-biblical legend henricvs rosas regna iacobvs (‘Henry (united) the roses, James the kingdoms’). This emphasized the links between James and his great-great-grandfather Henry VII, a widely used comparison at the time of his succession, notably in the pageants at James’s ceremonial entry into London on 15 March 1604.28 The final new legend took its place on the larger silver, sixpence to crown, and came from the Gospel of Matthew (19:6), quae devs conivnxit nemo separet (‘What God has joined together, let no man put asunder’).29 This time the coinage changes were applied to all the kingdoms. The new Irish coinage was changed in parallel with the English and in Scotland James made a more fundamental shift. He himself stated his logic: ‘reducing of the gold and silver of both the said kingdoms to one perfect equality is not only necessary p ­ reparation for the union of the said kingdoms, but an essential part of the same’. Initially based upon the English coinage, the Scottish coinage had diverged through the later middle ages, both in appearance and standards, and now stood at a ratio of twelve to one—a penny sterling was equal to a shilling Scots. James took this ratio and introduced Scottish coins that physically corresponded to English ones, differentiated principally by the initial marks used for internal mint purposes and the layout of the coat of arms. From the unite down to the penny, the Scottish mint issued ‘English’ coins, but with Scottish valuations: whereas the English unite was worth a pound, the Scottish unit was £12 Scots and so on down to the penny/shilling. James I’s use of the coinage as a weapon in his union project was highly unusual for the medium in displaying what could be considered an overt topicality. A speaker in the parliamentary debates of 1604 certainly referenced the new coin legends: ‘if we put our hand in our purse, and can feele a 20s-Peece of Gold, wee may perceive on it, Faciamus eos in Gentem Unam’.30 When any chance of union was over, the monetary messages supporting it remained throughout the reign, not even revisited for a new coinage with some significant new designs in 1619. Yet, although his policy failed in the short term, coinage provided one medium in which the concept of Great Britain was able to bed down in the daily life of the kingdom’s subjects. Although the Commonwealth did not use the term on its

27  The king seems to have selected the legends from a longer list of options on the same general theme drafted by Robert Cecil; see Galloway, Union, 60. 28  See Chapter 13 in this volume by Ian W. Archer, ‘Royal Entries, the City of London, and the Politics of Stuart Successions’ and Chapter 1 by Richard A. McCabe, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’. 29  This phrase was very familiar from the marriage service, though with its grammar tweaked appropriately. The presentation of the union of the thrones as a marriage was a common feature of the campaign for its acceptance and was one frequently employed by the king, most notably in his speech to Parliament on 31 March 1604. 30  The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, ed. D. H. Wilson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931), 270 and 273.

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coinage, the surviving issues of James I and Charles I kept it in currency and at the Restoration it returned to the national coinage, where it has remained ever since. ROY A L C O I N A G E R E S TO R E D James I’s succession challenges were as nothing in comparison to those of Charles II, in the monetary sphere as much as any other. Over the course of 1660 two monetary changes were set in motion, with a third following quickly. Together they would mark England’s most significant monetary transformation of the early modern period, the impact being subsequently echoed in Scotland and Ireland. These months witnessed England’s only politically inspired recoinage, as the Commonwealth issues were demonetized and replaced. Then in 1662–3 there occurred the most fundamental reshaping of royal representation on British coinage in the whole period, as a major technological change (mechanized techniques of manufacture) was combined with the introduction of a new neo-classical style that would have a very long legacy. The Commonwealth coinage (issued 1649–60) had itself become something of a rallying point for supporters of the English Republic while the king’s coin, as bearer of his portrait and title, carried a similar focus for royalists.31 Alexander Brome’s political poem Loyalty Confin’d had deplored the absence of right coin under the Commonwealth: What though I cannot see my King, Neither in his Person or his Coyne, Yet contemplation is a thing, That renders what I have not mine. My King from me, what Adamant can part, Whom I do wear engraven on my heart.32

On 10 May 1660 Robert Mossom preached at St Paul’s, his message reinforcing the role of the coinage as a guarantee of true authority: Indeed, under our heavyest weight of oppressions, beholding your Sacred Majesty bearing the Cross, when your Royal Head should have worne the Crown; Your Christian Patience, became our Princely Patterne for Constancy; Your Majesty constant in your faith to God, we constant in our faithfulness to your Majesty; so that, the Tribute we pay (dread Soveraign) is that of your own coyne, and stampt with your own Image.33 31  For the creation of these designs, see Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 87 and 102, though this treatment is only brief and hampered by an insecure grasp of mid-seventeenth century coinage and currency. 32  Alexander Brome, Rump, or, An Exact Collection of the Choycest Poems and Songs Relating to the Late Times by the Most Eminent Wits from Anno 1639 to Anno 1661 (London, 1662). This volume also contained another example of Brome’s poetic numismatics, The State’s New Coyne. Similar sentiments are also found in the anonymous Iter Australe Attempting Something upon the Happy Return of Our Most Gracious Soveraign Lord Charls II from Banishment to His Throne (London, 1660). 33  Robert Mossom, England’s Gratulation for the King and His Subjects Happy Union (London, 1660).

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Charles arrived in London on 29 May 1660 and current coinage production ceased within a day.34 The first mint indenture of the new reign was issued on 20 July and a new accounting period for coin production opened on 21 July.35 Well before this, about ten days after his return to London, around 8–10 June, Charles sat for a portrait by the leading miniaturist Samuel Cooper, intended to be a guide for the engravers of his much desired coinage.36 However, in the event no actual coins were then produced, nor would they be for several months, compared to the three weeks required in 1603 and (apparently) the handful of days of 1625,37 which was to the king’s huge annoyance. At least some of the delay may have been caused by sorting out first the question of who should be regarded as chief engraver and then who should actually prepare the coinage. There were two potential chief engravers, the incumbent Commonwealth officer, the great Thomas Simon, and the surviving royalist mint engraver Thomas Rawlins. Thomas Simon remained fully employed at the mint, eventually being retrospectively designated as ‘one of the engravers of the king’s arms, shields and stamps’ and ‘the King’s Medallist’ in a grant made on 31 May 1661.38 An order to Rawlins to proceed with the making of dies for the new coinage was issued on 11 June, but was never acted on, for unrecorded reasons—possibly to do with Rawlins’ health and capacities. Instead, Simon was issued with virtually identical orders on 10 August 1660, strongly emphasizing the need for speed: ‘Whereas Our affaires doe require and much import, that some speedy course be taken to sett in hand the making and imprinting of Our moneys’.39 Charles became increasingly frustrated by the absence of coinage in his name. He was present personally at a meeting of the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury on 18 August where was noted ‘the great public inconvenience and damage that ariseth from the standing still of the Mint and the occasion of it being alleiged to be that Mr  Symonds had not yet fitted the Stamps and Tools’. The king ‘prepared and required a peremptory and absolute order’ that Simon was to ‘forbeare all other services, until he hath perfected all things which belonge to him to doe, for setting the Mint presently to worke: and that he use all speed and dilligence therein, suitable to the absoluteness of this order and hereof he is not to fail’.40 This was possibly 34  In 1688 at the next major regime change, William and Mary permitted the mint to continue output of coinage in James II’s name while their constitutional position was established and their own form of representation worked out. 35  Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 688 and 745. 36  See Katherine Cooper, ‘Samuel Cooper’s Profiles of King Charles II and Thomas Simon’s Coins and Medals’, Master Drawings, 30 (1992), 314–19. Christopher Highley’s contribution in this volume records the enthusiasm to see images of the new king, which may have compounded Charles’s irritation at the time it took to produce his coinage (Chapter 4, ‘Charles II and the Meanings of Exile’). 37  Succeeding to the throne on 27 March 1625, Charles I issued his first mint indenture on 1 April and there appears to have been little significant break in output, to judge by the accounting of the mint: Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 741. 38  Helen Farquhar, ‘Thomas Simon, “one of our chief gravers”’, Numismatic Chronicle, 12 (1932), 274–310 at 287. 39  George Vertue, Medals, Coins, Great Seals and Other Works of Thomas Simon, 2nd edn (London, 1780), 83; see also Farquhar, ‘Thomas Simon’, 289–90 and Herbert Schneider, ‘The Hammered Gold Coinage of Charles II’, British Numismatic Journal, 36 (1967), 122–68 at 123. 40 Vertue, Medals, Coins, Great Seals and Other Works of Thomas Simon, 84; see also S. A. H. Whetmore, ‘Some Further Notes on Thomas Simon’, British Numismatic Journal, 30 (1960–1), 159–73 at 167.

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unfair on Simon, who had only been given the job a fortnight earlier. However, a month later the king was still impatiently chasing the mint, writing in his own hand to Simon: ‘forthwith to prepare the original or master puncheons and charges, and also some dies and stamps for Our gold and silver coins . . . hereof you may not fail’.41 Actual currency coinage in fact only began to appear in the course of November. Charles’s evident anxiety through these months demonstrates the importance he placed on having his own coinage available as quickly as possible. When it appeared, Charles II’s first coinage was as traditional as could be. The coinage was made in the ancient hand-struck manner. The pressures to convert to mechanized screw presses were now at a high level, but, inevitably, transforming the mint in this way would merely have increased the delay. In these early issues Charles II was portrayed looking left, as his father had been. There was a definite change in the decision to have a profile portrait on all coins, dispensing with the equestrian image used by his predecessors on the larger silver.42 Like Charles I, Charles II was shown crowned and dressed in contemporary clothing, his costume something of a compromise between those of his father and grandfather: an armoured breastplate peeps out but is mostly hidden by a flowing lace collar ­reminiscent of the civilian garb usually used by Charles I on his coinage. This is on the silver; the gold has a different mode of representing royalty. Here the king is no longer crowned or dressed in contemporary style, but wears a laurel wreath, and is dressed in Roman military gear, a cuirass visible across his chest. There was a ­precedent for this in the later gold of James I. Following shifts in the relative values of gold and silver, James had re-valued his older unites upwards, without removing them from currency, and from 1619 issued a lighter gold series to fill the gap in denominations worth a pound, ten shillings, and five shillings. Known as laurels, half- and quarter-laurels, these had depicted James in just this Augustan way, shifting his usual military style into a classical mode. Charles II can therefore be interpreted in his early coinage as referencing both of his Stuart predecessors (Figure 15.2). The legends Charles I had adopted were also revived for these issues, florent concordia regna (‘United kingdoms flourish’) on the gold, with its Jacobean echo; and christo avspice regno (‘I reign under the auspices of Christ’) on the silver. In fact, little gold coinage could be produced, as changes in the relative values of gold and silver were once more affecting the coinage, due to England retaining an uncompetitive mint price for gold.43 Once Charles II had at last launched his own coinage, he set in motion the next step: the obliteration of the numismatic legacy of the Commonwealth. A ­proclamation of 7 September 1661 set forth the process for ‘the calling in all moneys of gold and silver coyned or stamped with the cross and harp, and the circumscription, the commonwealth of England, and for making the same to be current onely 41 Vertue, Medals, Coins, Great Seals and Other Works of Thomas Simon, 84. 42  This design would never return to the British coinage except, unexpectedly, on the current queen’s coronation and silver jubilee crowns. 43  The gold coinage was formally revalued in a proclamation of 26 August 1661, raising existing unites from 20s. to 21s. 4d. and shifting the heavier pre-1619 Jacobean gold up accordingly, the ‘jacobuses’ being enhanced from 22s. to 23s. 6d. Charles did not take the occasion to adjust the weight of the gold, therefore all his early unites were worth 21s. 4d., not £1.

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Figure 15.2.  Silver half-crown (thirty pence) of Charles II, hammered coinage (1660–2). © Trustees of the British Museum.

to the first of December next, and no longer’.44 The exchange deal was unusually generous, offering full value for the coins by tale (i.e. by count), as long as they ‘did not want more in the weight than the remedies’, within the established toleration rate for weights. There was no charge for the cost of recoinage, which was borne by the government. This generosity can be interpreted as a sign of the determination to make as fast and total a clear-out of the Commonwealth currency as was possible, removing the most widespread physical manifestation of the regime’s existence. The proclamation described in detail the denominations affected and acknowledged that they had continued in use since the king’s return the previous year, before commenting: ‘We cannot but take notice that these Coyns were Stamped, not onely without, but against Our Authority, and were intended by the late Usurpers as a high Contempt of Us, Our Crown and Dignity.’ Claiming that the Commonwealth coins were unpopular and were being clipped and counterfeited by people believing them not to be covered by the coinage laws, since the king had not explicitly guaranteed their acceptability, the proclamation authorized their currency until the last day of November, with their counterfeiters and abusers to be given the appropriate punishments, but then after that date it ‘shall from thenceforth cease to be lawful Money of England, to all intents and purposes whatsoever’. It became clear that this was a completely impractical timescale and there was a series of revisions, backwards and forwards, until the final date was fixed at 1 March 1662.45 It proved to be a hard job to get the Commonwealth coins brought in, probably not because of any great love of them, but for the practical reason that, despite the fairly generous terms, owners would still lose out a little on the exchange. It was, however, successful: Commonwealth issues are unknown in later Stuart coin hoards. 44  Charles II, A Proclamation for the Calling in All Moneys of Gold and Silver Coyned or Stamped with the Cross and Harp, and the Circumscription, The Commonwealth of ENGLAND; and for Making the Same to Be Current Onely to the First of December Next, and No Longer (London, 1661). 45  Challis (ed.), A New History of the Royal Mint, 338.

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The third great numismatic consequence of the Restoration took a little longer to get underway. Once coins in the king’s name were again being issued by the end of 1660 and while the despised Commonwealth issues were being purged from currency across the winter of 1661–2, Charles II embarked on a wholesale refashioning of the royal image on the coinage, establishing a style of royal representation that would last into the nineteenth century. One of the driving forces seems to have been the decision to implement the mechanization of mint production, in the offing for some years. A sequence of French specialists and enthusiasts had been promoting such a change for a century: Eloi Mestrelle under Elizabeth, Nicolas Briot under Charles I, and most recently Pierre Blondeau at the Commonwealth mint. In April 1662 Blondeau was invited back from France. Meanwhile, Thomas Simon and a new figure, the Dutch John Roettiers, with his brother Joseph, were instructed to work on designs.46 The king ordered the mint officials on 7 February 1662: ‘to permit Thos Simon, one of the chief engravers, and John and Joseph Roettiers severally to engage a trial piece of silver of the value of five shillings according to drafts shown to the king, and none to disturb them till the work is done and presented to his Majesty for judgement’. By this point the general design of the new coinage clearly existed and what seem to be examples of the ‘drafts shown the king’ survive in Simon’s papers. Simon and the Roettiers proved incapable of working together ‘by reason of a contest in art between them’, as Henry Slingsby reported to the Council in April; since the design was already agreed, the ‘contest in art’ was one of technical execution, not imagination.47 On 19 May Charles decided in favour of Roettiers, inspiring Simon to create his famous ‘Petition Crown’ in protest.48 Simon had to make do with crafting the Scottish manifestation of the new royal image, creating dies for Charles II’s first Scottish coinage between November 1662 and January 1663, although the actual issue of coins had to wait until 1664. This story has moved well beyond the immediate consequences of the succession year, but the run-up to the coinage change had certainly gone back to the early months of the reign, which suggests that Charles’s first coinage issue was always viewed as a stop-gap. On 19 February 1661 Samuel Pepys met up with the mint’s deputy-master Henry Slingsby: We met with Mr Slingsby, that was formerly a great friend of Mons. Blondeau, who showed me the stamps of the King’s new coin which is strange to see how good they are in the stamp and bad in the money for lack of skill to make them. But, he says, Blondeau will shortly come over, and then we shall have it better, and the best in the world.49

46  Simon had almost certainly been responsible for the design of the Commonwealth coinage: see H.E. Pagan, ‘The Career of Thomas Simon’, British Numismatic Journal, 58 (1988), 178–89. 47  Farquhar, ‘Thomas Simon’, 297. 48  The petition was in the form of the technically difficult edge inscription. For the Petition Crown, see most recently Marvin Lessen, ‘Notes on Simon’s Pattern (Petition) Crown of Charles II’, British Numismatic Journal, 75 (2005), 91–112. 49  The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell, 1970–83), II, 39.

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So, the technological reform of the mint was being envisaged as the issues of the first coinage of the new reign were moving into circulation. Clearly Pepys was taking his information and maybe his opinions from Slingsby,50 but it would indicate that the decision to advance with mechanization was already well-embedded. It had always been the case that rulers were keen on the new techniques, because of the quality of the resulting royal images, whereas mints had found them more expensive and wanting in terms of efficiency;51 as aptly summed up by Pepys: ‘They say that this way is more charge to the King than the old way. But it is neater.’52 Some of the technical issues were being overcome, but a different e­xpectation about how coinage should look was, it seems, a real, if unquantifiable, part of the decision-making process. On 24 November 1662, visiting the Tower to view the money received in return for selling Dunkirk back to France, the king called in at the mint, as Pepys again reported: ‘Mr Slingsby did show the King and I did see the stamps of the new money that is now to be made by Blondeau’s fashion, which are very neat and like the King.’53 Coins were not in fact struck until early 1663, but there was less urgency, now the Commonwealth coinage had been purged, and there was perhaps more acceptance that a complete reorganization of the mint’s methods of production was always going to take time. The new coins had a double impact. The strong and clear strike of the screwpress, their perfect roundness and the presence of marking on their edges, to inhibit clipping, things that Pepys noted, all distinguished them from the king’s first coinage and indeed from the older pre-Commonwealth coin which still ­dominated the currency, if in increasingly poor condition. The new designs were as radical as the technology (Figure 15.3). The king’s portrait had now been turned to face left, further emphasizing the effect of the new coinage, and he was depicted in a wholly classicized form across the denominations, not just the gold. In fact, the gold was a little less Roman, since the king’s profile was cut off at the neckline, with no costume in view, although the laurel wreath remained as a sign of rule. The silver shifted from the contemporary look of the first coinage to a full neo-classical mode, with cuirass and Roman military cloak accompanying the crowning wreath. The only concession to contemporaneity on both series of coins came in the shape of the vast wig. The presence of a simpler portrait on the gold and a more elaborate one on the silver was a complete reversal of the traditional practice in which the gold, struck in much smaller quantities and on a softer metal, could more easily carry a more extravagant design, while the silver, struck in far greater quantities and much harder on the dies, carried a simpler image. On a technical level, the new ­mechanized processes made it easier to strike a more elaborately designed silver coinage, even on larger and thicker blanks, while the way the punches and dies were made and used now also reduced the risk to the vulnerable portrait punches in the creation of working dies. Changes in technology encouraged this particular 50  For Slingsby and his relationship to Pepys, see C. E. Challis, ‘The Career of Henry Slingsby’, British Numismatic Journal, 61 (1991), 167–76. 51  For an account of one such case, see David Sellwood, ‘The Trial of Nicholas Briot’, British Numismatic Journal, 56 (1986), 108–23. 52 Pepys, Diary, IV, 147. 53  Ibid., III, 265.

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Figure 15.3.  Gold guinea (£1) of Charles II (1663). © Trustees of the British Museum.

shift in the forms of royal representation with the consequence that the coins of daily business now bore the more impressive royal image. With this coinage also ended the long tradition of having a reverse legend with some sort of message, however generic: from this point the name and titles of the monarch encompassed both sides of the coin, with the date now an unfailing presence to define the issue, rather than using initial marks. A deconstructed form of the royal arms also replaced the single shield on the reverse, something which would also have a long life, if less utterly dominant. The Roman imperial theme in monarchic representation was a widespread one in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and a fundamental part of baroque visual and literary culture, but its transferral to the mass medium of coinage was an interesting step.54 One does not have to look hard to see the source of the particular version of royal authority adopted by Charles II: it is a close reflection of the coinage mode of Louis XIV of France, from the 1640s onwards, also machine-struck and familiar to Charles from his years in exile. The Augustan mode in itself was not of course necessarily French, even on coinage: James I’s laurels bear witness to this option and elements of it can also be encountered on the coinage of the Holy Roman emperors and of the Habsburgs in Milan and Naples earlier in the seventeenth century. However, there were specifics in Charles II’s milled coinage that make a recent French influence clear.55 In particular the distinction between the portrait styles on gold and silver would appear to be derived from French practice. It seems that this was the image of royalty always intended for Charles’s coinage, which can explain the restraint on such things as changing the direction of the portrait and failing to adjust the weight standards of the gold: it had just taken longer to get to this point than at other Stuart successions for fairly evident ­reasons—the 54  In the British context, see, for example, Sharpe, Rebranding Rule, in particular 106–8 and 154–5. 55  In the 1660s other European rulers, including the kings of Denmark and Sweden, also shifted their coinage portraits into this specifically French-derived Roman mode.

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linked desire to resume a royal coinage as quickly as possible and to purge the Commonwealth coinage from currency. All early modern British monarchs interacted with their coinage. They reviewed new designs, tweaked and critiqued them, sat for portraits, sought out skilled artists, and even personally designed new denominations. At no point was this interaction stronger than on their accession. Yet only James I and Charles II revisited the appearance of their coinage so swiftly and to such a profound extent. The fact that both were outsiders, entering a kingdom where they were largely strangers, is surely significant. Their new subjects had an acute curiosity about them, while they themselves felt an urgent need to establish their presence quickly: James as a mature, masculine monarch; Charles as the heir of his martyred father across the chasm of the interregnum. Yet each in their different ways (James through text and Charles through image) then proceeded to make a more considered adjustment, even though this had the potential to distract from the image each had initially established. Some things were more important than continuity.

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16 The Loyal Address Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715 Mark Knights The succession in 1658 of Richard Cromwell to his father’s Protectorate, a transfer of power that smacked of kingship, prompted a novel form of ‘gift’ to the new ruler: the address of thanks.1 Ninety-four prose addresses were sent to the new Protector, all professing loyalty and a willingness to stand by him.2 Whilst petitioning the monarch for redress of a grievance or for a favour was far from being novel in 1658, and much panegyrical poetry had been written to celebrate earlier accessions (as other contributions to this volume make clear), the new genre of panegyrical address fused subscriptional activity and acclamation so successfully that it remained an enduring part of political culture. The later monarchical use of the genre is perhaps surprising given that its origins lay with the propagandist journalism of republican writer Marchmont Nedham and republican secretary of state, John Thurloe, who were credited with its invention, and that the addresses to Richard Cromwell were attacked by royalists as well as republicans for the way in which they described him as the providential, ‘rightful’, ‘undoubted’, ‘lawfully nominated’ successor.3 Yet after 1658, and throughout the rest of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, adherents of the later Stuarts promoted such addresses, so that participating in the national culture of textual gifts came to be seen as an essential act of loyalty to the monarchy and beyond that, to the established Church and state. The loyal address was adopted and exploited by royalists after 1658 because it offered something innovative, adapting earlier panegyrical forms into a prose format that could stand as collective representations of a locality’s loyalty. Expressed through legitimated voices of incorporated borough councils, or county representatives 1  For the uncertainties surrounding Richard’s succession and the perceived need to rally support behind it, see Jonathan Fitzgibbons, ‘ “Not in any doubtful dispute”? Reassessing the Nomination of Richard Cromwell’, Historical Research, 83 (2010), 281–300, and ‘Hereditary Succession and the Cromwellian Protectorate: The Offer of the Crown Reconsidered’, English Historical Review, 128 (2013), 1095–128. 2  A collection of the addresses, compiled by a devotee of the ‘good old cause’ who may well have been Vavasor Powell, described them as ‘blasphemous, lying, flattering addresses’: A True Catalogue, or an Account of the Several Places Where Richard Cromwell was Proclaimed Lord Protector (London, 1659), quotation from the title. I am grateful to Ted Vallance for pointing out Powell’s probable authorship. 3  Sir George Wharton, A Second Narrative of the Late Parliament (London, 1658), 26. The royalist Wharton attacked the ‘blasphemous, lying, flattering, cycophant Addressours’.

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such as assize grand juries, such addresses embodied civic duty and pride. Even more significantly, the addresses could be printed: either separately as p ­ amphlets, or collected together for maximum impact, in bumper editions of ­periodicals. Indeed, the proliferation of print may well have been a necessary precondition for the emergence of the address. Printing addresses had several implications (which echo the ways in which David Zaret found that print transformed the allied genre of petitions in the mid-seventeenth century4): print gave them a public as well as a royal audience; it meant that an accession, or other event worthy of thanks-giving, was given a national profile, since local groups could send addresses to London; and it meant that each locality could see the expressions of other addressers, thereby creating a competition to praise more extravagantly, a national culture of prose panegyric. But the desire to emulate others meant that the nuances of criticism that were possible in panegyric could become threatened by the desire to appear more loyal than others and the genre was vulnerable to the criticism, also levelled at verse panegyric, that its effusive expressions of loyalty were of little enduring value. This chapter examines the genre of the loyal address, which has received very little attention from either historians or literary critics. The focus will be on the period from the 1680s to the Hanoverian accession in 1714, an end point that allows consideration of the effects of the height of party conflict in Queen Anne’s reign on prose panegyric and brief comments about its history in the Georgian era. Addresses were presented to every monarch at their accession during that period and so provide a valuable insight into the way in which this very public and participatory form of panegyric worked. But they are also a way of tracking larger tensions and developments that were affecting how the literature around and about succession was written, disseminated, and consumed. They force us to question what we mean by succession literature; they demand analysis of the rhetorical conventions of panegyric that they deployed; they enable us to reconstruct different, partisan, and increasingly Eurocentric narratives of the threats facing the ­monarchy; and hostility to them requires us to explain the contradictions and ambiguities which rendered the genre suspect. Historians have tended to think less in terms of genres than literary critics, and this may explain the relative neglect of this type of political and literary text. Yet there are good reasons why both groups of scholars should be interested in them. Whereas attention was once very focused on challenges to, and defiance of, later Stuart authority, in recent years we have learned a good deal more about the construction of popular loyalty to Church and state across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.5 The effect has been that we now appreciate that loyalty was not something 4  David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in EarlyModern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 5  For adherence to the Church of England and popular royalism in the seventeenth century, see John Morrill, ‘The Religious Context of the English Civil War’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 34 (1984), 155–78; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration to the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Tim Harris et al. (eds), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; 2nd edn 2000); Tony Claydon,

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simply inculcated from the top down, but was often a widely shared sentiment that was articulated with vigour when opposed or challenged. This revision of the nature and strength of loyalism has in turn helped to explain why the divergence of King and Church was so traumatic during the reigns of Charles II and more especially James II, and why the political culture of the later Stuart period was so contested. Similarly, work on loyal associations—subscriptional texts which bound communities to stand together, often for military reasons—has indicated that loyal addresses could mobilize large numbers of subscribers as well as provoking opposition.6 First deployed in 1584, associations were promoted in 1688, in 1696 after an attempt to assassinate William III, in 1715–16 in the wake of Jacobite rioting against the accession of George I, and in 1722–3, after the successful prosecution of Jacobite plotters. We are also beginning to know more about how satire and panegyric functioned to puncture or support political and religious loyalty. For example, satire (both graphic and textual) was deployed by both loyalists and their critics, produced in responsive dialogue with one another.7 The essays in this volume, especially those by Richard McCabe and Andrew McRae, also contribute to an emerging a­ ppreciation of the role played by satire’s opposite, panegyric, in the later Stuart period.8 William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–1685 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007); Lloyd Bowen, ‘Seditious Speech and Popular Royalism 1649–60’, in Jason McElligott and David L. Smith (eds), Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Charles W. A. Prior and Glenn Burgess (eds), England’s Wars of Religion, Revisited (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). For the importance of popular loyalism in the eighteenth century, see Geoffrey Holmes, ‘The Sacheverell Riots : The Crowd and the Church in Early Eighteenth-Century London’, in Paul Slack (ed.), Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and The Trial of Dr Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973); Mark Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792–3’, English Historical Review, 90 (1995), 42–69; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London: Vintage, 1996); Mark Knights (ed.), Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Impeachment of Dr Henry Sacheverell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012). Popular royalism could become disloyal, of course, when it meant adherence to the Stuart dynasty after 1688 and for popular Jacobitism: see Paul Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 6 Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), ch. 3; Ted Vallance, ‘“From the Hearts of the People”: Loyalty, Addresses and the Public Sphere in the Exclusion Crisis’, in Tony Claydon and Thomas N. Corns (eds), Religion, Culture and National Community in the 1670s (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), and ‘Loyal or Rebellious? Protestant Associations in England 1584–1696’, The Seventeenth Century, 17 (2002), 1–23. 7  Helen Pierce, Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Ashley Marshall, The Practice of Satire in England, 1658–1770 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Howard D. Weinbrot, Literature, Religion and the Evolution of Culture 1660–1780 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Roger Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Conal Condren, Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1997). 8 See Chapter  1, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’, and Chapter  9, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’, respectively. For discussions, see O.  B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: A Study of the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Theory and Practice (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1962); James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Arthur Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William III and Anne’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67; Joseph Hone, ‘Politicising Praise: Panegyric and the Accession of Queen Anne’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37 (2014),

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Elsewhere, Abigail Williams has shown how panegyric was appropriated by the Whigs to celebrate military victories over the French; and Kevin Sharpe has charted how kingship was desacralized by the revolution of 1688.9 We are thus well placed to bring historical and literary concerns together through a study of succession and other loyal addresses which reveal significant shifts in practice and in the politics of rhetoric over the seventeenth century. T H E G E N R E O F A L OY A L A D D R E S S It is necessary to say a little more about the essential characteristics of a loyal address and what differentiated it from the petition, a form of subscriptional text to which it was closely related. A petition was a humble request for something to be done; whereas an address was a profession of loyalty or thanks for actions or events that had already taken place. The mass of mid-century petitioning activity no doubt stimulated the innovation of the loyal address in 1658; but the latter was distinguished by its acclamatory and panegyrical text, ostensibly aimed at the Protector or monarch as the chief recipient. Loyal addresses usually gave thanks— for a smooth succession but also for military victories—or expressed loyalty at a time of crisis (in response to threats from abroad, for example, or, as we shall see, to internal threats). Whilst there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ address, since they were all crafted to meet particular occasions (such as an accession, royal death, military victory) and were mostly drafted locally to ensure individuality of expression, analysis of one address helps to highlight the essential characteristics of the genre. On 9 February 1685 James II was proclaimed king, following the death of his brother Charles II. The proclamation was published in the court’s own periodical, the London Gazette,10 and the very next item was an address from Portsmouth to the new King. It was slightly unusual for a provincial city to be given the pre-eminent role—London often led the way with addressing campaigns—but the importance of the navy to both the town and the new monarch may explain this. The address came from the ‘Loyal Subjects and Officers within your Garrison of Portsmouth’, reflecting how addresses sought the support of a corporate body in order to confer legitimacy: they regularly came from loyal militias, town c­ orporations, groups of 147–57; Noelle Dückmann Gallagher, ‘The Embarrassments of Restoration Panegyric: Reconsidering an Unfashionable Genre’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 39 (2015), 33–54; D. N. DeLuna, ‘“Modern Panegrick” and Defoe’s “Dunciad”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 35 (1995), 419–35; C.  A. Moore, ‘Whig Panegyric Verse 1700–1760’, PMLA 41 (1926), 362–401; Robert D. Horn, Marlborough: A Survey: Panegryics, Satires and Biographical Writings 1688–1788 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1975); Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 277–86. 9  Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1715 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kevin Sharpe, Rebranding Rule: The Restoration and Revolution Monarchy 1660–1714 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 10  London Gazette (hereafter LG) 2007 (9–12 Feb. 1685). The periodical began in 1665, initially as the Oxford Gazette, since the court had moved out of London because of the Plague. In 1699 the Edinburgh Gazette first appeared and the Dublin Gazette in 1706. Editions of all three periodicals are freely available online at https://www.thegazette.co.uk/.

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clerics, trading companies, and even colonial assemblies. The text was addressed to the king, but by virtue of being published was also implicitly intended for public consumption, both of other loyalists in the same or adjacent localities, or further afield, or sought to persuade or intimidate those who thought differently. As has already been noted, addresses were usually—though not always—published in the Gazette and the periodical became so stuffed with them that it had to expand the number of its pages.11 The addresses, intended for both the royal audience and the wider public, could in turn become part of a wider printed debate about their merits or, more often, why they were considered to be deceptive or manipulative. The Portsmouth text tells us nothing about how many people signed it. In an ideal world, promoters of addresses sought unanimous backing for their texts, but sometimes a simple majority was all that could be mustered and this was usually stated in the text, an indication of tensions within the group. In addition to ­corporate backing, addresses often also sought subscriptions from individuals and the number of signatories was often boasted about.12 In this case, however, the number of signatures mattered less than swiftness of response. The Portsmouth address was dated 11 February, just two days after the king’s succession, an incredibly quick piece of work; other addresses congratulating James were still coming to court as late as June. The Portsmouth garrison was signalling its zeal for the new king, a bold statement of the military muscle he commanded which would shortly be tested during the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, who disputed James’s succession and claimed it for himself. As Andrew McRae notes in his chapter, panegyric often operated to constrain uncertain alternatives and the accession of James II offered precisely such an occasion. The Portsmouth garrison declared that they think it our duty to Congratulate your Peaceable Succession to the Crown and to assure your Majesty that as we never had a thought to obstruct it, as some would have done by a bill of Exclusion; so we will alwaies firmly adhere to your Majesties Interest, and spend the last Drop of our Blood in the Defence of Your Majesties Person and in the maintenance of your Royal Prerogatives. And shall daily Pray for your Majesties long and Prosperous Reign over us.

This militaristic response was in some ways a hybrid of the address and the ­association, which formally bound loyalists together with an oath or commitment to express their devotion to the monarch through armed action, if need be. The Portsmouth address was a good deal shorter than most presented in 1685 or at other times; several paragraphs was more usual and some were even longer. The wording of the Portsmouth text is also, befitting its military origins, quite blunt; other texts waxed lyrical and sought to package their loyalty in more extravagant panegyric. But the assertion of loyalty, offer of service, and prayers were characteristic 11  On occasion, when they flew in the face of the government, the addresses were not printed in the Gazette, as in 1710 when they were gathered as A Collection of all the Addresses that have been presented to her Majesty, published by the fervent Tory trade publisher John Morphew. 12  In 1701 Sir Charles Hotham thought that ‘the greater number of hands’ to an address ‘will make it more valuable’: Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 8 vols (London: HMSO, 1901–13), VIII, 84–5.

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of the genre and the pointed reference to the attempts between 1679 and 1681 to exclude James from the throne was also symptomatic of the ways in which texts cold be used to make short ideological statements.13 The text was thus a political intervention, signalling support for the contentious succession and furthermore for the king’s prerogative powers, which had so often been attacked over the previous five years. We do not know precisely who drafted the Portsmouth address but we might suspect the influence of the garrison’s governor, Baptist Noel, Viscount Campden, who was closely tied by marriage to the fiercely loyal Bertie and Fanshawe families. If so, such pressure was not uncommon; but there were plenty of other addresses where the initiative was taken at a more local level, by loyalists within a corporate body. Deciding how far the texts were representative of ‘public opinion’ could, as we shall see, nevertheless be a fraught exercise.14 The wording of the vast majority of addresses—361 were sent to James after his succession—was different, the aim being individuality of expression and emphasis within a common rhetorical framework. Once drafted, and support secured, addresses were sent or presented to the monarch, a process that often involved loyalists travelling to Whitehall, a formal ceremonial moment which was in many cases brokered by a courtier, who introduced the address, and which could also result in an honour—usually a knighthood— being conferred on the presenter.15 Royal pleasure (and occasionally displeasure) could also be further indicated by short speeches or remarks. In Portsmouth’s case, the very short time between the royal proclamation and the text reaching London probably precluded the possibility of a presentation party; in this instance, the honour of presenting was displaced by the honour of being first to be presented and to call the opening shot of what became a national campaign of adulation. Portsmouth’s text was just one of hundreds promoted in the 1685 campaign, and of thousands across the later Stuart period. Addresses were promoted on a national and increasingly imperial scale: they came from across the country and the colonies, and, published separately and in collections designed to highlight both their number and their carefully crafted texts, they were intended for a national, and at times international, audience.16 Their high profile, and their very public 13  For the succession crisis, see my Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 14  For the way in which a corporation could be encouraged to address by an MP, see Hertfordshire Records Office, MS Verulam IX.A 268A, Sir Harbottle Grimston to mayor of St Albans, 7 July 1683; Thomas Bush’s reply to Grimston, 13 July 1683. There is occasional evidence of some copy-cat drafting: Charles Hedges told under-secretary of state John Ellis in August 1704 that ‘our burroughs here talk of addressing upon ye victory & success &c if you find any coming from other parts, send me two, different in terms, for my two boroughs, of ye like strain as others, fairly written & ready to sign’: British Library, Add. MS 28895, fol. 336 (31 Aug. 1704). The High Church Mask Pull’d Off: or Modern Addresses Anatomized. Designed Chiefly for the Information of the Common People (London, 1710) claimed that ‘Copies [of addresses] have been transmitted from London to several Parts of the Land; to others, Particular Heads only, to be modified by such whose abilities and zeal they could confide in’ (p. 3). 15  If the monarch was not available, a proxy could accept the address on his or her behalf. 16  For a map showing the geography of addressing in 1701–2, see Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation, 146–7. The addresses were also reported in French language periodicals such as the Nouvelles Ordinaires de Divers Endroits in the mid seventeenth century and Mercure historique et politique contenant l’état présent de l’Europe, from 1686, a point I owe to Ted Vallance.

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attempts to procure signatures and widespread endorsement, meant a widespread dissemination of the issues they discussed to a large number of people, both endorsers and readers. This meant that they were also susceptible to the partisan conflicts of the age; but they were also simultaneously given a generic legitimacy by the recognition in the Bill of Rights in 1689 of a right to address the monarch.17 The combination of right, zeal, and partisanship made the address a perfect vehicle for articulating sentiments in a political culture that prized public discourse. T H E S C A L E A N D PAT T E R N O F A D D R E S S I N G Since the address played a notable part in every succession after 1658 it is worth briefly charting the waves of prose panegyric that showered the monarchy. Addresses played a part in showing support for a free Parliament—which paved the way for the restoration of monarchy—and gave thanks for the restoration of the king in 166018 but they were revived on a larger scale during the succession crisis of 1679–81, when fear of disorder once again prompted loyalist efforts. This revival was related to the issue of the succession, but addresses were not limited to the occasion of a succession. Over 200 were prompted by a declaration issued by Charles II in April 1681 setting out why he had dissolved the Parliament that had sat in Oxford for just a week and had tried, for the third time, to alter the course of the succession by excluding James Duke of York from the throne. Almost the same number was triggered the following year in response to an association allegedly drafted by the first Earl of Shaftesbury to create an armed ‘firm and loyal Society’ committed to excluding James.19 The succession was again the focal issue in 1683, when an alleged plot to assassinate the king and his brother—the so-called Rye House Plot—was discovered, resulting in over 320 loyal addresses. So although, as we saw earlier, addresses flooded in after James II’s accession in 1685, they did so in the wake of a series of addressing campaigns over the previous four years that had sought to mobilize loyalty in a very public way. It was thus a reflection of the nervousness surrounding the succession after James II that just forty-three addresses greeted the birth of his son, whose legitimacy was disputed, in 1688.20 It was the succession, too, that was the key concern of over 200 addresses in 1694 on the death of Queen Mary, since William’s title to the Crown now rested 17  This was asserted by Brackley: LG 3757 (25–8 Aug. 1701). I sketch the development of the right to petition and address in ‘“The Lowest Degree of Freedom”: The Right to Petition Parliament 1640–1800’ in Richard Huzzey (ed.), Pressure and Parliament: From Civil War to Civil Society (Parliamentary History (Supplement) 37 (2018), 18–34). 18  See, for example, The Humble Address of the Mayor, Aldermen, and Citizens of Your Majesties City of Bath in the County of Somersett (London, 1660), drafted by William Prynne; The Loyal Addresse of the Gentry of Gloucestershire. To the kings most Excellent Majesty (London, 1660). 19  The History of the Association (London, 1682). 20  A Collection of the Several Addresses in the Late King James’s Time Concerning the Conception and Birth of the Pretended Prince of Wales (London, 1700). The Chetham library copy has ‘pretended’ deleted, rendering what might be read as evidence of the fickleness of the people into a celebration of the Pretender’s birth.

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solely on the controversial transfer of power achieved in 1689. And when in 1701 Louis XIV of France recognized the ‘Pretender’, the disputed son of James II, as the lawful king, William’s title and Anne’s future succession were thrown into jeopardy, eliciting 344 addresses rejecting the French king’s attempt to determine the English succession and explicitly renouncing the Pretender. Barely a few months after that campaign, Anne’s accession was greeted with a further 400 addresses, many of which again formally abjured the Pretender. The war that resumed against France was a war of succession—both of England and of Spain, since in the former France recognized the right of the Pretender and in the latter sought to appropriate the Spanish throne. The military victories achieved by allied forces were thus in a very real sense achievements to secure a Protestant succession and the addresses celebrating them—265 in 1704, 303 in 1706, and ninety-eight in 1708—could also be seen as succession-related not least because they frequently mentioned the need to guarantee a Protestant succession. The Union with Scotland in 1707 had also been necessary to secure the Protestant succession north of the border and this aspect was explicitly recognized in many of the 213 addresses which the Union prompted. Moreover, addresses promoted against Jacobite plots were directly concerned with the succession. A Jacobite invasion attempt in 1708 was condemned in 338 addresses, and 320 more followed the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. The 443 addresses congratulating George I on his accession were thus the fruit of a well-oiled machine and illustrated how a Stuart genre was adapted for use in the Georgian era. In short, thousands of addresses relating to the succession were promoted in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and to these we should add more, such as those in 1710 after the trial of Dr Sacheverell, at which Whig principles about the succession were vigorously debated. One indication of the significance accorded addresses is a commonplace book belonging to William Holgate, a member of the non-parliamentary borough of Saffron Walden in Essex, who thought them sufficiently noteworthy to fill its pages with the addresses that his locality and the county as a whole presented throughout Anne’s reign.21 The frequency of addressing campaigns over and beyond those timed to celebrate a royal accession nevertheless raises questions about the category, employed throughout this volume, of ‘succession literature’. In this period the succession was not so much an event as an ongoing debate that generated a great deal of literature; indeed, so much, so often, that vast swathes of print might legitimately be included in the category. It might be more precise, at least for the later Stuart period, to distinguish between accession and succession literature: the former marking the beginning of a reign (the material on which this volume is principally focused), the latter charting the public debate about the succession that swirled and often raged for much of the rest of the time. The plots and conspiracies against the Stuarts, and then the Hanoverians, ensured that succession literature was part of an  almost continuous drama played out over several generations. It certainly extended far beyond the immediate replacement of one monarch with another. 21  Essex Records Office, T/A 98, fols 149, 151, 152, 179, 259–60.

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The early seventeenth century had enjoyed an unusual, and short, period in which the succession appeared secure. But after 1649 the succession, and at times the very survival, of the monarchy was almost permanently uncertain. Indeed, the popularity of the panegyrical loyal address was in part due to its adaptability to both a moment of accession and a debate about succession. Clearly many felt a need for royalist panegyric beyond the moment of accession. T H E PA N E G Y R I C O F T H E A D D R E S S The loyalist addresses also raise questions about their status as ‘literature’, since they were ephemeral texts whose authorship is often uncertain and stylistically their prose can appear dull and repetitive. Yet they exploited a literary genre— panegyric—to create a new form of public acclamation that was carefully crafted. Panegyric is usually considered in relation to poetry, which developed under the first Stuart king and was closely associated with the succession.22 The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first use of the anglicized noun ‘panegyric’ as Samuel Daniel’s poem on the Stuart succession in 1603.23 Although the later Stuart addresses were prose panegyrics they fit the rules of panegyric very well, as they were set out by classical and Renaissance rhetoricians. Indeed, the rhetorical work being done by the texts is worth setting out. In 1685, in the immediate wake of James II’s accession and during the wave of loyalist addresses that followed it, the cleric White Kennett offered a translation of Pliny’s panegyric to the Emperor Trajan, under the title An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince.24 Kennett, who thought the Roman ‘seem’d to invite a parallel’ with his own day, looked to Pliny for guidance about the art of panegyric and the reader of his work could derive three important conclusions which can be applied to the later Stuart addresses.25 The first is that Pliny spent time contrasting past and present, setting out how the virtuous Trajan had overcome rebellion to usher in a new era of loyalty. The second was that Pliny created an idealization of the best of princes, deliberately listing the virtues that he claimed Trajan possessed, so that they might be emulated by his people. The third was that, as Kennett pointed out in his preface, this idealization also served to instruct the prince in how he ought to continue to act. Kennett called this ‘a kind of winning Lecture to future Princes (not by way of

22  Oldmixon thought that in addresses ‘the poetica licentia is as warrantable as in a poem’: The History of Addresses, Part Two (London, 1711), 230. 23  This was in fact the first use of the term in a title, though Early English Books Online (https:// eebo.chadwyck.com/home) has earlier occurrences used in the body of texts. John Gordon also wrote a A Panegyrique of Congratulation in 1603. 24  The preface is dated 1 Nov. 1684 but with a postscript dated 3 Mar. 1685 which explicitly refers to Charles II’s death a month earlier and James’s accession. The pamphlet was later used against Kennett when his identification with the Whigs was more obvious and hence when his earlier writing was construed as embarrassing: White Against Kennett; or Dr Kennett’s Panegyrick upon the Late King James (London, 1704). 25 Kennett, An Address of Thanks to a Good Prince (London, 1686), viii.

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assertory instructions)’ but through the lure of ‘imitation’. These rhetorical ploys were all present in the later Stuart addresses. The first feature of Plinean panegyric, then, was the contrast between past and present, the result of a struggle between evil and good in which the latter proved triumphant. This can readily be seen in the loyalist addresses of the 1680s, which told the story of a dangerous threat from a group of dissenting and atheistical republicans who conspired to pervert the course of the succession. The addresses of 1681 (after the king’s decisive break with Parliament), 1682 (after the ‘discovery’ of an allegedly seditious association against the king), and 1683 (in the wake of the Rye House Plot) constructed a version of loyalty that rested on the depiction of the first Whigs as seditious fanatics, who used religion as a veneer to hide political ambition and republican sentiments. Thus Portsmouth in 1682 alleged that dissenting conventicles were ‘trumpets of sedition and rebellion’.26 In 1683 address after address rushed to abhor the triumvirate of ‘fanatical, atheistic and republican principles’. Dissenters were attacked for promoting sedition and disloyalty to the Crown. Addresses attacked the ‘fanatical frenzy’ of the dissenters and their ‘implacable rage and malice’.27 Leeds attacked the ‘bloodthirsty men whose religion is rebellion and their loyalty witchcraft’.28 The addressers were keen to deny their opponents any legitimate religious belief. Religion was, in their eyes, simply being used as a mask or cloak for political designs. The addressers attacked the plotters as impious, atheistic hypocrites, ‘true-protestant-atheists’ as Dorset’s address put it.29 The rebels were ‘as far from being true Protestants as they are from being true subjects’.30 These rhetorical ploys went a stage further by suggesting that opponents of James’s succession were motivated by republicanism, an emotive term calculated to invoke powerful feelings of revulsion. In 1683 Eye condemned its ‘men of r­ epublican principles’ and Northampton observed that corporations had ‘degenerated by degrees from their allegiance to an imperial power into the corruptions of a commonwealth’.31 The charge of republicanism allowed the addressers to link the recent past with the older but still emotive past of the civil wars and interregnum. The Dorset grand jury that started the addressing campaign of 1682 thus saw the Shaftsburian ­association as ‘the obstinate remains of the late horrid rebellion’ and many of the addresses took up the parallel between the association allegedly prepared by Shaftesbury with that of the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, which, as the address from Wiltshire’s grand jury put it, ‘produced a rebellious, inhumane, and bloody war in this kingdom; and also that most execrable and horrid murder of our late sovereign and blessed martyr Charles the first’.32 Gloucestershire’s addressers thought they might have been enslaved ‘to a handful of men, another monstrous Rump of a Parliament, and our Property exposed to rapine and violence, as it was 26  LG 1710 (6–18 Apr. 1682). 27  LG 1855 (27–30 Aug. 1683); LG 1850 (9–13 Aug. 1683). 28  LG 1860 (13–17 Sept. 1683). 29  LG 1846 (26–30 July 1683). 30  LG 1858 (6–10 Sept. 1683). 31  LG 1852 (16–20 Aug. 1683); LG 1857 (3–6 Sept. 1683). 32  LG 1692 (2–6 Feb. 1681). The parallel was also made in The Two Associations (London, 1681) which printed them side by side.

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by men of like principles in the late dreadful rebellion’.33 The inhabitants of Brewton, in Somerset, were driven to profess their loyalty since ‘we have been ourselves or Fathers sequester’d, imprison’d, persecuted, undone; and for no other crime but our loyalty to your majesties blessed father and self, in whose service every individual man almost of us may to his glory remember some near relation that honestly lost his life’.34 New Woodstock’s address remarked that the memory of Charles I ‘is daily before our eyes; and we too plainly see the restless endeavours of the Fanaticks and men of commonwealth principles to play their accursed (yet beloved) game of rebellion over again’.35 The Shaftesburian association, Pembroke’s address alleged, ‘has awakened us to reflect more deliberately upon that bloody history of the late rebellion, carried on by Ambition and Enthusiasm, in which many well-meaning, unwary men, infatuated by the canting declarations and gilded promises of those times, were unfortunately involved in the ruine of the best of kings, the purest of churches and the most equal of governments’.36 The historical struggle of good over evil, already rehearsed in the early 1680s addresses, was thus available to the addressers of 1685 acclaiming their new king. Many duly went out of their way to congratulate the new monarch on his successful overcoming of the obstacles to his accession, notably in the form of the exclusion bill, as we saw earlier with the Portsmouth address, and the Rye House Plot. The Middlesex address, for example, thought that James had been delivered by God from the ‘Villanous designs which the race of Regicides and Excluders (who Murder’d the Royal Martyr your father) have contriv’d not only to destroy your Sacred Person but to exterminate the Monarchy it self ’.37 Similarly Westbury’s address condemned the ‘wicked strivings and malicious endeavours of Anti-monarchical men, to deprive your Royal Person of your undoubted Inheritance’.38 Address after address condemned the attempts to pass the exclusion bill, which was described as a ‘Monstrous’,39 ‘Hellish’,40 ‘diabolical and unjust’ bill,41 endeavoured by ‘Bloodthirsty villains’.42 Many addressers thus saw James’s accession as providential. Southampton’s text, amongst many others, talked of the sacred nature of the king and the providential nature of his accession.43 Pliny’s second lesson, that the people should learn from the virtues of their prince, was also not lost on the addressers of 1685. The key message, of course, was about the virtue of loyalty. The steadfastness and courage shown by James in overcoming his enemies was, the addressers insisted, to be emulated by his people who should remain steadfast in their loyalty and courageously ready to defend him. Carnarvonshire promised that it would ‘never err from an unalterable Loyalty to our King’ and Norwich addressers threw themselves ‘intirely at your Royal Feet, in 33  LG 1706 (23–7 Mar. 1682). 34  LG 1699 (27 Feb.–2 Mar. 1681). 35  LG 1706 (23–7 Mar. 1682). 36  LG 1728 (8–12 June 1682). 37  LG 2010 (19–23 Feb. 1685). 38  LG 2014 (5–9 Mar. 1685). 39  Wigan’s address, LG 2015 (9–12 Mar. 1685). 40  Dartmouth’s address, LG 2016 (12–16 Mar. 1685). 41  Cinque Ports address, LG 2025 (13–16 Apr. 1685). 42  Gloucester’s address, LG 2011 (23–6 Feb. 1685). 43  LG 2017 (10–16 Mar. 1685).

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the Protestation of a most firm and unalterable Allegiance to your Majesty while we live’.44 This prompted some high-blown rhetoric about almost unlimited loyalty. The lawyers of the Middle Temple argued that ‘Your Majesties high prerogative is the greatest Security of the Liberty and Property of the Subject’ and the city of  Oxford thought they owed ‘all our Privileges to the bounty of your Royal Predecessors’.45 James might well have been forgiven, it seems, for thinking that he had the unwavering support of his people. Yet if that was the lesson James drew—and it might well have been—it was because he had forgotten the third insight of Pliny’s panegyric: that embedded within the compliment was an implicit lesson, Kennett’s ‘winning Lecture’, for the monarch. Panegyric praised but it also instructed the monarch, as well as the wider audience listening to it.46 In 1685 this instruction concerned the strength of allegiance to the Church as well as to the king. Indeed, it was apparent that many addresses focused as much on the king’s declaration to Privy Council that he would uphold and maintain the Church of England as they did on the king’s accession, evidence perhaps of genuine relief that he did not intend a catholicizing policy but also a series of gilded warnings seeking to hold him to that line for the future. Warwickshire thus gave thanks, ‘not doubting but that the Church of England shall flourish in all her Legal Priviledges and Establishments’.47 Indeed some c­ orporations saw a sort of implicit deal on the table. Newark’s addressers refused to ‘doubt your Defending the Establish’d Religion’ and they would ‘reciprocally endeavour the maintenance of your Royal Prerogatives’.48 Addressers from Garstang in Lancashire also made this reciprocity quite explicit, albeit wrapped in soft language: ‘as the Church is the rule to us of a pure and unspotted Loyalty, so it is not possible we should lose the one [i.e. loyalty], since your Majesty is so graciously pleased to preserve the other [i.e. the Church]’.49 Several addresses went so far as to stress that the king’s word to protect the Church should be inviolable. Berkshire addressers thanked the king for his declaration ‘upon which we build our Confidence as on a Rock, the Truth of your Royal Word having ever been as undoubted as your Courage in the greatest dangers has been undented’.50 Hertfordshire adopted a similar rhetorical ploy, linking praise of the king’s steadfastness in battle and support of the Church: James was, they said, a prince of courage and ‘Firmness to your Word’.51 Wiltshire protested, perhaps a little too much, that ‘the security of your Royal Word hath left us no pretence for distrust’.52 Hereford offered thanks for his declaration to defend the Church which, o­ minously for James’s future policy, they protested was ‘far dearer to us than our lives’.53 Embedded in the panegyric, therefore, was a good deal of coded warning to the new king not to deviate from the public commitment he had made to the national Church. James, arguably, failed 44  LG 2020 (26–30 Mar. 1685); LG 2019 (23–6 Mar. 1685). 45  LG 2019 (23–6 Mar. 1685); LG 2015 (9–12 Mar. 1685). 46 Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric, 59–62. 47  LG 2021 (30 Mar.–2 Apr. 1685). 48  LG 2014 (5–9 Mar. 1685); cf. Brackley’s address, LG 2015 (9–12 Mar. 1685). 49  LG 2016 (12–16 Mar. 1685). 50  LG 2022 (2–6 Apr. 1685). 51  LG 2017 (10–16 Mar. 1685). 52  LG 2017 (10–16 Mar. 1685). 53  LG 2018 (19–23 Mar. 1685).

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to understand the rules of the genre or chose to ignore the carefully packaged advice he was given. A D D R E S S I N G E U RO P E A N D T H E W I D E R WO R L D The addresses presented after 1689 were increasingly concerned to place the British succession in a wider framework of European conflict. The narrative constructed in the 1680s, of a design by dissenting republicans to alter the succession and constitution of Church and state, sat uneasily with the post-revolution world of religious toleration and a parliamentary transfer of the Crown. The panegyrical necessity of retaining a contrast between good and evil was nevertheless fulfilled not so much by reference to internal threats but by the evil threat to England e­ manating from Louis XIV, albeit aided by Jacobite sympathizers at home, thereby in the process constructing a new narrative about the ideal of a constitutionally limited monarchy that offered a shining example for Europe to follow. Thus in 1701, after France’s recognition of the Pretender, many addresses denounced the French king’s attempts to alter the succession. Recognizing William’s title as ‘just and lawful’, a phrase that a decade earlier had proved so controversial because it offended Tory sensibilities, many addresses also invoked the people’s consent as a key factor. Thus Chester addressers thought the king’s title was ‘begun by the Free Consent and Affectionate Desires of your People’ and Brackley’s thought the king had been called ‘by the divine appointment and call of the People’ to rescue them in 1688.54 Similarly Southwark’s asserted that the king’s title was ‘agreeable to our Laws, Begun by the Consent and Continued without the Oppression of your People’.55 Parliament’s role in determining the succession— exemplified in the 1701 Act guaranteeing the Protestant line—now seemed to have far greater acceptance. Nottingham’s addressers thought Louis XIV had clearly ‘purposed to defeat those Excellent Acts of Parliament made for the Succession of your Majesty’s Crown in a Protestant Line, which is the Chief Prop and Dependence of our Posterity’, and New Windsor promised to defend ‘the Succession to the Crown as it is lately establish’d by Act of Parliament’.56 Cornwall resented the French king’s ambition to ‘Alter and Destroy the Succession of the Crown, which is so Wisely settled by Parliament’.57 Even when acclaiming Anne’s Stuart blood, addressers coupled her lineage with parliamentary sanction, a reflection of the integration of ‘revolution principles’ into the queen’s coronation, noted by Joseph Hone in his contribution to this volume.58 Thus the city of Oxford thought her title to be rightful and lawful ‘as well by a Lineal Descent as by the several Acts of Parliament for settling the Succession’.59 54  LG 3754 (30 Oct.–3 Nov. 1701); LG 3757 (11–14 Nov. 1701). 55  LG 3747 (6–9 Oct. 1701). 56  LG 3749 (13–16 Oct. 1701). 57  LG 3751 (20–3 Oct. 1701). 58  See Chapter 7, ‘The Last Stuart Coronation’. 59  LG 3794 (19–23 Mar. 1701/2). The phrase was repeated by Westbury’s address, LG 3798 (2–6 Apr. 1702).

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The 1701 and 1702 addresses also saw the succession as a key part of a wider, European balance of power that Louis XIV had upset. Indeed, Queen Anne’s accession speech to Parliament specifically recognized their European outlook when she told MPs, ‘I am very glad to find in your several Addresses, so unanimous a Concurrence in the same Opinion with me, that too much cannot be done for the Encouragement of our Allies, to reduce the exorbitant Power of France.’60 The new concept of a ‘balance’ of power was explicitly articulated in these addresses and in the ones congratulating the queen on her accession. Coventry’s address was an informed lesson in European politics. It hoped for ‘due balance’ in Europe against the restless ambition of France, explaining how the French king had added Spanish dominions to his own ‘and has seized on the Spanish Netherlands, the only Barrier between France and a nation so nearly ally’d to us in Religion and Interest’.61 Derbyshire sought to ‘preserve the Balance of Power in Europe’ and Honiton hoped the queen would always ‘hold the Ballance of Europe for the Common Safety of Yourself and your Allies’.62 Indeed, the addresses developed the notion that in fighting its war of succession, Britain was also fighting for European liberty. The new rhetoric thus played on an older discourse about the danger of popery and arbitrary government. France, said Warwick’s addressers in 1702, was ‘zealously Propagating the Poverty, Slavery and Superstition of her own Subjects amongst the Nations round about’.63 New Romney hoped that England and its allies would reduce the ‘exorbitant power of France . . . to such a Ballance as may consist with the Publick Peace and Liberties of  Europe’.64 Deal believed that the queen and her allies were engaged in ‘the Common Cause for the Liberty of Europe’.65 Such sentiments were more pronounced in 1704 and again when the succession was secured through union with Scotland. Britain, East Retford boasted, was the ‘Throne of Liberty, the Sanctuary of the Oppressed and the Arbiter of Europe whose Power (contrary to that of those Tyrants who have long infested and distressed the World) will be exercized only in doing Good’.66 Leominster’s addressers thought that the queen’s triumphs were ‘of a Nature different from the Heroes of former Times; Theirs in the Ruin and Conquest of Mankind; Yours is the Reduction of Tyranny and the Delivery of Oppressed Princes and Nations’.67 The contrast between British and French systems of government became ever starker. Thus in 1708 Plymouth hoped that ‘all the rest of your Subjects, as well as ourselves, will have so much common Sense as to weigh the Difference between a Rightful Queen and an Invading Usurper; between a Government ruling by just and good Laws and a despotick Dominion, exerting itself only according to the Arbitrary Will of a blind Zealot and a licentious Tyrant; between the pure Primitive Christian Religion and the same corrupted 60  The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, 14 vols (London, 1742–4), III, 197. 61  LG 3751 (20–3 Oct. 1701). 62  LG 3795 (23–6 Mar. 1702); LG 3796 (26–30 Mar. 1702). 63  LG 3796 (26–30 Mar. 1702). 64  LG 3796 (26–30 Mar. 1702). 65  LG 3796 (26–30 Mar. 1702). 66  LG 4324 (17–21 Apr. 1707). 67  LG 4332 (15–19 May 1707).

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and debauched to that Degree as in some Respects to be worse than none.’68 The idealization inherent in panegyric was now as much about the happy constitution in its European framework as about the monarch. T H E A D D R E S S AT T H E C L O S E O F T H E S T U A RT E R A The loyal addresses of the later Stuart period were rhetorical, emotively charged, richly textured lessons in political theory, the result of a two-way process of instruction, both for monarchs and for the wider public, in which national issues were brought close to local political cultures. The resulting addresses achieved a remarkable degree of participation and dissemination across England, Wales, Scotland, and the colonies, and made statements about Britain’s place in Europe. Through the addresses, as through the wider print culture of which they were part, rival rhetorical narratives were constructed. These contrasting narratives increasingly mapped on to divisions between Whigs and Tories; indeed, most later Stuart addressing campaigns fed directly into electoral campaigns, timed to influence the polls so that the panegyric had real purpose. The political nature of the address thus exposed the inner tension inherent within panegyric, between inclusivity and exclusivity, between a desire for unity through general acclamation and a desire to divide between the loyal and the disloyal. The address frequently became a party tool. This was all too apparent in the final years of Anne’s reign. The shift of rhetoric after the Revolution, to highlight the threat from Catholic France and declare loyalty to the war effort against it, made the return in 1710 to High Church Tory discourse which lambasted domestic republican, dissenting or atheistical ‘rebels’, deeply shocking to the Whigs. This divergence led to a significant contest between rival groups of addresses, each speaking very different political languages. A few quotations from the 1710 High Church addresses are enough to give the flavour of the rest. The address from St Albans abhorred ‘Schismatical, Antimonarchical and Republican Principles’ and promised to ‘curb and suppress all Irreligious, Immoral, Seditious and Rebellious Tenets’.69 Minehead condemned ‘how the Republican Principle of Resistance is of late openly taught’, a notion that was ‘inconsistent with Reason and Scripture, [even] tho in Cases of Tyranny and Oppression’.70 Brecon corporation argued that although factious men asserted that their allegiance was curtailed by ‘Certain Conditions’ their loyalty ‘admits of no Restrictions or Limitations’.71 Denbighshire’s attacked the ‘traiterous and damnable positions which assert the Legality of deposing or resisting Princes’.72 Hindon’s referred to ‘Antimonarchical Principles in every corner of this Kingdom’.73 Fowey’s attacked those who derived the queen’s title ‘from the sole Gift of the People’.74 The address from Essex attacked the usual trilogy of anti-monarchical, atheistical, and r­ epublican 68  LG 4427 (12–15 Apr. 1708). Cf. Williams, Whig Literary Culture, 93–172. Williams develops a notion of ‘martial panegyric’ (p. 136). 69 Oldmixon, The History of Addresses, Part Two, 155–9. 70  Ibid., 176. 71  Ibid., 184. 72  Ibid., 202. 73  Ibid., 243. 74  Ibid., 245.

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principles and men who tried ‘to render the Imperial Crown of these Realms precarious by insinuating that when your Majesty or your Successors shall do what they shall construe to be a Breach of an Imaginary Contract, the Subjects are discharg’d from their Allegiance’.75 All this, as well as the neglect or rejection of the war against France, flew in the face of the public discourse constructed by the earlier addresses and caused a heated round of pamphlet exchanges, with Whigs rounding on the High Church rhetoric as dangerous and misleading. Although classical panegyric was ideally intended to effect unity and harmony, to bring people and monarch together, the later Stuart period’s panegyrical addresses often achieved the reverse, dividing the nation with heightened rhetoric that fed into, and indeed helped to construct, partisan differences. Panegyric, as McRae has shown for the early seventeenth century, always contained within it the possibility of dividing;76 later Stuart addresses, promoted in a partisan context, were especially vulnerable to this charge. Differences over time between addresses, in tone and content, especially when they came from the same place, thus led to the critique that the form had become meaningless verbiage. John Oldmixon’s whiggish History of Addresses, Part Two (1711) made the point repeatedly that the Sacheverellite addresses of 1710 were often of a very different stamp from those presented earlier and hence that they signified little. Similarly, in 1710 Defoe thought that either people should ‘leave off addressing as a thing of no signification . . . a vain, empty, fruitless folly’ or ‘restore addressing to its usual vertue and signification’, so that monarchs could ‘believe their subjects when they speak to them’.77 Arguably the Whigs won the struggle of addresses, wresting public discourse back away from the High Church Tories with the accession of George I, but it was initially at a price. Just as verse panegyric was increasingly associated with dullness and involuntary satire (even comic inversion), so the profusion of contradictory addresses in the later Stuart period helped to undermine the form’s credibility and emasculate its capacity to instruct the monarch. As McRae notes in his chapter in this volume, partisanship compromised panegyric; it certainly helped to devalue the address of thanks, subverting part of its original intention of unified a­ cclamation. Partisan panegyric was consequently vulnerable to satire and ridicule. The addresses presented to George II at his accession in 1727 were formulaic and bland eulogies, little more than the fawning flattery that was associated with a debased form of verse panegyric. In the longer run, however, the address still had an important part to play, especially in the 1760s, when an appeal to the monarch seemed necessary to prevent Parliament oppressing popular rights, and in the 1790s, during renewed war with republican France, as a way of trying to rise above partisan division and to

75  Ibid., 254. 76 Andrew McRae, ‘Satire and Sycophancy: Richard Corbett and Early Stuart Royalism’, The Review of English Studies, 54 (2003), 336–64. 77  Daniel Defoe, A New Test of the Sence of the Nation (London, 1710), 88.

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create a sense of British identity that placed the monarchy at its centre.78 The genre of the address endured throughout the eighteenth century and its capacity to deliver a ‘winning Lecture’ as well as compliment thus re-emerged rather dramatically in the conflicts that erupted in the early years of George III. The Cromwellians had ­ironically invented an adaptable genre that long outlived its republican roots. 78  Andrew McRae suggests in this volume that panegyric failed to survive in any credible form in the eighteenth century, but see Linda Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation, 1760–1820’, Past & Present 102 (1984), 94–129.

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Afterword The Disenchantment of Monarchy Paul Hammond Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, But Harry, Harry.1 Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first.2

I The distance between the two quotations in the epigraph marks a profound and complex change in the theory and practice of monarchy. In the first case, the new King Henry V is trying to reassure his peers that he is no Turkish tyrant, and that his accession has transformed him from being the wild, scapegrace Hal, associate of thieves and prostitutes, into the gracious sovereign who will respect the laws of England and rule as befits a Christian King. When he says, in a startling image, My father is gone wild into his grave, For in his tomb lie my affections; And with his spirits sadly I survive3

he is claiming not simply that he has buried his wild passions (‘affections’), but that he has taken on his father’s ‘spirits’ to behave seriously and to rule gravely (‘sadly’): he has, in effect, become his father, and there is seemingly no difference between one Harry and another Harry. The twofold myth which Henry V presents is one of seamless continuity and of miraculous transformation, as if the very sacredness of monarchy has effected the metamorphosis of Hal into Henry. He does, however, conceal an awkward problem, for his father Henry IV was a usurper, while Hal is succeeding according to the laws of inheritance: but does the lawful succession to an unlawful ruler make that succession legitimate? By the time we reach Pope’s comment that, with the accession of the latest Hanoverian, ‘Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first’, this Catholic and Jacobite writer sees no difference 1  William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 2, ed. James C. Bulman (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), V.ii.48–9. 2  The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Valerie Rumbold et al., 5 vols (Harlow: Longman, 2007–), III, 177 (I, 6). 3  Henry IV, Part 2, V.ii.122–4.

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between one illegitimate monarch and another, whether these are monarchs of Great Britain or the rulers of the literary kingdom of dullness; in a dispensation where usurpers have displaced the legitimate line, it hardly matters which ­ignoramus presides. But what is it that makes a monarch legitimate? Although this present collection designedly eschews discussion of dramatic representations of succession—which might easily fill a second volume another day—it is remarkable how frequently problems concerning succession arise in, indeed motivate, Shakespeare’s plays. What is probably his first tragedy, Titus Andronicus, begins with a contested succession which is also a contest between elective and hereditary principles, in which the man who most clearly represents Rome and its ethos—Titus himself—refuses the empery and is subsequently displaced to the margins of that society which he has sacrificed so much blood to defend.4 The Henry VI trilogy centres on the contested succession to Henry V, with Henry VI himself admitting ‘My title’s weak’;5 not only does the rival claimant, Richard Duke of York, ascend the throne before agreeing to relinquish it, there is an ­additional rival in the rabble-rouser Jack Cade, who styles himself the heir to the Mortimer inheritance in a disquieting parody of the Yorkist’s claim. Shakespeare does not shy away from staging for us both debates over the legal status of a claim to the throne and the actual mechanisms of disputed succession. In 2 Henry VI the Duke of York receives a detailed exposition of the laws of succession according to which he may claim the crown; in 3 Henry VI the case is rehearsed again, to the confusion of Henry VI; in Henry V the king hears a long and apparently scholarly exposition from the Archbishop of Canterbury of the reasons why Henry’s claim to the throne of France is valid, the Salic law notwithstanding. So Shakespeare expected his audience to take an educated interest in the legal minutiae which make a succession valid or invalid. But he also requires us to acknowledge that on occasion law submits to force, and force succeeds: in Richard II he presents a ­deposition in the form of an enforced resignation (a scene omitted from the first printed text), and in Richard III the Duke of Buckingham stage manages the accession of Richard Duke of Gloucester by cajoling a group of tongue-tied citizens and a reluctant Lord Mayor into persuading this ostensibly godly man to accept the crown. Here, and in the scene in which the newly crowned Richard III gives orders for the murder of his predecessor, the young Edward V, Shakespeare shows us in detail the practical machinations which bring about disputed successions. Legitimate monarchs are even murdered on stage. Even so, violent successions do not always work out well, and rebellions trouble the reigns of both usurpers. Later he would show chaos ensuing upon the assassination of a ruler who leaves no immediate heir in Julius Caesar; a displaced heir cheated of his expected election to the throne of Denmark in Hamlet; the 4  The first act, in which the drama of the succession is staged, was probably written by George Peele: see my ‘Shakespeare as Collaborator: The Case of Titus Andronicus’, in Paul Scott (ed.), Collaboration and Interdisciplinarity in the Republic of Letters: Essays in Honour of Richard G. Maber (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 193–208; Paulina Kewes, ‘ “I ask your voices and your suffrages”: The Bogus Rome of Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus’, The Review of Politics, 78 (2016), 1–20. 5  William Shakespeare, King Henry VI, Part 3, ed. John D. Cox and Eric Rasmussen (London: Thomson Learning, 2001), I.i.134.

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botched handing over of power to the king’s daughters which precipitates tragedy in King Lear; the murder of a holy king and the accession of his assassin in Macbeth, which then generates deep anxieties in the usurper about his own lack of heirs; and the vision of an Edenic England under the king’s successor Elizabeth which graces Henry VIII. Nor is succession a motif only in histories and tragedies: in Measure for Measure the Duke abdicates temporarily and nominates Angelo as his successor, with near-fatal consequences for the citizens of Vienna. And Prospero ends Shakespeare’s last single-authored play by surrendering his magic powers and ensuring the succession to the dukedom of Milan, which will be united with the kingdom of Naples through the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand. There are obvious theatrical reasons why the drama of succession should have appealed to Shakespeare, but we can perhaps also suggest some deeper reasons for this interest. One could no doubt cite Freud and Frazer to account for the psychological and mythic power which resides in stories which narrate the killing of the father-king; indeed, Shakespeare approaches such a primal scene when he has the Player in Hamlet narrate the death of King Priam, for since Troy was in Renaissance myth the origin of Britain’s own monarchy, this killing of its last king resonates deeply. But the element in Shakespeare’s fascination with succession which I would like to pursue here is the opportunity which it provided for reflecting on the sacredness of kings. Most often this idea is troubled, and associated with unworthy or even murderous holders. One refrain which runs through the Henry VI plays is that Henry is a holy man, or at least seeks to be so. He turns frequently to his prayers, rarely able to embrace the decisive and dirty human means which are required to attain political ends, trusting instead in the power of God, and as a consequence he is regarded sarcastically by Machiavellian characters such as Queen Margaret and Richard Duke of Gloucester as a man who is too good for this world. There is a paradox here: the good man is not actually a good king in the sense of being an effective ruler; and if a man’s inability to discharge his responsibilities leads to the carnage of civil war, in what sense can we even call him a good man? But whether or not a king is a good or even a holy man, is it the case that a king is sacred simply by virtue of being king—even a usurping king, if Providence seems to have permitted that usurpation? When Richard III calls upon drums and trumpets to silence those who ‘Rail on the Lord’s anointed’ we may well regard his self-description as the illicit usurpation of a sacred title.6 Yet he was ritually anointed at his coronation, so why is he not the Lord’s Anointed? We might similarly demur at Claudius’s asseveration to Gertrude, when faced with a furious Laertes: Do not fear our person. There’s such divinity doth hedge a king That treason can but peep to what it would, Acts little of his will.7 6 William Shakespeare, King Richard III, ed. James R. Siemon (London: Methuen, 2009), IV. iv.151. 7  William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), IV.v.122–5.

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There is obviously an irony here, in that Claudius has not long killed his own brother, so this doctrine hardly protected King Hamlet. But was the doctrine not true in the minds of many in Shakespeare’s audience? If true, why would it not apply to Claudius, who was apparently elected legally as King of Denmark? More difficult still are the questions raised by the scene in which Richard II is deposed—or rather is compelled to resign the crown—by Henry Bolingbroke. In this scene Shakespeare carefully balances force and ritual. Before Richard even enters, Bolingbroke is proclaimed King Henry IV by the Duke of York, and when the Bishop of Carlisle protests he is promptly arrested on a charge of ‘capital treason’—that is, faithfulness to the anointed king and opposition to one who is not yet king.8 Immediately Bolingbroke begins to use the royal ‘we’ before any formal succession has taken place; force majeure suffices. When Richard enters he compares himself to Christ, which might seem a permissible extension of the idea that the king is sacred, were it not also part of Richard’s rhetoric of self-pitying self-dramatization. Yet, even from his own mouth, the comparison does not wholly lack cogency. Then Bolingbroke asks him: bolingbroke  Are you contented to resign the crown? king richard  Ay, no. No, ay; for I must nothing be. Therefore no ‘no’, for I resign to thee. Now mark me how I will undo myself: I give this heavy weight from off my head, And this unwieldy sceptre from my hand, The pride of kingly sway from out my heart; With mine own tears I wash away my balm, With mine own hands I give away my crown, With mine own tongue deny my sacred state, With mine own breath release all duteous oaths. All pomp and majesty I do forswear; My manors, rents, revenues I forgo; My acts, decrees and statutes I deny. God pardon all oaths that are broke to me; God keep all vows unbroke are made to thee.9 Richard is unable to separate himself from his office, maintaining that ‘I must nothing be’ and that he will ‘undo myself ’. With his own bodily hands, tears, and tongue he—apparently literally but only of course metaphorically—wipes away all the signs of kingship. But is this just metaphorical? Can physical acts such as these undo the metaphysical? It is an impromptu reversed coronation, but does it, we might ask, work? Is it an effective performative utterance? If so, how could a human being wipe away a divine seal? Yet if it does not effect Richard’s unkinging, why not? Earlier he had maintained that 8 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Charles R. Forker (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), IV.i.152. 9  Ibid., IV.i.200–15, omitting interpolated stage directions.

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Paul Hammond Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off from an anointed king.10

And now he tries to do that himself. Was he right then, or right now? There is in fact a nominalist streak running through much of Shakespeare’s thinking. We see it romantically in Juliet’s question, ‘What’s in a name?’11 We see it subversively in Falstaff’s declaration, ‘What is honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”? What is that “honour”? Air.’12 Cassius tries to persuade Brutus to act against Caesar by saying: ‘Brutus’ and ‘Caesar’: what should be in that ‘Caesar’? Why should that name be sounded more than yours? Write them together: yours is as fair a name: Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well. Weigh them, it is as heavy: conjure with ’em, ‘Brutus’ will start a spirit as soon as Caesar.13

But he is wrong: the name ‘Caesar’ starts the spirits of the mob much more readily than ‘Brutus’, though this owes more to Mark Antony’s rhetorical exploitation of Caesar’s name and body than to any inherent value. Richard II is also mistaken when he claims, Is not the King’s name twenty thousand names? Arm, arm, my name!14

If the world were really as Richard imagines it to be, a world in which the sacredness of monarchy is universally acknowledged, the king’s name would no doubt be sufficient to raise an army. But this is not the way the world is, it seems. Richard is not the only king to deceive himself about the value and potency of his title. Lear wishes to hand over the government of Britain to his sons-in-law whilst retaining ‘The name, and all th’addition to a king’.15 He wishes to keep the title and the outward honour (‘addition’), but discovers that without kingly power his kingly title cannot command respect. The most ruthless nominalist in Shakespeare is the proto-Hobbesian Edmund in King Lear, who, intent upon gaining his father’s lands, seizes as the object of his scorn the words ‘base’ and ‘legitimate’ which serve in social usage to displace him and to secure the inheritance of his half-brother Edgar: Why brand they us With base? With baseness, bastardy? Base, base? 10  Ibid., III.ii.54–5. 11  William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. René Weis (London: Methuen, 2012), II.ii.43. 12 William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, Part 1, ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), V.ii.133–5. 13  William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. David Daniell (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), I.ii.141–6. 14  Richard II, III.ii.85–6. 15  William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. R. A. Foakes (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1997), I.i.137.

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. . . Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land. . . . Fine word, ‘legitimate’! Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed And my invention thrive, Edmund the base Shall top the legitimate.16

To Edmund, the words ‘base’ and ‘legitimate’ are social creations which have no grounding in the ‘Nature’ to which he adheres. Legitimate succession, with all its accompanying rhetoric, is meaningless in a world where superior cunning or force holds sway.

II Within what metaphysical structure does the concept of legitimacy have cogency? Within what physical circumstances does it bow to force? Questions about the physical and metaphysical aspects of kingship and succession which Shakespeare raises in his plays resounded through the seventeenth century; reflecting on the execution of Charles I, Marvell acknowledged: Though Justice against Fate complain, And plead the ancient rights in vain; But those do hold or break, As men are strong or weak.17

We have seen in the present volume how proponents of James I thought it politic to proffer multiple defences of his claim, as if hereditary right alone were not sufficient:18 Archbishop Sharpe insisted that besides his familial claim, James was militarily powerful, had admirable personal attributes, was the dying queen’s choice, and would benefit the country. He was also God’s choice. The sheer number of such justifications begins to unsettle rather than substantiate the claim, as Sharpe in effect proposes a series of distinct, and not necessarily compatible, grounds upon which a monarch might legitimately succeed: by hereditary right; by force of arms; by nomination by his predecessor; by election on the basis of his own inherent qualities. Election by divine Providence looks like an ex post facto rationalization for an event which has already been brought about by human agency. Later, in 1660, the people (or at least those with the power to move events) elected to embrace kingship as the country’s system of government, even though mythologies or legal fictions

16  Ibid., I.ii.9–21. 17  The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, rev. edn (Harlow: Longman, 2007), 275. 18  See Chapter 10 in this volume by David Colclough, ‘ “I have brought thee up to a Kingdome”: Sermons on the Accessions of James I and Charles I’.

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subsequently presented this as the return of a king who had succeeded his father back in 1649.19 A version of this sleight of hand recurred at the Revolution of 1688: was this an act of divine Providence, or merely force majeure? Did the new rulers claim the throne by inheritance, by election, or by conquest? In the case of James I his accession was in effect an election by those court officials who had the means and the interests to carry this out. When his grandson fled the country, the throne was said to be vacant; indeed, so it was, literally; but according to what metaphysic was it also symbolically vacant? Is the chair empty? Is the sword unswayed? Is the King dead? The empire unpossessed?20

Perhaps none of James II’s supporters would have chosen to quote these lines ­spoken by Richard III as he faced the invasion by the Earl of Richmond, but such questions were nonetheless pertinent, and awkward to answer. Anyway, in 1689 the justificatory mythology followed the invasion, and law comes to seem just one element in a successful mythology. Roland Barthes wrote that ‘le mythe est une parole dépolitisée’, and that le mythe est constitué par la déperdition de la qualité historique des choses: les choses perdent en lui le souvenir de leur fabrication. Le monde entre dans le langage comme un rapport dialectique d’activités, d’actes humains: il sort du mythe comme un tableau harmonieux d’essences.21

Barthes’s analysis may hold good more persuasively for the products of the twentiethcentury bourgeois society which he was analysing than for the early modern sphere which is the subject of the present volume, for what seems most striking about the mythologies presented by writers on the royal succession is the difficulty which many have in achieving a harmonious picture of essences, since many of their images seem rather to collide with awkward historical facts than to occlude them. Even choosing a biblical text could prove hazardous, as Bishop Williams found when likening James I to Solomon.22 Resemblances between Charles II and King David, ubiquitous at the Restoration, contained the potential for unflattering reflections on both monarchs’ sexual escapades, until Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel found a comic or at least a witty mode in which to handle embarrassment. At the end of his poem the reader is invited to acknowledge the divine assent to Charles’s rule. The King says: ‘For lawful power is still superior found, When long driven back, at length it stands the ground.’ 19  See Chapter 8 in this volume by Paulina Kewes, ‘ “The Idol of State Innovators and Republicans”: Robert Persons’s A Conference About the Next Succession (1594/5) in Stuart England’. 20  Richard III, IV.iv.469–70. 21  Œuvres complètes, ed. Éric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2002), I, 854. ‘Myth is depoliticized speech . . . myth is constituted by the loss of the historical quality of things . . . in myth things lose the memory of their making. The world enters into language as a dialectical relationship of activities, of human actions: it emerges from myth as a harmonious picture of essences’ (my translation). 22  See Chapter 2 in this volume by Alastair Bellany, ‘Writing the King’s Death: The Case of James I’.

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He said. Th’ Almighty, nodding, gave consent, And peals of thunder shook the firmament. Henceforth a series of new time began, The mighty years in long procession ran: Once more the godlike David was restored, And willing nations knew their lawful lord.23

A Falstaff or an Edmund would have scoffed at Dryden’s repeated use of ‘lawful’, a repetition which may be a sign of anxiety rather than confidence. And the kingly epithet ‘godlike’ would come less readily—one might say, less naturally—to mind as the century wore on. The well-known sexual promiscuity of Charles II provided ample material for satirical representations of the royal body,24 the body which was still revered as sacred when sufferers were touched for remission from the King’s Evil, but hopes and fears about succession drew attention to the body of the sovereign, both ­physical and metaphorical. Such awkwardness about a succession which was tied to the quirks of royal bodies was not new: the succession of the Stuarts begins, of course, as a solution to the absence of any heir born to the body of the virginal Queen Elizabeth (and a solution of dubious legality, since it violated the provisions of Henry VIII’s will). There is something grotesquely comical about the way in which the body of James I was interpreted as it was opened for embalming: his head was so full of brains that they spilled out, while his heart was unusually large: such intellect, such compassion were manifest to observers of this king’s mortal remains.25 Charles II complicated the succession by fathering an illegitimate son who might make a plausible Protestant heir, while Anne brought the Stuart line to an end by having no surviving children; by contrast, the fertility of James II’s Catholic Queen Mary of Modena was a threat because of her ability to give birth to a Catholic son, and so to ensure a Catholic line of succession that promised to ‘stretch out to th’crack of doom’.26 Private bodies had public consequences, and the essays in this volume also invite us to reflect on the ways in which the public sphere was fashioned and functioned. Since some of these successions were effectuated by cabal (and in this category we might place the accessions of James I, Oliver and Richard Cromwell, Charles II, and William III and Mary II—indeed, all the rulers discussed in this book except Charles I and Anne), whereby a group of highly placed persons made a decision which was then presented to the nation as a fait accompli, it became important not only that an accession be announced to the people at large but also that it be justified as the will of the nation. At the beginning of our period we find addresses presented to the new ruler in the form of panegyrics which offered diplomatic advice as to what was expected of him, the poet speaking for the good of the 23  The Poems of John Dryden, ed. by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 5 vols (London: Longman, 1995–2005), I, 532 (ll. 1024–31). 24  See my essay ‘The King’s Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II’, in The Making of Restoration Poetry (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006), ch. 6. 25  See Chapter 2 in this volume by Alastair Bellany. 26  William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1964), IV.i.117.

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nation as a whole but in a semi-private forum, as if he were the prince’s chosen counsellor rather than the people’s voice.27 Sermons addressed a small godly audience when they were first delivered, but in printed form had the potential to draw many ­readers in to the occasion. Coins promulgated images of the new ruler— Augustan, martial, pacific—and the withdrawal and recoinage of Commonwealth currency drew virtually the whole nation into the project of oblivion and reminting.28 When coins from earlier reigns, but none from the Commonwealth, circulated alongside the money minted by Charles II, an unbroken line of monarchical continuity seemed to have been established. (As a schoolboy in the 1960s I sometimes paid my bus fare with pennies carrying the head of Queen Victoria, and even found in my change coins from the reign of William IV.) Later we find discrete constituencies raising their voices to approve the new ruler, as we see in the volumes of commemorative verses published by the universities, or in the proliferating addresses from towns all over the kingdom, addresses which at first had specific things to say about what they expected from the new reign, but later degenerated into mere formulae.29 For some writers the demands of the sacred called them away from the public sphere: for the Catholics Dryden and Pope, loyalty to the Stuart succession as Jacobites conceived of it entailed a loss of public office or preferment. Pope in his Dunciad created a kingdom in which succession was something over which he could exercise delighted control. Dryden wrote the great epic of succession when he translated Virgil, for his Aeneis is an extended meditation on how one survives in a condition of exile from one’s homeland when one’s bond to the sacred places has been abruptly severed; and also an exploration of how one finds new modes of kingship and eventually establishes a new kingdom.30 The complex story told in these essays is one in which there is repeatedly an awkward negotiation between the sacred and the politic, between principle and pragmatism, in which pragmatism is often rewritten as principle. If the story of the seventeenth century can in part be written as the story of the disenchantment of the world, it is the story of the disenchantment of monarchy. But at the end of the century, Dryden, a Catholic and Jacobite, would have dissented from this view, holding still to absolute and sacred truths; while at the beginning of our period Shakespeare (too canny to allow himself to be labelled) knew that monarchy was always what his Prospero would call an ‘insubstantial pageant’.31

27  See Chapter 1 in this volume by Richard A. McCabe, ‘Panegyric and Its Discontents: The First Stuart Succession’ and Chapter 9 by Andrew McRae, ‘Welcoming the King: The Politics of Stuart Succession Panegyric’. 28  See Chapter 15 in this volume by B. J. Cook, ‘ “Stampt with your own Image”: The Numismatic Dimension of Two Stuart Successions’. 29  See Chapter 11 in this volume by Henry Power, ‘ “Eyes without Light”: University Volumes and the Politics of Succession’ and Chapter  16 by Mark Knights, ‘The Loyal Address: Prose Panegyric, 1658–1715’. 30  See my Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), ch. 4, and ‘Dryden’s Virgilian Kings’, The Seventeenth Century, 29 (2014), 153–71. 31  William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Methuen, 1958), IV.i.155.

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Index Abel 78 absolutism  9, 152, 172–3, 177, 179–80, 184–5, 281 Achilles  120, 123 Act for Establishing the Coronation Oath (1689) 138 Act for the Queen’s Surety (1585)  154, 171 Act of Settlement (1701)  131, 132, 138, 140, 144, 184, 331 Act of Union (1707)  5, 326, 332 Aeneas  77, 211 Albyn, Samuel  215–16 Aldrich, Henry, Dean of Christ Church  230 Alexander the Great  72 allegiance, political  15, 124, 126, 128, 131, 145, 186, 200, 203, 242, 292, 328, 330, 334 religious  82, 139, 213, 215 American Founding Fathers  181 Amsterdam  98, 99–101, 104–10, 112 Andrewes, Lancelot, Bishop of Winchester  45, 50, 216 Anne, Queen of Great Britain and Ireland  1, 5, 6, 7, 132–45, 227, 306, 320, 326, 331–3, 343 coronation  13, 15, 132–45 miscarriages  7, 343 Anna of Denmark, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland; consort of King James VI and I  28, 54, 244, 250, 282, 284–7 Anthony, Charles  307 anti-Calvinism 215 anti-Catholicism  32, 49, 121, 126, 153, 162, 165, 171, 174, 182, 185, 219–20, 234–5, 246, 283–4, 291–3, 302 anti-popery, see anti-Catholicism Antichrist  31, 286, 289–90 Antwerp  85–6, 258 apocalypse  286, 289 arbitrary government  9, 64, 97, 104, 106, 171, 332 see also absolutism Archer, Ian W.  6, 13, 15 Argyll, Earl of, see Campbell, Archibald, ninth Earl of Argyll aristocracy  54, 176, 265, 281 Arminianism  7, 217 Armstrong, Sir Thomas  102–4, 112, 113 Arran, Earl of, see Hamilton, James, Earl of Arran Arwaker, Edmund  122, 198 Ashley Cooper, Anthony, first Earl of Shaftesbury  96, 99, 325, 328–9 Ashmole, Elias  274 Astell, Mary  184

Astell, Ralph  195 Astley, Richard  229 Atlantic, the  182 Atlas 270 Aubrey, Samuel  136 Augustan imagery  54, 71–2, 286–7, 313, 317, 344 see also Roman imperialism Augustus Caesar, Roman Emperor  36, 71, 286–7 Bacon, Sir Francis  34 Bacon, Nathaniel  157, 165–6, 169 Bale, John, Bishop of Ossory  80 ballads  2, 8, 12, 77, 81, 120, 278 Bancroft, Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury  50, 180, 208, 213 Barlow, William  28 Barlow, Thomas, Bishop of Lincoln  161–2 Bathurst, Sir Benjamin  135 Bathsheba 77 Bayle, Pierre  111 Bayly, Thomas  228–9 Baxter, Richard  278 Becket, St Thomas à, Archbishop of Canterbury 91 Beeston, Henry  230–1 Behn, Aphra  2, 12, 123–4, 128–31, 189, 200, 202–3, 297–8 Bellany, Alastair  13, 14, 38, 57, 106 Bellarmine, Robert, S.J.  30, 149, 151, 160, 163 Berkshire 330 Bertle, Roger  227–8 Bill of Rights (1689)  132, 139, 184, 325 Bilson, Thomas, Bishop of Winchester  28, 180, 212 Blondeau, Pierre  315–16 Blount, Charles  152, 172–7, 181–2 Blount, Charles, eighth Baron Mountjoy  32–3 Blount, Thomas  89–90, 94 Blow, John  134 Bodley, Sir Thomas  224 Bond of Association (1584)  171 Book of Common Prayer  40, 48, 50, 51 Bormeester, Jochem  110 Boscobel House  86, 89–90, 94 Boulter, Robert  64 Bower, George  141 Bowers, Toni  133 Bradshaw, John  156, 160–2, 179, 184 Brackley 331 Bramhall, John  165 Brathwaite, Richard  194–6 Brett, Arthur  84, 90–1 Briot, Nicolas  314

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362 Index Bristol, Earl of, see Digby, George, second Earl of Bristol see Digby, John, first Earl of Bristol British East India Company  274–5 Brome, Alexander  311 Browne, Sir Richard  277–8 Browne, Samuel  99 Bruce, Robert  285 Bruce, Steve  255 Brussels 80 Brutus, legendary King of Britain  21, 36, 262 ‘Brutus, Junius’  174 Brutus, Lucius Junius  79 ‘Brutus, Stephanus Junius’  174 Buchanan, George  155, 164, 180, 183 De iure regni apud Scotos  20, 152, 160 Buck, Thomas  226 Buckingham, Duke of, see Villiers, George, first Duke of Buckingham Bunyan, John  91 Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury  99, 116–17, 119, 123, 126–7, 129–30, 202–3 Cain 78–9 Caligula, Roman Emperor  71 Calvinism  7, 10, 48, 170, 180, 289 see also anti-Calvinism Cambridge, University of  37, 61, 154, 209, 222–9, 231–40 University Press  212, 223–4, 226 Camden, William  152, 157, 162, 224 Campbell, Archibald, ninth Earl of Argyll  95–7, 99, 104–6, 111–12 Campden, Lord, see Noel, Baptist, third Viscount Campden Cappell, Arthur, first Earl of Essex  104, 112 Care, Henry  124 Carleton, Dudley  21 Carlisle, Earl of, see Howard, Charles, third Earl of Carlisle Carr, William  100–2 Casebeard, John  169 Casteleyn, Abraham  96, 97, 100–2, 108, 112 Catherine of Braganza, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, consort of King Charles II  7, 93, 290 Catholicism  4, 5, 7, 8–9, 10, 21, 27–8, 30–2, 48–50, 54, 58, 64, 77–8, 80–5, 87, 89–93, 96–7, 99, 100, 104, 106, 108, 111–12, 120–22, 125–6, 132, 134, 138–41, 145, 150–3, 157, 168, 170–2, 177, 181, 183–5, 190, 202, 207–8, 213, 217, 222, 230, 234, 235, 246, 283–302, 333, 336, 343, 344 toleration of  9–10, 28, 31–2, 92, 126, 152, 167, 212, 283 ritual  85, 87, 91, 121, 132, 139, 250, 294 see also anti-Catholicism and popery

Cecil, Sir Robert, first Earl of Salisbury  35, 208, 213, 288 censorship  8, 101–2, 107–8, 110, 112, 158, 189, 292–3, 298 ceremony, royal  6, 12, 28, 37, 40, 42–6, 75, 85, 132–42, 187, 225, 242, 243–54, 257–64, 268–81, 285–6, 297, 305, 310, 324 see also coronation and pageantry Chamberlain, John  21, 27 Charing Cross  279 Charles I, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland  1, 4, 6, 7, 12, 14, 58, 80, 140, 206–7, 213–21, 224, 231, 237–8, 241–9, 250–2, 259, 265, 294–5, 301, 306, 311, 323, 328–9 aborted royal entry  6, 244, 259, 264 accession  37–46, 53–4 coronation  15, 135, 214, 241–9 execution  5, 14, 75, 158, 237, 249, 267, 341 marriage  7, 217, 238, 289, 291 as martyr  91, 108, 130, 140, 267, 301, 318, 328, 329 Charles II, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland  1, 7, 9–10, 12, 14, 64, 65, 75–94, 95–8, 100–4, 108, 110, 132–3, 138, 141, 150, 165, 169, 171, 174, 184, 186, 188, 193–201, 236–40, 241–2, 249–56, 259, 290, 304, 311–18, 321, 322, 325, 327, 342, 343, 344 coronation  6, 15, 132, 134, 135, 239, 249–56 exile  14, 75–94, 165, 169, 317 marriage  93, 290 popery  9, 80–6 royal entry  6, 132, 239, 259, 264–81 Charleton, Walter  63 Cheapside  275, 277–8, 290 Chester 331 Chettle, Henry  27, 36, 192 Child, Sir Francis  135 chronicles  32, 153–4, 157, 235 Chudleigh, Thomas  100–4 Church of England  8–9, 22, 28–9, 48–51, 81–3, 86, 92–3, 100, 122, 129, 139–40, 145, 210, 213, 217–20, 238, 243, 276, 280–1, 287, 292, 295, 319–21, 329–31, 333–4 Church of Scotland  22, 27, 82, 210, 243, 246, 249–53 Civil Wars, the  5, 58, 75, 108, 128, 156, 159, 163, 183, 249, 258, 261, 293 Clarendon, Earl of, see Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon Clarke, Jeremiah  139 classical culture  7, 10–11, 19, 80, 120, 141, 143, 180, 186–7, 211, 224, 226, 245, 257, 263–4, 275, 286, 311, 313, 316, 327–8, 334

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Index 363 Claudian, Roman poet  19, 20, 186 Claudius, Roman Emperor  71, 299 Claypole, Elizabeth  67–8 Clement VIII, Pope  30 Cogswell, Thomas  38, 57, 106 coinage, English  303–17 coinage, Scottish  304, 306–8, 310, 315 coins  13, 16, 303–18, 344 angel  305, 307, 309 crown  308, 310 guineas 317 laurel 313 shilling  304, 305, 309 sovereign  305, 310 unite  310, 313 Colclough, David  6, 15 Collinson, Patrick  171 Collop, John  91–2 Cologne  80, 298–9 Colt, Maximilian  43 common law, see law, common Commonwealth, the  4, 60, 64, 65, 71, 159, 160, 202, 238, 262, 310–11, 313–15, 344 Compton, Henry, Bishop of London  138–9 conquest  22, 33, 66, 114, 118, 128–30, 161, 166, 182, 184, 203, 211, 289, 342 consent, popular  10–11, 118, 154, 174, 177, 181, 211, 331 consorts, royal  7, 12, 15–16, 28, 54, 81–2, 92–3, 108, 159, 217, 238, 244, 250, 282–302, 343 Constable, Henry  30 Constantine, Roman Emperor  30, 36, 140 constitution  2, 5, 11, 13, 22, 36, 114, 119, 139, 155, 165, 168, 176–7, 180–1, 183, 190–1, 196, 264, 266 ancient constitution  157, 184 constitutional monarchy  4–5, 15, 133, 137–42, 145, 177–8, 199, 331, 333 see also monarchy Cook, B. J.  13, 16 Cooper, Samuel  312 Corbet, John  99 Cornwall 331 coronation, coronations  6, 12, 13, 15, 28, 40, 44, 75, 95, 121–2, 124, 132–45, 205, 212–15, 241–56, 257–9, 268, 274, 278, 280–1, 291, 297, 331, 338, 339 oath  132, 135, 138–40, 156, 161, 165, 178, 184, 250, 254 corruption  29, 35, 58, 120, 122, 160, 178, 180, 192, 292–3, 301, 328, 332–3 counsel, royal  15, 20, 23, 35, 40, 75, 120, 125, 178, 187–90, 206, 212, 219, 220, 251–2, 258, 263, 266, 288, 299, 344 Coventry 332

Cowley, Abraham  12, 63, 92, 121, 194–5, 240 Ode, Upon the Blessed Restoration  92, 194–5 Craig, Alexander  34 Craig, Sir Thomas  155, 177, 184 Crichton, William  162 Crofton, Zachary  267–8 Croker, John  141 Cromwell, Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, Ireland  1, 3, 6, 12, 14, 60–74, 75, 78, 86, 120, 128–9, 150, 158, 160, 165–8, 180, 193, 195–6, 200–1, 223, 227, 231–8, 249, 251, 268–9, 278, 319, 343 Cromwell, Richard, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, Ireland  1, 3, 12, 14, 60–5, 68–9, 71–2, 74, 168–9, 227, 231, 233, 236–7, 319, 343 nomination as Protector  61, 65, 68, 168, 319 Crosse, John  99 Crouch, John  280, 290 Daniel, Roger  226 Daniel, Samuel  4, 11, 22–5, 166, 187, 189–91, 288–9 A Panegyrike Congratulatorie  4, 23–5, 187, 189–91, 288–9, 327 Daniel, William  32 Danvers, John  89 Darcie, Abraham  53–4, 58 Darley, Henry, MP  158, 163 Davenant, Sir William  63, 194, 197 David  36, 77–9, 120, 206, 221, 342 Davies, Sir John  190 de Belloy, Pierre  177–8, 181 Declaration of Breda  265 Defoe, Daniel  145, 334 Dekker, Thomas  7, 12, 22, 25, 34, 244, 258–9, 261, 264 The Magnificent Entertainment  34, 244, 259 The Wonderfull Yeare  12, 22 democracy  176, 178 Denmark  101, 211, 337, 339 Denmark House  42–6 Dennis, John  142, 198–9 Derbyshire 332 Devereux, Robert, second Earl of Essex  251, 258, 260 D’Ewes, Sir Simonds  47, 56, 172, 215 De Wet, James  255 Digby, George, second Earl of Bristol  81 Digby, John, first Earl of Bristol  58 Dillingham, William  237 diplomacy  39, 97–104, 133, 142–5, 287, 295, 301, 343 divine right  7, 28, 44, 85, 108, 138, 152, 154, 156–7, 159, 169, 177–8, 181, 246, 283, 295, 329 dissent, see Protestant dissent Dodderidge, John  172

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364 Index Doleman, Robert, see Persons, Robert, S.J. Donne, John  2, 15, 207, 215–20 Dorchester 37 Dorman, Thomas  80 Dorset 328 Douglas, Robert  250–1, 253–6 Douglas, William, Earl of Morton  248–9 Dover  195, 197, 268 Downing, George  98 Drake, Sir William  156 Drayton, Michael  22, 26, 192–4, 196 Dring, Thomas  63 Drummond, William  12, 244–7, 249 Dryden, John  2, 12, 14, 62–3, 65, 69–74, 120–2, 124, 131, 150, 186, 188, 193, 195–7, 200, 202–3, 232, 342–3, 344 Absalom and Achitophel 342–3 Æneis 344 Albion and Albanius 122 Astraea Redux  193, 195–7, 239 Don Sebastian 124 Heroic Stanzas  62, 65, 69–74, 200, 232 ‘To His Sacred Majesty’  193, 197 du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste  20 Dublin  73, 270 Duport, James, Dean of Peterborough  234–5, 238–40 Dutch East India Company  111 Dutch Republic  14, 95–113, 142, 151, 160, 177, 274, 298–9, 304 Dymoke, Charles  137 dynastic unions  283, 286, 288 East India Company, see British East India Company and Dutch East India Company Edie, Carolyn A.  133 Edinburgh  4, 34, 35, 125, 244–8, 254–5, 270, 285, 296 Edward the Confessor, King of England  77, 253, 255 Edward II, King of England and Lord of Ireland  119, 163–4, 166, 174 Edward VI, King of England and Ireland  4, 80, 171, 205, 210, 227, 308 Eedes, Richard  208 Eglisham, George  13, 42, 57–8 elective monarchy  11, 15, 151, 154–7, 159–63, 166–70, 176–84, 337, 342 see also monarchy elegy  1, 6, 12, 25–7, 39–40, 42, 45, 52–5, 61, 64–74, 112, 120, 121, 127–8, 193, 200, 201, 224–35 Elizabeth I, Queen of England and Ireland  4, 6–9, 19, 25–9, 31, 32, 80, 89, 91, 132, 139–40, 142–3, 152, 166–7, 171–2, 186, 189, 198, 206–13, 223–5, 227–9, 233–4, 245–6, 262–4, 286, 305–9, 343 iconography  26–7, 34, 36, 227–8, 246 succession question  2, 5, 8–9, 167, 171

Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia and Electress Palatine  54, 289 Erasmus of Rotterdam  186 Essex, Earl of, see Cappell, Arthur, first Earl of Essex see Devereux, Robert, second Earl of Essex Established Church, see Church of England Europe  8, 14, 39, 76, 79–83, 85, 95–113, 219, 257, 331–3 balance of powers  96, 129, 332 Evans, David R.  85 Everard, John  292 Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681)  11, 74, 97, 98–104, 124, 170–83, 200, 255, 281, 295, 323, 328–9 Bill of Exclusion  174, 323, 329 as succession crisis  120, 152, 170–2, 325 see also succession Exclusion Crisis (Elizabethan)  171–2 Fairebrother, William  195 Fagel, Caspar  112 Farmer, Anthony  230 Farnaby, Thomas  226 Fenton, John  36 Fergus, King of Scotland  246, 249, 250, 255 Ferguson, Robert  97, 104–6, 112 Fiennes, Celia  136–7 Filmer, Sir Robert  11, 152–3, 155, 157, 173, 177, 180–1, 184–5 Fisher, Payne  61 flattery  20, 23, 26, 28, 30, 35, 36, 120, 123, 177–8, 200, 206, 212, 252, 267, 278, 334 Flecknoe, Richard  62 Fleming, Robert  199 Fletcher, Giles  227 Fletcher, Phineas  227 Fletcher, Robert  22, 25 Forbes, William  247 foreign policy  4, 14, 38–41, 58, 98, 102, 105, 112, 133–4, 142–5, 215, 216, 289, 326, 331–3 Forster, Harold  225, 226 Foulis, Henry  170 Foxe, John  80, 89 France  9, 65, 75, 77, 81–5, 92, 102, 104, 142–5, 175, 304, 308, 315–17, 326, 331–4 Fuller, Samuel  232, 234 Fuller, Thomas  77 Gadderar, James  184 Gager, William  225 Garrison, James D.  187–8 Geertz, Clifford  40 genealogy  2, 8, 22, 32, 153–5, 192, 211, 246–7, 250 Geneva  80, 180 Geoffrey of Monmouth  36 George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover  326

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Index 365 George II, King of Great Britain and Ireland and Elector of Hanover  334 George III, King of Great Britain and Ireland and King of Hanover  335 George, Prince of Denmark and consort of Queen Anne  137 Gerbier, Balthasar  258, 259, 278 ‘Glorious Revolution’, see Revolution of 1688–9 Gloucestershire 328 Great Britain  1, 5, 12, 14, 19, 21–2, 25, 31–4, 36, 92, 137, 250, 254, 270, 306, 310–11, 337 Godolphin, Sidney  134 Goffe, Stephen  81 Golden Age, the  119–20, 262, 286–7 Goldie, Mark  182 Gordon, John  33 Gouda 112 Green Ribbon Club  175 Grotius, Hugo  10 Guildhall  265, 268, 274, 276, 281 Gunpowder Plot  213 Haarlem 102 Hague, The  98, 99, 105, 113 Hall, Joseph  21 Hamilton, James, Earl of Arran  124–6 Hamilton, James, second Marquess of Hamilton 216 Hammond, Paul  16 Hampton Court Conference  28–30, 50, 213 Hanoverians  1, 16, 131, 132, 144, 154, 320, 326 Harrington, James  11, 176–7 Harris, Benjamin  174 Harris, Samuel  99 Harris, Tim  169 Harrison, Stephen  7, 258 Hatton, Sir Christopher  224 Hayward, John  26, 27, 155, 157, 177, 208–9 Helmers, Helmer  8, 14 Henri IV, King of Navarre and France  82, 170, 308 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and consort of King Charles I  81–2, 92, 159, 217, 238, 289, 290–5 Henry, Duke of Gloucester  159, 226 Henry, Prince of Wales  29, 191, 214, 216, 282, 286–7 Henry IV, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine  77–8 Henry VII, King of England and Lord of Ireland  22, 34, 77–8, 198, 210–11, 263, 310 Henry VIII, King of England and Ireland  80, 140, 154, 171, 186, 210–11, 228, 287, 343 Herald, Windsor  274

Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke 214–16 hereditary monarchy  15, 75, 118, 128, 132–3, 145, 151–9, 165–9, 171, 175, 177, 179–81, 184, 283, 287, 295, 337, 341–2 see also monarchy Hereford 330 Herringman, Henry  60–5, 67, 69, 73 Hertfordshire 330 Highley, Christopher  14 Hills, Henry  64 Hitchingbrooke 223 Hobbes, Thomas  11, 150–1, 152, 183, 188, 196, 199, 340 Hoftijzer, Paul  99 Holberton, Edward  232 Holdgate, William  326 Holinshed, Raphael  153 Holmes, Peter  152 Holland, Samuel  254 Hollar, Wenceslas  274 Holy League  177 Holyrood House  34, 255 Hone, Joseph  13, 14, 331 Hooker, Richard  29 Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus)  72 Hough, John  230 Howard, Charles, third Earl of Carlisle  134, 135 Howes, Edmund  264 Howson, John  80, 212 Hughes, John  142 Hunt, Thomas  172–4 Hume, Robert D.  135, 259–60 Hutchinson, Lucy  267 Hyde, Anne, Duchess of York  108 Hyde, Edward, first Earl of Clarendon  265–6 Hyde, Laurence, first Earl of Rochester  142 Ibbitson, Robert  158 iconography, royal  13, 15–16, 27, 33, 133, 137–45, 227–31, 253, 257, 260–4, 268–81, 308–10, 313–14, 317 Instrument of Government (1653)  67, 167 Ireland  5–6, 31–3, 36, 132, 137, 236, 310–11 Ireton, Henry  160 Italy  92, 101 Jacobitism  16, 125, 130, 138–9, 145, 204, 321, 326, 331, 336, 344 Jackson, Clare  241 James VI and I, King of Scotland, England, and Ireland  1, 4, 5, 7, 10–11, 19–58, 80, 91, 132, 152, 154–6, 162, 168–9, 171, 187–93, 201, 206–13, 223–4, 228, 241, 244, 246–8, 250–1, 253, 258, 261–4, 278, 281, 282, 286–7, 289, 299, 301, 304–11, 313, 318, 341–3 death  14, 37–58 effigy  43–7, 52–3 funeral  6, 40–52

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366 Index James VI . . .  (cont.) iconography  19–36, 53 Protestantism  9, 27–31, 40–1, 253 royal entry  6, 7, 12, 244, 259, 261–4 writings  7, 10, 21–1, 191, 224 Ane Fruitfull Meditatioun 21 Ane Meditatioun upon the Boke of Chronicles 21 Basilikon Doron  20–1, 23, 27–31, 35, 191, 264 Essayes of a Prentice in the Divine Art of Poesie 20 Lepanto 21 The Trew Law of Free Monarchies 20–1, 155, 180 James II and VII, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland (formerly Duke of York)  1, 5, 7, 8, 12, 64, 95–113, 115–31, 132–4, 137, 139, 141–2, 170–6, 187, 199–200, 202–3, 222, 230–1, 255, 265, 281, 295, 297, 300, 306, 321–31, 342–3 Catholicism  9, 96, 99, 100, 104, 108, 111–12, 125, 150, 170–6, 330 coronation  95, 122, 124 ‘James III’, see Stuart, James Francis Edward James, Thomas  152 Janus, Temple of  286–7 Jenkinson, Matthew  267 Jersey 75 Jesuits, see Society of Jesus Jevon, Rachel  84, 195 Johnson, Samuel  183 Jones, Inigo  53 Jonson, Ben  2, 7, 11, 150, 186–8, 190, 244, 258–60, 264, 275, 282, 286–9 Eastward Ho! 33 Panegyre  22, 190, 287 Workes 244 Jordan, Thomas  276 Joshua 36 Josiah  206, 210, 221 Josselin, Ralph  278 Julius Caesar, Roman Emperor  36, 71–2, 234, 237, 247, 287, 340 Kellison, Matthew  30 Kennett, White, Bishop of Peterborough  327 Kerr, Sir Robert  215 Kettilby, Walter  144 Kewes, Paulina  9, 15 King, Edward  226 King, Sir Robert  215 Kirk, the, see Church of Scotland Knapp, Francis  230 Kneller, Sir Godfrey  141 Knights, Mark  12, 16, 101, 102 Lambert, John  78 Lancashire 330

Laud, William, Archbishop of Canterbury  7, 15, 45, 50–1, 207, 214, 216, 218–20 laudando praecipere  11, 20, 205, 258, 262 law  5, 115, 118, 125–30, 139, 155–6, 159, 163–4, 175, 177, 178, 191, 230, 233–4, 266, 283, 290, 319, 326, 330–3, 337, 339, 341–3 common law  132, 154, 298 Roman law  162 Salic law  337 Lee, Maurice  243 Leeds 328 Legouis, Pierre  67 Leiden  98, 102, 103 Leti, Gregorio  299 Levellers  64, 118, 158, 162, 184 Leyburn, George  80 liberty (political concept)  97, 125–7, 131, 157, 178, 194, 199, 276, 330, 332 Leibniz, Gottfried  144 Lipsius, Justus  10 Lithgow, William  247 Livy (Titus Livius)  164 Llewellyn, Nigel  44 Lluelyn, Martin  79, 91 Locke, John  11, 97, 172, 177, 181–5 Loggan, David  274 London  1, 4, 7, 12, 15, 21, 30, 33, 34, 37, 45, 105, 125, 175, 191, 205, 209, 223, 224, 244–5, 247, 249, 251, 252–4, 257–81 citizenry  257, 275 disloyalty  175, 266–70 loyalty  258, 265, 269, 275–81 London Gazette 322–3 Long Parliament, see parliament, Long Louis XIV, King of France  9, 134, 138, 141–2, 144, 317, 331–2 Loveman, Kate  299 Lower, Richard  176 loyal addresses  12, 16, 187, 319–35, 344 loyalty, political  12, 15, 30, 65–7, 81, 90, 124–6, 172, 186–7, 199–205, 212, 230, 238, 289, 319–35 see also allegiance Lucan (Marcus Annaeus Lucanus)  234, 239 Lucius, legendary King of Britain  36, 140 Ludlow, Edmund  280 Luther, Martin  164 Mabbot, Gilbert  158, 160 McCabe, Richard  10, 12, 14, 207, 321 McCullough, Peter  208, 213, 215 Machiavelli, Niccolò  10, 162, 177 McRae, Andrew  15, 321, 323, 334 Magna Carta  166 Mander, Roger  142 Manningham, John  209 manuscript circulation  1, 7, 12, 23, 42, 56, 150, 179, 181–2, 188, 189

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Index 367 Marcelline, George  289–90 Mariana, Juan de, S.J.  149, 160–1, 163 Margaret of Beaufort, mother of Henry VII  288 Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots and consort of James IV of Scotland  210, 288 Mars 270 Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis)  72 Martin, Richard  10, 35, 262 Marvell, Andrew  2, 14, 60, 62, 64–74, 341 An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government 64 Elegy upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers 64 The First Anniversary  64–8, 70 An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland  65, 70 A Poem upon the Death of O. C.  64, 69, 71, 232 The Rehearsal Transpros’d 64 Mary I, Queen of England and Ireland  4, 80, 89–90, 210, 227, 246, 309 Mary II, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland  1, 6, 12, 15, 102, 114–15, 117–18, 120–5, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137–9, 141, 187, 199, 230, 238, 306, 325, 343 Mary Stewart, Queen of Scots  30, 78, 171–2, 180, 211, 250 Mary of Modena, Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and consort of James II  12, 15–16, 295–9, 302, 343 masque  187, 286, 288 Massey, John, Dean of Christ Church  230 Masterson, Henry  229 Matthew, Tobie, Bishop of Carlisle  208 Mead, Joseph  56 medals  13, 132–5, 141–4 Melville, Andrew  286 Mestrelle, Eloi  314 Middlesex 329 Middleton, Thomas  6, 7, 258 Millington, Thomas  30 Milton, John  4, 11, 150, 163, 183, 185, 226, 278–9 Lycidas 226 Pro Populo Defensio 61 The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates 164–5 misogyny  284, 291, 293, 301 monarchy, see constitutional monarchy; elective monarchy; hereditary monarchy; royal marriages; royal prerogative Monck, General George, first Duke of Albemarle  75, 91–2, 93, 129–30, 196, 276 Monipennie, John  247 Monmouth, Duke of, see Scott, James, first Duke of Monmouth Montagu, Richard  217 More, Sir Thomas  152, 186 Morley, George, Bishop of Winchester  85–6 Mornay, Philippe du Plessis  160, 174

Morrill, John  16 Moseley, Humphrey  63 Moses  78, 123 Mosse, Miles  154 Mossom, Robert, Bishop of Derry  311 Mulcaster, Richard  26–7, 245 Mundy, Peter  278 Muriell, Christopher  31 Nedham, Marchmont  11, 79–80, 82, 319 Interest Will Not Lie 82 Mercurius Politicus  80, 84 Neile, Richard, Bishop of Durham  215 Nenner, Howard  2 neoclassicism, see classical culture neo-Latin  28, 42, 51, 72, 103, 111, 152–3, 155, 184, 186, 222–40, 246, 282, 285–7 Neptune 270 Nero, Emperor of Rome  71 Neve, William  56 Neville, Henry  176–8, 181–4 New Model Army  162–3 newsbooks and newspapers  2, 3, 8, 12, 14, 37, 40, 50, 56, 76, 79, 95–6, 100–2, 113, 136, 141, 145, 152, 158, 162, 167, 195, 251–2, 294 Newton, Sir Isaac  134–5, 141–2, 145 Nixon, Anthony  27 Noel, Baptist, Viscount Campden  324 nonconformity, see Protestantism, dissent Norbrook, David  201 Normans  157, 161, 166, 247 North America  182 Northampton 328 Nottingham 331 Ó h’Eódhasa, Eochaidh  32 Oates, Titus  110–11 Og Mac an Bhaird, Fergal  32 Ogilby, John  239, 258, 274–5, 278–80 Oldmixon, John  334 orations  4, 23, 103, 257–8, 260, 262, 264, 270, 274–8, 285–6 Overbury, Sir Thomas  47 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso)  32, 67–8, 70–1, 225 Oxford  330, 331 Oxford, University of  15, 142, 183, 222–33, 235–6 University Press  223–4 Oxinden, Henry  78, 91, 195 Paddy, Sir William  40 pageantry  6–7, 12–13, 34, 132, 206, 225, 239, 244–7, 257–81, 285–7, 310 see also royal entries panegyric  2, 6, 8, 11–12, 15, 19–36, 60–74, 114–16, 119–31, 186–204, 205–7, 224–40, 242, 244, 246–9, 254, 261, 262, 280, 319–22, 327–8, 330, 333–4, 343–4

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368 Index Paris  75, 80, 81, 93 Parker, Henry  152, 165–6 parliament  6, 15, 36, 66, 99, 100, 102, 138, 142, 155, 157, 159, 163–6, 169, 172–3, 176–80, 183–4, 218–19, 220, 265, 268, 325, 328, 331–2, 334 elections to  268 Long  157, 183 Members of  8, 135, 137, 266, 276, 278, 332 Rump  129, 163, 166, 184 Scottish 243 parliamentarians  157, 159, 222, 223, 231, 235 parody  31, 337 Partridge, John  97 party politics  5, 64, 132, 133, 137–42, 199–200, 203, 333–5 see Toryism and Whiggism patronage, court  19, 23, 58, 212, 222, 229 patronage, literary  4, 6, 32, 190, 192, 203, 284, 299 Paul’s Cross  26, 37, 208 Peacey, Jason  96, 101–2 Pelling, Edward  173, 178 Pembroke, Earl of, see Herbert, William, third Earl of Pembroke Penruddock Rising  167 Pepys, Samuel  135, 277, 280, 315–16 Perkins, William  51 Persons, Robert, S.J.  15, 22, 27, 30–1, 149–85 A Conference About the Next Succession 15, 30, 149–85 A Treatise of Three Conversions of England 30 Pesaro, Zuane  45 petitions  28–30, 61, 75, 178, 207–8, 250, 265, 319, 320, 322, 325 Petowe, Henry  26 Petre, Sir Edward, third Baronet Petre  120 Peyton, Sir Robert  112 Pindaric odes  121–2, 202 Pitcher, John  23 Pliny the younger (Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus), Roman author  19, 186, 327–9 Plott, Robert  100 Plymouth 332 Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus), Roman general 72 Pompilius, Numa, legendary King of Rome  154 Pope, Alexander  336, 344 popery  9, 48–51, 55, 74, 79–83, 86, 92, 104, 122, 125, 139, 144, 153, 157, 159, 163–5, 165, 170–6, 183, 243, 267, 284, 290–5, 301–2, 332 see also anti-Catholicism Popish Plot  110, 139, 170, 172, 174 Popple, William  64 popular sovereignty  151, 162, 179 Portsmouth  322–4, 328–9 Powell, Gabriel  31 Powell, Thomas  25

Power, Henry  15 Pretender, see Stuart, James Francis Edward Price, Daniel, Dean of Hereford  214 Prichard, Sir William  169 Pricket, Robert  29 Pride’s Purge  163, 276 primogeniture  69, 181 print culture  1, 7–8, 98–104, 220, 320, 333, 344 Privy Council  8, 22, 34, 37–8, 40 proclamations, see royal proclamations Propertius (Sextus Propertius), Roman poet  71 Protectorate  1, 60–74, 158, 166–8, 193, 231–8, 265, 319 Protestantism  4, 5, 9, 21, 27–9, 31–2, 48–51, 54, 78, 80–93, 96–8, 102, 104, 110–13, 123, 132, 133, 137–42, 144–5, 150–4, 160, 163–4, 170–7, 180–5, 217, 219, 234, 246, 250, 267, 278, 280, 326, 328, 331 dissent  10, 96, 97, 99, 105, 267, 328 Protestant succession, see succession providence  10, 70, 108, 116–19, 126–9, 154, 159, 169, 175, 190, 196–9, 206, 210–11, 220, 319, 329, 341–2 Presbyterianism  9, 27–9, 82, 93, 157–8, 163–4, 170, 184, 250, 268, 278–80 Prynne, William  157, 163–4, 166, 293–5, 302 public opinion  95–113, 203, 324 public sphere  38, 67, 204, 343 Puritanism  9, 21, 27–8, 48–50, 98, 152, 154, 156–7, 170, 222, 231 Putney debates  162 Quakers  9, 92 radicalism, political  3, 10–11, 118, 144, 149–85, 267 Rawlins, Thomas  312 Reformation  132, 140, 176 regicide  6, 42, 128, 156, 158–61, 162–4, 166, 171, 175, 184, 249, 266, 267 Rehoboam 47 Republic, English, see Commonwealth, the republicanism  3, 11, 149–51, 159–60, 166, 169, 173, 175, 177–85, 222, 234, 266, 270, 328–9, 331, 333–5 religious toleration  9–10, 126, 331 see also Catholicism, toleration of resistance theory  9, 10, 149–85, 290, 333 Restoration  2, 4, 12, 14, 63, 65, 75–6, 78–9, 82, 91–3, 115–16, 130, 193–7, 201–3, 231–40, 252–6, 264–81 Revolution of 1688–9  2, 5, 11, 14–15, 74, 97, 112–13, 114–31, 152, 179, 181–2, 197–200 Revolution, principles  137–42, 331 Richard II, King of England, Lord of Ireland, and Duke of Aquitaine  119, 163–4, 166 Richmond 265 Rickard, Jane  132

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Index 369 Robinson, Humphrey  63 Rochester, Earl of, see Hyde, Laurence, first Earl of Rochester Roettiers, John  315 Roettiers, Joseph  315 Roman imperialism  54, 69–72, 77, 79, 154, 262–4, 286–7, 313, 316–17, 328 Roman republicanism  79, 151, 177, 179, 287 Rogers, William  144 Roper, Abel  63 Ross, Thomas  275 Rotterdam 111–12 Roundheads  156–70, 184 see also Parliamentarians Royal Exchange  262, 270, 280 Royal Oak  134, 268, 277, 279 royal children  283, 285, 288, 295–8, 301 royal entries  34, 239, 241, 243–9, 257–81, 282, 285, 286–7 see also pageantry royal marriages  7, 93, 217, 238, 283–4, 285–90, 297, 301–2 to Catholics  93, 217, 238, 284, 290–1, 294 Royal Mint  134, 141–3, 306–7, 309–10, 312–13, 315–16 royal prerogative  11, 156, 170, 175–7 royal proclamations  2, 12, 21, 22, 25, 35, 37–9, 61, 134, 154, 167–8, 209–11, 262, 264, 266, 305, 309, 313–14, 322, 324 royalism  75–94, 98–9, 117, 160–4, 166–7, 170, 183–4, 195, 222, 231, 234, 238, 251, 253, 266, 275, 280, 293, 303, 311–12, 319, 327 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul, Flemish artist  258 Rugg, Thomas  278 Rumbold, Richard  105 Rump Parliament, see parliament, Rump Russell, John  33 Russell, William, Lord Russell  103, 113 Rye House Plot  96, 102–3, 105, 110, 175, 179, 328, 329 Sacheverell, Henry  326, 334 Sadler, John  164 Saffron Walden  326 Salvetti, Amerigo  37, 43, 45 Sancroft, William, Archbishop of Canterbury 138 Sanders, Edward  85 satire  2, 12, 116, 119, 120, 128, 187, 204, 251, 299, 321, 342–3 Saul  77, 154 Saunderson, Thomas  303 Savoy House  280 Savile, Sir Henry  224 Sawbridge, George  63 Saxons  157, 173, 247–8, 253 Scone  75, 82, 243, 250 Scotland  5, 15, 22, 28, 31–6, 37, 42, 75, 76, 78, 82–3, 98, 99, 102, 104–5, 124–5,

132, 137, 179, 210–11, 215, 223, 241–56, 304, 306–8, 310–11, 326, 332, 333 Scott, James, first Duke of Monmouth  95–7, 102, 104–13, 124, 174–6, 323, 343 Scott, Jonathan  179 Scott, Thomas  98, 292, 295, 301 scripture  36, 48, 51–2, 70, 77, 116–17, 139–40, 153, 164, 180, 205–21, 310, 333 scrofula 343 Senhouse, Richard, Bishop of Carlisle  214 sermons  2, 3, 6–7, 8, 15, 26, 39, 46–52, 61, 95, 112, 116–19, 127, 132, 133, 138–40, 144, 154–5, 205–21, 238, 267–8, 344 Settle, Elkanah  114, 116, 123–31, 199 Distress’d Innocence 130–1 Eusebia Triumphans 131 A View of the Times  114, 116, 123–31 Shadwell, Thomas  198–9 Shaftesbury, Earl of, see Ashley-Cooper, Anthony, first Earl of Shaftesbury Shakespeare, William  13, 150, 185, 190, 336–41, 344 Hamlet  337, 338–9 1 Henry IV  13, 340 2 Henry IV  13, 336 Henry V 337 2 Henry VI  337, 338 3 Henry VI  337, 338 Henry VIII 338 Julius Caesar  337, 340 King Lear  338, 340–1 Macbeth 338 Measure for Measure 338 Richard II  337, 339, 340 Richard III  337, 338 Titus Andronicus 337 Shales, Charles  135 Sharp, John, Archbishop of York  139–41, 144, 145 Sharpe, Kevin  2–3, 40, 123, 207, 217, 237, 242, 251, 253, 281, 322 Sharpe, Leonell, clergyman  154–5, 209–13 Shirley, James  45–6 Skelton, Bevil  104–6, 108, 110–13 Skinner, Quentin  165, 180 Shropshire  86, 89 Sidney, Algernon  103, 152, 156, 169–70, 172, 176–82, 185 Court Maxims 169–70 Discourses Concerning Government  156, 179–82 Sidney, Henry  102 Sidney, Sir Philip  20, 119, 156, 224–6 Simon, Thomas  312–13, 315 Slingsby, Henry  315–16 Smids, Ludolph  112–13 Smith, Francis  99 Smith, Geoffrey  81

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370 Index Smith, Nigel  67–8 Smith, Samuel, clergyman  63 Smith, William, Vice Chancellor of Oxford 226 Smith, William  279–80 Smithfield 175 Smuts, R. Malcolm  15, 281 Society of Jesus  81, 85, 92, 110, 120, 149–85, 212, 217, 230 Solomon  29, 30, 33, 36, 40, 46–7, 52, 56, 206, 209–10, 221, 290, 342 Somers, John, Baron Somers  99–100, 152, 172–5, 177, 181–3 Somerset 329 songs  2, 8, 261, 270, 275–6 Sophia, Electress of Hanover  132, 144 Southwark 331 Southwell, Sir Robert  143 Spain  4, 41, 47, 58, 81, 92, 303–4 Spanish Match, the  213, 215, 291–2, 294, 301 Speed, John  166 Spenser, Edmund  25–6, 87 Sprat, Thomas, Bishop of Rochester  60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 72–4, 110 Sprunger, Keith  98 St George’s Day  6, 134 St Jean de Luz  85 St Paul’s Cathedral  238, 277–8 Stanley, Thomas  275 Starkey, John  99 Statius (Publius Papinius Statius)  19, 72 Stow, John  154 Stamford Hill  262 Strasbourg 80 statute and statute law  15, 132, 138–9, 145, 154, 168, 171, 211 see also law Straw, Jack  276 Strong, Sir Roy  134 Stuart, Arbella  35 Stuart, James Francis Edward  7, 16, 134, 141–2, 145, 326, 343 Stuart Successions Project  1, 3, 14 Suárez, Francisco, S. J.  149, 160 succession (royal) elective  11, 15, 151, 154–7, 159–63, 166–70, 176–84, 337, 342 hereditary  15, 75, 118, 128, 132–3, 145, 151–9, 165–9, 171, 175, 177, 179–81, 184, 283, 287, 295, 337, 341–2 Catholic  99–100, 122, 139, 152–3, 170–2, 213, 284–5, 343 Protestant  15, 131–3, 138, 139–45, 184, 326, 331 superstition  91, 139, 245–6, 250, 332 Swart, Steven  99 Swift, Jonathan  151

Tarquinius, Sextus  79 Tate, Nahum  199 Tatham, John  276–7 taxation  155–6, 267 Tenison, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury  138 Test Acts  139 Thames, River  270 theatres  4, 7, 136 Theobalds Palace  37, 42, 45, 49, 214, 216 Thirty Years’ War  29, 213, 289 Thomason, George  61, 65, 160, 279 Thoresby, Ralph  144 three kingdoms, see Great Britain Thurloe, John  319 Tiberius, Roman Emperor  71 Tilman, Edward  37–8 Toland, John  144, 179 toleration, see religious toleration Tonson, Jacob, the elder  74 Torbay  116, 199 Toryism  138, 140, 142–3, 183, 296, 297, 331, 333–4 Tower of London  37, 104, 257, 267–8, 270 Townshend, Haywood  172 Trajan, Roman Emperor  327 Treasons Act (1571)  171 Trenchard, John  175 Troost, Wout  102 triumphal arches  244–5, 257–81 see also pageantry; royal entries Tuckney, Anthony, clergyman  233–4, 238 Tudors  1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 21, 27, 80, 133, 134, 157, 288 Tuke, Sir Samuel, first Baronet Tuke  84–5, 93–4 tyranny  79, 97, 103–4, 112, 120, 151, 155, 160, 164, 166, 172, 183, 194, 200, 230, 235, 287, 290, 332, 333, 336

Tacitus, Publius Cornelius  10 Tarquinius, Lucius Superbus, King of Rome  79

Wales  5, 333 Walker, Sir Edward  274

Ulysses 77 United Provinces, see Dutch Republic Unton, Sir Henry  224 usurpation  77, 110, 120, 128, 145, 175, 266, 268–70, 332, 336–8 van Beuningen, Coenraad  105 van Citters, Aernout  102 van der Velde, Jacob  106 van der Werff, Pieter Adriaansz  103 Vaughan, Henry  169 Vaughan, Robert  53 Venner, Thomas  267 Villiers, George, first Duke of Buckingham  13, 41–2, 50, 57–8, 214–15, 220 Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)  54, 72, 239 visual culture  3, 13, 52–5, 87–9, 106–11, 251–2, 303–18 von Platen, Franz Ernst  144

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Index 371 Walker, Henry  152, 158–60, 162, 165–7, 177 Waller, Edmund  12, 60–2, 65, 69, 72–4, 186, 193–4, 197, 201–2 Upon the Late Storme  61, 62, 69, 73 Walsham, Alexandra  92 Walworth, William, Lord Mayor of London  276 War of the Spanish Succession  134, 142–5, 326, 332–3 Warwick  330, 332 Waters, Lucy  110 Weil, Rachel  118 Welbeck 244 West, John  14 West, Thomas  179 Westminster  37, 132–7, 257, 268, 279 Westminster Abbey  44, 46, 75, 132–7 Westminster Hall  135–7, 144 Whichcote, Benjamin  235, 237–8 Whiggism  96, 97, 99–104, 112, 124, 138–40, 142, 145, 170–83, 198–9, 296, 297, 322, 326–8, 333–4 Whitby, Daniel, clergyman  139 White, Richard, Marquis d’Albeville  99 White, Thomas  167–8 Whitehall Palace  37, 46, 58, 214, 324 Whitgift, John, Archbishop of Canterbury  208, 213 Wildman, Sir John  118–19 Willet, Andrew, clergyman  27–9 William III, King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Prince of Orange  1, 5, 6,

12, 15, 96–8, 102, 103–8, 112–13, 114–31, 132, 137–9, 154, 187, 197–200, 227, 230–1, 238, 305–6, 321, 325–6, 331, 343 coronation  121, 132, 137–9, 141–5 William IV, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and King of Hanover 344 Williams, Abigail  114, 322 Williams, John, Archbishop of York  42, 46–52, 216 Williams, Mark  81 Williams, Richard  280 Wilson, David  175, 182 Wilson, William  62–3, 73 Wiltshire 328 Winterton, Ralph  225 Winstanley, Gerrard  11 Wither, George  12, 61, 189, 200–3 Britains Remembrancer  12, 200–1 Salt upon Salt  61–2, 201 Speculum Speculativum 201–2 Wood, Anthony  173, 184 Worden, Blair  160, 169, 179, 231 Worcester, Battle of  75, 86, 89–90, 239 Wren, Sir Christopher  134–6, 138 Yearley, Steven  255 Zaret, David  320 Zwicker, Steven N.  12, 14, 114, 232