Things that Didn't Happen: Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678-1743 1783274093, 9781783274093

Table of contents :
Frontcover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
I: Fabrications
1 Incorrigibility : The Warming Pan Scandal of 1688–89
2 ‘Working in th’immediate power to be’ : The Popish
and Protestant Plots
II: Failures
3 Travesties : The Assassination and Insurrection
Plots of 1683
4 Contingency and Incontinence : The Jacobite
Invasion of 1708
III: Speculations
5 The Indifference of Number : The South Sea
Bubble, 1720–21
6 ‘Some Convenient Order’ : Mandeville, Berkeley,
and the Narration of Ethical Exchange
IV: The Dunciads
7 Living in Counterhistory : The Dunciads as Mock-
Prophecy
8 The Indifference of the Dunces : Agency in the
Dunciads
9 Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History
in the Dunciads
Conclusion: Events that Didn’t Happen
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

John McTague

This stimulating and original book looks at counterhistorical writing in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England, a period of social change and political uncertainty, when speculation of all kinds flourished. This book’s aim is less to determine what ‘really’ happened than to show how the tension between the factual and the counter-factual played out in the changing political culture of the period. From the alleged ‘Popish Plot’ of Titus Oates to the South Sea Bubble, McTague draws on a rich variety of sources – popular, archival and canonically literary – to investigate the propagandic and literary exploitation of three kinds of things that did not occur at this time: failures which inspired ‘what if’ narratives, speculative futures which failed to come to pass and ‘pure’ fictions created and disseminated for political gain. In a final section, he presents a new reading of the various versions of Pope’s Dunciad – texts which in their cannibalisation and repurposing of the material of political and literary culture reflect and deploy the methodologies and strategies of counter-historical propaganda explored in earlier chapters. JOHN MCTAGUE is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. Cover image: details from A Raree Show ([London], [1681]), British Museum, London © The Trustees of the British Museum. Cover design: www.stay-creative.co.uk

T H I N G S THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Counterhistorical writing, fabricating or speculating on what might have happened but in reality did not, tends to cluster around moments of crisis, when writers need history to make the most sense, but it happens not to. James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales born in 1688, was not an illegitimate child smuggled into the queen’s birthing chamber in a warming pan, but it suited many people to say he was. In 1708, the same prince did not quite land on the coast of Scotland with a force of 5,000 men in order to claim the Scottish crown, but writers busied themselves with exploring what would have happened if he had succeeded.

John McTague

THINGS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743

Things that Didn’t Happen

Studies in the Eighteenth Century ISSN: 2398–9904 This major series from Boydell & Brewer, published in association with the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, aims to bring into fruitful dialogue the different disciplines involved in all aspects of the study of the long eighteenth century (c.1660–1820). It publishes innovative volumes, singly or co-authored, on any topic in history, science, music, literature and the visual arts in any area of the world in the long eighteenth century and particularly encourages proposals that explore links among the disciplines, and which aim to develop new cross-disciplinary fields of enquiry. Series editors: Ros Ballaster, University of Oxford, UK; Matthew Grenby, Newcastle University, UK; Robert D. Hume, Penn State University, USA; Mark Knights, University of Warwick, UK; Renaud Morieux, University of Cambridge, UK.

Previously published Material Enlightenment: Women Writers and the Science of Mind, 1770–1830, Joanna Wharton, 2018 Celebrity Culture and the Myth of Oceania in Britain, 1770–1823, Ruth Scobie, 2019 British Sociability in the Long Eighteenth Century: Challenging the Anglo-French C ­ onnection, edited by Valérie Capdeville and Alain Kerhervé, 2019

Things that Didn’t Happen Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743

John McTague

T H E B OYD E L L P R E S S Published in association with

© John McTague 2019 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of John McTague to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2019 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 78327 409 3 The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset in Warnock Pro by Sparks—www.sparkspublishing.com

To my parents

Contents List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgements x List of Abbreviations xii Introduction

1

I: Fabrications

25

1

Incorrigibility: The Warming Pan Scandal of 1688–89 27

2

‘Working in th’immediate power to be’: The Popish and Protestant Plots

II: Failures 3

Travesties: The Assassination and Insurrection Plots of 1683

55 85 87

4 Contingency and Incontinence: The Jacobite Invasion of 1708

111

III: Speculations

139

The Indifference of Number: The South Sea Bubble, 1720–21

141

6 ‘Some Convenient Order’: Mandeville, Berkeley, and the Narration of Ethical Exchange

167

5

IV: The Dunciads 181 7 Living in Counterhistory: The Dunciads as MockProphecy 183 8 The Indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads 207

viii

Contents

9 Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 223 Conclusion: Events that Didn’t Happen

249

Bibliography 257 Index 275

List of Illustrations Fig. 1.

Bernard Lens, Mary of Modena with the Prince of Wales, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. © The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

40

Satirical print attributed to Pieter Schenk (1688), depicting Mary of Modena, the infant Prince of Wales and Father Petre, British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

41

Anon., The Two Associations (London, 1681), p. 5, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester. Copyright of The University of Manchester.

61

Fig. 4.

A Ra-ree Show ([London], [1681]), British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

65

Fig. 5.

Three of Spades, South Sea Bubble playing cards. London: Printed for Carington Bowles, 1721. Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection of Business and Economics, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

162

Anon., The Prevailing Candidate, or the Election carried by Bribery and the Devil ([London], [ca. 1721], British Museum, London. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

164

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3.

Fig. 6.

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions and individuals listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

Acknowledgements

I

wish in the first place to acknowledge the professionalism and restraint of all my colleagues, who have endured the long gestation of a project called Things that Didn’t Happen while hardly ever drawing attention to the ever-increasing ironies of its title. I have been extraordinarily fortunate in the teachers, mentors, colleagues, students, friends, and family who have offered intellectual, moral, and material support throughout my career. Without John Rigby’s early encouragement and advice, that career might have taken a very different path. Ros Ballaster and Lucinda Rumsey taught me what literary criticism was, and what it could do, and I am still trying to live up to their example as scholars and teachers. My doctoral supervisor Christine Gerrard’s guidance while I was a graduate student and her continued support since then have been invaluable. Abigail Williams has also shaped the way I think about the eighteenth century, as a teacher and mentor, and first suggested ‘things that didn’t happen’ as a way of describing the material I was working on. On balance, it looks like she was probably right. I wish to thank my editor Mari Shullaw at Boydell and Brewer for her help and her patience. The anonymous readers for the press have improved what follows a great deal, and I am very grateful for their careful reading and constructive criticisms. The series editors have been generous in their advice, too, and I thank them for their support of the project. This book has been improved immeasurably by the comments and advice of colleagues who read drafts of chapters in manuscript form: thanks are due to Josie Gill, Michael Malay, Laurence Publicover, and Stephen Bernard. Ralph Pite deserves a special mention for reading more than a full draft of the book and for helping me to find its final shape. Ian Burrows, Emily Derbyshire, David Hopkins, Madhu Krishnan, Ad Putter, and Sebastiaan Verweij have shared expertise, suggested leads, and helped with translations. I want to acknowledge the important role that the staff at the Bodleian Library, British Library, and the Arts and Social Sciences Library at the University of Bristol have played in supporting my work for this project. I am grateful to the Fitzwilliam Museum, the British Museum, Harvard University’s Baker Library, and the John Rylands Library for permission to use images. Some of the material in chapter one first appeared in John McTague, ‘Anti‐Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity in the Warming‐Pan Scandal of 1688–9’,

Acknowledgements

xi

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36 (2013), pp. 433–48. I am grateful to Wiley Blackwell for permission to re-use it. The research for this book was supported by grants from the Jacobite Studies Trust, the Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Bristol, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. A different kind of material support came in the shape of the BS5 Writing Retreats, whose heady mix of competitive hospitality and scholarly solidarity has also left its mark on some of what follows. Finally, I am thankful for the unwavering support of my family, my friends, and my partner, Chloë. This book is dedicated to my parents, whose love and support has always been remarkably unencumbered by expectations.

List of Abbreviations ELH ESTC HLQ JECS ODNB OED RES

English Literary History English Short Title Catalogue Huntington Library Quarterly Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Oxford English Dictionary Review of English Studies

Introduction

N

either Charles II nor his successor, James, Duke of York, were assassinated. This statement is especially true of the year 1683, for a plot to do precisely that was exposed that June.1 The king and his Catholic brother were to meet their end by way of ambush at the Rye House in Hertfordshire, on their return from the horse racing at Newmarket. A fire at Newmarket cut that trip short, and Charles and James travelled back to London before the conspirators could gather either wits or blunderbusses. Nevertheless, many of those conspirators were tried and executed. The following year, the poet and translator Samuel Pordage published a Pindaric ode related to this incident: The loyal incendiary, or, The generous boutefieu (London, 1684). According to the title page, this composition was ‘occasioned by the report of the owners bravely setting fire to the Rye House, as the King came from Newmarket’. The return from Newmarket in question was the one made a year after the conspiracy’s dissolution, at the end of March 1684.2 It is worth pausing over the poem’s occasion. If this inferno did take place, it is a curious kind of display to put on for the passing king: it is a kind of ceremonial erasure, doing away with a location polluted by treason; it is a sort of historical re-enactment, mimicking and commemorating the fortuitous fire that saved the royal family the year before; it is a celebratory bonfire giving thanks for the continued safety of the monarch, an entertainment to accompany his return home.3 This is not a good Pindaric ode, but it is a counterhistorical one: in explaining the fire’s significance, Pordage adjusts the history of the assassination plot. This adjustment betrays an inclination to treat this thing that didn’t happen very much as a thing that did. Pordage needs something bad to have happened at Rye House, justifying and explaining the 1684 fire. However, the house was only ever a prospective

1

This plot and the related insurrection conspiracy are the subject of chapter 3. Charles was at Newmarket from 1–22 March (Brian Weiser, Charles II and the Politics of Access (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), p. 183). 3 I have found no other reference to this fire. 2

2

Things that Didn’t Happen

location for evildoing.4 His response is to suppress that inconvenient truth and present the location as a locus horridus in which plotters plotted and at which assassins laid in wait. So, the speaker hopes that the fire will ‘Tear up the surface where the villains trod’ (p. 6), but, except for the conspirator who had leased the house, Colonel Rumsey, the villains never trod there. It speaks of ‘that Sooty, Black Cabal’, who ‘once assembled in Ryes hated Hall’ (p. 4), but no such assembly took place, as far as we know. Lastly, ‘The traitours all, like Maculae appear, | That here their Treasons hatch’d, and dire designs begun’ (p. 5).5 There was neither hatching of treason nor dire designing at the Rye House: the conspirators met at houses or taverns in London. They never met in Hertfordshire, to which location they were prevented from travelling by the news of that other fire, at Newmarket. So, Pordage has these sooty apparitions haunt a burning house that almost none of them ever set foot in, in front of a fire that marks or re-emphasises their punishment for an assassination that did not take place. It is as if Pordage himself has not quite grasped the complexity of this loyal arson, which both commemorates and seeks to burn away an event that has already not happened, by razing to the ground the location in which it did not occur, cauterising a historical wound. Pordage needs the house to have been the scene of a crime in order to make proper sense of its purging, reflecting a more widespread inclination to package these conspiracies into a coherent narrative. Curiously, this counterhistorical Pindaric seeks to make the Rye House assassination plot more historical, even as it consigns it to the dustbin of history (‘With this flame,’ the poem concludes, ‘all dire combustions cease’ (p. 6)). The loyal incendiary’s confusion of what was planned with what came to pass reflects the imbrication of thought and action enabled by contemporary treason law, according to which merely ‘compassing or imagining’ the death of the king was sufficient grounds for prosecution. This poem subjugates events to its own structure or design. It privileges the historiographical – the best, most effective way of narrating this happening – over the historical, or what actually happened. Things that Didn’t

4

It was alleged that the conspirator Thomas Walcott visited the house in a scoping exercise – an allegation Walcott denies at his trial – but otherwise Rye House is only mentioned as the appointed location for the intended assassination (T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials, 21 vols. (London: T. C. Hansard et al, 1816), IX.549). The general dearth of detail about the house in the trials may be attributed to the fact that the leaseholder Richard Rumbold was not tried, having fled to the continent. 5 Maculae are sun spots; the ghostly traitors are black shapes in front of the blaze (OED macula, n., d.).

Introduction

3

Happen also privileges the historiographical over the historical, which is to say that it pays more attention to the methods and techniques of writing about the past than it does to the extent to which such writing corresponds to or faithfully represents past events.6 It is particularly interested in the historiographical potentiality of things that didn’t happen, and the kinds of things that happen when people treat them as if they did. This introduction seeks to explore some of the theoretical ramifications of those interests, to clarify what is meant, here, by ‘things that didn’t happen’, and to give an account of the book’s structure and argument.

Replaying Life’s Tape In a 2008 article, John Beatty and Isabel Carrera consider Stephen Jay Gould’s thought experiment, ‘replaying life’s tape,’ which acts as the governing metaphor of his book on evolutionary history Wonderful Life. In this experiment, a tape (representing history) is rewound to a given point, all content forward of that point (‘anything that actually happened’) is deleted, and the tape is allowed to run again.7 For Gould, any replay ‘would lead evolution down a pathway radically different from the road actually taken.’8 Gould offers another account of historical contingency in the same work, which Beatty and Carrera refer to as the ‘causal dependence’ model, where modifying an event in a causal chain means later events either cease to exist or exist in a radically different form.9 In the tape-replay experiment, at any point in the past, anything can happen. However, in the ‘causal dependence’ model, Beatty and Carrera argue, ‘history matters’: that is, the details

6

The distinction between ‘historical’ and ‘historiographical’ here maps on to that made between ‘historical’ (‘of past events’) and ‘historiographic’ (‘of written accounts of past events’) in Aviezer Tucker, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011), p. xii. In this book, ‘history of historiography’ is generally used to refer to what is sometimes elsewhere called ‘historiography’, i.e. the study of the ways in which history has been written. 7 John Beatty and Isabel Carrera, ‘When What Had to Happen Was Not Bound to Happen: History, Chance, Narrative, Evolution,’ Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2011), pp. 471–95, p. 472. Beatty and Carrera are referring to Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989), esp. pp. 45–52 and pp. 277–91. 8 Gould, Wonderful Life, p. 51. 9 Beatty and Carrera, ‘When What Had to Happen Was Not Bound to Happen’, pp. 472–3.

4

Things that Didn’t Happen

of what has gone before are invested with a causative importance (event B matters because it makes event C possible). Happily, the scientists of the Lenski research group found a way of conducting Gould’s thought experiment, by monitoring the evolutionary outcomes of twelve populations of cloned E. coli bacteria, kept in identical controlled environments. Any variation in these populations could only be attributed to chance mutation. These bacteria were grown on a new medium containing citrate, ‘to which the strain of E. coli in question was not previously adapted’ and which it was unable to metabolise. However, the investigators thought it was ‘within the realm of possibility’ that E. coli might evolve the capacity to do so. After 31,500 generations, one of the populations did just that. Was this the result of a rare mutation which might possibly occur at some point in the future evolution of the other populations, or had this population ‘through a series of contingencies, evolved to become uniquely capable of taking the final evolutionary steps in the direction of citrate metabolism’? (p. 488). This was a question the Lenski group could answer, for they had taken a sample from each population every 500 generations. By ‘replaying life’s tape’ – returning to a point in the history of the ‘successful lineage’, and restarting the evolutionary process from there – they found that the lineage in question ‘had become uniquely capable of making this evolutionary breakthrough’. ‘A string of variations,’ Beatty and Carrera explain, ‘had to occur in order for that lineage to have the unique potential for citrate metabolism. Those variations might not have occurred, but they did. Then the final enabling variation, which might not have occurred, nonetheless did’ (p. 493). There are points in the evolutionary past which ‘matter’ more than others. The starting point of the experiment, at which the E. coli were identical, might, upon the replaying of the tape, give very different results. But the point at which one strain of E. coli developed the potential to metabolise citrate ‘makes all the difference’, as replaying the tape from that point consistently led to the development of this capability. Beatty and Carrera argue that this tells us something about the utility of narratives in the practice of history. There are some events in a narrative, they say, ‘that are not necessitated by the beginning, but that are necessary for the end’, what William Gaillie calls ‘the pivot of a good story’ (pp. 489-490). The experiment shows us ‘[w]hat narratives are especially good for’. That is: ‘situations where history matters: where a particular past had to happen in order to realize a particular future, and when the past that had to happen (in order to realize that future) was not bound to happen, but did’ (p. 491). Narratives are also good for other situations. They are also very good for investing non-occurrences with the kind of causal significance that makes

Introduction

5

something ‘the pivot of a good story’. Indeed, this book argues, things that didn’t happen have certain qualities that make them particularly good candidates for becoming such narrative pivots. This book is not about those twelve populations of E. coli bacteria, but, if it were, it would need to ask three further questions. 1. What difference would it make if these E. coli bacteria could talk, or write, especially about their own past or that of their neighbouring colonies? 2. More particularly: how are we to assess moments when the particular past that had to happen in order to realise a particular future was not bound to happen, and didn’t, but, nonetheless, someone said that it did, or behaved as if it had? 3. Conversely, what about the potential for historical denial, where a particular past that had to happen in order to realise a particular future was not bound to happen, but did, yet nonetheless was ignored, obscured, denied, overwritten? Beatty and Carrera’s study puts to one side the distinction between history and the past, not being concerned with the ways in which narration of the past in the past might complicate matters, because, unlike the subjects of this book, narrating the past is not something that E. coli bacteria are known to do.10 The history of the Rye House Plot of 1683 and the reaction to it, for instance, would be very different if the participants had been bacteria. This assassination plot, like the related planned uprisings in London, Scotland, and the west of England, failed. It failed, as we have seen, mainly because a fire at Newmarket changed the royals’ travel plans. If the participants in this historical affair had been bacteria, the Rye House Plot would simply have been a thing that was not bound to happen, and didn’t. It would fall into the same category as the failure of those eleven populations to evolve the capability to metabolise citrate. The ‘discovery’ of the Rye House Plot, instead, was an excellent opportunity for the government publicly and violently to reaffirm the oft-mooted connection between Whiggism and regicide. On the other hand, the suspicious death of the Earl of Essex in the Tower of London, the unusual trial of Algernon Sidney, and William Lord Russell’s protestation of innocence on the scaffold gave Whigs opportunities to insist that the Rye House Plot was not a plot, properly speaking, but a government fabrication, expressly aimed at disabling the Whig opposition 10

As Aviezer Tucker points out, ‘in textual criticism, comparative linguistics, and evolutionary biology the evolution of the studied system, texts, languages, and species is the transmission of information in time and its selection, whereas in historiography and archaeology the evolution of society and the transmission of information on past events are independent of each other’ (Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ., 2004), p. 260).

Things that Didn’t Happen

6

and its noble figureheads: precisely the kind of behaviour to be expected of proto-absolutist regimes. For both sides, then, the Rye House Plot was a thing that had not to happen in order to realise a particular future, to authorise a particular behaviour, or to enable a particular political position. The government and judiciary, thanks to the fact that ‘compassing’ the death of the king is also treason and punishable by death, were able to behave as if the plot had happened. The opposition position that the Rye House Plot was a fake conspiracy hatched by an oppressive government would not be tenable if the plot had taken place. The major interest for contemporaries was not in imagining what might have happened if the Rye House Plot had been ‘successful’ – a more familiar kind of ‘counterfactual’ thinking.11 Rather, what was interesting, what was useful for contemporaries, was the attempt to establish what kind of thing that didn’t happen the Rye House Plot was: a failure or a fabrication. If one rewound life’s tape and played it again, and, say, there was no fire at Newmarket, would one discover a gaggle of assassins gathered at Rye House in Hertfordshire, or not? These alternative pasts produce alternative accounts of the present: for the government, that the Whigs are an inherently regicidal (yet incompetent) faction; for the Whigs, that the government is an absolutist regime capable of murderous mendacity. For both sides, the failure of the Rye House Plot – a thing that was not bound not to happen, but didn’t happen nonetheless – becomes causally necessary in their narration of recent political history.

11

The utility of counterfactuals in professional historical practice is the subject of some controversy. For an account and critique of counterfactual history (especially its rise at the turn of the twenty-first century, marked by Niall Ferguson’s essay collection Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (London: Papermac,  1997), see Richard J. Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (London: Little, Brown, 2014). See also Antony Flew, ‘History: Fact and Contrary-to-Fact’ Philosophy 56 (1981), pp. 578–9; James Connelly, ‘A Time for Progress? A Study on the Idea of Progress in Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Critical Theory by Giuseppe Tassone’ History and Theory 43 (2004), pp. 410–22; Aviezer Tucker, ‘Historiographical Counterfactuals and Historical Contingency’ History and Theory 38 (1999), pp. 264–76). As well as seeking to distance itself from the conservative politics that have marked counterfactual history (Evans, Altered Pasts, pp. 49–51), this book is less troubled by these questions of historiographical method, because it is not engaging in counterfactual speculation, thinking instead about the speculations of late Stuart and Hanoverian writers. This study is in sympathy, then, with Evans’s conclusion that counterfactual history has merit less as a method than an object of historical enquiry (p. 176).

Introduction

7

Things that Didn’t Happen Though it is confessedly difficult to measure with any accuracy, it still seems reasonable to assert that there are more things that didn’t happen than there are things that did. With that intimidating plenitude in mind, this book confines itself to only a handful of things that didn’t happen in the late Stuart and Hanoverian periods. Those things fall into three occasionally overlapping categories: fabrications, or things that were said to have happened but didn’t, like the Popish Plot or the warming pan scandal; failures, or things that (only just) failed to happen, like the Jacobite invasion attempt of 1708; and speculations, or visions of futures that failed to come to pass, as seen in the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1720. These are, clearly, things that didn’t happen in quite an overdetermined sense, and they didn’t happen before a large and public audience. That publicity is vital. This book concentrates on episodes that generate a significant amount of writing, because it is interested in the kind of writing and thinking that fabrications, speculations, and failures produce, and the ways in which counterhistorical thinking and writing drive late Stuart and Hanoverian political culture. In this book, then, ‘things that didn’t happen’ does not simply mean things that (only) happen in imaginative writing, even if much of the writing considered is indeed ‘imaginative’ in numerous ways. Rather, the focus here is on the consequences of the movement between fiction and fact, or perhaps more appropriately, historicity and counterhistoricity, as a constitutive element of historiographical and political practice. Reading or writing about a historical narrative as if it didn’t happen, or insisting that a fabricated narrative corresponds with a historical ‘reality’, produces effects which go beyond questions of authenticity and accuracy. As counterfactual history is often accused of being particularly obsessed with facts, so a study that investigates impostures and conspiracies might likewise become fixated on authenticity, even if only in silhouette.12 However, this book tries to query the claims that the authentic or historically accurate have on our scholarly attention. The endeavour is admittedly made difficult by the binary implied by the title (some things did happen, some things didn’t). A starting point might be to say that the difference between occurrence and non-occurrence, in these cases, is less phenomenological than it is conventional. Or, less wholeheartedly deconstructionist: this book is much more interested in the conventional aspects of that difference than the phenomenological, 12

See Aviezer Tucker, ‘Causation in Historiography’ in Tucker, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography, pp. 98–108, p. 103, and Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven: Yale Univ., 2013), p. 222.

8

Things that Didn’t Happen

because of a strongly held belief that there is no unmediated access to the phenomena of the past. If that is the case, it seems prudent to concentrate on the mediation itself: not ‘did this happen (and how, why, etcetera)?’ but ‘what does it mean for someone to have said that it didn’t (or did)?’ This is not intended as a bloodyminded denial of the fact that things really did, and really do, happen to people. For instance, the first chapter concerns the warming pan scandal: the story that the Prince of Wales born in June 1688 was not the son of James II and Mary of Modena but a common child smuggled into the palace inside a warming pan. It proceeds on the assumption that James Francis Edward Stuart was legitimate. There are a number of reasons for so proceeding, not least that the allegations against him map so closely onto existing anti-Catholic tropes. More importantly, however, that chapter is basically uninterested in his consanguinity with James II and Mary of Modena. If someone were to excavate the Stuart’s remains and determine his legitimacy by way of DNA testing, that would have no bearing on the fact that his legitimacy was questioned, and questioned in specific ways, for specific reasons, throughout his lifetime. In some ways, then, it may feel like this book is having its cake and eating it: of course James Francis Edward was legitimate, it says, and of course the question of his legitimacy as a historical or biological fact matters less than what people say about it, how they say it, when, where, and to what effect. What matters is how it is made to matter. As Luise White writes of the utility of lies for the historian, ‘how they are crafted, and what they are made up of, reveals as much as any true statement: the craft, the words, and the fictitious events that make up the cover story, good or bad, are visions of what the liar thinks is legitimate.’13 Speculating about the Old Pretender’s legitimacy gets us nowhere so long as our interest is in developing an understanding of a political culture and the writing it produces.14 Thinking about the poetics of these narratives – how they are made, and what from – might at least put us on the front foot. This book makes a similar compromise regarding belief and intention. Were people taken in by such conspiratorial narratives? How many? What kinds of people? All difficult, if not irresolvable questions. One way around this difficulty, however, is to shift the focus from belief or persuasion to the demonstration or performance of those things. As Kate Loveman has 13

Luise White, ‘Telling More: Lies, Secrets, and History’ History and Theory 39 (2000), pp. 11–22. 14 Rachel Weil has a similar attitude to divining the historicity of alleged Jacobite plots in A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III’s England (New Haven; London: Yale Univ., 2013), p. 25.

Introduction

9

shown, both contemporaries and modern critics are particularly prone to reiterating narratives of readerly credulity. The tales of readers ‘duped’ by Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, repeated in modern criticism, are rightly read by Loveman not as a sign of the gullibility of eighteenth-century readers but their sophistication: ‘feigning credulity’ in Swift’s yarn is a part of ‘a Scriblerian game’.15 What people really believed matters less, and is much less susceptible to analysis, than the social or political effects of demonstrating certain beliefs. This approach helps to avoid underestimating the sophistication of a readership who spent much more time immersed in eighteenthcentury culture than we do. Rather than wondering quantitatively about who might have been tricked by a certain narrative, this book tries to think qualitatively, about the ways such narratives encourage or discourage the performance of certain attitudes. The non-juror George Hickes, investigating the circumstances of the Prince of Wales’s birth, described the events of 1688–9 as ‘a trial of skill’ between the ‘Ly-makers’ and the ‘Ly-believers’.16 This even-handed approach to credulity and deceit is one this book takes to heart. Hickes’s formulation emphasises aptitude and activity on both sides: belief is not something one has but something one does.17

Incorrigibility and Narrative The episodes examined in this book are characterised by evidentiary poverty, or incorrigibility: the quality of being unsusceptible to correction, proof, or disproof. It is no accident that much of the writing examined in this study focusses on matters that cannot be confirmed: the secret intentions of kings and ministers; the paternity of children; the future; and alternative pasts. Writers invest those incorrigible matters with explanatory power. In their study of ‘self-organizing systems’ in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury thought, Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman present a range of thinkers encountering the frustrating combination of opportunity and inaccessibility presented by the incorrigible. Of Pierre Gassendi’s ‘pious materialism’, they write, ‘For all his devotion to empirical fact, [he] knew that beyond the visible lurked the true springs of reality’. Pious materialists ‘clearly limited the abilities of human beings to know their world. But 15

Reading Fictions, 1660–1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 166–7. On ‘feigned credulity’, see pp. 66–9. 16 BL, Add. MS 33286, fol.17v. 17 As Luise White notes: ‘people often act on […] rumours even if they themselves don’t fully believe in them’ (‘Telling More’, p. 13).

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they also invested that space beyond empirical knowledge with substantial explanatory powers’. ‘The subvisible’, by which is meant phenomena unobservable by the human eye, even with the help of microscopy, ‘was the very arena of providential action’.18 This book argues, concomitantly, that the non-occurring is the very arena of propagandic action. For these pious materialists, the point at which empirical observation becomes impossible is also the point at which explanation becomes – is enabled to become – particularly necessary and potent. Likewise, counterhistorical writing clusters around moments when history needs to make the most sense, but happens not to. Such writing either creates or seeks out clearings in which causal explanation can proceed unimpeded by the empirical.19 For an example of this kind of thing we can turn to a 1707 English translation of Jean de la Chapelle’s Amours de Catulle (1680), a curious book that weaves a historical fiction around translations of Catullus’s verse. The fiction is redolent of secret histories or romans a clef, and Catullus and his associates behave in ways suspiciously reminiscent of the depictions of seventeenth-century courtiers in such texts. La Chapelle gives an account of his methodology in the preface: I had a mind then, to give the Sense of Catullus, in a manner, that shou’d not smell of the School, or the Commentary: And in Reading over his Works with some Thought and Application, I have endeavour’d to give a Guess at all his Intrigues and Galantries. Perhaps I have hit right; however it be, I have found out a Link, and by it a certain Chain of Adventures, which gives a very fair connexion to all the amorous Sonnets, that lie scatter’d without order or design, amidst his other Works.20

La Chapelle claims to have imposed form on the accidental, those poems scattered about ‘without order or design’. The value added by La Chapelle resides in the ‘fair connexion’ he establishes between the sonnets. ‘Fair connexion’ renders La Chapelle’s French ‘une suite tres vray-semblable’, ‘suite’ here meaning something like connection, also bearing connotations 18

Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self Organisation and the Eighteenth Century (Univ. of Chicago, 2015), p. 37. 19 Evans argues that Niall Ferguson’s counterfactual modern history steps sideways into a similarly unimpeded space to indulge in ‘conservative wishful thinking with a vengeance’ (Altered Pasts, p. 145). 20 Jean de la Chapelle, The adventures of Catullus, and history of his amours with Lesbia, trans. ‘by Several Hands’ (London: for J. Chantry, 1707), sig. A6v.

Introduction

11

of following (suivre) and thereby of consequence, which punningly equates connection with importance (as in the phrase ‘a person of consequence’). This ‘suite’ is ‘vray-semblable’, or verisimilar, which is translated here as ‘fair’, and the passage leans on both the aesthetic and ethical meanings of that word: it is beautiful and (therefore) just. It is no accident, in turn, that La Chapelle’s ‘sans ordre & sans lїaison’ is rendered as ‘without order or design’.21 Connection (‘lїaison’) does not just imply intention (‘design’) but is made quasi-synonymous in the process of translation. Immediately following this passage, La Chapelle celebrates incorrigibility: ‘And I dare affirm, that if there be nothing that can evidently prove the Truth of the History, which I have here compiled, there is nothing neither that can detect its Falshood, or destroy the appearances upon which it is built.’ The arcane groundlessness of his conjectures, unashamedly said to be built upon indestructible ‘appearances’, is both their best defence and, in a sense, what produces them. Incorrigibility – not being liable to correction or amendment – turns a deficiency into a strength and is frequently seized on as an opportunity. Such gaps have a particular appeal, that is, for those writing about the past.22 Jakob Tanner has noticed something similar, writing of what he calls a ‘systematic behind-ism’ in modern conspiracy thinking, a tendency to seek out the point at which explanation is both impossible and obligatory: “Behind the scenes” we find an open, unobstructed space for fantastic plots and concoctions, for a myriad of arbitrary assumptions, emotional identifications, and an affective acting out. There are no formal restrictions or material resistances to be encountered; every sign and object may be linked with another in both a profoundly meaningful and an easy way.23

It is precisely this unobstructed susceptibility to the making of fair connexions or suites vray-semblables, the conversion of the accidental into the 21

Jean de la Chapelle, Les Amours de Catulle (Paris: chez Claude Barbin, 1680), sig. *4. 22 As Martine W. Brownley writes of seventeenth-century ‘secret historians’, ‘[f ] aced with interstices, they enthusiastically filled in the gaps with extravagant embellishments to please their markets’ (‘Secret History and Seventeenth-Century Historiography’ in Rebecca Bullard and Rachel Carnell, eds., The Secret History in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2017), pp. 33–45, p. 40). 23 Jakob Tanner, ‘The Conspiracy of the Invisible Hand: Anonymous Market Mechanisms and Dark Powers’ New German Critique 35 (2008), pp. 51–64, pp. 51–2.

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consequential, that draws propagandists to failures, to speculation, and to fabrication. La Chapelle did what he did to Catullus’s oeuvre because he thought it would be aesthetically pleasing. This is not to say it does not have a certain politics, but it is not motivated primarily by political thinking. Unlike the sparsely documented life of an ancient poet, recent political history is saturated with just the kinds of things – things that happened – that might interrupt smooth connections.24 The writers examined in this book, unlike those E. coli bacteria, did not live in a controlled environment. However, we might see counterhistorical writing as an attempt to move past events into such a ‘clean’ milieu. La Chapelle did not absolutely need his account of Catullus’s life to be vray-semblable, or probable. Propagandists feel that obligation to a higher degree. This is partly because, as the eighteenthcentury mathematician and theologian John Craige put it, ‘probability generates faith, but destroys knowledge; certainty, on the other hand, generates knowledge and destroys faith.’25 Faith is often more useful to political writers than knowledge, for politics is fundamentally an art of persuasion. As Hannah Arendt wrote in ‘Lying in Politics’, Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, whereas reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we are not prepared.26

Counterhistorical writing is not always the same as political lying. Nor is the ‘unobstructed space’ that exists behind the scenes the normal condition of writing about the past. But it is a condition that brings some kinds of certainty within reach: paradoxically, the incorrigible is also the maximally dirigible. Incorrigibility is particularly appealing, then, when the recent political past does not make sense, but needs to.

24

On Aristotle and the accretion of the ‘accidental’ in history, see Lyons, The Phantom of Chance, p. 31. 25 Richard Nash, ed., John Craige’s Mathematical Principles of Christian Theology (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois Univ., 1991), pp. 53–4. 26 ‘Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers’ in Crises of the Republic (San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969), pp. 6–7.

Introduction

13

Distance and Immediacy Towards the end of his recent study On Historical Distance, Mark Salber Phillips asks, ‘Is it history’s job to speak about things that did not happen as well as those that did?’27 This book’s answer, unsurprisingly, is a qualified yes. Qualified, because it does not seek to tell historians what to do, but rather to illuminate the ways in which late-Stuart and Hanoverian writers did ‘speak about things that did not happen as well as those that did’. In its broad view of what counts as historical writing, this book also builds on the recent work of historians of historiography, Phillips included, who look outside of the ‘major’ historical genres and beyond the neo-classical idea of historiography as a prestigious and edificatory mode. The eighteenth century has proved to be fertile ground for such studies. Ben Dew and Fiona Price note that ‘despite its classical pedigree, […] the historical writing of the [long eighteenth century] still lacked the institutional structures and the independent identity it was still to acquire in later years’, connecting this with the fact that ‘the principal historians of the period were a rather motley collection of philosophers, journalists, political pamphleteers, churchmen and academics’.28 These structural factors, they suggest, underpin the various kinds of historiography practised in the long eighteenth century, a variety that has been neglected. That is, this is a period in which we can more clearly see kinds of historical practice that have not yet been subsumed or excluded by the forces of institutionalisation and professionalisation. Noelle Gallagher points out that the period 1600–1740 has been considered as a ‘black hole’ by the history of historiography, and her study Historical Literatures seeks to rectify that omission.29 Gallagher’s readings of genres such as advice to a painter poems and secret history helps us to appreciate historical writing ‘as a branch of literature in its own right – as a tradition that brought together texts as varied, as innovative, and as complex as those examined under the aegis of the early novel’ (p. xiv). Phillips has also encouraged historians and critics to pay attention to the diverse ecology of historical thought. Unlike Gallagher, however, he argues 27

Phillips, On Historical Distance, p. 231. Historical Writing in Britain: Visions of History 1688–1830 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 2. For a collection of essays sometimes sympathetic to these developments in the history of historiography, see Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons, eds., Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 29 Noelle Gallagher, Historical Literatures: Writing About the Past in England, 1600–1740 (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 2012), p. xi. 28

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that literary criticism’s sense of the early novel’s relationship to history has had a deleterious effect on our understanding of both. In the introduction to Society and Sentiment, he writes: Studies of eighteenth-century fiction often appear to treat history more as an epistemological category than as a literary genre in its own right – a body of writing, in other words, with its own formal problems to solve and its own opportunities for experimentation and generic change. Since in criticism of this sort history figures as a kind of truth claim that the novel both emulates and ironizes, students of the novel have felt little need to investigate historiographical practices in any detail. […] the result is that the novel is particularized, while history is generalized.30

This study seeks to avoid such a generalisation by being particular about all of the writing it encounters, subjecting it to close reading regardless of genre or content, at the same time as documenting instances of just such a tendency to appeal to the unproblematic solidity of historicity. In On Historical Distance, Phillips offers another way of troubling his­ tory’s normative solidity by defamiliarizing a structurally central component of thinking and writing about the past. Historical distance is traditionally understood to produce detachment or objectivity, an idea so normalised that ‘historical distance now seems barely distinguishable from the idea of history itself ’. Rather than ‘a natural feature of our relation to time – the historical equivalent of visual perspective’, however, distance, for Phillips, is made, not found: not simply ‘the work of time’, but ‘the work of hands, hearts, and minds (sometimes tugging in different directions)’.31 Here and in earlier work, for instance, Phillips writes of the use of affective scenes to reduce historical distance, or the deployment of irony to increase it.32 On Historical Distance closes with a discussion of counterfactuals, and 30

Mark Salber Phillips, Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820 (Princeton Univ., 2000), p. xiii. 31 Phillips, On Historical Distance, p. 4. See also Phillips, Society and Sentiment, pp. 26–30. Applying Phillips’s work on distance to historical fiction, Hamish Daly encourages attention to ‘the significance of time as a narrative effect whose ideological implications are often obscured as a fact of nature’ (‘Temporal Systems in Representations of the Past: Distance, Freedom and Irony in Historical Fiction’ in Mitchell and Parsons, eds., Reading Historical Fiction, pp. 33–49, p. 34). 32 See, for instance, On Historical Distance, p. 77, on Hume’s use of sentiment and irony. See also Phillips, ‘Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance,’ New Literary History 34 (2003), pp. 211–29.

Introduction

15

Phillips compares them to other ‘contrastive techniques’ such as Hume’s tendency to introduce ‘then and now’ comparisons.33 He argues that ‘counterfactuals redistance history in order to jar our perceptions of the past’ (p. 222). There is little to disagree with here. Strikingly, however, it is less Phillips’s discussion of the counterhistorical than his sense of the elasticity and artificiality of historical distance that is most relevant to what follows. Phillips demonstrates that distance is an effect of writing – of genre, or language, or style – more than it is a function of the passage of time. This matters for this book because in writing about or fabricating things that didn’t happen, late-Stuart and Hanoverian political writers engage in redistancing. The warming pan narrative uses pseudo-scientific details about the queen’s body to create a sense of pressing modernity at the same time as it distances, by positioning this particular Catholic plot in a grand narrative of attempts to extirpate the Northern Heresy. In this way these writers have their cake and eat it: the warming pan scandal is a cause of the revolution but it is not a necessary one. In the warming pan scandal, to return to Beatty and Carrera’s terms, history both does and does not matter. Reducing distance, and thereby emphasising the importance of individual actions (like the queen refusing to have her belly examined), polemicists offer this episode as a particularly egregious instance of Catholic treachery, of the treachery of these Catholics. History matters. However, increasing distance to the scale of the Reformation and Counterreformation and emphasising the typicality of the plot by, say, alluding to the ‘fake’ pregnancy of Mary I, makes history matter much less. As some theories of the history of science suggest that we would have a theory of natural selection without Darwin, so many of the proponents of or assenters to the warming pan fiction can see the ‘glorious’ revolution, and ill-fated attempts to avert it, as inevitable. Yet they do not forgo the immediate polemical advantages of particularity. This combination of immediacy and distance is a key strength of these counterhistorical narratives.

Why this Period? Prejudicial or conspiratorial narratives are wielded as means of narrowing or ‘making sense of ’ historical contingency in most periods, including our own. There are some features of the late Stuart and Hanoverian period, however, that mean that the opportunities for counterhistorical propaganda 33

For Hume’s comparisons, pp. 68–9.

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were quantitively and qualitatively different from earlier times, and which make the practice not accidental but central to an understanding of this political culture. Broadly speaking, the key developments are the coalescence in the late 1670s of the Tory and Whig parties, the overtly bipartisan structure that this brought to English (and then British) politics, and the increase in the capacity of what we might broadly call the nation’s communications networks: most pertinently, the printing presses, the development of coffee houses, and improvements to infrastructure via road networks.34 To continue speaking broadly, with larger audiences, faster communication of information, and an oppositional two-party system, the readers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were presented with accounts of the recent political past that were not just at odds with each other, but which explicitly sought to extirpate rival narratives. The rapacity of political debate – again reflected in structural changes like the Triennial Act – made all kinds of things unstable: allegiance; identity; meaning itself. This latter effect is explored in Mark Knights’s Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, which demonstrated the way that ‘representation’ (‘defined as both a political concept and as a mode of communication’) became a dominant force in political culture.35 The public were confronted with a political discourse driven by disagreement. This endemic failure to agree led in turn to an increase in the perception that representation or misrepresentation might not just be layers mischievously superadded onto an underlying reality but the very stuff of politics.36 Not everyone perceived this, granted, and perhaps only some of those that did admitted it: it remained polemically effective to dismiss one’s opponent’s doctrine as a fictional additive, insisting all the while on the ‘obviousness’ of one’s own. Many political writers and actors, indeed, behave as if they are living in an a priori world – as if the political order they were a part of was ‘a given’. The prevalence of incorrigible constitutional fictions such as the 34

Steve Pincus emphasises the speed of infrastructural change at the end of the seventeenth century, and its impact on politics. See 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale Univ., 2009), pp. 49–90, esp. (for communications) pp. 68–81. 35 Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain, p. 8. Knights stresses the importance of public opinion and the effect of organised opposition in London during the exclusion crisis in his earlier Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994). 36 As Knights puts it elsewhere: ‘the capacity of partisans to read the same events in different ways contributed to a consciousness of the fictionality of history and to a blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction.’ (‘The Tory interpretation of history in the rage of parties’ HLQ 68 (2005), pp. 353–73, p. 364).

Introduction

17

immemorial Gothic ‘ancient constitution’ or the derivation of divinely ordained sovereign power from Adam is a sign of two things: the fictionality of political authority and the need to obscure that fictionality. However, the political order was indeed made, not begotten, and the public coexistence of multiple rival political ontogenies enable the consciousness of that fact, even if demonstrating such a consciousness might not have been a winning strategy in a political mud fight. As Victoria Kahn has argued, ‘from thinking of politics as a prudential activity, an activity very often linked to a normative conception of virtue, many seventeenth-century men and women came to think of politics as a realm of poetics, even fabrication.’37 This awareness of the artefactual nature of politics, aided and abetted by the increased affordances of the printing presses, naturally had an effect on historical writing, as the work of Gallagher and Rebecca Bullard has shown. For Bullard, the genre of secret history, flourishing in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, encouraged a radical degree of scepticism about the possibility of a reliable historiography by continually revising ‘received’ accounts of the political past.38 These ‘minor historical genres’ are not just instructive counterpoints to ‘mainstream’ historical writing, but constitutive elements, driving, as Knights has argued elsewhere, the development of the historical profession: Partisan history, even and perhaps especially at its most polemical, fuelled a desire to correct the perceived faults of rival accounts. Polemical party history – the type of writing that is perhaps considered most unlike modern history writing – thus contributed to the development of historical method and to the scrutiny of “fact”. But, paradoxically, polemic also contributed to a sense of the fictionality of history: fact and fiction seemed unstable categories under the pressure of partisanship. […] partisan histories begged a public of partisan readers to judge the veracity, authenticity, and truth of the facts offered by their rivals. Party history may thus belong to the story of the rise of the novel as well as of the profession of history.39

37

Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 2004), pp. 15–16. 38 The Politics of Disclosure 1674–1725: Secret History Narratives (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009). On secret histories see also Gallagher, Historical Literatures, pp. 65–110, and Nicola Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), esp. chapters 2 and 3. 39 ‘The Tory interpretation of history in the rage of parties’, p. 354.

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The profession was forged not in a retreat from, but participation in, party politics; impartiality as a historiographical virtue arises from the comparison of different kinds of partiality. Only a close attention to this kind of writing can reveal the historiographical work – as in thinking about the practice of history – it is doing. This book holds that partisan counterhistorical writing, liberated from the phenomenal or empirical and encouraging direct contradiction to an even greater degree, throws the interestedness and methodology of late-Stuart and Hanoverian historical writing into even greater relief.

Apples and Oranges This introduction has had a lot to say about history and historiography. What follows, however, is really a work of literary criticism, albeit one of a broadly historicist bent. It may also be the case that a training in close reading encourages an attention to the counterhistorical. This book is attentive to the etymology of words and the ways that their deployment in certain contexts, or their recurrence across related texts, might open up or close down their various senses. Such a mode of reading is historical in that it pays attention to the history of individual words, partly to avoid accidental anachronism in imputing a given shade of meaning to a particular usage that was not current at that time. In its attention to the cohabitation of alternative meanings and their histories in single words or phrases, however, close reading might also be thought of as counterhistorical. Much of the ironic satire of this period – perhaps especially the writing of the Scriblerians and those in sympathy with them – exploits this kind of ambivalence. It has been argued that such a technique serves as some protection from prosecution.40 It also reflects a sense that history is shadowed by counterhistorical possibilities, as a single shade of a word’s meaning jostles for position with historically mediated alternatives. A text like Pope’s Dunciad – the kind of text I have been trained to notice things about – can seem to be richer, to yield more in the face of this kind of attention. Some of the texts included below are much less yielding, quantitatively speaking, but the practice of close reading, especially when conducted across groups of texts, seems to me to be the best way of exposing the historiographical work that is being done. Knights suggests that partisan history’s most

40

See Philip Hamburger, ‘The Development of the Law of Seditious Libel and the Control of the Press’ Stanford Law Review 37 (1984–85): pp. 661–765, p. 738.

Introduction

19

meaningful work – what Herbert Butterfield identified as ‘the function of true history’ – was carried out not within single texts, but in the comparison of many.41 In reading closely and moving sideways between texts that coalesce around particular episodes, this book attempts to capture that kind of work. A signal advantage of this episodic arrangement is that it is a way of catching texts or groups of texts that are doing historiographical work unawares. That accidental quality helps to trace the historiographical reflexes of a political culture. There is a second motivation for this approach: the narratives this work is interested in are sometimes fully told in individual texts but are more often built up by allusive relationships between texts, implied rather than stated. There is a kind of cultural literacy, distinct from the humanistic classical learning we associate with writers like Dryden and Pope, recoverable at least in part from a sustained reading of a wide range of printed and manuscript material. Educated eighteenthcentury readers may well have been able to make sense of Pope’s allusions to Milton and Virgil in his Dunciads, but they also recognised references to political debates and even specific pamphlets, sometimes recalling details from apparently ‘ephemeral’ texts decades old, a canon of ideas and tropes that is difficult for us to access. Writers relied on these two kinds of literacy, and they are both kinds of literacy that modern readers need help with. This approach raises methodological problems of its own. What is being described here sounds like a simulation of what it might be like to be an interested participant in political culture in, say, 1708. It is unfortunate that it sounds like that, for that is not this book’s intention. The book does, however, claim some analogy between its methodology and the experience of such a notional person. That is, it seeks to read things that were probably available to such a reader, but rarely attempts to demonstrate that the reading of such a text might have informed the writing of another. It is always possible, then, that the connections that this book makes between texts are made for the first time here. That possibility is, it seems to me, inescapable. Sheehan and Wahrman encountered an analogous problem in their study of self-organising systems. They too acknowledge that the thinkers and writers in their study may well have been working in ignorance of one another’s ideas. They hold that this is an unavoidable by-product of their object of study, and that such a demonstrable or phenomenal connection is not necessarily even desirable: that is, self-organising systems are an emergent feature of eighteenth-century thought, and a good thing to think about precisely because that kind of thinking arises in apparently disparate 41

‘The Tory interpretation of history in the rage of parties’, p. 70.

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Things that Didn’t Happen

disciplines or discourses. They argue that the best way of identifying selforganising systems is to think about a shared language rather than a set of essential rules or characteristics: The language of ‘language’ that we use in this book draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein. Whatever its status now, self-organization in the eighteenth century was not a coherent theory with distinct rules governing the relations of the parts, let alone the logical or consistent set of relations one hopes to find in a philosophy. It was something far more nebulous and mobile than that, a “complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” in Wittgenstein’s terms, with different spheres and outcomes of its application. This language cohered analogically, or in his terms via family resemblance, in which things belong together despite evident differences and even contradictions.42

Or, more succinctly: ‘We do not intend to lump together apples and oranges, but we are interested in their qualities as fruits’ (p. xiii). The materials in this book and some aspects of its argument are organised by what Sheehan and Wahrman think of as analogical coherence. This partly accounts for the use of ‘propaganda’ as a descriptor for writings that are quite distinct by most measures. Some readers will feel that to call the Dunciads ‘propaganda’ is to do them a disservice, but the term is not used pejoratively, nor is it used in ignorance of other qualities that make those texts seem unlike propaganda as it is usually conceived. The Dunciads are propagandic, and sometimes masterfully so. That they share this quality with writings less adroitly executed does not render that relationship meaningless. Things that Didn’t Happen holds that paying attention to the coincidence of analogous but not necessarily deliberately coordinated responses can reveal the working of a political culture. There does not need to be a probable connection or ‘suite tres vray-semblable’ running between responses to a given episode (pamphleteer X reads pamphlet Y and so writes pamphlet Z). What matters here is their concatenation, which offers those responses up as things that might productively be read together. The risk that said concatenation is one brought into being not by forces working at the time but the argument of this book, the accidental accretions of the archive or keyword searches in electronic databases, is an acceptable one.

42

Invisible Hands, p. xii.

Introduction

21

Structure Things that Didn’t Happen is divided into four sections: three, of two chapters each, corresponding to the different counterhistorical categories it engages with (fabrications, failures, and speculations), and a final three-chapter section on Alexander Pope’s Dunciads, texts which, in their cannibalisation and repurposing of the materials of political and literary culture, reflect, deploy, and offer a new way of seeing the methodologies and strategies of counterhistorical propaganda explored in earlier chapters. The first chapter reads the warming pan scandal as the earliest attempt to explain the ‘glorious’ revolution of 1688, one of the foundational British political events of the long eighteenth century. The warming pan scandal, this chapter argues, is the starting point for a history of the historiography of the revolution of 1688, and the absurdity of that starting point deserves our attention. Chapter two moves back in time to explore the political culture and historiographical practices that made it possible for a story like the warming pan fiction to take hold, concentrating on a cluster of fabricated conspiratorial narratives that coincide with the birth of the two-party system of British politics: the Popish and Protestant plots. The second section deals with two different kinds of failure: the Rye House Plot, which some contemporaries insisted was in fact a fabrication, and the attempted Jacobite invasion of 1708. The chapter on the Rye House Plot explores contemporaries’ use of travesty as a way of giving a polemical direction to their comparisons of what did and did not happen. Although the 1708 invasion attempt is also represented as a travesty by relieved British Whigs, the focus in chapter four is on the various ways writers capitalise on the adjacency of the historical and the counterhistorical: stressing either the impregnability or the precarity of the nation state transformed by 1707’s Act of Union. Speculations financial and philosophical are the subject of the third section. A chapter on the South Sea Bubble thinks through the opportunities things that didn’t happen afford to those writers seeking to apportion blame. As La Chapelle sort to impose form on the accidental, so anti-finance writers confronted with the apparent illogic of credit finance resort to essentialism, established anti-Catholic tropes, or the familiar metaphors of the theatre, setting their qualitative protests against what Stephen Connor has called the ‘indifference’ of number. Chapter six pursues the impact of these debates into contemporary philosophy. In his attack on freethinking morals and aesthetics, George Berkeley counters the indifference of freethinking by turning to narrative, which he uses for its explanatory force, its vectored linearity, and its ability to connect different values

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(aesthetic, moral, utilitarian) with plausibility. In doing this, he anticipates his friend Alexander Pope’s handling of literary and political culture in the Dunciads. The last section of Things that Didn’t Happen is devoted to the four versions of Alexander Pope’s most expansive satire, the Dunciads (1728; 1729; 1742; 1743), because they are set a-quiver in a range of different ways by the forces at work in late Stuart and Hanoverian political culture. Moreover, because of the ways in which each version of the poem provoked outraged response, they also set that culture a-quiver in turn, before reincorporating those reverberations into the next version of the poem. The final section explores this interplay in chapters exploring Pope’s engagement with prophecy, agency, and providence. On the one hand, it illustrates the impact of the findings of this study on our understanding of the Dunciads. On the other, it demonstrates the impact this way of reading the Dunciads can have on our understanding of late Stuart and Hanoverian historical thought. The key to these understandings, in short, is seeing the way that the Dunciads hold theories of history, as they hold the dunces, in suspension. Things that Didn’t Happen ends with an attempt to answer a question: if what William H. Sewell calls ‘events’ – particularly powerful and pivotal kinds of occurrence – ‘can undo or alter the most apparently durable trends of history’, what are we to do with ‘events’ like the smuggling of James Francis Edward Stuart into St James’s Palace in a warming pan?43 What are we to do with the ‘events’ that had transformative effects on late Stuart and Hanoverian political culture, but which didn’t happen? ~ In Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall, Thomas Cromwell, on the brink of dissolving the monasteries, recognises the situation as a historical tipping point, a balance held in his hands: There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it in your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.44

43

William H. Sewell, Jr., Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago; London: Univ. of Chicago, 2005), pp. 101–2. 44 Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall (London: Fourth Estate, 2009), p. 479.

Introduction

23

This book began with a desire to pay attention to that resonance of omitted things, and it is a resonance that many of the writers wrestling with failures, speculations, and fabrications in this period seem particularly attuned to. Rather than concentrating solely on fabricated conspiracy theories, or hoaxes, or historical near misses, or failed prophecies, this book seeks to hear the resonances of a variety of counterhistorical practices, and to hear them together, in order to demonstrate the ways they relate to and extend what we know about the histories of the literature, politics, and historiography of the period. Giving ear to the concordia discors of fabrications, speculations, and failures in this period reveals a political culture making and unmaking itself and its history on the hoof, as it were. Shooting from the hip in this manner necessarily leads to some imprecision, which is why the categories and concepts this introduction has set out are capacious: this book is chiefly interested in the interaction of the counterhistorical and the historical, not in forensically determining which is which; what matters is not what happened but how things are made to matter. To readers of some persuasions these aphorisms will seem evasive, but in this they reflect the fugitive nature of writing that purposively centres itself on the incorrigible and indeterminate, writing that seeks to harness that feeling of power in reserve for political argument, rewinding or – more frequently – overdubbing life’s tape to confront readers with those Damoclean moments where axes, shivering, are not yet fallen.

PART I

Fabrications

Chapter 1

Incorrigibility: The Warming Pan Scandal of 1688–89

A

bove a cosmetics shop and beauty salon housed in a Georgian building standing between Old Bond and Burton Streets in Bath, in a niche in the north-facing wall, there is a cherub. This small statue is a relic of the controversy surrounding the birth on 10 June 1688 of James Francis Edward Stuart, the son of James II and queen Mary of Modena. As the male heir to the Catholic James II, this child supplanted James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, princess of Orange, and his birth raised the spectre of extended Catholic rule in England. Much of this chapter is concerned with the extraordinary measures English Protestants and Whigs took, and the extraordinary positions they adopted, in order to dismantle this new Prince of Wales’s legitimacy: he was not the king’s son, but the progeny of the papal nuncio; the queen’s ‘belly’ was false, the child a commoner (the son of a miller, or a bricklayer), and smuggled into St James’s Palace while the queen feigned the pangs of labour. Despite the many enemies James II had made, however, he was not without supporters in the summer of 1688. One such supporter was James Drummond, 1st Earl of Melfort. Upon the news of the queen’s pregnancy, he commissioned a monument to be erected in Bath to commemorate the coming of the heir.1 This elaborate piece, costing £1500, was located at the Cross Bath, which the queen had visited in 1687 in an attempt to cure the fertility problems that had been plaguing her and her husband for years. The monument strongly implied a divine hand in the prince’s conception: a descending dove, figuring the Holy Spirit, was 1

As Jean Manco points out, the monument was completed three months after the birth so must have been conceived some time before (see ‘The Cross Bath’, Bath History 2 (1988), pp. 49–84, and the discussion of monuments in general on pp. 63–6; see also John Wood, An essay towards a description of Bath vol. 2 (London: by James Bettenham, 1749), pp. 259–62). A 1738 print depicting the monument by John Fayram is held in the British Museum (reg. no. 1960,0521.1); an earlier etching is in Thomas Guidott, De thermis britannicis (London: by Francis Leach, 1691), plate between pp. 208 and 209.

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supported by a trinity of columns. It was finished off with three cherubim, a crown of thorns and a cross: exactly the kind of idolatrous statuary that would provoke Anglicans and Dissenters. Should anyone have missed the symbolism, it is spelt out in a Latin inscription dedicating the monument to Mary of Modena, hailing her as ‘the mother of three kingdoms’ and describing the Holy Spirit moving through the bath’s waters.2 The monument became particularly incongruous following the revolution of 1688–89, an embarrassingly solid reminder of the continued if sometimes distant presence of the Stuart dynasty. The edifice was vandalised during the 1715 Jacobite rebellion, ‘[p]eople then looking upon the Image of the Holy Ghost as the most flagrant Mark of Idolatry,’ and the cross was replaced with an ideologically indifferent stone vase around the time of the 1745 rising.3 The monument’s slow degradation culminated in 1783 with Baldwin’s remodelling of Bath. The cherub now standing above the beauty parlour could be found there by the middle of the nineteenth century.4 The fate of the Melfort Cross now reads as a gradual replay of the dismantling of the Stuart regime, and the prospect of a Catholic and absolutist England. The iconoclastic and sceptical energies of the opposition polemic surrounding Mary’s pregnancy and the prince’s birth in 1687–89 worked rather more slowly on marble than they did on the prince himself. The erection of the monument in 1688 is a striking example of the optimism of some of James’s supporters in 1687. It stands – or at least, stood – as a reminder that Protestant or Whig ascendency was not a priori certain even in the last year of James II’s reign. Indeed, we need to see past the appealing ironies and metaphorical resonances of this monument’s demise in order to keep in mind how unremarkable it was for a loyal Catholic subject to erect a monument celebrating the birth of a Catholic heir and the prospect of a long-lived Catholic monarchy. The cherub now perched above the shop in Bath stands as a witness not just to the disappointment of such hopes, but to the solidity of such a prospect for some subjects in 1688. Writing shortly before the announcement of Mary’s pregnancy, the Earl of Clarendon declared, ‘unless God grants a male heir to the King, the Catholics and their religion will be utterly ruined.’5 The tone is characteristically balanced 2

Wood, p. 260. For anti-Catholic attacks on this ‘miraculous’ conception and Dryden’s rejoinder in Britannia Rediviva, see John McTague, ‘Anti‐Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity’, esp. pp. 8–12. 3 Wood, p. 262. 4 G. N. Wright, The historic guide to Bath (Bath: by R. E. Peach, 1864), p. 114. 5 Martin Haile, Queen Mary of Modena, Her Life and Letters (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1905), p. 166.

Incorrigibility

29

– would such a ruination be a good or a bad thing? – but it illustrates the ways in which all sides concentrated on the decisive potential of the unborn child in Mary’s womb (that is, those who were willing to concede there really was an unborn child in Mary’s womb – but more on that below). The conflict over James Francis Edward’s legitimacy is a conflict over what kind of future can be wrought from the allegedly indeterminate contents of the queen’s body (and later, the indeterminate contents of a warming pan). From the announcement of Mary’s pregnancy in late 1687, Catholic or royalist hopefulness for a male heir is read by opponents of the Stuarts as evidence of a premeditated conspiracy. Aphra Behn’s Congratulatory poem to Her Most Sacred Majesty, on the universal hopes of all loyal persons for a Prince of Wales (London, 1688), which appeared during Mary’s pregnancy and whose title emphatically wished for a ‘Prince’, would have provoked such derision.6 But these were indeed ‘hopes’ (although perhaps not so ‘universal’ as Behn implies), not an indication of a conspiracy. It would have been odd for a panegyric poem addressed to the Queen not to wish for a male heir. Corrinne Harol points out that Pope Innocent XI effectively told Mary of Modena that her job was to bear a male child, ‘consecrating herself to the conversion of England’; the delivery of her son was to enable the deliverance of English Catholics.7 There was always tremendous pressure on queens to produce male heirs. The pressure on Mary, perhaps, was greater than normal. All of this was excellent grist to the propaganda mill: that Catholics wanted a male heir was already very well established; the opposition merely had to fill in the blanks about how they went about it. As we will see, they also went to great lengths in order to engineer and maintain such blanks. James Francis Edward Stuart was the answer to the prayers of some Catholics, and to many his birth and its timing could have seemed genuinely miraculous. Opposition writers, however, could always perceive intrigue and fakery lurking beneath such ‘miracles’. In the 1689 pamphlet A Melius Inquirendum, a fictional account of a tribunal deliberating on the legitimacy of the Prince of Wales, a group of Catholic priests display the ‘popish’ assurance so riling to opposition authors: ‘in short, we have so well 6

As the non-juror Thomas Wagstaffe recognised in his letter, the gender was key: ‘There might have been a thousand supposititious daughters, & ye P[rince]. of O[range]. wd never have troubled himself about it’ (Bodleian MS Eng.Hist.d1, p. 4). 7 Corrinne Harol, ‘Misconceiving the Heir: Mind and Matter in the Warming Pan Propaganda’, in Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall (eds.), Vital Matters: EighteenthCentury Views of Conception, Life, and Death (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 2012), pp. 130–47, p. 133.

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Sung for Six or Seven Months, that the Queen of England hath at length had a Son.’8 According to this satire, their ‘song’ is not sincere prayer and divine answer, but a rhetorical deception. In this reading, James Francis Edward’s conception and birth were not miraculous, but fabulous. So, whilst we should not be surprised by Catholics and others loyal to the Stuarts hoping for a Catholic heir and congratulating the monarchs when such an heir arrived, we also have to remember that much of the opposition polemic operates on the assumption that the Catholics will be defeated (it helps that much of it was written after William of Orange’s arrival). The Whiggish teleology that a modern historian might be inclined to look past is a driving force in this polemic, and that polemic only makes the limited sense it makes when read with that teleological projection in mind. Crucially, the assurance that enables the Whig denials of James Francis Edward’s legitimacy – the certainty that Catholics are deceptive and conniving and will ‘stop at nothing,’ as princess Anne put it in a letter to her sister, ‘… if it will promote their interest’ – mirrors the fatally misplaced confidence of Catholics and Jacobites as they are represented in opposition polemic.9 While such mirroring brings the atmosphere of the playground to the debate – ‘I know you are, you said you are, but what am I?’ – that does not mean the writers involved were not deadly serious. On 21 November 1687, the ambassador to the Duke of Tuscany reported that ‘there is strong hope that the reported pregnancy of the Queen will soon be confirmed, but it would be impossible to describe the passion of those who do not desire it, nor the schemes and reflections of both parties, in case it should be true’.10 Mary’s pregnancy was announced on 23 December, was public knowledge by January, and the schemes and reflections came thick and fast.11 On 21 January, a libel was circulating in Oxford, alleging that three pregnant women had been recruited: should any of them give

8

Anon., A Melius inquirendum into the birth of the Prince of Wales (London, 1689), p. 12. 9 Sir John Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols. (London, 1790), II.172. James II’s ‘memoirs’ reflect on this as ‘the common calumny, that Papists think all things permitted for the sake of Religion, and that their Zeal will expose them to any danger for its advancement’ (J. S. Clarke, ed., The Life of King James the Second, King of England, 2 vols. (London, 1816), II.193–4). On the authorship of this biography, see below, p. 47 and n. 10 Martin Haile, Queen Mary of Modena, Her Life and Letters, pp. 172–3. 11 For the announcement see By the King, A Proclamation Appointing a time of Publick Thanksgiving and Prayer throughout the Kingdom (London: by Charles Bill, Henry Hills, and Thomas Newcomb, 1687).

Incorrigibility

31

birth to a male child, it would ‘be nursed up and be king’.12 The lampoon ‘The Miracle’, which casts the appropriately named papal nuncio Count D’Adda as the prince’s father, is scribally dated to January 1688, and the privy council discussed such rumours at a meeting around 17 January.13 In April, Count D’Adda reported that ‘the more obstinate heretics’ were insisting that ‘the queen wears a cushion’ to counterfeit pregnancy, and that satirical caricatures casting aspersions on the prince’s parentage were being published in Holland.14 The violent scepticism of princess Anne and the king’s reaction to such ‘scorelous songs, and underhand insinuations’ will be discussed below.15 The physician Hugh Chamberlen recalled in 1713 that the rumour that ‘the Child was supposititious’ began to spread around London ‘about a fortnight after the Child was born’.16 James II’s attempt to quash these rumours in the face of the anticipated invasion of the Prince of Orange unwittingly provided opposition pamphleteers with the materials they needed to give narrative form to the new Prince of Wales’s mooted illegitimacy. In his declaration of 1/10 October, William demanded an enquiry into the circumstances of the prince’s birth.17 In response, the king called a meeting at Whitehall on 22 October, summoning forty-two witnesses to the birth to give an account of what they had seen and heard on 10 June. The Earl of Peterborough was only able to provide the former, deposing that the queen’s cries were loud enough to force him ‘to stop my Ears with my Fingers to avoid hearing more of the like’.18 Such testimony was unhelpful enough, but the crucial moment for the opposition was an apparently innocuous observation by a Catholic midwife, Margaret Dawson. She stated that ‘she saw fire carried into the Queen’s Room in a Warming-Pan, to warm the Bed’.19 This detail enabled an extraordinary allegation: that the new prince was not the issue of his mother, but a common child, born in the convent that abutted upon St James’s Palace, smuggled into the building via a series of secret 12

Anthony Wood, quoted in Loveman, Reading Fictions, p. 111. Nicola Parsons, Reading Gossip in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave, 2009), p. 17. On ‘The Miracle’ and its relation to Dryden’s poem Britannia Rediviva, see McTague, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity, pp. 8–12. 14 Haile, p. 180. On these caricatures, see below pp. 39–42. 15 Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.192. 16 British Library, MS Sloane 4107, fol. 150. 17 Robert Beddard, ed., A Kingdom without a King: the Journal of the Provisional Government in the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1988), p. 147. 18 James II, King of England, At the Council Chamber in Whitehall, Monday the 22th [sic] of October, 1688 (London, 1688), p. 16. 19 At the Council Chamber, p. 6. 13

32

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passages and finally into the queen’s bed, inside the conveniently covered and roughly newborn-sized warming-pan.20 It may seem that Dawson had already described the contents of the warming-pan (she saw ‘fire’), thus ruling out the possibility that a baby had been secreted therein. However, the opposition pamphlet A Full Answer to the Depositions insists that Dawson had used ‘no more than a common Phrase of speaking’: ‘As suppose I had been in any room where this Warming-pan had gone through, and having no Suspicion [...] but in common phrase would say (though I see not the fire) there is fire or coals gone to warm to bed.’21 In this sceptical reading, Dawson says ‘fire’ when she has only seen a warming-pan.22 There is allowed to be no gap, in her mind, between the sign (warming-pan) and what it normally signifies (fire). In the anti-Catholic imagination this was typical of a ‘papist’, one inured to such things as the transubstantiated host (which does not stand for but is God) or the idolised image of a saint, worshipped in place of that which it represents. Anti-Catholic discourse, however, always insists on the gap between sign and signified. This piece of practical criticism, then, opens up a discursive space by keeping the lid of the warming-pan closed, and its contents indeterminate and obscure. That obscurity is not just an opportunity for but the lifeblood of this scandal, and it has to be maintained. No detail is so influential as the warming-pan, but the depositions share a characteristic that presents a series of opportunities to the opposition. The desire of these deponents to maintain a kind of decorum in this delicate situation produces a tendency towards circumlocution. The deponents quite literally talk around the queen’s body. Mary Crane’s deposition – that she ‘did not follow the Child, when it was first carried out of the Room, but staid in the Bed-chamber, and saw all that was to be seen after the Birth of a Child’ (p. 5) – is typical in its periphrastic avoidance of the royal body, describing the birth in silhouette. Likewise, Elizabeth Pearse, Laundress to the Queen, testifies that she ‘took away all the foul Linen hot as they came from the Queen’ (p. 8). The intimacy and materiality of childbirth is present here, but those qualities are transferred from the queen to paraphernalia:

20

Michael McKeon reproduces this map in The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Univ., 2005), p. 555. 21 Anon., A Full Answer to the Depositions (London, 1689), p. 14. 22 In testimony recorded by Pepys in December 1689, Dawson clarified, ‘I did also see fire in the famous warming-pan, so much talked on, and I did feel the heat of it’ (British Library, Add MSS 39822, fol. 5).

Incorrigibility

33

‘foul Linen’ is as close as Pearse can allow herself to get. Similar problems abound in the Earl of Middleton’s testimony: The Deponent stepped up to the Bed-side, saw a Woman, he supposes, the Midwife, kneeling at the other side of the Bed, who had her Hands and Arms within the Bed-clothes for a pretty while, then the Deponent saw her spread a Cloath upon her Lap, and laid the end of it over the Bed-clothes, and then fetch a Child (as the Deponent firmly believes, for he could not then see it,) out of the Bed into that Cloth, and give it to Mrs. Labadie… (p. 11).23

The Earl is simply reporting what he saw. Unfortunately, he effectively describes a series of coverings-up, and his turn of phrase plays directly into the hands of anti-Catholic polemicists. He cannot see the new Prince of Wales emerge from the queen because he cannot see through bed-clothes, but he also compensates for that deficiency in his capacity to observe with firm belief. Even then, the thing the Earl is unsure about is not whether the child came from the queen, but whether or not the child came out of the bed. In ordinary circumstances, Middleton should not need to be sure about these things – where else would a child come from? – but these are not ordinary circumstances. These deponents were never likely to say what opposition pamphleteers, after the fact, demanded that they should have: that they saw the child delivered from the queen, up close, and in anatomical detail. That is partly because the way early modern childbirth was conducted made it difficult for anyone to see such a thing. Even if they had, however, it is very unlikely they would have felt able to say so on record, and in the king’s presence. The ramifications of the (quite ordinary) veiling or ‘draping’ of the queen for the polemic surrounding this birth will be explored below. For now, it suffices to recognise the way that the scepticism surrounding this birth puts pressure on normal circumstance until it seems aberrant. That is, the opposition base their polemical attacks on things that didn’t happen, but which, according to them, should have (i.e. the exposing of the queen during childbirth). Those things were never at all likely to have happened, nor is there any evidence of them having been demanded before the birth. But the writing on this birth and the prince’s legitimacy builds a narrative in which it would have been reasonable for them to have been expected. It is a narrative which normalises aberrant demands, and it is

23

Sidney Lord Godolphin had a harder (or easier) time of it: ‘the Room was so full, that the Deponent could not get near the Bed, but stood by the chimney’ (p. 12).

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assisted in that work by the fact that the narrative is itself an after-birth. It is a historiographical project. In this narrative, the Earl of Middleton’s ‘firm belief ’ – really a rational conjecture – serves as a sign of popish implicit faith. In this narrative, only a bigoted papist, or a member of the plotting cabal, would expect a nation ‘To see a babe born, through curtains close drawn’, irrespective of the fact that this was probably the manner in which these writers came into the world themselves.24 It is a narrative that insists that the details supplied by the depositions – reeking linen, obscuring bedclothes, milk stains on the queen’s shifts – are mere accidentals, and that the central question of where exactly James Francis Edward Stuart came from remained unresolved. The narrative needs to remain unresolved; it is constituted and propelled by irresolution. Thanks to the efforts of poets and pamphleteers, the new prince is turned into and maintained as ‘a thing in the air | that’s neither dead nor living’, not just suspended between legitimacy and illegitimacy, or life and death, but held up in the air, at some undetermined point in a parabolic flight.25 The Answer to the Depositions lambasts the ‘juggling’ of conniving papists or casuistic Jesuits, but juggling is also an apt metaphor for the kind of repetitive labour that keeps the identity of the prince in doubt, obscure, or ‘in the air’, like spinning plates.26 That this is brought about by an obsessive focus on the apparent obscurity of the queen’s childbed, or the contents of the warming-pan brought into her chamber, is only one of the many ironies at work here. What James II later referred to as the ‘industrious absence’ of certain people from the birthing chamber – not least his daughter, princess Anne – helps to create this thing that didn’t happen. Or, at least, it helps to turn the thing that did happen – James Francis Edward’s emergence from Mary of Modena’s womb – into a thing that possibly didn’t.27 The absence is ‘industrious’ because it is deliberate and it is productive, and we might say the same of opposition 24

Anon., ‘A New Protestant Letany’, in A Collection of the Newest and Most Ingenious Poems, Songs, Catches, etc. against Popery, Relating to the Times (London, 1689), p. 16. 25 Anon., ‘The Council,’ in The muses farewell to popery & slavery (London: for S. Burgess, 1690), p. 87. 26 The queen’s ‘double reckoning’ (i.e. the two due dates calculated from either 6 September or 6 October 1687) is ‘a design and a juggle’ (p. 14); the ‘proofs’ of birth offered by the depositions are ‘only necessary amusements like a Jugglers flourishing his Stick, with a Hictius Doctius’ (p. 5). On the ‘double reckoning,’ see Gaspar Fagel, A Letter Writ by Mijn Heer Fagel (Amsterdam, 1688), p. 4, and British Library Add. MSS 32096, fol. 39. 27 For reasons to discount the aspersions cast on the birth, see McTague, ‘AntiCatholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity’, p. 446 n. 18.

Incorrigibility

35

writers’ focus on the negative space of the warming-pan. These people are not just courting but producing incorrigibility, and doing so by way of a strange combination of gazes averted before but penetratingly focussed after the fact. A refusal to bear witness to a birth is followed by a wielding of the invasive powers of printed polemic to demand an access to the queen’s body that was only possible in retrospect and in the imagination. Why does this scandal matter, and why is it a good place to begin this book? I have discussed elsewhere Steve Pincus’s relative disinterest in the birth of the Prince of Wales in his history of the revolution of 1688–89.28 As I have already said, I do not wish to overstate the warming-pan scandal’s causative force. I am not claiming that the prince’s indeterminate legitimacy was the thing that set William III’s 300 ships in motion. However, that does not mean that this thing that didn’t happen cannot help us understand this historical moment. The key to seeing its significance is a proper attention to the methods of the writers involved. Indeed, this is precisely Pincus’s method in the opening chapters of his book, though he directs his gaze elsewhere: to the method of historians of the revolution from the eighteenth century to the present. The main thrust of Pincus’s argument is that the revolution of 1688 was a revolution in the modern sense, comparable to the French and Russian revolutions, a conflict between two competing visions of modernity. In his introduction and first chapter he traces the development of an ‘old narrative’ that ‘emphasized the Revolution of 1688–9 as a great moment in which the English defended their unique way of life’. Pincus’s study aims to dismantle this narrative, arguing that ‘the English revolutionaries created a new kind of modern state’ (p. 3). Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1848) is cited as the most influential formulation of the old narrative, which for Pincus has its roots in early eighteenth-century debates, and particularly in the split of the Whig party into ‘establishment’ and ‘Opposition’ factions during the 1720s. For Pincus, Edmund Burke’s insistence in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) that in 1688 ‘there had been no innovation, no revolution, but merely a sensible and backward-looking restoration of the old order’ (p. 24) effectively dealt the coup de grâce to earlier or ‘Old Whig’ readings of the revolution as a popular uprising. Even for radicals like Paine, following Burke, 1688–89’s revolution was a poor cousin to ‘the luminous revolutions of America and France’ (p. 24). In this ‘old narrative’, history doesn’t matter. Here, 1688 represents the bloodless aversion of a

28

See McTague, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity’, pp. 434–5; pp. 444–5.

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crisis, the maintenance of a sort of British exceptionalism, the teleological but crucially gradual march of history: what has long been known as the derisively capitalised Whig Interpretation of History. ‘The Revolution of 1688–89 has receded from the popular imagination,’ Pincus concludes, ‘because it has ceased to be an interesting event’ (p. 28). This brief history of historiography is Pincus’s way of answering a question he poses for himself: ‘How did the Revolution of 1688–89 come to be a nonevent?’ (p. 14). By ‘nonevent’, Pincus means that the revolution has ceased to matter: in this ‘old narrative’, it is no longer ‘the pivot of a good story’. It is hardly a pivot at all. Unsurprisingly, the present chapter seeks to re-emphasise the fact that this revolution has always had a nonevent at its heart: the warming-pan scandal. For many contemporaries this was the pivot of the good story of James II’s overthrow. As some of his reviewers have noted, Pincus sidelines the controversy over the prince’s birth because his emphasis on the modernity of the Williamite revolutionaries leads him to downplay the significance of religious or confessional strife, thereby failing to do full justice to some of his sources.29 However, it is not just that a focus on the birth or on popular anti-Catholic bigotry would give a kind of balance to Pincus’s study, which is comprehensive in many other ways. I do not wish to see more space given to the Prince of Wales’s birth in histories of the revolution because I think it is more important than, say, James II’s interest in Gallican absolutism as a mode of government. Rather, the point is that to skip over this scandal is to miss an opportunity to think through one of the earliest historiographical projects relating to this revolution, a historiographical project that paradoxically precedes and – for some – enables and justifies it. It is less that I think that the warming-pan scandal is a key element of the history of the revolution of 1688–89, and more that I think it should be the starting point of any history of the historiography of that revolution. That is, Pincus’s survey of the historiography at the start of his study does not start quite early enough. That one of the decisive, if not the decisive, political events of the long eighteenth century has a fraud at its centre is a powerful motive for beginning 29

See Scott Sowerby, ‘Pantomime History’, Parliamentary History 30 (2011), p. 238; David Como, Rachel Weil and Steve Pincus, ‘Modernity and the Glorious Revolution’, HLQ 73 (2010), p. 152; Jeremy Black, review of 1688: The First Modern Revolution, by Steve Pincus, The American Historical Review 115 (2010), p. 487; Warren Johnston, review of 1688: The First Modern Revolution, by Steve Pincus, English Historical Review 125 (2010), p. 996; Melinda Zook, review of 1688: The First Modern Revolution, by Steve Pincus, Journal of British Studies 50 (2011), p. 208.

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a study of things that didn’t happen here. What did happen – the ejection of James II and his heirs – is a constitutive element of the political history of the period this book covers, and its shadow is cast over many of the events it engages with. That shadow extends to the final chapters on Alexander Pope’s Dunciads, with their reading of the Hanoverian establishment – an establishment only made possible by the revolution of 1688–89 – as a counterhistory made real. This is another way of saying that the shadow cast by what did and did not happen in 1688 is also a methodological one. As becomes clear at the end of this chapter, James belatedly realised that the battle he was fighting in 1688 was a losing one because his sense of whether and when history mattered – and what history consisted of – was out of kilter with the practices and habits of thought powering the fictions of illegitimacy that helped to run his family out of the country. Those historiographical practices – the feigning of credulity; the fabrication of evidentiary voids; the courting of incorrigibility; the privileging of ‘fair connexions’ – are practices we will encounter repeatedly through this study. They are practices brought into sharp focus by the controversy over the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart, but they have their roots in the series of related scandals and conspiracies of the late 1670s and early 1680s covered in chapter two, which demonstrates the ways in which they were baked in to English political argument and life. Before returning to that prehistory, then, the remaining two sections of the present chapter seek to establish the historiographical work done in the scandal regarding the prince’s birth, also showing that contemporaries understood the debate to be a historiographical one: not just an argument about what happened and what didn’t, but a clash between different conceptions of what counts as history, and how to make history matter. The first of these sections concentrates on the ways that opposition artists and writers fabricate incorrigibility so that they can perform kinds of revelation. The final section focusses on James II’s belated acknowledgement of the effectiveness and industry of opposition writers. As he writes his memoirs, the king teeters on the verge of seeing that the warming-pan scandal’s significance – like all things that didn’t happen – is less historical than it is historiographical.

Fabricating Incorrigibility The conservation of paintings generally only makes it into the news cycle when it goes badly wrong, or when the treatment of a painting reveals some hitherto unknown aspect of its design or authorship. Of course, this

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simplifies and misrepresents the purpose and methodologies of painting conservation, not least because it thinks of that discipline as one operating in the service of the art market. However, it is a phenomenon with a clear public appeal, and that appeal lies in the fact that it makes historical revision visible. The meaning of a painting we have been living with was not the true meaning after all, but the result of some belated interference which must be painstakingly removed to uncover the ‘original’ truth of the painting’s design. The appeal of such revelations is the appeal of secret history, a historiographical genre. A recent example of this is Kathy Hebb’s work on a painting by an unknown artist in the collection of Yale Divinity School.30 It depicts Martin Luther sat at a table, reading a bible by the light of a candle, surrounded by seventeen Protestant reformers, a number of whom hold books: presumably vernacular translations of scripture. It is an unabashed reworking of depictions of the Last Supper, the bread and wine of the communal Catholic Eucharist supplanted by sacred texts and the Protestant subject’s individual relationship therewith. During her treatment, however, Hebb uncovered four figures at the bottom of the composition: a cardinal, a monk, the Pope, and a bull. These figures are doing their best to blow out the candle burning in front of Luther, thereby extinguishing the Northern Heresy. The over-painting dates from the eighteenth-century. The motive for this obscuration is unclear, but the effect is sanitisation. This panegyric on the Protestant reformers was really anti-Catholic polemic, all along. This change in the painting’s tone repositions it in relation to the history of confessional dispute. Originally, the painting informed the reader that Protestantism may have risen, but 30

See Felicity Harley-McGowan, ‘A Seventeenth Century Surprise’, Yale Alumni Magazine 81.3 (Jan/Feb 2018) . For other news stories of this kind, see Shan Kuang’s uncovering of a whale (Maev Kennedy, ‘Restoration reveals hidden whale in 17th-century Dutch painting’, The Guardian (4 June 2014) ), the sanitisation of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Massacre of the Innocents (Richard Dorment, ‘The Royal Collection: bloody secrets of a masterpiece’, The Telegraph (4 November 2008) ), and the discovery of Seurat’s only self-portrait by Aviva Burnstock and Karen Serres at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London (Dalya Alberge, ‘Georges Seurat’s secret self-portrait sees light of day’, Evening Standard (28 March 2014) ). With thanks to Roxy Sperber, Douglas Kainoa MacLennan, Claire Shepherd and Sebastiaan Verweij for alerting me to these examples and others.

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remained at risk from Roman Catholicism, notwithstanding how clownish and feeble the figures at the bottom of the painting were. Be on your guard, it says. The over-painted picture is rather more self-satisfied: the reformed religion flowers naturally, inevitably, rationally – and it does so all by itself, a self-organising system. The effect of the over-painting and its removal is historiographical. The same can be said of two prints relating to the birth of the Prince of Wales. The first is an engraving by Bernard Lens, depicting Mary of Modena sitting beside her infant son’s crib (fig. 1). It serves as an official celebration of the new heir. The queen is looking demurely downwards and to her right, reservedly avoiding the viewer’s gaze. Her left hand rests maternally on the side of the prince’s crib. An anonymous Dutch satirical print of uncertain authorship carefully follows the composition of the Lens engraving, but adds in elements from two of the fictions of illegitimacy that circulated while the queen was pregnant (fig. 2). In this reworking, the queen’s eyes are not cast down but behind her, meeting the lascivious gaze of the Jesuit Father Petre, the major addition to composition. His previously invisible hand rests on the queen’s chest, and their faces are on the verge of meeting for a kiss. This is a particularly literal-minded and pantomimic instance of the ‘systematic “behind-ism”’ Jakob Tanner locates in modern conspiratorial thinking, which ‘always involves the same operation of making the invisible visible’. Petre was appointed to the Privy Council on 11 November 1687, around the time the queen’s conception was first rumoured, and it did not take long for stories casting him as the unborn child’s father to emerge. He was also frequently cast as the ringleader of alleged substitution plots. An early version of these is also alluded to in the Dutch print by way of the toy windmill resting on the prince’s bed-clothes: rumours held that the prince was really the son of a miller’s wife. The Dutch inscription informs the viewer that ‘Mercurial Father Peters, most expert in deceit, knows how to rock King, Queen, and people to sleep. The Prince of Wales nods, his little wooden mill stands grinding King, Queen, and baby out of England’.31 Petre’s soporific powers relate to the wider argument made by this engraving: the English people have been duped, and a vital part of that duping has involved the obscuration of the ‘true design’ of the prince’s legitimacy. Indeed, that the legitimacy is designed is precisely the point. The satirical retooling of Lens’s original involves numerous additions, then, 31

The translation is from Craig Hartley and Catherine MacLeod, ‘Supposititious Prints’,  Print Quarterly  6.1 (1989), pp. 49–54, p. 52. See also Catriona Murray, Imaging Stuart Family Politics: Dynastic Crisis and Continuity (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), chapter 1.

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Fig. 1. Bernard Lens, Mary of Modena with the Prince of Wales, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

but it presents itself as a revelation, showing the viewer what was really there behind the official account of the prince’s birth, all along: straightforward sexual intrigue. As with the Yale painting, what emerges from this ‘revelation’ is a sort of pantomimic, oppositional account of recent political

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Fig. 2. Satirical print attributed to Pieter Schenk (1688), depicting Mary of Modena, the infant Prince of Wales and Father Petre, British Museum, London.

history. The Stuarts are most certainly not a self-organising system, but the puppets of Father Petre, the Jesuits, and/or the papacy: all hands made visible by the satirist’s clear-sightedness. The Yale painting was sanitised by overpaint. The Dutch cartoon pretends to scrub away the propagandic

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obfuscation of the official engraving, which presents the prince’s legitimacy as a given. That legitimacy, the Dutch print insists, was made, not found. It can only make that insistence by way of a fabrication of its own. The Dutch print is a supplement masquerading as revelation. Opponents of the Stuarts are continually on the lookout for veils that they can rhetorically whip away. Much is made of the fact that the queen was ‘draped’ or ‘covered’ during her labour, and opposition writers were relentless in their insistence that Mary’s body should have been exposed.32 Sometimes they stressed the unprecedented pressures surrounding this particular birth as a justification, but more often they implied that such exposure was customary.33 It was not.34 Princess Anne, keen to discredit the pregnancy from the outset, insisted as early as March 1688 that she would not believe her brother to be legitimate unless she saw ‘the child and she parted’, a crucial moment that, according to those loyal to the Stuarts, she artfully avoided by absenting herself from the birth.35 The opposition insist that the queen’s modesty was not genuine but functional: ‘[t]he King’s introducing men’, declares the Answer to the Depositions, ‘was only to make a fair pretence of covering her, and not letting the Women see what is usual 32

One pamphlet expresses concern that the insufficient scrutiny of the circumstances of the birth was tantamount to allowing ‘the will of the King’ to decide the succession (Anon., An Account of the reasons of the nobility and gentry’s invitation of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England (London, 1688), p. 16). The Answer to the Depositions declared visual confirmation of the child ‘com[ing] out of the Womb’ from ‘credible Modest persons’ to be ‘the best proof and answer’ to its own allegations (p. 17). An Account of the Reasons demands that women should have ‘testified their Personal sight and perception of that very individual Child coming naturally out of the Queens womb’ (p. 12). According to another writer, these women should have been ‘of spotless Integrity’, and the observations were to be made ‘by the Assistance of Physitians and Women of experience’ (Account of the Pretended Prince, pp. 10–11). 33 See An Account of the Reasons, p. 12. 34 See: Jacques Gelis, History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 120; Lianne McTavish, Childbirth and the Display of Authority in Early Modern France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 58; p. 61); Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family, and Political Argument in England, 1680-1714 (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 1989), p. 96. 35 Dalrymple, Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. III, p. 172. Anne is determined to avoid being forced to acknowledge her brother’s legitimacy at this stage. See Clarendon’s interview with her (Samuel Weller Singer (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, vol. II (London, 1828), p. 198), and Margaret Dawson’s accusation that Anne ‘used tricks not to be there time enough when the queen came to be big’ (BL, Add. MS 39822, fol. 17).

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in true births.’36 This demand that Mary be uncovered was unprecedented, but the opposition pretended it was the least they could expect: ‘the labour was not like the usual and common labours, that is, I mean on Pallets, in Chairs, or the Bed turned down, so as the Womb is apparent.’37 The author of An Account of the Reasons complained that those present at the birth ‘may as well have been ten miles off ’ (p. 22). The sought-after proximity to the naked queen is frustrated, it is implied, by the distancing techniques of the Stuart court.38 In a letter to a sceptical correspondent at the start of the eighteenth century, the deprived non-juror George Hickes insists that exposing the queen would have been unthinkable: you further say, that such Care was not taken at his Birth, as was requesit, to remove those suspicions, which is not true, for never Child was born in so great a Presence of Quality, or Number, whoe through a sheet & one thin blanket, saw all the motions the Mother had \of the midwifs hand/; Nor could more be done except he had bin born so as to expose his Mother’s Nakedness to the Eyes of the Spectatours, which is never done in any except difficult births, for convenience of Manuall Operations.39

The queen’s body is just the right mixture of distant and proximate, obscured and on display. Hickes wants to stress the normality of the situation, so the covering is presented as necessary, but as ‘thin’ as could be. This thinness may reflect Hickes’s parallel desire to stress publicity, visibility, and openness. All the same, the revisions in this manuscript – the deletion of ‘the Mother had’ and the introduction of the not quite invisible midwife’s hand – are signs of Hickes’s reluctance to expose the queen’s body. For sceptics, the blanket (however thin) could be made to cover not only the queen but also a substitution plot. As Nicola Parsons puts it, ‘Mary’s physical body had falsely signified the birth of a legitimate heir while, in 36

Answer to the Depositions, p. 9. Answer to the Depositions, pp. 17–18. 38 This proximity is simulated elsewhere: see the account of the queen’s ‘monstruums’ in McTague, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Incorrigibility and Credulity’, pp. 4–5. 39 BL, Add. MS 33286, fol. 11. Hickes’s information comes from the midwife, Dawson. In her deposition Lady Bellasis states that the midwife ‘was sitting by the Bedside, with her hands in the Queens Bed’, implying that Mary was indeed ‘draped’ (At the Council Chamber, p. 5). In 1689 Dawson said, ‘I did see the Pr. of W. born. I may say see born, being at the medwife’s back so near as I could stand, and but one blanket being on the bed, I could see the medwife’s hands whenever she moved them’ (BL, Add. MS 39822, fol. 5). 37

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reality, gestating a conspiracy that would advance the private interests of the royal couple’.40 This was an opportunity to insist that the personal whim of Catholic absolutist monarchs and their pathological reliance on secrecy were standing in the way of rational proof – exactly the behaviour that antiCatholic discourse would expect of a ‘papist’. The inability ‘To see a Babe born, through Bed-Curtains Close Drawn’ is attributed not to the facts of early modern childbirth but to the pathological secrecy of the Stuart court and the axiomatic treachery of women’s bodies.41 Circumstance is imbued with intention, and the responsibility for incorrigibility (a simple fact of childbirth) is shifted onto plotting papists. As with the closed warming-pan, or the absolutist monarch’s inscrutable intentions, the covering of Mary’s body is in retrospect an opening, an opportunity. It is an opportunity for propagandists, because in their prejudicial narratives they can say that it is an opportunity for conniving papists. This whole affair is held together by gaps and inscrutability, by the gaps in public knowledge of the royal body, by the inscrutability of the divineright monarch, exemplified in his holding of the arcana imperii. These ‘state secrets’ were described by James I in 1610 as ‘the deepest mysteries of monarchy and political government that belong to the persons or State of Kings and Princes, that are gods upon Earth’.42 One of the warming-pan fiction’s achievements is the conversion of arcana imperii into skeletons in the closet. This hollowing-out – the tenor of the narrative’s central political metaphor – is achieved through the conversion of a miraculously timed royal birth into a fabliau of cushions-up-undershirts and how’s-your-father.43 As divine-right kingship was increasingly discredited, so the arcana imperii that were once the monarch’s privilege, a sign of their power, were transformed 40

Parsons, Reading Gossip, pp. 17–18. Anon., ‘A New Protestant Letany’, in A Collection of the Newest and Most Ingenious Poems, Songs, Catches, etc. against Popery, Relating to the Times (London, 1689), p. 16. On the treachery of women’s bodies, according to anatomists, see Corrinne Harol, Enlightened Virginity in Eighteenth-Century Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), chap. 2. 42 James I, King of England, ‘A Proclamation Touching D. Cowels Booke called the Interpreter’, in James Francis Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (eds), Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. I (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1973), pp. 243–4. See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Mediaeval Origins’, The Harvard Theological Review 48 (1955), pp. 65–91. 43 For cushions, see the pamphlet play The Abdicated Prince (London: for John Carterson, 1690), pp. 45–7. See also Lois Schwoerer, ‘Politics and popular culture: the theatrical response to the revolution’, in Lois Schwoerer, ed., The Revolution of 1688–1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1992), pp. 184–197. 41

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from a thing that the king possessed (unquestionable authority) to a way that the monarch behaved (unaccountable, secretive, conniving, untrustworthy): the central is made accidental. In this way, as Corrinne Harol has noted, the warming-pan fiction contributes to the delegitimisation of absolutism by way of a kind of generic degradation.44 The reticent illegibility of absolutist monarchs, or the female body, acts as a provocation for anti-Catholic and anti-absolutist polemicists, but that provocation – the illegibility – is also a product or effect of opposition writing. Michael McKeon describes the warming-pan affair as a reaction against ‘the doctrine of the king’s two bodies’, which had ‘authorized the concealment of arcana imperii from public view’. For him the scandal leads to a privileging of ‘the commonsense experience of private citizens’ over the ‘arcana imperii of royal authority’ in the determining of paternity.45 This is a convincing analysis of the way opposition polemic seeks to hold the monarchy accountable to their people by invading the privacy of the Stuart court, an invasion justified by an implicit analogy with the people’s right to resist tyrants. The following section seeks to build on McKeon’s insight to argue that James II’s initial reaction to the rumours is also shaped by his ‘commonsense experience’, and that of those members of the court who ‘saw every day the reality of the Queen’s being with child’.46 However, opposition writing converts the common sense of the king and his court into an example of the malevolent reticence of absolutist monarchs, or arcana imperii, just as it converts the mundane Catholic hopefulness for a male heir into evidence of a conspiracy. Like McKeon, Rachel Weil’s account of this episode is also interested in the distribution of information and the limiting of access thereto, but the source of obscurity is different. For her the affair is evidence of a triumph of a masculine, clinical and more public standard of proof over the ‘authenticity’ that had belonged to female midwives, and she describes the way that Whig propagandists shift the evidentiary goalposts, demanding unprecedented (and unreasonable) levels of detail.47 As we have already seen, they only made these demands in the knowledge that they could not be met, courting incorrigibility. Again, the next section seeks to develop Weil’s sense of the importance of empirical evidence to this episode by paying attention to the king’s developing relationship with empiricism. At first, he equates it with common sense, his phenomenal experience. Indeed, his arranging of the depositions at 44

Harol, ‘Mind and Matter’, p. 130. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, pp. 556–7. 46 Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.192. 47 Weil, Political Passions, pp. 86–104. 45

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Whitehall indicates a certain naïve or casual faith in the probative force of the empirical. The cavilling of pamphlets like the Answer to the Depositions is really an instrumental narrowing of the definition of what counts as ‘empirical’ evidence. And so, in developing an answer to the Answer to the Depositions after the crisis, the king sees the ‘empiricism’ of the opposition for what it is: a discourse. The (supposed) poverty of evidence that enables the invention of the warming-pan fiction is attributed by McKeon to the monarch’s arcana imperii, and by Weil and Harol to the mooted illegibility of the queen’s body, or the birthing process. This chapter has emphasised less the particular cause of those evidentiary shortfalls than the fact that such insufficiency is necessary for the propaganda to function. The warming-pan fiction fabricates a series of historical voids. The fabrication of those voids masquerades as the discovery of redactions in the historical record. Of course, those redactions are ‘covering up’ historical information that never existed in the first place. Ill-mannered and bigoted it may well be, but this is still a historiographical method. It outlines requirements for what might make a convincing or a good historical narrative, but it only does so in the knowledge that those demands cannot – indeed, for political reasons, must not – be met. These opposition writers do not just court but go out of their way to fabricate incorrigibility. Seeing that the warming-pan scandal is actively productive in this way helps us get past questions of credulity and authenticity (i.e. ‘did people really believe that the prince was illegitimate?’ Or, ‘what if the prince really was illegitimate?’). Getting past those questions helps us see both sides engaging in various practices, many of them historiographical, and helps us to see past why someone might do or say something so we can concentrate on how they are doing or saying it. To see past these questions is not to ignore them. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on ‘our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case’, saw the importance of understanding political lying as an intentional act: ‘This active, aggressive capability,’ she writes, ‘is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.’48 Hickes certainly perceived this activity and aggression, referring to the controversy surrounding this birth as ‘a trial of skill between the Ly-makers and Ly-believers’.49 According to his Jacobite biographers, the king would not perceive the importance of this

48

Hannah Arendt, ‘Lying in Politics’, pp. 4–5. Add MSS. 33286, fol. 17v.

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activity – which he eventually characterises as a kind of ‘industry’ – until he was a king in exile.

The Answer to The Answer to the Depositions The account of this episode in James’s ‘memoirs’, published in 1816 as The Life of King James the Second, paints a picture of a king turned historiographer too late. The ‘memoirs’ are a biographical account based on James’s own autobiographical memoranda but commissioned in 1707 by his son, and written by the Jacobite Thomas Dicconson, possibly with the help of David Nairne and Lord Caryll.50 Although ‘Dicconson’s Life’ marks some direct quotation from the original manuscripts with marginal references and quotation marks, it remains uncertain how much of the text is informed by the king’s own words as the original manuscripts are now destroyed. This means that the historiographical epiphany analysed in this section may not have been James II’s, but that of the Jacobite courtiers reflecting on the events of 1688 as they worked in 1707. Where ‘James’ or ‘the king’ is referred to below, then, the reference can finally only be to a character in a text (though this would be no less true if The Life were an extant manuscript in the king’s own hand). Despite this authorial incorrigibility, what is examined below remains a biography of the king authorised by one or more of the major players in the warming-pan scandal: James II himself, his son, or both. According to The Life, James initially underestimated the power of rumour and erred in thinking that a refusal to take seriously the admittedly absurd allegations against him and his family would enable him to weather the storm.51 With the benefit of hindsight, Dicconson’s king seems to realise that in 1688–89 he was working with a different set of rules about how history was made and established. In the following description of the rumours circulating during the queen’s pregnancy we get some insight into the king’s initial reaction to them, and what he thought necessary as he faced the near-certainty of William’s invasion. In the first place he 50

On the authorship of The Life see David McRoberts, ‘Chapter III: The Memoirs of James II and Other Jacobite Papers’, Innes Review 28 (1977), pp. 75–86, p. 78. 51 In relation to the prosecution of the seven bishops, James reflects on this kind of inflexibility, lamenting his ‘too great attention to what he thought just and reasonable’, which ‘hinder’d him from reflecting on what (to be sure) had been more safe as the case then stood’ (Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.157).

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confronts these stories at the level of content. Only later – the present tense of writing indicated by the ‘now’ in the following passage – does he realise the importance of method, or the way in which allegations were disseminated and maintained: The King reflected that dureing the Queen’s being with child, the report of her haveing a counterfeit big belly was universally spread, which then indeed was looked on as a jest, and the talke of a Cussion was the dayly subject of mirth to those who attended upon them, and saw every day the reality of the Queen’s being with child; but his Majesty was now convinced that popular conjectures, tho never so groundless, are not always to be cur’d by jests and undervaluing them, and that whereas the Queen’s bedchamber was accessible but to a few, no corner of the Kingdom was impenitrable to the false suggestions of the Prince of Orange’s Emissarys.52

It is not difficult to imagine a loyal courtier being the origin of the story that the queen was wearing a cushion, as a kind of exasperated sarcastic response to the very idea that the pregnancy was false (‘next they’ll be saying…’). That this was the reaction of the king in the first place – royal policy, as it were – is suggested by princess Anne’s remark, recorded by her uncle the Earl of Clarendon: ‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘the King knew of them; for, as he has been sitting by me in my own chamber, he would speak of the idle stories that were given out, of the Queen’s not being with child, laughing at them.’53 For those who ‘saw every day the reality of the Queen’s being with child’, such stories will indeed have seemed ‘idle’, falling absurdly short of the phenomena they were daily in contact with. However, by the time of this passage’s composition (i.e. ‘now’), James saw two vital things: first, these stories were not ‘idle’ but vigorously industrious, and industriously disseminated; second, the stories were not for him, nor were they for his queen, or his royal household. These ‘popular conjectures’ could not be ‘cured’ by his ‘jests and undervaluing’ because such jests and undervaluations had a limited audience. Unlike those ‘suggestions of the Prince of Orange’s Emissarys’, the king’s jests did not penetrate every corner of the country.54 James is perceiving the triumph of the dispersed power of rumour and print over the localised power of the royal presence. The power 52

Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.192. The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, p. 198. 54 For details of the Williamite press machine see Lois G. Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–89’ American Historical Review 82 (1977), pp. 843–874. 53

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of the latter – like that of the arcana imperii – is maintained by limiting access thereto, and limiting the number of and variance in representations thereof. In the face of the Williamite propaganda machine, however, the goalposts shift, and maintenance of the quality of royal representation is no longer an effective means of controlling the narrative: what matters is quantity and reach. James needed to engage with the whole nation, but he was really engaging with the limited community of the royal court. When Count D’Adda reported in April 1688 that the ‘obstinate heretics’ were ‘publishing that Her Majesty’s condition is a fiction’, he unwittingly hit the nail on the head.55 It is not just that the queen’s condition (her pregnancy) was being seen or represented as false. More pointedly, her pregnancy is a ‘fiction’, a crafted narrative with a purpose. A further implication is that her majesty was in a fictional condition, and had been put into that condition decisively by the opposition’s publications. Some time between 1688 and 1707, either the king or his biographers realise that this conflict needed to have been fought on that discursive plane. The king was initially astonished at the very idea that the depositions should be necessary at all. His explanations for that astonishment are perfectly rational, and again they mostly operate at the level of content. Indeed, they are all good reasons for modern historians to disregard the idea that the prince was illegitimate: to achieve such a substitution was logistically impossible; in doing so he would be depriving his own children of their birth right; undertaking such a plan would ‘endanger the ruin of themselves and all that adhered to them’.56 However, the first reason given is the most telling: James could not conceive ‘how a thing of that nature could be call’d into question’ (my emphasis). This was a failure of imagination, and imagination proved to be something that opposition pamphleteers had in spades. It also points to an inflexibility of approach, or methodology. As his initial dismissal of the rumours by way of jest is only effective (if at all) in the limited sphere of the royal household, so his sense of what counts as plausible here is reasonable, but crucially limited. It cannot withstand the probability that could be so readily borrowed from the ‘fair connexions’ of anti-Catholic propaganda. Like Hickes, Rachel Weil has seen that what makes anti-Stuart rumour and propaganda effective is not a passive but an active bigotry and ignorance. Weil perceives the way in which ‘promoters of the warming pan myth’, including princess Anne, actively created and maintained a space

55

Haile, p. 180. Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.193.

56

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in which scepticism could be maintained, ‘to give people […] a reason to continue believing what they wanted to believe’. Setting one’s face in a certain direction, turning away from a certain kind of history, is a kind of facilitation. What it facilitates is the making of fair connexions. We see this in action as Anne engages in conversation with an exasperated Earl of Clarendon, nine days after the depositions: ‘Is it not strange,’ said she, ‘that the Queen should never (as often as I am with her, mornings and evenings) speak to me to feel her belly?’ I asked her if the Queen had at other times of her being with Child bid her do it? She answered, ‘No, that is true.’ ‘Why, then, Madam,’ said I, ‘should you wonder she did not bid you do it this time?’ ‘Because,’ said she, ‘of the reports.’ ‘Possibly,’ said I, ‘she did not mind the reports.’ ‘I am sure,’ said she, ‘the King knew of them; for, as he has been sitting by me in my own chamber, he would speak of the idle stories that were given out, of the Queen’s not being with child, laughing at them. Therefore,’ said she, ‘I cannot but wonder there was no more care taken to satisfy the world.’57

This is characteristic of the functioning of the warming-pan myth. Anne does not directly approach the queen to ask to feel her belly, and she can use decorum as a cover for not doing so. But a decorum in the queen (her modesty) is converted into an opportunity for – and circumstantial proof of – trickery. Anne turns her face away from a certain kind of evidence so that she can later protest that it has not been forthcoming.58 And yet, when the king and queen turn away from malicious rumour, Anne manipulates that into a sign that they have suspiciously refused to take more care to ‘satisfy the world’ – and this not only after but in response to the unprecedented depositions. Only certain kinds of ignorance are bliss. According to The Life, James eventually saw this facilitation for what it was. A fascinating passage contains a detailed refutation of the Answer to the Depositions. It identifies the pamphlet’s central anti-Catholic bigotry and answers the charge that ‘it was impossible for the Queen to haue a Child’ by pointing out that she had already had many, ‘was not then aboue thirty years old, and (as it happen’d) had one four years after’. To the pamphleteer’s protestation that a warming pan was de trop on a warm June day, The Life snipes, ‘as if linning were not to be air’d at all times, especially 57

The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, p. 198. On Anne’s absence and correspondence with her sister Mary of Orange, see Weil, Political Passions, p. 91.

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on such occasions.’ It points out that Mrs Dawson testified to seeing fire in the warming pan. These objections are fairly straightforward rebuttals – that same level-headedness mixed with hauteur that led to the king’s attempt to laugh things off – but in this case the factual refutations build into an understanding of how the propaganda worked: ‘in fine, whatever was done by contrivance of the persons themselves to avoid being witnesses, or happen’d by accident, was all charg’d upon the King and Queen as designedly brought about to cover the cheat.’ Circumstance, The Life tells us, is imbued with intention. It also notes that this practice is enabled by an attitude that approaches the feigning of credulity as Loveman defines it: as noted at the start of this passage, this narrative comes into existence by way of ‘the weak credulity of some and malice of others’.59 While failing to realise that these two qualities might be held simultaneously – by a person maliciously feigning credulity – this nevertheless identifies the imaginary or psychological substrate on which this narrative thrives. The ‘Scribler’ responsible for the Answer to the Depositions ‘supposes without ground, denys without answering, and affirms without proof ’.60 This use of ‘supposes’ is typical of the way The Life transfers the language of illegitimacy away from James Francis Edward and onto the narrative that sought to disinherit him. But crucially, again, The Life is thinking about approach – not what is said, but how. I often tell my students that this is one of the things that distinguishes first class work. Nor is it only this pamphleteer’s methodology to which James or his biographers have become attuned: to the complaint that princess Anne had not seen the queen’s belly comes the following barbed riposte: ‘if she absented herself towards the end it was industriously done.’ The jests are no longer thought of as idle. ~ Belatedly, according to The Life, James II recognised that what he was confronted with in 1688 and 1689 was not simply ignorance and religious bigotry, but a political and historiographical practice, a muscle that the political culture had been developing for years: ‘these were, in fine, such Paradoxes as the King stood amazed at, and indeed none but a people accostomed to believe the fables of forty one, and the contradictions of Oates’s plot, could reconcile…’.61 What matters here is the difference in capacity between the king and his people: the monarch stands amazed at 59

Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.199–200. Ibid. 61 Clarke, The Life of King James the Second, II.194. 60

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those things his people are perfectly able to stomach, what they are now ‘accostomed to belieue’. For the James II of The Life, in retrospect, the warming-pan scandal appears to be enabled by the refinement of a set of reflexes or prejudices into a kind of pragmatically elastic credulity, or even an art. That movement from reflex to art is mirrored in the opposition’s conversion of ‘commonsense experience’ into the weaponised kind of empiricism they mobilise against the Stuarts. That weaponised empiricism – the extraordinary demands they made after the Prince of Wales’s birth – masquerades as commonsense, but the demands made, as this chapter has shown, were decidedly uncommon. King James’s perception that his people had become ‘accostomed to belieue’ extraordinary things highlights a divide not only between definitions of the empirical, but also divisions hidden in terms like ‘customary’ and ‘pragmatic’. James’s attempts to laugh this crisis off were pragmatic, from where he was standing. It was a pragmatism derived from his confidence that what he saw as customary – the ordinary – should have been able to proceed unaffected by allegations so very out of the ordinary as to be laughable. William H. Sewell might call this a confidence in ‘structure’ – a confidence that social relations would continue to reproduce themselves, as normal.62 The Whig opposition have a pragmatism of their own, which James would think of as a kind of unprincipled instrumentality. The difference is that their pragmatism is transformative, and based in a new normal, or a different set of social relations. In Sewell’s terms, the opposition succeed because they manage to turn the warming-pan fiction into what he calls an ‘event’: the kind of ‘happening’ that can transform social relations.63 This is a pragmatism refined into a sharp point, and it drives the warming-pan fiction’s conversion of the ordinary into the extraordinary, the accidental into the central. What James’s people have become ‘accustomed’ to is not the customary procedures that can be expected at the birth of a child, royal or otherwise, but the extraordinary levels of forensic detail and accountability that a certain kind of ‘empiricism’, and a certain kind of politics, requires.64 The kind of pragmatically feigned credulity operating here enables the draping of a convenient and – thanks to anti-Catholicism’s penetration in English society – familiar narrative over a series of difficult truths, to which James’s people were unaccustomed: England has a Catholic king with a male Catholic heir; the royal couple have produced a viable 62

On Sewell’s conception of structure see Logics of History, pp. 124–51. Logics of History, p. 101–2. 64 On the ‘crumbling’ of (cultural) restrictions regarding historians’ revelation of state and private secrets over the seventeenth century, see Brownley, ‘Secret History and Seventeenth-Century Historiography’, pp. 36–8. 63

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and legitimate male child after a string of miscarriages and infant deaths; the nation needs a revolution but it also needs to retain the monarchy.65 The successful delegitimisation of James Francis Edward Stuart and the exclusion of his family from the English throne is not the consequence of privileging ‘the commonsense experience of private citizens’ over the ‘arcana imperii of royal authority’, but the overpowering of inconvenient truths with conveniently ‘probable’ falsities.

65

For the queen’s miscarriages and the deaths of her children in infancy see ODNB.

Chapter 2

‘Working in th’immediate power to be’: The Popish and Protestant Plots

T

his chapter explores what The Life of King James the Second meant when it cited the king’s subjects’ ability to ‘reconcile’ the ‘Paradoxes’ inherent in the warming-pan fiction, an ability he connected to the fact that they were ‘a people accostomed to believe […] the contradictions of Oates’s plot’. This conspiracy is now known as the Popish Plot, named for the main progenitor of this series of interrelated narratives: Titus Oates. A former Catholic, Oates insisted that his conversion to the Roman faith was itself an act of subterfuge, enabling him to gather information about a Jesuit plot to overthrow the government, and Protestantism in England. The murder on 12 October 1678 of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, the justice of the peace who had first taken Oates’s depositions, helped his credibility: the assumption was that Godfrey had been murdered by Catholics seeking to suppress Oates’s revelations. Oates’s narrative was supplemented (and occasionally contradicted) by the testimonies of William Bedloe, Stephen Dugdale, and Miles Prance. Broadly speaking, the ‘Popish Plot’ consisted of: plans to assassinate Charles II and James; rebellions across the British Isles; repeated attempts to fire London (including the Great Fire of 1666, still at this time laid at the door of Catholics); and detailed plans for the re-establishment of Catholicism in England, including a list of those who could expect bishoprics, come the counterreformation.1 This was an alternative but dangerously 1

For the bishops, see Titus Oates, A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot and Conspiracy of the Popish Party Against the Life of His Sacred Majesty, the Government and the Protestant Religion (London: for Thomas Parkhurst and Thomas Cockrill, 1678), pp. 50–1. There is a summary of Oates’s narrative on pp. 63–8. The allegations of planned firings of London are mentioned by Oates, but covered in more detail in William Bedloe, A Narrative and Impartial Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot (London: for Robert Boulter, John Hancock, Ralph Smith, and Benjamin Harris, 1679). For a detailed account of the Popish Plot, see Peter Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2010). See also J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972).

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proximate past and future, according to Oates and his fellow informers. It was also a partisan counterhistory that had demonstrable and tragic effects: by July 1681 thirty-five men had been executed for their alleged involvement in the plot.2 For much of this political crisis, as Roger L’Estrange found, expressing scepticism about the veracity of Oates’s narrative was perceived as bordering on treason.3 However, by 1681, as Charles prorogued what was to be his last parliament and began proceedings to revoke the charter of the city of London, Oates’s plot seemed much less unassailable. This was in part because it had begun to be challenged by rival conspiracy narratives, including the ‘Protestant Plot’ (an alleged plan to kidnap the king at the 1681 Oxford parliament in order to bring him to terms). It is no accident that these plots and the formation of the Whig and Tory parties are roughly coterminous. The two-party system that dominated England for centuries – which was itself reinforced by the creation of two rival English royal families by the events of 1688 – was marked from its birth by the conflict over the historical origins of political authority that played out in the late-Stuart crisis: to caricature, divine right kingship derived from an incorrigible patrilineal descendance from Adam, and various versions of popular sovereignty, derived equally incorrigibly from vague apprehensions of an ancient ‘gothic’ constitution. This crisis did not just unfold at the same time as these political plots and counterplots dominated political discourse, but was viewed through them. In short, party politics from the outset was driven by historiographical argument, and much of the energy in political debate was expended in moving these conspiratorial narratives, or accounts of the origins of political power, between the categories of the historical and the counterhistorical. Historiographical disagreement was not invented in 1678, of course, but the shift to an oppositional political system did change the structure in which such arguments took place, and the strategies that might most successfully be used to win them. The twoparty system brought to political debate something more like ‘total war’: what is often referred to as ‘the rage of party’, that is, might be thought of

2

See The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Paul Hammond and David Hopkins, 4. vols (London; New York: Longman, 1995–2000), I.463. The Popish Plot was not bare invention: Oates’s narrative was corroborated by the discovery of correspondence between the civil servant Edward Coleman and the French court (see Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’, pp. 198–232). Jonathan Scott has argued that in the Secret Treaty of Dover and other conclusion between Charles II’s court and France there effectively was a popish plot (Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1991), p. 35). 3 Hinds, ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’, pp. 163–6.

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as the consequence of the desire not just to defeat one’s opponent, but, in doing so, to extirpate the historical basis of their position. The conflicts over narratives like Oates’s are only particularly pointed examples of a widespread practice: historiographical and political reflexes that eventually helped the warming-pan scandal stick. Seeking to explore those reflexes in detail, this chapter begins with the phenomenon of ‘ignoramus justice’ – the throwing out of the indictments of prominent Whig plotters for treason by the Middlesex Grand Jury and the indignant reactions provoked by these acts of historical denial, from John Dryden and others. The questions raised by ignoramus juries get to the heart of the political and historiographical conflicts of the early 1680s: how vulnerable is the historical record to manipulation or obliteration? When, how, and for whom does history ‘matter’, and what are the means of making it do so? The second section explores the answers to these questions offered by two texts: A Ra-ree Show, the seditious ballad attributed to Stephen College at his trial, and John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel. The chapter concludes by turning to the prose ‘narratives’ of the popish plot, and the ways in which informers use counterhistorical speculation not to revise dominant narratives or challenge their stability, but to shore them up. The foundation of these supports, as we saw in relation to the warming-pan scandal, is incorrigibility.

Ignoramus Justice In 1681, the Middlesex Grand Jury threw out two prominent cases. The first was the indictment of Stephen College, the ‘Protestant Joiner’, for treason on 8 July 1681, the second that of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, for the same crime, on 24 November of the same year. Both men were Whigs of markedly different backgrounds and social positions, but both were working (and sometimes working together) in opposition to the Stuart court. Their indictments came as the court and the crown began to reassert itself following Charles’s proroguing of the final ‘Exclusion parliament’ at Oxford on 28 March 1681.4 The Grand Jury, empanelled by 4

This Tory or loyal revival was referred to by some as a ‘second restoration’. See Philip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993), pp. 206–69. ‘Exclusion’ refers to attempts to remove the Catholic James Duke of York from the succession, and ‘exclusion crisis’ has often been used as an umbrella term for this period. Scott criticises this tendency, casting the exclusion campaign as a minor skirmish if not a diversion that obscures

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the staunchly Whig sheriffs Slingsby Bethel and Henry Cornish, returned a verdict of ‘ignoramus’ on the indictments of both men, meaning that their trials could proceed no further in that jurisdiction. For Shaftesbury, this was an escape; for College, the reprieve was brief, as the government took advantage of a loophole that enabled it to retry him at Oxford on 17 and 18 August 1681, where he was found guilty and executed. The term ‘ignoramus’ is more familiar now as a noun denoting an ignorant person, a fool, a meaning also current in the 1680s. In this legal context, however, ‘ignoramus’ is deployed as something more like a verb or a verbal phrase. Asked to consider a particular indictment, a document setting out the legal case for a particular prosecution, the jury’s duty is to determine whether or not the bill is ‘true’. Generally, this is a procedural matter; often bills fail because of errors in transcription, if the statute cited in the indictment could not be extended, or if the evidence cited was somehow insufficient (i.e. if there was only one witness to a fact instead of the requisite two). ‘Ignoramus,’ literally translated, means ‘we pay it no attention’.5 The effective sense is something like ‘this is not worth the court’s time, it is beneath its notice’. Like a judge asking juries to disregard a piece of testimony from a witness at a trial, ignoramus verdicts refuse admission to a historical record. These are kinds of historical denial that can never totally obliterate: this testimony happened, or this evidence has come to our attention, but for one reason or another it does not count, and must be disregarded. Ignoramus verdicts were not unusual occurrences in themselves. These cases, however, were different, both because of the specific politics of the alleged crimes, and the circumstances in which they were committed. College (like Shaftesbury) was a member of the Whig Green Ribbon Club, and he played a key role in some of the largest public manifestations of radicalism, the Pope-burnings of the late 1670s and early 1680s.6 He earned his nickname, ‘the Protestant Joiner’, through his carving of the effigies of the Pope that were ceremoniously burned in the streets of London.7 College’s Midcontinuities with earlier seventeenth-century crises of ‘popery and arbitrary government’ (Algernon Sidney, p. xiii); Melinda Zook is unsympathetic to this view (Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ., 1999), p. xix). 5 Paul Hammond renders this as ‘we do not know’ in the headnote to ‘The Medall’ (Poems II.7), a literal translation of the Latin. But as the OED points out, in legal use the phrase is understood as ‘we take no notice of [it]’ (ignoramus, n., etymology). 6 On the Pope-burnings, see Hinds, pp. 98–106, and Joseph Monteyne, The Printed Image in Early Modern London (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 155–214. 7 For the Green Ribbon Club, see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis,

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dlesex indictment accused him of having ‘Traiterously Conspired against the Life of his Majesty, he intending to depose and Murther him, in Order to which, He had provided Armour, and other Habillaments of War, to seize upon his Majesty at Oxford, &c.’8 His trial in Oxford effectively implicated him in what outside the courtroom was described as the ‘Protestant Plot’. Neither the Protestant Plot nor College’s alleged treasonous act happened in any phenomenal sense, but English law held that compassing and imagining the death of the king was in itself treason, and so in this case and others the long arm of the law extended beyond the phenomenal into conditional pasts and futures, and into the incorrigible minds of the accused. Shaftesbury was arrested on 2 July, and the building of the prosecution’s case also involved a kind of reaching. Like College, Shaftesbury was accused of threatening to capture the king at Oxford, and claiming that he would ‘never desist, until he had brought this kingdom of England into a commonwealth’.9 His papers were seized, and an anonymous draft of an ‘association’ was found. The association – which was not in Shaftesbury’s hand, and bore no signatures – called upon signatories to defend the Protestant religion and prevent the succession of the Duke of York by any means, including by arms. Two years later, the Whig writer Thomas Shadwell referred to the association sardonically as ‘the abhorr’d Paper never subscrib’d by, or publish’d to any body, before it came to the Grand-Jury’: as with College, Shaftesbury’s indictment centred on a thing that had not (yet) happened.10 Shaftesbury’s history as a civil war parliamentarian made it almost inevitable that this association would be compared with that signed in parliament in 1643, calling on members to refuse to lay down arms so long as the ‘papists now in open War against the Parliament’ – i.e. the king’s forces – evade justice. A short folio pamphlet, The Two Associations, prints these documents side by side, and its mis-en-page does some interesting historiographical work. The relative length of the 1681 document, printed in the right-hand column, means that it frequently overruns the ‘1643’ column, occupying the full width of the page. This happens most significantly at the end (see fig. 3). 1681 overtakes 1643 once more, and immediately below the conclusion of Shaftesbury’s 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994); David Allen, ‘Political Clubs in Restoration London’ The Historical Journal, 19 (1976), 561–80; and Greaves’s Secrets of the Kingdom. 8 Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 18 July 2018), July 1681 (o16810706a-3). 9 Howell, State trials, VIII.777. 10 Thomas Shadwell, Some Reflections Upon the Pretended Parallel in the Play Called the Duke of Guise (London, 1683), pp. 18–19.

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association we find ‘The Names of the Members that took the New Oaths and Covenants agreed on Tuesday, June 6. 1643’. These 1643 signatories stand in for those missing in 1681, and the two years are impressed on one another as a child might fold together the two halves of a ‘butterfly painting’.11 The composition of this pamphlet makes an argument that informs most conservative responses to the political agitation of these years: any organised opposition to the government must, if left unchecked, inevitably lead to regicide and revolution. It does not matter, suggests this pamphlet, that no one signed the association found in Shaftesbury’s papers, because Whigs are identical with regicides, an immanent and imminent threat that wants only opportunity. The 1681 association, effectively, is that of 1643, and the effects of the former should be used to judge the latter. History doesn’t matter. The grand juries, clearly, took a different view. In returning ignoramus verdicts, the juries were declaring that they would pay no attention to a thing that had not yet happened, rejecting the conditional perfect historical narrative that the prosecution (and pamphlets like The Two Associations) sought to construct. This rejection was inevitably read as a political act: what became known in the press as ‘ignoramus justice’. In an anonymous poem, the ghost of Shaftesbury confesses that such ‘justice’ is the result of a knowingly averted gaze: ‘My Squinting Eyes let Ignoramus wear, | That they may this way look, and that way swear.’12 With some justification, judicial procedure is read by Tories as historical denial and criminal collusion: looking the other way. Tories were further provoked by the eighty celebratory bonfires in the streets of London following Shaftesbury’s acquittal in late November 1681, and the striking in mid-December of a commemorative medal, provoking Dryden’s satire The Medall. In the dominant political mythologies of this time, the equivocating non-conformist Whig is the counterpart of the casuistic absolutist Jesuit, both dangerously antinomian, and both dangerously unmoored from essentialist meaning. Whigs like Shaftesbury are castigated by Dryden for a deviously instrumental acceptance of majority opinion, or the ‘common cry’, which leads to kinds of irreligion: The common cry is ev’n religion’s test: The Turk’s is, at Constantinople, best, Idols in India, Popery at Rome And our worship only true at home.13

11

Thanks to Matilda Cramer for suggesting this image. The Last Will and testament of Anthony, King of Poland (London, 1682), broadside. 13 Poems, II.22. 12

Fig. 3. Anon., The Two Associations (London, 1681), p. 5, John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

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This was not a political atmosphere in which one might recommend doing as the Romans do. Dryden takes issue with a relativism that erodes the distinction between fundamental and accidental differences in religious practice (the latter known in theological debate as ‘things indifferent’).14 To tolerate non-conformist Protestants is one thing, but these Whigs are accused of being willing to ‘turn Turk’ (or Papist, or Hindu) if it would serve their interest. Tory propaganda presented ignoramus justice as a confirmation and symptom of the self-serving relativity of Whigs and nonconformists. Tarring all such people with the same brush, the ignoramus verdicts are framed as self-preservation: But wot you what, Sir? They found it not, Sir; Twas ev’ry Jurors Case, and there lay all the Plot, Sir. For at this season, Should they do reason, Which of themselves wou’d scape, if they found it Treason?15

College’s indictment is read as an indictment of Whiggism itself; for Whigs to pay it no attention is not just a historical denial, but something like the modern psychological concept of being ‘in denial’. In The Medall, a pastiche of Lucretius’s account of the indifferent and detached gods in De Rerum Natura is used to describe the kind of deity non-conformist Whigs would prefer. Their God is effectively an ignoramus juror: A jolly God that passes hours too well To promise heaven, or threaten us with hell, That unconcerned can at rebellion sit, And wink at crimes he did himself commit. (Works II.30)

The Medall also exposes the exculpatory wriggling of ignoramus justice by thinking counterfactually: ‘The Men who no conspiracy would find, | Who doubts, but had it taken, they had joined’ (Poems II.27). Accusing the Whigs of ‘sophistry’ while indulging in some of his own, Dryden follows and anticipates many writers in stressing the proximity of what did and did 14

See Melissa M. Caldwell, Skepticism and Belief in Early Modern England (Abingdon: Taylor and Francis, 2016), pp. 197–223, esp. p. 202. 15 ‘Ignoramus: An Excellent Song’ in Nathaniel Thompson, ed., A Choice Collection of 120 Loyal Songs, All of them written since the Two Late Plots (London: for N[athaniel] T[hompson], 1684), p. 15.

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not occur, in lines that seek to reanimate the Whigs’ abortive plans without quite admitting them into history: In vain to Sophistry they have recourse: By proving theirs no plot they prove ‘tis worse – Unmasked rebellion, and audacious force; Which though not actual, yet all eyes may see ‘Tis working in th’immediate power to be. (Poems II.28)

These moves in and out of the phenomenal are indicative of the incorrigibility of non-occurrences. We are carried from ‘no plot’, to ‘unmask’d rebellion, and audacious force’, to the reluctant admission that such rebellion is ‘not actual’, and finally to that odd description of the plot as something immediately and actively abutting on the historical, ‘working in th’immediate power to be’. Dryden moves the Protestant Plot as close as he is able to historicity, describing a plot that has not just been averted, but which was – perhaps still is – actively ‘working’ to squirm its way into history. In this poem, and in his earlier work Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden builds narratives in which history almost matters. Like the ‘old narrative’ of the revolution of 1688 described by Pincus, in which the reign of James II is a temporary and ultimately indifferent blip in the march of British history, so Dryden emphasises the aberrance of Whig rebellion without taking it seriously as an agent of historical change. The next section compares this theory of history with that articulated by another poem emerging from this political crisis: the ballad attributed to Stephen College at his Oxford trial, A Ra-ree Show.

Theories of History in A Ra-ree Show and Absalom and Achitophel Absalom and Achitophel retells the events of recent political history by casually relocating them in the biblical narrative of the temptation of David’s (Charles II’s) son Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth) by Achitophel (the Earl of Shaftesbury). Opening with an allegorical history of the late seventeenth century, the poem offers a series of satirical portraits of the chief personalities of contemporary politics, before the prophet-king David brings matters to a head with a prophecy, ‘foretelling’ the Whigs’ failure. A significant proportion of the prosecution’s case against College in Oxford and some of the details in his indictment centred on the ‘publication’ of the

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ballad A Ra-ree Show, attributed to the defendant by the king’s counsel.16 Dryden manipulates recent political history so that it serves his satirical and historiographical ends, and hides that manipulation behind his biblical analogy. A Ra-ree Show reaches into the past not to find a space for satirical expression, but to issue a call to arms. Taken to Oxford to be distributed whilst parliament sat, A Ra-ree Show takes the form of a dialogue between ‘Leviathan’ (representing Charles II) and Topham, Sergeant-at-Arms of the Commons. In an illustrative engraving, issued separately but in some extant copies pasted to the ballad, Leviathan appears on the left (fig. 4).17 He is wearing a chest or pack on his back in which, the poem explains, he intends to transport the two houses of parliament to Oxford. Like Janus, he has two faces, indicating, according to a witness, ‘That he was half Protestant, and half Papist.’ (p. 21). Leviathan is followed by figures who represent the Whig MPs Cooper, Hughes, and Snow. On the right-hand side of the image he appears again, being pulled down into the mire by these men, some of whom are also stuffing the twenty-six bishops into his pack.18 The ballad corresponds to and explicates this narrative illustration. As Wessel has argued, this is a dialogue that imagines an audience for itself (and, in performance, addresses them). In the tone of an impetuous child, Leviathan demands that Topham take up musical instruments to attend his ‘Ra-ree show’ ‘Where e’re about I go’.19 That is, Charles insists that parliament should follow him to Oxford, or wherever he sees fit. Topham does not so much answer 16

Topham’s description of Leviathan as a ‘foul Beast’ in the second stanza seems to be the basis for the Oxford indictment’s accusation that College said Charles ‘did nothing but beastliness’, for instance (The Arraignment, Tryal and Condemnation of Stephen Colledge for High Treason (London: for Thomas Basset and John Fish, 1681), p. 3). As Jane Wessel has shown, the prosecution was working with a capacious definition of publication and authorship: the former included College’s alleged singing and expounding of the ballad, the latter extended to roles we would now associate with the book trade (‘Performing “A Ra-ree Show”: Political Spectacle and the Treason Trial of Stephen College’ Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1600–1700 38 (2014), pp. 3–17. 17 For the separate issue, a description of variants and a reading of the ballad, see B. J. Rahn, ‘A Ra-ree Show – a rare Cartoon: Revolutionary Propaganda in the Treason Trial of Stephen College’ in Paul J. Korshin, ed., Studies in Change and Revolution: Aspects of English Intellectual History 1640–1800 (Menston, Yorkshire: The Scolar Press, 1972), pp. 77–98. In the trial the prosecution suggests that ballad and illustration were separate: ‘that the picture might be better understood, he adds a ballad to it’ (The […] Tryal […] of Stephen Colledge, p. 17). 18 See Rahn, p. 96, n. 15. 19 A Ra-Ree Show. To the Tune of I am a Senceless Thing (London: for B. T., 1681).

Fig. 4. A Ra-ree Show ([London], [1681]), British Museum, London.

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Leviathan as turn to the reader/auditor, describing Charles’s avatar as a ‘Foul Beast’ that has packed the two houses of parliament into his chest, crying ‘Stop Thief with Ra-ree Show’. Through interventions such as these, and the narrative guidance offered by the engraving, the audience and readership are encouraged not to accept Leviathan’s invitation so much as to violently gate-crash the king’s absolutist revels. Leviathan-Charles has converted parliament into an itinerant and vacuous theatrical performance, or ra-ree show, by repeatedly proroguing it before it can pass legislation. Leviathan is particularly unapologetic about his mode of ‘Strong Government’ (an inane catchphrase he is made to utter frequently): Be quiet ye Dull Tools, with a hey, with a hey, As other Free-born Fools with a ho, Do not all Gaping stand, To see my Slight of Hand? With a hey, Trany nony nony no.

Charles-Leviathan here displays all the assurance typically attributed to the ‘papist’, so confident in the gullibility of ‘Free-born Fools’ that he thinks he can fool people even while telling them that he is doing so. Majesty, in this ballad, is a form of idolatry or deception, which Topham sees through and exposes. His iconoclastic critique of absolutism and popery has a historiographical dimension, as does Leviathan’s refusal to engage. This dimension emerges in Topham’s emptying out of the symbols of Stuart monarchy: ‘Quaking King in Hollow Oak, with a ho, | And Rosamond in Bower, | All Badges are of Power.’ The ‘Hollow Oak’ is the tree that sheltered Charles following the Battle of Worcester, subsequently transmuted into the Stuart symbol and pub-sign favourite, the Royal Oak. We then move, apparently associatively, to Rosamund’s bower, the labyrinth allegedly constructed by Henry II as a hidden location for trysts with his mistress Rosamund Clifford. Here vegetation obscures a monarch quaking for different reasons, we might say. The bower and the hollow oak are physical and symbolic structures screening the quotidian perfidy of popery and absolutism (cowardice; adultery). Conventionally enough, Topham is connecting sexual, moral, and political weakness; he is also suggesting, sceptically, that these are the qualities that lie behind – that give rise to – the romanticised tropes and myths of the aristocracy and the monarchy. ‘All badges,’ runs his final maxim, ‘are of power’. ‘Badges’ here seems to be used in the sense of ‘badge of office’. Social status is the effect of sublimatory fictions that transform violence (power) into symbol (badge). This is the process by which

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absolutism seeks to perpetuate itself, and to remove itself from history. The purpose of A Ra-ree Show is to head off that escape. Leviathan is unmoved by this attack: ‘Let ‘em hate,’ he says, as long as ‘they Fear,’ certain that locking parliament in his ‘Blindhouse’ will guarantee ‘Strong Government’.20 In reply, Topham obstinately returns Leviathan to a history of the Stuarts, one that remains marked by sexual misadventure: ‘Remember old Dry Bobs, with a ho, | For Fleecing England’s flocks, | Long fed with Bits and Knocks.’ A ‘dry bob’ is a sexual encounter that does not result in ejaculation, and by ‘old Dry Bobs’ is meant Charles I. Topham is implying that Charles II is a bastard.21 To be fed with bits and knocks is to be in the condition of slavery or domestication: ‘bits’ are the titbits fed to a dog beneath the table, and ‘knocks’ the chastising blows that often accompany them. The syntax makes it unclear whether the ‘bits and knocks’ are applied to the ‘flocks’ (the English people are in a condition of servitude under the Stuarts) or ‘old Dry Bobs’ (Charles I’s raising of taxes (‘bits’) are accompanied by the ‘knocks’ of civil war and regicide). In either case, Topham is seeking to make Leviathan face historical facts. Despite this second lesson, he remains an indifferent student: What’s past, is not to come, with a hey, with a hey, Now safe is David’s Bum, with a ho, Then hey for Oxford ho, Strong Government, Ra-ree Show, With a hey, Trany nony nony no.22

Unhistorical and overconfident, Leviathan is absolutist enough to think himself exempt from the historical process, conceived here as a cycle. As we will see, this is precisely the characterisation of David/Charles that Dryden builds in Absalom and Achitophel later in the year.23 Topham attempts to teach Leviathan that one of the effects of oppression is revolution. Leviathan responds with a series of catchphrases. A Ra-ree Show insinuates that 20

Blindhouses were the small buildings used in small towns and villages as temporary holding cells for petty criminals, detaining them until they could be formally charged. 21 See Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. (London; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 2001), I.124. 22 Ra-ree show, recto. 23 The identification of Charles II with David was common following the restoration (including in Dryden’s Astraea Redux (Poems I.42)). For further examples see Poems I.446–7.

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Leviathan-David-Charles and his supporters are suffering from a deluded neoclassical ‘great man’ view of history. This is a delusion of which they are shortly to be disabused, if Topham has his way. In closing, the ballad imagines the accomplishment of the revolution Topham has been fomenting (‘And now,’ he says, repositioning the reader in time, ‘you have freed the Nation’).24 The final stanza, in this jubilant future setting, returns to one more Stuart trope: ‘Ha-loo the Hunt’s begun, with a hey, with a hey, | Like Father, Like Son, with a ho.’25 A Ra-ree Show does not simply juxtapose the 1640s and 1680s and ask readers to spot the difference, or lack thereof, but encourages readers and auditors to put in the work necessary to bring that theoretical correspondence to practical fruition. A Ra-ree Show seeks to incite a rebellion that might replay the 1640s, literally and symbolically. It is working, Dryden might have said, ‘in th’immediate power to be.’ Rahn reads the close of the ballad as a prophecy that moves through tenses (from the pro- to the retrospective) in order to simulate inevitability: in the end, ‘[Topham] regards his coup d’état as already accomplished’ (p. 83). Something similar could be said of Absalom and Achitophel, though the inevitability generated there is of a different kind, authorised as it is not by an impersonally cyclical historical process, but the curiously passive heroism of the prophet-king David. Another important distinction is that unlike the author of A Ra-ree Show, who writes in anticipation of the Oxford parliament, Dryden speaks after the fact. Topham ‘regards’ the events contained in his prophecy as being already accomplished, for propagandic effect. The events prophesied by David in Dryden’s poem, however, really have been accomplished at the time of publication. He rearranges them to serve his polemical ends. We might say of Absalom and Achitophel what John Sitter says of Alexander Pope’s Dunciads: ‘the “facts” are collectively subjected to an abstraction.’26 That abstraction is not only, and perhaps not even primarily, the setting of modern events in Old Testament Israel, as one might expect. Dryden subjugates the ‘facts’ most significantly in the re-storying of recent political events as a series of errant plots or narratives that have their destination in and are resolved by the prophet-king David-Charles, a subjugation he might have carried out with any number of allegorical frameworks.27 Dryden makes historiographical decisions to 24

Rahn points out that the final six stanzas serve as a kind of prophecy, p. 83. See the representation of Charles I as a beleaguered stag in John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill’, for instance (Peter Davidson, ed., Poetry and Revolution: an Anthology of British Verse 1625–1660 (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1998), pp. 272–3). 26 The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1971), p. 68. 27 As Hammond points out, Absalom and Achitophel were characters that already 25

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increase the polemical effectiveness of the poem, decisions neither overly influenced by nor adversely affecting the integrity of the narrative as it runs in 2 Samuel. Noelle Gallagher’s reading of the poem as a work that probes the limits of historical analogy is perceptive, but it also treats the poem as if it considered itself to be coterminous with, not posterior to, the events it describes. Referring to Dryden’s halting of the poem before the demises of either Absalom or Achitophel as they are related in 2 Samuel, she writes: ‘The outcome of the poem’s symbolic narrative must, like the outcome of the contemporary events it commemorates, remain indeterminate until the events themselves transpire.’28 Dryden does suggest in the preface ‘To the Reader’ that this suspension has had an effect on the composition of the poem: The conclusion of the story I purposely forbore to prosecute, because I could not obtain from myself to show Absalom unfortunate. The frame of it was cut out but for a picture to the waist, and if the draft be so far true, ‘tis as much as I designed. Were I the inventor, who am only the historian, I would certainly conclude the piece with the reconcilment of Absalom to David. And who knows but this may come to pass? Things were not brought to an extremity where I left the story (p. 452).

Dryden cannot continue the poem, he claims, because he cannot bring himself to kill Absalom and thereby suggest that the same end might await Monmouth, whose life has not been ‘brought to an extremity’. The story of Monmouth and his relationship with Charles remained unresolved, and that indeterminacy, as well as the fact that Shaftesbury was yet to face trial for treason, is offered as a justification for ending the poem in medias res rather than in extremis (literally, at the point of death (OED, in, prep.2 I.8)).29 But Dryden is pointing us towards persons to obscure the liberties he has taken with events elsewhere in the poem. If anything, this poem strongly argues that ‘things’ had indeed been ‘brought to an extremity’ before being resolved decisively by the king. Indeed, the poem depicts the carried a certain political charge. That is, the ‘decision’ to use 2 Samuel was not entirely Dryden’s (Poems, I.446). 28 Historical Literatures, p. 152. 29 Harth notes that given the make-up of the Middlesex jury Shaftesbury’s acquittal was ‘a foregone conclusion’ by 24 October, when the Old Bailey ruled that Shaftesbury had to be indicted before 28 November (Pen for a Party, p. 99), but that does not mean Dryden could afford to risk it.

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generous and indulgent David as a monarch only acting in extremis, at the last and also the best possible moment. Dryden can afford to leave the fates of Absalom and Achitophel in suspension because in the theory of history he is working with their fates are irrelevant: the poem is a demonstration of their historical insignificance. The fact that in the four impressions of the first edition, ‘To the Reader’ (sig. A1) and the opening of Shaftesbury’s portrait (sig. C3) are conjugate (that is, printed on the same sheet of paper, despite being six pages apart) may be a sign that the printing of this poem was disrupted by Shaftesbury’s uncertain fate. Dryden would have taken closure if it was available. We can say this with some confidence because Absalom and Achitophel is a poem that fabricates closure by manipulating chronology, and more particularly because Dryden added lines alluding to Shaftesbury’s acquittal when the quarto edition was printed later in the year.30 The ‘end’ of Dryden’s narrative – the proroguing of the Oxford parliament – precedes some of the events that he wants to put in the middle of his poem. Dryden does not require a perfect correspondence between 2 Samuel and the opposition campaign because he can create a perfect correspondence of his own by rearranging recent history, and shifting some of that history into the prophetic mode. Gallagher argues that ‘the poem’s evidence for a circular model of English history lacks prophetic power […] because it was derived from recent, rather than distant (and thus specific, rather than archetypal) events’ (p. 150). However, the conversion of recent political history into prophecy is precisely the source of David’s prophetic power, and the poem’s, a potency constituted by the ability to subject facts to an abstraction. Borrowing the unassailable teleology of the ‘Pisgah sight’ afforded to Adam in the final two books of Paradise Lost, David’s final 30

For these lines, see below. Hammond’s headnote summarises the bibliographical anomalies, the additions in the quarto and some scholarly accounts thereof (Poems I.444–5; see also entries under no. 12 in Hugh MacDonald, John Dryden: A Bibliography of Early Editions and of Drydeniana (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1939)). Previous explanations of the conjugation posit the existence of a prior version of the portrait of Shaftesbury in manuscript which was censored by the king or revised for some other reason, say that C1 was cancelled, or that the lines were omitted by accident while printing was in progress. I think it is possible – but have not seen enough copies to be at all certain – that C1 and A1 were deliberately conjugated in anticipation of news from Shaftesbury’s trial (such a conjugation would make stop-press changes to ‘To the Reader’ or the opening of Shaftesbury’s portrait minimally disruptive). Even if they were not, the uncertainty of Shaftesbury’s fate at the time of publication is still a possible cause of revision or cancellation. Publishing the lines alluding to Shaftesbury’s acquittal prior to his hearing would not fit the historiographical design of Dryden’s poem, which is not predictive, but historical.

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speech allows Dryden to credit the prophet king with the resolution of contingency into a progressive linear narrative, closing off counterhistorical speculation. The bulk of Absalom and Achitophel is taken up with Dryden’s satirical ‘characters’, for which it is still celebrated. Between these portraits and David’s prophecy there is interposed a clipped summary of the crimes of the opposition (ll. 914–932), delivered by politicians loyal to the king, in order to show him ‘the danger of the wound’ and point out the extremity of the situation (‘no concessions from the throne would please’). David revolves ‘th’event of things’ in his ‘careful breast’, ‘at last his patience tire[s]’, and the king, in extremis, delivers his corrective prophecy, ‘by heaven inspired’. Dryden collates recent history so that David can address it in one fell swoop. Although the poem does not specify the historical moment at which David speaks, contemporaries may have recognised the echoes of Charles’s declaration justifying the prorogation of the Oxford parliament, published 8 April 1681.31 The prophecy represents and justifies the moment that Charles made that decision. Dryden presents the prorogation as both the result of long endurance and careful thought (to avoid making Charles look like an impulsive tyrant) and the inspired work of a moment, taken in extremis (to avoid the impression that the Oxford parliament really was a pageant, called only to be prorogued). As we have seen, the controversy surrounding ‘ignoramus justice’ played out in the late summer and autumn of 1681, months after the prorogation. However, the portrait of Shimei, or Slingsby Bethel, which precedes David’s prophecy, contains the following lines: During his office treason was no crime, The Sons of Belial had a glorious time: For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf, Yet loved his wicked neighbour as himself.32

Clearly the first line refers to the verdict passed on College’s Middlesex indictment. The observation that Shimei ‘loved his wicked neighbour as himself ’ alludes to contemporary readings of ignoramus justice as a travesty of Christian charity.33 Shaftesbury’s indictment hearing on 24 Novem 31

See Poems, I.527–8, and Godfrey Davies, ‘The Conclusion of John Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel”’ HLQ 10 (1946), pp. 69–82. 32 Poems, I.501. 33 See A Modest Vindication of the Proceedings of the late Grand-Jury (London, for N. Thompson, 1681): ‘How then could these Gentlemen pretend to common

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ber came too late for Dryden to refer to it in the first edition, which was published by the 19th. However, lines added to the portrait of Shaftesbury in the quarto ‘Second Edition; Augmented and Revised’ rectify that omission: So easy still it proves in factious times With public zeal to cancel private crimes How safe is Treason, and how sacred ill, Where none can sin against the peoples will: Where Crowds can wink, and no offence be known, Since in another’s guilt they find their own.34

Here is further evidence that Dryden will take closure where he can get it. ‘[N]o offence be known’ serves as a loose paraphrase of ‘ignoramus’, and Dryden speaks of partial justice as a kind of winking in The Medall a few months later. Once more we encounter the explanation of ignoramus justice as self-exculpation, the wilful refusal to recognise one’s own guilt in another’s. This resembles the lines on Shimei-Bethel, of course, but it is an explanation that could only properly have a place in a portrait of Shaftesbury after the hearing of 24 November. Dryden’s placement of this material before David’s prophecy has the effect of including it in the ‘loads of injuries’ that provoke the king at the poem’s close. Events that followed the prorogation – events that had not even come to pass at the poem’s first appearance in print, and whose non-occurrence at that point may have disrupted the printing process – are presented by Dryden as part of its provocation. The Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal is doctoring the record in an unusually literal sense, responding to unfolding events by unobtrusively folding them into his poem’s historiographical argument. As well as including events postdating the prorogation in his ‘history’, Dryden has David soothsay about things that have already come to pass. Again, ignoramus justice and College’s Oxford trial are pushed backward in time: By their own arts ‘tis righteously decreed Those dire artificers of death shall bleed. Against themselves their witnesses will swear, Christianity, or at least to the Purity of the Reformed Gospel, if through an unmanly fear of breaking some Humane Laws, they should cowardly do to College what they would not have done to themselves, contrary to the express words of Christ.’ (p. 1). 34 Poems, I.472.

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Till viper-like their mother plot they tear, And suck for nutriment that bloody gore Which was their principle of life before.

Whigs undo themselves because they are aberrations from the providential march of history being laid out by David. Dryden hammers home this general point by pointing his readers towards College’s trial, in which witnesses who had testified during the Popish Plot trials now swore against the Protestant Joiner, that ‘dire artificer’. Charles’s foes were turned against Charles’s foes. Dryden writes from a position of Tory victory, but shifts that post-facto assurance backwards in time, transforming it into perfect foresight.35 This teleological method also accounts for what otherwise looks like a risk: the characterisation of David-Charles as a monarch tolerant almost to the point of negligence. Even his plan of action, as staked out in this ‘decisive’ prophecy, looks rather like inaction: What then is left, but with a jealous eye To guard the small remains of royalty? The law shall still direct my peaceful sway, And the same law teach rebels to obey (p. 530).

‘[L]et ‘em take an unresisted course’, says David, confident that the eddies of providence will resolve matters in his favour, because Dryden knows that they already have. David’s almost boundless indulgence is insisted on throughout the poem, and in the prophecy, so that the Whigs’ machinations can seem unprovoked.36 Moving ignoramus justice backwards in time makes David’s intervention look like one made in extremis. The Whigs, however momentarily, force David to act out of character. They are a diversionary force, if they are a force at all. Absalom and Achitophel characterises the opposition to Charles as an attempt to knock history off course, and so 35

For a reading of an analogous deployment of partisan history as prophecy by Aphra Behn, see Albert J. Rivero, ‘“Hieroglifick’d” History in Aphra Behn’s LoveLetters between a Nobleman and his Sister’, Studies in the Novel 30:2 (1998), pp. 126–38. See also Claudine van Hensbergen’s discussion of Rivero’s argument in ‘Secret History and Amatory Fiction’, in Bullard and Carnell, eds., The Secret History in Literature, pp. 74–86, pp. 81–3. 36 David is blind to Absalom’s faults: ‘What faults he had (for who from faults is free?) | His father could not, or would not see’ (Poems, I.457). Later in the poem, ‘David’s mildness managed it so well | The bad found no occasion to rebel’ (I.461). This mildness is transmuted still later in the poem to the ‘monarch’s fatal mercy’ (I.465).

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David foresees not a glorious rout of the Whigs, but the weathering of a storm, a brushing off of the shoulders. But David’s certainty, his prophetic power, is fabricated: a gift from a rather more proximate future, delivered by Dryden into his hands. Unlike the genuinely anticipatory if somewhat hopeful prophecy that closes A Ra-ree Show, urging readers and auditors to re-enact the civil wars, David’s prophecy seems unassailable because it is not a call to arms but a calming of the seas, and because it is not a predictive prophecy but a partisan history shifted backwards in time. The close of Absalom and Achitophel looks prophetic, but functions as a panegyrical secret history: Charles knew what he was doing, all along, we are led to believe, pre-empting the Whigs at every turn. A Ra-ree Show ended with the insistence that history would repeat itself (‘the hunt’s begun’). Dryden does the same thing in the final lines of Absalom and Achitophel by alluding to his earlier poem on Charles’s restoration, Astraea Redux: 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.37

‘And now times whiter Series is begun,’ wrote Dryden in 1660, ‘Which in soft Centuries shall smoothly run.’38 ‘Now safe,’ in other words, ‘is David’s bum,’ though Dryden insists it was never endangered by the likes of A Raree Show. It is difficult to say if this is a direct response to that ballad’s attack on Stuart iconography. However, this act of self-quotation does function like an icon, elevating its referent above political conflict, synchronising the diachronous, making disparate historical moments incarnate in a thematically unified present.39 This kind of sublimation is precisely what A Ra-ree Show militates against. David’s second restoration is not so much a 37

Poems, I.532. Poems, I.292. 39 Steven Zwicker describes this effect in different terms, writing that the conclusion ‘[transforms] the Restoration present tense and the biblical past tense into a symbolic eternal tense’ (Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence, RI: Brown Univ., 1972), pp. 100–1). Kyle Pivetti argues that Dryden’s rhymes ‘construct a historical narrative that resolves political ambiguity; the series of aural echoes not only acknowledges but incorporates the apparent political contradictions in articulating a history of the nation state’ (‘Coupling Past and Future: Dryden’s Rhymes as History’, Modern Philology 109 (2011), pp. 85–107, p. 85). 38

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regression or harking back as a confirmation or underscoring: ‘Once more’, with feeling. Unlike Leviathan, Dryden is willing to acknowledge that history might sometimes return. The difference is that David is the great man able to ensure that the right bits of history re-emerge (or are somehow retained, remain immanent). Moreover, unlike Leviathan, David is both the destination and source of history. In David’s prophecy, history is not only cyclical but recuperative and progressive, a rolling stone that gathers just the right amount and correct variety of moss. In a Ra-ree Show, Topham insists on the resistless and impersonal cyclicality of history. Absalom and Achitophel answers that impersonal view of historical change with the limited but progressive heroism of David, who stands outside of a revolving history and marshals it, not as a travelling mountebank, but a child playing hoop-and-stick.

Immanence and Imminence in the Popish Plot Narratives The ‘narratives’ of the Popish Plot published by Oates, Bedloe, and others derived much of their credibility and persuasive force from their marshalling of circumstantial, vivid detail that helped to make the plot tangible and immediate, a present concern.40 But, as Peter Hinds has most recently shown, those immediate particulars rested on a bedrock of anti-Catholic prejudice, a broad, flat, sedimented accretion of historical narratives which helped efforts to subject the facts of a given allegation to a plausible abstraction.41 Many of the Popish Plot trials began with efforts to ‘prove’ the historicity of the conspiracy ‘in general’ – that is, to provide a narrative fabric into which the alleged facts could plausibly be woven, a narrative that does not just amplify the enormity of a defendant’s crime, but requires the crime, and others like it, to have been committed in order to make sense as a narrative. Many of the crimes of those accused of complicity in the Popish Plot are things that had to happen in order to guarantee a particular future, were not bound to happen, and didn’t, but were said to have happened regardless. Proving in general often reads as little more than a judicial reiteration of anti-Catholic prejudice: in his opening remarks at Coleman’s trial, the Attorney General insisted that the Popish Plot ‘hath been contriving 40

Sir Cyril Wyche MP was one of many people impressed by Oates’s ability to recall detail (see Hinds, p. 68). 41 See Hinds, pp. 140–97. For the political importance of anti-Catholicism in this period, see John Miller, Popery and Politics in England 1660–1688 (Cambridge, Cambridge Univ., 1973).

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ever since the reformation’. 42 In this he is echoing Oates, who in the preamble to his narrative declares that the papists’ ‘many past Treasons and Encroachments upon several Princes, for these last Thousand years in the World, will prove their inclinations for future’ (sig. ar). In a superficial way, such narratives increase historical distance simply by increasing the temporal scale. On the other hand, the flatness or indifference of the narrative makes distancing difficult, just as it is hard to orient oneself in a featureless landscape. In his History of the Damnable Popish Plot, Henry Care lists another series of precedents for Oates’s plot: the assassination plots against Elizabeth I, the gunpowder plot, the great fire of London. He explains the utility of this historical groundwork with a theatrical metaphor: In displaying [prior Catholic plots] we have been the larger, as well that the World may take notice that their late damnable Plot was nothing strange or incredible; (for what wonder is it to hear an Horse neigh, to find a Fox crafty, or a Tyger cruel, or see those concerned in Trayterous and bloody practices, whose Doctrines recommend the same as Duty or Merit, and who have for so many Ages been inured thereunto?) […] ‘tis still the same Tragedy, though the Scenes have often been shifted, and the Actors varied according to the different posture of Affairs...43

The treachery of Catholics is both an innate, naturalised quality – they take to treason like a horse to neighing – and something that they have learned, or ‘been inured’ to ‘for so many Ages’. Care seems to care neither how history operates nor upon whom. On one hand, the repeated instances of Catholic malevolence prove their inherent evil. Catholics are a constant, circumstances change around them, and they work on history. On the other, the historical experience of repeated acts of treachery works upon Catholics, inuring them to treachery. That indifference may derive from the general position being laid out here: when it comes to Catholics, in Beatty and Carrera’s terms, history doesn’t matter. The Popish Plot, says Care, is nothing strange or incredible. The difference between Catholic plots, and by extension individual plotters, is not substantive but accidental: ‘’tis still the same Tragedy’. If they have an identity at all it is the protean if not diabolical identity of the actor.44 Care’s metaphor reduces Catholics to an impersonal historical force – the force normally referred to as ‘popery’. 42

Hinds, p. 208. Henry Care, The History of the Damnable Popish Plot (London, 1680), p. 80. 44 In a play opportunistically attributed to the informer William Bedloe, The 43

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Slippery as it is, this appeal to ‘history’ is in part a reaction to the contingency thrown up by Oates’s narrative of a plot interrupted, one which would not ever run its course. This contingency encourages the search for ‘similar’ stories, narratives that might supply an end to this beginning and middle. Absalom and Achitophel reacted to the suspension of events by pretending to leave things up in the air while fabricating a false finality by way of David’s prophecy. However, this is not the only way to compensate for the narratologically unsatisfactory quality of a failed or foiled conspiracy. The most pressing question hovering over these narratives’ evidence is: what if this was never going to happen? Pre-empting this question, informers marshal counterhistorical possibilities to present a scenario in which the history they and the rest of the nation are living out is the only one in which the Papists have not succeeded in toppling the government. Putting the counterhistorical into the service of the historical, they bombard readers with alternative ways in which the Catholics might have menaced the nation had their primary objectives been thwarted. These writers insist that the popish threat is both immanent and imminent, ‘working in th’immediate power to be’. Bedloe warns that ‘without speedy prevention and great care, [the papists] will alwayes (as unwearied in villainy) attempt, and so too often (as we have just cause to fear) perform what they have laid and contrived by so many different ways and means; all still held in readiness’ (p. 3). This emphasis on the ever-readiness of a de-individuated Catholic threat is another way of saying that history doesn’t matter. Item XXVI of Titus Oates’s testimony concerns not one but several assassinations of the king that did not happen in March 1678. ‘There was an attempt,’ he says, beginning in the singular but ending in the plural, ‘to make an assassination upon the [king] […] several days as he was in the Park, and once as he was going to the Parliament-house.’ Unfortunately for ‘honest William and Pickering,’ the alleged perpetrators, ‘the opportunity did not offer itself ’. In an attempt to bring some tangibility to this tale of disappointment, Oates makes sure to describe some of its effects: William is ‘chidden’, but Pickering ‘had a Penance of twenty strokes with a Discipline [i.e. a scourge] on his shoulders’ (pp. 16–17). This report of violence makes the story no more verifiable, but it does indicate the ways in which things that didn’t happen furnish Oates with an occasion to supply the kind of circumstantial detail – how many strokes, and what with – that impressed Excommunicated Prince (London: for Tho. Parkhurst et al, 1679), the Jesuit plotter Zolazer, aping Barabbas’s bragging soliloquy in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, boasts, ‘I’ve gone | Through snaky Ways; and more strange Shapes put on, | Than Proteus could, with all his Witchcraft guess’ (p. 10).

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contemporaries. Miles Prance opens his account of the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey by detailing earlier attempts to take the justice’s life. ‘Girald’ and ‘Kelly’, Irish priests, happen upon a man that looked like Godfrey, but was not: his counterfactual doppelganger. They ‘Complemented [sic.] him as Sr. Edmondbury’, and the man said they were mistaken. This was not taken kindly: ‘they were so confident, as to think he did it out of Caution, to avoid them. And peremptorily told him he was Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, and made some attempts to push him into the House.’ By and bye they realise their mistake, and desist. On other occasions they follow the genuine Godfrey with murderous intent, but ‘could meet with no opportunity to dispatch him’.45 Here are a group of Catholics so intent on killing the Justice of the Peace that they almost murder someone who looks like him. An immanent threat, they wait only for ‘opportunity’. According to Prance, they get it, and he recounts the murder at some length. Yet he is unable to resist counterfactuals even after Godfrey is despatched. If, says Girald, they had not killed Godfrey where they had, ‘I resolved I would have followed him, down Harts-horn Lane that leads to his own House, and there would have run him through with my own hand.’ (p. 14). Prance’s conspirators confess to crimes committed in alternate histories, and those counterfactual offences are offered as circumstantial evidence. These asides have their cake and eat it. They make the murder of Godfrey feel contingent – with so many failures, it seems almost a miracle that they pulled the murder off – and yet the plenitude of ways and means offered by which they might have despatched the justice, but didn’t, makes it seem almost inevitable. This is a sort of instrumental indifference: if Godfrey had not been murdered, then he would have been murdered. Oates rifles the counterhistorical for corroborating evidence again when he describes the stopping of a coach in which he, John Fenwick, and four Jesuits were travelling to London. The ‘Searchers’ seize a box of Fenwick’s, containing assorted Catholic paraphernalia. But Oates points out that a trick had been missed: ‘… if they had searched the Pockets of the said Fenwick, they had found such Letters upon him, as the said Fenwick confessed to the Deponent, might have cost him his life; they being saith he, the Concern in hand; but the said letters the Deponent did not see’ (pp. 20–21). This counterfactual situation, in which the letters are discovered, effectively leads us back to the same historical outcome. The parabola of counterfactual digression meets the straight line of history without having made any appreciable difference. These narratives use counterfactuals

45

A True Narrative and Discovery of Several very Remarkable Passages Relating to the Horrid Popish Plot (London: for Dorman Newman, 1679), p. 9.

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to stress both contingency and inevitability. The combination of the two enables informers to emphasise the necessity and timeliness of their information. It is also a way of communicating the alleged uniqueness and precarity of the historical situation that their informing has brought about: were it not for our intervention, they suggest, the nation would have been doomed; without continued vigilance, it still might be. There is one counterhistorical event that these informers are particularly fond of: the setting of fires.46 Stores of gunpowder and other combustibles are a convenient physicalisation of the suspended volatility of ‘popery’. If energy is chemically suspended in gunpowder, then in papists, according to these writers, it is suspended historically, ‘working in th’immediate power to be’. Bedloe dedicates his narrative, with an apocalyptic flourish, ‘To The Surviving Citizens of London Ruined by Fire’. In part he means that Londoners have survived previous fires, including that of 1666, but he also insinuates that his readers have been spared from a conflagration that didn’t happen.47 Following the assassination of the king, he writes, the plotters ‘would immediately have proceeded to a Second Devastation’ (sig. A2). Bedloe asks his readers to imagine themselves afloat in the ‘Sea of Blood and Chaos of Confusion, You All, long ‘ere this should have been involved in’. Immersion in this conditional-perfect scenario is necessary, it emerges, because the danger has only partially and temporarily been averted: The other Thing I would advise You of, is not to Conceit, because the PLOT is discovered in some measure, and some few of Them brought to Justice, That therefore now You are secure, and that They will desist from such Attempts: For I know their Nature and Principles so well, that I dare assure You on the contrary, they will be more Active and Virulent now than ever: And for some proof of this be pleased to consider, How many FIRES have actually hapn’d, or been design’d, or begun, though by Providence, prevented, since the Discovery of the plot.48

Things have certainly not been brought to an extremity, Bedloe insists. The reader need not consider for long, for Bedloe supplies a list of fourteen 46

Hinds discusses fears of the firing of London, the blaming of the fire of 1666 on papists, and L’Estrange’s demolition of Bedloe’s Narrative and its interest in fires in chapter 10 of ‘The Horrid Popish Plot’, pp. 361–96. 47 Oates also offers a narrative of the fire of 1666, and refers to earlier failed attempts to burn London (and, in the confusion, ‘cut off ’ the king). See A True Narrative, pp. 22–5. 48 sig. [A3v]

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recent fires: ‘All these,’ he says, ‘and probably many others, that I never heard of ’ (sig. A4). Rather than making a claim to comprehensive knowledge, Bedloe suggests that Catholic iniquity is beyond the comprehension of any one informer. Oates at least claims to have been told of Fenwick’s letters; of these ‘probable’ fires, however, Bedloe has heard nothing. That seems to have no bearing on their probable historicity; indeed, they are ushered in here to shore up his ensuing testimony. Bedloe is operating on the assumption that the only possible cause of fire in London is by Papist. The continuance of fires after the discovery of the plot means that there are still some Catholics lurking in cellars with firebrands. It does not mean that the fires in question might not, after all, have been started by Catholics. The preceding pages contain a strange taxonomy, as Bedloe counts the ways in which Catholics set things aflame (there are twelve, including: ‘By hard Fireballs thrown through Glass-windows’; ‘By firing their own lodgings’; ‘By Strangers faining Errands’ (sig. a)). There is nothing particularly Catholic about any of these techniques, of course, but ‘popery’ is the master key that makes sense of the senseless destruction brought about by fire, charging its ideological indifference with purpose. Likewise, when Benjamin Harris cites a cache of fireworks as evidence of the papists’ ‘treachery and design’ (my emphasis) he overwrites the fundamental indifference – the inertia – of unexploded munitions, resolving that incorrigibility by insisting that they surely would have been exploded for a certain purpose, that they were designed to explode in a particular place at a particular time.49 Fireworks already stand in a kind of metaphorical relationship to ‘real’ explosions (i.e. those of war or terrorism). They may be symbols of power or capacity, but they preserve only the sights and sounds of military explosions, and reduce the possibility of harm by carrying their potential energy away from, not towards, persons and property. In the Popish Plot narratives, the papists allegedly turn these symbolic devices into properly incendiary ones, in keeping with their perceived tendency to literalise and materialise, as witnessed in the eucharist, and in the idolatrous ‘worship’ of images, perversions or misunderstandings of the operation of metaphor. With implausible accuracy, Bedloe reports a conversation between an unnamed citizen and ‘One Mr. Belland a Frenchman’, a fabricator of fireworks (‘Innocent Things, that will do no harm,’ he later protests (p. 11)). They are speaking ‘the Sunday before the fire began’ in 1666:

49

Hinds, p. 366. For the implication of the Frenchman Mr. Choqueaux in the popish plot on the basis of a cache of fireworks, see Hinds pp. 152, 269, 365–6. On the connection of indifference and inertia, see below p. 236.

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Says the Citizen, What kind of Fire-works do you make, onely such as will crack and run? Belland answered, I make all sorts; some that will burn and make no crack at all, but will flye up in a pure body of flame, higher then the top of Pauls, and waver in the Ayre. Says the Citizen, Mr. Belland, when you make your Shew, shall I see it? Yes, said Belland, I promise you, and gave him his hand upon it. Which Citizen in the time of the Fire, being upon the Thames in a Boat, saw, to his great amazement, sundry bodies of fire, burning above the Fire of the Houses as high again as Pauls wavering in the Ayre, directly according to Belland’s description (p. 10).

Credulity is stretched in the first place by the nature of the citizen’s question, which seems oddly particular and perfectly calculated to produce Belland’s answer regarding the precise effect of his fireworks. The implication, obviously enough, is that Mr. Belland was involved in the firing of London, and that the ‘Shew’ he refers to serves as a kind of cant term or code word for that terrorist act. Yet, according to this anecdote, the firing of London really was, in part, a firework display, or ‘Shew’, producing ‘great amazement’ in spectators. ‘Shew’, in retrospect, is not only a code word. This Catholic is unable to speak in metaphor, it seems, and his fireworks are not representations of dangerous explosions, but the real thing. The exploding of Belland’s fireworks, it is implied, is not accidental but central to the conflagration’s progress, and perhaps even one of its causes. The near perfect repetition of Belland’s description at the end of the passage seeks to establish that premeditation, even though all it really can establish is that some fireworks that Belland had made and was storing in London were ignited during the fire. As is so often the case, the irresolvable causal chain here is appealing for Bedloe. It is appealing because it is incorrigible: Bedloe is able to supply a motivation for the explosion of the fireworks, a motivation cobbled together from the anti-Catholic tradition his narrative draws on and perpetuates. It is difficult to contravene that explanation, not least because the evidence has all exploded – the evidence consists of explosions. He is also able to imply that the incorrigibility is appealing not for him but for Belland, that it explains his use of fireworks. Bedloe includes the Frenchman’s insistence that his fireworks were ‘Innocent Things’ to show that they were deliberately chosen as an incendiary device that might look like an accident, just as in 1688–89 the opposition claimed that Mary of Modena’s modesty was a ruse (‘[t]he King’s introducing men’, declared the Answer to the Depositions, ‘was only to make a fair pretence of covering

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her, and not letting the Women see what is usual in true births’).50 The incorrigibility of Girard’s alternative plan to murder Godfrey or Fenwick’s undiscovered letters has the same appeal and utility. These writers draw attention away from the opportunity and protection incorrigibility offers them, representing it instead as something seized upon by their targets. The same thing is at work in those writings of 1688–89 and later that transform the inscrutability of early-modern childbirth and paternity into evidence of a Catholic plot to inflict a supposititious Prince of Wales on the nation. In the Popish Plot narratives, informers offer self-consciously counterhistorical vignettes in which Catholics are also trying to murder the king and fire the city of London, attempts thwarted only because ‘the opportunity did not offer itself ’. In a context where motive is already supplied by pre-existing prejudicial narratives – where ‘popery’ is motive – opportunity is all that is required. Once incorrigibility is established as a sign of opportunity for wrongdoing, there is very little limitation on what might plausibly be alleged. It is narratives such as these, and controversies such as that surrounding ‘ignoramus justice’, which helped the English public develop the pragmatically elastic credulity that enabled them to reconcile the paradoxes inherent in the warming-pan scandal. ~ This book asks not just how late Stuart and Hanoverian people dealt with political and historical uncertainty, but rather why – to what ends – did so many writers and readers court and even fabricate such uncertainty. Incorrigibility should present writers with an impasse, and yet they are drawn to it as Pope’s dunces gravitate towards their goddess, Dulness. In the episodes examined in the last two chapters, incorrigibility has been an opportunity and a catalyst. While those episodes have fabrication at their heart, what has often been fabricated is a dearth of verifiable evidence: the queen refused to be examined by the right people at the right time; the queen was covered during labour; the lid was closed on the warming-pan; here is a description of some incriminating evidence that was never found, detailing another Catholic plot that never took place; these exploded fireworks are not an effect but a cause of the firing of London. All of this is industriously done. As well as being a sign of a certain kind of historiographical work, the courting of incorrigibility creates the space in which that work takes place, clearings in which causal explanation can proceed unimpeded by the 50

Answer to the Depositions, p. 9.

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empirical. In the next section, which deals with failures of various kinds, those clearings are happened upon in the wild, as it were – not produced by the hatchet work of informers and pamphleteers but brought into being by things going awry (or aright, depending on where one stands). This different provenance does nothing to lessen their appeal and their utility.

PART II

Failures

Chapter 3

Travesties: The Assassination and Insurrection Plots of 1683

T

his chapter deals with two overlapping conspiracies that were discovered in 1683, which are sometimes referred to with the umbrella term ‘Rye House Plot’.1 The first was a plan to assassinate Charles II and James, Duke of York as they returned from the horse races at Newmarket, a regular fixture in their calendar.2 The mooted location was the Rye House in Hertfordshire, which had been leased to Richard Rumbold, one of the conspirators. Plans to undertake this assassination in October 1682 did not get off the ground in time. Another attempt was planned for the Saturday before Easter 1683 (31 March), but a fire at Newmarket meant that the royals left the races early, arriving in London on the 27th, and the conspirators were unable to adjust to this accelerated schedule. The second conspiracy 1

Richard Ashcraft is keen to see the two plots as parts of a coordinated whole, stressing the overlap in personnel (Revolutionary Politics & Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1986), p. 362; p. 340). The prosecution combine the two plots in their opening statements at the first trial: Thomas Walcott was probably tried first because he was ‘concerned in both parts’ (Howell, State Trials IX.526). The Attorney General describes the conspiracy as double-edged, intended ‘to kill the best of kings, and to destroy the best frame of government’ (IX.524). Chief Justice Jeffreys establishes a dependant relationship – the assassination ‘was the intent of the design or the Plot in general’ (IX.525). However, Philip Milton, in an article critiquing Ashcraft’s account of Locke’s involvement, sees the plots as ‘rival[s]’, with ‘no attempt to coordinate them’. (‘John Locke and the Rye House Plot’, The Historical Journal 43 (2000), pp. 647–68, p. 654). 2 There were other mooted locations, though the model of ambushing the royal party while they were in transit is a consistent feature. At Walcott’s trial, Rumsey described alternatives discussed by the conspirators after the disappointment of March 1683: ‘It was to be done a coming from Windsor to London, or from Windsor to Hampton-Court, or the Play-House’ (Howell, State Trials IX.530). See also His  Majesties  declaration to all his  loving  subjects,  concerning  the treasonable conspiracy against his sacred person and government, lately discovered (London: for Phil. Lloyd, 1683), p. 13.

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was to raise an insurrection, in various locations – London, Scotland, the West and the North of England – a rising planned by a group of aristocrats that the prosecution called the ‘Council of Six’.3 Although the government had information concerning the conspiracies as early as 31 March 1683, the plot was not ‘discovered’ until June, when one of the conspirators, Josiah Keeling, lost his nerve and visited Secretary Jenkins at Whitehall on the 12th. By the 19th the conspiracy was publicly known.4 On 20 June, warrants were issued for Robert West and John Rumsey, and their testimony led to warrants being issued for Algernon Sidney (25 June), William, Lord Russell (26 June), John Wildman (28 June), Aaron Smith (5 July), John Hampden (9 July), and Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex (10 July).5 A series of well publicised trials took place, beginning in July, and leading to a string of executions. Shaftesbury was involved in the plotting, but died before the discovery.6 Essex committed suicide (or, according to some Whigs, was murdered) in the Tower, and some, such as Rumbold, Ferguson, and Ford, Lord Grey of Warke, escaped to the continent.7 The Duke of Monmouth surrendered on 24 November before going into exile: his absence meant that there was insufficient evidence to convict Hampden, who escaped with a fine of 3

This council comprised the Duke of Monmouth, William, Lord Russell, the Earl of Essex, William Howard, 3rd Baron of Escrick, Algernon Sidney, and John Hampden. The extent and purpose of this insurrection is fluid: Jonathan Scott argues that Sidney aimed to force the king to recall parliament through military aggression, and was involved in negotiations with the Earl of Argyll to coordinate a Scottish rising (Algernon Sidney, pp. 205–6); Ashcraft entertains the possibility of more widespread unrest (Revolutionary Politics, p. 40; p. 362). However, for Philip Milton ‘there is no evidence that the conspirators ever recruited men or amassed arms in the quantities required, and it is most unlikely that they could have done so without alerting the authorities (‘Shaftesbury and the Rye House Plot’, in John Spurr, ed., Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 233–68, p. 253. 4 Narcissus Luttrell records it in his diary. See Melinda Zook, Radical whigs and conspiratorial politics in late Stuart England (State College, Penn.: Pennsylvania State Univ., 1999), p. 109. 5 Scott, Algernon Sidney, p. 292–3; Ashcraft, p. 370. 6 See Milton, ‘Shaftesbury and the Rye House Plot’, for a sceptical account of the extent of Shaftesbury’s role, and Scott, Algernon Sidney, for a scathing one. 7 For an accessible account, see Alan Marshall, ‘Rye House Plotters (act. 1683)’, in ODNB. Scott and Ashcraft provide full if sometimes contradictory narratives, partly because of their focus on particular individuals (Sidney and Locke). For two studies concerned with the groups of radicals involved in these conspiracies see Zook, Radical whigs and conspiratorial politics, and Richard Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–1689 (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1992), esp. chs. 3–5.

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£40,000. William Howard, 3rd Baron of Escrick, turned king’s evidence in return for a pardon and was instrumental in the prosecutions of Russell and Sidney. The government was relentless in its prosecution of the plotters, for this was an opportunity to crush the leadership of the opposition, and to further delegitimise opposition in general. The fact that these frustrated plots put the government into such a strong position led to some speculation that they were not ‘real’ conspiracies, but government fabrications calculated to crush the Whigs. Whether or not this conspiracy was ‘real’ – a thing that did not happen, but was about to – was an important question for contemporaries, not least those on trial for their lives, and the majority of this chapter is concerned with the negotiation of that indeterminacy. However, partly because this is a historical failure – the conspiracies were not even attempted – and partly because of the long posthumous influence of conspirators like Sidney and Russell, that indeterminacy has kept the historiography of these plots off balance to the present day.8 No scholar accepts that James Francis Edward Stuart was illegitimate, but there remain modern historians who are sceptical about the ‘reality’ of the assassination and insurrection plots of 1682–83. In A Plague of Informers, Rachel Weil reflects the lack of consensus either way, referring to the Rye House Plot as ‘alleged’ (p. 4). Her note points to Richard Ashcraft and Melinda Zook as believers, and K. H. D. Haley as a sceptic. In Revolutionary Politics, Ashcraft preludes his own contention that the conspiracies were real and related with a litany of sceptics of various stripes, from outright denial (‘little evidence exists that it ever approached the realms of reality’ (p. 338 n. 2)), to those that downgrade treasonous conspiracy to ‘futile discussions’ (p. 338 n. 3), to those who are happy to accept the involvement of lower class conspirators but seek to exonerate noble Whig ‘martyrs’ such as Sidney and Russell either by arguing that they were not involved, or that whatever conspiracy there was did not amount to treason (p. 339 and n. 4, n. 5 and n. 6).9 Lois Schwoerer affirms that ‘the government did not concoct the plot’ and that ‘there is no doubt that 8

On Russell, see Lois Schwoerer, ‘William, Lord Russell: The Making of a Martyr, 1683–1983’, Journal of British History 24 (1985), pp. 41–71; on Sidney, Scott, Algernon Sidney. 9 In Secrets of the Kingdom, similarly, Greaves acknowledges the division of historical opinion on the subject, before edging towards confirming the conspiracy’s authenticity (pp. viii–xi). Schwoerer argues that Russell ‘received a fair trial, in terms of procedures and the law of treason prevailing in 1683’ (‘William, Lord Russell’, p. 50). Ashcraft writes ‘That those engaged in both aspects of the conspiracy were, according to the law as it stood in the seventeenth century, guilty of treason is, I believe, a justifiable conclusion’. (p. 340).

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proposals for an insurrection of some kind were discussed’; in her Heroic Mode and Political Crisis (2009), on the other hand, Elaine McGirr implies that the Rye House Plot was a fabrication.10 There are pragmatic reasons for this diversity of positions. The evidence is not very full, and what is extant is unreliable in various ways: because testimony is inconsistent; because witnesses constantly underplayed their own involvement; because the courts were highly motivated to secure prosecutions, and interpreted treason statutes as capaciously as they could in order to secure that goal.11 However, these arguments would not be taking place if Charles and James had been killed in Hertfordshire. These conspiracies are narratives interrupted, or caught short, and that incompleteness leaves more room than usual for disagreement. The crown’s prosecutors (aided in 1685 by Thomas Sprat’s ‘official’ history of the conspiracies) do their best to provide the public with a narrative that ends authoritatively in the conspirators’ deaths – but as we will see, not even removing Lord Russell’s head from his shoulders could silence him. Historians like Ashcraft and Zook, arguing for the significance, influence, and organisational sophistication of radical Whigs, build narratives that culminate in or at least point towards the revolution of 1688. Such teleology is a bugbear of Jonathan Scott’s, but his dismissal of the importance of the assassination plot is partly a symptom of his interest in Sidney as a politician and thinker, and partly a product of his revisionist reading, which connects this affair with the political crises of the earlier seventeenth century. What one makes of the gap created by the interruption of these conspiracies, that is, depends in part on the things that did happen one is minded to connect them to. Contemporaries recognise the polemical opportunities this indeterminacy affords. One striking instance is Thomas Percival’s 1696 pamphlet The Rye-House Travestie, which comes in the wake of the discovery and prosecution of a plot to assassinate William III and stage a Jacobite uprising. As the title implies, Percival presents these later plots as a ‘travestie’ of the 1683 conspiracies: both involved connected assassination and insurrection plots, and both assassination plots planned to assault a monarch in transit. But the pamphlet is also a travesty in a more straightforward sense: a carefully modified version of Thomas Sprat’s ‘official’ account of the earlier Whig 10

McGirr writes that Shaftesbury’s Association was ‘likely a Tory invention’, referring in the same sentence to 1683’s ‘equally questionable Rye House Plot’ (Heroic Mode and Political Crisis (Newark, NJ: Associated Univ., 2009), p. 86). 11 As Scott points out, this was also a feature of the popish plot trials. On the flexibility of the treason statute 13 Car. St. 1 c. 1 and Ferguson’s complaint that it ‘made words treason’, see Ashcraft p. 340.

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conspiracies, with names and other details adjusted to correspond with the 1696 plot. Percival does not disguise this act of plagiarism: the connections between the plots are hammered home by way of marginal page references to Sprat’s text, which was reissued in the same year (probably as a companion piece).12 The majority of Sprat’s prose is left untouched, the change in context doing most of the satirical work on Percival’s behalf. The relationship this text sets up between 1685 and 1696, then, is less one of historical distance than ironic proximity, and the reissuing of Sprat’s work makes that proximity even more tangible. The epigraph summarises Percival’s intent neatly: ‘Mutato nomine vestra | Narratur Fabula’ (‘with the name changed, the story applies to you’).13 Similarity does not quite bleed into identity here, though: this is an application, not a straight swap. Percival digresses at various times to attack particular Jacobites, and throughout makes small adjustments to Sprat’s prose, turning the latter’s abhorrence of the popular support for the Whigs in 1683 into statements of Jacobite incapacity in 1696.14 This allows Percival to pretend on the one hand that history does not matter – here is a straightforward replaying of the 1683 conspiracies, with a different cast of characters – while insisting, on the other, that it does: Jacobitism is a travesty of radical Whiggism, which latter has been shown to be on the right side of history by the revolution of 1688 and the ensuing political settlement.15 The fact that Jacobites have resorted to travesty reveals not just their incapacity but their ideological incoherence and hypocrisy: here are champions of passive obedience caught in an attempt to overthrow the government, and they could not even manage to come up with their own plot. While broadly insisting upon the similitude of two things that didn’t happen, then, Percival’s ironic tweaks provide the internal

12

For the original see Thomas Sprat, A true account and declaration of the horrid conspiracy against the late king, His present Majesty, and the government (London: by T. Newcomb, 1685). ESTC R16720, A True Account and Declaration of the Horrid Conspiracy to Assassinate the Late K. Charles II at the Rye-House (London: sold by E. Whitlock, 1696) is a reissue of the third octavo 1685 edition of Sprat’s history (ESTC R221757) with a cancel title page. 13 Thomas Percival, The Rye-House Travestie (London: for A. Bell, 1696). The quotation is from Horace, Satires, I. 1. 69–70. 14 For attacks on contemporary Jacobites and high Tories see (pp. 7–8; pp. 20–24; pp. 76–7). The smaller adjustments occur throughout – see, for instance, Sprat’s description of ‘great numbers of Citizens’ engaging in disloyal behaviour, against Percival’s insistence that disloyal Jacobite citizens are ‘no way numerous’ (Sprat, p. 39; Percival, p. 19). 15 This is precisely the kind of teleological reading of the early 1680s that Jonathan Scott rails against in Algernon Sidney.

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distance that allows him to distinguish between them. The 1683 conspiracies emerge as rehearsals for or even prophecies of the triumph of 1688. The 1696 plots, however, are permitted no such forward projection. They are simply failures, pale imitations. Percival is not working to establish or deny the historicity of either plot – he takes their ‘reality’ at face value. But it is difficult to imagine Percival writing The Rye-House Travestie in the way he does if either the Stuarts or William III had been successfully murdered. The failure of these conspiracies creates space, and that space licenses a greater tonal or generic range: in this case the combination of genuine anger at High-Churchmen and Jacobites with the comic glee attendant on celebrating their failure and – through an ironic act of plagiarism – exposing them as ideological plagiarists. The rest of this chapter examines travesties of various kinds: Aphra Behn’s connection of the sexual and political failures of Whigs in LoveLetters Between a Nobleman and his Sister; a curious fancy dress parade; double-agents and informers parodically impersonating ‘real’ conspirators. Travesty is of particular use in negotiating between genuine plots and those that are foiled or failed, because it compares without losing sight of supposedly essential distinctions. It is an appropriative technique that does not just draw comparisons but hangs and quarters them too. The built-in directionality of travesties – there is a serious ‘work’, and a ludicrous one – is useful for propagandists because, like self-organising systems, they work by themselves.

Disappointment The opening episode of Behn’s Love-Letters, finished by late 1683, presents the sexual and political entanglements of Ford, Lord Grey as futile dalliance.16 Even before Grey was implicated in the insurrection plot, he enjoyed considerable notoriety, having abducted his sister-in-law Henrietta Berkeley on 20 August 1682, marrying her to his servant. At the court case brought by Henrietta’s father, Grey was found guilty, but no sentence was passed, and in a matter of months, this scandal being overtaken by that of the conspiracies, the couple had fled to the continent. Unsurprisingly, scholars have interrogated the correspondences between Behn’s fiction 16

Love-Letters was entered into the Stationer’s Register by Joseph Hindmarsh on 26 October 1683 (G. E. Briscoe Eyre, ed., A transcript of the registers of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, from 1640–1708, A.D vol. 3 (London: privately printed, 1914), p. 203).

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and the Berkeley-Grey case, as well as the politics of Whig plotting more broadly.17 Most recently, Claudine van Hensbergen has argued that the political and romantic energies of Love-Letters pull in two directions: this is ‘a novel that frames the competing claims of two distinct genres’ – amatory fiction and secret history – ‘for the attention of Behn’s readers.’18 In the opening of Love-Letters, I suggest, Behn draws her readers’ attention to the methodological similarities between Philander’s attempts to seduce Silvia and the political machinations of Grey and the Whigs. If amatory fiction and secret history compete for her readers’ attention, Behn also shows us that both genres can be equally frustrating, and that political and romantic plots can be frustrated by the same means. John Richetti observes that the opening of Love-Letters ‘features unrelenting amatory rhetoric of the most flatulent sort’.19 The tone is struck in Philander’s first letter: ‘Silvia came in view! her unresistable idea! […] her dress all negligent as when I saw her last, discovering a Thousand ravishing Graces, round white small Breasts, delicate Neck, and rising Bosome, heav’d with sighs she wou’d in vain conceal.’20 It continues, unabated: Philander throws himself on the floor and sighs ten thousand times. He tears his hair. Sylvia raves and dies for some relief. A long negotiation follows, in which the couple inch closer to a rendezvous in person. By the time Sylvia commands Philander to put on love’s wings and fly to her, then, the reader is in a state of frustration analogous but not identical to that of the lovers (p. 56). For readers, the expected release is less erotic than it is narratological. Silvia’s frustration may well be sexual, but it is expressed in terms that also suggest a desire to move the narrative forwards. In a letter musing self-consciously on the difference between communication in writing and in person, Silvia writes,

17

See, for instance, Bowers, Force or Fraud, pp. 103–36; Albert J. Rivero, ‘“Hieroglifick’d” History in Aphra Behn’s Love- Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister’, Studies in the Novel 30 (1998), pp. 126–38; McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, pp. 507–46. Ros Ballaster’s reading in Seductive Forms is less focussed on the Grey/Berkeley affair, but has been influential (Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 69–113). 18 Claudine van Hensbergen, ‘Secret History and Amatory Fiction’, p. 76. 19 John Richetti, ‘Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister: Aphra Behn and Amatory Fiction,’ in Albert J. Rivero (ed.), Augustan Subjects: Essays in Honour of Martin C. Battestin (Newark, DE: Univ. of Delaware, 1997), pp. 13–28, p. 19. 20 The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1992–96), II.11.

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Failures …there is a Rethoric in looks; in Sighs and silent touches that surpasses all! there is an Accent in the sounds of words too, that gives a sense and soft meaning to little things, which of themselves are of trivial value, and insignificant; and by the cadence of the utterance may express a tenderness which their own meaning does not bear; by this I would insinuate that the story of the heart cannot be so well told by this way [i.e. writing], as by presence and conversation. (pp. 37–8)

For the avoidance of doubt, Silvia writes, ‘sure Philander understands what I mean by this?’ (p. 38). It is, of course, a sexual invitation. But Silvia’s desire for Philander’s ‘presence and conversation’ also resembles the caution of political conspirators, for whom speaking in person was obviously preferable to leaving traces of their plans in letters and papers. Indeed, according to the ‘Argument’, Love-Letters only exists thanks to a lapse in document security – these are letters supposedly found in Philander and Silvia’s St. Denis residence. This in turn reflects Behn’s actual use of the letters between Grey and Henrietta that were publicised in the trial proceedings, and Love-Letters is written in the knowledge of the incriminating documents found in the possession of opposition plotters – A Ra-ree Show; Shaftesbury’s association; the manuscript draft of Sidney’s Discourses.21 So, what Richetti calls Silvia’s ‘impatience with purely epistolary dalliance’ bears some resemblance to the attitude of Shaftesbury in 1682, who insisted that the Council of Six would be destroyed by their ‘patience’, threatening instead to ‘stand upon his own legs, and act by himself ’.22 Behn is not just showing that political and romantic intrigue have structural similarities: she is demonstrating that the failure of either or both changes the way one sees the history of such intrigue. The tensions between caution and urgency, passion and honour, distance and proximity are inherent in amatory fiction’s representation of seduction. What connects them more securely to political plotting is the fact that, like Grey and his fellow conspirators, after all this epistolary dithering, Philander fails. Following the much-anticipated encounter, Philander writes to Silvia: 21

The fictional provenance is related in the ‘Argument’ to Love-Letters (Works, II.10), and Todd includes the letters between Grey and Henrietta Berkeley as an appendix. At Walcott’s trial, a letter that he attempted to send from prison was read out, having been intercepted by a clerk. It beseeched his co-conspirator Rumsey not to incriminate him, offering the same in exchange, and did not help his defence (Howell, State Trials, pp. 551–2). 22 Ford, Lord Grey of Werke, The Secret History of the Rye House Plot (London: for Andrew Millar, 1754), p. 27.

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With much ado, with many a Sigh a panting heart, and many a Languishing look towards happy Bellfont [Silvia’s house], I have recover’d Dorillus his Farm, where I threw me on a Bed, and lay without motion, and almost without life for two hours; ’till at last through all my Sighs, my great Concern, my Torment, my Love and Rage broke silence, and burst into all the different complaints both soft and mad by turns, that ever possessed a soul extravagantly seiz’d with frantick Love, Ah Silvia, what did I not say? How did I not Curse, and who, except my Charming Maid? For yet my Silvia is a Maid; Yes, yes, ye Envying Power she is, and yet the sacred and inestimable treasure was offer’d a trembling victim to the o’rejoy’d and fancy’d Deity, for then and there, I thought myself happier than a triumphing God, but having overcome all difficulties, all the fatigues and toyles of Loves long Sieges, Vanquisht the mighty Fantom of the fair, the Giant Honour, and routed all the numerous Host of Womens little Reasonings, past all the bounds of peevish Modesty: Nay even all the loose and silken Counterscarps that fenc’d the sacred Fort, and nothing stop’d my glorious pursuit: Then, then ye Gods, just then by an over transport, to fall just fainting before the surrendering Gates, unable to receive the yielding treasure! Oh Silvia! what Demon, malicious at my Glory, seiz’d my vigor? What God, envious of my mighty joy, render’d me a shameful object of his Raillery? Snatcht my (till then) never failing power, and left me dying on thy Charming Bosom (II.57).

This liaison, like the assassination and insurgency plots, comes to a premature and unsatisfying end, and the untimely ending of both leaves Silvia’s virginity and the government likewise intact. The exposure of Ford Lord Grey as a disappointing lover has an obvious satirical appeal (‘Where shall I hide my head,’ Philander exclaims, ‘when this lewd Story’s told?’ (p. 57)). However, Behn does not just present us with an embarrassed peer, but the dilatory mating display preceding and heightening that embarrassment. Philander does not only fail, but immediately attempts to overwrite that failure with a long compensatory epistle. Philander is, in short, incorrigible – as, for Behn, are Whigs. The incorrigibility of Philander and his real counterparts is indicated by two shared characteristics: their generic entrapment, and their tendency to repetition or linguistic ‘dalliance’. Philander’s reaching for the language of heroic romance (Giants, Fantoms, Counterscarps) helps underscore the several ways in which Grey was a knight errant – in violation of social and moral codes, and wandering, having fled his country. Indeed, Philander is pushed to the margins of his own account of the liaison, transforming from

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the poised aggressor to the passive victim, his vigour seized, rendered an ‘object’ of raillery, not just unable to take the ‘yielding treasure’, but unable to receive it. His passivity here is that of the romance hero, stuck in a loop both generic and historical. As Philander puts it later, ‘such Tales I’ve often heard, as often laught at too’ (Works, II.57). The shift towards romance is always an effective way of decoupling a person or event from political history, and it happens elsewhere in 1683, too (Algernon Sidney’s scaffold speech, for instance, is referred to mockingly as ‘Coll. Sidney’s Arcadia’).23 For Richetti, ‘Philander’s rendition of his sexual failure points to Behn’s impatience with the repetitive self-indulgence built into the genre and her preference for action and movement.’ (p. 21). He is right, but it also reflects Behn’s impatience with what is for her an identifying feature of the Whig opposition: the pert refusal to allow the past to become the past.24 Philander, a typical Whig, seeks to control the present by rerunning the past in his letter, claiming ownership of the episode. ‘Eighty Three smells rank of Forty One,’ declares one poem, echoing many others. Like those others, and like Behn, however, it insists that this parallel is not made by itself, but the activities of the rebels, not artificial but phenomenal: ‘This is the daily Trade and practice of our Modern Whiggs, | Tho’ they’re always baffled in their damn’d Intrigues.’25 We are given to understand that a repetitive self-indulgence is built into Whiggism, and this sense of its illogical incorrigibility – repeating the same thing, expecting different results – is also a way of reading Philander’s response to his sexual disappointment. Answering Silvia’s account of their frustrated rendezvous, Philander resumes, as if nothing had happened: ‘I can think of nothing but Silvia, the lovely Silvia, the blooming flowing Silvia’ (p. 70); having failed to assassinate Charles and

23

This is more than a straightforward appeal to romance: as Scott has argued, Sidney did relate the ‘Old Cause’ – the opposition to popery and arbitrary government and fighting the forces of the counterreformation – to the activities of his ancestors, including Philip Sidney, the author of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (Algernon Sidney, p. 269). The pamphlet is turning that lineage of principled political activity into a lineage of romantic speculation. 24 In the dedication of her 1682 play The Roundheads, a historical allegory paralleling the Whigs with republican rebels, Behn insists her representation of the Whigs’ ‘Rebellion, Murders, Massacres and Villanies, from 40 upwards’ is justified by the fact that they ‘take such zealous care to renew it daily in our memories’. (The Roundheads or, the Good Old Cause, a Comedy, As it is Acted at the Duke’s Theatre (London, 1682), sigs. A2–A2v). 25 Anon., ‘No Protestant Plot; or the Whigs Loyalty’, in Choice Collection, p. 72.

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James at Newmarket in October 1682, the Whigs started planning precisely the same thing for the following March.26 Behn’s parody of pure epistolary dalliance, then, is not just crowing over Whig failure, but a reflection on Whig method, their ‘daily trade and practice’. This includes reflecting on the language they use. At the trial of the assassination conspirator William Hone, Josiah Keeling gave the following testimony: The Prisoner […] was at a Consult […] when the killing the Captain and Lieutenant was to be lop[p]ed, or dispatched, by those, meaning the King and the Duke of York; and that once being with him at Flanders Coffee-House, he declared, That it would never be well, till the BlackBird and Gold-finch were knocked in the head, meaning the King and the Duke of York; And that in a Consult […] Mr. West […] demanded how many Swans Quills, Goose Quills, and pair of Crow Quills, with Ink and Sand, were in a readiness? Meaning thereby Blunderbusses, Musquets, Pistols, Powder, and Bullets, that he was to have; and that he was fully consenting to Imbark himself in the wicked Enterprize[.]27

Philander says silken counterscarp when he means undergarment; Hone says blackbird when he means the king; West says swan quill when he means blunderbuss. The contexts in which they are speaking are on the face of it different – a letter to a lover, a conspiratorial meeting in a tavern – but even if these connections are coincidental, their coincidence is significant. Love-Letters is constructed out of such coincidences, after all. Indeed, at Walcott’s trial the Attorney General describes this kind of cipher as ‘these mystical terms’, his anti-romantic sarcasm casting such flatulent rhetoric as a distraction from the business of getting the facts straight.28 Philander’s glozing fustian, his excessive passion, his cod-philosophical rejection of social codes, are also kinds of cipher: ways of speaking to or behaving towards Silvia that (not unlike a silken counterscarp) partially cover his libertine 26

The October attempt is well publicised in the trial proceedings and in His Majesties  declaration […] concerning  the treasonable conspiracy (London: by Henry Hills and Thomas Newcomb, 1683), p. 9. 27 The Proceedings against the Lord Russel upon his tryal for high-treason (London: for Langley Curtis, 1683). This broadside, which is a clipped summary of the testimony recorded in Howell, State Trials, IX.574, will have appeared shortly after the trials on 12–14 July 1683 (Hone was tried on the 13th), i.e. this information was available to Behn quickly. Keeling first reports the exchange about the quills in his testimony at Walcott’s trial on the 12th (Howell, State Trials, IX.534). 28 Howell, State Trials, IX.523.

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sexual ambition. Like a co-conspirator, Silvia is in no doubt as to Philander’s meaning (as she hoped, above, he was in no doubt as to hers). However, the failure of Philander and Hone’s designs makes their respective linguistic play – conceived in each case as instrumental means to an end – seem like pure dalliance: vanity and wasted effort. The moment during Walcott’s trial when West proudly claims authorship of this cipher makes him sound almost as conceited as Philander: ‘this Mr. Keeling came in; he was there talking of Blunderbusses and Pistols in down-right English: I told him, it was a foolish thing to talk so before Drawers, and that was the occasion of calling them by the Names of Swan-quills, Goose quills, and Crow-quills.’29 Keeling had already described the cipher in his testimony; like Philander, West is staking a claim in retrospect, and this is therefore a self-indulgent repetition. West’s pride in his invention might be taken by a writer of Behn’s persuasion as a sign that Whigs are addicted to the means of rebellion – this behaviour is their ‘daily trade and practice’ – without having the resources or resolve to follow through on their plans. Inured to failure, these rebels cling to revolution’s trappings. A sorry figure of a ‘knight’, the remainder of Philander’s nobility consists only of the cliched and distorted traces of a chivalric language: Giants, Fantoms, Counterscarps. Philander and the Whig conspirators reveal themselves as travesties. The concatenation of Philander’s overblown build-up to his disappointing sexual encounter and the plotters’ revelling in code helps us see the difference that failure makes, the potential absurdity that lies in all things that didn’t happen. Failure, real or represented, transforms what would otherwise be effective work or prudence – a series of erotically charged letters leading to a sexual liaison; the adoption of cant or cipher in the midst of a treasonous plot – into waste. Disappointment makes that work instantly bathetic: ‘these mystical phrases’. Van Hensbergen points out that ‘Philander’s political plots, his “graver business of State”, repeatedly disrupt the amatory plots of the lovers as they attempt to consummate their relationship’ (p. 73). At first sight, the lovers’ initial encounter might look like one in which the attempt to consummate is interrupted not by politics but bodily failure.30 Yet this Whig’s bodily failure seems conditioned by the failures of his political movement, replaying them at the individual level. In this instance, it is not that the Whigs’ political plots disrupt their amatory

29

Howell, State Trials, IX.543–4. ‘The body fails them both,’ as Ros Ballaster puts it (‘The story of the heart’, in Derek Hughes and Janet Todd, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2004), pp. 135–50, p. 141).

30

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ones, but, sharing a narrative arc and sharing a ‘practice’, they are both alike characterised by disruption and its consequences.

A conspiracy diverted When, in March 1683, Richard Stretton called the conspiracy he was implicated in ‘an idle, ridiculous story’, he recognised that the key question was less ontological than it was political: even to prove the conspiracy a fiction, he goes on to imply, would be ‘no defence’.31 Stretton also recognised that story’s malleability and incompleteness, predicting that the government would sit on the information, giving them time to ‘lick it into some handsome form’.32 The interruption of the 1683 plots demands such craft: they want an ending. The handsome narratives established at the outset of the 1683 treason trials, proving the plots in general, create a storied environment in which the jury are asked to apprehend the facts brought before them by witnesses. The prosecution and the jury are obliged to find the suites vray-semblables between certain facts and persons, the ‘fair connexions’ necessary for the completion of satisfactory narrative. Such connections are made outside the courtroom too, of course. Algernon Sidney closed the paper disseminated after his execution by recruiting God to the opposition, thanking him for the opportunity to die a martyr to ‘that OLD CAUSE in which I was from my youth engaged, and for which Thou hast Often and Wonderfully declared thy self ’. He was referring to the struggle against popery and arbitrary government, extending back, for Sidney, to the Reformation, but for Tories the ‘old cause’ meant civil war republicanism and regicide.33 The author of Remarks on Algernon Sidney’s Paper insists that ‘this foolish piece of Scribble has quite destroyed the very foundation of the whole Party’: With what a full-mouth’d Out-cry did the whole Brotherhood abhor, so much as the imagination of a commonwealth, or the least Thought against Monarchy. […] This unpolitick Gentleman has very unfortunately pull’d off the whole Vizard: has joined the pieces of the Snake together again, and made the present true Protestant Zeal, as a Branch

31

Letters of Eminent Men, Addressed to Ralph Thoresby, vol. 1 (London: for H. Colburn and R. Bentley, 1832), p. 24. 32 Quoted in Scott, Algernon Sidney, p. 292. 33 See n. 23 above.

100 Failures of the Old Cause, no less than a continued link of the Old Chain of Rebellion.34

Not only has Sidney pulled off the opposition’s vizard – a visual and static revelation – but he has produced a handsome narrative, joining together the pieces of the snake, and ensuring that narrative’s probability by offering a ‘continued link’ or suite vray-semblable between his actions, the English civil wars, and opposition more generally. For some, the discovery of these plots also discovered the hand of God. The king’s declaration wasted no time in emphasising the deity’s particular concern for anointed monarchs.35 ‘Signs and Wonders make it plain, Sir’, claimed one ballad, ‘Kings are Heavens peculiar care’.36 A 1683 pamphlet cannot resist relating the providential aversion of the Rye House Plot to Charles’s ‘miraculous preservation’ in the oak tree at the Battle of Worcester.37 The discovery of these plots does not just reveal one instance of God’s care for monarchs, then, but establishes a ‘continued link’ running through the king’s life, the counterpart of Sidney’s reassembled snake. Such providential readings are widespread enough to be almost institutionalised: a key feature of the official handsome narrative of the plot. So, when conspirators seek to exculpate themselves by downplaying their preparedness in March 1683, they are forced to wrest agency away from the deity. For those writers thanking God for the preservation of the king, the apparently providential fire at Newmarket that disrupted the conspiracy is a part of a particular past that had to happen in order to realise a particular future, one that was not bound to happen, but did: history matters.38 However, when Robert West testifies that ‘when the News of the Fire came, […] [the conspirators] were in no readiness’, and that ‘the thing could not have been Effected, if the Fire had not happened’, history ceases to matter, and the fire becomes any old fire, accidental in both senses of the word. Robert Ferguson’s confession, written in 1685, attempts a more complicated revision. Here, the assassination conspiracy was always already foiled not by the hand of God, 34

Remarks on Algernon Sidney’s Paper, Delivered to the Sherrifs at his Execution (London, 1683), p. 4. 35 His  Majesties  declaration to all his  loving  subjects,  concerning  the treasonable conspiracy, p. 7; for the fire see pp. 12–13. 36 Choice Collection, pp. 190–1. 37 Anon., Here is a true and just account of a most horrid and bloody plot conspired against His most sacred Majesty (London, by E. Mallet, 1683), p. 3. 38 See The Loyal Health: Occasioned by His Majesties most Happy Deliverance from the Late Horrid Conspiracy, by the Fire at Newgate (London, 1684), and Harth, Pen for a Party, p. 227.

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but the industry of Ferguson and William Rumbold. Ferguson claims to have ‘found small difficulty in stiftling & diverting what was to have been executed upon the King & D. of York as they were to return from Newmarket in October 1682’, beating providence to the punch.39 Later in the confession, he describes Rumbold’s diversionary labours in similar terms. Once Rumbold was persuaded of the wickedness of the assassination plot, Ferguson writes, there was not one stepp really made towards the execution of it; and all after this thatt was warmly said or seemingly done by Mr. Rumbald for carrying it on, was only to cover himself and his friends from the jealousy and resentment of those who were violent for it to such a degree, that they would neither hear of any other method of rescuing our selves and redeeming the Nation, or bear to be reasoned with […] And whereas the preventing of that design hath been commonly ascribed to the King’s returning sooner to London than he otherwise intended, and that occasioned by the breaking out of a fire at Newmarket; I dar positively affirm that if he had remained there a month longer, he would have come back in as much security, and as free from danger of being assaulted upon the road, as at the time he did. (p. 435–6)

The last sentence is really just a paraphrase of West’s testimony, of course, but it shows that this description of Rumbold as a sheep in wolf ’s clothing is intended to disrupt the official providential narrative of the plot’s foiling. ‘[T]hey whose real aim was to hinder and divert it,’ Ferguson explains, ‘were always the brightest of the company while they were among the Bigotts, in declaiming against Tyranny’ (pp. 436–7). This is also a travesty, a parodic impersonation of plotting: Rumbold’s performance is undertaken to ‘cover himself ’, as with a costume (travesty coming from the French travestir, ‘to disguise him, or take on another man’s habit’).40 Ferguson presents that travesty as a kind of prophylactic: these men (including himself ) were the keenest in promoting the insurrection conspiracy ‘because they judged it to be a means of allaying the heats of men in prosecuting the other design’ (i.e. the assassination).41

39

Robert Ferguson, ‘Concerning the Rye House Business’, printed in James Ferguson, Robert Ferguson the Plotter (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1887), pp. 409–37, p. 426. 40 OED travesty adj. and n., etymology. 41 ‘Concerning the Rye House Business’, p. 436.

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For Ferguson, these conspiracies are not government fabrications – that would be a very unwise thing to insinuate in a confession – but fabrications they remain. In this account, it is Ferguson and Rumbold who lick the plot into some handsome form. Their labour supposedly keeps the conspiracy on the brink of historicity: close enough to execution to enable discovery and prosecution; sufficiently distant to prevent the deaths of the king and duke. This brinkmanship is enabled by their travesty of political plotting. At Walcott’s trial the Attorney General described the ‘miraculous Fire’ at Newmarket as ‘this great Providence to divert them’; but in Ferguson’s contingent account it is he, and not God, who diverts different men to different ends.42 He presents the assassination plot as one that was being foiled even as it was being prepared. The word ‘foiled’ is particularly appropriate here, recalling foils, the blunted weapons used in fencing. These are weapons that, like double agents, resemble their deadlier counterparts, but their difference is revealed only in extremis, when it comes to the point. That it never did come to the point is precisely what gives Ferguson the space to adjust his role in the conspiracies.

Lord Russell’s Ghost Tories are not slow to pick up on the way that Whigs like Ferguson exploit the incorrigibility of these nonevents. Another response to Sidney’s scaffold speech takes him to task for representing the conspiracy ‘as an airy fantom, and illusion, a trick of State’.43 Such historical denial and the reaction thereto is at the heart of the controversy regarding Lord Russell’s ghost, another ‘airy fantom’. It is unlikely, at this early date, that this pamphleteer was thinking of the French critic René Le Bossu when he reached for that phrase. However, Le Bossu’s usage is relevant here. Le Bossu’s phantoms are the deindividuated beings the epic poet invents before giving them a particular name and fleshing them out: of The Iliad, he writes, ‘[Homer] has given the Name of Achilles to a valiant and angry Phantom’. This sense is helpful because it highlights a key feature of phantoms: their indifference, and the malleability that indifference brings (‘it signifies little,’ Le Bossu shrugs, ‘whether the Persons are Dogs, or Orontes and Pridamont’).44 Recall 42

Howell, State Trials, IX.523. Anon., Some Animadversions on the Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs, on Friday December, the 7th, 1683. By Algernon Sidney, Esq; Before he was Executed (London: for John Cox, 1683), p. 1. 44 Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem: Containing Many Curious Reflexions, 43

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the epigram of the Rye-House Travestie: ‘the name changed, the story applies to you’: one effect of Percival’s tweaked reproduction of Sprat’s history is to suggest that it signifies little whether the persons are Algernon Sidney or the Duke of Berwick, Charles II or William III. A phantom, for Le Bossu, is a thing ‘working in th’immediate power to be’. So too are these assassination plots: airy fantoms ready to be shaped, in retrospect, by writers of all stripes. During the impanelling of the jury at his trial on 21 November 1683, Sidney objected to ‘two infamous persons that had acted my Lord Russel’s ghost’.45 These men were most likely the tallow chandler John Merridell and Thomas Kinsey, a Bloomsbury vintner.46 That Sidney knew them on sight may be a sign of his particular interest in this impersonation, but it was widely reported.47 Sidney objected to these men because involvement in the very useful and necessary for the Right Understanding and Judging of the Excellencies Of Homer and Virgil., trans. W. J., (London, 1695), p. 17, p. 19. 45 These are Sidney’s words at the sentencing (Howell, State Trials, IX.899). The objections are noted briefly by Luttrell (A Brief Historical Relation of State Affaires from September 1678 to April 1714 vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1857), p. 289). 46 Peter Hinds suggests that ‘Sidney did not believe the incident and was being opportunistic’ (‘Roger L’Estrange, the Rye House Plot, and the Regulation of Political Discourse in Late-Seventeenth-Century London’ The Library 3 (2002), pp. 3–31, p. 26). However, although no one names the specific jurors Sidney objected to, these two men were on the panel of jurors and have identifiable connections to the affair. L’Estrange recounts the accusation that ‘Mr. Merydale’ was involved in staging a mock trial of the conspirator John Hampden (then in the Tower) at the Crown Tavern in Bloomsbury (The Observator, 10 October). That accusation is made in the half-sheet broadside The Night-Walker of Bloomsbury (London: for J. Grantham, 1683), verso – see extended discussion below. That broadside also casts Merridell as an extra in the impersonation of Russell’s ghost (he is punningly identified as one who ‘takes his name from the Noon-Day’ [i.e. meridian] (recto)). Thomas Kinsey had been the landlord of the abovementioned ‘Crown Tavern, Bloomsbury, Midd;’ since the building of Southampton (later Bloomsbury) Square in 1665 (Henry Horwitz and Jessica Cooke, eds., London and Middlesex Exchequer Equity Pleadings, 1685–86 and 1784–85, (London, 2000), pp. 22–33; Alfred P. Beaven, The Aldermen of the City of London Temp. Henry III – 1912 (London, 1908), pp. 168–95. Both John Merridell and Thomas Kinsey appear on the list of the panel of jurors for Sidney’s trial drawn up by his legal counsel Sir William Williams (Howell, State Trials, IX.824–5; Titus Oates also reproduced this list in The second part of the Display of tyranny (London, 1690), pp. 331–4). 47 Roger L’Estrange claims in The Observator for 10 October that reports of the affair were picked up in the Harlem Courant, and that it was ‘half the Bus’ness of the News-Letters here about the town’. By newsletters here L’Estrange means manuscript newsletters, which may have been Sidney’s source.

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personation of Russell’s ghost clearly marked one out as a Tory convinced enough of the historicity of the recently discovered conspiracies to take to the streets in its defence. Russell’s voice lingered after his execution thanks to the swift and copious dissemination of his paper delivered to the sheriffs on the scaffold, of which there were as many as 25,000 copies in circulation during the last five months of 1683.48 The paper vehemently upheld his innocence. Russell claimed to have been convicted ‘by a strange fetch’, undone by malevolent (and wrong-headed) legal interpretation: ‘to kill by Forms and Subtilties of Law,’ he complained, ‘is the worst sort of Murder.’49 Whigs hailed him as a martyr, and Tories said he had damned himself by dying with a lie in his mouth.50 It was quickly rumoured that Russell’s speech was not his own work but that of his chaplain Gilbert Burnet.51 This attribution serves to protect the official line on the Whig conspiracies by characterising the speech as a calculated piece of propaganda. This authorship controversy was allegedly made flesh on the evening of 27 July 1683. The performance is described in detail in a critical, Whiggish broadside, The Night-Walker of Bloomsbury, and a related poem, A Satyr on the Pretended Ghost of the Late Lord Russell. The Night-Walker alleges that a Tory vintner, named elsewhere as John Rutland, dressed up as Lord Russell’s ghost, having borrowed costume elements from his drinking companions (a nightgown from a gentlewoman; aprons from fishmongers, and a ‘White Diaper Napkin’ from an undisclosed source). Rutland then wailed terribly ‘near the House where the Lord Russell lived’ – the location is important – to the following effect: ‘he fell a groaning like an Oxe at the first Sticking; nay, he groan’d even like the Groaning-board itself; and after a short preamble of Lamentations lewdly uttered, He cryed out, Oh - - - I have no rest because of the Speech that I never made, but Dr. Burnet.’ A more substantial version of this soliloquy is provided in the doggerel poem:

48

On Russell’s trial and execution see Lois Schwoerer, ‘William, Lord Russell’, and Hinds, ‘Roger L’Estrange’. 49 The last speech and behaviour of William late Lord Russell (London: for Thomas Fox, 1683), p. 4. Schwoerer argues that Russell’s trial was fair according to the law at the time (‘William, Lord Russell’, p. 50). 50 For responses to the speech by L’Estrange and others (as well as more context on Russell’s execution and the publication of his speech), see Hinds, ‘Roger L’Estrange’, especially pp. 5–22. 51 Burnet was called in for questioning on this matter by the government on 24 July 1683. Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1683: July–September (1934), 177–237. URL: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57455 Date accessed: 30 May 2012.

Travesties 105 I am the late Renown’d Lord Russell’s Ghost, That with a Lye’n my mouth went off the Coast Of this vain World: O what a grievous pother Is made o’th’speech of which I’m not the Author, For though it went Disguis’d under my Name, Yet Doctor Burnet only made the same. I cannot rest quiet in my Grave----52

Here the ghost is interrupted, silenced and laid to rest by the ‘ne’r failing, sovereign Remedy’ of a blow to the head from a Whiggish member of the watch. John Rutland, in these reports, is ‘a dull Tory Vintner’ (Satyr, sig. A) who is toeing the governmental line, however unconventionally. These satirical Whig accounts seek to defend Russell and his authorship of the paper, questioning the ‘reality’ of the plots and the justice of Russell’s execution by ridiculing Rutland’s alleged hijinks, drawing on the anti-Catholic tradition that associates fake hauntings with greedy papists.53 These are pointed instances of historiographical conflict: Russell’s paper revised the official account of the conspiracy by speaking posthumously; Rutland’s alleged performance attempted to make the past speak differently by chipping away at that paper’s authority; the retaliatory re-reading by the Whig accounts of that ‘haunting’, recontextualising the ghost as a popish trick, undermines that attempt to undermine. These are not just disputes about what happened, but about who is speaking, and who should be allowed to. In October, Roger L’Estrange, surveyor of the press and justice of the peace for the area in which this haunting was said to have occurred, stepped in to correct the record and to punish those Whiggish members of the book trade who had spoken out of turn. As Hinds has shown, L’Estrange used his legal powers to collect depositions from some of the locals, and the beadles and watchmen under his employ.54 A summary description of The Night-Walker and a revised narrative of the episode appears in his newspaper The Observator, on 10 October 1683, and the depositions are reproduced on the 11th. L’Estrange is clear: this is not, as The NightWalker attests, a ‘Bigotted Popish Sham’, but rather ‘an Arrant Cheat, and

52

A Satyr on the Pretended Ghost of the Late Lord Russel (London: for Edw. Golding, n.d.), sigs. A-Av. 53 The vintner ‘had a mind to draw custom to his empty house’; ‘there is nothing more common among the papists,’ says Will, ‘then to counterfeit Spirits and Ghosts,’ before offering a few choice examples (The Night-Walker, recto). 54 See ‘Roger L’Estrange’.

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Contrivance of the Phanatiques’.55 He illustrates the extent of this ‘Cheat’ by way of an exhaustive denial: First; To his Title. The Tallow-Chandler, & the Printer were not in the Company. 2ly, Not One Word of my Lord Russel at the Meeting; No Devil Acted, nor any Mention of a Ghost, or any such thing Intended: No Apothecary there Present; No Mony given to stop any body’s Mouth; No Night-Rail; No Muffling in a Diaper Napkin; No Ghost Dress’d up; No Chandler, nor Printer with him; No Groaning, or Stopping before Southampton-House; nor any Word of That Unfortunate Lord; No Lamentations; No Mention of either the Speech, or Dr. Burnet: Not a Blow, or an Angry Word; No Confessing his Name, or his Associates; No Examination; No Imprisonment in the Case; No Popish Contrivance: But in all Likelyhood, a Forgery of the Conspirators.56

All this denial reduces the events of that evening to a threadbare narrative. The depositions contend that on the evening of 27 July 1683, Rutland, the landlord of the Fountain Tavern in Holborn, had been drinking with friends. He took an apron from the shoulders of a gentlewoman and put it on his head. A fishmonger, Mr. Hunt, suggested that he would not dare to return home to his wife so attired. Rutland insisted that he would, and a wager was made for a bottle of wine, requiring him to walk around Bloomsbury Square, and go home, with said apron still in place (recto-verso). All of the deponents are suspiciously consistent in their avowals that no mention was made of the Lord Russell’s ghost or the authorship of his paper at any time. While this may have been high spirits, they all imply, it was certainly not political street theatre. This narrative seems even less plausible than that in The Night-Walker. At the very least, Rutland must have said something indiscrete about Russell. But the plausibility of L’Estrange’s account matters much less than what this evidence enables him to do. Langley Curtis, the publisher of The NightWalker, was indicted on 12 December 1683, tried on 14 March 1684, then pilloried in Bloomsbury Square on 26 April, when copies of the pamphlet were burned beneath him. Hinds has noted the symbolic importance of this location (‘Roger L’Estrange’, p. 26). It is conventional for malefactors to be pilloried in the location where they committed their crime, but as this is a response to an alleged site-specific performance (the haunting of

55

The Observator, 10 October 1683, verso. The Observator, 10 October 1683, verso.

56

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Russell’s house in Bloomsbury Square), there is a discernible flourish of poetic justice. That flourish becomes even more visible – and more dramatic than poetic – in the punishment of one of Curtis’s hawkers, who is ‘Ordered to be Whipt round the Market Place at Bloomsbury’.57 The fullest stage directions for this replaying of life’s tape are found in the sentencing of the publisher of A Satyr on Pretended Ghost: On 12 Dec, 1683, John Colley was found ‘Guilty’ by a jury, when he was fined £6 13s. 4d., and was committed to the New Prison at Clarkenwell, it being further adjudged by the Court that on the next Wednesday in the forenoon of the same day, he should be stripped from the middle upwards, and be publicly flogged on his back until his body should be bloody at the hinder part of a cart, from a certain place called the End of King Street in Holborn to a certain place called Bloomsbury Square and round about the same place called Bloomsbury Square, and then to and round about the place called Bloomsbury Market and thence to a street called Holborne near the door of a certain house called the Fountain Tavern [i.e. Rutland’s establishment] and be delivered.58

The whippings around and pillorying in Bloomsbury Square and Bloomsbury Market are partly for the benefit of the Russell family and Rutland, the injured parties, but Colley’s itinerary also maps directly on to the alleged wandering of Lord Russell’s ghost.59 In his paper, Russell characterised his trial as a travesty of justice. The alleged fancy dress parade led by the Tory vintner tries to silence Russell’s posthumous objections by raising him from the grave to have him disown the paper. The judiciary then set into motion a violent parody of that alleged performance, at the same time declaring that it didn’t happen, cauterizing a historical wound. We have moved from a travesty of justice to a judicial travesty. The close mapping of punishment onto crime here looks like poetic justice or contrapasso, one way of making narratives handsome. But it is complicated by the fact that these corporal punishments violently travesty events that according to the courts were said to have happened, but didn’t. Correspondence between crime and punishment is not unusual, but the criminal’s body is usually harmed in 57

The Proceedings of the Old Bailey (Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 29 May 2012), December 1683 (o16831212-2)). 58 John Cordy Jeaffreson, ed., Middlesex county records, vol. 4 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1892), pp. 220–1. 59 Colley’s indictment states that his publication tended to ‘bring a certain John Rutland of the said parish vintner into odium and contempt’ (ibid.).

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compensation for an act that has been proven to have occurred: thieves’ hands are removed, the lives of murderers are taken in exchange for those of their victims. Here, however, the punishment maps onto a supposed lie told by the malefactor. There is a biblical precedent for this. In the parable of the talents, the servant who fails to put his master’s capital to work, simply returning the sum intact, explains his cautious approach: ‘For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow’ (KJV Luke 19:21). The master, offended at this characterisation, responds, ‘Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant,’ before taking the ten talents and giving them to another servant who had invested more wisely. That is, the master performs the role he is cast in by the fearful servant, making real their counterhistorical speculation, and becoming a travesty of himself. Similarly, the hawker and booksellers – especially John Colley – are made to experience a stripped-down version of the history their publications had promulgated: a person walks around Bloomsbury and is met with violence. These spectacular punishments show that history to have been a counterhistory by making it history: as a result of L’Estrange’s efforts, this perambulation is described not in a scurrilous broadside, but the Middlesex sessions rolls, a respectable archival source. This reinscription on skin – on vellum and the bodies of publishers and hawkers – is a violent reversal of travesty: a serious treatment of a ludicrous work. With the names changed, the story is made to apply to them. ~ At his trial, Sidney objected to Merridell and Kinsey not just because they were Tories but because he recognised them as Tories engaged in policing and reproducing the historical narrative that would lead to his death. He objected to them because they were combatants in the historiographical conflict over the conspiracy in which he was implicated, and in which his trial was an important battle.60 Travesty was an important weapon in that conflict. Behn exposed Philander and the Whig plotters he reflected as travesties, all mouth and no trousers, privileging means over ends. Through his parodic act of plagiarism, Percival represented the 1696 Jacobite insurrection as the poor cousin of radical Whig activism, a sheep in wolf ’s clothing, and a hypocritical one at that. Ferguson suggested that he and Rumbold were travestying Whig plotting precisely in order to undermine it, holding 60

See Scott, Algernon Sidney, pp. 317–47.

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it in suspension just long enough to enable its discovery. The attribution of Russell’s paper to Burnet turned it into a travesty, an impersonation. Casting Rutland’s travesty of Russell’s ghost as a popish trick, The NightWalker of Bloomsbury read that attribution – and by implication the official account of the conspiracy – as legerdemain diverting attention away from a travesty of justice. In part, travesty abounds in the responses to these interrupted conspiracies because things that didn’t happen, and particularly historical failures, already resemble travesties of things that did: a ludicrous version of a serious work. But travesty is also of particular historiographical use. Like counterfactuals and ‘then and now’ comparisons, it is what Mark Salber Phillips calls a ‘contrastive technique’.61 Travesty implies a hierarchy and a direction – there is a serious work, and a ludicrous one. Sometimes the ludicrous work can be used to call attention to flaws in its serious original, but in the economy of genres, travesties or burlesques are generally less valued than the works from which they emerge. Unlike ‘then and now’ comparisons, then, in the historical writing this chapter has examined, travesties, with their built-in hierarchical distinctions, are another way for writers to historicise or dehistoricise certain narratives, and the persons and events suspended therein.

61

On Historical Distance, p. 222.

Chapter 4

Contingency and Incontinence: The Jacobite Invasion of 1708

O

n 12 March, 1708, the Earl of Mar wrote a letter from Whitehall, addressed to George Erskine at his estate at Alloa in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. That evening, a French invasion fleet arrived near Crail on the north side of the Firth of Forth. James Francis Edward Stuart was on board, and the fleet’s mission was to restore him as King of Scots by raising an insurrection in Scotland, ideally landing its 5,000 troops near Edinburgh and taking the castle. The earl’s instructions in this moment of national insecurity are as follows: I’m affraid before this come to your hand that you have heard of the French landing. E’er long there will be such a force sent against them that they and their associats will not be able to stand before; but I’m affraid our poor country and particular persons suffer. [...] The furnitur of the house is not so pratious that I’m much affraid of it, so take not down one bitt of it, but the looss things in the house of any worth, as linning or so, put into the chartur-house or some other sure place which I think better, except a few which you wou’d keep out in case any of my friends chance to come and ly there. […] There are armes in the closet of the cross vault, which you wou’d cause clean and give them out to the prittiest fellows of the toun who you can trust most, and they wou’d keep some kind of guard on the house to prevent it being pilaged or burnt by any loose partie. [...] I wish you cou’d get the cannon which are in the chartur buried, but it must be done privatly.1

Mar’s proprietorial concern for his ‘looss things’ is articulated in a letter that moves between assurance and alarm, and which in its mixture of tenses also reflects the ways in which this failed invasion provoked 1

H. M. C., Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar & Kellie, Preserved at Alloa House, N. B., ed. Henry Paton (London: for His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1904), p. 431.

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counterhistorical speculations both pro- and retro-spective. In the first place, Mar is required to write towards a contingent future. He knew that the French fleet was on its way, he knew that George Byng was pursuing them with a small British fleet, and he knew that ground troops were to be sent to Scotland to encounter any insurrection there. He did not know how those things might have borne out if and when his letter arrived. All of those things, in this letter, must necessarily be kept in suspension, and from that suspension arises Mar’s simultaneous confidence and apprehension, as well as the unstable temporality of the first line, shifting from Mar’s present anxiety at the time of writing (‘I’m affraid’) to his anticipation of a future that will render his letter redundant, a future spoken of in the present perfect tense – not ‘you will have heard’, but ‘you have heard’ – creating an odd feeling of immediacy. Mar is assured: ‘E’re long’ (a notably indistinct phrase) ‘there will be such a force sent against them that they and their associats will not be able to stand before.’ Reflecting many of his contemporary commentators, the implication here is that the pretender’s success is highly improbable in the face of the immoveable resolve of the British administration. And yet, the letter anticipates conflict, and indeed anticipates the consequences of a conflict, in its fears about the surrounding ‘country’ and the ‘particular persons’ for which and for whom Mar feels in some way responsible, as well as his own most moveable objects, or ‘looss things’. Arms are to be given to the ‘prittiest fellows of the toun’, fellows who must be worthy of ‘trust’. Similarly, cannon are to be buried ‘privately’ – as if visible preparations would be taken as a sign of alarm, and as if signs of alarm might be dangerously causative.2 Mar’s fear that those ‘particular’ persons suffer (not that they will suffer) seems to be in the present tense, a thing that is happening. Towards the end of the letter we move from the future and present tenses into the more conditional, imprecise, and aspirational (‘which you wou’d cause to clean’... ‘they wou’d keep some kind of guard’... ‘I wish you cou’d get the cannon which are in the chartur buried’). This modal laxity, alongside those ‘looss things’ and ‘loose parties’, suggests an atmosphere in which things might easily be carried away, or carried off, an atmosphere belying Mar’s opening confidence. I do not mean that Mar is more afraid than he is letting on; rather, his letter appropriately reflects the particular contingency of this impending invasion, which at the time of writing was yet to occur, and which at the anticipated time of reading may or may not have occurred. Towards the end of the letter it is difficult to

2

Defoe levels precisely this accusation at John Thompson, 1st Baron Haversham, below.

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know whether or not the earl – a serious and esteemed garden designer – is injecting a note of levity: ‘I hope nather friends nor enimies’, he writes, ‘will be so barbarous as to spoil my gardens.’ In the event, neither Mar’s parterres nor the shores of the Firth of Forth suffered any Gallo-Jacobite trampling. The invasion fleet had sailed past the Firth the night before, the result either of incompetence, bad luck, a pointed indifference for the whole expedition on the part of the French commander Forbin, or, it was suggested, ‘secret’ orders from the French king.3 The delay caused by this overshoot meant that a British fleet awaited the French in the Firth, and following a twenty-hour chase and an abortive attempt to land further up the coast at Inverness, the invasion fleet circumnavigated the British Isles, returning to Dunkirk from whence they came. Somewhere between 600 and 2,000 troops perished in abject conditions during this voyage.4 As a result, the king over the water makes the wrong kind of return; not an apocalyptic undoing of the post-1688 political settlement, but an allez-retour from and to his unhomely home in France. In the end this seems less an invasion than an orbit, or as one writer intriguingly phrased it in 1711, a ‘precipitate flight’.5 The vaunted peripherality of James Francis Edward Stuart to the newly united Protestant Great Britain seems to be confirmed by this costly, ineffectual and errant ghosting around the coast. In the pamphlets, newspapers, poems and sermons commenting on this episode, it is frequently referred to as the ‘intended invasion’. The moniker makes sense, partly because the public could see the invasion coming; ‘intended’ can refer to an event that is both once and future, so the modifier ‘intended’ keeps the event, and the pretender, in a conditional, counterhistorical space, held forever at the planning stage. That intend 3

The fullest and most recent narrative account of the invasion attempt is in Daniel Szechi, Britain’s lost revolution? Jacobite Scotland and French grand strategy, 1701–8 (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 2015), pp. 14–72. See also John Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: the Franco-Jacobite Invasion of 1708 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ., 1988). Lockhart of Carnwarth suspected that Forbin had ‘secret orders from his master’ and they prevented him landing the king after the failure in the Forth. (‘Scotland’s Ruine’: Lockhart of Carnwarth’s Memoirs of the Union, ed. Daniel Szechi (Aberdeen, 1995), p. 229). As Szechi points out, Forbin actually had contradictory orders: his formal instructions from the Second Secretary of State Pontchartrain reflected Mary of Modena’s wish that he obey James’s orders, but the final paragraph also ordered him to take the same care of James’s ‘person’ as he would of the French king’s (Britain’s lost revolution, p. 38). 4 Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, p. 39. 5 P. H., An impartial view of the two late Parliaments (London, 1711), p. 105.

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literally means to ‘tend towards’ adds an appropriately vague note to the epithet, especially given the predominant interest amongst these writers in diffusing or denying the pretender’s capacity to make things happen, to be decisive, to act, and given the ways that his expedition, in retrospect, seems so delayed, mistimed, and non-committal. In circumnavigating the British Isles, in failing to penetrate British defences, in being subject to weather and to the will of a foreign king, and in being permeable or leaky in a number of other ways, James Francis Edward Stuart fulfils the promise of his birth as it was represented in the anti-Catholic and anti-Stuart propaganda that circulated throughout his life. The pretender is another ‘looss thing’, an adherent of a ‘loose party’, and subject to numerous kinds of looseness. He is dispossessed, and defined by that dispossession, as we have already seen. Yet the pretender is also a possession, or, in a phrase important to the following discussion of this episode, ‘variously possessed’. That phrase comes from a 1711 history of the preceding two parliaments, and relates not to the condition of the invading prince, but those people who, weakened constitutionally by the virulence of party debate, have thereby been rendered indeterminate, susceptible to reshaping. The thing that straightens people out in 1708, according to the author ‘P. H.’, is the address of thanks made by the House of Commons to the queen after the danger had passed: This Loyal Address, so full of Spirit and Resolution, at a time when People were variously possess’d, had a very good Influence upon the Nation in general. By it several of her Majesty’s Good Subjects, of weak apprehensions, who had been kept wavering by the Artifices of a malignant Party, were thoroughly confirm’d in their Duty, and the Enemies of our Constitution discountenanc’d from any open attempt.6

In this context, ‘variously possess’d’ blends possession by beliefs or opinions with a kind of supernatural possession or overcoming; there is a similar slippage between being possessed of something (an opinion), and being possessed by it. What is at stake here is a kind of integrity – where to have ‘integrity’ is to be an obedient Protestant pro-Union Briton. The address’s ‘resolution’ is at the heart of its efficacy: it is resolved, determined, a coming together, a plausible narrative. Supporters of the invasion, or rather those considering such a position, are diagnosed not as inherently evil but as kinds of patients: damaged; ill; taken leave of by sense. Their errancy is conditional and temporary but it is precisely errancy, a straying 6

Ibid., p. 100.

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from ‘resolution’, a ‘wavering’. They are, at heart, good subjects, for this, of course, is the ‘normal’ condition. It is important, rhetorically, that the disorder attendant on being ‘variously possess’d’ is not just temporary, but about as far as this history ever allows the Jacobite cause to go. That is, the best the Pretender can do is cause unease, and cause it from a distance, keeping ‘Good Subjects’ ‘wavering’, in a kind of suspensive agitation. He cannot convert – or, as the sacramental language with which the passage concludes has it, ‘confirm’ – these people wholly or permanently. This is another way of undermining the Jacobite threat: they are an unrealistic political force, romantic. Like romances, they more severely affect the ‘weak’, or those prone to affect. The ‘variously possess’d’ are wont to fall into this disorder because despite being ‘Good’, they have ‘weak apprehensions’: not just a kind of dim-wittedness but a deficiency, metaphorically, in strength, an inability to ‘grasp’ things (Latin prehendĕre,  to seize). Understanding, resolve, apprehension: there is a masculine, stoic, martial undercurrent to all of these concepts, and the ways in which the metaphors here relate to weakness and illness conspire to equate being a ‘good’ subject with bodily continence, resilience, and impermeability. To be ‘variously possess’d’ is for that impermeability to have failed, however momentarily. This chapter proceeds with a discussion of the bilious Lord Haversham’s weaponisation of counterhistorical speculation, troubling the smug Whig administration with a meticulously constructed account of what might have happened had the invasion succeeded. The following section thinks through the questions of agency raised by the distinction between an invasion that has failed, and one that has been foiled. The final section focusses on the anxieties surrounding the Act of Union of 1707, which legislation is thought of both as a prophylactic against invasion, and a provocation. The violent language in the writing on this failed invasion is a product of the adjacency of the alternative histories and futures that this nonevent gives rise to, and the abrasive ways in which they are made to interact: a plate tectonic explanation of the ‘rage of party’.

John Thompson, 1st Baron Haversham: A Revisionist Historian John Thompson, 1st Baron Haversham, frequently had an axe to grind. Fond of controversy, his wariness of concentrations of political power meant that he moved between conventional political identifications throughout his life. In the 1680s he had associated with radical Whigs in the Netherlands, was active in the convention following William and Mary’s arrival, and whilst in some ways a staunch supporter of the new king, acted in opposition to his

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administration in the early 1690s. In the middle of that decade, he became more supportive of the government, and was rewarded with elevation to the peerage. In the next few years he seemed to move closer to the Tories, investigating the navy for corruption and criticising the management of the military in parliament.7 He opposed the union in the House of Lords, and was criticised by Defoe in the Review for attacks on the Duchess of Marlborough (a ‘she favourite’ and beneficiary of ‘State Idolatry’).8 A 1705 poem lambasts him for invoking ‘dang’rous Chimaera’s’ in his ‘popular S[peeche]s’, and it is with this sense of Haversham’s irresponsibility that Defoe engages in 1708.9 Amidst the raft of relieved addresses of thanks from the parliament to the queen, thanksgiving sermons, pamphlets and poems ridiculing the failure of the Gallo-Jacobites, Haversham’s is a curious and determined voice: determinedly oppositional, and in relation to the invasion, determinedly counterhistorical. In his speeches on the invasion he stresses the proximity of what did and did not happen, using a speculative yet evidence-based narrative of an alternate past, present, and immediate future as a stick with which to beat the ministry, and the Earl of Mar in particular. For Haversham, only a series of accidents averted disaster in the spring of 1708. It had little to do with the diligence of the queen’s administration celebrated elsewhere. On the contrary, he insists that had the invading forces landed, they would have met with little opposition due to maladministration – possibly treason – and a catastrophic under-resourcing of Scotland’s domestic defences. That Haversham has the ministry in his sights is made clear in a 1707 speech. Given on 19 November, it concerns the state of the fleet and its effect on trade, both of which he insists are in a desperate condition.10 That is less important than the sense the opening gives us that Haversham’s oppositional stance is not only a political but also a kind of historical positioning, as he stands Canute-like against the waves of officially sanctioned narrative:

7

The Lord Haversham’s speech in the House of Peers, on Saturday, February 15. 1706/7 (London, 1707), 2. 8 ODNB. See also Haversham’s defence of his 1705 speech, The Lord Haversham’s vindication of his speech in Parliament, November 15. 1705 (London, 1705), which is a barely disguised attack on Harley (and Defoe as his tool). 9 Anon., The Dog in the Wheel. A Satyr (London, 1705). 10 Dated from the title of An answer to the Lord Haversham’s speech, in a committee of the whole House of Peers, on Wednesday, Nov. 19. 1707 (London, 1707).

Contingency and Incontinence 117 I know it is generally looked upon as a Mark of great Weakness and Imprudence, to attempt Impossibilities; That Man would scarce be thought in his Right senses, that should endeavour to stop the Tide at Graves-end with his Thumb, and not rather suffer it to take its own Course, as knowing that it will as surely have its Ebb as its Flux; but yet there are some Cases wherein the universal Practice of Mankind shews the Mistake of this Maxim; who is there, that seeing his Parent languishing, and in an irrecoverable Consumption, would not think it his Duty to give him all the Assistance in his Power, though he was morally certain all his Endeavours would prove ineffectual, and the fatal Hour was just approaching; nay, does not every Man endeavour to preserve his own Life; while at the same time he knows that Death itself is most unavoidable.11

The hyperbole and scaremongering continues: the nation is sinking, in a ‘great Ferment’. He is unequivocal about the cause of this ferment and its (literally) radical cure: ‘My Lord, I take the Root of all our Misfortunes to be in the Ministry, and without a Change of Ministry in my Opinion, no other Remedy will be effectual.’12 In March 1708, Defoe takes Haversham to task. Such speeches, he suggests, might be read as a cause of the invasion: ‘...they that pretended to speak for the Nation’s Good, and to put their Thumb to stop the Tide at Gravesend, may see, whose Work they have been doing, and that their Clamour has been an eminent Assistant to bring the French out upon us.’13 He goes on: you have been the worst Traytors to your Country, your Out-cries of being ruin’d and undone, and brought to the last Extremity, what Effect have they had? Indeed, your Long Speeches have been Invitations to the Enemy to come, and make good what you have said, and take hold of the miserable Condition you have represented us in, to make it worse.14

This post-facto reasoning brings Haversham’s speech and the invasion attempt into a cause-effect relationship, serving also to establish a specific 11

Ld. Haversham’s Speech in the Committee of the Whole House of Peers (London, [1707]), broadside. 12 Ld. Haversham’s Speech, broadside. 13 Defoe’s Review, ed. Arthur Wellesley Secord, 23 facsimile books (New York: Columbia UP, 1938), XI.666. 14 Ibid.

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intention behind the incendiary rhetoric – to invite the Pretender and/or the King of France to invade a country variously possess’d. ‘What tho’ his L-rdship told us it would signifie nothing,’ continues Defoe, ‘[...] his L--dship is too penetrating, not to know it would have its Signification in another Place, and that his old Friends abroad, whose Cause he had lately restor’d himself to, would take the Word from him, and endeavour to prove him Inspir’d, by introducing the Consequences.’15 In this reading, Haversham’s speech is transformed into a cause by the Gallo-Jacobites coming along and supplying an effect. Defoe, like so many propagandists, converts the indeterminate (‘it would signifie nothing’) into the causative. In the opening months of 1709, Haversham launched an enquiry into the invasion attempt, and in doing so articulated before his peers a counterhistorical narrative of the previous year’s events. The intent was to counter the dominant impression that the queen’s ministers had been diligent, responsive, even heroic. Haversham’s is a narrative in which heroes do not appear, and he transfers the accusations of incompetence from the Gallo-Jacobites to the ministry. In his first speech, given on 12 January 1709, he opens by acknowledging that given the successes of the previous year’s campaign it might seem out of place ‘to speak to your Lordships of any Dangers at home, or to have the least apprehension from such a baffled Enemy’.16 His justification is that before the invasion attempt, following the 1707 campaign, the French had been in little better condition, citing the battles of Hochstet and Ramillies, effectively suggesting that conditions are the same as those that obtained the previous year. The French king, he insists, is ‘as near us this year as he was the last’; contrary to those other writers keen to stress the finality of the invasion’s failure, Haversham does his best to keep the danger clear and present, not vainly orbiting the nation but prowling about its borders.17 The rub of Haversham’s complaint and the reason for his enquiry is ‘the weak and defenceless condition of Scotland […] at the Time of the Invasion’.18 His motivation, he insists, is not cowardice, ‘But 15

Ibid., pp. 666–7. Defoe blames Haversham again in the Review for April 27 1708 (Defoe’s Review, XII.49–51). See also Anon., A Modest Vindication of the Present Ministry (London, 1707). 16 Haversham’s speeches can be found in The History and Proceedings of the House of Lords from the Restoration in 1660 to the present time, 8 vols., ed. Ebenezer Timberland (London, 1742), II.247–260. The quotations below run in order. 17 On proposals for other Jacobite invasions in 1709 and 1710, see Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, pp. 45–7. 18 On what the Lieutenant-General James Maitland described to the Scottish Privy Council as ‘the lamentable condition of the Scots garrison’, see Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, pp. 31–3.

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I am afraid lest her Majesty be dethroned whilst she lives, and that the Destruction of Popery and Slavery, whilst we are speaking Peace to ourselves, should suddenly, like a flood, break in upon ourselves’. A committee of enquiry was established, and Haversham made another speech reporting its findings to the house on 25 February 1709. ‘[G]reat care has been taken to conceal’ the number of operational troops in Scotland in March 1708, he says, and as a result he had been forced to get his information from a purportedly reliable (but unnamed) alternative source. According to that source, ‘the regular forces in Scotland ... were not above 1500 men’. This ‘Handful of Men’ received scant support, too (‘I find there was little or nothing done’); an increase in troops in Scotland had been voted in 1707, but not effected until after the invasion had failed. Haversham then proceeds to quote a series of letters between ministers and military officers. On 13 March, the Earl of Leven, commander-in-chief of Scotland, writes to Mar, bewailing the state of his troops and lack of money, and expressing disappointment that he would be forced to retreat immediately to Berwick if the French landed. According to the Lord Advocate, ‘there was never a Country more destitute and defenceless than we are, nor have we so much as a Treasury, or any Money for incident Cha[r]ges’. The troops sent from Ostend ‘did not arrive at Tynmouth Bar, till ten Days after the Enemy were seen upon the Scotch Coast, so that the Dispute, if there had been any, would have been over, and the Enemy in all humane probability, would have been Masters both of Edinburgh, the Castle, and all that was in it’. Domestic reinforcements were alerted too late to have been of any use. Although the queen stated in an address to parliament that transport ships were ready to sail from Ireland if necessary, in fact there were none, according to Haversham, because orders were not given by Sunderland to prepare them until 12 March. The attack on the Earl of Mar becomes most pointed in his analysis of an order sent to the Earl of Leven: ‘You are, upon the first Appearance of any Squadron of French Ships upon the Coast, to send to Ireland to [blank] to advertise him thereof, who has Orders to send Troops to your assistance.’ Mar had apparently omitted the name of Leven’s Irish counterpart. Leven writes twice to Mar to ask him to fill in the blank, to no avail. In the context of the other delays and the lack of orders for transports in Ireland, Haversham concludes that whoever considers this evidence ‘must, I think, be convinced that this Blank in the Instructions did not happen by Chance, but was a premeditated and designed Omission’. He is effectively accusing Mar of treason. The invasion, for Haversham, is a thing that did not happen because of chance, or good luck. However, had the French fleet managed to land, the dire consequences that would have followed might have been linked in a causal chain to this lacuna in Mar’s

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orders, the room left by a thing that should have happened, but didn’t. Once more, a counterhistorical narrative turns upon an evidentiary absence, an absence that is read as both a cover for and the key to uncovering misdeeds. Now not just a revisionist but a counterfactual historian, Haversham creates an alternate present in which the Earl of Mar had been responsible for a damaging Jacobite campaign on British soil, a circumstance not without its historical ironies.19 This account, further bolstered by damning inventories of scant and defective armaments at Stirling, Blackness and Dumbarton castles (‘300 Bayonets, with most of them broken and spoiled, altogether unserviceable […] 200 pikes, damnified by long lying’), serves to accuse the queen’s ministers of relating to her a narrative that was in fact counterhistorical, a misrepresentation. Haversham’s revisionist narrative is in turn the basis for another counterhistorical account, in which the invaders breeze into Edinburgh Castle and across Scotland, and perhaps the rest of Britain, effectively unopposed. This is not just a way of emphasising a near miss in order to expose incompetency or treachery in the ministry, though it is certainly that in part. More interestingly, Haversham insists on this counterhistorical narrative so he can suggest that this thing that didn’t happen, but very nearly did, is highly likely to occur in earnest, and soon: ‘if there be no greater Care taken for the future, than there was at this time of such imminent Danger, it will be the greatest Miracle in the World, if, without a Miracle, the Pretender be not placed upon that [i.e. the British] Throne.’ The government have been relying on miracles, according to Haversham, and attributing the effects of those miracles to their own industry.20 They present themselves as being in charge of a version of history – a history that they insist has been concluded – but in fact they remain susceptible to a replaying of life’s tape, one more plausibly aligned with the evidence as Haversham has set it out, a more probable (because not miraculous) future.

The foiled and the failed For many writers this invasion attempt represents the ‘last effort’ of the French and the Jacobites, but it cannot be so for Haversham.21 For him, this 19

Mar raised the standard for ‘James the 8th and 3rd’ on 6 September 1715 at Braemar, beginning the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. See ODNB. 20 On the effects on the government of Haversham’s enquiry and the publication of his speech, see Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, p. 47. 21 Thomas Coulton describes the expedition as ‘the last Effort that our Enemys

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is due to the fact that men like the Earl of Mar – enemies within – create ‘openings’ for their secret masters by leaving incorrigible gaps in their orders, or creating opportunities with their delays. Of course, the blank in Mar’s orders is as much an opportunity for Haversham as it might have been for Louis XIV and James Francis Edward Stuart, allowing him to turn a fait accompli into a prophetic warning. In similar ways, though often to different ends, the failed landing offers an opportunity for polemicists to redistribute agency by shifting the narrative centre of gravity, moving the event to the beginning, middle, or end of a range of historical and counterhistorical stories. Writers also offer a range of causes for the invasion’s failure which give more or less power to certain agents: the invasion failed because of the ‘bulwarks’ of British identity, strengthened by the union; the invasion failed because of the military and administrative skill of the government; the invasion failed because failure was part of God’s providential plan; the invasion failed because of Gallo-Jacobite ineptitude. A kind of causal or historiographical looseness is apparent when writing on this episode is looked at from a distance, and sometimes even when examined at close quarters. Some writers offer nearly the whole gamut of causes natural and supernatural, in part because such an accretion of causes is one way of making a historical narrative (and the political position it authorises) more probable. The causes of the invasion’s failure are said elsewhere (and sometimes within the same texts) to be its provocation (echoing Dryden’s doctoring of the record in Absalom and Achitophel).22 The thanksgiving sermon of Francis Hare is one such piece of writing. Hare – eventually rising to Bishop of Chichester – had recently been appointed prebendary at St Paul’s, and was a clergyman with exemplary Whig credentials: he had been Chaplain General to the army in Flanders in 1704, at Cambridge he was tutor to Robert Walpole and John, the first son of the could make, to render us unhappy amongst our selves, and expose us all to their own Fury and overgrowing Power’ (Nahash’s Defeat, […] A Sermon (London, 1708), pp. 7–8). For Francis Hare, the confirmation of the Protestant succession and the union made the French ‘resolve to try a last effort to confound us all at once, and bring the War by an Invasion home to us’ (A Sermon Preach’d before the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1709), p. 12). Writing to Halifax on 16 March 1708, Addison is confident that a British victory would be a decisive one: ‘I told your Lordship in my last how well prepared we are for ye Crushing this Intended Invasion, and I think there wants nothing else to the settlement of ye Union, this Expedition being the last Effort of the party that opposed ye uniting of the two Nations.’ (The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1941), p. 98. 22 See below pp. 71–5.

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Duke of Marlborough, and he had written a biography of the duke in 1705. He would later tangle with Swift and Manley over the war and negotiations for peace.23 In this early sermon, Hare often thinks counterhistorically. Here he imagines the emotions that would have been felt by Louis XIV had the invasion succeeded: …then would the so much long’d for pleasure have been gratified, the pleasure of confounding a Nation, he has always born an immortal hatred to, the British Nation, whose Religion and Government, have been the great Bulwarks to keep out Tyranny and Superstition from overspreading the Earth, and subduing the Nations of it to that more than Egyptian slavery of Soul and Body, they have been so long threatened with.24

Similarly, Joseph Cannell figures the Act of Settlement as a barrier erected like ‘a Fence for the Vineyard of God, that the Wild Boar out of the Woods should not spoil it’; Protestant Britain is a cultivated, civilised space, and the world without a Romance wilderness. Hare suggests that the qualities which make Britain secure – Religion and Government – also make it a target, vulnerable, like the keystone in an arch. It is a way of affirming the solidity of Britain whilst keeping in mind its position as the defender of a narrow defile through which popery is incessantly trying to pour in, ‘working in th’immediate power to be’. Again, the threat is said to have been neutralised but not dissipated, because the dissipation of ‘popery’ would also dissipate some of the bulwarks of mainstream Protestant British polemic. Hare continues to imagine Louis XIV’s jealous zeal for the destruction of Britain, and the nation’s saviours are more clearly individuated: These are the noble Views, which have actuated the Counsels and Arms of the great Oppressor for half a Century and more; for which he entred into the present most unrighteous War, for which he form’d this mighty Project in the beginning of the Year; but by the Blessing of God on the wise and steady Administration of Her Majesty, the vigorous Resolutions of Her Parliament, and the great Diligence of those Instructed by Her, the design was soon defeated, and the Storm that threatned nothing less than universal Wrack, went off without 23

See ODNB and Francis Hare’s record in the Clergy of the Church of England Database, , accessed 19 July 2018. 24 Hare, A Sermon, pp. 12–13.

Contingency and Incontinence 123 any other hurt, than what by our unreasonable Fears we did our selves. (p. 13)

To call such self-generated fears ‘unreasonable’ in the middle of a sermon which also stresses what might have been lost (‘universal wrack’) may well seem contradictory, but it is a contradiction born of the way this sermon moves between counterhistorical speculation and the assurance of hindsight. Hare insists on the improbability of this expedition succeeding, denigrating it as a sketchy ‘project’ and ‘design’, without relinquishing the advantages of stressing the horror that would be entailed by the improbable coming to pass. In this passage, individuals and groups with a hand in averting this disaster begin to emerge: Her Majesty and her steady administration; the Parliament; and ‘those instructed by her’ (presumably the military). Those helping hands are providentially approved by the blessing of God, but are still acting independently, with ‘diligence’ (a kind of ‘natural’ loyalty, the pleasure taken in doing duty).25 Lockhart of Carnwarth also acknowledged the alacrity of the British preparations, and the significant role the navy played, but insists nevertheless on the contingency of the affair: ‘it is incredible how soon a mighty [fleet] was fitted out which proved too strong for the French and the only means to frustrate the design and undertaking. Though, had not several cross accidents happened, the French might have landed notwithstanding the English fleet.’26 Later in Hare’s sermon, the almighty seems to intervene more directly: ‘What was more visible in the Disappointment of the Invasion the Enemy intended, than the Hand of him whom the Winds and the Sea obey, interposing in our Defence?’27 The last cause to be found in Hare’s sermon relates not to the British but to the French: he claims that the failures in the Firth of Forth and at Oudenarde are instructive because of ‘the plain Discovery they have made of the Inability and Weakness of the Enemy’ (p. 3). Defoe warns against this kind of patriotic assurance in his Review (‘Really Gentlemen, this Notion of beating the French Troops, because they are French, has been too fatal to

25

OED, diligent, adj. And adv., etymology: ‘Latin dīligent-em attentive, assiduous, careful, in origin present participle of  dīligĕre  to value or esteem highly, love, choose, affect, take delight in (doing)’ (my emphasis). 26 Lockhart of Carnwarth, ‘Scotland’s Ruine’, p. 224. In Britain’s Lost Revolution, Szechi acknowledges the ‘impressive’ speed with which the navy was ‘able to throw together a large squadron of major warships’ (p. 24). 27 Hare, A Sermon, pp. 20–21.

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us’).28 Yet for Hare, the invasion failed not just because the French are the French, but also due to the diligence of British subjects, and the hand of God, as well as being doomed to fail because of the ‘bulwarks’ built in to the British constitution. One thing seems certain: Lockhart’s ‘cross accidents’ have no place in Hare’s reading. For him, this was not a chance or random event, and he supplies an undistinguished plenitude of causes. Yet Hare is untroubled by if not unaware of the ways that moving agency around in this way undermines his own account. If the invasion was predestined to fail, and that predestination is borne out by God’s control of the winds, how significant can the diligence of the administration be? If the foiling of the invasion required a degree of British skill, doesn’t that suggest that they had an enemy that was not simply unable and weak? And if the enemy is so very deficient, then is the British prowess needed to overcome them not barely worth mentioning? These are all symptoms of the desire to present enemies as dangerous and ridiculous, as terrorists and clowns. The tensions inherent in that doublethink are ill-suited to a thanksgiving sermon, too straight-faced a genre to deal with such contradictions properly. A mock-epic poem, The Flight of the Pretender, makes some improvements in this regard. It does so in part because of the hybridity built in to the mock epic genre, and in part because it has its eye on multiple targets. As well as being a mockery of the Gallo-Jacobite failure, the poem attacks the Whig poet Richard Blackmore (here, ‘Maurus’), who is gleefully figured as a kind of illegitimate poet laureate to James Francis Edward: their shared incompetence supposedly overrides political affiliation. Like its protagonist, The Flight of the Pretender is ‘variously possessed’, being a parodic impersonation of Blackmore’s style, littered with satirically retooled quotation from Blackmore’s own Advice to the Poets (1706). That earlier poem celebrated the Duke of Marlborough’s martial exploits, before advising a hypothetical poet on how to write an equally hypothetical modern epic with Marlborough as its hero. We might think of that hypothetical poem as ‘the intended epic’; like the invasion, it is a work stuck in the conditional mode, and is mocked as such by The Flight. Like the Pretender’s expedition, Maurus’s brushed-up verse is a failed project, talking about and about epic achievement without ever quite getting there. In its parallel with and quotation of Blackmore’s military panegyric, The Flight also reflects the ways in which modern Whig ‘epic’ was read as mock epic by Tories because of the insufficiency of Whig heroes like Marlborough, and the Tory poem implicitly parallels the Whig general with the Pretender. The focus is on the 28

Defoe’s Review, XI.674.

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bathetic, on disappointment, and on deflation, and the implication is that both Blackmore and the Pretender’s ‘intended’ incursions on other people’s domains (respectively, Britain and Parnassus) were always already failures. The Pretender’s flight is equated bluntly in the preface with Blackmore’s volant poetic: Upon this extraordinary Subject, it was proper some Poem should be writ, and the Design being Romantick, it was fitting the Poem should be Epical, at least if not Heroical; and no Persons Enthusiastick Expressions coming up to such a high Undertaking, except those of Maurus, it was thought fit to make use of his noble Flights and Expressions to describe the egregious Flight of this Pretender.29

The ‘Design’ is ‘romantick’. Here, as everywhere, both poem and invasion are being described, and this generic marker is significant. The ‘design’ – i.e. the invasion plan – is ‘Romantick’ because it is fantastical or unrealistic (and therefore not properly the stuff of history) but also because it is cyclical, and self-contained. Another pamphlet, published before the fleet’s embarkation, describes the ‘specious Preparation that the French seem to make [...] to be a meer Chimera, and vain glorious Rhodomuntado’.30 A rhodomuntado is a boast, the word deriving from Rodomonte, the particularly boastful character from Italian romantic epics such as Orlando Furioso (1532). The invasion and the poem are romantically absurd, but also old-fashioned, archaic, of another time.31 Indeed, Helen Cooper’s work on English romance helps us see some quite specific ways in which this design is ‘Romantick’. Her analysis of the ‘meme’ of the rudderless boat and exposure at sea seems particularly applicable to this intended invasion, and may be influencing these allusions to romance. Cooper notes that ‘Exposure at sea constitutes a iudicium Dei […] it is a marine equivalent of the testing of right in chivalric combat’.32 For some writers, what was ‘exposed’ by the attempt on Scotland was precisely a iudicium dei, confirming the Chevalier Saint-George’s illegitimacy. That 29

Anon., The Flight of the Pretender (London: for Bernard Lintot, 1708), sigs. A3–A3v. 30 Anon., The Dauphine of France’s Speech to the Pretended Prince of Wales (London, 170[8]), verso. 31 ‘P.H.’ compares James Francis Edward to Don Quixote in An impartial view of the two late Parliaments (London, 1711), pp. 98–9. 32 Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2004), p. 110.

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French name for the Stuart prince is also relevant to Cooper’s reading of sea travel in romance: ‘the very etymology of “chivalry”, courtly French for horsemanship, would seem to preclude ship travel except as a means of getting to or from an island, or travelling between widely separated lands – a blank space between adventures, which the knight will encounter only when he comes ashore.’33 James Francis Edward, in the event, is denied adventure altogether. In the romance tradition, the survivors of such exposures often return to the society that expelled them to wreak revenge: ‘their return is likely to be as dangerous for those who set them adrift in the first place as exposure was for the victim.’34 This, of course, is the threat Jacobitism poses to the British nation, and Szechi has recently argued for the real credibility of that threat in 1708.35 James’s flight to France with his mother in 1689 was another kind of ‘exposure’, the consequence of the fabricated ‘exposure’ of the circumstances of his birth that ‘proved’ his illegitimacy. Like the exposure at sea of Shakespeare’s Prospero, it was an attempt to ‘[dispose] of a political enemy beyond the reach of rescue or restoration but without incurring blood-guilt in the process’: the Whig fantasy of the ‘bloodless’ revolution of 1688–89. Cooper also explains that ‘victims of casting adrift who are regarded as a threat to the state […] may simply have too much legitimacy’ (her emphasis): this is precisely the problem James Francis Edward posed to the opposition in 1688.36 But twenty years later, James is denied a triumphant Romantic return, and the failure of his 1708 expedition allows writers to imagine him not as an immanent threat always poised to return from the periphery to the centre, an accident made central, but a prince permanently suspended in ‘blank space’, a chevalier forever errant. In chivalric quests, Cooper argues, one journeys from the centre to the periphery, ‘and return[s] to the centre to strengthen it’. A ‘rudderless boat’, on the other hand, ‘impels you to the periphery; the centre rejects you, or you turn your back on it. What you find, however, is that what had seemed to be an edge is a new and truer centre.’37 In triumphant British readings of the failed invasion, however, all James finds is an impenetrable periphery, an edge that rejects him as the centre had done twenty years previously. To properly appreciate the bathos of The Flight of the Pretender one needs a sense of the handholds offered to parodists by Advice to the Poets. 33

The English Romance in Time, p. 110. The English Romance in Time, p. 113. 35 Britain’s Lost Revolution, p. 33. 36 The English Romance in Time, p. 113. 37 The English Romance in Time, p. 135. 34

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The following lines are indicative of its tone and technique, as Blackmore breaks into a canter, offering us triplets, Latinised location names, a tendency toward anaphora, syntax winding tortuously around rhyme words, and an insistence on the instrumental centrality of his hero, the Duke of Marlborough: He shone in Arms, and to the great Campaign, The radiant Tempest flew across the Main. He lands, and at their Great Asserter’s Sight, Fair Liberty rejoyc’d, and publick Right. The Hero march’d, and on the Danube’s Tide He chang’d the Balance to Germania’s side, And terribly chastis’d the Gaul’s aspiring Pride. With vital Purple he the Stream distains, Or from Bavarian, or from Gallic Veins. By Marlbro’s Sword upheld, the wond’ring Flood Was like Egyptian Rivers, turn’d to Blood.38

The Flight is not the early eighteenth century’s greatest parody, but it does have its successful moments. One such moment is the following passage, a pointed reworking of the lines above. The bathetic disappointment of the expedition is repeatedly enacted by the verse, which shifts tonally between excited optimism and mock-despondence, simultaneously drawing attention to Blackmore’s lumbering caesurae: He shone in Arms, and to the great Campaign, The radiant Tempest flew across the Main But did not land: At the Pretenders Sight, The Scots maintain’d their Liberty and Right. The Hero lay on Board: The Frithian Tyde Did change the Balance to Britannia’s side, And terribly chastis’d the Gauls aspiring Pride. No vital Purple now the Stream disdains, Or from Bavarian, or from Gallick Veins. For to say truth they having shed no Blood, There was no Sense in colouring of that Flood.39

38

Richard Blackmore, Advice to the Poets (London: for A. and J. Churchill, 1706), p. 4. The Flight of the Pretender, pp. 1–2.

39

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The pomp and enthusiasm of the first two lines comes crashing to earth with the delightfully flat ‘But did not land’. The ‘Scots’, who on sighting the Pretender should have been instantly ready to don wooden shoes and give their pennies to the Pope, instead ‘[maintain] their liberty and right’, adhering obstinately to the status quo. ‘The Frithian Tide’ flows the wrong way, not coming to the aid of its supposed king but the British fleet. This series of disappointments serves to efface or altogether deny the Pretender’s agency: The Flight of the Pretender is ‘not heroical’, as the preface stated, because it wants a hero. Marlborough lands; the Pretender does not. Marlborough marches; the Pretender is supine. Marlborough changes the balance of the conflict; the balance is changed in 1708 not by a person but by the contingent sea, the ‘Frithian Tide’. The last couplet is delivered in the informally pragmatic voice that is the rightful preserve of the loyal (but conservative) British subject writing as a cultural and martial victor. The fineness of the distinction between heroic success and bathetic failure in both literary and historical terms, the adjacency of what did and did not happen, is made comically clear by the swapping of ‘With vital purple’ for ‘No vital purple’, and the subsequent invisible transformation of ‘Or from Bavarian, or from Gallick Veins’ to ‘[Neither] from Bavarian, [nor] from Gallick Veins’. The Firth of Forth remains indifferently transparent in 1708, unmarked by the Pretender’s ghostly presence. As Cooper points out, exposure at sea ‘is a scenario that gives minimal opportunity for any kind of active heroism; and the chances that such an event will have a happy ending are remote’.40 Blackmore’s poem, as a kind of receipt for an epic poem, has much in common with the advice to a painter genre. That genre, Noelle Gallagher has argued, is a kind of historical writing that privileges a partial, close-up, detailed perspective, as opposed to what she calls the ‘bird’s-eye viewpoint typical of formal history’.41 The problem with such a narrowed perspective, as those famous restoration sequences by Waller and Marvell show, is that it is very easy to get round the back of, and very easy to take out of context, which is precisely what The Flight of the Pretender does. Much of the writing on this invasion emphasises the adjacency of what did and did not happen, either as a means of praising the speed with which the British responded to such imminent danger, or as a way of emphasising the nation’s vulnerability from within and without. The Flight of the Pretender does something slightly different, certainly demonstrating through recontextualisation and modified quotation the fine line between bathetic failure 40

The English Romance in Time, p. 110. Noelle Gallagher, ‘“Partial to Some One Side”: The Advice-to-a-Painter Poem as Historical Writing’ ELH 78 (2011), pp. 79–101, p. 80.

41

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and ‘epic’ success, but also – especially in the transformed but untouched line ‘Or from Bavarian, or from Gallick Veins’ – showing us the mock epic lurking like an enemy within the epic. The Flight of the Pretender casts both James Francis Edward Stuart and Marlborough not so much as historical actors, but as historiographical receptacles: not agents who do things, but pegs on which to hang certain historical narratives.

Enemies within: incontinence and integrity The pamphleteer who described the preparations at Dunkirk as ‘specious’ and a ‘vain Rhodomontado’ is not alone in characterising the whole episode as a distraction, a diversion, a piece of (bad) theatre, or a rehearsal.42 Such responses are a straightforward way of turning threat into farce, but there was also much speculation as to the fleet’s intended destination, and a sense that it might have been an attempt to divert Allied forces from the continent.43 Archbishop King reports to Jonathan Swift that some in Ireland ‘think it an amusement to divert the Succours designed for Spain’ (my emphasis).44 To amuse, from Old French ‘amuse-r to cause to muse, to put into a stupid stare’, had the primary meaning of ‘To divert the attention of any one from the facts at issue; to beguile, delude, cheat, deceive’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though senses relating to the risible and the trivial were current then too.45 To be amused is rather like being variously possess’d, and, leaving subjects stupidly staring, is also a way of weakening apprehensions. That amusement or distraction should become related to the trivial and the laughable reflects the ways that the accidental is both unintentional and peripheral: both are movements away from what matters, or what is held to. A prominent effect of this invasion, then, was to divide attention. The adjacency of failure and success, of history and 42

The Observator for March 31, reacting to the ‘insufficiency’ of the 5,000 men the French sent in support of the invasion, insists that ‘it looks as like a State-Farce, as any I ever heard of ’; the Earl of Mar remarked to his brother that ‘A certain kind of people here […] say it is a trick of the Court’. (H. M. C., Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Mar & Kellie, p. 428); Francis Hare insists that ‘In truth all they did was little more than noise’ (A Sermon, pp. 13–15). 43 In part, it was, and it may have succeeded in doing so if the French landed, according to Szechi (‘Nathaniel Hooke and the Dynamics of Covert Operations in Eighteenth Century France’ in Szechi, ed., The Dangerous Trade: Spies, Spymasters and the Making of Europe (Dundee: Dundee Univ., 2010), p. 94). 44 King to Swift 28 February. 45 OED amuse, v. 4; 7. See also 6. a. ‘to entertain with expectations not to be fulfilled’.

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counterhistory, and of the moderate and the immoderate, makes such a division both more straightforward and more dangerous, as this piece of Whiggish electoral propaganda from Bristol in 1708 makes clear. All the Highflying High-Church Notions border upon Popery. And such of the Highflyers as pretend not to be Jacobites, are the most dangerous: For whatever they may pretend, all their Measures tend that way, and they many times lead many well-meaning People into the like Measures, and their Consequences are to the Advantage of the interest of France, and of the Popish Pretender. And believe me, those Persons who would perswade you that there are no Jacobites but the Papists, are blinding your eyes; and endeavour to amuse you, with telling you the Church is in Danger, --- only that they may with the more ease compass what they call a Restoration.46

Here a (relatively) moderate political position (High Church) is bracketed with the extremism that is said to lie adjacent to it on the political spectrum. It is a common tactic, one made more effective by the two-party system, and possibly one of its chief effects. This kind of thinking relies upon a teleological narrative; the inevitable consequence of high-flying, its natural tendency, is Jacobitism and terrorism. Note too the spatial metaphor underpinning ‘high flying’, another kind of peripherality, another kind of errancy and irrelevance. The way in which this process is described is not quite the same as ‘radicalisation’, but a kind of ‘extremization’. The difference may seem slight, but the spatial metaphor is important. This is not a root-andbranch conversion from the ground up (radicalis relating to or forming the root), but a pushing from the centre to the periphery, a making accidental (Latin extrēmus, superlative of exterus outward). Highflying ‘borders upon’ Jacobitism, and the anonymous pamphleteer makes clear that this border is a permeable one; the seepage between Jacobitism and High Church Toryism means that people can act on behalf of the Jacobite cause (having been ‘amused’ or stupefied by cries of ‘Church in Danger’) even without being conscious of it. They are variously possess’d, unwittingly. This osmotic influence is encouraged further by those agents who really are Jacobites in disguise, and such chimeric individuals both act as syllogistic confirmation of a metonymic prejudice (some people that behave as Tories do are secret Jacobites; therefore all Tories are secret Jacobites) and function as a rough

46

Anon., A Dialogue between Adam and John, Two Citizens of Bristol, about Electing of Parliament-Men. (n. p. n. d.), p. 2.

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aetiology of extremism, an explanation of how beliefs held to be implausible or irrational can take hold: through the infiltration of the moderate by a criminal or extremist minority. Tories are of weak apprehension and particularly prone to being amused by Jacobites. These are adjacent orbits between which it is not difficult to shift, Jacobitism being only slightly further removed from the political centre. This kind of brinkmanship is built into the nature of party strife, but the fact that the Pretender had recently attempted to penetrate the border of the British Isles means that this language of adjacency and borders has a particular resonance, tying in with a wider concern with the extent to which the newly united Britain was now ‘variously possess’d’, a hybrid, and related anxieties over the incorporation of difference, kinds of hybridity (national and political), and varieties of integrity and disintegration. The invasion of 1708 was read as a direct response to the union of 1707. Josiah Woodcock’s sermon describes it as France’s attempt ‘to crush [the Union] in its Infancy, [...] whilst it was so young, green and tender, to blast and destroy it’.47 The union is a provocation, then, but it is also offered as a kind of protection or guarantee, a ‘bulwark’ against the rising tide of popery and absolutism. The union circumscribes England and Scotland, marking them out as different from their neighbours on mainland Europe (specifically, in this situation, France and its territories). Yet that circumscription also contains difference, and contemporaries, worried about ‘enemies within’ and ‘intestine divisions’, or anxious about the adjacency of the moderate and the extreme, feared that containing difference might exacerbate rather than alleviate conflict. While the invasion’s failure was read as a sign of the union’s success and the nation’s integrity, the very launching of the invasion, and the size of the force accompanying the fleet, is taken as a sign of the union’s precarity or permeability.48 This is reflected in responses to this invasion that reach for the metaphor of the body politic, and in the

47

Josiah Woodcock, A Sermon Preach’d August 19, 1708. (London, 1708), pp. 19–20. For instance, ‘There can be nothing more certain, than that the French would never have undertaken their late dangerous Expedition for Scotland, if they had not receiv’d great Encouragement to it from thence, and very large Promises of Assistance too from England’ (Arthur Mainwaring, Advice to the Electors of Great Britain; occasioned by the intended Invasion from France (London, 1708), p. 1); ‘Every Body is convinc’d by the inconsiderable Force, […] the French King imploy’d in the late attempt on us last year, That his Chief Dependance was upon the Incouragement and Promises of Assistance he had from hence’ (The Lord Haversham’s Speech In the House of Peers, Wednesday the 12th of January, 1708/9 (London, 1709), p. 2).

48

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prevalence in such writing of images of incontinence, attributed either to the Pretender himself, or those considered his tools. The departure of the French fleet from Dunkirk was delayed by a week by the prince suffering from a bout of measles.49 Surprisingly, this susceptibility of his body to disease (as well as the susceptibility of his ‘adventure’ to the chance visitation of illness) is not connected in explicit ways to the Pretender’s other supposed weaknesses. But the leakiness or ‘loosness’ of the Pretender’s body is invoked in poetry and prose, and a number of strikingly gastro-intestinal metaphors and images of bodily rupture surface in responses to the invasion. In Joseph Cannell’s thanksgiving sermon, the Pretender’s looseness is connected to a kind of permeability, the religion and education which the Pretender has ‘imbib’d originally’ guaranteeing that his ‘sway’ would be ‘arbitrary’ and ‘lawless’ (pp. 12–13; p. 16). That imbibition also seems to be the grounds for Cannell to attribute to the Pretender a pseudo-vampiric ‘insatiable thirst of blood’. It is not just the fact that James Francis Edward has been reared in absolutist France that leads to such dissolution: for Cannell, Catholicism is in itself a religion that ‘drives’ men to ‘either lose their Integrity, or their Lives’. Catholicism and absolutism lead to a kind of disintegration. In a moment where The Flight of the Pretender becomes even more closely allied to the advice to a painter genre, James Francis Edward is shown quite clearly to be out of his element, subject to environment as before, but seen through the lens of a low-brow pictorial genre from the Low Countries: Describe their slender Leader’s Mein and Air, By Fourbin forc’d away, and in Despair Born with th’impetuous Tyde of refluent War. But first, to form this image strong and true, In some Dutch Comick Piece his Figure view, Mighty Sea-sick, and going just to sp------w.50

49

Addison reports the news in a letter to Montagu on 9 March 1708 (Letters, p. 100). The Flying Post or The Post Master, the Post Man and the Historical Account and the Post Boy for March 11 summarise a report from the Paris Gazette a-la-main from March 16 (N.S.) indicating that the Pretender had measles and a ‘tertian ague’. Abel Boyer reads the illness as a ‘pretence’ (Abel Boyer, The History of the Reign of Queen Anne, Digested into Annals. Year the Sixth. (London, 1708), p. 338). See also Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, pp. 25–6. 50 The Flight of the Pretender, p. 5.

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‘Dutch Comick Piece’ alludes to seventeenth-century depictions of Flemish peasants, drunken and vomiting, by artists such as Jan Steen and Jacob Jordaens. Clearly the shift to genre (as opposed to history) painting is part of the mock-epic downgrading that governs this poem, but it is also a poem interested in emphasising, with the ‘strong and true’ robustness of Flemish comic painting, the ‘slender’ Pretender’s bodily weakness, taking advantage of the moral dissipation implied by the emissions in those Dutch paintings. Similarly, in The Invasion; a Satyr, an anonymous poem that ventriloquises a furious Louis XIV, the French monarch receives a letter containing bad news, reads it, and declares, They have fail’d by my Soul, as I fear’d, of Success. God’s Curse light on all such a Cowardly Crew, And Perkin they say has besh----t himself too. Fine Work for his mother, I swear by the mass, Lest he make the Throne stink, to clean Oglethorp’s a–se.51

Here the exposure, at sea, of the prince’s incontinence combines with a double exposure of his illegitimacy. The pretended prince’s two names (‘Perkin’ and ‘Oglethorp’) reflects the ways in which this poem layers two narratives of illegitimacy: ‘That warming pan juggle, and Oglethorpe trick’ (p. 3). According to the recently published Frances Shaftoe’s Narrative (1707), the Pretender was really the son of Theophilus and Eleanor Oglethorpe, a ‘second Prince of Wales’ who had replaced the ‘first Pretended Prince’ when he died at the age of six or seven weeks.52 Not only is the prince cowardly, but incontinent; not only is he incontinent, but infantile and still reliant on his mother in matters of personal hygiene.53 All this is loosely related to his capacity to rule, as he does not just foul his breeches, but is in danger of fouling the throne. A pamphlet by a pseudonymous ‘True Britain’ [sic.] makes a similar connection between the constitutions of the state and the body. The connection is not particularly new, already implicit in the metaphor of the body politic, but it seems to be pursued with more than usual detail: ‘We have been very much embarrass’d and embroil’d of late Years, with Intestine Divisions; which, like the Peristaltick Motion of

51

Anon., The Invasion; A Satyr. (London, 1708), p. 5. Mrs. Frances Shaftoe’s Narrative (London, 1707), p. 5. 53 James’s passionate insistence that Forbin deposit him on the Scottish coast as the fleet sailed north on 13 March rather gives the lie to these accusations of cowardice (Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, p. 38). 52

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the Bowels, torment and endanger our Constitution.’54 This seems a strikingly literal-minded deployment of the metaphor of ‘intestine’ divisions. Yet ‘intestine’, here, is not quite metaphorical, literally meaning ‘internal’ (from Latin intestinus). This is a kind of punning play, then, the final clause emphasising the digestive sense current but less common in this period, pointing out the homonymic quality of ‘intestine’. Similarly, ‘Embarrass’d’ did not relate to social awkwardness until the middle of the century, and here means ‘to hamper or impede’ (OED embarrass, v. 1. a) and more figuratively ‘to render perplexing’ (2. a and b); the latter sense is strengthened by ‘embroil’, referring to confusion and discord (embroil from French ‘brouille’, or quarrel, in turn connected to ‘brouiller’, to damage or interfere with; to mix or scramble).55 The connections between the body politic and the body natural and the emotions attached to it seem to be suspended, in the process of being worked out (as it were). As the Pretender’s indecision and ineffectiveness either leads to or is signified by incontinence, so party strife causes a dangerous mixture or perplexity (a weaving together) which, as the converging senses of the vocabulary show, is difficult to extricate from disorder of the bowels. That disarray functions as a provocation, or indeed an invitation, as The Union Proverb puts it: ‘Nothing but our own intestine Divisions, can invite the French King to set Foot upon ENGLISH or SCOTCH Ground...’56 Internal strife weakens the constitution and renders the body politic vulnerable to attack from without, and it does so for pragmatic reasons: the French king thinks this is a good time to attack, for the English are distracted. At the same time, it seems as if invasion is a sort of mimetic consequence of internal conflict, as if by ‘performing’ war in domestic politics the people effectively bring real strife upon themselves from without. Incontinence is the consequence of an inability to keep separate what should be within and what should be without, not just a sign of weakness but a dysfunction that leads to or is a sign of a kind of category error. The enemy within becomes the enemy without, and it is the correspondence between or – worse – identity of such enemies that lies at the heart of anxieties about Jacobitism in general, and more particular anxieties about what this failed invasion ‘reveals’ about those enemies, their respective locations, or their mobility. Thomas Coulton’s thanksgiving sermon seems itself to struggle to keep the enemies without and within separate. He castigates 54

Anon., A View Of the present Divisions in Great=Britain (London, 1708), p. 3. OED embroil, v. 2. (London, 1710). 56 Anon., The Union Proverb: Viz. If Skiddaw has a Carp, Scruffell wots full well of that (London, [1708]), p. 3. 55

Contingency and Incontinence 135

the ‘inhumanity’ of traitors, and thanks God for saving the nation ‘not only from an Enemy without, but from a worse within’. He goes on: ‘as nothing does more loudly speak God’s Anger against a Nation, than the Disaster of a Civil War; so it as loudly proclaims his Favour to us, that he guarded our Coasts, and kept out those which would have torn and rent us in our very bowels.’57 There is some slippage here. Coulton, like Haversham, wants to impress upon his congregation the monstrousness of those intending to abet the invasion, and he wants to liken that kind of division to the intestine division of civil war. From such enemies within the nation had been delivered. God is also thanked for guarding the coast of Protestant Britain, keeping the invaders out. In the last clause, however, the enemies within seem to become the enemies without: ‘those which would have torn and rent us in our very bowels,’ presumably internal foes, are curiously said to have been ‘kept out’. This embroiling of the interior and exterior may look like an inept writer of prose at work, but it might also reflect a fear that such distinctions are being effaced. Enemies within are ‘worse’ than those without, but that may only be a consequence of their position – in other respects, they are interchangeable with their foreign counterparts. The Invasion: a Satyr has similar problems, and again they are seated in the bowels. As has been established, the Pretender’s identity is compromised by two layered narratives of illegitimacy in this poem. That duality also involves a confusion of the internal and the external. At the outset of the poem, Louis is supposed to be speaking before he receives news of the invasion’s failure: Know all men by these, that a grand Preparation At Dunkirk was made, that so drain’d my whole Nation, I fear we’re all lost in’t upon my Salvation. ‘Tis Modena’s Viper my Blood has thus drawn, And gnaw’d her own Bowels to let out her Spawn; For ‘twas such a Monster, our Enemies say, It never had room to come out the right way.

The state of nurture is a state of war. This image of a monster emerging from the bowels of its mother cannot help but recall the violent reproductive interactions of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost (II.777–802). Like Milton’s depiction, it alludes to the common belief about the behaviour of newborn vipers, derived from Pliny’s Natural History: ‘[The viper] hatches 57

Coulton, Nahash’s Defeat, p. 13.

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the young inside her uterus, and then bears them at the rate of one a day, to the number of about twenty; the consequence is that the remaining ones get so tired of the delay that they burst open their mother’s sides, so committing matricide.’58 But in the poem, ‘Modena’s viper’ refers to Mary of Modena herself (‘the viper of Modena’, as in ‘the hunchback of Notre Dame’), and not her progeny. So, in a slight modification of Pliny’s account, Mary gnaws at her bowels in order to let out her spawn, rather than her spawn burrowing their own way out. The implication is that Mary has somehow undone herself by adopting as her own such a troublesome ward, and that her assenting to ‘That warming pan juggle, and Oglethorpe trick’ was itself a monstrous act that destroys or overruns her ‘natural’ maternal capacity, an act therefore appropriately figured as one that ruptures the abdomen. Nevertheless, the Pretender is also figured as an enemy within, tearing and rending the bowels of its host. This connects with Louis’s complaint that the expedition has ‘drain’d [his] whole Nation’: in relation to both his mother’s body and the court at St Germains, the Pretender is not a welcome guest but a damaging parasite. But, as with the confusion in Coulton’s sermon, the drift of the metaphor is in tension with the way the poem articulates the prince’s status; he may be figured obliquely as an enemy within, but according to the dominant narratives of the Pretender’s illegitimacy invoked in the poem, he never was ‘within’ Mary of Modena, being either a common child smuggled into the palace or a replacement for that first changeling, supplied by the Oglethorpes. The poem and sermons’ confusion of the inner and the outer reflects a desire to keep the Pretender in as liminal position as possible; in the former case it may also point to a dissatisfaction with the sterility of the warming-pan and Oglethorpe fictions, which do not allow for a metaphorical correspondence between the bodily violence of a monstrous birth and the violent effects that a parasitic prince, or his abettors, might have on a nation state, rending and tearing its bowels. It is precisely the mobility of the Pretender, his looseness, that does this kind of damage; a cipher, devoid of agency, he is not just neither here nor there but, variously possess’d, is continually being pulled from here to there, and violently so. ~ As this chapter has shown, the failure of the Jacobite invasion in 1708 was read by some contemporaries as a providential confirmation of Jacobite

58

Pliny, Natural History, Volume I: Books 1–2, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ., 1938), p. 401.

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or French incompetence, and British naval superiority. The qualities that arise in descriptions of the episode – meandering, aimlessness, cowardice, permeability, incontinence, disembowelment – are reflections of the indeterminacy of a thing that didn’t happen, but are presented as the innate qualities of Jacobite rebels that are revealed by the providential thwarting or bathetic failure of the expedition. This folding of the indeterminacy of a non-occurrence into the bodies of the Pretender and his abettors also accounts for those anxieties about an ‘enemy within’: in 1708, the Jacobites are leaky vessels for such concerns. In concluding his recent study of this invasion attempt, Daniel Szechi stresses the proximity of what did and didn’t happen: only ‘hair’s breadth turns of fortune […] allowed Britain to escape civil war.’59 Szechi is careful throughout to maintain a sense of the contingency of the situation in 1708, and his book also seeks to recalibrate our understanding of what was at stake, and the players involved. That is, his argument charges the adjacency of what did and did not happen with even more significance. At one point, Szechi articulates the indeterminacy of the expedition’s outcome by internalising it: ‘[the enterprise] always carried within itself the strong possibility of failure, if for no other reason than that it had to be launched at a time of year when weather conditions were likely to delay or obstruct it.’60 Britain’s Lost Revolution argues that the ‘Entreprise d’Ecosse’ was poised to deliver a future Scotland modelled on the strikingly radical vision of the self-appointed Jacobite leadership, the ‘Juncto’: ‘an economically viable and independent Scotland with a constitution that would have turned it, in effect, into a noble republic with a largely ceremonial monarch.’61 This Scots Jacobite agenda ‘was far more radical than anything envisaged by their Whig counterparts’.62 So, although on the one hand the enterprise carried potential failure ‘within itself ’, it is also true for Szechi that it was pregnant with the potential to ‘[transform] the very nature of the Scots polity’.63 In Szechi’s account, the Enterprise d’Ecosse carries both transformative success and failure within itself. Not unlike Lord Haversham, though for rather different reasons, he describes the 1708 expedition as ‘one of the hinge points of history’.64 It is presented as what Sewell would think of as an event capable of transforming social structures – ‘the very nature of 59

Szechi, Britain’s Lost Revolution, p. 198. Ibid., p. 55. 61 Ibid. pp. 200–1. 62 Ibid., p. 201. 63 Ibid., p. 200. 64 Ibid., p. 3. 60

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the Scots polity’ – but its transformative power is never quite unleashed, because it was not successful. While Britain’s Lost Revolution raises some ‘what if ’ questions – indeed, it is informed by quite a large one – it does not indulge in full blown counterfactual speculation. Rather, Szechi’s narration of the invasion attempt – unlike many of the self-congratulatory responses encountered above – keeps counterfactual possibility ‘working in th’ immediate power to be’ by privileging the eventful over the teleological. In the introduction, it was suggested that counterhistorical writing ‘either creates or seeks out clearings in which causal explanation can proceed unimpeded by the empirical’, an image resting on the metaphor of ‘gaps’ in the historical record: kinds of vacancy or vacuums into which narration must rush. Here the image seems less apt. The contingency Szechi insists upon, the simultaneous internalisation of failure and success, the terror of enemies within, the immanently apocalyptic Jacobite threat in Haversham’s speeches: these all derive their energy from the precarious containment of a sort of historical potential energy, by the artful suspension of success and failure in writing not just before the fleet failed to land in the Firth of Forth, but after.

PART III

Speculations

Chapter 5

The Indifference of Number: The South Sea Bubble, 1720–21

T

he South Sea Company was originally a Tory initiative, founded in 1711 by the new ministry formed by Robert Harley, intended to counter the dominance of Whig and dissenting interests in the world of finance. In 1714 the company took on the slave trading privileges granted to Britain by the transfer of the asiento as part of 1713’s Treaty of Utrecht.1 John Blunt was Director of the South Sea Company from 1711 until 1721. In 1719, following the apparent success of John Law’s Mississippi Company (which had transformed the public debts of France into company stock in 1719), Blunt converted £1,000,000 of government debt into South Sea stock. The project was a triumph, as stock sold above par and profits soared. The next year, the company entered into a bidding war with the Bank of England for the right to convert 60% of the National Debt into shares, for a fee to be paid directly to the Treasury. This scheme sought to deal with the complexity of governmental debt by converting the myriad agreements the state had with its creditors into one easy payment. Blunt’s company won, paying £7,500,000 for the privilege of converting £31,000,000 of the National Debt into South Sea Company stock. At first the project looked like a runaway success. Prices rose to a high of around £1000 for stock of £100 face-value in July of 1720. The crash came in September, as prices plummeted to £290; by mid-October they were £170.2 The ‘bubble’ of 1719 and 1720 certainly did happen: what didn’t is the continued growth in value 1

William Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720 (New Haven: Yale Univ., 2013), p. 10. On the importance of the asiento and the South Sea Company’s participation in the slave trade, see Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: an Economic History of its Origins and Consequences (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), chapters 4 and 6. 2 See W. A. Speck and Matthew Kilburn, ‘Promoters of the South-Sea Bubble (act. 1720)’, ODNB; John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford: Stanford Univ., 1960). On the financial revolution more generally, see P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London; Melbourne; Toronto: Macmillan, 1967). Chapters 5 and 6

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on which the project, and the hopes of some investors, depended. The 1720 crash is the consequence and the cause of the failure to make speculative futures come to pass. In a 2002 article, Julian Hoppit set about puncturing some of the ‘myths’ surrounding the bubble, showing: that 1720 saw an increase in joint-stock speculation in general, not just in connection with the South Sea company; that the ‘social mobility’ brought about by credit finance was not borne out by the evidence (the majority of investors were from the social and political elite, only 6% of investors were women); that petitions and other forms of protest were reactions to the political rather than the economic aftermath; that the term ‘South Sea Bubble’ was itself an invention of the 1770s.3 More recent scholarship has continued these corrective efforts. Helen J. Paul criticises the authors of the most influential studies of the bubble, John Carswell and P. G. M. Dickson, for their ‘gambling mania’ explanation of the crash and their omission of key sources, stressing the rationality of the behaviour of many investors with the help of the tools of behavioural finance.4 Paul argues that the scheme offered investors an appealing combination of high, medium, and low risk income streams. She also shows that the South Sea Company’s active participation in the slave trade and its holding of the asiento was grimly ‘attractive’ to contemporaries (p. 65). For Paul, the ‘real victims of the episode’ were the tens of thousands of enslaved people traded by the company, who ‘remained invisible to Georgian society except as sources of profit’ (p. 115).5 It is telling that there is no mention of enslaved people in the primary sources discussed in what follows: a species of historical denial with consequences that reach into the present day. As the editors of a recent collection of essays on the South Sea Bubble and crashes in other European markets in 1720 put it in their introduction: ‘the research done by the economists who have contributed to the present volume exposes the fallacy on which inquiries into bubbles have long hinged: markets are efficient, but investors behave irrationally.’6 In his cover the South Sea affair. For a more recent revisionist study see Paul, The South Sea Bubble, chapters 3–5. 3 Julian Hoppit, ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 12 (2002), pp. 141–65. Hoppit is responding directly to some of Catherine Ingrassia’s arguments in Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: a Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1998). 4 The South Sea Bubble, p. 2 and chapter 2. 5 Paul estimates that around 64,870 enslaved people were trafficked to the Spanish Americas by the company (The South Sea Bubble, p. 62). 6 Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly, p. 5.

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chapter in this collection, Hans-Joachim Voth steers a middle way between the idea that investors were straightforwardly mad, and the efficient markets hypothesis that dismisses the possibility of ‘irrational exuberance’. Instead, the bubbles were indeed ‘instances of overvaluation’, but the exuberance of those who invested in them was nevertheless rational, as far as their own interests were concerned. The problem was that ‘the rational pursuit of profit by investors did not translate into an efficient market in which the price was always right. In aggregate, individual profit motivation created a violent boom and bust in share prices.’7 The structures were not able to contain events. There is much useful revision here, and much good sense. However, in keeping with this study’s privileging of the historiographical over the historical, what follows is less interested in correcting the myths surrounding the South Sea Bubble than in pursuing them and accounting for their genesis and use. A number of the things that Hoppit complains of in the historiography on the crisis – the erosion of historical particularity, the clumsy paralleling of one financial crisis with another, the deployment of teleological argument – can all be found in writings of 1720 and 1721. Those traits are persistent features of writing on this crisis not simply because of a kind of intellectual laziness, but because they are appropriate to a certain kind of argument. They have use. For Hoppit, the way the term ‘South Sea Bubble’ has been adopted by popular culture has led to it being used in ways ‘merely allusive, merely suggestive’. ‘That would not matter,’ he continues, ‘but what is being alluded to and suggested melds, often unconsciously, fact and fiction indiscriminately.’8 The allusive and the suggestive have been shown in the preceding pages to be powerful (even structural) forces in political culture and historical writing. The assumption behind the near concatenation of ‘unconsciously’ and ‘indiscriminately’ in Hoppit’s phrase is that popular political cultures are prone to an unthinking ‘combination’ of genres, registers or categories. Yet such melding is very rarely ‘indiscriminate’: it is usually impelled by powerful kinds of discrimination. In the case of anti-finance writing in the 1720s, paradoxically enough, such melding is impelled by fears that distinctions of all kinds are being eroded or liquidated by exchange, the process whereby likeness is seen to ‘meld’ dangerously easily into identity. Two meanings of ‘identity’ are relevant here: exchange disrupts identity (as in who or what a person or thing is) through mistaken identity (‘[t]he quality or condition of being the same’).9 7

‘Blowing Early Bubbles: Rational Exuberance in the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles’, in Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly, pp. 89–97. 8 Hoppit, p. 165. 9 OED, identity n. 1. a. and 2. b.

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Catherine Ingrassia and Colin Nicholson have written influential studies on the relation between financial and imaginative speculation in this period. Ingrassia’s focus is on the opportunities afforded by the credit finance for women in particular: Reading a novel, like investing in a speculative financial venture, demanded readers’ imaginative participation in a narrative that could potentially be a vehicle with which early modern subjects could reinvent themselves and envisage their lives differently. [...] Not only did both these cultural innovations alter the way individuals considered the possibilities and limitations of eighteenth-century culture, they also created a significant new space for women to act with some agency.10

This sense that finance is like fiction – and that the effects of both on personhood are analogous, if not identical – is shared by Colin Nicholson, whose study of the anti-finance writing of the Scriblerians rests on similar foundations. In the early eighteenth century, he writes, New forms of property become the currency of social activity and mobility: society opens to wider participation as a consequence of which, in its civic self-identifications, the human personality radically revises its sense of identity and possibility. Uncertainty and flux were threatening to displace fixity and favoured forms and in marked conflict with the hierarchical values promoted in Pope’s Essay on Man, new kinds of activity were generating inherently unstable procedures.11

What is being described here is a certain position regarding finance, current in the eighteenth century, but that position is couched in a rhetoric that claims a kind of objective and general reality for what it describes. ‘The human personality’ really does ‘revise its sense of identity and possibility’; ‘uncertainty and flux’ – now, more than before the financial revolution – really were actually threatening to ‘displace fixity and favoured forms’. Certainly, contemporary writers raise concerns about the chaos and illogic of the financial markets, an illogic that they suggest is becoming endemic and collapsing all kinds of hierarchies. They do so, however, for polemical reasons. The very writers in this period who mock Court Whigs and 10

Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender, p. 2. Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1994), pp. 4–5.

11

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freethinkers for mistaking likeness for identity are quite capable of obscuring the fact that social, political, and moral disorders are not identical with but analogous to the perceived disorder or implausibility of credit finance. The potency of the supposed analogy between financial tokens and language resides in allusiveness and suggestiveness, both being good ways of sidestepping inconvenient truths. Financial chaos, such as that seen to have been precipitated by the South Sea Company in 1719–21, lies adjacent to political and social chaos. Anti-finance writers tend towards imbrication, turning adjacency into homogeneity, at the same time as claiming that a similar kind of imbrication is a consequence of credit finance, and the modus operandi of practices such as stock jobbing or freethinking. The perception that finance is like fiction is based on the premise that language is like money. In a post-Saussurean world, the apparently arbitrary value of financial tokens cannot but be seen as analogous to the arbitrariness of the sign. Both Ingrassia and Nicholson are picking up on a line of historical thought that argues that the institution of credit finance brought about changes in the relationship of subjects with the state and with each other. An influential proponent of such thinking was J. G. A. Pocock, who argued that the financial revolution made available for the first time ‘the image of a secular and historical future’, conjured by the expectation of repayment of investments at an undetermined future date.12 This is coterminous with and causally implicated in a shift in political paradigms from the dynastic model (Stuart/Hanoverian) to that of ‘court and country’, centred on civic republican ideas of political virtue enabled by a subject’s independence from the centre of power. Importantly, for Pocock, the financial revolution did not only herald a new conception of a secular future, but also brought about a change in the operations of language.13 The suggestion that credit finance’s destabilisation of value led in turn to an anxiety about the stability of linguistic signs and meaning is a telling one. It has been a productive premise for literary criticism to build upon, as Nicholson and Ingrassia do. However, a rise in anxiety is not necessarily the product of – and is certainly not the same as – a change in historical conditions. In relation to epistemology and language, the institution of credit finance, and the South Sea affair in particular, should be seen as revelatory rather than revolutionary. They revealed and explained the fact of the arbitrariness of value or instability of linguistic meaning. That revelation was also analogous in 12

Virtue, Commerce, History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1985), p. 98. 13 J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton: Princeton Univ., 1975), p. 441.

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character; that is, it seems to reveal new things about both terms of the analogy at the same time. However, as Tom Jones has argued, neither the nature of language nor of financial tokens was changed by credit finance (though both were susceptible to misrepresentation by contemporaries).14 Jones takes issue with the exceptionalism of Pocock’s argument and ‘the increasingly large literature surrounding eighteenth-century poetry and economics’. He writes, ‘[Pocock] suggests that an element of variability in the estimation of value is something new to economics in the early eighteenth century and so does something new to language; whereas I would suggest that evaluation is an inherently variable activity, and that language necessarily and relatively easily copes with such variation.’15 According to Jones, Pocock, like many of the counterhistorical writers encountered in this book, has indulged in some temporal sleight of hand: Pocock’s description of language is already based on a form of economy in which tokens are traded by individuals with the aim of improving one another, civilizing the passions, and so on. These tokens, like those of credit and the new economy, need have no real contact with their referent; that is, they need not refer to concrete things, but may refer to absent things or abstract ideas, for example. This is the kind of economy that Pocock describes coming into existence at the turn of the century, yet he portrays language anachronistically as already being this kind of economy. Pocock wants to say that a new development in economics alters the nature of language, but ends up saying that language was already the kind of system that economy was just becoming (p. 493).

Here, as in some of the writing examined below, analogy or similitude melds indiscriminately with causation. A synchronic comparison (financial value is arbitrary, like linguistic meaning) is rearranged into a diachronic progression (financial value became newly arbitrary due to the invention of credit finance, bringing about in turn a change in the way language works). Sheehan and Wahrman’s reading of the South Sea Bubble concentrates on the ways in which the phenomena of credit finance seemed to contemporaries to defy linear causation. In a sense, this means that credit finance is not very susceptible to narrative description, and this is one of the things that exercises anti-finance writers. Some respond to this implausibility, 14

Tom Jones, ‘Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst and the Meaning of Finance’, SEL 44 (2004), pp. 487–504. 15 Jones, ‘Pope’s Epistle to Bathurst’, p. 493.

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belligerently, by trying to narrate anyway – one symptom of the ‘pressing impulse to grasp, deny, or rein in the most unsettling aspects of the 1720 financial crises’.16 Thinking about the South Sea Bubble in the context of a study of things that didn’t happen makes sense because this financial collapse is itself caused by a failure of plausibility: the moment that the progressive and optimistic narrative of the future became incredible to investors, when credulity was stretched beyond a certain point, was the moment that the bubble burst. Responding to the disorientation supposedly ushered in by the crash, writers reorient themselves and others into more straightforward narratives that do not so much seek to explain as to do away with the complexity of the financial markets. They redistribute blame and fabricate causes. As in the warming-pan scandal, where the fundamental incorrigibility of early modern paternity is converted into an opportunity for and proof of evildoing, in 1719–21 the arbitrariness that had always obtained in language and finance is accounted for by some as a fabrication, a front for chicanery and wizardry, a screen or a curtain.

‘Something was nothing all along’: the comedy of financial disaster In his book Living by Numbers, Steven Connor muses on ‘the different kinds of value’ that words and numbers ‘connote’: Words embody values; they are our way of articulating difference of values. No word is equivalent to any other word. Words embody, that is to say, the principle of the incommensurability of values. Numbers, on the other hand, allow for the possibility of equivalence. Any number […] can be rendered exactly and entirely in terms of other numbers, indeed, this is the only way in which a number can be defined. Words mean uniqueness: numbers mean equivalence.17

Connor goes on to discuss the comedy of number in Samuel Beckett and Charles Dickens, but his insights can be mapped onto the anxieties surrounding financial crisis. ‘No word is equivalent to any other word’ might have been a banner the Scriblerians and other conservative writers could have gathered under, notwithstanding their fondness for wordplay and 16

Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, p. 118. Steven Connor, Living by Numbers: In Defence of Quantity (London: Reaction Books, 2016), p. 134.

17

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puns. The absolute ‘indifference’ of number, as Connor puts it, relates to the dehumanising potential that anti-finance writers see at the heart of rampant exchange.18 If exchange seems to disrupt identity (‘the incommensurability of values’) by mistaking resemblance for identity, it might be said to do so by way of the equivalence or indifference of number being transferred onto things that are not numerical: words, people, land, virtues. Connor describes ‘the giddiness of number as pure, unrelieved and, so to speak, indifferent differentiation’, observing that whilst there is ‘a kind of dissolute exhilaration in this indifference, [...] there is a horror too, the horror of losing count’.19 This gets near the heart of the anxieties articulated in the face of credit finance, commodity exchange, and financial crisis. It is also one way of accounting for the perversity of writers like Swift and Pope, both exhilarated and horrified by annihilation, chaos, and indifference. Connor also helps us see the funny side of financial disaster. This is admittedly made easier by the fact we are not implicated in it (at least, not implicated in this one). To see a financial disaster as comic is not simply to indulge in a Hobbesian ‘conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly’, though the reliance of that theory of laughter on relativity and difference is not insignificant.20 Rather, financial crises have a comic structure. Connor discusses a joke of Immanuel Kant’s, unpleasant in its racist colonial assumptions, and intended to illustrate the latter’s contention that ‘Laughter is an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing’: an Indian at an Englishman’s table in Surat saw a bottle of ale opened, and all the beer turned into froth and flowing out. The repeated exclamations of the Indian showed his great astonishment. ‘Well, what is so wonderful in that?’ asked the Englishman. ‘Oh, I’m not surprised myself,’ said the Indian, ‘at its getting out, but at how you ever managed to get it all in’.21

18

Connor, p. 134. Sheehan and Wahrman argue that the luxury consumer culture at the start of the eighteenth century presented customers with a series of apparently symmetrical choices between ‘equivalent’ consumer goods (though antiluxury writers tended to reject this symmetry). See Invisible Hands, pp. 76–86. 19 Connor, p. 148. 20 Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1999), pp. 54–5 (Human Nature ch. 9 sect. 13). 21 Connor, p. 131.

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Connor gives Kant’s explanation: the laughter occurs because ‘the bubble of our expectation was extended to the full and suddenly burst into nothing’. It is not a very good joke, and not just because of the racist overtones. In the present context, the word ‘bubble’ becomes more conspicuous than it might otherwise be. But the connection is not simply verbal; in that final phrase Kant could easily be describing the South Sea affair, the mechanics of which (inflating, stretching, bursting) operate upon credulity in ways remarkably similar to this joke. There are further connections: the joke is also about a kind of implausible inundation, and the apparently impossible occupying of small space with high quantity (according to a certain naive perspective). These are both characteristics of Jonathan Swift’s poem on the bubble, as we will see, but the Indian observer’s surprise at the copiousness of the bottle’s contents (or rather at its prior compression within the container) is also echoed in William Bond’s reaction to the socio-economic conversions of 1720: See here Two ruin’d Countesses in Tears; While there a south-Sea Upstart’s Strumpet wears Two Pendants, worth two Mannors, in her Ears.22

The description of social mobility is typically inflected with moral judgement, as noble countesses are usurped by ‘Upstart Strumpets’, and the stability of land and of hereditary titles is overturned by a process akin to prostitution. For Bond, what is being commodified here, as in prostitution, is a source of virtue: land, which guarantees the independence of the political class.23 The fertile and productive is transformed into an inert token, as is the misery of the downtrodden countesses, whose ‘tears’ may recall the shape of the pendants hanging from the strumpets’ ears. Also typical is the horror at the rampant synechdochic effect of the financial system, the ways in which tiny objects like diamond earrings can stand in for – or, bearing in mind Kant’s joke and the material terms Bond is dealing in, implausibly contain – ‘big’ possessions like ‘Mannors’ and, by extension, ‘big’ ideas like virtue and nobility. For Bond, the absurdity of this system of exchange lies 22

‘Hugh Stanhope’ (pseud. of William Bond), An Epistle to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (London, 1720). David Foxon notes that Stanhope is usually considered a pseudonym for Bond (English Verse 1701–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1975), vol. 1, p. 753, S706). 23 Voth estimates that at the peak of the Bubble, the South Sea Company was valued at approximately twice the value of all land in Britain (Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly, p. 90).

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in the way it implies identity between things because, however momentarily, they have the same financial or exchange value. According to Bond’s political creed, land was a source of identity, giving a person political integrity. The social mobility supposedly powered by exchange, in turn powered by the ‘artificial’ inflation in the value of South Sea stock, gives rise to an identity between earrings and estates that destabilises identity, or personhood. To exchange land for earrings is to treat it like number, to confuse the incommensurable with the indifferent or inert. Bond is railing against the confusion and replacement of the qualitative with the quantitative. In this civic humanist view of the economy, the distinction between land and earrings is qualitative: land produces virtue by generating wealth through agricultural production, providing labour, engendering community. Land may be a sign of independence, but it is also a guarantee: unlike inert diamonds, it is not only a token. Connor relates Kant’s definition of laughter as the product of the sudden reduction of a strained expectation to nothing to the relief theory of comedy, which he explains, in a modulation of Kant’s terms, as a situation in which ‘something is shown to be equivalent to nothing, something is shown to have been nothing, all along’. A funnier example of such comedy is Swift’s ‘On the Day of Judgement’. At the end of this poem, Jove addresses those ‘who in different sects have shammed | And come to see each other damned’, declares theological speculation regarding the afterlife to have been nothing, and dismisses all with the cry that marks the end of a practical joke: ‘Go, go you’re bit.’24 This is the relief theory of the apocalypse. Not quite universal darkness covering all, and governed by a different kind of impatience, it is nevertheless an apocalyptic fantasy of historical erasure. Indeed, humour that relies on ‘relief ’ is particularly well suited to put a stop to speculation of all kinds. Its comedy emanates from the cutting off of speculation, or the post-facto re-categorisation of the plausible as the absurdly conjectural. The South Sea Bubble, like the apocalypse, is revelatory. In the most straightforward sense, the strained expectations of investors bitten or bubbled into getting in and out of South Sea shares too late were reduced to nothing, or something close to it.25 But Connor’s account of the relief theory of comedy, Swift’s poem, and the conservative critique of credit finance all show us that this is not just about the rise and fall in value, but the separation and confluence of historical and counterhistorical narratives. 24

The Complete Poems, ed. Pat Rogers (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 507. For a contemporary articulation of this see Anon., A New-Year’s-Gift for the Directors (London, 1721), p. 27.

25

The Indifference of Number 151

What is revealed is the perception that what one had supposed to have been happening had not been happening at all. Something is shown to be equivalent to nothing, or erased. Strained expectation is not reduced to nothing, but ‘something is shown to have been nothing, all along’. The present perfect tense here and in Swift’s poem (‘have shammed’) is important, indicating that the transformation is and has been an illusion. History doesn’t matter. Or, rather, it turns out that history has not been mattering, all along. What is revealed by the crash, or by Jove’s declaration, is the continued but hitherto unfelt presence of an alternative but ‘real’ history, in which shillings were but shillings. Religious conflict has been a waste of time, has had no impact on nor borne any relation to the march of history (or, as Swift puts it, ‘Jove’s designs’).26 The piece of paper worth £1000 one day and barely anything the next was just a piece of paper, all along. The parabola of comedy meets the straight line of history without having made any appreciable difference.27

Essentialism and blame ‘Anti-metaphor’ is the term Pat Rogers uses to describe the insistent literalising tendency of Swift’s poem on the 1720 crash, ‘Upon the South Sea Project’. Like the comedy of relief, it is a technique that cuts through speculation. For Rogers, the process is ‘a reversal of the primal poetic urge, substituting the literal for the symbolic, the tenor for the vehicle’.28 The literalising puns that litter the poem are a way for Swift to turn nothing into something, an inversion of credit finance’s dematerialising effects. They also connect with the way Swift draws on the tradition of anti-Catholic satire in order to highlight the theatricality of the South Sea Bubble. This tradition is useful to Swift because of the way it spreads the culpability for the persistence of ‘popery’ evenly between conniving priests and the pathologically gullible laity. Near the opening of the poem, Swift adopts the

26

Poems, ed. Rogers, p. 507. On the comic structure of the Dutch compendium of texts on the 1720 bubbles, Het groote tafareel, see Frans de Bruyn, ‘Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid and its Readers, Then and Now’ in Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly, pp. 21–2, pp. 26–7. 28 Pat Rogers, ‘Plunging in the Southern Waves: The Idiom of Swift’s Poem on the Bubble’ in Documenting Eighteenth Century Satire: Pope, Swift, Gay and Arbuthnot in Historical Context (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2012), p. 184. 27

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voice of a street entertainer encouraging people to drop their money into the ‘Southern Main’: Put in your Money fairly told; Presto be gone – ‘Tis here agen: Ladies, and Gentlemen, behold, Here’s ev’ry Piece as big as Ten Thus in a Basin drop a Shilling, Then fill the Vessel to the Brim; You shall observe, as you are filling, The pond’rous Metal seems to swim: It rises both in Bulk and Height, Behold it mounting to the Top; The liquid Medium cheats your Sight, Behold it swelling like a Sop.

In this account of the ‘conversion’ of hard cash into South Sea stock, Swift adopts the voice of a cauldron-stirring mountebank: ‘Presto be gone – ’Tis here agen’; ‘You shall observe’; ‘Behold it mounting’; ‘Behold it swelling’. That voice, and the context of a laughably false transformation, recalls John Oldham’s Satyr on the Jesuits, and particularly its lampooning of the Eucharist: …nothing with the Crowd does more enhance The value of these holy Charlatans, Than when the Wonders of the Mass they view, Where spiritual Jugglers their chief Mast’ry shew: Hey Jingo, Sirs! What’s this? ’tis Bread you see; Presto be gone! ’tis now a Deity. Two grains of Dough, with Cross, and stamp of Priest, And five small words pronounc’d, make up their Christ. To this they all fall down, this all adore, And strait devour, what they ador’d before; Down goes the tiny Saviour at a bit, To be digested, and at length beshit: From Altar to Close Stool or Jakes preferr’d, First Wafer, next a God, and then a [turd] ’Tis this, that does th’astonish’d Rout amuse, And Reverence to shaven Crown infuse:

The Indifference of Number 153 To see a silly, sinful, mortal Wight His Maker make, create the Infinite.29

It may be coincidental that Swift’s lines end by comparing the apparent increase in size of the submerged shilling to the swelling of a sop of bread in water, and that Oldham’s describe the expansion of two grains of dough into the infinite. Yet both Swift and Oldham are describing things that didn’t happen, acknowledging that they looked rather like things that did happen, and showing why they did not, by adhering rigidly to material consequences. The scatological transubstantiation of the wafer, like the sinking of gold or falling of Icarus elsewhere in Swift’s poem, is a mechanical consequence of ingesting the (figurative) Godhead. Unlike credit finance, these downward movements, impelled by gravitation, peristalsis, or both, are processes that can be explained as kinds of linear causation. Oldham makes what scholastic theologians called the ‘accidents’ of bread and wine in the sacrament consequential, or central, and, contrary to Catholic doctrine, the only qualities substantially changed in the process.30 Read in parallel with Swift’s lines, the ‘stamp[ed]’ Eucharistic host starts to resemble currency. In both cases, the satire works to strip away the symbolic or token value of the objects in view – a Eucharistic host is simply a sop of bread, and (as Swift goes on to affirm) a coin is simply a piece of inert metal. Tokens are thought of not as tokens but as things-in-themselves, substantially unchangeable. The transubstantiation pretended to have taken place by the Catholic priest is abhorrent as an attempt to make the maker, inverting cause and effect, and confining the infinite in a piece of bread. This is quite the transformation of value, and analogous to the mooted illogic of a piece of paper having (theoretically) boundless worth. The impudence of attempts to ‘create the Infinite’ resembles the outrage at the scale of the South Sea director’s ambitions, and the horribly absurd equivalence of number revealed by the crisis. The fiat of the Catholic priest (‘…five small words pronounc’d, make up their Christ’) echoes the effect of Swift’s sacramental ‘basin’, and the mountebank’s own fiat (‘Presto be gone – ‘Tis here again’). In both poems the ‘transformation’ is exposed as an effect of language; not miraculous, but fabulous. Swift’s poem is unrelenting in its essentialism. Just as a shilling is always worth a shilling, so deception is always deception, regardless of how it is 29

John Oldham, Satyrs upon the Jesuits written in the year 1679 (London, 1681), pp. 92–3. 30 OED, accident, n. I. 1. A. Accidents are ‘those non-essential, material qualities which remain unchanged in the sacramental bread and wine after transubstantiation’.

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packaged. The poem declares for a moral essentialism, too, or a straightforward relationship between action and consequence. A Shilling in the Bath you fling, The Silver takes a nobler Hue, By Magick Virtue in the Spring, And seems a Guinea to your View: But as a Guinea will not pass At Market for a Farthing more, Shewn thro a multiplying Glass, Than what it always did before; So cast it in the Southern Seas, And view it through a Jobber’s Bill; Put on what Spectacles you Please, Your Guinea’s but a Guinea still.

In both Swift and Oldham there is an acknowledgement that there is something corrupt and persuasive and theatrical going on in either Catholic mass or stock jobbing. However, both poets steamroller complexity. A guinea is a guinea still. A wafer is a wafer, and if there is any transformation at all, it is straightforwardly digestive. The complex of market forces and conflicting intentions behind the South Sea Bubble is resolved in Swift’s poem into a straightforward narrative, and one familiar from popular antiCatholic discourse: the mystery of transubstantiation, like the mystery of arcana imperii, is simply a performance, and relatively easily punctured by ‘common sense’. Both Swift and Oldham are using the theatricality of financial crisis or transubstantiation to castigate company directors or priests for their ill-doings, at the same time as laughing at the gulls who were taken in by them. This has the advantage of making the directors seem both blameworthy and insignificant, only capable of fooling fools. Just as anti-Catholic discourse flip-flops between castigating deceptive Jesuits and chortling at their victims, so there is a back and forth in responses to the South Sea Bubble where blame shifts from particular persons to an amorphous crowd composed of greedy, luxurious, immoral, dim-witted, and near-sighted people.

The Indifference of Number 155

Arcana and Alchemy, Curtains and Screens Like the incorrigibility of the absolutist monarch’s arcana imperii, the resistance of credit finance to rational causal explanation is read as a deliberate ruse or distraction, a courting of incorrigibility. According to ‘An Englishman’, the ‘proceedings’ of the directors ‘have been fenc’d and guarded with such subtlety and Precaution, that Presumptions and leading Circumstances can only reach them’.31 Likewise, ‘Frauds and Injuries have been too subtly couch’d for the Statute-Law either to overtake or redress them’.32 James Milner accuses the French Mississippi Company of deliberate and instrumental obfuscation: ‘their Affairs were such an Arcanum, that the Wit of Man could not Fathom: Their Dividends were to be nothing but Paper; which they may coin ad Infinitum: So that whether they made Profit or no, they could pay what Dividends they pleased.’33 He speaks of the South Sea Company’s proposals in the same terms, introducing another already-debunked transformative process alongside the term ‘Arcanum’: I could not for my Life find out how thirty one Millions at Five and Four per Cent. and the long Annuities to be purchased in at above Par, by being only transfer’d from the Exchequer to the South-Sea, should be worth three times the Money they were worth in the hands of the Government. This I found was a Mystery that Figures were incapable of demonstrating; it’s an Arcanum that nothing but the Philosopher’s stone can make out, by turning whatever they touch into Gold.34

There is a gap here – the arcanum – in the causal chain of the narrative: that unexplained threefold jump in value. The mystery seems ‘unaccountable’ because it appears to go beyond number, being incapable of demonstration by figures. Crucially, the resolution of that unaccountability is not achieved by way of direct divine intervention, but a ‘miracle’ that was widely understood amongst this pamphlet’s intended readership as a sham: alchemy. The philosopher’s stone stands here not for magical efficacy but incompetence and chicanery disguised by sleight of hand and jargon. Another pamphlet,

31

Anon. [‘An Englishman’], Francis, Lord Bacon, or, the Case of Private and National Corruption, and Bribery, Impartially Consider’d (London, 1721), p. 53. 32 Ibid., p. 57. 33 James Milner, A Visit to the South-Sea Company and the Bank (London, 1720), p. 27. 34 Ibid., p. 26.

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The Battle of the Bubbles, trades Milner’s faux naiveté for an extended satirical allegory, but we end up in the same place: There was a committee of Magic Establish’d, whereby Mens Senses and Reason were both to be impos’d on; Black was to be White; Two and Two prov’d never able to make Four; nay, that a Pepper-Corn should soon produce an Oak-Tree. They had a Committee also, De propaganda Fide, who were the worst Rogues and Inchanters amongst them, and who, by the Use of Spells and Charms, cou’d make them believe any thing; as, that Brass was better than Silver; and a Bit of paper, with a Magical Seal to it, would produce an Immensity of Gold, only by keeping it a while in your Pocket.35

The two committees – of magic, and the propagation of the faith (De propaganda Fide) – divide their responsibilities in service of the South Sea Company’s aims. The former takes care of disrupting logic in ways familiar from other kinds of ‘world-turned-upside-down’ political writing, disruptions of natural order and the mathematical laws that, in the Newtonian universe, governed it.36 The latter committee (De propaganda Fide) is responsible for the recruitment of followers, and again we encounter an anti-Catholic overlay: the title alludes to the department of the Vatican founded in 1622 by Pope Gregory in order to oversee the church’s missions. Like the Catholic Church, it is suggested, this organisation ‘converted’ new followers through reliance on sham miracles (miracles of transformation, like the Eucharist). The committee De propaganda Fide produces believers by relying or playing on credulity. The ‘miracle’ here, however, is already acknowledged to be a discursive achievement – the committee do not pretend to actually convert brass into gold by virtue of a piece of paper, but merely ‘make them believe’ that such a thing will come to pass, encouraging a suspension of disbelief that obtains just long enough for them to get rich. Religious conversion melds with currency conversion. These allusions to alchemy, the no-popery rhetoric of the 1680s, and arcana imperii are markedly nostalgic or old-fashioned responses to what elsewhere is seen as a damaging innovation. The essentialism of Swift’s poem, Milner’s pamphlet, and the Battle of the Bubbles sees credit finance not as a change in the functioning of economic value, but a kind of spurious overlay. It is a means of undercutting the perceived unprecedentedness of the South Sea crash, 35

Anon. [‘a Stander-By’], The Battle of the Bubbles (London, 1720), pp. 37–8. On the invocation of Newtonian physics in writing on the bubble, see Sheehan and Wahrman, Invisible Hands, pp. 103–10.

36

The Indifference of Number 157

making it intelligible by citing precedents taken from popular political culture, precedents that have deceptive performance at their heart. These theatrical undertones are useful to propagandists because credulity – or belief – is built into the fabric of speculative investing, and because a stock market crash is the consequence of the sudden reduction of a strained expectation to nothing, a failure of plausibility (or in Sheehan and Wahrman’s phrase, a ‘crisis of causality’ (p. 110)). When investors bought South Sea stock with a view of selling it on at a profit, they bought into an optimistic view of the future in which indebtedness or liability could be transferred, consequence delayed. That optimism is the very thing that drives the bubble. It is inflated by credulity, and it bursts at the moment when that narrative of the future becomes unsustainably implausible. As in the theatre, credulity feigned or otherwise actively maintains the fiction under which audiences or investors are operating. It is a kind of collaboration. And, like the failure of dramatic illusion that might occur when watching a (naturalistic) piece of theatre (someone forgetting their lines, or falling over, or a prop malfunction), the bursting of a financial bubble exposes the fictional basis of a speculative economy. In 1721, the boys of Bury St Edmund’s Grammar School mounted a performance of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist. Major Richardson Pack, a retired serviceman and poet who had recently acquired the town’s abbey, wrote a prologue for the play and published it in The Weekly Journal: or, British Gazeteer for 16 December 1721, that date suggesting that the play was part of end of term festivities.37 The Alchemist was also staged four times in October and November 1721 at Drury Lane, its first outing since 1713.38 It is not difficult to imagine the motivations for staging this play at this time, a play in which three characters (Subtle, Face and Doll) go about tricking various citizens out of their money by pretending to be working towards discovering the philosopher’s stone in order to produce gold. If anything, it is surprising it was not staged sooner or more often. Pack’s prologue is not coy about this amateur revival’s relevance and political thrust, opening by describing the ‘Plenteous Crop’ of ‘Knaves and Fools’ in ‘Old Surly Ben[’s]’ 37

The poem also appears in Pack’s A new collection of miscellanies in prose and verse (London, 1725), pp. 48–50 (this publication gives the date and location of the performance), and there is an MS version in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (pr. bk. Firth b. 22, fol. 22).   38 The performances are on 25, 26, 27 October and 22 November (see Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., ed., Index to the London Stage, 1660–1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ., c. 1979), p. 468). The London Stage identifies Pack’s prologue as being written for this performance (part 2, vol. 2, p. 643).

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time, knaves and fools that were, in contradistinction to those of 1721, ‘content with moderate gain’. However, the times had changed: The Poet had he liv’d to see this Age, Has brought Sublimer Villains on the Stage; Our Knaves sin higher Now than those of Old, Kingdoms, not Private Men, are Bought and Sold, Witness the South Sea project, which hath shown How far Pihlosophers [sic.] may be out-done By Modern St – sm – n that have found the Stone. Well might it take it’s [sic.] Title from the Main, That Rose so swift and Sunk so soon again; Fools have always been Bit by artful Lyes, But here the Cautious were deceiv’d and wise, And yet, in these Flagitious Monstrous Times, The Knaves detected Triumph in their Crimes, Wallow in Wealth, have all things at Command, And Brave the Vengeance of an Injur’d Land 39

While Pack emphasises a change in the degree of corruption (knaves, or Statesmen, sin higher now) and the extent of its reach (to Kings, Ministers, the cautious and the wise), the import of this prologue and the staging of a century-old play is that there is no difference in the kind of knavery on display. Pack makes explicit Milner’s implication of the previous year, that the ‘arcanum’ here is, straightforwardly, political corruption. The prologue encourages the audience to use Jonson’s play to think of fluctuations in stock value as theatrical-rhetorical tricks. There are a number of reasons why The Alchemist is a useful play to achieve this end, the chief being structural. The action is managed by Jonson, and nearly mismanaged by the characters, in such a way that plot slides into plot as different gulls descend in quick succession on the house. This kind of compression demands frequent and rapid role (and often costume) changes, which means that the audience are privileged with a ‘backstage’ view.40 This is inside-out, monitory theatre that capitalises on troubling the suspension of disbelief. Like a 39

‘An Epilogue spoke to a Play call’d the Alchymist’ in The Weekly Journal: or British Gazeteer, Saturday 16 December 1721. Italics inverted; turned type in ‘Cautions’ corrected. 40 On the use of space in The Alchemist see Henry Turner, The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics and the Practical Spatial Arts (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2006), p. 271, and John Shanahan, ‘Ben Jonson’s Alchemist and Early Modern

The Indifference of Number 159

financial crash, The Alchemist alerts the audience to the fictional nature of the world they (and not just the characters) operate in by exposing the mechanics of performance. Additionally, especially in its first performances at Blackfriars theatre, the play uses that disruption of dramatic illusion as a further screen, distracting the audience from their own victimisation, having paid good money to see nothing happen (and even to be shown that it had been nothing, all along).41 Pack’s prologue invites the victims of the South Sea Bubble to see the knaves pulling the strings behind what seemed like a ‘magical’ increase in the value of South Sea stock. Imagining how audiences responded to this revival, or how it was staged, is a risky kind of speculation, but certain episodes in the play do resonate with the anxieties triggered by the financial crisis. For instance, Epicure Mammon, who expects the philosopher’s stone to be delivered into his hands, illustrates the morally damaging effects of equivalence. The exchange below comes at the end of a long series of speeches delivered to the sceptic Surly, in which Mammon lists all of the worldly goods that the philosopher’s stone will bring him: MAMMON. My shirts I’ll haue of taffata-sarsnet, soft, and light As cob-webs; and for all my other rayment It shall be such, as might prouoke the Persian; Were he to teach the world riot, a new. My gloues of fishes, and birds-skins, perfum’d With gummes of paradise, and easterne aire – – SURLY. And do you thinke to haue the stone, with this? MAMMON. No, I doe thinke, t’haue all this, with the stone. SURLY. Why, I haue heard, he must be homo frugi, A pious, holy, and religious man, One free from mortall sinne, a very virgin. MAMMON. That makes it, sir, he is so. But I buy it. My venter brings it me. He, honest wretch,

Laboratory Space’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 8.1 (2008), pp. 35–66, p. 55. 41 For a reading of The Alchemist as a trick played upon its original audiences, see R. L. Smallwood, ‘Here, in the Friars’: Immediacy and Theatricality in The Alchemist’, RES 32 (1981), pp. 142–60. Shanahan also sees the audience as dupes. ‘After all,’ he writes ‘we have paid admission to watch [Face] do his work, and will return home again with nothing but the memory of words and actions’ (p. 53). With thanks to Emily Derbyshire for sharing her expertise on Jonson.

160 Speculations A notable, superstitious, good soule, Has worne his knees bare, and his slippers bald, With prayer, and fasting for it: and, sir, let him Do it alone, for me, still. (2.2.88–105)42

That excellent pair of lines – ‘And do  you  thinke  to  haue  the  stone, with this?’ ‘No, I doe thinke, t’haue all this, with the stone’ – enacts syntactically the ‘crisis of causality’ perceived in the wake of the bubble, as means (living a pious, holy, religious life) are subordinated to ends (the possession of ‘all this’), and the knee- and slipper-wearing labour of virtue is alienated. Mammon’s ‘corruption’ of the supposedly sacred alchemical process is also a replacement of the diachronic – the alchemist works hard to become homo frugi, and is therefore rewarded with the philosopher’s stone and its powers – with the synchronic – the alchemist is homo frugi, and Mammon reaps the reward through his ‘venter’, or speculation. Consequence is bent into coincidence. In Surly’s line, ‘this’, i.e. Mammon’s projected luxurious lifestyle, is a cause that should have an effect: disqualification. Mammon’s revision shatters the causal relationship between ‘all this’ and ‘the stone’, insisting that their simultaneity and adjacency makes them equivalent. The exploitation of Subtle (the ‘alchemist’) as a surrogate is a dislocation of moral cause and effect, and its equation of virtue with money through exchange should provoke in the audience – especially that of 1721 – something like the abhorrence of the synechdochical transformation of landed estates into diamond pendants found in Bond’s poem, above. The inventory preceding these lines illustrates Mammon’s desire, in Pack’s phrase, to ‘have all things at Command’, and its excessive enumeration of goods and services is a more straightforward sign that what is happening here (as in Bond’s poem) is what Connor calls the ‘assertion of the purely quantical against the world of quality’.43 We should bear in mind, too, that the implication of Pack’s prologue is that the knaves in 1721 succeeded where Sir Epicure Mammon failed. The ways in which The Alchemist, like many early modern comedies, reveals the fluidity and constructedness of social identity also intersects with the concern in the 1720s regarding exchange’s effect on social hierarchies and identity itself – both in terms of personhood, and, as we will see in the next chapter, epistemology.44 According to Lawrence Danson, 42

C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson (eds), The Works of Ben Jonson, Vol. 5: Volpone; Epicoene; The Alchemist; Catiline, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), pp. 320–1. 43 Connor, p. 148. 44 The effect of exchange on identity is picked up by Elias Bockett in The Yea and Nay

The Indifference of Number 161 in Jonson’s comedies we see what the sociologist sees, that ‘All social reality is precarious. All societies are constructions in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse’.45

For Danson, such a revelation is both horrifying and funny (‘like the coyote in the cartoon, the social self treads air’ (ibid)). In this respect anomic terror is not unlike financial crisis, resembling the horror and the comedy of losing count brought about, for Connor, by the indifference of number. The staging of The Alchemist in 1721 is the product of a line of anti-finance thinking that reveals the inflation of stock value to be not miraculous but fabulous, insists on intention rather than random chance as the engine of those fluctuations, but refuses to entirely absolve victims of culpability for the scale of the disaster. Other responses to the crisis that invoke theatre are more pointed in their assignment of blame. One contemporary playing card (fig. 5) depicts an investor standing in a room with a curtain drawn across a window holding a rope attached to a wall, with which he considers hanging himself, saying, ‘If South Sea is 160 [i.e. if the value falls] this Rope must pay ye difference’. The verse caption reads: A Thriving Gamester quits his Box and Dice, And with his ready Money South Sea Buys; But loosing all, he Storms and Curses fortune And Damns the Rogues that lurks behind the Curtain

In those last two lines responsibility narrows in from the allegorical ‘Fortune’ to the more precisely located rogue behind the curtain, moving from the general (financial crisis is mysterious, unaccountable, governed by fortune, or chance) to the particular (someone hidden nearby is pulling strings). The identity of these rogues remains unclear. Like an absolutist tyrant, a Catholic queen in labour, or a fake alchemist, they are partially obscured, or veiled. That there is someone lurking behind a curtain also Stockjobbers, (London, 1720), where ‘Courtiers, Merchants, Mob and Citizens | […] Jew and Gentile, Saint and Sinner, | Tory and Whig, Monsieur and Mynheer, | Promiscuous deal’ (p. 6). For a more familiar and more positive account of the effect of exchange on identity, see Addison’s essay in Spectator no. 69. 45 Lawrence Danson, ‘Jonsonian Comedy and the Discovery of the Social Self ’, PMLA 99 (1984), pp. 179–93. Danson is quoting the sociologists Berger and Luckmann.

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Fig. 5. Three of Spades, South Sea Bubble playing cards. London: Printed for Carington Bowles, 1721. Bancroft Collection, Kress Collection of Business and Economics, Baker Library, Harvard Business School.

The Indifference of Number 163

brings the stage to mind, and, perhaps via Hamlet’s Polonius, implications of surveillance. The discovery of the Wizard of Oz behind his screen is one analogue, but this trope also picks up on contemporary political discourse. As we have seen with The Alchemist, to see ‘behind the curtain’ – behind theatrical representation – is to puncture the suspension of disbelief, and that revelation might be said to be both the cause and the effect of financial disaster. What is revealed for some, however, is chicanery not just financial but political. Robert Walpole’s deft management of the fallout from the South Sea crash played no small part in his rise to power, an elevation helped along by his endeavours to ‘screen’ ministers and members of the court from prosecution for corruption, eventually earning him the soubriquets ‘the screen’ and ‘skreenmaster general’.46 ‘The prevailing Candidate, or the ELECTION carried by Bribery and the Devil’, an opposition print from 1722 (fig. 6), elaborates on this theme. Here a court Whig ‘Minion’ at the centre of the image slips money into the pocket of an influential local in order to swing an election, while his less amenable wife looks the other way, distracted by a corrupt priest. The devil over the local man’s shoulder urges him to take the bribe. In the accompanying explanatory verse, the minion’s ‘Prodigal Show’, or performative verve, is seen as proof that ‘To the Court he is truly affected’, further evidence of the transference of the characteristics of ‘papists’ over to stockjobbing and court Whiggery in the 1720s: this Minion adopts the role played by Leviathan in A Ra-ree Show. Indeed, that repurposing of ‘Old Whig’ rhetoric continues. Two boys stand in the foreground, in front of the screen which partially covers this malpractice, but behind which both they and viewer can see. They brandish chains and ‘French wooden brogues’, the symbols of popery, tyranny, and slavery. ‘For such Traitors as you,’ they say, addressing the ‘Rogues’ behind the screen, ‘are the Rascally Crew | That betrays the whole Kingdom to Slav’ry.’ The screen itself is divided into seven panels, each corresponding to a year between 1715 and 1721. Three of these are marked with court 46

As one Jacobite ballad has it: ‘One Man [John Aislabie, Chancellor of the Exchequer] a Rogue, shall voted be, | and sent unto the Tower; | But then a greater Rogue than he, | Is honest call’d next Hour. | Ye Men of Sense, pray learn from hence, | Ne’er quarrel ’bout a Name, | Since it is seen, Walp-le and Screen, | In Greek are both the same.’ (A New Ballad. To the Tune of Hey Boys up go we ([London], [1721], half-sheet broadside). Aislabie was expelled from the house in March 1721; Walpole was named first Lord of the Treasury on 3 April, following a robust defence of his erstwhile rival the Earl of Sunderland (see W. A. Speck, Matthew Kilburn, ‘Promoters of the South Sea Bubble (act. 1720)’, in ODNB. For a satirical print depicting Walpole’s ‘screen’, see Goetzmann et al, The Great Mirror of Folly, p. 163.

164 Speculations

Fig. 6. Anon., The Prevailing Candidate, or the Election carried by Bribery and the Devil ([London], [ca. 1721], British Museum, London.

Whig parliamentary acts: in 1716, the Septennial Act and the repeal of the Act of Settlement’s residence provision (enabling George I’s controversial sojourns in Hanover). The final panel, 1721, refers to the ‘Quarantine Act’, a response to the Marseilles plague that opponents of the government thought draconian.47 Most significantly, the penultimate panel, for 1720, bears the inscriptions ‘South Sea Act’ (6 Geo. I, c. 4), approving the company’s scheme, and ‘Act to Indemnify S[outh] S[ea] V[illains]’ (7 Geo. I, 47

The act made provision for enforced confinement of sick and healthy persons, and to ‘cut off the Communication’ from infected towns or cities with trenches or ‘lines’. See A compleat collection of the protests of the Lords during this last session of parliament (London, 1722), pp. 6–7, and Edmund Gibson, The causes of the discontents, In Relation to the Plague (London, 1721).

The Indifference of Number 165

stat. 2, c. 1), which wrote off the £4,000,000 due to the Exchequer for the privilege of transforming the National Debt granted to the company (as had been stipulated in 6 Geo. I, c. 4). This print explicitly links corrupt political practices, court Whig legislation, and the South Sea Company. It does so by pretending to lift the veil between the public and those in power, by showing us the rogues behind the curtain. But the curtain itself is important too. The screen’s 1720 panel, its captions narrating the indifferent transformation of something (£4,000,000) into nothing, suggests that it is not just the fact of self-interested legislation such as the Septennial Act that is at issue here, but the counterhistorical method of the court Whigs, who deliberately offer the public something – 6. Geo I, c. 4 – that was really nothing, and that would eventually prove so to have been all along. In chapter one it was argued that the ‘draping’ of the Mary of Modena during childbirth, or the closed lid of the warming-pan, were kinds of obscurity that enabled and maintained the opposition’s campaign. The blanket covering the queen served in that episode as a kind of externalisation of the illegibility of paternity in the early modern period. Transferring that incorrigibility to a blanket or warming-pan helps the propagandists because it imbues circumstance with intention: blankets and warmingpans are things that can be manipulated, barriers that might deliberately have been placed between the royal household and the people. The incorrigibility is not found, they insist, but made – and made by the Stuart court. The propaganda needs these physical screens to function. What seems like a means of obscuration actually brings clarity to their arguments. The same is true of the screen erected in this print, and more generally of the readings of the South Sea Bubble or credit finance as cod-alchemy or theatrical performance. These writers are boiling down the incorrigibility of the financial markets – their resistance to explanation by way of linear causation – to as simple a form as they can, so they can give some direction to these phenomena that seem to work by themselves and identify those agents who are supposedly misdirecting the public. Exploring the work of George Berkeley and Bernard de Mandeville, the next chapter pursues the connection of court Whig instrumentality with freethinking and stockjobbing, and this imposition of diachronic direction on the synchronic immediacy of financial exchange.

Chapter 6

‘Some Convenient Order’: Mandeville, Berkeley, and the Narration of Ethical Exchange

T

he association of court Whigs with stockjobbing is enabled by a sensed connection between the troubling equivalence of imaginary property, and what is seen as a pernicious moral and epistemological relativism: the privileging of ends over means. These anxieties are bound up with the critiques of ‘freethinking’ in the early eighteenth century. Thinking about them in relation to this financial crisis reveals the historiographical dimension of both freethinking and the attempts to bring it to order. Bernard de Mandeville became a figurehead for the amorality associated with court Whigs. His most infamous work, The Fable of the Bees, is not about the South Sea Bubble in any straightforward sense, but it is dragged into the fray in its aftermath. The Fable first appeared in 1705 as The Grumbling Hive, an extended allegory in verse that declared that the private vices of the subject (avarice, prodigality, lust, and especially luxury) were actually beneficial to the commonwealth, stimulating manufacture and industry. In 1714, Mandeville published another edition of the poem, with new and extensive explanatory remarks on almost all of its lines. It is for these remarks – and not the ‘story told in Dogrel’ – that the text is remembered today, for it is here that Mandeville stakes out his political economics. The events of 1720 and the increased concentration on the ethics of investment gave new relevance to his theories, or made them more provocative. The 1723 reissue of The Fable led to an indictment by the Middlesex Grand Jury.1 For evidence that Mandeville was associated with the Bubble, we can return to William Bond’s poem on the crisis:

1

See W. A. Speck, ‘Bernard Mandeville and the Middlesex Grand Jury’, EighteenthCentury Studies 11 (1978), pp. 362–74.

168 Speculations Since as light Quibbling pass’d for Sterling Sense Folly, that Vice may stand in its Defence, Called Vices Virtues in its Venal Rhimes, And turn’d Illustrious Virtues into Crimes2

These lines link a perceived immorality propagated by Mandeville’s political economics with the corrupt trade in imaginary property, a manipulation of value that led in turn to a corruption of language and the arts, making vice and virtue equivalent. Bond expresses horror at the idea that ‘fortune’ – as in both luck or outcome, and wealth – could ‘ligitimate [sic] deceit’ (p. 3). For him, Mandeville’s thought was either a contributing cause of the South Sea Bubble, or symptomatic of a raft of moral and political errors associated with the Hanoverian administration. Importantly, this attack on Mandeville’s philosophy comes in a poem intended to discredit the court Whigs, and dedicated to the Prince of Wales, who was becoming a figurehead of the opposition. Mandeville is cast as an instrument of the court Whigs, and an apologist for their venality. However, it is the freethinking basis of such assertions that made him seem dangerous, and it is the indifference of freethinking to received wisdom and moral and political institutions that makes the association of The Fable of the Bees and financial crisis useful for propagandists like Bond. Mandeville’s moral relativity is unapologetic, unflinching, often deliberately mischievous, and Hobbesian: ‘things are only Good and Evil in reference to something else, and according to the Light and Position they are placed in.’3 Accused by conservative critics of enabling an instrumental and amoral politics, he himself insists on the instrumentality of ethics itself: ‘the first rudiments of Morality, broach’d by skilfull Politicians [...] were chiefly contriv’d; that the Ambitious might reap the more Benefit from, and govern vast Numbers of them with greater Ease and Security.’4 The mischief lies in Mandeville’s selection of illustrations. Because he is generally attempting to convince people of the equivalence of things usually supposed to be in hierarchical relationships, pointing out the contingency if not arbitrariness of those hierarchies, he has to affect a kind of indifference to the examples 2

Hugh Stanhope, An Epistle to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, p. 3. Bernard de Mandeville, The fable of the bees: or, Private vices, publick benefits, ed. F. B. Kaye, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1924), I.367. Hobbes: ‘…whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill.’ (Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2004), p. 24). 4 Fable, I.46. 3

‘Some Convenient Order’ 169

he selects, as if anything will do. As well he knows, however, such indifference is precisely what people will find provocative. The following instance is indicative: Honour in its Figurative sense is a Chimera without Truth or being, an Invention of Moralists and politicians, and signifies a certain principle of virtue not related to Religion, found in some Men that keeps ‘em close to their Duty and Engagements whatever they be; as for Example, a Man of Honour enters into a Conspiracy with others to murder a king; he is obliged to go thorough Stitch with it, and if overcome by Remorse or good Nature, he startles at the Enormity of his Purpose, discovers the Plot, and turns a Witness against his Accomplices, he then forfeits his Honour, at least among the party he belonged to.5

That there is honour even amongst thieves is proverbial wisdom, but Mandeville did not have to go to criminals for his illustration. He does so because rather than serving as an illustration of the ubiquity of honour (it is found even amongst criminals) it enables him to imply an equivalence between honourable thieves and honourable anyone-else – say, politicians or bishops – without quite having to say, as Gay later implied in The Beggar’s Opera, that bishops and politicians operate under a moral code that is structurally identical to that of thieves. The relativism of Fable of the Bees is not just moral, however. This becomes clear in Mandeville’s discussion of ‘the Reality of the pulchrum and honestum [...] that the Ancients have talk’d of so much’. The question at hand is ‘whether there be a real Worth and Excellency in things, a preeminence of one above another’; Mandeville is mounting a critique of essentialism. He acknowledges the centrality of this critique to his work in its introduction, where he says it is undertaken ‘[t]he better to perform what I have undertaken previously’.6 For Mandeville, essential meaning is an illusion. Rather, ‘what men have learned from their Infancy enslaves them, and the Force of Custom warps nature, and at the same time imitates her in such a manner, that it is often difficult to know which of the two we are influenced by’.7 The evidence for Mandeville’s denial of essentialism is that different things are valued by different people across time and space, and according to particular customs (or prejudices):

5

Ibid., I.198. Ibid., I.324. 7 Ibid., I.329. 6

170 Speculations The Value that is set on Paintings depends not only on the Name of the Master and the Time of his Age he drew them in, but likewise in a great measure on the Scarcity of his Works, and what is still more unreasonable, the Quality of the Persons in whose possession they are, as well as the length of Time they have been in great Families.8

Aesthetic value is explained away economically, and the purely quantical takes the place of qualities. But Mandeville is not a philosopher troubled by anomic terror. He is much more likely to see the funny side, and seems to revel in its capacity to steamroll distinctions. Again, mischief is evident in the concatenation of his examples: ‘How whimsical is the florist in his choice!’ he exclaims (now preferring tulips, now auriculas). Sometimes, he goes on to say, it is fashionable for men to wear beards, and at other times ridiculous.9 Then, almost in the same breath: Which is the best Religion? Is a Question that has caused more Mischief than all other Questions together. Ask it at Peking, at Constantinople, and at Rome, and you’ll receive three different Answers extremely different from one another, yet all of them equally positive and peremptory.10

One positive and peremptory answer to Mandeville came from the High Church Anglican William Law. It is not a sophisticated deconstruction of The Fable, nor is it a convincing rebuttal. Importantly, though, it isolates the Dutchman’s relativism as the root of the treatise’s evils. Law is resolutely essentialist. Morality has one origin, and that origin is God. ‘[I]t is absolutely impossible’, fumes Law, ‘for you to shew that there was any such Nation, free from all impressions of Religion and Morality. This you can no more do, than you can shew that all the World are not descended from Adam.’11 That Law could not really prove that all the world were descended from Adam might be objected by a modern reader, but he invokes the authority of scripture in order to insist on Mandeville’s freethinking atheism. The cleric makes his position on the relation of esse and percipi quite clear at an early stage:

8

Ibid., I.326. Ibid., I.327–8. 10 Ibid., I.331. 11 William Law, Remarks upon a late book, entituled, The fable of the bees, or private vices, publick benefits. In a letter to the author (London, 1724), p. 11. 9

‘Some Convenient Order’ 171 As things are different by their own proper Natures, independent of our Wills, so Actions have their own peculiar Qualities from themselves, and not from our Thoughts about them. In these immutable Qualities of Actions, is founded, the fitness and reasonableness of them, which we can no more alter, than we can change the Proportions or Relations of Lines and Figures.

On Mandeville’s take on the ‘pulchrum and honestum’, Law is equally unflinching. One problem with Law’s answer is that he seems to think that Mandeville will be troubled, philosophically, by his pointing out of the obvious. ‘Now,’ he writes, the Religion of our Country tells us, that God is Truth, and the Devil the Author of Lies […] And if I should ask you why one should be worshipp’d rather than the other, I should puzzle your profound Philosophy, as much as if I ask’d you which was the finest Flower; for you cannot tell me that one of these is really good, and the other really evil, and yet maintain, that there is no real Goodness in Truth, nor any real Evil in Lies.

Law seems to think he has caught Mandeville in a contradiction, but that would only be the case if Mandeville had argued that ‘one of these was really good’ at the same time as propounding his relativist epistemology. He does no such thing. Attacking Mandeville as an atheist by implication does no damage to the integrity of his argument, and one can imagine that philosopher simply shrugging his shoulders at Law’s attack, but it remains indicative of the conservative (Tory and Country) reaction to The Fable.12 Cato’s Letters offer an instructive comparison here, for in Trenchard and Gordon’s oppositional periodical essays one finds an oddly limited relativism, which might be said to fall into the kind of contradiction that Law wished upon Mandeville. That contradiction arises from the hybridity of the position of country Whigs such as the men behind Cato. These essays were explicitly conceived ‘to call for publick justice upon the wicked managers of the late fatal South Sea scheme’, and they display a conservative distaste for rampant equivalence. ‘Imaginary happiness,’ we hear in the 12

Mandeville recognises this panicked essentialist tendency in his critics, as seen in his response to George Berkeley’s Alciphron: ‘…not one of my Adversaries has attempted to disprove what I had said, or overthrow any one Argument, I made use of, otherwise than by exclaiming against it, and saying that it was not true.’ (A Letter to Dion (London, 1732), p. 21).

172 Speculations

dedication, ‘is a poor amends for the want of the real’. Law had taken Mandeville to task for encouraging precisely this confusion between the real and imaginary: ‘when any history is urg’d upon you, you may answer, that of Robinson Crusoe is call’d a true account.’13 Because of the foundational importance of civic humanist ‘virtue’ to Cato’s Letters, where landowners are protected from the temptations of bribery by their financial independence, their rhetoric tends to appeal to a kind of no-nonsense solidity. Like Swift’s poem, Cato’s Letters see stockjobbing and court Whig politicking as deceptions resting on and obscuring a more reliably solid ‘reality’. So, Cato recognises the existence and indeed the pervasion of a Mandevillean relativism, but, like Law, is reluctant to admit that such indeterminacy accurately describes the way things are: Misled by the great bias of superstition, everywhere found in human nature, or by ignorance and prejudices, proceeding as often from education itself, as from the want of it, we often take the appearance of things for things themselves, mistake our imaginations for realities, our delusions for certainties and truth.14

A hard distinction is carefully maintained between the appearance of things and ‘things themselves’. Cato would agree with Swift that a guinea is a guinea, regardless of the optical effects of immersing it in a basin. There is some irony at play here, for one of the purposes of the kind of freethinking in which Mandeville engages is precisely to overturn the ‘bias of superstition’. Cato’s recognition of the power of superstition and the privileging of the fictional over the real, always bound up in these periodicals with the machinations of court Whigs and financiers, extends to a recognition of that confusion’s instrumentality. That is, the confusion is causal, it can have ‘real’ effects. Thomas Gordon’s letter 19 opens with a description of a series of superstitious practices (throwing away losing cards or dice; avoiding marriage or business on certain days). However, he writes, recalling Mandeville’s ‘whimsical’ florist, though all the whimsies of this kind have no foundation, but in opinion; yet they often produce as certain and regular events, as if the causes were adequate in their own nature to the events. The opinion of a general, or of a cause, makes an army fight with double vigour; and 13

Law, Remarks, p. 63. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, ed. Ronald Hamowy, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), I.133.

14

‘Some Convenient Order’ 173 a confidence in the wisdom and integrity of governors, makes a nation exert its utmost efforts for its own security; whereas by a distrust of its rulers, it often sinks into an universal indifference and despondency.15

According to Mandeville’s philosophy, this is a quite natural state of affairs, but for Cato it is a sign of degeneration. Whilst it is true for Cato that ‘Men are often capable of doing as much, whether it be good or evil, by the appearance of parts, as by possessing them’, the truth is an uncomfortable one (I.310). A world where fiction intervenes so powerfully in ‘natural’ causes and effects is a world in need of revolution, which, in reducing things to first principles, will also make intelligible and logical the relationship between causes (or the nature of things) and their effects (or uses). Court Whig politics and philosophy, like credit finance, disrupt that ideal relatedness – disrupting the plausible connections of narrative – because of ‘an universal indifference’ to means, and a focus on ends. Unlike Law, Trenchard and Gordon are able to see the logic of Mandeville’s relativism, and they acknowledge the influence of such thinking in the real world. However, like other respondents to Mandeville’s writings and critics of credit finance, including George Berkeley and his friend Alexander Pope, they are reluctant to give too much ground.

Narrating value and valuing narration As Tom Jones has shown, both Pope and Berkeley acknowledge the arbitrariness of financial tokens, but that acknowledgement does not lead on to a wholehearted acceptance of the troubling equivalence at the heart of financial exchange. Their version of ideal exchange is productive rather than entropically destructive. According to Jones, Berkeley’s view is that ‘financial tokens should be regarded as a means of exerting power […] it is not a question of the relationship between what is written on a token and its weight, or between what is written on the token and the amount of gold in the bank, but of what the token enables the person to do in the world, what it can be used to do’.16 This is a move from a ‘referential’ account of value to an ‘instrumental’ one, ‘in which a token only ever has a value in use’ (p. 114). This is an instrumentality distinct in orientation from that of the court Whigs, but that it is instrumental nevertheless remains important. 15

Ibid., I.133. Tom Jones, Pope and Berkeley: The Language of Poetry and Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 87.

16

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The distinction, for both Pope and Berkeley, is ethical and aesthetic, and it helps to bring a kind of narrative plausibility to exchange, now seen as ‘an ethical system governed by God’s providence in which the use of the token is not just more important than its reference, but, in an important sense, is its reference’ (p. 107). In this kind of instrumentality, means can – perhaps sometimes should – be subordinated to ends, in the same way that according to certain providential perspectives bad things can have good effects. This sounds rather close to Mandeville’s insistence that private vices produce public benefits, but it is possessed of a narrative logic and a specific direction: history matters. The introduction of providence serves as a kind of prophylactic against the perceived moral and spiritual incontinence of freethinking. This religious and ethical narrativisation of exchange is a way for Pope and Berkeley to acknowledge the arbitrariness of value whilst also enabling them to address the crisis of causation, containing such disconnect in a vectored narrative with a certain political and moral direction. Mandeville’s hive, pointedly omitting the hand of providence, is what Sheehan and Wahrman call a ‘self-organizing’ system, characteristic of the kinds of eighteenth-century thought that sought to deal with causation in ways that go beyond providence. As the Dunciad’s fourth book explains away the atheistic potential of Newtonian mechanics by insisting on God as the first cause, Pope and Berkeley’s providential account of value transforms the amoral and self-satisfying instrumentality associated with credit finance and the Mandevillean hive by embracing it, surrounding it with narrative.17 Berkeley’s Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher (1732) is a philosophical dialogue that seeks to refute the philosophy of the fictional freethinkers Alciphron and Lysicles via Berkeley’s spokesperson Euphranor and his Christian ally Crites. In one discussion, the disputants debate the proper way of determining the beauty of a physical object. Alciphron, standing in here for the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, suggests that beauty is ‘amiable in it self, and for it self ’, and that there is a ‘steady principle of Beauty’ (p. 173). It is a transhistorical, essentialist view, and in this Alciphron differs from Mandeville. Euphranor’s attack on this position, which starts with visual beauty and develops into an account of the beauty of moral systems, articulates a relativism that is compatible with providence. He asks Alciphron to define the beauty of physical objects, who then replies, ‘a symmetry or proportion which pleases the eye’. Euphranor then persuades Alciphron that such a beautiful proportion changes according to the kind of object, and that 17

In the 1723 Middlesex Grand Jury indictment, both Mandeville and Cato are accused of affirming ‘an absolute Fate’ and denying ‘the Providence and Government of the Almighty in the World’. (Fable, I.387).

‘Some Convenient Order’ 175

therefore beauty must emanate from the relationship between parts. He introduces the importance of utility: ‘the parts […] in true proportions must be so related, and adjusted to one another, as that they may best conspire to the use and operation of the whole’ (pp. 174–5). The implications of this are that proportion is perceived not through sight, ‘but only by Reason through the means of Sight,’ and that beauty is an object of the mind (p. 175). The section concludes: The Beauty, therefore, or Symmetry of a Chair, cannot be apprehended but by knowing its use, and comparing its figure with that use, which cannot be done by the Eye alone, but is the effect of judgment. It is therefore, one thing to see an Object, and another to discern its beauty.18

This emphasis on utility and fitness for purpose in this theory of beauty sees aesthetic appreciation as a historical process unfolding over time (even if only over a very short period of time), one which is also time-bound in its implicit reliance on a fund of experience (e.g. knowing the purpose of a chair). This is distinct from Alciphron’s sensory account, in which appreciation is a much more immediate and instantaneous experience.19 Having persuaded Alciphron about physical objects, Euphranor asks him a set of analogous questions about moral systems, and again those questions have a narratological air. ‘I wou’d fain know,’ he says, revealing the connection of his aesthetic theory with providential thinking, ‘what Beauty can be found in a moral System, formed, connected and governed by Chance, Fate, or any other blind unthinking Principle[?]’ (p. 183). In such a freethinking system, ‘there can be no end or design, and without an end there can be no use, and without use there is no aptitude or fitness of Proportion’. Crito reemphasises the difference that providence makes: ‘in any System where Providence doth not preside, how can Beauty be, which cannot be without order, which cannot be without design’ (p. 185). Disorder precludes beauty because of a lack of connection, the kind of unmotivated disconnect associated with the accidental, with Mandevillean instrumentality, court Whig

18

George Berkeley, Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher (London, 1732), p. 175. Recall William Law’s insistence on the inalterable ‘fitness and reasonableness’ of actions and things, above, p. 171. 19 Alciphron and Euphranor are effectively negotiating between what James Noggle describes as the ‘two temporal poles’ of taste in The Temporality of Taste in Eighteenth-Century British Writing (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2012).

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politics and credit finance. Tying beauty to utility gives the aesthetic both a sense of direction and a purpose – that is, an ‘end’. In dialogue II of Alciphron, Berkeley again stresses the importance of duration, in a direct critique of Mandeville’s Fable.20 Lysicles declares that self-interest (and the attendant pursuit of immediate sensual pleasure) is the ‘first principle’ of his ‘sect’ (i.e. the ‘minute philosophers’). Berkeley stresses the errancy of this position by having Lysicles echo the Mandevillean maxim ‘private vices, public benefits’ in his insistence that these principles show subjects how to serve their country by ‘diverting themselves’. The implication – one echoed by Pope in the Dunciads and Essay on Man – is that this is (literally) an error. It is providence that uses passion and appetite as a means to ‘direct’ (not, importantly, ‘divert’) ‘diffr’ent men […] to diff ’rent ends’.21 Lysicles, like a stockjobber, is confusing means for ends. The minute philosopher insists that sensual pleasure is a ‘supreme good’, but Euphranor forces him to acknowledge that satisfaction dulls pleasure, which therefore can only be maintained by unsated appetite. ‘The Greek Philosopher therefore was in the right,’ says Euphranor, ‘who considered the body of a Man of pleasure as a leaky Vessel, always filling and never full.’ Lysicles reveals the acquisitive rapacity and, crucially, the short-sightedness of freethinking: ‘With us it is a maxim, that a Man shou’d seize the moments as they fly’ (p. 102). The importance of duration to this argument emerges in Euphanor’s contention that sensual pleasure is ‘but a short deliverance from a long pain’ (p. 110). In the following passage, Berkeley uses narrative to unite computation (financial accounting as a kind of prudential activity), moral judgement (being called to account), and assigning causes (or accounting for things): Socrates [...] suspected your Men of pleasure were such through ignorance. LYS. Ignorant of what? EUPH. Of the art of computing. It was his opinion that Rakes cannot reckon. And that for want of this skill they make wrong judgements about pleasure, on the right choice of which their happiness depends. LYS. I do not understand you. EUPH. Do you grant that Sense perceiveth only sensible things? LYS. I do. EUPH. Sense perceiveth only things present. LYS. This too I grant. EUPH. Future pleasures, therefore, and pleasures of the understanding, are not to be judged of by actual Sense. LYS. They are not. EUPH.

20

See Jones, Pope and Berkeley, pp. 133–5. ‘Epistle to Bathhurst’, TE III.ii.104.

21

‘Some Convenient Order’ 177 Those therefore who judge of pleasure by Sense, may find themselves mistaken at the foot of the account (p. 119).

Berkeley’s view of the pursuit of pleasure and its possible effects uses a financial metaphor, then, but it is not one drawn from the relatively novel world of credit finance. Rather, he alludes to an accounting in which guineas remain guineas: a kind of moral double-entry bookkeeping in which transactions have direct and measurable, even if deferred, effects (later on, Crites suggests ‘cast[ing] up the account of pleasure and pain, as credit and debt under distinct Articles’ (p. 143)). The kind of ethical relativism being built here requires such stability, the stability of a teleological narrative. Crites also takes a long narrative view on the question of pleasure: ‘We ought to make allowance in the valuation of each particular Pleasure, for all the Pains and Evils, for all the Disgust, Remorse and Shame that attend it: We ought to regard both kind and quantity, the sincerity, the intenseness, and the duration of pleasures’ (p. 120). Whilst quantity is acknowledged here, it seems subordinated to a range of evaluations that might be thought of as qualitative. Indeed, we might think of Berkeley’s assault on freethinking as an assertion of pure qualities against the world of the quantical, to invert Connor’s phrase. That Crites insists that effects (disgust, remorse, shame) attend on each particular pleasure again emphasises that what is being constructed here is a consequential and vectored narrative. Indeed, bearing in mind Connor’s thoughts on the fundamental equivalence of number – a disorienting and non-dirigible equivalence that destabilises causation – it might be said that narratives rely more on qualities than the quantical. The quantical dissolves narration, giving it no purchase. According to Berkeley’s critique, then, a major deficiency of freethinking is its short-sightedness. Rather than taking a long view of, say, a single human life (in which immediate pleasure is subordinate to long-term happiness) The Fable primarily widens its spatial focus in order to argue that in aggregate, considered as they operate in a commonwealth, private vices are of public benefit. This is rather like the providential distribution of good and evil in the world articulated by Pope and Berkeley, but, for them, Mandeville’s is a misleading and opportunistic use of aggregation. Mandeville ignores the effect dissipation has on the individual down the line by concentrating instead on the benefits accrued to the state. In The Fable, ill effects tend to be displaced synchronically, as when the chastity of ‘Virtuous Women’ is preserved by the ‘Incontinence’ and availability of

178 Speculations

prostitutes.22 Berkeley and Pope, on the other hand, make their arguments diachronically. They think in this way in opposition to what they see as Mandeville’s synchronic sleight of hand, a trick redolent of Mammon’s reshaping of consequence into coincidence in The Alchemist. The following lines from Pope’s Essay on Man, published a year after Alciphron, reflect the arguments just discussed, and (confusingly, in the present context) use a spatial metaphor to articulate temporal concerns. Pope is describing the difference between self-love (‘the spring of motion’) and reason: Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh; Reason’s at distance, and in prospect lie: That sees immediate good by present sense; Reason, the future and the consequence.23

As Berkeley does elsewhere, Pope uses a gravitational metaphor to explain human behaviour, self-love’s ‘strength’ being augmented by its proximity to its object. The different orbits of self-love and reason map onto their respective rapacity and composure. Self-love circles dangerously close to its object in order to ‘devour’ it, and, unchecked by reason, would ‘meteor-like, flame lawless through the void, | Destroying others, by himself destroy’d’. Given its position, self-love cannot see past its object, only being able to perceive ‘immediate’ good because it relies on ‘present sense’ (recall Euphanor’s insistence that ‘Sense’ – the minute philosopher’s guide – ‘perceiveth only things present’). ‘Immediate’ is of course a word with both spatial and temporal senses. Here the older one of ‘having no intermediary or intervening member, medium, or agent’ dominates. In this metaphor, however, space is standing in for time, and Pope effectively collapses the double meaning. Reason takes a more leisurely pace and has a wider purlieu, aiming rather to ‘taste the honey, and not wound the flow’r’. But reason’s distance, or its ability to see further, is really an ability to see through time, not space. Reason enjoys a kind of historical distance, paying attention to ‘the foot of the account’ and looking ahead to ‘future and consequence’. The providential argument of the Essay on Man requires the reconciliation of man’s perceived contrarieties, and so Pope insists that both self-love and reason are necessary. However, the partnership is not an equal one. Reason is a necessary restraint on self-love, and the only means of making its reliance

22

Fable I.95. TE III.i.63–4.

23

‘Some Convenient Order’ 179

on ‘present sense’ profitable in the longer term. Pope and Berkeley connect the satisfaction of present sense firmly with the disruption of the diachronous, or of narrative, suggesting at the same time that it is a kind of wilful error, or a letting go. This is why Pope figures reason as a restraining force that acts to ‘suspend’ self-love, to prevent or forestall the fall into error. The freethinker, stockjobber, Epicure Mammon and Mandeville are all trapped, so to speak, in synchrony, prioritising ‘immediate good’, or that which is closest to hand. Such an attitude is also a kind of indifference to or abdication of agency: to always choose the immediate good is not to choose at all. These indifferent agents think that they can afford to let things go because they do not understand ‘consequence’, undervaluing or ignoring the effect of their own actions or inactions on themselves or the world. Berkeley caricatures this as a lazy retreat into a view of the world as a self-organising system, a system in no need of husbandry. Lysicles is arguing against the important of fixed societal or governmental structures: Take my word for it; there is a plastic nature in things that seeks its own end. Pull a state to pieces, jumble, confound, and shake together the particles of Humane Society, and then let them stand a while, and you shall soon see them settle of themselves in some convenient order, where heavy heads are lowest and men of genius uppermost (p. 130–1)

The joke rising to the surface in that final line about the freethinker’s airheadedness recalls Pope’s play with intellectual and physical densities in the Dunciad. Lysicles’s account of political revolution as the indifferent shaking of a snow globe, or the settling of ash after an explosion, is also reminiscent of the entropic settling of civilisation into what Cato called ‘universal indifference’ at the close of Pope’s comic epic. The ‘plastic nature in things that seeks its own end’ is taken from the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth. Sheehan and Wahrman explain his theory of plastic nature as a self-organising system that enables ‘pious materialists’ to avoid charges of atheism whilst guarding against ‘the overenthusiastic theism that demanded God’s immediate intervention into every aspect of life’.24 Berkeley has Lysicles unthinkingly apply this philosophical fragment to the realm of politics, and his real concern here is the way in which a freethinker like Lysicles can use such philosophical positions as an excuse for indolence and indifference. Cudworth’s plastic nature is immanent, but it is also, as Sheehan and Wahrman point out, teleological, directing specific things to 24

Invisible Hands, p. 35.

180 Speculations

specific ends, ‘Regularly, Artificially, and Methodically,’ even though it does so unconsciously. Lysicles, however, sees it as a kind of labour-saving device. The order produced after his revolution is not specific, but indifferent: ‘things will settle of themselves in some convenient order’ (my emphasis), and at this point we should hear the literal or Latinate sense of ‘convenient’: an accidental collision or ‘coming together’ (the present participle of convenīre). The only thing this order is ‘convenient’ for, Berkeley suggests, is the lifestyle Lysicles would like to live. Lysicles’s indifference leads him to a position where one social order is equivalent to another, and the quantical – a state is simply made of so many ‘pieces’ – is asserted against the world of qualities. History doesn’t matter, and neither does the future. This endlessly reconfigurable state resembles – is perhaps the consequence of – the equivalence of credit finance transactions, in which numbers seem to work for themselves, convening at random, but really, according to critics of credit finance, working for the convenience of specific men. As the rest of this book will demonstrate, for a satirist like Pope, the fall into quietude and indifference which the four versions of The Dunciad articulate with increasing unease is only the ‘natural’ state of things in that it is a primeval one, an apocalyptic regression that is a consequence of inaction, or a dereliction of duty.

PART IV

The Dunciads

Chapter 7

Living in Counterhistory: The Dunciads as Mock-Prophecy

P

ope’s longest (and longest-running) satire began in 1728 as a defensive attack in three books, bewailing the degradation of culture and those he held chiefly responsible for it: the dunces, acolytes of the goddess, Dulness, almost all of whom were based on ‘real’ people. It expanded into the Dunciad Variorum of 1729, which named the hero, Tibbald, or Lewis Theobald, and the other dunces that he ruled over as king. The Variorum incorporated into its ample satirical apparatus material from the protestations and counterattacks that Pope’s targets had rushed into print in response to the original version of the poem. In 1742 appeared the New Dunciad, pretending to be a newly discovered manuscript of a fourth book of the satire, wider in its scope and darker in tone. In 1743, The Dunciad in Four Books joined this new fourth book with the earlier three, and introduced a new ‘hero’, Bays, or Colley Cibber, amidst a raft of smaller revisions smoothing over the joins and shifting satirical emphasis. Lines at or near the end of all versions of this poem describe an inverted apocalypse, as the goddess Dulness does not lift a veil but releases a curtain, and ‘universal darkness’ either ‘covers’ or ‘buries all’. This descending darkness is also the primeval obscurity from which civilisation emerged: as the poem also makes clear, this is really a restoration of the ‘mysteries’ of ‘Chaos’ and ‘eternal night’ (1743 IV.1–5).1

1

References to the major versions of the Dunciads (distinguished in notes as 1728, 1729, and 1743) are to Valerie Rumbold’s Longman editions: The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. III (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007), and The Dunciad in Four Books (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2009). Where reference cannot clearly be made to line numbers and accompanying notes (as in the case of prefatory material), it is indicated by page number (i.e. 1728, p. 14 points to ‘The Publisher to the reader’ from The Dunciad: an Heroic Poem; 1729, p. 162 to ‘Martinus Scriblerus, Of the Poem’ from The Dunciad Variorum, though both refer to the same Rumbold edition). References to Pope’s other works are to The Twickenham Edition of the Works of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1939–68), abbreviated where necessary to TE. Dryden’s translations are quoted from the California edition (The Works of John Dryden,

184 The Dunciads

The Dunciads attack novelty and modernity – the commodification of literature; freethinking; the pedantry of modish collectors – while insisting that such fripperies are of ancient, even primeval, date (as we will see, this is not the only kind of temporal sleight of hand at work in these texts). As the rest of this book seeks to establish, the chaos that envelopes civilisation at the close of Pope’s great satire is, in some quite precise ways, akin to the ‘convenient order’ to which the freethinker Lysicles indifferently submitted. For Pope, as for Berkeley, this is no order at all. The Dunciads are studies in inertia: in things failing to happen. Concluding a study of things that didn’t happen with Pope’s great satire may seem perverse, for the Dunciad happened again and again: in 1728, 1729, 1742 and 1743, by the most conservative count. It was also a happening: a cultural event that generated controversy, and then used that controversy to fuel its major and minor transformations. Yet one of the many criticisms levelled at Pope’s work has been that nothing much happens in it, that it is a poem devoid of unified action, and that this impinges upon its right to call itself an epic work of any kind.2 There is another sense in which the Dunciads have been said to rely on things that didn’t happen: the accusation basically coeval with the poem that Pope was dealing in untruth, slander, libel, misrepresenting the lives and actions of real historical people, descending immorally into personal invective or ‘particular’ satire. From hence derives Ned Ward’s complaint that he was not, as Pope alleged, the proprietor of a lowly ale-house, but a genteel tavern.3 Aubrey Williams addressed this, pointing out that such an attention to ‘accuracy’, whilst natural enough for Pope’s affronted targets, is not the task of the reader and critic. ‘All art,’ he writes, ‘involves a distortion of the historical, the “real”.’ For him, Pope’s simplification and caricaturing of the dunces was ‘a necessary part of the “distancing” of the ephemeral in art, of getting the bee into the amber’.4 We may now be more inclined than Williams was ed. Alan Roper et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1956–2002). I have also drawn on David L. Vander Meulen, Pope’s Dunciad of 1728, a History and Facsimile (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 1992); Maynard Mack, The Last and Greatest Art: Some Unpublished Poetical Manuscripts of Alexander Pope (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 1984). 2 Erskine-Hill defends Pope on the grounds that his narrative is known and does not need retelling (‘The New World of Pope’s Dunciad’, Renaissance and Modern Studies 6 (1962), pp. 49–67, p. 51). 3 Ned Ward, Apollo’s Maggot in his Cups: or, the Whimsical Creation of a Little Satirical Poet (London, 1729), pp. 30–1; 37–8, and Colomb, pp. 173–9. 4 Aubrey Williams, Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1955), p. 62.

Living in Counterhistory 185

in 1955 to say that historiography is itself always a distortion of the ‘real’, but his recognition that Pope’s Dunciad need not be put to forensic or legal tests of accuracy or justice is an important one. For Williams, Pope’s dunces ‘are neither wholly here – in the poem – nor there – in history’ (p. 64). The poem ‘simultaneously affirms and denies its historical connections at every moment’ (p. 75). Much of the counterhistorical writing examined in this book attempts to claim historicity (and with it authority, weight, consequence) for the events it describes. However, Pope’s poem attaches itself to the events of the late-Stuart and Hanoverian world with remarkable and sometimes infuriating variance. Often Pope insists on his poem’s historicity, but sometimes the poem requires a readerly awareness of the gap between the story ‘as it happened’ and the story as told. As an anonymous visitor to Pope’s grotto at Twickenham once put it, ‘by a fine taste and happy management, you are presented with an undistinguishable Mixture of Realities and Imagery.’ Maynard Mack, responding to these comments, suggests that in the grotto, and in Pope’s poetry, things are ‘translated by the poetic imagination out of history into dream’.5 For John Sitter, Pope is not moving things between history and dream, but whipping the accidents of history into shape by the imposition of form: ‘the Dunciad is rooted more deeply in abstraction than in fact, or, perhaps more accurately, the “facts” are collectively subjected to an abstraction’ (The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, p. 68). There is little to disagree with here, but stressing the historiographical or mythological arrangement of the poem over its referentiality obscures the fact that Pope is having his cake and eating it. ‘Abstraction’, or the translation ‘out of history into dream’, are (like the retreat into providential argument) bulwarks that Pope places between himself and charges of libel. However, seeing The Dunciad as an exercise in counterhistorical propaganda – a truly masterful one – is a way of confronting its documentary and fantastical aspects together. Rather than insisting on the ways in which the aesthetic qualities of the Dunciads transform or make less relevant questions of historical reference (The Dunciad is a poem, not a history), this study takes it as read that the Dunciads have a problematic relationship with history. To move beyond questions of authenticity and accuracy, we have to see that relationship as one beset by problems historiographical, not just historical.6 What Pope

5

Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto, 1969), p. 47. Tom Jones considers Pope’s poems as ‘works of history writing’ in ‘Pope and the Ends of History: Faction, Atterbury, and Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion’, Studies in Philology 110 (2013), pp. 880–902, p. 882.

6

186 The Dunciads

says about his culture matters less than the way he says it. The dominant historiographical mode in the Dunciads is prophecy.

History as Prophecy The Dunciad is hard to read. Even in the relatively unencumbered 1728 editions it conspires to interrupt its own narrative flow. ‘Where was I?’ it says, and makes us ask: ‘Where am I?’ Indeed, the poem may be harder to read now than it was for those first readers, who, furnished with sufficient means, opportunity, and inclination, could read The Dunciad in 1728 (perhaps with the help of a key), then concentrate chiefly on the new material in the Dunciad Variorum, followed by The New Dunciad, and finally The Dunciad, in Four Books.7 Our difficulty is not merely the usual difficulty readers encounter in understanding ‘referential’ eighteenth-century poetry, but stems from the way we enter the poem arsy-versy, through the various atemporal or post-facto constructions of editions scholarly and otherwise. The Dunciad is a moving target, and it moves through time rather than space. It has also never allowed its readers to forget its status as a printed book, as a variorum, as a record of itself as a text in progress. It does not let the reader forget these things because the poem’s evolution becomes a significant part of its subject matter. In reading The Dunciad, which, like the duncical works it ridicules, is a ‘past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new piece’, we are reading a work that more than most works of literature interferes with the temporal and spatial logic of reading, as well as reading a work that cannot securely be located in time.8 More than most works of literature, it challenges us to confront those temporal distortions. This chapter seeks to meet that challenge by exploring Pope’s use of the prophetic mode, a mode which, like the dunces, is neither here (now) nor there (then). The Dunciads’ collective refusal to stay in one time is not only a result of continual revision and repackaging, but might have been a problem for readers even when it first appeared. We are told in ‘The Publisher to the

7

Samuel Richardson complained of having to keep up with Pope’s continual reupholstering, writing on 19 January 1744: ‘I have bought Mr Pope over so often, and his Dunciad so lately before his last new-vampt one, that I am tir’d of the Extravagance; and wonder every Body else is not.’ (Correspondence with Aaron Hill and the Hill Family ed. Christine Gerrard (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2013), pp. 151–2). 8 1728 I.228.

Living in Counterhistory 187

Reader’ that the action of the poem takes place in 1719 or 1720.9 Yet several of the episodes in book two are based, if only allegorically and allusively, on events of a later date.10 Similarly, in book three, the underworld shade of the city poet Elkanah Settle ‘prophesies’ numerous things that have already happened either at the time of the poem’s publication or its professed time of action. Nor was Settle dead in 1719/20, at which point he could still look forward to four further years of retirement in the Charterhouse.11 Some of the specific things that Settle ‘predicts’ in the first version of the poem include: the rise to fame of Theophilus Cibber, who joined his father Colley’s company in 1720; Thomas Burnet and George Duckett’s attacks on Pope in the journals Pasquin (in 1722) and The Grumbler (in 1715);12 John Rich’s championing of pantomime in the city’s theatres, with Pope alluding directly to his role in Theobald’s A Dramatic Entertainment, Call’d Harlequin a Sorcerer in 1723, amongst other specific performances;13 the continued success of Poet Laureate Laurence Eusden (appointed 1718) and the Surveyor of Works William Benson (also appointed 1718); finally, Ambrose Philips’s preferment to secretary to the Primate of Ireland in 1724 and then purse bearer to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1727. Why does Pope choose to couch this history in the form of prophecy? As Aubrey Williams showed in 1955, Pope is writing with and through his two major literary models in book three: Virgil’s Aeneid, and Paradise 9

‘The time and date of the action is evidently in the last reign, when the office of City Poet expir’d upon the death of Elkanah Settle, and he has fixed it to the Mayoralty of Sir Geo. Tho – ld.’ (1728 p. 15). Thorold was Lord Mayor of London in 1719–20; the reference to him is removed in 1743. On the possible origins of The Dunciad in 1719/20 as a response to Giles Jacob’s Lives of the Poets, see James McLaverty, ‘Pope and Giles Jacob’s “Lives of the Poets”: The “Dunciad” as Alternative Literary History’ Modern Philology 83 (1985), pp. 22–32. 10 See Elizabeth Thomas’s involvement in the publication of Pope’s early letters by Curll in 1726 (1728 II.54 and n.). 11 The note to 1729 I.88 declares that ‘Settle was alive at this time’ (meaning 1720, the year identified in the note to I.83), and ‘Poet to the City of London’. The note then recounts the cessation of the office of city poet, ‘so that upon Settle’s demise, there was no successor to that place. This important point of time our Poet has chosen, as the Crisis of the Kingdom of Dulness.’ ‘This time’ (i.e. 1720) and ‘This important time’ (i.e. 1724) seem folded into one another deliberately (i.e. the imprecision is useful for Pope). See also McLaverty, ‘Pope and Giles Jacob’s “Lives of the Poets”’. 12 1728, III.140 and notes; Nicholas T. Joost, ‘Burnet’s “Grumbler” and Ambrose Philips’, N&Q 193 (1948), pp. 340–2, p. 341. 13 1728, Rumbold’s note to III.185. Pope’s note to ll. 185–206 refers explicitly to these things having happened in the recent past (‘in 1726, 1727, and 1728’).

188 The Dunciads

Lost.14 Settle’s prophesying to Tibbald and Cibber reflects Aeneas’s encounter with the shade of his father Anchises in Hades in book six of The Aeneid, which Virgil uses to articulate a triumphal and teleological narrative of the foundation and progress of Rome. As is now well known, such a model corresponds with Pope’s narrative of the translation of the goddess Dulness from the City to the Court (reflecting the translation of the Trojan gods to Rome) and the re-establishment of her empire there. In the passing on from father to son Pope can also reinforce the importance of succession, which so often gives his poem its anti-Hanoverian edge (‘Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first’). By drawing, too, on the conciliatory Pisgah-sight granted to Adam in books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost, Pope alerts his reader to another kind of succession, that of John the Baptist and Christ, and connects the episode with the biblical inversions that occur elsewhere in the poem. He is also taking advantage of and commenting on the political and historiographical features of this kind of history-cumprophecy. Dryden did the same thing at the end of Absalom and Achitophel, putting the foregone conclusion of the failed Exclusion campaign into the mouth of David-Charles, who speaks as it were from before that crisis had been averted. Pope is interested in the inevitability and teleology of the prophetic histories in Virgil and Milton, in their political aspects. However, in his poem, the coming saviour is not a saviour, but the antichrist of wit. Pope is perfectly willing to use pseudo-providential arguments to neuter his targets, but in parts of the Dunciads, especially in the prophetic vision of book three, and for much of book four, Pope is parodying the mode of political prophecy.15 The Dunces are said to be their own prophecies fulfilled at several points in the poem, which is in several ways interested in fulfilment, in closing off, in the apocalyptic end-time of the apotheosis of Dulness. The poem itself also plays with the idea of fulfilment in the retrospective adjustment of prophecies, the substitution of heroes, and the redaction of the historical record for polemical ends. The appearance of The Dunciad Variorum in 1729 was in a quite mechanical sense a fulfilment of the promise of the 1728 text, emphatically filling in its suspensive aposiopeses and partial blanks with the names of ‘real’ historical personages, and, in the notes, documenting the ‘veracity’ of Settle’s predictions, which were never really predictions 14

Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning, passim. On Pope’s use of prophetic tradition in ‘Windsor Forest’ and other early works, see Pat Rogers, The Symbolic Design of Windsor Forest: Iconography, Pageant, and Prophecy in Pope’s Early Work (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 2004), and Pope and the Destiny of the Stuarts (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2005).

15

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at all. In this particular way, as well as in general, The Dunciad is self-satisfied. It self-consciously adapts its own history in revision, accommodating complaints, recommendations, and unforeseen changes (and making them seem foreseen). Pope gives certain aspects of his poem the status of prophecy, and mocks the fulfilment of that prophecy, by adopting the teleological method of victorious propagandists like Dryden in order to reveal the self-interest and corruption of the Hanoverian establishment. Dryden could, to an extent, speak for the political establishment in 1681, and so his miniature Virgilian prophecy could be deployed straight. One source of Pope’s outrage in the Dunciads is that the enfeebled are succeeding despite or perversely because of that enfeeblement. The subjects of the prophecies of Milton, Dryden, and Virgil are radiantly legitimate sources of and destinations for history and meaning. As a result, those writers can prophesy the inevitable pushing aside of the weak and the disobedient, for whom, in such teleological narratives, there can be no place. Pope’s, however, is an inverted world. Royal power has folded in on itself, and the Hanoverian centre is a singularity attracting the inert and the precipitately dull.16 In his appropriation of this triumphant prophetic mode, Pope despairingly suggests that it is all but inevitable that pantomime should triumph, in a diabolic inversion of the inevitability of the visions of Michael, Anchises, or David, who, like Theobald or Cibber, are recipients of prophetic visions of a history that has already unfolded before the reader. ‘In vain, in vain,’ cries a voice something like Pope’s own, at the close of book four. Unlike the inevitability of Pope’s predecessors’ prophecies, the triumph of Dulness is not shored up by the resistless hand of providence intervening in the world, sustaining history, but the result of vanity: an absence, an attractive void, the rush to occupy a space simply because that space exists, and to be arranged in some convenient order or other. The rise of Dulness is osmotic, a parody of God’s plenitude or of nature’s abhorrence of vacuums. In the Scriblerian imagination, living in the early eighteenth century was very like living in a counterhistory, and The Dunciad presents itself as an alternative future, a dystopic vision. It couples that with the comically despairing admission that this mad vision of a vacuum-centred self-consuming world has actually come to pass. Presenting reality as counterhistory, degrading and denying it, is a very good way of writing counterhistorical propaganda. This is not quite the same as Pope saying, ‘you couldn’t make it up’, for Pope knows that you could make it up: it has, in fact, been ‘made up’. The 16

Joseph Hone argues that Dulness’s ‘fiat nox’ ‘undoes both God’s act of creation, and also the accomplishments of Anne and her Tory government’ (‘Pope and the Politics of Panegyric’ RES 66 (2015), pp. 106–23, p. 116).

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artificiality of the Protestant Succession, its demonstrably tenuous connection to the ‘real’ royal line, show it precisely to have been made, not begotten. The ending of Pope’s 1737 Epistle to Augustus playfully prophesies the unthinkable: the day when hell freezes over and Alexander Pope – like the dunces Eusden, Philips, and Settle – flatters in verse.17 Most of Pope’s prophecies are much more plausible, partly because they are often not prophecies at all, and partly because Pope and his readers negotiate what counts as plausible between them, shifting the ground. A letter from Pope to Swift regarding one of the abovementioned flatterers, Pope’s old antagonist Ambrose Philips, is an instructive instance of this: I’m sorry poor Philips is not promoted in this age; for certainly if his reward be of the next, he is of all Poets the most miserable. I’m also sorry for another reason; if they don’t promote him, they’l spoil a very good conclusion of one of my Satyrs, where having endeavour’d to correct the Taste of the town in wit and Criticisme, I end thus[,] But what avails to lay down rules for Sense? In ––’s Reign these fruitless lines were writ, When Ambrose Philips was preferr’d for wit!18

Replying on 26 November 1725, Swift writes: ‘I would have the Preferment just enough to save your lines, let it be ever so low, for your sake we will allow it to be Preferment.’19 This proved to be the case. In 1727 Philips was made purse bearer to the Lord Chancellor of Ireland (an ‘insignificant’ post, according to the ODNB: ‘ever so low’). Lines in all versions of The Dunciad reflect on Philips (or ‘Namby Pamby’) being ‘preferred for wit’ in very similar terms, and the notes give this Irish preferment as the justification for the slur (1729 III.332; 1743 III.326). So, Pope writes some lines in 1725 describing a thing that has not happened: the preferment of Ambrose Philips. He then states in a letter that he wants Philips to get a preferment in order to justify his satire and fulfil his prophecy. After a short wait, he gets it, though the preferment is hardly a bishopric. Still, Pope’s readership (here, Jonathan Swift) is more than willing to re-appraise and revalue historical events simply in order to preserve the currency of his verse, authorising and 17

TE IV.231. The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. David Woolley, 4 vols. (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999–2007), vol. 2, p. 612. 19 Ibid., p. 623. 18

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excusing it. As Swift says: ‘I would have the preferment just enough to save your lines.’ The past, or what happens to Philips, is subordinate to historiography: what Pope says happens to Philips, and, particularly, the way in which he says it. This episode combines the ‘justification’ of personal satire through historical accuracy with the use of backward-projected prophecy as a means of increasing authority (even if that authority is partly parodic). The readers Pope implicitly addresses in The Dunciad are more than willing to sustain his counterhistorical mythmaking, to feign credulity. Pope was able to ‘predict’ Philips’s preferment because he knew the rules of the ‘inverted’ world he lived in – which is simply to say that Philips was a likely candidate for minor promotion, given his affiliations. We should remember that this is only an absurdity in the Scriblerian imagination, which, as this exchange shows, does nothing to discourage itself. Swift is not Pope’s only cooperative reader. Towards the end of the Epistle to Burlington, Pope slips into a prophetic voice once more, this time looking forward rather enthusiastically to an erosion of distinction, or at least to the pleasingly inevitable. Unlike Dulness’s inertia and eternal night, this is a welcome kind of entropy. Pope is describing nature’s undoing of Timon’s architectural follies: Another age shall see the golden Ear Imbrown the Slope, and nod on the Parterre, Deep Harvests bury all his pride has plann’d, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land. (ll. 173–6)

This is only just prophecy, really little more than an acknowledgement that buildings and landscaping decay with time. Pope’s editor and literary legatee William Warburton, however, insisted that this was not only prophecy, but accurate prediction, in the following note to his 1751 edition: ‘Had the poet lived but three years longer, he had seen this prophecy fulfilled.’20 The reference here is to Cannons, the residence of James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, which was pulled down in 1747. The identification of Timon and his bad-taste villa with Chandos and Cannons was made early, and malevolently, by Pope’s readers. It gave them opportunity to claim that Pope was (once again) being perversely ungrateful by satirising one of his former benefactors. As Sherburn showed in 1935, both charges were unjustified, and Pope was at pains to deny them strenuously.21 Yet Warburton, 20

TE III.ii, p. 154. George Sherburn, ‘Timon’s Villa and Cannons’ Huntington Library Bulletin 8 (1935), pp. 131–52.

21

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interested in general in systematising and tying up loose ends, clearly could not resist this providential confirmation of his poet’s clairvoyance. Again, history is subordinate to historiography. When Warburton, a biblical scholar, refers to these lines from Burlington as prophecy, he seems to be thinking of prophecy in the Christian tradition, the tradition that sees Christ as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecies, and one that therefore essentially equates prophecy with prediction.22 Prophecy does not only mean prediction, however, but also seeing behind the veil of history, clairvoyance in its literal translation as ‘clear-sightedness’. Thomas Jemielity’s work explores the connection between Hebrew prophecy and satire, arguing that both are concerned with causation and so both are, in a sense, historiographical.23 Jemielity challenges the distinction between prophecy and satire – that satirists ‘chastise living vice and folly’ and prophets ‘predict the future’ – by pointing out firstly what is ‘old news for biblical scholars, viz., that prediction is really an insignificant feature of Hebrew prophecy, and, secondly, that satire and prophecy are both concerned with the future and depict that future as morally conditioned by present action’.24 John Barton illuminates the combination of theoretical conditionality and practical inevitability that attracts Pope to the prophetic mode, arguing that the ‘forebodings of disaster’ in prophetic utterance are not ‘mere prognostications’ but should be ‘understood as the inevitable consequences of the present sin which a change of course could, at least in principle, avert’.25 In this light, Pope’s history of the folly that led to the rise of the dunces is appropriately translated into the prophetic mode, combining as it does the two ends of prophecy: this is diagnosis presented as fulfilled prediction, and it is a diagnosis that has a propagandic

22

Thomas Jemielity points out that Samuel Johnson defined prophecy solely as prediction in his dictionary in 1755, and that ‘principles of Christian hermeneutics [...] see the Hebrew Scriptures as the Old and thus incomplete Testament providing types that find completion and fulfilment in the supposedly New Testament’ (Satire and the Hebrew Prophets (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), p. 71). 23 Jemielity, Satire and the Hebrew Prophets, pp. 11; 40; 53, and passim. 24 Jemielity, Satire and the Hebrew Prophets, p. 71. 25 Quoted in Jemielity, Satire and the Hebrew Prophets, p. 72. For Gregory Colomb, too, Pope has ‘the poet’s power to speak the future because he can remember the past and see in small signs the true (inner, disguised) character of the present’ (Designs on Truth (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1992), p. 13). See also Robert Griffin, ‘Pope, the Prophets, and the Dunciad’, SEL 23 (1983), pp. 435–46.

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function.26 According to Jemielity, like the Dunciads, prophetic works such as The Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse of John rely on a ‘fiction of an earlier composition revealed now at an opportune moment for the distressed faithful’.27 It is unclear, however, how far Pope is au fait with this more sophisticated view of Hebrew prophecy-as-satire. Pope, like his contemporaries including Warburton and Samuel Johnson, seems to have seen prophecy chiefly in the terms of that Old/New Testament binary of prediction and fulfilment.28 It seems most likely that Pope arrived at the analogy between prophecy and satire not through a knowledge of biblical scholarship but an awareness of the use of prophecy as a popular ‘stateengine’, as deployed by ‘enthusiasts’ like the Camisard prophets who rose to infamy in London in 1707. The predictions of such false prophets, in contemporary sceptical readings, are really attempts to make things happen – diagnoses with a propagandic function – and they are not above doctoring or reinterpreting their own predictions in order to make them seem as if they have been fulfilled.29 The Dunciads, like sceptical accounts of those French prophets, show what happens to prophecy when prophets do not properly understand the relationship between moral or social causes and effects, but, false seers inspired by a false goddess, are deluded into thinking that they do.

26

On the importance of diagnosis as a feature of mock-epic, see Colomb, Designs on Truth. 27 Thomas Jemielity ‘“Consummatum Est”: Alexander Pope’s 1743 Dunciad and Mock-Apocalypse’ in Catherine Ingrassia and Claudia N. Thomas (eds.), “More Solid Learning”: New Perspectives on Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (Lewisburg; London: Bucknell Univ.; Associated Univs., 2000), p. 176. On ‘apocalyptic satire’ as a satirical mode, see also Howard D. Weinbrot, ‘Apocalyptic Satire, James II and Transubstantiation: Pulpit, Polemics and the Declaration of Indulgence’ JECS 39 (2016), pp. 315–34. 28 Jemielity, Satire and the Hebrew Prophets, p. 71, and “Consummatum Est”, pp. 168; 176. 29 As an anonymous critic of the French prophets has it, ‘there is not a better StateEngine in the World, than Prophecy, when it is in hands that know how to play it skilfully. Let a serious People (such as the English are) be but once perswaded of a Man’s Prophetick Character, and there is nothing so extravagant which he shall not be able to perswade them to afterwards...’ (Anon., Clavis Prophetica (London, 1707), sig. A3v (italics inverted)). On the Camisard prophets see Lionel Laborie, Enlightening enthusiasm: Prophecy and religious experience in early eighteenthcentury England (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 2015).

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False prophecy and history as counterhistory The Dunciad reveals itself over a decade and a half as a series of unfolding prophecies: the history-as-prediction of book three in 1728 and 1729; The New Dunciad of 1742, itself in the prophetic (or, as Jemielity argues, apocalyptic) mode but also an intensification and confirmation of Settle’s soothsaying, as John’s Apocalypse is an elaboration of Christ’s promised return in the gospels (e.g. Mark 13:26); The Dunciad in Four Books of 1743, a radical revision and re-fulfilment of the earlier prophetic texts, a unification through rewriting, the Old and New Testaments conjoined and mutually modified. In The Dunciad Variorum, Pope further destabilises the status of Settle’s prophecy, and that moment is a kind of fulcrum on which the work’s oscillation between historicity and counterhistoricity is precariously balanced. This moment is complicated again in 1743. The 1728 version closes with the following lines: Let there be darkness! (the dread pow’r shall say) All shall be darkness, as it ne’er were Day; To their first Chaos Wit’s vain works shall fall, And universal Dulness cover all! No more the Monarch could such raptures bear; He wak’d, and all the Vision mix’d with air. (III.281–86)

It is important first of all to register the tense here, which is unambiguously future-directed. The last two lines confirm the vision’s status as a dream, but do not necessarily overturn its authority as a ‘true’ prophecy.30 Questions are admittedly raised at the beginning of this book, as the sleep triggered by Dulness’s ‘Cimmerian dew’ brings about ‘Raptures’ that ‘high the seat of sense o’erflow’, from which raptures derive a range of proverbial delusions: ‘the Fool’s Paradise, the Statesman’s Scheme’, and so on (III.1–11). It is only natural that a vision inspired by Dulness should inspire a kind of madness which ‘only heads refin’d from reason know’; the source of the vision of Settle’s prophecy is of course illegitimate, because of the illegitimacy of everything the dunces undertake, but these destabilising moments do not quite add up to a questioning of the prophecy’s authority. Things change with the Variorum, which concludes thus:

30

Rumbold suggests Tibbald’s awakening leaves the status of the vision ‘as prophecy’ uncertain (1728 III.286 n.).

Living in Counterhistory 195 Thus at her felt approach, and secret might, Art after Art goes out, and all is Night. [...] In vain! they gaze, turn giddy, rave, and die. Thy hand great Dulness! lets the curtain fall, And universal Darkness covers all. Enough! enough! the raptur’d Monarch cries; And thro’ the Ivory Gate the Vision flies. (III.345–6; 354–8)

The dreamer’s awakening is not explicit here, as it was in 1728, and Tibbald may well be articulating his surfeit from within his dream. This possibility reminds us of the fact that the second book concluded in a general somnolence, and that nutation is the means to Dulness’s apocalyptic ends in the fourth book.31 Further evidence for the dunce king’s uninterrupted slumber comes from Scriblerus’s note to 1743 IV.20 (‘Soft on her lap her Laureat reclines’): With great judgement it is imagined by the Poet, that such a Collegue as Dulness had elected, should sleep on the Throne, and have very little share in the Action of the Poem. Accordingly he hath done little or nothing from the day of his Anointing; having past through the second book without taking part in any thing that was transacted about him, and thro’ the third in profound Sleep. Nor ought this, well considered, to seem strange in our days, when so many King-consorts have done the like.

Whilst the note does not guarantee the fact of Tibbald’s/Cibber’s uninterrupted sleep, it certainly gives room for that interpretation. The ‘Index of Matters’ refers to IV.20 as the moment Cibber ‘Finally subsides in the lap of Dulness, where he rests to all Eternity’, where ‘subsides’ points punningly to corrupt patronage, or subsistence (1743 p. 403). The hero’s dozing is a way of connecting the new book with the preceding one. It is also appropriate for the antichrists of wit not only to emulate the failed vigilance of the apostles in the garden of Gethsemane, but to be positively encouraged in such inattention. So, especially in 1743, it makes thematic sense for the hero never to have awoken. Whether or not this is intended by Pope to emphasise the dream-like quality of the fourth book is unclear, and will remain 31

On the importance of dream vision as a generic model for The Dunciad in relation to Pope’s early Temple of Fame see Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, esp. pp. 66–117.

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so.32 Pope is much more interested in unfolding the possible interpretations of the vision’s status than in closing them off. From the medieval Pearl to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, awakening has served as a turning point at which the dreamer applies the lessons he or she has gleaned from their experience, taking dream-insight into lived experience. Denying the dunce kings such reorientation chimes with the asserted passivity and inertia of the dunces in general. There are other important differences in the Variorum’s conclusion. The tense in which Settle describes the wonders revealed to Tibbald has shifted, and we move in 1729 into a kind of insistent apocalyptic present, reflecting the general temporal ambiguity of the poem and, more specifically, the abovementioned ways in which the Variorum ‘fulfils’ certain features of the 1728 printings. This revised conclusion also connects much better with the sense of overwhelming in the opening lines of the book; the ‘raptur’d’ Tibbald’s seat of sense is indeed ‘o’erflow’d’, and the etymological link between the French rêve and the English ‘rave’ is re-emphasised.33 That connection is made explicitly in the notes, which apply not to these lines but a couplet from the book’s opening (ll. 5–6), sowing doubt in the attentive reader’s mind from the outset. In 1743, ‘Bentley’ then further glosses Scriblerus’s glozing, and both notes appear together as follows: Hereby is intimated that the following vision is no more than a chimera of the dreamer’s brain, and not a real or intended satyr on the present Age, doubtless more learned, more enlightened, and more abounding with great Genius’s in Divinity, Politics, and whatever arts and sciences, than all the preceding. For fear of any such mistake of our Poet’s honest meaning, he hath again at the end of the Vision repeated this monition, saying that it all past through the Ivory gate, which (according to the Ancients) denoteth Falsity. SCRIBL. How much the good Scriblerus was mistaken, may be seen from the fourth book, which, it is plain from hence, he had never seen. BENT.34 For Sitter, ‘Book IV is actually an ironic, elaborately inverted version of the grand convocation in The Temple of Fame.’ (p. 88): a continuation of the dream vision mode. 33 Harry Levin, ‘The Ivory Gate’, Yale French Studies 13 (1954), pp. 17–29, p. 18. Levin briefly summarises the derivation of the ivory/horn gate mythology on pp. 17–18. See also Rumbold’s note to 1729 III.358 and n., and R. G. Austin (ed.), P. Verhgili Maronis Aeneidos Liber Sextus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 274–6. 34 Dryden gives a number of explanations for the significance of the gates of ivory and horn in the notes to his translation of Virgil (Works, VI.825). The association of ivory with falsehood and horn with truth also has its roots in a Greek pun: see 32

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A prosaic reason for the addition of the ivory gates is simply that the Variorum gives Pope an opportunity to signal his indebtedness to Virgil and others. A less prosaic interpretation of the use made of such an opportunity is that this allusion in particular is an example of the range of diversionary tactics that the expanded textual space enabled. It matters that Bentley does not quite tell us which part of Scriblerus’s note is mistaken: the falsity of the dream, or the way he uses that falsity to speculate on Pope’s intention (that this vision is not really meant as a satire on the present age). Of course, Scriblerus is mistaken about both things, but that is not the same as Bentley saying so: all he says, coyly, is that the fourth book shows us ‘how much’ Scriblerus had erred. Pope leaves this question suspended, even though such suspension is superfluous. There is no question that this is a satire on the present age and that Pope means it, that is, but the question is left suspended anyway. The allusions, prolegomena and other paratextual features of the Variorum are the means by which Pope moves his poem between history, fiction, and literary precedent as an exculpatory tactic (such a thing was really said or done by a dunce; such an episode is part of the allegorical machinery of the poem, clearly fictional; such a thing is an allusion to Virgil, not the poet’s unalloyed judgement). The ivory gate, in this light, is one means of dulling the edge of Pope’s particular satire. Yet it is a particularly half-hearted one. In Scriblerus’s second comment on the gates, in the note to III.337, the passing of the vision through gates of ivory is taken as a sign that the poet ‘conceiveth better hopes’ from the various Hanoverian institutions that Settle predicts the disintegration of, declaring ‘all such imaginations to be wild, ungrounded, and fictitious’ by means of Virgilian allusion. Scriblerus, however, is to be read ironically, even if he really is describing one of the exculpatory effects of the allusion just outlined. The allusion is not simply backtracking or mollification on Pope’s part – we might do better to see it as a burlesque of such manoeuvres – though he would have been willing for some readers to interpret it in that way. One such reader is Daniel P. Deneau, who approached the ivory gates in 1959, arguing that the first of Scriblerus’s notes is ‘apparently facetious’ but that the second, to line 337, suggests that the poem might be ‘more optimistic […] than has been commonly realised’.35 Deneau goes on to acknowledge that in the four-book version ‘the allusion produces a curious, perhaps inexplicable tension or ambiguity’ (i.e. the incongruity possibly articulated in E. C. Brewer, A Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2001), p. 364. 35 Daniel P. Deneau, ‘Pope’s “Iv’ry Gate”: The Dunciad, III, 340’ Modern Language Notes 74 (1959), pp. 208–11, p. 211.

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‘Bentley’s’ note, that it declares an apparently fulfilled prophecy to be false), before concluding that Pope must have been aware of that ‘disparity’, ‘but thought it functional in some way’.36 ‘We cannot be sure’, he continues, ‘that Pope, with a characteristic sprightliness, did not leave the reference to the “Iv’ry Gate” in the final version of his poem to add a curious (and puzzling) tension – in order to mix “true visions” and “deluding lies”’ (p. 211). Deneau errs in taking Scriblerus’s optimism about Hanoverian cultural regeneration as being indicative of Pope’s, because he reads Scriblerus’s literal-minded scholarship straight.37 We should also note that the quarrel between Bentley and Scriblerus is not about the truth or falsity of the prophecy in itself, but rather what the poet meant by his allusion to the ivory gates, what it tells us about his intention, ironic or otherwise: what kind of thing that didn’t happen is this? The questions are historiographical, not historical. Scriblerus says in the first note that it is inserted ‘...for fear of any mistake in our author’s meaning’, and in the second, ‘That such is not seriously the judgement of our Poet [...] may be seen from his conclusion’. That the ivory gate denotes falsity is a reading never questioned by the text’s internal commentary. For Scriblerus, the allusion dilutes the virulence of the poet’s malice; in 1743 Bentley may be suggesting that the fourth book is not just a fulfilment of prophecy but an amplification of the poet’s rage and the scope of his satire: a clarification of satirical intent. So, whilst Deneau is right in some ways to recognise the incongruity recognised by ‘Bentley’ in 1743, that incongruity starts to make sense – a question deliberately suspended – if this whole section is read as a parody of popular uses of prophecy as propaganda. For there is no reason, in late-Stuart and Hanoverian culture, that false prophecies should not come true.38 We can be sure that Pope did

36

Rumbold notes that ‘the impression of Scriblerus’s naivety’ in the note to l. 337 is ‘undercut by the optimism implied in Pope’s letting the vision of Dulness’s triumph escape though the ivory gate’ (1729 III.307 n.). 37 James McLaverty notes the consistent and ‘ludicrous’ attempts of Scriblerus ‘to free the poem from its contemporary setting’, giving the assertion that the vision is ‘no more than a Chimera’ as his final example (Pope, Print and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2001), p. 104). 38 In the Aeneid, the unreality signified by the ivory gate is not at all the same as untruth. Warburton’s commentary on these lines argues along similar lines, as part of his theory that Aeneas’s descent into the underworld represents an ‘Initiation into the Mysteries’: ‘By the first [i.e. Horn] [Virgil] insinuates the Reality of another State; and by the second [Ivory], the shadowy Representations of it in the Shews of the Mysteries: So that the Visions of Aeneas were false, not as there was no Ground or Foundation for a future State; but, as those he saw, were not indeed in Hell, but in the Temple of Ceres.’ (The Divine Legation of Moses 2.

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leave the reference in in 1743, in order both to complicate (or to pretend to complicate) the question of his intention, and to confuse the distinction between truth and falsity – or history and counterhistory. Pope’s questioning the veracity of Settle’s prophecy – the historical correspondences of which are exhaustively witnessed in the notes to the Variorum, and may well have been experienced first-hand by early readers – cannot be anything but deliberate, even if it is not entirely serious. The changes to the status of the dream (and the vision within it) across the major versions of The Dunciad intensify and problematise its liminal status, enhancing the betweenness of the work as a whole. In 1728, book three recounts a dream from which Tibbald awakes, but which might still quite plausibly be taken as an ‘authoritative’ prophecy. In the Variorum, book three becomes a dream from which Tibbald may never awake, at the end of which Settle’s prophetic vision passes through a gate which ‘denoteth falsity’. In 1743, Bentley’s equivocal note undermines that declaration of falsity, and book three now seems to be a prophecy confirmed (or revised, reinstated) by the newly ‘discovered’ fourth book. It seems clear that these changes, responding as they do to other more wholesale revisions, were not planned in advance by Pope, but that they are made ad hoc does not mean they are incomprehensible. If we take the fourth book of The Dunciad in 1743 to be a fulfilment of the promise of The Dunciad Variorum’s closing prophecy, is it not the fulfilment of an invented prophecy, a fiction? Settle’s vision starts as a back-dated satirical literary history and ends as a parody of prophetic propaganda, of prophecy as a coercive ‘state-engine’. As Rawson notes, the closing lines of Settle’s speech are transferred into the poet-speaker’s voice and moved to the finale of the fourth book.39 This transfer further confirms the sense that the fourth book is a confirmation of the third, but it also points towards the contrivance of that apparent fulfilment. The record has been doctored. The triumph of Dulness is made, not begotten. So, book four is the confirmation, the realisation, of a deluded vision of the world, and a record of the absurd replacement of history with a diabolic counterhistory. That inverted world is also Dulness’s own creation, within and without the poem. At the start of his dream vision Tibbald descends to ‘th’Elysian Shade’ from his veiled repose on Dulness’s lap in the last recess of her temple. The underworld in which he meets Settle is located, then, in vols. (London, 1738–41), I.229). Likewise, Tibbald is not indeed in Hell, but in the Temple of Dulness, dreaming. 39 Claude Rawson, ‘The Sleep of the Dunces’, in Richard McCabe and David Womersley, eds., Literary Milieux: Essays in Text and Context Presented to Howard Erskine-Hill (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 2008), pp. 271–2.

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the same space as the chaos beneath (or in) the cave of poverty and poetry out of which issue the ‘nameless somethings’ that are the dunces’ works in book one. Those works, like the visions she grants Tibbald and Cibber, are the means by which she gains her ascendancy, as well as being its effects. In fact, one of the most troubling aspects of Dulness is her collapsing of the distinction between cause and effect: an efficient way of bringing about the end-time. Settle’s prophecy is a coercive strategy, a prophecy of greatness that is in effect a false promise, a diversion: a veiling of the inducement of catatonia with the promise of glory. Such empty promise reflects Pope’s view of the stagnation ensuing from Hanoverian preferment and patronage, the gagging effect of filthy lucre. Dulness is effectively killing time, encouraging an endemic idling that stops anything happening: Whereas Settle’s speech proceeds in the form of prophecy, it is not a prophecy of progress, either desirable or undesirable. Although Cibber happens to be its chosen, contemporary manifestation, dulness is of both old and modern date. There is no ‘progress’ finally, but only the realization of man’s potential and instinctive meanders to his native goddess.40

Sitter reminds us of the ways in which the move towards Dulness is precisely a fall, not propulsion; the removal of effective (Scriblerian) opposition; a ‘native’ state. ‘Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall’; not for nothing is the last action of the poem a release, a letting go of the curtain beneath which the dull elect (and, perhaps, the poet, his song, and the reader) have been hurriedly ushered, like children being called in from play to eat their solid pudding. Dulness’s will to veiling is one way of understanding her aptitude for inveiglement: in the allegorical sense, dullness is self-deception, pulling the wool over one’s own eyes. ‘For thee I dim these eyes, and stuff this head,’ declares Tibbald in his prayer, a declaration with dehumanising undertones: the dunces are turning themselves into men of straw, automata.41 The way that the goddess tucks her votaries in with veils and curtains is also the key to seeing the ways in which her apocalypse is curiously inverted, not a revelatory lifting of the veil, but a screening that blinds and incapacitates.42 The obscuration begins immediately before the dunce infante settles in for his eternal rest:

40

Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, p. 105. 1728 I.155. 42 Jemielity, ‘“Consummatum Est”’, p. 173. 41

Living in Counterhistory 201 Him close she curtain’d round with vapours blue, And soft besprinkled with Cimmerian dew (1729 III.3–4)

Tibbald and Cibber, bathed in the darkness of the Cimmerii, swaddled in blue vapours that recall the veils prescribed as a screen for the holy of holies in the Israelites’ temple, are then granted a prophetic vision that also serves as a bedtime story. Dryden thought that the horn from which one of the gates of sleep was constructed ‘infer[red] such Dreams are of Divine Revelation in Virgil’. As a vision that departs through the opaque ivory gate, it is appropriate that it should begin not with revelation, but a rapture that is in a large part a wrapping-up (as in both swaddling and conclusion: ‘that’s a wrap’). Dulness’s revelation is really an obscuration, as state-engine prophecies must needs be, and Pope, on the wrong side of history but certain that he is in the right, shows us the rogue behind the curtain, a rogue made more visible by the poet’s oblique position. Indeed, as Settle’s prophecy moves into the properly ‘predictive’ section, he cries, ‘Now look thro’ Fate! Behold the scene she draws,’ pointing, as Rumbold notes, to theatrical scenery that can be ‘drawn’ back and forth on rails, a process of apparent revelation later suggested to be a kind of regression.43 Yet Dulness is ‘drawing’ a scene in two senses: moving visions on ropes and pulleys like a celestial John Rich, but also painting or fabricating them. In both senses, this is an obscuration in the form of revelation, overlaid representation masquerading as revealed truth, and pantomimic performance as effective heroic action. Lines that appear for the first time in the first book in 1743 set up these connections between sleep, curtains, and political deception, as Dulness’s numerous screenings are aligned with Walpole’s status as skreenmaster-general: O! when shall rise a Monarch all our own, And I, a Nursing-mother, rock the throne, ’Twixt Prince and People close the Curtain draw, Shade him from Light, and cover him from Law; Fatten the Courtier, starve the learned band, And suckle armies, and dry-nurse the land: ’Till Senates nod to Lullabies divine, And all be sleep, as at an Ode of thine. (I.311–18)

43

‘But oh! what scenes, what miracles behind?’, according to Rumbold ‘a play on the use of stage scenery painted on to pairs of panels and progressively opened to reveal further scenes behind’. (1728 III.183 and n.).

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As readers in 1743 well knew, the answer to Dulness’s question ‘O! when…?’ was really ‘for the last two decades’, as Pope is clearly thinking of Walpole’s reputation for smothering dissent and denaturing institutions of learning and morality. The inevitability and ease of Dulness’s triumph seems to be comically highlighted, too, as this apparently desperate prayer is answered bathetically quickly by the cries of ‘God save king Colley!’ two lines later. The accession of the dunce king (Walpole, George II, Colley Cibber) has already happened, in history and in previous iterations of the poem, but is presented, tellingly, as being always already about to happen, immanent and imminent, like the threat of popery in the narratives of Oates, Prance, and Bedloe. As we know from the preface of 1728, and as the hero-swapping in 1743 confirms, dunces could easily be ‘clapp’d in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and chang’d from day to day’ (1728 p. 15). This starkly anti-Walpolean passage illuminates the political aspect of the veiling of the dunce king in book three and beyond, just as the ‘Lullabies divine’ and Cibber’s soporific odes reflect the reading of the vision in book three as a hypnotic nocturne.

Rapture One more significant instance of veiling in book four illustrates the temporal difficulties this chapter has been exploring, as well as raising the questions of agency and intention that abound in the Dunciads and which are problematised by its apocalyptic leanings. The invocation to the final book is an odd moment in which the poet-speaker himself addresses Chaos and Night, begging a momentary reprieve: Yet, yet a moment, one dim Ray of Light Indulge, dread Chaos, and eternal Night! Of darkness visible so much be lent, As half to shew, half veil the deep Intent. Ye Pow’rs! whose Mysteries restor’d I sing, To whom Time bears me on his rapid wing, Suspend a while your Force inertly strong, Then take at once the Poet and the Song. (1743 IV.1–8)

James Noggle argues that here ‘Pope purposefully blurs the distinction between his control and Dulness’s control over Book IV’, asking the powers to suspend their inevitable triumph so that he can sing their ‘mysteries

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restor’d’.44 Like Satan in Paradise Lost, the poet’s resistance seems circumscribed by divine powers, as well as by the inevitability and imminence of an apocalypse. Noggle also draws attention to the passage’s compression of time: [Pope] writes of Dulness’s ‘Mysteries restor’d’ in the past tense as if her triumph has already occurred. While the invocation seems to beg time of the Goddess before ‘the Poet and the Song’ are ‘at once’ taken, it simultaneously suggests that time has already run out – almost as if the suspension of her powers ‘a while’ and the taking of Pope ‘at once’ were impossibly simultaneous aspects of a single moment of poetic composition. (Ibid.)

‘[Dulness’s] force’, Noggle continues, ‘is not in suspension but already in effect, “the Poet and the Song” already taken on the wings of time.’ This kind of impossible simultaneity has been seen elsewhere in the poem’s backdated prophecies, its accretion of contradictory comments by Scriblerus and Bentley, and the ways in which it is both inside and outside of Pope’s contemporary world, ‘suspended’ in an incorrigible quantum entanglement of earnestness and irony, history and counterhistory.45 As Noggle goes on to suggest, this is also related to the ‘impossible’ simultaneity of rival intentions that inheres in a work so riven with ironies and counter-ironies: ‘it is obscure whether the “deep intent” is that of the poet or of Chaos and Night. Pope’s point is that the ‘imperfection’ can be read as ineptitude or sublimity, according to taste.’46 That imperfection, or incorrigibility, can also be ‘read’ or explained away as a deliberate obscuring of political malevolence, for these lines are also a nod to the encodedness of Pope’s satire, which is half-veiled in allegory, mythic structure, digressive and interpolative historical and textual practice, and diffusive literary allusion. Like Dulness, Pope coddles and baffles his victims and his readers through veiling and inveigling. As these lines are uttered or composed, time is bearing the speaker towards Dulness’s powers on his rapid wing. Rumbold hears an allusion to one of Milton’s sonnets, but Pope might also have Marvell’s ‘winged 44

James Noggle, ‘Skepticism and the Sublime Advent of Modernity in the 1742 Dunciad’ The Eighteenth Century 37 (1996), pp. 22–41, p. 33. 45 See also ‘the frequency of conflicting prophetic messages among the prophets of Yahweh’. (Jemielity, ‘“Consummatum Est”’ p. 172). 46 This obscurity is once more produced by Scriblerian and Bentleian glosses on line 4. Noggle, ‘Skepticism and the Sublime Advent of Modernity’, p. 32.

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chariot’ in the back of his mind: it seems he is playing with the carpe diem motif in this passage.47 The speaker’s request for world enough and time to finish his song, in this apocalyptic context, might be read as an injunction to carpe dies irae. Yet, in an agency switch typical of the poem, the poet is not the seizer but, along with his song, the seized, already borne along on time’s rapid wing. What is more, despite being already captured, he asks for a forestalling of a second bearing away, the final captio of the poet and the song. The passage also suggests another kind of seizure: the poetic fit produced not by sublime poetic frenzy but its duncical inversion, the overpowering of the seat of sense already suffered by the dunce king in the previous book. This kind of possession also bleeds into invasion of property, for ‘rapid’ has etymological connections with theft and abduction, being formed as an adjective by the addition of the suffix idus to the Latin verb rapere to seize, take by force, to carry off, snatch away.48 The presence of rapere in ‘rapid’ brings us back to another sense of rapture, and one appropriate to the apocalyptic context: the assumption of the bodies of the righteous at the Last Judgement. The dunces’ fall into Dulness is a kind of inverted rapture, but one wonders if the taking up of the speaker is also a travesty of the ascension or of classical and Old Testament raptures. It also more straightforwardly predicts the folding of the poet’s condition into the dunces, a confession of Dulness’s triumph, as, like Tibbald in book three, the poet is (or will be) raptured, overtaken, taken up, overcome. An effective propagandist, Dulness determines history – ends time – by equally annihilating the determination of those who serve her and those who oppose. In rapture, and perhaps more clearly in the adjective ‘rapt’, there resides an illuminating tension between spatial and intellectual ‘transport’, the play between being carried up and along, and getting ‘carried away’ (rapt, adj. ‘Carried up and transported into heaven’; ‘Of movement: as if swept along by a current’; ‘Deeply absorbed or buried in (a feeling, subject of thought, etc.); intent upon’).49 For Pope, getting carried away (straying too far into personal satire or politically dangerous utterance) might well have led to him being carried away by the authorities (‘taken up’ as one takes up a thief ); that the poem had taken things too far was certainly a charge levelled at him by less sympathetic readers. The dunces are rapt too, in so many senses, swept along in the current of Dulness’s Cartesian 47

1743 IV.6 n. OED rapid adj., etymology, and rape v. 2., etymology. 49 Robert A. Erikson explores the etymology of ‘rapture’ in a discussion of Pope’s movement between erotic rapture and ‘the rapture of the predatory satirist’. (‘Pope and Rapture’, Eighteenth-Century Life 40 (2016), pp. 1–31). 48

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vortex, doting lovers and dependant infants, but also ‘absorbed’ by dullness (and thereby incorporated, assumed, into Dulness), all of this being a direct consequence of their being ‘intent upon’ the minutiae of modern scholarship, carried away with and by pantomime and trifles, by surface, by the accidental.50 Such opening out of intellectual or metaphysical qualities into kinds of spatial and tactile reality is of course part of the way mock-epic allegories function in general. Physicalising the dunce’s moral and intellectual helplessness is also an important means by which this poem explores questions of agency: the subject of the next chapter.

50

In book four the freethinker’s Lucretian God, indifferent to and removed from sublunary affairs, is said to be ‘wrapt up in self ’ (1743 IV.484). Compare Dryden’s portrait of the ignoramus jurors’ Lucretian God, below, p. 62.

Chapter 8

The Indifference of the Dunces: Agency in the Dunciads

T

he Dunciad in Four Books works hard to fanfare the arrival of the new hero, Bays, or Colley Cibber. An important new addition in 1743 is Aristarchus’s disquisition ‘On the Hero of the Poem’. He quotes Cibber while relating the opinion of ‘carpers objecting to the clear title of our hero’. Their problem is that he was not, like Achilles and Aeneas, ‘Goddess-born’ (though the poem makes it clear that he is, like a Hanoverian king, adopted), but a player, and, in Cibber’s phrase, ‘never even a hero on the stage’ (1743, p. 83). In answer, Aristarchus brings in two advocates for the theory that heroes are self-made, not begotten: To all this we have, as we conceive, a sufficient answer from the Roman historian, Fabrum esse suae quemque fortunae: Every man is the Smith of his own fortune. The politic Florentine Nicholas Machiavel goeth still farther, and affirms that a man needs but to believe himself a Hero to be one of the best. ‘Let him (saith he) but fancy himself capable of the highest things, and he will of course be able to atchieve them.’ Laying this down as a principle, it will certainly and incontestably follow, that, if ever Hero was such a character, OURS is: For if ever man thought himself such, OURS doth. (p. 84)

There are at least three layers to peel apart here. Firstly, this is an ironic comment on Cibber’s brazen forehead, the false modesty dishonestly covering his self-importance. Like many of the dunces, Cibber thinks that he is propelling himself when he is really plummeting into oblivion. Second, ironically granting Cibber such historical agency comically (but still effectively) absolves Pope of the crime of malicious, particular satire. This momentarily effaces Pope’s agency, obscuring his intending hand. As Pope himself puts it elsewhere, ‘Fools rush into my Head and so I write’: Cibber puts himself in Pope’s poem, or simply finds himself there, having rushed into the vacuum created by Dulness and the convenient evacuation

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of Tibbald.1 Momentarily, The Dunciad appears to be a self-organising system. Finally, this washing of the hands is rather undercut by the fact that the reader can see Pope using Cibber’s words against him, hoisting him with his own petard. Aristarchus says Cibber is a self-made man. We are to perceive that he is in fact subject to dullness and subject to Dulness, rolled in a vortex. What the reader sees here is not history but historiography: technique. We might also see that the argument that Cibber has simply swum unawares into Pope’s ken is itself a front, translucently veiling the fact that Cibber is not subject to Dulness, but to The Dunciad, and to Pope. At the end of Aristarchus’s essay, we are returned to prophecy: Nothing therefore (we conceive) remains to hinder his own Prophecy of himself from taking immediate effect. A rare felicity! and what few prophets have had the satisfaction to see, alive! Nor can we conclude better than with that extraordinary one of his, which is conceived in these Oraculous words, MY DULNESS WILL FIND SOMEBODY TO DO IT RIGHT. (p. 86)

That last phrase is quoted from Cibber’s autobiographical An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740). Cibber’s point was that his ‘dullness’, or his proto-Shandean prolixity – he has covered only seven of forty-three years on the stage by chapter nine – will be compensated for by his readers, of which there are two kinds. The ‘ill-natur’d’ will be as pleased to find him a dunce in his old age as they were to discover him a ‘Brisk blockhead’ in his youth. For the more amenable, the wealth of information about the English stage will compensate for the length of his account. It is a curious apology, but reflects Cibber’s sense that his behaviour (or the manner of his writing) will provide materials for his enemies, while the content satisfies those ‘with no Gall to gratify’.2 In that sense his words are indeed oraculous, for The Dunciad in Four Books is rather more concerned with Cibber’s posturing than what he actually says, partly because it is in the nature of a dunce to privilege form over content, to be dominated by pose and repose. As it appears in An Apology, this exclamation is not exactly a prophecy, though it does attempt to predict (and perhaps thereby determine) reader reception. But Pope very firmly casts it into the prophetic mode, another sign that he is thinking here about agency. That Cibber is his own prophecy fulfilled reflects Settle’s words to him following the vision 1

The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (TE IV.19, ll. 13–4). Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, ed. by B. R. S. Fone (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan, 1968), p. 163.

2

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of the pantomimic apocalypse: ‘Son; what thou seek’st is in thee! Look, and find | Each Monster meets his likeness in thy mind’ (1743 IV.251–2). The Latin tag in the note for these lines (‘What you seek is in yourself; don’t look beyond yourself ’), adapted from Persius and Horace, twists their emphasis on the importance of self-sufficiency and self-confidence into an indictment of self-absorption, reminiscent of the ironic application of Appius and Machiavelli’s dicta by Aristarchus. Just as Aristarchus’s comment served to give and take away Cibber’s agency by turns, so these lines, along with the declaration that Cibber’s crowning as dunce king is a fulfilment of his own prophecy, make him seem paradoxically subject to a prophetic counterhistory spun from his own innards. Bays is subject to a prophecy, rapt. That prophecy may be false, stupid, unintended, or illegitimate, but it still diminishes his agency, and it is still fulfilled. That false prophecy is said to be made by himself, though it is really only made into a prophecy through Pope’s recontextualisation. His ‘prophecy’ is thereby re-read as brazen forehead, self-importance, or vanity. Cibber is pulled into his own emptiness. The need for the dunces to have and not to have agency is a problem for Pope, then, and one that he often solves or avoids by speaking double. It is a problem we have encountered elsewhere, in the insinuations that papists, fanatic Whigs, stockjobbers, or Jacobites are both terrorists and clowns. That oscillation is a means of giving and taking away historical and cultural significance. In the Dunciads this dichotomy is very closely related to the debate regarding the ethics of particular and general satire, and the extent to which Bays, Tibbald, and others are historically-anchored portraits, satirical transformations, or (as seems most likely) a combination of the two, the consistency of which varies according to context and purpose. For Mack, ‘the ambivalence of the mock-heroic metaphor’ (which enables Pope to speak double) means that he ‘can keep to the end the tension between all these characters as comic and ridiculous, and their destructive potential in being so’.3 According to Rawson, in The Dunciad, ‘two forces tug at each other. One is the sense of massive catastrophe. The other […] is that of the gnat-like puniness of the quotidian particulars which […] are the paradoxical components of large-scale cultural dysfunction’.4 The ‘gnat-like puniness’ of the dunces becomes a problem when they agglomerate into 3

Maynard Mack, ‘“Wit and Poetry and Pope”: Some Observations on his imagery’, in Collected in Himself:  Essays Critical, Biographical, and Bibliographical on Pope and Some of His Contemporaries (Newark: Univ. of Delaware, 1982), p. 52. See also Mack, The Garden and the City, p. 187. 4 ‘The Sleep of the Dunces’, pp. 259–60.

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a swarm. Swarms, as generalised collections of particular things, serve to efface individual traits and behaviours.5 They also amplify menace. One dunce, one Jacobite, one papist or fanatic can safely be dismissed as insignificant and ridiculous, a minor aberration, lusus culturae that can be easily batted away precisely because of their deviance and peripherality.6 However, dullness, Jacobitism and popery menace in a radically different way. This is because, like swarms, they streamline and make consequential the unintended random activity of the isolated actor, because they represent a principle, a critical mass, and the potential conversion of the aberrant or the accidental into the central: None want a place, for all their Centre found, Hung to the Goddess, and coher’d around. Not closer, orb in orb, conglob’d are seen The buzzing Bees about their dusky Queen. (1743 IV.77–80)

This description of the gathering of Dulness’s votaries near the beginning of the final book opens out into an extended metaphor of the gravitation of the ‘vast involuntary throng’ toward the goddess, discussed below. It also enacts that conversion just mentioned: the aberrant – literally, those who ‘wander away’ – are here ‘place[d]’. In swarming, these accidental, insignificant creatures find ‘their Centre’.7 Dulness converts the accidental into the central, and she does it by herself becoming the dunces’ ‘centre’, their essence. Paradoxically, but in keeping with the difference-erasing impetus of many rituals of initiation, and with the effects of swarming, she strips away their personalities and lived experience, qualities now become accidental to their roles as votaries. In this, as in so many ways, she reflects Pope’s satirical practice.

5

For Pope’s depiction of crowds in The Dunciad and other works and its relation to Elias Canetti’s crowd theory, see Julian Ferraro, ‘Crowds, Power, and Pope’ RES 63 (2012), pp. 779–96. Pat Rogers discusses crowds in The Dunciad and kinds of civil unrest in Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen & Co., 1972), pp. 99–126. 6 In book two of Gulliver’s Travels, the Brobdingnagian king’s scholars describe Gulliver as a ‘lusus naturae’: a ‘sport’ or ‘freak’ of nature. Gulliver derides this attempt to avoid the Aristotelian ‘old evasion of occult Causes’ by simply giving the unknown another name (Womersley (ed.), Gulliver’s Travels, pp. 146–7). Warburton says much the same of continental Cartesian thinkers in his note to 1743 IV.643–4, discussed below. 7 OED aberr, v., etymology.

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In discussing the parallels Pope draws between poetry and painting in his translation of the Odyssey, Tom Jones argues that such connections are emphasised ‘in order to show that both epic poetry and history painting educate their audiences, that they show the world stripped of its accidental qualities and as it should be seen in God’s divine scheme’.8 Jones is not thinking about the mock epic here, but the exemplary focus he describes, as well as its relation to God’s providence and a Berkleian ‘meaningful reality’, still has explanatory force when applied to The Dunciad.9 Both Dulness and Pope strip the dunces of their accidental qualities, having decided that the complexities of their individual personalities – their identities – are insignificant. Both do so according to a prophetic and a providential vision. Prophetic clairvoyance – seeing as God might see – is a mode that necessarily obliterates the accidental, especially if reality is held to be meaningful in the Berkleian sense. This is the condition much propaganda aspires to. To see a dunce stripped of their accidental qualities is to see them, Pope suggests, as God intends: as specimens. Here it is worth recalling, and remembering for what follows, that providence literally means ‘foresight’, and is thus directly related to prophetic sight or clairvoyance. Pope needs to efface the dunces’ individual agencies – through presenting them as barely differentiated members of a swarm, much more signs of a phenomenon than they are its cause – before he can acknowledge them as a force that can effect historical change. This stripping of the accidental qualities of the dunces is a justification for particular satire.10 Like an ignoramus juror, Pope tells us precisely who the dunces are, insisting all the while that he is paying them no attention.

The ontogeny of the Dunciads Unlike bees, many of Pope’s swarming dunces have names, and they often have the same names as real people. Reflecting Pope’s interest in presenting

8

Pope and Berkeley, p. 69. Ibid., p. 47. 10 Pope goes on the (doctored) record regarding this matter more famously in a letter (according to Sherburn, ‘most probably a “forgery”’, or a post-facto redrafting for publication of a more straightforward missive sent to Arbuthnot on 2 August 1734): ‘To attack Vices in the abstract, without touching Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with Shadows’ (George Sherburn (ed.), The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), vol. 3, p. 419, and p. 418 n. 5 (for the original letter to Arbuthnot, see pp. 423–24). 9

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his dunces as both terrorists and clowns, and reflecting the ways in which Dulness normalises the aberrant, the identity and identification of the dunces, so clearly central to the poem’s satirical functioning, is frequently said to be accidental. The French critic René Le Bossu, on whom Pope relies quite seriously in the preface to his translation of Homer, is read by him in relation to The Dunciad with a much more playful eye. Le Bossu unwittingly offers a rationale for keeping the dunces in that productive limbo between full personhood and symbol. The most obvious point of contact between Pope and Le Bossu is the naming of heroes. The issue became most prominent after 1743, but is present from 1728, where in ‘The Publisher to the Reader’ we are told:11 There may arise some obscurity in chronology from the Names in the poem, by the inevitable removal of some Authors, and Insertion of others, in their Niches. For whoever will consider the unity of the whole design, will be sensible, that the Poem was not made for these Authors, but these authors for the poem. And I should judge that they were clapp’d in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and chang’d from day to day, in like manner as when the old boughs wither, we thrust new ones into a chimney. (1728 pp. 15–6, italics inverted)

This devaluing of dunces’ individuality as members of a swarm is a sort of evolutionary view of history, akin to the notion that the theory of natural selection did not necessarily require the historical person Charles Darwin to come to fruition.12 History, in this situation, does not matter. The publisher privileges the action (the triumph of Dulness) over the agents, whose agency is thereby diminished. Revision and redrafting are offered as sign and symptom of the dunces’ insignificance. Aside from the institution of Cibber in 1743, we know from evidence of manuscript drafts and subsequent revisions in print on a smaller scale that many dunces were ‘chang’d from day to day’, though the motivations for such manoeuvres are usually more than arbitrary.13 According to this prefatory letter, those mindful of the ‘unity of the design’ will see that the identity of dunces is irrelevant, 11

James McClaverty points out the different issues at stake regarding naming in 1729 and 1743: ‘what was at first a joke later became an opportunity’ (Pope, Print and Meaning, pp. 101–2 n. 32). 12 See Gregory Radick, ‘Is the theory of natural selection independent of its history?’ in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 2006), pp. 147–72. 13 See, as only one of many examples throughout Rumbold’s edition, 1728 I.94 n.

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or at least subordinate to other considerations. This emphasis on design resembles Le Bossu’s focus on the primacy of fable, moral, and action in the formulation of an epic. Not unlike the publisher’s letter, Le Bossu’s treatise is very much concerned with the process of composition, the order in which a poet should consider and plan different aspects of their work. It is plain […] that the Action is not made for the Hero, since that ought to be feign’d and invented independently from him, and before the Poet thought of using his Name; and that on the other hand, the Hero is only design’d for the Action: and that the Names of Achilles, Ulysses, and Aeneas are only borrow’d to represent the Personages which the Poet feign’d in general. The Nature of the Fable will not admit us to doubt hereof; since all the Actions that are there rehears’d under the Names of a Dog, a Wolf, a Lyon, a Man, and the like, are not design’d to inform us of the Nature of these Animals to which they are applied; or to tell us of some Adventure that happen’d to them: For the Author of a Fable does not mind any such thing. These Personages on the contrary are only design’d to sustain the Action he has invented.14

Le Bossu’s apparent indifference to the differences between dogs, lions, and men like Achilles or Ulysses is one place that Pope could find comic potential.15 It is an indifference that might easily become Scriblerian if taken out of context. That actions are not really carried out in epic poems, but merely ‘rehears’d’, also happily describes Pope’s representation of the dunces as indolent, ineffective, and obsessed with pageantry. At the most simplistic level, Pope’s own joke in applying Le Bossu to his work is that The Dunciad represents the dunce’s raison d’etre, the place that they really find their centres, being personages ‘only design’d to sustain the Action he has invented’. Such indifference regarding persons is reflected in the impassivity of the process of finding a hero, as described by Scriblerus: ‘He seeks for one who hath been concerned in the Journals, written bad Plays or Poems, and published low Criticisms: He finds his name to be Tibbald, and he becomes of course the Hero of the poem’ (1729, p. 166). This description of what Pope’s critics saw as the major moral shortcoming of his poem diminishes the poet’s agency, absolving him. He finds that his hero’s name is Tibbald (which, of course, it isn’t, precisely), and he becomes of course the hero of 14

Le Bossu, Treatise of the Epick Poem, p. 54. Likewise: ‘As for the Fiction and Fable, it signifies little whether the Persons are Dogs, or Orontes and Pridamont, or Robert d’Artois and the Earl of Nesle, or lastly Achilles and Agamemnon.’ (Ibid., p. 17).

15

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the poem. He is very deliberately not said to have been made the hero by Pope, and in ‘of course’ there is a combination of happenstance (in the general run of things, as it happens) and predestination (of course, naturally, obviously, inevitably). Le Bossu offers Pope a framework for modulating the dunces’ agency, and his own. Fools rush in, and so he writes. At the outset of his treatise, Le Bossu sets out the importance of general applicability, probability, and plausibility, and in so doing diminishes the significance of heroes: Poesie, says [Aristotle], teaches Morality not by Recital only as an Historian, who barely tells us what Alcibiades for Instance (‘tis Aristotle’s own Instance) did or suffer’d: But by proposing whatever a Person, let the Poet call him by what name he please, ought either necessarily, or in all probability, to have said or done upon that or the like occasion […] in the Epopea, according to Aristotle, let the Names be what they will, yet the Persons and the Actions are Feign’d, Allegorical, and Universal; not Historical and Singular.16

Variations on the phrases ‘by what name he pleases’ and ‘let the names be what they will’ are almost incessant in the Treatise. Le Bossu here outlines a way of reading epic (and, unwittingly, a way of reading The Dunciad) as a series of exemplary situations, in turn enabling a conversion of The Dunciad’s particular satire into general moral fable. In this reading, we are not shown how Colley Cibber or Edmund Curll or Ned Ward acted in a certain situation, but how someone like them might have acted in a situation of that kind. This exemplarity is enabled by the dunces’ vaunted interchangeability, their status as specimens. According to such a view of the poem, the identity of the actor is subordinated to their role in upholding the poem’s moral and fable. Except, of course, as Scriblerus’s notes frequently inform us, often Pope’s actions and persons purport to be ‘Historical and Singular’. Identity and identification are important, but the identity of fabular representation with historical reality can always be said to be accidental, as it often is at the end of films. Historicity and referentiality are both mockingly and seriously suggested to be subordinate to the poem’s ‘fable’, and Pope is both following and undermining Le Bossu’s recommendations. Colomb argues that Pope starts his composition process with persons, ‘overturning the neoclassic story of epic ontogeny by finding episodes, actions, allegories, and morals

16

Ibid., p. 4.

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to suit its prime matter, persons and places’.17 It is right to insist on the importance of referentiality, and not to be misled by the systematisation of Scriblerus (or, in other places, Warburton). Yet Le Bossu himself gives grounds for the mixture of the allegorical and the real, and Pope must have been cognisant of what is said in the Treatise concerning what difference the presence of historical or mythical personages makes to epic poetry. Take the following response to a hypothetical interlocutor who questions whether an author using second-hand material deserves ‘the Name of Poet’: ...the Poet ought to feign one General Action; then he should look for the Names of some Persons (to whom a parallel Action has either truly or probably happen’d) in History, or some well-known Fables: And lastly, he ought to place his Action under these Names. Thus it will be really feign’d and invented by the Author, and yet will seem to be taken out of some very ancient History and Fable.18

As Erskine-Hill pointed out above, Pope’s poem uses (and displays) a dense network of ‘well-known Fables’, or contemporary cultural-political debate, and does so with great efficiency. That these ‘well known Fables’ are often history presented in a counterhistorical mode straitened by a pseudo-epic framework is one of the reasons Pope’s targets were so frustrated. Le Bossu inadvertently describes the combination of the real and the invented, the historical and the counterhistorical, that many modern commentators have seen as the key to understanding the poem’s achievement: it is ‘really feign’d and invented by the Author’, and yet it ‘seems’ to be taken out of some pre-existing ‘History and Fable’ (it often is, but pretends that history is pretence, a history that seems like counterhistory). At times it sounds as if Le Bossu is practically ordering Pope to make sure his general satire is upheld by particular, personal (but publicly known) details: ‘…if those, whose Names we borrow, have done any known Actions; the best way is to make use of them, and accommodate these real Circumstances to the Ground-work of the Fable, and to the Design of the Poet.’ The effect of this is to render ‘the feign’d Action more probable’, and ‘make it look like true History’.19 The facts must be collectively subjected to an abstraction. A few pages later, Le Bossu recommends that such historical details might well be rearranged and redacted as required by the fable; precisely the kind of

17

Designs on Truth, p. 119. Le Bossu, Treatise of the Epick Poem, p. 15. 19 Ibid., pp. 35–6. 18

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historiographical selectivity that Pope is chastised for by his targets and critics.

Probable falsity and improbable truth As Frederick M. Keener has argued, despite its declared Aristotelian underpinnings, the Treatise is historicist (indeed, New Historicist) in its emphasis.20 Keener relates Le Bossu’s focus on probability (i.e. that which is likely to gain the approbation of his audience) to his interest in the propagandic function of epic poems like The Aeneid. ‘For Le Bossu,’ and, Keener suggests, for Pope in The Dunciad, ‘the Action, but still more the Fable, is fundamentally the rhetorically adjusted history of the present monarch’.21 The four-book Dunciad famously begins with a mock declaration ordering the ‘Pretender, Pseudo-Poet or Phantom’ Tibbald ‘utterly to vanish’ to make room for ‘the Laureate himself ’ (1743 p. 28). As is well known, the term ‘phantom’ is borrowed from Le Bossu. It occurs frequently in the Treatise, but one instance is particularly important. It comes in a passage Pope alludes to in Scriblerus’s account of The Dunciad’s ontogeny, and amidst Le Bossu’s discussion of the best way of making epic poems more ‘probable’, or likely to be well received: Homer has made choice of the Siege of Troy, and feign’d that this Action happen’d there. He has given the Name of Achilles to a valiant and angry Phantom; that of Agamemnon to his General, that of Hector to the Enemies Commander, and others to the rest, as is to be seen in his Poem. Besides, he was oblig’d to accommodate himself to the Manners, Customs, and Genius of the Greeks his Auditors, the better to make them attend to the Instruction of his Poem, and to gain their Approbation by praising them, as far as the Faults he must of necessity make his Personages fall into, would admit. He admirably discharges all the Duties, by making these Brave Princes, and those Victorious People, to be Grecians, and the Fathers of those he had a mind to command.22 20

Frederick M. Keener, ‘Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu’, Eighteenth-Century Life 15 (1991), pp. 35–57, p. 54. For a subtle critique of Keener and further discussion of Le Bossu and Scriblerus, see McLaverty, Pope Print and Meaning, pp. 99–105. 21 Keener, ‘Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu’, p. 54. 22 Le Bossu, Treatise of the Epick Poem, p. 19.

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Pope’s task is complicated by the fact that he has at least two different constituencies to serve amongst his auditors: those who feign credulity in his fable and laugh along with him, and the butts of his jokes. He accommodates himself to the ‘Manners, Customs, and Genius’ of both constituencies, on the one hand by playing to the prejudices of those readers who share his feelings about the Hanoverian establishment, on the other, ironically, by parodically performing, in the person of Scriblerus, Bentley, and Aristarchus, or in the appropriated voices of his targets, the kinds of cultural degeneration he is satirising. Once more Pope’s practice across the lifetime of The Dunciad seems to be an over-literal and hyperbolic application of Le Bossu’s dicta, for by 1743 Theobald was no longer a probable hero for the poem, not nearly as central to Hanoverian culture as Cibber. ‘The Circumstances of Times, Places, and Persons’ had changed, and the Phantom at the heart of the poem required a new name. The Treatise also frequently stresses ‘the Resemblance the Manners ought to have with what common fame has published of them’ (p. 185). ‘When a Poet has nam’d Alexander’, Le Bossu writes a few pages earlier, ‘we know that the Inclination of this Personage is all for Greatness and Glory, and that his Ambition is larger than the Extent of the whole Earth’ (p. 172). Pope might say that when he introduces Cibber, we know much the same thing, though what ‘common fame’ reported of Alexander the Great was considerably more stable and less liable to objection than what Pope reported it reporting of Colley Cibber.23 Again, the tendency of Le Bossu’s Treatise mirrors that of The Dunciad, and comes close to describing its effect on the reputations of its targets and the literary history of the early eighteenth century. He offers advice on the liberties one may take if the persons in the poem are those ‘whose manners are known by few, and of whom common fame has said nothing’: For in this case ‘tis plain, one cannot give them Inclinations, that are like or contrary to what common fame has said of them; since she has said nothing about them. So likewise Aristotle does not oppose Names taken from History to Names that are invented, but he opposes to them names that are well known. [...] This License is only for such as first make use of these Names: For those who make use of them afterwards, are obliged to keep up the Character that was at first given them, and which comes to be known

23

Le Bossu notes the impossibility of taking away the names from people whose actions are already widely known (Treatise of the Epick Poem, pp. 39–40).

218 The Dunciads this way. They can only change some circumstances that are less known, and add other new ones, which shall be compatible with what one knows already of it.24

In writing The Dunciad, Pope follows Le Bossu’s advice on representing persons known and unknown, but applies those separate strands of advice to the same persons. The characterisation of Cibber is based on a satirical reading of his own Apology, and buttressed by publicised episodes from his life and career (‘What has he [i.e. Pope] said of them [the dunces]? A very serious truth, which the public had said before, that they were dull’ (1743, p. 32)). At the same time, Pope insists on Cibber’s insignificance, that he is a phantom made for the poem and not vice versa, and that The Dunciad is proverbially and literally the making of him (‘whether Bread or Fame be their end, it must be allowed, our author, by and in this poem, has mercifully given them a little of both’ (1743, p. 35)). Indeed, Le Bossu seems to describe the ways in which it has been difficult for centuries to think of Cibber and those other writers enshrined in the poem without first thinking of them as ‘dunces’: ‘those who make use of them afterwards, are obliged to keep up the Character that was at first given them.’ When Le Bossu writes of probability he does not always mean that which might gain the approval of intended readers. He also thinks about narrative probability and how it operates in different genres. In the context of thinking about Pope’s propagandic and counterhistorical practice, what Le Bossu has to say about ‘probable falsity’ and its relation to causation is illuminating: ...an Action may be either only True, or only Probable, or else without Truth and Probability, or lastly, it may have both these Qualifications. […] History has got the first, relying only on that which is true independently from Probability, which may, or may not be in it. Such is the action of the Maid of Orleans. The Epick and Dramatick Fables are opposite to History, in that they prefer a Probable Falsity before an Improbable Truth.25

Many late-Stuart and Hanoverian writers and readers prefer a probable falsity – that is, a fabrication that is nevertheless a properly connected narrative – to an improbable truth. The relation between the fictions of James

24

Ibid., p. 185. Ibid., pp. 132–3.

25

The Indifference of the Dunces 219

Francis Edward Stuart’s illegitimacy and the facts of his birth in 1688 is an instructive example, but by no means the only one. The play described above between history and counterhistory in The Dunciad might also be cast in Le Bossuean terms. Pope presents history in the counterhistorical mode of prophecy as a means of provoking a particular kind of nostalgia. He converts what for him and for likeminded readers were improbable truths – Cibber’s laureateship, or the preferment of ‘Namby Pamby’ – into probable falsities, episodes in the fable of the progress of Dulness. Pope renders his falsities probable by way of his epic framework, which delineates the causes creative of Dulness. These causes, like the causes driving so much of the writing in this study, are fabricated. Like the most effective fabricated causes, they are also incorrigible; at least, one cannot attempt to correct them without appearing to be foolish, or dull, which is much the same thing. It is pleasing, therefore, that Le Bossu sees such incorrigibility as the preserve of the creative writer. The historian, he argues, is obliged to relate all of the causes he can reliably know. However, the secrecy of politicians means that ‘he is justly dispensed from relating several causes, because he cannot come to any Knowledge of them’. The situation differs for the poet, who ‘has the same Reasons to tell all the Causes of his Action’ (because they are ‘instructive’), but is ‘more oblig’d to it than an Historian, since ‘tis more proper and essential for Poetry to instruct, than ‘tis for History’. Further, because the poet ‘makes his Matter himself ’ and reshapes or repurposes anything he happens to take from history, he ‘has not the same Reasons to excuse his Omission of any Cause whatever’: He must feign whatever is not there, or else change what is not suited to his purpose. If ‘tis probable that some Things may lie concealed from him, because no Man can know every thing; he then is instructed by the Gods who do know every thing. Virgil is my Warrant in the Case before us, he invokes a Deity, that he may come to the Knowledge of the Causes of his Action: and he relates such things, as he could never know but by Revelation; since he says they happen’d to Dido alone, and which she never made any one, no not so much as her Sister, acquainted with.26

We have seen plenty of ‘historians’ relying on the fabrication of incorrigible causes, but our conception of what makes a historian is not quite so strict as Le Bossu’s. Many of those ‘historians’ might also fairly be said to have 26

Ibid., pp. 89–90.

220 The Dunciads

made their matter themselves. Disciplinary and generic distinctions aside, what is being described here is precisely the liberty that Pope takes with the dunces. For while Scriblerus and others, including the ventriloquised dunces, often provide documentary evidence ‘proving’ the historicity of the various ‘actions’ narrated by the verse, the offensiveness of the poem lies in the kinds of causes that Pope fabricates for those actions: not just poverty, but lust, greed, an innate love of filth, irreligion, corruption, gluttony, and so on. The ‘crimes’ of the dunces were mainly already a matter of public record (the objectivity of that record is another matter). The Dunciad takes those disparate acts and corrals them into a swarm by converting them into episodes that flesh out Pope’s fable. And yet, as any ordinary reader would tell you, such apparently Neoclassical distancing does not go very far to eradicate the poem’s blunt referentiality, and nor is it intended to. At the outset of the first book in 1728 and 1729, the poet does not appeal to a deity or to the muses to communicate things hidden from mortal sight, as Homer, Virgil, or Milton might have done, but to the ‘patricians’ who ‘inspire’ the ‘wond’rous works’ of the dunces through their misplaced generosity. ‘Say from what cause,’ he demands, ‘in vain decry’d and curst, | Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first.’ (1729 I.3–6) The retreat of propagandists and historians into the incorrigible and arcane is reflected, methodologically, in Le Bossu’s thoughts on how to negotiate the causal plenitude required in poetry: if a cause for an action is unknown, invent one (and perhaps give yourself a supernatural source). The bare presence of an invocation is in part a mocking confession that the poet cannot know the causes of the improbable truth of the dunces’ continued success, as if such a situation defies causal explanation. Pope’s transferral of that conventional invocation from the muses or a deity over to city dignitaries is a sign that the gods and the muses have deserted the earth, and an indication of the troubling expansion of the city’s power and influence.27 It also suggests that the cause of the rise of Dulness is not miraculous, divine, nor even mysterious, but political. For whilst the invocation, in its shape and placement, suggests inexplicability or a gap in historical knowledge, it is also an answer to its own question, revealed to be depressingly obvious but, typically, ‘hidden’ in plain sight by a corrupt regime: O! What is the cause of the continued reign of Dulness? The continued patronage of ‘Patricians’. Le Bossu maintains that causal indeterminacy is unacceptable in epic poetry. In some ways, a providential view of the world takes the same position.

27

This is an expansion witnessed, or a prophecy fulfilled, by the revision of ‘Patricians’ to ‘[Dulness’s] instruments the great’ in 1743 (I.3).

The Indifference of the Dunces 221

Like teleological history, or counterhistory masquerading as prophecy, providential explanation also does odd things to causation and agency, limiting the capacity of individuals to effect change, partly because it reads the world from such a distance (at such a distance, everything agglomerates into swarms). For that reason, amongst others, it is a powerful tool for making conservative arguments intended to maintain the status quo, as well as being a good way of presenting even rather unprecedented historical scenarios or significantly contentious readings of such scenarios as the status quo, certain both a priori and a posteriori, where the latter certainty is founded on an ‘experience’ heavily conditioned by the propagandist, who sets up the prior conditions at the same time as shifting the responsibility for that conditioning onto God, the most incorrigible of all causes. According to Keener, this is one way of reading Virgil’s practice in The Aeneid; it is also a way of reading Dryden’s practice in Absalom and Achitophel.28 The freethinking dunces are accused, in the fourth book, of making the accidental central, artfully making man the final cause. The providential argument that drives much of the Dunciads, and behind which contradictions and fissures can be pleasingly obscured, makes God the final cause. That it does so with sincerity does not prevent it being artful. An analogy may be drawn with Warburton’s note to IV.643–4 (‘Philosophy, that lean’d on Heaven before, | Shrinks to her second [1729: hidden] cause, and is no more’), on gravitation and ‘occult qualities’. He applauds Newton’s refusal to search out a mechanical cause for gravitation, ceasing enquiry at ‘the first cause’ by seeing it as something impressed upon matter by God. He then ridicules those continental thinkers who accused Newton of retreating back to neo-Aristotelian ‘occult qualities’, and their attempts to site gravitation in ‘a certain elastic fluid’. Those thinkers, says Warburton, only offered a second cause, ‘for it might still, by the same objection, be asked, what was the cause of that elasticity’. What Warburton was unwilling if not unable to admit is that the difference between the British and European thought he summarises here is a difference in attitudes towards incorrigibility, the point at which explanation is both impossible and obligatory. He is unwilling if not unable to do so because he cannot concede what is a basically atheistic argument: attributing gravitation to an ‘occult quality’ and attributing it to God are effectively the same thing. To attribute it to God, who is only discernible to man in the ways he apparently orders the sublunary world, is simply to give a name to ‘occult quality’, with which

28

Keener, ‘Pope, The Dunciad, Virgil, and the New Historicism of Le Bossu,’ pp. 40–3.

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term neo-Aristotelians explain effects for which they cannot see causes. This is incorrigibility in corrigible dress. As the next chapter will show, such happy management is both deceptive and revealing. Pope uses providence or providential argument in The Dunciad as a means of controlling agency, exculpating himself, keeping others in their place. He also uses it, like the ha-ha ditch at his Twickenham villa, to conceal boundaries: between his poem and the world, between history and counterhistory, and, more quietly, between the providential hands of God, Dulness, and himself.29 It is not coincidental that such erosion of distinction mimics the very indifference the poem protests against, for both the dunces and Pope are in the business of fabricating causes and accounting for the incorrigible. Like all conservative thinkers and writers who retreat behind providence and concordia discors, Pope explains away or silences difference and dissent as contained and intended variation, resolving, ordering, or accounting for contingency as he sees fit. The effect of Pope’s providential bent on his historiographical and sociological practice in the Dunciads is the subject with which this book concludes.

29

For Helen Deutsch, ha-has ‘[permitted] the owners and renters of small gardens to aesthetically own what was beyond their means’, (Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ., 1996), p. 98; p. 248 n. 70).

Chapter 9

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads

T

he multiple significances of the word ‘accident’ and its variants have been explored throughout this study, and intensively in the foregoing pages, where it has been posited: that The Dunciad is concerned with the eradication in Hanoverian culture of the difference between the accidental and the substantive; that the dunces are obsessed with accidentals, the superficies of scholarship, or things indifferent; that the dunces’ modus operandi, and that of their goddess, is to make the accidental central; that to see a dunce stripped of their accidental qualities, as one might see a hero of epic poetry or history painting, is for Pope (following his friend Berkeley) to see them as God intended; that, relatedly, for the dunces those qualities normally considered central to personhood are deemed to be accidental by Pope, and stripped, for the dunces are marked and driven in his poem chiefly by their substantive crimes; that, related again, the prophetic mode (and by extension ‘divine’ epopea) tends to obliterate the accidental, for to the divine sight nothing is insignificant because no cause or intention goes unperceived; that, finally, the identification and historical identity of the dunces is really central to the poem, but, after Le Bossu, is said to be accidental. All of this still stands, as does the recurrent discussion in this study of the ways in which propaganda eschews the accidental in favour of narrative connections and the probability that they produce, or at least simulate. However, the Dunciads offer an opportunity to think through the etymology of the word ‘accident’ and its variants in detail, and doing so allows us to see the ways in which counterhistorical propaganda, accidents, falling, concordia discors and providence are interconnected in this poem, and in this period. It allows us to see, in the global and cataclysmic scale The Dunciad insists on at its climax, the ways in which history is made and arguments are won by flattening or denying contingency. It also helps to reveal Pope’s theories of history. The noun accident derives from the Anglo-Norman or Middle French accident meaning ‘unfortunate occurrence or incident, vicissitude of fortune, indication, exterior sign, symptom (all 12th cent. in Anglo-Norman

224 The Dunciads

or Old French), chance occurrence (13th cent.), non-essential quality, (of a word) grammatical property, morphological variation (all 14th cent.)’.1 Behind those precedents is its etymon, accident-, accidēns, from classical Latin. That Latin noun is formed as ‘a present participle of accidere to fall, to happen < ac- ac- prefix + cadere to fall’. This ancient correspondence between falling and happening is discernible in English phrases like ‘as it fell out’. As we have seen, historical writers, propagandists, and their readers are not satisfied with the bare statement that something has fallen out. They wish to know who caused the precipitation and whither its trajectory tends. Pope and his ideal readers share this attitude. It may be said that the majority of the dunces do not, in the poem, and when they do try to fabricate a cause for their fall towards dullness (which they read as the selfpropelled progress of Dulness), they are mistaken. The difference between falling and flying – like the difference between waving and drowning – is dissolved in The Dunciad through a right reading of providence that exposes the mechanistic irreligion, or the convenient order, of dullness. Cadere does not only connect falling and the accidental, but is entangled with the etymology of the word ‘cadence’. That word has metrical resonances, as is well known (‘The flow of verses or periods’ (Johnson); rhythm, rhythmical construction, measure’), coming from the Italian cadenza ‘falling, cadence in music’.2 Behind the Italian, more Latin, leading us back to the accidental: cadentia n., < cadent- present participle of cad-ĕre to fall. The literal sense is ‘action or mode of falling, fall’, and in this sense it was used by 17th cent. writers; but at an early period the word was in Italian appropriated to the musical or rhythmical fall of the voice, and in this sense occurs as early as Chaucer. Cadence is in form a doublet of chance n., adj., and adv., the direct phonetic descendant of cadentia.

These associations are particularly provocative in relation to Pope and providence. Maynard Mack and Martin Battestin have argued for the importance of concordia discors to Pope’s poetic imagination, and the latter’s study in particular emphasises its relation to cosmic harmony or the music of the spheres.3 More remains to be said about the politics of this 1

OED, accident, n. OED, cadence, n. See also the musical term ‘accidental’: ‘a note: raised or lowered by one or two semitones, in momentary departure from the key signature’ (accidental, adj., n. and adv. 3). 3 See Mack, The Garden and the City, and Martin Battestin, The Providence of Wit: 2

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 225

providential view of the world, the normativity of which is made somewhat inconspicuous in Battestin’s study. It is clear that Pope wields harmony as a propagandic tool. Moreover, the triumph of Dulness, in many ways a triumph of chaos and yet in the end troublingly still and facile, indicates that Pope is aware of the double-edgedness of harmony. It also suggests those connections between cadence and falling and composition: ‘In vain, in vain, the all composing hour | Resistless falls’ (4.627): there is no resistance, in the end; no opposition, no dissonance, and no disharmony. There is only composition, reflecting on the composition made with the Hanoverian monarchs in 1714, no doubt, an order from which much confusion sprung, but one lauded by its beneficiaries as a general peace. According to Rawson, ‘all composing’ relates to the Homeric ‘hypnos pandamator’, or ‘all-subduing sleep’.4 Rawson outlines the ways in which the restorative rest of the epic hero is converted in The Dunciad into abdication and the fall into oblivion. As harmony is related to indifference, to a lack of dissonance, so one might be willingly or unwillingly subdued. Pillows can comfort, but they can also stifle. We must also connect the falling of the all-composing hour of cultural apocalypse with the falling or cadence of Pope’s own verse, which is quite beautiful in this passage. It is, here and throughout, one of the means by which he takes hold of the ‘nonsense precipitate’ of the dunces and puts it into pseudo-epic order. Pope’s composition as a whole is of course a means of subduing and subjugation, and it supplies causes for the apocalyptic ‘hours’ and ‘curtains’ that seem simply to ‘fall’, as if they were things that happened by chance, that simply ‘fell out’. The all-subduing order of Pope’s line is the most evident way in which the reader feels the presence of an intending hand containing the chaos of Dulness. It is not the only way. From the etymology of accident we are led to falling, from there to cadence, and then back again to chance. All of these words are dealing with the distribution of things in the world. What they struggle with, or the struggle that their etymology bears witness to, is the intentionality of that distribution. That struggle – the struggle to make sense of the past’s dissonance – is what this book has been discussing. Providential thinking, which holds that things are distributed knowingly, and usually from some place above, is one way of overcoming or burying that difficulty. The appeal to concordia discors is an effective way of converting inequality to agreeable variety, supplying an intention and purpose for the apparently accidental. Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 9–15 and passim. 4 ‘The Sleep of the Dunces’, pp. 267–9.

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Such argument is the source of the authority of Pope’s Essay on Man, such as it is, and is witnessed by these often-quoted lines which bring the first epistle to a close: All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood; All partial Evil, universal Good. And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason’s spite, One truth is clear, “Whatever is, is RIGHT.”5

The sentiment is redolent of Althusser’s account of ideology’s guarantee: ‘...that everything really is so, and that on condition that the subjects recognize what they are and behave accordingly, everything will be all right: Amen – ‘So be it’.’6 The syntactic clarity of these lines is a rhetorical effect that harmonises with and contributes to the vaunted given-ness of the argument. What seems like chance, or disharmony, or injustice (‘partial evil’) is all to the general good. This is easy to observe, as long as you are able to stand far enough back. Gaining such a perspective, however, is challenging, for it is a perspective basically divine. This is where faith intercedes, filling in the ‘unknown’ and ‘not understood’ lacunae in fallen man’s vision. The central paradox in these lines, and the paradox that lends providential thought its exculpatory force, is that all nature, being divinely created, is but art; an inversion of classical accounts of imitatio. The paradox is exculpatory because it shifts the goalposts; art becomes less a derivation of or deviation from nature than an imitation of God’s own practice. The sleight of hand operating here is important. Such a statement effectively says, ‘the order that I see in nature – which order I am really imposing on nature in my representations of it, in the building of my gardens, the painting of my pictures, or the writing of my verse – was not put there by me, but by the God whose providence I can see, or which I have revealed, if only in part, through my artistry’. As Sean Silver writes of John Woodward’s cabinets of curiosity, ‘“nature” emerges as the design that may be elicited

5

TE III.i.50–1, ll.289–94. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (eds.), Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 701. See also Northrop Frye’s characterisation of comic endings (‘This should be’), alluded to by Jemielity in his reading of The Dunciad’s apocalypse as comic (‘“Consummatum Est”’, p. 181).

6

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 227

from an organisation of objects as though that design were there already’.7 So, as Mack and particularly in this instance Battestin have shown, in the eighteenth century artificial gardens could also be said to be ‘natural’, because, in the concordia discors they achieve in microcosm, they reflect the ordered variety of creation’s plenitude.8 The point here, once more, relates to agency. In saying that the order of my garden reflects the order of nature, I effectively remove myself from the authorial process. I attribute the effects of my art to the material or subject upon which it works. This kind of shift is also central to political writing, which distorts the past or misrepresents historical actors and then insists that it is the past or people themselves that are misshapen; the aberrant, protest such writers, are not made but found. ‘The trick,’ writes Silver, ‘is not to let the things take over; it is, as Pope exemplifies in the grotto, to control the arrangement of things through the design, rather than the other way around.’9 ‘[T]he Poem was not made for these Authors, but these authors for the poem.’ The preference for ordered disorder, like the preference for concealed bounds or ha-has, is a consequence of the desire to obscure intention and defer responsibility, sidestepping the problem of nature or history’s disorganisation and disaggregation by wilfully entering a closed loop.10 If Pope can be said to have a theory of history, it is this: as nature is like a garden that simulates nature, so the past is like a narrative that simulates the past. The tautology of those statements is vital, because it covers a historiographical and propagandic legerdemain. Pope’s brand of providential thinking insists that the past is already ordered, and that the chaos, chance or contingency the Dunciads bear witness to are effectively deviations from or corruptions of that underlying order – deviations and corruptions ultimately contained by the absolute ordonnance of God’s creation, as the dunces are contained by Pope’s satire. The sleight of hand, of course, is that Pope is claiming that the way he sees the world is straightforwardly the way the world is, and that those who see the world otherwise are seeing through a glass, darkly. Historiography masquerades as the past itself. Variety is only admired under the umbrage of an author-function which authorises disorder, creating and thereby 7

The Mind is a Collection, p. 78. When Addison and Pope thought of minds as gardens, or chests, argues Silver, ‘they were also designing chests and planting gardens with those same intellectual models in view’ (pp. 13–14). 8 Battestin, The Providence of Wit, pp. 45–8. 9 The Mind is a Collection, p. 97. 10 The concealed bounds are from Epistle to Burlington: ‘He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, | Surprizes, varies, and conceals the Bounds’ (TE III.ii.42, ll. 55–6).

228 The Dunciads

licensing it. Whatever is, is right. The truism that political argument arises from the discrepancy between people’s ‘positions’ or ‘orientation’, or ‘where people stand’, reveals the politics of providential thought. It insists that to see properly we must walk backwards until we stand shoulder to shoulder with the author-creator, at which point dissonant details resolve themselves into a general unity. Like counterhistorical propaganda, providential argument is a means of orienting and reorienting readers, a means of putting them in their place. Providential thought resolves incorrigibility (chance, accident, injustice) with reference to an invisible cause: God. That is, it puts incorrigibility in corrigible dress.

Eventful and Teleological Temporalities Another way of thinking of this process is that in the Dunciads, Pope attempts to subject an ‘eventful temporality’ to a teleological one. These terms come from William H. Sewell’s Logics of History, which seeks to combine the sophisticated but under-theorised awareness of temporality he finds in the work of historians with social scientists’ highly-theorised sense of the importance of social structures in their explanations of human behaviour and society. A key aspect of this endeavour is the attempt to theorise ‘temporality’ itself (especially ‘social temporality’, or ‘how time is implicated in the organization and transformation of social relations’ (p. 6)). In the chapter ‘Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology’, Sewell describes two conceptualisations of temporality that dominate historical sociology – ‘teleological’ and ‘experimental’ – before offering ‘eventful’ temporality as a ‘third, currently subordinate, conceptualization’, arguing forcefully that historical sociology needs to adapt this latter model. Sewell offers Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘big bang’ theory of the rise of global capitalism as an example of teleological temporality. In Wallerstein’s work, ‘the contingencies, choices, and consequences [he explores] are foreordained by the necessity built into the world-system from the moment of its creation’ (Logics of History, p. 87). More abstractly, Sewell explains, in teleological explanation, ‘events in some historical present […] are actually explained by events in the future’ (p. 84). In this conception of temporality, the future makes sense of the past. Indeed, the past only makes sense in relation to its future. ‘Experimental’ temporality is exemplified for Sewell by Theda Skocpol’s comparative work on the French, Russian, and

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 229

Chinese revolutions.11 This conceptualisation is founded on an ‘assumption of equivalence’ that makes it difficult to account for the ways that ‘events intervening between revolutions might affect their occurrence and outcome’ (p. 96). Sewell insists that such a temporality ‘can only be imposed […] by cutting up the congealed block of historical time into artificially interchangeable units’ (p. 95). To return to Beatty and Carrera’s terms: in teleological and experimental temporalities, history doesn’t matter. ‘Events’, for Sewell, are not just things that happen, but occurrences that ‘in some sense “change the course of history”’ (p. 226). He distinguishes ‘happenings’ from events: the former only ‘reproduce social and cultural structures without significant changes’. ‘Structures,’ for Sewell, who posits a more dynamic definition than that he finds in the work of other sociologists, ‘are constituted by mutually sustaining cultural schemas and sets of resources that empower and constrain social action and tend to be reproduced by that action.’12 ‘Happenings’ therefore contribute to this reproduction (which, for Sewell, is ‘never automatic’).13 ‘Events,’ on the other hand, ‘may be defined as that relatively rare subclass of happenings that significantly transforms structures.’14 An eventful conception of temporality, therefore, is one that takes into account this expanded potency: events are ‘capable of changing not only the balance of causal forces operating but the very logic by which consequences follow from occurrences or circumstances’. Events can change ‘the rules of the social and political game’ (p. 101). ‘Contingent, unexpected, and inherently unpredictable events,’ Sewell writes, ‘[…] can undo or alter the most apparently durable trends of history’ (p. 102). In an eventful temporality, history matters. This chapter seeks to reveal the historiographical work done by the Dunciads with the help of Sewell’s temporal categories, before the conclusion thinks through some of their implications for the episodes covered in the earlier sections of the book. It proposes that writing about things that didn’t happen seeks either to harness the transformative power of ‘events’, or to neutralise that power through the imposition of teleological or experimental temporalities: what has been thought of thus far as the composing effect of the fair connexions of well-turned narratives. By thinking not only of 11

As with the other scholars Sewell cites in this chapter, he argues that Skocpol has been relying on an eventful temporality almost unawares (pp. 97–100). 12 Logics of History, p. 151. On the complexity of the word ‘structure’ in the social sciences and Sewell’s own ‘theory of structure’, see pp. 124–51. 13 Logics of History, p. 143. 14 Logics of History, p. 100. One such event explored at length in the book is the fall of the Bastille (pp. 225–70).

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Pope’s transferral of persons and events from the historical to the counterhistorical, but the combination and suppression of different temporalities within and across the different versions of the Dunciads, we can see the ways in which ‘structure’ is privileged over ‘event’. According to the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, ‘[s]tructure is to the event as the social to the individual, the essential to the accidental’.15 The Dunciads are concerned with all six of these binary terms, and that concern is most visible in the way they approach the writing of history. Controlling the arrangement of things through their design, they convert the accidental to the essential while accusing the dunces of doing the very same thing. The Dunciads refuse to allow events to transform structure, even though the ‘cause creative’ of the Dunciads is precisely a feeling that events – the Hanoverian settlement, the commodification of literature – have transformed structures. The Dunciads might be read as a despairing analysis of an eventful world – a despairing analysis of the power of events – made by a poet wedded, despite the eventfulness his poem confronts, to a teleological conception of temporality. This is another way of thinking about the Dunciads’ many doublenesses: on the one hand, Pope explains the historical present as the product of a chaotic series of contingent events; on the other, through what Le Bossu would think of as his fable, or what we might see as his parodic design, he subjugates that eventfulness to teleology. Like an ignoramus verdict, however, such subjugation is not quite erasure. Pope embraces the energies of eventfulness, and seeks to contain them in that embrace. The Dunciads hold theories of history, as they hold the dunces, in suspension: rolling in Dulness’s vortex, the dunces are in ‘the condition of being suspended, as particles, in a medium’.16 The combination of eventfulness and teleology is in some respects a necessary feature of the kind of epic myth that Pope is constructing: Pope needs real things – persons and events – to give substance to his teleological world view, to flesh it out. This is another reflection of Le Bossu’s theory of epic, and another way of seeing Pope’s position on the ethics of particular versus general satire. ‘To attack Vices in the abstract, without touching Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with Shadows.’17 As we have already seen, the transformation of the dunces into shadows, or phantoms, complicates this position, but it does not eradicate it. One of the things the Dunciads seek to redress is an imbalance between the eventful and the teleological: as this chapter goes on to argue, Pope demonstrates that the dunces (and especially their 15

Quoted in Sewell, p. 199. OED, suspension, n. 11. 17 Sherburn, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, III.419. 16

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 231

queen) disturb the relationship between events and structure, the personal and the social, forward motion and the pull of gravity. As Sewell shows, in ‘a teleological explanation’, ‘events in some historical present are actually explained by events in the future’ (p. 84). The Dunciads are teleological, but they are not only teleological. In the cod-prophetic third book, Pope explains the historical present with a conceptualisation of temporality (eventful; chaotic, mechanical, accidental; entropic) to which he does not subscribe, the potency or dominance of which he begrudgingly acknowledges even as he resists it, in vain. For scholars like Joseph Levine, Pope and the Scriblerians more generally stand in opposition not just to the dry as dust scholarship of modern virtuosi but to the teleology of the Whig apprehension of history and the progressive optimism that characterises the ‘moderns’.18 But, as John Sitter has pointed out, the progress of Dulness is not a progress but a regression: the Dunciads do not parody Whig or ‘modern’ progress, except insofar as the dunces think they are making progress when they are really going around in circles.19 The parody of the ‘moderns’ in the Dunciads, such as it is, does not amount to an indictment of teleology, or progress. It is more straightforwardly an indictment of a series of events, and the historiographical work it does is to redistance, rearrange, and reinterpret that series of events, suspending them in a different temporal medium, and in the process downgrading ‘events’ to ‘happenings’. Progress for Pope is not really progress unless the narrative one progresses along is sanctioned by providence. This is why the dunces are out of their parts, revolving not around their proper occupations but caught in an orbit around Dulness that is also a continual fall. This is why the triumph of Dulness is an apocalypse, the end of history. Pope has a providential view of history, but he is confronted with a reality that cannot, on the surface of it, be explained straightforwardly as the work of providence. The complexity of his solution to this problem – or rather his suspension of this problem – reflects the complexity of these poems, and of this period’s historiographical practices.

Dulness as Singularity The absolute ordonnance of creation as described in the Essay on Man – whatever is, is right – relates to the aesthetic pleasures of ordonnance 18

Joseph Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell Univ., 1991). 19 Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, pp. 103–4.

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in epic poetry, whose formal, moral, and fabular integrity emerges radially from the centre, proceeding from the poem’s beginnings in media res. This is the experience described by Joseph Trapp as ‘finding order in what seemed “Wilderness” and of being led by one who can see design where we cannot’.20 Helen Deutsch discusses the pleasure that ‘consists in the eye’s apprehension of its own power to determine the form of accident’ with reference to Joshua Reynolds and Joseph Addison’s essays on the pleasures of the imagination, where ordonnance blends into possession, or rapture, a ‘taking up’.21 In reading The Dunciad, such order is indeed there to be felt by the reader, but ordonnance is a process rather less enjoyable for Pope’s targets, who are swept along by a design that he sees, where they cannot. For them, ordonnance is subjugation, and their rapture from history into dream feels more like a rupture, being neither painless nor dignified. Dulness herself, in the poem, is the source of a kind of ordonnance, even if her all-subduing influence is presented less as a radial and radiant formal unity than a creeping entropy, a fall into formlessness. For Colomb, the aesthetic appeal of ordonnance is an important means of coercion, coaxing Pope’s readers into a feigned credulity in his prejudicial narratives: ‘In the mock-epic things are so arranged that, if we are willing to become the kind of “initiated” reader the poem demands, our knowledge and the poet’s judgement are the same. In mock-epic as in epic, ordonnance becomes law.’22 Ordonnance is thus a means of interpellating the reader, inducting them into Pope’s way of seeing the world, placing them at his shoulder. Indeed, The Dunciad is an ordination of sorts, telling of the anointing of the dunce king and his initiation into the (possibly Eleusinian) mysteries of Dulness.23 The dunces and the poem’s readers are also ‘ordained’ in a more literal sense (‘To put in order, arrange, or prepare’ (ordain, v. I.)), conglobed around their queen like swarming bees, rolled in her vortex into an ordered disorder. Ordain, ordonnance, and its English equivalent ordinance (see sense 12 b.) relate in turn to the a priori ordering of creation, ‘That which is ordained or decreed by God, a god, or fate; a dispensation, decree, or appointment of God, providence, or destiny’ (ordinance, n. 3. a.). The pleasure a reader takes in ordonnance is the pleasure men like Pope and Berkeley 20

Quoted by Colomb, Designs on Truth, p. 33. Helen Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Defamation of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ., 1996), pp. 112–14. 22 Designs on Truth, p. 34. 23 See the ‘Argument to Book the First’ (1742 p. 92 and n.) and Douglas BrooksDavies, Pope’s ‘Dunciad’ and the Queen of Night: A Study in Emotional Jacobitism (Manchester: Manchester Univ., 1985), pp. 122–7. 21

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take in seeing God’s hand ordering reality. It is also a pleasure emerging from a teleological conceptualisation of temporality. In the poem, Dulness’s ordonnance is a travesty, or ‘mock-providence’, as Tom Jones put it recently.24 Under her aegis, the key organising principle is not fabular or moral integrity, but gravitation. As we have already seen, Pope responds to the eventful temporality he lives through by denying the dunces of his poem the capacity to make events happen. The incapacity of the dunces is emphasised by their subjection to the forces of gravity, which we can see as a physicalisation of their subjection by Pope, and his imposition of a teleological temporality in opposition to their freethinking insistence on the indifferently disruptive power of the events in which they are involved. Pope fleshes out his fable of the fall of civilisation with numerous episodes involving falls both physical and metaphorical. The diving contest in the second book is in many ways a case in point, though there the dunces’ precipitation is rather deliberate, if typically heedless of or indifferent to the unpleasant landing awaiting them in Fleet Ditch. Curll’s fall during the foot race in this book is a particularly clear illustration of the fabular importance of falling to Pope, and is explored below in detail. However, falls are not simply things that happen to the dunces on occasion or by accident (indeed, nothing happens to the dunces by accident). Rather, falling is the condition that the dunces are in (as Mary of Modena’s ‘condition’ was said to be a ‘fiction’).25 They are falling not just down but around, caught in paralysing orbits both intellectual and spatial. A good instance of the former is found in the first version of the poem, as Tibbald prays to his goddess, describing the services he has already rendered: For thee I dim these eyes, and stuff this head, With all such reading as was never read; For thee supplying, in the worst of days, Notes to dull books, and Prologues to dull plays; For thee explain a thing ’till all men doubt it, And write about it Goddess, and about it; So spins the silkworm small its tender store, And labours, ’till it clouds itself all o’er. (1728 I.155–162)

24

‘Pope and the Ends of History,’ p. 891. See below, p. 49.

25

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The two ‘’till’s in this passage are a sign of the instrumentality of Dulness’s votaries’ works. The point at which their labours cease is not when their works are complete, good in and of themselves, but when they or their readers are just about confused enough: when all men doubt, or the silkworm-author has perplexed itself, enwrapped and enraptured. The end point of duncical writing is neither unity nor clarity, but incapacity and dissolution for writer and reader alike. Their heads are in a spin, and they set other heads a-spinning. When these lines are transferred in 1743 to the speech Richard Bentley’s avatar Aristarchus makes on behalf of the universities in the fourth book, the rotary metaphors are intensified, suggesting their increasing centrality to Pope’s design. Indeed, Aristarchus’s speech is preceded by a synechdochical maelstrom, as the dunces are dehumanised by their identification with headwear: ‘Prompt at the call, around the Goddess roll | Broad hats, and hoods, and caps, a sable shoal’ (IV.189–90). The lines from Tibbald’s prayer come towards the end of the oration: See! Still thy own, the heavy Canon roll, And Metaphysic smokes involve the Pole. For thee we dim the eyes, and stuff the head With all such reading as was never read: For thee explain a thing till all men doubt it, And write about it, Goddess, and about it: So spins the silk-worm small its slender store, And labours till it clouds itself all o’er. (IV.247–54)

The passage is now introduced by those heavy rolling cannon (or Canons, heads of houses) and the smoke which involves the Pole, harmonising nicely with the scholars’ dimmed eyes and the clouded silkworm. Pole may well pun on ‘poll’ or head, but it also draws attention to the axis on which planets revolve. Involvement, like perplexity, is a kind of entanglement, but is much more explicitly orbital (from volvĕre, to roll).26 The word occurs earlier in the fourth book, immediately preceding lines this study has been revolving around for some time: The gathering number, as it moves along, Involves a vast involuntary throng, Who gently drawn, and struggling less and less, Roll in her Vortex, and her pow’r confess. (IV.81–4)

26

For other metaphors of rolling see Sitter, The Poetry of Pope’s Dunciad, pp. 38–9.

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Dulness’s vortex is Cartesian. In Descartes’s theory, planets were not moved by forces of attraction but swept along in streams of matter: ‘...the Earth, properly speaking, is not moved, nor are any of the Planets; although they are carried along by the heaven.’27 Newtonian gravitation is central to the Dunciads, but vortices are also useful to Pope, not least because the image of dunces floundering in a fast current (and, struggling less and less, on the point of drowning) is more comic and a new way of emphasising their helplessness; they are enthusiasts and virtuosi prone to getting carried away.28 In 1743, then, the lines from Tibbald’s prayer are involved in a series of descriptions of the dunces as helpless satellites of various kinds. Yet the orbital makes its presence felt even in 1728, where it is connected to the double meaning of accident by way of a pun on ‘about’, a word denoting both circumposition and circumlocution (or, more precisely here, circumscription).29 Both Tibbald in 1729 and Aristarchus in 1743 describe the labours of the dunces, who ‘explain a thing till all men doubt it, | And write about it, Goddess, and about it’. The dunces are caught in an orbit, which is nothing more than a particularly – perhaps indefinitely – prolonged kind of falling. They are circling both about the things they are explaining to death, and about the goddess Dulness. Their satellitic status is emphasised by the near-chiastic construction of the second line in the couplet; the ‘Goddess’ in the centre, with two instances of the phrase ‘about it’ about her. The near-perfect double rhyme emphasises the continual futility of the exercise, too, its recurrent pointlessness (which might be another way of describing an orbit). This emphasis on ‘about’ is not accidental. In a 1729 note we hear that Theobald had been ‘(to use an expression of our poet) about Aeschylus for ten years, and had received Subscriptions for the same, but then went about other books’ (I.210; the emphasis is Pope’s own). The translation of Aeschylus is a thing that didn’t happen, abortive, though Giles Jacob mistakenly claimed that it was finished in 1719.30 The note to III.311, which reads ‘Tibbald is translating this author’, is briefly 27

René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (Dordrecht; Boston; London: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983), p. 94 (Part III, Principle 28). 28 On Pope’s flexible adoption of different cosmologies to the same ends, see William Kinsley, ‘Physico-Demonology in Pope’s “Dunciad” IV, 71–90, The Modern Language Review 70 (1975), pp. 20–31, p. 21. 29 Joel Weinsheimer notes and builds upon this pun in his discussion of eighteenthcentury imitation and Heidegger (‘Writing about Literature, and through it’ Boundary 2 (1982) pp. 69–91, p. 71). I am indebted to Weinsheimer’s highlighting of the literal meaning of ‘circumscription’. 30 1728 I.200 n.

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revised in 1735 to ‘Tibbald was about translating...’ (1729 p. 300). As well as coming loaded with connotations of imprecision and inefficacy, ‘about’ describes both peripherality and periphrasis. Rather like ‘accidental’, its spatial aspect literalises the metaphor of being distant from one’s subject, missing the mark, and in turn relates to things being not properly intended or prosecuted: ‘With verbs denoting activity, with the sense of movement weakened or absent: at large, freely; in an aimless, idle, or frivolous manner; without any definite purpose.’ (About adv. 2. b.) That sense of ‘movement weakened or absent’ lurking in ‘about’ is one way of describing the effects of the vis inertia of Dulness. The continual falling of the dunce in orbit about Dulness is represented in (and a representation of ) their culturally and intellectually peripheral pursuits, the accidentals or things indifferent which have become central in Dulness’s inverted world. The indifference of and between the dunces – itself a kind of mock-providential ordonnance – has both physical and intellectual qualities. Indifference can diagnose the inability of the dunces to properly intend and therefore make things happen (‘indetermination of the will’), but it can also refer to the behaviour of inanimate objects. ‘All bodies,’ wrote Henry Pemberton, explicator of Newton’s Principia, ‘have such an indifference to rest, or motion, that if once at rest they remain so.’31 Pemberton’s ‘indifference’ is a synonym for Newton’s ‘inertia’. Dulness’s ‘force inertly strong’, then, is indifference.32 It is therefore supremely appropriate that it is in gravitational configurations that the dunces both lose themselves and find their centre, and through which Dulness effects her triumph. Dulness is a singularity. Colomb has underlined the significance of ‘moral gravitation’ as a way of understanding the significance of the ‘sure Attraction’ of one dunce to another.33 Moral gravitation was an attempt to account for social and moral order using analogies borrowed from Newtonian mechanics, enabling writers to think of sociability as a force acting on bodies, and doing so in proportion to the distance between people (family, acquaintances, strangers). Colomb refers to Berkeley’s essay in Guardian 126 as a particularly full account of this sociological theory. From that account also emerges a sense that it is not only inertia but a kind of exertion that holds both society 31

Quotation in OED, supporting the definition indifference n.1 3. a (‘Indetermination of the will (cf. indifferency n. 3), or of a body to rest or motion; neutrality’). Pemberton was writing in 1728. 32 Berkeley would think of this inertia as ‘indolence’: in Tom Jones’s summary, ‘a refusal to enter into conversation with God through the phenomenal world.’ (Pope and Berkeley, p. 135). 33 Designs on Truth, pp. 79–94.

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and the universe in a dynamic stasis. This paradox resembles the paradox of those lines in the Essay on Man, that chance is design. For Berkeley, ‘the unity of design’ discernible in the universe ‘plainly demonstrate[s it] to be the work of one infinitely good and wise being’. Part of this argument from design is that ‘the system of thinking beings’ (i.e. society), having originated from the same source as the physical universe, must be ‘actuated’ by laws that resemble the laws of physics.34 This isomorphic correspondence is reflected in (and possibly encouraged by) those spatial and intellectual meanings of accidental, about, and indifference hitherto discussed. Berkeley’s account of cosmic mechanics and social order emphasises the need for gravity or attraction to be opposed by a ‘rectilinear’ force. In the following passage, the hypothesised effects of removing opposition are not dissimilar to the all-composing effects of Dulness. For Pope and for Berkeley, gravitational attraction can be an apocalyptic force: The several great bodies which compose the solar system, are kept from joining together at the common centre of gravity by the rectilinear motions the author of nature has impressed on each of them; which, concurring with the attractive principle, form their respective orbits round the sun; upon the ceasing of which motions, the general law of gravitation that is now thwarted, would show itself by drawing them all into one mass. After the same manner, in the parallel case of society, private passions and motions of the soul do often obstruct the operation of that benevolent uniting instinct implanted in human nature; which notwithstanding doth still exert, and will not fail to show itself when those obstructions are taken away.35

In what is also effectively a revelation, a properly apocalyptic lifting of the veil as the law of gravitation ‘show[s] itself ’, Berkeley basically describes the ‘Big Crunch’, though he is unclear on precisely what the consequences of removing opposition in the social sphere would be. It seems that rectilinear motion is a good and necessary check on the potentially cataclysmic force of gravity, but that in the social world the situation is reversed: charity (moral gravitation) is a check upon rampant self-interest (‘private passions’). Even if the private passions and motions of the dunces are sometimes singled out for ridicule, their passive and inert obedience, their indifference, and their slumber allows them to be drawn into one mass at the poem’s close,

34

The Guardian no. 126 (London, Wednesday 5 August 1713), recto. Ibid., verso.

35

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as the all-composing hour falls ‘resistless’: both unopposed and (therefore) irresistible.36 Berkeley’s theory of moral gravitation reveals once more the social conservatism of providential thought, not least in the ways that it emphasises the invisibility or given-ness of the ‘normal’: only in an apocalyptic situation would gravity, a ‘secret, uniform and never-ceasing Principle’, finally ‘show itself ’. In its occult omnipresence, Berkeley’s gravitation sounds rather like ideology. Like Pope, for Berkeley ‘[t]he mutual gravitation of bodies cannot be explained any other way than by resolving it into the immediate operation of God’. The same applies to social mechanisms: ‘It is not the result of education, law, or fashion; but is a principle originally ingrafted in the very first formation of the soul by the author of our nature.’37 Berkeley does not say so outright, but to pursue his analogy, if charitable ‘attraction’ is implanted by God, then surely the equivalents in men’s minds or souls of the ‘rectilinear motions’ impressed on the planets by the ‘author of nature’ (i.e. kinds of self-interest, endeavour) are equally providential. We might think of such motions as one’s ‘calling’, as indicated by God in the providential distribution of talents. The providential sociology of moral gravitation, then, like the thought behind the Essay on Man, allows Berkeley to maintain that charity is intrinsic to humanity without absolutely castigating self-interest and inequalities in the distribution of wealth and happiness. After all, God surely applies varying degrees of ‘rectilinear force’ to different planetary and social bodies. A significant problem Pope has with the dunces is their refusal to continue on the path they have been impelled along by God, giving in to the attractions of Dulness, an endemic resignation that leads to a catastrophic collapse. Berkeley’s essay helps us see the ways in which, in The Dunciad, absence of intention, dereliction of duty, lack of resolve or moral ‘uprightness’, abandonment of one’s proper calling, and being out of place are all kinds of letting go, all kinds of falling. The simple presence of the force of gravity means that in general one has to intend to keep things upright or to keep things inside (that is, to remain continent). One needs to apply some kind of rectilineal motion to maintain equilibrium. Without such intent, and without such exertion, things fall away from the structures holding them in array. They are consequently vulnerable to being drawn together ‘into one mass’. Things that fall apart, or which are allowed to fall apart, away, over, might therefore be considered irrelevant, accidental.

36

1743 IV.628; OED resistless, adj. 1 and 2. Guardian no. 126, verso.

37

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 239

Another way of thinking about the providential nature of social gravitation is to recognise how neatly it fits into Sewell’s description of ‘mainstream social scientists’ and their ‘uncritical, or at least insufficiently critical, embrace of a certain natural science model’. In Sewell’s account, these scholars and these disciplines are hampered ‘by what interpretivist wags have aptly dubbed “physics envy”’: sociology’s attempt to ‘attain the degree of exactness that had already been achieved by physics at the time of Isaac Newton’.38 Berkeley’s use of Newtonian gravitation to explain social relations is teleological and ahistorical in just the way that Sewell characterises this kind of social science, and the teleological or experimental conceptualisations of temporality that underpin it. For Sewell, social science’s impulse to find ‘laws’ that govern human behaviour and society is problematic because – rather like the Dunciads – it tends to do away with the specifics that make establishing such transhistorical laws difficult by deeming them accidental, not central.39 In particular, such social science elides differences between cultures across time and space. The solution, according to Sewell, is for social scientists to ‘[admit] that social relations are culturally constituted’. Such an admission ‘would imply that the Newtonian grid of uniform space and time posited by the quantitative social sciences is in fact crumpled and rent – that the world is too messy a place to be understood by a Newtonian social science’ (p. 17). Sewell argues that understanding the importance of events and eventful temporality is the best way of confronting such disorder. Pope knows that the world is a messy and an eventful place. However, that knowledge in fact provokes his attempts to sweep the dunces under the carpet. He insists on the ‘uniformity’ of providence, ordonnance, and teleology not in ignorance but in response to a world that has been ‘crumpled and rent’. This is another reason that Dulness figures in the poems as a singularity, a resistless force that is not just attractive or diverting, but deformative. She may be the ‘directing soul’ of the dunces’ ‘business’, but in directing she also crumples them: ‘To human heads like byass to the bowl’ (1728, I.136–7). Perhaps this ‘byass’ is also a consequence of the rolling of the dunces in Dulness’s vortex, as the rotation of the earth turns it into an oblate spheroid. If Pope can be said to have a social science, it is a Newtonian one, like Berkeley’s. It can barely contain Dulness and the social relations she represents and reproduces. That does not stop Pope attempting such a containment.

38

Sewell, Logics of History, p. 88. Sewell’s critique of the ability of ‘rational choice theory’ to explain events like the fall of the Bastille is particularly persuasive in this regard (pp. 262–70).

39

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Some Convenient Ordure Edmund Curll has an accident during the second book’s scatological games. In this episode, as throughout the poem, the containing of disorder and variation in concordia discors is in comic conflict with the incontinent disorderliness of the human body. Curll’s fall and its consequences reveal the full range of meanings that cluster around the accidental: 1) the approximate, peripheral and periphrastic (for he is running about the Strand in pursuit of a phantom poet, an empty Joseph that is an approximation (about right) of John Gay, and one accidentally produced at ‘one lucky hit’, like the foam on the mouth of Apelles’s horse);40 2) in his slip, the senses of falling brought to the word through the Latin cadere; 3) the link through that same Latin verb to cadence and arrangement or composition revealed through the moral Pope extracts from the episode; 4) the move between chance (cadere again) and design revealed through that same process; 5) finally, the connections between falling, resignation, and incontinence, as Curll’s sexual-moral laxity comes into contact with and is marked by the precipitate leavings resulting from a more physical (but clearly related) looseness. Curll is racing Lintot, in an episode based on the foot race in the fifth book of The Aeneid. In the midst of the race, he encounters an unpleasant obstacle: Full in the middle way there stood a lake, Which C – l’s Corinna chanc’d that morn to make (Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop Her evening cates before his neighbour’s shop,) Here fortun’d C – l to slide... (1728 II.53–7)

Curll slides, or falls (cadere), and he does so in a puddle of piss. That puddle Corinna ‘chanc’d’ (cadere) ‘to drop’; more falling, and cadere again, the link suggested by droppings, leavings, waste, and the colloquial description of incontinence: ‘I had an accident.’41 It is all unlucky, and seems accidental, a fact emphasised as we hear that Curll ‘fortun’d’ to slide. Earlier drafts read ‘here slidder’d Curll’; according to Mack, ‘slidder’d’ was rejected as an archaism.42 Its pleasing combination of sliding and slithering might well be 40

As Scriblerus explains: ‘Our author here seems willing to give some account of the possibility of Dulness making a Wit, (which could be done no other way than by chance)’ (1729 II.43 n.). 41 OED, accident, n. 8. d. 42 1728 II.57 n.; The Last and Greatest Art, p. 100.

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 241

missed. However, given the importance of the accidental in this episode, it is quite possible that Pope puts in ‘fortun’d’ to stress the element of happenstance in these lines. Throughout The Dunciad, the veiled and inveigled dunces see through a glass, darkly. Their dim sight is trained not on means (what they are doing, or where they are walking), but ends (how they might profit, and where they can end up). They are engaged in activities that have a symbolic meaning – or in Le Bossuean terms, a moral – to which they are blind. They know not what they do, caught up as they are in their eventful temporality. However, Pope, as poet, can connect action and consequence, and is indeed obliged to, even or especially when that connection or design is effectively unknown to him.43 In the following lines, he does precisely that, moving from chance and accident to the gratifying ordonnance of poetic justice, bringing the moral to bear on the action that had seemed (at least to Curll) devoid of meaning, because it had seemed accidental, chancy, unintended. In 1728, the revelation runs as follows: Obscene with filth the varlet lies bewray’d, Fall’n in the plash his wickedness had lay’d. (1728 II.59–60)

In later versions, ‘varlet’ is replaced with ‘miscreant’, which has the happy effect of emphasising the unbelief of the dunces, and their consequent blindness to the hand of providence.44 Curll falls in the plash his wickedness has laid in a number of ways. Firstly, because his own ‘harlot’ Corinna besmirches the environs of his shop – she would not have been there if she were not his sexual partner. Secondly, because this whole episode stands in for Elizabeth Thomas’s (that is, Corinna’s) unauthorised publication of some of Pope’s early letters, and then more specifically Pope’s duping Curll into publishing the poet’s own edition of his correspondence by convincing the publisher that he was doing so surreptitiously, having happened upon the materials.45 All chance is design. We are moved from the dunce’s perspective, from which it looks like Curll fell in a puddle of piss that happened to fall into his path, to Pope’s, who knows and demonstrates that this is no accident but a consequence of being a bad subject. Behind the whole passage, perhaps, lies the proverb: ‘It is an ill bird that berays its own nest.’46 ‘Bewray’d’ is also revealing. The primary meaning in Pope’s line, and in the proverb, is scatological: it means ‘befouled’, and is connected to the dialectal 43

See the discussion of Le Bossu and causes, above, pp. 218–20. Variant recorded by Rumbold (1728 p. 49). 45 1743, p. 157 (Rumbold’s note to ll. 75–6). 46 John Ray, A Collection of English Proverbs (Cambridge, 1678), p. 102. 44

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‘ray’, a term from animal husbandry that refers to diarrhoea, usually in sheep.47 This word is often spelt without a ‘w’, but the two are frequently confused. ‘Bewray’ with a ‘w’ is roughly cognate with ‘betray’, and means ‘expose by divulging secrets, with prejudice’.48 Even further behind bewray is ‘array’ as in arrange, or dress (or ‘ordain’, as discussed above).49 This is exactly what Pope does in this passage, and in his real-life manipulation of Curll. He arranges circumstance so that Curll is hoist by his own petard, then attributes that poetic justice to a kind of providence. This dressing down looks accidental to Curll, but is really providential. The revelatory punishment is carefully arranged; it is also a way of putting Curll in his place, an arrangement. In these ways, Curll is punished by Pope. However, in the inverted world of Dulness, his fall is fortunate.50 Having prayed to the goddess Cloacina, he is ‘Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force’, overtaking Lintot to win the race (1728 II.83). His prize, however, turns out to be a disappointing series of phantom poets. Dulness says he should ‘lay down’ his grief at this trick, ‘And turn this whole illusion on the town’ (1728 II.111–12). That is, she encourages him not to sue for justice and restitution but simply to pass on his misfortune and turn it to profit by foisting more piracies on the reading public. Having said this, she then gives him a prize anyway: a biographical bed covering (later a ‘shaggy Tap’stry’), alluding to the Carthaginian frieze in which Aeneas recognises himself (1728 II.121–36 and 131–4 n.; 1729 II.135). The race in the fifth book of The Aeneid to which this episode alludes is also a narrative of a fortunate fall. Nisus, ‘hapless in his haste’ and failing to ‘mark’ his way, falls near the end of the foot race in the blood of a sacrificed oxen, ending up ‘besmear’d with Filth, and Holy Gore’. He proceeds to turn his misfortune into profit by passing it on, as Dulness would recommend, tripping his competitor Silius. They both come in last. Silius complains to Aeneas, and is awarded a lion’s hide in compensation (Aeneis V.427 ff.).51 Nisus petitions Aeneas in turn: ‘If such Rewards to vanquish’d Men are due, | He said, and Falling is to rise by you, | What Prize may Nisus from

47

Beray, v., etymology; ray v. 3. and 4., ray n. 10. Contemporary lexicographers define both spellings of the word. In John Kersey’s A new English dictionary (London, 1702), ‘To beray’ means to ‘defile or fill with ordure’ (italics inverted). Over the page, there are two entries for ‘bewray’, one defining it as ‘to discover a secret’, the other as ‘to foul his hose’. 49 ray v. 1. and 3; array v. 10. 50 Thanks to Ros Ballaster, who suggested seeing Curll’s fall as fortunate at a seminar at St Anne’s College, Oxford, 28 February 2013. 51 Dryden, Works, V.501. 48

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 243

your Bounty claim, | Who merited the first Rewards and Fame?’ (V.462–5). A reader might be excused for seeing an important difference between Nisus’s fall and the malicious tripping of Silius, but Aeneas either sees no such distinction or chooses to overlook it. Nisus is awarded a shield. Aeneas’s initial response to Silius is counterhistorical: ...Let no Disputes arise: Where Fortune plac’d it, I award the Prize. But Fortune’s Errors give me leave to mend, At least to pity my deserving Friend. (V.455–8)

As lawgiver, Aeneas arrogates to himself the dispensing power to overturn providence, adjusting the effects of historical events in favour of his ‘deserving Friend[s]’. It is, of course, a trivial set of compensations that Aeneas makes, but the ‘equal justice’ (V.475) expressed in his gifts to victor and vanquished alike might well be read by the disaffected as a kind of indifference. It is certainly politic, and probably meant to be read as such. Dulness, too, is indiscriminate in her gifts, as seen in her toying with Curll following his own fortunate fall. In light of the poem’s anti-Hanoverian impetus, it is possible that Pope saw in this episode an analogy between the indifference of Aeneas and Dulness and the post-1714 establishment in their allocation of rewards, which are distributed not according to merit but personal profit, pacification, or political exigency: some convenient order. Pope tags a draft section of book II’s sleeping competition – in which Dulness promises consolation prizes to those dunces who only slumber intermittently – with a quotation from Aeneid V: ‘nemo / nemo in hoc nu: / mero nihi non / donatus alibit’ (‘None of this number shall leave without a gift from me’).52 How is one to negotiate a world in which providential and revelatory bewrayment leads not to chastisement and humiliation, but victory and compensation? Aeneas’s intervention in fortune’s ranking of the runners may be trivial, but for Pope the effects of dullness on the proper distribution of rewards were rather more serious. Aeneas and Dulness shower gifts on their votaries, and at times may be said to do so arbitrarily, with an eye more on ends than means. Earthly happiness, according to the Essay on Man, is a plant grown from a ‘celestial seed’, ‘dropt below’, like so much manna (TE III.i.128, IV.7). Like the ‘past, vamp’d, future, old, reviv’d, new’ hybrid works of the 52

Mack, The Last and Greatest Art, p. 116; Virgil, Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1–6,  trans. H. Rushton Fairclough,  rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ., 1916), p. 493.

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dunces, or the impossible pastorals that give ‘to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers’, Dulness’s dunces flourish unnaturally, in the wrong place and at the wrong time (that is, in Pope’s time and place, which he writes of as if it were a counterhistory). Though they would be reluctant to admit it (and often with good reason), Pope shows the dunces to be out of their orbit, their trajectory warped by their own gravity of head and the gravitational attractions and deformations of Dulness. ‘Tho they are sad Writers’, wrote Savage, ‘they might have been good Mechanicks; and therefore by endeavouring to shine in Spheres, to which they are unequal, are guilty of depriving the Publick of many that might have been its useful Members.’53 The ‘spheres’ in which the dunces attempt to shine are not those which describe their proper orbits, according to Pope’s Newtonian sociology. The ways in which the dunces, as bad subjects, have refused interpellation and missed their callings are illustrated most fully in the controversy over poverty and the distribution of talents precipitated by the 1728 Dunciad, and addressed in detail in the Variorum. Pope was taken to task soon after the first Dunciad for attacking the poverty of the dunces. In Codrus, or the Dunciad Dissected, in which Curll and Thomas both had a hand along with Ambrose Philips, it is said to be unjust to attack people for characteristics beyond their control. Such people cannot help ‘Dulness, [...] a want of Capacity, Deformity, a want of Comliness, and Poverty, a want of Substance’. ‘Where can you find a Persius, a Juvenal, or Horace,’ it is protested, ‘lashing of Personal Defect, or Turns of Providence?’54 This renunciation of agency in the face of larger historical, genetic, socio-economic, and divine forces is somewhat ill-calculated, given their subjection in the poem, and difficult to square with the incessant attacks on Pope’s own disability (the poem at the pamphlet’s close characterises him as an ‘Elf ’). Pope takes up these objections in the letter to the publisher at the beginning of the Variorum: I question not but such authors are poor, and heartily wish the objection were removed by any honest livelihood. But Poverty is here the accident, not the subject [...] Poverty itself becomes a just subject of satyr, when it is the consequence of vice, prodigality, or neglect of one’s lawful calling. (1729 p. 130)

53

Richard Savage, An Author To be Let. (London, 1729), sig. C2v (italics inverted). Edmund Curll and Elizabeth Thomas, Codrus: Or, The Dunciad Dissected (London, 1728), p. 8.

54

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 245

Scriblerus later describes the dunces’ destitution as the result of ‘neglect of their proper talent thro’ self-conceit of greater abilities’ (1729 p. 164). By ‘honest’ livelihood, lawful calling, and proper talent, Pope means the path set for the dunces by providence, which happens to coincide with the place he wishes to put them in. Once more accident and consequence interact in this passage, which is concerned with separating out the consequential from the accidental, thereby fixing the dunces as agents in a narrative in which they have brought about their own socio-economic downfall. When Pope says that ‘Poverty is here the accident, not the subject’, he is in thinking in Le Bossuean terms. Poverty is accidental in the same way that the name of Achilles or Ulysses or the episodes taken from Trojan legendary history are accidental. The subjects of those poems are wrath and nostos respectively, as the subject of the Dunciads is the progress of dullness. Poverty in the Dunciads is the accident, because it is merely a sign of God’s will in the world. A good subject is supposed to interpret it as a prompt to use their talents (or respond to the lack thereof ) appropriately, better. The dunces are poor because they have neglected their lawful callings, refusing to be hailed. In the Dunciads, poverty is a consequence of prodigality: the errant, indiscriminate, and therefore not properly intended waste of resources, or talents. Pope sees wealth as a good distributed apparently (but not really) unequally by providence. Because of God’s plenitude and the idea of a world governed by concordia discors, such inequality is calculated to promote happiness so long as the response to those resources, or the dearth thereof, is correct. Earthly happiness, good, is a ‘celestial seed’ ‘dropt below’. These lines from the Epistle to Bathurst, on the use of riches, indicate that this position applies equally to material goods as it does to passions and intellectual capacity: ’Tis Heav’n each Passion sends, And diff ’rent men directs to diff ’rent ends. Extremes in Nature equal good produce; Extremes in Man concur to gen’ral use. (TE III.ii.106, ll. 161–64).55

The connection between money and passions assumed by these lines brings us back to the prefatory material in the Variorum. The letter to the publisher is concerned with callings, the direction (which is not chance, 55

Sheehan and Wahrman turn to these lines as the fourth example of early eighteenth-century figures ‘who presented visions of order emerging [...] from the contradictory and erratic actions of individuals’ (Invisible Hands, pp. 6–9).

246 The Dunciads

but may look like it) of different men to different ends. As well as callings, the Variorum engages with talents and their waste, not just through prodigality, but also inertia. A talent is a ‘power or ability of mind or body viewed as something divinely entrusted to a person for use and improvement’. This definition arises from the parable of the talents in Luke’s Gospel, which we encountered in chapter three. As is made clear by that parable, a talent was a weight or measure, an amount of currency or coin, and its metaphorical extension is a direct result of the exegesis of this story. In Luke’s account, a nobleman gives his three servants ten talents each before going away to be appointed king of a distant country, telling them to put the money to work. On his return, he finds that two have invested the money and made him some profit; they are rewarded with a proportionate number of cities to rule. The third servant hides the money in a napkin and simply returns it. We have already heard his excuse: ‘For I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow’ (KJV Luke 19:21). We have also already heard the master’s response to the servant’s inertia and insulting excuse, ‘And he saith unto him, Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, thou wicked servant.’ He proceeds to do just that, performing the role laid out for him by the servant’s own fears, taking the ten talents and giving them to the most successful servant. This parable is most certainly on Pope’s mind in 1729. Just before the letter to the publisher, he reprints quotations from Dennis, Gildon, Theobald, and Concanen, all of them justifying attacks on bad writers as a means of discouraging the misuse of talents. At the end of this section comes this phrase: ‘Out of thine own mouth will I judge thee, wicked Scribler!’56 Like the master in the parable, we are given to understand, Pope is simply performing a role already set out, unwittingly, by those beneath him. The justification for highlighting the poverty of the dunces – that it is no accident but a result of the misuse of ‘talents’ – is there in the word’s etymology, derived from interpretation of the gospel, and which Pope enthusiastically, if with typical indirection, points us towards. Both the wicked servant and the wicked dunces fall in the plashes their wickednesses have laid. The significance of their actions is unclear until it is unpleasantly revealed by their ‘master’. Again, one might object: how was the servant to know that he was committing a sin by being overcautious instead of productive, and how was Curll to know that he was not running around the Strand, but a treacherous symbolic space designed by 56

See also Scriblerus’s note to 1729 II.132, describing the ways Pope sneaks in praise of good writers by ironic inversion: ‘he found means to insert their panegyrick, and here has made even Dulness out of her own mouth pronounce it.’

Gravitation, Providence, and Theories of History in the Dunciads 247

that able landscaper, Pope? The problem with providence is that one has to be able to read it aright. Pope is almost the only clear-sighted reader in The Dunciad, and has a particular advantage in that he also controls environment and temporality, and is able to make teleologically ordered and classically allegorical the ‘unclassic ground’ on which the dunces think they tread, as and when it suits him (1728 III.208). Talents, as the OED and exegesis of the parable tell us, are divinely entrusted. What the dunces see as misfortune or chance is in fact an expression of providence that demands an appropriate action. Talents seem accidental as they – like wealth – are distributed by providence, falling out like manna from heaven. To the freethinking dunces, such design always looks accidental. They mistake a prevenient for a convenient order. In the Dunciads, and especially in the 1743 version, freethinking, which in its erosion of determining structure and its denial of essentialism makes all things accidental, leads to the misapplication of talents, as it leads to the indifferent distribution of wealth and preferment. Instead of following an honest calling, Pope insists, the dunces choose to do the thing they can (just about) do to stay afloat, hiding talents instead of investing them, neglecting the appropriate and productive in favour of the immediate and the profitable. The Dunciads are poems about use, and particularly the use of power. When they speak of the use of learning, riches, knowledge, talents, or when elsewhere in his verse Pope speaks of the ordering and use of landed estates (which encompasses all of the above), he is speaking of the subject’s ability to respond to the world as it is ordered by providence. He is speaking, in other words, of agency and of heroism, the ability to make things happen. In keeping with Pope’s Berkleian-Newtonian sociology, the dunces’ inability to properly respond to circumstance, a consequence of their inability to read in the broadest sense, is one reason they cannot be good subjects or epic heroes, because their actions tend away from the fabular trajectories described by God, or, more accurately in speaking of The Dunciad, Pope. Consequently of no consequence, they drift towards Dulness and into error. Subject to Dulness’s gravitational ‘attraction’, which is incestuously sexual-maternal as well as physical, the dunces and the Hanoverian culture they represent turn away from the upright rectilinear path upon which providence set them, succumbing instead to the alluring curvature of orbit, a continual fall that feels like flying. In this orbit, they trace the wrong parabola, a parabola that is parabolic in both senses. The triumph of Dulness is not a concerted effort, but cacophony resolving itself into apathetic unison; not rapture but rupture; not connection, but disconnect. Not properly intended, it is the consequence of an epidemic of dereliction.

248 The Dunciads

A letting go – a shrug and a yawn, a falling away – is at the heart, and at the end of this poem, where Dulness, the great Anarch and nursing mother, simply ‘lets the curtain fall’. What looks inevitable – the end of civilisation, of time, the dawning of chaos and night – is the consequence of inaction, inattention, accidents, releases, and precipitation. The triumph of Dulness is enabled by a series of things that didn’t happen, but should have.

Conclusion

Events that Didn’t Happen In another sense, for Pope, the Dunciads are full to bursting with things that did happen, but shouldn’t have – the preferment of Ambrose Philips, for instance – and so he works to create a world in which these happenings do not qualify as events. As I have argued, this is not the world in which he and the rest of the Scriblerians live, but a counterhistory. The Dunciads, like other Scriblerian satires, and perhaps especially Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, narrate changes in what Sewell thinks of as ‘structures’, and some of the events that brought those changes about: the professionalisation of writing of all kinds; the commercial opportunities brought about by print; the religious and social and political transformations proceeding from the crises of the seventeenth century. However, even as they narrate the apotheosis of Dulness – a cultural apocalypse – the Dunciads pretend that these events have not changed structures. That pretence is an attempt to preserve structures of a different kind, and it was and has been an enabling and effective one. Few people have written on the Dunciads without acknowledging the lasting effect they have had on literary and cultural history, as the politically and culturally marginal Scriblerians emerge as the victors from a conflict with the supposedly middlebrow mainstream, the account of which conflict has been transmitted to posterity chiefly through their own writings.1 One way of accounting for this influence is thinking of the Dunciads as historiography of a certain kind: a kind that indulges in what Sewell thinks of as the rhetorical suppression of the eventful. Sewell says that Immanuel Wallerstein’s account of the rise of global capitalism ‘contains some astute eventful analysis of the political and economic history of Europe in his period, although his rhetoric suppresses the narrative’s eventful qualities’. Sewell is suggesting Wallerstein produces an ‘eventful’ narrative unawares: the eventfulness emerges ‘all by itself ’, a necessary if not inevitable consequence of the material he is dealing with and the explanations he is trying to make. His point is that Wallerstein does not consciously 1

For a corrective view of the status of ‘Whig’ culture in this period, see Abigail Williams, Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681–1714 (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 2005).

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think he is working with an eventful temporality, and so those qualities are suppressed. The teleological temporality that theoretically informs Wallerstein’s work is a sort of veil, draped over ‘a far more interesting account of how the crucial but open-ended event of the discoveries [of the Americas] initiated a long chain of subsequent open-ended events that eventually and far from inevitably led to the emergence of a capitalist world economy’.2 Beatty and Carrera would call this a situation ‘where history matters: where a particular past had to happen in order to realize a particular future, and when the past that had to happen (in order to realize that future) was not bound to happen, but did’ (p. 491). The rhetoric of Pope’s Dunciads suppresses the eventful narratives contained within them, without obscuring them entirely. It insists that history does not matter while narrating events (which it insists are mere happenings) and describing persons (whose identities it claims are irrelevant) in fastidious detail. Indeed, one catalyst for Pope’s anger is the fact that his contemporary culture confronted him with what we might think of as the eventful’s disruption of the rhetorical: of decorum, of good order, of propriety, of stability, of (lawful) power. The disruptive force of the event was the force behind A Ra-ree Show, which did its best to upend from below the sustaining fictions of Stuart mythology. The suppressive and obfuscating historiographical rhetoric of Absalom and Achitophel, on the other hand, is Dryden’s way of maintaining symbolic order, and a sign of the teleological temporality informing that poem. One of the things that sets the Dunciads apart from the other works encountered in this study is their sheer extent, and the skill and knowingness with which Pope combines eventfulness and teleology. The veil he drapes over eventfulness is deliberately translucent, because providential teleology is not the destruction of the eventful, but the bestowing of form upon the accidental (a bestowal that can masquerade as a discernment). If ‘whatever is, is right’, then rightness needs things to be – needs the first ‘is’ of that line – in order to assert itself.3 This is a paradox cited again and again in criticisms of the poem: if you hate the dunces so much, why give them the oxygen? Why get your hands so dirty? Williams spoke of Pope’s transferal of the dunces from history into dream as analogous to getting the bee into the amber. Pope turns the dunces into specimens of precisely this kind. However, his combination of eventfulness and teleology in the Dunciads invites a modification of Williams’s metaphor. Capturing the energies of

2

Sewell, Logics of History, p. 87. I am indebted to Ralph Pite for seeing this and pointing it out to me.

3

Conclusion 251

eventfulness in his poem, Pope somehow manages to get the bee into the amber without stopping it buzzing, holding it in a suspended agitation. In Sewell’s reading, Wallerstein is writing ‘eventful’ history unconsciously. Similarly, he suggests, Charles Tilly’s work on the Vendée Rebellion ‘hid a masterwork of eventful sociology behind a veil of misconstrued universalizing science’ (p. 90). Sewell means that these sociologists are not thinking deeply enough about temporality, and consequently misrepresenting the strengths of their work. The suppression of the eventful in the Dunciads is more deliberate, a key part of its satirical and parodic design. But Sewell’s uncovering of eventfulness in the ostensibly teleological work of Wallerstein and Tilly resembles the ways that Things that Didn’t Happen has been uncovering the historiographical work done by texts not explicitly conceived in order to do such work. A Ra-ree Show was not written to promulgate a particular theory of history or ‘conception of temporality’. Nevertheless, it was argued in chapter two, it does. Through his focus on temporality, Sewell saw new things in major works in sociology; this book has sought to see the propaganda of the late Stuart and Hanoverian period anew in analogous ways. Sewell’s work on temporality can help us look at the present study anew, too. Chapter two argued that in the narratives of the popish plot produced by Titus Oates and others, and in anti-Catholic historical tracts, sweeping narratives of popish malfeasance served not only to collapse historical distance, but to establish the equivalence of one papist with another. Henry Care provided a litany of Catholic treachery ‘[so] that the World may take notice that their late damnable Plot was nothing strange or incredible […] ‘tis still the same Tragedy, though the Scenes have often been shifted, and the Actors varied according to the different posture of Affairs...’.4 Care reduced Catholics to an impersonal force: popery. It is a reduction powered by a kind of historical indifference. These moves are partly the consequence of bigotry: despised Catholics do not deserve individuation. However, they are also historiographical moves: when it comes to Catholics, Care suggests, history doesn’t matter. All Catholic plotters are the same, all Catholic plots are the same, all Catholic actions are conspiratorial. Care is working with an experimental, comparative temporality: Sewell might say that his blithe equation of the gunpowder treason and the popish plot was an attempt to ‘[cut] up the congealed block of historical time into artificially interchangeable units’. Pope’s indifference to the importance of chronology (as when, like Dryden, he moves historical events around to serve his 4

Henry Care, The History of the Damnable Popish Plot (London, 1680), p. 80.

252 Things that Didn’t Happen

satirical design) suggests an attitude to temporality that approaches the ‘experimental’. As I argued above, the Dunciads are a suspension of different temporalities, and Pope controls the dunces by controlling the temporal medium in which they are suspended. Sewell insists that such a mixture of temporalities is the most effective way of writing history, though his sense of what counts as ‘effective’ differs radically from Pope and the other writers encountered in this study. One of the ways he articulates this is by speaking of the combination of synchronic description (or ‘history as context’) and diachronic narration (or ‘history as transformation’).5 This is a combination Pope takes advantage of, and it is one we have encountered elsewhere: as Dryden in the conclusion of Absalom and Achitophel worked to make the diachronous synchronous through intertextual allusion, or, as Berkeley’s Alciphron wielded diachrony in opposition to the short-sightedly synchronous ‘convenience’ of court Whigs and freethinkers. Sewell’s parsing of the term ‘synchronic’ helps us see why it might be a useful propagandic tool, as well as a useful historiographical one. Although a synchronic description or analysis is often glossed as a “snapshot” that “freezes” time or as a “slice” of time, this is not quite right. Such a description is, rather, one in which time is suspended or abolished analytically so that things that actually occur in the flow of time are treated as part of a uniform moment or epoch in which they simply co-exist. Just as “synoptic” means that all views are present in a single glance, as in one of those Renaissance paintings in which the far-flung scenes of a saint’s life and martyrdom are depicted in a single continuous landscape, so “synchronic” means that different times are present in a continuous moment. To put it otherwise, in synchronic description, acts of cultural signification, rather than being treated as a temporal sequence of statement and counter statement or as linked by causal chains of antecedent and consequence, are seen as a mutually defined and mutually sustaining universe of (at least momentarily; until the analytic spell breaks) unchanging meaning.6

When Dryden insists in his 1660 panegyric that ‘now times whiter Series is begun’, he is suspending or abolishing time, or at least heralding and celebrating that suspension or abolishment. When he alludes to those lines in concluding 1681’s Absalom and Achitophel, ‘things that actually occur

5

Logics of History, p. 183. Logics of History, p. 182.

6

Conclusion 253

in the flow of time are treated as part of a uniform moment or epoch in which they simply co-exist.’ He does this, as has been argued, because one of the functions of his pro-Stuart propaganda is to sustain the illusion that the reign of the Stuarts, and particularly Charles II, has been and will be a mutually defined and mutually sustaining universe of unchanging meaning. This kind of synchrony is railed against by A Ra-ree Show, which seeks to drag the king down into a transformative diachrony. The flat accounts of Catholic ill-deeds found in Henry Care’s history and the narratives and trials relating to the Popish Plot are precisely attempts to make different times present in a continuous moment. However, Bedloe, Prance, and Oates’s accounts of the conspiracy go a step further, making incarnate in a single moment not just things that did happen, but a range of things that didn’t (ways that Justice Godfrey was not murdered; evidence that could have been found, but wasn’t). For Sewell, Sahlins’s account of the arrival of Captain Cook in Hawaii demonstrates that ‘to narrate an event meaningfully, the historian must not only recount happenings in time, but must also break from narration – that is, temporarily suspend time in order to analyse, in a synchronic discursive mode, the skein of relationships that define the nature and the potentialities of the objects and persons about which a story may be told’.7 Defining the nature and the potentialities of objects and persons is a key objective of both Dryden and of Pope. Both writers use the suspensive affordances of the prophetic mode not just to define but to obliterate the ‘potentialities’ of particular persons in their poems: for Dryden, the Whig opposition; for Pope, the dunces. As both writers are producing propaganda, however, their suspension of time does not only allow them to analyse this ‘skein of relationships’, but to fabricate it under the guise of analysis. The Popish Plot informers suspend time in a different way: not through the prophetic mode, but an experimental temporality modified by counterhistorical speculation. In all three cases the advantage lies in the preservation of contingent eventfulness alongside inevitable teleology. For Oates, Prance, and Bedloe the contingency makes their interventions seem all the more vital; for Dryden it emphasises the perfect timing and decisiveness of Charles’s prorogation of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, the central ‘event’ in his poem. Similarly, the prophetic mode in Dryden and Pope, as in their models Virgil and Milton, combines theoretical conditionality – here is a narrative concerning things that may occur in the future – with practical inevitability: everything in this apparently prophetic narrative has already happened, as everyone knows. Those 7

Logics of History, p. 219.

254 Things that Didn’t Happen

things are in fact what the narrative is for, the rearticulated components of a past that only makes sense in reference to the future. To pay attention to temporality or to the privileging of the synchronous or diachronous in historical writing is to pay attention to technique. Neither Sewell nor I are suggesting that time really is eventful, experimental, or teleological. These are features of historiography, not history. That means they are things that a writer can either choose to emphasise, or can emphasise unawares: either way, they are effects of writing or speaking about the past, not effects of the past itself. Things that Didn’t Happen has sought to take advantage of synchrony without entirely losing sight of chronology, in seeking to demonstrate the analogous methods deployed across a political culture, or political cultures, in response to what Sewell might think of as events. One of many differences between this study and Sewell’s, of course, is that many of the events analysed in the preceding pages didn’t happen. This does not mean that they should not be considered ‘events’ as Sewell defines them. The warming-pan scandal is an instructive example. In the chapter ‘A Theory of the Event: Marshall Sahlins’s “Possible Theory of History”’, Sewell outlines the characteristics that make ‘events’ significant: What makes possible the peculiar dynamic that characterizes events is the conjoining in a given situation of structures that previously had either been entirely disjoint or had been connected only in substantially different ways. When people act in a situation in which previously existing structures are newly conjoined, the consequences of certain of their actions will be deflected from what the actors intended.8

Both this study and those of other scholars have emphasised the confluence of various structures on or around the birth of James Francis Edward Stuart: the delegitimation of arcana imperii as the instrument of tyrants; the increasing masculinisation of childbirth and obstetrics more generally; a competition between two models of modernity; the volume and reach of printed propaganda; the pragmatically elastic credulity of ‘a people accustomed to believe […] the contradictions of Oates’s plot’. In his opening address at the depositions, James II referred to the situation as an extraordinary disease that required an extraordinary remedy. The particular form that the campaign to delegitimise James Francis Edward Stuart took – the warming-pan fiction – was a consequence of those depositions, seeded by the midwife Margaret Dawson’s statement that she ‘saw fire carried into the 8

Logics of History, p. 221.

Conclusion 255

Queen’s Room in a Warming-Pan, to warm the Bed’.9 It is fair to say that the consequence of this action was deflected from what the actor – either Margaret Dawson, or James II – intended. As Sewell points out, one of the consequences of the novel conjunction of structures is that ‘seemingly minor or contingent details of the situation can have major and enduring consequences’.10 The carrying in of a warming-pan, in the narrative crafted by the opposition, becomes a key event. It is an incidental detail transformed into an event by its placement in certain structures, or conjunctions thereof. It can be an ‘event’ only in those conjunctions. Perhaps, as Pope and Dryden fabricate the ‘skeins of relationships’ in their propagandic poems while pretending only to analyse them, so the introduction of the warming-pan offers itself up to writers as an ‘event’ that can power and make plausible the transformative narratives they are putting together. That is, there is nothing particularly ‘eventful’ about the carrying in of a warming-pan, but propagandists can arrange circumstances around it to make it so. Sewell notes that ‘we cannot predict in advance what structure of the conjuncture will shape the novel acts of reference that constitute the core of a given event. But’, he goes on, ‘we do know what to look for: a conjunction of structures that sets off a synergetic interaction between actors attempting to make structural sense of a highly volatile situation.’11 The warming-pan fiction and more broadly the continued delegitimisation of the Prince of Wales is certainly produced by actors attempting to make structural sense of a highly volatile situation: the revolution of 1688–89. This book has been arguing that actors ‘make structural sense’ of situations by turning to the fair connexions of plausible, persuasive narratives. It is true that we may not be able to predict which are the happenings that new confluences of structures might convert into events. But it is not just modern professional historians that ‘know what to look for’. Once one knows what to look for, it is not so difficult to fabricate the rest. The proponents of the warming-pan scandal knew a potential event when they saw one. James Francis Edward Stuart was not carried into the queen’s chamber in a warming-pan. Nevertheless, the story that he was – its formulation, wide circulation, and persistence over time – met Sewell’s criteria for an event: ‘an occurrence only becomes a historical event […] when it touches off a chain of occurrences that durably transforms previous structures and practices.’12 What matters is that the unconventional delivery of the prince 9

At the Council Chamber, p. 6. Logics of History, p. 221. 11 Logics of History, p. 223. 12 Logics of History, p. 227. 10

256 Things that Didn’t Happen

met these criteria at the time, not whether or not we think it should now. We might argue that although the revolution of 1688 probably would have taken place irrespective of the warming-pan scandal, the nature of Jacobitism, and in turn of Protestant British identities, would still have been indelibly altered in its absence. However, we do not need to argue that, because we are not seeking to convince our readers of the centrality of James Francis Edward Stuart’s legitimacy to understanding that revolution or the wider history of this period. Contemporaries, however, were (and another of Sewell’s criteria for ‘events’ is that they are ‘recognized as notable by contemporaries’).13 Rather than being the key to this period’s history, this book has been arguing that this and other things that didn’t happen help us understand the history of its historiography. Writing about things that didn’t happen seeks to harness the transformative power of ‘events’ in situations when no amenable ‘happening’ is available. The motivation for this practice varies: it may be that a transformation is perceived to have occurred (one royal dynasty has been replaced with another); alternatively, no such transformation has occurred, but it remains polemically effective or politically necessary to demonstrate that it has. This latter is the method of reactionary politics, which casts every incremental ‘progressive’ change (the minimum wage, gay marriage, reproductive rights) as a cataclysmic upheaval, a making the world anew, an event that ‘rearticulates’ structures.14 If ‘eventful temporality recognises the power of events in history’, then it is also true, if paradoxically so, that writing about things that didn’t happen does the same thing. Sewell argues that events are able to ‘radically redefine’ ‘the rules of the social and political game’.15 If that is the case, then it also accounts for the appeal of things that didn’t happen: if ‘events’ have that kind of power, then their fabrication or denial is worth the effort. The transformation of a happening or non-occurrence into an ‘event’ is an effect of design, of writing: it is a historiographical effect. The trick is not to let the things – whether they happened or not – take over.

13

Logics of History, p. 228. Logics of History, p. 244. 15 Logics of History, pp. 100–1. 14

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Print

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258 Things that Didn’t Happen —— A Collection of the Newest and Most Ingenious Poems, Songs, Catches, etc. Against Popery, relating to the Times (London, 1689). —— A defence of the people (London, 1744). —— A Dialogue between a Person of Qualities Chamberland And a Neighbouring Gentleman, Concerning the Prisoners to be sent to Scotland (Edinburgh, 1708). —— A Dialogue between Adam and John, Two Citizens of Bristol, about Electing of ParliamentMen (n. p., n. d.). —— A Dialogue Between Louis le Petite, and Harlequin le Grand (London, [1708]). —— A Full Answer to the Depositions and to all other the Pretences and Arguments whatsoever, Concerning the birth of the Pretended Prince of Wales (London, for Simon Burgess, 1689). —— A Letter from the French King, to the Pope, Concerning the Pretended Prince of Wales (Edinburgh, 1708). —— A Letter written from the Tower by Mr. Stephen Colledge (the Protestant-Joyner) To Dick Janeway’s Wife (London, 1681). —— A Melius inquirendum into the birth of the Prince of Wales (London, 1689). —— A Memorial of the Church of England, Presented to their Royal Highnesses the Prince and Princess of Orange (London, 1688). —— [A Gentleman], A Modest Apology, Occasion’d by the late Unhappy Turn of Affairs, With Relation to Publick Credit (London, 1721). —— A Modest Vindication of the Present Ministry (London, 1707). —— A Modest Vindication of the Proceedings of the late Grand-Jury (London, for N. Thompson, 1681). —— A New Ballad. To the Tune of Hey Boys up go we ([London], [1721]). —— A New Littany, design’d for this Lent, and to be Sung in all the Conventicles, in and about London, for the Instruction of the Whiggs (London, 1684). —— A New Song of Lulla By, or, Father Peter’s Policy Discovered (London, 1688). —— A New Way to Play an Old Game (London, 1683). —— A New-Year’s-Gift for the Directors (London, 1721). —— A Pindarique Ode, Upon the late Horrid and Damnable Whiggish Plot (London, n.d.). —— A Protestant Catechism for Little Children or Plain Scripture Against Popery (London, 1687 (reprint 1673)). —— A Satyr Against Commonwealths (London, 1684). —— A Satyr on the Pretended Ghost of the Late Lord Russel (London: for Edw. Golding, [1683]). —— A State of the Case between the South-Sea Company, and the Proprietors of the Redeemable Debts (London, n.d.). —— A Stiptick for a Bleeding Nation. Or, A Safe and Speedy Way to Restore Publick Credit, and Pay the National Debts (London, 1721). —— A Supplement to the Collection of Miscellany Poems against Popery and Slavery (London, 1689). —— A Third Collection of the Newest and Most Ingenious Poems, Songs, Catches, etc. Against Popery and Tyranny relating to the times (London, 1689). —— A Trip to Dunkirk: Or, A Hue and Cry After the Pretended Prince of Wales. Being a Panegyrick on the Descent (London, 1708). —— A View Of the present Divisions in Great=Britain (London, 1708). —— A Vindication of the Lord Russel’s Speech and Innocence, In a dialogue betwixt Whig & Tory: being the same that was promis’d to the Observator in a Peny-Post-Letter (London, 1683). —— A Vision in the Tower, To the L. H____d in his Contemplation (London, n.d.). —— Algernoon Sidney’s Farewel (London, n.d.). —— Aminadabs Letter to the Author of a Paper Called, The Independent Whig (London, 1720). —— An Account of the Pretended Prince of Wales and other Grievances, that occasioned the nobilities inviting, and the Prince of Orange’s Coming into England, To which is added, a short account of the murther of the earl of Essex (London, 1688). —— An Account of the reasons of the nobility and gentry’s invitation of His Highness the Prince of Orange into England (London, 1688). —— An Argument to shew the Disadvantage That would Accrue to the Publick, from obliging the South Sea (London, 1720). —— An Elegy on the Death of Trade (London, 1720). —— An Epistle to Alexander Pope, Esq; Occasion’d by some of his Late Writings (1735).

Bibliography 259 —— An Examination and Explanation of the South-Sea Company’s Scheme for taking in the Publick Debts (London, 1720). —— An excellent new song, Or, The Loyal Tory’s Delight (London, 1683). —— An Expostulatory Letter From a Supposed Quaker to a Zealous Preacher, Concerning the Birth, &c. Of the Person called the Pretender (London?, [1708?]). —— An Ode on the Death of the Late King James, written Originally in French at St. Germains, and dedicated to his Son the Prince (London, 1701). —— At Amsterdamnable-Coffee-House on the 5th of November Next, will be Exposed to Publick sale these Goods following in several parcels ([London?], [c.1684]). —— Clavis Prophetica (London, 1707). —— England’s Happiness, or, A Health to the Young Prince of Wales (London, 1688). —— England’s Triumphs for the Prince of Wales: Or, A Short Description of the Fireworks, Machines, &c. Which were represented on the Thames before whitehall, to the King, and Queen, Nobility and Gentry, Forreign Ministers, and many thousands of Spectators, on Tuesday Night, July 17th, 1688 (London, 1688). —— Exchange-Alley: or, the Stock-Jobber turn’d Gentleman; with the Humours of our Modern Projectors. A Tragi-Comical Farce. Humbly Inscribed to the Gentlemen daily attending at Jonathan’s Coffee-House (London, 1720). —— Forty One ([London], [1719]?). —— [‘An Englishman’], Francis, Lord Bacon, or, the Case of Private and National Corruption, and Bribery, Impartially Consider’d (London, 1721). —— Here is a true and just account of a most horrid and bloody plot conspired against His most sacred Majesty (London, by E. Mallet, 1683). —— Idem Iterum, or The History of Q. Mary’s Big-belly from Mr Fox’s Acts and Monuments and Dr. Heylins Hist. Ref. (London, 1688). —— Interragatories: Or, a Dialogue between Whig and Tory (London, 1681). —— Letter from a Presbyterian Minister in England, to his Friend in Scotland; With respect to the Invasion (n. p., [1708]). —— Loyalty Triumphant: Or, Phanaticism Display’d, A Song (London, 1684). —— Majesty in Misery, or an Imploration to the King of Kings; Written by his Majesty King Charles the First, in his durance at Carisbrook Castle, 1648 (London, 1681). —— [‘one who is disinterested, and was upon the Place’], Mr. Law’s Character Vindicated in the Management of the Stocks in France, with the True Reasons for their Sinking (London, 1721). —— Mr. Sidney his Self-Conviction: Or, his Dying-Paper Condemn’d to Live, for a Conviction to the Present Faction, And a Caution to Posterity (London, 1684). —— Multum in Parvo; or, Bubbles in a Nut-Shell (London, 1720). —— Papists Care of Protestants, or, A Short Hint of Popish Treatment (Edinburgh, 1708). —— Parker’s London News or the Impartial Intelligencer, no. 397 (London, Monday 5th June 1721). —— Poor Robin’s Dream (London, 1681). —— Popish Treaties not to be relied on: In a letter from a Gentleman at York, to his Friend in the Prince of Orange’s Camp. Addressed to all members of the next parliament (n. p., n.d.). —— Reflections Upon Coll. Sidney’s Arcadia; The OLD CAUSE Being some Observations Upon his Last Paper, Given to the Sheriffs at his Execution (London, 1684). —— Remarks on Algernon Sidney’s Paper, Delivered to the Sherrifs at his Execution (London, 1683). —— Scandal Display’d: Or, A Word in Season. Being An Answer to a Paper, Entituled, Advice to the Electors of Great Britain; occasion’d by the intended Invasion from France (London, n. d.). —— Scylla’s Ghost: An Heroick Poem, being a Satyr against Ambition (London, 1684). —— Sh---- Ghost to Doctor Oats. In a Vision Concerning the Jesuits and the Lords in the Tower (London, 1683). —— Some Animadversions on the Paper Delivered to the Sheriffs, on Friday December, the 7th, 1683. By Algernon Sidney, Esq; Before he was Executed (London, 1683). —— Some Remarks and Observations Relating to the Transactions of the year 1720 (London, [1720?]). —— Some Reflections Upon his Highness the Prince of Orange’s Declaration (n. p., n.d.). —— The Abdicated Prince (London, 1690). —— The Amours of Messalina Late Queen of Albion, 4 vols. (London, 1689). —— The Apologie of John Ketch Esq; The Executioner of London, in Vindication Of himself as to the Execution of the Late Lord Russell on July 21. 1683 (London, 1683).

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Index Please note that page numbers rendered in italics refer to images Absalom and Achitophel see Dryden, John accident 10–12, 19–21, 34, 45, 51–2, 70n30, 81–2, 100, 116, 129–31, 175, 185, 205, 210–14, 221–5, 231–2, 235–41, 244–7, 250 ‘accidents’ in reference to the Eucharist 153 ‘cross accidents’ 123–4 etymology of 153n30, 223–5, 240, 246 ‘things indifferent’ 62 accuracy see inaccuracy Acts of Parliament Act of Settlement 122 Act of Union (1707) see also Scotland 21, 115, 131 ‘Quarantine Act’ (1721) 164 Septennial Act (1716) 164–5 ‘South Sea Act’ (1720) 164 Triennial Act 16 alchemy see also Jonson, Ben 155–65 Althusser, Louis 226 Anne I see also warming pan scandal, Princess Anne 119, 122–3 Anti-Catholicism see also Protestants and Protestantism 8, 21, 28n2, 30–9, 44–5, 49–52, 75–9, 114, 122, 130–2, 151–6, 251 ‘fair connexions’ 37, 49 pope-burnings 58 A Ra-Ree Show see Protestant Plot arcana imperii see warming pan scandal, arcana imperii Arendt, Hannah 12, 46 Aristotle 12n24, 214–17, 221–2 Ashcraft, Richard 89–90 authenticity see inauthenticity

Barton, John 192 Battestin, Martin 224–7 Beatty, John 3–5, 15, 229, 250 Beckett, Samuel 147 Bedloe, William see Popish Plot Behn, Aphra Congratulatory poem to Her Most Sacred Majesty, on the universal hopes of all loyal persons for a Prince of Wales 29 Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister 92–9, 108 Berkeley, George 211, 223, 232–3, 236–9 Alciphron: or, the Minute Philosopher 171n12, 173–80, 252 Blackmore, Richard (‘Maurus’) Advice to the Poets 124–6 The Flight of the Pretender 124–9, 132 Bond, William An Epistle to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales 149–50, 160, 167–8 Burke, Edmund Reflections on the Revolution in France 35 Care, Henry see Popish Plot Carrera, Isabel 3–5, 15, 229, 250 Carswell, John 142 Catholicism see also anti-Catholicism; Protestants and Protestantism 170 Catholic monarchs see also warming pan scandal, William of Orange 27–30, 52 Eucharist 152–4 Jesuits 154 Pope Gregory 156 Pope Innocent XI 29 transubstantiation 153–4

276 Things that Didn’t Happen Charles I 67 Charles II failure to assassinate see Popish Plot; Rye House Plot legitimacy of 67 parliament, ‘Exclusion’ 56–7, 64, 70–1, 253 restoration of 74, 130 Royal Oak, the 66, 100 civil war 99–100, 135–7 Clarendon, Earl of see warming pan scandal coffee houses 16, 97 College, Stephen see Protestant Plot Colomb, Gregory 192n25, 214, 232, 236 Connor, Steven 147–50, 160–1, 177 conservation, of paintings 37–41 conspiracies 23, 34, 79 Council of Six see Council of Six Gunpowder Plot 76, 251 Jacobite see Jacobites and Jacobitism Popish Plot see Popish Plot Protestant see Protestants and Protestantism Rye House Plot see Rye House Plot to assassinate Elizabeth I 76 Cooper, Helen 125–8 Council of Six plot see also Rye House plot 88, 94 Berkeley, Henrietta 92–4 Burnet, Gilbert 104–5, 109 Capel, Arthur, Earl of Essex 5, 88 Colley, John 107–8 Curtis, Langley 106–7 Ferguson, Robert 88, 90n11, 100–2, 109 Ford, Lord Grey 88, 92–5 Hampden, John 88–9 Howard, William, 3rd Baron of Escrick 88–9 Kinsey, Thomas 103, 108 L’Estrange, Roger 105–8 Merridell, John 103, 108 Monmouth, Duke of 88 Russell, Lord William 5, 88–90 A Satyr on the Ghost of the Late Lord Russell 104, 107 ghost of 102–9

The Night-Walker of Bloomsbury 104–6, 109 Rutland, John 104–9 Sidney, Algernon 5, 88–90, 94–6, 99–103, 108 Discourses 94 Remarks on Algernon Sidney’s Paper 99–100 Smith, Aaron 88 Sprat, Thomas 90–1, 103 Stretton, Richard 99 counterfactuals 6, 15, 62, 78, 138 counterhistoricity 7, 12–15, 21–3, 56, 71, 75–9, 82, 112, 115–23, 130, 138, 183–205, 216–18, 221–3, 228 Counterreformation see also Reformation 15 Craige, John 12 Cudworth, Ralph 179–180 Danson, Lawrence 160–1 Darwin, Charles 15 de la Chapelle, Jean (La Chapelle) 21 Amours de Catulle 10–12 de Mandeville, Bernard see also Gordon, Thomas; Law, William; South Sea Bubble; Trenchard, William freethinking 167–77, 184, 233, 252 The Fable of the Bees (The Grumbling Hive) 167–80 Deneau, Daniel P. 197–8 Descartes, René 204–5, 210n6, 235 Deutsch, Helen 232 Dew, Ben 13 Dickens, Charles 147 Dickson, P. G. M. 142 Drummond, James, 1st Earl of Melfort see warming pan scandal, Melfort Cross Dryden, John 19, 189, 201, 255 Absalom and Achitophel see also Protestant Plot 57, 63, 67–77, 121, 188, 250–3 Astraea Redux 74 Britannia Rediviva 31n13 The Medall 60–3, 72 Dugdale, Stephen see Popish Plot

Index 277 Dunciads, the see Pope, Alexander, Dunciads, the E. coli 4–5, 12 Elizabeth I, failure to assassinate 76 ethical exchange 167–80 etymology see also puns and wordplay about 236 accident 153n30, 223–5, 240, 246 amuse 129 apprehension 115 beray 242n48 circumscription 235n29 diligent 123n25 ignoramus 58 in extremis 69 intended 113–14 intestine 134 involvement 234 rapid 204 rave 196 rhodomontado 125 root-and-branch 130 travesty 101 fabrication see also Jacobites and Jacobitism, Jacobite invasion (1708, failed) 21–3, 37, 46, 82, 89–90, 102 failure see also Jacobites and Jacobitism, Jacobite invasion (1708, failed) 21–3, 78, 83, 109, 120–9, 136 Ferguson, Niall 6n11, 10n19 finance 147, 172–3 anti-finance see Scriblerians Bank of England 141 compared to fiction 144–5 disaster, financial, comedy of see also South Sea Bubble, the 147–51 National Debt 141 fire 1–2, 5 Catholics, specific methods of setting 80 fireworks 80–2 Great Fire of London (1666) 55, 79 London, threats to set fire to 55, 79–82 pope-burnings 58 within the warming pan see warming pan scandal

France Camisard prophets 193 Dunkirk 113, 129, 132, 135 French, essential Frenchness of 123–4, 137 fleet of see also Jacobites and Jacobitism, Jacobite invasion (1708, failed) 111–13, 117–19, 123, 132, 137 Gallo-Jacobites see Jacobites and Jacobitism, Jacobite invasion (1708, failed) Hochstet, battle of 118 Louis XIV 118, 121–2, 133–6 Oudenarde 123 Ramillies, battle of 118 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Edmund Burke) 35 Revolution 35 freethinking 167–77, 184, 233, 252 Gallagher, Noelle 13, 17, 69–70, 128 Gassendi, Pierre 9–10 Gay, John 240 The Beggar’s Opera 169 George II 202 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry, murder of see Popish Plot Gordon, Thomas Cato’s Letters 171–3, 174n17, 179 Gould, Stephen Jay 3–4 ‘Glorious’ Revolution see revolution Gunpowder Plot 76, 251 Harol, Corinne 45–6 Henry II 66 Heresy, Northern see Catholicism Hickes, George see warming pan scandal historical distance 14–15 historicity see counterhistoricity historiography 13, 17, 36–7, 46, 56, 59, 68–9, 121, 143, 185, 191, 198, 208, 227–31, 254–6 history, secret 17, 74, 93 Homer 220, 225 The Iliad 102, 212, 216 The Odyssey 211 Hoppit, Julian 142–3

278 Things that Didn’t Happen hoaxes 23 Hume, David 15 inaccuracy 7, 184 incontinence 240 intestinal 129–36 sexual 177–8 spiritual see also freethinking 174 incorrigibility 9–12, 16, 23, 27–53, 95, 102, 147, 165, 219, 222, 228 Ingrassia, Catherine 144–5 Ireland 129, 187, 190 irrationality 142–3 Jacobites and Jacobitism 46–7, 91–2, 209–10 ballads of 163 Dicconson, Thomas see warming pan scandal, James II, ‘memoirs’ Jacobite Invasion (1708, failed) 111–38 Byng, George 112 Cannell, Joseph 122–3, 132 Coulton, Thomas 134–6 Defoe, Daniel 112n2, 116–18 Erskine, George 111 French, the see France Hare, Francis 121–4 Haversham, 1st Baron John Thompson 112n2, 115–20, 135–8 Leven, Earl of 119 Lockhart of Carnwarth 123–4 Mainwaring, Arthur 131n48 Mar, Earl of 111–13, 116, 119–21 Marlborough, Duchess of 116 Marlborough, Duke of 122–4, 127–9 Mrs. Frances Shaftoe’s Narrative 133 Pretender, the see Stuart, James Francis Edward Queen Anne see Anne I The Flight of the Pretender, 124–9, 132 The Invasion: A Satyr 133–5 Woodcock, Josiah 131 rebellion (1715) 28 uprising, threats of 7, 8n14, 21, 90 James I 44 James II (previously Duke of York) see also warming pan scandal

exclusion from the succession see also Popish Plot 57n4, 59 failure to assassinate see Popish Plot; Rye House Plot Jemielity, Thomas 192–4 Johnson, Samuel 192n22, 224 Jones, Tom 146, 173, 185n6, 211 Jonson, Ben The Alchemist 157–63, 178 Kant, Immanuel 148–50 Keener, Frederick M. 216, 221 Knights, Mark 17–18 land, stability of 149–50 Law, William Remarks upon a late book, entituled, The fable of the bees 170–3, 175n18 Le Bossu, René 102–3, 212–20, 223, 230, 241, 245 legitimacy see warming pan scandal Lenski research group see E. coli London 56–8 Bloomsbury see also Council of Six plot 102–8 Great Fire of 55, 79 threats to set fire to 82 Lucretius see Dryden, John, The Medall Macaulay, Thomas Babington History of England 35 Mack, Maynard 185, 209, 224, 227 Manley, Delarivier 122 Mantel, Hilary Wolf Hall 22 Marvell, Andrew 128, 203–4 Mary of Modena see warming pan scandal, Mary of Modena materialism, pious see Gassendi, Pierre McKeon, Michael 45–6 Milner, James see South Sea Bubble, the, The Battle of the Bubbles Milton, John 19, 189, 220, 253 Paradise Lost 70–1, 135, 187–8, 203 sonnets 203 Netherlands, the 132–3

Index 279 Dutch Whigs 115 Newmarket see Rye House Plot newspapers and journals 113 Pasquin 187 The Grumbler 187 The Guardian 236 The Observator 105 The Weekly Journal; or, British Gazetteer 157 Newton, Isaac Newtonian mechanics see also Pope, Alexander, Dunciads, the, gravitation 156, 174, 178, 221, 235–9 Newtonian sociology 244 Pemberton, Henry 236 Principia 236 Nicolson, Colin 144–5 Noggle, James 202–3 Oates, Titus see Popish Plot Oglethorpe trick see warming pan scandal Oldham, John see South Sea Bubble, the Oxford see also parliament, ‘Exclusion’ 59, 63–4, 67, 72 parliament, ‘Exclusion’ 56–7, 64, 70–1, 253 Parsons, Nicola 43–4 pasts, alternative see counterhistoricity Paul, Helen J. 142 Pepys, Samuel 32n22 Phillips, Mark Salber 13–15, 109 Pincus, Steve 35–6, 63 Pliny the Elder Natural History 135–6 plots see conspiracies Pocock, J. G. A. 145–6 politics, two-party see also Tories and Toryism; Whigs and Whiggism 21, 130 Pope, Alexander 148, 173–80 Dunciads, the 37, 68, 174–6, 179–80, 249–56 agency in 207–22 as mock prophesy 183–205, 208–11, 221–3, 231

as propaganda 20–2, 193, 199, 211, 218, 221–8 Benson, William 187 Bentley, Richard (Aristarchus) 196–9, 203, 207–9, 217, 234–5 Biblical allusions 192–5, 204, 246 Cibber, Colley (Bays) 183, 187–9, 195, 200–2, 207–9, 212–14, 217–19 An Apology for the Life of 208, 218 concordia discors 23, 222–7, 245 Curll, Edmund 187n10, 214, 233, 240–7 Dulness 82, 183, 188, 194–5, 198n26, 199–204, 207–12, 219–25, 231–9 Dunciad in Four Books 183, 186, 194, 207–8 Eusden, Lawrence 187, 190 gravitation see also Newton, Isaac, Newtonian mechanics 210, 221, 223–47 New Dunciad 183, 186, 194, 197–8 ontogeny 211–16 Philips, Ambrose (Namby Pamby) 187, 190–1, 219, 244, 249 providence 223–47 rapture 202–5 Rich, John 187, 201 richness 18–19 Settle, Elkanah 187, 190, 194–6, 199–201, 208 swarms 210–12, 220–1, 232–4 theories of history in 223–47 Theobald, Lewis (Tibbald) 187–9, 194n30, 195–6, 199–201, 204, 207–9, 213, 216–17, 233–6 Thomas, Elizabeth (Corinna) 187n10, 241, 244 Timon 191 Variorum 183, 186, 194–9, 244–6 Warburton, William 191–3, 198n38, 210n6, 215, 221 Ward, Ned 184, 214 Epistle to Augustus 190 Epistle to Bathurst 245 Epistle to Burlington 191–2, 227n10 Essay on Man 144, 176–8, 226, 231, 237–8, 243 Temple of Fame 195n31

280 Things that Didn’t Happen Popish Plot 7, 21, 73–82, 90n11, 92, 251–3 Bedloe, William 55, 75–80, 253 Care, Henry 76, 251–3 Coleman, Edward 56n2, 75 Dugdale, Stephen 55 Fenwick, John 78–82 Godfrey, Sir Edmund Berry, murder of 55, 78, 82, 253 Harris, Benjamin 80 History of the Damnable Popish Plot (Henry Care) 76 Oates, Titus 55–6, 75–80, 251–4 Prance, Miles 55, 78, 253 Prance, Miles see Popish Plot predestination 124 Price, Fiona 13 Prince of Wales see warming pan scandal Princess Anne see warming pan scandal, Princess Anne printing presses 16, 48 propaganda see also Dunciads, the, as propaganda 29, 41, 118, 157, 165, 220, 253–5 Whig see Whigs and Whiggism, propaganda Protestant Plot Absalom and Achitophel see Dryden, John Bethel, Slingsby 58, 71–2 College, Stephen (the ‘Protestant Joiner’) A Ra–Ree Show 57, 63–8, 65, 74–5, 94, 163, 250–3 trial of 57–8, 62, 71–3 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury 57–60, 63, 69–70, 88, 90n10, 94 Cornish, Henry 58 ignoramus justice 57–62, 71–3, 211, 230 Shadwell, Thomas 59 The Two Associations (Anon.) 59–60, 61 Protestants and Protestantism see also anti-Catholicism 21, 27–8, 113, 122, 135, 209–10, 256 Martin Luther 38 Northern Heresy 15, 38

Protestant Plot see Protestant Plot puns and wordplay see also etymology; Scriblerians 11, 103n46, 134, 147–8, 151, 195, 196n34, 234–5 Queen Anne see Anne I; warming pan scandal, Princess Anne Rahn, B. J. 68 rationality see irrationality Rawson, Claude 199, 209, 225 Reformation see also Counterreformation 15, 76, 99 regicide see treason Restoration, the see Charles II revolution 35 1688–89 (‘Glorious’ Revolution) see also William of Orange 21, 35–7, 63, 90–2, 113, 126, 255–6 Richardson, Samuel 186n7 Richetti, John 93–6 Rogers, Pat 151 Rumbold, Valerie 194n30, 198n36, 201–3 Russell, Lord William see Council of Six plot; Rye House Plot Rye House Plot see also Council of Six plot 1–2, 5–6, 21 Hone, William 97–8 Keeling, Josiah 88, 97–8 Newmarket, fire at 1–2, 5–6, 87, 97, 100–2 Percival, Thomas 90–2, 103, 108 Rye House Travestie, The 90, 103 Rumbold, Richard 87–8, 101–2, 109 Rumsey, Colonel 2, 87n2, 94n21 The loyal incendiary, or, the generous boutefieu (Samuel Pordage) 1–2 Walcott, Thomas 2n4, 87n1, 94n21, 97–8, 102 West, Robert 88, 97–8, 101 Wildman, John 88 Sahlins, Marshall 230, 253–4 Scriblerians 9, 18, 51, 144–8, 189–91, 213, 231, 249 Pope see Pope, Alexander Swift see Swift, Jonathan Schwoerer, Lois 89

Index 281 Scotland see also Jacobites and Jacobitism 111–38 Act of Union (1707) 21, 115, 131 Berwick 119 Blackness 120 Dumbarton 120 Edinburgh 111, 119–20 Firth of Forth 111, 113, 123, 128, 128, 138 Inverness 113 Stirling 120 self-organising systems 9, 19–20, 39–41, 179, 208 Sewell, William H. 228–9, 239, 249–56 Sheehan, Jonathan 9–10, 19–20, 146, 148n18, 156n36, 157, 174, 179, 245n55 Sherburn, George 191, 211n10 Sidney, Algernon see Council of Six; Rye House Plot Silver, Sean 226–7 Sitter, John 68, 185, 231 Skocpol, Theda 228–9 South Sea Bubble, the see also finance 7, 21, 141–65, 162, 167–8, 171 agency, female 142–4 An Epistle to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales (William Bond) 149–50, 160, 167–8 asiento, transfer of 141–2 Bank of England 141 Blunt, John 141 Harley, Robert 141 Mississippi Company 141, 155 National Debt 141 Pack, Major Richardson 157–60 Satyr on the Jesuits (John Oldham) 152–4 slave trade, the 141–2 social mobility 142, 149–50 South Sea Company, the 141–2, 145, 155–6, 165 The Alchemist (Ben Jonson) 157–63, 178 The Battle of the Bubbles (James Milner) 155–8 The Fable of the Bees (Bernard de Mandeville) 167–80 ‘Upon the South Sea Project’ (Jonathan Swift) 151–6, 172

speculation 21, 71 Stuart, James Francis Edward (Chevalier St. George; Perkin; Pretender; Oglethorpe; Old Pretender) 111–15, 118–21, 125–37 illegitimacy of see warming pan scandal incontinence of see incontinence legitimacy of see Jacobites and Jacobitism Swift, Jonathan 122, 129, 148–9, 190–1 A Tale of a Tub 249 Gulliver’s Travels 9, 210n6 ‘On the Day of Judgement’ 150–1 ‘Upon the South Sea Project’ 151–6 Szechi, Daniel 137–8 Tanner, Jakob 11, 39 terrorism, accusations of 124, 130, 209–12 Tories and Toryism 16, 56, 60–2, 73, 99, 102–8, 171 as secret Jacobites 130–1 Trapp, Joseph 232 treason see also conspiracies 1–2, 6, 56–9, 67, 72, 76, 89–90, 98–9, 116–19 as synonymous with Catholicism see anti-Catholicism as synonymous with Whiggism see Whigs and Whiggism Trenchard, John Cato’s Letters 171–3, 174n17, 179 two-party politics see also Tories and Toryism; Whigs and Whiggism 21, 56 Utretcht, Treaty of 141 van Hensbergen, Claudine 93, 98 Virgil 19, 189, 197, 201, 219–20, 253 Aeneid 187–188, 198n38, 221, 240–3 Voth, Hans-Joachim 143 Wahrman, Dror 9–10, 19–20, 146, 148n148, 156n36, 157, 174, 179, 245n55 Walcott, Thomas 2n4 Waller, Edmund 128 Wallerstein, Immanuel 249–51

282 Things that Didn’t Happen Walpole, Robert 121, 163, 164, 201–2 Warburton, William see Pope, Alexander, warming pan scandal (‘Oglethorpe trick’) 7–9, 15, 21–2, 27–53, 125, 133, 147, 165, 219, 254–6 A Full Answer to the Depositions 32–4, 42, 46–51, 81–2 A Melius Inquirendum (Anon) 29–30 An Account of the Reasons 43 arcana imperii 44–6, 49, 53, 154–8, 254 Chamberlain, Hugh 31 Clarendon, Earl of 28, 48–50 Count D’Adda 31, 49 Crane, Mary 32 Dawson, Margaret 31–2, 43, 51, 255 Father Petre 39, 40, 41 Godolphin, Lord Sidney 33n23 Hickes, George 9, 43, 46, 49 James Francis Edward Stuart see Stuart, James Francis Edward James II 254–5 ‘empiricism’ 45–6, 52 ‘memoir’ (The Life of King James the Second) 30n9, 37, 47, 51–2, 55 Lens, Bernard 39–40, 40 Mary of Modena 8, 27–9, 34, 39–42, 40, 41, 113n3, 136, 161, 165, 233 Melfort Cross 27–8

Middleton, Earl of 33–4 Mrs. Frances Shaftoe’s Narrative 133 Pearse, Elizabeth 32–3 Peterborough, Earl of 31 Princess Anne see also Anne I 30–1, 34, 42, 48–51 Schenk, Pieter 41 ‘The Miracle’ 31 William III (William of Orange) see also Revolution (1688) 30–1, 35–6, 47–9, 90, 103, 115 Weil, Rachel 46, 49, 89 Whigs and Whiggism see also Revolution (1688) 5–6, 16, 21, 27–30, 52, 56–63, 73–4, 88–92, 95–8, 102–9, 124, 163, 209 court 167–8, 172–3, 252 Dutch see also Netherlands, the 115 Green Ribbon Club 58 propaganda 45–51, 130, 167–8 split of 35 Whig Interpretation of History 36, 231 William of Orange (William III) see also warming pan scandal, William III failure to assassinate 90–2 Williams, Aubrey 184–7 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 20

John McTague

This stimulating and original book looks at counterhistorical writing in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England, a period of social change and political uncertainty, when speculation of all kinds flourished. This book’s aim is less to determine what ‘really’ happened than to show how the tension between the factual and the counter-factual played out in the changing political culture of the period. From the alleged ‘Popish Plot’ of Titus Oates to the South Sea Bubble, McTague draws on a rich variety of sources – popular, archival and canonically literary – to investigate the propagandic and literary exploitation of three kinds of things that did not occur at this time: failures which inspired ‘what if’ narratives, speculative futures which failed to come to pass and ‘pure’ fictions created and disseminated for political gain. In a final section, he presents a new reading of the various versions of Pope’s Dunciad – texts which in their cannibalisation and repurposing of the material of political and literary culture reflect and deploy the methodologies and strategies of counter-historical propaganda explored in earlier chapters. JOHN MCTAGUE is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. Cover image: details from A Raree Show ([London], [1681]), British Museum, London © The Trustees of the British Museum. Cover design: www.stay-creative.co.uk

T H I N G S THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN

Counterhistorical writing, fabricating or speculating on what might have happened but in reality did not, tends to cluster around moments of crisis, when writers need history to make the most sense, but it happens not to. James Francis Edward Stuart, the Prince of Wales born in 1688, was not an illegitimate child smuggled into the queen’s birthing chamber in a warming pan, but it suited many people to say he was. In 1708, the same prince did not quite land on the coast of Scotland with a force of 5,000 men in order to claim the Scottish crown, but writers busied themselves with exploring what would have happened if he had succeeded.

John McTague

THINGS THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN Writing, Politics and the Counterhistorical, 1678–1743