A History of Seventeenth-Century English Literature by Corns Thomas N.;

Author:Corns, Thomas N.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

Royalist Poetry

A singularly rich and surprisingly diverse corpus of verse was produced by writers loyal to the king in the mid-century decades. A singularly rich critical response has latterly developed. (See especially Miner 1971; Anselment 1988; Potter 1989; Loxley 1997; Wilcher 2001; there are shrewd discussions also in Hammond 1990 and Smith 1994.) The poets held in common a perspective on the events which shaped the royalist destiny over that period. For them, the personal rule was a lost paradise of peace and culture; the Long Parliament was a nest of rebellious sectaries, and Presbyterians were scarcely to be distinguished from the wilder heretics whose success was premised on the destruction of the episcopal government of the Church of England; the trial and execution of Strafford was a martyrdom and the betrayal of a heroic and deserted figure by men who should have shared his resolution; the first civil war was a rebellion and an act of treason; the military disasters of the mid-1640s were a tragedy inexplicable in terms of a divine providence, producing a terrible waste both of life and property; the death of the king was murder, treason and a deeply perplexing event; and the second civil war, at least till the battle of Worcester, a time of anxious hope. After 1653, as the Rump was displaced by the Protectorate and Cromwell emerged as a stabilizing figure safeguarding the realm against extremists, that royalist consensus fragmented.

Several themes recurred. There was a nostalgic invocation of life before the war. The failure of providence was met with bewilderment. The metaphorical death of Caroline England and the literal death of the king were treated with the familiar emotions of mourning: denial, anger, grief and an eventual resignation. Coping strategies included celebrations of libertine eroticism and political intransigence and a revaluation of the contemplative life, of retreat and retirement, and of friendship. Few poets manifested all of these concerns, but most engaged with several.

Some of these issues are more complex in their construction than others and require further comment. The evocation of nostalgia for the old regime is shaped by the multiple timescales of composition, early response and interpretation and eventual publication and, with it, wider circulation and appreciation. The collected poems of Suckling and Carew, reprinted through the 1640s and 1650s, reflected the court society about which and for which they were written, though in a context in which the court was dispersed and the king was displaced or, by the time of later editions, dead. Herrick’s Noble Numbers, the shorter collection of religious verse that makes up a double volume with his Hesperides, thus presented in print ‘To God: an Anthem, sung in the Chappell at White-Hall, before the King’, ‘A Christmas Caroll, sung to the King in the Presence [that is, the royal presence chamber] at Whitehall’, and ‘The New-yeeres Gift, or Circumcision Song, sung to the King in the Presence at White-hall’ (1 January is the Feast of the Circumcision). For those hearing them performed in the

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