Mammon's Music by Hoxby Blair

Author:Hoxby, Blair [Hoxby, Blair]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780300129632
Publisher: YaleUP
Published: 2002-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

From Amboyna to Windsor Forest

I have thus far stressed the efforts of Royalist poets to secure a place for the Crown in England’s commercial future by asserting the complementary relationship between force and commerce in their program of trade. We have also seen that in representing Adam and Eve as natives defrauded of their territory and their lives by a merchant adventurer working in the name of empire, Paradise Lost submits that Restoration program to a withering analysis. Had we leisure to consider the Painter poems that Andrew Marvell and others produced in response to Waller’s Instructions to a Painter, we would find that the gap between the Royalists’ rhetoric of trade and the administration’s mismanagement of the Second Anglo-Dutch War encouraged a rather different attempt to evolve a stance of loyal opposition through satire, one that saw the inter-penetration of the political and economic spheres exemplified in the war less as an ideal convergence of interests than as a dangerous erasure of saving distinctions. Here I wish to return, however, to the monarchical ideal of a trade empire. For despite its evident brutality and aggressiveness, despite its antipathy to the reformist conception of commerce that men like Milton began formulating in the 1640s, this conception had its own ways of acknowledging some of the costs and responsibilities that achieving primacy in world trade might bring. In this chapter, I consider two such acknowledgments, the first written by Dryden on the eve of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, the second written by Pope in celebration of the Peace of Utrecht, which ended England’s involvement in the protracted Wars of the Spanish Succession.

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