Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture, 1681-1714

Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714

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Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture 1681–1714 ABIGAIL WILLIAMS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan South Korea Poland Portugal Singapore Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York ß Abigail Williams 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Williams, Abigail. Poetry and the creation of a Whig literary culture, 1681–1714 / Abigail Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English poetry–18th century–History and criticism. 2. Politics and literature–Great Britain –History–18th century. 3. English poetry–Early modern, 1500–1700–History and criticism. 4. Whig Party (Great Britain)–History–18th century. 5. Great Britain–Intellectual life–18th century. I. Title. PR555.P6W55 2005 821’.509921342–dc22 2004026057 ISBN 0-19-925520-2 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset by Kolam Information Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk

In memory of my father, Shaun Williams

Acknowledgements I began this project with the assistance of a grant from the AHRB, and I could not have finished it without the time and money given to me by the Oxford English Faculty and St Peter’s College. Beyond this generous institutional support, I have personal debts of thanks. At the various stages of the book’s development I have been encouraged and guided by Christine Gerrard, Isabel Rivers, and David Womersley. I am also very grateful to all the other friends and colleagues who have read sections and drafts of the book: Sharon Achinstein, Matthew Beaumont, Jennie Barbour, Eleanor Collins, Brean Hammond, Mark Knights, Myfanwy Lloyd, Steve Pincus, Adam Rounce, Blair Worden, and Brian Young. I hope I have done some justice to their astute and constructive comments. Thanks are also due to those who have shared their unpublished research with me, in particular Ros Ballaster, Emma Jay, Nick von Maltzahn, Hannah Smith, and all the participants in the ‘Cultures of Whiggism’ seminar held in Oxford in April 2001. This is undoubtedly a better book for the numerous discussions at conferences and seminars that have prompted me to rethink various aspects of my arguments. And finally, to my friends and family, and especially Giles—thank you for your support and companionship.

Contents List of abbreviations

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Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

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1. The Tory critique of Whig literature

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2. Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688

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3. Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702

93

4. Poetic warfare 1702–1714

135

5. The sublime and the liberty of writing

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6. Patronage and the public writer in Whig literary culture

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Conclusion: Whig afterlives

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Biographical appendix

247

Bibliography

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Index

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Abbreviations Dennis, Critical Works

Dryden, Works

POAS

Shadwell, Works TE

The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939–43). The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker et al., 20 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1965–2000). George deF. Lord et al., (eds.), 7 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963–75). Poems on AVairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660–1714. The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers, 5 vols. (London: Fortune, 1927). The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1939–69).

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry In 1694 Joseph Addison, a young scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, published a history of English poetry, An Account of the Greatest English Poets. Having progressed through Chaucer, Spenser, Cowley, Milton, Waller, Dryden, and Congreve, Addison arrives at the present day, and his Wnal verse paragraph proclaims the latest successor to the tradition: I’m tir’d with rhiming, and wou’d fain give o’er, But justice still demands one labour more: The noble Montague remains unnam’d, For wit, for humour, and for judgment fam’d.1

For a twenty-Wrst-century reader this is a surprising moment. Addison’s ‘greatest English poets’ are the same as those found in countless other canonical histories of English poetry, until we reach the last named author. After all the familiar praise of Spenser and Dryden, Addison presents a poet that we have never read, or even heard of. The unlikely Wgure of Charles Montagu, later Earl of Halifax, is hailed as the culmination of the nation’s literary achievement. Montagu was the author of a recent panegyric on William III’s victory over James II at the Battle of the Boyne entitled An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex (1690). Addison does not seem to anticipate our ignorance of his last ‘great English poet’, indeed he describes him as ‘fam’d’ for wit, humour, and judgement. Nor does Addison present his admiration of Montagu as purely personal or idiosyncratic. A little research into the reception of the Epistle reveals that he was expressing an opinion that was widely held in the 1690s. The Epistle became something of an ars poetica for a generation of writers in the postRevolution period. It was widely praised as embodying the ‘wonderful Wre’ and ‘Raptures’ that were the very essence of poetic genius, and was 1 Joseph Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets (1694), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i.34–5. Further line references in the text are to this edition.

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republished numerous times over the next two decades, continuing to circulate both in separate editions and poetic miscellanies long after its initial publication.2 Reading Addison’s Account of the Greatest English Poets, then, exposes a curious and problematic discrepancy between his era’s familiarity with and enthusiasm for Montagu’s poetry and our utter ignorance of it. It is the task of this book to address this discrepancy. In situating Montagu’s verse within the evolution of a tradition of Whig poetry I hope to reconstruct some of the perceived literary and political values that lay behind the popularity of this verse, and to recover an important, but forgotten, historical aesthetic. Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset is more than a panegyric on a single military event. In his depiction of William III as the Achillean hero of the battle at the River Boyne, near Drogheda, Montagu celebrated the new Protestant king’s victory over the French and Jacobite troops led by the recently exiled James II. But he was also proclaiming the glories of a new political era for Britain that William III had ushered in with the Revolution of 1688. In the poem Montagu declares that he is ‘transported’ and ‘amaz’d’ at the imaginary scenes before him, struggling to Wnd words with which to express the enormity of his vision of the king in battle. In its attempts to Wnd a Wt form with which to celebrate the triumphs of post-Revolution England the Epistle resembled a whole body of verse by Whig authors. Although these works were met with considerable excitement and enthusiasm in their own time, they constitute a poetic tradition that has been largely occluded in existing literary histories of the period. Thomas Tickell, Richard Blackmore, and Joseph Addison himself all wrote poetry valorizing the political and military achievements of William III’s Britain. They, and others like Thomas Shadwell, John Dennis, and Ambrose Philips, saw themselves and were seen in their own time as part of an ambitious project to remodel and reform English literary culture alongside the contemporary transformation of political and social life. Whig authors responded to the 2 See John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (1696), in Dennis, Critical Works, i. 47; George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq. Occasion’d by the Death of the Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715) in The Posthumous Works of Dr George Sewell (London, 1728), 37. There were two editions of the Epistle in 1690, then again in 1702, and 1716, a Latin translation by Laurence Eusden, and circulation in the printed poetic miscellanies of the period. It was reprinted in the popular miscellany A Collection of Poems: Viz, The Temple of Death: by the Marquess of Normanby. An Epistle to the Earl of Dorset: By Charles Montague . . . (London, 1701), with further editions in 1701, 1702, and 1716, and in the collection An Essay on Poetry; written by the Marquis of Normanby [ . . . ] with several other poems, viz . . . (London, 1697).

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imaginative challenges of post-Revolution England with enthusiasm and conWdence, convinced that the political liberties established at the Revolution oVered the opportunity to create a new native literary culture that was distinctively Whiggish. The funding and distribution of their poetry was secured through substantial patronage from the Whig aristocracy, who collaborated with Whig publishers such as Jacob Tonson to produce prestigious editions of poems that were promoted as a new English literature, to rival that of classical Greece and Rome. I am using the label ‘Whig’ here to group together a loose and varied collection of writers. To do so clearly disguises a signiWcant diversity of ideology both at any one moment and over the decades between 1680 and 1715. It also glosses over the diVerences that existed between the general political rhetoric of practical Whig politics and the speciWc rhetorical tradition of this poetry. However, as we shall see, there were political emphases that remained constant in Whig ideology throughout the period, emphases that were frequently deWned in opposition to the principles and opinions espoused by Tory writers. In the poetry that forms the subject of this study we will see Whig poets writing in support of the Exclusion movement, the Revolution of 1688, and the Hanoverian succession, matters on which many of their Tory and Jacobite contemporaries took a rather diVerent stance. Through an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the two parties and their literature I hope to illuminate the cultural politics of early eighteenth-century poetry. It is undoubtedly the voices of the Tory poets of the period that are more familiar to readers today. John Dryden, and the members of the Scriblerus Club, such as Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay, dominate literary histories of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Much of their poetry engaged in direct and open conXict with Whigs and Whig literature, and their satiric dismissals of their opponents as ‘dunces’ and ‘hacks’ are now better known than the opponents themselves, or their poetry. It has become a literaryhistorical cliche´ to observe that the political victors of the eighteenth century have been its literary losers. The Whig parliamentary party secured a political hegemony during the century, but the poets that shared these politics are marginal Wgures in existing accounts of the period. Not one edition of the collected poetical works of a Whig writer has been published since 1937, and the most substantial account of early eighteenth-century Whig verse is still W. J. Courthope’s chapter on Whig panegyric in his History of English Poetry, which was published a

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century ago.3 It is Tory and Jacobite authors whose works now constitute the literary canon. Thus we have an inverse relationship between political and cultural authority in our historical accounts of this period. The political Wgures who sponsored, wrote, and were celebrated in Whig poetry were a powerful elite who were to dominate political life throughout the century, while the authors who wrote about them were mere hacks, known nowadays largely for their roles as Pope’s dunces. This book represents an attempt to re-examine this version of eighteenth-century literary history. It will question the binarism of political victory and literary failure that has been so central to the literary historiography of the period, showing that things must have looked rather diVerent in the early eighteenth century. The major Whig poets were not losers in their own time: while they were perceived or depicted as such by later literary historians, this was in many respects a retrospective classiWcation. Whig poems were successful in their day: Addison’s verses on the Battle of Blenheim, The Campaign, were hugely popular, with three editions within the Wrst three months of their publication, and further editions in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in 1708, 1710, 1713, and 1715, while Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur went into two folio editions in 1695, then again in 1696, 1697, 1714, and a Latin translation in 1700. Such poems frequently outsold the works of the Tory authors with which we are more familiar today. For example, Thomas Tickell’s poem The Prospect of Peace (1712), a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht (1713), went into Wve editions in the Wrst year after its publication, whereas Alexander Pope’s more famous Windsor Forest (1713) saw only two. Of course, not all early eighteenth-century Whig writers have been condemned to obscurity: part of the aim of this book is to oVer new perspectives on the writing of more familiar authors, such as Joseph Addison and the third Earl of Shaftesbury, whose works are best understood in the context of a speciWcally Whiggish literary culture. 3 The most recent existing collected editions of the major Whig poets are as follows: Samuel Garth, The Poetical Works of Samuel Garth (Glasgow, 1771); Charles Montagu, The Works of Celebrated Authors (London, 1750); George Stepney, The Works of Celebrated Authors (London, 1750); Laurence Eusden, Original Poems and Translations by Mr Hill, Mr Eusden and Others (London, 1714); Ambrose Philips, The Poems of Ambrose Philips, ed. M. G. Segar (Oxford: Blackwell, 1937); Thomas Tickell, The Poetical Works of Thomas Tickell (London, 1796); Joseph Addison, The Miscellaneous Works, ed. Guthkelch (London, 1914); Leonard Welsted, The Works in Verse and Prose of Leonard Welsted, ed. J. Nichols (London, 1787); William Congreve, The Complete Works of William Congreve, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1923). For W. J. Courthope’s chapter on Whig panegyric see his History of English Poetry, 6 vols. (London, 1895–1910), v. 20–43.

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A reappraisal of this poetic tradition oVers a more balanced literaryhistorical context within which to read the period as a whole. The neglect of the Whig poetic tradition has undoubtedly distorted our understanding of many of the acclaimed poets of the early eighteenth century, and it is important to reread Whig poetry not only on its own terms but alongside contemporary Tory verse. My analysis of individual poems demonstrates some of the speciWc ways in which the writing of the Tory Augustans was a response to that of an evolving Whig opposition. This restores some of the contours of topical debate to a polemical literary culture. Familiar works such as Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel and Pope’s Dunciad read very diVerently in the context of their Whig contemporaries, revealing what Stephen Zwicker has aptly termed the ‘rhetorics, structures, and poetics of contest’ in this period.4 The examination of the discrepancy between the political and literary fortunes of the Wrst Whigs also raises much broader questions about the historical contingency of literary evaluation, the deWnition of ‘literature’, and the forces inXuencing the formation of the literary canon. In focusing on the particular fortunes of a group of Whig writers and their critics, this book explores the complexities of canon formation at a particular historical moment, revealing the interplay of aesthetic and political considerations in the representation of a literary tradition. Moreover, in reconsidering contemporary responses to the Whig sublime, it oVers an attempt to imagine a historical aesthetic speciWc to its own time and place. In reappraising the nature of the literary taste that ensured the popularity of Whig verse at its initial publication we will confront the post-Romantic separation between art and aesthetics and political ideology. Not only does politics provide the subject matter of Whig verse, but, as we shall see, political and aesthetic concerns were inextricably linked in both the positive and negative evaluation of literature in this period.

Joseph Addison, the Account of the Greatest English Poets, and literary history As a way of introducing some of the consequences of a reappraisal of the Whig poetic tradition I shall return to the Account of the Greatest English 4 Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 7.

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Poets, where Addison expands upon the merits of Charles Montagu’s verse: The noble Montague remains unnam’d, For wit, for humour, and for judgment fam’d; To Dorset he directs his artful Muse, In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use. How negligently graceful he unreins His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains; How Nassau’s godlike acts adorn his lines, And all the Heroe in full glory shines. We see his army set in just array, And Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the sea. Nor Simois choak’d with men, and arms, and blood: Nor rapid Xanthus’ celebrated Xood, Shall longer be the poet’s highest themes, Though gods and heroes fought promiscuous in their streams. But now, to Nassau’s secret councils rais’d, He aids the Heroe, whom before he prais’d. (ll. 134–49)

Many of the characteristics of early Whig poetry and the implications of its analysis that I expand upon in the following chapters are encapsulated in the passage above. As we have established, it is a tribute to Montagu’s poem on the Battle of the Boyne, written four years before. Like many other Whig poems of this period, Montagu’s elevated verse took as its subject the military victories of the Nine Years’ War, and here Addison celebrates the writer’s ability to evoke the bloodshed and martial heroism of conXict, when ‘Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the sea’. However alien to modern sensibilities, this enthusiasm for gory bellicosity was central to the popularity of poetry of the period. Yet while the Account praises such descriptive qualities in Montagu’s verse, it is of course also a tribute to William’s, or Nassau’s, ‘godlike acts’ which lie behind them. As Addison tells it, the excellence of Montagu’s verse is inseparable from the excellence of its subject matter: moreover, the praise of the literary merits of the poem displays Addison’s own commitment to the Williamite regime. Aesthetic and evaluative judgements cannot be separated here from political concerns, since the appraisal of Montagu’s Epistle conXates literary form and political content. Addison’s lines on William demonstrate in particular the belief that the king’s deeds will inspire future poets, providing the basis for a new era of elevated heroic verse. They reXect a wider expectation that the Revolution will usher in an era of unprecedented

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

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literary achievement, establishing both the conditions and the subject matter for a revival of native literature. We might consider the claims made here for Williamite literature alongside another, more familiar, account of the development of English letters published in the same year. John Dryden’s poem ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ oVers an account of dramatic tradition that describes the postRevolutionary age as one when ‘Poetry is curs’d’.5 Dryden’s implicit criticism of Williamite literary culture is of course a statement of his own political allegiances. Juxtaposing these two poems underlines the vast diVerences that exist in contemporary interpretations of the state of literature—or politics—at any immediate historical moment. These diVerences are all too easily obscured in later accounts, and this study aims to restore a sense of early eighteenth-century literature’s oppositional dynamics. Addison’s Account of the Greatest English Poets foregrounds questions of canon formation.6 It seeks to identify a native poetic tradition, and to relate contemporary English verse to this narrative. The Account provides a prehistory of ‘muse-possest’ Englishmen, who have ‘spent their noble rage in British rhimes’ (l. 4). The references here to both ‘English’ and ‘British’ demonstrate the importance of national identity in the evaluation of poetic tradition, yet also a blurring of the distinction between British and English that is characteristic of much verse of the period. The Act of Union of 1707 loomed large in Whig political debate, yet, as Richard Terry has shown, in many accounts of native poetic tradition the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ were frequently used interchangeably.7 Addison’s Account also reveals a dualist and sometimes contradictory perspective on the relation of past and present literary culture. The native past is evidently important as a pedigree for modern poets: yet the poem’s teleology also suggests that modern achievements are an improvement on what has gone before. This complex relationship with native poetic tradition reverberates throughout Whig verse, particularly during the War of the Spanish Succession, when poets 5 John Dryden, ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve, On His Comedy, call’d, The Double– Dealer’ (1694), in Dryden, Works, iv. 433. 6 In a recent study Richard Terry has claimed that the poem marks the stabilization and consecration of the canon of English literature (Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 51). Terry’s reading of this poem seems rather selective, in that he ignores the Wnal section on Charles Montagu and asserts that Dryden is presented as the apogee of poetic achievement (pp. 6, 50). 7 Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 9.

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debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in relation to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. Contemporary poetry and its subject matter were seen as adding to a distinguished lineage of English literature, but also as surpassing it. We Wnd a similar ambiguity about the relationship between past and present cultures in Addison’s discussion of classical literature. His boast that ‘Nor Simois choak’d with men, and arms, and blood: | Nor rapid Xanthus’ celebrated Xood, | Shall longer be the poet’s highest themes’ has been read as signalling a rejection of classical models for modern Whig literature.8 But in fact it is a statement less about native literary originality than about the subject matter of heroic verse: it is the scale of contemporary military victories that renders classical comparison redundant. The introduction of the epic comparison works in two ways. It suggests that modern verse can now rival the Aeneid and the Iliad because of the magniWcence of its subjects, but in evoking classical comparison it also establishes the framework of literary achievement against which we should measure Montagu’s verse. This dualism, within which classical and earlier native literature are a source of authority, yet also an authority to be rendered redundant by the events of modern life, reverberates throughout the verse of the period, complicating notions of poetic ‘originality’. Addison’s tribute to Montagu does not, of course, focus only on the subject matter of his verse. Its excellence, as he sees it, is also a matter of style. Montagu’s stylistic virtues seem to be related to his birth: ‘noble’ and ‘graceful’ Montagu with his artful strains connotes an aristocratic hauteur. Yet alongside this there is a suggestion of informality, and in the reference to ‘loose familiar strains’ Addison presents an image of sociable conversation. These models of literary debate, the aristocratic and the sociable, were to be embodied in the Whig Kit-Cat Club, of which Addison and Montagu were both members. The Club, with its famous dinners, provided a focus for many of the cultural activities sponsored by the new Whig elite. In combining writers, soldiers, statesmen, and Wnanciers it was a very public manifestation of the happy marriage of political and artistic life that was central to the new Whig literary culture. This symbiotic relationship between public and literary worlds is made manifest in Addison’s Account. We have seen that the poem praises William III as well as Montagu. It also includes a third 8 See David Womersley, introd. to Womersley (ed.), Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin: 1997), p. xviii.

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Wgure: ‘To Dorset he directs his artful Muse, | In numbers such as Dorset’s self might use’. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, was one of the signatories of the invitation to William III, and a prominent member of the king’s household. He had met Montagu while the poet was still a Cambridge undergraduate, and introduced him to the king shortly after the Revolution. With Dorset’s support Montagu was fast becoming an inXuential member of the powerful group of Whig statesmen and Wnanciers known as the Junto. In the Wnal lines of the passage Addison remarks on Montagu’s recent transition from poet to statesman, drawing attention again to the connections between literary and political culture: ‘He aids the Heroe, whom before he prais’d’. This symbiotic relationship between poetry and politics was evident in the networks of patronage that sustained Whig verse at this time. Addison reads the Epistle as a paradigm of poetry generated by the productive interchange between one poet-statesman and another. Yet what the Account does not explicitly say is that Montagu was Addison’s patron, and that Dorset was Montagu’s patron. Once privy to this information one might argue that Addison’s praise of Montagu’s ‘judgment’ oVers a self-serving reXection on his patron’s discernment, or that Montagu’s tribute to Dorset is merely due payment for his political advancement. These are contexts which make it hard to interpret Addison’s literary evaluation of the Epistle to Dorset, since such patronage relations, here as elsewhere, clearly conXate issues of literary and political inXuence. One of the aims of this study is to balance later suspicion of literary patronage with a more detailed examination of how contemporaries perceived the relationship between patron and writer, and the Wnal chapter oVers an examination of literary patronage and its role in the evolution of Whig culture.

Montagu’s afterlife: Pope, patronage, and the formation of the canon Charles Montagu’s heroic verse provided evidence to his peers of the post-Revolution rebirth of letters. As statesman, patron, and poet he seemed to embody the marriage of political and literary culture that was so central to Whig visions of the modern nation. So what happened to these verses of Montagu’s, once seen as the vanguard of the nation’s brilliant poetic future? By the mid-eighteenth century Montagu’s works, along with those of his contemporaries Samuel Garth, George Stepney,

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and Thomas Tickell, were being published only in collections such as The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (1749), and a quarter of a century later when Samuel Johnson published his Lives of the English Poets (1777–80) he faced criticism for his decision to include such minor Wgures in his account of English poetry.9 If we trace Montagu’s critical fortunes through the biographical dictionaries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we can see that his reputation changes signiWcantly. From the 1750s there is a shift of emphasis Wrst of all away from his poetry to his patronage, and then later the accounts are marked by an increasingly hostile perspective on his role as a patron.10 Over and over again biographers quote the same phrase, Pope’s lines from the Epistle to Arbuthnot, where Montagu is described as ‘fullblown Bufo, puV’d by ev’ry quill’.11 This brief satirical portrait of literary narcissism became the only lens through which the poet-statesman was seen. By the time of Alexander Chalmers’s canon-deWning General Biographical Dictionary (1812–17) it was noted of Montagu merely that ‘as he was a patron of poets, his own works did not miss of celebration’. His patronage was viewed as the pursuit of a rich man concerned to secure his reputation, and contemporary praise of his poetry was therefore construed as merely the eager Xattery of potential recipients. This brief survey of Montagu’s reception reveals two factors that inXuenced the later critical fortunes of many Whig poets and the literary culture that they embodied. The Wrst of these is the role of Pope and the Scriblerians in determining the reputations of Whig writers. Texts such as Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704), Gay’s Trivia (1716), and Pope’s Peri Bathous (1727) reiterated associations between Whiggism and bad writing, enthusiasm, illiteracy, and poverty, and verse like 9 The Works of the Most Celebrated Minor Poets (London, 1749). See also The Works of Celebrated Authors, of whose Writings there are but Small Remains (London, 1750). On this criticism of Johnson’s Lives see Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 245–6. 10 See Giles Jacob, The Poetical Register, 2 vols. (London, 1719–20); Theophilus Cibber [Robert Shiels], The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland to the Time of Dean Swift, 5 vols. (London, 1753); The British Biography; or an Accurate and Impartial Account of the Lives and Writings of Eminent Persons (London, 1773–80); John Aiken, The General Biographical Dictionary; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the most Eminent Persons (London, 1799–1815); A. Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary: Containing an Historical and Critical Account (London, 1812–17); R. A. Davenport, A Dictionary of Biography (London, 1831). 11 Alexander Pope, An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), in TE, vol. iv, p. 112, l. 232.

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Montagu’s was relentlessly mocked for its aspirations to the sublime.12 The derision of Whig poetry reached its peak with Pope’s Dunciad, which parodied the Whig vision of the progress of contemporary literature with the progress of Dulness, heralding in an age of lead, when ‘Universal Darkness buries All’ (IV. 656).13 While The Dunciad levels its satire at a range of targets, its literary victims are predominantly Whig writers, and their Whig patrons. Pope’s inXuence on the shaping of early eighteenth-century literary history was enormous. As a brilliant, but profoundly partial, literary history of its time, The Dunciad damned many of Pope’s contemporaries to eternal mediocrity. The second inXuential factor that Montagu’s story reveals in the evolution of critical responses to Whig poetry is a changing attitude towards the economics of print culture, and an increasing suspicion of the patronage system underlying the production of Whig poetry. Samuel Johnson’s famous letter to the Earl of ChesterWeld (1755) was the crystallization of a growing conviction that the patronage system entailed servility and political compromise.14 This notion that patronage was somehow distasteful, and that the only proper condition for the man of letters was one of Wnancial independence, was perpetuated through to the twentieth century. In Authorship in the Days of Johnson (1927) A. S. Collins concluded that patronage ‘was enervating; it was unbecoming the dignity of the profession of letters; in politics it was open to abuse, and harmed the writer and the public’.15 And, as Dustin GriYn has argued, a distaste for the notion of patronage has perpetuated to the present day in literary criticism that tends to emphasize the adversarial relationship between authors and the hegemonic authority of their time.16 From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, then, patronage was seen as hindering poetic independence, creating relationships of debt and interest within which literary works and reputations are shaped by the needs of the patron. Such a view could only have a negative eVect on the later reception of the Whig poets who proudly proclaimed their own and other writers’ dependence on powerful statesmen. Charles Montagu was not remembered as a benevolent 12 On the cultural politics of the Scriblerus Club see Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 238–90. 13 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (1742–3), in TE v. 409. 14 On Johnson’s complex attitudes towards patronage see Dustin GriYn, Literary Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 220–45. 15 A. S. Collins, Authorship in the Days of Johnson (London: Robert Holden, 1927), 213. 16 GriYn, Literary Patronage in England, 3.

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man of letters, but as a narcissistic potentate surrounded by a bevy of hired pens. The networks of inXuence described in Addison’s Account have had no place in models of literary production which insist upon the Wnancial and ideological independence of the poet.

Whigs and Whiggism The interdependence of political and literary concerns at the heart of the Whig poetic tradition is nowhere more evident than in early eighteenth-century arguments for the revival of English letters. We can start to glimpse some of the excitement felt about the future of English literature in a letter written in 1706 from the third Earl of Shaftesbury to Jean le Clerc: There is a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the aVairs of all Europe now turn [ . . . ] it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in greater proportion than ever17

Shaftesbury’s emphatic linking of political liberty and literary culture echoes arguments found elsewhere in his writing, and in the works of Whig ideologues such as John Dennis and Richard Blackmore, all of whom articulated a theory of politico-cultural development that is rarely recognized in existing accounts of the period. In what amounted to a manifesto for the revival of modern English literary culture, they claimed that the constitutional liberty oVered by the Revolution of 1688, combined with the patronage oVered by a committed Whig aristocracy, presented the opportunity to forge a distinct and self-consciously modern cultural identity for Whiggism. As Shaftesbury and others saw it, the Revolution was a major and transformative intervention between the past and the present. It prompted a reconsideration of sources of cultural inXuence, forms of literature, and of the role and responsibility of the modern writer in public life. These writers saw the establishment of a Whig political culture as the primary factor in the promotion of literary excellence. But, beyond the enthusiastic endorsement of the Revolution, and its perceived political liberties, what did it mean in particular to be a Whig writer? As H. T. 17 Shaftesbury to Jean Le Clerc, 6 March 1706, in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900 by Swan Sonnenschein; repr. London: Routledge, 1992), 353.

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13

Dickinson has asserted, there were core policies that remained constant. The commitment to a balance between liberty and political order, freedom of conscience, government by consent, and a mixed and balanced Constitution can be identiWed in Whig writing across the period. In the decades covered here these principles took the form of support for the Revolution of 1688, the Hanoverian succession, the sovereignty of king-in-Parliament, and freedom of worship for Protestant Dissenters.18 Yet any attempt to describe Whiggism in this period is complicated by the diversity of early Whig ideology. The evolution of the name ‘Whig’ in itself reveals the diverse development of Whiggism. ‘Whig’ originates from ‘Whiggamore’, a term for Scottish Presbyterians, and it continued to be used in this context until the end of the nineteenth century at the same time that Whiggism was becoming associated with the Exclusion movement and the predominantly English, London-based high-political grouping that grew out of it, and that forms the focus of this study.19 Over the course of the decades between 1678 and 1715 the Whig political party gradually shifted away from its roots in traditions of popular urban Dissent towards the establishment of a far more socially and ideologically conservative power base with the Junto Whigs of William and Anne’s reign. In many ways the Whig verse produced during the 1680s is shaped by the need to Wnd ways of articulating opposition within the constraints of censorship, concerns which were no longer important after the Revolution. By 1710 the interest in the depiction of the city and ‘the people’ that marked earlier verse was no longer germane in a culture of Whiggism built around the elite Kit-Cat Club. Moreover, after the Revolution Whigs were frequently divided between those who were prepared to compromise their principles in order to secure power and 18 H. T. Dickinson, ‘Whiggism in the Eighteenth Century’, in John Cannon (ed.), The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), 28–44 (42). This essay provides a basic overview of the nature of Whig ideology in the period. For another survey of the development of Whig argument see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse’, in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, ChieXy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–310. 19 See R. Willman, ‘The Origins of ‘‘Whig’’ and ‘‘Tory’’ in English Political Language’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 247–64. I have focused this study on English, metropolitan Whiggism because the writers and the literary debates I describe were rooted in a Londonbased literary culture, albeit one whose publications circulated in a wider provincial readership. On Whiggism in its Scottish and Irish contexts see P. W. J. Riley, King William and the Scottish Politicians (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979); Jonathan I. Israel (ed.), The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); W. A. Maguire (ed.), Kings in ConXict: The Revolutionary War in Ireland and its Aftermath 1689–1750 (Belfast: BlackstaV, 1990).

14

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

those who would rather be in opposition than be accused of having sacriWced their political integrity. Thus alongside the development of what we might call mainstream Whig political thought there persisted a more radical Whiggism, whether in the form of the conspiratorial plotting of the 1680s or the aristocratic republicanism of the 1690s and 1700s.20 The coexistence of these varied interests has generated an ongoing historiographical controversy over the conservatism or radicalism of early Whiggism. Revisionists such as J. C. D. Clark have argued that the Revolution was essentially conservative. Far from signifying the birth of a modern state founded on contractual government, 1688 represented no more than a change in the king and a continuation of the ancien re´gime.21 Yet other historians have emphasized the continuing signiWcance of a republican tradition within early Whiggism, and have argued that the outcome, and implications, of the Revolution seemed far from certain to many contemporaries.22 While my reconsideration of early Whig political poetry undoubtedly oVers new perspectives on these debates, the function of this study is not primarily to use Whig verse to reconstruct a dominant political ideology. In emphasizing the vitality and sophistication of the Whig cultural programme, the study will certainly counter some of the popular preconceptions that have accumulated around eighteenth-century Whiggism. These have tended to be dominated by the image of corruption and inertia associated with the Whig ascendancy, or by the intellectual fallacies of ‘the whig interpretation of history’.23 Yet, as we shall see, early Whiggism might also be 20 On the radical plotters of the 1680s see Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). On the country Whigs of the 1690s see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959); Blair Worden, introd. to Edmund Ludlow, A Voyce from the Watch Tower, 1660–1662, Camden 4th ser., xxi (London: Royal Historical Society, 1978). 21 J. C. D. Clark, English Society 1688–1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 6–7. 22 Mark Goldie, ‘The Roots of True Whiggism, 1688–94’, History of Political Thought, 1 (1980), 195–236; Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. xiii–xiv; Pocock, ‘Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform’, 215–310. The tercentenary of the Revolution of 1688–9 in particular provided a focal point for such debate over the conservatism or radicalism of early Whiggism. For a good discussion of reconsiderations of the status of the Revolution see Lois Schwoerer’s introduction to Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), 9–14. 23 On the pervasive and negative inXuence of Herbert ButterWeld’s notion of ‘whig history’, see Annabel Patterson, introd. to Patterson, Nobody’s Perfect: A New Whig Interpretation of History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 1–35.

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

15

identiWed with a dynamic and in many ways revolutionary project to remodel cultural and political life. I will not, however, attempt to construct a narrative of Whig political thought through the poetry of the period. Whig poetry had an existence of its own, within wider Whig ideology. It drew on its own political languages and rhetoric and did not always articulate the same things as contemporary prose propaganda. So, for example, the Whig poets writing in response to the Revolution of 1688 used an idiom of gloriWed rape and conquest at a time when such images were unusable in prose. By investigating the literary expression of the political and cultural agendas of early Whig poets I will explore the way in which writers constructed a poetic mythology from the divergent interests and ideologies that made up the wider political spectrum of early Whiggism. The poetry is read not as part of a generalized or uniform political programme but as a series of evolving deWnitions of Whiggism which continued to be shaped by their engagements with other texts. Within the body of Whig poetry, too, there exists signiWcant political diversity. There were, for example, Whigs who were dissatisWed with the Williamite government, just as there were those who were profoundly suspicious of the Whig Junto led by Montagu and John Somers. I have linked Shaftesbury’s philosophies to Montagu’s poetry because they are both premised on a conviction of the singularity of the post-Revolution moment. Yet in reality during the 1690s they stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum: Shaftesbury the Country Whig in opposition and Montagu the spearhead of William III’s ruling Whig Junto. Writers such as John Tutchin and Daniel Defoe, both committed Whigs, assumed very diVerent positions on the signiWcance of the Revolution of 1688. As I hope will become apparent, Whiggism embraced a diverse set of concerns in this period; yet the term carries signiWcant meaning in reconsidering the literature of the period as a polemical dialogue.

Politics and literature The reconsideration of the Whig poetic tradition involves the analysis not only of the speciWc nature of Whig ideology but also of the broader relationship between politics and literature, and the notion of the public writer. Many of the terms associated with political writing have come to assume pejorative associations: ‘propaganda’, ‘polemic’, and ‘partisanship’ all connote tendentious argument, writing that is somehow

16

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

cruder, less sophisticated, than that which is less politically explicit. A reassessment of the Whig tradition demands consideration of the relationship between political function and aesthetic value, and a reappraisal of the role of poetry as propaganda, polemic, and partisanship.24 Early Whig verse was literally a form of propaganda, as a ‘systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice’.25 One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate the role of this poetry within the broader movement to establish the cultural and political legitimacy of Whig policies, and to consider the politics of poetry in their broadest sense. The propagandistic function of Whig verse took a number of forms. Most obviously, poetry presented partisan views of certain policies, Wgures, and battles. Whig writers used their verse to argue for the Exclusion Bill, for the land war, for the Hanoverian succession. Yet the promotion of a body of elevated poetry produced and sponsored by Whigs also had cultural capital in its own right, demonstrating the revival of native arts and letters after the Revolution. Like the palaces, plays, and paintings sponsored by the wealthy Kit-Cats, the signiWcance of literature as a form of display was as important as its role in topical debate. And on another level the literary and cultural criticism and philosophy of John Dennis, Joseph Addison, and Shaftesbury promoted new ways of reading, writing, thinking, and behaving, demonstrating that each was a natural consequence of Whig ideology. All these aspects of Whig culture were propagandistic, in that they sought to reinforce the legitimacy of a particular reading of recent history. In order fully to understand the culture of this period, we need to be alert to these varied ways in which artistic forms could articulate political ideology. A reappraisal of Whig poetry also oVers an opportunity to consider the nature of political identity. Early Whig verse was recognized to be explicitly partisan: the poet considered to bear a responsibility for the celebration and memorializing of aVairs of state. The poetic tradition described here was party-speciWc both in its responses to topical issues 24 There has of course been much important work on the relationship between politics and literature in recent studies of the period. To name only a few inXuential studies: Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Howard ErskineHill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Poetry, Politics, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994); Philip Harth, Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 25 OED 2nd edn. s.v. ‘propaganda’.

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

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and in its adoption of broader concerns. This book will chart the development of a number of distinct themes in Whig writing, such as the emphases on moral reformation and the modernity of the Revolution. This evidence of speciWcally Whig as opposed to Tory themes runs counter to claims for the consensual nature of political debate in the period. It oVers an important corrective to the argument, found in the work of Lewis Namier, J. H. Plumb, and, more recently, Linda Colley, that the Augustan age marked a period of political consensus and the transcendence of party-political division.26 Yet, for all the evidence of distinctly partisan ideas and themes, we cannot read these debates as rigidly oppositional. There is much evidence of the Xuidity of partypolitical allegiance in contemporary literature. The networks of friendship and inXuence between Whig writers and statesmen seen in Addison’s Account suggest that political aYliation was a prime factor in the evaluation of literary merit. However, returning to that poem, we can see that even here the lines of inXuence work in a number of diVerent ways. Addison’s Account may laud Montagu, but it also hails Tory Dryden as the ‘great poet’ of the previous age. The bookseller Jacob Tonson, who played such an important role in the creation of Whig literary culture, published both the Account and Dryden’s poem ‘To Congreve’. And in the latter poem, for all the attack on William III, Dryden presents as his own successor William Congreve, a prominent Whig rising through the ranks of diplomatic service. Moreover, a broader examination of the evolution of political poetry in this period reveals that, despite a strong sense of ideological opposition, there were important crossovers between Whig and Tory rhetoric. My accounts of the language of anti-enthusiasm in both Whig and Tory writing and of the competing claims on discourses of sociability demonstrate a level of Xuidity in party-political debate that is central to the understanding of both the Whig and the Tory traditions. My sense of the complex relations between political and literary discourse owes much to recent studies of poetry and politics in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. The reconstruction of Whig literary culture is a revisionist history in that it attempts to give a sense of alternative possibilities: to tell a story that has been written out of literary history. In this it bears comparison with the work of critics 26 Sir Lewis Namier, The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (London: Macmillan, 1929); J. H. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725 (London: Macmillan, 1967); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992).

18

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

who have sought to map other traditions of political writing that have been marginalized in the literary canon. David Norbrook’s and Nigel Smith’s work on radical and republican writing in the 1640s and 1650s and Murray Pittock’s and Howard Erskine-Hill’s recovery of Jacobite literature have in their very diVerent ways drawn attention to the politicized nature of canon formation and to the existence of poets’ voices which have been suppressed by their political opponents.27 Yet while these studies oVer important models for the reappraisal of alternative traditions within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, they also emphasize the singularity of the conundrum examined here. Most revisionist histories seek to emphasize the existence of a political tradition that has been marginalized or under-represented. The politics of Whiggism, on the other hand, unlike those of republicanism or Jacobitism, have never been ignored. Part of my study involves an investigation into the development of this historiographical asymmetry. As will become clear, the value judgements around which we have built our modern literary canon are inextricable from the cultural politics of the period. In particular, we will see the way in which the inXuential satires of John Dryden and the Tory Scriblerians eVectively aestheticized a political attack on Whig writers. This book thus pursues some of the implications of recent critical work on Pope and the Scriblerians: Brean Hammond, Carole Fabricant, and others have stressed that the poetry of Pope and Swift is less a profound moral vision than a form of ‘cultural combat’ in the face of threat to them.28 In an introductory essay on eighteenth-century literary criticism David Womersley has oVered a more speciWcally political perspective on the nature of this cultural threat, arguing that Tory poetry and criticism existed in a dialectical relationship with a Whiggish vision of literary aesthetics and literary history.29 The potential of a reappraisal of such a Whig tradition has started to become evident in studies of the literary culture of the 1720s and 1730s, in Hannah Smith’s research into Hanoverian court culture, Christine Gerrard’s work on the patriot opposition to 27 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic ; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994); Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution. 28 Brean Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986); Carole Fabricant, ‘Pope’s Moral, Political, and Cultural Combat’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 29 (1988), 165–87. 29 Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, pp. xi–xliv.

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Walpole, and Tone Sundt Urstad’s re-examination of Walpolian propaganda.30 It is my aim to take all these new approaches as a starting point and, in analysing Whig poetry in its fullest context, to oVer a signiWcant re-evaluation of the politics of literary culture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

The chapters It is a central argument of this book that we cannot understand early Whig poetry without Wrst exploring the relationship between political and aesthetic judgements in the early eighteenth century. By way of introducing this relationship, and the cultural politics of literary debate, the study begins with an account of what I have termed the ‘Tory critique’. Dryden, Pope, and Swift lampooned their Whig adversaries as talentless hacks and dunces, images which have exerted a huge inXuence over their later critical reception. Rereading a satirical tradition from MacFlecknoe to The Dunciad we shall see that the developing Tory argument about bad poetry has an inherently political basis. The notion of the ‘dunce’ was intimately connected with a set of associations between enthusiasm, commercialism, and populism. All these concepts were central to earlier Royalist attacks on Puritans, and it is within this polemical tradition that we need to address Tory satire. As this summary suggests, a reappraisal of the negative associations clustered around Whig writing provides an important framework for understanding how issues of literary merit were inextricable from those of political aYliation. It is also essential for understanding the way in which Whig literature shaped and was shaped by the attacks of its opposition. Chapters 2–4 will look at the dialogue between Whig and Tory writing from another perspective, demonstrating the way in which Whig writers used public poetry to develop a distinct set of myths and arguments about contemporary events between 1678 and 1714. In Chapter 2 I shall explore the verse produced between 1681 and 1688 by the ‘First Whigs’, and examine the ways in which the diverse and disparate emergent Whig party attempted to deWne itself in opposition. 30 Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2001); Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole ; Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as Pro-Government Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1999).

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Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

As writers from both sides oVered their respective representations of the political will of ‘the people’, they drew on competing discourses of radicalism and rationality in an attempt to secure the authority of their description of recent history. This chapter illustrates the ways in which early Whig public poetry participated in this debate about the nature of popular politics and of political rhetoric in the period. Chapter 3 pursues the story of Whig verse during the reign of William III (1688–1702), and examines the way in which Whig writers responded to the Revolution, and the militarism of William’s reign. From 1688 onwards the nature of party-political discourse changed signiWcantly: the accession of William III brought many Whigs back into public life, and Whig poets became, largely, the defenders of the regime, rather than its critics. This chapter will explore some of the implications of the Revolution and the wars which followed, arguing that the Revolution presented two major new challenges for Whig writers: Wrst, to legitimate the unconstitutional and unprecedented events of 1688–9, and, secondly, to celebrate William’s military campaign on the Continent. In Chapter 4 we shall see the ways in which these concerns had developed a decade after the Revolution. By the end of the 1690s it was possible to write simultaneously of the Revolution as a return to earlier historical paradigms and as the beginning of a new era: to claim both historical precedent and inaugural status for 1688. On the one hand William’s wars had brought conXict, and victories against France that were comparable with legendary triumphs at Cre´cy and Agincourt. Yet the funding and organization of the war had brought huge economic and social change. This included a system of public-deWcit Wnance with its attendant urban culture; a class of Whig statesmen, Wnanciers, and clergymen all indebted to the new regime; and a religious settlement. The dual perspective was to reverberate throughout the public poetry of the 1700s, as writers debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in relation to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state, and in particular the celebration of the victories of the War of the Spanish Succession. Chapter 5 develops some of the ideas introduced in this thematicchronological narrative, and also returns to the theoretical concerns with historical aesthetics established in Chapter 1. It looks more closely at Whig poetics, and in particular at the evolution of the Whig sublime. It will approach the question of the literary merit of Whig poetry by considering what it was that contemporaries liked about the verse. I shall attempt to recover a historical aesthetic that will enable us to

Introduction: Rereading Whig poetry

21

understand how a now-forgotten poetic tradition could have enjoyed such popularity in its own time. Many believed that the rapturous excursions associated with sublime verse suited the elevated nature of the new poetry and its triumphant subject matter. The long-standing association between sublimity and political liberty prompted writers to believe that the Revolution and its consequent freedoms would inaugurate a new age of great writing. It will become clear that in much early eighteenth-century verse the concept of the sublime was intrinsically linked to the issues of authority, modernity, and liberty found more widely in Whig poetry. The book concludes by once again returning to the wider connections between literary and political culture in the period. Previous chapters have shown how aesthetic and political concerns were inseparable in early Whig literary culture. Now we will see how the connection between the two took material form in contemporary support for the arts. Chapter 6 provides a counterpoint to Chapter 1 by showing that, far from being the penniless hacks described in contemporary Tory satire, many Whig poets were the beneWciaries of a sophisticated system of patronage. An examination of the nature of this patronage reveals the economic and political networks behind Whig verse, and it also demonstrates the important ideological commitment to the systematic promotion of a Whig literary culture. The intention behind the extensive support of Whig poetry in this period was not just to secure the services of political propagandists but to support a distinctively Whiggish cultural arena. The new Whig elite would become the guardians of a revitalized artistic culture whose grandeur would reXect their authority and largesse, and the modern writer would play a vital part in the remodelling of cultural, political, and social spheres in the early eighteenth century.

1

The Tory critique of Whig literature Twenty-Wrst-century readers of literature are unlikely to be familiar with Charles Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset. If they know of Montagu at all, it will most likely be through Pope’s attack on ‘full-blown Bufo’ in his Epistle to Arbuthnot (1735). Pope’s version of literary history has been enormously inXuential in determining later perspectives on early eighteenth-century poetry, and partly as a result of this Montagu’s poetry has vanished into apparently deserved obscurity. In this respect, Montagu and Pope can stand as a metonymic example of the interconnected fortunes of Whig poetry and Tory literary criticism. The critical fates of the majority of the poets that form the subject of this book were shaped by the attacks of their political adversaries. My revisionist study of Whig literature will begin with a re-examination of this Tory critique. In reading a series of familiar Tory works from Dryden’s MacFlecknoe (1682) to Pope’s Dunciad (1728–44) as a chronology of anti-Whig satire, I hope to show the ways in which these poems eVectively aestheticized issues of political diVerence. By connecting a series of texts from the 1660s through to the 1740s, we can chart the development of a satiric vocabulary about ‘bad’ poetry, and the continuity of a set of associations between enthusiasm, commercialism, and populism which are ultimately derived from Royalist ideology. These associations generated a circular argument about contemporary literary culture, within which bad poetry was equated with ‘bad’ or opposing politics, and those politics in turn equated with bad poetry. Of course, an assertion of the political concerns underwriting the attack on ‘bad’ poetry is not in itself evidence of the literary merit of Whig verse. But it does open up the authority of Tory critical dismissals to questioning. Our post-Romantic tendency to regard the aesthetic and the political as distinct, separate, even oppositional categories serves us poorly for comprehending a historical period in which aesthetics were understood to be inherently political. Charting the evolution of anti-Whig satire reveals much about both the Whig and the Tory traditions in this period. The relation between

The Tory critique of Whig literature

23

Tory critique and Whig poetry was involved and dynamic. Whig poetry developed in response to the points of Tory attack, and this attack also adapted, sometimes belatedly, to changes in Whig writing and the circumstances of its production. For example, the emphasis on politeness and on sociability in Whig writing cannot be understood without recognizing that Whig writers were traditionally depicted by their opponents as mad, illiterate, and antisocial zealots. Nor can we understand the import of Whig hopes for a post-Revolution cultural revival without Wrst recognizing the Tory emphasis on the signiWcance of the Restoration in 1660. Moreover, mapping the long inheritance of antiWhig rhetoric reveals it to be in many respects anachronistic by the 1720s, when it was being deployed by Pope, Jonathan Swift, and John Gay. These Scriblerians were drawing on a set of pre-existing arguments found in the work of Restoration writers such as Dryden, John Oldham, and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, and adapting them for a very diVerent political era. Acknowledging the historical debts of Scriblerian satire undermines recent readings that construct it as an analysis of modernity. In many ways, its cultural critique was retrospective. Most importantly here, recognizing the political dimensions of Scriblerian satire troubles our customary acceptance of its evaluations of Whig literature.

The Royalist inheritance The tradition of literary criticism which Tory writers inherited and perpetuated was founded on Royalist attacks on Puritan culture. As Lucy Hutchinson observed, Royalists commonly claimed that their opponents were ‘an illiterate, morose, melancholly, discontented, craz’d sort of men, not Wtt for humane conversation’.1 All these characteristics were typical attributes of the religious ‘enthusiast’. This derogatory label, meaning those claiming false inspiration, had long been used to attack various Protestant groups, zealous sectarians, millenarians, prophesiers, and others who opposed the existing Church order, and it was particularly aimed at those who claimed that they received inner revelation.2 Enthusiastic writers were commonly lampooned as 1 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44. 2 See J. G. A. Pocock’s deWnition: enthusiasm was considered to be ‘the essential characteristic of Puritanism: the claim to personal inspiration by an indwelling spirit,

24

The Tory critique of Whig literature

ill-educated and dangerously populist, while their style, as Michael Heyd has described, was associated with a predilection for a confused, ornamental idiom and high-Xown language.3 Those accused of enthusiasm were not always the illiterate and the uneducated, but enthusiastic writers were frequently attacked for inciting the popular classes with appeals to their passions, and for using the powerful Dissenting press to disseminate their radical politics.4 Thus from the beginning religious Dissent was linked to commercial authorship and low culture. After 1660 the Anglican Church, anxious to shore up its restored authority, continued to draw on the existing tradition of anti-enthusiastic discourse to attack all those who seemed to represent a threat to either Church or State. Although religious enthusiasm had originally signiWed those who believed themselves to be privy to divine inspiration, its application was soon extended to cover any form of religious or political dissent. Thus by the time of the Exclusion Crisis it had come to be synonymous with early Whiggism.5 As in the Civil War period, the attack on enthusiasm had a powerful cultural dimension. The celebration of the regeneration of art and literature after the Restoration was premised on a polemical rejection of Puritan culture. Tory writers constructed an account of national decline and revival according to which Restoration culture rose up gloriously from the ruins of Puritan with all its chiliastic and antinomian capacity to turn the social as well as the metaphysical world upside down’. (Pocock, ‘The Varieties of Whiggism from Exclusion to Reform: A History of Ideology and Discourse’, in Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, ChieXy in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 215–310 (219). Classic attacks on enthusiasm in this period are Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (London, 1655) and Henry More, Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1656). 3 N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), 156–86; Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), 5. The idea of poetic enthusiasm as signifying uncontrolled frenzy dated back to attacks on the Dionysiac movement in ancient Greece (see E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1951), 82). On the complex politics of plain style at the Restoration see Roger Pooley, ‘Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration’, Literature and History, 6 (1980), 2–18. 4 Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’, 7. 5 T. N. Corns, W. A. Speck, and J. A. Downie, ‘Archetypal MystiWcation: Polemic and Reality in England 1640–1750’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 7 (1982), 7–11. During the early 1660s the Clarendon Code, a series of pieces of punitive legislation against all those who were not a part of the established Church, had widened the Anglican critique of Dissent by blurring the categories between Presbyterians, Quakers and Baptists, Behmenists, and Anabaptists (see Sharon Achinstein, ‘Milton’s Spectre in the Restoration: Marvell, Dryden and Literary Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 59 (1997), 1–29).

The Tory critique of Whig literature

25

barbarism. In the essay Of Dramatick Poesie (1668) Dryden famously stated that: the fury of a Civil War, and Power, for twenty years together, abandon’d to a barbarous race of men, Enemies of all good Learning, had buried the Muses under the ruines of Monarchy; yet with the restoration of our happiness, we see reviv’d Poesie lifting up its head, & already shaking oV the rubbish which lay so heavy on it.6

Other Tory poets corroborated this story. Dryden’s friend and fellow translator Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, announced in his Essay on Translated Verse (1685) that at last ‘Phoebus and the sacred Nine, | With all their Beams on our blest Island shine’ (ll. 372–3), while Aphra Behn lamented the previous period as one in which the world was ‘grown to that low Ebb of Sense, | To disesteem the noblest Excellence’.7 The brilliance, vitality, and exuberance of the Restoration cultural scene was established in stark contrast to its other—the Puritan literary tradition. This ‘other’ tradition is the heritage that Tory writers associated with the writing of the First Whigs. Thus the Tory critique of early Whig poetry was based on many elements of the anti-enthusiastic discourse that had characterized Cavalier attacks on Puritan writers. The attack on enthusiasm worked by an analogy between the debasement of literary and of religious forms. Poetic enthusiasm was a threat because it represented an anarchy in the realm of literature that was parallel to the threat posed by religious enthusiasm in the context of the established Church. Dryden asserts that ‘A Dissenter in Poetry from Sense and English, will make as good a Protestant Rhymer, as a Dissenter from the Church of England a Protestant Parson’.8 Enthusiastic discourse, like enthusiastic religion, was characterized as vulgar, indulgent, and idiosyncratic, in contrast with conformist plainness, rationality, and civility.9 In this polemical 6 John Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, An Essay (1668), in Dryden, Works, xvii. 63. Robert D. Hume argues that the most prominent feature of Dryden’s literary criticism is his belief in a radical split between the Renaissance and the Restoration: this notion Wts well with the story of cultural decline that we see articulated in the Essay and elsewhere (Hume, Dryden’s Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970), 90). 7 Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1685) in David Womersley (ed.) Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), 108–20 (119). Further line references in the text are to this edition. Aphra Behn, ‘On the Death of E. Waller Esq.’ (1688), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992–6), i. 290. 8 John Dryden, preface to The Medall (1682), in Works, ii. 42. 9 Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 82–8.

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Wguration of the contemporary literary scene conformist or Tory poetry was what was to become known as ‘literature’: classic texts designed for an elite, whose production was independent of the populist presses, and the market forces of Grub Street.10 These sets of binaries were to form an important part of the developing Tory poetics: Gay’s Trivia, Swift’s Battle of the Books and Tale of a Tub, and Pope’s Dunciad all perpetuate the oppositional myth inaugurated in Tory Restoration texts. The link between religious enthusiasm and bad poetry is made manifest in a range of writings of the 1670s and 1680s. In Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse false inspiration in poetry is conXated with false inspiration in religion. Roscommon dictates that Abstruse and Mystick thoughts you must express, With painful Care but seeming easiness, For truth shines brightest through the plainest dress. (ll. 217–19)

and cautions: Beware what Spirit rages in your breast. For ten inspir’d ten thousand are Possest. (ll. 298–9)

He alludes not only to the suspicion of confused language and inspiration found in earlier attacks on Puritan writers but also to the fear of the link between enthusiasm and popular extremism, the threat of the ‘ten thousand’ who are encouraged by such poetry. We Wnd the same comparisons between stylistic harmony and the ‘fanatick’ abuse of poetry in John Oldham’s work. His poem ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ (1678) establishes a series of oppositions between good and bad writers, order and confusion, and true art and hack writing that form the basis of the Tory status quo. The political implications of these oppositions become explicit when he contrasts the harmony and proportion of Jonson’s writing with the eVorts of ‘dull and ignorant Pretenders’ (1.52): The meer Fanaticks and Enthusiasts in Poetry (For Schismaticks in that, as in Religion be) Who make ’t all Revelation, Trance and Dream, Let them despise her laws, and think That Rules and Forms the Spirit stint. (ll. 54–8)11 10 The extent to which polemical Tory texts were presented as literary classics is already evident in the Dryden–Tonson Miscellany Poems of 1684, in which Dryden’s MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel were published alongside a series of classical translations, and were praised for ‘a Style so keen, as ev’n from Faction draws | The vital Poyson’ (‘Upon the Author of the Following Poem’, in Miscellany Poems (1684), 85). 11 John Oldham, ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ (1678), in The Poems of John

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Literary ammunition The force of this implied correlation between the abuse of religious and of literary forms was to ensure that the charge of ‘enthusiasm’ acquired a polemical agency in discussions of literary merit. Tory writers developed a circular argument within which all Puritans/Nonconformists were bad poets, so all bad poets must be Nonconformists and enthusiasts. This inverted logic retained credence despite the fact that images of impoverished religious fanatics were to become ever less appropriate to Whig literary culture as the decades went on. In Tory satire aesthetic evaluation was predicated on political considerations, and political evaluation was also determined by aesthetic judgements. An early and inXuential example of the use of anti-enthusiasm to discredit an opponent is found in Dryden’s famous attack on Thomas Shadwell in MacFlecknoe (1682).12 The original context of the satire was a literary one, concerning diVerences between the two poets over the relative merits of the comedy of repartee and the comedy of humours, and over the reputation of Ben Jonson.13 Yet, although the debate was about dramatic theory, and although, as Steven Pincus has shown, Shadwell was by no means sympathetic to Dissent,14 Dryden’s attack clearly associates the writer and his work with religious enthusiasm and the political radicalism that accompanies it. Shadwell’s hymn, the references to the nurseries at Bunhill and the Barbican, Flecknoe’s role as an inspired prophet, and the imagery of darkness and melancholy all link Shadwell and his ancestors to the cultural proWle assigned to enthusiastic writers.15 Moreover, Dryden also draws on links between religious radicalism and the populist press to present Shadwell as participant in

Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 195–6. Further line references in the text are to this edition. 12 Yet, as James Winn observes, Dryden’s response to this tradition is complex—on the one hand he attacks Nonconformist style, yet on the other his strong prose style clearly comes out of his background in a Dissenting family (Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 26). 13 For a fuller account of the debate see R. Jack Smith, ‘Shadwell’s Impact upon John Dryden’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), 29–44. 14 Steven Pincus, ‘Shadwell’s Dramatic Trimming’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds.), Religion, Literature and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 253–74 (260–1). 15 See Ken Robinson and Clare Wenley, ‘MacFlecknoe the Enthusiast’, Durham University Journal, 75 (1983), 25–30.

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a degraded literary market place. In this world avaricious booksellers and craven authors generate reams of worthless paper, ‘Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum’ (l. 101), images which were to reverberate throughout later Scriblerian satire.16 Dryden’s quarrel with Elkanah Settle over Settle’s production of the Empress of Morocco (1673) reveals a similar politicizing of the literary agenda. Here again, literary judgements are given political inXection. When Settle published his tragedy in a de luxe edition in 1674, Dryden joined forces with two other playwrights, Crowne and Shadwell (at this point an ally), to respond to his audacity. His angry response, which took the form of the Notes and Observations upon the ‘Empress of Morocco’ (1674) was partly provoked by Settle’s open attack on the Laureate in the dedicatory epistle to the play. It was also generated by resentment of the patronage that Settle had secured from the court wits, two of whom, Rochester and Mulgrave, had contributed prologues to the Empress.17 Thus the controversy was essentially a question of economic and artistic rivalry, as the leading playwrights of the day jostled for pre-eminence in the court and in the theatre. However, Dryden’s ‘literary’ attack on Settle was loaded with political and religious implications. He refers to Settle as an ‘upstart illiterate Scribler’ who produces ‘unintelligible Poetical Cant’ and continues: He himselfe declares he neither reads, nor cares for Conversation, so that he would perswade us he is a kind of Phanatick in Poetry, and has a light within him; and writes by an inspiration which (like that of the Heathen Prophets) a man must have no sense of his own when he receives18

Dryden draws on all the associations established in caricatures of Puritan writers to attack his rival: Settle is unsociable, incapable of conversation, mad, and crazed with the belief that he receives direct inspiration. His threat to the Laureate’s professional standing is thus presented as no less than a threat to the political settlement.

16

John Dryden, Mac Flecknoe (1682), in Works, ii. 56. On the background to the quarrel see Maximilian E. Novak, introd. to The Empress of Morocco and its Critics: Settle, Dryden, Shadwell, Crowne and DuVet (Los Angeles, Calif.: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1968). 18 John Dryden, postscript to Notes and Observations on the ‘Empress of Morocco’ (1674), in Works, xvii. 182. 17

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Yet Dryden’s charge of illiteracy had no actual basis. Settle’s credentials as a scholar were solid: he went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar, and spent a year at Trinity College, Oxford. There is no evidence of his having radical religious beliefs. His only fault was to have been an ‘upstart’, descended from a family of barbers, a fact which his critics seized upon time and time again.19 The attack on Settle’s lowly origins represents an important part of the developing Tory critique of opposition writers. Dryden, Roscommon, Oldham, and others commonly present the realm of poetry as the preserve of an elite, of those who are born to be poets. Social and literary hierarchies are conXated so that writers who threaten to intrude are seen as a disruption to the natural order, and are condemned for their aspiration and usurpation. As a number of critics have observed, Dryden frequently used the idiom of succession, true or thwarted, to describe his own position in relation to other writers.20 However, this emphasis is not unique to the Laureate—it was shared by a number of contemporary Tory authors, and would continue to be developed by Pope in Peri Bathous and The Dunciad. Roscommon is insistent that ‘Degenerate lines degrade th’attainted Race’ (l. 287), excluding both those who ‘Prostitute their Pen’ and ‘Rich Ill Poets’ from this race of true poets (ll. 277, 283). Oldham describes a similar literary aristocracy in his fragment ‘In Praise of Poetry’: Stand oV unhallow’d Rabble! these high Misteries Are seen only by clear enlighten’d Eys: All rude unknowing Readers they disdain (ll. 11–13)21

This Tory polemic was based on the idea that not only should the authorship of poetry be conWned to a natural elite, but it should also be addressed to an exclusively elite audience. Writers rehearsing earlier anti-Puritan attacks continued to claim that opposition writing was 19 See A Character of the True Blue Protestant Poet: Or the Pretended Author of the Character of a Popish Successor (London, 1682), 1. 20 On the importance of this idiom of succession see Jennifer Brady, ‘Dryden and Negotiations of Succession and Precession’, in Earl Miner and Jennifer Brady (eds.), Literary Transmission and Authority: Dryden and other Writers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27–54. Yet the coterie of aristocrats implied in Dryden’s work was often an illusory one. As Stuart Gillespie has shown, Dryden’s Tonson miscellanies, which were presented as the work of the ‘nobly born’, were in fact largely translated by a backbone of ‘professional’ authors and scholars (Gillespie, ‘The Early Years of the Dryden–Tonson Partnership: The Background to their Composite Translations and Miscellanies of the 1680s’, Restoration, 12 (1988), 10–19). 21 Oldham, ‘In Praise of Poetry’, in Poems, 333.

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irredeemably rabble-rousing. In the anonymous The Character of a Whig, Under Several Denominations (1700) the Whig writer is deWned as one who: is so fond of being Publick, that he will rather be a Blasphemous or a Rediculous Incendiary, than not be taken Notice of as a Whiggish Author [ . . . ] What a Fury will he raise about Nothing, and counterfeit a Foolish Melancholly upon improbable dangers, to excite the brutish passions of the Rabble, upon every slight and frivolous suggestion.22

For John Oldham, too, bad poetry is by deWnition populist. Emphasizing Ben Jonson’s elevation above other playwrights, he declares: ‘Let meaner Spirits stoop to low precarious fame, | Content on gross and coarse applause to live’ (ll. 260–1).23 Once again, this attack on the popular is linked to an assault on professional authorship: Oldham’s lines on the starving Whig poets anticipate Pope’s and Swift’s later images of impoverished Grub Street hacks: Settle, and the Rest, that write for Pence, Whose whole Estate’s an ounce, or two of Brains, Should a thin House on the third day appear, Must starve, or live in Tatters all the year. And what can we expect that’s brave and great, From a poor needy Wretch, that writes to eat?24

(ll. 203–8)

City drama This link between opposition poetry and populism, commercial authorship, and low culture was commonly emphasized by associating Whig writing with a tradition of city drama and spectacle. Tory writers shored up their own claim to represent high culture by claiming that the work of their opponents was comparable with fairground entertainment and pageantry—a comparison that would resurface most famously in Pope’s Dunciad. For Oldham, Thomas Jordan the City poet was representative of a whole tribe of dunces: Ev’n that vile Wretch, who in lewd Verse each year Describes the Pageants, and my good Lord May’r, 22 23 24

The Character of a Whig, Under Several Denominations . . . (London, 1700), 95–6. Oldham, ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’, in Poems, 202. Oldham, ‘Spencer’s Ghost’ (? 1683), in Poems, 244.

The Tory critique of Whig literature Whose Works must serve the next Election-day For making Squibs, and under Pies to lay, Yet counts himself of the inspired Train, And dares in thought the sacred Name profane.

31

(ll. 63–8)25

The City tradition is also central to Dryden’s attack on Shadwell in MacFlecknoe.26 The satire itself describes a mock pageant, with its introductory oration, mock investiture, and Thames procession, and Shadwell is aligned with a series of populist dramatists. Where Dryden identiWes himself with Jonson, Fletcher, Etherege, and Sedley, he presents Shadwell’s literary forebears as Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker, James Shirley, and John Ogilby. These four writers are all linked by their connections to Christopher Beeston’s theatrical company, whose main theatre before 1642, the Red Bull, specialized in rowdy, Xamboyant, populist drama.27 Dekker and Heywood are also linked by the fact that both of them wrote pageants for the Lord Mayor’s Show held every year on 29 October.28 Dryden’s decision to locate Shadwell within this theatrical tradition serves a number of functions. One is that it supports Dryden’s deWnition of his own work as high art: while the Laureate’s satire was circulating in manuscript amongst an aristocratic elite at Oxford and Cambridge, Shadwell, Dryden claims, was turning out humours comedy to please the lowest common denominator. Moreover, the association with Dekker and the pageant tradition also works to suggest that Shadwell’s drama is crudely didactic, in the tradition of the Lord Mayor’s processions.29

25 Ibid. 240. On Oldham’s inXuence on Scriblerian satire see Emrys Jones, ‘Pope and Dulness’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 54 (1968), 231–63. 26 Tom H. Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell: An Approach to MacFlecknoe’, Studies in English Literature, 3 (1963), 323–34. 27 See Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell’. Dryden clearly deWned his own art in opposition to the populist drama typiWed by the oVerings at the Red Bull: in ‘Of Heroique Playes’ he argued that dramatists ought to rely on dramatic eVects, and states that the fact that ‘the Red Bull has formerly done the same, is no more an Argument against our practice, than it would be for a Physician to forbear an approv’d medicine because a Mountebank has us’d it with success’ (Works, xi. 14). 28 Towers, ‘The Lineage of Shadwell’, 331. 29 Dryden’s alignment of himself with Jonson, and Shadwell with Dekker may well allude to the quarrel between Jonson and Dekker over the nature of city drama, in which Jonson attacked Dekker for his populist and didactic pageants (see Muriel Clara Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry: Social Implications in Jacobean London’, in Harold Fletcher Brooks, Antony Coleman, and Antony Hammond (eds.), Poetry and Drama 1570–1700: Essays in Honour of Harold F. Brooks (London: Methuen, 1981), 60–75).

32

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Yet although both Dryden and Oldham are anxious to emphasize the gap between true poetry and city entertainment, there were in fact many forms of contact between these two spheres of literary activity. Established dramatists—for example, Thomas Heywood and Ben Jonson— had written pageants for Lord Mayor’s Shows in the past. There was also an increasing exchange of actors and plays between the booths of Bartholomew Fair and the theatres, partly because the fair provided work for actors when the theatres were closed.30 Thus the distinctions between high and low culture that are so central to the construction of the Tory myth are far less stable than they seem: Dryden’s and Oldham’s texts, like later Scriblerian satire, wage their cultural warfare by erecting boundaries where few exist.31

Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits The literary quarrel of 1699–1700 between Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits at Will’s CoVee House represents a signiWcant stage in the evolution of anti-Whig discourse. This infamous literary skirmish was parodied by a range of writers, most notably by Swift in The Battle of the Books (1704) and Defoe in The PaciWcator (1700).32 While the controversy did not develop along exclusively Whig/Tory lines, it reveals the consolidation of a satiric vocabulary about ‘bad poetry’ that was clearly derived from earlier attacks. The emergent Tory critique was structured around an inXuential set of oppositions between wit and sense (or didacticism), gentlemanly sociability and city prudery, and literary ease and prosaic hack work. Blackmore’s Satyr Against Wit (1699) was intended to provide a defensive response to Samuel Garth’s The Dispensary (1699). Thus it was generated by the ongoing debate between apothecaries and physicians over the opening of a free out-patients’ clinic in the College of Physicians.33 However, the Satyr and the quarrel that followed it were 30 S. Rosenfeld, The Theatre of the London Fairs in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 9. 31 See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, ‘The Grotesque Body and the SmithWeld Muse: Authorship in the Eighteenth Century’, in Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1985), 80–118. 32 For a comparison of the responses to The Satyr against Wit see D. N. DeLuna, ‘Modern Panegyrick and Defoe’s ‘‘Dunciad’’ ’, Studies in English Literature, 35 (1995), 419–35. 33 For a full account of the politics of The Dispensary see Gregory C. Columb, Designs on Truth: The Poetics of the Augustan Mock-Epic (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 157–61.

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more directly concerned with the status and function of the man of letters than the role of the physician. In The Dispensary Garth had mocked Blackmore’s verse, quoting sections of his epics, recommending that he ‘learn to rise in Sense, and sink in Sound’.34 In the Satyr Blackmore claimed that his writing was a ‘poetry of sense’ and was far superior to the insubstantiality and immorality of the works of the ‘men of wit’, as Garth and his companions at Will’s had styled themselves. Picking up on arguments that he had made in his prefaces to Prince Arthur and King Arthur, Blackmore reiterated the importance of the moral reformation of the national literature. To correct the modern depreciation of letters, he proposed that a group of prominent Whig magnates—Baron Somers, Charles, Earl of Dorset, and Charles Montagu—underwrite a ‘bank of wit’ to reform the currency of poetry. Under this scheme Dryden, Garth, William Congreve, Thomas Southerne, and William Wycherley would all be purged of their licentiousness, and would learn to value ‘Virtue and [ . . . ] Merit’.35 Interestingly, Blackmore’s attack on wit returned many of the charges that earlier Tory writers had used against Whig and Dissenting poets. Drawing on antienthusiastic discourse, Blackmore claimed that wit was a form of insanity: ‘It takes Men in the Head, and in the Fit | They lose their Senses, and are gone in Wit’ (ll. 34–5). He also suggested that the depravity of enthusiastic wit posed a threat to the nation’s political stability, asking: ‘What well-form’d Government or State can last, | When Wit has laid the Peoples Virtue wast?’ (ll. 79–80).36 However, for all his attempts to oVer his own cultural critique, Blackmore’s poem was hardly oV the presses before it met with outraged responses from the Wits. The main counter-attack came in the form of Commendatory Verses, on the Author of the Two Arthurs’ and the Satyr against Wit; By Some of his particular Friends (1700), a series of squibs composed by Tom Brown, Charles Boyle, Sir Christopher Codrington, and other members of Will’s, including John Dennis, Addison, and Garth.37 34

Samuel Garth, The Dispensary (1699), in POAS vi. 102. Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (1699), in POAS vi. 149. Further line references in the text are to this edition. 36 On changing deWnitions of wit in this period, as exempliWed in contemporary drama, see Richard Braverman, Plots and Counterplots: Sexual Politics and the Body Politic in English Literature, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 220–5. 37 For an extensive account of the authorship and publication of the Commendatory Verses see Richard C. Boys, Sir Richard Blackmore and the Wits: A Study of Commendatory Verses on the Author of the two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit, 1700 (Michigan, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1949). 35

34

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While the poems are clearly not driven solely by party-political diVerence, they derive many of their criticisms of Blackmore from earlier images of Whig writers, as Charles Boyle’s lampoon suggests: ‘Let Bl—re still, in good King Arthur’s Vein, | To Fleckno’s Empire his just Right maintain’.38 One of the most frequently repeated charges made against Blackmore was based on his associations with the City. The preface to the Commendatory Verses suggests that Blackmore take control of City entertainments, and that the authorities should ‘put the entire Management of SmithWeld into his Hands, and make him absolute Monarch of all the Booths and Poppet-shews’.39 Thus Blackmore was swiftly connected with the moralistic pageants and popular entertainments that Restoration writers had used as the epitome of the didacticism and rampant commercialism associated with Whig writing. Blackmore was also accused, like Settle, of being ill-educated, though, like Settle, he in fact had a perfectly respectable academic background, having been educated at Westminster, Oxford, and Padua. In his prologue to Vanbrugh’s version of Fletcher’s The Pilgrim Dryden refers to him as ‘Quack Ma[u]rus’ who ‘never took Degrees | In either of our Universities’. Also reminiscent of Restoration rhetoric were the disparaging and unfounded insinuations of a connection between Blackmore and religious enthusiasm. Dryden suggests that the physician’s reformist ideals conceal a more sinister political agenda: But what if, after all, this Godly Geer, Is not so Senceless as it wou’d appear? Our Mountebank has laid a deeper Train, His Cant, like Merry Andrew’s Noble Vein, Cat-Call’s the Sects, to draw ’em in again.40

Blackmore was to continue to be lampooned as an enthusiast by other writers for years to come, and the extent to which he recognized the importance of this rhetoric in attacks on himself and other Whig writers is demonstrated in The Kit-Cats, in which he parodies anti-Whig rhetoric.41 Imitating a Tory vocabulary of aspiration, sectarianism, and 38

Charles Boyle, ‘The Quack Corrected’, in Commendatory Verses, 73. The ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ to Commendatory Verses, n.p. John Dryden, prologue to The Pilgrim (1700), in The Prologues and Epilogues of John Dryden, ed. William Bradford Gardner (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 180–1. 41 An interesting later attack on Blackmore as enthusiast is The Flight of the Pretender, with Advice to the Poets (London, 1708), sig. a3v. The author of this poem—rather 39 40

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enthusiasm, he writes of his friends in the Kit-Cat Club as a malevolent force: Who wou’d with Arts the British Heads reWne, And the Subversion of thy Throne design. The Kingdom into Parties they have split, Enthusiasts of Sense, and Schismaticks of Wit. In Strength the restless Sectaries encrease, And interrupt thy quiet Subjects Peace.42

However, the main emphasis in the Wits’ attacks on Blackmore was not so much his religious heterodoxy as his transgression of social norms. The distinctions between Blackmore and the Wits at Will’s were distinctions of class: his parochial civic morality was set up in opposition to their aristocratic gentlemanly sprezzatura.43 As we shall see, this stereotype of the antisocial, zealous Whig writer was to inform the development of Whig literary culture: attempts by writers such as Joseph Addison and the Earl of Shaftesbury to create the polite face of modern Whiggism were in part determined by their opponents’ attacks.44 These Whig ideologues would promote sociable discourse that was ostensibly beyond diVerences in rank; the Tory attacks on unsociable Whig writers are, however, insistent on class distinctions. The Christ Church wit Tom Brown (1663–1704) emphasizes Blackmore’s disregard for the ‘good Manners’ that characterize the conduct of the Wits, and asserts: he tells the World, that ’tis impossible for a Man to be a Wit, and not a Rake; this I suppose he calculated for the Meridian of Cheapside, and for the Consolation of his City-Friends, whom all the World will clear from the Imputation of being Wits45

inappropriately—uses the idea of Blackmore’s illegitimacy in the realm of poetry to make him the panegyrist of the politically illegitimate Pretender. 42

Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708), 14. See Robert M. Krapp, ‘Class Analysis of a Literary Controversy: Wit and Sense in Seventeenth-Century English Literature’, Science and Society, 10 (1946), 80–92. 44 On discourses of enthusiasm and sociability see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Sociability, Solitude, and Enthusiasm’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60 (1997), 153–78. For fuller accounts of the importance of sociability in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture see John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 45 Thomas Brown, ‘To Sir W. S——Upon the two incomparable Poems, the Satyr Against Wit, and the Poetae Britannici’, in Familiar and Courtly Letters, to Persons of Honour and Quality, by Mons. Voiture (London, 1701), 131. 43

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Implicit in his attack is a set of judgements about the relationship between class and sociability. Blackmore’s lack of manners is attributed to his City connections, despite the fact that he was very far from the rude tradesman described in these satires. Other contributors were not so reserved in their condemnations of Blackmore’s engagement with the Wits. The Countess of Sandwich demands: ‘Thou fund of Nonsence, was it not enough | That Cits and pious Ladies lik’d thy StuV [ . . . ]?.’46 Her lines suggest something of the perceived readership of Whig poetry: urban tradespeople and ‘pious ladies’. With this focus on social distinction she once again emphasizes that literature should be the preserve of a select few, that genuine poetry and criticism remain exclusive to those born to it. It was because of these aspects of Blackmore’s engagement with the Wits that his name was frequently linked with that of Richard Bentley (1662–1742), the scholar who had recently come into conXict with Charles Boyle, William Temple, and the group of ‘ancients’ over the authenticity of the Phalaris epistles.47 As Joseph Levine observes, at the root of the ancients and moderns controversy lay a clash of cultural mores, between the classical paideia of the amateur gentleman and the humanistic scholarship of the professional philologist. Again, the participants in the debate over the Battle of the Books did not divide along party-political lines, but it is clear that the nature of the ancients’ attacks on Bentley and William Wotton rested on the same distinctions of class and style that characterized attacks on Whig writers.48 Bentley’s professional classical scholarship presented a threat to the integrity of the classical ideal that was so important to gentleman scholars such as Temple.49 When the young Christ Church scholar Charles Boyle (1676–1731) went to the defence of Temple and the Epistles in Mr Bentley’s Dissertations . . . Examin’d it emerged that what was really at 46 Countess of Sandwich, ‘To a Thrice Illustrious Quack, Pedant, and Bard’, in Commendatory Verses, 7. See also Charles Sedley’s poem, ‘Upon the Author of the Satyr against Wit’, in Commendatory Verses, 2. 47 A number of the Commendatory Verses link the two authors: see e.g. ‘The Noble Corrected, or Advice to a Quality Commentator’; ‘An Equal Match: Or a Drawn Battle’; ‘A Modest Request to the Poetical Knight’. 48 On the diYculties of reading party-political allegiances in the battle see Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 6. On Wotton and Bentley’s roles in the establishment of a new ‘Whig Cambridge’ in the post-Revolution period see John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 67, 142–55. 49 Levine, The Battle of the Books, 49.

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issue was a question of cultural authority, as Tom Brown’s account reveals: Never did Wit and Learning Triumph so gloriously over Dullness and Pedantry, as in that noble Book [ . . . ] all the Polite Judges in Europe were pleased to see an Arrogant Pedant, that had been crouding his Head twenty Years together with the Spoils of Lexicons and Dictionaries, worsted and foiled by a Young Gentleman, upon his own Dunghil, and by his own Criticisms.50

Both the Wits at Christ Church and those at Will’s drew on an established critical tradition in which scholars were represented as illmannered, bookish, didactic, vulgar pedants.51 In their attacks on Bentley they oVset this stereotype against their own worldly and gracious sphere of litte´rateurs.52 Like the Tory critique, the Christ Church wits’ attack was essentially ad hominem, and focused on matters of style rather than content: in concentrating on the inelegance of Bentley’s prose, and the arrogance of his assertions, they obscured the intellectual issue underlying the debate—the authenticity of the Epistles—over which their opponent clearly had the upper hand. In the eyes of their Tory critics, both Blackmore and Bentley, the aspiring poet and the scholar, shared an earnestness about their work, a disregard for fashionable savoir-faire, relatively humble social origins, and committed Whiggism. Their association marked the beginning of the twin focus on the Wgures of the pedant and the poet that was to form the basis of Scriblerian satire.

Pope’s Essay on Criticism One of the most important texts for understanding the evolution of the Scriblerian project in the early eighteenth century is Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1711). In the Essay Pope explicitly identiWes himself with a tradition of Royalist and Tory writers, and articulates many of the 50

Thomas Brown, ‘To Sir W. S——’, in Familiar and Courtly Letters, 133–4. These stereotypes were originally premised on the socio-economic diVerences between clerks and gentlemen; see Steven Shapin, ‘ ‘‘A Scholar and a Gentleman’’: The Problematic Identity of the ScientiWc Practitioner in Early Modern England’, History of Science, 29 (1991), 279–327. Shapin argues that although the Royal Society was intended to encourage the gentleman-scholar, tracts on education and practical courtesy literature continued to characterize pedantry as a major disqualiWcation for genteel society (p. 295). 52 Yet the delineation of this satire of pedantry was complex, since the pedant was also, paradoxically, linked to the worldliness of rampant commercialism. For a fuller discussion 51

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arguments that we have seen in earlier attacks on Whig writers. Like Roscommon and Oldham, he emphasizes the literary values of harmony and moderation, which are linked to a political agenda. His emphasis on clarity and his suspicion of ornate literary style reiterates earlier distinctions between conformist and Nonconformist discourse. Yet we also see signs of engagement with modern Whig culture, in the Essay’s promotion of ease and gentlemanly conversation in literary criticism.53 Central to the cultural politics of Pope’s Essay was the recent publication of John Dennis’s The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704).54 In this essay Dennis oVered a series of arguments about poetry and criticism that ran counter to the tradition of Tory criticism that had developed through Dryden, Roscommon, and the Wits at Will’s.55 The crystallization of a set of distinctively Whiggish ideas about poetry in The Grounds of Criticism undoubtedly sharpened Pope’s agenda in the Essay on Criticism, and Pope’s self-deWnition in the Essay is formed in reaction to the developing Whig tradition exempliWed by Dennis. In the Grounds of Criticism Dennis elevated Milton’s poetry as the high point of native tradition. In contrast, Pope’s mentors in the Essay, as in his pastorals and very early pieces, are Royalist and Tory writers whose work exempliWed a poetry which was regular, stylish, and occasional, and bound into the culture of the Stuart court. In the Essay Pope praises the Easie Vigor of a Line, Where Denham’s Strength, and Waller’s Sweetness join. True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance, As those move easiest who have learn’d to dance. (ll. 360–3)56

The much-discussed aesthetics of moderation found in the Essay can be more fully understood when seen as arising out of this tradition. Many of commercialism and pedantry see Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 84–90. 53 These qualities are, of course, not speciWc to the Essay. In his essay on ‘The Politics of Style’ Pat Rogers argues that the wider implications of Pope’s technique are that his poetic style ‘shuns obscurity’, ‘asserts the intelligibility and connectedness of things in a genteel, elegant idiom’, and constantly ‘compares, contrasts, judges’ (Rogers, ‘The Politics of Style’, in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27–36 (34)). 54 For a summary of theories about Pope’s motives for the attack see E. Audra and A. Williams, introd. to An Essay on Criticism, in TE i. 207. 55 On Dennis’s alienation from the Wits see Dennis, Critical Works, ii. xxv–xxvi. 56 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), in TE i. 280–1. Further line references in the text are to this edition.

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39

critics have read Pope’s concern to ‘Avoid Extreams’ as an essentially unpartisan position, oVering a middle way between critical polarities.57 Yet his emphasis on moderation is also a reiteration of the stress on balance that is found in Royalist verse. Poets such as Waller and Denham used the concept of poetic harmony to articulate a political and cultural agenda, constructing analogies between poetic propriety and political harmony so that, as in Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, an aesthetics of moderation came to represent the divinely ordained order found under the Stuart monarchy.58 The rhetoric of moderation, as we shall see in the following chapter, had also acquired a range of political inXections over the course of the later seventeenth century. For Pope, Tory poets such as Roscommon were the natural heirs to the Royalist tradition. Roscommon’s Essay, in which he urged writers to ‘make the proper use of each Extream, | And write with fury but correct with Phleam’ (ll. 300–1), perpetuated earlier Royalist aesthetics. The court wits also shared the mannered occasional style of Waller and Denham, and Pope’s attraction to the Restoration lyricists is demonstrated by his early imitations of the Earl of Rochester and the Earl of Dorset.59 His friendship with Wycherley and his monumentalizing of Dryden’s achievement in the Essay conWrmed his role as self-appointed heir to this Royalist/Tory tradition. The politics underlying these stylistic preferences are obvious. Pope’s account of Roscommon’s revival of literary criticism perpetuates the Tory myth of the Restoration that we have seen inaugurated in the 1660s: But we, brave Britons, Foreign Laws despis’d, And kept unconquer’d, and unciviliz’d, Fierce for the Liberties of Wit, and bold, We still defy’d the Romans, as of old. Yet some there were, among the sounder Few Of those who less presum’d, and better knew, Who durst assert the juster Ancient Cause, And here restor’d Wit’s Fundamental Laws.

(ll. 715–22)

57 Pope’s editors Audra and Williams claim that in the Essay, Pope endeavours ‘to bring about a literary peace in his own time [ . . . ] by providing his age with a broad and Xexible critical position on which all can in some measure agree’ (TE i. 226). 58 See Paul J. Korshin, ‘The Evolution of Neo-Classical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1968–9), 102–37. 59 James Grantham Turner, ‘Pope’s Libertine Self-Fashioning’, The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 29 (1988), 123–44.

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Pope’s description of restoration and revival echoes Dryden’s lines on Roscommon: in ‘To the Earl of Roscommon’ he proclaimed that ‘The Muses Empire is restor’d agen, | In Charles his Reign, and by Roscomon’s Pen’ (ll. 28–9).60 His rejection of ‘the Liberties of Wit’ is also a challenge to Dennis’s and other Whig writers’ theories of cultural development. In the Grounds of Criticism Dennis had linked the revival of native literature to the re-establishment of political liberty at the Revolution, praising Milton for ‘daring to break a little loose’ from the rules of the ancients.61 The Essay hinges on distinctions between plain style and ornament which, again, are adapted from Roscommon’s criticism.62 Where Dennis claimed that ‘the frequent Use of Methaphors, Dialects, Epithets’ was necessary to poetry ‘because they are the Language of Passion’,63 Pope’s emphasis on clarity and the avoidance of metaphor looks back to earlier anti-enthusiastic rhetoric: But true Expression, like th’unchanging Sun, Clears, and improves whate’er it shines upon, It gilds all Objects, but it alters none . . . . . . . A vile Conceit in pompous Words exprest, Is like a Clown in regal Purple drest

(ll. 315–17, 320–1)

However, although the literary historiography and political idiom of the Essay clearly align it with a tradition of Tory criticism, Pope is also careful to claim his account of English poetry as a politically neutral one, presenting partisanship as the preserve of the opposition: Parties in Wit attend on those of State, And publick Faction doubles private Hate. Pride, Malice, Folly, against Dryden rose, In various Shapes of Parsons, Criticks, Beaus.

(ll. 456–9)

60 John Dryden, ‘To the Earl of Roscommon, on his Excellent Essay on Translated Verse’ (1684), in Works, ii. 172–3. 61 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism (1704), in Critical Works, i. 331. 62 Pope’s debt to Roscommon’s and Buckingham’s criticism was immediately recognized by contemporaries: Addison wrote that ‘we have three Poems in our Tongue, which are of the same Nature, and each of them a Master-piece in its kind; the Essay on Translated Verse, the Essay on the Art of Poetry, and the Essay upon Criticism’ (Addison, Spectator 253, 20 December 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), ii. 485–6). 63 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism, in Critical Works, i. 340.

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As he was to insist in his later poetry, only his enemies’ writing was marred by petty factionalism. According to Pope’s Essay, Dryden was not a political writer, but the Colliers, Shadwells, Langbaines, and Blackmores were.64 This qualitative distinction between political and non-political poetry—even within the context of profoundly partisan texts—was to be central to the critique of the Whig tradition. Pope’s Essay and Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism were very diVerent stylistically. The Grounds of Criticism was formal and prescriptive, and Dennis made no attempt to disguise the fact that what he was oVering was a series of rules and stipulations for the reformation of English poetry which were ‘eternal and unalterable’.65 The piece was structured formally, like Le Bossu’s strictures on epic, divided into sections and subsections, proposals and specimens. Pope’s Essay, in contrast, although equally prescriptive, was familiar and conversational. In the Essay he describes this style as based upon the principle that ‘Men must be taught as if you taught them not’ (l. 574), and he clearly follows a Horatian model: ‘like a Friend familiarly convey | The truest Notions in the easiest way’ (ll. 655–6). This familiar style again focused attention on the man of letters in a social context. According to Pope, what deWnes good criticism is social ease, the conWdence and judgement of the man of the world: Tho’ Learn’d, well-bred; and tho’ well-bred, sincere; Modestly bold, and Humanly severe? Who to a Friend his Faults can freely show, And gladly praise the Merit of a Foe? Bless’d with a Taste exact, yet unconWn’d; A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind; Gen’rous Converse; a Soul exempt from Pride; And Love to Praise, with Reason on his Side?

(ll. 635–42)

While Pope’s notions of ‘generous converse’ oVered a contrast to Dennis’s critical model, they closely resembled the arguments of a later Whig theorist. In his Spectator essays Joseph Addison discussed the nature of literary criticism, using the conversational format of his essays 64 Yet at other times Pope seems to be critical of Dryden’s partisanship—see his comment that ‘the Aeneid was evidently a party piece, as much as Absalom and Achitophel ’ (Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), i. 229). 65 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism, in Critical Works, i. 331.

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to oVer examples of both how to read and how to develop critical skills. Addison eVectively demystiWes the evaluative process, suggesting that anyone can develop sound opinions with the appropriate reading in French, Italian, and classical authors.66 Yet, for all the apparent similarities in approach between Addison and Pope, we can discern certain essential diVerences between the two critical models. While the conversational, familiar tone and style of the Essay, like Addison’s criticism, seems to oVer the reader inclusion into the arena of literary criticism, the boundaries between those who are qualiWed to write as critics and those who are not are very clearly demarcated in Pope’s poem.67 As J. Paul Hunter observes, ‘the learning it argues is necessary is easy neither to acquire nor to apply’.68 Not only does Pope oVer a series of impossibly contradictory rules that the critic must obey,69 but he also conXates social and literary status to suggest, like Oldham, that only those born to criticism or poetry may practise it: In Poets as true Genius is but rare, True Taste as seldom is the Critick’s Share; Both must alike from Heav’n derive their Light, These born to Judge, as well as those to Write.

(ll. 11–14)

Thus Roscommon’s skill as a critic is linked to his ‘Manners gen’rous as his Noble Blood’ (l. 726). Those who fail to qualify as critics are those marked by their lack of social Wnesse. They are the socially aspiring, ‘The Vulgar’, that ‘thus through Imitation err’ (l. 424), and the writer That in proud Dulness joins with Quality, A constant Critick at the Great-man’s Board, To fetch and carry Nonsense for my Lord. (ll. 415–17)

Bad critics lack the conversational grace and manners that mark the work of Roscommon or Walsh. The Essay revealed Dennis, Pope’s inXuential Whig rival, as exactly this type, who 66

See e.g. the discussion of literary criticism in Spectator 291. See Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, pp. xxxv–xxxviii. 68 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics Worth Recovering?’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 1–20. 69 David Morris argues that what unites the contradictory deWnitions of the Essay is Pope’s emphasis on the values of propriety and generosity, which are, again, social rather than literary skills (Morris, ‘Civilized Reading: The Act of Judgment in An Essay on Criticism’, in Howard Erskine-Hill and Anne Smith (eds.), The Art of Alexander Pope (London: Vision, 1979), 15–39 (26) ). 67

The Tory critique of Whig literature reddens at each Word you speak, And stares, Tremendous! With a threatning Eye, Like some Werce Tyrant in Old Tapestry!

43

(ll. 585–7)70

Pope’s description of his opponent reveals an appropriation and reversal of his opponents’ arguments. As later chapters elaborate, the rhetoric of liberty prevails in Whig criticism of this period: Dennis and others argued that they were freeing English literature from the tyranny of the past. Here, however, it is Dennis with his minatory critical prescriptions who is the tyrant. Moreover, at a time when emergent Whig ideologues were promoting conversational models of cultural debate, it is Dennis who is too unsociable to countenance an exchange of opposing viewpoints. The uptake of such arguments about sociability in Tory satire reveals the double-edged nature of its cultural critique. As Brean Hammond has argued, Scriblerian satire is frequently strengthened by its selective appropriation of the cultural traditions it purports to reject.71

The Scriblerians John Sitter has described Pope’s Essay on Criticism as ‘an elaborate, if subdued conjunction of cultural history and Bildungsroman’.72 As such, it reveals much about Pope’s self-deWnition as a poet and critic, and about the way in which he reinforced his own centrality within a speciWcally Tory tradition. Many of the critical positions developed in the Essay were to feed into the various literary projects generated by the Scriblerus Club. Although recent criticism has tended towards a diVerentiation between the individual members of the Scriblerus Club, it is clear that in many ways the work of writers such as Pope, Swift, Gay, and John 70 Pope was to continue to portray Dennis as rough and argumentative for the rest of his career. In Peri Bathous he appears as one of the ‘Porpoises’ who are ‘unweildy and big; they put all their Numbers into a great Turmoil and Tempest, but whenever they appear in plain Light, (which is seldom) they are only shapeless and ugly Monsters’. (Pope, Peri Bathous: or the Art of Sinking in Poetry (1728), ed. Edna Steeves (New York: Russell and Russell, 1952), 27). 71 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 214. On Pope’s borrowings see Roger D. Lund, ‘From Oblivion to Dulness: Pope and the Poetics of Appropriation’, British Journal for EighteenthCentury Studies, 14 (1991), 171–91. 72 John Sitter, Arguments of Augustan Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 87.

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Arbuthnot is best understood by considering their shared cultural agenda.73 The Club was, from the beginning, a speciWcally Tory grouping, founded as a literary adjunct to the Brothers Club, a Tory version of the Whig Kit-Cat Club.74 Thus it was from its inception a group which was deWned in response to the cultural and social groupings of contemporary Whig writers. The Scriblerians’ interests were initially focused on satires on pedantry, in the form of publications such as the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741) and Three Hours after Marriage (1717). However, their obsession with delineating the diVerences between true and false intellectual pursuits was soon extended to contemporary literature, and satire on contemporary poetic culture is central to works as chronologically and generically diverse as the Dunciad, the Tale of a Tub, and Trivia. As I argued at the beginning of this chapter, Scriblerian satire is founded on many of the qualitative distinctions used by earlier Tory writers. Although Pope, Swift, and Gay often link the degeneration of literature to the speciWc circumstances of the Hanoverian/Walpolean regime, they draw on a set of assumptions about good and bad poetry that are part of a pre-existing myth about politics, religion, and literature. Thus the images of writing and writers they employed were in many ways out of step with the nature of contemporary Whig literary culture they wished to condemn, complicating their claim to chronicle the modern. There are numerous elements of Scriblerian satire that are inherited from earlier Royalist and Tory writers. True poets are, as ever, independent of the sordid economics of the market place, and the demonization of Grub Street dominates the work of Pope, Swift, and Gay. From the parodies of publishers’ puVs at the beginning of Tale of a Tub to Gay’s lines in Trivia on Gildon’s works ‘at Chelsea under Custards read’ and, Wnally, Pope’s Dunciad, individual Whig authors are subsumed in the bigger picture of a grasping and talentless literary underworld. Despite the fact that, as the Miscellanies demonstrated, both Swift and Pope drew on ‘low’ and popular genres in their own work, they continued to make distinctions between the high literary status of their poetry and the ephemeral and lowbrow nature of that of their opponents.75 And if 73 For a fuller version of this argument see Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing, 239–86. 74 George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 73–4. 75 On Swift’s embrace of popular forms see Ann Cline Kelly, Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and the Man (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 13–104.

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Whig writers were a lowly group, so were their readers. The Scriblerian attack continued a tradition of anti-populist writing, as demonstrated in the references to City poetry and drama found in Swift’s ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’ (1733): In ev’ry Street a City-bard Rules, like an Alderman his Ward. His indisputed Rights extend Thro’ all the Lane, from End to End. The Neighbours round admire his Shrewdness, For songs of Loyalty and Lewdness. Out-done by none in Rhyming well, Altho’ he never learnt to spell.

(ll. 285–92)76

The commercialism of contemporary writers was also deWned in relation to an increasingly nostalgic sense of the Restoration court as a golden age of royal patronage. The claim that under the late Stuarts, and especially Charles II, the best writers and artists enjoyed a quality and quantity of patronage never to be seen again after 1688 dates from the 1690s, where it is found in the poetry of the Jacobite poet and dramatist George Granville. Granville’s longing for the bright days of the Stuart court and the artistic life that it funded and inspired is the subject of a number of his poems. He identiWes the culture of the Restoration court in Edmund Waller’s love lyrics, which for him ‘proclaims | The shining Court, and all the glittering Dames’—the very embodiment of the Stuart cultural myth.77 Through his imitations of Waller, Granville constructed himself as a latter-day Cavalier, a man out of his time, bereft of the court life and the monarchy that had sustained Waller’s poetic output. Such a nostalgia for an age of royal patronage and court culture clearly inXuenced later Scriblerian verse. Although, as the Wnal chapter will demonstrate, it was the Whig writers of the postRevolution period who enjoyed the real golden age of patronage, in the works of Pope and Gay the era of the Stuart court is fondly remembered as all that the debased contemporary market place is not. On Pope’s authorship of anonymous lampoons see Claudia Thomas, ‘Pope and His Dunciad Adversaries: Skirmishes on the Borders of Gentility’, in James Gill (ed.), Cutting Edges: Postmodern Critical Essays on Eighteenth-Century Satire (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 275–300 (280). 76 Swift, ‘On Poetry: a Rapsody’, in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), ii. 649–50. 77 George Granville, ‘The Progress of Beauty’, in The Genuine Works in Verse and Prose Of the Right Honorable George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, 2 vols. (London, 1732), i. 79.

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In An Essay upon Criticism Pope writes that under Charles II ‘Wits had Pensions, and young Lords had Wit ’.78 Similarly, in Trivia Gay laments a lost age of past brilliance: Here Arundell ’s fam’d Structure rear’d its Frame, The Street alone retains an empty Name: Where Titian’s glowing Paint the Canvas warm’d, And Raphael’s fair Design, with Judgment, charm’d, Now hangs the Bell-man’s Song, and pasted here, The colour’d Prints of Overton appear.

(ll. 483–8)79

For the Scriblerians the commercialism and populism of the modern writer was once more connected to enthusiasm. From the academic virtuoso of the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, to the Aeolists in Swift’s Tale of a Tub, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, the Scriblerians mocked the confusions and pretensions of the committed enthusiast, whose claims to divine inspiration were so often used to trope failed poetic aspiration.80 In Peri Bathous Pope sharpened this satire by parodying the increasingly Whiggish interest in the poetic sublime, reversing the images of elevation and transcendence that were so central to the sublime aesthetic. He writes of the ‘Love of the Bathos’ which is sacriWced to ‘all other transitory Regards’, and declares that ‘nothing is so great which a marvellous Genius, prompted by this laudable Zeal, is not able to lessen’.81 The political resonances of enthusiasm were also not forgotten.82 In ‘On Poetry, A Rapsody’ Swift links religious zeal and republicanism to the low sublime, writing of ‘a thousand Bards’ (l. 378) that:

78

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, in TE i. 298. John Gay, Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), in John Gay: Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing and Charles E. Beckwith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974), i. 157. 80 On Swift and enthusiasm see C. M. Webster, ‘Swift and Some Earlier Satirists of Puritan Enthusiasm’, PMLA 48 (1933), 1141–53, and ‘The Satiric Background of the Attack on Puritans in Swift’s Tale of a Tub’, PMLA 50 (1935), 210–23; Philip Harth, Swift and Anglican Rationalism (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 105–16; M. V. DePorte, Nightmares and Hobbyhorses: Swift, Sterne, and Augustan Ideas of Madness (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1974). 81 Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 21–2. 82 The Scriblerians’ insistent reinforcing of the links between poetic and religious or political enthusiasm complicates the popular critical view, upheld in Shaun Irlam’s recent work, that the eighteenth century saw the ‘softening’ of enthusiasm into a purely aesthetic concept (Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 57). 79

The Tory critique of Whig literature plot to turn in factious Zeal, Duncenia to a Common-weal; And with rebellious Arms pretend An equal Priv’lege to descend.

47

(ll. 379–82)83

As before, Nonconformity was seen to come hand in hand with crude moralism. Whig writers were busy transforming issues of moral and literary reformation into notions of politeness, yet their opponents continued to represent them as antisocial and humourless didacts. The Scriblerian scorn for ‘bourgeois’ didacticism is partly manifested in an aristocratic use of the demotic and the sexually explicit.84 But it is also evident at a more obvious level, as in John Gay’s prologue to The Captives: ‘What gain we by this solemn way of teaching? | Our precepts mend your lives no more than preaching’.85 Similarly, morality and, in particular, popular instruction are central to Pope’s deWnition of low poetry in Peri Bathous: ‘if the Intent of all Poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that Kind which diverts and instructs the greatest Number, is to be preferr’d’.86 In the ‘Couplets on Wit’ he claims that: ‘Some who grow dull religious strait commence | And gain in morals what they lose in sence’, and argues that it is the overearnest zealots who are rewarded with positions: ‘Wits starve as useless to a Common weal | While Fools have places purely for their Zeal’.87 However, by the 1720s this depiction of Whig writers as fanatical radicals was strangely old-fashioned. It was out of keeping with the realities of contemporary political culture: by the time Pope published Peri Bathous, in 1727, the Whigs had not only secured a powerful political hegemony but they had also distanced themselves from the alliance with Dissent which had been forged in their years in opposition. Moreover, as we shall see, many Whig writers enjoyed a measure of Wnancial independence thanks to the pensions and places granted by members of the Kit-Cat Club, and were far removed from the seedy 83 Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’, in Poems, ii. 653. In his account of Mania and Literary Style Clement Hawes seems unable to explain Swift’s conXation of enthusiasm and literary style precisely because he does not contextualize Swift within this tradition (Hawes, Mania and Literary Style: The Rhetoric of Enthusiasm from the Ranters to Christopher Smart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 101–25). 84 See Claude Rawson, Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 287. 85 John Gay, prologue to The Captives (1724), in John Gay: Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), i. 345. 86 Pope, The Art of Sinking in Poetry, 10. 87 Pope, ‘Couplets on Wit’, in TE vi. 234–5.

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poverty depicted by their satirists. Tory writers might have drawn on traditional associations between Whiggism and enthusiasm to discredit their opponents, but this was clearly a rearguard action. It should be read as an attempt to discredit a status-quo position, not as a serious indication of the political or cultural marginalization of Whiggism. The accession of 1714 had left the ‘men of sense’ writing the public poetry, and it is perhaps a more signiWcant indicator of the state of cultural politics under the Wrst Hanoverians that while Whig poets were producing oYcial poems to celebrate the glories of the new regime many of their Tory counterparts turned to alternative themes, much as Dryden and other Jacobites had rejected public poetry in the 1690s.88 In Swift’s ‘On Poetry: a Rapsody’ it is the Whig poet who ‘for Epicks claims the Bays’ while the Tory writes ‘Elegiack Lays’ (ll. 295–6).89 A nostalgia for the occasional verse of earlier Royalist and Restoration poets characterizes much Tory poetry of this period, from George Granville’s imitations of Waller’s lyrics to Prior’s graceful epigrams and songs.90 Pope’s attitude towards this tradition is clearly complex. While, as we have seen, his early poetry is indebted to Restoration verse, there is an increasing emphasis on the public role of the poet in his later work.91 Yet he and his allies preserve the stress on aristocratic ease. The Scriblerians’ assault on contemporary scholarship invoked the same class distinctions that the Christ Church Wits had applied to Bentley.92 In texts such as Swift’s Battle of the Books, and the Memoirs of Martinus 88 Matthew Prior’s shift from the elevated public verse of Carmen Seculare (1700) to the light lyrics and lampoons of his later poetry oVers some evidence of this trend. 89 Swift, ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’, in Poems, ii. 650. 90 Thomas Woodman argues that Pope, Swift, Gay, Parnell, and Prior all deWne themselves in relation to a courtly amateur tradition, which enables them to distance themselves from the solemnities of oYcial Whig verse and to make a virtue of their alienation from traditional sources of patronage (Woodman, Politeness and Poetry in the Age of Pope (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1989), 43–54). 91 On Pope as court poet manque ´ see Ian Jack, ‘Pope and his Audience from the Pastorals to the Dunciad Variorum’, in R. F. Brissenden and J. C. Eade (eds.), Studies in the Eighteenth Century (Canberra: University of Canberra Press, 1979), 1–30. Yet Pope also writes, for example, that Crashaw: ‘writ like a Gentleman, that is, at leisure hours, and more to keep out of idleness, than to establish a reputation [ . . . ] no man can be a true Poet, who writes for diversion only’, Pope to Henry Cromwell, 17 December 1710, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), i. 109–10. 92 Brean Hammond, Pope (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 100–7. As Valerie Rumbold observes in her introduction to The Dunciad in Four Books, it is easy to forget just how outmoded the Scriblerians’ allegiances to the ‘ancients’ were (Rumbold, introd. to Alexander Pope: The Dunciad in Four Books (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 3, 8).

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Scriblerus, scholarly practices such as obtrusive annotation and extensive prefatory material were parodied in order to show up the parochial vocation of scholars, one which fell far short of polite conversation and genteel disinterest. A narrowly deWned sociability also continued to mark poetic style. As we have seen, Pope used the Essay on Criticism to shape a literary criticism based on social Xuency and gentlemanly conversation.93 In the later poetry this emphasis is perpetuated in the epistles and the imitations. Pope celebrates the stability and taste of the natural aristocracy such as Burlington and Bathurst, and through the genre of epistles to friends he mimics the aristocratic tradition of manuscript circulation.94

The Dunciad Pope’s Dunciad is the epitome of this Scriblerian obsession with the demarcation and deWnition of culture. It establishes the heroes and the villains of the literary scene more exhaustively than any other contemporary text, and locates Pope as the supreme arbiter of poetic merit.95 The poem clearly has a dual focus: Pope opens his account of the apocalyptic condition of modern culture in the Dunciad Variorum with the assertion that ‘This happened in the Year 1725, and continued to the Year 1728’.96 The contemporary speciWcity of his cultural critique becomes even more heightened in the four-book version of 1743. Yet at the same time as Pope claims to be performing a dissection of his own historical moment he also plots his analysis of duncehood on to a preexisting tradition of bad writing:

93 In the light of this emphasis, both in the Essay and in later poetry, it must have been particularly galling for Pope when Hervey criticized him for lacking the sociability and ease that Colley Cibber possessed (see Hervey’s Letter to Mr Cibber (1743) and Dustin GriYn, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 239). 94 On Pope’s attraction to the culture of manuscript circulation see Margaret Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 95 On Pope’s poem as ‘an alternative literary history’ see James McLaverty, ‘Pope and Giles Jacob’s Lives of the Poets: The Dunciad as Alternative Literary History’, Modern Philology, 83 (1985), 22–32. 96 Pope, Dunciad Variorum (1729) bk. I, l. 2 n. in TE v. 60.

50

The Tory critique of Whig literature She saw old Pryn in restless Daniel shine, And Eusden eke out Blackmore’s endless line; She saw slow Philips creep like Tate’s poor page, And all the Mighty Mad in Dennis rage.97

While critics have recognized Pope’s debt to Oldham’s Grub Street satires, or Dryden’s MacFlecknoe, they have rarely acknowledged the extent to which The Dunciad is also informed by the same cultural agenda that underwrites those earlier works. Pope’s portrait of the dunces is characterized by an emphasis on unsuccessful aspiration that Tory writers had always levelled at their opponents. In The Dunciad, as in Peri Bathous, the dunces cannot succeed in what they do, but only move erratically, or resolutely, downwards. Bad poetry is once more linked to populism, particularly through the series of references to City pageantry and fairs: the poem is set on the day of Sir George Thorold’s Lord Mayor’s Procession; the four Guardian Virtues surrounding Dulness are recurrent features of Lord Mayor’s Day pageants; and the progress of the dunces through the City and its environs mirrors the route taken by the Procession.98 Pat Rogers has shown the way in which Pope transformed Grub Street itself into a metaphor linking his enemies’ artistic failures with the poverty, madness, and crime associated with local landmarks.99 These allusions to the City of London have been read as an attack on the stockjobbing and proWteering encouraged by the Walpole government, but, as we have seen, by the time Pope was writing The Dunciad City entertainments had become Wrmly linked to a set of associations with bad poetry and heavy didacticism.100 The epic also satirizes poetic enthusiasm, as Dulness replicates the images of anarchy and confusion that were associated with false inspir97 Dunciad Variorum, bk. I, ll.101–4, in TE v. 71–2; Dunciad in Four Books, bk. I, ll.103– 6, in TE v. 276–7. Hereafter book and line references to the two versions will be referred to in the text as ‘A’ and ‘B’. Quotations are taken from the Twickenham edition. 98 For a more detailed account of correspondences between the Lord Mayor’s Procession and The Dunciad see Aubrey Williams, Pope’s Dunciad: A Study of its Meaning (London: Methuen, 1955), 29–41. 99 Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972). In Grub Street Rogers does much to investigate the historical basis of the Scriblerian myth, but his careful research into the geography of duncehood ultimately reinforces the divide between the world of the poets and that of the dunces. 100 cf. David Fairer: ‘The Lord Mayor’s Day itself is not the focus for attack. It is seen as a symptom of something greater. The ‘City’ was where, as now, the real powers in society lay, among the proWteers, stock jobbers and middle-men’ (Fairer, The Poetry of Alexander Pope: Penguin Critical Studies (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 140).

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ation.101 The level of frantic activity which characterizes the actions of the dunces may seem out of keeping with the heaviness of Dulness, but as Pope explains in a footnote: Dulness here is not to be taken contractedly for mere Stupidity, but in the enlarged sense of the word [ . . . ] It includes [ . . . ] a ruling principle not inert, but turning topsy-turvy the Understanding, and inducing an Anarchy or confused State of Mind. (B. I. 15 n.)

The frenzy of the dunces, as they ‘gaze, turn giddy, rave’ (A. III. 354) resembles images of fanatic Wts, while the phantom poet—‘A shapeless shade! it melted from his sight, | Like forms in clouds, or visions of the night!’ (A. II. 103–4; B. II. 111–12)—is a parody of the visions of the enthusiast. It is a commonplace that Swift’s Tale of a Tub and ‘The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ satirize religious enthusiasm, and there are a number of points of contact between the depiction of enthusiasm in Pope and Swift’s work. According to Swift’s deWnition in ‘Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ the enthusiast begins by ‘lifting up of the Soul or its Faculties above Matter’ but always ends up completely immersed in matter.102 Other anti-enthusiasts believed that what an enthusiast took to be religious zeal could always be traced to his bowel movements.103 This confusion between the imagination and the basest corporeality is, of course, central in The Dunciad, as when Curll rises: Renew’d by ordure’s sympathetic force, As oil’d with magic juices for the course, Vig’rous he rises; from th’eZuvia strong Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along

(A. II. 95–8; B. II. 103–6)104

Moreover, Pope’s emphasis on descent and the false sublime in both The Dunciad and the Art of Sinking in Poetry mirrors Swift’s account of the enthusiast whose Xight of fancy ‘having soared out of his own Reach 101 See Dennis Todd, Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 197–216. 102 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit’ (1704), in A Tale of a Tub, ed. A. C. Guthkelch and D. Nichol Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 266. 103 See Henry More in Enthusiasmus Triumphatus (London, 1656): ‘The Spirit then that wings the Enthusiast in such a wonderful manner, is nothing else but that Xatulency which is the melancholy complexion, & rises out of the Hypochondriacal humour upon some occasionall heat, as winde out of an Aeolipila applied to the Wre’ (p. 17). 104 Emrys Jones expresses this point well in his famous essay on ‘Pope and Dulness’: ‘What the Grub-Street setting does is to force into violent antithesis the notions of body

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and Sight, not well perceiving how near the Frontiers of Height and Depth, border upon each other; With the same Course and Wing, he falls down plum into the lowest Bottom of Things’.105 The Dunciad works on the basis of the same logic as Dryden’s satires: all enthusiasts were bad poets, so all bad poets must be enthusiasts. Pope draws on the cultural mythology that had developed around Dissent, so that by placing the dunces within a set of references to enthusiasm their association with populism, illiteracy, and commercialism is axiomatic. We might compare this with Pope’s treatment of social class in the poem. Claudia Thomas has shown that within the logic of The Dunciad all bad poets are of low social origins, so many of the dunces are assigned a social status signiWcantly lower than that to which they are entitled.106 Although many of the contemporary writers featured in the poem were from origins similar to Pope’s, or slightly better, Thomas argues that in order to assert his own position Pope ‘derived his representations of enemies from seventeenth-century caricatures of paid writers as lowermiddle class artisans’.107 So, for example, Leonard Welsted, the son of a clergyman, who had been educated at Westminster and Trinity, Cambridge, and who had enjoyed a successful career in government service, is associated with low-life tavern culture and the excessive consumption of beer. One of the great advantages of the Tory myth was that it enabled Pope to create a satire that was at once particular and general. On the one hand the list of ‘friends and enemies’ that he oVered in The Dunciad was founded on local and personal likes and dislikes. Writers became dunces because of some particular slight or insult.108 Yet on the other hand the poem also attempted to translate these local issues into a more universal story about the decline of culture, as Pope suggested in a note to the 1743 edition: the Action of the Dunciad is the Removal of the Imperial seat of Dulness from the City to the polite world; as that of the Æneid is the Removal of the empire of Troy to Latium.109 and mind by showing the ethereally spirited poet of tradition yoked to a clumsy machine of a body which constantly craves to be fed, clothed, warmed and cleaned’ (‘Pope and Dulness’, 247). 105

Swift, Sect. VIII, of A Tale of a Tub, 157–8. See Thomas, ‘Pope and His Dunciad Adversaries’, 275–300. Ibid. 280. 108 e.g. Pope’s resentment of Giles Jacob, as revealed by James McLaverty in ‘The Dunciad as Alternative Literary History’. 109 ‘Martinus Scriblerus of the Poem’, in TE v. 51. 106 107

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It is clear that Pope’s use of an extended set of parallels with the Aeneid and the Odyssey in addition to verbal echoes of Horace and allusions to Paradise Lost all locate the concerns of the poem within a wider literary culture.110 The Tory tradition facilitated this dual perspective because it provided a model of literary criticism that was both a highly politicized attack on individual authors and a series of qualitative judgements appealing to ideals of literary merit that transcended contemporary controversy. However, although the Tory myth apparently oVered Pope a model for cultural critique that was simultaneously of its time and timeless, he could not escape the problems of anachronism. Dryden’s and Roscommon’s criticism of their contemporaries had in many ways represented the particular realities of Whiggism in the 1680s: an opposition group linked strongly to urban Dissenters, that drew on a rhetoric of populism, and circulated printed material through the extensive underground Nonconformist press. But Whig literary culture had evolved in subsequent decades. By the late 1720s Whiggism was more likely to be associated with the Hanoverian court and the Walpole regime, with the largesse of the Whig magnates and the artistic patronage that they could aVord. Pope goes some way towards acknowledging the changing socioeconomic basis of Whig literary culture. His detailing of the activities of low-life dunces is balanced by a recurring interest in the powerful patrons who supported them.111 The eVect of this is that Dulness is linked to both high culture and low culture, wealth and poverty. Pope accounts for these paradoxes in a note to the 1729 Dunciad Variorum, in which he writes: SmithWeld is the place where Bartholomew Fair was kept, whose Shews, Machines, and Dramatical Entertainments, formerly agreeable only to the Taste of the Rabble, were, by the Hero of this Poem and others of equal Genius, brought to the Theatres of Covent-Garden, Lincolns-inn-Fields, and the HayMarket, to be the reigning Pleasures of the Court and Town. This happened in the Year 1725, and continued to the Year 1728. (A. I. 2 n.; B. I. 2 n.)

What has changed about contemporary literature, he suggests, is that the rightful equation of high social status with high art has been undermined. The lines between high and low are now not so clearly 110 For a fuller account of the parallels with the Aeneid see Williams, Pope’s Dunciad, 17– 29. For a summary of other classical allusions see Howard Erskine-Hill, Pope: The Dunciad (London: Edward Arnold, 1972). 111 Rumbold, introd. to The Dunciad in Four Books, 4–5.

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deWned, and low art threatens the preserves of real literature. Yet, as we have seen, Dryden’s attacks on his contemporaries reveal that far from beginning ‘in the year 1725’, the mixing of the popular and the polite had been a source of criticism since the Restoration. Like other Scriblerian satires, The Dunciad presents an old-fashioned attack on Whig literature, while masquerading as an analysis of modern literary culture. The presence of the Tory myth in The Dunciad creates contradictions in Pope’s portrayal of the economics of the literary scene. On the one hand ‘bad’ Whig writers are poor, starving in garrets because they are no good. This is a stereotype clearly inherited from an earlier tradition of aristocratic amateurism, exempliWed by Roscommon’s disdainful reference to ‘Unhappy men, | Compell’d by want to Prostitute their Pen’ (ll. 276–7). Yet on the other hand in the brave new world of Hanoverian Britain it is these poets who receive the Wnancial rewards from the royal and aristocratic patrons that Pope, Swift, and Gay are excluded from, as Pope laments in Book 3: Gay dies un-pension’d with a hundred Friends, Hibernian Politicks, O Swift, thy doom, And Pope’s translating three whole years with Broome.

(A. III. 326–8)112

Thus money and Wnancial stability is and is not an index of merit, leading Pope into the position whereby he ‘appears to have abandoned every conceivable model of literary production’, insisting upon his independence from the taint of both commercial authorship and patronage.113 Situating Scriblerian writing within a lineage of Tory satire oVers a fresh perspective on the nature of literary evaluation in this period. It becomes evident that the Scriblerian depiction of the degeneration of modern culture was founded on a long-standing equation of bad poetry with bad politics. The adjudications of literary quality that have served to condemn Whig poets to obscurity represent one side of a battle for cultural authority in the period. The Tory accusations described above read rather diVerently once we recognize that their assertions about a ‘dunce’s’ education or religious aYliation may be rooted in rhetorical habit rather than biographical fact; or that they may simply represent a return of Whig accusations. It is certainly clear from this survey of the 112 In the four-book Dunciad the line on Pope reads: ‘And Pope’s, ten years to comment and translate’ (B. III. 332). 113 Brean Hammond, ‘ ‘‘And Hate for Arts that caus’d himself to rise’’: The Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’ (1st pub. 1986), repr. in Hammond (ed.), Pope, 143–63 (158).

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Tory tradition that ideas of literary merit had become inseparable from those of political opinion. We can also gain new insight into the nature of Scriblerian satire. In constructing their critique of duncehood, Pope, Swift, and Gay drew on a set of pre-existing arguments found in the work of writers such as Dryden, Oldham, and Roscommon, who had also presented Whig poets as populist, illiterate, mercenary, unmannerly, and mad. The notion of Scriblerian satire as an analysis of modernity is thus profoundly problematic, since in many ways it was retrospective, a form of satirical shorthand tailored to an opponent that no longer existed. As we have seen, this complex polemical tradition was based around the assertion of fundamental social and literary distinctions, in which Tory writers represented themselves as gentlemen, and their poetry as high culture; that is, as ‘literature’. In this they have been more successful in posterity than they were in their own time: the Tory poetry that forms the subject of this chapter has continued to be published and read, as ‘literature’ should be, whereas Whig poetry has faded from sight, like the ephemeral pulp it was accused of being. Yet Tory writing was not read or written in isolation in its own time, and the dialectical nature of early eighteenth-century literary culture becomes immediately evident if we start to examine the alternative Whig tradition that has been written out of literary history. The following chapters will retrieve the targets of Tory satire from the shadow of their opponents’ criticism, revealing the evolution of a distinct and vital poetic tradition whose perceived threat was seen to justify the sustained critical onslaught described above.

2

Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 This history of Whig poetry begins with the muddled origins of partypolitical debate in the Exclusion Crisis. The use of ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ as concrete badges of political identity was not as clear-cut to contemporaries as it has become with hindsight. From our own retrospective position it is tempting to identify discrete political groups and principles that were far from distinct in the confusion of contemporary debate. Moreover, very few of those writing in the 1680s actually described themselves as Whig or Tory, although they were happy to label their opponents as such as a form of abuse. Consequently, some recent historians have cautioned against applying a traditional Whig–Tory analysis to the unrest of 1679–81.1 Yet rereading the poetry of the period as a dialogue between competing political positions reveals emerging points of diVerence in the representation and articulation of contemporary politics. These diVerences are evident not only in the treatment of the topical issues of the Crisis but also in the Wguration of political writing in general. The Whig poetry of the 1680s frames a series of questions about the role of the political writer that reverberate throughout later periods: What was the relationship between political and literary discourse? What did it mean to lay claim to the voice of the people? This chapter shows the ways in which Whig writers attempted to answer these questions, drawing on notions of popular appeal and, later on, of country retreat to secure political legitimacy, and attacking their adversaries through a discourse of moral and literary reformation. A closer analysis of the dialectic between Whig and Tory poetry reinforces the argument established in the previous chapter, that many of the key terms of the Tory critique were polemically inXected: the emphasis on moderation, and the attacks on Whigs as 1 For a survey of historiographical debate over the nature of party-political identity in this period see Gary Stuart De Krey, Jonathan Scott, et al., ‘Order and Authority: Creating Party in Restoration England’, Albion, 25 (1993), 565–651.

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‘cits’ and enthusiasts had very speciWc political origins in the debates of the 1680s. The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis that followed it began with the allegations of Titus Oates, a discredited Jesuit novice, who claimed that he knew of a popish plot to assassinate the king. This largely Wctional tale rapidly gained in credibility on the discovery of the murder of the judge to whom Oates had made his depositions, coupled with the revelation of a treasonable correspondence between the Duke of York’s former secretary and Louis XIV’s confessors concerning a plot to overthrow the Church of England.2 The apparent conWrmation of the existence of a Catholic conspiracy aroused long-standing fears of threats to the Protestant religion and the Englishman’s liberties that had been developing over the course of the 1670s.3 It focused attention and concern on the political and religious implications of the eventual succession of the Duke of York, whose conversion to catholicism had been suspected since his refusal to comply with the Test Act of 1673, and whose second marriage in the same year had been to a Catholic Italian princess, Mary of Modena. Out of the hysteria over the implications of the plot a pressure group emerged, who believed that the only way to safeguard the national religion was to pass a Bill of Exclusion to prevent James from ever acceding to the throne, replacing the Catholic heir with Charles II’s illegitimate son James, Duke of Monmouth. This group was soon to be known as the Whigs, from the term ‘Whiggamore’ used for Scottish Presbyterians, while those who opposed them became known as the Tories, from a name for Irish brigands.4 Between 1679 and 1681 three Parliaments were called, in May 1679, October 1680, and March 1681, in each one of which the opposition introduced Bills of Exclusion against James. The battle over Exclusion soon extended far beyond Westminster, as it was fought out in provincial elections across the country. The press, newly released by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679, pumped out thousands of pamphlets, poems, and newspapers, as both Whigs and Tories tried to justify their political positions. 2 For more detail on the development of the plot see John Spurr, England in the 1670s: ‘This Masquerading Age’ (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 260–73; J. R. Jones, The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis 1678–1683 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961); J. P. Kenyon, The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972). 3 The best account of the years preceding the crisis is found in Spurr, England in the 1670s. 4 See R. Willman, ‘The Origins of ‘‘Whig’’ and ‘‘Tory’’ in English Political Language’, Historical Journal, 17 (1974), 247–64.

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Absalom and Achitophel and the voice of moderation The most famous poetic response to the Crisis is undoubtedly John Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, a mock-biblical satire which allegorized the Duke of Monmouth’s aspirations to the throne through the story of the temptation of Absalom by his wily counsellor Achitophel.5 By the summer of 1681, when Absalom and Achitophel was published, the political tide had began to turn in favour of the Tories and Charles II, and the imprisonment of the Whig leader the Earl of Shaftesbury on the charge of treason on 2 July marked the beginnings of a widespread reassertion of royal authority. Dryden’s poem was written in the weeks before the trial, and was clearly designed to inXuence public opinion at a critical moment in the Crisis. Yet while Absalom and Achitophel oVers a highly partial retrospective on the plot and its aftermath, and was consequently met with replies from a number of prominent Whig writers, it has rarely been considered in the context of other poetic responses to the Crisis.6 Re-evaluating the satire alongside some of these poems illustrates the ways in which contemporaries read Dryden’s poem, countering his story of seduction and deliverance with very diVerent narratives of the past two years. The Duke of Buckingham’s Poetical ReXections on a Late Poem Entituled Absalom and Achitophel (December 1681), Samuel Pordage’s Azaria and Hushai (January 1682), and Elkanah Settle’s Absalom Senior: or, Achitophel Transpros’d (April 1682) reveal a profound divergence between Whig and Tory writers on the concept of populism in the period, exposing the polemical nature of Dryden’s apparently even-handed treatment of recent history. 5 For discussions of Dryden’s use of biblical imagery see Earl Miner, Dryden’s Poetry (Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1967), 106–43; Steven Zwicker, Dryden’s Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation (Providence, NJ: Brown University Press, 1972), 83–101. 6 While critics have been ready to trace Dryden’s debts to classical and earlier English canonical writers, they have neglected the work of other contemporary writers. The most detailed study of the satire in the context of other political writing is Philip Harth’s extensive examination of Dryden’s Tory propaganda in Pen for a Party: Dryden’s Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). However, although Harth’s meticulous research has done much to link Dryden’s presentation of the Exclusion controversy to existing Tory arguments, it does not address the poem in relation to competing Whig accounts of the crisis. On Dryden and other writers see Kathryn Walls, ‘To ‘‘Prosecute the Plot’’: A Spenser allusion in Absalom and Achitophel ’, ANQ 4 (1991), 122–4; Albert Poyet, ‘Echoes of Ovid in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel ’, Notes and Queries, 28 (1981), 52–3; Reginald Berry, ‘Chaucer and Absalom and Achitophel ’, Notes and Queries, 26 (1979), 522–3; A. D. Ferry, Milton and the Miltonic Dryden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

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Absalom and Achitophel presents itself as a moderate intervention in a debate otherwise characterized by extremism and political spin, seeming to oVer a normative model of political rhetoric and action that is contrasted with the fanaticism and deviancy of the opposition. It advertises its claims to moderation and impartiality from its title pages, with a foreword which claims that great poetry can transcend party faction and ‘if a Poem have a Genius ’ it will force its own reception in the World. For there’s a sweetness in good Verse, which Tickles even while it Hurts’ (ll. 13–15).7 The Laureate stresses that he hopes to ‘Extenuate, Palliate and Indulge’ (l. 14). This profession of moderation has been seen as Dryden’s attempt to assert ‘Christian’ values which would transcend the partisanship of contemporary debate: James Winn, the Laureate’s most recent biographer, asserts that ‘In Absalom and Achitophel [ . . . ] Dryden found a way to make lasting art out of this apparent contradiction between the Christian ideal of moderation and the political necessity for vengeance’.8 However, as Philip Harth has shown, Dryden’s emphasis on moderation was clearly derived from contemporary court rhetoric, where it served a speciWc political function.9 Charles II had used his Declaration of April 1681 to stress the unreasonable conduct of the House of Commons in the last two Parliaments, but he had not launched a direct attack on the Dissenters. Without threatening retribution, the Declaration had promised that the king would rule by law, and would summon parliaments frequently. It also claimed that while Parliament had acted ‘arbitrarily’, the king had acted for the security of the nation. In adopting this nominally moderate stance, Charles was eVectively occupying his critics’ moral high ground: where previously the opposition had claimed that the court had acted 7 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel (1681), in Works, ii. 3. Further page and line references in the main are to this edition. As Michael McKeon observes, the aestheticizing of the poem is partly a product of Dryden’s presentation of his material: the tendentious nature of the political and religious arguments the poem contains is occluded by the Wction created by the biblical parallel (McKeon, ‘Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel ’, in Felicity Laura and Nussbaum Brown (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (London: Methuen, 1987), 23–40. 8 James Winn, John Dryden and His World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 345. See also Bruce King: ‘if Dryden’s achievement has not been fully appreciated, it is because our knowledge of the poem’s political occasion misdirects our response away from its imaginative patterns’ (King, ‘Absalom and Achitophel: A Reevaluation’, in Bruce King (ed.), Dryden’s Mind and Art (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), 65–83). 9 Steven Zwicker and Derek Hirst have also emphasized the need to consider Dryden’s apparent moderation as a form of political rhetoric (see Zwicker and Hirst, ‘Rhetoric and Disguise: Political Language and Political Argument in Absalom and Achitophel’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 39–55).

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arbitrarily, his claim is that the court is the party of moderation, the opposition that of fanaticism. This rhetorical strategy was characteristic of the polemic produced by the Exclusion Crisis, which was dominated by an ongoing debate over the twin concerns of moderation and fanaticism as writers from both sides oVered their respective representations of the political will of ‘the people’. Dryden’s poem is essentially structured through a rhetorical balancing of the rational norm and the deviant other. In Absalom and Achitophel the court and the king are presented as the party of reason and moderation, while the Whig exclusionists are linked with excess and fanaticism. In the Wrst Wfteen lines of the poem Dryden describes Charles’s promiscuity as an act of generosity, and abundance, in which the king imparts ‘His vigorous warmth’ (l. 8) to willing recipients. Opposition writers had long attacked the king’s sexual and Wnancial proXigacy: Andrew Marvell’s Last Instructions to a Painter (1667) had famously linked the king’s unbridled sexual indulgence to political ruin. It has often been noted that in eVectively acknowledging such contemporary criticism of the king’s sexual promiscuity Dryden revealed the even-handed nature of his satire.10 Yet what has not been recognized is that Dryden also reverses the terms of that criticism to attack the king’s subjects. As part of their assault on the king opposition critics had depicted Charles as a debauched and pampered monarch unable to see beyond the gratiWcation of his own desires: in Absalom and Achitophel the king is presented as generous in his lust, while it is the king’s subjects, the ‘factious Jews’, who are spoilt and debauched: ‘God’s pamper’d people, whom, debauch’d with ease, | No King could govern, nor no God could please’ (ll.47–8). This underscores one of the central arguments of the poem, which is that it is an ignorant and selfseeking crowd that is responsible for the escalation of recent political hysteria. The Whig and Tory polemic of the previous two years had been characterized by an increasingly Werce battle over the representation of ‘the people’. Whig mass petitions were answered by a series of loyal Tory addresses and ‘abhorrences’, signed by corporations, JPs, grand juries, and oYcers of the militia, which sought to demonstrate that the real voice of the people lay on the side of the supporters of king and court.11 As the anonymous author of A Letter from Scotland (1681) asked: ‘I 10 See e.g. Steven Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 132; Winn, John Dryden and his World, 351–2. 11 For a full discussion of this debate, see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

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would fain understand what is meant by the People? For now every man calls himself the People’.12 This contest over what ‘the people’ actually signiWed is central to the dynamics of Dryden’s poem. Michael Conlon has asserted that the Laureate depicted the crisis as ‘a radical attempt by the Whig party to subvert the established government and to impose the will of the few upon the many’.13 But this is in fact the reverse of the truth, for the Laureate’s assault on populism oVsets the vulgar many against the noble few. The latter, the statesmen who defend the monarch and the Constitution, are contrasted with the ‘Factious Croud’ (l. 68), the ‘Solymæan Rout’ (l. 513), the ‘Rascall Rabble’ (l. 579). In Dryden’s account the Whig leaders manipulate not only the crowd itself but the rhetoric of the people: thus Achitophel bribes Absalom with a spurious rhetoric of nationhood: ‘Thy longing Countries Darling and Desire; | Their cloudy Pillar, and their guardian Fire’ (ll. 232–3), and we are told that ‘pity never Ceases to be shown | To him, who makes the peoples wrongs his own’ (ll. 725–6). Yet, as the quotations above demonstrate, Dryden was himself playing with the rhetoric of ‘the people’. His attack on popular politics involves a lack of distinction between legitimate public sentiment—the voice of ‘the people’—and the ignorant intervention of the masses—‘the crowd’. In a subtle shift in emphasis, the two become synonymous: What shall we think! can People give away Both for themselves and Sons, their Native sway? Then they are left Defensless, to the Sword Of each unbounded Arbitrary Lord: And Laws are vain, by which we Right enjoy, If Kings unquestion’d can those laws destroy. Yet, if the Crowd be Judge of Wt and Just, And Kings are onely OYcers in trust, Then this resuming Cov’nant was declar’d When Kings were made, or is for ever bar’d

(ll. 759–68)

Absalom and Achitophel is an attack on popular politics as much as an assault on Shaftesbury and the Whig leaders. As the lines quoted above demonstrate, the people become synonymous with the crowd, who are the source of the conXict. The aristocrats and inXuential Nonconformist 12 A Letter from Scotland: Written Occasionally upon the Speech made by a Noble Peer (London, 1681), 1. 13 Michael J. Conlon, ‘The Passage on Government in Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel ’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 78 (1979), 17–32 (19).

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merchants, who represented to many Tories the real threat amongst the Whigs, are occluded in Dryden’s portrayal of an opposition with an overwhelmingly populist power base.14 In Absalom and Achitophel it is the ‘small but faithful Band’ of Tories who ‘tempt th’united Fury of the Land’ (ll. 914–16) that represents the true voice of the nation. David’s Wnal speech makes his attack on his subjects explicit: ‘But Save me most from my Petitioners. | Unsatiate as the barren Womb or Grave; | God cannot Grant so much as they can Crave’ (ll. 986–8). The Whig writers responding to Dryden focused their criticism on his representation of populism, and his negative deWnition of public opinion.15 The anonymous author of Satyr to His Muse (1682) (possibly Thomas Shadwell) did not miss the laureate’s rhetorical conXation of crowd with people, and declared that The peoples voice, of old, the voice of God, Thou call’st the voice of an unruly Crowd; Crowds are the Fools,— That Flock to thine, and Durfeys Loyal Plays, And give Implicite Claps on your Third Days; About the Stage of Mountebanck they Wait, And Whoop at Cudgels, or a broken Pate, But have like thee, no Interest in the State.16

In this poem there is a signiWcantly diVerent sense of ‘the people’ to that found in Dryden’s satire: here, the people are the political nation, who have, and should have, a role in public debate, as opposed to the ‘crowd’, who have no interest in aVairs of state and are associated instead with a mindless consumption of popular entertainment. We Wnd a similar emphasis in Samuel Pordage’s mock-biblical poem Azaria and Hushai (1682). Here Monmouth is the virtuous young prince Azaria and Shaftesbury is Hushai, the wise counsellor urging caution. Pordage’s poem concludes with a lengthy passage on the relationship between king and people, in which the deWnition of the people is one that grants them political agency, should their king transgress: 14 On the perceived threat posed by aristocratic and wealthy Whigs see Richard L. Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 13. 15 Although see Buckingham’s Poetical ReXections, published by Richard Janeway in 1682, which announced itself on its title page to be the work of ‘a Person of Honour’. The poem focuses on the personal aVront given to the individuals of quality lampooned in Dryden’s satire. 16 [Thomas Shadwell], Satyr to His Muse (1682), in Works, v. 268.

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But if that Kings the tyes of Laws do break, The People, without fault, have leave to speak; To shew their Grievances, and seek redress By lawful means, when Kings and Lords oppress.17

This series of poems of 1681–2 seems to suggest that for a Tory writer like Dryden ‘the people’ meant something very diVerent from that which it signiWed for contemporary opposition writers. Absalom and Achitophel is a poem designed to win popular support for the loyalist cause. Yet at the same time it denounces the notion of ‘popularity’ as an index of political merit or success. Mark Knights has persuasively portrayed the Exclusion Crisis as a polemical contest to represent the will of the people. He argues that shifts in party allegiance after 1682 stem not from a transformation of the Whigs of 1678 into the Tories of 1681 but rather a struggle among ideologically committed men to represent their will as the will of the nation.18 However, what the texts discussed above indicate is that beneath an apparently shared appeal to popular support there lay radically diVerent interpretations of what exactly ‘the people’ meant. They also reveal that a debate about the role and nature of the public writer was intrinsic to the polemic of the Exclusion Crisis. And, Wnally, they show that all Exclusion Crisis literature was partisan: none of these poems has a claim to disinterest or moderation that is anything other than a rhetorical strategy.

The Medall We can see these arguments about the agency of popular opinion developing through Dryden’s later, and more vitriolic, satire on the crisis. The Medall, A Satyre Against Sedition was published three months later than Absalom and Achitophel and in its stridency it reveals the changing polemical landscape of the Exclusion debate. As we have seen, in the earlier poem Dryden used his preface and the rhetorical balancing of reason and excess to suggest an authorial impartiality in his presentation of the Crisis. However, in The Medall the tone is no longer moderate: a rational norm is only implicit, and visible merely as a contrast with the demonization of the opposition as crazed Dissenters. 17 18

Samuel Pordage, Azaria and Hushai (London, 1682), 31. Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 346.

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‘The people’ have become a rabid group of religious zealots, whose meaningless cant is an index of their lack of political legitimacy. The Medall ’s ostensible subject is the outcome of the Earl of Shaftesbury’s trial for high treason at the Old Bailey, in November 1681. The jury famously returned the bill marked ‘ignoramus’, and, to celebrate, a medal was struck, which depicted Shaftesbury on one side and a view of London Bridge and the Tower with the inscription Laetamur (we rejoice) beneath it. This emblematic coupling of the opposition cause and the City of London illustrates the increasing signiWcance of the representation of the London crowds. Dryden’s poem uses the trope of the medal to attack Shaftesbury, and emphasizes his connections with the City of London and its Nonconformists, so that the City becomes the embodiment of the popular Dissent that Dryden satirizes. Where the foreword to Absalom and Achitophel had begun with Dryden’s professed desire to appeal to moderates on both sides, The Medall is unashamedly partisan in its approach to political diVerence. The satire is prefaced by an ‘Epistle to the Whigs’ in which the Laureate mounts an attack on Whig politics, Whig writers, and Nonconformists. Throughout The Medall Dryden oVers an immoderate attack on Nonconformity as a way of establishing the moderate status of his own position. Nonconformity is linked with the City, and with republicanism, madness, chaos, and bad writing. The Medall provoked a series of poetic responses from Whig authors which countered Dryden’s images of chaotic and powerless speech by reasserting the validity of popular protest, and drawing on the rhetoric of ‘plain speech’ to authorize their oppositional critique. As Tim Harris and other historians of the period have emphasized, the relationship between the Anglican Church and Dissent was perhaps the greatest problem in late Stuart domestic policy.19 The Act of Uniformity of 1662 had eVectively drawn an arbitrary line across English religious life. After 1662 all Puritans, Presbyterians, Baptists, Quakers, and other Protestant groups outside the Anglican Church were designated Dissenters. The sporadic enactment of a severe penal code against Protestant Nonconformity inevitably alienated Dissenters subject to heavy Wnes and imprisonment. The relationship between Nonconformists and the established Church was fraught: some Puritans and Nonconformists attended their parish church whilst also going to their own 19 For fuller accounts of the religious disputes of the period see John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England 1646–1689 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991) and Tim Harris, Paul Seaward and Mark Goldie (eds.), The Politics of Religion in Restoration England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).

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meetings; others never attended Anglican services. In addition, the spectrum of religious diVerence included within the category of Dissent created problems: many Presbyterians did not like being grouped together with Baptists or Quakers. And although Dissenters claimed to want religious toleration, the very notion of what they understood by toleration was divided: some wanted to rejoin a more loosely organized national Church; others wanted to set up their own Churches under the national protection of the monarch. However, beyond all these diVerences, many Dissenters were increasingly united and vocal in their suspicions of the political aspirations of the Anglican Church, and its iure divino churchmen. They claimed that the Church of England had betrayed its principles, and was hopelessly entangled with its popish past. As the Exclusion debate progressed, this religious conXict increased. Many of the pamphlets produced during the 1680–1 Parliament discussed the status of Dissenters, while MPs debated the merits of comprehension versus indulgence.20 Tory propaganda became increasingly hostile towards Dissent, and as the loyalists began to gain ground following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, the attack on Dissent intensiWed further.21 Conformists argued that Dissenters were dividing Protestantism and thus weakening it in the face of popery, and they began to appropriate the rhetoric of Protestant unity that had characterized earlier Whig polemic. A spate of pamphlets urged Nonconformists to join the Church of England as it stood, arguing that Dissenters were in league with the papists. The Medall was conceived amid this debate about Dissent. In the poem Dryden reduces the whole of the exclusionist cause to the question of Dissent and, like many other contemporary Tory pamphlets, he asserts that the real threat to political and religious liberties comes from radicals and republicans designing their own form of godly hegemony. He foretells a future under Whig rule in which the competing sects will vie with one another to assert their own forms of arbitrary power: The Presbyter, puft up with spiritual Pride, Shall on the Necks of the lewd Nobles ride: His Brethren damn, the Civil Pow’r defy;

20

See Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 288. To the extent that in April 1680 a moderate Anglican clergyman such as Bishop Tillotson—formerly an ally of Shaftesbury and Exclusion—preached a sermon arguing that no one should aVront an established religion (see Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 262). 21

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And parcel out Republique Prelacy. But short shall be his Reign; his rigid Yoke And Tyrant Pow’r will puny Sects provoke; And Frogs and Toads’ and all the Tadpole Train Will croak to Heav’n for help, from this devouring Crane.22

(ll. 298–305)

For many of the poets responding to The Medall, this attack reinforced fears of retribution and of the persecution of Dissenters under a newly restored government authority. Samuel Pordage’s reply, The Medal Revers’d, is subtitled A Satyre against Persecution (1682). In the ‘Epistle to the Tories’ which prefaces the poem he asks ‘what means this new Persecution of Dissentors, in the midst of peace and quiet, but another irritation if possible, to some insurrection?’.23 Parodying Dryden’s lines on the tadpole sects, he voices Dissenting suspicions of episcopal power and the designs of the Anglican Church, and declares that Oppression will grow bold, the Tadpole-Priests, Shall lift above the Lords, their Priestly Crests. T’attempt or struggle then will be in vain, For Persecution will a Tyrant Reign; Her fatal pow’r will then be understood, And she will glut her self with Martyrs Blood.24

Where Dryden had depicted a popular insurgency by the Dissenting masses as the main threat to national stability, Pordage presents the Anglican clerisy as the real enemies of state and religion, and the tyranny of their political ambition as the central threat to the status quo. Dryden’s attack on Dissent in The Medall was not conWned to worship alone: both poem and preface suggest that abuses in religious practice are paralleled in abuses in literature. The Medall, and the Whig responses to it highlight the overlap between political and literary discourse in this period, since the argument about political authority is bound up with an argument about linguistic authority. In the ‘Epistle to the Whigs’ Dryden makes a clear identiWcation between Dissent and Whig writers, proclaiming, as we have seen, that: ‘A Dissenter in Poetry from Sense and English, will make as good a Protestant Rhymer, as a

22 John Dryden, The Medall. A Satyre Against Sedition (1682), in Works, ii. 52. Further line references in the text are to this edition. 23 Samuel Pordage, The Medal Revers’d: A Satyre Against Persecution (London, 1682), 6. 24 Pordage, The Medal Revers’d, 30.

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Dissenter from the Church of England a Protestant Parson’.25 Further on in the poem Dryden again draws on the rhetoric of anti-enthusiasm that was so fundamental to attacks on Whig writing. In his depiction of the debate, the Earl of Shaftesbury’s political hypocrisy is made manifest in his attempts to mimic Puritan enthusiasts: he is seen as doubly false, as he attempts to feign inspiration that is in itself inauthentic: He cast himself into the Saint-like mould; Groan’d, sigh’d and pray’d, while Godliness was gain; The lowdest Bagpipe of the squeaking Train.

(ll. 33–5)

Shaftesbury is not the only enthusiast. Dryden resumes his attack on the crowd, claiming that ‘Nor Faith nor Reason make thee at a stay, | Thou leapst o’r all eternal truths, in thy Pindarique way!’ (ll. 93–4). Here the correlation between literary and religious forms is made explicit. Dryden makes a link between Whig popular politics and the poems of Pindar, whose complex versiWcation and arguments were long seen as exemplifying poetic inspiration unmodiWed by reason. The crowd is as ungoverned and Xighty as a Pindaric ode, and Whig rhetoric and polemic are inseparable from Whig politics. In fact, Dryden goes as far as to claim that rhetoric is all there is to Whig argument: ‘faith and reason’ are the preserve of the loyalists alone, he maintains, employing again the opposition between rationalism and fanaticism that we have seen in Absalom and Achitophel. He echoes charges made by other Tory satirists: the author of A Loyal Satyr Against Whiggism (1682), possibly Thomas Sprat, claims that As we’re in truth, they’re positive in lies; What one but says, the other straight will swear, Let it be right or wrong, or foul or fair, It is all one, since they the Godly are.26

These Tory satirists were asserting the truth claims of their own polemic by undermining the signifying power of the speech of their opponents. In their responses to such attacks Whig poets sought to Wnd a language of opposition that would counter their images of hypocrisy, empty rhetoric, and false inspiration. In Absalom Senior, of April 1682, Elkanah Settle links the notion of false inspiration and eloquence not to

25 26

Dryden, preface to The Medall, in Works, ii. 42. A Loyal Satyr against Whiggism (London, 1682), 2.

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Dissent but to Jesuit casuistry.27 Achitophel, here representing the Earl of Halifax, believes himself to be ‘more than half inspir’d’ (l. 1013) following a visitation from the spirit of Edward Coleman, the Duke of York’s confessor, and dreams of priestly grandeur, ‘an ephod, miter, and a cope’ (l.1002)28 Retiring with his books to his closet, we are told that There, for all needful arts in this extreme, For knotty sophistry t’ a limber theme, Long brooding ere the mass to shape was brought, And after many a tugging, heaving thought, Together a well-order’d speech he draws . . . . . . . . Wondrous the champion, glorious the success. So powerful eloquence, so strong was wit; And with such force the easy windfalls hit. (ll. 1015–19, 1024–6)

In these lines ‘eloquence’ and ‘wit’ are seen as a form of sophistry, as a linguistic strategy with which to legitimate dubious political argument. Other Whig writers oVered a similar critique of their Tory opponents’ style. In The Medal Revers’d, Samuel Pordage counters Dryden’s ‘Epistle to the Whigs’ with his own ‘Epistle to the Tories’ in which he argues: you Tories think you now have the better end of the staV, you have the Law, you have the great ones, you have Power, on your side; & therefore may do what you will, and abuse whom you please, the Whiggs must not open their mouths, and let them speak never so reverently of the King, all is blasphemy and canting in your Ears. You brag of your Poets and your Orators, and that all the witt lies on your side; be it so, we will not strive with you about it, we pretend to honesty and justice, that shall make amends for our ill Language and Verses.29

This passage and the lines from Absalom Senior illuminate contemporary debate over the political implications of literary discourse. It has become a critical commonplace that the Restoration was the ‘age of wit’, the triumph of an Augustan poetics that privileged form, eloquence, 27 On the existing critique of casuistry see Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); Albert R. Jonsen, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988). 28 Elkanah Settle, Absalom Senior (London, 1682), in POAS iii. 151. Further line references are to this edition. 29 Pordage, preface to The Medal Revers’d, 7.

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and verbal ease. Steven Zwicker has demonstrated the political dimensions of this aesthetic, arguing that Dryden inherited from Davenant and Hobbes an emphasis on wit as an alternative to the politics and poetics of inspiration that they saw as characterizing Nonconformist and republican writing. For these writers wit combined reason, instinct, and design, in opposition to the political and social radicalism associated with revelation and visionary poetics.30 What the Whig poems of the 1680s show is that this conWguration of wit and socio-political authority that is so familiar to us now as the style of the age was contested by contemporaries who privileged other discursive qualities. For both Pordage and Settle wit has become a term of abuse, a stylish froth above a moral void. In Pordage’s satire Dryden’s wit is no match for ‘honesty and justice’, and where the Laureate had attacked the writing of his opposition as false inspiration and empty rhetoric, Pordage lays claim to the topos of plain speech in preference to the empty Xourishes of the Laureate’s wit. Moreover, where Dryden had linked popular opposition to the untrammelled excesses of Pindaric style, Pordage envisions his side of the political discourse entirely diVerently. He represents the attack on Whig writing as an attempt to silence all opposition: for him, the voicing of political dissent is not specious ‘cant’ but political agency, and for the people to speak is for them to exercise their constitutional liberties. In the poem itself he goes on to make the ringing accusation that Power serves for Law, the wrong too oft’s made right; And they are damn’d, who against power dare Wght. Wit rides triumphant in Power’s Chariot born, And deprest Opposites beholds with scorn.31

London’s people Pordage’s defence of opposition discourse, with its emphasis on the rights of ‘th’opprest’, picks up on the debate about who ‘the people’ really are that we have seen in Absalom and Achitophel and its responses. However, in The Medall, as I have suggested, Dryden’s attack on popular politics is more speciWcally focused on London as the site of civil unrest. The city of London was the home of one-tenth of the national popula30

Zwicker, Lines of Authority, 21–5.

31

Pordage, The Medal Revers’d, 1.

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tion. It was here that the Whigs applied pressure for Exclusion by mobilizing mass support in the form of petitioning campaigns and the pope-burning rituals held on 17 November.32 In London the Tories saw the most visible signs of the populist politics they feared. Much of the debate about the status of Whig popular support inevitably involved competing images of the city itself. Was it, as Tory propagandists suggested, a hotbed of unruly radicalism, or, as Whig writers claimed, the loyal capital of Protestantism? As the Exclusion Crisis progressed, the focus on the city grew more and more intense, reaching a head during the shrieval elections of the summer of 1682, when Charles, realizing that control of the city’s legal and political machinery was vital to his reassertion of authority, used his newly elected Tory Lord Mayor to nullify the election of two Whig candidates to shrieval posts.33 The Medall was written in the midst of debate about Charles’s decision to begin quo warranto proceedings limiting the city’s charter and its right to self-governance. Thus a large part of Dryden’s criticism is levelled at the disloyalty of the London citizens that the king was in the process of suppressing. He asks of the people of London: ‘what vengeance will they urge, | Whose Ordures neither Plague nor Fire can purge’? (ll. 187–8). For Whig writers, on the other hand, the city represented far more than a site of popular unrest. It had an emblematic signiWcance as an embodiment of many of the political freedoms associated with the ancient Constitution, a historical construct centring on the immemorial, timeless existence of king, lords, and commons that together governed England, which was believed to guarantee the fundamental political liberty of the people. To many Whigs the assault on the city and its charters seemed an ominous sign of things to come. Thomas Shadwell’s reply to The Medall, The Medal of John Bayes (1682), takes the form of a defence of London’s political heritage: But some foul Monsters thy rich womb does bear, That, like base Vipers, would thy bowels tear; Who would thy ancient Charters give away, And all thy stronger Liberties betray: Those Elder Customs our great Ancestors

32 On the Whig petitioning campaigns see Mark Knights, ‘London Petitions and Parliamentary Politics in 1679’, Parliamentary History, 12 (1993), 29–46; ‘London’s ‘‘Monster’’ Petition of 1680’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 39–67. 33 For more detail on the elections see Howard Schless, POAS iii. 207–16.

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Have from the Saxon times convey’d to ours, Of which no Pers’nal Crimes a loss can cause, By Magna Charta backt, and by succeeding Laws.34

With its references to customs, Saxon times, and Magna Carta, Shadwell’s poem frames its support of the city in the language of the ancient Constitution, and London is Wgured as a bulwark of liberty.35 The debate over the city was also characterized by competing representations of trade, and of the economic practices which sustained so many of London’s Whig inhabitants. The links between trade and early Whiggism were strong: a considerable section of Whig support in the city came from its mercantile population, who had long been hostile to Charles II’s foreign policies. Their opposition was partly based on economic and partly on ideological grounds.36 Since the early 1670s there had been a transition in popular opinion from anti-Dutch to antiFrench sentiment among many English merchants and opposition MPs, who complained that the French represented the real threat to English trade. They argued that Charles’s Dutch wars left the French free to usurp the trade of both England and Holland, and prevented English merchants from dealing with the Dutch. During the Restoration period Nonconformity became ever more associated with the manufacturing and trading part of the nation, and the urban middling classes increasingly succeeded the Puritan gentry as the chief sponsors of Dissent.37 There were a signiWcant number of Nonconformists who felt that England should not wage war against the Dutch, who, unlike the French, were fellow-Protestants. In addition, many of the most inXuential merchants, like Thomas Papillon and John Dubois, were French Huguenots, who were Wercely anticatholic and increasingly worried about the treatment of the Huguenot population in France. 34

Thomas Shadwell, The Medal of John Bayes (1682), in Works, v. 259. On the use of the concept of ancient constitutionalism in the seventeenth century see J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957); Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St Edward’s ‘Laws’ in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 36 On the gradual alienation of London merchants from Charles’s policies see Margaret Priestley, ‘London Merchants and Opposition Politics in Charles II’s Reign’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 29 (1956), 205–20. See also Steven Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Hatred of Holland to Hatred of France’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333–62. 37 See John Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 144. 35

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The events of late 1681 and 1682 magniWed these tensions. Out of the turmoil of municipal politics came a spate of Tory comedies, such as John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), Aphra Behn’s The City Heiress (1682), and Tom D’Urfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), all of which parodied the archetypal prosperous City Whig. Elsewhere, Tory writers presented trade as both ungentlemanly and un-English. In The Interest of the Three Kingdoms (1680) Roger L’Estrange invoked ‘the public Spirit’ (p.10) and stated that the English were a nation fundamentally unlike the Dutch, who were ‘addicted only to TraYc, Navigation, Handicrafts, and sordid Thrift’ (p. 14).38 In The Medall Dryden’s attack on the City Dissenters is closely linked to their commercial activities: In Gospel phrase their Chapmen they betray: Their Shops are Dens, the Buyer is their Prey. The Knack of Trades is living on the Spoyl; They boast, e’vn when each other they beguile.

(ll. 191–4)

He also presents the aZuence brought by the port of London as a corrupting evil: I call’d thee [the Thames] Nile; the parallel will stand: Thy tydes of Wealth o’rXow the fattend Land; Yet Monsters from thy Large increase we Wnd; Engender’d on the Slyme thou leav’st behind.

(ll. 171–4)

The cyclical Xoods and retreats of the Nile had long been associated with the excess and corruption of Egypt itself, a civilization brought low by its self-consuming luxury.39 Dryden’s description of the Thames oVers an image of London’s great river very far from that at the end of Annus Mirabilis (1667), where he had described London with her ‘silver Thames, her own domestick Floud’ who ‘Shall bear her Vessels, like a sweeping Train’ (ll. 1189–90).40 These images of London’s gains as a corrupting form of excess echo contemporary criticism of the city’s role in trade. Some saw the capital’s apparently unbounded import and consumption of luxury goods as a disproportionate squandering of the nation’s wealth, which was not balanced by similar levels of export of native produce.41 However, it 38

Roger L’Estrange, The Interest of the Three Kingdoms (London, 1680), 10, 14. In the Metamorphoses (1. 422–9) Ovid claims that monstrous half-live forms of men had been discovered in the slime left by the receding Nile. 40 John Dryden, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (1667), in Works, i. 104. 41 Carew Reynell complained that ‘the trade doth much exhaust our money’, since the nation was being swamped by quantities of French luxuries or German linen without 39

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was equally possible to view the capital’s role in the circulation of trade as a route to national prosperity. The Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, 1663, and 1673 had created a body of legislation that ensured that all goods destined for and coming from English plantations had to be shipped in English vessels and had to travel via England, where they generated large amounts of revenue from taxation. Thus London was the centre for the re-export of goods and materials brought from east to west, its role in the Atlantic trade making it a prominent supplier as well as a consumer of imported goods.42 In the polemic generated by the shrieval elections, and the debate over the status of the capital, Whig writers emphasized precisely this sense of the city as the centre of supply which linked the nations of the world through its river commerce. In The Medal of John Bayes Shadwell proVers an encomium to the city as trading centre: In spight of lawless men and Popish Xames, (Inrich’d by thy much lov’d and bounteous Thames) May into thee the Wealth of Nations Xow, And to thy height all Europes Cities bow.43

Similarly, in his long poem on the shrieval elections, Midsummer Moon: Or the Liveryman’s Complaint (1682), the opposition poet Thomas Thompson describes how The stately Nereids, with the swelling tide, Rich freights from all the universe provide; Whate’er of rarities the East can shew, With all the glittering entrails of Peru, Cargoes of myrrh and frankincense they bring, And pearls and diamonds for an oVering.44

Thompson’s passage, with its full complement of nereids, naiads, and Thames mythology, signals backwards to earlier poetic models, not only to Dryden’s London of Annus Mirabilis but also to Denham’s Cooper’s making any money from its own goods (Reynell, The True English Interest (1674), quoted by Spurr in England in the 1670s, 131). 42 One contemporary commentator argued: ‘this trade of our plantations doth not only increase both [our shipping and our treasure] equally, but with the increase of itself increaseth also the limits of our dwelling; adding as it increaseth not only the trade of one climate after another to us, but joining the countries themselves and the inheritance of them as well as their trades to these his Majesty’s territories and dominions’ (Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Rawlinson, in Seventeenth-Century Economic Documents, ed. Joan Thursk and J. P. Cooper (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 536). 43 Shadwell, Medal of John Bayes, in Works, v. 260. 44 Thomas Thompson, Midsummer Moon: Or the Liveryman’s Complaint (London, 1682), in POAS iii. 259.

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Hill (1642) and Waller’s To My Lord Protector (1655). By the time of the Exclusion Crisis Whig writers had appropriated this tradition of imperial poetry. Through it they represented London’s people not just as the centre of the nation, but the centre of the whole world.45

Country and city So far the representations of the political nation and its people found in the poems described above have polarized into Tory attacks on the city of London, and Whig defences of the city and its trading interests. Attacks on cits clearly became part of the satiric vocabulary of Tory loyalists in the early 1680s, and Whig writers in turn defended the liberties and voices of London’s people. Yet London was complex enough to sustain multiple deWnitions, and from an alternate Whig perspective it could be represented negatively as a place of display and consumption, characterized by the high life of rakes and beaus. As time passed, opposition writers increasingly associated London with this alternative set of political and cultural identities, drawing on the critique of vice and proXigacy in the Stuart court associated with the ‘country’ opposition of the early 1670s.46 Historians of the seventeenth century have long sought to root the origins of the Whig party in the country opposition.47 Central to its ideology was a politics of virtue: an emphasis on the excess and corruption of court life, and on the corresponding independence and political integrity of those outside it—that is, in the country. Over the course of the 1660s the notion of ‘the country’ had gradually acquired a partisan force, coming to represent an alliance of land-based gentry against newly monied upstarts, of open political debate against cabals, and of English patriots against foreign intruders.48 45 On this imperial tradition see Karen O’Brien, ‘Protestantism and the Poetry of Empire’, in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain 1660–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 46–62. 46 The question of whether or not this country opposition formed a distinct ‘party’ is a vexed one. In 1673 William Temple described as many as four separate groups within the opposition to the court, whose demands ranged from those who wanted to bring down Charles’s cabal, Buckingham, Lauderdale, and Arlington, to those who wanted to persuade Charles to divorce Catherine of Braganza. For a summary of this debate see Tim Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party ConXict in a Divided Society 1660–1715 (London: Longman, 1993), 63. 47 On the development of the country opposition see Spurr, England in the 1670s, 77–9. 48 Sir Robert Howard’s banned play The Country Gentleman (1676) illustrates the ways in which country ideology was articulated in dramatic form: the play centres around a

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For many Whig poets writing during the early 1680s country rhetoric became increasingly useful as a way of articulating their opposition to the government. At the same time that they were being pilloried by their opponents as City tradesmen and urban low-lifes they were busy forging political and rhetorical links with the country. This new emphasis was related to the political circumstances of the Tory reaction, and its implications for print culture. From 1681 onwards the government initiated a harsh campaign to reassert royal authority and many exclusionists began to lose conWdence in the prospect of immediate action. Some of the moderate Whig activists responded to the political situation by making peace with Charles II and retreating from the public arena.49 Others resolved to use violent intervention to change the succession. Groups of activists began the conspiratorial plotting that was to culminate in the Rye House Plot and, later, the Monmouth Rebellion.50 However, regardless of the extent of their commitment to active resistance, Whig writers had little room to articulate their political agenda in print in this period. After 1682 the government drew on all its legal machinery to silence the network of publishers and printers that had circulated so much exclusionist propaganda.51 Because of the suppression of the Whig publishers, and the imposition of heavy government censorship, far less Whig verse and drama was published between 1682 and 1687 than at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Not only had the opposition lost their electoral grip on London, but they were also losing the public discursive spaces of the playhouse and the group of ‘good’ country gentry, who are oVset by Wgures representing FrenchiWed Restoration courtiers, and scheming politicians (see Annabel Patterson, ‘The Country Gentleman: Howard, Marvell, Dryden in the Theater of Politics’, SEL 25 (1985), 491–509). However, country rhetoric was not exclusively employed by a single group of political opponents to the court. A whole range of pamphleteers were eager to associate their message with the sturdy political independence of the country gentry, and the pamphlet genres of letters to friends in the country or appeals to or from the country were all employed to evoke a certain set of convictions and attitudes. Despite the fact that the lives and fortunes of most of the gentry and aristocracy revolved around both city and country, the polemical agency of the provinces outside London had an appeal for groups across the political spectrum (see Spurr, England in the 1670s, 161–5). 49 On those who did not retreat see Melinda Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (Pennsylvania, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). 50 For a full narrative of the plotting of this decade see Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom. 51 In April 1682 the Council interrogated the Whig booksellers Langley Curtis and Richard Janeway for having allegedly printed false and seditious news. In the winter of the same year Henry Care, Richard Baldwin, and Jane Curtis were prosecuted, while Eleanor and Francis Smith were Wned in April 1683 for continuing to publish radical works (see Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 15–20, 40–9).

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pamphlet. Occasions that might be expected to prompt poetic outpourings, such as the deaths of Russell and Sidney, were mourned largely in manuscript verse.52 Blair Worden emphasizes the extent to which mainstream Whigs were anxious to distance themselves from the socalled ‘Whig martyrs’ Sidney and William Russell, who feature very little in late seventeenth-century Whig propaganda.53 The public printed dialogue between Whig and Tory poets that we have seen in the early 1680s was no longer possible. The idiom of country retirement and retreat oVered many writers a way of articulating their opposition without seeming to do so. Consequently, it became the dominant motif of Whig poetry during the later 1680s. The voice of opposition changes after 1682 from representing the will of the people of the city towards the notion of retreat. This shift is exempliWed in Shadwell’s 1682 satire on Dryden’s The Tory-Poets: My Muse the Court will leave, contemn the Stage, A long Farewell to so prophane an Age: Debaucht to Lust, to Avarice and Pride, Who’de be condemn’d to Court or City Pews, Be damn’d to nonsence and the stink of Stews; To wait for Pensions who would take delight, And be at last but a sham’d Favourite, Who’de purchase Favour by perWdious Oaths, Or pawn his Conscience for to buy him cloaths.54

Like other Whig writers of the period, Shadwell forges an association between the city and moral and political corruption, in contrast with which the country becomes the source of virtue and disinterested 52 Although Lois Schwoerer has argued that there were ‘compelling reasons for memorializing William Russell’, her evidence of poetic tributes produced immediately after his execution is conWned to only one anonymous ode, in manuscript (Schwoerer, Lady Rachel Russell: ‘One of the Best of Women’ (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 141–2). Margaret Crum’s index of manuscript poetry in the Bodleian Library lists only two manuscript elegies, one on Sidney and one on Russell (Crum, First Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in the Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969) ). There were, however, several printed satires on the executions, such as Algernon Sidney’s Farewell (London, 1683) and An Elegy on the Earl of Essex (London, 1683). 53 Worden observes that while he has for convenience termed Sidney a ‘Whig martyr’, the Whig leadership was ‘embarrassed’ by Sidney’s radical statements quoted from his papers at his trial, and by the more moderate William Russell’s refusal to disavow, before his execution, his belief in the subject’s right to resist a tyrant (see Worden, ‘The Commonwealth Kidney of Algernon Sidney’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 1–40). 54 Thomas Shadwell, The Tory-Poets: A Satyr (London, 1682), in Works, v. 286.

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action. He advocates neither submission to the current regime nor direct political action, but instead a life of moderate ease beyond the temptations of the court and the city. We should however be circumspect in taking this and similar declarations at face value. In the context of extensive censorship and suspicion it is hard to gauge what lies behind the professions of retreat that we Wnd in Whig writing that did get past the censors. Many central opposition Wgures declared their intention to retire from public life: in The Protestants’ Remonstrance against Pope and Presbyter (1681) the Quaker MP William Penn writes a ‘plea for moderation’ explaining why the ‘private concerns of family and Estate’ ought to take precedence over eVorts to ‘send to market for troubles’ in political aVairs; while Gilbert Burnet says in his History that he ‘went into a closer retirement’ from politics after the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament.55 The Baptist poet and journalist John Tutchin, like the author of The Tory-Poets, imagines the retreat from political life in terms of literal retirement to the country. In doing so he draws on the same tradition of the Horatian beatus vir retirement poem to characterize opposition exile during the 1680s that Royalist poets such as Lovelace, Herrick, and Cowley had used to describe their responses to the events of the 1640s (and that Jacobite poets such as Dryden would use in the 1690s). In her account of the development of the retirement poem Maren-SoWe Røstvig has claimed that John Tutchin was ‘the Wrst exception to the rule that only Tories and Anglicans would write about the happiness of rural retreat’ and that he adopted the tradition to further his project of moral reformation. However, as this account reveals, the beatus ille topos was useful to a number of Whig poets of the 1680s for more speciWcally political reasons.56 Tutchin’s ‘Discourse of Life’ was, in eVect, a summary of the contents of Cowley’s essays, and it Wnishes with

55 William Penn, The Protestants Remonstrance against Pope and Presbyter (London, 1681), 34; Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time: The Reign of Charles II, ed. Osmund Airy, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1897–1900), ii. 288. For a more detailed account of the declining fortunes of the Whig party, see Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 313, and K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968), 724. 56 Maren-SoWe Røstvig, The Happy Man: Studies in the Metamorphosis of a Classical Ideal, 2 vols. (Oslo: Norwegian Universities Press, 1954–8), i. 290. On the symbolism of retreat for Jacobite writers of the following decade see Murray Pittock, Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jay Arnold Levine, ‘John Dryden’s Epistle to John Driden’, in Bruce King (ed.), Dryden’s Mind and Art (London: Oliver and Boyd, 1969), 114–42.

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a paean to an idealized life of gentle retreat that typiWes the retirement poetry of the 1640s and the 1680s: Grant me, good God! a Melancholy Seat, Free from the Noise and Tumults of the Great: Like some Blest Man, who his Retinue sees A tall and sprightly Grove of servile Trees.57

Yet Tutchin was no political moderate. In the same year that this poem was published he took part in the Duke of Monmouth’s rising, and was subsequently tried before Judge JeVreys at the Bloody Assizes. Immediately after the Revolution he published his A New Martyrology, a collection of death speeches and sermons from the radical uprisings of the 1680s. Others also preached a moderation which belied their continuing radicalism: in a pamphlet of 1681 the Independent minister John Owen (1616–1683) advocated ‘repentence and universal reformation’ as the only way for the country to avoid destruction, but went on to publish a pamphlet in the following year in which he enunciated a doctrine of active resistance in circumstances in which religious and civil rights were threatened.58 In 1683 he was implicated by Monmouth in the Rye House plotting, and he was interrogated about the proposed rebellion prior to his death later that year. One of the further implications of the Whig adoption of country rhetoric was that it involved a thorough rethinking of the relationship between the opposition poet and the people. Shadwell’s 1684 manuscript poem ‘The Protestant Satire’, not published until 1747, reveals how far things had changed by the mid-1680s. In the poem Shadwell attacks Dryden and his protected position at the heart of the regime. He compares the Laureate’s self-serving actions with an idealized deWnition of the opposition which clearly presents Whig politics in terms of independent ‘country’ virtue:59

57

John Tutchin, ‘A Discourse of Life’, in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1685),

147. 58 John Owen, preface to An Humble Testimony unto the Goodness and Severity of God in His Dealing with Sinful Churches and Nations (London, 1681) and A Brief and Impartial Account of the Nature of the Protestant Religion (London, 1682). On Owen’s views on active resistance, and his role in the plotting, see Greaves, Secrets of the Kingdom, 93–4, 121–2. 59 Howard H. Schless, the editor of the third volume of Poems on AVairs of State, has attributed the poem to Shadwell on the basis of internal evidence. Schless’s argument for Shadwell’s authorship of the poem is partly based on the references within the poem to the contemporary playhouse. In addition to the references to The Rehearsal, the poet also

Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 All All All All

sense of freedom and our country’s laws, dang’rous daring to assert her cause, love to truth in a degenerate time, suV’ring virtue’s a reproach to him.

79

(ll. 201–4)60

While earlier Whig verse had also, as we have seen, laid claim to the rhetoric of liberty and virtue, the diVerence in this later period lies in the poet’s relationship to the nation. Shadwell writes of ‘our country’s laws’, yet it is no longer clear where he stands in relation to the subjects that constitute that nation. As he depicts it, the poet is no longer the mouthpiece of the people, but is isolated and impotent, as the nation acts against its own best interests: Since guides who must mislead have best esteem, And those who should corrupted crowds redeem From the lov’d yoke of their own passions’ sway To the far worse of other men’s betray

(ll. 28–31)

In the early 1680s Dryden had characterized popular opinion as misguided enthusiasm exploited by unscrupulous politicians: by 1684 it is the Whig opposition who despair of the nation’s ‘lov’d yoke of their own passions’ sway’. This sense of alienation from popular politics mirrors contemporary shifts in popular opinion since the heady days at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. The years following the Oxford Parliament had seen many subjects retracting their support for the Whigs, in favour of the king.61 The threat of punishments inXicted by the Tory reaction undoubtedly inXuenced many: but others had seen in the escalation of partisan debate the spectre of civil war, in contrast to which the monarch symbolized political and social stability. This leaching of popular support away from the Whig cause leads the author of The Protestant Satire to deWne his cause as one of the few ‘left as thin as Gideon’s little band’ (l. 450). Those who do resist are those ‘patriots, whom he [L’Estrange] calls a trait’rous gang’ and whom the government will ‘Seize without proof, and without trial, hang’ (ll. 76–7).62 accuses Dryden of copying the empty oratory of Sir Formal TriXe, the comic butt of Shadwell’s play The Virtuoso. 60 Thomas Shadwell, The Protestant Satire (1684), in POAS iii. 525. Further line references in the text are to this edition. 61 See Tim Harris, ‘Was the Tory Reaction Popular? Attitudes of Londoners Towards the Persecution of Dissent, 1681–86’, London Journal, 13 (1987–8), 106–20. 62 The speciWc reference here seems to be to Sir Thomas Armstrong, hung for his part in the Rye House plot.

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The ideal of retreat had clearly generated a Xexible body of rhetoric for Whig writers in this period. The idyll of the man of virtue, distant from the corruption and chaos of town, became a way of articulating a critique of the government whilst maintaining an appearance of political impartiality. The strength of Tory reaction against Whiggism and Dissent can be measured by the increasing use of the word ‘moderate’ as a term of abuse for those advocating religious toleration. As we have seen, Dryden captured the rhetoric of moderation for the Tory court party during the Exclusion Crisis. It was an idiom, though, which was to prove very Xexible in its connotations. As the Tory reaction developed, Tory churchmen turned their attack from Whigs to moderates and ‘trimmers’.63 Any minister who was soft on Dissent was lambasted as a trimmer, a group of ‘ambiguous men, that are listed under our banner, and receive the Church’s pay, but serve our dangerous enemy, the fanatic and Dissenter’. For John Evans, the author of Moderation Stated (1682), a moderate was ‘One who will frequent the Publick Churches, and Conventicles too; one who will seem devout at Divine Service, and appear for the Church of England on a Sunday, and the other six Days work, hard against it’.64 By refusing to discriminate between radicals and trimmers, Tory polemicists ensured that the term ‘moderate’ was freighted with a range of ideological resonances.

The poetics and politics of reformation The Whig poetry produced after the Tory reaction is marked by its apparent aspiration towards a moral perspective on contemporary public life, which was used as a coded form of political opposition. Yet we should recognize that reformation had both a topical and a broader cultural signiWcance. Whig writers also emphasized the moral function of literature in their attempts to discredit the wit and style of court poetry. An interest in the role of literature as an agent of moral reform, rather than of pure entertainment, can be found in earlier Restoration writing. Debates between Dryden and Shadwell over the merits of humours comedy framed similar concerns. In the preface to the Humorists (1671) Shadwell had argued that: 63 See Mark Goldie and John Spurr, ‘Politics and the Restoration Parish: Edward Fowler and the Struggle for St Giles Cripplegate’, English Historical Review, 109 (1994), 572–96. 64 John Evans, Moderation Stated: In a Sermon preached before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor (London, 1682), 36.

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I must take leave to dissent from those, who seem to insinuate that the ultimate end of a Poet is to delight, without correction or instruction: Methinks a Poet should never acknowledge this, for it makes him of as little use to Mankind as a Fidler, or Dancing-Master, who delights the fancy onely, without improving the Judgement [ . . . ] I confess, a Poet ought to do all that he can, decently to please, that so he may instruct.65

The party divisions of the late 1670s and 1680s undoubtedly sharpened such arguments into more speciWc party-political diVerences between Whig and Tory writers.66 Whig writers used the argument about moral reformation as a way of criticizing the achievements of their Tory contemporaries, arguing that recent years, far from being a time of restoration and revival, had seen the moral decline of the national literature. In The Tory-Poets (1682) Shadwell suggests that contemporary Tory poetry would make an entire canon of English poets turn in their graves: Spencers old bones about do toss and turn With Indignation kicks his rusty Urn. When great Cowly’s Tomb the Ladies walk And of the modern Poesie do talk, His stately Urn doth bow its drooping Head, And modest blushes ore the Marble spread, As if asham’d of his Posterity, A base, degenerate, sottish Progeny.67

As the reference above to contemporary poetry as ‘A base, degenerate, sottish Progeny’ suggests, in this period Whig poetry could be deWned in opposition to the foppishness, immorality, and insubstantiality of Tory writing. The attack on wit became part of a wider critique of the postRestoration literary scene. Where Tory critics such as the Earl of Roscommon had traced the progress of poesy through from classical Rome to a new golden age in Restoration England, Whig writers presented a very diVerent history. In ‘A Satire against Vice’ John Tutchin questions the celebration of England’s new Augustan age: 65

Thomas Shadwell, preface to The Humorists (1671), in Works, i. 183–4. Shadwell was immediately answered by Dryden, who invoked classical authority in the preface to An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer (1671) to prove that ‘the chief end of it [comedy] is divertisement and delight’. Shadwell’s argument with Dryden is continued in the dedication, prologue, and epilogue to The Virtuoso (1676). For a fuller account of the debate between the two authors see R. Jack Smith, ‘Shadwell’s Impact upon John Dryden’, Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), 29–44. 67 Shadwell, The Tory-Poets, in Works, v. 285–6. 66

82

Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 Our fair Augusta, once the Nations pride, To whom new honours brought each Xowing Tide; Now, by its peoples crimes, a Desart made, And though a well built Town, a very shade.68

John Cutts, the future Williamite war hero, produced a progress of poesy, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’, in which he described the sacred origins of poetry and its current downward trajectory: In dissolute, and undiscerning times, When Vice unmasks, and Vertues pass for Crimes, The sacred Gift of charming-Poetry, Is look’d on with a slight, and scornful Eye; But if we trace the steps of former Years, It’s high Descent, and Dignity appears.69

Cutts traces his muses not through the classics and France, as Roscommon and Dryden had done, but through David and Solomon and the sacred origins of poetry in the Bible. He implies that until contemporary poetry regains its moral and Christian function, English literature is destined to languish. The argument that poetry should be used as a medium for religious instruction, and that the Bible contained the Wrst poetry known to mankind, was, of course, not new. It was a commonplace of Renaissance criticism. Sidney had claimed in his Defence of Poetry (1595) that: The chief, [poets] both in antiquity and excellency, were they that did imitate the unconceivable excellencies of God. Such were David in his Psalms; Solomon in his Song of Songs, in his Ecclesiastes, and Proverbs; Moses and Deborah in their Hymns; and the writer of Job.70

Later seventeenth-century poets had shared his emphasis on the divine origins and nature of poetry. Cowley claimed in the preface to his Poems (1656) that ‘It is time to recover it [poetry] out of the Tyrants hands, and

68 Tutchin, ‘A Satire against Vice’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 9. Compare this with his later celebration of Augustan revival in his panegyric on the Revolution, An Heroick Poem upon the Expedition of His Majesty (London, 1689). 69 John Cutts, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’, in Poetical Exercises Written Upon Several Occasions (London, 1687), 18. 70 Sir Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry (1595), in Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 80.

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to restore it to the Kingdom of God, who is the Father of it’.71 Whig poets from the 1680s onwards identiWed their own arguments for religious poetry within this tradition of poetic reformation. When Tutchin argued that ‘the Abuse of Poetry has been very great in these latter Ages’ he went on to observe that ‘since Mr. Cowley, there has been none that has endeavoured to RectiWe it’.72 The important distinction between Tutchin’s and Shadwell’s arguments and those of earlier writers was that they used this well-developed strain of seventeenth-century literary criticism as part of a speciWcally Whiggish literary agenda, which was premised on the perceived failings of contemporary Tory writers. Tutchin parodies the fop or rake culture in opposition to which the poetry of reformation is deWned: To the Play-House we descended, For to get a grain of Wit, Our own with Wine was so defended. We sate spuing in the Pit, ’Mongst Drunken Lords and Whoring Ladies, To see such sights whose only Trade is.73

The critique of ‘Wit’ here once again reveals the extent to which the dialogue between Whig and Tory emerged in debates about literary style, as well as political principle. This particular attack on rake culture in Tutchin’s poem has its origins in earlier seventeenth-century literary debate, and in particular in Puritan anti-Cavalier rhetoric. The Whig attacks on Tory writers, such as the description of Dryden in the ToryPoets as ‘by lewd lascivious Verses, bawdy Rhymes, | Dubb’d the sweet singing Poet of the times’, mirror the caricatures of libertine Cavaliers developed by the Parliamentary press of the Civil War period.74 Lucy Hutchinson’s deWnition of the Cavalier who revels in ‘blasphemous oathes, ribald conversation, prophane scoVes, sabbath breach, derision

71 Abraham Cowley, preface to Poems (1656), in J. E. Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1963), ii. 88; see also William Davenant, preface to Gondibert (1651), also repr. in Spingarn (ed.), Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century. 72 Tutchin, preface to Poems on Several Occasions, sig. a4r. 73 Tutchin, ‘The Tory Catch’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 23. 74 Shadwell, The Tory-Poets, 279. As Thomas Corns explains, this stereotype bore little relation to fact, but came instead from an established pejorative image of the professional soldiery, and an older tradition of anti-court writing, which presented the monarch’s courtiers as ruthless, foppish, and lecherous (Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 3–6).

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of the word of God, and the like’ is representative of many such attacks.75 By yoking together a Renaissance belief in the superiority of divine poetry with mid-seventeenth-century anti-Cavalier rhetoric, early Whig writers mounted a powerful defence for their literary culture. Such rhetoric also distanced the Whigs from the inspired ‘ejaculations’ of religious enthusiasts, by locating their arguments for sacred poetry within a tradition of respectable Protestant piety.76 However, while the arguments outlined above demonstrate the development of a Whiggish emphasis on poetic reformation in response to Tory lewdness, the political alignments within Restoration literary culture were more complex than this identiWcation between Toryism and libertinism, and Whiggism and Puritan propriety suggests. The Whig appropriation of the literature of moral virtue was clearly compromised by the fact that many of the early opposition leaders, such as the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of Buckingham, were renowned rakes. It is presumably as an attempt to distance himself from such excesses that John Tutchin’s poetic tribute to Rochester constructs the earl as a pastoral poet, and makes the extraordinary claim that: The Bawdy Flashes of thy Muse. This to the Publishers was due, Not Licens’d and Allow’d by you.77

As the years passed, the Restoration wits seem increasingly to have been read as part of a Whiggish history of opposition.78 Anti-court satires attributed to Rochester and Buckingham played a large part in the

75 Lucy Hutchinson, Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, ed. James Sutherland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 44. See other attacks such as Englands Wolfe with Eagles Clawes: The Cruell Impieties of Bloud-Thirsty Royalists, and blasphemous AntiParliamentarians (London, 1646). 76 The Whig emphasis on ‘divine’ poetry seems to be a return to the late sixteenthcentury movement towards divine subject matter that Lily B. Campbell describes in Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1959). On Puritan attacks on poetry and drama see Russell Fraser, The War against Poetry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). On the problematization of the notion of divine poetry for early to mid-seventeenth-century Calvinist writers, see Elizabeth Clarke, introd. to Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997). 77 Tutchin, ‘To Rochester’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 19. 78 For a full history of the complex intersection of political radicalism and libertinism in this period see James Grantham Turner, Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality, Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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popular Whig miscellany Poems on AVairs of State reprinted between 1697 and 1715. The 1707 republication of Sedley’s works stressed the playwright’s oppositional political identity, boasting of his ‘untainted Love to his Country’ and placing his lyrics alongside transcripts of speeches by Algernon Sidney on the scaVold, Waller against ship money, and at the trial of the Earl of Argyll in 1681.79 The Restoration libertines demonstrated that the man of wit could also be the man of political virtue, creating tensions within Whig ideology which were to resonate in later attitudes towards wit and politeness, as we shall see.

James II and reformation With the accession of James II the whole notion of moral reformation acquired a new and topical signiWcance. Although James began his reign with the goodwill of his subjects, it was not long before he began to alienate growing numbers, including many Tories. As he started to appoint Catholic peers as Privy Councillors, and staV his army with Catholic oYcers, the Anglican majority began to resent having to share power with the king’s Catholic confederates. James soon abandoned eVorts to achieve a parliamentary repeal of the Test Act and Penal Laws because of the opposition of Church of England MPs and Anglican bishops. Instead, in April 1687 he issued a Declaration of Indulgence which suspended the penal code for both Catholics and Dissenters. His strategy seems to have been to forge an unlikely alliance of Catholics and Dissenters to challenge the hegemony of the Anglicans in Parliament.80 The Declaration of Indulgence, not surprisingly, drove many Anglicans into active opposition to their king. It also split the basis of Whig support.81 Shortly after the Declaration the king received a letter of ‘thankful acceptance’ on behalf of the Dissenters, which was made up of eighty addresses of thanks. Presbyterian ministers such as Vincent 79 The Poetical Works of the Honourable Sir Charles Sedley Baronet, and his Speeches in Parliament (London, 1707), sig: a3r. 80 J. R. Jones, Country and Court: England 1658–1714 (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), 242; James Miller, ‘The Later Stuart Monarchy’, in J. R. Jones (ed.), The Restored Monarchy, 1660–1688 (London: Macmillan, 1979). 81 James’s willingness to tolerate both Catholics and Dissenters meant that a sizeable proportion of his supporters were, paradoxically, the same Whig Dissenters that had sought to exclude him from the throne at the time of the Exclusion Crisis (see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke’s Circle and James II’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 557–86).

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Alsop, Joseph Reed, and Daniel Burgess all put their names to the document. But there was no consensus among Nonconformists: many moderates, such as Richard Baxter, refused to oVer their thanks, saying that they did not want to oVend conforming members of the Church of England. Thus Nonconformity occupied an increasingly pivotal position in the shifting political climate of 1687–8. Dissenters were courted on all sides: by James; by the Anglican Church; and also by the Prince of Orange.82 In the context of this battle for Nonconformist support, writers from both political sides had to Wnd ways of establishing a position that could comprehend religious Dissent. The rhetoric of moral reform was clearly one way of appealing to the godly. The political and moral corruption of the nation was a complaint of many Dissenters during the 1680s: the diaries of the Presbyterian minister Oliver Heywood chronicle the perception of a decline in public morality during the decade. In August 1682 he writes: ‘J. P. [John Priestley] having been in the country told me of the very outragious sinning there is in all places, even little children will curse, damne, in a very horrid manner’, and in October of the same year he writes ‘It seemes still the world is mad on wickednes’.83 However, the appeal to moral reformation was not exclusively aimed at Dissenters. The complex negotiation of James’s domestic policies of indulgence ensured that Catholics and Anglican Churchmen were also striving to outdo one another in their personal religiosity. As Mark Knights has argued, the precarious position of the Church of England under James led Anglicans to adopt a rhetoric of private morality.84 Following James’s declaration of indulgence, the Church began to draw on the notion of individual conscience as a justiWcation of resistance to civil authority, and consequently Anglican churchmen encouraged their parishioners to practise an active religiosity. Meanwhile, the king also urged the godly life, and in June 1688 issued a proclamation against debauchery, drunkenness, and swearing.85 Reformation consequently 82 e.g. the Earl of Halifax’s Letter to a Dissenter warned Nonconformists that they were in danger of being used as stepping stones for the political ambitions of the Roman Catholic Church (see Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689, (147–8)). 83 Oliver Heywood, The Reverend Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702. His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner, 4 vols. (London: Brighouse, 1881–5), ii. 295. 84 Mark Knights, ‘ ‘‘Meer Religion’’ and the ‘‘Church-State’’ of Restoration England: The Impact and Ideology of James II’s Declarations of Indulgence’, in Alan Houston and Steve Pincus (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 41–70 (61–6). 85 Knights, ‘Meer Religion’, 66.

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came to play an increasingly central role in the political and religious debates of the late 1680s. The development of this diverse emphasis on reformation oVers an interesting corrective to existing accounts of the period. It has become a historiographical commonplace that the Revolution of 1688 inaugurated a reformation of manners, identiWed largely with the Williamite court. Tony Claydon describes the growth of a biblically based discourse which presented William as a providential ruler who had a divine commission to protect the Protestant Church in England, and to return the nation to its pristine faith, piety, and virtue. He argues that the need for such a discourse arose from a desire to assuage contemporary doubts about the new king’s legitimacy, to promote his anti-French war, and to enable the king to govern through Parliament.86 However, the evidence of the preexistence of a discourse of reformation in a range of texts produced in the late 1680s suggests that this moral project cannot be identiWed exclusively with the Williamite propaganda machine. Competing claims to the moral life were played out in the poetry produced under James II. For the new Catholic convert John Dryden the idea of reform was a useful way of linking Dissent with Catholicism, against Anglicanism. The Hind and the Panther (1687), the Laureate’s beast fable justifying his conversion and celebrating the spiritual mysteries of the milk-white hind of Catholicism, came out shortly after James’s Declaration. In the poem Dryden was faced with the diYcult task of renegotiating the anti-Nonconformist polemic that had marked his Exclusion Crisis satires and his defence of Anglicanism in Religio Laici. One way he did this was to draw on a rhetoric of moral reformation to attack the Church of England, and this no doubt served his own ecclesiastical ambitions as well.87 In The Hind and the Panther Dryden presents the piety of the Catholic Church in contrast to the vice and luxury of the Church of England: God’s and kings rebels have the same good cause, To trample down divine and humane laws: Both wou’d be call’d Reformers, and their hate, Alike destructive both to church and state:

86 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 87 Roger Morrice reports: ‘Some say that Mr Dreyden if he takes Holly Orders is like to (be Provost of the Colledge in Dublin) have considerable preferment’ (Morrice, Entring Book, Dr Williams’s Library, i, Saturday, 17, July 1686). Other rumours circulated of

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Moderation, fanaticism, and ‘the people’ 1681–1688 The fruit proclaims the plant; a lawless Prince By luxury reform’d incontinence, By ruins, charity; by riots, abstinence. Confessions, fasts and penance set aside; Oh with what ease we follow such a guide! Where souls are starv’d, and senses gratify’d. Where marr’age pleasures, midnight pray’r supply, And mattin bells (a melancholy cry) Are tun’d to merrier notes, encrease and multiply. Religion shows a Rosie colour’d face; Not hatter’d out with drudging works of grace; A down-hill Reformation rolls apace.

(pt. I, ll. 357–72)88

Protestant reformation is here linked to moral reformation, both of which are shown to foster no more than lawlessness and luxury. The speciWc targets of this attack are revealed in Dryden’s lines on Gilbert Burnet, the cleric who was to continue to drive the reformation movement under William and Mary, described here as King Buzzard, ‘Broadback’d, and Brawny built for Loves delight, | A prophet form’d, to make a female Proselyte’ (pt. III, ll. 1145–6). The Hind and the Panther earned its author a number of hostile responses, the most successful of which was produced by two Cambridge undergraduates, Matthew Prior and Charles Montagu, whose satirical eVorts were to earn them the patronage of William III. Their burlesque, entitled The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse, appeared three months after Dryden’s poem. The two authors ridiculed the use of the beast fable to communicate the mysteries of the spiritual life, and drew on the Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1671) in their parody. The Rehearsal, a burlesque of Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada (1670), had ridiculed the Laureate’s heroic style as overblown fustian. Montagu and Prior’s burlesque of Dryden’s poem worked by adapting Buckingham’s play to the very changed contexts of James’s reign. In The Rehearsal Buckingham had mocked Dryden’s aspirations to play the rake and man about town: like many other satires on the Laureate, it had exposed his Dryden’s election as head of house of All Souls, Oxford (see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration, 1688–1692’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143–71). 88 John Dryden, The Hind and the Panther (1687), in Works, iii. 133. Further line references in the text are to this edition.

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attempts to participate in the witty bawdy banter of court wits such as Rochester and Sedley. But by 1687 Dryden was the aspirant churchman, no longer the kind of writer who, in Rochester’s words, ‘To frisk his frolick fancy hee’d cry Cunt’.89 Montagu and Prior mocked the Laureate’s new self-fashioning in The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, parodying his eVorts to become the man of virtue who ‘cannot bear this loose talk now’.90 The insubstantiality of Dryden’s reformation becomes evident in his disproportionate detailing of the fashionable London haunts. There is a dig at Dryden’s old social aspirations, as Bayes comments after having given a catalogue of public houses: Do you mark me now? I would by this represent the vanity of a town fop, who pretends to be acquainted at all those good houses, though perhaps he ne’er was in ’em. (p. 136)

As its title suggests, Montagu and Prior’s burlesque also drew on Andrew Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d, both in speciWc allusion and through the general thrust of its argument. The great joke in the title of The Hind and the Panther Tranvers’d was, of course, that The Hind and the Panther was already in verse, poetry which its author had described as ‘the Majestic Turn of Heroick Poesie’.91 In The Rehearsal Transpros’d Marvell had reworked Buckingham’s burlesque as an attack on the high-Xying Anglican Samuel Parker. He had levelled Buckingham’s attacks on extravagance and fancy at Parker, making parallels between artistic solecism and ecclesiastical absurdity, stagecraft and priestcraft. The High Church was associated with drama, romance, Wction, and rhetoric, in contrast with which Marvell’s plain prose style was linked to integrity and reason.92 In The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, as in Marvell’s satire, folly, confusion, and empty rhetoric are oVset against sense and reason. Once again, political-religious argument was articulated in a contest over literary discourse, in which reason and truth were oVset against wit and rhetoric. However, whereas Marvell’s target had been Samuel Parker’s high-Xying Anglicanism,

89 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘An Allusion to Horace 10’, in The Works of John Wilmot Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 73, l. 74. 90 Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior, The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), in POAS iv. 123. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 91 Dryden, preface to The Hind and the Panther, in Works, iii. 122. 92 See N. H. Keeble, ‘Why Transprose The Rehearsal?’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 249–68.

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Prior and Montagu link the same qualities to Dryden and the Catholic Church. The rhetoric and Wction that Marvell associated with the Church of England are now more appropriately identiWed with Dryden’s fables of transubstantiation, as the Laureate himself boasts: Indeed, your knotty reasonings with a long train of majors and minors, and the Devil and all, are too barbarous for my style, but, egad, I can Xourish better with one of these twinkling arguments, than the best of ’em can Wght with t’other. (p. 135)

As before, the Laureate is seen to privilege wit and style over the knotty reasonings of theological truth, further compounding the Whiggish critique of Restoration poetics that we have seen developing over the course of the 1680s. And, by drawing on a Nonconformist text in support of their assault on the Laureate and his Catholicism, they again appealed to both Anglicans and Dissenters. These texts all oVered claims and counter-claims to the moral and spiritual high ground, frequently combining issues of literary and moral reformation. Montagu and Prior’s allusive satire on Dryden and his selfdeWned role as reformer was to be matched by increasingly scurrilous attacks on the king and his court. Early in 1688 the former Restoration rake Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, began to circulate his scathing A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies. In this lengthy verse satire James and his courtiers were reduced to crudely sexualized caricatures, as Dorset mounted a Juvenalian attack on The vicious lives and long detested fame Of scoundrel lords, and their lewd wives’ amours, Pimp-statesmen, bugg’ring priests, court bawds, and whores.93

Like Marvell in his Last Instructions to a Painter (1667), written two decades before, Dorset conXated sexual vice and political corruption to present an image of a court incapable of seeing beyond its own desires. However, unlike his brother, James II was not to outweather this political storm. Few Anglican bishops had supported the Declaration of Indulgence, and many had encouraged their clergy to disobey the king’s instructions. They were supported by leading moderate Dissenters. When James issued a second Declaration in April 1688, and instructed the bishops to order their clergy to read the declaration from the pulpit, the crisis came to a head. Seven Anglican bishops signed a 93 Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset, A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies (1688), in POAS iv. 191.

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petition to explain their refusal to obey the king’s order, and were subsequently taken to trial in June 1688, when James made a criminal complaint of seditious libel against them. Shortly after the trial of the seven bishops began Mary of Modena gave birth to a son, apparently consigning the nation to a Catholic succession. Opponents of the regime in England and Holland were stung into action, and by the autumn of 1688 Thomas Wharton’s ballad ‘Lilli Burlero’ was widely circulating, prophesying the now inevitable invasion of the Dutch stadthouder. In the 1680s we can see the emergence of two opposing political and rhetorical traditions. In their struggle to secure discursive authority Whigs and Tories developed distinct arguments about contemporary political and literary culture. Some of these ceased to be relevant in later decades. The representation of ‘the people’ became less important after 1688, as popular urban support moved away from the Whig party towards the Tories.94 And the Revolution of 1688–9 would see many Whig poets emerging from their posture of retreat in opposition to take a place at the heart of the political establishment. Yet there were also continuities, and we can see some of the ideological and thematic concerns of Whig writing outlined here developing in subsequent decades. In particular, the emphasis on moral and literary reformation that we have seen emerging over the course of the 1680s was to reverberate throughout Whig writing under William, and continued to have both a topical and a broader cultural signiWcance. Moreover, for all the complexities of the legacy of the 1680s, it was clearly important to many late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writers to identify the events of 1680–8 within a pre-history of Whig and proto-Whig opposition. Whig poets writing immediately after the Revolution constructed narratives that presented the previous decades as an ongoing struggle to assert the liberties enshrined in the ancient Constitution. Looking back on recent political history, they identiWed the country opposition of the early 1670s, the Exclusion movement, and the plots of the 1680s as part of a teleological progression towards the Revolution. As Nicholas von 94 Gary Stuart de Krey’s study of London politics in this period demonstrates that by 1690 City Whig leaders had misgivings about the encouragement of popular involvement in Corporation politics, and that the 1690s saw a growing ‘ideological apostasy’ among the Whig leaders, who retreated from the populism of the 1680s, an emphasis which was to culminate in the anti-libertarian City Elections Act of 1725. Accordingly, support moved towards the Tories, taking the form of the London protests in favour of Sacheverell, and popular urban Jacobitism (Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688–1715 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 177–212).

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Maltzahn has shown, Andrew Marvell’s speeches and prose writings were appropriated as part of the pre-history of Whiggism.95 The popular poetic miscellany Poems on AVairs of State: from the Time of Oliver Cromwell to the Abdication of King James the Second (1697, 1699, 1702, 1703, 1710, 1716) oVered a poetic history of the times through the opposition satires of the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s, and panegyrics on the Revolution of 1688. While modern historians are rightly cautious of constructing early Whiggism as a continuous struggle from Exclusion to Revolution, contemporaries had no such qualms. In the alternative political history presented in the diverse and topical texts described above we can see the emergence of a narrative of political virtue, opposition, and persecution that would gain in authority over the following century. ‘Whig history’ in its most teleological and deterministic form begins in the late 1680s.

95 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Prehistory of Whiggism’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).

3

Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702 The 1680s saw the emergence of oppositional language and arguments within Whig poetry. Writers drew on a rhetoric of popular opinion, of literary and political reformation, and of plain speech to authorize their critique of the Tory establishment. From 1688 onwards, however, the nature of party-political discourse changed signiWcantly: the accession of William III brought many Whigs back into public life, and Whig poets by and large became the defenders of the regime, rather than its critics. This chapter will explore some of the implications of this shift, arguing that the Revolution presented two major new challenges for Whig writers: Wrst, to legitimate the unconstitutional and unprecedented events of 1688–9, and, secondly, to celebrate William’s military campaign on the Continent. The implications of these changes continue to reverberate through Whig verse throughout the decade, prompting reconsideration of where the nation stood in relation to its past, and questions of how the new circumstances of public life could be accommodated within existing traditions.

Revolution: restoration and innovation One of the ‘facts’ most frequently rehearsed in the poems on the Revolution was that the Prince of Orange had come to England to restore the nation’s liberties after having received a letter of invitation signed by seven prominent peers.1 However, this appealing image of a deliverer prince responding to a desperate nation’s cries has long obscured the European and strategic contexts for William of Orange’s invasion in November 1688. As France’s territorial ambitions appeared 1 On the appeal, and the role of the letter of invitation, see Jonathan I. Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment: Essays on the Glorious Revolution and its World Impact (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–43 (12–13).

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ever more aggressive, William sought to counter the increasing power of Louis XIV by forming a grand coalition with the King of Spain, the Emperor Leopold, and the German princes. England’s membership of this alliance was central, but James II’s handsome French subsidies ensured that he had no desire to join the coalition. So it was that early in 1688 William approached sympathizers in England, who put together an invitation that would enable the prince to invade under the Wction that he was simply responding to a request from the beleaguered nation. During the summer and autumn of 1688 William began assembling a massive force to support his prospective invasion, and on 5 November he landed unopposed with his army at Brixham in Devon. As he made his way up through the West Country and towards London he was joined by James’s deserting forces and supporters, and it became increasingly clear that the Dutch prince might be able to go as far as securing the crown itself. The Wrst, ignominious Xight of the king on 11 December created a vacuum in the government that William saw he could Wll, and when James Xed from his guard at Rochester on 23 December the way was clear to the throne. By the end of January a convention Parliament had declared that King James had ‘abdicated the government’ and that the throne was thus vacant. It was at this point that the proposal to make William regent started to Wnd opposition among members of the House of Lords, who argued that if the throne were indeed vacant then Mary, rather than William, was next in line to the succession. William responded by threatening to return to the Netherlands, and Mary expressed her desire not to take precedence over her husband. Faced with the prospect of the return of the exiled Stuart king, supported by Louis XIV, the Lords agreed to a constitutional compromise, in which William and Mary would rule as joint sovereigns but William would have sole charge of the government. In April 1689 the Dutch prince and the Stuart princess were crowned king and queen of England. One seventeenth-century historian has recently claimed that the period immediately before and after the Revolution was ‘arguably the most intensely ideological and philosophical of all major episodes in English history’.2 The invasion of a Dutch prince, the Xight of the Stuart 2 Jonathan I. Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 6. There is, however, little agreement over the nature of the ideology underlying the Revolution. Israel himself emphasizes the nature of the Revolution as a Dutch invasion, rather than as a domestic rearrangement of the Constitution; Jonathan Clark maintains that the Revolution changed only the king, and not the fundamental nature of kingship; while J. R. Western has argued

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king, and the constitutional compromise of the Revolution settlement were all events that demanded debate, explanation, and justiWcation in print. Mark Goldie’s extensive analysis of the pamphlet literature surrounding the Revolution has revealed the vigour and complexity of contemporary responses to the remarkable events of 1688–9, a printed controversy on a scale to rival that of the Exclusion Crisis. It is clear from his survey that contemporaries did not reach a single explanation, but drew on a range of theses to justify what had happened. Goldie’s survey of the political pamphlets produced in 1689 reveals that printed debates about the Revolution featured one or a combination of some of six theories: that the people had a right of resistance when King James broke the contract; that William had a superior claim de facto over James’s claim de jure; that the king had deserted, thereby leaving William to enjoy right by possession; that the Revolution was a military contest between two independent sovereigns, in which William’s conquest of James was held to legitimate his title; that William was king by the divine right of providence; or—the concept of resistance in extremis—that necessity had created an exception to passive obedience.3 The Whig poetry published on the Revolution reXects these diverse responses, and oVers alternative explanations and narratives in an attempt to give representational and political stability to an event whose implications and ramiWcations were far from clear. Steven Zwicker has argued that one of the major problems facing writers responding to the events of 1688–9 was that of ‘claiming an English identity both for the Revolution and its resistance’.4 However, there were, in fact, a number of ways in which Whig writers located the that 1688 was in fact a counter-revolution. W. R. Speck has claimed that it was an aristocratic coup, and Steven Pincus asserts that 1688–9 represented England’s Wrst nationalist revolution (Israel, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 105–62; J. C. D. Clark, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution: The English State in the 1680s (London: Blandford, 1972); W. A. Speck, Reluctant Revolutionaries: Englishmen and the Revolution of 1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 6–7; Steven Pincus, ‘To Protect English Liberties: The English Nationalist Revolution of 1688–9’, in Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity, Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–104). 3 Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 573–664. 4 Steven Zwicker, ‘Representing the Revolution’, in Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173–99 (180–1).

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Revolution within earlier English history, and the legal and constitutional justiWcations of the change of monarch were frequently grounded in historical argument. This perspective is most evident in the invocation of the ‘ancient Constitution’. Claiming that the new regime represented a return to the political liberties enshrined in the ancient Constitution, James Tyrrell and other Whig apologists undertook detailed reviews of earlier English history to demonstrate precedents for parliamentary intervention in the defence of liberty.5 The panegyrics on the Revolution also draw on the myth and the language of the ancient Constitution, to situate recent events within a pre-existing narrative. The recently established political regime was both a conWrmation and a consolidation of rights the English people had always had. Thus the new Whig Laureate Thomas Shadwell looked back to an earlier age of political freedoms in his Congratulatory Poem on His Highness (1689): The great Prerogative was understood A vast unbounded Pow’r of doing Good: From doing Ill, by Laws it was conWn’d, If Sanctions, Pacts or Oaths cou’d Princes bind. By Ancient Usages and Laws they sway’d, Which both were by the choice of Subjects made. Old Customs grew to Laws by long Consent, And to each Written Law of Parliament; Freedom in Boroughs, and in Land Freehold, Gave all, who had them, Voices, uncontroul’d.6

From this perspective the Revolution could be seen not as a frightening and unpredictable imposition from outside, but as a return to an older model which derived its authority from time immemorial. The intervening period between ‘ancient usage’ and modern times was, as Shadwell and others saw it, one of increasing deviation from an original model of political freedom, in which the Stuart monarchs had marked the high-water point of royal tyranny. Thus in the Congratulatory Poem quoted above Shadwell describes the history of the English monarchy between Elizabeth’s reign and William’s accession as one which ‘Turn’d

5 See J. P. Kenyon, Revolution Principles: The Politics of Party 1688–1702 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 35–7. 6 Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem On His Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (1689), in Works, v. 337. Further page references in the text are to this edition.

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Kings to Tyrants, and to Slaves the free’ (p. 338). His history of the seventeenth century oVers a narrative of political decline, in sharp contrast to Tory accounts of the period. Reversing Royalist images of the interregnum as a period of chaos and disorder, he writes of the collapse of religion and government under the later Stuarts: ‘Ruin and Rubbish cover’d all the Ground, | And no remains were of the buildings found’ (ibid.). In this polemical Wguration of recent history William III’s reign could be seen as a return not only to the distant past of Saxon custom but also to the days of Elizabeth I, the last monarch who had upheld the rights of the Protestant nation. The two monarchs were also connected through the narrative of the papist threat that had developed over the course of the intervening period. For those keen to read recent history in these terms, the fact that the landing at Torbay took place on November the Wfth, and that 1688 was the hundredth anniversary of the English triumph over international catholicism, was, literally, a godsend.7 In numerous poems and pamphlets Whig writers presented the Dutch king as the natural heir to Gloriana, airbrushing William’s more recent Stuart forebears from the national history. Furthermore, William’s identiWcation with Elizabeth provided a good precedent for an AngloDutch alliance, as William Temple realized: in his observations on English foreign policy in the Memoirs and Letters he characterized previous hostility to the Dutch as a series of mistaken vacillations from Elizabeth’s earlier cooperation with the Netherlands. In 1585 Elizabeth had backed an expedition to the Netherlands which was intended to help protect the Dutch from the encroachments of Spanish Habsburg military power.8 The parallels with 1688 were obvious: once again English and Dutch forces were combining to defend reformed religion in Europe from the threat of catholicism. Elizabeth’s expedition, led by 7 The republications of 1688 include: A Speech made . . . in Parliament, anno 1593 . . . concerning the Spanish Invasion . . . (London, 1688) and Queen Elizabeth’s Opinion concerning Transubstantiation, with some Prayers and Thanksgivings composed by her Imminent Dangers (London, 1688). Yet, as Jonathan Israel and GeoVrey Parker have recently shown, the most obvious parallel lay in the similarities between the Spanish Armada and the Dutch armada—a parallel William’s propagandists were keen to play down (Israel and Parker, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, in The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 335–63). 8 Dutch poems on the Revolution characterized the expedition to England as an acknowledgement of English assistance in the past (see J. V. M. de Vet, ‘The Image of William and Mary in Dutch Poetry’, in Robert Maccubin and Martha Hamilton-Philips (eds.), The Age of William III and Mary II: Power, Politics and Patronage (Williamsburg, Va.: College of William and Mary, 1989), 352–7 (355)).

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the Earl of Leicester, had even drawn on the same rhetoric used at the time of the Revolution, for her Protestant crusade was greeted in Holland by pageants hailing Leicester as the nation’s deliverer, and likening him to King Arthur.9 Thus Shadwell declares that We from the Mighty States have now gain’d more Than by our Aid they ever got before, When the Great Vere’s and Sidney’s won such Fame, That each of them immortaliz’d his Name.10

It is clear that late seventeenth-century observers found historical precedent a useful way of understanding the bewildering pace of recent events. Earlier English history could be used to show patterns of return, continuity, and even restoration. Yet alongside this use of historical perspective we also Wnd apparently contradictory arguments stressing the radically innovative nature of the Revolution. This sense of novelty is evident in the Presbyterian Oliver Heywood’s jubilant account of the events of 1688, where he speaks of ‘the whole face of things changed next to a miracle once in 3 months time, so the managem[en]t of all things is put into other hands and the scene of things so altered as if it were a new world’.11 Contemporaries seem to have maintained a dual perspective in their understanding of the Revolution, seeing it as both a continuation and a radical break from past history. Thomas Shadwell’s Congratulatory Poem on His Highness moves from the invocation of custom and time immemorial to images of creation and birth: When undistinguish’d in the mighty Mass, And in Stagnation Universal Matter was, Huddled in heaps the diV ’ring attoms lay Quiet, and had no Laws of Motion to obey: Th’ Eternal Mover threw the ferment in, The solid Attoms did their Course begin: The quickning Mass moves now in ev’ry part, And does its Plastick Faculties exert. The jarring Attomes move into a peace,

9 David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), ch. 5. 10 Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem To the Most Illustrious Queen Mary Upon Her Arrival in England (1689), in Works, v. 343. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 11 Oliver Heywood, The Reverend Oliver Heywood BA 1630–1702. His Autobiography, Diaries, Anecdote and Event Books, ed. J. H. Turner, 4 vols. (London: Brighouse, 1881–5), iii. 235.

Legitimacy and the warrior king 1688–1702 And all Confusion and Disorders cease: The ugly undigested Lump became The perfect, glorious, and well order’d Frame. Let there be Light, th’ Almighty Fiat run; No sooner ’twas pronounc’d, but it was done.

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(pp. 339–40)

Drawing on Newtonian and Lucretian models of origin, Shadwell’s account of the Revolution presents the event as comparable with Creation itself: the ‘undigested Lump’ of the English polity transformed into the ‘well-order’d Frame’ of a modern Constitution. There could be no continuity between past and present if before creation there was only disorder and confusion. The implications of this complex understanding of the historical moment were to reverberate throughout the Whig poetry of the following decades. In political terms, the Revolution was seen as at once the perfection of a past policy and a decisive intervention between past and present. As we shall see, its cultural signiWcance was similar: post-Revolution literature was both a continuation of past models and a rejection of the past in favour of a modern originality.

Romance seduction In the Whig panegyric published on the Revolution we Wnd some of these apparent contradictions of perspective resolved through the use of romance narratives. If recent history were told in the form of feudal romance, William could be portrayed as a heroic knight arriving in an hour of need. Romance conveyed the reassurance of old conventions, yet it was also a form that could accommodate the unexpected. In Jonathan Swift’s early ode on William’s Irish expedition the king’s vanquishing of the French and Jacobite threat is described in terms of a romance rescue: He did the Airy Goddess Court, He sought Her out in Fight, And like a Bold Romantick Knight Rescu’d Her from the Giant’s Fort.12

12 Jonathan Swift, ‘Ode to the King on His Irish Expedition’ (1691), in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), i. 7.

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Likewise the author of An Ode upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition of his Highness (1689) praises William as ‘a truly loving Enemy’ Who by relieving the opprest, And helping the distrest, Has realliz’d the old Knight Errantry.13

Romance oVered a narrative whose closure was at once astonishing and conventional, a testament to both the surprising nature of recent events and the legitimacy of their resolution. Paul Salzman has recently argued that romance became a Royalist genre by the 1660s because it oVered a form that could encompass the extraordinary and unimaginable turns of events in recent public life.14 The seventeenth-century writer Sir Percy Herbert aYrms this view: ‘since by no other way almost, could the Multiplicity of strange Actions of the Times be exprest, that exceeded all belief, and went beyond every example in the doing’.15 But, as the poems on the Revolution reveal, for many later writers 1688 represented a similarly extraordinary moment.16 The romance topos enabled writers to express the sense of the marvellous but to locate that within a normative model of romance, within which the entry of the ‘Romantick Knight’ was both expected and desired. It also, of course, allowed them to emphasize that William, like any good knight, had acted not for his own political ambitions but on behalf of the beleaguered victim, thus dispelling suspicions that the Revolution was part of a wider strategy in the Dutch stadthouder’s plan for Europe. In celebrating recent history as a romance—the story of a gallant soldier knight arriving at the eleventh hour to save a damsel in distress—poets eroticized the story of the Revolution. The accession 13

An Ode Upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition (London, 1689), 4. Paul Salzman, ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, N. H. Keeble (ed.), in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 215–30 (220–8). 15 Sir Percy Herbert, preface to The Princess Cloria (1661), sig. Aiv, quoted by Salzman in ‘Royalist Epic and Romance’, 225. 16 On this sense of astonishment see Burnet’s sermon preached before the king in December 1688. Burnet had described recent events as a Wction realized: ‘We have before us a Work that seems to ourselves a Dream, and that will appear to Posterity a Fiction’ (Burnet, A Sermon Preached in the Chapel of St James’s, Before His Highness the Prince of Orange, 23rd of December, 1688 (Edinburgh, 1689), 1). 14

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could be read as the nation’s joyful subjection to her heroic rescuer, as in the anonymous An Ode upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition (1689): Gain’d did I say? It was an Easie gain; England was glad to lose herself to Him, Who came her Laws and Just Rights to maintain . . . . . . . . Sure such a Conquest never was before, That made the Conquered rejoice more than the Conqueror.17

Here William III’s accession is described in terms of a seduction in which the nation is complicit in its overthrow. In trying to Wnd ways of reconciling invasion with consent, poets conjured visions of a sexual conquest, in which an essentially passive nation is overpowered by heroic intervention.18 This notion of the invasion as a form of conquest, rather than as an act of providential right, or the manifestation of the will of the people, is found in many of the poems of the period, but rarely in the prose defences. One of the interesting aspects of the poems on the Revolution is that while they drew on many of the arguments found in contemporary pamphlet debate, such as the notion of a right by providence, or through popular election, they also articulated ideas that were rarely aired in pamphlet debate. This suggests poetry could be used to generate arguments not found in prose writing. It has become a historiographical orthodoxy that the pamphlet defences of the Revolution did not portray William’s accession as a conquest, or an invasion, despite the fact that the army he brought with him was four times the size of the Spanish Armada, incorporating at least 21,000 men, 5,000 horses, and a Xeet of 500 vessels.19 According to M. P. Thompson and others, contemporary writers would not argue for the accession by right of conquest because that meant that it could not be an act of succession by a lawful claimant. Thompson asserts that the notion of conquest not only undermined the conventional thesis of the Revolution, that of abdication, but it was essentially an appeal to the sword which implied that 17

An Ode Upon the Glorious and Successful Expedition, 3. On the image of rape in Jacobite writing on the Revolution see Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Literature and the Jacobite Cause’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689–1789 (London: J. Donald, 1982), 49–69. 19 Israel and Parker, ‘Of Providence and Protestant Winds’, 106. 18

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God’s judgement was expressed in success.20 An appeal to the sword would, theoretically, confer as good a right on Cromwell, or any future usurper, as on William. A right derived from the outcome of war could be seen as impermanent and subject to fortune, which would be unhelpful for writers attempting to stress the solidity and stability of the new regime and its foundation.21 Thompson’s assessment is supported by Mark Goldie’s survey of the pamphlet responses to the Revolution, which shows that only a few writers used the argument from conquest alone to justify William’s accession.22 However, in the poems celebrating William and Mary’s arrival the image of the ‘glorious conquest’ recurs again and again. Many Whig writers, rejoicing in what they saw as their release from the shackles of Stuart tyranny, must have been profoundly uncomfortable with the notion of being conquered by a foreign power. M. S., the author of a poem addressed ‘To His Highness’, acknowledges the diYculty of reconciling the idiom of military conquest with the accession of a king who had supposedly come to grant his subjects liberty. Attempting to distinguish between William’s heroic conquests in the Dutch republic and his successes in England, he observes that ‘the Former Attempt was to Regain His own, and the Rights of the States; in the Latter He was Invited as a Gen’rous Friend’.23 Yet, despite this caution, the oxymoronic allure of the happy victim and the generous conqueror was elsewhere to prove irresistible to poets seeking a heroic idiom with which to celebrate England’s grateful deliverance. William was the marvellous invader ‘who only Conquer’st to preserve’; who leads a nation ‘Rap’t and Enamour’d of its vassallage’.24 While the image of vanquished vassals and passive subjects is elsewhere associated with the tyranny of Stuart rule, in these poems it becomes a form of tribute to the heroic nature of recent history. The Whig appropriation of conventions of romance and their images of conquest did not go unchallenged by Tory writers. Reading Aphra 20 M. P. Thompson, ‘The Idea of Conquest in Controversies over the 1688 Revolution’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 38 (1977), 33–46. 21 These pitfalls of conquest theory were already fairly familiar ground in constitutional debate, as shown by J. G. A. Pocock’s work on the problematic status of the Norman Conquest for writers earlier in the century (Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 150–1). 22 Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument’, 489. 23 M. S., To His Highness the Prince of Orange. A Poem (London, 1689), A1r. 24 John Herbert, ‘To the King’, in Musae Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1689), sig. b3v; Henry Beeston, ‘The Queens Arrivall’, Vota Oxoniensia pro . . . Guilhelmo Rege et Maria Regina (Oxford, 1689), sig. x1r.

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Behn’s A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet (1689) in the context of these panegyrics reveals the extent to which the tropes of Whig verse could be recognized and appropriated in a political dialogue about the legitimacy of William’s accession. Tory poetry of the 1690s was deWned by its engagement with the emergent myths and images of the Whig Revolution, as will be conWrmed by my discussion of John Dryden’s work later in this chapter. Behn’s Pindaric Poem is ostensibly a verse epistle responding to a request from Bishop Gilbert Burnet that she write in celebration of the accession. In the poem Behn is refusing to write, yet nonetheless paying a double-edged tribute to Burnet’s role in the revolution. She rejects Burnet’s invitation politely on the grounds of her pious loyalty to the Stuart king, but, as Virginia Crompton and others have noted,25 the poem contains within it a veiled criticism of Burnet’s role as propagandist: Oh Strange eVect of a Seraphick Quill! That can by unperceptable degrees Change every Notion, every Principle To any Form, its Great Dictator please.26

As we have seen, many of the Whig responses to the Revolution were marked by their emphasis on the indescribable nature of what had happened. The strange reversal of fortune was best encapsulated in a romance paradox, in which the nation was the grateful victim of her oppressor. Yet in To Burnet the emphasis is rather diVerent. Rather than portraying recent history as defying adequate textualization, Behn presents the Revolution as a product of the pen alone: as events that have been written into existence. Behn’s engagement with the propaganda supporting William is a testament to the perceived signiWcance of contemporary celebrations of the Revolution. As she tells it, the poems and pamphlets relating to William’s arrival are the Trojan horse in which the Whigs have acceded to power. She compares England’s fate with that of the Greeks, since in both cases ‘’Twas Nobler Stratagem that let the Conquerour in’ (l. 85). She suggests that it has all 25 For a good discussion of the poem’s strategies see Virginia Crompton, ‘ ‘‘For when the act is done and Wnish’t cleane, what should the poet doe, but shift the scene?’’: Propaganda, Professionalism, and Aphra Behn’, in Janet Todd (ed.), Aphra Behn Studies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–53. 26 Aphra Behn, A Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet on the Honour he did me of Enquiring after me and my Muse (1689), in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992–6), i. 309, ll. 70–3. Further line references in the text are to this edition.

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come about through a combination of rhetoric and strategy; thus Burnet is praised for his wit and eloquence, his ‘Reasoning’ (l. 16), his use of ‘Strategem’ (l. 85), that ultimately brings about ‘the great Design’ (l. 88). Drawing on the idiom of contemporary panegyric, Behn writes of invasion and seduction, but in this case it is merely a rhetorical usurpation: With Pow’rful Reasoning drest in Wnest Sence, A thousand ways my Soul you can Invade, And spight of my Opinions weak Defence, Against my Will, you Conquer and Perswade. (ll. 16–19)

As elsewhere in Behn’s prose Wction and poetry, the adoption of a female passivity or weakness is more complex than it seems.27 Even as she says that she ‘never durst, like Cowly, tune her Strings, | To sing of Heroes and of Kings’ (ll. 37–8), Behn is addressing Burnet in Cowley’s heroic Pindaric form, and with the Bishop’s full knowledge that she has previously written reams of court poetry in celebration of the Stuart kings. Moreover, in emphatically representing herself as the subject of the successful conquest, Behn avoids the seduction that ought to be the subject of the poem, William’s conquest of his subjects’ hearts, his masterful invasion of a grateful nation. It is signiWcant that Behn’s susceptibility is to eloquence, not to genuine force or authority: Gilbert Burnet’s wondrous pen is said to carry a commanding force, ‘like that of Writ Divine’ (l. 15), and ‘an Authority Divine’ (l. 39). In the context of contemporary debates about the legitimacy of the new monarch’s claim to power, it is notable here that Burnet’s ‘Writ Divine’ is a poor substitute for the higher forms of authority that have been displaced. The moral and political absolutes of the Church, liberty, and property celebrated elsewhere in Revolution panegyric are absent from Behn’s depiction of the Revolution. Instead, it is the exiled Stuart king that is associated with piety and loyalty, concepts which are alleged to have no place in Burnet’s new world.28 Although To Burnet masquerades as a muted tribute to the Revolution, it is notable that its hero is absent from the poem. Unlike the 27 Compare e.g. the signiWcance of the ‘powerlessness’ of the narrator in Behn’s Oroonoko (see Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 229–32). 28 Behn echoes criticism of Burnet’s casuistry that is found elsewhere in contemporary Jacobite satires. In Arthur Mainwaring’s Tarquin and Tullia (1689) it is said of the Bishop that ‘To serve all times, he could distinctions coin, | And with great ease Xat contradictions join’ (Mainwaring, Tarquin and Tullia (1689), in POAS v. 48).

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countless panegyrics devoted to the heroism of the deliverer king, William III does not Wgure at all here. Behn refers to ‘a Man so Great, so Learn’d, so Wise, | The Brave Atchievement Owns and nobly JustiWes’ (ll. 94–5), lines which might appropriately be used of the new monarch, but it soon becomes clear that this man is Burnet, and that the ‘JustiWes’ here refers to his casuistical forms of persuasion rather than William’s Wtness for the throne. Moreover, although Behn invokes arguments used to justify William’s accession, it is not to praise the king. At the beginning of the ode Behn refers to Caesar’s accession through popular suVrage, but whereas in a Whig poem this might be an image of William’s claims through popular election, here Behn uses the analogy in relation to her own selection by Burnet. Similarly, she introduces the Wgure of Moses, who sees the ‘Chosen Seed possess the Promis’d Land’ (l. 61). But again this is not an image of William as deliverer but instead another representation of the poet. Behn’s appropriation of these rather unlikely role models testiWes to her recognition of their rhetorical agency in contemporary panegyric: the poem continually invites comparison with Whig panegyric, only to underline its author’s refusal to participate in the genre.

Militarism One of the reasons why it must have seemed appropriate to celebrate William of Orange’s arrival in 1688 as a military invasion and conquest was that contemporaries were well aware of William’s history of martial prowess in defence of the Dutch Republic. They knew he had spent most of the past twenty years on the battleWeld Wghting Louis XIV, and they also recognized that he intended to pursue the Wght against France once he was settled on the English throne.29 The king’s new aggressive anti-French foreign policy was a radical departure from the policies of the previous two Stuart monarchs, whose close relationship with France had been the subject of much suspicion during the 1670s and 1680s.30 29 William had been appointed Captain General of the Dutch army at the unprecedented age of twenty-two. He began his career with the campaign against the French invasion of the Dutch republic of 1672, and spent most of the 1680s Wghting against French dominance in Europe (Stephen Baxter, William III (London: Longman, 1966), 135–288). 30 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 140.

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William was seen by many as inheriting an earlier tradition of English warrior kingship, a man who would revitalize England’s identity as a martial nation: the newspaper Mercurius Reformatus announced that ‘Nothing but a William III can be able to rouze up the martial Genius of England, which the soft reign of a Charles II had laid asleep’.31 Elsewhere, the king’s prospective feats were compared with the victories of the Hundred Years War: Then our lov’d Edward ’s and Wft Henry’s Fame, In France shall yield to Nassau’s conquering Fame, Cressey and Agen-Court new dy’d in Blood, Shall make his Title to the Lillies good.32 Tremble ye Walls of Conquest at the sound, A Henry ’twas Wrst raz’d you to the Ground. How will that Monarch’s Ghost be joy’d to see The Ball young Henry lost, rebound to Thee!33

Edward III and Henry V here form a populist history of early English warrior kingship, oVering historical perspectives on William’s militarism within which the Dutch king almost appeared more English than the Englishmen he replaced. Yet, for all the evocation of earlier conXicts, the nation’s new commitment to a European alliance designed to combat the power of France was to bring profound and controversial internal change, and to transform the monarch into a military leader. The Nine Years’ War, in which English forces, as part of William’s European coalition, fought in Italy, the Dutch Republic, and the Mediterranean to weaken French potential for further expansion in Europe, inaugurated the longest period of Britain’s engagement in warfare since the Middle Ages. In doing so, it not only changed William’s identity but, as John Brewer observes, it transformed the whole nation: Britain emerged in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as the military Wunderkind of the age [ . . . ] Under the early Stuarts Britain had cut a puny military Wgure; by the reign of George III Britain had become one of the heaviest weights in the balance of power in Europe.34

31

Mercurius Reformatus, or The New Observator, 9 July 1690. An Essay in Verse On the Fourth Day of November, Signaliz’d by the Birth of William Henry, Late Prince of Orange (London, 1690), 4. 33 A Congratulary Poem on the Most Illustrious William Henry, Prince of Orange (London, 1689), 2. 34 Brewer, Sinews of Power, p. xiii. 32

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During the 1690s the conduct, the policies, and the funding of warfare were changed radically: abandoning the trading interests which had characterized Stuart policy, William acquired a standing army and reworked the systems of national administration around the ever more pressing weight of military commitments. This involved a huge increase in taxation and a new system of public-deWcit Wnance.35 The king remained at the centre of these developments: he assumed and maintained complete administrative and strategic control over military activity throughout his reign, and even insisted on leading his troops into battle throughout the campaigns of the 1690s. Michael Roberts’s account of military development in the seventeenth century has shown that such a warrior king was a particular product of the late seventeenth century, a period in which the new scale of the waging of war made it necessary that the monarch ‘take over the business of supplying material and supervising war industries’, and, as a result, ‘the ruler was increasingly identiWed with the commander-in-chief ’.36 The king’s military might became the central theme of Whig panegyric, and the main target of those writing in opposition. And because of the nation’s enlarged role in the European arena, the celebration of William’s military prowess was not just intended for domestic consumption. Over the course of the decade the battle for Europe was extended by both William and Louis to literary propaganda, as English and French poets competed in their claims for their leader’s heroism.37 Williamite poets, from Elizabeth Rowe to Matthew Prior, shared a commitment to the celebration of the king as warrior hero, and a consensus that his feats oVered the only subject for contemporary poetry. However, the representation of the king as a warrior hero was complex. While William’s apparently limitless power in the European conXict was a source of national pride and wonder, it had also to be 35 The standard account of the Wnancial innovations of the reign is P. G. M. Dickinson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study of the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756 (London: Macmillan, 1967). Interesting accounts of the impact of these developments on contemporary literature can be found in Colin Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 36 Michael Roberts, quoted by Manuel Schonhorn in Defoe’s Politics: Parliament, Power and Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. 37 Arthur S. Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67.

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reconciled with an emphasis on the circumscription of his authority in domestic aVairs. The author of
ˇ ´`¸˚ˇ . . . An Heroick Poem Humbly OVer’d to His most Sacred Majesty (1696) suggests the tension between the two aspects of the king’s governance: ‘Bounded are monarchs in their Soveraign Rule; | Yet Nassaw seems wide Europe to Controul’.38 Thus Richard Steele’s portrait of the king in The Christian Hero emphasizes the self-denying nature of William’s heroism, which is dedicated to preserving liberty rather than aggrandizing monarchical authority. Comparing the French and English kings, the ‘two great Rivals’ of the age, Steele declares that: Both [are] animated with a restless Desire of Glory, but pursue it by diVerent Means, and with diVerent Motives: To one it consists in an extensive undisputed Empire over his Subjects, to the other in their rational and voluntary Obedience: One’s Happiness is founded in their want of Power, the others in their want of Desire to oppose him: [ . . . ] one is made to Oppress, the other to relieve the Oppressed: The one is satisWed with the Pomp and Ostentation of Power to prefer and debase his Inferiors, the other delighted only with the Cause and Foundation of it, to cherish and protect ’em.39

The complex intermixture of power and liberty represented by the panegyrics was also evident in negative images of the king. French writers attacked William III as a great usurper and tyrant, and as a republican devil, ‘le nouveau Cromwell’, whose defence of liberty would ultimately destroy all monarchies, while Tory opponents of the war saw his conquests of the French as a reXection of his vanquishing of English liberties.40 A further complication in the presentation of William as a military king was the religious dimension of the conXict, which was widely represented as a battle for the defence of Protestantism in Europe. From the Revolution onwards Whig writers drew on the extensive body of anti-papist rhetoric that had developed over the previous century. Four separate collections of the popular miscellany A Collection of the Newest and most Ingenious Poems against Popery and Tyranny were 38
ˇ ´`¸˚ˇ . . . An Heroick Poem Humbly OVer’d to His Majesty (London 1696), 8. 39 Richard Steele, The Christian Hero (London, 1701), ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 83. 40 For more detail on criticism of the king see Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 42–3. For contemporary satire on William’s absolutist tendencies see Advice to a Painter (1697), in POAS, vol. vi.

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published in 1689 alone, containing many recycled anti-papist satires from the Exclusion Crisis.41 Poems such as ‘A Dialogue between father Petres and the devil’ and ‘Popery Pickled, or the Jesuits Shoes made of Running Leather’ reworked old anticatholic and anti-Jesuit material in the light of the Revolution. And in panegyrics William was the defender of the Protestant Church, driving out the whore of Rome: a poem, addressed to the ‘Protector of the Protestant Religion Throughout the World’ proclaims him Not of Baal ’s Legions, but Protestancie. Accelerate your Gideonick Force; Steer to the Kingdom void of all Remorse: Secure under Heav’ns Banner You shall Fight.42

However, while the Prince’s new subjects were initially keen to champion the war of true religion, William’s foreign policy was dependent on close ties with Catholic Austria and Spain. Thomas Shadwell proclaimed in his congratulatory poem to Mary that the king’s sword ‘shall keep the Papal World in awe’ (p. 343), but the new alliance in fact had the backing of the Pope, and served the papacy’s strategic interests in Europe. The alliance was primarily devoted to curbing the power of France, rather than banishing popery from Protestant Europe. So, not surprisingly, the oYcial Williamite iconography avoided the anticatholic rhetoric that marked so many other contemporary publications. Catholic allegiances presented no obstacle for the imaginative J. D., author of A Poem upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England (1689), who reads William’s relations with Spain as the preliminary step to a successful Spanish counterreformation: Empires true ends by him are understood, Not the Wild Lust and Pleasure of the Prince; But pure Religion and the Peoples good. Spain his Old Enemy does now confess, To him she ill-deserved safety ows; 41 On anticatholicism in the period see Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 42 To the Most Illustrious and Serene Prince . . . Protector of the Protestant Religion Throughout the World (London, 1688), 1.

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However, William’s confederacy with his Catholic allies clearly complicated his image as Europe’s Protestant crusader, and poets were more likely to sidestep the concept of a holy war.44 It was hard to sustain the rhetoric of pan-Protestant empire when the Pope was a prominent supporter of the campaign. One other way in which contemporary writers forged a political unity between the diverse national groups making up the coalition was by linking France and French absolutism to oriental despotism. Louis XIV’s alliance with the Ottoman court gave poets ample opportunity to play out the battle for Europe as one between vigorous European liberty and tyrannical eastern despotism.45 The polemical use of the eastern other to emphasize William’s benign rule is evident from 1689: Graecian and Roman Grandeur in Him meet, He scorns Barbarian Asiatick State: Chuses to be so, rather than look Great, Virtue within, than Princes at His Gate.46

Here classical models of enlightened leadership are contrasted with the primitive despotism associated with oriental monarchies. This opposition is found elsewhere in comparisons of William and Louis XIV: in The Christian Hero Steele observes that ‘The one enjoys the Summet of Fortune with the Luxury of a Persian, the other with the Moderation of a Spartan’.47 And in Shadwell’s Ode to the King on His Return from Ireland (1690) the French king is tainted with the worst of eastern eVeminacy: he is marked by ‘the most Barbarous, and Abject ways; | Such as the Turk, or Tartar scorns to use’ and ‘in his mean, and Savage Joys must Wnd | More of a Woman, than a Hero’s Mind’.48 In Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane William III is identiWed with the martial prowess of the eponymous hero, while his French counterpart is assigned all the 43 J. D., A Poem upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England (London, 1689), 3–4. 44 Steven Pincus has recently argued that ‘few in England thought wars of religion legitimate; and they were consequently reluctant to interpret 1688 as part of an evangelical drive to promote a true faith’ (Pincus, ‘To Protect English Liberties’ 93). 45 On French relations with Suleiman II see Israel, gen. introd. to The Anglo-Dutch Moment, 36–7. 46 J. D., A Poem Upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition, 2. 47 Steele, The Christian Hero, 83. 48 Thomas Shadwell, Ode to the King On His Return from Ireland, in Works, v. 361.

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tyrannous megalomania associated with the Ottoman Sultan Bayazit, who is Fond of false Glory, of the Salvage Pow’r Of ruling without Reason, of confounding Just, and Unjust, by an Unbounded Will49

As Ros Ballaster’s study of oriental scandal Wctions demonstrates, the analogy with the Ottoman dynasty had long proved fruitful for English writers seeking to attack their political opponents.50 In the prose Wction of the 1670s and 1680s the covert pursuit of absolutism, eVeminacy and decadence in a court, the decline of empire through luxury, were trends that could be located in Turkish contexts to suggest the weakness of Charles II’s reign, and his subservience to his scheming mistresses. After the Revolution both the exiled James II and Louis XIV were represented as oriental despots in the roman-a`-clef. Peter Bellon’s The Court Secret of 1689 oVered a parallel between Persian–Turkish relations in the sixteenth century and French–English relations in the seventeenth, presenting Roman Catholicism as the minority Shiite sect in Sunni Turkey (Protestant England), and the established Islamic sect in Persia (France). Louis XIV Wgures in the person of the great Safavid Persian emperor Abbas the Great (1588–1629) who expelled the Ottomans and Usbeks from Persia and presided over an eZorescence in art and culture. The two parts conclude with a promise of a third part (which does not appear to have been produced) ‘under the Title of, The prodigious Birth and Life, Tyrannical Government, and miserable Fall of the Christian Turk, Lewis the Fourteenth’. As these examples demonstrate, the eastern ‘other’ oVered a way of creating profound ideological and political diVerences between two monarchs who were in many ways very similar. Christianity, masculinity, and classical republicanism were oVset against the luxury, eVeminacy, and despotism of the East.51

Williamite heroism and Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset For all these tensions in the depiction of the Williamite campaign, the king and his military feats were to dominate Whig poetry throughout 49

Nicholas Rowe, Tamerlane. A Tragedy (1702), 2nd edn. (London, 1703), 3. Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1660–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 51 On Protestant views of Islam in the period see Ahmad Gunny, Images of Islam in Eighteenth-Century Writings (London: Grey Seal, 1996), 65–83. 50

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the decade. The most celebrated panegyric of the 1690s was undoubtedly Charles Montagu’s An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex (1690), the poem which, as we have seen, constituted the summit of native literary achievement in Joseph Addison’s An Account of the Greatest English Poets of 1694. The Epistle is a poem about the prospect of providing the appropriate response to the poetic imperative created by William’s reign, and as such it tells us much about the literary dimensions of Williamite militarism. Montagu begins his poem with the assertion that the king’s military prowess dictates a new direction in English poetry: Poets assume another Tone and Voice, When Victory’s their Theam, and Arms their Choice; To follow Heroes, in the Chace of Fame, Asks Force, and Heat, and Fancy, wing’d with Flame. What Words can paint the Royal Warrior’s Face? What Colours can the Figure boldly raise?52

This emphasis is matched in other Whig verse of the period. In a poem of 1695 Addison calls for A Muse that in advent’rous numbers sings The rout of Armies, and the fall of Kings, Britain Advanc’d and, Europe’s Peace Restor’d, By s o m e r s ’ Counsels and by Na s s a u ’s Sword.53

Montagu and Addison share a conviction that the king’s actions demand elevated poetic forms: epic, heroic verse is the only mode suitable to celebrate recent events. They also suggest that William’s military victories constitute the main subject for modern poetry. Whilst the revival of the muses under a new king might be a commonplace of seventeenth-century panegyric, we Wnd in both Montagu’s poem and the responses to it an insistence on poetry’s function speciWcally as a document of the aVairs of state that is particular to the Whig verse emerging in the 1690s and 1700s. David Womersley has argued that this Whiggish belief that ‘political and military events create the substantive content of the poetical agenda [ . . . ] is importantly diVerent from the

52 Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 4. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 53 Joseph Addison, A Poem to His Majesty (1695), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 39.

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parallel Tory contention that aVairs of state create the conditions within which literature either Xourishes or declines’.54 It is certainly clear that for the many opposition writers of the 1680s who had lamented the insubstantiality of contemporary poetry the reign of William III seemed to oVer new hope for English verse. The Revolution and its aftermath provided many would-be public poets with the truly important subject matter that they perceived to be the proper realm of poetry. At last Whig writers had great events in public life to celebrate in the heroic idiom they aspired to command. Over the course of the 1690s Montagu’s Epistle became a classic, and references to it operated as a form of shorthand for precisely the sort of heroic public poetry that Montagu had identiWed as appropriate to that warfaring decade.55 By the time of the War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) the Epistle had acquired a canonical status, as the paradigm of Whig heroic poetry. Leonard Welsted’s poem on the Battle of Oudenarde begins: O for that Heavnly Voice, that pierc’d so high, As bore e l i z a to her Native Sky! Or that no less renowned Bard’s, whose tongue With Accents all divine, with Musick hung, Immortal b o y n e , and n a s s a u ’s Glory sung! O that my feeble Eccho I could raise, To the high Pitch of their Eternal Lays!56

Charles Montagu’s feˆted celebration of William’s victory at the Boyne, like many other poems of the period, attempted to convey the mythic scale of ‘Nassau’s godlike acts’ by comparing his actions with the feats of classical heroes, or early warrior monarchs. In the Epistle William is Edward III, Jove, and Mars, and in other poems he is Hercules, Achilles, or a heaven-sent avenger.57 One of the ironies of Whig panegyric of this 54 David Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), p. xix. 55 See Samuel Wesley, Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London, 1700); Joseph Addison, ‘An Account of the Greatest English Poets’ (1694), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell & Sons, 1914). Arthur Williams asserts that: ‘The Epistle to Dorset became something of an ars poetica of Whig poetry in the 1690s and beyond’ (‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William III and Anne’, 56–67 (59) ). 56 Leonard Welsted, A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late Famous Victory of Audenarde (London, 1709), 1. 57 See Stephen Baxter, ‘William as Hercules: The Implications of Court Culture’, in Lois Schwoerer (ed.), The Revolution of 1689: Changing Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 95–106.

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period is that the king’s modern bureaucratic warmongering was imaged through these nostalgic representations of military heroism. Part of the reason for this choice of typology was that there were no very recent models of English heroic militarism. In The Birth of the Muse (1698) William Congreve announces of William: ‘Thou’ from oblivion shalt the Heroe save; | Shalt raise, revive, and Eternize the Brave’.58 Whig poets writing after the Revolution had to reinvent a heroic idiom for the wars of the 1690s, because the models of kingly virtue inherited from the later Stuarts were no longer appropriate to a warfaring nation. Images of an aggressive William in battle are in stark contrast to those of the ‘mild’ hero king, the types of Aeneas or David, that are found in the panegyrics addressed to the later Stuarts. A comparison of Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset with his poem ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II’ of 1685 reveals the distinction.59 Montagu’s elegy on Charles is, like many other contemporary depictions of the king, a product of the Restoration settlement. When Charles returned in 1660 he was anxious not to alienate those who had participated in or cooperated with the governments of the interregnum. The Declaration of Breda had oVered a broad amnesty, and panegyrists had celebrated Charles’s political toleration, assigning him the qualities of gentleness, humility, and the ability to forgive. So the terms ‘meek’ and ‘mild’ feature insistently throughout Montagu’s poem, as Charles becomes the model of Christian forbearance that had proved most enabling to the political circumstances of the Restoration: ‘The Woman’s Sweetness, temper’d Manly Wit, | And Loving Power, did crown’d with Meekness sit’.60 But by 1690 circumstances had changed, and Montagu was celebrating a diVerent kind of king, as William’s protracted battle against Louis XIV was translated as the defence of liberty in Europe: Born to subdue insulting Tyrants Rage, The Ornament, and Terrour, of the Age . . . . . . Him, their Deliv’rer Europe does confess. (pp. 2–3) 58

William Congreve, The Birth of the Muse (London, 1698), 9. On the depiction of Charles II as a generous and mild hero in Dryden’s drama and poetry see George McFadden, Dryden the Public Writer, 1660–1685 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 238–53, 290–3. 60 Charles Montagu, ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty’ (1685), in The Works and Life of the Right Honourable Charles, Late Earl of Halifax (London, 1715), 2. 59

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In 1685 Montagu had praised Charles for his non-aggressive foreign policy, suggesting that true glory lay beyond the battleWeld: ‘More Noble than the Spoils that Battels yield, | Or all the empty Triumphs of the Field. | ’Tis less to conquer, than to make Wars cease’.61 By 1690 the nature of glory had also changed, and it is the military hero that is the focus of Montagu’s praise, as he declares his aim ‘To follow Heroes, in the Chace of Fame’ (p. 4) and describes a warrior king resplendent in the blood and din of battle: What Colours can the Figure boldly raise? When, cover’d o’er with comely Dust and Smoke, He pierc’d the Foe, and thickest Squadrons broke? His bleeding Arm, still painful with the Sore, Which, in his Peoples Cause, the Pious Father bore: Whom, cleaving through the Troops a Glorious Way, Not the united Force of France, and Hell, cou’d stay. (p. 4)

Montagu’s depiction of William as warrior, cleaving his bloody way through the thickest squadrons, constructs a heroic model in which physical bravery and martial strength are paramount. This type of kingship is seen in other poems of the period: an anonymous female poet writing on the death of Queen Mary in 1695 praises William’s virile manliness over the eVete concerns of other monarchs: The din of Generous War Prefer’d by him To the soft Musick of a shaken String, And all th’ EVeminate little tender things Beneath a Mind so Great, Wtting the Luxury of softer Kings.62

The characteristics of a monarch are here explicitly gendered: it is manly to Wght, eVeminate to display cultural interests. Where Montagu had once praised Charles for his ‘Woman’s Sweetness’, the verse on William displays little of this interest in ‘feminine’ virtues. Such an emphasis on the speciWcally masculine qualities of Williamite heroism is also reXected in contemporary ideas about the type of poetry that should celebrate the warrior king.63 Montagu’s Epistle was 61

Montagu, ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty’, in Works, 7. An Ode Occasion’d by the Death of Her Sacred Majesty (London, 1695), 4. 63 Whig writers were, of course, not alone in their gendering of literary style: the opposition between the manly and the eVeminate was echoed in the criticism of many 62

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frequently praised for ‘The Heat and Beauty’ of its author’s ‘manly thought’, and later poets such as Addison, Blackmore, and Dennis all claimed to be aspiring to a manly idiom.64 At one level the masculine vigour of elevated Whig poetry could be seen as a corrective to the feminization and foppery that was perceived by many earlier Whig writers to lie at the heart of the moral decline of the Restoration court. But true manliness was not only the ability to draw a hero in epic mode, but also an unsqueamish ability to celebrate the practical detail of active heroism. Addison praised in particular Montagu’s ability to portray ‘Boin’s dy’d waves run purple to the sea’, an observation that reappears in several later responses to the Epistle, and in his own poem on the Battle of Namur Addison dictated that when the forming Muse wou’d copy forth A perfect Pattern of Heroick worth, She sets a Man Triumphant in the Weld, O’er Giants cloven down, and Monsters kill’d, Reeking in blood, and smeer’d with dust and sweat.65

As this quotation reveals, Williamite panegyric frequently combined overtly Wctional generic models—here the giants and monsters of romance—with an enthusiasm for an almost graphic realism in the description of the physical detail of bloodshed. It was a combination that was to recur throughout the military poetry of the following decade, as the next chapter will illustrate.

Montagu, Dorset, and the politics of conversation Montagu’s Epistle is a panegyric on William III’s victory in Ireland, but it is also, as we have seen, a tribute to Montagu’s patron, the Earl of Dorset. The poem foregrounds the relationship between the two men, and their mutual commitment to the new monarch. In doing so it reveals some of the social, political, and economic ties underwriting post-Revolution verse that I shall explore more fully in chapter 6. Both Montagu and Dorset were ‘literary’ members of the Whig Junto; that is, contemporary writers (see Laura L. Runge, Gender and Language in British Literary Criticism 1660–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) ). 64 George Stepney, An Epistle to Charles Montague, Esq.; on His Majesty’s Voyage to Holland (London, 1691), 1. 65 Joseph Addison, To the King (1695), in Miscellaneous Works, i. 43.

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the court Whigs at the centre of William’s Whig government and later the powerful Kit-Cat Club. As such they embodied a symbiotic relationship between the spheres of poetry and public life that was very often celebrated by Whig writers. They represented the new Whig potentates, the breed of statesmen-poets that formed the centre of the patronage system developing under William III. Yet in the Epistle Montagu plays down the public dimension of his relationship with Dorset, framing his poem as an informal letter between friends, and writing of the way in which his Muse Idly aVects, in this Familiar Way, In easie Numbers loosely to convey, What Mutual Friendship wou’d at Distance say.

(p. 4)

This informal quality of the Epistle was also praised by its readers. Addison writes of Montagu: ‘negligently graceful he unreins | His verse, and writes in loose familiar strains’, and George Sewell’s posthumous tribute to Montagu praises his ‘Excessive Spirit, Fluency, and Ease’.66 Montagu’s poetics are clearly linked to his social graces, and we might read the Epistle as a poetic embodiment of the eloquent conversation privileged elsewhere in Whig culture of this period, especially in the essay form.67 Montagu’s soaring lines on the majesty of the battle are punctuated by a reminder that this remains an epistolary exchange between two men: Stop! stop! brave Prince!—What does your Muse, Sir, faint? Proceed, Pursue his Conquests—Faith, I can’t: My Spirits sink, and will no longer bear; Rapture and Fury carry’d me thus far Transported and Amaz’d. That Rage once spent, I can no more sustain Your Flights, your Energies, and Tragic Strain, But fall back to my Nat’ral Pace again; In humble Verse provoking you to Rhime, I wish there were more Dorsets at this Time.

(p. 8)

66 George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq; Occasion’d by the Death of the Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715), in The Posthumous Works of Dr George Sewell (London, 1728), 38. 67 As numerous critics have observed, the Tatler and the Spectator engaged in a dialogue with their readers, using their letters and contributions to construct an ongoing debate over cultural mores. On the visual representation of such ‘performed informality’ and sociable intimacy see David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 36–46.

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The insertion of this short dialogue in the Epistle reminds us of the friendship between Dorset and Montagu, and, beyond that, of the networks of patronage that link them to one another, and to the king who is celebrated in the poem. There are many Whig panegyrics of this period that take the form of a verse letter from one Whig writer to another, and while the poetic epistle is a popular convention in this period, Whig panegyric epistles are distinct in that they very clearly link the friendship between author and addressee to particular political events: they presume and express shared political values.68 There was a particular rash of such epistles published at the accession of George I: 1714 saw the publication of Ambrose Philips’s An Epistle to . . . Charles Lord Halifax, Leonard Welsted’s An Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s accession to the Crown, and Laurence Eusden’s A Letter to Mr Addison on the King’s Accession to the Throne.69 All these poems were intended to remind the newly favoured Addison and Steele of their authors’ loyalty and eagerness to support the new regime. But by presenting their panegyrics in the form of letters between friends, Whig epistles gave an idealized poetic form to the sociable network of inXuence that underwrote Whig literary culture, and implied a set of shared responses to contemporary aVairs of state.

The soldier king and the opposition Montagu’s Epistle represented to many the high-water mark of Whig panegyric in the 1690s; a poem whose elevated depiction of a valiant warrior king in conXict provided a prototype for hundreds of later imitators. The inXuence of such images of the soldier king is not only evident in the Whig poetry of the 1690s: the regime’s critics also focused on the king’s military prowess, but as the source of their criticism.70 Throughout his late poetry John Dryden reverses the premises of Williamite panegyric, suggesting that military activity represents a step backwards for civilization, and for literary culture in particular. 68 On the verse epistle in this period see William C. Dowling, The Epistolary Moment: The Poetics of the Eighteenth-Century Verse Epistle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 69 See also George Stepney, An Epistle to Charles Montagu; Ambrose Philips, An Epistle to the Honourable James Craggs Esq (London, 1717). 70 For a good comparison of Williamite and Jacobite presentations of the king see Craig Rose, England in the 1690s: Revolution, Religion, and War (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 18–62.

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While Montagu celebrated the epic dimensions of the king’s exploits, in ‘To Kneller’ (1694) Dryden writes of the decline of the classical world, when Goths and Vandals a rude Northern Race, Did all the matchless Monuments deface. Then all the Muses in one ruine lye; And Rhyme began t’ enervate Poetry. Thus in a stupid Military State, The Pen and Pencil Wnd an equal Fate. (ll. 47–52)71

Militarism is here associated with the decline of classical culture, rather than with the heroic battles of Homeric or Vergilian epic, and Dryden’s reference to the invasion of ‘a rude Northern race’ also suggests a parallel with the recent arrival of the Dutch king, whom he sees as bringing a new era of northern barbarism to the republic of letters. Further on in the poem Dryden returns to the question of the relationship between the age and the art it produces, comparing Kneller’s inability to complete a large historical painting with his own failure to write an epic, insisting that there is no place for the celebration of heroic activity in contemporary society:72 That yet thou hast not reach’d their high Degree Seems only wanting to this Age, not thee: Thy Genius bounded by the Times like mine, Drudges on petty Draughts, nor dare design A more Exalted Work, and more Divine.

(ll. 145–9)

This argument oVers a direct refutation of contemporary Whig claims that the Williamite victories would produce great works of art. Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset, for example, had drawn on the ‘advice to a painter’ tradition in an attempt to express the scale of the victory, and had proclaimed that ‘Boyne wou’d, for Ages, be the Painter’s Theme’. Yet in ‘To Kneller’ Dryden suggests that the very achievements which Montagu and others associated with the king’s triumphs—exalted and 71

John Dryden, ‘To Sir Godfrey Kneller’ (1694), in Works, iv. 462–3. This view of Kneller as purely a portrait painter has been challenged by J. Douglas Stewart in ‘Sir Godfrey Kneller as Painter of ‘‘Histories’’ and Portraits Histoire´s’, in David Howarth (ed.), Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 243–63. Kneller was to go on to design and paint a complex historical-allegorical painting of William III at Hampton Court (see J. Douglas Stewart, ‘William III and Sir Godfrey Kneller’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 33 (1970), 330–6). 72

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divine works of painting and poetry—could not be achieved in these iron times. In other poems the former Laureate responds to the premises of Williamite writing at the level of typology. His series of images of Alexander and Hannibal is in dialogue with the contemporary identiWcation of William with the great warrior leaders of western history.73 In Alexander’s Feast (1697) Dryden presents the mighty general as a ‘vanquished Victor’ (l. 115), a puppet controlled by the musician Timotheus.74 In ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman’ the Wgure of Hannibal comes to signify not the embodiment of military success but the dangers of an overreaching ambition: Ev’n Victors are by Victories undone; Thus Hannibal, with Foreign Laurels won, To Carthage was recall’d, too late to keep his own.

(ll. 164–6)75

Here Hannibal is through his absence and preoccupation with military glory a greater threat to his country’s stability than the enemy he is Wghting. This, along with Dryden’s other criticisms of the militarism of William’s reign, is more than an individual response to Williamite propaganda: the emphasis on peace, detachment, and moderation within ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman’ locates it Wrmly within the terms of the ‘country’ ideology that was appropriated during the 1690s as a mode of political opposition to William’s government and its policies.76 This loose grouping included Whigs who were concerned about the escalating costs of what appeared to be an unwinnable war, and about the presence of the large army required by the heavy commitment on the Continent. It assumed the same ‘country’ rhetoric that the Whig opposition had adopted a decade before. The country opposition, keen to defend the interests of landowners, were critical of the expense of the war because they felt that they were funding most of its costs by paying huge amounts of land tax. Convinced that the navy was less expensive 73 William is compared with both Alexander and Hannibal by John Hopkins in The Triumphs of Peace (London, 1698), and again with Alexander by John Glanvill in ‘Directions for Lamenting the Death, and Celebrating the Memory of His late Sacred Majesty King William’, in Glanvill, Poems, Consisting of Originals and Translations (London, 1725). 74 Dryden, Alexander’s Feast (1697), in Works, vii. 6. 75 Dryden, ‘To My Honour’d Kinsman, John Driden’ (1700), in Works, vii. 201. 76 For a fuller account of country ideology in the 1690s see Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977).

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than the army, they wanted to use the navy to defend trading interests in Europe, as had been done under Charles II, the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate. The court Whigs favoured William’s policies, and wanted to use attacks by a standing army on fortiWed land frontiers to fulWl strategic objectives in a large Continental war to defend Europe from French hegemony. So country interests developed into opposition to the cost of the war on land, and to the constitutional threat posed by a permanent standing army, while the court Whigs became identiWed as ‘the war party’ or ‘the patriotic party’ and defended both the standing army and William’s military commitment to his European coalition.77 As we shall see, these divisions over the king’s conduct of his war, and its implications for domestic policy, were to come to a head during the standing-army debates of 1697–1700.

The queen of reformation Both Whig and Tory poetry of the 1690s was dominated by the widespread identiWcation of monarch with soldier. William’s authority was celebrated in poems that presented rituals of conquest and bloodshed as the essence of manly heroism. Where, then, did this leave Queen Mary, with whom he shared the throne? Many writers seeking a model for this Protestant English queen naturally compared Mary with Elizabeth I. In Shadwell’s Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birth (1689) the Laureate declares of Mary: ‘By beauteous softness mixt with Majesty, | An Empire over every Heart she gains’, and thus ‘No more shall we the great Eliza boast, | For her Great Name in Greater Mary’s will be lost’.78 However, there were clearly some diYculties with the analogy with Gloriana, most notably in that Elizabeth I had ruled at all times. Mary’s sovereignty, on the other hand, was shared with her warrior husband. When William returned from his campaigns for the winter the queen handed over the reins of power. These tensions are evident in the elegies produced on Mary’s sudden death in December 1694, an event which produced an outpouring of poetic tributes. Poets sought ways of negotiating the realities of Mary’s dual roles as dutiful wife and 77 As Kenyon observes, the fortunes of the Whig party slipped noticeably during times of peace or impending peace, such as in 1696–1702 and after 1710 (Revolution Principles, 3). 78 Thomas Shadwell, Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birth, in Works, v. 346.

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omnicompetent monarch.79 George Stepney Wnds a classical precedent for the queen’s conduct: So Pallas from the dusty Field withdrew And when Imperial Jove appear’d in view, Resum’d Her Female Arts the Spindle and the Clew.80

It is clear from the analogy with Pallas that the practicalities of the king’s extended military activity meant that Mary II needed to be presented both as Wgure of power and as a domestic paragon. One way in which these two roles were seen to be combined was through the queen’s participation in the reformation-of-manners movement.81 Mary’s role as the queen of reformation allowed her panegyrists to depict both public and private virtues: her moral piety was evident both in her encouragement of reformist legislation and in her own conduct.82 As we saw in the previous chapter, in the last years of James’s reign a discourse of reformation had developed as a form of opposition to the king and court. Immediately after the Revolution Williamite propagandists working under Gilbert Burnet began a campaign to present the new monarchs, and Mary in particular, as the Wgureheads of a reformation movement, claiming that they had come to save the British people from themselves, as much as from popery and absolutism.83 This propaganda was supported by a range of active measures: societies for the reformation of manners sprang up, and drinking and swearing were banned in the street by a parliamentary act ‘for the more EVectual suppressing of

79 Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 215. Tory writers and the queens they celebrated dominate Barash’s book, and there is only a brief discussion of Mary II. However, as the account above suggests, further research into the role of Mary II would oVer important new perspectives on the relationship between gender and political and religious authority in this period. For an account of the satirical responses to the queen’s death see POAS v. 439–47. On the wider eVects of the queen’s death, see Jane Garrett, The Triumphs of Providence: The Assassination Plot 1696 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 55–7. 80 George Stepney, A Poem Dedicated to the Blessed Memory of her late Gracious Majesty Queen Mary (London, 1695), 5. Pierre Motteux uses the same analogy in Maria. A Poem Occasion’d by the Death of Her Majesty (London, 1695), 10. 81 We can trace this image of the Protestant godly queen in the later representation of the Hanoverian queens (see Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2001), 53–8). 82 On Mary’s godliness see Rose, England in the 1690s, 42, 203–4. 83 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Blasphemy and Profaneness’.84 The theatres were hardest hit by the changing moral climate: the two playhouses were presented as a public nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex county, actors were Wned £10 for indecent language on stage, and Vanbrugh’s Provoked Wife (1697) was pronounced as obscene in 1699. The emphasis on reformation addressed some of the tensions in William and Mary’s shared rule, and it also enabled Whig writers to pursue more partisan political agendas. For some Williamite Tories the legitimacy of the new regime, and therefore their allegiance to it, rested largely on Mary’s dynastic claims as the daughter of the previous Stuart king. For example, in Aphra Behn’s Congratulatory Poem to her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary Upon her Arrival in England (1689) the queen is consistently described as the daughter, never the wife, of a king: she is the ‘Illustrious Daughter of a King’ (l. 62) and ‘Great Cesar’s OV-spring’ (l. 107).85 The notion of the ‘queen of reformation’ enabled Whig poets to counter such claims, and to reiterate their critique of the Restoration monarchs, by situating Mary within an anti-Stuart history of corruption and reformation. In ‘T. J’’s poem ‘To the Queen’ the poet announces: By the false Light of Courts deceiv’d before We or their Vices, or their Habits wore; But now ReWn’d they our Example grow, Sham’d honourably into Good by You.86

As we can see, the role of the court in relation to reformation had changed signiWcantly: where Whig poets of the late 1680s lamented the lack of moral leadership given by a corrupt and luxurious court, under William and Mary the court had become exemplary in its reformed piety. Moreover, the focus on the ‘queen of reformation’ also emphasized Mary’s particular role as the protector of the Church: although William had charge of the administration of the government, he left the Church to the care of his wife, and from early on poets lauded Mary as ‘a true Tender Nursing Mother to the best of Churches’.87 Yet, while the 84 (9 & 10 William III, c. 32.) Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution, 94–5. On the formation of the societies for the reformation of manners see Rose, England in the 1690s, 205–9. 85 Aphra Behn, A Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary Upon her Arrival in England (1689), in Works, i. 305, 307. 86 T. J., ‘To the Queen’, in Musae Cantabrigienses, b1r. 87 Mary’s sympathies soon set her in opposition to her sister Princess Anne, who was associated with Henry Compton, Tory Bishop of London, and so the divisions within the

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queen’s guardianship of the Church eased the concerns of some Anglicans fearful of the Calvinist monarch’s protection of Dissenters, the emphasis on reformation could also be used to critique the forms and ‘postures’ of the Anglican High Church. One Revolution panegyric addressed to the queen declares its author’s hopes for a reformation of the Church itself: Religion too become a gaudy Misse Seldome appear’d but in a foppish dress. When they saw naught but posture and grimace Where learning and devotion should take place.88

As this poet sees it, Mary’s reformation of the Church would encompass not just an increased emphasis on moral piety but a rejection of the ritual and ceremony, the ‘posture and grimace’, associated with the high-Xyers of the Anglican Church. In identifying the regime, and the queen in particular, with the reformation movement Whig writers of the 1690s were renegotiating the relationship between the monarchy and contemporary poetry. As we have seen, under the Stuarts the emphasis in Whig verse had been on the use of poetry as a corrective to the lewdness encouraged by the court, drawing on a strain of classical republicanism in which political and personal virtue were seen as irreconcilable with the corruption of public life at court. Many opposition writers of the 1680s had deWned their poetic role as that of the Juvenalian satirist, speaking truths which would reveal vice and folly to the unseeing fashionable world. John Cutts had claimed that his ‘unpolish’d Muse’ was ‘stripping Folly of that gay Attire, | Which Knaves invent, and Fools so much admire, | I shew her naked to the World’.89 However, from the 1690s onwards the role of the poet was subtly redeWned, as reformation became a bulwark of government policy. The poet was no longer a satirical scourge of the public world but a defender of the new moral regime, and Whig writers Anglican Church polarized around the two sisters. While Mary sponsored Burnet’s programme for a Whiggish reform, Anne’s support for the high-Xyers fuelled the hopes and resentments of High Church Tories. For a more detailed account of Mary’s role in Church politics see Mark Goldie, ‘John Locke, Jonas Proast, and Religious Toleration, 1688–1692’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds.), The Church of England, c.1689–c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143–71 (163). Mr Sparling, ‘Poem to the Queen’, in Vota Oxoniensia, sig. y2v. John Cutts, ‘Le Muse Cavalier’, in Poetical Exercises Written Upon Several Occasions (London, 1687), 31–3. 88 89

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stressed the public, rather than the private, dimension of moral reformation. In his preface to Prince Arthur Richard Blackmore proposed a licensing system to ensure that only those writers who were ‘on message’ were entitled to speak: ‘Poets, as Preachers are in some Countries, were paid and licens’d by the State, and that none were suVer’d to write in Prejudice of Religion and the Government’.90 The literary critic John Dennis is equally insistent upon the role of poetry and drama in relation to the Williamite government. He argues that the most important part that poetry can play at the present time is to support the State: since Religion is the only solid Foundation of all Civil Society, it follows, that whoever endeavours to re-establish Poetry, makes a generous Attempt to restore an Art, that may be highly advantageous to the Publick, and beneWcial to Mankind.91

Dennis set out his theories for the reformation of modern poetry in two long essays, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704). His theory of poetry and its function was based on the idea that poetry was ‘an Art, by which a Poet excites Passion’.92 Rather than viewing poesy as a mere vehicle for instruction, Dennis argued that the most eVective way for it to accomplish its ultimate aim, ‘to reform the Manners’, was to engage the passions of the reader. He claimed that Christianity oVered the most powerful source of human passion, and therefore the greatest opportunity for poetic sublimity. Poetry shared many common bonds with Christianity, in that they both relied upon a combination of passionate and supra-rational persuasion, and both were designed to restore an inner harmony that had been disrupted by the Fall. Dennis argued that sublime poetry could restore man to a pre-lapsarian state: Poetry seems to be a noble Attempt of Nature, by which it endeavours to exalt itself to its happy primitive State; and he who is entertain’d with an accomplish’d Poem, is, for a Time, at least, restored to Paradise.93 90 Richard Blackmore preface to Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books (London, 1695), n.p. As Brean Hammond suggests, these lines might also have been a reminder to the government that the licensing laws were coming up for renewal (Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 90). 91 John Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), in Critical Works, i. 373. 92 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 336. 93 Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701), in Critical Works, i. 264.

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However, while he believed that the Bible was inspired directly by God, he did not extend this theory of inspiration to modern poets. To do so, he claims, would be ‘absurd and blasphemous’.94 Instead, he identiWes natural, rather than supernatural, explanations for the workings of poetry, explaining that poetry aVected through a combined appeal to the reason, the passions, and the senses. In Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur (1696) he quotes and modiWes Aristotle, arguing that although the Greek philosopher’s use of the term entheos has been taken to mean ‘there is something divine in Poetry’, he is ‘pretty conWdent that entheos is us’d metaphorically here, and signiWes something extreamly pathetick’. Thus, he argues, ‘Genius is nothing but Passion’.95 In this, as in other arguments, Dennis was clearly distancing himself from earlier radical writers. One of the potential problems with the Whig emphasis on moral reformation was that it could be seen as a throwback to the piety and (perceived) hypocrisy of mid-century Puritanism that was so relentlessly satirized by Tory writers. Dennis’s arguments about poetry and reformation are shaped by his recognition of this potential criticism. By stressing the natural sources of poetic eVect, his new theories about divine poetry were not associated with the claims to divine inspiration that had made religious enthusiasts such a target for their Tory and Anglican opponents.96 And in arguing that the contemporary stage should be reformed, rather than suppressed altogether, Dennis assumed a relatively moderate position in debates over the moral laxity of the theatre. The nonjuring cleric Jeremy Collier had published a series of tracts arguing that the theatre should be banned outright. In responding to Collier, Dennis emphasized that it was not moderate Whig reformers, such as himself, who were the heirs to mid-century political and religious radicalism, but Jacobites such as Collier. He compared Collier’s attack on the theatre with the furious zeal for ‘Ruine and Reformation’ evident in the works of the Presbyterian pamphleteer William Prynne.97 By attacking Puritan censorship he emphasized the moderation of his own moral agenda: 94

Dennis, Critical Works, i. 212. Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur (1696), in Critical Works, i. 135. 96 For a history of the complex responses to enthusiasm in this period see Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37–58. 97 Dennis, The Person of Quality’s Answer to Mr. Collier’s Letter, Being a Disswasive from the Play-House (1704), in Critical Works, i. 302. 95

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that beastly Reformation, which, in the Time of the late Civil Wars, was begun at the Tail, instead of the Head and the Heart; and which opprest and persecuted Mens Inclinations, instead of correcting and converting them, which afterwards broke out with the same Violence, that a raging Fire does upon its Wrst getting Vent98

As this controversy between Collier and Dennis suggests, the debate over literary reform did not follow exclusively party-political lines in the late 1690s and early 1700s.99 Not only was the reformist platform split between a Jacobite clergyman and a Williamite Whig but Dennis’s critical style drew criticism from a number of Whig contemporaries. For all his revolutionary zeal and critical acumen, Dennis’s prescriptive criticism and increasingly splenetic attacks on his fellow-writers were out of keeping with a growing emphasis on the role of the critic as an even-handed gentleman of the world.100 During the following decade Dennis’s ideas about moral reformation were to be modiWed in the politer discourse of the Spectator and the Tatler. Poetic reformation would become the talk of tea tables and coVee houses as Addison and Steele brought politeness to the middling classes.

England and England’s people As we have seen, over the course of the 1690s Whig poetry was dominated by its celebration of the exploits of the warrior king. War panegyric was characterized by a rhetorical convergence of nation with monarch, and monarch with soldier.101 These relationships were thrown into question with the end of the war in 1697. A recoinage crisis in 1696, coupled with a lack of conWdence in government short-term credit, 98 Dennis, The Usefulness of the Stage, to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion (1698), in Critical Works, i. 154. 99 The same is true of the wider project of the reformation of manners. As the editor of POAS vi observes, while the opposition to the institutionalized reformation of manners came largely from the Tories, eVorts to seize the reform movement for the Whigs were unsuccessful (POAS vi. 399). 100 On the ambivalence of Dennis’s position in relation to polite literary criticism see John Morillo, ‘John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory and Literary Theory’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 21–41; Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘Literary Criticism Among the Disciplines’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (2002), 343–60; Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England, 169–77. 101 On the survival of this heroic, militaristic idiom in the celebration of the Hanoverian monarchs see Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England’, 26–52.

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spurred William and his ministers to begin peace negotiations with France early in 1697. The most expensive war in the nation’s history was Wnally concluded with the Treaty of Ryswick, signed in September 1697.102 The peace brought new challenges for Whig poets: William’s militarism had dominated the verse of the previous nine years, and writers now had to address a warrior king who was no longer at war, and a nation no longer united, even superWcially, by its commitment to the war eVort. This renegotiation of the relationship between king and nation was made more complex by political controversy over William’s insistence on maintaining a substantial peacetime force. Between 1697 and 1699 the king and his Junto Whigs fought a country opposition determined to reduce the standing army, and the battle came to a head with the Commons’ votes of January 1699, in which Whig and Tory country MPs, defying the king and ministry, elected to reduce the army to seven thousand men.103 The debate threw up a whole series of questions about the relationship between England and its deliverer, and the destiny of the nation as a whole. The time was ripe for historical reXection, and in the poems of the late 1690s we can see the beginnings of a debate about the signiWcance of the Revolution and its modernity that was to reverberate throughout the following century. As I have suggested, the standing-army debates directed interest to matters of nationhood. This interest took the form of a controversy about the position of foreigners in England. The focus on immigration was a direct result of parliamentary eVorts to reduce the standing army, because the bill to limit William’s army contained the proviso that the forces retained should all be the king’s ‘natural born subjects’, a qualiWcation which aVected principally the king’s favourite regiment, the elite Dutch guards. It was a proviso born out of long-standing suspicions of William’s favouritism towards his Dutch courtiers, and it unleashed a tide of xenophobia, which peaked with the Act of Resumptions of 1699, requiring the king to revoke all the Irish estates given to 102 The seven years of conXict had brought few beneWts for either side, since the treaty required all parties to surrender the territorial gains they had made since 1688. Arguably the most signiWcant aspect of the deal from an English perspective was that it required Louis XIV to promise to give no more assistance to the enemies of William III, and in eVect to recognize his claim to the throne. 103 For more detail on the debates see Lois Schwoerer, No Standing Armies!: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

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Dutch courtiers at the beginning of the reign. Anti-Dutch polemic challenged the enduring Wction of William as the nation’s liberty-loving deliverer, as Gloriana’s heir who was more English than his predecessors. It generated a new debate about who the English people really were, and where they stood in relation to an aging Dutchman and his compatriot courtiers. Anti-Dutch sentiment had a long history in English political writing: the three Anglo-Dutch wars of 1652–4, 1665–7, and 1672–4 had fostered a series of satirical stereotypes, from Marvell’s The Character of Holland (1653) to the anonymous The Dutch-mens Pedigree or a Relation, Shewing how they were Wrst Bred and Descended from a HorseTurd . . . (1653).104 Although Steven Pincus has argued that popular sentiment moved in favour of the Dutch in the 1670s and 1680s, there was nonetheless a thriving tradition of anti-Dutch satire when William and Mary arrived in 1688.105 The king’s propagandists recognized the need for some pro-Dutch publicity, and shortly after the Revolution Sir William Temple, who was a former ambassador to the Hague, published his memoirs and letters, all of which stressed that England’s true interest in foreign policy lay in cooperation with the Dutch, and in helping them to preserve the Spanish Netherlands from the aggression of Louis XIV.106 The new king’s dynasty was incorporated into a familiar Whiggish history of the defence of liberty, despite the fact that the Orange family had long seemed to many Dutch and English to represent monarchical tyranny.107 Writers accommodated the aristocratic Nassaus into the same ongoing narrative of the battle against the encroachment 104 The historiography of the period has traditionally located the source of this hostility in the commercial rivalry between the two nations over colonial possessions, and in particular the East Indies. In Protestantism and Patriotism Steven Pincus has challenged this reading of British foreign policy in the Anglo-Dutch wars, arguing that the wars were fought for ideological purposes (Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–68 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a fuller history of anti-Dutch abuse see P. G. Rogers, The Dutch in the Medway (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 7–13. 105 Steven Pincus, ‘From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Hatred of Holland to Hatred of France’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), 333– 62. For anti-Dutch satires on the Revolution see in particular In DeWance to the Dutch (1688) and A New Song Upon the Hogen Mogens (1688), in POAS iv. 284–8, 314–15. 106 Sir William Temple, Memoirs of what Past in Christendom, from the War begun 1672 to the Peace concluded 1679 (London, 1691); Letters written by Sir William Temple during his being Ambassador at the Hague (London, 1699). 107 In the early 1680s Algernon Sidney had warned of the despotic ambitions of the House of Orange in his unpublished Court Maxims. For more detail on anxieties about the dynasty see Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism, 125, 128.

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on liberties which had characterized earlier English history. That narrative was aided by Temple, whose ‘Essay on Heroick Virtue’ genealogically traced the liberty-loving strain of the English to the northern Goths, who were also the more direct forbears of the barbarian tribes that had produced the house of Nassau. Thus Richard Steele (1672–1729) attributes to William the very inheritance that was claimed to be the preserve of the Englishman: ‘to whom ’tis Haereditary to be the Guardian and Asserter of the Native Rights and Liberties of Mankind’,108 while Addison acclaims the race of Nassaus as ‘The World’s great Patriots; they for Justice call, | And as they favour, Kingdoms rise or fall’.109 The king, however, was rather less adept at endearing his subjects to his countrymen. Although one of the elegies on William’s death was to commend Albermarle as ‘the Patroclus to our great Achilles’,110 many more subjects were critical of the king’s marked preference for Dutch counsellors and generals. The outcry that accompanied the Act of Resumptions was thus a revival of long-standing criticisms of the regime, and it gave the king’s opponents a context within which to vent their suspicions of the Dutch, and their royal patron. The literary and ideological ramiWcations of the debate can be seen very clearly in the satiric exchange between a series of Whig writers: John Tutchin, John Dennis, and Daniel Defoe. John Tutchin’s poem The Foreigners (1700), a verse satire on the ambitions of Portland and other Dutch courtiers, was published shortly after the Act of Resumptions. It was answered by John Dennis in The Reverse (1700) and, more famously, by Daniel Defoe, who came to the defence of the king and his ministers in his enormously popular satire The True Born Englishman (1701).111 The exchange again reveals the lack of consensus among Whigs at this time: although the Act was mainly backed by Tories, Tutchin, author of the Whig martyrologies, joined forces with high Tory Edward Seymour to become the most vocal supporters of the new legislation. At the centre of the disagreement between the three Whig writers lay profound diVerences not only over the role of the king’s Dutch allies in 108

Richard Steele, The Christian Hero, 87. Joseph Addison, ‘To his Majesty’, in Works, i. 42. 110 The Weeping Muse: A Poem Sacred to the Memory of his Late Majesty (London, 1702), r sig. a2 . 111 All subsequent line references are to POAS vi. Foxon lists thirty editions of The True Born Englishman before 1750. It was also revised and adapted to the circumstances of George I’s reign in 1716. 109

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public life, but also over the meaning and signiWcance of the Revolution, and over the identity of the English nation. All three writers drew on the mock-biblical allegory made popular by Absalom and Achitophel. England was Israel, but opinions were divided over what Israel represented, and who was responsible for her deliverance. Tutchin’s nostalgic call for a return to the values of an earlier age and for the vigorous defence of the liberties enshrined in the ancient Constitution was met by Defoe’s enthusiastic embrace of an England still in the making, of a mixed race of people committed to the defence of liberties founded only with the Revolution of 1688. In The Foreigners Tutchin presented England as an Israel plagued by ambitious Gibeonites, who had no place enjoying the bounty of the promised land.112 He traced the nation’s troubles to its history of alien intervention, seeing William’s Dutch favourites as the natural successors to the pillaging Scottish Stuarts. For Tutchin, Israel, or England, was a nation deWned by its exclusion of the alien other, and the Israelite was Jewish by birth rather than political allegiance. In The Reverse John Dennis responded with an alternative mock-biblical account, oVering the counter argument that it was the Dutch who had shown the English the way to the promised land, delivering the nation from itself: ‘If Judah’s Sons are false, and Gibeon’s just, | Gibeon has a right to share in Judah’s Trust.’ (61–2) For Dennis, Israel is a political, not an ethnic, entity whose real enemies are republicans such as Tutchin who threaten king and Constitution. As this summary reveals, the combatants from both sides were using the promised land to signify two very diVerent polities. In The True Born Englishman Defoe rejects the Israel analogy precisely because of the looseness and Xexibility of the allegory: No Parallel from Hebrew Stories take, Of God-like Kings my Similies to make: No borrow’d Names conceal my living Theam; But Names and Things directly I proclaim. (ll. 921–4)

Defoe observes that the image of the nation as promised land, so long a dominant motif in English political verse, could be used to cloak

112 In Joshua 9 the Israelites were tricked into dependence on the Gibeonites, neighbours of Israel who had fooled Joshua into making a peace treaty with them by pretending that they were from a far-oV country, when in fact they dwelt amongst the Israelites in adjacent lands. On this allusion, and the longer tradition of mock-biblical satire in the

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tendentious and dangerous arguments.113 In his satire he demonstrates the way in which the concept of England-as-Israel collapses because once the nation is anatomized it becomes clear that the boundaries between the chosen and the unchosen people are surprisingly hard to delineate. The English are a mongrel race, bred from centuries of conquest, invasion, and immigration. Here, moreover, England’s status as ‘the chosen people’ is a point of reproach rather than of selfcongratulation. The satire alludes to Psalm 137, in which Israelite loyalty in the midst of adversity brings about the destruction of the nation’s enemies: conversely, in Defoe’s poem the ingratitude of the English in a time of national prosperity reveals them to be unworthy of the providential deliverance they enjoy.114 Thus, where Tutchin’s construction of national identity is predicated on its hostility to the foreigner, Defoe reveals that in fact the nation is as foreign as its neighbours. And where Tutchin reads the nation’s chosen-ness as a justiWcation for its exclusion of aliens, Defoe sees it as a destiny that needs to be justiWed by the actions of its subjects. This contest over the motif of England-as-Israel oVers an important modiWcation of Linda Colley’s inXuential discussion of national identity in Britons, in which she argues that the concept of the nation as Israel was central to the formation of ‘Britain’ as a Protestant nation in the eighteenth century.115 It is certainly true that the concept of the nation as the chosen land recurs throughout the poetry and prose of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Yet, as these poems reveal, contemporaries also recognized that the allegory of England-as-Israel was a Xexible and politically enabling form of rhetoric rather than a single and stable form of self-identiWcation. If the poems reveal a divergence in their representation of the chosen land, they also diVer in their readings of the nation’s history. The debate over the Act of Resumptions became in part a conXict over interpretperiod, see Michael Suarez, ‘The Mock-Biblical: A Study in English Satire from the Popish Plot to the Pretender Crisis, 1678–1747’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1999). 113 For the history of England as Israel see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 30–3, 368–9. 114 This point is taken from Michael Suarez’s discussion of the poem in his account of mock-biblical satire (see Suarez, ‘The Mock-Biblical’, 71–83, and esp. 77). 115 Colley, Britons, 30–3. See also Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 420. There is a discussion of the complexities of the relationship between Protestantism and national identity in the introduction to Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (eds.), Protestantism and National Identity, Britain and Ireland c.1650–c.1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–29.

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ations of the events of 1688–9. While William may have been king de facto by 1700, the political foundations of the Revolution remained a subject of continuing debate. In The Foreigners Tutchin attacked one of William’s favourite Dutch courtiers, William Bentinck, the Earl of Portland, questioning the source of his authority, and in doing so reminded his readers that their king acceded through popular election, since ‘Heaven allows the People sure a Power | To chuse such Kings as shall not them devour’ (180–1). As in the furore over Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel, the notion of ‘the people’ was a contested one. For Tutchin the people are the nation, whose wishes have been overruled by aspiring Dutchmen: When no Successor to the Crown’s in sight, The Crown is certainly the Peoples Right. If Kings are made the People to enthral, We had much better have no King at all (ll. 174–7)

In his response John Dennis takes issue with this rhetoric of popular rights in much the same way that the Tory loyalists of 1681 had done. Here the voice of ‘the people’ is wrong-headed republican doctrine, as he laments: ‘No God they’d suVer, and no King obey. | But would the People by the People sway’ (ll. 79–80). Popular opinion is not a reliable mandate for political authority, since the people can err: God Wrst appointed Kings, and God ordain’d That should be Wx’d which He alone sustain’d, Well knowing from his Providential Mind, That Israel could not chuse, since she was Blind.

(ll. 181–4)

Similarly, for Defoe the people are no more than ‘an Amphibious Illborn Mob’ (l. 187), with delusions of grandeur: ‘The Mob are Statesmen, and their Statesmen Sots’ (l. 665). As this account reveals, the satiric exchange exposed an uncertainty not only about the racial identity of the English but also about their political identity. Tutchin’s nationalism is grounded in a nostalgia for earlier generations of independent libertyloving warrior forebears, and his poem Wnishes with the command to cast oV the ‘slavish Gibeonites’ and reassert an ‘Antient Courage’. His particular brand of Whig historiography is rooted in a conviction that Englishness and English liberties need to be recovered, rather than created. Defoe takes issue with this: his England is ‘Modern to the last degree’ (l. 404), and, quoting Juvenal’s eighth satire, he urges his readers to abandon their politics of nostalgia, since ‘Fame of Families is all a Cheat, | ’Tis Personal Virtue only makes us great’ (ll. 1215–16). As he rereads the history of the nation he Wnds that the triumphs so central to

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Tutchin’s account of the independent nation were all too often won with the aid of foreign intervention. Thus the Englishmen who secured the immemorial sovereignty of Parliaments were a motley collection of ‘Roman-Saxon-Danish-Normans’ (l. 194), while Gloriana’s race of heroes was made up of ‘Dutch, Walloons, Flemings, Irishmen and Scots | Vaudois and Valtolins, and Hugonots’ (ll. 259–60). The appeal to history which, as we have seen, was so central to Whig myth-making is exposed as no more than a selective manipulation of the past. The divergence here between Tutchin’s retrospective notion of England, grounded in a reverence for the ancient Constitution, and Defoe’s commitment to political modernity represents an important tension in Whig ideology and Whig culture at this time. By the end of the 1690s it was possible to write of the Revolution as both a return to earlier historical paradigms and the beginning of a new era; to claim both historical precedent and inaugural status for 1688. Such dualist thinking was extended to the king’s militarism. On the one hand William’s wars had brought conXict, and victories against France that were comparable with legendary triumphs at Cressey and Agincourt. Yet the funding and organization of the war had brought huge economic and social change: a system of public deWcit Wnance with its attendant urban culture; a class of Whig statesmen, Wnanciers, and clergymen all indebted to the new regime; and a religious settlement. The dual perspective was to reverberate throughout later Whig poetry. What began, initially, as a way of describing the political implications of the Revolution became increasingly a way of thinking about the cultural past and future. Matters of literary form, allusion and imitation, and subject matter could all be seen as oVering diVerent perspectives on this question, as Whig writers created verse which was authorized by the past yet emphatically insisted on the present as its location and source of legitimation. As we shall see in the following chapter, this paradoxical view of the nation and its history, and its poetic expression, was to be pursued in the literary debates of the following decade.

4

Poetic warfare 1702–1714 The political dimensions of literary debate were to gain sharper and more conXicting deWnition in the ‘rage of party’ that characterized the reign of Queen Anne. The Whig poetry of the period is informed by many of the themes and concerns we have seen developing over the course of the 1690s, though in many cases these were given diVerent inXection by the changed political circumstances of the decade. The militarism celebrated in Whig poetry under William III continued after 1702 in response to the victories of the War of the Spanish Succession. In numerous panegyrics on the battles at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), and Oudenarde (1708) we can trace the development and modiWcation of the heroic idiom that had developed in the previous decade. While this mode was undoubtedly complicated by the replacement of the warrior William with the invalid Anne, it found full triumphant voice in the celebration of the successes of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. As I have suggested, a dual perspective on the past and on literary tradition is another point of continuity between the Whig poetry of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In this chapter we will discover the ways in which this produced paradoxes in the notion of literary tradition. Throughout the reign writers debated the relevance and authority of pre-existing literary forms in relation to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. Yet in doing so they argued simultaneously for the legitimation of poetic form through earlier models and for the rejection of older forms in favour of modern innovation. The Whig quest for literary and moral reformation continues, also, Wnding inXuential expression in Addison’s and Steele’s periodicals, and the philosophies of the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Yet in reformulating morality as a form of polite sociability, these texts exposed some of the fundamental discontinuities in early Whig ideology.

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The queen at war The start of the War of the Spanish Succession in May 1702, just after the death of William III, inaugurated a new decade of European warfare, in which Britain fought as part of the Grand Alliance. The ultimate aim of the war was the same as that which had underwritten the Nine Years’ War; namely, to prevent French Catholic domination in Europe.1 Part of the agreement made at the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 was that when the childless Charles II of Spain died his territorial possessions would go to the ‘neutral’ Elector of Bavaria. However, when the king did die, in the summer of 1700, he left all his territories to Philip of Anjou, the French claimant, who was a nephew of Louis XIV. This eVectively created a uniWcation of the French and Spanish thrones, and William III responded by putting together a Protestant alliance to curb the inXuence of Louis XIV. England’s objectives in the war were threefold: to maintain a balance of power in Europe; to protect the nation’s trading interests; and, lastly, to secure recognition of Queen Anne and the Hanoverian succession, an issue that had become particularly acute after Louis XIV’s formal recognition of James III of England in 1702. For many Whigs, who already suspected that the cause of the Pretender and Louis XIV were one and the same, the battle on the plains of northern Europe was a contest for the future of the Protestant succession.2 Perhaps the most obvious obstacle for Whig poets intending to celebrate a war conceived under William and conducted under Anne was the question of how to accommodate the new queen within the idiom of martial panegyric. As we have seen, the Williamite poetry of the 1690s had created models of English kingship in which royal authority was Wrmly linked to active military leadership and physical bravery in battle. These images were hard to tally with the debilitated

1 The fullest account of the war is still G. M. Trevelyan’s England under Queen Anne, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1930–4). See also Derek McKay, Prince Eugene of Savoy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977) for more detail on the allied perspective, and J. B. Wolf, Louis XIV (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968) for detail of the French involvement. 2 GeoVrey Holmes, British Politics Under Anne, rev. edn., (London: Hambledon, 1987), 83. The two central Whig policies of the reign, the Regency Act of 1706 and the Act of Union of 1707, were designed to help safeguard a Protestant future. However, as Steven Pincus observes, the representation of the War of the Spanish Succession as a Protestant crusade was troubled by the catholicism of the Habsburgs (Pincus’ review of Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), Journal of Modern History, 67 (1995), 132–4).

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woman who was already largely chair-bound at the time of her accession.3 Anne herself cultivated parallels with Elizabeth I, and England’s last ruling queen clearly oVered a suitable model for a queen committed to the vigorous defence of Protestantism.4 Writers such as the author of the anonymous broadside England’s Triumph (1702) proclaimed that ‘Now the Second Elizabeth sits on the Throne, | No Courage is wanting our Foes to confound’.5 For Whig writers the parallel with Elizabeth could also be used, as it had been in the 1690s, to support a pro-Dutch foreign policy and England’s commitment to the Grand Alliance.6 However, once again images of the queen as ‘warrior woman’ had limited applicability. Carol Barash has argued that at moments of political conXict Queen Anne was more likely to be portrayed as a pious, weeping heroine than as a justice-loving Gloriana.7 And where Gloriana as warrior woman had been surrounded by a court of chivalrous knights, Anne’s political advisers were a coterie of female friends far distant from the scenes of battle.8 Moreover, as the reign progressed 3 The queen’s gender was later used as an explanation for the ministerial rout of 1710, and the peace negotiations that followed it. Harley writes of her reluctance to continue with the war as springing from ‘her sex and Christian horror of bloodshed’ (BM Loan 6/3, cited by A. D. MacLachlan in ‘The Road to Peace 1710–13’, in GeoVrey Holmes (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution 1689–1714 (London: Macmillan, 1969), 197–215 (201)). 4 Anne herself endorsed the comparison: when she was crowned she took on Elizabeth’s motto, semper eadem, and in 1713 she had her portrait painted as Elizabeth had done, with the blue ribbon of the Knights of the Garter around her left arm (C. Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714: Politics, Community, and Linguistic Authority (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 210). One of the most lengthy treatments of the Elizabeth–Anne parallel was Richard Blackmore’s poem Eliza: An Epick Poem (London, 1705). For a fuller analysis of Anne as Elizabeth see Vincent Carretta, The Snarling Muse: Verbal and Visual Political Satire from Pope to Churchill (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 1–19; for later political Elizabethanism see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 230–3; Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Poetry, Politics, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994). 5 England’s Triumph (London, 1702), 1. 6 In a letter to a Huguenot friend living in Holland, the third Earl of Shaftesbury emphasizes that ‘by further search you may Wnd other instances of England’s like concealment in the Protestant interests abroad, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth especially, who put herself at the head of the Protestant cause, and whose example may very becomingly be applied at any time to our good Queen and her present ministry’ (Shaftesbury to Mons. Basnage, 21 January 1707, The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900 by Swan Sonnenschein; repr. Routledge, 1992), 377). 7 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 218. 8 See Frances Harris, ‘ ‘‘The Honourable Sisterhood’’: Queen Anne’s Maids of Honour’, British Library Journal, 19 (1993), 181–98 (189).

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the queen tended to be delineated in maternal terms, far removed from the male public world with which Elizabeth had been so Wrmly engaged.9 As Carol Barash has shown, many Tory writers reconciled the queen’s femininity with her commitment to warfare by focusing on her role as ‘mother of the Church of England’. This enabled them to emphasize both her feminine piety and the fact that she would use whatever force necessary to protect the Church.10 It was rhetoric which not only tallied with the queen’s very public and fervent Anglicanism, but also clearly made her Tory property, an ultimate authority behind the ‘Church in Danger’ propaganda which they relied on throughout the reign. In Whig poetry of the same period it is often Anne’s successor who occupies the imaginative centre of writing about the queen, because the War of the Spanish Succession was largely seen by the Whigs as a battle in defence of the Hanoverian succession. William Congreve’s 1708 ballad on the victory at Oudenarde is about the battle not between Anne and Louis but between the two contenders for the future throne of England, Prince George, the Elector of Hanover, and James Edward Stuart. Congreve lauds the ‘Young Hannover Brave’: Thus Firmly he stood As became that High Blood, Which runs in his Veins so Blue; This Gallant Young Man Being Kin to Queen Anne, Did, as were she a Man, she wou’d do.11

However, for Whig poets looking for a male warrior hero the most popular choice was undoubtedly the Duke of Marlborough. Although John Churchill had changed political allegiances numerous times over 9 On the problem of Anne’s self-representation as symbolic and literal mother see Toni Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood: British Writing and Culture, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), 37–89. On gender and political argument more broadly in the period see Rachel Weil, Political Passions: Gender, the Family and Political Argument in England, 1680–1714 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 10 Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 224–5. Barash observes that images of Anne as mother of a speciWcally Anglican Church were also used to counter the Mariolatry developing around Mary of Modena. 11 William Congreve, Jack Frenchman’s Defeat (London, 1708), in POAS vii. 342–3. It is interesting that again the principles and the rhetoric of dynastic inheritance are employed to counter Jacobite lineal claims (see also Leonard Welsted’s A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late Famous Battle of Audenarde (London, 1709): ‘The Princely Youth of Hanoverian line, | In whom his god-like Father’s virtues shine’ (p. 9).)

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the past decade, by the early 1700s he had become a Wgure of heroic proportions for many Whigs. As Robert D. Horn’s bibliography of panegyrics on Marlborough shows, the duke’s role in the epic battles of Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde spawned hundreds of poems of praise. At times the emphasis on Marlborough, coupled with the virtual retreat of the Prince of Denmark from public life, meant that the duke was portrayed as a royal husband, as in Samuel Cobb’s Poem Occasion’d by the late Victories obtain’d over the French and Bavarians . . . (1709).12 Marlborough is the hero: Who Fights abroad, while a n n a Prays at home, And moves with Passion the Windsorian Dome : For, if she sighs, the Statues seem to groan; And, at her Tears hard Marbles sweat their own: Concern and Greatness in her Looks are seen, The Loving Mother and Defending q u e e n .13

We can see here the way in which the emphasis on Marlborough as military leader eVectively relegates the queen to a domestic and maternal role. In other poems he becomes the queen’s surrogate, the Williamite military hero that she never could be. In countless war panegyrics not only was he presented as continuing the great king’s legacy, but he was also compared with many of the same biblical, classical, and historical heroes. In James Shute’s A Pindarick Ode (1703) he is Moses, Joshua, and Gideon; in James Smallwood’s Congratulatory Poem on Blenheim, he, like William, is a ‘True English Hero of the Ancient Race’ and his victory is ‘As Azencourt: So our Brave Warriours stood, | When France their Anger Mourn’d in Tears of Blood’.14 In John Dennis’s poem on Ramillies it is Marlborough who is the natural successor to the line of royal military heroes, following ‘great Edward ’, ‘Conqu’ring Henry’, Eliza, and William.15 In other poems he is Caesar, Aeneas, 12 On the limited role of the prince in public life see Bowers, The Politics of Motherhood, 52–3. Yet W. A. Speck has argued that George’s role as patron has been greatly underestimated (Speck, The Birth of Britain: A New Nation, 1700–1710 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 11–13). 13 Samuel Cobb, A Poem Occasion’d by the late Victories obtain’d over the French and Bavarians . . . under the Command of his Grace the Duke of Marlborough (1708), in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1709), 247–8. 14 James Smallwood, A Congratulatory Poem to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough, on His Glorious Success . . . (London, 1704), repr. in Robert D. Horn, ‘The Authorship of the First Blenheim Panegyric’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 24 (1961), 297–310 (299). 15 John Dennis, The Battle of Ramilla: Or the Power of Union. A Poem in Five Books (London, 1706), 70.

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Hercules, and Joshua.16 Moreover, not only was the duke the type of William and his warring forebears, but his battles were dramatized with the same rhetoric that we have seen used to celebrate the wars of the 1690s. Whig poets continued to draw on themes of liberty, martyrdom, and deliverance throughout the panegyrics of the decade.17

Addison’s The Campaign and John Philips’s Bleinheim The emphasis on Marlborough’s role became a way of appropriating the successes of the war as speciWcally Whig victories. By the end of 1702 the Whigs had developed an attitude towards the conduct of the war that was a natural correlative of their position during the 1690s. This consisted of an uncompromising commitment to the Grand Alliance and to Britain’s contribution to the Continental struggle against Louis XIV led by the Duke of Marlborough. The Tories, as under William III, wanted to conduct a limited ‘blue-water’ policy, which would pursue the dual purposes of securing defence against France and safeguarding colonial possessions. Thus Tory poets praised military heroes such as the Duke of Ormond and the naval commander Sir George Rooke, rather than the Whiggishly aligned Marlborough, and they favoured war in Italy or the Mediterranean rather than in Flanders.18 16 For Marlborough as Hercules see Charles Johnson, The Queen: A Pindarick Ode (London, 1705); for Caesar see The British Caesar: Or the History of the Glorious Achievements of John, Duke of Marlborough (London, 1705); for Aeneas, Catherine Trotter, On His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1706); for Joshua Joshua: A Poem in Imitation of Milton (London, 1706). 17 A body of rhetoric that Thomas Harley refers to as ‘a senseless jargon of France, Jesuits, and an invisible army of 100,000 pilgrims mounted upon elephants’ (Thomas Harley to Edward Harley, 30 December 1708, HMC Fifteenth Report, Appendix V. The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland (London: HMSO, 1897), iv. 516). John Dennis’s two lengthy war poems, Britannia Triumphans (1704) and The Battle of Ramillia (1706), are good examples of the extended use of this rhetoric (see also Nicholas Rowe, A Poem upon the Late Glorious Successes of Her Majesty’s Arms (London, 1707) and Charles Johnson, Ramelies, A Poem (London, 1706) ). 18 Robert D. Horn, Marlborough: A Survey. Panegyrics, Satires and Biographical Writings, 1688–1788 (Kent: Dawson, 1975), 25, 37. For examples of these strategies in Tory panegyric see Charles Tooke, To the Right Honourable Sir George Rooke (London, 1702); Samuel Phillips, The German Caesar. A Panegyrick on Prince Eugene . . . (London, 1702). Whig satirists responded by belittling their opponents’ heroes, as in the anonymous poem on the Battle of Malaga, On the Sea Fight between Sir G. R. and Tolous (London, 1704). That the Tories were attempting to represent the drawn battle at Malaga as a victory comparable with Marlborough’s is evident in a contemporary letter from Defoe to Harley: ‘the High Church party look on [Rooke] as their own. The victory at sea they look upon as

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These opposing perspectives on the conduct of the campaign and the nature of its successes are evident in two of the most famous panegyrics produced on the war: Joseph Addison’s and John Philips’s rival oVerings on the Battle of Blenheim. The poems illustrate the ways in which partypolitical diVerence could be articulated through the deWnition of Marlborough’s role with regard to the Queen: Tory poets explained the duke’s victories as a result of Anne’s direction of the war, while Whig poets praised the leader himself. Addison’s The Campaign (1705), commissioned by Baron Somers and dedicated to Marlborough, bears a typically Whiggish emphasis on Marlborough. Although it is the queen who initially despatches the duke to his Continental warfare, the major part of the poem is preoccupied with detailing the progress of the battle, and with celebrating the actions of ‘Our god-like leader’ who is ‘Big with the fate of Europe’ (ll. 63, 73).19 The geographical and logistical diYculties of the conXict are all occluded by the grandeur of Marlborough’s shaping vision, ‘forming the wond’rous year within his thought’ (l. 65) so that the campaign is almost won before it is begun. Samuel Johnson’s praise of this evocation of Marlborough’s ‘calm command of his passions, and the power of consulting his own mind in the midst of danger’ reXects the overwhelming sense of the general’s control that is created in the poem.20 Yet while Addison omits the messy detail of the local diYculties of the campaign, his narrative, like the panegyrics of the previous decade, nonetheless stresses the graphic physical detail of the conXict. He describes, for example, ‘Thousands of Wery steeds with wounds transWx’d | Floating in gore, with their dead masters mixt’ (ll. 317–18).21 The details of the account distance the battle from the absent queen, and at the conclusion of the poem it is clear where Addison’s praise is really directed. Anne may oversee an explicitly Whiggish foreign policy: their victory over the Moderate party . . . I am oblig’d with patience to hear . . . the sea victory set up against the land victory; Sir George exalted above the Duke of Marlborough’ (HMS Portland MSS), iv. 137). 19 Joseph Addison, The Campaign (1705), in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 159. All further line references in the text are to this edition. 20 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 129. 21 It is a trait found elsewhere in the poems on the war: Richard Blackmore celebrates Marlborough’s heroic endeavours on the battleWeld in Instructions to Vander Bank (1709), describing ‘Warriors quiv’ring in the Pangs of Death, | Rolling their Eyes, and gasping out their Breath’ (Blackmore, Instructions to Vander Bank: A Sequel to Advice to the Poets (London, 1709), 5).

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Poetic warfare 1702–1714 By her, Britannia, great in foreign wars, Ranges through nations, wheresoe’er disjoin’d, Without the wonted aid of sea and wind. By her th’ unfetter’d Ister’s states are free, And taste the sweets of English liberty

(ll. 452–6)

but the Wnale of the poem is reserved for the general: Ma r l b roˆ’s exploits appear divinely bright, And proudly shine in their own native light; Rais’d of themselves, their genuine charms they boast, And those who paint ’em truest praise ’em most.

(ll. 473–6)

There is a deft reversal of the idiom of divine right here: for Addison, Anna is royal, but Marlborough is ‘god-like’. The queen may be granted the custodianship of the nation, but it is the duke who comes closest to divinity, ‘divinely bright’, or, as he is depicted in one of the poem’s most famous moments, the angel riding the storm. In John Philips’s Miltonic poem on the battle, Bleinheim (1705), which is dedicated to Robert Harley, and was commissioned by Harley and Henry St John, there is less emphasis on the commander than on the ultimate source of his authority.22 The poem is a loose imitation of book VI of Paradise Lost, in which Philips relocates the war in heaven to the battleWelds of northern Europe.23 Bleinheim begins with a corrective to Whig accounts of the war. Rather than present the battle as a continuation of Williamite victories, Philips emphasizes the fact that William III failed to curb French encroachment, which it is left to Anne to achieve. While the poem clearly exploits popular support for Marlborough following the victory at Blenheim, this enthusiasm is again tempered by the fact that Philips’s ultimate praise is for the queen: ‘in Thy Realms secure | Of Peace, Thou Reign’st, and Victory attends | Thy distant Ensigns’ (ll. 456–8).24 It is Anne who takes the credit for the victory: Marlborough is merely a ‘distant ensign’. Moreover, despite the fact that Philips is celebrating a victory on land in Flanders, the Wnal section of the poem is dominated by its emphasis on naval 22 On the circumstances of its publication see M. G. Lloyd Thomas, introd. to The Poems of John Philips, ed. Lloyd Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), pp. xxi–xxii. 23 On Philips’s Miltonic imitations in this and other poems see Dustin GriYn, ‘The Bard of Cyder-Land: John Philips and Miltonic Imitation’, SEL 24 (1984), 441–60. 24 All references to Bleinheim are taken from The Poems of John Philips, ed. M. G. Lloyd Thomas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1927), 9–25.

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engagements and peace. Rooke appears, and ‘with winged Speed He rides | Undaunted o’er the lab’ring Main, t’assert | Thy liquid Kingdoms’ (ll. 429–31). Philips declares that for all Marlborough’s heroics the war has solved nothing, and is mere ‘wasteful strife’, since the Spanish succession is still undecided (l. 389).25

Blenheim Palace Although Whigs and Tories were at odds over the representation of John Churchill’s role in the battle at Blenheim, the victory at the Danube in August 1704 undoubtedly cemented his military reputation and his fortune. It was the Wrst time that British troops had defeated a French army for centuries, and the Wrst time in Wfty years that a French army had been decisively beaten. In February 1705 Queen Anne made the duke a grant of the royal manor of Woodstock in Oxfordshire in recognition of his services to the nation, and shortly afterwards building work began on Blenheim Palace. The subsequent representation of the palace in contemporary poetry was to expose diverse perspectives on the general and the nature of his achievements. Woodstock Park, within the royal forest of Wychwood, was formerly the site of a royal manor house, and it had been used as a retreat by nearly every monarch since Henry I.26 Thus the site connected the duke to earlier English kings, and to one in particular: the famous military hero Henry II, who was reputed to have courted Rosamond CliVord at Woodstock. The popular mythology surrounding this romance was that Eleanor, Henry’s queen, had been out walking with him in the park, when she noticed a ‘clew of silk’ clinging to one of his spurs. She picked it up, and followed it through a labyrinth, at whose centre she found Rosamond.27 The tale of the warlike Henry’s romance oVered a Wtting counterpoint to the military achievements of the Duke of Marlborough, whom poets envisioned returning to his own romantic bliss at Blenheim. The story of the labyrinth and Rosamond’s bower continued to be the main interest of the park while the new palace was being 25 This debate over the emphasis on the respective roles of queen and general also underlies Matthew Prior’s poem on the victory at Ramillies, An Ode, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Queen (London, 1706) and William Atwood’s Whig response to it in A Modern Inscription to the Duke of Marlborough’s Fame (London, 1706). 26 David Green, Blenheim Palace (London: Country Life, 1951), 25–7. 27 Green, Blenheim Palace, 23.

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constructed, and it was celebrated in a number of Whig poems and plays, including Addison’s opera Rosamond (1707).28 The park also had powerful literary resonances, as the reputed home of Chaucer, an association that went back at least to Camden’s Britannia (1586).29 Both these connections gave panegyrists access to native literature and history, providing a mythic backdrop to the contemporary warfaring of the national hero. Yet at the same time the rising splendours of the new palace also represented the best aspects of modern Whig culture, in the form of John Vanbrugh’s architecture and Godfrey Kneller’s paintings. Despite the fact that for the Wrst Wve years the palace consisted of little more than mud, stones, and wrangles over the payment of workmen, poets like Leonard Welsted projected on to the site their hopes for the nation, envisaging in it ‘Britain’s politeness seen, in Vanbrugh’s art’.30 It swiftly became, as Robert Cummings has argued, ‘an emblem for the Whigs of triumphalist aspiration and a hoped-for new order’.31 However, Blenheim could of course also be seen as a symbol of the ambitions of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. From the very beginning the project was politicized: the early choice of Churchill’s fellow Kit-Cat member Vanbrugh as architect rather than the royal Surveyor-General, Christopher Wren, suggested the Whiggish bias of the nation’s new monument. And contemporaries were quick to note the correlation between Vanbrugh’s grandiose aesthetics and the pretensions of his employers, as Swift’s early satire ‘The History of Vanbrug’s House’ (1706) reveals. The escalating costs of the project, from an original estimation of £100,000 to £250,000 and upwards, and the mounting opulence of its scale and embellishments were seen as a sign of the cupidity of the duke and duchess.32 When the Whig administration fell, Blenheim became a focal point for the debate about the legitimacy of the Churchills’ stranglehold on public life, and was so much perceived as a symbol of the aspirations of the Whig oligarchy 28 Yet see also the use of Blenheim in the Jacobite George Granville’s The British Enchanters: Or No Magick Like Love (London, 1706). 29 E. G. Stanley, ‘Chaucer at Woodstock: A Theme in English Verse of the Eighteenth Century’, Review of English Studies, 190 (1997), 157–67. 30 Leonard Welsted, A Poem, Occasion’d by the Late Famous Victory of Audenarde, in Works, 13. 31 Robert Cummings, ‘Addison’s ‘‘Inexpressible Chagrin’’ and Pope’s Poem on the Peace’, Yearbook of English Studies, 18 (1988), 143–58 (149). 32 Pope was to observe in 1717: ‘I never saw so great a thing with so much littleness in it: I think the Architect built it entirely in compliance to the taste of its Owners: for it is the most inhospitable thing imaginable, and the most selWsh’ (Pope to Martha Blount[?], September 1717, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), i. 432).

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that the Tory ministry ceased to fund building work on it in 1712, shortly after the dismissal of the general.33 So the rising palace at Woodstock could be seen both as a sign of the success and optimism of the Whig administration and as an emblem of its greed and hubris. The most celebrated example of the Whig topographical poem set at Woodstock is the young poet William Harrison’s Woodstock Park, which was published by Jacob Tonson in two folio editions in 1706, while Harrison was still at Oxford. Heavily inXuenced by Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, the poem begins with a stag hunt: So Coward Princes, who at War’s Alarm, Start from their Greatness, and themselves disarm, With recollected Forces strive in vain Their Empire, or their Honour, to regain, And turn to rally on some distant Plain, Whilst the Werce Conqu’ror bravely urges on, Improves th’Advantage, and ascends the Throne. Forgive, Great Denham, that in abject Verse, What richly thou adorn’st, I thus rehearse. Thy noble Chace all others does exceed, In artful Fury, and well-temper’d Speed.34

Harrison compares his poem with Denham’s because both describe a stag hunt. Yet, while in Denham’s poem the stag represents Charles I, the king as the quarry of his political opponents, in Woodstock Park the hunt is developed as a metaphor for Marlborough’s military successes, with Marlborough the hunter and the chase the pursuit of the French on the plains of central Europe. Harrison clearly wants his poem to be compared with an earlier classic, but in altering the signiWcance of the hunt he reveals a selective approach to those earlier models. Harrison’s awareness of poetic tradition is also evident in his references to Chaucer. Having introduced the theme of Woodstock as Chaucer’s birthplace, he then attacks John Dryden’s recent imitations of the poet. Dryden, he claims: Took wond’rous Pains to do the Author Wrong, And set to modern Tune his ancient Song. Cadence, and Sound, which we so prize, and use, Ill suit the Majesty of Chaucer’s Muse; 33 Green, Blenheim Palace, 128. The extent to which the fortunes of the palace were recognized as tied to the political fate of the Churchills can be seen in the satirical ballad He’s Wellcome Home: or a Dialogue between John and Sarah (London, 1711). 34 William Harrison, Woodstock Park. A Poem (London, 1706), 3–4.

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Poetic warfare 1702–1714 His Language only can his Thoughts express, And honest Clytus scorns the Persian Dress.35

Coming at a time when Dryden’s versions of the medieval bard were universally acclaimed, this criticism is surprising.36 However, Harrison’s argument makes sense in the context of the heroic myth-making that he was authorizing with Chaucerian allusion. Where Dryden had translated Chaucer’s poetry into a graceful modern idiom, for Harrison it is precisely the crude beauty of Chaucer’s ‘honesty’ that is so prized. Presented as an eVete neoclassical man of letters Chaucer had little relevance to Marlborough, but as the voice of ancient majesty he was an ideal Wgure with whom to link a man whose mythical heroics were comparable with an earlier phase of English history. However, for all this evocation of the rugged virtue of earlier native culture, Harrison ultimately rejects comparisons with previous episodes of English history. After the allusions to Henry and Chaucer he declares: Silenc’d be all Antiquity could boast, And let old Woodstock in the new be lost. No more her Edwards, or her Henrys please; Their Spoils of War, or Monuments of Peace. By c h u r c h i l l ’s Hand so largely is out-done, What either Prince has built, and both have won.37

The suggestion is that Marlborough has in fact exceeded all previous history: the actions of earlier military leaders are surpassed by recent events, and their monuments are overshadowed by the commemoration of Marlborough’s victories at Woodstock. The remainder of the poem is a vision of the prospective splendours of the completed palace, and Harrison writes of the paintings that Kneller will create to adorn the walls: No fam’d Exploits, from musty Annals brought, Shall share his Art, or furnish out the Draught; No Foreign Heroes in Triumphant Cars, No Latian Victories, nor Græcian Wars: Germania’s fruitful Fields alone aVord Work for the Pencil, Harvest for the Sword.38

35

Harrison, Woodstock Park, 4. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion: 1357– 1900, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), vol. i. pp. xxxviii–xxxix. 37 Harrison, Woodstock Park, 8. 38 Ibid. 9. 36

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The mythological and historical iconography that traditionally characterizes historical painting is here rejected in favour of the representation of exclusively modern native achievement. Yet it is, as we have seen, more complex than that. Harrison’s poem seems to suggest that historical comparison both is and is not an appropriate measure of the scale of current events: earlier ages can oVer types of heroism, but these are ultimately rendered redundant by the pace of recent history.39 This is the same split perspective on historicity and modernity that characterized responses to the Revolution, and it was to recur throughout the period.40

The war and the canon It is clear there were a number of Whig and Tory writers who drew on the poetry, or the reputations, of Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser for the same reasons that Harrison favours Chaucer.41 The renewed interest in home-grown poetic forebears was a patriotic way of emphasizing the status of the victories, which were praised as comparable with those described by Homer or Vergil, but which clearly demanded a native epic voice. In addition, the unpolished vigour of Spenser, Milton, and Chaucer made them poetic models more appropriate to the heroics of Blenheim and Oudenarde than the reWned lyrics of Stuart court poetry. In Libertas Triumphans (1708) Charles Gildon oVers a very clear explanation of the new taste for earlier English poetry:

39 However, this novelty could also be seen as a sign of impermanence: in the poem A Dialogue between Windsor Castle and Blenheim House (London, 1708) the two palaces come to represent the old and the new in political-artistic culture. Blenheim is eVectively presented as fashionable frivolity. 40 For the view that this poetry was exclusively moving towards a rejection of older styles see Arthur S. Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67. 41 On the changing reputations and uses of earlier poets in the long eighteenth century see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jack Lynch, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Jonathan Brody Kramnick, Making the English Canon: Print Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). As William Weber has described, the politicized rehabilitation of earlier English culture was also prevalent in contemporary music, and in particular in responses to musical classics (Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 93–6).

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Poetic warfare 1702–1714 Assist Harmonious Genius of this Isle, That on our Ancient Bards were’t wont to smile; Who didst the Heroe warm with Martial Fire, And then the Bard to sing his Deeds inspire: Who Chaucer, Spencer, Milton gavest to Fame, By Nature made capacious of thy Flame42

Here Chaucer, Spencer, and Milton are seen to provide models of bardic eulogy, the poetic Wre that the present age demands. In this poem they have a largely symbolic signiWcance, as voices resonant of a native past, but elsewhere we can see a more sustained engagement with the verse itself. Each poet represented a good model for contemporary panegyrists. Milton’s Protestant epic oVered writers the opportunity to paint their panegyric on a truly heroic canvas.43 John Dennis’s epic The Battle of Ramillia (1706) begins with an imitation of the Wrst book of Paradise Lost, in which the spirit of Discord addresses her ‘accurst Assembly’, who plot to bring about the overthrow of Liberty. As Nicholas von Maltzahn has observed, one of the ironies of the development of the Miltonic battle poem was that Whig poets had to ignore the fact that Milton had shown a profound ambivalence about militarism, and new techniques of war, in his much-emulated description of the War in Heaven in book VI of Paradise Lost.44 Instead, the epic became a template for the celebration of the heroism and splendour of martial conXict. Other poets found a source of inspiration in Shakespeare: in Jasper Robins’s The Hero of the Age (1704) the bard is lauded as the prime example of the heroic poet: ‘Were Shakespear living, and had then stood by, | Shakespear had wanted Words for this Dread Day’.45 Whig writers continued to draw on the image of the bard to emphasize Marlborough’s heroics even when the general was under attack from 42

Charles Gildon, Libertas Triumphans: A Poem (London, 1708), 6. One of the earliest instances of Miltonic imitations is James Shute’s A Pindarick Ode upon Her Majesties sending the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1703), in which Marlborough confronts all the host of Satan and ‘From Regions of eternal light, | Down, down they fall to everlasting night’ (p. 5). There seems to have been a Xood of Whig Miltonic imitations following the Battle of Ramillies. There are Whig poems, which predate Philips’s Bleinheim, in Joshua: A Poem in Imitation of Milton (London, 1706) and Charles Johnson’s Ramelies, A Poem (London, 1706). Other examples are ‘Mr Paris’s’ Ramillies. A Poem (London, 1706); Dennis’s The Battle of Ramillia (London, 1706). 44 Nicholas von Maltzahn, ‘The War in Heaven and the Miltonic Sublime’, in Steven Pincus and Alan Houston (eds.), The Nation Transformed : England after the Restoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 154–79. 45 Jasper Robins, The Hero of the Age (1704), quoted by Horn in Marlborough, A Survey, 89. 43

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the Tories. In Tatler 137 Steele writes that the duke reminds him of ‘that noble Figure which Shakespear gives Harry the Fifth upon his Expedition against France’ and quotes the prologue to Henry V with its invocation of a ‘Muse of Fire’.46 Spenser was especially relevant to poets seeking literary models for their panegyric, because of the long-standing comparison of Anne with Gloriana. The inXuence of The Faerie Queene is evident not only in Prior’s Ode, but in Dennis’s Britannia Triumphans (1704), in which Louis ‘like a hoary Wizard close immur’d, | In his enchanted Castle sat retir’d, | And there unseen he mutter’d secret Sounds’.47 Again, Whig poets drew on the idiom of chivalric romance in celebration of their very modern military campaigns. In 1713 the pamphleteer Samuel Croxall drew on Spenser’s status as proto-Whig to produce two sets of ‘continuation cantos’ from the Faerie Queene, which he used to attack Robert Harley’s Tory administration. An Original Canto of Spencer (1713) begins with a Whiggish invocation: ‘Fair Liberty, bright Goddess, Heavenly-born, | So high esteem’d by ev’ry living Wight’, and goes on to tell the story of a hapless maiden, Britomart (Britain), who is misled by a wicked old wizard, Archimago (Harley). Archimago persuades her to ‘oVer Terms of Peace, and happy Agreement’ to the evil Sir Burbon (Louis XIV) and Romania (Rome).48 The Original Canto, like so many Whig poems of this period, identiWes the prospect of national salvation in the accession of the Elector of Hanover, and thus the poem concludes with the prophesy that the valiant Sir Athegall (George I) will one day rescue Britomart from her captors. Spenser’s pastorals were also popular, and Whig poets blended pastoral and chivalric elements to create the oxymoronic genre of ‘war pastoral’.49 John Oldmixon’s A Pastoral Poem on the Victories at Schellenburgh and Blenheim (1704) establishes a parallel between Anne and Elizabeth, and between Spenser and contemporary Protestant poets: She, for whom Collin touch’d his golden Lyre, And sung her Glorious Acts with equal Wre; Ev’n She, must now to a n n a’s Reign resign 46 Richard Steele, Tatler 137, 23 February 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), ii. 291. 47 John Dennis, Britannia Triumphans. Or a Poem on the Battel of Blenheim, in The Select Works of Mr. John Dennis, 2 vols. (London, 1718), i. 173. 48 Samuel Croxall, An Original Canto of Spenser: Design’d as part of his Fairy Queen, but never Printed (London, 1713), 7. 49 Horn claims that the earliest example of Spenserian war pastoral is A Poem on the Late Glorious Success of His Grace the Duke of Ormond at Vigo (London, 1702).

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Poetic warfare 1702–1714 The Wrst Bright Page, and in the second shine. Eliza’s Arms reliev’d an Infant State, But Empires are by a n n ’s repriev’d from Fate. Her Hero’s the New World explor’d for Gold, But a n n’s for Glory only save the Old. And shall not Her Illustrious Triumphs raise Thy fainting Voice, and Tempt thy Sylvan Lays.50

Oldmixon sees the Shepheard’s Calender as the remnant of an earlier age: his emphasis is on the contrast between Elizabeth’s ‘Infant State’ and Anne’s ‘Illustrious Triumphs’, which by implication demands sylvan lays made appropriate to the new era. This concern for the adaptation of pastoral for modern contexts is the subject of the preface to his poem, in which he defends the use of pastoral for heroic themes, dismissing those readers who imagine that shepherds and shepherdesses ‘shou’d be always Billing and Cooing, Sighing and Sobbing’.51 Citing the example of Vergil’s lines on Pollio, and the eighteenth idyll of Theocritus, Oldmixon argues that the shepherds of the golden age were not idle philosophers, but statesmen: The Shepherds in those Days had not only the Charge of their Flocks upon their Hands, but the Care of the State; and as the Riches of the World consisted chieXy in the Riches of the Field, Flocks, Herds, and Corn; so Husbandry and Labour were so far from being thought below Persons of the highest Quality, that Kings held at once the Crook and the Scepter.52

In his redeWnition of the genre Oldmixon emphasizes the allegorical function of the form, within which rural pursuits oVer parallels, rather than alternatives, to contemporary public life. If, as he argues, shepherds are in fact kings, the subjects traditionally excluded by golden-age pastoral—heroism, politics, war, and money—are in fact themes central to the pastoral mode. The genre is no longer a retreat into sylvan nostalgia but oVers models of authority and culture with which to reXect the modern nation.

50 John Oldmixon, A Pastoral Poem on the Victories at Schellenburgh and Blenheim (London, 1704), 4–5. 51 Ibid. sigs. c2r, d1r. 52 Ibid. sig. e1v . Other Whig war pastorals are Mary Pix’s A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Lords Commissioners for the Union (London, 1707) and Henry Brookes’s Daphnis, A Pastoral Poem (London, 1707).

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Pope, Philips, and the pastoral wars This argument about the public and contemporary subjects of pastoral informs one of the most contentious literary debates of the decade: that over the respective merits of Ambrose Philips’s and Alexander Pope’s pastoral imitations of 1709. Although the controversy has spawned a range of political readings, the pastoral wars have rarely been linked to the battle poems produced to celebrate the War of the Spanish Succession.53 Yet we might read Pope’s and Philips’s poems alongside these military panegyrics, which also contested the relevance of earlier poetic models to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state, and the role of neoclassical imitation in modern public poetry. Seen in this light, the pastoral wars demonstrate that early eighteenth-century intellectual debates about the relative virtues of the ancients and moderns had speciWcally political resonances, as poets debated the nature of modern poetry. At the time when the pastorals Wrst appeared, Pope and Philips were both trying to establish themselves in the London literary world. Philips, who had just returned home after a short career with the British expeditionary force in Spain, was looking for government employment, which he hoped to secure by drawing attention to himself through his writing. Pope was also trying to make contacts in London, and using Will’s CoVee House to launch his literary career. However, where Philips had aligned himself with prominent Whigs such as Addison and Lionel CranWeld, Earl of Dorset, the dedicatee of his pastorals, Pope’s sympathies lay with Tories such as Wycherley, Swift, and Arbuthnot. Their quarrel began with the simultaneous publication of the two poets’ work in Jacob Tonson’s Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part, of 1709. The opening poems in the collection were six pastorals by Philips, while Pope’s poems concluded the volume, structurally emphasizing the comparison between the two poets. The political dimension of Pope’s and Philips’s diVerences was demonstrated by the responses to their work. Philips’s fellow Whigs rallied to his side: Steele lauded Philips in Tatler 10 (1709), and Addison followed suit in Spectator papers 223, 400, and 523, while Tickell took up his defence in the Guardian. Leonard 53 The best analysis of the political resonances of the pastoral wars is given by Annabel Patterson in Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 206–14. On the politics of Pope’s pastorals see Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Alexander Pope: The Political Poet in his Time’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15 (1981–2), 123–48.

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Welsted praised them in his Remarks on the English Poets (1712), Tickell called him ‘a second Spenser’ in The Prospect of Peace (1712), and Charles Gildon, in The Complete Art of Poetry (1718), stated that in pastoral ‘most of our young Dablers in Rhime have try’d their Strength; but alas! not one besides Mr Philips has hit the Mark’.54 Meanwhile, Wycherley, Granville, Swift, and Gay had all stated their preference for Pope’s poetry.55 The more extensive puYng of Philips’s poems in the Whig periodicals may partly explain their greater popularity in the years immediately following the appearance of the Miscellany, which saw three new editions of Philips’s poems between 1706 and 1710, as opposed to only one of Pope’s.56 Most critics have explained the diVerences between the two sets of poems as concerning existing ideas about contemporary poetry and its relationship to the classics—the ancients and moderns debate. This well-documented dispute was based on two opposing theories about pastoral poetry, one termed the ‘neoclassic’ theory, derived largely from Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, and the other the ‘rationalistic’ school, from Bernard de Fontenelle.57 The neoclassic school agreed that a pastoral should be an imitation of the action of a shepherd living in the golden age, reXecting the values of the ancient past, of peace, innocence, and virtue. The prime models for this type of pastoral were those of the ancients Vergil and Theocritus. Those following Fontenelle, on the other hand, believed that pastoral was just a representation of the tranquillity of rural life which could be adapted to the environment and age of the individual writer.58 The emphasis here was less on a slavish adherence to the rules of the ancients than on what Fontenelle described as the ‘Natural Light’ of the poet’s own reason. Yet the contest between neoclassicism and rationalism was not an exclusively aesthetic debate. At issue was the question of how far modern imitations of classical forms should be committed to the depiction of events in contemporary public life. Of course, in many ways there was no great opposition between ancient and modern, neoclassic and rationalist. As 54

Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry, 2 vols. (London, 1718), i. 157. George Sherburn, The Early Career of Alexander Pope (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934/ 1968), 117–18. 56 On the impact of these reviews on the ensuing pastoral wars see Edward Heuston, ‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, RES 29 (1978), 160–8. 57 I take these terms from J. E. Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England 1684– 1798 (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Press, 1952), 75–95. 58 Fontenelle’s seminal work the Dialogues of the Dead was translated by the Whig poet John Hughes in 1708 (Hughes, Fontenelle’s Dialogues of the Dead, [ . . . ] with a reply to some remarks in a critique called the Judgment of Pluto & c (London, 1708)). 55

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Joseph Levine reminds us, both sides shared a common respect for the literature of antiquity, seeing the ancient past as a storehouse of perfect examples of life and art: they argued essentially about the possibility of imitating those examples in modern literature.59 Oldmixon’s preface on pastoral, in which he argued that the shepherd was the modern-day statesman, and that contemporary pastoral ought to translate the past into the present, represented the extreme of the rationalists’ position. Ambrose Philips’s pastorals exempliWed the rationalist model in that they were Spenserian rather than Vergilian, and described English rustics, ‘Lobbin’ and ‘Hobbinol’, living in a recognizably English landscape, with native folklore and rustic archaisms.60 In his preface to his poems Philips claimed that ‘Theocritus, Virgil, and Spencer are the only Writers, that seem to have hit upon the true Nature of Pastoral Poems’—a statement which, in placing Spenser on a level with Theocritus and Vergil, shared Oldmixon’s conviction of the possibility of adapting pastoral for modern contexts.61 Like other Whig writers, such as Dennis and Blackmore, Philips was suggesting that native English poets could create their own poetic models. Moreover, Philips’s shepherds and shepherdesses were, like Oldmixon’s, often thinly disguised portraits of contemporary public Wgures, and Philips used his lyrics to celebrate Whig policies. The most prominent political issue evident in the poems is anxiety over the stability of the Protestant succession. The Act of Settlement of 1702 had theoretically secured the throne after Anne’s death for the Hanoverian heirs of the Electress Sophia, but this was potentially open to contest from a Jacobite claimant. Phillips’s six poems reXect Whig concern about the future of the succession in their preoccupation with images of loss and death. The ‘timelessness’ of golden-age pastoral is rejected in favour of a historically speciWc preoccupation with contemporary aVairs of state. In the third pastoral there is an elegy for the queen’s dead infant son, the Duke of Gloucester, ‘Albino’, whose loss is both a public and a private calamity, as Angelot explains: Nor did the Nymph for this Place in her Dearling’s Welfare all her Bliss, 59 Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 44. 60 Although, as Annabel Patterson observes, for all their overt Spenserianism, Philips’s pastorals were also indebted to Vergil (Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 212–13). 61 Ambrose Philips, preface to Pastorals, in Poems of Ambrose Philips, 3. Further line references in the text are to this edition.

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Poetic warfare 1702–1714 And teach him young the Silvan Crook to weild, And rule the peaceful Empire of the Field.

(ll. 53–6)

The fourth pastoral centres on the inevitable death of ‘Stella’, and the mortality of Anne herself: ‘I clasp’d her too; but Death was all too strong, | Nor Vows, nor Tears, could Xeeting Life prolong’ (ll. 53–4). Whig anxiety over the uncertain outcome of the inevitable death of the queen, and the arrangements for the succession, is also the subject of the second pastoral, where Thenot tells the melancholy Colinet: Nor Wolf, nor Fox, nor Rot amongst our Sheep; From these the Shepherd’s Care his Flock may keep: Against ill Luck all cunning Foresight fails; Whether we sleep or wake, it naught avails.

(ll. 53–6)

In contrast with these allegorical Wgurations of political life, Pope’s pastorals were not only heavily neoclassical, featuring shepherds called ‘Strephon’ and ‘Alexis’ who made references to classical mythology, but they were also less overtly engaged with contemporary public aVairs. Although the poem on Spring contained a riddle alluding to Charles II in the oak tree, and, by implication, the queen as Stuart monarch: ‘Say, Daphnis, say, in what glad Soil appears | A wondrous Tree that Sacred Monarchs bears?’ (ll. 85–6), his pastorals do not function as allegories of contemporary politics to the extent that his Whig counterpart’s did.62 Moreover, in Pope’s rewriting of Vergil there is no trace of the Roman historical context, of war and dispossession: the only concerns, with the exception of the riddle, are love and poetic competition.63 This lack of engagement is evident in the poems’ dedications. Philips had dedicated his poems to the Earl of Dorset, the Whig envoy to Hanover who was responsible for ensuring the security of the Hanoverian succession, whereas the only one of Pope’s pastorals dedicated to a statesman, ‘Spring’, was addressed to Sir William Trumbull, a former secretary of state who had retired from politics. The pastorals are also diVerentiated by the literary traditions with which they align themselves. Philips’s poems are clearly an attempt to 62 Alexander Pope, ‘Spring’, in TE i. 69. Further line references in the text are to this edition. On the meanings of the riddles and the revisions to them see the editors’ introduction to the Pastorals, in TE i. 39–41. Howard Erskine-Hill argues that the riddles give Royalist, not Jacobite, signals (Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution: Dryden to Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 64–5). 63 See Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 208.

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appropriate Spenser as a proto-Whig, the foremost Protestant poet of patriotism. In the third pastoral he establishes a tradition of continuity between national poets and their patrons: as Vergil was to Augustus, and Spenser ‘made ev’ry sounding Wood | With good Eliza’s Name to ring around’ (ll. 6–7), so he will ‘teach the vocal Vallies ANNA’s Praise’ (l. 12). In the sixth poem the Elizabethan parallel is developed further, as Philips compares Elizabeth and Sidney to Anne and her poetry-loving Whig statesmen: Full fain, O blest Eliza! would I praise Thy Maiden Rule, and Albion’s Golden Days. Then gentle Sidney liv’d, the Shepherds Friend . . . . . . . Thrice happy Shepherds now: For Dorset loves The Country Muse, and our delightful Groves; While ANNA reigns. O ever may she reign! And bring on Earth a Golden Age again. (ll. 37–9, 41–4)

Spenserian pastoral has here become a model of public poetry with aristocratic patronage, an image of the literary culture of the Whig KitCat Club. Pope also identiWes himself within a tradition of English poetry, but it is one with diVerent political implications. In ‘Spring’ he invokes two signiWcant models: ‘Inspire me Phoebus, in my Delia’s Praise, | With Waller’s Strains, or Granville’s moving Lays!’(ll. 45–6), revealing a nostalgia for the culture of the Stuart courts, and the patronage it provided. Moreover, by celebrating the line of succession between George Granville and Edmund Waller and himself, Pope posits a kind of hereditary continuity between one generation of committed Stuart poets and the next—a poetical conWguring of the constitutional principles at the centre of Jacobite political claims. Where Pope’s allusions evoke the bounty and splendour of the Stuart court, Philips’s poems allude to a diVerent model of literary production. In Philips’s second pastoral Thenot describes the administrative and cultural role of Menalcas: Menalcas, Lord of all the neighb’ring Plains, Preserves the Sheep, and o’er the Shepherds reigns . . . . . . . . He, good to all, that good deserve, shall give Thy Flock to feed, and thee at Ease to live; Shall curb the Malice of unbridled Tongues, And with due Praise reward thy rural Songs.

(ll. 112–13, 116–19)

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Menalcas here represents a patron, possibly the Earl of Dorset, possibly Addison, whose guardianship of contemporary poetry is presented in idealized form. As members of the inXuential Whig Kit-Cat Club, and supporters of a number of Whig poets such as Philips, both men represented precisely the sort of committed aristocratic patron whom, as I shall demonstrate, many Whig writers saw as replacing the cultural hegemony of the court. Philips picks up the argument made by Oldmixon, adapting pastoral situations to celebrate the queen and her Whig statesmen. For him the cultural guardianship of modern poetry lies with these statesmen, who will fund the true-blue Protestant poetry that the nation demands. Pope’s profoundly neoclassical pastorals, on the other hand, share none of this impetus towards modernity, and are characterized by their nostalgia, both for a golden-age idyll and for the culture of the Stuart court.64 As Patterson remarks, they espouse ‘a poetics of retreat, deWned in Virgilian terms, while cautiously engaging in undercover warfare’.65 In the context of a war in which both Whig and Tory writers were battling to ensure the cultural dominance of their own mythologized versions of current events, pastoral, as Oldmixon had observed, was about far more than the ‘billing and cooing’ of shepherds and shepherdesses. The political and cultural ramiWcations of the pastoral controversy did not end here. The whole issue was revived four years later, when the Tory ministry began peace negotiations with France. Reversing the claims to patriotic public service that had characterized Whig triumphalism over the war, Tory propagandists accused the Whig ministry of having perpetuated the conXict to serve their own private ends, while Whig authors insisted that the conduct of the war had been informed only by the values of heroism and public spirit. The rhetoric used in these debates was characterized by both pro-war Whigs’ and anti-war Tories’ claims to be the guardians of the nation’s true interest in Europe. Thus once again the concept of ‘the Englishman’ acquired a polemical force in contemporary propaganda.66 John Arbuthnot drew on the 64 It could be argued that the pervasive nostalgia of Pope’s Pastorals is evident in many of the poems of the 1717 volume. On Pope’s self-presentation in the collection see Dustin GriYn, Alexander Pope: The Poet in the Poems (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 71–99. 65 Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology, 212. 66 It is signiWcant here that the debate about the war centred around representations of Englishness, rather than Britishness. On the development of a speciWcally ‘British’ national

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Wgure of ‘John Bull’ to promote the Tory interest in the peace process. The honest English ‘Bull’ was established in opposition to the Wgure of the conniving Dutch ‘Frog’, in an attempt to convince contemporaries that, far from uniting with the Allies and prolonging the war against France, it was in the nation’s interest to recognize that their real enemy was the Dutch.67 Whig propagandists such as Steele, on the other hand, used the term ‘English’ to characterize their concerns about clauses in the Treaty of Utrecht which seemed to favour French political and commercial interests.68 This struggle over competing versions of national identity provided the political context for Thomas Tickell’s revival of the controversy over the respective literary merits of Pope’s and Philips’s pastorals in his Guardian papers of 1713.69 Tickell’s papers were published within a literary culture that was more divided than it had been at the time of the poems’ initial publication. During the period between 1709 and 1713 the rift between the two poets’ rival camps had deepened, and it had become increasingly diYcult to maintain cross-party literary friendships such as those between Pope and Addison, or Swift and Addison and Steele. Party-political diVerences were formalized in the establishment of separate literary clubs: in 1712 Addison set up Daniel Button, a former servant, to keep a coVee house in Rose Street, Covent Garden, not far from Will’s, and conveniently close to Jacob Tonson’s oYces in Bow Street. It was to become Addison’s Whiggish ‘Little Senate’, and its members included Philips, Tickell, the Oxford poet Henry Carey, John Hughes, Addison’s cousin Eustace Budgell, Welsted, Thomas Burnet, youngest son of the Bishop, and George Duckett.70 Addison used the identity see Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992). 67 On the developing use of national characters in the debate over the war see Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Erickson, introd. to John Arbuthnot, The History of John Bull (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), pp. lvii–lxviii. 68 In the autumn of 1713 Steele published a new journal, entitled simply The Englishman. Its editor was, Steele explained, going to lay before his readers the present state of the world ‘like a Man of Experience and a Patriot’, and, above all, impress upon them the need to ‘Be an ENGLISHMAN’ (Steele, Englishman 1, 6 October 1713, in The Englishman ed. Rae Blanchard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955), 5.) See also Calhoun Winton, Captain Steele: The Early Career of Richard Steele (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), 154–78. 69 It is signiWcant that the printed debate over the pastorals did not really take oV until this period: most of the Whig praise of Philips’s poems dates from 1712 (see Heuston, ‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, 160–5). 70 Sherburn, Early Career, 114–48.

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Spectator to promote this circle of contemporary Whig poets, publishing essays praising the poetry of Tickell, Budgell, John Hughes, Philips, Henry Carey, and Laurence Eusden. Meanwhile, Tories such as Pope, Gay, and Swift, who were eventually to form the Scriblerus Club, remained centred around Will’s. Tickell’s defence of Philips’s poems took the form of Wve Guardian papers of April 1713. His argument concerned the concept of a native English pastoral, and the need to modify the prescriptions of the ancients in the light of native custom.71 Tickell began the fourth, and most inXuential, paper in the series with the statement that he would treat the English ‘with such Meekness as becomes a good Patriot; and [I] shall [ . . . ] recommend this our Island as a proper Scene for Pastoral’.72 He continued: our Countrymen have so good an Opinion of the Ancients, and think so modestly of themselves, that the generality of Pastoral Writers have either stoln all from the Greeks and Romans, or so servilely imitated their Manners and Customs, as makes them very ridiculous.73

Tickell’s Whig politics take the form of heavy-handed cultural nationalism. By emphasizing the patriotic commitment of writers who used native settings he could, by implication, claim that ‘servile’ neoclassicists and their defenders were being unpatriotic.74 Pope responded to Tickell’s essay in his satiric Guardian paper 40, when, in addition to accusing Philips of plagiarism, he said that his rival, in spite of his attempts to anglicize the pastoral, had made mistakes in English natural history, by planting wolves amongst his shepherds.75 According to Pope it was Philips who was not a true Englishman, being unable even to provide a faithful account of his nation’s past. He argued that Philips’s rusticisms were a cruel parody of the speech patterns of his compatriots, and mocked his attempts to render native idiom by oVering his own Wctional eclogue about a pair of hapless rustics named ‘Rager’ and ‘Cicily’. Thus the ‘pastoral wars’, begun in the politicized context of Whig war panegyric, were extended into the following decade by the 71

For a fuller account of the series see Congleton, Pastoral Poetry, 87–9. Guardian 30, 15 April 1713, in Joseph Addison, The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1982), 128. 73 Ibid. 74 Edward Heuston has argued that Tickell’s decision to write the Guardian essays was prompted by Pope’s claims to be a pastoral poet at the end of Windsor Forest (Heuston, ‘Windsor Forest and Guardian 40’, 165–8). 75 Guardian 40, 27 April 1713, in The Guardian, ed. Stephens, 161. 72

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polemical conXict over Englishness that was generated by the peace negotiations. This was a dispute over immediate political questions played out through discussions of literary form and poetic tradition.

Literary reformation and the Whig periodicals As this account of the pastoral wars suggests, the emergent periodical press created a medium within which politico-literary debate Xourished. Addison’s and Steele’s journals provided an essential and controversial outlet for the dissemination of Whig poetry and Whig literary criticism. Their essays also provided the most explicit exposition of developing ideas about literary reformation. Over the course of Anne’s reign the project of literary reformation shifted away from its associations with John Dennis’s prescriptive and formal criticism. Reform was redeWned as reWnement, and became part of a developing discourse of politeness and sociability, crucially linked to the liberties so recently established with the Revolution. One of the most prominent Wgures responsible for this transformation was the third Earl of Shaftesbury. As Lawrence E. Klein has described, Shaftesbury was committed to a programme of gentlemanly reformation, which was designed to improve the moral and cultural health of the ruling elite.76 Like Blackmore’s and Dennis’s criticism, this programme was linked to a political agenda. However, where these earlier writers had stressed correction and regulation, Shaftesbury’s project was to be brought about by the use of polite philosophy, which he saw as a way not just of articulating ethical ideas but of transforming the modern gentry. He lamented the decline in recent culture that had brought about the ‘vile Ribaldry and other gross Irregularitys’ of drama, and yet he dismissed the didacticism of ‘Zealots’, claiming that ‘the World, however it may be taught, will not be tutor’d ’.77 Shaftesbury argued that a change in sensibility would be brought about at the level of manners and politeness: Wit will mend upon our hands, and Humour will reWne it-self; if we take care not to tamper with it, and bring it under Constraint, by severe Usage and 76 Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 77 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: or Advice to an Author, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), i. 142; Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709), in Characteristicks, i. 41.

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rigorous Prescriptions. All Politeness is owing to Liberty. We polish one another, and rub oV our Corners and rough Sides by a sort of amicable Collision.78

The passage reveals both the shift in emphasis from ‘rigorous prescriptions’ to polished politeness, and a stress on the link between manners and political liberty. These ideas were to be embodied in Addison’s and Steele’s periodicals, which exemplify the redeWnition of reformation as a form of politeness, although their formulation is far more explicitly linked to an emphasis on Christian virtue. In Guardian 21 Steele reveals his hopes for a shift in the deWnition of polite society: I will not despair but to bring Men of Wit into a Love and Admiration of Sacred Writings; and [ . . . ] I promise my self to see the Day when it shall be as much the Fashion among Men of Politeness to admire a Rapture of St Paul, as any Wne Expression in Virgil or Horace ; and to see a well-dressed young Man produce an Evangelist out of his Pocket, and be no more out of Countenance than if it were a Classick Printed by Elzevir.79

Steele’s vision of the gentleman of the future oVers a model of reformation that is a long way away from that found in the Whig writings of the 1680s, which had condemned the wit and fashion associated with the court as corrupting and enervating. The Whig periodicals eroded the opposition between polite society and moral virtue, hoping to create a new social norm in which Scripture would become as much a part of everyday life as the latest coVee shop or classical edition. In essays on subjects from petticoats to Christian doctrine, John Dennis’s minatory prescriptions were replaced by a companionable and generalist discussion of matters of taste and ethics.80 Although the politics of the Tatler and the Spectator were ostensibly neutral, they could nonetheless demonstrate quietly that Whiggism was the natural consequence of the public values and attitudes that they articulated, while at the same time diverting attention from private and privileged matters of politics to public matters of social behaviour.81 In deWning the terms of modern politeness, the essays also oVered a retrospective evaluation of earlier literary texts, and one of the most prominent objects of criticism was 78

‘Sensus Communis’, in Characteristicks, i. 39. Steele, Guardian 21, 4 April 1713, in The Guardian, ed. Stephens, 104. 80 On the role of the periodicals in the development of literary criticism see Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism from The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984), 9–27. 81 In the Wrst number of the Spectator Mr Spectator declares: ‘I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs 79

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the court of Charles II, and the literature that it produced. In his review of a production of Wycherley’s Country Wife in the Tatler in April 1709 Steele argues that The Character of Horner, and the Design of it, is a good Representation of the Age in which that Comedy was written; at which Time, Love and Wenching were the Business of Life, and the Gallant Manner of pursuing Women, was the best Recommendation at Court [ . . . ] a Poet had, at that Time, discover’d his Want of knowing the Manners of the Court he liv’d in, by a Virtuous Character, in his Wne Gentleman, as he would show his Ignorance, by drawing a Vitious One to please the present Audience.82

Steele’s argument is premised upon a distinction between the mores of the previous age and those of the present. By historicizing the phenomenon of Restoration comedy, he makes it clear that the modern day demands a very diVerent form of drama. However, in other papers the moral agenda appears to be transhistorical. Addison’s opinions on earlier English poetry posit morality as the cornerstone of literary excellence in all ages. In the Chevy Chase papers he claims that the old Northumbrian ballad is superior to the ‘wrong artiWcial Taste’ of ‘Gothick’ writers like Cowley in being, like the poems of Homer, Vergil, or Milton, founded ‘upon some important Precept of Morality, adapted to the Constitution of the Country in which the Poet writes’.83 Similarly, in the papers on Paradise Lost the poem’s excellence is demonstrated in its moral function. In paper 369 he announces that he is of the opinion that no just Heroic Poem ever was, or can be made, from whence one great Moral may not be deduced. That which reigns in Milton is the most universal and most useful that can be imagined; it is in short this, that Obedience to the Will of God makes Men happy, and that Disobedience makes them miserable.84

Whilst moral reformation was integral to the contemporary evolution of polite society, it was evidently not the exclusive preserve of the moderns. and Tories’ (Spectator 1, 1 March 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), i. 5). For a closer examination of the politics of the Spectator see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Joseph Addison’s Whiggism’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). 82 Tatler 3, 16 April 1709, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, i. 31. There is a similar emphasis in his essay on The Man of Mode in Spectator 65, of May 1711, in which he examines the role of wit in the theatre. 83 Spectator 70, 21 May 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, i. 297, 299. 84 Spectator 369, 3 May 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, iii. 391.

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In time Whig writers would come to view all these very varied approaches towards literary reform as part of a continuum which stretched from the Reformation to the present day. In Mary Wortley Montagu’s parody of The Dunciad in ‘Her Palace Placed Beneath a Muddy Road’ we Wnd a history of Whig and proto-Whig writing that neutralizes the diVerences between the Puritan and the polite: When Harry’s Brows the Diadem adorn From Reformation, Learning shall be born, Slowly in Strength the infant shall improve The parents glory and its Country’s love, Free from the thraldom of Monastic Rhimes, In bright progression bless succeeding Times, Milton free Poetry from the Monkish Chain, And Adisson that Milton shall explain, Point out the Beauties of each living Page, Reform the taste of a degenerate Age.85

Wortley Montagu’s poem presents a narrative of English history that links the Reformation to Milton and Addison in a seamless progression of ever-increasing moral reWnement. However, as I have already suggested, the Whig endorsement of moral reformation was complex. Not only, as we have seen, did the Whig opposition of the 1680s have roots in the activities of prominent Restoration rakes, but there were clearly some tensions between the virtues preached by the reformists and the emphasis on sociability that marked the activities of the Court Whigs and their friends in the Kit-Cat Club. The convivial environment of the Club and its toasts and lavish feasts were integral to its self-presentation as an alternative centre of cultural and political values. In emphasizing how much fun they had together, the Kit-Cats embodied a coupling of Whig politics and sociability, which was a powerful rejoinder to contemporary images of Whigs as unsociable enthusiasts. However, this very conviviality was, as David Solkin has observed, potentially in conXict with the reformation movement, a problem which is clearly negotiated in the contemporary visual representation of Whig social rituals. In his analysis of James Thornhill’s group portrait of prominent Whigs in conversation Andrew Quicke in Conversation with the 1st Earl

85 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘Her Palace Placed Beneath a Muddy Road’, in Essays and Poems and Simplicity, A Comedy, ed. Robert Halsband and Isobel Grundy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977; paperback edn. 1993), 248.

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of Godolphin, Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steele (c.1711–12) Solkin argues that sociability is carefully presented in moderation: although the group are centred around a bottle of wine, there is only one bottle, and two glasses between Wve men.86 We can see a similar ambivalence about sociability and reformation in Steele’s pronouncements on drinking in the Tatler. In Tatler 241 he had gone so far as to condemn the practice of drinking alcohol outright, stating that even when drinking did not lead to excess it still prevented a man from being ‘Master of himself ’.87 Yet Steele himself was no stranger to the high life, as Macaulay phrases it, ‘a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes’, while his club, the spiritual home of modern Whiggism, was famed for its splendid feasts and drinking songs.88 His high-minded attack prompted irate responses from his readers, and a month after the piece Wrst came out he oVered a more accommodating approach towards alcohol, which emphasized the polite virtues of moderate consumption of spirits: Noisy Mirth has something too rustick in it to be considered without Terror by Men of Politeness: But while the Discourse improves in a well-chosen Company, from the Addition of Spirits which Xow from moderate Cups, it must be acknowledged, that Leisure Time cannot be more agreeably, or perhaps more usefully employed than at such Meetings.89

Steele’s retraction and re-evaluation of his position says much about the ongoing dialogues within early eighteenth-century Whig ideology. Macaulay famously observed that Addison ‘reconciled wit and virtue, after a long and disastrous separation, during which wit had been led astray by proXigacy, and virtue by fanaticism’.90 However, this marriage between wit and virtue was not always entirely harmonious. The ideological and social distance between the discourses of Puritan piety and civilized politeness inevitably created moments of tension such as the one described above, in the process exposing discontinuities between the competing political agendas that informed early eighteenth-century Whiggism.

86 David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and Yale, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 41–7. 87 Tatler 241, 24 October 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, iii. 237. 88 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Life and Writings of Addison’ (1843), in The Works of Lord Macaulay, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1898), x. 121. 89 Tatler 252, 18 November 1710, in The Tatler, ed. Bond, iii. 282. 90 Macaulay, Works, x. 167.

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Peace poems As Queen Anne’s reign drew to a close Tory diplomacy moved Wnally towards the conclusion of peace with France, which was cemented with the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht in April 1713. The Whigs, predictably, saw the event as a capitulation to France and a negation of the years of Continental warfare that had preceded it.91 Tories, on the other hand, were jubilant. Many poets, like the author of The Triumph of Virtue (1713), crowed over the defeat of the Whigs and their warmongering: in this poem Harley is lauded as the ‘Noble Patriot’ who has delivered a suVering Israel, and ‘Freed the Nation from its servile Yoak: | The Yoak of War, of all things most accurs’d’.92 The author of the anonymous Peace. A Poem (1713) turns the rhetoric of Whig triumphalism on its head: ‘Too long have We indulg’d our Martial Flame, | Disgrac’d by Triumphs, pillag’d into Fame’.93 The Whig poems on the peace are, unsurprisingly, characterized by a reassertion of the merits of the war. Their emphasis is on the success of the battles and, above all, on the heroism of the disgraced general who led them. Thus in Thomas Tickell’s poem On the Prospect of Peace (1713), while there are tributes to the Tory ministers, the hero is not Harley, or Bolingbroke, or Shrewsbury, but Marlborough. The poem begins in territory familiar from countless Whig celebrations of the war, with a scathing account of the cowardice of French soldiers who ‘Lurk’d in the Trench, and skulk’d behind the Line’ while ‘Britain’s heroes [ . . . ] Such temper’d Fire with manly Beauty join’d’.94 In the retelling Marlborough’s exploits have acquired a fabulous quality, as returning heroes regaled their young with romantic tales ‘of Palfrey’d Dames, bold Knights, and Magic Spells, | Where whole Brigades one Champion’s Arms o’erthrow’ (pp. 3–4). Tickell’s poem is as much a consolidation of the Whig mythologization of the war as it is a celebration of the peace. Even when he is commemorating the advent of peace his vision of Britannia’s place in the world is still one of a nation rooted in the European conXict that generated the war. Britain may no longer be Wghting, but her commitment to the 91 A good account of the peace negotiations is given by MacLachlan, ‘The Road to Peace 1710–13’, in Holmes, (ed.), Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 197–215. 92 The Triumph of Virtue: A Poem Upon the Peace, Inscribed to the Earl of Oxford (London, 1713), 1. 93 Peace. A Poem Inscrib’d to the Right Honourable the Viscount Lord Bolingbroke (London, 1713), 1. 94 Thomas Tickell, A Poem, To His Excellency the Lord Privy Seal, on The Prospect of Peace (London, 1713), 1–2. Further page references in the text are to this edition.

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policies of the alliance is unchanged: ‘To Europe’s Wounds a Mother’s Aid she brings, | And holds in equal Scales the Rival Kings’ (p. 7). From Tickell’s perspective the peace is only possible because the war has been won, and thus the event can be celebrated as a Whig achievement made possible by military victory.95 Like all the poems on the peace, The Prospect of Peace focuses on the trading opportunities oVered by the Treaty of Utrecht, but Tickell again deWnes the nation’s role in the new world order in familiar terms: ‘In circling Beams shall Godlike An n a glow, | And Churchill’s Sword hang o’er the prostrate Foe’ (p. 10). Tickell’s poem could not be more diVerent from its Tory counterpart, Pope’s Windsor-Forest. Sales of The Prospect of Peace immediately outstripped those of Windsor-Forest, but Pope’s poem is the only celebration of the peace that is still read.96 Traditional accounts of Pope’s oVering have explained the poem within the contexts of biblical and classical allusion, and the most contemporary point of comparison is generally John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill.97 However, reading WindsorForest in the context of contemporary Whig and Tory poems on the war discloses an interesting perspective on its literary politics. This context reveals the poem as rooted in the contested versions of the national poetic and political past that we have seen developing in Whig poetry over the decade, and also demonstrates that it is based on a very selective reading of the poem taken as its model, Cooper’s Hill. Where Tickell’s poem is, as we have seen, as much a celebration of war as of its conclusion, Pope’s poem, as numerous commentators have shown, is an unequivocal rejection of the arts of warfare in place of those of peace. The War of the Spanish Succession is largely occluded in the poem, to the extent that, as Robert Cummings observes, WindsorForest is ‘radically inappropriate to the celebration of a political event’.98 95 For a fuller account of Tickell’s poem and its representation of the Treaty see John Richardson, ‘Alexander Pope’s Windsor-Forest: Its Context and Attitudes towards Slavery’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35 (2001), 1–17. 96 The Prospect of Peace averaged almost an edition a month for the early months of its existence, while Pope’s poem had only two editions in its Wrst year (Sherburn, Early Career, 101). 97 One of the most inXuential of these accounts is Earl Wasserman’s chapter on Windsor-Forest in The Subtler Language: Critical Readings of Neoclassic and Romantic Poems (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), 101–68. See also Reuben A. Brower, Alexander Pope: The Poetry of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘The Political Poet in his Time’. 98 Cummings, ‘Addison’s ‘‘Inexpressible Chagrin’’ and Pope’s Poem on the Peace’. This essay oVers an important, and long overdue, consideration of Windsor-Forest in the context of other poems on the peace.

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Where Tickell’s poem ends with a list of the poets who will celebrate the liberty of peacetime culture, such as Congreve, Rowe, Prior, Addison, Garth, and Philips, all poets who had written serious public verse, Pope addresses his poem to George Granville, a writer whose operas and short lyrics made him an unlikely national bard. Rather than engage with the public occasion of the poem, Pope develops the mythical associations of the natural world of Windsor Forest, which, Earl Wasserman and others have claimed, become an extended metaphor for the political life of the nation. Wasserman argues that where images of warfare do appear in the poem, they tend towards the depiction of warfare as destruction and aggression, and the hunting scenes, so often used in war panegyric (such as Harrison’s Woodstock Park) as a metaphor for the impending military victory, are here signiWcant by their emphasis on the poignancy of the short lives and violent deaths of the hunted pheasant, lapwing, or lark. Windsor-Forest demonstrates its opposition to Whig war panegyric not by entering into overt conXict with it, but rather by obscuring its own political stance, and thus opposing panegyric style as much as substance. Pope’s use of Windsor as the local focus of the poem is important: it is clearly deWned in opposition to the Whiggish ‘rural court’ at Blenheim, the topos of so many Whig poems. Several Tory satires published in the years immediately preceding the peace use Windsor as shorthand for Tory party allegiance. The Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough Rock (1711), a satire on the ambitions of the Churchills, oVsets Blenheim Palace against Windsor Forest. The anonymous author claims that: When Stock of Wood shall come to owe, Its New-born Name to m a r l b o r o u g h Believe it then, from hence shall Rise A p l a n t , whose Boughs shall reach the Skies.99

It is Windsor that represents the rightful home of the nation’s leader, and her justice will ultimately prevail to overcome the designing Churchills. In another poem of the same name the struggle between the Whig war party and the Tory peacemakers is represented as the hawks versus the doves—an image which reappears in Windsor-Forest, where Pan’s pursuit of Lodona is compared to the Xight of the ‘Werce Eagle’ after the ‘trembling Doves’ (ll. 185–8).100 99

The Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough Rock (London, 1711), 3. The Windsor Prophecy. Printed in the Year 1712 (London, 1712). See also Swift’s poem of the same name, The W—ds—r Prophecy (1711), in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. 100

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Yet while Pope’s poem is undoubtedly informed by a Whig/Tory divide over the topos of Blenheim versus Windsor, it is also deWned in opposition to an emphasis on Windsor as the home of constitutional freedom that can be found in earlier Whig panegyrics on the war.101 Charles Gildon’s Libertas Triumphans (1708) ended with a prospect of Windsor which made the political implications of the site explicit: Near, r u n n y m e a d with Pleasure it surveys, Of Old enobl’d, with Peculiar Praise: With righteous Force the f r e e - b o r n e n g l i s h there For Sacred m a g n a c h a r t a did declare. And with their a n c i e n t r i g h t s and l i b e r t y Compell’d reluctant Tyrants to comply. Third Edward here to conquer France was born, And Valour, with new Ornaments adorn. Here a n n a yearly makes Her blest Retreat; And with wise Counsels Gallic Fraud defeat.102

Gildon saw in Windsor not only the birthplace of modern political liberty, but also a royal palace linked to a long tradition of heroic antiFrench warfare.103 It is not surprising that Pope chose to distance his account of the forest from these powerfully Whiggish associations. However, in neglecting the constitutional signiWcance of Windsor he produced a poem which was also very diVerent from Denham’s Cooper’s Hill. Pope gives an account of Denham’s poem as a series of images and descriptions of a place ‘tending to some Hint, or leading into some ReXection, upon moral Life or political Institution’,104 and many critics have read this as a description of Pope’s own method in Windsor-Forest, but in fact the two poems are very diVerent.105 Denham’s poem is far Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958). All line references to Windsor-Forest are to the Twickenham edition. 101 Vincent Carretta has argued that Windsor-Forest should also be seen alongside the Whig representation of recent history in contemporary paintings, and in particular in the context of Sir James Thornhill’s Allegory of the Protestant Succession at Greenwich (The Snarling Muse, 12–18). 102 Charles Gildon, Libertas Triumphans: A Poem (London, 1708), 17. 103 In Windsor Castle: A Poem (London, 1708) the interest is again focused on the ceiling paintings of Williamite military victories, and on the statues of heroic Edward and his Knights of the Garter. 104 Pope, Iliad, XVI. 466 n. in TE viii. 261. 105 e.g. Brendan O’Hehir, editor of Cooper’s Hill, claims that ‘not merely does WindsorForest stand self-confessed as a poem inspired by Cooper’s Hill, but a careful analysis shows it to conform to the precedents of Denham’s piece in every signiWcant detail’ (introd. to

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more politically explicit than Pope’s.106 He uses the buildings of the castle itself, the monuments of the monarchs interred within it, and the proximity of Runnymede to articulate a series of very explicit statements about the need for a mixed monarchy, where ‘Happy, when both to the same Center move, | When Kings give liberty, and Subjects love’.107 In Pope’s poem there is little interest in the castle building itself, as Joseph Warton was to observe.108 Where Pope does refer to it, it is to make a very diVerent point from that made either by Gildon or Denham, both of whom used the palace to present a gallery of royal military heroes. In Denham’s case the list of royal warriors emphasizes his royalist agenda, while in Gildon’s poem they are seen to anticipate Marlborough’s actions. However, when Pope refers to the line of princes buried in or born at the palace (ll. 299–320) it is in order to emphasize the ravages of time. He notes that Verrio’s paintings of Edward III’s victories are already decaying on the walls, and that the signiWcance of the buried tribe of English heroes is that ‘the Grave unites’ and ‘blended lie th’Oppressor and th’Opprest’ (ll. 317–18). It was this neglect of the historical import of the palace that formed the basis of John Dennis’s criticism of Pope’s poem. Dennis argues that the political reXections that form the moral centre of Cooper’s Hill are entirely missing from Pope’s prospect of the park: The Objects that are presented to the Reader in this latter Poem, are for the most part trivial and triXing, as Hunting, Fishing, Setting, Shooting, and a thousand common Landskips. Whereas of a thousand Objects that Cooper’sHill presents to the View, Sir j o h n d e n h a m chuses only the most Instructive, the most Noble, and the most MagniWcent [ . . . ] As St. Paul’s, London, Windsor, Thames, the Side of Cooper’s-Hill that is next to the Thames, and Runny-Mead between them, ennobled by the Grant of the Great Charter there to the People of England.109 Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, ed. O’Hehir (Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif.: University of California Press, 1969), 5). 106 For the speciWc political occasion of the poem see William Rockett, ‘ ‘‘Courts make Kings, but Kings the Court’’: Cooper’s Hill and the Constitutional Crisis of 1642 ’, Restoration, 17 (1993), 1–14. 107 John Denham, Cooper’s Hill (1668 edn.), in Expans’d Hieroglyphicks, ed. O’Hehir, 160, ll. 333–4. 108 Warton writes: ‘I have frequently wondered that he should have omitted the opportunity of describing at length its venerable ancient castle’ (Warton, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (London, 1756), 24). 109 John Dennis, Remarks upon Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer. With Two Letters concerning Windsor Forest, and the Temple of Fame (1717), in Critical Works, ii. 136. Further page references in the text are to this edition.

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Dennis, like Gildon, places a typically Whiggish emphasis on the constitutional importance of Runnymede. He also shares his stress on the signiWcance of the buried kings at Windsor, who were powerful symbols as ‘the Advancers of England ’s Glory’ and an important ‘Remembrance of our past Triumphs’ (p. 136). Dennis’s short critique of Windsor-Forest in some ways comes to the nub of the party politics of the poem. Pope, as he observes, borrows much from Cooper’s Hill, a topographical poem which Denham had used to emphasize the importance of political moderation and mixed government.110 However, Pope’s poem takes this framework and Wllets out the constitutional politics that Gildon and others had found so attractive. He replaces them with subjects which, as Dennis says, are ‘trivial’: the pursuits of leisure. From this perspective the public occasion that Pope is ostensibly celebrating is obscured, appearing only, if at all, through a series of literary tropes: the brutal chase, the pursuit of Lodona, and the double fall of the two Williams.111 Viewed in the context of contemporary Whig panegyrics, it appears that the political import of Windsor-Forest, like that of the Pastorals, lies as much in its refusal to engage with public poetry at all as in the coded hints of Jacobitism that many recent critics have identiWed as the sign of a political agenda.112 It is thus a poem whose politics are ‘radically inappropriate’ not just to its occasion but also to the poem it takes as its model.

The death of the queen Although Pope began Windsor-Forest with the joyful pronouncement that ‘Peace and Plenty tell, a s t u a r t reigns’ (l. 42), Anne’s days were numbered, as he well knew. She died on 1 August 1714, and on her 110 On the relationship between politics and aesthetics in Cooper’s Hill see Paul Korshin, ‘The Evolution of Neo-Classical Poetics: Cleveland, Denham, and Waller as Poetic Theorists’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2 (1968–9), 102–37. 111 Robert Cummings argues convincingly that recent critics of Windsor-Forest, inspired by Wasserman, have been too quick to read everything in the poem as a metaphor of its proposed subject; namely, the replacement of war with peace. He argues that the poem does not have this political and thematic coherence, and is better understood as belonging to a tradition of sylvan poetry typiWed by Statius (Cummings, ‘Windsor-Forest as a Silvan Poem’, English Literary History, 54 (1987), 63–79). 112 In fact, Pope’s criticism of the management of the war, and of the Whig ministry, is restrained compared with many of the other Tory or Jacobite peace poems, such as Bevil Higgons’s A Poem on the Peace (London, 1713) or the anonymous The Triumph of Virtue (London, 1713).

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deathbed placed the white rod of the Lord Treasurer in the hands of Shrewsbury. The choice of the moderate Shrewsbury, rather than the Jacobite Bolingbroke, in eVect secured the future of the Hanoverian succession. Fearful of a Jacobite rising against the Elector, Shrewsbury ordered immediate military fortiWcations, ensuring that when George arrived in London, where he was crowned on 1 August, he was met ‘with such Tranquility as can scarce be believ’d but by them who were EyeWitnesses of that memorable Event’.113 The editor of the Wnal volume of Poems on AVairs of State writes of Anne’s death that ‘few princes ever died so little celebrated in verse’.114 However, if the queen’s death in itself did not produce a Xood of poetry, the accession of George I did. All those anxious to secure places or pensions under the new regime rushed their oVerings to the presses, and David Foxon lists over Wfty poems written on the accession, arrival, and coronation of the new king in 1714, more than twice as many as those produced on Anne’s accession.115 For Whig poets George was in many ways a much easier subject for panegyric than his predecessor, and he was swiftly appropriated into the tradition of military heroism they had celebrated in William and Marlborough. The Whig panegyric tradition ensured that the new king automatically inherited a number of historical and mythical forebears. For Welsted his leadership is on a par with ‘Alcides, Pollux, Numa, and Nassau’; for Samuel Croxall, George takes his place alongside a group made up of ‘the Barons who in Times of Yore | Successful Arms for England ’s Safety bore’, the two Edwards, Henry V, Elizabeth, and, again, William.116 The new king was also connected to the ongoing narrative of patriotic martyrdom, through the losses of the War of the Spanish Succession, as Welsted emphasizes: for this, the British youth expir’d, Blanamian Welds were strow’d with heaps of slain, And Virtue won on Almenara’s plain.117 113 Abel Boyer, Quadriennium Annae Postremum; or the Political State of Great Britain, 2nd edn., 8 vols. (London, 1718–20), viii. 119. 114 Frank H. Ellis, in POAS vii. 603. David Foxon numbers twenty funeral poems produced in 1714. 115 David Foxon, English Verse 1701–1750: A Catalogue of Separately Printed Poems with Notes on Contemporary Collected Editions, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). 116 Leonard Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s Accession to the Crown (London, 1714), 29; Samuel Croxall, The Vision, A Poem (London, 1715), 7–15. 117 Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 28. See also Dennis, On the Accession of King George, where he celebrates ‘the Souls of the triumphant Slain, | Who dy’d to compass this

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However, while there are many similarities between the poems on the accession of George I and those written in 1689, in the later poems the nature of the transfer of power is less problematic than it was for the panegyrists of the Revolution. Contemporaries were not faced with a sudden and unprecedented change of ruler, but a constitutional fait accompli that had been prepared over a decade earlier. Another important shift away from the themes of the Revolution is the emphasis on trade and prosperity that we Wnd in the accession panegyrics. After two decades of prolonged Continental warfare, poets writing on the accession envisage the reign of their new monarch as one dedicated to peace, trade, and liberty rather than renewed engagement overseas. For all the allusions to William, and the race of godlike heroes, the most characteristic note of the poems of 1714 is one of relatively peaceful optimism: Not long Religious Rage mankind shall tear, Nor wasting Zeal her bloody standard rear. Commerce again prepares to lift its head, Again to Xourish, and its bounds to spread; The Merchant shall transplant in British air Whatever growths remotest regions bear, Whatever Art in various lands improves, Or the sun ripens, or its climate loves118

Along with this new peace and political stability would come a burgeoning of British arts.119 Welsted prophesies an age of cultural brilliance fostered under peace and liberty: O Liberty! O Goddess! hail. Thy charms Politeness give to Peace, and fame to Arms: Great Patroness of arts! thy ripening Wre Instructs each waking genius to aspire120

The liberty for which Whigs had struggled and argued through the preceding century was now, it would seem, established and ready to bear social, economic, and cultural fruit. Poets were preparing to Auspicious Day, | In Blenheim and Ramillia’s deathless Fields’ (Select Works of John Dennis, i. 335). 118

Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 27–8. This claim is also anticipated in much earlier poetry: in Libertas Triumphans (1708), Charles Gildon prophesies of George: ‘Neglected a r t s shall find his early Care, | The Hev’n-born m u s e his royal Bounty share . . .’ (20) 120 Welsted, An Epistle to Mr Steele, 8. See also Ambrose Philips: ‘Once more the long neglected Arts to raise, | And form each rising Genius for the Bays.’ An Epistle to the Rt. Hon. Charles Lord Halifax (London. 1714), 4. 119

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celebrate English triumphs beyond the battleWeld. Their sense of what Whiggism meant and what it signiWed to be a Whig poet had come some way from the verse produced in response to the Exclusion Crisis. As we have seen, at that time a strong, self-aware tradition of poetry emerged as an oppositional voice in literary-political debate. Over the next decades it adapted to accommodate the changing role of Whig political culture, which occupied an increasingly central position in the evolution of post-Revolution Britain. Yet we should nonetheless see the Whig verse produced over the whole period as a coherent and evolving poetic tradition. It was a tradition that was recognized from within: its later proponents acknowledged their forebears, and developed their themes, styles, and imagery as well as claiming a much longer native lineage. It was recognized by opposition Tory poets, both explicitly and implicitly. It was integral to the literary debates of its time; it exerted a signiWcant inXuence on the progress of politics, and on their interpretation. The fact that Dryden and Pope’s work of this period remains familiar to us now, while this poetry with which they were in dialogue is decidedly unfamiliar, has less to do with the contemporary signiWcance of Whig poetry, and more to do with later politics of aesthetics. Chapter 5 reconsiders this complex relationship between aesthetics and politics by turning to examine the ways in which Whig writers theorized and evaluated their own poetic tradition.

5

The sublime and the liberty of writing Whig poetry has long been tarred with the label of ‘bad poetry’, and one of the aims of this study is to historicize such questions of literary merit as a way of moving beyond the reductive notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature. I have argued that we need to recognize the extent to which attacks on Whig poetry were politicized. In the work of Dryden and the Scriblerians Whig writers were ridiculed in language which related their aesthetic quality to their political identity. A reappraisal of the Whig tradition needs to acknowledge the blurring of the two sets of concerns to understand the negative criticism which has dominated the reception of the poetry. However, historicizing notions of literary merit and value involves considering how Whig poetry was seen by those who liked it, as well as by those who didn’t. This chapter will explore some of the reasons why Whig poetry was so highly praised by contemporary readers. In a recent essay J. Paul Hunter has argued powerfully for such a reconsideration of historical aesthetics, emphasizing the need for critics to recognize ‘the dependence, circumstantiality, locality, temporality, and subjectivity of taste’.1 We need only examine the publishing history of the Whig poetry discussed in previous chapters to Wnd evidence of its contemporary popularity. As we saw in the Introduction, one of the most widely praised Whig poems was Charles Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset, which was published by Francis Saunders in two folio editions in 1690, with further editions in 1702 and 1716.2 Contemporary enthusiasm for the Epistle was commonly expressed in terms of the poem’s aVect. In attempting to deWne the true poetic sublime, John 1 J. Paul Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties: Are Historical Aesthetics worth Recovering?’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 1–20 (2). 2 The Epistle to Dorset was also circulating in a number of printed miscellanies of the period. It reappears alongside works by Normanby, Robert Howard, and Roscommon in A Collection of Poems: Viz, the Temple of Death . . . in editions of 1701, 1702 and 1716, and in a similar collection, An Essay on Poetry . . . with Several other Poems (London, 1697), which included Normanby again, Stepney, and Prior.

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Dennis wrote of Montagu’s Epistle to Dorset as embodying the ‘wonderful Wre’ that was the very essence of poetic genius,3 while George Sewell writes of its ‘proper Raptures, and Poetic Fire’.4 Critical and commercial success was not unique to the Epistle. Addison’s poem on the Battle of Blenheim, The Campaign, was also very popular, with three editions by Tonson in folio within the Wrst three months of its publication, and further editions in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin in 1708, 1710, 1713, and 1715.5 Again, it was praised for the heat and Wre associated with poetic Xight: William Harrison’s lines on the poem from Woodstock Park are echoed elsewhere in contemporary reception: Each Action he exalts with Rage divine, And the full Danube Xows in ev’ry Line. But we in vain to Thy Sublime aspire; So heatless Glow-worms emulate the Fire.6

Another notable poetic hit of the period was Thomas Tickell’s poem on the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. Although Pope’s Windsor-Forest is today the most widely known celebration of the Peace, in 1712 it was Tickell’s poem The Prospect of Peace that was met with greater acclaim by contemporaries, published in folio by Tonson in 1712, and going into Wve editions in its Wrst year, with a sixth in 1714: this compares with Pope’s poem which had two London editions in 1713 and one in Dublin. Montagu, Addison, and Tickell would now probably be classiWed as minor writers, rather than bad poets. But the same cannot be said for the physician-poet Richard Blackmore, immortalized through his sonorous braying in The Dunciad and still now a watchword for mediocrity. Yet he too was popular in his own time: his Wrst epic poem, Prince Arthur, published by Awnsham and John Churchill, went into two folio 3 John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem (1696), in Critical Works, i. 47. 4 George Sewell, ‘An Epistle to Joseph Addison Esq. Occasion’d by the Death of the Right Honourable Charles, late Earl of Halifax’ (1715), in The Posthumous Works of Dr George Sewell (London, 1728), 37. 5 The Campaign also reappeared in printed miscellanies, in Tonson’s 1708 collection of war poems, A Collection of Poems, occasionally written upon the Victories of Blenheim and Ramillies, A Select Collection of Modern Poems by Several Hands (London, 1713), Tonson Miscellany pt. VI of 1716, and the volume A Collection of the Best English Poetry (London, 1717). 6 William Harrison, Woodstock Park. A Poem (London, 1706), 1. See also Jane Brereton, ‘An Epistle to Sir Richard Steele; On the Death of Mr Addison’ in Poems on Several Occasions: by Mrs Jane Brereton. With Letters to her Friends, and an Account of Her Life (London, 1744).

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editions in 1695, then again in 1696, 1697, an edition by Tonson in 1714, and a Latin translation in 1700.7 This chapter will attempt to understand and explain this popularity by exploring the role of the sublime. While there were many diVerent sorts of Whig poems, from satires and lampoons to ballads and hymns, the most celebrated were undoubtedly the elevated public poems on contemporary political events, which were praised for the Wre and genius of their rapturous poetic excursions: the sublime aVects of the verse. The prominent Whig literary critics of the period, such as Addison, Dennis, and Blackmore, all developed and promoted interest in the native sublime, while Leonard Welsted’s 1712 translation of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous provided an accessible version of the most inXuential classical theory on the nature of poetic aVect.8 The perceived re-emergence of the sublime in this period was crucially linked to its long-standing relationship with political liberty, an association which had already been exploited by earlier seventeenthcentury poets. David Norbrook and Nigel Smith have shown the way in which earlier seventeenth-century republican writers perceived that the transgressive qualities of the sublime made it a mode Wtting for revolutionary times, enabling poets to echo in stylistic terms the subversiveness of their radical political ideology.9 The rejection of formal precision and order that the sublime entailed also oVered a critique of the specious harmony associated with Royalist poetics.10 Writers commonly traced the linkage of political and poetic freedom to the great theoretical work on the sublime, Longinus’ Peri Hupsous, which was 7 Prince Arthur was not Blackmore’s only commercial success: his attack on the Wits, A Satyr Against Wit, went into three editions in London in 1700, and one in Dublin. The Kit-Cats had three editions in 1708, one in 1709, and one in 1718. And Blackmore’s ‘advice to a painter’ poem Instructions to Vander Bank went into three editions in 1709, while Creation, his physico-theological poem, went into four editions in the Wrst six years after its publication. These bibliographical statistics are supported by the extent of Blackmore quotation in Edward Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry (London, 1702), which cites Blackmore alongside Dryden, Cowley, and Waller as examples of ‘noble thoughts [ . . . ] that are to be found in the best English Poets’. 8 On the role of this important ‘Longinian’ tradition in the development of the sublime in the eighteenth century see Peter de Bolla and Andrew AshWeld (eds.), The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 18–21. 9 David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 137–41, 212–21; Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 125–6, 189, 203. 10 Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 137–9.

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translated by John Hall in 1652.11 Longinus’ theories of poetic process were rooted in the concept that great writing could only Xourish with political freedom. At the end of Peri Hupsous he presents the view that ’tis a popular Government which forms and nourishes great Genius’s, since in eVect all our most celebrated Orators Xourish’d under that Administration and dy’d with it. There is nothing perhaps, added he, which more elevates the Souls of great Men than Liberty12

While in the treatise the views expressed here are not explicitly attributed to Longinus himself, this passage was to provide the basis for the long-standing perception that the sublime was intrinsically linked to political liberty. Liberty and sublimity are here causally linked, and this link stems, importantly, from the historical and ideological contexts of ‘genius’. Poetic genius is not a transcendent attribute of an individual but one which manifests itself in particular historical conditions. This sense of the historical-ideological context of poetic aVect is central to the later evolution of sublime theory. It exists in tension with the Romantic conviction that genius rises above historical and material spheres. Here, genius, and thus sublimity, is inseparable from the particulars of politics and history. Although few early Whig writers associated themselves with the republican theorists of the 1650s, in the decades after the Revolution they, like the republicans, recognized the sublime as a mode appropriate to their political agenda. Leonard Welsted’s version of Peri Hupsous refashioned the Greek critic as an early eighteenth-century gentleman, Wnding in his works that ‘Spirit of Politeness, that Elevation both of Thought and Language, and that piercing Judgment’ that marked a great writer.13 In his ‘Remarks on the English Poets’ attached to the translation Welsted read Milton, Shakespeare, and Spenser through Longinus, and argued that native English poetry could oVer moments of transport comparable with classical epic. The relationship between liberty and sublimity was not only perceived in the constitutional contexts of modern poetry. Early eighteenth-century enthusiasm for the sublime was crucially linked to the notion that the Revolution demanded new literary forms to express its 11 J.[ohn] H.[all], Peri Hypsous, or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence (London, 1652). 12 Longinus, On Great Writing, trans. Leonard Welsted, in The Works of Dionysius Longinus, on the Sublime. Or, a Treatise Concerning the Sovereign Perfection of Writing (London, 1712), 125–6. 13 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, sig. a4v .

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radical implications.14 Whig literary critics drew on a libertarian rhetoric to express their hopes for modern verse. Richard Blackmore, for example, calls for ‘some Good Genius qualify’d for such an Undertaking’ who ‘would break the Ice, assert the Liberty of Poetry, and set up for an Original in Writing in a way accommodated to the Religion, Manners, and other Circumstances we are now under’.15 Samuel Cobb declares that ‘an overcurious Study of being correct, enervates the Vigour of the Mind, slackens the Spirits, and cramps the Genius of a Free Writer’.16 For some, this interest in ‘the Liberty of Poetry’ took the form of a new enthusiasm for blank verse.17 By writing poetry without a formal rhyme scheme, it was argued, poets could restore native verse to an ancient state of liberty, just as the Revolution had restored the liberties earlier founded in the ancient Constitution. Thus Shaftesbury praises Milton and Shakespeare, who To their eternal Honour they have withal been the Wrst of Eu r o p e a n s , who since the Go t h i c k Model of Poetry, attempted to throw oV the horrid Discord of jingling Rhyme. They have asserted antient Poetick Liberty, and have happily broken the Ice for those who are to follow ’em18

As Shaftesbury’s statement suggests, blank verse contained within it elements both of the modern and the ancient. It could represent the restitution of ancient political liberty and, at the same time, the casting oV of a barbarous and uncivilized literary tradition, ‘the Gothick Model’. John Dennis justiWes his use of blank verse in The Monument (1702) citing two very diVerent traditions of literary criticism: ‘I will only put the Reader in mind that Mr Milton looked upon Ryme as a Bondage, and my Lord Roscommon and Mr Dryden as a Barbarity’.19 In this formulation 14 John Tutchin, for example, asserts that ‘Freedom (the much-lov’d Theme) our Lines adorn, | Of which our Fathers sang beneath the Morn’ (An Heroick Poem upon the Late Expedition of His Majesty, to rescue England from Popery, Tyranny, and Arbitrary Government (London, 1689), 8). 15 Richard Blackmore, preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700), sig. b1r. 16 Samuel Cobb, ‘Discourse on Criticism and the Liberty of Writing’, in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1709), sig. a3v . 17 The perceived link between blank verse and political freedom was not a new argument, as Paradise Lost demonstrated. On arguments about Miltonic blank verse see Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry 1660–1780 (Boston, Mass., and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 63–8; Dustin GriYn, Regaining Paradise: Milton and the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7, 81. 18 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), i. 116. 19 John Dennis, preface to The Monument (1702), in Critical Works, i. 297. See also Dennis’s preface to Britannia Triumphans (London, 1704).

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rhyme is both a recent shackle to be thrown oV and an obstacle to modern politeness. Other writers saw the rejection of rhyme as a way of restoring poetry to a prelapsarian purity. Samuel Cobb writes of Adam’s Wrst poetry: No shackling Rhyme chain’d the free Poet’s mind, Majestick was His Style, and unconWn’d. Vast was each Sentence, and each wondrous strain Sprung forth, unlabour’d, from His fruitful Brain.20

Yet, as this example suggests, the theoretical commitment to blank verse was rarely manifested in practice. Despite the widespread enthusiasm for ‘unconWn’d’ forms, most Whig poems were still written in heroic couplets, and it is one of the ironies of the development of poetics in this period that the writer who was most successful in popularizing blank verse was in fact a Tory poet, John Philips.21 For many writers the freeing of modern verse was more likely to manifest itself in attempts to attain a poetic sublime. With its emphasis on eVect, its rejection of formal harmonies in favour of transcendent expression, and its privileging of poetic genius, the sublime seemed to represent a ‘break’ with the formal traditions of earlier verse. One of the virtues of the sublime was that it oVered a paradigm for a paradoxical combination of classical authority and aesthetic freedom: it was, in eVect, an established and authoritative poetic tradition deWned by the rejection of set forms. Whig writers wrote of ‘breaking the ice’ and asserting the liberty of poetry, yet they continued to measure the standards of sublime verse by the poetry and rhetorical theory of an earlier age: in his famous series of essays on Paradise Lost Addison justiWed his defence of the sublimity of the epic with reference to Longinus and Homer. Welsted’s remarks on the English poets compared selected passages from Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene with the Greek critic’s examples of sublimity from Homer, while John Dennis develops his concepts of a native Christian sublime with reference to Longinus and Homer. Those intent on reaching the sublime also found inspiration in the odes of the Greek poet Pindar, whose elevated excursions on the glories of Olympic and mythic heroes, commonly believed to be related to Longinian theory, 20

Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 177–8. See David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003), 149. For a discussion of the implications of the couplet form in this period see Hunter, Sleeping Beauties. 21

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were a classical prototype for precisely the sort of poetic vigour that modern poets were keen to adopt in their celebrations of public life.22 Pindar was signiWcant as both a public poet and a practitioner of the sublime. He provided an important model for many Whig writers because he demonstrated the political role of the poet in Greek society. In his preface to his Pindaric ode on the death of Queen Mary, The Court of Death (1695), John Dennis, quoting Rapin, argued that the ode ‘is not only great by the sublimeness of its Spirit, but by the greatness of its Subjects. For it is made use of to sing the praises of gods, and to celebrate the most glorious actions of men’.23 The ‘sublimeness’ of spirit had long been exploited by earlier English poets. Cowley’s Pindarique Odes (1656) provided an important model for the naturalization of the Pindaric into English. Part of the signiWcance of Cowley’s use of the form was his emphasis on adaptation rather than faithful reproduction, so that the ode did not need to be conWned to personal encomium, but could be used for other similarly elevated subjects. After Cowley the form began to be used for the awe-inspiring subjects of resurrection and destiny in religious poetry and natural disasters in occasional poetry.24 Moreover, through Cowley’s verse the notion of the Pindaric increasingly came to signify not only the triadic form but a more general escape from the rules of poetic tradition. In ‘Upon Liberty’ the proud independent spirit of Pindar is opposed to the monotony and servility of other verse forms.25 For the early Whig poets, then, the Pindaric ode was an ideal vehicle for the imaginative daring and Xights of eloquence associated with the sublime, without the ambitious length of the epic. The Xexibility of the form and its ability to convey the breathless aspiration associated with poetic Wre was exploited by many. The sense it conveyed of a poet barely able to master the energies of his poetic matter oVered a way of communicating the extraordinary events of contemporary life, from the awe-inspiring visions of heroic valour to 22 For a fuller discussion of the rise and fall of the Pindaric ode in this period see Penelope Burke Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of Pindar in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford University, 1974). See also Howard Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 334–58. For the continuing use of Pindar in mid-century political poetry see Dustin GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 63–7. 23 Dennis, The Court of Death (1695), in Critical Works, i. 42. See also Weinbrot, Britannia’s Issue, 348. 24 See John Tutchin, The Earthquake of Jamaica, describ’d in a Pindarick Poem (London, 1692). 25 See Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of Pindar’, 82.

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the terrifying forces of darkness.26 John Dennis was an acclaimed practitioner of the form, hailed by Dryden in 1694 as one of the ‘greatest Masters’ of the ode, ‘in which the English stand almost upon an equal foot with the Ancients’.27 Congreve, Maynwaring, and Samuel Cobb were among many who also struggled with the metrical complexity of the ode in their attempts to emulate the Greek poet’s exalted utterances in celebration of the mythic battles of the 1690s and 1700s.28 As this account of the classical modelling of the sublime suggests, there were paradoxes in the conceptualization of the relationship between sublimity and liberty. Critics frequently described a ‘genius’ that is ‘unconWn’d’ by formal contraints. In emphasizing aesthetic freedom in this way, this criticism could appear to be advocating a form of literary liberalism, a rejection of existing poetic models. Theorists such as Dennis certainly argued for the need for new poetic forms to free English literature from the cultural hegemony of the pagan ancients, seeing in the Revolution the freedom to create a new classic culture.29 And, as we have seen, Whig panegyrists claimed that William’s or Marlborough’s feats made classical epic redundant.30 Yet we should be cautious about taking these professions of literary liberation at face value: freedom from formal constraints and the emphasis on new native poetry did not necessarily entail the rejection of the past. Although David Womersley has written of ‘the Whiggish rejection of classical models for modern British epic’, the negotiation of the antique past was more complex than this.31 As the poems quoted in previous 26 For a contemporary discussion of the potential problems of Pindaric style see Dennis, preface to The Court of Death, in Critical Works, i. 42–5. 27 Dryden went on to proclaim: ‘You [Dennis] have the Sublimity of Sense as well as Sound, and know how far the Boldness of a Poet may lawfully extend’. Dryden to John Dennis, March 1694, in The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1942), 72. 28 William Congreve, A Pindarique Ode, Humbly OVer’d to the Queen (London, 1706); John Dennis, The Court of Death; Arthur Maynwaring, A Pindarick Ode, Inscrib’d to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough (London, 1705); Thomas Yalden, On the Conquest of Namur. A Pindarick Ode (London, 1695); see also Samuel Cobb, A Pindarique Ode to the Memory of Queen Mary (London, 1695); anon, On the Victory of Ramelies: A Pindaric (London, 1706). 29 See David Womersley, introd. to Augustan Critical Writing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1997), pp. xxii–xxxi. 30 See Addison, An Account of the Greatest English Poets, in The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914), i. 35; Richard Blackmore, Advice to the Poets. A Poem (London, 1706), 12. 31 Womersley, Introd. to Augustan Critical Writing, p. xxvi. See also Arthur S. Williams, ‘Panegyric Decorum in the Reigns of William and Anne’, Journal of British Studies, 21 (1981), 56–67.

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chapters demonstrate, there was a pervasive interest in the validity of classical models for modern poetry. When panegyrists rated the exploits of William III or Marlborough over those of Hercules or Achilles, they argued not that classical models were to be rejected in favour of a purely native tradition, but that the events of contemporary life were as impressive as, or more than, those depicted in classical epic. In the literary criticism of Dennis, Addison, and Blackmore we Wnd the claim that modern Christian culture oVered a sounder basis for the sublime than the pagan mythologies of the ancients, but this is coupled with the use of those classical models as paradigms of the heroic sublime. And in the pastoral wars of Queen Anne’s reign Ambrose Philips and John Oldmixon attempted to redeWne earlier poetic modes to make them Wtting to the celebration of contemporary aVairs of state. We might compare all these writers’ complex negotiation of classical and native art with the Whiggish temples of virtue later constructed by Queen Caroline at Richmond and Cobham at Stowe in which a classicized framework and structure surrounded Wgures such as Isaac Newton or Samuel Clarke, who were representatives of the future of modern Whig culture.32 In both cases classical models oVered both a form of cultural authority and a point of comparison: modern achievements were measured up against ancient to aYrm their ‘classic’ status, rather than to undermine the signiWcance of earlier models.33

Religious sublime Both Longinian criticism and the Pindaric ode oVered classical models through which Whig poets would conceptualize and evaluate their 32 This discussion is informed by a paper given by Emma Jay entitled ‘Death, Fame, and Authorship: Literary Responses to Queen Caroline’s Hermitage at Richmond’ given at the ‘Restoration to Reform’ seminar in Oxford on 26 May 2003. For further detail on the busts see Katherine Eustace, ‘The Politics of the Past: Stowe and the Development of the Historical Portrait Bust’, Apollo, 148 (1998), 31–40; George Clarke, ‘Grecian Taste and Gothic Virtue: Lord Cobham’s Gardening Programme and its Iconography’, Apollo, 97 (1973), 566–71; Judith Colton: ‘Merlin’s Cave and Queen Caroline: Garden Art as Political Propaganda’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 10 (1976–7), 1–20. 33 As David Spadafora has argued, while many were convinced of the progressive nature of contemporary cultural achievements, claims for the superiority of modern culture rested on subjective arguments about the perceived virtues of ancient or modern cultures, and it was for this reason that contemporaries were more likely to identify the advances of modernity with the more visible, palpable signs of progress evident in scientiWc and mechanical developments (Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in EighteenthCentury Britain (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1990)), 76.

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notions of the contemporary sublime. Both were often associated with the rapturous idiom of biblical poetry, and it was through this Christianized sublime that the Wrst Whig writers began to articulate their desire for an elevated native poetry.34 The elevated exclamatory verse typiWed by the Song of Solomon oVered a Wtting model for poets intent on expressing the wonders of divine truth.35 In the preface to her Poems on Several Occasions Elizabeth Rowe recommends the ‘vivacity’ and ‘purity’ of the Canticles, while John Cutts, rejecting the meditative devotional tradition of Herbert and Vaughan, describes the passion of the Song of Solomon:36 Witness his Songs of Love so Wnely writ, Where Nature puts on various forms of Wit, To move the secret Springs of Sympathy, And Wre the Soul into an Exstasie.37

Other poets aspire towards a similar spirit. Benjamin Keach pleads: Wilt Thou, who dost the Muses aid, aVord Divine assistance, that each pow’rful word May rend a heart at least, and every line Turn Kingdoms and whole Nations into brine Of their own tears? Teach me, O Lord, the skill T’extract the spirit of grief, O let my Quill, Like Moses Rod, make Adamants to Xy, That tears may gush like Rivers from each eye.38

Rowe, Cutts, and Keach all draw their vocabulary of ecstasy and inspiration from biblical sources. As David Morris has shown, over the course of the seventeenth century a range of writers became increasingly interested in replicating the high style of the Bible in modern religious poetry.39 Some attempted paraphrases of the Bible, and particularly the

34 On Pindar and the Psalms of David see Wilson, ‘The Knowledge and Appreciation of Pindar’, 185. 35 For a fuller account of the reception of the Song of Songs in the seventeenth century see Elizabeth Clarke’s forthcoming book, Rewriting the Bride: Authorship, Gender, and the Song of Songs. 36 Elizabeth Singer Rowe, ‘Preface to the Reader’, in Poems on Several Occasions Written by Philomela (London, 1696), sig. a4v . 37 John Cutts, ‘Musarum Origo: or the Original and Excellence of the Muses’, in Poetical Exercises Written upon Several Occasions (London, 1687), 23. 38 Benjamin Keach, The Glorious Lover. A Divine Poem Upon the Adorable Majesty of Sinners Redemption (London, 1685), 115. 39 David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England (Kentucky, Ky.: University of Kentucky Press, 1972), 14–22. On

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Psalms, while others aimed to produce a powerful religious poetry by creating an original poem which took its subject, or style, from the Bible, as in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Cowley’s unWnished Davideis.40 Elsewhere, the Christian sublime took the form of eschatological verse and the poetry of imaginative devotion.41 However, while many wanted to duplicate the high style of Hebrew poetry, they as yet had no means of explaining why and how it achieved its powerful eVects. It was not until Boileau’s translation of Longinus’ third-century fragmentary treatise on the rhetorical sublime, Peri Hupsous, became widely available towards the end of the seventeenth century that critics had a working vocabulary and method of literary criticism with which this ‘grand style’ could be analysed.42 Although there were at least Wve editions or translations of Longinus during the seventeenth century, it was Boileau’s translation of 1674 which Wrst made widely available a critical terminology which soon became inXuential in descriptions of poetic and rhetorical aVect. And it was in John Dennis’s essays on literary criticism, written during the 1690s, that the combination of Longinian theory and biblical style found its most inXuential expression. In The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry (1701) Dennis argued that while it was true that the ancients had produced poetic works that had drawn on the ‘enthusiastic passions’, there were passages in the Bible that far surpassed them. Comparing Psalm 18 with a passage from Vergil’s Georgics, he asks his readers to consider of the psalm That there is more Terror here, both Ordinary and Enthusiastick, and consequently, more Spirit in a faint Copy [ . . . ] than there is in Virgil’s Original. What Force, and what inWnite Spirit must there not have been in the Original Hebrew?43

Dennis believed that the future of modern poetry lay in the Christian sublime. He was convinced the evidence of the Wre and spirit of Hebrew the rhetoric of the Christian grand style see Deborah K. Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 40 Examples of biblical paraphrase include Richard Blackmore, A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700); Edward Young, A Paraphrase on Part of the Book of Job (London, 1719); Isaac Watts, Horae Lyricae Poems ChieXy of the Lyric Kind (London, 1706). 41 Examples of eschatological verse are Edward Young, A Poem on the Last Day (Oxford, 1713) and Isaac Watts, ‘The Day of Judgment’, in Horae Lyricae. For a full discussion of all forms of sublime religious verse in the period see Morris, The Religious Sublime, 104–54. 42 Morris, The Religious Sublime, 28–39. 43 Dennis, The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 269.

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verse demonstrated that truly divine poetry was capable of stronger eVects than pagan verse, and that by developing a tradition of powerful native religious verse modern writers could surpass the triumphs of classical literature. Thus he announces that the intention of The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry is no less than ‘to raise it [poetry] to a height which it has never known before among us, and to restore it [ . . . ] to all its Greatness, and to all its Innocence’.44 This belief in the need to create an original native religious poetry was shared by other Whig writers. In his Paraphrase on the Book of Job (1700) Blackmore argued that overdependence on classical traditions meant that ‘we have no Originals’. Rather than imitate, he suggested that native writers create their own Christian verse, claiming that passages from the Bible ‘are nobler Examples of the sublime Stile, than any can be found in the Pagan Writers’.45 In the context of Blackmore’s criticism, ‘original’ here means native original: a model of elevated writing produced by an English writer. For both Dennis and Blackmore, Milton’s Paradise Lost provided an example of just the sort of new freedoms that poets and critics aspired to. Milton’s grand style took his verse far beyond the contrived fancy of Waller or Cowley, and the Christian subject matter of the poem provided concrete proof of a sublime ‘accommodated to the Religion, Manners, and other Circumstances we are now under’.46 Addison’s series of Spectator essays secured the poet’s posthumous reputation as the author of the great heroic poem on a Christian subject. Dennis’s explanation for the ‘inWnite Spirit’ of Hebrew poetry was that it was the work of a divine hand which no mortal could ever hope to match. In the preface to Horae Lyricae (1706) Isaac Watts oVers his explanation of why religious verse was more likely to create sublime aVect: If the Heart were Wrst inXam’d from Heaven, and the Muse were not left alone to form the Devotion and Pursue a Cold Scent [ . . . ] the whole Composure would be of a Piece, all Meridian Light and Meridian Fervor.47

Watts’s reference to the heart ‘inXam’d from Heaven’ reXects a widespread conviction that sacred subjects could inspire poetic passion on a level unparalleled in secular verse. However, one of the problems with the notion of creating a modern sublime and sacred poetry was that 44 45 46 47

Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 328. Richard Blackmore, preface to A Paraphrase on the Book of Job, sigs. b1r. i2r. Ibid. sig. b1r. Watts, preface to Horae Lyricae, n.p.

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poets needed to Wnd explanations of the sources of poetic transport whilst avoiding the suggestion that they had been directly inspired by God. Tory satirists had long associated Puritanism and Whig verse with enthusiasm: with claims to false literary and spiritual inspiration. The Whig appropriation of the sublime in the late seventeenth century was shaped by a desire to distance the expression of the sublime from such attacks. The beauty of Longinus’ treatise was that it provided English critics with a non-mystical and non-mechanical justiWcation for the poetic process. Longinus had claimed that passion was the essence of poetic spirit, and so it was in terms of passion rather than divine inspiration that Dennis mounted his arguments for modern poetry. In one of the earliest formulations of his ideas, Remarks on a Book Entitul’d Prince Arthur (1696), Dennis quotes and modiWes Aristotle, arguing that although the Greek philosopher’s use of the term entheos, or enthusiasm, has been taken to mean ‘there is something divine in poetry’, he is ‘pretty conWdent that enueoB is us’d metaphorically here, and signiWes something extreamly pathetick’. This, he argues, would dispense with the notion of divine inspiration in poetry and mean that ‘Genius is nothing but Passion’.48 Later on Dennis was to distinguish between two sorts of passion: vulgar passion, such as anger or pity, which is prompted by the immediate apprehension of a particular event or object, and enthusiastic passion, which is the source of poetry, and which is produced by ideas in contemplation. Through meditation on a particular idea the enthusiastic passions of admiration, terror, horror, joy, sadness, and desire could be evoked and exploited in contemporary poetry. The whole process by which a poet attained spirit, passion, and Wre could be explained as an exercise of the imagination and intellect, as he demonstrates with an example of the way in which an ordinary object is transformed by meditation: The Sun mention’d in ordinary Conversation, gives the Idea of a round Xat shining Body, of about two foot diameter. But the Sun occurring to us in Meditation, gives the Idea of a vast and glorious Body, and the top of all the visible Creation, and the brightest material Image of the Divinity. I leave the Reader therefore to judge, if this Idea must not necessarily be attended with Admiration; and that Admiration I call Enthusiasm.49

We can see the way that Dennis has distanced himself here from the mystical and supernatural elements of poetic inspiration. Enthusiasm, a 48 49

Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entitul’d Prince Arthur (1696), in Critical Works, i. 135. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 339.

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concept associated elsewhere with spurious claims to divine power, is in Dennis’s opinion merely an eVect of awe and admiration, which is felt by the reader. This shift towards a secularized theory of poetic inspiration was to prove inXuential in the theorizing of the sublime in later eighteenth-century poetry.50 Dennis’s criticism created a theoretical basis for the understanding of poetic aVect and its relationship with contemporary Christian culture. However, the question remained of how to fulWl the poetic destiny that he and Addison had described in such rapturous terms. It was all very well to celebrate Milton as the new Homer, to analyse Paradise Lost in Longinian terms, but what were the implications for the practice of the post-Revolution poet? In his essay on book VII of Paradise Lost Addison identiWed what he saw as the closest thing to the Miltonic sublime in modern verse. Drawing his readers’ attention to the recent publication of Richard Blackmore’s physico-theological poem, Creation: A Philosophical Poem (1712), Addison declared that it ‘deserves to be looked upon as one of the most useful and noble Productions in our English Verse’.51 Blackmore’s poem, which used Newton’s natural philosophy to celebrate the divine workings of the natural world, oVered an inXuential model for rapturous Christian poetry. As a number of critics have described, Newtonian science had oVered to many early eighteenthcentury writers new ways of accounting for the relationship between God and created nature.52 Blackmore explained in the preface to his poem that Newton’s theories could be used ‘to demonstrate the SelfExistence of an Eternal Mind from the created and dependent Existence of the Universe’.53 In the Spectator Addison had suggested the sublime potential of the new natural philosophy, arguing in one of the papers on 50 See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); John Morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS, 2001); Shaun Irlam, Elations: The Poetics of Enthusiasm in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 51 Spectator 339, 29 March 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), iii. 261. 52 The Wrst decade of the eighteenth century saw an increase in this subject in the works of writers such as Lady Mary Chudleigh, Henry Needler, and John Reynolds. The fullest account of the physico-theological tradition is found in William Powell Jones, The Rhetoric of Science: A Study of ScientiWc Ideas and Imagery in Eighteenth-Century English Poetry (London: Routledge, 1966). See also Robert InglesWeld, ‘James Thomson, Aaron Hill, and the Poetic ‘‘Sublime’’ ’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9 (1986), 141–56; Michael Cohen, ‘The Whig Sublime and James Thomson’, English Language Notes, 24 (1986), 27–35. 53 Richard Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxviii.

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the imagination that no one had done more to ‘gratiWe and enlarge the Imagination’ than ‘the Authors of the new Philosophy’, and had described the ‘amazing Pomp and Solemnity’ and ‘Immensity and MagniWcence of Nature’ that were to be enjoyed in the contemplation of the earth in its Wrmament.54 As his description suggests, the embrace of science and consequently the physico-theological genre was rooted in the concern for reformation and education through polite discourse that lay behind Addison’s and Steele’s periodical journalism and Shaftesbury’s philosophy. Blackmore said that he had chosen poetry as the medium for his message because it ‘engages many to read and retain what they would neglect, if written in Prose’, and his emphasis in his preface to Creation is on the role of poetry in a social context.55 He declares that his aim is ‘to bring Philosophy out of the secret Recesses of the Schools, and strip it of its uncouth and mysterious Dress, that it may become agreeable, and admitted to a general Conversation’.56 While the end is instruction, poetry provides a more polite and approachable medium for the education of the reader than straight instruction. The physico-theological poem eVectively brought divinity to the masses through the engaging conceit of the poet as telescope (or microscope), oVering the reader unseen worlds of heavenly order. Whig poets had long found useful political metaphors in Newton’s natural philosophy.57 The Principia could be read as a series of metaphors for the balanced energies of a mixed Constitution, and the political resonances of Newton’s theories would later Wnd their most explicit form in John Desagauliers’s poem, The Newtonian System of the World, the Best Model of Government: An Allegorical Poem (1728).58 54 Spectator 420, 2 July 1712, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, iii. 574–5. Other Spectator papers on the beauties of science are nos. 121, 387, 519, and 543. 55 Richard Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxiii. 56 Blackmore, preface to Creation, p. xxxv. Cf. Addison in Spectator 10: ‘I shall be ambitious to have it said of me, that I have brought Philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables, and in CoVee-Houses’ (Spectator 10, 12 March 1711, in The Spectator, ed. Bond, i. 44). 57 As John Gascoigne has argued, although it was possible to be a Tory and a Newtonian, it was amongst the Whigs and latitudinarians, who were more inclined to emphasize the importance of natural rather than revealed theology, that Newton’s theories found most support (Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of the Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 147). 58 I am grateful to Kendra Packham for this source, and also for her useful insights into the use of Newtonian science as constitutional metaphor. For an early example of Newtonian science as political metaphor see Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem on His Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (1689), in Works, v. 340.

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However, what really inspired the poets of the early eighteenth century was not images of order and balance but the imaginative potential of the complexities and enormities of Newton’s divine structure. This was not Newtonianism in a Blakeian sense, the universe reduced to a Wxed order thanks to the triumph of reason over the imagination. Blackmore and later followers such as Aaron Hill, James Thomson, and David Mallet instead dramatized the visionary impact of Newton’s revelations. The Principia opened up new worlds of poetic exploration, inspiring them to swoop through the solar system, dive to the depths of the ocean bed, and pierce the mysteries of the atom and the raindrop.59 Blackmore’s Creation begins, like many poems of its kind, with a description of the inconceivable: How Abject, how Inglorious ’tis to lye Groveling in Dust and Darkness, when on high Empires immense and rolling Worlds of Light To range their Heav’nly Scenes the Muse invite? I meditate to Soar above the Skies, To Heights unknown, thro’ Ways untry’d, to rise.60

Blackmore’s vision of himself rising and soaring to the outer limits of the universe exempliWed Longinus’ claims for the sublime quality of human perception. In Peri Hupsous the Greek critic had claimed that the whole World is not capacious enough for the extensive Contemplations of the Human Mind, and [ . . . ] our Thoughts soar above the Heavens, and penetrate even beyond those Boundaries which encircle and terminate the Universe61

In demonstrating the sublime potential of the natural world, Creation literalized Longinus’ images of poetic vision. Blackmore’s dizzying juxtapositions of light and dark, human and divine, great and small were to become characteristic of the genre, which was marked by its rhetorical balance between the limits of human perception and the vistas that could potentially be described. A recurring emphasis in Creation is the dynamism of the created world. Again and again Blackmore is drawn to the ‘Attractive Vigour’, ‘strange Energy’, and ‘force 59 In his recent account of Augustan poetics Blanford Parker argues that such detailed description of ‘the world of things’ is characteristic of the Augustan shift away from symbol and allegoresis into the quotidian and the naturalistic (Parker, The Triumph of Augustan Poetics: English Literary Culture from Butler to Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ). 60 Blackmore, Creation, 3. 61 Welsted, Works of Dionysius Longinus, 105.

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Innate’ of tides, atoms, and rivers. Nature positively pulsates with competing life forces, energies whose complex balance in itself provides evidence of a divine presence.62 Blackmore combines a Whiggish optimism about Newton’s scientiWc modernity with Dennis’s conviction that divinity and sublimity of poetic aVect are always mutually enhanced.

Secular sublime In the physico-theological verse of the early eighteenth century the sublime was embodied in a rhetoric of transcendent Xight which linked divine providence to scientiWc and poetic aspiration. The emphasis on inspired Xight, on the ecstasy of poetic excursion, that typiWes this poetry was also found in the panegyrics on aVairs of state. Poets like Blackmore, Dennis, John Hughes, and Elizabeth Rowe wrote both divine and secular sublime, using the same elevated verse to celebrate the events of public life that characterized their rapturous religious poetry. In her early poem on the Battle of the Boyne, Rowe exclaims: Oh were the potent inspiration less! I might Wnd words its Raptures to express; But now I neither can its force controul, Nor paint the great Ideas of my Soul.63

For Rowe the secular and the divine sublime were brought together in biblical paraphrase. Images of the violent and martial god of the Old Testament oVered precedents for the depiction of the heroic battles of William III. In ‘A Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk’ Rowe presents God’s power over the Chaldeans as symbolic of William’s victories over the French and Jacobites.64 At the end of the poem her vision of the avenging deity becomes conXated with that of the king: Thy threatning Arrows gild their Xaming way, And at the glittering of thy Spear the Heathen dare not stay; 62 See e.g. John Hughes, An Ode to the Creator of the World, Occasion’d by the Fragments of Orpheus (London, 1713); Leonard Welsted, The Scheme and Conduct of Providence (London, 1736). 63 Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 31. On Rowe’s political verse in the context of contemporary Whig poetry see Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 141–66. On the early poetry see also Henry F. Stecher, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, the Poetess of Frome: A Study in Eighteenth-Century English Pietism (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1986), 38–45. 64 For a fuller discussion of biblical models and the female poet see Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 150–3. On the use of images of biblical violence by earlier

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In The Grounds of Criticism Dennis had observed that ‘nothing is so wonderful in its EVects’ as those ideas ‘which shew the Wrath and Vengeance of an angry God’.66 His selections from biblical verse, intended to prove the sublimity of Hebrew poetry, are dominated by images of martial fury and valour drawn from Habbakuk and from the Psalms.67 It is clear that even when these passages did not make the parallel with secular violence explicit, they provided an inXuential idiom for the contemporary celebration of military might. However, there were other Whig writers who believed that divine themes were not the most Wtting subject matter for sublime poetry.68 Shaftesbury comments that while biblical Wgures such as Moses or Joshua oVered Wne examples of illustrious men: ’twou’d be hard to copy them in just Heroick. ’Twou’d be hard to give to many of ’em that graceful Air, which is necessary to render ’em naturally pleasing to Mankind; according to the Idea Men are universally found to have of Heroism, and Generosity.69

As many Whig writers saw it, the great victories of the 1690s and 1700s oVered examples of awe-inspiring feats which were almost beyond comprehension, and which left contemporaries struggling to Wnd language within which to express their admiration. The sublime enabled them to express this sense of awe and astonishment, as in Montagu’s inXuential Epistle to Dorset: Oh Dorset! I am rais’d! I’m all on Wre! And, if my Strength could answer my Desire, In speaking Paint this Figure should be seen, Like Jove his Grandeur, and like Mars his Mien.70

Dissenting writers see Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 84–114. 65

Elizabeth Rowe, ‘A Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 21. Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 361. 67 Dennis, The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 366–8. 68 Morris, The Religious Sublime, 43–4. 69 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 183. 70 Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 5. 66

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Similarly, Blackmore describes the poetic process in his Advice to the Poets: The Inspiration comes, my Bosom glows, I strive with strong Enthusiastic Throws. Oh! I am all in Rapture, all on Fire, Give me, to ease the Muse’s Pangs, the Lyre.71

Neither of these passages presents a rational or coherent account of the battle scenes it describes, but instead uses the vocabulary of sublime aVect: Wre, rapture, and enthusiasm denote the magnitude of the subject matter. The subject described is placed beyond comprehension and, importantly, beyond criticism. Longinus had declared that The Sublime rather ravishes than persuades; it creates in us a certain transport and admiration, mixed with astonishment and surprize, which is altogether distinct from barely pleasing or perswading.72

In presenting their accounts of recent history in terms of the sublime, Montagu and Blackmore not only gave stature to their hero but they also hoped to place their poetry beyond the realm of propaganda. One of the perceived qualities of the sublime was that it transcended logical argument or persuasion. The polemical representation of recent history was couched in terms that supposedly rose above mere partisanship. Elevated verse did not seek to justify because it did not have to: the reader is simply ‘ravished’, a passive receptor of an overwhelming force. John Dennis develops this sexual dimension more explicitly in his observation that the sublime is ‘an invincible Force, which commits a pleasing Rape upon the very Soul of the Reader’.73 While Dennis does not explore the full sexual connotations of the reading process, his deWnition illustrates the way in which the sublime was seen as positioning the reader beyond the realm of reason and choice. It is not, of course, only the reader who is overwhelmed by the object described. Both the examples cited here illustrate the eroticized vocabulary of poetic inspiration, whereby the poet, too, is overcome by a force comparable with sexual passion. Sharon Achinstein has written of the overlapping vocabularies of holy ardour and carnal eroticism in 71 Sir Richard Blackmore, Advice to the Poets (London, 1706), 25. Importantly, Blackmore also speciWes that these ‘throws’ must be ‘Enthusiastick in a proper place’ (p. 12). 72 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 3. 73 Dennis, Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, in Critical Works, i. 359.

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Dissenting verse of this period, and, discussing Elizabeth Rowe’s versions of the Canticles, she argues that a sexualized response becomes a testimony to genuine spiritual experience, since ‘the poetic rapture becomes a legitimizing sign of a divine presence’.74 Yet Rowe’s own Williamite poetry, like the examples from Montagu and Blackmore above, is also marked by this sexualized language, as we see in her gasping exclamation of ‘potent inspiration’ and inexpressible ‘Raptures’ over the king.75 Within Whig panegyric poetic rapture operates to place the political authority of its object beyond the need for legitimation, through the overwhelming force of the secular heroic sublime.

The sublime moment One of the most celebrated examples of sublimity in Whig poetry, frequently cited as the paradigm of the modern heroic sublime, was Addison’s description of Marlborough as an angel riding the storm in The Campaign: So when an Angel by divine command With rising tempests shakes a guilty land, Such as of late o’er pale Britannia past, Calm and serene he drives the furious blast; And, pleas’d th’Almighty’s orders to perform, Rides in the whirl-wind, and directs the storm.76

In the Tatler Steele used the passage as the greatest example of the sublime style, citing the opinion of a man who claimed that ‘tho’ he ran thro’ many Instances of Sublimity from the ancient Writers’ he knew of no other occasion ‘wherein the true Greatness of Soul, which animates a General in Action, is so well represented’. The image of the angel in the storm, he declares, ‘sets forth the most sedate and the most active Courage engag’d in an Uproar of Nature, a Confusion of Elements’.77 Steele’s approval of Addison’s evocation of the chaotic disturb-

74 Sharon Achinstein, ‘Romance of the Spirit: Female Sexuality and Religious Desire in Early Modern England’, ELH 69 (2002), 413–38. 75 Elizabeth Singer Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several Occasions Written by Philomela, 31. 76 Addison, The Campaign (1705), in Works, i. 165. 77 Tatler 43, 19 July 1709, in The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), i. 310–11.

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ance of the natural world points to another aspect of sublime poetry in this period: its ability to invite visions of apocalypse. As David Fairer observes, early eighteenth-century poets were drawn to the terrifying aspects of the sublime: to scenarios of destruction such as those found in Aaron Hill’s The Judgment-Day (1721).78 But it is signiWcant that in Addison’s poem, as in much of the Whig panegyric of this period, the apocalyptic is countered by the controlling Wgure at the centre of the chaos. The force of this passage in The Campaign is to draw attention to the sedate general, the eye at the heart of the storm, a sense which is reinforced by the echo of Nahum 1: 3: ‘the Lord hath his way in the whirlwind and in the storm’.79 Such visions of controlled destruction, of almost-apocalypse, recur throughout the poetry of this period, as a form of tribute to military leaders whose ultimate control is visible behind the chaos. But we could also read the image of the controlled storm as one of the sublime eVect itself. Longinus compares the poet’s capacities to rouse sensation with those of natural phenomena, so that the sublime ‘bears all before it like a Hurricane, and presents, at one view, the Orator’s whole collected force’.80 The poet, like the general, commands a force that he is only just master of. The popularity of Addison’s image of the angel in the storm may lie partly in its conXation of poetic and military power. As Steele’s comments demonstrate, the merit of The Campaign was perceived to lie less in its whole than in the image that formed the core of its sublimity. This is characteristic of critical responses to the sublime: readers most commonly found moments of brilliance in particular passages or phrases, rather than across a work as a whole. Thus when Addison came to describe the virtues of Paradise Lost in his Spectator papers it was his emphasis on the isolated ‘beauties’ of Milton’s style that proved most inXuential on later responses to the poem.81 A sense of the unevenness of the sublime can again be traced back to Longinus, who identiWed the sublime style in isolated passages of poetry, rather than in its wider structure. Longinus oVered a very diVerent approach 78

Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 125–7. Samuel Johnson, whilst praising the poem, comments on the repetitive nature of the simile, arguing that Marlborough is so like the storm that the lines on the storm are merely repetitive (Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 130–1). 80 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 4. 81 There is a similar emphasis in his An Account of the Greatest English Poets, where Addison describes Milton as ‘Bold, and sublime, my whole attention draws, | And seems above the critick’s nicer laws’ (Works, i. 33). 79

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to literary texts from the rule-bound formality of Aristotelian criticism. Rather than examine the coherence of plots and unities, Longinus concentrated on smaller units of composition, on particular passages, that represented the examples of great writing. Sublimity was to be found, like a nugget of gold, hidden among a mass of less spectacular material. This idea of the erratic and unattainable nature of poetic sublimity clearly shapes the critical evaluation of poetry in this period, and literary criticism in turn sought to identify and celebrate such passages, rather than justify the whole work. An emphasis on the moment is also evident in the way in which poetic texts were reread after their initial publication. Peter de Bolla and Andrew AshWeld have suggested that anthologies oVering the selected ‘beauties’ of poetry eVectively constructed a ‘taxonomy of textualized aVect’, a collection of individual passages which represented the most elevated moments of individual poems. Edward Bysshe’s hugely popular The Art of English Poetry (1702) oVers lines from a range of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century poems under various subject headings, ranging from war and thunder to love or dolphins.82 Richard Blackmore’s poetry is extremely well represented in the collection, as Bysshe according to the subtitle of the anthology, selects the moments that to him seem to embody the ‘most natural, agreeable, and noble Thoughts [ . . . ] that are to be found in the best English Poets’. The physician’s lengthy epics seem to have gained longer life as a collection of thoughts rather than as sustained narrative poems. Considering this model of reception prompts the question of whether in seeking to reread this sublime Whig verse (and in particular lengthier works such as Blackmore’s) as whole poems, and in criticizing their lack of consistency, we neglect the terms in which they were Wrst written and appreciated. In his discussion of the sporadic nature of the sublime Longinus oVered the examples of Pindar and Sophocles who ‘sometimes in the midst of their greatest Violence, while they Lighten and Thunder [ . . . ] their Fires suddenly become extinct, and they unhappily fall’.83 The perceived unsustainability of the sublime not only aVects the evaluation of poetry in this period, but also its expression. Whig poets attempting to attain the sublime routinely testify to the erratic and Xeeting nature of the lofty imagination, and their poetry rarely assumes the form of 82 De Bolla and AshWeld, The Sublime: A Reader in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, 11. Bysshe’s The Art of English Poetry was reprinted in 1705, 1708, 1710, 1714, 1718, 1724, 1725, 1737, 1739, and 1762. 83 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 99–100.

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an assured and seamless poetic excursion. The struggle towards imaginative transcendence is part of the poetic process. Sublime verse is characterized by the professions of linguistic inadequacy that accompany the Xight of imagination, and the need to describe ‘something too great for utterance’. Over and over again writers such as Addison, Montagu, and Blackmore struggle to articulate the enormity of their subject: Addison begs: ‘wou’d my strength but second my desire, | I’d all his boundless Bravery rehearse’ (To the King, ll. 170–1), and Samuel Cobb implores ‘O cou’d my Muse reach Milton’s tow’ring Flight, | Or stretch her Wings to the Maeonian Height!’ only to discover that ‘The Muse grows dumb | Not weary’d with his Praise, but overcome’.84 As we saw in Chapter 3, Montagu’s celebrated Epistle falls in mid-Xight: My Spirits shrink, and will no longer bear; Rapture and Fury carry’d me thus far Transported and Amaz’d. That Rage once spent, I can no more sustain Your Flights, your Energies, and Tragic Strain, But fall back to my Nat’ral Pace again.85

Montagu is as concerned with the act of writing, or attaining poetic Xight, as he is with the ostensible subject being praised. The Epistle may have been consistently cited as the pinnacle of high style, but it was a poem dominated by its author’s sense of his inability to write sustained heroic verse. In Elizabeth Rowe’s verse this inability to sustain the sublime vision is feminized, as she declares her woman’s voice inadequate to hymn the bloody victory: ‘Too soft’s my Voice the Hero to express; | Or, like himself, the War-like Prince to dress’.86 In all these poems it seems that, paradoxically, it was in the very failure to attain a coherent and consistent elevation that the true sublime was most evident.

Sublime failures This troping of failure within the sublime was to reverberate throughout Whig and Tory verse of the early eighteenth century. Longinus had 84 Joseph Addison, To the King (1695), in Works, i. 45; Cobb, ‘Of Poetry: A Poem’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 223–4. 85 Montagu, Epistle to Dorset, 8. For a contemporary parody of the style see the anonymous The Flight of the Pretender, With Advice to the Poets, a Poem (London, 1708). 86 Rowe, ‘Upon King William’s passing the Boyn’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 31.

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discussed the bathetic elements of the sublime, remarking rather tritely, in Welsted’s translation, that ‘He greatly falls, who falls in great Attempst [sic]’, and it is clear that a striving for poetic grandeur and elevation is closely related to bathos, to the failure to attain this height.87 Thus even within the terms of its own aesthetic theory Whig writing could verge on the absurd, in a poetics in which elevation was inseparable from deXation, true inspiration inevitably coupled with false. The juxtapositions of physico-theological poetry, where a piece of beeswax could be described in the same rapturous tones as the whole of the solar system, gave the verse of Blackmore and others a mock-heroic dimension, while the rhetoric of Wre and soaring Xight was, as Longinus had observed, apt to deteriorate into mere ‘Noise and Vapour’.88 As we have seen, such instability was exploited to its full satiric potential by Pope and Swift, in works such as The Dunciad and Peri Bathous which mocked the failed pretensions of the Whig poet. However, an interest in the relationship between true and false inspiration, between sublimity and mere fustian, was not exclusively the province of Tory critics. In the preface to The Court of Death (1695) John Dennis discusses the nature of the sublime, and how to achieve it, and comments on the way in which ‘fustian’ and ‘superXuity of epithetes’ must be avoided by the modern writer aiming to achieve sublimity and magniWcence. Fustian, he says, proceeds ‘only from an Impotent eVort of the mind to rise, when it wants both warmth and force to take its Xight with vigour’.89 Similarly, an excess of epithets ‘brings Deformity and Impotence, and becomes a clog to the Mind’ (p. 44). However, a qualitative distinction between the true and false sublime was problematic. Longinian criticism was focused on poetic aVect rather than the rules of poetic form, yet the subjective nature of the aVective experience made it hard to legislate for a ‘true’ sublime. Dennis asserts that ‘a man of Sense must have a very fantastick opinion of himself, if he thinks that the false Sublime can warm him’ and that ‘Verses that seem warm to a man of sense can never contain any Fustian’ (p. 43). As he describes it, the distinction between the true and the false sublime is as obvious as that between hot and cold. Yet these evaluative absolutes were to prove simpler in theory than in practice, as Dennis’s subsequent criticism of Richard Blackmore’s epic 87

88 Ibid. 18. Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 8. Dennis, The Court of Death, in Critical Works, i. 43. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 89

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poem Prince Arthur revealed. In his Remarks on Prince Arthur Dennis undertook to demonstrate the poem’s failure as an epic. Working from the premise that ‘An Epick Poem is [ . . . ] a Narration, and that Narration must be delightfull’, Dennis asserted that in the case of Blackmore’s poem ‘the greater part of the Narration, neither is nor can be delightfull to Men of the best tast’.90 In Prince Arthur he Wnds the bombast and fustian that are the hallmark of the false sublime. As he sees it, the incidents are not surprising, the episodes are not pathetic, and the whole is characterized by ‘needless and triXing Descriptions’ (p. 141). Dennis reassures his readers that reception provides objective evidence of literary merit, since the true quality of great poetry is evident to ‘Men of the best tast’. There were indeed many, like Dennis, who had enthused elsewhere at the Xights of Whig panegyric, but who insisted that Blackmore’s aspirations to epic sublimity were misplaced. In his history of English poetry in ‘Poetae Britannici’ (1700) Samuel Cobb praises the excursions of Montagu’s Epistle, and declares that the heroic endeavours of William III are to be the theme of modern poetry. Yet Blackmore is identiWed as one who strives for Xight but ultimately misses the mark: We grant he labours with no want of Brains, Or Fire, or Spirit; but He spares the Pains, One happy Thought, or two, may at a Heat Be struck, but Time and Study must compleat A Verse, sublimely Good, and justly Great.91

Yet the trouble with Prince Arthur was that it prompted much praise as well as criticism. The poem, as we have seen, was hugely popular: Samuel Johnson, who made a special case for the inclusion of Blackmore in his Lives of the Poets, comments: That Prince Arthur found many readers is certain, for in two years it had three editions; a very uncommon instance of favourable reception, at a time when literary curiosity was yet conWned to particular classes of the nation.92

The contrast between such popularity and the criticism of other readers illustrated the fact that not all men of sense agreed: one man’s sublimity could very well be another man’s fustian, and vice versa. 90 John Dennis, Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur, An Heroick Poem. With Some General Critical Observations, and Several New Remarks Upon Virgil (1696), in Critical Works, i. 70–1. Further page references in the text are to this edition. 91 Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry’, in Poems on Several Occasions, 214. 92 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Blackmore’, in Lives of the Poets, ii. 238.

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In the Remarks on Prince Arthur Dennis attempted to address this knotty relationship between poetic aVect and literary quality. Acknowledging that Prince Arthur had enjoyed great popular acclaim, he considered the hypothetical argument of the reader who observed that ‘the Narration of Prince Arthur pleases me, and pleases ten thousand more, and therefore it is delightfull’ (p. 70). Dennis quickly dismissed this notion of mere popularity as an index of merit, stating that ‘there is a good tast, and [ . . . ] there is a bad, and [ . . . ] the latter very often prevails’ (p. 70). However, he was on more diYcult ground when forced to consider the nature of his readership and the undeniable evidence of ‘men of good sence’ who had enjoyed Blackmore’s poem. In the ensuing discussion of poetry, popularity, and taste Dennis problematized some of the central terms of contemporary literary criticism. What exactly was a man of sense? What was a man of taste? Were they the same thing? In attempting to legislate for the evaluation of literary works he declared that those who were genuinely qualiWed to judge of literary merit were a select group. He asserts that ‘that which is commonly call’d good sence, is not suYcient to form a good tast in Poetry’ and argues that in the ‘best Judges’ ‘good sence should be joyn’d with an inclination for Poetry, and with a tolerable share of experience in it’ (p. 70). Only these ‘best Judges’ are able to discern ‘Pebbles [which] may, by their false glittering, be impos’d on the ignorant for Diamonds’ (p. 71). As this account suggests, Dennis’s endeavours to establish the markers of genuine poetic genius became more fraught the further he probed into the relationship between taste and literary excellence. Having established that aVect was the hallmark of the true sublime, he then speciWed that that aVect was only signiWcant if felt by a man qualiWed to judge. This was an argument that in turn complicated ideas of the broader function of literature. As Dennis acknowledges, an emphasis on the exclusivity of ‘true’ taste was incompatible with notions of the reformative function of literature: if a true tast for Epick Poetry were conWn’d to so small a number, and consequently, so few were capable of receiving the true delight from it, it would follow from hence, that its Instruction, which it conveys to the Reader by pleasure, would not only be restrain’d to a very few, but to those who want it least (p. 71)

Dennis counters this argument by maintaining that if poetry can please the best judges it will automatically please other, less discerning

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readers, who will soon lose interest in the mediocre verse they have previously enjoyed. It remained, however, a source of tension in the critic’s discussions of the sublime.93 The periodical essays of the Tatler and the Spectator are the intellectual fruits of Dennis’s theories about literary merit and literary criticism. Addison’s and Steele’s essays on poetry and drama attempted to reconcile the exclusivity of literary criticism with an emphasis on the didactic and reformative role of literature. In their informed and literate discussions of contemporary and classic literature they showed their readers not only why some texts were diamonds rather than pebbles, but also how those diamonds could oVer moral touchstones for contemporary society.

Sublime oppositions The emphasis on irregularity, on excess, and on the transgression of the known boundaries of poetic experience that was central to Whig deWnitions of the sublime runs directly counter to the elegant wit and order privileged by Tory critics such as George Granville and the Earl of Roscommon. So how far are poetics party-political in this period? Whig writers frequently presented their ideas from an oppositional perspective. As we have seen, many poets of the 1680s had linked the emphasis on wit and eloquence in Tory writing to the elegant corruption of the Stuart court. This suspicion of verbal order and stylishness is perpetuated in later critical writing. Leonard Welsted’s treatise on the sublimity of the English poets belittles the ‘gawdy Strokes of this glittering Tinsel-Vein’ in Edmund Waller’s poetry and writes of the ‘certain prettinesses of Fancy, by some mistaken for easy Writing, by others for genteel Poetry’ that are valued in contemporary verse.94 The editor of the Whig miscellany Poems on AVairs of State prefaces his selection of liberty-loving Whig and republican poets with an explicit attack on poetic harmony: There are a sort of Men, who having little other merit than a happy chime, would fain Wx the Excellence of Poetry in the smoothness of the VersiWcation [ . . . ] I must own that I am of opinion, that a great many rough Cadencies 93 For a full discussion of the negotiation of taste and class in Dennis’s criticism see John Morillo, ‘John Dennis: Enthusiastic Passions, Cultural Memory and Literary Theory’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 34 (2000), 21–41. 94 Welsted, The Works of Dionysius Longinus, 168, 172.

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[sic] that are to be found in these Poems, and in the admirable Paradise Lost, are so far from Faults that they are Beauties.95

And on the other side Tory writers were outspoken in their condemnation of poets straining for the sublime: in Concerning Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1702) George Granville attacks the writers Who, driven with ungovernable Wre, Or void of Art, beyond these bounds aspire, Gygantick forms, and monstrous Births alone Produce, which Nature shockt, disdains to own . . . . . . . . Such frantick Xights, are like a Mad-mans dream, And nature suVers, in the wild extream.

(ll. 13–16, 57–8)96

These lines expose Granville’s fear of the wider implications of the sublime: the suggestion of unnatural aspiration betrays the social dimensions of poetic ambition, and there is a ‘monstrous’, ‘ungovernable’ quality to elevated poetry that suggests the transgression of an established political order which shocks Nature herself. It is not hard to see how Samuel Kliger argued that the distinctions between the ‘irregularity’ of Whig poetry and the ‘regularity’ of Tory poetry form the basis of party-political aesthetics in the eighteenth century.97 However, there are a number of factors which complicate this reading of early eighteenth-century poetry. While the heated cultural politics of the Wrst decade of the eighteenth century might have encouraged a Whig appropriation of sublime or elevated verse, this argument becomes less sustainable by the mid-eighteenth century, when politics were not so dramatically oppositional, but verse was still highly ‘irregular’.98 And recent critics have drawn attention to the ways in which the sublime could be used by poets across the political spectrum. Christine

95 Preface to Poems on AVairs of State from the Reign of King James the First to this Present Year 1703 (London, 1703), sigs. a2r-a2v. On the political implications of this critique of poetic regularity by republican writers see Norbrook, Writing the English Republic, 134–9. 96 George Granville, Concerning Unnatural Flights in Poetry (1701), in Womersley (ed.), Augustan Critical Writing, 126–8. 97 Samuel Kliger, The Goths in England: A Study in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 3–6. 98 Christine Gerrard explores some of the diYculties of theorizing about the correspondence between political ideology and aesthetic form in The Patriot Opposition to Walpole: Politics, Poetry, and National Myth, 1725–1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 71–81.

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Gerrard has shown the way in which writers of the patriot opposition, such as Aaron Hill, James Thomson, and David Mallet, took up Dennis’s theories in their criticism of the Walpole government during the 1720s and 1730s.99 David Fairer has argued that the sublime, with its suggestion of a truth that could not be articulated, could also provide an appropriate form for Jacobite sentiment.100 Taking a diVerent angle, James Noggle has recently argued for the existence of a ‘sceptical sublime’ in Tory poetry of the early eighteenth century. He asserts that we can read the constant undercutting of the sublime in Pope’s poetry as another way of expressing the unutterable nature of truly elevated thought. Thus the scepticism of the Essay on Man ‘far from abolishing a sense of the sublime, elevates it out of sight, itself a paradoxical movement that generates a commanding but peculiarly empty authority’.101 In this way Pope’s endless parodying of the Xights of Blackmore, Dennis, and others demonstrates a conviction that a sublime vision may theoretically exist, but it cannot be articulated. Noggle’s argument requires us to accept parody of the sublime as a form of sublimity, but there is also evidence of straightforwardly sublime or enthusiastic tendencies in early eighteenth-century Tory writing.102 If we reread Roscommon’s Essay on Translated Verse we can see that while Roscommon praises a ‘strict harmonious Symetry of Parts’, he also aspires towards poetic elevation: Hail, mighty MARO! may that Sacred Name, Kindle my Breast with thy caelestial Flame; Sublime Ideas, and apt Words infuse. The Muse instruct my Voice, and Thou inspire the Muse!103

Such interest in the sublime can also be found in Pope’s Essay on Criticism. I argued in Chapter 1 that Pope’s Essay was essentially deWned in reaction to Dennis’s Grounds of Criticism. But alongside the attacks

99 Christine Gerrard, ‘Pope, Peri Bathous and the Whig Sublime’, in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). 100 Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 128. 101 James Noggle, The Skeptical Sublime: Aesthetic Ideology in Pope and the Tory Satirists (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127. 102 For a fuller discussion of the politics of enthusiasm see my article ‘The Poetry of the Un-Enlightened: Politics and Literary Enthusiasm in the Early Eighteenth Century’, History of European Ideas (2004). 103 Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse, Womersley (ed.), in Augustan Critical Writing, 113.

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on Dennis and the incipient Whig critical tradition we also Wnd admiration for the rapturous mode of Longinian poetics. This is implicit in Pope’s praise of the critic who can ‘From vulgar Bounds with brave Disorder part, | And snatch a Grace beyond the Reach of Art’ (ll. 154–5).104 It is also made explicit in the lines on Longinus, who, Pope declares: ‘Is himself that great Sublime he draws’ (l. 680). Pope evidently found substantial evidence of such poetic aVect in Homer’s Iliad. In the preface to his six-volume translation he marvelled at the ‘sublimity and spirit of [Homer’s] thoughts’ and observed that: Exact Disposition, just Thought, correct Elocution, polish’d Numbers, may have been found in a thousand; but this Poetical Fire, this Vivida vis animi, in a very few105

As Kirsti Simonsuuri and others have shown, Pope’s Iliad was to be inXuential in its promotion of the sublime qualities of the epic, paving the way for the reconsideration of the Greek bard’s ‘original genius’.106 However, Pope also hoped to achieve similar eVects in his own poetry. He writes in a letter to William Cowper in February 1732: I should not be sorry if you tryed your hand upon Eloisa to Abelard, since it has more of that Descriptive, &, (if I may so say) Enthusiastic Spirit, which is the Character of the Ancient Poets, & will give you more occasions of Imitating them.107

The term ‘enthusiasm’ is used here not to denote false inspiration and religious radicalism, but in the sense that Dennis had developed in The Grounds of Criticism, as a form of poetic inspiration and genius associated with primitive poetry. Further evidence of Pope’s own attempts to achieve such poetic aVect may be found in his ‘Messiah’ (1712), a ‘sacred eclogue’ that begins with the lofty invocation: ‘Ye Nymphs of Solyma! begin the Song: | To heavn’ly Themes sublimer Strains belong’.108 In invoking the nymphs of Jerusalem rather than the conventional maidens of pastoral, Pope announces his emphasis on sublimity rather than mere delight, and the later allusions to Vergil and Isaiah reinforce 104 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism (1711), in TE i. 257–8. Further line references in the text are to this edition. 105 Alexander Pope, preface to the Iliad, in TE vii. 4. 106 On Pope’s Homer see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Original Genius: EighteenthCentury Notions of the Early Greek Epic, 1688–1798 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 107 Pope to Cowper, February 1732, in The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1956), iii. 269. 108 Alexander Pope, ‘Messiah’ (1712), in TE i. 112.

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the expectation of poetic Xight. David B. Morris has suggested that the poem may represent Pope’s oblique answer to Henry Cromwell, who had reminded him that while he had surpassed Dennis in the realm of criticism he had yet to prove his superiority in the grander poetic forms in which Dennis specialized.109 Whatever the origins of the poem, contemporaries and later readers from Richard Steele to Joseph Warton recognized ‘Messiah’ as a prime example of the biblical sublime.110 An interest in sublime enthusiasm was evidently not an exclusively Whiggish preoccupation. Tory writers were certainly more likely to attack their contemporaries for their enthusiastic tendencies and misguided attempts at poetic Xight than aspire towards an elevated poetics themselves. However, they also were reluctant to lose purchase on the concept of the sublime, with its connotations of poetic genius and Wre. There are undoubtedly diVerences of emphasis in the Whig and Tory versions of the sublime. In the examples of the Tory poetry given above the sublime is not causally linked to political liberty, nor is it used in the context of political topics. In Whig verse and literary criticism the sublime is fundamentally related to a political context. There was perceived to be a connection between the establishing of political liberty and the fruition of native literature, in the form of sublime verse. The sublime, with its suggestion of innovation and freedom from formal constraint was the ideal mode in which to celebrate the events of postRevolution Britain. Moreover, it was also seen as the appropriate model for a body of public poetry in celebration of the awe-inspiring heroism of contemporary military leaders. Reading contemporary praise for the Whig sublime both alongside its more famous Tory critique and alongside Tory attempts at the sublime illustrates the necessity for bringing a historical awareness to the aesthetic rules and values through which we might now read and judge both Whig and Tory poetry. To cite J. Paul Hunter again: ‘Aesthetics are particular, local, time and technology-dependent, and Beauty is in the culturally trained eye of a Beholder who exists in time and space for such a little while’.111 It is only in attempting to reconstruct such a historical ‘Beholder’ that we can start to understand early eighteenthcentury poetry on its own terms.

109 110 111

Morris, The Religious Sublime, 111. On the reception see Morris, The Religious Sublime, 112. Hunter, ‘Sleeping Beauties’, 18.

6

Patronage and the public writer in Whig literary culture In this Wnal chapter I will return to the broader relations between political and literary culture by addressing the material basis of the production of early Whig literature and in particular the networks of patronage that lay behind Whig poetry. Within these networks we can discern the interconnection of state Wnances, government aVairs, court authority, and literary culture. This interconnection was so complete that boundaries and distinctions which are now taken for granted, between the commercial world, the world of court and government, and the world of the arts, were barely recognized in the glory days of the Whig ascendancy. The close connection between literary and political cultures was not conWned to the Whigs, as any study of Tory Augustan satire and ‘the rage of party’ will show. But amongst Whigs in particular there was an ideological and practical commitment to the beneWts of the marriage of arts and politics: a sense that the two were interdependent. On the one hand, as we have seen, Whig poetry was dedicated to the celebration of events in public life, and there was a widespread belief that literature could both create and provide evidence of political legitimacy. And on the other hand key Whig political Wgures became the sponsors and guardians of the new literary culture. In examining the exchanges of material support and literary endorsement that provided the basis of Whig patronage we can gain new perspectives on the intersection of political and cultural life in the period. The exposure of such networks of support further explains why Whig poets represented an aVront and a threat to their Tory critics. Whig writers were coopted into the machinery of government to such an extent that they and their work became at times indistinguishable from party-political life. In such a situation, party-speciWc Wnancing for literary endeavour could not but create resentment in those writers

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clearly excluded from the spoils.1 Exposing systems of Whig patronage will also give further resonance to my description of this verse as public poetry. The literary work produced by Whig patronage is in many cases commissioned to serve that Wne borderline between government or party interest and public, general, or national interest. Making systems of Whig patronage apparent will conWrm powerfully that the poetry discussed in this book is Whig poetry. The ties between statesmen and authors, between state ideology and literature, are so tight that the association of party and poems becomes self-evident. The value—even the necessity—of bringing political understanding to any of the poetry of this period is made explicit, demonstrating again that politics and aesthetics cannot be separated in analysis of these poems. Yet at the same time it is clear that the wealthy Whig aristocracy became involved in literary and artistic projects that did not have a speciWc political agenda. The evidence of the lavish theatre, publications, architecture, and music sponsored by the Whig aristocracy demonstrates that patronage was also used to secure cultural authority in the broadest sense.

Patronage and the author A reappraisal of Whig patronage clearly oVers new perspectives on authorship in this period, and it oVers in particular a corrective to the notion that the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century witnessed the gradual rise of the independent author. Recent criticism has moved away from the morally loaded idea of patronage as ‘dependence’ that we have seen in earlier critical responses to Whig verse, but it has perpetuated a narrative of the rise of the professional author in the early eighteenth century.2 In his recent account of the literary market 1 Several of Charles Montagu’s biographers explain Pope’s and Swift’s hostility to the famous patron as a result of their jealousy and disappointment at failing to secure his support (see John Aiken, The General Biographical Dictionary; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the most Eminent Persons (London, 1799–1815); Alexander Chalmers, The General Biographical Dictionary: Containing an Historical and Critical Account (London, 1812–17). 2 As Dustin GriYn has argued, the concept of the rise of the professional author became increasingly attractive during the 1980s because it dovetailed with wider arguments about the ‘commercialization of culture’. (See e.g. Deborah Rogers, ‘The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century English Literature’, Clio, 18 (1989), 171–8, and J. H. Plumb, ‘The Commercialization of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century England’, in Neil

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place in the eighteenth century, Professional Imaginative Writing in England (1997), Brean Hammond asserts: ‘I see the decades following 1660 as a period of English cultural history in which a relatively rapid shift from patronage to marketing as the primary way of Wnancing imaginative writing was accomplished’.3 This chapter will complicate this teleological history. Not only will it show that many writers continued to be supported by aristocratic patronage well into the eighteenth century, but it will also disturb the equation of patronage with tradition, and commercialism with modernity underpinning the story of the rise of the professional writer. Prominent early eighteenth-century Whigs viewed their support of the arts not as an antiquated quasifeudal system, but as part of the new and invigorated reorganization of modern Britain. Through literary patronage the Whig elite hoped to foster an original and distinctively Whiggish national culture.4

Stuart patronage As we have seen, Tory attacks on the commercialism of Whig poetry frequently involved a nostalgic longing for an earlier ‘golden age’ of Stuart patronage. Their images of the generosity and magniWcence of the Stuart court have been so inXuential they have prompted later critics to accept as a fact the argument of these texts: that patronage ended with the Stuarts, and that professional writing had to replace it as the McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (eds.), The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England: The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), 265–285.) 3 Brean Hammond, Professional Imaginative Writing in England 1670–1740: ‘Hackney for Bread’ (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 249. The recent, and important, investigation into the role of women in the eighteenth-century literary market place found in the work of Paula McDowell and Catherine Ingrassia has tended to corroborate this emphasis on commercialization (McDowell, The Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998); Catherine Ingrassia, Authorship, Commerce, and Gender in Early Eighteenth-Century England: A Culture of Paper Credit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) ). 4 There are, of course, critics who have dissented from this argument about the commercialization of literature. In Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Margaret Ezell emphasizes the continuation of a ‘social’ literary culture based on manuscript transmission. In Literary Patronage in England 1650–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Dustin GriYn argues that literary patronage remained alive and well throughout this period. However, GriYn’s preoccupation with the ambiguities of dedicatory prose, and its place as a ‘site of contestation’, means that it is the way that Tory writers simultaneously resist and endorse patronal authority that engages most of his attention. The Whig writers who beneWted most fully from systematic government patronage are given much less consideration.

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dominant force in literary production.5 The narrative of the eighteenthcentury rise of the professional author out of a system of patronage depends upon the assumption that seventeenth-century patronage was Wrmly entrenched and not itself subject to signiWcant change. Yet this image of the Stuart court is a myth, and was recognized as such even at the time it was being constructed. In a strident attack on Pope’s Essay on Criticism the Whig critic John Dennis took issue with its claim that under Charles II ‘wits had pensions’, arguing that all the World knows that it was one of the Faults of that Reign that none of the politer Arts were then encourag’d [ . . . ] there was then indeed a favourable regard shewn to Wit, but no real Encouragement. Butler was starv’d at the same time that the King had his Book in his Pocket. Another great Wit lay seven Years in Prison for an inconsiderable debt, and Otway dar’d not to shew his Head for fear of the same Fate.6

Dennis’s claims that under Charles II the arts were not genuinely encouraged are supported by recent historical research on the Wnances of the late Stuart kings. R. O. Bucholz’s study of the Augustan court has shown that the decline of court culture can in fact be dated from the reign of Charles II, and that the real achievement of the Restoration court was to create its own reputation, so that contemporaries assumed that cultural innovation and patronage depended on the king.7 Other accounts have shown that the Stuarts fared poorly compared with the monarchs of Continental Europe, and were never as active in artistic patronage as the Bourbons or Habsburgs. Charles I and Charles II might have tried to build an imitation of the cultural life of an absolutist court, but it was a very pale imitation.8 As we shall see, it was not until 5 Steven Zwicker for example has referred to: ‘The sudden disappearance of the centre of . . . [court] patronage with the Xight of James II [which] must have been a source of some consternation in 1688’ (‘Representing the Revolution’, in Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649–1689 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 173–99 (176) ). 6 John Dennis, ReXections Critical and Satyrical, upon a late Rhapsody, call’d, An Essay Upon Criticism (1711), in Critical Works, i. 412–13. 7 R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 16. 8 See J. H. Elliott, ‘The Court of the Spanish Habsburgs: A Peculiar Institution?’, in P. Mack and M. C. Jacob (eds.), Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honour of H. G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 2–24; R. Isherwood, Music in Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973); S. Orgel, ‘The Royal Theatre and the Role of the King’, in S. Orgel and G. Fitch Lytle (eds.), Patronage in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 26–73.

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the advent of William III that England saw the development and funding of the kinds of cultural programmes associated with the French court. There were good reasons why it was diYcult for Charles II to maintain high levels of royal spending on the arts during this period: the privy purse was simply too tightly controlled by Parliament, and too impoverished, to be able to aVord the generosity of the French king.9 And in fact, if we look more closely at the 1670s and 1680s, we Wnd that, for all the later nostalgia for Stuart court patronage, many writers favoured by Charles II were complaining that the king’s enthusiasm for poetry was not matched by his Wnancial commitment. Even John Dryden, the Laureate who had proclaimed the Restoration as a new Augustan age, and had sung the achievements of the Stuarts for over four decades, writes in his ‘Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ (1693) that he was ‘encourag’d only with fair Words, by King Charles II, my little Sallary ill paid, and no prospect of a future Subsistance, I was then Discourag’d in the beginning of my Attempt’.10 The accepted description of the Restoration period as a time of glorious Xourishing of court-sponsored arts may be based more on rhetoric than evidence.

Opposition patronage during the Exclusion Crisis The erratic benevolence of Charles II was not of course the only source of artistic support during the 1670s and 1680s. Study of opposition publications during this period reveals that there was a network of support available to early Whig writers. This patronage seems to have taken the form of one-oV payments for individual publications or occasional donations rather than the systematic funding of the arts 9 This restriction aVected the whole spectrum of artistic activity—the theatre, which Charles II had famously supported in the early years of his reign, was struggling so much by 1682 that the King’s Company was forced to unite with the stronger Duke’s Company. By the 1670s court musicians’ salaries were so seriously in arrears that the King’s Musick decayed, and payments to Dryden, Charles’s Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, were so overdue that Dryden instigated more commercial projects to supplement his income. Kathleen M. Lynch argues that Dryden himself may have suggested Tonson’s scheme for the publication of an annual miscellany of poems by selected writers (Lynch, Jacob Tonson, Kit-Cat Publisher (Tennessee, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1971), 21). 10 John Dryden, ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’, in Works, iv. 23. For a similar story see John Oldham, ‘A Satyr . . . Dissuading the Author from the Study of Poetry’ (1682/3?), in The Poems of John Oldham, ed. Harold F. Brooks and Raman Selden (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987).

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that was to characterize the post-Revolution period. The only centralized source of patronage during the 1680s was the Green Ribbon Club, a Whig club which met at the King’s Head on Chancery Lane.11 It provided a point of contact for the various and dissimilar political groups that made up the opposition: amongst the 170-plus members of the Club there were peers and MPs, like Ford Lord Grey, the Rye House plotter, or the Whig leader the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury; old puritans like Slingsby Bethel; wealthy merchants from the City, lawyers, and minor City oYcers; and politically active country gentlemen, whose connections inside and outside London made them hugely inXuential.12 The most public form of propaganda organized by the Green Ribbon Club was the huge pope-burning procession that its members held on 17 November, the anniversary of Elizabeth I’s birthday. However, the Green Ribbon also seems to have been responsible for the publication and dissemination of topical pamphlets and poems.13 The mixed membership of the Club, with its combination of politicians, writers, and publishers, clearly brought together potential writers of Whig propaganda with potential patrons. The writers who frequented the King’s Head included Charles Blount, John AyloVe, Thomas Shadwell, and the journalist and publisher Henry Care, who was Wnancially supported by the Club during a period of persecution by the government authorities.14 The aristocratic leaders of the Whig opposition were also members. These included the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury, and Ford Lord Grey. The Duke of Buckingham had links with many of the radicals in the Club, and may even have sought to patronize it.15 Whig stationers represented at the King’s Head included the Baptist Francis Smith and the bookseller John Starkey, whose shop was one of the alternative locations for Club meetings.16 11 For a fuller account of the Club see J. R. Jones, ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, Durham University Journal, 49 (1956), 17–20. 12 Many members also belonged to other city clubs, such as the Green Dragon, the Angel, or the Salutation. Others belonged to political clubs in their own provincial towns, and the contact that this provided between the centre of Whig political organization and the rest of the country proved essential to the success of the mass petitions for the summoning of Parliament between 1678 and 1681. 13 Surviving historical records are so scant that it is not possible to trace which publications Green Ribbon members supported. 14 See Jones, ‘The Green Ribbon Club’, 17. 15 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 138–9. 16 Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 163.

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Outside the Club patronage of opposition writing was organized largely through Nonconformist publishing networks. Contemporary accounts suggest that Nonconformists in the book trade were recognized as playing a central role in the production of opposition writing, and Lois Schwoerer’s study of Henry Care has shown that the printer/ publisher or bookseller often actually acted as a patron him- or herself, commissioning the writing of a particular pamphlet and supplying the author with ideas and money.17 The restrictions upon Dissenters in the pulpit and in the press had forced Nonconformists to develop a sophisticated undercover publishing system through which opposition writers circulated their unlicensed propaganda. The years immediately after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 marked a crucial period for the emergence of these Nonconformist booksellers and printers as central Wgures in the literary market place, as Michael Treadwell has shown.18 Such printers and publishers produced both prose and poetry, and they evidently packaged political verse for diVerent markets: topical verse and ballads were included alongside the news and commentary in weekly serials such as Henry Care’s Popish Courant, but there were also the more prestigious poems that form the basis of this study, which appeared singly in folio editions.19 This commercial tailoring 17 Roger L’Estrange, the licenser of the press, refers to Francis Smith as ‘The principallAgent for the Presbyterians [i.e. the future Whigs] in their Trade of Libells, being entrusted with their Manuscripts’ (cited by Richard L. Greaves in Secrets of the Kingdom: British Radicals from the Popish Plot to the Revolution of 1688–9 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), 18). Henry Muddiman referred to Smith as ‘The prime dispenser of all sorts of the most lewd and seditious pamphlets’ (Muddiman, newsletter of 4 March 1684, cited by J. G. Muddiman in The King’s Journalist 1659–1689: Studies in the Reign of Charles II (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1971), 243). Schwoerer discusses in particular Henry Care’s involvement in A Narrative and Impartial Discovery of the Horrid Popish Plot (1679) (Schwoerer, The Ingenious Mr Henry Care, Restoration Publicist (Baltimore, Md., and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 77–80). 18 Michael Treadwell, ‘London Trade Publishers 1675–1750’, Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982), 99–135. Treadwell cites the Whig publishers Richard Janeway, Richard Baldwin, and Langley Curtis as prime examples of the rise of the trade publisher, whose commercial exploitation of the Exclusion Crisis was informed by their long-standing political commitment. For a more detailed account of the Baldwins’ trade see L. Rostenberg, ‘Richard and Anne Baldwin, Whig Patriot Publishers’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 47 (1953), 1–42. 19 Of the singly published poetic responses to Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel that are discussed in Chapter 2, Thomas Shadwell’s The Medal of John Bayes was published by Richard Janeway, Elkanah Settle’s Absalom Senior by Langley Curtis, and Edmund Hickeringill’s The Mushroom by Francis Smith. For a substantial discussion of the circulation of political material in pamphlets and MSS in the Exclusion Crisis see Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 156–84.

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indicates that early Whig writing was funded through both sales and patronage. Although there are very few documents that have survived to show the extent to which Whig politicians planned and directed political propaganda, there is some proof that the activities of opposition printers were supported by senior political leaders. At a general level the lapse of the Licensing Act unleashing the publication of so much Whig propaganda was probably brought about through campaigning in the House of Lords by Lord Wharton and other unidentiWed Nonconformists.20 More speciWcally, there seem to be a number of ties between the Whig leader the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury and various Whig publishers. Roger L’Estrange described Shaftesbury as the ‘brain’ in the press of the Whig opposition, and the author of the Memoirs of the life of Anthony Late Earl of Shaftesbury (1682) alleges that at Shaftesbury’s London home, Thanet House on Aldersgate Street, ‘Whole Sholes of Lewd and Seditious Pamphlets’ were written, printed, and dispersed, with the help of ‘the Anabaptist Booksellers, Smith and Harris, Jack Starkey &c.’21 The location of Thanet House was certainly close to many of the radical printers, as well as to the prominent City Nonconformists, merchants, and artisans who supported the Exclusion movement. Shaftesbury organized the ‘monster petition’ of January 1680, and there is also some evidence to suggest he commissioned and authored individual publications. This is conWrmed by the reports of government informers from this period.22 Thus, although the details of transactions between Whig peers and opposition stationers may no longer exist, contemporary accounts and occasional documents suggest that the huge output of exclusionist propaganda during this period was in part sustained by support from Whig leaders. However, this patronage probably constituted occasional donations to individual poets rather than the larger-scale bureaucratic systems of support developed under William III. 20 Douglas R. Lacey, Dissent and Parliamentary Politics in England, 1661–1689: A Study in the Perpetuation and Tempering of Parliamentarianism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1965), 133. 21 G. W. Kitchin, Sir Roger L’Estrange: A Contribution to the History of the Press in the Seventeenth Century (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1913), 272; Memoirs of the Life of Anthony Late Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1682), 6–7. 22 On the monster petition see Mark Knights, ‘London’s ‘‘Monster’’ Petition of 1680’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 39–67. On evidence of Shaftesbury’s role in commissioning writing see Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 162; Scandalum Magnatum: Or, Potapski’s Case (London, 1682), sig. a2v ; T. J. Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 1977), 159; F. Smith, An Account of the Injurious Proceedings of Sir George JeVreys . . . (London, 1680), sig. a1r.

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Charles’s Oxford Parliament of 1681 and the punitive campaign to reassert royal authority that followed it had signiWcant implications for the production of opposition writing over the next few years. Some writers found aristocratic patrons who could support them: Thomas Shadwell was taken in by Charles Sackville, the Earl of Dorset, who was later to become a prominent supporter of Whig writers, including, as we have seen, Charles Montagu.23 The opposition stationers who had produced and distributed much of the exclusionist propaganda of the previous decade were heavily hit by the Tory backlash. When the government censor, Roger L’Estrange, clamped down on seditious publishing networks during the summer of 1682 most of the opposition stationers collapsed, many of those who were not imprisoned going into hiding or exile.24 Yet, as discussed in Chapter 2, Whig poetry, particularly satires, continued to be written in this period. Many poems circulated in manuscript, and some of them found their way into print, probably with the aid of the women involved in opposition publishing, who maintained presses when their husbands and fathers were in prison.25

The Revolution, William III, and Louis XIV Gilbert Burnet, the Anglican bishop who, as we discovered through Aphra Behn’s Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet (1689), was to direct the production of much Williamite propaganda, was in contact with at least two underground opposition stationers during the later 1680s.26 As opposition to James II increased after 1685, and the prospect 23 In his dedication of The Squire of Alsatia (1688) Shadwell says that Dorset gave him the use of his house, Copt Hall, to write in, and in his dedication to Bury Fair (1689) he says that he supported him during the ‘near Ten years I was kept from the exercise of that Profession which had aVorded me a competent Subsistence’ (Shadwell, dedication to The Squire of Alsatia (1688), in Works, iv. 202; dedication to Bury-Fair (1689), in Works, iv. 294). 24 These indictments reached a peak in December of that year, when the new Tory sheriVs of London were able to select juries to deliver convictions against booksellers and printers (see Crist, ‘Francis Smith and the Opposition Press’, 235). 25 Wives and daughters such as Eleanor Smith and Elizabeth Calvert kept an underground publishing business going while their husbands were in prison (see Maureen Bell, ‘Seditious Sisterhood: Women Publishers of Opposition Literature at the Restoration’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill (eds.), Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), 39–60). 26 John Hetet’s study of the underground Nonconformist press provides evidence of Burnet’s links with John Darby (Hetet, ‘A Literary Underground in Restoration England: Printers and Dissenters in the Context of Constraints 1660–1689’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge,

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of William of Orange entering into the constitutional crisis seemed ever more likely, the Dutch stadthouder used Burnet to help mount a campaign to produce a series of works in support of the Orange position.27 The Williamite propaganda machine produced printed tracts alongside prints and commemorative medals on a scale unprecedented in earlier political culture. Lois Schwoerer asserts that ‘Never before in England or on the Continent had these instruments been used together in such large number for a single purpose or employed, perhaps, with greater eVect’.28 After the Revolution William and Mary sought to establish the authority of the new regime, and a vital technique for this project was their investment in contemporary architecture, painting, and poetry.29 R. O. Bucholz shows that when William and Mary assumed the throne they poured large sums of money into the royal household and into new building work, thus creating the impression of a lavish and thriving court culture. The paintings and craftsmanship at the palace at Hampton Court are the most obvious sign of this intended splendour: research based on the recent restoration of the King’s Apartments reveals that William III commissioned artists from Versailles to create his own ‘iconographic programme of self-gloriWcation to rival that of Louis XIV’.30 The extent and nature of Williamite patronage was indeed intrinsically related to the contemporary activities of the French court. University, 1987), 189). If Burnet was involved in Williamite propaganda in the 1680s, this is unlikely to have happened before 1686, since William was reluctant to ally himself with the Whig opposition in England until about 1687–8. Although William was involved in a propaganda campaign in England in the early 1670s, with Peter du Moulin and the opposition writers Marvell and John AyloVe amongst others, he resisted the attempts of the Whig leaders to draw him into the Exclusion controversy. For more detail on the campaign see K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition 1672–4 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), 52, 53, 105–7. 27 On Burnet’s role in producing the Declaration, thanksgiving sermons, and other material see Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 30–3. 28 Lois Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–9’, American Historical Review, 82 (1977), 843–74 (843). On the evidence of coordinated publishing immediately after the Revolution see Mark Goldie, ‘The Revolution of 1689 and the Structure of Political Argument: An Essay and an Annotated Bibliography of Pamphlets’, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, 83 (1980), 573–664 (592–4). 29 On William’s achievements as a patron of the visual arts see Christopher Brown, ‘Patrons and Collectors of Dutch Painting in Britain in the Reign of William and Mary’, in David Howarth (ed.), Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in honour of Sir Oliver Millar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 12–31 (12–16). 30 Susan Jenkins, ‘The Artistic Taste of William III’, in The King’s Apartments: Hampton Court Palace (London: Apollo, 1994), 4–9 (9).

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T. C. W. Blanning has shown that the representational culture of the court at Versailles inXuenced most of the rest of Europe, and we might understand the role of Williamite patronage through his description of the French model.31 Blanning argues that Louis XIV realized that states were centres of authority as well as power and could be eVective only if their coercive capability was recognized as legitimate by their members. It was in pursuit of this legitimacy that he unfolded his grand cultural programme.32

Williamite patronage was clearly used to secure political legitimacy in a similar way, and it was also used to rival the eVorts of Louis XIV, intended to replicate and compete with the display of French authority. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that William III’s aesthetic choices were very similar to his counterpart’s. As Christopher Brown describes, William’s artistic tastes were closely modelled on the gilded and highly decorated interiors of Versailles, and he consequently patronized the French Huguenot architect-designer Daniel Marot, and the baroque painter Antonio Verrio.33 It is ironic that although William spent his entire military and political career trying to curb the power of France, he and his courtiers brought a French baroque style to England. The evidence of William and Mary’s substantial support for the arts does not tally with the received view of Williamite culture. In Anecdotes of Painting in England (1765–80) Horace Walpole wrote that William III contributed nothing to the advancement of arts. He was born in a country where taste never Xourished, and nature had not given it to him as an embellishment to his great qualities. He courted Fame, but none of her ministers.34

This idea of William III as anti-cultural, neglectful of the arts, is one which has been perpetuated up to the present day. Yet it was not always so. Even at the time Walpole was writing there were those who looked back on William’s reign as a golden age for the arts. In April 1777 John Wilkes made a speech in the House of Commons lamenting George III’s removal of the Raphael cartoons from Hampton Court to Buckingham Palace, where they were no longer accessible to the public. Wilkes reminded his audience that it was William III who had originally 31 T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 29–52. 32 Blanning, The Culture of Power, 33. 33 Brown, ‘Patrons and Collectors of Dutch painting in Britain’, 27–8. 34 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England with Some Account of the Principal Artists (1765–80), ed. Ralph N. Wornum, 3 vols. (London, 1888), ii. 201.

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restored the cartoons and had them installed in a new gallery at Hampton Court, observing that ‘King William, although a Dutchman, really loved and understood the polite arts. He had the Wne feelings of a man of taste, as well as the sentiments of a hero’.35 The relationship between self-representation and cultural patronage is complex. Part of the reason why William III’s role as a patron has not been recognized is that he did not encourage images of himself as a man of the arts. His perceived hostility to such matters Wtted well with the notion of a heroic warrior king, too busy saving Europe to engage with the Xattery of portrait painters and panegyrists. Whig writers actively encouraged the idea of William’s rule as the reverse of the ineVectual, luxurious court culture associated with the Stuart kings. William also beneWted from the contrast with Louis XIV, who was presented by his opponents as ever eager to sponsor his own cultural myth-making.36 The poet and diplomat Matthew Prior scoVed at the vanity of the French king: ‘His house at Versailles is something the foolishest in the world; he is strutting in every panel, and galloping over one’s head in every ceiling’.37 The rivalry with the French court created a need for artistic patronage, yet meant at the same time that the new English king had to be seen as scorning the role of the self-serving patron. Richard Blackmore praises William as: Reverse of Lewis He (example rare!) Lov’d to deserve the Praise he could not bear. He shun’d the Acclamations of the Throng, And always coldly heard the Poet’s Song.38

Charles Montagu’s encomium to William in the Epistle to Dorset also makes a comparison with the French monarch: ‘Oh! if in France this Heroe had been born; | What Glittering Tinsel wou’d His Acts adorn’!39 Yet for all this rhetorical emphasis on the king’s lack of interest in the arts, William was investing in major changes in contemporary cultural 35 Quoted by John Shearman, Raphael’s Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (London: Phaidon, 1972), 152–3. 36 On contemporary German distrust of Louis XIV’s baroque court culture and patronage see Georges Livet, ‘Louis XIV and the Germanies’, in Ragnhild Hatton (ed.), Louis XIV and Europe (London: Macmillan, 1976), 60–81 (74–6). 37 Matthew Prior to Charles Montagu, 18 February 1698, in HMC Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Bath, 5 vols. (London: HMSO, 1904–80), iii. 193. 38 Richard Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708), 3. 39 Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset (London, 1690), 8.

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life. These changes included the establishment of bureaucracies, political programmes, and systems of Wnance that could channel resources to writers and other men of wit and ability; particularly, of course, if these men were Whigs. Some of these structures and systems, such as the civil list and the secret service, would remain in place throughout the eighteenth century.

Networks of literary patronage under William III William III transformed the structure of the royal court after 1688, dismissing almost all of James II’s old servants and allies and replacing them with Englishmen who had backed him both politically and Wnancially from the Revolution onwards.40 This Whig Junto became hugely powerful, with immense resources in their control. In order to direct more closely the progress and funding of the wars on the Continent, William reorganized state Wnancial and administrative structures, centralizing power and wealth in the hands of the Junto immediately surrounding him. These new Whig ministers were able to use the resources of the crown, in the form of pensions and places, to reward their friends. Although patronage was clearly not an exclusively Whig activity, it was the Whig nobility, politicians, and clergy who were in a position to distribute places and Wnancial support after 1688.41 The patronage of contemporary writers by Whig statesmen took place under William’s personal authority. Although Johnson suggests in the Lives that William did not deserve all the honour and respect heaped on him as patron but ‘by a choice of ministers, whose disposition was diVerent from his own, he procured without intention a very liberal patronage to poets’, it is hard to see how the huge government 40 Others who had played supporting roles during the 1680s also immediately beneWted from the new regime: Shadwell became Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, while the English printers who had helped circulate Williamite propaganda were given government printing jobs and monopolies (see Lois Schwoerer, ‘Propaganda in the Revolution of 1688–9’, 855). 41 John Gascoigne’s account of the creation of a ‘Whig Cambridge’ after the Revolution reveals the growth of networks of ecclesiastical and academic patronage during the 1690s, as newly prominent latitudinarian bishops such as Gilbert Burnet, Benjamin Hoadly, and Simon Patrick began to use their inXuence to shape the theological, political, and cultural future of the university (Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion, and Politics from the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 69–184).

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funding of Whig writers in the 1690s could have been achieved without his support.42 As Stephen Baxter observes, despite his reliance on a series of ministers, William retained control to the extent that ‘none of them could make or break a Wrst lord of the treasury, spend a shilling beyond his own salary, or write a line of the speech from the throne’.43 The necessary link between the king and the gifts of his ministers was certainly evident to contemporary writers—Samuel Wesley’s Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (1700) makes the source of Montagu’s benevolence explicit: ‘True Worth his Patronage can never miss, | He has his Prince’s Smiles and that has his’, whilst in Samuel Cobb’s ‘Of Poetry’ (1700) we Wnd William surpassing all previous patrons: ‘No more of Richelieu’s Worth: Forget not, Fame, | To change Augustus for Great William’s Name’.44 One of the most signiWcant implications of these developments was that the most conspicuously celebrated patrons and poets of Williamite literature held positions in the government and court. The Whig patrons were major statesmen: men like Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, John, Baron Somers, and Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset. Poets like Addison, Stepney, Prior, Congreve, and Hughes were all given posts in return for poems celebrating either the Revolution or William’s victories in the Nine Years’ War. The Whig ideological commitment to a unity of politics and letters was thus institutionalized through networks of patronage which linked poets and statesmen at the highest level. Poets themselves were given administrative roles because Whig patronage did not take the form of individual payments, but rather the gift of positions of public service. As Macaulay observes of Addison’s rapid promotion from poet to Secretary of State, ‘without opening his lips in debate, he rose to a post, the highest that Chatham or Fox ever reached’.45 The man of wit and the man of business were seen as interchangeable. 42 Samuel Johnson, ‘Life of Addison’, in Lives of the Poets (1779–81), ed. G. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1935), ii. 85. 43 Stephen Baxter, ‘The Age of Personal Monarchy in England’, in Peter Gay (ed.) Eighteenth-Century Studies Presented to Arthur M. Wilson (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1972), 1–11 (6). 44 Samuel Wesley, An Epistle to a Friend Concerning Poetry (London, 1700) repr. by Augustan Reprint Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1947), 17; Samuel Cobb, ‘Of Poetry, A Poem’ (1700) in Poems on Several Occasions (London, 1707) repr. by Augustan Reprint Society (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1946), 222. 45 Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘The Life and Writings of Addison’ (1843), in The Works of Lord Macaulay, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1898), x. 111.

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The great aristocratic patrons of the 1690s were tied into the centre of the Williamite regime from its inception. John, Baron Somers had played a part in the Convention Parliament, heading the committee that drew up the Declaration of Rights. Appointed Solicitor General in 1689, he rose to Attorney General, and then Keeper of the Seal, Wnally becoming Lord Chancellor by 1697. His own work consisted of anonymous translations for Tonson of epistles by Ovid, biographies by Plutarch, and orations by Demosthenes. The huge number of Whig writers dedicating to him suggests the symbiotic relationship between his literary and political interests: John Locke, Joseph Addison, Jacob Tonson, Pierre Bayle, Richard Steele, and John Hughes were all supported by Somers under William and Anne.46 Charles Sackville, the elderly Earl of Dorset, occupied a position even closer to William, as Lord Chamberlain of the Household from 1689–97 and member of the Regency Commission in 1698. A court wit during the reign of Charles II, he was out of favour under James II, backed the invitation of 1688, and was consequently given his position in the royal household under William. This was celebrated, as we have seen, by Charles Montagu in his Epistle. Dorset, who had himself written a number of opposition satires, was well placed to help writers into government positions. He had become famous for his support of writers such as Dryden and Samuel Butler, and he continued to welcome poets to his houses, Knole and Copt Hall.47 It was also believed that Shadwell’s promotion to Poet Laureate in 1689 was owing to Dorset.48 The most celebrated of the Whig patrons in the 1690s and 1700s was Charles Montagu. Montagu’s career reveals the way in which the developing system of Whig patronage blurred the distinctions between men of business and men of letters: a poet could rise up through government ranks, so that one patronized could eventually become a patron in his own right. Montagu’s poetry became known following the success of The Hind and the Panther Transvers’d to the Story of the Country Mouse and the City Mouse (1687), his collaborative parody, 46 For a more detailed account of Somers and literary patronage see Robert M. Adams, ‘In Search of Baron Somers’, in Perez Zagorin (ed.) Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1980), 165–202. 47 On Dorset’s generosity to writers such as Dryden and Butler see Giles Jacob, The Mirrour: Or, Letters Satyrical, Panegyrical, Serious and Humorous on the Present Times (London, 1733), 22. 48 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691), repr. with an introd. by John Loftis, 2 vols. (Los Angeles, Calif.: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1971), ii. 443.

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with Prior, of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther, which was succeeded by the popular anti-court satire The Man of Honour. When Montagu then produced his Epistle to Dorset, the Earl of Dorset took the opportunity to present the young poet to the king. From these beginnings Montagu rose up through the Treasury and, along with Somers, developed and directed Wnancial policy under William, founding the Bank of England and the system of public credit. Although he did not have the wealth or the social inXuence of the other great aristocratic patrons, Montagu’s inXuential position at court meant that he was free to dispense oYcial favours and appointments.49 He was celebrated by Whig panegyrists as ‘the great Maecenas’ and he supported writers such as Stepney, Addison, and Congreve. He was also involved in the promotion of contemporary philosophy and science, through his lifelong friendship with Isaac Newton and his role as President of the Royal Society between 1695 and 1698. Other Whig writers were to reap similar rewards. Joseph Addison’s panegyric ‘To His Majesty’ of 1695, with its compliment to Somers, and his 1697 poem on the Peace of Ryswick, addressed to Halifax, secured his literary and political credentials, so that in 1699 he was given £200 of government money to travel in Italy, an expedition which produced his A Letter from Italy (1704), dedicated to Halifax, and his Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705), addressed to Somers. On his return he celebrated Marlborough’s victories with The Campaign (1705), was made Under-Secretary of State in 1706, and, with works such as The Free-Holder, defended government policy right up to his resignation in 1717, when he retired with a £1500 government pension. George Stepney, who was educated at Westminster and Cambridge alongside Charles Montagu and Matthew Prior, was taken up by Dorset following his contribution to the Cambridge collection of verses on Charles II’s death. As Wrst one of ‘my Lord Dorset’s boys’ and then a client of his old friend Montagu, he was given a series of diplomatic posts, becoming secretary and envoy to the Elector of Brandenburg in 1692, and a commissioner of trade in 1697. By the time of his death in 1707 Stepney had become one of the most accomplished men in government service.50 Prior himself 49 For an account of the way in which Montagu was able to make introductions for Whig writers see John Oldmixon, preface to The Life and Posthumous Works of Arthur Maynwaring (London, 1715), 18. 50 The support of the king was ultimately behind these appointments, as a letter from Prior to Dorset makes clear—Prior writes that Stepney might almost choose his place, ‘having had the fortune to be placed in such a light that his Majesty has known and

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was discovered by the Earl of Dorset while he was reading Horace in his uncle’s tavern, and brought to London, where he was educated at Westminster School. Dorset continued supporting him throughout the 1690s, and he, like Stepney, was given diplomatic posts in exchange for his literary support of the regime in poems such as Carmen Seculare (1700) and An English Ballad on the Taking of Namur (1695). In 1690 he was appointed secretary to the ambassador at the Hague, in 1697 he was made secretary to the embassy at the Treaty of Ryswick, and in 1701 he entered Parliament as MP for East Grinstead.51 John Hughes, author of The Triumph of Peace (1698), The Court of Neptune (1699), and The House of Nassau (1702), was another writer who earned diplomatic appointments from Whig panegyrics. Having dedicated his translation of Fontanelle to the Earl of Wharton, when Wharton went as Lord Lieutenant to Ireland in 1708 he oVered to take Hughes with him and establish him there.52 Similarly, the critic John Dennis earned the patronage of the Duke of Marlborough for his panegyrics on the War of the Spanish Succession, and in 1705 was given a place as a royal waiter in the port of London at a salary of £120 a year.

Jacob Tonson and the Kit-Cat Club Whig poetry was clearly funded as part of the very infrastructure of the Williamite government. Many of the writers linked to the networks around the Whig Junto published at least some of their poetry through Jacob Tonson, who during the course of the 1690s established himself as a central Wgure in the post-Revolution literary scene. Tonson started out from relatively humble beginnings: the son of a Holborn surgeon, he became apprenticed to the publisher Thomas Basset at fourteen. Having completed his training, he began by working with other publishers until approved of him’ (Prior to Dorset, 24 November 1693, quoted by H. T. Swedenberg Jr., in ‘George Stepney, My Lord Dorset’s Boy’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 10 (1946), 1–33 (8) ). For fuller details of Stepney’s career see Susan Spens, George Stepney: 1663–1707, Diplomat and Poet (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1997). 51 For fuller details of Prior’s career see C. C. Barfoot, ‘ ‘‘Hey for Praise and Panegyric’’: William III and the Political Poetry of Matthew Prior’, in C. C. Barfoot and P. G. Hoftijzer (eds.), Fabrics and Fabrications: The Myth and Making of William and Mary (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 135–88. 52 Michael Foss, The Age of Patronage—the Arts in Society 1600–1750 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 147–51. For claims for Wharton, like Montagu, as ‘the Maecenas of our Isle’ see Giles Jacob, dedicatory verses to A Miscellany of Poems (London, 1718).

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his career took oV with the publication of John Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida in 1679.53 Tonson and Dryden worked together for two decades, and Tonson became involved in increasingly prestigious ventures. His success was consolidated with his illustrated edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost in 1688, and by 1700 he was identiWed as a major literary power-broker: in Richard Blackmore’s Satyr against Wit (1699) he is described as ‘the great Wit-Jobber of the Age’.54 Although Tonson made most of his huge fortune from stocks and speculation in England and France, the money that he originally invested in this was earned from publishing. From 1688 he had taken on a number of projects designed to tally his literary and political interests, publishing panegyrics on the war by Joseph Addison, Matthew Prior, Richard Blackmore, William Congreve, and George Stepney. He also brokered aYliations between promising or established writers and politically prominent dedicatees: he famously tried to persuade Dryden to dedicate his Aeneid to William III, and when Dryden refused he had his way by altering the engravings of Aeneas to give the hero William’s hooked nose.55 Although a number of literary critics have identiWed the Wnancial success and independence of Tonson as an indication of the commercialization of the literary market place, an examination of Tonson’s role in the networks of Whig writers and statesmen reveals the extent to which his success was in fact dependent upon his pivotal position in a patronage system.56 There were undoubtedly signiWcant personal economic incentives for Tonson’s coordination of patrons and authors. As the history of his relationship with Joseph Addison suggests, the publisher was adept at working the patronage system to his own advantage. Addison began corresponding with Tonson while he was still at Oxford, when he agreed to produce a translation of Herodotus for him.57 Tonson went on to publish a number of further works by Addison, and was to reap the rewards of his literary brokering most spectacularly when he bought 53

On Tonson’s background and early career see Lynch, Jacob Tonson, 1–16. Richard Blackmore, A Satyr against Wit (1699), in POAS vi. 149. 55 See James A. Winn, John Dryden and his World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 484. Similarly, in 1695 Tonson asked Matthew Prior, via Sir William Trumbull, the Secretary of State, to compose a poem on the death of Queen Mary (Lynch, Jacob Tonson, 76). 56 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein on the role of the printer as patron, in The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; repr. 1990), 100. 57 On the Herodotus project see Joseph Addison to Jacob Tonson, spring 1695, in The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 1–2. 54

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Addison’s copyright for the hugely successful Cato before it opened in Drury Lane in April 1713. Beyond their private Wnancial value, Tonson’s activities also had a broader politico-cultural signiWcance, particularly through his involvement in the Kit-Cat Club. Early eighteenth-century sources agree that Tonson acted as permanent secretary of the Club, and when he was away the Club did not meet. In many ways the Kit-Cat Club represented the fulWlment of the Whig commitment to a symbiotic relationship between poetry and public life. The Club was home to almost every important Whig potentate of the period, and incorporated statesmen like Lord Somers, Robert Walpole, and Sir William Pulteney, alongside prominent Wnanciers, military oYcers, and a series of writers, including Addison, Steele, Congreve, Samuel Garth, John Vanbrugh, and Arthur Maynwaring. The group began to meet around 1696–8 for weekly dinners and drinks. The Wrst meetings took place at Christopher Catling’s tavern, the Cat and Fiddle in Gray’s Inn Lane, and it was from Catling’s famous ‘Kit-Cat’ mutton pies that the Club gained its name. The group moved from there to the Fountain Tavern in the Strand, and then, in 1704, Tonson built a special room for the Club to meet in at his house in Barn Elms.58 It was from the outset a social club rather than a political club like the Green Ribbon, or an exclusively literary one like Will’s, and meetings took the form of lavish feasts, with poetic toasts to celebrated beauties of the day. By 1700 the group had grown to approximately forty, all men, from a variety of backgrounds. Although peers predominated over commoners, making up three-Wfths of the Club, the Kit-Cats seem to have been keen to stress their mixed membership, with Tonson, the son of a bootmaker, on an equal footing with the Earl of Wharton. This social diversity is reXected in Godfrey Kneller’s famous series of portraits of the Club’s members, which were hung around the walls of the room at Barn Elms. As David Solkin has observed, where a series of formal portraits might traditionally adorn an aristocratic family seat, supporting the dynastic claims of the family, the Kit-Cat paintings instead celebrate a group of men linked by their commitment to a set of social and political ideals. Moreover, within the elite conWnes of the Club’s closed membership, the portraits emphasize a certain 58 Catherine Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club: A Study of Patronage and InXuence in Britain 1696–1720’, Ph.D. thesis (Calif.: UCLA Press, 1982), 31. For contemporary accounts of the Club see Edward Ward, The Secret History of Clubs (London, 1709) and John Oldmixon, The History of England During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, and George I (London, 1735).

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homogeneity among their subjects. Rather than drawing attention to the badges of rank and status, the portraits suggest a level of friendly equality, a clubbability and worldly sociability that was to be reXected in the cultural projects that the Club endorsed.59 This is reXected in Richard Blackmore’s account of the origins of the Club in The KitCats (1708): ‘All the Wrst Members for their Place were Wt, | Tho’ not of Title, Men of Sense and Wit’.60 Thus although the Club assumed many of the responsibilities of an alternative court, and many of its members were aristocratic, it was a court that proclaimed a membership deWned by shared political ideals rather than lineage.61 James Ralph describes the era of the Kit-Cat Club as a time when ‘the Talents of a good Writer were esteemed a suYcient QualiWcation for almost any Employment whatsoever, and when Room was left or made for their Admission’.62 The Club’s procurement of government posts and sinecures for politically committed Whig writers was impressive: in 1708 only three members of the Kit-Cat Club were not on some government payroll. This was not only because through the Club they had gained Whiggish patrons in high places. It also resulted from the growth of government machinery after the accession of William III, and in particular the centralized bureaucracy needed to sustain the war eVort during the 1690s. This growth had created many new jobs which could be disposed of by patronage and place peddling. The link with the Duke of Marlborough and Sidney, Earl of Godolphin, gave the Whigs the advantage in this place market, since these two men could inXuence appointments in the military and all other branches of government service. The diplomatic service was a particularly reliable supplier of jobs for Kit-Cats, providing for Ambrose Philips, Matthew Prior, and George Stepney, among others.63 Other Kit-Cats also had inXuence over the disposal of bureaucratic positions, especially those placed in the Treasury and the secretaryships of State, who had control over all major 59 For Solkin’s useful discussion of the Club and the portraits see David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 27–47. 60 Blackmore, The Kit-Cats: A Poem, 5. 61 Cf. Bucholz: ‘The Kit-Cat acted very much like a court, bringing artists, patrons and middlemen together, and commissioning in its own right pamphlets, poems, plays and even a theatre in the Haymarket’ (Bucholz, Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture, 242). 62 James Ralph, The Case of Authors by Profession or Trade (London, 1758), 32. 63 The number of diplomatic representatives in service had grown signiWcantly under William and Anne, and by 1706 there were Whig representatives in every European court but Spain (Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 178).

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business at home and abroad.64 The Kit-Cat Club was not the only powerful institution forging associations between Whig patrons and Whig writers. Many connections inside and outside the Club were formed at school and university. As the biographical appendix reveals, many were linked through Westminster School and Cambridge University, and in particular Trinity College, Cambridge. At a time when a decreasing proportion of the gentry and aristocracy were going to either Oxford or Cambridge, these college links would have meant that contemporaries would almost inevitably have been Wrst-hand acquaintances.65 Of course, none of these factors represents an absolute recipe for Whiggish alignment: the Tory, later Catholic, John Dryden also went to Westminster and Trinity Cambridge, while Richard Steele and John Locke studied at the Tory stronghold of Christ Church, Oxford. And there were other patterns for Whig writers, some of whom like John Hughes were educated at Dissenting academies, but had no university education. However, it is fair to say that a signiWcant number of Whig writers shared a university education at Cambridge, especially Trinity College, had access to the Kit-Cat Club, possibly through Halifax, the Earl of Dorset, or Joseph Addison, and were rewarded with places or pensions from aristocratic Whig patrons.

Tonson and Kit-Cat publications Jacob Tonson was the organizer and publisher of the Kit-Cat Club and the focal point of its members’ various literary activities.66 Not only did 64 The career of William Congreve demonstrates how these connections could work. For thirty-Wve years Congreve held lucrative positions in the bureaucracy, starting in 1695, when Charles Montagu helped him into his place as one of the commissioners for regulating and licensing hackney and stage coaches. In 1697 he was appointed, again through Montagu, one of the managers of the lottery, and then in 1700 awarded the sinecure of ‘customs of the Poole port’. In 1705, thanks to the inXuence of fellow Kit-Cats Henry Boyle and John Smith in the Treasury Commission, he became one of the commissioners for wine licenses. 65 See Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 22. Charles Montagu, Richard Blackmore, George Stepney, Leonard Welsted, Matthew Prior, John Locke, and Nicholas Rowe were at Westminster School, most of them under Richard Busby; John AyloVe, George Stepney, Montagu, Welsted, Samuel Cobb, and Laurence Eusden were all at Trinity College, Cambridge, and their contemporaries at Cambridge between 1660 and 1700 included Thomas Shadwell, Ambrose Philips, John Dennis, Samuel Garth, Matthew Prior, Samuel Croxall, and John Cutts. 66 Tonson’s publishing activities were undoubtedly aided by his association with fellow Kit-Cat Charles Seymour, sixth Duke of Somerset and Chancellor of Cambridge

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Tonson supervise the contact between individual poets and their inXuential dedicatees, and publish a string of works by young and established Whig poets, but he also organized a series of prestigious collaborative publications written or funded by members of the KitCat Club. Tonson’s Wrst big institutional project involving the Club’s members was the Several Orations of Demosthenes (1702), a series of seven jingoistic orations encouraging the Athenians into war against Philip of Macedon. This anti-French Whig propaganda included translations by the Earl of Peterborough, Samuel Garth, and James Stanhope, and a second Philippic by ‘K. C.’—possibly a joint eVort by a group of Kit-Cats—which urged war in order to ‘stop the Growth of His Power, least it Rise insensibly to such a Pitch, as that we shall not be able to stemm the Torrent’.67 The Orations were followed by a lavish publication of Dr Samuel Clarke’s edition of Caesar’s Commentaries (1712) dedicated to the recently disgraced Duke of Marlborough.68 Clarke was fast gaining inXuence as the theological spokesman for the group of latitudinarians who were driving academic and political developments in post-Revolution Cambridge, and his role in this Kit-Cat project very clearly links networks of Whig theological, political, and literary patronage in this period.69 Clarke’s edition was published by subscription, a form of publication that was particularly well suited to Tonson’s range of interests and contacts.70 The Kit-Cat Club provided Tonson with access to writers and also to a huge body of politically inXuential and rich subscribers, who were eager to support, or be seen University, who, along with Richard Bentley, re-established the Cambridge University Press in 1696. Between 1696 and 1702 Tonson used the Press to produce his inXuential series of Cambridge classics, a series of small-format editions of classical texts. Tonson’s role in relation to the Press is the subject of Robert B. Hamm’s doctoral work on ‘The Tonson Shakespeare Project’, Ph.D. thesis (Los Angeles, Calif.: UCLA, 2003). On the history of the Press in this period see D. F. McKenzie, The Cambridge University Press, 1696–1712: A Bibliographical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 67 ‘K. C.’, ‘The Second Phillipick’, in Several Orations of Demosthenes, To Encourage the Athenians to oppose the Exorbitant Power of Philip of Macedon (London, 1702), 111. The translation was reissued in 1711 to coincide with the Tory peace negotiations. 68 The book was initially to be dedicated to James Butler, Duke of Ormonde, but in December 1709 the Kit-Cat Club ordered Tonson to make Marlborough the dedicatee (Lynch, Jacob Tonson, 47). 69 On Clarke’s role in post-Revolution Cambridge see Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment, 115–41. 70 On the domination of subscription lists by the aristocracy in this period see W. A. Speck, ‘Politicians, Peers, and Publication by Subscription, 1700–50’, in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 47–68.

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to support, contemporary literature, particularly if it enabled them to demonstrate political solidarity. In the case of the Commentaries an overwhelmingly Kit-Cat-dominated subscription list was a way of demonstrating Whig loyalty to the former general. The Commentaries project was an ambitious one. Addison described the grandeur of Tonson’s original plans for the edition in a letter to Leibniz, telling him that ‘He [Tonson] intends to spare no cost in the Edition of this Book which will probably be the noblest Volume that ever came from the English press’.71 Tonson began working on the publication in 1703, when he went to The Hague with the Duke of Grafton to get type, paper, and illustrations for the book.72 The details of the assembly of its select subscription list suggest that Tonson intended it to be a high-cultural project endorsed almost exclusively by a Whig elite. He spent nine years completing the list, yet at the end there were only eighty-seven subscribers, who contributed three guineas each. As a rough comparison, there were Wve hundred subscribers for Milton’s works, and subscriptions to Dryden’s Virgil cost Wve guineas each. However, the names that do appear on the Commentaries list suggest that the time Tonson spent in Wnding subscribers, and their limited number, were linked to its exclusivity.73 Addison told Leibniz: ‘The Book will be a large Folio and has for its subscribers the greatest of the nobility in England with Prince Louis of Baden and Prince Eugene at the head of ’em’.74 The selective nature of the list is also suggested by Addison stating that the list was already full, despite the fact that it had well under a Wfth of the subscribers that Tonson had secured for the Milton edition in 1688. In 1713 Tonson embarked upon another similarly ambitious project that served to illustrate the status of contemporary Whig writing. From 1709 the Tonson house had been producing a series of vernacular classics, a canon-deWning set of duodecimo editions of earlier English poets, which included the works of Denham, Suckling, Cowley, Milton, 71

Addison to Leibniz, 10 July 1703, in The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Graham, 43. Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 249. The elite included the House of Hanover, the Whig hero Prince Eugene of Savoy, and Baron Cutts. There were very few Tories on the list—most notably, the Earl of StraVord and Robert Harley. Catherine Howells points out that they were moderate in 1703 (Howells, ‘The Kit-Cat Club’, 252). 74 Addison to Leibniz, 10 July 1703, in Letters, 44. Thomas Hearne claims that Prince Eugene gave thirty guineas as his contribution to the subscription (Hearne, Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, ed. C. E. Doble et al. (Oxford: Oxford Historical Society, Clarendon, 1885–1921), iii. 329). 72 73

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and Rowe’s edition of Shakespeare. Then in 1713, following the example of the Dutch printing house of Elzevier, which had become famous in the seventeenth century for its publication of small editions of the classics, Tonson began to publish small-format, high-quality literary works by contemporary authors. This new series was composed predominantly of literary texts by Whig authors. It included Addison’s Cato, The Campaign, and Rosamond (1713), Thomas Tickell’s A Poem . . . on the Prospect of Peace (1714), and, interestingly, a third edition of Pope’s Essay on Criticism (1713). Writing of the set, David Foxon concludes: ‘I Wnd it hard to escape the implication that, along with Milton and Shakespeare, these were the English classics’.75 With their inexpensive and portable format, the set would introduce the ‘classics’ of Whig writing to a readership far beyond the elite of the Kit-Cat Club. Both the Elzevier series and the Commentaries publication should be seen as part of the wider movement to forge a distinct cultural identity for Whiggism.

Liberty and artistic achievement Through Tonson’s publications, and contacts, the Wnancial largesse of the Kit-Cat Club was being used to fund a post-Revolution rebirth of native artistic achievement. Richard Blackmore describes Tonson’s literary endeavours with the Kit-Cats as fulWlling precisely such a function: Kit-Cats by their Discipline secure, Preserv’d their well fram’d Constitution pure; Soon from this warm well cultivated Bed Letters came forward, Sense began to spread, And Wit shot up apace its thriving Head. The Languid Muses, now, new Life acquire, And every Genius feels his native Fire.76

Blackmore’s description of the aims of the Club frames many of the central themes of Whig poetry and criticism. The Club’s activities yoked together patronage, genius, poetic Wre, and a modern native culture, all of which were seen to stem from the establishment of modern political 75 David Foxon, Pope and the Early Eighteenth-Century Book Trade, ed. James McLaverty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 23–32 (28). 76 Blackmore, The Kit-Cats, 5.

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liberty. The ambitions of the Kit-Kats seemed to justify the conviction of many of their Whig contemporaries, who believed that the constitutional freedom of post-Revolution Britain created the ideal political context within which to develop native literary excellence. Writers traced a cyclical history of the growth and decline of classical Greece and Rome and used it to demonstrate a correspondence between political liberty and literary achievement77—in Blackmore’s words, ‘Letters and Empire, whose confederate Pow’r | Mutual each others prosperous Fate secure’.78 Drawing on Machiavellian arguments, prominent Whig writers such as Blackmore and the third Earl of Shaftesbury juxtaposed the image of the virtuous citizen, who thrived under liberty, and who was associated with martial strength, independence, publicmindedness, and frugality, with the luxury, eVeminacy, and excess that thrived under a tyranny.79 The Whig commitment to military engagement in post-Revolution Britain showed the revival of the martial splendour associated with a liberty-loving people. All that remained was for the war to establish the kind of domestic and international stability that would guarantee a glorious new future for English arts and letters. Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks oVered a vision of the new era possible under an improved political order, in which he argued that the nation’s political and cultural history was analogous to the history of Rome. Shaftesbury observed that ‘ ’Tis with us at present, as with the Roman People in those early Days, when they wanted only repose from Arms to apply themselves to the Improvement of Arts and Studys’.80 However, while the Xourishing of Roman liberty and letters was shortlived, Britain was set for a more enduring period of growth, as Shaftesbury proclaimed: 77 For a fuller study of the relationship between political liberty and aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century see Michael Meehan, Liberty and Poetics in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1986). On concepts of progress, and its perceived dependence on both patronage and liberty, see David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-Century Britain (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1990), 75. 78 Richard Blackmore, The Nature of Man. A Poem. In Three Books (London, 1711), iii. 74. 79 J. G. A. Pocock has drawn attention to the unlikely association of martial virtues with devotion to the arts: early eighteenth-century Whigs believed that the imperial greatness brought by liberty would extend to wider cultural achievement within an established and peaceful context (Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975) ). 80 Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, Soliloquy: Or Advice to an Author (1710), in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), ed. Philip Ayres, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), i. 118.

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There is a mighty light which spreads itself over the world, especially in those two free nations of England and Holland, on whom the aVairs of all Europe now turn, and if Heaven sends us soon a peace suitable to the great successes we have had, it is impossible but letters and knowledge must advance in greater proportion than ever.81

John Dennis also oVers comparisons with Roman history, and in particular with the reign of Augustus, which he says saw art, language, and religion at their zenith. He explains the reasons for the advancement of poetry at this time: the Elevation that might spring from the Remains and the Appearances of Liberty, and consequently, the Appearances of their being Masters of the Universe; and lastly, the never-to-be-forgotten Bounty of a magnanimous Prince82

Dennis’s explanation probably tells us more about his vision of his own historical moment than it does about the reign of Augustus.83 He counters the Augustan myths of the Restoration with a vision of imperial greatness based on the political liberty and elite patronage established with the Revolution, and outlines a magniWcent new future for the arts, within which England has the opportunity to develop her own classic culture. The scale of Whig and particularly Kit-Cat designs for modern Britain was recognized and often resented by contemporary commentators, many of whom were critical of the Kit-Cats’ power and breadth of ambition. In Examiner 6 of 7 September 1710 Matthew Prior declares that ‘The Collective Body of the Whigs have already engross’d our Riches; and their Representatives the Kit-cat, have pretended to make a Monopoly of our sense’.84 In the Jacobite William Shippen’s satire on the Club, Faction Display’d (1704), Tonson boasts to his fellow Kit-Cats: I’ll print your Pamphlets, and your Rumours spread. I am the Founder of your lov’d Kit-Kat, A Club that gave Direction to the State.

(ll. 388–90)85

81 Shaftesbury to Jean Le Clerc, 6 March 1706, in The Life, Unpublished Letters, and Philosophical Regimen of Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, ed. Benjamin Rand (1st pub. 1900; repr. London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1992), 353. 82 Dennis, ‘Advancement and Reformation of Poetry’, in Critical Works, i. 247. 83 For a substantial analysis of Augustanism in this period see Howard Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983). 84 Examiner 6, 7 September 1710. 85 William Shippen, Faction Display’d (1704) in POAS vi. 668.

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Shippen mocks the perceived hubris of the Club’s members, who have such an inXated sense of their own inXuence that they attempt to ‘give Direction to the State’. Here Shippen stresses that the Club is not the same as the State, and should never be. Yet there were Whigs happy to see Club and State as one and the same. In The Kit-Cats Blackmore praises BOCAJ [Tonson] the mighty Founder of the State [who] Led by his Wisdom, or his happy Fate, Chose proper Pillars to support its Weight.86

Tory concern over the cultural aspirations of the Kit-Cats is also evident in Robert Harley’s sponsorship of a rival Tory club, the Brothers Club, or ‘the Society’, which seems to have been intended to promote cultural and social links to counter those fostered by the inXuential Whig club.87 Jonathan Swift describes the purposes of the new Tory group: The end of our Club is to advance conversation and friendship, and to reward deserving persons with our interest and recommendation. We take in none but men of wit or men of interest; and if we go on as we begin, no other Club in this town will be worth talking of.88

Swift’s vision of the prospective club as a source of patronage as well as a social forum is explicit, and indicates that the Kit-Cat Club was recognized by contemporaries as an organization that could couple cultural support with sociability. The major investment of Kit-Cat members in a wide range of artistic projects is best understood in the context of this broader philosophy relating political liberty and cultural regeneration. It has always been unclear why the Club was so committed to providing places and funding for writers like Congreve, Addison, Garth, and Budgell. At one level investing in contemporary writing undoubtedly provided the Whig establishment with an important supply of in-house propaganda writers—for example, the Club raised the subscription list for Richard Steele’s pamphlet on the Protestant succession, The Crisis (1713). Yet the Kit-Cats were also involved in many projects that did not have a speciWc 86

Blackmore, The Kit-Cats, 5. Members of the Club included Harley, St John, George Granville, Lord Orrery, Lord Bathurst, John Arbuthnot, and Matthew Prior. For more detail on the formation and activities of the Club see R. J. Allen, The Clubs of Augustan London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 76–82, 250–9. 88 Jonathan Swift to Esther Johnson, 21 June 1711, in Journal to Stella, ed. Harold Williams, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948), i. 294. 87

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political agenda. These were a demonstration of their ambitious assumption of cultural responsibilities. While the authors Wnanced by the Kit-Cats were predominantly Whigs, the Club also endorsed the work of a small number of Tory poets. Tonson’s inclusion of Pope’s Essay in his Elzevier series certainly suggests a desire to include writers outside a narrow political grouping. More prominently, Dorset, Garth, and Montagu’s role in organizing John Dryden’s funeral and burial in Poets’ Corner seems to have been designed to yoke the poet’s memorial and literary afterlife to the Kit-Cats’ cultural programme.89 Perhaps the most public display of the Kit-Cat Club’s artistic patronage was its support of the theatre. In this, in many ways, the Club took over the role that was perceived to have been played by the Restoration court, and, like Charles II and his courtiers three decades before, they frequented the theatre in a group.90 Yet the extent and generosity of the Kit-Cats’ patronage meant that they were able to oVer cultural funding on a scale the Stuarts had never been able to aVord. They sponsored the construction of their own theatre, the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket, which opened in 1705 with Vanbrugh and Congreve as joint managers.91 The theatre, funded by a subscription list raised by Vanbrugh, was created in order to assist Betterton’s company, whose previous location in Lincoln’s Inn Fields had left it unable to compete with Drury Lane. The Tory journalist Charles Leslie describes the new venture in his Rehearsal: The Ki t -Ca t Clubb is now grown Famous and Notorious, all over the Kingdom. And they have Built a Temple for their Dagon, the new PlayHouse in the Hay-Market 92 89 On Dorset’s role in securing Dryden’s place in Poets’ Corner see Richard Terry, Poetry and the Making of the English Literary Past, 1660–1781 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 38. Montagu in particular became widely recognized as Dryden’s posthumous patron: he is the dedicatee of the funeral collection The Nine Muses (1700), and the irony of his role as Dryden’s new patron is noted in the dedication of the volume: ‘You have been pleased already to shew Your Respect to his Memory, in contributing so largely towards His Burial, notwithstanding He had that unhappiness of Conduct, when alive, to give you Cause to Disclaim the Protection of Him’ (The Nine Muses: or Poems written by Nine severall Ladies Upon the Death of the Late Famous John Dryden Esquire (London, 1700), sig. a1v ). 90 By 1700 the Kit-Cats were seen to be attending the theatre in a body (see John Loftis, The Politics of Augustan Drama (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963), 40). 91 See Judith Milhous, ‘New Light on Vanbrugh’s Haymarket Theatre Project’, Theatre Survey, 17 (1976), 143–61. 92 Charles Leslie, The Rehearsal, 41, 5–12 May 1705, in A View of the Times, Their Principles and Practices: in the First Volume of the Rehearsals. By Philalethes (London, 1708).

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Both the creation of a Whig playhouse and the scale of Kit-Cat patronage available to individual writers created a strong association between the Whig party and drama in this period. In addition to plays written on Whiggish themes of liberty, such as John Dennis’s Liberty Asserted (1704) and his Appius and Virginia (1709), there was also a spate of plays based around Marlborough’s successes in the war, such as Nicholas Rowe’s Ulysses (1706), Mary Pix’s The Adventures in Madrid (1706), and Addison’s Rosamond (1707).93 Moreover, dedications of plays from Anne’s reign show a strong bias towards inXuential members of the Club: Congreve, Gildon, and Rowe all dedicated plays to Halifax, while Tom D’Urfey dedicated to the Earl of Wharton, and Susannah Centlivre to Somers. In addition, Halifax instigated his own project to promote a tradition of national drama by reviving the ‘Three Plays of the best Authors’; namely, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Fletcher’s The King and no King, and a compilation play made up of the comic scenes from Dryden’s Marriage-a`-la-Mode and The Maiden Queen put together.94 Alongside this emphasis on native dramatic tradition, the theatre built by the Kit-Cats also came to play a large part in the introduction of Italian opera to England.95 In 1708 the castrato Nicolini sang Alessandro Scarlatti’s Pyrrhus and Demetrius, paving the way for a series of successful operas at the theatre. Not all the Kit-Cats approved of Italian opera—there were attacks by Addison and Steele in the Spectator on the use of Italian recitative and the rejection of native musical traditions—but the lavish spectacles at the Haymarket were funded through the subscriptions of the Club’s wealthy members.96 When interest in the opera dwindled in the following decade, the Royal Academy of Music was founded to support it, again supported by the Kit-Cat subscribers.97 Kit-Cat expenditure on the arts was not conWned to the metropolis. The Wrst decades of the eighteenth century saw prominent Whig grandees making their mark on the landscape with a series of grand country houses. Between 1700 and 1720 Vanbrugh was their architect of choice, and his baroque splendours became Wtting emblems of the optimism and ambitions of post-Revolution Britain. As the palaces rose they 93

See Loftis, The Politics of Augustan Drama, 37–45, for a fuller account. Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr Colley Cibber (1740), ed. Robert W. Lowe, 2 vols. (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1889), ii. 4–5. 95 See Philip Olleson, ‘Vanbrugh and Opera at the Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket’, Theater Notebook, 26 (1971), 94–101. 96 See in particular Spectators 18 and 29 for criticism of Italian opera in England. 97 See Foss, The Age of Patronage, 148–9. 94

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shaped the nation in the image of the new establishment. Vanbrugh began by designing Castle Howard for the Earl of Carlisle, and moved on to Blenheim Palace for the Duke of Marlborough, Kimbolton Castle for Lord Manchester, Claremont for the Duke of Newcastle, and the gardens at Stowe laid out for Lord Cobham.98 He in turn was supported by the Kit-Cat Club, helped into the comptrollership of the OYce of Works by the Earls of Carlisle and Halifax, and brought back under George I with the added title of Surveyor of the Gardens and Waters. GeoVrey Webb, Vanbrugh’s editor, has remarked that his style ‘stands in the same relation to orthodox classical architecture as the Heroic drama stands to Classical tragedy. Indeed, Heroic architecture is as good a description of his style as could be found’.99 For a generation convinced of the heroic dimensions of contemporary public life, such a style was the perfect idiom. Again, not all Whigs were of one mind: in the Characteristicks Shaftesbury promoted Palladianism as the most Wtting style for new architecture, and in time the Whig elite followed suit, embracing a more restrained neoclassicism in the works of Colen Campbell and William Kent. The exterior splendour of the country house was only the outmost sign of the lavish artistic expenditure of the Whig aristocracy. The Duke of Chandos’s improvements at Cannons, his house in Middlesex, suggest the scale of patronage aVorded by individual Kit-Cats.100 Chandos had made his fortune in the post of paymaster during the War of the Spanish Succession, and rose from there to become one of the richest men in the country. Given a dukedom by George I in 1719, he retired at the age of forty-Wve, and devoted himself to establishing a life of aristocratic grandeur at his seat in Middlesex. The interiors were copiously decorated with allegorical and historical paintings by James Thornhill and Louis Laguerre, the artists who had made their reputations in the post-Revolution building boom. Chandos Wlled the newly painted rooms with treasures including Raphael cartoons, carvings by Grinling Gibbons, and paintings by del Sarto, Rubens, Vandyck, Lely, and Kneller. And Cannons was also famed for its music, becoming no 98 On the changing relationship between patron and architect in this period see Richard Wilson and Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1800 (London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000), 109–44. 99 GeoVrey Webb, introd. to Sir John Vanbrugh, The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Bonamy Dobree and GeoVrey Webb, 4 vols. (London: Nonesuch, 1927–8), vol. iv, p. xxiii. 100 See C. H. Collins Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1949).

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less than a small music academy under Chandos’s largesse. The Duke kept a band of thirty players, hired Dr Johann Pepusch as his director of music for Wfteen years, and had two organs installed. In 1717 Handel was appointed as composer, producing the Chandos Anthems during his residence. Chandos, like other great houses of the period, was in many respects a court in miniature. The scale and opulence of its artistic projects mimicked the patronage previously associated with the monarchy.

The cultural responsibility of the statesman The most articulate spokesperson on the subject of the connection between aristocratic patronage and the creation of a modern Whig literary culture was the third Earl of Shaftesbury, who was not a KitCat himself but had many connections with members of the Club.101 Shaftesbury’s correspondence reveals the extent to which he discussed many of his ideas about contemporary politics and the future of Whiggism with founder members of the Kit-Cat Club, such as Stanhope, Halifax, Somers, and Sunderland. While he was suspicious of what he perceived as the moral laxity of the leisure pursuits of some Club members, he admired Stanhope and Somers, and hoped that they would share the Whiggish philosophy outlined in the Characteristicks.102 Shaftesbury claimed that the arts in Britain were well placed for improvement because, following the Revolution, it was an age where ‘Liberty is once again in its Ascendent’. He believed that patronage was central to this new cultural enterprise: in Soliloquy: or, Advice to an 101 While Lawrence E. Klein’s Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) oVers an excellent account of Shaftesbury’s cultural politics, Klein does not examine the important links between Shaftesbury and the KitCats, which I see as crucial to Whig literary culture in this period. 102 Somers’s inXuence on Shaftesbury’s thought is demonstrated by the fact that Shaftesbury believed the Characteristicks should really have been dedicated to him (Shaftesbury to Somers, 30 March 1711, in Philosophical Regimen, 430). The importance of Stanhope’s contributions to Shaftesbury’s philosophy is demonstrated in a number of letters, and in particular a letter of 7 November 1709, in which he cites the military commander as the prime example of a statesman who is not afraid to occupy his leisure time with philosophy and letters (Shaftesbury to Stanhope, 7 November 1709, Philosophical Regimen, 413). On Shaftesbury’s relationship with Stanhope, Halifax, and Somers see Robert Voitle, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, 1671–1713 (Baton Rouge, La., and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 302–3, 367–8, 258.

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Author (1710) he declared that with the assistance of responsible aristocratic patronage the arts and sciences could at last attain ‘that Politeness and Beauty, in which they wou’d soon appear, if the aspiring Genius of our Nation were forwarded by the least Care or Culture’.103 Moreover, he went on to emphasize that ’Tis expected that they who are high and eminent in the State, shou’d not only provide for its necessary Safety and Subsistence, but omit nothing which may contribute to its Dignity and Honour. The Arts and Sciences must not be left Patron-less.104

His own patronage took a number of forms, most obviously in the Wne arts: his commissioning of a series of emblematic engravings for the second edition of the Characteristicks, and of a large history painting of the Judgment of Hercules, by Paolo de Mattheis, are good examples.105 But he obviously thought poetry was important in consolidating a sense of nation, writing of the poet’s role in recording and mythologizing aVairs of state for future generations: Le t a Nation remain ever so rude or barbarous, it must have its Poets, Rhapsoders, Historiographers, Antiquarys of some kind or other, whose business it will be to recount its remarkable Transactions, and record the Atchievements of its Civil and Military Heroes.106

Shaftesbury saw the Kit-Cats’ largesse as an extension of the committed support that was so central to his philosophy, and approved profoundly of their generosity to contemporary authors. He writes to Charles Montagu: Perhaps there might have been none of this sort [scholars] left among us, had not your lordship, even in your private character, been a patron to them, when they had none left in the public. How they may multiply now your lordship and your friends are coming into Court, I know not107 103

Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 115. Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 120. 105 On the engravings see Felix Paknadel, ‘Shaftesbury’s Illustrations of Characteristics’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 290–312. There is also an interesting discussion of his role in commissioning a portrait by John Klosterman in Solkin, Painting for Money, 5–6. 106 Shaftesbury, Soliloquy, in Characteristicks, i. 119. This is not, of course, to say that Shaftesbury was uncritical of contemporary panegyric. He adds to this recommendation of the genre the observation that ‘in reality the Nerve and Sinew of modern Panegyrick lies in a dull kind of Satire; which [ . . . ] will appear to have a very contrary EVect’. 107 Shaftesbury to Halifax, 16 December 1708, in Philosophical Regimen, 395–6. 104

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Other Whig writers of this period echo his emphasis on the role of patronage in post-1688 Whig literary culture. In the dedication of his Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Language (1714) to the Duke of Newcastle, Leonard Welsted identiWes the present glories of English letters as dating from the reign of William III, and goes on to outline the future for English, or Whig, literary culture: Every Thing, my l o r d, our Trade, our Peace, our Liberty, the Complexion of our Language and of our Government, and the Disposition and Spirit of the Britons . . . all would conspire to make this Nation the Rival of the most renownd among the Ancients for Works of Wit and Genius; could we but once see that amiable Temper of Humanity, and that Love of Learning, which distinguish your g r a c e, more generally prevail among persons of your rank.108

Shaftesbury and Welsted share an insistence on the role of patronage not as a point of continuity with old literary traditions but as the backbone of a new literary modernity. This helps to explain why there is such an emphasis in Whig writing of this period on the modern statesman as a rounded man, a man of ‘wit and business’, equally at home with aVairs of state and the world of letters.109 This emphasis is embodied in the inXuential poet-statesmen of the era, and in the sociable marriage of culture and politics underlying the formation of the Kit-Cat Club. If the Whig elite was to assume the role formerly carried out by the court, and use its cultural authority and Wnancial power to shepherd in a new age of unprecedented national literary glory, then it was of paramount importance that its members were more than competent bureaucrats. A number of dedications of Whig texts are characterized by an emphasis on such an ideal marriage of statesmanship and culture. Eustace Budgell’s dedication of his Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1714) to Halifax describes the great patron as ‘at once reWning and mixing in all the polite Pleasures of the Age, and at the same time animating the great Scene of publick Business [ . . . ] all that Wnishes a Great Man, and makes an Agreeable one’.110 Similarly, John Hughes’s 108 Leonard Welsted, Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Language, Epistles, Odes etc Written on Several Subjects (London, 1724), p. xv. 109 It is exactly this emphasis on roundedness that Klein describes as central to Shaftesbury’s vision of modern Whig culture. That culture was to be based on notions of sociability and politeness, and polite learning, which was ‘generalist in its orientation, tending to the development of the whole person and keeping the person and his social relations in view’ (Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, 5). 110 Eustace Budgell, The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (London, 1714), sig. a3v ---a5v .

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dedication of his Works of Edmund Spenser (1715) to Somers plays on the way his patron balances arts and politics, ‘with the same Authority prescrib’d to the Counsels of the Wise, as to the Improvements of the Polite’.111 For the Whig elite informed political patronage was clearly not a thing of the past, but vital to the future of post-Revolution Britain. Statesmen such as Somers and Halifax were seen to oVer new models for men in public life, demonstrating a combination of political and cultural responsibility. Their activities of course also oVered a jingoistic challenge to the patronage of Louis XIV, countering the majestic projection of the Sun King with panegyrics, palaces, and plays celebrating a Whig, and English, supremacy.

Club, court, or civil society? The implications of Whig patronage for our broader understanding of the development of early eighteenth-century culture are complex. In one sense it appears that the activities of the Kit-Cats mimicked what T. C. W. Blanning, following Jurgen Habermas, terms a ‘representational’ court culture; namely, a form of display directed at an essentially passive public.112 The authority of the political elite was visibly demonstrated in the poems they published, the theatre they constructed, the palaces they built for themselves, and the famously lavish dinners that they held. In these ways, then, the Kit-Cat Club really did take the place, both politically and artistically, of an alternative court comparable with the French model. However, the Club and its members can also be seen as part of a diVerent cultural model. Numerous recent historians have described the growth of a ‘public sphere’ in early eighteenth century England, which Blanning deWnes as ‘the medium through which private persons can reason in public [performing] the vital function of mediating relations between the essentially separate realms of civil society and the state’.113 In some ways the Kit-Cat Club performed a similarly public function: the Club represented a quasi-democratic forum of aristocracy, gentry, and tradesmen, bound not by class but by a shared commitment 111 Edmund Spenser, The Works of Edmund Spenser in Six Volumes, (ed. John Hughes, London, 1715), vol. i, p. 5. See also Steele’s dedication of the third volume of the Tatler to Halifax. The widely recognized link between statesmanship and patronage was noted by critics of the Club (see the satirical The Kit-Cat C——b Described (1705) ). 112 For a fuller discussion of representational culture see Blanning, The Culture of Power, 7, 29–99. 113 Blanning, The Culture of Power, 8.

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to political ideals. The convivial meetings of the Kit-Cat Club provided an autonomous opinion-forming congress within which private individuals could meet for rational discussion. The Club was a source of political and cultural debate and inXuence outside court and parliament. Moreover, the Kit-Cats’ involvement in projects like the Spectator and the Tatler, which promoted a popular cultivation of moral and cultural reWnement, can be seen as part of a shift away from an exclusively royal and aristocratic monopolization of arts and manners, and towards a cultural arena in which matters of taste and politics were agreed on the basis of consensus and reasoned debate. Both the models I have described here—the statesman-courtier and the ‘homosocial’ Kit-Cat diner—reXect aspects of the ways in which Whig writers participated in the political establishment. However, it is less clear how far either model encompasses female writers, and much research remains to be done on the role of women in Whig literary culture. It is hard to see how the close relationship between public life and poetry described above could accommodate female authorship, and it is thus tempting to speculate that for the women on the margins of such an elite the writing of poetry was necessarily a more private occupation, or more dependent on the commercial market place. The careers of Octavia Walsh and Susannah Centlivre may oVer some examples of the options available to the Whig woman writer in this period. Walsh, the sister of Kit-Cat William Walsh, produced largely devotional verse in manuscript, while the dramatist Centlivre was a selfdeWned professional writer. Yet, as Sarah Prescott has recently argued, the notion of women writers as either commercial professionals or virtuous amateurs has obscured the ‘pluralist’ nature of much writing in this period.114 Not only were the worlds of print and manuscript more interpermeable than we are apt to think, but for many women writers the guise of the respectable amateur could become a way of both marketing books and articulating public statements. Prescott also cautions against the assumption that homosocial literary networks necessarily excluded women writers. As both she and Christine Gerrard have emphasized, the literary circle around Aaron Hill in the 1720s included Eliza Haywood and Martha Sansom alongside James Thomson, Richard Savage, and John Dyer.115 And in the case of the Kit-Cat Club, while the 114 Sarah Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 1690–1740 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 115 Prescott, Women, Authorship, and Literary Culture, 26–30; Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 61–101.

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most visible role of women in the Club seems to have been as the subjects of drinking toasts, it is clear from the accounts of the young Lady Mary Wortley Montagu that the Club and its networks also provided the opportunity for literary exchanges. Montagu was Wrst introduced to the Club as a young girl, and later as a toast, but she also established relationships with Addison, Steele, and Garth, and was later to prove instrumental in the composition of Addison’s Cato.116 However, it remains to be said that few, if any, women could have participated in the exchanges of writing for public services that characterized Whig patronage in this period. It is signiWcant that where Aaron Hill’s metropolitan circle styled itself along the lines of a provincial coterie, the Kit-Cat Club was emphatic in its emphasis on the broader public role of its patronage and cultural activities. In the case of Susannah Centlivre it is clear that, while Centlivre evidently aimed to secure some sort of Wnancial support from the Whig aristocracy with dedications to John Somers, as a woman she could not expect to enjoy the diplomatic or bureaucratic career with which so many male writers were rewarded. The exposure of this patronage system clearly oVers insights into the material print culture of Whig poetry, revealing a nexus of relationships at the heart of political and literary life in the early eighteenth century. The prominent writers and statesmen of the period were linked by party and club aYliation, by education and sex. The reciprocal connections between writers and patrons represent in material form the interweaving of the political and the aesthetic at the heart of Whig literary culture. But, more than this, the early Whigs’ commitment to broad and generous cultural patronage was central to their self-deWnition. It had a major inXuence on the forms and themes of writing in this period. It determined perceptions of the relationship between literary and political life, of the public role of the author, and of the cultural responsibilities of the statesman. Although literary patronage in this period has frequently been seen as a vestige of an older, court-based literary culture, the great Whig patrons saw their support for the arts as modern, not traditional. Through patronage they were attempting to shape the future, and shape the nation’s culture in the image of their own political ideology. They sought to promote a grand and optimistic art to reXect their military and political triumphs, and in particular 116 On Montagu’s contributions to Cato see Isobel Grundy, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 63.

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what they perceived to be the triumph of political liberty after the Revolution. In supporting a wide range of prominent artistic projects, many of which did not serve a speciWc topical agenda, Whig patrons asserted the cultural authority of the new political elite.

Conclusion: Whig afterlives I have argued in this book that Whig writing of the period between the Exclusion Crisis and the Hanoverian succession was characterized by an enormous optimism about the future of Whig poetry. Many poets believed that the political liberties established after the Revolution, coupled with the establishment of a Protestant succession, presented an opportunity to create a vital new Whig literary culture. This project took both theoretical and material form, through the production of a substantial body of Whig poetry and literary criticism, underwritten by a system of aristocratic patronage. However, the chronological limits of the study have prevented me from exploring how this literary culture developed in subsequent decades. What happened to Whig poetry after 1714? I began by suggesting that the critical fortunes of Charles Montagu oVer a paradigm for the occlusion of the Whig tradition from the eighteenth century to the present. But literary history is clearly more complicated than this, and the reception and afterlife of Whig poetry consists of more than a sudden shift from enthusiasm to neglect. Even while Montagu’s poetry declined in popularity, the tradition he represented continued to inXuence eighteenth-century verse. We can probably trace a trajectory from the early Whig poetry I have described in this book through the court Whig verse of the 1720s and 1730s. There is, however, no comprehensive account of this later literature, and I can only speculate about possible areas of comparison.1 It is tempting to suspect that the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession marked the decline of the sustained military panegyric that had been the dominant feature of the previous two decades.2 The poems on George I’s accession suggest that trade became a major focus of Whig panegyric, an emphasis exempliWed in later Whig and patriot Whig works such as Edward Young’s Imperium Pelagi (1730) and Richard 1 On the politics of the period see Reed Browning, Political and Constitutional Ideas of the Court Whigs (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). 2 Dustin GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 42–3.

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Glover’s London, or, The Progress of Commerce (1739).3 Yet, as Dustin GriYn’s recent account of patriotism and poetry reveals, poets continued to produce victory odes for later military successes at Porto Bello, Dettingen, and Culloden, and the celebrated early Whig panegyrics provided inXuential models for patriotic verse many decades after their Wrst publication.4 Thomas Tickell’s The Prospect of Peace (1712) was given pride of place in Robert Dodsley’s Wrst Collection of Poems by Several Hands (1748), while poems written in celebration of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 alluded to Addison’s The Campaign (1705). Moreover, Hannah Smith’s analysis of the iconography of the Hanoverian monarchy has shown that the Wgure of the Protestant soldier-deliverer-king continued to be central to the representation of George I and George II.5 Smith’s thesis oVers a persuasive counter to Linda Colley’s claims that Jacobite verse dealt essentially in personalities and romance, and that there was no equivalent for the Hanoverians, whose panegyrists dwelt on the achievements of the monarchy, rather than their personal qualities.6 She draws attention to a dynamic heroic idiom in Hanoverian rhetoric, which can be seen as a continuation of the myths and iconography established under William III. Recent work on the culture of the Hanoverian courts also complicates the prevailing view that the Hanoverians were neglectful of the arts.7 Smith and others have demonstrated the survival of a vigorous court culture well into the mid eighteenth century. There is undoubtedly a shift in the nature and quality of Whig literary patronage after 1714. Tone Sundt Urstad’s account of Robert Walpole’s poets has shown that while Walpole spent an enormous amount of money on contemporary writers, this support took the form of individual payments, and writers were rarely given a 3 On trade and empire in later verse see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 2000). 4 GriYn, Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth Century Britain, 34–73. 5 Hannah Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–60’, Ph.D. thesis (Cambridge University, 2001), 26–52. 6 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 202. 7 The potential of further research into this area was demonstrated at a conference on ‘Hanoverian Court Culture in Britain, 1714–1760’, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 5 April 2003. See also Smith, ‘Georgian Monarchical Culture in England, 1714–1760’. On Queen Caroline’s patronage see Joanna Marschner, ‘Queen Caroline of Anspach and the European Princely Museum Tradition’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Queenship in Britain 1660–1837: Royal Patronage, Court Culture and Dynastic Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 130–42.

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permanent reward, so that they remained dependent on him for their livelihoods. Moreover, Whig patrons of the 1720s and 1730s expected more for their money: while the Kit-Cats had supported poets without demanding that they produce solely party propaganda, by Walpole’s time writers had become politically accountable, with little freedom in relation to their patrons.8 The political hegemony secured by the Whigs after 1714 clearly brought enormous beneWts to many of the writers discussed in this book, who were rewarded for their eVorts on behalf of the Protestant succession with places and pensions. However, while the accession of George I established Whiggism as the dominant political culture, it also threatened the unity that the party had found in opposition. The years between 1716 and 1724 saw a fragmentation of political interests between the Sunderland and Walpole factions, and the Robinocracy was to create a body of inXuential Whig dissidents. It seems inevitable that this fracturing of political culture had an impact upon the cohesion of Whig literary culture. The ideological and Wnancial commitment to poetry that is found in the 1690s and 1700s was generated by a party united in opposition, and determined to consolidate their recent, and precarious, political achievements through the creation of a distinctively Whiggish cultural sphere. It is tempting to suspect that the excitement and enthusiasm engendered by the prospect of a Whig Britain was dissipated by its reality. This could be because of the division of the party, Walpole’s emphasis on prose propaganda over poetic prestige, or perhaps the fact that oppositional poetry can never retain its urgency once it becomes the verse of the political establishment. The continuing inXuence of early Whig writing can, however, clearly be traced in the poetic style of later writers, and in particular in a developing tradition of sublime religious verse. Aaron Hill’s poetry reveals many points of comparison with early Whig writing, as Christine Gerrard’s recent biography of Hill has shown.9 In his preface to The Judgement-Day (1721) Hill expresses the same desire to articulate the inexpressible that we have seen in Montagu and Blackmore, describing the way in which his subject matter evades authorial control and ‘bursts from our very Approach, and overXows Humane Thought, when we 8 Tone Sundt Urstad, Sir Robert Walpole’s Poets: The Use of Literature as ProGovernment Propaganda, 1721–1742 (Newark, Del., and London: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 56–75. 9 Christine Gerrard, Aaron Hill: The Muses’ Projector, 1685–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 106–21.

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would draw it into Description!’.10 Later on, in Advice to the Poets (1731), he was explicitly to endorse the freedoms of blank verse. James Thomson’s poetry can also be seen as a development of the Whig tradition. The Seasons (1726–30) is derived from the physico-theological tradition initiated by Blackmore’s Creation, and, like Blackmore, Thomson stressed the divine origins of poetry. In the preface to Winter (1726) he declaims: ‘let Po e t r y, once more, be restored to her antient Truth, and Purity; let Her be inspired from Heaven, and in Return, her Incense ascend thither’.11 It is possible to trace a trajectory of serious elevated poetry through from Hill and Thomson to Young’s Night Thoughts (1742–5) and Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1757). An important consideration in the revision of this line of inXuence would be the evolving status of ‘poetic enthusiasm’. Jon Mee’s recent work has shown that writers continue to negotiate the more radical resonances of the notion of enthusiasm during the Romantic period.12 Exploring Thomson’s or Young’s debts to earlier Whig verse also raises important questions about the formation of the eighteenth-century poetic canon. Why did The Seasons and Night Thoughts become two of the most popular poems of the century yet the elevated verse of writers such as Blackmore and Montagu was forgotten? Adam Rounce has suggested that Akenside’s odes continued a tradition of explicitly public Whig poetry into the 1760s, but because of their political content they were dismissed on aesthetic grounds.13 While the aesthetics of early Whig panegyric were to achieve a lasting currency, perhaps the commitment to the celebration of aVairs of state that accompanied them was not. Another aspect of the Whig literary project that undoubtedly continued to inform poetry in subsequent decades was the literary and cultural criticism of the era. Joseph Addison’s essays on Paradise Lost and on the pleasures of the imagination remained key critical works well into the nineteenth century, while Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks was to continue to inXuence religious, philosophical, and cultural debates in 10

Aaron Hill, The Judgement-Day. A Poem, 2nd edn., (London, 1721), p. iii. James Thomson, Winter, 2nd edn., (1726), in The Seasons, ed. James Sambrook (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 304. 12 Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 13 See Adam Rounce, ‘Akenside’s Clamours for Liberty’ in David Womersley (ed.), Cultures of Whiggism: New Essays on Literature and History in the Long Eighteenth Century. (Newark, NJ, and London: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming). 11

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Britain and Europe.14 What has been less widely recognized is the legacy of John Dennis’s aesthetic theories for later Romantic poets.15 Thomas De Quincey wrote disparagingly of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s ‘absurd craze’ for Dennis’s theories of poetic inspiration, but there seems to have been more to it than this.16 Wordsworth cites Dennis on several occasions in relation to the religious sublime in epic poetry and to Dennis’s taxonomy of vulgar and enthusiastic passions.17 Moreover, Dennis’s theory of the sublime oVered an important model for the interconnection of passion, memory, and renewal that was so central to Wordsworth’s conceptualization of poetic process. Such links further trouble the notion of a shift from neoclassical to Romantic poetics in the eighteenth century, and undermine some of the boundaries of periodization across the century. However, my intention here is not to pave the way for a reconsideration of Dennis et al. as precursors of Wordsworthian Romanticism. Whig poetry and Whig literary criticism are important in their own right. For too long ‘minor’ Wgures such as Dennis have been required to play a supporting role to canonical authors in order to gain entrance into modern criticism. Part of the aim of this book is to disturb the distinction between canonical and non canonical, and to demonstrate that it is only by historicizing relations between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poets, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing, that we can begin to see the literary past in all its vibrant complexity. The poetry written between 1678 and 1715 demonstrates that Whig authors created a dynamic and ambitious body of writing which served both to consolidate a sense of political unity and to celebrate the most notable events of public life. This poetry was critically engaged with the arguments of contemporary Tory writers, at both a topical and a theoretical level. As such, it oVers an essential basis from which to revise our understanding of the poetics and cultural politics of the early eighteenth century. But its signiWcance also goes beyond that: in 14 On the reception and inXuence of the Characteristicks see Philip Ayres, introd. to Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), vol. i. pp. xxii–xxxi. 15 Although see John Morillo, Uneasy Feelings: Literature, the Passions and Class from Neoclassicism to Romanticism (New York: AMS, 2001); Theresa Kelley, Wordsworth’s Revisionary Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); JeVrey Barnouw, ‘The Morality of the Sublime: To John Dennis’, Comparative Literature, 35 (1983), 21–42. 16 Unpublished letter from Thomas De Quincey to Alexander Blackwood, 30 August 1842, cited by E. N. Hooker, introd. to Dennis, Critical Works, vol. ii, p. lxxiii. 17 On the relationship between the two writers see Morillo, Uneasy Feelings, 5, 16–18, 26–7, 29.

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exploring the complexities of canon formation in a given historical moment, in questioning the hierarchical relationship between canonical text and non-canonical context, and in endeavouring to restore a historical aesthetic it oVers insights into the study of early modern literary culture that reach far beyond Whig poetry itself. In his celebrated Epistle to Dorset of 1690 Charles Montagu had claimed great responsibility for the contemporary writer, declaring that: Poets have this to boast; Without their Aid; The freshest Lawrels, nipp’d by Malice, Fade, And Vertue to Oblivion is betray’d: The proudest Honours have a narrow Date, Unless they vindicate their Names from Fate.18

Subsequent literary history has inverted the relationship described here between poetry and history. The historical events celebrated in the Epistle and other poems have lost none of their fame over the centuries. It turns out that ‘The freshest Lawrels, nipp’d by Malice’ have been those of Montagu and his Whig contemporaries. This book, it is hoped, will go some way to vindicate their names from fate. 18 Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Charles, Earl of Dorset and Middlesex (London, 1690), 3.

Biographical appendix Jo s e p h Ad d i s o n (1672–1719), essayist, poet, and statesman. Educated, with Richard Steele, at Charterhouse School, then went on to Queens College, Oxford, and Magdalen College, Oxford. Encouraged by Charles Montagu, and given a pension from John Somers. Travelled in Italy, publishing his Letter from Italy (1703) on his return, and wrote his most celebrated poem, The Campaign, on the victory at Blenheim in 1704. Made Under-Secretary of State, then Commissioner of Appeals; MP for Lostwithiel in 1708. Lost oYce on fall of Whigs. Contributed to the Tatler, and began the Spectator in March 1711. Member of the Kit-Cat Club, he also presided over a group of young Whig writers at Button’s. Produced Cato in 1713, and became engaged again with essay writing with The Guardian in 1713. Returned to politics on the death of Queen Anne, and became Secretary to the Lords Justices, then Secretary of State, along with Stanhope, in 1717. Retired 1718, fell out with Steele, and died shortly after, in 1719. Jo h n Ay l o f f e (d. 1685), poet. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Member of the Green Ribbon and King’s Head Clubs; executed in 1685 for his part in the Rye House Plot. Ap h r a Be h n (1640–89), poet and dramatist. Grew up in Surinam, returned to England c.1658. Employed to spy for Charles II in Netherlands, then became professional writer, with series of successful comedies and prose Wctions including The Rover (1677) and Oroonoko (1688). Wrote political verse in celebration of the Stuart monarchy. Ri c h a r d Bl a c k m o r e (d. 1729), physician and poet. Educated at Westminster School, Trinity College, Oxford, and Padua, Fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians. Rose to fame and some notoriety with his Williamite epic Prince Arthur in 1695. Knighted and appointed physician in ordinary to William III in 1697. Attacked by Dryden, Garth, and Steele in debate over his Satyr Against Wit (1700); received much praise for his physico-theological poem, Creation (1712). Continued to write until his death in 1729, publishing medical treatises, pamphlets on the Arian controversy, and two more lengthy epic poems. Th o m a s Br o w n (1663–1704), writer. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Became headmaster of grammar school in Kingston-on-Thames, then left and moved to London, producing series of satirical poems and translations. Associated with wits at Will’s coVee house.

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Eu s t a c e Bu d g e l l (1686–1737), writer. Nephew of Joseph Addison, educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and went on to the Inner Temple. Addison made him a clerk in his oYce while employed as secretary to Lord Wharton. Contributed to the Spectator. Became under-secretary to Addison when he was made secretary to Sunderland following the accession of George I, and went on to become Accountant-General of Ireland. Lost position as result of a quarrel; became part of the opposition to Walpole. Contributed to The Craftsman, and started a weekly periodical, The Bee (1733–5). Committed suicide in 1737. He n r y Ca r e (1648–88), journalist and political writer. Editor of the exclusionist Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome (1678–83). After accession of James II wrote in support of catholicism and Dissent. Su s a n n a h Ce n t l i v r e (?1669–1723), actress and dramatist. Produced nineteen plays between 1700 and 1722, and specialized in comedies of intrigue and manners. The Busie Body (1709) and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) among her most successful works. Also acted outside London, as a strolling player. An ardent Whig, and friend of Farquhar, Steele, Budgell, and Rowe, her Whiggish politics are evident in several of the plays. She also published two long poems: ‘A Poem to King George [ . . . ] upon his Accession to the Throne’, and ‘An Ode to Hygeia’, which was included in an anthology of Verses upon the Sickness and Recovery of the Right Honourable Robert Walpole. Sa m u e l Cl a r k e (1675–1729), theologian. Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and went on to write in defence of Newton’s Principia. Took up chaplaincy at Norwich, then rector of Drayton, near Norwich. Gave Boyle lectures at Cambridge in 1704–5. Became leading metaphysician and adherent of a priori philosophy, attacked as both deist and orthodox. Became intimate with Queen Caroline, and had many followers among latitudinarians, especially Bishop Hoadly. Published editions of Caesar’s Commentaries and Homer, in addition to scientiWc and philosophical works. Sa m u e l Co b b (1675–1713), poet and translator. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Taught at Christ’s Hospital. First publication a poem on Mary’s death. Went on to produce a series of panegyrics on the War of the Spanish Succession: Isaac Watts claimed that Cobb’s The Female Reign: An Ode (1709) was ‘the truest and best Pindaric’ he had ever read. Wi l l i a m Co n g r e v e (1670–1729), dramatist. Educated at Kilkenny Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin, contemporary with Jonathan Swift. Began to publish plays from 1693, enjoying great success with Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700). With support of Charles Montagu, enjoyed a long career in government service, becoming commissioner for licensing hackney coaches 1695–1705; commissioner of wine licenses 1705–14; Secretary for Jamaica 1714. Member of Kit-Cat Club.

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An t h o n y As h l e y Co o p e r , f i r s t Ea r l o f Sh a f t e s b u r y (1621–83), statesman. Educated at Exeter College, Oxford, then Lincoln’s Inn. Switched allegiances from Royalist to Parliamentary side in 1644. Military service as head of Parliamentary forces in Dorset, member of Cromwell’s Barebones Parliament 1653. Opposed Cromwell by 1656, and led forces supporting Charles II’s entry into Blackheath in 1660. Granted peerage at coronation, Lord Chancellor in 1672, when he made John Locke his secretary. Became part of the cabal on fall of Clarendon, supported Second Dutch War, created Earl of Shaftesbury 1672. After fall from oYce in 1673 became part of parliamentary opposition to court, member of Green Ribbon Club, supported Exclusion Bill and became leader of exclusionist cause. Arrested for high treason July 1681, acquitted November, Xed to Holland and died 1683. An t h o n y As h l e y Co o p e r , t h i r d Ea r l o f Sh a f t e s b u r y (1671– 1713), politician and philosopher. Under the guardianship of his grandfather, the Wrst Earl of Shaftesbury, from the age of three. Educated at home by John Locke, then at Winchester College. Elected MP for Poole 1695; staunch Whig and member of country opposition in 1690s. After retirement from politics in 1698 remained at his Dorset house, and produced his inXuential Characteristicks in 1711, for which he was attacked as a deist. Supported John Toland, much inXuenced by Cambridge Platonists. Travelled to Naples to improve his health in 1711, and remained there until his death in 1713. Na t h a n i e l Cr o u c h [Richard or Robert Burton] (?1632–?1725), publisher. Author of popular histories, including History of the Lives of English Divines who were Most Zealous in Promoting the Reformation (1709) and Martyrs in Flames: Or a History of Popery (1695). Sa m u e l Cr o x a l l (d. 1752), writer and cleric. Educated at Eton and St John’s College, Cambridge. Took orders 1714; chaplain to the chapel royal at Hampton Court 1715, and went on to attain a series of ecclesiastical preferments, reputedly in recognition of his political services to the Hanoverians. Contributed to Samuel Garth’s Metamorphoses (1717). Jo h n Cu t t s , Ba r o n Cu t t s o f Go w r a n (1661–1717), soldier-poet and military hero. Educated at Catharine Hall, Cambridge. Rose to prominence for his bravery at the Battle of the Boyne, and earned the nickname ‘the Salamander’ for his heroism at the battle of Namur in 1695. Employed Richard Steele as his private secretary, who went on to publish some of his verses in the Tatler. Continued to Wght under Marlborough in the War of the Spanish Succession; third in command at Battle of Blenheim; appointed Commander-in-Chief in Ireland 1716. Da n i e l De f o e (?1661–1731), journalist and Wction writer. Nonconformist family, educated at Newington Green Academy. Fought in Monmouth rebellion

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in 1685, and joined William III’s army during his advance on London in 1688. Appointed accountant to the commissioners of glass duty 1695. Published series of works in defence of William III during last years of reign; most famously The True-Born Englishman (1701). Tried and pilloried for his attack on the High Church in The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702). Wrote for both political sides during Anne’s reign: employed by Robert Harley, and later by Godolphin and Sunderland. Published numerous historical and political works; later famous for his Wctional works Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Journal of the Plague Year (1722). Jo h n De n n i s (1657–1734), poet and critic. Educated at Caius College, Cambridge, and mixed with a number of prominent writers at Will’s coVee house on his arrival in London. Defended the Revolution, and wrote in support of the War of the Spanish Succession, earning a place, through the Duke of Marlborough, as a waiter in the port of London. Began a long quarrel with Pope following the publication of the Essay on Criticism, and soon distanced himself from the Addisonian literary circle, falling out with both Addison and Steele. Produced a series of inXuential critical treatises on the nature of sublime poetry, and continued to write critical and political essays into the 1720s. We n t w o r t h Di l l o n, Ea r l o f Ro s c o m m o n (?1633–85), poet and politician. Founded an informal literary academy, which included the Earl of Dorset, the Marquis of Halifax, and Dryden; produced his inXuential Essay On Translated Verse in 1684. Jo h n Dr y d e n (1631–1700), poet and dramatist. Educated at Westminster School, and Trinity College, Cambridge. Published Heroique Stanzas (1659) in celebration of Oliver Cromwell, but changed sides after 1660 and wrote panegyrics on the Restoration of Charles II. Produced a series of popular rhymed heroic tragedies during the 1660s and 1670s, including The Indian Emperor (1667) and The Conquest of Granada (1670–2). Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal from 1670. Wrote the mock-biblical satire Absalom and Achitophel (1681) in defence of king and government during the Exclusion Crisis. Converted to catholicism under James II, justifying his conversion in The Hind and the Panther (1687). Lost all his oYces under William III. Continued to publish some drama, and several translations, including his celebrated Works of Virgil (1697). Died 1700 and buried in Westminster Abbey. La u r e n c e Eu s d e n (1688–1713), poet, later Poet Laureate. Educated at Trinity, Cambridge. Secured patronage from Charles Montagu with his Wrst publication, a Latin translation of Montagu’s poem on the Boyne; contributed to the Guardian, and to Garth’s Metamorphoses (1717); produced a panegyric on the marriage of the Duke of Newcastle to Henrietta Godolphin, and was rewarded with the laureateship after Nicholas Rowe’s death in 1718. Took orders in 1725, and was appointed to a rectory in Lincolnshire.

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Si r Sa m u e l Ga r t h (1661–1719), physician and poet. Educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge. Fellow of the college of Physicians; dedicated his oration to the college in 1697 to William III; produced a mock-epic poem, The Dispensary (1699), about the apothecaries’ opposition to the establishment of a free dispensary. Supervised Dryden’s funeral in 1700. Member of the Kit-Cat Club. Knighted on the accession of George I, and became physician in ordinary to the king. Edited inXuential translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in 1717. Jo h n Ga y (1685–1732), poet and dramatist. Educated at Barnstaple Grammar School, then brieXy apprenticed to a mercer in London. Became acquainted with Pope in London, who encouraged the publication of Rural Sports (1713) and The Shepherd’s Week (1714). Appointed secretary to the Duchess of Monmouth in 1712, and then secretary to Lord Clarendon as envoy to Hanover. Returned to England on the death of Queen Anne, had success with Trivia (1715), and collaborated with Pope and Arbuthnot on the farce Three Hours After Marriage (1717). Lost almost all his fortune in the South Sea bubble, but went on to become a household name with The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and its sequel Polly, which was banned by Walpole. Supported by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry for the last decade of his life. Died 1732 and buried in Westminster Abbey. Ch a r l e s Gi l d o n (1665–1724), poet and pamphleteer. Catholic, educated at Douay School, later a deist. Produced The History of the Athenian Society (1691); edited Langbaine’s Dramatic Poets (1699); attacked Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1714), and became one of his dunces. John Dunton claimed that he was a ‘dependent of the Whigs’ in The Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705). Ge o r g e Gr a n v i l l e , Ba r o n La n s d o w n e (1667–1735), poet and dramatist. Educated at Trinity, Cambridge. Keen to join the royal forces against Monmouth in 1685, and to defend James II in 1688. Went into literary retirement during the 1690s, and produced a series of imitations of Waller. Entered public life at Anne’s accession; succeeded Walpole as Secretary of War 1710; created Baron Lansdowne as one of twelve peers to see through peace negotiations; removed from position 1714; suspected of complicity in Jacobite rising, 1715. Lived abroad 1722–32; returned to publish collected works and become reconciled with the Hanoverian monarchy. Wi l l i a m Ha r r i s o n (1685–1713), poet and diplomat. Educated at New College, Oxford, where he met Addison, who secured him a post as governor to a son of the Duke of Queensberry. Continued the Tatler for Wfty-two issues after Steele ceased to write for it. Through Swift acquired a position as secretary to the ambassador at the Hague, and as Queen’s secretary to the embassy at Utrecht. According to Edward Young, Addison said of Harrison’s Woodstock Park: ‘This young man, in his very Wrst attempt, has exceeded most of the best writers of the age’ (Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of

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Books and Men, Collected from Conversation, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), i. 339). Ol i v e r He y w o o d (1630–1702), Presbyterian preacher. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge. Became preacher in West Riding. Excommunicated in 1662 after Act of Uniformity, but continued to preach, holding conventicles at homes of Presbyterian gentry and farmers. Became itinerant evangelist in northern counties; imprisoned 1685–6 for holding an illegal assembly. Jo h n Hu g h e s (1677–1720), writer and translator. Educated at Thomas Rowe’s Dissenting academy alongside Isaac Watts. Wrote a number of panegyrics on William III, and was rewarded with a place in the Ordnance OYce; appointed Secretary to the Commissions of Peace in the Court of Chancery in 1717. Contributed to the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, and produced The Lay Monk with Richard Blackmore. Be n j a m i n Ke a c h (1640–1704), Baptist minister and writer. Imprisoned for preaching in Buckinghamshire 1664. Moved to London, became Calvinistic Baptist and preached at Goat Yard Passage in Southwark. His advocacy of congregational singing and his issue of a hymn collection in 1691 caused a rupture with the Church. Published a series of controversial pamphlets. Ch a r l e s Mo n t a g u , Ea r l o f Ha l i f a x (1661–1715), poet and statesman. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. Gained notice as a poet with his burlesque (with Prior) of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther (1687). Signed letter of invitation to William III; elected MP for Maldon 1689. Appointed Clark of Privy Council 1689; Lord of Treasury 1692. Established Bank of England and system of public credit, and worked with Somers, Newton, Locke, and Halley on the Recoinage Bill; Chancellor of the Exchequer 1694; First Lord of the Treasury 1697. Impeached for his part in Partition Treaty 1701, and out of oYce under Queen Anne, although appointed commissioner for negotiating union with Scotland in 1706, and joint plenipotentiary to the Hague 1710. Member of Kit-Cat Club, became famous for his patronage of contemporary literature. Acted as one of the Lords Justices from the death of the queen to the arrival of George I. After the accession appointed First Lord of the Treasury, and invested with Order of the Garter 1714. Died suddenly in 1715; buried in Westminster Abbey. La d y Ma r y Wo r t l e y Mo n t a g u , ne´e Pierrepont (1689–1762), writer. Daughter of the Wfth Earl and Wrst Duke of Kingston; introduced to the KitCat Club at an early age. Educated at home, very widely read. Her Court Eclogues was published, without her permission, by Edmund Curll in 1716. Accompanied her husband Edward Wortley Montagu when he went to Constantinople as ambassador in 1716, and wrote her Turkish Letters there.

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Returned to England in 1718, continued to write poetry, little of which was published in her lifetime. Friendly with Lord Hervey, and famously quarrelled with Pope, attacking him in several satires. Produced a periodical, The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737–8). Left England in 1739 and lived for most of the rest of her life in France and Italy. Died 1762. Jo h n Ol d m i x o n (1673–1742), historian and pamphleteer. Early panegyrics to the Duke of Portland and the Duchess of Marlborough; established The Muses Mercury in 1707–8, a periodical containing verses by Steele, Garth, Motteux, and others; translated Works of Boileau (1711–13), dedicated to Charles Montagu; contributed to Arthur Maynwaring’s The Medley; published a series of secret histories between 1712–16, exposing papist/Stuart conspiracies. OVered the post of collector at the port of Bridgewater in 1716. Produced a Whiggish History of England During the Reigns of the Royal House of Stuart (1729–39). Am b r o s e Ph i l i p s (?1675–1749), poet and dramatist. Educated at St John’s College, Cambridge. Secretary to the Whig Hanover Club; JP for Westminster 1715; commissioner for the lottery 1717; Secretary to the Lord Chancellor in Ireland 1726. Started the Freeholder, with Thomas Burnet and Richard West, in 1718; nicknamed ‘Namby Pamby’ on account of his poems written to the infant daughters of Lord Carteret. Jo h n Ph i l i p s (1676–1709), poet. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, under Aldrich. Became known thanks to his mock-heroic poem, The Splendid Shilling (1701), and was then introduced to Harley and St John. Al e x a n d e r Po p e (1688–1744), poet. Born into Roman Catholic family which lived in London until c.1700, then moved to BinWeld, in Windsor Forest. Educated largely at home and by a local priest. Became friendly with William Walsh, William Wycherley, and Sir William Trumbull, and the London wits from an early age. Pastorals published 1709, followed by The Rape of the Lock (1712) and Windsor Forest (1713). Increasingly distanced from Addison’s ‘little senate’; member of the Scriblerus Club with Gay, Swift, and Arbuthnot. Made his fortune and reputation with his translation of the Iliad (1715–20), which was followed by the Odyssey (1725–6). Moved to Twickenham in 1718, where he lived for the rest of his life. Published Dunciad Variorum (1729), Moral Essays (1731–5), Imitations of Horace (1733–8), Dunciad in Four Books (1743). InXuential friendships with Swift, Bolingbroke, and Warburton. Sa m u e l Po r d a g e (?1633–91), poet. Former steward to Philip Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and son of John Pordage, astrologer and Behmenist. Wrote a number of Restoration panegyrics, and went on to produce exclusionist propaganda, including A New Apparition of Sir Edmundbury Godfrey’s Ghost (1681) and The Medal Revers’d (1682). Attacked by John Oldham and Roger L’Estrange.

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Ma t t h e w Pr i o r (1664–1721), poet and diplomat. Supported by the Earl of Dorset from an early age, educated at Westminster and St John’s College, Cambridge. Following the publication of his collaborative parody of Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther (1687) he gained, through Dorset, a diplomatic position at the Hague; appointed secretary to the negotiations at the Treaty of Ryswick 1697; voted for Montagu’s impeachment over the Partition Treaty in 1701, and subsequently joined the Tories; friendly with Harley, Bolingbroke, Swift; sent to negotiate the Peace of Utrecht in 1711; impeached by Walpole 1715. Th o m a s Ro g e r s (1660–94), educated at Trinity College, Oxford. Took holy orders and was given living at Slapton, near Towcester. Published anticatholic satires and an attack on Robert Molesworth dedicated to William III. El i z a b e t h Si n g e r Ro w e (1674–1737), poet. Daughter of a Nonconformist minister. Published Poems . . . by Philomela 1696. Corresponded with The Athenian Mercury in the early 1690s. Patronized by the Thynnes of Longleat. Friendly with Isaac Watts and Matthew Prior. Went into retirement after her husband’s death. Known for her pious epistolary verse. Ni c h o l a s Ro w e (1678–1718), dramatist and Poet Laureate. Wrote a series of popular plays including The Ambitious Stepmother (1700) and the Wercely Williamite Tamerlane (1702), which was played annually at Drury Lane on November the Wfth; appointed Poet Laureate at the accession of George I, and made one of the surveyors of customs at the port of London. Ch a r l e s Sa c k v i l l e , Ea r l o f Do r s e t (1638–1706), poet and courtier. Renowned rake during the 1660s and 1670s. Friendly with Dryden, Butler, and Wycherley, and oVered patronage to many contemporary writers. Withdrew from court under James II, and publicly opposed the imprisonment of the seven bishops; signatory of the letter of invitation to William of Orange, appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household 1689–97. Ge o r g e Se w e l l (d. 1726), pamphlet writer. Educated Eton and Peterhouse, Cambridge, and went on to study medicine at Leyden and Edinburgh. Published numerous poems, translations, and pamphlets. Tory politics evident in pamphlets of 1713–15, but became a supporter of Robert Walpole by 1718. Contributed to William Harrison’s Wfth volume of the Tatler, and to the Spectator. El k a n a h Se t t l e (1648–1724), poet and dramatist. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford. Wrote a series of heroic dramas in the 1660s and 1670s and was attacked by Dryden, Shadwell, and Crowne over his tragedy The Empress of Morocco (1671); produced poems and plays in support of the Whigs, but recanted following the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681 and became a Tory propagandist; after the Revolution attained the post of City poet;

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continued to write plays, both for Drury Lane and Bartholomew Fair, and poems on aVairs of state. Th o m a s Sh a d w e l l (?1642–92), dramatist and later Poet Laureate. Educated at Caius College, Cambridge; entered the Middle Temple. Self-proclaimed heir of Ben Jonson and his humours comedy, and produced a series of successful comedies during the 1660s and 1670s, including Epsom Wells (1672) and The Virtuoso (1675). Famously feuded with Dryden, partly over dramatic theory, and was attacked in MacFlecknoe (1682); he retaliated in The Medal of John Bayes (1682) and The Tory-Poets (1682). Replaced Dryden as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal after the Revolution. Jo h n, Ba r o n So m e r s (1651–1716), Statesman. Educated at Worcester Cathedral School and Trinity College, Oxford; entered the Middle Temple. Defended the seven bishops in 1688, and presided over the committee which framed the Declaration of Rights. Knighted October 1689, Attorney General 1692, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal 1693, member of the Privy Council and Lord Chancellor 1697. Along with Newton and Montagu introduced devaluation of currency by clipping. Head of Junto Whigs in early years of Anne’s reign, advocated vigorous prosecution of war. Member of Kit-Cat Club. Given place in Cabinet at accession of George I. Ja m e s , f i r s t Ea r l St a n h o p e (1673–1721), soldier and statesman. Educated Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. Volunteer in Flanders 1694–5; given colonelcy of regiment, and elected MP for Isle of Wight and Cockermouth, 1702. Brigadier General 1704, and minister to Spain 1706. Fought in Spain during War of Spanish Succession and made commander-in-chief of British forces in Spain 1708. Member of Kit-Cat Club and friend of third Earl of Shaftesbury. Returned 1712, and was made a leader of the House of Commons. Led House of Commons with Walpole after accession of George I, and was made First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1717. Ri c h a r d St e e l e (1672–1729), essayist. Educated at Charterhouse School, where he Wrst befriended Joseph Addison, and went on to study at Christ Church, Oxford. Entered military service under second Duke of Ormonde, and was later taken up by John Cutts, colonel of the Coldstream Guards, who employed him as his secretary. Associated with Sedley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and other London wits. Published his Christian Hero in 1701, dedicated to Cutts, and wrote a series of comedies 1701–5. Appointed gentleman waiter to Prince George of Denmark 1706, gazetteer in 1707. Began career as essayist with the Tatler in 1709, and afterwards contributed to Addison’s Spectator. Published a series of anti-government political pamphlets 1712–14. On accession of George I was appointed JP, and deputy lieutenant for county of Middlesex, then surveyor of the royal stables at Hampton Court, and supervisor of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Continued to publish pamphlets and a series of short-lived

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periodicals. Began a controversy with Addison in 1719; published his last play The Conscious Lovers in 1722. Died 1729. Jo s e p h St e n n e t t (1663–1714), Baptist and hymn writer. Pastor of a London Baptist congregation in Old Broad Street, and lecturer to the general Baptist congregation in the Barbican. Produced a version of the Song of Solomon in 1700. Ge o r g e St e p n e y (1663–1707), poet and diplomat. Educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met and became friends with Charles Montagu. Supported the Revolution of 1688, and was rewarded with a series of government positions (envoy to the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg 1695; commissioner of trade and plantations 1697; envoy to Vienna 1702; envoy to the Hague 1706). Member of the Kit-Cat Club. Jo n a t h a n Sw i f t (1677–1745), poet and clergyman. Educated at Kilkenny Grammar School, along with Congreve, then Trinity College, Dublin. Moved to England and lived with Sir William Temple, as his secretary, from 1688. Ordained 1694, and then returned to live with Temple, whose involvement in the ancients and moderns debate prompted Swift’s Battle of the Books, published in 1704 with A Tale of a Tub. Appointed Vicar of Laracor 1700, although spent much time in Dublin and London. While in London edited the Examiner and produced various political pamphlets. Increasingly linked to Tory ministry. Became Dean of St Patrick’s in June 1713, and returned to Ireland after death of Queen Anne. Took up political writing again with The Drapier’s Letters. Gullivers Travels published 1726, an instant success. Remained in Ireland after 1728, and continued to write Irish pamphlets, most famously A Modest Proposal (1729). Ill health from 1733, and later mental illness. Died October 1745; buried in St Patrick’s Cathedral. Th o m a s Ti c k e l l (1686–1740), poet and statesman. Educated at Queen’s College, Oxford. Appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford 1711; contributed to the Guardian and Steele’s Poetical Miscellanies 1713; produced a translation of the Wrst book of Homer’s Iliad to rival Pope’s version in 1715. Appointed undersecretary to Addison when Addison became Secretary of State in 1717; became Addison’s literary executor after his death; appointed Secretary to the Lords Justices in 1724. Ja c o b To n s o n (?1656–1736), publisher. Son of a surgeon, apprenticed 1670, made freeman of company of stationers 1677, and began own business in same year. Began buying plays by Dryden, Otway, and Tate, and made huge proWts from edition of Paradise Lost (1688). Published most of the major authors of the day. Secretary of the Kit-Cat Club from 1700, appointed printer of parliamentary votes 1714, and given grant of stationer, bookseller, and printer to principle public oYces in 1720. Died 1736.

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Jo h n Tu t c h i n (?1661–1707), pamphleteer. Descended from a family of Nonconformist ministers. Took part in the Monmouth rebellion and was tried by Judge JeVreys, but pardoned thanks to a bribe; produced a panegyric on the Revolution, and earned a position in the victualling oYce in 1692; dismissed in 1695, and began to write anti-Williamite propaganda, most famously his attack on the king and his Dutch ministers in The Foreigners (1700). Is a a c Wa t t s (1674–1748), poet and hymn writer. Educated at Southampton Grammar School and Stoke Newington Academy, under Thomas Rowe, where he was contemporary with John Hughes. Became pastor of Stoke Newington, but retired on grounds of ill health. Wrote a series of educational manuals, and works of popular divinity, and became famous for his Hymns (1707) and religious poetry, published in Horae Lyricae (1706). Le o n a r d We l s t e d (1688–1747), poet. Educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. Acquired a position in the oYce of one of the secretaries of state through the patronage of the Earl of Clare; went on to become clerk in the Ordnance OYce (c.1722), and commissioner for managing the state lottery (1731). Friendly with Theobald, Steele, and Hoadly. Sa m u e l We s l e y (1662–1735). Educated at the Dissenting Academy at Newington Green with Defoe. Published his Wrst poems anonymously with John Dunton, and later contributed to the Athenian Mercury. Acquired a curacy in London, and became friends with Gilbert Burnet. Published a poem on the Battle of Blenheim in 1705, and was rewarded by Marlborough with a chaplaincy in his regiment. Father of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Th o m a s Wh a r t o n , f i r s t Ma r q u i s o f Wh a r t o n (1648–1715), politician. Supported the Exclusion Bill and backed the invitation to William of Orange in 1688; Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire 1702; Commissioner for Treaty of Union 1706; Lord Lieutenant in Ireland, with Addison his secretary, 1708–10; violently opposed to the Treaty of Utrecht. Was made Marquis of Wharton in 1715. Member of the Kit-Cat Club. Ch a r l e s Wh i t w o r t h (1675–1725), diplomat. Educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. Introduced to diplomacy by George Stepney, and under William appointed to represent England at the Diet of Ratisbon; envoy to Russia 1704, Poland 1711, and Prussia 1714. Created Baron Whitworth of Galway in 1721. Th o m a s Ya l d e n (1670–1736), poet. Produced some Williamite poetry in the 1690s, but openly adhered to the High Church party after Anne’s accession. Appointed Dean of Divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1709. Questioned for involvement in the Atterbury plot in 1723.

Bibliography primary sources Ad d i s o n , Jo s e p h, The Guardian, ed. John Calhoun Stephens (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1982). —— The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941). —— The Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Addison, ed. A. C. Guthkelch, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1914). —— The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). Ai k e n , Jo h n, The General Biographical Dictionary; or Lives, Critical and Historical, of the most Eminent Persons (London, 1799–1815). Ar b u t h n o t , Jo h n, The History of John Bull, ed. Alan W. Bower and Robert A. Erickson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976). —— and Po p e, Al e x a n d e r Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950). At w o o d , Wi l l i a m, A Modern Inscription to the Duke of Marlborough’s Fame (London, 1706). Ba r t o n , Sa m u e l , A Sermon Preached at St Mary le Bow before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor and Court of Aldermen on Wednesday the 16th of July . . . (London, 1690). Be h n , Ap h r a , The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1992–6). Bl a c k m o r e , Si r Ri c h a r d , Advice to the Poets. A Poem Occasion’d by the Wonderful Success of Her Majesty’s Arms, Under the Conduct of the Duke of Marlborough, in Flanders (London, 1706). —— Creation: A Philosophical Poem. In Seven Books (London, 1712). —— Eliza: An Epick Poem (London, 1705). —— Instructions to Vander Bank: A Sequel to Advice to the Poets (London, 1709). —— King Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Twelve Books (London, 1697). —— Prince Arthur: An Heroick Poem in Ten Books (London, 1695). —— The Kit-Cats: A Poem (London, 1708). —— The Nature of Man. A Poem. In Three Books (London, 1711). —— A Paraphrase on the Book of Job (London, 1700). —— A Satyr Against Wit (London, 1699). Bl o u n t , Si r Th o m a s Po p e, De Re Poetica: or, Remarks upon Poetry (London, 1694).

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Index Achinstein, Sharon 191–2 Act of Resumptions 128–9, 130, 132–3 Act of Settlement 153 Act of Uniformity 64 Addison, Joseph 33, 40 n. 62, 130, 217, 218, 247 Account of the Greatest English Poets 1–2, 5–9, 12, 17, 112 Campaign, The 4, 141–2, 174, 192–3, 242 on literary criticism 41–2 on Milton 178, 193, 244 on Montagu 1, 6, 8, 9, 116, 117 on A. Philips 151 and politeness 159, 160 Rosamond 144 in Spectator 41–2, 157–8, 184, 186–7, 193 ‘To His Majesty’ 219 To the King 195 and Tonson 221–2, 226, 227 Akenside, Mark 244 ancients and moderns controversy 36, 151–156 ancient constitution 70–71, 91, 96, 177 Anglican Church 24, 85–6, 87, 89–91 and Dissent(ers) 64–5 Mary II and 123–4 Anne, queen of England: and Addison’s The Campaign 141–2 and Anglican Church 123 n. 87 death of 169–70 and Elizabeth I, parallel with 137–8 and Philips’s Blenheim 142 and war 136–40 Arbuthnot, John 156–7 Aristotle 126, 185 AshWeld, Andrew 194 authorship, professional 29 n. 20, 30, 205, 206–7 AyloVe, John 247 Ballaster, Ros 111 Barash, Carol 137, 138 Baxter, Stephen 217

Bayle, Pierre 218 Beeston, Christopher 31 Behn, Aphra 25, 247 City Heiress, The 72 Congratulatory Poem to Her Sacred Majesty Queen Mary Upon her Arrival in England 123 Pindaric Poem to the Reverend Doctor Burnet, A 103–5 Bellon, Peter 111 Bentley, Richard 36, 37 biblical poetry 82, 125–6, 131–2, 182–3, 190, 193 Blackmore, Richard 2, 141 n. 21, 177, 194, 215, 228, 247 Advice to the Poets 191 Creation: A Philosophical Poem 175 n. 7, 186–7, 188–9 King Arthur 33 Kit-Cats, The 34–5, 175 n. 7, 223, 227, 230 Paraphrase on the Book of Job 184 Prince Arthur 4, 33, 125, 174–5, 197 Satyr Against Wit 32–3, 175 n.7, 221 Wits, quarrel with 32–7 blank verse 177–8 Blanning, T. C. W. 214, 237 Blenheim Palace 143–7 Boileau, Nicolas 183 Bolla, Peter de 194 Boyle, Charles 33, 34, 36–7 Breda, Declaration of 114 Brewer, John 106 Brothers Club 44, 230 Brown, Christopher 214 Brown, Thomas 33, 35, 37, 247 Bucholz, R. O. 207, 213, 223 n. 61 Buckingham, George Villiers, 2nd Duke of 58, 88–9, 209 Budgell, Eustace 157, 236, 248 Burnet, Gilbert 77, 212–13 Burnet, Thomas 157 Bysshe, Edward 194

Index Cannons Honse 233–34 Canon formation 7, 9–10, 18, 22–55, 173–75, 227 Care, Henry 209, 210, 248 Carey, Henry 157 Carretta, Vincent 167 n. 101 Catholicism 57, 87, 89–90, 109–10 Catling, Christopher 222 censorship 13, 75–7, 126 Centlivre, Susannah 238, 239, 248 Chalmers, Alexander 10 Chandos, James Brydges, Duke of 233–4 Character of a Whig, Under Several Denominations, The 30 Charles II, king of England 70 Declaration to all His Loving Subjects 59 and patronage 207, 208 promiscuity of 60 depicted as hero, 114 Chaucer, GeoVrey 144, 145–6 Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough 138–40, 148–9, 223 and Addison’s The Campaign 141 Blenheim Palace 143–7 in On the Prospect of Peace 164–5 and Philips’ Blenheim 142–3 in Whig poetry 148–9 city drama 30–2, 45, 50 Clark, J. C. D. 14, 94 n. 2 Clarke, Samuel 225–6, 248 classicism 8, 152, 154, 158, 180–1 Claydon, Tony 87 Cobb, Samuel 139, 177, 178, 195, 248 ‘Of Poetry’ 217 ‘Poetae Britannici’ 197 Codrington, Sir Christopher 33 Collection of the Newest and most Ingenious Poems against Popery and Tyranny, A 108–9 Colley, Linda 17, 132, 242 Collier, Jeremy 126–7 Collins, A. S. 11 Commendatory Verses, on the Author of the Two Arthurs and the Satyr against Wit; by Some of his particular Friends 33–4 commercialization of literature 205–6, 221 Congreve, William 17, 138, 221, 231, 248 Birth of the Muse, The 114 patronage 217, 219, 224 n. 64 Conlon, Michael 61

297

Cooper, Anthony Ashley, see Shaftesbury, Wrst Earl of; Shaftesbury, third Earl of Corns, Thomas 83 n. 74 country opposition 74–80, 120–1, 128 country rhetoric 74–80, 120 Courthope, W. J. 3–4 Cowley, Abraham 82–3, 179 Crouch, Nathaniel 249 Crowne, John 28, 72 Croxall, Samuel 149, 170, 249 Cummings, Robert 144, 165, 169 n. 111 Cutts, John, Baron Cutts of Gowran 82, 124, 182, 249 De Quincey, Thomas 245 Declarations of Indulgence 85–6, 90–1 Defoe, Daniel 130–4, 250 PaciWcator, The 32 True Born Englishman, The 130, 131, 132, 133–4 Dekker, Thomas 31 Denham, Sir John: Cooper’s Hill 39, 73–4, 145, 165, 167–8 Dennis, John 2, 33, 149, 177, 250 Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry, The 125, 183 Battle of Ramillia, The 139, 148 Court of Death, The 179, 196 on enthusiasm 185–6 Grounds of Criticism in Poetry, The 38, 40, 41, 125, 184, 190 on literary criticism 38, 183 on national identity 130–1, 133 and patronage 207, 220 on poetry, reformation of 125–7, 180, 229 Pope on 42–3 on Pope 168–9 Remarks on a Book Entituled, Prince Arthur 126, 185, 197, 198 Reverse, The 130, 131, 133 and sublime 125, 173–4, 183–6, 191, 196–7, 198–9, 245 Desagauliers, John 187 Dickinson, H. T. 12–13 Dillon, Wentworth, see Roscommon, Earl of Dissent and Dissenters 13, 24, 25, 47, 53 and Anglican Church 64–5 and Declarations of Indulgence 85–6, 90–1

298

Index

Dodsley, Robert 242 Dryden, John 32, 208, 231, 250 Absalom and Achitophel 5, 58–63 Annus Mirabilis 72, 73–4 Blackmore, attack on 34 Catholicism, conversion to 87 criticism 145–6 on Dennis 180 n. 27 Hind and the Panther, The 87–8 MacFlecknoe 27, 31 Medall, A Satyre Agaisnt Sedition, The 63–9, 70, 72 Of Dramatick Poesie 25 on Roscommon 40 satire on 88–90 Settle, attack on 28–9 Shadwell, attack on 27–8, 31 ‘To Kneller’ 119 ‘To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve’ 7, 17 and Tonson 221 and Williamite wars, criticism of 118–20 Duckett, George 157 dunces 19, 30–1, 52, 53: see also Pope: Dunciad D’Urfey, Tom 72 Elizabeth I, queen of England 97–8, 121, 137–8 England’s Triumph (anon) 137 English civil war period and literature 23–5, 83, 126–7 enthusiasm 22, 23–4, 33, 40, 202 and commercialism 46 cultural, development of 24, 25 dunces and 19 literary and religious, relationship between 24, 25 poetic 25, 50–1 Pope on 50–2 and populism 24, 46 religious 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 34, 51 Shaftesbury, Wrst Earl of, and 67 sublime and 185–6, 202–3 in Swift 51–2 and Whiggism 10, 48 Epistle to Dorset (Montagu) 1–2, 6, 112–19, 215, 219, 246 and sublime 173–4, 190, 195 Erskine-Hill, Howard 18, 154 n. 62 Eusden, Laurence 118, 250–1 Evans, John 80

Exclusion Crisis: literature of 57–74 opposition patronage during 208–12 Ezell, Margaret 206 n. 4 Fabricant, Carole 18 Fairer, David 50 n. 100, 193, 201 Fontenelle, Bernard de 152 Foxon, David 170, 227 Garth, Samuel 9–10, 251 Dispensary, The 32–3 Gascoigne, John 187 n. 57, 216 n. 41 Gay, John 251 Captives, The 47 Trivia 10, 26, 46 George I: poetry on accession of 170–2 as military hero 138 Gerrard, Christine 200–1, 238, 243 Gildon, Charles 251 Complete Art of Poetry, The 152 Libertas Triumphans 147–8, 167 Gillespie, Stuart 29 n. 20 Godolphin, Sidney, Earl of 223 Goldie, Mark 95, 102 Granville, George, Baron Lansdowne 45, 166, 200, 251 Green Ribbon Club 209 GriYn, Dustin 11, 242 on commercialization of literature 205 n. 2, 206 n. 4 Guardian 151, 158, 160 Hammond, Brean 18, 43 on 18th century literary market place 205–6 Harley, Robert 142, 230 Harris, Tim 64 Harrison, William 251–2 Woodstock Park 145–6, 174 Harth, Philip 59 Hawes, Clement 47 n. 83 Herbert, Sir Percy 100 Heyd, Michael 24 Heywood, Oliver 86, 98, 252 Heywood, Thomas 31 Hill, Aaron 243–4 Homer 53, 202 Horn, Robert D. 139 Howard, Sir Robert 74 n. 48 Hughes, John 157, 217, 218, 220, 252 Works of Edmund Spenser 236–7 Huguenots 71, 214

Index Hume, Robert D. 25 n. 6 Hunter, J. Paul 42, 173, 203 Hutchinson, Lucy 23, 83–4 Israel, Jonathan I. 94 n. 2 James II 57, 94 Declarations of Indulgence 85–6, 90–1 and reformation 85–92 Johnson, Samuel 11, 141, 193 n. 79 on Blackmore’s Prince Arthur 197 Lives of the English Poets 10, 197, 216–17 Jones, Emrys 51 n. 104 Jordan, Thomas 30–1 Junto Whigs 9, 13, 15, 116–17, 128, 216, 220 Keach, Benjamin 182, 252 Kit-Cat Club 8, 34–5, 47–8, 162 function of 237–9 and national culture 227–34 publications 224–7 and theatre 231–2 Tonson and 222–7 Klein, Lawrence E. 159, 236 n. 109 Kliger, Samuel 200 Kneller, Godfrey 144, 146, 222–3 Knights, Mark 63, 86 Krey, Gary Stuart de 91 n. 94 Laguerre, Louis 233 Leslie, Charles 231 L’Estrange, Roger 72, 210 n. 17, 211, 212 Letter from Scotland, A (anon) 60–1 Levine, Joseph 36, 153 liberty and poetic form 175–81, 203 and artistic achievement 227–31 and politeness 159–60 literary commercialism 19, 22, 24, 45, 46, 52 literary criticism 11, 53 Addison on 41–2 Dennis on 38, 183 Pope on 38, 39, 41, 42, 49 Roscommon on 39, 42 Locke, John 218 London, City of: and country opposition 74–80 depiction of 69–74 and Nonconformity 64 Longinus 185 Peri Hupsous 175–6, 183, 188

299

Pope on 202 on sublime 191, 193–4, 195–6 Louis XIV, king of France 136, 215 and Ottoman court 110–11 and patronage 214 Loyal Satyr Against Whiggism, A 67 Lynch, Kathleen M. 208 n. 9 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 163, 217 McKeon, Michael 59 n. 7 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 91–2, 148 Marlborough, Duke of, see Churchill, John Marot, Daniel 214 Marvell, Andrew 60, 89–90 Mary II, Queen of England 94 and Anglican Church 123–4 and Elizabeth I 121 patronage 213–14 and propaganda 213 and reformation 121–7 Mee, Jon 244 Memoirs of the life of Anthony Late Earl of Shaftesbury 211 Mercurius Reformatus 106 militarism 2, 105–12, 128 as source of criticism 118–21 Milton, John: Addison on 178, 193, 244 Dennis on 38 and Tonson 221, 226 see also Paradise Lost moderation, rhetoric of 38–9, 59–60, 80 modernity: and Scriblerian satire 53–5 and the Revolution of 1688 98–9 and pastoral 153–6 and patronage 236 Monmouth Rebellion 75, 78 Montagu, Charles, Earl of Halifax 6–7, 217, 252 and canon 9–12 Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, The 88–90, 218–19 ‘On the Death of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles II’ 114 and patronage 9, 10, 11–12, 218–19 see also Epistle to Dorset Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 162, 239, 252–3 More, Henry 51 n. 103 Morris, David 42 n. 69, 182, 203 Muddiman, Henry 210 n. 17

300

Index

Namier, Lewis 17 national culture: Kit-Cat Club and 227–34 national identity 7, 128–34, 156–9 nationalism 7, 133, 158–9 native poetic tradition 38, 144, 145–6, 147–8 Navigation Acts 73 navy 120–1 Netherlands: Anglo-Dutch Wars 129 anti-Dutch feeling 128–31, 133 and Elizabeth I’s expedition 97–8 and liberty 129–32 trade with 71 Newton, Isaac 219 natural philosophy 186–8 Nine Years’ War 6, 106, 136 Noggle, James 201 Nonconformity 13, 24, 25, 47, 64–6, 71–72, 86, 210 Norbrook, David 18, 175 Oates, Titus 57 Ode Occasion’d by the Death of Her Sacred Majesty, An 115 Ode upon the glorious and Successful Expedition of his Highness, An 100, 101 Ogilby, John 31 O’Hehir, Brendan 167 n. 105 Oldham, John 30–1, 32 ‘In Praise of Poetry’ 29 ‘Upon the Works of Ben Johnson’ 26, 30 Oldmixon, John 253 on pastoral 153, 156 Pastoral Poem on the Victories at Schellenburgh and Blenheim, A 149–50 opera 232 Owen, John 78 Parker, Blanford 188 n. 59 pastoral 149–59 Paradise Lost (Milton) 53, 161, 178, 184, 186, 193 and battle poems 142, 148 patronage 3, 9, 11–12, 48 n. 90, 155–6, 205–6 criticism of 11–12, 205–6 during Exclusion Crisis 208–12 Kit-Cats and 231–3, 235 Louis XIV and 214 Montagu and 9, 10, 11–12, 218–19 and national culture 206 and political legitimacy 214

Pope and 53–4 Shaftesbury, third Earl of, on 234–5 Stuart 45, 206–8 Welsted on 236 Williamite 88, 213–20 women and 238–9 Patterson, Annabel 156 Peace. A Poem (anon) 164 pedantry 37, 44 Penn, William 77 Philips, Ambrose 2, 253 Epistle to . . . Charles Lord Halifax, An 118 and pastoral poetry 151–6, 158 Pope, quarrel with 151–9 Philips, John 178, 253 Blenheim 142–3 Pincus, Steven 27, 94 n. 2, 110 n. 44, 129, 136 n. 2 Pindar and Pindaric ode 67, 69, 178–80 Pittock, Murray 18 Plumb, J. H. 17 Pocock, J. G. A. 228 n. 79 Poem upon His Highness the Prince of Orange’s Expedition into England, A (J. D.) 109–10 Poems on AVairs of State 84–5, 92, 170, 199–200 politeness 23, 47, 163 Pope, Alexander 144 n. 32, 253 Art of Sinking in Poetry 51 on bad poetry 47, 49–50, 52 on Dennis 42–3 Dennis on 168–9 Dunciad 5, 11, 26, 29, 49–55 on enthusiasm 50–2 Epistle to Arbuthnot 10 Essay on Criticism 37–43, 46, 49, 201–2, 231 Essay on Man 201 in Guardian 158 on literary criticism 38, 39, 41, 42, 49 on Longinus 202 ‘Messiah’ 202–3 on Montagu 10 and pastoral poetry 151, 154, 155, 156 Peri Bathous 10, 29, 43 n. 70, 46, 47 A. Philips, controversy with 151–8 on Roscommon 39, 42 on sublime 51, 201–3 and Tonson 227 Windsor-Forest 4, 165–7, 168–9, 174 Popish Plot 57 populism 22, 61–2

Index and poetry 19, 24, 30, 46, 50, 52 and politics 60–64, 91, 133 Pordage, Samuel 253 Azaria and Hushai 58, 62–3 Medal Revers’d, The 66, 68, 69 Prescott, Sarah 238 Prior, Matthew 215, 217, 218–20, 221, 254 in Examiner 229 Hind and the Panther Transvers’d, The 88–90 Ode 149 Queen’s Theatre, Haymarket 231–2 Ralph, James 223 Rapin-Thoyras, Paul de 152 rationalism 67, 152 Red Bull theatre 31 reformation: James II and 85–92 literary 33, 80–85, 124–27, 159–63 and Mary II, queen of England 121–7 moral 80–1, 85–8, 121–4, 161 Republicanism 14, 18, 46–7, 64, 65, 108, 175–6 Restoration of 1660 24–5, 39–40, 114, 207–8 Revolution of 1688 93–9 justiWcations for 95–8, 133–34 poetry on 96–105 and propaganda 212–14 Reynell, Carew 72 n. 41 Roberts, Michael 107 Robins, Jasper 148 Rogers, Pat 38 n. 53, 50 Rogers, Thomas 254 romance 99–105, 116, 149 Roscommon, Wentworth Dillon, Earl of 29, 40, 250 Essay on Translated Verse 25, 26, 39, 201 and literary criticism 39, 42 on sublime 201 Røstvig, Maren-SoWe 77 Rounce, Adam 244 Rowe, Elizabeth Singer 254 ‘Pindarick Poem on Habbakuk, A’ 189–90 Poems on Several Occasions 182 on sublime 189, 195 Rowe, Nicholas 254 Tamerlane 110–11

301

Royal Academy of Music 232 Royal Society 37 n. 51, 219 Rumbold, Valerie 48 n. 92 Rye House Plot 75, 78 Ryswick, Treaty of 128, 136 Sackville, Charles, Earl of Dorset 9, 116–17, 254 Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies, A 90 and patronage 217, 218, 219–20 see also Montagu: Epistle to Dorset St John, Henry 142 Salzman, Paul 100 Sandwich, Countess of 36 Satyr to His Muse 62 Saunders, Francis 173 Schless, Howard H. 78 n. 59 Schwoerer, Lois 210, 213 Scriblerus Club and Scriblerians 10, 23, 43–9 and critique of Whig literature 10, 23, 43–9, 54–5 see also Arbuthnot; Gay; Pope; Swift Sedley, Sir Charles 85 Settle, Elkanah 254–5 Absalom Senior 58, 67–8 Dryden’s attack on 28–9 Empress of Morocco 28 Several Orations of Demosthenes 225 Sewell, George 117, 174, 254 Seymour, Edward 130 Shadwell, Thomas 2, 62, 109, 212, 218, 255 Congratulatory Poem on His Highness 96–7, 98–9 Dryden’s attack on 27–8, 31 Humorists 80–1 Medal of John Bayes, The 70–1, 73 Ode on the Anniversary of the Queen’s Birth 121 Ode to the King on His Return from Ireland 110 ‘Protestant Satire, The’ 78–9 Tory-Poets: A Satyr, The 76–7, 81, 83 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Wrst Earl of 211, 249 imprisonment and trial of 58, 64 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of 15, 137 n. 6, 249 Characteristicks 228, 233, 234–5, 244–5 on patronage 234–5, 236 and reformation 12, 159–60, 228–9

302

Index

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of (cont. ) on sublime 190 Shakespeare, William 148–9, 177, 178, 227 Shapin, Steven 37 n. 51 Shippen, William 229–30 Shirley, James 31 Shute, James 139 Sidney, Algernon 129 n. 107 Sidney, Sir Philip 82 Sitter, John 43 Smallwood, James 139 Smith, Francis 210 n. 17 Smith, Hannah 242 Smith, Nigel 18, 175 sociability 23, 36, 49, 162–3 Solkin, David 162–3, 222–3 Somers, John, Baron Somers 15, 141, 217, 218, 219, 255 Spadafora, David 181 n. 33 Spanish Succession, War of 136, 138 Speck, W. R. 94 n. 2 Spectator 117 n. 67, 127, 151, 160 Addison in 41–2, 157–8, 184, 186–7, 193 Spenser, Edmund 149 Sprat, Thomas 67 Stanhope, James, Wrst Earl Stanhope 255 Starkey, John 209 Steele, Richard 130, 149, 157, 218, 255–6 Christian Hero, The 108, 110 Crisis, The 230 development of Whig periodicals 159, 160 in Guardian 160 on A. Philips 151 in Tatler 163, 192 Stennett, Joseph 256 Stepney, George 9–10, 122, 217, 219, 221, 256 sublime/sublimity 46 and apocalypse, visions of 192–3 and bathos 195–6 classical 178–9 Dennis and 173–4, 183–6, 191, 196–7, 198–9, 245 and enthusiasm 185–6, 202–3 false 51, 195–9 and liberty 175–6, 180 Longinus on 191, 193–4, 195-6 Montagu on 11 Pope on 51, 201–3 and propaganda 191 religious 181–9, 203

Roscommon on 201 secular 189–92 Shaftesbury, third Earl, on 190 sporadic nature of 192–5 Welsted on 178, 199 succession, Protestant 153–4 Swift, Jonathan 99, 256 Battle of the Books 26, 32 on Brothers Club 230 on enthusiasm 51–2 ‘History of Vanbrug’s House, The’ 144 ‘On Poetry: A Rapsody’ 45, 46–7, 48 Tale of a Tub 10, 26 Tatler 117 n. 67, 127, 160–1 Steele in 149, 151, 163, 192 Temple, Sir William 74 n. 46, 97, 129–30 ‘Essay on Heroick Virtue’ 130 Terry, Richard 7 theatre and theatres 28, 75–6, 208 n. 9 attacks on 122–3, 126 Kit-Cat Club and 231–2 Queen’s, Haymarket 231–2 Red Bull 31 Thomas, Claudia 52 Thompson, M. P. 101–2 Thompson, Thomas 73 Thomson, James 244 Thornhill, James 162–3, 233 Tickell, Thomas 2, 9–10, 256 in Guardian 157, 158 on A. Philips 151–5 Prospect of Peace, The 4, 152, 164–5, 166, 174, 242 and Tonson 227 ‘To His Highness’ (M. S.) 102 ‘To the Queen’ (T. J.) 123 Tonson, Jacob 17, 145, 174, 218, 256 and Addison 221–2, 226, 227 Elzevier series 227, 231 and Kit-Cat Club 222–3 and Kit-Cat publications 224–7 and Milton 221, 226 Poetical Miscellanies, The Sixth Part 151, 152 topographical poetry 39, 73–4, 145–7, 165, 167–8 trade 71 London and 71, 72–3 Nonconformity and 71–2 Treadwell, Michael 210 Triumph of Virtue, The 164 Tutchin, John 83, 84, 130–4, 177 n. 14, 257

Index ‘Discourse of Life’ 77–8 Foreigners, The 130, 131, 133 ‘Satire against Vice, A’ 81–2 Tyrrell, James 96 Urstad, Tone Sundt 242 Utrecht, Treaty of 157, 164, 165 Vanbrugh, Sir John: architecture of 232–3 Blenheim Palace 144 Provok’d Wife, The 123 at Queen’s Theatre 231 Verrio, Antonio 214 Verse epistles 49, 117–18 Virgil 53 Waller, Edmund 38–9, 73–4, 199 Walpole, Horace 214 Walpole, Robert 242–3 Walsh, Octavia 238 Warton, Joseph 168 Wasserman, Earl 166 Watts, Isaac 184, 257 Webb, GeoVrey 233 Welsted, Leonard 52, 113, 157, 257 Dissertation Concerning . . . the English Language 236 Epistle to Mr Steele, on the King’s accession to the Crown, An 118 on George I 170, 171 on patronage 236 Peri Hupsous 175, 176 on A. Philips 151–2 Remarks on the English Poets 151–2 on sublimity 178, 199 Wesley, Samuel 217, 257 Western, J. R. 94 n. 2

303

Wharton, Thomas, Wrst Marquis of Wharton 91, 220, 257 Whitworth, Charles 257 Wilkes, John 214–15 William III of Orange 2 accession of 93–7, 100–2 and Catholicism 109–10 Elizabeth I, identiWcation with 97 England, invasion of 93–4, 101, 105 and France 127–8 anti-French foreign policy 105–6, 114–15, 136 Irish expedition 2, 113 masculine qualities 113–16 militarism of 2, 105–12, 118–21, 128 opposition to 103–5, 108, 118–21, 128–33 patronage 88, 213–20 and propaganda 103, 122, 129, 212–13 Will’s CoVee House 32, 33, 151, 158 Windsor Forest 166–69 Windsor Prophecy. Found in Marlborough Rock, The (anon) 166 Winn, James 27 n. 12, 59 wit 68–9, 81, 83, 163 Wits, Blackmore’s quarrel with 32–7 Womersley, David 18, 112–13, 180 Woodman, Thomas 48 n. 90 Worden, Blair 76 Wordsworth, William 245 Wotton, William 36 Wycherley, William 161 Yalden, Thomas 257 York, Duke of 57: see also James II Young, Edward 244 Zwicker, Stephen 5, 69, 95