Abstract
A proclamatory aesthetic grounded on the advocacy of Charles’s grand design might be expected to falter when those designs themselves ploughed into the obstruction of the Scottish Covenant. Accordingly, Martin Butler locates a structural and thematic change in the Caroline masque during the second half of the 1630s: ‘The trope of reform … disappears’, he writes, as ‘the parade of reforming intention at court’ is transformed into an urgent search for funds.1 However, a poetry which had seen in the King’s progressive refinement of his kingdom its own purpose and authority seems rather more reluctant to surrender that structural dynamic. The challenge from Scotland, in particular, was met with a determined insistence on the trope’s continuing relevance.
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Notes
Mark Fissell, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), chapter 1; Peter Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–41 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 4.
Michael Parker, “To my friend G. N. from Wrest’: Carew’s Secular Masque’, in Joseph Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds, Classic and Cavalier: Essays on Jonson and the Sons of Ben (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982), 171–91, esp. 184-5; Anselment, Loyalist Resolve, 42-3; John Kerrigan, ‘Thomas Carew’, 345.
See Thomas Clayton, ed., The Works of John Suckling: The Non-Dramatic Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 142–8, 328-9.
I quote the text of Salmacida Spolia from Stephen Orgel and Roy Strong, Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court (2 vols, London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1973), II, 729–34.
See R. Malcolm Smuts, ‘Public Ceremony and Royal Charisma: the English Royal Entry in London, 1485–1642’, in A. L. Beier, David Cannadine and James Rosenheim, ed., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 83 and 91.
Ibid., 92. An enduring account of the struggle for control of the city is to be found in Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965).
Gerald Aylmer, ‘Collective Mentalities in Mid-Seventeenth-Century England, II. Royalist Attitudes’, TRHS 5th Series, 37 (1987), 10.
Peter Newman, The Old Service: Royalist Regimental Colonels and the Civil War, 1642–46 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 24–5; Russell, British Monarchies, 457.
For a modern account of the duel itself see R. T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby: The Ornament of England (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956), 156–7.
Peter Newman, ‘The King’s Servants: Conscience, Principle and Sacrifice in Armed Royalism’, in John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf, eds, Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 235.
L. C. Martin, ed., The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 30–1. Subsequent quotations from Herrick’s verse are from this edition: line references are incorporated into the text.
J. Venn and J. A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigienses, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922-7), I, 217 and II, 115.
P. W. Thomas, Sir John Berkenhead, 1617–1679: A Royalist Career in Politics and Polemics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 37 and 39.
John Stucley, Sir Bevill Grenvile and his times, 1596–1643 (Chichester: Phillimore, 1983), 5–7 and 71; Madan, 145.
A. M. Gibbs, ed., William Davenant: The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 134–6 and 411.
S. R. Gardiner, The History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649 (4 vols, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897-8), I, 165–6.
Gerald MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 199–202.
Brendan O Hehir, Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s Coopers Hill (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 25–40. All quotations are taken from the ‘A’ Text in this edition.
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© 1997 James Loxley
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Loxley, J. (1997). ‘Bels which ring backward’: War and the Pen. In: Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230389199_3
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