Abstract
The travails and conflicts of the English Civil War and Commonwealth were typically conceived in Judaeo-Christian terms: Israel neglects its covenant and suffers the captivity of Egypt or Babylon; God in his mercy delivers it through the prowess of a Joshua or a Gideon. Roman precedents also contributed: King Charles was identified with Tarquin or Caesar, Parliament and its generals with the Bruti or Cato. Fairfax’s New Model army and Cromwell’s navy were admired for reviving a republican discipline.1 The apocalyptic excitement, the conviction that God was active in political affairs, imparted the sense of national uniqueness and imperial destiny that Romans celebrated in the triumph. Both sides appropriated the conventions of triumph, to celebrate victories and for other purposes as well. In difficult times, consolatory triumphs promised eventual vindication. In defeat, the noble deaths of the king or his soldiers created the paradoxical triumphs of martyrdom. In the Civil War, royalist uses of triumph generally reconstruct Roman convention more accurately, while Parliamentary adaptations are more varied and resourceful. In the 1650s, this balance is redressed, or even reversed. Some Commonwealth writers produce triumph poems of baroque grandeur and endow Cromwell with the traits of an Augustus, though others contest this ostentation. Royalist writers prophesy vindicatory triumphs with a feverishness that recalls Puritan apocalyptics.
‘Cypresse, not Bayes’
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Notes
Bulstrode Whitelocke, Memorials of the English Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1853), vol. I, p. 355;
B. Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: the Fleet and the English Revolution1648–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 52–3.
The Civil War, ed. Allan Pritchard (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), p. 73; cf. Epibateria (1643), sigs B(2)2, B(2)3.
S.R. Gardiner, History of the Great Civil War, 1642–1649, 2nd edn, 4 vols, (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), vol. I, pp. 14–15;
Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: the Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 2.
An Ordinance of the Lords and Commons… Together with two exact Relations (1645), p. 4. Many of the alleged whores were soldiers’ wives: Peter Young and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War: a Military History of the Three Civil Wars, 1642–1651 (London: Eyre Methuen, 1974), p. 250.
S.R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656, 2nd edn, 4 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1903), vol. I, pp. 21–8, 178–81.
A Perfect Relation of his Excellency the Lord General Cromwells Reception …in and about the City of London, printed with Another Victory in Lancashire Obtained against the Scots (1651), p. 3; cf. Gerald M. MacLean, Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 230–1.
See C.V. Wedgwood, Poetry and Politics under the Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), pp. 76–9;
Raymond A. Anselment, ‘The Oxford University Poets and Caroline Panegyric’, John Donne Journal, 3 (1984), 196–7; MacLean, Time’s Witness, pp. 199–202;
James Loxley, Royalism and Poetry in the English Civil Wars: the Drawn Sword (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press — now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 81–4.
The Poetical Works of Robert Herrick, ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 271.
Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 94–102.
Triumph of Loyalty (1648), pp. 17–18. See Daphne Woodward and Chloe Cockerill, The Siege of Colchester, 1648: a History and Bibliography ([n.p.]: Essex County Library, 1979).
Triumph of patience (1649), pp. 3, 4. On the conventions and iconography of the triumph of patience, see Gerald J. Schiffhorst, ed., Triumph of Patience: Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Orlando: University Presses of Florida, 1978).
King, Elegy, l. 166, in The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). For poems on Charles’s execution, see MacLean, Time’s Witness, pp. 214–19.
Elegy, ll. 200 (marginal note), 173, 175. Cf. Barbara Carpenter Turner, Winchester (Southampton: Paul Cave, 1980), pp. 109–13;
John R. Phillips, The Reformation of Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), ch. 9;
C. Carlton, Going to the Wars (London: Routledge, 1992), ch. 11.
Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: Our Chief of Men (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), pp. 455–63;
Roy Sherwood, The Court of Oliver Cromwell, 2nd edn, (Cambridge: Willingham, 1989).
Robin Simon, “Roman-cast similitude”: Cromwell and Mantegna’s ‘Triumphs of Caesar’, Apollo, 134 (1991), 111–22. The republican Council of State had taken similar steps: Kelsey, Inventing a Republic, p. 39.
Charles Wilson, Profit and Power: a Study of England and the Dutch Wars (London: Longmans, Green, 1957), p. 79;
Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), p. 155.
Gardiner, Commonwealth, vol. II, pp. 153–220; vol. III, pp. 28–60; vol. IV, pp. 146–76; Charles Harding Firth, The Last Years of the Protectorate, 1656–1658, 2 vols (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), vol. I, pp. 1–11. Caspar Staphorst’s triumph of peace laments the spectacle of Protestants at war with one another: Carmen …de bello Britannico et ejusdem per Dei gratiam foelici exitu, qui est triumphus pacis (Dordrecht, [1656]).
Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Cromwellian Protectorate, 2nd edn (London: F. Cass, 1962), p. 3.
Mr. Recorders Speech, p. 2; cf. Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 5.
Elaiophoria, pp. 7, 18, 48. In John Locke’s Oxford contribution, Cromwell surpasses both Caesar and Augustus: Elaiophoria, p. 45. On ‘Protectoral Augustanism and its critics’, see David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 7.
On Fisher’s career, see Norbrook, Republic, pp. 231–8; on interregnum panegyric in general, Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 277–86. I believe that Smith underrates Fisher’s technical competence as a Latinist (p. 285). The 1650s saw a corresponding vogue for literary triumphs in other fields, e.g., the Protestant translation of Savonarola, The Triumph of the Crosse (1651); R. Boreman, Triumph of Learning over Ignorance (1653) and Triumph of Faith over Death (1654); R. Fletcher, ‘Easter Day’, in Ex otio Negotium (1656).
Cf Oliua, sig. H2; Elaiophoria, p. 100. On the continuity between Elizabethan and Cromwellian imperialism, see Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 158–60; on the debate over imperialism in 1654–6, see David Armitage, ‘The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire’, Historical Journal, 35 (1992), 531–55.
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Miller, A. (2001). Civil War and Commonwealth. In: Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230628557_8
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